Christopher L. Webber

Complaint Department

2008-08-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

On January 15 I placed an order with Farmer Seeds as I have done often before and in due time the seeds arrived and were planted. An important part of my order was Lincoln peas, a long time favorite of my family. The weather grew warm and the seeds sprouted, the vines grew, and the blossoms appeared. But in the six rows of peas I planted, the first two rows of blossoms were purple! Lincoln peas had always before had white blossoms. However, I watched and waited and eventually saw pods that were knobby looking, unlike the smooth pods of Lincoln peas. Eventually they matured and we ate some. They were not Lincoln peas.

At this point I wrote a friendly letter to the Customer Care Department at Farmer Seeds saying something seemed to be wrong. I thought they might find the situation oddly amusing as I did. But the reply, while it apologized “if there was an error” in my order, requested that I send “the original shipping label, along with a brief note detailing your request” and “a sampling, or picture of the item in question.”

Well, I had already detailed my request and was happy in the interests of science to send a sample of the non-Lincoln peas, but the original shipping label was long gone. Who keeps the original packing of a seed order for six months? I did send them their confirmation of my order which came by e-mail and said, “We suggest you save this email for any future inquiries.”

That didn't satisfy the folks at Farmer. “We are willing,” they said, “to make a single EXCEPTION and send a replacement order if you will send us a COPY OF YOUR CANCELLED CHECK or CHARGE CARD STATEMENT as proof of purchase.” (Emphasis theirs.)

Why should I, I wondered, have to prove that I made a purchase from them? Don’t they keep records of what they sell and to whom? Yes, they said, they do keep records, but it is company policy to insist on evidence from me.

So I sent them a copy of the credit card statement. By now the cost of the correspondence (sending them sample pods and blossoms, sending them a copy of the credit card statement, etc.) was beginning to outweigh any possible refund.

And what have I received in return? An electronic transfer of funds that appeared in our account without other notice for one-third of the $6.95 I spent originally. They did not refund any part of the shipping cost, though the peas would have been the largest part of the cost. They have never even acknowledged the arrival of the samples I sent them, let alone report on what may have gone wrong or what the misfits were – though I asked more than once.

Result? The “Customer Care Department” has lost far more than $2.32. They have lost a long-standing customer and reaped some very unfavorable publicity.

I also discovered by typing “Farmer Seed” in my internet search engine that at Dave’s Garden they have a feature called Garden Watchdog that allows gardeners to report their experience with various companies. Over the past year, Farmer Seed has chalked up two positive reviews, four neutral reviews, and 24 negative reviews. So I am not alone in thinking that this is a company with problems.

Now you know.

Quotation of the Week

2008-08-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

“In the twenty-first century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

John McCain
Candidate for President of some place which is not a nation.

Columbus discovering America

Cousins

2008-08-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

In the mystery of human relationships, cousins are a strange middle ground between people who are close family (parents, grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren) and those who are strangers (having no known relationship).

This week I spent two days in a “cousins reunion,” a carefully planned event bringing together the second generation descendants of Eugene and Caro Fowler Basquin, an immigrant from France whose name indicated Basque ancestry a couple of centuries back and a member of an old New England family . They had five children who grew up, four daughters and a son. These five (one never married) produced ten children. With two of these (and their spouses) we have had fairly close relationships. Two others I never met. One has died. The others have crossed our paths on occasion. Six of these ten and five significant others were assembled in Mystic, Connecticut, for a low key event that featured a couple of block-buster meals, lots of nibbles with alcohol, an afternoon ride up and down the Connecticut River by steam train and ship, and ambles through a couple of museums and specialty stores. We included in our number, among other things, a couple of Episcopal priests, two lawyers, two registered nurses, business people, a concert pianist, a teacher, an author, and others, all in some degree of retirement.

It was an enjoyment. I had conversations in depth about everything from translating Horace to presidential politics and conversations in no depth about the weather and the foibles of Global Positioning Systems.

What brings us together? A certain degree of physical resemblance, a good deal of commonality of upbringing, similarities in the expectations we were raised with. I remember my mother telling how she brought home an excellent report card to show her father and was told, “What do you expect? You’re a Basquin!” We spent time telling what we knew about our grandparents. None of us had any memory of Eugene Basquin, who died when I, the oldest cousin, was three, and our memories of our common grandmother were limited. We didn’t talk much about our parents since all of us knew all of them. A plan to talk briefly about what each of us was up to never happened. It was more about being: being together, being who we are, discovering commonalities, cousinalities.

“Know thyself,” is an ancient piece of wisdom because, as Wikipedia wisely observes, knowing oneself is an important step toward knowing others. We are told that Vice President Cheney and Senator Obama are eighth cousins. It is said that all Western Europeans are within thirty degrees of cousinhood with a common ancestor scarcely a thousand years back. A few more cousin reunions might be a very good thing.

Time Frames

2008-08-08T06:54:00.001-07:00

I was walking in the orchard last week when I noticed some apples. They were on a tree that had never borne before and they were pale green shading to yellow as they ripened.

Nursery catalogs are surprisingly coy about the time it takes a tree to produce fruit. Semi-dwarf trees will produce fruit sooner than a full size tree and dwarf trees will produce fruit even sooner - but how soon? Not soon enough to enable me to remember what tree it was I had planted. The nursery companies always attach a plastic label that has the nursery name stamped in bold and indelible letters on one side and the name of the variety written with a marking pen on the other. The marking pens are not indelible; the variety names wear off in a year or two. Recently they’ve begun stamping the variety on in indelible ink and I’m grateful, but that’s no help with my older trees.

I went to look at my file of orders placed. The first two trees in the orchard were ordered 30 years ago and one of those trees has been my best producer for a long time. The other died last year. The yellow apples seem to be Lodi, an apple that ripens in late July or early August, way ahead of most others. I planted that tree – semi-dwarf – eleven years ago. No wonder I’d forgotten about it. I have other trees, even older, that still haven’t produced anything. I hope I can still identify them when they do.

I remember also a conversation I had recently with our neighbor, a professional forester. I asked him what he thought might be the problem with my oldest chestnut tree. It had produced a few more chestnuts every year for five or six years now. Last year was a banner year with maybe two or three dozen nuts. But I found literally hundreds of tiny nuts that never matured. What did he think might be the problem. “Maybe the tree just isn’t mature enough to ripen them all,” he suggested. After thirty years? Yes; we’re talking trees, not people. (Actually there are people not very mature after thirty years also.) I have three walnut trees planted thirty years ago that have yet to produce a single nut.

I planted a copper beech when we first bought this property. Somewhere I read that they live for five or six centuries so I thought I should get it started. On line, I learn that they live “only” 100 to 150 years and start flowering after 30 to 80 years. Mine might start flowering next year – or not.

We’re talking time frame. If I don’t get a good crop of green peas this year, there’s always next year. If it seems that I’ve put a nut tree in the wrong place or that I’d rather have a different kind, it’s not that simple. Some things take more time than others.

I wonder whether we lose certain perspective when everyone grows up in a city and makes dinner in the microwave. I grew up in a day when oatmeal was made in a double boiler and cooked overnight on the stove.

I’m thinking about the way we attempt to solve the energy crisis by opening up more areas to drilling, solve mid-eastern tensions by imposing democracy on Iraq, fight the war on terror by overthrowing constitutional traditions two centuries old.

I hope I live long enough to harvest walnuts from my trees. I pray for leadership that understands the human time frame.

Prime Time in the Garden

2008-08-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

It’s too soon to hang up the “Mission Accomplished” banner or take any victory laps, but this year’s garden is looking good. Already our super-size freezer is beginning to look full – and the season is far from over. What happened? Maybe three things:

1) I’ve learned about some crops that I hadn’t tried before or had forgotten to include in my planning. Pole beans are something I never bothered with until two years ago. It took a couple of years to figure out how to create a trellis for them to grow on and how to keep the voles away. Pole beans are like a vertical garden, producing beans all up and down a five foot high trellis. It’s good exercise hunting for them too. I also learned recently about Swiss chard – another crop that keeps on giving. Like spinach, Swiss chard boils down drastically when cooked, but a short row has produced about 8 pints in the freezer so far, and we’ve already eaten some along the way. I hadn’t grown beets in several years or purple cauliflower or enough broccoli plants. All these add content and color to this year’s crop.

2) I think (fingers still crossed) I’ve learned to deal with voles. For several years I didn’t know what my problem was when whole rows of crops disappeared before producing. Then I learned about voles. They are like short-tailed mice but twice the size. They love vegetables. Last year I found organic ways to deal with voles (traps, for one) and this year I haven’t seen much evidence of their presence. Maybe they figured out that I don’t want them around. It makes a difference when the crops you plant grow up without being chewed off. Several years ago the raccoons learned how to climb over the eight-foot chain link fence. Since then we haven’t had much corn to eat. This year I got the Hav-a-Heart trap out early and two raccoons that came early to check the crop are no longer in the neighborhood. Maybe that’s why the corn is still thriving this year.

3) Weather? Luck? Going to France for ten days and leaving the garden to its own devices? Maybe all of the above. A good garden seems to require a certain amount of serendipity. One example is the winter squash that are spreading across the center of the garden. I didn’t plant them. They are growing where the semi-composted compost got tilled in: the seeds came from last year’s squash but the fruit are totally different. Last year’s squash were small; these are enormous and very differently shaped. I guess they don’t breed true. I don’t know what we’ll do with a half dozen squash the size of a basketball, but maybe the family can have squash for Christmas dinner this year.

August is prime time in a garden. Beans, beets, broccoli, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes (large or small), Swiss chard, zucchini. It's very satisfying to plant a crop and harvest the results a few months later -- even more satisfying come January to have our own fruit and vegetables available.

2008-07-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

I've never had a guest columnist before, but when I found this discussion of a new book by Caroline Grant (nee Webber) and Elrena Evans, I thought this might be a time to try it. It comes from "The Debutante Ball," a web site for first time women writers, and begins with a paragraph by the editor of that site, Gail Konop Baker.

I first “met” Caroline Grant when I was columnist at Literary Mama and clicked with her immediately. She was smart and funny and deep and a terrific writer. When I went out to San Francisco for Tillie Olsen’s memorial the year before last, I met her in person. We had brunch at this amazing breakfast place in East Berkeley. During that brunch she talked about the Mama PhD book and I thought it sounded like a GREAT idea and here it is.. One of the miracles of publishing, an idea transforming into something you can hold in your hands. Astounds me every time. Please join me in welcoming Caroline and Elrena and then click on Amazon and buy the book!

Today, Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans write about editing their new anthology, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, which has been called “easily the most important piece of work to date on academics and family issues, full-stop.” The anthology voices stories of academic women choosing to have, not have, or delay children, and its essays speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family.

Read more about the book at mamaphd, view the trailer at you tube, and join the conversation about work and family at the book’s blog on Inside Higher Ed.

3,000 Miles, Two Writers, One Book

Meet over email. Of course; you live, after all, 3,000 miles apart, but it helps our relationship get into writing right away. We are literally words on a page (screen) to each other for the first year of our collaboration (we don’t even talk on the phone!) It doesn’t hurt that we meet via Elrena’s submission to the section of Literary Mama that Caroline is editing at the time.

Meet when one of you is pregnant. This helps get the conversation personal, pronto, as Caroline cautions Elrena that she might not get back to her very promptly with edits.

Don’t always stick to the point. We know we are both writers, and mothers, and if we’d stayed on topic it might have stayed at that. Instead, we digress into breastfeeding and parenting and graduate school and ivory tower life — and friendship. And then, ultimately, a book.

Write about what matters to you. This is old advice, but it’s still good. Elrena was on medical leave from graduate work and thinking she might want to write about mothering and dissertating. Caroline had left the ivory tower behind when her first son was born, but was still frequently looking back and second-guessing her decision. Writing about our choices seems like a good way to figure out if they are the right choices for us. (Caroline can now say yes with assurance; Elrena’s still up in the air but has decided that’s okay for now; up in the air is still a place, after all).

Invite others to join the conversation. At a certain point, it’s always good to share your thoughts with others. We figure if we have so much to say about our lives in and out of academia, other women might, too. They might even have advice or ideas on how to make it better. We write up a call for submissions and spread the word. To our amazement and delight, essays came pouring in.

Punt! Write until you’ve lost your way, or stop making sense, and then email your draft to your collaborator. If you’re lucky (we always were) she will make what you wrote sound better, add some more, and then send it back to you for refining. You will smile when you read what she’s added: ah, yes — that is what I meant to say.

Are you deep in the book project now? Time to have another baby! We pause for the arrival of Elrena’s son.

Agree on everything. When we were in graduate school, we sat through innumerable training sessions with our peers, learning how to mark essays and score exams until we all worked from the same rubric and our responses all agreed. It was a useful process, but one we don’t happen to think of this time around. We read all of the submissions independently (3,000 miles apart and four kids, remember?), marking them Yes, No, and Maybe. When we are done, we exchange our lists and see that we only disagree on one essay. We send it back and forth for a while, and soon both feel right about our decision.

Meet! A year into the project, Caroline realizes her Christmas travels will bring her within a couple hours drive of Elrena’s home. “In my ideal world,” she emails, “there’d be an aquarium or something equidistant from your house and where I’m staying, and we could all gather and you and I could start 5 or 10 different conversations and maybe finish three sentences while we run around after the kids!” Elrena emails back the URL of the New Jersey State Aquarium, exactly one hour’s drive for each of us. Ask, and you shall receive. So now we can attach voices and faces—of ourselves and our husbands and kids—to our writing.

Return to work with fresh energy after the meeting. Keep it light. Pepper your emails with exclamation points and smiley faces, just in case. Always put your families first. Sympathize about everything, big and little: the rejection letter, the sleepless night, the husband’s work hours, the emergency room visit. Celebrate milestones: publications, toilet training, landing an agent, birthdays, editorial promotions, weaning.

Send the book proposal out to nearly a dozen publishers. Receive many rejections and two good offers. And it only takes one. Effortlessly agree on the publisher, talking on the phone while one set of kids splashes in the baby pool and the other set makes and serves an elaborate play-doh dinner. Sign a contract. Marvel at how different your signatures are.

Knock yourselves out to fine-tune essays, trying to draw out the best in each writer, then fact check and copyedit. Negotiate the contracts of 40 contributors, many of whom become friends, also. Learn how to use Google docs to keep things organized. Work during naptimes, typing with one hand while nursing, at 5 AM before the family awakes, and on weekend afternoons while your husband and kids go to the zoo. Always feel like the other one is doing more work, and wonder how she does it. Feel grateful, because you know she feels the same way.

Just when you think you’re done, receive one last, significant editorial suggestion. Start to lose the plot. “But it’s perfect!” one of you cries. “It is perfect,” the other agrees; “but we’ll make it even better.” And you do.

Wait for publication day. Be surprised by a package on the doorstep a month earlier than you are expecting. Page through the book, pausing over well-remembered passages that still read so well, but look a lot better in their new home. Show the kids where you dedicated the book to them. Grab a tissue as your newest readers carefully spell out their names.

Anniversary Cruise

2008-07-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

If you paste the link below into your search window, it should take you to an article I wrote about the history of the Lambeth Conference for the Times of London's on-line publication.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4317892.ece

Barack Obama went to Iraq, the Anglican bishops went to Lambeth, and the Mets went on a ten game winning streak – but I was on a barge in southern France and knew nothing of all that. For the better part of ten days, I was in another world, often as narrow as the two sides of a small canal or the dimensions of a canal barge. But a small world can sometimes bring far more rewards than the larger one. The Christian faith is that the meaning of life is found in relationships and it all begins with family. Over a span of fifty years, Peg and I have acquired a small but remarkably varied family – who like each other! There’s no better place than a canal barge to find that out.

We were a total of thirteen, ranging in age from 70-something to 3 – four children, three spouses, four grandchildren – and that was the exact number the barge held. We are often together for a day or two at Christmas or Thanksgiving but never before for a whole week. Of course, we weren’t entirely on our own. There was a crew of five – captain, first mate, chef, and two stewardesses – all of them significantly younger than any of our children, and they made sure we had every creature comfort imaginable. There were two wines and two cheeses at every meal, introduced with a short description. There was a help yourself liquor cabinet and chocolates on the pillow every night. (The second night, Ben, age 6, came running back to where the rest of us were lingering over dinner to tell us, “The chocolate fairy came again!”) The last night there was a premium champagne and an anniversary cake with five candles sending up streams of sparks.

In between time, when we could drag ourselves away from the table, there was swimming in the Mediterranean (twice), bike rides off into the country, a medieval village one day and a castle another, bull games, Bastille Day-eve fireworks, and a visit to the Châteauneuf-du-Pape winery for the most carefully guided wine tasting I’ve ever attended. We also visited Arles and saw much evidence that Van Gogh had been there first. And finally we came to Avignon where we toured the papal palace (bare and boring), watched Ben and Eli ride the carousel, and enjoyed two meals, dinner one day and lunch the next, at sidewalk cafes where it wasn’t the food that mattered but the ambience. It was festival time in Avignon and actors and performers were constantly coming by to entertain us a bit and encourage us to go see their show.

We had gathered as a family first in a hotel in Montpellier where we spent the night. The next morning, Sunday, we gathered in one of the hotel rooms for a simple Eucharist. I remember discovering many years ago that when you come to the Eucharist to give thanks for God’s gifts, you are given another and greater gift. During a week such as we have had, one can almost forget that. If fifty years had led “only” to such a family as we have, it would have been enough, but there are always greater gifts ahead. Satisfied and over-satisfied as I am, I try to remember that. If heaven is better than last week, it will be well worth waiting for.

Ite, mairimasu

2008-07-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

There are lots of things that I could be blogging about over the next two weeks: the garden, the orchard, the Lambeth Conference, American politics, even Beowulf – but it will have to wait. We leave tomorrow for a 50th wedding anniversary trip with all the results and consequences of that Easter Monday event half a century ago: four children, three spouses, and four grandchildren. We have chartered a barge that has accommodation for exactly that number of persons – plus a captain, a cook, and a steward. We range in age from 76 to 3 and will have a week to cruise the canals and rivers of southern France. Avignon is probably the best known location in the area, but there are vineyards and cheeseries and ancient churches and palaces to be visited as well as the papal palace and famous bridge. When bored with the barge’s stately progress, we can get off and bicycle alongside or veer off into the countryside. Lots to do, but plenty of time to relax and enjoy each other.
While we are gone, the Lambeth Conference will start. How could they have scheduled that so badly?
But also while we are gone, peas and beans and broccoli will be ripening, as will blueberries. How could we have scheduled that so badly?
But go we must and the crops will just have to wait.
The bishops won’t wait either. You might want to check the Times of London web site for an article (two, actually: a long version and a summary version) by me on the history of Lambeth. But you may have seen it already in Episcopal Life or the bulletin inserts.
The Japanese phrase in the title slot means “Going, but returning.”
Assuming the airlines do their job, we’ll be back along about July 22 and you will find a full report here.

Independence Day

2008-07-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

Independence Day is here again and I’ve been reflecting, as one should on such occasions, about the meaning of it all.

I grew up in a small town in upState New York in the latter years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. My first schoolhouse had four rooms for the first four grades (2 up, 2 down) and there were pictures of Lincoln and Washington at the front of each room. We began the school day with the pledge of allegiance. In those days, you placed your hand over your heart as you said, "I pledge allegiance” and then extended the arm outward toward the flag at the words “to the flag” That manoeuver was curtailed when it was decided it looked too much like the German “Heil Hitler” salute. After that, we kept our hands over our hearts.
Later, I remember being told in school assembly that we would also change the words of the Star Spangled banner. Instead of “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,” we would now sing “for our cause it is just.” I remember feeling slightly uneasy about that, but ten-year-olds don’t usually question these things.
I also remember marching in the school band on Memorial Day and helping to ring the church bell on V-J Day.
Patriotism was easy in those days. At least it was for me. I now know that there were conscientious objectors and pacifists who found it harder to be uncritical.
But I would like to think that my patriotism may be stronger now than it was then - but more critical. How could I not be critical when I consider that this country has squandered the world’s good will in a series of ill-considered foreign adventures, that the majority of my fellow citizens believe the death penalty is an appropriate remedy for violent crime, and that they are safer at home if they have a gun or two on hand. I ponder also the fact that in a majority of the elections I remember (9 of 16) the same fellow citizens have selected the less qualified candidate. No wonder we find it difficult to commend democracy to the rest of the world.
Nonetheless, I have requested that the congregation I will serve next Sunday sing "America the Beautiful" as the closing hymn and that we say the Prayer for our Country in unison at the end of the Intercessions.
I guess I feel the same way about this country that I feel about the Christian faith. Would you belong to a faith which, for the largest number of its followers world-wide, is ruled by an infallible pope, and whose most vocal and visible representatives in this country make fools of themselves on a regular basis?
But consider the alternatives! Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst system of government except all the others.
I remember the Australian couple who showed up at St. Alban’s Tokyo one day on their way around the world with their 8-year-old son. He had not been baptized, they told me, because they wanted him to be free to choose. But then they had traveled widely and seen other religions first hand. Now they wanted their son baptized.
It’s not the reality I salute; it’s the vision.
I see the heavenly city, New Jerusalem, still ahead but worth striving for. I call to mind the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, the Susan B. Anthonys and Martin Luther King Jrs. and so many others who have believed in the possibility and brought it a step nearer. Who would have believed that this country would ever nominate an African American to run for President? Who knows what is still possible? When I was growing up, I believed we would get there sooner. But what other vision is so worth working for, praying for - and voting for?

God of Chaos

2008-06-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

There’s a story about a young pastor in a rural area who went to call on one of his parishioners and found him in his field. “Fine looking field you have here with the Lord’s help,” said the pastor.

“Yes,” said the farmer, “but you should have seen it when the Lord had it alone!”

With a quarter-acre garden and two acre orchard, I’m not really a farmer but I know how the farmer felt. God cares for the land differently than I do. A good deal of the time I find myself fighting with God’s plan.

My plan is for creating order. God just creates. For whatever reason, I want to see a carefully groomed green expanse with fruit trees set in straight lines at regular intervals and, in the garden, straight rows of vegetables with bare earth between them. God doesn’t like straight rows and bare soil. No matter how often I take my hoe and cultivate between the rows, there will be new green shoots coming up in 48 hours or less. In a week, the brown soil will be green. In a month, my vegetables will be choked out by God’s choice of plants – what we deride as “weeds.”

Walk around the periphery of the orchard and you will see God at work, constantly moving in on “my” ground. If I simply mow the grass, my two acres will be diminished substantially by the end of the summer. God’s chaotic garden encroaches on mine inch by inch. It’s often a branch of wild roses that makes the first move. It reaches out over the mown grass by a foot or two or three. Instinctively, I swerve away from it when I come around on my lawn tractor. The thorns can pierce cloth and may find unprotected flesh. Under that branch of wild rose, a barberry bush is expanding outward also. Mow it down and it will come back time after time. Honeysuckle is right there as well. It has no thorns but it sends out branches in all directions and just keeps on coming. Raspberries and blackberries love the fringes also. And I’m reluctant to prune them back because they offer free fruit later in the summer. These are the front line troops in God’s army. Behind them come the cherry saplings and birch seedlings, fast growing and immune to my mower. And then come the maple and oak; with their arrival my orchard has become God’s forest. Sometimes you see the hardwood seedlings coming up in the middle of the lawn. They have no chance there but each tree produces hundreds of seeds every year and only needs one of those to grow every hundred years or so to reproduce itself. If two find a place to grow, it’s doubled it’s population. There’s only one of me against hundreds of invasive species doing their best to destroy my orderly world.

But isn’t God a God of order? St. Paul says: “God is a God not of disorder.” (1 Cor 14:33) But Paul’s experience is different from mine and I have to wonder whether Paul is wrong.
There is, no doubt of it, a human need for order. Our knowledge and powers are limited and nothing drives us crazy faster than a day when things get out of control. Our civilization rests on order and predictability. Workers on an assembly line have to show up on time and carry out their assignments. Lights have to come on when you flip the switch. Computers have to bring up the file you ask for. Politicians get votes by standing for “law and order,” not chaos.

And isn’t that the kind of world God made? Water boils at 212 degrees. Things fall when you drop them. The sun comes up every morning. But scientists who look more deeply find disorder behind the order. “Chaos theory” enables scientists to talk about an orderly world with unpredictable outcomes and then there’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that tells us we can’t know both the location and momentum of a particle in quantum physics. The British pioneer geneticist, J.B.S.Haldane, once said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.”

And just because we have a need for control and order, we shouldn’t assume that God is on our side. The message I’m getting as I try to trim back the wildness is that my need for order may put me in conflict with a Creator whose purpose for the universe may not fit my logical mind. Yet year after year we see new churches being formed and old ones divided because two persons or two parties are so absolutely sure that God must conform to their logic. Why would not God be happy for us all to subscribe to the same clear and rational agenda? It’s hard to believe God would not want us united in a clearly stated faith and orderly church. But why would God be constantly undoing my effort to construct an orderly garden?

Through most of human history, kings, emperors, and other rulers have concentrated power in one place. It make sense to unite a society with a single vision. Nevertheless, we have begun to experiment with democracy and significant number of state now have elected leaders – who frequently attempt to break down the controls on their power. Democracy is chaotic. Freedom is chaotic. But perhaps a chaotic democracy is a better reflection of God’s purpose for us than an orderly dictatorship.

What I’ve come to accept after some years is that the garden is always going to be slightly out of control. I will continue to fight it, but I no longer expect to have my way all the time. Likewise in church and state. Everyone ought to be an Episcopalian but I sometimes see evidence that God has a broader mind. It is even possible that God can work through political candidates whose views I abhor. I do understand that it’s better to let them have their say than to clap them in jail. The fact that I am constantly challenged forces me to think things through more carefully and work harder for the views I believe in.

There are fields in this part of the world that God works on without competition. Around the edges the wild rose can climb twenty feet up a telephone pole and burst into a waterfall of white blossoms in the spring; randomly scattered in the field, clumps of daisies burst into bloom in early summer; here and there, young cherry saplings will be loaded with fruit in late summer to feed the birds. There’s nothing neat about it but it has its own beauty and it effortlessly supports a richer abundance of life than my garden. It may well bear better witness to God than the neat and orderly garden I work so hard to maintain.

Wild Strawberries

2008-06-20T17:24:00.001-07:00

Was I complaining recently in this space about the difficulty of getting everything done while retired? I was, and here’s why: I spent an hour and a half this afternoon picking wild strawberries.

Yes, I had other things to do but two days ago I had set out to mow a field on the far side of the pond and I noticed some small red spots in the grass and realized that I was mowing down wild strawberries.

Now, if you were lucky enough to grow up in a small town in the Depression and World War II era, you might have had the experience of picking wild strawberries. I remember a farmer stopping by to say that there were strawberries in one of his fields if we wanted to get them. I remember going with my mother, sister, and brother. I remember wandering around looking for strawberries, occasionally finding them, and coming home with enough to make strawberry shortcake and even strawberry jam. I think my mother must have done a lot of picking.

But that memory stopped me short. You can’t just run a tractor back and forth where there are strawberries. I picked a cupful or so and had most of them on my cereal the next day. I couldn’t get back to it the next day - I’m retired after all. But I got back there today and really got into it. It was midsummer eve; what better time to be picking wild strawberries?

Strawberries may be bright red, but they don’t make themselves easily visible or available. You get down on all fours and brush the grass one way and another looking for them. A big one may be a half inch long; a small one half that size. They hide under the leaves and the tall grass. Think of it as searching for a lost contact lens. Sometimes there are two or three on a stem, but the next cluster may be three or four feet away and you will have to work your way there slowly, searching through the grass as you go. It’s all too easy to put your hand or foot or knee on one before you see it.

Do you know what wild strawberries look like? If you put them under a magnifying glass set to, say, 50X, you would see something very much like what they sell as strawberries in your local store. The problem is that while they pump them up to the size of a golf ball, they do it with water. The flavor is not pumped up. One commercial strawberry has about the same amount of flavor as one wild strawberry - maybe less. If I had fifty strawberries on my cereal, they would fill two tea spoons. If you ate fifty commercial berries, you might get the same flavor - but there would be no room in the bowl for the cereal and you would get tired of eating them long before you got enough flavor to make it worthwhile.

Today’s harvest weighed about three ounces. An hour and a half for picking, well over half an hour for hulling. Connecticut’s minimum wage is $7.65 an hour. That’s $5.30 an ounce. $83 a pound. That’s why you don’t find wild strawberries in your supermarket!

I will have wild strawberries on my cereal again tomorrow - but I have saved a few ounces in the freezer for the next overnight guests who think to ask for them. Half the joy of picking is being able to share an experience available nowhere else. Get your reservation in early; the supply is limited!

Famous in Santa Barbara

2008-06-18T06:26:00.001-07:00

They say everyone is famous for fifteen minutes - but do they tell you it will be in Santa Barbara?

When I began researching the Lambeth Conference last year I had no idea what it would lead to. I guess I was doing it because a) I have an interest in it as an Episcopalian, and b) I’ve agreed to write a regular column about the Anglican Communion for our diocesan newspaper. When my research (completely on line) produced an essay of 5000 words, the editor refused to let me take over her paper, so I sent it off to an Episcopal web site called episcopalmajority. You can still find it there in four installments gussied up with pictures. That was reproduced in Episcopal Life, the national newspaper of the Episcopal Church and on a couple of other web sites and led to a number of speaking engagements as far afield as Roanoke, Virginia.

Then came a request to chop it up into four 700 word pieces for use as a bulletin insert for Episcopal parishes. And that led to a request for republication in Noozhawk, the online newspaper of Santa Barbara, California. The editor goes to church and reads his bulletin and thought Santa Barbarans would be as interested in Lambeth as they are in the latest vote of the city council on a 35-home development in Las Positas or the arrest of a murder suspect in Goleta. You can find it by typing noozhawk (or noozehawk, it seems to be spelled bith ways!)into your search engine.

I might also note that when editors ask how to identify me I always tell them to include “author of Beyond Beowulf, the first ever sequel to Beowulf.” As of today, my Amazon sales rank has gone up by 100,000 since I last looked. I hope bookstores in Santa Barbara are prepared for a surge!

On Being "Retired"

2008-06-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

My California daughter has just co-edited a book about the choices women make when they have hopes for a family and a college career. How do you deal with the competing pressures? (search for "foodthought" to learn more)

I’ve been pondering the same question myself as I deal with the pressures of combining retirement with a career. Actually, retirement alone is pretty much of a challenge. My favorite definition of retirement is: when you wake up in the morning with nothing to do and by the end of the day you’ve done half of it.

“Sit around and smell the roses,” they say. But who weeds the roses? Who trims them and fertilizes them? Right there you have a problem. But when you try to add in peonies and lilacs and day lilies and tomatoes and potatoes and spinach and lettuce and an orchard, you may not find time for those roses.

And that’s just the easy part.

But if your idea of retirement (as mine is) is having time at last to keep the weeds under control but you still prefer to be at the front of the church on Sunday and want to write a book or two every year, it does get complicated. One of my daughter’s contributors speaks of feeling guilty when she’s home because she’s not at work and feeling guilty when she’s at work because she’s not at home. I know how it is. When I’m in the garden, I know I need to be writing and when I’m writing, I know I should be in the garden.

“Organize;” that’s the key, isn’t it? Get a “To Do” list. Right; I have one. “Spray the poison ivy, put the mower deck back on the tractor, get some netting over the blueberries.” I made that list three days ago. Today I went out and pulled reeds out of the pond, weeded the beets, and picked gooseberries. Farming is a lot like housework or raising a child. You can make all the lists you want, but then you notice something else that needs doing and do that instead.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” said the poet, “or what’s a heaven for?” Well, it’s not for being in control, because we won’t be. Here we can sometimes, however briefly, fool ourselves into thinking that we’re in charge of our lives; hereafter we won’t have that option. So maybe the PhD mother and “retired” Connecticut farmer are getting a first hand taste of heaven right now.

What's Your Problem?

2008-06-10T07:14:00.001-07:00

For years I told people that I liked The New Yorker because of the theology in the cartoons. I once put together a proposal for a book to be called “The New Yorker’s Idea of Heaven” which, I thought, would be a good match for that wonderful map you may have seen: “The New Yorker’s Idea of the United States.” I had dozens of cartoons available to illustrate my proposed book, many showing a black-garbed figure with a sickle and many with clouds and a gate of heaven and St. Peter checking in new arrivals.

Now The New Yorker has gotten more serious about its theology. The double issue for mid-June has a serious of short essays on faith and doubt and a longish book review of Bart D. Ehrman’s new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer. It’s part of a sudden wave of books attacking the God idea, intended, perhaps for an audience too young to remember the “God is Dead” wave that came by some forty years ago.

The New Yorker’ s reviewer starts us off with a summary of the events of May 15, 2008: fifty thousand or more dead in China, some hundred thousand in Burma, ten killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, a dozen by a missile strike in Pakistan, a policeman by ETA terrorists in northern Spain. Some days are worse than others, but sheer numbers are irrelevant. The question arises more sharply when the victim is someone you know well. I had been ordained only a year or two when a member of the parish I was serving in Brooklyn ran a stolen car into a group of people killing several, and another, on the same day, known to me as a member of a Cosa Nostra-type of enterprise, was found shot to death in a car on the docks. The mother of the first man died of a heart attack when she heard what had happened. The wife of the second conspired with me to conceal what little money she had from relatives determined to spend it all on his funeral without regard for the needs of their three small children. More recently I visited a couple whose daughter, now in her teens, has never been able to walk or talk. They carry her from place to place and care for her lovingly.

Why? Job’s question is not new nor is the answer changed.

“Consider the ostrich,” God says to Job. “What do you know about creation?”

Exactly. What do we know? The circle of what we know expands out at an increasing rate of speed and expands at the same rate our awareness of the vast unknown beyond. Astronomers grapple with the questions of dark matter and the expanding universe and begin to wonder whether they will ever have final answers. But they can be sure they will have more questions.

I was talking some years ago with a woman dying of cancer who told me she wanted to be able to see what would become of her children. “You will know,” I assured her. “But I want to hold them,” she said. And what do you say to that?

No one can spend a lifetime in parish ministry and not face unanswerable questions or wonder what logic there is to the events of daily life. I have never been one to tell people that “God has his/her reasons” or “God wanted him/her” or “It’s all for the best.” I’d rather follow Dylan Thomas’ advice: “Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” No one can convince me that the bereaved couple in China whose only child has been killed in the collapse of her school are part of a larger plan. I remember walking through a military cemetery in Normandy and thinking of all the lives that were never lived. Is this evidence of a merciful God?

I have often said that I am keeping a list of questions to get answered hereafter. I am not looking for answers now because there are none that can satisfy me or any other reasonable person. I can offer some partial answers: free will accounts for a lot. Where there is love there must be freedom and where there is freedom it will be misused. If we were puppets dangling from God’s fingers, there would be no evil because there would be no freedom. Those who believe we are all part of a plan God is working out in infinite detail have a much greater problem than I do. Their God has much more to answer for.

Those in the new wave of deniers have much in common with the fundamentalist. Both imagine a God who is constructed to their specifications and to meet their own needs. “This God,” says the denier, “cannot be because I cannot understand the logic of such a God.” “This God,” says the fundamentalist, “can be because I can understand the logic of such a God.”

I remember the title of a book by J.B.Phillips, “Your God is too small.” If you, denier or believer, have all the answers, you do not know God. God, by my definition – and my definition is as likely to be wrong as anyone else’s – is not limited to my logic. The God I can understand is not God.

But I have other questions that need to be answered. They are like Job’s, but, perhaps, more immediate: “Have you considered the rhododendron and the peony?” Is there not more to account for there than in the earthquake and flood? The earthquake heaves up and subsides; the flood sweeps in and recedes. It’s over and we can move on. Yes, the sorrow and grief remain, but they also ebb with time. They are not renewed every day. The events in China and Burma have power to astound us just because they are out of the ordinary. The problem of evil consists to some degree in its random and occasional nature.

Not so the rhododendron. That mass of flame bursts out again predictably every year and reminds us of the omnipresence of beauty. The daffodils give way to the lilacs and the lilacs to the peonies. Is there a need for all of them? Would the balance of nature be any less balanced if there were no lilacs? Is there a special need for the gold finch that the purple finch can’t supply? Would the New England forests be an less effective in their role of converting carbon dioxide to oxygen if there were only black oak and not red? Would we be aware of something missing of we had never seen maple leaves turn red and gold in the fall, if they simply turned brown and fell? Why is the world so filled with beauty and why are we so moved by its existence? If the presence of evil leads you to question the existence of God, do you not also have to consider the presence of beauty?

I have no sufficient answer when I am asked to explain the pain and suffering that are all too frequently in the news. But equally I have no answer for the problem of beauty which is seldom in the news because we take it for granted.

I haven’t read Ehrman’s book, but I like the reviewer’s attention to the problem of what he calls “negative belief.” “The rebel is stuck,” he writes, “in an aggrieved nostalgia for belief.” I knew several such rebels myself in college. More passionate in their unbelief than believers in their faith, they spent hours in the college library looking for further evidence for their position. But there was a narrowness about their concerns, a self-blinded focus on the pain of the world and a blindness to its beauty.

I’m with them in wanting answers but not so confident of human mental capacities that I expect all the answers any time soon. We are, after all, asking about a Creator and no answer will be satisfying that looks only at the disasters. There’s more than that to account for: explain to me also, please, the existence of beauty.

Nature's Gold

2008-06-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

What was Robert Frost talking about when he said, “Nature’s first green is gold”? I’ve always thought it was forsythia, but my wife thinks it’s willow twigs. What I’m surer of, however, is that Frost was much too gloomy. “Nothing gold can stay,” says Frost. So get over it and move on.

My problem with spring in New England is that each new phase seems spectacular when it comes but is succeeded by something that seems, impossibly, better yet.

When the forsythia breaks out in cascades of gold across the landscape, it’s a marvel, but then come the daffodils in their myriad varieties: gold trumpet in gold corona, gold trumpet in white corona, double corona, flecked and frilled and fabulous. But then come the lilacs: wow! Great soaring bushes full of blossom: lilac and burgundy and white. And barely are they established then along come the azaleas and rhododendrons.

Rhight now it’s rhododendron time and - as with the previous phases - I’m awestruck. What could be better? I’m reminded of our last visit to the Isle of Skye and our stay in a country hotel where I marveled at an embankment of rhododendrons fifty yards long and twenty to thirty feet high, beginning near the main road and ranging on back past the hotel. I believe there were at least eight different shades in a range from red through magenta to pink to say nothing of white and yellow. But they grow wild in Scotland and you get bored with them after awhile. Maybe I’ll be bored with them here by the time the peonies come along and make me forget them.

Have you thought that heaven might be boring with nothing but perfection day after day? Yes, but John Donne tells us that there “every minute is in the highest exaltation, as good as it can be, and yet superexalted and infinitely multiplied by every minute’s addition; every minute is infinitely better than ever it was before.” Like a New England spring.

Do you think God will run out of ideas? If so, it’s because you live in some season-less place like Texas or in New England and haven’t been paying attention.

Consider the lilies

2008-05-25T16:59:00.001-07:00

“Consider the lilies of the field,” said the gospel this morning, “they toil not neither do they spin.” Right. They have a system that relies heavily on human labor. I toil and spin and all they have to do is grow. I spent the afternoon considering all sorts of things in the field, toiling and spinning enough to get a lot of things to grow. But they couldn't do it without me.

Think back with me now to the 18th of January, if you will; a warmish day for mid-winter but with enough new snow that I spent some time shoveling it off the driveway. Later in the day I finished filling in the order blanks for garden seeds and sent them off by e-mail. It’s one of the pleasant tasks of a winter day and conjures up memories of warm summer sun smiling down on rows of green vegetables. The snow will be gone, the need to put more wood in the stove will be ended, and the heavy winter sweaters will be stored away. That was then.

Now it is May. Join me as I go out to the garden to bring those winter dreams to reality. The sun indeed shines down -- and produces sweat. That in turn draws the hordes of gnats who look forward to their day in the sun even more than I do. I take the hoe and make the furrows to plant the seed. Today’s project is corn;, it can’t be planted until the soil is warm and a wet May has kept the soil cool. Last year this time the corn was up. Last year this time the temperature was 89. It could be worse.

Well, that was easy; why not put up the fencing for the green peas to grow on? If I had put the rolls of chicken wire away last fall as I should have, I would have to make a few trips with the tractor to get them down to the garden but they never got put away. There they are, just outside the garden gate, slightly rusted from their exposure to six months of weather but still serviceable. Good, we will drive a fence post in place and begin to unroll the wire. Why is it that there is always a rock two inches below the end of the row of peas? I move the fence post a few inches one way and another. It is a large rock. I drive the fence post in six inches back from the row. The gnats are enjoying the fact that I am too fully engaged in finding a rock-free area to drive the fence post to wave them away. Good, one fence post in; eleven to go - and rocks carefully placed under the end of almost every row.

Six rows of green peas, three rolls of chicken wire: one will take care of the first two and a third rows. That means driving another fence post mid-way of the third row. There’s a rock there also. Three rolls, in the event, take care of five rows, not six. There must be more wire somewhere. I’ll do it tomorrow. Notice now, if you will, the dark green leaves coming up everywhere. Those are mustard greens. I planted mustard greens several years ago and they return every year in abundance. I am planning to get a genetic modification kit and cross mustard greens with green peas, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots. All of these will then spring up automatically every year. This will be the greatest step forward since the domestication of wheat. Never again will there be a need to deal with gnats and rocks; simply till the garden and wait. No more need to toil or spin. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

Identity Theft

2008-05-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve sometimes wondered what it might be like to be John Smith or, maybe, Bill Brown. In our corner of Connecticut we’ve been amused by the number of Bobs we know - one who built the house, another who dug our pond, still another who repairs my chain saw. What must it be like to hear your name called and realize it’s someone else? What if your name didn’t give you a clear identity?

I never faced the problem until Chris Webber became a star at Michigan State and in the NBA, but even then it was a sort of distant problem. We weren’t likely to be in the same room or see the same people.

This week identity theft hit home. I’d gone to Roanoke, Virginia to speak at a diocesan clergy day and a room was reserved for me in the Hotel Roanoke. I went to the reception desk and gave my name. They looked puzzled. “Did you check in earlier?” “No, I just got here.” “Just a minute, sir; we’ll get this straightened out.”

They were back shortly with my plastic room key and two warm cookies, a specialty of the house. “Have a nice evening.”

I took my bags to my room, came back down, and went off to dinner with the bishop and his wife at their home.

When I returned, I couldn’t open the door to my room. The inside latch was engaged as if someone were in the room. I went back to the desk for help. To my left another man was speaking to a clerk and I heard my name. “Are you Chris Webber?” I asked. “Yes,” he said; “What are the odds that two people with this name would register at this hotel on the same day?”

It turned out that we don’t have the same name at all. His middle initial is M not L, and he spells his name the German way, with one B. How could the hotel have been confused? We laughed about it and went our ways. The hotel sent a man to pry my door open. It’s a poor design that enables the latch to fall in when you close the door on the way out. No big deal.

Next morning a statement was stuck in my door showing the hotel’s charges - including an evening meal the night before. It seemed unlikely that I should have to pay the hotel for the meal at the bishop’s house so I went back to the desk. “I think that charge was for Chris Weber,” I said, “Not Chris Webber.” They apologized and reissued the statement.

But what do the John Smiths and Bill Browns of this world do? How often do they mutter about their parent’s choices of monikers? What must it be like to share your name with a multitude? A small taste of the problem is amusing; on a daily basis, I doubt it’s funny at all.

The Writing Life

2008-05-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

The evening news tells us that many people these days are cramming 31 hours into 24. They question whether people are any more productive.

I can’t vouch for quality, but there’s no question about quantity. How did I live without a computer?

Today I’ve been working on three separate projects and dealing with editors and secretaries in London, New York, and Virginia. Two of these projects were generated by a blog I wrote months ago. At the time only two or three comments were posted and I was discouraged. Then came an invitation to be principal speaker at a conference in Roanoke, Virginia. With that conference coming up next week, I’ve been back and forth with the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia about getting handouts to be distributed. In the midst of that, from London, came a request to edit the material in my blog so it can be used as bulletin inserts available to Episcopal Churches everywhere. And, of course, I heard today from the editor of an upcoming book in New York that the material I had sent on a disc wasn’t there, so would I please send it in sections by e-mail.

I did take one day this week to travel to Hartford to do some research on my major writing project, but that’s taken a seat at the back of the bus lately.

No wonder I haven’t posted a blog in some days. After all, it’s springtime and I’ve had to break to plant three dwarf apple trees, two gooseberry bushes, and some broccoli.

But I do ponder now and again what life was like for Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, scratching away with their quill pens at a thousand words a day.

I also remember that their words are still read!

The chicken, the egg, or the senator?

2008-05-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

The familiar riddle asks, “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” The Senate has been trying to find out, and it’s not that easy.

Senator Schumer of New York heads a committee looking into the rapidly rising cost of food. Recently he and his colleagues questioned a panel including a professional economist, the head of a farmer’s association, and the head of a baker’s association.

The farmer wanted the senators to know that wheat wasn’t causing the problem. When you pay $1.25 for a bagel, he told the senators, the cost of the wheat is only seven cents. Besides, he said, when you use corn for ethanol, that doesn’t diminish the supply of wheat. True, said the baker, but genetically modified corn can now be grown much further north and you can get 120 bushels of corn an acre as opposed to 40 of wheat. The baker had been to the Dakotas and talked to farmers who were making the logical switch. But, said, the economist, the real problem with the price of wheat is the devastating drought in Australia and other wheat growing areas. That he assured his hearers, is the real problem.

I found all this very informative, but wanted the senators to probe more deeply. No one asked, for example, whether the worst drought in Australian history might have been caused by changing weather patterns caused by global warming caused by green house gases produced by the rapid increase of car ownership in India and China that created an increased demand for oil that led Congress to mandate more ethanol to keep fuel prices from going up too rapidly so more people can drive.

Instead, Senator Schumer changed the subject and asked the economist why the cost of eggs had gone up so far and fast. “It’s the lack of layers,” said the economist. It took a few minutes to make it clear that the layers in question were not in the baker’s cakes. So why were fewer hens laying eggs? Because, we were told, more of them had been used for broilers. And why were more chickens used for broiling than laying? For a moment the committee was on the verge of answering the age old question as to which comestible came first. But Senator Schumer had been called to an emergency leadership meeting and the committee went on to other subjects.

I was left musing on missed opportunities. No one asked, for example whether using hens for broiling instead of laying might help cause global warming? Logically it might, but that question also never got asked.

So, once again, Washington has fallen short. But I want you to know that there is a committee out there working on the problem.

Refection Reflection

2008-04-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

Few things are lonelier than eating alone in a restaurant. I found myself in that situation recently when I had an evening between events in a strange city and had to dine by myself. I took along a book and learned something of seventeenth century theology while I ate. But I also reflected on my situation and why it is that eating needs to be social.

That it does, is obvious. When I lived in Bronxville, there was a parishioner who would invite my wife and me to have dinner with him on a regular basis at his club. His wife had died; he didn’t know how to cook; and meals even at his club were unbearably lonely. He made it a practice to invite someone to eat with him. The truck driver can sit at the bar in the roadside café and talk to the waitress or another truck driver. My brother had a dog with the same principles. If he and his wife were going out for dinner, they would fill the dog’s bowl before leaving but it remained untouched until they returned. Even a dog hates to eat alone!

Food and conversation were made for each other. Eating alone, I was finished in 30 minutes. That’s not time enough to digest the main meal of the day. Someone with whom to talk slows the eating to a proper digestive pace. Likewise a good conversation requires time to digest what is said. Bites of food between bursts of conversation slow the talk to allow reflection. Together, food and conversation provide each other with the necessary time for each to be absorbed.

No wonder the central service of the church is Eucharist and sermon, food and conversation. No wonder the first English Prayer Book required that the Eucharist not be celebrated alone; there must be a congregation of at least two or three. For the priest to “eat alone” distorts the nature of the sacrament. A private mass is inconsistent with the nature of Christianity; it makes a lonely meal of what ought to be a social event.

But if I hadn’t been eating alone, I might never have realized all this.

A Child's Alphabet of the World of Bush

2008-04-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

This is a work in progress. I was making a list of things that bother me about the Bush administration and noticed that they fell easily into alphabetical order. Then limericks began to come. I really don't have time right now to work up 26 limericks - or even to finish off the alphabet - so I thought I would put it out there for contributions. Sends your entries to clw@clwebber.com.

Airline safety
The airplanes that fly in the sky
Will wear out, no doubt, by and by,
But let’s just relax
And not check them for cracks
If it costs us too much to comply.

Billionaires tax relief
If you think that your taxes are high,
You should see why the billionaires cry:
Without help, they insist,
They can barely exist.
Well, it’s tough, but I’m willing to try!

Contracting out defense work: Problems getting enough enlistments? Blackwater gets plenty of people to work for them because they pay better. Why should the government have to pay an army when free enterprise can take care of our defense? Besides, if the government spends all the money on free enterprise defense, we won’t have any left for health care.

Drug cost: if people want better drug coverage, we can help the drug companies provide it

Environment: it’s still cooler in New England than in Texas so what’s the problem?

Food: let’s help the farmers by encouraging them to grow more corn and use it for fuel. Of course the farmers will need more fuel for their tractors and there may not be enough food for everyone, but the mid-west will vote Republican.

Gun control: so a bunch of college kids got shot; it’s still safer on campus than in Iraq

Health care: can’t afford better health care because there’s a war on.

Iraq: the famous presidents are the ones who got us into big wars so we need one for our record (of course, there was also Jefferson Davis)

Justice Dept: we need District Attorneys who will concentrate on voter fraud and find out why we might have lost two elections without some last minute rigging of the results

Katrina: is it our fault if people choose to live behind levees the government didn’t build properly?

Left behind (No child): if children learn to memorize answers and not think critically, they’ll be able to remember Bush’s name but not to exercise critical judgment about his job performance.

Mortgage Mess: let’s rescue the banks that made bad decisions but why should we help people who made bad decisions?

Nucular energy: can’t pronounce it so we can’t let the Iranians get it.

Oval office: where the Decider sits.

President: if the President is the chief executive, why should other people be allowed to interfere?

Quagmire: soft ground such as might be found in Vietnam but not in the Middle East.

Republican party: So who needs New England when we can steal elections in Florida and Ohio?

Stock exchange: we can’t let Bear Sterns fail because wealthy people would lose money.

Tax collecting: we cut back funding for the IRS because it annoys people to have tax collectors come around, so then we had to hire private contractors to bug people instead. We’d all rather be bugged by the free enterprise system than the government.

United States: Texas and 49 other places.

Veterans administration: if we spend all that money on getting troops to Iraq, where will be find the money to care for them when they come back with injuries?

Washington: we always said Washington was the problem, and, as you can see, we were right!

X

Y

Z

2008-04-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

It's been at least a week since Ive published -- too much to read! And what follows is more than I usually ask you to read. But it brings life - and death - to the fine print and easily overlooked details. I think it's must reading. I hope you'll take the time. Beowulf had only Grendel to worry about. Our monsters are far bigger.

**************************

Catch 2,200: Nine Propositions on the US Air War for Terror
By Tom Engelhardt

Thursday 10 April 2008

Let's start with a few simple propositions.

First, the farther away you are from the ground, the clearer things are likely to look, the more god-like you are likely to feel, the less human those you attack are likely to be to you. How much more so, of course, if you, the "pilot," are actually sitting at a consol at an air base near Las Vegas, identifying a "suspect" thousands of miles away via video monitor, "following" that suspect into a house, and then letting loose a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone cruising somewhere over Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Second, however "precise" your weaponry, however "surgical" your strike, however impressive the grainy snuff-film images you can put on television, war from the air is, and will remain, a most imprecise and destructive form of battle.

Third, in human terms, distance does not enhance accuracy. The farther away you are from a target, the more likely it is that you will have to guess who or what it is, based on spotty, difficult to interpret or bad information, not to speak of outright misinformation; whatever the theoretical accuracy of your weaponry, you are far more likely to miscalculate, make mistakes, mistarget, or target the misbegotten from the air.

Fourth, if you are conducting war this way and you are doing so in heavily populated urban neighborhoods, as is now the case almost every day in Iraq, then civilians will predictably die "by mistake" almost every day: the child who happens to be on the street but just beyond camera range; the "terrorist suspect" or insurgent who looks, at a distance, like he's planting a roadside bomb, but is just scavenging; the neighbors who happen to be sitting down to dinner in the apartment or house next to the one you decide to hit.

Fifth, since World War II, air power has been the American way of war.

Sixth, since November 2001, the Bush administration has increasingly relied on air power in its Global War on Terror to "take out" the enemy, which has meant regular air strikes in cities and villages, and the no less regular, if largely unrecorded, deaths of civilians.

Seventh, in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq (as well as in the tribal areas along the Pakistani border), the use of air power has been "surging." You can essentially no longer read an account of a skirmish or battle in one of Iraq's cities in which air power is not called in. This means (see propositions 1-4) a war of constant "mistakes," and of regularly mentioned "investigations" into the deaths of "militants" and "insurgents" who, on the ground, seem to morph into children, women, and elderly men being pulled from the rubble.

Eighth, force creates counterforce. The application of force, especially from the air, is a reliable engine for the creation of enemies. It is a force multiplier (and not just for U.S. forces either). Every time an air strike is called in anywhere on the planet, anyone who orders it should automatically assume that left in its wake will be grieving, angry husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, relatives, friends - people vowing revenge, a pool of potential candidates filled with the anger of genuine injustice. From the point of view of your actual enemies, you can't bomb, missile, and strafe often enough, because when you do so, you are more or less guaranteed to create their newest recruits.

Ninth, U.S. air power has, in the last six and a half years, been an effective force in a war for terror, not against it.

Who's Counting?

What does this mean in practice? It means something simple and relentless; it means dead people you might not have chosen to kill, but that you are responsible for killing nonetheless - and even if you don't know that, or are unwilling to acknowledge it, others do know and will draw the logical conclusions.

What does this mean in practice? Consider just a typical collection of some of the small reports on air strikes in Iraq that have slipped into our world, barely noticed, in recent days:

Six U.S.-allied Sunni fighters from the "Awakening" movement were reportedly killed in strikes by an AH-64 Apache helicopter on two checkpoints in the city of Samarra on March 22. ("The U.S. military denied the checkpoint it attacked ... was manned by friendly members of the so-called awakening councils and said those killed were behaving suspiciously in an area recently struck by a roadside bomb ... It ... said the incident was under investigation ... AP Television News footage of the aftermath showed awakening council members loading bodies into a pickup.")

Fifteen people in a single family were reportedly killed by U.S. helicopters in the city of Baquba in northern Iraq on March 23rd. ("The US military forces were not available to comment on the reports ...")

In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, five civilians, including a judge, Munaf Mehdi, were reportedly killed and ten wounded from strikes by "fixed-wing aircraft" in a "battle with suspected al-Qaeda Sunni Arab militants" on March 26. ("Preliminary assessment," according to the U.S. military, "indicates that despite coalition forces' efforts to protect them, several civilians were injured or killed during the ensuing gunbattle.")

According to the Iraqi police, a U.S. plane strafed a house in the southern city of Basra, killing eight civilians, including two women and a child on March 29th.

According to Iraqi police sources, five people, including four policemen were killed and three wounded when U.S. helicopters struck the city of Hilla in southern Iraq. According to another report, two police cars were also destroyed and an ambulance fired upon.

A U.S. F/A-18 carried out a "precision strike" against a house in Basra, reportedly killing at least three civilians, two men and an elderly woman, while burying a father, mother, and young boy in the rubble on April 3rd. ("'Coalition forces are unaware of any civilians killed in the strike but are currently looking into the matter,' the military said ... Associated Press Television News showed cranes and rescue workers searching for survivors in the concrete rubble from the two-story house that was leveled in the Shiite militia stronghold of Qibla.")

In most of these cases, the facts remain in dispute (if anyone, other than the U.S. military, even cares to dispute them); the numbers of dead may, in the end, prove inaccurate; and the equivalent of he says/she says is unlikely to be settled because, most of the time, no reporter will follow up or investigate. Such cases generally follow a pattern: The U.S. military issues a brief battle description in which so many militants/insurgents/terrorists have been taken out from the air; local officials or witnesses claim that the dead were, in part or whole, ordinary citizens; the U.S. military offers a denial that civilians were killed; if the story doesn't die, the military announces that an investigation is underway, which no one generally ever hears about again. Only on rare occasions, in our world, do such incidents actually rise to the level of real news that anyone attends to.

There may be an Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website and an Iraq Body Count website, but there is no Afghan version of the same, nor is there a global body count (www.gbc.com) to consult on such War on Terror civilian deaths from the air. Usually, when such events recur, there aren't even names to put with the dead bodies and the reports themselves drop almost instantaneously beneath the waves (of news) without ever really catching our attention. Even if you believe that ours is the only world that really matters, that we are the only people whose lives have real value, that doesn't mean such deaths won't matter to you in the long run.

After all, what we don't know, or don't care to know, others care greatly about. Who forgets when a loved one is suddenly killed in such a manner? Even if we aren't counting bodies in the air-war subsection of the President's Global War on Terror, others are. Those whom we think of, if at all, as "collateral damage" know just what's happened to them and to their neighbors. And they have undoubtedly drawn the obvious conclusions.

Our "Strike Weapons" and Theirs

Here's the sorry reality: Such occurrences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the "arc" of territory that the Bush administration has, in a mere few years, helped set aflame are the norm. Our "mistakes," that is, are legion and, in the process of making them, our planes, drones, and helicopters have killed villagers by the score, attacked a convoy of friendly Afghan "elders," and blown away wedding parties. For us, "incidents" like these pass by in an instant, but not for those who are on the receiving end.

The attacks of 9/11 are usually not placed in such a context. We consider ourselves special, even unique, for having experienced them. But think of them another way: One day, out of the blue, death arrives from the air. It arrives in a moment of ultimate terror. It kills innocent civilians who were simply living their lives.

This happened to us once in a manner so spectacular, so devastating as to make global headlines. But small-scale versions of this happen regularly to people in that "arc of instability" - and, if there were to be a global body count organization for such events, it would long ago have toted up a death toll that reached past that of September 11, 2001.

Let's remember that, after 9/11, Americans, from the President on down, spent months, if not years in mourning, performing rites of remembrance, and swearing revenge against those who had done this to us. Do we not imagine that others, even when the spotlight isn't on them, react similarly? Do we not think that they, too, are capable of swearing revenge and acting accordingly?

The above list of incidents covers just a couple of weeks in one embattled country - and just the moments that made it into minor news reports that I happened to stumble across. But if you read reports from Iraq carefully these days, few describing U.S. military operations in that country seem to lack at least a sentence or two on air operations - on what is really a little noticed "air surge" over that country's cities and especially the heavily populated slum "suburb" of eastern Baghdad, Sadr City (once known as Saddam City) largely controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. With perhaps two and a half million inhabitants, if it were a separate city, it would be the country's second largest.

Here, for instance, are a few lines from a recent Los Angeles Times piece by Tina Susman on escalating fighting in Baghdad: "American helicopters fired at least four Hellfire missiles and an Air Force jet dropped a bomb on a suspected militia target ... A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steven Stover, rejected Iraqi allegations that U.S. airstrikes and gunfire have killed mainly civilians. 'There might be some civilians that are getting caught, but for the most part, we're killing the bad guys.' 'We're very precise,' he said, adding that many airstrikes had been called off when it was not possible to get a 'clean hit' that would avoid hitting noncombatants." Or this from Sameer N. Yacoub of the Associated Press: "The U.S. military said one of its drones launched a Hellfire missile during the night at two gunmen shooting at government forces in a different part of Sadr City." Or this: "Three US airstrikes in northeastern Baghdad have killed 12 suspected gunmen and wounded 15 civilians, Iraqi police and US military say."

Each of these came out while this piece was being written, as did this: According to the AP, air strikes in a remote province of Afghanistan aimed at a warlord allied with the Taliban may have killed numerous civilians. ("Other provincial leaders said many civilians were killed in the hours-long clash, which included airstrikes in the remote villages of Shok and Kendal ... U.S. officials and the Afghan Defense Ministry have denied that any civilians were killed.")

Whatever happened in these latest air attacks, the deaths of civilians are not some sideline result of the War on Terror; they lie at its heart. If your care is safety - a subject brought up repeatedly by Senators who wanted to know from U.S. commander General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this week whether the surge had made "us" safer - then, the answer is: This does not make you safer.

And yet, don't expect this counterproductive way of war to end any time soon. After all, the Air Force already has underway its "2018 bomber," due for delivery the same year that, according to the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubic, the Iraqi army will theoretically be able to guard the country's frontiers effectively. And don't forget the 2018 bomber's successor, "a true 'next generation' long-range strike weapon" that "may be a traditional bomber or an exotic 'system of systems,' with features such as hypersonic speed." Maybe by then, the Iraqis will actually be successfully defending their borders.

Until then, think of the U.S. air war for terror as a Catch 2,200 - every application of force from the air resulting in the creation of a counterforce on the ground, another kind of "strike weapon" for the future, while those collateral bodies pile ever higher. Perhaps, by 2018 or 2035, worldbodycount.com will be operative.
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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, "The End of Victory Culture" (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Note: The invaluable website Antiwar.com was especially invaluable this time around when it came to tracking news accounts of recent US air attacks. Please note, though, that the dates given in the piece for the attacks are approximate. All I had were the datelines on news stories, which may not reflect the actual day of each attack.

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Nature's First Gold

2008-03-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

“Nature's first green is gold,” said Robert Frost. I had always thought he was talking about forsythia, but research suggests that he may have been talking about the willow tree and the yellowish color of its twigs before the first leaves open out. Either way, it overlooks the snowdrop. Mine were out more than ten days before the first crocus. And long before the first forsythia. We have forsythia out only because we brought branches in and forced them.

One way or another, we’re at that time of year when any signs of spring are welcome. We still have freezing temperatures most nights and the promise of a “wintry mix” on Monday. Snowdrops and crocuses don’t make much of a statement but it doesn’t take much of one to get attention in the drab and chilly days of late March..

Last fall, planning ahead, I decided to upgrade our crocus supply - and wrote about it in an October blog. I had planted 75 of them and hoped for good things this spring. If you’ve been waiting for a report, I can tell you that the first five are up - four golds and a purple. I hope there will be more.

Meanwhile, even five crocuses, a patch of snowdrops, and some forced forsythia have me thinking of spring, and no one has described its impact better than Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters):

“Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.”

Spring is possible, a “perpetual astonishment.” When it comes, it makes winter worthwhile and makes me pity those who live in places without it.