Tag: jabba the hutt

The Orcs Of Congress

jono55

A preface to this post. One of my personal mythic/reality/dreaming/challenging places is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. One puts a canoe in the water, steps into it and away from the land, and all is changed. You are on your own, responsible for your own life in a way that is restorative to the worn and tattered thing that urban living makes of your soul. If something breaks … there is no one to fix it but you. I have been lucky enough to visit this beautiful area more than thirty times. It is as close as I have ever gotten to the numinous.

So I am definitely taking this next affront personally. The Republicans just voted to overturn a ban on mining near the Boundary Waters. It’s another one of those billionaires versus the public good scenarios. This time it’s a Chilean conglomerate whose operation would threaten this area, whose beauty I frequently exploit to brighten the pages of this often colorless and meandering blog.

So this is a kind of particular mine that is a copper sulfide mine, and what happens is copper sulfur rock is brought up to the surface, hundreds and hundreds of millions of tons of it. And when sulfur is exposed to air and oxygen – oxygen and water, which we have a lot of in northern Minnesota, it basically turns into sulfuric acid, and then it flows into the watershed. This mine is literally a mile or so from water that drains directly into the Boundary Waters and then into Voyageurs National Park.

NPR All Things Considered: Newly approved mining in Minnesota may threaten waterways of a beloved nature preserve

I will repeat a challenge here that I made more than a year ago. When was the last time anyone heard or read about a mining company who did not damage the environment no matter what they might have said in order to be permitted to do their work? Basically it is a sad but oft repeated story, trite in its details. Rape and run. Do the damage and then let the people try to get satisfaction in order to repair the harm.

This next paragraph is for those who have read (or seen the movies) of the Lord of the Rings saga. In my view the Republicans have made themselves into Orcs wearing tailored suits. Manifestations of the worst of human impulses, seemingly no longer capable of doing anything resembling good works.

Too strong a statement, you say? Too melodramatic? Just answer this question: where is your data? I certainly have mine in abundance. Like I said at the beginning, this is personal for me. In this instance it is the GOP taking the baby out of the rear-facing car seat and tying it to the front bumper. Little good can come from such a maneuver.

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Her Love Was Meant For Me, by Richard Thompson

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All of the trails on the South Rim of the Black Canyon National Park are now open to hikers. We are cautioned not to leave the paths and tramp around on what has always been a fragile landscape and is now even more so as it is attempting to recover from last year’s fire. No problem for us. We’ve always respected those rules. If the large numbers of human visitors were allowed to roam everywhere they wanted to it wouldn’t take long for a great deal of the beauty of those trails to vanish underfoot. This trail system is moderately strenuous for us in a few places, but overall is just a great workout in a dramatic setting. We are eager to add those hikes to our attempts at maintaining something like fitness.

Really, when I hit the pillow at night I can almost hear my aerobic capacity falling away. There is nothing for me to gain by avoiding exercise but to acquire more than a passing resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.

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Speaking of his Abominable Huttness, I remember what a large deal it was when the first Star Wars film was released. Among the hordes that went to see it were son Jonnie and I. I think we went three times, and the following Christmas there were several Star Wars gifts with his name on them. It was a moment for him. One of Jonnie’s traits was that when he liked something, he dove in headfirst. Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings books, and the rock groups Kiss and Led Zeppelin were all recipients of his interest and devotion. If he was a fan of something you did, he bought all your stuff.

Jabba was one of the major heavies in that first movie, where his nasty physical appearance and poor personal hygiene were contrasted with Princess Leia’s lightly-clad attractiveness in several scenes.

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Buckle up and get ready for a two-minute assault on your memory. The unforgettable theme music.

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Someone came to the White House Correspondents Dinner last evening and fired shots, killing no one. He has been apprehended. As of this morning we don’t actually know who might have been his target, at such a dinner there are so many who have that potential. It could have been Cluck, a member of his cabinet, or a reporter who incensed the assailant for reasons obvious or obscure.

Deciding to go up against the Secret Service at a black tie event is not the hallmark of a mentally stable person. Perhaps he was sticking his head out of the metaphoric window, as Howard Beale suggests in the video below, and it didn’t make any difference to him who he killed or injured. Just to do something … . The world we occupy today tends to bring out the crazy in a person.

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Shoot Out The Lights, by Richard Thompson

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Under The Banyan Tree

jono55

Well, dang. After passing over us for years, COVID finally reached its clammy fingers into BaseCamp, our home. Robin came down with fever and a cough on a Monday night, and the diagnosis was confirmed a couple of days later. By Thursday I had symptoms as well, but much milder than poor Robin. Only three weeks ago we both received COVID boosters, so we hope to skip the worst part.

What burns most is that after the planning, making of signs and buttons, working with our committee on routes and safety issues … knowing that this may well be a historically important rally … we can’t go. Even if we felt physically able, there is the small matter of contagion. We are temporary pariahs and that’s all there is to it. What we may do is get into our car and do a bunch of drive-bys, adding some positive honking to the mix as the march passes by. We’ll see.

No matter. The 18th promises to be fascinating as millions of people (who so obviously hate America) get together to talk about our freedoms, the Constitution, redressing wrongs, taking care of our most vulnerable … and giving the good ol’ gang of thugs on Pennsylvania Avenue something to think about.

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Apparently Cluck has taken issue with being on the cover of Time Magazine. It’s the photograph. He thinks it is a poor one, and doesn’t catch a single one of his good angles. I don’t know … he’s got that Mussolini-chin raised, his eyes are on I dunno where, but it’s that neck and its doubled dewlap that seems to be the issue. Some observers have made scatologic fun of its appearance, but you won’t find any of that low sort of humor on this blog. Nossir.

Poor fellow. One of the most powerful men on the planet is turning into this creature in front of our eyes. Can’t the White House dermatologist do something? Isn’t there a lotion … ?

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Last night we watched a fine old film, one that both of us had seen years ago, but enough time had passed that only the faintest recollections remained. It was Elizabeth, from 1998 and starring Cate Blanchett and a host of fine actors including Daniel Craig and Kelly McDonald in small roles before they became really famous. Both Robin and I are seemingly endlessly interested in that part of English history beginning with Henry VIII and through to the end of Elizabeth’s reign.

I mean, geez, all that chicanery, plotting, religious warring, those heads being lopped off and all, what’s not to love? And what wouldn’t I have given to play the teensy part of an armored guard and having the chance to say: “Well, it’s off to the Tower for you, milady. Best pack a light bag.”

Nope, that’s back when politics was really fun, and the losers didn’t hang around to gripe over and over about things when each dustup was over. That’s because the losers were hung, beheaded, or chopped into several pieces and distributed around England to be displayed as object lessons. We could learn a lot from the past about what to do when a regime fell. ‘Twould make it more interesting if the consequences were a bit more substantial.

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Poco and I were spending some quality time with each other the other day, comparing aches and pains and the virtues of becoming old as dirt. It is his opinion that any energy spent on anything other than lying in a sunny spot during the warm part of the day is wasted. Being over the hill means that you are just that … over the hill. Accept it and get over it is his message. You can make a fuss, splutter and steam to your heart’s content, but it is a rare old gent or lady who is really listened to. Or if they are listened to it’s like: “Isn’t that cute? It can talk just like you or me.”

No, the days when the people of the tribe walked over to the banyan tree to consult with an elder are largely over. It’s too easy to say to oneself “What could someone who isn’t fluent on Instagram or TikTok possibly say that would be meaningful to me?” And I get it, I really do.

The pity is that so many of our problems are old ones dating back centuries and some of them do have remedies that have been worked out over generations. And thus that neglected information needs to be relearned and relearned anew, often painfully.

Oh well, I said to Poco, c’est la vie. Could you move over just a hair, I need a bit more sun on my left side.

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In November of 1975, I had only recently moved my family to Hancock, a small town on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The Keweenaw is a finger of land that sticks out into Lake Superior, on of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world.

On the night of November 10, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the big ore boats on the Great Lakes, disappeared in a Lake Superior storm. It was all the news in Hancock at the time, as was anything that happened on the Lake, but it wasn’t until Gordon Lightfoot recorded his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that the story was burned into our memories. The song played seemingly continuously on the radio back then, and every November afterward that we lived there. Lightfoot donated proceeds from his music to a fund for the widows and children of the lost sailors.

The NY Times ran a piece this week that brought up this old chestful of memories for me. I was working as a pediatrician in Hancock in 1975, and I had nothing to do with Great Lakes shipping, but if you lived anywhere that touched Lake Superior you were affected because of the enormity of the lake and of it’s caprices. Taking a boat ride out on the lake? Better have a good boat with working radar because fogs didn’t always roll in on you like they were supposed to do, sometimes they materialized in a minute all around you and finding your way back home became a measure of your skill as a navigator.

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot

The song is a haunting one, and some of that feeling of dread and loss comes up when it is played, even fifty years on. There is a line toward the end of the song that stands out for me.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

It could also apply to any of those situations in life where one minute you are living in your everyday world and the next you are trying to survive what has blindsided you. Time slows down as horror slips in and now nothing is the same and never will be again.

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The national No Kings protest of October 18 was larger by millions than the first one, back in June. I don’t have local numbers at the time of this writing, but the crowd was solid. Robin and I weren’t well enough to mingle and march, and certainly didn’t want to spread our misfortunes to the celebrants, but we couldn’t stand missing the event completely so we got into our car and drive down to where the rally was taking place.

We had attached a large NO KINGS sign to the door of the car on the passenger side and we drove slowly along the line of marchers on the sidewalk with the windows open and the radio blaring Fire On The Mountain over and over again. The crowd responded vigorously and clapped for us as our Subaru “float” drove past and we in turn clapped for them. After circling the marchers’ route several times we dropped out and returned home to the infirmary to continue with more boring routines involving lots of well-earned coughing and self-pity.

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Fire On The Mountain, by Jimmy Cliff and others

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