Your Heard It Here First…

Gingrich Wins South Carolina Primary - NYTimes.com 

Did you read what I wrote yesterday? 

I feel like the cartoon guy in a long robe and beard holding a sign. 

How Time Flies

 

So, it’s been a busy time all right.  That and my New Year’s Resolution to keep a diary has taken up some of that time.  Still, I owe you some thoughts from time to time, and how could I resist this: Newt Gingrich slams John King for question on ex-wife (2:01) - The Washington Post. 

You already heard about it, of course, but did it strike you as weird that the truly despicable fellow got an ovation for calling the reporter despicable?  I know that ‘the best defense is a good offence,’ but this was breathtaking.  It ranks up there with the fabled definition of ‘chutzpah’ as killing your parents and asking for mercy because you’re an orphan. 

Some years back an acquaintance recommended a book, “The Sociopath Next Door.”  I think Newt is a sociopath.  He is intelligent, focused, passionate and other interesting things.  But people are merely means to ends, tools to be used, perhaps toys to be enjoyed.  (See Kant’s Second Formulation)

When it comes to caring about something, he is the only one in that universe.  In some ways, now that I think about it, that may make him the incarnation of American conservatism. 

'We're going to take back America' -

Isn’t that we are always hearing?  Ok, not always, but often enough to be recognizable.  According to the the Dubuque Telegraph Herald the razor thin victor, Gov. Mitt Romney: says 'We're going to take back America.’

From whom or what? 

The current president is whom, and by extension all those who voted for him.  Romney’s words, but not only his, essentially say I stole America, and all my fellow unamerican americans.  When Romney says he and his should ‘take back America’ he means my politics are illegitimate. I and mine are bad, he and his are good.

I have heard that sentiment from lots of the candidates.  It seems a very common notion out there in Republican land.  But if you Google ‘take back America,’ you get as many left wing as right wing sites.  So this is not a one sided phrase. 

Lots of people think other people have stolen the country.  What is bothering me is that the logical consequence of saying this is to declare that folks who disagree with you are not your fellow citizens at all.  This phrase is semantically equivalent to saying, “I am a true American, and you are not.” 

Why doesn’t anyone question this language and its implications?  Yes, I know about rousing the base and all that, but at what cost?  Must we demonize the other party to win elections? 

And we wonder why we are so polarized. 

So THIS is what I have

Sciatica is the name, and I was not sure until I started having radiating pain to my foot. Remember how I mentioned a back ache? Well, that is gone now, but before that I had a groin pull and now I think the result of that groin pain was sciatica. You can find out about it from the folks at Mayo. Go to Sciatica - MayoClinic.com

The good news is that I can do most everything. The bad news is that pain killers are little help. About the only time I have no pain at all is lying down. Having been a gym rat for so many years, a modicum of daily pain is normal for me. What I dislike is that it takes a moment or two in the morning (or after extended sitting) to get going again.

Of course, it did not help that I decided to jog a lap or two on Tuesday. Because I slightly favor my right side (where the pain is) I landed poorly on my left foot and felt a jolt to the Achilles tendon. That means I hobble on both legs in early the morning. What a picture that is, I can assure you. Walter Brennan had nothing on me. (He had a distinct walk associated with his grampa McCoy character, in case you don’t get the reference.)

I read that unless the pain is debilitating it will likely go away over time. I have endured sore elbows and strained rotator cuffs before, so this is not news. But it is annoying, so if you have any suggestions about how to hasten my healing let me know.

Yoga? Massage? Acupuncture? All three? If this takes a while one or more could be in my future.

What really nags at me, though, is wondering what I injure next. Wanna start a pool?

A Precious Sadness

At long last, Christmas Eve is a day of calm (even if the evening is full of work).  Our children are grown, so the mystery play of Santa is no longer necessary.  Our material needs and wants are few, so the task of buying and wrapping is smaller.  As the morning moves toward noon I have an island of serenity that allows me to write this. 

So why am I sad?  Not heaving sorrow, mind you, but a sort of bruised tenderness.  Maybe it was catching a movie on cable TV by accident early this morning, “October Sky,” which was ok enough as a story.  The plot and theme are commonplaces now among ‘inspiring movies.’  What might have stayed with me, though, was the setting, West Virginia. 

At various times I have traveled through that place.  Each time I felt a profound sadness amid the stirring beauty of the land.  Nothing quite explains it, but there are notes of resignation and regret in it, caught in the aroma of decaying trees and coal.  Something about the hardscrabble landscape tears right through my eyes and into my heart, a reality that gets covered over by civilization and its false contents.  To be that real, that true, even if it hurts, feels right to me. 

This sort of sadness, born of my visits there and to other portions of the Appalachian hills, is precious.  I do not want it to go away.  Most of the time we want to get rid of sadness, but this kind is precious, somehow to be treasured.

My Facebook page this morning is dotted with people wanting and feeling that magical Christmas sensation, perhaps as a way to connect with a remembered childhood time when the world shimmered with a kind of intensity that tarnishes to dull predictability as we age.  For me, though, the usual Christmas magic feels more false than real.  Angels and shepherds and stars and flying sleighs obscure the shimmer of the world as it truly is. 

Give me young women with rough hands and old men with sparkling eyes, the terrible swift beauty of mountain streams and the smell of pine and hickory smoke.  Keep your angelic choirs and let me hear the sound of the baby cry and the song of the mother soothing it.  Is this not magic, that in a world so hard we still believe life is worth it? 

I crave the broken hearted tenderness that old hills and tired houses and worn lives call up, the sort of world my ancestors knew, the sort of world Galilean peasants two thousand years long ago lived in and through.