Look at Vermont

Look at Alaska. Senator Lisa Murkowski conceded the Republican primary Tuesday to tea party/Palin candidate Joe Miller. In conceding, Ms. Murkowski criticized what she called distorted and personal attacks against her by Mr. Miller in the campaign. For his part, Mr. Miller accused Mr. Murkowski’s campaign staff of illegally interfering with the recount.

Look at Glenn Beck (I never said this would be easy.) I’m not sure what he was attempting with his rally at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, but it seems he has ambitions beyond being on Fox News forever. I try to put myself in his shoes. Here’s a guy who used to be a disc jockey and now he’s got a tee vee show, a radio show and his own “university” (however much damage his institution does to our understanding of that word). I’m sure there are people out there telling him he’s a prophet, naming children after him and so forth. It would be hard for me not to get a bit messianic if I was subject to all that and I think my grasp on reality is more tenacious than Mr. Beck’s.

Look across America. The current wave of Islamophobia has given an escape valve to the huge pressure of racism that has run beneath the surface of our continent since Mr. Columbus first made landfall. In Tennessee, western New York, Washington state and Connecticut racists are attacking (respectively) a mosque, a Sufi mosque (Sufis are like the Quakers of Islam, as mild and gentle a people as you’ll find anywhere), a Sikh (who is not a Muslim: what next – attacks on Buddhists?) and a hookah bar (one featuring belly dancers, no less – not exactly Sharia law, dude).
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Purple’s a Fruit.

The grapes really came in this year. They’re ripe now; reminding me that nature has its own schedule, regardless of what I else I think I have to do.

So I was out early this morning, cutting clusters, hoping to get some juice pressed before the day’s (previously scheduled) activities began. The sun was just clearing the trees and it was already hot, having only gone down to 70 or so last night.

The bees were active, heading out toward the fields of goldenrod by the barge canal and hydrangeas of the neighborhood for pollen. The grape arbor is adjacent to the hives and the bee smell was strong in the air. (It’s the goldenrod pollen. My friend Bill says, “People think it stinks. Unless they happen to like it.”) Adrienne calls the bee smell sweet; I think it’s nutty. Either way, it was heavy and cloying in the close morning air. All the odors of the yard – flowers, vegetables, bees and compost – are heady these days with the final fullness of summer.

Grapes don’t ripen simultaneously, even those in the same cluster, so the idea was to find those bunches with the fewest unripe grapes. The big steel salad bowl was quickly filled and many left hanging, but I had at some point to find an accommodation between nature’s agenda and my own.
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Nice to be Important, Important to be Nice

Not that you’d know it by the national media, but we had a primary election in Vermont Tuesday. Pretty exciting, but lacking in tea parties, billionaires trying to buy their way into office, wrestling executives and so forth.

What we had was a five-way contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Our four-term (two-year terms) Republican governor is declining to run for re-election and anyone with ambition and a “D” after their name saw this as their opportunity. (Our congressional delegation consists of two Ds and a lefty I, none of whom is over 90, so no one expects those seats to open soon.)

A five-way primary campaign and everyone was so… nice. Perhaps it was a Canadian contagion; we are a border state. The rivers flow north, the manners head south. Debate after forum, the five limned policy differences so precise one had to be a wonk to appreciate the nuances. (“Oh and before I finish, I’d like to thank my fellow candidates for the great campaigns they’re running…”)

So, of course the national media didn’t pay attention. Where’s the conflict? Who’d care about that race? Vermonters, apparently. Despite moving the date of the primary from September to August for the first time (“Everyone’ll be on vacation!”), voter turnout exceeded all predictions. About 70,000 ballots cast. (“Seventy thousand? I had more people than that in my high school!” I know, I know, but it’s Vermont. We’re tiny.)
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How Hard is This?

Polish President Lech Kacszynski and 95 others were killed in a plane crash in Russia last April. A few days later, Polish boy and girl scouts erected a four-meter wooden cross in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw.

It’s been four months, a new president is in office and life is returning to normal. Most Poles think it’s time to move the cross away from the palace, others think it should be left where it is. It’s getting controversial. Poland’s constitution separates church and state; those who want to move the cross away from the palace say such a display is inappropriate for a modern secular state. Those who want to keep the cross say Poland is an overwhelmingly Catholic country and the cross represents their interests.

Although I may have an opinion on the issue, it’s not for me to decide. It’s for the Poles to decide.
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Drinking Dry the Sea

Consider the environmental woes that confront us. Consider drinking dry the sea. They feel about the same.

Global warming, overfishing, deforestation, uncontrolled release of genetically modified material, nuclear waste.

So cut it down, make it manageable. Choose a single issue – say the release of toxic chemicals into our air, soil, water and our bodies. Reduce it further; only look the effects on human health – in fact, just look at the effect on the health of children.

Even this, perhaps, is more than we can bear.

Poisoned for Profit by Philip and Alice Shabecoff (Chelsea Green, 2010) tours the landscape and history of post-war America’s poisoning of its population, particularly its children.
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“… Is to Stop Discriminating…”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Parents Involved in Community School Districts v. Seattle School District No. 1, (2007) wrote, “(t)he way to stop discriminating on basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who says the Supremes are immune to sound bites? If Chief Justice Roberts believes what he wrote, can we fairly extrapolate that he thinks, “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation is to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation”?

Does he believe? Can we extrapolate? Probably not. Mr. Roberts famously told his the US Senate during his confirmation hearings that a judge’s role is to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” Once ensconced in his lifetime appointment, the record of his court has been to pitch, bat and push as hard as it can toward the right end of the spectrum. In Lebetter v. Goodyear, Mr. Roberts and company eliminated workers’ ability to sue for race or gender discrimination. In Exxon v. Baker, the court slashed away 90 percent of the damages Exxon had to pay victims for the Valdez spill and in the infamous Citizens United case, allowed corporations to spend freely on elections, giving First Amendment rights to businesses.
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Vacation, Then and Now

JOE’S POND, VT – We’re on vacation this week at Joe’s Pond (formerly “Injun Joe’s Pond”) in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Swimming, canoeing, reading on the dock, getting sunburned, walking down to the little store for an ice cream after dinner, hearing the loons call at night.

It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.

There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.

In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.
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