ON THE DEATH OF PAMMY

In my sorrow over the death of my little doggie friend, I draw on the words of Samuel Johnson on the death of his friend (his mother) (Idler No. 41, January 1759).

That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose fancy dancies after meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend, but the fallacy will be in time detected; the last year, the last day must come. It has come and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.

The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavor tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.

. . .

Yet such is the course of nature, that whoever lives long must outlive those whom he loves and honours. Such is the condition of our present existence, that life must one time lose it associations, and every inhabitant of the earth must walk downward to the grave alone and unregarded, without any partner of his joy or grief, without any interested witness of his misfortunes or success.

Rest in peace, little Pammy.

TROUBLE IN DEMOCRACY

Democracy has served us well for over 200 years, but unfortunately it carries the seeds of its own destruction. Alexander Hamilton considered this in Federalist Paper 10, where he talked about factions. He thought that factions would tend to cancel each other out and that their ultimate result would be good. That presupposition has seemed to hold for a long, long time, but may well be crumbling now. Factions, now known as interest groups, have attained such influence and voracity that they have made it next to impossible to accomplish anything anymore. No matter what laudable effort is made to alleviate a social or political evil, some group immediately jumps in and claims to be harmed by the proposal or that it is contrary to some other equally laudable effort. And this struggle of faction and counter faction goes on and on regardless of the proposals advanced and so vigorous are they that in the end not only are no adjustments made to the status quo, but social discourse is damaged to the degree that civil society itself is threatened. Thus is factional discord the doorway through which power politics replaces democracy.

Similarly, with the Bill of Rights. Marvelous achievement in the history of governments, but now becoming more and more dysfunctional. Freedom of Speech, for example, is a most laudable ideal, but no sooner is it exercised by one group than another group claims to be harmed. Or the Right to Bear Arms, or what we now call Separation of Church and State, have been exaggerated to cover a multitude of areas never dreamed of by the Founders. Contention and confrontation have attained such dominion over Right that now we are on the verge of social upheaval over whether and how to exerise these ten basic Rights. This, too, is a struggle that can conceivably destroy our whole sociopolitical structure if we don't go back and learn to respect each other and to settle differences without trying to utterly destroy those with whom we disagree.

CREATION AS IRONY

The Creationists would have us believe that a single Creator in one swell foop created all the earth and all its creatures. Well, if He, She, It did just that, then clearly such a Creator was (is) the Monster of all monsters. For what but a monster would create creatures (same derivation) that could only survive and live by killing and eating each other. This has to be the ultimate irony of life, that all creatures, including us vaunted humans, live only by killing and eating our fellow creatures. Ruminants not withstanding, for the vegetation they eat is alive, too. It's enough to make one send for an atheist. And irony of ironies,
Creationists go on to claim that this Creator is a creature of love. What in the world is this nonsense about?

POPERY POTPOURI

The morning posts are all full of the new pope, mostly with questions about his assumed conservatism. Such nonsense. On election the man became infallible, so what's this concern over such a mundane issue as whether he's conservative or liberal or in between? Hell, he's infallible. His statements are TRUE. Period. Now either change the doctrine or stop the palaver.

Love the new name. Ratzinger. God knows the Catholic Church has plenty of rats that need zinging. Yeah, I know it's German and has nothing to do with rats, but still the homonym is fun.

Lots of efforts afoot to instill the dead pope with gobs of personal moral authority. It doesn't work, I think. The pope's authority comes from his position; it is wholly institutional. Making him a saint or calling him great doesn't change a thing. Today we don't have anybody on the world scene who speaks with personal moral authority, pope, president, or whatever. Personal moral authority is especially scarce in this country. Too may shysters around. Some tried to make McCain into such a figure, but he turns out to be just another Republican supporting the self-serving policies of the Bush administration. And what a flop Clinton turned out to be in this department!

MUSINGS

I never cease to marvel at the verbal perigrinations of our peerless leaders in Washington. To believe Tom Delay is to deny reality. Such innocence. Such innate goodness. Such religiosity. Clearly, the man is a saint. Just ask him.

Personally, I suspect he's rotten to the core.

The media would be well advised to devote as much attention to the black smoke rushing from the smokestacks of our factories as to the smoke emanating from the Vatican chimney. The machinations of a bunch of old fools in Rome to elect a chief boogeyman are a waste of time. Better if the media were to abandon the whole process and devote their energy to making the world a better place by pointing out the folly of a church that mocks its message with oppulent displays worthy only of a monster dictator

Spending a lot of time worrying about and with my adorable 12+ year old diabetic Keeshond, Pammy. She's reached the point that she's beginning to lose weight (a fourth of total body weight now) and has a lot of trouble eating. I keep trying new foods and she'll eat some once or twice and then refuses to eat any more. I have her on some stomach medicine, which may be helping a little, but she desperately needs to eat more. In addition, the little warm weather we've had so far this spring is already getting to her. I'll have to lower the AC this summer or she'll really suffer--if she survives that long.

Tax season is over and my 2 1/2-month stint as an AARP Tax-Aide is complete. We did only e-filing this year, because IRS, which sponsors the service, insists that we do it that way . My own taxes I did the old-fashioned way, by hand. It's kinda fun doing other people's returns; my own, I agonize over, although it is much simplier than some I did for other people. I figure just one mistake and the IRS will come out here and shoot me.

Pretty clearly the Republicans are trying to destroy the nation. Bush's main efforts have been directed at destroying the economy, at which he's made much progress, followed now by Congress' efforts at destroying the checks and balances that have preserved our nation for 200 plus years. Not to mention the gratituous attacks on middle and low income people from both the Executive and Legislative branches. Social Security is something the Republicans have wanted to destroy since the day it was begun in the mid-1930s. They can't stand the control it gives older citizens during the final years of their lives. Sadly, the people most in need of a government that champions their needs are the very people most likely to be stampeded by red herring issues designed to frighten and confuse, such as claims that well-intentioned people are out to force homosexuality on their children and/or to destroy the hill-billy Christianity that so dominates the majority of American's thinking.

HERE WE GO AGAIN

It is more than passing interesting that Ariel Sharon is visiting Bush at this time. In the period just before we launched the attack against Iraq, Sharon visited Bush weekly. Now he is back voicing dire warnings about Iran. Is he trying to induce us to attack Iran as we did Iraq? I'm worried.

MEDIA CIRCUSES

Media, both print and broadcast, have been pretty much set pieces for the past week or two. First, the circus surrounding the last days of Terri Schiavo and now the nonstop coverage of the pope's last days and illness. The media seem to love last days!

I have a great deal of sympathy for all members of the Schiavo family, although it's a sadly disfunctional crowd. Not being much into the pope and things catholic, I'm not terribly moved by his death. Throughout all the verbiage over his history and legacy, we seem to have forgotten that the Catholic Church is a totalitarian organization inimical to everything we have worked and fought for over the past 200 plus years. Perhaps after more than four years of constant chicanery and destructive politics our desperate need for someone to believe in has kicked in and the dead pope offers us some person to trust, albeit posthumorously. That we'll settle for a dead hero shows just how desperate we are.

The president and his administration, of course, are trying to cash in as best they can on both deaths. Shows what a sleazy crowd they are. All this, too, will continue and we'll get on with the same old same old, politicians trying to butter their nests and the religious right damning to hell everybody who doesn't subscribe to their perverted Christianity.

Moving along to more of my angst at the hill-billy Christianity that has come to dominate public life in the past few years, I am drawn to Emerson's Divinity School Address at Harvard in 1838. In this speech Emerson hit the old fools so hard that they wouldn't listen to him again for 30 years. Believe me, the loss was theirs. In my personal struggles to understand what religion is all about and where, if anywhere, it belongs in my life, I come back again and again to Emerson's statement early into this address that "the doctrine of it [the indwelling Supreme Spirit] suffers from this perversion, that the devine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury." This tells me, or rather it agrees with my understanding, that God and Man are the same, or more specifically, that we are Jesus. Why else is Jesus depicted in a purely human form (although with a few magic tricks) if not to emphasize that he and we are the same. Look at his life. It's a story that encapsulates the stories of our lives, a mysterious birth (all births are mysterious), a childhood (current psychology notwithstanding) of little consequence, struggles to survive and understand his (our) place and duties in the scheme of things, and then ultimately worldly defeat. The essential message is that not only can we handle the difficulties of everyday life, but that through mind and imagination (spirit) we can also confront inevitable defeat (death) and face the end of life with peace and equanimity. Christian theology of heaven, I suspect, was thrown in as a device to help simple, illiterate people understand that death, though inevitable, is not a thing to be feared and that we can approach it peacefully. This is what Christianity is all about. It is what all religion is about: to help us live and die.

The story of Jesus is thus our story. It is not about someone who lived thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away. We are the ones living this life, falling and getting up again, in a perpetual death and resurrection dance that goes on throughout out lifetimes. It is we who die on the cross (earth) and we who rise again. The theme of death and resurrection, of fall and redemption, dominates the mythology of all planting cultures. It derives ultimately from seed and depicts in transcendent manner our grasp of how death of seeds in the ground and their resurrection in new plants is the source of all we have and do. Through the ancient mythology and metaphors of the Middle East we have transformed this fundamental fact of nature into a transcendent experience that allows us to live and die in peace.