Archive for March, 2010

President Obama Finds His Bark

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

One of the standard plots in fiction can be named, “Reaching Maturity”. One of my favorite examples of this shows up in the Disney dog movie, “Chihuahua”.

The little, lost doggie protagonist spends the first act meekly needing all kinds of help. In Act Two she falls in with a band of free-range dogs who tell her to grow a backbone, channel her inner bitch, in a word, “Find your Bark!” In Act Three she finally emits a deep, commanding “Rowff!”  that literally brings the walls crashing down on the bad guys.

Similarly, President Obama spent his first year in office rather puppily hoping that Congress would fling him a nice, fuzzy tennis ball of a health care plan along broadly pleasant but dismayingly vague lines. The effort left Congress exhausted and stalemated by the end of 2009. The Senate enacted one bill, the House another. Even the most domesticated Democratic poodles in the media despaired of any resolution. 

As the new year began, the President seemed anxious to change the subject. Saturday Night Live parodied his 2010 State of the Union address in a skit where the Obama character tells Congress, “Health Care? I could go either way on that. Pass something. Or not. Whatever.”

Suddenly, Rowff! Barak Obama became Bark Obama. The health care bill moved ahead of everything on his agenda. He took a risky political decision to enact a bill by a divisive parliamentary maneuver ironically named, “reconciliation.” Even more, he took pains to be seen as the whip hand in the backroom bargaining. He took the bill away from the Congressional leadership, made it his own, and rammed it through.

Again suddenly, Rowffr! the President steps into television’s bully pulpit and double-dog-dares Republicans to just go ahead and try overturning his health bill if they think they have the necessary bite. Put your teeth where your growl is! he taunts them. Then Rowffrrr!! he flies off to Afghanistan over the weekend to wag his nagging finger of shame at the government there. Then he jets back to sign the health bill in Virginia on Tuesday. He’s There! He’s Here! He’s Everywhere!

And he’s found his bark.

I saw an opinion piece today calling health care Mr. Obama’s “Air Traffic Controller Moment”. The writer recalled how Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for illegally striking during his first year in office. It stunned labor organizations, galvanized pro-business lobbies in Washington, and transformed him from an affable but ineffective father-figure into a decisive, if feared executive. His supporters and opponents alike took Reagan’s political agenda seriously after that.

The writer notes that Republicans did lose Congressional seats in the midterm election that followed a year later, as typical for the party holding the White House. But Reagan’s standing with the public improved afterward to the point that he was re-elected overwhelmingly with almost 60% of the vote.

Is it just me, or does Mr. Obama really seem energized by his recent political triumph? Republicans hoping to sideline him into permanent irrelevance by blocking passage of the health bill should listen to the bark. They need to get over their cognitive dissonance and prepare to campaign on the merits of constructive policies where they have some chance to win.

The Congressional Republicans’ strategy of unified defiance failed them. It will not serve the GOP hereafter to remain monotonously anti-Obama. Their best hope–one with a reasonable chance of success–is to offer the public a demonstrably loyal opposition with a credible agenda and inspiring leaders capable of delivering the goods. Get out ahead of the President’s agenda and push a positive platform of their own. So far, they have proven unable. Further truculence on their part would only grant Mr. Obama a meaningful lead in his own bid for re-election.

Bill Clinton, the former President, reportedly advised Mr. Obama, “I learned a lot about this job during the first year.”  Truth told, that is probably the only way to learn. The lesson in this case was that the leader must sooner or later wield his power and damn the cost. Seems to me that Mr. Obama knows that now.

We should all go back and re-read his campaign speeches. Pay attention. Suppose he really meant what he said. Get ready for a lot more of it to move through Congress. Rowff!

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How To Squeeze a Sponge

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

“Wipe with a damp sponge,” said the Housekeeping Tip, as I glared at a smudge of jelly on the tabletop. It had an oil-finished surface that should not really get wet, but a dry rag would not wipe it clean

“Okay,” said I. Now, to my mind damp means uniformly moist but dry enough that no water leaks out. That implies first soaking it wet then squeezing. The difficulty is to coax all the excess water back out of the thing.

A hasty squeeze will fail. An impudent spurt always lurks within a quick-squeezed sponge waiting to squirt upon the worst possible place. It takes time to make a sponge be just damp.

Squeeze hard–and hold it there. Water drains and drips, first in a rush, then a steady flow, then slowly tapers off. Relax the grip too soon and the sponge will slurp up any loose water on the hand, with intent to splatter.

I glimpse the physics of this just slightly. It has to do with surface tension and turbulence in fluids. Even dry materials are affected. For example, sand does not dump all at once out of a bucket but flows like water, complete with last dribbles and a clinging residue.

Turbulence makes everything take longer than we think it should. Even thought itself can push ahead only so fast before it bogs down in distraction and stress. We are stuff of the world we occupy and subject to its limitations.

At a deep level turbulence evades human understanding, the way that frogs’ brains cannot compass the concept of a wall. Encountering one in the garden they will jump and bump against it instead of going around; there is just no way for them to know better.

One of the 20th Century’s great physicists, Werner Heisenberg, originated the Uncertainty Principle that contributed to formulating the quantum theory. Even such a deep thinker as he felt baffled by turbulence and, presumably, the time it takes to squeeze a sponge. He is famously quoted explaining what he will do upon entering Heaven and meeting God. “I will ask Him two questions: why Relativity? and why Turbulence? I expect He will have an answer for the first.”

My guess would be that turbulence is necessary in order for Time to exist. Here is what I mean. Water stored in a sponge and strength pent up in the hand muscles of an arm represent imbalanced concentrations of energy in nature. So are people, and planets, stars and galaxies.

Unfortunately, the space-time continuum dislikes having its energy puddle about so unevenly; it wants to be, well, uniformly damp. The process by which such concentrations smooth out is called Entropy. It is also known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that energy flows naturally in one direction only: outward from concentrated conditions, but never back in. We depend upon it; nothing moves in this world without a flow of energy.

However, the ultimate end result of Entropy is nothingness. When all energy rests in perfect balance, the world stops. My point is that if not for turbulence all the imbalances in the universe would settle in an instant. There would be no time, literally. Therefore no space, no place, no us.

Turbulence is why squeezing a sponge takes time. While it drips in your grip consider how limitations make desirable things possible. The tabletop–and the cosmos–will look better if you do.

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The Sourdough Life in the 21st Century

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

We U.S. Baby Boomers have become food voyeurs. Our interest in good food consists mainly of eating it, with a strong secondary interest in watching it made.

Julia Child’s French cooking TV program showed us the way. I am happy that last year’s movie, “Julie and Julia”, motivated many people to purchase Childs’s cookbook and examine its recipes. Perhaps the family dinner will taste better in America from now on, on average, so that’s a good thing.

Yet most families will still gather around what comes out of cans and boxes bought at the store.

We Boomers vowed as youths to reject all uniform outcomes of modernity as synthetic, and reassert the individual as a conscientious actor bound by sentient consent to the natural world. “Give us simple food, lovingly hand-made from pure ingredients!” we cried. (Our downfall was to emphasize mostly the “give us” part of that. We want consistently wonderful food to come on demand, without effort. Which is how we got Starbucks. But let us rant another day.)

The natural world does not reciprocate our mythological impulses toward beneficial cooperation; it would just as soon eat us, raw. Making food from scratch consumes effort, imposes schedules, and too often fails to attain its objective. It requires mastery of skills that no longer pass from parent to child in the normal course of family life. Who has time for that, anyway?

The answer, of course, is to take the time and invest it with directed effort, to move food preparation from an appetitive utility into a meaningful activity. This is what I mean by the “sourdough life.” Call it a hobby, then, or an amateur pursuit. I borrow Michael Chabon’s assertion of the French meaning: lover; enthusiast. The sourdough life seeks forgotten food skills for the love of it.

It is a learning-centered life. Not the kind of Tuesday-night dabblers’ classes where one puts the finishing touches on a pre-packaged product, however. Craft results from study and long practice. Our modern sourdough learns from teachers if he is lucky, or books if available. Paying attention to the work is another good way to learn.

What prompted this little digression was a breakthrough with a recent batch of corn hominy. I have learned to make it well enough for my own food. Now I want to make it look attractive. And easy, a la Julia. The breakthrough? Letting the corn soak overnight in its solution of pickling lime and water. This really loosens the outer coating that we want to get off. Then warm it back up, don a pair of heavy duty kitchen gloves, reach in there and mush it around pretty aggressively. After five to ten minutes or so, stop when most of the kernels are nice and clean enough for what you have in mind.  Rinse thoroughly, pick out the unattractive few bits, and there you are.

I got the idea from an oral history of a Native American named Buffalobird Woman, written down in 1910. In the book, Native American Gardening, she details the yearly agricultural cycle of an extended family. Their standard practice was letting the corn hominy soak overnight. Bing! bright idea.

The sourdough life is not about rejecting the present for some presumptively better, earlier time. It is about recognizing the joy of craft, knowing the way of materials, reaching back for the wisdom people used to own when self-sufficiency was necessary, but carrying it forward into the present day through a greater sense of personal engagement in realizing the quality of our lives.

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