Happiness Is A Warm Gun

"I'm so upset about Orlando and what went down, but I can't believe these people would come out afterward and their answer to Orlando is to take away guns from the public. It's [expletive] mind blowing to me." First of all, sir, no one is suggesting that we take guns away from the public. That's exactly what makes all the gun control arguments turn into foaming-at-the-mouth-I've-got-my-pocket-sized-copy-of-the-Constitution-right-here exchanges. And I could understand how this kind of thing might get an ex-Navy Seal all agitated. He's going to want that AR-15 to recreate those battlefield experiences when the bad guys show up on his front lawn. Or maybe that curmudgeonly senator who has an ax to grind with our president, seeing as how he lost big and he's a veteran too, but maybe he misspoke. It's amazing how many people are lining up to shoot off their mouths at this moment when that should be the least of our worries. It's not about taking guns away, fellow patriots, it's about keeping guns out of the hands of the bad guys.

In case you were wondering, it wasn't John McCain or Dom Raso or some other regularly appearing face of the National Rifle Association who muttered those words. It was radio personality Howard Stern, who never met an end of a chain that he would not pull. He continued his rant with a metaphor: "Now, let's say I walked up literally to a sheep herd, and they know that every night the wolves pick off a couple of them," Stern said. "What if I went up to the sheep and I said, 'You wanna have a shot at the wolves? I'm gonna give you a pistol. You can actually even the playing field with these wolves whose fangs are out. You could shoot them and save your family.'" See, those of us without guns are sheep, and the only way to deal with wolves in his world is to act like them. We must all become killers. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, since he's the only one with a chance to read the Second Amendment.

Meanwhile, down the hall from Howard is another media type who surprised people with his somewhat clear thoughts in the wake of yet another mass shooting: Bill O'Reilly. After taking a few big wide swings at us bleeding heart types, he went ahead and said that it is time for some substantive discussion about gun control. After years of business as usual, it seems that there are some among us who are starting to smell the coffee, or the gunpowder or spilled blood. No one is suggesting that we repeal the Second Amendment. Okay, there are some, but mostly the question of gun control is just that: control. As Mister O'Reilly suggested, the idea of a "well regulated militia" included the word "regulated." 

Oh no. I am agreeing with Bill O'Reilly. These are indeed strange times. 

No Do Overs

Preserving Delegates’ Ability to Vote Their Individual Conscience

The secretary of the national convention shall receive and faithfully announce and record each delegate’s vote in accordance with these rules. If any such delegate notifies the secretary of his or her intent to cast a vote of conscience, whether personal or religious, each such delegate shall be unbound and unconstrained by these rules on any given vote, including the first ballot for the selection of the Republican nominee for President of the United States, without the risk of challenge, sanction, or retribution by the Republican National Committee. Allowable personal reasons shall include the public disclosure of one or more grievous acts of personal conduct by a nominee candidate, including but not limited to, criminally actionable acts, acts of moral turpitude or extreme prejudice, and/or notorious public statements of support for positions that clearly oppose or contradict the policies embodied in the Republican Party’s platform as established at the national convention.

These are the words in the proposed rule that the Republican Party is considering to allow delegates to "vote their conscience." Maybe when they were at this caucus or that primary, the delegate in question was caught up in the maelstrom of feelings that might have given them the idea that voting for a certain orange-skinned candidate was a way to set things right. To make America Great Again, They may have been under the impression that their vote would send a message. That message? Something along the lines of, "Can you believe that I actually voted for Trump?" And the giggling commenced. When everyone sobered up, and they looked at that sea of red baseball caps and thought about what they had done, there must have been some shame and regret. "You mean you did it too?" How are we going to get out of this one? 

I know: Let's make a rule that takes all those drunken sots and gives them one more chance to set things right. Really? You want that guy to represent the party of Lincoln and Reagan? He's a nutjob, you know that, right? He's not presidential.  He's a reality TV show. Wouldn't you like to take another crack at this? It's not too late. Like when they killed Bobby Ewing, and the ratings for Dallas fell off the chart. What could we do? Bring him back the next year and say that it was all just a dream. The idea of any one of those gentlemen stepping out of the shower to greet a shocked Pam gives me a little knot in my stomach, but that's how it works in the TV world. But probably not in presidential politics. 

Sorry guys. You might get some of the ketchup back in that bottle, but not all of it. Not enough. In the big book of saving face, this is the face they are stuck with. The orange one, with the great big mouth. There will be no wishing this one away. No take backsies. 

Your Dad Did

And you're a chip off the old block
Why does it come as such a shock
That every road up which you rock
Your daddy already did

- John Hiatt "Your Dad Did"

My son came back from his freshman year in college and I listened to him talk about life in the dorm with his roommates. I told him that he now has his own college stories, so he no longer has to ask for me to repeat mine. Which was sort of disingenuous, since I still regularly repeat the stories my father told me. Some of them were about college, but since he didn't spend a lot of time in college there weren't as many stories to retell. Instead, I remember the stories he told about growing up in Kansas. Or his high school days in Boulder. Or the time he spent in the Army, driving a radio truck around Germany, keeping Europe safe from the potential Communist insurgence. Actually, to hear him tell it, there wasn't a lot of concern about communism, more worries about the fried chicken his sergeant brought along and the beer they acquired by pulling up to the beer hall in a tank and having the beermaids pass cans down the barrel. 

I probably spent way too long, as a kid, believing everything my father told me. Like when he told me that it was his time in the army, wearing a helmet for two years, that caused him to lose his hair. Or the time he and my older brother took my younger brother and I into the pitchblack passages they discovered in the ruins of Chichen Itza. "Be careful here, since there's a fifty foot drop straight down," he told us as we clung to him unnecessarily. There was no drop. There was no hole. He was lying. I wouldn't have plummeted to my death, but I did end up losing my hair. Even though I never wore an Army helmet. 

And then there were all those jokes. Hundreds of them. The ones I remember, anyway. Most of them were just straight up silly, and though the off color ones have been largely forgotten, I always loved the way he told them. They were better than the true-life stories, and they tended to flavor the ones from real life. Which made it ever more difficult to discern the verisimilitude of anything that came out of his mouth. Which wasn't really a problem, since I was sticking around for the humor. 

I tell my son the truth. I may embroider the edges from time to time, but mostly I keep things interesting by picking the stories I choose to tell. The funny ones, mostly. Every so often, I toss in one of those heartfelt man to man deals, just to keep me honest. I tell him my dad's stories, and he's heard a lot of that vast storehouse of jokes. They now get stirred into the mix with his own. Generations of funny bits handed down from father to son, with the expressed intent of getting a laugh. 

Like your dad did. 

Thanks For Nothin', Ben Franklin

Sometimes I forget what it sounds like when everything is turned off. That is what happened the other day when I came home from my morning run. When I opened the basement door to check on the laundry, I heard the phone ringing. This was odd, since the timing of phone calls coming into our landline usually precludes me having to answer the basement phone, but I picked it up anyway. The voice on the other end of the line was recorded. It was Hillary Clinton, asking me to join her in her quest to make America as good as it possibly can be. Or something like that. I hung up without making much more of it, since there was laundry to fold.
The music that had been pouring into one ear from my iPod stopped when I got upstairs and silenced it, anticipating that I would be standing in front of the cooling pile of clothes, watching the cable television shows that I might otherwise have missed. But there was no little red light in the lower right hand corner of my TV urging me to turn it on. I walked into the bathroom and noticed that there was no little green light on the handle of my Sonicare toothbrush, reassuring me that it was charged up and ready to go. In the kitchen there was no hum from the coils of the refrigerator and the clock on the microwave had gone to black.
My immediate reaction was to blame my son, the user of so much of our electricity, and as he had just recently returned home, I was quick to assign blame to him for this lack of power. I grabbed the keys to the basement where this whole enterprise had begun and muttered to myself mildly unkind things while my son slept. When I reached the breakers below, I noticed that none of them had been tripped. I made a note to apologize to my son for thinking those power thoughts about him.
Back upstairs, I busied myself with the laundry, noting that the good news was that everything was dry before we couldn't make it so. It was a breezy day and the sun was out, so I reckoned that we might have been able to dry things out on the line, but it would have taken more time. When I finished, I sat very still and noticed the quiet. Without all those circuits blaring away in their boxes and in the walls, I could hear the clocks ticking. I could hear the birds chirping and the kids playing outside. I went out on my front porch and a young father from next door asked if our power was out too. I told him it was, and he sighed. He held his little boy in his arms and I watched him wonder what to do with his son who was accustomed to being entertained by various electronic means. Go for a walk, sing a song, I suggested. "Like in the pioneer days." We laughed and waited for the next thing to happen. We waited for electricity to be discovered again.

Big Enough

Like our president, I get tired of reaching this podium for the expressed purpose of addressing another senseless tragedy. I am also confounded by those who look to make sense of such nihilism. Even worse, to me, is the political hay that is being made even as I sit in front of my keyboard about guns and Islam and gay rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness my fellow Americans. Get behind those words writ large by Mister Jefferson. Stop trying to ban this weapon or that religion and start supporting the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Why not get a little jump-start on our Fourth of July Sale-A-Bration this year?
Possibly because the death of fifty men and women doesn't get anybody in the mood to buy a mattress or wave a flag, unless it is out of defiance. Defiance of all those things that make events like the murder of those fifty and the wounding of another fifty-three more part of our nation's continuing attempt to resolve conflicts at the end of a gun. Remember that the same president who comes to that podium with furrowed brow and patience waning is the same guy ordering the drone strikes in the Middle East. I know: Apples and Oranges. But the stories we are reading about the young couple who hoped to be married will now be buried together, or the letter from a mom to the survivors in Orlando that included an apology: "Sorry that our tragedy here in Sandy Hook wasn't enough to save your loved ones.:
All this talk about the killer's job being "the worst in American History" doesn't take into account moments like the collapse of the World Trade Centers. Or the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Omar Mateen will have to stand in line behind Timothy McVeigh on the line to get into hell. What is less clear is what the waiting period will be for those FBI agents who may have kicked the hornet's nest in Timothy's head when they killed seventy-six members of the Branch Davidian sect.
So what amounts to polite discourse in our society is now being meted out at a frightening rate with semi-automatic weapons, and I can't help but think of the old George Carlin bit where he plays a disc jockey telling his audience that the holiday weekend's highway death toll is down from last year, "You're not trying!" he admonishes his audience. Because that is where we live: the land of the free and the home of the brave, and the super-sized. Go big or go home. Everything in moderation is for countries that can't afford the payments. Can you imagine how long it would take to strangle fifty people?
On second hand, don't. Hug someone you love. Kiss them on the head. Agree with them. Go out and pursue happiness. In a big way.

The Line

Things fall apart. That is part of the reason the title of this blog is Entropical Paradise. Over the weekend, while wrestling with the ivy that had become entwined in the fence separating our property from that of the apartment house next door, I uncovered the truth about that fence. It is rotting. Having the ivy draped over it for years had not proved to make it stronger, though it certainly made it thicker, especially over the course of this past year of increased precipitation. Once the vegetation had been stripped away, it was apparent that rot had set in. A great stinking swath of moldy rot. The ivy was slowly working at breaking the fence down to its component molecules. Given another decade, I'm sure that there would only have been a lump of of decomposed vegetable matter where once stood a rampart, strong and tall.
It is this fence, the one around our yard, that has been the bane of my home-owning experience. I have built, repaired, rebuilt, and repaired again this barrier between us and them. It kept the dog in and the neighborhood kids out. It provided a safe haven for front lawn football and back yard water fights. It drew a line around our little plot near heaven. It gave me a place to go and close the gate behind me. When the latch worked, that is.
Now, nineteen years later, I find myself on the verge of tearing down a great section of that edifice, with the intent of replacing it, of course, but with an eye toward the future. That fence was here when we moved in. We have replaced the south section, which had once been chain link and permeated with bamboo. The slats in the front were once replaced on a regular basis when the plum-gathering kids scrambled over them and in their rush to get in and out with their tasty treats or projectiles snapped them off. A few of the posts were dug up and restored to their less-rotted and upright condition. It's part of the plan.
The plan is to tear it down and put something else back up in its place. There is plenty of imagination going on out there in the world of fencing. I would like to tell you that there will be some grand construction set in its place that will stand as a tribute to its builders. It will be another one of those summertime projects, and once it is complete, I can start the clock on how long before I have to repair it. Or chop down the ivy.

Pride In The Name Of Love

"This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.  And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well." And that's how our president chose to describe the situation in Orlando, Florida on Sunday. Easy enough for someone who was already on the anti-terrorist watch list to get a job as a security guard. An armed security guard who could legally purchase weapons used to kill dozens of his fellow human beings. Legally, especially since he was employed by a firm that  had contracts with the federal government. 

So the right to bear arms continues to win out over the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Going to the movies. Going to a nightclub. Going to church. Going to school. Elementary school. Drawing cartoons. The fact that the refrain, "and all these weapons were purchased legally" keeps coming up in conjunction with tragedies like the one that took place in Orlando suggests that there might be something wrong with the laws. 

That's why we have legislators, judges, and litigators: to fix the laws that don't work. Guns themselves have changed incredibly since the days that the Second Amendment was originally written. It took an average of twenty seconds to load and fire a musket back in the eighteenth century. On full automatic setting, an assault rifle can fire thirteen rounds in a second. Guns have changed. The Second Amendment has not. If anything, the support for that piece of the Constitution has received more reinforcement and support than any other. The "attacks" on the Second Amendment generally come as a response to the attacks that have taken place with the arms in question.

Is this the kind of country we want to be? Is this that "Shining City On A Hill?" Hate or terror? It doesn't really matter because it was both, profoundly for those who were there and for those who died there. I think this country isn't about hate or terror. It's about love.

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
- U2