Poppy Pounds

Catch XXII Redux

2011-02-06T22:02:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:
It didn’t get much ink given the sturm und drang of the last two years, but Senate leaders have come to an informal compromise over Rule 22; the rule covering the use of the filibuster discussed previously. Don’t think that tenderheartedness has broken out, though. The accommodation results from a new situation on the ground, so to speak. This Senate now has 53 Democrats and 47 Republicans which puts the possibility of cloture out of reach for both parties. Filibuster as a delaying tactic as opposed to a killing tactic is off the table. In other words, a filibuster would take the form of the filibuster of old where a member needs to identify himself and hold the floor for the tactic to work. The chance of it becoming a party-wide tactic is diminished.

Mr. McConnell and Mr. Reid looked out from Lookout Mountain and saw a Senate where nothing gets done. This was the situation that existed in the second Clinton administration and directly resulted, along with a booming economy, in the paying down of the national debt at an extraordinary pace. God forbid that should happen again.

So they tried it out on the Aviation Policy Bill. Aviation Policy has been bouncing around the Congress since Mr. Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controller’s Union.

You’ll be happy to know that Chicken Little was wrong. When the measure came up, Mr. Reid permitted a flood of amendments from the floor including repeal of healthcare. None of the amendments passed because the Aviation Policy bill had been thoroughly vetted in committee over the last two and a half decades or so.

This was just the first try of what Senator Schumer called procedural civility.

There are a number of things in its favor, not the least of which is the Presidential election. For the mid-terms, most Republicans ran against Nancy Pelosi’s heavy-handed tax/spend ways and healthcare. Mr. Obama is the likely issue in 2012.

Anything can and will happen. For now, though, a little peace is welcome.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

Characters Welcome: Ralph Hall

2011-02-02T15:59:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

For those of you who prefer a few facts to inform your positions, Ralph Hall Republican from the 4th District (Rockwell) of Texas, may not be your man. That’s nothing remarkable in the lower chamber and would not warrant our attention if he weren’t the new Chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee. That particular committee is charged with encouraging “scientific advancement" as "one of the keys to U.S. competitiveness in a global marketplace." We will look into the specifics later.

For now, attend to the notion of a reliable vote in Congress. We have already learned how the seniority system works. Please apply all the negative aspects of that system to this character. Believe the hype. A reliable vote coupled with a chairmanship is the most valuable thing a lobbyist can own short of the Speaker. Do not think, however, that Congressmen are “owned” in the sense that they are obliged to do whatever their lobbyist “owner” requires. The system is much more subtle than that. In your mind form an atom with a nucleus and orbiting electrons. The dense material is a vote while the electrons that circle are The Congressman, the lobbyist or interest group and money.

The reliable vote attracts and holds the Congressman, the money and the lobbyist. It forms a very stable system. Everything is in balance and no one can tell what brings about that balance. Did the Congressman come first with his natural political inclinations and moral gyroscope or did the lobbyist make a persuasive case for one position or another? Or, is money the stabilizing force as between Congressman and lobbyist? I don’t know and I don’t care.

The fact is that a set of circumstances have come together to make a reliable vote possible. That reliable vote, in its turn, replicates itself endlessly over the thousands of issues that bawl and holler for attention each year over the 30 years since Mr. Hall went to Washington.

Figuring all this out can be daunting. The National Rifle Association and the Israeli Political Action Committee are well known as is the National Education Association and The American Hog Producers. They each have their own ratings that are a pretty good at clueing us to reliability on the gun, Zionist, teacher and oinker fronts. But what is The Eagle Forum and (I dare you) what is the Alliance to Stop the War on the Poor? Maybe you can guess what Arc is up to.

Whatever you may think these outfits are about, their ratings are very important in the reliable vote sweepstakes. Mr. Hall is a prince among reliable voters. To be sure, most members of Congress are reliable voters. The system works to make the money flow, the lobbyist employable and counting the Congressman’s nose in advance of a vote is made tranquil and effortless.

It also obviates the pesky rigors of persuasion, attentive listening or thoughtfulness. That’s where Ralph Moody Hall comes in. To put this particular character in the chair that oversees the government’s science and technology effort is a painful reach. He was once quoted as saying that he could do anything his grandson’s computer could do – wait for it – only slower. He was also the elegant gentlemen who got perilously close to killing the Science and Technology bill last year by inserting a provision that permitted federal employees to view porn on their office computers. He has serious questions about global warming fears. Why? You see, he has these serious questions and doubts man’s activities could affect nature one iota.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t know nothin’ about no global warming. I do expect more from those whose decisions will affect your Hawaiian Tropic expenditures.

I’m Just Sayin’

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Characters Welcome: Fehlleistungen

2011-01-23T12:46:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

It’s amazing what one can learn flipping through an old and familiar book. In this case the flipping was motivated by some initial flipping through a book picked up absent-mindedly. One thing led to another. Clear?

Anyway, all that flipping lead to the conclusion our Congressmen and Congresswomen don’t deserve close scrutiny. As much fun as snark can be, it only works when we presume the butt of the joke had it coming. They don’t. Your standard Congressunit is a rather ordinary person equipped with an outsized ego in much the same way as strippers are ordinary people with underdone egos. Both stimulate assumptions that are mostly false.

Winston Churchill, when he was elected Prime Minister already had thirty electoral campaigns under his belt spanning the forty or so years he spent in politics. He reported a great regret. He had wasted a whopping eighteen weeks of his life on the stump. Winston Churchill was never ordinary and was never over worked like our politicians. Over working our Congress makes it worse. Asking them to raise money every waking moment compounds the folly. The folly issues from the need to be a reliable vote to some interest group that can vouchsafe one’s reelection. The system is nuts. No wonder much of what comes out of their mouths is garbled, monotonic and middling. It’s no wonder we can’t seem to cooperate. When there is little oxygen to the brain and one’s sense of self resides in a K Street ledger it’s hard to be thoughtful.

And, we get a big slice of parapraxis. Parapraxis is coinage from a translator to convey “fehlleistungen” a German word that literally means “misperformance”. Most people call it a Freudian slip. It’s a condition brought about by a repressed urge finding outlet in speech. A man may say to a woman, “Yes, I want bed and butter”. Dr. Freud found these utterances highly significant and worthy of our attention. We don’t give it much heed of course because it’s poor manners to point out such things in polite company. Still, one sees it every day when someone has their mouth on auto pilot – like in the Congress.

Did you hear the Congressman say, “I resent the gentleman questioning the Speaker’s mendacity”? Of course he wanted us to hear “veracity” but he said mendacity too many times, like little people exiting a clown car.

Maybe you heard a Congresswoman say, “Everyone should be an affectionado of California wine.” If affectionado were a word it would mean the same thing except the lady was so abashed, she left the lectern. Hmmm.

This stuff doesn’t happen when we write our own speeches and pore over our word’s effect on others. It happens when parrot -reading a tone poem of some junior staffer or mouthing the bullet points of a lobbyist. Just so, the conditions persist when interviewed by a talking TV head – eyes fixed on the middle distance, blinking like crazy and, God forbid, don’t answer the question directly.

We need to free up our representatives to think, discuss and agree. The corrosives effect of campaign money needs to be taken out of play. The 15 and 30 second spot needs to go the way of Mr. Ed. The campaign bus with its bloated entourage and trailing reporters is plain silly. We are wearing our leaders to a frazzle.

Let’s get our political leaders flipping though some old books to see what new might be there. Think of the potential; informed, internalized Churchill, Freud, Amos and Hosea. Let’s switch our demands from telegenic to thoughtful. Maybe we could value reasonable over intimidation. We may get those things if we turn off those soul-stealing cameras. The posturing and the vapidity just might go with them. We can’t properly judge them until they write their own speeches to justify their votes. Then we’ll have the complete package.

I’m Just Sayin’

Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

Characters Welcome: Spencer Bachus

2011-01-16T02:07:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

Today we begin in earnest to examine the potential shenanigans in the 112th Congress. At the risk of appearing partisan, we’ll start with a few of the incoming chairmen in the House. As you know, the House is a stickler for the rights conferred by seniority. The tradition can be defeated after great pains and is usually granted to a less senior member because the ranking member passes or is egregiously and publically incompetent.

There are few committees this term where seniority works to evoke that gesture with the shoulders and palms up. You remember that gestures from when Michael Jordon sunk three three-pointers in a row. It says, “Don’t ask me.”

Mr. Spencer Bachus, a 62-year-old lawyer and Republican Representative from Alabama’s sixth Congressional District has toiled without complaint for 18 years to rise to the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee. Take note here of the Alabama connection. The great State of Alabama has a lock on financial services legislation and oversight of financial services regulation. Richard Shelby Senior Senator from Alabama is ranking member of the Committee for Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Alabama has a financial services sector that would fit into the odd file drawer on Broad Street. Both Houses have these committees tasked:

"[To oversee] all components of the nation's housing and financial services sectors including banking, insurance, real estate, public and assisted housing, and securities."

Mr. Bachus makes no bones about the silliness of that task:

“In Washington, the view is that banks ought to be regulated, but my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

We ought to offer the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a principled position on the issue. Maybe we should also ignore that Mr. Bachus (like no other Representative) relies heavily on financial services campaign contributions. And, maybe we should ignore that Mr. Bachus runs mostly unopposed making it possible for him to use those millions he gets from Wall Street every year to subsidize his poor relations in the House. This has the effect of buying him influence greater than his grasp of the job and, frankly, his reputation as an intellectual lightweight. He just beat back a chairmanship challenge from Mr. Ed Royce of California on just that basis.

It isn’t those things at all. He is one who has toyed with the idea of shutting down the government this spring or summer. Never mind that a resolution to freeze the debt ceiling or failure to pass a budget has little chance of passage. Never mind that just the prospect of that sort of vandalism is enough to roil markets for months. Never mind that the American people deserve better. The suggestion is, at once, hair brained and deeply condescending.

Legislators should legislate, not be an instrument of policy. The same people (Mr. Bachus among them) who rail against activist judges are guilty of chipping away at the power of the Executive, not through law or threat of law but through harassment and disapprobation. The challenge has been laid down several times: If you haven’t got a workable solution to the debt crisis, sit back quietly until one comes along. We ought to have had enough by now of the cant and rant which offers fixes that can’t be done, won’t be done or assigns blame by the ton.

The only answer is for the adults in the Congress to put their heads together with the adults in the Administration and hammer out a program that we can follow together. The time is now.

I’m Just Sayin’,

Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

Characters Welcome

2011-01-14T11:09:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

Soon we will begin a series of posts about the committee chairmen in the House of Representative as well as some of the more colorful characters who are ranking members.

For those of you waiting for snark, this will be the the place.

I'm Just Sayin',
Poppy
www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

The King's Speech

2011-01-11T21:47:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:
I’m convinced that Mr. Bush would have been more or less universally lauded for his mugging of Iraq had he been able to control civil society once Saddam Hussein was on the run.

You may remember the welcome our troops received on the streets of Baghdad; the triumphant pulling down of the statues and the revelation of opulent palaces. Also remember that days after the welcome, government ministries and other corporate offices were looted rather thoroughly and irreparably. Shortly after that, some old religious scores began to be violently settled. It started with Christian liquor stores and quickly spread from the Shiite slums to leafy Sunni neighborhoods and hasn’t yet stopped.

Into the chaos leaped Iran (Shiite protection) and Saudi money (Sunni and Wahabi protection) and criminals (the protection rackets and others) as well as al Qaeda (all purpose nut jobs). It made for a heady brew.

In fairness, Mr. Bush’s hands were tied because he didn’t have the manpower. Among the lies he was told was that we could leave the people without an army, without police and without civil institutions because a shadow government was already in place. He also couldn’t disarm the populous because the populous was accustomed to doing without. Oh yes, don’t forget the mantra: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. He was also told that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. He was told there were weapons of mass destruction on the premises. He was told all manner of malarkey and he told it to us.

Just so, Saddam Hussein made sure everyone had a gun and a triple dose of paranoia after his policy of lies and half truths failed. Tehran licked it's chops from the beginning. The Saudis was delighted to see Syria shut off from Iraqi oil.

Be that as it may, criminals, religious zealots, politicians with guns and kids with a zest for havoc met no opposition. A culture that raised Stone Age cities, conceived the first agriculture and actually saw the bosom of Abraham was stripped of her leaders and professional class, looted of her artistic patrimony and burdened with the burial of her dead.

To think that such destruction issued from a few words spoken in a few capitols around the globe (including Baghdad and Tehran) is no intellectual leap. In fact, to think that the damage issued from something other than words is whistling Dixie. Everything save hurricanes and bear attacks issues from words.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The quotation comes from The King James Bible John 1:1. Curiously, there are no competing translations. It means, I hope, that Moses’ big idea was that words are the source of all things. Consider Genesis 1:1-5

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Don’t get your panties in a bunch, kids. Poppy is unqualified to make a theological argument. I am arguing that the current debate about the consequences of words was settled a very long time ago. A "word" is that by which we communicate our will; by which we convey our thoughts; or by which we issue commands; the medium of communication with others.

Nor do I subscribe to the idea that anyone in particular ought to take the fall for recent events. And, while we must unreservedly protect from prosecution ugly public words on First Amendment grounds, we need not condone them. Similarly, excusing incendiary speech on the basis of frustration, anger or grief begs the question. Words matter.

I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

Comments on Comments

2011-01-10T00:03:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

It’s natural to be upset about the recent events in Tucson, Arizona where a gunman killed six people and wounded a dozen more. While the police may know his motives, we know this gunman went to a public place with the intent to commit murder.

We also know from his writings in social media that he exhibits a deeply muddled sense of causality and discrimination. But, being confused does not make for murderous intentions. Don’t look over here for an explanation of murderous intentions.

Nevertheless, I was struck by a couple things found in CNN,s “This Just In”. You may know that This Just In puts out raw and unfiltered reports about breaking news stories for those people who like to be up-to-the-minute. It also provides a place for people with a computer to put their two cents worth in. I almost never look at This Just In for those very reasons. Still, I was motivated to both go there and to read the comments.

The local Sheriff rated a paragraph:

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik used a nationally televised press conference to condemn the tone of political discourse in his state. He charged that public debate is now "vitriolic rhetoric," which has rendered Arizona "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry." Dupnik suggested that such rhetoric can have deadly consequences.

At first glance it seemed incredible that a Sheriff answerable to the voters would use such words to describe his community. Plus, after all we’ve been through with hypersensitive Muslims; somebody used a holy place to describe a magnet for prejudice. But nope, come the next day, he upped the ante:

“I think we're the tombstone of the United States of America," Dupnik said of The Granite State … “

He also had lots to say about ideology-based radio and television. We’ll save the question of idiot fringe media for another day. On the question of whether Pima County residents are particularly susceptible to vitriolic rhetoric he is clearly and naively wrong. We know that because of what’s in the comments -- hundreds of them. Loonies are found in every county, city and hamlet in this land.

There is no way to characterize the commentary on political grounds. Of course there were conservatives, liberals, libertarians, LaRoucheys, trivializers of all stripes, strict constructionists, very strict constructionist, super strict constructionists, progressives, populists and maybe even a whig or two. What can be said about a super majority of them is a meanness of spirit; that vitriolic rhetoric Sheriff Dupnik was talking about. Their purpose is blame. Their currency is blame. Their scriptures are blame. Someone or some system must carry the responsibility for anything that works contrary to their wishes.

Boy oh boy, do they have their stories. Sarah Palin is to blame because she “targeted” the 20th Congressional District of Texas. Progressives can’t stand the Bluedogs. Psychiatry coddles the dangerous. The cops have been disarmed by bleeding hearts. Conservatives are heartless haters. Schools have let us down. Churches are no longer relevant. The patriot movement preys on the weak. Government is too intrusive or not intrusive enough. There was a lot of blather about guns. Television, video games and popular music are tearing at the fabric of society. Glen Beck is a cretin. If only we’d listened to Glen Beck. You get the idea.

What was missing in these comments was a sense that something dreadful had happened; namely murder and maiming by glock and narcissism. Beyond ruining too many lives, no ideological, political, religious or social purpose was served. And, while there were strictures offered there was no horror at the gravity of the crime.

There was plenty of thoughtful reaction by our political leaders. Make no mistake, though, a way of speaking has taken hold that is ugly and pointless. The republic is the lesser for it.

I’m Just Sayin’

Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep

2011-01-06T10:40:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:
Our politicians don’t quote poetry any more. Senators Everett Dirksen, Robert Kennedy, Alan Simpson and Robert Byrd were about the last of those who could be counted on for appropriate verse. We’re not sure whether this state of affairs is a result of current politico's assessment of our capacity to understand the art form or if they’ve taken an assessment of themselves. Either way, the loss to political discourse is profound.

Granted, poetry requires learning a short glossary. Let’s be confident, though, that anyone who can learn fo’ shizzle, gym hares and ROFL can learn metric foot, consonant cluster and synecdoche.

Nor is poetry inaccessible. It doesn’t have to be snooty. Consider Ogden Nash,

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

Or Louisa May Alcott

Little shadows, little shadows
Dancing on the chamber wall,
While I sit beside the hearthstone
Where the red flames rise and fall.
Caps and nightgowns, caps and nightgowns,
My three antic shadows wear;
And no sound they make in playing,
For the six small feet are bare.

Or that master of the clerihew form, the champ

Who floats like a butterfly
And stings like a bee?
It is me
Ali

Poetry celebrates paradox and recognizes ambiguity as natural. Maybe that’s why we don’t hear it so much. The holding of paradox in one’s mind might be the definition of maturity; to at once adore the beauty of God’s creation and recognize the importance of competing responsibilities. Robert Frost inspired a generation of political leaders on both sides of the aisle with words like these:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

As the mouth fills with stunning sound and the mind fills with the ache of contradiction each of us knows so well, we have the stuff of poetry.

This is just a thought: Poetry requires carefully chosen words as well as an appreciation for carefully chosen words. Maybe we should settle for a little thought before we demand that any of it rhymes.

The opening ceremonies of the 112th Congress had a certain – let’s say – inanity the Sominex people would love to bottle. If the words were carefully chosen, they were arranged leached of all soul, promise and meaning. Wallpaper music, stripped of melody, drooled from the podium of the House to form a puddle of vapid insignificance. There was no poetry and nothing quotable.

I’m Just Sayin’

Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/

Crowd Control

2011-01-03T23:55:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

Many times on these pages I have asked you to watch out for certain people. Mostly we have talked about the avatars, those with special knowledge, the simplifiers, the slick promoters, the bowdlerizers and those whose only plea is to trust them. This is an important topic and, if you’re tired of hearing about it – tough. The world is ripe.

History is rich with guidance in this matter. Too many times we have looked back at those we followed so blindly and asked: “Why did we do it?” One supposes that to be a legitimate-enough question. A question more likely to get at the truth is, “Why did we love him so much?” Do you get the distinction? Categorical obedience comes from love, unenthusiastic obedience issues from cynicism or gutlessness. Put that way, it’s easy to pick oneself out. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a churchman and great conscience of the mid-twentieth century, put it this way from his Nazi prison cell:

"If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and ... give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves."

Even as his assassination drew near, Dr. Bonhoeffer put the case mildly. H. L. Mencken, a journalist and anti-cleric, never suffered from such modesty:

"The individual man, cheek by jowl with the multitude, drops down an intellectual peg or two, and so tends to show the mental and emotional reactions of his inferiors. The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic; almost simian. Crowds, properly worked up by skillful demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and to do anything.
The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely.
What happens when a crowd cuts loose? ... The few superior men in it are not straightway reduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads. On the contrary, they usually keep their heads, and make efforts to combat the crowd action. But the stoneheads are too many for them. ... And why? Because they are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers. The third rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions. A whoop strips off his disguise."

Just this morning the Mencken quote flew overhead quite by chance as this topic again cried for attention … funny how that happens. And, accounting for the age in which the two quotes were crafted, young ladies may not think it applies to them. It does.

All this talk of the mob and herd-mentality begs the question of the alternative. The truth is that shouting “Heil Hitler” is easy as is drinking Kool Aid offered by some huckster or following a smooth talker to a commune. There are lots of lesser examples not the least of which is empty-calorie partisanship. It is difficult, on the other hand, to be in relationship with another individual person. It is hard to be responsible for a family. Friendship is often dodgy. Sharing can be risky. Faithfulness is not for the faint.

You gotta wonder when you see someone who prefers his dog to human interaction. Wringing one’s hands over the faceless poor is not the same as feeding and clothing real people. Carrying a placard one time in a billion got someone out of jail. These also are pale substitutes for individual responsibility.

Just in case you’re interested, there is much research that confirms the idea that, despite the proximate cause, riots and tumult are generally for fun and profit and have little to do with improvement.

Here again, Dr. Bonhoeffer is instructive:

“Being free means ‘being free for the other,’ because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free"

Here’s hoping you can hold these words dear. When we free ourselves up to think for ourselves, our thoughts do not turn to the hubbub but to each other with real and addressable needs.

I’m Just Sayin’

Poppy
www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

If You Haven't Got a Ha'penny, God Bless You

2010-12-27T21:58:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

Get ready. The silliness we’ve learned to endure from Congress is about to go into hyper drive. Here is a hint that might help: Whatever name given to any issue in the 112th Congress, the subtext will always be government debt. Of course, there’s the National Debt pushing $14 trillion. Nearly every state, county, municipality, mosquito abatement district and public transit system is swimming in debt. Not for profit social service agencies are borrowed up to their brow ridge because of deadbeat states, counties, municipalities, mosquito abatement districts and public transit systems. What a mess.
The national debt alone is about a year’s wages for the average adult. Paying the foreign portion alone would cost about $200 per month for 15 years or $35 per month for 35 years from every wage earner.
Whatever the reason (elective wars, ill-advised tax cuts, underfunded entitlements, out-of-control healthcare costs, quantitative easing and stimulus payments) we’re in a fix. No one has a perfect handle on the problem. No one has the power to impose a solution, however brilliant. Congress is the least capable forum for any solution. We are not even agreed on a comfortable level of debt let alone agreed on the major reductions that will be required soon.
There are those who will tell you that spending is the sole problem. That is true if we are prepared to gut the social safety net. The people who say that spending is the sole problem are prepared to do that very thing.
Some will tell you that military expenditures are the problem. That is also true if you are prepared to abrogate treaty obligations of longstanding, have an armed force trimmed to meet only imminent threats; a force incapable of backing up foreign policy goals and, at the same time, throw much of the politically unstable parts of the globe into chaos. There are people prepared to risk that too.
Some will say that we should tax and assess our way out of this jam. That too can be done if you are prepared to risk social strife and contempt for the government on an unprecedented scale. Don’t worry, some of our political leaders will risk as much and more.
There is a sizeable slice of political thought that advocates a hands-off approach. Sooner or later, they argue, we will either grow our economy or shrink our economy until all the forces listed above come into balance naturally. Some of those people would merely cancel the foreign portion of the debt to the tune of $9 trillion give or take. Such an action would queer the idea of ever borrowing another penny from foreigners. Heaven help us if we encounter some emergency that would require an infusion of hard currency.
As we understand it right now, whatever we do must be both effective and palatable to a huge fraction of taxpayers. In other words, once we agree on the debt target, the solution is somehow resident in all of the above solutions; a combination of taxes, entitlement efficiencies, military retrenchment and discretionary restraint. The pain will need to be spread as evenly as possible for as short a period as possible.
I don’t know the answer nor do I know anyone who does. That is why we called this meeting. Beware of those who claim to have the answer especially if it’s a simple or painless one. Beware of political leaders who ask you to trust them without revealing their plans. Beware of those who will sell any natural rights in the name of thrift. Beware of those who will sacrifice the poor and the infirm as a political expedient. Beware of those who would impoverish the wealthy and productive. History teaches that none of these ever work.
As these matters come before the 112th Congress, we will examine each in more detail.
I’m just sayin’
Poppy

The Ox and Ass Kept Time Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum

2010-12-18T17:38:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

You know the Little Drummer Boy; pa rum pum pum pum?

We all know how this stuff happens: Somebody decides that your delicate sensibilities can’t stand some word or some image and manages to keep it from you. That somebody is called a bowdlerizer. A bowdlerizer is not exactly a censor. He decrees what you should hear or see. He is someone who would disinfect things for you. God forbid you should worry your pretty little heads.

What could be more pure-of-heart than to keep from our sweet youngsters what is vile and indelicate. Make no mistake, what is vile and indelicate should be kept from your ears.

Just be aware that he is a human too with a complex set of motives and anxieties like the rest of us. Sometimes the stuff that gets cleaned up says more about the cleaner than about the dainty ears of children. Sometimes she would rather you didn’t giggle during the Christmas Pageant when you hear the word “ass”. Okay, so “donkey” would be acceptable but doesn’t fit into the songs metric scheme.

So the word gets changed to ‘lamb’. How very adorable. Except now the line has been leached of its meaning. From the very earliest crèches or manger scenes depicting the birth of The Christ Child, an ox and an ass have been present based on the words of the prophet Isaiah:

The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.

Much has been made of this over the last couple millennia. Ox is kosher; donkey meat is forbidden. Many scholars have taken the verse to foretell the Jew/Gentile debate of the early church. Others have contrasted the gentle ox with the obdurate ass. The juxtaposition has also been used in quite judgmental terms toward Jewry. In any case: You got your baby Jesus, you got your ox and you got your ass.

This is a rather mild example to be sure. After all, what harm does it do? No real harm has been done except you get to be ever-so-slightly cheated of a carol’s richness. This is in the name of foregoing a few giggles at the Christmas Pageant.

Political talking points are cut from the same cloth. A talking point serves up a sanitary, unambiguous and easily repeatable bit of humbug for the home folks to toss about at dinner. Talking points usually involve a tautology (self-referential reasoning) in the hope that enough repetitions will crowd out whatever nuance might otherwise exist. Some recent examples are:

We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

We’re giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.

Here again, a couple of mild examples that, in the scheme no things, don’t amount to much. This is not a partisan post. The partisan ones will curl you hair.

In the first instance, we are avoiding the word “debt” because at $14 trillion there is no power on earth capable of denting it in our lifetimes. It is merely lip service to an ideology that long ago has been stripped of its political muscle.

In the second instance, we make reference to something that happened eight years ago. The question at hand is whether we should raise taxes on one group or another. And besides, taxes are levied on earnings not net worth.

As bad as talking points are, the outright vending of ignorance ranks just below the bald-faced lie. Senators from South Carolina and Arizona used words like “sacrilegious” and “disrespectful” to describe their obligation to work during the week between Christmas and New Years. That sort of thing is way beyond cant. Maybe he just misspoke, but the plain text of the junior Senator from Arizona suggests that the very day (December 15) was Christmas.

So what? Senators bloviate – that’s what we expect of them. They’re giving you what you need to hear without much in the way of thought or care. The Senator was bowdlerizing for your benefit.

All the polls show it: the electorate has a low opinion of Congress. That low opinion cuts both ways. Congress has low opinion of the electorate.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Catch XXII

2010-12-16T10:54:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:
This is going to be difficult. It is difficult because life is difficult, the exercise of power is difficult and accepting the consequences of both is difficult. One should hasten to add that whatever subtracts from life is also difficult and whatever shrinks from power imposes difficulty.

For a certain generation, nowhere was this little maxim better embodied than in a work of fiction called Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Published in 1961, the book explores the reach of bureaucratic power over the individual and the reach of power of one individual over another. Our hero, Captain Yossarian, is a bomber pilot operating out of a backwater during World War II. He is approaching his promised 40-mission limit and wants out. Cynical, inept and foolish superior officers along with minor functionaries conspire to prevent it. Catch-22 is the pretext:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

Eventually, we come to learn that Catch-22 is notional. Cruelly, it makes no difference. Whether the catch exists is irrelevant. It is so widely believed to exist and quoted often enough to have the force of law, if not truth.

Then there’s Senate Rule XXII. You may remember we discussed this matter before in the December 5th post, “Chicken Crap”. We looked at the filibuster.

As the 112th Congress constitutes itself on January 3, 2011 and only on January 3rd, Rule 22 may come up under a parliamentary mechanism called The Constitutional Option. (If The Constitutional Option is aimed at the minority, it’s referred to as The Nuclear Option.) At the risk of simplifying too much, the Senate can change its rules on the first day of the session employing a simple majority required for passage; or so goes the theory. The mechanism would be for the purpose of amending the Cloture Rule -- limiting the length of a filibuster or force a filibustering senator to truly stand in the well of the Senate in person or some combination of ingredients.

While we contemplate whether the Democrats can pull it off and eventually pass constitutional muster, we should consider the question of whether they ought to try.

The text of the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate for confirming treaties (Article 2, Section 2), expelling one of its members (Article 1, Section 5), and concurring in the proposal of Constitutional Amendments (Article 5). In all other matters, the Constitution gives the Senate the power to make its own rules (Article 1, Section 5). Starting with the first Senate in 1789, a simple majority could move to bring any matter to a vote. In 1806 a motion to call the question was eliminated. The filibuster became possible. A single Senator could now block a vote, 100% support was required to bring the question to a vote. In 1917 cloture was introduced requiring a two-thirds majority of those present to end debate. Cloture was amended in 1975 requiring three-fifths of the entire Senate.

Supporters of the right to filibuster argue that the Senate has a long tradition of requiring broad support to do business, due in part to the threat of the filibuster thus protecting the minority.

On the other hand, the Senate is not a seriously representative body. The people of California have the same number of votes as do the people of South Dakota. The Senate is designed to cool the passions of the majority as well as queer the will of the occasional nutcase. So, when we say minority, we mean a minority of senators who might all be from small states or all be from more populous states, southern states, manufacturing states … you get the idea.

Finally, when they have been in the minority, both parties have abused the filibuster. Particularly in the appointment of judges, the minority rises in purple outrage. Federal courts stay short-handed for years.
Rather than a rule change, a culture change might be in order. That’s the hard part. Just because it’s possible to employ a weapon hardly gives license to use it. The potential for more conflict and more resentment -- however it plays out -- is very, very high.

We ought to favor an arrangement where the minority, after having aired their objections fully, accepts the will of the majority. Under this arrangement, it is up to the people to decide come the next election. No rule can impose the adoption of a principle.

For no one should rule out the capacity of the mean-spirited to abuse any rule, game any system or confuse childish petulance with healthy debate. After all, that is what we have experienced: an undignified muddle unworthy of confidence.

There is no catch-22.

I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Blind Man's Bluff

2010-12-11T10:00:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:
If you ever get the chance, read the book A Beautiful Mind about Nobel Laureate John Nash and his battle with paranoid schizophrenia. It’s only covered tangentially in the book, but John Nash also helped popularize Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that examines the success, or lack of it one experiences because of the decisions of others in strategic situations. Game Theory is quite powerful in modeling decisions to cooperate with or resist the actions of others.

Some of our best minds are at work in this field including my personal favorites, the guys who figure out what’s going on in Texas hold ‘em. You may know the game. Its poker, we’re assured, but so esoteric, spooky and cultish that it’s super stars qualify as an alien life form.
In game theory, the concept of equilibrium is the goal. Please allow some over-simplifications here: The best we can do is to set up a circumstance under which one has a 50/50 chance of a satisfactory outcome. In no other human endeavor is this idea more manifest than the poker bluff. The best poker minds, using the snazziest computers and the latest social science research* have confirmed that among equal players, using the best bluff techniques to maximum advantage will not put one additional chip on the pile. The best one can do with a careful bluff strategy is to prevent an opponent from overwhelming one’s overall strategy. In a zero-sum game like poker, that is no mean feat.
So what is Congress doing with all this bluff and counter bluff? Certainly there’s more at stake here than some chips in a zero-sum game. The calculus is impossible. There is no way to model or understand it. There are no experts for this state of affairs. There are not likely to be any winners. Right on this spot is where paranoid schizophrenia meets alien life.
We now have abundant evidence that all the parties to this mess are thrashing about in a furious game of blind man’s bluff. In this case, the blind fold is ideological intransigence and injudicious bluffing. If it weren’t so serious (watching our leaders trip over the furniture and crash into the walls) this might be something we could look forward to laughing about later. That is, all the possible outcomes (save divine intervention) are unattractive.
If that weren’t enough, we have rioting in the streets outside Whitehall of all places. The natives are restless in Greece, Ireland and France over many of the same issues. We have some vandal spilling the contents of diplomatic pouches all over the countryside. Iran and North Korea are about to get strapped with a nuke or two. Pirates and slavers are operating openly at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Public education sucks. There are several troublemakers lying in the weeds ready to run for president two years hence. Oh, and lest we forget, Oprah’s last show is just months away.
I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/
*Eight Nobel economics prizewinners use some form of game theory

Weenies

2010-12-09T09:17:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

Don’t accuse me of being partisan; not this time. The cloture vote in the Senate that thwarted the majority on the issue of extending Bush-era tax cuts had an interesting sideshow. The first vote was 53 to 36 and the second vote was 53-37. So, depending on which vote we mean, either 11 or 10 Senators did not vote. All of them happen to be Republicans and all of them happen to be weenies.

A principled no vote is acceptable in a republic; an unprincipled no-show is not. This is on the heels of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform vote where three Republican House Members ‘phoned in no votes but didn’t bother to be on hand. The Democratic House Member who voted no was there and showed some spine.

For our purposes it’s not important who these gutless guys are. Their names are in the record. The real question is: What sort of contempt for the people’s business does it take to gin up a scheduling conflict?

Legislators miss votes all the time. What makes this different is that it appears to be a bloc in both cases. The Senate non-vote sported nine southerners. The Debt Commission no-show had to have been colluded. It is truly saddening to contemplate that urgent business in Texas or Alabama trumps the requirements of national public office.

Let’s get some pride together. You’re stinking up the joint.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Wang Dang Doodle

2010-12-07T15:34:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

We have too many professional political operatives. There are too many people whose livelihood depends on advocacy. Here’s a shiny new dime for the person who can name any issue for which there are no advocates in Washington. A quarter goes for anyone who can name any advocate that does not have a sworn professional enemy. A crisp new dollar bill goes to anyone who can justify this scrum of professional advocates and opponents as a zeitgeist rather than in the particular.

Advocates thrive on extremes. We believe in tough, unyielding advocates who will fight ‘til the last nickel to support them has been exhausted

Everyone likes his own advocate and despises each advocate’s evil twin. It’s just human nature. We want to know that someone is watching out for our money or our sensibilities or our prejudices or our diseases or our religious and moral scruples. Just so, we like to know if some group is jonesing for what is rightfully ours, their grasping hands will be slapped.

The problem is that they’re making a mess. Our laws are overly long and complex because of it. Our regulations are a crazy quilt of insufferable and minor distinctions. Our courts are clogged with ever-finer particularities made on ever-less important matters.

We write the most mind-numbing descriptions of the word fresh. We have ten or so kinds of embezzlement. If you’ve ever made an attempt to parse the school lunch nutritional standards you have yet to test your capacity for torture. Toilet seats conform to a standard. There’s an outfit that proscribes dirty words. Picture a committee meeting with hundreds of chairs all clamoring for attention. You get the idea.

And yet, no matter how silly or timid, it’s always a result of good intentions informed and confused by our advocates.

Let’s say we have a rash of robberies where the robber threatened her victim with a whisk. Is that armed robbery? Is the whisk covered under the statute? Is a woman wielding a whisk during a robbery suffering from some delusion as yet unbeknownst to medical science? How long and how heavy is the whisk? Should we have Armed Robbery with a Whisk in both the first and second degree? What if the victim had a smaller or larger whisk?

The answer is that armed robbery was committed. The important part was “rash” of robberies. Some politician, no doubt egged on by WANGS (Whisks Are Not Good Society), vows to put a stop to it. So we get a new sort of crime over which legislators must meanly debate; about which regulations must be written and after which the courts must rule endlessly.

We go through all this effort to achieve … what? We certainly don’t get a lessening of robberies.

People in authority no longer have authority. No one seems to be in charge so no one need take responsibility. We have traded the idea that we elect people to represent us for a system of rulemaking among all the other people who claim to represent us. All those definitions of fresh do not come from the legislature. They come from bureaucrats who are left to deal with the WANGS of this world and who have their own rules to follow. They have an impossible job. The legislature kicks the ball to the bureaucrat’s court where the other representatives of the people snarl and bully their way to this present predicament.

No wonder people are frustrated. We have a system that doesn’t trust politicians, doesn’t trust regulators and doesn’t trust courts. We put our trust in WANGS who are constantly being thwarted by politicians, regulators and courts as well as the anti-WANGS lobby.

Come to think of it: Can we really trust WANGS?

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Chicken Crap

2010-12-05T04:19:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

Chicken crap is nasty stuff. Oh sure, it’s a great fertilizer; chock-a-block with nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. But, peeuw, the stuff fresh out of the bird is toxic to plants, animals and people. It’s the ammonium. Amononium burns, blinds, suffocates and kills. To be useful, chicken crap needs to be composted in such a way as to mitigate amononium's intensity; thinned and diluted.

We can appreciate that in-coming Speaker John Boehner was frusrated. The Democrates just didn't get it. The people had spoken. The people, he asserted in his annoying narcissistic way, wanted Republicans to run things; not Democrats. But here we are in the lame duck session extending the Bush Era tax cuts for those who earned less than $250 thousand and allowing the tax cuts to expire for those who earned more. He called the vote chicken crap.

The measure went to the Senate. In that body, even in the lame duck session, the Republicans had a weapon called filibuster. Just in case you haven't looked it up for yourself recently, the word has an interesting etymology.

The word started out as Dutch (vrijbuiter ) and was filtered through the French used originally to refer to pirates or freebooters. Later, it applied to freelance military adventurers originating in the United States trying to destabilize governments in Central and South America for sport and profit. They were called by their hapless victims Filibusteros. The phrase, “Yanqui go home.” was said to first be hurled at these mangy characters.

Starting about 1851, the term was used to describe those who attempted to hijack debate by holding the floor until the majority came to its senses. The great orator Cato used the tactic twice in ancient Rome by the simple expedient of speaking past dusk. Henry Clay, Wayne Morse, Huey Long and Strom Thurmond showed some good filibustering skillz in the past. The most famous fictional filibuster was portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in the film: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Of course, the practice is now codified into the Senate’s rules (Senate Rule XXII). No exertion is required to hold the floor. Still, it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. That procedure is called cloture.

By the time the measure got to the Senate it was no longer chicken crap. It was called theater and a waste of time. It was a waste of time because the Majority Leader and Torquemada successor already knew he lacked the 60 votes needed for cloture. For a body that wastes time so prodigiously so often, an epithet crafted out of that cloth is asinine on its face.

Okay, kids. What have we learned? There was a disquisition on chicken crap and one on the word filibuster. What about the debate? Was it principled, elevated and civil? Did the parties engage one another’s arguments? Was the republic served?

Not hardly. We had anger, pandering and cynicism galore. What could be more obvious, quoth the Republicans? It’s wrong to raise taxes during a recession. They offered no evidence, but neither did the democrats make any particular attempt to refute. The democrats argued that the wealthiest of Americans could afford the tax and, besides, the government needed the money. Republicans never laid a glove on it. The parties talked past each other.

Both parties seem to be at sea -- unsure and spineless. There’s plenty of schoolyard bravado alright but neither nub nor root. After all we’ve been through this year, it’s still silly season on the Potomac. Chicken crap.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Revenge

2010-12-01T12:39:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

A couple of you have written me privately about the sequence that’s followed to get from grievance to un-redressed grievance to frustration to revenge. Good question. It’s a good question, not only because the answer eludes me, but also because it points to the difficulty with discussing these matters. Let’s see if we can, at least parse the question.

As has been pointed out, there never seemed to be an opportunity for North Korea to be satisfied with an outcome different than the one she sought; that of unification under a Soviet-style system. The grievances, however, begin long before that in the 2^nd century CE when china cruelly colonized the peninsula as a buffer against the Japanese. That horrible condition existed until the 20^th century when Japan visited its own brand of cruelty and occupation on the people starting around 1910.

Skip to WWII. In what is now a laughable bit of statecraft, Mr. Truman allowed the surrender of Japanese forces to the Soviet Union north of the 38^th parallel and accepted surrender on behalf of the United States in the south.

The North, with Stalin’s rule in the USSR as a guide and Stalin’s active connivance, immediately attempted a forced reunification on the South. They nearly succeeded. Mr. Truman and the UN intervened attempting to force reunification under US hegemony. They nearly succeeded before Mao Zedong intervened. They nearly succeeded but fought to the stalemate that exists today.

By then, grievance was piled upon grievance upon grievance with no way to sort it out. In cases like these, wars usually settle things for awhile. Stalemated wars solve nothing and harden the grievances to boot.

Today, North Korea is a police state that cannot feed its population, has no access to hard currency, isolated diplomatically and militarily as well as falling behind in almost every area of human progress. It has two assets: a nuclear weapons program and thousands of artillery pieces pointed at Seoul. Its leadership is paranoid beyond belief and rules from behind a curtain worthy of The Great Oz.

History judges all of the parties to this tragedy harshly. At no time did the great powers care one whit for the gathering frustration of the Korean people. Check out the 8^th chapter in the book of Hosea. We have every reason to expect that what we have sown will ripen to a whirlwind.

Hosea’s prophecy reminds us that we can never really escape the consequences of actions. And, even in the face of a situation like Korea where there is plenty of blame to go around, we cannot escape our own part in it.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Doomed Repeat Doomed Repeat Doomed

2010-11-29T15:49:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

This latest series of letters were supposed to focus on the antics of the 112^th Congress. We keep getting sidetracked. Sorry.

The problem is that we are not yet sufficiently grounded in history or political theory to evaluate any legislative goings-on let alone appreciate the little whimsies that brighten an otherwise drab reporting of the news. Okay, I’m not sufficiently grounded. We’ll just have to learn by doing. Sidetracked is to be expected.

There are a couple simple theories of history; linear and cyclical. The linear theorists are mostly Western and hold that history operates on a more or less straight line that is not necessarily self-referential. Christians, among others, claim a teleological or natural purpose and finality to history. We are, however, obliged to countenance whatever it is we get.

Then there’s the cyclical view: Events are points along the circumference of a wheel that repeat each time that point works its way ‘round. This is more of an Eastern idea and, to our minds, contemplates a miserable condition. Oh boy, here we go again. War, pestilence, famine, death; each visited upon us in turn forever.

But why can’t history be a curvilinear, meandering and raucous stream that is neither predictable nor headed any place in particular. It just can’t because I said so and it fits not-at-all into the premise of this piece.

Others subscribe to the Pan Theory. However it pans out is fine.

Let me propose the Importuned Grudge Theory.

History is full of grudges; unscratched itches that fester for generations or centuries that demand some resolution for the grudge holder. Never mind that cynical politicians or divines, from time to time poke at these cankers for their own purposes. Whatever the mechanism, it happens. And, when it happens, we have a doozey of an historical event.

Islamic jihadists are still mad about the Crusades and being tossed from Europe. Hitler was miffed at the WWI settlement terms. The Chechens still harbor hard feelings about Josef Stalin. Native Americans figure they were wronged. Democrats were paid back for Nixon’s fall by demonizing Clinton. Democrats, in their turn, painted Bush as a feckless moron. It was Robert F. Kennedy who said, “Don’t get mad. Get even.”

Cue the Koreans. Sixty years ago in mid September, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur pulled off a stunning amphibious landing at Inchon on Korea’s west coast, cut off the North’s supply of Seoul and denied them a unified Stalinist peninsula. Sixty years ago to the week, MacArthur was about to defeat the North militarily. He had subdued Pyongyang, The North’s capitol and was about to occupy the countryside.

He didn’t see the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army 300,000 strong under the command of Peng Duhuai hidden in the bushes in places called Kunu-ri Pass, Ch'ongch'on River and Chosin Reservoir. One US regiment was decimated; the other prevailed but was cut up so badly that American troops had to fight their way to the south where they are to this day. And, to this day, Pyongyang is still riled about their thwarted unification plans. They celebrated the anniversary this year by taking umbrage at the thinnest of provocations and set the potential for some more bloody history.

Grudges matter.

That may another way of saying that it’s not enough just to prevail. The brilliance of the First Amendment to the Constitution was not only to restrain the government’s power over religion, speech, press and assembly but the often overlooked right to petition for the redress of grievances. It’s the redress part that should interest us here. People want their grievances remedied, as in put right or rectified. Grievances un-redressed, as we have seen, are grudges. Grudges never go away. Redressing grievances is hard for the winner who gets to write history – so hard, it almost never gets done. So don’t ask me how.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

All My Hexes Live In Texas

2010-11-26T17:48:00.001-06:00

It was announced this week that Tom DeLay former Republican Leader of the House was convicted on a money laundering and conspiracy beef. This is after a six year investigation, two curiously different indictments, one venue fight, one appearance on Dancing with the Stars and a twelve day trial.

Republicans claim political prosecution. Democratic prosecutors say, “Who? Me?”

Tom Delay, was once known as The Hammer. You never met someone smugger or more entitled. He left a lot of bodies bleeding into the carpet. He made a lot of enemies. To this day he both looks and acts the part of gangster.

You may remember that Mr. DeLay was the architect of the so-called K Street Project, a legal shakedown of Capital Hill lobbyists. Nobody responds well to being mugged even when it’s legal.

Even so, a man who was not so disposed would have gotten off with a fine or a reprimand. But no; he fibbed to prosecutors, news outlets and (horrors) his lawyers. He refused to testify under oath anywhere. He was tiresome to the last. He was a micro-manager who fashioned his defense around the idea that he was just a figurehead. Juries almost never buy it. After the verdict was read, he couldn’t summon up any respect for the jurors or the process.

Mr. DeLay persisted in his behavior for so long and so shamelessly that he managed to create a critical mass of irritation and annoyance among his victims. He could only be wrestled down using the same medicine; a thousand small cuts became a torrent. He was convicted on his reputation.

Bottom line; karma got him. Better yet, so many people cursed him so tirelessly that at least one of the hexes finally stuck.

Focusing only on the law as written and practiced may have gotten him off. There was not much evidence presented at trial that could be pinned on DeLay personally. As was the case with Governor Rod Blagojevich, being a jerk is not necessarily a felonious act. Yet, how they both acted lent such a fetid aura to the proceedings, prosecutors and jurors figure they are guilty of something. Blagojevich got off with a hung jury, DeLay didn’t. Blagojevich will face another trial. Delay will appeal until The Second Coming. Their political careers are over for sure. It wasn’t for some criminal exploit either. It was for a sense that the best way to ride is roughshod and the best offers are those that can’t be refused.

Did he deserve to be brought down? Darn tootin’. Did he deserve a money laundering and conspiracy conviction worth life behind bars? Probably not.

Aren’t we talking about bullies? Whether we find them in high places or low bullies are everywhere – the intimidating boss, the chiseling mechanic, the mulish brother, the no-speaks friend, the obdurate teacher and callous cop are all examples of bullies we meet regularly.

We have a complicated relationship with the bullies around us. They are so much a part of our lives that they’re hard to avoid and there’s no way to tell how best to deal with them if you must deal with them. Sometimes, like the K Street lobbyist, you just bend over and accept it. Sometimes, like the friend who won’t tell you why she’s angry, we can ignore them. Sometimes we are obliged to resist more or less depending on the circumstances.

I like this little quote from Mohammed Ali:

“Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.”

In Ali’s mind there’s a technique for dealing with bullies. If you must deal with a bully who would intimidate, terrorize, torment, oppress or harass; stick with him. Next, break the problem down into bite-sized pieces. Then, work on one bite-sized piece at a time. Persevere. Make your case all the time. This technique presumes that you will not be intimidated, terrorized, tormented, terrorized, oppressed or harassed. That said, it sounds like good advice to me.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Yeah, Well. The Dude Abides

2010-11-23T22:26:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

Depending on how you count, there will be more than 100 new Members of the 112^th Congress. That’s more new members than the First Congress had in total. Depending on how you count, there were 26 Senators and 65 Representatives that met in Philadelphia during that balmy April of 1789. They were a gaggle of petty, fractious, stiff-necked, upper middle class, thick skinned and hidebound individuals sent to straighten out what was wrong with government since the Revolutionary War (depending on how you count:1775-1783) was settled six years earlier.

And every two years thereafter a new congress was formed to do the people’s business, damn each other to perdition and expect fulsome praise for the effort.

What’s different? There are two schools of thought: The first is that, in those olden days when the earth was still cooling, public persons treated each other with a gentility and rigid attachment to etiquette that one does not see today. Boy Howdy! is that ever true. The other difference often stated is the homogeneity of that congress: all white, all male, mostly wealthy, all Christian and all former rebels. That also is true.

Digging deeper, however, you will find that while they resisted snark in public, they hired goons (we call them surrogates today) to tell the most vile tales on street corners and in the press. And, while they had no reason to look down their noses about physiognomy, purse or religion, they did find ways to snigger about professional and regional distinctions. Planters had little else in common with lawyers; merchants had little else in common with mariners; bankers had little else in common with the clergy while northerners despised southerners and southerners despised northerners with a purity only arms dealers could love. Since when did we need an excuse to identify a despicable if irrelevant dissimilarity in the quest to vilify a political rival?

This topic bears a nod to Jeffrey Lebowski, the slacker Everyman who speaks of himself in the third person and abhors change. He does not update us on his life so much he as validates it, “Yeah, well. The Dude abides”.

Anyway, I’m making the case that not much is different between the First Congress and the 112^th Congress when it comes to the issues and the personalities. There may be a change in the look of members and most have thrown off their veneer of sophistication and decorum. All the venality and grasping and smugness remains. Remaining also is the idealism, fellow-feeling and desire for service that motivates a small but significant fraction of the political class. We have no right to expect human nature to change. It’s the constraints we agree to that change.

That’s right; it’s the institution that’s changed. Members have huge staffs. Committees have huge staffs. Leaders have huge staffs. Travel is free within its liberal constraints. This last election did not repeal incumbency which is common and stretches across decades. Campaign finance and its corrupting influence just reached the $4billion mark. The whole system is awash in money. Congressional work is exhausting. There is little time to think. The Congress has rule books. Those rule books are thick, densely written and respond only to furious ministrations of legalistic minds. Nearly everything is recorded and reported to feed a news beast that is, at once, all-seeing and never makes eye contact.

Life in Congress is, in short, life in a toxic fish bowl. Your guess is as good as mine why an otherwise smart and effective person would subject himself to the abuse. Okay, there is the public adulation and the cushy lobbying job afterwards but she pays an extraordinary price to get there.

Still, as we’ve seen, there is 222 year’s worth of people who got elected. Think of them as ordinary people with a prodigious appetite for pain. They deserve civility from us notwithstanding the loutish circumstances that surround them. Come to think of it, everyone deserves civility from us.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Aphorisms, Slogans, Code Words and One True Thing

2010-11-19T20:23:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

You can’t blame politicians, teachers or preachers for that matter, as they try to make things easy for us. Easy isn’t necessarily bad. We live in a sound bite culture that reduces complex ideas to slogans that can fit on a bumper sticker or flattened onto a wiki. Ideas not rendered into some aphorism, slogan or chant don’t have much of a chance to pierce the din of all the other aphorisms, slogans or chants that fill up space in our lives. Sloganeering has been around as long as religion and slander. Besides, these figures of speech make it possible for the busy and indifferent among us to express ourselves without the appearance of ignorance. You will hear a lot of it belched from the 112^th Congress

Think about it. Taken on their own, stripped from the context of a moment, for the moment, slogans are risible. “Only you can prevent forest fires” is patently silly without a picture of some nut flicking a burning cigarette toward some stationary Tumble Weeds. “Just say no to drugs” is a famous and apt example.

Chants like “yes we can /yes we can /yes we can “ as well as “drill, baby, drill /drill, baby, drill/drill, baby, drill” fall in the same category. One heard this sort of thing spoofed at the Jon Stewart rally on the National Mall: “Three word phrase/three word phrase/three word phrase.”

Chants, aphorisms and slogans have an insidious kid sister: Code Word.

Code words allow the speaker to claim ignorance of the meaning taken by the hearer. The speaker says, “No, I said homeless. I didn’t once say treasure sucking ne’er-do-well filthy drunkard”. We know what he meant because of its textual surroundings. But, no, he didn’t violate some rule of political correctness.

Here’s one you’ll like: “Waste, fraud and abuse”. Politicians use this as code for an unlikely ideal. I, Senator Snort, am going to root out waste, fraud and abuse by legislating against it. It is already illegal to waste, commit fraud or game the system. “Government Spending” is code for programs and projects the speaker doesn’t like. “Special Interests” are those interests that differ from ours. “The American People” is a sophisticated code justifying an action drawn from the unprovable clamor of the citizenry. “Truth” is so rare and so precious as to inspire awe and shouldn’t be used in political discourse at all. “Lie is the very definition of a slogan. And … don’t get me started on “Original Intent”.

So what, Poppy, shall we do? Know this One True Thing: Code Words and their siblings are slippery and likely dishonest. Don’t knowingly repeat them. For Heaven’s sake don’t make them up. Decide for yourself what is right for you to say and do. Hear out competing voices. If you can’t decide, admit it. Language is powerful and should be treated respectfully.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com

Conscience Your Vote

2010-11-18T09:18:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

I was struck by something Mr. Bush said the other day. He was flogging his memoir. Matt Lauer asked him about his views on torture. Mr. Bush said he consulted lawyers on the question of whether waterboarding was legal. He was assured waterboarding is legal. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were tortured. That was the end of it. Lauer dropped the subject.

The thing is, you know, something’s missing. The first step to such a decision is to determine what one believes. That must have been what happened. He decided what he wanted to do and then he consulted the lawyers. Surely he didn’t go to a lawyer to find out what he believed or what he wanted to do. Right? Who asks a lawyer about what one should believe?

As Pogo Possum said to Porky Pine, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

We do ask lawyers to get our beliefs straight. We do ask scientists to inform our religious impulses.. We do learn how to act from television and the movies. Famous people are called celebrities. We do ask politicians to frame, if not proscribe, our ideals. Honestly, it is easier to have someone or an institution tell us what to believe and how to comport ourselves.

The alternative is a stony, narrow and uphill path.

Think of that as the challenge for the 112^th Congress. It has begun already as members have been asked to take the pledge on earmarks. Earmarks are what we used to call Private Bills. They are public projects for which only one member has any interest. Many of these projects are bundled together as a package with an agreement that all other members support one another. Neat.

That’s what Members of Congress are sent to do – get federal dollars flowing back to the home district. The pledge and the reality are irreconcilable.

There is a related practice on the revenue side. An industry or a single corporation cozies up to a Congressman and suggests that a tax break would sure be nice. That tax break is cooked up and packaged with other such tax breaks across the country and codified with the same sort of connivance employed with earmarks. No wonder our active tax code is nearly 72thousand pages long.

None of this is to say that all earmarks are pork and all tax loopholes are corrupt. One man’s pork is another’s essential service. One woman’s tax exemption is another’s quest for fairness. Earmarks initially funded national parks, laboratories, museums and lots of specialized university study. Governing is a tricky business.

We make a case here for the de-demonizing of the other guy. When you think about it earmarks and tax exemptions are a deeply democratic mechanism that embodies the sort of horse-trading we call bipartisanship. It is by no means perfect but it does have that effect. Just don’t get all worked up over the sanctimony that surrounds this debate.

Still, earmarks amount to about $15billion and, we guess, tax exemptions are on the same order of magnitude. In FY 2010 we spent about $138.6billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if you need further perspective.

My guess is that the lawyers will figure out a way to fund earmarks and generate tax loopholes some other way. Let's just hope the Congress acts out of an obvious set of beliefs as it proceeds.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy

Conscience Your Vote

2010-11-18T09:03:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

I was struck by something Mr. Bush said the other day. He was flogging his memoir. Matt Lauer asked him about his views on torture. Mr. Bush said he consulted lawyers on the question of whether waterboarding was legal. He was assured waterboarding is legal. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were tortured. That was the end of it. Lauer dropped the subject.

As Pogo Possum said to Porky Pine, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

The alternative is a stony, narrow and uphill path.

That’s what Members of Congress are sent to do – get federal dollars flowing back to the home district. The pledge and the reality are irreconcilable.

My guess is that the lawyers will figure out a way to fund earmarks and generate tax loopholes some other way. Let's just hope the Congress acts out of an obvious set of beliefs as it proceeds.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy

Laws, Rules, Guidelines, Traditions and Process

2010-11-15T17:31:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

The 112^th Congress has started before the 111^th Congress has adjourned Sine Die. The new majority has announced that it doesn’t have the votes to repeal the new healthcare law as they promised. So, they’re going to bludgeon it to death procedurally, fiscally and by subpoena.

You can decide for yourselves whether the law is good, bad, in need of emendation or any number of combinations of the above. That’s your right as a thinking person.

Still, let’s take the time now to think through this “any means possible” strategy as a legislative tool. Just so you know how I feel, the ideal ought to be (in the vast majority of cases) to allow legislators to vote up or down any lawful measure. To use the Rules of the House as an endless delaying tactic strikes me as disrespectful and careless. Similarly, using the subpoena power of legislative committees as a tool of intimidation should be used reverently and sparingly. The investigation of colleagues across the aisle is a particularly nasty instrument and best left to law enforcement.

You may recall last spring the minority was up in arms over what they termed ”abuse of process”. It was subsequently suggested by Speaker Polosi that the healthcare bill, as it was returned from the Senate, not be opened for amendments bypassing debate in conference. That way, the bill could be approved by a single vote without further deliberations. The strategy worked. It was signed into law a couple of days later. The minority went apoplectic. The House went into recess; Congressmen held town hall meetings and the Tea Party Movement was born. That takes us to November 2nd.

Here we have a classic case of handing the loser a club with which to beat the winner bloody. On the one hand, healthcare reform was so important to the majority that it felt obliged to employ any tactic to get the measure passed. It was a matter of honor and promise keeping. On the other hand, the tactic so enraged the minority that it felt licensed to employ whatever tools it had at hand.

Now, the situation is reversed. The new majority will use any weapon in its arsenal to get the law repealed or, failing that, starved. There will be a lot of blood on the carpet over this one.

There are only two things for sure barring some catastrophe: two years hence Republicans will still be in control of the House and Mr. Obama will still be President.

But how will the republic fare? Will this matter be fought to a draw that maybe (just maybe) the next election will settle? Is there any chance we can learn some civility? Hang on to your wigs and keys. The ride will be bumpy.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy

Sont De Mots Qui Vont Tres Bien Ensemble

2010-11-08T13:11:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

One sure sign of emotional health is that we do things repeatedly that work well for us. Repeatedly doing things that serve us ill is called neurosis. It is a good thing to maximize actions which add to our sense of wellbeing and limit those things that are harmful. Healthy children learn this early on in subtle and important ways – a behavior that gets us what we want from Daddy may not have the same effect on Mommy or schoolmates and teachers. Somehow the well adjusted learn to tailor their behavior to fit the circumstances in which they find themselves. The poorly socialized among us insist that harmful behavior needs to be repeated enough times for its effectiveness to show through. Life is hard on such people.
To see this principle in action, one need go no further than the Congress of the United States.

The fight for leadership of the 112th Congress began in earnest the day after November 2nd. The Republicans had put on an impressive show of electoral muscle. Most pundits are saying that after the parade passes by and all the chads have been swept up, Republicans shall have gained at least 60 and maybe 62 seats in the lower chamber.

John Boehner, the current minority leader, is the presumptive choice for Speaker of the House of Representatives. He is a true character in a long tradition of true characters that have stomped political ground in this country since the Mayflower Compact. Mr. Boehner from Ohio is a Daddy figure like William Howard Taft. He ought to be the easiest man in the world to please – just give him exactly what he wants.

It’s the rest of the leadership field that will be fun to watch. The three remaining positions are Majority Leader, Majority Whip and Chairman of the Republican Conference. Like most jobs worth fighting over, there is s nice but modest salary bump that goes with the position. Last time I checked the Whip, for instance, gets about $12,000 more per annum than a garden variety Congressman.

And, like all political jobs worth fighting for, it isn’t just the money. It’s the staff. In Washington, like lots of other places, the bigger the staff the bigger the stick with which to wield influence. The word “staff”, as you know, means both a set of servants and a corrective stick. The Whip, for example, has a staff salary budget of about $1.6 million plus payroll associated costs (read healthcare, pension and social security costs), office space and furnishings, travel, communications, consultants, use of the Congressional Budget Office, gym, Library of Congress, paper clips and birthday cup cakes.

The most fun contender for a job like that will be Michele Bachmann representing Minnesota’s 6th congressional district. When she was seated in January of 2007, she became (incredibly) only the third woman to represent Minnesota in Congress and first republican woman from Minnesota to so serve. She has announced that she is a candidate for the position of Chairman of the House Republican Conference – the fourth most important position.

Leadership positions in the House as well as the Senate are usually available to those who have campaigned for and contributed financially to making the Republican Caucus as large as possible. Ms. Bachmann has certainly done that. Because her seat was safe this last cycle, she campaigned all around the country on behalf of Tea Party candidates. She has a huge campaign funding base and Political Action Committee that allowed her to be generous with her poor cousins on the hustings. Her stump speeches were well received by the faithful and the dough appreciated by the poor relations. There is at least one anecdote from Election Day about a woman in Minnesota who pitched a fit and refused to take a ballot because Michele Bachmann was not on it. Never mind that the voter was registered in a different congressional district.

So, you ask: What will make that fun?

There are two more things you should know. Remember I said Tea Party? This is a movement that, regardless of its bone fides as a political juggernaut and as a legitimate group of citizens redressing grievances before its government, got its start and first strapped on its spurs by joining the most outrageous, rude, tasteless, disrespectful shows at town hall meetings hosted by Members of Congress. You remember the shouting and foaming with no opportunity for reply and the deep embarrassment felt by other attendees?

Don’t get me wrong. Members of Congress are big boys and girls who have taken worse lickings and continued ticking. Don’t waste any sympathy on them. Focus instead on the idea that they are Members of Congress who hew to the idea that getting mad is decidedly inferior to getting even. Corollary is the certainty that what can happen to one Member of Congress on one issue at one time can happen to another Member of Congress on another issue at another time. That sort of behavior has never been countenanced in the Washington corridors of power. It’s not likely to start now. It’s an article of faith among the grown-ups that what goes around comes around.

Another strong tradition of the House that won’t go away in the face of a tantrum is the idea that one earns one's place in the leadership by dint of toil for the leadership. She will need to claw her way past some senior members making a few more enemies in the doing.

And then we have the threat. If she doesn’t get Chair of the Republican Conference, she’ll form her own caucus. This would be “The Conservative Constitution Caucus”. A caucus is a group of like-minded Members with its own funding and staff. Other examples are the Blue Dog Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus. Lesser known ones go by names like The Democratic Israeli Caucus and The Kidney Caucus. There are a great many caucuses, task forces and working groups. One Member displays prominently on her web site the 35 or so caucuses that claim her membership.

Not to worry: while expensive, caucuses are funded by the taxpayers and often supplemented with lobbyist money. So far, so good with two problems: Another caucus is just one more example of government spending and, more important, The Republican Party already sees itself as conservative and deeply reverential toward the constitution. Worse yet, from the leadership point of view, such a caucus would be peopled by Members who wear Reynolds Wrap hats to better receive massages from space aliens. All parties will allow swift-boating of enemies but deeply fear turn-about. Its fair game to tell whoppers during a campaign but irresponsible to feather a nest for the unpredictable or supply weaponry (staff) to those who value ideological purity over reasoned debate.

Some of the issues that Republican leaders knew better but let slide in this way are: $500 billion gutted from Medicare, death panels, $2 billion presidential trips, Nancy Pelosi’s 747, voting with Nancy Pelosi X% of the time, the stimulus created no jobs, the American People are overwhelming against Healthcare Reform, only we listen to the people, we have a plan for lowering the national debt, Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Mr. Obama is constitutionally unqualified for office, Mr. Obama is a Socialist, Mr. Obama is a Nazi, and the 16th Amendment is a fraud, the 14th Amendment decided wrong-headedly and the 2nd Amendment Holy Writ.

Lets say your name is John Boehner: Do you want that in the councils of the mighty? That is the fun part: how to reward an untrustworthy ally. Mark my words. John Boehner, who purports to brook no compromise, will begin to sputter (his face a brighter shade of orange) on this and many related issues. Hissy fits and intimidation will not prevail. We will see a disappointed Michele Bachmann.

Let me hasten to add that Republicans have not cornered the market on lies, damn lies, venality, pettiness, and childish displays of outrage or, for that matter, selective intellectual discipline. We will learn plenty about Democrats as these pages unfold. This is not intended as a partisan blog.

But … please. Just because we can point to similar foibles on the part of “the other guy”, it’s hardly a reason to minimize or condone it. Lets start with the little things just to see if principles can’t be applied broadly enough to provide guidance in our public discourse. For now, lets hope there are enough well adjusted adults around for a start.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy

Madam I'm Adam

2009-07-07T15:18:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

There are names for human diseases, temptations, losses, dysfunctions, rushes, fears, shocks and pauses. There are names for the things that surround us. There are names for the conceptions that inform our actions. Knowing these words can be very powerful. That may be why we invent them with such alacrity and fashion ever finer slivers of meaning.

The creation story we have from the ancient Hebrews underscores this idea. Among the powers granted Adam was that of naming the plants and animals. We’ve been naming things ever since. Learning is often the retention and rapid recall of names and their meanings. Scholarship is often the coining of terminology. History often turns on the naming of events.

At the risk of getting too worked up over this, the unique power we have as humans to create and recognize a name encases our sentience. For as powerful and unique a thing names disciplined by grammar can be it is shorthand for what goes on in our hearts. Names are not sentient.

That’s why names can be dangerous and hurtful as well as being dispositive and uplifting. That’s why, for all effort bent to the contrary, misunderstandings flourish. That’s why it’s still possible to talk past each other, dictators remain normative and swindlers still earn a living.

I’m just sayin’

Much Love,

Poppy

Simply Gifts

2009-07-05T19:39:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

Unless you’ve been away at camp or living underground lately, you’ve noticed that a famous entertainer has died. Michael Jackson was a hugely talented singer, producer and innovator. His gifts were so great that after forty five years in show business, he was still giving us novel songs, inventive dance and eye-popping music videos that will outlast us all. By all accounts he was shrewd in business as well. Those who mourn him do so out of a sense of gratitude for the joy he brought us. That is for sure. There is also a sense of lost promise, a squandered future and no way of understanding his death.

He died under circumstances of his own making.

The risk here is to engage in poppy psychology by looking for a thread that wove through his life that, had he seen it, could have been excised. Worse yet, we can point fingers at those who enabled him, those who ate the crumbs from his table, those who hadn’t the courage to say “no” to his wealth and power and those who excused his behavior as merely eccentric. Instead, let’s see if we can take a lesson from this tragedy.

He was born with gifts in much the same way as you were born with gifts. I am speaking here of the gifts that are not necessarily attributable to genetics. Sure, we get our tallness and our skin tone from our parents. We get our taste for foods from our experiences and love of books from our educations. Good skiers usually come from snow country. Our fear of snakes and of falling may be pure instinct and shared with the like of goldfish and platypuses. Michael Jackson’s gifts were way past all that. Your gifts are way past all that. They are what they appear to be, simply gifts.

Lest I sound simple-minded, the lesson is to treat gifts for what they are and nothing more. Some of us are able through dint of effort to polish those gifts. Some of us know we have gifts and choose not to employ them. Some of us never recognize our gifts. Whatever happens, though, we did not manufacture our own gifts. We cannot exchange the gifts we have for some others more valued. Our gifts are ours and belong to no other. Gifts are not skills we can learn. Gifts are not commodities up for trade. Our gifts are what we are when we’re not wearing our skins.

So, we don’t treat gifts except with gratitude and humility. You can be guaranteed that any other way will come to no good.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

The Power Of No

2009-06-08T21:49:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

My lazy Sunday afternoon was rocked recently by a story in the New York Times with the headline: “Reluctantly, Sufis Answer A Call To Arms In Somalia”.

You may know the Sufis. They practice of mystical form of Islam that honors tolerance and a personal relationship with God. It takes a lot to get them mad. The warlords of that benighted land fight over real estate and property without regard for human life, livestock and crops as if they still lived in the time of Tamujin or Attilla. The Sufis are catching a big part of the collateral damage.

More recently, there are stories coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan where the locals are taking matters into their own hands. Peoples of the Swat Valley and in Upper Dir known for their fierce regard for hospitality and who have been at peace with all others since the early days of the British Raj have formed militias to end Taliban thuggery.

One thinks also of Dietrich Bonheoffer, a wunderkind theologian and pacifist in both Weimar Germany and The United States in the 1930s. He too took up arms against an oppressor in the form of Nazism and condoned an assassination plot against the duly-elected Chancellor, Adolph Hitler.

I bring this matter up at this time to say that our better natures and otherwise loathsome actions can sometimes coexist. It’s unstable ground to navigate, though. What is the difference between a righteous uprising and a vigilante committee, for instance? Who appointed The Rev. Dr. Bonheoffer judge and jury? When innocents die righting a wrong, who answers for their deaths? Is history spun by the victors of a conflict leaving truth as just one more victim? Is there a crime so great as to justify the employment of another crime? Is there a bright line between evil and indifference?

Good question. I don’t know the answer. People feel strongly. We’re passionate creatures. The man who murdered the family planning physician recently exhibits no remorse. He’s real clear he’s doing the Lord’s work.

Me? I think he’s the worst sort of criminal much on the order of Che Guevara who employed the flimsiest of reasons to justify murder. Still, the guy is secure in his righteous anger and will not be dissuaded.

Know this for sure: Whenever you say no and are prepared to back it up with unpleasant scuffling, sorting out the aftermath will be messy.

But wait boys and girls, the aftermath of indifference and apathy is just as messy. You can’t get by unscathed no matter what.

If you pay attention to anything I say, pay attention to this: Be a thinker. Know what you are doing and why. Know the possible outcome. Know that once you do a thing, it’s done. Know there will be consequences whether good or bad. Accept those consequences. They’re yours.

Still, you’re not excused from making informed decisions and acting on them. Just like those Sufis, those Pashtu and the cabal around Herr Bonheoffer made decisions and stuck around to watch them play out; you are privileged to participate in a principled and meaningful life. It’s really the only satisfying way to live.

I’m just sayin’

Much Love,

Poppy

Enhanced Mendacity Techniques

2009-05-01T22:45:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

This post comes from a place of deep frustration. The torture debate is on again. Wasn’t this settled? Didn’t Mr. Bush back off the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”? Didn’t he say that, if we did torture we’d wouldn’t anymore? We held an election that included this subject where both candidates espoused the same position: We don’t torture.

I have an inkling why this matter is still front and center. It has to do with release of some memos written by political appointees in the Justice Department who split some hairs, razzled some dazzle and bammed some boozle – nothing up the sleeve, honest.

How poor is our political discourse when a few lame hacks can write gossamer bunkum justifying an odious practice followed by elected officials braying, “See? … Signed off by the lawyers”.

It’s bad enough when twaddle passes for scholarship, its worse when easily identifiable decency gets lost in the double shuffle.

The same hooey went on over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. This one made it to the Supreme Court. It wasn’t even close. All the ink that was spilled making the case those non-citizens held on foreign territory were not entitled to Habeas Corpus never dealt with the obvious – we believe in Habeas Corpus. It is a founding principle of our republic. A high price has been paid for it preservation. The accused has a right to be charged under law, face his accuser and have a speedy trial. We believe in that.

This may be the time to assert that the Golden Rule leaves little room for slick interpretation. You know me. I’m deeply suspicious of the effortless aphorism. The Golden Rule, however, is so tightly wrought and so genuinely intuitive that there’s just no wriggle room.

The scholars call the Golden Rule the Ethic of Reciprocity. It is found in religious texts across the globe, is ancient as recorded thought, remarkably consistent in wording and held as an ideal nearly universally. Why is this so hard?

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

Unclear Ignorance

2009-05-01T11:53:00.003-05:00

Dear Children:

Have you noticed that TV news segments often involve reporters interviewing each other? Laying aside the suspicion that this practice is neither news nor reporting, we are left with nothing. “Tell me, Lancome, what does this triple homicide say about the quality of law enforcement in the city?” “That’s a very good question, Chanel. The answer is unclear.” Nothing gives way to more nothing.

Wait. Did he just say that the answer was unclear? Is that the same as saying he doesn’t know? Yes, it does mean he does not know the answer. Nor do we expect him to know the answer. The whole exchange is unintelligible.

But that’s not why I called this meeting. This meeting is about copping to ignorance. Maybe we can start a new fashion of admitting ignorance. One knows that ignorance has taken on a pejorative sense recently. It’s still a perfectly good English word. If you'd rather not use it among your friends, we can use it here for safe-keeping. It was no less a thinker than St Jerome who said: "It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance." More recently, Will Durant wrote: "Education is the progressive discovery one's ignorance."

Let’s start by appropriating from others less and attributing more. We don’t really know the answer to a question if we read it in this morning’s paper. We know for sure we read it in The Bugle. That’s about it. There is nothing wrong and certainly no dishonor to report that you don’t know but you read something in The Bugle.

This has become an important topic because the internet makes it possible to get a wide range of opinions on any subject quickly, easily and anonymously. We want to take care that we distinguish what we say for ourselves and what we pass on for others.

It’s hard, I know. Who can say with a straight face that something you just vouchsafed as fact was actually from squirrelnuts3411? Or, who would want to admit that some public policy opinion was recently cribbed from the blog bidenhater.com? Silly as it sounds, it must be done.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

Ms. Liberty

2009-04-27T23:08:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

There are few things that people have longed for more than liberty. In human history liberty is the one thing most denied, the most feared and the least understood of political concepts. Worse yet, once granted liberty is a moving target and will never be perfected.

That said, it’s easy to see why liberty is found so dangerous by even enlightened of dictators through the ages. For liberty to come into flower it must be granted to everyone. The country bumpkin and the wheelwright and the clergy will all outgrow their britches. The untutored as well as the learned from every corner will want a say in the affairs of state. It’s just too messy of a prospect to keep strict order.

Actually, liberty can be a bit scary for those on whom it is thrust. There will come a time when you are released from the clutches of your parents and set out on your own. Liberty can be quite prickly indeed.

Liberty is understood in modern parlance as synonymous with words such as freedom, independence, franchise and license. Mr. Jefferson, on the other hand, thought of liberty as a broad political right stemming from a previous condition of servitude. Serfs, peons, prisoners, slaves and other vassals of the state are said to be set at liberty. Liberty, in the view of Jefferson and his fellow conspirators, was different from a notion of freedom that included independence, franchise, privilege and license.

Freedoms were thought of as conditions that may be enumerated, restricted, controlled and even proscribed. Physicians, for instance, are free to practice medicine within the confines of a license granted by the state. Voting is a freedom restricted by age. Use of alcohol, tobacco and other dangerous products are controlled by taxation. A person with a license to use dynamite is not necessarily free to blow up his neighbor’s outhouse no matter how deserving that outhouse might be.

Freedom is also a feeling. We can feel free to act. We can feel coerced thereby robbing us of a feeling of freedom. Freedom may be the absence of necessity.

We’re going through this muddle to make a point: We are at liberty to experience freedoms. It is a wonderful feeling. Most of the peoples on earth are not at liberty to experience freedom.

Put another way, liberty means not captive.

Captives have a special place in our narrative. Throughout the Hebrew Bible there are stories of captivation and captives – who got captured and who got ransomed, who did the capturing; who got carted-off where. In the Christian canon, however, we have this single, poignant passage:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

Here we have a license that grants little in the way of freedom in the usual sense. That is, if we accept the usual construct of freedom as a range of permitted actions, the wider the better. Who would volunteer to be constrained? Who would accept obligations without prospect of reward?

The answer to those questions is at the core of the concept of liberty. We are at liberty to accept or reject commissions that severely restrict the range of our actions.

That’s where you come in. How you express your liberty is mostly up to you. But, as we have said in these pages before, the cost is always high. Express your liberty in a way that affronts, you will surely be affronted. Express your liberty in a way that is healing, you will lose your freedom to abuse. Express your liberty in a way that is selfish, you will do so alone. Express your liberty to control others, your life will be spent keeping them shackled. Express your liberty in the service of money, money had better be good enough.

By the same token, we are at liberty to keep our options open, to not commit one way or the other. That too has a price.

The idea that there is some higher recompense for a valued choice or penalty for a bad one doesn’t work either. Mr. Jefferson, for one, used the liberty he was granted in his own time and was judged worthy and grand. In another time, he has been vilified as a slave owner and hypocrite. He is known for articulating high-minded concepts yet abused his chattel maid.

James R. Lowell wrote a poem in 1845 that was set to music fifty years later from a Franz Josef Haydn tune. It was written to protest an American military incursion into Mexico. The Poem is called: Once To Every Man and Nation. It was once part of the rich hymnody that graced our churches. One couplet says it very well.

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Liberty is powerful medicine. It is given to you unbidden with all the dangers, joys and challenges that attend it.
I’m just sayin’.
Much Love,
Poppy

P.S. One of the reasons our hymnody is rich has everything to do with the subject of Mr. Lowell’s poem and the music to which it is set. Fashions run in and out of our culture. Some things that are quite evocative and expressive in one age become passé in another. The Haydn tune (Austria), was originally written as a patriotic song subsequently adopted by the Nazi thugs mostly for its ill-advised line: Germany is above every nation in the world. Add to that the fashion among hymnal committees in recent decades to excise martial themes, references to physical infirmities, gender-specific believers and lyrics whose context are no longer easily accessible. The poem here loses on two of those counts. The tune survives in lots of hymnals with the title: Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken.
Just in case you’d like to read the Lowell poem, it follows.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

Zygote This, Your Highness!

2009-04-22T15:22:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

In The Declaration of Independence, Mr. Jefferson and the other rebel leaders held that individual persons had an inalienable right to life. That doesn’t sound very radical to us. We have a right to live and that’s that. That’s right.

It wasn’t so settled a principle as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The Sovereign on the one hand or The Mob on the other had all the rights over life.

The Founders seized the immodest idea that government could not deprive anyone of life capriciously. From the beginnings of civilization, governments treated life as an asset to be exploited for its own purposes as one would the water in a lake or clay in the earth. In the case of a kingdom, the ruler could sign a warrant for anyone’s death on his own authority. In other cultures, any gang of pitchfork-wielding vigilantes could have your head.

We’re still working out what this means in fine slices. Be that as it may, the idea that government cannot willy-nilly take life only began to be codified for ordinary people with the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution. That codification required something called due process of law. As big a deal as this was and is nothing in these principles guarantees life.

Your life is a result of a freakishly random set of circumstances that began when the first set of human parents produced children. Lucy Hominid met Dezi Australopithecus in the Addis Ababa suburbs more than three million years ago. Over the millennia some people died before they could reproduce, some lived to reproduce. Of those who did reproduce, some had one child, some had many more. Some of the issue of those parents survived to reproduce and so on until we get to the six or seven billion people now alive. Three million years is a long time, but Humankind really got started about ten thousand years ago as the last ice age receded. Figure four or five generations per century. Imagine the productive power of a single grandmother given four hundred generations.

Next imagine the toll of war, pestilence, disease, natural calamity and pure dumb luck.

The math geniuses among you will want to work out the odds but, trust me, the odds of you being on the planet at this moment are not anything approaching possible. Complicate the calculus further by factoring the odds of your living where you live under the rule of law with the parents you have and the wealth you enjoy. Your unique selfness was lifted up a very steep, very tall cliff to get you here.

Yet here you are. What are we to make of that?

Well, dear ones, we can start with amazement and top it off with gratitude. You can be amazed that something like you that had no say in the matter really matters. You really matter to your friends and family. You matter to me and, one hopes, you’ll matter to the wider world. As zany as it seems, our infinitesimal speck of cosmic dust swirling in an infinitesimal eddy of infinitude of light and space and substance really matters. In a cosmos where it can be said that life is empty and meaningless, where it is empty and meaningless to say that life is empty and meaningless, you are present and meaningful.

That’s why we have reason for gratitude. That’s why expressions of gratitude are important.

Beyond that, though, there is another small matter to consider: We are stuck with each other. We are stuck for better and for worse. We are stuck with all the vagaries that will produce the next generation of people who will matter and who will, in their turn, be stuck with each other.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

Dude, Where's My Scar?

2009-04-18T15:03:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

The last thing anybody wants is to be laughed at. As much as we abhor the experience, as assiduously we may guard against the possibility, as loathsome is the aftermath; it still happens. Somebody thinks something we did or said was worthy of ridicule. Whether it’s a disparaging remark, sneering mimicry or purposeful misapprehension, it always stings.

You shouldn’t jeer at other people. You never know what the real effect will be. What starts out as a harmless jape in your mind often ends as a permanent bruise on the other’s psyche. It’s also wrong on a couple other counts. For instance, it wouldn’t be particularly brainy on your part to point out the obvious like fatness or pimples. Similarly, there are no style points for repeating someone else’s observation of yesterday; she is stuck with those glasses no matter how hideous.

Of course, we’re all aware of what passes for funny on TV. Fictional people being mean to each other is both easy and predictable. It is not for polite company.

I know, I know. The temptation is sometimes overwhelming. Me? I bite my tongue over people who imagine they sound Wagnerian but what comes out is Alvin and the Chipmunks. All modern poems that contain the words “twas” or “twill” are a regular source of amusement. Fashion advice from the outlandish, elbow digs during concerts and reflexive opinions by the patently ill-informed often oblige an unkind comment.

It is still a temptation best resisted. If someone genuinely wants your opinion and there’s something cute to say, by all means … Even at that, one needs to be sensitive to the real question. An inquiry into whether a new haircut is flattering is an invitation to flattery not a wish for beauty advice.

Two years ago we were calling to invite classmates to a reunion. You would be astonished to learn how many people used as an excuse for not coming the teasing they took forty five years ago. That, for sure, is a long time to hold a grudge. That, for sure, is instructive on the power of the unthinking sneer or foolish observation.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

Do You Want Trites With That?

2009-04-16T16:59:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

Can you stick with me on a complicated topic?

Picture a predicament that comes up every day, is a source of conflict, is not taught in school and (most of the time) goes unacknowledged. Picture a set of terms that everyone uses and no one understands. Picture an impossibility that regularly substitutes for observable reality.

That would be cliché.

Just to be clear, cliché refers to overused but accepted expressions. A bromide, to make a fine distinction, is an unoriginal expression in response to an original happenstance. Both are applicable here. Old wives tales, chestnuts, rules of thumb and platitudes may also serve proxy.

Most of the time we easily recognize cliché for what it is: no problem. It’s just something harmless that gets said to fill up the space between important things. Most of the time a bromide is the gloss we use to brighten an otherwise dull recitation on a dull subject. Whether there are any old wives around to enlighten us is debatable. Most of the time a rule of thumb simply gets us past pesky precision.

It’s the gooey middle ground between the nugget of truth that first spawned the cliché and the rocky hard place of something you can take to the bank – something on which you can depend – that’s the problem.

See, each of us has at least some values, ideals, principles and ethics that suit us well enough – that make sense to us. We use cliché as shorthand. “Honesty is the best policy”, as we have discussed before, is a rich tapestry of interdependent threads that are well attended using cliché. Each of us shares some of these values and threads and differs on others. That’s okay too. A little divergence here and there is healthy and makes us hardier.

No, it’s dependability that we need. Cliché doesn’t work outside our little circle – our tiny circle of shared ideals and established ethical constructs. Witness our consternation with pirates and rogue states and terrorists and warlords and animists and communists and anarchists and any others with whom we differ fundamentally. There’s no shorthand to make common cause with those who don’t and won’t share our codes, customs and dispositions.

There are terms for this too: Culture Clash, Racial Narrative, Class Struggle, Received Truth, Religious Animus, Homophobia, White Guilt and (my personal favorite) Self Loathing all come readily to mind. No definitions need to be made here. They are mostly cliché about cliché. They describe Cliché Conflict.

Nobody expects you to solve intractable human relations problems. For now, let’s confine ourselves to the everyday and close at hand. In that spirit, here are some tests for sorting out the harmless from the tricky cliché.

If you are asked not only to agree, but to agree in some specific and fulsome way, you just might be in a cliché conflict.

If you must recite some prescribed mantra or pay some humbug lip service to be admitted into a community, you just might have a cliché conflict.

If you are dealing with someone for whom jargon takes precedence over substance, you just might be in a cliché conflict.

If you express a thought that is met with anger, resentment or sullen silence and you have been sincere and kindly, you just might have a cliché conflict.

If your colleague is only interested in opinions she shares, you have just observed cliché conflict.

If you are accused of being unable to “get” something by virtue of your race, gender or similar circumstance, you just might have been stung by cliché conflict.

There are lots of examples.

Suffice to say that when argot stands in for thought, pique substitutes for engagement and exclusivity relies solely on the plainly apparent, it’s unlikely to be your problem. You are better than that. You have been taught to actively engage, look beneath the surface and to mistrust inconsequential certainty. You are willing to be convinced by force of argument and not by earsplitting harangue.

It may be hard to hear in this age when we honor diversity and embrace differences, but people who will not try to understand you are the ones with the problem. There isn’t much we can do about it either. There is no percentage in a program to kiss a bully into right relationship, for instance. Other means need to be employed.

Cliché then, while useful, is merely a basket of thin reeds that neither protect nor instruct.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy

Windows Live™: Life without walls. Check it out.

Happy Pursuits

2009-04-04T22:56:00.002-05:00

Dear Children:

The Declaration of Independence is one of those great documents in human history that, at once, lays out a set of ideals that forever elude us and makes a list of specific failings that can be unambiguously redressed.

Among the most ideal of the notions expressed in The Declaration is that of the pursuit of happiness. In the future, we’ll examine what life and liberty rights entail.

Delegates to The Second Continental Congress who approved the document were not vexed in the slightest by the idea. The Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted at about the same time included the phrase and thinkers such as John Locke writing a hundred years earlier were quite clear that this was a bedrock gift of natural law.

To Locke, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and others who held this truth to be self evident knew the pursuit of happiness to be a right to engage in the trade of one’s own choosing. It was not the province of government, church, family, guild or tribe to decide for an individual what employment he should undertake.

In those days, it was quite common to restrict this right. People took names like Miller, Baker and Wheeler. Sons were granted immediate admittance to a guild upon successful completion of an apprenticeship. Other apprentices were subjected to longer periods of servitude and “proofing” before admittance. A person expected to follow in the family business. This, of course, was for the greater purpose of maintaining a class system based on the idea that certain people who practiced certain professions were better or lesser than persons who practiced other professions.

You get the idea.

But imagine the confusion that resulted: Someone named Baker was shoeing horses and someone else named Blacksmith had the temerity to study law. It was quite an unsettling time. The established social order was turned upside down. People who could lay claim to peerage were reduced to mucking barns and others with the humblest of lineage were laying claim to huge tracts of land and exploiting its resources.

As a direct result, the average person living in North American from long before the Revolution to this very moment was richer by far than the average person living on any other continent. We went from a system of resources rationed according to inherited privilege to a system that rationed resources according to wealth. But, because our poor people were still richer than other nation’s poor folks, we were not guilty of abuse.

Maybe not.

In a time like the present when we have become aware that resources that were once thought to be inexhaustible are becoming exhausted, we need to rethink the meaning of the pursuit of happiness. When services such as health care are grievously expensive, is it fair to ration it on the basis of wealth? When we reach the point where finance drives our economy, can we take pride in production and the creation of wealth through endless subdivision of fleeting assets? Have we found the ugly side of the pursuit of happiness?

I don’t think so. We can still work with it. The idea has served us well. As a matter of fact, you should embrace the gift you have now as a matter of settled law; the opportunity to seek your own happiness in the dignity of work. Work is its own reward made all the more sweet by its having been freely chosen. Naturally there are problems for each age to shape and perfect. We hope you will be part of that debate.

The pursuit of happiness as seen by Mr. Jefferson carries strictures of its own. It holds that no institutions may tell an individual what employment she must seek, to be sure. Yet, nothing in the concept repeals other natural laws that bind us together as members of the family of humankind beholden to each other.

Just remember that he says we are the inheritors of inalienable rights granted by The Creator. He lists the pursuit of happiness among them.

That’s where life and liberty come in.

Much Love,

Poppy

Air Travel Is For The Birds

2009-03-17T22:34:00.002-05:00

Dear Children:

There was a time when air travel was unusual, luxurious and expensive. It didn’t take long for it to become commonplace, cheap and painful. Take this morning, for instance.

We arose early in west suburban Boston. That part was okay. We were off to Logan Airport at the stroke of ten for a noon flight. In that time the car could have gotten us 120 miles down the road through fens and forests, history and myth, budding trees and melting snow; 18 wheelers and McDonalds by the score.

Instead there was the TSA assiduously guarding against the 4.5 oz toothpaste tube and ferrous metal. Don’t misunderstand: Nobody wants a hijacked aircraft used as a weapon against iconic buildings or the power grid. Its just that our sense of diligent fairness requires granny to get out of her wheelchair to be wanded, babies to have boarding passes and a suspension (however briefly) of our right to free speech. A mindless devotion to specific rule plays proxy for safety. Yet, we endure it for the greater good even though we know that determined criminals will merely bypass a hardened target for a soft one.

Airports, like shopping districts throughout the world, all look alike. They have the same Sunglasses Hut, the same newsstands, the same over-priced candy, the same stainless steel walls and the same hands-free toilets and sinks. If getting through customs or past the TSA weren’t enough, the glassy far-away stare on most folks is fashioned from pervasive numb and number sameness.

No wonder our minds, if not rotted by television, make great orchid-growing medium. In airports, one sees those portable DVD players, WiFi hotspots and CNN Lite everywhere. Forget sameness, we don’t actually leave home -- God forbid we should take delight in a stopover in Detroit.

Aircraft air is just this side of toxic – closer to ozone than oxygen. We all face forward just like old-timey prison dining rooms. Why is it that city buses can arrange seating for a varied view and airliners can’t? Airliners have a beggar-thy-neighbor system of comfort. The passenger in front tilts back his seat either shortening the one aft or producing a chain reaction of tilts into the empanage. Elbows are not safe from beverage-service carts nor are rest rooms the least bit gag free. What is that blue liquid?

So from Logan Airport we flew to Detroit to layover an hour or so and board a smaller plane destined Omaha. Omaha is not our destination. Our destination is three hours off by car. This is for the purpose of getting a cheaper fare. We save $200 each using this method. Because four Benjamins is nothing to sneeze at, we sneeze at a trip home in the dark.

Early in February it was less expensive to fly from home to Orlando thence New York and retrace the dog-leg than to go directly from home to New York round trip. A nodding acquaintance with geometry exposes that state of affairs for the fraud it is. It is not unlike our prehensile purchase on the idea of telephone long distance when we are all mostly equidistant from the satellite – the hypotenuse doesn’t matter.

Yet here we are at 30 thousand feet unable to see the ground and entertaining the belief that traveling 500 miles per hour is oh-so right. Maybe when this headache subsides and blood no longer pools in my rump, I’ll feel better. Who knows?

Much Love,

Poppy

Our Moment Stack

2009-03-11T14:21:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

It’s Lent. In the popular cultural, Lent is as a time of self-denial. Giving up some treasured pastime or food for forty days (plus Sundays) is said to be good for what ails you. This, to be sure, is after a day of indulgence called Fat Tuesday.

Don’t look at me. Getting a reward in advance for a personal discipline in the future may sound a little backward. Who’s to say? Maybe, this one time during the year, arranging things out of order may be the ticket: sort of a feng shui cartwheel.

The religious context of Lent is certainly contrary to the regular way of doing things. One of the lessons of this season is that the things that matter will cost your life. God help us, if something matters, the consequences are profound.

For that matter, the scriptures are chock-a-block with stories about people who are blessed, cursed, killed and saved for their acts. Name an instance where mere thoughts, claims or intentions made the slightest difference to anyone.

In the here and now, in the space we occupy with our bodies, the things we hold dear play out in our actions. It’s not a head-game. It is a function of arithmetic. One action that occupies a moment is exclusive to that moment. Every moment offers a fresh decision about how to occupy that moment. We make decisions whose predicates are resident in our values – the things that are important.

It is no great leap to the conclusion that our values can be read by our actions. The things we hold dear drive our actions in a way that mere palaver cannot. And, by the shortest possible extension, value-driven action pushes out all other possible actions for that moment. The things that matter cost your life.

It’s no accident that we refer to personal history as how a life was spent. It wasn’t unwound out like a length of rope. It was spent. We don’t get a determined number of breaths or heartbeats. We get one moment stacked upon another for a lifetime.

This is a good thing. This is a very good thing.

We spoke of this before. Intentionality doesn’t count. The best we can do is interpret how our values drove us for a moment gone bye-bye. Here’s the wonderful part: we get to amend our values. Surely, if we are unhappy with a moment past, we’ll need to make a change. The next moment is upon us.

It is also the route to happiness. By this method we can be at peace inside our own skins. When there is no disconnect between a profession and an action, all is well. That moment – that lifetime – is well spent.

Much Love,

Poppy

The Gamaliel Objective

2009-03-09T13:38:00.000-05:00

Dear Children:

This is getting complicated. And, just in case anyone’s interested, this blog is challenging my ability to say anything fresh about Big Topics. A couple of your preacher Daddies and some of your preacher uncles know about this problem. The temptation to expound on ever-smaller slices of Big Topic is very real. That temptation is what leads to ever-finer distinctions in theology, dogma and political orthodoxy. In short, we surrender to the greatest single source of conflict that has plagued every moment of every day in sapient history.

Do you remember the dictum that emanated from the Pentagon when the debate was on about the intractable problems of our occupation of Iraq? It was said: Go big, go long or go home. That is a thimble-sized description of the problem with authoritative pronouncements. Going big suggests an imposition of indubitable edict. Going long presumes that we have an open-ended mandate for truth-finding. Going home suggests that once the pearls have dropped from our lips, the job is done.

The policy-makers in Washington decided in the case of Iraq to go big for a while and then go long. I don’t know if that’s the right policy for Iraq, but I do know it’s the right policy for the marketplace of ideas. (Ideas are important not because everybody has them but because so few of us has them. Most of us depend on the ideas of others. Ideas are different from opinions, a distinction that is often lost. Opinions are expressions about ideas, not the ideas themselves.) Ideas are Big Topic. How many Gods are there? Does one of them care about us? What good is learning? What is right relationship? Is there evil? Is there purpose? Does any human life matter? I name just a few.

We need to be committed to the proposition that ideas have lives – lives that are worth investigating. Like everything with a life, ideas are capable of maturing or ossifying – being helpful or destructive. Like everything with a life, potentiality is balanced by withering. Ideas respond to nurturing and shrink with neglect. Ideas can be dead wrong and gloriously transcendent. No idea that has been freely expressed, investigated and subjected to varied opinion is likely to be dangerous. Ideas received by avatars and imposed by bureaucrats without debate are especially dangerous. Do you get the distinction? As they say in The Hood: “Feel me?”

Do not fear the airing out of either ideas or opinions. Instead, fear enforced opinions and ideas or ideas that were snatched from the ether by those with special knowledge or access to special sight. Look up the Sage Gamaliel in The Acts of the Apostles and then let us all know when we last had a Sanhedrin or bothered with Pharisees. There are plenty that aspire the job but they never seem to last.

My plan is to go long.

Much Love,

Poppy

Telos All About It, Poppy

2009-03-03T14:37:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

I’ve been re-reading some of my recent work including these posts. I ask this question for you: Who appointed Poppy Grand Inquisitor?

Nobody. In my own defense, please let me describe in the broadest possible terms, what informs these judgments that are inflicted on those who would love me anyway.

The first is the hardship of experience. Just recently, I told someone I love that all education is expensive. If there was ever a thought worthy of a petit point pillow, it is that. All education is expensive because it is wrought from what would otherwise be dross, refined in fire and often turns out to be just another link in a chain. It is never free, never easy and never enough.

Just like the self-help books that describe someone else’s education, these thoughts put down for you can only suggest a place to go for education. The education itself must be won by you and will be available only to you.

I should also tell you what I believe about transcendent things. As you know, I subscribe to rather orthodox, rather stripped-down Christianity. As such, I believe that salvation is free, grace is not only sufficient but also abundant and that God is at work in history. That’s about it. I’m happy to debate all other tropes and claims as well as the plain text of the scriptural canon. I might even hold strong views. Those views are open to interpretation, further reflection and amendment. As such, they are of less substantial stuff than beliefs are made of.

If what I believe is true, I must live a life that is primarily grateful. If my salvation is secure, if my gifts are equal to my tasks and if God will someday make everything right, there isn’t much else to ask for.

Between now and death, life presents challenges. Life is not challenging to test us or even to strengthen us. That’s just how life is -- challenging. Conflict will continue. Unhealthy urges abound. We are made of brittle material that becomes more fragile as we age. That business about the only certainty being death and taxes is flat wrong.

There’s no inquisition here. If I can, though, I’d like to stiffen your resolve to learn and to grow. I’d love it if you embrace the idea that life is hard and that there’s no escape. And, if you could also grasp the idea that there is good purpose to life with grace sufficient for your part in it, well, that would make me very happy indeed.

Much Love,

Poppy

A Booger Her Way

2009-03-02T11:13:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

The last post on this blog generated a lot of comment. Most wanted to know1.) How can we tell what is showing on our faces and 2.) How can we recognize honesty in ourselves?

One thing is sure: We recognize dishonesty. Dishonesty is easy.

Honesty, on the other hand, is subtle and slippery. Plain, painful honesty isn’t good enough.

Say, for instance, you detect an aroma cloud surrounding your sister. What is the honest thing? “You stink!” is honest in the sense that it’s factually true. Is it possible she already knows? Surely your pointing it out is gratuitous, even mean-spirited.

Yet, there are circumstances where she both doesn’t know and needs to know. Say there is a snot unit hanging from her nose. “Nice booger, Sis!” is, at once, demonstrably true and unnecessarily cruel. Here’s the tricky part: She needs to know. Our job is to be both true and responsible. “Here’s a tissue for that yuck on your nose.” Live the difference.

Almost always, it is better to talk than not to talk. Our talk should strive to be honest and responsible. More often than not, we discover in the course of talk what is honest and responsible. We work out what we truly believe with the help of others. As we talk, the things we say and the expressions that play across our faces reflect in the other. We get a chance to revise and refine our attitudes.

Did you ever get put on No Speaks? Name something less agreeable than No Speaks. It’s the way we punish each other for saying or doing something we don’t like. It is also the least likely strategy for reforming behavior. Isn’t it better to stand toe-to-toe on an issue for a few minutes than to spend days, months or years fuming and mute?

Here’s a favorite: “If you don’t know what’s bothering me, I’m not going to tell you.” Sure, we get angry and don’t trust what we’ll say at that hot second. Anger is a part of our nature. Staying angry, though, is poisonous. Settle the problem. Don’t let it fester and worsen. Why should you be injured by a punishment you mean to inflict elsewhere? Besides, it’s not honest.

Further, an honest and responsible exchange of views sometimes results in that most unpleasant of discoveries: I was wrong. Do not fear this eventuality however odious it may seem. Being habitually right is frequently over-rated and always annoying.

How do we know how we are being perceived? We see it in others.

How do we recognize honesty? We grasp it in true and responsible exchanges with others.

Much Love,

Poppy

No, Honestly

2009-02-27T09:53:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

We teach others how to treat us.

Make no mistake. Most people look to us for guidance about how they should interact with us. Put another way: people seek hints about their own interest in relationships from the object of that relationship. Such is the curious fact of the matter. Pretty goofy.

Of course there are bullies and other clueless nincompoops who operate independent of the rule. But, bullies and the oblivious form a tiny school of odd fish swimming in a great swarm of wrigglers busily looking outside themselves for tips on how to act.

It’s you I care about, so we should stay in the specific: We teach others how to treat us.

That hang-dog expression we use when we want a little sympathy communicates that we are weak. The snarl that plays across our faces when we’re angry tells others to stay away. That goofy grin when we are unsure is often taken for an unserious nature. Flinching in the face of conflict tells just the opposite story from when we get our game faces on.

Is our head in the clouds? Do we care about our neighbor? Is our language combative or passive? Are we way too cool to bother with another’s problems?

All these things and much more are communicated in our facial expression, our language and how we hold ourselves in three-dimensional space.

The question is: Are those expressions true?

Remember we are teaching people how to treat us. What is gained when we are nonchalant when our interest is keen, for instance? We are teaching that we don’t care in the face of truth 180 degrees off true north. What is taught when we gush over trifles and mock the weighty? Is our shyness real or is our purpose to dodge something unpleasant?

None of this is as difficult as it sounds. I certainly don’t want you to phony-up your countenance or dissemble your language. We should cultivate honesty. We should practice making our faces match the facts.

Try this little exercise: Next time you’re called to answer in the affirmative, say “yes”. At the same time wag your head from side to side in the typical “no” manner. Observe the other person. Does she respond to the spoken word or to the gesture? You will discover that most of the time she will register “no”, some of the time she will register confusion and a small fraction of the time she will register “yes”

More importantly, what have you taught that person about how to treat you? Are you to be trusted? Do you care enough to communicate with clarity? Or, worse of all, are you weaseling to quote yourself later as having been truthful while encouraging a false impression for now?

This is important stuff. Be honest in your words. Be honest in your actions. Be honest in your inactions. Teach others to treat you honestly.

Much Love,

Poppy

Technicolor Burp 35 Thousand Style

2009-02-09T17:18:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

Consider this tableau from the Orlando airport: A family submitting to the bureaucratic horrors wrought by thirty years of hijackers and terrorists. The tallest among them was a lean and acned dad, eyes focused on the middle distance. Below him was a twirling, bouncy nine-year-old filled with the spirit of one of the princesses that abound in the Magic Kingdom. Looking up at her was a squalling, mulish two-year-old lashed in a stroller. Surveying him was a laconic infant of uncertain gender about the size of a Shitzu, swaddled across a pair of ample breasts belonging to a mom – bedraggled – with a belly full of child number four.

One should think this is an occasion for all those who had been in similar boats to rush in with aid for an obviously distressed group. Not on your life. Rather, the folks who did not look away were abuzz in the line with murmurings of condemnation. Within earshot of the family were questions about why they were there at all and hopes they would not be seated where personal repose might be disturbed. One supposes that these disapproving ninnies could not imagine a planeload of such families wrung out, amped up, rundown and done-in returning from Mickey’s paradise.

Yet, such was the case. There were diapers and screeching, shouts of unfairness, reports of bladder condition, aisle escapes and all the squawking vocalizations of family life. I heard no fewer than six different words for poop. There were entreaties of all hue and level, most of which fell on deaf ears.

Buster, who occupied a small portion of Mom’s lap, was of a mind to puke away his time in the air. At first, Mom didn’t want to hand him over; insisting she was equal to Buster as well as Roxanne’s sullen presence smoldering in the window seat. She was convinced at a second effortless coaxing.

True to his promise, Buster up-chucked strained beets and belched Enfamil clouds all the way to LaGuardia.

This story is about human needs – the ones we all share -- the little things. We do not refer to the self-satisfied pronouncements on family values of politicians and divines. We refer to universal, commonplace, everyday, unrewarded, golden-ruley decency.

We most certainly do not refer to sacrifice. We mean the easy, part-of-our-day, utterly costless decency that oils the gears of human interaction.

Much Love,

Poppy

Missed Boats: Regrets

2009-02-05T18:07:00.003-06:00

Dear Children:

There has been no shortage of opportunities recently to speak of regret. Maybe it’s the advancing age of my circle. Who knows?

Regret can be recognition that we did something wrong or could have done something better. That sort of regret is healthy and recommended. When we backtrack over our day as its ending, we can assess what went right, what went wrong, what we could have done; what we should have done. Wrongs, after a fashion, can be righted the next day. Right actions are a source of comfort and cheer. Are you with me so far? Just to be clear: there will never come a time when the acknowledgement of the weight of our actions cannot be expressed for the betterment of ourselves and the ease of others.

Just so, there will never come a time when past actions can be changed. We never get a do-over on anything -- never ever. Even when you get to try again – golfers call it a mulligan – that first try is in the books forever and permanently established even if you are the only one who knows. Your future has been affected and your unconscious mind never forgets. That is the case for all actions whether for good or ill. We hear it every day. “If only I had done that thing differently, I wouldn’t be in this pickle.” “When I was nine I had a chance to take piano lessons. Something happened. Now I can barely play the radio.” “If only I hadn’t taken that dare, I wouldn’t be gimping up these stairs.”

I’m here to tell you cuties that those statements are true and serious. See? It’s not about one particular dare. Laser in on whether taking dares at all is a good idea. Accept that actions taken today will play out tomorrow with a certainty reserved for death and taxes.

Here’s the problem: Memories of our actions can morph into a corrosive effect called regret. We get so worked up over mistakes, the memory of them blocks positive action. We come to believe that we are somehow diminished or, worse yet, destined to repeat our errors. The differences are subtle. Please stick with me.

Never express an error by using “if only” as in “I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. I wouldn’t be cooling my heels in detention”. While the statement is true on its face, it is more likely to produce an ugly regret. Instead, express it in a positive way: “I am here because I shot my mouth off”. Can you appreciate the difference? When we acknowledge that we did something and accept that the action is immutable, reform is possible. A wish is not useful. The “if only” statements are what’s known in the movie trade as a MacGuffin – a way to misdirect the viewer from the real action of the plot. A MacGuffin does not explain what is happening. Exposition of the plot swamps the MacGuffin to the point of nothingness.

That goes for the close calls as well. Sometimes rotten things happen around us. We get caught up in them and the consequences are painful. It is never constructive to focus on the negative. Something unfair may have happened. Yet we are still obliged to acknowledge our part in the incident. Yes, even if our part was trifling, we need to make positive concession to the facts. That way we can dwell less on unfairness and more on learning to be sensitive to our surroundings.

There is promise in this. I promise that if you learn to own up to your part in everything that goes on around you, regrets – especially the longstanding ones – become MacGuffin. Regrets lose their power to explain when the facts play out and the story unfolds naturally.

Much Love,

Poppy

P.S. Mulligan and MacGuffin sound like they could be racial or ethnic slurs like the description of a hammer as an Irish screwdriver. They probably are. Irish screwdriver certainly is. The word handicap began its life to describe a beggar as one whose cap is handy to receive alms. The Shakers, the Quakers and the Puritans all accepted names that were, at first, meant to be unflattering. Our language is chock-a-block with such terminology. Don’t worry about it. The truly crude racial and ethnic smears are well known and should be avoided. Beyond that … you needn’t worry.

Carpenter Rant

2009-02-01T22:10:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

At a certain age, life invites a measure of predictability. Life is never predictable, of course. Life has its own agenda quite apart from individual aspiration. It’s just that the interior gets familiar.

You don’t have this problem. There is nothing especially settled among your emotions. There is little about which you’re confident. Most of your feelings are, at once, resolute and alien.

The golden years are different. Resolute must be summoned and alien is mostly shunned. Do not be in any hurry to reach that state. Hang on to the intensity you feel. Welcome the exotic and outlandish. These are gifts for you from a Providence that provides abundant hours to pay out in wonder and awe. In fact, the only real requirement of youth is to discover how much wonder you can handle and how awestruck you are prepared to be.

Open yourself up to idle curiosity. Fill yourself with silly questions that have no practical answers. Accept that our universe and her mechanisms will forever be beyond measuring. Appreciate the endless complications of conflict and cooperation. Know that every thing in creation is different from every other thing in creation. Constancy in change and changeless in openness obviates discontent.

I’ve taken up woodworking after a long hiatus. I’m attracted, in part, by its timelessness. Noah, Jesus and Geppetto come to mind. The tools we use – hammer, saw, ax and drill -- were invented so long ago we have no idea who contributed so profoundly to our lives. For millennia humankind has struggled to shape wood into things useful and beautiful.

Since then, the tools for shaping wood have changed only to make the struggle more precise and more forgiving. We now have very sharp, very exacting, very fast; very responsive tools that contribute in no way to the satisfaction one feels at completion. Epeius and Joseph of Nazareth felt exactly what all woodworkers feel.

The privilege of the child is joined with the need of the older adult. The wood in its stock form is freighted with potential. No amount of planning and no anal regard for the diagram produces a finished product identical to its conception. The wood completes no destiny as Michelangelo suggests. Instead, the wood is consequential along with the tools and the artisan. The process is breathtaking.

Clearly, it’s not predictable.

Much Love,

Poppy

A Place Called Nope

2009-01-31T09:51:00.000-06:00

Dear Children:

Everybody has an opinion about the Middle East and its troubles. One hopes that you too will take an informed view of the history and present goings on there as well. Maybe you will be the one that finds the right formula that satisfies the dizzying buffet of competing interests in that region and disconnects them from the dizzying variety of competing forces across the globe that complicate and harden those interests. The death, the destruction, the wasted resources, the wonton hatreds, the deferred progress, the misdirected innovation, the slavish cult of revenge, the petty tit for tat, the fresh quarrels and manufactured slights that crop up with each new generation multiply and flourish. There is little optimism and less hope.

As you are thinking and learning about this region, keep a few practical considerations in mind.

1.) Innocent people are difficult to find. Once someone joins a political party, writes a letter to the editor, paints a slogan on a wall, lobs a stone, teaches conjecture as truth, contributes money for propaganda or weaponry, harbors a criminal or shuts his eyes to wrong-doing … all of them have taken a side. Truly innocent people, by extension, are invisible and unrepresented. To be sure, there are lots of innocent people. They just don’t seem to matter.

2.) There is plenty of guilt to go around. Every faction has its own version of history, its own ethnic and religious mythology, its own justifications, its own thugs, its own warmongers, its own blinders and its own simmering suspicions. There is no shortage of factions. If this region is rich in anything, it is rich in factions.

3.) Strife is normative. In our country, we have succeeded lately and in some minimal way in settling our differences peaceably. Peaceable resolution of dispute is thin and fragile. We could lose it at any moment. Nevertheless, it has made us smug and superior toward those who don’t settle grievances in court or through the ballot box. Violence is the resort of choice for a largish fraction of the world’s leadership. For them, it works.

4.) Motives are impossible to assess with certainty. No one knows the mind of another. As such, it is dangerous to act on the basis of perceived motivation. The manifest actions of others are tricky enough. Whatever you do, though, beware of those who claim unique, didactic or exceptional knowledge.

5.) The Socratic method lets us down as well. In the Middle East we insist that our interlocutor agree to a specific set of facts or circumstances as a condition of civil discourse. This is, to be sure, a cultural locution that works well in tribal settings and is not meant as a criticism. Far from a trope, it allows all parties to be right all the time. To us it looks like the parties are not engaged at all. Rather, they seem to be talking past each other with no particular ambition for agreement. This is, indeed, the case.

Does all this mean the peoples of the Middle East face utterly intractable problems? Yes it does. So far, the only stable regimes in that part of the world have had to rely on either oppressive police-state rule or other forms of fear. Bugbears are as numerous as the factions that animate them.

So, what do you think: More cops or more bogeymen?

I’ve decided what I’m doing. My prayers are with Senator Mitchell and his mission to the Middle East. I hope President Obama will be serious and courageous about peace. A new model is required. The cycle of violence must be broken.

Much Love,

Poppy

Not My Job, Man

2009-01-08T01:00:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

By now everybody knows Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois shot his mouth off about profiting from his power to fill a vacant senate seat. It remains to be seen if narcissism over a tapped ‘phone line is a crime. We’ll see if prosecutors can convict someone of being a bully. All that is for the future. For now, the governor’s reputation has taken a hit from which it will never recover.

How does something like this happen?

Well, my dears, one answer is that the governor was always a braggart. He was always a bully who hid his pettiness and mendacity from the electorate through four elections – twice for Governor and twice for Congress. True enough. Who knew the guy was like that?

The answer to that question should be on all our minds. Who knew?

Lots of people knew. Lots of people helped him pull the wool over the eyes of voters. Lots of people sat around watching him browbeat donors. Everyone on his staff, everyone who was intimidated by his antics, everyone who signed off on the fruits of his extortion and everyone who heard informed whispers knew all about it. There must have been thousands who knew. That’s who knew: Thousands.

Which begs a question or two about the ethical duty of those who knew: At the very least shouldn’t someone who knows about notorious and barefaced criminality turn on her heels and run in the opposite direction? Shouldn’t someone victimized by unlawful persuasion pick up his iPhone to tell the cops? What about those who had a fiduciary, judicial and friendship duty to the governor? Did they try to correct his behavior?

If everyone who knew discharged his lawful and ethical duty toward the governor, he would not be twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

There is nothing new about this problem. It has ever been thus. It is possible to be responsible but not guilty. The enabler is far more difficult to prosecute than the ganef. The wives, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, landladies, tailors, waiters, dog groomers and clergymen who know they’re getting a slice of pelf all have a stake in the misdeed. Those who knowingly benefit share culpability to some lesser or greater extents yet are granted a smug chuckle at the expense of the exposed felon.

See, in the end, we are responsible. We are responsible to recognize those situations where harm is forming. We are responsible to correct the behavior of those who would do harm. Failing correction, we are to hop the first stagecoach out of Dodge. When all else fails and the wrong done sufficient, we are obliged to snitch.

Making these decisions will haunt your whole life. By now you have seen situations such as these and struggled with your conscience. School is a petri dish for moral ambivalence. Anyone who tells you that your duty is always clear is obviously unclear on the meaning of duty. Doing the right thing is messy business.

Much Love,

Poppy

Rationing Rationalization

2009-01-06T16:32:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

The dearth of recent posts comes about for a reason. In the same way as events respond to causality, the absence of events is rooted in causality. We hold this to be true intuitively. More important, it’s evidenced by the way language works, especially English. Our received logic is anchored by “if/ then” and “if not/ then” constructions. Our scriptures are expressed using this device. It works well most of the time and is most useful in the doing of business. The Law of Contracts depends on it. Every action or inaction has a consequence. Culture is anchored by an adherence to the proposition that action and inaction have consequences that affect us all.

Mathematicians are beginning to find ways of expressing this idea in a purer form than classical logic. They call it Game Theory. In its crudest expression, Game Theory offers the promise of finding a way to get over on another by locating the vulnerability of the other – usually identifying greed – and capitalizing. It turns out that “right action” and “wrong action” are not mutually exclusive. The games theorists, rather, express it as cooperative and uncooperative action. In their models it makes a difference when one decides to be cooperative or uncooperative not just whether one is cooperative or uncooperative. As its evolving, Game Theory offers the hope that we will be able to recognize and predict optimal mixes of cooperation and tension.

These guys are on to something important. In fact, they’ve opened up the tiniest hole in the mystery of causality. While it’s given we operate intuitively with the notion of causality, we have not the smallest understanding of the thing that is causality – the why of things. The need to know why something is the way it appears to be is so fixed in us that we cannot appear to abide that it is unknown.

That fixation compels us make stuff up. The scientists call it hypothesis, the rest of us engage in rationalization.

My Dears, the urge to hypothesize is a good and noble one. To try something on for size, to experiment, and to probe is in the service of maturity and education.

The shortcut of rationalization is profoundly bad for you. To make something up for the purpose of avoidance, evasion or short-term gain is, on its face, immature and destructive. Nothing good will ever come from it. This I know from bitter experience that has manifestly chastened me.

Try this on for size: Submit everything you say and do to the rationalization test. Did I say that thing to evade responsibility? Did I do that thing because the alternative is too painful for me to face? Did I tell the whole truth? Did I answer the question directly? Did I parse my answer to give a false impression? Are my questions asked respectfully, honestly and directly? Like that.

For now, don’t do anything with the honest and private answers you get back from the test. Merely collect them. You will find that rationalizations are everywhere and everyday. Soon you will recognize them for the toxins they are. You will recognize them in others.

That’s what you should care about. You should care that you recognize and own-up to shortcuts, shuckin’, jivin’, dissembling, lying and insincerity. You need only to admit these things to yourself for now. It’s difficult but important work. It will help you learn what is right and the importance of timing. Armed with this knowledge, you will learn the futility of pretense and the peace that comes from simple, honest, humane expression.

If you’ve gotten this far, you may ask what this has to do with all those missing months of posts.

I don’t know. The simple truth has eluded me. That could be the subject of another post.

Poppy

Tuesdays With Sorry

2008-05-19T06:00:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

This blog has been way too much fun. Even though some of our more waggish readers have dubbed the submissions “Poor Poppy’s Almanac”, it’s been fun. Now, as I’m confident that we’ll really get to 160lbs, it looks like the character (if not the content) of the diary will have to change. When I do get to the magic One Six Oh, I’ll be sure to crow loud and long. No one will miss that event if shameless self-promotion still works. It will be a great day if for no other reason than the decibel level of the personally blown horn.

Just so you know, the 170lbs weigh-in occurred last Tuesday. I always weigh the least on Tuesdays. Go figure. Saturday I weighed in at 170.5.

So, as we cast about for a compelling conceit for the blog, some themes come to mind. They all have the charm of being sufficiently self-absorbed to keep me on task, but lack a high-minded way of enlisting the wider world to a noble goal. After all, obesity is quite a toney subject these days and matches the drumbeat of every do-gooder in sight. Fat is bad. Lean is good. Health is splendid. Dissipation is flagrant. Discipline is laudable. Negligence is willful.

There is one thing we all share. Not everyone can scratch that common itch, but because we all have it, there may be a way of spinning some themes it suggests. That impulse is art.

Think about it. You have heard people say that they wished they could play the piano or draw from life. Hordes show up at concerts to sop up the talent of others. We buy CDs, movies and pictures. We read for the delight of it. Which of us hasn’t craved a talent or a unique ability. It truly is universal to create yet we sell ourselves short with the pretext that we were not blessed with a gift that is valued.

Therefore, if we accept the idea that a creation urge is universal, we are obliged to gratify that urge. We need not be concerned for whether the product is valued. Who cares if you have the urge to sing and the song you choose isn’t fashionable. You have done your job, a job for which God has fitted you. We make far too little of longings and far too much of praise.

I love houseplants and I love to plant them in unusual containers. Terrariums are a particular favorite. I love the feel of wood and the shapes it can take. So far, there has not been a path beaten to my door for the want of the objects that result, but the satisfaction in their creation has been uplifting.

Maybe I can share some of the stirrings of satisfaction with you. While there is no wish for you to replicate or admire my work, there might be a way for you to replicate the joy I feel as you are encouraged to create for yourself.

On the Ipod Saturday was The Jordonairs, a Gospel group. It features an anchoring bass by the name of J. D. Salman. He’s dead now, but I bet you’ve heard his voice. Elvis Presley on the most popular Gospel album of all time records him. Elvis used a back up group called The Stamps. And, as luck would have it, I met a classmate from nearly five decades ago who knew JD and sang on the same stage. I’m looking forward to learning more about the history of Gospel music from him.

Much Love,

Poppy

Within A Stone's Throw

2008-05-13T23:32:00.005-05:00

Dear Children:

The previous post – the one called John Phillip Snooza – has generated a lot of comment outside the blog. Mostly people are exploring the difference between quality decision-making and the idea of virtue. Let me explain:

We don’t talk much about virtue these days. The expression of a virtue, say thrift, lends itself to belittling, silly logical extensions and cliché. We don’t talk about thrift because it’s easy to substitute the word cheap. We don’t talk about industry for fear of being thought a plugger. Chastity has become another word for prudish. Humility is short for wimpy. Only suckers are charitable. You get the idea.

What we have these days are core values. Each of us has a set of core values. My core values are just as genuine and justifiable as yours. Your core values, in turn, may be wildly different from each of your acquaintances. It’s bad form to question anyone’s right to his or her core values. That’s the difference between virtues and core values. Virtues are shared definable ideals and core values are individual and needn’t be expressed.

This is the point at which persons of an older certain age begin to sigh and those of a younger certain age shrug. I don’t care.

Decisions, the helpful kind and the destructive kind, issue from bedrock belief. You can be confident that a person who treats you shabbily is likely to treat others the same. Expressions of generosity are almost never a hit-or-miss proposition. Caution is hardly accidental. Intemperance is predictable.

Ask yourself: when it comes to things that count, what counts with you? We all have beliefs even if we don’t want them. We cannot hold beliefs secretly because decisions reflect beliefs clearly and consistently.

Oh, on the off chance you were wondering about people who appear inconsistent, don’t be fooled. Those are people who believe in moral plasticity. If you see one, make the sharpest turn possible and run for your life.

It’s also time to report on weight loss. This morning I weighed 170 lbs. That’s thirty pounds since the first week in February and the lightest I’ve been since Lent 1984. We may be within striking distance of the 160 lbs goal.

The next post will discuss what will happen should I ever get to One Sixty as well as other stuff I’ve been pursuing lately. See the picture clue.

Much Love,

Poppy

John Phillip Snooza

2008-04-27T01:26:00.002-05:00

Dear Children:

There is a shiny new dime right here that says you have the same idea I once had about sleep. You believe that functionality is the most important issue in your intellectual, social and athletic life. How you happen to feel at the moment can wait for another day. So long as you are on a par with the smartest in the room or can compete with the swiftest or the most admired all will be well. There’s plenty of time for sleep in your old age that hobbles in about age 29 or so.

Do not believe it. You need sleep in sufficient amounts not only for the moment’s functionality but also for next week, next year or next decade. There is ample evidence that people of any age benefit from sleep in many ways. Memory improves. Crankiness diminishes. Lung, muscle and vascular utility rises. Incidence of depression, bipolar disorder and paranoia among other horrid mental problems lessens. Skin tone brightens. Sniffles and colds are less brutal. Injuries heal faster. Scars fade. The list goes on and on.

There is a larger principle at work here. The principle holds that what you do or don’t do right now plays out forever. There are health consequences, of course. That gratuitous Mars Bar attached to your thigh can outlive a tortoise. I'm living proof. That’s just one example.

Consider this: Deciding to blow off school today can be a loss or a gain. Who knows? What is certain is that decisions are not discreet events. Decisions, like sleep, have long-term implications. One decision always informs the decisions that follow.

Just as an exercise, map out a decision tree. Start anywhere; say deciding to take a tumbling class instead of a dance class. Where does that decision lead? What branches are created? How far do the repercussions extend? Are there branches on the branches and do those branches have branches. Its not really possible is it?

Now don’t get all bewildered. Don’t let the endlessness of a decision’s results get in the way of anything. Not deciding is a decision too and has a different set of branches on branches. While you can’t know how your life will play out, you can know where the decision you made came from. Some decisions come from our hearts, others come from our intellects and still others are made for us.

The worst decisions are made of base and fleeting stuff. I was angry. I was in a hurry. It was spite. I followed a leader. The sun was out. The moon was full.

Please note: They’re not wrong decisions, they’re under-funded.

Excellent decisions issue from the knowledge that we live complicated lives with other people who make decisions that act on us just as our decisions act on them.

Excellent decision-making also makes it easier to own up to mistakes. We all do things for reasons that turn out bogus. Okay, that thing was bogus. I was wrong. What is the right thing to do now?

Maybe we’ll sleep better.

On the iPod today were Sousa marches. It made me think of a favorite pastime, that of parades. I like the kids in the Radio Fliers, of course as well as the politicians and the Cause Floats. What I like best, though, are the marching bands.

A marching band is a profoundly old-timey thing. Our age doesn’t provide for submitting to uniformity in dress and step. Each of us is celebrated as an individual gemstone worthy of praise for that fact alone. No problem.

Still, for me it’s a joy to see kids synchronizing, harmonizing, coordinating, orchestrating, matching; making a unit pleasing to both eye and ear.

Much Love,

Poppy

On Being Certifiable

2008-04-23T12:16:00.002-05:00

Dear Children:

Consider, please, the following official document. See if you aren’t so proud you could just bust.

KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS that the Board of Regents, Trustees, Faculty and staff of the Fitness Institute of Cosmic Totem certify and affirm that _____Poppy_________, has completed the initial, interim, tentative stage one goal of his fitness program by shear application of effort and perseverance and contrary to popular belief by losing __Ten Percent______ of his body weight.

WHEREAS he/she has reached the aforementioned goal three times within the previous four years, this certificate is granted provisionally for ___Six_______ months from the date first herein written after which time should the losses be maintained the certification shall be made permanent and

WHEREAS the certificant has pledged to lose an additional ____Ten Percent_____ of his present body weight within the provisional period and

WHEREAS the certificant has pledged to continue during the provisional period to eat within the limits of her/his approved diet, continue with the recommended cardiovascular and strength training program,

IT IS THEREFORE recommended that all persons of clean health and upstanding moral suasion plant upon the certificant a kiss about his mouth, cheek and neck in recognition of his/her achievement.

Attest: __Summa Phlunkie, DMetSci.____

And they said it couldn’t be done.

Much Love,

Poppy

Here Kitty Kitty

2008-04-19T00:31:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

Try to picture this little problem. You’re watching the beats-per-minute (BPM) readout on the treadmill. You have five minutes for the BPM to go from 120 to 99. It’s the cool-down period after one hour of training at a deliberate 120 BPM. You want the sensor to get to 99 and stay there for at least a minute. You want that more than anything because it will mean your interim heart recovery goal shall has been met.

The sensor quickly recedes from 120 to 105. There is a chance you’ll make it this time. Then, everything slows. One agonizing second after another agonizing second teases toward the goal. You get to 100 and the wretched thing bounces back to 104. This happens several times. The five-minute period expires. You’ll need to wait for tomorrow.

The next day comes as does the next day. A week passes and the heart rate goal eludes.

I’m beginning to believe that the fraught hope of that one lousy fewer beat per minute precludes its apprehension. In other words, I have to contemplate the idea that the act of staring at the display and wanting it to move in the right direction may produce enough anxiety to prevent the achievement of the goal.

Some scientists, particularly particle physicists and sociologists have contemplated the problem of how an observer to a phenomenon can change or affect the natural occurrence or the measurement of that phenomenon simply by observing it. It’s sometimes called the Copenhagen Effect or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty. It postulates that in order to properly observe the behavior of a single particle, allowances must be made for the behavior of other particles in the atom that would, by rights and in it its turn, effect the behavior of the observed particle.

This problem has led to a thought problem called 'Schrodinger's Cat' named after the man who posed this particular set-up. Suppose there is cat shut up in a box. With the cat is a switch made of a particular particle that, as it decays, promises a 50-50 chance it will kill the cat. The same chance guarantees the cat will be unaffected by the decay of this particle 50% of the time.

After the decay of the particle, our observer is invited to open the box and check on the condition of the cat. The result is unremarkable. The cat is either dead or the cat is alive. A certain reality is established. The next time the outcome could be different and certainly will be in half the observations. The problem, as you’ve already imagined, is not about the open box but the closed one. Before the box is opened, is the cat dead or alive?

The answer, of course is, neither dead nor alive. The answer, if you are prepared to believe it, is that the cat is both dead and alive. That’s the case, at least, within the priesthood of particle physicists.

Here among the mere laity, we are required to live inside a perceptible realty and act on that realty. When we don’t, we engage in wishful thinking, a mechanism that tries to alter perceptible realty. Think about it. We do it all the time.

Wishful thinking is one of the most dangerous things we can do to ourselves. We want a realty that is not. We wish that realty were not imposed on us. It is frustrating and crazy making to wish for a realty that cannot be. It is a source of anxiety that prevents healthy management of healthy ambitions within realty.

There will come a time when you and I will talk about perception of perceptible realty. In the meantime, it is important for you to accept that there is such a thing as realty. For now, here’s a hint: Realty is honorable.

I didn’t reach 99 because 99 just isn’t real for me right now. My staring, my wanting; my wish did not affect the sensors. I could be the calmest, least self-conscious man on the globe (which I am not) and still not reach 99 until the time comes.

Much Love,

Poppy

Hearts And Showers

2008-04-11T00:03:00.003-05:00

Dear Children:

Some of you have said, “Thanks a lot Poppy for all the wonderful insights you’ve been sharing with us lately. Fascinating as those musings may be, it’s sometimes difficult to parse what you find clever from your fixation with fatness. Please Poppy, tell us how you’re doing with your health goals.”

All right. All right. But you must promise – better yet, pinky swear – that the following dull recitation won’t keep you from a readiness for questions larger than my OCD. After all, the larger questions are nothing less than the same questions that have beset us from the time fire inspired story telling. We mustn’t quit now. Assuming I get the pinky swear I’ll let you in on a secret. Sure you got your burning bush and your tablet etching on the mountaintop, but for most of us access to afflatus is in the pondering of these matters together.

Aside from belt size, the most important thing to me has been a freakish heart rate. Walking around beats per minute was about 105, way too high. Resting heart rate was in the middle nineties. For the past months I’ve trained on a cardiovascular machine tuned to maintain a heart rate of 120, which is just south of 80% of the target heart rate for a man my age. The idea is to lose enough weight so that my heart doesn’t have to beat so fast to get blood surging around a frame for which it was not designed as well as strengthen it and make it more economical. I was on blood pressure meds too. Uncontrolled, my blood pressure was around 150 0ver 100. The problem lay in how to measure progress required by obsessives.

Of course, if my resting heart rate lowered, that would be ideal. And, I wanted to improve the recovery time after exercise. That too was a problem because it took forever to get the heart rate down. If I took care of those two things, I figured I’d be some distance toward cardiovascular health.

The progress report is good. My resting heart is now in the upper sixties, down thirty beats per minute or so. I’d like to get it into the fifties. Recovery time has improved as well.

Heart rate is closely monitored on the treadmill as well as after a shower. I take my blood pressure after showering also. So, there are two measures of recovery. The first is the five-minute cool-down period after an hour on the treadmill. In that measure, my heart rate goes down from 120 beats per minute to whatever it is five minutes later. Three months ago, it would go down ten beats or so. Now it goes down twenty beats or so. It has never gotten to ninety-nine. My ambition for now is for beats to get into the lower nineties.

The after shower schedule has it’s problems. A workout will lower most people’s blood pressure. Still, that number is headed the right direction. Typically, blood pressure would be, say 135 over 85. Today, that number was 92 over 62. That’s toward the bottom of the normal scale. It’s past my bedtime at this moment: blood pressure stands at 136 over 79, higher on the normal scale for the upper number and about right on the lower number. I stopped taking the meds.

After a shower, most people’s hearts run a little faster. I don’t know why. By that time, however, my heart rate has slowed to around 85. That is down 20 points from a just a few weeks ago when 105 was not unusual. I may be able to do better.

Is that informative enough for ye?

I can’t get Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto out of my mind. I listened to it twice today. There’s something spooky, primal and deeply appealing that is holding fast. Mozart is always the smartest one in the room. It feels like he is also the one up to the most mischief. Why is that comforting?

Much Love,

Poppy

My Statin Doll

2008-04-09T01:19:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

As a gimlet-eyed college student, I took employment at a funeral home. The charm of the job was that it came with an apartment. To be sure, there was also a roommate. He and I did whatever was beneath the dignity of the funeral director including sweeping up, driving the hearse and ushering at funerals.

Of course, the real reason for the upstairs apartment was answering ambulance calls in the middle of the night. Yup: This was a time before licensed EMTs, $900 trips to the hospital and lawsuits over every little thing. Two 19-year-olds would visit the scene of a car crash, cart off gunshot victims, lash down loonies destined for the psych ward, haul baleful women in their 38th week of pregnancy, wait outside domestic disturbance residences to see which spouse was the bloodiest and lots of other fun and pukey tricks of the trade.

In that town was also a thing we don’t see anymore, an elected coroner. Funeral directors took gentlemanly turns running unopposed for the office as parcel to their civic duty thereby achieving an equitable division of such labor and stiffs paid for by the county.

Coroners kept for their own purposes personal copies of the death certificates they were obliged to sign. There were resident such certificates that dated way, way back and included magisterial documents attested to by previous owners of the funeral home and, by extension, sometime coroners. It was the Cause of Death blank that interested me most. “Ran off road, hit tree” will tell you the quality of insight required at that time and place. There was no shortage of “natural causes”, “old age”, failure to thrive” and, my all-time favorite, “death by misadventure”.

Death by misadventure is a euphemism we should bring back. It simply means that the croakee was in that predicament as a consequence of his own actions. If he was found smeared along the railroad tracks and there was detected the smell of alcohol, it didn’t take much medical learning to know that the wretch had done this thing without benefit of counsel. His demise was a calamity that had befallen a fool who paid a fool’s price.

We heard a speaker just last Friday describe, in part, why statin drugs prescribed for high cholesterol is a 30 billion dollar business. The first 20% is legit. That’s $6 billion. There rest is humbug. An unholy fraction of users derive no benefit whatsoever both because cholesterol is not the bogeyman we thought and because the drug doesn’t lower cholesterol. Statins actually harm another significant fraction. But what to put on the death certificate? Try this: Notwithstanding our best efforts that included ample BS and liberal doses of expensive snake oil, the patient died anyway ... death by misadventure.

But get the not-so-subtle shift. This time the system killed him. Blame big tobacco, fast food, smog, the gun culture, soul-sucking ghetto life, availability of crack, TV trays, TV dinners, TV, broken homes, crumbling schools, pharmaceutical houses, too few jails, too many jails, sugary cereal, red meat, ersatz popcorn butter, corporate agriculture, organized religion, secularism, lenient courts, activist judges, you get the idea.

There are plenty of things that need fixing. Lets fix them, you and me. There is nothing so pathetic as a peace activist who has a peace garden in her back yard. That is a vain and hopeless enterprise. If you’re for peace, get in the way of the bullets. If you’re for release of the captives, give one a job. If you see a hungry person, you can be certain that a bagel will do better work than a platitude. Better yet, if all you have to offer is an empty gesture, own up to it now. You’ll feel better. It costs your life either way.

There is no such thing as a person who by virtue of his lack of virtue gets himself squashed by a train. There is also no such thing as a killer movie popcorn conglomerate. People get themselves into trouble. People make and buy things they oughtn’t. People make mistakes. People are also the lever by which wrongs are righted.

Come to think of it, of the precious few important things over which we have complete control, to act or not act is one.

Much Love,

Poppy

Mythtaken For Time

2008-04-06T11:38:00.003-05:00

Dear Children:

Blurting it out may be best: I only lost two pounds in the last two weeks. In about 180 weeks, I’ll be back to my original weight of 6lbs, 10oz. That really isn’t so horrifying a fact if it weren’t for an unspecified fact behind the fact behind the fact.

There’s this friend that says I’m too focused on weight and that weight is a stand-in for something I don’t want to reveal. So, the way this guy postulates it, I keep the conversation pointed to weight instead of the more solemn issues in my life. Fair enough … maybe. Let’s see.

Its true I wouldn’t care what the scale said if the mirror said something more gratifying. It’s also true that I shouldn't care about either the scale or the mirror if I weren’t in fear for my life. That’s why I quit smoking. I didn’t want to die an early, grisly, painful, expensive, hacking death. Still, I may not care about dying so much if I felt better about circumstances in general. There is so much unfinished business. There is so much to resolve. There are too many injuries to heal both of the afflicted sort and the afflictive sort. There is so much art and love and sorrow and mourning to express. Where will the time come from?

Maybe it’s more complicated than that. Time may be a stand-in for a substitute for a surrogate for a proxy. Who knows? What is it?

That’s the fact I’m getting at: the one behind the fact behind the fact.

But I do like the idea of time a lot. For now, though, time is a commodity. All the great scriptures teach otherwise of course. God is The Potentate of Time and will one day abolish it in favor of a stress free eternity. We just flat needn’t worry about time and, without that worry, what is there to worry about.

For us, in this life, time is truly a commodity and there are no shortages of things to worry over. As such, time can be wasted, spent, juggled and ignored. The only thing we cannot do is preserve time. There is no bank that will take it into deposit and promise an increase. Neither can we barter, legate, bailment nor will it over to another generation. It is our commodity for our personal use and not valid in transfer.

Never put off for tomorrow those things you have no intention of doing at all.

I’m just spit balling here, but if time is proxy for fitness I got me all the time in the world. It’s a beautiful thought. Lets try it on for size anyway.

The ipod has been playing Jelly Roll Morton. They called him Jelly Roll for a reason other than the fact that his momma named him Ferdinand. In any case, The Jelly Roll Blues is thought to be the first jazz music ever published. He may not have been the father for there were many parents but he attended the birth of jazz. Over the last ninety years or so, the songs have not lost their freshness, their energy or their grit. We call them songs even though the lyrics were severely subordinated to the music and the scoring. I love them all although there is one particular favorite called Hyena Stomp where the lyrics consist exclusively of the most wonderful full-throated, head back belly laughter.

Much Love,

Poppy

Government Intelligence Makes Exact Estimate

2008-04-03T01:24:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

After having lived a while, most people learn to hold and accept opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. It’s not a skill, really. It’s more like a coping mechanism. There are way too many perfectly acceptable opposing ideas abroad in the land.

White light’s constituency is millions of colors. Make an untidy mess with more than three crayolas. Pay attention in school and you will learn valuable information. Pay that attention; you’re likely to miss valuable information in a text message about that skank of a chem partner. God is all-powerful but couldn’t be bothered to get the cutest nose on the most deserving adolescent. Bullies never get anything except all the lunch money. There are teachers who don’t like kids.

There are even terms like oxymoron, incongruity, conundrum, paradox, anomaly, SIDS, collateral damage and others that put a name to facelessness. Kids with little power and strong convictions like you know whereof I speak even though we don’t use such words in our everyday speech.

But then, as I said, we learn to embrace situations that are paradoxical and oxymoronic. There is nothing to be done about it. You may have to be of a certain age to find aptness in an idea like bittersweet. Baptisms, weddings, graduations, anniversaries and funerals conflate tearful, consequential, eloquent, humdrum, hilarious and frightening sensations into the proceedings. It’s a way to cope.

As I was working the elliptical trainer today and the local classical station was presenting a dissonant rondo for broken cello and neglected piano, my mind wandered to the presentation we heard last Thursday. It was Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto in C Minor.

What I know about musical literature will fit in your eye. Nevertheless, in this piece Mozart was up to something -- something both impish and brilliant. The piano, the oboe and the bassoon wage a weighty squabble. To be sure the flute, the strings, timpani and horns offer up colorful insights, but this argument – the conundrum under consideration -- was one of parts and paradoxes. I don’t have the foggiest what all the fuss was about. I trust it was more important than, say, a bar bet. Yet, we’ll hasten to add, it was deeply satisfying.

We were all coping quite nicely, thank you.

Much Love,

Poppy

It’s The Fall, Not The Sudden Stop

2008-03-31T03:00:00.000-05:00

Dear Children:

Most of you have met military people. They’re just like us with one important difference: they have a heightened sense of existential dismay. They know how random, how fragile, how inane military operations can be. They are asked to do things with purposes larger than their own selves and families and risk their skins for low pay into the bargain.

These facts form the hypothesis of war from ancient times. Soldiers do the prince’s bidding at the prince’s caprice.

No wonder one finds among our military friends a special brand of gallows humor. They speak of life’s slender thread in terms that stress the chances of survival as hit and miss at best.

I overheard a conversation between one clueless civilian and an active duty airborne officer over a question of the mortality of parachutes. The question was, “Say you jump out of an airplane at 20 thousand feet … both the primary and secondary ‘chutes don’t open. How long do you have to live?” The officer impressed me. His riposte: “You have the rest of your life.”

Truth like that does not come in flavors. Life may be a feeble commodity but it is all around us. While death is certain, it can’t contest life in terms of quantity. Compare one moment of death against a multi-googolplex of life moments. If that weren’t enough, each moment of life is pregnant with the next moment of life; something even the confidence of death cannot match.

Each of us has the rest of our lives to live out. We may not know the term of years but we do know that life fills and feeds us, irks and rips at us; life urges and claims us. It’s the best argument I can think of to do life right and well.

It’s also a reason to live healthy and strong.

These thoughts occurred to me on the treadmill Saturday as I was listening to The Blind Boys of Alabama; Higher Ground. It is such a marvelous recording that I didn’t know I was moved until the tears were landing on the belt. You may remember this group as the one that sang the lyrics of Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. Amazing Grace is so familiar both as a Baptist anthem and as piped for funerals of fallen firefighters. In the Blind Boys reformulation, the lyrics are reborn as the hope John Newton clutched so fervently trying to clear his soul’s stain. He clung to the claim that only Grace could relieve his personal participation in the slave trade. Grace is a life experience.

In the instant album, they do a heart-wrenching call and response version of Precious Lord. This is Thomas A. Dorsey’s struggle late in his life. Dorsey knows it’s late. He asks for a hand to pay out his terminal moments on his feet and alive.

Much Love,

Poppy

The Deadly Number Three

2008-03-24T21:05:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

This last week was quite remarkable and, in many ways, agreeable. Last week gave me an opportunity to try some experiments. Never mind why the time was right for these experiments. Suffice to say that the stars figured to align, you know, the way stars align and then got aligned in that star-aligning thing they do.

The first experiment sounds a little stupid. Check that. The first experiment was a lot stupid. Someone once said that the way to find out what weight is or how much weight you lost can be easily demonstrated at the Wal-Mart. So I decided to try it. Wal-Mart doesn’t package their dumbbells. One can pick up a dumbbell and walk around with it, feels its heft and get a feel for its effect. The idea is to first determine how much weight you mean to lose – say twenty pounds – go to Wal-Mart and pick up two ten pound dumbbells. That’s one in each hand. Then walk around and do your usual shopping for an hour or so with these dumbbells held tightly in your fists.

The effect is not to demonstrate what its like to lug twenty pounds. Rather, the effect is to simulate the stress that extra weight has on your body. The effect is striking and, I’ll wager, undoable by most of us obeasts. If you had forty pounds to lose, you wouldn’t get to the fishing aisle from the weight lifting aisle.

You will soon appreciate that losing twenty pounds is a significant undertaking. There’s no way it can be easy. The effort will be substantial and probably frustrating.

The flip side is that you will soon learn that losing that twenty pounds is likely to contribute substantially to your well-being. There will be that much less stress on your heart, your circulatory system, your joints, your back and your lungs.

I was the moron – excuse me: educably mentally retarded -- who walked around Wal-Mart for and hour with 15 pounds dangling from each arm. Aside from the arm pain that I discounted because we usually carry our weight on our bellies and legs, I was winded, full-body achy and barely able to return the dumbbells to their shelf. It was quite an experience – one that I recommend for anyone who wants to guess what the cost of obesity can be. To be rid of those thirty pounds became, for sixty minutes at least, an intense and profound wish.

Another experiment was made possible these last few days. On Friday I lost my moorings. There was no way I could seem to get enough food down me. The day proceeded well enough with healthful meals and the usual exercise regime. Then 6:00 pm stuck and I was ravenous. We’re talkin’ stupendous, breathtaking hunger that would not subside. Intellectual awareness was useless. The food shoveling didn’t quit ‘til the car transported me (not bad as flukes go) to the Culvers for a bacon double cheeseburger and a quart of vanilla custard.

The next morning I ordered the number three for breakfast. The number three begins with two fried eggs, hash browns, toast and your choice of breakfast meats. Obviously, I’d gone astray.

After breakfast I was all satiety and disgrace. And, upon cool reflection, realized that if I were to stay on the diet, I’d be obliged to forego food for a fortnight or two. Fortunately, I was granted another cool reflection. I would forego food for a day.

Strangely, it was not unpleasant. There were some moments of withdrawal symptoms, I admit. Out of caution, I monitored my blood pressure and resting heart rate often during the day and went to the gym as usual. The blood pressure readings and the resting heart rate actually went down. I didn’t check blood sugar until the 30-hour fast was over late Sunday afternoon. That was a mistake because I was nearing hypoglycemia. Diabetics shouldn’t do that.

The experiment was instructive, however. I hope I learned that I’m merely addicted to too much food, a condition that can be rectified with a lot less food. The problem has always been that I relapse from the small-meals ideal to the endless-meals atrocity.

Please note: There is nothing in my history to suggest that this knowledge will find its way into practice. One can hope. Is that so wrong?

I made the weigh-in by the way. I’m at 188lbs down 2lbs from last week.

On the treadmill I listened to the 25 or so Harry James Orchestra hits. Many of them featured Frank Sinatra as the boy singer. That and the two-pound loss made my day.

Much Love,

Poppy

omg cto

2008-03-17T21:48:00.001-05:00

Dr Chldrn:

2day i wade 190 tht mens i lst 2 in a wk

2 is gd aamof I wade tht mch a mo ago

wca bcoz im bck on trk i figr ok 4 an om

wmpl whn I saw th nbr becoz was xpcting

mayb 192 btw im sfete

lusm

Poppy

Erin Go Braugh or Freudian Slip? You Pick.

2008-03-15T00:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Children:

Today we will discuss the matter of workout fashion. We see many chic women at gyms. Some of them even work up a sweat. We see many classy men many of whom sweat as a consequence of the stroll from the Escalade. We see those whose clothes are best described as ratty and those who go for punctilious. There is a significant fraction of gym-goers with snooty designer labels and those proudly displaying their preference for the latest Wal-Mart knockoff.

It makes not one whit of difference to your workout. Your outfit does not apprehend your health. Dress is for other matters altogether.

As a matter of fact, dressing can be seen to be in three general categories namely style, fashion and, my personal favorite, haphazard.

Style is that mode of dress calculated to sign on with an exclusive group. Spy someone wearing black lipstick, spiky hair and boots too heavy for stealth and you’ve got a batter for the Goth team. Enthusiasts of a certain persuasion wear tee shirts with exhortations on the relationship of conception to viable life. Gang tats, hats askew, metal-studded wristbands, ten-gallon hats and platform wedgies are sure signs of style and group ID.

Fashion, on the other hand, marks a person as an individual whose appearance is carefully arranged to fit one’s body, coloration and personal manner. A fashionable person wears duds worn by no one else. The fashionable cognoscenti shop in boutiques trafficking in one-of-a-kind items. Fashionable people get up in haute couture to vintage grunge so long as it can’t be found at Target.

The haphazard buy what they can and wear what they’ve got. Most have a general idea that stripes clash with plaid and red hats are grotesque. Trousers should have fewer than three and more than one leg. Sensible shirts button up the front and underwear has a mysterious purpose and is required in the event of a bus mishap. The haphazard trust haberdashers and refuse to understand that they work on commission.

JD Powers and Associates estimates that there are approximately one point seven stylish people and point zero zero three fashionable people per thousand adults. For anyone under the age of eighteen, multiply everything by 632.

Whether you are stylish, fashionable or haphazard is a matter of sublime indifference to me. You can be anything you want. You can look like anything you want. Please be aware, though, that what you wear and how you wear it actually makes a difference. So what if it’s wrong for people to make judgments about people based on their appearance? It’s too bad. It happens.

I know how tough it is for you. It’s hard to try on a new persona without the requisite duds. Maybe you want to see what it feels like to represent gansta rap creds. You’ll need the get up to match; the slouch pants, the baseball cap with the price tag screwed on cockeyed, the affected slouch and pimp roll in Air Jordans, the snarl, the victimhood and, just to complete the package, a syntax with that all-purpose article “yo”.

That stuff costs real money. The Airs alone will set you back two benjamins. I’m just saying: representing requires an investment. Make sure you’ve got the scratch. Walking that walk for a few hours strikes me as expensive at best.

Chasing the Paris Hilton mystique? Good luck with that.

All I want you to do is think about it, whatever it is. Make sure it’s worth the hassle.

Much Love,

Poppy

A Jigger Of Brimstone, Please. Hold The Fire.

2008-03-13T23:19:00.002-05:00

Dear Children:

I’ve got four terrific Poppy Pounds posts in the works: Each one is more inspired than the next. These are deep writings worthy of an ancient scriptorium yet chock-a-block with sidesplitting humor and weighty insight.

They do lack a point, though. Writing really ought to have a point. Pointless prose on solemn topics is a skill I learned at the knee of my father. Dad was a Minister of The Gospel who never seemed to rally a reason for standing behind a pulpit. Unexamined, his sermons had a poetic mystery to them that most folks found uplifting just long enough to be permanently confounded.

It was an off-putting experience, as a teenager, to be charged with explicating a sermon that failed to tincture the ether upon pronouncement. It was only natural, I suppose, for “pew frogs” as I called them at the time, to think that I might have some notion of what lurked in the sluices and pleats of Papa’s breast. My adolescent head would bob or shake as the moment seemed to suggest, but I had no more idea about the theological payoff than did the earnest parishioners. By this time, as Grace would have it, his sermons were infrequent or outside my hearing. Nevertheless, the experience remains vivid and enduringly cheerless.

Before you get the idea that I have some contempt for preachers, I hasten to differ. A sermon is a burdensome thing. Church is important. Worship is important. Proclamation of The Gospel is important. As a matter of fact, in terms of the whole of the church experience, including Deaconate meetings, preaching is, at once, monumentally taxing and a single soul’s shared tenuous tether to the Almighty. It’s an awesome responsibility.

I’m just saying that my dad never seemed to find firm purchase on a reason for anyone to listen.

And, we have a reason why these posts have lost some of their urgency. I want there to be a point to it all. That’s what I’m searching for; grasping for … and, I’m willing to dangle a participle along the way to achieve it.

One more thing: I promised to tell you how I did on my trip. You’ll recall that traveling has always been an excuse to eat way too much and exercise way too little. I’m here to report a victory of sorts.

I did not gain any weight. I exercised (after a fashion) every day. I ate many rich and expensive meals. I got home weighing exactly the same.

I bet there’s a point to be found somewhere.

Much Love,

Poppy

Anger Challengement

2008-03-07T08:24:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

Complex problems are the least likely problems resolved. We understand the issue intuitively. Problems resist solutions when they have both moral and legal dimensions or, worse yet, competing moral dimensions.

For instance, we are often faced with the opportunity to hit back when we are wronged. Hitting back is a deeply satisfying thing to do. We are wronged. We are angry. Repaying in kind is the first thing that pops into our minds. We hit back whether it is with words or fists or one of the sneakier forms of revenge. The fight usually escalates.

The fact is that we don’t intend to hurt someone else even if we start it. One of us was merely looking for some advantage in play or competition. The wronger had only the purest of motives and the wrongee had only the purest of cause for retaliation. After that, we lose the thread of the original issue and life gets complicated.

It is the unresolved simple problems that rapidly morph and metastasize into knotty, cancerous problems. Simple problems usually have simple solutions.

Oh boy. Here comes the hard part: We must think. We must think sooner. We must think creatively. We must think simply. We must think beyond the hot moment.

Don’t react until you have thought through these questions:

What is my part in this mess? Discount your action by the amount of culpability you share. Remember that you were present at the offense. Make sure you are truly aggrieved. Turnabout is usually fair play.

Is my response proportional? Nobody ever wins unless the punishment fits the crime. Don’t be the escalator. People, even people we don’t like, are often rational. Rational people recognize when responses are proportional.

What happens next? Reactions must contribute to solutions.

Can I handle the next step? It makes little sense to yank the chain of someone who will only yank back harder and more permanently. If you must take some bruises for your reaction, make sure those bruises point to a solution.

What lesson will be drawn from my reaction? Pure appeasement for the sake of delaying reckoning for another day seldom works. Another day will surely come and you’ll be obliged to start the process over. Make sure the other party is clear about your intentions.

Does my reaction hurt me more than her? If, for instance, you decide not to return to the playground because a rotten kid is there, you remain injured and angry. A small problem gets unresolved and complicated.

Have I considered forgiveness?

You ask: “Very interesting Poppy. What does this have to do with fitness?” Good question. The answer is “maybe everything”.

Many will tell you that they over eat or over vedge because of some offense in their childhood. One often hears that we eat to find love or acceptance. I know I smoked cigarettes for twenty years because it disappointed my father. Let’s see if I taught him a lesson.

My reaction was not proportional, I didn’t think it through, it sent the wrong message and it hurt me more than it hurt Dad. Nothing good was achieved. The offense went unrequited. No problems got solved. He died before we could solve the problem. Life got complicated.

Let’s acknowledge that our lifestyle may directly result of an emotional transgression on the part of someone else. If that is so let’s fix it.

Confront the perp. Break down complexity into bite-sized, simple problems. Settle on a sensible course of action that releases your anger. Move on.

There will be plenty of opportunity for you to unravel problems like this as life proceeds. Learn to do it well. If your reaction leaves you frustrated, you have chosen the wrong reaction. Go back, please. Keep going back. Experiment with what works for you. I promise there will be an abundance of slights, transgressions and outright crimes going forward. If you get enough practice finding solutions, you’ll be a stronger, happier person.

No ipod today. Last night I attended a concert where Freda Payne paid tribute to Ella Fitzgerald. The setting, the music and the company combined to make it a wonderful evening.

Much Love,

Poppy

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

2008-03-04T16:20:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

This week is a grave challenge. I’ll tell you why in a second.

But first, there’s the matter of the weekly weigh-in. Yesterday I weighed 192.0lbs. That’s 2.5lbs slimmer for the week and eight pounds lighter since the blog began four weeks ago. Quite sensibly and quite unusually that loss represents an average loss of two pounds per week. Of course, as we have discussed before, on average everyone has one ovary and one gonad, more or less. Two weeks ago, I reported a total loss of ten pounds. Just to overstate the case: I have lost 12.5lbs pounds and gained 4.5lbs over four weeks.

Last week also saw a bitter reminder about Chinese carryout food. There is nothing better than Chinese carryout. For someone watching his weight closely, though, water retention as a result of the sodium content of the food can add four pounds in the two days it took to finish the leftovers. As good as the Szechwan beef and broccoli was, the weight gain was too spooky. Besides, a man my age ought to be severely restricting salt anyway. It messes with blood pressure. Who needs that?

All that is by way of avoiding a tale about the challenge faced this week. I’m traveling.

Traveling, by itself is no threat to fitness to be sure. Away from home, I lose track of healthful small meals and exercise. What’s worse, travel is an excuse because both nasty fast food and super caloric white tablecloth meals are easy. Simple, small, nutritious meals away from home are difficult. Must we explain that statement? It is self-evident.

But, Poppy, you say, “Just order the salad. You can get the salad at McDonalds as well as Café l’Snob. Be sure to get the lo cal dressing.” Right!

What sort of person turns down the Pheasant Under Glass with Hummingbird Tongue Sauce in favor of grass, shoots and leaves? Don’t answer, “vegans”. They are .000000001 of the population and are tiresome at best. The rest of us are ordained to struggle.

Let me suggest a small change in travel food: Order anything you want. Eat a third of what comes on the plate. Eat half. Eat a lot less of it. My experience is that it is easier to train yourself to eat less than it is to train yourself to eat twigs and weeds. Maybe you’ll get a headache for the first couple of days. Take some aspirin.

Exercising out of town is sort of the same: Exercise when you can as much as you can. Today, I took a walk on the beach. It didn’t match my gym workout but it was exercise.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Much Love,

Poppy

Heinous, Odious and Sucky

2008-02-25T16:02:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

The chance that this post will be, like, super boring and totally grotesque is for sure. See, the last few days have been, like way heinous, odious and sucky. I told you about the cold weather and the scandalous slow way my body reacted. In my entire life, I’ve never felt such a stupid, stupid feeling. So, I like ate a bunch of stuff for like, four whole days, didn’t even go to the gym or nothing. I just vegged and sat around.

Now I’m, like, super super fat and waddling everywhere and stuff. Whatever…

So, I finally got back to the gym today and (you know what?) I was up, like four and a half pounds from last week. How is that even possible, man? What does it even mean? I’ll tell you what it means: It means that I ate, like, a bajillion too many calories, right. Culvers makes this totally rad custard soft serve that is to die for. They’ve got vanilla and chocolate and loads of other flavors like peppermint swirl and stuff. You can also get it mixed up with candy bars that are crushed and such.

Don’t you dare say I’m starting over because I am not starting over. I am not starting over one little bit. It’s just a bump in the road of life and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Tomorrow is another day because yesterday’s gone. Yeah. Yesterday’s gone.

Besides, I was like bummed when I got to the gym and the ipod wasn’t putting out. I had to watch daytime TV on four plasma screens … we had ESPN, FOX News, The Price Is Right and CMT. It was nauseous, girl.

On ESPN was like endless Roger Clemens working out with some dork in his like humongous home gym. There was also a guy setting the forty-meter dash record, whatever that is. We saw that lots and lots. There were also tons and tons of Hooters commercials between tons and tons of shaving commercials. I’d like to hurl.

I had to read the crawl on FOX too. Get this … Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama are neck and neck. She’s the wife of the president in Washington and he’s this Arab guy from Kenyi, Hawaii. Why they want to neck on national television whizzes right by me. Geez.

The Price Is Right creeped me out. There were people on stage jumping and clapping or being sad because the price was right or the price wasn’t right. They should get a life or maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend or something.

Country Music Television got a laugh out of the old guy on the elliptical trainer next to me. He said Merle Haggard was finally aging into his name. Funny, I think. Anyway, he had me guess what the song was about when I could only see the video. In the whole hour I never guessed right once. I remember a girl dancing in prison, it was raining in this dude’s house and a total bottle blonde couldn’t stop crying. She had to stop, though because she was so, like, totally broken up. The old guy said she was crying because the dude in the beard puked his beer.

What’s so hard about getting MTV or VH1 anyway? Maybe they just get basic cable. That is so 20th century, I’m thinking.

Much Love,

Poppy

Cold Snap Flap

2008-02-21T16:27:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

First the excuse; then we’ll discuss whether its any good.

It’s been powerful cold lately. The plains are sitting in an infuriating Artic Dome that puzzles and woes. It has sluiced away all my energy and left me panting and adrift: a ruthless chill of the sort I have never experienced. Yesterday it was minus 17F. Accounting for the wind, it was minus 40F.

It wasn’t so cold I couldn’t walk a block and a half to the Hamburger Inn (since 1931) home of the Egg Burger (since 1936) to order the Thunder Burger (grilled onions, jalapenos and ‘shrooms) topped with provolone. It was cold enough to muse that the Thunder Burger may be named for The Thunder Sisters famous in these precincts for correcting male companions with a rolling pin. It wasn’t so cold I couldn’t walk slightly farther to Skellys (since 1998) for fish and chips. Both dishes come with crispy seasoned fries and considerable comfort. It wasn’t so cold I couldn’t meet buddies for coffee and deliver stuff to the church for an upcoming rummage sale. It was, however, sufficiently harsh to thwart a three-block trudge to the gym.

That was yesterday. Today it has warmed to a balmy plus13F and still the only thing that gets me out of the house is food.

Do you see what I’m faced with over here? The question isn’t rhetorical; you can tell by the punctuation. Can you guess?

Me neither.

Taken in the context of history, we may not be experiencing anything unusual. Winter is known for its cold. I’m known for squirrelly tangents and poorly lit emotional hallways. The two should slot-A-tab-B nicely. This feels ominous, though.

Nevertheless, I’m open to the possibilities of tomorrow and a new day just behind the curtain of night.

Much Love,

Poppy

To Toledo And Back In One Day

2008-02-20T07:09:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

People often come up to me and say, “Poppy, when is the best time to weigh myself?” My answer is always the same: “What do you want the scale to tell you?”

Personally, I can’t pass a scale. There’s my new gee-whiz body composition monitor occupying a place of honor in the upstairs bath, the work-a-day digital guy in the downstairs can and the mighty Toledo at the gym. Those are the ones I use most often.

Scales often take a little time to warm up. As such, I recommend stepping on and off a few times. Reckon an average or pick the best result. It can’t hurt.

I weigh myself as often as mental health permits but I have only one official weight for the day. That reading is at the gym after a workout that included heavy perspiration and heavy respiration. It is also after a shower and before deodorant. It’s a harmless conceit because it’s taken the same time every day. Weigh yourself in a disciplined way.

People also come up to me and ask, “Poppy, my scale has been mocking me. Should I replace it?” By all means: If your scale is not telling you what you want to hear, you are duty-bound to replace it.

One of the great fallacies in weight loss is that scales deal in brutal honesty. They most certainly do not. Knowing pounds avoirdupois is of limited utility. Listen to what your scale is saying.

If you hear: One at a time, please; Yep, those are your mother’s thighs; Someone has been hitting the cashews again; That’s apple FRITTER not APPLE fritter or Nobody loves a Fat Ass you own a malevolent scale. It means you harm. Send it to Perdition.

Scales that traffic in non-judgmental, supportive and uplifting truth are the kind you want. They say things like: I know life has been stressful lately; We’ll pass on that large strawberry pineapple milkshake next time; Somebody is mighty proud and Let’s think about alternatives. These scales, strangely enough, are not the spendy ones. They look like all the others and sport the same integers. One does need to scope them out, though. Hold one up to your ear and listen for signs of transcendence or despair. Pick the one that helps. Leave the hurtful ones for the skinny people.

I finished listening to Johnny Cash: American Recordings. It was worth the effort. Today I’m looking forward to Andrea Bocelli: Sacred Arias. There’s this guy at the gym that asked about my iPod and was interested in how it worked. It turns out we share an affection for Rosemary Clooney. It was my pleasure to set his feet upon a right path of MP3.

Much Love,

Poppy

Fat Chance

2008-02-18T15:00:00.001-06:00

Dear Children:

One of the fun things about being a kid is the inverse proportion of fairness we feel as toddlers than we do as tweens. The younger the child the better developed her sense of fairness. The older she becomes, the less likely she is to expect fairness. You’ll soon notice that older adults have no expectation of fairness.

As we mature (rightly or wrongly) we depend more on an assessment of the factual, quantifiable and demonstrable. Consider how disputes are resolved. We go see the judge. The judge has an obligation to follow laws that have some element of fairness. Still, the law may not be fair to one of the parties in favor of a greater and more socially acceptable fairness to the other party. Even if the judge follows the law diligently, the law may not be precisely on point to the particular case. In that event, the judge must use judgment. The whole idea is to produce an outcome. That outcome, called a verdict, is expected to settle the instant dispute and all others like it. It’s much more complicated than I’ve outlined but you get the idea.

Laws are for the purpose of controlling behavior and trials are supposed to refine law by producing a clear winner and a clear loser. In the end, someone is to blame. We like that. Even if we don’t like the outcome, knowing whom to blame is somehow comforting.

The rest of life is not so simple. There are some aspects of life that lend themselves neither to fairness nor to adjudication. Disease is one example. Some people are clearly more talented or better looking than most. Some people will not obey the rules. There are many examples.

Nowhere is there such unfairness as in our genetic makeup. Most of what we are physically, mentally and spiritually come from our parents. Our outlook, our resemblances and our capabilities come directly from the families into which we were born. In no case can we say we deserved to be born a particular way. This is stunningly true when it comes to the question of obesity.

A recent British study has concluded that genetic, birth order and family values factors determine 77% of our predisposition to obesity. Clearly, if I’m fat I can lay the blame squarely at the feet of my parents and family of origin. Lots of the journalists who reported the story agreed. Seventy-seven percent is quite overwhelming and, in a close call, lots of judges would say that it swamps other factors completely.

Don’t be taken in. You see, we have not yet accounted for the remaining 13%. Consider: What if I could guarantee 13% fewer Dodge Ball hits? Do you know that the difference in the first place finisher and the last place finisher in individual sporting events is far less than 13%? A 13% advantage can be overwhelming too. A six-stroke advantage at the end of a 72 hole golf tournament can be less than that.

Play fair. Fight fair. Be fair. While you’re at it, take great care in assigning blame. I’ve learned that obesity is 77% hereditary but we need to think of it like allergies and double-jointedness: as an unevenly distributed biological predisposition. It’s just more of a struggle for some than it is for others.

I’ve been listening to The Commitments recently on the iPod. It’s Soul music sung by a group ostensibly from Barrytown a slum in north Dublin, Ireland in the 1980’s. There are just one or two albums because the group was formed for the purpose of making a movie. That and The Blues Brothers movie soundtrack present an interesting introduction to Soul.

Much Love,

Poppy

Shabbat Shalom

2008-02-16T17:06:00.004-06:00

Dear Children:

Another day of rest comes just in time. It’s always been a matter of mild interest to me that the version of the Ten Commandments that appears in the 20th chapter of Exodus spends a lot of words on just two of those commandments. The first is the proscription of idols and the second is about the Sabbath Day. In says in part, “Six days shalt ye labour and do all thy work: …”. Six days is about right. Five is too few to really say you worked. And, not to put too fine a point on it, two rest days seems excessive.

This is also the day I report my weight (This is being written on Saturday so as not to do violence to The Sabbath). On Saturday I weighed 190lbs. That’s a loss of 5.5lbs. Last Sunday, you’ll recall, I said this sort of weight loss isn’t sustainable. I still believe that to be true but I’ll take whatever I can get. In this case, I’ve lost 10lbs. in two weeks. Still, I’ve been here before many times. Around 180lbs. there is a wall. I’ll need to lose another ten to face that test.

This is also stats day. Tell me what you make of this, please. You will recall the treadmill is set to run for one hour at about four miles per hour. The machine is responsible to adjust the incline to achieve a target heart rate of 120 beats per minute. That is 77% percent of the maximum for a man my age. The hour is then expanded by a three-minute warm-up and a five-minute cool-down. Sometimes the machine reaches level (0.0 incline) when my heart rate is elevated. The machine asks me to slow down the belt until the heart goes down to 120 bpm. The machine keeps track of the time, the distance covered and calories consumed. Got it? Here’s what happened over the previous six days while on the treadmill for sixty-eight minutes each day:

Monday 3.90 miles; 486.3 calories; 124.69 ca/mile or 7.15 ca/min.
Tuesday 4.45 miles; 533.5 calories; 119.89 ca/mile or 7.85 ca/min.
Wednesday 3.60 miles; 313.0 calories; 86.94 ca/mile or 4.60 ca/min.
Thursday 4.25 miles; 530.8 calories; 124.89 ca/mile or 7.81 ca/min.
Friday 4.25 miles; 436.5 calories; 100.35 ca/mile or 6.42 ca/min.
Saturday 4.46 miles; 420.2 calories; 94.22 ca/mile or 6.18 ca/min.

How do we account for the differences among the days? The treadmill settings did not change. Are we different physically on different days? Do the factors that control mood also control our physicality? How much sleep did you get the night before? Are you aggravated, elated or sad? What’s the weather like? Is there an iPod factor? Did you have any caffeine or protein or carbohydrates for breakfast? What were the proportions?

There are too many variables to parse. The best we can do is take note of the constituent details of our lives and strive to harness the positive ones and constrain the negative ones. That’s big talk. We’ll see.

On the iPod today were selections from a four-CD set of Johnny Cash called American Recordings. Mostly, the theme is manhood. Girls may listen too.

Much Love,

Poppy

Average What You Say, Mean What You Normal

2008-02-15T16:18:00.002-06:00

Dear Children:

There are some powerful arithmetic terms that we use quite casually and to our peril.

Average means the result obtained by adding several quantities together and then dividing this total by the number of quantities. When you get to sixth grade, all will be revealed. In everyday parlance, to be average is to look and act like everybody else.

Normal is used to denote conformity to a standard or range of standards that marks us as one of a desired group. Normal people are those found in the fat part of the bell curve of people that live approximate to us. Normal people in Chad do not look or act like normal people in Norway.

Mean is another arithmetic term used to find a point that is equally distant from two extremes or poles. Snooty people are fond of asking whether you are referring to a distributive or statistical mean. Ignore these people

Nobody is average. Most of us are normal inside tightly defined and typically suspicious criteria.

For our purposes let us not use these terms when referring to people. It’s simply not useful. More often it’s dangerous and hurtful. I’ll tell you why.

I love professional basketball. Professional basketball players conform to a highly desirable group. None of them is normal despite this conformity. To be sure, they are all freakishly able athletes who earn their living playing basketball but, beyond that, there are no things that can be said about an individual professional basketball player that is true of all the others or even a few of the others. Kobe Bryant, like all NBA players has excellent cardiovascular health. His resting heart rate is 35 beats per minute, well to the left on any NBA beats per minute bell curve. Shaquille O’Neal is both really, really tall and really, really heavy. Shaquille O’Neal bears no resemblance whatever to Yao Ming. These three are used for illustrative purposes because no NBA General Manager says to his Director of Player Personnel, “Get me an average player, please”.

Just so, you should be suspicious of attempts to categorize yourself. The one thing you have in common is one grandfather. That is a good thing for me but it doesn’t offer much currency generally. No bank in the world will lend money on such thin collateral. It sure couldn’t get you elected President of the republic.

You are all smart in different ways. You are all good looking in different ways. Each of you will make a way in the world that is different.

More to the point please do not make life decisions based on “average” or “normal” criteria. Our job is to discover the thing for which God has designed us. There is a delightful turn of phrase in the 10th chapter of Job where the bewildered servant nevertheless acknowledges: “Thou didst clothe me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. Thou hast granted me life and steadfast love; and thy care has preserved my spirit.”

I hope that applies to fitness as well. Here the averages and the norms and popular wisdom serve only as a hint to what comes next. Each of us was uniquely knit. The extent to which we accept that fact proceeds to informs what’s best for us individually.

On the iPod today was the musical comedy Chicago and the soundtrack from O Brother Where Art Thou. Both have astonishing music and catchy lyrics. The stories they tell are quite different. The former is cynical and coarse and advises we "Go to hell in a fast car" while the latter is all about the "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and the hope of heaven.

Much Love,

Poppy

What's In Your Pocket; Change?

2008-02-12T23:44:00.004-06:00

Dear Kids:

Last night I ate everything. I do not exaggerate. After 10:00 pm, I consumed two pork chops, about a half-pound of previously frozen corn with blue cheese dressing, four double-handfuls of wavy potato chips and one toasted Breadsmith Russian Rye Dinner Roll with butter.

That after-ten thing is significant. That’s when real bonus eating takes place. What’s up with that?

There are a couple things that seem true. When I’m getting enough sleep, it doesn’t happen. And, when my life is otherwise regular and predictable, it doesn’t happen.

Simple, you say. Why not cultivate regular habits and get enough sleep? These truths didn’t occur to me a moment ago. I’ve known about them since the Second Nixon Administration. The former appears to be contrary to my character and the latter appears to be contrary to my temperament.

The question is: How grievously may I hate the symptoms when the cause is so dear? If we are wedded to our partiality, we needn’t quibble over the practical upshot.

Am I missing something? I'm saying we are obliged to accept those things that necessarily follow from what is entrenched. Could we change it anyway? If we could make a change, is it worth the struggle?

It’s something to think about.

While you’re at it, think about what that has to do with Aretha Franklin. I think about her a lot. She's got it all including a beautiful and expressive voice, enviable phrasing and passionate Gospel sensibilities. I’ve loved every minute listening to her recordings. I even saw her up-close once galumphing down Halsted Street. Her love songs were on the ipod today.

Just don’t take her love song lyrics too seriously. The lyrics come in two categories:

I love you and here’s why, plus

There’s nothing wrong with me but if you change just one little thing all will be well.

The first is okay.

The second category is trouble. As described above, as individuals we don’t change easily. Relationships are exponentially more difficult. It's not just an issue of one party’s culpability, it’s that the other party is blameless.

Don’t believe it. In every relationship, there are at least two of you. In fact, two is the irreducible number that people come in. Pair is normative. So, not only is it unlikely someone else will change but, when a relationship goes south, there’s plenty of blame to share. First look to the contribution you make to any enterprise. After that, it’s okay to scrutinize the other.

Much Love,

Poppy

Glossary And Shinery

2008-02-11T16:42:00.000-06:00

Dear Ryan:

You are last because you are the youngest. Of course, that would be a pain for a lesser personage than you. You are the strong, silent type -- the one in charge -- the potentate who has merely to lift a pinky to command attention and respect. I always picture you as the calm, steady, unmoved gibraltarian in the hubbub. It is a quality that will serve you well in your life as the boss.

So, just for you, is some useful information to understand what’s going on in the gym.

LATS BIS PECS ABS GLUTES DELTS QUADS TRAPS HAMMIES

You’d think people who pump all that iron could manage the weight of a whole term in their mouths. ‘Tain’t so. These are the first muscles one trains as part of a strengthening program. LATISSIMUS DORSI is the large, fan-shaped back muscle that extends from your middle back, along the spine to the hip and up to the armpit, BICEPS are the muscles on the front of the arm between the elbow and shoulder (you figure out what Tris are), PECTORAL muscles are the thick, fan-shaped muscle group situated at the upper and forepart of the chest, ABDOMINALS are the tummy muscles that so fascinate Hip Hop artists and their groupies, GLUTEUS muscles are the largest (it figures) muscles in your body...your butt muscles, DELTOIDS are shoulder muscles that come in three parts or “heads”; front, medial (side) and rear, QUADRICEPS are the four muscles on the front of the thigh between the knee and the hip joint, Trapezius muscles run from neck to shoulders and down back along the spine and (my personal favorite) the HAMSTRING, is the muscle on the back of the legs from glutes to knees.

I believe you are old enough to know what guns and wheels are.

Hardbodies are those who have trained for an extended period with some success. These folks are also ripped, buff, cut, striated, shredded, jacked and muscleheaded.

Backfat refers to the fat on your upper back in your lat area.

An FSQ is an abbreviation for front squat. Don’t ask.

Burn is the uncomfortable sensation, produced by the buildup of lactic acid and other metabolites, felt in the muscle being worked. Some actress popularized the phrase “feel the burn”. Don’t bother.

Calorie is short for kilocalorie or the amount of heat required to raise 1 kg of water 1º Centigrade. It is a unit of energy.

Clean and Jerk: A lift calling for the weight to be raised from floor to overhead in two movements.

Clean and Snatch: A lift where the weight is raised from floor to overhead at arms' length in one motion.

Test question: What is a Clean?

A Muscle Spasm is a sudden, involuntary contraction of a muscle or muscle group that hurts like the very devil.

Congestive Heart Failure is the inability of the heart muscle to pump the blood at a life-sustaining rate -- just north of dead.

On the iPod today was a musical called Little Shop of Horrors. The music is terrific. The story is about appeasement of an oppressor and how difficult it is to reverse oppression once we empower it.

Much Love,

Poppy

LIFO To FUPA

2008-02-10T13:54:00.000-06:00

Dear Cynthia:

This is a day of rest. As such, I’m going to “give it a rest” today. Things have gotten a little sententious of late anyway. Plus, here you are the Human Spark Plug -- the kid with all the energy and dazzle. Sorry.

So lets get historical to see what the raw numbers are and determine if they have anything to do with anything.

The pros tell us that fitness, including weight loss, is a function of both diet and exercise working in tandem. Diet comes in two forms, less food and less fattening food. Similarly, there are two basic kinds of exercise, cardiovascular and strength training. We ought to be able to tell if, applied assiduously, we can see them work.

Two things are for sure: 1.) If I’m slacking off exercise, I’m eating like a pig and 2.) Exercise both suppresses appetite and speeds up metabolism.

Strength training serves to reshape the body. In my case, I had pretty good legs but poor upper-body strength. For all my sins and miss-steps of the past year, both upper-body contour and strength have improved. Slacking off for short periods doesn’t seem to have much effect on strength.

Cardiovascular exercise, as its name describes, is all about heart, lungs and circulation.

There’s a big caveat in all this: Very few could exercise himself or herself slim. The most vigorous exercise only burns 700 or so kilocalories per hour. More sensibly, it takes about an hour on the treadmill for every Big Mac. One pound of fat is the equivalent of 4,200 kilocalories. One half pound lost will require +/- four hours at that pace.

That said, here’s what happened over the last year:

2/12/07 to 3/9/07 193.0lbs to 186.0lbs
Slack
4/16/07 to 4/21/07 191.5lbs to 186.5lbs
Slack
8/15/07 to 11/21/07 196.0lbs to179.5lbs
Slack
12/3/07 to 12/18/07 182.0lbs to 180.0lbs
Slack
12/31/07 to 1/11/08 194.5lbs to 188.5lbs
Slack
1/30/08/ 200lbs
Slack
2/3/08 Blog begins
2/4/08 to 2/10/08 200lbs to 195.5lbs

I think this proves that there is a direct link between exercise and weight loss/gain even though the calories burned through exercise are not equivalent. We can surmise that a calorie consumed in the absence of exercise is more likely to find it’s way to the waist.

Still, how about the 4.5lbs lost last week? While I’m puffed up with pride, it’s not necessarily a sustainable pace. It may not be healthy to maintain such a pace. And, I think the principle of LIFO (last in first out) applies. The fat we piled on most recently is the fat that is consumed soonest. The most stubborn fat has been around the longest and is in the FUPA (you figure in out): belly fat. It is both genetic and intractable. Obviously, it’s a problem better saved for later.

This morning opened with a diner breakfast of two eggs any style, lightly buttered wheat toast, crisp golden hash browns and a steaming cup of our special blend coffee with sweet cream – so wrong on so many levels. Lunch will consist of phlogiston and political promises. Just to be sure, dinner will be a covered dish: Rice Cake Surprise.

Tomorrow look for words I learned at the gym.

Much Love,

Poppy

Waist Not, Want Not

2008-02-09T17:26:00.000-06:00

Dear Reid:

I just saw the movie of you riding your bike without the training wheels. We’re talking way cool. That’s just the way you are: always the source of action and scoot. When you grow up, you will either be the world’s tallest Leprechaun or the world’s shortest Fomorian. Either way, you are certain to have an impact.

I need your advice on something. Do you think there’s such a thing as magic pants?

Here’s some background:

When I weigh 195 pounds or so, like now, my pants need a thirty-eight-inch waist. When I weigh 180 pounds, the waist needs to be thirty-seven inches. At the Target, you can’t buy thirty-seven-inch pants. That’s the way it is. The choices are 38 or 36. Custom sizes are available at any haberdashers but the price isn’t justifiable for someone certain of losing weight. Get it?

The last time I weighed 180 pounds just before Thanksgiving, I puzzled over this problem. The solution, of course, was to replace the whole wardrobe of 38-inchers with 36-inchers. After all, it would only be a matter of days – a week at the most – ‘til the pants fit perfectly. Do you see what’s happening? I was about to imbue these Target trousers with magical powers. I didn’t express it this way, of course. The effect was the same. These pants had totemic prowess sufficient to ward off belly fat.

It didn’t work, as you know. The pants and their false promise were thwarted. It was a matter of deep disappointment. It put me in a funk. Don’t get any wild ideas. I’m much too sophisticated to have imagined that there is such a thing as magic. Yet, look what happened. The net effect was to engender a downward spiral.

We do this sort of thing all the time. I hinted at this to Cori last Monday. We should be suspicious of all substitutes for achievement and appeals to dark powers. What I should have done is press on with a program that was working and manage a setback within the parameters of my own powers (whatever they are).

Today I listened to Rosemary Clooney; Songs From The Girl Singer. It was the best.

Tomorrow is a day of rest.

Much Love,

Poppy

Resolution Failure Revealed

2008-02-08T20:45:00.000-06:00

Dear Wesley:

Maybe I told Benjamin a wrong thing. I’m beginning to form an attachment to the ear staples. My appetite has lessoned considerably, the headache is gone and I exaggerated about the smoking thing. Stay tuned. An open mind has been achieved.

I mention this to you particularly because of all my grandchildren, your mind is the most uncluttered; uncluttered by prejudice and secret agendas. In fact, I have never met anyone with such a pure inner life. I wish I could peer inside just to see how it is done. Alas, no one can be inside the mind of another. As such this disquisition may be completely wrong. Forget that. Humor me. Try it on for a while to see if there is any truth to what is suggested.

We don’t fully appreciate the “why” of our actions. To some that might be recognition of motive; to others it might mean a declaration of intent; a different group might express it as a response to anxiety. Lets just say that each of us does things for good and sufficient reasons yet don’t particularly need to express or even know the reasons.

That, I think, is the explanation for New Year’s Resolution failure. We’re not in touch with what possessed us to make that resolution or have an inkling of the practical implication of its fulfillment. If we did know, we probably wouldn’t make much of it at all. We would just do it and not wait for the New Year.

When you hear something like, “I plan to start my diet on Monday”, that poor soul is in for a doomed diet.

So now you know why you’re being burdened with this ponderous inquiry. I want to know why. Why did I get fat in the first place? Assuming there was good reason for it, why make a change? Does my life hold such import that prolonging it satisfies some greater good? Who benefits one way or the other? Why am I blathering on so insistently? Is any of this worth the aggravation?

You tell me.

On the iPod today was Jerry Lee Lewis The Sun Recordings -- all sorts of wonderful country tunes and even some Tin Pan Alley. What a joy.

Tomorrow, look for a post on the value of 36-inch pants.

Much Love,

Poppy

Blubber Technology

2008-02-07T09:18:00.000-06:00

Dear Benjamin:

You are my sojourner. By the time you are 18 months old, you shall have already lived in three states. That’s mighty impressive. I can’t wait for acts two and three.

Did I tell you I got one of those cool body composition monitors for Christmas? A body composition monitor is a snooty name for a scale that weighs one’s body as well as passing a low-level electrical signal up through the body that measures the percentage of body fat, the percentage of body water, total weight of bones and calculates the calories required to maintain one’s present weight.

Who needs that? Nobody. If one can see additional holes on one’s belt to the right of the wear-mark one is making progress in fat reduction. Right? Still, I asked Santa for the monitor because I want to develop my inner geek and cultivate a reputation as someone to be reckoned techno-literate. After all, these monitors need to be programmed.

The monitor now knows that I am 5’7.5” tall and I’m a 63-years-old male that is not an athlete but gets a moderate amount of exercise.

Yesterday morning four hours after my breakfast of twigs and berries… It said I weigh 197.6lbs, my percentage of body fat is 29.2, my body water is 49.6%, my bones weigh 7lbs. and it takes 3,305 kilocalories to run a physique like that.

Okay. How much does my fat weigh? My fat weighs 57.5992lbs. (197.6 X .292 = 57.5992). Fitness experts figure that I’m at the top of the “over fat” category. Eight more tenths of a percentage point and I’m officially by-God obese.* To get into the healthy category, my body fat percentage should be between 15 and 25. Twenty percent would be best. My fat needs to weigh a lot less.

But wait. As I proceed with strength training, I’ll add additional lean weight called “muscle mass” so I can’t tell you how much my fat should weigh when I reach the 20% goal.

The wild card in all this is the Total Body Water Percentage. You’ll recall that my number is 49.6%. This number fluctuates wildly during the day. Nonetheless, this number is at the bottom of the normal scale. Men should have a number between 50 and 65 according to my monitor’s manual. I don’t know anything about what my hydration should be and what my low number means. I do know that as this number rises, the fat percentage should lower. Huh?

One more thing …

On Super Tuesday I marched into an acupuncture storefront at 11:22 am and told Rhonda to put staples in my ears. I had a coupon for $10 off. The coupon was included with their newspaper ad that promised that the staples would not only cause me to eat less but would cure my smoking habit, relieve stress and eliminate headaches.

The staples were installed seconds later. After that, my appetite was ravenous, I had a four-hour headache, I was stressed out, I’m $60 poorer and I thought about taking up cigarettes again after 26 years.

Maybe it’ll work out but, for now, there is nothing but shame.

Much Love,

Poppy

* According to the manual, “obese” in German is “fettleibig”.

Are Senior Citizens Selfish?

2008-02-06T18:52:00.000-06:00

Dear Halle:

Someone like you who is a born puzzle solver, will get a kick out of this one: A group of researchers in the Netherlands, after considerable study and no end of tax payer’s guilders, came to the obvious conclusion that fat people are less of a burden on the Dutch medical system than fit people.

It seems that fat people die sooner than fit people. And, because older and fitter people consume the largest fraction of their medical services in the last few years of their lives, fine fettle runs up the cost of universal health care in the Low Countries.

Here’s the puzzle: Do we encourage obesity to save money on health care or pony up the dough to protect both the fit and the fat? What about cigarette smokers? They die sooner than non-smokers. Why not encourage smoking as a cost-cutting measure? What about buying everyone a motorcycle and ban helmet use? What do you say? Lets get rid of seat belts.

I know which you would choose. You would rather spend money to encourage the fat to get old and fit. Me too. Still, it’s an interesting question in an abstract, public policy sort of way.

It’s the same question each of us faces every day. What’s better? There must be some direct correlation of time we spend on good things for our bodies as against time we spend on rather more pleasurable activities like dessert? Could the same be true of our minds? Is there a direct correlation of time spent at our studies and time in front of the TV?

At bottom, each of us gets a term of years. We can never know how many years we get until it’s too late. That’s part of the fun.

So, how would you rather spend your life? Before you answer, though, ask yourself if what you choose has public policy implications.

I lost half a pound today. The iPod blessed me with three Mark Twain short stories. Tomorrow look for a post about a cute new scale and my recent piercing.

Love,

Poppy

Fat Tuesday

2008-02-05T13:22:00.000-06:00

Dear Tony,

Every time I think of you, that smile lights up the dimmest shelf in my heart. Doubtless that heart-breaking countenance of yours will take you places for which we mere upright-walkers are obliged to struggle.

Just so you know; while the obverse of that coin may not be as obvious to you, it is painfully obvious for the rest of us. Please. I don’t want you to change; far from it. But know that while you are skipping along a flower-strewn path lined with mortals anxious to do your bidding, your humble relatives may only sigh and marvel how God’s love is so fervently and excessively applied.

Which leads me to the one and lonely thing I have learned about a pilgrimage to fitness: We may get there but we may not remain. Perseverance is the only virtue to be admired and the only pearl to be prized. See? If we actually get to the point where we can claim to be fit, the only thing to do is persevere in the fitness. And, if that perseverance in fitness leads to longer life, we get to persevere in that fitness ever longer.

My present workout routine is appallingly simple. As anyone will tell you, my idea of perseverance was always an apology for a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I haven’t wanted things to be simple. For me, order was achieved by defeating complexity.

Wrong. Lately, I’ve come to believe that a circumstance of any kind is inherently orderly. Our job is to discover how that circumstance came to be. Circumstances cry out to be accepted and reconciled within a larger context and set of circumstances.

That’s why perseverance is so important generally and important specifically to fitness. Fitness may be the ultimate metaphor for reconciliation. We are obliged to be the best version of what we are – simple, complete and reconciled to the order that is around us; keeping us.

Anyhow, I’m doing an hour of cardiovascular exercise; usually the treadmill set at 3mph and the incline tuned to maintain a heart rate of 120bpm. That’s just shy of 80% of the maximum for my age.

Then there’s a series of Nautilus machines as follows: leg press 165lbs.; multi-triceps 60lbs.; biceps 70lbs.; rowing back 140lbs.; bench press 60lbs.; incline press 70lbs. and pullover 100lbs. The forgoing is done two times with 20 repetitions each. Then I do 30 repetitions times two of both the lower back and the abdominal machines at 110lbs.

That routine gets me about halfway through the Gospel discography of Elvis Presley.

Much Love,

Poppy

Twenty-Four Hour Bug

2008-02-04T13:39:00.000-06:00

Dear Cori:

Today is the first day of my public quest for fitness. As you can see from yesterday's post, I have had a few periods of sensible eating and vigorous exercise that have resulted in weight loss and a start toward cardiovascular health. Those periods were always followed by phases of weight gain and deteriorating health. It is my hope that if, this time, I share my goals with you, the other grandchildren and the rest of the world, I might summon the strength to make a life-time lifestyle change.

Of course, I want to be slimmer and better looking. More importantly I want to watch you grow up some more. I figure that through a combination of God's grace and my own effort I can see you started on a family and children of your own. Right now, I'm shooting for 30 or so more years -- time for selfish enjoyment of all things Corneille.

The past 24 hours tell a story. Last night I went to a super bowl XLII party. There could not be a more perfect challenge at the buffet. Every nasty food group was represented. You know those smallish over-sweet meatballs? There was gloppy spinach dip in a bread bowl. There were buttery crackers and phony cheese galore. The chicken wing food group was there along with the baked beans with fatback group. And, just for the sake of confusion, there were healthful spears of asparagus wrapped in a ham-like material.

To be fair to our host, there were also hunks of broccoli and cauliflower as well as offerings of celery and radish. Of course, next to these paragons of rectitude was a cauldron of ranch dressing.

And then there was the beer -- German lager; unfiltered wheat; dark stout; premium domestics; imported Mexican and Chinese -- just to name a few; calling and mocking me from their chilly caves and niches.

What to do?

I had a few naked vegetables, one of the asparagus thingies and one generous scoop of those glorious meatballs. I cannot describe how unsatisfying it was. Injury was added upon being persuaded by some smugness of mind not to have any beer. I stared way too long at the frosty mugs. Pornography comes in all forms.

At home there was a small portion of left-over red cabbage and white brat along with a helping of microwaved frozen corn seasoned with lo-cal french dressing. I went to bed in a snit.

This morning saw a new day and a bowl of grape nuts with some fruit out of a formerly frozen bag. There was a cup of coffee laced with a dollop of sugar substitute.

Thus fortified, the gym awaited. More about that tomorrow. The workout routine was satisfied and made palatable by an ipod load of Luciano Pavarotti "World's Best Loved Arias".

I just now weighed myself. I lost weight. The cost was very high.

With Much Love,

Poppy

The Journey Begins Tomorrow

2008-02-03T12:53:00.000-06:00

A year ago I weighed 207 lbs. Today I weigh 207 lbs. Along the way, I have lost 25lbs, 20 lbs and 18 lbs. Thats 58 lbs. I'm 63 years old and stand 5' 7" tall.

I have exercised vigorously for weeks at a time, eaten small meals for weeks at a time, eaten vegetarian for weeks at a time and lost weight.

I have eaten like a pig for weeks at a time and slacked off exercise for weeks at a time. For those periods, I have gained weight.

The thing is: I don't know why I'm enthusiastic about fitness, health and weight loss one week and not another. There must be some mechanism at work.

Anyway, thats the purpose of this blog; to keep up a diary of how I feels each day, assess what it was in my day that suggests a sense of determination, ease or a willingness to slack off.

So, starting tomorrow look for a post late in the day about how I did the previous 24 hours.

These posts are a research tool for me. Still, if they help someone else, so much the better. And, if anyone has a suggestion for me, I want to hear it. Tangentially, there will be a written record for those of you who care to follow my progress