AMERICAN DIGEST

Dear Whole Foods: We're through. It's not me. It's you.

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:30:53 -0800

You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can't pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I've tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It's time to face the fact that we just don't have that old natural spark between us any longer. We've faded from organic to conventional. It's time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new -- elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you're doing to me is doing it for me any more.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole -- like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, those sloppy seconds of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn't get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because "they go with my Earth shoes".

I put up with your petulant insistence on "helping me" find things I wasn't looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself "Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?"

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Yes, I put up with your junkies' greed as you whined for more and more.... especially in the cheese department where you had no shame in marking up English and French and "local, sustainable" cheeses first to $20 a pound (Or as you coyly say, "$19.99!").... and then up to $25 a pound... and then -- since somebody was evidently paying you to screw them this hard -- when you went whole hog and started into the $35 a pound range with no end to your cheese needs in sight.

Yes, I just looked the other way, Whole. I figured I could always just skulk around the deli counter cadging slices of salami and smidgens of cheese off your perky crew until they grew tired or I was full. But the feeling of being used by you -- especially with the Euro cheeses which went up and up regardless of how heavily the Dollar was sitting on the face of the Euro -- kept on pinching me in the pocket.

Even then I accepted your "Give More Green to Be More Green" smarm. Why?

Was it because your moist and juicy fruit always looked so tender, sweet and tasty?

Was it because you always reminded me, in your organic, vegan, tofu sodden shelves, of those unshaven but passionate hippie girls of my youth? The one's with the faint Frida Kahlo mustaches like the fuzz I once licked from your peaches.

Was it because I thought I was demonstrating my successful status by shopping at a grocery store whose motto might as well have been, "Whole Foods: Why Pay Less?"

Was it the frisson that compulsive gamblers feel as I watched a single paper bag of your goodies climb relentlessly over the last few years from $50 to $75 to over $100 with no sign that I was at least going to get a French kiss as a reward?

I even put up with your ceaseless whining about the friggin' environment, being green and all, and your constant nudging about bringing my own bag to carry away your noodle soup, and your waxed cardboard containers for the salad bar that would always leak dressing onto my leather seats.

I suppose it was all of these things about you, building up slowly... and yet... and yet....

Whenever I'd leave you, after depositing a C-note or two in the register by the door, I'd think, "No more. No more. We can't go on meeting like this." But in a couple of weeks, my yearning for you would rise like the yearning I often have for a Korean massage. And I'd be back, slipping into your embrace, and always.... after scraping the detritus of my plate into the garbage a few hours later... I'd feel used. Even after a shower.

But today was it. That's enough. We're over. Finito. Kaput.

What was it? Like the end of all sordid love affairs, Whole, it was a little thing that did it.

There I was, after buying a slab of your succulent meat at a mere $18.99 a pound, adrift in your kitchen supplies aisle. I remembered that I needed aluminum foil. I scanned your bursting shelves and then I saw it... the "If You Care" Aluminum Foil. It was made, it breathlessly told me, of "100% recycled aluminum."

The "If You Care" was a 50 foot roll of the silver stuff. It was priced at $4.50. Next to it sat your good old new aluminum foil. Yours was a 75 foot roll of the stuff I've faithfully used and recycled all these years. It was priced at $2.25.

It dawned on me then, Whole, that as it was with so many other things about you I was screwed no matter which I chose. Somehow, if I "cared" enough to spend $2.25 more for 25 feet less "If You Care" foil I'd just recycle that caring foil again so that it could come back for more caring at a higher price.

I could take it, Whole, when it was just you and me and a little extra expense for a small tickling moment of splendor in the wheat grass. But now you were sharing your shelves with the high price whores of recycling and I knew that if I stayed with you a moment longer, I would turn green with bankruptcy.

That's why I abandoned you and your succulent meat in your shopping cart on Aisle 5. That's why I left that chunk of Neal's Yard Cheshire at $32.99 mouldering in your private collection.

Whole, I've given you some of the best, and certainly expensive, grocery purchases of my life. But we're done now. Like all tawdry retail sluts tarted up with those French plum tarts near the cash registers, you've finally stepped over my food love line of death.

I've left, a shattered man, with whatever shreds of dignity and solvency remain. Don't write. Don't call. And especially don't offer to take me back to that Devon Clotted Cream in Aisle 2 that we once smeared over our shortbreads together in that wild, hot Summer of 2006. We're quits. Deal with it.

Hungrily yours,
Gerard

P.S. If by any chance you want to dump that Neals Yard Cheshire at fire sale prices when Washington refuses to bail you out... twitter me.

[I first took the pledge last November. I confess I have backslid, had a slip, fallen off the wagon since then. There's a watermelon in my fridge to prove it. I repost this from time to time to help me stay clean.]

Summer Night

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:23:49 -0800

By Grant Snider @ INCIDENTAL COMICS

Here Now, A Superb Short and Bittersweet Film about Baseball Legend Pete Rose

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:52:35 -0800

"If you want to put something on my tombstone that was very important to me: it’s 1,972. That’s how many winning games I’ve played in, so that makes me the biggest winner in the history of sports."

As If Food Weren't Expensive Enough Already Cost of Parmesan Due to Rise

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:09:19 -0800

Overturned shelves of Parmesan cheese wheels in a cheese factory in San Giovanni, Italy, on May 21. 2012, following an earthquake the day before. -- Earthquake in Northern Italy

Some things just cannot be duplicated. Parmesan cheese, real Parmesan, happens to be one of those. The price of this particular cheese is already screaming through +/- $20 a pound for regulation strength. After this earthquake, I'm looking for it to double. When it does it will be added to all those other things that the current government and media are determined to hide as very real rises in very real prices. Just yesterday, on the way to purchase some Parmesan among other things, I stopped for my regular once-a-month tank of gas. Cost? North of $80.00. I seem to remember a time when the same tank was $40.00, but I am evidently supposed to send that down the memory hole as well.

Hope for change? At this rate the next time I fill up all I can hope for is a little change from $100.00. How about you?

Good Morning. You're Welcome.

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:57:51 -0800

The record of yet another series of moments when the beauty of the Earth and the human race rises up and takes your heart with it. The Creator made the world and the entire universe for moments exactly like this. And gave you a ring side seat.

Higher Education and the Holy Cookie

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:58:53 -0800

On the greatest chocolate-chip cookie in the known universe, with recipe....

The Critical American Issue of the Day

This issue is not, as many would have you believe, whether or not the Constitution is a "living document" (It will be a living document on the day that it breaks out of its case and takes the current Supreme Court out for a drink, a toke, a smoke, and a poke -- assuming Justice Ginsberg stays home.), but is centered instead on the much more important and utterly American question: "Just what is the finest chocolate chip cookie in the known universe?"

One night in the Hood River Hotel in Hood River, Oregon on the banks of the Columbia, I had a chance to examine that question again just before the cataleptic sugar shock of nine home-made chocolate chip cookies knocked me sideways for eight hours like a poleaxed pound puppy.

When this coma finally released me, I thought more deeply on the question of the Holy Cookie and what makes for greatness. I would have liked to hand the baker of the cookies that conked me the laurels but I cannot.

I shall explain the nature of my judgment, the history behind it, and also, should you choose to stay with me, provide you and you alone with the recipe for, "the finest chocolate chip cookie in the known universe."

First of all, anything that can be purchased in a supermarket is not fit to be called a cookie, much less a chocolate chip cookie, no matter how thick the BS on the package may be. Especially any with the word "artisan" on the package which must be incinerated in situ. We're all agreed on that, right? Right.

Second, do not be fooled by "boutique" chocolate chip cookies. They are all from Satan's Workshop and are, therefore, instruments of the Enemy who is out to weaken the intellectual and moral fiber of America. Consumption of these cookies leads, inevitably to "a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness [and] loss of essence." You may, in a moment of weakness after, say, a friendly strip search at the air port, find that you cannot "avoid" these cookies, but under no circumstances are you to give them your essence.

Eat Not the Cookie of Satan

"Singing them sweet sounds to that crazy, crazy town:" The Bee Gees & 1975

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:10:49 -0800

When all is said and done 1975 was my favorite year out of all the decades in New York City. This was that year's soundtrack. Nights on Broadway. Les nuits blanche. White nights.

Built to Last

Sat, 19 May 2012 21:21:28 -0800

Upstream they've allowed the water level of the river to fall until the dam's top blocks can be seen as the waterfall retreats. The river's bottom emerges and a spring shorebird skitters along the edge of the green muck, its beak probing the dirt. Three pigeons pace on and peck at the drying granite blocks. Each block in the slightly curved dam wall under their feet is an easy ton of stone. The dam spans the river and, when the water is allowed to rise, it vanishes under a sheen of falling water. But now the water is low even though the river still flows.

Behind the dam a grating of steel bars lets the river flow under the dam and gush out the spill pipe at the foot of the stone blocks. There the river continues to flow under the footbridge, between the stone and brick walls of the mill, over another waterfall further on, and then, past other mills still downstream, out to sea.

The mill holds the river tight between its walls for a short span and, in the past, the dipping, turning wheels would have spun drawing the river's power into the mill and, through rods and pulleys, relayed it on to the machines.

The first mill at this turn of the river was a saw mill in 1649. Then a grist mill came in its place. In time that too was torn down and the granite and brick buildings here now were raised up. The mill rises above the river, five stories of brick set on many courses of granite foundation stones. In its current form the mill made fabrics from civil war uniforms to fine cashmeres. Another mill just downstream made munitions for our arsenals. One gun from those foundries and lathes went first north to Portland and later west out over the ocean to Pearl Harbor. Later that mill's machines made other parts out of case-hardened steel and pig iron. Other products, over the years, came from the mill: Christmas tree ornaments, cameras and film, paint, ice creepers for the Russian troops during World War II, rifle grenades, ski poles, waterproof boxes, and wooden shoes.

Today those machines are gone. Today the mill houses those who admire the fashionability of loft-like apartments; who value the anonymity of its corridors and numbered doors.

On massive granite blocks the mill as it now is has straddled the river for over a century. With care and maintenance its good for another century -- or two or three -- even though its use then cannot be foreseen anymore than the builders of the mill would have thought in their day that they were building housing.

The men who built the mill built better than they knew; far better than the Frank Lloyd Wright fancy "Falling Water," once lauded by all but now already being rotted out and reclaimed by the stream it enfolded. The mill was not built as a fancy but as a machine for making and now for living, built to last by men whom we cannot hope to emulate.

In full spate the river surges between the mill's walls and, at times, rises to flood the lowest apartments much to the distress of its fashionable tenants.

At flood speed the river rushes beneath the lower windows with a rumble and a stifled roar as if some endless ghost freight train was passing, passing, passing.

But then the spring flood abates to the hushed rustle and hum of flow. Over the calmer water swallows daub their nests under the eaves and, at dusk, dart and flicker over the water. And the mill around them, built long ago on the rocks of capital, skill, muscle, sinew and faith, contains the river below and the spring sky seen in its surface. The mill, raised on granite and formed from fire-forged bricks laid one after the other by arm and hand, mortar and trowel, built to last, endures.

Today we live in the reflection of their times. Today we taste the afterimage of events.

330 Things I Know About the Net

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:46:46 -0800

I've been at this since 1987. Here's my list so far. What do you know?

1. THE NET IS THE ENTIRE KNOWN CYBERSPACE UNIVERSE, AND LIKE THE REAL UNIVERSE IS CONSTANTLY EXPANDING.

2. THE SIZE OF THE NET IS UNKNOWN.

3. THE NET IS JUST LIKE THE SOCIETY IT CONNECTS, ONLY LESS SO.

4. NOBODY OWNS THE NET.

5. THE NET HAS NO CENTER.

6. IF YOU INSIST THAT THE NET *MUST* HAVE A CENTER, LOOK IN CALIFORNIA.

7. INFORMATION ON ANY SUBJECT YOU CAN THINK OF, AND MILLIONS MORE YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO THINK OF, IS ON THE NET

8. ON THE NET ALL LAWS ARE LOCAL.

9. THE NET IS NOT FAIR.

10. THERE ARE NO FINAL LIMITS TO THE NET, ONLY REST STOPS.

11. THE NET IS A POSTOCRACY NOT A DEMOCRACY.

12. THE PRIMARY NEED THAT DRIVES THE NET IS THE NEED FOR AFFILIATION.

13. THE SECONDARY NEED THAT DRIVES THE NET IS THE NEED FOR ATTENTION.

14. "THE NET SEES CENSORSHIP AS SYSTEM DAMAGE AND ROUTES AROUND IT." -- JOHN GILMORE

15. YOU CAN'T KNOW THE WHOLE NET OVERNIGHT, OR EVEN OVER A DECADE.

16. THE SOCIETY OF THE NET IS TRIBAL.

17. "THE NET HAS NO MIND. IT BORROWS YOURS." -- THE UNKNOWN POSTER

18. ON THE NET YOU MEET PEOPLE FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

19. VIRTUAL APPEARANCES ARE ALWAYS DECEIVING.

20. THE ONLY BEHAVIOR YOU CAN CONTROL ONLINE IS YOUR OWN.

21. NO FEAR.

22. IF YOU DON'T HAVE SOME SOCIAL SKILLS, GET SOME.

23. READ BEFORE YOU RESPOND.

24. DON'T TICK OFF SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS; THEY WILL GET THEIR REVENGE.

25. YOU CAN'T BREAK THE NET.

26. IT'S ALWAYS RUSH HOUR SOME WHERE ON THE NET.

27. YES, YOU CAN CONTACT CELEBRITIES ON THE NET BUT DON'T EXPECT AN ANSWER.

28. IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN, KNOW WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY'RE DOING ON THE NET.

29. ALL NETWORKS GO DOWN ON YOU. AND WHEN THEY DO ALL YOU CAN DO IS MOAN.

30. HAVE A STRONG PASSWORD AND A WEAK PASSWORD AND KNOW WHERE TO USE THEM.

Mexico's Drug War: 50,000 Dead in 6 Years

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:40:01 -0800

A forensic technician sweeps blood off a street at a crime scene in Monterrey

A photo-essay at - In Focus - The Atlantic is pretty much death and corpses all the way down. In a way it's good we're getting the military out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We're going to need them at home.

I'm aware of the self-hating Americans' arguments that the drug cartels of Mexico are only there because of this country's insatiable hunger for illicit drugs. All fine and good, but.... but... you have to admit that Mexico brings a whole new level of game and brutality to this "business." It's almost as if there is something endemic to the Mexican character that compels this kind of slaughter that is beneath even the carnal, uncaring slaughter instincts of insects.

Books That Should Be: New Additions to the Invisible Library

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:33:45 -0800

DREAMS OF MY TWO FATHERS: World's Most Important Autobiography Revised and Uncloseted

GLIDE PATHS AND PORK CHOPS: Principles of Porcine Aviation

REVOLUTIONARY RELAXATION: How to Unwind with Small Shooting Sprees

COMPROMISE ECOLOGY: The Handbook of "The Friends of the Sierra Club and Halliburton's Earth."

STIFFED: Around the World in 80 Lapdances

LOOK MOO, NO THUMBS: A Cow's Guide to Instant Messaging

BOYFOOT BEAR WITH TEAKS OF CHAN: Zen Puns for Every Occasion

FUELISH: The Future of Electrosolarlunamethanecorn-powered Vehicles

SEX MIT SCHLAG: The Tangled Histories of Love and Dairy Products

THE 7 COMPULSIONS OF HIGHLY DEFECTIVE PEOPLE

WE'RE TWELVE STEPPING: 12 Foolproof Square Dances for AA Shindigs in Rural America

THE SPEED OF DARK: Measuring the Slowest Thing in the Universe

GENDERLENDING: Same Sex Marriage for Heterosexuals

DUCT-TAPE DROMEDARIES: Beyond Balloon Animals

MY GIRL: The Life of Jenna Bush, 46th President of the United States As Told by Her Father

PRONE YOGA: Asanas for People Too Pooped to Sit Up

THE PEOPLE, MAYBE: The Progressive Professor's Guide to Making Sure Only Smart People Vote

THE I-CHANGE: Fortune Telling with the New Commemorative Quarters

YO, GOD: The Revised Standard Hip-Hop Version of the Gospels

My Mother at 97

Sun, 13 May 2012 01:59:34 -0800

Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun -- then and now

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. Now she's 90 years old and she comes to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three inch heels, and a six foot long purple boa. She's threatening to sing Kurt Weill's 'The Saga of Jenny" and dance on the table one more time .

She'll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table this year. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 97 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. "If it wasn't for my knees I'd still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net." [Note 2012: Alas she had to give up tennis two years back when her knees finally gave up. She didn't. Water walking twice a week.]

She plays Bridge once or twice a week, winning often, and has been known to have a cocktail or two on occasion. She still drives even though it causes my brother to fret. This is a good thing since he's the kind of man who sees the incipient disaster in everything and it's good for him to fret about something that has a smidgen of reality to it.

She keeps a small two-bedroom apartment in a complex favored by young families and college students from Chico State and, invariably, has a host of fans during any given semester. She's thought about moving to the "senior apartments" out by the mall, but "I'm just not sure I could downsize that much and everyone there is so old."

Gay Marriage: Just Do It! (And Welcome to It)

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:36:36 -0800

"Fools rush in where fools have been before."

I'm with Dorothy Sayers on this one:

As I grow older and older
And totter toward the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom

We've got a lot of problems with marriage in this country, but can't we take a step back and draw a deep breath, smell the winds of change and admit that Gay Marriage is a done deal?

It's here. It's queer. So what?

Enough with all the whining and carping and running about with one's hair on fire screaming, "Oh! Gay Marriage. I got the fear!" If a couple of normally insane Americans want to get a bunch of friends or Elvis impersonators together, seek out a whompingly liberal priest, rabbi, minister, or Marryin' Sam to hitch them up... so what?

Speaking as a twice married, twice disappointed, compulsively heterosexual male, I have heard the arguments and seen the yearning and felt the love of gay and lesbian couples from sea to shining sea. And I have felt their gay pain and now wish only that they share my straight pain. It will bring us together faster than Obama explaining economics to stoners everywhere on the Daily Show.

Deep down all our fellow gay Americans want is to be allowed their right, at long last, to enter the, ahem, Holy Realms of Sanctified and Blissful Matrimony. I take them at their word.

And I say: "Bring.... It.... On! Get... Down! Let it be, at long last, Mission Accomplished!" It is the morning of a decade of fabulous parties in America, and not a moment too soon.

The American Argument

Tue, 08 May 2012 07:47:14 -0800

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Sometimes small notions indicate issues of larger moment. In the discussion of a previous post, a commenter delivers a vest pocket critique of America seen from abroad. The salient part reads:

As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't give a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.

What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?

I could go on - but I won't, except to say two things. Americans' bad habits are a poor example for everyone else - and America's gluttony for oil in particular, and their actions to make sure it gets fed, and the money transfers resulting from it, make the rest of the world much more dangerous

Some observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those a reasonable man might form on a daily diet of the American media melange. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your head fill with harmful fat.

Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.

I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."

It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.

By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.

The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true.

It is not true from a glance at the steadily declining levels of emission in a steadily increasing and mobile population over the decades. It is can be seen to be obviously untrue from the simple fact of living in America for six decades -- decades that have seen more deep and lasting social change than at any other time in the history of the country, perhaps the world.

I was, as constant readers may know, born in Los Angeles six decades ago. I remember the poison air of the 1950s. I remember the smog alerts, the soot that would settle on the windowsills and grind its way into the clothes. I remember the black smudge that would be visible within a block of my front yard. I saw it that same black smudge some three decades later, not in Los Angeles, but in London.

Today there is still a haze over Los Angeles on most days, but you have to stand back some to see it. You also have to stand back in your mind and know that Los Angeles, depending on how you define it, is now home to between 10 and 18 million people (Up a tad from the 4 million of my childhood when only every family and not every individual had a car). The only way that air in Los Angeles today could become perfect would be if you gave every resident a unicycle for transportation, a mandated vegan diet, and forbid flatulence under pain of death.

In short, the air in American cities is today more than acceptable and is not, by any stretch of an imagination not twisted by false impressions, "poison." And it improves daily. Could it be improved more? Certainly it could and inevitably it will.

The same observations hold true for our rivers, our reservoirs, our parks, our homes, our communities, and for all other nation-wide measures by which one might discover the true quality of life. We tolerate high gasoline prices in large measure because we will not drill and pump our vast reserves nor will we build new refineries. This indulgence can be reversed whenever the political will to do so arrives. And it will.

At the same time, as it would be in any imperfect human society of 300 million souls, it is perfectly possible to find the pockets of poison and the ghettos of despair in this protean country. Viewed over an inch of time you would note they are shrinking, but you could still stand on a street corner in South Central or Harlem and focus a camera in such a direction and frame the images in such a manner you could deliver the impression of a vile and selfish society in which the poverty-stricken obese were crushed under some corporate oppressor's boot.

You could, and many still do, ferret out an example of racism daily if you look hard enough. But it’s an evil juju only the most poisoned of our people waste their lives in pursuing. It is the witchdoctor’s feathered fetish shaken in America’s face daily by the race-hustlers and rent-seekers in the Democrat Party and the present administration in order to preserve their plantations of colonized minds. Free men know it is only skillfully shaped propaganda and does not represent anything close to the truth of the American experiment and environment in 2009. Here even our poor are filthy rich measured against the world's poor.

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter -- in my critic’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad -- a mindset in which "the perfect is the enemy of the good." It is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange masochistic pleasure. A country that permits all perversions will not shy away from perverted politics. Instead it will seek to fund them in perpetuity.

The commenter seems to feel that it is there is some implicit global responsibility of America to set a "good" example rather than, as he feels, its current "bad" example. He seems to feel that as America goes, so goes the world; that the Brits drive big cars in Britain not because they make that choice as free people but because some bizarre 'American mind waves' force them to do so against their will; that the Chinese, if impressed by some future America's return to some eco-idyllic state, will shrug off the desires that the increasing wealth and semi-liberty of their situation affords them and peacefully return to the days of the ox-cart, the rickshaw, and root-grubbing famine. In short he places too much power in the hands of America and too little in the hands of the human individuals in the rest of the world. To this way of thinking the example is all, and that only if the example is a "good" example can the world be perfected.

To a small extent he is correct. The global reach of American media is a force in the world, but a deeply confusing one. Our media's main export is a mixed message. It constantly tells the world about our shortcomings ("Alas, we have not yet perfected our country. Here's how..."), but at the same time shows the world our achievements ("Check out the good life, the very good life, and get some for yourself. Here's how..."). What he fails to note, or perhaps perceive, is that the American Story rises out not out of agreement but out of the American Argument, an argument that we've been having here in the land where men have been able to freely speak and vote their minds for well over two centuries. It is an argument we're not finished with yet.

There are many ways of stating the American Argument with itself -- indeed, it is many arguments -- but one of the most straightforward is "How shall men be free and how shall a society of free men then be structured?"

From time to time the passions that animate the American Argument run to blood, such as the era that led to the Civil War and, to a much lesser extent, our current era. At other times, the Argument is pitched at a much lower level of intensity. But the Argument is ever present and any number can play. If you can get here and become a citizen you can participate as well. Hell, we'll let you participate even if you are here and not a citizen. We might even allow millions of you to become citizens overnight in order to join the Argument. You don't even have to learn English any longer.

We just had a big argument over that last concept and, even though it's over for now, it's not over yet. Now we are on to arguing over matters of life and death and who will, in the end, pay the reaper's bill. Indeed, the great thing about the American Argument is that it is never over. The Argument will go on and on prompting every generation to add to it and shape it as that generation wills -- for good or ill -- and trusting that America will self-correct over time as long as the Argument endures and is not won by either side.

The reality is that the American experiment continues its pursuit of the good and its flirtation with perfection. In this pursuit of happiness the American experiment continues to demonstrate to the world what a real egalitarian and free society actually looks like and is. Not what such a society could be, but what one actually is here, now, today. And we arrive there by our constant political argument about "the perfect" vs. "the good;" a "utopia tomorrow" via government intervention in all aspects of life versus individual liberty and the best "possible" world here and now. It is an argument that seeks balance rather than predominance, but when one side of the argument seeks a permanent win the social fabric that binds the country begins to tear. When this happens good citizens of either side will endeavor to patch it once again and continue the Argument.

Indeed, for all intents and purposes, the Argument is the American Revolution today. The Argument is an artifact of the American Revolution. It endures because the American Revolution endures, 233 years later, as the most successful revolution in the history of the world. The American Revolution did not start in 1776 -- that was just the shooting phase. The American Revolution began when men from the Old World first came to the New World and decided to make it new; when men of that world set foot here and came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder.”

The American Argument emerged from the impact of this land on the Old World. This impact is chronicled in the first visions that the New World could be more than the extension of the Old; that it could be truly New. The vision of a world made new is an ancient one in this land. It predates the Revolution and the formal founding of the United States. The roots can be found in such documents as "The Mayflower Compact" and most clearly in John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "City Upon a Hill."

Many consider the Declaration of Independence to be the key document in the creation of the American experiment, but the seeds of it are to be found in many earlier expressions of what it was like to be new in the New World. Of these, the closing words of Winthrop's "City on a Hill" stand for most of the others:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life, that we and our seed may live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.

"Therefore let us choose life...." That's pretty much what we try to do here in America some 233 years out. We try in our halting, shambling, faltering way to always choose life; life with all its flaws and complexities and victories and defeats.

We don't try to be perfect -- although there are many among us who urge it upon us and expect it from us in order to feel more perfect themselves.

At the same time I would not deny that we are by default an example to the world -- if not the perfect example so many would prefer. Instead we are simply, warts and all, the best society in all its multifoliate aspects that currently exists or has ever existed upon the Earth. We are a nation that has never been perfect but always, if you could walk the land and know the lay of it, the warp and the woof and the thought dreams of it, much better than we have any right to be. If you could look at the world from orbit and see the people of the world flowing over its surface in some sort of schematic, you would see, when you came to gaze at the borders of America, many footprints going in and few coming out.

That's why I am always amused by the exhortations from within and without to "get perfect or get gone." They always seem to me to be filled with spleen on the surface but with an incredible yearning on the inside; a yearning that acknowledges in its very bitterness; in its very existence that this country of all the others is still "the last best hope of Earth." America-loathing knows in its bones that, no matter how much it dislikes the world with America in it, it would be a much less perfect and much more dangerous world with America out of it. Then again, given the shape of the world and the nature of the American argument, perhaps this wish may some day be granted and the world can again sink back into the tyranny of individuals, faction, and totalitarian state-control.

Perhaps. But that day is not yet. With all the rancor now on display, I still believe that we've got about two to five more centuries left to continue setting our "bad example." Hell, give us one century more to argue and our "bad example" might even get you your "perfect world."

Revised and rewritten from July, 2007

Bigger Tents: On Rebranding "CONSERVATIVE" and "REPUBLICAN" with "AMERICAN"

Sun, 06 May 2012 21:38:12 -0800

An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,... No sentimentalist .... no stander above men and women or apart from them...
-- Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

“I am not an American, I am THE American.”
-– Mark Twain

Remember when Hillary Clinton, during her last attempt to rule the world, stopped calling herself a “liberal” and rebranded herself as a “progressive?”

I do.

It was Clinton's desperate attempt to crawl out from under the vast heap of crap she and all the other “liberals” had piled on themselves

– notably during her own husband's administration.

And who, when trying to run, wanted to have that old liberal ball and chain around her thick ankles?

Not Hillary.

By 2007 “Liberal” had become so drenched in sewage liberals could only clean it through “rebranding.”

The new/old brand name chosen was 'progressive.'

And it worked for them and for Obama just long enough to get them elected by a credulous public who had seemingly never heard "progressive" before.

“Progressive...” it sounded so, well, hopeful. It was, after all, not "trans-" but "pro-"gressive.

After all, who can be against “progress?” Who is not pro "pro?"

Who, that is, except the vast majority of older Americans who had seen the wreckage that the progressives' “progress” had wrought wherever it touched down on the American landscape.