Pander: It's not just New Englanders' name for China's national symbol

I met this morning (Mar 22) morning's minion (WBZ TV news) and saw a clip of Massachusetts' Sen. Scott Brown speaking to a group of fishermen.  He was addressing proposed new lower limits on fishing in the Atlantic due to depleted stocks of haddock and cod, primarily, but of virtually all groundfish.  Brown excoriated "Washington insider" scientists for these limits (a new and creative use of that worn-out right-wing phrase), and questioned the science behind their conclusions, another worn-out right-wing strategy.

Also on this morning's news was a clip of Pres. Obama speaking to a group in Oklahoma(?) or some other oilstate, saying that we're drilling way more than we used to already but we should keep drilling more and probably re-think the Keystone Pipeline and find a way to get it going, regardless of science, fact,  or addiction.

And those in attendance at both appearances nodded and applauded, as both speakers knew they would.

Anyone with even a glimmer of awareness knows that the US is refining more oil than we have in decades, that, for the first time in decades we are actually net exporters (and why is that so?  Might it be cheaper for us if we just kept it all here?), that a new well going on-line today won't affect price for several years, that oil is a finite resource, and that the main factors in the gasoline price-spike are skittishness on the part of investors and speculators about events in Iran and the rest of the Middle East, and that market speculation in petroleum futures itself;  investors bet on whether oil prices will rise or fall, and that speculation makes oil prices rise or fall.  That is unfettered, unregulated Kapitalism at work.  Politicians have made promises and attempts to curb such speculation but all such attempts have, shockingly, been thwarted (I think that's the first time I've ever used that word in a piece of writing.  It felt good.).

People with even a passing knowledge of population increases and resource management also know that there are simply far too many people on this fragile planet (But we can't discuss birth control!), and that natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, relative to that overwhelming population.  Oil, gas, water, trees, minerals, all manner of flora and fauna are in serious danger of depletion,  extirpation or extinction, and the consequences for those at the top of the food chain are unknown.

And today, as I write this, in Acworth, NH, elevation 1800 ft., on the second day of spring, about two months earlier than "normal," my lilacs have budding leaves.  This evening I went for a walk with my dog; I was barefoot.  So was she, but that's not all that unusual.

The Koch brothers--scary extreme right wing billionaire oil types, lurking and looming in the background of the Tea Party and various nefarious right-wing causes (and effects, come to think of it), and yet also patrons of the Arts--(go figure) commissioned a study to debunk global-warming science.  Their head research scientist, physicist Richard Muller, a heretofore staunch global-warming skeptic, well-paid to say there's no such thing as global warming, came back with "Uh, no, it's, uh, it's definitely really happening, and we should reduce greenhouse gases" (I made that quote up, but I'll bet it's not that far off.).  Don't hear much about that study, do you?  And by the way, other recent studies have shown that people who get their info exclusively from Fox actually know less about what's really, truly factually happening in the world than people who get no news at all. They've apparently not-spun their way into negative capability.  And I didn't make that up.

My question this week, and every week for the rest of my life, probably, is "Where are the Grown-Ups?"  Where are the people in power who are willing to tell the truth, and tell it again, and again, even if it's ugly and scary and the great unwashed might not want to hear it?  And where is the majority of said unwashed who are willing to hear dire info and accept it and act accordingly, to pull their heads out of the oil-sands and try to cope or even to begin an attempt to change the future we're on the brink of?

 In Mark Hertsgaard's Hot: Living Through The Next Fifty Years On Earth, he uses an image that I find strikingly vivid and apt.  He asks readers to imagine themselves on a train headed downhill; ahead looms a large fog bank.  When the engineer sees that fog, he hits the brakes.  The laws of physics and inertia take hold;  although he's trying to stop, he hasn't enough time.  He's going to go some unknown distance into that fog.  We're into that fog bank now, into that unknown.  The things that'll keep us from going way far in are recognition of the fog's existence, and the foot on the brakes. And we're deep into denial that the fog bank is there, and we haven't even started stopping yet.  ...And the band played on....

Yes, I'm mad as hell. Peter Finch's character in Network made that phrase and feeling work to public advantage:  people threw open their windows and yelled it out into the night and began to change their behaviors. But that was a work of fiction.  In this mess we call real life, not so much.  I'm mad that the right-wing talking assholes (that's where their heads are) obfuscate, mislead, outright lie about the straits we're in, all the while consolidating their power and fattening their bank accounts while the so-called Left (there is no actual Left anymore:  Nixon would be too liberal to be elected today.  Think about that....) hems and haws and stammers weakly and ineffectually and wets its finger to see which way the wind is blowing--it can't even consider what's actually in that wind--and pontificates accordingly.  It is said that a people get the government they deserve;  I think the same can be said of a future.

My country--hell, my planet (well, it's not actually my planet, but you get what I mean) has been hijacked by sick, twisted, delusional, selfish ideologues who care only about the next news cycle, never mind the next election, and their bank accounts' bottom lines, never mind their kids' and grandkids' futures.  Win the debate at the expense of truth.  It feels totally like the toddler response to Hide and Seek:  "If I have my eyes closed, you can't see me."  "If I deny this stuff viciously and vociferously enough, and amass enough gold, I'll be immune."  And while there's a soupcon of truth there, since it's the poor who'll get it first and worst (as it always is) it's gonna get us all, no matter who, what, or where, no matter believer or denier.  As Greg Brown said, "Life's not what you think it is, it's just what it is."

So what to make of this, radiologically?  Should I play songs of doom and gloom, apocalypse and cynicism?  Nah, I've done all of that stuff. On the Titanic, the band kept on a-playin', and if it worked for them--what's that? Oh, it, it didn't,  really?  Oh, well, that may change...Nope-- What the hell-- the ship sank, this train ain't stopping, so: "Let's Dance." And maybe, if we wait long enough and clap really hard, the Real Grownups will show up and save the day....

Hope to see you Tuesday, noon till two Eastern on 100.1 FM, or wool.fm.

"Dance me to the end of love."

That Was the Winter of Our Disconnect

So, to paraphrase that wonderfully innocent anti-war poster from the 60s, what if they gave a season and it didn't show up?  It feels hard to celebrate the passing of something that wasn't: Winter Into Spring, as George Winston would have it, doesn't it?  It's like the Repugs lamenting the passing of, and hoped-for return to, a time and a country that never really existed.  But that's next week's post, and theme.

As evidenced by that last sentence, I find it sooo difficult to stay away from those two elephants-in-every-room-of-the salon, those fraught enemies of friendly and genteel (oh--maybe that's why) conversation, Religion and Politics. "Are you sure it's bad to stick my fingers into those spinning blades?  Oh, lemme try, it'll be okay...."  I maybe oughta change the name of this space to "Bloody Stumps."  But I'm'a avoid controversy again this week and just deal with mud-luscious, puddle-wonderful Spring.  Except to raise the specter of looming and catastrophic climate change which almost all of us, even those who believe on some level that it's happening, resolutely deny.  It'll be interesting as hell to see if, the next time we're s'posed to have a winter, we do.

But on to a celebration of actual Spring, not the Spring we've had for most of the winter, but that time to take out the baseball glove and oil it up, the time of puddle-splashing and marble playing and hopscotch and jump-rope and jesus, how old am I?  Does anyone still do any of those things anymore?  Am I one of those-- not fuzzy-headed-liberals but foggy-brained-conservatives-- living in an idealized Never Never Land?  Aargh, more of the non-prescription drugs, quick!

Anyway, in past years of Spring-celebration shows, I've gone for, as I usually do, songs with the theme in the title.  This time I have in mind to play songs that instead evoke Spring, the first warm days, the release from cold and winter and the promise of warmth and summer.  Stuff like Daydream and Groovin' and It's a Beautiful Morning, many versions of what is to me the quintessential springtime celebration song (and, probably not coincidentally, peyote chant) Witchi Tai -To, and like 'at.  I'll also have to play something by Firesign Theater (likely High School Madness) since, sadly, Peter Bergman, one of the founders of that brilliant and anarchic comedy troupe, the Beatles of counterculture humor, died recently.

Hope you can join me on Tuesday, noon-till-two, on 100.1 FM or wool.fm, broadcasting from beautiful, springlike in all seasons, downtown Bellows Falls, VT.

Beware the goat-footed balloon man.

Alpha and Omega are taken: Guess I'm stuck in the middle with you

The danger in me writing about anything biblical is that I know bupkis about it.  But in today's public or even semi-public discourse, rampant ignorance and outright lies are hardly unusual or even disadvantageous.  In keeping with those standards and practices, then, herewith follows today's gospel of Mark.

A couple of religio-inspired things have gotten my attention lately, and they are from the Alpha and Omega of the Bible, from Genesis and Revelation.  Letting the last be first:  Elaine Pagels (of the Gnostic series, probably most notably The Gnostic Gospels) has a new book called Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.  In it she apparently attempts to, as Adam Gopnik (and what a wonderful writer he is) says in a recent New Yorker, "gently...bring"(Revelation's) "portents back to earth."  It is Pagels's contention that (quoting Gopnik again)  "it's essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century....All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the Left Behind books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents" (then-) "contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience."

So Revelations is basically just a Michael Bay action movie script, Transformers circa 85CE.  There'll be no seven-headed beasts (Wait!  How many candidates were there on stage in NH for the first Repugnicant debate this year?  Um, Santorum, Bachman, Romney, Gingrich,...uh, Perry, Pawlenty, and, let's see, someone biblical, ummmm, oh yeah, Cain;  let's see: Santorum one, two, Romney's  three, four, Perry five...holy shit!), no battles between millions of angels and demons (except on pinheads), no supernatural meaning to 666 (it's just a really long road to get your kicks on), no choruses of trumpets, etc, etc.  Turns out it's not prophecy, it's just allegorical reportage, just made-up, opinionated ad hominem shit, like on Fox Noise (Motto:  "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.") today.  It's kinda disappointing, really, but it certainly won't change the views of the Christian Right (again, mostly neither Christian nor right, by their words and behavior)  from attempting to scare the bejeezus out of us with their "facts."

What does scare the bejeezus out of me, what is perhaps the most damaging prose ever committed to print BMB ("Before My Blog") in human history comes from Genesis 1:28:  "Be fruitful and multiply" (wow, have we heeded that directive) "...replenish the earth" (maybe not so much that one, except with ourselves) "and subdue" (my emphasis) "it, and have dominion over..." EVERYTHING... "that moveth on the earth."  Kill, kill, drill, drill, frack, frack--"God said it, man.  I'm just doing His bidding!"  We've been focussing our attention on the apocalyptic vision in Revelation all this time when the end is actually gonna come from that very beginning (See previous post, "Every hello contains goodbye," he said, self-referentially).  Adam hadn't even named everything his offspring were gonna be hell-bent on destroying when God put out that contract (Can't you just see him in his study, telling his consigliere, "Use Luca Brazzi...?).

What brought this up for me was a fairly recent quote (it's hard to keep up, they're generating new wacknesses so fast) from Rick Santorum (R, Headuphisass), wherein he accused Obama of "phony theology."  In fairness, as things are spelled out above (and, to some, Above), Santorum's got a case.  If, as he went on to say, Obama's views are based on "... a world view that elevates the earth above man" (that pagan Kenyan Hitlerian socialist) well, there may be a "gotcha" there.  It's contrary to The Word of God.  Of course, strict adherence to The Word is leading us to the total destruction of life as we have known it on this near-totally subdued orb, and may in fact give credence to Newt Gingrich (R, Hell)'s vision of colonies of humans on the Moon ( and in fairness, let's call that the "Kramden Gambit," shan't we, as Ralph was always threatening to send Alice there)  in the near future.  We all need to step back here, take a deep breath, and realize that a years-long winnowing of the Repug field of candidates still contains those guys as self-proclaimed (at least) serious contenders, and then think about what that means for the future of the two-party system, democracy, and our species.  But that's for a future post.

At any rate, all of this is spurring me to play songs of creation, beginning, revelation, and mysticism.  Hope you can join me on Tuesday from noon till two (remember, it gets here an hour sooner this week--how great is THAT?)  at 100.1 FM or  on the webs at wool.fm.

And say "Amen," somebody.

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Reader, beware:  What follows is a rambling and yet I hope coherent philosophical meditation on life, love, separation, relationships, death, all without the caustic and sometimes snarky asides you may have become somewhat used to in this space.  So Abandon All Expectation, Ye Who Enter Here, and don't say I didn't warn you.

As many of you already know, Alice is leaving on the 10th of March for 5 weeks or so in the sunny (praps) and tornado-free (we hope) southland.  She was accorded the honor, chosen from among hundreds, maybe thousands, of applicants, to be poet-in-residence at Connemara, Carl Sandburg ("The fog comes in on little cat feet," "Hog Butcher for the World...City of the Big Shoulders")'s homestead, now a National Historic Site/Nat'l Park in Flat Rock, NC.  You could Google it--it's pretty cool.  It even has its own herd of historic goats(!).  She'll be there for 3 weeks, then plans to hike the Appalachian Trail for a week or two in Virginia before returning home in mid-April.

So it's only for 5 weeks, but it's for 5 weeks.  It's interesting the thoughts and emotions this has called up, first for Alice and now for me.  She wrote to a friend "It's almost like I'm planning for a death--my death?  Like I need to tie up loose ends, finish obligations, let go of things and people I can't attend to right now, prepare for the unknown ahead, and prepare my family for their own version of that unknown."   On the face of it that may seem a little extreme, but is it?  Maybe it's the time of life, maybe the time of man (sorry, Joni), but everything in this journey we're all on is terribly tenuous and impermanent, isn't it?

I expect that everyone reading this has experienced real and permanent physical loss, the death of someone to whom they have been intimately close, whether parent, child, sibling, spouse, or close friend, and I certainly don't mean to trivialize those losses by likening them to a 5 week absence.  And yet, and yet: it's all on a continuum (As Bokonon reminds us in Cat's Cradle--Vonnegut, of course, and you MUST read the book if you haven't, or haven't recently--"Any man (sic) can call time out, but no man (sic, again) can say how long the time out will be.").  Life is mostly about sharpening our ability to let go of stuff.  All we can be certain of is loss, and we can't know what, when, or for how long.

Not long after reading that response of Alice's, I came across, in a New Yorker capsule review of Penelope Lively's new book, How It All Began, this striking thought:  "...beginnings and endings are arbitrary points on a time line of unintended consequences...."  I found that very moving and thought-provoking in its reference to arbitrariness and lack of intention;  no matter one's theological beliefs or lack thereof, the stories we tell ourselves about our ability to control aspects of our own lives or the lives of those close to us are just that:  stories.  The portion of our lives we can actually control, despite what we may think, is miniscule.  That lack of control, of self-determination, leads some to prayer, some to alcohol or other drugs, some to self-help tracts, some to hiking or other forms of physical exercise, to yoga, meditation, talk therapy, and many to outright denial,  all of which are basically means to get through dark nights of the soul.  I do not mean to belittle or judge any means of coping; if you are offended by my likening prayer to drugs, for example, I'm sorry.  I happen to see them as close kin.  If you don't, well, that's how you do it.  Life, though, I think we may all agree, would be nigh-unto-unbearable without one or another of the mechanisms we've developed.

And here's why, maybe, for me.  Because it's all so fleeting, and because it's all a mystery.  Jerry Jeff Walker says "Whatever ain't mystery is just guesswork."  And the course of knowing, or of attempting to know, is so fraught. The closer we get to someone, the further, or the quicker they recede.  Where are those little babies who used to crawl all over me?

My Dinner with Andre is one of my absolute favorite movies.  Many find it a total snorefest, but for me it's endlessly fascinating.  For the uninitiated, it consists simply of two men, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, having dinner in a New York restaurant and conversing about life, careers, relationships, death.  The climax, if such a movie can be said to have one, comes in these last ruminations by Andre on exactly what I'm getting at here:

...the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes.  I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something.  I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms.  Who are we?  And that's to face--to confront--that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death....  


You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting, which is so incredible.  Then in the next moment you start to think about things: work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow...the world comes in quite fast.  Now that again may be because we're afraid to stay in that place of forgetting, because that again is close to death.... In other words: you interrelate and you don't know what the next moment will bring, and to not know what the next moment will bring brings you closer to a perception of death....

...have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years, that's completely unpredictable.  Then you've sort of cut off all your ties to the land and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.  I mean, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: 'cause they seem to provide some firm ground.  But there's no wife there.  What does that mean, a wife?  A husband?  A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone.  Where's that son?

That passage always makes me cry, and reading and transcribing it this morning was no exception.  It's all so tenuous, this life, and it all goes so fast.  Goodbyes are for stages of life too, I think. "Hello" itself implicitly contains the ineffable if inevitable "Goodbye."  The two are inextricably intertwined. We welcome people into relationships, we are welcomed ourselves, whether for 5 minutes or 50 years, but at our backs we always hear, if we're attuned, whispers of goodbye.  We can't control, we can't very often create outcomes.  What we can do is accept and (see earlier post) love.

This week, then (noon till 2, eastern, 100.1 FM, wool.fm virtually), I'm playing "Goodbye" songs, such as the one that gives this post its title, from David Gray's cover of Marc Almond (it also incorporates passages from "Into the Mystic" and "Madame George", so you know it's a big winner for me), other Hello/Goodbye songs from The Beatles, of course, and Tim Buckley, plus lots of plain Goodbyes. Not surprisingly, there are many of them.  I'll also do a brief salute to Davy Jones, the first of the "Prefab Four" to shuffle off the stage permanently.

So goodbye, Alice, have a blast, write and hike and remember what it was like to have all of that unfettered time once, and let's hope you return to a world as unchanged as it's possible to be.