Barbeque The Cherry

OH (overheard) at work: “You can’t have a barbeque without cherries.”

Um…..yes. Yes, you can. I’ve had literally hundreds of barbeques without a cherry in sight. If I were to make a list called “Essential things to bring to a barbeque”, “cherries” would be far from the top of the list. It would be located somewhere around “scuba gear” and “sharpened pencils”, way down near the bottom of the list.

OH at work: “Knowing, caring, and understanding are not two, but three different things.”

I feel like I have to elaborate on yesterday’s post.

(And lo, the multitudes cried out, “Yes! Explain thyself!”)

Firstly, and primarily, there really isn’t any other country in the world that lets you natter on like this. Yes, Western countries have most of the same degree of personal freedom that Americans do, and I guess, when you say “America is the freest country in the world,” you should, for the sake of completeness, say that “America and the Western democracies are the freest region in the world.” To paraphrase the great Lewis Black, “nowhere else in the world lets an asshole like me talk like this.” I love my country the way I love my wife-with all flaws clearly in view and acknowledged, but overcome by a deep, abiding respect for the larger beauties.

You can go on and on about America’s flaws. And people have. And whoa, do we have some doozies.

We never really came to grips with either the Native American or African American genocides. We still haven’t really figured out how to integrate capitalism, with its clear winners and clear losers, and Judeo-Christian humanity, with its clear absence of winners and losers. We still haven’t figured out how to deal with the effluent from a modern industrial economy.

One of the most heartening thing I have learned in my reading in history is that the Founders, and really all of our ancestors, saw these problems and acknowledged them. They didn’t go so far as to solve them, naturally. Then again, neither have we. But they didn’t (not ALL of them) completely ignore them, put them on a shelf and put their fingers in their ears, yelling “la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!”

They were men. They dealt with things the best they could. As baseball historian Bill James puts it, we should look upon their failings with sympathy, in hopes that future generations will look upon ours the same way. There are plenty of books willing to expose hypocrisy and corruption and evil in American history, but to focus on just the dark passages misses the point.

I react just as violently against the sunny, Lee Greenwood, aint everything grand school. I shrink away from celebrating patriotism because it has become, in this day and age, a de facto denial that there has ever been anything wrong in this “shining city on a hill”. I don’t know how to express the mixed blessing of the accident of my birth in one of the richest parts of the wealthiest nation on earth. I hate war, but I love military history and was raised and educated by my father, who worked for a major defense contractor for most of his life.

I am reading “The Company”, a marvelous novel about the CIA. It is historical fiction, but has real people in it. It dovetails nicely with this discussion, as does this week’s “Left, Right and Center”. So many millions, throughout the years, have been trying to make the right decisions with the imperfect and incomplete information in front of them.

The moderator on “LRC”, Matt Miller, points out, rightly, that so often right wing patriotism obscures or denies flaws, while left wing patriotism obscures or denies strengths. Robert Scheer rightly comes back with the observation about how many times Republicans who didn’t serve, or barely served, (Nixon, Reagan, Bush II) had no problem calling into question the patriotism of Democrats who did (McGovern, Carter, Kerry). Military service is not the sole arbiter of patriotism, but to call a vet who faced the bullets unpatriotic while you didn’t is pretty galling.

I was watching “Independence Day”, again, last night, and it occurred to me that so many films where the president, or symbols of the president, were defiled or destroyed were made during the 1990s. As if the fact that Clinton was president gave them license to mock the office or something like that. Or perhaps, more simply, it was simply that the first young, vital president since Kennedy gave scriptwriters the inspiration of a president being anything other than an old man.

In New York, Boston wasted a fine start by Bat Masterson and fell to New York, 2-1. They loaded the bases in the ninth, but Mariano Rivera shut the rally down to seal the loss. Tampa plays at home against the Royals tonight, so if the Naughty Fish win, Boston will be 4 games out. Tim Wakefield, who has both owned the Yankees at time and gotten lit up by them at times, pitches tomorrow night for Boston against Joba the Hutt.

There was an interesting point on the Slate Cultural Gabfest-perhaps George Carlin doesn't seem as funny anymore because his influence is so pervasive that it is part of the environment.