.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Mount Rushmore
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Crazy Horse
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Speed and Luck
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Torture is back on the radar
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Un-American to the last
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Once more into the breach, I guess
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
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