Back on 15 November I listened to and then blogged about the final episode of the third Season of the podcast Serial. At the time I did my best to transcribe a bit of the final moments. In the interim, the official transcript has been posted and I’ve quoted those final moments before.

Another sentencing for a triple murder in a barbershop. It’s a capital case. The courtroom’s crammed. Relatives of the victims and of the defendant fill the gallery. The media is set up in the jury box with their cameras and microphones.

A man named Alvin Wright comes forward. He was a victim in the case. He’d been cutting someone’s hair when shooting exploded the shop. He saw people he knew get killed. Alvin Wright had testified for the prosecution at trial. And now, just before the judge issues her final decision whether she’s going to sentence the defendant, who is twenty-one, to death, Alvin Wright addresses the court.

Alvin Wright: The whole situation is fucked up.

Judge: It’s a court of law. I mean, use different words.

Alvin Wright: I mean, this is what I’m dealing with, though.

Sarah Koenig: The judge tells him it’s a court of law. There’s different words. Go ahead.

Alvin Wright: I mean, the situation is messed up. It’s a messed up situation, man. Do I agree with putting him down like a dog? No. That’s just me. Can’t nobody win. You putting him down, we don’t get nobody back. Nothing.

It’s just like we just keep losing. Just black people, period. We just keep losing. You’ve got all these white people right here, they’re looking at us like we’re in the zoo. And this is real shit. Like we’re in a zoo.

Judge: Mr. Wright, I don’t—

Alvin Wright: No, no. I’m just looking at the big picture of it, like look at this, and look at this. That’s life. We’ve got to do better than that.

Judge: Mr. Wright, thank you.

Sarah Koenig: The best kept secret in the Justice Center is in the lobby. It’s tucked between two pillars near the elevators. Looks like a wheel you might see at a raffle or a bingo game, but it functions as a suggestion box. You can send kites to the staff. The administrative judge will get them—he’s got the key.

After hanging around this building for a year, I have many suggestions, just off the top of my head. I’d say, go minimalist. Don’t pile six charges onto a single crime when one charge will do. Don’t overcharge to force a guilty plea. Don’t lock anyone up, unless they’re demonstrably violent. Admit that police officers lie under oath. Get out of the punishment business and turn toward the urgent problem of fairness.

Keep obsessive track of who exactly is being charged with what crime, how their sentence shakes out, and what their life looks like in three years or five years. Take note of the color of their skin and how much money they make. And don’t shove what you learn in a drawer and forget about it. Don’t be insensibly tempted, as Charles Dickens wrote, into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course.

Cops, prosecutors, judges, lawyers—call out the colleagues who degrade your profession. Pay assigned attorneys and public defenders at least twice as much as you’re paying them now. Judges, stop choosing assigned attorneys. Citizens, mix up the bench. Stop electing judges countywide. And overall, slowdown. Doubt yourselves.

And I know how corny this sounds, but imagine that every person in the elevator car is part of your own family and reflect on the far reaching pain of prosecution. Also don’t tape anyone’s mouth shut in court—that happened. And consider getting rid of the grand jury.

I could cram that wheel to bursting. But if I’m only allowed one suggestion, I’d say, let’s all accept that something’s gone wrong. Let’s make that our premise.

Many times during our reporting in Cleveland when I’d ask about problems or reforms, someone would throw out, well, let’s remember, we have the best system in the world. County prosecutor Michael O’Malley said it to me—I just think people need to realize we have the best criminal justice system in the world. The people who operate that system know about the warts, and they concede we can always improve. But generally, they’re not chomping for an overhaul, the kind of extreme makeover that the data is screaming at us to undertake.

We’ve all heard the stats—that we here in the United States imprison a vastly higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world. We are number one. The numbers are well-documented, wildly out of whack, and unprecedented in our history.

Also well-documented—inequity. Every joint in the skeleton of our criminal justice system is greased by racial discrimination. Compared to white people who’ve committed the same crime and who have similar criminal histories, black people and other people of color are arrested more often. They’re charged more harshly, given higher bails, offered worse plea deals. They’re handed longer prison sentences, and their probation is more often revoked.

These numbers aren’t floating above us in the sky. They’re alive all over the country. We looked at studies from New York City, and Alabama, and Wisconsin, and Iowa’s sixth district, and Hampton Roads, Virginia, and Harris County, Texas. It’s everywhere, in all our courthouses.

Reporters often hear that we only report the bad stories. We exaggerate and sensationalize, especially when it comes to law enforcement or wonky prosecutions. But we didn’t go to Cleveland and sift through hundreds of cases looking for the most egregious injustices we could find. We didn’t have to. The ordinary ones told us everything we needed to know.

In my original post I wrote of Koenig’s ending:

Koenig wraps her part of the season talking about the suggestion box in the lobby of the court house. She has many suggestions. All of them will be ignored, 30 days from now? No one in Cleveland will remember what she said.

I stand by that conclusion and that causes me pain.

Via Mano Singham…

They have come from dinner at the nearest new restaurant—
you know the kind: bottle glass in the window,
brass rails, and a fanciful line of red neon
on the wall. They have known enough to
order Sancerre with the fish. And now they
stoop in the rapidly-gathering twilight,
helping each other off with their coats.
She is wearing a dress from Alcott and Andrews.
The sprigged white flowers like breaths on a black field
cannot chasten the lines of her body
as the air tones down to meet her silhouette.
A necklace flickers briefly
at her throat like an eddy of silver
from a subterranean river.
Then the last light fails with a palpable after-image,
as if it had fled down the throat of an hourglass.
I imagine the stagehand flinging the iron
wheel of the rheostat to bring on this darkness
as if tilting the world with his hand.
For a moment they seem like our first parents, lorn
on the veldt, that barbaric gold light fading;
and, of the strange cries in the night ahead,
none stranger than that of their own conjunction,
the constellations unnamed above them
and God not yet interpreted; only
this clamor for a voice and its intimation
in the ear of an ambiguous companion,
no better than oneself, but other.

—House Lights Down by Karl Kirchwey

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 27—

They waited.

We can’t try hard to relax, just as we can’t use a lot of strict effort to be mindful. When we practice together as a community, our practice of mindfulness becomes more joyful, more relaxed and steady. We are bells of mindfulness for each other, supporting and reminding each other along the path of practice. With the support of the community, we can cultivate peace and joy in ourselves, which we can then offer to those around us. We cultivate our solidity and freedom, our understanding and compassion. We practice looking deeply to gain the sort of insight that can free us from suffering, fear, discrimination and misunderstanding. —Practicing Joy Together from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

CRUISING THE CUT… No. 7

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: occlusion, the act of occluding, the state of being occluded—such as the complete obstruction of the breath passage in the articulation of a speech sound, the bringing of the opposing surfaces of the teeth of the two jaws into contact, also, the relation between the surfaces when in contact, the inclusion or sorption of gas trapped during solidification of a material; the front formed by a cold front overtaking a warm front and lifting the warm air above the earth’s surface.

Occlusion is a descendant of the Latin verb occludere, meaning “to close up.” Occludere in turn comes from the prefix ob-, here meaning “in the way,” and the verb claudere, meaning “to close or shut.” Occlusion is one of many English terms derived from claudere. Some others are recluse, seclusion, and exclude. An occlusion occurs when something has been closed up or blocked off. Almost all heart attacks are the result of the occlusion of a coronary (heart) artery by a blood clot. When a person’s upper and lower teeth form a malocclusion, they close incorrectly or badly. An occlusion, or occluded front, happens when a fast-moving cold front overtakes a slow-moving warm front and slides underneath it, lifting the warm air and blocking its movement.

You remember things; you can talk these things back and command details. You know literature. You’ve always found your self-worth there, and what I’m telling you is that literal memory is your enemy. It’s been a large part of your identity all your life, and that part is going to want to drag you down, to destroy the things you create. —From Where You Dream: The process of writing fiction by Robert Olen Butler, p. 19.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

                         The gates of the town
Were open and the horsemen went riding out,
Father Aeneas and faithful Achates among
The first, and all the Trojan captains with them,
And in the midst, there was young Pallas himself,
Elegant in his war cloak and painted armor,
Looking like Lucifer, the Morning Star,
Venus’s favorite of the stars in the sky,
Whose light dispels the darkness as it rises
Up from the nighttime waters of the Ocean.

—Book Eight, page 259, line 750

This is how I began…

Some books to consider: Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them by John Mueller; Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror by Mia Bloom (also, Small Arms, Children and Terrorism to be published next year); and Jihad Academy: The Rise of Islamic State by Nicolas Hénin.

The narrative is one I’ve repeated many times since 2001: we created this problem and we keep the problem going because people are making a shit load of money from the problem. I constantly refer to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine because that is the blueprint for understanding why we continue grossly inflate this threat.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 26—

Virgil kicked Skinner and Holland out of the back room.

If 2017 was a new hope for the Republicans’ war against The Affordable Care Act, then 2019 could see the Democrats (at least in the House) strike back. Mano Singham, writing in The coming major fight over Medicare for All, explains:

Thanks to a sustained effort, the idea of Medicare for All as a way to introduce universal health care coverage has become part of the mainstream conversation. It is no longer seen as the fringe issue it was portrayed as when Bernie Sanders spoke in favor of it just a few years ago during his campaign for the presidency. It played a big role in the congressional elections and Lee Fang and Nick Surgey have obtained a document that outlines how the health industry is gearing up to launch a fight against it.

The question for me will be how many voters remember Orwellian Republicans pontificating that they had always supported protecting coverage for pre&eumlxisting conditions and would always do so. I’m thinking that those lies could bite them in the butt.

Day changes from cannon to morning glory
her body dances death dances in the prell light

beads strung out all through Japan’s public parks, my head,
light green eyes of the birds that break branches to build homes there.

she tore the page, “Varieties of Emeralds”
from little sister’s picture encyclopedia.

I watched this all with a spike in my vein from a top floor window
I felt the blood pass from my arm into the glass tube above it…..

then it was rainy bonsai everywhere for me
and black masses across my brain like planets on solar maps

paper secrets I used to believe lined the open closet shelves
her body split and floated into the air forests like astral monkeys.

It’s there, the air the body the soft green day:
your life cutting through the light noise of New York City’s traffic dawn.

—Prell by Jim Carroll

CRUISING THE CUT… No. 6

I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to Brexit. There have been, and continue to be, more important concerns in life, but I do like to stay reasonably well informed which took me to Fintan O’Toole’s long read: The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit in The Guardian. What O’Toole does is provide some critical historical perspective and takes us to what could have been the tipping point. He writes:

In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication—the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”

Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.

Empires are fickle creations, always doomed to falling. England, indeed all of Caucasiandom, had a good run. We knew we couldn’t be on top forever.

We may think of joy as something that happens spontaneously. But joy needs to be cultivated and practiced in order to grow. When we sit in mindfulness with others, it’s easier to sit. When we relax with others, it’s easier to relax. The collective energy can help us when we’re tired or when our mind wanders. The collective energy can bring us back to ourselves. This is why it’s so important to practice with others. At first we may worry that we’re aren’t doing sitting or walking meditation properly, and we may hesitate to practice with others for fear of being judged. But we all know how to sit and how to breathe. That’s all we have to do. After only a few moments of concentrating on our breathing, we can bring peace and calm to our body and mind. We only need to pay attention to our in-breath and out-breath. Just focus on that. That’s all it takes to begin to calm the agitation in your mind and body and restore stability and peace within yourself. The concentration of those around you will also support you as you begin to practice. Do this a little bit each day, alone or with others. When you train like this, it becomes easier to return to your mindful breathing. The more you train yourself, the more easily you touch the depth of your consciousness, and the more easily you can generate the energy of compassion. Each one of us can do this. —Cultivating Joy from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: audacious, intrepidly daring, adventurous; recklessly bold, rash; contemptuous of law, religion, or decorum, insolent; marked by originality and verve.

But this is the tough part: for those two hours a day when you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place—it can’t be white-hot and dark at the same time, but I don’t care – that paradox, live with it—whatever scared the hell out of you down there – and there’s plenty—you have to got in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can’t flinch, can’t walk away. That’s the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily. —From Where You Dream: The process of writing fiction by Robert Olen Butler, p. 18.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

After that, they made their way with effort along
The road that offered itself before them till
They came to the farthest field, where they were those,
Famous for the deeds they did in war,
Thronging together, apart from the other shades.

—Book Six, page 186, line 655

This is how I began…

In the past 30 days, HCWW has welcomed visitors from these countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Philippines, Australia, Germany, India, South Korea, China, New Zealand, Turkey, Belgium, Spain, Serbia, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Singapore, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Netherlands, European Union, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Brazil, Italy, Malaysia, Romania, Myanmar, Hungary, Ecuador, Portugal, Japan, Dominican Republic, Poland, Sri Lanka, Columbia, Greece, Kenya, Denmark, Luxembourg, Puerto Rico, Somalia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Slovakia, Russia and Pakistan.

I have always been fascinated by the international reach of Have Coffee Will Write. In my early days I used a program that tracked users around the globe—this was how I found my blogsister Shamash in Myanmar—but I let that habit lapse in recent years. A few days ago I updated some software and regained that metric. Here are the nations of people who visited HCWW Thanksgiving Day. If you’re here from outside the United States, please leave a comment and let me know what brought you here.

And as always, thanks for reading.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 25—

After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.

Writing well is more than a way to make money. My father, Kurt senior wrote like an angel, simply in order to be civilized, to make the lives of those around him more amusing and interesting.

—to Alexander and Jackson Adams on 18 January 1987, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, p. 371

The new rightwing version of GetUp—a popular but not at all racist movement. —First Dog on the Moon. Visit GetUp!

CRUISING THE CUT… No. 4

All night rooting, Hamlet squeezed loose,
a secret pinkness under the wall,
your pet piglet
feeling himself round and free in the city.
He’d made it.
Streetlights reddened his tiny eyes.
White clouds hooted from his nostrils.
He sprinted up and down the sweet garbage rows.

You weren’t worried. You said
pigs are among the cleverest creatures we know:
whales descend from pigs.
I imagined Hamlet bobbing on the ocean,
in the sunshine growing huge and thoughtful.
We searched all morning in the park,
shattering the frosted shadows of trees.
Now he seems like part of our love getting away.

We found the women hurling their groceries
over their heads, on Main Street, Hamlet
squirting out from under parked cars,
his tail curled tightly behind.
Children shrieked happily.
Policemen toddled on their knees, pleading,
plunking their nightsticks.
A store window had broken, blanketing
the sidewalk. A firetruck came
and backed over a streetsign.

Everyone pointed, Hamlet skidding
down Pearl Street by the river.
I don’t believe he swam for it,
smoothly cutting through the slushy Kennebec
and across Casco Bay into the open Atlantic.
I think he went to the dump
with its enormous seagulls turning overhead
and waited for the town dogs.

—Chasing Hamlet by John Witte

Usually we think of relaxing and healing as things that happen when we are alone. But many thousands of people have participated in collective walking meditation and mass sitting meditation in some of the world’s busiest cities. People have walked mindfully and peacefully around the Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. They have left footprints of peace and freedom on the ancient streets and piazzas of Rome. Thousands of us have sat in silence and stillness in London’s busy Trafalgar Square and in Zucotti Park in New York City. Everyone who participates and everyone who witnesses this collective practice has chance to get in touch with the energy of peace, freedom, healing and joy. The collective energy generated on such occasions is a gift that we can offer ourselves, one another, the city and the world. —Collective Energy Of Healing from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: impromptu, made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment, improvised; composed or uttered without previous preparation, extemporaneous.

Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you. —From Where You Dream: The process of writing fiction by Robert Olen Butler, p. 13.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

—Book Nine, page 281, line 470

As they were nearing the camp and the rampant walls
There was a flicker of light, off to the left,
A glimmering ray of moonlight in the darkness,
Reflected from the helmet of Messapus
That Euryalus had forgotten he was wearing;
And so they saw Euryalus and Nisus,
On the road over there, and Volcens, suddenly
Alert, called out through the darkness to the two of them, “Halt!
What are you doing, over there on that road?
Why are you armed? Where are you going to?”
There was no reply to them across the darkness.

This is how I began…

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 24—

Zimmer was accompanied by Lucy Banning, the deputy who’d taken Larry Van Den Berg to jail.

The planets whirled across the blackboard all morning,
Saturn with its twelve rings, Jupiter with its belts,
red Mars, green Venus, the familiar blue Earth
where we sat in that eighth-grade class learning light
years, 8 light minutes for the sun’s rays to touch my arm,
Alpha Centauri 4.4 light years away,
Betelgeuse, the giant red star in Orion’s shoulder,300,
Rigel, the blue giant in Orion’s knee, 540,
the vastness of blackness suddenly ours
while Richie Reese picked his nose
and lovely Karen Awlen hitched up her dress. Infinity and eternity
blurred by the sun in dull yellow chalk
as I felt the pull of the planets and their moons
hold me in my desk where carved hearts orbited
with the names of those I did not know, Jimmy loves Sue,
Tina and Barry circled by a ring of smoke drifting
up from a speeding Chevy, I Love My Dog, Snookie,
etched in small, straight lines by the inkwell. 1944, 1946, 1950, 53, 56,
each year trailed names the way Halley’s
comet trailed light that October morning,
and I carved Lorraine, 1958, with a crescent moon cupping it
while Sister Angelica told us Copernicus knew the Earth was a wanderer,
Galileo the first to see the phases of Venus, sunspots‚
telling us about the Black Hole that sucked all light into it,
spreading her black-winged arms and wrapping Margaret Blake
to show her what it was like, unfolding Margaret’s chalk-white face
when she began to cry the face that would begin to glow white
in a few years and then fade, cancer of the lungs they said
but we all knew it was the blackness she saw back in that class,
blackness revolving in Sister’s heart,
blackness of distances we could not even imagine,
blackness we heard even then in Margaret’s sobs while cosmic
clouds floated on the board with the label,“raw material of creation,”
where stars were born and died,
and planets whirled on their inevitable paths.

—Learning the Planets by Len Roberts.

This poem, perhaps because of the science, girls and eighth-grade connection, made immediate sense to me.

CRUISING THE CUT… No. 4.

Politics? I will vote Democratic because that is the most humane of the two parties, but not by much. The Clintons are shallow, opportunist Yuppies, but they are the only game in town. Doesn’t Dole make you ashamed to be a World War Two vet? What a crabby old poop!

—to Ollie Lyon on 18 June 1996, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, p. 369

If you can sit in meditation on your own, quietly and peacefully, that is already relaxing and healing. Even if nobody else knows you are meditating, the energy you produce is very beneficial for you and for the world. But if you sit with others, if you walk and work with others, the energy is amplified, and you create a powerful collective energy of mindfulness for your own healing and the healing of the world. [tikkun olam, JH] It’s something one person cannot do alone. Don’t deprive the world of this essential spiritual food.—Healing Energy from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: cornucopia, a curved, hollow goat’s horn or similarly shaped receptacle (such as a horn-shaped basket) that is overflowing especially with fruit and vegetables (such as gourds, ears of corn, apples, and grapes) and that is used as a decorative motif emblematic of abundance; an inexhaustible store, abundance; a receptacle shaped like a horn or cone.

This was not the word of the day, but I’ve always wondered if feckful existed and how to use it. Feckful means: efficient, effective; sturdy, trusty; powerful, vigorous. Unmodified, feck—with apologies to the Irish—means: the greater share, majority (The feck of the town council didn’t fancy his backers.); part, portion (took the best feck of a year or sold the best feck of the litter.); value, worth (no feck would come from it.); a number or quantity especially when large (a whole feck of them came.).

—Fiction is the art form of human yearning. (33:55)

The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself. —From Where You Dream: The process of writing fiction by Robert Olen Butler, p. 12.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

Opposite this on the doors is the island of Crete
Arising from the sea; and there’s the story
Of Pasiphaë and the trick of the mating her
To the bull’s cruel love, and the biform mongrel that she
Gave birth to, the Minotaur, the product of
The vile coition; also depicted there
In the house of inextricable wandering,
But Daedalus, in pity for Ariadne,
Untangled the tangled strings, showing blind feet
The way to follow along their bewildered way.

—Book Six, page 168, line 36

This is how I began…

This is more than just a little brilliant.* Kate Streit , writing in This Sinkhole Is Finally Getting Fixed Because Residents Planted Tomatoes In It, explains.

They say that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. But the residents of Toronto had another idea when it came to getting a lingering sinkhole in their city fixed. The residents of Poplar Plains Road has become frustrated. They’d repeatedly called city officials, asking them to repair the gaping hole, all to no avail. So they decided to get the officials’ attention another way.

The residents planted tomatoes in the sinkhole, and after a story about the unconventional garden aired on CityNews, the City of Toronto finally sent crews to begin work on repairing the sinkhole. Before the city ultimately intervened, residents took turns tending to the blossoming tomatoes

Clevelanders should adopt this idea. The tomatoes could come in very handy at city council meetings.

*I originally found the story in News Of The Weird in my copy of Funny Times.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 23—

Virgil and Jenkins spent an hour at the Blue Earth bank.

Any work of art [including writing? JH] is one half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for sincerity? There aer virtually no beloved or respected paintings made by persons of whom we know nothing. We can even surmise a lot about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caves underneath Lascaux, France.

So I dare suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to attach your name to your pictures, and to say why you hope others might find them rewarding to look at, there goes the ballgame right there. Pictures are famous for their human-ness and not their picture-ness.

—to Bernard Vonnegut on 11 October 1995, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, p. 361

.

—David Johns, No. 3

We ate alone in the immense dining room.
My mother got me to eat each night
by saying any meat was buffalo meat.
The desert had the silence of one who waits.
Cool water, clear water—she sang.
Her voice soothes my deepest blood
as I listen to her sing it over and over;
she knew just how to prolong
cool— clear— wa-ter—.

The desert was vast and empty.
Water nowhere, neither cool nor clear.
My one friend lived in a trailer in a dust bowl.
I’d wander off alone and once
got far enough away to where
the bleaching neon of the strip
dwindled to tinsel.

Everywhere we went men were after her.
One clear night we were walking home
hand in hand in the dark.
No moon, but the road was lit
by gas station globes
and not too distant hotels,
when a silver-haired man
behind the red wheel of

a white Caddy convertible
stalked alongside
and offered us a ride.
She gripped my hand; panic
coursed through us, our spines rigid.
“Don’t look, just keep walking.”
Soon she would be married again.
What a waste of beauty—and all on my account.

There is no love like the love
of sons for mothers.
And the seedy silver-haired man,
and his measured, robotic voice,
has hunted me since—
and enters me tonight
through The Talking Heads’ searing,
apocalyptic version of the song…

These were the best moments of my life,
alone in Vegas for six weeks
keeping a beautiful woman company
while she obtained her divorce.

—The Nowhere Water by Mark Rudman

>

What is your most relaxed position? Sometimes we think we can only relax if we are lying down. But we can also sit in a relaxed position. Your posture can be upright and not rigid. Relax your shoulders. See if it’s possible to sit with no tension in your body. —A Relaxed Position from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: noisome, noxious, harmful; offensive to the senses and especially to the sense of smell; highly obnoxious or objectionable.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

Do not give in to the woes that are to come,
But all the more bravely you must go to face them,
As far as Fortune will allow you to do.

—Book Six, page 171, line 133

This is how I began…

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

     —James Baldwin*

Yesterday, I wrote about Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner’s 2017 long read: A mission for journalism in a time of crisis. This morning, as I return to reading The Guardian, I found another piece by Viner: ‘The Guardian’s reader funding model is working. It’s inspiring’ and that’s good news.

(Also: From Iceland to India: the global community supporting the Guardian, Why our readers’ support is vital to the Guardian’s future and ‘More than just a newspaper’: Guardian writers thank readers for their support)

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 22—

The Tahoe’s clock said 11:51 when they passed the “Wheatfield City Limits” sign, but Virgil drove over to Clay Ford’s house anyway, Jenkins following behind.

—David Johns

Mindfulness is the continuous practice of touching deeply every moment of daily life. to be mindful is to be truly present with your body and you mind, to harmonize you intentions and actions, and to be in harmony with those around you. We don’t need to make a separate time for this outside of our daily activities. We can practice mindfulness in every moment of every day—in the kitchen, the bathroom, or in the garden, and as we go from one place to another. We can do the same things we always do—walking, sitting, working, eating and so on—with mindful awareness of what we’re doing. Our mind is with our actions. —Mindfulness In Daily Life from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

—De la Vision Profonde…

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: perforce, by force of circumstances.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

And also it is his will that Ascanius
Should bear them gifts saved from Ilium’s ruin:
A mantle stiff with golden enwoven figures;
A beautiful veil with a yellow-acanthus fringe;
A gift her mother Leda had given to Helen,
Who brought it from Mycenae and later wore it
When leaving for Troy and her illicit nuptials;
A scepter that Ilione, Priam’s eldest
Daughter had carried; a necklace of pearls; a crown
Encircled with double rows of gems and gold.

—Book one, page 29, line 87

This is how I began…

*The whole quote—the final paragraph of Baldwin’s excellent essay: As Much Truth As One Can Bear, published on 14 January 1962 by the New York Times—goes:

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principle fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

So many books, so little time, but I do need to read Baldwin.

That Ralph Nader perpetuates the (factual buy misleading) meme that Congress is unpopular with voters bothers me. The meme is factual because the surveys do find that truth, but misleading—to the point of being meaningless—in that no one votes for more than three of the 535 members, a representative and two senators, of Congress and the voters typically return sitting members to office more than 80 percent of the time. That means that a majority of voters heartily approve of their representatives; the other 532 members? not so much.

I disapprove of carpetbagging, supporting members of Congress that you can’t vote for. That to me is fundamentally wrong because it dilutes or perverts the votes of those who can actually cast votes in those races. We have Dark Money because we’ve tolerated individuals and organizations spreading money where they have no business spreading money.

We can, and do as Nader suggests, greatly influence our national dialogue by directly supporting the people we can cast votes for. We should do that.

Nader, in If It Takes the Rats to Wake Up Us and Congress, Bring Them On! This Book Shows How! writes:

Let’s get down to the all-important matter of Congressional performance. No matter how pollsters ask the question–“do you approve of Congress…?” or “do you have confidence in Congress…?–less than twenty percent of people respond positively. Four out of five Americans disapprove of what Congress has been doing and are presumably disappointed about what Congress is not doing. That’s an overwhelming unhappy majority. There are many changes, reforms, and redirections for our country that conservatives and liberals both agree on, (See my book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State). There would be more agreements were we more alert to the divide and rule tactics of our political/corporate rulers and reject such manipulations outright.

For decades, I’ve argued that it is easier than we think to change what comes out of Congress–the smallest yet most powerful branch of government under our Constitution.

Our history demonstrates that if one percent or less of citizens, reflecting majority public opinion, roll up their sleeves and focus together on their two Senators Continue Reading »

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 21—

Virgil used his flashers going back to Wheatfield, not that there was much traffic, but he could run at ninety miles an hour without worrying about a sheriff’s speed trap.

A year and a week ago, Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian wrote A mission for journalism in a time of crisis, defining her vision for the newspaper that turned 199 this year. She began:

No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public.” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that “the spirited discussion of political questions” and “the accurate detail of facts” were “particularly important at this juncture”.

Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by dazzling political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The public sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries–and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.

This is a long read, so you should get a cup of coffee or tea, perhaps a biscuit or three and sit down to read. If news organizations on this side of the pond adhered to the principles of The Guardian, we would be in a better place today.

As a journalist, these two paragraphs struck hardest for me:

To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent. Members of the media are increasingly drawn from the same, privileged sector of society: this problem has actually worsened in recent decades. According to the government’s 2012 report on social mobility in the UK, while most professions are still “dominated by a social elite”, journalism lags behind medicine, politics and even law in opening its doors to people from less well-off backgrounds. “Indeed,” the report concludes, “journalism has had a greater shift towards social exclusivity than any other profession.”

This matters because people from exclusive, homogenous backgrounds are unlikely to know anyone adversely affected by the crises of our era, or to spend time in the places where they are happening. Media organisations staffed largely by people from narrow backgrounds are less likely to recognise the issues that people notice in their communities every day as “news”; the discussions inside such organisations will inevitably be shaped by the shared privilege of the participants.

Journalism needs more journalists who’ve never gone to university. Like Eric Blair, who singled out The Manchester Guardian for praise.

In her essay above Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner links to foundational documents by her predecessors. The first is from 5 May 1821, when founder John Edward Taylor wrote:

It may safely be asserted, that no former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character, than those which are now claiming the attention of the public. To any one, who regards, for a moment, the conflicting ‘views and wishes of the Commercial and Agricultural Interests,—the considerations which may arise out of the existing Laws for the regulation of our Currency,—the present and the anticipated pressure of the National Debt and of Taxation,— this statement will be sufficiently apparent.

The second, came 100 years later when Editor CP Scott wrote:

I think I may honestly say that, from the day of its foundation, there has not been much doubt as to which way the balance tipped so far as regards the conduct of the paper whose fine tradition I inherited and which I have had the honour to serve through all my working life. Had it not been so, personally I could not have served it. Character is a subtle affair, and has many shades and sides to it. It is not a thing to be much talked about, but rather to be felt. It is the slow deposit of past actions and ideals. It is for each man his most precious possession, and so it is for that latest growth of time the newspaper. Fundamentally it implies honesty, cleanness, courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and the community. A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted.

And American newspapers/organizations?

à tout ce qui fuit
—Charles Baudelaire

The clock inside the mantid
       egg under the drifted snow,
  the sap clock in the February tree,
     Von Karajan’s internal metronome
with different signatures exact in either hand,
   the gearbox of the Amazon, the oceanic cogs,

  a bull’s neck wounded, outpour of galactic noise,
gut strung on tortoise shell, on
        boxwood, or gold wire on gold,
       silver eels in estuaries swimming down
       past grizzled salmon bound upstream,
  terns, orcas, caribou in shrunken herds,

    state ministers who synch their talks
into the general’s scheme, stock brokers taking note
     and families at the border with no plan,
    the unhoused axle of the planet wobbling
one half turn among the stars
     in thirteen thousand years,

hatched leatherbacks not making for the heavens
        into the surf but pulling onto the highway
with front flippers bloody toward new lights in town,
  clock stopped on the mantle, pockmarks
                     of storm systems on the sun,
       ticking from inside a flame-rapt log

—Horologe by Brooks Haxton

The Second aspect of meditation is looking deeply in order to see the true nature of things. Understanding is a great gift. Your daily life conducted in mindfulness is also a great gift; this too is the practice of meditation. Mindfulness carries within it concentration and understanding —Looking Deeply: The Second Aspect Of Meditation from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: henchman, a trusted follower, right-hand man; a political follower whose support is chiefly for personal advantage; a member of a gang.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

                                               …When Turnus and
The Ausonian leaders hear the rising clamor,
They wonder at it, but when they turn to look,
They see how the sea if full of incoming ships,
And how from the crest of the helmet of great Aeneas’s
Head there is a light like flames uprising,
And how from the golden boss of his shield there’s fire
Vomiting forth, as when in the night there’s sudden
Flux of blood-red fiery comets, or when
The Dog Star Sirius shows its sinister light
In the dark of the nighttime sky, and it’s the sign
Of bad luck coming soon, thirst and sickness,
Coming into the fields of mortal men.

—Book Ten, page 313, line 377

This is how I began…

I have said that there are three reasons for locking up someone who breaks the law: first, to protect the law-abiding from further harm; second, to deter those sitting on the fence from becoming law breakers; and third, to rehabilitate the incarcerated so that, having paid their debt to society, they do not pose a future threat to society.

We do the first pretty well, the second not so much and the third poorly at best.

I was surprised this morning to read in Russ Bensing’s Changes that while the Ohio Revised Code agrees with me on the first and second, the third is only a recent addition. Bensing writes:

Remember the two principle purposes of felony sentencing found in RC 2929.11? Now there are three: in addition to protecting the public from future crime and punishing the offender, we have as a purpose “to promote the effective rehabilitation of the offender,” “using the minimum sanctions that the court determines accomplish those purposes without imposing an unnecessary burden on state or local government resources.” The last quoted part was in the old statute, and some adventurous lawyers argued that this meant unduly harsh sentences violated that admonition. The next court which buys into that argument will be the first, but perhaps the inclusion of rehabilitation as a purpose will change that mind-set.

One factor of law enforcement that we don’t talk about is the cost-benefit analysis—which George Lucas took to the level of absurdity—of what we do. Bail, pleas bargains, reduced sentences, parole and probation are all about saving tax dollars, not justice.

We should have that talk.

I don’t own a Smartphone so I don’t know if grayscaling works. Please enlighten me.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 20—

As Virgil was driving Shrake through the night to the hospital in Fairmont, the woman who had swastikas tattooed on her earlobes was sitting in Jim Button’s Nazi kitchen with her hair pulled up over the top of her head in two horns, held in place by two fat rubber bands.

I’ve probably written more about Walmart than any other topic, but I’ve been on a very long sabbatical from that soul-sucking corporation. Fortunately others have not. In my inbox from The Resistance Now comes news of the Stop Walmart Act. Co-sponsored by California Congressman Ro Khanna (D-17), the bill:

would prevent large companies from “buying back” stock – when a company buys its shares back from the market, often enabling it to distribute more cash to shareholders – unless they committed to the $15-an-hour minimum and allowed employees seven days paid sick leave.

Remember, Amazon is still far smaller than Walmart. Also from TNR an alert to Ocasio-Cortez joins climate change sit-in at Pelosi’s office where Miranda Green reports:

Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined 150 youth activists in a Tuesday sit-in at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office, where the group called for congressional action on climate change.

Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Representative-elect for New York, joined the members of Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats in the demonstration, which lasted for more than an hour.

Clearly, Ocasio-Cortez has hit the ground running sitting…

There is a joke: What is the difference between being mental and being eccentric? Wealth. What is acceptable, endearing even in the billionaire is at best tragic in those of us of meager means.

For noble persons, madness seems to have been
A matter of custom–in the old romances.
Alas! I shall be mad, they say, and at once

They are: putting off sanity like a mantle,
To go naked into the hazards of winter.

—Dissonant Interval by Frederick Tibbetts

We learn to celebrate that which we imagine might be to our benefit. Relatives are, at the end of the day, relative.

Via reader Ryan…

If we can’t rest, it’s because we haven’t stopped running. We began running a long time ago. We continue to run, even in our sleep. We think that happiness and well-being aren’t possible in the present. If you can stop and establish yourself in the here and now, you will see that there are many elements of happiness available in this moment, more htan enough for you to be happy. Even if there are a few things in the present that you dislike, there are still plenty of positive conditions for your happiness. When you walk in the garden, you may see that a tree is dying and so you feel sad and aren’t able to enjoy the rest of the garden that is still beautiful. If you look again, you can see that the garden is still beautiful, and you can enjoy it —Stop First from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Hmmm. Why is running such a theme–faster runs between, long run scene, I’m running around and We run throughout our whole life—with me right now? I think I ought to stop and listen to the Universe.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: chapel, a subordinate or private place of worship; a place of worship used by a Christian group other than an established church; a choir of singers belonging to a chapel; a chapel service or assembly at a school or college.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

High on the stern of his ship Aeneas, having
Prepared for his departure from the city,
Was seizing the opportunity to sleep,
And suddenly a shape appeared before him,
Form of the god who had come to him before,
Radiant young golden-haired Mercury, saying
To him as he lay there sleeping, “Goddess-born,
How can you lie there sleeping when all these dangers
Are all around you?

—Book Four, page 126, line 783

This is how I began…

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 19—

There may have been faster runs between Wheatfield and Fairmont, but the driver would have been pushing a Porsche.

The Daily Poem for 17 November from the Paris Review…

I listened to the patter of sailors coasting on breakers,

to how the skittish engine chattered and stalled
and I want to say clamored, for that’s how close I was
to the motor humming. Oh I know, talk is cheap. Tawdry,
specious, a source of distance and misunderstanding, probative and
salacious: lustrous too, if I say so.

—Language by Ira Sadoff, Fall, 1996.

I think paused would have been a better word than stalled here, but what do I know.

Ryan commented on yesterday’s post and I was reminded of Tim Jenison’s exploration of the works of Johannes Vermeer and his hypothesis that Vermeer painted using a camera obscura.

Years ago I shared—what I think was—the original video that would lead to Tim’s Vermeer with my father who was a painter. Sadly, I don’t seem to be able to find that video, so this will have to do.

So, this morning I read The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome by Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson in this week’s The New Yorker. I was disappointed. The story is long, very long, on background and, for a tale reaching back to the lame-duck days of the Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency, so thin as to be transparent—in a bad way—on information as to what happened.

In my reading I noted two passages and a decent bit of wordplay.

First, was this:

The agency began to look for specialists in the U.S.

In early February, 2017, Michael Hoffer, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Miami, received a call from a State Department doctor, who told him, “We have a problem.” Hoffer—who had worked with the military to treat head traumas, and had kept his security clearance—agreed to help. He soon saw one of the victims, and in the following months others flew to Miami. Hoffer ran a battery of tests, which confirmed that the C.I.A. officers had sustained serious injuries.

That led to the wordplay as doctors tried to determine what was happened and someone, unknown or unremembered, coined Immaculate Concussion.

Second—in the last column of the last page—came:

More likely, the cause was a device that emitted radio frequencies or electromagnetic pulses, which entered through the victims’ ears. (Structural variations within their heads could help explain why some heard sounds while others didn’t.) Inside the head, the energy could have caused “cavitation,” or bubbling, in the tiny fluid-filled passages of the inner ear, or in arterial blood.

I wrote a marginal note to myself wondering: Could the staff wear a TLD-like device that would sense high-frequency sound? Given all the research (and deployment?) of sonic weapons by our own services, I’m more than a bit incredulous that we don’t know what is used. I suspect that we’re keeping quiet so as to retain a strategic advantage here.

While I’m running around doing weekend errands, I listen to WCPN. The show most likely to cause me to sit in parking lot has long been Ira Glass’ This American Life, which airs Sundays at 11 a.m. Whether he realized what he was going or not, Glass created the podcast the way Cervantes created the novel. So, when I heard that Serial, a child of TAL had come to Cleveland, I knew I had to listen. I was well pleased.

All of this is prelude to Binge Listening: How Podcasts Became a Seductive—and Sometimes Slippery—Mode of Storytelling in this week’s The New Yorker. Rebecca Mead roughly frames a medium clearly squirting out its cracks and topping its levees, like a podcast about solitary confinement in American prisons, prompted Mead to write:

Podcasting is a peculiarly intimate medium. Usually transmitted through headphones to a solitary listener, or played over the car stereo during a commute, an audio narrative can be immersive in a way that a radio playing in the background in a kitchen rarely is. Podcasts are designed to take up time, rather than to be checked, scanned, and rushed through: they are for those moments when you can’t be scrolling on your phone. For a digital medium, podcasts are unusual in their commitment to a slow build, and to a sensual atmosphere. At the conference table, people were eager to discuss ways in which audio could deepen the story, as well as the visceral experience of the listener. “When you read accounts of people in solitary, all they talk about is what it sounded like,” [TAL alumnus Adam] Sternbergh said. “There’s nothing to say about the visual experience. Once you have described what the room looks like, that’s that. Their whole world is an auditory world.”

Since listening to Season 3 of Serial, I’ve made a point of listening (at least partially) to a dozen or so other podcasts. None grabbed me. I’ll keep looking listening.

There is much of Sir James Matthew Barrie in Hermann Hesse, both were betrayed by time and expectations and found refuge and solace in the only world they could control: fiction. Barrie created Peter Pan. Hesse breathed his life into Emil Sinclair and Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund and Hans Giebernath and Harry Haller and The League and Joseph Knecht and me.

Adam Kirsch, in Hermann Hesse’s Arrested Development for The New Yorker, writes:

In America today, Hesse is usually regarded by highbrows as a writer for adolescents. Liking him is a good sign at age fifteen, a bad one by age twenty.

For many readers, Hesse’s novels are among the first serious fiction they encounter—a literary gateway drug. This was particularly so during the international Hesse craze of the nineteen-sixties, when the books became passports to the counterculture and Timothy Leary advised, “Before your LSD session, read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf.”

I read Steppenwolf first and then Siddhartha and then all the rest. I still have all my copies. I wonder what kind of sign is indicated by liking Hesse at 63? I wonder what this says about me:

The idea that one’s inner life is unusually dangerous and risky is one that most adults grow out of—partly because we get calmer with age, partly because we come to recognize the full reality of other people. But Hesse’s heroes are punk Peter Pans—they don’t grow up, and despise people who do, because they see maturation as a surrender to conformity and accommodation. Things that most people learn to put up with strike Harry Haller as the fetters of a living death:

Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead.

Most people, in other words, are what Holden Caulfield, another favorite avatar of teen-age readers, called “phonies.” What torments Hesse is the difficulty of being authentic—of staying true to who you really are, despite the enormous pressures of alienation and conformity.

Meditation has two aspects. The first is stopping. We run throughout our whole life, chasing after some idea of happiness. Stopping means to stop our running, our forgetfulness and our being caught in the past or the future. We come home to the present moment where life is available. The present moment contains every moment. Here we can touch our ancestors, our children and their children, even if they haven’t been born yet. We calm our body and our emotions through the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking and mindful sitting. Shamatha [Sanskrit for “stopping.”] is also the practice of concentrating, so we can live deeply each moment of our life and touch the deepest level of our being. —Stopping: The First Aspect Of Meditation from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: susurrous, full of whispering sounds.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

And she, with ceremony due, brought gifts
Of gold-inwoven robes and other things
The loom has richly made, and a Phrygian scarf
For the boy Ascanius, to whom she says
‘O you who are the image that survives,
The only one, of my Astyanax,
Accept these gifts from me, into your hands,
In testimony of of Andromache’s love,
Of Hector’s wife, the mother of his son.

—Book Three, page 92, line 697

This is how I began…

Writing in Technicolor Vincent: Why filmmakers love van Gogh for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane first allows Woody Allen to deal with the pronunciation question and then says fuck-all, writing:

…Isaac (Woody Allen), who’s only just met [Mary (Diane Keaton)], flinches in disgust, mouthing and remouthing her words as if he were chewing stale cake. To him, it proves she’s a phony who tries too hard. The correct version, for him as for most other Americans, is “van Go,” and the joke is that none of them are right. Nor are the English, who plump for a cozy “van Goff.” Let’s be honest: we will never be sufficiently glottal. We should leave van Gogh to the Dutch, from whose lips “Gogh” emerges as a two-part catarrhal feast. Thank heaven for Vincent.

Yes, thank heaven for Vincent. That was good enough for Don McLean.

On the final page, Lane sets me straight on van Gogh’s death.

One thing that the sleuth attempts to unlock is the secret, such as it is, of van Gogh’s demise. For decades, it was accepted that he shot himself, and the movies concurred with the biographers; if Kirk Douglas used a gun, it must be true. Then, in 2011, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith brought out their brick-size “Van Gogh: The Life,” with an appendix entitled “A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding.” They suggest that van Gogh may have been killed, in error, jest, or anger, by “a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West,” who often carried an old revolver for show. This account—which, according to the authors, clears up nine anomalies of the case—is not widely accepted, but it’s good enough for Schnabel, who relies upon it for his film, although the resulting scene is so oblique that most viewers will be mystified. I’ll stick with Pialat, who, typically, has van Gogh stumble into view with a bloodstained belly, and without explanation or complaint. How he came by his wound is of no consequence; all that need concern us is that, around thirty hours later, he dies.

This always bothered me because, who commits suicide by shooting them self in the belly?

Lane mentions: Lust For Life (1956); Vincent (1987); Vincent & Theo (1990); Dreams (1990); Van Gogh (1991) and Loving Vincent (2017). Even Dr. Who had a go…

Might a winter weekend be good for a Vincent Van Gogh film festival?

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 18—

Jenkins called from his car at 9 o’clock, and said, “We’re in place.”

& the solitary figure remains oddly hesitant & indistinct

& pensive although
Perhaps she is simply realizing that she does not wish to go

Where all of the others wish to go

Does St. John think Klimt is channeling his inner Thoreau here? Is St. John?

To meditate means to pay full attention to something. It doesn’t mean to run away from life. Instead it’s an opportunity to look deeply into ourselves and into the situation we’re in. —Meditation from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: exculpate, to clear from alleged fault or guilt.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

…None of the gods
Would listen to your father’s prayers and vows,
And you, dear sanctified wife, are kept by death
From the knowledge of what this is that has happened to us,
While I the father am left alone in this life,
Surviving the son…

—Book Eleven, page 345, line 211

This is how I began…

This is the final episode of Serial’s season three. Here’s my prediction: If in five years Sarah Koenig is still doing radio (and I have no doubt she will be) and she returns to Cleveland, she won’t find any difference between 2017 and 2020.

Koenig chose to end with the voice of barber Alvin Wright, a witness in what was described as a massacre at a Warrensville Heights barbershop, who stood in court and (time mark 43:47) said:

The whole situation is fucked up. Do I agree with putting him down like a dog? No. Ain’t nobody win. You putting him down, we don’t get nobody back. Nothing. We just keep losing. Just black people period, we just keep losing. We got all these white people right here. They’re looking at us like we in a zoo. And this is real shit, like we in a zoo. I’m just looking at the big picture. Look at this, or look at this. That’s life. We got to do better than that.

And he’s right; but we won’t,

Koenig wraps her part of the season talking (time mark 44:39) about the suggestion box in the lobby of the court house. She has many suggestions. All of them will be ignored, 30 days from now? No one in Cleveland will remember what she said.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 17—

“Never actually found a dead body before,” Holland said, “though I’ve seen a lot of them.”

I once knew someone who, if you held her hands tightly so that she could not move them, was unable to speak.

In May 1949, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, published Why Socialism?. Written by resident scholar at the the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., Albert Einstein, the essay comes out the gate asking the obvious question: “Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism?” Einstein, answering his own question replied: “I believe for a number of reasons that it is.” And he was off.

There is much in the 2,667-word essay, and you should read all of them, but I want to focus on two passages and Einstein’s conclusion. The first passage is this:

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life.

This is the tension that I pointed to in Atul Gawande’s piece for The New Yorker. And this tension is a central source of existential angst. Einstein, in the second passage, continues:

Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

That is why the rules, at the most fundamental level, must change, and they must change at the very beginning. Nearly 70 years later we still cling to the industrial age model of education that has long since ceased to useful or beneficial to society. Einstein wrote:This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

What follow is Einstein’s vision of how to shape the change. He concludes:

The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Democratic Socialism, Socialism shaped by the people, and not the minions of oligarchs, must ask and answer those questions.

Socialism is no more a bad word than liberal.

We need to own and champion both.

I don’t quite know what to think about today’s poem: Self-Portrait. Perhaps a few more readings will flip the switch.

Serena J. Fox is an intensive care physician and consultant in medical ethics and human rights. The Bellevue Hospital ER in NYC and trauma units in DC inspired the poems in her book, Night Shift. She believes deeply that poetry has an essential role in the teaching of care giving

UPDATE: On Monday I posted about Russell Bensing’s examination of two pending bills in the Ohio Legislature dealing Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground.

This morning, Sam Allard reported that one of the bills discussed by Bensing—HB 228 passed the Ohio House. While outgoing Governor John Richard Kasich has said he would veto any such bill, Republicans have more than enough votes in both chambers to override any veto.

Killing people not-like-you is about to get easier in Ohio.

Each of us is like the waves and also like the water. Sometimes we are excited, noisy and agitated like the waves. Sometimes we’re tranquil like still water. When water is calm, it reflects the blue sky, the clouds and the trees. Sometimes, whether we’re at home, work or school, we become tired, agitated or unhappy and we need to transform into calm water. We already have calmness in us; we just need to know how to make it manifest. —Calm Water from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: memento, something that serves to warn or remind; also, souvenir.

I’m always delighted when synchronicity slips in; in this case the pairing of memento with Thich Nhat Hanh’s Pebble-For-Your-Pocket meditation above.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

This right hand wouldn’t condescend to take
Away the life of such a thing as you.

—Book Eleven, page 354, line 17

This is how I began…

Like Ralph Nader I have long been frustrated with the way Republicans—channeling their inner Plekhanov—always make Democrats look like fools on word choice. The best known example is Pro-Life/Pro-Choice. Republicans won that contest before Democrats even knew there was a contest. I blame the Democratic Party’s need to be the loyal opposition. Not loyal to the nation, of course, but rather, loyal to the oligarchs who fund both parties. Democrats can’t call out the ignorant tight-ass club Republicans like fictional president Josiah Edward Bartlet for fear of offending their supporters meal ticket.

Nader, in The War Over Words: Republicans Easily Defeat the Democrats, writes:

The Republican Party lost ground in the Congressional and state elections earlier this month, but they continue to triumph in the all-important contests over words.

Republicans have been winning the “war over words” for years. First, the hard core political right wingers symbolically claimed the Bible and the American flag, turning them upside down. To them the Bible meant anything but the Golden Rule and compassion for the “poor,” so frequently noted in the Scriptures. They brandished the flag as a patriotic symbol to gag dissent, as a bandanna for waging war crimes, and as a fig leaf to hide the shame of their cruel domestic policies in the U.S.

During the late Forties, few Americans chose to call themselves “conservatives.” “Liberals” were ascendant, coming out of the FDR years. Under incessant associational attack on the word “liberal,” few politicians now brandish their beliefs as “liberals,” Continue Reading »

So, in the past week I’ve been tossing, filing and reading. I try to follow a kind of reverse 80/20 rule where 80 percent of what I have is recyclable and gets tossed. The remaining 20 percent gets equally divided into what gets filed for future reference—using my indexed system*—and I read the rest. What I read, of course is also subject to recycling/filing. One of the reading functions, of course, is to provide grist for my blog mill, such as this bit I pulled from Atul Gawande’s The Upgrade: Why doctors hate their computers. Gawande’s piece is excellent—I’m contemplating sending a copy to my own medical team—but what I highlighted was almost a throw-away thought. Gawande asks:

Why can’t our work systems be like our smartphones—flexible, easy, customizable? The answer is that the two systems have different purposes. Consumer technology is all about letting me be me. Technology for complex enterprises is about helping groups do what the members cannot easily do by themselves—work in coördination. Our individual activities have to mesh with everyone else’s. What we want and don’t have, however, is a system that accommodates both mutation and selection.

When I read this I thought: this is a metaphor for our current political situation. We have a tension between wanting our system to let us be us and a desire to pull together for mutual benefit.

We elect representatives to work out (with our help) how best to balance those two desires. The current crop is doing a lousy job of that. Perhaps the newly elected bunch will do better.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 16 —

After choking the breath out of Van Den Berg, Virgil met with Jenkins and Shrake at Skinner & Holland.

I’m reading Russ Bensing’s blog backwards—newest to oldest—and on 2 November he wrote:

Lucky for Ohioans that we have West Virginia. In 2016, there were more drug overdose deaths per capita in Ohio than any other state except the one on our southeast border.

There’s some good news. Prescription drug overdose deaths here hit an eight-year low in 2017, and the number of heroin-related deaths last year was the lowest in four years. The bad news is that drug deaths increased 20% anyway. Some of that is due to a 39% increase in cocaine-related deaths, but the biggest driver was fentanyl, an opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than heroin. Of the 4,854 deaths in Ohio attributable to drugs last year, fentanyl was responsible for 3,431 of them.

The emergence of fentanyl has come as a surprise. In fact, the legislature had failed to establish a bulk amount for fentanyl, as the Ohio Supreme Court pointed out earlier this year in State v. Pountney, which meant that possession of less than 20 grams of the substance was a fifth-degree felony.

Nineteen grams of fentanyl is enough to kill ten thousand people.

Last month when I was writing a political piece for Aziz Ahmad, I wrote:

Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, and Carfentanil—used to sedate very large zoo animals—is 100 times more potent than Fentanyl. Only 2 mg of Carfentanil is needed tranquilize a 2,000-pound elephant. Measuring a marginally safe—0.2 mg (a poppy seed weighs 0.3 mg)—dose of the drug for a 200 pound human would be impossible outside of a sophisticated laboratory.

In what twisted universe do we imagine that drug dealers are relying on their own Walter White? By Bensing’s estimation, 19 grams of Carfentanil would be enough to kill 100,000 people. Bensing continues:

The Ohio legislature swung into action, and effective Wednesday, the drug statutes were amended to substantially increase the penalties for fentanyl. Trafficking or possession of that nineteen grams now gets you a mandatory prison term for a second degree felony. Actually, it’s worse than that: if you have nineteen grams of any substance which contains fentanyl, you get the same penalty.

Unless Issue 1 passes next Tuesday.

Issue 1, of course, failed last week: 49.19 percent to 50.81 percent. Did we dodge a bullet or take one?

Via Mano Singham…

Mehdi Hasan is the kind of journalist we need more of. Hasan is now the latest addition to my daily—Saturday-Monday—blogroll.

Thomas James Weaver, in A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, writes;

Addressing a full house, [Ta-Nehisi Coates] opened with a short reading from Between the World and Me, prefacing it with the comment that his book is, above all, about fear — in particular, the degree to which fear in African-American communities is at the root of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Here was the bit that I liked most:

Late in the conversation, before turning to several student questions, [interviewer University of Vermont professor and poet Major] Jackson posed a question that went to the heart of Coates’ book, what it is and what it is not. “Why does the country need to hear optimism out of the mouths of black people?” Jackson asked.

Noting that because he wasn’t raised in the Christian tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. or James Baldwin, Coates said he is not inclined to preach the power of love. “Most things don’t end up well,” he said. “The moment in which there is black progress is when a critical mass of white people has decided it is in their interest.” Coates walked through some American history: Lincoln was assassinated by a racist; King was wire-tapped and harassed by the FBI, then assassinated as well; the light of Barack Obama’s presidency was followed by the retrenchment of Donald Trump’s. “As a writer, I want to be respectful to all of you,” Coates said. “It would be wrong of me to read a bedtime story to you. It would be deeply disrespectful.”

This is why I respect Coates so much.

To increase your mindfulness and concentration, gently and easily follow your in-breath and out-breath all the way through. Just sitting and following your breath can bring a lot of joy and healing.Breathing in, I follow my in-breath all the way through.
Breathing out, I follow my out-breath all the way through. —Following The Breath from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: tomfoolery, playful or foolish behavior.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

…The Fame
Of this spreads wide, and burns in the hearts of mothers;
Aroused to frenzy like hers, they leave their homes,
Looking for other places to lay their heads;
They bare their necks, let loose their hair to the wined
And the weather, they fill the air with their howling cries,
They wear the skin of fawns, they carry spears,
And in their midst bloodshot Amata sings,
The wedding song of her daughter and of Turnus,
And cries out to the others, “Wherever you are,
You loyal Latian mothers, if you have any
Pity for me, if you know the rights of mothers
And if the knowledge gnaws at your hearts, come join
The orgiastic rites, let loose the fillets
That bind your hair…”

—Book Seven, page 220, line 517

This is how I began…

*I keep papers in tabbed folders in my office in a physical filing cabinet. Each folder is labeled with a date in the form of YYMMDD (today would be 181114). Each folder contains no more than 10 distinct items and on any day when I file more than 10 I add an A to the date code and open a second, B. On my computer I have a running, LIFO file, that contains key words for those papers in the file. For instance, here are the keywords for my file 180713A:

Johnique Wilson Thank you card Power of Disruption Charles Blow 170213 Donald Trump approval ratings Trump resistance movement Power of Clarity Steve Pavlina clear goals are essential Naomi Klein The worst of Donald Trump’s toxic agenda is lying in wait a major U.S. crisis will unleash it Jason Reynolds Long Way Down Costco Membership Smart Compassion Meditation for fidgety skeptics Rain meditation Dan Harris Buddha’s Diet Books on Buddha and Buddhism and Meditation William Butler Yeats The Second Coming Reni Eddo-Lodge Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race

My current file, which holds only seven items at present, is 180713B.

So, reading comments on Mano Singham’s post White nationalist Jewish Republican loses in New Jersey, I left this comment:

@Holms, No. 3

Sadly, in this case, sonofrojblake is precisely correct. This is exactly how Trump has already started to play the shift.

Here, as I see it, is the problem for the Democrats. Like the 2008-2010 (and to a much lesser extent the 2010-2018) Republicans, all they can do is play defense. Yes, they can investigate Trump and maybe there’s hope there, but I don’t think so.

In the meantime, they have zero chance of passing any meaningful legislation because Mitch McConnell won’t let any bill get past the Senate. All they can do is vote down any bill—building the border wall, &c.—the president wants.

Talk of impeachment is just silly since there is also zero chance of at least 34 Republicans voting guilty if the House forces an impeachment trial. Remember, the impeachment of Bill Clinton resulted in an approval rating of 71 percent for the president after the Senate failed to not only get the 3/4ths vote needed to remove him, but the Senate couldn’t even get the majority of Republicans to vote for removal.

Then there’s the problem of a President Mike Pence. As bad as Trump is, Pence would be worse because he knows how Washington works.

We will have a do-nothing Congress—except for those bills that financially benefit their handlers (as Mano has remarked upon innumerable times) which will get hardy bi-partisan support—for the next two, quite possibly six, years.

@Dunc, No. 4

The key words in DonDueed’s comment are “at the moment.” Like global warming, don’t confuse changes in weather with change in climate. Those whose wealth depend upon the ebb and flow of the stock markets are very happy and doing quite well, thank you very much. Sure, the little guy might take it in the shorts, but the Masters of the Universe are laughing all the way to the piers where they dock their multi-million dollar yachts.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 15—

After Larry Van Den Berg and his brother were arrested, they were taken to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department and processed.

At any moment, we can say this small poem to ourselves and take a mini-rest. This poem is like a tiny vacation, except that it brings you back to your true home, instead of taking you away from it.

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

You can even shorten this poem; it works just as well:

In
Out.

—Resting Poem from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: recalcitrant, obstinately defiant of authority or restraint; difficult to manage or operate; not responsive to treatment.

Finally, a thought for today, an exercise in sortes vergilianae:

Upon the green bank of the river, in
A grove of verdant sheltering trees, there lay
A white mother sow with her newborn young, all of them
Of the same white color as she; and father Aeneas,
While his chosen comrades witnessed at the altar,
Sacrificed them as an offering to you,
Great Juno, in honor of you.

—Book eight, page 240, line 124.

This is how I began…

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 14—

Virgil went to bed discouraged.

George Michael Zimmerman entered the idea of Stand Your Ground into the national consciousness when he used concept to justify his murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Zimmerman was, sadly, successful in his defense and went on to cause more pain and mayhem.

So, yesterday I noted that I had added Russel Bensing’s The Briefcase to my blogroll. The top post goes directly to Ohio and our own twisted relationship to Castle doctrines and Stand Your Ground. Bensing, in Self-defense (?) writes:

…the meat is the amendment to RC 2901.05. That’s one of Ohio’s two Castle doctrines (we’ll get to the other one in a minutes), and up to this point they simply provided that someone who used deadly force against an intruder in their home or vehicle was presumed to have acted in self-defense.

This goes well beyond that. Basically, the amendment provides that if a factfinder could rationally find, “when viewed in the light most favorable to the accused,” that the defendant acted in self-defense, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he didn’t. The presumption for a home or car is retained, but the new statute specifically provides that even if the prosecution overcomes the presumption, the State still retains the burden of disproving self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

That’s a big change. Who bears the burden of proof is often outcome-determinative. The defendant’s burden of proving a preponderance of the evidence that he was in fear of death or great bodily harm now becomes the State’s burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he wasn’t.

But there’s also a change to RC 2901.09 which could be even more significant.

Bensing isn’t understating that significance. I sent him a note this morning—no comments on the blog—about the case of Abdul Rahman and Andrew Easley featured in the Serial podcast: Pleas Baby Pleas.

If you haven’t been listening to Serial, you should be.

(Also, check out the bottom of Bensing’s left-hand column for his blogroll of Legal Blogs.)

Might this have been Donald John Trump’s (Fair is foul, but foul’s alright very much NSFW) Macbeth moment? I’m thinking yes, although he’d never get the reference.

From the National Nurses United:

We know we are at a tipping point in this movement. 70 percent of Americans support Medicare for All. Progressive candidates up and down the ballot ran on this issue and won in large part because of it. H.R. 676 already has 123 co-sponsors, which was unimaginable a few years ago. In July, Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Keith Ellison and Debbie Dingell launched the first ever Medicare for All Caucus in the House of Representatives, and that caucus now has 77 members who are committed to Medicare for All.

Even the President has seen the rapidly growing popularity and feels threatened enough to lie on camera. He released a video calling Medicare for All “the worst thing that will ever happen to you and your family.” The White House then released a report that accidentally made the case for single-payer. These attacks would not be happening if momentum were not on our side.

Passing H.R. 676 will be a major moment of victory in our fight for real healthcare justice. Help us cross this finish line…

So, in 1994, Newt Gingrich famously presented his Contract With On America containing the proposed text of 10 bills that Republican house members would bring to the floor in the first 100 days. While the implementation was mixed, the message was not. The Democratic Leadership—please gawd, not Pelosi—needs to better that plan in 2018 and hit the ground working on 3 January.

Episode 1—Affirmative Action; Episode 2—Saudi Arabia; and Episode 3—Amazon.

Back in the early days of Have Coffee Will Write, I regularly posted poems from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. That was one of the elements that prompted Scene to name me as inaugural Best Local Weblog. I’ve written about a lot of poetry since, but not on as regular basis as before. That changed today with my subscription to The New Yorker’s daily poem email. First up is The Beetle by Sharon Olds which concludes:

I never liked the way the other god’s body
dissolved on the tongue, now I come with my
strong dark jaws—your life in my
body is my life, I want to use it with
real physical rage and physical love.

Clearly, Olds grokked.

I’ve always been fascinated by the international reach of HCWW. Note: according to Jetpack none of these clicks are from bots, but YMMV.

Your breathing is a stable, solid ground where you can take refuge. No matter what thoughts, emotions and perceptions are going on inside you, your breath is always there, like a faithful friend. Whenever you’re carried away by thinking, overwhelmed by strong emotions or feeling restless and dispersed, return to your breathing. Bring body and mind together and anchor your mind. Become aware of the air coming in and going out of your body. With awareness of the breath, our breathing naturally becomes light, calm and peaceful. At any time of the day or night, whether you’re walking, driving, working in the garden or sitting at the computer, you can return to the peaceful refuge of your own breath. —Awareness Of Breathing from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: admonish, to indicate duties or obligations to; to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner; to give friendly earnest advice or encouragement to; to say (something) as advice or a warning.

Holy Ghost by John Sanford: Chapter 13—

Virgil, now seriously bummed, went out to his truck and called Frankie, asked her how she was feeling.

This would never, ever happen in our household!

First, full disclosure, when I first read about this series—Cleveland Talks Serial, not Serial itself—Lawrence Daniel Caswell and I had very minor comment barney on a post by Sam Allard.

OK, so you know about my prejudice on this series and having listened to the first episode, I wasn’t wrong. Other than learning about Russ Bensing’s blog—thank you very much for that WCPN—the podcast was 35 minutes too long. I have added Bensing’s blog, the briefcase: Musing by an Ohio Criminal lawyer, to my reformulated blogroll—and dropped a note to Bensing about his excellent (so rare in those J.D.-impaired among us) writing.

So, The Paris Review has begun recording podcasts. Individual shows do not have unique URLs—or embedding, give them a chance, they’re still in the ’50s—and are listed in LIFO order so you have to scroll down on the page to find No. 1. Enjoy.

While the entire interview with Maya Angelou is not included—we only get the beginning and a beautiful exchange not included in the printed version—being able to actually hear the great writer speak is wonderful.

Listening to Wallace Shawn reading Denis Johnson’s Car-Crash While Hitchhiking took me back to August 1974 when I hitchhiked nearly 1,500 miles in three days traveling home from Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. Passing through Kansas City, Kansas, I had what I now think of as my serial-killer moment. A guy in a pickup gave me a lift and then casually offered me a hot meal and a warm bed for the night if I’d “help him with some chores on his farm.” Yeah, he might have just been a good guy, but the writer in me now—I had no clue then, just dumb luck and a desire to get home—has always wondered if I, literally, dodged a bullet there. He let me off at an exit in Missouri and I made St. Louis by night fall and bedded down just off the interstate. I made Marietta later that afternoon.

We human beings have lost confidence in the body just knowing what to do. If we have time alone with ourselves, we panic and try to do many different things. Mindful breathing helps us to relearn the art of resting. Mindful breathing is like a loving parent cradling a baby, saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you; just rest. —Healing from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: valorous, possessing or acting with bravery or boldness, courageous; marked by, exhibiting, or carried out with courage or determination, heroic.

The choice here is, I’m certain, not an accident. What too many people don’t understand is that bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery, being valorous, is being scared shitless and doing what needs doing despite of your fear.

For me, Happy Veterans’ Day just doesn’t cut it. Yeah, we all have some happy memories of our time of service, but that isn’t what we really remember. If you can find one, wear a poppy. Since I moved to Cuyahoga County in 1984, they’ve been hard to find. I had to stock up from the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in my hometown in order to have a supply.

Remember what we did and what your parents, your spouse, your children might have to do. And not just on Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day, but most importantly on Election Days. Every time you cast a vote think of the lives of the men and women you might send to their deaths with your vote. Stop and consider the families that could lose someone they love very much because of the box you ticked on your ballot.

I’m not suggesting that you vote for politicians who are anti-war or anti-military, but rather that you consider how quickly they might cast their vote to send our troops to fight. Not since 8 December 1941 has our Congress correctly exercised Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 giving solely to Congress the power: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water. Instead they, Democrats and Republicans, have abrogated their Constitutional responsibility and passed the buck to the sitting president.

When people thank me for my service—I know they’re sincere, but the phrase really galls me—I often ask if they have someone they love in uniform. Too often the answer is no. That’s wrong. If every family had members prepared to go in harm’s way we would not be so quick to leap into a conflict we do not understand and cannot win.

Remember us the next time you vote.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Major John McCrae, May 1915

You’ll probably still be asleep at 5 o’clock this morning (that’s 11 a.m. in France) but if you are awake, or as soon as you might read this, take a moment, read the words of Major McCrae, and remember B.D., Ray Hightower, Leo DeLuca (aka Toggle) and the rest of us.