Field trip -- the drive to Springfield

Illinois does go on for miles and miles, hours and hours. Photographs of a farm beside the highway, and another farm past it in the distance, and a third and fourth in yet further distances, still don't convey the endless expanse of land and sky. Imagine walking through here beside a creaking, slow- moving covered wagon, when all the land was prairie cut through with meandering small creeks burbling down in the grasses. They named them "Vermilion" or "Money." I think scenery like this is the reason why, the few times in my life that I've seen mountains, I have found them weirdly disturbing and almost confining. Beautiful of course, but still. Imagine never being able to see the horizon.

Then again, imagine reaching a certain point -- right here -- and deciding, this is a good place to stop. We'll live here. Or, imagine deciding, no, let's go on walking for two or three more months and settle in Nebraska ... or Utah ... or Oregon.Who knows? Maybe some people in the wagon trains were thinking, I'd like to live near mountains. Or the sea.

The change in the look of growing things was noticeable once we reached a certain point south. The spring day was unusually warm everywhere, but beyond a certain point, the meager springtime colors of our northern part of the state changed, from the grays and browns of bare trees and plowed fields, the bright tans of last year's grasses and the deep reds of the almost budding trees, to a more uniform stippling of the palest green along the treetops and in the underbrush in the woods zooming by. Had we passed, in our drive, from what the gardener knows as USDA Zone 5 to Zone 6? In Springfield -- yes! the excitements of the capital were our destination -- things had gone even further. A few flowering crabapples were in full bloom, and a magnolia across the street from Abraham Lincoln's house had already dropped most of its petals. Then there was this odd thing.

This tree graces the site of Lincoln's first law offices in downtown Springfield. On the building next to it, in the picture below, happens to be a reproduction of a flowery painting by Vachel Lindsay, who struggles to be the second-most significant figure ever to come from the town. Poor fellow, it's not his fault. What can one do, when one is a forgotten poet-artist who happens to share a bit of biographical coincidence with an incomprehensibly epochal figure? By way of thought experiment: who, for example, counts as the second most important man from Stratford-on-Avon? Answer comes there none.

American photographs

One thing is certain: it's a boy.When did dresses for little boys go out of fashion? They used to wear them, at least for formal photographs, until the age of four or five, and they didn't get their baby curls cut until that age, too.

It seems this little man's parents had compromised, or fashions were in flux by then. Haircut yes, dress, still yes.

Again with the commonplace book

It's incredible, and heartening, to see and read the wisdom that shows up among anonymous people thinking and commenting anywhere the freedom of the internet allows them to do so. It's not all blathering, ALL CAPS SHOUTING and "trolls." This is from a post at Pajamas Media called "The Slow Suicide of the West." And it's better than the base article. The commenter calls himself only "Kipling."

"The faith of the author in classical civilization is laudable but largely misplaced. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were eventually able to hold their civilizations together. The Greeks had their own intercene [sic] wars that eventually gutted their civilizations. The Romans pursued a vicious policy of conquest to fund their imperial coffers. For every Cicero there were countless Neros and for every Cincannatus [sic] a legion of Sullas.

"The strength of western civilization is built upon Biblical Christianity and its revelation to the world of universe of ordered liberty. The Nazis and Marxists did not just happen on the scene in the 20th century. They were the product of the philosophical quest for answers in the rejection of God that ended in the bloodbath of Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzche [sic -- he forgot the 's'] and nihilism marked the death of philosophy as he concluded that we are simply bubbles of emptiness on a sea of nothingness. With truth out the windows, the disciples of Nietzche [ditto] embraced the will to power and spread darkness across the land. No philosophy has risen to take its place and we live in a post-modern world where the individual determines truth.

"Western civilization can only restore itself when it reforms upon the foundations that made it great. These foundations include our classical ancestors but they also include the giants of Christiandom [sic -- Christendom] who developed the concepts of ordered societies that influenced our founders. Christianity gave us the dignity of man, the value of work and honest labor, and the drive to suffer and yearn as a means of spiritual growth. It gave us a belief in something larger than ourselves that was worth sacrificing and building for on a daily basis. It gave us strong homes, strong churches, and informed citizens. It gave us a sense of community and purpose that far surpassed the ancient world. It can do so again but we must go back to the ancient paths."

Is he right? Despite the [sic]s, he's thinking. Heartening. 

Safety

Snow. With a vengeance. Howling winds. Darkness. "White-out conditions." "We are encouraging everyone to stay off the roads after 6 pm."

Four of the family are safely home, but not the fifth. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, it's 5:33, it's 6:00. There were rumors that the store would close early for the night. "Sixty percent of what you fear doesn't happen." Images: the long drive home through the woods. Fishtailing trucks, lonely roads, looming headlights, taillights; the flickering, pale orange sparkling lights of a plow far, far away. You cook a very plain meal and do the dishes because it seems better to do that than to look casually out the windows.

Images, states of mind: the eerie in-between feeling of anticipating what it will be like when everything is all right of course, when it's not all right yet. An hour from now perhaps, or an hour and a half. Or twenty minutes? You can anticipate the slam of a car door, the usual footsteps on the porch. But they haven't happened. It snows. The windows rattle, the snow against them sounding like whipping, rustling cloth. 

After dishes, then what? There's a difficult feeling in the stomach. You have no desire to do anything giving any pleasure or relaxation. That's like another country, which you haven't reached or even embarked for. It's 6:04, it's 6:17. Phone calls. "Just checking to see if everyone's home safe." 

The cat, from out of nowhere, spreads herself lazily on the floor at your feet, near the back door. That might be the sound of an engine outside, but looking won't make it so. And what if it isn't?

But there are stories of cats knowing when their people are home, or even on their way home. You part the blinds. There is the car, halfway in the driveway, but stuck, and the snow streaming wildly in its yellow headlights.

Well of course. Naturally nothing would have happened. A great breath of normalcy. "She's home, she just can't get in the driveway. I'll help shovel her out." Actions: throwing on boots and coat, hat and gloves. Stomping out to the wind and the darkness that isn't real darkness but a geometry of weird, orange-gray wedges. Stomping out into shadows and angles of light from the big streetlight and the shape of the house, stomping out into the fine lashing snow. It billows and rolls off the neighbors' roofs. The temperature really isn't that bad. It's even enjoyable, to be out in the elements like this.

We shovel. The wind pushes at our backs, tearing at the snow and throwing it from our shovels. She complains that her first serious problem on the drive home "had to happen right in front of the house!" I said, better here than in the woods.

We finish freeing the car and clearing out a parking space for it. She pulls in. Inside, there is much thudding of boots and tossing of wet clothes over the shower curtain bar to dry. There are phone calls returned -- "oh, good" -- pajamas, a late dinner, a movie. Pleasure and relaxation. Everyone has the day off tomorrow, while outside, the worst of the night blizzard is said to be only just beginning. Hours and hours of it. Safety.

Across the street the neighbor's dog bounds out, leashed to the silhouette of her owner in their yard's geometry -- in the glare of the porch light, the angle and shadows of their steps, the overhanging gutter, the roof and the vague square of the house behind. She relieves herself, bounds about as if wanting to chase squirrels or the snow, and hunches over again beneath the tall, bare, straight-swaying trees while billows of snow and wind pour around them. Then her leash tightens as she bounds back to safety, dragging Master. A mile away, the deer we'll see in spring must huddle in the black woods.

Undercover

We happened to stop and rest in a small shadowed plaza, where park benches lay scattered about and weird modern sculptures splayed against the sky and fountains -- so much prettier -- splashed. The tall buildings loomed about us. It was a hot day.

While we sat among the crowds, five or six young black kids all dressed in jeans and plain white t-shirts came racing around a corner and sprinted down a corridor which led like a small canyon off the plaza. They disappeared up some wide steps.

All this time, a street performer had been setting up on the curb nearby. He was a black man wearing sweat pants and a shirt. We watched him put out a big boom box and a drum.

He took off his sweats. Underneath he wore a skin-tight, multicolored spandex bodysuit. He leaned over, switched on the boom box, and stood up on the drum as if it were a stage. His music blared, raspy, something funky and nondescript.

A uniformed cop on a bicycle rode slowly past him, up on the sidewalk. The performer said nothing but pointed gracefully in the direction the boys had run. The cop rode that way, and the performer began. He contorted himself, pulled a narrow plastic hoop over his body, balanced remarkably. I noticed there was a clear plexiglass box on the ground beside him, the kind contortionists fold themselves into on t.v.

While he stood on his drum, acting, playing to the crowd, he also watched where the cop had gone and where the boys had gone. He stood handstands while watching. Then one of the boys came back, the youngest and smallest. He settled in quietly among the crowd. The performer did not take his eyes off him.

I hissed in Aunt Laurie's ear that I thought the street dancer was an undercover cop. She gave me that arched-eyebrow glare, which usually means “Really? How interesting, you’re so wrong.” After a few minutes more, she was ready to move on.

We left. The man was still balancing and contorting and his music still pumped and thundered as we made to cross the street beside him. I was tempted to compliment him quietly on the fine job, but I thought this might blow his cover. On the other hand, I don’t see how the young kid who came back -- was sent back -- could not have known full well what he was.

"So this is how liberty dies" -- by resumé

Is it "amid thunderous applause," as Padme sadly says in one of the Star Wars movies? Maybe, although poor George Lucas was more prescient than he knew. Trying to savage George Bush in that film, we may be sure the erstwhile freedom-loving director subsequently felt not the slightest distress at the thunderous applause that in a few years elected Barack Obama to office.

No, it's not necessarily the applause that marks the event. It might instead be the fact that liberty dies when one or two people, who don't care much about freedom or any other abstractions, nevertheless need to make a political career out of getting noticed for doing something. Someday, I do believe historians will look back marveling that the prime characteristic of our era was that we were all busy compiling our resumés. Think of the idiotic things we do, think of the time we are compelled to waste, because we, or someone in authority just above us who wants to be noticed and promoted, is compiling a resumé. The staff training days, the workshops, the break-out sessions, the role-playing, because the director wants to be able to boast "I implemented staff training days with break out sessions and role playing" when she writes her next grant. Think of the smarmily-acronymed drug and gang "resistance" programs delivered to bored, embarrassed students in the public schools, because the school principal wants to be able to boast likewise when he goes for his Ph.D., and the nice young police officer in charge of the program wants to be able to say he sponsored D.A.R.E.  and G.R.E.A.T. when he runs for county sheriff in fifteen years ... have you ever seen thirteen-year- olds required to dance, in front of an audience, to the song "D! -- I won't do drugs! A! -- I won't have an attitude ...."    

Then there are small-time politicians who latch on to an issue, which itself has no value except that it erodes a little bit of freedom from people's daily lives, because the issue seems to have "legs" and because they, the small time politicians, want to become big time, or at least stay employed as politicians. Have you read the excellent cover article in the latest Weekly Standard, titled "Another triumph for the greens (why your dishwasher doesn't work anymore)"? 

In sum, Jonathan V. Last's article tells us how it happened that dishwasher detergents, which used to contain about 8% phosphorus -- this is the chemical that makes the detergents clean well -- now contain 0.5% and don't clean nearly as well. And we none of us have any choice but to buy them. The companies that make Cascade, Finish, and Electrasol all agreed to remove those useful phospates from their formulas as of last summer, because three politicians in Spokane, Washington, wanted them banned. Phosphates are blamed, rightly or wrongly -- note: rightly or wrongly -- for polluting fresh water and eventually killing fish, in the Spokane river specifically. The two meatiest paragraphs in the article follow:

It was in the midst of Spokane’s phosphorus-reduction mania that two politicians got the idea to ban dishwasher detergents containing phosphates. In April 2005, one of Spokane’s state representatives, Democrat Timm Ormsby, proposed a bill requiring that any dish detergent sold or distributed in the state contain less than 0.5 percent phosphorus. At the time, Ormsby didn’t think the bill had much of a chance. “I thought we were up against a pretty steep challenge,” he says, “given that other states had tried and failed.” The bill sat stewing until, a few months later, Spokane County commissioner Todd Mielke, a Republican, proposed a phosphate-detergent ban for the county.

Mielke, who served for five years in the state legislature before becoming a corporate lobbyist, was widely respected by Washington Republicans. When he joined forces with Ormsby, support for the phosphate ban took off in the house. It passed by a vote of 78 to 19 with such strong bipartisan support that both the speaker and the minority leader voted for it. The legislative strength of the bill surprised Lisa Brown, the Democratic majority leader in the state senate, who quickly became engaged. She knew a winner when she saw one. And it didn’t hurt that she, too, hailed from Spokane. With Brown muscling it along, the bill passed in the senate just two weeks later, 41 to 7.

Did both men, and the woman, have a genuine passion for reducing phosphates in their hometown's river, or a passion for fish, or nature, or only a passion -- and more and more I believe it is the ruling human one -- for telling their fellow beings what to do? Or were they just interested in improving their resumés? The result has been not only that good dishwasher detergents were banned in Washington state, but that the detergent manufacturers "threw in the towel" and decided to make all their products 0.5% phosphorus, rather than manufacture two sets of soaps, one for sale in Washington and one for the rest of the country. They recognized that there is no fighting Gaia.

And then, consider Lisa Brown. She, too, seems to be building her resumé.

Last January the Washington state legislature took up a proposal to ban phosphates from residential lawn fertilizers. It passed in the senate, but stalled in the house. The bill, which would have required neighbors to inform on one another, was sponsored by the Democratic majority leader, Lisa Brown [emphasis added].

Perhaps it's inevitable that democratic government becomes depraved. Eventually, there is nothing for candidates to promise, and nothing for elected officials to do, except to create more and more laws. At least olden-time aristocracies devoted a good part of their year to hunting, wenching, and court intrigue, and so left Jack Sprat alone to buy the dishwasher detergent he liked. Yet, note how people in un-democratic regimes walk through fire to vote.

Erasmus declared Folly the daughter of Plutus, Riches, and has Folly describe her father as the god "according to whose pleasure war, peace, empire, counsels, judgments, assemblies, wedlocks, bargains, leagues, laws, arts, all things light or serious -- I want breath -- in short, all the public and private business of mankind is governed ... this is my father and in him I glory."  If Folly in turn marries Democracy, it seems the children of the pair turn out to be the best and the brightest who like to outlaw things, and thus meddle and destroy in their own incremental way. They end up writing a lot of resumés.

One more thought, to be filed under the heading "incremental meddling." Eventually, the phosphate-banning, fish-loving environmental mania is going to come up against the grand topic of public health. Towards the end of the Weekly Standard article Jonathan Last writes,

The anti-phosphorus lobby began by agitating against phosphates in laundry detergent. In the early 1990s they were banned, though an exception was made for dish detergents. Now phosphates are banned in dish detergents, too, though these bans make an exception for commercial dish detergents, which still contain phosphates. Surely they are next in line for improvement.

"Next in line" are commercial detergents. What this means is that in time people who want to be noticed for having gotten something done are going to decide that it's not very important whether or not restaurant (or hospital?) dishes are clean. They also don't care if Jack Sprat actually wastes more water and more electricity hand-washing or double-dishwashing his dishes, as long as he's not using what they want to boast in their resumes about having banned. Will restaurant patrons complain about dirty plates and glasses? What of the public health inspectors, visiting kitchens and store rooms and also compiling resumés?

Hospitals, I suspect, will become the battleground where environmentalism makes its stand. Being an environmentalist has to be a function of youth and health. Recycle as you like, carpool, plant a tree on Earth Day, think green thoughts, smile at nature and love Gaia as you please, -- but wait till the day when you have to enter a hospital. The things those doctors and nurses use once and then throw away will absolutely astonish you. And when it's your turn to benefit from their ministrations, you will want them to go one doing exactly that, no matter how many trees you've planted on Earth day or how many canvas bags you righteously lug to the grocery store. You will want them using and hygienically throwing away the exam gloves, the needles, the syringes, the cotton swabs, the plastic sheaths for ear scopes and thermometers, the plastic I.V. lines and drip bags, the plastic bed protectors and the hand sanitizers and the face masks and the little cups for your pills. All this is only what you see in the patient's room, where things are relatively tidy and unshocking. God knows what is used up and thrown away in operating rooms or labs, and I don't mean obvious biohazards. When it comes to our lives and our health, we don't care what goes into the landfill or flushes into the ocean. Perhaps a race memory of filth and disease is still that strong in us. In the hospital we say: keep me clean and keep me alive.

For the moment, anyway. Can the best and brightest, people like Ormsby, Mielke, and Brown, change that? Will your doctor be required to share needles for the sake of the environment? It seems impossible, but up until last July it seemed impossible that free citizens would not be permitted to buy a good dishwasher detergent. It seems impossible that we shall all be forbidden to buy lightbulbs as of 2014, but lo, the law exists. (You can stock up, if you don't mind pretending you live in the old Soviet Union whose peoples' hoarding habits we used to rather pity.) When it comes to the hospitals, then we will see what passions the religion of Gaia really compels. Or perhaps there's a greater and subtler force at work, and it's just our attachment to the incremental folly of resumé writing. Either way, I imagine the daughter of Riches somewhere in heaven, laughing, deliciously.      

God

Look closely, and you'll spot him waving from the distant clouds. From a psalter belonging to King Henry VIII; scanned from the book Henry VIII and his Court, by Neville Williams (1971).

We know we mustn't think of Almighty God as an old man in heaven, crowned and robed, yet how often the image crops up -- in Western art, of course. There is a precedent for it. In the Bible, Daniel says:

I beheld till thrones were placed,
And one that was ancient of days did sit;
His raiment was as white snow,
And the hair of his head like pure wool;
His throne was fiery flames, and the wheels thereof burning fire ... (Dan. 7:9)

Have readers noticed the large number of posts lately that are a bit long on pictures and a bit short on text? I hope no one minds. Working retail during the holidays, having the flu, and tending to the wine blog have all taken quite a bit of time. Will attempt to become as verbose as ever, soon.