Half the Story...or less

I hope we all understand by now that English folk societies within strongly constrained regions led likewise to deep differences in colonial stock the was settled within the borders of the present day United States over three centuries, but in particular during the first 150 years because, comparatively, those newcomers were so numerous.  With that caveat resting its solitary head in the background, yet we can turn our attention to significant modern day observations by some of our most trenchant writers on the newspaper opinion pages of our local dailies.  for me, one of these is David Brooks who today (2/8/08) observes a factor of the educational/economic differences between those Democrats drawn to Hillary Clinton and those others who prefer Barack Obama; and why the solutions of those who would be the nominee answer to the life experience emotive nature of those differing constituencies.  [I regret, it is impossible to post a link from my own local paper here owing to contractual limitations on Brooks material signed by this newspaper -- a condition I suppose is common among all those newspapers where his work appears.]  You might look for it nonetheless -- even if that means at your local library -- especially those among you who are amazed that young people could be drawn ot either of these candidates in anything like the numbers they clearly are.  [We can credit Obama for his stirring of the need of the young to DO something good in life, to which end it seems they think  sacrifice of even the keen substance of their earnings wojuld not be too much.  The same does not seem to be possible for HIllary, whose default practice is to attack "Bush" this and "Bush" that, with the occasional "Rove" or "Cheney," "Limbaugh" or "Hannity" thrown in for good measure of what it might do for her -- accusing others of divisive behaviors while she engages in the practice.]

The New Year

The concept 'new year' is artificial, remarkably so, for the desired result, it would seem, is an excuse for another party - something like feudal times in Europe when serfs and peasants of all description were run on the squirrel cage until they dropped, simply attempting to eek out a too modest living on a plot of overplanted  soil that had not been rested since the time their own fathers had run a rude stick down a wriggling furrow, spread a few seeds, and slowly starved into disease and the ultimate experience; and still they were given more so-called festival days per year than are enjoyed by 21st-Century humankind in the (similarly) so-called "developed nations."  What a gift!

Death.

If you too have wondered (in the full implications of that word) why folks throw their too easily earned and too easily flowing dollars into the coarse experience of horror cinema, KISS, Marion Manson, adoration of Charles Manson and his ilk, and fulltime partying, here is the answer: people are inured to the simply comfortable life and looking, searching, delving for that 'something more' to stir their deadened passions, their overwhelmed senses.  Curiously, they do so by attempting to top the last touch, kiss, smell, taste, until "society," as they like to say, creates a Richard Dahlmer who can eat his read meat rare.

They are on the wrong track and it is the wider We who have brought them to this juncture in what so many are wont to call 'human development.'  What is missing is the obvious: a sense of awe -- that kind of 'over the top' -- for something yet greater, something larger, something truly better.  What that might be is not really so difficult to figure out: should you think that "what we have is..." something not so sweet and good as justice, then you might have already found and grasped the opposite - reverence and veneration of the something greater, something larger -- larger than everything else and everywhere -- God.

What a quaint thought.

Perhaps...indeed, perhaps, if you comprehend also the origins of that word: knowing also odd, perhaps because bothering to know anything well and deeply in our time is become so petty and laughable as to garner only ridicule.  Let us make it our hope in the New Year that change is our personal purpose and that by such change a greater good will come to prevail over the giddy chaos that now threatens to overwhelm our country, our communities, families, our children and selves, and our sanity.

Pray for this in praise of the only truth that is God.

Chavez in Venezuela

Ortega in NIcauragua.

Castro in Cuba, or is HE ... or is it merely he, the brother?

There is little doubt in my mind about whom to vote FOR tomorrow...while so many will vote against.

Putin, a ""former" top KGB agent in Russia.

That's only four (or five) of THEM; and they are NOT us.

Prayer, praise, service, and awe.

Storyteller

Substantial material has been flowing from my 20th century pen of late, not least of which is not only tales but expositional material re the art and troubles of storytelling. This has been more than a minor success for me: I am a storyteller, there is little doubt; but there are doubts about how effective a storyteller I am and have been in times now past. Now, if there is any question remaining, it is tied only to the assertion that "The time has come," and thta it shall be important to fulfill it with courage and commitment.

I have enjoyed, fully enjoyed this exercise, for it has reminded me of mid-century now past when I spent up to ten hours a day scribbling on three-ring college ruled and in a variety of kinds of notebooks, putting down anything from poetry and short story to journalism and essay. I was inhabited by an irresistible force and luxuriated in that transportation and the visitations that attended it: I was glorified in those years -- probably twenty of them.

Over those years, I managed to collect a considerable paperweight of rejection slips that I used to suggest among friends would paper my bedroom wall. Probably not entirely true, not close to true, but the hyperbole made the point for us all. Then, in 1987, I stopped publishing almost anything exvept journalistic polemic and outdoor sports articles, largely because I STOPPED writing anything else: dead stopped, unto DEAD. Maybe I have been.

Indeed, if anyone might have asked me two years ago whether I had written 'anything' in the intervening years - that anything being poetry or short story ... I would have said no and thought I was truth telling. Then about a year past I happened to have reason to pull apart older filing cabinet materials and a set of cabinets, both of which stored - among other things - materials I had written 'observational notes' in or things that had made it into typewritten form. I had thought they were older. They were ... but only in part: pages that had been empty were filled with random materials I had written -- those observations and rhymes and statements and stories that had erupted into my mind during intervening years since 1987 and that I had taken the time to record rather than neglect.

Neglect has been my usual path during those years. NEGLECT - or a failure of courages ... or a failure of faith in my God-given talents that I denied but may have overcome me.

The reader may wonder at my joy or blink and ask why this matters. Writers are vulnerable creatures, not because their frail courage fills them with doubt, but because their telents, strength, and skills make them understand how essential it is to maintain a healthy openness to others, to experience, and to the world at large. I have written about this at modest length in another place - the abstract to my doctoral dissertation, and more recently in a planned introduction to a collection I am yet ... collecting, so I will not expand more upon it here; but it would be good were the reader to stretch the imagination in the attempt to embrace this concept: it is essential to comprehending the generic swriter (I'll get along without it for the moment but appeal for it later and in another place).

Joy matters.

Friends and a Half

Last night, my local Friends of NRA Committee event came off at one of the best banquet houses in the Capital District: we had a good time, and some folks walked offf with some TERRIFIC great buys at low dollars: e.g., one young woman from the Hudson Valley walked off with a photo-safari to Republic of South Africa for a meagre, get this, $1,050. (Oh, yeah, she'll have to pay somewhere in the realm of $1200 round trip airfare. BUT that buy was for a safari for TWO!) Challenge: Go online, search, try to find anything like that for under $5,000 per person! You will not.

Anyhow, we did pretty well, even though, had this dinner banquet & auctions occurred in almost any other region of the country we would have given away three times the stuff we did (which was a lot -- a city lot!) and have taken in at least three times the bucks we did for the Foundation.

What does the NRA Foundation do with those dollars: 1) underwrite projects like youth programs in the shooting programs around the country, including Eddie Eagle; 2) so doing the FNRA saves NRA millions of dollars that had been traditiojnally spent to train those youth and police and just plain folks; and 3) puts half the money back into the local area for a local, homegrown committee to review a variety of grant applications made by local clubs and to fund those clubs proportionally with the dollars earned from banquets in that locale.

From my point of view, all that is good --- and is the only reason I agreed to be the 2006 Chrmn.

What did I learn over the term this thing unfolded? Well, first of all, you have to understand that I've been doing this since about 1986-90 -- whenever one year after the FNRA was founded came around. There has been an ongoing "street battle" with the young man who went to work during those early months of the effort, who is only doing his job as he is told to do it (he has zero options), but who might carry a different attitude toward our local committee to his work.

This year he called and asked me to show up to the first meeting, largely as institutional memory. I went. It became soon apparent that another committee from another area would be in the saddle, even though an adequate group of folks had been recruited from the local region. When it came time to pick a local chairman I suggested first one, who declined, then another person: they are good folks and could have walked away with it. I left Chairman, much, much to my displeasure, and only because I had been told it would be for two months only, after which someone else would step up and carry it -- a significant matter to me, for I have been swamped during recent months. Never happened despite my ongoing objections.

The man from another committee -- a really able and energetic person -- told me he had me covered anytime I could not pitch in. True. And that is what I learned: no one knows our local area the way the members of OUR committee know it, but they were shortly shoved into such a narrow functionality that it was that man and his deeply experienced, wholly committed, sealous committee who were in charge. True also that they know almost nothing current and truly deep of our area in the ordinary or demographic/psychological sense.

It became a kind of struggle the main battle of which will occur hereafter: with the local committee. Our committee begins all over again come July 5. They have to take the reins and hold onto them: it will not do to allow others to impose themselves and grouse about the performance of our folks as if they were without either resources of their own, imaginations, or energies. They used them all this year, and used them well -- and they never lost their composure under considerable pressure that would have broken other less self-disciplined persons.

Just a word to the wise: when working in community projects, do it yourself -- with local help if possible -- and not by allowing distant persons who think they know better than you how to do it (this could turn into a polemical diatribe re modern partisan differences and taxes!). It is enough to allow impressment as if from above...once. After that, let'em go home and tend to their local flower gardens. And you tend to yours with no less focus.

Howe & Ser Moving Co., MIT vs CalTech, and Good Sportsmanship

The marvelous thing about sportsmanship is the ability to accept the high level of ambiguity that is essential to the requisite "give and take."

This past week several news outlets have indicated that the supreme academic achievements of the past year have been in the hands of the Massachusetts and California institutes of Technology -- MIT and CalTech. Well...maybe: on the 20th anniversary of the snatching of the CalTech cannon from that campus by a corps of creative studetns at Harvey Mudd College, hackers from MIT entered the CalTech campus complete with moving truck and forklift, secured the necessary papers to move the famous cannon, and snatched it for the long ride to the MIT campus where it now resides.

The beaver is the mascot and symbol of the well-deserved and industrious MIT campus -- administrators, faculty, and students, but especially the latter. When Howe & Ser Moving Co. dropped off the mysterious missing cannon on the MIT campus recently, it now was found to sport a replica of the gold "Beaver" classring earned by MIT students.

Also, now there is a catch: CalTech has filed grand theft charges and is coming after the prize --- and the students who managed to pull off the prank for the second time in CalTech history, well-soiled history, I might say -- and I do.

Here then is my cheer to the clever (which actually means good-natured, don't you know!) MIT undergrads who so well planned, orchestrated, and pulled off this wonderful long-distance effort, even marking the event with an appropriate and tasteful plaque to commemorate the effort, thus establishing the superiority of MIT ingenuity (and memory) over that that of their West Coast cousins. But no...CalTech established that the instant they filed the charges.

Neglectful and Delinquent

I have not been sticking to it of late: between volunteer obligations and family requirements I have been often outside of the home, visiting a close family member in the hospital, entertaining that family member in our home, adn travelling. I expect this will continue until at least mid June of Early July. That's just the way it is.