There's something fishy going on in America. If you haven't noticed it, maybe its because you're swimming downstream--going with the flow--as we couch potato Americans are wont to do.
When I was in the middle of China--the mountains of northern Sichuan provice--this past summer, I saw a public service video while standing in line in an airport. The message was spoken to me by two cartoon piggies conversing. One piggie explained to the other that "swine flu comes from America."
Oh yeah?
It made me think of when I was a kid in the 1950s. There was an ailment called the "Asian flu," being passed around in the US. And so I wondered, looking at the cartoon piggies on the airport video screen: Are the Asians getting back at us now? blaming us for our invasive micro-organisms? Yeah, I know, there's no reason to take it personally. And certainly I'm subjectivizing my perception of international propaganda spin campaigns.
But interpreting media messages is sometimes like living in a fishbowl. 
Then today I hear on NPR that a new menace to America--at least the Great Lakes part of it--is a fish that has been named the "Asian carp." What I wonder is: who named this piscetic T-rex the "Asian carp?" Was it the same person(s) (some committee?) who strategize  nomenclature to discredit the onslaught of "Asian" exports that sturgeon the aisles of our Walmarts? And I hear on the radio report that environmentally responsible scientists in the midwest are "poisoning" a stretch of one of our precious rivers in order to stop the invasion of this dreaded Asian carp. The scientist, interviewed on All Things Considered and also earlier on Science Friday (Talk of the Nation), stated that this  invasive carp would threaten the ecological balance in the Great Lakes.
Would this dastardly fish be devouring other species to the point of their extinction? I wonder.
I mean...making war on a fish species? Isn't that fishocide? Doesn't the UN have a resolution against that somewhere? Or how about the EPA?
What a brave new world we have made for ourselves.
I'm expected to swallow?... hook line and sinker, the rationale and its accompanying  anti-<i>poissonal</i> purge that some band of brave biologists needs to stop those Asian carps before they devour our yankee bream and walleye? Build a wall to stop the fish? They're not Mexicans, you know... not Palestinians, not east Germans; they're just fish, for cryin out loud.
Is that the message I'm supposed to hear here? Poisoning our American waterways to tarp a carp is environmentally acceptable? I mean...poisoning a fish population? What have we come to in the name of balancing trade deficits and fish populations? Final aquatic  solutions?
I feel like I'm in the middle of a trans-Pacific PR war, and the innocent, unsuspecting, just-doing-his-own-thing tarp is being scaled back--offered as a sacrifice--to appease the gods of ecological (trade?) balance.
Is it just me?  And I'm a person who reads, likes to keep up with current issues.
Am I, an American citizen, now expected to support fishocide for the sake of balancing (trade) ecological systems?
I don't have anything against Asians; I think they're a nice. But now I'm wondering, thanks to the scientists on NPR, about the undue influence of these Asian communist fish that seem to be swimming upstream in order to take  control of ouer liquidity.
 

In her 1986 book Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Chang writes an account of her ordeal during the so-called "Cultural Revolution" in China.

Thank God that China has overcome the madness of those dark days.

The cultural revolution was  a reign of terror concocted during the end of Mao's life by his wife, Jiang Qing, and a gang of underlings who were jockeying for power.

Power hates to concede, hates to give up anything. From the 1949 revolution onward, the Communist party under Mao's leadership had imposed a series of authoritarian transformations upon the ancient nation of China. By the late 50's, a severely misguided, mismanaged, famine-inducing "great leap forward" industrial policy had wreaked havoc on Chinese society. It became obvious to many that the Marxist/Maoist way of doing things was insufficient for successfully governing the people. Something was wrong.

Mao wasn't the brightest star that ever shined on earth, but he was a very smart guy. After the Chinese, with help from the Allies, had thrown the Japanese out of China after WWII,  Mao had figured out how to organize the communists to overcome the Kuomintang, which was the other major military/political faction contending for leadership. In 1948-49, he and his troops ran their rivals, led by Chiang Kai-shek, off the mainland to Taiwan.

After being in power for ten or fifteen years the Mao-imposed governmental plans began to fall apart at the seams. Things were not really going according to plan. Instead of analyzing the faulty communist idealism upon which his program was based, Mao and his lackeys embarked upon a strategy of  blaming most of the people who had been put in charge after the revolution. In the late 1960's his wife Jiang Qing manipulated, with a little help from her friends, the party rings of power to preserve the cult of leadership that had been building up around the old grand master of Chinese-style communist authority.

The resulting "Cultural Revolution" was all about the younger generation being turned loose against their parents' generation to teach them a thing or two about how things are s'posed to be. From Nien Cheng's description, and also from the accounts of many others, history reveals that the kids were quite judgemental and unmerciful toward the old folks who had screwed up Mao's perfect vision of what China might become.

The  young  "Red Guard" whippersnappers were turned loose upon their all-too-human, but faithful, cadres who had preceded them in authoritative roles. The younger revolutionaries were enlisted in droves to correct their elders' administrative errors, and they got pretty heavy-handed about it. They were not merciful.

While flower power was the order of the day across the Pacific in San Francisco (haha), ridicule became the basis for  new indoctrination being projected onto Chinese cadres during those terrible times.

It was mass confusion. Anything goes as we try to figure out  who's in charge here?  That was the tyranny of the moment. The Red Guards turned China upside down with their unmerciful denunciations and public displays of ridicule against faithful communist administrators. History shows that the main governing principle  that "Mao Zedong Thought" espoused was an unworkable  ideal of perpetual revolution.  The result was anarchy.

It wasn't until after Mao's death that these abuses came under the analysis of more sensible leadership. Someone was praying for China, because what appears to be a providential turn of events produced Deng Xiaoping as China's new helmsman. Deng's reforms seem to have produced  a steady stream of improvement  in the government of China. The Tianenmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 is a lamentable exception.  Today, Chinese citizens persist in working constructively to rectify the governmental abuses of the past, and to establish a bedrock of democratic innovations.

 Let's hope Hu Jintao , Wen Jiabao, and other leaders will  not deny the  efforts of those patriots, and will accept  reforms to constitutionally protect freedoms of speech, assembly and worship for the people of China.

Nien Cheng,  the author mentioned in our first sentence above, was a victim of cruel humiliations and injustices during the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966. After spending six and a half years in prison on false charges, she had managed to live and tell about it. I find her testimony very informative, although it is tragic.

More about this question of where authority comes from...later.

Carey Rowland, author of Glass Chimera

Long before Netanyahu riled the Jewish left, long before Bibi was even born, and before Sharon, Peres and Rabin were prime ministers of Israel, long before Moshe Dayan, Golda and Ben Gurion sent patrols into the streets of Jerusalem--and before Herzl and Hess acted t0 manifest their visions of a Jewish state--even before  Hillel and Maimonides  fortified the veins of Hebrew culture with their wisdom... there was King Hezekiah of Israel...

 and an upstart prophet named Isaiah who spoke during Hezekiah's time into the lives of the ancient Israelis. Isaiah purported, as was the  custom for prophets during the times of the kings of Israel, to speak on God's behalf; Isaiah made, in what's known as chapter 56 of his writings, this declaration: "For my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples."

And so has it been.  The site where once  the Jewish temple stood has become, indeed, a place of prayer for "all peoples."  God knows...the Muslims pray there, in their two mosques that presently occupy the site.  And Christians, me among them, have an obsession with the place and its environs--Golgotha, ethlehem and  all the holy land up beyond Jericho and Nablus into Galilee.

So it happens that the modern Israelis who administer the land of Israel and its holy mountain find themselves  somehow keepers of a sacred tradition of monotheistic devotion that has spread, like it or not, beyond the Judaic traditions and into the legacies of Christianity and Islam.

It's quite a tricky role for the Jewish tribes to play in world history, being the keeper of the flame...

especially since modern Jews  have, in large part, replaced their old religion with secular devotion to enterprising benevolence and progressive emancipation.

They've passed on the "chosen people" label. It gets them in too much trouble. Jewish identity  has morphed into a  secular--some would say socialist, some would say mercantile--sense of, as Michael Goldfarb calls it, mission.  With the Adonaic tradition represented by Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets now considered, thanks to evolution, somehow obsolete or naive,  world Jewry exerts itself proactively into a developmental role as "a light unto the nations, " to use Michael Goldfarb's reference. I have no problem with this. I love the constructive involvement of Jewish activists that I see in public life.

 As I was reading, a few days ago in Global Post, Goldfarb's thoughts about this, I saw that he quoted  the 19th-century pioneer, Mendel Hess:  "Israel must be exemplary for all peoples, must reach the highest rung on the ladder of moral perfection."

The otherworldy standards of Hebraic tradition have thrust upon modern Jews a self-appropriated "mission" to serve as benefactors  and founders of a world in which justice and equality  become the fulcri of civilization. That's a high calling indeed, one that, I think, Isaiah would approve.

But our present situation is not simple. To start with, about 1300 years ago Mohammed really threw a monkey wrench in the religiously historical works when he metGod on Mt. Moriah. And then his followers went and built a mosque there to commemorate the occasion.

So as it turns out, 20-century Jews who took possession of eretz Israel as their domain have, like it or not, appropriated for their progeny a role as administrators of the  world's prime prayer hot-spot.  It comes with the territory. We other Abrahamic covenantists  must therefore present this challenge to the  keepers of the Shemitic flame: What are you going to do with it? Keep it to yourself?

I hope not.  How 'bout ...can you recast Jerusalem as a "house of prayer for all peoples?" I mean, especially since religion is no longer that important to you anyway. And maybe free up the west bank, democracy style, while you're at it?

We just celebrated twenty years of having no Berlin wall. I beseech you, Bibi and company, are you going to make the world endure, as the Russians did, twenty years of  apartheid-like oppression while you micromanage ethnocentric settlements between checkpoints?  No!  For God's sake, lighten up.  Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall.

I'll be praying that you see the light, and that all west bank residents can see that same light where once a wall was. Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite, next year in Jerusalem. 

"So you shall divide this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel.
"You shall divide it by lot for an inheritance among yourselves and among the aliens who stay in your midst, who bring forth children in your midst. And they shall be allotted an inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.
"And in the tribe with which the alien stays, there you shall give him his inheritance..."
(47:21ff)

You, O America, are the nation of nations.

And wherever on earth the people dwell,

or the icons of the web do sell,

and planes of air descend,

you inspire their poverty to end.

Then do they bid you adieu, like they did the British

before you.

Your golden-headed ingenuity hath inspired them all;

still, do you evade the final margin call?

In days of old, your silver-shielded inclinations gave breath to greatness.

Not hateness.

With your strong-armed enterprise enabling masses to bust the hardscrabble,

O America! how your simple speech doth strive to overcome the Babel.

Back in the day, your bronzen halfbacks scampered,

unhampered

through smoke of kamikazis  

past the ghoulish camps of Nazis

which now you accuse each other of becoming.

You're so cunning.

Not!

Oh iron-legged one, who runneth at the game

 and at the mouth,

in all directions north and south,

what will you do now upon your feet of iron and clay?

Shall I compare thee to a tragic play?

Entropy doth assail thee like a worthless m-b-s,

which thou doth seek to unload before it can digress.

Yet  it sachs thee to the ground, bearly stearns thee round and round;

with jolting, bofa torts, you fall like ponzied citicorpse.

Oh! quoth the raven evermore,

upon thy credit-defaulted shore:

Prosperity, prosperity, burning bright

in the newshours of the cabled night

what financial convoluting instrument

can forestall thy fateful detriment?

What prophetic lens or scope could foresee such slippery slope?

Upon what back of mortgaged securitee

will he who bailed the bank bail thee?

But wait! What light through yonder window breaks?

What hope, what blessing, for what

 God's sakes?

Arise! and go, and fly with me

into uncharted

opportunity.

China is fast becoming the new economic engine of the world. They are revving up now, as  we did about 120 years ago, during our time of "manifest destiny" and railroad-enabled continental expansion. The 21st century will be the era of Chinese expansion and swelling GDP.

But China's impulse to economic power has not always been so well-focused; their long plodding  path to world leadership was  punctuated by a few false starts. Two of the most notable of their newfound prosperity's costly pangs were the "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s, and the "Cultural Revolution" of the late 1960s.

These events took place on the other side of the world from where I grew up here in the USA. I had no significant knowledge or understanding of them, being caught up as I was in the bourgeois pop-culture comfort of American childhood and teen angst.

But I have learned something about what was happening in China during those perpetually revolutionary times. Earlier this year, I read a book about it: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. She was a woman born in 1952, the year after me.  This summer I visited Sichuan province, where Ms. Chang grew up and played her part in the tumultuous "Cultural Revolution" as a teenager while I was an American kid.

Her father, Wang Yu, had been the governor of Sichuan province in the early 1950s. He had served the people of China in that capacity as a dedicated, competent communist party official. Ms. Chang writes in chapter 23 of Wild Swans:

"It was then (the early '50s) that the Communists were at their most popular--just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order..."

 But fifteen or so year later her father was denounced and humiliated as a "capitalist roader," someone  whose personal accomplishments and political identity did not fulfill the shifting requirements of chairman Mao's fickle finger of favor.

Why was he denounced after many years as a loyal agent of the party?

Among the many political mechanisms of Maoist control during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s was the regular practice of gathering peasants to denounce former leaders whom the party had determined were counterrevolutionary. In the commune at Deyang, Sichuan, where she lived and worked in 1969, Ms. Chang recounts one such public humiliation that she had witnessed.

"A 'speak bitterness' session was organized for the peasants to describe how they had suffered under the Kuomintang, and to generate gratitude to Mao, particularly among the younger generation." (Wild Swans, Anchor edition, 1992, page 417)

Local party organizers conducted a meeting in which they criticized former officials whose alleged malfeasance and incompetence  had caused a terrible famine years earlier. On this particular occasion, they singled out one cringing forty-year old man--now  working among them as a forced laborer--to be insulted. He had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap program of industrial development about ten years earlier.

But this man had been appointed by the communist party; he was not a Kuomintang leader. The zealous peasants were confused and misled. They pointed to him and proclaimed their accusation: "... that man ordered the (other working) men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields." He had been one of the dedicated cadres who supervised gathering up woks and other metal resources to be re-smelted into industrial goods, thus supplanting essential agricultural works with misguided industrial programs.  

What a dear price was paid for those force-engineered steel products extracted from Chinese productivity during  the Great Leap Forward--famine in the countryside. The same thing had happened 35 years prior in Stalinist Russia.

Such were the meddlesome policies of party-mandated, best-laid plans of proletarian mice and men--and  their vindictive aftermaths during the unpredictable political swings of the Cultural Revolution. This unfortunate official had been guilty of towing the party line, having told his charges that they were "in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food." But now, a decade and a famine later, he was being officially blamed and maligned, just as the author's governing father had been.

Ms. Chang later sought out the humiliated production manager  and asked for his story. He said: "I had to carry out orders... Of course, I didn't want to lose my post."

Just  following orders. Where have we heard that before?

This fickle dynamic of human inconstancy is something to ponder now that the world's cultural revolutionaries of forty years ago are now its financiers.

Be careful, Mr. Hu. Don't let your country suffer the fate of Governor Yu.

 

"

Mt. Ebal stood warm, dry, and high in the morning sun. The red, gold hues of its boulderous ridges projected starkly into whisper-blue sky. On a soil-laden saddle nestled within the lower, rocky welts a man was digging.

Yesterday, the man had tilled the sandy soil and thrown in manure, which he had gathered from the sheep field. Today, he was hoeing trenches in the dirt.

Setting the hoe aside against a nearby shrub, Yahya Najah lifted his arm, moved the forearm across his sweaty brow, thanking God for another beautiful day. In order to give a moment's respite to his aching back, Yahya stood up straight, looked southward across the valley to Mt. Gerizim. He drew a deep breath, and drank water from a plastic bottle.

 He had lived here since he was a child. Today, he was extending the stewardship of this land that his father had acquired and developed for olive-growing over thirty years ago. Yahya's father, Hassan, moved to this valley in the late '60s after the old Mughrabi quarter, just below the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been demolished. His family had been planting, cultivating, and harvesting olive trees since his father's arrival here.

He reached into a burlap bag, pulled out several short lengths of olive branch that had been cut the day before, tossed them into the trench he had just dug. Then he grabbed the hoe and covered them with dirt. He moved to the next section of trench and repeated the procedure. Several times he performed the task, until his burlap bag was empty. Having placed this collection of propagation-stock in the dry ground of Mt. Ebal, Yahya watered the new rows with a water sprayer. When the tank was empty, he picked up and strapped the tank on his back, picked up the empty bag, grabbed the hoe, and walked down a rocky path to the garden patch. He would be going into Nablus today to sell vegetables at the market.

After harvesting a truck-full of vegetables, Yahya and his brother, Kader, drove the fifteen miles into Nablus, backed the truck into the usual stall and unloaded their produce for sale.

They spent the rest of that day selling vegetables. In the evening, after most of the produce had been sold, Yahya left Kader to finish their day's enterprise while he took a stroll up the street to get some supper for them. Satisfied to have gathered the increase of their labors, Yahya enjoyed the evening sun as it bathed the busy West Bank cityscape with golden light. As he ambled along, he noticed an American news reporter speaking into a microphone. While passing the scene, and curiously surveying the camera as it turned silently upon a cameraman's shoulder, the farmer's face was projected to television sets around the world. But he wasn't thinking of that; he was looking for a good falafel.

The American spoke into his microphone.

***

Half a world away, Rachel Vinnier saw, for a couple of seconds, the face of a handsome middle eastern man on the TV in the corner of the restaurant.. She had glanced up at the TV while inspecting a case of French wine that had just been delivered to the Jesse James Gang Grille. As she watched, the cameraman in Nablus panned the busy streetscape, and ended his movement with a focus on John Demos' serious face.

"

Excerpt from Glass half-Full, a novel by Carey Rowland.

Everybody needs work.
Right now, we need art to inspire work.
Here's how it happens:
First, humans find themselves on earth. We're like, "Get busy; survive. Gather stuff to eat."
We learn a few things along the way. We plant seeds, instead of just finding them already in the ground.  We manage. This becomes agriculture, man's first industry.
That's part of it. Meanwhile, our neighbor down the road, across the street or across town or across the ocean, is doing something different: there's  animal husbandry--raising animals for their milk or meat, not to mention their dung (valuable stuff, that dung.)
There's mining, metallurgy, mercantilism, chemistry, industry and study.
Humans use their intelligence to manage earth resources--minerals,plants and animals. We devise ways to increase yields, making our efforts and our resources more productive. Old-fashion way of managing agriculture was done through accumulated generational farmer smarts and responsible stewardship of the land and its resources. In the modern way of doing things, this could mean genetic engineering.  We shall see how all that pans out. Some folks are not into it. They'd rather have God's little acre and organics. Hopefully we can maintain a society where techies and earthies can coexist and not ruin each others' trip. We get along.
We innovate. We invent tools. We fine-tune things. This is art; art is not just something that hangs on the wall at the Met.
When man has more produce and goods that he, his family and/or community, can consume, there is surplus. What to do with it? Save it for leaner times. Fine. Some stuff doesn't save so well, or could be put to better use by some other person or entity.
Trade surplus for other stuff. This is very important. It's the basis of commerce, economics and modern life.
Surplus accumulated and well-managed becomes wealth. Wealth on your day(s) or week(s) off becomes leisure. Does leisure produce anything?  Yes.
Art.
Art is the human's response to having a little free time.
A few thousand years pass by. Cut to the chase: Modern society has arranged for folks' needs to be met collectively. We have devised various systems for doing this--capitalism, communism, and everything in between.  That's oversimplifying it, but blogosphere denizens prefer simplicity.
But here's the rub. Once we've established economic systems, it turns out that everything works in cycles: day and night, sunrise/sunset, rise and fall of tides,  seasons, spring planting and fall harvest. Just like the old days. Economics is no exception to every other activity in the world. Boom or bust, like it or not. Shit happens. So we're deep in it now.
Got job? 
What our present cycle is revealing is that our era of financed leisure is over. Kaput.  Our levels of languor, our revels of being being entertained on the couch are tanking. The easy money is spent. This lifestyle maintained for too long by too many has become unsustainable.
Unsustainable:
 Time to get back to work. And if you don't have a job, can't find one, now is the time to stop waiting around for something to happen. The government may bail you out somewhat with some fake money, but the real question is: What are you going to do with your life? Get busy finding new ways to make your life productive. That's where the art to inspire work comes in.
Art is life; life is art. Get creative. Get busy. What can you do today to improve the life of yourself, your family, loved ones, community, nation?

Carey Rowland, author of Glass Chimera

Maybe it was between a rock

and some hard place

that JFK was stuck

before he was struck.

Maybe it was between

 some terrible course of action

and a place  he could not would not go.

We do not know, you know,

the contents of those daily intelligence reports,

with choices between

tragedies unseen

by us,

with news of shooting and burning

that could terminate the turning

of our regular ignitions

and our convenient conditions,

not to mention our munitions.

We just don't know.

Nevertheless

Whose woulds these are we think we know,

going to and fro between Michael,

and Angelo,

but never really knowing who's right or wrong

in any given situation,

yet always having to take sides because,

you know, we're the big kid

on the block.

Maybe it was between some rock

and a hard place

with dastards on both sides

that our Prez was found

and so they laid him down,

because he could not do both.

He had taken an oath,

gave his last full measure of devotion.

And while the car was still in motion

Jackie climbed atop the seat

where widows wail and orphans bleat.

We just do not know, you know

what those offal briefings show.

I know not  

what course the hot-seat man may trace;

I wouldn't want to be

in that oval-smelling place.

May God help us.  

What czarish beast stalks
by the schoolyard door,
and turns its big brother hand
upon the downcast eyes
of a child?
What insidious thanatos
inflicts sterility
with shameful spewing,
thus undermining daddy's counsel
and mommy's tender wishes?
Oh, It'll take a village
to deliver us from such misdirected trust--
the betraying of education
with a kiss
inappropriate.
Oh, may God help us.

So, democrats can pretend that the USA is pining away for some egalitarian health care plan that will cover everyone and still be affordable, but the predominance of the Baucus plan is evidence that something formidable brews beyond the beltway and the northeast  corridor, and that that force-to-be-contended-with is somehow accidentally or even intentionally represented by the million  plus viewers of Fox News.  Like it or not--a force to be contended with.

I know this because I went down to Louisiana and spent a week there, my sister-in-law educating me to the foxy preferences of hinterland America, or maybe it's just because I was in the south, south/Midwest what's the difference--mainly unions, I guess.

Anyway,  just when I had started to harbor a mild respect for the fox because of O'Reilly's relative objectivity (compared to Limbaugh and Beck) as they were speaking some serious truth about deficits and devaluation of the dollar or some such,  Friday morning dawns up with the announcement that our Prez had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cool.

So I'm flippin the radio from NPR to AM talk to hear what Limbaugh and Hannity are saying about it, as if I couldn't predict.  And it's like, give me a break.

They just totally dis our Prez, and for what I don't know. I mean, a Nobel is not just  spelling-bee hubris. It's much more than that. You gotta hand it to the man from Kenya/Honolulu/ Chicago--it's a great honor.

On the other hand it does seem that the Nobel committee is  using their coveted prize to put a spin on our imminent military superpower directionality.

What's with this choice that puts Prez in the same category with Mother Theresa? Is it because Mr. Obama is leaning on the Israelis to forsake their apartheid? Or because he wants to talk to Iran? 

And I don't even trust the Iranians. Something inside of me wants to classify them with Hitler and Ribbentrop, because of their reported holocaust-denial statements. Is this a case of Prez in lala land? Obama as Neville Chamberlain?

Gosh, I don't know. History is so much easier to discern when you're looking backwards.

Or maybe it's that the Nobel committee is hoping to dissuade him from further troop buildup in Afghanistan. I wouldn't want to be Barack Obama now.  I feel for him. This is one tarbaby in which his centrist strategy will alienate one side--hawks or doves--or the other, no matter how the chips fall, and  McChrystal's proclamation doesn't simplify matters any.

So anyway my sister-in-law has me tuned into Hannity one night to get a sampling of the foxy hinterland view of things, when lo and behold who shows up on the fox but Michael Moore.  Who'd a thought it?

And I'm watching this little exchange. But Hannity gets on my nerves because he keeps wanting to change the subject , to talk about Moore's accumulating wealth and influence, with its capitalist implications, as if Michael is, you know, a hypocrite, a closet capitalist.

We're all hypocrites of some kind or another, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

But Michael Moore keeps wanting to talk to Sean about Jesus, as if the Nazarene's impact on human events were a real influence on his own worldview and work and as if Jesus had some opinion about how to deal with the 46 million uninsured. Well,

I hope so; my modus operandi has for many years been WWJD.

What would you do, if your mother asked you?

 

I once walked on the top of the wall that surrounds the most fiercely disputed real estate in the world.

Clueless American tourist that I am, I had purchased a ticket from a guy in a booth at a place called the Citadel of David. So my wife, son, and I had obtained what seemed to us to be some kind of official clearance to take a hike along the ancient rampart top. Our sunlit sojourn there afforded an elevated, comprehensive  view of the old holy city area.

As it turned out, however, our purchased tickets provided only limited access. We encountered an  impediment on the south end, somewhere near the Zion gate, which required that we  descend to the ground via a narrow stone stairway. So we wandered back through the old city, generally north by northeast, past the wailing wall (a different wall), and far beyond it. At some point in, I think the northeast quadrant of that temple area, we were able to get back up on the perimeter wall and continue walking. We were no longer in, as they say, the Jewish quarter.  But getting back on the wall required us to crawl under an immobilized turnstile in a place where nobody could see us.

This did not seem like something that officially authorized tourists would do. Nevertheless, we resumed our stroll from that point. I remember thinking that, somehow, the value of our wall "tickets" seemed questionable, or perhaps, dare I admit it, worthless. Passing from one domain to another brought us under a different set of rules.

Sure enough, a couple of military guys discovered our adventure and asked some nosy questions.  We showed them our tickets, but they were not impressed.

So we had to get off the wall again.

And this is what I thought about when I saw, last night, a scene in Simone Bitton's 2004 documentary movie,  Wall.  Many scenes in the film  showed real-life westbank residents climbing over "the wall," or through breaches in it and around barbed wire that enraps it. This movie is about the wall being built by the Israeli government to separate two ethnic groups, Palestinians and Jews, on the west bank.  

So I, subjectivizing my experience of the movie as people do, remembered myself crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in old Jerusalem, and feeling a little guilty, or threatened, or something dubious like that, about it. Although I'm talking about two different walls here, the  idea is the same: a wall is intended to keep one people group on one side, and a different people group on  the other. But one of the great lessons of human history is that where some folks build high walls, other determined souls find ways to  get over, around, or through them. A couple of relatively recent examples would be  the Berlin wall, or the Dachau wall.

Anyway, my  crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in Jerusalem was one little memory that crossed my mind. There were other memories evoked as I watched this documentary. In my mind's ear I heard  echoes of Itzhak  Perlman's wailing violin that came at the end of Schindler's List.

This potent strain of musical pathos drifted into me when Simone presented in her film an interview with an Israeli citizen, Schuli Dichter. His description of the wall in Samaria found me smitten with the tragedy of it all. With video footage of the Samarian chainlink wall, Schuli's testimony includes a mention of his home kibbutz, Maanit, which had been founded in the early 1940's by some of the first Jewish settlers in that area. Here are a few of his statements that propelled Perlman's violin strains into my mind:

"Our parents in Maanit came here from the shtetls of Lodz."  and   and "This fence has eliminated... the possibility of a Jewish home in this world."

So what has changed since Nazi walls enclosed victims 69 years ago?  In some ways, the world has seen many changes. In other ways, perhaps not so much. People build walls, and other people find ways over, through, or around them. From one side of a wall to the other, hapless human beings overcome one bondage only to encounter  another.

"Closure and enclosure are the cornerstones of our lives here," said Schuli to Simone, as he drove her through Samaria to the west bank.

That's when another memory that came crawling under my radar. It had been recorded thousands of years ago by an ancient, emotive documentarian, Jeremiah.  He wrote: "Indeed, who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will mourn for you, or who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?"

 

For several generations now, we've been gathering a pile of prosperity here in the richest country in the world. And most everybody has gotten at least some piece of the action. How many decades in a row now has it been that Americans have been steadily purchasing cars and washing machines, TVs and microwaves, air freshener and deodorant and movie tickets with popcorn? We're a pretty fat n' happy bunch. What we have here in the USA is a high standard of living, probably the highest in the history of the world.

I mean, how many people do you know who don't have indoor plumbing? How many in your circle of friends don't have a car or a TV?  We are rich, I tell ya.  Even the folks whose incomes hover around the poverty level all this stuff.

In the developing nations of the world, folks don't have all this booty yet.  

In the formerly-third-world places--India,  Brazil, South Africa, and even in China, the streets and malls and markets are teeming with millions of people who have yet to acquire the wealth-multiplying trappings of  middle-class comfort. These are great, teeming markets yearning to be full. They're the next wave of aspiring consumers, like your kids in the supermarket with miniature shopping carts and little flags that read "shopper in training." So many of these minions have yet to buy that first washing machine, that first microwave, that first automobile. 

 But they will eventually, as their collective economic tides swell and their proverbial boats rise. Then the enterprisers among them will form companies and employ neighbors and friends to manufacture goods to meet the escalating demands of prosperity. But it's not likely their new acquisitions will originate in Dayton or Birmingham or Oxnard where the costs of affluent American labor render finished prices prohibitive.  

 We've got a high standard of living in this country that has propelled us, for lo these many decades, ahead of the the thundering herd. But now our opulent baggage has landed us in the dust as the pack passes by. We've priced ourselves out of the world market. But don't go blaming our politicians or our business leaders. This is just the way things work in a world where energetic workers and smart managers are free to make a better affordable mousetrap. It had to happen sooner or later; it's been a long time coming. We had an incredibly long ride on that post-wwtwo wave while it lasted; now it's time for us to paddle out and catch the next set.

Here's what needs to happen: find a way to pump some of the hot air out of our expansive, expensive American standard of living. Position us, once again, as lean and mean, efficiently productive contenders in the world marketplace. We've already, you know, burst one bubble. Can't we puncture another one? Dean Baker  opined yesterday that economists should have identified our "over-valued dollar as a main cause of imbalances in the US economy."

As it turns out though, the reserved Fed has issued a prescription for our economic obesity. They have  found a way to trim the fat real quick. And it just might work.  It's called: the devalued dollar.

If Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe found, rather suddenly, their wallets full of greenbacks that had the purchasing power of, say, 60% of last year's dollar--the effect would be just like knocking our standard of living down by 40%.  That might be enough of an overhead reduction to get us back in the game of competitive manufacturing. Then maybe we can again crank out washing machines or widgets or memory chips or hula hoops or solar collectors as inexpensively as they will in Manila or Mumbai or Mombasa. 

 Devalued Federal Reserve Notes will be a mixed blessing. On the down side, they'll  mean less buying power for us yankee producers. But hey, we've got plenty enough stuff to last us for awhile anyway. 

Folks would have an abundance of dollars again; everybody could get back in the game, pay off some debts, maybe take the kids out to eat.  

Now, if that "over-valued dollar" could be knocked down a notch or two so that it is no longer so uppity, what would it take to accomplish such a feat?  Everybody take a 40% pay cut?

No way. It'll never happen. Too complicated, and politically impossible. But there is a fix. It might hurt a little bit, but it would work pretty quickly, though not quite as fast as instant breakfast or drive-up food.

Make dollars. Print so many of them that Uncle Tim can push a big stack of chips out on the table to stay in the game. The bluff might just work if he keeps a poker face, although it's Uncle Hu's face that the world will be watching.

 

We Americans put a lot of stock in our news, you know. For most thinking people, news is a significant part of the daily routine, and a big chunk of our collective memory. For those who are not into news, other media devour mega megs in our national psyche.

 Back in the day, some studio in Hollywood made a movie, and I remember Dolly sang a song that went something like this: "Working nine to five, what a way to make a living..." I don't remember much about the flick, but I do remember the song. Funny how some things stick with you while others don't. We have those jangly little memory bits, and we have the really big ones too.

You probably remember where you were when President Kennedy was shot, or when Martin Luther King, Jr. caught the assassin's bullet. Those were dark days, times of nationally-shared tragedy.

 For my parents' generation, the big event must have been  the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor.  Four years of blood and sacrifice eventually paid off with the defeat of a lethally potent,  triaxial  fascism, and then two brighter, if not quite so memorable commendations--Victory in Europe (May 8, 1945) day and, Victory in Japan (August 15, 1945) day.

 As for my generation, we have a cloudy, mixed-emotions memory of Peace with Honor in Vietnam. Sadly, the most vivid image in my mind from the final stages of that struggle was a picture of evacuees being helicoptered from the American embassy in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

 In our present situation, I'm wondering just how the VI and the VA days will play out.

Be that as it may, I'd like to point out that we do we have, you know, a collective psyche about these cataclysmic events.

 You can probably tell me where you were when 911 hit. I was doing some remodeling work for a friend. He rolled his wheelchair out of the basement door of his house and said that a plane had hit the world trade center.  My first mental image was a kind of comic book picture of a Cessna hitting the skyscraper.  But of course that first image proved to be quite an understatement. In the ensuing hours, I found out, as most of America did, differently. As the old Buffalo Springfield song says: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear..."

Here it is eight years later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

 But even before that, I remember  the stock market crash of '87. I recall the mountaintop development where I was working with a carpentry crew to construct a home. At the end of a typical day, I was driving down that mountain when I heard on the radio that the Dow had dropped more than 500 points. The stark financial news that happened to fall on that sunlit afternoon is still  vivid. . . and yet, I didn't even have any investments.  Just a few days or weeks before that, the owner of the home (being built) had said: "Greenspan will be good for business."

He was right about that. Alan served up a pretty lavish punchbowl. But it seems the long party fizzled out last fall when Hank Paulson pulled a fire alarm, and all the guests went scampering for the exits. 

That memory is quite clear too, and it's something like this:  7:55 am, just before undertaking a new day in the nine-to-five routine, sitting in the car in a school parking lot, and Kai Rysdall's voice  on the radio.  In this case, the memory isn't fixed to a single day, but a series of days in the same place, at the same time, hearing the incredible story of  our financial demise as events unfolded over several weeks.

Here it is a year later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

One remainder is obvious though:  Times are hard; now it's like pulling teeth to try to make a living.

The exponential curves of change that  recently commandeered our course have confounded even the most prosperous  among us.  Even the Wall Street Journal people, for cryin' out loud,  are trying to figure out  how to squeeze a few profits out of people's new info-gathering habits.

Punchbowls are a lot of fun while they last. The one we're drinking from now--this internet thing--is quite a stimulant for the ole neurons. We've all become accustomed to this free online punchbowl, and we're wondering just how the freebie will inevitably evolve into something that actually costs us.  Because. . . yes Virginia, it's too good to be true.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant online. But what can you believe? As they said back in the last depression, there's no free lunch; most likely, when it comes to reliable content, there's no free punchbowl either. We'll learn that soberizing lesson one of these days soon when we wake up and realize that unbiased, objective reporting of factual events in the world doesn't just happen. 

 There are real journalists out there somewhere who deliver verifiably accurate reports of what is going on in the world--not  just opinionated, bloggated jabber like what your're reading here.  This challenge of keeping those reporters functional and reliable is one we'll have to work out collectively, and everybody will have to pull their share of the load.  It's a little like public radio with their pledge drives, or maybe like the WSJ with its paywall between free content and premium content, or some combination thereof.  We shall see.

If you're ever in Honolulu, ask the local folks about the "Punchbowl." They may direct you to a  volcanic site where you'll understand just what dear price our freedoms require of us.  In this life, there's really no free punch, except the one that hurts.

 

Carey Rowland, author Glass half-Full

 

 

            Passing another car on the highway ain't what it used to be.

For whatever reason, this random thought flashed through Marvin's mind as he tapped the cruise control up a notch or two from 73 to 75.  With fingertip commanding a sedate roar of defossilated power, he eased on past the guy in the right lane, both of them gliding along in the same direction, and Bono on the radio. A few seconds later, he's back in the right lane, like slicing butter.

"And I still haven't found. . . what I'm looking for. . ."

            It wasn't very far from here that he had regularly undertaken a similar maneuver in the '57 Chevy.  Maybe it was even the same spot. The old county road had run along this same route. But back in the day, passing another car on the two-lane was actually a matter of life and death, although you certainly didn't think of it that way; it was just the way automobiles interacted at that time, like ships passing in the night, or in the day.

            But if you do think about it--sixty miles an hour stoked up, for passing purposes,  to seventy or more, and the oncoming car whizzing at probably the same speed--that's a hundred and twenty mph of massive steel and chrome Newtonian force--barreling  down in space and time directly at each other. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure that if the aggressor (the passer) doesn't accurately judge spatial relationships and relative velocities and overtake the passee so as to get back in his lane at the appropriate moment, there could be hell to pay--like the big one, the  that's all she wrote moment and then silence except for, like, Damocles' radio antenna flopping, and no more signals conducting through the warp of black hole space from some distant infinity of the universe.

            I'm damned lucky to be alive, thought Marvin, although there had no doubt been a million and one close calls that he was never even aware of in the intervening fifty years. And to tell the truth, the supposed danger in such an unseemly perilous passing highway encounter didn't hold a candle to what he had lucked out of on D-day at Normandy thirteen years before he even had the Chevy.  Now that... was a bona fide miracle.

            Damn Nazis, what a hell of a mess they inflicted on us. Nevertheless, passing another vehicle these days on the freeway is much safer than what it once was, or so it seems.