Explanation:  Today's blog disturbs even me... so I decided to begin with the first picture I got this morning.  It's one of many seed clusters hanging from a tree near the Plaza de Panama where I went this morning for a lecture on the subject of Orientalism in art and culture. I found the other pictures of pictures at the San Diego Museum of Art. Some of those seem to fit my theme and my mood today.

IMAGINED HISTORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES

The problem for some Americans and especially for too many American politicians is that their imagined histories and geographies often don’t correspond to the realities of the populations and places they represent. When they speak on the Senate or House of Representative floors, politicians who experience disconnect between the real and their imagined America sound very much like the “Hollow Men” in T.S. Eliot’s poem by that name.   

This week the House of Representatives with its Republican majority cut billions of dollars from the food stamp program, ignoring the reality that 47 million Americans live in poverty. The 210 votes of Democrats weren’t enough to counter the 214 votes of Republicans determined to end the food stamp program which was designed to address the plight of the poorest American citizens who are living without adequate food.  What in the world are those who voted against the program thinking?  It is clear that they are not thinking about the reality of hunger in America.  Do they not know about the hungry children in their own districts?  Do they know... and knowing not care?  What does it say about them... and about us as a nation?

I am guessing they have replaced reality with imagined images of the people they represent as if they were all living in the kinds of surroundings to which politicians go on their fund-raising forays in their districts. They have forgotten the disturbing vulgarity of poverty and replaced it with an imagined landscape that looks like the pretty parks and monuments they are invited to dedicate. 

The obscenity of a pervasive hatred of government that characterizes the Tea Party, especially Tea Party Representatives whose employment is paid for by government, is palpable and should not be excused.  Excusing this obscenity happens either because of gross ignorance of the reality of poverty and the damage it does especially to children or a knowing immoral disregard for those who simply cannot take care of themselves.  Love of country, not the imagined nation but the real one, isn’t demonstrated by a carefully placed flag lapel pin but by real programs that meet real needs of real people.  

You’ll find T.S. Eliot’s poem following the pictures in today’s BLOG.  It is my hope and my firm belief that the the final four lines of the poem need not be a picture of the American democracy.

"Lion Devorant un Lapin" by Eugene Delacroix

"A Village Scene" by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot

"Theseus Slaying the Minotaur" by Antoine-Louis Barye 

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

            A penny for the Old Guy

                       I

    We are the hollow men

    We are the stuffed men

    Leaning together

    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    Our dried voices, when

    We whisper together

    Are quiet and meaningless

    As wind in dry grass

    Or rats' feet over broken glass

    In our dry cellar

    

    Shape without form, shade without colour,

    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

    

    Those who have crossed

    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

    Remember us-if at all-not as lost

    Violent souls, but only

    As the hollow men

    The stuffed men.

    

                              II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

    In death's dream kingdom

    These do not appear:

    There, the eyes are

    Sunlight on a broken column

    There, is a tree swinging

    And voices are

    In the wind's singing

    More distant and more solemn

    Than a fading star.

    

    Let me be no nearer

    In death's dream kingdom

    Let me also wear

    Such deliberate disguises

    Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

    In a field

    Behaving as the wind behaves

    No nearer-

    

    Not that final meeting

    In the twilight kingdom

    

                   III

    This is the dead land

    This is cactus land

    Here the stone images

    Are raised, here they receive

    The supplication of a dead man's hand

    Under the twinkle of a fading star.

    

    Is it like this

    In death's other kingdom

    Waking alone

    At the hour when we are

    Trembling with tenderness

    Lips that would kiss

    Form prayers to broken stone.

    

                     IV

    The eyes are not here

    There are no eyes here

    In this valley of dying stars

    In this hollow valley

    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

    

    In this last of meeting places

    We grope together

    And avoid speech

    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

    

    Sightless, unless

    The eyes reappear

    As the perpetual star

    Multifoliate rose

    Of death's twilight kingdom

    The hope only

    Of empty men.

    

                           V

    Here we go round the prickly pear

    Prickly pear prickly pear

    Here we go round the prickly pear

    At five o'clock in the morning.

    

    Between the idea

    And the reality

    Between the motion

    And the act

    Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom

    

    Between the conception

    And the creation

    Between the emotion

    And the response

    Falls the Shadow

                                   Life is very long

    

    Between the desire

    And the spasm

    Between the potency

    And the existence

    Between the essence

    And the descent

    Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom

    

    For Thine is

    Life is

    For Thine is the

    

    This is the way the world ends

    This is the way the world ends

    This is the way the world ends

    Not with a bang but a whimper.

Taking a break today from political thinking, I went to the zoo with a friend... and came away feeling that I had made friends with mama and papa panda.  Their baby stayed almost out of sight at the very top of a tall tree.

I like bamboo. My pictures of this ubiquitous, special kind of grass have little connection with the subject of my writing today. The attention of the world was drawn this week to yet another tragedy caused by a mentally ill person with a gun... 

Aaron Alexis killed himself and a dozen other people.  He was known to have been mentally ill. Aaron Alexis bought a gun from a gun shop.  It was easy for him to get the gun because the National Rifle Association makes certain that just about anybody who wants just about any kind of gun for any purpose can get it.  Actually, the majority of American citizens are in favor of reasonable gun control, but the National Rifle Association buys American legislators to ensure that no federal law gets passed that might inhibit the manufacture, sale, and use of guns.  

The leadership of the NRA and all but the dullest-witted legislators know and ignore statistics that should cause any reasonably intelligent and morally honest individual to rush to establish laws that would bring some control to the proliferation of guns in America.  All of them know that mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. A report from the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the National Institutes of Health, estimates that 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.  This translates to 57.7 million people in the United States.  Obviously, not all persons suffering from a mental disorder are a threat or a danger to others.  Persons suffering from mental illness need and deserve appropriate treatment.  Our bought-and-paid-for legislators know that health care systems in America are woefully underfunded, so many unwell people, including many suffering from mental illness, cannot afford to pay for health care; so their illnesses go untreated. 

Aaron Alexis was not an evil man.  He was sick.  Illness is a condition.  Illness isn’t evil. People are evil if they know exactly what should be done to make people healthier and the world safer for everybody but fail to do it.

The Future is Now...

Once each month at the Civic Center in downtown San Diego the dream of American citizenship becomes a reality for as many as a thousand people.  I was there today, and so were ten high school seniors and their teacher... and a bunch of other seniors of the tribe to which I belong... retired people who believe American democracy is worth preserving for all generations that follow ours. The young seniors and their teacher and we older seniors had come to the plaza outside the Civic Center to assist people as they filled out the forms that will give them the opportunity to exercise the primary right of citizens in a democracy, the right to vote. 

After our registration work was done and we were getting ready to leave the plaza,  another group of people came to claim another right of citizens in a free democracy.  They know they are allowed under the law to assemble peacefully in a public place to object to a proposal to close the government facility where they are employed. 

Spring Soup for the Soul

Spring Soup for the Soul

from “Stucco Visions” by Aliki Roussin-Croney

The photographic images I caught with my camera today had primed me to do some writing, perhaps to attempt a poem that might express the mystery of circles... but at the end of the day I studied a familiar painting by the Greek-born Aliki Roussin from her series which she calls “Stucco Visions," and I decided to save the writing about circles for another day.  The painting that I have admired since I first saw it a couple of years ago is appropriately called Spring Soup for the Soul. Roussin-Croney’s painting is done with a medium much more like stucco than oil.  I’ve decided to pair it with a photograph I took  of Swiss Chard a few days ago in a community garden in Yachats, Oregon. The picture of chard could go by the same name: Spring Soup for the Soul.  I’ve thrown in the circular images just for the heck of it...

HOME AGAIN...  It’s true that some things don’t make sense... no matter how hard we try to find meaning in them.  I got all the way home today without taking a single picture, which, given my photo du jour  habit that borders on compulsion, doesn’t usually happen... doesn’t make sense.  We started the drive home at eight o’clock this morning in Woodland, just north and west of Sacramento.  Eight hours later we pulled into our garage.  A perfect end to a perfect trip... except for my having neglected today to stop along I-5 to snap the picture that I had intended to get of the dry gullies and hills north of Kettleman City.  I settled for something more familiar... at home.  We have a bookcase where, along with books, we keep what some people would call “souvenirs” from a lifetime of journeys.  They are more than nick-nacks, much more important than souvenirs, though I guess that’s what they are.  They are reminders...  

For today’s picture I decided to get something from home, so I took aim at a ceramic horse that became part of our household when we lived in Singapore and later came to live with us in The States.  It actually has little value.  It’s not from the Tang Dynasty, or the Ming or even the Ching Dynasty which extends all the way up to 1911. I remember buying it but don’t remember the year (sometime between 1969 and 1974) and bringing it into the house on Greenmead Avenue just off Bukit Timah Road in Singapore.  The little horse traveled to Washington, D.C., then to Upstate New York, and finally to San Diego.  It occupies a place on a shelf with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh; “Paradise” and “Purgatory” from Dante’s The Diving Comedy; and four volumes of Shelley’s Poetical Works; the two volume set of Le Morte D’Arthur, By Thomas Malory; and Victor Huro’s Les Miserables, Volume 2 (the one that begins with Book VIII “The Noxious Poor.”).  I don’t know what happened to Volume 1.  Perhaps I lent that book to somebody long ago, and maybe it’s out there somewhere on somebody else’s bookshelf. On the shelf there’s also a lapis lazuli egg from China.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this writing, some things don’t make sense. But the things in this picture are familiar and make me feel I’ve arrived at home when I get there.

I’M HEADING HOME after a week of driving around in California and Oregon on some of the best highways and across some of the most spectacular bridges in the world.  I’ve trudged through pristine wilderness, walked along well-kept sidewalks in safe, stable towns, and stopped at rest areas and information centers for guidance about what and how to see some of the most admired scenery on earth. Schools have opened for another year and have begun again to provide American young people with some of the best education in the world.  I drove today on an interstate highway that took me very close to beautiful Mount Shasta, a sight that a majority of Americans will live a whole lifetime without ever seeing.  I could go on naming the facilities and services I use regularly which are bought with the taxes my fellow citizens and I have paid, but the list would soon become much too long for this BLOG writing. 

WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND is why some of the people I know who are enjoying regularly the same facilities and services that are available to me are so obviously dissatisfied with the government that makes our good life possible.  Why do so many people who have all the advantages, who make use of public resources, who live the good life keep on bitching and whining... What is the basis for their complaint that the poor are costing the country too much?   The people who have been out and about in California and Oregon enjoying the resources I have been enjoying this past couple of weeks aren’t the poor. The one’s I’ve seen taking advantage of what government buys and maintains look a lot like me... and a lot like the people who say they hate government and want to shrink or destroy it.  Where’s the logic?

The story of Amanda is too sad and too depressing to tell, so I won’t attempt it.  Instead I’ll remember my walk through woods today to a spot in what seems wilderness but in reality (which is the state in which I live most of the time) is only a few hundred yards from busy highway 101 south of Yachats.  At the end of the walk I came upon a stone statue, ritually adorned, which was standing with great dignity beside a great clump of fern. It was Amanda.  

In the same year that the American Civil War was winding down in the East under the heavy weight of suffering on both sides of the conflict, a blind Native American woman, guilty of nothing more than having been married to a white man who abandoned her, was forced to walk with a few other Indians north to their internment at Yachats.  She was prodded barefoot through almost impenetrable wilderness in what is now the state of Oregon.

Perhaps the only thing more satisfying this week than traveling a familiar stretch of highway has been a visit with friends Kathee and Ben in their perfect place on the Oregon coast. These are people with whom I feel comfortable expressing exhilaration and joy at the way late afternoon sunlight hits a lighthouse or how the ocean meets the land at Yachats or puzzlement over something I’ve read in the newspaper. 

I needed someone to tell me again what the plan is for peace on earth, the promise of Christmas which I have been hearing at least once a year for what has now become my long life. My need to know was prompted by the associated press report of the Florida pastor of a Christian church who was arrested by police on his way in his pickup truck to a public park with nearly 3000 kerosene-soaked Korans and a barbeque grill where he planned to avenge the death of Americans killed in New York on 9/11 by burning the books.  

“Polk County sheriff’s deputies arrested Pastor Terry Jones, 61, on a felony charge of unlawful conveyance of fuel as he traveled in a pickup towing a large barbecue-style grill filled with kerosene-soaked Korans. Jones had said he was heading to a nearby park to burn 2,998 Korans — one for every Sept. 11 victim."  --Associated press

Probably some people are wondering how this fool could not know that you can’t go down the road in America with a barbeque grill full of kerosene-soaked books. We are a country of laws, and you just can’t do that.  It puts other Americans on the highway at risk. 

While “those people” are scratching their heads about why a man would take such a chance on the highway, I’m wondering if it’s possible that this preacher of the Gospel of Peace has missed the whole point of what he presumably reads to his congregation from the book he and they consider holy.  Is it possible that he doesn’t know what harm he is doing and what shame he is heaping on his country? Is it possible that he doesn’t know that there are seven billion other people on the planet besides Americans?  My question is not about what to do about fools whizzing down the highway with barbeque grills full of kerosene-soaked books, but what to do about the ones who claim to know all about how to achieve peace on earth but obviously don’t have clue.  

WORDS definitely aren't necessary to describe the Southern Oregon coast 

from Brookings to Reedsport.