Blood Red I was digging up our winter crop of crimson clover turning it over to enrich the coming corn when the tiniest red spider —a clover mite— ran frantic across my arm. I told it that I meant no harm as if it could believe what must be lies from an enormous, hungry vertebrate.…

I’ve been thinking about two recent actions and one inaction by the United States government. The actions: Trump ordered the military to prepare for two separate wars, one in South America and the other in Africa. The inaction: the Supreme Court turned down a request to consider overturning same-sex marriage. Separately, these issues seem unrelated,…

A Brief Recap America is at war, an internal war. We’ve had class war most of our history, with race, sex, and immigration status used to focus the rage of the lower strata on those even lower than themselves. I’ve quoted robber baron Jay Gould before but his statement during the 1886 railroad strike bears…

A few days ago I was on the phone with an old friend, talking about roommates and relatives, health problems and, eventually, politics. We got around to Charlie Kirk, whom neither of us had heard of before he was shot, and whose views we disliked, to say the least. Suddenly our private conversation was interrupted…

In the previous post I asked what we can do about our current American police state. There don’t seem to be detailed instructions like those I used to follow when repairing my old VW beetle. However, I believe I can list some general dos and don’ts. Since the Trump administration is evidently intentionally copying much…

In the previous post, I cited the comment of a New York Times reader who proposed that the federal government impose a “uniform biometric ID system” with name, address, citizenship status, history of police encounters, bank transactions, etc. I replied by suggesting an implanted chip (like the ones in dogs) that would, in addition, transmit…

Since the backlash to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, our so-called “sweet land of liberty” has been sliding ever closer to an Orwellian police state. Since Trump’s second inauguration eight months ago, however, that slow slide has become an avalanche. Big Brother is Watching You “Every breath you take And every move…

These days we’re seeing an almost volcanic eruption of those underlying infections that course through the body politic—by which I mean sexism, racism, homophobia, and the various religious and ethnic prejudices. Today I want to look at one of these infections: racism. As I mentioned in a previous post, racism has been embedded in American…

Brief Happy Reunions, and a Shadow I tore myself away from the farm for four days—two of them on Amtrak—for a trip to the SF Bay Area, because Anat was in town. She and I first met in 1979, when I became lovers with her mother, Ruth, an Israeli woman studying for her PhD at…

E-I-E-I-O Readers may wonder why I haven’t been blogging for over a month. You can blame it on climate change. Portland has had a hot summer, and everything in our backyard farm has been ripening at once, so all my time has been taken up harvesting, cooking, and putting up for winter. One of the…