On The Record

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, trouble was brewing.
"Say guys, do you suppose there's any way we could screen the wretched refuse coming into our country to make sure that we never have to spend a dime on them?"
"Well, that would mean that only people who were self-sustaining would ever get into the country."
"Yeah?"
"Do you really feel like that is in line with our country's moral center?"
Laughter erupts. "Feel? You're kidding right?"
A general wiping of eyes and snorting. "Moral center?"
A fresh burst of snickering.
"But seriously, ahem, couldn't we just keep all the poor folks out and only let in the rich ones?"
"Seriously?"
"Wouldn't it be best to keep all those tired, poor, sick, yearning to breathe free types off of our doorstep?"
"Well, I suppose we could limit the number of new immigrants who would require government assistance such as food stamps or Medicaid."
"Well, we could ask the Supreme Court, since the Court of Appeals already ruled against something like this." 
"Sure, sure, but I've got that problem pretty much taken care of now."
Chuckles ensue. "Well sir, I guess that's true."
"And while we're at it, can we put some sort of civics test in there? Just to help weed out the really dumb ones?"
"Something simple, like branches of the government and their responsibilities?"
"Yeah, like that."
"Maybe a question or two about what Congress does and what the President does?"
"Pardon me?"
"You know: Checks and balances. Separation of powers, that sort of thing."
"Excuse me?"
Silence in the room. "Oh. Right. My apologies, your highness."
"That's better."
"Yes sir."
"Now can we get back to more important things? Is it time for Fox and Friends?" 

My Beef With Kobe

If you have listened to me whine here for years about Kobe Bryant, you understand that my issues with him as a basketball player run a little deeper than whose uniform he happens to be wearing. For those of you less familiar with my rant, I will attempt to distill it into its essence: He left high school to join the NBA. This put a gigantic hole in my argument to ten year olds that they should look to possible alternative career paths other than hoops. Kobe could do it, after all. Why not them?
If you slept through this past weekend and missed the news, Mister Bryant and his thirteen year old daughter were among the victims of a helicopter crash just north of Los Angeles. All eight passengers and the pilot perished. And ESPN stopped to tell the story. All day long. Along with a great portion of the rest of America and basketball fans across the world. These were parents and children who died on their way to a basketball game.
Like so much of the rest of the country, I was caught up in the media event that was The Crash. Presidents tweeted about it. Movie and recording stars stopped making movies and recording albums to ponder their existence in a world without Kobe Bryant. Mourners who gathered outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles threatened to overwhelm the crowds gathered for that night's Grammy Awards. This was an event of epic proportions. This was an enormous media event.
So here is the friction that I feel: Like the way that kids at my school could look at Kobe and imagine themselves flying above the rim, without strings or the weight of a college degree, I have a twinge anytime someone falls from the sky in a small aircraft. That is how I lost my father. It isn't the flying that is so difficult, ask any member of Wile E. Coyote's pack, it's the landing. The speed and force involved in slipping the surly bonds of earth are as profound as any we know. I believe we should all be surprised when humans take off and land in one piece, which puts a solid crimp in my dreams of owning a flying car.
And speaking of dreams, here is what I want to say: When I dream of flying, it is very matter of fact. I don't have to race to reach escape velocity. I don't have to flap my arms furiously to stay afloat. Mostly I just hang there, not unlike those slow motion videos of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant leaping into the air. I don't worry about the landing. I will have time for that when my flight is over.
If man were truly meant to fly, he would do it on the basketball court.
Aloha, Kobe Bryant. You didn't so much stomp on the Terra but hang above it.

The Long Road

Way back in the early nineties, I remember watching the vein in Eddie Vedder's forehead and wondering just how much longer he could go on like that. Then Kurt Cobain shot himself, and I began to dread hearing the news about Eddie and how all that intensity finally caught up to him. Nirvana and Pearl Jam are both in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Kurt beat Eddie to Cleveland by three years. Posthumously. Eddie lived long enough to induct the surviving members of The Ramones, sporting a leather jacket and a fresh mohawk haircut. Eight years after Kurt pulled the trigger.
As it turns out, maybe I didn't need to worry about Eddie quite so much. Rather than seeing his music as a window on his suffering, it turns out that maybe he was expelling the demons from his soul through his lyrics. How do I reckon this? Back in 2011, he released and album of Ukulele Songs. I expect there are plenty of ways to connect up grunge to ukulele, but not through the depths of suicide. Because Eddie and his bandmates, to crib awkwardly from another album title, lived through this.
These are the guys who came tumbling out of Seattle in that first great wave that helped clear the beaches of hair metal, at least for a while. And long since we all put our flannel shirts back in the closet, they are still making music. Not as a reunion act, with a new lead singer, but a working band with thirty years on the road. Yes, they have a few drummers in their past. Who doesn't? They have a new album coming out in March: Gigaton. Pearl Jam is alive and well.
After years of tilting at windmills such as Ticketmaster, Pearl Jam continues to make music and tour. After all these years, it is perhaps sad irony that I bought my tickets to the upcoming date in Oakland through Ticketmaster. They were not cheap. But I suppose that's what age and experience will get you. Those are expensive items. And this will be the start of the potential tirade by some about how they sold out and their new stuff doesn't sound like their old stuff and they were never that good anyway.
Which isn't a very objective standard. What is objective is that thirty years later Eddie Vedder is still alive and kicking. Maybe not as hard as he used to. He's fifty-five years old. I don't kick as hard as I used to. And worrying about things like burning out or fading away is left for others. Pearl Jam has done neither. Which affords them my applause. And the money for a ticket to see them play.

By George

Dear George,
It was just about two weeks ago that you gave me one of my proudest teaching moments. I had introduced the reading quiz we were about to take in class by saying that it wasn't  the first students who finished who usually did the best. It was those students who took their time to try and figure out the answers to the questions that they read who got the best scores. Just before the end of the class, you were the last one in the room to finish. You got one hundred percent. I was happy for you. Not just because of your success, but because I know that reading is not your favorite thing. I know this because you have announced it. Several times this year. You got every answer correct on your quiz not because you love reading so much, but in spite of it. And I was happy for me, too. I considered this a success for me as a teacher too.
We have known each other since you were in kindergarten. I taught you then, and now six years later, I am winding up my time with you. During that time I have seen you struggle with reading and writing in computer class, but I have watched you blossom out on the playground. In PE, and as a Young Hero during recess, your skills are abundant. I applaud your efforts on the soccer field, but even more I appreciate your willingness to try something new: basketball. You are taking a chance on something you were never that good at, but you found yourself taking to it almost from the very first practice. I guess none of us should have been surprised.
But at the end of last week, you also broke my heart a little. I know how much you struggle when we have a substitute in your room. It takes you a long time to warm up to a new person, and getting used to a new grownup telling you what to do is one of your biggest challenges. Which may be why you tend to challenge them back. Complaints of "What did I do?" and "That's not fair" come out of you long before all of your great problem solving abilities. You run your teachers through an obstacle course of acceptance that is calculated to make them match your first teacher, your kindergarten teacher whom your still regard as the best you ever had.
She probably was. She got you to read and to learn and to accept responsibility for your actions. She put you on a path to being the leader that you have become at our school. I am grateful to have made a connection with you that has helped me help you. Finally, after all this time, I feel as though you will listen to me. That is what that reading quiz taught me.
But the next week, when you were struggling with that new authority while your teacher was out, you retreated to some of those old habits. You got stuck in a place that made you question authority. Even the voices that were trying to help you get to a safe place for learning. I lost my temper with you, and for that I apologize. I was upset because I felt that I could not go back down a path where I was begging you to do the right thing. I was not comfortable watching you exchange your true leadership skills for those of a class clown.
You are not that. You are far better than that. And I am a better teacher than that.
So I am very sad. It was a tough week for a lot of kids and teachers at our school. It was one of those weeks where we are all glad when the weekend shows up and we can push the do-over button for the next Monday morning. Bouncing back is never easy, but it gets harder when you're as old as I am. I hope you can help me with that. I hope that there is still another great moment of learning ahead for the two of us.
If there's not, I want to thank you for that one. And many others, over the years. Next year, you'll be off to middle school and I will be back at work, trying to solve the puzzle that is three hundred other kids. I hope you remember that time we have spent together, not for our last week, but for all those weeks before. And what lays in front of you.
Sincerely,
Mister Caven

Tick

"One year ago, I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire. I said I wanted you to panic. I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do. But don’t worry. It’s fine. Trust me. I’ve done this before. And I can assure you: It doesn’t lead to anything." These were the words that Greta Thunberg used to begin her address to the World Economic Forum. 
She continued: "The fact that the U.S.A. is leaving the Paris accord seemed to outrage and worry everyone. And it should. But the fact that we are all about to fail the commitments you signed up for in the Paris Agreement doesn’t seem to bother the people in power even the least. Any plan or policy of yours that doesn’t include radical emission cuts at the source starting today is completely insufficient for meeting the one point five - or well below two-degree commitments of the Paris Agreement."
The underlying sentiment of her full address can be summed up in her assertion that "Our house is still on fire." United States Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin replied in the only way he knows how, by sneering,  “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
Which is probably why, two days later, the Doomsday Clock moved to its closest point ever to midnight. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, we are currently one hundred seconds to midnight, or the metaphorical Doomsday. We are no longer talking about minutes, as we have in the past. We are now talking about the time it takes you to say Mississippi one hundred times. Back in 1947, the clock was originally set to seven minutes (seven hundred twenty Mississippis). This was just after a certain country used nuclear weapons during war, and suddenly everyone else needed to get themselves one of those nuclear weapons to make sure that nobody would ever use nuclear weapons in war again. For the record, it was a bunch of Atomic Scientists who came up with that idea for nuclear weapons in the first place, so it sort of makes sense that they are attempting to figure out a way to get that genie back in its bottle. Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock has been reset twenty-three times. It hasn't been a slow and steady march to midnight. In 1991, they pushed it back to seventeen minutes til midnight. 
Lately, the combination of climate change and the renewed specter of nuclear war leaves us with just a few moments to gather our loved ones to say "adjö." That would be "goodbye" in Swedish. A year from now it would be nice to think that we could come together again to celebrate the new administration with a few more seconds added to our potential. In the meantime, stop idling. Plant a tree. But most of all, tell everyone else that we want to live through these next one hundred seconds.

Longview

That dull roar you hear in the distance is the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump. The "J" in this particular instance stands for "justice." Whether or not it will be served is anyone's guess at this point, since as my mother points out, very little seems to have slowed him down up to this point. That roar, by the way, depends a little on how closely you are monitoring the situation in Washington D.C. My wife has the feed coming through her speakers all day long. I can't stand to listen to it, but I keep my eyes out for any alerts. Like: "President" resigns in disgrace.
How did it come to all this? Instead of doing the campaign for 2020 dance as we all will have to do anyway, we are going to sit through this exercise in the democratic (small "d") process. While the rules and general civility of the experience will be debated endlessly, we might all agree that it is infinitely preferable to the armed insurrection alternative. Not that we don't have to keep that potential in the back of our minds as the side with the guns make threats both general and specific. And just for a moment, can I ask where the proud Democratic (big "D") gun owners are? The ones that shout about how if the "president" isn't removed from office they'll come locked and loaded to our nation's capitol looking to do harm?
Nope. These are the op-ed folks, more likely to write a strongly worded letter than pick up a weapon. Because they truly believe the pen is mightier than the sword. Or the keyboard is mightier than the automatic weapon. Well, to paraphrase the poet, how did we get here?
Once upon a time, someone suggested that when we grow up, "anyone can be president." This would be a test of that theory. As my mother likes to point out, there are a lot of people who seem to think this is a good thing. This is "their guy." Keeping in mind that we continue to encourage every American to vote, even though there are efforts to disenfranchise certain portions of "the people," but we are still "we the people." Our ongoing mission is to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And where you stand on the current state or our union has everything to do with how you feel about the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump. History is not on the side of those favoring removal, since only three American presidents have been impeached, and the two previous cases ended in acquittal. Was justice done? Depends a lot on where you stand, historically. But the historical perspective suggests that this too shall pass, much in the same way that the previous two did. It was not pretty, and those past trials helped create the situation in which we currently find ourselves. It may not be justice, but it is history. 

And Now For Something Completely Sad

Herding cats. Chasing the wind with a net. Directing Monty Python.
Impossible feats, all.
Terry Jones may not have been much of a cat wrangler, but I can imagine him with that net and I know that he directed Monty Python. For those of you who are challenged by the notion of who is whom in that multi-faceted comic troupe, Terry Jones was the one who wasn't American. Terry Jones was the one who co-directed The Holy Grail. He was Sir Bedevere in that one. Terry Jones directed Life of Brian. He was Brian's mother in that one. Terry Jones directed Meaning of Life. He was many things in that one, but perhaps most notably Mister Creosote.
And if all of that resonates with you, then you will also miss Terry Jones' inspired lunacy here on this plane. It will please no one more than my good friend from high school to know that the Oxford English Dictionary includes the word "pythonesque" to describe a style of absurdist humor found in the television show Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was this group of Englishmen and one American ex-pat who forever altered the course of John Phillips Sousa's Liberty Bell March. And comedy.
It is absurdly tragic that Mister Jones suffered his last years with dementia, since he wasn't able to fully enjoy it. It was the dementia that he suffered on all of us for so many years for which we have him to thank. We can also be thankful that he thought himself amusing enough to join up with college chum Michael Paliln (the nice one) and begin a silly assault on the times in which they lived. And before that, too. Terry Jones was an author as well, penning children's books as well as scholarly works about Chaucer and other high-minded pursuits.
And now he goes to join that comedy revue in the heavens, joining fellow Python Graham Chapman with songs by Neil Innes. His brand of lunacy coupled with an inner calm that defied the chaos around him is a rare thing. He stomped on the Terra, and then pointed back at it to laugh. He will be missed.
Aloha, Mister Jones.