tales of copper city

Religion is poetry

Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.

On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.

Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity).  Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.  

And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life.  I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.

 

Ending Loser Liberalism

I am really learning from Dean Baker's The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.  I have long read Baker's columns on economic policy but his book really spells our how narrow and how uniformed we liberals are in national and state policy debates. 

I once spent about a "New York Minute" in a doctoral program in economics and I soon saw it wasn't for me. To plow through a doctoral program and survive as a policy and social liberal takes all kinds of endurance and courage.  You have to hang on to your convictions in courses on price theory, money and banking, economic development and on and on.  The same goes for law school.  I dropped out of both, for much the same reasons.

Shadows

I wrote this early in the year but never put it up.  But somehow I think I should, to honor Callie, our wonderful dog who suffered a lot at the end, this time real suffering. But this time she knew she had us to be with her.

I've mentioned our dog Callie, who's been with us for almost two years.  She's a wonderful and very affecting dog, especially since she had a really rough first six months. She had spent her early months in a "hoarder house" with a large pack of stray dogs and she must have been constantly insecure and anxious.  And then she was placed with an older and disabled man and he abused her, and she was taken away.

When she arrived she was in shock.  I remember her being brought to our mayor's shop, Jack Porter's place, the Bisbee Bug, and she tried to crawl away from all the big people who were waiting to see her. When I picked her up, she peed. I think now that she simply had never been around people very much, which is very damaging to dogs. She's soon stopped the peeing when we handle her or pick her up and now she's fine with us most of the time. Carole has worked with her tirelessly, patiently for months but she still spooks easily and is always alert and vigilant, as if expecting the worst.

Food, football, and the federal government

This story was sent to me by my good friend for so many years, Jim Brown, from Austin, or near abouts.  We went to college together at UT in Austin. Jim is a fine steel guitar player who played out at Threadgill's before Janis Joplin made it famous.

The story Jim sent me is about a football team in Georgia, a triple AAA team, from a poor rural county. The players couldn't get enough to eat...literally. The area is so poor that many, many living there simply don't have enough food to put on the table, certainly not enough for their kids to go out and play football hard and fast.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/highschool/blog/prep_rally/post/Georgia-school-overcomes-hunger-to-claim-state-t?urn=highschool-wp10283

It's a wonderful story about some terrific kids, a smart coach, and, guess what, the federal government.

The team went on to win the state championship...

Jim came from a poor part of Texas, which back in those days was not just a few areas, and he says this story has a lot of meaning for him. We were both born as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl was ending, so our families were just escaping the damage the 1930s  did to Oklahoma and Texas. My family managed to make it to the oil fields of East Texas where there was work. Others weren't so lucky.

Thanks, Jim, and I'll pass the story along to our mutual friend in California, who's struggling again.

The 'Say Anything' Party

Mark Schmitt, in the recent New Republic has a wonderfully trenchant analysis of Newt Gingrich's politics: "Say Anything."  Gingrich doesn't really try to explain his flip-flops; he just says what he needs to say to fit the politics of the eternal now he lives in, which is a parody of the "One Day at a Time" of A.A. fame.  Their "One Day at a Time" is to find themselves; Gringrich's is to endlessly counterfeit himself.

The wonder of life!

I don't know why, but somehow this picture of a young Pygmy goat, captured by Carole at the Cochise County Fair a few months back, captures the miracle of life, in all of its wondering faces.