Category Archives: Americana

A long weekend – or short week – trip to New England and Down East

Americana, Travel

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A couple of months ago, Michele was invited, along with several other women,  to see the fall color at Gail Cousins’ new home in New Hampshire. Then, a couple of weeks ago, she had the brilliant idea that I should join her in Boston for our anniversary. A couple of days ago, we started thinking it would be  fun to go to Acadia National Park, instead, and that is where the trip finalized.

I flew to Boston Saturday, October 26th,  to join Michele. All day Saturday, it turned out, when the flight, with a stop in Denver, was added to the time shift. Michele had booked me into a hotel in Winthrop, theoretically near the airport, but pretty far away in a cab whose driver didn’t know the way. The next morning, however, I could get up, walk about 200 feet to see the boats in the cove and, behind them, the planes taking off from Logan.

After a walk on the beach,

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I caught a bus to New Hampshire where Michele was going to meet me. It was the first time I had taken a bus in, probably, fifty years and I don’t think much has changed. When I say bus, I don’t mean a city bus around San Francisco or Rome. I mean an interstate type bus; a bus where you buy a ticket at a counter and then stand in line, a bus where they put your luggage underneath in a special compartment, the kind of bus Patricia Neal got on in Hud.

Michele met me with Karen Amy and we had lunch in Nashua, New Hampshire, my first picturesque New England City but far from my last one.

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That night, we had an excellent lobster dinner a Gail Cousins’ home and watched the Red Sox beat the Cardinals 4-2. It was a great start to New England and I forgot to take any pictures.

In the morning, we got serious on the trip part of our Trip driving to the coast. Michele was driving and I was navigating because I hadn’t yet been added to the drivers’ list on our rent-a-car. Michele driving and my navigating is not our best combination. I suck at navigating with a smartphone, primarily because I have no idea of the scale, what with the pinching and un-pinching the map back and forth, from an overview of the western hemisphere to one mile to the inch. Looking out the window didn’t help much either, everything looked pretty much the same.

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We did finally reach the coast and then drove about 150 feet north into Maine for a planning lunch.

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In the mid 70’s, I went with a friend to Death Valley for the first time as an adult. I had a long list of things I wanted to see and the friend said something like, I don’t care what we see, but I want to really see it. I don’t want to not see a whole bunch of stuff. That advice has informed all of Michele and my trips. We might not see much, but we take our time and do see what we see. We decided to take our time driving north along the coast, stopping often.

Michele also like to base a trip on a theme to give it coherence. At the restaurant where we had lunch, it was oysters-on-sale day and they had a list of featured oysters, with handy descriptions, many from Maine. We did not know that, in some circles, Maine is as famous for oysters as lobster but we were learning. Michele’s mom loved raw oysters and the quest for great oysters screamed Me, me, you won’t regret it!  We decide to get to the Damariscotta River Estuary that night, the home of the famous Wiley Point oyster (firm shell, large, light in texture, high salinity).

Immediately, we began to see the actuality of what we were doing. First off, the coast of Maine is long, a little over 200 miles as the crow flies, but about 3500 miles if you walk the tideline. Then it is dense, very dense in the south. And populated; and picturesque, except picturesque with powerlines every where. And urban – especially in the south – with, by and large, wall to wall houses on most of the shoreline. The best views were when we crossed bridges but those were the hardest places to stop; they were often narrow with no place to walk.
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The good thing about  all the urbanity was that we ran into an Enterprise Rent-a-car place pretty quickly and I was able to get authorized. Then I could drive and Michele could tell us where we actually were. We got to Kennebunk – The only place so named. the sign says – as the light got good. Then it was on to Kennebunkport, the home of the Bush Families Museum which we didn’t have time to take in, but we did stop at the local Heretic House.
1st Day-9637-2In the fading light, Michele took a couple of pictures of the local flock – probably Republicans – and I took some bridge and beach photos.
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1st Day-9641  1st Day-9644  1st Day-9660We made it to Wiley Cove – near Hog Island – in the dark.

 

The horrific things we do to each other

Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological Musings

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I brought a biography of Clarence  Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the  Capital vs.Labor  fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man,  and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

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Back home

Americana, Travel

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It is great to be home again and we can’t wait to go back. Flying back into Silicon Valley from Back East with – mostly – Maine calibrated eyes, is slightly surprising. Both Boston’s Logan Airport and San Jose’s Mineta Airport are nearly new but that is all that is the same. At Logan, it is hard to find a place to plug in a computer, at Mineta, every seat has a plug (except the chairs in the Meditation Room across from the gate).

Wandering around the Northeast – New England? Down East? – I missed my five o’clock cappuccino, in San Jose, we passed three espresso places between the gate and picking up our luggage. When we left Boston – near noon -it was in the low 50’s, at San Jose, it was in the low 70’s at 6:30.

The most pleasant surprise was the space, the vistas when we got off the plane. To a great extent this is because of our topography; there are mountains to have vistas of. Waiting for the shuttle, to the east was the Diablo Range, pale orange in the fading light, and to the west were the Santa Cruz Mountains, soft in the haze. In New Hampshire, we would drive for miles and see nothing but the next quarter-mile of road. A beautiful quarter-mile but no view until we crossed a bridge.

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The West is just plain opener than the East. Not just long vistas open, but it feels more open to change. I don’t think that Silicon Valley is a coincidence, I think that it is a result. The East is weighted down by the past – of course, if you are from the East, you might say grounded by the past and both are right – there are ghosts everywhere, waiting behind the present.
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On the way home, Michele and I were already making plans to go back. We were a little too late this year

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and the trip was way too short.

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Kicking the can

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings


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The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.1

It was a vivid demonstration of  how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling  the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of  being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started).  This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end,  just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/

 

Shutdown, honor, and doing what ever we want

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

Government Shutdown

My complaint with organized religion – my fear of, really – is not in any particular belief structure. I listen to Pope Francis say If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? – and I think , Now there is a holy man, there is a man connected to something greater than himself. My grievance, my fear of, is with that faction – that all religions seem to have – that justifies what they want by the certainty of using God. Hey! don’t blame me about my belief that homosexuality is bad, God told me to believe that way.

When I listen to the doctrinaire faction of the Republican Party, the No Compromise faction, what scares me is that they have that certainty. They seem to believe what they are saying. While what they are saying – and doing – seems cynical and hypocritical to me, I am fearful that they are doing it out of the religion of greater National Need. I am alarmed that this government shutdown isn’t a beef between the Republicans and Democrats. I am alarmed that the Republicans are shutting down the government just to shut the government down. What distresses me is that the shutdown is the goal.

Sure, not all the Republicans feel this way, maybe not even a majority feel this way, but a hardline core does and they are wagging the dog right now. That minority is looking at themselves as being honorable (much more honorable than that Kenyan President). They are what Eric Hoffer called True Believers.

To – not quite – pick an example at random, going to Michelle Bachmann’s website gives the impression that she is very happy with the government shutdown. She is so certain in her beliefs that she doesn’t even see the irony in voting – and campaigning  – to shut down the Government and then working to get the WWII Memorial open, saying, on her website, Another wonderful day of greeting brave WWII veterans from across the country at their memorial. Of course part of it is that Bachmann only wants to shutdown the bits she doesn’t like, but it alarms me that she believes the parts she likes are the only legitimate parts.

While I don’t understand John Boehner’s strategy – he talks like he knows the shutdown is doing damage and then continues to keep the government from functioning – or his justification, I am sure he has one. Maybe he thinks that he is the only rational player on the right and he justifies his actions as the only way to keep the barbarians from taking over.

Everybody has a justification – a reason if you prefer – for what they do. Just saying I am doing it because I want to is not enough. Especially when what we want to do is horrible or illegal. Then the reason is often about a truth that is bigger than the immediate issue. Often that bigger truth it is a truth that other observers can’t see.