Year: 2009
Happy Bloomsday
Posted on June 16, 2009 in Milestones Reading
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
, James Joyce, [amazonify]0679722769::text::::Ulysses[/amazonify]
Today is [[Bloomsday]], celebrating the life and work of novelist James Joyce, especially that day in 1904 when the events of his novel [amazonify]0679722769::text::::Ulysses[/amazonify] take place (and on which he met his wife in real life.).
An American Hallmark
Posted on June 14, 2009 in Foreign Relations
I found the reaction of Americans to events in Iran interesting: they seemed sick and hurt that the election had not gone the way that their prognosticators had predicted. “Had to be rigged!” Laughably one of them told me that I didn’t appreciate nuances in the Iranian people — mostly just to say it, I guess. (I have had three Iranian students of differing backgrounds and views plus many friends over the years.) Americans read their own newspapers, watch their own television for information about the rest of the world. They want the world to like them. When it doesn’t, they assume that the results were fixed, that people just aren’t getting the information they need to be converted ((It never occurs to them that maybe the people over there are receiving information that we aren’t getting here? Oh, they’ll say, but it is always just propaganda.)) ((I just got reminded of this story. A Friend (as in Quaker) I know was living down in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinistas. An American peace delegation happened to be visiting on a day when they were holding a barrio meeting. After watching the back and forth for a few hours, an American turned to the Friend and asked her “Did they just do this because we are here?” When we go abroad or watch from our television chairs, it’s the same thing: the world is putting on the show for us. That is why we keep calling some situations wrong.)) . Both conservatives and liberals do this. It’s an American hallmark.
Stitches Out and A Golden Morning
Posted on June 5, 2009 in Dentition Routine Weather
Once through all that, however, everything was pretty much the same as it had been all the years I’d been going to Tustin, California for periodontal work
No Soldiers on a Field
Posted on June 3, 2009 in Abortion Courage & Activism Terrorism Violence War
“They weren’t on the battlefield, but apparently the battlefield’s here.”
Daris Long, father of Private William A. Long
The winding down of the war has made me complacent. I haven’t written about it since October 2007 ((I don’t count the articles I wrote about taking better care of our vets or the video in which I invited the soldiers to come home last November.)) . Military operations still occur in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians die. Soldiers die. Schemes go on behind the scenes to get the oil out while we can. And at home, an angry young man forgot what it means to oppose war.
The shootings committed by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad demand that we people of conscience who oppose war reflect on how we have communicated our message. This is essential: to be a pacifist means making no preparations to kill which hopefully will lead to no killing. Period. Mr. Muhammed obviously prepared to kill: according to the New York Times, police found “several boxes of ammunition and a red duffle bag containing two homemade silencers, binoculars, clothing and medicine.” This leaves me the chicken way out: he obviously wasn’t a pacifist.
But that’s not enough. The word did not get through to him: in a war, the lives of soldiers and civilians are equally important. Antiwar activists protest the deaths of both. To murder in opposition to a conflict makes no sense: the aim of stopping people from dying cannot be achieved by making people expire. Have I failed to do my job as a spokesperson for conscience? Is my silence of the last two years a dereliction of duty?
I think so. For this reason, I shall watch affairs a little more closely. Both the wars and the activities of peace activists shall be my focus when I can get news.
Now I set this challenge to anti-abortion activists: clean your own house. I daresay that you have sinned more than I have. Yet where my first response was to accept this as an act of terrorism and acknowledge the possibility of my influence or failure to express the message, yours was to deny. Shame on you.
To my fellow pacifists and anti-war activists: let’s keep our movement consistent to its principles. We are not soldiers set out on a battlefield: we’re human beings laboring to convince other human beings of justice.
What I said to an anti-abortion activist & other thoughts
Posted on June 2, 2009 in Abortion Courage & Activism Terrorism Violence
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
From my Twitter account (EmperorNorton):
I used to be anti-abortion, but then the hatred that was spoken by the others in the movement became impossible. When I discovered that many anti-abortion people were hostile to my pacifism and my anti-death-penalty stance, plus when I saw the complexity of the issue when it comes to pregnancies and how the anti-abortion movement didn’t acknowledge that abortion might be necessary to save the life of the mother not to mention the cruelty of putting a woman who was raped through an unwanted pregnancy, I shrugged my shoulders and became pro-choice because the anti-abortion movement was clearly not for me. Too absolutist. If there is ever a superior alternative offered without the hateful rhetotic and better answers to the question of rape and life-threatening defects, I will certainly jump on board. But I value and respect the human beings around me. I know that life is a difficult struggle. The anti-abortion movement simply isn’t pro-life enough for my taste.
This article by Frank Schaeffer strikes me as a conscientious statement of the problem with the anti-abortion movement’s rhetoric.
The anti-abortion people who I encounter don’t get the full import of the term “conscience”. They seem to think it means that you have an opinion and you do everything you can — no matter how harmful the rhetoric or the methodology — to achieve that goal. Most draw the line at violence, but nearly every one of them uses language that is so stinging and inflammatory as to incite some of their number to arson, bombing, assault, and murder.
As a pacifist, I have come to appreciate that what I say can be an influence on others. The example of a young man who converted to Islam and then shot a military recruiter was thrown at me. Was I responsible for that? I replied that it was certainly reason for me to pause and examine how I spoke in opposition to the war. Was I demonizing the opposition? Did my words forget that pacifism means avoiding killing ((The way I live my pacifism is this: I do not spend my life preparing for violence. I do not own guns and I do not take courses in martial arts. I seek alternatives to violence, avoid situations where violence might occur.)) ?
When we act from our conscience, we don’t just look at our behavior but the way we influence others. This is where the anti-abortion movement largely fails to be a movement of conscience. To tell the truth, I think it is nothing more for most people than a chit to count against liberals when issues such as the wars, torture, oppression, etc. are raised.
Movements of conscience do not see the opposition as an enemy to be defeated, but as potential converts. So Gandhi persuaded the British to leave India: he did not start a war.
Dream
Posted on May 23, 2009 in Dreams
I’m trying to find my way through a cemetery by reading the tombstones as I drive. Lynn and I end up in a Unitarian-Universalist meeting led by a rabbi who was hired by the minister to lock the doors and turn out the lights. At many points during the service, he stops to check a torn-out piece of yellow notepaper affixed to the frame of a glass door. At the end of the lecture, he pulls out several piles of books which he says will be helpful in our spiritual journey. There’s a stampede of hands for them and the only thing I manage to grab is a thickish text on how to study.
The lone tree and rigging in the mouth
Posted on May 23, 2009 in Body Language Dentition Hikes and Trails Photos
This is a photo ((If you want to see more, visit my photostream.)) I took on my last walk with Drake in the hills. This golden mesa kept attracting my attention but I couldn’t frame it with a wide-angle lense, so I stretched out my zoom to telephoto length. Even then, haze made the picture unpretty, so when I downloaded at home, I put it through an infrared and then a platinum effect plug-in to get the result that you see.
I’ve been quiet mostly because I went into a frenzy of shooting photos before I got a tooth extracted on Wednesday. I’m none too comfortable today — traditionally the most painful because you puff up and stretch the stitches to the breaking point.
Last night I got up the courage to look at what the periodontist had wreaked ((My Twitter friend Felicity said “You only just looked at it tonight? I would have checked it as soon as I got home.” I confess I am a coward and need to get used to the string being there.)) . There’s enough string stretching from tooth to gum to palate (ew!) in there to rig the Pilgrim or The Spirit of Dana Point. I imagine sailors tugging at the lines, changing the direction of the gums, with each pull producing a new, spasm.
This is usual for the third and fourth days, which I am in. Fortunately I was so nonplussed by the pain of the second day that I stopped taking vicodin at all, so I have a store ready to weather the next several hours of misery.
This ship is rounding the Horn. We’ll make the Golden Coast soon.
Where I Have Been
Posted on May 18, 2009 in Daily Life
I’ve been running around taking photos and videos in preparation for my being down for several days following a tooth extraction. Once I get all that uploading done, I’ll resume writing.
In the meantime, you can enjoy my work on Flickr. If you happen to be a member yourself, please feel free to add me as a contact.
Warholized
Posted on May 7, 2009 in Imagery
You know, I always hated the creep. [[Andy Warhol]] that is. Especially after the way he treated [[Edie Sedgwick]].
Swine Flu
Posted on May 1, 2009 in Swine Flu
For the past several days, I have been tweeting against the notion that we were on the verge of a [[pandemic]] on the scale of the 1918 epidemic that killed up to a quarter of the earth’s population at the time. I haven’t heard the rumor that Obama has been spraying an aerosol version of the virus at rock concerts yet, but there are whispers that this is all an attempt by the pharmaceutical companies to cash in on a panic or by the Obama administration to push through the nomination of [[Kathleen Sebelius]] as Health and Human Services Secretary.
As events unfold, I am more convinced that there won’t be a huge flu epidemic here in the USA, not because the potential hasn’t been there but because officials of the WHO and the CDC are being allowed to react to the problem as they are supposed to. A potential Class 5 hurricane of a virus has been spotted in Mexico and this time the government has prepared itself for it.
The name of the game is to keep the numbers down by closing schools when a case is reported and by educating the public. Smaller numbers mean, among other things, less of a strain on stockpiles of the antivirals that have been shown to affect the H1N1 virus. If in six months time, the Right is yelling even louder that this was an overreaction, then Sebelius and the CDC can declare a victory. The epidemic will have been averted.
