Charter in Mustard

Photo by R. E. Younger, Terra Nova Photography

Dear Anonymous

The thing about posting a blog is you never know if anyone's going to read it or not. Which is nice in a way, because when you write something decent you can feel glad it's out there for the world to see, and when you post something you worry is a bit too revealing or schmaltzy or cynical, you can convince yourself no one's likely to read it anyway.

But then you start to get feedback, comments left in response to your posts, and you realize people really are reading this thing. Cool! Except it seems there's an underworld of characters out there who spend a lot of time surfing around looking for statements of opinion that differ from their own, and then they pounce like an alley cat and eviscerate the poor blogger with a nasty comment or two, usually demonstrating in the process that they've missed the whole point.

That in itself, while not very nice, I can live with. Hey, it's still a free country after all. I can say what I want, and so can you. The problem is these hit and run commentators never leave their names. Or else they leave a stupid made-up name like Piso Mojado. So you wonder. Who really wrote this? Was it anyone I know? Someone who just doesn't want me to know they really have such opposite opinions? Maybe it was someone being paid by the radical right to ferret out dissenters and ambush them right there on their own blog pages? Or was it some angry survivalist holed up somewhere in the middle of the South Dakota prairie, surfing the Web for random blog comments while taking breaks from writing his or her grand manifesto? In the end of course it doesn't really matter who they were, because you already know everything you need to know about them, which is, they're gutless.

So far, these anonymous posters have seemed to pop up most often in response to comments I've made about the Bush Administration. They seem to think I'm a bad American for criticizing the president. They've even accused me of hating my country. This strikes me as bizarre. I don't hate my country. I love my country. What I hate is what George Bush and his posse have done to it--including fostering this crazy idea that conscientious dissent is unpatriotic. On the contrary, this nation was founded on the concept that citizens should be free to think and express their own thoughts, even if they run counter to government policies. Being a "good" American does not mean you must support the government no matter what. That's not democracy; that's totalitarianism. Being a "good" American, I believe, can sometimes compel a citizen to stand up against the government, because the government can be wrong, can lose sight of the goal, can even diminish the liberties America stands for. When that happens, and I believe we are seeing it happen right now, "good" Americans have a patriotic duty to stand up and say so.

By the way, if my anonymous detractors think I'M being harsh on the president, they should read Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times. Now there is a courageous, concerned American. I salute him for stating our current national dilemma so honestly and so well. Maybe I should send him an anonymous compliment.

Update, May 2, 2006: Turns out the L.A. Times agrees with me about anonymous posters, as one of their Pulitzer-winning reporters has discovered the hard way.

The Truth About Freelancing

People tend to glamorize the concept of freelance writing as a career. It's an understandable fallacy, stemming from the word itself. The concept of freedom in your work is so appealing when you're committed to the nine to five routine. There are advantages both ways of course. The salaried employee may enjoy less personal freedom, but paychecks arrive on a regular basis, along with paid vacations and sick time, 401Ks and health insurance. Or to put it in the words of the late John Keats, a wildly successful freelancer during the 1950s and 60s and one of my favorite writing teachers, the trade-off for the nine-to-five lifestyle is "all the benefits that slaves enjoy." Keats was a marvel of self-discipline and productivity, who churned out a series of fantastic nonfiction books in addition to all his magazine articles and made enough money to raise a family of four children and even buy an island in the St. Lawrence River between New York and Canada. His philosophy of quitting his job to begin his work has always inspired my inner freelancer, and I've been haunted by his onetime admonition to me: "You should never hold an office job." What he meant by that was he felt I should write. Sometimes, I can believe those long-ago words and take courage in the power of possibilities. But in reality, the writing life is not always so idyllic. Yesterday I came across this piece by the very talented Sarah Hepola that sums it up so well I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

April Is the Greenest Month

Photo by R.E. Younger, Terra Nova Photography

When in April the sweet showers fall and pierce the drought of March to the root, and all the veins are bathed in liquor of such power as brings about the engendering of the flower, when also Zephyrus with his sweet breath exhales an air in every grove and health upon the tender shoots, and the young sun his half-course in the sign of the ram has run, and the small fowl are making melody that sleep away the night with open eye (So nature pricks them and their heart engages), then people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers long to seek the stranger strands of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands.
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

It's my favorite time of year in San Diego. Fresh in the wake of winter rains, the land transforms from dead brown to lush green. The birds are so happy they can't contain themselves. Terra Nova is bathed in song from dawn to dusk. And the crows and raptors are flying with baggage in tow, no doubt taking meals home to their families rather than eating everything themselves in the field. Saturday morning I saw a kite hunting, a magnificent, nearly all white bird that can hover in midair and then drop out of the sky like a stone when it sights its prey.

Between the garage and the road and back, the rabbits cross our paths by two and threes. They've been busy; already I've seen a little one. And amid the jumble of trailers, chicken coops and corrals below us in the canyon to the east, I've been watching a foal trying out its spindly new legs.

All too soon the green will fade, and the world will turn brown again, the lush grasses will become fuel for the coming fire season. But for now the canyon is glorious and verdant and all of us who live here, from the field mice to the redtail hawks to the Newfs and their humans, are reveling in its riotous celebration of spring.

A Good Day

Let's accentuate the positive, shall we? It was a good day. Perfect spring weather, great progress on "the book," good news on two other projects under way, quality time with the Newfs, phone chats with both daughters and Bob, who's coming home tomorrow from a week-long business trip. All in all, it helped take the sting out of losing Ace on American Idol last night. If you haven't been watching, you can't understand, but the Ace Face will be missed. Oh, and he's a pretty fair singer, too.

Comic Relief Is on the Way

I know what you're thinking. It's not fun reading Younger Yarns anymore. Sandra has turned into a shrew. It's not that politics is all I think about these days. It's just that Bush and crew make me so mad I have to write about them or explode. Meanwhile, other things in my life--lovely, warm and fuzzy things--go unreported. So I promise to mix it up a little from now on. Stay tuned ...

Mushroom-Clouded Minds

I really can't believe I'm writing this, but it seems the top leadership of the United States of America have actually been busy drafting plans to "pre-emptively" attack yet another sovereign nation, this time with nuclear weapons. NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!!

The problem: Iran is working toward nuclear capability, a sobering development by anyone's estimation and something the administration believes only big, benevolent, responsible superpowers like us can have. So it only makes sense to stop them by nuking their R&D facilities, which by the way include university laboratories--a strategy inspired, no doubt, by parents who beat their children for hitting each other. Please, someone wake me up and tell me I'm just caught in a sci-fi nightmare.

They've denied it of course. "Wild speculation," the president says. "Fantasyland," Rumsfeld echoes. Oh yeah, like I really believe them. Pinnochio couldn't keep up with this pack of liars. The latest evidence: we've learned the president himself authorized the long-celebrated media leak that led to Valerie Plame Wilson's exposure as a CIA agent. Yes, the same president who told us how much he hated leakers, promised us he would fire this one when he/she turned up, and then ordered a big, fat investigation into the situation. Your tax dollars at work.

If only the news about Iran war plans had come from some third-rate, conspiracy-theorist blogger, but alas, the reporter was none other than the venerable Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, the same writer who first acquainted us with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. This guy has some sources.

Surely, I first thought, Bush can't really attack Iran without congressional approval, and Congress won't fall for his scare tactics again. But it turns out he can. We could wake up tomorrow morning, and it could already have happened.

Words fail in describing the lunacy, the immorality, the hyper-hypocrisy of all this. Suffice it to say, we have met the axis of evil, and they is us. The good news is the president's approval ratings have dropped a few more points, indicating more Americans are figuring out he's not the compassionate conservative they thought he was.

Update, May 31, 2006: Some commenters suggested I was seriously over-reacting here. But apparently I wasn't alone. Dozens of prominent physicists have written to President Bush calling U.S. contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against Iran "gravely irresponsible" and warning of "disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world." You can see a petition signed by nearly 2,000 physicists, including several Nobel laureates, at http://physics.ucsd.edu/petition/