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EMBEDDED IN A WEB OF LOVE

2/27/2012

 
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DOG AND KITTENS
  Embedded In A Web of Love
  Humano Sapiens is on top of the food chain, exterminator of all competing primates, most recently Neanderthalensis. Its weapon is brains. Had dinosaurs not been destroyed by a meteor, might they have achieved intelligence, or one of the pachydermata (elephants), or panthera (big cats) or cetaceans (dolphins and whales), to become the planet's top predator?  I don't think so because they are all too physically adapted to need it. Clumsy proto-humans cowering in caves, no match for bears or boars or hyenas, desperately needed an equalizer—intelligence.
    Yet many animals including humankind have a capacity for empathy, even across species. Dogs and cats are not always enemies [see photo, left above, Mitt Romney's dog], and when species barriers are crossed, a magical world appears. Elizabeth and I entered it when she adopted a baby sparrow that had fallen from its nest.


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ELIZABETH AND POOH
    We live in animal-unfriendly Manhattan, where sparrows nest in the open ends of pipes that hold up street signs. A baby had fallen at our door, cheeping piteously, watched by a small cluster of people. Elizabeth took it to our apartment, called Dr. Schaubet, our vet, who said to buy meal worms at a pet store. With an eyebrow tweezer, she placed them one at a time into the tiny open maw. Pooh had come into our lives.
    Elizabeth installed him in an old canary cage. He would hop from its perch onto her finger and she would draw him out through the always left open door. And she taught him to fly. Perched on her finger, she'd lower her hand and his wings reflexively opened, until one day he rose and flew across the room. His world was now our whole apartment yet he stayed in the front room and returned to his cage every night.
    Elizabeth gave music lessons in the front room. Pooh would land on a student's head.  Some found this unsettling, asking, "What happens now?" or "Am I about to be pooped on?"
    Weekends we usually went to New Jersey, taking Pooh in his cage, letting him fly in our enclosed porch. But it was our Manhattan apartment he considered home, and as Summer became Fall, he settled in as family. Elizabeth's students became used to having him on the head or a shoulder, which she never allowed to interrupt a scale or melody being practiced.
    As Winter became Spring, Pooh found a cranny on the flange of a steam pipe where it rose into the front ceiling, and with of scraps of paper, thread, and knitting wool supplied by Elizabeth, built a nest. I had assumed nest-building needed the presence of a female, but Pooh, a male said Dr. Schaubet, completed this project on his own. We proudly pointed it out to visitors.
    New York summers can be hot, but fearing Pooh would fly out, we dared not open a window. Before leaving one stifling day Elizabeth cracked one half an inch, and when we returned, Pooh was gone. We tacked signs to nearby telephone poles,. Next day a neighbor breathlessly told us that she'd been walking along and a sparrow flew beside her, no more than two inches from her ear.
    And that was the only word we ever had about Pooh. He had somehow squeezed himself back into that hard world from which he had come. Did he learn to survive in it? We hoped so, but doubted it.  Nevertheless, in a world consumed by hate and misery, Pooh showed us that we are also embedded in a vast web of love, We left his dear little nest in our front room for years.



WHAT MAKES THE HOTTENTOT SO HOT?

2/24/2012

 
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LAST CANDIDATES STANDING
What Makes the Hottentot So Hot?
    In the 20th and final Republican debate, one question outshone all the exhausted spiels heard since they began. The four remaining candidates were asked to tag themselves with a single word. They came up with:
    Ron Paul: Consistency.
    Rick Santorum: Courage.
    Mitt Romney: Resolute.
    Newt Gingrich: Cheerful.
    Ron Paul wants the government out of our public and financial lives, but not out of our intimate lives—out of the boardroom into the bedroom, that's Consistent to Dr. Paul.
   Courage, said Rick Santorum hopefully, like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz: "What makes the Hottentot so hot, what puts the "ape" in apricot, what have they got that I ain't got? Courage!"
   Mitt Romney, flipping every which way in the winds of public opinion, wants to be considered Resolute. Resolutely spineless, maybe
    Cheerful, offered Newt Gingrich, with his best imitation of a cherubic smile. He thinks pretending to be cheerful can hide the gall he extrudes, a one-time front runner who is now, to use a WW II, army expression, "sucking a hind tit."
     Here's a more accurate set of tags:
                        Ron Paul: Feckless        
                          Rick Santorum: Mindless  
                          Mitt Romney:  Gutless        
        
            Newt Gingrich: Clueless
      Send me your tags for any candidate, or all four, to be posted here!

      


I DON'T ENVY LOTTERY WINNERS

2/22/2012

 
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Discovery lifting off with John Glenn inside
I Don't Envy Lottery Winners
    I don't envy lottery winners or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Or rock stars, or poker champions, or celebrity chefs. I can't even imagine their lives, and how do you envy what you can't imagine?
    But I do envy John Glenn, seeing him on TV lately and hearing him on the radio about how it felt to be the first American in space fifty years ago, and then at age 77, into space again, the oldest person ever up there. He also went into politics and became a U.S. senator, but that's not the part I envy.
    He's ninety now. Sounds old, but (not that much older than I, I'm afraid) he seems to be in good shape and clearly has all his marbles. Our small difference in ages was enough to put him into the heart of WW II.  I barely squeaked out seven bombing missions in Italy while Glenn flew Corsair fighters in the Pacific and F-86 jets in the Korean War, where he shot down 3 MIGs. I salute him for that but its also not the part I envy.
    Glenn said that the day he flew into space and orbited the Earth is still vivid in his memory. I try to imagine that mind-boggling experience and certainly envy that. As a private citizen and US Senator, he flew his own private plane. When he mentioned that he'd recently sold it, I detected a hint of regret, especially when he went on to say that he still had his FAA pilot's license (me too!), and still loved to fly. "I'll never get over that," he added. Glenn's lifetime of flying—that, I envy.
    Yet it's not green-faced envy because I get a good feeling thinking about a man who was never ground bound, which is how I felt after I'd stopped flying and before I began dancing. Flying and dancing are more related than most people imagine. I'd go so far as to say one is a form of the other   Both pilots and dancers have a tendency to divide people into those who can and are, and those who can't and are not.
    Sometimes I dream that I might have made it into space if I'd switched into a slightly different groove. But I enjoyed my own groove too much to switch. So it's not truly envy, more a kind of abstract what-if.  But my admiration is wholehearted, along with a curious pride I feel just thinking about John Glenn, a guy who really had the right stuff.
    Bravo!


THE BIGGER THE CROSS, THE BIGGER THE WHORE

2/20/2012

 
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The Bigger the Cross, the Bigger the Whore
    In the bad old days, the exclusive definition of "whore" was someone who offered sex for money. Now they are "sex-workers." In Amsterdam, Holland, there's a statue celebrating them [photo, left]. But the word "whore," still has bite and can be applied to anyone who counterfeits human feelings and manipulates them for personal gain.
    Trust is a feeling, and betrayers of trust are whores, making Bernard Madoff one of the biggest in history. At the other end of this scale is an ancient "babushka" sitting on a folding chair on the steps of a Russian Orthodox church in Moscow. Her eyes are closed, she crosses herself every twenty seconds, rocking in pious bliss, the embodiment of sanctity. Tourists snap pictures and drop rubles into her lap.  
    And who has not received an email of this sort?
"Dearest One,
    Sweet Jesus spoke to me about you. My husband, former Surgeon General of Gabon, deposited sixteen million, five hundred thousand dollars in USB Bank, London, to be murdered in a coup by Golomunda Gono. Sweet Jesus told me you will help me reclaim these funds, for which I gladly offer a commission of twenty-five percent.... Yours in Christ."
    A creepy scam with phony sanctity
that thrusts it into whoredom.
    Politics is whore Heaven. Emotion and trust provide rich soil for pandering and deception. Combat-dodger and war monger, George W. Bush, running for president, announced that Jesus Christ was his favorite "philosopher." Newt Gngrich became a Catholic, wishing himself clean of serial philandering while trying to impeach President Clinton for having a quickie with Monica Lewinsky.  John Boehnor invokes religious freedom to rail against a law guaranteeing contraception aid to poor women. Mitt Romney wears faded jeans pretending to be middle-class. (Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and loopy Michele Bachmann believe what they say, making them ideologues, but not whores.)
    During the American occupation of Italy after WW II, Rome was full of young women who'd lost husbands, fathers, brothers. Desperate to feed their families, they were not deemed whores, even by the crude standards of American soldiers, and some ended up as wives. American soldiers advised each other on how to spot the whores.
    "The whores wear crosses, and the bigger the cross, the bigger the whore."
    Still has a grain of truth.


SELF-DECEPTION, DENIAL, AND A LONG JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

2/17/2012

 
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A Moment from "The Long Day's Journey Into Night"
_A Long Journey Into Night
    Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, The Long Day's Journey Into Night, has star-crossed lovers, accusations, denials, confrontations, and enough drama to make a great opera. The play premiered in Sweden where they love emotional chaos, then played Broadway, and then the world.  Yet it seems so over the top it always made me wonder if real people could be so self- deceiving and blind. But after a look at today's political far right, it is clear that they can.
    After al Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center, George W. Bush started a war with a miserable backwater country run by a demented tyrant who'd had nothing to do with the attack. Bush strutted around in a jet pilot's G-suit, and called himself a "war time president," but instead of asking for sacrifice and citizen participation, he cut taxes, told Americans to go shopping, and set about wrecking the economic and ecological regulations that kept the powerful ("Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely") from destroying the country. The U.S. plummeted out of Bill Clinton's surplus into the most ruinous deficit in history, culminating in economic collapse.
    Bush's approval rating plummeted too, to 22 percent, prompting Jay Leno to ask, "What is the matter with those people?" referring to the befuddled minority who still approved. But enough did see the truth to elect Barack Obama and hand him the daunting task of rebuilding our shattered economy. 
    Economic wreckage is less visible than that left by a tornado, and rebuilding harder to comprehend. Yet the obvious fact is that Bush and his amok policies destroyed the economy, a truth that Republicans, now calling for a return to those policies, deny. Some are charlatans and liars who only want to grab all they can. Others live in true denial, a self-deception as acute as those of the doomed characters in O'Neill's play.
    Can the self-deceivers, abetted by self-seeking billionaires, succeed in reinstalling those who caused the disaster? Once I'd have said impossible, just as I once thought Eugene O'Neill's portrait of a whole family in denial was impossible. Yet I must wonder; can they possibly install another crew of rascals ready to steal all they can while setting the U.S. on another long journey into a night of national decline?



WHITNEY HOUSTON: A WORLD BEREAVED

2/15/2012

 
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_Whitney Houston: a world bereaved
    The loss of Whitney Houston wounds the hearts of all who gloried in the sheer virtuosity of her unique voice. She died too soon, like Mozart, Edith Piaf, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and so many others.
    But beneath the keen sense of loss is gratitude; it's a wonder we had Whitney Houston at all. A famed music teacher said, "Having a great voice is like being born with a Stradivarius in your throat." Add musicality, artistry, temperament, beauty, all in one human being who must also inhabit an environment that can recognize and cultivate such gifts.
    But celebrities live under pressure. Erving Goffman's landmark. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, reveals that all people show one life to the world, keep another private. But celebrities, dogged by snooping, leering public media, have little privacy. Instantly recognized, they are unable to go anywhere without drawing hordes who offer admiration and awe, but also possessiveness. "We put you up there You'd better be grateful!" And among them can lurk the deranged. A Jody Foster fan, imagining it would impress his idol, tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. After asking John Lennon to sign the cover of his album, which Lennon did, a demented fan fatally shot him in the back. What can it be like to endure such pressures all the time?
    We don't yet know what caused Whitney Houston's death, and I, for one, don't want to know. Her recordings and films remain, and like those of Edith Piaf, will long be played. And yet they are mere echos of her talent, and the glory she brought to all her talent touched. And if such a talent is snatched away, the whole human race is bereaved.


SElF-MADE MULTI-MILLIONAIRES

2/12/2012

 
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Standard Oil Octopus
_Self-Made Multi-Millionaires
    Mitt Romney boasts that he is a self-made multi-millionaire, assuming voters like the idea of having one run the country. But self-made millionaires are a mean and hungry lot whose lives are spent in the relentless pursuit of money and destruction of competitors. Herbert Hoover was one, made his fortune in shipping and mining, and brought the cold killer instincts of a CEO to the Oval Office. When he saw WW I vets occupying what was called a Hooverville in Washington, DC, asking only for a promised bonus to help them survive the Great Depression, he called in the army. General Douglas MacArthur obligingly drove them out and destroyed their pathetic tent city. With his business man's view of the economy, Herbert Hoover intended to let the Great Depression run its course. 
    Mitt "I'm-a-business-man-so-I know-how-the-economy-works" Romney, who raked in millions through financial dealing, stashing lots of cash in offshore bank accounts, offers the same solution—let foreclosures run their course, millions of people booted out of their homes and into poverty. He doesn't worry about the poor either—the nation heard him say so—because they have a "safety net." What can Romney in his luxury mansions,  know of safety nets or the people trapped in them, safety nets he intends to destroy, by the way?
    We've also had presidents who inherited their wealth: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt. John F. Kennedy. Their fathers and grandfathers may have been killer sharks but the sons never needed such instincts and when they turned to politics they had an entirely different world view.  Once Ted Kennedy was stopped by a question tossed his way.
    "Hey Ted, ya ever worked a day in your life?"
    "Nope," he relied
    His working class questioner smiled, "Ya ain't missed nothin."
    If Mitt Romney had any sense he wouldn't boast of having made his fortune by himself, even if true. (His father was wealthy.) But this is only another symptom of his insulation from the Ninety-nine Percent, betrayed by a stream of callous remarks:
    "I like firing people,"
    "Ten thousand dollar bet?"
    "Corporations are people."
    "I'm not concerned about the poor."
    "Let the business cycle run its course."
    Romney's debate and speech coaches are doing their best to prevent more such revelations about the kind of president he'd be.

    Lotsa luck.

RAGE, RAGE, AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

2/8/2012

 
--"Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
    The death of an age mate and dear friend raises the specter of one's own imminent death. We are supposed to be afraid. Dying was never openly discussed by air crews when flying combat missions in WW II, or did I ever reveal my own half-whispered prayer as we entered "flak-alley," two minutes flying straight and level so the bombardier could aim, giving anti-aircraft gunners a good target.
    "Okay, God, here's your chance to keep me alive long enough to make love with at least one more beautiful woman!"
     I'd managed to shed my virginity shortly before going abroad and stunned by the drama and ecstasy, was anxious to repeat.
    Flying officers of two B-17 crews—pilot, co-pilot, navigator
--_shared a tent. The other pilot, a taciturn mid-Westerner named Roy Arndt, was an atheist.  We never talked religion but before we'd flown combat, my navigator, Ardrah "Ike" Buddin, from Rock Hill, South Carolina, said to Arndt, "Wait ‘til you see flak exploding. You'll start believing in God."
    Arndt didn't reply until a week later, the evening after his first mission. He turned to Ike, said,  "I'm still an atheist."
    I was once asked to describe how it felt amid bursts of flak. Truthfully, I was too busy to feel anything. Veterans of much tougher combat—ground troops attacking through machine-gun and mortar fire—say much the same thing. If there's any feeling,  it's like stage-fright, what people feel before making a speech, or some other kind of performance. Only stage-fright as I felt it, was more intense. This makes no sense; no matter how bad you are, the audience does not try to kill you.
    My dear friend died quietly and without pain, according to a doctor and two nurses who visited during the long week of the dying "process." They claimed to be able to detect signs of pain in those unable to express it. Al neither ate nor drank. Or did he speak. Yet he was conscious. Once I put my lips close to his ear, said, "I love you, Al," to have his eyes open wide, turn to me and see me. I took his hand, felt him squeeze a dozen times in the next quarter hour, until he drifted into something like sleep. When he died, a tiny pulse in his neck simply stopped. Nicole, one of his gentle aids, left the room. I rested my left hand on his thin shoulder, cradled his head in my right arm, put my head down, and cried.

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    Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

    Being 90 years in this world,  with great kids,  great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
                                   Stuart Hodes

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           With my friend, Nero.
                   April, 2012.
        Photo by Ray Madrigal

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