I used to rail a good deal against religion because of the many bad things that are done in its name.  Then I read Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World and realized that it’s people who do bad things and, if they don’t justify it by religion, they will justify it by some other means. Or not.  Maybe St. Augustine was right.  Maybe we’re just bad.

Or maybe it’s the men who are bad.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have two wonderful brothers, an incredible father and a fantastic husband.  I have a lovely son, great male friends and colleagues. . . .  They are not bad.  But in the case of Aisha, the girl whose nose was cut off by her husband while her brother-in-law held her and the Taliban judge looked on. . . .  I’m sorry. Those guys are BAD.

Or maybe they’re just Biblical.

Let’s not forget that Muslims consider the Bible one of Islam’s holy books: according to Muslims, the Bible was God’s unfolding revelation, only (again, according to Muslims) the Jews didn’t get it quite right, which meant that God had to make another stab at getting his people, whichever people that actually was, back on track:  ergo, “Chosen People?  Take Two.” Moreover, both Hebrews and Arabs are considered Semitic peoples, who share the same subgroup of Afroasiatic languages. In other words, they’re kissing cousins. Which is why we shouldn’t be overly surprised the same horrendous punishments proscribed in Sharia law, can also be found in the Bible.

Here’s the difference: some of us have moved on.

Sure, stoning was the punishment for eighteen different crimes under Jewish law. However, in the early years of the Common Era, the Sanhedrin – essentially, the Jewish lawmaking body – effectively put the kibosh on capital punishment.  After 30 AD (CE), no more stoning.  Or, at least, no more legally sanctioned stoning.

Fast forward two thousand years and they’re still stoning and mutilating people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and those portions of Afghanistan under Taliban.  Hello!  Time Warp!  Get with the program, fellows!  You’re loathsome barbarians! Aren’t you embarrassed?

Apparently not.

Americans believe in freedom of religion, but you don’t notice Scott Roeder, the nut job who shot abortion provider George Teller, getting a pass because he thought murdering somebody was God’s will.  Isn’t there some way we can protect these women from their ridiculous men?Because, trust me.  No woman, no matter how pious and fundamentalist her upbringing,  believes that she deserves her frigging nose and ears cut off for running away from an unhappy domestic situation, and, if she does, she should be rescued because she has been brow-beaten to the point of being delusional.

"Off with his . . . everything!" Monty Python's The Holy Grail

As this long war winds down, the accepted wisdom is that no outside power, no matter how Super, has proven capable of conquering Afghanistan.  I have a plan. Let’s poll the men and see who thinks Sharia law is a good idea.  Then let’s airlift any of the men who think otherwise, along with every last woman and child the Hell out of that Hell hole; let’s take them with us when we go.  We owe them that much, surely.  Then we can sit by and watch as the men left behind destroy one another one appendage at a time, rather reminiscent of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail.

It shouldn’t take long.

The snake pit that is Iraq

In the previous century we watched Europe self-destruct twice, then clamber out of the ruins and put itself back together again, sort of like the Scarecrow after his near death experience at the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West, reconstituting himself with fresh straw.  Of course it was painful; of course it took time.  But not that much time.  Not really.

Why is that?

Well,  for one thing, we could have jammed both world wars into the better part of a decade that we have been in Iraq  and, although part of the legacy of those wars was the dissolution of European-based empires, the countries that had given their names to those empires were established entities with relatively intact institutions. They could be right-sized, the fat trimmed, the belt tightened without too much attendant angst.  Winging, yes.  Bleeding out, no.

Not so the Middle East.

Saddam Hussein was a nasty piece of work.  Tyrannical dictators usually are. But let’s not forget that our opprobrium towards him has far more to do with his nationalization of Iraq’s oil fields than any cruelties he perpetrated on Iraqis, Kurds, et al.  After all, we have given ample proof of our tolerance of corruption and bad behavior from Heads of State, provided they align themselves with our objectives.  What was unforgivable about Hussein (besides testing nerve gas on dogs) was his attempt to keep Iraq and Iraq’s oil for himself/his cronies, not the atrocities to which his regime gave rise nor the fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction he was rumored to have stockpiled.

I’m not sure what we expected when we marched into Baghdad in 2003. . . .  Oh, right — to be hailed as liberators.   Well, those whose job description includes administering  lipstick to sows point to some improvement seven years down the line.  However,  far as I can see, Iraq remains war-torn, ravaged, occupied by a loathed foreign power (us), and swarming with mercenaries, Al Qaeda infiltrators, tribes with genocide on their minds and suicide bombers lining up for the chance to blow the whole shebang to Kingdom Come.  Not a place I’d want to live in, but the place in which we, in large measure, have condemned the Iraqis to live.

The use of heroin and other hard drugs, virtually unknown in Iraq under Saddam’s regime, has increased dramatically since the U.S. led invasion; even more disturbing has been the spike in use among children. To be fair, this is partially due to Hussein’s draconian drug laws (it was pretty much “Off with her head!” if you were caught changing your mind) and the presence of troops along Iraq’s various borders, now porous conduits for hashish and heroin from Iran and Afghanistan and cocaine from Turkey. That the Iraqis are lighting up, that they are turning on and tuning out, that they are hopping aboard the white horse should come as no shock, given what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  As I said in a previous blog about Afghanistan – who can blame them? I’d take drugs too.  So would you.

And, so, it turns out, do our troops, only in their case, it may not be so much a case of abusing drugs as it is of  using them — prescription drugs, that is, although I’m quite certain that some of our troops are up to some type of less quantifiable psychotropic shenanigans in their down time.   On the record, however, are Department of Defense statistics showing that, from 2005 to 2008, there was a 400% increase in the prescription of antidepressants and other drugs used to treat anxiety, depression and insomnia among our troops and that, as of 2007, 12% of combat troops in Iraq took antidepressants or sleeping pills.  Do they need them?  Hell, yes, and don’t you be thinking of taking them away from them!  In 2009, 160 active-duty Army suicides were reported – a 15% increase from the previous year — and a whopping 1 in 10 of the men and women who serve in this theatre of war will return home to wrestle with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome – our Evil Fairy’s gift to them that  keeps on giving and giving and giving, year after year, one shitty thing after another.  And, by the way, “Thanks for your service. No, really.”

In the immortal words of Edwin Starr: “War! huh-yeah/What is it good for?/Absolutely nothing.”

Praise the Lord and pass the pipe!

"If it was a snake, it wudda bit ya!" Mom playing Aunt Eller in Oklahoma

My mother, Martha Nell Hardy, was a transcendently beautiful woman who, as she aged, began to trade more on wisdom and an increasingly folksy humor than her looks.  It was her way of aging gracefully and still having a rapt and appreciative audience. My father, novelist and playwright Bill Hardy, is a wonderful writer, but, for peculiar turns of phrase, it was Mom who took the proverbial cake.  Perhaps it was because her father was from Altamont, a small town in Texas whose newspaper featured a Puny Column, wherein all indisposed citizens were identified and their ailments detailed, or the fact that her Great Aunt used to inform her sister that her Puerto Rican date had arrived by hollering, “Mary Elizabeth!  That half-breed’s here!”

Here are a few of Mom’s more memorable lines:

• “It all goes to the same place.” Referring to food and why you should not fret if your food juices co-mingle.
• “If it was a snake, it wudda bit ya!” Referring to something in plain sight – such as the mustard — that you have stupidly asked her to find.
• “Stick your head out too far, it may go home in another car.” Who can argue with that?
• “Strike while the cookies are passed.”  It was years before I realized that the actual expression was, “Strike while the iron is hot.”
• “Dead as a nit.” Apparently more final than plain old “dead.”
• “Your Jesus bush.” The azalea bush Father Devereau gave me on my confirmation.
• “Think of it as protein.” Boll weevils in the flour.
• “Who does her hair?” Not a compliment.
• “You got to eat a peck of dirt before you die!”  But, why?

Mom loved to “swocker” dogs (get them all riled up), while “Matty Friezler style” referred to a meal set out on the sideboard for people to help themselves, leading us children to wonder: Who was this mysterious  Matty?  “Anti-goat” was her word for deodorant. An “erk-erk!” was a heritage home that she wanted to buy and renovate. Then there was my Uncle Leon, whom nobody much liked.  She called him, “The Horse,” which has always puzzled me, because aren’t horses nice?

Every once in a while she would have an attack of reverse snobbism.  “We don’t buy our furniture,” she would declare. “We have our furniture.” In this, she was paraphrasing a female representative of the venerable Cabot and Lodges families who, when asked where she had purchased her hat, replied, “We don’t buy our hats. We have our hats.” The implication was that we enjoyed the same relationship with our chattels that Boston Brahmins did with their millinery.  The reality was that our furniture was inherited from deceased middle-class relatives or looted from junk shops, of which she was an avid aficionado.

Speaking of deceased middle-class relatives, my Great Grandfather George Skinner was a conductor on the K.D. Special, a train that ran between Galveston, Texas and Joplin, Missouri. According to Mom, this was the reason for her uncannily good sense of direction. I’m not sure how she arrived at this conclusion, but the fact was, she really did have a good sense of direction.  Whenever we were lost, she would reassure us by saying, “Don’t worry. I’m the grand-daughter of a railroad conductor.” And we were reassured.

My grandmother always cried when my mother left.   Mom’s solution was this: she would lean out of the train window and yell, “Don’t forget to feed the chickens!”  Not only did my grandmother hate chickens with a vengeance that bordered on the pathologic, she was also extremely Texas Lace Curtain Gentile and the idea that other people might think she kept chickens embarrassed her so much that she would abruptly stop crying and scuttle quickly away.  (Grandmother also stole towels from every Hilton she and my grandfather stayed at on each of their several around-the-world tours and hoarded paper products. But I digress.)

When I was in my early twenties, I moved far away from my parents and, although I visit often, I continue to live a two-day drive from my home town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Over the years Mom and I worked out between us our own private little leave-taking ritual. As my car was pulling out of the drive and she was starting to tear up, I would lean out the window and call to her, “Don’t forget to feed the chickens!”

In fact, it was the very last thing I said to my mother before she died.  Only I was the one doing the crying that time.

If it hadn’t been for her, I’m sure my head would have gone home in another car long ago.

Got any worms?

My dopamine is down a pint; I’m having what Dan Carlin calls a Black Dog Day.  I’m not sure why.  Generally I’m relentlessly cheerful, but today . . . today not so much.

Speaking of Dan Carlin, he of Common Sense and Hardcore History, it’s partially his fault, him and all the other podcast pundits I listen to on an ongoing basis: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Jack Clark of Blast the Right, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, the New Yorker’s Political Scene, every podcast Slate does except the sports one, (because, as I have long maintained, I don’t do balls); The Nation and Washington Week in Review and PBS Newshour and The Daily Show and The Economist and Bill Maher’s Real Time and  Time Magazine, always and for decades, cover to cover.

You get the picture.

I am an idealistic skeptic. I worship heroes and have delusions of grandeur . . . for them, not for me, which explains to Seasoned Readers why I think the sun shines out of Obama’s ass. I also thought it shone out of Martin Luther King’s ass and the collective asses of the Kennedy brothers and, oh, yes, Right Wingers, FDR’s ass as well. Especially FDR’s ass. (I hope that thought is sending you into convulsions. That would make me very happy.) I have been a political junkie from the tender age of seven, when my Dad woke me up on a cold Indiana November night, took me outdoors, pointed to a night sky chock full of stars and announced, “Camelot begins tonight.” He also gave me a juice glass of Coke – to celebrate.  My mother never let us have pop, but the night Jack Kennedy was elected. . . .  That was a big night.

Of course, it doesn’t help my present slough of despond that I am listening to an audio version of Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World in my car. (The Nazis are just launching their program of racial cleansing.  Mother of God, were they evil!)  As for my read-read,  I’m midway through Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, which is about how the Internet is turning our brains into sparkly yo yos.  And it is.  I used to get lost in a book for hours.  Now I can barely hold out for ten minutes before the urge to multitask overwhelms me and I leap to my feet and dash off to do several things at once, one of which, incidentally, is this blog.

To top it all off, just this past weekend my stunningly beautiful twenty-five year old daughter told me she was worried about getting old, that she was afraid of losing her looks.  (I prudently stopped short of confessing that I still fret about my figure and whether I’m “pretty”.  Hello! I’m fifty eight years old.  The answer is:  No.) Then she showed me how, with only a slight bit of manipulation, she could make her under-knee crease resemble either her bum crack or what we used to refer to as her  “cluny.”

As my father used to sing whenever anybody whined, “Everybody hates me/ nobody loves me/ I’m some ugly child/ I’m going out to the garden and eat worms.”

Or maybe I’ll just cook supper while I’m unloading the dishwasher and ironing the napkins, all the while listening to Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars on my i-pod. (Speaking of which, move north.  Come 2036, it’s us who’ll have all the food!)

Sure, they all look alike – raggedy and dusty and like they live in a country that’s been bombed into the Stone Age. . . . Oh, right.  It has been bombed into the Stone Age.  Or it’s dark and they have guns.  Oh, and what about that unfortunate habit of theirs of shooting off guns to celebrate a wedding or driving rapidly towards checkpoints while gesticulating wildly – never advisable given our understandably jumpy troops. And what’s with the bad guys not wearing uniforms? That way you’d at least know who’s side somebody’s on before he. . . say . . . blows himself up  so as to take out you and a few of your buddies.

The crux of the problem is that we’re out of sync: we’re waging a war and they’re . . . well . . . they’re messin’ with us.  Let’s face it. The Afghanis are wedged in between a rock and a hard place with nary an iota of wiggle room.  If they co-operate with NATO forces, the Taliban does bad things to them; if they co-operate with the Taliban, NATO troops do bad things to them.  It’s what you might call a lose/lose situation. The only way to chose between two, very painful evils is proximity – the guys who are within striking distance. . . . That’s who you side with.  For the time they are within striking distance. The hearts and minds of the Afghanis aren’t for sale; they’re for rent. By the hour.  And, frankly, under those circumstances, mine would be too.

The United Nations recently published the results of a study to determine the prevalence of drug use in Afghanistan. It reveals that 800,000 Afghans, 7% of the adult population of 14 million, are drug users – a disturbingly high percentage when compared to other countries and one that is steadily rising.

Under the circumstances, who can blame them?

Obama established an end time to our involvement in Afghanistan back in December 2009.  It can’t come soon enough. It’s time we picked up our toys and went home.

I have no doubt that McChrystal is a Warrior . . . one with a capital W.  Joe Klein describes him as an extraordinary soldier, but one who is pathologically incapable of not speaking his mind.  However, I’m not sure McChrystal . . . or it . . . is that simple.

Let’s review the history of our engagement in Afghanistan.  Bush plunged us into this war in retaliation for 9/11 and to get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive.   I’m actually not going to fault him for that.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Probably we should have looked before we leapt . . . and realized that  Afghanistan defies military occupation and has for millennia, that the words that greet visitors as they arrive at the Kabul International Airport might properly be those that  greeted sinners entering Hell in Dante’s Inferno:  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”   Instead, we came, we saw, we thought we conquered, we declared premature victory and off we dashed to Iraq to destroy that country.   Having accomplished  Operation Iraqi Ruination, we turned our sites back on Afghanistan to discover that it had – OMG! – metastasized.    What to do?

What to do, indeed?

That was the  conundrum with which Obama had to deal when he took office (conundrum in the sense of a logical postulation evading resolution):  1) how to slink out of Iraq while saving sufficient face to show ourselves on the world stage after that particular embarrassing and devastating debacle; and 2) how to get out of Afghanistan without looking like a bunch of tribal yahoos whopped our technologically superior asses. In an earlier blog, I referred to the war in Afghanistan as a tar pit – easy enough to clamber into, hard as Hell to get out of, and virtually impossible to emerge from not besmirched.

What are Obama’s current options in Afghanistan? The Left wants him to bail; the Right wants him to hunker down and win.  The Left wants out yesterday.  The Right doesn’t care how long it takes, so long as we WIN, goddam it!  Of course, this is all hypothetical because victory in Afghanistan is impossible. This isn’t a conventional war, after all; it’s a police action and, boy, are those bad guys are winning! Worse and much more conclusive, they’ll be there long after we leave and, possession being nine tenths of the law, that’ll be the end of that.

So, what’s a President to do?  After a lengthy review of the war effort and much consultation with generals, Obama decided to compromise.  (Was this a good idea?  How the Hell do I know?  Can you have a good idea when it comes to Afghanistan?)  He nearly triples the force he inherited as Commander in Chief, giving the Generals and the Right more or less what they wanted; then, to appease the Left, he promises to start drawing down troops in July 2011, to, in effect, end the war at a more or less specific point in time.  In other words, he gave the Generals what they said they needed to win on their terms and then he’s getting us the Hell out of there, no matter what. He’s ending the war and trying to put the best face on it that he possibly can.

Oh, now, stop your fulminations!

Lefties, remember the scene in Saigon when we all of a sudden pulled out of Vietnam.  Do we want to a repeat of that in Afghanistan?  I don’t know if I’m prepared to sit through a performance of Miss Saigon set in Kandahar.

Righties, stop foaming at the mouth.  We’re losing! Sometimes America loses!  No, really. Suck it up.

As for the military brass. . . .

Well, that is where McChrystal’s very public insubordination comes in. As McPeak pointed out, McChrystal is a Warrior.  He’s not a police chief.  He’s not an administrator.  He sees that our offensive is on the defensive, that our “war” effort is circling the drain, that our attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people are offset by their desire to keep their heads.  And, as a Warrior, a proud Warrior, he can’t stomach it; for sure, he doesn’t want to be associated with it.  I don’t believe for a nano second that McChrystal did not fully intend for his remarks and those of his closest aides to appear in print. I don’t know whether he knew he’d be fired, but I suspect he did.  After all, that way there could be no question that the unspeakable nightmare unfolding in Afghanistan is Obama’s war and not McChrystal’s.

Move over you three Afghan officers who,  as reported by Time, shot yourselves in the foot when your battalion’s combat tour was extended so that you could get medevacked the Hell out of Hell.  Make a little  room on the heli  for Stanley.

Some people wanted to do bad things to my poor little Smart Car . . . with me in it!

I was astonished last Saturday to wake up to a crowded inbox full of comments on my weekly blog The Gulf Oil Spill – It’s on You, America.  I’ll be honest.  Usually my little forays into cyberspace net a handful of nice comments from family members and a few high school buddies I haven’t seen for 35 years (and whose names appear to have mysteriously morphed although I think I know who they once were.)  So I was unprepared for the love/hate that bubbled up like a witch’s brew from the ether over the next few days.   Canadians pointed out that it was cold up here (I know, I live here), a number of people wanted to do bad and really quite imaginative things to me and my car, it would also appear that I am stupid, naive and (worse!) a progressive (to which I say, “Duh!”). . . and then a lot of people agreed with me that we should stop pointing fingers and get about the important business of ending our addiction to oil.

Which was, after all, my point.

Let me reiterate: I’m not saying that BP shouldn’t be held to account and I’m not saying that they are not to blame.  They should and they are. For the oil spill.

Nor am I saying that the government’s response was all that it needed to be.  I heard from some of you in the Gulf who pointed out any number of things the government could have done better.  I believe you.  And even the radical Obamist that I am admits that there are things he could have done better as well. You’ll notice I said ‘he’; not ‘He’.  I may think that the sun shines out of his ass, but I don’t believe he’s infallible. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing a blog about politics; I’d be founding a new religion.

Let’s get real, folks. The ship of state is a big, creaky, rusted out old tub and, yes, for all you big-government loathers, it is bloated.  How did it get that way?  Well, I don’t want to let Republicans get all the credit, but both Reagan and W. did a really good job of not walking their government-is-the problem talk.  Budgets, deficits and government all ballooned during their administrations; their legacy is the Jobba the Hutt size mess in which we currently find ourselves.  Not to mention those two dandy wars.  It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to jump into a tar pit than it is to clamber out of one and good luck coming clean any time soon.

No, it’s not big government that’s the problem, it’s bad government.  And right now we have big bad government. It’s not bad because Obama happens to be President.  It’s bad because it has no regulatory teeth in critical areas. Think about it. If the banks had been better regulated, we wouldn’t have lost our collective shirt back in 2008 and, if oil companies had been better regulated, we wouldn’t be filling up the Gulf of Mexico with crude even as I write — 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day worth. We have a systemic problem.  Something’s broken. And that’s why it’s ultimately pointless to focus on Obama and how he’s handling the situation and especially on what he is wearing while handling the situation.  Hello.  This is not about outfits. This is not Sex in the City III, it’s Apocalypse Now and we can’t allow ourselves to be distracted. The ship is going down.  Forget about the damned deck chairs.

Part of being adult is accepting responsibility, taking charge, and directing your energy towards being part of the solution, not part of the problem.  Stop yelling, “Kill the ump!”, haul your ass out of the bleachers and get onto the field.  Stop with the blame and get in the game.  That’s what I’m saying.

By the way, I approve dissenting comments because I believe in a free exchange in the marketplace of ideas.  I’m willing to admit it when I’m wrong and I listen to cogent arguments.  Sometimes I’m even persuaded by them. From here on out, however, I will not approve comments that are weird, creepy, threatening, or so completely off the wall that I fear for their writers’ sanity.  And, please, if you’re going to comment, don’t make things up. Check your facts.  I do.

My Smart Car uses less than $300 a year and can hold a week's worth of groceries and an admittantly apprehensive golden retriever!

Written on June 16, 2010, on the morning after Obama’s historic Oval Office address to the Nation

Get ready, ’cause I’m getting on my high horse!

Those of you who know me realize that I’m a radical Obamist. I think the sun shines out of his ass.  Really.  I do.  And I think he’s handled this old Spill in the Gulf thing as well as anyone could be expected to have.  I mean, just how do you solve a problem like Maria?  This thing is huge.  What?  He’s supposed to do nip-ups and make it disappear?  He’s supposed to get pissed off and his divine wrath will somehow plug the hole?  News flash: governments can only do so many things at once.  Sure, the Minerals Management Service was a party on the rocks heading for the rocks, but we had two wars on the go, 47 million Americans without health care, and a global financial meltdown.  Our President was, I think you’ll agree, a little busy.  Reform, particularly reform of entrenched bureaucracies, takes time, especially when that entrenched bureaucracy is having as much fun as MMS seemed to.  Rome wasn’t built in a day; nor was Sodom destroyed in one.  No, wait. It was.  Never mind.

In any case, my point is this.  The responsibility for the oil spill ultimately lies on us – and by ‘us’, I include Canadians, because 1) I am an Americanadian and 2) Canadians are even bigger energy hawgs than Americans. According to the World Bank (last updated June 15, 2010), in 2007, Canadians consumed 8,169 kilograms of energy, per capita, while Americans consumed 7,666.  Compare that to other industrialized countries:

• Australia – 5,992
• The Netherlands – 4,909
• Russia – 4,909
• France – 4,258
• Japan – 4,057
• Germany – 4,027
• United Kingdom – 3,464
• Italy – 3,001
• China – 1,484

What’s wrong with us?  I’ll tell you what’s wrong: we’re a stiff-necked people.  Never mind the Jews (Israelis, incidentally, use only 2,875 kilograms of energy a year).  It’s us North Americans who have refused for decades to do one damn thing about our addiction to oil.  What made Jimmy Carter, the first President I ever voted for, a one-term President?  A little thing called the Iran hostage crisis.  Oh, and the fact that he had the temerity to tell us that we had a problem with oil and that, if we didn’t do something about it, that problem would grow and grow and grow . . .  just like the oil spill filling up the Gulf of Mexico right now.  For advising us to turn the heat down and wear a cardigan, we banished him to that penumbral shadowland haunted by ex-Presidents, where he has labored ever since in the service of world peace, and put in his place – ta! da! – Ronald Reagan – a nice man, but a terrible President (don’t go all flinty-eyed on me; I said he was nice), and so far down the oil companies’ pockets that he was sucking lint with every breath.

Come on, people!

Stop criticizing the President for not being mad enough or empathetic enough or for wearing the wrong kind of pants. . . .  (What is it with Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson anyway? (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/aghast-gretchen-carlson-accuses-obama-of-wearing-fancy-pants/)  What does she want him to wear?  Hip waders?  Overalls?  Hot pants?  Oh, excuse me.  He’s supposed to dress like Thad Allen?  He’s supposed to pretend to be in the Coast Guard? The way Bush pretended to be a fly boy?  Give me a break!

Instead look in the mirror and see the person who has not written his Congressman asking that a carbon tax be put in place; who has objected to wind turbines in her neighborhood because they aren’t pretty; who just had to buy that Hummer, but somehow didn’t have to buy that Prius (thus potentially martyring themselves for the cause); who invests their money on Wall Street in the hopes of making more money, but not in green investments in the hopes that our children might have an actual planet at the end of this wild ride.   Criticize that person.  Then do the right thing. Get off your duff and help us out a little here. We could sure use it.

The common wisdom is that we get the politicians we deserve.  Not true in Obama’s case.  We don’t deserve him, but we’ve got him.  So let’s just be grateful he’s not a warmongering idiot like Bush and get on with it.

Then something untoward happened.  Or maybe it was toward.

During our recent trip to Hawaii, my magnificent stepdaughter Shanah took us on a tour of the North Shore of Oahu in her Rav 4. The top was down and my locks were a veritable riot of gold and burnished ash – with ‘riot’ being the operative phrase; think Medusa in a car wash.  And someone whom I will not identify because usually he is much nicer to me twisted around in his seat, eyed me and announced, “You look just like Robert Plant!”   Whereupon he snapped a photo of me.

Now I don’t have to tell you that that is not what a girl wants to hear.  Even less not something a girl wants to see photographic evidence for.  Yet, there it was – irrefutable.  I did, indeed, look like Robert Plant and, believe me, that was not what I had had in mind. (For purposes of comparison, click here: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/dc9/2010/03/show_announcements_robert_plan.php)

So, when I got back to the mainland, I marched into Jeanette’s salon and announced that I wanted to go back to my roots.  Specifically I wanted her to match my roots and let the grey grow where it may.  (It’s there, I know, lurking behind the brown.  It’s my eyebrows that tipped me off; left to their own devices, they look like something ferocious and wily belonging to a badger.)

A day later I panicked and called Jeanette, pleading with her to return me to my unnatural state.  She put me on her cancellations list and booked me in her first available slot, ten days hence.  A day later I called and cancelled the appointment.    I had realized that it was not the hair that was the problem; it was the face.

Before a dozen friends call me and launch into the Consolation of Inner Beauty Thing, it’s OK.  Really.   Profoundly myopic, I wore glasses from the age of seven.  Needless to say I got contacts the instant I could – at age fourteen — and I kid you not when I say that I would have put rocks in my eyes if it meant I didn’t have to wear glasses.  And most of the time that was how it felt – like I had rocks in my eyes.

Then, at around age forty five, my eyes started rejecting contacts until eventually I was forced to give them up entirely.  My vanity washed up on the shore of age, I mourned my loss . . . until I found that it was much easier to swim if I didn’t have to worry about damn stupid contacts and I wasn’t forever getting dust or sand in them and having to do the Cyclops Dance of Agony in a desperate bid pry them out of the offending eye, nor did I any longer find myself crawling around the floor with a flashlight trying to find a rogue lense in high shag carpet.. Yes, there was a down side to no contacts – not so pretty anymore – but there was also an upside – less boring hassle and excruciating pain.

And so it will be with my hair.  In any case, chances are that people won’t look.  And, if they do, at least I won’t look like Robert Plant. Instead, I will look like Shirley Temple . . .  when she grew up and became Ambassador to the U.N.  And wasn’t that what I have always wanted anyway — to grow up to be Shirley Temple?

The author, looking a lot like Martha Nell

When my mother died, mysterious forces began to shape me in ways I am only beginning to comprehend. Whole chunks of her must have seeped into me as I sat, holding her hand and singing to her in the cheerless hospital room in which she lay dying. Because I did sing to her – Amazing Grace and Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child and May the Circle Be Unbroken. . . .

“I was standing by the window/On one cold and cloudy day/ And I saw the hearse come rolling /For to carry my mother away.”

I sang these songs not to comfort her. I don’t have a particularly pleasing voice, certainly not anywhere as good as the robust choir alto I had always envied her for. And neither of us was even remotely religious; if anything, we were defiantly irreligious, although we both confessed to a belief in Dog Heaven. (String Theory must be made to account for something. Why not Dog Heaven?) No, I sang her songs from the soundtrack of our lives, a compilation carefully selected to be appropriate to both venue and occasion and I hope, I really hope she heard me, although she might not have. By the time I arrived at her bedside, she had been unconscious for some time.

My point is that all the time I was singing, attempting to break through the dark wall to where Martha Nell still huddled, I thought I was on a one-way street – me trying to get through to her so hard that I guess I didn’t notice how hard she was trying to reach me.

I don’t believe in the wholesale transmigration of souls, but I have a hunch that something you might term ‘essential creep’ takes place when somebody dies. Call me narcissistic, but the fact of the matter is that I can neither imagine a time in which I won’t exist nor remember a time in which I didn’t. In that same way, I cannot begin to fathom how what was at one moment as real and powerful a being as I can conceive of – my marvelous, strong, beautiful mother – how SHE could exist one moment and not the next. Religious people have found a story to explain this particular thorny riddle, but I’m an Independent Traveler; I like to book flights and accommodations myself, on the Internet; I’m not interested in package deals or all inclusives. What I know . . . what I absolutely know is that my mother sure as heck went somewhere when she died and, looking back over the last five years, I’m pretty sure a substantial part of her relocated to yours truly.

Recently we hiked into Molokai’s Halawa Valley up through the rainforest to the base of a waterfall. In passing we had mentioned to our fellow hikers that we had come to that sacred island to heal after the death of our beloved golden retriever. Later, one of the women took me aside and said, “We’ve had four goldens and this is what you must do as soon as you are able: you must get another one. The breed is so distinctive that, even though it isn’t the same dog, it’s close to the same. By the time you’ve noticed that your new dog has his or her own personality and is not a reincarnation of your previous one, you’ve fallen in love all over again.” That lightened our hearts considerably; maybe, just maybe we hadn’t lost Buddy. Not utterly. Not entirely.

And maybe I haven’t lost Mom. Maybe she’s right here inside me, more so every day. And how not, when you think about it? We are, after all, representatives of the same breed.

Now, where did I put my knitting?