I don’t wish to make light of the trials faced by people back east. I know that a lot of people went through a very difficult time. And they showed the world — again — that the citizens of American cities are strong and good. And look, there’s another silver lining:
The Iraqis are getting a real kick out of it. Apparently, they think it’s a hoot. And they have some warm weather tips to pass along. It’s a good thing: America is about more than just a good asskicking. All the worlds a stage!
Well I had a productive afternoon. I backed my Toyota pickup truck into my garage and cleaned it out. It had accumulated a lot of my personal junk in it over the last seven years. It’s all cleared out now, into the dumpster or into the closet in the garage. Many treasures.
Old Blue is going to a happy new home in the mountains this weekend. He’s always been a coastal truck, a beast of the arid shelf of level freeways and clean, salty onshore breezes. I truly hope he enjoys his new job and gives his new driver, my brother, many miles of service. I’ve been good about his oil changes; he should live to 200K, God willing.
It’s funny how we imbue such machines with personality … heart. Old Blue has a good heart. Many times, we’ve climbed hills, like the Grapevine south of Bakersfield. And when we got to the top, I’ve patted his dashboard and said, “good little truck.”
He always starts. Even when his starter was going out recently, he didn’t totally refuse to start. Just tried to get my attention. “No. … No … OK, I’ll start.” In over seven years, that was his only repair, besides a horn. Are you starting to catch on that I’m an extremely sentimental guy? But wait …
What I was thinking about the most as I was cleaning was the opportunities of life in the moment that we passed and drove by. I remember a few times, sitting on Old Blue’s tailgate, backed to the edge of the bluffs, watching the dolphins pass, and feeding bites of my sandwich to the dog. I would’ve had more of times like that, in retrospect. Wish I’d climbed into the back a couple of times, and listened to the rain on his shell. … Don’t it always seem to go?
It’s just a truck you say? No, it’s a metaphor for the way I live my life from day to day, regretting that as the sunset heads for Asia and I crawl into bed, I’ve lost opportunities for clear thoughts, quiet moments and the droplets of awareness that bead on the turtlewaxed skin of a mundane life.
When I left my last car, a Mercury, on the dealers lot after 10 years of hard miles, I didn’t write about her. Didn’t even look back. They probably shipped her to Mexico, since she couldn’t pass smog. And maybe I’m a little slightly wiser man. … Well, now I’ll be driving a white Jeep Cherokee. I’m looking forward to what he has to offer. We will go some places, see some things. I will have to learn his name.
You’ll be very pleased to know that the liberals won the culture war of the 20th century.
I had a feeling it would come down that way. The Right couldn’t score in the second half; the Liberals wouldn’t let go of the ball. But things got nasty in overtime, and smart money says it’s a different game when the Liberals play the Neocons.
The Liberals made the field damn near unplayable, pockmarked by chuckholes of moral and aesthetic relativism. Unable to take the moral high ground by means of subjective populism alone, the Liberals stuck to the swampy turf down the middle, and beat the Right with a short-thrown but incessant ground game. (Everybody gets some yardage, but nobody gets redeemed, and we’re all PC for the press.)
Basically, there was nothing defensive (read reactionary) players like Falwell could do against the mind-numbing one-two punch of Hollywood and the baby boom. The third quarter, dominated by Kennedy and King, devolved into a mind-numbing mess: The Right just stood there, while the Liberals brought in the second string, and sloppy points were scored by the likes of Stern and Flint. Ironically, it probably wouldn’t have played out that way, if the Right hadn’t given that klutz McCarthy the ball.
The Neocons are a different team. They play the middle too, and they play dirty. They’re perfecting an end run around the Constitution and the Truth. And they made a smooth move trading Morality for Fear. This leaves the Liberals virtually defenseless, because they lost all coaching and their best players in the last match. The Neocons can give up the Hail Mary in favor of the Avé Caesar, and fake us out with a dirty bomb.
Get your tickets. It’s gonna be a great show.
I’m miffed, annoyed, peeved. I can’t access my blog on blog-city. Their server is totally non-responsive. But I sure got to this one. I’m serious considering firing those guys. Aaargh.
FLINGING FREEDOM FRIES
Oh dear, the French are miffed at the British over Iraq again. Seems some French companies have been accused of violating sanctions and selling stuff to Saddam that nice people shouldn’t have. A British spokesperson points out that this might be resented by persons in a new Iraqi government.
“I must say, if I were an Iraqi minister in the new Iraqi government, I think I would personally take a poor view of companies that have been breaking U.N. sanctions and supporting Saddam’s vile regime.”
The French folks are offended … and they say we’re arrogant.
TOO QUIET
It’s very quiet in here. I can hear a fan running in the bedroom, the gentle hum of the computer, and sometimes a faint whoosh of traffic. This is the kind of quiet that prompts a man to think too much. Which is a problem, because it’s April 8.
On April 8, 2000, the cancer had come back and we had to take our beloved Stella to the vet’s office. The doctor put her to sleep. I am almost 42 years old. I have buried people I loved very much. But that remains, without qualification, the worst day of my life.
I remember as we held her, how she looked up at the fluorescent lights with a kind of joy. She was blind. And I remember when we’d go to the beach, she’d do a little dance with her rear end when her paws hit the sand. These two poems are about those memories.
Yep, the silence is getting way too loud.
MIKE HAWASH – MATERIAL WITNESS?
Due Process:
Function: noun
1 : a course of formal proceedings (as legal proceedings) carried out regularly and in accordance with established rules and principles — called also procedural due process
2 : a judicial requirement that enacted laws may not contain provisions that result in the unfair, arbitrary, or unreasonable treatment of an individual — called also substantive due process
Looks dead to me. Somebody poke it with a stick.
IT’S A RUDE WORLD AFTER ALL …
Disney beefs up security at Epcot’s French pavilion thing, or whatever, fearing anti-French backwash, because France didn’t want to fight with US. Merd, somebody wake me when it’s safe to have french toast again.
THE OTHER GEORGE … NO, THE OTHER OTHER GEORGE
George McGovern ran for president over thirty years ago. I’m very pleased to learn he’s not only still alive, he’s still thinking and still has something to say.
I remember the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon vs. George McGovern. I was eleven that year, in the sixth grade, and we had a mock election in school. I was for McGovern; I had a button and everything. I wonder what happened to it, and my Impeach Nixon button too.
I’ve read that mock elections in schools often presage the real ones to a degree that’s uncanny. Maybe that’s because the kids know who their parents are going to vote for, and simply vote the same. I don’t know, but it wasn’t that way at Canalino School in 1972. McGovern won by a landslide.
I guess the west coast counterculture was beginning to seep through the cracks at our school. Maybe through those high louvered windows that the teacher had to open with a long pole. Maybe the strange fears of the distant but disturbing war were seeping in too. For whatever reason, that Fall progressives dominated in the classrooms farthest from the sandbox and the swings.
I’ve often wondered how America might be different if Nixon hadn’t won. I like to think that we’d have a kinder society, a more vigilant focus and a firmer grip on individual rights, maybe fewer jobs gone overseas. A man can dream. And as Simone Weil said, “A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough…Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.”
In any case, it’s great that Mr. McGovern has contributed this column to The Nation. The wise voice of a man in his 80s, who took his best shot.
SHAME ON THE OAKLAND POLICE
I’m one of those people who usually respects the police for their service and sacrifice. But I’m just sickened and angered by what Oakland police did today. I’m sick and tired of people who abuse the authority given to them by the people, by using that authority as a weapon against the people from whom it derives.
There is simply no excuse for attacking protestors. Political dissent is the very foundation of our democracy, one of the American rights and virtues for which so many have fought and died. This kind of abusive overreaction is a defilement, if not a repudiation, of the gifts of liberty our veterans have given us. When our men and women come home from Iraq, not one of the officers who was at the Port of Oakland today should dare to look them in the eye.
WHO TOLD YOU I’M PARANOID?
“As a new war raged in Iraq, the people in the room were acutely aware of the only slightly older war that has consumed their daily lives like nothing before — the way in which the war on terrorism has also turned into an assault on individual liberties.”
Why we may never regain the liberties that we’ve lost
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
GONE TOO SOON, AND TOO FAR FROM HOME
I’ll admit it; I think the war with Iraq is sad. It leaves me despairing that we will ever overcome the impulse to shed blood as a means of “solving problems.” But the death of David Bloom of NBC is doubly sad. Is it because he’s more innocent, not being a soldier? No. Except for the few powerful megalomaniacs who started this thing, we’re all equally innocent and culpable.
I don’t know why I find Bloom’s death more troubling than the other troubling deaths. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching him report, riding around on that big whatever. Maybe it’s just the irony; the guys he was with didn’t let him take a bullet. They didn’t drive over a mine or get doused with sarin gas. He rode all the way up from Kuwait, only to go out under the ultimate friendly fire.
Metaphor 