Category: Arts & culture

Altoona, Iowa, to Auburn, Indiana

Carol had to do some business last night after I went to bed, so I got up before her and went to the truck stop restaurant next to our motel to buy a protein-filled and fat-filled breakfast of bacon and eggs. While I ate, I read The Des Moines Register. The 90 point headline proclaimed: “A BANNER DAY FOR GAY RIGHTS”. Three quarters of the front page was devoted to articles on Monday’s Supreme Court rulings. Four of the inside pages, and half the editorial page, were devoted to gay marriage. The Des Moines Register made sure to point out the important role Iowa has played in the recognition of equal marriage rights:

“In 2009, Iowa became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage, when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated equal rights embedded in the state constitution.

“The Iowa case, Varnum v. Brien, helped pave the way for Wednesday’s Supreme Court decisions, said Randall Wilson, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa.

“It was only after (Varnum) that we saw that opinion was starting to change around much of the country,” Wilson said. “And it’s the Iowa tradition of being on the forefront of civil rights.”

It was so green in Iowa! I couldn’t get over how green the gently rolling hills looked as we drove through the Iowa landscape. The trees were astonishingly green; the grass by the side of the road, although it showed just a little bit of summer gold, was green; the corn, not quite knee-high, filled the cultivated fields with deep green; the soybeans were green; everything looked green except for the occasional white farm house, silver silo, gray-brown weatherbeaten and collapsing barn, and the white cement roadway stretching in front of us. The great drought of the past few years is over; and the open water standing in the bare, low corners of the fields showed that an excess of rain, while making everything green, has given the farmers the opposite problem: wet and flooded fields.

We decided to stop in Iowa City to buy lunch at the coop. We didn’t know where the coop was, nor if there even was one any more; when we made this trip in the opposite direction ten years ago, we thought that there would be a coop in a college town, and we navigated to it by instinct; but now Carol just consulted her phone, which gave the address and phone number of the coop. We decided to call the coop for directions, and a nice young man asked if we were coming from the east or the west, and then told Carol to take exit 249. Exit 249 was a good five miles east of the main Iowa City exit, but we took it anyway, thinking that a polite young man who worked at the coop would have local knowledge that we should take advantage of. The directions he gave us had us drive in on Rochester Avenue and turn left on Jefferson, but we discovered that Jefferson paralleled Rochester. We gave up on the directions. By instinct, we found the Unitarian Universalist church, and parked beside it. New Pioneer Food Coop was just behind the church parking lot; this was not unexpected, since fifty years ago there were many Unitarian Universalists were involved in helping to start food coops.

We stocked up on lunch food at the coop, and then drove to the next Iowa rest stop, where we ate at a shaded picnic table, while watching clouds building up to the north. The clouds kept building as we drove through Illinois and then entered Chicagoland, the vast sprawling mix of suburbia, industry, and occasional fields of corn and soybeans that extends nearly halfway across Illinois from Chicago itself. It was nearly rush hour. Traffic started getting heavy, and the drivers started getting more aggressive and ruder. We thought of pulling off the highway and eating dinner somewhere. We took the exit to Minooka, Illinois. There was nothing in Minooka; nothing, that is, except for sprawling housing developments with big stone gates inscribed with the name of the housing development. One development was called Indian Ridge; the name was a blatant lie, for the Indians had all been killed off in the Blackhawk War of the 1830s, and this particular housing development stood on a particularly flat stretch of ground.

We gave up finding food in Minooka, and braved Chicagoland rush hour. Chicagoland was so soul-suckingly dreary that we drove clear through to Chesterton, Indiana, where we stopped to have dinner at a Round the Clock restaurant, where our waitress called us “sweetie,” and where we had free wifi and apple pie.

By now it was dark, and we drove through intermittent rain and darkness until at last we reached Auburn, Indiana. We had hoped my sister could drive up an meet us here for breakfast, but she came down with Clostridium difficile, one of those very unpleasant illnesses which makes you want to stay close to home, and which makes your friends and relatives choose not to visit you just in case you forget the sterilization protocols. We decided to wave to her from here: Hi, Jean!

Sidney, Nebraska, to Altoona, Illinois

We left Sidney, Nebraska, at about ten in the morning. Our first stop was the Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park out side North Platte, Nebraska. Buffalo Bill’s house was set up the way I remember historical houses being set up when I was a child, with no influence from the cadre of trained museum professionals. No trained museum professional would have a life-sized mannequin dressed as Buffalo Bill greeting you from the parlor on the right as you entered the door of the house; no trained museum professional would have a slightly moth-eaten buffalo head hanging in one of the horse stalls in the barn; no trained museum professional would let you wander around in the hay loft without any signs explaining exactly what you were seeing. We ate lunch at some picnic tables in the shade of tall trees, within sight of four young buffalo the state arranges to have living in a pen a hundred yards from Buffalo Bill’s house. The entire state historical park was utterly delightful, and I got the sense that Buffalo Bill’s ghost (if he has one) must like the whole arrangement very much.

We tried to stop for dinner in Lincoln, Nebraska, but got lost, and finally just grabbed a cup of coffee and a sandwich to go at a bookstore that seemed to sell more tchotchkes and coffee and snacks than books.

As we drove further, everything began looking so very green. It is not green this time of year in California, it is brown. And the air began to feel humid. We were approaching the midwest.

We stopped again at the Pottawattamie rest area in Iowa. From a display on the wall, I learned about the 200 foot high loess hills of Iowa, amongst which the rest area was sited, and which are a geographical marvel. I found a mulberry tree which, by the evidence of the stains on the sidewalk, had dropped all its ripe fruit. Carol found something that looked like blueberries, though the plant was a definite tree, and the leaves didn’t quite look like blueberry leaves:

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But the rest area attendant assured her that he and the local FedEx delivery man ate lots of the fruit, so Carol did, too. What a great rest area — a geology lesson, fruit for the picking, a clean and pleasant rest area, with free wifi to boot — and it made me think that Iowa must be an enlightened state, to treat passing strangers as honored guests. Somehow this reminded me that Iowa is one of the states that ratified same-sex marriage. Then Carol got email from one of the people with whom she sells solar panel leases: the Supreme Court struck down Prop 8, and same sex marriage is now legal in California.*

Then we drove and drove until we reached Altoona. And here we are, late at night, in another Motel 6.

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*Though the BBC Web site reports that “the San Francisco appeals court has said it will wait at least 25 days before allowing same-sex marriages to resume in California.” But that delay means I will be back in California in time to perform weddings — Amy, the senior minister at the Palo Alto church, and I have talked about doing free weddings for anyone of any gender who wants one, probably on the first day that they are allowed. More on this as the situation develops….

Finding a new direction

Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union (my union!), published an edited conversation she had with Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. Horovitz is one of the more interesting people out there trying to make the world more humane for workers, so it’s an interesting, albeit short, conversation. Here’s one interesting comment by Alperovitz from this conversation:

“I come out of liberalism. That whole movement is largely over — and that needs to be said. I say that with one caution: they’re holding the line in certain areas, importantly, against a lot of pain. But it’s not the way of the future. It’s a decaying and dying system of politics. It needs to be said.”

This is an important critique for religious liberals to think about, because (for better or worse) religious liberalism has tied its wagon to the horse of political liberalism. Like political liberals, religious liberals favor social tolerance (not a bad thing) coupled with a highly regulated form of consumer capitalism. But liberalism, whether religious or political, seems unable to move forward in the face of global climate change and an increasingly exploitative economic system. This is not to diminish the efforts of political liberalism or religious liberalism, for both forms of liberalism are striving mightily to keep us from moving backwards into worse exploitation, and moving backwards into global climate disaster. But we’re in a place in history where just holding steady is not going to be good enough.

Speaking of political liberalism, Alperovitz says, “A whole new direction needs to grow” — a new direction that is not conservatism, nor that offshoot of conservatism, libertarianism. But neither Alperovitz nor Horowitz can yet say what that new direction will be. I think this is true for religious liberalism as well — what we’re doing now isn’t moving us forward, we don’t want to go back to dogmatic religion, nor do we want that offshoot of dogmatic religion, individualistic religion. But what our new direction will be is not clear to me.

What squirrels want

As we walked past the little plum tree this morning, heading towards the car to drive to the church, Carol pointed to the ripe plums that lay on the ground. “The squirrels have been getting to them,” she said.

“You know what I’m going to say,” I said.

“What?” she said, somewhat warily.

“Squirrels just want to have plums,” I said.*

Despite herself, Carol laughed.

We got into the car, and she began singing, “And squirrels they want to have plu–ums / Oh, squirrels just want to have plums….”

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*If you were lucky enough to miss the popular music of the 1980s, that’s a reference to a 1983 hit song, with vaguely feminist lyrics, performed by Cyndi Lauper.

Have Yourself a Buy Nothing Christmas

Yes, it’s not too early to start planning for Christmas. More specifically, it’s not too early to start planning if you want to have a Buy Nothing Christmas. A bunch of Canadian Mennonites have been promoting this concept through this Web site, and this Facebook page.

I like them because they’re not afraid to tell the truth about Christmas consumption as they see it, yet they’re not sanctimonious about it. And they play ukuleles in the snow. And they have funny posters.

Geez, how did I miss this?

Geez magazine: Holy Mischief in an Age of Fast Faith — they’ve been around since 2005, and how could I have not heard of them before? Maybe because they’re Canadian, and even though I’m a Canadiophile, there’s enormous cultural resistance here in the States which tends to prevent the in-migration of culture from north of the border. All kinds of good things to read, including stories and blog posts like Reduce, reuse, repent: Earth Day tent revival — A dash of cold water for Christian anarchism — Choice and capitalism: A lesson from ecological Marxism.

Good stuff. You might want to check it out. And thanks, James, for turning me on to Geez.

The story of the two wolves

Since some of you like tracing first references of things, I want to alert you to an interesting development in the comments thread of a recent post. Amanda posted a comment in which she said she had been powerfully moved by the native American story of the two wolves, a good one and a bad one, who are fighting; the one you feed the most is the one who wins the fight. I like that story, too, and Amanda’s comment got me wondering which Native people the story came from; the earliest printed reference I could find for the story was a 1964 book on Christian prayer which attributed the story to the Mohave people; in that version, it’s two dogs who are fighting, not two wolves. Then Erp got in the act, and found the story in a 1914 Bible commentary, where the story was attributed to “an Indian.”

Now I’m really interested in this question. If you can find an earlier printed reference to the story, I’ll send you a fair trade chocolate bar, in addition to which you get bragging rights.

And thanks, Amanda, for starting us off on this interesting quest.

Reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Yesterday I finally finished reading James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I can’t remember when I started reading the Life of Johnson, but it was probably during the 1990s. I bought a used copy of a paperback edition, which I believe I found at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and that edition is a 1987 reprint; so I must have begun reading after 1987. And I was obsessed with eighteenth century New England history during the 1990s; reading Boswell’s account of one of the most interesting lives of mid-eighteenth century London fit right in with that obsession. So it has taken me about two decades to finally finish reading all 1,400 pages of the book.

I made pretty good progress at the start: as I recall, I read the first third of the book in a few weeks; this part of the book takes place before Boswell actually met Johnson, and it takes the form, more or less, of a narrative. But after this first third of the book, my progress slowed. I would read two or three of Johnson’s conversations, as recorded by Boswell, and I’d have to pause — pause to appreciate the beauty of the language, and to think about what Johnson said. A page of my handwritten notes remains between pages 986 and 987 of the paperback, and I copied out this passage in full:

[Sat. 25 June 1763]

After having given credit to reports of his [Johnson’s] bigotry, I was agreeably surprized when he expressed the following very liberal sentiment, which has the additional value of obviating an objection to our holy religion, founded upon the discordant tenets of Christians themselves: ‘For my part, Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.’

Rereading this, I can see why I thought it worthwhile to copy this out by hand.

Johnson was prone to fits of melancholy — today we would probably call him depressive, an unlikable and clinical word — and on this same page of notes I copied out this brief passage: Continue reading “Reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson”

Maker Faire and lobsters

Carol and I went to Maker Faire today. It was held just a couple of miles away in San Mateo, so we were able to walk there — which was good, because so many people attended that some of the parking lots were four miles away from the event. If you’ve never heard of it, Maker Faire is kind of like a state or county agricultural fair for geeks and engineers.

We saw the gee-whiz showy things you’d expect to see at Maker Faire: strange metal constructions that belched fire; all kinds of robots; people riding around inside giant self-propelled cupcakes; a Rube Goldberg-style giant mousetrap powered by simple machines and a bowling ball; the CO2 eruptions that happen when you drop Mentos into carbonated beverages. My favorite gee-whiz showy thing was the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir, an art car covered with fish and lobsters that danced in carefully choreographed movements:

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And we saw the geeky technical things you’d expect to see at Maker Faire: conventional automobiles converted to electric power; too many projects made with Arduino microcontrollers; robots; drones; giant soap bubbles; a blacksmith; ham radio operators.

We also saw things that you might not expect at Maker faire: goats; chickens; beekeepers; a guy selling New-Agey devices to protect you from EMF radiation; a steam-powered scale-model train; lessons on how to walk on stilts; a really good drummer who used plastic trash barrels and other found objects for his drum set.

It was very satisfying, if for no other reason than being able to spend time hanging out with thousands of other geeky people who like to make things instead of consuming things.

Update: Because a commenter asked, here’s a video (taken by Carol) of the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir:

A time of growing cruelty

In a recent post on her blog, Alice Walker writes about how the FBI has called Assata Shakur a terrorist. At one point in the post, Walker, being a poet, diverges from commentary on current events into a meditation on the prevalence of cruelty in the United States today:

“What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live….”

In recent months, I’ve been trying to understand why I feel there is something morally unsound in our society recently — and yes, I know that every era thinks their time is morally unsound. But every era does have its own particular moral unsoundness, and I think Walker is on to something: our time is a time when we are increasingly tolerant of cruelty, even amused by cruelty.