What follows is an unpaid political rant.
Unless you’re reading this blog using a bicycle-powered generator in the desert outback somewhere east of Perth you’ve heard of the revolutionary change in the leadership of the United States. It’s the culmination of tireless work for equality and civil rights by generations of good people. In Tuesday’s California elections, in addition to voting for Barack Obama in a landslide, voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, a worthy initiative that mandates more humane cage conditions for chickens and other farm animals.
I should be happy, and I am genuinely happy—about those and many other things that happened election day.
This gardener is pissed
But politics is a messy beast, and this gardener is having a bout of bad attitude. It started on Monday with the first signs of a bad cold and then worsened as some of the political fallout from Tuesday’s elections became clearer. So often, along with the good and revolutionary, you get delivered the vile and reactionary. In the same California elections I referred to the populace narrowly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment rescinding the rights of gay and lesbian citizens from marrying each other, thereby upholding the traditional values of having gays and lesbians marry people of the opposite gender.
In effect, in their actions, the voters of California decided to grant additional civil rights to poultry, while at the same time rescinding rights for the state’s gay and lesbian population.
So, are we to conclude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise property taxes, all it takes is a slim majority of the population to take rights away from thousands of its fellow citizens? Have the California voters said that my commitment in marriage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!
The lawsuits have begun, and one of the arguments is that very issue of the size of the vote necessary to revise a basic right that’s in the constitution versus merely amending it. Legal challenges often get a bad rap in this country, but if it had been left exclusively to the popular vote we’d still have things like segregation and industrial runoff igniting the rivers of the Northeast.
My current cold will pass, along with my current bad attitude. No matter the immediate outcomes of the challenges to Proposition 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intolerance. No matter what transpires, John and I will continue to consider ourselves married.
It’ll take a while for the culture to change, but the signs are everywhere. Although people over 30 voted for California’s Proposition 8, the population 30 and under soundly rejected it by a margin of two to one.
Another sign: Let me quote the final sentence of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.
…And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
And let me compare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tuesday night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his America resides in the third paragraph from the very beginning.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
At no time in his campaign did Obama defend gay marriage. That would have been political suicide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invisible as we were in King’s day. This is a different vision of America that will come to be as the next generation finally gets its say.
The bar has been raised.
November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »
Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s commentators consider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Verlyn Klinkenborg remarks in the introduction to the Modern Library English edition of 2002, “most students of Čapek believe gardening is a subset of life, whereas gardeners, including Čapek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.”
—Robert Pogue Harrison
My first meaningful exposure to the work of Čapek came through Leoš Janáček’s amazing 1925 opera, The Makropulos Affair, which is based on Čapek’s play of the same name. I suppose you could call it a science fiction opera: a young woman becomes the laboratory rat of her alchemist father, who is tasked by Emporer Rudolf II to devise a formula that will extend his life by three centuries. When given the potion, the daughter at first drops into a coma. However, when she wakes up, she truly has been transformed into being able to live another 300 years. In living through those extra years she becomes increasingly detached from her original humanity as she is forced to leave one mortal husband after another and loved ones fade around her. At the end of the opera, even though she is in possession of her father’s formula for the elixir that would allow her to keep extending her life, she refuses to concoct the drink and chooses humanity—and death.
It’s a powerful tale with echoes all the way back to the Odyssey, where Odysseus declines eternal life in favor of his known, mortal one, back in Ithaca with the family and friends he knows and loves. Also, Čapek, ever rooted in the earth and distrustful of the quick, shallow pleasures of “progress,” uses the play to express his dis-ease with where unthinking application of the technologies that were exploding around him would lead the human race.
I bring all this up because I’ve been reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. One of the chapters is devoted to Čapek and his work, The Gardener’s Year. The quote at the beginning of this post comes from that chapter, as does this second by Čapek himself, in an extended quote:
I tell you, to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory… And if you have no appreciation for this strange beauty, let fate bestow upon you a couple of rods of clay—clay like lead, squelching and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing-gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade; ill-tempered, unmalleable, greasy, and sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake, and dry like a brick, impermeable like tin, and heavy like lead. And now smash it with a pick-axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer, turn it over and labour, cursing aloud and lamenting.
Then you will understand the animosity and callousness of dead and sterile matter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becoming a soil of life; and you will realize what a terrible fight life must have undergone, inch by inch, to root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called vegetation or man.
All this may sound a little dense and difficult going, but others of Harrison’s quotes from Čapek’s work show it to be incredibly funny at the same time. I have plenty of books lined up that I need to read, but this one is moving to the front of the queue.
July 07 2008 | Categories: everything • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Gardener's Year • Karel Capek • opera • Robert Pogue Harrison • technology | 3 Comments »
There’s an old family photo that I think about every now and then. My sister and I are seated at a viewpoint overlooking the lower falls on the Yellowstone River. My sister is staring into the camera and at my mother who took all these early family pictures. And next to her is me, staring not at the camera but over the railing at something off to the side, not the main attraction of the falls, but something else—maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.
For me gardens can be wonderful little mementos of the larger landscape. Surround me with interesting plants and their interesting colors and textures, and you’ll stand a chance of losing me in it. But I’m also interested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked versions of what lies beyond the garden gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the garden, and I’m interested in what the garden reveals about the person planning, planting and tending the garden.
And I have lots of other interests that I expect will end up here—art, photography, design, music, politics, science, stuff in the news—and so I expect these notes will ramble a bit, something like an old Lady Banks rose growing in many directions from its rootstock. Since the rambles and brambles grow from the same rootstock, though, I expect they’ll have something in common.
I guess all that’s a bit of a manifesto. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an interesting place, even if that world is a small patch of garden with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cosmos in a flowerpot on someone’s apartment windowsill.
And so, off we go!
November 24 2007 | Categories: art • everything • gardening • landscape • landscape design • rambles | Tags: my sister • old photographs • why people garden • yellowstone | No Comments »
