There Once Was a Union Maid, But She Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Just home from the theatre and checking my computer one more time before going to bed, and there's this link from my friends at New York's Working Families Party, one of the few bright spots on the USA's political landscape now that Russ Feingold's not in office, and here it is for you too now:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/06/30/a_wageless_profitable_recovery.html

Taegan Goddard's Political Wire is one of the most reliable sources for solid, factual political reportage on the internet. I know this because my son told me. Without divulging my son's identity, I can assure you his word is, well, good as silver. Gold is apparently not the thing to value any more.

Yes, folks, it seems to be true: "corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income" during our recent "recovery." I doubt that any of you reading this are much surprised, whether or not you pay much attention to the fact that the banks and brokerages we bailed out with our hard-earned dollars basically put the money straight into the silk pockets of their CEOs, whether or not you care that more American families are falling into poverty, that we are dishing out more for gasoline while the profits of oil companies keep going up and up and up. Fact is, no matter whose figures and what analysis you deem important and/or credible, I'd guess that you, like me, are feeling worse off financially today than you were a year ago and probably much worse off than you were two years ago.

I was leafing through a magazine yesterday and found myself staring at a full page ad from a local car dealership trumpeting the fact that "Everyone can afford $250 a month." But they're wrong. We can't. If my car quit working, I would not be able to replace it. I'm not even sure I can afford to take it in for its routine maintenance now due. There is no extra $250 a month to spend on a car or a new furnace or getting the dishwasher fixed. And the ironic thing about this all is that I'm actually doing well by almost anyone's standards. I own a nice house (even if it needs lots of repair), I have a functioning car (with 100,000 miles), I have a fairly nice and secure job, and my children have finished college. What I have is not only out of reach for most of the world's population, it is out of sight for most of the world's population. But this, after all, is America.

Indeed. It is, in a word, advanced capitalism. People in parts of the world where capitalism is just hitting its stride, places like India and China, should be watching what is happening here with interest and some alarm. This is, after all, where they're heading, and it is not a beautiful meadow with wild animals and blue skies and wildflowers so thick they make you wince to traipse through them on brilliant summertime mornings when the dew is still fresh on their petals.

No. Corporate profits are up. Living standards are down. The gap between rich and poor is widening, as more and more of the former working/middle class are slowly dragged into the spreading puddle of the poor. Not even my former trade union seems to understand the real impact of this change. My union was broken this winter here in Wisconsin, and while tens of thousands of us, union members from all over this once-progressive state, converged on our state capitol to protest this, my union made tee shirts to sell to its members and agreed to a monstrous cut in our wages and benefits without even consulting us, its members. They completely missed the opportunity to use their only real tool: The strike. It could have been a general strike, but it wasn't even a local strike. And now, as of yesterday, they lost the right to represent me. They can no longer collect dues from me. And you know what? I don't even care. They lost me when they failed to refuse to comply with the governor who just successfully emasculated them.

And in case you want to see what happens when trade unionists aren't afraid to speak up, go to Four Star Video here in Madison or (sigh!) order it up on Netflix: "Made in Dagenham." Lovely, heartening movie from England.

After the Meal's Done, the Poem's Still Incomplete

Dinner went too late tonight, and my brain's too tired to write a blog of my own, so let me give you someone wiser better more poetic. I spent a part of my day at the office today (don't tell anyone!) looking up poems by this man because I've been thinking about poems and been thinking about Palestine and thinking about a young man named Vittorio Arrigoni who died there this year (along with many others, unnamed, but he was Italian and so the world deigns to name him), and so here is a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, in translation, which follows closely upon my dinner conversation tonight about the difficulties and the dangers of translating poetic thought, which includes both the Bible and the Quran, into languages other than those of their original formation, and in many cases, takes away the mystery and thrill of the oral presentation to the flat rendering of print on a page. But I think this is a nice translation, and my criterion, if you would know it, is simply that it brings beauty and wisdom to its syllables, and I suspect that Mr. Darwish might have found that sufficient.

This blog is dedicated to my dinner guests: Marilyn and Georgy and Leigh. What a fine dinner table we made.


To a Young Poet
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated By Fady Joudah

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

Back in the US of A Don't Know How Lucky U R

I guess you can tell if you scan my recent posts that I am still thinking a lot about my experience in Egypt. It was my first time visiting any country south of the Mediterranean and my first time in a place where I didn't speak the language and my first experience in an Arab nation, so I guess it's understandable and perhaps even good that my two weeks rocked my world. I would not have it otherwise. I didn't even visit the pyramids, but I had such a great opportunity to spend time with everyday Egyptians that to spend time with tour guides just didn't hold appeal. Maybe I'll go back when I'm 80 and sign on to a tour bus group that will take me straight from the airport to the pyramids, maybe even let me pose on a camel's back. The only camels I saw were loose in the streets of Nuweiba, wandering freely, eating out of the town's open dumpsters before heading home to sleep.

I prepared for my visit by reading all the Egyptian novels I could cram in, almost all of Mahfouz and a major selection of Aswany. It turned out to be a really great preparation. Today, my hair stylist, working diligently to repair my travel's double devastation of the desert's sun and the sea's salt, asked me if I'd ever felt real culture shock. I thought about it, thought about the women in hijabs and birqas and the men in long, loose galabiyas, the bruises in the middle of the devout men's foreheads, the hookahs and the separation of the sexes, the crazy crazy traffic and the all-night bazaar life that substituted for nightclub life, and I had to answer, "No, not really." Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction can be more informative than truth.

Now that I'm back, I'm rereading a lot, mostly archives of the articles about the revolution that make more sense after having crossed Cairo's bridges and walked around Tahrir Square. I'm reading more non-fiction now: Aswany again, but his pre and post revolution collection of essays this time, "The State of Egypt." And a book I heard about right before I left and ordered right after my return was waiting in my mailbox today after work: "Cairo: The City Victorious."

Travel is not just tourist sites and postcards, not just collecting souvenirs. Travel is a quest for understanding another place, another people, another way of life. I am still on my quest, even though I'm back in Wisconsin, where democracy is just as precious and precarious as it is elsewhere, as our friends in Egypt are now experiencing. Here, democracy is just looking a little less inviting and exciting than it is in Cairo, with a careless Republican government fully installed and controlling the conditions of our daily lives with as little regard for diverse opinions as well, any deposed Egyptian tyrant. Thank goodness state's here don't control the military nor even most levels of law enforcement. That may prove the essential diffence.

The Big Screen and the Capitol Building

The Wisconsin State Capitol lies pretty much on a straight line between my office and my home, and for the nearly three years I've lived and worked here in Madison, it's been one of my many small, sustaining pleasures to cut through the capitol building on my walks home. It's a really magnificent building, and it always make me feel a little taller, a little braver, and a little better to walk through it somehow.



Do real cops wear T shirts with printed badges?

 But this winter changed all that. The Republican governor who was inaugurated in January had the capitol sealed off when thousands of Wisconsinites began regular protests around and in the building, decrying Scott Walker's stated goal of taking away collective bargaining rights from public service workers in our state. One door was left unbolted of the score of doors that are usually wide open, and if you were determined to enter by that one door, you were greeted by ostensible law enforcement officers of sometimes indeterminate affiliation, made to empty your bags, packs and

Now THESE are real cops: the Patrol!

pockets with a thoroughness and a lack of good humor that TSA would do well to imitate.


 The last time I tried it, halfway into the ritual of dumping my pens and and pins and private belongings into plastic bins for these strangely unidentified men to inspect, I realized I was about to start crying. I refused. I grabbed back everything I had already deposited, told the unsmiling men, "I hate how you're doing this; I really hate how you've destroyed the civilian atmosphere of this building," and I ran back through the metal detectors and out of the building.

Today, for the first time since then, on an absolutely beautiful day toward the end of June, nearly four months to the day since we were surprised on February 28 to find the entire capitol in lockdown despite a promise to open it after what was to be a temporary closing for cleaning it after many days of protests, today I got to walk freely through my House again. During those four months, I felt seriously depressed every time I walked around the Capitol Square. To see the doors shut against the people the building proposes to serve provided a gut wrenching reminder of the fact that the present state government did not even pretend to be interested in serving me, or any of the 49 percent of the voters who are reliably Democratic right now. Republicans thoroughly control both the Assembly and the Senate, as well as the Governor's Office, and, most cruelly of all, the State Supreme Court, once naively assumed to be a chamber where party affiliation was not relevant. If you live in Wisconsin, you know all this. If you live elsewhere in the States, but are politically active or involved in labor issues, you probably know this too. Developments here got quite a lot of press this winter, most of it as outrageously slanted as our alleged representatives here.

But today I got to walk straight up the stairs to the big revolving doors and enter the high cool hallways of my  beloved state capitol. I sensed a knot begin to dissolve a little in my chest, a knot that has felt oddly like a clenched fist instead of a heart pounding inside me. But I vow not to forget. Today, the Capitol was reopened because Governor Walker signed the state's new budget into law this weekend, a budget that is built on the premise that the rich deserve more, that the poor deserve nothing, and that the working class, the middle class is too concerned with reality television to bother with reality of class issues and public education.

Perhaps the governor's right. I have become a little more cynical since we lost our noble efforts to influence public opinion enough to alter the shape of our state's financial future. An article in the New York Times yesterday detailed how the boxes that Americans use to deliver cable signals to their televisions consume more energy in our homes than our refrigerators and in some cases even more than our air conditioning systems. Perhaps we do care more about reality TV than reality. Perhaps I'd better subscribe to cable and see what the hokey-pokey's all about.

The Revolution of Hand Holding

Back in the seventies, when everyone with a heart was a radical leftist and we still thought Mao was a hero even though we all knew the murals and posters of the Chinese Communists were never going to hold a candle to the artwork of the ancients, my friend Mona got to go to visit there with the very first group of Americans allowed entrance. Mona, you must understand, had been wearing a Mao cap and jacket for several years already, along with those flat little archless MaryJanes on her feet. She'd been learning Chinese. She was, in short, eager as they come.

But it was, after all, the seventies, and we were not only radical leftists with heart, we were hippies and we were still  young, and sex and love were probably the ony two agenda items that beat out world peace and freedom on our agenda. So when Mona reluctantly returned from her long-anticipated visit to the culture that would set a model for the rest of humanity (yes, we are indeed talking about China...there was a point when we thought they were actually heading toward freedom), the first thing she had to tell us was this and it has long since surpassed anything else my friend told us that may have had political value: "They don't even hold hands on the streets in China!" Mona's current boyfriend was also on the trip. I'm sure the two of them scandalized most of Peking, as it was still known then.

Now it's 2011. So much has changed. Hippies are pretty much gone, except for a handful of scrawny men with scrawnier gray ponytails aimlessly wandering around Berkeley and Madison and Santa Cruz still; China has not only moved beyond Mao, they have become a model of Western industry, complete with all the environmental hazards inherent in that. And in Egypt, lovers still can't kiss in public, can't spend the night with each other, can't acknowledge homosexuality which, as I've said previously, "doesn't even exist." Egypt may not be ruled strictly by sharia law, but there is still a surprising amount of enforcement of sexual mores in both the cities as well as the desert. I guess it gives the huge police force something to enforce. In a nation where drinking is also frowned upon, if not outright banned, and traffic laws are absolutely non-existent, there can be so little for police to do with their authority.

It's serious. Doormen and porters are the primary enforcers of the code that prevents premarital sex, and in hotels, even the big Western hotels, you must show proof of marriage to be given a room with someone of the opposite sex. I don't imagine they would ask two men for this, but then, remember: homosexuality doesn't exist in Egypt. Bowabs, as we non-Arabic speakers, muddle their proper Arabic title, can make or break a romance and make or break your budget. During the corrupt reign of Hosni Mubarak, they were part of a deep and sinister chain of informants that kept Egyptians docile and compliant. What role they play in post-revolutionary Egypt remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I don't recommend you go kissing your honey in the streets of Cairo or even on the beaches of the Red Sea. Someone may still be watching you. But take heart: It's okay to hold hands here.

It's a Man's World (cont'd)

A few hours after deplaning and my first awestruck encounter with a fully Muslimized woman, I was whizzing through the dizzy traffic of Cairo on a Friday night after prayers, when everyone is out and everyone is at their best (no accident the revolution had its highest moments on Fridays after prayers...the whole population, er, 90 percent of the population to be exact, is holy and ready for miracles on Friday evenings), while my driver had his head stuck out of the car window to conduct one of the 38 conversations he would have with his fellow Cairean drivers that night, I noticed the following. It will rest forever in my mind snuggled right next to the image of the woman in head to toe black waiting outside customs.

Two boys, not yet truly young men, but aiming diligently at that noble goal, walking together down the crowded street. They were probably thirteen years old, by most Arab standards, men, meaning they were mature enough to be considered threats to unveiled women, would not, hence, be allowed easy access to classrooms of girls, share food at weddings with girls, see the skin of no females until marriage if they were devout, except their mothers and their sisters. You know the age: When puberty has gained the upper hand, no longer takes the boy by surprise. Whiskers are sprouting on upper lips, if irregularly; perspiration has taken on a new pungency. And somehow, in any culture I have ever witnessed, the stride of the boy has changed, a little longer, a little more from the hip. So we have two boys, on the cusp of sexual maturity, where they will balance with more or less  ease, depending on their religious values, their family ties, their imaginations for another few years or so. And these two boys, in Cairo in June of 2011, post revolutionary Cairo, are wearing completely matching ensembles that remind me immediately and uncannily of the beautiful boy in the filmed version of "Death in Venice," the blonde boy with the striped shirt. They are holding hands and walking with their new man-stride down the crowded street, dressed for the night, dressed to impress, holding hands and walking on a Friday evening after prayers. I am the only one who notices, except my daughter. The Egyptian who is driving, a deep and dear friend of ours, doesn't seem to understand why we even remark upon the boys.

You see, this is so much a man's world, a world where homosexuality has for so long been so denied, hidden, subversive no one can readily understand how standards of affection and affiliation between men are different here than elsewhere in the industrialized world. Men spend their deepest lives with men here. The division between the sexes is so deep and wide they don't even often see the other side. And before Mubarak, there was a long period of time when it wasn't like this, when men and women mixed, when women didn't have to hide themselves from view. Mubarak was smart enough to know that increasing Islamic fundamentalism would serve his reign well. Over the course of his cruel dominion, women lost a lot of freedom and men returned to the ways of their great grandfathers. Our friend the native Cairean told us about how his mom used to wear miniskirts. Now, both she and his sisters are veiled.

In the USA, we call this kind of sexual separation a fact of life only in the Board Room, where life is still a man's world.

It's a Mad, Man's World

There is no homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world unless you know where to look. And this goes for both men and women.

The Islamic world, it's no secret, is a man's world. Wait. Let me correct that. The world is a man's world. There is not a place on the globe with a population of greater than 100 that is not a man's world. But in most parts of this man's world, a woman can wear (pretty much) what she likes and can afford, she can go (pretty much) where she chooses and can afford, and she can say (pretty much) what she wants, even if that voice comes in the form of a ballot.

The first person I saw after I passed through customs in Cairo was a woman (I have to assume) in the long black robe and head covering we call a birqua, a rather radical birqua at that, having even the small slit that is usually left open for her eyes covered with piece of black fabric which I hope was transparent from the inside as it certainly was not from the outside. This was my first visit to Egypt. I'd come prepared for more conservative dressing in Cairo, but nothing really prepares you to find that it's real and it's thorough. I noticed that even the woman's hands were covered; she wore black gloves that went to her elbows. When she walked, and her robes swung, I saw that her ankles were covered in what appeared to be beautiful black shaded stockings. Fascinated, I had to almost physically restrain myself from reaching out to touch the soft folds of the burqua's cloth. It looked irresistibly soft, reminding me of the skin of the bat ray in the open tank at the Monterrey aquarium, which is, to date, the most remarkable surface I've ever had the pleasure to be able to touch with my eager fingertips.

Tell a modern Cairean man anything about how Egyptian women are subservient, and he will probably laugh at you. "They dress as they do out of free choice," you will almost assuredly be told. "No Egyptian man can tell an Egyptian woman what to do. He would not eat for weeks if he tried." Even in that statement, something makes me cringe. No one seems to care that there is an implicit suggestion therein that it will be the woman who is making sure there is food on the family's table. And definitely they do not want to hear this from me, the blonde, blue-eyed, wide-eyed Americana.

This is a man's world. Here, unlike some countries where the Quran is more important than the Constitution or where the Quran IS the constitution, women can vote, can drive, are required to attend school for as many years as their brothers. Women are engineers, doctors, lawyers, and mothers. But this is a man's world. Go into any of the teeny tiny shops that line Cairo's teeming streets, and even if it is a woman's clothing store, there will be a man in charge. He is usually sitting. Sitting with his four closest friends, all of whom are now silently assessing me, without a smile, without a single sign of interest, without a greeting. If there is a woman in the shop, she may approach and if she does, I will probably even be awarded a smile that somehow seems real to me. But the team of men, two of whom are probably smoking sisha, one of whom is thumbing through a wellworn copy of the Quran, and one whose eyes very rarely move from the cash register, just watch me. Only one works here. The others, his buddies and or brothers and or sons, are here to bolster him. This is life in the Societe des Cafes. Every shop here is a mosque and a teahouse.

(to be continued)

Letters, Redux

After a really long hiatus, I'm giving this blog another go. It's been over a year since my last posting. It's been a tumultuous year. I am not just older, I am changed. My mother died and I did not, my youngest child graduated and moved to DC and I did not, my daughter moved to Egypt and I did not. But I learned from everything. There was the revolution in Egypt and a failed democratic movement right here in Madison. The two had many similarities, many differences. I studied both quite closely. I made many new and wonderful friends, from all parts of the world, some right here in Wisconsin, some very far away. I wrote poems and rediscovered painting. I mourned my mom and tried to find within myself a residue of her spirit and the joy she held onto even as death cruelly, cruelly claimed her. I went to Egypt and experienced life in a third world country seeking to reinvent itself. It was a revolution for me as well as the people who lived there. I will see what I have to say now. Welcome back, Russ Feingold.

Is Republican the New Democrat?

To those of my readers and friends and relatives who live in Massachusetts: WHAT HAPPENED OUT THERE? Ted Kennedy is groaning in his grave; his seat went to a Republican, tipping the balance sheet on the health care bill he championed, putting it effectively into the red.

Far better analysts than I are out there scribbling their perspectives on how this loss of a Senate seat to the Republicans in what is arguably the most Democratic state in the Union can be interpreted and what its consequences will be. But I would like to hear from those of you who live there: What happened?! Coakley ran an inadequate campaign, while Brown ran a flawless attack; that seems incontestable now. But why did she run an inadequate campaign? Are there not vigorous political minds at work in the Northeast who might have realized what was at stake here in the vote? Did Democrats not go out and vote? Was it too cold? Are you NUTS????

Please tell me. Because you know, I am writing letters to Russ Feingold, the utmost Democrat of Democrats, often the Lone Wolf of Democratic Conscience in the U.S. Senate, as he begins ten months of campaigning to claim his present seat in that challenged body for one more set of six years. He is faced with wealthy opposition in this race within a body politic that is more damaged and facing a crueler terrain to surmount than we have seen in many decades. So Massachusetts makes me worried. Losing Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold in one year, while Smarmy Joe Lieberman is still smirking from his concealed corner like Mad Ludwig II would do me in. Cynicism is out there waiting in the wings for the cue to take center stage. We must send her back to the dressing room, expeditiously, strip off her gowns and her cosmetics, expose her for the skeletal apparition she truly is.

Russ, it's time to step it up. Your jobs credit proposal: Get it going! The empty GMC plant in your hometown of Janesville: Get it going! Where are the public works projects we dared to think were going to begin: Get them going! Everywhere, recovery is stalling. Unless something starts moving, unless we see the machinery starting to produce again, November is going to be the cruelest month.

Only Here On the Street Where I Live

My friend Georgianne was down here this weekend, finishing a slumber party we began over 35 years ago up in my bedroom in Appleton, slugging down our first illegal beers, one each, enough to send us into giggles for the rest of the night. We are better drinkers now and haven't lost a bit of our giggling prowess either. This was Georgianne's first visit to my house in Madison, the first time she has been in any of the many cities and neighborhoods I've  called home. Over morning coffee before she left, she commented on how well I seemed to fit in this place I've now lived for over two years. "It seems like the perfect fit for you," she commented. I demurred, which means I protested but not too vehemently.

It's hard to protest living in Madison, Wisconsin unless you want to sound like a real jerk. Madison is a really nice place to live. There are good reasons it regularly makes it into the Top 10 of annual magazine lists, "Best Places to Live," "Best Place to Find A Job," "Best Educated City," "Best Place to Ride Bikes," "Best Place to Be a Dog," and "Definitely Best Place to Be a Lesbian." By and large, we're well-educated, stably employed, healthy and overly friendly in this town. To say you don't like to live here is like saying you like going to the dentist; it makes people look at you strangely and maybe even recoil a bit.

If there was any doubt about this in my mind, it disappeared today. Martin Luther King Day. I was out of town last night but got back mid-afternoon. As I drove back, I was listening to an amazing show on radio station WORT-FM dedicated to the jubilant music of Haiti and the resilient spirit of its  people. Then, as I turned onto a semi-commercial street in my neighborhood, I noticed a gaggle of school children waving large hand-lettered signs toward drivers like me. HELP HAITI! DONATE TO THE RED CROSS! I turned off the road and circled the block so I could drive by again, more slowly and with money ready. "Do you want a cookie?" the happy collector asked me as she clambered down from the roadside snow bank. "Perhaps you would eat one for me," I suggested. She seemed to think that was reasonable.

Turns out a bunch of neighborhood kids, out of school for the MLK holiday, had organized this on their own. They baked cookies to reward donors and spent the morning making signs out of old corrugated cardboard. A local hospital, St. Mary's, where one of their moms worked, had pledged to match what they collected as long as it wasn't more than $10,000. With my $10, they were well on their way to at least one percent of that, I'm sure. St. Mary's, btw, is doing this for Haitian donations raised by all their employees. Hooray for their generosity!

I finished the drive home. The Haitian music show was done, and the next show was a public affairs program on which the host was talking about how desperately low on food the survivors of the earthquake are, with relief efforts slowed by the destruction of the little nation's transportation infrastructure. Prices of any remaining food supplies in the metropolitan Port Au Prince area have predictably sky-rocketed. People are fighting over cans of soup. I would be doing the same if I were there. So would you. So would Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Robertson. Don't let them fool you. Don't let them fool your parents or your neighbors. Speak the truth on Haiti. It's Martin Luther King Day, and we have the honor and privilege of living in the United States of America where our waste is a bigger problem than our wants.

And those of us who live in Madison have it even better than most. Georgianne is a school teacher in a northern county. They don't even get to take this day as a holiday, and there are many districts like this, commemorating Columbus Day but not Martin Luther King Day. In at least one school district up in northwestern Wisconsin, they actually take off a day they call "Easter Monday," but not MLK Day.

Is there really an Easter Monday, for anyone?

Blessed Are the Merciful

Everyone who has a heart and soul feels pain for the people of Haiti this week.

This doesn't include Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh whom, it is now more clear than ever, have neither hearts nor souls.

This says it with more class and calm than I can muster on the subject of these two hateful men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoWOw8Jm5w&feature=youtube_gdata

The Sun Is Shining When It's Dismal

Went for a walk during my lunch break today, and there was this enormous mallard's head sticking out of frozen Lake Mendota behind Memorial Union about 60 feet out from the shore. This was as close as I dared get, and all I had in my bag was a cheap little camera, so it's not a very good picture, but you get the idea of what life is like out here at this time of year. Well, sort of. Actually, it isn't even this good. I doctored up the picture some already, adding a nuance of color, a suggestion of sunshine. There was neither, not an iota. This was one of those days that might serve to define "glum."

But for at least one duo, it will probably go down in their personal history as a bright and special day. Before coming upon the Mallard Head, aka Drowning Duck, I walked along the lakeshore path, seemingly the only person who thought the day befitting an outdoors stroll. Except for the couple up ahead, that is, and the increasingly loud and semi-hysterical laughter hiccoughing in escalating bursts from the woman of the pair. It was borderline annoying, to be there on this still and somber day with some maniacal racket jackhammering down the tree-lined path like a chainsaw. But as I got closer, it began to sound more like sobbing, out of control sobbing. My step quickened; my concern altered. By the time I was up to the couple, I was on full alert and ready to intervene.

And then I saw the ring box. He was holding out a wine colored ring box toward her, and she, her hand discreetly covering her open mouth, was careening wildly between sobs and giggles, guffaws and teary gasps. I recognized the condition immediately, since I am among the world's best at it: Emotional overload. Laughter, tears...at this point in emotional cognizance, there is no difference. I quickened my step again, apologetically, sorry to have blundered into what had been meant to be a personal moment, not a Personal Moment With Anxious Overseer.

Twenty paces on, I paused, though, remembering the camera in my bag. Slowly, I turned back. "You guys want a picture of this?" I called. They nodded, big grins whiter than the snow along the shoreline. They were startlingly young, younger than either of my own kids, I suspect, utterly fresh-faced and almost certainly more innocent. On her coat was pinned a button, I think you can see it in the photo, offering a hug to the world. I clicked twice and gave them my business card since they were too young to have one of their own. "Send me your email, and I'll send you the pictures," I promised. "Congratulations."

Glum. Ho hum. A day is only as bleak as you let it be, and so I have doctored up the Drowning Duck for you. Congratulations to everyone who triumphed today, including my friend Felicia who got a good treatment plan from a new doctor instead of the full hysterectomy that the first doc had recommended.

A La Mode, A La Midwest, et Moi

By now, if you've been reading any several of my posts here, you have probably concluded that I am quite the mean and heartless bitch. I mean, I not only lose my patience with my dying parents, I criticize them for their positions on Medicare and national healthcare. I criticize my sisters for having too much money. In fact, as my kids are always criticizing me, I criticize nearly everyone, including myself. And this all despite the fact that one of my sloppier New Year's resolutions was to become a nicer, better person, urged on by my co-worker Bethany who does, after all, spend more waking hours with me than anyone else on the planet right now.

Today, I confess that not only is all the above true and not only am I largely unrepentant about the above (except for the making of sloppy, unkeepable, hopelessly imprecise resolutions), I am actually considering becoming even more heartless and for the most shallow of reasons: Fashion. You see, I made the mistake of watching TV last night, genuine network TV. I'd worked hard all day, then come home and worked hard for several more hours on domestic duties.  After throwing in a load of laundry in the utility room adjoining the so-called Bonus Room where my largely defunct television set lives, I idly clicked on the remote as I waited to see if the water lines to the washer were frozen, as happens here in Wisconsin. Amazingly, the erratic TV worked and so did the water, and I ended up plunking myself down in front of random network TV shows for the first time in many years, and now I'm a changed woman, it seems. Suddenly, I have a deep, almost primordial craving for a really expensive, probably custom-fit suit, a woman's suit, one that both Katie Couric and Sarah Palin might notice with some amount of envy. I would even buy nylons to wear with it, I've been thinking. Some new high heels.

Perhaps it was yesterday's blog that made me vulnerable, thinking about Sarah and Katie facing off on network TV, but it was a mean woman executive with extremely interesting eyebrows on some show that had "Ted" in the title who really made me crave sartorial splendor. Her suit was gorgeous. Absolutely perfect. And it would have looked stunning on me. Or maybe it's just that I'm sort of involved with a man who abhors skirts. I don't mean "skirts" as a euphemism of sorts for "women"--I mean he genuinely dislikes, really can't abide, skirts. Who says there is nothing new under the sun? The first time he confessed this, I really thought he was kidding. I mean, if I had strangely shaped legs I would undoubtedly have believed him and blanched and gone running home, but I am a runner, and my legs are GOOD! My next thought was that he was psychotic. I'm still debating this possibility.

Maybe I've been living here too long, in this Midwestern city where fashion is the disrespected consort of comfort and comfort is the abject slave to climate. Don't have a belt that goes with those shoes? Here: Wear a fanny pack! Don't have enough pockets in those elasticized pants? Again, the fanny pack! In any other city in the country, I would be considered a slob without the least sense of clothing based on what I wear. Here, I could be strutting down runways...if they were only clear of ice and snow and the damned infernal salt that is now ruining all my footwear.

The suit this mean executive wore on the unknown TV show last night was so absolutely lovely I think I might leave academia and go into private business if lured by a closet full of such perfectly tailored skirts and jackets. I might even start driving a car to work so my shoes wouldn't get caked with salt. I might get my hair done professionally instead of snipping at the ends in front of my bathroom mirror, or at least start blow-drying it, since I wouldn't have to cram it into a hat or, worse, a bike helmet. Maybe I might experiment with lipstick, maybe inject a little botox...

Or maybe I'll just turn off the TV again, slip into the polyester-perverse Snuggie my Dad just gave me "because it seemed just perfect for you," and go back to reading Destiny Disrupted, an engrossing history of Islam. I am a Wisconsin woman, I'm afraid. Hand me that fanny pack, please; my Burt's Bees lip balm is in it.

Knock Knocking on Heaven's Door: Anyone Home?

I lost it this weekend, my patience, that is, and not only did I lose it, I lost it with Old People, Really Old People, People on Death's Doorstep Old People: my parents. I am not bragging; I think, though I wasn't raised to use a confessional, I may even be admitting my moral smallness. Why I would do this in a blog addressed to Senator Feingold may be hard to figure out, but perhaps there is some political value to my confession, as I can't help but think I'm not alone in this experience I'm having.

Like almost all my age peers, those of us euphemistically labelled the Sandwich Generation, which I think sites us like bologna between the young and the old "bread slices,' I am getting a close-up and in-depth introduction to the pleasures of dying, American style by taking care of my elderly parents. Like so much else in our Puritanically inspired national culture, death a la Protestant is primarily negative in emphasis, as in, "Not Me." No one gets to die easily here. At the fittingly named Ronald Reagan/UCLA Medical Center in California, the chief executive recently told the New York Times (12/23/09), “If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die.”  It's no wonder our health care costs have rocketed sky high. Heaven might be empty if not for the upward arch of our health care costs.

OK. I'm being a little unfair, but not grossly. Health care costs actually came down a smidgen recently for the first time in many months, though that may have been a simple consequence of the fact that the entire nation was so icy no one made it to their appointments so no one had any unnecessary testing or labwork done. My parents, however, have the last incredible doctor in the U.S. who is really the kindest doctor I can imagine and whom I would mention by name if I didn't think I'd embarrass Jack Anderson. He, a one-time high school classmate of mine, actually sends lab techs and specialists to my parents' house to do their work-ups in their condo. Well, it may be a little self-preservation on his part, combined with kindness; he may be justifiably concerned about meeting my parents' gold Buick head-on on the roadways they share since I spoke with him regarding observations of my dad's increasingly inattentive driving. In any case, Jack sends the clinic to my folks now, and I love him for that. And now you know about that gold Buick sedan, too, so don't say I didn't warn you! In fact, as a general policy, I think it's pretty wise to use extra caution any time you see any color Buick LeSabre on the road. It's a pretty safe bet the driver is a minimum of 75, with critically lengthened reaction time. Either that, or it's the teenager who just inherited Grandma's old car when she went into the nursing home. And with that, we're back to my losing patience with my own parents, who are not quite yet in a nursing home.

My parents are both still at home, largely because of the kindness of people like Jack and their seemingly endless legion of friends, as well as their limited cadre of daughters, all four of us. This last weekend was one of my times to be with them, to do some of the household chores that accumulate each week in both my house and theirs, to cook some meals that are nutritious in sufficiently ample quantities that leftovers can easily be reheated over the coming week, to spare them a few of the chores that are so easy for me and so painstakingly difficult or time consuming for them. And, almost inevitably, during this visit as in nearly every visit, there's some point at which the old tensions of our longstanding relationship snap like a too-tight guitar string. That would be my patience popping.

This time it was Medicare. My parents, as I've mentioned before, are major recipients of Medicare. Even if the only thing Medicare paid for was their list of prescription drugs, they would be major beneficiaries. I mean, just one of my mom's prescriptions, a little pill called Rilutek she takes twice every day without fail, would cost someone like me about $1,000/month, if purchased from an online discounter. My parents must visit a medical professional of some specialty at least once a week, and this doesn't even include the "fringe" medical care people, like the OTs and PTs and home care providers. Medicare pays almost every single medical expense they incur. But this weekend, among my other duties, I was charged with telling my parents that changes in Medicare coverage were going to necessitate they fulfill a 20% co-pay on a state-of-the-art communication device my mom needs to use as her ability to speak disappears, a percentage which will amount to around $3,200. Do the math, and you'll realize that this is one expensive piece of equipment we're talking about here!

My parents, of course, were dismayed. Aghast might be a better word, for at least one of them. And it is not that they can't afford the three grand, but that they feel entitled to Medicare. After all, it's been paying for everything. Why should it tighten up the purse strings now, they want to know, just when it looks like everyone else in the nation is about to get health care due to what they regard as the devious machinations of President Obama and that nasty Nancy person ("You know, the one who wears all the pearls"). That's when I lost it. I lost it, and I ended up raising my voice and effectively calling them selfish and greedy people, "Republicans," I believe I called them in the extreme vexation of the moment.

We have so much. Even when we trim our budgets, we have so much. I have a sister who complains of living in straitened circumstance. They have an ocean-going sailboat moored  two blocks from their front door on the Massachusetts coastline. I have another sister who has ceased giving Christmas presents because the downtown office building she owns is causing financial stress in her life. How dare we complain. How dare we begrudge others some of what we have in such abundance. How dare we write our Congressional representatives that while we understand the need to trim the national budget, it's not right to trim the part that affects, yes, us.

I lost my patience. Then, Protestant as we are, we agreed not to talk about it any more. It all made me so relieved to drive home, even through the blinding, blowing snowfields. As Pete, another high school friend, commented ruefully after listening to me vent today,  "I had forgotten how emotionally draining it is to be a caregiver." Pete nursed his mom through her last years of Alzheimers. For all I know, Russ Feingold may be experiencing some of these same feelings. He's part of the Sandwich Generation, too, I believe.

I do know that I for one am really spread thin. And I think maybe, just maybe, we don't have a responsibility to keep everyone alive who enters the doors of the hospital.

Successful Networking: What To Wear for the Cameras

If I was into numerology, I would probably have some explanation for why this date might be special: 01-11-10. I mean, it's a palindrome. There absolutely has to be something numerically significant about that! I mean, something more than Fox TV's announcement about the Palin Drone's new broadcasting job with them. Sarah Palin. The same backward as forward. Is that sort of like being two-faced?


It makes me feel even better about not having cable television. In my new nightmare, Katie Couric and Sarah Palin are staring grimly at each other from opposite sides of the same round table, their legs under the table flashing back and forth, back and forth, crossing and recrossing with every point they deem scored. The wager? Whoever loses the debate of the day's events, judged by viewer ratings, has to give up skirts and don pantsuits for posterity.


Hillary, meanwhile, is jetting over the ocean again, on her way to the first of a series of speeches, focusing on the Asia-Pacific multilateral command in the Pacific.

Don't Know How Lucky You Are, Boyz

Out for dinner last night with my good friend David trying to get my blood moving with some spicy Vietnamese food at the Ha Long Bay Cafe before heading home to write the previous entry about Russia. Much of the fuel for that entry came from our dinner conversation, so here is a follow-up straight from David, because I still can't tell a joke. Well, not exactly straight from David--I also can't help but embellish just a little...

A train was heading east across Russia from Moscow. In one car, obviously private, sat four men, Vlad, Joe, Mikhail and Vlad Jr., none of whom confessed to ever reading Trotsky. For most of the long journey, they hardly spoke to each other, finding historic precedent to be sufficiently telling. Besides, everyone but Vlad the Younger was so old they dozed throughout most of the journey.

Then, with an horrendous screeching of metal on metal, the train screamed to a sudden stop. Everyone awoke. A conductor poked his head into the car. "Tracks ended," he shrugged. "We're stopped." And before anyone could question or incarcerate him, he was off. In Russia, no one lingers for the next round of questions.

The four leaders stared from under eight heavily knit brows at the end of the trail, the swirling snowy emptiness of the Siberian landscape all around. Lenin spoke first. "We'll have to appeal to the revolutionary zeal of the masses to come finish this track across the rest of Siberia." Stalin gave him a sharp shove back into his seat. "Not while I'm on this train!" he scowled. "We'll round up the enemies of the state and force them to lay the tracks. That way we don't need to supply coats!" Gorbachev, meanwhile, had called for a tray full of vodka and now motioned Stalin into a seat before directing the steward to pass out shots all round. "Is unnecessary to force anyone to do it," he counseled solemnly. "We'll form a committee and formulate a 10-year-plan that will include not only train tracks but roadside stations and world class restaurants." Young Vlad Putin, meanwhile, was ignoring all of them and calmly pulling closed the old velvet curtains across the train car's dirty windows. "Nonsense," he reprimanded them in an low voice that made all the old leaders strain to hear him--how he loved making people strain to understand him. "We don't need to do anything at all. We just close the curtains, sit back, and pretend we're moving forward."

Wisconsin's motto is "Forward." We were the birthplace of the Progressive Party and we are now the home state of Russ Feingold. Click on the link and check out how he's entered on the NYT chart of major events in the last decade. Yes. Open the curtains and look at what's happening out there. We need trains.  We need genuine forward momentum. We need Russ. This is not Russia, after all.

Notes from the Functional Tundra

Lately, I've been feeling a lot like I live in Russia. For one thing, in the years I was gone from the state, something happened here: People started wearing fur lined caps with ear flaps and permanently pinned up brims which I'm certain have long been de rigeur and all the rage, well, at least some of the rage, on the streets of Moscow, not to mention the steppes of Siberia. This haberdashic fashion might be sufficient to raise my geographic concern, but when they're coupled with the frigid temperatures, the shock-unabsorbable potholes of our urban roadways, and the overwhelming morass of the civil service to which I've been exposed now, I am pretty certain I live in Russia.

My new friend GL, who was born and schooled in Moscow, laughs at the notion. "You know how you can tell you're not in Russia," he chides me, rolling thick Russian consonants like river steamers down the Volga as we gulp down tofu chunks and apple juice in a way appropriate to recently liberated Muscovites. "You're not in jail for saying that." With that, we clink our juice glasses and toss another shot of AJ down our gullets. But really, it feels a lot like Russia here in the American midwest these days. Not only are faces hidden under fur brimmed Ushankas, young women are wearing down coats to work, long and puffy and white usually, like enormous marshmallows, as if function has overcome fashion, as if everything Marx wrote about the dialectic of change has really come true here in the heartland of America. Quantity transforms to quality, function to fashion. You can no longer see the truth of any person. Faces and forms are uniformly obscured. Being warm is everything. Soon we will all be wearing thermal longjohns under our trousers and not caring if the stretched out and vaguely graying cuffs show when we cross our legs, leaning back from the conference table. Next thing you know we'll start smoking again. Waking up in the morning and asking for Wodka.

Don't get me wrong. I am one-quarter almost-Russian. Well, occupied Russian. My grandmother came from Lithuania. Maybe that's my problem. You see, my grandmother despised Russians. She would speak nothing but German just to spite Russians. Me, I just don't like it when people wear animal skins around their faces. I don't care what kind of fur it is, don't even care if it's fake fur. In a different but somehow related way, which came up today at work, I don't like it when I see that the practices of state employees who are protected by both trade unions and the civil service result in mediocre work being done in an indifferent fashion by people whose only genuine interest in their work is its retirement plan. Is it only me who thinks that it's absolutely insane to work a job you abhor just in order to retire? I mean, why not do something you like so you don't focus on retiring, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen almost exactly at the same time you become so old you're incapable of really enjoying it? We're back to Marx here: alienated labor. Work is something wonderful. Labor is... well, if you've ever had a baby, you know what labor is.

But it's cold here. It's so very cold. I'm going to go crawl under my stack of heavy wool blankets that Dr. Zorba Paster on NPR's "On Your Health" broadcast has told me at least twice are probably responsible for my inability to sleep through the night. "Try sleeping with lighter weight blankets," he urges his caller with such assurance. I'll stick with the amazingly warm Hudson Bay blankets my friend Ann donated to my freezing bedroom. I'll go dream about people tying the skins of dead animals around their ruddy cheeks and chortling as they trudge through the big open square in front of the Kremlin with the snow falling all round and a steamer whistle blowing in the distance, as Putin watches from a second floor window.

My friend GL is probably right.

The Little Geothermal Engine That Could

Right now it's sixteen degrees Fahrenheit here in Madison, Wisconsin. Temperatures tonight are expected to fall to somewhere around the original double digit, by which I mean not 10, but TWO. Windchills, which do matter, will take us to subzero levels I would sooner not dignify by naming.

This is a cold and barren place. Color has fled. The flowers, leaves, and most of the pretty birds are gone, and the skies are almost always white. It's amazing to me that kindergartners here persist in coloring the sky as the same skinny strip of blue across the top of the page as children who live in more temperate climes. Just goes to show you that optimism has not disappeared utterly from our planet; we still think of sky as being blue.

I went for a run yesterday, when it was even colder than today. My neighbor, out chiseling ice from her driveway, called out to me, "You're crazy!" This was from someone who has lived here, voluntarily and largely without protest, for forty-some years. At least I was moving fast and in a manner that wasn't damaging my spinal column. Craziness is relative, and endemic among my relatives.

I often wonder on days like this just why I came back to Wisconsin. I am not a hardy soul. I like sunshine and beaches and even that recently derided accompaniment to these preferred circumstances: the suntan. I will not be so stupid as to say if I die of melanoma I will at least die tan, but I can't say I haven't thought this. Right now, I am sadly observing how faint the lines from my swimsuit straps have become on my winter-paled shoulders. I have invested heavily in bottles of Vitamin D3, hoping to ward off seasonal depression. I'm unsure how well it's working. When I spoke this afternoon with a colleague who is spending her winter break in summery Argentina, I'm afraid I was borderline rude when she asked if there was anything besides sunshine she might bring me when she returns next week. "There is nothing that matters besides sunshine," I believe I snapped, icily.

Behind me, below the big windows of my office, Lake Mendota is freezing. It's lost its deep blue color, too, and is gradually turning solidly pale and white. You will know it is frozen the second the first ice shanty appears. Somehow ice anglers know the precise instant water becomes a solid. It is not their scientific training; it is far more precise than any science and less mathematical. On the other lake, the one behind my house, the anglers are already living in their winter community. A whole shantytown is out on the bays of Lake Monona. You would almost think Wisconsin winters are something we welcome around here. This, however, would be erroneous for most of us with IQs above 120. "Well, it could be worse," my boss commented with inexplicable gaiety today, "We could be in International Falls." I wonder what they say up in Barrows, Alaska. Maybe they just take sufficient consolation in their distance from Sarah Palin's Anchorage that they've become unflappable.

And what does any of this have to do with Senator Russ Feingold? Well, first let me clarify. Frankly, I believe that everything concerns Senator Russ Feingold. I believe that if the Senior Senator from the Good Progressive State of Wisconsin had as much time as he wanted, he would probably even care that my dishwasher is broken and that I don't know how to fix it or even if I care to try. Russ would like me to be happy here. He likes this state and would like me (and you) to like it here, too. To be able to live here comfortably. And so the problem of this state's frigid temperatures is something we need to address here.

We need geothermal energy installations that bring heat to our walkways and public spaces. We need bus shelters in which we can stand to stand and wait for buses that are stalled behind cars whose tires are spinning without propulsion on the sheets of ice that we euphemistically call streets. We need sidewalks that we can walk down, even run down, without considering first whether our health insurance deductible is so high that a broken or twisted ankle is financially untenable. Geothermal heat can give us all of these, an investment that makes sense both to those who lament and protest global warming as well as to the idiots who say our recent cold snap disproves global warming.

Really, what has happened to all the big public works projects that were supposed to start up as part of our national recession recovery efforts? The New Deal, in anemic modern form as originally proposed, seems to have become, with inaction, the New Deal, Anorexic Form. We need high speed trains and we need geothermally heated sidewalks and bus shelters. We are cold and many of us are unemployed. And those of us who are not unemployed are getting really really sick of having people with pinched faces tell us with inexplicable spite, "You should just be glad you have a job." It's as bad as being a kid at the dinner table again, hearing about kids starving in distant parts of the world. Me, I'm nearly to the point where I may just start replying, "And you should be lucky you have a mother. Otherwise no one might love you."

Russ, we need jobs. We need to start building all the projects pledged by the recovery plans. Things need to move. Governor Doyle submitted the proposal for the high speed trains; things need to stay in motion on this. I mean, remember in the flurry of national security reorganization that commenced after 9/11? All the agencies involved in identifying potent national enemies with the intention to wreak mass destruction of our citizens were going to be newly coordinated and their communication network strengthened and improved. This Christmas a man with a mission whose own FATHER had tried to alert the authorities nearly managed to set fire to another aircraft. We need to keep pushing for the recovery work projects to move forward. We want tracks laid. We want safe, fast, warm transportation that is energy efficient and puts people back to work on projects that make all of us happy.

Oh yeh. The child optimistic enough to color the sky blue all winter? I was one of them.

Driving to Milwaukee Via I-94E

Drove in to Milwaukee yesterday, on the second-last day of the Andy Warhol exhibit. Roads were clear of snow and deer, nothing but salt swirls and speed traps to slow down my 2000 Civic. My fellow Madisonian and UW alumnus Michael Feldman was on the radio. WPR. The Ideas Network. Made me regret just a little that I'd sent all my year-end dollars to Planned Parenthood (see previous post). But then, at least I'm a member. Public radio already gets my support at least once every year.

Driving a car is not good for the planet. I mean, petroleum-wise, it beats flying, but that's about all you can say for it except that it's not a bus. Now don't get me wrong: I take the bus to and from work five days every week. I have the good luck (having had the foresight) to live right on three major bus lines. That sounds like a bad place to live, but it's a lovely tree-arched street lined with charming and squalid tall Victorians. Houses, I mean, not the one-time Queen's descendants. But buses, no matter how plush or clean they may be, the stately Van Galder coaches a prime example, are still, well, buses. We really need trains. Nice, high speed trains. With real conductors. And maybe some porters. It's all about jobs, right? And these buses need to originate in Madison, not Columbus. What's with Columbus, anyway? There is so little in Columbus other than the Amtrak station that they actually invested in a Christopher Columbus museum and put a sign out on the main highway that skirts the periphery of town as if passing motorists keen on arriving elsewhere will see the sign and say, "Hey, Hon! Look at that! The Christopher Columbus Museum is here! Wanna stop?" Even though Christopher Columbus didn't come within 1245 nautical miles of Columbus (and that only if the nautical vessel could somehow fly as the crow does, in summer months).

But anyway, I'm driving to Milwaukee on highways so good and clear of traffic on a Saturday morning that I really do need to watch out for the squad cars parked at unlikely angles at unpredictable intervals throughout revenue-hungry, action-hungry Jefferson County. I think the police officers of this county got together at some point and brainstormed appropriate police response to their twofold environmental dilemmas: 1) there's really nothing happening in Jefferson County to warrant police forces or pay for new squad cars and 2) the interstate that passes through the county like the mainline artery taking intellect and money everywhere but the county coffers is almost always shrouded in a pea soup of fog. The answer was double genius. Plant squad cars all along the interstate. The fog will keep motorists from seeing them; the resultant speeding tickets (my son's was nearly $300 two years ago) will pay for nice new squad cars.

Driving from Madison to the Milwaukee Art Museum ("Oh please. Just call me 'MAM.'") is my idea of a really good drive, especially if it's not foggy. Basically, it involves getting on Interstate 94 and driving east until the interstate ends at Lake Michigan, where you park the car and walk into the Calatrava addition to the MAM. As someone with a classically inverted sense of direction, this in itself is sufficient reason for me to buy an annual membership to the MAM. In fact, I buy a double. I am always on the lookout for a good deal, and the double allows me to always bring a friend and seem generous, where in fact I am stingy and just looking for the best deal. Yesterday, for example, I had every intention of bringing my friend Gail, until her husband claimed her, something about remodelling the bathroom. Since the remodel involves a deep soaking tub, I had to relent. Some things can vie with art, and a good bathtub may be one of them.

Oh. Perhaps you've been noticing the occasional red-inked words. These are for Russ and his crew. These represent his voters. I think it's important for him to know how many of my readers are his electors. I may seem to be a loose and wandering intellect, but so are my circles of friends and readers. And a lot of them are wandering around Wisconsin right now. Freezing, but wandering. The smarter ones, of course, like me, are seated in front of their computers, roaming through the sunny fields of intellect, which are looking to me this morning much more like summertime in Provence than the frozen tundra outside the window of my study.

Hmmm. I was going to write about the incredible crowds at the MAM yesterday. I was lucky enough to get there before noon and see the Warhol with only a few tense episodes of elbow-jamming. By the time I wandered back to the stunning spaces of the entryway in search of food, the lines were winding like a snake or a bank run through the foyer, and a peek into the galleries where the Warhol works are hung revealed a packed house, where no one under 6'4" was going to see anything but shoulder blades.

But I'll have to write about the amazing hunger for art in the souls of the wintry housebound another time. My BFF's on the way over for breakfast, and I'm still in my bathrobe and house slippers.

Happy New Year from Russ to Us!

Just hours after posting my very first "Letter to Russ," I got an e-mail from him, a wish for a happy and safe new year, plus an acknowledgement of having reached his campaign's final fundraising goal for the calendar year just ended. Perhaps you got it, too.

With all due respect for the strange workings of synchronicity aside, I was not much moved. I don't think well wishing and fundraising go well together. It's sort of like wearing black shoes with a brown belt or maybe even a burkah offset with a Star of David pendant. One just shouldn't mix certain things, like warm wishes for the new year and cold talk about money. Unless of course you're sending good money, along with good wishes, as my favorite old aunts used to do, "Don't forget the Lord loves you even more than we do," scrawled in red felt-tip pen on a sawbuck inside a greeting card adorned with winged and naked cherubs.


My son, ably schooled and intently interested in the machinations of political campaign work, tells me that one thing Obama's successful campaign proved last fall was that electors (you and I and the bozos down the street, too) will eventually donate money if hit up often enough. Russ's campaign is apparently taking this to heart. In the last week, I have received almost daily entreaties to contribute, some of them the identical copy, sent from different e-mail addresses. I have to think that if the Obama campaign proved that sympathizers eventually succumb to repeated requests like this, they failed to include a significant demographic group in their survey efforts, people like me: The Inexorably Principled.

Because, as you probably know, the Feingold campaign is not exactly the only group that was vying for your end-of-year loose change. I turned on the radio and my beloved Public Radio broadcasters were making the case for my last dollars (what dollars?). I brought in the mail and my beloved Planned Parenthood's fearless Cecile Richards was there in an envelope with another polite reminder that I hadn't yet sent in my usual year-end dollars (what dollars?!) And the ALS Society, which provides the most incredible support services to my beloved mom without ever requesting payment, greeted me when I opened my e-mail, wondering whether I'd prefer to charge this year's final donation of dollars (what dollars?!!).

Frankly, Russ, you didn't stand a chance this year in the queue for the crumpled up bills that I rummaged from the inky bottom of my messenger bag. But I'll be there when you really need me, just like I'm there for Planned Parenthood right now. They're going to have a heck of a fight ahead of them this year now that the religious right has wormed its insidious way back into the rotten apple of state's rights via the health care proposal, at stake once again women's ability to control our reproductive destiny. This is the front line, and Planned Parenthood will be there on my behalf.

And one more note, Russ. On that same mailing, when you wished me a happy and safe New Year? That word "safe." It reminds me of planes and missed screenings of noted high risk travellers, made me think of Detroit and then Manhattan and the towers and all the ways the last administration preyed and prayed upon our fearfulness. Wish me happiness, wish me prosperity, wish me good health and good skiing and good research. Wish me a meaningful, courageous, and creative New Year filled with good friends and good work...And I'll wish the same for you and even help you get there.

Happy New Year

Went to see "Up in the Air" with my oldest BFF today, meaning my longest enduring BFF in the whole wide world, one of the few people I speak to regularly who knows that I was not always a skinny and somewhat awkward blonde with a good fashion sense: I used to have no fashion sense. Who says nothing changes?

New Year's Eve. One tends to think about changes. Even "Up in the Air," a very mediocre movie with a very un-mediocre leading man (what is not to adore about George Clooney? His crinkly, smiling eyes?) leads one to think about change on the last day of an eventful year such as this. And this is without mentioning the Big Change, Mr. Change, Mr. President, Obama.

"There is nothing constant in the universe. All ebb and flow and every shape that's born bears in its womb the seeds of change." Ovid. I still don't know if Ovid was a person or, like Aesop or God, a sort of personification of a narrative compendium, but I still like that quote. I think it was the first quote I memorized, aside from the roughly 532 Bible verses I had to recite on Sunday mornings all the way through eighth grade confirmation class. "To every thing (turn turn turn) there is a season (turn turn turn) and a time for every purpose under" the Democrats, including national health care now.

Another year. The Byrds and the Bible are still sparring in my babyboomer brain. I am as up in the air as ever regarding love. I am as up in the air as ever regarding commitment. I am as up in the air as ever, a drifting red balloon knock knock knocking on Heaven's door as my Mom dies and my optimism seems less and less warranted and more and more essential. Medicare is paying all her very outrageous medical costs, and yet neither she nor my dad support national health care. Go figure. I am not up in the air about being a Democrat, about thinking government should take care of the people of the nation.

Happy new year, Russ. I hope it's a good one for all of us. I'm looking forward to sharing the confusion and the clarity with you and everyone else around here.