Taking down the flimflam man

Paul Ryan is a liar. He lies glibly about even the most unimportant things, like the time he ran in a long-ago marathon. Moreover, his math doesn't add up. 

One or two observers of the political scene have had the prescience to point this out repeatedly over the past few years. For their efforts, they have been derided and verbally abused by the Very Serious Pundits of the Washington Beltway. But those truth tellers have been right all along and, recently, a few of the much-maligned (and richly deserved, too!) mainstream media have begun to notice that Ryan is really, as Paul Krugman famously dubbed him, a "flimflam man" and to actually point out his prevarications and lack of substance.  

Then, of course, there was that little debate last night where Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly called him out on his lies and essentially laughed him off the stage. I didn't actually watch the debate, but I did check in on the live-blogging of it throughout the hour-and-a-half and it was obvious even from that that Biden was enjoying himself. 

Today, I've followed the news reports of it and read several of the analyses, most of which, it must be admitted, are colored by the writer's political views. Still, it is apparent that Biden firmly and vigorously defended Democratic principles in which I believe, and I am very grateful for that. All that I really require of my politicians is that they stand up for the things that are important to me and that they tell the truth, and, very importantly, that they don't let their opponents get away with telling bald-faced lies! 

I hope that President Obama will take a page from Biden's book in his next two debates. His is a very different personality from Biden, more introverted and thoughtful, and that's okay. I don't expect him to be otherwise. I do expect him to have the courage of his convictions and to fight for what he believes in and to remember that when your opponent is out to destroy everything that you have struggled so hard to achieve, it's not really necessary to be polite to him. 

In the meantime, thank you, Joe Biden, for showing how to deal with the flimflam man. As Charles Pierce of Esquire wrote today: 

For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of some really terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political commonwealth in which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly, impoverished deaths, while all the essential elements of a permanent American oligarchy were put in place. This has garnered him loving notices from a lot of people who should have known better. The ideas he could explain were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday night on a number of important questions, including when and where the United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.

Well said. They are both flimflam people. No real substance there.

 

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny: A review

I had never met Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, the most prestigious homicide unit in Canada, prior to Bury Your Dead. This was the sixth in the Gamache series and there have now been two more added for a total of eight. I've added all the other seven to my "to be read" list. This was a wonderful read and Armand Gamache is a wonderful character, a humane and intelligent police officer who cares about his agents and the communities in which he works and cares about getting the job done right. He cares, in short, about justice. 

We meet Gamache in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy that has hit his Surete force. Agents have been killed and wounded as a result of an investigation gone wrong. Gamache himself was grievously wounded, almost killed, but he blames himself for the deaths and injuries his officers suffered. He is on leave from his job in order to recover from his injuries, both physical and psychological. He has gone to old Quebec City to visit his friend and mentor, Emile, to find sanctuary and comfort and to try to come to terms with what has happened.

But even in Quebec City, ensconced in the home of his friend, murder manages to intrude.

Gamache has been whiling away the hours doing research on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, at the library of the Literary and Historical Society, an organization set up to preserve and protect the Anglo culture in Quebec. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham was a turning point in the struggle between England and France over supremacy and control of Canada. Gamache is fascinated by the mistakes made by the French General Montcalm in the battle. He identifies with him because he feels keenly that he has made mistakes also. But one morning when he arrives at the "Lit and His" to do his reading, he finds the place overrun by police. A dead body has been found in the basement. An amateur archaeologist, obsessed with Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, has been murdered, hit over the head with the shovel he had been digging with. When the local police realize who Gamache is, they ask him to help with the investigation.

Meanwhile, Gamache has also had second thoughts about one of his own previous investigations in the little village of Three Pines. A hermit had been killed there. The evidence led to the owner of a local bistro as the murderer. But the man's partner is convinced he didn't do it and he wages a campaign of daily letters to Gamache to convince him of this. Beset by doubts, Gamache asks his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to investigate with fresh eyes. Beauvoir also is recovering from injuries in the incident where his chief was wounded, but he takes up the investigation as a welcome diversion from dark thoughts. 

Thus, we have a story that runs on two tracks, covers two investigations. But wait! There is a third track. We get to learn, through flashbacks experienced by Armand and Jean-Guy, of the horrible incident that did so much damage to the Surete, an incident which only the action and sacrifice of the men and women of the Surete managed to prevent from doing inestimable destruction to the whole of eastern Canada and the United States. That Louise Penny is able to keep all three of these tracks going at the same time, rather like keeping three balls in the air simultaneously, is really a tour de force of writing skill.

Penny's plotting is truly amazing. Almost from the first page, the reader is on pins and needles wondering what will happen next. She builds the suspense steadily, and even though she plays fair with the clues, near the end there is a plot twist that was so unexpected it left me with my mouth hanging open.

Not only are the plotting, the characters, and the stories themselves examples of a writer on top of her game, but throughout she weaves in tidbits of the history of Canada, much appreciated by this ignorant American reader. Like many Americans I suspect, I have a great fondness and admiration for our northern neighbor, but little knowledge of the nitty gritty facts of its history. It was good to be able to learn just a little bit here. Maybe I'll learn even more from the seven other books in the series. I look forward to that.

Hey, where'd they go?

Remember a couple of weeks ago, before the presidential debate, when all the political polls, even the very right-wing ones like Fox News and Rasmussen, showed President Obama leading in the race? This had been the case for several weeks and the right-wingers were going crazy!

"The polls are biased!" they cried.

"They are weighted in favor of Obama!"

"The pollsters are asking the wrong questions!"

"They are interviewing the wrong people - too many Democrats, too many people with cell phones!"

Now, there's been almost a complete turnaround in the polls. Nearly all of them either show Romney leading or basically tied with President Obama. And what do we hear from all those whiners about bias in polling? Crickets. They are all too busy chortling about what a terrible debater President Obama is and how Super Mitt is headed for victory!

You don't think the whiners could have possibly been insincere in their critique of pollsters, do you? You don't think they could have been, heaven forbid, BIASED in their assessment?

Well, never mind. I'm sure if the polls reverse again next week, all the whiners will be back on Fox News in full voice, complaining about those terrible liberal-leaning pollsters.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: A review

I don't usually read Young Adult fiction for the very good reason that I am not a young adult, but my younger daughter who is, and who is also a librarian, gave me this book and recommended that I read it. She liked it and thought it was something I might enjoy. Well, she didn't steer me wrong about Harry Potter so I decided to give it a chance, and she was right again. I did enjoy it.

The novel, as most of the reading world knows by now, is set in the dystopian landscape of what was once known as North America. The society that we are familiar with has been destroyed by a combination of man-made and natural disasters. Rising ocean levels have reduced the size of the continent to a shadow of its former limits. It is now the country of Panem which consists of a shining Capitol, set somewhere in what was once called the Rocky Mountains, and twelve Districts. 

Each of the Districts has its specialty. District Twelve, located in what were formerly called the Appalachian Mountains, specializes in the production of coal. Its people, like the people in most of the Districts, are poor and live on the knife's edge of starvation. It is from this District that the story's protagonist, Catniss, comes.

At some point, there had been a rebellion in the Districts against the Capitol and, after putting it down, the Capitol keeps the Districts in line and reminds them of its all-powerfulness by demanding a "tribute" from each District every year. This "tribute" consists of two children, a boy and a girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Each living tribute must fight to the death against all the other tributes on live TV, which all the other citizens of Panem are forced to watch. These are the Hunger Games.

Each District's tributes are selected by drawing their names from all the eligible ones at a public ceremony called the reaping. When Catniss is sixteen years old, she attends the reaping, as all citizens are required to do, with her mother and twelve-year-old sister, Primrose. When the girl tribute's name is read out, to Catniss' horror, it is Prim's name. As Prim walks to the stage, Catniss jumps in front of her and offers herself as a volunteer in her stead. This is allowed and so Catniss becomes a participant in the terror of the Hunger Games.

After the books that I've been reading lately (The Canterbury Tales, The Cat's Table, etc.), this one seemed very simple in structure and language. It was an easy and quick read, very fast-paced and hard to put down once one got into it. Suzanne Collins describes her settings and her characters very well and gives us empathetic characters to root for, an important feature I think for a YA book.

This is the first in a series of three books, again as all the reading world knows, and  the trilogy was among the top ten books that were challenged in the past year, according to the American Library Association.  The books were challenged for being anti-ethnic, anti-family, insensitive, having offensive language, occult/satanic references, and violence.  The only part of that that I saw in this book was violence, but it was appropriate to the story. Reading the book was my way of doing my bit for celebrating the freedom to read in Banned Books Week.

I think that I probably will go on to read the other two books in the series. Not right away though. I need a break from dystopia and teen-age angst.

Silent Sunday: The bird with the golden slippers

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: A review

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours y-ronne
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open yë
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende...

How many of us spent part of our freshman year in college learning that prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and then struggling to recite it for our English literature professor? Surprisingly, although I can't always remember what I did last week, I can still remember much of that prologue that I learned all of those long years ago.

I think it is the lyricism, the lilting cadence of the thing, that makes it so memorable. That was a feature of the Middle English in which Chaucer wrote. This week, I read a modern English translation by David Wright for Oxford World's Classics of the entire work and I felt it had that same quality of lyricism. It seemed very true to the original.

In college, I read the excerpts that were required reading for my literature class, but I had never read the work in its entirety. Several books that I have read this year, both fiction and nonfiction, have dealt with this period in history, and, in particular, Barbara Tuchman's excellent  A Distant Mirror about the 14th century made several references to Chaucer and to his masterwork. It piqued my interest and made me decide to read the whole thing.

The setting of the tales is that a group of diverse pilgrims are about to make their way from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral to worship at the site where Archbishop Thomas Becket had been murdered. To amuse themselves along the way, they agree to a competition in which each will tell a story. At the end, the teller of the story which is judged best will receive a free meal at the Tabard Inn back in Southwark, the meal to be paid for by the other pilgrims. Among the pilgrims is Chaucer who records the tales.

Many of the pilgrims are officials of the Church or are in some way tied to the Church and Chaucer is unsparing in his depiction of these characters. They are mostly venal, greedy, often licentious beings who are completely devoid of Jesus' empathy for the poor and downtrodden.

Especially are they devoid of any empathy or understanding for the lives of women. Perhaps because I am a woman, I was particularly and acutely sensitive to the portrayal of the women in the tales. For the most part, they are either idealized, chaste, saintly beings, an image worshiped by chivalric knights, or else they are complete bawds, living only for the pleasures of the bed. If they are married - and almost all of them are - their chief goal in life is to make a cuckold of their husbands. The married men in the party who tell tales of wives depict them as harridans, as violent creatures who cheat and beat their husbands and get their comeuppance in the end.

One wonders why Chaucer's tales so characterized women. Was he simply reporting the common themes of the day? Were his cartoonish portrayals of women his sly and satirical way of making a point, somewhat like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal? Was he, in short, a 14th century feminist trying to bring change to a world view that was totally hostile to women?

Incidentally, Barbara Tuchman, whose book pointed out the similarities between the 14th century and our own time, would likely be quick to see the analogy between the Church's attitude toward women in the 14th century and the Church's attitude toward women today. Not much progress there, I'm afraid.

The 14th century was, of course, a God-obsessed period and nearly all of the tales relate in some way to the Bible or theology. My two favorites among the stories, though, were mostly free of such associations.

"The Wife of Bath's Tale" introduces us to a woman who has buried five husbands and is on the lookout for a sixth! She may be as close to being liberated as a 14th century woman could be and she has a joy in life and a bawdy sense of humor which is totally infectious. I loved the Wife of Bath!

My second favorite story was "The Nun's Priest's Tale" perhaps because some of my favorite animals are chickens. This story is a retelling of a popular Middle Ages parable about the rooster and the fox. In this case, it's the tale of Chantecleer and his favorite hen Pertelote and the dastardly fox Renard. The priest does manage to get in a dig at women in that it is Pertelote's advice which causes her beloved Chantecleer to be caught by the fox. Never fear, though. As always in these stories, the rooster outfoxes the fox!

This was a wonderful read. It really stands up well over the six centuries since its writing. The bawdy, irreverent tone is not so different from something you might see on late-night television today. I'm not sure if that is such a wonderful recommendation, but I guess what I mean to say is, the world really hasn't changed much since Chaucer's time. He and his other pilgrims would fit right in today.

Waterwise Plants for Sustainable Gardens by Lauren Springer Ogden and Scott Ogden: A review

(Cross-posted from Gardening With Nature.)

All over the country, gardeners are facing the realities of restricted water availability. Water-use restrictions are now commonplace, not only in dry climate areas like the Southwest, but in the Northeast, the South and the West and Mid-West. It really is a nation-wide phenomenon, one that is likely to get worse as global warming continues unabated. Even in areas that do not yet have water restrictions, low-water plants are an important ingredient in planning a sustainable garden. What's a poor gardener to do?

Gardeners, after all, want their gardens to be beautiful and interesting and the common impression of a low-water garden is that it is a boring space with a limited plant selection. Lauren Springer Ogden and Scott Ogden have written a book that proves to us that this does not have to be the case. Waterwise Plants for Sustainable Gardens: 200 Drought-Tolerant Choices for All Climates is a wonderfully practical and usable guide to what the authors consider to be the 200 best plants for low-water gardens. These are tough plants that are guaranteed to thrive under such dry conditions.

Each individual plant entry includes the common and botanical name for the plant, as well as information about the regions for which the plant is best adapted, growth and care information, notes on pests and diseases, and, of course, a picture of the plant. Moreover, the guide includes a wide variety of plants, from trees to succulents, perennials to bulbs, all selected for their wide adaptability and ornamental value. 

The Ogdens cover both humid and arid parts of zones 4 to 10 and offer choices for gardens from coast to coast. The guide also has information about companion plants and includes creative design ideas. It really is one of the most user-friendly guides that I have found. It is readily accessible to the novice gardener as well as the more experienced ones.

The writers are garden designers and horticulturists who have a wide range of experience in various climates, plants, and planting styles both in the United States and Europe. We are lucky that they have chosen to share that experience with us. I can recommend their book wholeheartedly for those gardeners who, like myself,  are genuinely interested in creating a sustainable garden.

(A copy of this book was provided to me at no cost by the publisher for the purposes of this review.)