CUL-DE-SAC

The USA can feel like a safe bastion with oceans on either side that’s far from basket-case nations filled with terror and war. But if you read anything about Mexico this year, read Williams Finnegan’s story in the New Yorker called The Kingpins.

His story is very powerful and very sad as it focuses on what’s happening to the Mexican city of Guadalajara. But it’s not just there, it’s all over Mexico that violent criminal militias are turning the place into a frightening, lawless country.

Stories of dozens of dismembered or beheaded corpses being dumped in piles to send messages of terror are happening in Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puerta Vallarta, and so on. Tijuana is only 20 miles from my front door but I haven’t been there in years. You can imagine why.

The article talks about how authorities cannot be trusted to tell anything but lies and half lies. Every seeming truth is merely a pantalla, a screen to hide the real agenda of people in the employ of warlords who profit from drugs, kidnapping, and above all terror.

The USA has spent its time worrying about events and governments thousands of miles away in the Middle East and Central Asia. But I wonder when the focus of our armed foreign policy will be the failed state to the south, where authority and government are empty shells and large crime syndicates are just as powerful and destabilizing as the Taliban.

The saddest comment may have been one from a man who spoke of how peace may only come when El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, can take over the country.

After reading the article, I pray for Mexico and hope something will save it.

I live east in the time zone and days aren’t very long even on the longest days of the year. The coast of California takes a sharp turn west as it heads north and I’m as far south as you can be. Reno is further west than LA and even LA is further west than San Diego. They must get a whole extra hour of daylight in San Francisco.

I have memories of late daylight in Minnesota and even later light in Ireland, where I once visited in the summer. I could hitchhike into a town, get there at ten at night and still have enough daylight to find a place to stay.

I remember a man who talked about the earliest recordings of hillbilly music, collected by an anthropologist who wandered the Appalachian hollers to coax the locals to play their instruments into his microphone. The man wondered about those musical rustics, to whom the time of day meant very little because you got up when the sun rose and went to bed when it disappeared below the horizon.

Light these days is dimmer and more diffuse because it comes from power plants at night. We crowd next to the lamps in our homes and they dare us to stay up way beyond the end of the sun’s daily circuit. I don’t find the night exciting. I like my sleep and I feel sorry for people who are denied their right to restful darkness.

I don’t like seeing businesses that say they are open 24 hours. Why can’t they knock off at a reasonable hour like everyone else and just let their staff go home? But maybe it’s meant to be a comfort to unhappy people who have to work the overnight shift; cops, freight train conductors, early morning TV producers. Maybe 24-hour shops aren’t being greedy. They just want to give company to the misery that others have to endure.

I remember the great blackout last September when the lights went out for 4 million people in Southern California. Night fell and my neighbor had a blackout block party and sharp shadows crossed my street, but they weren’t from the streetlight but from a near full moon. For once, I didn’t miss the light of the sun.

At this time of year I feel like it’s all downhill, like a 25-year-old who knows he will never grow more brain cells than he will lose. Just as age takes us slowly toward dementia, the diminishing light will continue daily until December when night falls by 5 p.m. But maybe I should just shut up and enjoy summer solstice.

My work took me this week to a place north of San Diego where they make Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. It’s popular with the organic ingredients crowd, and one of the ingredients in it is hemp seed oil.

That is what caused the owner of the company to lock himself in a cage that was placed in front of the White House, where he was arrested by D.C. cops after they broke into his cage with a circular saw.

A little background.

Hemp is a fibrous plant that’s a close cousin of marijuana. Its fibers have been used for hundreds of years to make clothes, rope and ship sails. The owner of Dr. Bronner’s soap company told me the word “canvas” is derived from the word “cannabis.” I looked it up. He’s right.

He is David Bronner, a tall guy with a beard like Lenin who has a habit of snapping his fingers when he wants to emphasize a point he’s making. He’s a capitalist with a liberal political agenda. Buy a bottle of his soap and you’ll find it comes with lots of text that describes our spiritual unity.

Dr. Bronner Magic Soap is made with hemp seed oil, which you cannot produce in the U.S. because hemp is a cannabis plant that contains THC (the chemical that makes you high) therefore the oil has to be produced in and imported from Canada. Bronner thinks his cost of buying the oil would be 20 percent less if you could grow the stuff in the USA.

So his cause is part financial and part philosophical. Does he really need hemp seed oil to make his soap lathery and luxuriant? Maybe he does.

Bronner says you’d have to smoke an acre of  hemp to get high. But marijuana activism has gotten so tied up with hemp it’s hard to know whether the two can every be twain

I asked him if he was in favor of the legalization of marijuana, and he said yes… for recreational, medicinal and spiritual purposes. It’s possible that smoking dope will get you closer to God but the recreational aspect of the stuff is what makes the whole issue suspicious

As far as the government is concerned, hemp and dope are the same thing. So the industrial and cosmetic uses of hemp and its seed oil will have to take a back seat, thanks to the tiny fraction of THC that cannabis always comes with. You’d never know the stuff you use for making clothes and rope would be so demonic to gain a government prohibition, or so angelic that Dr. Bronner would risk jail to set it free.

The gateway to summer is a cool month that surprises me every year. In June, high temperatures here can be as low as 65 degrees. They talk about “June gloom,” but gloom is relative. In San Diego that might only mean we have overcast skies as often as not.

I remember living in the Midwest and talking to a person from Arizona about the weather. She told me she was getting used to Minnesota but, she said, “You remember that time, last year, when we didn’t see the sun for two months?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. It just seemed like regular weather to me.

Summer in Southern California ultimately means an unbroken dome of blue sky and bright sunlight. Marine clouds along the coast are common, but if you get a couple miles inland even those disappear. The temperatures are moderate and in any other place this weather would be a Godsend. But here it becomes monotonous.

Here, from May to November, it just doesn’t rain. In summer I dream of rain. I think of the way it makes the streets gleam at night. I imagine the sound it makes on tin roofs. Overcast and rain make you reflective. Sunlight is emotionally shallow.

I have been in California long enough to know the world has changed since the last time I lived anywhere else.

Sometimes I look at San Diego and tell myself the place, where I used to live, wasn’t like this. Life was different and the people were different. That’s probably true. They were different.

But now, how do I know that it isn’t exactly the same there as it is here? These days they probably send text messages in Minnesota too. Maybe my past and the places I knew simply no longer exist.

Lately I was talking to a gifted journalist who was fired from San Diego’s daily newspaper, the Union Tribune. He was looking at opportunities in Minneapolis and I told him to consider the weather, but he pointed out the fact of global warming.

Minnesota has had a spate of very mild winters. The winters I remember were tough and frigid, with temperatures plunging below zero for days on end. The snow would crunch beneath your feet and the wind would cut right through you. Now, even the reliably brutal Minnesota winters are no longer reliable.

Places change and I have also changed. You see the world from inside your skin, and my skin is older. Now, all I really know is that it is June and the air is (again) surprisingly cool, and I hope that this year will be like the year before.

I’m pretty sure the summer will grow brighter and warmer as it gets longer, and I can’t hope for rain until it’s nearly Christmas. In the Midwest, the summer will be hot and humid and the lightening will crack as thunderstorms roll across the countryside.

I hope the place I used to live is still a different place. But not having been there in a while, how would I know?

Four years ago I was excited by presidential candidate Barack Obama.

He was a stirring speaker. He was smart and had a clear intellectual bent. His views appealed to my political philosophy. He was a tough and tenacious campaigner. Above all, he was black.

The simple notion that a member of the race, that had been slaves in this country, could become it’s leader was reason to celebrate. I even read his book, for God’s sake!

But now Obama is a one-term incumbent running for reelection, and the idea that he was a politician that could transcend politics and bring us all together turns out to be as naive as I suspected it was. Today, Barack Obama is in a hard reelection campaign. He’s facing a challenger a lot like he was four years ago, in a situation not unlike the one that brought down the Republican Party of George W. Bush.

The “situation” is an economy that the ruling party doesn’t want to claim. We may be having a recovery (repeat, maybe) but it’s lame. The challenger is Mitt Romney, who knows how to fuzz his views to grab the political middle. He is also smart and tough and has a record of accomplishment that causes people to think it wouldn’t be a disaster if he won.

Another thing he has in common with Obama is he’s a member of minority (the Mormons) that people of the past might have considered unelectable. But now that we’ve elected an African-American to the top job, why not a Mormon?

The reason I thought Obama could unite people lay in his history. Here was a man whose father was African, but he grew up in the USA. Here’s was a man who was black, but whose family was white. (Read Dreams From My Father and you’ll know what I mean). He knew what it took to live between cultures and make it work.

This is why his inauguration included not only civil rights figures but also an evangelical preacher who delivered the invocation. Obama was a liberal but his ties to the black community meant he was comfortable with their social conservatism.

That changed this year when he changed his mind on gay marriage from con to pro. It was a calculated move. He knew the black vote wouldn’t abandon him on that single issue. Meanwhile, he was looking at all that campaign money in West LA that he wasn’t going to get unless he had a change of heart.

This was similar to Romney changing his mind on abortion (to the “anti” side) in order to win the GOP nomination. Like I said… they have a few things in common.

So today — 4 years later — Barack Obama has lost the freshness and novelty, and he’s become another liberal Democrat towing the party line. But there are some facts in his favor.

Obama has achieved financial system reform and health care reform. In foreign affairs, his restraint in the Middle East has saved us billions and it’s allowed the Arab street to take the leadership role in Libya and Egypt. He ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, bringing Americans the justice they craved. Afghanistan? Well, never mind.

Elections are unpredictable. Obama, so far, has the financial support of most campaign donations from the military. That’s not what you’d expect, and there will surely be more surprises to come.

Even so, I would be VERY surprised if Obama wins Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, like he did last time around. This election will be close, and our first black president could be a one-term president. That has happened to plenty of past presidents, both good and bad.

By the way, if you’re wondering what this year’s election might be like, take a look at this article from NPR.org. I’ll give you the short story: Certain experts say it’ll be an incumbent vs. challenger race similar to either FDR vs. Alf Landon in 1936, Carter vs. Reagan in 1980, or Kerry vs. G.W. Bush in 2004. Take your pick.