Christmas

And the world wonders at the centuries-long persistence of Christmas among the Christians.

Hung upon this tree, almost every ornament represents a hallowed memory, or a different era of 40 years shared between one man and one woman, and the three now-grown children who filled up the void in their shared life. 

Several ornaments are hand-me-downs from the grand- and great-grand- generations who are now gone to that great yuletide in the heavens.

Gazing at the tree on a chilly December night, although the room is quite warm, calls to mind all those past Christmases.

Christ the Saviour is born. And another family lives to tell the yuletide tale.

Believe it or not, the true, original Christmas spirit is potent, alive and well, and still passing from generation to generation.

A relic of days gone by?

Perhaps. But much more than that, a celebration of eternity to come, made real by the child born in Bethlehem so long ago—the one who grew up to conquer hell and death on a goddam cross.

Believe it not. The manger was good enough for Jesus; it’s good enough for us. It's a potent story with an eternal ending. Join in if you've caught the Spirit.

Glass half-Full

DNA the best Way

The dispensation of DNA

is best when it’s done in an orderly way.

What’s needed is that any man who so yearns

should direct his emissions in loving terms

to the same loving recipient every time:

all his kids have the same mama on down the line.

So let the ladder of life, the DNA

be distributed in a family way.

From the itinerant visionary

to the coding contemporary,

counsel the loopy adventurer with his genital arrow

to find motherly love in the strait and narrow.

So the resulting kids will grow up right,

and not be left in a social services plight.

You may think I’m old-fashioned in this,

but ’tis not a principle to flippantly dismiss:

The distribution of our precious DNA

is bestly dispensed in the family way.

Now if you guys think that I'm not cool,

well I AM cool, y'all. . . and no April fool!

Glass Chimera

Ask not what the world can do for you

If the mandarins of this world want to manage everything from their databases

if they wannna fix everything so everyone is the same and everyone has the same

opportunities and all are equal in the eyes of world and all hues and colors and

shades of gray and shades of brown black and white blend together having the same

access to all the good stuff that this managed world has to offer such as

access to all the education, employment, electoral, and economically elevatable

opportunities that can be put together by the Fed and the IMF and the UN and the

G20 and the G-hundred and the G-thousand and all the world together appointing

managers who assure that everyone is on the same page and nobody

gets blowed up and and everybody is safe and secure and fat and happy

or slim and lean as the case may be

If the bureaucrats and the directors of this that and the other feel like they need to

manage all this stuff and turn back the rising tide of climate change

and the ancient, undeniable, irrevocable urge that rises between a man

and his woman

and therefore the renegade loins of men and women who unite in their beds every night

and ever day bringing forth all these children and this family

busting forth out of their mama's womb and then growing up in Africa or Indonesia

or Uruguay or Gary Indiana or Mesa Arizona or Mexico City or Moscow or Orlando

and if they feel the need to put a rein on all our emissions

all our carbon spewing forth from all our cars and our planes and trains

and our monorails and our leaping' lizards and leviathan whales and

our males and females,

and if they think they can manage all this and

turn the unquenchable tide of the life force and and the gaia

so that it becomes something other than what it is

which is the life force itself that comes

from the loins of a man

and the womb of his woman,

and then those subsequent young boisterous bucks and does

who spring forth from the loins of mankind

then let them come to Mickey's place and see

what its really all about.

Let them discover that the proletariat has now become

the bourgeoisie

with every man chomping down on his family's piece of the pie

and every woman bringing forth her children and proud

of it

and all those neuters who wish to not participate are

free to do so because

we'd all like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony if

we could, buy hey

we'll settle for the next best thing, which is having youn'uns

and watching them grow and if you don't believe me then

come to Mickey's place and see

what's really going on.

You can't put a tether on this thing. We must be free

to live and work and have our being and have

our children and watch them grow

and hohoho every Christmas

and hiedee ho gonna get me a piece of the pie

you don't need to get it for me

gonna get it my own dam self

and for our kids too.

What's it to you?

Let them come to Mickey's place and see what's

really going on.

Ask not what the world can do for you,

but what together we can do for our children and our children's children.

Glass half-Full

Afterglow

One man, one woman

become one.

Host of family and friends

from near and far

gather.

Joy, celebration, love;

heaven comes down

to us

while we witness,

in bright sunshine,

nature's original intent

for him and her. . .

sacramental coupling more

mysterious and sweet than

we could have anticipated, so that the

coital coupling to come will conceive pure

love.

A miracle of unity, this event transforms

all who are present and willing

to enter into their sacred intent toward each other,

in faithfulness, fidelity, finality.

Rare, but true.



John speaks of love and sacrifice, while

celestial grace streams from

blue sky.

Wisdom gets multiplied by two, and

Joy

far greater than we could have mustered,

erupts from the fearless conviction of their vows,

spoken boldly, with certainty, and yet lit up

around the edges, like this entire celebration itself,

with a slightly naughty mirth.

Such brave intent we see, in spite of the dissolution of all things holy that's

going on out there in, you know. . .

the world, and all that other crap we hear about from time to time.

But now. . .

Their vowful miracle becomes

a blessing to us who witness, even

as they speak the gift into existence, pronouncing to

each other.



And then they skip away.

And so amazed are we

while we wonder at the the scene. We

had wandered in; now we float

out, in sacramental awe.

We eat, drink, dance, celebrate into the night until. . .

as suddenly as they had entered in,

bride and groom are gone.

To discover the greatest mysteries of life.

This Afterglow

bequeaths us traces of infinite, unpredictable

fulfillment,

with glintings of eternal grace.

This moment, remembered, shall inspire us

to consecrate today's exchange, while

these two young ones are continually equipped,

in time,

to become one.

They'll discover, as days and nights ripen,

that pleasure which is, in all of life, the most precious of all:

to behold, as days slip into years, that smile on the face

of the one you love.

They'll come to savor it, like the finest wine, as Mom and Dad have,

and their Mom and Dad before them.

That unfathomable depth of joy will fortify

the life they share with invincible companionship.

While meanwhile, back at the ranch, parents bask in

afterglow.

Denying Climate Change

The critical question about climate change is not whether it is happening or not. The point is: what should be done about it, and perhaps more importantly--what can be done about it?

The earth and its biospheres have always been changing. There is no doubt about that. Scientific research and exploration have provided ample evidence of that truth, geologically and biologically. Miles and miles of extruded, eroded, sedimented, metamorphated, conglomerated rocks and minerals have convinced most of us who are paying attention that the world was, is, and will always be in flux.

In our present age, are emissions from human activity inflicting destructive effects on the earth and its inhabitants?

Yes.

Undoubtedly, aye, but here's the rub: As far as general mankind is concerned, "climate change" will never be anything but a perpetually unproven scientific hypothesis, which is apparently morphing, as the earth itself is, into a political movement that is misunderstood by the masses.

The political movement, which claims to be acting on behalf of mother Earth herself and her inhabitants--that political movement-- is founded upon unquantifiable theoretical snapshots of a gigantic moving target, and hypothetical random samplings of constantly shifting sands.

The resulting politics and ideology of the climate change believers will become increasingly restrictive, and ultimately repressive. These believers are starting to get zealously mad and revolutionary, similar to the Marxists/Bolsheviks about a hundred years ago.

And look what happened with that. Marx had figured out a few things about human commerce and wealth accumulation, but his proposals yielded a new eschatological layer of ideas for humans to argue, fight about, and wage wars over.

Like Marxism, the political/economic outcome of climate change agitprop will become as oppressive as the big bad wolf himself--carbon-spewing Capitalism. And in the long run, the end-game is the same: who is going to take control of the means of production?

To XL-pipeline, or not--that is the question. But it's only the next point of many contentions yet to come.

However all this homosapiens tragicomedy plays out, some people will come out on top of the imposed carbon-squelching or carbon-permitting policies; others will be ground down beneath the weight of it all. Some will lose; some will win.

Speaking of win, think of it this way: WIN. WIN was the acronym touted by President Gerald Ford, long about 1975. It stands for: Whip Inflation Now.

The Climate Change idea is like that. Everybody knows, or will know because they've been taught about it, that human-caused climate change is destructive. And everybody knows that something should be done about it. But most people don't really understand it. It's like trying to understand inflation.

And now, by the way, in Keynsian-speak, inflation has morphed into a thing that is not so bad after all. Because, when properly bridled, it protects us from being gobbled by the new big bad wolf of economic tectonics--deflation. We have now a theoretical target of 2% inflation, just as we probably have somewhere in a Kyoto or Copenhagen consensus, a target of ----kg/day carbon emissions.

My theory is that the general body of mankind will never truly understand the dynamics of climate change, just as we heartland flyover dweebs will never fully comprehend the economic forces that push our meager assets and never-ending liabilities around like toys. We never will grok it.

The concept of climate change itself will probably always be misunderstood, mis-applied, miscommunicated, and probably--dare I say it--mistaken, just like the rapaciously exploitive practices of capitalism have been, and just as the revolutionary, anarchic thrusts of Maxism have been.

But if people ever do comprehend the immense implications of climate change and its proposed remedies, they will achieve that understanding through education, not political deprivations and repression.

So all ye climate change believers out there--get busy educating us deniers out here, because that's the only way we'll ever understand it. Teach on.

Don't try to choke us with regulations and treaties.

Forty years ago, when I was graduating from LSU, I was an environmentalist of sorts, and antiwar also (my draft number was #349). And I really did believe, as I still do, that we humans should not pollute the earth.

Now there's a good idea: do not pollute. Which reminds me of an old slogan, similar to the WIN thing:

Give a hoot; don't pollute!

I think some fella named Woodsy Owl came up with that one. He came along after Smoky the Bear had set the tone for environmental awareness.

I believe the Environmental movement should have stuck with that motto, instead of complicating the issues with all this "climate change" and "global warming" effluence. Effluence is, when you get right down to it, worse than affluence.

Affluence is kind of nice to have, and not as outdated as the climate change zealots would have us believe. The result of reasonable affluence is that folks will settle down somewhat instead of rampaging through the streets and looting the system.

While progressing through youth and middle age, my environmental zeal has toned down a bit; it took a back seat to establishing a homestead, a household and (dare I say it) a coital family. No ZPG for me and my fruitful wife.

Now I've written my way into a Saturday sunrise. Maybe it's time to hop on the Vespa and make a run to do some errands. On second thought, take the car, make a recycling run. If there's a way to avoid emitting carbon, I haven't figured it out yet, and I don't know if we ever will, especially with China and Kilauea doing their thing on the other side of the world.

my song about it: Deep Green

Glass half-Full

Musings on Natural Capital

Have you noticed this truth about life? We live in a hostile world.

From our studies of history, and from our common experience, we discover a truth that is quite unwelcome: we live constantly and seemingly forever in enmity with each other and with the earth.

In ancient times, homo sapiens encountered natural enemies that had evolved in the planetary ecosystem. Poisonous snakes slithered beneath our feet, requiring us to look down, even as predatory carnivores stalked us from above. Furthermore, even if such an environment were not perilous enough to keep the hair on the back of our necks regularly raised with alarm, we encountered craftier dangers from our fellow humans. Something about the species itself seems to have encoded enmity among men.

Some men/women managed to band together in tribes or bands in order to collectively resist the numerous threats presented by existence on this earth. By collaborating, people could gather more life-sustaining resources, producing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Also by working in community, folks could more effectively overcome those beastly enemies lurking in the jungle, and those tribal ones in the next valley.

Your worldview may be defined by a revelation of Edenic origins, or maybe it is constructed around a principle of biologic evolution. I do not consider those two philosophies as necessarily contradictory. What some folks call irrationality, and some folks call heresy, I may call cognitive dissonance. Life is full of contradictions, and I can’t comprehend them all, so I’m willing to listen to what you have to say, even if I don’t agree with it.

Nevertheless, there has to be some basis of agreement, n’est ce pas? Otherwise we have no foundation for civilization itself. Folks have to agree on something, otherwise the tiger creeps from behind while we are trying to decide what to do, and he’ll pounce on us before we can say strategy—or if not the tiger, the lion or the dragon.

Or the tsunami, or the hurricane, or the toxic oilspill, or the toxic assets. Danger is all over the damned place. No way around it, no matter how much we civilize ourselves.

I suspect that in former times, people did a lot more acting than they did thinking, and that’s how they managed to get so much work done.

Or is it the other way around?

Oh, but I digress toward indeterminable speculations on the origins of our species, and the descent of man to whatever this is that we have on planet earth today. What I really want to write about is this phrase I heard a couple days ago: natural capital.

Our post-industrial revelation, or deduction--whatever you want to call it-- brings us to a juncture where we discover the absolute necessity of conserving the earth itself . (Call me a conservative if you like; I don’t care.) Even as we gathered its produce in the earliest times in order to sustain life and initiate civilization, we were being conservationists. Now, the global challenge of modern existence requires to get off our financial assets and start considering the earth itself as our most valuable capital--flora and fauna and elements and all of it.

The continuance of civilization itself will require conservancy (to use an appropriately contemporary word) and stewardship (the biblical word).

Can we rise to the task?

Yes, we can, if the North Koreans don’t nuke us to death, or the Iranians don’t jihad us to death, or the Israelis don’t irk us to death, or the Chinese don’t pollute us to death, or the Russians don’t vodka us to death, or Hugo doesn’t talk us to death, or rolling stone doesn’t amoralize us to death or tv doesn’t opiate us to death or the Americans don’t drone us to death.

Yes, we can!

Yes, I have my hand up. And I’d just like to say, Nuala, that the beginnings of civilization originate, parabolically speaking, in families—Adam, Eve, etc., when he looked at her and said woohoo! and nine months later out slithered little Cain. Later on Abel popped out, and there you have all in one family what you need to know about the origins of human bondage.

Oh there was a poisonous snake involved too.

Human experience has always been that way, always will. Many may say that concepts or ideologies of ethnic identity, nationhood, or the hope of world peace (it takes a village, you know) can supplant the family urge. But our DNA is strong and stubborn and built solidly upon the double helix of family procreation, and I like it that way.