Tolstoy: A Free Writing

I've been home with an awful sinus infection for the last five days while Katherine has been down in Phoenix with Bud and Janet. I was just too sick to go, plus I didn't want to infect anyone. Most of the time I've been hanging out on the couch watching movies and taking a variety of medications. (I would advise against doing sinus rinses with any degree of regularity.) The last two days my headache subsided enough to let me read and I managed to finish Anna Karenina. I initially started to read it because after I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and some reviews that basically said it couldn't compare to the greatness of Russian novels, I wanted to see if the reviewers were right. Plus, just like Zelig and the neurosis caused by his failure to read Moby Dick, I didn't want Tolstoy's masterpiece lurking over my already hopelessly neurotic head.

Where it usually takes me less than a week to read a novel, I have been in Anna Karenina for about two months. As an excuse, I will hasten to add that I have been mostly engrossed in political stuff in my liberal magazines and that, plus the headache I've been having since Thanksgiving, have slowed me down a bit.

Furthermore, let us face it. Tolstoy is tough sledding.

I have never been able to understand how anyone can start reading a book without compulsively reading it until it is done. Personally, I have a hard time remembering what has transpired if my last reading was more than a couple of days ago. My friend Bud only seems to read when he is on an airplane or by a swimming pool. The result is that it takes him a year to finish a piece of pulp fiction. No wonder he does not relish reading.

I've discovered that Tolstoy is different. Sometimes I went as much as a week between opening the book, but the plot was so clear and the characters so memorably drawn that I never once felt lost. But that is not what I want to talk about.

I started reading it defensively. Why, I wondered, does a book have to be a CLASSIC in order to be great? Why does the fact that Freedom is easy to read and impossible to put down make it more trivial than Anna Karenina, or War and Peace, or Brothers Karamazov? Why does, according to the reviewer mentioned above, Tolstoy reach tragic heights when Franzen's wonderful novel is just a romance?

Sure enough, as I was reading it I kept wondering if the reviewer had actually read Anna Karenina, or was he just spouting conventional wisdom? At first glance, the characters seem every bit as small compared to the "big picture" as any of the characters in Freedom. Whole chapters are devoted to meaningless parties and horse races and grouse hunts where characters busy themselves with the minutiae of social discourse and worrying if they are wearing the right clothes, or creating socially acceptable impressions. Just like Franzen's novel, a good deal of Anna Karenina is focused on the political scene in Russia in the middle to late 1800's. Some scenes are clearly satirical. Some are didactic. Some are pointless

When I taught Edith Hamilton's definition of tragedy I always pointed out her comparison of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary. Hamilton maintained that Emma was a small person who dies a pathetic death while Anna is a great person who dies tragically. For the first 600 pages of the book I didn't think Edith knew what she was talking about.

But then I got to the last 150 pages where Anna spends most of them contemplating suicide over, to put it rather simplistically, a love gone bad. Where Emma's taking of arsenic is a completely selfish escape from a situation of her own doing, Anna's is characterized by dozens of pages of introspection and increasingly bitter insights into the nature of the world. She walks on the train platform by a varied collection of humanity, each scene disgusting her further. Her walk is a lot like Yossarian's through Rome looking for Nately's whore, or Dante's descent into Hell. The scene builds and her final throwing herself under the train is a jolt this reader will never forget, not because it is pathetic and painful like Emma's suicide, but because she is too magnificent in her delusions to end thus. There is nothing in Franzen's novel, maybe in any novel, to compare.

Juxtaposed to that is what has become my all time favorite character--Levin. This wonderful man goes through the whole novel loving his work, being confused by the inane pomposity of Russian nobility, pursuing meaning while the rest only discuss philosophy as a kind of parlor game.

He wants to know the answer to those key questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Is there a God? If not, why keep on going? The reader can see that Levin lives his life as if he knew the answers to the questions. Levin can't see that simple truth until the end. The answer to meaninglessness is DOING WHAT IS NECESSARY. He contemplates suicide, but he has his wife and his child and his in-laws, and his peasants, and god knows what else that he has to live for.

"But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living."

He kept passing the open windows.

We see Levin in the pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby ("So we beat on . . . "), and in Wally in My Dinner With Andre.

Levin comes to this realization in a flash of insight, just like most of us do, but with a lot more poetry. And then, and this is what I most like about the book, as soon as he gets up from being in the field and looking at the dome of the sky, he reenters the real world with its pettiness and selfishness and joins in whole heartedly.

"I shall go in my same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."

When good is the enemy of perfect

Conservatives must be reeling a little bit today after reading a front page story in The Denver Post with the headline, "Economy making a strong '10 finish." Factories are getting busy again. The Dow is up more than 2 percent. Factory output, led by our bailed out auto industry, has grown for the sixteenth straight month. All regions of the country, except St. Louis and Philadelphia, are growing economically. Private employment has enjoyed the highest monthly increase since November of 2007.

This all sounds like a republican nightmare. The last thing the republican party wants is for something, anything, good to happen to the country because that might hurt their chances to make Obama a one-termer.

I'm sure the republican spin machine is whirring full speed to dismiss this news and reassure the faithful that things are still terrible in the USA and getting worse. And I'm sure all those Tea Partiers out there, the ones who still believe that Obama is not a citizen, but is instead a Manchurian candidate from Kenya bound and determined to turn our exceptional country into a socialist state, can't wait to gobble up the good/bad news that they want to hear from Rush and Glen and Sarah and the rest.

For example, consider the ad hominem spin Denver Post columnist and Mike Rosen wannabe David Harsanyi used a few weeks ago to put the kebosh on the reported resurgence of General Motors ("GM plan the Cadillac of failed ideas," The Denver Post, November 19).

After all the newspapers reported the surprising success of GM's initial IPO after their near collapse, Harsanyi rushed to convince himself and his readers that this was just so much political spin and nothing to brag about.

"Oh, good, the Obama administration has another imaginary victory for taxpayers to celebrate," he sneers in his first sentence, thus setting the tone for the rest of his rant.

He rips Obama's statement that GM "took another step to becoming a success story" with the scornful rejoinder, "Not 'survival,' but success. Taxpayers are going to make a profit even!"

He dismissively admits that GM has paid back in full the approximately $15 billion it borrowed from the government, but then reminds us that the approximately $43 billion taxpayers invested in GM stock remains a losing proposition and will never be recouped because, according to Harsanyi and the "many analysts" he cherry picks, GM will never again flourish.

This seems to fly in the face of GM's recent IPO. According to Politico's Morning Money (By the way, anyone who is now saying to themselves that Politico is just another liberal news outlet hasn't been paying attention, or is seriously reading challenged.), GM's IPO closed at 3.6. percent over the initial price, adding up to a $4 billion profit on the $36 billion the Obama administration put into GM.

"The $40.1 billion in repayments would mean the Obama administration has more than recouped its $36.1 billion. . .and the federal government would recover all but approximately $9.4 billion of its original $49.4 billion overall investment in GM ($13.4 billion of which came under the Bush administration)."

I don't know what any of that means, but it sounds better than Harsanyi would like us to believe.

But he uses other rhetorical devices to fire up the vitriol in his readers. He calls the money we invested in GM a "blank check." How so? From this casual observer's vantage point it seems that GM paid a heavy price for taxpayer's help.

He suggests that the recent safety recalls by Toyota and Honda are simply trumped up scare tactics by the Department of Transportation designed to give GM an advantage. Tell that to the Toyota owners who plowed into things when their gas peddles stuck.

Next he gets mad because companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, those of the bail out, will make a fortune on GM's IPO. It is unfair, he says, to the taxpayers who financed the bailout. So, what exactly is his point? Has anyone in the Obama administration ever said that the bailout was fair? Of course it wasn't fair; it was just necessary. And now we are seeing that it just might be successful.

He then goes on to explain how GM's payback of the initial loan is an illusion because it used TARP money. So what? It was GM's money and they obviously had achieved the liquidity they needed to use it.

He laments the poor share holders who lost money over GM's potential collapse and the government directed bailout by saying "Confiscating the property of investors for the common good isn't generally conducive to a healthy business environment." I understand Harsanyi's effort to lay down a sarcastic salvo got in the way of fairness, but he makes a non-point. Of course the method chosen to save GM wasn't "generally conducive to a healthy business environment," but this was not a normal situation and the business environment GM found itself in at the time was anything but healthy.

Finally, we get to Harsanyi's, and I'm beginning to suspect all conservatives', real complaint about the whole GM thing. Investors, he says, may want to "ask why GM is making ideologically motivated money-losers like the Volt. . . What happens when taxpayers divest themselves from GM's social engineering projects?"

His point is clear that the GM bailout and its movement toward environmentally sensitive automobiles is just another facet of Obama's socialist agenda, like having school children eat healthy food, or having bicycles available in metropolitan areas. IT IS ALL AL GORE'S FAULT FOR TRUMPING UP ALL THIS GLOBAL WARMING BULLSHIT.

Harsanyi just doesn't get it. GM's offering is continuing to grow. The taxpayers are continuing to get a return on their investment. Interest in cars like the Volt is high. All the naysaying in the world will not change that.

Of course the whole situation is unfair. Of course we have a rough road ahead. But I don't see the benefit of commentators like Harsanyi continually making good the enemy of perfect just to score partisan points.

The difference between The American President and the American President

I love how wonderfully simplistic The American President, a movie by Rob Reiner, is. Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) is a first term widowed president who is trying to get a crime bill that has been watered down by compromises with the loyal opposition through congress before his third state of the union address. His poll numbers are high and he and his staff are gearing up for his second term election in a little less than a year. They don't want to lay an egg by not getting the crime bill passed.

This is all complicated by Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning), an environmental lobbyist with whom President Shepherd falls in love. Presidential advisor Lewis Fairchild (Michael J. Fox) and press secretary McCall (Anna Deveare Smith) understand that this little romance could spell trouble with the electorate, especially when the press catches President Shepherd spending the night with Miss Wade in the White House just down the hall from Lucy Shepherd, the President's ten year old, trombone playing daughter. But the President stands his ground. He maintains that his love life is none of the voters' business and directs his staff to respond to the inevitable prying questions with a "no comment."

Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), President Shepherd's political nemesis and the certain presidential nominee of the other party, latches onto this romantic development and starts questioning Shepherd's character at every opportunity. He can smell blood on the water. Sure enough, the President's poll numbers start dropping.

All of this comes to a head when Shepherd has to make an odious deal screwing Sydney Ellen Wade's environmental initiative in order to muster enough votes to get his crime bill passed. There is a big confrontation in the President's bedroom with Miss Wade (She apparently can come and go as she pleases in The White House.) and she storms out, leaving President Shepherd to walk the halls reevaluating his job performance of late.

The movie ends with the President popping into a televised White House press conference where he finally attacks Bob Rumson's characater, professes his love for Sydney, drops the compromised crime bill, and sends Miss Wade's ground breaking environmental legislation to the hill. Everyone loves Shepherd's new found gutsiness and his total legislative about face. If there was a chart nearby we could see Shepherd's poll numbers rise even as he walks out of the press room. His aides are happy. Miss Wade takes him back and he ends up walking triumphantly into the house chambers to deliver his state of the union. We don't have to be told that he will win the upcoming election by a landslide. Bob Rumson is no where to be found.

In real life the President's reversal would have been way too late. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin would have already fixed it in the American mind that Andrew Shepherd was an adulterous Nazi. Afer all, when Adolph Hitler was in power he thought about crime all the time and, just like Andrew Shepherd, had a mistress. Coincidence? I think not!

Shepherd's pronouncement that you can't stop crime without getting rid of assault weapons would automatically lose him all white, male voters who would be reminded hourly by Limbaugh and tearfully by Beck that their basic constitutional liberties were being threatened by Andrew Shepherd's socialist agenda.

Global Warming skeptics from Maine to Alaska would see the end of capitalism in Shepherd's call for a twenty percent reduction in emissions in the next ten years.

And of course, Lucy Shepherd's plaintive trombone playing in the White House residence would serve as a potent reminder of the President's failure as a devoted father.

Bob Rumson would win the next election in a walk.

My Favorite Things - III

Last night after the final bows for White Christmas at the Town Hall Arts Center in Littleton, Katherine and I waited in the reception room for Christian to emerge from the dressing room. There was a table in the center of the room filled with platters from Whole Foods. I picked up one roundish thing with a toothpick sticking out of it that I took for a fancily peeled radish. It turned out to be a ball of inedible goat cheese that I discreetly disgorged into a napkin and placed in the trash. There was another table in the corner with a volunteer selling wine, beer, and the like. For those of us either too cheap or too impatient to wait in line for the drinks there was also a punch bowl filled with a rusty colored liquid. I filled a plastic cup and took a sip. Sure enough, it was a perfect pairing for the cheese ball I rid myself of a few minutes before.

The cast slowly filtered out to the hugs of friends and family waiting to congratulate them. We kept saying "good job" or "you were great" as certain recognizable players filed by and they kept answering "Thank you. Thank you very much." Have you ever noticed that performers almost always give you that "Thank you. Thank you very much" response when congratulated. They must teach that in beginning acting classes.

We congratulated the guy who played Bob Wallace and gave him a "great job", even though I would rather have heard Chris sing those songs. (That's the only thing that ever goes wrong when I watch Chris do a show. I always think the show would be better if he did every song. I'm sure the parents of the Bob Wallace portrayer felt the same way, but they probably aren't as objective as I am.)

Th female leads came out looking smaller in real life than they did on stage. I wanted to tell Ellie Schwartz, the little girl who played Susan Waverly, how impressed I was by her. She wasn't just cute; she was an actress.

There was a black guy in the ensemble who moved wonderfully. I saw him come out of the doors, but I didn't feel like breaking through the mobs of well wishers to give him a personal thumbs up.

Chris finally came out. Just a few minutes before he had been dressed as Santa Claus for the final rendition of "White Chritmas." Now he was his usual self in jeans, sweatshirt, and a turned around baseball cap. All the other cast members were still a little on stage--in character--when they emerged, with maybe traces of make-up here or there. Chris looked and acted like he had been there before, like a receiver who simply hands the ball to the referee whenever he gets into the endzone.

We hugged and gave him a quick review: "The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing" and "I Love a Piano" were the two best numbers in the show; he was the best one in his row; the female voices were a little weak, but they were great on stage; etc., etc..

It was all so familiar.

We've been waiting for Chris to "come out from backstage" ever since he was in junior high. We've waited for him after a performance of Pirates of Penzance at Deer Creek. We waited for him after performances at the old Bonfils Theater (now the Tattered Cover) in the Lyric Opera Society's productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. We've waited for him at Disney and at Elitches

We have also waited for Nate after performances at Elitches, or The Comedy Sports, or the PIT in Manhattan, or MGM Studios at Disney.

We've waited for Franny after her starring role as Miss Mary in Green Mountain Elementary's end of the year pageant. We've waited for her after a drama camp in Grand Lake. And we've waited for her every night of her performance as Polly in Crazy for You.

I was reminded last night that waiting to congratulate my kids after a performance is one of my favorite things. I can't think of anything that has given me more pleasure than reveling in their performances. I mean, going out for a drink with Chris after his performance in I Love a Piano at DCTC remains one of the great moments of my life.

I especially loved the wait at Green Mountain before they remodeled the school. Family and friends would congregate in the cafeteria under the fish wall and wait for that evening's cast to come out the door by the old tech arts department. There was plenty of room to hang out in comfort and plenty of time to go through joyous post mortems with everyone involved. (That comfortable waiting ambiance came to a crashing halt after they remodeled the school. Now, everyone waits in the hall leading from the theater entrance past the administration offices. It is too crowded and hectic. We always beat a fast retreat after shows done in the new theater.)

I remember after opening night of South Pacific how Sybil took Nate by his lapels and pushed him up against the wall. "WHY DIDN'T YOU DO IT THAT WAY AT DRESS?" she yelled. That was Sybil's way of giving high praise.

I remember the pride I felt every night after You Can't Take It With You because both Chris and Nate were brilliant.

My most memorable waiting took place after seeing Christian in Wind in the Willows, his first show at Mesa. Franny and Kathie and I kept looking at each other throughout the entire show with the same things on our minds: "God, he is as good as we thought he was all along!" It was a great moment.

Last night in downtown Littleton brought all that back. White Christmas is a good show with some genuinely funny moments: the train ride rendition of "Snow" stopped the show. It runs through Christmas (the theater is dark Monday through Wednesday).

Postmortem: The Midterms

I've been doing a lot of thinking since the so called referendum on Obama's performance a few weeks ago and I've made myself a few promises that I am planning to keep. First, it was not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I was pretty convinced that Reid would lose in Nevada and with that loss I was reconciled to the republicans taking over both the house and the senate, but that didn't happen.

I ended up being proud of Colorado. I was worried Bennet would lose to Buck even though Bennet's voting record in the past two years has been exemplary. In my lowest moments I thought it possible that Tancredo could end up being our next governor, thereby ranking Colorado right up there with Minnesota and Illinois as states who need to duck their collective heads when gubernatorial discussions commence, but Colorado didn't fall prey to Tancredo's One Trick Pony campaign. I guess the state's electorate agreed that illegal immigration is not the only vital issue facing Colorado as Tancredo's ads proclaimed. And if Tancredo won that would have meant that ballot initiatives 60, 61, and 101 would have probably won as well. But my fellow Coloradans wisely voted down all of those issues by huge margins. Not only that, but more school bond issues passed than failed. So, even though the economy is everyone's main issue and distrust of government is on everyone's minds, we managed to vote reasonably in the midst of a nation wide electorate who, if television pundits were correct (have you noticed that they almost never are), cast its vote based on nothing more than a knee jerk reaction.

Second, I promised myself that I would not get angry about things. I remember a little dialogue I had two years ago with one of the conservative minions who haunt the Y during the morning hours.

"You're one of those liberals who believe everything Obama says, aren't you?" he asserted.

"No, but unlike my republican friends, I don't think that everything he says is a lie," I responded.

During the past two years that gentleman, who is actually quite likable if you can manage to confine the discussion to the weather and good places to go for green chili, and all of his like minded friends took delight in any failure that team Obama suffered. The fact that those failures, few though they were, also meant that the country as a whole suffered was and continues to be lost on those folks.

So, I promised myself that in addition to not getting angry I would also be happy about any successes the republican controlled house might achieve. I think it would be great if somehow all of our economic problems got solved through the bi-partisan action of the newly empowered republicans in the house and the new chastened administration.

I even promised myself to look at the next two years with interest to see how everything was going to work itself out. In order to fulfill that promise I have to do a few things. I have to NEVER look at cable news, whether that be Fox or MSNBC. I have to NEVER listen to talk radio. If I read a newspaper, I must NEVER turn to the op-ed pages. No more Frank Rich. No more Tom Friedman. No more Paul Krugman. I must confine myself to those articles in The New Yorker about ballet and movies and developments in third world countries. No more economic analyses. No more inside scoops on Washington infighting. I have to confine myself to reading fiction. No more political treatises. If I go to a party I have to be careful to stick to small talk. You know, gossip about people who are not in attendance. Clever quips about obscure news items. Concern over how drug violence in Mexico might interrupt my travel plans. Stuff like that. It is going to be a dreary two years, but at least I will remain sane.

I mean if I really dwelled on Mitch McConnel's professed goal of the republican party, to make sure Obama was a one-termer, I might get a little upset. It seems to me that a good republican goal would be to make the country a better place, but then I realize that if any of the country's problems were solved while Obama was still in the White House the republican plan to unseat him would be compromised. It is clear that the worst thing that could happen in the next two years to the republican party would be if Health Care actually made people's lives better, or if the economy sprang back to life and people were getting hired right and left. That is a continuing republican nightmare.

I've promised myself to stop being a smart-ass if I somehow get involved in a political discussion, but instead just ask polite questions. For instance, I would like to know how my republican friends can reconcile their repeated calls for a balanced budget with their refusal to even consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire on those making more than $250,000 a year. I would have a bunch of questions for them:

1. Since you refuse to extend unemployment benefits without demanding that the administration and the democrats account for every penny of the cost with a corresponding budget cut, would you be willing to do the same accounting with the $700,000,000,000 it would cost to keep the tax cuts?

2. Since Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending account for more than 85% of the federal budget, exactly what are you willing to cut to make up for the $700,000,000,000 the tax cuts would cost?

3. If your response is to simply pare back Medicaid and Medicare, what do you plan to do with the proliferation of homeless sick people that would result? I mean wouldn't it cost big bucks to build a nation wide system of poor houses and debtor prisons? Or are we just going to let these people get sick and die on the streets? I mean homeless people already constitute a blight on the urban landscape. Wouldn't the 2% of the population with their tax cuts firmly in place be even more upset by sickly homeless people. If we are going to have the poor with us always, shouldn't we at least do something to make them look good as they congregate around super highway underpasses? Otherwise, it could get downright depressing. I mean look what happened to Sandra Bullock when she was confronted by only one pretty healthy homeless kid in The Blind Side. She had to stop going to lunch at swanky places with her tax sheltered friends. Wouldn't that just about devastate the economy?

Shift gears.

If I were a democratic strategist (god, there is a horrible thought), I would shamelessly borrow the following idea from Gary Hart. A couple of weeks ago in his blog (A Matter of Principle)he cited the Esquire Commission to Balance the Federal Budget. A group of former legislators got together and devised a plan to balance the budget by 2020. Mr. Hart suggested that it would be pretty cool, not to mention telling, if the recommendations of the commission were put before congress with an up or down vote just to see how serious everyone really was about balancing the budget. I would actually be willing to watch CSPAN for such an occasion.

In order to help myself remember the commission's proposals I will briefly enumerate them here.

Social Security

-Gradually raise the retirement age to 70 with allowances made for those people with the kind of manual labor jobs that would constitute a disability if they worked that long.
-Use a different, more realistic method, to figure cost of living (COLA) adjustments.
-Increase the number of years used to figure the monthly benefit.
Projected Savings: $86 billion

Defense

-Enact the administration's proposed weapons systems cuts.
-Reverse the "Grow the Army" initiative.
-Restructure the military so as to more accurately reflect the changing reality of conflicts.
-Assume the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq will decline.
Projected Savings: $309 billion

Health Care

-Institue medical malpractice reforme through the establishment of medical courts.
-Assume the recent Health Care Reform will stay pretty much in tact because when it gets right down to it most of the provisions when they are explained sans spin make sense.
-Change from a fee-for-service system to a pay-for-performance system (this is where Obama's health care initiative started before being watered down by special interests).
Projected Savings: $10 billion

Other Spending

-Enact the president's proposed spending program terminations as detailed in his 2011 budget.
-Cut the federal work force by 5%.
-Delay future NASA missions to the moon and Mars.
-Reform (read: get rid of) farm subsidies.
-Eliminate all earmarks.
-As with Social Security, use a more realistic and accurate method to figure COLA for military pensions and veterans' retirement benefits.
Projected Savings: $71 billion

Total Projected Savings from all areas: $476 billion
Total Debt Service Projected Savings (servicing the debt will obviously decrease given all of the projected savings): $142 billion
Grand Total of Projected Savings: $618 billion

New Revenue Proposals

-Repeal health-care tax exclusion; offer a refundable health-care tax credit.
Projected Revenue: $63 billion

-Increase gasoline tax by $1 per gallon.
Projected Revenue: $130 billion

-Limit itemized deductions for high earners (this is different from letting the Bush tax cuts expire).
Projected Revenue: $57 billion

-Keep tax rates low for the next decade for everyone.
Projected Revenue: -$273 billion

-Curtail state and local sales-tax deduction that tax payers are allowed on their federal taxes.
Projected Revenue: $12 billion

-Eliminate subsidies for biofuels.
Projected Revenue: $16 billion

-Include all new state and local government workers in Social Security (goodbye PERA)
Projected Revenue: $21 billion

Total Projected Revenue Increase $26 billion

Final Numbers

Total Projected Revenues in 2020: $4.693 trillion (20.8% of GDP)
Total Projected Spending in 2020: $4.681 trillion (20.8% of GDP)
Total Projected Surplus in 2020: $12 billion
Projected Debt-to-GDP ratio in 2020: 52% (currently that ratio is significantly higher than 60%)

Let us have an up or down vote on that and see where everyone stands. You have to agree that there are things for everyone to like about this report and things for everyone to hate. It is kind of like life.

Father Steele

Tom Steele S.J. died of natural causes last week. He was seventy-six. I saw the obituary notice Friday morning before I went off to meet Bud for some serious handy-manning. Over coffee and oatmeal I cried.

I first encountered Father Steele in an American lit class the second semester of my sophomore year at Regis College. He introduced me to Spiller's The Cycle of American Literature, a book that fueled many a lesson plan in my career as a public high school teacher. I loved the symmetry of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis as explained in that work and ended up applying that thinking to almost everything I ever taught whether there was a connection or not.

He was only in his mid thirties and freshly armed with a doctorate from the University of New Mexico and I was immediately taken by his quiet integrity. I actually went to the library sometime during that semester and read his dissertation. Sure enough, it was a scholarly exploration of the Frontier Thesis and its manifestation in the works of James Fennimore Cooper. Natty Bumpo would have been surprised at how erudite his living at the edge of the wilderness was.

I think Father Steele was the first professor who actually saw through my horrible studenting to the smart but lazy little boy I was. Always in search of a father figure, I sought him out after class with sophomoric questions and comments, all of which he patiently listened to and then politely answered or explained how they missed the mark by just a tad. He liked my voice on paper even as he was dismissive of my lack of scholarship and kindly gave me a string of B's on my last minute essays written in my messy room the morning they were due.

We became friends through chance encounters in the snack bar where we would sit until the wee hours of the morning smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking pots of coffee while we talked about everything from Viet Nam to Jacobean poetry. I loved John Donne and Father Steele kindly helped me figure out Donne's increasingly elaborate conceits. As I took more classes from him my junior and senior years our after hours encounters moved to Ernie's, a funky little bar on the corner of 44th and Federal. Father Steele drank beer with scotch chasers, just like my grandmother, and I used my masterfully doctored fake i.d. to drink right along with him. Jesuits don't spend too much time fretting over minor sins involving good liquor.

I was a frequent guest in his tiny room at Carrol Hall where he would show me his impressive collection of Santos from New Mexico that he collected while working on his highly regarded book, Santos and Saints. I think he had one of the largest personal collection of Santos in the world. He ended up donating his entire collection to Regis so as not to violate his vow of poverty. The collection now held by Regis University is as impressive as any museum collection in the country.

Father Steele baptized my son Christian. He was a frequent visitor to my home and livened up many a party with his wry sense of humor. He, as much as anyone in my life, can be held accountable for the way I think, value, argue, and love. Even though I had lost track of him over the years, his death has reminded me of so much that I treasure. I miss him more than I can say.

Foodies' Getaway

Katherine was taken by thoughts of gardens and gardening on our recent trip to Justin and Aubra's wedding in Berkeley. I was more taken by the end results of that gardening: the restaurants.

You have to understand that any trip we take is mainly an excuse to go out to great restaurants. Going to New York City is about seeing Nate and Ashley, but it is also about eating at Babbo, or following Nate for a food tour of the lower east side. It was wonderful spending time with Ken and Franny in Kauai, but the tasting menu at the St. Regis and tapas at Bar Acuda added a lot to the experience. So yes, we were in northern California to celebrate a wedding and rejoice in the beautiful ceremony, but before we left we made sure to score dinner reservations at some memorable places.

Before we leave for a trip we like to go out to some nifty place in Denver in order to make the evening before the plane ride an easy one. This time we had an early dinner at Z Cuisine in the Highlands area. Z Cuisine is a small french bistro occupying a tiny space on 30th, so you have to get there early since they don't take reservations. Katherine specifically wanted to go there because we had lunch reservations at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's version of a bistro in Napa, and she wanted to compare their respective onion soups. Yes, that is the kind of thing we think about when traveling.

(I have to insert here that I despise reading food critics for the most part because they labor to come up with new verb choices in their effort to relate every nuance of every dish. Things are always getting slathered, drizzled, adorned, ornamented, topped-off, etc. I don't care about stuff like that. I just want to know what the place feels like.)

I am happy to report that Z Cuisine feels great. The evening's offerings are always written in someone's gloriously ornate handwriting on a large chalkboard. The tables are small, but well spaced. There is an inviting bar with five or six stools and there is a wine bar next door while you wait for your table. Like at all good restaurants (Z Cuisine is good, not great) the waitstaff exhibits great pride in the food and drink they bring and delight in filling you in on the particulars of the evening's fare. There are suitably frenchlike posters and knick knacks on the wall and the uni-sex restroom, even though it opens out brazenly into the middle of the room, is tastefully appointed, rising above the obsolete plumbing that defines places like this. By the way, Katherine's onion soup was quite good with the bowl crusted over with the melted cheese that ran over the top, just right for nibbling. My lamb was huge and just okay and the wine by the glass menu was well-priced and adequate. This was a nice way to start our trip.

After arriving in San Francisco and somehow getting over the Golden Gate Bridge, we stopped off in Sausalito on our way to visit Ken's family in Santa Rosa. We stopped off at a sea food restaurant right on the harbor aptly named Fish.

(Don't you love the new trend of naming restaurants exactly what they are. There is Toast in downtown Littleton serving breakfast. The Kitchen in Boulder serving, you guessed it, food out of a kitchen. Tyler Florence has a place in Manhattan called The Cafeteria. There is probably a cafe some place called Meat and Vegetables, another one tersely called Food, although there might be a copyright on that one. If I ever opened a restaurant I would like to specialize in organ meats just so I could call it Offal. I think it would be a sensation.)

Anyway, Fish was the perfect place to recuperate from the drive through the maze of San Francisco. You order your food at a counter that doubles as a fish market. The "catch of the day" is clearly indicated and the choices are huge and tempting. I had three huge fish tacos and Katherine had a hearty clam chowder. Our only regret was that we didn't order the french fries as we saw one heaping serving after another go by to the crowd of diners on the deck overlooking the impressive array of yachts and fishing vessels.

We had a great visit in Santa Rosa which Katherine has already elaborated on in the previous post. The tour at Kenwood will become a permanent memory. I'm still trying to get my head around the volume of wine produced by less than an acre of pinot noir: 56,000 bottles! Multiply that by the tens of thousands of acres in cultivation and one wonders how people could consume that much wine. We certainly try to do our part.

The highlight of our foodie tour of northern California was Saturday night at Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is a kind of culinary shrine for people who care about such things. Started by Alice Waters after she toured France as a young woman, it is the first restaurant that emphasized locally grown, sustainable product, and thus it started what has become known as California Cuisine. When I was a kid, I remember my uncle Carl taking us out to dinner at Gartner Haus in Estes Park, the fanciest restaurant in town. There we would have prime rib, baked potatoes, and the adults would splurge and order a bottle of Lancers. Oh yes, and we all had the shrimp cocktail to begin the meal, except Carl: he had the marinated herring. That was fine dining in the early sixties.

Alice Waters and her funky little restaurant changed all that. Today most good and great restaurants proudly tell you where each item of food originated. They give you the names of the farms and tell you on what the cows grazed. There are fast food joints that tell you where the day's french fries originated. All of that, like it or not, started with Chez Panisse.

As opposed to The French Laundry, another culinary shrine in St. Helena, Chez Panisse serves five straight forward courses in a fixed price menu that changes every day, depending on what product looks best on any given day. The French Laundry is all about presentation; Chez Panisse lets the food talk for itself. We started with a glass of champagne from Rheims, the only thing on our menu that was not locally sourced, moved to crostinis with halibut, incredible heirloom tomatoes, and chicken liver. Next came a raviolini (I call them tortellini) in brodo (little raviolis in brown chicken stock). Then came a spit roasted pork loin on locally farmed beans that might be the greatest thing I have ever tasted. Finally a dessert that was good but still just a dessert. I'm not much into dessert. We had two bottles of the same champagne and Alice Waters personally comped our first bottle. It pays to hang out with a White House staffer who has made friends with the first lady's personal chef.

If you ever find yourself in the bay area, try to score a reservation at Chez Panisse.

The next morning, before the wedding ceremony, we drove over to Fisherman's Wharf with Franny and Ken and browsed around the markets at the Ferry Building. See the photo above. Mushrooms I've never seen, nor heard of. Great oysters. A cheese shop that we are going to start shopping at on line. Ditto a store that serves any kind of pork preparation you can think of and some you can't. If the Ferry Building were in Denver I would want to sell my house and move to some place within walking distance.

After the wedding Franny and Ken went back to the east coast and Katherine and I headed up to St. Helena in Napa. On the way we stopped at Bouchon where we had one o'clock reservations for lunch. This is one of the great restaurants of the world, at least in my experience. It is another french bistro kind of place with the freshest oysters I've ever had--even better than the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. I ordered steak frites which might be the best meal I had, excluding Chez Panisse, on the trip. Katherine had the onion soup. It was on a completely different plane than the onion soup a few nights earlier at Z Cuisine.

Then it was on to Meadowood where we intended to park the car and spend the next two days and three nights playing tennis, dabbling at croquet, and eating every meal on site. Meadowood has the highest Michelin rating of any restaurant in Napa Valley and for good reason. The room is incredibly sophisticated, the wine list is alarmingly huge, and the service is impeccable. Not only do they bring you a new napkin every time you leave the table, but on the way back the hostess greets you with a "Welcome back" and ushers you back to your table. Of course, the food is beautifully presented and ingenious. On our last night there the general manager of the place gave us a beautifully wrapped bottle of Roederer champagne (crisp, clean, and characterized by the tiny bubbles that shout "THIS IS A GREAT BOTTLE OF WINE").

The next day we somehow crossed the bay bridge during rush hour and made it to the airport with time to spare. The ride home was mercifully short. That night, after unpacking, we went to Tres Potrillos and had margaritas, Negra Modelo, and wonderfully greasy enchiladas. That menu always gets our digestive systems back on track.

Garden Thoughts, California, Justin's Wedding, and Hamlet

Katherine today.

I've had gardens on my mind for a while. I like them.

We were in California for a week to see Justin Garland get married. It was wonderful and gardens certainly were pivotal in the event. We were touring gardens with Franny and Ken's family around Santa Rosa before we made it to the wedding with all of its garden connections. After the wedding we headed up to a resort in St. Helena in the heart of more gardens. I can't imagine someone having lived our week in California without coming home and yearning to become a bigger and better gardener.

We started our week in garden-land in Santa Rosa at a BBQ hosted by Ken's eccentric cousin Steve. He has a big room off his kitchen that is totally papered in photographs of his favorite memories and postcards that connect to artwork he is passionate about--artists like Frida. I noticed her stuff a lot because I'm currently intrigued by her work. I was sad there was never the right moment in the crowd of folks to ask Steve about the Frida postcards placed throughout the photographs.

This same room is bordered in all directions by multi-colored Christmas lights and 1950's furniture and Mexican pottery and dishes. This is an eclectic place. It moves all over the place. So does Steve.

You leave this room and enter a garden designed and tended by the lady Steve shares his life with--LaVonne. It is a glorious garden. Herbs and lilies mingle together and there was a rosemary bush I envied tremendously because the scent was so powerful and good. There were vegetables and medicinal plants and all varieties living in some sort of perfectly ordered harmony that might make sense only to its creator.

The room was so Steve and the garden so LaVonne. I was glad we were included in the family reunion orchestrated because Franny and Ken were in town.

The next day we went to a redwood forest named for a General. My past experience tells me there are lots of individual redwood trees named for generals. This time the whole grove was named for General Armstrong. It's a California state park. It's lovely.

We walked amongst the trees and ultimately all of us--Ken's mom and brother, Franny and Ken, Jim and I--were in a quiet amphitheater surrounded by the redwoods and it was ever so slowly raining golden leaves down. Nobody said anything. A really nice garden moment.

We had a quick lunch at a great deli at Korbel and did a tasting of several champagnes. There were gardens, but LaVonne had called and we needed to meet her at Kenwood to see a full "crush" of some grapes just being delivered.

LaVonne works for the Korbel group of vineyards and got us in at Kenwood to see the grapes arrive in giant steel trucks and then watch them dump them into a crusher vat where a nasty looking coil churned the grapes around and turned them into mush and juice. We tasted the grapes--so sweet and the juice from the first pressing was sweet too. The best grape juice I've ever tasted. We wandered amongst tanks and watched a guy happily stirring a tub of yeasty water with his bare hands. We learned how the bees that arrive with the grapes get filtered out of the wines (a great relief at the time). We learned that folks who had been working with the harvest were really happy people. I really do think gardens help people be happy.

The next evening we ate dinner with Franny and Ken at Chez Panisse in Berkeley where the whole locally grown movement began. Alice Waters began a whole movement with this one beautifully simple restaurant in a simple house. We had a wonderful mean based on what was fresh in Ms. Water's garden. We got to tour the kitchen. Ahhhhhh.

Sunday was Justin's wedding. It was the first Jewish ceremony we ever witnessed and it was beautiful. The blessings made my heart sing. The ceremony took place in a redwood grove that is part of Berkeley's botanic gardens--very holy and quiet and just enough breeze to have leaves fall on the knitted covering for the wedding space that Cindy had created. The design of the covering was based on garden images as well. There are correct and sacred words for the covering C. made and for the space the ceremony took place and I've forgotten those words already. It was a perfect place in spirit and in aesthetics. I never saw C. that I didn't cry for the happiness of it all.

The reception was at a very "green" place with very hard floors, but the food came straight from gardens and the folks who attended certainly all believed in fruits and vegetables and food. It was a good time.

On Monday we headed up to the Napa Valley to "camp" alone at Meadowood. We found it years ago when we first looked into that book about all the places you are supposed to go before you die. We were doing pretty well (we knocked off four anyway) when we discovered we liked some places so much we needed to go back. Meadowood is one of those places. Anyway, Meadowood is a definite splurge and we stayed two days.

We played tennis surrounded by vines that grow on the fences while we listened to woodland creatures moving around in crisp, fallen leaves. We played croquet in the officially required white and/or khaki clothing while we bemoaned the fact that our croquet game was off because some leaves and pine needles had fallen on our otherwise perfectly groomed croquet playing field. We ate at The Restaurant and The Grill where all the fruits and vegetables are grown on farms on the property. We sat on our porch and watched ferns under old oak trees and wondered how the management got the pretty little stag with his pretty little antlers to walk by us on our first evening there. Gardens everywhere.

I'm home now. My garden is dead and yesterday I made dinner out of its last production--harvested just before we left. I'll miss my garden.

Hamlet compares Denmark to an unweeded garden and notes that rank and gross things possess it. That's the charm. You have to look at your garden all the time and you have to tend it and get rid of weeds and rank and gross things like slugs and aphids, and you have to love your garden and notice if it's feeling perky or blue and you have to worry about bugs and critters that want to eat what you've grown and you have to look with joy at the flowers and blooms and fruits and vegetables you've managed to get to your table for viewing or eating. Hamlet doesn't tend his garden and his Denmark garden just plain sucks. If I pay attention to my garden, it thrives. I have no clue what I'm doing, but I know if I just pay attention I manage to grow stuff and it is a happy thing. Hamlet just needed to be a better gardener.

STAR ISLAND - Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen's newest novel is right up there with Skinny Dip and Sick Puppy, my favorites. It is the story of Cherry Pye, an amalgam of Lindsay Lohan, Brittney Spears, and Paris Hilton, and the attempts to hold her minimal talents together as she succombs to every drug induced temptation that gets in her path. Cherry is not the main character, however. That distinction goes to Annie DeLusia, an aspiring actress who earns a goodly income standing in for our pop diva whenever Cherry is too incapacitated to perform for the paparazzi. One Paparazzo, Bang Abbot, kidnaps Ann in hopes of holding her ransom for a swap with the real thing. He wants an exclusive photo shoot that he feels will make him rich and somehow enhance Cherry's tenuous hold on a career.

Like all Hiaasen novels, there is a steady stream of bizarre characters and an underlying environmentalist theme which result in all sorts of bizarre situations and sick, albeit hilarious, acts of retribution. We have an ex-governor hiding out for years in Florida's swamps, the botoxed public relations twins, the psycho body guard who, after losing his left hand to a baracuda, has replaced it with a weed whacker (People tend to take him and his lawn implement seriously), Cherry's enabling parents, and a succession of shady characters who prey on the rich and famous.

At the end everyone gets just what they deserve and the reader is left waiting for Hiaasen's next hilarious dissection of Florida politics,

REPLY TO OBAMA'S LATEST CALL FOR SCHOOL REFORM

I just finished a piece posted on THE DAILY BEAST talking about Obama's recent call for longer school days and the firing of all bad teachers, the implication being that this would go a long way toward making schools better.

It reminds me of the Woody Allen joke at the beginning of Annie Hall. Two ladies at a Catskill resort are talking.

"The food here is just awful," the first one says.

"Yes, and the portions are so small."

I guess that is the newest received wisdom to cure all that is ailing public education. The teachers are bad and need to be fired, so let us expose our children to them for even longer periods of time.

I've written about this before, but how many bad teachers are we talking about? 80%? 60%? Less than 50? One or two? How many "good" teachers taking the place of "bad" teachers will we need to compensate for rotten and disinterested parents, aging schools with antiquated connectedness, unfunded mandates, and tests that only serve to impede instruction in inner cities while doing nothing for affluent suburbs, who don't need the help anyway?

I suspect that the percentage of bad teachers, whatever that means, in education is about the same as the percentage of bad doctors, lawyers, parents, plumbers, gas station attendants, 7-11 clerks, businessmen, and POLITICIANS. I say fire them all and let illegal immigrants do the job. Their image couldn't be much worse.

I obviously think Obama is way off the mark on this one, but I'm still not ANGRY. I don't think he is a fascist, or a Colonialist from Kenya. If I had the money and the time I would still love to attend John Stewart's Reasonable Man March, or whatever it is called. I just wish that teachers would stop serving as the scapegoat for the failings of the other institutions of society, like the Family, to name just one.

FREEDOM - Jonathan Franzen

These are tough days to be a liberal. We just take ourselves too seriously and so when the inevitable waves of criticism come we get confused, fight back for awhile, and then go off into a corner and pout. How can all those nasty republicans and nutwing tea partiers not understand what we all know to be true? Don't these people read papers? Don't they value logic and facts?

When we come into power, we lose our sense of humor. When John Stewart skewered George W. Bush back in the good old days of a republican administration, we got the joke and laughed uproariously. But when he skewers Obama, we feel angry and betrayed. When The New Yorker published its infamous cover before the last election of the Obamas dressed like Muslims fist bumping each other, we were outraged. We got the joke, sort of, but knew that all those stupid conservatives out there weren't smart enough to see satire when it hit them in the face. No wonder our detractors say we are elitist. They say it because we are.

The current political climate is a good one for reading Jonathan Franzen's new book. It focuses in on all those themes that are keystones for liberals and anathema for conservatives: Environmentalism, Corporate Greed, Conservative Insensitivity, and of course, Freedom versus Liberty. And just like in real life, none of those themes and conflicts get resolved. Every one ends up selling out.

Briefly, it is the rambling story of Patty and Walter Berglund, their life long rock and roller college chum and iconoclast, Richard Katz, and their son Joey. There are other characters, much too numerous to mention here, who have the same significance as single episode crew members on the USS Enterprise. They help move the plot and give the main characters someone to play against, but that is all.

Patty is the main character here, mostly because her therapeutic autobiography supplies the reader with all the essential history to understand the tensions that energize the plot. A misunderstood daughter of liberal wealth. A teenaged rape victim. A basketball star at the U. of Minnesota. A desperate housewife and all that implies. And a cloying mother of a rebellious son. Patty is all those things.

Walter is the hero. A passionate environmentalist. A sell out to the 3M corporation. A disillusioned father. A betrayed husband. A monumental rationalizer. A victim of circumstances he helps create. That is Walter.

Richard is the brooding third side of this improbable love triangle. A talented guitarist. A slave to his selfishness. A person with impulse control issues. A collosal womanizer. An object of love for both Walter and Patty. Richard is the soul of this novel.

The intricacy of the plot is worthy of Joyce Carol Oates. It meanders from the suburbs of the twin cities, back to college days and before, to Washington D.C., to the mountain destroying coal mines of West Virginia, to the gulf war, to South America, and back to Minnesota. The characters fall in and out of LIKE with one another and at the end everything, except the state of the country and the world, seems to be working out.

It is a very topical novel. Most of the action takes place during Bush II and eventually ends up with the Obama administration. Bush II doesn't come off very well; the jury in the book, as well as in real life, is still out on Obama.

My reaction to the whole thing has been keeping me up nights ever since I finished it about a week ago. It was impossible to put down and I finished the 562 pages in two glorious days. It was also the first book I've read since Underworld that I felt compelled to underline.

The main reason the book has been keeping me up nights is because I feel a little guilty about liking it so much. It really isn't a work of art in the sense that DeLillo's tour de force is. It is more like journalism and I always feel like I've cheated myself somehow when I read something that isn't ART. I loved Stieg Larson's trilogy, but I'm a little ashamed to let people see me reading it. I also love John Irving and Pat Conroy, but after reading something by those guys I feel the same sheepishness I feel after eating a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Then I get angry at my reaction and the similarly snobbish reactions of elitist reviewers for The Atlantic or The New Yorker. I mean what exactly is wrong with a compelling story? Why does a book have to be hard to read in order to be great? Why is journalism (my snobbish put down word for non-art) any less worthy than art?

I think I have an answer, at least for me. I saw Frida the other night, a wonderful movie about the love of Diego Rivera and Frida with Trotsky thrown in for good measure. I thought it was obvious (not to mention one of the points of the movie) that Frida's tortured canvases were art, while Rivera's magnificent murals were merely journalism. Hamlet said one should hold a mirror up to nature, but an artist, I think, does more than that. Frida took reality and deconstructed it, threw it up in the metaphorical air, rearranged it, and made us look at it in completely new ways.

Underworld is a greater artistic achievement than Freedom because it does the same thing. It reinvents the way stories are told by playing with chronology, point-of-view, and even questioning reality itself. Freedom never approaches that and therefore only reaffirms what we already know to be true. There are no new insights. But the reaffirmations are wonderful and I loved every one of them.

I have two paintings (posters actually) by Ray Knaub hanging in my home. One is a commision he did for the Georgetown railroad showing the train going over a bridge suspended over a gorge. It is a wonderful piece constructed on an epic scale. The other is a still life of three pots, the background all awash in shades of amber. It plays with realism a little and ends up being a painting not about three pots, but about all pots and all southwestern art. I love it.

I'll stop rambling now. Freedom is a wonderful book. The three main characters are unforgettable. The insights about conservatism, capitalism, liberalism, and the nature of the artist are compelling and true. Read this wonderful book.

Let me end with the essential conundrum of the novel:

What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.

In The Magus, Conchis tries to explain to Nicholas that Freedom was the RIGHT to do all and the prohibition not to do all. Freedom examines the same paradox.

Life in the Maintenance Lane

Katherine here today.

I learned a long time ago that life is basically maintenance. I tried to teach Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a number of times and it certainly taught me to maintain the bits and pieces of my life in any number of ways. I'm not sure what my students got out of it, but it always helped me.

I get up and I just start maintaining things in between what I do to earn a living. I maintain teeth, skin, hair, my weight, my fitness, my brain (I hope), my clothing, my relationships with friends and family, my nails, my emails, my car, my garden, my yard, and our finances. I maintain the lists I make of the stuff I have to maintain. If I had a motorcycle, I'd maintain it too just like Pirsig's book suggests.

Normally this maintenance business doesn't bother me too much. I just get up and start doing what needs to be done. I've even done pretty well when the maintenance demands have escalated. Stuff like cancer got in my way and increased my daily protocols, but I managed to keep plugging away like a good little soldier.

Last week I collapsed though. Two new sets of protocols entered the picture and the result was two days where I lived on the verge of tears when I wasn't actually crying. I wasn't sure I could take any more maintenance chores than I was already doing and I simply crashed and burned. I'm doing better now though thanks to Jim and C. Fite and Christine (my beautiful daughter-in-law) who somehow said and did the right things at the right time. No one else really knew I was in trouble at the time.

I have "frozen shoulder." Mastectomy patients like me and band leaders get it. Last spring my shoulder seized and I couldn't raise my left arm straight up and I couldn't put my left arm behind my back. I could hike and kayak though, so I decided to take weeks off from knitting and anything else that required my shoulder to go up or my arm to go behind my back. I was pretty sure rest would fix the shoulder.

Resting did not work. Now I see a physical therapist regularly and do all sorts of new maintenance work. She warned me it could take up to 18 months for my shoulder to return to normalcy, if it ever did. She taught me my stretches and exercises and 40 new minutes of protocols were added to my daily duties.

Three days later I stabbed a thorn under my right thumbnail while putting on my gardening gloves. I thought I removed the thorn. Two days later my thumb was a mess and I had a substitute doctor (mine is out of town) removed more of the thorn. Another two days passed and things were worse and I went in for a LONG procedure or a SHORT surgery where another substitute doctor lifted my thumbnail and dug around for remaining thorn fragments. This hurt a lot. This also added three 15 minute thumb soakings and four rounds with a heat pad to my daily protocols. This was when the good little soldier just died inside me.

My thumb procedure was last Monday and it's Friday now. Jim has hovered and brought me my favorite ice cream (Salted Butterscotch by Sweet Action Ice Cream Co.) and loved me in so many ways through my grumpy two weeks. He's even worried that I can't knit for now. How this logical fellow can love me like a pure romantic I'll never know, but I'm so glad he can. We are a perfect odd couple somehow.

C. Fite actually stopped by the house with flowers and a perfect card. The only card I've ever saved. Christine listened to me when I hurt and called me with good news about herself like she was truly my daughter. My heart soared. The world started getting better again and my little soldier self began to return.

Even though my heart hurt and I felt like I would never get back to having a normal shoulder and thumb, I never skipped a single protocol along the way--I just started resenting all the maintenance. Jim and C. and Christine made me remember that I should never resent the stuff keeping me here to love and be loved.

The seeds that Jim and C. and Christine planted all last week bloomed into a lot of hope this morning. Their love combined with finishing a wonderful book while sitting in my knitting den seemed to put me all back together. My little soldier inside is feeling pretty darn perky right now.

I promise to write about the book when my thumb is up to more typing. It is The Swan Thieves by Susan Kostova. I plowed through all 661 pages this week and it ended perfectly for me. I'm such a romantic idealist and it's rare for an ending to heal my heart in the way this book did. That's a lot.

I'm not sure what my point is today. If you're reading this, I hope you'll keep maintaining your motorcycle or the little soldier inside yourself even when you're feeling sad. You discover people love you and it's only your perception that is screwed up. I learned that long ago from Sissy Hankshaw and her huge thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins). I just forgot to follow every lesson I ever taught.

Twitterpated

I was being interviewed on SKYPE the other day for some kind of generational reality road trip show with Nate when the interviewer asked me what I thought of Facebook and Twitter and the like, hoping to get some kind of old codger reaction to all this new-fangled technology that is ruining the world. She wasn't disappointed.

I told her I thought Twitter was basically a work of the devil and then said a bunch of random things because I was flustered by the crappy sound on SKYPE and the -at least- thirty second lag between my statements and her reception of them. It is hard to be articulate in that situation, at least it is for a technologically challenged person like myself.

As a result, I spent a sleepless night trying to come up with a better response, and I came up with the real reason I hate Twitter in particular and most electronic communication in general. It looks ugly! I hate the abbreviations and the typographical short hand that all proficient Twitterers use.

LOL
:)
:(
R U OK?
L8 for appt
Gr8 to hear from U

Yuck. That was not an abbreviation, just my reaction to the whole thing.

I know I am an old English teacher and therefore the worst kind of cultural dinosaur, but I just love the way a page looks when it is filled with blocks of beautiful print. I like the way Starkeyland looks, even though I know I could make it look much more modern by having sidebars and scrolls and links all over the place and adding all sorts of nifty colors, but I hate that.

Even though I hate the content of The Wall Street Journal, I love the way it looks. Watching Fox News always makes me nauseous and not just because of its content. I much prefer watching talking heads on PBS. Back in the good old days I was proud of the way The Ram Page looked compared to all of the other glitzed up high school publications that other journalism programs produced. True, we didn't clean up with awards at Colorado Press Day, but I always just attributed that to the rotten taste and values of the judges.

I appreciate the Tod Helton/Dexter Fowler Rockies commercial where they are sitting in the lockerroom and Tod asks Dexter "What's a Tweet?" Fowler explains and Helton's reaction is the same as mine. "You mean you tell people your daily schedule?! Who cares what you are doing? You're basically still a rookie."

8am rewriting Gr8 Gatsby

10am running marathon LOL

11am lunch w/K

etc. etc. etc.

YUCK

Open - Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi's autobiography was completely mindless. It was wonderful to read.

It has spent some time as #1 on the best seller list and it has lots of hype. Time said : "One of the best sports autobiographies os all time . . . One of the better memoirs out there, period."

"Not your typical jock-autobio fare. This literate and absorbing book is, as the title baldly states, Agassi's confessional, a wrenching chronicle of his lifelong search for identity and serenity, on and off the court." -Los Angeles Times

"The most revealing, literate, and toes-stompingly honest sports autobiobraphies in history." -Rick Reilly.

I would have to agree, but keep in mind that we are talking about sports autobiographies here. Sure, compared to Wilt this is heady stuff. Of course Wilt Chamberlain went into much more detail when listing his sexual conquests. By Wilt's account he would have had to bedded three or four women a day starting at age eight to amass the numbers he gives himself credit for.

It is also better than Tom Jackson's autobiography in conjunction with Woody Paige, although one of the hypes on Jackson's back cover came from my mother-in-law. "With the exception of my husband, Charlie, Tom Jackson has given me more pleasure than any other man," she cleverly asserted. I think that was the best line coming from that book.

I don't think it is as good as Mad Ducks and Bears (Alex Karras), but that was more an expose of football life than an autobiography. And, of course, it can't compete with my childhood favorite, The Knute Rockne Story. My junior high devotion to Knute Rockne and Notre Dame makes Rudy whathisname look like a slacker. But I digress.

I had just finished reading Brooklyn and went to the Tattered Cover to buy Freedom, but as is usually the case when I walk into a bookstore, came home with a handful of other titles. I spent the rest of the day determined to start reading Jonathan Franzen's novel, but some force kept pulling me toward the Agassi. I gave in and, just like many of the reviewers said, I couldn't put it down. I finished it by the next morning by reading it in between serves at the U.S. Open. Even though I am a rotten tennis player, I love the game; if you love the game, you love Agassi.

Actually, Agassi merely dictated the book ( I suspected as much from the start) and a typist put it on paper and/or hard drive. Then J. R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar) gave it some structure. It is a successful collaboration. The book presents a straightforward account of Agassi's career in chronological order. It paints a pretty horrible picture of his driven father (Agassi was forced, never cajoled, into hitting 2,500 hundred balls a day!) and Nick Bollettieri's horrific tennis boot camp in Florida. It details his rivalry with Pete Sampras and his hatred (mutual) of Boris Becker. It takes us through a number of his more important matches, everyone of which I remember watching with rabid attention. And, of course, it talks about his awkward relationship with Brooke Shields and his eventual true love, Steffie Graf. It also talks about his heavy experimentation with Crack/Meth during his low years and his humiliating rehab with the help of Brad Gilbert and a whole entourage of trainers, pseudo shrinks, family, and friends. At the end he spends a lot of time talking about his charities, notably the school he funds and runs in Vegas. The whole ordeal ends on a triumphal note, and even though Agassi is basically a whiny jerk through most of his life, we end up happy for his apparently happy and successful future.

My main reaction to the whole thing is a certain bemusement at the error of magnitude that has characterized his life. The obstacles he had to overcome seem so insignificant, so trivial, compared to the obstacles that most of us face every day. Okay, okay, he had a bullying father who pushed him to be a tennis star and make millions and millions of dollars. The women in his life didn't understand him. He was tempted by drugs. Sometimes he lost important matches. Once, he was forced to watch The Joy Luck Club with Barbra Streisand and a collection of hollywood stars. He was on the set of Friends when Brooke Shields, in a cameo, licked the hand of one of the guys (Agassi stormed out.). His back hurt a lot when he got out of bed. But, praise the lord, he overcame all of that to start a school and live with Steffi Graf and his kids in Vegas. Interesting, but not the stuff of tragedy. I mean we could all tell him stories that would break his heart.

That's the thing with sports nuts. Listen to them argue on some sports talk show and you would think that the trading of Brandon Marshall was the end of the world as we know it. Kyle Orton only threw ONE TOUCHDOWN against the Jags and sports columnists like Woody Paige and Mark Kizla manage to opine for 700 words each as if that actually mattered. Of course, I was, and continue to be, devastated that Federer lost in the semis, but that is another story.

In biographies of people of significance like John Adams or Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln, the obstacles they encounter are out of my experience. They are huge stumbling blocks requiring huge deeds by huge men or women. By contrast, it is fun to read about Andre's puny travails but he needs to take himself a little less seriously. Of course, if he did that he never would have dictated his book and then where would we be.

The Renaissance Bellhop and The Road to Oxiana

Katherine today.

One of the wonderful things about nice hotels is that there are people hired to lug your stuff around and bring you things simply because you want them. They are called "bellhops," but it's a silly out-dated name. I've discovered that some of my favorite people are or were bellhops and there's some sort of natural art to getting to know your bellhop. I call it curiosity. If you start asking questions about your location, restaurants in the vicinity, or about the hotel itself--well, you discover a lot about your bellhop and sometimes you learn a lot about where you are.

Some bellhops, sadly, are dolts. They have no thoughts about their surroundings and often feel you're wasting their valuable time answering questions that you should have researched online for heaven's sake.

One of my favorite bellhops was Jeremy up at Jenny Lake Lodge. He felt the bellhop/cocktail waiter/fire-starter role was probably among the noblest on the planet. He turned his delivery bicycle into the "bellmobile" and had a handyman's belt with a plunger proudly hanging from some appropriate slot that was the "bell-belt." He rang the bell on his "bellmobile" to announce his arrival and the folks in the Columbine cabin heard him often--plumbing problems there. My favorite memory was when we first did the 21 mile jaunt over Paintbrush Divide and came home so blistered and tired we knew we couldn't trudge over to the lodge to get much needed cokes. Jeremy (alias "The Bell Man") somehow knew our needs and arrived with a pitcher of Coke before we could even call and request it. Jeremy loved his job and was born to serve. He manages a big hotel in the Caribbean now. That always makes me happy.

Sometimes bellhops are bellhops because they love the surroundings and will do anything to be near them. The Lodge at Vail is peopled with snowbums trying to eke out livings between days on the mountains skiing or boarding. Jenny always employs a conglomeration of fishermen, hikers, paddlers, and mountain climbers and between the wait staff and the bellhops you could learn about anything in Grand National Teton Park--Yellowstone too.

This year at Jenny we got to know Ross. I'm not sure Ross was enthralled with his job title, but he was a great bellhop nonetheless. He delivered ice with elan and if we were on the porch when he came by we talked books mostly. He created a cocktail just for me--vodka with huckleberry lemonade. Ross spent last winter in Beaver Creek and was summering in the Tetons. He raced down mountains all winter and came to Wyoming to climb them all summer. There was a certain symmetry in his down and up lifestyle that pleased me.

Ross graduated from GW in DC (I think I've got that right--it's been over a month and my memory isn't what it used to be). His degree was impressive and I think environmental, but I'm really guessing there. Anyway, he became my model for the Renaissance "bellhop." Between his bellhop shift and his cocktail shift he'd either read a book or climb a mountain. Wonderful balance.

One day we went to Jackson to find him a climbing book--we thought he could attack both his loves simultaneously that way. We wanted The Wall by Jeffrey Long (cool book about climbing El Capitan with quite an ending), but couldn't find it and settled on a light book about climbing the fourteeners in Colorado called Halfway to Heaven. It's just fun. Nothing heavy there at all as I recall.

Ross was equally inspired and he brought us The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron. He indicated it would be the book he wanted with him if he were stranded on a desert island. This book is not a book just for fun and I felt a bit embarrassed at having picked such a light book for him when Jim and I are usually pretty good about matching books and readers.

Anyway, I've just finished The Road to Oxiana and it is not the book I would want with me on a desert island and I keep wondering why it is Ross's choice. I need to email him about that.

It's an interesting book even though I had to slug my way through the first half. It's a travel book detailing the writer's trip through Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930's. Robert, our traveler, is almost creating the genre most recently used in Eat, Pray, Love (I didn't like that one, but I'll spare you my Eat, Pray, Love rant). The first half seemed like constant descriptions of minarets, mosques, and mausoleums. Having never really seen any of that geography other than watching it get blown up during modern press coverage of wars in the area, the architecture and landscape described was hard for me to connect to--all the fault of my lack of Mideastern experience. I finally did better when I stopped trying to read it straight through and began to read Robert's daily entries one at a time. It took me over a month with this approach, but I appreciated the book much more that way.

I really liked the second half. I began to understand Robert's tone of voice--probably because he talked more about people and the frustrations of his journey. Robert was wonderfully sarcastic and he and his fellow drop-out from Oxford, Christopher, began to suggest that the Eat, Pray, Love formula for self-awareness through travel might sometimes be selfless rather than selfish.
At the end of the book, Robert credits his mother for teaching him to see the world the way he did. I loved that.

I think Robert and Christopher logged about 850 miles in ten months and never did reach their precise goal. Terrible roads, cars and lorries in sorry shape, bizarre political decisions, and the whims of local potentates detained them regularly. They were often ill. Christopher was arrested for unexplained reasons. The accommodations were rustic and the local folks often chased them away from the architecture they wished to study. They loved it all and were sad when it ended. Robert's perception of reality as almost always breath-taking and his ability to see the kindnesses of others and realize his own indiscretions were beautiful.

If I'd read the book in 1937 when it was first published, it never would have crossed my mind to wonder if Robert and Christopher were gay. I wondered though. They liked dressing up. Robert packed for them "Martha-like." Robert missed Christopher when he was in jail. Even though I know I need to put things into the context of the times, this exchange made me wonder too:

"Seeing Christopher slopping about the deck in a pair of shorts and that red blouse he bought at Abbasabad, Miss Willis asked: 'Are you an explorer?'
'No,' answered Christopher, 'but I've been in Afghanistan.'"

The book certainly shows how not much has changed culturally in the area as well. The Russians are in and out and skirmishing with the Afghans. Doctors are forbidden to treat women. The various religious sects in both Persia and Afghanistan fuss over everything--down to what is permissible for Robert and Christopher to visit, draw or photograph. The book didn't inspire much hope for peace in the Middle East.

My favorite moment in the whole book is when Robert talks about an earlier traveler in the area--someone named Moorcraft who died in 1825 at Andkhoi. Yet another traveler, Sir Thomas Holdich in The Gates of India, thought Moorcraft an idiot for carting 30 books with him on his journey because sojourners should only take along "light and handy equipment."
Robert's response to all this made my heart sing:

"A light and handy equipment! One knows these modern travelers, these over-grown prefects and pseudo-scientific bores dispatched by congregations of extinguished officials to see if sand-dunes sing and snow is cold. Unlimited money, every kind of official influence support them; they penetrate the furthest recesses of the globe; and beyond ascertaining that sand-dunes do sing and snow is cold, what do they observe to enlarge the human mind?
Nothing...
No one thinks of (the traveler's) mental health, and of its possible importance to a journey of supposed observation. Their light and handy equipment contains food for a skyscraper, instruments for a battleship, and weapons for an army. But it mustn't contain a book. I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveller: 10,000 pounds for the first man to cover Marco Polo's outward route reading three fresh books a week, and another 10,000 pounds if he drinks a bottle of wine a day as well."

I liked that.

I'm glad I read the book. It's not what I would take to a desert island and again I wonder why it is Ross's choice. Mostly I've begun to think about trying to travel with a keener eye and trying to decide what book I'd like with me on a desert island. I'll let you know.

Zen and the Art of Sausage Making

Katherine today-just so you know.

Yesterday we spent the whole afternoon making various types of sausage. We got into sausage making last Christmas because each year we treat ourselves to some new cooking technique. We learn something and it fills the time between familial extravaganzas and keeps me from having less-than-merciful thoughts about the dark Republicans who litter my family tree. We've taken up pasta-making, tamale-making, cheese-making--lots of stuff like that. Last year it was sausage-making.

This was our fourth foray into sausage making, filling our freezer so we can have an array of choices whenever we want. Last winter whenever the weather people indicated we'd be snowed in, we'd rush out to Tony's and get the meats and sausage casings and spend the wintery day this way.

We started with one little Mario Batali recipe and just made Italian sausage. By the third outing, we'd figured out what we needed to do and we started improvising. Those improvised sausages were so good that we began playing around with all sorts of possibilities and yesterday we cranked out three miraculous batches.

Since I am a sweetheart (well, most of the time), I decided to share the process for any adventurous cooks who might be reading out there.

Equipment:

You need a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer. If you have a Kitchen Aid mixer you're halfway there because they have the right attachments available. We bought them for ourselves for Christmas last year--not real pricey either.

Ingredients:

You need meat, fat, filler (breadcrumbs, potatoes, etc.), liquid (wine, brandy, stock, etc.), and seasonings. The trick is learning to trust your instincts and be playful. You also need sausage casings which you can get at gourmet food shops that make their own sausage (we get ours at Tony's).

Basic Procedure:

You need to get the meat and fat really cold, but not frozen because it will grind up better. We usually just put it in the freezer as we start setting up. Cut the meat and fat into one inch cubes so it can make it through the grinder. Then you grind up the meat and fat. You need about one fourth of the quantity to be good fat (pancetta, pork belly, bacon). Add filler and appropriate seasonings. Add the liquid last until you get a texture that is tighter than meatloaf, but not too tight (that took some time to figure out). Then you need to try the sausage before you stuff the casings. Just fry up a small portion and give it a whirl. It's a nice break in the process too, especially if the sausage is yummy.

The next part is a bit yucky, but you get over it quickly. You need to clean the casings. Put a length in a bowl of water and then get it out and trap it between your fingers and pull it through to get rid of excess water. It's slimy--what would you expect for pig intestines? Attach the casings to the sausage stuffer, run the sausage mix through the machine until it appears at the end of the tube, tie a knot in the casing, and then start pushing the meat filling through the attachment (follow the Kitchen Aid directions). Make one long sausage and when it's done, pinch it and twist it into the serving sizes you want. Put the little beauties in the freezer and then they're ready when you want them.

Yesterday's Recipes:

Duck Sausage (makes 12 smallish sausages). This one is costly and you only share it when you know someone understands how special it is.

2 whole duck breasts
1/4 pound pancetta
fresh homemade bread crumbs--maybe a cup
zest of two oranges
salt to taste
white pepper to taste
red pepper flakes to taste
sage to taste
French chervil to taste
1/4 cup Citronge liqueur
orange juice as needed to get the moisture level correct

Breakfast Sausage (makes 28-32 large sausages)

4 pounds pork butt/shoulder (same stuff, but stores call it by different names)
1 pound pork belly
fresh homemade bread crumbs--maybe two cups (sheer guess here because I just throw it in until it looks right)
salt to taste
white pepper to taste
lots of red pepper flakes (we like it spicy)
onion powder
sage to taste
French chervil to taste
beef stock as needed to get the correct moisture level

Italian Sausage (makes 28-32 large sausages)

4 pounds pork butt/shoulder
1 pound pork belly or pancetta depending on how rich you feel
fresh homemade bread crumbs--maybe two cups
salt and white pepper to taste
red pepper flakes to taste
lots of marjoram, basil, oregano, fennel seeds
white wine as needed to get the correct moisture level

You can do anything. Our last round included a veal sausage where we added cooked mushrooms with partially cooked and diced potatoes as the fillers--that was pretty darned expensive, but heavenly. Strangely, the finished sausages are somehow beautiful although that's hard to imagine before you actually go through the process.

It was a great day and our freezer is filled to the brim with wonderful sausage goodies. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving when I can start my stuffing by pulling out some of the breakfast sausage for my original recipe.

BROOKLYN - Colm Toibin

Katherine and I have had this running argument for almost as long as we've known each other about gender bias in literature. Her point has always been that far too many of the novels we asked our students to read were written from a male point of view by mostly male artists. I always argued that gender was not an important factor in literature that was truly great. Sure, Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn are about boys, but that doesn't take away from the universality of those works. Holden's and Huck's realizations spring from situations associated with boys, but they are the same realizations that girls have and the same satisfaction can be had by reading about them, regardless of the sex of the reader. Madame Bovary, I suppose, is in my top five list of favorite novels precisely because Emma's story transcends gender even as it is based on it.

Don't get me wrong. I certainly agree that there are more books about male characters than female ones on required reading lists and I think educators should use a little affirmative action in order to offer students a better balance, but I don't think the current situation is some kind of male conspiracy. The Bean Trees is a great book, but I think teachers make an egregious error when they emphasize feminism in their approach to it. It isn't a feminist statement; it is an exploration of parental love, marital love, and the fight against injustice that love should always engender. Even a book like Catch-22 that on the surface seems to treat women like objects, ends up celebrating the refuge and love provided by those same women. It is a great novel and as a great novel transcends gender.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin is such a book and I strongly suggest that you postpone all further activities and rush out and read it. Just like Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man offers, to my way of thinking (understand that this is the Jesuitical training in me speaking), a pitch perfect description of young introspective males, so does Brooklyn offer such a portrait of a young woman in the person of Eilis Lacey, an Irish lass who makes the journey to Brooklyn.

Overshadowed by her sister, Eilis is destined to be nothing more than a wallflower who dabbles in bookkeeping until, at her sister's instigation, she escapes the social restraints of the home land for the scary freedom of the boroughs of New York City. Terribly homesick at first, she ends up standing up for herself, taking night school classes and falling in love with a life-loving Italian plumber, Tony.

I know, I know, this sounds like the makings of a Harlequin romance and maybe it is, but Toibin's exquisite exploration into the character of an ordinary human being placed in a new set of circumstances just overwhelms the reader with recognition. I was brimming over the entire time even when I reached the last twenty pages and had to force myself to keep going to the inevitable conclusion.

But the conclusion wasn't as inevitable as I thought. It was instead almost exactly what you would expect to happen, but in that expectation we see how ordinary people doing ordinary things can approach tragic heights.

I've always liked those novels that eschewed the grandiose for the commonplace. Most stories, after all, are not about great individuals clashing with great forces; instead, they are about people like me who sometimes find themselves in over their heads frequently due to their own stupid, human choices. Emma Bovary is like that. The sad little car salesman in Fargo is like that. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are certainly like that.

Brooklyn shows us that choices, even insignificant ones made by seemingly insignificant people, can be just as heroic, just as existential, as those made by anyone no matter how great or heroic they seem.

I am now going to go right out and buy Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I've never read it, but I'm betting it will feel a lot like Toibin's wondrous achievement.

I Was Bored Today So I Watched Glen Beck. Big Mistake

I just finished watching the first fifteen minutes of Glen Beck and, just like every other time I have watched, I came away amazed at the "content" of the show. Today was the first show since his Restoring America rally at the Lincoln Memorial, so I was expecting him to talk about that triumph with a certain amount of Beckian smugness, but instead he spent fifteen minutes showing video clips of different media types attacking the whole thing. After each clip he reminded his viewers that he is the ONLY non-governmental figure IN HISTORY to have single-handedly convened 500,000 people for such a happening. (Actually, if you don't count Martin Luther King, the last person who got that many folks in one spot had to throw together a bunch of loaves and fishes to feed them all. Of course that couldn't happen in Washington because the waters around the city are too polluted.)In any event,he was sad when he shared his feelings of persecution when left-wing pundits bad mouthed the event, or when LIBERAL media outlets underestimated the crowd at only around 100,000.

I've always been amazed at the self-referential nature of the show, at the portrayal of poor Mr. Beck as a kind of martyr for the conservative cause who allows himself to be regularly pilloried by people like Joe Klein and news outlets like The Huffington Post. When he isn't congratulating himself for his courageous stands, he is drawing conspiracy theories that would make Mel Gibson blush. Well maybe not, but you get the idea. He seems more a caricature than Stephen Colbert and Colbert is trying to be a caricature.

He expressed his sadness, mixed with a little self-righteous outrage, over the skepticism with which his claims are met. What does he expect. His estimate for the crowd was five times the estimates of every other media outlet. He, of course, uses this disparity to support his claim that the media is simply a lap dog for PROGRESSIVES. Well, I'm a PROGRESSIVE (I keep putting that word in caps because whenever Beck uses it he seems to expect his audience to collectively shudder)who is skeptical of Beck's claims. After all, the last time The Tea Party had a Beck inspired rally in Washington, Fox News estimated the crowd at somewhere over a million strong. To prove their point they aired a photograph of a full-to-the-seams mall. There was one problem with the photo. It was taken years before at Bill McCartney's Million Man March. If you have been to Washington within the last couple of years, you have certainly seen the Native American Museum, an impressive addition to the network of museums in our capital. In the Fox photo, however, you could clearly see on the left the empty spot between the Washington Memorial and The Capital. If you looked closely you could also see a crane being used to erect the Native American Museum. The photo was a complete sham, just like Mr. Beck.

He even addressed the controversy over his choice of August 28 for his rally. As everyone who keeps abreast of things must know, August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Beck claims that his choice of that date was completely innocent and merely coincidental. C'mon man! Beck would like us to believe that when he sat down with Sarah Palin and others to plan this event, they just stumbled upon August 28! "Oh look, I have the 28th free on my calendar." "Well let me see, so do I. This'll work out just fine." Please.

How can anyone in their right mind take this person seriously?