Tag: oh the humanity

“One Sky”

The Inaugural dawn evoked poet Richard Blanco's line about "Hope, a new constellation, waiting for us to map it."

So I wimped out on going down to the National Mall to watch the inaugural hoopla. But I watched it on TV. That counts, right?

At least I was able to hear all the speeches, which is more than some of the unlucky visitors who happened to be corralled in the farthest areas open to the non-ticketed public, where the Jumbo-tron screens flaked out during Obama’s speech.

I can only hope the excitement of Being There made up for the technical failure.

For me, it was an inspiring hour of speechifyin’, superb music and some thoughtful poetry thrown in to satisfy the high-brows in the audience.

Yet after Beyoncé had dazzled us with her unfailing grace, and the crowds began to head for the exits, I checked out the instant analysis online and was saddened, though not surprised, to learn that not everyone shared my enthusiasm for the proceedings.

The percentage of venomous ranters to giddy believers was at least small enough to sustain my habitual pie-eyed optimism that somehow, after the bands have packed up and gone home, after the balls gowns have been sent to the cleaners and the champagne corks swept up, there may be some period of detente between the various feuding factions, not only in the government, but in the public discourse.

Of course, I’ve been a gullible sap most of my life. Eager to believe the unbelievable, dream the impossible dream, etc., I’ve never taken to the general cut and thrust roughhousing of politics. I keep thinking grown-ups should be able to cooperate and work toward the common good more effectively. I forget that not everyone cares about the common good.

Earlier this past weekend I happened to see a license plate in McLean, Virginia, that hit me like a slap. It read: MEFIRST.

My husband suggested that perhaps it was intended ironically. But gullible as I am, even I don’t buy that theory. It kind of depresses me to think that there are people who would even think such a sentiment was funny.

But you know what? After this morning’s stirring celebration of all that is right and good about our one-of-a-kind nation, I’m not going to let a few sour apples spoil my pie in the sky.

My president is a rock star. And I do believe in “We the People.”

Make My Millennium

Sock It To Me

Okay, so here’s my guilty secret. I like movies where things explode.

Not all movies where things explode. But when Bruce Willis, or someone of his stripe, sets off to save the planet with a quip and a smirk, I enjoy the payoff as much as any backyard commando. Maybe more, since I have no personal illusions about being able to pull off anything remotely qualified to feature in an action flick. When I take action these days it’s usually in the kitchen, or, if I’m lucky, in the garden.

Yet much as I like action movies where things explode and steely-eyed heroes step in and light the match, I recognize these stories as fiction.

Fiction is something I understand. Reality, not so much. Perhaps that’s why it simply blows my mind that there are actually people in the “real” world who think it’s a swell idea for the United States at this point in the progress of the civilized world to build a so-called “Death Star” to protect us from anticipated alien attacks.

And here I thought I was delusional.

Well, it’s possible, I suppose, that the paranoid  legions will have the last laugh when the aliens start bombing and scorching us with their death rays, but I feel fairly confident that at the rate we’re killing each other off down here on Earth there won’t be much for aliens to conquer, when and if they ever arrive.

I was comforted to read in The Washington Post today that the Obama administration “does not support blowing up planets.” Good to know.

In the meantime, that estimated $850 quadrillion which the proposed “Death Star” would cost (and you know how it is with estimates – nothing comes in under the estimate) could come in handy as we try to pay down the national debt, solve the problems in our education, health care and aging infrastructure.

And after we end hunger, poverty and injustice, then we can get that Death Star project up and running. Sure we can.

Coming soon to a theatre near you.

Taking Stock

Rock Creek in The Calm Before the Storm

The day after the super storm known as Sandy, we woke to find our electricity still on, our trees still standing, our flood levels not catastrophic.

All we had, in addition to the relief of feeling spared the worst of this extraordinary storm system’s brute force, was the ache of sympathy for those who weren’t so lucky.

The fickleness of weather is a gambler’s dream. People who build on sandy shores play a game whose odds are not in their favor, but as long as the sun shines and the breezes are soft and refreshing, beach dwellers enjoy the envy of many inlanders.

Not feeling much envy this week.

The after-effects of this nightmarish weather event will still be felt next summer, when the suntan lotion and beach umbrellas go back on the repaired beaches. The people who have suffered most from this storm will never forget it.

But for the rest of us, those of us lucky enough not to have had trees fall on our houses or cars or worse, lucky enough not have had the water rising inside our homes, the memory of even a storm such as Sandy will inevitably fade.

It’s human nature. It’s tough to dwell on frightening scenarios and carry on with the daily routines of life. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, we all gotta work and play until we die. Dwelling on misery doesn’t make it any less likely to happen again. So we do our best to manage the fear. We keep it handy, right there on the shelf with the batteries and candles and extra rolls of toilet paper.

Here’s hoping we won’t need to restock any time soon.

Paint By Number

Just Another Brick in the Wall

The first time I participated in a national election I cast my vote for George McGovern.

I believed in him and his entire platform. Some people may remember him only as the man who suffered a crushing defeat against Richard Nixon in 1972, but McGovern was so much more than that. A lifelong advocate for peace and justice, he was also a former war hero who flew 35 missions in Europe in World War II, including several during which his plane was so shot up he barely managed to fly it to a safe place to land, feats which earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Yet his remarkable resume wasn’t enough to overcome the slander and innuendo heaped upon him during the 1972 campaign in which he ran as the anti-war candidate, determined to end the bloodshed in Vietnam. Nixon’s team branded McGovern as a pacifist sissy.

A proud liberal, McGovern spent his long life working to promote peace, to end hunger around the world, and to implement tax reform and better health care. He didn’t get a lot of respect for his efforts until late in his life, long after the corruption of Nixon’s campaign and the machinations of the Republican Party  had been exposed.

I was sorry he lost in 1972. It was the start of trend, for me. The candidates for whom I voted rarely won, and if they did, they usually didn’t last long. Jimmy Carter was in and out of the White House so fast it barely registered. Then came the Clinton triumph, and I thought for a while the jinx was over, until he revealed that he was only a man, even in the Oval office.

When Obama won I was far away, on the west coast, in the other Washington, where the constant clanging of partisan swords and sound bites that provides the ambient soundtrack inside the Beltway seems pleasantly remote. But as I watched the gathering on the National Mall during Obama’s inauguration, I felt a wistful pang of homesickness. At last, I thought, the tide was turning, and I wasn’t there to enjoy it.

Now, the stage is set for another showdown. I’m not confident. I’ve seen enough of these things to know that money matters far more than it should in our political system. And the poorest among us, the ones who can least afford to lose more, are the ones who stand to lose the most.

Still. There’s hope.

On a wall near Calvert Street in Washington, D.C., a striking mural covers the side of Mama Ayesha’s restaurant. Completed in 2009, the painting by artist Karla “Karlisima” Rodas depicts the last nine presidents, from Eisenhower to Obama. In the center is Mama Ayesha herself, a petite yet powerful woman whose Middle Eastern restaurant began serving to Washington notables in 1960, as the Calvert Cafe. After Mama Ayesha’s death in 1993, the name of the restaurant was changed to honor her. Born in Jerusalem, Mama Ayesha came to this country in 1940 and began her career as a cook for the Syrian Embassy. Her enduring success (the restaurant continues as a family business) is a tribute to all that America stands for – opportunity, freedom, social justice and the dignity of the individual. It is fitting that her portrait is included among all those powerful presidents.

But the question remains: Will there be a new face in the mural line-up after November 6th? Maybe the artist has no plans to update, no matter what happens. There’s no telling, after all. Polls and maps and surveys toss numbers around like confetti, but in the end it will come down to hard numbers.

How much is your country worth to you? There’s a number out there.

Burning Blight

So I see that Ang Lee has made a movie out of Yann Martell’s brilliant fantasy The Life of Pi.

This seems a bit ambitious to me, but then, Ang Lee is a genius, so perhaps he can handle it. Yet when I read the book about a boy who survives 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, I heard much discussion about what, if anything, the tiger symbolized. Was it a metaphor for death? A figment of the boy’s fevered imagination? Or some divine manifestation of the power and majesty of God?

I wanted to believe the tiger was real. You know, like Calvin’s Hobbes but with claws and teeth.

Friends told me I was hopelessly naive. No doubt they were right. Yet now I’m curious to see how my reading of the novel compares with Lee’s visualization.

In fiction, as in life, point of view can clarify or obscure. When you’re high up, looking down, the patterns of human behavior are easier to observe, but only when you’re down on the ground, in the boat with the tiger, can you get a feel for the hunger, the anger, the despair in people’s eyes.

For most of us, our point of view limits our ability to understand one another, and, as history and the daily news remind us, the inability to empathize can be fatal. When point of view provokes point of gun, everyone loses.

This is what the tiger means to me.

The tiger is the cornered beast, the itchy trigger finger that lurks deep in the psyche of every soul. And we are all in this boat together.

Unless we tame our tigers, the outlook is bleak. As the fires of bigotry and religious fervor rage hotter across the world, we would do well to remember that absolutes rarely are. Everything depends on perspective. Now more than ever, as the world tilts toward chaos, it’s imperative that cooler heads prevail.

It’s harder to make peace than to provoke war. But to stir up hatred for political gain is the lowest form of evil – the methodology of fascists.

So let’s all take a deep breath and look this tiger in the eyes and try not to make any sudden moves. We could still make it to the shore if we don’t panic.

But never forget, tigers can swim.

What’s For Dinner?

Celestial Grace

Depending on whether you view religion as the answer to the world’s problems or the cause of a lot of them, you may or may not enjoy Tom Perrotta’s thought-provoking novel The Leftovers.

I liked it. But then, he had me at “leftovers.”

Many of us lucky enough to live in the world’s most obese and privileged nation share a common “problem.” After we’ve finished our dinners, whether we eat out or cook at home,  what to do with the leftovers: save them or not?

This question is at the heart of Perrotta’s lightly satirical riff on the idea of The Rapture, the belief that when the end of the world comes, and it’s a’comin’ soon according to some folks, the good people who followed the rules and stuck to the straight and very narrow path will be whisked away to eternal joy, while those who strayed, or didn’t manage to follow the directions on the side of the box will be left behind to scratch their heads and lick their wounds in abject misery.

Or not.

And therein lies the tale. What makes Perrotta’s prose so delicious to me is how easily he weaves the absurd with the seemingly sensible. Thus, as the story reveals how the lives of the leftovers are dramatically changed, we see some characters accept the “Sudden Departure” as a judgement on their own behavior, while others take leave of their senses entirely. The premise mines a rich vein of human folly, but Perrotta always respects his characters. He reveals their weaknesses but never diminishes the effort it takes to stay sane in a world that no longer makes sense.

This message resonates all too clearly in our real world, where the incidence of unbalanced individuals committing mass murder appears to be a trend rather than a rarity.

People in pain can lose their ability to behave rationally. People without hope are like dry leaves in the path of a wildfire. Any little spark can set them off.

As Bob Dylan once wrote:
Too much of nothing can make a man ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise, another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession we cannot mock a soul
When there’s too much of nothing, no one has control.

We live in dangerous times. Some people turn to religion for answers. Others turn on religion.

And then there’s Tom Perrotta, who offers a fresh perspective on the human need for connection, for love, for hope, with or without religion. In The Leftovers he seems to suggest that, as any good cook knows, even the saddest, homeliest looking leftovers can still make a fine meal. They just need to be carefully warmed up and served with love.

Don’t we all?

Echoes of an Infinite Scream

It's a big planet; someone has to pollinate it.

Too long for a science fiction title, you think?

Yeah. In these attention-challenged times it would need to be shorter, sharper.

But I have to say when I read that Edvard Munch’s beloved work “The Scream” sold for $119.9 million at an auction on Wednesday, I felt a kind of primal rage.

I understand the appeal of the work. Surely we’ve all been there, felt that. And Munch’s depiction of a soul in torment is subtle in a florid sort of way. Unlike the works of other more literal artists (Hieronymous Bosch springs to mind with a pitchfork), Munch didn’t illustrate actual nightmarish scenarios. “The Scream” instead reflects the existential horror which lurks just below the conscious level of thought. You never see the monster under the bed, after all. The imagination has no limits.

I love art. I think life would be immeasurably diminished without it. But there’s something obscene about that amount of money being spent on a small pastel. If we had already solved all the world’s problems, eliminated famine, war and pestilence, then, maybe, we could earmark a bit more for decoration. But I realize that’s not how the world works. It’s supply and demand everywhere you go. And as my husband commented when I began ranting about the price of the painting, “They’re not making any more of them.”

Yeah. Well. I get that. But I feel that way about Earth, and the sense of urgency doesn’t seem to be universally shared.

One reason this particular “Scream” is said to be worth more than the average poster is that it has a few lines by the artist describing his inspiration for the work hand-written within the frame:

I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Now it makes sense. Munch, it appears, was an environmentalist, waaay ahead of his time.

In 1962, back when the word ecology was something new and many people thought recycling was a kooky fad, Rachel Carson wrote “The Silent Spring,” a prescient warning on the unchecked use of pesticides and chemicals. Many people thought she was a kook too.

But now, when bee colonies are disappearing around the world because of exposure to the toxins spread by corporate farming, when frog species are vanishing as pollutants poison once pristine habitats, and the toxic clouds forming above cattle feedlots can be seen from space, it’s time to wake up and smell the methane.

Yes, I am a tree-hugger, haunted by the silent screams of disappearing nature.

Earth is the Big Tree and we’re killing it. If it falls, we all go down with it. Probably screaming our heads off.

Where is Munch when we need him?

Signs and Wonders

Is it a warning or a cry for help?

Things look bad, some say.

Others insist everything’s been done before, it’s all cyclic, we survived the Great Depression we’ll survive this, etc.

For many of us addicted to the 24/7 news feed, the signature tune of this dawning century, it’s hard to find hope. Unless you turn away from your TV, step away from the computer, recycle your newspaper and look to the sky.

There, the clouds roll by, as they have for millennia. The sun rises, shines and sets, as it is wont to do. If you live around here, rain comes with the territory. But never so much rain that we have to flee to higher ground, except for the few who choose to live along the rivers. Sometimes our decisions affect our lives. Other times, our lives take shape due to forces and decisions far removed from our sight or control.

The disturbingly unsettled economic miasma currently oppressing much of the planet came about through the machinations of a tiny portion of the population who, having much already, decided that having more would be even better. For them.

Now, as the rest of us struggle to readjust the balance, it’s important to remember that for a huge segment of the world’s population having almost nothing is the norm. They don’t have Black Friday sales in Uganda, for instance, where an entire country was decimated by the ruinous misrule of a corrupt leader for decades.

War, terrorism and civil unrest are inevitable until we can wipe out hunger on the planet. It’s a huge goal. So huge most of us give up after a few attempts to make a dent in the wall of indifference. But for this very reason, the small successes of determined efforts by various international aid organizations should be celebrated and honored.

Heifer International offers a chance to give a life-changing gift to the poorest people on the planet. As the holiday season bears down upon us here in the land of good and plenty, it’s worth considering. If instead of lining up on the day after Thanksgiving we sat out Black Friday and put just a fraction aside for those far less fortunate than the activists who can afford to wear Gore-Tex while protesting the iniquities of Wall Street, it might signal a turn in the tide.

Sure, it wouldn’t change the whole world overnight. But stranger things have happened from small beginnings.

Revolting Developments

The mood in Fremont.

Back in the day, before people said things like “back in the day,” John Lennon sang a song about revolutions and how “we all want to save the world.” At the time, quite a few of us thought it might really happen. But then Lennon was murdered on his own doorstep by a lunatic, and though a lot has changed since then, the worldwide problems of economic disparity, environmental degradation and escalating violence have continued to grow worse.

At this moment throngs of angry people are massing on the streets in New York, Seattle, and across Europe to demand change.

Will it happen as a result of these demonstrations? Or will the corporate giants whose behind-the-scenes control mechanisms dictate how news is spun, how elections turn, and who profits from the suffering of the powerless win again?

Aging flower child that I am, I’d like to believe that this time, at this particular moment in history, things will be different. And if this turns out to be the case I believe it will be almost entirely due to the global shift in the way communication takes place. But I could be wrong again. Here in Seattle it’s easy to fall into the assumption that everyone in the world is connected to the internet, that everyone is literate and rational and conscientious. It’s easy to overlook the vast gulf between the connected and the disconnected, whose sources of information remain as choked as their sources for material income.

Last week, for example, I heard a first-person account by an American citizen who had been imprisoned in a Chinese holding cell for months while awaiting sentencing for a minor public disturbance. His descriptions of the conditions in the cell were appalling, but even more disturbing to me was his discovery of the disbelief shared by all of his Asian cellmates who completely rejected the idea that the U.S. had ever put a man on the moon. They all considered this a blatant falsehood propagated by the U.S.

When lies replace truth in the common understanding, great injustices grow powerful.

Perhaps in the U.S. we have placed too much trust in our capitalist system, expecting it to be self-correcting. It’s natural to distrust big government, but an economic system without strong government oversight runs the risk of capsizing from the greed of a few unprincipled individuals.

Another headline grabbing image in the papers this week ran alongside the scenes of crowds in the streets: a giant freighter, its load of containers a-tilt in a rough sea.

As such accidents grow more common, we become numb to the damage. But the long-term costs of ignoring our common problems could sink us all.

Free For All

Dark storm clouds were getting their game face on, tossing lightning back and forth as I walked across Key Bridge, the one named for Francis Scott Key, who gave us “The Star Spangled Banner,” the world’s worst national anthem, when I saw a driver execute a sudden, and I would guess, highly illegal u-turn in the middle of the bridge.

The traffic around him braked and swerved to avoid him as he whipped a u-ee and took off back to Georgetown. Perhaps he’d forgotten his wallet. Or suddenly realized that the only girl he ever loved was back there, soon to be lost to him forever (cue soundtrack). Or . . . maybe he just figured, “What the hell, why shouldn’t I?”

Well, setting aside issues of public safety, general adult responsibility and civil order, it could be argued that there was no actual sign forbidding the maneuver. And it could be further argued that creative driving is as much an inherent right in this country as the right to pursue pursue happiness – in whatever insane manner one chooses.

In truth, in this country, the right to be reckless, ridiculous, and a little bit nuts is one of our more cherished notions. Although our nation is founded on a firm platform of law, we began as revolutionaries, and the call of the wild card remains potent in our deck. We are a nation of innovators, risk takers, rule breakers. It runs in our genes to admire outlaws and thieves, as long as they accomplish their feats with flair and without hurting the innocent.

Perhaps we’ve all watched too many movies. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, until some fool tries to drive as if he were in a Hollywood chase scene, forcing the rest of us to be his expendable extras.

Ah well. It’s the Fourth of July. Time to celebrate our freedoms, which apparently, in the minds of some, includes the right to act like idiots.

So here’s to you, USA. Long may you wave, strike up the bands, set off fireworks, play ball, etc., etc.

But maybe go easy on the crazy.