Where has he been for fifty years?

I was disappointed that the Star Tribune gave credibility to a deeply uninformed editorial by publishing it on February 4.  In it, Stephen B. Young asserts that the war against Vietnam was lost by dishonest reporters, effeminate intellectuals, and weak leaders.  “Stabbed in the back” was exactly the same argument that Adolf Hitler made for the German loss in World War I.  The US lost the war in Vietnam not only because no one had any idea what winning would look like, but mostly because the entire project was ethically repellant and uninformed by history.  At least the Star Tribune put the article on the opinion page.

Washington had taken extreme measures to create a government in Saigon pliable to its directives.  One relatively free election had been set aside because the results didn’t suit Washington.  The assassination of another president had been sponsored by the American ambassador.  Three times the tonnage of bombs had been dropped on little Vietnam than had been dropped on the whole world in World War II.  Selective torture and assassination of suspected members of the Viet Cong infrastructure, known as the Phoenix Program, hadn’t rolled back sympathy for the nationalist cause against Saigon and Washington.  The Strategic Hamlet Program of moving populations off land people had lived on for generations had only the effect of creating a vast pool of recruits for the Viet Cong.  Declaring huge “free fire zones” had not stopped the dwindling of areas controlled by Saigon, but had also contributed to the pool of recruits for the Viet Cong.  Bombing the dikes to flood populated areas, mining the harbor in Haiphong, destroying crops and animals, burning to the ground hundreds of villages, spraying poison on the landscape, dropping antipersonnel bombs and napalm on civilians were violations of international law, in some cases violation of US law, and in many cases crimes against humanity.  Sacrificing 60,000 Americans, killing 3,000,000 Vietnamese, and spending nearly a trillion dollars: what more would Stephen B. Young have advised Washington to do?  There was no such thing as winning that war, and even if there were, no civilized or rational country would aspire to do so.  Please note that I do not blame US soldiers.  They fought valiantly.  I blame Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and conservative senators.

It is my hope that in the future the Star Tribune examine more closely what it publishes for truthfulness, rationality, and decency.

When will I learn?

Here’s something that embarrasses me: I was elated by Stefon Diggs’ game winning catch when the clock ran out in the divisional playoff game on January 14, 2018.  What that catch concealed was the time-honored habit of the Vikings: giving up a big lead and collapsing in the end.  In that game with the Saints, the Vikings needed a miracle to win a game they had in hand.  The sweetness of the win derived in part from the unexpected deviation from their history.

So what's embarrassing for me?  First of all, I find myself elated by something as trivial as the outcome of a football game.  Where is the substance?  How is the world better because the Vikings won?  How is misery reduced or joy increased?  There are as many people made unhappy by the win as there were people made happier.  I am reminded of the answer to the question presented to Johnny Unitas: “After a touchdown, you walk off the field with the same emotional expression as when you were intercepted.  What gives?”  Unitas said, “I get more emotional for kids and animals than I do for football.”  That response – not mine – I respect.

But here is what really embarrasses me: When the Vikings lost to the Saints in the championship game in 2009, I salved myself by saying to myself, “It’s just a stupid football game.”  In 2018, when the Vikings won, I didn’t say to myself, “It’s just a stupid football game.”  It’s that loss of integrity that embarrasses me.  And, what’s more, I will behave in the same way many times in the future, no doubt.  I salvage some self-respect by being aware and embarrassed by my response.

Evolution continues

The Dallas Safari Club is raising money to promote the survival of the black rhinoceros, which is good because the number of black rhinoceroses in the universe has now dropped below 5,000, which is down from 70,000 forty years ago. They are auctioning off – I am not kidding – a permit issued by Namibia to hunt and kill one black rhinoceros. Here’s the good news: That another homo sapiens has a capacious enough intellect to hold both of those ideas, conservation and auctioning off such a license, in his mind simultaneously is proof that the great engine of evolution – diversity – is still chugging along on all cylinders. "First and foremost, this is about saving the black rhino," says Ben Carter, the executive director of the Dallas Safari Club. "There is a biological reason for this hunt, and it's based on a fundamental premise of modern wildlife management: Populations matter; individuals don't. By removing counterproductive individuals from a herd, rhino populations can actually grow." (At least that’s the same kind of logic conservative use when asserting that reducing taxes increases revenues.) My own mind is simply too antiquated to use at one time two ideas so mutually exclusive. Remembering that humans share 23% of their DNA with cauliflower, I can’t conceive that the president of the Dallas Safari Club and I share more than, say, 10% of our DNA, but then that may be another case of the weakness of my own mind, in this case not being able to shrug off logic. Mr. Carter is a bold new experiment, evolutionarily speaking. He and I use our brains for completely different purposes. Adaptations in evolution are often accomplished by using an organ in ways unrelated to previous usage. So rest assured that evolution is continuing to provide variety. The bad news is that we see once again that evolution promises only change, not a direction or progress.

Sometimes it does matter

I hate election years because I hate division among people. Unfortunately, progress requires that tension. Every election forces you to choose between one of two American traditions. One tradition sought to abolish slavery; the other sought to expand it. One tradition worked to abolish child labor; the other worked to preserve it. One worked to create the forty-hour work week, safe working conditions, and a living wage; the other opposed all attempts to give work dignity and security. One tradition fought for civil rights for all; the other would reserve them for only some. One tradition fought for equality before the law; the other wasn’t even willing to outlaw lynching. One tradition seeks equal pay for equal work; the other doesn’t. One tradition knows how racist and ineffective executing criminals is; the other would keep us in the company of Iran, Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia for the most executions. One tradition welcomes all to first class citizenship, including the right to marry the one we love; the other reserves that honor for some and not others. One tradition imagines a world at peace; the other insists that war is normal. One tradition sought to outlaw deploying children as soldiers; the other, believe it or not, prevented the US from signing the Conventions of the Rights of the Child, meaning only the US and Somalia favor that obscene practice. One tradition rejects torture as either effective or acceptable; the other doesn’t. One tradition would teach science in biology classrooms; the other religion. One tradition accepts the fact of global warming and seeks to mitigate its effects; the other seeks to preserve the profits of the oil companies. The theology of one tradition focuses on love and justice; the other insists that people are essentially evil. One tradition says we must prevent deranged people from acquiring guns; the other would do nothing about the parade of killers in our schools and theaters. The list goes on and on. Elections force you to choose a tradition. Doing nothing about evil, as Martin Luther King said, makes you an accomplice to it. Saying that all politicians and parties are the same is intellectually lazy. In 2018, find the facts and choose a tradition.

Blinded by the darkness

My encounter with four women by The Rarig Center during The Fringe Festival caused me distress in the same way the quote from Isaac Newton does.  In it he describes himself as a child fingering a pretty shell while the ocean truth lies before him.  He knew that the little pebble he had found, which for the rest of us was the greatest contribution to physics in history, was virtually worthless compared to what remained to be known.  In the same way, I noticed these women, felt anxious, saw the potential for an image, and took a picture.  The anxiety I felt was not the discomfort men often feel in the presence of women.  Rather the detail that was visible to me in the bright August afternoon reminded me of how little I knew about them compared to how much I knew was imaginable.  So many stories presented themselves to me.  (Let me call them A, B, C, and D.) How did C hurt her left foot?  It is bandaged.  And not only is it bold enough that a lightly clad woman would lie flat on her back in public, but she also lazily wraps her right arm around D in an easy embrace.  How – leave alone why for now – did she climb onto that wall with an injured foot?  B seems emphatic with gestures of her head, body, and hands toward D who responds affectionately with a smile and an indeterminate hand motion.  What was being communicated either way?  What need did B have of such a large purse on a hot day when everybody else was so lightly laden?  What did she expect to transport?  Something.  Not her coat.  She carries that over her left arm.  How can B, C, and D seems so passionately engaged and yet A seems off in her own thoughts?  Something about her orientation to the whole day was different from the beginning; only she wore stripes and wasn’t as careful with her hair as the others.  And why has she removed her shoes, or at least one of them?  These are only the stories hinted at by what I can see.  All four of them have whole libraries of stories as we have all accumulated: fears and hopes of what might or might not happen before the end of the day, insults and wounds delivered by parents, friends, and lovers and dragged through their lives as the fighting and doomed bull in the ring drags darts, secret virtues or strengths each imagines are essential to her survival and carries like hidden charms, fantasies they have embellished over the years, and memories of mistakes each hopes no one ever learns about.  A pebble before the ocean of truth is right.  A small pebble.  It all happens quickly and quietly before me on just another summer afternoon in the city.  Shrouded in so much ignorance, imagining myself approaching these women feels like going to a party uninvited, naked, blindfolded, handcuffed and thrust into the room backwards.  What’s not to feel anxious about?

Other people

Sartre said that hell is other people and Woody Allen said that the only problem with sex is that someone else has to be there.  Well, I am not as much of a sour puss as either of them.  I am very much introverted but I love the company of other people.  People are one of my favorite photographic subjects too.  I have a very pronounced preference for unscripted pictures, pictures in which the subject does not know she is being photographed, and pictures where little is happening other than a person being there.  Here's a good example:

My camera has a silent shutter, which allowed me to get this image of the girl without her awareness even though my lens was no more than eighteen inches from her face.  I was standing near her in the sound booth of my church during service.  My camera sat on the counter top pointed, I hoped, in the right direction.  Clearly the sermon was not speaking to her, which was good for the picture.  Being preoccupied creates a strong sense of interiority.  Certainly the mystery of other people is one of the profoundest in the cosmos.  My world radiates out from myself through my eyes, but so does hers.  How two sets of radiation, of consciousnesses, can coexist is incomprehensible to me and yet it goes on about me every single day.  Go figure.

Part of a letter sent to a friend:

Dear X,

I like the quote you sent me in your last letter: The universe is too big to hold onto but it is the right size for letting go of.  I have kind of a junky room.  The rest of my house is uncluttered, mostly because I share it with Adele, but my room?  Not so much.  Over my desk I have several pictures of Adele and some angels.  My theology does not admit such things as angels, but the image has a strong appeal for me.  (I love the Harry Potter books even if I think the whole idea of magic is silly.)  I have one word tacked to my wall: patience.  I discovered how important patience is one winter day when I was driving to Huron, SD, to be present for the funeral of the mother of my best friend.  I became impatient with how slowly the person in front of me was driving.  I started to pass him and discovered two things of the world I had just created for myself.  I was on a patch of black ice so I had very little control of my car and about a quarter mile ahead of me in my lane was a semi-trailer truck traveling at a speed differential to me of about 130 MPH.  The only thing I could do was allow myself to slowly drift into the ditch on my left.  Fortunately, three conditions prevailed in the direction I was going.  The ditch was shallow and had a field beyond it.  There was about two feet of snow just beyond the shoulder of the road.  And there was no telephone pole waiting for me.  I sailed out into the field about eighty feet.  I suffered no damage to my minivan.  I was not hurt in anyway, but my car was completely stuck and these were the days before cell phones, so I walked back to the road and flagged someone down.  (I was sort of amazed that nobody stopped to see if I was okay.  I would have, but maybe everybody else assumed that an impatient idiot like me needed to learn a lesson.  Which I did, of course.)  I asked the person who stopped to ask someone in the next town to send a tow truck.  She asked if I was okay and pointed out that I had a nose bleed.  I don’t remember being hit in the nose, but I suppose it is stressful to sail off the road at 70 MPH.  Eventually my car was pulled back onto the road and I was on my way again.  I realized though that I had come close to death because I wanted to arrive in Huron, SD, at, say, 2:15 pm rather than 2:25.  What an idiot.  When I returned home, I printed out in large font the word “Patience”, mounted it on a piece of colorful paper and put it up on my wall.  The Church gets lots of things wrong and one of them is that patience is not regarded as one of the cardinal virtues.

Anyway, patience is one of the ways I cede control to the universe.  I am usually completely entertained by observing whatever is going on around me.  It’s one reason I rarely interrupt people.  I see that I am not going to change people around me – even if I wanted to and even if I could – so I do a lot of listening.  Being patient includes being okay with being wrong and being okay with people around me being wrong.  I don’t like being corrected and generally it is useless to correct other people.  It communicates disrespect.  There is no way of correcting other people without implying that you believe they are wrong about something and that you believe that they are unable to figure it out for themselves.  There is also arrogance in asserting that what you know is more correct than what they know.  Finally, I have found that when I propose to correct someone else I am usually more interested in showing off how superior I am to the other person than I am in contributing to the knowledge of the other person.

Thomas Merton, a famous Catholic scholar and theologian, said that the shortest prayer is “Fuck it.”  By fuck it, he means “I am not in control here.  My control is not worth much.  Even if my contribution or control had value, attempting to transmit it, I probably would not have a significant positive impact.  Besides, all of us have gotten along pretty well without me running my mouth.  So whatever it is I am being presented with, fuck it.”

All of this is why the website I have built for myself is www.notthatitmatters.net.

So, yeah, I propose to be patient.

Here’s a picture I took about fifty years ago:

I like it because it is so expressive of the jubilant spirit of the family dog in those days.  His name was Hershey Bar.  He was a miniature poodle and lived to have someone throw a ball for him to retrieve.  I suppose that if he had been patient, he could have waited for the ball to come back down to him, but, no, he loved life and activity so much that he had to leap up to catch the ball in the air.  So, can I be a patient, zen-kinda guy or do I want to be passionately engaged?

Your friend,

Why I take photographs 1

I have had lunch on most Fridays with my friend LeRoy now for nearly forty years.  I never tire of our conversations.  He's the friend of my life; I will never have another friend like him again.  One of the reasons our friendship is so gratifying and durable is that we are very similar in some ways and very different in others.  That makes for varied and unexpected conversations.  One talk we had recently has accelerated my thoughts about why I take pictures.  Actually we were talking about writing, and more specifically, writing for publication.  He's a very good poet, who has had a book published and several poems published in journals.  I don't write poetry, but I have written two books for middle school girls, one of which is worth reading - find it on Amazon if you like; it's called Spirit at Bear Lodge - the other one, not so much.  I enjoyed writing both of them and have no regrets for the many months I spent on them.  I worked for a couple years to find either an agent or a publisher for Spirit with no success.  What I learned in my effort soured me on the whole publications game, which went deeper than me simply defending my bruised ego.  I am a good writer, but I have no illusions that I am in the top  one percent of one percent of the people who submit books to agents or publishers and who actually appear on the shelves of Barnes and Noble.  I'm not and I am not for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that I want to have a life in addition to getting published.  Every good writer - Kate DiCamillo comes to mind - made serious sacrifices to get to where she is as a writer.  To be a successful writer, you have to decide early in your career to not do some of the things that are also important to you.  Examples of things that I would have had to reduce or eliminate in my life are having a professional career, being involved in the defense of the planet and the vulnerable living things there on, contributing to my faith community, and even being a husband and father.  You gotta make choices.

But I also discovered in my attempt to get published that you have to make other sacrifices I was simply not willing to make.  First and for most you must reduce the quality of what you want to write in order to get published.  By reduce the quality of what you want to write, I mean that you have to pay less attention to what you want to say and more attention to what agents and publishers want to sell.  When agents tell you to write the book that only you can write, what they really mean is "You take all of the risks and I will take most of the profits of your efforts."  Aspiring writers are told that successful writers spend ninety percent of their time marketing and ten percent of their time writing.  Well, I want to write, not market and if that means that I will never get published then so be it.  I am confirmed in my decision by the witnessing the tsunami of garbage offered up as writing that washes over me every day.  I'm just not interested.

Enter LeRoy.  He says that if I am not writing for publication then I am "just masturbating."  The real hammer in his judgment is not the reference to masturbating which carries all of the life-hating, pleasure-hating viciousness of the worst of our culture.  The heaviest rejection is loaded into the word "just."  That word says that whatever is being evaluated - my writing in this case, or more precisely my intentions as a writer - are diminutive or somehow less than something else.  Worthless.  Pointless.  Nugatory.  (There's a good word.  Look it up.)  In LeRoy's defense, he says that my writing is brilliant and more of the world would benefit from reading it.

I am not persuaded.  Not even a little bit.  To elaborate on why, I turn to why I take photographs.  Take this picture, for example:

I took this picture when I was driving east across North Dakota.  I saw it sail by my field of vision and I knew right away that I wanted to get the image.  I wouldn't have gotten it had I been traveling with anybody who valued their time.  My dogs were with me, but they don't value one moment over another so I was good to go.  In North Dakota, the opportunities to get off of freeways are rare.  The reason for that is that for most people there are few reasons to get off freeways when they are driving across North Dakota.  I had to travel for about twenty minutes to turn around, which means that I had to travel back another twenty minutes to get to where I wanted to take a picture.  Then, since the image was on the other side of the freeway, I had to drive at least twenty minutes in the other direction to turn around to get back to the original spot where I had seen the image I wanted fly by me at seventy-five MPH.  From seeing the image I wanted to pulling over to get that image was about an hour and a half.  (See above about having to make sacrifices to be an artist of any kind.) Then, I discovered that a trucker had pulled his rig into the pull off, thereby ruining my image.  It was a rest stop and he may have pulled over to nap for an hour or two.  Fortunately for me, he got back on the road after about half an hour.  Now I am over two hours of just getting positioned to take the photograph.  I took a couple dozen shots and got back on the road myself.  

So here is a picture that will never get published, except on this site.  I think it is a good picture nonetheless.  It is typical of one kind of image I like to make:  stark, high contrast, minimalist, evocative, and, in this case, funny.  Not everyone would be willing to apply those adjectives to this picture, much less characterize it as either interesting or good.  And while I love praise and I value to evaluation of competent critics, I am fine if no one else likes it.  My teacher Carl has taught me that some times artists have to accept that their audience may be an audience of one.  To create the image you see above, I have given away about four hours of the few hours I will have in the light.  I hope you like it, but if you don't, then I encourage you to move on to the next moment in your life.  If no one likes it, well, frankly, I don't care.  I want to contribute to the pleasure of other people.  I want to make contributions to my own community and culture, but mostly I want to make images like this one, regardless of who sees it.  I would do it even though I knew that no one would ever see it.

I didn't point out to LeRoy that only a tiny minority of the poems he will ever write will ever be read by more than a couple people.  He might respond, reasonably, that the scores of poems he writes that no one will see make possible the poem that maybe scores of people will read.  Nor did I ask him if he would write poetry if he knew that he would never be published.  I knew him now close to fifty years ago and he was writing poems then.  I am doubtful that he was writing for publication then.  I am doubtful that he held the opinion then that he was "just masturbating".  And, here's the thing, I know that he and I have actually masturbated in the past.  All healthy people have.  And we will probably masturbate again.  We will do that even though doing so will be just masturbating.  Without quotation marks.  Why?

There are lots of reasons, which I will not go into here.  My point is that I have many reasons for writing and taking pictures that are unrelated to either publication or anybody ever reading what I write of seeing the images I create.  More on that in subsequent entries.

Pet Peeves

Tailgaters.  What prompts people to think that they will get wherever they are going any sooner if they trail my car by a car length at 70 MPH than if they allow for four or five car lengths?  They can see that I am driving at the same speed as the car in front of me.  I am slightly more tolerant of being tailgated in the left lane on a freeway.  That's the lane for people who are not subject to laws of physics anyway.  It is obnoxious to have some jerk pull to within a yard of my car at 75 MPH, but there seems to be a convention that trailing closely in that lane means that they request that you go into the slower lane even when it is obvious again that I am driving as fast as the person in front of me.

Tailgating is one example of a condition I call OPC or the Only Person in the Cosmos.  Other manifestations of OPC are smoking a cigar near other people, even outside, especially where the other people propose to relax and enjoy themselves as in an outside café, parking so that your car takes up two slots in a ramp or parking lot, reaching way in back of the cooler in a grocery store so that you get a fresher carton of milk than anyone else, walking slowly across a street in a crosswalk even though you are clearly holding up traffic, and having a loud conversation on your cell phone in a public place.  Two people can simultaneously exhibit OPC when, for example, they stand with their backs to the wall in a narrow passage conversing, forcing me to walk between them.  It reminds me of the one time Vladimir Putin said something truthful in public.  He characterized terrorists by saying that to them the rest of us are the same thing as dust.