Today’s post, “Writing Organically,” can be found at www.magicalwords.net.  Please visit the site and enjoy!

Today was graduation day at the university where Nancy teaches.  Sounds like it was a nice ceremony.  As always, graduation here reminds me of my own college graduation many, many, many years ago.  

I went to Brown, where the procession leading from the University green to the chapel where the graduation service takes place, goes through a complicated and wonderful marching pattern.  Basically the current graduating class is followed in the procession by older classes back for reunions, as well as by the administration and faculty.  They walk through the university gates and then line the road so that they can cheer as the others walk by.  But as each group walks by the last of the spectators, they themselves move to the roadside and become spectators.  In effect, it’s like continuously turning a sock inside out — each end gets pulled through; each group gets to watch every other group walk by.  Hard to describe clearly.  Suffice it to say that I’ve experienced Brown’s graduation as a graduating senior, as a five year alum, and as a twenty year alum, and eachtime it has been an incredibly moving experience that left me feeling that I was part of a much larger community.

So what about you?  What are graduations like at your colleges or high schools?  Any special experiences?

Last week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award entry was a fun one.  Certainly it was lighter than most of those that came before it.  And, I’ll warn you now, it was far lighter than this week’s is going to be.

As usual, we have no shortage of nominees.  There’s John McCain, who during several appearances this week repeated his claim that Hamas, the Middle East terrorist organization, had “endorsed” Barack Obama for President.  There’s Hillary Clinton, who spent the latter half of the week talking about how Obama won’t get the votes of “hard-working Americans, white Americans” come the fall.  How is it that she isn’t accused of being an elitist and a racist?  Does “hard-working American” equal “white American”?  Do African Americans not count as “hard-working”?  And does she think so poorly of her low income white supporters that she thinks they’re incapable of voting for an African American candidate?  She should know better.

Then there’s the voter in Greenwood, Indiana who happened to be at an Obama campaign stop a day or two before the Indiana primary.  This was in a restaurant, and as the candidate approached his table, the man waved him away, saying, “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”  News flash, dude:  He’s NOT Islamic.  He’s a Christian.  I mean, come on!  Did you totally miss the Reverend Wright craziness?  And while we’re at, did it ever occur to you that there are millions of Americans who are both Muslim and PRO-America?  Idiot.

But for all my griping about the stupidity of American politicians and pundits, the ridiculous tone of our political campaigns, and all the other buffoonery that I’ve described in this space on Saturday mornings, this week’s award winner makes most of our leaders look like geniuses.

If you’ve seen a newspaper or newscast this week, then you know that the Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma to everyone in the world except the United States government, which continues to insist on using the old name, was struck by a devastating cyclone on May 3.  Myanmar is desperately poor.  It’s also ruled by a brutally repressive and utterly paranoid military dictatorship.  Think North Korea without the quirky charm….  This week, as the United Nations, the United States, other Western powers, and countless NGOs tried to rush medical supplies, food, and other aid to the victims of the storm, the government of Myanmar refused to allow any outside assistance to reach the literally millions of people who have been displaced by this tragedy.  Tens of thousands are dead.  Villages have been flooded.  Drinking water is contaminated and food is scarce.  Soon the physical toll from the storm will be dwarfed by the humanitarian nightmare caused by disease and starvation.  And still the government is dragging its feet.  A few days ago it seized supplies intended for victims.

The Bush Administration’s response to Katrina was a travesty, caused by incompetence and negligence.  Some would claim (and I’d find it hard to argue the point) that had that storm flooded neighborhoods inhabited by wealthy whites rather than poor blacks, the Administration’s response would have been completely different.

But what the leaders of Myanmar have done to their people in the last week makes even that shameful episode in our nation’s history seem a minor offense.  I get absolutely no joy or satisfaction from this, but this week’s BOW Award goes to the government of Myanmar.  Take a BOW, assholes.  You’ve earned it.

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another political cartoon from my friend Bryan Prindiville and me.  This week’s cartoon is called (somewhat facetiously) “Avoiding the Issues.”  Enjoy!

So, for the second time in about three months one of our credit cards has been hacked.  Weird things about it:  First, it was the new credit card that we got after the last one was hacked.  (We have several cards, but this is the only one that seems to be giving us trouble.)  Second, the false charges put on the credit card last time were for about $2,000.00 each and were charged at bike shops in Europe.  This time the false charge was for about $1,500.00 and was charged (wait for it….) at a bike shop in Europe.  And both times, we had put in a legitimate charge at one online seller in particular about three weeks before the problem arose.  I can’t prove this last connection so I’m not going to give the name of the online merchant, but be careful who you order from, and if you can, place your orders by phone rather than over the net.

Tune in tomorrow for a new political cartoon from my friend Bryan Prindiville and me. 

Thanks to all for the great comments on yesterday’s post.  Woke up this morning and found that my newly-minted teenager was very much like the child who lived here yesterday and the day before.  One day at a time.  That’s the ticket.

I seem to be in the middle of another good writing week.  I’m making good progress on the book, and more important, I like what I have so far.  I’m even finding time to birdwatch every morning before I sit down to write.   Spring migration is starting to wind down.  We probably have another three or four days, but after that it’ll slow down and we’ll settle into a typical Tennessee summer — hot days, thunderstorms in the late afternoons, muggy nights spent sitting on the porch, listening to the crickets and frogs, watching the lightning bugs.  Sounds good to me.

As of today, I am officially the parent of a teenager.  A girl teenager.  A very pretty girl teenager.  I need a gun….

I am entering a phase of life during which I will become utterly clueless in the eyes of a child who once revered me.  I will be hopelessly unhip.  In fact, I already must be, since I can’t imagine that the word “unhip” has been in vogue since the release of “Hotel California.”  Oh, and my musical taste now sucks.  Once upon a time she thought it was cool to listen to not only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Little Feat, but also James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt and Sting.  Now, if the musician’s name is more than one word long, and if it doesn’t begin with a lower case letter and include a number and six consonants, it’s not worth listening to.

For the next several years, my very existence will be a source of shame and mortification for her.  I will be able to make her cringe simply by opening my mouth or saying hello to one of her friends; I will be able to embarrass her any time I want. (Okay, so maybe there’s an upside to this….)

The phone will no longer be ours.  Oh, Nancy and I will still pay the bills.  But none of the calls will be for us.  My daughter will point out that this is the perfect reason to buy her a cell phone, but I’m not sure we want to go there either.  She also wants a facebook page.  And one (or more) of those online IM accounts.  She’s already emailing her friends all the time.  She makes me swear that I won’t read her messages, but even if I did want to read them, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of what she and her friends write.  We are all destined to live in a world without punctuation, capitalization, or traditional spelling, a world in which phrases become an indecipherable series of obscure acronyms:  nvm, omg, idk, l8r, g2g. 

SMN (Shoot Me Now…)

And boys.  Good God, there are going to be boys.  Lots of them.  (Of course she had to get her mother’s looks — it would have been too much to ask that she be short and funny-looking and bearded like her Dad….)  Hence the gun.  It’ll have to be a shotgun.  Something I can be cleaning on the front porch as they roll up to the house for that first date.  I should probably get a hound, too.   And a rocking chair.  They all go together:  hounds, rocking chairs, shotguns.  Then again, I’m not at all sure that as a Jewish liberal New Yorker with an earring I’ll be able to pull off the “Dad with the Shotgun” thing.  I wonder what it costs to put landmines in the front yard and driveway.

At least the second one isn’t a teenager yet.  Then again, she’s 9 already.  And very precocious.  

God help me….

Today’s post, “The Writing Imperative,” can be found at http://magicalwords.net.  Please take a look at the site and enjoy!

Survived my soon-to-be-a-teenager’s birthday party last night.  We rented out the swimming pool again and served the usual birthday fare (Pizza, carrots, grapes, soda, cupcakes — not the healthiest, but not the worst either).  The kids seemed to have a great time and once again Nancy and I avoided having the party at our house.  Can’t put a price on that.  Two of the girls slept over, but even that went well.  They were quiet by 11:30; asleep by midnight.  Not bad at all.

Was going to blog about some political stuff today — again.  But it’s gorgeous out and my younger daughter wants to have a catch and really what could I say that hasn’t already been said?

Have a great Sunday all. 

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition:  “Buffoon — n  1:  A ludicrous figure; clown.”

I offer the definition because for some weeks the BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award goes to someone (or someones) who is not so much a clown as a insensitive lout or a partisan hack.  And there are examples of this among this week’s nominees. (I should note here that the list of nominees is thinner than usual this week.  Not sure why.)  Certainly I was tempted to give retroactive BOW Awards to George W. Bush and John McCain to commemorate the five year anniversary of Bush’s speech given aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln beneath the now imfamous “MIssion Accomplished” banner, during which he announced that major combat activities in Iraq had ended and that the U.S. and its allies had prevailed.  Of course, the mission has yet to be accomplished and the U.S. has not prevailed, and our world is a more dangerous place because of this Administration’s illegal, immoral, and ill-conceived war.  So why nominate McCain for this?  Because just a month after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier, as it began to become clear to people that the mission had not been accomplished after all, McCain said that it had.  Here’s the exchange, in which McCain is challenged on the point by Fox News host Neil Cavuto (I know, I couldn’t believe it either):
NEIL CAVUTO: “Senator — after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn’t over.

McCAIN: “Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it’s very appropriate.”

Now, of course, McCain claims that he always thought that the banner had been inappropriate, yet another McCain flipflop which is almost cause enough to give him this week’s award.  But there will be no award for Flippy McSame this week.

Back to that definition of “buffoon.”  You want clowns?  I present to you the crew at “Fox and Friends”, Fox’s morning “news” program.  Remember earlier in the week when Hillary Clinton was challenging Barack Obama to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate?  This phrase — “Lincoln-Douglas style” refers to a series of seven unmoderated, unscripted debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race, in which Lincoln, the Republican, lost to Douglas, the Democrat.  The debates are still viewed by historians as a high-point in American political discourse, an example of what might happen when two public servants possessing keen intellects and uncommon speaking talent presented their divergent views on crucial issues of the day, unfiltered.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the idiots at Fox and Friends thought it would be funny to tell one of their interns to dig up video of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Of course there is no video, and the Fox and Friends anchors yukked it up on TV the other day, at the expense of the hapless intern who didn’t know that the video he was searching for didn’t exist.  (We can save for another day the discussion of what this story says about the way our schools teach history.)  But what happened next is truly remarkable.  The Fox and Friends folks put up a graphic with pictures of Lincoln and Douglas.  Except they didn’t put up a picture of white politician Stephen Douglas.  They put up a picture of former-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Here they were making fun of their intern for not knowing that there wouldn’t be video of a debate held in 1858, but they didn’t know which Douglas(s) Lincoln debated.  Apparently it never occurred to them that there weren’t any African-Americans, former slaves at that, running for the U.S. Senate two years before the Civil War.   Apparently it never occurred to them that even if a former slave had been running for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he wouldn’t have been running as a Democrat, since at the time the Democratic Party was the pro-slavery party.  The Republicans, of which Lincoln was one, were the abolitionist party.

For managing to screw up so royally, I present this week’s BOW Award to the people at Fox and Friends.  Take a BOW guys; you’ve earned it.  And then I’d suggest you take a quick look at your kids’ sixth grade history textbooks….