Background Color

So Barack Obama, who floated magnificently into the White House upon a beneficent cloud of historic awe and wonder only a year ago has found it necessary to step gingerly down onto real soil, where things are gritty, grimy and, well, just a little counter-historical.

The punctuation mark at the end of the new president's first year: the single most influential Democratic seat in the Senate changes over to the Republicans with the election of centerfold model Scott Brown to the patriarchal Kennedy seat in liberal stronghold Massachusetts. To many loud celebrants of the moment, the Obama legacy is already done. Stick a fork in it. Add the garnish. Serve it up. Finis.

Democrats everywhere are stunned. To Bostonians, the feeling must be akin to what they felt when their 16-0 Patriots faltered in the Super Bowl. The beer and pretzels are left to go stale.



The analysts have circled like vultures picking over the carcass of the election. The wonks are turning out the pockets, drawing astonishingly clairvoyant conclusions from the lint. But we should be careful not to over-analyze what may be a surprisingly simple post-mortem. We should be careful not to assume that the Obama election was about more than it really was.

While the election of the first president of African-American descent was a dizzying and wonderful achievement on its own merits, it coincided with a large groundswell of something else that is beginning, with the gubernatorial elections of the summer and the Massachusetts election of this week, to break through the political crust. Far beyond any principal in operation there may be one thing that will overwhelm everything else--a massive (perhaps unprecedentedly massive) wave of voter dissatisfaction.

Wonks on both sides of the aisle, from the ballistic blonde division on FOX News to the oh-so-knowing stuffed suits over at CNN, are going after one another ferociously, all claiming to hear the heartbeat of the nation--what is it that the American masses really want? Do they want less government or more? Do they want expensive guaranteed health benes or independent predatory health roulette? Do they want a socialist messianic state or an avaricious, unethical free market? Do they want dog-protected, barbed-wired, impenetrable borders or a wide open door for Mexican narcotraficantes to slip through and kill us in our sleep? After all, elections are always about the issues, right? Of course right.

When the Obama election swept the Democrats back into power, they wanted it so badly to be about the vindication of their ideals, of their pet policies, of "compassionate" government. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi felt that their years of toil behind the Bush mast were at last being rewarded.



They were wrong.

What the latest elections have shown is that Obama won because Republicans lost. The Bush years were not good for "conservative values." The propagation of an incredibly expensive war with little or no strategic value, coupled with an almost unprecedented expansion of federal oversight that encroached on everything from how to pack your overnight bag to how to test your children, increased spending on an alarming scale. Add to the cauldron the fruits of two decades of corporate deregulation and malfeasance that allowed for the ex nihilo creation of non-existent wealth, and the whole brew was ready to blow. The Three Wise men of the Right, Rush Lowbrow, Sean Calamity and Bill Oh Really make no mention of this, or they find a way to point their middle fingers elsewhere, But the blame rests squarely on the ruling Republicans with the all-too-willing complicity of Congressional Democrats.

At the end of the Bush administration, the cauldron began bubbling over with a horrific stench. The choice was between letting it blow like a volcano, wreaking havoc everywhere, or purchasing the world's most expensive pressure valve in the form of a federal bailout, sending the worst of the toxic gases into a huge, red deficit balloon meant to contain the damage.

The damage that began to unfold, however, was very real. People, their families and communities everywhere began to experience financial disaster first hand. Voters with previously comfortable political ideologies began to see things differently. People who had never voted before suddenly found a reason to line up in record numbers. And they weren't voting the issues. They were voting mortgages and milk money.



The McPalin debacle was less about "darn-tootin'" Sarah Sixpack and the Aging Mannequin than it was about a rare new thing in Washington--accountability. People don't want policies. They want problem solvers. There was a whiff of hope that Barack Obama might just be one of those, and that he might be able to bring in some folks who could solve problems. People didn't want Hillary because she was part of the Previous Mess. People didn't want McCain because he was a part of the most Recent Mess and couldn't remember how many homes he owned while so many other people were losing the only one they had.

The Obama Administration's biggest mistake has been not to recognize just how important it was for him and his people to get in there and start solving problems on a grand scale. Perhaps it was unfair to expect this of a comparatively inexperienced leader. Sadly, real change was never going to happen as long a the existing apparatus remained untouched. Bitterly partisan players like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi kept their positions of privilege. Obama began peopling his administration with long-term DC operatives. Essentially, except for a few new faces, the top power deck in DC received only a modest shuffle.

One year later the dimensions of the war have scarcely subsided. Federal initiatives are as intrusive as ever with no sign of shrinkage. The battle over Health Care devolved into a lobbying brawl with quibbling and ideological barn burning rather than solutions. The federal bailout with its gargantuan price tag is being diverted, along with many other vital national elements, offshore to the more forward-thinking Chinese. (Oh, baby! What a day it will be when they start calling in the note!)

But voter attitudes are the same now as they were last year, and a desperate populace is no respecter of parties. The Massachusetts voter turnout was down 20 points from the general election. The highest concentrations of voters were in the regions with the highest unemployment rates, and they voted Republican. Why? Because Massachusetts isn't liberal anymore? Don't kid yourself. They voted Republican because their governing party failed to get their jobs back. They voted Republican because they were immediately furious with the people who looked most responsible. That was the lesson of '08. That's the lesson of '09. And it's about to be the lesson of '10.



Republican Party operatives better learn from this, as well as their Democratic counterparts. It's not about ideals or principals or party platforms. It's about a chicken in the pot and some bacon in the fridge. It's about Populism, just as it was in the early 20th Century when similar economic times struck the nation.

Get a clue. If Barry doesn't sober up and start solving problems, the next greatest politician in Washington will be the next best Populist. Chances are the former Cosmo centerfold from Mass will not be that guy. But somebody will be. One shudders to think of who.

My dad watched the news religiously when I was a kid. He was pretty inflexible about it. Of course, when 6 pm rolled around, there wasn't anything else on TV in those days. There might have been something lame on the local UHF channels. But news was what we watched.

Huddled before the big console television in our cookie cutter home in Virginia Beach, we watched the stolid news figures of the day as they read off from sheets of paper, looking up gravely into the camera every few lines. I started taking a more active interest in the news around 1972, during the Nixon-McGovern showdown. Vietnam was winding down, Watergate was heating up and the Arabs and Israelis were always squabbling.


Walter Cronkite

1972 was the year Walter Cronkite was thought by many to be the most trusted man in the country. I think Uncle Walter probably knew this was more of a comment on the sad state of affairs nationally than it was a complete vote of confidence for him. Folks that are a little younger than me don't remember how bad those days got to be. I have to laugh a little every time I get an urgent email forward telling us, couched in fund-raiser lingo, that America is in its darkest hour. Believe me, things have been a lot worse. A whole lot worse.

Even as an eleven year old, I knew the country was in serious trouble. The fabric of the presidency was unwinding before our very eyes. I watched the demise of Richard Nixon and I cried. We had lost a war for the first time in our proud history and soldiers returned without honor, railed upon by draft dodgers and peaceniks who had no idea what their uniformed brethren had lived through. Others never came back. The economy was in the toilet. The Cold War was in full swing and it was looking bad for the good guys.

Someone had to step into the vacuum of trust. Who would have thought it would be the journalists? Not even they expected it. But as the Washington Post brought down a corrupt president and the nation's Armed Forces returned in defeat, the sonorous tones of Walter Cronkite broke through the chaos, much as it had when John F. Kennedy was shot, We needed him. And unbeknownst to him, he presided over an irreversible transition in the life of American journalism.

He became a star. Years later he would note how, when he and his colleagues got into the TV news business, they were thought of as working class stiffs. Their salaries were at the level of school teachers and cops. They drove average cars, worked killer hours, had families, drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of cigarettes. They were part of the fabric of the public they served.

But, like the lead character in "Legend," Cronkite was the last of a breed. When he retired he was replaced by the man who had become famous for slicing and dicing Richard Nixon on CBS--Dan Rather. And Dan Rather started the pernicious legacy of superstar news personalities commanding multi-million dollar salaries. And TV news, which Malcolm Muggeridge argued was never really news at all, became just another form of entertainment.

Cronkite himself leveled disparaging remarks against the shift. The job, he said, was essentially to read the news, not to report. The news anchor was a news reader and nothing more. Cronkite and those of his ilk--Morrow, Reasoner, Mudd and others like them--wouldn't be marketable today as anything but voice-over talent.

But there's no putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Flip through the dozen or more news channels at any given time of the day now and what do you see? Lots of strutting male peacocks and sharp-tongued bottle blondes, not to mention a heavy contingent of former beauty queens with hourglass figures and creative cosmetic schemes.

In this circus paradigm, one can actually find quality--but the quality is of an artistic and technical variety and not anything actually having to do with delivery of substantive news. My favorite news shows today are those that have surrendered completely to the understanding of TV's ultimate purpose--to give us entertaining junk. They are, in rank order, "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, "The Colbert Report" with Steve Colbert and, drumroll please, "Despierta America," the Spanish language morning news show broadcast from Miami on Univision. In fact, the last of these, which includes the show's talent getting up and dancing every now and again, not to mention a host of other silly antics, has higher viewership in the U.S. than all the other network and cable news programs combined. The only catch is that you have to understand a bit of Spanish.


Despierta America

So it is that with the passing of Walter Cronkite, we see the official end of an era when TV news at least attempted something serious even if, according to Neil Postman and Malcolm Muggeridge, it never really succeeded. One cannot, in the end, fault Walter for trying. It was a good dream while it lasted.

Response to Simone Weil's "Human Personality."

From Simone Weil: An Anthology

"The chief danger does not lie in the Collectivity's tendency to circumscribe the Person, but in the Person's tendency to immolate himself in the Collective."

In this essay, Simone Weil, an early twentieth-century French thinker, deals with the place of the "person" within larger "collectives." I capitalized both nouns in the quote because the English word "person" is an unattractive cousin to the French personne, which can mean "anyone" as well as "that individual." It is not as synonymous with "individual" as is the English word. Capitalizing it may not quite do the trick, but maybe we can tweak it thereby into a Bigger Idea.

"Collective" is Weil's word for the group to which a Person attaches oneself, such as a political entity, corporation, church, union, etc. I capitalized it, too, to give it the same level of emphasis.

To put the quote into slightly more understandable terms, Weil is saying that it is less dangerous for a group (community, church, labor union, political party) to restrict (or ultimately silence) individual expression and freedom than it is for Persons to so completely devote themselves to the will of a group that they surrender their voice--and will--to that of the group. She goes on to say that the two errors are doubtless connected. In other words, the suppression of the Person by the group may be related to some level of voluntary self-supression in the Person. Either way, It is that self-supression that worries Weil so much.

With good reason. The statement of Weil's caught my eye because of her use of the term "immolation." The word is old, iderived from a Latin term for sprinkling meal on meat about to be sacrificed. In French, as in Latin, the word became synonymous with sacrifice. But because Weil, who died in 1943, did not live to see the Vietnam War, she would not have been familiar with the English connotation of the term as "self-sacrifice by fire." One particular Buddhist monk, protesting government policy in the war, poured fuel on himself and lit a match, burning hiimself alive. I remember seeing a photo of this self-immolation as a teenager and being horrified by it. Apparently I wasn't the only one. Malcolm Browne's award-winning photo may have single-handedly shifted our understanding of a word.


Self Immolation of Thic Quang Duc, photo by Malcolm Browne

I had this photo in mind when I was writing my dissertation in 1994 and included the term "self-immolation" as a way of describing an extreme level of self-censorship in social and public interaction.

All of us self-censor in social settings. Those who lack the ability of self-censorship in public are either small children (with horrendous questions or commentary in the checkout line) or have Tourette Syndrome, whose afflictees cannot always control what they say. But the rest of us have a lot of things going on internally at any given moment, much of which gets set aside when we engage in conversation or when we find ourselves speaking or performing in a public setting. Sometimes we might be shutting off the never-ending flow of inner psychological drama. And at other times, we may just choose not to say something we're thinking. The other day during commencement festivities, I was speaking with a person whose nose was flaming red. It was so red it was impossible to ignore. And all the while this person and I were speaking, a little monologue was going on inside my head: "Does he know? How can he not know? Why didn't he do something about it? Does he care? Good grief, that's red!"

Often when I am teaching a class or speaking in a larger venue, I see things going on in the audience, many of whom are under the impression that they are invisible, that beggar some sort of comment. But to tell someone to wake up or to put away the cell phone or stop doing homework for another class would have a negative impact entailing ripple effects that, to me, aren't worth the momentarily satisfying assertion of authority. Therefore, I self-censor.

But there is another level of self-censorhip that has more to do with Weil's statement than the normal social maintenance I've just talked about. We also self-censor in order to show our allegiance to certain ideas, ideals and groups. Whenever we become part of a group, whether it be as an employee, a disciple, an amateur enthusiast, an artist, or even as the natural result of a shift in status (the Country Club as opposed to the YMCA), we naturally learn the Language of the Tribe the better to fit in with that group. In learning the new lingo, two things happen. We acquire new terms, so that we can be perceived as using them smoothly and knowingly "I pwned you, freakin' newb!" And, conversely, we begin to shed, to prune, to self-censor terms that don't harmonize with the Tribal Tongue. In church, we sing "Wonderful Words of Life," not, "Your Body is a Wonderland."

All of which gives rise to a question: Is it truly a thing to be feared when someone self-censors to such a degree that they have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated themselves? To what extent was/is this happening for those adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in El Dorado, TX (think uni-brow and antebellum peasant fashions)? Or to what extent is this happening with suicide bombers in Baghdad?


FLDS Yearning for Zion--

Certainly ideological self-immolation creates these extreme cases. But Weil's question, and mine, is concerned more with those who do not perhaps belong to some extremist sect in the middle of nowhere or in some terrorist training camp, but those who live and breathe among us who have allowed some Voice of Authority to silence their thinking, their reason and their ability to see beyond the confines of some mental prison they have created for themselves. Would this describe, for instance, the people who let their 11-yr-old daughter die of treatable diabetes last year because they thought God was going to heal her? Does this describe the senior citizen who sends her life-savings, pension checks and social security to a complete stranger who has persuaded her that this TV ministry is God's best hope for humanity?

Does it describe people on the political fringe who seem to live on the intellectual equivalent of a liquid diet--consuming only the kind of news, opinion and information that affirms a pre-selected point of view, right or left?

The answer to that last question, though it might surprise some, is no. While subsisting on the impoverished dogmas on the fringe does involve a harmful level of self-negation, it is not as absolute a condition as immolation. There is something inherently destructive and even deadly about immolating oneself for a Collectivity. The consequences are always catastrophic for someone.

But the fringe-dwellers, though heavily "negated," can and do function quite well in society, though typically flocking in groups around mega-personalities or ego-saturated agenda-setters. Yes, I am speaking of the likes of Rush Limbaugh on one side and Michael Moore on the other, both of whom left their senses years ago but whose ardent fans have failed to see the vacancy signs. The devotees of Limbaugh fail to realize he is neither conservative (nor Christian), and the disciples of Moore fail to see he is neither liberal (nor socialist). They are both super-inflated grand-standers carried along by the inertia of their bloated personalities, with no safe harbor in sight. Their adherents, while deceived, are in no real danger of capsizing their own lives by bombing clinics or getting handcuffed for civil disobedience. Most of their biggest fans are fully functioning members of society whose personal lives represent the best and worst of living in an affluent, unreflective culture. It is only their intellects they have chosen to deprive.

Nevertheless, the specter of intellectual and spiritual self-immolation looms--not that rank and file hard-liners such as those I just mentioned are susceptible. I doubt seriously that they are. Those trapped in an immolators' fate got there by other means, usually involving either an involuntary or semi-voluntary stripping down of their persons and psyches brought on by want or need. The benefit of affluent middle-class life is that, while it doesn't guarantee against a near-fictitious understanding of the world, it does tend to insulate against radical extremism. Be that as it may, we find ourselves compelled to deal with the immolators. They have a tendency to crop up from time to time, whether it's Jim Jones or Branch Davidians or FLDS in our backyard--or people who come over and commandeer or airlines. We cannot afford to ignore them.

Photo by Obama campaign

So it's a "historic" election.

The adjective is lame in this context. Every election is "historic," in that it happened in history. And in this case, calling something as monumental and memorable as the 2008 Presidential election merely "historic" is like describing Niagara Falls as "misty." It's an accurate description, but it doesn't quite get there.

I don't think I need to go into the broader reasons why minorities in particular wept openly for joy at Barak Obama's election. To paraphrase from Geico, even a caveman could get it.

What I want to address is a particular demographic that didn't get it before the election, and that is in danger of not getting it afterwards: white evangelical Christians. That means the majority of people I know and call my friends. I'm an evangelical--half Latino at that. But I voted for Obama. Perhaps it was the Latino half that made me do it.

As one demographic category after another logged in with sweeping gains for the Democratic presidential nominee, only three groups did not shift even a smidgen in Obama's favor: Working class white men, white women over 30 and... drum-roll, please...white evangelical Christians. This is all according to the accursed New York Times, of course. Check out Politico as well.

The Democrat managed to garner huge gains among minority evangelicals. He won the Catholic vote by a significant majority. And he took the under-30 white vote (male and female) by just as large a margin. But "older" evangelical whites voted the other way by a staggering 75%-25%.

That's three-quarters of the people riding around with fish symbols on their vehicles.

The Democratic candidate also made huge gains in all but two states in the Union. Those were Arkansas and Tennessee. I live in Tennessee. Lots of white evangelicals and working class white males in Tennessee.

I do know why these folks could not vote for Obama. I was on the receiving end of dozens of email forwards from several friends, all of which either (1) predicted Apocalypse with Obama's election (2) identified Obama as the Anti-Christ or (3) said he was best friends or had vital business dealings with the Anti-Christ.

Do not take those Anti-Christ references literally. I only mean them to indicate the extreme negativity of the content.

Other emails and personal pleadings all but said that a Christian could not, in good conscience, vote Democrat, much less vote for Obama. The day before the election, I heard radio declarations by pastors who said, "Pray for God's mercy, pray for God's will, pray that John McCain will be elected."

Good and honest people allowed themselves to be carried along a crest of dishonest and brutal character assassination--and thought they were doing God's will, much as the Crusaders did who slaughtered Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem a millennium ago. There was little anyone could say to persuade these good folks that what they were doing was actually un-Christian and wrong. And it's highly unlikely they would see it as wrong even now. They are more likely to wonder why everyone else couldn't see the burning truth contained in these forwards. They are wondering what in heck is wrong with the rest of the world.

The white evangelicals have something to fall back on, however. They are used to the rest of the world being wrong. Many of them, in the aftermath of this astonishing electoral result, will hunker down in their roles as a persecuted minority, much as they were doing in the 1960s as the birth of civil rights and fears of the cold war submerged the nation in turmoil.

I feel very deeply for my evangelical friends, especially those who are feeling bitterly disappointed and wondering, perhaps, if God hasn't pulled a fast one somehow. I have been there and I understand fully the emotions with which many are wrestling today.

It's hard not to feel hampered by the knowledge that there is little one can do to shake the conviction that abortion and homosexuality are the most vital issues confronting our nation. Trying to inform people that those two issues form a miniscule part of the policy and legislative issues facing us only makes them more upset. Trying to encourage them to embrace pro-active evangelical involvement in issues surrounding peace, the environment, poverty, health, human rights and even race gets one labeled as a liberal--even though the Bible clearly emphasizes them.

But younger evangelicals are leading the way. I'm humbled by the passion of these teen and college-age people, many of whom are still politically conservative, but find themselves working with shelters for battered women, boys and girls clubs, urban outreach centers, relief organizations and countless other places that put a human face on the issues.

With the election of Barak Obama, evangelicals of every stripe have a rare opportunity to be directly involved in redemption, restoration and reconciliation. A door has been opened that has been locked for as long as this nation has existed. This man is no messiah, but the act of electing him has shattered the lock on the door, the lock of senseless ethnic division. It would be tragic if, when all is said and done, evangelicals do not have the courage to walk through that door, even if it's in the company of some people they consider unholy. Those who sit back with a damning attitude this time may just damn us all.

One does not have to agree with the Democrats or with this president-elect to recognize the opportunities this election has created for evangelicals to fulfill their calling as salt and light rather than down-trodden malcontents. I really hope those who consider themselves God's people will begin to think that God's plan goes beyond making things so bad in this country that some Republican Reagan Messiah will come back to save us. It would be the most exciting thing to see evangelicals roll up their sleeves and pitch in to work with their neighbors.

At the very least, we could give it a chance.

Brand new video from an unmanned Japanese lunar mission called Selene (moon). Yeah--that's us. The Earth. All of us. Watch it through to the setting and think about how big we really are.

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, and Union University got more than that last week with the demolition of its campus by tornadoes. The news frolics on like a spoiled child, with stories about primaries, baseball scandals and Brittany. But the students and their families are still picking up the pieces at Union. Being at a similar institution makes me feel for them on the one hand and grateful on the other that the winds passed us over, though my eleven-year-old son spent an hour huddled in the hallway of his middle school.



Union has set up a Disaster Relief Fund if anyone would like to give.

Please keep them in your prayers. My father's five sisters and their families live in the area, but all of them were safe.

A couple of weeks ago, at the LAX airport, I was passing through security, all nonchalance. I had my shoes off, my belt off and all my loose change in a pocket of my valise. I've traveled enough to have a nice, tight little drill. I have a place for everything, all planned to a "T," including jacket, shoes, laptop, carry ons, etc. It works like a charm every time.

Only this time, it didn't.

"Bag check!" the security guy at the screening station yelled.

I sailed through the metal detector, no problem.

"Who's bag is this?" a security lady said, hand waving over my smallish piece of luggage, the one I carry with everything in it so I don't have to wait for baggage claim.

"That's mine," I said, curious. I had deliberately taken everything out of it of a bladed nature--even nail clippers.

"Grab your shoes and follow me," she said.

I followed her. As I was tying my shoes, she was going through my stuff. In no time, she had located and pulled out every liquid item among my toiletries--shaving cream, hair gel, deodorant, after-shave, even my contact lens solution--all the makings of that bomb I had been planning over the last 30 years. Busted.

"I'm going to have to take all these," she said to my stunned ears. What kind of absolute bull manure was this? This is someone's idea of keeping the nation safe, confiscating some academic fart's extra-hold orange hair gel? I could feel the heat rising along my hackles, wherever they are.

"Really?"

"Yes. You have to have transparent 3 oz. containers all in a transparent plastic bag separate from everything else."

Is that so they will make a better Molotov cocktail? I wanted to ask, but decided to keep quiet. I shrugged my shoulders. "Okay," I said. She dumped them all unceremoniously into a trash can while I zipped up my now empty kit and took my luggage back, a little lighter than before. I zipped up my fury with it.

And as I walked away, I said to myself, "Someone is going to pay. I'm voting straight Democrat on election night."

A few hundred years before Christ, Aristotle noted that man is a political animal. He was not being unduly sexist. The "master of all those who know" lived in a time when women didn't figure into the process much. Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman in American History to rise so high in the system. That's a lot of pressure.

But it's not the "man" part of Aristotle's claim that is of interest, but the "animal" part. Last night, we walked with the animals and talked with the animals, from CNN to FoxNews to the dried up local stations trying to look like CNN and FoxNews. It was a night unlike any in a very, very long parade of long nights. Last night there was a jailbreak at the national zoo.

Now, I'm not disparaging anyone here. I can't remember when I was so thrilled by the political process. Well, I can. It was 1980, the first time I ever voted. Last night was the first night since that time that I felt my vote really counted for something. Those of you who find politics boring, I'm sorry. Whatever anti-civic parasite got slipped into your brain by the "Dukes of Hazzard" when you were young, you need to be deloused.

Last night something magical happened. As the results from district after district came in, I could see the encrusted walls of a corrupt and bloated regime begin to peel, then to crumble, finally to come down like the one in Berlin. You might ask whether it hurt me, a lifelong Republican, to see this. You bet. But there's hope. The GOP juggernaut, grown hopelessly fat, abusive and greedy in its last decade, needed an enema in the worst possible way. Enemas hurt. Or so I'm led to believe.

As I voted the Democratic ticket, I wasn't voting for anyone in particular. I was voting my anger. As I punched the red button, it had "Eject" written on it.

And "Eject" is exactly what we (yes "we") did. Well done by you, America. You can wake up when you need to. I'm proud of you.

With Rummie finally gone and the followers of Abrahamoff and the teen molesters running for the hills, we are also witnessing a monumental change in the Democratic Party, one that, with the proper encouragement, could actually see an influx of genuine, caring Christians pouring into a vacuum of need. Rejected by the radical right wing of the party, these believers have wandered without a political home. They have reached out finally to the Democrats, and it will be very interesting to see what becomes of men like Jim Webb and Heath Shuler, strong believers whose political menu includes the idea that ethics, social justice and hard work are virtues to be encouraged through legislation, not paid mere lip service to or ridiculed as "liberal."

It will be interesting to see whether the entrenched Democratic leadership, the rabid warriors like Pelosi, Reid, Rangle, Conyers and others, will survive their success. Here's the first prediction that they will not.

Nevertheless, after years of disillusionment, it's just great to see revolution again. Let's just hope we don't repeat the lament of Simon Bolivar and find that, in the end, we have "plowed the sea."

Thanks for the comments here and elsewhere from the last blog. Rather than reply individually, I'll use this entry to add my own thoughts on the poem "The Future of Forestry" by C.S. Lewis. Thanks again to Insometry for bringing the poem to my attention.

Tolkien and Lewis (and other colleagues) were dismayed by the destructive advance of technology. Tolkien voiced his antipathy to this a lot louder than did Lewis. Both of them loved to take walking holidays out in the countryside (how I wish we had something like that today!) The scene in "Shadowlands" in which Jack Lewis didn't seem to know how to handle a phone at a country inn is so far removed from the truth, it was distressing (that was among the least of alterations to Jack Lewis exercised in the film).

Like many who responded, I love those last lines: "So shall a homeless time, though dimly/Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)/A sight of tree-delighted Eden." Very powerful, I think. And I agree that those lines may contain the key to what Lewis may be saying--emphasize "may" since poetic interpretation is often subjective. Some argue that a poet's interpretation of their own work is not necessarily more vaild than someone else's. I wouldn't go that far, but forgive me if I use Lewis' imagination to prompt my own.

I think Lewis may have been suggesting that "contraceptive tarmac" has already stretched over our world--not so much literally as in our consciousness. We are so urban-suburban-techno-obsessed that we don't even realize that the Divine Creation is still there, surrounding us. We are so into our own creations--the things we are busy making and the things that someone else made but that frame and shape our daily lives--that the very concept of the Divine creation has become has sunk to the leve of an old story, a fairy-tale-like reality.

On a more cynical note, the Creation (that shrinking part that is independent of the human intervention derided by Agent Smith in "Matrix") has become merely recreational for us. This is not either implicit or explicit in the poem, it's my addendum). It has been placed in our calendar when we can fit it in, part of the machinery of our existence, no longer the compelling partners of our lives. We engage it on our own terms when we go for a hike or a picnic. And sometimes even then we corrupt it with our machines, taking our I-Pods and radios to blank out the untamed fact of nature.

Maybe I've read too much into it, but the imagery in this poem resonated very deelpy with me because of the many times when I have taken a walk or even gotten out of the car on the way to work and I've been taken by surprise, literally, by the sound of the wind in the trees, by the angle of the sunlight on the flowers or by the song of a bird on the concrete curb. The surprise so so palpable because it's like an invasion into the very fabric of my life which has drifted so far from seeing the hand of God around me, the Life that teems in every nook and crevice. And I feel ashamed for a moment or two that I don't see these things all the time. The shame lasts as long as it takes me to get into the elevator and push the button for my floor. By the time I unlock my office door and fire up the computer, the trail of my sincere and well-meaning thoughts has vanished like the exhaust from my Nissan Frontier.

I really don't mean to sound like a rabid conservationist here. That's not the path I want to take, nor is it where Lewis was going. It's a matter of perception, I think--how we see. I feel the need to have my eyes opened again, like the blind man referenced subtly in the poem. We all stand in need of divine dirt and spittle touching our eyelid so that, when we look again, we can see men as trees walking.

These thoughts are made more profound for me this weekend. I'm writing this from the campus of Pepperdine University, where I am attending the Reel Spirituality Christian film festival and conference. Film has the power to help us see differently. It's sad, in a way, that we use it so rarely for what it may have been created for in the first place.

Insometry quoted part of a poem by C.S. Lewis with the title above, but did not have the whole poem. It is reprinted in Poems (one of Walter Hooper's many editing jobs). I am posting it here because, as Insometry says, the poem probably comments on more than just the prospective loss of trees. And so I'd be interested in hearing what people think. Once again, this is C.S. Lewis, and not me--especially since people seem too frightened (or kind) to comment on my poetry, feel free to comment on Jack's, as he is gone and won't be offended. Actually, this is a terrific piece by him, when not all his poetry is terribly good, in spite of his aching desire to be thought of as a poet. He was jealous of T.S. Eliot in this regard, some say.

The Future of Forestry

How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country's heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac's laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, "What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us."
Then, told by teachers how once from mould
Came growing creatures of lower nature
Able to live and die, though neither
Beast nor man, and around them wreathing
Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight--
Half understanding, their ill-acquainted
Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings
--Trees as men walking, wood-romances
Of goblins stalking in silky green,
Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn's
Collar, pallor in the face of birchgirl.
So shall a homeless time, though dimly
Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)
A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

I have a little theory about this poem, but I'll wait to hear from others. For the curious, apparently a band has named themselves after the title. See Insometry and The Future of Forestry. I don't know anything about them, though.

Pop culture shifts like desert sand. The dunes are always changing but somehow seem the same.

At the Outback (the sad American-Aussie imitation, not the real thing) the other night, our family sat in a snug corner booth. We were dining on the bread and real butter, waiting for the food, and Nicholas, our ten-year-old, said or did something, I don't remember what it was, that prompted his mother to declare, "You must have learned that from your father."

Nicholas denied the influence.

"Ah," I said (in my best faux Master Po voice). "But you have learned many things from me, Grasshopper."

Nicholas, adding his own faux to my faux, fired back, "I don't think I've learned much at all from you, Cricket."

Leslie and I dissolved into helpless laughter. "You so deserved that," Leslie said when she came up for air, wiping tears.

"I don't get it!" Nicholas protested.

Some moments, as we know from our Master Card ads, are priceless.