Category: Current Affairs

Lately this blog has been rather serious given the erosion of civil liberties in these United States and the associated articulations about those cultural "engines" that have helped to make the weakening of our constitution possible. There is of course nothing funny about these matters.

Still, I was imagining our family–a weirdly Finnish and patriotic group–Lutheran, polite at least in public. I got to wondering what it would have been like if the former King of Sweden had somehow found himself sitting in my family’s kitchen. Here are the results of that exercise:

The King of Sweden came over for dinner. He had trouble arranging himself at the table because Scandinavian royalty wear complicated undergarments which makes sitting rather challenging. We tried to make him feel better by saying that we once had the Pope over to our house and he also has difficult underpants, etc.—but we were just making that up because of course we wanted the king to feel better. My family is nothing more than a group of "enablers" as they say in pop psychology.

But really: the king looked awful. Like most northern blue bloods he had a papery, thin skin and there were hundreds of spidery veins wear his hair should have been and God, he could really sweat quite profusely. Add to this the fact that owing to his underpants he couldn’t sit up straight and owing to these same factors he couldn’t sit still, and you have a good picture of the man’s general condition.

I hasten to add that we didn’t feel smug about this situation. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of ill fitting garments in our family. And certainly one or more of us has sweated at table.

My grandfather looked in the Finnish-Swedish dictionary to see if the Swedes have a word for "wedgie" for in this way he hoped to tell our guest that it was alright if he wanted to use his hands.

The long and short of the matter is that the Swedes have no word for "wedgie" and we weren’t about to make one up.

After the king was gone we gleefully imagined euphemistic terms that we might have tried on the king.

"I see, Your Highness, that you have a Goat in the Garden! Please, feel free to use your hands."

"A long fish sometimes requires ten fingers, eh Olaf?"

As I say, we had the general decency not to laugh until the King was safely in his carriage.

Our family has good manners where the nether parts of Nordic royalty are concerned.

S.K.

People all across this country can’t parse sentences or write them and those who "can" partake of literacy seem to deliberately avoid the obligation to do so. Everyone is allowed to think in fragments.

When I was younger I read Neil Postman’s book entitled "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and thought that the book’s central assertion that Americans have been badly damaged by their collective abandonment of reading was too extreme. Ah but my cautionary and altogether youthful idealism was too much the stuff of the greenhorn. After two George W. Bush administrations, after the feckless reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by the newYork Times, after the wholesale destruction of our nation’s Bill of Rights—I can only conclude that we are fit to sit tightly in the dark and utter low gibberish.

What, you may ask keeps me above the water line of sanity? I have this unshakeable optimism that the people of my nation want better lives for their children and grandchildren. I take comfort from the knowledge that the two finalists for the Democratic presidential nomination are a black man and a woman; I am uplifted to see a blind man (who also happens to be African-American) serving as the governor of New York. I see progress in many sectors. I do.

Still, if the news industry is going to talk endlessly about Jeremiah Wright then I want them to talk just as openly and with the same degree of umbrage about the homophobia and zenophobic ideas of the Rev. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson—both of whom have vulgar and un-American ideas of several kinds. The press has for far too long given ugly preachers a "pass" when they’re on the Republican side of the ticket.

How do preachers with ugly ideas or politicians who use fear and demagoguery to capture votes get away with it? Because the press won’t make a bi-partisan stab at the matter. If we want to stand for values we have to live them. Amusing ourselves indeed.

S.K.

Because we have a very old dog my wife Connie and I "trade off" sleeping on the sofa downstairs so we can be near our pal "roscoe". We used to carry him upstairs to our bedroom but he weighs close to 80 pounds and though we’re strong enough for the task you can tell that being carried like a sack of potatoes is uncomfortable for the old guy. So we try to be near him in his dotage.

Last night I listened to the BBC while drifting in and out of sleep. At one point I dreamt I was in Iraq with the poet Brian Turner who was being interviewed about his experiences as a soldier and poet. I was asleep and yet abel to hear my radio. I half dreamt I was in a bombed out house staring out at the night sky. I heard Brian Turner reading a poem entitled "Here, Bullet" and then I was truly asleep and struggling to navigate a complicated and unfamiliar house.

The unconscious is always clever.

Brian Turner’s collection of poems Here, Bullet takes us through houses and landscapes of terrifying moral and psychological struggle.

You can read more about his remarkable book at:

http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/here_bullet.html

S.K.

Our house in Iowa City stands adjacent to a man made pond where predictably the ducks have been busy doing duck-like things now that the ice is gone and yesterday morning, early, as I was walking our golden retriever (a family pet) "Maggie" (who likes to stare sagely into the middle distance and can do this for up to four hours at a stretch) a cartoonish and frenzied feather storm of a duck flew low over Maggie’s head declaiming in duck lingo the following poem:

"Dog-person, dog-person stay on your side of the rowanberry bush

Else we ducks will take up leider music with the savagery of Beethoven

And the vocal manner of Igor Stravinsky, who was forced to leave his homeland

Because he sang in the shower and innocent children and old persons were terrified by the sound, and you wouldn’t want that kind of thing to be visited upon you, would you?"

Duck poetry doesn’t have to rhyme.

S.K.

I woke in the night with the wind pushing at the eaves, restless for some reason and a radio voice told me that the United States has lost its 4,000th soldier in Iraq and that was all they said and I wanted the radio man to say something about the close to a million Iraqi’s who have died and the wind pushed at my house and the BBC was instantly talking about cricket and golf and I lay there in my bed amid the sounds of the wind and thought of all those souls still circling the earth, for that’s what souls must do when they have been denied justice though you won’t hear the president say so and your local minister likely will say no such thing. You have to be some kind of stone age worshipper of rivers and trees to believe that the dead call for human rights with the night wind.

The newspaper said this morning that President Bush spends time each day reflecting on the loss of our American  soldiers. I should hope so. I will add that I hope he begs forgiveness for “Shock and Awe” and for the reckless destruction of Iraqi civilians.

As it says in The Book of Common Prayer:

“O Lord,in Thee I have trusted;

Let me never be confounded.”

Amen 

S.K.

I am in Washington, DC for a three day poetry festival called "Split This Rock".  I am wearing a hat that says: "Navy: Accelerate Your Life". I believe in the U.S. Navy.

I believe in the acceleration of progress–a thing that might be different from the Navy’s sloganeer’s idea of acceleration.

Strictly speaking, if you accelerate your life you die more quickly. Strictly speaking life is life and no one needs to be faster to experience it.

What an amateur Buddhist I am!

My hotel is old and the windows are drafty and I think John Wilkes Booth has the room next door .

I was surprised tonight by a lurching drunk who managed to ambush me while my guide dog was taking a pee.

"You want some pee?" I asked?

"Nah," he said, as if contemplating pee for the first time in his life. "nah," he said, then staggered away.

Washington is the most disgraceful capitol city in the developed world.

Of course historians will tell you it was always this way.

In America we love to say "it was ever thus" as if by doing so we’re exonerated from taking a part.

I don’t believe in accelerated life.

This is of course the language and symbolism that preys on human despair.

I suspect we have plenty of despair to go around.

No one should be drawn to join the military out of financial hardship.

If the Navy had to attract the children of the rich would their slogan be: Navy: Slow Down Dude!

You get my drift of course: the rich don’t have to accelerate a thing.

Except when they’re driving through neighborhoods like this one.

S.K.