HinesSight

Life and death on a Maui beach

I may have watched a man die today at Napili Bay. Even on vacation reality intrudes, especially for the man and his family. I hope he lived. I’ll know what I read The Maui News tomorrow. What I do know now is that it is possible to die on a beach, relaxing in Hawaii, with not a care in the world. Until…

A burly fellow vacationer is pressing on your chest, doing CPR, while another man is rhythmically blowing air into your mouth. Your face is ashen. Your body is motionless. Waves break over your feet. But you can’t feel the water.

I was sitting under our favorite beach tree on a grass mat, watching kids playing in the surf, hoping that the waves would reach body-board riding height, happy that it wasn’t raining, just cloudy and threatening. I was so into my practice of wu-wei, not-doing, that at first the sight of a bunch of adults clustered around a spot of beach about forty yards to my left didn’t register. My mind even thought, “Maybe they’re having fun burying someone in the sand.”

Sadly, the “burying” part was uncomfortably close to the truth. When I trained my binoculars on all the activity I could see CPR being performed. It was jarring to listen to children having fun in the surf while I watched the solemn efforts to save the man’s life.

Soon, a siren. Medics from the fire department rushed to the man’s side. One felt his neck for a pulse. Defibrillation equipment was hastily unpacked. Paddles were placed on his chest. A ventilator went over his mouth. An intravenous drip went into his right arm. Hopefully all this effort paid off. I never saw the man move, nor any signs of relief from the medics or bystanders.

He was a big man, chunky. I couldn’t help but observe that most of the men who had come to his aid were similarly overweight. One beachgoer who helped carry the stretcher across the sand to the ambulance was positively obese. His stomach fat flapped as he struggled forward, carrying the front of the stretcher. Will these men change their under-exercising, over-eating ways now that they’ve seen how a heart attack (which I assume is what happened) can strike anywhere, anytime?

Probably not. We all have our ways of denying death. Good ways. Effective ways. I do too. Until I see death close-up through a pair of Nikon binoculars, imagining myself lying in the sand, unconscious, having my chest compressed while my wife looks on with terrified eyes.

She seemed to be his wife, at least. And the younger woman, his daughter. While the medics were getting him ready to be transported two policemen got out report books and took statements from the women. The women obviously were torn, one part of them wanting to respond to the police questions, another part trying to remain aware of what was being done to save the husband’s/father’s life.

After he was taken up the slope of the beach to the ambulance, the women rushed around picking up the remnants of what had started out as a happy day on Maui. Towels, suntan lotion, drink containers—everything got hurriedly wrapped up in their beach mats. They half-ran after the police. Suddenly there was no trace of what had happened.

Just a empty patch of beach.

Laurel walked down from our condo soon after. She had missed everything. She told me all about her morning’s shopping experiences. I related my dying-man-on-the-beach story.

I soon forgot about him. I waited for big body-boardable waves that never came. I went for my daily 30-minute swim. We went back to our room and ate lunch. I read my Jack Reacher thriller, “Without Fail.” I took my afternoon Maui nap.

Everything is back to normal. Except, really, it isn’t. Ever. It can’t be when “normal” is just one heartbeat, a single breath, from simply being a meaningless word.

A dying man on the beach convinced me of that. As if I needed to be convinced.

Feeling half my age on Maui

We got to Maui yesterday. I’d only been here a few hours when I felt half my age. Actually, less than half. For I was “carded” while buying some groceries at the Napili Market. Ah, the joy! I immediately thought that I must be the most youthful-looking fifty-six year old on earth when a checker asked to see my driver’s license before he’d sell us the wine that Laurel had put in our basket.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Maui County has a law requiring proof of 21-ness before alcoholic drinks can be sold to anybody. This seems ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that whenever we walk down Lahaina’s Front Street, we usually get a few open requests from locals to sample what, in the old 60’s days, was called Maui Wowie. Apparently the sale of alcohol is more heavily regulated on Maui than the sale of marijuana. Clearly the checker also found the law senseless, since he gave us a rant about useless government regulation while he was bagging our groceries.

So that’s one new thing about Maui we’ve discovered on this, our 15th visit to the island. The weekly comics in both the Maui and Honolulu newspapers are in color now—that’s also new. And it’s also new that, on our first day here, the weather is windy and showery. Almost always we’ve been treated to nice weather until near the end of our stay, but Maui decided to throw us a change-up this year.

Oh well. The view is still beautiful from our Napili Shores condo. Note the intrepid Napili Bay beach-goers in the foreground. Quite a few vacationers aren’t deterred from enjoying the ocean by breezy trade winds and frequent showers. Especially kids, who I can hear screaming happily in the surf right now even as it’s sprinkling.

When you’re wet all over, does it matter if it’s raining? I lived out this adage on our own mostly-dry beach visit this afternoon when a passing shower spurred me to my daily Maui ritual of swimming back and forth across Napili Bay. Thirty minutes, non-stop. My style is of my own invention, designed to lessen the chance of a contact lens washing out: twenty side-strokes, then ten modified back-strokes; repeat for about two and a half crossings of the bay.

Like they say about fishing, for us a bad day on Maui is better than almost all good days anywhere else. I love going to sleep with the sound of waves. I love eating small sweet bananas that are so much tastier than the bland variety we get on the mainland. I love how everyone, locals and visitors alike, are almost universally relaxed, laid-back, hang-loosed.

This wasn’t the case with Laurel, though, as our Hawaiian Airlines flight from Portland was boarding. One of our “charming” married-for-15-years rituals (it’s more charming to me than to Laurel) is that whenever we fly, she says “Please, don’t wait to get on at the last minute like you always do,” and I say, “Don’t worry, I’ll be at the gate twenty minutes before takeoff, like I always am.”

I have carefully researched boarding rules. The general policy of airlines seems to be that the plane door is closed ten minutes before takeoff, and passengers are to be on board fifteen minutes before takeoff. So getting on the plane twenty minutes early is entirely in order, especially since my carry-on bag is able to fit under the seat in front of me. It doesn’t have to be squeezed, defying all the laws of compression physics, into an overhead compartment half the size of the bag—the annoying practice of so many other passengers.

Yesterday, after indulging in our habitual “She says, He says” argument, Laurel suggested that we ask the Hawaiian gate personnel their opinion. “Great,” I replied, confident that airline regulations were on my side. And indeed, the guy we queried said, “If you’re at the gate twenty minutes before departure, that should be fine.”

“Yes!” I cried, pointing two index fingers at Laurel and doing a little victory dance around her, while the Hawaiian Airlines person did his best to look down at some paperwork and avoid taking sides in what so obviously was a (minor) marital spat.

Looking back at the moment, though, in my excitement at winning our argument I didn’t pay enough attention to another comment the gate guy made: “The scheduled departure was 10:00 am, and the plane is now supposed to take off at 10:21.” In hindsight, I should have given the word “supposed” more weight.

So my personal pre-take off preparations, which included a leisurely perusal of the Oregonian sports page in the stall of an airport rest room, didn’t take sufficient account of the fact that when a scheduled departure is changed from 10:00 to 10:21, the airline does its best to leave as close to 10:00 as possible, notwithstanding the assurance made by the gate guy that I could show up at 10:00, no problem.

When I exited the restroom just down from the gate at 9:59, feeling right on schedule and pleasantly lighter compared to when I entered, the first thing I noticed—indeed, couldn’t help but notice, was that a blonde-haired woman, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Laurel, was waving her hands and screaming at someone, who seemingly was me, “Hurry up! They’re holding the plane for you!”

“Ah, another little joke by Laurel,” I thought, barely hastening my steps. “Run! Run! They’re going to leave without you!” Which, as it turned out, was disturbingly close to the truth. I was the last one on board, and we had to kick a woman out of one of our seats who had been told by a flight attendant, “Everyone should be on the plane by now; you can choose a different open seat now.”

Maybe this will teach me a lesson. Maybe. I still believe the constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, such as forcing a man over 6’ 1” into a coach seat designed for female gymnasts. Five and a half hours flight time from Portland to Maui struck me as long enough punishment; I didn’t want to endure any extra minutes.

But what the heck. Marriage is all about compromises. Next flight I’ll be at the gate twenty minutes before the scheduled departure—the original scheduled departure. And Laurel will be ready to go when I say, “It’s time to leave for the movie or we’ll be late!”

Change, it can happen at any age. Especially the age when you're youthful enough to be carded at the grocery store. Which on Maui, is any age. I love Maui: the ever-young island.

Spot the impostor

Thanks for Laurel's sister, Dee, for sending us these wonderful impostor bunny photos. They're pawsitively purrfect. Happy Easter to all.

Mole control tips

Like many homeowners, Laurel and I have had a love-hate relationship with moles. On balance it’s been about 1% love and 99% hate, with a mild feeling of closeness to the bastards arising only when our dog manages to dig one up, starts playing with it, and the mole frantically tries to wave its paws and dig its way to safety—a tough job when you’re caught between the jaws of a gentle-mouthed Lab-Shepherd mix.

If you’re looking for a solution to your own mole problem, I’ll get right to our current approach to controlling the S.O.B.s. These boxes contain 80 recently-purchased pounds of dry Mole-Med. That’s an amazingly large amount (Mole-Med usually comes in 7.5 pound bags), but we have an amazingly large amount of landscaping around our house. And when it comes to moles, we’ve learned that there’s no point in messing around with half-hearted measures.

So we cover the earth with Mole-Med, a repellant that uses castor oil to drive the nuisances onto someone else’s more agreeable-smelling property. There actually is some research that supports the effectiveness of Mole-Med and similar castor-oil approaches to repelling moles. For us that was reason enough to give Mole-Med a try, since over the years we’ve gone through every mole control approach known to man, woman, and dog. To wit…

Vibrators. We’ve tried several kinds of vibrators intended to disturb mole peace of mind (not to be confused with mole vibrators intended for another purpose). They seem like a great idea: simple, cheap, easy to use, non-lethal. However, in our yard the moles seemed to cozy up to them for a massage rather than flee from the supposedly irritating vibrations. When I returned some to Sharper Image I enclosed a photo of mole earth mounds piled up right around the product that they said would keep a yard mole-free for a 100 foot circumference, or whatever. Yeah, right.

Poison. So we turned to meaner methods. I’ve dropped can after can of poison pellets into mole runs (and also gopher holes). I felt terrible doing this, imagining the moles and gophers coughing their little critter lungs out as they died a slow, painful, lonely death underground. Yet since I never could discern any lessening in mole/gopher activity after dispensing the poison pellets, I soon stopped feeling guilty. I started up again, though, after we moved to…

Professional trapping. Yes, some pest control companies will try to trap moles. Not many, but we found a company that seemed fairly competent and signed up for a several-month mole trapping service. A guy would come out several times a week at first, and then only when we called and said that a trap appeared to have sprung. I think they got three or four, at a cost of somewhere around $75 a mole, more or less. Not particularly cost-effective. We learned that mole trapping is tricky, since you have to be super careful to wear gloves and keep your scent off the traps. One mole guy had a knack for trapping them; the next guy didn’t. We decided to find a cheaper mole service…

Serena, the Wonder Dog. She works for the joy of the kill, or rather, given her gentle Lab sensibilities, the joy of the playing. Serena probably has captured as many moles for free as the professional trappers did for a fairly hefty monthly fee. The main drawback is obvious: in the course of digging up a mole, a dog will do more damage to your garden than the mole did. Plus, Serena would rather chase squirrels and chipmunks, who race around visibly, than burrow after the elusive mole. Which turned us to…

Home remedies. Such as pepper—both black and red. Also, home-brewed liquid castor oil repellent. The Mole Man doesn’t put much stock in such approaches. He favors the good old-fashioned trapping approach. I agree that none of the nostrums we cooked up and spread around the yard seemed to do any good. But, as noted above, trapping takes quite a bit of skill and the willingness to look dead moles in the eye—something we soft-hearted vegetarians would prefer not to do.

So we’ve settled on Mole-Med. It is easy to scatter around, doesn’t look bad, and seems to do a decent job of repelling moles for a few months after it has been watered in. There are similar castor oil products that we’ve tried. We like dry Mole-Med because it is lightweight (corn base, I believe), so we think we get more mole deterrent for our money compared with the heavier clay-based competitors.

I note that the Mole-Med web page says that “even moles have a purpose.” Yes, I’m sure they do in the grand scheme of Nature. That’s why we have come to feel better trying to drive them away rather than killing them. If you’ve been screaming epithets while you pound a pitchfork into newly-raised mole runs, do your karma a favor and give Mole-Med a try.

We all are Terri Schiavo

I’d like to write about something other than Terri Schiavo. But I can’t stop thinking about her. Why? Because I am Terri Schiavo. And you are Terri Schiavo. We all are Terri Schiavo.

By which I mean: whoever Terri Schiavo is—body, soul, matter, spirit—each and every person is. This is the root reason why her situation is so compelling and produces so much passion. Whatever will happen to her when she dies is what will happen to you and me when we die.

If Terri is merely a material body, then when her body dies she is gone forever. Since her brain is dead, and the brain is the locus of a person’s consciousness, then Terri may already be gone forever if matter is all she is.

However, if Terri is something more than her body, then that “something”—call it soul—will survive the death of its bodily shell.

As Terri goes, so you and I go. Thus even though the impassioned debate over the removal of her feeding tube is couched in political and religious terms, I believe the fuel that is feeding the fire of this controversy is much more deeply personal. To put it bluntly, it’s that death scares us shitless.

Many people won’t admit that they are scared of dying. I will. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I die. I wish I did. I’d like to be sure that my soul will live on after my body is dead. But I don’t know that this will happen. I just hope that it will.

Most Americans, whether they are conventionally religious or unconventionally spiritual, hope like me that there is more to life than bodily existence. The operative word though is “hope.” It is a fact that every person will die. What occurs after death is in the realm of belief.

At least for now. When you and I take our last breaths, the reality of what lies beyond will be right before us. Or not, if we are not.

Laurel and I have strong feelings about how Terri Schiavo’s situation is being handled by the courts, Congress, and her family. So do lots of others.

When Peggy Noonan rails against the morals of the “pull the plug” people in a Wall Street Journal editorial, my blood starts to boil (metaphorically, thankfully.) When I wrote about religious zealots running amok in this case, a man commented that I was driven by hate for anyone who didn’t share my “secular humanist agenda.”

I’m sorry he felt that way. I don’t hate him. And I don’t hate Peggy Noonan. What I hate, really, is death. Not death per se, but the mystery of what happens after death. This uncertainty creates anxiety in all of us. It is part of the human condition.

People deal with this angst in different ways. Some do their best to not think about death. Others do their best to have faith that God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha-nature, Jehovah, the Tao, something or someone, will take care of them after death. Still others do their best to accept the finality of death as the end of their existence.

Yet irrespective of these best efforts, death will come. When it does, thoughts, beliefs, and acceptances will be swept away in the instant of our passing. To be replaced by: reality. Whatever it is. Afterlife. No life. Semi-life. Meta-life. Whatever, we all are united by that moment which comes to every man and woman: the last earthly moment.

When I watch CNN and see the “Save Terri” crowds standing vigil outside her hospice, I see part of myself. The part that wants to cling to life at any cost, that recognizes how precious is the sense of “me” now inhabiting the body known as Brian.

When I watch Fox News and see Michael Schiavo pleading that his wife be permitted to die with dignity, I also see part of myself. The part that wants to soar as soul above the crude confines of materiality, that recognizes how marvelous is the expanse of the cosmos that lies beyond the little knowledge of reality that I have now.

And when I watch the videos of Terri Schiavo, I see myself most of all. Not part of myself, all of myself. I wonder what I would be—no, will be—when my brain becomes mush, worm food. Will “I” still be there? And where is “there”?

Whatever I will be or won’t be, wherever I will be or won’t be, I feel that Terri Schiavo and I are the same. As are you and me. As are we all. Terri’s enduring gift is that she has brought us closer together. That may not seem to be the case at this moment given all the divisiveness surrounding her bedside.

But I believe, or at least hope, that this will be Terri’s lasting legacy: a greater recognition that we are all Terri Schiavo. That whatever our religious beliefs or lack of beliefs, whatever our political inclinations or lack of inclinations, we are all human beings.

Who will die. One by one, yet also as One.

Terri Schiavo and Democratic silence

Channel-surfing through the cable news networks this morning, I chanced upon a MSNBC interview about the Schiavo case that made me say to myself, “How wise are this man’s observations!”

Namely, he was agreeing with what I said in yesterday’s post: the Democrats are wussing out on this issue because they’re scared of the religious right/social conservatives.

Here’s what Terry Neal, chief political correspondent for WashingtonPost.com, had to say:

MSNBC anchor: “So why have the Democrats been so silent, so quiet [about the Terri Schiavo case]?

Neal: “Well, that’s a good question. There’s still a lot of soul-searching among the Democrats. And I think the Republicans have a problem, but I think the Democrats have a problem too. The problem the Democrats have is that they seem to be unable to coalesce and come together around any issue that is sort of controversial. And I think it raises the question among people, ‘What exactly does this party stand for?’

I mean, think about it. In the Senate the Schiavo bill passed by unanimous consent. That means not one Democrat, not one Democratic senator, was willing to go to the leadership and force a floor vote on this. They just let this thing go.

And the reason is, they’re all scared about the exit poll numbers that show so many people care about moral issues, and the vast majority of those people voted for George W. Bush. They’re unwilling to take a stand on issues, even if it might upset the minority of voters who aren’t going to vote for them anyway.”

Right on, Mr. Neal.

My advice to the Democratic Party is that a precondition for having moral values is that you have any values. When you keep blowing in the wind, just like Kerry did, shifting course with every perceived change in the political climate, voters are going to see you as lacking a firm value spine.

Flexibility is fine. But bending is from a stable center. Cooked limp spaghetti can’t bend because it doesn’t have any firmness from which the bending can take place. Democrats are so loosey-goosey these days, I don’t know what they stand for any more. That’s why I’m comfortable remaining an Independent. I know what my values are; I’m perplexed about Democratic values.

As I said yesterday, if the Republicans introduce a bill that makes the recently-passed Terri Schiavo law apply to every incapacitated patient in a similar condition, the Senate Democrats are going to have a tough time explaining why what was good enough for Terri isn’t good enough for everybody.

My prediction is that these Dems are going to be saying, “I voted for the Terri Schiavo bill before I voted against it.” Such waffling isn’t the route to re-taking Congress and the Presidency.

Democrats on wrong side of Schiavo law

An ABC News poll says that 70% of Americans feel that it was inappropriate for Congress to get involved in the Terri Schiavo case. So it was ill-advised of the Democrats (particularly in the Senate) to be so supportive of a law that the vast majority of people oppose.

Democrats aren’t going to get back in power by missing opportunities like they had in the weekend voting. The Schiavo bill is clearly unconstitutional, so the Dems could stand tall for the rule of law, state’s rights, due process, and all that legal stuff. The Schiavo bill also is clearly against “family values,” in that Michael Schiavo is Terri's husband and legal guardian, which makes him the best person to decide how his wife would have wanted to be treated—a position courts have consistently agreed with.

But, apparently fearing the wrath of the Christian Right minority (as I’ve written about on my other weblog), most Democratic legislators caved in and voted for this atrocious federal intrusion into a family disagreement. Including every Democratic Senator. Yesterday Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden’s website said that Wyden approved of the Schiavo bill after his concerns had been addressed in the version that was sent to the House.

I assume this means that Wyden disapproved of the initial version of the bill that applied to anyone in Schiavo’s situation. When the bill was rewritten to apply only to Terri Schiavo, Wyden got behind it.

But here’s my question for Wyden: “What are you going to do when Republicans sponsor a bill that would allow anyone to go into federal court to challenge how an incapacitated patient without an advance directive is being treated? How will you answer when you’re asked, ‘If the bill you voted for was good enough for Terri Schiavo, why shouldn’t a broader bill be passed that would apply to everybody in a similar situation?'”

Few, if any, people would want the Christian Defense Coalition filing a lawsuit and trying to tell them how a loved one in a Schiavo-like vegetative condition should be treated. Yet the Democrats have now implicitly said “Come on in!” to those who want to open the door to more intrusion by religious zealots in private family affairs.

The crazy thing is that most religious people don’t favor the Schiavo bill. The ABC poll found that even evangelicals were evenly divided on whether her feeding tube should be removed. So it’s frustrating that Democrats missed an opportunity to both vote for progressive principles and for the clear wishes of the American people. Namely, to keep the federal government out of individual end-of-life decisions.

Today Sen. Wyden’s web site has no mention of the Schiavo bill. It isn’t even listed as a “hot topic” on the home page, though clearly it is. I suspect that Wyden is hearing from so many angry constituents, he doesn’t want to publicize his support for this legislation.

Laurel and I are among the angry. We emailed the Oregon congressional delegation yesterday, urging them to vote against the bill. Rep. David Wu courageously opposed congressional intervention in the Schiavo case, as did Rep. Earl Blumenauer. We watched C-Span’s and CNN’s coverage of the House debate last night. Some other Democrats stood up for the Constitution and people’s right to privacy, making well-reasoned impassioned speeches. But not enough Democrats.

By and large, Democrats rolled over like good little lapdogs, just as the religious right wanted them to do. It didn’t matter that all the facts were on the side of those opposing passage of the Schiavo bill. Emotion and blind faith—“I know that Terri can laugh, smile, and respond to her loved ones! We can’t let Terri die!”—won out over reality.

Terri Schiavo’s court-appointed guardian found, after extensive study, that she indeed is in a permanent vegetative state. Today I heard CNN’s medical reporter, Sanjay Gutpa, say that he has researched the medical literature and found that no one, repeat, no one, has ever recovered from a permanent vegetative state. Yet Tom DeLay and other Republicans keep claiming that they can tell, apparently from video clips alone, that Terri Schiavo is conscious of her surroundings.

She isn’t. Over and over, the cable news networks show the same footage of Schiavo seeming to follow a large balloon as it is waved over her head, and seeming to smile as someone runs fingers through her hair. “Seeming” is the operative word. This article, “Understanding Terri Schiavo,” describes how people in a persistent or permanent vegetative state (there is some disagreement about Schiavo’s detailed diagnosis) can appear to be responding to stimuli, but the movements are almost certainly random or mere reflexes.

In today’s Salem Statesman Journal Sriram Khé has a timely opinion piece, “Rhetoric-over-fact culture threatens our democracy.” Laurel and I couldn’t agree more. The political positions of too many people on both the right and left are much more the product of personal feelings and religious faith than careful consideration of facts.

It is one thing to know the facts about a situation and come to your own opinion about how to handle the situation. It is quite another thing to spout your ignorant opinion—“Terri has been deprived of due process!”—when you haven’t the faintest clue about what is really going on.

It’s deeply unfortunate that most Democrats went along with right-wing rhetoric last weekend and ignored the facts of the Terri Schiavo case. A Los Angeles Times editorial today called it “The Midnight Coup,” saying that “this case once again shows that some social conservatives are happy to see the federal government acquire Stalinist proportions when imposing their morality on the rest of the country.”

But not only social conservatives. Social liberals too. That’s what makes the weekend’s events so disturbing.

Carpet cleaning: the horror of it all

Note what lies in front of the caveman in what I must assume is a historically accurate The New Yorker cartoon (December 20/27 issue). A carpet. He doesn’t look happy. He shouldn’t be. His cavewoman gatherer has just introduced a hitherto unknown horror into his caveman life. Carpet cleaning.

Yesterday I endured my semi-annual carpet cleaning hell. Laurel knows that I hate these incursions into our cave. It doesn’t matter. She calls up the carpet cleaner and schedules them anyway. I had been dreading the coming of 9:00 am on Friday all week. The reality was even worse than I had expected.

And I thought I knew what to expect.

I’d answer the doorbell and let a guy in who would proceed to make my life miserable for three hours. He’d open doors and windows throughout the house on a 50 degree day. He’d spray awful-smelling stuff on the carpet and then get it all wet. He’d haul in noisy equipment. He’d put a fan at the entrance to my office that would blow like a hurricane while I was trying to do important stuff on my computer, like look for revealing photos of Tom Cruise’s new girlfriend. He’d move around whatever furniture we had left in place. And then, after creating all this chaos, he’d give us a bill for $500.

I was right about almost everything. Except, actually it was more like six hours. And the bill was more like $600.

Plus, the hose on his truck that we had hooked up to an outside softened-water faucet leaked like crazy. I spent fifteen minutes wrapping his hose with every form of leak-stopping tape that I could find: duct tape, electrical tape, emergency pipe wrap tape, asphalt roof repair tape. I had that hose connection bulging like a boa constrictor that had just eaten a rabbit.

It still leaked like a sieve. For the whole six hours. Wasting our well water, stressing our water softener, driving me even crazier than I already was.

Laurel went for a long walk with Serena during most of the nightmare. She came back about noon when she expected the carpet cleaner would be done. He had just warmed up. I have no idea how it is possible to spend six hours cleaning 1300 square feet of carpet. The guy spent a lot of time on his cell phone, calling his boss to tell him that he was behind schedule.

I wanted to scream from my wind tunnel-like office, “Just clean our _____ing carpet instead of explaining why you are late cleaning our carpet. That’s why you’re late, you _____ing idiot! You’re on your damn cell phone instead of cleaning our carpet!”

But somehow that didn’t seem like what a Taoism convert who supposedly flows with life would say. Except I wanted to say it. Go figure.

Today, to me the carpet looks exactly like it did on Thursday. However, I can clearly see that our checking account balance is $600 less. Well, I’ve read that women’s sense organs are more sensitive than men’s. Probably Laurel can see dirt that is invisible to me. She assures me that the carpet needed to be cleaned. I trust her.

Laurel asked how often our carpets had been cleaned during my first marriage. I had no idea. I’ve probably blanked the memories out in some sort of protective post-traumatic stress reaction. Yesterday’s memory too will fade, I hope. But I can’t forget that August is coming.

Another carpet cleaning horror awaits. I must be strong. Somewhere, there is a support group for men who work at home and are married to women who have the carpet cleaned twice a year. I will find it. With the help of my caveman brothers, I shall endure.

Thank you, Willamette Week personals

click to enlarge
Some sixteen years ago Laurel placed a personals ad in Willamette Week. This was in the ancient pre-online days, so I read about this 40 y.o. aware, fit, well-educated, independent, successful, attractive, blonde, long-haired SWF as I was thumbing through a Willamette Week copy that I had picked up at the state Capitol. This enticing and absolutely accurate description got me to write a letter to Box 601 that evening.

As of today we’ve been married fifteen years. Thank you, Willamette Week. By the way, karmically speaking it was interesting that a personals ad in a Portland publication brought together a Salem man and a woman who lived fairly close, outside of Silverton. Even more (play Twilight Zone music in your head now), we both were Isuzu Trooper owners!

Last year I wrote about how we got married just eight months after we met. I broke, no I smashed to smithereens, the ridiculous relationship rule that you hear repeated so often: “When you get divorced, don’t make any serious personal decisions for at least a year.” That may be good advice for some people. But not for others. When you know that someone is right for you, why wait to make a commitment?

It wouldn’t have taken us even eight months to get married if there hadn’t been a several week communication hitch after I wrote my first letter to Laurel. The two and a half page single-spaced description of my marvelous qualities (I could have gone on for quite a bit longer, but wanted to project at least a veneer of humility) piqued Laurel’s interest. She phoned the home number I had given her and my daughter, Celeste, answered.

“Is Brian available?” “No, can I take a message?” “That’s all right; I’ll call back.” Experienced in the perils and pitfalls of dating, Laurel thought that Celeste might be my wife. She had skipped over a line at the bottom of page 2: “I have a 17 year-old daughter who is living with me.”

Laurel kept on calling. Celeste kept on answering. And I kept on getting frustrated when I’d come home and hear my daughter say, “That woman called again but she wouldn’t leave a message.” Thankfully, we finally connected. First by phone and then at a Salem Mexican restaurant where, foreshadowing the past fifteen years, I had to sit and wait for fifteen minutes while Laurel took her sweet time showing up for our first date.

She was worth the wait then. Much more so now. Tonight we’re planning to go out for a vegetarian dinner at our favorite place to eat, the Marco Polo Global Restaurant. If Laurel isn’t ready to go when I am, which is a near-certainty, I’ll spend the time mentally singing the praises of the Willamette Week personals—which are now available online.

Looking over them just now I notice that a few things have changed since Laurel and I met. The quick menu options are divided into “personals” and “no strings attached.” A count of several categories revealed that the “personals” are evenly divided between the number of women seeking men (51) and men seeking women (47). But in the “no strings attached” category, there was just 1 woman wanting a man, but 13 men wanting a woman (apparently no-stringers “want,” while personals “seek”).

For fifteen years I’ve been happy to be strung to Laurel. I was a seeker back in 1989, as was Laurel. Her ad said that she “seeks a mate to share the mysteries and pleasures of life.” She found one.

At the time I fulfilled all of her listed personal ad criteria except for the “values dogs” item. I ended my first letter to Laurel with, “By the way, I should admit that dogs are not my favorite creatures in life. I had dogs when I was growing up, but only cats since then. Yet it seemed that this difference paled in comparison to all the other things we appeared to have in common.”

After Laurel’s psychotic German Shepherd, Tasha, died and we got the gentle Wonder Dog, Serena, I was pleased that Laurel could now cross that final criterion off of her “man has to be…” list.

Bottom line: It pays to advertise. Someone out there has, or is, just what you’re looking for.

Blogging about Nightline's blogging program

If you missed it, here’s a recap of last week’s Nightline program about bloggers and blogging. True to the blogging spirit, I’m working from my middle-aged memory. I didn’t take any notes while watching the program, nor do I want to take the time to review it—though it still resides on my digital video recorder.

This is my take on the program. Take it or leave it.

Bloggers, said Nightline, are wonderfully opinionated. Well, if you are on the wrong side of their opinion, then it won’t seem so wonderful. But the subjectivity of weblogs is what makes them so appealing. And, to some, dangerous. A blogger was asked if she feels that she should be subject to journalistic conventions such as having at least two sources for every significant news item. “No,” she said. “I’m not a newspaper.”

And yet she is. Nightline showed two computer screens, one with the New York Times online home page and another with a weblog home page (I’ll use BlueOregon as a nicely designed example). To compete with the New York Times newspaper you’d need many millions of dollars, printing presses, distribution channels, and lots of employees. However, anyone can become a blogger, With minimal expertise and $$$, in a few minutes you can have a weblog that can be read worldwide. And it can look just as good as the New York Times web presence.

Bloggers spoke enthusiastically about their love of blogging. How blogs are interactive, allowing readers to click on links that lead to more information about the subject, which lead to even more information, and so on ever deeper into the blogosphere. By contrast, traditional media are one-way streets where news and opinion are transmitted, but rarely permit responses by readers, viewers, or listeners.

Blogs create communities. They allow people with common interests to congregate in cyberspace, people who otherwise never would have been able to find each other. Amen. Whenever I peruse the TypePad statistics for my weblogs, I get a warm feeling as I see that someone from India, say, has used a search engine to find a post that I wrote on some esoteric subject. I realize that just a few people in the world care about my subject. But that person did. And I do. Two makes a party when it comes to weblogging.

Nightline featured a woman who was aghast that a state legislator was sponsoring a bill requiring that miscarriages be reported to a government agency. This wasn’t the main intent of the bill (which I can’t clearly remember), yet it would have been an unintended consequence of the way it was written. She fired up her weblog and began writing about the bill. Soon her posts got the attention of expecting mother’s groups and the like. Emails started flooding into the legislator’s inbox.

He withdrew the bill. And he wasn’t happy about becoming the brunt of a blogger’s righteous indignation. “Why didn’t she talk to me first?” he asked. When Nightline asked her the same question, she said, “I didn’t feel like I had to. He is a public official. The proposed bill was a public record. I have the right to express my opinions on my weblog.”

I side with the blogger, though I commiserate with the legislator. As bloggers become more visible and influential, they need to be increasingly careful that opinions are clearly separated from facts. In the blogosphere, these lines can easily become blurred. The anti-bill blogger spoke of how her original posts opposing the legislation got more and more garbled as other web sites passed on her words. Like the game where a message is whispered from ear to ear around a circle of people, errors accumulate with repetition.

All in all, though, watching the Nightline program left me standing prouder as a blogger. Blogging is helping to restore a sense of balance to media outlets that have gotten way too big, too corporate, too powerful, too unfair and unbalanced.

One of the most memorable images I remember from the program was when the moderator spoke about the above-mentioned woman pressing the “post” button on her weblog. Nightline showed a Formula 1 race and a voiceover something like, “Bloggers, start your engines.”

This is the power of weblogging, they said. One person’s opinion can become amplified into a powerful howling mass of supercharged outrage. If you’re standing on the track watching the energized blogosphere speed toward you, it can be an awesome experience.

Just ask Dan Rather.

White House doublespeak about rendition

Whenever I watch C-Span’s coverage of the daily White House press briefings I wonder how the correspondents keep their sanity. It’s admirable that the blogger at FishbowlDC persevered until he finally got a White House press pass. But I bet he often thinks, listening to spokesman Scott McClellan, “Why the heck am I wasting my time here?”

For McClellan is a master of using robotic responses that have little or no connection to what is being asked. It’s amusing to use the 30 second advance button on my digital video recorder and hear McClellan repeating the exact same words every half a minute like a neo-con pull-toy: “Freedom is on the march…Everything changed after 9/11…Freedom is on the march…Everything changed after 9/11.”

Last Monday, March 7, I happened to tune in while McClellan was blathering on about the U.S. rendition policy. Rendition is a fancy word for what basically is kidnapping. “Sixty Minutes” recently featured a segment on the practice. Typically it works like this.

A suspected terrorist (note, suspected) is arrested in a foreign country. Sweden, say. He’s then turned over to American authorities who fly around the world in a private jet. Wearing hoods, they pick up the suspect and deliver him to a country where torture is an accepted interrogation technique. Egypt, say. The poor soul is then beaten and otherwise tortured to within an inch of his life. No trial. No lawyer. No one knows where he’s been taken.

Sixty Minutes interviewed a man who, as I recall, was arrested in Bosnia. He was flown by the rendition team to Afghanistan. There he was beaten and accused of being a terrorist. He was told that nobody knew where he was, which naturally included his family. After a few months he was released and dropped off in Albania.

He said that he was told, “We got you mixed up with someone else.” He didn’t believe that story. Regardless, it’s scary when the American government believes that it can pick up someone and secretly deposit them into the hands of torturers. Of course, the U.S. claims that the countries where the suspects are rendered have agreed not to use torture. Yeah, right.

Here’s how this part of the White House press briefing went. Scott McClellan is answering (or more accurately, trying not to answer) a question from ABC’s Terry Moran.

McClellan: We also have an obligation not to render people to countries if they believe they would be tortured…But this is a different kind of war, and it requires us to gather intelligence so we can protect the American people.

Moran: One of the countries that receives a lot of these individuals is Uzbekistan. What is it that the Uzbekis can do in interrogations that the United States of America can’t do?

McClellan then says that he can’t speak about specific intelligence matters. Moran presses on in his fruitless search for a straight answer.

Moran: In general, what is it that that this country, the most advanced in national security matters of any country in the world, cannot accomplish in interrogations that the nation of Uzbekistan can?

Once again, McClellan slides off the question, saying that he can’t speak about specific intelligence gathering techniques. Moran won’t let him off the hook.

Moran: I’m wondering about the rationale for rendition. Why does the President approve of it? Why has he expanded it? And what is it that countries like Uzbekistan, in general, offer the U.S.?

McClellan: I’ve just told you that, in general, we have an obligation to the American people to gather intelligence that will prevent attacks from happening in the first place. The war on terrorism is a different kind of war and we have sworn enemies of the United States who seek to do us harm and we are talking about enemy combatants, known terrorists, involved in plotting and planning to attack the American people in the past, and who might have information that can help us prevent attacks from happening in the future. And as we go about gathering intelligence we have rules and laws that we believe are important, that we believe need to be adhered to…The President has made it very clear that we do not torture.

Highly debatable. But now that Americans have been caught using torture, it seems that the backup policy is to have other countries do the torturing for us. So McClellan can stand there with a straight face and say “We do not torture.” We just have people in hoods pick people up and fly them in a private plane to places where they do torture.

Disgusting. 1984 doublespeak is alive and well in 2005. Listening to McClellan, I was proud to be a Kerry voter.

“I Heart Huckabees”

I loved the philosophy in this DVD movie. I didn’t like much else about it, especially the lame title, which features a heart as in “I [heart] New York.” Even Prince has given up on the unpronounceable symbol shtick. The producers of “I Heart Huckabees” should have chosen a title more befitting to the movie.

I don’t know, maybe “The Existential Detectives.” For Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are the centerpieces here. They are two Existential Detectives hired by an environmentalist who is trying to figure out the Meaning Of It All. “All” includes his efforts to save open spaces and his relationship with a spokesman (Jude Law) for Huckabees, a chain of stores which, as Ebert says in the above-linked review, “doesn’t care about the environment, but cares deeply about seeming to care.”

The storyline, acting, and characters in “I Heart Huckabees” didn’t do much for me. However, I got through the 105 movie minutes enjoyably thanks to the philosophical snippets that popped up regularly and roused my interest. I would have enjoyed the movie considerably more if the plot had been dropped completely.

The ideas underlying the plot are compelling. A “My Dinner With Andre”-like conversation about whether the cosmos is (1) a meaningful unity or (2) meaningless chaos awaits another filmmaker. Here Existential Detective Hoffman champions the “all is one” perspective while his nemesis, a French woman played by Isabelle Huppert, puts forth the “all is crap” position.

The phrase “All is crap” doesn’t do justice to the philosophies of Sartre, Camus, and the other existentialists I avidly read during my early college years’ embrace of meaninglessness. But, if I remember correctly, in three words it pretty well sums up thousands of pages of their writings.

Hoffman believes that everything is connected; Huppert believes that everything just is. Where Hoffman enthusiastically sees a reflection of loving cosmic oneness, Huppert (metaphorically) sips her expresso, takes a puff on her unfiltered cigarette, and blows out a smoke-ring with a cynical, “That’s bullshit.”

There are powerful arguments on both sides. That’s what made “I Heart Huckabees” so compelling for me. I wasn’t much interested in how the storyline turned out; I was eager to learn the outcome of the philosophical mano-a-womano. In my opinion, it was a draw. Laurel came away feeling that All is One was the winner.

It could well be that both sides are right: life is meaningless and life is meaningful. Which is true at a given moment just depends on… . Well, if I could replace those three dots with some words, I’d be a happy philosophical camper. I’m still searching for the trail that leads to the campground, so have a long way to go before I’m able to settle into a tent of truth. Sometimes I feel that I’m getting some glimpses of the path ahead, though.

The beginning of “I Heart Huckabees” features some coincidences. Wanting to figure out what those coincidences mean drives the environmentalist to hire the Existential Detectives. They follow him around, observing every detail of his life, on the assumption that if everything is connected, following any single thread of an event could reveal the entire fabric of the cosmos.

After I watched “I Heart Huckabees” I experienced a mild existential coincidence of my own. In the movie a character observes that only 5% of the matter/energy in the universe is recognizable. This is true. Physicists estimate that 70% of the stuff that makes up the universe is dark energy, 20% is dark matter, and just 5% is ordinary matter (“dark” is scientific shorthand for “we don’t know what it is”).

So there I was in my post-movie moment, brushing my teeth before going to bed, reading the February 28, 2005 issue of U.S. News and World Report that I had opened up next to the sink. And in an article called “Mysteries of the Mind” there it was! The 5% solution!

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

Beautiful. The human mind that only knows about 5% of the stuff in the universe is only aware of 5% of what goes on in itself. Let’s see: 5% times 5% is a quarter of a percent. That seems about right—after ten thousand years or so of civilization Homo sapiens is clued in to about 1/400th of what the cosmos is all about, 0.25%.

No wonder life seems so meaningless so much of the time.

But then…there’s the other 99.75%.

Get a grip on that, even some of that, and I suspect life looks much different.

Bring it on.

Oregon’s climatologist denies global warming

Oregon is in a drought. That’s undeniable. The U.S. Drought Monitor says so. Global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases is for real. That’s also undeniable according to the results of a recent study of ocean temperatures.

As I wrote in an earlier post, "Global warming: the big truth," Oceanographers analyzed more than seven million recordings of ocean temperatures from around the world. They compared the rise in temperatures at different depths to predictions made by two computer simulations of global warming.

Bingo. Right on. No doubt about it. Man-made greenhouse gases are the cause of observed changes in ocean temperatures. One of the researchers, a marine physicist, said: "We've got a serious problem. The debate is no longer: 'Is there a global warming signal?' The debate now is: 'What are we going to do about it?'

Yet Oregon’s climatologist, George Taylor, denies that global warming is occurring. In September 2004 Taylor was part of a group that sent a letter to Sen. John McCain, who was chairing a Commerce Committee hearing examining recent scientific research concerning climate change impacts. The group was quoted as saying that “there is little supporting meteorological evidence” for global warming.

That's ridiculous. Take a look at the New Scientist "Special Report on Climate Change" and the first thing you'll read is, "Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes." Scientists at the University of Washington have studied changes in northwest snowpacks and concluded that global warming could shrink already diminished snowpack water content by over 50% in coming decades.

Meanwhile, George Taylor gives speeches where he says that global warming actually isn't an imminent threat.

I hope Taylor will change his mind. Oregon can’t afford to have a state climatologist who doesn’t understand that global warming almost certainly is a major influence on our state’s climate. Its worrisome when the climatologist for a coastal state doesn’t believe that oceans are warming because of greenhouse gases. By contrast, the climatologist for Washington state says that global warming is no myth and the repercussions could be severe in the Pacific Northwest.

They already are. Close to home here in Salem, Detroit Lake, along with other reservoirs, probably won’t fill up with enough water for boating this year, just as in 2001—another drought year. This will hammer the Detroit economy. A recent Salem Statesman-Journal article lists other impending drought problems: “shortages of irrigation water for farms, tight municipal water supplies, inadequate river flows to nurture salmon and other wildlife and extreme wildfire danger.”

Right after this list of impending catastrophes, the article says, “State climatologist George Taylor, calling himself an eternal optimist, said he thinks a wet spring is possible.” Well, we'll see. Longer term, Taylor believes that Oregon will be cooler and wetter than normal for the next 15 years. That's hard to imagine given the trends of the past few years.

During most of the past winter the jet stream took storms to the south, into California and away from Oregon. To my understanding, this is a typical El Nino pattern. In his paper, “Impacts of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation on the Pacific Northwest,” Taylor writes that the warmer ocean temperatures associated with an El Nino results in lower than normal precipitation for the Northwest.

Which is just what is happening. And it has been happening for years. A 1998 NOAA (National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) report said that global warming might be exacerbating El Nino’s effects on the weather. After this report was issued Al Gore urged Congress to act to reduce greenhouse gases. His advice was ignored. People are more likely to believe in the reality of El Nino than in the reality of global warming. Politically, says this analysis, the two have been disconnected.

Yet almost certainly they are connected. It isn’t difficult to make a persuasive argument that Oregon is going to suffer through a drought because manmade global warming has raised ocean temperatures, which has created El Nino conditions, which divert Pacific storms away from the Northwest.

Oregon’s policy-makers shouldn’t be focused only on dealing with the effects of global warming, as the group Taylor is associated with has argued. This group advised that emergency preparedness should be the focus of efforts to mitigate the effects of Florida hurricanes. Since Taylor doesn’t accept the reality of global warming, I expect that he isn't supportive of the West Coast Governors' Global Warming Initiative that Oregon is a part of.

Doesn't it seem strange that Oregon's climatologist is at odds with not only most of the world (which has adopted the Kyoto Treaty) but also the official policy of our state? The above-linked Oregon Department of Energy page says that "on September 22, 2003, Governors Kulongoski, Davis and Locke announced that they have concluded that Oregon, California and Washington must act individually and regionally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because global warming will have serious adverse consequences on the economy, health and environment of the west coast states. (Governor Schwarzenegger has continued California's participation.)"

It isn’t too far off the mark to say that a meteorologist who doesn’t believe that global warming is occurring is akin to a zoologist who doesn’t believe in the theory of evolution, or a cosmologist who doesn’t believe in the big bang. Taylor’s writings (such as this, and this) point toward a conclusion that he is out-of-touch with the broader scientific community.

Hopefully he is keeping his mind open. I look forward to learning whether recent research has led George Taylor to change his opinion about global warming.

When even evangelical leaders are getting behind the effort to fight global warming, Oregon’s climatologist should become a convert to doing what’s right for our state and the earth. (See post continuation for a New York Times article on this evangelical movement)

Blogging focus of "Nightline" tonight

Bloggers and those who love them will want to watch "Nightline" tonight (ABC, 11:35 pm on our local Portland station). The scheduled subject is blogs and their effect on society. Here's an excerpt from today's Nightline email:

Tonight's piece is a fascinating one. Turns out that as John and producer Elissa Rubin were conducting interviews with bloggers, they were being blogged. The bloggers had some interesting opinions, to say the least. And as this program airs (and this e-mail is read by viewers), there's no doubt that bloggers will blog about it.

Yes, they got that right.
(See post continuation for the full Nightline email about this program).

I love Karl Rove

Not me, but Virginia sure does. She (unless “Virginia” is a he) has a marvelous website, I love Karl Rove!, devoted to expressing her feelings for Karl. This may be the only place on earth (I certainly hope it is) where you can buy a thong with Rove’s face on it.

Virginia has a way with words: If you're feeling particularly frisky, and are needing a little extra face time with Rovey, just flip your RoveThong printed side in so he can directly address the heart of the matter. You just might find, as thousands of RoveHos have, that while Karl may indeed be 100% GOP in the Cabinet Room, dans le boudoir, his oral arguments delve deeply into the very core of thighpartisanship, and the hot button issues he simply lives to agitate.

“RoveHo”—what a chilling image. This website should be made the centerpiece of high school abstinence-only programs. Gazing upon all the photos of Rove’s visage, and reading about Virginia’s lust for him, certainly dampened my own sex drive.

Don’t miss “Virginia Wade’s Guide to Democratic Candidate Humpability,” circa December 2003. I never thought that anyone could fantasize about having sex with Joseph Lieberman. Great stuff, Virginia.

Relax, vitamins won’t be banned

Laurel recently got an email warning that vitamins with a potency over the RDA will be available by prescription only soon, for an international group called CODEX will be taking our good old American supplements away if we don’t stop them.

I told her that this sounded like an Internet “urban legend.” And indeed it is, according to the great debunking web site, Snopes. Yes, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in concert with the World Health Organization (WHO), does have a Codex Alimentarius Commission.

But it certainly isn’t true, as this web site breathlessly proclaims, that “an international pharmaceutical trade-group cartel known as CODEX is preparing to limit dietary supplements to RDA-quantities only, and make any supplement over the RDA a prescription-only item.”

Snopes points out that the laws of each country govern how supplements are regulated. I’ve heard that DHEA, which I take in a probably futile effort to postpone the aging process, isn’t sold over the counter in Europe, while it is in the United States. The Codex Alimentarius Commission is working to establish international food standards, but compliance with those standards is voluntary. And I don’t see Congress passing a law that would take our mega-doses of Vitamin C away.

My public relations recommendation to the FAO and WHO is that they come up with a better name for the Codex Alimentarius Commission. It sounds like something out of the DaVinci Code—a shadowy global cabal that is out to control our alimentary tracts. The commission explains that this name came from a similarly-termed effort in the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1897 and 1911.

Come on, though. We Americans don’t trust international groups, and especially not those with mysterious Latin-sounding names. I also would recommend that the commission tone down its rhetoric a bit. After recently seeing (and writing about) “The Yes Men,” a documentary about some guys who put up a fake WTO web site, I was initially suspicious that the Codex Alimentarius Commission Internet presence was for real.

These lines sound just like something the Yes Men would have put into one of their WTO spoof speeches: “It is difficult to imagine a world without the Codex Alimentarius. It has been said that if Codex did not exist, somebody would have to invent it.” Yet this comes from a “Codex and the Future” page on what I am assured is the real Codex web site.

We’re relieved that our vitamins appear to be safe. For now. All I can say is that if those United Nations thugs show up at our house in their black helicopters we won’t go down easily. They’ll have to pry our beloved supplements out of our warm wrinkled hands. (See "A Vitamin Creation Story" to better understand our worshipful relationship with these health enhancing sacraments).

Taoism talk flows

Yesterday I gave my first-ever talk about Taoism to a Chemeketa Community College class. As befits the subject matter, it flowed pretty well. I rationalized my minimal preparation by saying to myself, “That’s how a Taoist sage would do it—speak from the heart, not from notes.”

Of course, one problem with this approach was that I’m not a Taoist sage. And the heart from which I tried to speak from is filled with all kinds of crap. Some wisdom too, I hope, but largely crap. Which reminds me that somehow I missed sharing with the class a favorite quotation from The Book of Chuang Tzu. Now that it comes to mind, I feel better about what’s in my heart:

Master Tung Kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “That which is called the Tao, where is it?”
Chuang Tzu replied, “There is nowhere where it is not.”
“But give me a specific example.”
“In this ant,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Is that its lowest point?”
“In this panic grass,” said Chuang Tzu.
“Can you give me a lower example?”
“In this common earthenware tile,” said Chuang Tzu.
“This must be its lowest point!”
“It’s in shit and piss too,” said Chuang Tzu.
Master Tung Kuo had no answer to this.

Almost as soon as I walked into the Judson Middle School classroom for the second half of the three hour class I got a question from an earnest student: “What does the te mean in Tao Te Ching?” “Oh, no,” I thought. “Am I expected to actually know something about Taoism?” I started to lose confidence in my whole lesson plan, which basically consisted of reading some mystifying anecdotes from The Book of Chuang Tzu and commenting confusedly on them.

If nobody had any idea what I was talking about, that was OK. After all, Chuang Tzu is known as the “genius of the absurd.” If the mojo (or should I say “ch’i”?) in the class started to flag, I had a copy of my “The Tao of Paris Hilton” and "I become a Taoist" posts ready to roll. One thing I wasn’t ready for was a serious question about the meaning of a Taoist term. Fortunately, the class was on a break and I could wriggle away with a “Good question, I’ll try to get to the meaning of te during my talk.”

But I didn’t try very hard. I think te means “life force,” which seems real similar to “ch’i.” And isn’t ch’i part and parcel of the Tao? Whatever. That’s the beauty of Taoism. Words count for nothing. No matter what you say about Taoism, you’re wrong.

I was pleased that everyone in the class appeared to stay awake right up to 9:00 pm. That was my main goal: not put anyone to sleep. To achieve that end I used several of my tried and true public speaking techniques: (1) when interest seems to flag, tell an embarrassing story about yourself, and (2) if that doesn’t perk up the room, tell an embarrassing story about someone else. Such as Laurel. Well, it wasn’t so much embarrassing as revealing. I observed that Laurel will spend all afternoon tending to the trees she’s planted on our property, then come in and say, “Look at my desk! I’ve got so much paperwork! I should have been inside working on it!”

But if she had done that, I can almost guarantee that come dusk she would be saying, “Look at how nice the day was! I’ve got so much gardening to do! I should have been outside working!” We don’t trust our instincts, was my conclusion. If we feel the urge to do something, and then do it, second-guessing often sets in after the first-impulsing. Taoism discourages such mental musings: “Maybe it would have been better if….”

Chuang Tzu says, “That which one does because it is impossible to do other, that is the Tao of the sage.” Easy to say. Also easy to do. It only is possible to do one thing at a time, so why not simply do that one thing fully, completely, passionately, unreservedly, happily?

Figuring that if I ended my talk on a mysteriously enigmatic note I’d be less likely to get any additional quasi-scholarly questions that I couldn’t answer, I turned to “The Shores of the Dark Waters” chapter. Here’s how it begins. If I took Chuang Tzu’s message seriously, I’d welcome tough questions about Taoism. And answer just as Words-of-Actionless-Action did.

“Control Room” and “The Yes Men”

These two now-rentable documentaries are a great double feature on the interlocking themes of media manipulation and human gullibility. Without the latter, the former wouldn’t work. If people weren’t so easy to fool, the media would have to put out truly fair and balanced news because the citizenry wouldn’t tolerate having the wool pulled over its eyes.

In reality, however, there’s a symbiotic relationship between media shepherds and the sheep-like reading/watching public. Watching these movies in tandem makes this connection more obvious. “Control Room” focuses on how the Arabic satellite news channel Al Jazeera and the U.S. networks covered the early days of the Iraq war, and how the Pentagon tried to spin this coverage.

“The Yes Men” shows how some creative anti-World Trade Organization guys were able to put up a spoof GATT web site and get invitations to speak to groups about WTO policies. The amazing thing is that generally the Yes Men tricksters could do and say outrageous stuff with no outrageous reaction from the audience.

At one presentation they argued that, as Roger Ebert summarizes, “The involuntary servitude of imported labor, which is what slavery amounts to, has been replaced in our times by the much more efficient system of exporting jobs to countries that are poor to begin with, and thus have lower maintenance costs for labor. This ‘remote labor’ is the natural alternative to slavery…[The worker] is responsible for his own housing, feeding, and medical care—which can be at a cost level much lower than a slave owner could safely provide.”

Maybe PowerPoint dulls people’s critical thinking. Whatever, after the talk the audience dutifully applauded and didn’t ask any questions. Another time the Yes Man presenter ended a speech by ripping off his business suit, revealing a gold lame body suit that featured an inflatable phallic-like appendage which supposedly was a prototype design for technology that would enable managers to supervise employees from anywhere in the world.

You’ll have to see the movie to believe what the Yes Men got away with. Even when some students challenged their plan to recycle human excrement so a hamburger could be eaten over and over, thereby improving McDonalds’ profits and lowering food prices in the Third World, the challenge was to the plan, not to the credibility of the Yes Men themselves.

Why didn’t a student stand up and scream, “You guys aren’t real WTO representatives! You’re fakes!”? That’s the big question “The Yes Men” left in the minds of Laurel and me. More personally, how much of what we see and hear ourselves is as illusory as the Yes Men speeches? For example, is Fox News just another put-on, albeit vastly better financed and without gold lame body suits?

“Control Room” shows how different the Iraq war looked on Al Jazeera as compared to the U.S. networks and cable news channels. I came away with a much more sympathetic view of Al Jazeera. To some extent I had believed the Donald Rumsfeld bluster that Al Jazeera slants its coverage to show only the anti-American perspective. But after watching the movie’s interviews with Al Jazeera correspondents and editors, it’s obvious that they are committed to a vision of media integrity that is at least as valid as the Fox News version. Probably, more so.

Sure, Al Jazeera picks and chooses what to report. Images of dead Iraqi children are shown more often than pictures of Iraqis giving flowers to U.S. troops. Yet every news organization does the same thing: pick and choose. Worse, what is picked and chosen from may have already been manipulated, thereby increasing the illusion shown to viewers.

The scene of reveling Iraqis toppling the Baghdad statue of Saddam Hussein was one of the pivotal media moments of the Iraq war. However, an Al Jazeera correspondent argues persuasively that the men shown toppling the statue didn’t have Baghdad accents and seemed to have been brought by U.S. troops for a staged event. “Control Room” shows a different view of the toppling than was presented on American TV: the square looks almost deserted apart from the relatively few men taking the statue down.

So the moral from these movies is: don’t always believe what you see, hear, and read. Look at life through multiple eyes, various perspectives, alternative interpretations. Trust your instincts when something seems too ridiculous to be true. Likely, it isn’t.

Urgent alert for highlighting professionals

Highlighters are a big part of my life. I am utterly unable to read a non-fiction book (and I read a lot of them) without a highlighter in hand. I consider myself a highlighting professional. I’ve test driven many kinds of highlighters over the years. I’ve come to settle on what I consider to be the Porsche 911 of highlighters: the tank style Sanford liquid accent.

I always have a few extra around the house to avoid a highlighting emergency. However, a big advantage of the Sanford liquid accent is that you can see how much highlighting fluid is sloshing in the tank. This now seems an essential feature of a high-performance highlighter for me.

I can’t imagine driving my car without a gas gauge. Unexpectedly I could find myself stopped by the side of the road at any time. The analogous situation with my non-fiction books is that I could find myself unable to turn a page and keep reading if the only highlighter I had available ran dry. A highlighting professional wants to be able to monitor the fluid supply, just as a NASCAR racer has more engine gauges at his disposal than amateur drivers do.

So here’s my alert to other tank style Sanford liquid accent aficionados: All the evidence points to a conclusion that this highlighter has been phased out of production. A few days ago I went to Fred Meyer to stock up on them and was shocked, absolutely shocked, to not see this item displayed. Ditto with Office Depot, though they haven’t carried them for quite a while.

My fingers were trembling with anxiety when I checked out the Sanford web site this morning. I felt even worse after I ran down the list of liquid accent highlighter choices. Not a tank style among them. Apparently Sanford has gone completely to a weeny pen style that doesn’t hold near enough fluid for someone like me, who may highlight most of a page when the “oh yeah, this is good!” spirit strikes.

Luckily I found an online office supply source that still had a decent supply of the tank style highlighter in stock at a reasonable price. I bought 28 of them (my $50.40 order got me just over the free shipping line). I’m feeling like I should have bought even more, since this is just a several year supply, at most, and I plan on living much longer than that. For the question becomes, is life really worth living without a decent highlighter in hand?

Hopefully I’ll never have to confront that question. If there is a merciful god, or even more likely, greedy capitalists, the tank style liquid accent market niche will be filled again before I run out of my inventory.