banal news of the day

Introducing a new feature!  News actually culled from real media sources telling you what you already know!

Did you know that there is —snow in Alaska this winter?  I would have missed this exciting news, but I read the Oregonian every day.

Yes, folks, Anchorage Alaska has gotten more snow this winter than usual, up to 150 inches. (that’s as much as we got in the winter of 179 in Chicago).  Snow is–get this–piled up high on the sides of the streets.  An Anchorage resident is quoted as saying he’s “sure glad he has an SUV”.

Whew!  Guess there’s no need to worry about global warming.

What’s next?  News of a heat wave in Jamaica?  Sure how the folks there remembered to buy bathing suits.

the supreme idiot’s big day

Usually State of the Union addresses remind me of the Super Bowl.  They both take place in the dead of winter and are predictable, bland, and boring.  Our idiot-in-chief, however, continues to defy his low expectations. Because of my son’s music lesson I missed the domestic part of his speech, which, upon reading, seemed vague but inoffensive.  But I arrived just in time for his 45 minute ramble on Iraq, which was a remarkable exercise in incoherent paranoid fantasy.

Bush cast the conflict in Iraq as the opening salvo in an epic battle between good (America) and evil (variously identified as Al Quaeda, Shia terrorists, Sunni terrorists, and Hezbollah).  Americans, and those who support their cause, are on the side of hope and freedom.  The terrorists on the other hand, drink blood and eat their own babies.  Should we withdraw from Iraq, the forces of evil will triumph and unspeakable horrors ensue.  And as for the hapless Iraqi Maliki , who  isn’t turning out to be as malleable a puppet as the necons hoped?  They’re Shias, (presumably not of the terrorist kind), who replaced Saddam Hussein (a secular Sunni dictator, but of the terrorist kind).  Bush let him know that he’d better “understand” the terms of the epic battle.  Or else.

The epic battle isn’t ending anytime soon, either.  We will be fighting it for generations.  .

Whew!  Bush was obviously sleeping off a few too many frat parties during history class.  But he obviously found time to read some comic books.

The inconsistencies of Bush’s argument are too numerous to recount.  Does he truly believe, for instance, that the sectarian divisions tearing Iraq apart originated last year?  Does he make no distinction between secular dictators driven by power and greed, and stateless terrorists driven by religious fanaticism?  Did it ever occur to him that factions in Iraq, such as the Kurds, might be exploiting the American invasion for their own ends?  Does he consider the fact that the chaos in Iraq is increasing the power of terrorist factions in Iran and Syria?  Did it ever occur to him that power doesn’t always come out of the barrel of a gun?

Duh.  That would be expecting the guy to think, when he’s using up all his available brain cells remembering to put one foot in front of the other.

The Democratic response was on target but very measured.  To some respect,  I understand their strategy:  better to take the high road and build as broad a coalition as possible in opposition to Bush’s war policy.  Certainly Republican and military antiwar sentiment is growing, and it would be foolish to alienate these newcomers to the party.

But on the other hand, I really wish somebody–Republican or Democrat, civilian or military–would call Bush on some of his more fantastical statements. To accept his paranoid vision as remotely reality-based only validates its legitimacy.  Ultimately somebody’s going to have to say that the emperor has no clothes.  

while you were sleeping

My husband, son and I went to an antiwar march last Thursday–it’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for over four years.  Back then we were a small minority.  But we were obviously ahead of our time, because beliefs that were once all the way out there on the unpatiriotic fringe have now become mainstream.  A group of active duty military lifficials just presented a petition to Congress demanding an immediate withdrawal of troops.  Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Mormon Republican, doesn’t want any more American soldiers dying to “determine the next sucessor to Muhammad”.  Even conservative stalwarts like George Will are backpedaling

Don’t get me wrong–better late than never.  I’m glad all these folks have finally seen the light.  In fact, I think our best hope of stopping this catastrophe comes from diaffected military personnel and Republicans.

But I still have to ask…where have these people been for four years?  And for that matter, where were Democrats like John Edwards, who voted for the initial war resolution and now claim to have been “misled”?  The dubious justification and inherent dangers of this war of choice were evident to me from the start.  Why weren’t they obvious to all these people who had so much more access to information?  And where was the seventy percent of the American public who now opposes the war? George W. is not exactly a brilliant persuasive demagogue.  He sounded like just as much of a blowhard idiot four years ago as he does today.

Did the trauma of September 11 totally suppress their critical faculties, putting them into a stunned coma from which they are only now emerging?  I’ve got a more cynical view, as far as the politicians and talking heads are concerned.  They just didn’t think the Iraq invasion was going to be any big deal.  It wouldn’t last that long.  Not many Americans would be killed.  It wasn’t worth the risk of criticizing the invasion and looking “unpatriotic”.  (the amount of ignorance this reflects regarding the history ot the Middle East, and our own recent history in Vietnam, is, of course, staggering).

As for the American public in general?  They didn’t want to look unpatriotic either.  Plus they just wanted to go about their regular lives and not be bothered.  Why think too much about the news when you can flick the remote and change the channel?

Well, those of us on the lonely antiwar fringe are glad to find you latecomers on our side.  But in the interim, during your four year coma, over three thousand Americans have been killed and over twenty thousand injured.  Countless Iraqis have been killed (estimates say over 35,000 last year) and their country is in shambles.  American prestige and influence has been destroyed throughout the world and that world is a lot less safe place.

You’ve got a lot of blood on your hands, guys.  While you’ve been lying their passed out, Bush and the rest of his gang have caused an awful lot of damage that we are all going to have to clean up.    So do me a favor and don’t act so disengenous. 

optimum mess

Last week, during a chaotic yet joyful visit, my brother showed me a book he’d recently bought, entitled something on the order of “optimum mess”.  The basic thesis of the book was that neater and more organized is not always better.  Hyperneatness and organization carry their own efficiency cost.  Most systems, business or personal, operate most effectively at an optimum level of mess.  The key is to find that level.

I’ve been thinking about that book as I organize my house, office, and life for the new year.  Periodically, I am beset by such urges, usually when its gray and cold, leaving me indoors and face to face with the mess.  I am sloppy by nature.  Clean but sloppy.  Papers pile up, balls of yarn tangle, unread magazines overflow their basket, legos appear in the most mysterious of places.

Complicating the situation is the fact that I am a fan of the ornate, the complicated, the abundant.  I know people who have stripped down, Zen-like houses and seemingly stripped-down lives, but their brain cells must fire in a radically different way. My taste in home decoration is my taste in novels is my taste in life:  gothic and overgrown, full of history, mysterious pathways, and surprises. My ideal is organized creative chaos.  (Yes, I know there’s an inherent contradiction there)

The optimum mess theory  counters the conventional wisdom that you should purge your possessions with relentless regularity.  You never know, they say, when an article in a year old copy of Harper’s might trigger a life-altering revelation, or that bustier from the eighties might prove the perfect thing to wear to a party, or that old record album might be worth $10,00o on EBay.  In truth, on the rare occasions when I’ve made the conscious decision to throw anything other than overt garbage away, I’ve usually regretted it.  Before my marriage and subsequent move to Chicago, I went through a giant pile of childhood memorabilia.  One thing I threw away was a collection of looseleaf notebooks containing canned food labels given to me by my Grandpa Barney, a canned food salesman.  Not only were these labels my only tangible heirloom from my Grandfather, I now see labels like them framed and sold for considerable sums at antique stores.

It’s that ideal of organization that drives these wintertime household frenzies.  My mind is as full of projects as my house is with stuff.  If only I was perfectly organized, I think, I would finish those three screenplays, sew that quilt, knit that flowered bag, grow twenty varieties of heirloom tomatoes, practice the piano, read every issue of the zillions of magazines I subscribe to, cook a new recipe daily, and call my congressman every time Move On sent me an email.

So I’m trying.  Last fall I sorted my yarns by color and texture and placed them in attractive cubicles.  I organized all my free lance article projects in metal files, and when I finish an article I save it on the computer, and throw out all those little post-it notes.  I picked up my son’s hundreds of pieces of Playmobil from where they sat jumbled by his closet, blocking his access to his own impressive collection of children’s magazines.  Together, we reassembled the Playmobil in his brother’s room, which had been sitting large and empty since he left for college.

Playmobil is made in Germany, and each set comes with intricate instructions for assembly, down to miniature sailor’s knots for the pirate ship and snowshoes for the Arctic explorer.  We both love Playmobil in all its complexity, and each time we buy a new one we assemble it carefully and painstakingly according to instructions.  (I even keep the instructions in a file).  But then the castle or iceberg inevitably gets bumped into or simply enthusiastically played with, and collapses.  I have no idea how to put them back together again (don’t ask me to get the instructions out of the file). 

In our reconstructed Playmobil universe, lions romp on the iceberg and pirates wear armor.  Monkeys hang from the bakery walls and cows make friends with the polar bear.  You never know what unlikely incongruity you’ll dream up next.

Now that’s optimum mess.