Only college seniors were allowed
cars on campus in those ancient days.
Four guys, Juniors, searched car lots and found
just the thing, a ’47 hearse,
Pontiac, straight 8, just fifty bucks
each. A Senior said he’d claim the beast
legally was his. Quadruple dates
were the thing: one couple in the seat,
driving, six would lounge on pillows where
caskets usually rode. Of course, at times
two young people would kiss, death be damned.
Steve’s Hearse
At the birdhouse outside our window in Montana the bright blue male Mountain Bluebird feeds his young at day-break.
Mountain Bluebird Daddy
Blue daddy’s not blue today, soaring
through sunlit skies in search of
berries and beetles he pulls from
the green world for their baby blues.
The Bluebird is not blue today at
crack of dawn, returning to their
brood in the Bluebird house
beneath the telephone wires.
He fills the open beaks with
breakfast brought from Momma’s
kitchen stocked from the pantry
of Nature’s Earth-green Temple.
The Mountain Bluebirds are threatened by changing climate, according to research you can read HERE on The Audubon Society website page.
The Brexit referendum results are in and the earthquake in Britain is sending out global shockwaves.
From this observer’s perspective, Brexit happened in no small part because of the sentiment that could elect an unfit American candidate to the office of President here at home: Nationalism. Tribalism. National idolatry: “We are British!” We are Americans!”
The immediate result for Britain is the loss of more than a few Pounds. Watch the tremors in world markets, hold on to your wallet, and remember that sometimes the people get what they ask for. A lesson in advance for the November election here in the States.
Click The Punk who would be President for Garrison Keillor’s piece on Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations.
This is too good to miss.
“He is a thug and he doesn’t bother to hide it. The only greatness he knows about is himself.
So the country is put to a historic test. If the man is not defeated, then we are not the country we imagine we are.”
- Garrison Keillor
Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder. Other times I don’t wonder at all. I’m amazed, disappointed, and chagrined. Today was one of those as the Senate’s refused to pass legislation that would have indicated a modest degree of sanity and freedom from the gun lobby.
My generation grew up watching Gabby Hayes and others in the Westerns that dominated our TVs. The law of the Old West was the law of the gun-slingers. We played cowboys and Indians with pretend guns and bows and arrows, re-enacting America’s westward expansion sometimes wondering whether the ones with bows and arrows were more civilized than those with guns.
Gabby Giffords book photo
More recently a different Gabby – Gabby Giffords, a vibrant U.S. Representative from Arizona – was shot and nearly killed, joining the growing numbers of victims of gun violence.
This later Gabby sent an email expressing her disappointment after today’s Senate’s refusal to adopt simple, common-sense legislation.
Moments ago, the United States Senate voted on two measures that would have strengthened our gun laws and helped keep guns out of the hands of criminals, domestic abusers, the dangerously mentally ill, and known and suspected terrorists.
And in the wake of yet another mass shooting — the deadliest in modern American history — the Senate chose to do the unimaginable: nothing at all.
Five years ago, I was shot point blank in the head, and the Senate did nothing. When 20 young children and six educators lost their lives in Newtown, Connecticut, the Senate did nothing. San Bernardino, Roseburg, Navy Yard, Charleston, Isla Vista — nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Well, I am a fighter and I am not going to give up now. This won’t be easy, but we’ve made great progress over the past few years. And I know that if we continue to stand together, we are going to pass legislation that saves lives, or we will elect a Senate that will.
… I am sure we’ll hear platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue,” but this was neither. These senators made a decision based on fear and calculations about the gun lobby’s influence. But I can promise you their fear is nothing like the fear my constituents felt years ago, or the people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando felt last weekend.
Sometimes I wonder. What will it take for those we elect to office to become clear?
Until they act, the Gabby Giffords of this world and those she represents will continue to fall because someone believes, or wants us to believe, that the old world of Gabby Hayes is the real America.
“Don’t the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven’t yet investigated? And don’t those people who aren’t able to escape the bonds of their own ego think that the entire Universe, even the countless worlds of outer space, is just a backdrop for this ego? And yet it might be quite different.”
― Adalbert Stifter (1805 – 1868), Indian Summer
Click HERE for more about Adalbert Stifter.
Click HERE to listen to the brief interview with Steve about his newly published book, 52 Sins, on the University of Illinois Public Radio station.
Here’s the English translation of the French Cro-Magnon chorus posted yesterday as The Cro-Magnon Chorus:
“You think you are superior (to us). You are very stupid. Your intelligence and behavior insult your Cro-Magnon ancestors. We never changed the climate!”
Confession: I had to use an online French to English translator to understand the message of the Cro-Magnon Chorus. I wasn’t trying to be superior!
Viewing the 17,000-year-old cave paintings of our Cro-Magnon ancestors in Lascaux, France yesterday, I wondered what they would think of their more developed descendants. Suddenly, I thought I heard a Cro-Magnon chorus echoing through the caves:
“Vous pensez que vous êtes supérieur. Vous êtes très stupide. Votre intelligence et le comportement insultent vos ancêtres Cro-Magnon. On n’a jamais changé le climat!”
Orlando is the latest locale for an outbreak of madness. It was committed by an individual claiming allegiance to ISIS, but it was nevertheless evidence of a larger collective madness, a frame of heart and mind angry because reality doesn’t accord with what we believe the world should look like: like, a world without LGBTQ people. A world without blacks…or whites…or Latinos…or Gringoes…or Jews, Christians, or Muslims, or men…or women…or children.
Investigators and journalists are telling us about the Orlando shooter.
But no one can really tell us why. Most of what we hear frames the picture of horror from the righteous outside, ignoring the ironic madness of onlookers’ gasps and sighs, bound together by our hatred of the hater, the shooter, assuring ourselves that we’re not haters, that we’re not shooters.
Life is always both simpler and more complex than we can grasp. Meanwhile, the imagined division into the saved and the damned metastasizes. It takes many forms.
In my tradition the crucifixion exposes the malady — the anxious fear that creates a scapegoat; the competing claims of goodness according to one ideal or another, and the death of man and God at the hands of the righteous. In this view there are no clean hands. Or, to put it differently in the terms of the cartoon, we’re all in the same leaking boat. There is no place from which to proclaim from on high that the boat is leaking only on the other side.
Views from the Edge 