this old anvil

They say that forty is the new fifty.  That means I turned “forty-six” today.  Funny, it’s Mother’s Day; it was Mother’s Day when I was born in St. Joseph’s hospital in Milwaukee in 1952.  Long time since then.

Birthdays are weird, at least for me.  I remember when my forty-seventh approached.  I viewed it with some trepidation because that was the age at which my father died (killed in an accident at his gas station – he tried to stop a rolling car but it stopped him – not very pretty).  It somehow entered my psyche, in a subtle way, that 47 years was a natural lifetime. 

Know that I had just turned 17 nine days before this and 47 seemed pretty old to me.  I wonder if that notion of a 40-something lifespan influenced my own lifestyle, and my lack of planning for a retirement (I’m going to Nicaragua because I can live decently there, thanks to the favorable dollar-cordoba exchange rate).  Anyway, I faced my 47^th year as a year of danger, as my last.

And then my sister Pat called to say “Happy Birthday.”  I mentioned my premonition of impending demise.  “You dope,” she said, “Dad was 46 when he died.”  So, I had survived my year of danger! 

I had a whole new problem: what do I do now?  This was a year after a divorce and a bankruptcy.  It’s hard to explain.  It’s not like I had been walking around thinking I was going to drop dead at 47 (or 46, if you want be exact).  It’s that I didn’t have any long term plans, if you know what I mean.  I really didn’t plan on lasting this long.

But here I am, six years past the half-century mark, ten years older than my father – poor guy – when he died.  I kind of like it, and would like it to go on a good while longer.  I have lots of memories and lots of stories to tell.  And I plan on accumulating more of the same. 

      Through the windless wells of wonder
By the throbbing light machine
In a tea leaf trance or under
Orders from the king and queen

Songs to aging children come
Aging children, I am one

People hurry by so quickly
Don't they hear the melodies
In the chiming and the clicking
And the laughing harmonies

Songs to aging children come
Aging children, I am one

Some come dark and strange like dying
Crows and ravens whistling
Lines of weeping, strings of crying
So much said in listening

Songs to aging children come
Aging children, I am one

Does the moon play only silver
When it strums the galaxy
Dying roses will they will their
Perfumed rhapsodies to me

Songs to aging children came
This is one

                            Joni Mitchell

      “Songs to Aging Children

Birds, I guess, don’t stay in one place too long.  Yesterday morning was the last time I saw my little mama-bird and her offspring.  They weren’t in the nest when I got up this morning, and haven’t been around all day. 

I thought Nick and Brendan grew up quickly, but in a week, maybe a week and a half, those tiny hatchlings got to over half the size of their mother.  Actually, I only saw one yesterday; I don’t know where the other was.  And now they’re gone.

Not knowing anything about birds, I kind of expected that she would take up permanent residence on my balcony – at least till it was time to migrate – and I thought that would be so cool.  I see my little garden out there as a little nature preserve, perched above a concrete parking lot.  And you know, it seems like there is a limitless number of birds in the world but they really could use some help.

The Latin American forests and meadows where they winter are being converted to farm fields, with the resulting lack of sustenance leading to a smaller number of birds returning each year.  And then, there are the towers! 

Birds have built-in compasses, particles of magnetite in their brains that orient them to the Earth’s magnetic field.  The short end of the color spectrum (purple, blue, green) gives those particles navigational clues.  Longer red waves disorient birds.  That wasn’t a problem till the Age of Electronics.  In the 1920s, we started putting up radio transmission towers, followed by TV towers.  And now we’ve got cell phone towers all over the place.  With the advent of air travel, it was decreed that any tower over 199 feet tall had to have warning lights.

Birds evolved to fly toward light in bad weather.  Before electricity, that meant the moon, leading them above the storm.  Now they head for those red lights on over 200,000 towers in the US alone, smacking into the tower itself or getting sliced up on its guide wires.  Over 500 million birds die this way every year, just in this country. 

Then there are those power lines that birds have learned to perch on as trees disappeared.  As long as they don’t complete a circuit by touching another wire or the ground, they’re okay.  Big birds, like hawks, condors, eagles, cranes, etc, unfortunately, have big wingspreads that have contributed to their dwindling numbers.  And new steel power poles act like giant ground wires and even small birds get fried – by the hundreds of thousands.

And then there are cats, introduced to the Americas by European settlers.  The domestic cat we know separated from the bigger felines about 15,000 years ago in the Mideast.  It started hanging around human settlements – at the dawn of agriculture – because stored up grain attracted rodents – its natural prey.  Humans and cats learned to tolerate each other due to their mutual usefulness.  (Dogs were different; because of their heightened senses of hearing and smell, humans wanted to keep them close, to warn them of danger.)

Cats have never lost their hunting instincts.  Even the most pampered tabby will, if let outside, become a silent, tree-scaling, pouncing predator, something American birds were and are evolutionarily unprepared for.  One study showed that free-ranging cats kill upwards of 219 million birds per year – in the state of Wisconsin alone!

Anyway, (This has gone on quite long hasn’t it?  Well, that’s what you get from a guy on a Saturday night when he doesn’t have a date!) I guess I’m a bird-lover, of sorts.  At least, I’d like to see them continue to exist.  And I guess I could draw some sort of analogy regarding birds’ tendencies to fly away with my recent romantic adventure.  But I’ll just say this: if you have to go, then go.  If you want to come back, I’m still here.     

(The facts above come from a really good book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, St. Martin's Press, New York.) 

Maybe you recall me writing last year about a bird that built a nest in a flower box on my balcony.  She had disappeared, leaving her two eggs.  I wasn’t sure if she had fallen victim to a neighborhood cat or just been driven away by the torrential rains we were having at the time (she was totally unsheltered and we were really getting hit badly then, for days at a time).  When things finally dried up I found the eggs smashed in the nest, and dumped it over the rail. 

            Back in March I started readying my little garden for spring planting.  I aerated the soil, adding some home-made compost (mostly coffee-grounds).  I planted some tomatoes, cucumbers, snap peas, chiles, cilantro, and kale, and hoped that my begonias would re-bloom.  No sign of a nest then.

            A week or two later, as I stepped out on the balcony to water my plants, I heard a familiar flutter and whoosh as a bird took off from a hanging flower basket.  The rim of that basket is just above eye level for me.  On my tiptoes I looked and, sure enough, there was a nest with two little eggs in it, next to some tiny begonia leaves.

            I figure it’s got to be the same bird.  Only this time she picked a better site; the flower basket is partially sheltered by the building’s eaves.  And we have a better “relationship” this time.  Last year she would take off anytime I stepped out on the balcony, and perch on a telephone wire across the parking lot, staring (balefully, I imagined) at me.

            This year I started by opening the sliding door and screen very slowly, and waiting a few seconds to, slowly, step out.  Then I would stand very still for a while before going about my tasks, like watering, with no sudden moves.  I’d go and sit out there and read for a while.  She got used to me and never flies off when I come out there anymore.

            Even after the eggs hatched!  That was about a week ago, when I peeked out the window and saw two scrawny hatchlings nestled up to either side her.  I had worried about the well-known defense mode of mama-birds.  I had visions of being dive-bombed when I came out to water my tomato plants.  But, we’re cool.

            And it seems like it’s just me.  She’ll take off if Brendan goes out there, even with me.  Same with Janet – when she used to come over.  The first time, I don’t think the bird was there, but the second and third times, she took off, even though I stepped out first and Janet was careful to move slowly and all that.  (Ah, Janet, I miss the way you used argue with me out on that balcony!)  I wonder how long this could go on.

                It’s kind of funny.  I know that birds are migratory creatures, and lots of North American birds winter in Mexico, and Central and South America.  I don’t know the life span of birds but wouldn’t it be something if I ran into this one after I early retire in October, 2010 and move to Nicaragua?

In an email I got today a friend takes me to task for “propos(ing) that a woman in a committed relationship violate her promise of fidelity to the man she loves.  If you were in his shoes you would probably feel differently.” 

Actually, I didn’t really say, “Hey, Janet, why not cheat on your lover with me?”  Ideally, she should be in an “open” relationship that is not threatened by outside sexual activity.  I think most people these days accept that their spouses and Significant Others have friends of the opposite sex that they spend time with alone, for drinks, conversation, companionship, whatever.  Why not allow sex into that “whatever?”  I’ve often found it to be the fitting end to a pleasant evening – or a nice way to greet the dawn – with  someone I like (not love).  It can be done with affection and respect, without threatening one’s partner’s more serious relationship.

But let’s say Janet’s willing but her S.O. isn’t.  Who was it that said: “The thief treasures the taking more than the prize?”  I’ll admit to having “fooled around” with a couple of married women in the past, as well as had some “lapses” in my faithfulness certain times when I was supposed to be monogamous (but not in my last marriage – which lasted 13 and ½ years.  Oh no!  It was my insanely jealous wife who took up with someone else.)  But there IS something delicious about forbidden fruit.      

Actually, I have been over, around, under, above and through the monogamous –not monogamous thing in nearly 40 years of relationships – four serious (including two marriages), one or two others that were close, and dozens that fall under the category of cheap & superficial (hey, there’s a time and place for everything!).  Sometimes we were exclusive, sometimes we weren’t. 

Fact is, half of all marriages end in divorce, with infidelity the major reason.  It seems a lot of people agree with me on monogamy, they just don’t like admitting it.   

I’ve always liked a statement (probably apocryphal) attributed to Aleksandra Kollontai, an early Bolshevik: “Having sex should be as simple as drinking a glass of water.”  Supposedly, Lenin said that was like drinking from a dirty glass.  There is no “official position” on the question, it’s all personal.    

Brendan spent his recent spring break in New York City.  His older brother, Nick, got to do the same back when he was fifteen, and now it was Brendan’s turn to get the grand tour, conducted by his two uncles.  (My younger brother Bob’s companion, Jerry – they’ve been together over twenty years – has always been referred to as “uncle” by my boys and my sister’s kids as well.)

They had a great time: a couple of shows (Broadway and Off-Broadway); Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty; and restaurants – my epicure brother and brother-in-law know where to chow down in the Gotham city.  When they started this thing with Nick, I kind of wondered, why, at age fifteen?  Turns out it was a brilliant insight.  At that age a kid has a certain modicum of maturity but also still the capacity to be “wowed.”  And at sixteen, well, he’ll be working a part-time job to get some money to buy a car and not have the time to spare.

Brendan was telling me about “real” Chinese food, “like they have in Chinatown” the other day and I got to thinking about my visits to New York and the city’s history.  Like how Brooklyn was an isolated small-town surrounded by dairy farms until the bridge bearing its name was opened in the 1880s.  Or how Central Park used to be a swamp full of poison oak and sumac.

Wall Street is named for a real wall that stood there to defend against Indian attacks.  Broadway was a trail along which early Dutch settlers could see deer and mountain lions.  Mannahatta, as its original inhabitants referred to it, was a hilly, rocky island criss-crossed with rivers and creeks.  Over the years, the hills were leveled, their soil used to fill streambeds and so provide the base on which to build the present towering metropolis.

Now look, this is not a screed against the spread of concrete and steel at the expense of Mother Nature.  What’s got me in this “New York State of Mind” (sorry, Billy Joel) is not the havoc we, as a species wreak on nature.  It’s what we as individuals do to ourselves.

It’s Janet I’m thinking of.  There won’t be any weekend roadtrip to San Antonio.  She called me last night and told me what I had suspected.  She has been living with a guy – who had moved out over some issue or other – who is now back.  So, I’m the odd man out.  That’s okay.  We weren’t in love with each other.  But there was an attraction, and maybe it could have led….

It was a painful conversation.  She didn’t like telling me we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore.  And I didn’t like hearing it. 

It’s serial monogamy, all over again.  I think there’s something unnatural about it.  I think the need for exclusivity in a relationship springs more from ego and a desire to control than from love.  And suppressed feelings and desires will come out, eventually, in some form or another.

It still rains in New York, and that water, which used to flow into now-gone rivers and creeks has to go somewhere.  The city maintains a massive and elaborate system of pumps that keep some 12 million gallons of water a day from overwhelming the city.  That’s on a day when it doesn’t rain. 

When it rains, there’s no soil in Manhattan to absorb it.  The streams that used to carry it off are gone.  The water runs down the streets into sewers that were laid a hundred and twenty years ago, above the subway lines (they were built later).  Back on September 11, 2001 with its resultant power failures, if emergency generators hadn’t kept certain key pumps in operation, the Hudson River could have burst through the tunnels that connect New York’s and New Jersey’s subways, inundating the island borough.

Relationships are like New York.  You think you’ve suppressed all those desires and urges but they’re still there, like all that water.  Underground.  But it’s going to come up again, somehow, someway. 

C’mon Janet.  You know you like me.  Don't wait till the pumps fail.

What do you say to a constitutional amendment allowing one to lie about past sexual adventures?  The reason I ask is that I just read some news about the Roger Clemens case.  In case you don’t know, the former pitcher – one of the greatest of his era – was fingered by a former trainer, under indictment for trafficking in steroids, as a onetime user of the banned substance.

Clemens sued his accuser, Brian McNamee, for defamation of character.  All of a sudden we’re hearing about extramarital affairs Clemens supposedly had over the years, including one with a teenaged country singer when he was 28.  McNamee’s lawyer has stated that if Clemens wants to sue to protect his “reputation,” the defense will do what it can to tear said reputation down. 

Just coincidentally, when I was 28 – maybe 29 – I was dating a 17-year old down in San Antonio, where I used to live.  Amy: a slim little “slip of a girl,” with short brown hair and grey eyes and thin Irish lips.  I met her at a meeting of a coalition working to stop US military intervention in Central America (we’re talkin’ early ‘80s).  Her father brought her.  He was a psychiatrist and a Quaker, and had no problem with our relationship.  They lived in a “gated community,” the first I’d ever seen.  Security got to know me well, raising the gate for my ’72 Nova when I would bring Amy home at three or four in the morning.  She was smart as a whip, and a pacifist.  I was a Marxist, and we would have the most wonderful arguments….    

Anyway.  I bring this up because I have nothing to hide.  Seventeen is legal age in Texas, you know?  And I wasn’t married, or cheating on anyone – as, apparently, Clemens was.  My point is that I talk about it because I want to.  I would not like to be forced to talk about it now, many years later, on a witness stand, testifying about possible drug use.  What’s the connection?  Given the schizoid character of our society’s notions on sex, I think that unless a case directly involves sexual activity all mention of it should be banned.

The notion of “covert” sex is on my mind in regard to Janet.  It has occurred to me that I just might be the “other guy.”  I have never been to her house.  All of our dates, except one, have been on weeknights.  Maybe a guilty conscience is behind her outraged response to my “serial monogamist” remark.  I’m starting to think she’s married, or living with someone. 

Sunday I called her and said, hey, Brendan starts work at Six Flags this Saturday so he won’t be coming over this weekend.  Let’s take a little road trip down to San Antonio, I’ll show you the sights.  She said she would think about it.  I haven’t heard back from her.

I’d like to tell her that whatever else she has going on, I’m ok with it, if she is.  I just don’t know how to bring it up.  I would hate for her to feel guilty about seeing me.    

Maybe you didn’t notice it but, Janet, who I met at a Hillary Clinton bash, had by my second post about our “relationship,” become a Barack Obama supporter.  Clinton won the Texas primary but lost the next two or three in other states.  Janet switched to Obama, now the “front-runner.”

Quite a few Clinton Democrats have done that, in the interests of unifying their party for a strong campaign against Republican John McCain.

I don’t care about that.  And it doesn’t say anything about Janet’s character; in the context of bourgeois politics, this is SOP.  But when we talked about it a while back it struck me that what she said about Obama sounded a lot like what she said about Clinton.

I attributed that to the homogenizing effects of that same bourgeois politics.  Candidates and parties may disagree on how to do something, but they all agree on what is to be done.  Take Iraq (please!).  They all agree on the need to establish a stable US client regime there. The disagreement is about how quickly they think they can do it, and how many American casualties public opinion here will stand for here in the meantime.

Anyway, electoral politics aside, what got me about Janet’s switch was how she couldn’t or wouldn’t see that aside from putting Obama’s name in Clinton’s place in what she said, that she wasn’t really saying anything new.

I didn’t pursue that thought at the time – I really don’t look for ways to start arguments – but on further reflection it takes me back to the Christian monks of the Middle Ages.

Yes!  Really!  (Stay with me here, okay?)

We tend to think of “Western Civilization” as something that developed in a straight line from the philosophers of ancient Greece to us.  Fact is, there was a thousand year gap between them and us.  After the fifth century fall of Rome, the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Cicero, and so on and so on, were lost.

European society developed along new social, economic and political lines.  It wasn’t until the 15^th century Renaissance that those writings were rediscovered.  Renaissance means “rebirth,” and people then considered themselves to be restoring what had been lost for so long.

And they were basing themselves on copies of the ancient classics that had been languishing all that time in monastic libraries.

Some of those old documents are still around and every once in a while, the experts who study them find a “palimpsest.”  That’s a manuscript that has been written on more than once.  Papyrus, and later, parchment were hard to produce and therefore expensive and rare. 

Say you’re a monk in Clonagh in 750 CE and you’ve been assigned the task of producing a new copy of the “Life of St. Polycarp.”  And you run out of parchment in the middle of the second to last chapter.  What do you do?

You rummage through the stacks of scrolls and codices in the monastery’s library until you find one you don’t think is very important, something like a copy of Democritus’s theory of atoms, written in the 5^th century BCE.  You scrape the lettering off it and start writing your stuff on it.

A good palimpsest is one on which the original writing is still legible. 

Back to Janet and me.  I started looking at her as a kind of political palimpsest, and a reluctant one at that, not wanting her previous “writing” about Hillary to show.  Then I thought, well, aren’t we all?

Janet and I really know very little about each other.  I’ve told her about a marriage that ended nearly ten years ago, two sons, and a relationship that ended over two years ago.  I know she’s divorced, had a boyfriend till last January, and has a daughter.  That’s it, and we’ve never gotten into the “whys?” for any of this.  We always get into that “other stuff” when we sit down and talk.

There is so much more I could tell, so much more I would have to tell if this gets serious.  What I’m wondering right now is, could I ever let her read the stuff I’ve posted about her?  Would she let me read anything she may have posted about me somewhere? 

Then there's the question of what "writings" of my life are still showing that I don't know about?

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to explain anything?                

Whatever it is I’m doing with this woman it’s not a “relationship.”  I can’t even talk Shakespeare with the woman!  

If you recall some recent posts, Janet, who I met six or seven weeks ago, interpreted some remarks of mine on monogamy and racism as attacks on her character.

Now mine came under attack.  Seems I’m an “anti-Semite.”  That’s because, a) I accept The Merchant of Venice as a comedy, as the Immortal Bard intended it, and, b) I don’t think Shakespeare created the character of Shylock to disparage the world’s Jews.

If you don't know the story: the Jew Shylock lends money to Bassanio, who invests it in a commercial venture subsequently lost at sea and then has to pay back the loan with the infamous “pound of flesh.”  Portia, Bassanio’s betrothed, saves him, with a speech in court pointing out that while the contract allows the creditor to claim his pound of flesh, it doesn’t allow him to shed a drop of his debtor’s blood in the process. 

The main lesson to be drawn from this, I’ve always held, is: There’s nothing like having a smart girlfriend!  Other commentators, however, focus on Shylock, or rather, Shakespeare’s view of Jews, as expressed through his drawing of the Jewish moneylender.  Of course, I have an opinion on that, too.

And it came out in another late-night balcony wine-cigar-cigarette conversation.  She mentioned she had been a Business Administration major and an English Lit minor in college.  Not being much into the former, I steered the conversation toward that latter.  Who’s your favorite writer? I asked. 

She mentioned Dickens, James and a couple others I wasn’t into.  Then she added: “And Shakespeare, of course.”  It was the “of course” that got me.  That’s what I always say.  Shakespeare, OF COURSE!

Were we connecting?  Were the “darling buds of May” blooming?  What’s your favorite play? She asked.  

Hamlet.  No, wait a minute, I said.  Romeo and Juliet.  No, King Lear. 

Hmm, she said, all tragedies. 

Oh, I like the comedies too.

Like what?

Oh, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and oh, yes, The Merchant of Venice.  Even in the darkness out there on the balcony, with just minimal light diffused through my living room blinds, I could see her face cloud over.

I’m Jewish, she said.

Oh, I said back.  Now, if you know the play you know Shylock is a grasping, greedy, murder-intentioned money-lender.  He also gives us one of the most moving statements ever on the humanity of the Jews (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?  if you tickle us, do we not laugh?  if you poison us, do we not die?  and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”)

That’s what made the Bard great, you know.  He told both sides of the story.  I tried to explain to Janet, that Shakespeare never knew any Jews.  They had been expelled from England nearly 200 years before he was born, and they weren’t allowed back in for nearly a hundred years after he died. 

Throughout the middle ages all over Europe, Jews had functioned as merchants and moneylenders (mainly to kings and princes, which is what got them in trouble you know.  When a monarch couldn’t pay back his loans, he’d kick the Jews out of the kingdom, quoting the Gospels about the Jews killing Christ.  We know where that led.)

The term Jew, however, had entered the popular lexicon a metaphor for greed.  But the greedy people Shakespeare was referring to were English Christians.  His play was a hit because the public was feeling the effects of the rise of a new class of these Christians – known as Puritans – who would, some 40 years later lead a civil war that led to the beheading of the king and the founding of a republic based on a new capitalist order.

Shakespeare picked up on the changes that were just beginning to shudder through society.  While feudal society had been exploitative, it had, like ancient society before it, been based on personal relationships.  Everybody related to somebody else – one to one.  A slave to an owner.  A serf to a lord.  And the slave-owners and the lords were also ranked from the lesser to the greater.

The security of knowing one’s place and role in society in accord with one’s birth was just starting to change.  Some people thought now that hard work and enterprise could lift one out the class of one’s birth.  Trouble was, they’d screw over anybody for a buck – or a pound, I guess, but you know what I mean.

The Bard just used a commonplace term and a stereotypical figure for greed to exemplify what he saw going on in his world, in which real Jews were absent.  Even though an anti-capitalist bias, I think can be picked up in his works, Shakespeare became the great writer that he is for us today because he picked up on another, deeper trend in his changing society.

That’s the birth of the human personality.  Those would-be capitalists needed to overcome the notion that one’s birth determined one’s place in life.  They said, Hey, you have choices!  I don’t contend that these would-be capitalists or Shakespeare were consciously doing all this.  I think the beauty of the Bard’s work is in the ambiguity he displays.

In Julius Caesar, for example, is Shakespeare a monarchist or a republican?  His characters mouth beautiful propositions in support of both positions.  But the play is not about that.  It’s about people – friendship, loyalty, individuals in conflict, each with their own characteristics: recall Cassius of that “lean and hungry” look. 

God, this has gone on so long, maybe that’s one reason Janet seems to be down on me  - maybe I talk too much.  She didn’t seem to think much of my explanation.  I think she saw me as someone trying to “explain away” a statement that could be “construed” as “possibly anti-Semitic.” 

That would fit in with her Barack Obama fixation and the concept of politics as “sound-bites.” 

When it comes to “deal-breakers” in relationships, politics is small change.  I don’t care who you vote for, but don’t fuck with the Immortal Bard.  Hey, Janet, don’t call me; I’ll call you!         

In the first several centuries C.E. (Common Era, once know as A.D.), the followers of Jesus spent a lot of time and energy fighting among themselves about who, and what he was.  The issue was: human or divine. 

There were disagreements within each camp.  Jesus could have been a man like any other, specially blessed by god.  Or his human form might have been a guise temporarily assumed by a god.  Then again, maybe he had been a real human, transformed into a deity upon his death.

And if Jesus were divine, was he the offspring of a god and a human, like old Achilles or Caesar Augustus?  What was his relationship to Yahweh, the god of the sacred writings?  Where did the Holy Spirit fit in?  How many gods were there, anyway?  The first Christians were Jews – who were monotheistic (at that time, although not throughout their history as some would have it).  It was a battle of the heresies.

The winner was, of course, the Trinity: three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – in one God.  What I’m looking at here is not theology but terminology – words, and what they mean to the people who speak or write them.  And to those who hear or read them.

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, concentrating right now on ancient Greece and Rome.  One piece of knowledge I’ve picked up is that there was no equivalent term in ancient Greek or Latin for our person.  The closest would be mask, what an actor wore onstage in those days as he switched from role to role.

Sort of puts that old controversy – and its resolution – in a new light.  Imagine a sermon that asked, “What mask is god wearing today?” 

Of course, I’m not much into sermons about god, but I am into people, being a person, myself.  And I can’t help but wonder about how my word for myself is rooted in an attempt at disguise.        

While I don’t have much in common with anyone named Rockefeller, I have to agree with what Senator Jay Rockefeller said about the military past of the “presumptive” Republican candidate for president:  

 McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues,"

This led to an uproar of sorts, resulting in the West Virginia democrat apologizing to McCain: “While we differ a great deal on policy issues, I profoundly respect and appreciate his dedication to our country….”

A spokesman for Barack Obama, on whose behalf Rockefeller had been speaking, said “Senator Obama has a deep respect for Senator McCain’s service to this country and doesn’t agree with what Senator Rockefeller said.”

Hmm, so does Obama think that McCain was airlifting CARE packages to Vietnam? 

Of course not.  He knows that his potential electoral opponent was a participant in the biggest bombing campaign in history.  The US dropped more bombs on Indochina than it did in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II.  And don’t forget the napalm and Agent Orange.

Keep in mind that no Vietnamese ever brought down any skyscrapers here.  We went over there to support a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. 

You sympathize with the oppressed Buddhists of Tibet?  In 1963, Buddhist monks were burning themselves to death on the streets of Saigon in protest of the regime the US was propping up.

McCain got shot down during all that.  He can complain all he wants about how he was treated as a POW.  He’s lucky he got out of there alive. 

All this, however, is “inconvenient” in the context of a bourgeois election campaign.  Rockefeller screwed up by stating an ugly and indisputable fact.  He apologizes.  Obama takes his distance from the statement.

Fact is, McCain is a war criminal, by the standards established by the US at Nuremburg, and by the Geneva Conventions.  The reason Obama doesn’t pursue this line of attack against McCain is simple. 

If he becomes president, Obama will need people like McCain to show their “dedication to our country,” and provide “service to this country” in pursuing the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the future wars against Iran, Syria, and North Korea.  I would add Cuba to the list, but everybody in Washington knows better.

Well, I managed to piss her off again.  Janet, that is, the woman I told you about a while back.  We met at an upscale Hillary Clinton fund-raiser (at which I was a gate-crasher of sorts, not having any funds to speak of nor any support to offer).  After a couple of dates we got into a discussion of monogamy.

In my late-night, alcohol-enhanced wisdom I pronounced her a “serial monogamist,” by which I meant to make light of our social concept of monogamy.  All I meant was that few of us take seriously the idea of having just one marriage/sexual partner for life.  And she, like many of us, tried to honor the concept by being “exclusive” with whoever she was in a “serious” relationship with at the time.

Janet took it as a criticism of her and a general cynicism about life on my part (I’m sure a lot of it was in the delivery).  She was wrong about the first part, possibly right about the second.  But she gave me a second chance.

This time the discussion was not of sexual mores – we agreed that if we got serious we would be monogamous (not a big concession on my part since I’m not exactly fighting ‘em off these days).  This time it was politics.

Politics!  My views of politics are as skewed – in the eyes of most people – as my views on sexuality and marriage (it all flows from the same source, in my mind).  Anyway, the other night I mentioned to her that Obama’s speech on race relations seemed to help drive his campaign forward.

She agreed.  And she was very happy about it.  Now, I’m not stupid.  I did not point out that Obama did not endorse or condemn his pastor’s comments on 9/11, AIDS and drug addiction.  He simply pointed out that this is how “Black America” expresses its frustration with the continuing effects of racism.

I did not express my opinion that he was saying, “if you want Black America to keep going to work for lower wages, and sending its kids to lousy schools, and not getting adequate healthcare, and living in substandard housing, you better at least let them blow off some steam on Sunday.”

I didn’t say that, contrary to liberal gushings, Obama had not made a “powerful statement on racism,” but rather, had sent a message to the rich and powerful that he was not one of those “bad” Blacks.  (And they heard it, you know.  He picked up $40 million in contributions since that speech, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $20 million.)

No, none of that.  All I said was:  “Why do you call him Black?”

“Because he is,” she said back.

At that point, “The Great Explainer” stepped forward.  He’s a nice guy, by the way, wanting only to help people, by the benefit of his erudition and experience, to better understand the world they live in.  He explained:

Barack Obama has a Black father, born in Kenya, and a white mother, born in the USA.  That’s 50-50.  The reason he is considered Black is due to our society’s adherence to a standard of “whiteness” established hundreds of years ago by southern slave-owners.

They didn’t want to recognize or free their offspring resulting from their rape of Black slave women.  Laws were adopted throughout the slaveholding South specifying that a person who was at least 1/32^nd Black was Black, not white, and still a slave.

The “Reflections of Comrade Fidel” in today’s online “Granma,” the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper, was a “welcome home” to the health workers of the Henry Reeve Brigade.  They had been in Peru helping in the aftermath of an earthquake in the province of Cuzco.

Given that Cuba has more doctors working in the Third World than the World Health Organization the event wasn’t very notable.  But I recalled the name of the group, and when it was set up.  While Hurricane Katrina was battering New Orleans and the Gulf Coast the Cuban government informed Washington that it had 100 doctors ready for takeoff as soon as the weather permitted their plane to land at any regional airport.

And there would be another 500 ready about twelve hours after that.  Now, these weren’t just any doctors.  This was not the Cuban equivalent of the groups of American doctors who sometimes make holiday-like excursions to poor countries to provide free medical care – I’m not against that by any means – this was a contingent composed mostly of veterans.

They’d worked in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the most isolated and poorest regions thereof, staying at their posts during invasions, hurricanes, typhoons, coups, earthquakes, civil wars, and so on.

They were outfitted with backpacks loaded with “necessary medical provisions” and a couple of days rations.  The plane was on the tarmac, ready to go.  They waited for an answer, as the SuperDome was converted into an overcrowded hellhole and dead bodies floated down the streets of the Crescent City.

They waited as George W. Bush dithered and FEMA tried to figure out what was happening.  A day went by, two, then three.  As the crisis deepened the Cubans said they could send 1,500 doctors and other health workers.  They never got an answer.  To avoid a possible “propaganda victory” to Cuba the people of the Gulf region were denied valuable aid.  

I remember Fidel saying that Cuba would not have been able to help if a space shuttle or a nuclear submarine was in trouble.  But Cuba knows hurricanes and it knows how to get medical care to people who need it.  The offer of aid, rising above the politics, was testimony to the Revolution’s profound humanism.

Washington’s refusal of that aid was testimony to the profound rottenness of our social, economic and political system.  The basic human solidarity expressed in the Cuban offer of help is foreign to us here.

No, you won’t find an “Epistle to the Bolsheviks” in there among Corinthians and Romans and Ephesians.  And I doubt if you’ll find a single reference to the “Apostle to the Gentiles” anywhere in the 40-plus volumes of Lenin’s writings.  (I haven’t read them all but I’ve definitely made a dent in them.  That goes for the Bible, too, including Paul’s epistles.)

But I think there is something analogous or parallel in the careers of these two figures of truly seminal historical importance.  First of all, let’s note that Paul’s epistles (about half of which are, according to most scholars, authentic) are our oldest Christian writings.  They go back to the 50s CE, predating the gospels by 50 to 100 years.

Both Paul and Lenin were rebels, not only against the “establishment” of their times, but within the rebel movement itself.  Remember that Paul was not of the original Twelve, who had been handpicked by Jesus and who had walked with him.  Paul had helped persecute the followers of Jesus.  Paul declared himself an Apostle after his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus and later, a quick trip to heaven.

Lenin was no proletarian.  The son of a member of a lower order of the Russian nobility he took up the cause of the workers as a university student.  He might have been influenced by an older brother who was hanged for alleged involvement in the assassination of Tsar Alexander by the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a definitely non-Marxist outfit.

Paul had to fight for his vision of the church against that of the original apostles, including Peter (the “rock” on which Jesus supposedly founded his church) and James, the brother of Jesus (for Christ’s sake!).  The issue was whether gentile converts – what we call Christianity was then a Jewish sect – had to follow Mosaic Law. 

Eating kosher was not a big problem, nor was ritual purification – mikva baths and the like.  Circumcision – now that’s a different matter, and remember there was no anesthetic then!  Paul said they didn’t have to; Peter and James said they did.  Paul won.

Lenin became a Marxist two years after Frederick Engels died (12 years after the death of Karl Marx).  His first venture into international socialist politics was in the debate over Eduard Bernstein’s revision of Marxism. 

Bernstein, who had worked closely with Engels and who had edited Theories of Surplus Value, the fourth volume of Capital, now said that class struggle was ancient history, that capitalism had entered into a peaceful phase, and could be reformed out of existence.   Lenin said no to all that. 

In the course of his “career,” Lenin went on to lead a successful socialist revolution in his native Russia, against the “advice” of all the leading socialists of the time, including Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, both contemporaries of Engels (Kautsky was even known as the “Pope of Marxism” to some, Plekhanov had translated Volume One of Capital into Russian). 

There are two parallels here, one obvious, the other not so much so.  Clearly, the Christianity of today is not that of Paul nor the savior he spoke of so lovingly.  The teachings of a humble peasant preacher – and his apostle – were appropriated by priests, bishops, popes and emperors, and converted from both a comfort for and a form of struggle by the poorest layers of society – slaves and landless peasants – into another pillar of that society that oppressed them.

And Lenin’s Soviet Union degenerated into a horrible caricature of socialism under the rule of a dictatorial bureaucratic caste (the decline of which and the corresponding rise of capitalist tendencies there have not led to an increase in human happiness). 

The other way in which Paul and Lenin parallel each other is that they were both apocalytpicists.  Paul really thought that the Second Coming was nigh.  That’s why, by the way, attempts by evangelicals and fundamentalists to use his writings as guides to everyday life strike sensible people as artificial and strained.

You can’t understand Paul without understanding that he believed that the end times would come before his generation passed from this earth.  The parallel with Lenin is that, when his party led that revolution in 1917, he saw it as the beginning of the end times for capitalism.

Russia in 1917 was too backward, too peasant, too under-industrialized to go socialist.  Everybody knew that, including Lenin.  But it was the start.  All we have to do, said Lenin, was hold out till the big battalions from Germany and France come to our rescue.  Of course, those battalions never arrived.

All the “excesses” bourgeois historians like to charge against Lenin (most of which, by the way, are false) flow from that sense of that coming anti-capitalist apocalypse.  Just as to Paul nothing mattered except one’s attitude toward the Savior, for Lenin nothing mattered but one’s attitude toward the Revolution. 

Seven million Russians died in a vicious civil war.  The Bolsheviks won, without anyone coming to their rescue.  Their “prize” was a country that had suffered through four years of World War, two revolutions, and a three-year civil war. 

Victory gave birth to defeat.  Just as Paul’s church was taken over by the “better elements” of the Roman Empire, the party and state Lenin fought to establish were taken over by a caste of bureaucrats which would drive the workers and peasants out of political power.

But, y’know, as depressing as all that might be, as a student of history, I take courage from it.  It IS possible to make a change in society.  It may not turn out the way you planned, but, goddamn it, go out and do it, and see what happens.  It can’t be worse than what we have now.

In the news today: “Iraqi government takes on Shiite militias.”

Wait a minute.  What is the “Iraqi government” except a glorified Shiite militia, with the benefit of US support?  Of course, it’s in the interests of US policy to portray Iraq as a country with a government in need of support (for freedom and democracy, not oil!) against terrorism.

But if you add up the supporters of the Sunni Ba’athists, the Shiite militias (encompassing followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the “Badr Organization,” and the Fadhila party – all more or less “pro-Iranian,” and all at each others’ throats), and the troublingly independence-minded Kurds (with their “black sheep” brethren of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the “terrorists” that have been driving Turkey crazy), what do you get?  You get the majority of the people, or more correctly, the peoples, that inhabit that place called Iraq.

Iraq is not a nation; Iraqi is not a nationality.  Prior to the late 1950s, the "country" had not been “independent” since it was known as the “Babylonian Empire,” 2,500  years ago.  Its borders were drawn by French and English diplomats in the aftermath of World War I as they carved up the remains of the Ottoman Turkish Empire into their respective “spheres of influence.”

From a colonialist point of view ethnic, social and cultural “diversity” is a plus.  Playing off one group against the others, doling out privileges to one or another helps block the formation of a united front against foreign rule.  The wave of nationalism that engulfed the world’s colonies after the Second World War, however, prompted a movement in Iraq that won nominal independence.

A largely middle class movement attempted to forge a nation out of those diverse materials.  That development was cut off by a Ba’ath Party coup in the early ‘60s.  While they employed nationalist and socialist phraseology, the Ba’athists were based on the wealthier layers of the Sunni Muslim community, the “favored” group under earlier British rule.

The brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was a brake on the centrifugal forces that have always been at work there.  His ability to hold those forces – potentially destabilizing for the whole Mideast - in check was the primary reason the first President Bush didn’t follow up his “victory” in K