the vote
I have waited to vote until tomorrow. It seems traditional to me and I like being a traditionalist. Anyway I heard it took 20 or 30 minutes to wait in line to vote early and that is about all it has ever taken me to vote the old-fashioned way.
Probably I am going to be up late Tuesday night waiting to know what happens. The pollsters say we are split right down the middle and there are only a few who are still undecided.
Is there anyone who can really see both sides of this? Personally, I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly hold opinions different from my own. I have many friends who I know are voting for Bush. I have to assume they are either deceived or confused.
yard signs
You may have read that Texas congressional districts were redrawn for this election in an unusual move that tended to favor Republicans. As it happens the district I live in now pits two incumbents against one another - Pete Sessions and Martin Frost. Neither one of them was the congressman for this area last term.
What surprises me are the yard signs this race has generated. It seems that practially every other house has a yard sign. And not just those 18-inch wide signs. Lots of folks have BIG signs - mini billboards - in their yards. Driving down the street I feel like they are yelling at me.
The signs for the two congressman far outnumber the yard signs for the presidential race. That may be because there is not much doubt who is going to win the presidential vote around here. From what I can tell the congressional race is somewhat closer. By my informal count the Frost signs seem to have a slight edge in numbers. It could be that his supporters are putting out an extra number of signs just in case. After all Sessions was accused in an earlier race of stealing his opponents signs.
one thousand american flags
On my way to visit my mother Saturday these flags caught my eye in a park in Corsicana. I pulled over and got out with my camera. It was impossible to get the full effect. I counted 25 rows and 40 columns.
A young woman straightening the flags said her mother had organized the event and directed me to a van parked under a shade tree where I found the organizer eating a sandwich. She said the flags are to fly from September 11 through November 11 to commemorate those who fell on 911. I never did fully understand the significance of the number one thousand. However I believe it does happen to be about how many American soldiers have fallen in Iraq to date, so I am posting the picture here as a reminder of that.
i remember ronald reagan
One of my favorite things in high school was working on the school newspaper. It was fun trying to put words together to make a story but creative writing was out of the question for me. It was hard for me to drag anything personal out of myself but a lot easier to be a reporter of events. Most of the time I was assigned to report on sports, which was really something I knew little or nothing about. I scarcely even knew the rules for most of the games. I guess I was what today you would call a geek. I probably would have stayed at home if I hadn't had to write about the game, so being a reporter helped me get out of my shell and participate in events a little.
I don't know how it came about but one day our journalism teacher told me that she had selected me and my classmate Jenny to go to a press conference for Ronald Reagan. He was in town to speak at a fundraising dinner and had invited high school students to participate in the press conference. He was not the president yet; I think he was running for governor. I knew him from TV as the announcer on Death Valley Days, advertising "20 Mule Team Borax."
I wore my suit for the event and Jenny was wearing high heels. I remember the heels because they made her taller than me and I felt self-conscious walking next to her. We had press passes which allowed us into a small room where we sat around a table with Reagan at one end. There were a couple dozen reporters and we were the only high school students there. I can't remember any of the questions; they were probably about defense and taxes and things that kind of went over my head at that time. Toward the end he looked at us and asked specifically if we wanted to ask anything but neither Jenny or I had anything to ask. I had thought about questions ahead of time but I was too awestruck to speak up. He was the first famous person I had ever met. Afterwards he shook our hands and I got an autograph. We didn't get to go to the dinner or hear his speech.
It's become a cliche to say this but I was impressed by how warm and personable he was. Like a kindly grandfather or your favorite uncle. For me at that age what Reagan said on political issues made sense. The way he explained things made the solutions to problems seem so reasonable. I was attracted to the libertarian school of thought, which still influences a lot of my opinions. I had also just read Ayn Rand which had impressed me a great deal. Later in college my opinions changed considerably and by the time Reagan was president there was not much we would have agreed on.
For a while I dreamed of becoming a newspaper reporter. I called on the local paper to see about a summer job there but they told me they only hired children of employees or friends. In college I worked on the newspaper briefly. It was actually a smaller staff than my high school paper and run by a small clique. I quit after a semester and that was the end of my reporting career.
it wasn't just invented by hallmark
So this is how Mother's Day originated.
the passion
Despite my misgivings we went to see the Passion movie yesterday. It was not at all the movie I was expecting. From the opening scene it seemed both surreal and mythic. It did not so much tell a story as it put together images that you recognized from film and art and from hearing and reading about it a thousand times. If a viewer did not already know the story the film might not even have made sense. There was never any explanation of how Jesus came to be where he was. But we all do know the story so it didn’t have to be told. It is one of the central myths of our culture.
Partly because of the subtitles I suppose it reminded me of a silent movie. Often the actors seemed to be posing in familiar tableaux like you would see in a wax museum. It really conveyed a mood of an ancient and familiar story being retold.
Strangely the violence did not bother me all that much. It was so extreme that it no longer seemed real. In fact I felt oddly detached and unmoved by the whole film. Not everyone in the audience felt that way however. I heard more than a few people in the audience sobbing or gasping.
I came to the conclusion that it was less anti-semitic than I had expected but more so than it could have been. The story from the first telling was anti-semitic. The early Christians tried to ally themselves with the authorities by portraying the Jews as a common enemy. Because of that it is necessary to bend over backwards to remove that taint from the myth. Gibson actually does insert several extra-biblical scenes in the film that help with this. There are scenes of Jews speaking up for Jesus, offering him water, and so on. But then he portrays the Jewish authorities as practically rabid. I wish there had been more explanation for their behavior.
The characters that most of the audience are likely to identify with are Pilate and his wife, who come across as educated, upper-class liberals. The Romans in their day occupied a similar position in their world as Americans do in our own time. I could easily picture Pilate as the American governor of an occupied country, weighing the life of one man against his own goals. And in another added scene Mrs Pilate offers clean towels to Mary. They seemed just like the father and mother on Joan of Arcadia, one of the TV sitcoms I watch.
One of the best parts of the film is the portrayal of Mary, always in the crowd and following Jesus as he carried the cross. I particularly liked the flashbacks with her in them, one where she runs to catch the falling baby Jesus and another where she is laughing with the carpenter Jesus. Juxtaposed against her in the crowd was Satan which provided an element of good versus evil.
bisextile day
As predicted we woke up to a morning of heavy rainfall. Listening to NPR in bed I learned a new word. Look it up.
Several weeks ago we bought advance tickets to the "Passion" movie for this afternoon. Someone from our church was organizing a group expedition there. At the time I hadn't yet heard about the amount of violence in the movie. Now I am feeling a little squeamish. If I am able to sit through it I may offer up a few comments later.
terrorist alert
This morning a headline in the Christian Science Monitor happened to catch my eye. That's how I came to find out that nine months ago the government uncovered a huge terrorist plot just down the Interstate from me in Tyler, Texas:
Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature."Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."
What is so amazing is that there has been no mention of any of this on the local news, or the national news for that matter. This in spite of the fact that the news is full of terrorist talk every day, and we were subjected to another alert over the holidays about some vague threat.
Here is a guy caught red-handed with bombs and it is not worthy of a news report? Could it be because he is a white-supremacist and not a Muslim?
UPDATE: David Niewart has been covering this story for some time. I especially reccommend his article on Marketing Terrorism. I'm glad it's getting some attention.
are you a closet canadian?
Apparently I am, according to my results on a test I found at Dave Pollard's site. Results are plotted on a grid similar to the one for the Political Compass test. It has been used to compare the social values of Canadians and Americans. I am not surprised that there are lots of differences. Pollard writes about the results of the research:
The median scores for Americans tend slightly to the upper left, far more deferential to tradition and authority, and with a more status-conscious, competitive, survival & security bent than their neighbours to the North. Canadians are more skeptical of authority and tradition (men especially), and more idealistic and consensus-seeking (women especially).
Take the test yourself and see where you fit on the grid. I am way down deep in the lower right corner.
chocolate - health food?
This morning as is my usual Saturday morning custom I was listening to People's Pharmacy on my local NPR station. The topic was chocolate as a health food (unfortunately People's Pharmacy does not have on-line transcripts).
Dan actually wrote a little about this awhile back, focusing mainly on cocoa drinks. I was concerned then about the amount of fat in chocolate, but new research shows that the fat in cocoa butter may actually be good for you, like some fish fats and olive oil.
The flavonoids in chocolate are antioxidants. The darker the chocolate the better it is. And of course the less sugar also. Making cocoa from scratch is better than the instant, mainly because you can control the amount of sugar.
Even Dean Ornish was quoted on NPR as favoring chocolate snacks. The recommended dosage is about an ounce a day, taken between meals. And contrary to what your mother always told you it turns out that it is good to take a snack before meals - it ruins your appetite. If you're trying to loses weight, isn't that exactly what you want?
One cautionary note though: It does seem that some of the research on this was funded by the candymaker Mars.
I think I can see a new book in the making - the chocolate diet book. And the Times has already written about the appreciation of fine chocolates as the next gastronomic fad.
neighborhood story
You could easily think that there is nothing worth preserving about this neighborhood. It has no historic value. There are similar ones all around the city. It is just a unremarkable collection of small 60-year-old cottages originally built for working-class families that happens to be surrounded on three sides by big estates that cost twenty times as much or more. Still, a few years ago for a brief period a handful of people thought it was worth trying to keep it as it was.
For years the neighborhood changed slowly. When a house changed hands new owners would modernize the kitchen or add on a master bedroom suite or a family room. When we moved here ten years ago some of the houses were still in the hands of original owners. Most people knew their neighbors. They borrowed each others tools and looked out for each others kids. There was a small-town or country feel to the place even though it was in the city.
Then something gradually started to be different. New houses started to go up on the few remaining vacant lots and when they were filled up old houses started to get torn down to make way for new ones. These houses were much bigger. They filled their lots to such an extent there was scarcely room for a tree. Instead of a porch swing and rose bushes in front they presented a row of garage doors and a paved driveway.
At first we thought nobody would buy these houses and the developers would soon give up and go away. But that did not happen. A few people recognized that these changes would destroy the small-town feel of the place and decided to try to do something about it. They took over the moribund neighborhood association and tried to rally the neighborhood to their side. They began to publish a newsletter to advocate their point of view and to hold meetings. Legally there was nothing to be done since the neighborhood was developed piecemeal and had no restrictions other than regular city codes. But they believed that if everyone in the neighborhood shared their values and stuck together they could prevent the changes from taking over. They passed around petitions and presented them to builders.
From the beginning you could see that it was not going to work. There were a lot of people at the meetings but afterward they would shake their heads and say “Yes, it’s a shame, but everyone should have the right to do as they want with their own property.” Besides they might soon be able to sell out at a handsome profit and move on anyway.
Someone at least was threatened. There arose an alternative neighborhood newsletter, published anonymously, which satirized the association leaders and went so far as to name “tacky yard of the month” awards.
In the end of course they failed. All of the leaders have sold out and moved away. In a final act of bitterness they formally dissolved the neighborhood association and mailed the charter back to the state. One woman even sold her property to a developer. The house going up there now looks as if it may turn out to be one of the ugliest.
Read what others have to say about "preserving place" at Ecotone.
mahatma
I can't let today go by without mentioning that it is the 135th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. Under the Fire Star has lots of information and links.
perplexed
Here is something I've never been able to understand. How can someone love plants and nature and gardening while at the same time supporting public policies that are harmful to the environment?
I've wondered about this many times but last night I wondered again, after listening to a fellow gardener who had been a guest at the Bush ranch gushing about the president's interest in nature and his expressed desire to know the name of every plant. I've heard before about the special environmental features of his house and the native plants in his garden. Perhaps some of that can be attributed to trendiness, but still it's a good trend and there are plenty of others who have not adopted it.
I've never met Mr. Bush and I have no idea how much of his interest is genuine, but I've met lots of other people with the same apparent conflict. People with lovely gardens (which they work in themselves) and an apparent interest in nature, but who support drilling and logging in national parks and see environmental regulations as just an enfringement on property rights or an obstruction to more profits.
If you enjoy something wouldn't you be opposed to forces that would destroy it? I know I am not good in seeing things from another's point of view, but I just can't see how his interest can run very deep.
quote for the day
Paul Krugman, in an interview with Kevin Drum:
... what really, really scares me, even though I can't write about it all the time, is the environment. That's more important than anything.
labor day
Most of us tend to forget what Labor Day is all about. After all we are all professionals and managers now. It's popular to think of unions as a refuge for slackers and grafters. Right.
At least Joel has a good essay up about it. Go read it.
eviscerating the clean air act
The Bush administration is about to change the rules of the Clean Air Act to allow thousands of older industrial plants to upgrade without having to install new air pollution equipment.
Current rules require installation of pollution control equipment whenever plant owners undertake anything more than "routine maintenance." The new rule will allow plant owners to spend as much as 20 percent of the cost of replacing production equipment before they have to install new controls.
Quoting Katherine Q. Seelye via Common Dreams:
The exemption would let industrial plants continue to emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere and could save the companies millions, if not billions, of dollars in pollution equipment costs, even if they increase the amounts of pollutants they emit.
The old rule has long been opposed by industry. This is just one more example of the White House changing the regulations to benefit its friends.
the dean strategy
There has been some interesting posts at Off-the-Kuff and at CalPundit regarding the presidential campaign strategy of Howard Dean. Charles Kuffner at Off-the-Kuff compares it to bridge strategy and makes a pretty nice argument that events could turn it into a long-shot winning hand. At least it sounded convincing to someone like me who has never played bridge. If I understand his argument correctly, he is saying the Dems have such a bad hand that they have to play for the long shot. Dean is betting that enough bad news will start to come out of the Iraqi occupation and hindsight on the war that public opinion will start to turn, and then he will be seen as the only candidate who took the right position from the start.
There is still a lot that could happen before a candidate has to be chosen so I guess it is good to have that base covered. I'm glad all the Dems are not betting on the same strategy. Mostly I have liked what Dean has had to say, except I have been bothered by the squabbling with Kerry. That doesn't seem necessary to me.
the silencing of dissent
This story about Chris Hedges being booed off the stage while giving a commencement address really depressed me. I keep expecting to hear that it was not students but Republican dirty tricksters. Then I saw the one about the Dixie Chicks being booed again yesterday at an awards ceremony. I thought that was already over.
UPDATE: Steve Bates also suspects dirty tricks may have been involved in the Chris Hedges scene.
killer d's
If you are not from Texas you may not have heard about the Democrat lawmakers who are hiding out in Ardmore, OK, in order to prevent the Texas legislature from achieving a quorum and voting on a redistricting plan put forth by Tom Delay. There are others who can tell the story better than me, so read Charles Kuffner's posts at the Political State Report and also on his own site. You can read more about it here and of course you need to read Molly Ivin's comments.
top gun
Better writers than me, including Aziz Poonawalla and Joe Conason have already reviewed the recent remake of Top Gun.
mayoral election
There's a new weblog called The Burnt Orange Report and a couple days back it had a pretty good post about the Dallas mayoral election coming up.
I live in North Dallas and I find it surprising the amount of support Laura Miller has here in what I think of as a Republican stronghold. As in the special election last fall, there are a huge number of yard signs for her. As a councilwoman and as a reporter before that she opposed the big business projects previous mayors were known for. As a candidate she campaigned instead on improving the services that average citizens really need. Why can't that strategy work at higher levels of government as well?
hiding my head in the sand
Over the weekend I received a couple of emails containing the Transcript of Tim Robbins Speech to the National Press Club, along with a plea to pass it on to everyone in my mail directory.
I have been really avoiding the war ever since it started. I've never really been into watching the so-called news programs on TV. But at least I used to listen to NPR on my morning commute and read the NY Times headlines via the Internet. But over the past few weeks I've mostly given that up too in favor of playing CD's in the car and reading mystery novels.
Generally I don't hear much discussion of the war from friends or relatives either. Not a soul mentioned it at family gatherings over Easter. Nor have I heard much talk of it at the office, although I do see a lot of people checking out CNN and MSNBC as I walk down the rows of cubicles.
I guess I am just inclined to hope that it all fades back to normal soon. Things are not going the way I would have liked. But fighting against it is also not the future I would will for myself. I don't really want to be into politics. I would rather tend my garden.
Abraham Lincoln and the Mexican War
I got to thinking about the reference Howard Dean made about Abraham Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican War. Having gone through public schools in Texas I was required to take Texas History in the sixth grade and then again to graduate high school, so I have a vague recollection of studying the Mexican War, but I did not remember anything about the role of Abraham Lincoln.
So I went googling and found a couple of resources to refresh my memory. This report discusses Lincoln’s opposition and this one gives more information about the war itself. This last document also reminded me that opposition to the Mexican War was what prompted Henry David Thoreau to refuse to pay his taxes, for which he was jailed. He wrote the essay Civil Disobedience while in jail which became the basis for the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Dallas women bare all against war
Can't think of any comment so just check out the picture.
the war
Remember when Bush campaigned as a "uniter, not a divider?" That seems really ironic when you look at how badly he has performed in uniting the international community behind his agenda. Check this article and also this one. I think that the damage Mr. Bush is doing with our relationship with the rest of the world will far outweigh any slight advantage in security we may gain from Saddam's elimination.
For those of us who opposed the war the question is, what should we do now that the war is inevitable? I really like this response from Howard Dean. In fact the more I see and read about Dean the better I like him.
