Bye to Blogger

For those interested in these Wordsmith posts, you'll have to go to Typepad. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll send you there.

Bob

Riding the Blau Donau (The Blue Danube)

The missus and my trip to Eastern Europe was one I've anticipated for a long time. I think mostly because I've been fascinated with Austria, the Danube, Vienna (a skyline shot is above), the Strauss family, Mozart for a long, long time. But I discovered other sites that made the trip darned interesting. I'll be brief here, and share the highlights. First, we arrived in Munich on November 4th - voting day in the U.S. It took a day or so, but the President-elect's picture was everywhere. I'm still wondering why the overwhelming fascination. Maybe it would have been the same if John McCain had won - I don't know. More likely, I suppose, the world was breathing a sigh of relief that the current administration's tenure would soon be over. Poor Bush. I think he's probably a nice fellow, and there were elements of sincerity and that common touch the U.S. so admires in his eight years. He just wasn't presidential caliber, and the fellows behind the scenes took too many liberties with the man's authority. But I digress. Actually all my dreams came true in one day in Vienna. We docked near the Innere Strasse. Despite an intestinal plague, we had a fine meal, managed a drive to one of Vienna's gilded palaces, aka the Old Stock Exchange, to hear a chamber orchestra play an hour of Mozart and Strauss. One of the most splendid music performances I've ever experienced, sick or no. But before that we had visited a little known city in the Czech Republic, Cesky Krumlov, a quaint place on the Vltava River (picture below). Our next stop was Budapest, a city one could wander for a month without losing interest. Sadly, we had only a few hours there. (A picture of the Hungarian Parliament - on the Danube's banks - follows.) Finally, just as we were getting into the rhythm of touring mode, we came to our last port of call, Bratislava, in Slovakia. It's THE urban center of that nation, but more quaint than Vienna or Budapest. It reminds a bit of Paris, the old, romantic arrondissements (below, a pair of street scenes near the Danube.) I'm still digesting the experience, of course, and there's much, much more to tell than blog interest likely allows. What I discovered from this experience is how vital that area of Europe has grown since their Soviet overlords backed away. The people are proud of their nations, their cities, their accomplishments of the last decade or so. Their enthusiasm is innocent and yet infectious - we couldn't help but be excited for/with them. I likely won't make such a trip again - it's too hard on these bones of mine, but I still recommend taking such a boat ride. History - at least the locales where it took place - are best experienced first-hand.

Patience, Please

You loyal readers of these humble posts, please have patience - -the Missus and I'll be celebrating completion of my MLA degree with a ride down the Danube, so expect a post just prior to December. Such get-outta-the-rut trips are great for perspective, so I might have some fun insights to share when we return. Until then, Miz Hawks or Master Frauenfelder can keep your juices flowing when you're not curled up in the Barcalounger with a good book. Have fun, Gridley

Keepin' It Real

Fact One: A cousin of mine, and his wife, just returned from a visit to Wisconsin. After gasoline prices rose to $5 per gallon in some places, my folks lucked out and paid no more than $2.91 per gal. Petroleum was over $150 per barrel a month ago, and now it's below $70 per barrel. Fact Two: The stock market, real estate values, and credit have tanked, but the Social Security seems on steroids by comparison. Fact Three: I had a colonoscopy today, and no polyps or other nasties were found. A friend of mine - and some thirteen years younger - had the same invasive fun a month ago. His doctor found a cancerous tumor. Fact Four: The Boston Red Sox pulled out another miracle win - down 7-1, they won 8-7 - the biggest postseason turnaround in baseball history - while Joe Torre (formerly of the regal NY Yanks, now of the equally elite LA Dodgers) dropped an embarrassing series to the blue-collar Phillies. Fact Five: U.S. voters seem more enthralled by social and political dirt than the issues that keep them working, well-fed, and healthy. Fact Six: The International Monetary Fund (IMF), formerly U.S.-controlled turf, is now leading the way through our current financial meltdown via Europeans. Fact Seven: Josh Brolin's portrayal of George W. Bush seems more humanly realistic than the poor man (W) seems as I watch him on TV. NOTE: I'll try to keep this post from being any more of a political rant than it is already, but I'm not promising. The impact on readers of these facts - despite one's political, social, or economic point of view - will likely be one of frustration. Or anger. Or the urge to denial. But this is where the best qualities of art and entertainment come in. Sports bare the human qualities of planning, cooperation, endurance - these qualities necessary to prevail in times of challenge. And sports allow us a relatively safe emotional outlet for the frustrations that accompany change in other arenas of life. Not coincidentally, what we see through sports at the moment, it the durability of blue-collar grit over the rule of show-me-the-money elitism.

Art serves the same human needs, but in a different way. Through its process of mimesis, art colors "real" life, exaggerates it, contextualizes it in a way that allows us to re-experience it, to see it anew, without the blankness of boredom and overexposure. As such, art is as neutral a thing as "real" life itself, but it affords us a view of its foibles and strengths - without preconceptions and biases.  So what does the future hold for us (and here I mean all seven billion atoms of Humanity)? The bare-naked truth of of it is: Whatever we choose. Change, too, is a neutral thing. But it's real. The angst-ridden human state of "How do I cope with change?" is a dream state of too-many options. This dream state is where the worst of political life leads - to constant yammering about the best approach to life, without a roadmap of how to get there. But politics should be a means to an end - that end being a secure, rewarding life for all - not the ideological oneupmanship we've persisted in obsessing over, this state serving only our personal and tribal egos.

Home

I’ve been wondering lately about the impact of home on us all. And I’m using the word in an all-encompassing sense here: the building—apartment, house, condo—whatever it is we call home. But I also mean the more transcendental sense of the word, i.e., what constitutes a home for us. Homes are much in the news lately, what with the mortgage implosion. And the question talking heads natter about these past two weeks is two-pronged: How did those of us wishing to buy a place allow ourselves to be talked into a mortgage we couldn’t pay for? Beyond that, why did the loan companies and banks allow it to happen? The economic answer is an extremely complex one, but that’s not my meat today. I’m simply wondering at the phenomenon of home, at the near-mystical qualities we assign it. The novel I’m writing has much to do with home. Germans and Soviets, as WWII loomed, thought enough of their homelands to die defending them. In researching the war prior to writing, I read a number of memoirs of these soldiers, and found that home was constantly on their minds. Home being family, friends, countryfolk. Also being a place with which to identify. But being away from it always seemed to create the darkest sense of void for these poor men and women. If I were an argumentative soul, I’d ask why folks don’t simply pick up and move when someone wants their land? I’d ask why we in the U.S., perhaps people of all shapes, sizes and places find it so compelling to stay in one locale, to lay claim to it, raise families there and die there. This question is particularly pertinent to me, because I grew up in a military family in the fifties and sixties. Our life was one of constant travel, meeting new people, living in exotic places. It had its rigors, but we looked forward to it. Then, during the late sixties and early seventies, the world suddenly seemed awash with peripatetic people. One would see hippies walking the roads of Tibet, India, Morocco, anywhere the door was halfway ajar. The catchword of the time for these people was “one-worlders,” citizens, not of a nation or a city, but of the world. Maybe these people were harbingers of something that won’t come to fruition for another hundred years, but they seemed to have shed the notion of home, of the specialness of place. But as I blinked, the one-world music seemed to have stopped, everyone scrambling for a chair. Travel is expensive now, I realize, what with four-dollar gasoline, but “cocooning” had become a phenomenon before the petro-mongers ran us out of our cars, SUVs and trucks. We found we could experience the world vicariously, via cell phones, the Internet, cable TV, all fed by a network of little Sputniks beeping their way around the world. Still, I keep wondering why the draw to a place when our interests take us so far afield. I haven’t given this as much thought as it deserves, but I think the urge to “place” has a lot to do with the most basic elements of the human experience. Familiarity seems at the emotional root of it. There’s something comforting, despite our innate restlessness, about a place we’re continually occupying. Everything else we might name—the people, the mountains or seashore, the weather—all these things seem to revolve about a desire for familiarity. In a more metaphysical (I hate that word, but it seems to work here) sense, I think what we’re all about is identity. For some reason, we find it had to define ourselves as individuals. You know the joke: Who are you? I’m a doctor. No, that’s your profession. Who are you? I’m a husband and a father. No, those are relationships you maintain. Who are you? I’m a good person. No, you’re describing an acquired quality. Who are you? The insistent question goes on and on until the hapless interviewee gets irate or dunks her head in the punch bowl in order to get away from you. Still, the question’s hard to answer, isn’t it? And because we find that question so hard to answer from an inner vector, we keep looking for the answer in outward ways. And place seems to be the constant draw. In the most primitive sense, we find protection in place. We find physical and emotional nourishment there. Being bound by our habits, we stay there, become nearly as rooted as trees and cabbage. Earth to earth, dust to dust, and all that. Now today, millions of people world-wide are finding that sense of self threatened by the confoundingly dumb way our financial institutions have de-managed themselves. What will come of it? I’m the last person you should ask, but I choose to assume the financial world will right itself, mortgages will be made reasonable, people will wipe away their tears and sweat and continue living as they choose. But maybe—just maybe—we’ll allow this trauma to upset us to the point that we finally answer the hardest question, Who are you? If we can do that, then Nepal will be little different from Home, U.S.A.

Even after four hours of back-aching yard work building a barbecue pit in back of our house, I seem to still have enough moxie to yield to passion (...no, not that kind). I follow my pal Dave Frauenfender's blog, Breakfast With Pandora, "religiously," and I respect his thought and his ability to express it in words. That's why I took a while tonight to post a response to his latest entry on "Magical Thinking." I don't see my post as an argument contrary to his - it is, I think, an effort to extend his argument. You can read his and mine on Pandora, but I thought it worthwhile to post my response here as well. Readers, judge for yourselves: Personally, I don't have a problem at all with people believing something beyond the senses exists - after all, I remember a quote from Buckminster Fuller to the effect that some 95% of 20th Century's scientifically demonstrated reality exists (macro and micro) beyond the normal range of the senses. And I'm not really concerned that humanity continues to anthropomorphize what remains undiscovered beyond our sensory capacities. What I do have a problem with is people like Bush and Palin who insist that this quality transcendental to demonstrable reality tells them to do things. Doubly so when national leaders allow such sensibilities to sway their thinking. When "exclusivity thinking" of this sort trumps a rational secular approach to life (whether in leaders or not), it always seems to lead to "I'm the chosen of the chosen ones, and you're not," leading to "You must come to your senses and accept my version of things," leading to war, genocide and, since the 20th Century, the possibility of MAD (mutually assured destruction). This is what the ongoing development of a secular reality is all about - to preempt religious and spiritual exclusivity with values and qualities that can be accepted universally. To me, secular reality yields the love, respect, cooperation, and other values that seem to get lost in a hierarchical world of faith in things that one may or may not be realistically attuned to. That Palin seems to think human efforts will fail or pale without her version of people's being "right with God" can be (at the very least) self-deceiving without some sort of limitation on how that belief leads her to act. That Bush seems to think he has divine sanction to wage war is little different from bin Laden's nihilism. And both his and Palin's approach to religious-belief-in-politics seems to tacitly demonstrate that this world isn't worth its salt - that the only sense of reality worth accepting is their favored, nebulous one beyond this world. To me, that seems a recipe for wholesale social and planetary destruction.

Fascist Style

I'm taking a history course this semester - auditing it, actually - and tonight's lecture was on the "style" of fascism in pre-WWII Italy. The term and the subject matter took me aback. This so-called style had to do with the subliminal messages used to promote the emotional content of the fascist "ethic". The idea was to fold in a cup of emotional appeal for ancient times with a heaping tablespoon of traditional values and, through the use of ultra-modern technology or contemporary art, bake (or half-bake - your choice) a futuristic pie that could be had today! The image at the top of this post is of the fasces, (in Mussolini's arms) that was meant to be an emotional connection to the glories of ancient Rome. In 1930s Italy, surreal art appeared-for instance-in the form of Mussolini's face painted in gigantic proportions on the side of a building, or in sculpture, such as this profile piece: And Italy developed a style of architecture that used shapes to evoke ancient Rome, such as in the below image, meant to simulate the Colossuem: Naturally, any dictator's image would be incomplete without an image of the glorious leader in warrior pose: As I took in the pictures presented in class, I saw eerie reflections of cultural styles in our own U.S. of A. The images I present here give only a sketchy idea of what was available in fascist Italy, but if readers are interested in looking deeper into this breathtaking subject, Google it, or visit your library, and send me your reflections.

The Subterranean Truth Of Art

I spend a good bit of time at my computer working on writing - which runs from emails to creative projects to schoolwork. I've noticed that creative writing (and I suppose my other key-tapping efforts benefit from this) is a lot like I imagine acting to be. That is, I've had to learn to emote - perhaps in a slightly exaggerated form, as befits acting - in order to define characters I write about or make up, and to present them through their actions and dialogue. So here I often sit, spewing supercharged emotions, even after the writing's done for the day. But I can't turn off the emoting as easily as I can shut down my computer. So my wife, my friends, neighbors, even cell phone-clutching SUV drivers on the freeway- i.e. everyone I meet- gets to feel the brunt of these creative juices during my daily "cool down" period, and sometimes long after. My dear wife is generally okay with that; she has an artistic sensibility, and easily gets into the flow with me. Sometimes I'm too much even for her, which means I probably confound friends and neighbors with what seems erratic behavior, if not a latent bipolar disorder. One way I spin down that energy is by walking - up to four miles a day around a small, local lake. Or through carpentry. Or yardwork. Or weightlifting. But sometimes, when my muse has injected my soul with too much muse-spiration, even these things don't let me put creativity to rest. On my walks of late, I've started wearing my iPod, listening to downloaded music, college lectures, languages, and such. For me, the music option is best. The rhythms, the emotional content of the music, these act as lightning rods for my creative juice - they put me back in my own body. Soon, I'm walking in time with the tunes. The more intense the music, the faster I go...well, up to a point...I'm not eighteen any more. The music colors the way I see the world around my lake: if it's brutally hot, some cool jazz will make me seem in the midst of sea breezes on a California beach. If its gloomy, the air fouled with dust and pollution from lack of rain, my day brightens with some good-time music. Recently I pulled out an album by Kenny Rankin, a great song stylist with a masterful voice. This album of Rankin's , Silver Morning, was a hot item back in the seventies. It covered a couple of Beatles tunes and showcased a facile voice that must command a four if not a five octave range. Soon I found myself searching iTunes for more of his stuff. He has a new album out - I say new - 2004, I think - it's named A Song For You, and on it he styles on jazz and pop standards. Yesterday, before I walked the lake , I found myself in a gloomy funk. I've been writing about a real-life character, a soldier/pilot who fought for Germany on WWII's Eastern Front. Naturally, I've climbed in the emotional saddle with him, and as he wears down under the stress of war, so do I - hence my bluesy funk. But this funk proved a nasty one - durable and deep. At the lake, I slid my iPod dial to Rankin's new album, pressed play, and began to walk. The second cut on the album is called Where Do You Start - about someone splitting from their romantic partner, the pair trying to cope emotionally as they divide up their belongings. My funk had little or nothing to do with a break-up, of course. But just like Rankin's song character, I wanted to find a way out of this moody morass I was in. As I dug into the song's story, began to feel what the character, the song's writer, and Rankin were feeling with respect to that piece of music, my mood began to bleed away. Halfway around the lake, I felt purged. This, I realized, is catharsis. The Greeks felt the process, named it, and passed it on through the ages. They urged emotional release through drama, maybe through related songs as well. So now I'm wondering, not about the creative process as much as about its nature. Is there really some underlying and unifying impulse to creativity, something that allows me to use writing to sense the emotions of a real German pilot, to pass that emotion along to my future readers? Is there some abstracted, subterranean sensitivity that knows when I've delved too deeply into the drama of my "arty" life and can use someone else's creativity to help me purge? If so, there's a lot more to life - and to art - than I ever imagined.

Will It be Change...Or Will It Be Change?

As the Democratic National Convention gets under way this week, I began to think about the direction in which our country might be taken by either candidate – John McCain or Barack Obama. As a writer, I’ve been put on the spot by my fellow writer Lyn Hawks (thank you Madam Hawks), about the direction a person of a given cultural orientation should take in one’s writing. Specifically: Should a writer’s personal experience dictate an audience or subject matter? Work with me here – there are connections between these two subjects. First a disclaimer. I’m not - or ever will be – a political prognosticator or a visionary concerning social evolution – I came to the game a bit too late for my writing to be that grand. The really good writers are historically supposed to be visionaries of a sort – not limited by practicalities or history. And writers of the gifted sort have often been able to dance through life’s landmines and present, in the form of stories, a view of where humanity is headed. This has often taken the form of presenting fantasy scenarios of the future in which the writer gives us a good idea of where not to go. I’m thinking especially of J.M. Coetzee and Cormack McCarthy. These two modern writers have given us rather unsettling snapshots of the apocalypse that might face us, should we take such-and-such a road to the future. Still, writers do give us a sense of the future, as Joseph Conrad did in Heart of Darkness, and as writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have done in plumbing modern issues concerning thought, language, and meaning. Predictably enough, these same issues keep cropping up in modern politics. In an era in which ideology trumps food, land, even oil, when the big political enchiladas of the world – I’m thinking here of China, Russia, the U.S., and the Common Market nations - can no longer get away with imposing themselves on the rest of the world through military or economic force, there’s still this crazy thing called imperialism. Today, the power guys’ imperialism is, then, in a word, ideology. But the big problem with ideology as a form of imperialism is that people are basically conservative. Religion, politics, and economic structures all conflate to ideology. The way that comes down to us Joes and Janes Lunch-bucket leaves little room for improvisation or social evolution. In fact, the more our assumed ideologies are threatened, the more we dig in their heels. So what do we do when real, significant social, political, or economic change is necessary? Revolution has been the solution for the past couple hundred years. Think Jean Paul Marat and Vladimir Lenin, but also think Martin Luther and Milton Friedman. Ideology leaves little room for orchestrating gentle change. Right now, academics and politicians, religious leaders and writers, all think in terms of multiculturalism, of sharing ethnic values across the board, perhaps ending in some global blending that would make Woodstock Nation proud. But, as Michel Foucault made plain, we still think of such issues in terms of power: Revolution. Magnetic personalities. The human drama we assume accompanies grand, necessary change. So what we’ll likely see from Obama and McCain will continue to be the need to cast themselves as larger than life in the run-up to the elections. And of course, each one’s opponent will try his damndest to shoot holes in the other’s larger-than-life image. And the remarkable thing is, we’ll aid and abet in both the inflation of personality and the deconstruction. Why? Because, while we viscerally recognize the need for change one or the other of these men might represent (in the form of a grandiose leader/parent/savior), none of us is ever all that comfortable with change in general. And so we begin again, circling through the loop of idealistic promises, then begetting a deconstruction of those promises, which begets more of the same, but wearing a new pair of shoes. Finally some muse-inspired writer, hacking away at his or her computer, will eventually state the obvious (and here I’m making another stab at Miz Hawks’ dilemma - another way in, if you will): make reality-defining change for yourself, and don’t get too much in the way when others begin doing the same thing.

Baseball, Friendships, and Moving On

I've been unfaithful to baseball this summer. My antidote to the South's summer swelter has always been sweet iced tea, watermelon, vine ripe tomatoes with my supper, and baseball. When I lived in Atlanta, I attended Braves games infrequently, but I always managed to watch them on TV or listen to games on the radio. I knew the players - the lineups remained stable for many years and, besides knowing their stats by heart, I tended to think of the players and coaches as members of my extended family. Then my summers began to experience a streak of sadness. The player rosters shifted all too often. The teams had salary caps, meaning highly desirable players had to be traded to stay on budget. The Braves were sold to Time Warner, who found paying for baseball, our national pastime, a non-cost effective proposition. Now I look at the box scores in the paper and hardly recognize a name. Moving to Asheville, here in the North Carolina Mountains, didn't help much. My wife and I quickly discovered the Asheville Tourists, a Class A farm team to the Colorado Rockies. The games are more intimate in a smaller stadium, the fans more colorful, the games more exciting, as former college and high school standouts fumbled their way toward Big League skills. Vendors served us cheap baseball food, beer, and cola in our six-dollar seats. Still, the favorite players disappeared at a steady pace, moving to AA or Triple A, some all the way to the Rockies. The price of seats is rising steadily, and the team's new owner has installed one of those Big League scoreboards - the kind that invariably diverts your attention from the real reason to be there - the game and its subtleties. It's much the same with friendships. Many of us move around as we grow up, take jobs, change careers, and retire to quieter spots and more peaceful lifestyles. My wife decries the loss of friendships, the difficult process of making new ones in late (ahem) middle age, and so do I. To counter that angst, I've made the effort to renew or maintain friendships with high school and college pals, professional colleagues, and friends made in other venues of life. Telephone calls and e-mails help recharge those friendships to some degree, but they don't replace being with old friends in person, and on a regular basis. We've made a few friends here - my wife through her weaving and local social activities, I though my writing and a late-blooming academic life. Sadly, though, friendships don't happen as spontaneously now as at age twenty-one. For some reason, we're more cautious about allowing new people into our lives. Friendships, like modern baseball, means moving on, I suppose. We never deny ourselves opportunities for change, but we have a visceral need for constancy. I still yearn to watch the Braves, to know all their players, but the modern game doesn't allow that. I want to keep the Tourist players here forever, but that would be at the expense of their dreams of baseball glory. I often want to return to my halcyon days, with my various coterie of friends, but they've changed, moved away, and so have I. Somehow we need to strike a balance between change and constancy. Too much change is disorienting, and constancy can lead to a dull, life-robbing existence. How we do balance things is an individual matter, certainly, but the need for both is something we all share.

Rain

One of the most talked about subjects here in the drought-stricken mountains of North Carolina these days is rain. Or more specifically, water. Development is growing here as people flee Atlanta, Charlotte, and the big cities of the north. Western North Carolina, or WNC as the newspapers call it, isn't all that different from other areas in its manner of providing for our water consumption; we get our water from lake reservoirs and rivers. The main difference here from, say Atlanta, is that the water here is exceptionally pure. We don't allow recreational use of most of our lake reservoirs, and so far our rivers are far cleaner than Atlanta's Chattahoochee River. Water resources are obviously linked to rainfall, and that's another difference between WNC and other localities. The mountains here generate micro-climates. Sometimes it can be five degrees cooler where I live than twenty miles south at the regional airport. This also means rain might fall regularly here while a town a few miles away may be experiencing an exceptional drought. Meanwhile, Duke University is gathering rainfall data on the mountain ridges in an attempt to more accurately predict rain in these micro-climates. If Duke makes a breakthrough here, we can expect more location-specific weather reports. Despite Duke's efforts, though, rainfall patterns will surely remain as whimsically unpredictable as ever over the long haul. Which means we'll never know which area will be replete with water at a given time and which won't. Economic development in such remote areas as WNC may be the challenge of the future. Not only because we're slowly abandoning the big cities for idyllic spots like Asheville, where I live, but because such modern migrations and the economic structure it takes to accommodate these restless movements likely won't take the time to consider our long-term need for water. Clearly, we don't live at the beck and call of nature anymore - we've chosen to live independently of nature. We have heating and air conditioning to take away summer heat and the frosty winds of winter. We're able to obtain foods from distant locales, foods we couldn't possibly grow here. Yet we still suffer when rain deserts us. So what will we do, as world population approaches ten billion, to reconcile our constant need for water, which ultimately means predictable rain? I don't have the answer to that, other than to pose a few questions: Are we willing anymore to accommodate nature and its constantly changing patterns? If so, to what degree will we "tolerate" nature? Perhaps we aren't willing anymore to adapt to changes in the natural world. If that's so, will we be compelled to take our technology into space, build cities on astral rocks, and create our own climates? Whether the answer is a simple, pragmatic one or ridiculously cosmic, it'll require that humans become more aware in general. Despite our growing freedom from natural extremes -thank you technology-we'll still have to adapt to some degree as nature pressures our technologically based world. And that means, ultimately, staying awake to rainfall - where it is, and how we use it.

Responsibility

Over the past few days, I've been corresponding with an old high school pal, one of the few with whom I've kept touch. My blog bio speaks roughly to my personal history, and his is not dissimilar. He had a military father, followed those footsteps for a short time, and then entered into civilian public service. He's a staunch southern conservative (feel free to read into that what you will), and I'm sort of a mix. I tend to be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, although the end result of my decisions in both areas tend to be rather muddy. So,while being lifelong friends, we're both combative and competitive. We're both retired from our careers now, and he spends a lot of time - as I do - before his computer. And with a national election drawing near, it hasn't been surprising that he's passing along some of the many conservative blog entries castigating Barack Obama. I try simply to grit my teeth at these, but our combative history always drags me into contentious emails with him. Now, don't get me wrong, I have my own concerns with Obama, as I do with McCain, but Charlie always has a way of appealing to the urge in me to take sides. So as I threw that first counterpunch back at my pal, I had to wonder: Are we doing something constructive here? U.S. national politics has always been the stuff of ideological and verbal fisticuffs - even degenerating into physical bouts in our Congress' early history. But are we, I began to wonder, using such contentiousness as a tool to resolve national problems, or are we avoiding social responsibility by indulging in such scrapes? I'm a sometimes-fan of political columnist David Brooks. Just yesterday, I read a column - surely written with the China Olympics in mind- concerning the national import of "rugged individualism" versus "national harmony." These are dangerously vague catch phrases, to be sure. But what Brooks had in mind, boiled down, is this: Are societies that value the rights of individuals (read: U.S.A.) better off than those that put first the needs and rights of the nation as a whole (read: China)? If we look only at these two societies (which is to make the comparison overly simplistic) we see a U.S. in danger of waning in its world-wide influence, and China, still politically Communist, emerging materially. Russia has always straddled that divide, and so it's interesting to read from the writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's recently deceased man of letters - and who has lived in both the U.S. and Russia - that we in the U.S. have taken the rights of the individual past the point of being a constructive element of our national well-being. As I began to think about these political conflicts with my old pal, it occurred that what we were doing was finding something in the personalities of McCain or Obama that we could relate to as individuals. Then we sought to find in the other candidate something to reflect our own personal weaknesses. And with this done, it seems that - if Charlie and I were to magnify our contentiousness to the national level- what we would be seeing was a nation, its people obsessed with trying to project their individual personalities onto the rest of the nation. What these mental gyrations of ours come down to is this:are we able, in a responsible manner, to solve national problems through the workings of this so-called "cult of personality?" Can we use these dynamics to resolve healthcare, Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements? From such combativeness do we resolve economic issues, such as our ballooning national deficit, food shortages and costs, the rising cost of fuel and transportation? Or do we have to quiet our personal voices - just a little- so we can talk responsibly about these issues, perhaps in so doing give a little more of ourselves to the good of the nation? The jury seems out as yet on these questions. But let's take a hard look at what transpires in what's left of the run-up to our national election. Maybe we'll find that such contentiousness leads to solutions. Or maybe we'll discover we need to do a little paring on our personalities for a positive national harmony to emerge.

Heroes and Such

This is the kickoff weekend for Olympics 2008, which brings to mind the idea of heroes. My pal Dave, who blogs at Breakfast With Pandora, having recently run a half-marathon, has one sort of hero in mind, and with appropriate respect for Dave, I have another. To me a hero is something of a servant, a person who reaches beyond the ordinary to accomplish a thing for others. In war, a hero might be one who risks his/her well-being to save the lives of others or to minimize risk to them. In an unusual circumstance of ordinary life, a hero might keep a plane from being hijacked. But in the most normal of circumstances, a hero might stop and help an elderly person change a flat tire. Or work unselfishly to better the lives of his or her family. So how is it that Olympic athletes become heroes? Athletes excel at some physical skill, perhaps by natural gifts, maybe by unusual personal drive and dedication. We couch potatoes and athletic wannabes see the end result. We cheer because we see these athletes as doing things we can't do - for us. And this is why it's a travesty that the Olympics are so wrapped up in nationalism. Yes, these athletes are heroes to their nations, but it's misplaced recognition to play national anthems at their awards ceremonies. Isn't it enough to place them on a pedestal for a moment, take photos and films for posterity, and award medals? Heroism is an odd phenomenon - it's individual effort that happens in a moment, but is commemorated forever. Let's not continue to taint the moment of such a person by nationalistic meddling.