A Pilgrim’s Digression

Back in early December, following the Democratic victory in the Virginia Governor’s race, I began writing this post, in which I outlined what I felt to be a winning theme Democrats might use in 2008. I called this theme “A Return to Normalcy,” based on Warren Harding’s election-winning strategy after the trauma of World War I.

At the time I began writing it, I was not thinking of the 2006 elections, because generally I feel that mid-term elections are about local pocketbook issues, rather than national debates. Yet it seems like despite history, 2006 is indeed shaping up to be a national race.

Yesterday, Democrats unveiled their campaign for Real Security, a theme which promises to figure prominently in the upcoming election season. Republicans still feel that security is their strength, but there are some chinks in the armor. Polls suggest that fewer and fewer Americans believe the trope that violence can only be countered with violence, i.e. America is safer because we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq, rather than here at home.

Yet polls are not the sole, or even the best reason, to take a stand for more Homeland Security and less Interventionism. It’s the right stand to take, and I think Democrats finally realize that.

The first sentence in the Democratic “Real Security” plan is “The first responsibility of our government is the security of every American.” Amen. Finally, they get it. Democrats such as Garrison Keillor and Joe Lieberman have been saying as much for ages.

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This weekend, we had our first real snow of the year.  Overall, it has been a mild winter.  December 2005 was much worse than anything we encountered in January or February, in terms of cold temperatures or snow.

Thus it came as a surprise to awaken Saturday morning to a dusting of snow on the ground and street, and more snow falling.

When I got up and announced that it was snowing, Brendan went right to the window.

“Gee, I didn’t even wear my pajamas inside out,” he said.  A teacher told him he could make it snow if he wore his pajamas inside out.

Lynn had already left the house.  Saturday was National Scrapbooking Day, and she spent the day scrapping with her girlfriends while Brendan and I had the house to ourselves.

I quickly planned a good day for us.  We would go to breakfast at the Waffle House.  Then to Wal-Mart to buy a “Thomas the Tank Engine” computer game Brendan has been wanting.  Then we would come home and build a snow man, if there was enough snow.  Then we would play his new computer game.  Then lunch.  And that was as far ahead as I could think.

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I slept poorly last night.  In my dreams, I was helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity, an activity completely at odds with my non-work ethic.  So all night long, I was pounding nails while family members, including my Grandpa, looked on.

The thunk, thunk, thunk of hammer on nail, nail on wood, became almost nightmarish, after awhile.  My Grandpa was proud of me, though.  He said, “I taught you how to hold that hammer.”

You have to hold a hammer low on the handle, so when you swing it the hammer provides much of the weight that drives the nail; hold a hammer too high and you are driving a nail only with muscle power.  My grandpa taught me that when Dad, Mom, and I were building our house on Pine Avenue in Parkersburg.

At one point I took a break and wiped away the sweat from my face.  I was shirtless and pretty buff, practically a teenager again.

As I rested, my aunt Stella offered me a cigarette, a Lucky Strike.   Aunt Stella was weeping; in my dream, her husband, Harry, had died recently.  In reality, he is still alive, but very sick with a heart condition that probably will kill him sooner, rather than later.

I lit the cigarette with a match.  The first puff was heady and rich; the smoke flowed into my lungs smooth as if someone were pulling a silk handkerchief down through my air passages.

I went back to pounding nails, the cigarette drooping from my mouth.

I woke up from all this pounding at a little before three, and I could not go back to sleep.  I lay awake until 4:30, at which time I got up to prepare for work.

In my lungs was the ghostly feeling of cigarette smoke.  I can still feel it.

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I’ve been reading a good book the past two weeks, titled American Gunfight: the Plot to Kill Harry Truman. I first heard about this book on the podcast of the Power Line radio show. Although the Power Line blog is a Conservative blog, I find its essays and its radio talk show to be fair-minded and intellectually challenging to people on both sides of the war. Funny how war has come to be the central, defining intellectual issue of our time. But there you go.

Back in November 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate Harry Truman and came pretty close to succeeding, closer than media reports at the time indicated to the public. Truman was staying in Blair House, across from the White House, when the two men attacked his security detail in an effort to shoot their way into the house. During the gunfight, Truman actually leaned out a window directly above his assailants, in a foolhardy attempt to see what was happening outside.

What I find fascinating about this story is that far from being grim, bloody-minded terrorists, as they would be described today, they were simple family men who believed passionately in the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Assassinating Truman was supposed to be a ploy to attract the attention of the United States people and government, which they saw as an oppressive colonial power, unfairly Americanizing and impoverishing their homeland.

However, the result of their assassination attempt was to kill another simple family man, Les Coffelt, a White House police officer, and grievously wound another. One of the Puerto Rican assassins also died in the gun battle. Truman escaped unhurt, and the incident passed quickly from the front pages to the history books as the irrational action of two crazed Hispanics. Why would Puerto Ricans want independence anyway? It doesn’t make sense. Poor, stupid bastards, people say.

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This weekend, we have trekked over to the house nearly every day, in one case three times in one day, in order to obtain an estimate on some work from tree removal companies.

We have about seven trees that we would like removed.  Mind you, we still aren’t closing on the home until March 31, but as soon as we do close we are going to have professionals lined up, ready to do our bidding and put the grounds and the house in tip top shape.

We obtained estimates from four tree removal companies this weekend, and the estimates ranged in price from $1750.00 to $970.00.  $970 was the final estimate we received today, and we accepted it and signed a work order.  As soon as the house is ours, we will schedule the work.

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Now that I have written my one obligatory political post for this month, I can return to writing about the things that are truly important.  Dreams, life, and literature.

In my dream, I am walking along the bank of the James River in Richmond. The River is high and muddy. The evening grows late. As I walk, the sun begins to set, but instead of turning back, I continue on.

Eventually, the city gives way to woods. The banks on either side of the river are heavily wooded, and the ground is growing rockier and steeper. Soon I am clambering over rocks, climbing away from the water’s edge towards the forest that is now above me. Still, I don’t turn back. Night is coming on fast.

By the time I reach the top, it is fully dark. There is no moon. I can hear the river below, rushing on its rapid course. The James is fairly shallow, so you might think of a river you have seen that is wide, but whitecapped with rapids.

On top of the cliff, I discover that I have come upon someone’s home and yard. An old fifties-model Chevy sits in the packed dirt of the driveway. In fact, the house itself appears to be old, what in my mind I describe as a “clapboard house.” I feel as if I have travelled back in time fifty years. I debate whether to go to the door and knock. There is a light coming from what I presume to be the living room.

I have to pee. I really have to pee. So right there in the yard, in full view of the large window from which the light emanates, I unzip and piss in the yard. What a relief.

Then, a woman appears in the window. She looks middle-aged and plainly attractive, though I can’t see her face well. She sees me pissing in her yard, and I have the impression that she is gawping at my penis, but I cannot stop the flow now. I had to go too badly to stop it now. Also, though I am frightened and conscious of the need to hurry up and zip up and skedaddle, I admit to feeling a rush of pleasure at exposing myself before this woman.

As I finish and zip up, she turns to someone in the house I can’t see and makes a comment. I can’t hear her. The person in the room must have said something, because she smiles as if he made an absolutely hilarious joke. Then she turns back to the window and resumes watching me, smiling to herself.

For a second, I stand there undecided. Should I go back the way I came, or follow the driveway to the road? I can feel my rising frustration with my indecision. If there is a man inside, he may even now be loading his shotgun.

With that thought, I turn and run towards the cliff where I came up from the river. The climb down is steep and slippery. I am pretty well bruised and scraped when I reach leveler ground.

I have a long way to go back, too. I start to think I should have gone the other way after all. “It’s always better to go forward than back,” I say to myself. I contemplate climbing the rocks again.

At this point, I wake up. It’s about 3:45 in the morning, and I really am about to burst. So I use the bathroom, and when I get back into bed I try to pick up the dream where I left off. I can get the feel of it. I can easily picture myself standing there looking up at the rocks, thinking I should climb them again. But I don’t know what happens next.

Russ Feingold’s proposal for a formal Congressional censure of President Bush over his wiretapping of American citizens may have caused some hardcore Bush-haters to fall into a love swoon with the Wisconsin Senator. However, I find this move to be dangerous in the extreme to genuine intellectual opposition to the President and his policies. Additionally, I do not think it increases Democratic chances of winning back the House and Senate in November if Democrats are seen as running entirely on a platform of “Impeach Bush.”

Essentially, this is what the censure motion boils down to: it paves the way for impeachment hearings next year, if Democrats win control of Congress.

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I have seen Napoleon Dynamite. Or at least a close relative.

Today on the train, I sat across from a young man of about twenty who could have been the tater tot-loving, tether ball-playing Mr. Dynamite. He was scrawny and goofy looking with wild, curly brown hair. He wore a blue sweatshirt on which a band of happy teddy bears played musical instruments in a forest. Over top of the sweatshirt, he wore a yellow rain slicker.

Around his neck hung a Government id on a lanyard that said “I [Heart] Jesus.” I could not see what agency he works for, but I immediately thought: “He’s a plain clothes Federal Marshall and this Jesus Freak routine is his cover. He’s actually armed with a .9mm sidearm under his rain coat, ready to shoot any suspected suicide bombers before they can blow up the train.”

In his lap, Special Agent Dynamite was holding an enormous Bible, indexed with homemade thumb tabs down the side. The Bible looked like one of those large, family-size coffee table Bibles sold primarily to people who think contraception is contrary to God’s will. And it was contained within a large, cloth zipper case the size of some people’s carry-on luggage.

On top of the Bible was a book of Biblical crossword puzzles open to the second or third puzzle. As he attempted to complete the puzzle, the little Napoleon would refer to the Bible, leaning so close to the text I thought for a moment he was going to lay his head down upon the book.

And of course, to top off this weird scene, the young zealot was wearing iPod earbuds presumably connected to an iPod in the pocket of his yellow rain slicker.

What music do you suppose he was listening to?

I slept fitfully last night, mainly because I had one of the worst nightmares I’ve experienced in awhile.  In my nightmare, we moved into our new house only to discover that we had no money left to beautify the yard, not even money for grass seed.

Then we started finding problems with the house that we did not know about before buying.  For example, the first time I flipped the light switch to turn on the outside light, the wall bent loosely inward as I pressed the switch.  The walls were nothing more than cardboard painted white!  How could we have missed that?

I alerted Lynn, and we went around the house, suddenly finding one problem after another.  The bathroom faucets crumbled into rusty, metal lumps when I touched them.  The air conditioning did not work and the windows would not open.  The oven caught fire when I turned it on, becoming an open flame grill.  And none of the doors would stay closed.  As soon as you closed a door, it would pop open and swing wide.

Then we noticed that we seemed to be having to walk uphill to go from one side of the house to another.  We went outside and saw that the house was clearly unlevel.  In fact, just in the few days we had owned it, the foundation had cracked and the house was canting steadily to the left, its high side.  We could hear it cracking and popping as it broke apart like a ship being crushed by icebergs.  As we watched, it literally broke up and fell into a heaping pile of dusty scrap lumber.

Waking from this nightmare early this morning,  I had to keep reminding myself that the home inspection would have told us if the walls were made of painted cardboard and if the house was going to fall down within days of buying it.  It was tough convincing myself of that. The dream had been very vivid.

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“As falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls.”

The line is written on a bathroom wall in one of the Wichita, Kansas, strip bars owned by Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid). The line comes back again at several odd moments in the film, most odd of all at the end, when the protagonist, Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) writes it on the back of an RV with a red Sharpie.

Then the RV abruptly backs up, knocking him to the ground.

There must be something important about that statement concerning the apparent symbiotic relationship between Wichita and Wichita Falls, but like many elements of the film The Ice Harvest, meaning is not easily discovered.

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