Sick of Politicians

Every day seems to fall further and further into a morass of political sniping, political demagoguery and just plain turning everything into a political calculation of some kind.

Witness the vote in South Dakota to eliminate all abortion, except in case of life threat to the pregnant woman (how magnanimous of them). All done so that they would get sued and could proceed this to the Supreme Court, eventually, in an attempt to overthrow Roe v Wade.

I don't care what your view on abortion is and don't care whether you agree with me or not on it, but this is getting ridiculous - to take something that is so personal to so many people and just turn it into a political calculation to force your views on everyone else.

maybe they will get what Bush is getting now and it will come back to haunt them in some great ironic way - as in reaping what you sow.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about the whole ports brouhaha. I do know that I'm sick of the whole political lot, Democrats and Republicans alike, posturing and pandering to narrow interests rather than working to actually secure us and make our country and the world a better place to live in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/opinion/24fri1.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fEditorials&oref=slogin

Karen and I were sitting having a nice dinner out last night and talking about this, commenting on how removed you can be in one instant, but that life is so out of balance in so much of the world, and as soon as you turn on the radio you cannot escape it.

It feels like there are so many missed opportunities, as well as miscreated situations that I'm starting to seriously look around and think about where in the world one could move and have what might be considered a peaceful, non-intrusive, quiet life.

It's not that I want to disengage from the world, but I am really getting sick of the whining from all sides of the political spectrum. There is just no attempt to find a common space to come to rational decisions about what might be best for the long term health of the world. It's just us vs. them and them are always categorized as evil.

Now, I love Molly Ivins. But even this recent column http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20327
is an illustration of how we all just continue to state the obvious without any real solutions being offered.

Here's what I think - let's just declare that Bush and his cronies are officially irrelevant, wrong and will be out of office eventually and start working on the new agenda for 2008 and beyond. I don't think anything will really happen in the next two years in the runup to the 2008 election (except more bad stuff and more of the same deceit, lying, incompetence and general decline of working people, the middle class and the poor).

I'll start thinking of my ways forward. I would love to hear others. This conversation will continue.

A Duckie and A Horsie

Jo Jewell contributed the following:

Oh how exciting it was to see this forum! To read and know full well that you too, could write and other people would read it. My reaction was one like in first grade; seeing someone else's writing led me to raise my hand: "Me! Me, oh pick me! I want to talk!" then when called upon, then, just like in first grade, lowering my hand and looking down, a bit startled that I didn't have anything to say.

That is, until now-"Oh, Oh! Pick me! Read this, pick me! Oh, oh, Pick Me!""

Okay, Jo, do you have something to share?

"Well, Yes I do. I would like to share about impermanence, about insights and insecurities, or perhaps more to the point- the insight to be gained from insecurity, with a wee dash of insecurity about that insight. Shall we dance? Cha cha cha...

It's about a Peanuts cartoon I saw a long time ago: Charlie Brown, Shroeder, and Lucy are laying on a hill looking up at the clouds in the! sky. Lucy says, "Shroeder, what do you see in the clouds?" Shroeder responds by saying, "I see Beethoven, creating the final movement to one of his greatest symphonies." "Yeah," says Lucy, "over there I see Einstein working on the theory of relativity." Then Schroeder asks, "What about you Charlie Brown? What do you see?" Charlie Brown says, "Well... I was going to say I saw a Ducky and a Horsie but I changed my mind."

Before leaving a daylong meditation at Spirit Rock, the teacher sent us away with the encouragement to live in the moment by saying "Let us pause and remember that all we hold dear will eventually not be- that we ourselves will die and everything we know and love will die as well."

Maybe my southern upbringing is to blame, but that just didn't perk me up. I didn't feel that ole' time joie de vivre deep down in my bones.But I did smile as I saw the yellow "Yield to the Present" sign as I drove away.

And I must say I was really hap! py with the sight and sound and smell of David cooking in the kitchen and Olivia drawing at the table when I got home.

Who was it that said that all of man's suffering stems from his inability to sit quietly for five minutes?

Wes "Scoop" Nisker believes that our government is in the final stages of imperialism, which through my simplified lens means that most are starting to see that the Emperor has no clothes. What is it about our kind that we want so much to be "right" about things? And then to demand everyone else not only see and hear that we are "right" but to believe and even live according to our "right" way?

Maybe it is part of that same impulse that leads us to raise our hands, even when we don't really have anything to say. Or the one that frustrates us to stop short after we were so confident and happy about seeing that Ducky and Horsie in the clouds.

Which leads this hand raiser to say, "I'm through for now, I'm done." W! ith a lowered head, wondering if this was actually anything to say.

Oh well, You can call on someone else now or perhaps it is your turn.

Jo Jewell

Weddings and Anniversaries

Karen Salinger contributed the following:

I just want to remind everyone that this is a great way for us to share some personal family news as well as a way of sharing our insights and opinions.

Yesterday, Laura and I marked our wedding anniversary. Two years ago yesterday, we stood in line in front of City Hall from 6 o'clock in the morning on a cold rainy day. As the hours ticked away, we gradually made our way closer and closer to the front of the line where we completed the paperwork and received our license. At 4:30 in the afternoon we finally stood four stories up above the rotunda and pronounced our wedding vows. Although the city was forced to invalidate the marriage, we have the certificate and we have the most amazing memories of that day.

LIFE * BALANCE * TRANSFORMATION * WAR

Where have all the leaders gone?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/opinion/20krugman.html

This past weekend seemed to be all about the four themes above. Over a span of 20 odd years Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass created an amazing trilogy of films:
Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance
Powaqqatsi - Life in Transformation
Noyayqqatsi - Life in War

Karen and I caught Koyaanisqatsi on Friday night with The Philip Glass Ensemble playing the music live to a screening of the film. It's quite an extraordinary film and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it. It felt quite prophetic and could have easily been made today, much less in 1983.

We then saw Terence Malick's "The New World" on Saturday and it continued the theme we had already been talking about of life thrown out of balance by the introduction of new technologies and the interaction between different cultures and how they so easily come into conflict with each other when there is a lack of understanding and respect for different ways of seeing the world.

We seem to be living in a paradoxical time in history. While there is much to be celebrated about modernity and the vast improvements to quality of life through new technologies, there also seems to be a question of balance that is out of whack.

Cultural identities are either being questioned or entrenched into dogmatic views or disappearing altogether. Climate change is transforming the places we see now as land that may someday be seashore (did you catch the 60 minutes piece last night - scary). Pre-emptive assaults are changing the nature of war, whether it be terrorist actions or imperial actions, and the reasons we choose to fight and what we fight over are coming down to narrow national interests that will have broad global consequences.

Life is out of balance. Life is being transformed. We can no longer define "war", as anything may qualify under the rubric of a "war" on global terror and victory or end of war cannot or will not be defined by our "leaders".

A lot to think about, and so few leaders to think them through.

Other Salingers Weigh-In

From George Salinger











From David Salinger:

Jo and I have a film that we love called What the Bleep… and there is a new extended version coming out called What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole.

The attached link has lots of info. Perhaps you could post this to let folks know about it.

http://www.whatthebleep.com/

you too can contribute. send stuff to Paul.

other takes

so, just to be fair, some alternative viewpoints for all to consider:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/opinion/17Wright.html
(onDanish cartoons)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/17/DDGT9H9E1L1.DTL
(a different viewpoint on Meredith Monk's performance)

Weigh in with your own thoughts by clicking on comments.

Normal Human Response

Dick Cheney shooting quail and friends. The Muslim world going crazy over a few unfunny cartoons. The media blowing everything out of proportion. Where's the common sense in any of this?

David Brooks had a good column about this (the Cheney part and basic human response anyway) in today's NY Times http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/opinion/16brooks.html.

Where did this all start anyway, taking everything and politicizing it into a kind of hyper sensitive reality where there is never any common ground for rational discussion? Aren't some things just simple tragedies, simple modes of provoking rational discussion? Have we lost a sense of simple human decency where we look at something and say that's really bad, I feel for those people?

OK, I am certainly no fan of Dick Cheney, and actually think he should resign, not because he accidentally shot someone while hunting, but because he is the symbol of 5 years of secrecy, corruption and incompetence in a government that completely misunderstands the world and how to be an engaged leader solving human problems, not to mention a failure to actually protect us, which should be government's primary concern.

One can only imagine that if rather than invading Iraq, our so-called leaders had engaged with the Muslim world in a dialogue about the right response by all responsible people to the threats of fundamentalist terror groups (religious or otherwise), things like the Danish cartoons would have ever seen the light of day. No, I don't blame all ills in the world on the US government, nor do I think they bear direct responsibility for the publishing of what might be construed as offensive cartoons. In fact, it seems increasingly unproductive and odd that the Muslim world can't look itself in the face, recognize some of the ills that have grown out of its teachings and had their own internal dialogue about how they act and engage in a modern world.

But choices have consequences, and the choices made by the Bush Administration have had more than disastrous consequences for many people's lives.

Whatever did happen to "compassionate conservatism" anyway? Gone in the fog of war, like so many other things, I guess.

Impermanence 2 - Self Indulgent Art

So, as a follow-up, KZ and I went to see Meredith Monk last night. The quote was from an article about the performance prior to its actually taking place.

Unfortunately, the piece(s) were not up to the concept portrayed in the quote. While there were moments of aural beauty and the lighting had some interesting architectural and sculptural aspects to it, most of the evening was self indulgent, pretentious and meaningless - and put both of us right to sleep.

I've seen Monk before in concerts with the SF Symphony and thought she was interesting and certainly has a vocal range that is amazing for a small woman, but the attempt to be multi-disciplinary and try to weave together media, music, dance (if you could call it that) and performance did not impress us. It felt childish and actually somewhat anti-dance, anti-performance, almost making fun of other disciplines.

It raises the question of whether self-indulgence can ever attain the level of art? Personally, I'm often disturbed by artists that have made a name for themselves and are well regarded attempting to make statements that seem too precocious and cute, as if whatever they do should be taken with seriousness and appreciated because of who they are.

Monk certainly seems to have her devotees if the shouting and applause from a segment of the audience last night is any indication, but it left us cold and I think we were the first ones out the door.

Sometimes you get a hit. Sometimes you get a miss. You just have to keep showing up and hope for the best.

Impermanence

When you die, your presence falls away. You leave the earth and the image fades. We who remain are left with your essence.
-Merdith Monk (quoted in SF Chronicle interview)

I was taken with this statement, which can be taken in a number of ways and doesn't seem to conflict with the many belief systems that people have, whether they be religion based, spiritually based, scientific based or totally agnostic.

I think we get so caught up in disputing belief systems, perhaps with good cause when those belief systems seem to spread such disaffection and violence into the world, that we kind of forget that there is a unique human element to all of us that is only here for a very short time and we should be working on the essence of that being here each day rather than squabbling about who gets to go to heaven, or if one even exists.

musings from the left coast

This year seems to be starting with a heavy focus on family. Connecting, maintaining, supporting.

I'm finding myself drawn to the big questions these days - do we actually need politicians to govern our lives? Is intelligent design merely an oxymoron designed to insult our intelligence? Should I be teaching myself and other family members Chinese? (Well, it's probably too late for me, but my grand daughters, nieces and nephew may want to consider it.)

Basically, this is an invitation for everyone Salinger to stay in touch. Send me photos, epistles, rude comments, whatever and I will try to post them so everyone can see what's happening across the spectrum of Salingerdom.

Last year was pure craziness as I traveled well over 150,000 miles and hit most of the continents once or twice. Not sure what this year will bring, but hoping for a slightly more sane approach to coming and going.

I do know that I will be in DC and NY in late March, Japan in early March, Scotland (most likely) in July and who knows where in between.

Karen (Zukor) is taking the year off from her business as a paper conservator and has her trusted employees running the business for her while she takes a much deserved break and figures out what the rest of life holds for her (and me).

So, I'll be posting my personal musings, reflections and observations on as regular a basis as I can, so bookmark this site to keep up, and do send me stuff to add to the postings.

Cheers to all,
Paul