But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

And this isn’t some progressive spoof either, it’s a peer reviewed study based on longitudinal market research in the U.K. Now on first blush, you’d think this would bring a smile to our liberal faces. And it did. I admit it. (Although I started to send it to my conservative friends, but didn’t, since I thought it might be cruel. Probably not, since they don’t believe in science and statistics anyway.)

But the more you think about it, the bigger problem it is for us. Because if people are conservative because they’re stupid, then that’s a problem because one of our core tenets is: It’s off-limits to persecute people for things they have no control over like skin color, sexual orientation, intelligence, etc. I can see it now. At some Florida supermarket somewhere, a small boy is pointing to a seventy year-old woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a Newt Gingrich button and his mom is saying, “Shhhhh! Don’t point, Alex. She’s a Republican, but she can’t help it.”  And this means that we have to stop mocking Rush and all right-wing positions on climate, gun control, taxes and the like, because they are too dumb to understand why their ideas are bad.

Just outside Chicago, one hospital is advertising its obesity clinic with billboards that say, “It’s a disease, not a decision.”

Romney-Santorum 2012. It’s a condition, not a choice.

I predicted Romney to win and I am sticking to it. Let the kids at the Tea Party sleepover have their fun, sooner or later the grown ups are going to come upstairs, turn off the music, make everyone get back into bed and cut out the lights, just like they always do. Post-Eisenhower, the Republican Party has worked on the principle that the great unwashed should just shut up and do what their betters tell them to do. And when push comes to shove, they will.

So what do the results really tell us?

Three things, I think.

First, the average IQ of any large group of randomly selected people should be a hundred, but it may be quite a bit lower than that in South Carolina. What do SC Republicans want? Progress on the economy, abortion, gay marriage? Yeah, right. I am from South Carolina. What they really want is an electoral lynching. It’s called the White House for a reason, they believe.

To achieve that, they should vote for the most moderate candidate available. That’s not poli-wonk talk, it’s real science, what game theorists call the “ice cream stand on the beach” solution. (For real.) If you’re putting a new ice cream stand on a beach that already has one, where is the best place to put it? The other end of the beach? Nope, as close the existing stand as you can get, but closer to the middle. For the non-mathemeticians, that means the candidate most likely to beat Obama is a moderate. Nominating someone who is not only not centered, but instead of being on the beach may be up on the boardwalk stealing bicycles, is asinine.

Unless we assume this is some uber-sophisticated tactic on their part to prolong the selection process long enough to convince the party elite to draft Mitch the Bitch or Bush 3.0 or the like, Gingrich makes no sense at all.

Second, be they fools or be they savants, they are all a bunch of hypocrites. The exit polls say that people for whom morals and religion were paramount overwhelmingly went for Newt instead of devout and untarnished candidates like Santorum and Romney. Newt? Really? The voters of South Carolina are saying one thing and doing another, and all I can say to that is “Thank God.” (Were She to exist.)

As memory serves, it was Asimov who said, “Men always cheat their gods,” and thankfully that’s true. As bad as the mullahs are, they would be worse without that secret stash of Johnnie Walker locked in the desk. And can you imagine how ill-tempered the Christian right would be if they weren’t having sex with prostitutes in airport toilets? I, for one, applaud their hypocrisy, if the alternative is they actually act on what they purport to believe. And I am delighted to have more proof of that hypocrisy, were more needed. (Yes, Vitter, I am talking to you.)

Third, Woody Guthrie is spinning in his populist grave.

Populism is the politics of envy. For the most part, American populism, from Andy Jackson to Huey P. Long, was about envy of the rich. The new Tea Party populism, though, is about envy of the poor. The white middle class envies the non-white lower class, whom they believe enjoys a life of tax-payer funded leisure while whites have to go to work every morning. The white lower class envies and resents the non-white lower class, whom they percieve has been redistributed income, status, and opportunities that would have gone to the whites in the past. Because economic growth is not a zero sum game it’s not exactly true, but no matter–they believe it. It’s populism, but of a particularly nasty sort, and different from traditional American populism.

This populism of the Tea Party may be new and fresh to America, but it’s not new and fresh. Check with Americans who have immigrated from third world hellholes, because they have seen this poor-bashing for decades. That form of populism is the stock in trade of third world despots like the Bhuttos and the Ghaddaffis, who purport to be friends of the poor while looting their countries. They get by with it because they are so adroit at playing the various factions off against each other.

I have to admit all it is fun to watch all this writhing about in pain by the Republicans, but I don’t think it changes much. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “Anyone who has come this far on a fool’s errand, owes it to the honor of those fools to complete that errand,” and for Romney, the errand started when he was a very young boy and his father missed out on his presidential aspiration. I can’t see him giving up and quitting now, and over the long haul he’s still got the cash to grind it out.

On tonight’s episode of Modern Family (perhaps TV’s best sitcom), one of the storylines deals with what happens when a young child starts using curse words. One of America’s more prominent gatekeepers of the public morality, the Parents Television council, immediately lurched into a galloping conniption. That they haven’t actually seen the episode, and hence, have no fudging idea what they’re screeching about, is beside the point.

“It’s not suitable language for a child that young in the real world, and it’s not suitable language for a child that young on television, either.”

Turns out the adorable little child actress is saying “fudge” instead of the more vapors-inducing “fuck.”

It all feels so familiar. Like back in the ’80s when Tipper Gore and her friends got their granny panties in a bunch over things like Ozzy’s “Ultimate Sin” which, despite the hot demonic chick in the video turns out to have been a love song about “how could you leave me?” The album, of course, featured other such Satanic themes as “nuclear war is bad,” so you can understand their pique. Anyhoo, Tippy and the rest of the Concerned Responsible People^® in Washington formed the Parents Music Resource Council, a forebear to the PTC, to by jingies slap some labels on all that objectionable comment.

This was a debacle from one end to the other, but their first really huge mistake was in summoning Frank Zappa and then handing him a microphone. What followed was a first-ballot induction into the Beatdown Hall of Fame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then later on, they compounded their error by calling Steven Dallas, who was then the manager of heavy metal band Deathtöngue. Here’s how that went down.

Yes, well. We seem to have no fewer narrow-minded zealots than we did a generation ago, nor does our current crop of zealots seem to feel any more obligation than their predecessors did to actually, you know, understanding what they were talking about.

I’m torn. Part of me wants to encourage the PTC to shut the fudge up. But another part of me enjoys watching the self-righteous idiocracy clown itself while the world watches.

In any case, I look forward to tonight’s episode. But I’ll watch it lying down so that I won’t bump my head if I faint.

_____

Credit: Berke Breathed, Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. Little, Brown, 1987. Highly recommended.

by Robert S. Becker

Working as both mirror and impetus to our deranged discourse, the right wing primary continues to bless us with stunning revelations worth every single cringe-worthy moment. And this eye-popping field sets the record, establishing unbeatable redneck standards. Why, I can’t recall so many obvious freaks in one party since, knee-high to a grasshopper, I wandered through my first, weird-smelling Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus.

Who of us will ever forget this French guillotine of a primary, as inept jesters instantly rise up only to get beheaded, like sacrificial winners of those prehistoric ball games? And it’s ongoing, though I soulfully regret Michele Bachmann “stepping aside” and Rick Perry’s looming departure. Perry’s never-say-die doggedness harkens to his brave Alamo forebears – except they were skilled warriors who could shoot straight. Okay, buffoons are exiting faster than falling bricks, but there are still loony Texans at large plus nasty goons (Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum) on the prowl.

Let’s tabulate the dividends paid so far, though readers will add more before Mitt Romney wins a reluctant coronation (and if not, all hell will break lose – yum, yum).

1: The Vast Rightwing Pandering Machine (VRPM) appears bottomless, brazenly throwing mud in every direction. The more outrageous the lies, the more hayseeds swallow it. Ah, dreams of the Wall Street-loving Obama (cast as “socialist destroyer of America”) vs. the Wall Street-loving Romney (cast as the evil “vulture capitalist”)? Be still, my beating heart.

2: The Tea Party base, a study in perpetual bewilderment, portrays perplexity compounded by multiple personality disorders. What else explains its desperate lurch from one shiny surface to the next, darting like hysterical fish in too small a bowl?

3: Remember Ratatouille’s motto, “anyone can cook”? This band of boobs proves “anyone can run” – dump enough cash, ego, celebrity or gall, and the media hobnobs.

4: Former suckers to Palin, Trump, Bachmann Cain, and Perry, the base now cheers on Santorum AND Gingrich AND Ron Paul – all joining the “government stinks” Bush-lite crowd headlined by the infinitely adjustable mortgage named Romney.

5: Paul proves, especially for naïve youngsters, that half-a-candidate sounds better than none, or doubled-downed pettifoggers. How nice to learn the Moralistic Majority still favors bombing Iran to peace and Social Security/Medicare to libertarian dreams of “free-market freedoms.”

6: Rethug bigwigs still rule, letting has-beens and losers incite drama (and the illusion of public choice) while safely going with Romney. Who says the fringe isn’t tolerant and open-minded? Why, judging by Newt’s status, they disqualify entrants only with jail time, felonies or non-Biblical sexual encounters.

7: Perry died on the vine because even dimwits understand “dumber than W” just won’t wash. Hear, hear for high standards.

8: That Trump and Cain – truly fraudulent political non-entities – lasted more than 15 minutes evinces not just stunning stupidity about what presidents do, but how much damage a compromised scam artist can do.

9: If your frontrunner is a plastic, inauthentic automaton, make him look heroic by contrast with much worst varmints. Spice up the melodrama, even comic relief, when your lead character is devoid of personality, charisma, or solutions.

10: Right wing candidates are incorrigible deceivers if they believe their own cartoon logic that rich people a) create good jobs with spare change; b) alone earned all their millions; and c) daringly overcame untold obstacles that liberals forced in their way.

Throw in your two cents. I take solace when a free TV series fully dramatizes the capricious obtuseness of a major party. What reality show, not heavy with satire, would dare offer up the whack-a-mole plot from Trump through Santorum? We snarling satirists now have to modify our bias about a rigid GOP base stuck in its ways. What, that clueless, spinning mass desperate for the perfect messiah is flexible enough to accept Romney the Mediocre Mormon. Let’s not rule out rumors of late entries, like that dubious buzz Sarah Palin could throw in (or up) her hairball into the ring. Right, more tall tales told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.

Surprised by “Raptor Capitalism”

Okay, I admit being surprised, even feeling ambushed, apparently like Romney. How many sharpies figured Rethugs would turn suicide bombers by putting predatory capitalism itself on trial? Oh, my. Who guessed Santorum (an orthodox Catholic of late anointed by evangelicals!) would be the last purist standing, with Gingrich the Catholic convert in the wings? Or that no Democrat, but two wingnuts, would gang up – and disown – Bain Capital as “vulture capitalism”? How unkind, least of all to vultures. Bain hired killer hawks who feasted only on live companies, leaving the picked-clean corpses for riff raff. “Raptor capitalism,” I say.

Overall, in these grim times, does not civilization advance by watching a defective party’s multiple tectonic splits play out? Observe this marvel – a major party, facing an incumbent on the ropes during hard times – without the whiff of an actual jobs program, other than firing that socialist Muslim. Can GOP hot shots truly believe this nonsense will work in the general election – MORE tax breaks for the rich, fewer regulations, new wars, and cuts to Social Security/Medicare? Maybe a Reagan pushed by a Rove could pull off miracles, but dull Romney only has tired Bush hacks on call.

Lucky for Obama the imploding GOP encourages us to adapt a Newtonian law – a mediocre body in power tends to stay in power unless acted up on by an equal or greater force. Imagine the robotic, job-killing, flip-flopping Romney, bleeding from a hundred primary cuts, against a relatively popular “war president” without major scandals and an expanding economy. And then reboot with Santorum the Obsessed vs. Obama. I’d pay to see that show.

Do we have a meritocracy – or what – electing the best hustler to the highest post, the prize for fooling more of the people more of the time?

_____

Editor’s Note: Thanks for our friend Robert for turning us onto Keith Tucker’s cartoons. The one above is a little too accurate for comfort, though. See more of Keith’s work here.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

Unfortunately for James the candidate, he now finds himself embroiled in a controversy that has gone viral. Just Google “Craig James killed five hookers” and you’ll see what I mean. The story has even infiltrated a site dedicated to soliciting donations for James, with one donor insinuating a poem with a clever acrostic calling James a “hooker killer.” (Note the first letters in each line of the “Ramzy” item in the second screen grab below.)

Some are chalking the story up to something called a “Google bomb,” which sources describe as a sort of search engine hijacking. To see an especially successful example, go to Google and search for “Santorum.” NSFW, indeed.

Still, I cannot find any indication that the James campaign has so far denied the charge, nor do I find any official comment as to whether James consorted with prostitutes, alive or dead.

Caution is urged, as this story is potentially a hoax, but voters are always encouraged to fully inform themselves, especially in an age so rife with partisan media-generated controversy. Witness the ongoing battle over whether evolution is factual or merely a theory, which plays out in debates over whether or not to teach creation science in schools. Or the raging conflict over climate change – is it real or is it the product of a media-driven liberal agenda? And what about President Barack Obama’s nationality? Many remain unconvinced that he was born in the United States. It can be difficult to know what sources to trust, so the only reasonable recourse is to gather and consider critically as much information as possible. Nor should we rush to judgment, one way or another. The stakes are simply too high, and if it takes months, even years, to reach a definitive understanding of the events surrounding the James/hooker killer mystery, it’s time well spent.

The citizens of the state of Texas should demand that James, who seeks one of the highest offices in the nation, address these allegations forthrightly, making available all documents that might potentially be relevant to the allegation, even if such documentation proves personally embarrassing.

As we do not currently have before us sufficient evidence to rule out the possibility that James is a serial murderer, it seems appropriate to call for more data and to initiate a vigorous public debate on the issue. Information is the lifeblood of participatory democracy, and voters are sometimes justified in their reservations regarding candidates who seem elusive about their personal and professional pasts.

Thanks to Frank Balsinger for the screen shots of the donation site shown above.

Here’s my New Year’s gift, a light bauble of a jingle for those normally put off by reason in rhyme. I gave up trying to take Newt seriously enough to write prose for him; like Kissinger per Tom Lehrer, he’s moving himself beyond satire. But I found a thesis and inspiration from that famous lyric celebrated by heavy drinkers. Enjoy.

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should this self-adoring crackpot,
Not by satire be enshrined?

We’ve fallen hard, to grisly bottom,
Underneath Perry, Bachmann, Cain –
Halfwit hayseeds spewing hokum –
Now worse – a cynical pimp urbane.

Yes, next to Romney, stilted, wary,
Newt’s a churning “idea machine;”
Playing bombastic clown contrary,
He taints “debate” with gab obscene.

Newt dismisses his crimes in arrears,
Touts the “historian,” Tiffany-rich;
Yet reprisal for his career of smears
Explodes as victims openly snitch.

Newt dumped both used-up wives,
Twin “family values” disgrace;
Yet full absolution he contrives,
Self-pardoned by self-anointed grace.

Driving this facile self-deception
Conversion to the Roman church:
What better feeds self-genuflection
Than “St. Newt,” risen, un-besmirched?

In his mind a legend, past and present,
Wielding God’s infallible sword,
Newt’s hubris locks on transcendence
Just install his throne near the Lord.

Join his holier-than-thou campaign,
The sinner with self-expiated sin,
Redemption past the material plane,
In case Jesus needs a stand-in twin.

Illustration by Paul Szep.

Season’s Greetings….