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.

"Think of all the people the Lord hasn't sent here..."

That's a line from Michael Smith's beautiful song "We Become Birds."  The whole of the line is "When you're put here, it's for a reason/...."  Not Michael W. Smith, the mega-selling Christian popster, but Michael Peter Smith, the criminally underknown/hence underappreciated Catholic folk singer known best, if at all, for "The Dutchman," which Steve Goodman had something of a hit ( a folk hit, which means he might have sold as many as twenty copies) with.  When I first heard that line I thought that like many of Smith's "Catholic school years" songs, it was knowingly dumbly ironic, poking gentle fun at the sorts of believers he obviously was familiar with from his Catholic schooling.

Then came Rick Santorum.

On March 29 of last year, Candidate Santorum uttered these immortal thoughts:  "The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don't have enough workers to support the retirees.  A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end (sic) in abortion."  Holy Mother-of-Pearl (Hester, right?):  Where does one even begin, with that?

Leaving aside politics (which I expect I'll be addressing in future), religion (ditto), and abortion,  ( hopefully not, except to say that it's less than a quarter, not a third, of pregnancies which are aborted, and that number seems very high to me) and just dealing with Logic and Reason vis-a-vis that quote is daunting enough.  I mean, ( I mean) it's really hard for me to get my head around that statement enough to address its sheer idiocy, but I feel I have to try, somehow.  Like I owe it, to someone....

More than 30 years ago, I sat in Prof. Mahlon Barnes's Logic class at the University of Hartford as he gleefully, in exposing some logical fallacy or another, said "Show me that set, the one that contains 'no people.'"  BTW (hey, c'mon, I'm hep), you should Google "logical fallacies" sometime.  It's pretty amazing how routinely they're used unchallenged in daily political discourse.  Anyway, how do you talk about the grouping "no people," or "people who haven't been born" in a concrete way, as if you knew or could say something about them?  It's like arguing about whether unicorns had spots or were just solid colors.  If you're gonna raise that "issue," wouldn't taxes have been higher, to pay for their schooling?  And unemployment rolls would have swelled even more during The Great Recession if they'd all (who, again?) been here.  Not to mention "welfare queens"(St. Ronnie's memorable term) and drug use and teen pregnancy (no contraception or Sex Ed in a Santorum Administration, of course) increases with all those extra people.  Shouldn't we in fact be grateful to all the people who haven't gotten here yet?  Sheesh, it's already hard enough to find a parking spot.

With all due respect to Dr. Barnes (who I believe has joined the set of "Those Who Were Here Once, But Are No Longer"--and shouldn't we be pretty pissed at them, too, for not helping us now?  It's Obama's fault, you know.), I can't remember which fallacy he was illustrating at the time.  I should be wicked mad at the brain cells which never came to me, but what the hell.   It does put me in mind of a similar sort of quandary, though:  When I was working in Maine years ago, I had a co-worker who once, angry at having scraped against a nail that hadn't been fully driven, asked "Who didn't drive that nail?"  Well, didn't we have fun answering that one: "Uh, Mother Theresa, Mao, Eisenhower, , my paperboy, that bird flying by...."  And now we could add "All those people who haven't been born yet!"

So the show this week (Tuesday, noon til two pm, eastern, 100.1 fm, wool.fm):  In honor of Rick "Theocracy and Ideology Trump Logic and Reasoning Every Time" Santorum,  I'm playing "logic" (of which there are few)  and "reason" (enough, I think) songs.  And, more than likely, "We Become Birds."

Hope you're not among the millions and millions who won't be there....

"What Chew Want...", or: "What Foods These Morsels Be"

When I was a lad--was too, once--and would go to visit my sister and her family in Connecticut, we'd listen to WTIC AM in the AM; there was a dj there named Bob Steele (CT's answer to Dave Maynard, my favorite dj on WBZ radio when AM was king, before it became hate-speech radio) who, each day, would announce his weight on-air as he fought the battle of Midwaist.  I'm not doing exactly that here, but something similar.  Hey, I said these posts won't always be political, although I could argue, if I were an arguin' sort, that everything is political.  F'rinstance, who grows our food? What chemicals are in it?  Has it been genetically modified?  Should we import out-of-season fruits and veggies from South America, or even Cali or FLA?  How do we cope with the health-care costs of our horrible diet?  And on and on....

Anyway, I'm currently in week two of an Elimination/Cleanse regimen (I hate the word "diet," for its many silly connotations) of caloric consumption, for my gastric betterment.  Both of my grandfathers died from internal explosions: my father's father from a burst appendix before my father was born, my mother's from a bleeding ulcer.  I had my first ulcer at age 7.  How long does it take for a person to come to his senses and change what he ingests in order to overcome a lifetime of Twinkies, Ring Dings, TV dinners, heavily processed fruit and vegetable servings and the like (my family loved all that stuff; maybe it was a way to assimilate and to get out of the shadow of the Depression and WWII deprivation) and, maybe, feel better?  In my case, nearly 52 years.  Hey,  no one has yet accused me of being smart--or mature (pull my finger).

Anyway, as I expect you know at least slightly, these sorts of programs require that one eliminate (meaning "stop eating or drinking;" clearly, all eating and drinking ultimately leads to elimination) virtually everything that a normal American (ooh, now there's a subject for discussion, huh?) would regularly consume.  One breaks the fast with a shake of some sort, protein-and-fiber-based, with some kind of allowed fruit for taste; midday is solid food time: chicken or fish, rice or quinoa, some sort of vegetable (and that list is surprisingly short);  the evening "meal" is liquid again: a pureed soup of some sort, no solids.  The idea is to eat easily-digested stuff and let the whole tract  rest.  For 3 weeks.  Then, ideally, one adds back one banned substance (wheat, sugar, dairy, red meat, eggs, alcohol, oh my god--sorry) at a time for 3 days each to see how the body reacts to each, so one knows what one should eat or drink, and what to avoid.

As I said, I'm a third of the way through, mostly past the cranky snappish misery, the acute stuff, and settled in to the dank, gray, teeth-clenched-forced-march, just-keep-doing-it-until-it's-over section.  It's fuckin' great, really.  And while I genuinely can see the benefits of this regimen, and my guts can certainly use all of the rest and soothing they can get, I do think of the forbidden foods occasionally (hah!).  Saturday, for the first time since starting, I went into a grocery store (Alice, bless her, who is also doing this thing, has done virtually all of the shopping and preparation).  Jesus. It was like being in Amsterdam: Everything I walked past winked at me, whispered my name, beckoned to me suggestively, promised me wondrous pleasures if only I would succumb to their entreaties. I bought some haddock and fled.  It was like being a, a, uh, well, a  mildly hungry and self-deprived middle-class white person in a grocery store.

I occasionally have a firm grasp of the obvious, and try to let that brilliance shine through in my prose.

Since food has been so prominent in my thinking lately, what better way to assuage my pangs   than to play two hours worth of songs about food (no buildings this time, Talking Heads fans) on the radio this week as I sit alone in the studio, stomach growling?  I'll try to hit all of the food groups: I'm sure there'll be some meat, some potatoes, some bread, veggies, pie of various sorts (Honey, American), Savoy Truffle, some Tupelo honey, ice cream and likely some candy.  Probably even some Spam(TM), for you Hawaiian fans (Hawaii has the highest per-capita consumption of any state in the US of that fabulous Hormel product.  You could look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say.).  As always, my show runs from noon til 2 pm Eastern on 100.1 FM, at wool.fm on the interwebs.  Hey--have any of you become members of WOOL, or checked out the aforementioned website?  You soitenly should, and discover how many cool shows we have to offer.  Hope to see you on the radio this Chewsday.

Yours in digestive peace....

Love is god

On this, the eve of St. Valentine's Day, I want to talk about love.  Not Hallmark Card, sappy movie, romantic-dinner-out, flowers and chocolates love, but Real Love: basic human, for all people equally, unconditional, life-giving, nurturing, whole-making, restorative Love.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little piece and did a show about the military,  about what seems an innate human warlike component to our natures,  and on the toll that takes on each of us, realize it or not, and on the nature of life in general.  I got a few responses that were really interesting and thought-provoking.  Surprisingly, or maybe not, they were mostly from men, who were wrestling with the whole male, testosterone-inflected and -infected, brute-force-is-the-answer reflexive response to so many situations.  This was weighed against the question of whether there are just wars, situations which have gotten to a point at which there is really no other answer, no way to deal with the brutality of one side, except for the use of force by another.  The big touchstone in recent(ish) history is, of course, WWII;  given the madness and carnage being wreaked on the Jews, Gypsies, and really the whole of the rest of Europe by Hitler, what else could we do but respond with force?

History, even more recent history (Pol Pot, Gaddaffi or however the hell we're spelling his name today, Milosevich, Idi Amin, the Afrikaaner regime in South Africa, Lester Maddux and George Corley Wallace in the American south of the 60s Saddam, right up to Bashar al-Assad in Syria right now) is rife with examples of brutal despots who will stop at nothing to maintain or extend their power and influence.  The US has hardly been blameless in such endeavors, from our treatment of Native Americans to African Americans to gays to--well, you get the idea--and we also frequently back the bad guys overseas because it furthers our short-term economic interests, and we seem incapable of thinking beyond the short term.  Gore Vidal once said that we have no public memory before last Tuesday, and I think we have no public vision beyond next Monday.

One common feature of all the evil leaders I've listed above is gender:  all are obviously men.  A couple of you suggested that perhaps it was time to let women step up to leadership roles even more than they have done in recent years, and I've often thought that myself.  It seemed to me that women, who carried and bore and raised us would be less likely then to send us off to die for lack of a better way to resolve conflicts.  But I'm not sure that Maggie Thatcher, or Golda Meir, or Angela Merkel, or Michele Bachman, or Phyllis Schlafley ("Nuclear weapons are a wonderful gift from a wise and loving God"), or, especially,  one of the sickest and most evil people walking the planet today, Ann Coulter, would really be any kind of a step forward, or up.  Scientists worry about the effects of all of the increased incidence of estrogen in the environment, but somehow testosterone levels seem to be rising in women....

If it's not as clear-cut and simple as a gender issue, that women are inherently more likely than men to be nurturing and to seek alternatives to violence as a means of conflict resolution, then what?  Here is where I enter dangerous territory for me, because what I'm going to say seems contradictory to things I've said and acted for much of my life, and because, because of the previous clause, I don't really know much about the religious or spiritual aspects of the stuff I'm going to espouse (when has that ever stopped me?):  but the answer really has to be Love.

As in so many areas, I have lagged behind my wise and wonderful wife in understanding human needs and the essences of life.  When our kids were little and I was learning the enormous responsibilities and efforts required to make these beings who were here through my own actions into good and caring people, as they would behave in ways that, let's say, needed adjustment, I would instinctively go to punitive mode.  Alice's direction, though, was toward making sure that they were getting enough love, that they knew that they were loved, unconditionally.  When we'd see or read about or watch on TV examples of nominal adults evincing evil behavior or just being assholes to someone, Alice would say that person "didn't get enough love."

That thinking made me cringe at least a little.  I saw it as weak, as forgiving, reinforcing, and maybe even enabling behaviors that needed changing.  Maybe it's a result of my own diminished testosterone as I age (have you seen the back of my head?  I haven't, but apparently there's not much hair left there.  Do you know that--well, let's just leave it at hair loss, shan't we?), but I have really come to see that, while it may not be true that "All You Need is Love," the need for love and acceptance (which are really the same thing)  is paramount:  it has the single biggest impact on all of our other needs and desires and ways we interact with the world.

In contemporary America, at least, I think the concept of unconditional love has become twisted, bastardized, turned on its head.  Where the hell did all of the "helicopter parents" my generation has engendered come from?  Why have we become so desperate to be friends with our kids at the expense of being their parents and guides?  Partly because we don't want to be adults ourselves, I think.  But doing for,  unwillingness to confront, to help change, does nothing positive.  Nobody wants to be a jerk; they behave counter to their best selves because of a perceived lack on their part of something crucial to their lives, to their selfness.  I would certainly argue that that lack, if they could articulate it, is sufficient love.  We ALL need to be able to say to those people "I see that you're hurting.  What is it that you're missing, what is it that you need?"  The answer, I'm convinced, is gonna be "love."

Yes, this is easily dismissed as rose-glassed, starry-eyed, Hippie-peace-and-love claptrap.  It doesn't take into account chemical dysfunctions and mental illness, but if the rest of us are set up differently, even those pathological/physiological issues can be surrounded and dealt with in other than violent ways.  People who assault, who rob, who kill, who perpetrate heinous behaviors on the rest of us, might have led entirely different lives if they'd been loved enough.  Thinkers down through the ages have promulgated these ideas, from the Greeks to Jesus (setting aside the whole "Son o' God {TM}" discussion, spreading the gospel of love is a pretty powerful and cool idea), Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Dr. King, to, bringing it all back home to music and pop culture now, John Lennon.

Now, John Lennon was a controversial figure, and really not a nice person in many, many ways, especially as a younger man.  He was violent, he treated women badly, he was caustic and cutting in his wit and his lyrics.  He was also abandoned by his parents at an early age, raised by his auntie, who did her best but couldn't fill the void in his soul, that lack of love at crucial ages and stages.  Say what you will about Yoko, but his relationship with her effected a huge change in his outlook and behaviors.  He was killed before he could complete the journey, killed by someone who didn't get enough of the same things that Lennon himself had lacked.  As Mind Games says "Love is the answer and you know that for sure/Love is the flower, you got to let it, you got to let it grow."

Say to a pure Marxist that Communism has been shown to be a total failure, and that person will reply, "How do you know?  Pure Communism has never been tried."  Say the same to a Capitalist about Capitalism and you'll get the same response: "In its pure form, it's never been tried."  I'm pretty sure we can say the same about pure, pervasive, unconditional Love.   How do we finally start it?  Dunno. But what have we got to lose?

Hope you can join me for lots of "Love" songs (but not really of the "moon, June, spoon" sort) on Tuesday, VD, from noon til two on 100.1 FM or wool.fm.  I also hope some of you will be moved to jump in here with some comments to further a discussion....

What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?