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The news for young Republicans

Did everyone catch the little news item about the homeless Florida woman at President Obama’s town hall meeting last week? Her name was Henrietta Hughes, and within minutes of asking the president — in a heart-tugging TV moment — “Help, please,” she and her son were offered a rent-free home by (of all people) the wife of a Republican state official, a nice lady named Chene Thompson.

For some reason, this story has driven conservatives insane. Right-wingers are all but beating their heads against the pavement in outrage and disbelief. I do not know why. Here is a sampling of commentary from a conservative web site (which I will not dignify by linking, but it was among the top hits from a Google search). I didn’t even bother to cherry-pick these comments — just grabbed them off the top of the stack:

10:11 AM The Underground wrote …

Impeach Obama Hussein!!

10:09 AM avgjoe wrote …

Im sorry but you and your looser son need to get a job. Move to an area you can afford to live in you may have to move out of FL to find a job & home you can afford. Notice that none of her relitives want anythng to do with this leach?

10:08 AM dz wrote …

If we continue on this path we won’t make it 30 years. Now the government is going to start giving people homes. Welcome to the United Socialist States of America, catering to the least common denominator since the 1960s.

10:07 AM MaryS wrote …

Fat, lazy liar………. She couldn’t get work in fast food or as a domestic? Housekeeper in a hospital? What do you want to bet?

10:04 AM quailblaster wrote …

The bible says those who dont work shouldnt eat.

10:04 AM Crush wrote …

I think most of us agree the this woman is typical of what the culture of “GIMMEE MO” will be about now that OBAMA is in office having been put there by the black vote and mindless white voters…….SO…..Let’s move on now to news that reflects something we may still have control over.

10:00 AM fedup 09 wrote …

The article said they sold property and have had help offered to them. They guy defending them stated that the 47,000 was in 2005,maybe if they would have spent wisely they wouldn’t need help now. Most people can’t get the concept you have to work in order to keep things ande work takes EFFORT.

9:56 AM ssquared wrote …

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Henrietta Hughes would be satisfied to continue living in her car as long as it’s a NEW CADILLAC! And Nancy Pelosi will get it for Henrietta with a loan from Freddie Mac personally approved by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. The Cadillac will be delivered by Jamie Gorelick and Maxine Waters. Ain’t it wonderful?

On the face of it, such anger is hard to explain, even in the context of the modern GOP. The heroine here is a Republican. Not a penny of government money changed hands. No meddling bureaucrats stepped in to boss people around. This was a pure and spontaneous act of, if you will, Christian charity.

The only thing I can figure is this: We need urgently, as a nation, to report the news in a way that even Republicans can understand.

Accordingly, I offer the following summary which I urge you to forward to those conservative friends and relatives who are always sending you helpful informative e-mail.

HEROIC ARYAN HOUSEWIFE STOOPS TO HELP WRETCHED NEGRESS

There — all clear now?

In future installments we can touch upon other topical matters. We’ll take it one step at a time.

• Jews Now Permitted To Own Property And Hold Public Office
• Harvard-”Educated” Muslim Mulatto Steals Election, Enters White House
• Homosexuals Freed From Camps, Allowed To Use Sidewalks (Though Not To Marry, Praise God)

Before long, Republicans will understand as much about current events as, you know, sane people.

Waiting for Spring

Here’s a soundtrack for late winter:

1. Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul – KLF
2. I Can Wait – Slut
3. Waiting (Phase One) – Porcupine Tree
4. Pacing the Cage – Bruce Cockburn
5. Maybe Tomorrow – Stereophonics
6. In The Sun – Joseph Arthur
7. Catch 22 (Ver. 1) – Spouse
8. It’s Gonna Be All Right – Gerry & the Pacemakers
9. Belleville Rendez-Vous – Ben Charest
10. When The Ice Goes Out – John Gorka
11. Slip Into Something… – Kinobe
12. Lullaby of the Leaves – The Duo-Tones
13. Sandmann – Les Hommes Sauvages
14. Lullaby of the Leaves – Keely Smith
15. Breathe Me – Sia
16. Nights of Forgotten Films – The Strange
17. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears – Julee Cruise
18. By This Time Tomorow – Minor Majority
19. Kalifornia – Kashmir
20. Shine – Intrinsic
21. Grateful – Pete Philly & Perquisite

All tracks are mp3’s except 2 and 16 which are m4a’s, playable by iTunes or any other MPEG-4 compatible media player.  Cover art is included.  This playlist will fit on a standard 80-minute audio CD.  For optimal dining and dancing pleasure, tell iTunes to “Use Sound Check” and set the space between tracks to zero.

Download it here.

Why I’m dumping Andrew

Andrew Sullivan is no longer my favorite blogger. And this is why.

Rather than recap the whole shameless saga, I will simply post a (lightly redacted) copy of my personal e-mail to Andrew:

Let’s review. You’ve been ceaselessly lambasting the Catholic church for its indifference to the plight of helpless children who have been treated as de-personalized objects of enjoyment by grown-ups. And now you post this video featuring a clearly distressed little boy on drugs. You call it a “mental health break.”

I am dumbfounded by how tone-deaf (or color-blind, or something) you seem to be about this.

This is a really embarrassing, and private, family video that should NEVER have been posted anywhere. The father is obviously an idiot, but you should know better. This poor little boy has NO clue what is happening to him, and is clearly in extreme psychological distress. How can you not see this? Does one have to be a parent to have any empathy at all for children?

Let’s play it back. The video opens with the child asking in utter bewilderment: “Is this real life?” Near the end, he fairly wails: “Why is this happening to me?” And then he cries: “Is this gonna be for EVER?”

And what do you, Andrew, have to say? Just this: “I’m afraid I didn’t take it that seriously; and I doubt the kid did either.”

Are you completely out of your mind? Are you blind? Are you deaf? Have you no heart at all? Is this really why you consider yourself a conservative — because you continue to believe, deep down, that unhappy people have only themselves to blame? Even if they are seven years old? Even if they are utterly helpless, and being laughed at (however gently) by their own parent? Does their obvious misery — completely overwhelming to their young consciousness — really strike you as unworthy of any sympathy at all?

Apparently so. I really can’t get past this. “Mental health break.”

Happy trails.

Update: And he just keeps piling it on. Utterly shameless and uncaring.

At the center of all this adult merriment is a 7-year-old child. “Why is this happening to me?” Ha ha ha!

Europop motherlode

One of my favorite music blogs, Hits in the Car, is a labor-of-love sustained for a few years now by a Dane called Stytzer. The man is tireless, his taste unimpeachable, and his blog now sufficiently institutionalized — especially in northern Europe, but also in the indie-pop scene at large — that bands and labels bombard him with sample tracks.

In an odd mental state somewhere between joy and exasperation, Stytzer recently unloaded “Nothing but Music – the endless post?” — a very lengthy index of links of free tunes that have come his way over the past several months. All these tracks are in downloadable mp3 format. All are offered by the artists themselves (or in some cases by their record labels). Which is by way of saying: these are legal, guilt-free downloads. And bear in mind, these are only the songs that Stytzer LIKES — his personal “hits in the car.” Heaven forfend that we should stumble upon his discard pile.

A musical cornucopia of this magnitude is naturally too varied to categorize in any simple way. It’s mostly Europop with a generous leavening of U.S., Canadian and J-pop artists, including heavy-hitters like The Arcade Fire, Asobi Seksu, Devendra Banhart, Beirut (a must-hear), Allison Crowe, and Iron & Wine. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Click around at random or listen to all of it. Think of it as a soundtrack for the economic meltdown.

Weeds, part 2

Bill McKibben, in his devastating 1989 book The End of Nature, noted wryly:

The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like panes of glass on a greenhouse — the analogy is accurate. But it’s more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.

The italics are McKibben’s, and the vehemence of this particular thought — that we humans have inalterably changed the world — strikes a note that is typical of most modern environmental writing. There isn’t even any need to complete the thought: We have changed the world, and this is a bad thing. The last part is more or less taken for granted.

Fair enough, I suppose. Who can argue that we haven’t made a right jolly mess of things? But I don’t believe that’s the whole story, start to finish. I  believe the relationship between humans and the natural world (and our way of understanding that relationship) is more complicated than we generally realize.

Consider McKibben’s choice of words: “a sweet and wild garden.” If you unpack that little phrase you find that it implies — indeed it demands — a human presence if it is to make any sense at all. What after all is a garden? A garden is not an arbitrary patch of wilderness. It is a created thing, a beguiling artifice. The fact of a garden suggests the hand of a gardener. Peel open the Judeo-Christian world-view and you find the story of the Garden of Eden — the gardener in this case being none other than the Almighty. Still, a garden, not a jungle, not an untrammeled spread of Palistinian woodland. A garden made specially for humankind. And of course humankind mucked it up. So this image we have of ourselves — despoilers of paradise — is not a new idea at all. It’s one of the very oldest ideas we have.

The notion of “paradise” is revealing in itself. We use it more or less synonymously with “heaven,” but the word doesn’t actually mean that. Etymologically, a paradise is a walled garden. And in the Koran, this idea is worked through explicitly: the exact layout of the divine garden in described along with the specific plants that grow there and the kind of fountain that plays at its center. It seems that when we try really hard to imagine the best, most wonderful place that could possibly exist, a garden in some form or another irresistibly springs to mind.

Making gardens — not divine but actual, living, dirty, imperfect, and likely infiltrated by weeds — is something we’ve been doing for a very long time. And even making due allowances for human fallibility and lapses in taste and a tendency toward laziness (especially in August) and unaccountable fondness for such evil abominations as the hybrid tea rose, it can generally be said that a garden is a very good thing. A wonderful thing! And yet, pace McKibben, it is also a human creation.

So we come to the thought — seldom spoken aloud in enlightened company — that not all human impact upon the natural world is of a dire, lamentable sort. Some of our impact is positive, though it seems we lack the rhetorical talent to convince ourselves of that. We humans are more than our Biblical caricature, a ham-fisted wrecking crew laying waste to God’s green Earth. We are gardeners, too. And farmers and tree-planters and flower-breeders and all kinds of other things, some of which are 100-percent cool.

Now there is a corollary to this. If our impact upon the natural world is not altogether bad, then we probably need to find a new way of thinking about this modified world we are living in. We need to consider realistically what we are doing here and how we might do it differently, given that our extinction (though prophesied with suspicious enthusiasm for many centuries now) does not seem immediately in the offing. It’s not enough to just wring our hands and deplore the loss of wilderness, the viral spread of humanity into every habitable niche of the planet. Okay, yeah, there’s that, it’s happening. Other things are happening too. Some of what we have wrought is actually rather good. We should do more of the good stuff, I think, and less of beating ourselves up.

Prison workshop villanelle

“Doing Time” by Betsy Scholl:

They call me Babe and make a kissing noise
from inside their bars and inside their rage.
Most of them are men, though they act like boys

who’ve played too hard and broken all their toys.
Now they’re trying to break their metal cage.
They yell out Babe, make that loud kissing noise

as if their catcalls mean they have a voice
routines and bells can’t break. “It’s just a phase,”
their parents must have said when they were boys.

Don’t ask what they’re in for; let them enjoy
their small audience, their short time on stage:
“Hey, Babe, how about…” then that kissing noise.

In class they want to rhyme, their way to destroy
all evidence of anguish on the page.
They can’t bear to remember being boys.

Some study law, some use another ploy,
daydreaming they’ll do time, but never age.
“Hey, Babe,” means “kiss off” to that cellblock noise,
to broken men, in here since they were boys.

Betsy Scholl lives in Portland and is Maine’s current poet laureate. And an all-round righteous gal.

Weeds, part 1

My almost-favorite TV show (running a neck behind Mad Men). You just have to love a story set in a gated McMansion community whose theme song is the folkie classic “Little Boxes.” Remember?

There’s a red one, and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.

Each episode opens with a different version of this song. The original was by Malvina Reynolds, though Pete Seeger’s recording is probably more familiar. Covers by the Decemberists and Phosphorescent are also worth a listen.

I won’t get into the plot except to note that the title means two different things. One has to do with the untidy but fascinating life forms that spring up even in seemingly sterile environments. The other refers to what is estimated to be either the #1 (according to DrugScience.org) or #2 (according to Down East magazine) cash crop in Maine.

Hullaballoo over Bald Rock

Not far from my back door, somebody wants to build a cell-phone tower. The plan got whacked down (twice) by the Lincolnville town planning board, but then the board of appeals — voting 2 to 1 — reversed that decision and green-lighted the project. En passant, the chairman expressed his personal view that tower opponents are a bunch of “radical environmentalists.”

Some of my friends and neighbors got pretty upset about this. They banded together, made a web site, held some fund-raisers, and filed a lawsuit. Last week they won a significant victory, though perhaps not a final one — a judge in Waldo County Superior Court overturned the appeal board’s action, kicking the matter back to the town with instructions to deny the request for a permit to build the tower. The judge’s ruling is, of course, subject to appeal.

Like most places, we’ve got cell-phone towers sprouting up like mushrooms around here. What makes this particular project somewhat different — and what my friends are up in arms about — is the impact a 191-foot “monopole” would have on a distinctive swath of local scenery: the view from Bald Rock.

Photo by Zane Kaminsky

Kinda nice, isn’t it? There are more pictures here. Bald Rock is a small mountain about a mile inland from Penobscot Bay, and is part of Camden Hills State Park. It’s an easy climb — about 50 minutes from the trailhead to the peak — and the view, as you can see, it really splendid. U.S. Route 1 is somewhere down there, running along the coast, but almost completely hidden by trees. You can just glimpse the ferry terminal and the little strip of shops and restaurants at Lincolnville Beach. Apart from that, the landscape is pristine, little changed from the way it looked when Lincolnville was first settled over 200 years ago.

The cell tower would sit right in the middle of what I’ve learned to call the viewshed.

I don’t think this is a case of “radical environmentalism” — a talk-radio term that has no particular bearing on the affairs of this small town. I think it’s a case of conflicting visions, incompatible priorities. The landowner on whose property the tower would be built believes he has a right to do with his land as he pleases. The self-styled “Bald Rock Community” believes that this exceptional natural site — along with its million-dollar view — is a treasure belonging to everyone. (They also believe they’ve got the letter of the town planning code on their side, a feeling apparently shared by the Superior Court.)

I expect there will be an appeal. Which means my friends will need a lot more money. You can learn more about the whole thing here.