Lynn Anderson death

Quite by accident, I ran across the news story today of the heart-attack death of Lynn Anderson last month.

Anderson, 67, was probably best known for her hit song [I Never Promised You A] "Rose Garden," which could send Nashville country music purists into paroxysms of disgust but nonetheless left others -- including me when no one is looking -- moved and melted.

computers fail classroom hopes

Investing heavily in school computers and classroom technology does not improve pupils' performance, says a global study from the OECD.

The think tank says frequent use of computers in schools is more likely to be associated with lower results.

The OECD's education director Andreas Schleicher says school technology had raised "too many false hopes".

It used to be joked that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, one of them would eventually produce Shakespeare's works.

Sorry, Virginia, you're going to have to break a sweat.

Or, just because you go to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

the assassin's bullet

If I understand it correctly, an assassin will stalk his target a bit before executing his task. And one of the aspects of that stalking is to note the target's bits of habitual behavior: when does s/he go jogging; when does s/he leave for work; what time does s/he get up or go to bed; where and when does s/he shop for food; what are the favored places for a dinner out, etc.? And by learning the habits, the assassin can pick a time and place that will make the execution most likely to succeed without incurring subsequent punishment.

All of this passed idly through my mind this morning as I assessed my discontent in household events that disrupted my habits and patterns. It was nothing serious, but I disliked being thrown off my habitual course ... coffee, writing, emailing, walking -- I wanted my habitual ducks lined up, however mundane and old-age-y they might be. Habits were easier and more companionable than spurs and side tracks. No curve balls need apply and, where they did, a certain crankiness/quasi-panic rose up: I resented having to recalibrate and bring things back to 'normal.'

And it was then that I thought of the assassin and how easy my state of mind would make his task. A creature of habit fits neatly into the sights of some mildly-imaginative assassin.

The only trouble with this comic-book scenario was that at this point in my life, I don't really do anything that would be worth the assassin's bullet.

And that was mildly depressing.

The rule of thumb is to "dodge the bullet" or elude the danger, wherever it comes from. No one wants to get hurt, much less assassinated. So, in other times, there were all sorts of maneuvers to duck or parry or preserve and protect. Social graces, able philosophies, defensive ramparts, the buck and shuffle that keeps things coherent.

There is something gloomy about recognizing that I am not even worth the assassin's bullet. It makes me want to rush right out and do something naughty or offensive. But that would take more energy than I want to or can expend.

It would be nice, in some sense, to think I was worth an assassin's bullet.

Oh well.

back to exceptionalism

In the course of trying to cobble together a newspaper column for Wednesday, I circle around once more to the conundrum of exceptionalism, a grisly or glorious bit of potential that strikes me as inescapable when espousing any heart-felt persuasion.

Exceptionalism ... my way as distinct from the highway.

I use the word in a sense wider than what the dictionary provides, to wit, "the condition of being different from the norm; also :  a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region." Exceptionalism in my lexicon is also quite personal -- a choice of direction or practice that, like it or not, is distinct from other persuasions and, more important, deserves special and excusing treatment.

By my yardstick, then, even the most "inclusive" spiritual persuasions is by nature exceptionalist in that it sets itself in contrast to non-inclusive diets. The distinctions may be subtle and suave or coarse as splintery toilet paper, but the exceptionalist stamp is clearly in evidence.

And so it should be.

And that's the conundrum. In making a choice, something else is automatically downgraded and set apart from that given choice. Life may be inclusive, but choices are not ... but how else is anyone to discover the honest inclusivity without exercising an exceptionalist verve?

Beats the socks off me.

'shaming' fat people

Comedian Nicole Arbour has raised some hell by calling out fat people in a six-minute video that got so much attention that YouTube shut it down for a while. Yup, it's insulting in one sense, but it is also laced with some serious and altruistic focus. I particularly liked Arbour's self-deprecating observation that it was a blonde pointing these things out.

Serena's still the best

Despite her loss yesterday, Serena Williams remains No. 1 in my book.

sell drugs, get a college education

In one sense, I suppose, it's kind of nice to think that the world's drug cartels are financing some of the college educations so prevalent in my neck of the woods. The cartels, whether in Afghanistan, Mexico or Colombia, are not composed of altruists and the innocent and guilty blood that follows in their wake is both cruel and huge. Like Donald Trump, their credo is, "your weakness is my gain" ... and the gains are huge.

How this dovetails with little freckle-faced Johnny or Sally attending one or another of the institutions of higher learning in the Pioneer Valley where I live was brought home to me yesterday when an Associated Press story detailed the purchase by grade schools, high schools and, I imagined, colleges, of an opiod overdose antidote ... the fast-acting naloxone.

I mentioned this story to my younger son, who does a bit of hanging around with students at the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College, both located six or eight miles away. His face screwed up into a twenty-something grimace of certainty: "What a bunch of assholes," he opined as if that were the beginning and end of the topic. People who used heroin simply because it was cheap and available were not people he was willing to hang around with. As a parent, I was relieved.

But then the conversation trailed off into 'lesser' drugs -- cocaine and marijuana and the like. As usual, the greatest addictive drug problem -- alcohol -- went unmentioned. These 'lesser' drugs were clearly not so bad in his oh-so-certain lexicon. And then he got around to acquaintances who peddled drugs on campus ... and how much money they made. I didn't press or probe of seek out details, but one fellow, by my son's word, made $10,000 in a month while another scored $40,000 over a similar time span. "He's paying for his college education," my son said of one such peddler.

The amounts caught my attention. That's a lot of money. Even subtracting for the self-important inflation that criminals may attribute to their deeds ... that's a lot of money -- enough to cover many of the bills a star-spangled America attaches to a "college education," the kind of education that can turn out Donald Trumps.

The trouble with the tales of those whose crimes escaped detection and retribution is that the details go begging. Yes, there is something slick about "getting away with it," but there is a price to pay. A friend of mine -- a one-time hippie who made a lot of money selling drugs on the west coast before becoming a Zen priest -- told me that the life of someone selling illicit drugs may be lucrative, but it is also jam-packed with paranoia. Every knock on the door, every new acquaintance, every pedestrian or blue Chevy that seems to shadow your moves, every second of every day is fraught with the fear that you might get caught and spend a very long time in prison. Such fear, aside from interfering with sleep rhythms, can lead to bloodshed that is both literal and metaphorical.

But hey -- the kid's getting a college education, right?

The details of drug dealing generally focus on the individuals and families that are shattered. And as the offspring of a single mother who was an alcoholic and a pill-popper, I am sympathetic to the enraging sorrows and angry conclusions that allow my son to be at least partly right when he calls drug-users "assholes."

But as I pointed out to my son, "everybody commits suicide in his or her own way." This is not to excuse or condone drug dealing. It is to wonder how the rest of us were lucky enough not to have walked that road, finding solace in some powder or pill when life seemed to be moving too slowly or too fast, but in any event was strangely under- or over-whelming.

And who wouldn't like to be making a lot of money? And who wouldn't experiment here and there with the crazier side of life? And who wouldn't ignore the fallout of their actions? And who wouldn't think the universe is all about me-me-me?

I suspect, but don't know, that there simply is no moral high ground. (The higher the ground, the greater the nose bleed.) There is simply the question of who anyone might like to see in the bathroom mirror.

schools begin stocking opiod antidote

Back-to-school supplies updated:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- Schools aren't stocking up just on pencils, books and computers anymore. This year, count a new tool at many schools nationwide: the heroin-overdose antidote naloxone.

Many schools are now keeping naloxone on hand, and some states allow or encourage schools to stock it. 

One, Rhode Island, now requires it for all middle, junior high and high schools. A survey of 81 Rhode Island school nurses who participated in a naloxone training program last year found that 43 percent of high school nurses who responded reported that students in their schools were abusing opioids.

Fifteen said they had to call 911 at least once in the past three years for suspected student substance use or overdose.

by hook or by crook

Is it true? I suspect it is:

No good (wo)man ever got that way by being good.

S/he got that way by hook and sometimes cruel crook.

news stuff

News stuff --

A boy walks among some of the 3,000 flags placed in memory of the lives lost in the September 11, 2001 attacks, at a park in Winnetka, Illinois, September 10, 2015. REUTERS/Jim Young

Relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are due to gather in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington on Friday to mark the 14th anniversary of the hijacked airliner strikes carried out by al Qaeda militants. [Reuters ... which managed to write a news story without injecting the word "terrorism."]

-- And, passed along in email, this campy video assault on the Kentucky town clerk who was jailed after refusing to process marriage license applications for homosexual couples:


... and news of the ongoing refugee migration in Europe, floods in Japan, Republican attempts to desparage and/or derail a diplomatic agreement between the U.S. and Iran ... if you want the news, I guess it's best just to look it up.

chess player kicked out

I guess if there's a game to play there's a desire to cheat....

[BBC] An Italian chess player has been kicked out of one the country's most prestigious tournaments after allegedly using a camera and Morse code to cheat.

Officials at the tournament became suspicious when Arcangelo Ricciardi, who is ranked 51,366 in the world, began beating far better players.

Mr Ricciardi was reportedly blinking in an unusual manner and holding his hand under his armpit.

Confronted by referee Jean Coqueraut, he refused to open his shirt.

hot weather

Another fat and fetid day in the making, a sluggish slug fest that William Faulkner might have made hay from -- metaphorical homicidal thunder growling on the horizon... ugly, rancid incest passing the time and everywhere delicate porcelain overlooked with praise... a time when stupid people are contradicted at your very real peril. It's too hot to think and woe betide the fool who tries.

Yesterday was in the 90's (30's Celsius) and today promises more. Survival mode. The woodpile needs straightening, but ... well ... who knows? In California, a friend's lungs are under forest-fire-smoke assault. In the Middle East, I'm not sure if the massive sandstorm has run its unusual course. But where the air becomes a threat, what else could possibly be serious? Children and the elderly are warned. I am among the latter while feeling as pervasively inept as the former.

One hundred and seventy miles to the south, Serena Williams beat her elder sister, Venus, at the U.S. Open championships last night in New York. Two powerful, skillful women enduring the heat and eclipsing, in my mind, the male counterparts who are due to play later. It is hard to say "wow" in the thick, thick thickness of the environment.

Laughter seems to have taken a vacation.

sand storm pacifies Middle East

A large dust storm has hit western parts of the Middle East, putting dozens of people in hospital and leading to public health warnings.

After hitting parts of Syria on Monday, the dust spread to larger areas of the country on Tuesday morning.
Parts of Lebanon, Israel, Turkey and Cyprus were also affected. Lebanon's state news agency said two people died - one an elderly man found on a roof.
Syrian media said the weather stopped fighting in Hama and Idlib provinces.
The pro-government al-Watan newspaper said (in Arabic) that government helicopters were prevented from flying because of the dust.

Roman Catholic and other yearnings

On Sept 22 at 4 p.m., Pope Francis will touch down for a visit to the United States. Today, I was fooling around with a notion for a column, wobbly and half-formed, in anticipation of that visit ....
******

Less than a mile from where I sit and type, the spires of St. Mary's help to define the skyline of my home town. Architecturally uninspired, the cathedral is nonetheless imposing despite its status as an institution no longer in operation. The Vatican cut St. Mary's loose in the face of mounting maintenance costs and the dwindling revenue stream from a dwindling worldwide constituency: The pedophile-priest scandal was just one of the pin-pricks that took the air out of the Roman Catholic balloon.

And now the pope has come to visit America. Francis has enjoyed a lot of good press, much as his namesake did ... a gentle, smiling, simple man who seems intent on making people happy and not just obedient. No powerful man ever got that way without guile or deception, but it is nice to think he might have.

Who will begrudge the loving intentions of those who venerate the pope and perhaps once loved St. Mary's? Love is lovely. Hope is lovely. Aspiration is as human as things get. And there was a time when St. Mary's helped to embody what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

My father's father was a Presbyterian minister, a man who had my father memorize great hunks of the Bible by candle light. As is often the case in such obedient settings, my father came to despise the universe of Christian credulity. Instead he chose the religion of the intellect and became a professor of English among the architecturally-unexceptional buildings across the street from St. Mary's. As a critic of Christian credulity, he was better-informed than most: The idolatrous forms of atheism did not appeal to him. He preferred to pick Christianity apart on its own terms. And, given half a chance in the Smith College classrooms where he taught Shakespeare and adored James Joyce, he would do just that.

I grew up with institutions like St. Mary's as a force to be recognized. Christianity was the law -- implicit or explicit -- of the land. Some of my best friends were Christians. Christianity was both St. Mary's stolid architecture and the woven architecture of people I knew. Christianity was like the ocean -- a part of the environment. It could be stupid and hypocritical but Christianity spoke of the human heart, however confusing and confused the language. I could not bring myself to disdain the human heart, whatever its contributions to various disasters.

The pope's visit to America underscores for me the diminishing role of religion in America. Yes, the scandals contributed. Yes, the rise of the Internet contributed. Yes, the economic hard times imposed a questioning spirit on the financial outlays that churches always seem to demand. But what was once a monolith seems somehow depleted like a Macy's Easter parade balloon. Giving assent to minions of an institution is an option that carries less heft. It's not a malevolent reassigning of priorities but rather a sense that whatever will respond to a yearning heart can no longer be attributed to a church father or mother. Whether a Judaism which finds its foundations in "the law" or a Christianity, which finds its foundations in "caritas" (roughly, charity) can fulfill the heart's petition ... it just doesn't stand out as the most fruitful and compelling format.

And in trying to describe this loss of environmental tableau, I do not intend to create one of those sneaky spiritual backdoors to a new and improved and more compelling realm of answers. Sure, I'm a Zen Buddhist, but as I say to anyone who will listen, "I wouldn't wish my training on my worst enemy and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in China."

But I still am moved by the yearning of the human heart, no matter how wacky. What will happen to that yearning as exemplified by St. Mary's spires? What will happen to that yearning when the Vatican -- the richest institution on earth -- grows limp and is blown to the side of the road?

And all I can think is that once upon a time, a long time ago, a single heart yearned for something just out of reach. Fact or fantasy makes no difference: It was the yearning that amounted to anything. From that yearning the uninspired spires of St. Mary's grew. From that yearning, the long-distance runner ran through "the wall." From that yearning Jim Jones gathered a crowd that committed mass suicide. From that yearning, a piece of the ineffable came into focus ... and then fell away unmourned.

And from that yearning, perhaps, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned the words, "make your own bible." Isn't that the nature of yearning in the end, writing bibles whose instructions peal and proclaim and then lose their emphatic credibility. And what they lose does not diminish their meaning and usefulness: It just means that when instructions are learned, it is time to exercise them.

Who knows what yearning lurks just around the corner?

immigration catastrope

To judge by the news media's droning drumbeat, day after day, of the migrants trying to get out of northern Africa and the Middle East, there is desperation afoot. People are willing to put their own children in harm's way in order to escape some more awful arena of existence. Some achieve their goal. Others, including their own children, die. The European countries that are targeted as relatively safe havens are awash in conflicting opinions about these desperate people -- whether to take them in or shun them.

It would be impossible to sift out all of the reasons, all the twinkling facets, of desperation that are in play. It goes beyond heart-wrenching and becomes numb ... and the line attributed to Stalin floats to the surface like some oddment from a sunken ship: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

England and France are so conflicted that they are considering attacking one of the sources of discontent and desperation -- the government of Syria. It might be easier to go to war with the source of the desperation than to absorb the financial impact of this tsunami of migrants. Isn't there a source of desperation that prompts families to put their children at risk?

And the answer is, for the simple-minded like me, yes. The governments that rely on the population for sustenance have not sufficiently nourished the nourishers. And, as the Somali official once opined when asked about the pirates operating off his shores:

If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.

There is nothing political in this statement. Rather, I think, it describes an imperative for those desperate to protect their young. Never mind Marx, never mind decency ... let's talk water; let's talk bread.

Catastrophes are too hard to compass. There needs to be a shorthand. The mind cries out for a Donald-Trump-esque oversimplification that is nevertheless true: 

If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.

The catastrophe has not yet quite reached the U.S., one of the arbiters of unshared wealth and instigators of military tumult on foreign, often lucrative, shores ... but be patient. "It's not my fault" simply will not wash over time.

breakfast branches

In the predawn brightness, a small herd of squirrels bulked up today in the Tree of the Hanging Squirrels across the street. Like a group of jabbering children surrounding the breakfast table, they skittered from branch to ever-thinner and more succulent branch, nibbling and somehow exulting.

The whole of it is a morning ritual, a ritual that precedes a coming fall, a ritual that has a beginning, a middle and an end, as if some school bus were coming and they could not afford to miss it. After 15 or 20 minutes, they have disappeared and the Tree of the Hanging Squirrels is once more still.

Do the Japanese maple shoots taste like Pop Tarts to the squirrels? Do the squirrels, when conferring, comment that "it tastes just like chicken?" No matter -- this is their watering hole, their place in which to reinvigorate their energy and exultation: Imagine that! -- hanging upside down from time to time in order to reach out-of-reach sustenance.

A nice day is coming, but I think the squirrels would be there even if the day promised to be nasty.

"the road not taken"

Always there is, to borrow from Robert Frost, "the road not taken" or its permutation, "the road less traveled."

What-if, what-if, what-if...?

Do I dass or do I don't?

And yet, when all is said and done, isn't it true that everyone has taken the road not taken, has dared themselves into a land unknown, has been the ultimate iconoclast while never moving an inch from the suffocating, all-powerful majority?

It's not the road so much -- do you think? -- as it is the mind of the traveler, so rutted and well shorn.

As a friend of mine was wont to say, "Wherever you go, there you are." And how could where you are ever be anything but the road less traveled?

How is it possible NOT to take the road not taken?

on the political stage 2015

Jeremy Corbin

I guess "political mavericks" are called political mavericks because they do not stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually assuming power. But to the extent that politics does indeed represent the voting public, it's hard to describe people like Bernie Sanders,  Donald Trump and England's Jeremy Corbin as somehow distant from the mainstream fray. It's a bit like excusing mainstream religion for the quirky and sometimes vile cults they spawn -- good, bad or indifferent, it cannot be done.

Trump's bombastic idiocies notwithstanding, I am glad for these shake-up-the-scenery candidates: They may never win, they may detract from serious debates about serious issues, but if the electorate is going to be led back to the same-ol'-same-ol', at least itt is nice to have a little fun and to sense that someone speaks up for those who see "nonsense" ... and wish that "sense" would come back into vogue.

a little dirty joke

Passed along in email today was this oldy-but-goody dirty joke.

I have to admit it made me laugh anew, though I can imagine others' finding it offensive.

in the wispy world

This morning, in the wispy world between consecutive thought and remaining dreams....

-- I dreamed I found my footprint in the snow. The snow was perhaps an inch deep, with a small layer of slush below the whiteness above. I knew to a certainty it was my footprint because somehow the snow detailed the upper part of the foot. The size and sinuousness were mine as were the faint grooves along the nails. Yes, for sure, it was my footprint in the snow, but I had no memory or explanation of how it had gotten there... no memory of the cold that must have been, nor any goal that footprint had set out to achieve.

-- In Capri, at an outdoor cafe that sat on a cliff and overlooked the Adriatic Sea below, my mother encouraged me to go to a nearby table and ask Walt Disney for his autograph. I was 11 at the time and I staunchly, if politely, refused. I knew who Walt Disney was, but saw no reason to bother him or intrude or beg. What would I do with the autograph if I had it? But more important, I was in the process of building interior fortifications whose premise was that if I made myself small enough and silent enough, the world of adults would find no reason to remind me of my unsatisfactoriness. Childhood was not a time when I was overwhelmed with support, with reminders of how I was right and excellent and satisfactory. The sense of being unsatisfactory was painful, but I could find no remedy for it short of being as invisible as possible. Something within me rebelled at the ways in which I felt as if I were being used instead of loved. I might be unsatisfactory, but I was not about to add to that load if I could help it. And so I internalized the unsatisfactoriness yardstick ... nothing was ever quite good enough ... until a brief moment yesterday.

-- Yesterday, I was chatting on the phone with the fellow who had managed my mother's affairs in the years before her death. Gideon and I came out of some of the same tapestry of the past, so, besides talking my mother's business over the years, we also became chums with some shared background. And yesterday, in recapping some of the facets of my mother's death and the wrinkles of her affairs that had been and remained to be smoothed, Gideon mentioned with a kind of d'oh tone of voice that everyone in his elder-care office had come to consider me an honest and honorable person. Gideon and I know each other well enough so that there is little or no reason for idle, ass-kissing praise. So I felt a bit as if I had been struck by lightning. Here (rightly or wrongly) was something I could believe and I really did delight in believing it. The lifetime habit of unsatisfactoriness washed out to sea for a moment and I had attained what I wanted to attain even if what it was I wanted to attain was not entirely clear ... yes, honesty and honor were two things I did consider satisfactory ... even if they turned out to be unsatisfactory. Here was a place I was willing to place my bet without a backward glance. The feeling was as delightful as the imprinted snow must have been cold. Satisfactory ... imagine that. I was never trained up to rely on the accolades of others or to pat myself on the back, but this reminder from the outside managed to break some mold ... and I could relax and even smile.

Naturally, it's gone now. Gone, but not quite forgotten.

a college education

After I got back from an obligatory three-year stint in the army, my mother set me up for an interview with her editor at Doubleday, then a book publisher in New York. The idea was not so much to provide me with a job and a way to sustain myself -- which I needed -- but rather as a means of investigating a job possibility that dovetailed with something I liked, which at that juncture, included books.

In 1963, after three years in the army, two of them in Berlin, I really did not want to go back to the cloistered bubble of academia where I was about a year and a half short of a degree. I wanted to do something in the 'real' world, the wider world, the more faceted and juicy world. But hey, I needed a job, so I went to the sit-down with LeBaron Barker, a crusty fellow around 60.

I was anxious. Yes, my tie was straight and my creases pressed, but I wanted to make a good impression and, since I was not yet acquainted with what making a good impression entailed, felt ill-at-ease and inadequate. Lee and I talked for about a half an hour.

At the end of that time, he asked bluntly and somewhat to my surprise, "So ... do you want a job?" And because I couldn't think of a good reason to say "no," I said "yes" instead.

"OK," he said in a relaxed tone that only a man with power can enjoy, "let me call up the personnel department and get this college-degree crap out of the way."

At that time, no bureaucratic sissy had yet thought up the term "human resources," although the federal War Department had morphed into the more righteous Department of Defense in 1949. It was still the plain-Jane "personnel," but the function was pretty much what it had always been, including sifting out those who might not have a college degree, the gold star that would allow personnel executives not to take any risks and still feel confirmed in their assessments. Lee was different: He was powerful enough and daring enough to size someone up and place a bet without excuses.

And so I went to work for Doubleday, although a friend of mine who had worked part-time at another publishing house warned me against it: "You have to understand," he said, "they're not selling books. They're selling shoes." By the time I quit five years later, I knew enough to know he was right ... or anyway right-ish.

This morning's local newspaper is crammed with information about all the college students who have returned to this valley that is crammed with institutions of 'higher learning.' Maybe they will get degrees. Certainly they will take on inordinate debt. But it made me wonder what good a college degree really is. I mean, seriously. I don't mean what's comme il faut, but really. I don't begrudge a college degree, however many examples of college-educated nitwits are adduced. But neither am I willing to lie down and spread my legs for the assertion that a college degree is a good or necessary thing.

How would history have been revised if Adolf Hitler had been accepted to art school? Could anyone lacking some degree of education even ask a question like that? Maybe it's not so much what anyone learns that counts; maybe it's more important what they do with what they have learned.

I honestly don't know. I do know I don't want to listen to some squishy-soft disquisition on the virtues and necessities of an education and the degrees it might confer.

Looking back, I don't wish I had finished college. I do wish I could have saved my kids from the financial burdens a college education implies these days. College has the potential to suggest a wider array of possibilities, but for anyone determined to ignore those possibilities, a college degree is unlikely to help. What the hell is it for?

The halls at Doubleday were carpeted. They were vacuumed daily. The atmosphere was buffed as a high-end manicure. Mostly its minions were white. Everyone was pretty bright ... in some cases genius level. It was just not dirty enough for me. Dirty, wide, scrappy, intractable ... like the world of newspapering I transferred into... a world in which all topics were in-bounds and full of unexpected twists and turns. Wasn't life more like the popcorn-maker in the movie-theater lobby ... you never knew where then next micro-explosion might erupt?

College education as imagination? Maybe that's closer to the mark. But perhaps not, too.

If it's a pity to be any stupider than you need to be is it likewise a pity to be smarter? Stupid can exercise a lot of cruelty that smart may sidestep ... but smart is equally capable of smugly camouflaging with terms like "human resources." Cruelty, like kindness, is a equal-opportunity employer.

I guess I'll just have to chalk it up to another thing I don't know.

Obviously there is no one answer, but when the morning newspaper is full of bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed students entering the academic lists, I wonder.

holy war

Popes, prelates, nuns, imams, Buddhist monks, Hindu swamis and a host of other credulous individuals are all paid to believe in the god they have espoused. But Kim Davis, the jailed Rowan County (Ky.) clerk, is not paid $80,000/$90,000 a year to believe or disbelieve in her god.

The taxpayers assure her a livelihood based on the governmental functions she is authorized to perform. For $80,000 a year, I can imagine there is some incentive to perform those duties faithfully and possibly even well.

But Kim Davis is in the slammer, holding out for both her salary and the high moral ground. Kentucky doesn't mention gay marriage in its oath of office, but that's not enough to slow Kim Davis down.

"God's law" is not to be broken and Kim Davis is here to mark the breaking point.

At 49, it seems to me that Davis might credibly argue that when she took office in January of 2015, she was in whole-hearted compliance with the oath required of all Kentucky officials ... including an affirmation that she had neither fought nor acted as a second in any duel.

But then -- oops! -- on June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled gay marriage was legal in all 50 states. Suddenly, the world in which Kim Davis operated had changed the rules. Her whole-hearted compliance was (though not by her choice) revised. The fickle finger of fate had hung Kim Davis out to dry. For almost thirty years she had worked in the clerk's office. Kentucky allows state officials (Kim's mother was a longtime clerk) to hire family members and, in Kim's case, to set salaries. All that time in office; everything working fine; and now this!

It seems now that Kim Davis wants both to keep her income and assert the beliefs and opinions that are not requisite or relevant to the position. She now sits in jail, declaring she will not honor gay marriage licenses and will not certify those licenses certified by her assistants.

If the pope were to let his faith waver, you could imagine firing him. But in the case of someone whose faith has no bearing on what a taxpaying citizenry might wish to accomplish ...?

As numbers of others have already commented, Kim Davis' principled stand might be more credible if she simply gave up her governmental salary and praised the Lord on her own time. But for the moment, she seems determined to keep both the income and the high moral purpose. And there are others in and out of Kentucky who agree with her. The kindness of her religious convictions seems to reach so far and no further.

PS. In the course of a cursory bit of research on this topic, I did run across the following description of Davis' personal life. It's not particularly relevant to the issues involved, but it did manage to make my jaw drop ... Henry VIII's love life was a snap by comparison and Kentucky seems to be a land of familial overlaps. Anyway, Wikipedia says...:

Davis has been married four times to three different husbands, the first three marriages ending in divorces in 1994, 2006, and 2008. She is the mother of twins, who were born five months after her divorce from her first husband. Her third husband is the biological father of the twins, who were adopted by her second husband, Joe, who is also her fourth and current husband.

Joe supports her stance against same-sex marriage. One of her twin sons, Nathan, works in her office as a deputy clerk and has taken the same position to deny marriage certificates to same-sex couples.

Into the land of the Jukes and the Kallikaks ... or that's the way it feels to me. A realm of backwardness and transmitted ignorance ... an assumption unnecessarily generalized and broad-brush insulting but with some grain of truth flavoring it. Sorta like Forrest Gump: "Stupid is as stupid does."

the womb of God

Is it true? I sort of imagine it is...

The truly amazing thing about what is amazing is that it refuses to stay "amazing" and yet sets up a lifelong craving or longing or insistence on what is amazing. "I would give my left nut for ...." is not a mantram everyone might use, but it conveys the message: What is amazing melts my socks and elevates me in ways that beckon and beckon and beckon.

Amazing is like the womb of God, me-less and complete.

No more God: What an incalculable blessing or curse that neither blesses nor curses.

I would give anything to return to that place and time and characteristic-free breath.

But there is no return.

A kiss, an orgasm, a soft and inescapable shifting of some very ordinary landscape, a sunset or dawn ... it can be anywhere and anything. Pundits wax wise. Fuck 'em! It is the realm itself that beckons and who in his right mind would not yearn for such surcease and completion?

Who would not give anything for the ordinary?

like quicksilver

Come morning, the days puddle and pool like mercury on a Formica table top.

Is it more important that today is Friday or that somehow Thursday got lost along the unraveling of the week? I really don't know. Things slip and slide and refuse to be wrapped for placement under whatever this Christmas tree called existence might be.

Would it make a difference if I knew? Does it matter if I don't? The only thing that seems discommoded is this Boy Scout insistence on being "prepared."

Mercury is commonly known as "quicksilver."

It is poisonous, but I'm not dead yet.

oh God! another "God" to cope with

Kim Davis

Nobody in their right mind would claim to know how to play the piano or ride a bicycle because s/he had read a book about it ... maybe a very good book.

And nobody would begrudge a book-reader his or her conviction founded on information in that book.

But when the information and conviction of the one impinges on the legal rights of another, isn't it time to throw the book away and get down to brass, human tacks?

How tedious true believers can be, not least when their beliefs are widely shared and the rest of us have to waste a lot of time battling for some breathing room in a world guided by someone else's book.

OK ...

A county clerk in Kentucky who has refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs heads to court on Thursday where a federal judge could hold her in contempt for defying his order to do so.

Lawyers for Kim Davis, the elected Rowan County clerk who is an Apostolic Christian, on Wednesday asked U.S. District Judge David Bunning to temporarily block his order requiring her to issue marriage licenses while she appeals the issue.

Davis has refused to issue licenses to any couples, gay or straight, since the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry under the U.S. Constitution.

Christianity is often known -- or likes to be known -- for its kindness, whatever its cruel manifestations. Kindness is a good thing in a social setting which human beings, as social creatures, demand....

Oh shit ... it's so tedious, spinning out the counterpoint to an illegal righteousness. Tedious, tiring. No need for righteousness -- that's just more energy wasted. Never mind the least-among-us whining. Fuck it! Just don't do that and then tell me you know how to play the piano.

I know, I know -- you're not supposed to say it out loud, but it's very hard not to: Will you please stop being an asshole?!

If God's law is greater than Man's law, how much does Christianity differ from the radical version of Islam that is currently accused of a literal and metaphorical bloodbath in the Middle East

PS. Well, the issue as it affects Kim Davis has been resolved without really resolving it.

cruelty heaped on cruelty

Since within unspeakable, self-absorbed cruelty there always seems to be another-and-another-and-another cruelty, I wonder if there is likewise another, greater kindness within great kindnesses. Whether the answer is yes or no, Arquimedes Puccio seems to have set a personalized standard for cruelty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story of the Puccio family, whose members abducted wealthy Argentines for ransom and hid them in their house before killing them, is making [made for the movies] headlines again, 30 years after their convictions....

It was 1985 and Argentina was coming to grips with its newly restored democracy.
Secrets were slowly emerging after seven years of military rule during which as many as 30,000 people had been forcibly disappeared.
But the story of one family shocked the country. -- BBC

sheep shorn of 88 pounds

[BBC] An overgrown Australian sheep affectionately named Chris has set a new unofficial world record following a hair cut from five shearers.

Welfare crews warned it risked death because it was so woolly from living in the wild for several years.

More than 40kg (88lb) of wool was removed in what the RSPCA says is the heaviest wool haul from one shearing.

"the scientific method"

One of the hallmarks of "the scientific method" is that the results of a particular bit of research can be reproduced. Assuming those results can be reproduced, the research receives the scientific stamp of approval... and, by extension, we call all agree more or less that something is scientifically true and not just some new and approved bit of high-voltage opinion or belief.

This morning, I wonder about reproducing stuff.

Is that possible?

Superficially, sure -- but really?

An odd realm.

crossing the bullshit-terrorist line

It seems that even those imbued with the most heart-felt of what passes for patriotism these days have their limits on the amount of loud-mouthing they will tolerate:

William C. Bradford

WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) — A West Point professor criticized for writing an article calling some legal scholars treasonous and "lawful targets" for the U.S. military in its war on terrorism has resigned a month after he was hired to teach a law course.

A spokesman at the U.S. Military Academy said William C. Bradford resigned Sunday. He said no further details would be released because of privacy and legal constraints.

In an article published this spring in the National Security Law Journal, Bradford said legal scholars who criticize U.S. tactics in the war on terror are helping the Islamic State group undermine America. He argued that these academics should be considered enemy combatants and charged with treason and supporting terrorism.

Trying to out-red-white-and-blue the red white and blue is no easy business. William C. Bradford's story, which has all the trappings of pure satire a la The Onion, is unfortunately not some imaginative send-up. It is the actual-factual times in which we live. The 185-page article he wrote is positively viscous in the way that unedited or poorly edited academic papers can be. I tried and failed to read it all: It sounds important and it sounds caring and it sounds patriotic but at some juncture I felt that I was being hornswaggled by yet another second-rate academic who was afraid of simple, straight-forward argumentation in English.

The most fearsome part is that someone -- though not West Point apparently -- is likely to believe Bradford. And, as usual with inflammatory rhetoric, and incredible amount of time and energy has to be expended in order to set the record straight ... effort that might have been put into something nourishing and constructive.

Serena Williams for queen

If there were a vote for queen, I would vote for American tennis pro Serena Williams. I don't care if she has a hundred foibles and faults, Serena Williams simply is what is in my mind. Nothing left out, nothing left over ... it is the way of things and Serena Williams is it.

Last night Williams went onto television's U.S. Open court to face Vitalia Diatchenko, a Russian ranked 86th to Williams' No. 1. Diachenko bowed out after 21 minutes of playing time. She claimed an injury, but from the get-go, Daichenko's playing was so amateurish as to ask the question why she was there in the first place. The announcers had to buck and shuffle in order not to scoff ... this was, after all a world-class event and anything less reflected badly on the importance they were paid to bring to the game. The announcers tried ... and failed.

I am not a tennis or any other sort of sports aficionado. But I do enjoy excellence and I was intrigued by the match: How would a world champion face off, not against someone who would give her a run for her athletic money, but against someone so indubitably impoverished by comparison? How would the queen of all the known universe act and react? How would she treat the least of her subjects?

The queen played. That is what she does and she did it. True, it felt as if, occasionally, she was dragged into Daichenko's realm of weakness -- double faulting because, well, what the hell? -- but in general the  queen played. She kept her eyes cast down. She had come to play. This was this and she would demean neither her opponent nor herself... a real warrior.

I can see why people like and perhaps adore sports. There is no pussy-footing, no nuance, no side ... make a move and the move is it and that's all there is to it. I love nuance in its time, but in sport, the lesson is driven home ... there is no other choice ... ever ... THIS IS IT! Plain as salt. There is no sidestepping responsibility or factuality. There is no going back. There is no ... no ... no anything. This is it. There is no honor or defeat, no kudos.

What king or queen summons the courage to step into this arena that cannot be avoided and yet is so hard to enter?

With winning or losing in the rearview mirror ... what is that like? I am somewhat ashamed to praise someone I don't know and yet feel constrained and delighted to do so: Serena Williams for queen!

Queen of the silence. Queen of the is. Queen to all and sundry. Queen without a crown. Strong and dignified without strength or dignity.

I'm just making it up, of course.