Weimar Moments

This has been an intense week, to say the least. It was not just the discovery that one of the steel radials on my aerial roof antenna had gone missing, but that after having the house power-washed, I find myself having to kick in the front door just to get inside. Then there were those skin thingies I had removed a couple of days ago. All of it pales, however, and is small potatoes, in comparison to those school kids who were hauled out of classrooms across the country to prevent them from hearing Obama's speech on Tuesday--because their parents think he is Hitler. That really did seem like the last straw in the department of outrageous insults and disrespect that now passes for political life in this country.

But so-called "last straws" at this point have become the unfortunate norm. Not only did Halloween hooligans (disguised as Republican members of Congress) boo the President the following night while he was giving his much-awaited public address to both Houses of Congress and the American public on health care, but one of them, Joe Wilson, shouted at him, saying "You lie!" It seems like we are having ever-escalating examples of what one columnist tagged as "America's very own Weimar moment."

The next morning Wilson mustered a phony apology to the President, but later that day, he used the incident not only to fund-raise on his website, but also to reassert his drivel. "I will not be muzzled," he announced. "I will speak loudly against this risky plan of government takeover of health care and giving health care to illegals." Joe Wilson, it turns out, is a card-carrying member of a White Supremacists group, and also belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a contemporary offshoot of the KKK. If it were up to Wilson, the Confederate Flag would be flying over the South Carolina State Capitol.

Wilson is now widely known for his absolute contempt for Barack Obama. Two anonymous reader comments I found on the Huffington Post summed it up pretty well, at least for me:

"The bigots of the Republican whites-only world are beside themselves with rage because a black man is in the Oval Office and he isn't there to polish the silverware."
"A black president and a white southern congressman. You do the math. I'm just glad he didn't say, 'You lie, boy.'"

The day after Obama's speech, my friend Liz forwarded me the following letter, written by Lou Pritchett, vice-president of sales and customer development for Proctor & Gamble. It was originally submitted to the New York Times, but did not get published. Now it is circulating in cyberspace, supposedly vetted by a fact-checking site, www.snopes.com. I've included about two-thirds of the full text.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any
of the others, you truly scare me. You scare me because after months of
exposure, I know nothing about you.
You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy
League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible
signs of support
You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth
growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.
You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.
You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't
understand it at its core.
You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.
You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself
with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly
denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.
You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America'
crowd and deliver this message abroad.
You scare me because you want to change America to a European style
country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.
You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a
government controlled one....
You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging
you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.
You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider
opposing points of view from intelligent people.
You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent
and omniscient.
You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.
You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs,
Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of
view.
You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.
Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will
probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.
Lou Pritchett

Even if this letter were a proven fake, the sentiments expressed in it are bonafide; they are circulating widely on the Internet and on talk-show radio as a matter of course, every day. A short while after reading Lou Pritchett's letter, the same friend forwarded me another article, this one written by a senior writer at Tallahassee Democrat, Gerald Ensley. Ensley identifies the word "socialist" as the new racist slur. It replaces the old "nigger"-word, which it is no longer considered socially acceptable to use. "Socialist" has become code for expressing unrelenting contempt for the black man who was elected President of the United States. "This is hateful, ignorant, racist bile," he writes. Obviously not all people who oppose Obama are racists, he adds, but those people do not use buzzwords like socialist or communist or Nazi. They simply oppose his policies, not the man.

Honestly I wasn't planning to blog about this subject (yet again), until something else put me over the top. Almost immediately after receiving these two e-mails, I happened to read an article in Vanity Fair about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The essay, by Sam Kashner, was actually more about the huge emotional upheavals undergone by the assassination's embattled chronicler, William Mancheste, in his subsequent relationships with certain members of the Kennedy family, most especially Jackie, who tried to stop the book's publication. "The Death of a President," finally appeared in 1967, and by 1970 had earned more than a million dollars, all of which was donated to the Kennedy library. But it is now out of print. All of which makes for a fascinating story.

However, it was a particular section of Kashner's article that jumped off the page at me, in light of this summer's tea-bagging health-care rallies and the two events (recounted above) of outlandish Obama-bashing that occurred this week. Kashner describes a period when Manchester went back to Dallas, to walk the five-mile motorcade route where Kennedy was killed, and to explore for possible clues to the assassination around the city. What he discovers is that such deep political enmities were simmering in the town that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip--by people as diverse as Billy Graham and Senator William Fulbright, who both pleaded with him not to go there. Here is the relevant paragraph that made my hair stand on end, and has caused me write this huge, over-sized blog:

"Manchester also discovered that Dallas 'had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists...the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of [ultra-conservative oil billionaire] H.L. Hunt and his activities. In that third year of the Kennedy presidency' Manchester wrote, 'a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, 'Impeach Earl Warren.' Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas...Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy's name was booed in classrooms;...a wanted poster with JFK's face on it was circulated...[for allegedly] appointing 'anti-Christians...aliens and known Communists to federal offices.' " That day an ad had appeared in The Dallas Daily News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party. When it was shown to the President, he was appalled. He said to Jackie, "Oh, you know, we're heading into nut country today." Shortly after that he was shot.

Yesterday I received a copy of the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Intelligence Report: The Second Wave." The letter which accompanies the report starts off:

"Dear Suzi Gablik,

Nearly a decade after virtually disappearing from public view, the so-called 'Patriot' movement is back. These antigovernment extremists--right-wing militias, 'sovereign citizens,' groups and ideologically driven tax defiers--are being revitalized around the country, and authorities are reporting a disturbing increase in Patriot activities and propaganda....In this issue of the "Intelligence Report," we investigate the recent proliferation of potentially dangerous Patriot groups and examine an alarming new component. Previously, these extremists were motivated mostly by a paranoid hatred of the government. But with a black man now in the White House and high levels of non-white immigration, the movement has been infused with racism. Already we've seen a rash of domestic terrorism incidents largely in response to Obama's election....

Sincerely,
Morris Dees, Founder"

I haven't read the report yet, but plan on doing so soon. Even Virgil finds himself at a loss for some kind of worthy punch line to offset the darkness of this blog and close it down. He's just as jumpy today as I am. So I'll let "joetheinformed" have the last word here: "The Republican party needs to be disbanded. They are a disgrace to this country."

"Indeed," Virgil does pipe up. "It's either disband, or take up Tantric Yoga: learn to sublimate those base instincts." The trouble with both of these suggestions is that neither will happen. Growing good human beings is definitely more difficult than growing good asparagus.

Bipartisanship with Snakes

If you happen to belong to the lately disempowered Republican party in the U.S., that is to say, if you are a Republican who is now out of power, what do you do to stay relevant? The answer can be found in a single word: you SWIFTBOAT.

This means that what you want, more than anything, is to cripple the President and to get rid of him, in whatever way works.

It can be done, you discover, by orchestrating public screamfests composed of your constituents--the racists, crazies, teabaggers, lynch mobs, and vigilantes who are all out for blood--and then by overwhelming the country with lies about how Obama is a closet socialist--or worse, a fascist--who intends to take away your freedoms via healthcare reform and who plans, sooner rather than later, to kill off everybody's grandma. You disburse enough anxiety and stoke enough panic into the marketplace of semi-illiterate sheep until your lies are actually believed. And then, as people's brainwashed thoughts turn unspeakably devilish, they will begin t to sound typically like this [comment posted by "eyeopener," September 6th, 2009, on Politico.com]:

"He is stopping our economy,all his advisers are people who have either worked for or belong to Communist groups that want to harm the United States..He promise change he didn't specified the complete destruction from within under his agenda :destruction of jobs,closing down our farms under the guise of protecting an insect, guppy,etcs. attacks on the middle class, the small business owners, the wealthy, cuts from the medicare system saying that they should be dead instead of living in their golden years because they cost to much in the last years of their life. You know what they deserve every penny they worked hard all their life for this country. Has czars calling for sterilization, limits on how many children to have certainly no army for our future defense. Put another czar to stop media from telling us the truth on what going on similar to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.. also cutting our defense at a time when we have N Korea with a trigger happy dictator itching to blow us to kingdom come.. and he is on our side.. and he is doing this for our benefits to improve how other countries view us as Americans. Wait a minute who side is he supposed to be on. He swore to protect our freedom, our liberty our country and the pursuit of happiness.. I don't think too many of us real Americans whether democratic or republicans are happy at all with his agenda at this point.. Stop this insanity before its too late."

If, on the other hand, you happen to be President Obama, and you are facing a nihilistic opposition party that is relentlessly determined to destroy your presidency rather than to govern in good faith, what do YOU do? Counterpunch? Come out of your corner fighting? More thunder and lightning? Or, do you simply opt out of doing business with fanatics and go it alone? Can you simply refuse to take the bait and just go on as before, even if it means seeking "bipartisanship with snakes?" As for me, I am obsessed with trying to figure it all out.

"I think Obama should just quit," says my friend Ray Kass, stunning me into silence. Not that I haven't had the same thought more than once, myself. Nobody, in my opinion, should have to submit to such abuse and disrespect, least of all a president of the United States.

As I lay on the massage table yesterday, my massage therapist, Hakuin Rose, had a different take. "If you are the President of the United States, you do your job, which is to uphold the two-party system, because that is the centerpiece of what our democracy is about. As President, there is an obligation and commitment to support the conventions of our democratic system." This certainly seems to be Obama's way.

Then I found it, a surprise blog by a surprise author (one of my old-time gurus), Carolyn Myss--in, of all places, the Huffington Post. Her books have been an inspiration to me for years. But she has never shown up on a political blog. The power lock down between Republicans and Democrats, she says in her blog, is not a problem that can be solved with legislation. It is a predicament. Predicaments are much greater than problems, because, by their very nature, they do not have solutions. (Aha! I thought, no wonder I'm having such difficulty figuring this thing out!)

"This nation," she writes about Congress, "needs its representatives to undergo a transformation of their egocentric power plays for the sake of the survival of our nation. They really do have to put this nation first and not their own careers. They really do have to pull together to make wise policies at this critical time because America's base of power is imploding. But are they capable of seeing that? Can you imagine these pride-driven individuals even grappling with the idea of this challenge?...They are laden with lobbyist obligations and old world ideas about 'problem solving'--namely that all problems can be resolved by spending more money, initiating new legislation, or by invading and bombing...If ever there was a time when this nation could use creative visionaries and leadership we actually respected instead of carnival barkers who offer nothing more than criticism of the opposite party, it is now."

Myss says she is still holding on to hopes that Obama has what it takes not to cave in to criticism and dilute his energies--even though he is up against a Republican force that is now convinced they have him on the run with this health care bill. "It would be more than refreshing to watch him come back to life again, having shed a bit of his "Team of Rivals" innocence in which he assumes he can work, like Lincoln, with his adversaries as well as his supporters. And though Lincoln was from Illinois, Obama needs to remember he's from the south side of Chicago."

So, Let's Go, Obama! It's time to climb out from under that dumb napkin!

The Sorry State of Everything

The venerable and beloved "liberal lion" of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, is dead. Not only was he a great friend, ally, and mentor of the President, but he was also the primary mover and shaker across decades in the Senate with regard to universal healthcare reform. At this point, it is impossible to know how, if at all, Kennedy's death is likely to affect the outcome of any proposed legislation that has already received the kiss of death in advance from Republicans. In case you haven't heard, they have made it clear that, for them, healthcare reform is an opportunity to "break" Obama's presidency. So, even though Kennedy's death has been on the cards for some time, the precise timing of it, at least for me, has the ring of hidden synchronicity, whose meaning, however, is yet to be revealed

Meanwhile, the problem of passing healthcare reform has been compounded in recent weeks by the many defecting Obama supporters, who are adding their disenchanted voices to those of his despisers, opponents, and accusers. Last week, my friend Jane and I listened in dismay while Arianna Huffington (co-founder of the HuffingtonPost blog) chastised Obama publicly on "The Charlie Rose Show" for not exercising enough LEADERSHIP. Things aren't coming together, she declared, because he's "conflict-averse." (Was she channeling Sigmund Freud?) Obama, Arianna railed, needs to stop waffling on the public option. He needs to throw all those lying Republicans over the wall. He should fight harder and act nasty--where is the sound of the lion's roar? Her own stridency was stunning.

Of course we all went through similar tough passages like the current one during the campaign: those jaw-clenching periods when every one and his brother had an overheated opinion about what Obama should or should not be doing. Times when it seemed like his ship was sinking, but then, almost miraculously, it didn't. So all of this feels a bit like watching reruns of "Two and a Half Men," only without laughs. My own sense of Obama's "leadership" style is quite different from Arianna's, I must confess. I don't exactly read him as "conflict-averse." I think he just prefers to bide his time, keep his cool (when all around him are losing theirs), and wait for the right moment. Then, at what may seem to everyone else like one second before midnight, he will make a canny move. However, I can imagine a question being legitimately raised with respect to such an off-hand strategy--like, what if the moment for acting has already come and gone? Yikes!

So, if the question now is whether the President has been too deferential to Congress, and not daring enough in seizing the reins, my own opinion is, I don't happen to think so. One of my best blogging mentors (not Virgil, but Andrew Sullivan) seems to feel the same way. In one of his many posts about Obama, Sullivan assesses the President's M.O., describing him as a liberal in policy but a conservative in temperament (i.e. cautious, consensus-seeking, empirical, not impetuous). Obama, he claims, understands the role of his office as the presider, not the decider--the executive being just one of three co-equal branches of the U.S. government.

"As he [Obama] had once written when describing his strategy as a black man in a white world: no sudden moves," Sullivan writes. "And we have seen none. Obama likes the system; he just wants to make it work for more people...Obama is, at his core, a community organizer. Community organizers do not jump into a situation and start bossing people around. They begin by listening, debating, cajoling, inspiring, and delegating...[they] try to empower others, not themselves."

Sullivan concludes: "It's too soon to tell, but I learnt long ago not to underestimate Obama's strategic skills and persistence....He is taking his time and keeping his cool. The question is whether a volatile electorate in a terrible economic time will be patient enough to wait." Admittedly, things are not looking all that good with respect to those racist crowds consumed by hate and Nazi-speak and guns.

"People are starting to lose faith in the president," Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times and a big supporter of Obama's, wrote recently. "Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in...more and more he is seen as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naive about the prospects for bipartisanship...and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him."

But Herbert concludes: "Maybe they're wrong....It's possible that we've been without mature leadership for so long that it's difficult to recognize it when we see it. Mr. Obama has proved the naysayers wrong time and again. But if it turns out that this time HE'S wrong, hold on to your hats. Because right now there is no Plan B."

In the current issue of Time, Joe Klein wonders how you can sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal? He describes the crude takeover of the healthcare debate by the right wing of the Republican party as a "DISINFORMATION JIHAD." It's a killer phrase, and I hope like hell it catches on. Klein voices outrage that no moderate Republicans dared to stand up to Rush Limbaugh, when he compared the President to Adolf Hitler--nor when violent crowds have tried to pulverize public forums in order to render creative policy discussion impossible.

Obama, Klein concludes, "will have to come up with something, though--and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican party." Virgil suspects it is the First Dog "Bo" (he of the white paws), who is the secret sharer Obama can tell his troubles to. So I just hope he's right, and that Bo is giving the Prez some good tactical advice for how to deal with political lepers, douchebags, and dickheads. Maybe he'll come up with something like "you reach over, and you just pour it, right in their bowls," and we will all have one of those "teaching moments" again. Or, do you suppose that would be considered just a little too unsporting?

Entering the Labyrinth: Game On

It's becoming more and more apparent that if you are not armed with a ball of gold thread, you will never find your way out of what has now become the labyrinth of healthcare reform. A sense of multiple dead ends and irreconcilable disparities--of dots that will never connect and inscrutables gone feral--has been well captured and embodied in this text that arrived on my email yesterday from Marc Ambinder, a blogger on the Atlantic. Feel free to snigger while you read it, but don't be surprised if you end up with a bitter vertigo by the time you're done. And whatever else you do, do not fail to bring along that ball of gold thread.

Health Care: Choose Your Own Adventure
By Marc Ambinder
Posted: 17 Aug 2009 01:07 PM PDT
With apologies to Edward Packard and Bantam Books...

The White House is always accusing the media of treating health reform like a game. So..

Step 1. The health care system is broken and needs reform.


If you agree with this statement, please go to Step 50.

If you disagree with this statement, please go to Step 50.

Step 2: If you're afraid that ObamaCare will spell the end of private insurance and be a total disaster, Go to Step 54. If you support -- in general -- the consensus insurance reforms in the House and Senate bill, go to Step 3. If you support a single payer system and are worried that the White House has conceded way too much, go to step 33.

Step 3: If you believe that, even with insurance reforms, health care isn't worth the effort unless it includes a "public option," go to step 5.

If you believe that "consumer protections," combined with some cost-cutting measures, higher taxes on the rich, structural reforms and inducements TBD are good enough, Go to step 4.

Step 4: Congratulations. I've identified you, at heart, as a health care policy wonk with center-left tendencies. Or, you work in the White House. Go to step 6.

Step 5: You're outraged that the White House thinks the public plan is negotiable. Go to step 6.

Step 6: House Democrats say that a conference bill without a public option won't pass their chamber. If you believe their threat, Go to step 8. If you think they're bluffing, go to step 7.

Step 7. All your focus is on getting to 60 votes in the Senate. If you think Sen. Ted Kennedy will be able to return to the Senate and cast the 60th vote, go to Step 8. If you don't think Kennedy will return to cast the deciding vote, go to Step 9.

Step 8: You're focusing on a handful of Democrats and a few Republicans. If you think you should play hardball, go to step 10. If you think you should let the finance committee, messy as it is, reach a consensus, go to step 11.

Step 9: If you think 61 votes is undoable, you decide to take a gamble on the reconcilliation process. Go to step 35. Else, proceed to step 8.

Step 10: The White House fills in the details: reform is a must. It's a clarifying issue. When the American people watch the final, final vote, they're going to view the pro-reform side as being "right," and senators need to get on the right side of history. If you think this is sufficient enough, go to step 14. If you think this is an insufficient threat, go to step 13.

Step 11: Your base approval rating drops another 10 points. If you think this is temporary, go to step 12. If you're worried, to back to step 6.

Step 12: Wait a while. Then go to step 16.

Step 13: You have your chief of staff threaten to cut the balls off of any Democrat who KOs his president's signature item. If you think this will work, go to step 16. If not, go to step 15:

Step 14: You bargain that the polarization of the health care debate will diminish over time, and that appeals to logic and reason are sufficient, and that things will sort themselves out in the end. If you're confident, go step 16. If not, go back to step 8.

Step 15: You resort to bribery and trickery, are arrested, and thrown into jail. Game over.

Step 16: The Senate falls in line, and passes a health care bill that includes a government-funded co-op and no public option. The House passes a bill with a public option. A conference begins.

If you think this is plausible, go to step 17. If you think the Senate won't fall in line and won't pass a bill, go to step 20.

Step 17. Stalemate in conference. If you think the conference bill is reported out WITH a public option, go to step 24. If you think the conference bill is reported out without a public option, go to step 25.

Step 20: Health care is scrapped for the year. If you agree with James Carville that the Democrats should punish the Republicans for killing it, go to step 21. If you think the Democrats should punish the Democrats for killing it, go to step 22. If you think the Democrats ought to remain mute, go to step 22.

Step 21: This works. Go to step 40. This doesn't work. Go to step 23.

Step 22: In January of 2010, The Democrats try again. If it works this time, go to Step 16. If it does not, go to step 23

Step 23: Democrats are wiped out in the election of 2010,. having no accomplishment to show for it. If you think this is a likely scenario, go to Charlie Cook's symposiums. If you don't, turn on MSNBC. Game over. Go to Step 61.

Step 24: The House and Senate pass a bill with a public option. Obama has won. Go to Step 61.

Step 25: If you think House liberals will cave, having been sufficiently, ah, induced, by the White House, go to step 26. If you think they will hold, go to step 27. If you think the Senate Democrats won't support the conference report with a public option, go to step 27.

Step 26. Go to step 24.

Step 27: If you think that a permanent stalemate arises, go to step 20. If you think that a third way compromise can be reached, go to step 28.

Step 28: A third way compromise is reached. If you think that the House and Senate manage to pass a bill and that Obama will get credit by the American people and his base for health care reform, go to step 29. If you think that Obama's "win" will be seen as a loss, go to step 30.

Step 29: Obama, brimming with confidence, ends the year with high approval ratings again. Democrats, sensing the popularity of the president and his bill, have something to run on in 2010. Go to step 40.

Step 30. You convene a conference to figure out what Obama should do in 2010 in order to cast his first year and a half as a success. Public opinion gradually softens over time, and Obama's approval rating creeps up. If you think it will creep up, go to step 40. If not, go to step 32.

Step 32: 2010 opens with Republicans and Democrats on an even footing, but President Obama has lost much of his luster, and struggles to regain the magic. His experiment at political reform -- the Obama project -- has failed. Obama decides to govern as an unreconstructed liberal. If you think this is a plausible scenario, e-mail me. If not, you recruit Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson to take over the White House. Go to Step 61.

Step 33: If you believe that reform ain't worth the paper it's printed on unless it changes the health care system to single papyer, go to step 34. If you agree that the consumer protections are worth having, even if the rest of the bill totally sucks, go to step 4.

Step 34. The bus to Canada has plenty of open seats. Game over. Go to Step 61.

Step 35. If the Senate parliamentarian is skeptical, go to step 8. If the Senate parliamentarian lets you wind up with a pretty good bill, many provisions sunset within five years, and you're consistently fighting an implementation battle with Republicans. Go to Step 61.

Step 40: Democrats lose, at most, a few seats in the House and one or two in the Senate. It's possible that they pick up seats in both chambers.

Step 50: You have private health insurance. You develop pancreatic cancer. Your health insurer won't pay for experimental treatments. Go to Step 51.

You have Medicare. You develop pancreatic cancer. Treatment is available, but you won't get it for several months. Go to Step 51.

Step 51: You decide that the health care system is broken and needs reform. Go to step 2.

Step 54: You are probably a Republican, or a conservative independent, or a libertarian.

Step 61: Turns out that the White House underestimated costs. Congress approves emergency supplemental of $500-billion and raises Debt Ceiling to $14.5-trillion.

Wild Orchid Ice Cream

Readers of this blog may remember my enthusiastic review of Eric Hansen's book, "Stranger in the Forest," a thrilling account of the author's walk across Borneo in the company of two (Stone Age) Penan guides. It is a book I liked so much that I mass-mailed it as a gift to many friends on my Christmas list last year. Currently, I am reading another of Hansen's spectacular books, this one called "Orchid Fever," about the scented fragile flowers which grow in the farthest corners of the earth, and have become the focus of a massive orchid trade, interwoven with issues of plant politics, endangered species, and the colorful but often weird people who are attracted to the world of orchid esoterica. Hansen's writing is uniquely infused with living energy, and I, for one, can't get enough of it.

There is a chapter in "Orchid Fever" that absolutely captivates me, all about a Turkish dessert--an ice cream made from wild orchid tubers, milk, and sugar. The mixture is first frozen, then beaten with metal rods, and eaten with a knife and fork. The taffy-like texture is so elastic it can be stretched and used as a jump rope. This last little detail is just the sort of thing that lights up my surrealist psyche, which grows fat on unlikely juxtapositions that make even a cockroach laugh.

Hansen managed to convince the editors of Natural History magazine in New York to send him to Turkey, so he could investigate orchid ice cream and write a story. (My kind of guy, my kind of project.) What he discovered is, not only can you jump rope with this versatile dessert, but according to experts, it can also heal the spleen, prevent cholera and tuberculosis, facilitate childbirth, stop your hands from shaking, and improve your sex life. It is also thought that wild orchid ice cream is a cure for the love-crazed. It's taste can be enhanced by the addition of baklava, chocolate, crushed roasted hazlenuts, ground pistachios, and fresh strawberries. Yum.

Once Hansen arrives in Turkey, he visits Ali Uster, a well-known ice-cream shop in Istanbul that has been run by Ali Kumbasar and his four brothers for twenty-eight years. There he has his first bite of the orchid ice cream of Turkey--and loves it. The basic ingredient of orchid ice cream is SALEP, a whitish flour milled from the dried tubers of certain wild orchids found along the edges of the Anatolian plateau, which happen to resemble the testicles of a fox. The name SALEP DONDURMA literally means "fox testicle ice cream." It was first made in Anatolia in the sixteenth century in a town called Maras in the Taurus mountains.

Hansen travels to Maras, in order to learn more about the tradition of making SALEP DONDURMA. There, he meets Mevlut Dogan, a well-dressed Turk with a four-foot wide handle-bar mustache, the tips of which are fastened to the shoulders of his suit jacket with brass safety pins. Dogan takes Hansen to the most elegant DONDURMA shop in town, where he is able to observe the whole process of making orchid ice cream from scratch. Three hundred years ago, donkeys brought snow and ice down from the mountains to use in freezing the DONDURMA. Now it is produced by stainless-steel machinery and gelato-makers imported from Italy. Once inside the shop owner's office, Hansen sees a framed photo of a young boy jumping rope with a length of orchid ice cream.

Reading something like this makes me want to hang around on our planet. Bear with me, please, when I tell you that orchid ice cream is the perfect antidote for the nausea I feel when observing my fellow human beings paint Hitlerian mustaches and Nazi swastikas across the lovely face of our president. Seeing that has the effect of making me want to fill my pockets with stones and walk straight into the river, like Virginia Woolf did, never to come back. Our president deserves so much better than defacement by an artless mob. If I had any wild orchid ice cream, I'd definitely offer him my plate.

Four Amigos Vacation with the Stars

My staycation (stay-at-home vacation) morphed into a bonafide travel VAcation last week, when I took to the road with three other friends, Simone Paterson, and Chico and Ellen Harkrader. We headed for a small town in West VA called Berkeley Springs, the country's very first spa, where we were booked for two nights at a B&B called Maria's Garden & Inn, with statues and paintings of the Virgin Mary everywhere.

Things got off to a somewhat patchy start, when Simone arrived at my house on Wednesday to pick me up, and her car freakishly locked itself shut, with the key, and her luggage, both inside. We stormed the barricades for several minutes, to no avail: the lock did not respond to curses, jiggling, or my own car-key clicker. There was no choice other than to head back from Blacksburg to Simone's house in Christiansburg and secure a duplicate key. I fretted all the way on the ride back, worrying that if the fault was somehow electrical, even the replacement key might not work. But then, it did. We arrived in Roanoke only about an hour late to the Harkrader's house where, after a rapid transfer of gear into their car, we finally set sail. (Have you ever tried to sail in a car? Skillful use of language allows you to do that, even if real circumstances do not.)

Just before we arrived in Berkeley Springs, Ellen announced that she had called the Inn to confirm our reservations, only to be told they were closed on Wednesdays--so, nobody would be around to greet us. Our room keys were in an envelope taped to the door. The inn turned out to have a lot of doors, but after some serious scrounging, we finally found the elusive keys. Our room, with two twin beds, had a dingy look (I thought), straight out of a Carson McCullers' novel. But since none of my fellow travelers had ever heard of Carson McCullers, this smarty-pants observation promptly fell flat on the thick Elvis Presley carpet. Our bathroom was in the hall. It had no shower, just an uninviting bathtub designed mostly for midgets. The good news, however, was finding out that there was a TV inside the room. Simone and I were both wildly keen not to miss both nights of the grand finale of our favorite program, "Dancing with the Stars." As it turned out, my own favorite contender, Janine, won the title of America's favorite dancer--a rare happening, since I am not usually in sync with the rest of the general public. Because of the TV show, however, which took up our two evenings, we failed to visit the vintage 1940's movie theater, still going strong with "The Transformers."

After tossing luggage into our respective rooms, we went out to investigate the town. Berkeley Springs is a tiny oasis in a confusing world; walking around, you will soon find the public baths where you can take the mineral waters in tubs large enough for up to three people. You will run into an acupuncture clinic, and a homeopathy lab where someone in a white coat is making homeopathic remedies behind a large pane of glass while you watch. You will visit a myriad of small shops, an antiques mall, and an ice cream parlor with sensational chocolate chocolate chip ice cream cones, have a massage, and finally come to rest in a local bar, whose drop-dead margueritas are among the best anyone ever had. Then, evening having arrived, you will dine out on seared tuna, while sitting outside on the porch of a restored house built in 1913, in a world-class restaurant with the funky name of "Lot 12." The restaurant is up three flights of stairs, high on a hill, and definitely not to be missed. Pricey, but worth every penny.

On Saturday, back in Blacksburg but still in residual party mode, I went to see "Julie and Julia," extending for another day the Tinkerbell effect of what was surely a magic holiday. Now, it's Monday, and back to business. Tomorrow the President will appear in person at a Town Hall rally in New Hampshire to answer questions about health care reform. However, as Nancy Pelosi wrote in USA Today, it is evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. These tactics, as have been reported, have included hanging in effigy one Democratic member of Congress in Maryland and protesters holding a sign displaying a tombstone with the name of another congressman in Texas, where protesters also shouted "Just say no!" drowning out those who wanted to hold a substantive discussion.

I have to wonder at what point our country will start taking the terrorist threat posed by conservatives seriously? Recently, NBC News got access to a memo about tomorrow's meeting, sent out by the New Hampshire Republican Volunteer Coalition to their supporters:

"NHRVC members and others,

Barack Hussein Obama will be arriving in Portsmouth on Tuesday to hold a STAGED "Town Hall Meeting", where he will essentially hand pick who the guests will be and what types of questions will be asked of him.

A MASSIVE protest rally is being organized just outside of the facility where Obama will be holding his "Town Hall Meeting" to promote his plan for a government takeover of your healthcare decisions.

There will be news media from all over the world at this event and it will be the ideal opportunity for us to tell the rest of the country exactly how NH voters feel about Obamacare (taxed/rationed healthcare). It will be the most important pro-liberty event of the year in NH and it is critically important that every one of us attend.

If you can, bring a sign that says something like, "OBAMACARE=TAXED/RATIONED HEALTHCARE", etc.

Come anytime between 8am-4pm (peak time will be 11am-4pm"

Now, in the oncoming dog days of summer, the lies are back like a plague of locusts--and I am wondering how will we all survive this escalating nihilism that permits anything and everything? My gut tells me we are going to sizzle in the fires of hell--because, when aggregated, these meetings are looking more and more like the dark edge of Dante's Inferno. Concern about health care reform begins to seem like small potatoes compared with the real threat of evil that is stalking our country, howling and sneering down the aisles, in desperate hope of creating as much chaos and destruction as possible.

Rorschaching the President

The above photo originally appeared on the official White House Blog after the highly publicized "beer summit." I came across it myself on Andrew Sullivan's blog, which cross-referenced a post written by Thomas Lifson, a conservative blogger on www.americanthinker.com, who proceeded to interpret the photo in a very negative light.

Submitting the much maligned photo to the "ink-blot test," I decided to offer my own interpretation of it here, because my interpretation is so very different to that of Lifson's--Lifson, as you'll see in a moment, declares Obama's body language in the photo as evidence of yet "another major Obama blunder." From there, he proceeds to leap off the deep end into a highly subjective, scorching attack on Obama.

When I look at this photo, what I see is Obama striding away from a job well done. He is leaving behind two men who, before he brought them together to share a beer in the White House, were unable to speak to each other in a respectful or civil way. Each felt maligned by their previous, most unfortunate encounter--which, like a fly stuck in fly paper, had managed to drag along with it the whole embattled culture of race relations in the U.S. After their White House encounter, however, we see the younger white policeman ever so gently helping the frail black professor navigate down the White House stairs. At least, that's what the body language in the picture says to ME: given the right isometrics, even the most hot-headed of adversaries can get their knickers untwisted. For which, thank you, Mr. President.

So, what does Thomas Lifson see, looking at the very same picture? Here are some bits from his utterly amazing riff:

"Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?...

"As some AT commentators point out, this picture becomes a metaphor for ObamaCare. The elderly are left in the back, with only the kindness of the Crowleys of the world, the stand up guys, to depend on. The government has other priorities..."

"That's why I think this image will have genuine resonance. It captures something that older Americans in particular can relate to. The President presses ahead with a program that will tell them to take painkillers instead of getting that artificial hip.

"At every stage of the entire Gates affair, Obama has... revealed that he automatically blames the police and thinks they really are stupid to begin with. It didn't trigger a single alarm bell in his mind as he figured out what to say...
The non-apology apology revealed an arrogant man who cannot do what honest people do: admit it when they make a mistake....

"But then in a small moment that nobody in the White House had the brains to understand, Obama goes and sends a body language message like this... he lets his true character show. This helps widen the level of doubt that Obama is the same guy a majority voted for. Those doubts can only grow...I predict that more and more Americans will become open to the argument that they have been had by a sophisticated and ruthless effort to foist a phony on America."

[Thomas Lifson www.americanthinker.com
Hat tip Rick Richman]

"Wow!" says Virgil, my alligator guru who has finally reappeared, after a long hiatus. "This is an odious stunt at best. I think any writer of dirtbag blubber like this must have tomahawk fever, causing him to leave behind such an oily residue." "Yuck!" he adds, stomping his paw, as if trying to squash a roach. "Only the oxiest of morons--somebody with polecat propensities whose liver contains a deadly poison--could jump to such icky and botched conclusions. This guy makes me want to run like a vegetarian at a pig roast." And then, with that final virtuosic flutter, Virgil departs again, to grill some eggplant.