My buddy, Kris — #1 of my 5 regular readers — expressed surprise that I didn’t write anything on Earth Day. Of course, my first thought was to recycle a blog entry from prior years. In part, I was distracted by teaching and, in part, I was distracted by thoughts of the Pennsylvania primary (more later).

Earth Day was like every other day, I’m happy to say, in so far as I had moments being there, loving the Earth, if not the world. Our wysteria (as I prefer to spell it) is past peak but still magnificent. It may be the best display of redolent purple bunches in 20 years. The bees certainly think so — those that take time out from the rosemary bushes. The vibrant red to orange to yellow Austrian copper rose by the door is just peaking — its time is much shorter than the wysteria. Birds are everywhere. The hummingbirds are back. Hawks abound (perhaps because of all the damn doves). I nest between a great river and greater mountains beneath a stunning sky. I think Frank Zappa said it best when he said, “It’s fucking great to be alive.” (There goes my parental rating. Sorry, kids.)

It’s not that I’m always high on life. It is obvious that it is far easier — more natural — for humans to destroy than preserve. And the End of Days are going to be hideous and slow. But, optimist that I am, I believe the Earth will rebound and return without out the infection of humankind. (To our successors: Learn from our mistakes, even though we could not.)

Thirty-eight years ago, Earth Day began as an extension of the hippie movement. Yes — thank the hippies! Thank the liberals. Thank Tricky Dick Nixon — whose daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, supports Obama — for bowing to democracy momentarily to support the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act. Every one of those things *infuriates* the Radically Wrong, who would condemn Nixon for his liberalism. (Such insanity may be a consequence of environmental degradation, ironically.)

Peace, love and happiness,
mjh

Twenty-three years ago today, my Mother died of cancer. Just a few days ago, a character on TV asked another how she got over her mother’s death. “I didn’t,” she replied. I fought back tears. A few days before, in the movie, Millions, a mother returns from the dead to speak one last time with her youngest son. She explains that he is the miracle she brought into the world, a sentiment my Mother — like most mothers, I’d like to think — could have expressed to each of her children and grandchildren.

Grief is a crushing sorrow. I understand how it ruins so many lives and leads to suicide or revenge.

A few days ago, I pulled a box out of my closet and started working through the layers of paper that had accumulated. As I sorted through things, I wondered what had started this particular pile. Why have I been holding on to these things? The newspaper at the bottom was my answer: 7/3/07. The day Kitty died. Kitty was my friend for most of 20 years. Merri says Kitty was my daemon, in the sense of the Golden Compass.

Death is bad enough. But to suffer through the slow, painful death of someone you love is reason enough to doubt or curse god. It is the final reminder of Life’s utter indifference to all living things. mjh

Atheists behind the greatest cruelty, says Pope – Telegraph, By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a powerful attack on atheism, saying that it was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.

In the second encyclical of his papacy, the Pope urged Christians to put their hope for the future in God and not in technology, wealth or political ideologies.

His 76-page document, Spe Salvi, comes in the context of rising secularism in Europe and a spate of books attacking belief in God, including the “The God Delusion” by the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins.

In the document, the highest form of papal writing addressed to the whole Church, Benedict XVI said that many people rejected religious faith because they no longer found the prospect of an eternal after-life attractive.

Instead, they had put their faith in human reason and freedom in the hope that the “kingdom of man” would emerge.

In a scholarly analysis, he said that these ideas had originated during two periods of political upheaval, the French and Communist revolutions.

He said that Karl Marx and the 19th and 20th century atheism spawned by his revolution could be seen by some as a “type of moralism” responding to the injustices of the time.

Atheists argued that “a world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God,” the Pope wrote.

Whether the error is the headline writer’s or the pope’s, the quarrel is with Marxist Communism or the biggest practitioners thereof. People are capable of astonishing cruelty, whether they are believers in god or not.

Please notice, though I despise this particular line of “reasoning” and have no use for a pope whatsoever, I do not call for his death, as so many devote believers in god would seek for those they disagree with. I don’t claim to be a better person because I’m an atheist. My point is there are good atheists and evil worshippers. We are all human beings and need each other more than god. peace, mjh

It’s minutes until sunset and already 8 hours past the moment of the solstice. Think of the sun at the top of a 47 degree arc, sliding now towards the bottom in mid-Winter.

It is interesting to read that this is mid-summer’s eve and, in some cultures, the *last* day of summer. A special day, any way you look at it. Darkness and cold loom — seeming a long way off, like death to a teenager. And then, light and heat again — a resurrection we witness but are denied. A cycle so long it seems never-ending, though even it will someday. mjh

Sunday Drivers – Los Angeles Times, by Dan Neil

The pre-race activities of the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 were all about the troops. In addition to the usual F-22 flyovers and color guard presentations, Lowe’s track director “Humpy” Wheeler arranged for the U.S. Army to “secure” the front stretch of the racetrack, with troops in full battle rattle, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and a Howitzer. Eight Nextel Cup race teams surrendered $8 million in advertising when they repainted their cars with military-themed graphics as part of an “American Heroes” program. In the money-obsessed world of NASCAR, this was no empty gesture.

Perhaps I was the only one made uncomfortable by this welding of sport and militarism, but it seemed at times I might have been watching the German Grand Prix of 1938. It also seemed to me more than a touch neurotic. It’s possible that, given the fool’s errand on which we have sent our military in Iraq, we feel we can’t say thank you enough, nor can we bring ourselves to say the obvious and more appropriate thing: We’re sorry.

And yet, for all the troop-honoring and American hero worship, the U.S. public is astonishingly illiterate about Memorial Day, which is officially observed on the last Monday in May. ….

The United States wrestled with Sabbatarianism through the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, but by the 1950s, the Puritan Sunday had given way to enormous pressures for leisure, entertainment, commerce and sports. Particularly sports. Harline begins and ends his book [Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl] with Super Bowl Sunday, an event that in its rituals, prayer breakfasts, helmeted heads bowed during the invocation, represents the sacralization of the secular. NASCAR too has its showy effusions of pre-race piety that innoculate it from charges of sacrilege. Thank God and Goodyear.

According to a 2006 Pew Forum survey, 60% of white evangelicals—an audience not unknown to NASCAR—believe the Bible should have more influence on U.S. laws than the will of the people. But are they willing to live by that? If they check their Deuteronomy, they’ll see racing on Sunday is not allowed. The same goes for football, baseball and golf.

It is a curious corner of the American character that allows people who neglect the simplest conventions of patriotism to wrap themselves in the biggest flag imaginable, that permits people who couldn’t name the Ten Commandments at gunpoint to swear they are the divine law of the land.

We’re a deeply patriotic and religious people. Just don’t bother us with the details.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]

[mjh: Cleanse your palate before you read this bonus Neil.]

A Nation Wallows – Los Angeles Times
Dan Neil
June 17, 2007

There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story’s many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.

For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts’ grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.

Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting “guides,” killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture—of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry—exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. “Jurassic Pork,” the New York Post slyly offered.

I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison —one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig—used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.

Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig—and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers—can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America’s dietary coal mine.

The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar. …

[A]s the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you’d expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game “reserves” that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke. …

And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]