A Short Posting

Ski season is here. After months of arid blue skies we've finally been hit with a series of storms across the Northwest. Six inches of snow in the Boise valley were slushed away with days of rain, but the Front is still white and billowy. I had the afternoon off, and Ada being with her grandmother, I jumped in the truck and sped up to Bogus Basin for a few hours of skiing. To the south, the valley was hidden in clouds, but the backside of Bogus was in sunshine. It's a great feeling to look down on clouds: clouds threading apart in the rosy afternoon light, nearly within hand's reach; the sky opening to the north above rolling white-blue mountains and the white shards of the Sawtooth Range some sixty miles away.

It was Monday and just about nobody was up skiing. There was a four to six inch layer of new powder in the trees, enough to make my legs forget that this was the first telemark venture of the year. Perhaps the nice thing about the late snow arrival is its nearness to Spring. We don't have months and months of snow to dig through, and the tinge of warmth in the air gives both an elated spring feeling and a sense of urgency, even sentimentality, to those of us who love being in the snowy mountains. Of course, the dry winter will cost us. Summer and its fires will come. But for now it was good to have a dose of the white stuff, watch the spinning gold of the clouds against the pale blue, and forget the concerns below.

Occupy Boise, Part I

18 December 2011

Yesterday Ada and I went to visit the Occupy Boise campsite, located downtown on the grounds of the old state courthouse. As we entered the patchwork of tents and canvas structures, some trimmed out festively for the holidays, others bearing cardboard signs (Pardon our dust – we're building a better world), a small group standing by the mess tent noticed us and waved. I waved back, and Ada, in my arms, felt emboldened to do the same. One of the group approached us. She was a smiling, dolled-up middle-aged woman who might have stepped right out of a PTA meeting. Following behind her were two others: an old thin black man, and a scruffy white guy who looked tired and dowdy as if he'd just finished a long shift in a factory. Through the tent flap I could see a man stooped over a griddle cooking breakfast for others huddled at the tables. The morning was frigid and except for the breakfast being made, the grounds were quiet, the private tents closed protectively against the frozen sky and the thicket of bare trees overhead.

The dolled-up woman reached out her hand and brightly made introductions. I sensed in that moment their ownership of the grounds, as well as their hope that here was someone — a someone who would bring their young daughter here — who had sympathy for their cause. But politics was not the first thing out of their mouths. The woman looked polished for a reason. She had dressed up to come down here and support the Occupiers, and despite the cold, wasn't it a great day to be alive?

“I don't stay here during the week,” she said. “I only come down weekends to help out. Isn't it great? It's important for our country. So I come down and do what I can.” I asked what that was. “Oh, mostly talk to people. Get the message out. There's a big march on Monday, from the Anne Frank Memorial. You should come, bring your girl,” she enthused, glowing like a cheerleader. I asked what she did, and she upended my expectations by telling me she was a real estate agent, living in the small town of Marsing, an hour away by the Snake River. “We've all got to do what we can,” she nodded at Ada, as though acknowledging the child was doing her part just by being here. “All of us, to take back our country from the corporations and the rich who control it. You know, we've all got more in common than you think. The other day a guy came down here, a tea-partyer, and after we talked awhile he realized we were in the same boat. You just gotta focus on the same problems we all have. This one here's a tea-partyer, too.” She motioned to the white guy, who was talking earnestly with the black man. You had the feeling that all about the grounds quiet determined conversations about the betterment of the country were simmering in the tents and over the breakfast tables and among those standing about slapping their sides to keep warm. “Or he was a tea-partyer. He was just looking for something to grab on to, politics-wise. Then he lost his job. And here he is.”

The men joined us and for a while we talked politics while Ada, to my surprise, watched on without boredom, intrigued by these characters. We began to stroll, compelled by the cold to keep moving. There was a big common tent for gathering and socializing, an open tent which held clothes racks full of sweaters and second-hand garments, a row of port a potties, and other tents situated for the common needs of the grounds. A thick-gauge electrical chord ran to the common tent from an outlet at the side of the courthouse, and I remembered something I'd read about the city, to the dismay of many on the right, allowing the Occupiers to use their power. In all, the city had been fairly accommodating to the Occupiers, compassionate, you might say, to their suffering in the cold.

The old man and I fell back and I asked him where he was from. “San Francisco,” he said. When I told him Ada was born in the City, how we'd lived there for many years, he paused, his face lighting up, and smiled grandly into Ada's eyes. “You from San Francisco too!” Ada can be very cautious around strangers, but now she returned the old man's deep smile.

“You know,” he said proudly, “I have a boy, too.”

“Does he live out here?”

“Well, he was in Snake River,” he waited for me to recognize the name.

“The river?”

“The prison. Over by Ontario. He done seven years there.”

“And that's why you came out here, to be near him?”

“Yes.”

“But he's out now? He's doing alright?”

The old man's face lit up again, a radiant sad joy: “My boy is doing good. My boy is doing good.”

We walked about under the leafless oak and silver maple trees. The old man talked dreamily of San Francisco. Boise had been good to him — “the people are very nice here” — but he longed to be back near the water and hills of the bay. He spoke slowly, precisely, and the space between his words was the dream space of the open road, the careful space that one develops around themselves after years of being alone and wandering. I could tell the old man had a great love, or at least a great memory of love, for his boy, and he needed to be near his son in order to give body to that love. His son was living in San Francisco again and soon he meant to move back there. I hoped that he would, but I couldn't help feeling that it was all just more dreaming, the story he told himself and strangers to give some narrative to his life, some texture just out of reach.

As we circled around to the mess tent, Ada began to get cranky. She was cold and restless. The other two had gone inside the mess tent for breakfast, and the old man and I stopped to say our goodbyes.

“So I guess you'll be leaving for SF soon?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said adamantly. “I got work to do still. I'll be here till spring, at least.”

Fragments of Franzen

15 November 2011

“The solitary I as a writer is forever trying to reach the solitary I of the reader.” — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen was in town the other week to give a talk at the Egyptian Theatre. The Deco-era venue was filled to capacity and the excitement in the air was only faintly dampend by Franzen, who, after bounding on stage with a ruffian's flair, informed us rather stiffly that he couldn't, “for contractual reasons,” discuss his recent novel Freedom. There was a collective pause, and I swore I heard the crowd collectively wonder: then WTF are we here for?

But Franzen soon warmed up. He began reading from a “lecture” regarding the four pestering questions authors must answer “as payment for the privilege of speaking in public”:

1. Is your fiction just “thinly-veiled autobiography”?

2. When and where do you work?

3. Who are your influences?

4. An author interview I read said when writing, the characters take over. Does this happen to you?

Before we get to his reply, it's helpful (as a visual aid, if nothing else) to note how interesting Franzen is to watch on stage, both for how intensely he considers a question, and for his own self-aware position within the question's setting. He seems to be as frankly, and at times as nakedly and uncomfortably, self-conscious as some of the characters in his novels are. But he's equally, on the strength of his capable intellectual probing, as confident. You see him vacillating between the two states, talking through his thoughts, examining the air above the audience and then the floor at his feet, taking an apple from his leather valise and considering it too before taking a bite, pacing slightly as he hems and haws over a question, moving by degrees from doubt and dark humor to a revelation that is only occasionally ironic. The man seems a mix of impulses: wry and irreverent one moment, then good-hearted, even perhaps guilt-addled, the next. Is that what happens to good Midwestern boys when they go to live in Manhattan?

As for Franzen's influences (question number three, for those still hanging in there), he doesn't consider Tolstoy or Kafka or Roth to have any more sway over him than the bands or music (a mention of Stravinsky) or the movies he loves, though clearly these writers are dear to him. We are, I hazard to paraphrase, a product of a mosaic of cultural influences, and whether the effect is shattering — Elliot's The Wasteland comes to mind — or a constructive harmony, is for us to materialize through our art, and not stunt by fixating on the sources of inspiration. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of, or well-versed in, those sources. But Franzen, like Richard Katz in Freedom, seems to harbor an embarrassed revulsion of all things fetishized, of all things obvious. One's modesty must be equal to one's capabilities. “Sure,” he or Katz might say to the fawning questioner, “I like those (insert favorite writers/bands). What of it?”

For those kinds of details — where and when one writes, what music one listens to while sharpening their pencil — are not only fixations, but distractions from the spirit of a thing. According to Franzen, a writer doesn't so much take from the particulars of their exterior life as they receive from the current of their subconscious. Writing is a “deliberate dream”, flowing from one's nocturnal self. Kafka never experienced metamorphosing into a beetle; his story is an extension of states of consciousness explored by the author. For a novel to be worth anything to writer or reader, the writer must grapple with the conditions of the soul — particularly the follies and weakness therein — and bare some truth through one's investigation. And if an author achieves this, completes the exploration, then the geography has been mapped, the mission completed, and therefore in order to write a new novel the author must — and these are Franzen's words — become a new person, for they need new terrain to write about.

Here I thought Franzen might be stretching it. What if one's soul is vast and contains multitudes, as Whitman's does? Surely a soul with hordes of dilemmas and weaknesses and passions and loves and derangements could provide a hard-working author with enough sustenance for more than one book. We do grow and change and come to know more of ourselves over time. And that, I think, is what Franzen is requiring of the writer: to know your vast self and its many, sometimes contradictory, states; to write with your eyes wide to your dreaming soul.

(Which, I must insert, all sounds a bit more romantic than I find Franzen's work to be.)

But this is a question all writers must ask themselves (and these are my ideas here): are they revealing truths in their work? Or at the very least, are they exposing insights into the struggle to do so? Fiction writers face a particular dichotomy: they are at once writing truthfully about stuff of the imagination. And through the artifices of fiction. As Steinbeck said, “A novel is a true story that didn't happen.” To a degree, of course, fiction must be artful. But across that line lies artificiality. And shy of that line, the work becomes autobiography. Which isn't to say it's no longer meaningful, but the genre changes. Or if it doesn't — if the novel stays a novel and that novel stays a good one — the more you suspect the plot to be the experiences of the author, the more a mystique grows around the author. The novelist becomes a kind of hero in the Hemingway model. And maybe it's this role, this mystique, this obviousness, that Franzen is uncomfortable with; one he wishes to dispel with a claim that only thirty or so pages of all his fiction is directly relate-able to his life.

The strength of what I took from Franzen's lecture is this question of truths revealed and wrestled with in a novel. Truths that issue from your spirit's innards, and not necessarily from the trimwork of your day. Speaking of innards, the last book I read before Freedom was Yonder Stands Your Orphan, and the two books couldn't have been more different. While I savored Barry Hannah's swamp-rich, perverse and lovely writing — characters who could “sodomize and puke on [each other's] back, and still respect [each other]” — by the last page I had to ask myself what the point of Yonder was. A thrill-ride, a gorgeous pulp fiction verging on mystery? Being a fan of Cain and Thompson, I'm all for those qualities, but in the end I need some sustenance, some structure built on insights, to make the nastiness go down less cheaply. (Even the roughest moonshine still has some moon it, right?)

On the other hand, while I sometimes feel Franzen's characters to be over-intellectualized, too thoughtful, I at least trust that he's working through his scenes to get at some revelation, deep or quotidian. Hannah's tweaked characters, by contrast, at best exude a drop of truth only after some sick or euphoric contortion: a murder or molestation or barge wreck often larger than the capacity of the author to divine through. Which isn't to say I don't like Hannah. The fucker is funny. And it could even be argued that he rides his subconscious more freely than Franzen does or prescribes. But I need those revelations. For these days, being the pious family man that I am, there isn't much room to wedge in reading, and the book that gets pried open each night before sleepfall had better be good, had better shoot some truths into my slipping soul, or else it's stealing from my dream time. And Kafka wouldn't like that. Nor would Franzen.

An Inch Away

15 September 2011

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

In Chekhov's stories there's always that wisp of happiness just out of reach, sensed, experienced in flushes, but unsustainable, as though by nature true happiness is incompatible with everyday life. And Chekhov's poor lovers, to have any chance at such happiness with each other, must reveal their affair and upend their marriages, which they cannot bear to do. Or can they? Is there a surge of courage, a will to take on “the complicated part” in that last sentence? Or is the complicated part a matter between the two of them? Each time I read that final passage I see it in a different way. I'm left in as much limbo as Anna and Dmitri are. Where is the beautiful life only an inch away?

This early morning, still dark, another shrill bird call woke me – something between an owl's pulsing hoot and a cranes shriek. I've heard it before, always before dawn, and still can't name the mystery bird who's call is as witchy as a coyote's. Anyhow, I couldn't get back to sleep and got up quietly and went to the kitchen to make coffee before sitting down at the lamp beside the window to read. The calm of the early hours was never so serene and vital as it is now with little Ada tearing up the house. All the same, as the trees start to silohet against the greying sky, I get excited for her to wake, to be pulled out of my solitude by the sound of her soft footfalls charging down the hall, her drowsy call for daddy, her tousled hair and the downy smell of sleep on her neck as she lifts her arms around mine. We're never so alone as when we sleep. And never so alive as when the family rustles up together for breakfast at the table, the door open to the cool morning. Am I being too sentimental? Is this a rebuttle to Chekhov? Either way, it's his fault: he put me in this mood.

Some find Chekhov cold, but I think they don't understand him. Or maybe they don't read him at the right time of day. There are certain writers who are not just a reading but a state of mind. When they describe a tree in March coming into leaf against the brown hills you see it precisely. You see it like the leaf was in your hand, the branch bent to you, a current of warmth moving over the hills through the brisk air. All good writers get their voice into your head, of course. But some clear your head. Some are like meditation, settling you and opening your perceptions from within. Chekhov is one of those, as is Hemingway on his good days, Tolstoy. And of the contemporary writers I know, Per Petterson goes on that list. His Out Stealing Horses is one of the best books I've read, ever. I can still smell the pine sap on the boy's hands after a day of felling trees with his father in the summery Norwegian woods.

Maybe I should end on that note, that image. But another comes to mind out of nowhere:

On the radio the other day was an interview with an American journalist who had spent six months in solitary confinement in Libya during the ongoing revolution. He said solitary was the most agonizing, maddening experience, and that what kept him sane were his dreams. When he dreamt, his cell dissapeared and he was no longer alone – and so his dreams became a deeper reality to him. I imagine that his waking hours in the cell became a kind of dead slumber, a grey interlude to pass through, before the meadows and family get-togethers and cocktale parties and seaside hikes and love-reunions and rowdy football games of his dreams.

And I imagine the coldness of waking into that cell. The waking from your family and from the strange lush bird calls outside your window, from your child singing out for you to get up, to the nothingness of a prison cell. And I can't imagine much worse for a person to go through. I don't know why that tangent came to me. I don't want to be dreary. But sometimes it's the sorrows and vulnerabilities of the human experience that come to you when you're thinking of your child. You could cry for heart-joy thinking of them, and from heart-sickness, because they connect you through their big souls to all the human race. You cannot dream or hope or worry for your child without dreaming or hoping or worrying for all the peoples of the world.

Or even for a couple of fictional characters in a story written a hundred and forty years ago. Good literarture connects us; as do our early mornings alone to the lifting darkness; and the sound of our kid's pattering steps down the hall.

Our Times are Everywhere

5 July 2011, Boise

In early morning the first light stirs the birds and their various calls – lush, clattering, whistling, begging – wake me with the dream-sensation I'm somewhere in Brazil, in a dripping rain forest and not the high desert of Idaho. After a few thunderstorms to bring in the solstice, summer is finally here. We leave the windows open to the cool air until mid-morning when the sun flashes off the trees and makes you glad for their shade. In the afternoon it's best to be down by the river or in the hammock on the north side of the house, where you can see through the leaves to the hills in the sun losing their wild-flower mauves to that sandy beige that is the color of heat in this town. Stegner called the West a semi-desert with a desert heart. It's in summer here that that heart starts to beat robustly, pumping salt from your slick limbs and buzzing a dry heat in your ears if you're not lucky enough to be under trees or in water. You've got to do like the birds do around here: sing in the mornings and wait till sundown to dive after your dinner.

Do we Americans tend to be less satisfied with our stations in life than those of other societies? And are we Far-Westerners still less satisfied when it comes to where we live? How much of that insatiability is human nature – our evolved tendencies to roam, to chase the horizon – and how much of it is a product of our consumer culture? Humans are a restless, curious, imaginative bunch: dreamers of distant lands, greener meadows, better-protected mountain passes. And the constant advertising and materialism thrown at us only adds fuel to that fire. So it's sometimes hard to know what's a genuine urge of the spirit and what's a whim blown your way from an ad while you weren't paying attention.

Anna and I wonder a lot about this restlessness, especially because we're in a constant state of it. We're fairly happy here in Boise, what with a good house on the edge of the hills under the trees. We've good friends and a great active community of artists and parents and outdoorsy types around us. And vitally, Ada is happy here. There are all the parks and trails and kid friends in the neighborhood she could want. If we were having more success in our fields of writing and painting would we be more content? We might be a bit happier, or filled with a larger sense of purpose, but I doubt we'd feel more content. We might then merely want more. I don't mean a larger house or better car. Not that kind of stuff. But more of the success that acts as an inlet to relevance in the world – more relevance and more importance. I won't kid myself: I'm no genius who deserves to be canonized. I'd just like to be better involved in, and pertinent to, our times.

So how do we do that? Where are our times and when is the next direct flight there? Jump over to the Middle East and report directly from the Arab Spring? Get down to New Orleans to see the transformation of the city after Katrina? Hurry over to Montana to moniter the Exxon pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River? Sell everything and move to Berlin and join the amazing scene there? I envy journalists for their always being on the front edge of history, reporting from the first page of the next big story.

But our times are everywhere; our times are what we make of them, are the significance we create in the place we're living. It's not a question of moving geographically but conceptually within the moment of the age. When you get into step with a great idea or solution or movement of the day you're suddenly whisked ahead at the speed of the present, in touch with the horizons of the zeitgeist, and there's no need to go anywhere else but more deeply into where you are.

Progress Report: Telluride and MountainFilm

5 June 2011, Telluride, CO

In Telluride the aspen are just coming into leaf. The broad table-topped foothills are as green as the hills in Switzerland, and the deep groves of leafing aspen shimmer beneath the white peaks of the glaciated valley. The winter was a dry one, but spring made up for it with a series of snow storms that blanketed the hills and bevelled the San Juan summits to diamond points. So now it is that lovely perfect season of halves: half winter and half summer: half excitement and half wistfulness: warm breezes in the valley smelling of drying earth and lilacs and the San Miguel river coursing under budding willows; yet the mountains still in snow, the high ivory peaks holding winter like a last sip of wine against the sun-blue sky; the snowpack melting from the ridges so that each day, watching the lines where good skiing is still to be had, you see cliff bands exposed and sloughs of avalanche darkening the white bowls; and the feeling is one of watching the last locust blossoms wilt from the branch.

We're here for vacation, visiting family, and for MountainFilm, a festival of documentaries that focus on environmental and social issues from around the world. The festival is amazing, but something of a roller coaster ride emotionally. Just when you think the world is doomed, that we've completely doomed ourselves and the planet along the way — perhaps after watching a documentary about mountain-top removal mining practices (On Coal River) — you're filled with hope after watching another film on how the mere introduction of a bicycle has transformed and empowered the lives of people in developing countries (With My Own Two Wheels). You swing back and forth like this: between despair and indignation on one side, and hope and determination on the other. The theme of this year's festival is “awareness into action”. It's a perfectly good theme, an energizing one. Personally, internally, I find the real challenge when dealing with these matters is to avoid fatalism.

For if you believe we're fucked, we are. Or rather, if you believe we're fucked and do nothing about it, then our fatalism becomes nihilism and we truly are finished. And maybe in the end we are goners – we've pushed and overpopulated and pried open the earth to no end — but we can't ever quit fighting. We can't give up the struggle for what is right and good in this world, even if the fight comes to nothing. But it never comes to nothing. Even if that fight does no more than spare a watershed from mercury pollution for another season, or keep a kid healthy and a factory worker safely employed for a few more years or less — that less is always something more than nothing. It's the powers who want us to sit back and let them do as they please who would have us believe otherwise, who would foster our fatalism while they extract the last precious somethings of the world from under our dozing spirits.

It's not enough not to sleep; we must get up off the mat and fight, in whatever large or small ways we can.

Yesterday we went for a walk on the valley floor. Budding pussywillows, pink ground flowers and dandelions speckling the grass; three cow elk grazing by the river. (And the evening before a coyote out stalking the prairie dogs). The San Miguel River is charging with snow melt, fast and translucent with sediments as it cuts S-curves into the valley. The morning had started out dim and sweet-smelling with smoke from three fires to the south: one in New Mexico, one near Durango, and another in SE Colorado. But by mid-day the haze was clearing and the white peaks emerged against a slate-blue sky. Craig and his very pregnant wife Melanie joined us for the hike. As we walked Craig told me the details of how Telluride came together to buy the valley floor, just west of town, for 50 million from the developer who wanted to put condos and a golf course on the sprawling verdant open space. There was some division within the community, but now that the floor is not just public domain but open wild space for the rest of the critters living here, nobody can imagine a different outcome. We stopped beside a bend in the river to rest and snap a few photos. A favorite is of Ada touching Melanie's protruding belly as she declares “baby in dere.” A good chance one or two of those elk cows by the river have a baby in there, too. The valley provided important grazing during the spring snow storms. And in these days of over-development and crowding, the open space offers a lush and dreamy sustenance to our harried spirits. We're all “babies in dere,” aren't we?

Our idea of progress can't only be about development; it must also include non-development: leaving places alone. What the Telluride community did to protect this area is huge. The valley is a great example of what can be achieved when we come together and give what we can, big or small, in a larger effort to do the right thing. I know “right” can be relative, but walk this valley gazing up at the chiseled peaks, fish the river for rainbow and brown trout, laze in the flowers with your kid or sweetie or both, and you'll know this right in your gut.

National Security: One Hen Coop at a Time

7 March 2011, Boise

“Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -- Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

Winter is nearing its end, but like an old man intent on showing the world he still has some kick left in him, the season gave us a four-day storm of snowfall and near-zero lows — all of it more flurry than force. Days before that a warm front had pushed up from the coast, bringing with it Oregon juncos and chickadees riding the soft wave north. I had just returned from three days of back-country skiing in the Sawtooths with my good friend Dave M. from Sonoma County, and it felt like we'd stepped out of central Idaho into balmy Northern California. But now the chilled air is back and the juncos are chittering in the bare trees, perhaps feeling cheated somehow, perhaps looking on the bright side as the sun melts away at the snow patches on the ground. That's February for you: a warm caress from the south, then an icy suckerpunch from the north. But you can't feel too badly for being duped when you see how many migrating song birds have been fooled just the same.

Yesterday we went to dinner at the home of our friends A.W. and J.B. For a year now I'd been hearing about their famous “compound” over in the southeast-end of town, and I was anxious to see it for myself. A is an artist, and her husband J is a craftsman; and with their sweet two-year old daughter, and A's sisters living next door, the whole fam-damnily has put together a big shared property that is about as village-utopian as you could hope for. The sprawling backyard is a combination of neighboring yards with the fences taken down. There are garden plots and cherry trees, solar panels on the rooftops, landscaped fire pits and picnic tables, a ditch canal that runs water from the Boise River (which they have a share of), and a big yurt on a platform that serves as A's studio and houses her glass kiln.

But what takes the cake is the chicken coop. Down the spine of the block runs the canal through an easement between the backyards. At first they had put a coop back there and set a few chickens adrift, and then the neighbors got curious. Soon everybody on both sides of the canal wanted in. And now you push through the wire gate to a menagerie of hens of every kind: dozens of them, skirting underfoot, cawing, amazing in their variety and brilliance, soothing in their murmuring calls. The deep warm straw smell of the coop brought me back to my grandparents' place in Italy: an Old World feeling of home and security and coziness. We collected a few eggs and gave them to Ada to carry in her basket. She was delighted out of her mind by the birds. And as if that wasn't enough, she went silly over the plump lazy rabbit that has taken up home with the birds.

Back in the house, toasty warm with the stove burning, we drank beer and ate dinner and talked while the girls ran about the place. Or rather, J and I ran our mouths. We were glad to have sympathetic ears and so we got things running pretty hot: why are so many American's so damn ignorant? Ignorant of their own working past and traditions of craft and self-sufficiency? In part because this present manifestation of the American Dream is fundamentally a suburban one, conceived in the Fifties and perpetuated by corporate interests, which would rather keep us as children forever wanting trinkets instead of providing for ourselves; forever fatuous and fattened up, cut off from the wisdom of the land and our grandparents, believing that if you use your hands you deserve to scrape along, and that if you want to get somewhere in life, it's got to be upwards into the digital heavens of finance and technology. We talked about Thoreau's economics of self-sufficiency; we talked about the Confucian Code of Fealty: family first, then your block, then your village, then your countryside, and somewhere past the concentric rings of the horizon, your “country”.

All of this at a time when the state of Wisconsin (and other states, including Idaho) are vying to strip public workers of their right to collective bargaining. What will it take for us to remember, to relearn, our working class history and common strength. Common people fighting the excesses and advantages of the wealthy few who both pull the levers of the machine and draw the drapes of media which hide the machine. All of this while the people in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya are rallying to the precipice of revolution. If they have the courage, why don't we? I'm not arguing for revolution in this country, not on a national level. Americans are not quite uncomfortable enough for that to happen yet. So long as TV dinners come twenty to a cheap-pack at Costco, the revolution will never pry itself from its Lazyboy.

Except on a local level. We've all heard the rallying cry. But it's a timeless refrain, going all the way back to Confucius' days, back to the German and British Romantics, the American Transcendentalists, even the Arts and Crafts movement: quality over quantity; craft over consumption; local over diesel-driven shipping containers. Your first devotion, your first revolution, must be to and at home, and from there the effort ripples out to your block, your town, and long long down the line, if ever, to your so-called country.