Dystopian Paradox

Is this a great picture or what! On our left (Barack’s right) is Angie Dickson from our very own Tarrant County.

Angie’s family has been in politics since ever, and Angie is carrying the baton all the way from here to Denver.Angie was one of the leaders of Camp Obama this past weekend in Fort Worth. When I found out she was a delegate I just had to hear her story.

She related to a small group of us that she met Barack a couple of years ago before a lot of us had even heard him. When she was telling us about that meeting and that now she’s going to Denver as an Obama delegate, tears came to her eyes.

Behind those tears must have been a cascade of emotions: joy; compassion; humility. I don’t know because those are Angie’s feelings.

And last night, listening to Michelle, the camera panning the delegates, many of them- black, brown, white, men, women- had tears in their eyes. Because Michelle was telling her story. The American dream. Not the African American dream but the American Dream. From poverty to the pinnacle of success, potential realized through opportunity and tons of hard work.

The Bush administration is turning that dream into a dystopian nightmare, a society of hopelessness for all except the unscrupulous. McCain has the same sandman, hiring Rovian hacks to run a smear campaign. That’s the style of campaigning that brought us the Bush administration. Insanity is voting for the same kind of people again and expecting better results.

I’m amazed how I identify with what I’ve heard from the speeches in Denver the first two nights. I got involved in this campaign because of my views and my concern for the future, for my kids’ and my grandkids’ future. That’s what I’m hearing from Denver. There isn’t a dime’s difference between what Barack is campaigning for and what Hillary is campaigning for. I just finished listening to her speech.

But I was for Barack from the get-go and stayed with him. He didn’t resort to playing on fear (the3 a.m. phone call), but rather campaigned on a message of hope. And hope we have and must have. Even in times when many in our country could easily see their circumstances as hopeless.

And we have leader, Barack Obama, who doesn’t just express hope. He embodies it. He has shown us what he can do. He got himself a soulmate the likes of which I would die for. And he put together an organization that defies imagination. But nothing daunts Barack’s imagination or his dreams.

The dreams we are now speaking of are visions of the future. Obama had a dream and it’s coming true. And wait ’til Thursday when Barack accepts the nomination and pays tribute to the 44th anniversary of Martin Luther King and his “I have a Dream” speech. And that dream is coming true in a city at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Have a box of kleenex beside you Thursday evening.

My kids’ and their kids’ future is at stake. Now is the time to go all-in for Barack Obama for President of the United States.

That’s me in the green shirt. It was a privilege to attend the Obama Camp and to be involved in Barack Obama’s campaign as a volunteer. A field worker from Obama national organized the camp, which was held at the North Texas Health Sciences Center August 23.We learned a great deal and had fun doing it.

I got involved in this campaign because of my kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids. Obama came from nowhere, yet he’s been preparing for this campaign all of his adult life. I’ve had some great experiences in my life, like going to the Rose Bowl to be a part of the history the Longhorns made by beating Sourthern Cal for the National Championship in the granddaddy of bowls.

But a football game is insignificant compared to the challenge we now face. Even though the emotions can get intense, its just a game.

And now we can participate, not just spectate, in history in the making, in a political contest that will be as brutal as this country has ever seen. It’s a privilege that may not come our way again.

We have the opportunity to direct our energies toward returning this country to a place where we and our children and their children can realize our potential. Now is our time and now is Barack Obama’s time. Working together, we can put Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House.

Ridge Dickey
Fort Worth, Texas

Last evening some friends invited me to dinner. We ate at a local Mexican food restaurant that we were all familiar with. The new menu had the same dishes but different prices. Sticker shock. We wound up spending what we usually spend, but ate about half as much.

Maybe that will be a silver lining in the inflation cloud. We Americans won’t eat as much. I did people watching at the mall recently, and most of them who walked by, no matter what age, were not skinny.

I didn’t watch that much of the olympics, but I heard one of the commentators remark that the American women gymnasts on average weigh-in about 20 lbs heavier than the Chinese. Maybe that’s because the average age of the Chinese woman gymnast was 9 and the American 16. Or maybe it’s because even our women gymnasts are carrying a few extra pounds. If they are, then all of us Americans are fat slobs. Except for Barack Obama.

There was a bit on a news program last week about how pizza sellers are hurting. Cheese is up 50 percent, and flour costs three times as much as a year ago. The dollar stores are going to have to come up with a new name or start stocking even junkier junk.

I was going through the NYT online hurriedly this morning and ran across an article about John Edwards philandering. The author Judith Warner stated about a third of the way through that “I don’t want to discuss John Edwards’s extramarital behavior here. I don’t want to beat up on Elizabeth, a woman who, it seems to me, has already endured many lifetimes’ worth of pain.”

Before that statement, Warner mentioned Edwards or Elizabeth 10 time times. After that statement, she mentions Edwards or Elizabeth 14 times.

It used to be that a political leader’s philandering was off limits to the public eye. John F. Kennedy is a prime example. Invoking high-minded prose as an artifice to justify their opportunism, the main stream media now follows the lead of the National Inquirer et al to cash in on the personal lives of our politicians and other celebrities.

It appears this phenomenon of exposing indiscretions coincides with the rise of the political influence of evangelicals, who themselves sometimes engage in the worst behaviors of our politicians.  My guess is that no one in the main stream media philanders, or they are as hypocritical as the rest of us.  If they do, then who can we trust?

The only judgment I can pass on Edwards or Bill Clinton or Spitzer is that they all exercised poor judgment in their philandering because they knew doing so made them sitting ducks for the press and political opponents.

The Bush administration has exercised enough poor judgment for the next hundred presidential administrations, yet I’m not aware of any philandering among its constituents.  We all exercise poor judgment sometimes. Maybe it would be better for our country if our presidents saved the exercise of poor judgment for their personal lives, rather than in carrying out, or attempting to carry out, their duties as president.

Being unmarried for 20 years should have forced me into a domesticity level higher than slob. It hasn’t. Every time I move, it’s taken several days’ work to clean the place up after everything’s out. After I’ve been in a new place for a couple of months, it’s a candidate for Waste Management.

I moved into my present apartment last fall with the conviction of keeping the kitchen and bathroom clean. I’ve done a pretty good job overall but with some backsliding.

When I moved in, a family of bugs was living in the clock display of the kitchen range. It’s one of those old type displays with leg-like elements that light up green to make a number about 3/4 inch inches tall, block style.

From the get go, members of the bug family took turns covering one or more of the lit green leg-like elements. Sometimes I’d look at the clock on the range and think it was 7:24 for example. But that didn’t seem right so I’d pull out my cell phone, and sure enough it was maybe 9:56.

Not only were these bugs changing the time all the time, but they looked unsightly in my kitchen that I kept so clean. So I made a trip to the hardware store and got a sixpack of roach motels.

These bugs evolved from or into roaches. Little buggers were less than a half inch long with a tail end that was blocked instead of the wings terminating in an elipse. Not as fast as roaches either.

Anyhow, the roach motels didn’t put a stop to the bugs screwing around with my range clock. I fretted over this problem for months.

Then I remembered someone telling me that if the bugs can’t find anything to eat, they leave. Rocket science. So I cleaned up the kitchen thouroughly after every meal I ate at home. Sure enough, the clock began displaying the correct time within about four days.

Then I got sloppy for about a week and they showed up again. So I started doing better again. Then two days before I was to leave town for five days, I observed one of them making a dash across the drainboard. So I left that kitchen glove clean when I left for the trip.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been experimenting a little by leaving dishes unwashed before going to bed, to see if the bugs would show back up. I haven’t seen a bug since I got back nine days ago. Maybe I want them to come back so I’ll have something alive to play games with in my apartment. Maybe I could direct my energy to more productive enterprises. Maybe I could be perfect.

I hope the Obama campaign has something up its sleeve to trump McCain’s swiftboat card. Sunday I went to Borders to buy Andrew Bacevich’s new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. They didn’t have it.

But they did have on their main display that you can’t miss when you walk in, Obama Nation. I guess Border’s must be feeling the effects of the economic slump. Maybe they’ve started carrying hardcore porno dvds.

The U.S.A.’s tagline use to be “The Land of Opportunity.” The Bush administration changed that to “The End Justifies the Means,” which pretty much sums up Machiavelli’s political philosophy. And John McCain’s.

The title of this blog is derived from a line in Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer that reads “Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace.” That line is this blog’s tagline. His prayer may be the most widely known of his works, and many if not most who are familiar with the prayer may not know where the prayer came from. Until this afternoon, I knew nothing about his scholarly works. I hope to learn a great deal more.

Last night, I caught the first few minutes of Bill Moyer’s one-hour long interview of Andrew Bacevich, who has a new book out entitled The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. After listening for a few minutes, I turned the TV off because Bacevich’s words brought up pain I didn’t feel like feeling last night.

This afternoon after I finished some legal analysis I get paid for, I went to Bill Moyer’s spot on the PBS website and clicked on Friday’s post. It led me to a page which contained excerpts from Moyer’s interview of Bacevich. In the post, Moyer’s comments that:

A key message Bacevich takes from [Reinhold] Niebuhr is one of humility. Not only must we understand the limits of what a government — and its military — can accomplish, but we must resist the temptation to guide history towards some perceived purpose or end.

Some may wonder why this blog mixes personal philosophy with political and strategic thinking. The reason is that by definition, immutable laws and principles apply everywhere.They apply in every aspect of my life and the lives of all of us. I cannot cordon-off my personal, even private life as mutually exclusive of any other aspect of it. And if I operate outside the bounds of these immutable laws and principles, then I will surely fail. We can’t avoid the operation of these laws and principles by denying their existence or ignoring them.

Philosophy and science are both in search of the truth, as should be religion and spirituality. So if there are immutable principles, each of these disciplines properly practiced and applied, will discover and adopt them. Those that don’t will produce regimes that crumble.

I began my one and only novel in 1995 and completed it the summer of 2001. The novel contains some dialog between a medical doctor and an architect, who is one of the main characters. The architect posits the question, is a scientists or a novelist more likely to arrive at the truth? The medical doctor unequivocally maintains that the scientist would. The architect expresses the view that the one who has the greater humility is more likely to arrive at the truth.

After 9/11, the Bush administration took action based on the erroneous assumption that the United States through its military power is the world hegemon. We aren’t and never were, except possibly for a couple of years after World War II when we alone possessed operational nuclear bombs.

Our body politic is now swallowing a poison pill by accepting the proposition that our national security is contingent on continuous engagement in an unending global conventional war. But we are no longer hegemon if we ever were. And we cannot fund a perpetual global conventional war.

I question the motivation of Bush administration and those behind it including the neocons. They have a vested financial interest in perpetuating conventional warfare. There are far less expensive ways to defend the security of our citizens. But then what’s going to happen to Boeing and Lockheed and Haliburton and the jobs they produce if we stop funding conventional warfare? The same thing that’s happening to the U.S. automakers and the jobs they have produced.

So what do we do for jobs? Engage in sustainable enterprises. More on this later. For now, get use to the idea that we don’t live on the block that controls the neighborhood anymore. We still live on the same block, but it isn’t what it used to be in terms of dominance.

Humility is inversely proportional to our egocentricity and false pride. Egocentricity clouds objectivity, with the result that truth will be arrived at only by chance. Humility mitigates the power of our egos with the result that we can view our world more objectively.

We would improve the prospects for our future and our kids’ and grandkids’ futures by adopting some humility, rather than perpetuating this fantasy that we alone dictate history. This fantasy, a chimera of our false pride and egocentricity, will result in our complete humiliation and the disintegration of our society.

The specter of dystopia is staring us down as we collectively avoid eye contact with it.

Saturday morning, August 8

The wedding was my excuse for making this trip, but what I was really looking forward to is being with my sister Grace and her kids and their spouses. And then the wedding began at 10 a.m. and I realized that the wedding itself was why I came.

Erin in her simple white dress, pink shawl, with a bouquet of daises she holds at her waiste and a daisy in her hair, decending the walk to the beach with her bridesmaid, the sister-in-law to be in a simple brown dress, the wedding party on the beach standing in loose dry sand, waiting in a circle open to the east from where comes the sun, the force of life, the circle open to receive the bride, wherein waited her groom Matt and his father the best man, and the judge who would wed them, all in bare feet.

And Erin and her bridesmaid entered the circle from the east, and joined her groom Matt before the judge, the circle closing around them. And all there were barefoot, except me, and I removed my sandals and we were all barefooted and grounded in the sand of our Earth.

I was experiencing a wedding of a thousand years ago in the British Isles or Polynesia, outdoors as guests of nature, and all of us children of the Earth and grandchildren of all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Beautiful words the judge spoke, words chosen some by the bride and groom and some by the judge. And tears in the eyes of all. By the sea from which came life. All reaffirming life and our gratitude for the gift of it, and the opposites coming together as a symbol of hope for the renewal of life, a remembrance of those who have left us but are still with us, and those who will come from the joining of opposites.

The bride and groom kissed, and then it was over.

+ + +

There was a steady south breeze on the beach, fifty-five degrees on this cloudy wedding day morning, mist in the air, yet all of us barefoot. Someone found a spot in the sand maybe five feet in diameter that was warm, and some of us warmed our feet in it, wondering what caused the warmth.

A niece in-law told us about a small spot in California that stays at 800 degrees and no one knows for sure what causes it. I asked if there was a voice that kept saying, “I am what I am.” My ex-brother-in-law said, “Yes, Moses before the burning bush, and it announcing ‘I am that I am,” and my niece-in-law says “Yea, God and Popeye saying “I yam what I yam.”

+ + +

Everything about the wedding drew us together. The families of the bride and groom coming together including the extended families. While the wedding was going on, at brunch after the wedding, and that evening at dinner at the home of the groom’s parents.

Thomas Friedman reports in the NYT today that yet again the Senate has failed to pass a bill that if enacted, would extend the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and production tax credits for building wind turbines. Senators McCain and Obama were both absent for the vote. McCain has not shown up for any of the eight votes on the measure in the last year, yet within the last couple of weeks he was calling for Congress to reconvene to do something about our energy crisis.

For background on the peak oil scenario, check out Josh Matlock’s article posted on The Texas Blue blog August 5. Peak oil is the point at which the rate of consumption of oil and gas exceeds capacity to produce. World peak oil has either happened or will soon. Domestic (USA) peak oil occurred long ago. Additional domestic drilling will not reverse domestic peak oil, and won’t be a drop in the barrel of global production.

Contact your elected representatives and let them know they are working for you and not big oil. Let them know you’re aware of the peak oil scenario and globle warming. Make it clear that you don’t want the US of A to be the next General Motors. Short term thinking must be used in the short term, like now, to rid ourselves of short term thinking.

Friday afternoon, August 8

Things picked up this afternoon when everybody got in town. All of the wedding party except for the groom’s parents went to dinner (Grace and Erin plus her fiance Matt, Grace’s other three children, all men and two of whom are married and so their wives, and Grace’s ex-spouse and his wife.) That’s ten people and a lot of fun to be with.

Graces’ ex paid for dinner and I didn’t put up a fight. After all, he isn’t putiing out for a big wedding for Erin. She’s getting married on the beach. I may send him a bill for my travel expenses.

We got to talking politics a little, with the John Edwards thing kicking it off. One of my nieces-in-law is from Edwards’ neck of the woods and she can’t stand the guy. Said he’s a low life ambulance chaser. Grace pointed out that I was a lawyer. I told my niece-in-law that I don’t chase ambulances unless there’s money in it

People bad mouthing lawyers doesn’t hurt my feelings. I expect it. I don’t like most of them either. My favorite lawyers are criminal defense lawyers because they protect our bill of rights. The executive branch of government, including prosecuting attorneys, are constantly trying to trash the bill of rights and our civil liberties. I do office practice, and trial attorneys don’t consider office practitioners to be real lawyers. That doesn’t hurt my feelings either. Used to irritate me a little though.

The grooms parents live here. The rest of the wedding party (except for me) are staying in condos that overlook the Pacific. The beach must be 150 yards wide beginning at water’s edge and terminating at a steep rise of 50 feet where the condo complex is located. Amazing view from up there, looking down on the beach and following the ocean to the horizon where it merges with the cloudy sky. My guess is that the subduction of the Pacific plate forces a constant rising of the terrain, and wave erosion accounts for the wide beach and its termination at hilly terrain that rises hundreds of feet above sea level within a mile of the beach. The rain forest begins less than five miles from the beach.

Saturday morning:

Six of us went to breakfast at a small cafe not a block away from Grace’s condo. We had a half hour to kill before the place opened at 7.30. We walked down to the beach. Being next to a beach is always a primal experience for me, looking out over the ocean where life may have originated on Earth. And knowing that there was nothing but water for 5000 miles between that beach and Japan.

One of my nephews and I got to the beach first. He’s married, working and getting his MBA. I asked him what he planned on doing with it. He said wherever it took him, but wants to do the entrepreneurial thing.

I encouraged him on that. At 32 years of age, he realizes that everyone is an entrepreneur whether they know it or not. No way to escape uncertainty by working for someone else, so I think its healthy to take responsibility for our perceived plight even if we work for others, rather than blaming it on jobs going overseas or whatever. Seems to me that taking responsibility for our circumstances is an aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset, and being an entrepreneur is not a precondition to having that mindset.

The groom’s parents live here, and I’ll meet them this morning at the wedding which is to happen circa 10 a.m. on the beach. I’m wearing what I went to breakfast in- shorts, sandals, shirt and a windbreaker. I may be overdressed.

So we did breakfast, which was good but uneventful. The name of the cafe is Nancy’s and I think Nancy was waiting on us. I liked Nancy. One of my nephews was thinking about taking some of the leftover pastry back to his place, and I said I’d like to take Nancy back to my place. Fat chance since I’m 30 years her senior, plus sporting several other characteristics repugnant to women.

Anyhow, Grace said there was something wrong with Nancy. I thought she meant mentally. Grace said no, it’s the way she talks. After that, I listened attentively when Nancy came around but I didn’t pick up anything wrong with the way she talked. Besides, if she’s got a speech impediment that could be a real plus. She might be self conscious about it and keep her mouth shut most of the time. I related this possibility to Grace.

Grace seemed to take offense. She thinks I’m serious when I say things like that. Maybe I am. Maybe my attitude toward women is my major handicap in trying to get women. Quien sabe. Quien preocupe.