A day for intense, personal irony.

The Nobel Prize winner explains how some wars are good and necessary.  He’s not old enough to have ever been faced with being drafted.  And he hasn’t served. He’s apparently not worried about things like quagmires.  He wins an award for peace.  The award it turns out was endowed by a maker of explosives who felt guilty about blowing things up.  The prize winner explains to people interested in peace how war is sometimes necessary.  He is not embarrassed to do so.  And the sometimes when war is necessary, he informs us, is now.  That does not embarrass him either.  Or at least not very much.  Has peace ever been so devalued?

Closer to home, well, to my home anyway, number 2 son is in Hanoi traveling and taking photographs.  He’s a photographer.  Forty years ago, I spent a lot of time and energy on trying not to get to Viet Nam.  I could look at that big plane that flew weekly to Pleiku and plan on how I was not going to be on it.  No matter what.  Now he’s there.  Because he wants to be.  In of all places, Hanoi.

He sends me a photo of a fish dinner he ate for lunch in Hanoi yesterday.  The fish was delicious but, he reports, very bony.  What can I say?  I tell him the best part of a whole fish cooked like this is the cheeks.  You can use a spoon to get to them.  How do I know that?

The Hanoi Fish

On docuDharma, a refuge from the craziness of a larger, group blog that is its “blogfather,” there are several essays on the recommended list at this very moment about that particular larger, group blog.  And a bazillion comments, including some from me, on what its apparently self inflicted, fatal wounds might mean.  And what is happening in that crazy corner of the Internet.  A corner from which I am absent and hope to remain so.  Except that I keep looking over my shoulder, rubbernecking at the crash.  And wondering about the plane to Pleiku.

What can I say?  Why is it that I think know I’ve seen these movies before?

I’ve been thinking about disappointments.  And how to deal with them.  How to handle that bitter taste.  And the sadness.

You must know what I mean.  Relationships that wither.  Expectations that dessicate.  Hopes that die.  Plans that collapse. Love that fades away.  Friends who pass on.  Children who move away.  Parents who die.  Machines that rust and fall apart.  Treasures that rot.  Fabric eaten by moths.  Politicians who don’t deliver. The list is long.  And it’s inexhaustible.  It’s about what we want but cannot have.  It’s about what we want to get rid of but cannot shed.  The Buddha was right.  Our clinging makes us suffer.  And we cling.  Oh how we suffer.

Disappointment is just a particular form of sorrow, of suffering.  It’s everywhere and as common as dust.  It begins in expectations and ends in rubble.

I could get angry about this.  Many people do. But that doesn’t do any good.  I could yell about how unjust, unfair, improper, illegal, brutal and stupid it is.  I could want to fight and look for a brawl.  But that doesn’t matter.  The hurt remains.  It persists despite how I distract myself.

I could catalog my disappointments for you.  Disappointments in love.  And in politics, which might be the same thing.  Disappointments about health.  Disappointments about wealth, fame, esteem.  And in all of the other human areas in which I didn’t get what I wanted or expected or desired.  Or what I deserved.  I could give you, if I haven’t already done it in installments over the past few years, a long list of my many, many grievances.  But that’s not why I’m writing now.  No. I’m writing now because I want ever so slightly to shift our attention, to shift how we deal with our inevitable and pervasive and continual disappointments.

Which brings me to the blues.

Here’s the cardinal blues idea: things are disappointing and they hurt us in our hearts and souls.  We all have these profound hurts.  But, and this is the biggest but in the blues, if we’re going to keep our souls and our hearts and our passion and our humanity alive, we need to release these hurts and pound them out and scream them out and see them for the rich, beautiful, human feelings they are.  We want to embrace them in all their humanity.  We want to embrace that we love deeply and that, sadly, we’re disappointed.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a lover, or a friend, or a country, or a political party, or a group, or an idea.  None of that matters.

And it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.  Sometimes it really stings.  I just want to sing and dance the song of life one more day.  I want to celebrate that I’m alive, I’m human, and I feel it deeply, deeply in my heart.  Here’s what I mean:

——————-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles  

Today there are presidential elections in Honduras.  The US says that it doesn’t matter that the golpista government of Roberto Micheletti is still in control despite international condemnation, that Manual Zelaya, the democratically elected president, is still stuck in asylum in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and that Brazil and Venezuela have announced that they will not recognize today’s election results.  Nor does it matter that the US originally denounced the coup, cut off non-military aid, and demanded the immediate reinstatement of Zelaya.  All of that, amigos, is stuff you’re supposed to forget about.  Just forget it.  Yeah, after today, democracy will be magically restored in Honduras via an election.  And we’re back to the same old same old.  The power of El Norte continues, the maquiladoras make Fruit of the Loom for export, the bananas are back on the shelves, and the military puts its boot on the throat of anyone in Honduras who complains about the lack of democracy.  It’s 1910 all over again.

The AP reports:

A new Honduran president chosen Sunday faces the challenge of defending his legitimacy to the world and to his own people, who are bitterly divided by Central America’s first coup in more than 20 years.

Porfirio Lobo and Elvin Santos, two prosperous businessmen from the political old guard [both of whom support the golpistas], are the front-runners. But their campaigns have been overshadowed by the debate over whether Hondurans should cast ballots at all in a vote largely shunned by international monitors.

Manuel Zelaya, the left-leaning president ousted in a June 28 coup, is urging a boycott, hoping overwhelming abstention will discredit the election. As polls opened Sunday, he vowed the United States would regret its decision to support the vote.

“Abstention will defeat the dictatorship,” Zelaya told Radio Globo from the Brazilian Embassy, where he took refuge after sneaking back into the country from his forced exile Sept. 21. “The elections will be a failure. the United States will have to rectify its ambiguous position about the coup.”

The US’s “ambiguous position about the coup” isn’t all that ambiguous. Especially in historical context.  The US has said explicitly it will support the government elected in this election. Period. It just doesn’t matter to the US government that is imposing democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else, that there be actual democracy in its own hemisphere.  That would require the restoration of Manual Zelaya and an election supervised internationally.  Instead, we have an election supervised by the golpistas and their military.  One can only wonder why US warships have not arrived off shore to preserve order and democracy.

The word from the streets isn’t ambiguous at all:

“The best thing for this country is not to vote, to show the world, the United States, which stabbed us in the back and betrayed us,” said Edwin Espinal, whose 24-year-old wife, Wendy, died of from asthma complications a day after soldiers hurled tear gas to disperse protesters demanding Zelaya’s return.

There is, of course, the expected golpistas’ repression.  Narconews reports:

The free speech necessary to guarantee free elections is not the message being transmitted to the resistance front. Intimidation, torture, illegal detentions and in extreme cases assassinations are being carried out to prevent mass mobilizations on Election Day. The National Front Against the Coup D’état has encouraged all week a ‘popular curfew’ on Election Day to prevent clashes with the opposition. The Center for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights in Honduras (CIPRODEH), has documented aggression directly from the police and the military towards nearly all human rights groups working in Honduras.

And now, hypnotically, the promise that the US under Obama would have a new relationship with Latin America, one in which democracy would be fostered and coups would be discouraged, one in which the oligarchies would not be permitted to exploit and repress poor people, one in which popular leaders could be elected even if they disagreed with El Norte and not be the immediate objects of golpes de estado,  those promises will be forgotten.  They will be erased from your memories.  And life as we knew it in 1910 will resume.

——————————

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

A Lionfish

Some bad news from underwater in the Caribbean.  Indo-Pacific Lionfish have apparently been spotted on the Mayan Riviera, the stretch of coast from Cancun in the north to Tulum in the south, of Quintana Roo, Mexico, and throughout much of the rest of the Caribbean.  These fish don’t belong there.  It’s not their natural habitat, and they’re predators to most other reef species.  They are voracious.  And to top it off, their spines are also toxic to humans.

Let’s go for a swim.