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  • The Cowboy Outfit

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    What then is required? Light! Light! Light in floods!

    –Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

    “Hold that thought,” he said, and disappeared into the dark part of the house. The dark part of the house was pretty much the whole house. He had a couple of kerosene lanterns in the living room, but otherwise he was living in complete darkness.

    I thought I heard him going down the stairs with his flashlight into the basement. He always had this flashlight tucked into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He was living like a hermit right in the middle of the city, holed up in his cluttered house and sitting around all day in his pajamas.

    I honestly couldn’t understand what had happened to all my oldest friends, what had gone wrong, but something had, and somehow, through some apparent miracle, I had been spared. I wasn’t the slickest-fielding shortstop in the American League, but I could still find a way to get up in the morning and get myself dressed. I still owned a functioning toothbrush.

    When he finally emerged he was wearing a tan Stetson Range Rider hat, a snap-button western shirt with fancy embroidery, and a pair of cowboy boots made out of what appeared to be the shimmering scales of some sort of exotic fish. I don’t know, maybe it was alligator skin. His pajamas were untidily tucked into the boots.

    “That’s much better,” he said. “I wasn’t hearing you. I’ve got an attention problem lately, and I’ve discovered that sometimes the cowboy outfit helps. So, anyway, I’m sorry: You were saying?”

    I couldn’t remember what I had been saying and told him as much.

    “But I asked you to hold that thought,” he said.

    “I’m not sure there was really a thought there to hold,” I said. “We were just talking casually. Catching up, I guess.”

    “But I sensed you were going somewhere with whatever it was you were saying,” he said. “It seemed like you were on the brink of really getting at the essential truth of the situation.”

    “What situation would that be?” I asked.

    “This situation,” he said. “The situation in general. I sensed you had an agenda.”

    “I don’t know,” I said. “I think you might have been mistaken. I had –I have– no agenda.”

    He shrugged and slumped down onto the couch, and began to absent-mindedly strum his out-of-tune guitar. “I guess that’ll have to work,” he said. “I wish, though, that you had made that clearer before I went to the trouble of rustling up the cowboy outfit.”

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  • Signs of intelligent life

    In another of the many victories for the good guys on Tuesday, all eight members of the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board who had voted to mandate the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the district’s schools were defeated.

    As one voter put it, “Now you have to take our city off the laughing stock list.” And, we can also put them back on the list to get the flu vaccine, should we ever make any.

    As some of you many remember, I once suggested that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution shouldn’t be eligible to get flu vaccine, which after all, is built on the scientific fact of the evolution of viruses.

    So here’s to your health, Dover.

  • Power Outage

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    Gopher Bush supporters have decided they’ll only come out in disguise

    Don’t ask me why, but I made a stop today at Power Line, the blog that supposedly brought down Dan Rather.

    I was looking for their explanation of the St. Paul mayoral election. But despite extensive searching, I couldn’t find one.

    I was talking to another political big shot this morning and she remarked that we hadn’t heard much lately from Mark Kennedy, the Bush/Rove designated Senate candidate who was famous in the last election for comparing Patty Wetterling to Osama bin Laden.

    Could there be a movement, even from the Right, to run away from Bush? Are his candidates keeping a very low profile these days?

    There was a Kelly-stomping stampede in St. Paul last night. I guess Powerline must have thought it was just the sound of random thunder and ignored it. Or maybe they don’t want to stick their heads up on that topic either?

  • On The Air

    I’ve had a few requests to post my commentary which aired at MPR yesterday, but is not archived over there. This isn’t precisely the final cut–sometimes the perfect word on paper just doesn’t work out loud. Actually, that happens a lot. Anyway, here it is:

    Coming around the lake the other day, I noticed there were orange barricades piled along the sidewalk, on medians, in the grass. I guess there had been some kind of event. The wind blew pretty cold, there were walkers and joggers, cyclists in their funny stretch pants, roller skiers making their telltale snick and scratch. Winds out of the Southwest at about ten miles per hour, and there were gusts that sent yellow and brown leaves kiting along through the air.

    I glanced out across Lake Harriet and I felt depressed. In a tight little herd by the boathouse, all the white metal buoys were nestled together like geese, and next to them the overturned tenders with their oars safely stowed somewhere else. A steady beating of whitecaps came against the Northeast shore, and I thought how fun it would be to head on a reach with my little sailboat, the Lucille Clifton, her mainsail pinched against the gusts. But there were no sailboats, and no canoes.

    The park board wants all sailboats off the lake by October 15th. I came off the water four days late. I was reluctant then, as I am reluctant now, to say goodbye–not to the summer, because I welcome fall and winter, each season in its own time. But I grieve the death of the lake. For the next six weeks, it’ll be deserted–no swimmers, no sailors, no buoys, the fishing docks floating like lost space stations. It’ll be a month or more until the ice sets firmly enough to allow the first crackling steps of unleashed dogs, then the sticks and rocks thrown by children, then the children themselves, then finally the parents with the ice skates.

    It’s hard to tell which is a busier time on the lake, mid-summer or mid-winter. Long about August first, there are days when sailboats congest the lake as if it were a parking lot full of circling hotrods. At twilight, as the boats tack back to their buoys, the muskie fisherman come out and troll the shallows, casting their monstrous lures fifty yards at a time. At the Harriet guardhouse, more fishermen sit along the shore in lawnchairs and on pickle buckets, listening to the Twins, keeping an eye on their bobbers. I always see their landing net leaning there against an ash tree. It’s big enough to haul in a healthy teenager.

    As summer simmered down into fall, I couldn’t justify leaving work early enough to sail before sundown. Still, I played hooky once or twice. I brought along a flashlight, in case the wind died and I had a long paddle back to buoy number twenty-one. I’m pretty good at flaking the sails and stowing the jib and battening things down, but not good enough to do it blind.

    The day I came off the water, the wind was flukey. For the last time this year, I cast off the buoy. It was a cool day, a day to remind me that not every windy day is a sailing day. One rogue wind nearly knocked me down, and my jeans were soaked in icy water. But I couldn’t bear to sail her to the landing for the last time. I stayed out, beating upwind, then running downwind, then reaching across, again and again.

    The sun set behind Linden Hills and I finally tacked toward the band-shell, catching a glimpse of the tattered banners atop the buildings. It was getting dark–hard to trailer the Lucille Clifton and take down her rigging. Holding the tiller and the mainsheet in one hand, I got out the flashlight with the other, switched it on to test the batteries, and set it on the deck. A searching wind came hard, the boom came across, and I saw the flashlight tip and roll off the cowling and into the lake. I thought I saw its weak beam spiral down ten feet. And then it was gone, into the green night.

  • I Will Be Kind, I Will Rewind

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    I have a lot of time on my hands, and I recently discovered a new trick with (I like to imagine) some radical implications.

    I’ve always wanted to be either a saint or at the very least some kind of hero, but the older I get the more it looks like I just don’t have the proper makeup to pull it off. I’m not, I’m afraid, made of particularly sturdy stuff. I guess I’ve made my peace with the idea that sainthood and real heroism would be pretty taxing occupations, and all but impossible for a man who really doesn’t much like to leave the house.

    That said, I have resolved to do what I can, and to look for opportunities for small acts of heroism and altruism in solitude. I’ve been experimenting –I can’t sleep– and I’m slowly learning how to pull things back from the past, to rewind time. It’s tedious but gratifying work; editing, really, erasing little bits and pieces of history –a careless phrase or gesture, a rash impulse acted upon, a mistake here, a regret there. It’s sort of like fishing in the past.

    So far I’ve found that I’m limited to no more than twenty seconds at a time, and I can reclaim these moments from every life but my own. Each night I coax brief segments of time through the dark crack at the bottom of my bedroom door, reeling them in at the end of a coil of dental floss that I wrap around my thumb.

    It’s possible that I’ve taken back some of your own time and erased little moments from your memory and life, but you’d likely never know it. As far as I can tell my efforts only manifest themselves in others as amnestic gaps; for some reason I also have been given to understand that these same segments are simultaneously obliterated from the memories of every other person who might have been affected or impacted by whatever it was you might have said or done.

    I’m sure you can see how useful my work might be, and how it might work towards restoring relationships and rebuilding bridges.

    It’s somewhat frustrating, I’ll admit, that the people whose benefactor I am remain anonymous to me. I have brief, almost blinding flashes of recognition; I hear voices and see things, but everything happens at hyper-speed and in reverse, so the effect is very much like trying to make sense of a rapidly rewinding cassette or video tape.

    I keep working at this project, though, and I’d very much like to build up my stamina to the point where I can extend these revisions to longer and longer stretches of time. In the next year I’m hoping to be able to reclaim entire days, and the ultimate goal, of course, is to be able to fine-tune this astonishing process so that I can erase substantial portions of my own life.

    Most of it, in fact.

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  • Intelligent Design Stops at the Kansas Border

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    Hey, Toto, I bet we can fool those Kansas rubes with a story about scarecrows and wizards. Auntie Em will never suspect we were just out behind the barn smoking a fatty.

    It seems the Kansas Board of Education voted today to make Intelligent Design part of the curriculum in Kansas biology classes. Thank God, most of you are saying, we’re not in Kansas.

    I just have a couple of questions. If God really was the intelligent designer, why did he skip Kansas when it came to handing out the intelligence? And, figures made public this week show that American kids are falling even further behind our international competitors when it comes to math and science proficiency. Do you think there’s any reason for that?

  • Unseen Hands

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    What Iowa looked like before genetically engineered corn

    I’ve been hanging out lately with a young economist who’s been making a study of the history of economic thought. The conversation is a bit one sided, because, while I’ve heard of economic philosophers such as Keynes, Mill, Smith, et al., he’s actually read them.

    Sunday night, the conversation turned to the government’s role in economic policy. He told me that, despite all the political bloviation to the contrary, all serious economists past and present, believe the government has a role (and even duty) to influence the market–not just to keep it safe to operate.

    Two stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal make that point today. (Sorry, you’ll have to subscribe to read them, just like I do.) One story made note of the well documented fact that many American drug companies have stopped making vaccines and antibiotics because they can make so much more money making Lipitor and Viagra. So, just when we really need vaccines and antibiotics, there ain’t none. The story, of course, (this is the WSJ, afterall) makes the point that the drug pushers can’t make any money because the government essentially sets the price, for vaccines especially, and it lets people sue the companies for alleged side effects.

    Seems to me these are both easy fixes: indemnify the companies against any good faith mistakes, and since drug companies are, or at least should be in part, in business for the public good, license them sort of like we license broadcasters. In effect, we’ll let you make huge profits on your drugs, but in return, you have to do something for us, and make drugs we need, but the public weal demands be widely available and cheap. (Ok, I was kidding about regulating broadcasters, but you get the point.)

    The second story was that of a farmer in Spain who had spent years developing a special organic variety of corn, only to have it polluted by strains of genetically engineered seed pollen blowing into his field from his neighbors. It is a growing problem, affecting even such American industrial giants as Anheuser Busch, who want to keep their beer making ingredients pure.

    What an apt metaphor for the unregulated spread of all things capitalism.

  • Canadians are coming for your children

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    As soon as I get done kissing you, I’m going to scare some Minnesotans

    You read it in the Strib first. Katherine Kersten tells us today, “A proposal to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman in Minnesota’s Constitution is one of the biggest issues our state will face in the next legislative session.” Never mind education, tax policy, transit, bird flu, foreign terrorism threats, or energy costs, don’t forget it’s the gay married terrorists that are out to kill your way of life.

    I shouldn’t be surprised at anything Katherine Kersten says, but today I have to admit she’s topped herself. As if we didn’t have to worry about all the dangerous Mexicans who want to come here to pick our fruit and clean our houses, now an even more insidious invasion is being fomented in Canada. Nope, health care for all wasn’t bad enough. And they don’t even want to stop at good strong beer. And, if the fact that many of them speak French doesn’t make you afraid, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

    Those goddam Canucks don’t legally descriminate against gay people. They’re going to hell and they want to take your children with them. And who does Kersten hold up at the defender of Canadian (and your) virtue? The Catholic Church. Yup, that Catholic Church–you know the one that’s been hiding pedophile priests for the past several centuries.

    Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary is coming to the Twin Cities this week to tell us all about it. He’s one of the bishops who has threatened Canadian Members of Parliament with denial of communion in retaliation for their votes on gay rights to marriage. As Kersten further quotes him, “Canadians who believe in the historic definition of marriage, who believe that children need a mother and father, are now the legal equivalent of racists.”

    Now that’s not exactly true. But exact truth won’t work, if your object is to scare people and inflame your voting base. What is true is that people who would deny rights to gays are the legal equivalent of people who would deny rights to people of a different skin color. Remember when it was illegal for a white to marry a black? I do.

    If you don’t, have a look at our own 14th Amendment. Minnesota can pass all the anti-gay legislation Kersten and her ilk can scare us into, and some activist judge who can read the U.S. Constitution will just have to strike it down. And won’t the “base” have fun with that? Politics of divisiveness, welcome to Minnesota. You’re welcome here.

    Can we at least ask that the Strib move this preposterous idiot to the Pandering to the Churchgoers page on Saturday, or, at the very least, bury her next to the bitchy gays Claude Peck and Rick Nelson in the Sunday Signature section? Her column’s very presence on the news pages denegrates the efforts of the good reporters and columnists who toil there.

  • Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat

    Our friend Deborah Caulfield Rybak reports today that Garrison Keillor is apparently not interested in renewing his show’s handsome permanent lease at the Fitzgerald Theater. As DCR notes, the reasons are not entirely clear, and both Keillor and MPR chief Bill Kling expertly deflected questions about what might have really gone down. (Kling: Keillor makes his own decisions. Keillor: We gotta keep moving, keep the circulation in our toes.) True enough, a radio program creates its cognitive setting out of thin air, and it can originate from Nanook of the North’s igloo, if that’s where the gods of radio wish to do their work.

    Keillor’s remark that he’d love to take the show to jolly old England for a year strikes me as brilliant–at the international level, Keillor long ago surpassed Bob Dylan and the City of Chicago as Minnesota’s most noteworthy asset. (Oh, near Chicago!–bang bang!) Also, if you love the English language, and especially the printed word, as much as Keillor does, you often wonder just what it would take to pick up and move your whole sordid freak show over the pond to the Old Sod. I’d do it in a heartbeat, just to be able to read the Guardian and Private Eye and the Tattler and Q magazine everyday. Still, Keillor’s life shows several interesting patterns that might be motivating factors . For example, I think he tends to run away rather than fight, and he’s vulnerable to the gripe that there is no honor for a prophet in his own hometown.

    It may also be true that his show deserves a more frenetic, glitzy setting like the Pantages or the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis. (Though maybe not quite ready for Rochester and Morris.) Funny how satisfaction is never permanent, restlessness is the human condition, and Keillor seems to have the old itch to shake the dust off his shoes again. That, or negotiations with MPR have broken down, and this is the nuclear option.

  • Some Final Thoughts On A Fairy Tale

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    Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

    —Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer”

    There are other things besides monkeying around with words that are necessary, require commitment and discipline and all the cooperative powers of the heart and mind, and that are worth doing precisely because they involve risks whose rewards are a form of salvation and intimate, connected immortality, a lasting connection with living memory.

    It’s all a question of who, precisely, you want to be known and remembered by, and how.

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