Bug Food
I think we Americans must think that life is some sort of cosmic sporting event. Our language is fecund with sporting terms that we use for almost every thing: he hit it out of the park, that's par for the course, hat trick, whose you're daddy? Okay, may be not the last one.
Many of our sports are team endeavors that require military-like tactics: defense and offence. The one odd ball, there I go again, is baseball which turns everything upside down.
In baseball the defending team controls the ball and has to throw it, giving up control. The offensive team is in a weird spot because while they are trying to score, they too are in a defensive position, protecting the home plate: three strikes and your out. Everyone plays as a well trained team, but each player is offered ample opportunity to show individual excellence. Baseball really is the American game.
Tonight, I was involved in another of America's great passions: politics. I went door knocking with Frank Hornstein, the Representative for our district in the Minnesota Legislature. I was operating on the old saying, "If it really matters, you've got to put some skin in the game." You were probably wondering where I was going with all that sports talk.
it was a perfect night to go knock on doors in my neighborhood. Frank told me that we need to be out from 7:00 until 8:00 pm. Earlier and we would be bothering folks at dinner and latter, we'd be bothering people as they settled in for the evening. Frank was a community organizer before going into politics, so he has a great deal of practical experience in meeting with people and finding out what is on their minds.
Since it was a beautiful evening, many people weren't at home. The few that were pleasant and talkative.
However, just after 8:00 p.m. while we still had a block or so to do, the bugs came out. And that is when I got some skin into the game.
One of the few sports related memories that I cherish is that of playing baseball on a late summer afternoon/evening. Not being particularly quick on my feet when it came to ball handling, I was always stationed in the outfield. Since I am by nature inclined to take the long view of things, the outfield worked just fine. The smell of the cut grass, the color of the sky as the sun lowers in the west, that strange screeching sound that the night-hawks make when they are diving for insects: it all is as fresh today as then.
And of course, the bugs.
So there I was knocking on doors, doing my part in the great American game of politics, the smell of fresh cut grass, the sun setting, and being eaten alive by bugs. I was in heaven.
You think I exaggerate about the bugs? Did you ever see the science fiction movie Starship Troopers? It was like that.
By the way, I highly recommend the movie. It is not great cinema, but there are some very startling scenes that fore-shadow our world today. It was released in 1997.
Les
Sloganator
I don't know if you knew this about me, but I've enlisted in the Coalition of the Disgusted and joined the DFL as an active player. For those outside the state of Minnesota, DFL stands for Democrat, Labor, Farmer: an anachronistic throw back to the days 60+ years ago when Minnesota was a Populist state and had progressive political parties not aligned with the main parties. Originally, the DFL was a fusion of Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. The DFL is part of the Democratic Party but still holds onto its traditional name. The Republicans were the IR, Independent Republican party, you can guess how long that lasted once Reagan and his lot got into power. All Republican's had to shape up and there went the independent. There might be a lesson there some place.
Pardon me, I digress.
Below is an email I got from the chairman of our Senate District. Our district is the most liberal and active, go figure.
Any way, the Republican use of the Internet is very savvy and almost mythological in its success. On the other hand we Democrats have always felt that the rightness of our beliefs and values was self-evident and besides we are very tolerant of other people's values and prefer not to bad mouth them. We'd rather try to find common ground, compromise, and work things out in a win-win solution.
In these cynical, what's in it for me, times you may think I'm bullshiting you but, those are actual phrases I've heard used by me and my fellow Dems.
Again, I digress.
Occasionally however, the Republicans do something very clever, too clever, and it gets them. The following is an example.
The backstory is as follows: earlier this month, the web site for the Bush-Cheney campaign - the real one, paid for by MBNA America and Richard Scaife - featured a "create your own banner" tool, where you could enter your own slogan and print out your own poster, with the Bush-Cheney logo, and a note at the bottom "paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc." Democrats, of course, couldn't get enough of this. The original sloganator accepted everything, then it started censoring profanity and words like "Hitler" "dictator," and "evil".
Nevertheless,many clever folks exploited the sloganator to their own ends before its sad demise only a couple of weeks after its birth, and its mourners assembled some of the best for the slide show.
The link below is best enjoyed with the sound on:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~meo232/sloganator/
Set the Fuse, Mr. Moore!
Fahrenheit 9/11
Becky and I went to see Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Being the biased left-winger that I am, I think that the criticism leveled against it is crap. In addition, considering that much of the criticism is coming from the media, most of which is owned by 8 mega-companies, I'm not surprised that it is shallow and predictable. They've forgotten their own history and, unfortunately, their responsibility to the people of the Republic.
In the 15th Century the introduction of the printing press made possible the mass production of the Bible and other liturgical works. As a result, literacy exploded across Europe, the use of Latin-the official liturgical language of the Church Universal-was undermined by the growing demand of Bibles printed in local vernacular, and ideas flowed like water across the continent. By the 16th Century it was possible to produce and distribute information and commentary via inexpensive flyers called broadsides: large single sheets of paper printed on one side.
Broadsides were inexpensive and easy to produce and they gave voice to many who until then had been silent. These frequently anonymous and undated, broadsides often contained opinionated political or social content. They were the literary equivalent of the naval broadside: where a warship would pull alongside another ship and fire a withering cannonade trying to knock down its masts and, literally, the wind out of its sails.
Broadsides were also a tool of well known writers and thinkers to sidestep censors and quickly get their ideas into the public debate. Anonymity protecting them from persecution.
Stephen Daye, perhaps the first printer in the English North American Colonies, brought his family and a press to Massachusetts in 1638. In 1639 he printed the broadside, Freeman's Oath and in 1640, he printed the first book in the colonies, the Bay Psalm Book,. Daye's printing house, Cambridge Press, remained the primary press in the colonies until 1674.
In 1761 the poem, An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries, was published in a broadside. Written by Jupiter Hammond, a slave of the Lloyd family on Long Island, it is the first known published literature of an African American. Hammond followed with three more poems and sermons.
During the American Revolution, the presses of both sides delivered blistering salvos.
The Abolitionist press, both nationally known newspapers and small presses, stoked the debate about slavery for at least 15 years before the Civil War with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin most remembered, although in fact there were a number of authentic slave autobiographies that were printed and distributed. The fame of the great Fredrick Douglass, self-emancipated slave, author, and one of America's most eloquent orators, was due in-part to the printing of his autobiography and his speeches.
By the late 19th century, newspapers had grown in such power that they were commonly used to direct public sentiment in any direction that the publishers wanted: sometimes for the good, as in the case of social reforms against the use of child labor, and other times on Jingoist adventures such as the Spanish American War
In the 20th century the media has been a formidable force in all societies of the world. I won't even bother going over the Cold War, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars 1 and 2.
American culture is based on the First Amendment that insures freedom of religion and the press. These freedoms are joined at the hip and can not be separated without killing both of them.
Michael Moore is the one who is following the American tradition of free speech. It is he who, unlike the braying asses of the right wing (Limbaugh, Hanity, and the rest), makes assertions that can be verified from a variety of public sources. You may not agree with his conclusions but you know where he got is information.
As has become the case over the past 12 years, the media has chosen to fall into its comfortable role as the reactionary and anti-democratic chorus.
Les
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
1st Amendment, U.S. Bill of Rights
First Day of the Rest of My Life
The rain drips from the roof and makes soft plopping sounds as it hits the overhang outside my window. The light is a defuse grey. There is a big evergreen tree that blocks most of my 2nd floor view and provides a busy roost for a variety of birds. It's almost like being in the woods.
Becky is downstairs making breakfast: the sounds of dishes clinking and the smell of garlic wrap me in a warm blanket of familiarity. It blends seamlessly with the low contrast day outside.
Today is not an important day for me, no birthdays or anniversaries to remember. I finished my summer class at Metro State on Monday, so perhaps the big event is that this is the first Sunday in months when I don't have a class assignment to work on. I can take the time to reflect on my, where I'm going and why.
Moments like this are when I can say, "This is the first day of the rest of my life." and take the long view. Which leads to this blog.
I've been messing around with the idea of creating a blog of my own for some time. I've played with a couple of Open Source applications and been slowly getting it together. But then I saw the blog by
Chris Dykestra, a fellow DFL volunteer. It's well designed and thoughtful. I decided that I could go on forever researching and learning the intricacies of the blog, PHP, and PERL technologies or I could just go ahead and do it.
So, since this is the first day of the rest of my life, I put aside all that meticulous burrowing I can do instantly and dive in using eBlog a canned application. After all I can always keep looking into the technical side of things in the background while I get on with the important stuff, which is reflecting and writing.
About 8 months ago, I decided to change directions in my life. Working as a technical writer has been good to me in some ways. When there is work the pay okay, not great but okay. It is easy to get involved in writing about technical matters because I enjoy discovering how things work. More importantly, writing is a key aspect of my personality. I have to write, even if it is sporadically. To paraphrase, "I think, therefore I write." Often the reverse is also true; writing forces me to think.
About 40 years ago when I was a freshman at Ohio State University, one of many schools I've attended over the years, I took one of those frosh introductory courses that stuffed 800 students into a decaying auditorium and pretended to educate. I don't remember the name of the class or the guest speaker, but it had to do with writing as a profession. The speaker was about 30 and had published something. I didn't know him from Adam but some of the students around me seemed impressed.
He started his presentation with the following, "So you want to be writers? What the hell are you doing in here then? This is a waste of time, go write something!" I learned three important lessons from the lecture.
First, this guy was an idiot. Why insult so many people who had come to listen and learn? True, it is important to experience the world and write about your experiences, which was a later part of his lecture, but it is also important to be able to visualize what being a writer is. One of the processes that keeps people or all races and ethnic groups from advancing is the lack of role models and what a role model provides is an example to help visualize the unknown. I was 18 years old and fairly new to the world. I needed help to visualize what being a writer was and what writing required. This guy started off at the end of his lecture rather than at the beginning and pissed me off.
Second, while he was an idiot, he eventually made his key argument. Writers write.
Third, he reinforced a bit of Buddhist wisdom that I had recently read: judge not the teachings by the teacher. Even a doorknob like the speaker could impart a bit of knowledge, albeit accidentally, if you just listened with an open mind to the message, not the messenger.
As for his premise that being in school was a waste of time and that simply going forth and writing was what was necessary never made sense to me. At an other lecture, I had heard a speaker talking about painting, again faceless after all these years, that had stuck a dart of wisdom in my young head. "Before you can break the rules, you need to know what the rules are. Breaking the rules through ignorance is that, ignorance and means nothing. A lucky stroke at its best. Successfully breaking a rule intentionally is genius at its best."
All of which leads back to here and now on the first day of the rest of my life.
This blog is what I must do, write: probably sporadically.
Ignorance or genius? You be the judge.
Les Phillips / 06.27.2004
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.
Once they've exhausted all other alternatives."
Winston Churchill
