Tourists

I've been working up at the Grand Canyon for the last eight days, and I'll be there for eight more next week. It's a fascinating place -- geology, archaeology, a variety of climates, and roughly five million visitors.

I don't know how many of them hike the South Kiabab trail, but it sure seems like a lot. We can work for maybe a minute before waiting half a minute for some tourists to walk by. Not exactly the most pleasant or efficient arrangement for working. On the other hand, we are treated to a nearly inexhaustible supply of comedy, enthusiasm, ill-preparedness, and insightful quips from passersby. Here's a list of some of my favorites.

Questions and observations:

1. When's that elevator going to be ready?
2. Are you guys looking for gold?
3. What are you guys doing here?
4. It's like you're in a chain gang!
5. So how long are you down here every day, like two, three hours?
6. You are destroying this place.
7. Do you have a cab coming for me?

Attire and equipment:

1. Flip flops
2. GPS units
3. Fishing poles
4. A single 12-oz bottle of Aquafina
5. Dome tents from Target with sales tags still attached
6. Compasses on strings around necks
7. Camouflage backpacks

Activities:

1. Feeding squirrels
2. Getting bit by squirrels
3. Singing along to iPods. Jimmy Buffet, since you're curious.
4. Running down the trail.
5. Dragging feet up the trail.
6. Taking pictures of grungy trail crews.
7. Crying.

How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People

Witty line, Mr. President. I liked it.

So here's my rant of the moment regarding free speech. Of course I like it, of course I think everyone should be able to say whatever he or she wants to say. At the same time, I'm getting pretty tired of hearing about Dick Cheney, let alone what he has to say.

The former Vice President can say whatever he wants, I suppose, and since the media's willing to report on it, we'll have to hear it. Our civil liberties need to come with disclaimers, though. While we all absolutely have the right to assemble, to speak freely, to print or broadcast information and opinions, to worship, and to petition the government, the way in which we do those things can certainly still make us arrogant, moronic, nasty, and brutish.

For example, the KKK has a constitutionally protected right to exist and to assemble. Exercising that right in the way they do, however, makes them morally objectionable and culturally detrimental. We can't, and shouldn't, take that right away, but we can and should call a spade a spade -- it's a horrible organization full of dangerous, violent, and stupid people.

So when our former Vice President, whose task it was (and as a citizen of our democratic republic, still is) to defend and nurture freedom and liberty, says it's just fine to interrogate people in extreme, violent ways, well, it's our job to call him a sour and hostile man. While Cheney insists that waterboarding is not torture, it doesn't seem to be a part of his argument. The way he tells it, it doesn't matter if we're simulating drowning or cutting off toes, so long as we get the information needed to save American lives. With all due respect (read: none), Mr. Cheney, stop watching 24. There are other ways that have been proven equally if not more effective of evoking important information from captives; furthermore, effective or not, torture is wrong. End of story.

The effectiveness of a particular method should not be the sole standard by which it is judged. The American public reacts very negatively to Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens for using steroids. Steroids have undoubtedly made those men better baseball players -- never once did it occur to their lawyers to argue that "well, shoot, I mean, it got results." They didn't talk about dozens of home runs or 100 mph fastballs, because the stats didn't matter. Bonds could have batted four hundred home runs, and Clemens could have thrown baseballs faster than fighter jets, but it'd still be wrong, and it would still offend baseball fans.

I know what you're thinking: Russ, you can't compare torture to doping. It's true -- baseball is unrelated to terrorism. I don't actually mean to create an analogy between the two. I just wanted to give an example of the old adage about the ends justifying the means being incorrect.

As a quick aside, many historians wonder if Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince -- the source of the aforementioned adage (sorta) -- has been widely misinterpreted. Some argue that Machiavelli wrote satirically, or perhaps to shed light on the dangers of monarchy, or even to lure the de Medici family into behaving according to his advice and thus hasten their overthrow. Kinda cool.

Long story short, shut up, Cheney. You're wrong, and you're a jerk.

Church

So, uh, I gave up Church for Lent.

I feel like that’s probably a clichéd little joke that gets made quite often, but seriously, I did. Truth be told, I probably got more out of this year’s Lenten observance than I ever did soda or red meat or whatever.

I did plenty of churchy stuff -- Canterbury, Prov VIII, quite a few Complines right before bed, and I’m helping out some friends with a lock-in on Saturday night. I avoided proper Church until tonight, though, when I went to a Maundy Thursday service.

I always remember liking Maundy Thursday. I like the symbolism of washing each other’s feet, and I like that most people in the congregation are willing to suspend their squeamishness about touching, let alone washing, other people’s nasty, dirty, crumbly feet. Tonight, though, I found myself getting frustrated sitting in the service. Maybe I’m just not conditioned for 90 minutes of Church anymore. I balked when I saw that there was a Communion in the service, and once I’d settled into that reality, I realized we were ending the service with the stripping of the altar, and that we were going to read all of Psalm 22, with pauses after each verse, and then we were going to sing a Taize song a few times. Also, the service was to be concluded by everyone either leaving in silence, or going off to an overnight vigil.

I was angry. I had wanted to talk to Sue about when we should plant our garden, and talk to Sherm, Jan, and Pastor Bob about the new Chaplain candidate, and to say hi and thanks again to Judy for making us dinner last week, and to find out how John was doing. No such luck.

It occurred to me that I resent Church quite a bit, especially during Lent. I joke to my friends that Jesus got better, and that when he spent forty days in the wilderness, he wasn’t thinking “man, this would be way better if everyone else was miserable.” I wouldn’t mind it if it were simply a time to turn inward a little, meditate on our lives and try to figure out how to better love and serve one another, but for some reason, I’ve always gotten the feeling that the point is to inflict a little misery on churchgoers. I’m not sure what it is -- maybe it’s that they axe all of the good hymns and replace them with horrible, hard to sing dirges. Deprive the altar of Spring flowers and instead put morose little arrangements of sticks around, to make sure we got the whole point about death and being forsaken.

Those are all pretty benign seasonal gripes, though. They’re not the real reason I gave up Church for Lent. I grumbled to my friend Hilary earlier this evening that, really, I’m just so incredibly sick of dealing with the bureaucratic headache Church has become. It’s not at all fair, but I can hardly go to worship on Sunday, or even on Thursday, without being haunted by my deracinating experience last summer at camp or by our seemingly perpetual and thus far fruitless search for a new Chaplain.

Jan, Ann, and Bob are all good at their jobs, and invariably, at some point during the Sermon, I’m called to rise above myself. Become healthier, more awake, more whole. I’ll admit I always completely lose track of the actual Sermon, but I usually start thinking about how to actually live my faith. It usually involves forgiving the powers that be down at the Diocese, facing up to my own failings, and then trying to figure out some way to cultivate genuine reconciliation.

Anyone reading this has undoubtedly heard my rant about last summer, and about Church politics on the whole. When I’m at my best, I want to try the right approach. You know, stick with it. Put my spiritual and intellectual energy into a peaceful and insistent effort to make Church better. After all, I’m not going to be able to influence things at all if I just give up and opt out. Furthermore, camp (and my associated rage) has nothing to do with Canterbury or with Sunday mornings.

The rest of the time, though -- which is most of the time -- I’m tired of trying to take the proverbial high road. Why assume the best of these people who’ve stepped on my nerves over the years? Why trust them, why follow them, why help them? Counselors are still being thought of as too immature, too selfish, too gay, too godless, too rebellious, and too drunk. I start wondering why only the people at the bottom of the hierarchy -- the lowly parishioners, students, and camp counselors -- are taken to task for their failings. On some level, I know very well that priests, bishops, and other leaders are doing the best they can to take care of this crazy mess we call a Church, but man, oh, man do I wish I could throw all of that compassion stuff out the window. I wish I could lead a coup and send them all packing, or embarrass them publicly for caring too much about numbers and too little about ministry, or watch the institutional Church finally die off with an unheralded but much-deserved little thbpbth noise, and have its collapse be met with utter indifference.

Now, of course I don’t really want any of that to happen. I just wish that the Church functioned the way it should. I wish it could be a genuine community for its members, and people would support and love each other. Eat together, laugh together, mourn together, think together, learn together, and pray together. I don’t really see that happening, though, if we keep spending all of our time and energy worrying about how many people there are and how much money we have to restore organs, renovate kitchens, and open more churches in the suburbs.

At the end of the day, though, maybe I don’t really care about any of that, and I just wish I had my camp back.

Granny's

Howdy from Safford.

Here's the way I see it -- you can do cheesy stuff on Valentine's Day, you can do bitter stuff on Valentine's Day, or, you can use it as an excuse to eat like we do (and largely ignore it otherwise).

Pictures of food, like always:


Cornish Pasties. Short pastry, a layer of thinly sliced potatoes and rutabaga, a touch of onion, beef chopped into cubes with faces no larger than your fingernail, butter, salt, and pepper.






Dad's crepes, nice thick bacon, and fresh fruit.

The Grand Old Party

Here are some things Republican party leaders think should be scrapped from Obama's stimulus plan, for being too wasteful:

$448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters.
(They must hate freedom, huh?)

$600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees.
(Why would we want to spend $600 million to clean up our vehicle fleet and help out Detroit?)

$400 million for the Centers for Disease Control to screen and prevent STD's.
(Their abstinence only education programs don't work. This seems vital to me.)

$1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs.
(Can't people living in York and Loma Linda just throw it out their back window? The coyotes and javelinas could eat it, right?)

$150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities.
(Pfft, museums are completely unnecessary. Great civilizations like the Greeks and the Egyptians never would have spent money on museums or libraries or monuments.)

$1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion.
(The Census is Constitutionally required. Totally wasteful.)

$75 million for "smoking cessation activities."
(Forget skyrocketing health care costs, prevention is for sissies.)

$200 million for public computer centers at community colleges.
(The Google is just a liberal brainwashing tool.)

$650 million for wildland fire management on forest service lands.
(Can't imagine their lobbyists in the logging companies are too happy to hear they consider this wasteful.)

$1.2 billion for "youth activities," including youth summer job programs.
(Hey, that's probably me!)

$160 million for "paid volunteers" at the Corporation for National and Community Service.
(Yep, also me.)

$850 million for Amtrak.
(Only communists ride trains.)

You can check out the full list here, at CNN.com.

Good job, guys! You figured out how to shave $20 billion. $20 billion out of eight or nine hundred billion. That's, uh, a quarter of a percent. Those Democrats won't bankrupt the country on your watch, no sirree.

That $20 billion will buy us about two months of war in Iraq.

Dear Bishop

This is not a game. We need Chaplains in Flagstaff and in Tucson.

Also, they need to be good, humble, kind, intelligent, friendly, warm, honest, respectful, and wise.

The News

News really should be news, don't you think? About traffic and weather and laws and business and stuff. Entertainment news has always really irritated me.

I'm uncomfortable with the sort of crossover appeal Sarah Palin has to the press. We're getting barraged with headlines about her as if she's Paris Hilton AND the Vice President.

Democracy (Sort of)

Unless you factor that whole Electoral College thing into the equation. But that's a rant for middle school government class.

One thing's for sure -- there are going to be a lot of angry, disappointed, resigned people tomorrow. Very nearly half of the country will just about lose faith in the government all over again. Remember 2000 and 2004?

It seems like most people I talk to has a whole lot invested in this. My conservative friends are afraid that Obama will give people a little too much assistance in the midst of this economic crisis and thereby entirely subvert every American's work ethic, or open the borders, or that he'll let gay people get married (which would somehow undermine the legitimacy of every heterosexual marriage...I still don't understand how). My liberal friends are afraid McCain will continue the war (and maybe start some new ones), draft an entire generation of American men, give tons of money to evil corporations and nothing to struggling families, melt down glaciers in hopes of finding oil, and start testing nukes in blue-leaning cities.

Of course that's mostly hogwash. Sure, McCain had to act like Bush to win the primaries, but I'd guess that he's still the same moderate Republican he was back in 2000. And even FDR's (and Al Smith's) sweeping reforms that increased assistance to Americans didn't turn us into a nation of lazy dirty rotten commies.

Neither of them will be able to do everything they've said they can do, so the other side can take comfort, regardless of who wins.

It's too bad that conservatives and liberals alike expect so much of their respective candidates. Conservatives want McCain to be John Wayne. They need someone to shoot the bad guys and pistol whip the whiny little sissies who want more help from the government and to get out of Iraq. Liberals are expecting Barack Skywalker to vanquish Darth Cheney and Emperor Bush and restore justice, freedom, and peace to the world.

Those are some tall orders.

The Wisdom of Garth Algar

As it turns out, people my age fear change much more than our seemingly entrenched Baby Boomer parents and Children of the Depression/WWII grandparents.

Facebook got a facelift. Several million high school and college-aged kids freaked out.

I could give you a synopsis of the (mostly minor) changes that happened at camp this summer and tell you how counselors (especially myself) reacted. Honestly, though, you can probably do the math.

The trouble is, people see us supporting Obama, or listening to, well, whatever it is folks my age listen to, or programming our parents' Tivos, and they assume that we're all about change. The wave of the future, man.

When it comes to things that actually affect our lives, though, we want to beat whatever change it is that comes creeping toward us with a hammer until it stops moving and we're confident it won't reanimate.

This is something important to consider if you're one of those poor sods ministering to us, leading us, or, really, interacting with us at all.

The Eastern Front

History quiz for you guys.

Which of the following leaders successfully fought Russia along Russia's Western border?

a. Napoleon Bonaparte
b. Kaiser Wilhelm
c. Adolf Hitler
d. None of the above.

And now, a current events quiz.

Which of the following luminaries in US politics thinks it wouldn't be such a bad idea to go to war with Russia in Eastern Europe?

a. Barack Obama
b. John McCain
c. Joe Biden
d. Sarah Palin