A nation's debt to Joe Wilson

The flap over Joe Wilson- a white Southerner- calling President Barack Obama- an African-American Northerner- a liar on national television in one of the very centers of American democracy has threatened to derail the national conversation on health care reform once again. But the nation actually owes Joe Wilson a debt, because he has ripped open the scabs covering the wounds of racism that continue to make our country bleed.

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency allowed many Americans to pretend that the wounds of racism are healing or, indeed, even healed. But watching the news and even the daily interactions between people of different races show that those wounds remain very deep and are freshly cut every day.

I've never met Joe Wilson. Maybe he isn't a racist himself. Maybe he's just another disgruntled Republican bitter and angry that the promised permanent conservative majority promised by Karl Rove turned out to be a lie because Rove misoverestimated the American tolerance for incompetent and ineffective government. In any event, Wilson's words revealed the lie underpinning the Republican Party's pretense to moral superiority and exclusive claim to patriotism which they have been selling particularly since 1980. Ronald Reagan, if he could come back and have a look at these latter days of the GOP, would probably not even recognize this current collection of misanthropes as Republicans.

Wilson's few words and subsequent unwise intransigence showed the depth of the disrespect which has been accorded the first African-American President. Other Presidents have been met with grumbling when addressing Congress, but none have had "you lie!" shouted at them (even when it turned out thatthey had lied). Protesters bringing guns to places where the President was speaking "to exercise their Constitutional right to bear arms" is nothing more than an effort at intimidation in order to keep the uppity in their places. It worked in Mississippi and Alabama and throughout the South for a long, long weary time. Why not again? Protesters shouting for Obama's death are little different than the exultant accessories to murder clustered about the bodies of tortured and hanged black men slung from trees, grinning at the cameras recording their sins.

It is possible and even necessary for the Republicans to bring to the discussion strong criticism of Obama's and the Democrats' health care reform ideas. This is how laws are improved and strengthened in the crucible of debate. Racism- however veneered- disrespect and bitterness undermine the ideals of our republic like the worm in the bud. They are a cancer in the guts of the nation and, if not exposed and rooted out, these things will destroy us.

"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings," sang Bob Dylan. Joe Wilson has exposed the bitterness, disrespect, false patriotism that dogs the Republican Party and the broader racism that still plagues our nation. These are more insidious threats to freedom than was ever seen from the handful of Communists of the Red Scare of the 50s. For bringing this into sharp focus, we owe Joe wilson a debt of gratitude.

Happy Birthday Dad!

I realized this morning that today would have been my Dad's 80th birthday. He passed away in August 1996 a month after bypass surgery. He had polio at age 6 (in 1935) and after recovering from the polio was found to have developed diabetes. He took insulin twice a day for the rest of his life- it had only been discovered in 1921 and became available as a treatment in 1923 and protamide zince insulin in 1936 (I remember him taking that form of insulin as one of the two he used; the other was Lente. Later he switched to Humalog). I remember him carrying a little case with his insulin bottles and his syringes on every vacation or overnight trip. I remember my Mom's amazing skill at estimating his blood sugar levels with a single glance.

I also remember going to auto races with him- especially USAC midgets and sprints and occasionally stock car races. We went to a lot of races when I was a kid; in those days the USAC midgets came to the local race track (Santa Fe Speedway) three times a summer. By the time I was in high school it was once a year. There's no better racing than midgets on a 1/4 mile dirt track. My Dad used to race stock cars but that was before I was born, so I never saw him race. I've seen photos of the cars and of him racing (including one of him crawling out of his upside-down car). In the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s he acquired a 1930s Crosley powered TQ midget that he restored and took to vintage car races around the Midwest, along with his collection of thousands of racing photos. We used to sometimes go and look up old-time racers to get his photos autographed. I remember spending an afternoon with Fritz Tegmeier when I was about ten, and several visits to see Slim Williams and his wife Gladys (Slim was the subject of the book Alaska Sourdough by Richard Morenus- Alaska was another fascination of my Dad's).

When he died, many of the people he knew from racing came to pay their respects and told me many wonderful stories about my Dad that he had never thought important enough to mention. But that was my Dad- so interested in other people that he hardly ever talked about himself.

So I wish I could call my Dad today and say "happy birthday!" But I can't and it hurts even 13 years later. If your Dads are still around, give 'em a call. I'm going to call my Mom today... and her 80th birthday is just three weeks away.

Old Friends Redux

I went to my friend Pat's 50th birthday party. When I was in high school there were- like high schools everywhere- a lot of cliques. It's the nature of youth and many humans in general. I went to a small high school (graduating class = 147) so people often had to be in several cliques in order for all the cliques to be represented. My clique was the anti-clique clique. Me, Pat, Dan, Mariann, Jim, Don and Rick hung out together most of the time plus a few more folks here and there. Since graduating from high school, I mainly just kept in touch with Pat. Life goes on and that's the way it goes- people's lives progress and you lose touch. And mortality strikes- Don died from leukemia a few years after graduating from high school, plus several classmates have passed away too. It seems much too early for people who are only hitting the Big 5-0 this year. So, while extolling the virtues of Old Friends in an earlier post, I must acknowledge that the truth is that Old Friends include people who don't get to be old.

So at Pat's party, Jim and Mariann and I showed up from the old gang. It was interesting to find that in many ways these folks are the same as they were and at the same time utterly different. In high school, we had lots in common. As adults in the middle of middle age, life has gone on, things like marriages and divorces and children and careers and professional development have come in. Our lives are much more separate than they were, and yet the relationships in many ways feel the same. Something else- their intelligence and wisdom was much more obvious. Intelligence and wisdom is still under development when you are 17 years old. That's still true at 50, but it's also true that wisdom and intelligence are more developed. My friends are experts at what they do now. They are respected in their fields, they know what they are doing... they are "solid" in a way that just can't be in high school. A funny thing was that we talked very little about high school. We talked about the years since, the things that have happened and have shaped us to be who we are.

There also another difference: perspective. In one's teenage years, every problem and trauma seems big. In middle age, we can put those problems in context. We've gotten through other problems and we'll get through these too. We've had other successes and we know that these are temporary- and that tomorrow someone will ask "what have you done for us lately?"

I was delighted to see my friends at Pat's party. It was just cool to see them, to see who they had become. And, even better, we're only about halfway through (give or take a decade). Who knows how things will go from here.

Old Friends

I'm old enough now that I have old friends- that is, friends who are old. My best friend from high school, Pat, is having a surprise 50th birthday party. It's not a total surprise, since he knows about it in the abstract but doesn't know the date. I won't mention that here for obvious reasons, even though he- like 99.998623719% of the planet- does not know about my blog.

I've known Pat since 1973, freshman year in high school, when we bonded over being Packer fans in the suburbs of Chicago. Jeez, that's almost 36 years ago. There is something about old friends, people who knew what an idiot you were and thus are able to put in context the idiot that you are now. People with whom you can talk about stuff in a sort of shorthand or code, who can pick up your meaning in just a few words. Sometimes the conversation sounds like:

"Well, I..."

"Yup. Me too."

"So then we..."

"Sure, let's."

It's the sense of connection. Even if you see somebody once a year, the connection is still there and the conversation just starts up where it left off. Old friends.

New Blogs

As if it wasn't bad enough that I have a blog I hardly ever update, I have started two other blogs to sadly neglect.

About 5 years back in an discussion on the iBOB mailing list, Chris Laumb and I somehow got the idea of starting a loal "BOBish" cycling group. We called if "FrostyBOBs" and I put together a Web site. We had talked about having some fun local group rides exploring more interesting places than most of the local cycling clubs did- a mix of on- and off-road, for example. We made announcements, people signed up for getting notified about rides and events... and... nothing. We never got our acts together to do a single ride. Fortunately, Hiawatha Cyclery came along a few years ago and have been hosting some of the types of rides Chris and I were thinking about.

Earlier this year, I decided to stop running the Web server I set up in the back bedroom, so I killed the FrostyBOBs site; I haven't been able to find satisfactory free web hosting (no surprise there) and haven't been able to get URL forwarding to work to send the redirects to the home page my ISP allots me. But I like the idea, still hope to get something going along these lines, and started a blog instead (frostybobs.blogspot.com) and will eventually point the www.frostybobs.org URL to it. And I plan to mail out an announcement to the folks who previously signed up. If you click the link to the FrostyBOBs blog right now, you'll see a fat lot of nothing. I've got to get around to actually setting it up.

The other new blog is for the Jazz Workshop in Minneapolis at McRae Park. About a year ago my wife and some friends went to Merlin's Rest for a few adult beverages and to hear the Hot Club of East Lake. During the break I struck up a conversation with Papa John Kolstad about buying one of their CDs and- my also being a guitarist- ended up talking with him about his rare late 30s Gibson L5; this lead to meeting the entire band and chatting for a while with the bassist/trumpeter Same Fiske.

I have played guitar for nearly 30 years and most of that time have played a mix of jazz/blues/Grateful Dead music. I bemoaned to Sam the "fact" that there was nowhere for the casual musician to practice playing jazz with other people. Sam smiled and contradicted this, informing me about the Jazz Workshop that meets at McRae Park in Minneapolis every Saturday. Woot! So the next Saturday I turned up and have been going to the workshop ever since. Turnout is highly variable, most often being me, two to four vocalists and a sax player. Sometimes Sam comes to play bass and trumpet, and sometimes there is a drummer, pianist, other horns, etc. I started the blog to try to publicize the workshop, since it is a unique resource in the Twin Cities, in hopes of recruiting more people to come develop their jazz playing abilities. If you click on the link to that blog, there is some actual content!

Starting the new year backasswards

Today is the start of the first full week of the new year. Thus far I have not spared any time to sit down and contemplate what I want to do with 2009 and already I feel like it is slipping away from me. I've noticed, as have many others before me, that as I get older the years seem to slide by ever faster. 2008 seemed to be about six months long rather than twelve. If I live to be 100, 51 years from now, how fast will the years seem to go by then?

Obviously it's a silly notion that 2009 is slipping away from me. In terms of time, every one of us has exactly the same amount of time: now. We can remember the past, we can project about the future, but we live now. Quite literally we each have "all the time in the world." It's good to remember that sometimes. It reduces the stress a little bit.

Speaking of the past, for Christmas I received a DVD of old home movies which I hadn't seen in at least thirty years. Some of these movies were made at least fifteen and perhaps twenty years before I was born. They feature my mother and her family; she looks to have been about 13 at the time of many of them. My grandparents were younger in these movies than I am now. The movies were made at family holidays and at the weekly family picnics that were held all summer long. Many of the short snippets were filmed at the family cabin near Eagle River WI, which was built by my great-grandfather on land purchased by my grandfather. When I was a kid, my grandparents had retired to live there permanently with the assistance of my uncle. They lived there until my grandfather's death in 1970, my grandmother selling the place a year or two later. Many of my happiest childhood memories happened there at Christmas and on summer vacation, and it was wonderful to see these old movies again.

That was the past. As for the future, I'd better come up with some notion of what I want to do with 2009 before it really does slip away.

Pseudocrisis of conscience

According to the Washington Post, "The Bush administration today issued a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers -- from doctors to janitors -- who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs."

The gist of the matter boils down to this: "'This is a huge victory for religious freedom and the First Amendment,' said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a socially conservative group that opposes abortion. 'No one should be forced to have an abortion, and no one should be forced to be an abortionist.'"

Part and parcel of the right wing worldview is the belief that they are under siege because of their values. Never mind that they are usually the ones laying siege to civil freedoms for most of the country- the right wing being a small but loud minority that seems far larger than it is, and which has an outsized voice in public policy. As Bill Moyers pointed out in 1991, the delusional right wing is no longer the lunatic fringe- they have been accepted into the front and center of the Republican Party. That this is mainly a marriage of convenience for the real power brokers behind the RNC escapes no one but the social conservatives.

The new policies issued by the Bush Administration are predicated on this same nonsense. There are no doctors that are forced to be abortionists in their practices. Some are required to learn the procedures in medical school and residencies, because moral outrage aside there are legitimate reasons to perform abortions such as fetal death (which occurs in 25% of known pregnancies and sometimes requires surgical intervention to remove the fetus and placenta). But no physicians are forced to perform abortions in their practice- they can and do refer patients seeking abortions to physicians who are willing to provide those services. But now doctors opposing abortion will not even be required to make those referrals- let alone perform the procedure- because that would be a violation of their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Nor will pharmacists be required to fill prescriptions for RU-486 to victims of rape or incest if that violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Even if there is no other pharmacy for 100 miles in any direction. Pharmacists will not even have to fill prescriptions for routine birth control medications if that violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Heck, for that matter, doctors or nurses or pharmacists wouldn't have to provide narcotics to people with bone cancer if the use of those medications violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." You can see where this is going. There is no guarantee that the "personal, moral or religious beliefs" of any health care provider are compassionate or even sane, but now decision that harm patients made on the basis of "personal, moral or religious beliefs" are protected under the law and aren't medical neglect of malpractice.

The fundamental problem with these regulations is this: the health care decisions made by patients are now held hostage to the moral beliefs of the health care provider. The moral beliefs of the patient have been overridden by the Bush Administration. The health care needs of the patient have now been overridden by the Bush Adminstration. If this policy stands, we can expect to see a push from the right wing to send "right minded" candidates to medical school, attempting to flood the ranks of doctors, nurses and pharmacists with anti-abortion social conservatives as a way to prevent access to these services.

Tony Perkins is wrong in his claim that the policy is a win for religious freedom; it is a win for the extreme right wing and is a loss for religious freedom for millions of people with less constrictive religious views. It is not even remotely a victory for the First Amendment. It is a victory for the right wing who believe that their moralist constructions are so radically superior to all others that they should be the law of the land. This policy is a victory for creeping theocracy and another blow against the American Experiment.

A fitting epitaph

The Bush Administration is naturally trying to find a fitting soundbite-worthy epitaph to shape the Bush legacy. "Protected the Nation" appears to be the favorite. My suggestion would be "Screwed the Pooch."