The Living and The Dead

WARNING: THIS POST HAS PHOTOS OF DEAD MARINE MAMMALS

One morning last week before the fires, smoke and haze the sun rose in an orange-red sky. We hadn't seen a sunrise like this for most of the summer. Not because we weren't awake, but because the marine layer of fog has been unbelievably persistent. It hangs around the coast until noon or later every day, burns off for a few hours, and then blows back in around 8:00 pm, cooling things off for a perfect sleeping chill. The tomatoes aren't happy about it, even the San Francisco Fog variety grows a tough skin in this weather. But, that's summer on the central coast.
Roger and I didn't want to have to tell you, but RoRo died August 6th. The stranding coordinator responded to my inquiry and wrote, "The cause of death was a trauma wound that caused him to be septic." We really had hoped he would survive. His death made me wonder, though, if our human interventions into their wild lives is a good thing. Who are we to intervene? Put them in weird buildings, probe and prod them? When they die, they do so in places utterly foreign to them. Wouldn't the beach have been a better place to wash up? Really.
I can't stop myself from thinking about this stuff: The role humans have on the planet from the very smallest to the biggest wrecks. We sure seem to make a mess of it. The road to hell and all of that... I know it is easy to argue that had RoRo survived, it would have been worth it. That may be true, but I'm not sure I know how to think for a sea lion. Suddenly we are on his death panel, considering his end of life directives. Is this dominion with a benevolent face? I simply don't know.
There's something about being on the coast, though, that really puts life and death right out there for you to take a good long look. One day we see these animals in pursuit of their prey, rampaging through the water, and gulping other sea life like there's no tomorrow. And the next day there's a large dead sea lion floating just off shore, or a young porpoise dead on the sand. I don't know any other place where large lifeless mammals show up, and demand your attention.
And yes, we would like to protect every last one of these animals from the wreck human contact, but I suddenly wonder if that means protecting them from even the very best of our intentions.

We know this is a touchy subject. For the record, we would stop on the highway and try to pick up an injured bobcat or coyote that had been hit by a car. We would want to disentangle a whale from fishing nets. We utterly admire the work Julie Zickefoose does with injured hummingbirds, and Dave Dorsey and The Bird Learning Center does with eagles and other raptors. I'm trying to grasp the subtle difference between taking sick marine mammals off the beach and to the hospital, and rescuing creatures who would have otherwise been well if not for our inadvertent traps, boat propellers, crushing automobiles, reflective windows, high tension wires, and poisoned earth. There's something ... there's something I can't quite put my finger on yet that leaves me with discomfort about a sick marine mammal dying in a building after being driven up a 100 miles up a highway in the back of a pick up truck. It makes me wonder what we are we doing, and why.

Variations on a Theme

While we're soaring with the exuberance of imagining some warmer sunny clime in our future, and simultaneously stressing about the cat's health and all of the packing we're going to have to do very quickly, we take a long look out the window and watch the various creatures deal with their place in the hierarchy of the wild.
Several beautiful Violet-Green Swallows arrived on the same day last week. Only one will get this nest box. For hours they took turns perched on the opening and denying access to the others.
We hadn't seen a Lesser House Finch in about two years. Most male House Finches are red. The yellows are those which don't have access to the highest quality food. Note this young gent is eating seed in the driveway gravel while the reds take turns on the seed feeder.
I've been reading about mallard behavior. Every piece I've read says that males leave the females when she starts sitting on the nest. That's it, relationship over. Here's what this drake does, day after day, he comes here alone and sits. He quacks and waits. He flies off, and he returns. Only when she comes, the one with restless wing syndrome (thanks for that description, mojoman) does he rest. An aggressive alpha male has tried to take over the pond. The mellow beta drake, and I with my human beta self asserted, chase that interloper off. This drake waits for her, and the lone female we call Ms. Gloria Steinem. The three of them rest all evening by the pond.
Stick Robin shows up a robust and healthy male. We secretly fantasize that he's the father of many of the young robins we've seen over the years. He's the eloquent teacher of how to survive being dealt a lousy hand. (Stick Robin photographed on Sunday. He looks good, doesn't he?)

Update: Bonsai's health is definitely improving. He's not happy about his new diet, but he's adjusting. He's even dealing with the daily dosing of antibiotics. We are surprised and heartened by how much he trusts us, even when we are making his life miserable.

The house inspection is scheduled for next Monday at 9:00 am. One more hurdle to clear on the road out of here.

We're not saying anything about politics these days. You know us. You know what we think. We were reminded the other day about Jon Stewart's tirade on Crossfire a few years ago, when he shouted how Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson's antics were killing our country. I think we're about due for another tirade about how almost all of media is killing our democracy. Perhaps this tirade will need all of our beta voices together. Just a thought.

dots

do they connect?

in the aftermath of the tragedy on 9/11 we heard much criticism that someone (?) failed to "connect the dots." apparently the requisite dots existed, but in a variety of agencies which did not facilitate connection of their respective dots. here are a couple of dots, with two views of each, that seem to beg me to connect them, though they appeared in public at differing times.

in the first dot, there goes the money. i picked just two stories about this because it has been reported rather widely, if sporadically, over many years.

'WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.

An inspector general's report said the U.S.-led administration that ran Iraq until June 2004 is unable to account for the funds."

from cnn.com here.

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another view of the dot.

a pallet load of bux.

"The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee."

from an article by david palister in the guardian on 2/8/2007. the picture is from this article. thank you Guardian Unlimited.

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now the second dot. does the money reappear? does this dot have a line from the previous dot?

"There’s a lot of pools of black money around, a lot of money. Undoubtedly, some was, I’m told, came from Iraq. That is, as you know, there were hearings the other week that showed $9 billion in Iraqi oil money mysteriously disappeared and was unaccounted for. Some of that money was washed around. There was also a lot of money found after Saddam fell. We found several caches of huge amounts, you know, hundreds of millions, and billions of dollars in some cases, of cash. We also found money in various ministries. There’s no, really, accountability, and a lot of it could have ended up in black pools. It’s just not clear where the money came from, and it’s not supposed to be clear. What you do is you wash the money in. You get it to certain people."

seymour hersh, from this interview on 2/28/2007 with amy goodman

the context of the quote is a long explication of his suspicions that our own government, or the shadow government run by cheney, is funding sunni jihadist groups in many countries in the middle east as a counter to (shia) iran.

if you're feeling chipper and want to be depressed read the whole thing. or go here to read hersh's full article on this subject.

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and another view of the second dot.

"WASHINGTON — A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads on his whereabouts, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of Al Qaeda operatives and money into Pakistan's tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity."

the lede of an article by greg miller in the la times, may 20, 2007

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i had noticed that a bunch of cash went missing a while back in iraq, and that now our own government reports that money is flowing from iraq to al qaeda in pakistan, but i had not read hersh's piece before i started looking for sources for this post. after doing so i smacked myself upside the head and said in my best homer simpson voice "DOH!" so the cia, or other "elements" of our government, took some of the dough to fund their secret operations. does that sound familiar? is ollie north catholic? does he shit in the woods?

so now, the enemy (sunni al qaeda) of our enemy (shia iran) is our friend. that worked out so well in afghanistan where the enemy (the taliban) of our enemy (russia) was our friend. until they weren't. but wait!!! aren't al qaeda and the taliban friends? are we friends-by-proxy with the taliban now? ok. i'll stop with this line of lunacy.

it looks to me that we are financing those who attack us because they hate us for our freedoms, with cash we threw around in iraq like beads at mardi gras in new orleans, some from iraqis, and maybe even some stolen by some part of our own ruling cabal.

who would benefit from permanent war, cold or hot? who has already benefitted?

Violence: Our Inhumanity

I've been thinking about violence...

...ever since I read Phantom Scribbler's poignant posts about a woman named Helen Hill, but also because Roger and I have become addicted to the HBO series Six Feet Under. Normally we would never describe that show as violent, but on Saturday night we watched Season 4, Episode 5. It's the one where David, one of the lead characters, is brutalized and tortured by a psychopath for several harrowing and unsettling hours.

Roger and I don't watch much TV. But when we do take a trip around the dial on the remote control we are often dismayed by the amount of violence we see. Violence is everywhere-- the news, documentaries, drama. In one format or another there is both the shock and celebration of it in our culture. We even saw an advertisement for a violent Christmas movie. (WTF is that about?) We click along, never stopping long enough to see who is behind the gun, the knife, the bomb. It's simply everywhere, on every channel. Murder and mayhem.

On Saturday we settled in for a little DVD escapism. We had already spent the rainy afternoon watching the original version of The Manchurian Candidate (excellent, but strangely, purposefully, and impersonally violent). By 9:00 pm we were ready for our Six Feet Under fix, but fifteen minutes into it, the horror of random personal violence came trampling through in the role of unbidden apocalyptic marauder. Through David's character we see how unsuspecting innocents always are, not believing what is actually befalling them, and how hopeful that somehow rational thinking and appeals to humanity will spare them. But isn't it the epitome of violence that the victim be utterly de-humanized, that pleasure be derived from inflicting suffering on others.

I left the room. I could not watch. Roger was able to sit through the entire episode albeit with trepidation and horror. Afterwards, we wondered if the fact that I am a survivor of a violent crime simply leaves me less able to watch the kind of violence inflicted on others. But I don't think that's it-- because I have always responded viscerally to depictions of violence, long before I myself fell victim.

Roger adds:
how could i watch david be assaulted, battered, and terrorized?

the first idea that occurs to me is that i have never been in such a situation. the last fight I was in was in the fourth grade. since then i have not been threatened physically in a way that left no out. i have encountered very bad people, but never in a confrontational way. while it was scary to be in their presence, and i slid away as fast as possible, nothing bad happened. i have no "sense memory," as the actor's studio says, of being scared shitless in the face of a brutal psychopath, or even a bully, to say nothing of being punched and kicked, so i think i can watch some forms of violence in a semi-detached way. not that my heart doesn't race, not that i don't feel fear and anger, and not that i enjoy watching, but i can hold back from investing myself entirely. my compassion for david and my curiousity, or need, to find out what happened, carried me through the scenes of physical violence.

i like drama. not melodrama. i appreciate that someone, mostly a large group of someones, goes to the trouble of producing a story, a play, a movie. it's a lot of work, so i try to "take the trip" with a willing suspension of disbelief. modern film and television portray "realism" quite well. the illusion of violence works, so i pick my "trips" carefully. i would survive a viewing of a slasher movie, but for what? an adrenaline rush? a bad one? and the hangover? i'll take my adrenaline rushes from my own physical adventures that don't involve hurt or pain or humiliation on anyone's part, thank you.

But we wonder, what role does theatrical depictions of violence serve in our culture? Why do you suppose there is so much of it? It is truly baffling to us, and we would love to hear why you think it is so ubiquitous. We may have been watching a two-year old episode of some HBO series, but it coincided with the real-life violent death of a fine woman, wife, and mother. What does it mean for all of us to live with the subtext of violence that permeates much of our life and popular culture?

When I left the room where the DVD was playing, I turned on the stereo and played old Moody Blues singing "Om." It just seemed like the right thing to do.