The Nature of Things

In Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." All of Anne Tyler's families are different and that is certainly true of the Tull family that we meet in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant . We meet the family initially as its irascible matriarch, Pearl Tull, lies dying at age 85. Caught between life and death, she is beset by memories and by regrets. She struggles to tell Ezra, her favorite son, that he should have had an alternate mother, but she is unable to form the words. Her memories take her back to the time, some 30 years before, when her husband, Beck Tull, deserted her, leaving her to raise their three children on her own. Beck was a traveling salesman and his children were used to him being away from home, so none of them noticed any difference at first. Their mother refused to tell them they had been deserted. She pretended - for years! - that he was just on another business trip....

The governor of our state, who was last heard from threatening to secede from the United States, is suddenly doing what he has made fun of other states for doing: He's asking for federal assistance to handle our drought and wildfires . Of course, the truth is Texas has been getting federal assistance of one kind or another all along and will continue to get it no matter how much of a hissy-fit the governor and legislature throw. But to hear Rick Perry tell it Texas stands alone with help from no one. Today, Perry stuck his foot in it even more by complaining about President Obama showing concern about Alabama and the other states so hard hit by this week's tornadoes - states that have lost over 300 lives as well as inestimable property damage. How come he's concerned about all those states and not Texas, Perry wonders? He sounds like a jealous fourth grader. Really, how petty can you get? Pretty damned petty, not to mention clueless, if your name is Rick Perry.

There was an interesting article on the DailyKos website yesterday about Earth's climate . It was published before the latest and most devastating round of tornadoes that hit the South, killing (at last count) more than 200 people, injuring many more and virtually destroying some small towns. The timing of the publication thus proved ironic. The article talks about the warnings that have been given repeatedly by climate scientists over the last 30 years or so about what we can expect from global climate change, especially if we continue to refuse to acknowledge our part in it and take steps to reverse some of the damage we have done. The bottom line is that we can expect to see a dramatic increase in extreme weather - storms, droughts, floods, extended heat waves. The planet's normal climate regulators, such as polar ice caps and the troposphere, are being overcome, damaged and even destroyed by Earth's unnatural warming, with disastrous results. One always has to ackn...

So Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate has been released to the public and is now available for anyone to examine. That means there will be no more questioning of his legitimacy as president, the silly season can end, and we can get on with discussing our serious problems, right? Wrong. The people who questioned the legitimacy of Obama's presidency and his citizenship will still find reasons to question it. Why? Come close and let me whisper in your ear. BECAUSE IT HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN, STILL IS, AND EVER WILL BE ABOUT HIS RACE . The people who have questioned his citizenship are racists pure and simple. They cannot stand the thought of a person with dark skin being president. Do you really think if the situation had been a white president with fair skin and blonde hair whose mother was from North Dakota and whose father was an immigrant from England and who was born in, oh, say Alaska in 1962, they would ever for a mom...

So the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the Paul Ryan budget plan which would destroy Medicare as we know it and then they went on break. They went home to meet their constituents in town hall meetings. Perhaps they had been reading the Washington Post or watching the inside-the-Beltway pundits on the cable news programs and so expected to be greeted as conquering heroes. Those boos and pointed questions from angry voters must have come as quite a shock to their delicate psyches. Wherever the people who voted for this draconian plan have met the public, they have found that people do not like what they did. They are asking the congresspeople questions like, "Why are you trying to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the poor, the children, while at the same time you are giving additional tax breaks to the richest people in the country?" Apparently, the congresspersons are finding it difficult to answer that question, as well the...

I didn't watch the first season of " Treme" on HBO last year, but my family did, and they kept nagging and nagging me, telling me how great it was and how much I would love it until, as the second season of the show was looming, I gave in and took to HBO On Demand and watched all ten episodes of the first season in just a few days. All things considered, I think I was smart to view it this way. I'm not really much of a television junkie and I can't claim to have watched other David Simon series like "The Wire" or "Homicide" so I came to "Treme" as a Simon-virgin, so to speak. Having now watched the first season and the first episode of the second season, I might want to go back and look at some of his earlier work. "The Wire" springs immediately to mind. For the uninitiated, "Treme" is set in New Orleans. The first season's episodes begin three to four months after Katrina. The city is in ruins. So are t...

Just in time for Easter, I've finished Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King. The non-canonical Gospel of Judas, which is the topic of this book, was purportedly found in Egypt in the 1960s or 1970s. Its provenance is somewhat shaky, but the only known copy of the work, in the Coptic language, has been carbon-dated to around 280 of the Common Era, give or take 60 years. It is believed that this is a translation of an earlier Greek work which was in existence at least in 180 C.E. when the influential Christian priest, Irenaeus, spoke out against it and other writings that offered an alternative view of the circumstances and meaning of Jesus' life and death. Elaine Pagels and Karen King are two respected scholars of Gnosticism, the philosophical tradition from which the Gospel of Judas springs. They explain how and why the author of the work (who, obviously, was not Judas Iscariot but apparently someone sympathetic ...