Seasonal letter to friends

I (Julius) realize it’s become customary on certain occasions to send out a letter (same one) to all and sundry, friends, relatives, pets. To me, it feels like cheating. After all, it seems when you do this you’re not really addressing the recipient as an individual, so the “letter”, like a blog, is all about you, you, you.
Nevertheless we are willing to drop the Grinch attitude and run with the rest of the herd – so this is my attempt at the group seasonal letter. Some of you may be getting this in the post; if you are interested, and have access to the internet, you can look up a blog invented for just this purpose, with photos and art randomly scattered therein. The blog address is https://aherodias.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/173/.

So what have the Gordons been up to? Well, first of all we are trying to recover from the shock of the disintegrating economy and what is has done to us in particular. Sometimes Julius wakes up in the middle of the night shrieking the name of the Secretary of the Treasury, sweat dripping from his earlobes. No matter how many times we hear the most knowledgeable experts and analysts on NPR, the situation seems simple and clear to us: With the brazen compliance of the Congress, Henry Paulson has managed to transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer’s dollars to the richest people in the country, perhaps the world.

Of course our government has been doing this since about 1950 at least, but always in increments small enough to not awaken the rage of the nation.

In the past they have used the justification of national security, which allows them to take 500 billion or so a year and spend it entirely on the wars and preparation for wars that we are eternally creating. For some reason this year, after allowing Wall St. bankers and brokers to become absolutely glutted with unearned profits, our representatives have dropped all pretense. Now it’s simply: give our rich buddies and political supporters all the gold, without reservation, and fuck everybody else. Hence the banks paying their valued employees big time, with our money, buying up smaller banks and other properties, with our money, and never having to account for a cent. After all, Congress does not have the legislative ability to punish this behavior (even if they wanted to, that is).

Our solution for 2008: pay no taxes. That’s right, we are considering our tax refusal strategy and will work at getting as many of you involved as we can. We realize that this step may be easier for us than for you – after all, our income this year will probably amount to minus many years of gainful employment. The net will look like the sum of our Social Security checks, and that’s it. So they can throw our sorry ass in jail for the meager sum they would have gotten from us anyway.

On a somewhat more cheerful note, we just spent Christmas day cooking and serving food to the residents of the Primavera Foundation’s Men’s Shelter in Tucson. The graciousness of these men was compelling and their gratitude abundant. Makes you wonder why hundreds of thousands of men and women in this country are forced to live in charitable shelters or on the streets when they are so obviously willing to take on meaningful, dignified labor. Meanwhile the above-mentioned Wall Streeters are celebrating the holiday with extra millions in their individual pockets and the complete sympathy of their stooges in Congress and the White House.

Will it be any different under Obama? So far we are not seeing any signs, but one can always hope. Maybe he will understand that the way to build a contented nation is not by pissing away all of its wealth on military stuff – which has no positive multiplier effect in the economy – but by working as one large community to rebuild our infrastructure, provide decent schooling for our kids, building a renewable energy program nationwide, shrinking the armed services, implementing single payer national health care… well, you know the drill.

The other night we went to see Oliver Stone’s “W”, not a brilliant film but a decent attempt to show the Bush family from the human side. This started us thinking that perhaps W was the whole time at the mercy of his cabinet and trusted advisers. Perhaps Bush was unaware that in 1998 a number of men who would later be part of his presidential team sent an open letter to Bill Clinton, saying among other things: “In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.”  Signatories to this letter included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams, all members of the group called Project for a New American Century and therefore closely associated with Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Jeb Bush, also members of PNAC. You get the impression that W, along with Colin Powell, was suckered into pursuing the war.

Julius has been reading a lot of great essays by Gore Vidal. It’s really worthwhile, and quite depressing, to read a series that he calls his State of the Union Addresses, talks he gave while touring the US in 1975, 1988, and 2004. What’s fascinating is that over a thirty year period he examines exactly the same issues that face us today, including the environment, the military machine, loss of civil rights, growth of the national security state, transfer of wealth from the lower to the upper classes, lack of an independent press, influence of big money in the political arena, and so on. The only thing he missed was the 2008 financial meltdown. In any case, he has been proposing the same obvious and elementary solutions to our national problems and of course he has been totally ignored (or shut out) by our media and shunned by the power structure in Washington.

In addition to reading Julius has continued with painting, sometimes with satisfying results and often not. You can see a number of recent paintings, and older works, at http://www.aherodias.wordpress.com. Grace has been investing a lot of time in creating a livable environment for us, doing particularly beautiful work in the garden. We have put together a crude water collection system, improving it as we discover its faults, with the goal of minimizing the amount of city water we use. Right now we have a capacity of 280 gallons, which gets filled up pretty quickly during any rainstorm. In addition we will be landscaping to trap as much water in our yard as possible. We’re learning more and more about how to grow food in the Arizona climate and we have just joined the Tucson Organic Gardeners group. We have been composting every bit of unused food material for a year now and we may just be considering the use of a composting toilet. We’re told it only smells for the few seconds it takes to run out of the door and pour the contents of the bucket (?) into the composting area.

Today, Friday Dec. 26, we are anticipating the first freeze of the season. In a desperate attempt to save our tomatoes (yes, we still have tomatoes and eggplants and peppers growing), we draped all the plants with plastic sheets and put some electric lights inside the shelter for additional warmth. It has rained two out of the last three days so our water storage is at a maximum.

This morning on NPR we heard a report on the Middle East relating the recent hostilities between Gaza and Israel. The report stressed that Palestinians had fired more than 100 rockets into Israel and capped off this news item by mentioning that one of the rockets killed two Palestinian children. It was almost as if the NPR reporter was saying “See that? Palestinians kill their own children as well as trying to kill ours. Israel has no responsibility for this violence.” It’s interesting to compare this story with numerous reports about Israeli-Palestinian violence that appear regularly in Israeli newspapers. Selecting one at random: On New Years Eve 2007 Haaretz, the major Israel daily, summed up the year as follows: “It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed, according to the B’Tselem human rights organization, including the victims of Qassam rockets. Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was still a terrible year: 92 Palestinian children were killed (fortunately, not a single Israeli child was killed by Palestinians, despite the Qassams).”

Well, that was a quiet year. Yet one can’t help but notice that American papers rarely recount the death and destruction inflicted by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) against Palestinians. For example, B’Tseslem, the Israeli human rights group, reports that at least, 4897 Palestinians and 617 Israelis have been killed by hostile violence since September 29, 2000. An interesting ratio (about 8 to 1) not commented on much in this country. An even more interesting figure compares the number of Palestinian children killed by the IDF in that period – 952 – with Israeli children killed by Palestinians – 84. This works out to a ratio of 11 to 1. What does it say about the IDF that children accounted for nearly 10 percent of the numbers killed by Israeli’s military? What does it say about the State of Israel? About our government, which supports that state to the tune of around 3 billion dollars every year without fail?
It looks like it’s been a quiet year for us as well. Since the beginning of the year we have been hunkering down as we watch Julius’ 401K retirement fund dwindle into the ether. We have been really good with economizing, whereas before we never paid (much) attention to the price of restaurant food, or books, movies and other shows, etc.

If we eat out at all, maybe twice a month, it usually consists of stopping at a taco stand or picking up a $6 pizza. More typically we get our pizzas at the grocery discount store when the price drops below $3.

We have learned how to make our own baked beans – much better than commercial varieties and about one tenth the cost. We really pay attention to the electrical appliances and we keep the house temperature (during winter) at 69 or less during the day and 66 at night.  And we have discovered a really great discount grocery store in our very own neighborhood where we can get many of our food items at half the retail cost and sometimes much cheaper. For instance, this evening we bought packages of 4 veggie burgers at $1.49 per pack. We often get Tropicana OJ for $2. We haunt bakeries that sell day-old bread so we can enjoy good bread at a dollar a loaf. And we always go to the movies on Tuesday. Why, you ask? Because that’s the day we get to see the films we want at a buck a ticket!
The city of Tucson has a large number of free events going on, and many are very interesting, whether from a political, historical, or environmental aspect; so many, in fact, that we could occupy every evening of every week by going to one, and it’s sometime hard to choose.

Last week we attended a meeting of a “Beyond the Bleep” discussion group where we watched a film called ‘Everything is a Black Whole.’  This is part of a series, ‘Crossing the Event Horizon”, in which the physicist Nassim Haramein discusses in detail his theories about the dynamic structure of the universe. You can watch a 9-minute segment of the film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwUOHGug7O4 but to really understand what’s going on you have to see at least one DVD worth. One thing that comes out of this theory, which I won’t discuss at length, is the fairly creepy assertion that Earth may have seen visitors from another part of the universe about 10,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve heard all this before, but consider just these few facts about a single object: the Great Sphinx of Egypt, which was carved like a sculpture in a single piece out of the existing rock. The ruin of an ancient temple, built with stones quarried from this rock, contains stones that weigh more than 200 tons each (think of 200 Hummers for comparison). Another temple located some 200 miles away was also constructed using stones of the same size, quarried from the same location, fitted together with incredible precision, and raised more than 40 feet.
Here’s a photo to give you some idea of the construction. Every one of the stones in the picture weighs over 100 tons.

So we have to ask: If Egyptians 5000 years ago were able to move 200-ton stones 200 miles (no, this is not a high school algebra problem) and elevate them to 40 feet, exactly what kind of technology were they using?  Archeologists don’t think that Egypt even had the wheel at that time, let alone giant cranes and mining vehicles. How about a boat large enough to carry hundreds of tons of rock, and how would you get such stones in such a boat – then move them 12 miles from the river? Hmmmm… I leave you to put the rest of the puzzle together. And by the way, the films, more than 8 hours worth on 4 DVDs, contain many more pieces of interlocking physical evidence.

If  you’d like to hear more about this in detail, a good place to start is:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13MPOrC1WWs&feature=related. After listening to the good Dr. Harramein on these subjects yu may want to see earlier parts of his lectures in which he describes how the universe works from a physics point of view.
We also have places that cost money but are extremely worthwhile to visit. For instance, we bought a membership last year (when cash was available) in the Sonora Desert Museum, which holds specimens of all the animal and plant life you are ever likely to encounter in the Sonora area. You can geet up close and personal with mountain lions, wolves, bighorn sheep. You can watch hawks, owls and eagles flying and catching prey (out of the trainer’s hand).

We’ve spent a fair amount of time hiking around Sabino Canyon, which is only 20 minutes away by car (by the way, Julius overhauled his 37-year old bike but has only used it twice, although his original intent was to abandon the use of the car in town).

The Sabino Creek trail can be beautifully colored depending on the time of year.

For really great color we went to the Picacho Peak area after the spring rains started.

Upon leaving this area we got scolded by a rich white dude who claimed he “owned” the land we were crossing and where we had parked our car.  We didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his family so we cheerfully moved the car and grumbled about him (and capitalism in general) later on.

In June we flew east (our last “real” vacation) to go to the Peoples Music Network meeting in High Falls, NY. PMN, in caase you didn’t know, is an organization that Charlie King founded decades back with the mission of promoting music that furthers progressive political causes. That’s a long way of saying “folk music.” Over the weekend you get to play with and hear musical icons – Charlie, Pete Seeger, Holly Near, John Fromer, inter alia – as well as youngsters making their way up the folk music food chain.

After PMN weekend we traveled all over the great state of New York, from Niagara Falls to New Yawk City. In between we attended the Clearwater Music Festival. Not only was the music great but we got invited to go on a nighttime sailboat cruise on the Hudson River. We visited some friends and family along the way (Darwin and Donna, Gloria, Moshgan, George and Susan on Staten Island, Sharon in Delaware).

Sharon’s grandson Colin playing my guitar

We’re still hoping they will all come to visit us in Tucson, especially in the winter; after all, it was a balmy 31 degrees last night: hope the tomatoes survived. If you ever do the New York circuit yourself, don’t miss Letchworth State Park in the Finger Lakes district and the Corning Glass Museum.

One of the falls in Letchworth Park. (Don’t ask me why this photo is sideways. Just accept it)

Niagara Falls is awesome (you don’t hear me using that word much), especially from the Canadian side. Any sunshine at all produces a magnificent rainbow over the falls.

Bridge Over the Niagara River

In Niagara Falls, Ontario, you can visit a wonderful aviary where most of the birds walk and fly around at will in a very large space. I’ve never been so close to a Scarlet Ibis before:, especially a mom grooming her baby:

Back in Tucson we drove to Madera Canyon, about a 45-minute haul south. The place is a magnet for birdwatchers; you canat some seasons see 13 different kinds of hummingbirds, including this Rufous beauty.

Along the trail this youngster stopped to pose for us:

Apparently he liked hearing us sing.

During the presidential campaign season, Julius went canvassing on behalf of Dennis Kucinich (who didn’t have a shot in hell because of the way the newspapers and especially the national networks shut him out of the debates). Doing that activity he made a friend of Tad Beckworth and his partner Alanna Randall. Suffice it to say that we truly enjoyed their company, their positive outlook on life, and their various talents. So of course, just as we felt the friendship deepening they announced their intention of moving to Portland, Oregon. Now they are gone, leaving a little  hole in our life. Ain’t it always the way?

After Dennis fell Tad and Julius picked up the ball for Ralph Nader, for which we got a lot of grief from many people who were anxious to prevent the election of another Republican. While I understand their feelings, and while I am glad Obama was successful, I still want to know: How long does one have to go on accepting second or third best, especially when these “lesser evils” are so much a part of the political establishment that has ruled this country. For years I have argued that there is only one political party in this country. Gore Vidal has named it well: The Property Party. I think that at least since 1950 you could also call it the National Security Party. They represent the wealthiest class in the US, the “mainstream” corporate media (who do not represent the mainstream of American culture), faithfully spout the ruling part’s line, and they dedicate their lives to making sure that those wealthiest folks get ever wealthier at the expense of the rest of us.

As I write, the Israeli Air Force is still busily bombing and strafing Gaza, the most densely populated area in the world, using weapons such as cluster bombs. These cute little devices are designed to throw hundreds of smaller “bomblets” which then spray shrapnel randomly in all directions. Obviously the IDF is “targeting terrorist strongholds”, but if you can’t get a terrorist a few hundred civilians will serve to terrorize the populace. Who knows, they might voluntarily leave Judea and Samaria to their rightful owners. By the way, the IDF dropped millions of these bomblets in the last Lebanon war.

Okay, I think I have said enough for one seasonal letter. Your comments and ripostes are welcome, especially if you disagree with any of my opinions. I hope to see you all soon.

Happy New Year!

Julius