Deposed, legitimate president Manual Zelaya of Honduras returned to his country and took shelter in the Brazilian Embassy, where he remains.  Thousands of Hondurans rushed into the streets to support his return.  And now, the golpistas have unleashed the expected repression.

Please join me on the streets of Tegucigalpa.  

Here’s a trick question.  Is there anything wrong with a death penalty jury trial in which the prosecutor trying the case is having an affair while the case is going on with the judge who is trying the case?  I know.  It looks pretty unfair.  It looks pretty sleazy.  There really should be something the matter with this, right?  Shouldn’t the judge recuse herself?  Shouldn’t the case be assigned to a different prosecutor, all for the sake of the appearance of fairness?

But in Texas, ground zero for state killing, there’s no answer to these questions.  At least not today  Why?  Because the majority of the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’s highest court that considers criminal appeals, is wagging its finger at the defendant’s lawyers saying that the affair isn’t something that the Court will look at because the defense lawyers waited too long to raise the issue.  According to the Court, it’s OK to execute Charles D. Hood whether there was an affair or not because the defense waited too long to raise the question. You cannot make this stuff up.

A Social Flycatcher

One possibility is that I make up stories. I dream them up, I fantasize them up, I just make them up. They come from me, from my brain or my mind or my heart. If that’s where the come from, that’s ok with me. I’m convinced that dreams, fantasies, stories are really important, often more important than physical objects and things you can see, so if they spontaneously arise from somewhere inside me, and I write them down, that’s fine with me.

But there’s another possibility. One that’s more exciting. I like this other possibility a lot better.

I spent two weeks in Mexico, north of Tulum, Quintana Roo, writing every day. I was trying to finish the first draft of my second novel, working title “Tulum.” Where did the ideas in that draft come from? Did they come from me? Or did they come from somewhere else?

When I first arrived at Bahia Soliman, where I was going to write, I noticed a particular kind of bird that was very pretty, very unusual for me. It’s unusual for me because it only lives in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. It’s called a “social flycatcher.” I don’t know why it’s called that. Its Wiki explains all kinds of things but not its name.

I think it’s called “social” because it doesn’t immediately fly away when it’s near people. Or other birds and animals. That’s just what I think. Anyway, I was wondering about this beautiful bird, and whether it might be near me because it was carrying stories for me and wanted to give some of them to me.

Whenever I got to the point in writing when I couldn’t sit at the computer any longer, whenever I got stuck, whenever I had to figure something out about what I was writing, whenever I needed new ideas, whenever I needed inspiration or endurance, I’d go out for a walk. And maybe I’d see one of the social flycatchers.

I liked looking at this very pretty bird. Maybe, I thought, it was carrying the information, the story I needed to write down. And sure enough, after I went for my walk, I would find that I was able to continue to write, that I was able to go on with my writing, that I knew what to type.

This process went on for about two weeks. For about 15,000 words (I had a lot of words before I got to Mexico). And then one day, I thought, “Ah hah. That is the finish line, that is the end of this book, that is how it ends. I will finish this up tomorrow or the next day or the day after. I can see the conclusion, the last paragraph. Finally it has appeared. That’s where and how this book ends.”

After that I didn’t see any of these birds again. No more social flycatchers. Not a one.

There are a lot of possibilities here. Maybe it was time for them to move on to another place to feed. Maybe it was time for them to move west or north on their migration. Maybe they ate all of the bugs where I was. Maybe having passed on whatever information they had for me, they decided to go and help somebody else, somebody else who was dreaming something up. Maybe somebody who was writing, or painting, or writing music, or making something.

I prefer that they went on to help somebody else.

Wherever they might now be, I want to thank them for all of their help. But, I’m sorry to say, I don’t know how to thank them except to write about what a wonderful assistance they were to me and to acknowledge their help.

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cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

In the middle of Justice Scalia’s dissent in Troy Davis’s case, a dissent that Clarence Thomas joined in, we have this remarkable, astonishing, shocking sentence:

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

I cannot believe that they wrote this in a Supeme Court opinion.  And I’m not alone in thinking I would never, never, never see something like this in a published opinion.

19 year-old Herta Lluso is going to be deported from the US on August 19.  Unless, of course, we can get ICE officials to grant her a stay of deportation.  That’s where you come in.

Herta’s case is a strong example of just why we need the Dream Act:

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (The “DREAM Act”) is a piece of proposed federal legislation that was introduced in the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives on March 26, 2009. This bill would provide certain illegal immigrant students who graduate from US high schools, are of good moral character, arrived in the US as children, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency. The students would obtain temporary residency for a six year period. Within the six year period, a qualified student must have “acquired a degree from an institution of higher education in the United States or [have] completed at least 2 years, in good standing, in a program for a bachelor’s degree or higher degree in the United States,” or have “served in the uniformed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, [have] received an honorable discharge.” “Any alien whose permanent resident status is terminated [according to the terms of the Act] shall return to the immigration status the alien had immediately prior to receiving conditional permanent resident status under this Act.”

Wiki.

Passage of the Dream Act, however, won’t solve Herta Lluso’s deportation, because she’ll be gone, deported to Albania, long before it passes unless we get a stay of her deportation.  What we need to do is get a stay of her deportation.  And we need it now.

I found Herta’s story at dreamactivist.org:

My name is Herta Llusho, I am 19 years old, and I writing this because I am about to be deported.  I was born in Albania and was brought to the United States when I was 11 years old.   With the help and support of my family, I have struggled through more than seven years of legal proceedings to find a way to stay in this country legally.  Despite our best efforts, on August 19, I will be removed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from the only place I know as my home.  I will be sent back to a country that has become a foreign place to me.  I don’t even speak Albanian well anymore.  My only hope of staying here is for as many people as possible to ask DHS to delay my deportation until the DREAM Act is passed.

My parents brought me to the United States because they believed in the promises this country had to offer. To them it was the land of opportunities, values, and ideals. They were faithful believers of the American Dream, meaning that through hard work, education, and good character their children could accomplish anything they wanted. In fact, they believed in it so strongly that they sacrificed their own lives, as well as their relationship to make it happen. My dad stayed in Albania with the hope of relocating to the US, while my mom left everything behind in pursuit of a better life for her children. To this day, even after many years of struggle and sacrifice, they still believe that it is all worth it, and so do I. I have been truly blessed in the many opportunities I have received. The United States has made me the person I am today. I would like nothing more than to contribute to the country that has given me so much.

You can read her entire story at Citizen Orange.  And you can listen to her tell it here (audio is not great, so turn it up):

There’s not a lot more to say about why Herta should be kept in this Country.  It’s obvious. She is the kind of person we want in this Country.  It is our loss to deport her.

Let’s stop this deportation. Suggested action steps are here.  Please do what you can.

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cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Don Mariano Quispe Flores

Pachamama, mother earth, Santa Madre Tierra, the earth, the planet is obviously in trouble.  This should by now be obvious.

The Q’ero of Peru, the descendants of the Incas, live in remote villages that are above 14,000 feet above sea level.  They have lived in these areas for hundreds of years. They live above the tree line.  They raise llamas, alpacas, vicunas, and other similar animals, and they grow big kernal maiz (“choclo”) and hundreds of species of potatoes.  And until recently they kept to themselves.  They stayed away from the cities.  And the Government.  And, of course, they kept their understandings of Shamanism and energy medicine to themselves.  They certainly didn’t tell North Americans about it. But then, relatively recently, they noticed the oddest thing, that the glaciers surrounding them were slowly melting.  Slowly becoming smaller.  Slowly disappearing.  And the spiritual teachers in the lineage decided that Q’ero who were healers, who were powerful Shamans, who knew that it was necessary to heal mother earth and her children, would have to go down the mountain and bring out their teachings and carry them across the world.

I spent this past weekend with Q’ero Shaman Don Mariano Quispe Flores at The Abode in New Lebanon, New York, along with some three dozen other shamans.  Don Mariano is 72 years old.  He does not know how to write.  Or to read.  He speaks only Quechua (though he does say a very few words in English and Spanish).  His village in Peru is about an 8 hour bus ride and then a 4 hour walk uphill from Cuzco.  This trip to the United States (he stopped in California and Washington State and Colorado before journeying to the East) was his first trip to the US, though he has been to Europe.  He is a very sweet, gentle, and humble man.  And a powerful, traditional healer.

Because Don Mariano speaks Quechua, his translator sometimes translated first into Spanish, and then someone else translated into English.  This was an incredible gift: I could hear what Don Mariano was saying three times.  No, I didn’t understand the first statements in Quechua, but I could feel and hear his tone of voice, and then it was repeated in both Spanish and English, so the content was repeated.  I’m not going to try to bring you all of Don Mariano’s teachings.

Instead, I bring you this very short essay to tell you something important that you probably already know only too well, just to remind you.

Pachamama, your Mother Earth, Santa Madre Tierra is in trouble and she needs our help and our caring for her.  She needs us to honor her.  And protect her.

This might involve traditional practices, like making offerings (“despachos“) and prayers for the healing of the earth.  It also might involve ceremonies, calling in the power of the Twelve Sacred Mountains (the Apus), the six directions, prayers, and healing thoughts.  These are all important.  But also important, perhaps even more important is our continuing awareness of Pachamama and our actions to take care of her as she takes care of us by feeding us, by giving us water, by providing shelter.

So I have a very simple request.  Please pause now, look up from your screen, go outdoors if you can, and see, if you can, the unbelievable, abundant world surrounding us, the world on which we walk.  Look at Pachamama.  And feel, if you can, in your heart gratitude for all Pachamama provides us.  This gratitude is incredibly important.  It is the beginning point to help the planet.

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cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Is this the test pattern?

I have not abandoned my effort to compete for the title of Happiest Man In The World.  To the contrary, I am training more diligently than ever.

An important part of my training is going for long walks as often as I can.  I prefer the woods and the beaches.  I don’t think it really matters where I go, or how fast I walk, as long as I walk for long enough.  Over an hour and a half and less than 3 hours seems about right.  I begin early in the morning, hopefully before 6:30 am.  At that time, the sun is low in the sky and birds are still singing their morning cantatas.  The air is sweet.  It’s cool.  In fact, it’s perfect.  Even when it’s raining.  It brings me happiness.

Soon, later in this month, I hope to go on vacation.  This is an important part of my training.  When I’m on vacation I do very little.  I read. I write. I swim. I day dream. I increase my meditation.  I increase my walking.  Some people have suggested that the sloth might be my totem animal.  But they are wrong.  I never voluntarily climb trees.  I do not hang from my appendages.  Instead, I turn my focus more exclusively on the beautiful planet we all live on.  I explore my feelings of gratitude.  I see where inspiration might be.  I do only what I am called to.  Mostly, I’m just being.  And just being brings restoration and freshness.  And yes, happiness.

I’ve been known to rant here.  And to argue against what the Government is doing or not accomplishing.  That has sometimes made me happy, made me feel that I was speaking the truth to power.  Even though in all likelihood power wasn’t reading anything I wrote.  But that kind of writing can also be exhausting, and at some point, it can be frustrating.  Frustration doesn’t make me happy.  Nor does exhaustion.  So a change of course might be restorative.

You don’t have to go to exotic places to have a vacation.  You don’t have to be rich.  You can stay home, and have a vacation.  What you need is some time, enough time that you can put your usual, daily life briefly on pause, and collect yourself.  Time to refresh yourself.  Time to think less habitual thoughts.  Time to assess and appraise.  Time to care for yourself.

None of this is earth shaking.  None of this is particularly controversial.  I’m saying it because the season lends itself to slowing down, to disconnecting briefly, to taking a break.  I’ll take a break in a couple of weeks.  And I hope that will make me happier.

What would make me most happy, I think, is if everyone could take a break and come back in the Fall excited to continue, rested, energetic.  Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

So what’s your vacation plan?

In advance, I ask your pardon for a rant I am unable or unwilling to suppress.  Today’s White House Beer Summit On Race Relations And Police Practices has enraged me.  Police Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge PD didn’t deserve an invitation for beer at the White House, he needed an appointment for a deposition in a federal civil rights case in which he and his superiors were the named defendants.  But according to the Trad Media^TM, all of Crowly’s vengefulness, his making an illegal arrest, his making a stupid, unjustifiable illegal arrest, his serving up a racist/classist illegal arrest of a person in his own home is now behind us.  We’re past all of the ugliness of his conduct.  It has now been chilled (unless you have to live with brutality and oppression on a daily basis) with some beer.  And pretzels.  This I hasten to point out might solve Police Sgt. Crowley’s immediate problem, including departmental discipline and federal civil rights action for damages, but it doesn’t solve my problem.  Or the country’s.  And I don’t think it solves Prof. Gates’s problem.  It certainly doesn’t solve the US’s police problem. Not one bit.

In August I will have been posting on my personal blog, The Dream Antilles, for five years.  That’s about 640 posts. Because of a host of unreliable hit counters, I don’t have an exact number of how many people have visited my blog.  I estimate that the number of hits is something between 50,000 and 100,000, but I can’t really prove it.  Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe not. Who knows?

This Blogiversary has to be some kind of an achievement:

“Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that “95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream – or at least an ambition – unfulfilled.” Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

source

So we live in a world in which most individual blogs are quickly dropped. I can easily understand why. The reason has to do with the need repeatedly to create content.  It’s easy to post once.  But after that, the road is strewn with casualties and unposted rough drafts.  In fact, it requires writing regularly, which anyone will tell you, isn’t all that easy.  Writing regularly is far easier in theory than in practice.  In practice it requires something that looks and feels a lot like work, only you don’t get paid for it.

Keeping an old style, individual blog afloat with original content has to be a labor of love.  Or of obsession.  In a way an old (more than 3 years is old) personal blog resembles a treasured fountain pen or beloved portable typewriter or even a well worn pencil.  Using it becomes second nature.  For me it has become something I do, whether or not anyone is looking.  Why I would do this is a harder question by far.  It has something to do with writing and having things I want to say about topics that interest me.  In some ways it’s like those other pursuits one embarks on just because they’re there.

And most times, nobody’s looking.  Group blogs get far more hits in a day than I get in a month.  Some blogs get as many hits in an hour as I’ve had in 5 years.  None of that really seems to matter.  I go on and on and on.  I continue to have things I want to say, so I say them.  If people read it, that’s great.  If they don’t, I’ll just continue to write and to hope that some fine day readers will discover my blog and get lost in it for an hour or two and that they’ll enjoy the way it makes time disappear.  After all, that’s what it’s there for.

Which brings me back to this Fifth Blogiversary.  I have no idea how to celebrate this milestone.  But I suspect that you, dear readers, might have ideas. Any suggestions you have are appreciated.

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cross-posted, of course, from The Dream Antilles

I think it’s time, once again, to talk about police abuse, the violation of citizens’ rights by police officers, and their being held to a different, lower standard of conduct than other citizens.  I think that’s the core of the Henry Louis Gates arrest. And I think the commentaries that focus on the illegal arrest of Dr. Gates just as examples of racism and/or classism to the exclusion of the societal role of out-of-control police are missing the boat.  Of course, the poor, people of color, immigrants, the disenfranchised, the powerless are the usual objects of police abuse.  But the primary, ugly problem that needs to be confronted is that the police are unrestrained and repeatedly commit illegal acts with impunity.

This old post from April, 2006 makes my point far better than yet another re-hashing of the illegal arrest of Dr. Gates in his own home by Cambridge Police.  And it even goes a long way toward explaining why the offending officer has been invited to a beer at the White House rather than a deposition in a federal civil rights case in which he is the named defendant.

I am now going to take my anger out for a walk.

Jorge Luis Borges (photo by Diane Arbus)

Some of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories seem to be mined from that deep dream filled gap between being awake and being asleep. It’s a magical space: vivid events occur that are at once as real as they are impossible. If the sleeper wakes, sometimes the impossibilities are revealed. And then there’s wondering: how could anything that defies physical reality appear to be so real.

In “The Disk,” a story from The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)(1975), the impossible object is the “disk of Odin”:

“It is the disk of Odin,” the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. “It has but one side. There is not another thing on earh that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king.”

Ordinarily, objects are in three dimensions. Here one appears that has only a single side. Of course, it would be more or less invisible. And physically impossible on earth.

This, of course, is not entirely correct. The Moebius strip, discovered in 1858, has only one side and one boundary component. But that’s not important to the story.

The person with the disk eventually “opened his hand, and [the narrator] saw the gleam of the disk in the air.” But when he returned to where the disk was released, he couldn’t find it. And he’s been looking for it for years. In other words, the disk of Odin vanishes like a dream.

This kind of impossibility sometimes possesses far larger objects.

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino tells us of this “Invisible City”:

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the Medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sack cloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

   From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Alas, the city is a two dimensional solid, another escapee from the chasm between waking and dreaming.

In the moments between sleep and wakefulness these objects seem tangible to me. The city is flat, but it’s a city. The disk glimmers. I know I’m dreaming, but I try to remember to hold onto the dream so that I will be able to examine it more fully when I am awake. But as I awake, as my sleep falls away, the fallacy arises, and the object I am clenching so tightly in my fist, disappears. What was it? I wonder, how could that be? What was that? But it’s gone.

All of this is so reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra, “Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.”

Which brings me ever so reluctantly to the elusive dream of a national, single payer health care system.  In the dream, I am drinking rum and playing dominoes.  Somehow, my empty glass falls off the table, lands on the cement walkway, and shatters.  Somehow, probably because of the drinking and the kidding around, I cut my hand deeply on the glass when I try to pick up the shards.  My hand hurts and it is bleeding badly.  My friends are surprised that there’s so much blood, so they wrap my hand in a bandage, and we head on foot for the emergency room which is luckily only two blocks away.  When we enter, a man sitting at a desk says to me and my friends, “I see you’ve cut your hand.  Please come with me so we can take care of it.”  And then, mirabile dictu, he does.  Just like that.  I’m out of the hospital in 20 minutes with 3 stitches and a nice, white bandage.  It seems strange to me.  Nobody asks me questions about insurance or citizenship.  They don’t ask me to pay for anything.  When I wake up, I realize it was a dream.  It was impossible. I must have been in Cuba.

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cross-posted from The Dream Antilles