40 Days

Lent is actually quite an interesting period; or it could be, if it were once again more broadly observed. Think of the potential impact on American foreign policy alone of the parable of Jesus spending 40 days in the desert, reflecting on sin and fighting temptation; and its corollary of christians reflecting on and asking forgiveness for our sins, and focusing on acts of kindness for others. When viewed within the context of our overwhelming consumption of world resources; our hubris in the face of the rest of the world; our denial of suffering by the poor both within and without our country's walls (don't even get me started on ours, or Israel's, walls)-- 40 days is not a hell of a lot. In fact, it's nothing.

If Obama or Hilary or anyone could give us this--a way to step back from American arrogance to and defensiveness from the world at large, and from the poor in particular--I'd guarantee my vote.

In fact, the questions of Lent, as illustrated in the story of Jesus and the serpent in the desert, not surprisingly cross religious borders, finding their echoes in Jewish, Muslim, and even Buddhist thought. Does a particular action serve only ourselves? What sort of power seduces us? What sort of hunger invites us to grab a short cut? What sort of attention do we crave?

For our politicians as for us, these are the ongoing questions of our time.

Bored Dumb

It's Lent and I've given up alchohol (again). It is viciously icy here day after day, and Judith has just fallen on the lovely, coated shore (as pictured) for the fourth time this winter.

No wonder I am getting cranked up to be in "Post Valentine's Day, February Rant Mode," and being told by friends they are "bored"--a word used all too frequently in my neck of the winter woods--is just the thing to set me off. I've never liked the word, and ban its use with my students.

"Tired of the world" and "not interested" are the most common meanings of "bored"; but there are also those associated with the drilling aspect of the verb, such as "to make one's way steadily, especially against resistence." This I find of much greater interest. But verbs are active, and being an actor is never how one finds oneself "bored." Being bored is to have something done to you when you are NOT acting.

As a culture, we Americans, very much like unevolved adolescents (see The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence, which cites "boredom" as a condition most frequently affecting this group--and a condition closely related to depression), have a problem with boredom.

The primary cause of boredom in any situation is a lack of attention. And that's exactly what we are taught by the media and our public schools and our families to do: to not pay attention. Rather than being taught that everything is of interest--say, if not the plot of a movie or book, then the language or the cinematography; if not the moral quandary then the characters themselves, etc.--we're taught to either "like" or "not like" things. And if we decide we don't like something--say, a political candidate or issue--we lose interest. We shut down. We close ourselves off--in fact, we defend ourselves-- from the myriad of interesting details: like these stones, their colors and shapes caught just beneath the thin, translucent surface of winter.

We've become a culture of defense, and nothing illustrates this more readily or tragically than how often so many are bored dumb.

Winners and Losers

Today our home team, the New England Patriots, are poised to win their fourth Super Bowl in five years.

Our Boston Red Sox, after not having won a World Series since 1903, won their first World Series in 2004 and won again in 2007.

Meanwhile, the Celtics, a great basketball team when I was growing up but one that's been in the doldrums for nearly 20 years, have lost only eight games this season and are 12 games ahead of the nearest competition.

Out there in media-land, they are starting to call us New Englanders "winners."

I'm just not sure how I feel about this change in perception.

OK, not that sports are the only, or necessarily the best, metric for a regional culture. There's also cuisine; and, of course, theater.

But when you grow up in a place that, let's face it, has established pride in its underdog status; a tiny region rising from the eastern underarm of New York City--and then you start to become winners: it's a big perceptual shift. What does it mean to us as New Englanders to embrace a culture of winning?

Will it mean better education, and stemming the loss of jobs from our northern climates? Will it mean a return to Blue State dominance of national politics; of New England surpassing the south and midwest in leading america's voting for a new president?

Probably not. Hopefully neither will it mean that New Englanders--famously ornery and uncaring about showy wealth and fame--will succumb to the success-crazed, ego-driven culture that appears to be, more and more certainly, dominating our national heritage.

Here's what I'm hoping for today: a really tight, tight game. Long, excellent, stunning passes by both Tom Brady and the Manning baby. High scores on both sides. A close enough game we will all be glued to our sets until the two-minute warning.

And the outcome? Why do we care so much? Why do we want so badly to identify with a team that is the winner? Maybe, just maybe, who knows: if we all asked ourselves this at half-time, while reminding each other that losing is good for the soul, we'd emerge on Monday morning a better nation.

Enjoy the game.

Bi-Partisan? Bi-Something: is it nature or nurture?

As caucus day finally reaches us here in Maine (Sunday, February 10), it's impossible not to dwell on, well, partisanship. After all, the very nature of the caucuses is that there are Democratic and Republican events and choices.

I've had a couple of chances lately to experience and then to muse on the differences between local Democrats and Republicans, and, try as I might, I can't seem to convince myself these differences are merely policy or electoral choices.

Democrats and Republicans here on my small island, where we are of course all mixed up at every meeting, just plain seem to behave differently. And these different behaviors--toward both process and people--appear to originate in quite polarized ways to understand the world.

When we sit down at tables in the evenings or mornings, at town hall or at the schools, to work together to improve local education or economic development or affordable housing, we've got engineers and artists, gay and straight, democrats and republicans all right there elbowing for space. You'd have to say we've got more than bi-partisanship; we've got multi-partisanship. Which is to say that, unlike in larger places, you can't avoid those folks who think and act differently from yourself.

This is an amazingly powerful thing: the democratic ideal, really. It is also a frustrating one, because small changes are hard and long fought. Living and working in a truly multi-partisan environment makes it easy to see why it is so difficult to achieve world peace; to lower greenhouse gas emissions; or to achieve any of the large, international goals so necessary to our survival as a planet.

I'd like to think that, despite our different perspectives and practices, we share the same goals: we want to continuously improve education for our kids; we want to stimulate prosperity for more of our community members; we want to reverse global warming and live at peace as a world.

The real, day to day problem--the one that keeps us from achieving our communal goals and ideals--is we don't really focus on shared goals. Instead, we each tend to focus on our own individual goals, which have to do with ways to approach and interact with the world. And that's when the difference between say, the engineer and the artist, or a democrat and a republican, matters.

How do we move beyond the impasses caused by these differing world views? You'll note I am not going to characterize or judge either: they are just immensely different, and again, my experience is that these individual differences very often get in the way of moving forward toward shared goals. But I do have a funny story, from the world of gay pop culture, that reflects this impasse.

In season three of "The L Word," a Showtime evening soap designed for the lesbian crowd, one of the gals "switches teams:" i.e., she falls for, and moves in with, a man after years in lesbian relationships.

Happens all the time, in both directions.

The funny story part is a scene in which she invites her old pack of lesbian pals to a party, to which her new male honey also invites HIS pack. And, you know, as life as in art: it's awkward. The straight crowd is mostly titillated and thrilled by the beautiful young lesbians; and the lesbians are pretty dismissive of the kind of unconscious rudeness and judgement that wafts from the straight crowd (here is where you can insert your own republican/democrat analogies . . . ).

Because it is a TV show, the writers--to break the ice and move along the party, not to mention the show's message--sit them down to play a trivia-type game, one in which the players make up their own questions. "Who is Terrell Owens?" one of the straight guys ask. The lesbians look nonplussed. "Only one of the greatest receivers in the history of football!" the guy guffaws. The lesbian group shrugs diffidently, as a unit. "Who's Kathleen Hanna?" one of the lesbians ask. Now it is the straight groups turn to look nonplussed. "The most famous founder of riot grrrl music!"

Etc.

A little black and white, but it makes its point: as privileged americans, we tend to live in highly segmented worlds--our fiercely won and proclaimed self-identities dictating much of our everyday choices and world views. We read only the news we want to read (thanks to RSS feeds and customized emails); we listen to only the music to which we want to listen; and when it comes down to solving a community problem--we see only the world each of us individually wants to see.

It's the paradox of democracy; and we're gonna have to be a little more creative than we've been for the last 20 years to really make it work before we melt down the planet.

Running on Fumes

Late yesterday afternoon, as I was racing up island from the theater to the school, I noticed it was nearly 4:30 (meaning I was half an hour late already for the meeting of the school technology committee meeting, which I was attending)--and I noticed my truck's gas gauge indicated I had zero gas.

I was, as is so often the case and in so many ways, running on fumes.

I slowed down (good for truck, environment, and bystanders anyway). It was snowing large flakes, and was bitterly cold. I really didn't want to have to walk a mile or more when I ran out of gas.

If you're like me, you might remember slowing down is a major strategy in energy conservation. Again, I'm not talking about personal, human energy here -- although I might as well be. I'm talking about our use of gasoline, and our production of driving's evil byproduct, atmosphere-warming CO2. But for those of us who got our licenses in the 1970s, pre SUVs; and then had to wait in line to buy gas, odd-numbered and even-numbered days based on our plates; and hear the cries of outrage in Nebraska as the federal speed limit was set at 55 throughout the country -- we might remember that slowing down is a part of conserving energy.

So I coasted down the last incline and into the twins' Mill Pond Service. Lights were on but no one appeared and I could easily imagine them closing at 4 p.m., since many island businesses do. But when I got out and poked my head into the garage itself, one of the twins appeared.

"I'm running on fumes," I told him. "Glad you're still open."

He came out and began filling the tank (we're happily not self serve or automated here on the island). "You know where that phrase comes from?" he asked nonchalantly.

"Nope," I said, thinking I was about to hear a yarn about a epochal empty tank.

"Back in the 1960s," he began, "when folks started getting really interested in the environment, some folks down at MIT began to get interested in how far you could really get on one gallon of gas."

Now I'm sitting with my head hanging out the driver's window, listening.

"So they took a 1955 Chevy, and they tinknered with the carburetor," he continued. "they had a closed track to run this test on. You know how you can see the fumes coming off gas when you leave it sitting in the sun?"

I nodded.

"Well, if you heat the gas up, you get these heavy fumes. So heavy you can run on them. So then they shaved the tires down, practically to points in the middle, so only one inch or so was in contact with the ground."

Seeing this tippy old Chevy in my mind, I begin thinking maybe this is a tall tale after all.

"Then they started her up. They got her up to about 35 mph and then just sent her around the track with this one gallon of gas and its fumes . . . and she kept going for over 300 miles."

My jaw dropped, and he laughed. "It's true," he said. "There's another story about a guy, about the same time, bought a new DeSoto and drove all the way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles without using hardly any gas. When he got there he went into a DeSoto dealership and asked what was going on. They looked under the hood and said, um, you got a model with our new, experimental carburetor on it. Then they took it from him and replaced it with the old model, which used LOTS of gas.

"Course now the oil and car companies own all them patents, and you're never going to see them in a car," he concluded, grinning. "That was back when Greenpeace and all those other environmental organizations got started up. But I've got the knowledge to do it myself, and with gas prices going the way they are I might fix up my own."

I told him I'd be by to have my own carburetor operated on. Who wouldn't want to, if we could, run on fumes? And who doesn't believe, after all, that it is really possible; although not to the benefit of those making the policy and the $$.

Slow down. Save yourself a gallon of gas, and more.