A Pilgrim’s Digression

“The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.” Heraclitus

Exactly one year ago, I wrote in Breakfast del trashcan about a crone I had been seeing around town.

She is an elderly white lady, stooped and tottering as she walks. She wears several layers of clothes and usually has a kerchief of some kind tied around her head. Her distinguishing feature is her cane, which she has decorated like a May pole with strips of yellow crime scene ribbon and orange and pink construction zone tape.

The first time I saw her, she was walking down the street, poking with her stick at the mulch around the bases of trees planted in the sidewalk. She muttered unintelligibly to herself. Second time I saw her, she got on the bus I was riding to work, and I was able to hear some of what she said. I last saw her on October 28, 2004.

What are the chances that exactly a year later, to the day, I would see this woman again? Yet this morning, as I was walking up C street SE towards 2nd st. SE, on my way to work, there she was.

I heard her first; she was ahead of me, just standing there beside the fence that runs alongside St. Peter’s. She was disputing with passersby, who dutifully ignored her. A well-dressed man on his way to work passed her, and she said something to him. He turned around and said (I only caught the last part), “…you old bitch.”

She stood there looking after him, raising her cane and shouting unintelligible threats and imprecations. I seem never to be able to understand anything she says. The words don’t connect with even the semblance of reason, and it’s nearly impossible to retain them in memory without ordering them in a rational way that ruins the total randomness of her poetic selection of phrases.

As the man she had apparently insulted passed me, he said, “What a loony.” Apparently he wanted my affirmation, but I didn’t respond. As I approached the woman, she was still shouting after the man who had called her an old bitch.

“How are you today?” I said, slowing as I approached her.

“Now you’re caught,” she replied, looking directly at me. “And goodbye for you, Son of a Bitch.”

I nodded and smiled and went on.

Sometimes I wonder if this woman has not stepped right out of a fairy tale onto the streets of Washington. One man looks at her and sees a “loony,” I look at her and see a crone or a prophetess, a witch from the dark forests of myth. I try hard to listen to everything she says and keep it, but like the Sibyl of Cumae, often we read into her sayings exactly the wrong things, to our detriment.

She could have been prophesying my death, or my imminent exposure in the CIA leak investigation as Miller’s source for the name of undercover agent, Valerie Flame. Who knows?

Perhaps if I see her again tomorrow, I’ll ask the Sibyl to elaborate on her prophecy. Today, after speaking her wisdom to me, she doddered up the sidewalk just behind me, still talking. When I turned onto 2nd street, she did to, but she walked in the middle of the street right up to the intersection with Independence Avenue SE. Thankfully, it was before dawn, so the street was empty. There we parted ways, me off to the coffee shop, and she…I don’t know where she went. One moment I saw her standing there on the corner, the next moment I lost sight of her. All that remained was her voice; I could still hear her all the way down the street. Now have I interpreted her prophecy correctly, and will I heed what she has told me?

In my post on Sunday, When the ship comes in, I mentioned that we should not get our hopes too high that Bush Administration officials are going to be indicted in the Plame Name Leak investigation. The following quote from today’s Washington Post should make us step back even further from the edge of unfounded exuberance:

Grand Jury Hears Summary of Case On CIA Leak Probe

But after grand jurors left the federal courthouse before noon yesterday, it was unclear whether Fitzgerald had spelled out the criminal charges he might ask them to consider, or whether he had asked them to vote on any proposed indictments. Fitzgerald’s legal team did not present the results of a grand jury vote to the court yesterday, which he is required to do within days of such a vote.

Increasingly, I don’t believe there are going to be any indictments. I have little evidence to support that belief, except my innate pessimism. However, I feel like the media has driven expectations of indictments, resignations, and scandal too high, so that whatever happens tomorrow is almost certainly going to be a disappointment. Anything short of the indictment of Cheney is going to be a non-story.

I lived through the Clinton years as a Republican, so I know how this works: you think the lawyers have finally caught up with the bastards, but then they slip the noose. That’s just the facts of life in Washington.

That said, if I’m wrong and some big indictments do come down tomorrow, I’ll be more than happy to eat crow. Accompanied by a well-baked potato, crow ain’t half bad.

Quite by accident, I stumbled across the website for a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Matthew Scully. He has written a book titled Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. In it, he makes a powerful argument against cruelty to animals from a Conservative Christian viewpoint.

Primarily, his argument is from the Christian perspective, which makes it neither Conservative or Liberal, but rational and ethical. In fact, if you read some of his other articles on his website, you find that the defining quality of his thinking is not the bigoted reasoning informed solely by political gain we have come to associate with Conservatives, but pure, powerful logic.

One wonders what happened to all this levelheadedness when Scully sat down to write for the President.
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I’m testing out a couple new WordPress image plugins. One is called PhotoPress, the other is called Image Browser. So here are some pictures of our cat, Café au Lait. My sister-in-law gave her to us as a kitten in 1996, so she is getting older now. Here, she has been sleeping on Brendan’s bed, her favorite sleeping spot…because he never sleeps a whole night there!

Click on the thumbs for larger versions, if you want. Of the two plugins, I’m going to use Image Browser. I really thought PhotoPress was going to work like a charm, and it did (to a point). When I would click on a thumb, it tries to load the full size image in a new browser window formatted according to my blog theme. My blog theme is customized, and so the page rendered in a screwy, garbled way. The website says that PhotoPress works well with the default theme, but the plugin file “album.php” may need modification to work with my theme’s styles.

Sorry, but it’s not worth it to me. I want a plugin that just works (hey, I’m a Macintosh user, that’s just how we are). I mean, why not have the full-size images load in a blank browser window? Doesn’t that make the best sense?

That’s what Image Browser does. After downloading and installing the plug-in, first you have to make sure Uploading is enabled in your WordPress Admin page. Go to “Options,” then to “Miscellaneous.” “Upload” is the only thing under “Miscellaneous.” Choose your preferences. Make sure you enter the correct URI and the correct upload directory for your folders; follow the examples beneath the text box.

Then, when you open a new “Write” pane to make a post, you will now have an “Insert Image” link at the top right corner of the page. A pop-up window steps you through the process of choosing your pictures (they must already be uploaded via the “Upload” panel of your Admin page) and deciding how to display them. I chose to display mine as “Thumbnail with link to full-size image,” and most people will probably do the same.

The great thing is that when you upload your pictures in the “Upload” panel, WordPress gives you the option of creating your thumbnails right there, and it gives you three different sizes of thumbs to choose from.

Although it would be great if uploading images were a little more “built in” to WordPress, not to mention intuitive to use, once you figure out how to do it, uploading and displaying images isn’t too difficult. The ease with which thumbnails are created even makes up for any deficiencies in ease of use elsewhere.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

I don’t know what happened to me in college. At a time of life when young people are supposed to expand their musical tastes beyond the top 40, I wasn’t listening to much music at all. I was too wrapped up in this ridiculous dream of being a writer of “literature.” I read Wordsworth and Shelley and Eliot and Pound—I didn’t listen to music. Or if I did listen to music, I listened to then-Alternative Rock. What a snot I was.

Thus it is that I am thirty-two years old and only now discovering Bob Dylan—and I discovered him only within the past three or four months, as if it weren’t bad enough that it’s taken me thirty-two years to catch up to tastes most people acquired in their early twenties.
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Bus Ride Shook a Nation’s Conscience

As in the east, the weather in Detroit looks pretty miserable today, cold and cloudy with a strong probability of rain. The rain is already pouring here in Washington. It’s worth noting that on a day of storms, Rosa Parks died, one of the last Civil Rights pioneers.

When someone who is very elderly dies, I always wonder if the world they are leaving is anything like they imagined it would be when they were younger, or if all of them are disappointed. I know a couple elderly people in their nineties, both women, and I have asked them to tell me their impressions of how the world has changed. On the one hand, they tell me anecdotes about how a sister died in the great 1919 flu epidemic, or how their earliest memory is of sitting on their papa’s shoulders and watching the soldiers in parade down Philadelphia’s Broad Street, returning from Europe in 1918. On the other hand, they inevitably say times were better in the past, before this or that. Those two women are white women. I don’t think Rosa Parks would agree with them. The world she leaves behind is infinitely better for people of her race than the world into which she was born in 1913.

What I find remarkable about Parks is that here is an ordinary person with no special qualification to have influenced societal change, yet through a confluence of events and personality, she changed the course of a nation in a way that few Presidents could even manage.
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“Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously / He brags of his misery…” Bob Dylan

The blessing and the bane of blogging are one and the same: its immediacy. So often, what one writes is quickly rendered moot, or else proven to have been based in ignorance and carelessness. Sloppiness is the dominant trait of modern communications.

I feel like if I had last week to write over again, I’d choose not to write my post on the Baptist church we’ve been attending and my feelings concomitant with returning to regular church attendance. I should have learned by now not to write about religion. It’s a subject on which I am not qualified to hold an opinion. Thus when I insist on holding forth in one of my long-winded self-flagellations I prove only my utter foolishness and self-absorption.

I cannot think about religion, God, or theology outside the box of my own emotionalism. Furthermore, since I cannot provoke in myself the slightest interest in ever reading any theology, my ignorance is likely to remain at a level roughly equivalent to a six year-old in a Fundamentalist Sunday School. So I’d best just keep quiet. Stick to writing about politics, or whatever pleases me, so long as it is not religion related.
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The past few months, I’ve noticed the prevalence of a particular type of advertisement on AM radio. I hear advertisements for Home DNA tests during just about every commercial break.

“Tired of living with the uncertainty that a child may not be yours?” The radio announcer asks. “Our Home Paternity kit can set your mind at ease.

I went to the company’s website just out of curiosity. I’m sure it’s a legitimate company, but there just seems something so wrong about this product. Or maybe what’s wrong is merely that there exists a need for this product.

To whom is it marketed? Apparently, it is marketed to men, since a woman would probably not be living with uncertainty about whether a child is hers or not. One doesn’t usually forget going through pregnancy or labor. Technically, a woman can’t really be cuckolded, can she?
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Tom DeLay Mug Shot - October 20, 2005

No sooner said than the Smoking Gun fulfils our wish.

Here’s the mug shot, and Delay is indeed flashing his politician’s grin. He’s even wearing his Congressional pin in his lapel.

Rove Told Jury Libby May Have Been His Source In Leak Case

When the rats turn on each other, you know the ship is nearly sunk.

This week has been a strange news week. Nothing much has happened in the Fitzgerald leak investigation, but it has been nearly the sole focus of political reporting in Washington. Even the Harriet Miers debacle has become the second act to whether someone close to the President is about to be indicted.

Much of the reporting has just been rumor-mongering for the lack of anything tangible to report. Yesterday, there was the most ridiculously empty story on the Conservative “news” site NewsMax.com that said “rumors are flying around Washington that Cheney might step aside—and be replaced by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.”

Frankly, I didn’t know “rumors” were a legitimate source of news, but what do I know? I’m not a journalist. The “rumors are flying” garbage was picked up by Slate and the New York Post, so obviously journalistic standards don’t mean much anymore.
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