Not in anger but in sorrow

What can you say?

As years go, 2011 had its usual share of blessings and curses.For me and mine, well, I'm a father, so perforce my year was consumed by my children, and in that respect it was more blessed than not.

My Big Guy turned eight and started third grade, while Little Miss made five and started public school altogether, going to kindergarten with Peep's K-teacher from three years ago. They seem to be growing and thriving.

The Boy is smart and funny, and he even impressed me on Christmas Morning when, confronted by a ridiculously juvenile present from one of his aunties, he simply smiled and nodded graciously instead of rejecting the gift with a snarl. He has taken on a half-portion of preteen snippiness and attitude but seems to have mixed some maturity in there as well.He still seems to me to be myself at eight; determined to go at life the hard way. That's not an easy road to walk, and as a father it pains me to watch him insist on taking it. But all I can do is show him where he's going and love him as he goes there. And hope he chooses happiness instead of troubles.

As the girl gets bigger she's taking an interest in her condition as Chinese and American. She talks of her parents in China, is enthused about everything Chinese, and takes pride in the marvel that she can be Chinese AND American which, as she has told us whenever possible, is way cooler than being plain old vanilla caucasian-American.She is sweet and loving, the very avatar of the peacemaking little sister. So far she has yet to run up against anything she can't overwhelm with kindness and I dread the day she does. Until then I try and keep her in hugs, kisses, and lap chang (臘腸)

And I'm a husband. My bride Mojo continues to be the marvel that is Herself; she has continued her running program, including competing in several 5K fun-runs and getting her distances up to as far as seven miles. She looks wonderful, and from my selfish vantage feels even better - there's something about strong muscles under smooth skin that seems designed to provide delight to the male senses.Her sewing has improved to the point where she is actually making clothes (from "upgrading" existing clothing with appliques and frills). And perhaps the most exciting surprise she has brought to our lives was to learn - just this past week - that her contract with Northwest Natural has been extended six months.

I don't know how I managed to be so gifted with such a woman, but, trust me, I never forget how lucky I have been. I lost a good woman by selfish ignorance and learned from that loss; I hope I will never forget that my beloved is worth more than rubies.

And me?

Well, sadly, all I take with me from this year is the newly-won knowledge that I should have treated my body with more respect. I didn't, and it is finally punishing me for my carelessness with cruelty.In all other respects I hope I have earned another year's wisdom and another year's kindness in return for another year's journey away from the strength and fury of youth. If there is any justice in the world vieillesse should gain in savait what jeunesse can no longer pouvait.

I have my work, which I enjoy and have learned to do well; I have my beloved and my children, who with me weave the strong cloth of "family" from the warp of love and the weft of obligation. Those of you who wear that fabric know whereof I speak; it's not always a comfortable garment, not always stylish or fashionable, but it's durable and a comfort in the cold and the storm. We don't always enjoy the weaving of it. But we often do, and the crafting is both an honor and a joy when it's done well.I have my Portland home and my Cascadian homeplace.

And I AM at home here. I have been a Portlander, an Oregonian, and a Northwesterner longer than I have been anyone anywhere else. Twenty-one years this winter.

I may not have been born here but in all other senses I am a native Oregonian with all the strengths and failings that entails.

In many ways I feel more strongly rooted here, in the dark and wet soil of the Northwest, than I do in the larger nation that calls me its own. I may have spent twenty years wearing the uniform of the United States, but in many ways the flag I fight for now is the green, white, and blue of Cascadia; if 2011 has brought me any revelations it is that while I'm resigned to watching my nation foolishly struggle to return to the Gilded Age at home and fritter away its substance in feckless adventures abroad I am unwilling to let that foolish fecklessness degrade the Pacific Northwest I love. Let the United States take its own road to hell, provided that the Republic of Cascadia prospers.Does that sound callous?

I think it does, and, yet, I cannot retract it. The end of 2011 finds me less enamored of my nation, and many of its people, than ever before. Don't mistake me; I understand that the United States has never been what has pretended to be, that the American people have never been as wise, as just, or as peaceful as we like to say we are. And I also believe that in both its promise and its practice the United States has been on the whole a good place to live and a force for human benifice both to its own and to many other peoples.

But this year, as it has for decades preceding it, my country seems to have grown a little meaner, a little poorer, a little more selfish and self-absorbed, a little less gentle abroad and a little more greedy at home. Sorry, America, you could have been a truly great nation. Shame you didn't really try to live up to your promises.

So.

Goodbye, 2011. You weren't much of a year; just another journey around the sun.Let's do better next time, eh?

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

~ Richard Wilbur

Dead Time

There's something about watching a soil sample rebound from consolidation that encourages reflection.

Boredom, perhaps?

This week between Christmas and the New Year has always seemed like an odd sort of interval of no-time to me ever since my Army Days. Back in the Eighties, at any rate, this week was usually a period of massive "ghosting"; we'd fall in for a ridiculously abbreviated morning PT - often distinguished by pure fun-PT like basketball, dodgeball, or the usual exercises but led by the junior privates for the entertainment and mirth of all involved - and then go hang around the aid station for the morning, clean already-clean weapons, dick off doing small PM chores in the motor hole, or find reasons to go "inventory our TA-50" which always seemed to entail fiddling with the field gear in our racks with our boots off while watching He-Man cartoons.

After midday chow even this pretense of military activity ceased, and we would spend the rest of the afternoon just goofing off; hanging out in the chow hall, or at the gym, visit our married pals at their quarters, watch bowl games in the dayroom or just chill in the barracks with our friends.

I remember one particular mid-week afternoon that turned into a "Faces of Death" marathon from noon until well into the following morning.

Remember those videos?

In the pre-cable era I recall that the "Faces of Death" videos were considered shocking evidence of the decline of Western Civilization; amateur (or professional outtake) films of people getting waxed in various either horrible, or comical (or both) ways. Hangings, electrocutions, falls, plus all the usual gawdawful atrocities humans have always managed to figure out how to perpetrate on each other...packaged in a tidy ninety-minute VHS tape perfect for bored-GI entertainment. But the usual finger-waggers and professional morals nannies considered them the nadir of human morality and signs that Western civilization was headed for the depravity of Rome and Babylon.

How innocent were we..?

Anyway, this week was also the time when young troops would get involved in all sorts of insane horseplay; it was this time in 1986 when Private Black pioneered "drainsurfing" during an unexpectedly-intense dry season downpour and ended up in the swamps behind Venado Beach. Given Blackie's penchant for bizarre nonsense I'd have to say that this was fairly subdued for him; nothing was set afire, nobody but him ended up naked, and there were no arrests. This week was for "Jackass"-grade stunts before there was a "Jackass".

Today I'm a sedate middle-aged, middle-class father and husband and the notion of jumping in a raging drainage ditch with a foam sleeping pad wouldn't occur to me any more than running for mayor of Portland. But this week, this dead-week between the two holidays, still retains an odd sort of surreality for me.

It has always seemed to me that the old year really dies with the solstice and the Jesus-come-lately graft of religio-commercial holiday glitter we've pasted to it. The silly alcohol-fueled celebration of the New Year a week later marks the beginning of another year's journey around the sun.

But for now we wait, idly diverting ourselves with desultory work and the bright nonsense of our new toys, through the short, dark week as the earth spins through the no-time that spans the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

And, perhaps, take some time to reflect on where we've been. And wonder where we're going.

All the Troubles in the World

...are listed here - the source of the graphic below:I find it interesting to note that some of what we think as truly appalling human conditions - chattel slavery, for example - last for years, decades, even centuries...and yet take a relatively small toll in human lives compared to, say, World War 2, which many of us still consider a Good War and one of the United States' "great adventures".

Which, I think, points up the caution needed in placing a price on horror in death alone. Slavery has always been considered one of the truly heinous human acts because of the wealth of misery it contains. There are, indeed, "fates worse than death" and few of them are remitted the slave.

What I do find interesting to note is the apparent increase in horror over the past hundred years or so. But then you stop for a moment and think of the centuries of human atrocity that have simply disappeared into the memory hole. Rome alone fought nearly constantly during her Republican and Imperial periods - Plutarch says

"[Janus] also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time..."

I wonder; what will some future Plutarch write about our own country in our own time?

μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε: The Outer Circle

I've been silent here for a long time, or so it seems to me.

Here it is almost the end of April and I've posted, what, five times?

I realized just this week that I have lost...something...some critical passion or fire that kept bringing me here.

One thing, I think, is the realization that this place is now so empty, that so many friends and readers have gone.

I enjoy writing for its own sake, but one of the main reasons I write here is to try and get my ideas heard and hear back from those who read my writing. And while I love talking to Lisa, mike, Ael, Pluto, the folks who come for the "battles" posts like Leon and Don Francisco, well...it seems like such a small circle. Much as I enjoy our little community, blogging means time, thought, and work, and I had once hoped that work would enable me to reach out much further.

Realizing that it's just the few of us in this little room, frankly, makes me think that the Facebook contingent might have something. At least all they have to work on is 520 characters. (He snorts...)

And MilPub, too, absorbs a lot of energy; my military and political writing that once came here ends up there being discussed in ways that make the sad idleness of the cross-posts here all the more frustrating.

But I think it's broader, and deeper than that.

Way back in probably 2007ish or so I wrote a post here called "Don't Disturb My Circles".

In it I talked about the Grand Illusion of parenting; that we, we parents, could somehow, through will, or effort, or just hope, divert the the terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day.

That we could

"...manage our little piece of the world while the Heavens fall around us. We teach, we warn, we clutch, hold and pull away. We hide the scissors and cap the poisons and pad the corners and close our eyes at the daredeviltry and hope that the fates are kind and the ground soft. We compare car seats for impact performance, choose bike helmets for impact resistance, make healthy lunches, watch uplifting programs, read good books and teach good manners and confide good choices until it seems that we’re ready to fall over exhausted from so much care."

And that somehow, by all these good choices, all this care, that we could control our world.

And when I say "control", I mean only that we could protect our children from physical harm.

Mojo and I know, in a way I hope few parents know, and will ever know, that the harm is always there. We can never forget that. And if we ever do, the fine gray skiff of ash inside the wooden matryoshka doll on the shelf in our bedroom is there to remind us that though

"...we may tell ourselves that anything that wants to hurt or kill our children will have to tear us apart before it does, as we do we realize that all our love and all our strength are helpless against a kinked umbilical cord, a flu germ, a moment’s inattention on the part of another driver."

We live with that pain, and the fear of that pain, every day.

And to that pain the only options are to surrender, or endure it and continue. We chose to risk the dark seas of Fortune and have there continued our journey as parents.

But I didn't really want to talk about parenting again.

I wanted to talk about my country.

Because in the earlier post, I talked about how part of parenting is a deliberate decision to ignore the statistical facts that a certain number of children will die or be maimed by auto accidents, falls, poisons, disease, violent acts...and that in the most incisive parsing of persons and circumstances there is no way of ensuring that your - our - own children are protected from harm. Instead we live our lives as if those awful fates were not possible, as if we could spend the remainder of our lives tracing our children's hopes and dreams in the dust and that the shadow was just the plane tree from across the garden and not a Roman soldier with his sword red in his hand.

Right now I think more and more about that because of what I see in my country.

First, let me just say that making a democracy work seems to require some fairly simple things.

Yes, I know that there many, many difficult things within those "simple things" - a googleplexmillion, as my son would say, of complicated individual choices and decisions. The devil is, as always, in the details.

But it seems to me that the overarching principles seem pretty commonsensical:

Involve everyone in the life of the nation to the extent possible.

Try to keep the citizens "citizens", and not rulers and ruled. That means that extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme partisanship and extreme homogeneity, extreme power and extreme weakness are all inimical to making a country work. The critical mass in the middle exists not as a lump unable to choose a pole but as an active force of median values; practicality, sense, compassion, bravery, honesty, fidelity.

Make the place as equitable and fair as possible; let those who can exceed do so, but not by letting those who can't fall below the level of "citizen".

Help for the sick, the weak, the old; callousness makes a nation vicious, not strong.

Be strong, but not swaggering, powerful, but not rapacious. Don't go looking for fights; enough trouble will come your way without seeking it.

Spend within one's means, but recognize that polities have common goods with spending on. Accept that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that those who reap the most benefits pay the highest price, and should do so gladly and graciously.

Aim for self-sufficiency. It's one thing to trade, another to be dependent on things like minerals and petroleum that we as a nation can't produce for ourselves. It presents the ugly choice between a hostage to, or a thief of, the things - such as petroleum - that the nation lacks.

...

I know that my country never really lived up to those ideals. But I look around now and it seems that I can barely recognize the nation I grew up in, I can't ignore the ignorance, greed, short-sightedness and general fucktardry.

My country seems determined to tear apart the structures that helped form it as I knew it for no better fucking reason that because our wealthy seem to object to paying taxes and our "leaders" seem addicted to foreign war.

Instead of possibilities like a Manhattan Project to solve our dependence on the petroleum we must buy or take from others, our energy seems to be invested in arguing about aborting pregnancies and similar nonsense.

Instead of asking why we seem to insist on giving up our liberties for some illusion of safety from scary Terrorists, and our broad base of economic power for a narrowing and precarious - but taller - pyramid of lucre, we worry about idols and silly street crime.

I would never, never in my life have imagined "Busted" magazine as little as two years ago. But there seems to depth to the folly we delight in, and not simple, harmless foolery that we hairless monkeys have always delighted in but the sort of bone-deep stupid that begins to warp and twist the very structure of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

And I feel powerless to stop any of this.

I have tried conventional politics, and helped replace our senior Oregon senator with a man who seems to believe in the ideas I mentioned above. I voted - not gleefully and with a dull resignation - for the current president and his party. In hopes that they would fight for the nation I grew up in.

And, instead, watched them and their entire organization cower from, and truckle to, the people who seem to think it would be good if my country returned to the time when power, and wealth, were reserved for a small elite - assuming, I suspect, they they will be in that elite. I have watched the people I thought would fight for the sort of America I grew up in; the America of the living wage, of the GI Bill, where old people and sick people could, at least, have some hope of evading a Dickensian casting off...I have watched them squirm to evade being called "liberal" and flinch under the invective of liars, buffoons, idiots, and lunatics.

And I look around and just don't see a hope of changing this. The alternatives appear to be either the new Oligarchs...or those who run before the oligarchs.

My country is being commodified, privatized, outsourced, downsized, monetized, saturated with advertisements, war porn, greed, and foolishness. It is getting "leaders" like...Donald Trump.

While I recognize that much of the history of humanity has always been thus, it is painful for me to watch it happen again, to my own land, and know that anything I can do is less than a grain of sand in this vasty deep of clusterfuckery.

...

So, as with parenting, I can't keep the Romans outside the walls. I can't prevent the terrors, avert the bad choices, make decisions for the governing of my Syracuse in hopes that it will avoid the siege and sack. All I can do is try and keep them from disturbing MY circles. The circles I have some hope of control over and feeling for.

It hurts my heart to admit that I no longer feel that I can make any real positive change for my country, but my country seems to me to have mortgaged itself to its wealthiest citizens and industries, and I haven't the power or the riches to compete with them.

All I can do is look to my family, my home, my neighborhood, my city. My little circles in the dust.

And in the next post, I want to talk about that.