Updike's death poem

John Updike died last Tuesday. Apparently he was working on a poem about his death:

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

'Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise - depths unplumbable!

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

'I thought he died a while ago.'

For life's a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur. 

please work together

A week into office, President Obama spent nearly two hours today wrangling with Republicans in the House and Senate over his economic stimulus package. Republicans are still pushing for more tax cuts.

When a Democratic President walks into Republican conferences to explain his plan for two hours, something his Republican predecessor didn't do, let's hope they can together find enough fluff to cut so that everyone can agree on moving forward.

Whether the stimulus package is what is needed or not, whether it will work a bit or not, who knows? But if the Republicans stonewall him after this outreach and his willingness to listen to their ideas about the plan, we'll get an idea of how this will go for a while.

Maybe they're ticked about the "Mexico City" abortion ruling.

Bob Herbert had a good column today about Republican la-la-land mentality to be able to balance the budget and keep cutting taxes.

Rachel Maddow, you go!

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC

Ok, I knew this would kick in, the haunting, yucky, crappy fact that Mr. Obama has always planned to accelerate the aggression in Afghanistan.

Thanks to Rachel Maddow, alone in the media (?) voicing her objections to the plan in Afghanistan - especially using Russia's supply routes, maybe peace-loving people will find their voice to pressure the Obama administration to re-think the strategy.

Justin Raimondo has strong praise for Ms. Maddow in today's antiwar.com. I hope she will keep on speaking her mind boldly. She is one of the few TV journalists who has risen to the top who seems to keep on speaking her mind. I hope she won't be pressured by MSNBC into toning it down. I hope she will keep asking hard questions. I hope her voice, that has become popular since the presidential campaign, will get through to the Obama administration.

As Mr. Raimondo says, closing Guantanamo is fine, but if it's only to appease liberals and avoid the harder mess in Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it's pathetic.

white house garden

Over at Slow Food Nation I read about Kitchen Gardeners International waging a web campaign called Eat the View to get the Obamas to devote a portion of the White House garden to an organic edible garden.

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You have 3 days to vote for a tasty change:

what we need is here

portrait of Wendell Berry by Rob Shetterly, part of Shetterly's collection called "Americans Who Tell the Truth"

Poet and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, along with plant geneticist Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, wrote an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's New York Times about what's needed: a new 50-year farm bill. What they say is that, of course, we need to rethink the industrialized farming we're doing, which depletes and adds toxins to the soil, and depends too much on fossil fuels. The answer? Perennialized grains.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

Read the whole piece here. I love Berry and have followed him for a while, though not too closely. He doesn't own a computer and believes we should think for ourselves. What a concept! I appreciate his simple way of viewing life and the world. Here is a poem he wrote that beautifully expresses that simplicity:

What we Need Is Here

~

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.