Stone Bridge

Found photographs

2012-01-14T21:40:00.024-06:00

While cleaning out a storage room I found some old photographs belonging to my wife's father Tom Sutherland. These photos had been put in a box after the 2001 flood on Onion Creek, and have suffered some damage due to neglect since then. I have found out who some of these people are, but the identity of the others is a mystery.

This is Kay's great-grandfather Maclin Robertson outside the family home at a ranch near Salado, Texas. The house still exists, essentially unchanged. Kay and I visited the place once when her father was still alive; it is where he grew up.

This woman is unknown; although it is very likely she is one of Kay's great-aunts.

This woman is unknown to family members I have asked.

The only clue I have about this picture and the next is that they were in an envelope sent to Kay's grandmother Mary Elizabeth Robertson from a photo studio in Houston in 1954, where she had probably sent negatives to have copies made. The photos were obviously taken long before 1954. I am guessing they were Robertson family members.

This boy's photo was in the same envelope as the previous.

This is Kay's great-aunt Minnie Bell Sutherland.

Occupying Austin

2011-10-06T18:18:00.011-05:00

I went by the "occupy Austin" event today at City Hall. Several hundred people were there early in the afternoon. As of about 2 o'clock it was quite peaceful and uneventful. Austin police are generally not hostile to events like this, but there were a lot of police officers in attendance, including, to my surprise, Chief Acevedo himself, who walked around talking occasionally to the top button of his shirt, which presumably contained a microphone.

There was a surveillance team on the top of the building to the west of City Hall, three guys with binoculars, plus a still camera and a video camera set up on tripods. I took some photos of 'em with a 200 mm lens, and when I got home I realized that they were military. Two of the three were in what I'd guess are Army uniforms. The third guy in a t shirt could have been a cop, or a soldier who took off his fatigue shirt.

I am interested in why the military is watching this demonstration. Anyone have any ideas?

Photos below (click on any of the images for more detail):

And of course I have to show you Chief Acevedo talking to his shirt:

Plus an impressive array of motorcycle cops parked in the shade across the street

And that was to keep this...

...from getting out of hand

It was peaceful enough when I left.

When the lesser of two evils argument fails

2011-08-01T11:13:00.004-05:00

(Note of explanation: A month and a half ago I wrote the following more as an internal soliloquy than a normal blog entry--given that my irregular posts have left this blog with essentially no readers--but I realize now, some time after the fact, that if a reader does come along, there is no clue in the post what I was talking about. Mea culpa. The occasion was Obama caving to the Republicans when they held the economy hostage on raising the debt ceiling. A more extended internal soliloquy would include ruminations on whether to vote in the Republican primary in hopes that Romney as president would do less damage to the country than Perry, or whether to seriously look at living in another country. And I would direct the very hypothetical reader to my other blog, equally irregular but far less political, at Brass nor Stone.)

In the case of this deal with the devil that Obama has made, I am not sure that for Democrats to support it, and to support Obama in the next election, is in reality the lesser of two evils, so my title is probably misleading.

If the Republicans are not bluffing, then surely for Democrats to join with them in destroying the economy gradually is better than letting Republicans alone destroy it suddenly. Yeah, maybe. You would think. But not in this instance. Two or three years down the road, the country is going to be in the same sorry state regardless of who is president, thanks in large part to Obama himself.

And the worst possible case would be for the next Herbert Hoover to be a Democrat, or rather, to call himself a Democrat.

So I've arrived at the slightly consoling thought that the next Herbert Hoover is likely to be a card-carrying Republican, and that with a Republican Congress the ex-Party of Lincoln will completely own, as they say, the subsequent catastrophe.

I knew a lot of angry liberals who refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. I think I still believed in the lesser of two evils argument in those days, and I duly held my nose and voted for Humphrey.

In hindsight I think I made the right decision. But I feel pretty good about the idea of writing in some third party candidate's name in 2012. In defense of my 1968 vote for Humphrey, he never agreed in ADVANCE to sign on to the bombing of Cambodia, or to the Watergate burglaries. Obama on the other hand has capitulated in advance to everything the Republicans want.

Birth of a Nation

2011-01-29T00:03:00.023-06:00

I had never seen Birth of a Nation. I don't know why I watched it, I guess it came up when I was browsing in Netflix on-demand titles, so I started watching on a whim. I was blown away. I watched it all the way through, all three hours.

I'm not a fan of historic film, or silent film, or propaganda, artful or otherwise. For example I wasn't much interested in Triumph of the Will, though I did watch it all the way to the end. If I were a film history buff (obviously I'm not) Triumph of the Will might have held my interest more. I just saw it as ugly and dated, and more to the point, as Nazi crap.

Birth of a Nation was racist crap...but I've never seen anything like it and I have been trying to figure out why it fascinated me. Part of it may be that it gave me a sense of the permanence of some of the right wing sentiment in this country, a vision of America that's still around, mutatis mutandis of course--nobody justifies the Ku Klux Klan now.

I don't think I would call it a movie at all in the present-day sense of the word. Maybe you can think of silent film as a kind of extended mime-melodrama--in this case very extended, as I said, three hours long--accompanied by music, originally played in the house.

I can't tell you why a moving-picture mime performance three hours long with captions and music worked, but it did. In 1915 a ticket cost the equivalent of over $40 in 2010, and the film was a runaway hit, the biggest grossing hit in movie history until the late 1930s.

I guess I haven't been patient enough to sit through many restorations of silent films, but my impression, and I hasten to say, not a very informed impression, is that they were accompanied by rinky-tink and slightly comic player-piano sounds, but until now I never thought much about the music in the originals.

With Birth of a Nation I think the music was actually the key to its power, even more so than the amazing photography--or so it seems to me--much like in Alexander Nevsky, though that was not a silent movie. (An aside: I originally saw an unrestored version of Alexander Nevsky many years ago, and thought the Prokofiev score for the Battle on the Ice was absolutely perfect in its majestically satanic quality, but later I discovered in hearing a restored version that a lot of that was the distortion of the degraded sound track. The restored version seemed like hearing a Tom Waits song performed by Loreena McKennitt. Oh well.)

I wonder if Lee Atwater and Donald Segretti and Karl Rove and Frank Luntz didn't watch Birth of a Nation, secretly, and find in it something that could still be used. I don't mean that they saw it and discovered music as a tool of misinformation--Republican propaganda has gone in other directions--it was the whole deal, the idyll of America that was being sold to the viewer, a vision of an ideal America that Republicans have to like, excluding the overt racism of course. But the music had to be really important in why Birth of a Nation succeeded.

The score was selected by Joseph Breil with a lot of help from, or (I have read) argument with, Griffiths, and was played by house orchestras, at least in the case of performances in major cities. (I read somewhere that Breil's score was not played at the Los Angeles premiere, but only later at the New York opening.) At any rate the Breil score seems be the soundtrack of the film's presently released version. And that soundtrack is fascinating.

What do we hear? Orchestral and kinda tarted up versions of Dixie, Bonnie Blue Flag, Camptown Races, My Country 'Tis of Thee, O Tannenbaum (which at that time must have been familiar to Breil as also being the socialist anthem the Red Flag) the Ride of the Valkeries, Gary Owen, and at the end, the Star Spangled Banner as the new nation of Aryan white brotherhood, north and south, is born. And of course there was a lot of original stuff by Breil. I'd guess he wasn't a very good composer, but Dixie has an emotive spin on it, on its own.

So I think what kept me with the movie was the music, and the simplicity of mime. Plus the cinematography, but that's obviously not news. A simple, mythic message, pulling out all the stops in the delivery. Which, unfortunately, seems to be what the right-wing in America is good at. Even more unfortunately, maybe better today than in 1915.

An irrelevant-to-my-point footnote: I have not looked into real scholarship on Birth of a Nation, but the online commentary always notes that the major black roles were played by white people wearing blackface. That's not really true. I noticed a few, but only a few, white people in stereotypical blackface playing minor black roles. A great many of the black crowd members and extras actually were black. Black actors and extras were clearly available in Los Angeles and were hired for the movie.

The major black characters in the movie, who were villains, were supposed to be "mulattos." I think that's important. Race mixing was a big deal in Birth of a Nation, representing contamination and corruption, not just of whites but of blacks as well. The villains did not appear in blackface; they were obvious white people whose skin had been made to appear dirty. Nothing more. Just dirty. The symbolism is obvious.

Trivia: I suppose the rocky terrain could pass for Appalachian foothills, and ponderosa pines for loblolly pine, but I had to laugh at a big agave that persistently appeared in the background scenery during one sequence toward the end.

OK, I may have misspoken

2010-08-10T15:24:00.009-05:00

...when I said I was through with this blog because I was tired of political negativity. I still am tired of it, but when Robert Gibbs, the President's mouthpiece, attacks _liberals_, for Christ's sake, because we have been insufficiently appreciative of Mr. Obama, I have to differ. So let me get a couple of things off my chest.

Obama has broken promises on everything from ending the war in Iraq to gay rights. He has sucked up to the Wall Street bonus junkies. He has backed away from a meaningful stimulus program, or from doing anything about foreclosures or unemployment. He has actually revved up a war in Afghanistan that George Bush had definitively lost by 2002, which is at this point absurd as well as un-winnable. And did I say we are still in Iraq, a war originally based on falsehoods--and now Obama is lying about our "leaving" when in fact we still have 50,000 "non-combat" troops there and that he proposes to keep them there indefinitely?

His government claims the de facto right to assassinate American citizens abroad. He believes, like Bush, that he has the right to imprison people without charges indefinitely, possibly for life. Guantanamo is still open. He has claimed the right to deny habeas corpus. He has given de-facto immunity to the criminals who dreamed up and approved the torture policies of the previous administration. His economic team is essentially the very Wall Street insiders who crashed the economy. He has sold out the public on the environment, among other things giving the oil companies carte blanche that they used to create the most enormous oil pollution disaster in world history.

He has pandered to the Republicans on their immigration hysteria. He is unwilling to fight for anything that he claimed to believe in when we voted for him. He has shown himself totally spineless (or totally duplicitous) on doing anything about global warming.

He sold the public out on the public option, so the health care bill will now benefit far fewer people than it should, and cost far too much. He has shown every sign of buckling under to the Republicans on gutting Social Security. He is a TERRIBLE president.

Yes, you can say he is better than Bush. But so little better, in fact, that he is still deeply in the realm of terrible. If he doesn't step up to the plate I am pretty sure he will be a one-term president. I personally have never voted for a Republican and never will, but at this point I don't see much point in voting for Obama again either.

Update, as of Dec.21, 2010:

Obama only a few days caved to the Republicans on the tax bill benefitting the upper 2.5% of income earners and screwing the economy fairly long-term in the process, and today has torpedoed net neutrality with Bush-era Orwellian language, calling his betrayal of net neutrality, a "victory" for net neutrality.

His administration continues to make the hysterical manhunt for Julian Assange into a major project, with a grand jury convened in northern Virginia to find a pretext for charging Assange with a crime in the United States, even as the criminals from the Bush era mentioned above continue to go free. Meanwhile our government places private Bradley Manning, the soldier accused, among other worthy and honorable things, of leaking the videos that expose the aerial murder of journalists from a helicopter in Iraq, under a form of arrest that amounts to torture--the supermax solitary confinement regimen his administration subjects him to is considered a war crime if we treat prisoners of war that way--and the helicopter gunners of course have not been punished, nor have those who gave them their orders.

I am beginning to feel about this Democratic president the way I felt about Lyndon Johnson, although Johnson at least had a redeeming virtue that I have not so far seen even a glimmer of in Obama, which was a commitment to civil rights. Obama is about as bad as Johnson on murderous foreign military adventures, and worse than Nixon or Eisenhower (FAR worse than Eisenhower) on everything else.

It says something remarkable about where this country has gone that the only presently visible alternative to Obama and his Democratic Party is the Republican Party of Sarah Palin.

Impermanence, revisited

2010-01-31T00:05:00.002-06:00

When I started this blog I chose to subscribe to a free commenting utility called Haloscan, which at the time seemed more user-friendly than Blogger's native commenting system. For one thing it would notify me by email if I got new comments on an old blog post. Blogger did not do that, and as far as I know still doesn't.

Looking back on several years of blogging at Stone Bridge it has some of the usefulness of a diary: I can find out what I was doing, say, in July of 2006. Otherwise I would not have a clue. Additionally, there was an ongoing conversation with regular, and occasional irregular, visitors, in the comments. A certain sense of community arose, which possibly would still be going on, if I had not gotten burned out on the political negativity which had overtaken most of my posts.

Haloscan has now been sold to a company that will allow the comments to stay, but we have to pay a very modest fee for them. I am probably going to let the comments go, not because of the money, which is insignificant even for a pensioner of my very limited means, but because the blog itself is inactive, and I only rarely get new comments. The Blogger comments will still be possible for such stragglers.

I have downloaded and archived the old comments for my own personal use, (many of the comments were interesting and some memorable.) Unfortunately I can see no way to restore them to the original posts as blogger comments, but on the other hand I see no real need to.

So in a few weeks the comments will disappear.

It occurs to me that some people may still have RSS feeds for Stone Bridge, and will notice this entry, and hopefully be reassured that I did not erase their comments out of some late-blooming aversion to the comments, or to them.

Impermanence

2008-06-16T18:58:00.006-05:00

I do not expect to be making any new entries to this blog, although as in all things, I could well be mistaken. I have had little taste for writing lately (I spend most of my spare time taking nature photographs), and in my opinion fwiw the best writing on this blog was at the beginning, when I had several years worth of accumulated ideas (and in some cases, previously written stuff to upload.) So, in the unlikely event you are a new person coming to this blog, I suggest you go posthaste from this entry to the first, rather than read any of my recent posts, which have deteriorated toward the political and the opinionated in keeping with the times. To such a hypothetical reader I especially recommend my obsolete travel notes, found here and there in the early months of this blog.

I started a test blog once, called Brass nor Stone, which I am now thinking of using for any stray impulses to write, if they arise. The reason is that its template allows larger photos. I could try to re-format this blog to use a new template, but that way lies madness, or disaster, or both, so I think it is better to refer readers, if any, to more interesting material toward the front end of this blog, and to new material, probably mostly photographic, at Brass nor Stone.

Yesterday's rabbit

2008-05-29T13:10:00.002-05:00

My yard is regularly visited by a couple of rabbits, and I sometimes have a moment to snap a picture of one before my little dog Bella goes crazy when she catches the scent or--occasionally--actually spots it, and begins a frantic and yapping pursuit, always with the same result, of course, which is the rabbit disappearing through a small hole in the back fence which, for better or worse, is too small for Bella to get through. This ritual effectively constrains my rabbit-photo-op window of opportunity to one click, because when Bella hears it she knows that I am taking a picture of something, and charges off to investigate.

Occasionally two clicks.

Everyone loves a parade

2008-03-16T18:19:00.005-05:00

As you get older certain things lead to a sense of time standing still, or what year is this? It can be disquieting. Especially when you leap whole decades and at least for a second it feels like 1968 except for the old people whom I unaccountably resemble marching beside me in the peace demonstration. (In 1968 we were all young, as all of you old enough to remember will know.)

Yesterday's springtime (well, technically, late winter) peace march in Austin was almost a duplicate of last year's, and the year before, and the year before that, with many of the same faces, immeasurably more geriatric, perhaps. The parade was billed as the Million Musicians' March For Peace, and although it came up a little short numbers-wise, it was a loud and robust event musically, with a brass section at the front (which someone in the crowd, not me, joked had been provided by AARP) plus drums, tambourines, tin whistles, ukuleles, cowbells and supposedly a pots-and-pans rhythm section bringing up the rear in memory of Molly Ivins, though I was closer to the front and can't vouch for that. Just as last year, the mainstay tune of the brass was When the Saints Go Marching In, which gave several musicians opportunity to display some outstanding tuba and trombone virtuosity.

In the middle of the throng we had a guy in a kilt playing martial airs on the highland war pipes. I am not sure what to make of that.

Our parade went through the middle of the entertainment district, which this week is the same as South by Southwest. One of the first posts on this blog, in 2005, is an account of what seems, upon re-reading, to be this year's parade.

I also wrote a post on last year's event. If I were lazy I would simply link to the two earlier posts and be done with it.

Small differences are what I am left to write about, which leave me with a certain optimism. I didn't have the feeling that any onlookers along the route considered our actions unpatriotic, even when we passed by the Salvation Army soup kitchen. (Down and out alcoholics tend to be more sentimentally patriotic than the rest of us, I dunno why.) If Bush's war has lost its appeal to drunk people, maybe our country is on the road to recovery.

Just as in previous years, the street crowd, already festive at one in the afternoon, seemed a little unsure what the hell was going on, but whatever we were doing, they approved of it. Some guy came running out of a pub with his electric guitar, and feigned consternation at discovering it unplugged and thus useless for joining in.

We walked a circuitous route from the capitol building to city hall, where various post-march performances were booked on the front steps. Even if there hadn't been a parade, a free venue during SxSW will always draw a crowd, so several hundred stayed for the music, shading themselves from the unseasonable heat under the awning of solar panels.

A few photos of the event follow, plus one of a runaway bride.

Click on any picture for a larger view on flickr.

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Singer songwriter in front of the capitol building, before the parade

The march begins

The trumpet section

Code pink

Stereotypical tuba player

The bagpiper

Afterwards, on the steps of city hall

Now, the runaway bride was before the parade, on the capitol grounds. As the marchers gathered, I spied this young woman taking to her heels and departing. (You can see anything at our state capitol building.) If our gathering march had frightened away the wedding, the groom had apparently bolted in another direction. We will never know.

What would Jesus say?

2007-12-24T23:23:00.000-06:00

Ronald Reagan's Cadillac welfare queen seems be part of the ur-unconscious of the right-wing mind. (Would it be unfair to call it the conservative racial memory? Perhaps.) She lives there in the psychic shadows, constantly ready to be rediscovered and to emerge on demand, in the hour of conservative need.

And so it came to pass, only recently, as I understand it, that Sharon Jasper, a resident in public housing in New Orleans, complained about missing window screens, a leaking sink, and high deposit charges and utility bills in her subsidized housing. This got the attention of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, such that they sent one of their photographers to look at her apartment. Given that a leaky sink will not put any news photographer in the running for a photojournalism Pulitzer, the photographer opted for a picture of her very large TV set instead.

Now, this TV set has excited a good deal of outrage in the conservative blogs, like Ross Douthat's, for example. And I myself saw the picture. The flat screen TV appeared quite large, though the wide-angle lens used exaggerated this somewhat.

But no matter. It was definitely a big television set.

The Lee Atwater-esque encoded message here (which right wingers with instinctive wisdom never feel the need to spell out and make potentially falsifiable) is that the overburdened taxpayer has paid for this TV set, or, if not and if the money was Ms Jasper's very own, then it should have been used for several months rent for non-subsidized housing. Absent such assumptions, indeed, why else would there be the outrage?

Well, let's assume for the moment that the Atwater-Rove message is true, just for the heck of it.

The important question to ask, then, in terms of the holiday tradition being celebrated even as I write (by all except secular enemies of Christmas and maybe a few Jews and Muslims and Buddhists), is "so what?"

I suspect Ross Douthat either belongs to, or in any case and for whatever reason psychically identifies with, an income bracket that has received an inordinate Republican tax break at the expense of the rest of us, not to mention at the expense of our children and grandchildren, and as such is either himself a greater burden to his fellow men than Ms Jasper, or admires men who are. Not to put too fine a point on it, Warren Buffet, second richest man in America, is in a much lower tax bracket than his secretary, who pays twice the percentage of her income to support George Bush's war than Warren Buffet does. Mr. Buffet was honorable enough to express outrage about this, but I doubt if any conservative bloggers have. I could be wrong, of course. I haven't read Ross Douthat's archives to find out about him.

But I digress. Getting back to the TV welfare queen, and to introduce a little perspective here, this being Christmas Eve, I went to the Good Book to say what Jesus might say about the matter. Assuming that, say, adultery might be considered even worse in conservative circles than ownership of a large TV set, Jesus' words to a mob agitated by a serious transgression against a conservative moral code might be instructive and apposite. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

In fact Jesus seems like the kind of guy who would get more offended about wide-screen TVs in the houses of the rich than in the houses of the poor. Specifically, "...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Matthew 19:24

That's a pretty hard message for a conservative to hear, but they seem to have been diligently at work all these many centuries not hearing it.

And there's this: "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you" again from Matthew. This would seem to prohibit those among the right wing who are actually Christians from being real soreheads about Ms. Jasper's subsidized housing.

In the spirit of the Season, I have to say that my overall impression is that Jesus was far more forgiving of the sinners than of those who obsess and rend their garments about the sin.

Newspaper of record

2007-11-18T15:48:00.001-06:00

You'd think that Maureen Dowd had at last jumped the shark with her psychotic Hillary dominatrix column in today's New York Times, but I finally realized, reading it, that the shark can no longer be jumped by an American pundit. Modo's steamy mix of unknowing self parody, psychosexual obsession, bodice-ripperesque O-take-me-Rudy fantasy as politics has finally achieved the level of the unremarkable in political journalism. I guess I hadn't been paying attention. Tom Friedman's sophomoric "Obama needs a big swinging Dick as VP" column on the same page clinches it.

One weeps for the Republic.

Is this a great country or what?

2007-11-10T12:28:00.000-06:00

Yesterday our born-again Manichaean president made his fourth trip to San Antonio to strut and preen before an audience of wounded and maimed soldiers at Brooke Army Medical Center. According to the San Antonio Express-News, he made a light vs dark speech where he said that "If you kill people to achieve a political objective or to advance an ideology ... you are nothing but evil." He was referring, of course, to "suiciders," not deciders.

"Bush spent almost two hours at the center chatting with wounded soldiers, including Pfc. Nicholas Clark, 26, of Seattle, around whom he wrapped his suit coat. Bush asked Clark, who lost his left leg below the knee in an ambush June 2 in Afghanistan, if he wanted to go home."

"No. I want to go back (overseas)," Clark said.

"Isn't this a great country?" Bush responded.

The hoverbot

2007-10-10T23:07:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post has come out with a story about tiny flying robots which may be spying on, well, whoever. They had a photo of a robotic "fly" which was actually about the size of a wasp, resting on the tip of someone's finger. The robot wasn't shown in the air, and it was not clear that it was functional.

They also had a video which showed a flying robot "dragonfly" which did have two pairs of wings like a dragonfly, but the resemblance ended there: the robot was about the size of a great tailed grackle, and flew like a barnyard chicken that had gotten over a fence.

According to WaPo's informed sources, DARPA is also spending the taxpayers' money installing computer chips in moth pupae, hoping a bionic spy moth will emerge. They are also working with beetles, hoping to take control of living insects with inserted silicon chips.

Mention was also made of the threat of unrestricted flying robots to commercial air traffic.

The story concluded with speculation that tiny spy robots may already be airworthy and operational, mentioning various reports of odd looking dragonflies at peace demonstations.

I also have my inside sources, more credible perhaps than those of the Washington Post.

Here is the real deal, the CIA's secret spy bot. Called the hoverbot, it is about half an inch long, and contains a very, very tiny camera with an even tinier ultra telephoto zoom lens.

Ken Burns's War

2007-10-03T18:47:00.001-05:00

Having watched the 16 hours of Ken Burns's war extravaganza, I have to say I thought it sucked. There was a lot wrong with it as art, which I will get to, but there was a deep moral hole at the center of it. The artistic failure and the moral black hole are related.

Nostalgic, sentimental, slow paced like an endless thanksgiving family get-together, and deeply invested in American exceptionalism, with a self-congratulatory and mawkish backward view of any mention of the evils of the time, segregation, for example, from an implicit we-are-much-better-now-thankyou viewer-supplied perspective, plus running through it all there was a kind of subliminal and in my view deeply dishonest crypto-triumphalism as contaminating background radiation. It was a succession of Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post magazine-cover pictures of war on the home front alternating with the attempted-realism of non-stop newsreel explosions, weary soldiers marching, more explosions, corpses, and more corpses, and mutilated corpses, and more of them too, all with the probably unintentional effect of deadening any real realization of the human meaning of it, with a voiceover of course, explaining it all.

Mention was made of the furor that arose when the first photos were published, in Life, I think, of dead American soldiers in Pacific beach sand. Those photos had impact because no one had yet seen them. To see 16 hours straight of death and mayhem and more death and more death yet deadens the moral instincts, assuming the viewers have any left after CSI Miami and the average American action-movie genre film.

This series was in effect a vaccine against a genuine apprehension of what that war or any other war really is.

The voice-over was almost unbearable--no cliche, bromide, nor hackneyed comfort-zone voice giving sonorous meaning to it all left undeployed, and most unbearable of all was Tom Hanks reading homilies from a Minnesota small-town newspaper. I hasten to say that the homilies themselves were not unbearable in their original context. They only became so in the context of this obscene celebration of The War.

Yes, celebration. Who does Ken Burns think he is kidding?

And the celebration was profoundly dishonest, in every which way from Sunday. (Tom Hanks could really say that well, I'll bet.) First of all, the idea of taking four towns as representative of America is folly. Hispanics got angry, with good reason, because there was not a Martínez or a Gonzales from any of these places, but four towns are by definition not representative. The project of painting these towns, in black and white mostly, as "America" is flawed and dishonest from the start.

What this was, was the construction of an idyllic myth of "America" brought together by this great (and I suspect in Ken Burns's view, wonderful) crisis, The War. Rosie the Riveter rolled up her sleeves. Civilians put their shoulders to the wheel. We put our differences aside. Fresh faced boys lined up to volunteer. All underwent great sacrifice, enduring hardship, death, and destruction to further our great project, victory, which brought us all together.

What crap! What unbelievable nonsense.

Burns inadvertently makes exactly those same observations about the Japanese and the Germans. The War was a great crisis that brought everyone together, everything subordinated to the cause of victory--but, given a view from the outside, he has no trouble seeing the downside of Japanese or German nationalistic fervor.

Our guys are heroes. The Japs are fanatics. This film should really be offensive to anyone not blinded by Ken-Burns-Americanism.

Burns also comes down pretty much on the side of those who claim the use of the atomic bomb was necessary, and quotes absurd hypothetical numbers of lives-that-would-have-been-lost. Half a million American soldiers. Hypothetical numbers are great to send into rhetorical battle.

He mentions, but only in passing, and without exploring it, the fact that the Japanese were actively trying to arrange a conditional surrender when the bombs were dropped. He does not mention that the one condition they required, and which we rejected, was the retention of the Emperor as head of state. When they surrendered unconditionally, we gave them the very thing they had been holding out for in their back-channel peace proposals.

Burns, who has no concept of irony, does not talk about this.

Burns does not say a word about the fact that the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Leahy, opposed dropping the bomb. He does not mention that Eisenhower opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral Nimitz opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral Halsey opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral King opposed it. He does not mention that MacArthur opposed it. Most of them opposed it on old-fashioned moral grounds. Some, who knew how close Japan was to military collapse, opposed it on pragmatic grounds.

He does not mention that Einstein opposed it. Of course not. Einstein was not from Mobile, Alabama, or Laverne, Minnesota.

The millions of people who watched the final episode of this travesty went away knowing nothing of the historical issues surrounding the use of the bomb, and now think that it was a regrettable necessity.

That's very sad.

Why did I watch it, then? The personal accounts were fascinating, and were the main reason I stuck with it all the way through. I liked all the talking heads, even the couple of them who made the war into a springboard for some well-rehearsed crackerbarrel philosophy. They spoke, as the voiceover would have said, from the heart. Their words from the heart however were drowned out by the voiceover and the the explosions and the sturm und drang, courtesy of Ken Burns. These people were deeply deceived by Mr. Burns, in my opinion, because their relatively quiet and moving testimony was perverted to his toxic ends.

I liked most of the music, but again, it was misused to further Burns's terrible project.

I never saw Burns's Civil War, and I know now that I never will.

Maureen Dowd, glossed

2007-09-21T12:47:00.000-05:00

The first bad thing about the lifting of the TimesSelect curtain is that Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks are no longer hidden behind a protective veil, and the second is that I, a retired guy with better things to do with his time, once again feel a certain compulsion to read them. My operative relapsed-addict emotion when caught by their columns is a kind of hair-standing-on-end fascination, like when you can't turn your eyes away from some TV horrorshow like CSI Miami (which is probably really bad for you, mental-health-wise, to watch.)

Friedman and Brooks are the ones who sometimes provoke me enough to write blog responses, but I have never quite gotten a handle on MoDo. For Dowd junkies I have the pleasure of recommending a blog entry at Bats Left Throws Right, where Mr. Doghouse Riley has compiled, at who knows what psychic cost, a handy Dowd glossary that is, well, both a work of profound psychological insight and a stunningly accurate lexicographical tour de force.

The good thing is that I am no longer dependent on the kindness of strangers for Krugman.

Reflections on 9/11

2007-09-11T17:24:00.000-05:00

I think September 11, 2001, was my first day back at work. Ten days earlier my wife Kay had gone into the hospital with acute myeloid leukemia. She had been extremely sick when admitted, but by the 11th she had started chemotherapy and her condition had stabilized. The oncologist told us that Kay had a 50 percent chance of being cured. I knew by then that he was stretching the truth, but I have no doubt that his motive was to make Kay feel better.

I was sitting at my computer looking up stuff in medical journals about myelogenous leukemia, when I heard someone saying that the Pentagon was on fire and that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. The White House is under attack, someone said.

Oh, I thought. That's interesting. My concerns were elsewhere. That can't be true, I thought. And I went back to reading about blood cell cancer. We had no TV in my office, but someone turned on a radio, and slowly the scope of the attacks began to dawn on me.

I don't know if you remember, but there were rumors of more planes hijacked and possible attacks elsewhere. It occurred to me that I should be with Kay. I had only scheduled myself to work half a day, so I left early and went back to the hospital. Kay was watching TV in her room when I got there.

So, like everyone, we watched the towers explode in a fireball. Again and again. We watched the towers fall, and fall, and fall again. (I have never watched those images since then, and I probably never will. I can see them in my mind's eye if I want to--and I don't much want to.)

I didn't know anyone who died on 9/11. Nor do I know anyone who knew anyone who died on 9/11. I realized watching with Kay in her hospital room, still not totally sure she would survive in the short term and very uncertain about her longer term prospects, that 9/11 was very different for a few thousand people who died, and for family and friends who were left behind, than for the rest of us. It was a national trauma, whatever that means, but a lot of people since then tried to pretend to a level of grief that is not really theirs. That is not to say that the rest of us are not sincere in being shocked or horrified or angered by what we all saw.

There were a few thousand people who suffered real grief on 9/11. The rest of us were spectators. Kay's death eight months later was more real and terrible to me than a thousand 9/11s. That is the nature of actual grief, and actual death.

What I am leading up to is that there was and is a profound bad faith at the core of the political use of 9/11, mostly by Republicans, though they are not the only culprits. It's just that they have used it more cynically than anyone else, and with incredible and heart-stopping success. They used their own pretended grief and other people's shock and horror to further, and unfortunately to accomplish, their political agenda, which turned out to be pretty goddamn vicious and monstrous in almost every way possible.

I am not a conspiracy crackpot. Even though George Bush instantly appropriated 9/11 and used it for his own purposes, I don't think he engineered it, if only because he is not that competent. Nor do I believe he passively but knowingly let it happen. His popularity was dropping, and he may have been secretly praying for a terrorist attack, but I doubt if he really knew anything about it. He is a chuckle-headed if inflexible and authoritarian superannuated frat-boy, and frat boys don't bother their pretty heads about stuff like that.

The problem is what he did afterwards. I am not talking about hiding all day in a hole in Nebraska, or was it Kansas, I forget, though that was certainly revealing behavior on his part. What I am talking about is his wrapping himself in the flag and pissing on it from the inside as he defiled the the bill of rights and set about making his office one of an elected absolute monarch. No separation of powers for this creep. He stole the country, and used 9/11 as his burglary tool.

He is still doing it, as he conflates staying the course, as he calls it, with patriotism, and sends his flunky General Petraeus to take the heat for the White House authored put-up job bogus-numbers "Petraeus report" on the alleged success of the surge.

Interestingly, George Bush and Osama bin Laden both like to commemorate 9/11. Given that it made both of them successful beyond their wildest dreams, how could we expect otherwise?

Another anti-war vigil in Austin

2007-08-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

About 300 people gathered late yesterday afternoon on both sides of the Congress Avenue bridge in opposition to the Iraq War. The people driving by overwhelmingly honked in support. I didn't see any expressions of disagreement, but I don't have psychic powers to intuit the motives of the honksters who did not wave or cheer. Certainly there was no overt hostility.

All in all, it was very peaceful, and a nice afternoon to be out on the bridge, but as far as I can tell the efforts of the Austin Statesman photographer, who was busy with several cameras, went in vain--I could find nothing this morning in the Austin newspaper about the event. He certainly took more photos than I, and I took 20 or 30. But the online Statesman sometimes buries or does not run things that are in the print edition, so perhaps I missed it (I unsubscribed to the print version a year ago, for political reasons.)

Clearly though, it was not a significant news event on a day when local news included a congratulatory piece on an Austin Statesman reporter winning third prize for an outstanding food-reporting story.

Torture once again

2007-08-25T19:52:00.000-05:00

Here we have Megan McArdle, a conservative columnist at Atlantic.com, suggesting that those of us who oppose torture, possibly not including the columnist, should not use pragmatic arguments against torture by claiming, for example, that it does not work. She suggests that perhaps it does. Instead, she advises liberals, of whom she is clearly not one, to take the harder approach, and stand against torture on moral grounds.

McArdle, who previously wrote a blog under the pen name of Jane Galt, may perhaps be a fan of the the harder approach and the heroic pose on principle, if her taste in political literature can be admitted in evidence (she enjoys the novels of Ayn Rand, though she insists she is not, herself, an "objectivist," Rand's name for her socialist-realism stood on its head.) I find myself unfairly perhaps suspecting that if McArdle does in fact oppose torture on principle, it is because so many liberals oppose it for inferior and pragmatic reasons.

But, in any case, I agree with her that if we oppose torture, we should do so on principle, even as at the same time I have my doubts as to her bona fides as an advice-giver to liberals.

But is the legitimacy of torture something that is even a morally defensible thing to talk about? Is it a discussion we should actually have? Why do liberals find themselves invited--by right-wingers whom we are assured are earnest,philosophically-minded truth-seekers--to even talk about such a thing? Does the invitation to this intellectual soiree have another consequence, not to mention another purpose, than the unveiling of the Truth?

I am not suggesting a conspiracy, by the right. I am suggesting a fundamental flaw in the way these guys look at the world.

Let's take something similar. Suppose a right-winger proposes--and not in a Jonathan Swiftian way--that we seriously examine the case for murdering our children, and eating them, in times of hardship.

After all, 9/11 changed everything. And sometimes it works. Protein is protein.

Immediately we see the problem.

Now McArdle here in effect inserts in her by-the-way manner that really, if we _really_ oppose such cannibalism, we should do so because it is a bad thing, not because it doesn't provide calories.

Now, in the first amendment sense at least, I am not in favor of actually, legally, suppressing such a discussion. I suppose I am more in favor of a Mennonite-like shunning of people who wish to carry on that conversation with us. The only philosophical argument here, that I can see, is the case for rejecting such talk altogether, not the case for boiling and eating our children.

I suppose I would make a sort of slippery-slope argument, that the very consideration of that behavior--or for that matter, of torture--takes us closer to very bad things indeed.

At this point, someone wishing to be helpful, suggests that we should define our terms (we actually see this in comments to McArdle's blog.) What do we mean by killing and eating our children? Perhaps eating our children without killing them should be an acceptable thing to talk about. And so forth. Or to paraphrase some of the real comments, "Torture is a bad thing, agreed, but how about waterboarding?"

We see the slippery slope, here, already getting slid down.

Tlakaelel at Hueco Tanks

2007-08-08T09:58:00.000-05:00

Tlakaelel is important in the Mexica movement, an indigenist religious revival movement which began in Mexico City in the 1960s. It is organized, if that is the word, into highly independent local groups called kalpullis. Partly traditional, but tending towards syncretism, this movement tapped into Chicano identity issues in the American southwest, where the kalpullis have adopted a lot of US Native American religious ceremonies and beliefs. Over the years Tlakaelel, whose real name is Francisco Jimenez, has evolved a sort of pan-Indian ideology which has a Nahuatl mythological core, but a lot of ceremonial practices gotten from North American Indians.

A few years before her death, my wife Kay Sutherland, an anthropologist whose specialties included Native American rock art and meso-American religions, had concluded that a lot of elements of southwest rock art represented a fusion of Meso-American and native pre-Puebloan concepts. Through a complex series of events, this led some kalpulli members in El Paso to seek out her assistance in getting the Texas parks system to give their kalpulli the same status to conduct religious ceremonies at Hueco Tanks State Park as some US Native American groups had.

So she spent some time interviewing Tlakaelel, who is revered as an elder by most US kalpulli groups, and she took him to important rock art sites like Hueco Tanks. She came to feel that the kalpulli understanding of these sites was certainly as valid as that of the official Native American groups. Now, the parks department wanted only groups with historical cultural continuity with Hueco Tanks. Their concept of cultural continuity was simplistic, but hey, these people are highly politicized bureaucrats, and simplistic is all they know. Kay gave it a shot, but their basic prejudice (literally) was that these people are Mexicans reinventing themselves as Indians, a viewpoint completely at odds with Kay's anthropological training, not to mention her Jungian personal views of religion.

Anyway, Kay was sympathetic to the kalpulli, and presented a perhaps overly sophisticated argument to the parks people that all religions reinvent themselves all the time, and moreover that there was in fact a greater continuity of myth between the religious symbols found at Hueco Tanks and the contemporary belief system of the kalpulli than with the contemporary belief systems of some of the allowed groups. But no dice. The kalpulli lost.

So they conduct ceremonies in the desert outside Hueco Tanks.

I think these photos were taken in 2001. Tlakaelel would have been about 80 years old here. He has a certain personal presence, as you may be able to see from the pictures.

For your amusement...

2007-07-19T13:23:00.000-05:00

...and speaking of Senator Hutchison, when I was sending the remarks in the previous post to the senator, I found the following caption on her web page. It was under a photo of the back of a lot of heads in an auditorium looking at a woman in the distance who may be the Senator herself behind a podium, addressing them. "07.18.07 Senator Hutchison addresses the Christians United for Isreal Washignton Summit about America's friendship with Isreal."

I am sure this will be corrected at some point, if and when a literate person reads her web page and points it out. Perhaps I will send an email to the site administrator myself.

Update: I did email the site administrator, who, without privately thanking me or even acknowledging my message, fixed the caption. Republicans. But in fairness, I guess he or she could have been fired if the Senator, who is notoriously bad tempered with underlings, found out about it.

Another open letter to my senators

2007-07-19T12:10:00.000-05:00

I occasionally get tired of sending unread pixels to gnomes in the offices of senators Cornyn and Hutchison, and post an open letter addressed to the senators from Texas on my blog so that they might, when surfing the web, run across it and read it here. Of course I also send it the standard way, along with an invitation for the senators (or designated gnomes) to comment, either here or by return mail. They never do, unless you count a form letter.
-----------------

Dear Senator:

Having seen Michael Moore's film, I feel compelled to write to protest the awful medical system we have in this country.

The word "awful" is carefully chosen. This is the only country in the civilized world where people are _ever_ reduced to penury by medical bills. Only in America. Not only does this happen here, it happens routinely, even in cases where people have insurance they have paid for all their lives in good faith, believing it would actually be there for them when they got sick.

As you know it is quite common to have payment disallowed by insurance companies when major illness strikes. Indeed, and as you know, insurance companies employ large numbers of people whose sole _job_ is to find excuses not to pay when an insured person gets sick.

Republicans believe deeply in home ownership. As it happens, this is also the only country in the civilized world where people lose their homes because of medical bills. Medical bills are the major cause of personal bankruptcy in this country. Not only that, but because of the draconian bankruptcy laws (that YOU voted for, by the way, Senator) victims of illness now stand not only to lose their homes, but, once reduced to bankruptcy, will spend their old age (if they survive the illness, which in this country is less likely than in 36 other countries) in perpetual debt peonage to meet the requirements of their court-ordered payment plan, assuming of course they are able to hobble to Walmart to work as a greeter or stockboy.

What a brave new world you have created!

But wait--the rest of the world is not like this. I momentarily forgot. Sorry. This problem is one of the few items we can find still bearing the label "made in America." In France, and Britain, and every western European country, they spend half as much as we do on medical care, with better medical outcomes. Half as much money. Better outcomes.

And faster service.

Contrary to insurance company propaganda, in all of these countries except Canada they have a _shorter_ wait time for elective medical procedures than we do. (In Canada it's about the same as here.) And nobody at all goes bankrupt because of medical bills in Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Belgium...you get the picture...or even in Canada.

Wow! How do they do that?

Well, I have a suggestion as to how. Here's my proposal. Why don't you extend the, um, "socialized" medical care you receive as senators to the rest of us? Senators and members of Congress have a very good taxpayer funded medical plan, which is comparable to what ordinary citizens have in France. I have seen the details of your plan. It's exceedingly gold-plated--for the United States, although, of course, it would be entirely normal elsewhere.

This issue is kind of personal for me, actually. A good friend of our family died a few years ago because she had no insurance and could not afford to see a doctor until she got very sick, at which time it was too late to cure the cancer that killed her--which is routinely cured if caught early. She was the sole support of two children. She worked as a waitress. Her excuse for her negligence? She had to put food on the table and come up with the rent for a roof over their heads. Obviously, in retrospect, she should have let them go hungry for a week, and perhaps even gotten herself and her children evicted. That would be the Republican way.

Maybe there's a better way, senator. The system that you and your friends have built (for the rest of us, not for yourselves), sucks. It's time to change it.

Sincerely,

Jim McCulloch

Dulce et decorum est

2007-07-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

So here I am minding my own business on Flickr, where I have sequestered myself lately, looking at and enjoying other people's excellent photos, and in going through new photos on one of the groups that usually has wonderful pictures displayed, mostly of nature, I find a photo of a tattered stars and stripes against a stormy sky, with the caption "Remember the children..."

This is the day after Scooter Libby has been pardoned by The Decider in Chief, and the day before the Fourth of July, so it briefly occurs to me that politics will rear its ugly head for good or ill, probably ill, but hey, let's not jump to conclusions yet. Maybe it's an ironic comment on justice in America, where Scooter walks and merciless and often draconian sentences are meted out to the lower orders, who of course have no friends in the White House.

So with a deep sigh, I read the long entry that followed the ellipsis, which quickly fulfilled my intuition that we cannot escape right-wing political hectoring, in this case dipped in syrup, even when we are innocently looking at online photo galleries. "Some of us have highs, others lows, but really, what have we done for those who have lows unavoidable? Those away, serving, what have we done for them, for their families, for their children."

What indeed? So far, it looks like we have posted a photo an American flag. This person, who btw likes to upload photos of monster trucks crushing natural beauty under enormous tires, goes on:

"what are we doing on Independance Day to remind those children of military parents that the sacrifice they give is also as worthy of the ones their military parents give. Remember those kids who dads havent seen them graduate, havent seen the prom dress, didnt get to walk them down the aisle, havent had the first dance, missed a baptism, werent there for a birth, a first step, a first word, a first smile.

Remember those in the Services who didn't volunteer when there parents did....remember the children. "

Well, in answering the question, which our flag waver does not actually do, other than proposing remembrance and a sort of involuntary enlistment for them, I suppose that since those children already have the folded-up flag the government gave them, they have no need of flag photos, nor of reminders that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, nor saccharin pieties and sappy bromides.

What was this guy thinking?

You know, there's not a lot you can say to someone whose father or mother has been killed in Iraq, whether that father or mother was an American soldier or one of the 600,000+ Iraqi civilians killed so far. "I'm sorry," (if sincere) is certainly appropriate. I don't know what else you can say.

But now that I think about it, I suppose that monetary reparations would be a good thing--even though obviously morally and psychologically insufficient--in that a chunk of money would at least be a practical help to survivors. The sums could conceivably be quite ample, if taken out of the profits of Halliburton and Blackwater and all the other mercenary corporate profiteers swollen like parasites with the rewards of war.

And maybe some of the superpatriots could sell of a few of their monster trucks and all-terrain vehicles and donate the proceeds to the children of the war dead. Anything helps.

Where have I gone?

2007-06-25T12:48:00.000-05:00

I have mostly been ignoring the impulse that leads to the leaden and pedestrian (if sincere) prose you see in the movie review below, or to incendiary political rants, and taken me and my camera out in the world to take pictures of it, at the moment mostly photos of the natural world, though that may change. And I post them on Flickr, if anyone is interested in seeing lots of dragonflies and butterflies.

Regardless of the quality of the results, I seem to enjoy this hobby a lot more than writing blog entries, hence I put up a lot more pictures on Flickr--more or less daily, depending on the weather--than posts on the blog. I do try, at least occasionally, to put a little bit of explanatory (or exculpatory) writing under the photos, though, lest anything think I have slipped entirely under the spell of the visual.

So, even though the blog is still in business, please don't stay tuned here on a daily basis. But if you check back every couple of weeks, you might find something new.

Sicko

2007-06-23T21:05:00.000-05:00

In this movie Michael Moore does just what he has done in the past, only better. He presents a very, _very_ simple point that most Americans agree with.

Actually, several very simple points. It's wrong to let people die or suffer because they are poor, or because they are uninsured. It's wrong for insurance companies to hire people whose sole job is to find excuses to deny coverage to people who _are_ insured, or at least who had believed themselves to be insured, till they got screwed out of coverage by their insurance company. It's wrong for people to lose their homes because of medical bills. It's wrong for the richest country in the world give 50 million uninsured people rotten medical care, or none, and simply throw them to the wolves when it comes to illness. It's wrong for hospitals to dump a confused and indigent patient, barefooted and wearing a hospital gown, on a Los Angeles skid row because the woman had no insurance. You see her wander around, dazed, in the street, after being put out of the taxi--all captured by a security surveillance camera. It's a pretty strong image.

And it's wrong for us to spend twice as much per capita on medical care as any country in the world, apparently to have that spending go to profits for insurance companies rather than treatment of illness--such that we are 37th in the world in the overall quality of our medical care.

Because Moore presents things very simply, and powerfully, he places those who disagree in the position of having to excuse obvious inequities, iniquities, and injustices, as well as outright medical atrocities like having to decide which finger you want to save, of two you have sliced off, based on the size of your savings account.

The more complex and convoluted the apologies for this sort of thing are, the deeper the hole the apologists dig for themselves.

He's unfair, of course. What he does is something the right wing has always done, and always been good at, but which they do in a much more dishonest way. Given that the Right thinks of their kulturkampf as a war, not a discussion, Moore presumably believes he is justified in coming back at them in the same way. It's kinda refreshing, if you believe in his message, to see a man of the left being both unfair and really effective.

But the Cuba business was probably a mistake, because it gives the Right an opening to change the subject. Alas, Moore can never resist a stunt. Fox News has already referred to the treatment Moore's sick people got in Cuba as Potemkin medical care. But the damage Moore does to himself here is confined to people who do not see the film. Those who do see it will still agree with Moore's basic points even if they suspect that the Cuban medical care shown was more than what an ordinary Cuban would get. The trouble is, a lot of people will not see the movie, and will get their review of it not from me, or someone like me, but from Fox and Rush Limbaugh.

In any case, Moore is not at all unfair, and is not pulling a stunt, when he compares Canadian, British, and French medical care with our own. At least half the movie is a demolition of the claims right wing propagandists have made for half a century about medical care in these three countries. In one nighttime sequence he goes on house calls with a French doctor. House calls. The French spend _half_ as much as we do on medical care, pay their doctors very well, have better medical outcomes, and can still afford to pay doctors to visit patients in their houses!

When was the last time a doctor came to your house?

How can a right winger argue with this? Only by changing the subject, preferably to something about Cuba. Even that is dangerous. Cuba is a third world country that has been subjected to a severe embargo for 40 some-odd years. Whether Moore's sick people got Potemkin medical care or not, ordinary Cubans do live as long as we do, and more Cuban babies survive infancy than American babies. Overall, Cuban medicine is ranked 39th in the world, slightly behind us. Remember, we are number 37, although, as some of us are fond of saying, we are the richest country on the planet.

Incomprehension

2007-06-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

This South Congress sidewalk photo was taken at the most recent First Thursday, which was an originally spontaneous Austin street event which is now semi-institutionalized but highly variable in turnout, sometimes very extravagant with large crowds, or sometimes sedate, like this one, hard to tell from the normal South Congress sidewalk scene except for clumps of enthusiastic capoeiristas, occasional street musicians with forlornly open guitar cases with a few dollar bills floating inside, a couple of vacant lots with tentsfull of renaissance-faireish craft vendors, and an occasional street preacher.

The women in the foreground have just each been handed a multi-page tract dense with King James Bible quotations set in 6 point type. The preacher seems to be a fresh-faced country boy hard beset by sin. He is not wearing a kevlar vest, though it might appear--sorry for the quality of the photo--that he is.

The strange case of General Patriotboy and his lynch mob

2007-06-09T18:24:00.000-05:00

Lately the dovecotes of liberal Blogistan have been fluttered by the Nashville Is Talking incident. I was alerted to this by Chris Clarke's blog, Creek Running North. A local blogger in Nashville (www.nashvilleistalking.com), Brittney Gilbert, well known for her stalwart liberal views, posted, under the heading Teaching Libs a Lesson, a particularly vicious piece of work from a right-wing, racially ante-bellum blogger called Smantix, which exulted in Steve Gilliard's death.

It was in fact so nasty that one would either assume that Ms Gilbert was herself an insane racist who agreed with this, or else that she was holding up to her readers a particularly dreadful piece of trash, illustrating what kind of person this Smantix character was. And in fact, regular readers of Nashville is Talking knew that the latter was the case, because Ms Gilbert was well known to detest Smantix, who is apparently notorious in Nashville for such beyond-the-pale stuff.

Her blog actually posts a lot of stuff without much comment, relying on the readers to either have common sense, or the initiative to find out context and meaning for themselves. Her paid gig as a blogger, under the auspices of a Nashville TV station, according to a video she posted in February, prior to the uproar, is in fact to function as an aggregator of other Nashville blogs, with some comment or opinion from her. Apparently she had in fact commented on Smantix and his views in the past. She neglected to do so this time.

Problem is, you have to spell stuff out for fundamentalists. Trouble is on the horizon.

Soon a liberal blogger called Patriotboy who usually posts under his other pseudonym of "General J. C. Christian, Patriot" (who is moderately well known, and who considers himself--in his own Haloscan comments, at least--an "A-list" blogger,) happens upon the Smantix screed.

Oh, my. He goes nuts. He denounces Ms Gilbert. He writes her employer, and the blog's advertisers, trying to get her fired. Not only that, his devoted what-he-said following apparently did likewise, and filled the comments to her blog with, well, poorly considered remarks.

General Patriotboy himself, who was soon informed that Ms Gilbert was a liberal and that she was well-known to dislike Smantix and everything he stands for, is now in a quandary. Shall he back down? Well, he does, in the sense that he removed the contact information for writing her employer. Evidently he regarded this as a retraction of his request that she be fired. But he redoubles his vituperation, as do his troops.

He adds an update to his original post. In it, he asks her to apologize. His request was phrased as "Apparently, Brittney is just plain fucking stupid." That kind of request for apology generally is not perceived as such.

This is probably what set off the firestorm. Now people were going to the General's blog and accusing him of being a sexist bastard. The general denied this, and I am willing to take him at his word, but unlike Ms Gilbert's clear statement that she finds Smantix's words abhorrent, the General refused to retract his remarks about "Brittney," but continued to maintain stoutly that he was not a misogynist.

You can draw your own conclusion about that.

And the troops continued to accuse Gilbert of stupidity as well as racism, in her blog's comments, as well as in the General's.

One of them asks, "Is she at the local Klan meeting or is she dropping the kids off at Nazi Youth Camp?”

Another asks, “Brittney, Brittney, Brittney: What are we going to do with you kitten?”

Another lets her know of her perils if she travels to Canada. “In Canada, Brittney and her colleagues could be considered criminals under the Criminal Code of Canada as it states that ‘anyone who incites hatred of an identifiable group or promotes hatred is guilty of a criminal offense and will be imprisoned for two to five years.’"

Another says, “Brittney, what a monster you are.”

Another: “You’re a bigot, there are millions like you, everybody knows it, case closed.”

Another: “Either Brittany is an idiot or she’s got a serious racism jones. Well, actually the two are not mutually exclusive. There are far too many people with Brittney’s skill set currently working in media and government, perhaps she should consider a different career path.”

There was a lot more like that.

Ms Gilbert quit. She said essentially that this was the last straw; she had been thinking of leaving anyway, she wasn't thick-skinned enough for this kind of abuse, and goodbye.

Well, you can imagine what happened then. I checked in at General Patriotboy's place, and the comments were far from universally favorable, though the General's faithful did step up to the plate. And more. One of them, indeed, goes so far as to write the dean and the student newspaper and the supervising professor of a UC Irvine PhD student who had disagreed with the General and his throng, accusing the student of being a white supremacist, which was self-evidently the opposite of the case. This tattling had the intent of--well, it's unclear to me. Getting the student thrown out of school? I don't know.

At last count there were 265 comments in the General's blog on the whole business, including a few of my own, which I regret. There are also a great many other blogs, including Creek Running North, and now this one, expressing some opinions on the matter.

I guess what I find appalling in this is being forced to a renewed awareness that there are a lot of people nominally on my side, that I don't want on my side. I cringe.

In fairness to the General--although it's hard to be fair to him, because he has carried it out to a degree where that's difficult for me to do--I can understand his outrage at the offending Smantix filth. I guess at that point we part company, because if I ran across something that vile, I know I would have tried to find out if it was being held up as something awful, or if the blogger agreed with the quoted material.

In Brittney Gilbert's case, that would not have been very hard.

How do you know when...

2007-05-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

This is pretty local and arcane, but people in Texas who have been following the recent events in the Texas House of Representatives will know what I am talking about.

An old bad joke made worse (something Texas politicians are good at):

Q: How do you know when Tom Craddick is lying?
A: When Terry Keel's lips are moving.

When the people of the state declined to make Keel a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, they forgot to drive a stake through his heart.

Update:
OK, I suppose I should explain this. It's simply too obscure.

Terry Keel was my rep in the Texas Legislature. Although (because of gerrymandering) he represented what was considered a safe Repub seat, his ambition led him to run for higher office. Whether because of his haircut, which, though comic, is a trivial issue but probably the deciding one, or because of his politics, which combined an opportunism he is unable to conceal with an extremism which down-home Republican extremists probably suspected, unjustly, was merely simulated, he lost.

Cheers arose from all of us who have had anything to do with him. A Democrat won the seat he vacated. Hurrah!

Meanwhile, the speaker of the Texas House, Tom Craddick, a minor league henchman of Tom Delay, was running into difficulty with his own party in the Lege because of his high-handed ways. I don't know the details of why--his arrogance, favoritism, and stupidity have not changed and have not harmed him in the past so I see no reason why they should suddenly do so now--my guess is that backroom backstabbing is involved--but anyway a revolt broke out and a head count showed he did not have the votes to keep his post. So, his response to this situation was to fire the Parliamentarian (a paid official) whose job was to make sure parliamentary rules were followed, and he hired an unemployed pol, the selfsame Terry Keel mentioned above, as a replacement.

The reason quickly became apparent. One thing that Craddick is not, is quick on his feet. In fact he is possibly the most inarticulate and witless politico this side of George Bush himself. You have not seen a deer in the headlights until you have seen Tom Craddick attempt to answer an unfriendly question. Keel, on the other hand, though creepy beyond belief even without his black cape, is smart.

So for the duration of the (failed) revolt, about 3 days, those of us with enough curiosity to tune in on the local access channel which had the Lege live, could see someone raise a point of order, and Craddick would turn to Keel, Keel would speak in slow three or four word phrases (the limit of Craddick's short term memory, apparently) which Craddick would repeat verbatim on the mike. The world's worst puppet show.

In this way, Keel orchestrated a refusal to recognize any motion whatsoever to remove the speaker. And the orchestration was successful. I fear that Keel will go far.

The Zen of dragonfly photography

2007-05-24T17:50:00.001-05:00

The word zen, which arrived in Japan after a complex millenia-long meander through East Asia of ever-more-mispronounced Sanskrit, means meditation. I have practiced Buddhist meditation, in one way or another, for more than 30 years. I do still sit in meditation, but i prefer to bring a certain amount of zen to my ordinary life--though the preference does not necessarily imply success in the project.

I find dragonfly and butterfly photography very meditative, unlike regular attendance at my local zen meditation hall, which requires 12 miles of driving on Interstate 35, each way. The drive hones your survival skills, assuming you survive, but in general is unmeditative in either direction, regardless of whatever degree of spiritual awakening you may have arrived at in the interlude between each half of the commute.

I actually like to sit zazen (which redundantly means sitting meditation) at home, and (rarely nowadays) at my local zendo, but the drawback mentioned keeps me from doing the latter much. Before I retired, my work was in the same part of town as the zen center, so since I was already in mid-town Austin, it made sense to go pretty regularly. If I went to the evening zazen after work I could look forward to sitting crosslegged on a cushion looking at a wall for 40 minutes--not for everyone, I realize--and in recent years, not for me, because of hip stiffness, so I sit seiza instead of crosslegged, that is you sit on your ankles, ideally with the aid of a cushion or a small bench made for the purpose. Then I would drive home after rush hour, which generally involved less adrenalin than the 5 o'clock traffic itself does.

Zen Buddhists also do a kind of walking meditation called kinhin, which, for Soto Zen practitioners (my local zen center is Soto, not that that matters) is a slow motion one foot per breath deal that is vaguely silly looking, as in fact almost everything you see or hear in a meditation hall is, come to think of it. However, when I walk in the woods and spot a dragonfly I want to photograph, an unbiased observer would say that my movement at that point would look even sillier than kinhin. Certainly the movement is even slower. I have this superstition that if I manage to approach the dragon (that's what we call them) or the damsel (ditto) or the butterfly in the right state of mind, I will not scare it off. Empirically, that's probably not correct. But then, on the other hand, when I do scare it off, a moment's reflection convinces me I was in the wrong frame of mind.

That is how how superstition is maintained.

Almost as much as walking in the woods and taking pictures, I find processing the pictures to be meditative as well. The zen of photoshop.

The photo below, of a calico pennant, possibly embodies a little bit of both.

Votefraud

2007-05-14T15:24:00.001-05:00

At this writing it is still uncertain whether the Texas Legislature, exercising its Texas-size and legendary unwisdom, is going to pass a poll tax surrogate in the form of a voter ID bill, requiring would-be voters to prove they are citizens. We'll see. A lot of Republicans, in the course of what passes in the Texas Capitol for debate, have been bleating piteously about the danger to our way of life posed by noncitizens swamping the polling places.

A lot of Democrats, and indeed many other reasonable people, have been flummoxed by the this episode of Vote Fraud phobia. Elsewhere in the country, we see a certain manic quality, for example, in the Republican explanation for the wholesale firing of federal prosecutors, that the fired prosecutors didn't show enough zeal in prosecuting vote fraud. The official excuse is beyond strange, because there is no evidence that vote fraud had occurred significantly in the bailiwicks of the fired prosecutors, or indeed, had occurred at all.

So what's up with that, one wonders.

The problem from the POV of the Bushies is not "vote fraud," but instead the more pressing and serious danger of "votefraud." "Votefraud" is pronounced sternly as a single word, and is a dogwhistle Republican code for the franchise when exercised by Democrats.

And as you will recall the Republicans have striven mightily to prevent votefraud, most notably and successfully in the 2000 Florida election, when, at the behest of Jeb Bush, many thousands of black voters who were in fact eligible to vote were put on a list of people to be turned away from the polls. The votefraud of these black voters was twofold; first, that their names resembled those of released felons who, under Florida law, were not supposed to vote; and secondly and more importantly, that black Florida voters traditionally vote about 9 to 1 in favor of any Democrat.

So, even though massive votefraud occurred anyway, such that slightly over 50 percent of Florida voters cast their votes in favor of Al Gore, the votefraud suppression list made the results close enough that Governor Jeb could ask the Supreme Court to intervene to appoint his brother president, to prevent the additional votefraud of a recount.

It was too close a call, and they didn't like it.

So we can see why votefraud is an ever-present concern of the Bush Administration. Once you understand the nature of the problem, it's obvious why prosecutors, even Republican-appointee prosecutors, would be fired if they were unwilling to interrupt the investigation of crime and political corruption to pursue the politically urgent matter of Democrats voting.

And given that many of prosecutors all around the country were actually doing their statutory (as opposed to political) job, it's not a bit surprising that Karl Rove wanted to fire them one and all, clean house and begin anew, kind of like God dissatisfied with his own handiwork, to start over again, in this case with a Justice Department arkfull of the faithful few and a lot of dumb animals--though if Mr. Rove had been in charge of the actual Biblical Ark, he would have brought on board a lot more sheep than the letter of the Law allowed, for who could wish to see the Texas Legislature drown?

Quote of the day

2007-04-30T10:57:00.000-05:00

"We don't really have extremist groups here," he said. "This is the heart of the Bible belt."

--Lufkin (TX) Police Sgt. Stephen Abbott, quoted in the Austin American Statesman.

This remark was in regard to a guy from Lufkin named Paul Ross Evans, who was just arrested for planting a bomb at an Austin abortion clinic.

The old Caldwell County Jail

2007-04-29T21:51:00.001-05:00

My intention today was to take photos at a couple of old Mexican graveyards, but I ended up in taking pictures of an abandoned jail instead. (Notice that I avoided the cheap writerly temptation to say I ended up in jail. It's not often I have such discipline.) The old Caldwell County jail is in Lockhart, Texas, and was in use from about 1910 until 1982. It's a kind of jail you used to see in little towns all around Texas. They have mostly been torn down, and replaced with facilities no doubt just as inhumane, if not more so, but more comfortable for the staff and harder to break out of, allegedly.

(All photos can be viewed larger on Flickr.)

This is actually a very small building. I didn't count the, um, beds, but I'd say the place could have held 15 to 20 very crowded prisoners at one time. The jailer and his family lived on the ground floor. The two floors above were where most of the prisoners were housed, and there was a place for a gallows in a stairwell space between these two floors. The gallows was removed in the 1930s without ever having been used, according to the woman who ran the museum now housed in the jail building. The fourth floor was a single room used for solitary confinement. It was actually a lot roomier and nicer than the other cells, and it had a view. For all the other cells, there was an observation corridor used by the jailer that stood between the cells and the windows so the prisoners could not really see out.

The museum is a local history museum with the excellent odds and ends that I have come to expect from local history societies--a sword from the Civil War that belonged to a local worthy, a saddle from the Chisholm Trail along with a gallery of portrait photos of Chisholm Trail cowboys, an Edison phonograph with a hand crank, someone's piano, a local doctor's turn of the (20th) century bedroom furniture, et cetera. I love stuff like that, and the museum proper--i.e., the ground floor jailer's quarters--was full of such things. But to my surprise, the public is allowed to go upstairs and through the old jail itself, which is pretty much unchanged since 1982, except dingier and the paint as now all peeling, and plus there is no bedding on the steel beds.

There was a photo in the museum of the first sheriff to run this jail, above a display case which held his brass knuckles. He was murdered walking over the railroad tracks between the courthouse, two blocks away, and the jailhouse. I speculated that the brass knuckles might have had something to do with the unsolved murder, but the museum lady seemed to think it was courthouse politics gone very severe.

In any case, you don't want to go to jail in Caldwell County. At least not then, and probably not now.

Photos follow:

Common room. What you see on the opposite wall is a sink, not a urinal. Both the second and third floors had very low headroom. It looks like they painted over graffiti with metallic paint every few years, but when the jail was abandoned they seem to have left the last wall-writings untouched.

Beyond the door is a 2 person cell, about the size of a broom closet. There are two steel bunks in there. Some cells were bigger than others, leading me to remember that the jail was almost certainly racially segregated. I didn't ask the museum woman, but I suspect that the smaller cells were for racial minorities.

This is solitary, on the 4th floor. As I mentioned, it is more spacious than the other cells.

This is the view from solitary.

Jailhouse wisdom. This is actually not original to the graffitist--it's a quote from Bernard Meltzer, a radio show host from the 1960s through at least the 1980s. Maybe the jailer put it there for the comfort of the prisoners, though I doubt if jailers were encouraged to write on walls.

This graffito is more mysterious, but seems more authentic--as you can see it was first written in pencil and then recopied more legibly by the spider artist.

This cell contained "El Vato," which might be translated as anything from "The Dude" to "The Badass." El Vato may have been the same as person as "a la pinta Arturo Acosta." "A la pinta" would mean " on the way to the pen."

Finally, a jail corridor, for atmosphere.

Remembering a mass murder

2007-04-17T13:41:00.000-05:00

I was on the University of Texas campus on August 1, 1966, when Charlie Whitman started shooting people from the university tower. I had graduated from UT 2 years before, had lived in San Francisco after joining the Army reserves, and had just returned to Austin. I was unemployed, trying to decide whether to go back to San Francisco, and was hanging out in the student union (already a slacker.)

I heard banging noises which sounded like they were coming from the courtyard between the student union building and a library building. It was an odd sound, and for some bizarre reason my mind finally concluded it was someone cracking a whip there. Never mind that I had never in my time as a student seen anyone cracking a whip on the University of Texas campus, or anywhere else in Austin for that matter--it was somehow what I thought. And I thought nothing more about it for several minutes.

The whip cracking continued. I idly decided to see what was going on, and walked over to where I could see the courtyard. No whip cracker, but the noise continued. Someone came running down the student union hallway and said that a guy had been shot while riding a bicycle on the Drag, as the main street on the west side of the campus was called.

I heard somebody else say someone was shooting from the tower.

So, naturally, I went to the nearest window in the student union building where I could see the tower. I stood there in the middle of the window, along with several other people, and I could clearly see Whitman with his rifle. He was shooting over the tower parapet at that time. (Later, when police and deer-hunter citizens started shooting back, he began shooting from some port holes under the stone parapet.)

It should have occurred to me that if I could see Whitman clearly, he could see me clearly. But that thought did not enter my head. I decided to make room for others to gawk, and as I moved away from the window, Whitman shot someone who had been standing next to me. There was a big commotion, and all I could see was that someone fell down, people ran away from the window and they pulled the wounded person away. That wounded person lived.

Nobody stood in the window after that.

I didn't know any of the people killed, though one of them was the son of a professor I liked.

I was staying with a friend of mine who was a grad student in biology. He and his wife and I went to see a movie later that day, in the middle of the afternoon, a comedy, I think, though I remember nothing about it. I remember sitting in the dark in an old-fashioned downtown movie theater paying no attention to whatever was on the screen. Sitting in the dark for 2 hours watching a movie none of us paid any attention to seemed to make us all feel better.

The murders were very shocking to me--more so even than the one yesterday in Virginia, though probably that was because I happened to be present at the UT tower shooting. Still, I wonder if my impression that a crime like that was more unimaginable then than now, is true. That the mere fact that crimes like that are more imaginable, makes them more possible?

Low-impact crusade

2007-04-14T12:26:00.001-05:00

Over at Meanwhile Back at the Ranch Idyllopus is (gently) criticizing No Impact Man, whose blog which consists in a running journal of a low impact Manhattan lifestyle. As a Zen guy, I like paradoxes like the juxtaposition of "low-impact" and "Manhattan." Plus as a bonus (for me) no impact man currently has a somewhat bizarre discussion of Nansen's cat, an infamous koan. (Technical detail: NIM uses the Korean spelling of Nansen, I use the more common Japanese spelling. In present-day Pinyin it would be Nanquan.) NIM seems to think that the cat is the planet. It's unclear to me whether NIM considers that he is the Zen maniac who, as a test of the monks (metaphorically, one presumes) kills the cat, or that his critics are the killers, or both. That's very Zen.

I don't have any criticism of a low-impact lifestyle. I am pretty low impact myself, but it's a function of being Low-Income Man, plus maybe some remote Scottish stinginess inherited from my forebears, operating scarcely diminished at a remove of 300 years.

It seems to me very American of us to make saving the planet into a personal and moral quest, like NIM does. America, in our minds, should still be a City on a Hill, a new Jerusalem (never mind that the reality of America, from the beginnings till now, ought to disabuse us of such notions.) And if we are gonna be worthy of being among the elect, we must be strenuous in the pursuit of personal goodness. Who can object to that? I certainly don't. I like good people, and the low-impact crusaders are good people, by and large. As an old hippie, I have personal memories of earlier such children's crusades. I was a part of them. I still cherish the worldview we had. I am not cynical about the motives of the children. They may have been the finest children in the world.

The problem is that it won't save the planet.

The tragedy of the commons works on all scales, from an individual to an international level. Personally and locally, if I use less gasoline, it increases the supply, and lowers the price to Hummer owners, who drive more. Internationally, if the US as a nation decreases gasoline consumption, it increases gasoline availability for others, which leads to a decrease in the price of gasoline in, say, China, where in response they build more cars and highways, and drive more.

Likewise, Jevons's paradox is a related problem. William Stanley Jevons first noticed that the increased efficiency of Watt's steam engine over the earlier Newcomen engine led to more coal being burned, not less. It's intuitively obvious to us why this is so, but it was a puzzle to economists. Increased fuel efficiency of cars will not, of itself, lead to less gasoline being consumed, but will very possibly have the opposite result.

The only way to get circumvent these two tendencies is through governmental action (gas taxes, rationing, etc.) and, on a larger scale, international treaties. This requires a sense of emergency, like everyone had in world war II. We do not yet have such a sense of emergency. But, because the problem is genuine, we will presumably realize the emergency exists at some point, and be willing to act. The question is, of course, will it be too late. I wish I knew the answer.

(I was going to put in a coda that came out basically sounding like "in the meantime, to thine own self be true." But one of the reasons I have cut back on political blogging is the Polonius quality it had--to my mind at least. I laughed the other day when I read, in James Wolcott I think, a quote from someone else to the effect that what we really love about Hamlet is that Polonius gets stabbed. So, in the spirit of Nansen, I will now try to kill off Polonius for a few days again.)

Addendum: In the original version of this post, I had overlooked a certain grandiosity of NIM's blogname, and mistakenly referred to the blog's author as Low Impact Man. Sorry for the carelessness.

Arbitrary Zen photo

Friday cat blogging

2007-03-30T10:49:00.000-05:00

Gray on the dining room table. He likes this table because he can see out the front windows, and because it often has stuff on it that he can push onto the floor. Here it is unusually free of such objects, and perhaps he disapproves. But it is hard to read a cat's expressions.

Anti-war march in Austin, St. Patrick's Day

2007-03-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

One of the first posts on this blog, 2 years ago, was a brief account of a peace march on the final Saturday of South by Southwest in Austin in 2005. SxSW as it is called, has become a big deal here, with crowds downtown all week long, musician hopefuls from all over performing at amazing hours (sometimes before noon), and music industry people, and talent scouts and hucksters and critics and writers and an amazing array of people who get their way payed to come here, and when they get here dress like they imagine Austin hippie-musicians do. It's a nice event, but those of us who live and work in Austin generally can't afford to go to many of the performances. There is also a SxSW film festival, as well as music, btw, but the films are earlier in the week. But I digress.

Sadly, the 2005 march did not bring the war to an end, nor has any march since then done so. But we can't give up on this, so today we had another anti-war march. This one was more in the spirit of SxSW than the 2005 event, because we had our own music. Word seemed to have gotten out that any musician was welcome and any musical instrument should be brought. And a lot of people who could actually play came to the march, plus, to make it democratic, so did a lot of people who brought pie pans to bang on with spoons.

But it doesn't matter, in a parade, because when the tubas and trumpets and trombones at the front were playing When the Saints Go Marching In (they did, actually, most of the way, real loud), the various knots of instruments along the length of the march would play something else because you can't hear what's at the front anyway if you are fifty yards behind.

So we paraded through the streets of Austin behind a brass band, mostly a tuba ensemble, but with any conceivable instrument being played somewhere in the throng, from pennywhistles to ukuleles to saxaphones to fiddles.

It's almost enough to restore your faith in America, several thousand people marching down Congress Avenue in opposition to the Iraq War, with a loud brass band and police motorcycles leading the way and the cops in general being nice even when people wandered out of the designated lanes (we were supposed to only use half of Congress Avenue, though we were allowed all of Sixth Street, which is already blocked off to car traffic anyway because of SxSW.) The crowds on Sixth Street, just as in 2005, were mostly bewildered, but strongly supportive. Many joined the march, since the parade had better music than some of the indoor venues, no doubt.

The parade ended, as before, on the steps of city hall, with more music.

More photos are on my Flickr page, which is where you will go when you click on the photos below.

Dancing in the parade

Here we are on Sixth Street, the heart of Austin's music district

Friday cat blogging

2007-03-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

Gray looking out the kitchen window early in the morning. There's nothing out there.

Gray attempting to psychokinetically fill his food bowl by gazing powerfully at the servant

Joe Klein

2007-03-06T21:24:00.000-06:00

Having taken a brief vacation from public affairs, I was unaware until today that a Time magazine columnist named Joe Klein had caused a stir in left-Blogistan by accusing us of being, well, left-wing extremists. Or rather, we "might be" left wing extremists if....[see long list below.]
(Now just how the fuck--to validate the last item on Klein's list--can a guy get what I presume is a nice meal ticket and a regular gig writing for a magazine found in every dentist's office, plus second-tier Sunday afternoon pundit status, with stuff like the following, which is absolutely no different in quality or thoughtfulness from riffs on "you might be a redneck if your porch caves in and kill four of your dogs, etc."?)

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:
--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
Hmm. A majority of people in 20 of 26 countries polled by the BBC recently believe that very thing. This makes most Canadians (among many other nationalities) left wing extremists, eh, Joe. In fairness, Israel, Iran, and sometimes North Korea, are widely thought to at least occasionally surpass us in the negative force in the world department. However our current standing is at an all-time low world-wide, according to the pollsters, and a majority of people in the world outside of Poland and a few countries in Africa join me in being left wing extremists, it seems.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
I guess I could believe that if I belonged to the Trotskyist faction of the SDS. Does Joe Klein think we are living in 1968? When was the last time you heard "American Imperialism" used by anyone but a stand-up comedian?

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.
See the previous. I have to say, though, that Joe is trying to slip a false dichotomy past the folks in the dentist's office--it's perfectly possible for a left wing extremist, at least in my case, to believe the decision to go to war in Iraq was neither of the above. How about you, gentle reader?

--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.
Um, what? I'm not following this one.

--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.
Oh, Joe, Joe, how can I answer that when my porch just caved in and killed my dawgs? Jesus H Christ. How can stupid stuff like this even get printed? Should I try to take this question seriously? Should anyone? Suffice it to say that most of us LWEs can, indeed, think of better liberal ideas than capitalism, even capitalism barricaded by Joe's tendentious and somewhat cargo-cultish qualifiers.

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).
I guess we LWEs are in the glass half empty camp. Sorry, Joe.

--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.
" Eternal problems," huh? Joe likes to telegraph the answers, doesn't he? Now Jesus did say a long time ago, and a little more eloquently than Joe Klein, that the poor are always with us, but I don't think He woulda said that Lazarus should have acknowledged that his situation was neither society's nor Dives' responsibility and gotten himself up from Dives' door and gotten his sorry ass off welfare.

--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.
I also believe that a hot-air balloon isn't an airplane. Who did win the 2000 election, anyway, Joe?

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.
There are many corporations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is probably not fundamentally evil. Walmart is perhaps more towards the powers-of-darkness end of the spectrum. Halliburton is, if not in league with the Devil, clearly in league with His servants in the White House.

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.
Nah.

--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.
I think Joe needs to name one, so we can decide.

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
Allow me a digression here. Where did the term "people of faith" come from? Whatever happened to "Christians" or "Jews" or "Baptists" or "Seventh Day Adventists" or "members of a polygamous splinter faction of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints"? My point being that many "people of faith" do not have opinions on abortion or gay marriage that anyone would want to mock. Some, however, do. To try to gather all the people of faith behind a criticism-proof protective shield constructed as an analogue to "people of color" is to obscure some important distinctions that we LWEs continue to make, living as we do, in the ruined remnants of a reality based world.

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives. Well, what can I say? Though I don't want to be vulgar about it, I do feel a little put out that I have wasted a half hour of my time unburdening myself of the certain exasperation I feel when I run into stuff like Mr. Klein's shameless rhetorical defecation on captive readers who already have enough trouble, like a root canal and how to pay for it.

Announcement

2007-02-22T15:19:00.000-06:00

No, I am not closing down this blog. But regular readers will at this point benefit from knowing, if they have not figured it out already, that I will not post as often as I used to. Probably coming by once a week will do, or even once a month.

I think bloggistry probably has probably been here long enough to have established a standard blog trajectory. Blogs begin with enthusiasm, the blogger having lots to say. Later it becomes more like a job, with a sense that people are counting on you and you need to say something significant--or at least put some words out there. After that comes the realization that it's not a job, and indeed that nobody should be (and hopefully nobody is) waiting in suspense for your next post.

The first year of this blog was mostly anecdotal and personal, consisting of recollections and reflections about people and places I have known. The second year has been sustained more by political outrage than anything else. I suppose the political outrage still exists, but there is not a lot to say about the Regime that has not been said by sane and reasonable people many times over.

I feel less compelled than formerly to write about politics, simply because I am either repeating myself or amplifying, not necessarily to advantage, what others have already said--not that that will be guaranteed to shut me up, given the always astonishing ability of Republican officeholders to descend to new depths of foolishness, reckless folly, and shameless deceit in ways that even now astonish me. Whenever I am astonished I tend to sit down at the keyboard and write.

Lately I have spent more time taking pictures than I have writing. I am well aware that whatever native talents I have lie more in the realm of words than picture-taking, but sadly--or it would be sad if either were more than a retirement hobby--I greatly prefer photography to writing. I always have.

Years ago, I had a girlfriend who, after knowing me a few months, observed that I was obsessed with seeing things--that I had a more binoculars than your average compulsive birdwatcher needs or wants, several telescopes, a drawer full of hand lenses, and of course a camera, though I could not afford a very good one. I took one or more of these instruments out with me far more than I needed to, like going to the grocery store with a Hastings triplet in my pocket, not that I had any real intention of examining the produce with it, but just because you never know when you might want to look at something up close.

She thought this was odd. Maybe it is.

Anyway, since retirement I have rediscovered an interest in photography that had somehow lapsed in the press of job and family life in the 20 years or so before I retired.

As I mentioned I am not all that good it it, but I find myself very much looking forward to a day of taking photos, and regarding even an hour or two of sitting down to write a blog entry in something like the opposite way--which is not a good way to approach a blog.

So this is a long way around of saying it may be a week, or a month even, between blog posts--whatever the frequency may turn out to be of being struck with something that seems important to say, and a desire to say it.

In the meantime if you wish to check in on my life, or that part of it I am taking pictures of, which at the moment is mostly outdoor stuff, nature photography, but also contains occasional records of trips and social events, you can go here to see photos arranged by date, or here to see them arranged by subject.

Thursday buzzard blogging

2007-02-15T19:54:00.000-06:00

A couple of shots of Cathartes aura.

Checking me out

Flying away, since I seem to be in good health

Is Iran next?

2007-02-12T10:47:00.000-06:00

Before we rush off to the next Republican war, we should take a moment to think about the one we are in.

I suspect the claims of Iranian interference in Iraq are most likely lies, given the credibility of the people who are making those claims, and given the ongoing lack of evidence. But that is not and should not be the issue. The issue is that we have no business in Iraq in the first place, and, hence, should get out.

What is important to remember is that we have no legal or moral or national self-interest basis for being in Iraq. None.

We are engaged in a war now universally acknowledged to have been founded on lies. We are not defending our "homeland" from Iraqi aggression. Iraqis were not involved in 911. Iraqis had no weapons of mass destruction to threaten its neighbors, much less us. We are not bringing democracy to the Iraqis. We are not bringing them security, but civil war instead. We are not bringing them prosperity. We are not even securing a reliable supply of oil for our SUVs, as cynics believe is the true purpose of the war. (Oil is sold on the open market. If we somehow "secured" oil from one region, there would simply be more for sale to the rest of the world from other oil-producing regions. This isn't rocket science. This is economics 101.)

The latest, last, and least of reasons given by the Administration and its cheerleaders is that to leave Iraq would be "defeat" and defeat would harm our country. What crap. We were driven out of North Korea, and our country prospered. We were defeated in Vietnam, and we survived as a nation. And with regard to Vietnam, we obviously would have been better off never going there to start with, and, once we did go there, would have been better off leaving sooner rather than later. Nothing could be more evident.

Anyway, it follows from the fact that _all_ the reasons for going to war in Iraq were and are untrue, that we now have no justification--at all-- for being there at this moment.

It also follows that the Iraqis who choose to resist have a perfectly legitimate reason to defend their country against a foreign invasion.

We forget this. We have illegitimately (and, under international law, illegally) invaded their country, using outright lies as a pretext, and are now occupying it by force. People in any country, under such circumstances, might be expected to fight back. We would normally accord legitimacy to such resistance.

Except, of course, that ours is the invading and occupying force.

If they have good reasons to defend themselves against an invasion that no one now believes had any truth behind it, then presumably they would have the right to call on assistance from others. Whether various factions of the Iraqi civil war have done this I have no way of knowing.

I would be far less disturbed at learning that they did, assuming that the Administration and its servo-repeaters in the press are, God help us all, actually telling the truth at last--which I tend to doubt--than at the ongoing and daily injury our continued presence in Iraq does to our honor as a nation, to goodness and decency itself, to the harm it does to our own soldiers, and the even more tragic injury it does to the people of Iraq, when 650 thousand of them have already died in our war and no end of the carnage we have brought them is in sight.

And it increasingly looks like the only way out of this debacle the Administration sees is to march into Iran--citing, of course, provocations.

That's not much of a plan.

Friday cat blogging

2007-02-09T17:25:00.000-06:00

Gray feels the need to yawn

He feels better now

Self portrait on my 66th birthday

2007-02-08T21:13:00.000-06:00

My daughter would have wanted me to do something to celebrate, but she is in Costa Rica.

Waiting for the self-timer

Salon on spanking

2007-02-05T10:09:00.000-06:00

In an article in Salon this morning, Eilene Zimmerman goes off on a proposed California law against parents hitting children. The legislation is highly unpopular in California, and evidently has no chance of passage.

But even though it won't pass, it "raises the question of how far the government should go in telling parents how to raise their children" (not to mention providing material for an article, always useful for a writer.) Ms Zimmerman sees a slippery slope yawning before her, though, as it happens, many civilized countries have such laws. Sweden is one. But it seems Sweden is not a popular role model for Americans, law-wise.

The author's view is that we already have laws against "physical abuse," which should be sufficient. Physical abuse is legally defined as assault which leads to physical impairment. In other words, if you don't break any bones or leave any bruises you are home free, as a parent who hits children. And the author's implicit, but somewhat conflicted, view is that it should remain that way, although, being a capable writer, she does not place her own opinion on laws against hitting children in the same paragraph as her mention of physical impairment.

My own feeling is different from hers. It's true that I am not in favor of major, punitive criminalization of hitting children--we are already too punitive as a nation. That is part of the problem. But certainly making it a misdemeanor punishable by, say, a fine would be A-OK in my book. In Texas you can beat your child in public and get away with it, no problem, but if you forget to get your car inspected on time you will owe the government $135. (I have no problem with the latter, by the way.)

Underlying the article, it seems to me, is a fundamental notion, deeply rooted in the American psyche, of the legitimacy of inflicting physical pain on people--a notion that is really not questioned by the author, though when her American psyche encounters another world-view, it does recoil in amazed horror.

How are we going to teach our children to cross the street safely, if we don't whack them to alert them to the danger?

To digress a little bit, as part of our national character, we don't much question things like the fundamental police power of enforcing "compliance," at least by non-lethal means. In other words, if you question authority you can expect, and should expect, to get into, um, compliance, through somebody putting some pain and suffering on you, if need be. As far as most Americans are concerned, the taser is fine and dandy for that purpose, a big improvement over the bullet or the billy club. But this is territory that Ms Zimmerman does not explore.

One of the proponents of the California legislation mentioned in Zimmerman's article is a law professor with the unfortunate name of Thomas Nazario. (You can already see it coming, can't you.)

Zimmerman declaims in passing--without seeing any irony in her own contribution to the public discourse--against America's saturation with opinion on child-rearing, which produces, in her view, massive parental anxiety. I suppose if you are anxious about not being able to continue hitting your disobedient kid, there may be something to that. She yearns for a simpler time, when spanking was spanking, not child abuse.

Shortly into the second page of her article, she quotes someone calling the proposed California legislation fascist. The word "fascist" appears five words away from the name "Nazario," who, as I mentioned, is a proponent of the law. I told you that you could see it coming.

We see here the utility of projection in american politics--as for example Rush Limbaugh's calling women he disagrees with feminazis, while if we pause and search for irony, and scratch the surface of Mr. L himself we might find something close to the very essence of a real Nazi, un-adjectively-modified. Or perhaps we might merely find a huckster with no principles and a shrewd view of those of his audience. In any case the dogs are loose now; fascists are running in the street, which is where we are at the end of the article, though the author's internal conflict over her own position puts in a surprise appearance in her final paragraph.

"Should any of us be doing these sorts of thing? Of course not" she says, of hitting children. But she doesn't want to be arrested for it, if she does it.

And I don't want her to be arrested either. What do I want? I guess I want her to go back to her own memories of being spanked and hit as a child, and see if she is really as unimpaired as she thinks.

Spitting and baby-killing

2007-02-01T10:03:00.000-06:00

A new story of good and evil is making its way through the right-wing blogs, and, of course, has gotten play on Fox News. It is, in essence, this: A disabled Iraq-War veteran named Joshua Sparling, who was a counter-protester at the recent anti-war demonstration in Washington, says he was spat upon, called a baby-killer, and threatened with clubs by maddened peace-demonstrators.

Some have questioned Mr. Sparling's story. He has in the past made at least two public claims--which have separately gotten into the news--of having been menaced or abused by people opposed to the war, which, combined with this, certainly seem to make him a statistical outlier. But who knows--some people get struck by lightning more than once.

What is more curious is the way this story immediately gets into print and gets air play, and becomes an issue with the right wing. It seems to have visceral appeal, as did the Vietnam era urban legends of peaceniks howling insults at returning soldiers, and spitting on them.

Spitting is interesting. Americans regard it as a sort of ritually contaminating gesture, something unclean (though, oddly enough, relative strangers in America regularly exchange spit, sometimes on the first date). Spitting on, or at someone, is not how Americans would normally disagree. And it seems to me that there is an element of unmanliness in the gesture, when and if it occurs, as well as un-Americanness. A red-blooded American man would challenge you to a fistfight, perhaps, but spitting implies, somehow, spit and run. John Wayne would not do it--it's not the Code of the West.

I have to admit that the reappearance of the Vietnam-era epithet "baby-killer" puzzles me. If I remember right, the term "baby-killer" entered public consciousness after it became known that Lt. Calley and his platoon did indeed murder about 500 civilians, many of them children. In other words, there was a historic event that led to the use of the term--and I think it was used--in some of the more extreme screeds of the SDS and such groups. Whether or not the phrase was ever actually uttered as an insult to individual soldiers in airports and bus terminals, as claimed by the right, is of course, open to question.

In any case, the present war lacks such a context. The atrocities that have entered public awareness have more to do with the torture of adults than the killing of children.

But the incorporation of spittle and supposed name-calling into stories of good and evil seem to me spring not from context or plausibility, but from a kind of psychological projection. These tales seem to appeal to people who love to hate their enemies, but do not wish to acknowledge that hatred; people who consider those with whom they disagree to be deadly enemies, not political opponents.

Friday cat blogging

2007-01-26T17:26:00.000-06:00

Gray opens one eye to see what is going on.

plus Friday zoo blogging available
here.

I haven't been out much...

2007-01-19T10:58:00.000-06:00

...because of several days of rain followed by an ice storm. It is still cold (for Austin) and muddy--not good for trekking around outdoors. But I have been keeping my bird feeder filled, and the birds come to me. This bird, a downy woodpecker, is not at the bird feeder but is busy investigating my fig tree, which, no longer encased in ice, kept the bird interested for 15 minutes, which must be a week in downy woodpecker time. I think the ice may have split the bark to reveal some food source--in any case I don't recall seeing a woodpecker in the fig tree before.

Downy woodpecker

click for larger view

Obsolete travel notes--Honduras before the Hurricane, part 2

2007-01-17T21:47:00.000-06:00

Another in my obsolete travel notes series. Travel accounts tend to become out of date quickly, but I have found that I actually prefer travel writing that has arrived at great obsolescence, and describes places that you will never see, or that cannot be seen anymore by anyone, the past being a country difficult of access, to borrow the cliche. I usually take notes when I travel, but only write up a narrative years later, when I can sort out what part of what I saw has fallen away from the commonplace world as I know it, as--ideally at least--some of it may have done.

The Mainland
Bustling, raw and ugly, San Pedro Sula looked like global-economy hell. If you took Odessa, Texas, tripled the population, narrowed the streets and filled them with a few thousand badly tuned used school buses, and allowed only whimsical garbage pick-up for six months, you would have something like the same civic charm. But there was a certain prosperity. It had the raw vigor of rich and unscrupulous people on the move and poor but industrious people trying not to go under.

We had gotten off the plane from Roatan Island, where we had spent Christmas. (Honduras before the Hurricane, part 1) It was still Christmas in mainland Honduras, actually--Christmas in Latin America continues until January 6th. We had to spend a day in San Pedro Sula to await our baggage, which did not return with us on the plane from the island, for unknown karmic reasons. So we ate at the Hotel Skandia lunch counter. Prosperous, possibly wealthy, Hondurans, dressed rather elegantly, were passing the time there, leisurely, a no-hurry latin concept of lunch settling out of the otherwise get-rich-quick capitalism atmosphere for two hours in the middle of the day.

We walked around seeing the sights, and went into the cathedral. It had been built in the 1950's, but looked much older. Inside, they had erected a festive fifty-foot thatch Christmas tree over a framework of iron, behind the main altar, and installed a creche below it. A few faithful, on Tuesday in the morning, knelt praying. One man, in front of a big crucifix in a side chapel, had his eyes closed and his hand on the life-sized-Jesus' bare thigh. The man's family knelt around in a semicircle, all of them praying. Had we thought, we would have prayed for our safety on our bus rides.

Busride to Copan. Mostly local passengers, but a few tourists. A thuggish-looking German let Eve use his large, sharp, hair-trigger switch-blade knife to peel her apple. His girlfriend was very delicate and beautiful. Both carried enormous packs on to the bus, and heaved them in a big stack in the back, where the space was contested by men carrying bushels of fruits and vegetables bought in the market in San Pedro Sula to their fruitstand in Copan. One of the market guys conversed with Kay about his life's ambition to go the US to work and earn enough money to buy a used Toyota pickup and come home with it so he wouldn't have to ride the bus every morning with his day's inventory, competing for space with more frivolous travelers. Let us hope that by now he has achieved his goal.

The forest along the road as we went upcountry had mostly been cut down for agricultural purposes, just as it had been in Mayan times, but now, as then, they left occasional huge whitebarked trees in the fields. One kind was called Ceiba, another kind I can no longer find the name for. The reason for leaving these trees uncut in the field is said to be religious.

The bus ride was long, and as we settled in and started to doze off, "Bang! WHOCKAwhockawhacka!" Everybody woke up. The bus was tilting and careening back and forth across the road as it slowed down. Blowout. The bus finally weaved to a stop. The bus crew, 2 men and 2 boys, jumped out and changed the tire in ten minutes. The driver displayed his impatience by taking off his sunglasses.

Town of Ruinas de Copán (formerly San Jose de Copán) is on a low hill overlooking the river that flows past the archeological site. The Mayan site is a quarter mile upstream. The streets of the town are cobblestoned. The Spanish woman who runs the hotel wanted her 25 Lempiras per person in advance. Cold shower. Cold showers in the tropics are just as cold as anywhere else. We took our laundry to a friendly American woman who lived up the steps (one very vertical street ends in steps) around the corner. She had been living there several years, and seemed to have found a niche for herself. A laundress in Ruins of Copán. What strange lives you encounter, when you travel.

Copán. The guides attaching themselves to shoals of wandering tourists were somehow central to the odd theme park atmosphere, making it a little hard to imagine the human sacrifice narrative they were promoting, even if the big stones sitting like giant turtles in front of the pyramids and statues were indeed used to spread-eagle sacrificial victims to cut their hearts out with flint knives. We were walking around in a pleasant, well-mowed archeological park with little boys selling replica figurines all around us. Big stacks of stone skulls, however, looked ominous even in their present setting. Was the discoloration of the stone altars blood, or weathering, or something painted for touristic purposes? The Mayans did practice human sacrifice, but generally only of captured kings or generals. Think Saddam Hussein and his men, for a modern analog.

The second and third squares of the park were less restored than the first, and free of roving guides. The stonecarving looked to me like something Chinese.

We walked to the river. We found some Germans camped there; the German guys had gone into town to get supplies and drinking water, leaving a statuesque young woman who was unselfconsciously wearing a tiny bikini and tending a fire. Campesinos hoed weeds in a nearby field and ogled her, as were two guys covered with mud, squatting in their underwear digging clay in the riverbank to make the Mayan replicas to sell to tourists. A bunch of girls on the opposite cliff, dressed very conservatively, giggled as they looked down at the young German woman.

Bus to Gracias. A woman paid the bus driver an egg for a ride of a few miles.
Castor beans grew commonly along the roadsides; I never got around to asking why. Purple morning glories twined along the fences. Poplars shimmered along dry creeks. Tall white daisies, high as sunflowers, clustered along the road. We saw an occasional spectacular orange-flowered tree that I found out, by inquiry, was called llama del bosque, "flame of the forest." That was the name of a restaurant we had eaten at in Copán.

We passed a town called Flores, meaning Flowers, on the dirt road stretch of highway on the way from Santa Rosa de Copán to Gracias. Flores was a nice-looking town, except for the town square, which was not only barren of flowers, but barren of almost anything. No vegetation, statuary, or benches--nada. Flowers everywhere but here.

In Gracias, we ran into a Dutch woman ("La Olandesa") who was friendly and told us about the town. She later took us to some hot springs. She had come to her little town as part of some Peace-Corps-like program, and then she stayed on after the program ended, as a restaurant owner, daredevil jeep driver, and "women's advocate" (her words). She was full of smiles, spoke Spanish and English, in addition to her native Dutch, and had a cheerful female Honduran sidekick who seemed to be a sort of partner in the restaurant and the women's advocacy. Both women had buck teeth and intelligent faces. La Olandesa was very social, and a crowd gathered in the evening at her restaurant, surrounding her with gossip and persiflage. Enjoyable company.

Next day, La Olandesa drove like a madwoman to get us to the hot springs, down a chuckholed, spinal-compression-injury rocky road two or three miles. The hot springs consisted of several rocked-in swimming holes. The water was warm, not hot. Big broadleaf trees shaded the place, and a Flame of the Forest. We stayed there, for an hour or so, floating in the warm water, till the jeep came back. There was a little concession stand, a few Hondurans soaking in the springs. People were rubbing a green clay on their faces to improve the health of their skin, they said.

Cloud forest. We got a ride in the back of a pickup from some guy who took us to the cloud forest--La Olandesa's jeep was now in need of repairs. The clouds were nearly down to the town level. We soon got up above the pueblo, and looked down on the cloudbank bright in the sun that covered the village. From the park entrance we hiked in for an hour and a half, through trees like Colorado with a tropical understory. There was a coffee field by the visitor center. A friendly dried-up and sinewy woman in a plain dress, with two wild skinny dogs loping along ahead of her, came striding up the trail and opened the center (which was really a small, abandoned-looking wooden house) and showed us a map of the park. We walked along the stream, which was pretty and clear. I got a drink out of it, assuming the water was OK, which it was. Three colors of mint grew there, blue, purple, and white, the latter two with a menthol smell. Sycamores grew orange-leaved like fall maples next to the stream, under the pines, along with lots of tropical broadleaf trees. On the walk back, at the level of the park entrance, I noticed a sometimes-tended banana field along the trail, possible belonging to the park attendant.

Oak tree leave shone like metal in the sun.

We didn't have time for a more extended stay, and we had a plane to catch in San Pedro Sula. We took a quick meal in a small restaurant in Gracias with velvet-painted Elvises on the wall, before leaving on the bus. (What's the plural of Elvis--"Elvi," maybe?) Bad Elvi.

The bus back to San Pedro. We had noticed that an assistant usually started a bus driver's engine, then when everything was ready for the great man himself, the bus driver would ascend to his seat, with ceremony, place his sunglasses before his eyes, and ease the bus into gear. A bus driver would no more dream of wearing a seatbelt than a bullfighter would wear kevlar armor. This driver was a burly man with menacing handlebar mustaches, whose driving pressed every advantage, who passed at high speeds on on blind curves and hills. I believed that the guy would someday go out in a blaze of glory. Fortunately he did not do so that day. He got us to San Pedro Sula nearly an hour ahead of schedule. I had been fearful that my failure to pray in the cathedral would cost us dearly, but someone else on board must have prayed enough for all of us.

The magic touch

2007-01-12T12:26:00.000-06:00

It is never a good thing to have a president on a mission from God, as we see with Mr. Bush's chutzpotic (I have been waiting for a chance to fuse chutzpah and despotic into a single word, and our President, sadly, gives it to me) unilateral decision to raise the stakes in Iraq. Bush has always been able to brazen his way out of trouble, but the last time it really worked flawlessly for him was the 2000 election, when he gambled that he could take office by simply acting as if he had won. And sure enough, he has been living in the White House ever since.

So at this point I think this habit is hard-wired into his administration. A message from the American people, delivered by the last congressional elections, can't compete with the message of past successful effrontery. He believes, and has believed all along, that magical thinking creates its own magic.

What his magical thinking envisions, and what he may have in fact created, is a situation where the country may be boxed in, and either we have to accept what everyone must regard as catastrophe--in this case, coming home from Iraq with nothing to show for it but 3000 American dead, 650,000 Iraqi dead, plus civil war and anarchy in a failed state we have left behind--or double down, and widen the war to Iran, which is what I think he wants to do, and, unless he is deterred by Congress and the public, what he is probably going to do.

The fact that it seems insane should not make us worry any less. Look at his history. And look at the signs. We have a recently published story--and perhaps it is not just based on rumor--that we have given the Israelis the green light to conduct a nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Israelis have denied any such plans, but of course they have denied for years that they even have nuclear weapons.

We have our raid a couple of days ago on an Iranian consulate. We have ramped-up saber rattling, demanding the Iranians stop supplying the insurgency, and a plan to place more American troops along the Iranian border. (The absurdity of the idea of a largely Sunni insurgency being funded and supplied by Iran is a fine point that will be lost on a public, and possibly on Congressional foreign affairs oversight, where an important committee chair does not even know the difference between Sunni and Shia.) We have aircraft carriers being deployed to the region, and Navy aircraft obviously are not going to help secure the streets of Baghdad. So what are they for?

Allow me a moment of dystopian imagination, here. (Hopefully it will turn out to be as mad as George Bush and all his march-hare neocons.) If his plan is to box us in to a situation we can't retreat from, a military confrontation with Iran certainly fits the bill. Once that spirals out of control, we are committed for another few years--and we certainly don't want to change ruling parties in the middle of a war, do we?--until that war becomes, itself, another disaster, larger and uglier and more dangerous for both our security and our civil liberties even than the Iraq war has been.

I think that's were George Bush imagines his legacy to lie. He thinks that God will pull this thing out of the fire for him, and if it takes a bigger fire for God to consider personally stepping in, well, hey...

George Will and the minimum wage

2007-01-04T20:01:00.000-06:00

George Will, a syndicated--and no doubt highly paid--conservative scold, tells us, in his column today, that raising the minimum wage to something higher than $5.15 an hour is a bad idea. His evidence is that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. Well, that's not his only evidence, but that's what he leads with, which indicates the quality of what is to come.

Will, he of the perpetual dyspeptic scowl and tightly buttoned collar (could it be that his mood, if not his conservatism, could be helped by loosening his tie?) goes through the usual litany of falsehood and half-truth to make his case, but it seems scattershot and perfunctory. It's hard to wear what appears to be a Rolex and get too indignant about the laboring classes making too much money. (Well, hard it may be, but his duty is clear. So he manfully sets about it, frown firmly in place, as always.)

Mainly, he says, the poor don't need a higher minimum wage. The poor already make more than the minimum wage, he says. (Six dollars an hour, perhaps? And that because of _state_ minimum wage laws, of which Mr. Will, as it happens, disapproves. Ah, well.)

Having said that the poor don't need higher wages, he then adds triumphantly that most of the workers getting the minimum wage are not poor.

That's true pretty much by definition. If you tried to live by yourself on the minimum wage, you could not pay the rent, much less eat. So you have to live with others. Poverty is defined by the government in terms of households, not individuals. So if you live with one and a half other minimum wage workers, you are above the federal poverty level, which is almost as much of an indictment of the government's definition of poverty as it is of Mr. Will's intellectual integrity.

Other parts of Mr. Will's Heritage press release re-write do not cohere well. For example, he tells us that higher minimum wages will increase high school drop-out rates, luring unwary youths with the promise of easy money. He also tells us that higher wages will increase unemployment.

Now, as it happens, this last factoid has been shown in to be untrue in the aggregate, but, alas for Mr. Will's thesis, true for one subgroup of workers--part time _student_ workers. In other words, high school students are about the only class of people who find it harder to get work when minimum wages are raised. Mr. Will ignores this fact when claiming, on the word of two un-named "scholars" that school enrollment will drop 2% if we raise the minimum wage 10%.

You can't have it both ways, George.

But, actually, conservative apologists for the stacked deck and the screwing of the poor, regularly do have it both ways, simply because they do not care about the truth or consistency of what they utter or write, any more than about compassion or fairness, much less equality (a word that probably makes Will shudder. Everybody can't have a Rolex, right?)

When I imagine Mr. Will, above, wearing a paper cap and a work-stained apron, instead of his suit and tie, behind the counter of a franchised fast food place, it is not out of ill will or unfriendliness, but as imaginary but nevertheless heartfelt acknowledgment that he, over and above other workers would be, on the basis of his merits alone, one of the two thirds of minimum wage workers who, he says, get a 10% raise inside of year.

The free market, as Mr. Will says, must be given its due.

Three views of an orange-crowned warbler

2007-01-04T18:12:00.000-06:00

This warbler was rustling in some leaves behind my house. It seemed very busy, and let me get close enough to get some good photos. Although I couldn't tell as I was taking the pictures, it seems to have found a small gelatinous delicacy to eat.

Searching

It finds something

...a mid-morning snack

St. Stephen's Day waxwings

2006-12-26T21:07:00.000-06:00

Today is St. Stephen's Day, or Boxing day in the British Commonwealth. St. Stephen is both a mythological and a composite figure in Christian lore, because there were several real persons known as St. Stephen, and the some of the deeds attributed to St. Stephen could not have been performed by anyone, most notably being martyred at two different times.

Officially, he was supposed to have been killed off by a mob after the Sanhedrin condemned him for blasphmy in about 34 AD. He was thus the first Christian martyr. Because of that, he seems to have gotten mixed up in the ancient legend of Herod and the Cock, which has Herod the Great being informed that a greater king than Herod himself has been born in Bethlehem, and, like all despots when receiving bad news, Herod responds badly.

In a medieval English carol I am fond of, Stephen appears as a waiter in Herod's hall carrying in a roasted boar's head, and when he sees the star over Bethlehem, dramatically quits his job and gives the King the bad news, as follows:

He cast adown the boar's head,
And went into the halle;
"I forsake thee, king Herod,
And thy werkes alle.
"I forsake thee, king Herod,
And thine werkes alle,
There is a child in Bethlem borne,
Is better than we alle."

Herod at first mocks Stephen thinking him mad, and then says that such a thing can no more be possible than for the chicken on his plate to come to life and crow, which, of course, it immediately did.

Herod take this very ill and has Stephen taken out and stoned to death.

Another Stephen, St. Stephen of Hungary, was a pagan nobleman who murdered a rival by gouging out his eyes and pouring molten lead into his ears. After this Stephen converted to Christianity, he required of Hungarians that they too become Christians, and, evidently being being impressed by the cautionary example of the rival, the Hungarian people did so.

"St. Stephen," whoever he was, is (or has been at various times) the patron saint of bricklayers, stonemasons, headaches, horses, and is now associated with gift-giving, at least in English speaking countries.

So, since St. Stephen is also associated with the wren for reasons that are very unclear, I went out birdwatching today, and saw some more cedar waxwings. This seems to be a good year for cedar waxwings in Austin. Some years I hardly see them at all.

It was a beautiful day in Austin, by the way. No wrens, however.

Couple of waxwing photos below:

Three waxwings in a hackberry tree

Waxwing on a broken branch

Note of interest only to people picky about photographs

2006-12-19T11:32:00.000-06:00

I have occasionally tried to figure out why my photos on my blog appear washed-out. I had assumed that Blogger was stripping out color profiles, which, if you care about the appearance of, say, an old color photo you have tried to restore, is certainly not a good thing. On the other hand, it's not really a big deal.

I recently began uploading a lot of photos to Flickr, which allows much larger file sizes than Blogspot, and, since I am paying them money for storage (not much, but still...) I was unhappy to find the same problem. So I looked into it. It turns out Flickr does _not_ strip out color profiles, but if you are using a browser that is not color-space aware, the end result is the same--a washed-out photo.

I found this out by trial and error, except in reverse--ongoing error, and then finally, some experimentation.

I am using a Mac, and I normally use Firefox as my browser, which, sadly, does not seem to handle color properly. Otherwise I very much like Firefox. Hopefully Firefox on Windows machines does a better job, but I suspect not.

For Macintosh users, the current version of Safari does handle color correctly at least to the extent of displaying sRGB more or less as intended.

So you Mac people, you should probably use Safari when viewing Photos on Flickr, at least if you want to see them the way the photographer had in mind.

(I can't advise Windows users, of course, having not used a Windows machine since I retired. Hopefully there exists some Windows browser that will handle color decently well, which, minimally, would mean doing something more or less correct with sRGB photos.)

But none of this will make the slightest bit of difference for photos stored on Blogspot, because as far as I can tell, they do, indeed, strip out color profiles.

I recently restored some 1987 photos of a trip to Real de Catorce in Mexico to some semblance of how they originally looked, and put them up on Flickr. If the question of color profiles interests you (or if old Mexican towns interest you) you can try these photos with different browsers. Safari makes a big difference on my Mac.

Friday cat bloggery

2006-12-15T16:24:00.000-06:00

Christmas cat

Waxwings and winterberries

2006-12-14T18:05:00.000-06:00

I was birdwatchiing in McKinney Falls state park today, not expecting many birds though, because it was in the middle of the afternoon, not the best time for seeing birds--but as walked along the limestone cliff above Onion Creek I began to hear the faint gargling whistles of a flock of cedar waxwings. I soon found myself surrounded by the whistles, localized in bushes all around me. The birds paid little attention to me. They were busy eating winterberries, which is what the bright red berries of the native deciduous holly (Ilex decidua) are called. The holly plants have all lost their leaves at this time of year, so the berries are easily visible to the birds, and the birds, as it happens, are also easily visible to the camera.

It was actually a mixed flock of waxwings and robins, but they seemed to share the feast amicably, possibly because there seems to be a big crop of berries--plenty for everyone.

Here is a cedar waxwing who has found a winterberry.

Here is a waxwing looking for more berries

Two waxwings in a holly bush

(click on any photo for larger versions on my Flickr page.)

December insects in Austin

2006-12-13T17:58:00.000-06:00

It was another 70° day in Austin, and it brought out some butterflies and a few dragonflies. The dragonflies were taking the opportunity to mate. Dragonfly sex is weird (though perhaps no weirder than anyone else's). The male clasps the female behind the head with hooks at the tip of his abdomen, and the female reaches up with the tip of her abdomen, where she is keeping her eggs, and fertilizes the eggs at the male sex organs at the bottom of his thorax.

Variegated meadowhawks mating

And here is a view of a common buckeye butterfly, active on a warm December day...

...and here's another

click any photo for larger view

Town birds at Town Lake

2006-12-12T19:35:00.000-06:00

It was a fine, sunny day in Austin, after a spell of cold and damp weather. I went down to Town Lake to see which ducks are back, and found ruddy ducks, buffleheads, and great numbers of lesser scaups.

Having also lately taken an interest in butterfly photography, I noticed that several butterfly species are still out in good numbers, notably American snouts (not nearly as numerous as before the first freeze), buckeyes, and a large yellow Phoebis species, either agarithe or philea. But I had my 1.7x tele-extension lens on because I wanted to take pictures of birds, and this is no good for macro shots.

I thought I had better pictures of the birds than it turns out that I did. Below is the best of the scaup photos.

This is a female ruddy duck. More commonly they have their short, stiff tails held almost upright.

This is one of Austin's monk parakeets. They have lived and bred in Austin for 30 years or more. They are temperate and subtropical birds from South America, and can withstand fairly cold weather. They like power poles.

(click for larger versions of the photos at Flickr.)

Kay visits a Mexican bordello

2006-12-09T09:07:00.000-06:00

subtitle: The follies of youth

In the summer of 1962, Kay Sutherland was on an archeological dig in the desert near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, in northern Mexico. She was 20 years old and was an anthropology student.

Now, it's not clear whose idea it was, but some of the guys on the crew decided to visit a house of prostitution in Monterrey one Saturday night. Kay, having as usual made herself one of the boys, and being the person she was, wanted to go along, to see what it was like. She said, "why don't I go disguised as a man?" The rest of the crew--perhaps surprisingly--liked this idea.

The "disguise" is shown below. In the photo, they are on their way to the brothel. I don't know where Kay got the fake sideburns. The concept was that Kay would buy a drink and sit silently with a couple of others who were also drinking but not buying the favors of the ladies of the night. Thus Kay, as a good anthropologist, could observe first-hand, or almost first-hand, the culture of Mexican whorehouses. This whole thing was not well thought out, though. Sitting silently was not Kay's strong point, and also, I think she was the only one of the group who spoke Spanish.

Unsurprisingly, their plan went awry. The management took one look at them and raised the prices of drinks astronomically. My guess is that no one was fooled, and that everyone in the place thought the group was a bunch of American college students one of whom was a woman dressed like a man, and that in any case they were not going to be paying customers. Hence, high drink prices would encourage them to leave.

At this point the group had a problem. They had all already bought drinks and they realized with dismay that they did not have enough money to pay for them, which if nothing else indicates to me that my theory--that they were suspected of being a group that was gonna look but not buy--was correct. If they didn't have enough money after collectively pooling their pesos to pay for the drinks, obviously no one had seriously planned on paying for sex. Either that, or someone had been the victim of a pickpocket. (Unfortunately, I don't remember Kay's account of the origin of their financial woes, except that I remember it was complicated.) I am also surprised, looking at the photo, that they were allowed a tab.

But now they had this problem--they owed a debt they couldn't pay to some very tough customers in a very bad part of town. Big paunchy guys wearing black stetson hats and cowboy boots and big silver belt buckles, who seemed to have some employment capacity in the place, were staring at them and not in a friendly way. They decided to get up--nonchalantly--and move toward the door as the tall guy in the photo, who presumably could run the fastest, fumbled with his wallet like he was going to pay la cuenta.

As they got out the door and ran, he, too, bolted. Three of them ran one way and Kay and a guy who was with her ran another way, but Kay was wearing shoes that were too large and didn't fit, and the shoes kept trying to fall off, and she was soon left behind by her companion, so she was now all by herself running in a blind panic with floppy clown shoes down a dark alley in the red-light district in Monterrey, Mexico, trying to escape from pursuers she imagined wanted to beat the hell out of the skinny and pasty-faced boy she still thought they believed she was.

But, as it turns out, no one was actually behind her. No one was chasing any of them. The whorehouse proprietorship had sent no goons in pursuit. But the archeology crew only figured that out later, after they managed to reunite and return, safe and sound, but very late, to where they were staying.

The scrambling escape from the whorehouse must have caused a lot of merriment to onlookers, actually. People must have considered it worth the price of a beer.

Improbable as it may seem from the photo (or the story), several of this group went on in later life to become college professors.

Occasional cultural notes: The Blanton

2006-12-04T23:40:00.000-06:00

(I believe my last cultural note was a review of a vast hunting-supply and outdoorsperson supermarket a few miles south of Austin, hard by Interstate Hwy 35. You get what you pay for, at this blog.)

I have twice visited the new Blanton Art museum of the University of Texas at Austin, which has been built a little behind schedule after Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron abandoned the project in a world-class dudgeon, as befits architects of their station, after the UT System Board of Regents nixed their original plan, which looked like an enormous plastic and glass tent (which by the way I kind of liked) saying it was not in keeping with University's Master Plan, which stipulates that all new campus buildings should conform to a "Spanish Renaissance" style. And clearly, it was neither Spanish nor renaissancy, not in any way. The new Blanton building, now finished, designed by some Boston architects whose names I forget, is nothing to write home about but does fit well with a lot of other UT buildings, and is indeed handsomer than most of them, in my opinion.

Downstairs is a big Luca Cambiaso exhibit. Cambiaso was a little-known Genoese Renaissance painter, and this is billed as the first major exhibit of his work anywhere in half a century, and the only one ever put up outside of Italy. I didn't much like his work. Since they won't let you take photos of the first floor exhibits, I can't show you why.

But I found plenty of things to like upstairs, among the permanent exhibits--and you can take pictures, though the light is so bad it is hard to do so. Except for the 20th century stuff, this is all out of copyright, so I think it is OK to put these photos on the web.

Here is a painting of David with the Head of Goliath by Claude Vignon, from about 1620. David here is curiously girlish, and this reminds me of some of the Salome-with-the-head-of-John-the-Baptist paintings I have seen, the ones I can remember being, I believe, Victorian--which leads me to wonder if this weird and obscure painting by Vignon may have somehow been an influence on the Aubrey Beardsley crowd. Probably not.

Next is Giovanni Battista Passeri's Musical Party in the Garden, which is a cheerful painting that is hard not to like, or at least I found it so.

Here is one of George Romney's many paintings of Lady Hamilton, and not one of the better ones, but it led me to read a little bit about her--she was quite an extraordinary woman.
She was was born Amy Lyon in 1765, and was the daughter of a blacksmith. Later she changed her name to Emma Hart. She was apparently brilliant as well as beautiful, and eventually became Lady Emma Hamilton. In many ways she was the prototype of the modern celebrity, famous for being, well, famous. And, of course, she was Admiral Nelson's mistress. She was an alcoholic, and, sadly, drank herself to death. (This little caption hardly does justice to her life, which was spectacular. Sorry.)

I especially liked the little section of 19th century frontier paintings. Here is a detail of a Henry Farny painting, Council of the Chiefs.

click any photo to enlarge

Variegated meadowhawk in flight

2006-11-30T20:40:00.000-06:00

Yesterday the temperatures was over 80°F in Austin. Today the temperatures were in the upper 30s all day long. No dragonflies out today. This photo was taken yesterday. If this were a photo of a dragonfly at rest, I would not post it, because it is too blurry. An ideal camera for this photo would have been one which could focus as quickly as my eye, and could take non-grainy photos at very high ISO numbers. I do not have such a camera. But given a necessarily slow shutter speed, and the one shot out of a dozen tries that was almost in focus, it's not a bad picture of a dragonfly in the air.

Not so green

2006-11-29T12:36:00.000-06:00

The Onion Creek Greenbelt is close by my house, and I frequently go walking and birdwatching there. I have mentioned it many times in my blog. The most striking characteristic of the photos I have put up that were taken in the Greenbelt, seems to be the near total absence of green.
Today's photos are no exception.

This is the horse trail where I frequently start my walk. The trees directly ahead conceal an arroyo.

And here is a juniper tree partially fallen into that arroyo. Twisted juniper trunks sometimes make interesting photographic studies.

click on a photo to enlarge

For those of you who have may have enjoyed some of the photos on my blog, I'll mention that I have been putting up a lot of more on my Flickr page. Many of them have appeared here also, usually at somewhat lower resolution. In the future I think I'll upload some high resolution scans there from my ongoing scanning project. Flickr enables me to archive fairly good quality photos and organize them by occasion, or by subject, or by whim. It's a bit different from a blog.

I do plan to continue this blog, though as I mentioned previously, because of other projects my posts will be less frequent in the near future.

Excuses

2006-11-27T11:27:00.000-06:00

I have been busy with various retirement-type projects, including continued scanning of old photographs--we accumulated more than I can reasonably digitize in one lifetime--plus sporadic transcription of my wife's diaries for my daughter and stepdaughter (given my typing speed and the difficulty of Kay's handwriting, I will have to live to be 104 like my grandmother to have any hope of finishing). Plus I go birdwatching and nature-photographing almost daily. All this by way of an excuse as to why I have been neglecting this blog. Sadly, the neglect will probably continue for a while, though I hope to put up an occasional photo, like the monarch butterfly, below, that I found flitting around in some dry grass yesterday, down by Onion Creek. I was surprised to see it. We still have butterflies, but I thought the monarchs were gone.

Monarch butterfly

We had a great Thanksgiving, BTW--Eve was home from grad school, and my mother drove up from New Braunfels, and we had about 20 friends over as well. I think everyone had a good time, as I did.

Monday photo miscellany

2006-11-20T19:54:00.000-06:00

These are escaped domestic Chinese geese, Anser cygnoides, on Austin's Town Lake. Chinese geese are descended from the wild swan goose of Central Asia, which is not a swan+goose hybrid, but rather gets its name from the head, which resembles that of a swan.

We still have a few straggling flowers in Austin. We have not yet had a killing frost, but we will soon. This is some kind of small aster, blown up larger than life size.

A nightshade species.

A robin near Onion Creek.

Another robin, a few feet away from the first. The robins are back in large numbers now.

(Click any photo for a larger view.)

Note: No more posts here till after Thanksgiving.

Friday cat blogging

2006-11-17T11:09:00.000-06:00

Gray on the wall under the fig tree

Close-up: the stop bothering me look

click photos to enlarge

More November butterflies, and a hermit thrush

2006-11-17T09:10:00.000-06:00

A red admiral, Vanessa atalanta, in the afternoon sun at the Onion Creek greenbelt

A variegated fritillary, Euptoieta claudia, also in the greenbelt

Another view of the frit

This hermit thrush was left staring warily at me, occasionally flicking its wings, after the tree full of robins I had been stealthily approaching (I should put stealthily in quotes) exploded in alarm--actually, it was three separate salvos of robins, 15 or 20 each I guess, launched about half a second apart, rocketing through half-bare November hackberry branches as I fumbled with my camera. Damn, I thought, so much for stealth. But the hermit thrush was still there, nervous, wondering what I was doing down there, but unwilling to leave.

click any photo to enlarge

The new atheism

2006-11-16T13:56:00.000-06:00

I've just been reading an article by Gary Wolf, in Wired News, which can be summarized as saying that the fatal flaw of atheism is that atheists are assholes. Or more strictly, he is saying--given the nuanced picture he paints of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett--that they are, just slightly, insufferable. I thought of Alice B. Toklas dismissing Ezra Pound as a village explainer. She was using essentially the same argument.

Now, one can say that Wolf misses the point, and obviously, if the point is the truth of atheism, that would be correct. Defenders of Pound's poetry can consider the truth of Toklas's put-down irrelevant. But Wolf makes a good case that that line of reasoning is more worthy of consideration than we might initially think.

It occurred to me, in reading Wolf, that some of the more passionate contemporary atheists replicate the fervor of partisans in the war on terror in--for example-- advancing Bernard Lewis-like arguments against islam...and then go on, in the name of reason and consistency, to use the same arguments against Christianity. Take Harris, who is an atheist crypto-Buddhist, but who becomes evangelical in his crusade against Islam, using rhetoric Richard Perle himself might be comfortable with, although actually Perle might be a bit less inflammatory. The difference of course (to be fair, one of many differences) is that Harris goes on to discover the same flaws in Christianity and supernaturalism in general--namely, that, as belief-systems, they are all inimical to civilization, and should be eradicated. That means the ideas ought to be eradicated, not the people, but it is hard to eradicate ideas, especially given that the bearers of these ideas regard the ideas as proxies for their very selves, and will defend the ideas with the fervor of anyone defending the homeland (another proxy for the fortified self) against its enemies, to the death. That way lies trouble. I say that as another crypto-Buddhist.

So are notable militant atheists like Dawkins and take-no-prisoners bloggers like PZ Myers theological counterparts of neoconservatives? I'm guessing Dawkins and Myers are politically left, and hence would reject the proposition with vigor, if not horror...but...how about the crusader spirit, the scorn for weakness and negotiation? Well, you'll have to answer the question on your own.

Anthropologists have always taken religion to be rational, not in the way that philosophers speak of rationality, but kind like economists do when they are talking about the rationality of the market. The market operates rationally even though the stuff you buy cannot necessarily be philosophically justified. SUVs are bad for the world, but you get a sense of well-being, allegedly at least, in exchange for your money, and the market system (well, supposedly) rationally adjusts the disconnect between your needs and your pocketbook.

Perhaps the word rational is operating as a pun in this discourse--a play on the word, though the pun is not especially funny.

I do consider that militant Islam and evangelical Christianity are, in fact, a danger to civilization. But I don't want to be a danger to civilization myself.

Militant Islam is not the same as Islam. For a long time I was a subscriber--a silent member--of an online Sufi discussion list. Unlike the people on any other internet discussion group I have ever been part of, including Buddhist ones, the Sufis were polite, unflappable, and they damped out any incipient flame-wars with humor, generous good will, and cheerful invitations for one and all to find something holy both in the views of the flamer (who were very rare on the list to start with) and in the views that the would-be flamers were denouncing as vile and beyond the pale. And we all know that online exchanges are--normally--notorious for acrimony.

These Sufis seemed to me, after I had been reading their thoughts for a couple of years, to be the most balanced, the most urbane, the most generously thoughtful, and the least self-important group of people I have ever met online. In other words, they behaved like exemplary guests in your home would behave, but with strangers. You can't get more civilized than that.

These were traditional Chishtiyya Sufis, not Western new-age type Sufis--they were devout Muslims, from Muslim countries, and spoke English on the list only because it served as a common language. Of course, they were mystics, and thus might be considered heretics by puritanical Saudis, but they thought of themselves simply as ordinary Muslims. They just tended to have a reverential viewpoint on the world in general, and probably would define God--which they did not seem much interested in doing--as that which they were reverent about, in the world. A far cry from what atheists want to dislike.

I am certainly as guilty as anyone else of having a scornful view of evangelical Christians. As a Buddhist I try to remind myself, often and unsuccessfully I am afraid, that dissing someone's religion does no good.

Returning to my SUV bad example, suppose you are concerned about global warming and want to convince people to stop buying SUVs. How do you do that? I don't claim to know the secret, but surely it would not consist in hectoring them and pointing to them the harm that SUVs do. You can successfully point out SUV harmfulness to people who already don't have them, but not to those who do. Obviously, those folks think otherwise or they would not have bought the damn things. The harangue is not a good tool for this work.

postscript:
But [if someone who wants to stay on-message asks] do I believe in God? Like many Buddhists, I tend to think the question is unimportant. If pressed, though, I guess I would answer like a Chishtiyya Sufi.

More bug and bird photos

2006-11-15T13:12:00.000-06:00

I have been more inclined to read than to write, lately, and I am at the moment occupied reading George Monbiot's Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. I am not yet sure whether it is a hopeful book or a depressing one--he proposes, at the beginning, that the 80% carbon emissions reduction estimated by many climate scientists to be needed to avoid catastrophic global warming is wrong, and that a 90% reduction is actually required. Then he says he thinks it can be done. Given that the less-than-10% goal of Kyoto has not been met, if for no other reason than having been effectively sabotaged by the United States, his claim that a 90% reduction can be reached has caught my interest--but I am closer to the beginning of the book than the end.

One thing he says at the outset--and I am sure he is right about it--is that sporadic individual action, however well intended, won't suffice, and that persuading governments in the developed world to take action is the key.

But more of this later, perhaps, after I finish the book. For now, here are some Tuesday pictures of Town Lake wildlife.

This is a female American rubyspot, Hetaerina americana

Another female rubyspot

...and a male American rubyspot

A snowy egret.

click any image to enlarge

Saturday random juxtapositions

2006-11-11T18:46:00.000-06:00

Onion Creek Baldcypress trees. This is at the upper McKinney Falls. Some years the cypress trees provide a bit of fall color.

A ruby-crowned kinglet also near Onion Creek

Roseate skimmer, Orthemis ferruginea. These are very handsome dragonflies. I took the photo several days ago, in Zilker Park.

Yet another American snout butterfly, Libytheana carinenta. They are amazingly abundant around Austin this fall. No one knows why, really. This one has obligingly, and uncharacteristically, opened its wings. Generally they keep their wings folded and look like dead gray leaves.

Click any photo to enlarge

November butterflies

2006-11-09T21:35:00.000-06:00

We have not yet had a freeze in Austin, and we have some fall flowers after the recent rains. So we still have lots of butterflies. The most common are American snouts, which which I have uploaded photos of before. Here are some other species.

A gulf fritillary, Agraulis vanillae

Another view of the same butterfly

This is a theona checkerspot, Chlosyne theona

A phaon crescent, Phyciodes phaon

Both the phaon and the checkerspot are flitting around in some small white aster flowers.

(click any image to enlarge)

A fine day for a walk

2006-11-08T12:40:00.000-06:00

In November of 1960 I was 19 and a university sophomore and I had paid my Texas poll tax and I voted for the first time, and I voted for John Kennedy. The election was a real cliff-hanger. Sometime after midnight, when it seemed reasonably likely that Kennedy had actually won, I went with a friend of mine to a cafe in downtown Austin that was open all night and was a hangout for local politicos. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, and at maybe two in the morning Lyndon Johnson, the new Vice President of the US, walked in and began shaking everyone's hand. He shook mine. I was real happy.

Of course, four years later I was picketing Lyndon Johnson's ranch.

I don't recall a moment of unalloyed pleasure at the results of an American election since that night in 1960. The first couple of years of the Kennedy administration set a high bar, I suppose.

But this morning, once again, I feel happy about an election, probably because George Bush has set a new sort of benchmark--I can't call it a high bar--as the worst president in American history. And I think the election showed the public is coming to realize it. I'm not fooling myself that control of the House and a possible razor-thin control of the Senate will make a huge difference in the direction Bush is going, but it will certainly slow him down.

Texas, naturally, did not join in the nationwide waking-up event, but there were signs of consciousness even here. A Democrat won Tom Delay's old congressional seat. I think that's called sending a message.

And it's a clear, sunny day here in Austin, and I don't feel like sitting in front of a keyboard much longer, so I'm outa here. Later.

Monday at Zilker Park

2006-11-06T19:56:00.000-06:00

Here is a miscellany of photos I took in Zilker today, first below Barton Springs, and then in Zilker Gardens.

These gadwalls and the snowy egret were sharing a rock in the middle of Barton Creek below the dam.

Another pair of gadwalls resting on a flat rock by the bank.

Fox squirrel by the creek

Here are two desert firetails (Telebasis salva) on a lily pad in Zilker Gardens. They have just mated, and the female is now in the process of laying eggs. The male is still attached to her head. Odonate sex, like all sex, looks strange. The male attaches behind the female's head, then the female reaches up with the end of her abdomen to fertilize her eggs at the male genitalia. Then she can lay the eggs, which is what's going on here. With some odonates, like these desert firetails, the male remains attached to the female's head while the egg-laying is going on. I am not sure why.

This is another great spreadwing, Archilestes grandis. Zilker Gardens is the only place I seem to find them.

Click any photo to enlarge

Poorly matched photos

2006-11-03T20:01:00.000-06:00

It seems odd to put these two photos up in the same post. What they have in common is that I saw both these guys on my walk today along Onion Creek, and that they both let me get very close. The reason I got close to the mestra was that it was cold and hence inactive. I don't know why I was able to approach so close to the vulture. Sometimes they are reluctant to abandon their meal, but this one was not feeding on anything.

Common mestra, Mestra amymone. I mentioned in another post that blogger somehow muted the colors of a previous photo of this same species of butterfly. This one looks a little better.

Black vulture. Vultures are more closely related to storks than to birds of prey. You can kind of see that here.

click photos to enlarge

A few Sunday close-ups

2006-10-29T19:45:00.000-06:00

An orange sulphur butterfly, Colias eurytheme, on an unidentified salvia near my house

Two views of a common mestra, Mestra amymone, near Slaughter Creek in South Austin

Partial ventral view of the mestra's wings

Dorsal view

Variegated meadowhawk, Sympetrum corruptum, also near Slaughter Creek

Click photos to enlarge

The speaking of the English in Washington

2006-10-27T19:08:00.000-05:00

I am, myself, to the manner born, in the speaking of English, assuming one is willing to grant that my native South Texas dialect deservedly bears same name as the language most commonly spoken in North America and the British Isles. I know that Lyndon Johnson, long ago, and George Bush, more recently, have cast doubt on that assumption, but bear in mind that LB J most likely would have forgotten how to speak English in DC, a very special place, and that George Bush's efforts to sound like a yokel are successful only because of native talent, not his origins.

But in general I have assumed that our current batch of Republican politicians actually are, like me, native English speakers, except for exceptional horrorshow visitants like Henry Kissinger, back again from the realm of the undead. The lesson here is never to assume nothin. Thus we have the Vice President, when asked on Tuesday in a radio interview, "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" answering, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me."

So what can this mean? Those of us who learned to speak our language at our mother's knee have somehow jumped to the conclusion that he is endorsing a specific form or torture called waterboarding. Indeed, what the hell else could the question have meant, and what the hell else could the answer mean?

Or so would ask your average native speaker.

Ah, but no. Mebbe we native speakers don't speak the language Mr. Cheney does. Tony Snow, the current White House glad-hand to the press, says the vice president "was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives and he was not referring to water boarding."

So it's not waterboarding, and moreover--according to Snow--the Vice Prez could not say what in fact he was really referring to because of security concerns. The particular nature of the lifesaving "dunk" is, God bless my soul, a State Secret.

But even if it's a secret, let's be logical about this. If he is not referring to waterboarding, or to some some ingenious but as yet unrevealed form of water torture, what other kind of dunk in H20 would the vice president possibly want us to share his faith in the life-preserving properties of? A warm bath? A nice shower with a bar of soap? Oh, boy, the VP would be treading on dangerous ground there, if only because of the justifiably poor image of concentration camp guards giving prisoners a bar of soap and inviting them into a shower room. I don't thing the VP really wants to go there. Not even he. Or let us hope not.

So a very modest application of ordinary logic to the combined statements of the Vice President and Tony Snow can lead to only two possible conclusions, which in this case are not necessarily exclusive, the one being that they are lying, or the other being that they do not actually speak English.

Addendum:
"Stay the course."

Friday cat blogging

2006-10-27T18:08:00.000-05:00

Gray enjoying the afternoon sun. It has been a very fine day here in Austin. Gray approves of it.

Tuesday photo miscellany

2006-10-24T19:42:00.000-05:00

Today I am afraid I will disappoint those visitors who come to this blog hoping for political diatribes, startling anecdotes, unfair and unbalanced philosophical viewpoints, or simply gossip. Maybe later.

As is usual lately, I've been out taking photographs. Unlike political blogging, nature photography works to keep the cortisol situation outside the danger zone. Here is a photo miscellany from the past few days.

Western ribbon snake, Thamnophis proximus. This species is highly variable. Our central Texas variety usually has a red stripe down the back, as this one does.

Fiery skipper, Hylephila phyleus, on a Palafoxia flower.

Black vulture landing at a vulture roost in the middle of Landa Park in New Braunfels, Texas. The roost is on an island in a small lake fed by Comal Springs, the largest natural spring in the state. It's quite a beautiful setting for a vulture roost. Cormorants and red-tail hawks also like it.

Turkey vulture overhead near Onion Creek

The damselfly that I mentioned in an earlier post, that I could not identify. I am reasonably certain it is a smoky rubyspot, Hetaerina titia. This species is also highly variable in appearance. I took a photo of one in Belize that was much darker.

Click any photo to enlarge

Dragonfly at Hornsby Bend, and another butterfly photo

2006-10-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

It was a lovely day today as I walked along the river at Hornsby Bend, and I saw my first red-tailed pennant, a fairly spectacular dragonfly which--as the name implies--has a bright red tail. I also took a couple of photos of a damselfly I can't identify, and maybe I will put up a photo of it if I ever do identify it.

Red-tailed Pennant, Brachymesia furcata

There were thousands of snout butterflies out, mating, hanging around, maybe migrating--I am not sure about that. They have colorful wings, in flight, but normally when they land they keep their wings folded, and they look like dead leaves. I was trying to get pictures of the dead-leaf pose, and just as I snapped the shutter, the butterfly flew away, and I caught it in flight. So here's a rare photo--for me--of an American snout, Libytheana carinenta, in the air.

Click to enlarge

Friday butterfly blogging

2006-10-20T18:04:00.000-05:00

A white peacock, Anartia jatrophae, on the banks of the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels, Texas. This is a tropical butterfly, here at the northern end of its normal range, though individuals will occasionally wander much farther northward.

Click to enlarge

Wednesday dragonflies

2006-10-18T20:09:00.000-05:00

Two dragonflies near Slaughter Creek in South Austin. The first is another female Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis

This one is a Flag-tailed Spinyleg, Dromogomphus spoliatus, which has captured a skipper, probably a Southern broken-dash, Wellengrenia otho

Click to enlarge

The Age of Aquarius

2006-10-18T11:34:00.000-05:00

I think contemporary Christian Evangelicalism is misconstrued by most of the rest of us as being an aberrant form of historic Christianity. I think that is a mistake. It's hardly Christianity at all, as the world has known it, for good or ill, down through the centuries. To be sure, it arose out of Christianity, but psychologically, it seems be a New Age feel-good cult. These people are hippies gone bad. (And I say this as an old hippie, gone bad in a different direction.)

It's true that the roots of the modern evangelical movement lie in the remnants of 19th century revivalism, the 2nd Great Awakening. The ecstatic conversion experience accompanying the big emotional-breakdown camp meetings became a marker, a sort of test, for authentic salvation (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin would, of course, all twirl in their graves.) That mid-20th century evangelical religion eventually made it officially so, of course, was in effect to ditch nineteen centuries of Christian theology and belief.

But for all its celebration of ecstatic conversion, 19th century Protestant revivalism had not yet forgotten the great questions of historic Christianity which defined sectarian boundaries within the Christian mainstream; questions of the nature of God and the nature of Christ; the mystery (or more strictly speaking, incoherence) of the Trinity; the intricate Rube Goldberg linkages of grace, works, faith, free-will and predestination; of the nature of the sacraments and of the structure and authority of the church and its hierarchy; and the history, nature and authority of the scriptural canon.

All that is pretty much gone. By and large modern evangelicals know absolutely nothing of any of it, regardless of where the nominal roots of their own lineage lie. Many evangelical sects, but not all, are descended from Calvinist churches, but contemporary evangelical eyes glaze over when predestination is mentioned. Some of the Pentecostal and Holiness groups are descended--historically, but not in any other meaningful way--from Wesleyan anti-Calvinist churches. Most of the current members of these groups have never heard of the controversy between Wesley and the Calvinists, and many of them have never heard of John Wesley.

Sad to say, there are even Catholic evangelicals, who share with their nominally Protestant brethren a total ignorance of Church history and doctrine.

Contemporary Southern Baptists (like other evangelicals) seem to know all about the Rapture, a bizarre doctrine first appearing full-blown in the mind of a 19th century (non-Baptist) preacher named John Darby, but know nothing of the traditional Baptist resolution of questions of theology, soteriology, and hierarchy in the brilliant--and in a way admirable--twin Baptist cop-outs of soul-competency and the priesthood of the believer, which, for all their unorthodoxy, at least have some antecedents in nineteen centuries of Christian mysticism and several centuries of anti-hierarchical radical Protestantism.

So what have the evangelicals replaced historic Christianity with? Well, like cowbird eggs in a magpie's nest, we find the Rapture and allied weird nonsense like dispensationalism and Christian Zionism, indeed a whole bubbling cauldron of crackpot millenarian woolgathering based on obsessive readings of the Apocalypse of St. John; not to mention fundamentalist scriptural idolatry as a sort of enabling background radiation. Lately we also find Republican Kulturkampf politics.

But above all that, the ecstatic conversion experience is firmly established as the feel-good centerpiece of their feel-good religion, to which, to be fair, all the Darbyist gibberish is actually secondary.

And the fact that the warm glow of conversion is now psychologically central to Evangelicalism and has as a practical matter replaced almost the entire baggage of former Christian orthodoxies has drawn vast numbers of the Boomer generation into the evangelical fold, like bees to nectar. And there are lotsa bees out there. (Sadly, they tend to vote, and vote Republican, more due to the cooptationist success of shrewd Republican strategists than to an inherent Republican-ness within Evangelicalism itself.)

Personally I think the cosmic convergence of hysteric frontier immigrant camp-meeting emotional release with New Age if-it-feels-good-it-must-be-true Boomer complacencies has come to fruition. The Age of Aquarius seems to be here.

Curious perspectives from inside the beltway

2006-10-16T15:01:00.000-05:00

Following are excerpts from a story by R. Jeffrey Smith in the Oct. 16 Washington Post about two unsuccessful Judiciary Committee amendments to Bush's bill which stripped legal rights from people whom the President declares to be "enemy combatants." The point of Smith's article is that one of the amendments, which he weirdly designates as the "extreme" one--which retained habeas corpus--never stood a chance of passage, whereas the other amendment, being "less extreme" (i.e. it severely curtailed habeas corpus, but did not abolish it outright) might have fared better. He offers little or no proof of this contention other than some vague hearsay. In any case, the amendment which he calls "extreme," that retained habeas corpus as we have known it, was the one that came to the full Senate, and it failed.

But the point of view implicit in the piece really seemed peculiar to me. The whole article was a considerably after-the-fact story postulated on the hypothetical votes of Republican senators who--acccording to Smith's imaginary hindsight--share Smith's own implicit view that the true defenders of civil liberties are those who would destroy the village of our freedoms in order to save it, perhaps leaving a grass hut or two still standing. Quite an odd notion, I think, made even odder by Smith's reversal of the normal meanings of the word "extreme."

I guess you could say his choice of terminology was tendentious, to say the least. Here are some highlights. (Emphasis supplied.)

The news reached Democrats working on the military commissions bill in the Senate cloakroom the morning of Sept. 27. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a sponsor of two amendments giving detainees a right to challenge their detention or treatment in federal court, had decided to bring the more extreme amendment to a vote...
On the detainee bill, Frist had make clear his desire to ensure that no amendment passed, spokeswoman Amy Call said. She said “we were worried about both” of Specter’s amendments. The more extreme version would have deleted the bill’s suspension of habeas corpus rights. The less extreme alternative, which Specter co-sponsored with Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Gordon Smith (R.-N.H.), would have allowed detainees to file a single habeas corpus petition after a year of detention.

So I decided to email Smith about this.

My email:
"Since when is preserving the right of habeas corpus 'extreme?'"

Smith's reply:
"there's nothing extreme about it. it's solely a relative term -- ie compared to the other amendment."

So I wrote back:
"Interesting. Let's say you have a physical object in front of you--say,
a yardstick. Which is the extreme end? Presumably, the end away from
you. Equally relatively, let's say you have two positions on habeas
corpus, abolish it or preserve it. Which is the extreme position?
Presumably, the one opposite your own."

To which he replied:

"let's try another example. you have two amendments in front of you: one would remove any reference to habeas corpus from a bill. another would leave language allowing one habeas petition after one year of incarceration. which is more extreme in political terms?
i repeat: it's solely a relative term -- ie compared to the other amendment."

Here ends the exchange.

I confess myself puzzled by Smith's answers. It would normally be thought disingenuous to call the lesser of two abridgments of our freedom the greater in its extremism. And despite his appeal to the relative in the switching the negative and positive poles of the issue, in his examples, it remains a conundrum in my mind. The only explanation for the wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective here, that I can come up with, is that Smith sincerely believes that preserving habeas corpus is extreme in the context of an alternative that would partially abolish it--in other words, that Smith is a Republican or has, through inside-the-beltway osmosis, learned to think like one; or that he is profoundly illogical. And perhaps those positions are not all that far from one another.

Friday cat blogging

2006-10-13T18:49:00.000-05:00

Gray waiting patiently for his supper

Small pauses on the road to senescence

2006-10-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

Having lived in Austin these many years now, I thought it was time to visit the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, a long-standing local attraction which I had never stopped to see. Locals are often the last to visit a local attraction.

I thought it was a nice place, but I may have been positively, and unfairly, influenced as an art critic by the young woman to whom I paid my $3.50 admission. As a somewhat hesitant afterthought, she said "Too bad you're not over 60. You'd be eligible for the Senior Citizen rate." Which would be $2.50. The fact that she considered me a not-quite-60 ticket buyer, but mentioned the over-60 fee just to be safe, gave a pleasant lift to my day--or else was a shrewd public relations move on her part. I am personally convinced she was sincere on account of her reaction when I told her I was 65, which was to eye me suspiciously as if I were trying to bilk the Umlauf Sculpture Garden of a dollar. I was unexpectedly, and vainly, pleased.

Charles Umlauf was a local sculptor who taught for many years in the art department at the University of Texas. His main claim to fame is the incredible number of public art pieces he placed around the state of Texas, mostly very large and perhaps exaggeratedly realistic (except for the absence of sexual organs on the male nudes) statues of and well-muscled athletic-looking bronze men, and lovely bronze women with signature upturned faces. Supposedly one of his models was Farrah Faucett, when she was an art student. The statues I have seen are mostly very pretty to look at, though there is something a little disconcerting about a several-ton bronze woman with Playboy centerfold proportions.

There is (relatively) little of that here. Much of the statuary is smaller, and I'm guessing is unsold preliminary versions of larger pieces, left in his workshop at the time of his death. I know have seen larger versions of some of the smaller statues elsewhere. I'm guessing the Garden showcases some artwork that may have been less appealing to Municipal Art Commission tastes but which may have been what he really preferred to do. I dunno. But at any rate some of the pieces struck me as displaying more whimsy and charm than his stuff I have seen elsewhere. Plus, in one to two cases, an unexpected element of the sinister.

According to their web page, I could have brought my laptop and surfed the web while sitting by the fern-shrouded lovers shown here. I am not sure why this would draw visitors, buy, hey, maybe I am getting old.

I am guessing this is Jesus

This is the most interestingly creepy St. Francis I have ever seen.

Another strangely mixed religious message. This is presumably Jesus, with the dove descending, but the halo (or is it a bishob's mitre?) looks like horns unless you look closely, and the cherub-heralds remind me of a flock of bats. (Apparently Umlauf sold a much larger version of this to an Episcopal Church in San Antonio. I'm surprised.)

Click on any photo to enlarge

Cloudy morning on Onion Creek

2006-10-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

Onion Creek is dry in places because of the prolonged drought. There has been no real rain in the watershed of the creek for several months, and the daytime temperatures are still in the 90s. On the plus side, there is not much ragweed this year, and the poison ivy is stunted and burnt-looking.
The developing El Niño event should lead to rain here this fall and winter, but no sign of it yet.
This is how it looks now--well, strictly speaking, how it looked a couple of days ago.

The Lower Falls

Ammonite fossil in Cretaceous limestone. The leaf is about 3 inches long, for scale.

Mystery picnic table, long abandoned

Texas persimmon, Diospyros texana, more commonly called Mexican persimmon hereabouts. Very pretty trees. The small edible fruits are black when ripe.

Click any photo to enlarge

Anecdote of the bull

2006-10-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

My wife Kay died in 2002, and both Anna and Eve have expressed interest in Kay's diaries, which are hard to read due to her handwriting--not the best. So I have (very) occasionally been transcribing them. Each year she bought one of these little yearbooks with one blank page for every day of the year, to record her thoughts and the events of her life. Each diary has a good record of January, part of February, and a few entries from March--then nothing until Thanksgiving or Christmas, when she would write about the inevitable outbreak of holiday-season trouble in her large and tumultuous family.

The remainder of each of those years remains a mystery now, with only my hazy and imperfect memory to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, I just ran across this, and readers of my blog who knew Kay might find it interesting, a brief portrait of her as a girl, with maybe a clue of what she would be like as a woman. The entry is from 1989, but she is writing about something much earlier.

If Eve has helped me rediscover my childhood, Anna helped me rediscover my teenage years. She has a yearning to travel that I felt so strongly. "Mom, I just have to go somewhere." she would say, and I can remember saying it in that exact tone of voice with those exact words at exactly the same age. When I said it, at the age of sixteen, my parents, very wisely, found a Church of Christ missionary family, fundamentalists named Mr. and Mrs. Smith who were willing to let me come stay with them on Hacienda Huantepec in the small town of Pabellón, Aguascalientes, in Mexico. I was to teach their children and help with the driving. I had just graduated from high school and I wanted to be on my own so much that I was on the verge of running away.
I took the bus by myself and found the granja [farm], where they lent out their bull for breeding. I'm sure they performed other Christian services, but this was the most popular request. I dutifully drove a large truck with a bellowing bull to remote areas in the state, with Mr. Smith sitting beside me. Mrs. Smith stayed home with the children. It seemed a perfectly normal thing for a sixteen year girl old to be doing. On one occasion, it rained hard and we got stuck in the mud, Mr. Smith put rocks under the rear wheel, the bull bellowed and I gunned it and moved back and forth until I got us out. We moved forward through a rock bed creek after the road ended. We arrived as the sun came out into a place that I have, to this day, not been able to find on a map. The people were there to greet us, lined up in a row with English hymnals in their hand, left by a missionary who had visited them thirty years before. The hymnals were worn and they sang "a Mighty Fortress is our God" in strangely accented English as we walked up the slope with Mr. Smith bringing the bull and me following.

Needless to say, she later went into anthropology.

Kay as a young anthropologist

Three odonates

2006-10-02T13:40:00.000-05:00

The first two are damselflies. The great spreadwing and the Comanche dancer belong to different families of damselflies. Unlike most damselflies, spreadwings hold their wings out from their body when at rest.

Great spreadwing, Archilestes grandis

Comanche dancer, Argia barretti

The dragonfly is a a black setwing, Dythemis nigrescens, a mostly Mexican species.

All were photographed at the Zilker botanical gardens in Austin. Click to enlarge any photo.

Friday cat blogging

2006-09-29T08:55:00.000-05:00

Gray on a favorite ledge

(click to enlarge)

Yet another (sigh) letter to Senator Cornyn

2006-09-26T12:23:00.000-05:00

First a word of explanation. Senator Cornyn is certainly in the running for the worst of the worst in the Senate, with competition only from selected contenders from Oklahoma and Alaska. Maybe Pennsylvania. Well, maybe some others. Senator Cornyn's current mission is to abolish habeas corpus. He is on the Judiciary Committee. Anyway, Senator Cornyn hates to hear from constituents, unless they come bearing major campaign contributions, and so he makes it as hard as possible to send him an email. You have to take a Republican IQ test to send it to him. Really. ("Select the third word in the list from bottom to top.") Generally I don't bother. I know they go unread in his office, and his office rarely replies, so I make a point of putting them up on my blog, whenever I actually do go the trouble of sending him a constituent viewpoint.

In this email, I ask a simple question. And who knows, maybe one of his aides will clarify the Senator's views in the comments here.

=============

Dear Senator Cornyn:

I am glad to see that Tom Sullivan, in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, turned the proceeding around a little and asked _you_ a question, concerning your defense of the Star Chamber proceedings that have been going on in Guantanamo. He described in some detail the total absence of fairness in the trials: the fact that the detainees had no lawyers, did not speak English, had no ability to cross examine, had no access to the alleged evidence presented by the Government, the total absence of physical evidence, and the seeming absence even of any rules of evidence.

So he asked you, "Now, you call that due process?"

You didn't answer.

Well, I'll ask it again. Do you call that due process?

Sincerely,

Jim McCulloch

What does that mean, "human dignity"?

2006-09-24T12:03:00.000-05:00

Since I read the news less than I should (but more than I like) I was unaware until recently that George Bush actually said, in defending his torture proposals, that the concept of human dignity is too vague, and must be discarded. "What does that mean," he said, "outrages upon human dignity?"

When you learn a language, the way you acquire the meaning of words is not by reading a dictionary, but by listening to actual usage.

Thus Mr. Bush could perhaps begin to apprehend the meaning of "human dignity" by referring to the words of his speech writers, which, of course, by convention are considered Mr. Bush's own words, since Mr. Bush actually read them aloud in various venues not so long ago, most notably in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2004, when he used the phrase no less than ten times. Here are some of Mr. Bush's own words (emphasis supplied.)

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have established a global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have joined together to confront the evil of trafficking in human beings."

"Because we believe in human dignity, we should take seriously the protection of life from exploitation under any pretext."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have changed the way we fight poverty, curb corruption, and provide aid..."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have acted to lift the crushing burden of debt that limits the growth of developing economies, and holds millions of people in poverty."

"Because we believe in human dignity, the world must have more effective means to stabilize regions in turmoil, and to halt religious violence and ethnic cleansing."

On April 2, 2005, Mr. Bush spoke of Pope John Paul as follows: "Pope John Paul II was "a faithful servant of God and a champion of human dignity and freedom."

And in June of this year he said, “We’re after the terrorists not only by staying on the hunt, but we’re after them with an ideology of hope, an ideology of life, an ideology that recognizes human rights and human dignity.”

I have also seen a theory--propounded by crackpots on the Internet--that Mr. Bush is suffering from some kind of progressive cognitive disorder, to explain an alleged deterioration in his fluency in public speaking between 1991, when he was pretty sharp in some gubernatorial debates, and now, when...well, he isn't.

So maybe he is simply forgetting his native language. That would be sad, if the problem is neurological, but--and this, I am afraid, is far more likely--it would be chilling, if it is the inevitable consequence of six years of total immersion in doubletalk. Chilling, because it implies he had no more idea what the words meant when he read them 2 years ago, or last year, or in June of this year, than he does today.

Torquemada redivivus

2006-09-22T16:49:00.000-05:00

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.
--Washington Post, 9/22/06

It seems the Good Germans have decided to go along with torture after all. Unless some miracle occurs and enough real Americans, as opposed to the Good Germans, are unexpectedly found in the Senate to thwart this unfortunate scheme, our so-called President will be given authority to continue what he seems to have a desperate psychological need for, torturing those he determines to be enemies. I should insert here the standard "first they come for the Jews, then they come for the queers, etc...then they come for you" warning, which of course mutatis mutandis is relevant here, but the eventuality of Democrats eventually being the victim of Disappearances and the thumbscrew is less the issue than the absolute depravity of torture as official government policy, which, regardless of the Orwellian doubletalk the Republicans choose to clothe the decaying corpse of America's honor in, the stench of the indecency cannot be obscured with any words, even those coming from Clever Karl's propaganda mill, regardless of who the designated-to-be-tortured are, or will be.

The enthusiasm of the right-wing in this country for torture as policy seems to me to spring not just from the Bush Administration hysteria-mongering, but from the more fundamental pathology of right-wing extremists--upon which the hysteria-mongering builds--which is a limited-good view of the world. People who think you must struggle against others to have anything, whether it be happiness or money or political power, that there must always be absolute winners and losers, tend to have a harsh and punitive take on the world in general, and are more than ready to embrace policies that assuage their fears by bringing misfortune to others (thereby, given the magical thinking prevailing in such minds, removing or reducing the likelihood of it for themselves.) Torturing their enemies makes them feel safer, regardless of its inherent immorality or its provable ineffectiveness as a means of extracting information.

All the ticking bomb scenarios advanced by torture apologists are stupid, and conceal--not very well--a profound bad faith. The real historical use of torture has always been to intimidate and terrify, not to extract the location of little Nell, kidnapped and tied to the train tracks, before the train comes. Successful interrogation, according to those who have experience in such matters, plays on the values and hopes and fears of the person interrogated as the most useful, and perhaps the only, tools to extract information. Anybody capable of a millisecond of self-reflection, which seems to exclude much of the Republican Base, can see that if you were being tortured you would say whatever it would take to get it to stop. The likelihood of that being the truth depends entirely on the remorse or second-thoughts or sense of guilt of the interrogated, which is far less likely to be operative in the soul of someone who has just been tortured than in the heart of someone who has been treated more intelligently, not to mention decently.

And the dishonor this obscene and duplicitous policy brings to America (which at this point in the Bush Administration a cynic would pronounce as more coals to Newcastle) is a cause of sorrow, if not dispair, for any person who loves what this country has, at its best, stood for, and ought to stand for now. I still hope that the better elements in the American character, which I suspect are still found, however residually, even among the Republican Base, will ultimately move us away from Bush's Holy War, and Bush's Inquisition.

Let us hope.

Summer doesn't want to let go

2006-09-21T21:27:00.000-05:00

It's been quite dry for the last 3 months in Austin. All the prickly pear cactus are withered from drought and look as if they might die, though they are in no danger of that. I guess I could provide visuals, but face it, a picture of a shriveled-up cactus lacks universal appeal. Some of the deciduous trees are shedding their leaves early. The flame-leaf sumacs, which (along with a native oak) provide about the only fall color around here, have already turned brown and lost their leaves. On my walks in a Searight Park I see few bicyclists and fewer joggers. After a brief respite, afternoon temperatures are back in the 90s.

The dry weather also seems to have reduced the number of dragonflies. On my walk today I saw only four species, but--and here is the good news, for me at least--I got reasonably good photos of two which I had not gotten decent pictures of before, a band-winged dragonlet and a female blue dasher. (I've gotten lots of good photos of male blue dashers, but this female is a first.)

Female blue dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis

Band winged dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata

click photos to enlarge

Live oaks at Searight Park

2006-09-16T15:31:00.000-05:00

I like the light yesterday in the late afternoon under the live oaks at Searight Park in Austin.

click to enlarge

Wednesday wildlife at Hornsby Bend

2006-09-14T00:04:00.000-05:00

Hornsby Bend is a bend in the Colorado River near Austin named after an early settler, Rueben Hornsby, who built a log house nearby. It's presently the site of several large sewage treatment ponds, and is a premier place to go birdwatching--but mainly in the winter, when the smelly ponds are full of ducks. There are several miles of trails along the river and in the woods near the sewage ponds.

I went there to take pictures of dragonflies. I didn't see many, but I did get shots of a couple of black saddlebags, plus a butterfly and a snake. And it was a nice day for a walk.

Black Saddlebags (Tramea lacerata)

Another black saddlebags

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, (Papilio glaucus), on a lantana flower

Eastern Yellowbelly Racer, (Coluber constrictor flaviventris)

(click any photo to enlarge)

The tragic imagination

2006-09-11T11:04:00.000-05:00

Five years ago today someone at work told me that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York, and that the Pentagon was on fire. This had little emotional effect on me. My mind was elsewhere.

My wife Kay was in the hospital having been diagnosed with acute leukemia 11 days before. I had just come back to work, and only during the mornings. The rest of the day, and the nights, I was spending at the hospital at Kay's bedside. She had just started chemotherapy. There was still a chance that she could die very quickly from the progression of the disease, before the chemo began to work, assuming it was going to work at all. She could also die from the chemo itself. It was kind of touch and go.

So, as I said, my mind was elsewhere.

I excused myself from work and went to the hospital. Kay had a TV in her room, which was--uncharacteristically--on. The twin towers were burning. There was some confusion as to what was going on in Washington. The TV talkers were frantically excited. The green sticky plastic reclining chair I spent so many nights in was beside her bed and faced the TV set, and I sat down beside her and watched.

It seems like we watched a long time, Kay and I. Days, maybe. Like anyone and everyone else. The only difference was that Kay was dying, although she didn't die that day, or during the next few days--it was 8 1/2 months later--and we were both trying to adjust that that possibility. Actually, possibility was the wrong word--near certainty was more correct. I had been doing some reading, and discovered that the oncologist, whose social skills were inversely proportional to his expertise (which is not as bad as it sounds, social-skillwise, as we were to discover WRT his expertness), had perhaps failed to be convincing in claiming Kay had a 50/50 chance of eventual recovery, because, in her case, those were not the true odds. The odds, in reality, were much, much worse than that.

I guess he thought it would make us feel better to lie, and it would have, had he been a better liar. He would probably have been correct in saying that Kay had a 50/50 chance of surviving the week, and in fact Kay turned out to be in the lucky 50 percent, that week. But we didn't know that in advance.

Anyway, this sudden threat of death, which had come out of nowhere, gave us an odd detachment as we watched people jump out of windows, some of them holding hands. We held hands as we watched. I think we both felt like we had a kind of empathy that other people did not. On the other hand, we felt distant from it, with our own very real worries.

We watched the fall of the towers over and over--like everyone else. But it was not my main focus. It's in the background, for me, in my memory of that day, and the days afterwards.

Though we did talk about it. It wasn't that day itself, but it was very soon after, that Kay began to feel troubled about the talking heads' use of the word tragedy. I remember her saying something to the effect that it's not tragic for America. Not for us. It's only tragic for the people who jumped, and who died in the buildings, and for their families. For people who knew them. Not for the rest of us. You are watching this on TV, for God's sake.

I think she sense an orgy of false emotion being unleashed, or being deliberately stirred up. It was terribly real, and it was also a media event. It was all very confusing. Still is.

In retrospect, I think Kay was wrong, in a certain sense. It has turned out to be America's tragedy, exactly to the extent that genuine feelings of horror and empathy--which legitimately existed in the hearts of those of us who watched only on TV--have been contaminated, polluted in some way by the media, and most of all, of course, by the Bush administration.

Those people have stolen what was a real and terrible catastrophe for 3000 people and their families and friends, and turned it into a different and needless tragedy for all of us. For the world. And they have done it without thought or remorse or shame or regard for the payoff awaiting those who are thoughtless and remorseless that always comes at the end of a classical tragedy. And I fear the play is not over.

And we should remember Katrina, too

2006-09-10T09:11:00.000-05:00

George Bush's scheduled grandstanding on this Sept.11 as we approach an important national election appears in stark contrast with his behavior on the same day five years ago, when, after being filmed in a state of paralysis clutching My Pet Goat with that deer-in-the-headlights look he gets when faced with crisis, whether it be a national tragedy or a hostile question in a press conference, he then disappeared for the rest of the day to hide in a hole in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, of course, Mayor Giuliani, a man whose political ideology is nearly as deplorable as George Bush's, showed himself to be a leader and a mensch--everything our so-called president is not. It serves to remind us that there are Republicans who, unlike our so-called president, deserve our respect even if we disagree with them. Let us hope that someday such Republicans take their party back from the Gadarene swine who have taken it over and who, unless stopped, are rushing as fast as they can to their destruction, which would be well-deserved if it did not include, as it unfortunately does, (sorry, the metaphor breaks down here) our own destruction as well.

The depths to which this beyond-belief and beneath-contempt psychopath and his co-conspirators have dragged our country is illustrated by watching a few minutes of Fox News, where the alternative-reality world of the Bush gang finds its truest expression--which I did recently by accident when it was unavoidable without impolitely demanding that my host turn off his tv.

On Fox News America learns, and a good part of America has apparently come to believe, that we are winning the war on terror, that George Bush is a personal friend of the weary and smoke-begrimed fireman Bush draped his arm over in a photo-op when he did show up belatedly at the scene of the tragedy five years ago, and that Democrats are responsible for 911 after all. These are but a few of the many other equally absurd notions that a regular viewer of Fox would imprint on. If you tell the public the world is flat long enough, I would guess that 24 percent would come to believe it, which I believe is the exact percentage of our people who strongly approve of our President. Watching Fox news is like taking LSD without joy or insight. A bad trip.

I mean, anyone with any remaining expectation of a molecule of civilized behavior from the Bush-Cheney-Rove bunch is going to be perpetually pole-axed with astonishment and disbelief at their effrontery. The balls-out cynicism of their using a national tragedy to gain political advantage is still hard to come to terms with.

But they have used it for five years, and plan to use it, as best I can tell, for the next fifty.

And they show every sign of lining up another war-of-convenience, this time against Iran and/or Syria, to take people's mind off the fact that our war in Iraq has turned to shit and the reasons for it have turned out to be fiction--not that watchers of Fox are aware of either fact.

And now, before our very eyes, ABC is turning into Fox News, with a planned 5-hour miniseries which is packaged as a documentary but which is full of events which never, in reality, happened. In the miniseries, Clinton is to blame for 911, having called off our on-the-ground forces at the point they were about to capture bin Laden.

This is complete fantasy, like the weapons of mass destruction. But millions of people who know nothing of actual history and who do not attend closely to the fine-print that might clue them in that the miniseries is no more a documentary than the west wing is, will come away believing it's true, and will, naturally, forget that someone actually did let bin Laden get away when we had forces in place who could have captured him at Tora Bora.

That someone was George Bush. Why would George Bush try to capture his greatest political benefactor, after all?

Some recent dragonfly photos

2006-09-08T08:52:00.000-05:00

Roseate skimmer

Another roseate skimmer. Females and young males are dull orange. Males as they get older develop a rosy red color, hence the more-often-than-not non-descriptive name.

A nicely perched red saddlebags

Click any photo to enlarge

Eastern pondhawk eating a damselfly

2006-09-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

The damselfly is a powdered dancer. This is at McKinney Falls on Onion Creek near Austin, yesterday.

Click to enlarge.

The terror campaign

2006-09-02T13:24:00.000-05:00

George Bush is making speeches around the country saying that the War on Terror is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century." So here we have our President, a deeply thoughtless man, believing, or pretending to believe, as he reads the teleprompter and nods and smiles when it tells him to do so, that terrorism is a creed, like Communism.

But terrorism is a method, not a belief-system. Mr. Bush does not want to dwell on that fact. If you are an apologist for partisan murder you will quickly realize that you need to find a way to speak of terrorism as the other guy's murders, not your own. If terrorism is someone else's ideology, then by definition your own murders are, well, not terrorism. Thirty thousand+ civilian dead in our Iraq war are, by such definition, something else. (The better estimates are well over a hundred thousand civilian dead, but not even the most committed Neocon denies the 30,000 as a minimum figure. So let's use that.)

The trouble is, at this point it becomes very tricky to even use the word meaningfully. These 30,000 people were innocent of any crime. Some of them were killed by the civil war we have brought them. Some were killed directly by our own military actions. Very few were killed by our soldiers with the outright purpose of murdering civilians to terrify those who remained alive. Thus, by the terrorism-as-method standard rejected by our President, we have certainly killed far fewer civilians for terroristic purposes than Osama did, and, if nothing else, we could be exempted from accusations of terrorism.

But if terrorism is an ideology, our effort to exempt our own butchery, a butchery which springs from Republican ideology, seems, well, arbitrary. Any objective person who accepted Bush's definition but not his frame of reference, would have every reason to consider us far greater terrorists than Osama was, or is. By a factor of ten, at a minimum.

None of this enters into Mr. Bush's head. His motives are simple and his goals are clear. He reads his words. He relies on the public not to closely examine those words. Exactly like the al-Qaida terrorists he derives so much benefit from, Mr. Bush, under the tutelage of Karl Rove, is doing everything he can to further the seepage of fear through our population, and he does so for the simplest of reasons: it benefits the Republican Party, or at least it has up until now.

Every reflexive shudder of horror at the unfathomable wickedness of our adversary becomes a reflexive Republican vote, in Mr. Bush's view. It has worked for five years, and Karl Rove likes to stick with the tried-and-true.

I hope my optimism that the public is finally catching on to this is not premature. When the President and Don Rumsfeld go around the country insulting the 60% of Americans who now have some doubts about the Iraq war, you'd think the effect of this would not be to bring them back in the fold, but to drive them further out of it. We'll see, I guess.

Islamic fascism revisited

2006-08-29T22:10:00.000-05:00

I had a nice vacation in a beautiful and media-deficient country, so it took a few days to get my bearings among all the cloud-cuckoo-land absurdities that had popped up, courtesy of the Republican Party, in just two weeks. I somehow had imagined the "Islamo-fascism" meme had died out months ago of its inherent irrationality and stupidity, though a moment's reflection should have warned me that irrationality and stupidity do not guarantee, or even contribute to, laying to rest of wrong and ignorant ideas. Quite the contrary.

So it seems "Islamo-fascism" is back, first in the mouth of our president, false as his grits-and-red-eye-gravy accent and absurd as his mechanical smirk, and then suddenly jabbered wildly by legions of robotic GOP servo-repeaters, spoken as if it were an actual word with a meaning.

For example, when I open up the Austin Chronicle, I find the following in its letters column:

Because we are the last defense from Islamist fascist barbarism, we must unambiguously champion positive American exceptionalism. This is our role as everyday citizens in helping to defeat Islamist fascism. For if we do not proactively defend ourselves and the U.S. is not victorious, humanity will be condemned to genocide, torture, and crushing tyranny.

None of us can remain aloof from these realities...We are in World War III. It has been formally declared against America and the free world by al Qaeda, the Iranian Sharia theocracy, and their devoted SS-like automaton forces. Yes, the Nazis have been reincarnated; only this time they are Islamist fascists.

[The Chronicle editor's] attitudes are representative of the appeasing neo-leftist Michael Moore Democratic Party. Because they lack grounded moral clarity and courage, they are incapable of comprehending the danger humanity faces from Islamist fascism. This allows the Islamists the crucial edge in this great mortal struggle. As a result, the defeatist Democratic Party cannot be allowed to wield political power and control national security. Otherwise, the free world will be in grave existential peril...Reject neo-leftist appeasement. Embrace the noble cause of American victory over Islamist fascism. If not, you become an unwitting useful idiot enabling the genocidal Islamist fascists in their efforts to enslave and tyrannize humanity.

This charmless bit of well-poisoning was not intended as a parody.

And unfortunately you can't ignore it as the isolated abusive rhetoric of a single misguided Republican in a regional alternative newspaper. Google News returns hundreds of recent hits on "islamo-fascism" and its permutations. Those hits I clicked on were just about as foolish as the letter I quoted, though in some cases not as histrionic.

All of them, of course, ignored the profoundly secular corporate-state nature of the actual fascism of history. More importantly, none of the shouters noticed their own uncanny mirror-image duplication of Islamist holy-war rhetoric. Holy war, whether Islamist or Republican, is not a fascist concept. It's a concept that comes to us straight from the 11th century. George Bush has more in common with Urban II than Osama bin Laden does with Mussolini.

(On an upbeat note, I just noticed that at least my spell checker is still sane and reasonable, and continues to mark "islamo-fascism" as a mistake. )

Brief impressions of Caye Caulker

2006-08-24T12:14:00.001-05:00

Down at the swing bridge in Belize City, the water taxi to the cayes was a ramshackle but businesslike covered speedboat holding about 40 passengers on hard benches, the boat powered by three big 200 horsepower Yamaha outboard motors. Everyone filed aboard from the crowded and chaotic boat terminal, 2/3 of the passengers not-yet sunburned budget tourists with lumpy and already-grimy backpacks with protruding one-liter water bottles with suck-spouts on the theory that you can't trust the water here, and 1/3 island residents bringing large household items like refrigerators still in the boxes. Non-budget tourists fly to the islands.

But it's not like the old days. This boat was covered (though the windows were broken) and unlike in the old days the boat was not loaded to the gunwales with cargo and passengers, and some life vests were visible under the benches. I made the mistake of sitting on the middle bench, which had no backrest. At the end of about an hour of travel I would regret this choice. We were knee to knee with the passengers seated on the bench lining the bulkhead. Those opposite me were college-age girls from Australia.

The big engines rumbled to life and we moved away from the boat terminal and picked up speed down Haulover Creek. By the time we passed the last "no wake" sign in the harbor our heavy boat was moving along fast at full throttle, pulling a wake behind it that would rock an aircraft carrier.

One of the Australian girls was quietly vomiting into a plastic bag. Her nausea was something she came on the boat with, not seasickness--the ride was bumpy but the boat was not swaying in the way that sets off inner-ear alarm signals.

Being Australian, the puking girl neither sought sympathy, nor received any from her friends.

I meditated on the roar of the engines for an hour--conversation was impossible, though shouted remarks could be exchanged. After an hour we were passing the south end of Caye Caulker, formerly mangroves, which had a few mango-flesh colored McMansions that had sprouted since the last time I was here, when was it? gee, almost ten years ago. Wow, time moves like a fast motorboat.

At the front dock, we were greeted by a hustler who touted improbably low room prices (remember, we were water-taxi tourists, not plane tourists, so "cheap" was a taken-for-granted selling point) if we piled into his golf-cart taxi to be taken to Hotel X (whose actual name I have now forgotten). But we had a place in mind a hundred yards from the dock, so we needed no transportation. It turns out, though, that the improbably low-price rooms would all have been, um, filled, and by then you would have already paid off the taxi. We verified the actual prices at Hotel X later.

Tina's Backpacker's Hostel was colorful (see photo below) and cheap, and pretty bare-bones. The rooms were small and dim, but they were for sleeping, right? Communal bathroom and showers. Tina's has a kitchen and a fridge, and if you had a lock you could stow your valuables in wooden drawers that had insubstantial hasps screwed into them. The great thing about Tina's is the outdoor part, the porch and yard, with a couple of big tables in the shade (mostly) and several hammocks and a porch swing, all shaded by palms and overarching tree-size sea-grapes. The dock in front of Tina's has fallen into the sea, but there is a surviving covered pavilion over the water that requires a short leap to get onto, which has several broken chairs and a lovely view.

Caye Caulker has not yet been "ruined," as we nostalgiacs say, but I can see it is on the way. By all reports Ambergris Caye has not only been ruined, but is a truly awful experience, combining first-world prices and traffic, with colorless remnants of third-world inconvenience and discomfort, plus mangrove-destroying accommodations for the mega-rich-and-decadent on the outskirts of San Pedro Town and on up the island. We had been advised to avoid it and we did.

Caye Cualker has essentially no cars. Well, there is a fire truck and a police pick-up truck, but that is all I saw while we were there. Golf carts and bicycles can be rented, and are in widespread use. You can walk from one end of the village to the other on the unpaved, pale-sand streets in 15 minutes if you walk fast. If you walk south from the village you get to the realm of the McMansions and some of the pricier places to stay.

The barrier reef, second longest in the world, is the main attraction. And the island ambience.

It's still "relaxed" as everyone says, and indeed I saw and smelled a good deal of marijuana being smoked. Takes you back.

The old island fishing economy is mostly gone, I think. No doubt there is still commercial fishing, but tourism is now how most islanders make their living. That's probably for the best--they are certainly more prosperous now. I'd say there is a widespread consciousness by islanders that the health of the reef, and ecological responsibility in general, is important for their livelihood now and in the future. On the other hand property owners stand to make a lot of money clearing off mangroves to build new houses. Clearly, some have succumbed to this lure.

Many of the beautiful locally built wooden sailboats of the old fishing fleet are now gone, and the rest are now used to take snorklers out to the reef. Those sailboats, which all had a deck and a cabin and several "dories" (i.e., small dugout canoes) stacked on deck or sometimes towed behind for the crew to sleep in, were common the first time I visited the island, and I was sad to see that they are increasingly replaced by big motor boats. The fishing sailboats had a live well in the bottom of the boat which admitted sea water for keeping the catch alive on a multi-day fishing trip. The fast motorboats can ice the catch down and get back in a few minutes.

The island is divided in two by "the split," a channel which may or may not have been created by a hurricane. In any case, the split, which is free of sea grass, is the place to swim and, if you wish, sit at an open-air bar and watch the swimmers while drinking rum or Belikan, the national beer. Sea-grass between the island and the reef, which is important for ecological health of the reef and fishery, keeps the rest of the island from being very good for swimming from the shore. The split has a ruined pier to sit on while you are not in the water. The water, of course, is clear and beautiful.

It was the rainy season, which reduces the number of tourists, at least American tourists. Lots of French and Germans. Very unhealthy and severe tans, that shade of reddish brown that hurts just to look at, were much in evidence.

We spent some time with Eve's uncle Simeon Young, who is Belizean and who operates a dive shop. His family in the old days were all boatbuilders and fishermen. He was adopted as a small child by Eve's grandmother Lois some time after she married a Belizean fisherman back in the 1970s. Simeon is a few years older than Eve. His business seems to be prospering. He took Hunter out on a half-day dive trip.

On this trip I habitually awoke about sunrise, and on a Sunday morning at dawn I was walking down the sandy streets where a few island people were out sweeping the sand in front of their houses or businesses--an old fashioned practice I remembered from past visits. As I walked past the yellow police station with closed louvered windows I heard a man's loud screams coming from the upper floor of the station.

A scowling arms-crossed policeman with dark sunglasses stood in the shadows in front of the station in a don't-ask-about-this stance. I walked on, as did the islanders passing by, hurrying up a little and not speaking to each other, uncharacteristic for islanders. In 2003 a police constable was suspended for fatally shooting a man in the back of the head in this same police station. The constable claimed self defense. I have not been able to find out the disposition of that case, but it was clear from islander response this morning's unpleasantness that it would not be a good idea to stop and inquire of Sunglasses about the screams. Nothing to see. Move along.

But by and large visitors and islanders alike, while we were there, seemed to be enjoying life. Most of the islander friendliness seemed to me to be genuine and not part of a hustle. I liked being there. The food was occasionally good, and was never bad, and usually cheap. Our stay in Caye Caulker was a couple of days of relaxing, hanging out, reading in shaded hammocks in Tina's yard, and going out to the reef. And in my case, taking photos of frigate birds and boys playing in dugout canoes.

A sign on front street says "Go Slow." Everybody did.

A few photos follow. (More photos, including a lot of other parts of Belize, plus family stuff, can be seen at my Flickr page, in more or less random order, with varying amounts of explanatory material.)

The front porch of Tina's guesthouse

The view from Tina's pavilion at water's edge

This is a traditional fishing boat, with a non-traditional cargo and painted non-traditional colors. Striped, unpatched sails are also an innovation.

A view of kids playing in a dory on the beach.

Click on any photo to enlarge.

I'll try to put up some remarks about other places in Belize soon.

Home again

2006-08-18T14:52:00.000-05:00

Just got back from Belize yesterday, but I'm too busy at the moment to write much about it. I'm helping my daughter get ready for her move to Baton Rouge for graduate school. I'll try to have a longer post and more photos sometime early next week. In the meantime here's a nice photo of a red-lored parrot taken near Punta Gorda.

(click to enlarge)