The Real Meaning of All Hallow's Eve

Garrison Keillor says that Halloween as a Republican holiday. Why?

You try to scare folks to death while grabbing all the goodies that you can!

I wonder if garlic and holy water will run them off. I'd suggest wooden stakes and silver bullets too but the Secret Service might have a problem with that.

What's a little Death between friends?

Donors setting up funds from beyond grave

By SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Writer
Published 10:52 am PDT Friday, October 28, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dozens of political donors are reaching beyond the grave to support candidates and parties, setting up their estates to continue giving campaign money long after their deaths, a study released Friday found.

Presidential and congressional candidates and political parties have collected just over $1.3 million from at least 100 deceased donors since 1991, according to the Halloween-themed "From Coffins to Coffers" report by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.

Political parties are the biggest recipients. National Democratic Party committees have received at least $644,000, while Republican Party committees have taken in roughly $588,000, the nonpartisan watchdog group's review of campaign finance reports found.

In the last election, posthumous donations totaled at least $72,851. That compares to roughly $679,000 in the 2002 election cycle, the last time donors could give unlimited sums to national party committees.

Many recipients identified the donors' occupation as "deceased" on reports to the Federal Election Commission, or said the contributions came from an estate.

Deceased contributors face the same donation limits as the living: $2,100 per election to a federal candidate and $26,700 a year to a national party committee.

Read the report at:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=756

Foxification

San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Steve Tady, a.ka. "The Betting Fool" recently bemoaned what he described as the "Foxification" of sports broadcasts, using the example of the World Series. This process requires ridiculous camera shots, massive overuse of graphics and things like the "Right Now!' box, which tells you in big box print what you're already looking at. Read the sage wisdom at:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/10/25/fool385.DTL

This naturally required a thoughtful response:

----------------------------------------------

Dear Betting Fool,

The problem is that the "Foxification" of sports mirrors the Foxification of life. You see it everywhere.

I have a co-worker who watched the playoff day games over Mlb.Tv in one window on his computer while a stock ticker scrolled across the top of his screen and ESPNNews ticker ran across the bottom, while he worked in both Word and Explorer. Oh, and when a new e-mail message arrived, it popped a message in the middle of the mess. He thinks this is perfectly normal.

Then there's the bud who asked me by to watch a football with him. It was a good game, a game he spent reading and writing e-mail on his laptop while we watched. Great sports company, eh? "Don't worry, I can talk, watch and do e-mail at the same time," he said. He couldn't, of course, but he won't believe that.

Go to a kids Saturday soccer game and see all the soccer moms and dads spending as much time on their laptops and cell phones as they do cheering on Jr. and Jr. Miss. Can't waste time, y'know.

People complain about fans at SBC Park leaning into their the cell phone instead of watching the game. But everyone does this nowadays. The only "problem" at SBC is that everyone's doing it out in the open at the time at the same place.

Needless to say, I think this is all madness. The scientists tell us that we really can't "multitask." We're not wired for it. It gives us headaches and insomnia. But our machines are wired for it, and because they can, we think we have to as well. Based on current mass behavior, Fox logically assumes we're all attuned to this, and broadcasts accordingly, desperately afraid that we're going to "multitask" away to something else unless they keep our mind and eyeballs a' jiggling all game long.

Whine not at Fox Sports, who at least promotes the World Series. They ain't NBC, whose marketing chief publicly called for a four game sweep in 1997 when Miami and Cleveland went head to head in what turned out to be a riveting seven game down-the-last-out show. Weep for the masses, who can't put down their frickin' doodads long enough in Fall 2005 to really appreciate the most exciting four game sweep I've ever seen.

Rosa Parks

It's been too long since I attended college so I forget the guy's name right now. He was a tall, sharp fellow who served with me at the campus Amnesty International group and we took some political science and international relations classes together.

One day we were discussing civil rights and all and I mentioned the Montgomery bus boycott which set off the modern movement. It started, I said, when Rosa Parks refused to get up and give her seat to a white man, as was required by law. He looked at me. "She had to do what?", he asked. I took some time to explain the system.

Under the law, I told him, whites filled the bus from the front to the back. Blacks filled the bus from the back to the front. When the two groups met in the middle, any subsequent white rider could demand the seat of a black rider. Rosa Parks simply refused to give up her seat. She was tired after a hard day's work and simply wanted to sit. For that, she was arrested and the bus boycott began.

My friend listened, then thought for a minute. Then he floored me. "Are you sure that happened? Where did you read this?", he asked.

This is like asking for documentation of Pearl Harbor.

"Why in the world do you ask that?", I shot back. "It was in all the papers. Trust me. I'll show you where you can look it up."

"Well", he said, "I just can't see that happening. I couldn't imagine getting on a city bus and telling a black person to get up and give me their seat. If I did that on a city bus going home I'd probably get my butt kicked. It just seems odd, that's all."

First off, the poor soul was clearly a product of a poor educational system which teaches him how to pledge to the flag but little about what went on to make the pledge more than just a flowery saying. We could have stuck with "... with Liberty, except for riders of the Montgomery bus system, and Justice, except for blacks everywhere in the South and a helluva lotta places up North and out West ..." but it just didn't rhyme. That's what made Rosa famous.

Second, it explains why there's so little understanding of the civil rights struggle today. It's hard to imagine the world we left behind. It seems surreal, like a bad science fiction novel. But it's real to me.

In the mid-'60s a white woman took my mother's seat as my family traveled by train through Texas, after my mother got up to get food or go to the restroom. Under state law, the white woman was entitled to it. But the rail system was under federal jurisdiction so the idiotic state laws didn't apply. I remember the hooting and hollering, and the white lady sitting quietly but firm before the conductor led her away.

(This is a -big- reason why traditional conservative hate-the-feds philosophy doesn't ring for African Americans. In our view, the feds act as a brake on the states as much as the other way around.)

I suppose as people like Parks dies away, and as kids like me grow up and pass on too, that the memories will be lost and we can finally move on. Some would argue that this will be a good thing. Memories like that, they say, simply reinforce arguments over who did what to who, and who is entitled to what, and which rights apply and on and on. But they miss the larger point that the end of Jim Crow was truly one of the great events in American history, and proves the underlying strength and value of the American system.

The sad part is, folks like my college friend will never see that as it played out through and after Rosa Parks. It's their loss.

Re: One Day at Home Depot

Frank,

Maybe she’s a Red state agent, trying to subvert our beautiful Blue state progressiveness. She’s just not very good at the job.

California Red staters are feeling mighty oppressed these days. The best they can do is a rock star governor who’s really not very good at his job and who avoids the (kaff!) “culture war” nonsense like the plague. Recent studies find that even if the Governator Arnie’s attempt at a Tom De Lay-like redistricting wins, which looks doubtful, the Dems would still hold a majority in the state Legislature.

It’s mainly due to people like me, college-educated and/or colored moving in off the coast. Last February a spokesman for the Greenlining Institute, which works to provide low-income and “people of color” access to financial services told me that of the one million African Americans in Southern California, only 200,000 lived in the “traditional” core areas of Compton and South Central L.A. So the local Red staters are feeling screwed.

In response to this, they’ve come up with an idea which is rotten for just California, but a pretty good one for the country as a whole.

Their idea is to apportion electoral votes by congressional district, not just statewide. Maine and Nebraska do this, and it ends up with an electoral college vote more representative of the state than the current winner-take-all. It means that the islands of blue and red inside every state could have a voice, and an effect on the statewide total.

All 2004 we kept hearing about ‘battleground states.’ In short, both candidates spent most of their time and money in around ten states, a fifth of the Union. California, New York and Texas, were completely ignored. Under this plan, every state’s electoral votes are in play, which means we’d get a truly “national” campaign, and actually less of this divisive Blue vs. Red stuff, which makes for cool maps on CNN and Fox, but really don’t help national discussion or truly represent the states themselves.

As the lady at Home Depot proved.

Terry Preston

---

From: Frank Hay [mailto:anonymous-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 8:27 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/21/2005 08:23:07 PM

"White Power in Black Hell."

You saw this in CA? Sad.

It's inherently contradictory.

Let's not tell them.

--
Posted by Frank Hay to From the Mountaintop at 10/21/2005 08:23:07 PM

One Day at Home Depot

It was a lazy late afternoon on a typically warm Sacramento fall day. Temps hover at highs in the mid-'80's these days, and to my now-acclimated soul, it's quite pleasant. I took some time to mosey over to my local Home Depot for a little shopping.

You meet all kinds at a large store like Home Depot. This one is located at a large shopping near the junction of two major interstate highways, so it's busy. I suppose I found what I was looking for.

My friends in Oakland sneered when I moved here to Sacramento. "You'll miss the -diversity-", they said. Actually, Sacramento is the most diverse city in the US in terms of housing, according to the census and other stats. My particular area of town is known locally for its diverse bourgeoisie. The marvelously liberal inner Bay Area is becoming less and less diverse as the "people of color" with get up and go get up and move inland. The People's Republic of Berkeley has the dubious progressive distinction of now being the whitest city in Alameda County. But the biggest difference is that around here, you actually see poor -white- people. Never find one of those in Oakland.

So I wasn't all that surprised to see a youngish white woman just in from the trailer park wearing a white patterned tee-shirt strolling toward a cash register. What struck me was the particular pattern itself.

It was a Confederate flag surrounded by the phrase "White Power in Black Hell."

As an aside, Confederate flag lovers always go on about how it's not their fault that the Battle Flag has been appropriated by despicable people, but do they every go out of their way to shut 'em up?

Okay, the Constitution protects this sort of silliness and I'd be the first to the barricades to protect it. But what the heck does it -mean-?

Did it mean that whites are forced to live in a Hell created by black people? If so, I'm flattered by the implication of the deep power I and other furry-haired Americans allegedly hold. I feel like the German Jew who responded to the Nazis' pogroms by saying that he just wished he were half as threatening as they said he was.

Did it mean that whites are taking power in a black Hell? If so, why aren't they aiming a little higher? If I were trying to take over an extradimensional plane I'd shoot for Paradise myself. Let someone else rule in Hell.

Given that, are they admitting that figurative black Hell is where they ought to be? If so, I applaud their honesty. I'll even volunteer to light the fire once they reach the blackest level of the Pit they can find.

In short, to all the white power supremacists out there (clearly imagining living in a world without any pro basketball worth watching), please try and be clearer in your rants. Hatred is a simple emotion. It shouldn't be that hard to get it clearly off your chest.

My last question to her is, if you feel that way, what the Hell are you doing in Sacramento, one of the most diverse cities in the country, particular in terms of housing? I mean, why drop right down into your own Hell?

Some people I'll just never understand.

Re: The Left Hand of God

Frank,

He isn’t. They just –think- he is.

This is why De Lay Republicans can be certified legally insane. After all, people who hear voices in their heads should be put away for their own protection, right? So when dear Tom is put away for a long, long time, it’s for his own good. He might hurt himself.

Terry Preston

---

From: Frank Hay [mailto:anonymous-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 3:55 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/20/2005 03:55:11 PM

Dear God,

Please stop talking to Republicans!

Thanks,

--
Posted by Frank Hay to From the Mountaintop at 10/20/2005 03:55:11 PM

The Left Hand of God

"He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey, and it all comes down to worldview ?He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."

"It never ceases to amaze me that people are so cynical [that] they want to tie money to issues, money to bills, money to amendments."

For all that you need to know about our GOP House commander-in-thief, go to:

http://www.exterminatetomdelay.com/bug.php

Re: Good Work!!

Frank:

Actually, they’re not being hypocritical. They are being consistent, in a sick way.

For years, they kept telling us that government is inherently evil and that public servants were liars, thieves and scalliwags. When you set such your standards for public service so low, you’re bound to hit them when you finally get your turn.

---

From: Frank Hay [mailto:anonymous-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 1:29 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/19/2005 01:29:02 PM

With Clinton it was all about the Rule of Law. Now with the CIA leak, Frist's questionable stock sales and the sleazy Texan DeLay they're lamenting the "criminalization of politics".

Their hypocrisy is complete - they've become what they hated.

Good Work!!

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the following conversation took place:

GW Bush: “I need to reassure my radical base about Miers but I can’t do it myself. Get down to Texas and ask some of the cronies to front for me.”

Soon after, several judges insist that Miers’s religious beliefs will require her to overturn Roe v. Wade. Good work! At least we know that Karl Rove is still on the job.

So the Bush team has managed to do what John Roberts managed to avoid, inject personal religious beliefs smack dab into the middle of the confirmation process. Good work!!

For eons, conservatives have insisted that judges’ job was to interpret and apply the law, not rule on personal convictions. Okay. Last I looked, religious convictions were just as personal as liberal political convictions. If Miers’s religious convictions will require that she rule a certain way on longstanding case law then, by their own actions, the conservatives have disqualified Miers from holding a seat on the high bench. Good work!!

The GOP’s knock on Clinton was that he was all campaign, no govern. After five years, it’s looking like a case of familiarity breeding contempt.

"Houston, we have a problem ..."

Last night’s National League championship series game showed once again why baseball is the supreme sport.

Every other sport requires a clock. The game is played on a rectangular field with the goal of getting the ball or whatever into a goal at the respective ends of the field within a defined time. Fun, but overall pretty derivative.

Baseball is over when a certain number of tasks have been completed, not when the clock strikes twelve. In theory, any team has a chance to win as long as 27 outs haven’t been recorded yet. Last night, the Cardinals showed why. Two outs, top of the ninth, down by two runs, one out away from packing for the winter … and they win the game. Sudden, shocking and unexpected, the very definition of drama. It just couldn’t be better.

This isn’t to say that other sports aren’t exciting. In football, a team down by a score or two –races- the clock to score. I still watch the San Francisco 49ers’ 1989 Super Bowl win over Cincinnati for inspiration. Down by a score, could Joe Montana go the length of the field in time? Yes!! Yaaaay!! But if the ‘Niners were down by two scores, no drama at all. Nada. Nothing. Not in baseball. A team’s not lost until that last out has run up.

Is it any wonder it’s still the national pastime?

Which brings me to my seven rules of “If I Were Commissioner” baseball:

1. No team except the Yankees can wear pinstripes. They set the standard, let everyone else enjoy them. Everyone else just looks like pitiful wannabes.

2. No network is allowed to show two games at the same time, as Fox did a couple of nights ago, putting one on broadcast, the other on deep cable. This unfairly discriminates against obsessive types like me who want and need to tank out in front of the tube or radio during playoff season, and are only given three hours out of a possible six to do ir.

3. No shots of famous people attending a ballgame. This goes for ex-presidents and actors alike. No one cares and it takes away from shots of attractive women, which is what the cameramen and the fans would prefer to see anyway. The only exception are shots of former ‘Niner QB Steve Young at SBC. That’s okay. After all, what other good Mormon boy could enjoy such success in San Francisco, of all places?

4. Maintain the current practice of not showing televised scenes from bars in the road team’s hometown through a formal ban. “Hi, we’re drunk and loud and watching teevee!!” If I want that, I can invite friends over. Stay on the game.

5. Place a ban on any more wildcard teams in the US Constitution. This is critical because greedy owners just don’t know when to stop. Baseball commish Bud Selig was reportedly close to adding a second wild card team a couple of years ago. The two wildcard teams would play a one game playoff to see who’d get to go to the real playoffs. Even -more- excitement, and spinning turnstiles, after the All-Star Game. No, no, no. The current setup is fine. This year, so many teams were "on the bubble" it looked like the MBA. The wildcard works because it –is- “in or go home.” Keep that tension. It makes the wildcard a valid contender.

6. It’s funny to see “This day in 1967” featuring a World Series game while current division playoffs are going on. Shorten the season. This is baseball. It shouldn’t begin and end in a snowstorm. When the last game of the Series inevitably does, some idiot will propose a Super Bowl-style of rotation among warm wintered cities, passing the Series audience off to the same corporate pigs who fill a typical SB stadium, not real people.

7. Get rid of the silly All Star rule giving home field advantage to the league who wins the game. It’s not made the game any more intriguing and punishes a good team from a weaker league in the Series. I say, mix up the game even more. Play Red states vs. Blue states. Or US vs. the World, given all of the foreign-born players currently blessing the game. Or have each league WS manager draft their respective teams. Turn it into a big fantasy game.

I’m still hoping for a Cards – White Sox Classic. If nothing else, last night I got something I cherish greatly, thousands of miserable pathetic Texans. That alone was worth the price of admission.

The Fall Classic

Our long national nightmare is finally over.

We don’t have to hear any more about the Yankees or Red Sox.

It was fun last year, even for the overwhelming majority who don’t live in or who didn’t grow up in the Northeast. We heard about the Curse, and the Rivalry and the big dollars on each side. And the passion. And the tradition.

It was almost a fairytale ending. All that it lacked was World Series drama. The rematch of the 1967 “Incredible Dream” Series never materialized. (The modern Red Sox era came out of that year. Before that, attendance at Fenway was actually pretty poor for years.)

We even got Stephen King showing up ESPN. When the Sox were down a million to one in Game Three, they tracked down Stephen King for some woe in yet another apparent disappointment. Mr. King tripped ‘em up by being cheery and upbeat about the whole thing. “It was a good year,” he said. But you’ve gotta be feeling bad right now. “Well, the Sox had a good year, and it was exciting,” King said. But, you –must- be feeling bad right now, ESPN said. King kept merrily telling us how good the year was and so on. You could see Gary Miller, the ESPN reporter, getting irritated at fishing for a certain story and not landing it. Who would expect to get a –happy- horror writer at Fenway Park? Of course, King was co-writing a book on the season and would come out a winner regardless. It’s a pretty good book, too.

So this season came as bad sequel to a movie where the story seemed to end at the curtain call. You can’t keep replaying the same story. Yes, the Yankees and Red Sox have a rivalry. But so do other teams in other sports. It’s just that this one is a particular love of the northeastern media, so we get it over the national wires, in stereo, and up among the decibels. It was loud this year, and annoying. And fortunately, it’s done with.

Me, I’m rooting for a Midwestern Classic, the Cards and the White Sox. When I think of classic baseball, I think of corn, wheat and wide shouldered cities off in the distance. -That’s- red-blooded American baseball. Now that we’ve got the Curse out of our system, we can get back to our roots.

And the White Sox in six (they’ve got the pitching) when we get it.

Re: Columbus Day

Frank,

Just imagine how different history might be had Mrs. Columbus been along on the trip.

---

From: Frank Hay

Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 3:53 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/12/2005 03:49:51 PM

"The English brought wives."

And their wives made them ask for directions!

(Time to warm up the chow mein . . .)

Columbus Day

Today is Columbus Day (celebrated). Or Indigenous Peoples Day (in Berkeley).

The irony over the annual tussle over what Columbus Day means, whether it’s a celebration of a bold pioneer or genocidal imperialism, is that the holiday initially set out to show Americans that Italian-Americans weren’t all bad. Times were hard for a lot of Italian immigrants after Ellis Island. They were smelly, garlic-obsessed papists to a lot of “native” Americans. To show the country that not only were some quite bright, but that in fact, the country wouldn’t exist without them, “Columbus Day” was born around the turn of the century.

Columbus Day was a pretty big deal when I was growing up in San Francisco. At least a quarter of my elementary school was Italian American. Columbus Day was “Festa” time, when Old San Francisco celebrated its now mythical love affair with Italian heritage. As someone who has rarely found a pasta he didn’t like, this worked for me. For a lot of my schoolmates, it was “Kiss Me, I’m Italian” time. For one of my early girlfriends, I did just that.

“Indigenous Peoples Day” bugs me in part because it misses the historical mark, to be discussed below. But also because it makes no sense. If you’re born somewhere, you’re indigenous. “Native” makes little sense either, for the same reason. If you look at human migration patterns, we’re all “non-indigenous.” Even the Indians. They came from Asia, and there is some evidence that the Sioux and others we know from John Wayne movies may have displaced other migrants who reached here before them.

The importance of Columbus isn’t in why he came. It’s in the fact that others followed. There’s growing evidence that a number of folks, including East Asians, may have sailed to this hemisphere before he did. And everyone agrees that the Vikings settled the coast before the “natives” ran them off (silly Norsemen didn’t wait until the Europeans got gunpowder). But after Columbus came the wave.

The English brought wives. The French and Spanish didn’t. (The fact that the English settlements by far did the best is testament to the power of the girl you bring home to momma.) The result was the Western Hemisphere we know today. You don’t have to like Columbus, and he certainly wasn’t very likeable, to acknowledge the –effect- his misguided little trip had on history.

It’s also, if you’re a public worker, it's a good excuse for nice day off during Indian summer. I live in the state capital of California and it's tough at the mines when every third person you meet is living a long weekend.

Anyways, I’m off for now. I think there’s some leftover lasagna in the fridge …

Re: Splish, Splash

Frank,

Winner has to buy the loser a fresh copy of Al Franken’s “Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot.”

Terry Preston

---

From: Frank Hay
Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2005 7:00 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/09/2005 06:56:30

Good for you, Terry. Want to race? :)

--

Us vs. the Caliphate

President Bush sought Thursday to revive waning public support for the war in Iraq, accusing militants of seeking to establish a "radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia" with Iraq serving as the main front. Islamic radicals are being sheltered by "allies of convenience like Syria and Iran," Bush declared in a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy.

------------------------------

Yeah.

He’s so -cute- when he says stuff like this!

Let’s see, there’s one country in the Mideast run by theocrats relatively hostile to us, Iran. And the biggest threat to that rule is … other Iranians. The U.S. is apparently quite popular with the post-revolution generation, who have seized their own future and like Sharper Image catalogs as much as the Koran. Then there’s Syria, ooh, big, well, not –really-, bad, well, just sorta, Syria. Syria loves the Islamic jihad so much that the current ruler’s dad flattened an entire city to root ‘em out.

Yes, Saladin is rising again. Saladin was a Kurd like … our closest allies in Iraq, who have lived under a relatively democratic regime for over ten years. But he pitched his tent, so to speak, in Egypt, the heart of the Arab world … which has just seen its first, very loose, attempt at an open presidential election and promises of still more due to public pressure.

Seems to me as if the Jihad has to fit a lot of Arabs and Muslims before they can even think about taking us on. So where’s this “Islamic empire” going to take place?

In the minds of the president’s more simplistic supporters, who love the idea of modern Crusaders defending the cross against the infidels. Godless communism has thrown in the towel. You can’t holler about them any more. There’s no point looking under lefty Aunt Rosa’s bed for them anymore. So what’s a godly warrior to do?

Why, find other zealots willing and able to play the game, that’s what. People who worship the –wrong- God (although a deity who offers a paradise full of willing women can’t be all bad.) People who, unlike Commies who could look just like me or you, are different. Brown usually, with funny clothes. People you certainly don’t see in Birmingham, Alabama. And people willing to fly airplanes into buildings!! Great!! So what are we waiting for? This is the modern era. We don’t need a pope to call for a crusade. We’ve got Fox News and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. So everyone, pick up your pike and your halberd and let’s get going.

The Islamic terrorists are no threat to the continued existence of the US and the Western world. They’re not even much of a threat to the continued existence of Arab and Muslim states. As David Brooks noted in a recent article, the typical jihadist strikes a profile strikingly similar to young Marxist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They’re often the first generation of upwardly mobile families caught between feeling like they’ve moved past the old world but not quite comfortable in the new. As a result, they create a utopian ideal, a new norm, to live in.

A lot of the attraction, in my opinion, is built in the relatively vague aims of the jihad movement. There’s no twenty point plan for the brave new world. There’s just the Koran as they see it, and the promise of a happy life. In this sense it’s similar to the Nazis, who were also vague and drew people in because they promised action and a better life, not a debating society.

This isn’t a class of civilizations, or of religions. It’s growing pains. What we have called the Third World is growing up, and some of the teens are going through a standard find-myself rebellion. They’re just doing it with car bombs.

The answer is to continue to push for democratic and economic development, but allow the locals to set the pace and the agenda. One of the remarkable lessons of Iran is that when people seize control of their own destiny, they’re a lot more likely to make progressive choices than when it’s imposed on them (hence our struggle in Iraq). As one Iranian political leader said recently, “Time is on our side. After all, it took the West hundreds of years to get where it is. We’ve just had twenty.” Our best weapon against the jihadists over time is patience, and a gentle nudge from time to time.

Now will someone please tell our president? He’s just making himself look silly otherwise. Next thing you know, he'll be dressing himself up like Richard the Lionhearted. It's embarrassing.

Splish, Splash

It’s been a busy month. I’ve been organizing a Walk to School Week for my son’s school. I went to grade school in San Francisco, where we literally had to walk uphill both ways to get to school. My momma would have thought I was nuts to ask her to drive me to school. “Boy, you got feet!! What do you think God gave ‘em to you for?”, is what I’m sure she’d say. But today’s kids get personal chauffeur service to and from everywhere and have gotten fat and lazy. So some other parents and I are organizing events to lure them back on to the sidewalks for a healthy dose of fresh air and exercise to start the day. It’s been fun. But tiring.

But the really tiring thing has been learning how to swim. Yep, at the ripe old age of 47 I’ve finally learned how to boogie across the pool.

Part of it is long-deferred desire. A lot more is having a second-grader son who was splashing water on me in the pool and then paddling to the other side, laughing. Oh, such fun it was when I shot back after him a couple of weeks ago!! He liked it. He’s now got Daddy as pool buddy in addition to playground buddy, ballgame buddy and hide-and-seek buddy.

Perhaps the biggest incentive was fear of not being able to hop into the pool or river and save my son’s life without risking my own. That was the motivator of motivators.

So now that I know how, I feel stupid for all the years I didn’t. I literally learned within a week. On Monday I would sink to the bottom of the pool. By Friday I could scoot across with little difficulty. (Gotta watch the feet, keep ‘em –straight-!) In the past, I tried to learn it on the cheap. I took a college course, and then last year a Parks and Rec course. In both cases, it was “hold on to the side and kick.” Did nothing.

Grown-ups who can’t swim have two stunning fears. One is sinking, of not feeling solid surface under our feet. The other is dunking our head under the water. Seems, like, -dangerous- or something. That’s why my momma wouldn’t let me learn when I was a kid. I wanted to go to the local pool and learn. No, she said, you can’t get in the pool because you don’t know how to swim. Gee, Ma, I think I need to do that to –learn- how to swim. Momma never learned to swim herself and was absolutely terrified of drowning. So I didn’t learn.

(San Francisco high school graduation requirements at the time included knowing how to swim. My swim class teacher couldn’t believe I didn’t already know how and told me to stand by the pool until she could figure out what to do with me. After a couple of days of this, I skipped class and spent the time reading the Foundation and Empire sci-fi trilogy.)

My son could swim when he was five. He’s always loved water and my wife is a good swimmer, so he learned by watching and doing at an age when he doesn’t overthink it all.

So, on a lark as I passed by a local swim school in August, I stopped, and signed up for professional lessons.

I hate spending money for nothing, so I knew that if I paid cash money, I’d learn. I also needed –individual- lessons. I needed someone to sit there, push me, direct me and get my head under water.

It worked. Now, I love swimming. It’s fantastic exercise. It’s a social thang, especially here in toasty summered Sacramento. There were warm days through September where I could douse myself in the local homeowners association pool. Now that the days are cooling, I’ve just gotta find an indoor pool to play in. Besides, it’s a great way to get Leroy to behave. During the summer, all we have to say is “No pool!” to get him to straighten up and fly right.

The oddest part has been the lukewarm congratulations of the grown folks around me. It’s been, “oh, that’s nice …”. I was expecting huzzahs and backslaps. But I guess when you’re finally learned something a lot of second graders can do, it’s really much of a victory. But I’ll declare victory anyway. It was my war, so if I say I’ve won, I’ve won. So there.