Friday cat blogging

Here are some oldies because amazingly, I haven't taken any photos this week!


Orange Boy likes to mash his head into things but in this photo he looks like Snoopy à la vulture.


Young Guy hasn't munched himself into this tiny basket from Nahuizalco, El Salvador in a while.


I may have put this one up before but it is one of my all-time faves of Orange Guy who was letting me know he wanted dinner.


And here are all three within reaching distance of each other.

So what is priesthood about anyway?

The not-so-serious mediation. Later, the real one.

A lot of people going through the discernment process talk about all the sacramental things they want to do as a priest. (I know, I did, too.) And while I understand practically everything I do to come from a place of prayer, that doesn't necessarily mean I am standing behind the altar presiding all the time. These thoughts are on my mind as we are about to ordain yet another soul to the priesthood on Saturday.

So what was today? Swiss Cheese as far as getting much done.

7h30: woken up by La Doyenne shredding the New York Times that is by the side of my bed on the floor so I get up.
8h30: finished up with feeding the cats, having coffee, getting dressed, checking emails, time to head to Montpelier.
9h10: great satisfaction for having dropped off the 28-page bulletin for Saturday's ordination at the photocopy place, I wander over to the New England Culinary Institute's bakery, La Brioche, to grab a croissant to munch on as I walk back to the car.
9h30: back here, begin to work on the newsletter that is due today.
12h00: three phone calls later, going outside (in snow and then rain) to help someone who is graciously delivering split wood for free that Compa will use to heat our shoebox-sized house, I am almost finished with the newsletter.
12h30: deciding not to row now, I have lunch with cat participation.
13h30: still tinkering with the newsletter and also dealing with emails to the vestry about health insurance for next year, and to members of the diocesan Global Reconciliation Committee, I haven't rowed.
14h30: the photocopying place calls to say the bulletins are ready. So much for the rowing (GUILT). It's a lost cause now. Mañana I will have to row (when???) at least 15K to make up for yesterday and today.
15h00-16h00: back to Montpelier (21 miles RT) to pick up 175 bulletins (they look great). It's already so gloomy dark out that I have to turn on the headlights (we're down to 9hours and 14 minutes of daylight — that just means it's not night).
16h00-16h45: more phone calls (of the six or seven today, I placed two).
16h45: good off time, listening to All Things Considered
16h45-18h00: working on customaries for Saturday's ordination, doing Sunday's bulletin
18h00: SALSA time (i.e., making it from scratch and enjoying it)
18h30-20h00: feeding cats, more email about insurance and newsletter, two more incoming and one outgoing phone calls, and everything minced up by emails
20h00-21h00: dinner time

Isn't this scintillating? However, this can be considered a typical day: chopped up into little pieces. Now that the 12-Step meeting next door is over, I am going to the office to drop off the newsletter, labels and Sunday's bulletin.

This is often times what priesthood is about.

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Then I read the below over chez Padre Mickey.

Caminante, No Hay Camino is a great blog, passionate and well reasoned. I love her photos and the sermons she posts, as well as her Friday Cat Blogging. Caminante is passionate about her faith and about justice and she inspires me.

And I am supposed to say something after this? No hay palabras other than gracias.

BTDT

from I can haz cheezburger

Rare occasion

I so rarely see films that it is a red-letter day when I do. But last night, I saw Joyeux Noël at Compa's church. (They have an occasional film viewing.) The measure of the worth of a film for me is if I am still thinking about it the day afterwards. In this case, I am.

Perhaps it's because I preached on this event Christmas Eve 2004 or 2003 (I am not at home to verify). At that time, a book [Stanley Weintraub's Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (The Free Press, 2001)] had just come out on the event. So, to see this historical moment rendered into cinema (in English, French and German) intrigued me. Below is a review of the film.


CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE MOVIES
Reviewed By David A. Thomas

Christmas Eve: Joyeux Noël (2005)
Reviewed By David A. Thomas

Joyeux Noël is a foreign film made in France, UK, Germany, and Romania. It was nominated as Best Foreign Film for an Oscar and for a Golden Globe. It is unambiguously anti-war. More than that, it is a story of the transcendence of the spirit of Christ over war in a certain time and place in history. On Christmas Eve, 1914, at several points along the front, the field commanders on both sides declared a temporary cease-fire. They did so to celebrate Christmas together in the no-man’s land that lay between their trenches. A bloody, brutal, hand-to-hand battle previously raged between them for two months.[1]

The movie fractures the standard war movie genre’s format of showing everything from one side’s perspective. Here, three armies are engaged in a barbaric trench war.[2] Thankfully, scenes of slaughter are shown only briefly. Joyeux Noël does not privilege one army over another, because the war per se is not the subject of the movie. The war is merely the setting for the personal story of the men caught in it. Each of the armies is represented in exactly identical ways. All of the characters are cast and depicted as being likeable, regardless of their national identity. There are no intrinsic cues for us to know who to root for. The movie does not explain or even mention the political issues.

When war breaks out in the beginning of the movie, we are introduced to a few representative characters from each of the three countries—Scotland, Germany, and France. We follow them through their enlistments into warfare in the trenches. Each nationality’s characters in the movie always speak their lines in their native tongues When they are not shooting at each other, they glare at each other—they are situated scant yards apart. They can hear their enemies shuffling their playing cards in the night.

On the German side, one of the soldiers is a famous operatic tenor. His singing co-star (and lover) before the war persuades the Kaiser to allow her to visit him during Christmas, so that they might provide a recital for the morale of the troops. Kaiser Wilhelm had already ordered 100,000 Christmas trees to be distributed to the troops along the front line. On Christmas Eve, with those candle-lit Christmas trees mounted atop their trenches, the Germans begin their musicale.

As the beautiful music reverberates across the lines, first the Scots begin to accompany the tenor on their bagpipes. Then the French begin to sing along. The tenor emerges from his protected position and takes a stance in the midst of the killing zone. He holds aloft one of the trees as he sings. In a surreal way, one by one, troops from all sides come out from their trenches to surround him, listening reverently.

History declared that ninety percent of all of the known WWI “Christmas truces” occurred under the cover of music.[3]

The Scottish priest, Father Palmer, (serving with the troops from home in the capacity of a stretcher bearer) then steps forward to conduct a Christmas mass. He proceeds, using his poor Latin.[4] All the soldiers from either side, devout or not, stand shoulder to shoulder together in worship. The musical highlight of the film then transpires: his partner soprano is asked by the priest to sing Ave Maria. All listeners are transfixed by the moment, both in the scene, and in the theatre.

The next day, the soldiers continue their truce. First they bury their dead who had been lying where they had fallen. Then a football is introduced and the games begin between the athletes from the opposing forces. The men share photos of their wives and families back home. Finally, headquarters begins artillery bombardments again. Only this time, each army’s commander informs their enemy counterparts when they are about to be shelled, and invites them to come over and wait together in safety until the salvos end.

Of course, this fraternization cannot be tolerated. Each army, in turn, has its top brass to come down and ship all their soldiers to other posts, replacing them with completely new units in their trenches. Even the Bishop comes to the front and orders Father Palmer back home to Scotland. Father Palmer protests that he conducted the Christmas service as he felt led by the Lord Christ to do. While the Bishop delivers a blistering sermon to the effect, “Jesus came to bring a sword, and he commands you to kill all of the enemy’s people, good or bad,” Father Palmer calmly removes the cross from his neck and hangs it on a bedpost.

The soldiers on all sides were no more and no less than ordinary men. They were done with war, personally, after that unforgettable Christmas Eve together. Each nation’s war leaders cannot tolerate fraternization with the enemy, who must be demonized, dehumanized, and destroyed.

No man’s land was not that strip of frozen mud between the opposing trenches. It was the uncrossable gulf that yawned between the troops at the front and the old, fat general staffs at the rear who ordered them to mount the battlements and sacrifice themselves to enemy machine guns. It also separated the Church’s faithful servants from her leaders in the hierarchy, who were as jingoistic as the warmongers who started the war.

Footnotes

[1] The events portrayed were real, though the characters in this story are fictionalized. The setting represents just one specific battlefield, but the “Christmas truce” of 1914 actually broke out spontaneously at several places along the front.
[2] For dramatic effect, only three countries play a role in this story. However, it was World War I, and there might have been as many as six countries or more fighting at any given time and place in its history.
[3]Production Notes.
[4] It is unclear from his vestments and his incorrect Latin, whether he is Catholic or Anglican. Perhaps, like the sculpted servicemen of ambiguous military branch assignments gazing from afar at the Vietnam Memorial, this priest’s character is envisioned generically to represent a chaplain of any denomination.

Wednesday morning silly

This one comes from my sister-in-law. It's a little too true.

So there I was . . . just relaxing in front of the T.V. when the kids yelled,'Hey Dad, come see the kittens'.

It's not just here...

... that things are bad.

According to Co-Latino, the paper of the left in El Salvador, President Tony Saca and the deputies on the right voted through last Friday night a 10¢ increase to the price of gasoline and diesel by way of increasing the gas tax. As the editorial in Co-Latino says, the middle class (such as it is) and the poor will be hit with other taxes, such as an augmentation in the price of public transportation. The gas tax increase will cascade into other areas of the public sector.

Not to worry though, the neo-liberals have protected the interests of the multinationals.

Our compassionate conservative gummint at work

This article really ticks me off.

In Hospice Care, Longer Lives Mean Money Lost

CAMDEN, Ala. — Hundreds of hospice providers across the country are facing the catastrophic financial consequence of what would otherwise seem a positive development: their patients are living longer than expected.

Over the last eight years, the refusal of patients to die according to actuarial schedules has led the federal government to demand that hospices exceeding reimbursement limits repay hundreds of millions of dollars to Medicare.

The charges are assessed retrospectively, so in most cases the money has long since been spent on salaries, medicine and supplies. After absorbing huge assessments for several years, often by borrowing at high rates, a number of hospice providers are bracing for a new round that they fear may shut their doors.

[…]

In the early days of the Medicare hospice benefit, which was designed for those with less than six months to live, nearly all patients were cancer victims, who tended to die relatively quickly and predictably once curative efforts were abandoned.

But in the last five years, hospice use has skyrocketed among patients with less predictable trajectories, like those with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Those patients now form a majority of hospice consumers, and their average stays are far longer — 86 days for Alzheimer’s patients, for instance, compared with 44 for those with lung cancer, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

[…]

The medical director at Hometown Hospice, Dr. Sumpter D. Blackmon, said he relied heavily on the judgment of the hospice’s nurses to determine whether prospective patients were rather likely to live longer than six months. But of the 56 patients on the books on Oct. 31, 17 had been there for at least that period, including two for more than 500 days.

“Doing this for 40-something years,” said Dr. Blackmon, a longtime physician here, “every time I think somebody is going to die tomorrow, damned if they don’t live for a year and a half.”

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Hospice and the palliative care it gives is one of the best end-of-life care measures to come along. Problem is, coverage is only for six months. So now that people are living longer, it means that their six months can stretch into a year or two. And, heaven forbid, that is way too long for someone to be in hospice and receive medicare coverage.

So once again, people will wait until the last minute to be admitted to hospice. I've walked with families whose loved one was served by hospice for literally three hours before the individual died. It's such a fragile moment — to decide to enter hospice means that one is admitting that one is 'terminal.' But aren't we all? It just depends when we'll get off the train. Some will disembark sooner than later. But we're all on the same ride. So why make it more difficult?

Now that hospice care centers are being forced to repay the government, I can't help but imagine that they will be more cautious in admitting people to their care. And that is tragic.

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, as I was looking for the below article on Emma Clark at the BBC web site, the following item scrolls across the top news bar:

'Cheney found to have irregular heartbeat.'

You mean they actually found one?

My bad.

Mind the Gap

End of line for London Tube announcer after spoofs

LONDON (AFP) — The woman known as "the voice of the Tube" on London's underground has been sacked after criticising the network and making spoof announcements including making fun of US tourists, officials said Monday.

Emma Clarke has for the last eight years been famous as the voice warning travellers to "Mind the Gap" between the train and the platform, and to "stand clear of the closing doors."

But the 36-year-old, a professional voice-over artist, annoyed her employers with a series of light-hearted spoof announcements posted on her own website, at www.emmaclarke.com.

In one she says: "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

In another she announces that the passenger pretending to read a paper but actually staring at a woman's chest should stop, since he was "not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert".

In addition Clarke, who lives in Highgate, north London, said she used to use the Tube herself but no longer does so because it is "dreadful."*

A London Underground spokesman said the problem was the criticism rather than the spoofs. "Some of the spoof announcements are very funny. But Emma is a bit silly to go round slagging off her client's services," he said

"London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms Clarke are experiencing severe delays," he added, according to the London Evening Standard.

Clarke told the daily she was surprised by the decision. "I don't feel that I have been slagging them off -- that was never my intention. It was just a bit of a laugh," she said.

But said a Tube spokesman: "We won't be providing her with any more work. It's not because of the spoof announcements. It's because she has criticised the Underground system."

*According to the BBC report this evening, she said they took her comment out of context. She said it would be dreadful for her to ride the Tube and watch passengers subjected to her voice.

One of those days

The cats are hunkered down and so am I. It's a late November day, grey, grey out (November is the cloudiest month for us) and it's raining. That rain may change to freezing rain and some areas (I am not sure about here) will get snow tonight. It's grismal out.

This column in today's NYT captures the day perfectly.

November 26, 2007
The Rural Life
True November
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

A couple of days ago we had what the forecasts call a “wintry mix,” which always sounds to me like something you’d set out in bowls at a cocktail party this time of year. It was, in fact, rain, snow and sleet mixed with sand and salt and the sludge that gets thrown from the treads of tires. One minute snow was falling in clumps, and the next it was raining. The sky was the color of duct tape, and it let about that much light through. What a “wintry mix” does is make you want to stay home — or perhaps go into the world foraging for provisions simply for the pleasure of getting home again.

This is true November weather, in which I learn to admire the stoicism of the animals all over again. Stoicism is the wrong word, if only because it implies an awareness of being stoic. They stand over their hay in the wintry mix, and they seem to take it as it comes. I imagine them thinking, “No flies!,” as a way of enjoying this grim weather.

It’s the difference that makes a day like that so interesting. Till now, this has been a bright oaken autumn. The most vivid colors came and went, leaving behind the oaks, which hold their leaves far longer. The last few weeks have been dusted with a dry, wooden light, and the oaks have shown just how various and pungent their colors can be. It was as if the oaks had all stepped forward to remind us of a spectrum of color that goes unimagined in most years.

But everything changes on a wintry day. The woods seem to withdraw, even though the snow on the ground creates the illusion that you can see deeper into them. The brightness vanishes, and that gives all the subtler colors — the variations of gray on the bark of a maple tree — a heightened presence. As voluminous as the woods seem in summer, when they are full of shadow, now is when they seem most corporeal, most alive. I don’t mean the fact that you can trace a squirrel’s route along the maple high line or watch the woodpeckers in a hickory lining up for the suet. I mean that the trees seem to be making a gesture of a kind they never do when the leaves are green, as though they could only really be themselves when the light is low and the air is damp and the year is drawing in.

Mug Meme

From Rev Dr Mom — this is an open meme on mugs. Needless to say I have far more than what you'll see. These aren't good photos (I can't get good close-ups with my digital) but you'll get the gist. Don't enlarge them; they look better small.



For starters, a mug from El Salvador with the IAES graphic. I can't remember when I brought this back from there. It's not in the current rotation of mugs.


There has to be at least one mug of a cat. My sister gave this to me. It's a Tiffany mug, not able to go in the microwave so it is reserved for the first cup of coffee that comes straight from the pot.


Fundación Cristosal, a fundation that supports the Anglican Episcopal Church of El Salvador, commissioned these mugs in 2003 to sell at General Convention. I hauled a total of about 75 of these mugs back. So did a lot of other people. These are done by a cooperative, Shicali, that consists of deaf people who would otherwise be unemployed. They do a lot of other designs, too. Remember that every mug from El Salvador has had to be carefully transported. (front side)


Fundación Cristosal's symbol is a dove drawn in the style of La Palma. (back side of above mug)


This image of the fire of the Holy Spirit imposed on a primatial crozier is the Archbishop of IARCA and Bishop of El Salvador's graphic. (front side)


This mug commemorates the installation of the Most Rev'd Martín Barahona as Primate of the Anglican Church of the Region of Central America, 24 August 2002. (back side)


Finally there's my Texas snowflake mug. Since I love chile peppers, Compa's cousin from San Antonio gave this to me. I use it a lot in the winter.

Proper 29C • Last Sunday after Pentecost

Even though I have done so for fourteen years now, typing in the title of the file for this sermon always strikes me: I call it ‘Last Pentecost’ rather than Proper 29 (which it is also). Somehow by typing the word, ‘last,’ I mark the turn of the seasons, a change that also happens every year at this time.

The contrast between the end of the Season after Pentecost and the beginning of Advent always takes me by surprise. On the last Sunday of the current season, we always hear an account from the passion story. Next Sunday, we will start a new gospel, a new liturgical year, one that typically begins with portents of the apocalypse and the impending historical earthquake that comes with Jesus’ birth. As we move closer and closer to Christmas, we will regress in the chronology of Jesus’ story, until we arrive at the annunciation and then his birth. As the Christian year always is cyclical, it is fitting, then, to be reminded so close to the nativity of where the story is headed — namely, the cross. We know, of course, that the cross is not the end of the story, the resurrection is, but the cross is certainly is a reminder of what the Incarnation entails.

We hear this morning the themes we have heard all year long in Luke’s gospel. First, Luke consistently points out life’s two ways — following and loving God or the way of taking care of oneself. The people of Bethlehem turn their backs on Mary and Joseph; the shepherds rejoice and believe in Emmanuel. Ten lepers are healed of their disease, but only one returns to Jesus to give thanks. Two people go to the temple to pray; one boasts of his achievements before God, while the other beats his breast and calls himself a sinner. A man falls in a ditch on the side of the road; the leaders of the community pass him by; the outsider, the Samaritan, helps him.

Second, Luke’s gospel begins with two songs that serve as guidelines for how we should live our lives — the Magnificat and the Beatitudes. Both songs speak of great reversals in society, reversals that will happen as Jesus walks and talks with the people of his land. Both songs speak of God’s goodness, if we only open our hearts to understanding what true power is, the grace of God. Throughout the gospel, Luke returns to stories of these reversals, both great and small.

Perhaps the greatest reversal is how Jesus speaks to the marginalised and the outcast — the sick, the tax collector, women, orphans, widows, all those people who live outside of the purity codes of his time, who were considered unclean and, therefore, unworthy, Time and time again, Jesus shows them God’s love and care. In turn, they today, remind and teach us of God’s love.

Beyond that, Jesus demonstrates God’s forgiveness. There’s the parable of the prodigal son, in which Jesus speaks of a father’s forgiveness and compassion extended even before it’s asked for. Then there’s Jesus’ reaching out to the thief on the cross who asks for forgiveness and to be remembered in God’s kingdom. Jesus answers with all the love that comes from God: Today you will be remembered in paradise.

What sort of a king, then, is this whom we remember today? Certainly not a triumphant king, but a self-giving king. Unlike the king of the epistle reading, who is described as the object of all creation’s worship, this king on the cross represents the core of Christian faith — the self-emptying Christ. In the cross, we find the two fundamentals of our Christian theology: the Incarnation and kenosis. The Incarnation — God choosing to enter human flesh, live and die as one of us. Kenosis — the act of self-emptying, giving over of all power, all beauty, all glory, all grace that Jesus demonstrates in the passion.

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Both the reading from Colossians and Luke speak about God’s saving grace as found in the person of Jesus Christ. The opening chapter of Colossians is one of the great christological hymns of the New Testament, comparable to Philippians 2.6-11 that says so eloquently:

though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

The hymn from Colossians has a cosmic sweep, speaking about two different works of the Son of God: first, Jesus’ participation in creation before his birth and second Christ’s redeeming work. Though not stated in chronological order, the letter refers to the incarnation, the cross and the cosmic, reconciling effects of the cross. It also speaks of the resurrection and the establishment of the church as Christ’s body. The ten verses that lie at the beginning of this letter are rich, and concise—what we call a creedal statement. In it, we find our living and breathing doctrines of creation, redemption and reconciliation of the universe, and of the church as the sphere in which Christ’s saving act is already glimpsed.

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Paired with this soaring hymn that attests to the glory of Christ’s position in the Trinity, is the Lukan story of the crucifixion. We are taken from the vast spaces of heaven to the precise location of the cross and the person of the suffering redeemer (precisely the reverse order of the readings we will hear on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when we move from the manger to the cosmos). The story of the cross turns the idea of Christ the King utterly upside-down.

Returning to the whole of the gospel story, we see that Jesus’ domination is the inverse of what we would expect of a king. He refuses to be master of the world, the mighty monarch, the spiller of blood. His reign is an anti-reign, one that subverts our notion of kingship.

Jesus is the king who serves the other. He is the king who dies for the other. Unlike kings of the world, Jesus is unguarded, defenseless. He does not have the protection of armies and he does not practise self-defense. His rule, as the crucified one, is unique. His existence is the very stumbling block to faith of which Paul would write.

Calling Christ a ‘king’ assaults every human desire for power and domination because with Christ, the domination just doesn’t happen the way it does for us. Moreover, Jesus, the innocent one accepts fully our guilt. One of the criminals on the cross gets it when he says: ‘We deserve condemnation; we are only paying the price for what we have done, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ That statement of acknowledgement saves that criminal.
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Perhaps one lesson we need to take away from this day is the notion of humility. Humility enables us to forgive and enables us to recognise our dependence on God and our interdependence. Humility reminds us that it is not for us to judge others; whatever judgement there may be for someone else will lie in God’s hands alone. And humility opens our hearts to receive the gift of salvation that God has given us through Jesus’ suffering on the cross.

For what we are really doing today is remembering our salvation and how it was obtained through the antithesis of the suffering king. As we move toward Advent to the Feast of Christmas, we will encounter the power of the Incarnation, God among us. God among us, in Christ, defies our expectations. May our hearts be self-emptying and humble to receive Christ in the weeks to come and always.

Passe, passe le temps, le temps se passe vite

Some things are timeless such as this view,* one I have enjoyed all my life off and on. It's the lighthouse at the end of a reef that sticks out into the Long Island Sound. As a kid, I walked out the reef as far as the tide would allow me and always the lighthouse was there to guide me.

These days, when I go back to the beach, I wonder how many more times will be in store for me. I love going there but I also know that someday I will no longer have the homebase (i.e., my parents' house) and for that, I am melancholy.

But today my niece and I enjoyed a picture-perfect day, so clear that Long Island and the lighthouse seem to float on the water and horizon. So for today I am thankful.

*[Just wish it weren't 250 miles downstream!]

Friday cat blogging

So here's the wonderful tower that my father made for his geriatric, 17 and a half year-old cat. She hasn't really tried it out but it is a work of art. Instead, we hauled her off to the vet because she is listless... perhaps hyperthyroidism.

A Thanksgiving tongue-twister

Every Thanksgiving I would give this tongue-twister to my French students. Have fun. It is perhaps easier after a glass of wine.

Diderot, dit-on, dînait d'un dos d'un dodu dindon.

[Diderot, they say, used to eat the back of a fat turkey.]

When it's just Compa and me, we don't eat turkey. We've done vegetarian, fish and even steak. Today we'll eat at some friends' house so we'll probably have turkey.

Thanksgiving Day sermon

Last year in the lead editorial, the New York Times rhetorically asked:

Is this the year Thanksgiving becomes nothing more than the prelude to tomorrow’s shopping? Will we soon be calling the fourth Thursday in November Black Friday Eve? Probably not. But we may need a richer set of Thanksgiving traditions, an enlarged sense of the day, as a last defense against Christmas — perhaps even a bigger Thanksgiving songbook so that we don’t find ourselves surprised by Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” in a crosstown cab in early November. Lovely song, but heard too early in the season it causes private despair instead of commercial elation.

This is the day when all our impulses collide. We work hectically to fit the holiday in — hectic flying, hectic driving, hectic shopping and cooking — and yet we hope somehow that we will be sitting down, come dinner, to a full-fledged, old-fashioned Norman Rockwell “Freedom From Want” feast, with a roasted turkey that fulfills our emotional needs and embodies the permanence of our familial and communal bonds reaching right back to the 17th century. It may be too much to ask of one day and one bird and one set of relatives.

And yet all that fervor to be getting somewhere, to come to some quiet point of mutual celebration in the day suggests that Thanksgiving is still thriving. The light of late November registers deeply in nearly all of us. When dusk comes and yellow lights begin to shine out of the windows of houses upon a still largely snowless nation, you may begin to understand the force that has drawn us all together, bound by as much as love and as little as proximity.

Just when it feels as though we might be overlooking the meaning of this holiday — the peculiar value of Thanksgiving — it becomes clear that we have drawn together once again not to exchange the gifts our entire culture seems to be driving us to shop for but to share, simply, each other.

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The above editorial hits upon the cultural roots and tension of Thanksgiving but has to leave out the overlay we encounter every year: our faith that teaches that gratefulness and thankfulness are daily. Our faith reminds us of the source of all that we have — God — and how God has provided for us and how we are stewards of these riches. What might not seem as material wealth can sometimes transform itself into spiritual wealth. Mercifully, we don’t have to cram our thankfulness and gratitude into one day a year. Instead, we should live it every day of the year.

At Tuesday night’s ecumenical community service, Kevin Rooney of Saint John’s gave me this prayer which I used then and pray now:

We come to you, O God, as a thankful people. We are mindful in this Thanksgiving season of our blessings, not just our difficulties; of our successes, not just our failures; of our assets, not just our liabilities; of our strengths, not just our weaknesses; of our joys, not just our sorrows. Grant us, we pray, the attitude of gratitude, not only in these coming days, but in every day of our lives. May our gracious God teach us to thank God for the past, trust God for the future, serve God in the present, celebrating every day God gives us with glad and joyful praise.

We don't all drive this way up here

Pity the poor homeowners whose house was attacked yesterday by this SUV.


Evidently the house is at the foot of a hill. And the driver (who ended up dazed and with scratches) is facing arrest for operating under the influence of a regulated drug. The house owner and his wife are physically OK but probably shaken up and their Thanksgiving is pretty wrecked up.

[photos: the Burlington Free Press]

Hype! Hype!

The media is screaming about the increased travel and ensuing mess that Thanksgiving week brings about. The president talks about the dread of travelling at this time. The radio reports that the president has ordered that the military open closed airspace.

It's breathless news!

And it's hype.

Air travel already is a mess. According to various web sites (Joe Sharkey and the Boyd Group), airplanes are already travelling at 80-85% capacity. There's already no leg space or room to breathe. Those airspaces that the president says will be open, already are for the most part and the big one is not even useful for the eastern seaboard other than allowing planes to circle indefinitely. From the Boyd Group:

"27 million passengers will be flying this holiday!"

"That's FOUR PERCENT more than last year!

"Flights will be jam-packed!"

"Airports will be crammed with travelers"

"Flight delays could be horrendous!"

Sorry to reveal the exciting ending to this supposed air travel horror flick, but here's a flash for the reporters who are wandering out at airports and sitting in studios interviewing amateur lightweight consumer gadflies who don't know diddly about airline operations:

Essentially, every one of those statements describes a normal week in the air travel scene of 2008.

Yup. A normal week. So the good news is that Thanksgiving week should be pretty much like any other week, give or take. The bad news is also that Thanksgiving week will be like any other week. It will be no less and no more vulnerable to system delays, cancellations, and snafus. And aside from different passenger demographics, there will only be marginally more people flying - because flights have been full for months, and there's not much capacity - if any - being added.

If you want to be thoroughly depressed, go here.

It's a collection of articles about air travel in the 21st century.

The selection begins with this overview:

Crowded, late and — knock on wood — safe.

That pretty much describes the unpleasant state of air travel these days. Flights on domestic jetliners are fuller than ever, as the industry's fleet, shrunken from bankruptcies and other post-Sept. 11, 2001 travails, struggles to accommodate demand that grows with the economy.

The crowding will get worse — and stay that way, probably for years — before it gets better because airlines in the United States have few new planes on order.

+

I don't know why this fascinates me so, other than I have my own collection of war stories — late or cancelled flights, overcrowded airports, unpleasant seatmates — just like everyone else.

You surrender your life and freedom once you park your car at the airport. From there on in, you're back in kindergarten or preschool. I alternate between Dante's, 'Abandon hope all who enter here,' to Jesus' words in the garden of Gethsemane: 'Not my will but yours.'

This said, I will be joing the millions travelling more than 50 miles for my Thanksgiving dinner. The last time I flew on 'black Wednesday' was in 1988 for my niece's baptism out in Colorado and I vowed never again.

I'll happily stay with my feet quite planted on the ground today.

Plus ça change....

This book, Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, edited by Cary Nelson (University of Minnesota Press) came out ten years ago during the Yale grad students' attempt to form a union. I had left academia by then but had been part of a strike by the under-paid but over-educated staff at Firestone Library, Princeton University in 1990.

The NYT has an article about the disappearance of tenure-track positions in which it states:

'Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private.'

Having been a 'junkie' (an adjunct) I know a little of what the article describes. For the five semesters I taught one section of second or third-year French, and as a post-doc, I earned $2000 pre-taxes. Oh, it was one prep but it still ate up far more than the three hours I was in class.

As a grad student at Princeton and a TA, I taught two sections of French for eight semesters. I no longer remember what I made other than after the first semester it was taxable income and it covered my room and board.

The article continues:

Tenure, a practice carried from Germany to the United States, was designed to guarantee academic freedom to professors by protecting them against dismissal. Some argue that it also protects incompetent or lazy teachers and sometimes leaves universities saddled with professors in disciplines that have lost currency.

The lack of tenure can leave adjuncts vulnerable. In a number of cases, professors outside the tenure track have been dropped after run-ins with administrators over everything from grading to opinion articles in newspapers.

Several unions have been organizing adjunct faculty in recent years. In Michigan, the American Federation of Teachers has successfully organized full-time, nontenure-track professors at Eastern Michigan University, as well as part-time and full-time adjuncts at the University of Michigan campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint.

“They are so exploited, the only difficulty in organizing adjuncts is finding them,” said David Hecker, president of the teachers federation.

Keith Hoeller, who has been teaching philosophy for 17 years as a part-timer in Seattle, described it this way: “It’s a caste system, and we are the untouchables of academia.”

Aletia Droba taught for 10 years as a part-time philosophy professor in the Detroit area. She said she was paid as little as $1,400 a course at community colleges and as much as $2,400 a class at universities.

Some semesters, Ms. Droba said, she taught as many as seven courses at four colleges, including across the border in Canada. This fall, she landed a full-time, non-tenure track job. She will teach five courses in the fall and spring combined — less than the number she often taught in a single semester as a part-timer.

Ms. Droba will not miss the constant driving that a part-timer does, shuttling among universities. “My students used to ask me how come I knew so much about current affairs,” she said. “And I’d say, ‘I listen to NPR all day.’ ”

I bought the book whose image appears at the top of the post even after I had fully left academia because I was curious about how the academy was going to survive in the 1990s. When I entered Princeton in 1981, everyone said, 'Don't worry about the job market; it will ease up — all these professors are going to retire and then things will be fine.' When I finished up my doctorate in 1990, the so-called glut of jobs had still failed to materialise. In my field, medieval French language and literature (yeah, really useful), there were three tenure-track positions in the entire country.

It has only gotten worse for professors. Universities hire adjuncts because they don't have to pay them any benefits. They keep them just below half-time, which ensures that they won't have to pay anything more than the pittance of a salary.

Barbara Ehrenreich in the intro to the above book published in 1997, says: 'If you look at the real world, as academics call big business and finance, one widespread trend today is the practice of driving down the wages and living standards of people at the bottom and at the middle. I'm not sure what to call this. An economist might call it hyper-captalism, but I'll just call it the bandit economy.... The bandit economy also entails cutting benefits, subcontracting work to firms with lower wage structures, and going from full-time workers to temporary workers with no benefits. It involves give-backs — like asking employees to accept lower wages than they already have — and things like constructing two-tier work structures....'

So the NYT article on the decrease of tenure is news? Not really to anyone who has been connected to academia. This train has been barrelling along for quite some time. It's yet another sign that as a society our priorities are way off.

Off my soap-box. Time for bed.

Thanksgiving week

Once again, the ramp needs to be shovelled. This is the first 'real' snow storm of the year. It did something on Friday night last week but it didn't fully cover the ground. This one counts (it's a long-standing joke that it has to be more than an inch, cover the ground and stay for 24 hours). It's late this year. But we often have Thanksgivings where there is snow on the ground. Then everything warms up and we end up with freezing rain for Christmas. The childhood memories of walks on the beach Thanksgiving Day are pretty remote here.

Oops, I forgot to bring in the chairs. Shortly after I took this photo, I dusted the chairs off and carted them to the shed for the winter months. Time also to retire the chrysanthemums and put the wood in the shed, too.

The crummy weather cut down on attendance at the ecumenical Thanksgiving service tonight. I had copied 60 bulletins, but I would be suprised if we were 30. Only 6 of us from our congregation were there (two clergy, one in the choir and three in the pew).

No wonder: where there was still snow on the road (such as the driveway to the Methodist church where the service was held) it was the consistency of mashed potatoes. I watched the young (very!) Orthodox priest spin out half way up to the street, back down and then have to do a running start to get out of the parking lot. The second try he got out.

Earth-shattering thoughts, aren't these? Tonight's a night when I don't have much brain power to do much more than these little putterings (which makes my blog an undergraduate college reader's level according to whatever test there is out there).

Cranking up

The Concept2 Holiday Challenge is fast upon us. Barring disaster (such as happened to a colleague's wife who tripped on a guy wire attached to a tree, fell and broke her arm), I plan on rowing the usual 200K between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. I have to take into account the days I won't be near an erg and not get too complacent at the beginning. I like to hit the halfway mark distance-wise before the calendar halfway mark. So we're off on that.

Always in search of interesting music to accompany the long rows (minimum 20 minutes, maximum can be 90 or so), I have landed on Tinariwen. Two weeks ago Saturday Morning Edition interviewed them (or the producer, I no longer remember). They featured two songs from the group's most recent album: Aman Iman: Water is Life.

Their music is rhythmic, hypnotic, a blend of Middle Eastern roots, and 1960s guitar riffs. The bass repeats over and over, there is call and response between the lead and the background women's vocals. The group (I hesitate to call it a band in the western sense) is Tuareg (in Arabic: 'abandoned by the gods' — a strange name for an auto as in Volkswagen's SUV, I think). They are nomadic, wandering the Saharan desert.

Justin Adams, guitarist of Sinead O'Connor, produced their first album, the Radio Tisdas Sessions, in December 2000. Electricity was rationed so all the recording took place between 7.00 PM and midnight over two weeks.

This first album is perhaps the most simple and really great for a mindless row. The music flows along at a steady at comfortable walking pace. It's not music to row a fast piece but good for just going along, as though you were out on a river, enjoying the day.

The call-and-response nature of the music reminds me of Krisna Das' music, also good rowing music for long pieces.

So I have just eliminated a few more excuses for not rowing.

Monday morning cheezburger

How true.

Proper 28C

Wrestling this morning’s collection of readings into one theme for a sermon, without the sermon galloping off into five hundred directions has been a challenge. On top of it all, the lectionary readings contrast so much (at least for me) with the collect appointed for the day — one of the collects of the year I know by heart, particularly the line about ‘reading, marking and inwardly digesting’ holy scripture. If you think anything the way I do, the question is: ‘But what do I do with this apocalyptic literature we always hear at the end of the church year, just before we launch into Advent? How do we read, mark and inwardly digest what’s in chapter 21 of Luke’s gospel? It sounds too foreign.’ I tend to steer away from these writings because they seem to have been so abused over the centuries.

Do we read back into the bible the current sufferings -- just take this week's — the earthquake in Chile… the cyclone in Bangladesh… the unstable situation in Pakistan and Burma… the war in Iraq… the on-going ageless conflict in the Middle East… the scourges of HIV/AIDS, malaria, dengue, poverty and hunger? I don’t think so, though it might seem tempting to do so.

Did Jesus intend for people to take these things literally? It’s hard to say. Besides, what Jesus said has been interpreted through the lens of those who wrote the gospels and interpretations of subsequent generations since the words’ first utterance.

A few historical points can help clarify some of the gospel passage, however. We’re not sure of when exactly the gospel according to Luke was written but it’s fairly certain that he wrote it after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. Thus, the gospel is full of the specifics that took place before the fall of Jerusalem. Jesus had to have known how people respond to earthquakes, fires, wars and insurrections, to plagues and famines, and he surely knew what challenges his followers would face.

Also, what Jesus purportedly teaches, clearly follows in the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic literature. While Luke was writing primarily to a gentile audience, he still could use formulaic descriptions of how the end time would come to pass. If one considers the gospel passage, one will see that it has a clear outline, beginning with a prediction of the destruction of the temple, then warnings about false teachers and messiahs, then another prediction — this time about political and natural disasters, and then a forecast of what post-Easter times will mean for the disciples.

If the gospel teaching ended with those dire forecasts, then it would be tempting to write it off completely as some crazy writings from the first century. But it doesn’t. It ends, instead, with these simple words: The end will not follow immediately. Therein lies the clue to understanding this apocalyptic passage from Luke.

Even Paul, writing to the Thessalonians in about 50 CE — before any of the gospels were written — in the first writing of the Christian canon we have — was struggling with the already-not-yet-nature of being a Christian. The community of Thessalonica was deeply concerned about the resurrection, wanting to know if those who had died before Jesus’ resurrection were hopelessly lost or would they be saved? If you read through the two letters to the Thessalonians, you will see just how the earliest Christian communities struggled with the immanent end times as they understood them and the reality that with each passing year, they were further and further from Calvary.

By the time Luke came around, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Jesus movement was going to be around for the long-haul. The second coming, the end-time, what is called the parousia, was not at hand as the prophets had foretold. Instead, the second coming was in some far-off future, and the Christian community had to figure out how to live in the present while waiting for the second resurrection.

As the Christian community waited and still waits, it has been a part of history (for better and for worse). It has been in the midst of wars and insurrections, persecutions and being the persecutor, any and all natural disasters that have touched humankind.

Three millennia later, we still live in this in-between time. We stand one foot planted in front of the empty tomb on Easter, with the other foot groping in the dark for the second coming, the parousia. The question is: do we solely read, mark and inwardly digest (and therefore try to interpret and pin down to specific current events) the apocalyptic teachings in Luke or do we try to find in our biblical canon something that resonates better with our Easter resurrection faith?

The Revised Common Lectionary substitutes for the Prayer Book lectionary choice of Malachai wherein the prophet speaks of the last judgement, a passage from Isaiah. The text is an exuberant description of the joyful future that stretches out before the people of God. It celebrates God the creator. It speaks of a new heaven and earth, a wholly new created universe. There will be a new Jerusalem, a city full of joy with children that will live to old age. Peace will abound.

This hopefulness continues in the canticle we say this morning. Isaiah sings a new song — even at a time when the people are not ready to sing it yet. In his song of praise to God, Isaiah proclaimed words that his people needed to hear and we today need to hear — words about salvation, trust, strength, joy, waters, wells, thanks, praises, hope.

In short, both Isaiah texts remind us of the future and the shining vision of what might be possible. Isaiah, and even Jesus’ words at the end of the gospel reading tell me: Don’t panic, work hard, concentrate on the future because God is already here and most important, don’t give up hope.

While I might find it easier to focus on the cross, I must turn my attention to the resurrection, to those places where I can build community, a new reality, a future that is not marked or characterized by strife. I myself can strive to be a reconciler in my midst by engaging people to find the common ground, speaking out against situations of oppression, challenging the status quo when it is exclusionary and doing whatever I can to be a healer. This call is not limited to the ordained — it is each and every person’s responsibility passed on through the waters of baptism, to restore the world to God through Christ.

This responsibility is not a burden — it is a joy. For each time we speak out, each time we strive for what might be, we hope and bring into this passing age a glimpse of the age to come. Though we may have one foot or both feet planted in the here and now, may each one of us be for those around us a beacon of hope of what might be… especially in these wild times. That action is one that I must and want to mark and inwardly digest, just as I have read and received these words of hope.

[cross from La Palma, El Salvador. On it is written, 'La Nueva Creación,' the New Creation.]

What is wrong with us?

Jamie Bledsoe, 35, caught up on sleep in the fairground parking lot. On Friday, Bledsoe, a waitress with no health insurance, had 6 upper teeth filled and made an appointment to have 12 of her lower teeth extracted on Saturday. RAM [Remote Area Medical] gave away just 16 sets of dentures over the weekend. After extractions, most patients simply return home with antibiotics, painkillers and an order to eat only soft, mushy foods.
[from tomorrow's Sunday New York Times Magazine]

You see the bad teeth here in Vermont, too, and you just know. It's heart-breaking. I can't imagine having almost all my lower teeth yanked at age 35. And yet, here it is. As the title of the article says, 'Third-World Care in the First World.'

Scott Syverud, an emergency-room doctor at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville who has volunteered at the expedition for four years, says, ‘‘If you spend a day here, you see there’s something wrong with health care in this country.’’

Good dental care is a class thing. And more and more, fewer and fewer people are able to afford it.

There is something so wrong with this.

Then, go read Bob Herbert's column about a mother who didn't realise that her insurance stopped coverage after $75K in expenses. Go tell that to a mother whose daughter had cancer and died, who now thinks she failed her daughter because she didn't understand her policy.

C'mon, people, we've got to vote (and agitate)!

Friday Cat Blogging on Thursday

... since I won't be near my home computer tomorrow.


Here's a photo of my sister's two cats: Tucker and JJ, two orange boys.


And this is Tucker three years ago when he came home as a kitten.

First advisory of the season

...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM EST FRIDAY... THE WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM EST FRIDAY FOR THE GREEN MOUNTAINS OF SOUTH CENTRAL VERMONT AND ACROSS WASHINGTON AND ORANGE COUNTIES IN VERMONT. HEAVY RAINFALL OCCURRING THIS MORNING WILL CONTINUE TO MIX WITH AND CHANGE OVER TO SNOW LATE THIS MORNING AND INTO EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. SNOW WILL ACCUMULATE FIRST AT HIGHER ELEVATIONS...AND GRADUALLY DEVELOP AT THE LOWER ELEVATIONS. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WILL RANGE FROM 3 TO 6 INCHES BY MIDNIGHT...WITH THE HIGHER AMOUNTS ABOVE 700 FEET IN ELEVATION. AS THE CHANGEOVER TO SNOW OCCURS...WATER FROM EARLIER RAIN WILL LIKELY BEGIN TO FREEZE ON ROADWAYS...CREATING A HAZARDOUS DRIVING CONDITION...ESPECIALLY AT HIGHER ELEVATIONS. IN ADDITION...SNOWFALL RATES WILL BE HEAVY AT TIMES...RESULTING IN VERY LOW VISIBILITY...ESPECIALLY DURING THE AFTERNOON AND EVENING HOURS. PERIODS OF SNOW SHOWERS WILL CONTINUE LATE TONIGHT INTO FRIDAY...WITH SOME LIGHT ADDITIONAL SNOW ACCUMULATION POSSIBLE. A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW...SLEET...OR FREEZING RAIN WILL LIKELY LEAD TO...OR RESULT IN SLIPPERY ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES. USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.

Here I am without snows on my car — like everyone else. There's no point in calling the garage, everyone else in creation will be doing the same thing. It shouldn't matter; I am heading out this afternoon for our provincial synod and conference, that takes place at a hotel outside of Boston. I figure I will be driving out of it.

The postal carrier still has on shorts albeit covered up by a poncho. I know it's REALLY cold when I see her wearing pants. She'll wear shorts all the way into January.

[photo from the February 2007 blizzard]

On other fronts, I have just entered a new 30 minute piece on the erg. It now places me 15/89, top 20%. The longer the distance, the better my rankings are. My 10K from May still holds at top 9%. My days of being numero uno long evaporated but it was fun while it lasted.

One of those days

Even though the photo is of a ditty bag, it's meant to convey a grab bag (but the images of grab bags weren't any good).

It has been one of those days (remember Pink Floyd's version to this title)... just a grab bag [the original typo is grab gab which is also appropriate!] of thoughts.

Not rowing because my shoulder protests, but knowing I have to. Mañana.

Spending time doing paper work — expense reports (always time consuming), writing back to a prisoner who thought he was contacting the local Catholic church but got us instead, forwarding his request to the local Catholic church; mailing a stole made in El Salvador to someone I met this June down there.

Meeting with the choir director for 2 1/2 hours. We decided this year we'll have a 5.00 PM Christmas Eve service, followed by potluck (instead of 4.00 PM) and an 11.00 PM (rather than 10.00 PM which we have done for the past three years) Christ Mass/Midnight Mass. Christmas Day is the usual 10.00 AM. What are your schedules for the 24th and25th?

Visiting someone at her house. This person rescues stray cats (and then places them) and, by so doing, sees the underbelly of town. The stories she has to tell about the people are astounding. Vermont very much has its share of poverty. Right now she has a cat whose age is indeterminate but whose paws are somewhat deformed: she should be a polydactl but the extra claws/toes never fully formed so the cat walks with her front paws splayed out like a basset hound's.

Polishing brass with the altar guild. I already killed off a lot of brain cells polishing brass as a kid; it won't make any difference now.

And now having to face finishing my report on Executive Council for our provincial synod meeting Friday at a hotel that is a good 200 miles away. Off I go tomorrow. Right now, it's bed.

As I write this, the house shakes. It's one of the late night freight trains going through town. The railroad tracks are one street over from here. I've lived where I can hear trains off and on since 1981 and have grown to like their presence. For some reason it's consoling.

Alors, voici quelques idées de mon petit train-train. [Here are some ideas from my little routine.]

There's some chuzpah

Go here to find out what these women did to get into so much trouble.

It's a Camino day

... at least in thought. Maybe it's because I collected up all the various guidebooks and travel narratives about it last night. I have to do a presentation on the the camino in January to the local ladies' reading group so it has been on my mind. It also has been on my mind because this coming spring for the first time in four years, I won't have the rhythm of the camino to look forward to. It's partly because we have finished it, there's little enthusiasm to redo parts of it right now and mostly because the dollar against the euro is so low that we couldn't afford it (1E = $.145).

I ran across this paragraph the other night in an online essay, A Pilgrim, but a Tourist Too by Denise Fainburg:

None of the guidebooks tells you that walking the Camino is something of an extreme sport. It lacks the cachet of, say, sky-diving, but everyone has a tale to tell of pinched nerves, fractures, tendonitis, or the more prosaic blisters. Each evening in the refugios you will see walkers tenderly anointing and disinfecting their feet.

Gee, I have been engaging in an extreme sport all these springs and I didn't even know it!

My feet sure say so. I have lasting effects from walking all those kms and miles. My left foot shows no inclination of completely healing from the plantars fibramatosis; the lump in the arch remains. And the tendon around my ankle that goes to the arch still cramps up. Even with orthotics and switching my exercise activity to rowing which doesn't use the foot in the same way, it's still funky.

But, oh, how I want to walk. How I miss it. The big question is: with what walk in a place that uses the dollar can I satiate that need? I still need to have a long walk to look forward to.

Perhaps I want the walk to know that I am still mentally able to meet such a challenge, to keep on going when it would be so easy to get on the bus and knock off 50 kms in an hour rather than in a day and a half. (In so many of the books I have read of other people's experience, the authors talk about bailing out and taking the bus or train... usually for health reasons, like being too sick to walk from ingesting bad water.) I am glad that I have walked every since inch of that camino, including bonus miles. So I want another like challege as a way of proving to myself that, yes, I am capable of rising to a challenge and finishing it.

[feet, day 2, May 2006 29.5 kms outside of Moissac, France, in Saint Antoine]

No comment

Here's Pat Oliphant's commentary for today. It speaks for itself.

Monday morning laugh

because we all need to laugh, especially first thing in the week (though I don't like the 'fire at will').


from I Can Has Cheezburger

The Pinochet Files

The Coup at Home
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 11, 2007 The New York Times

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”

Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon. [bold mine]

drawing by Barry Blitt