Birthday Greetings
Morning featured iced tracery on the windowpane above my bed, and, while I bicycled to a Bette’s breakfast, Berkeley weather was crisp, clear, and cold. At least there wasn’t much wind. I’ve been paying close attention to the pavement as I ride because, lately, my tires have been glue for glass shards, causing a record number of flats.
Pages of The New York Times are filled with reports of Dean’s drubbing in the Iowa caucus and the likelihood that he’s already washed up in New Hampshire. While Kucinich, who at best polls in single digits, chimes with my political views, I’m prepared this year to support the Democratic nominee in the prayer of unseating our near-dictator. While savaged by other Democratic candidates and the major media leading up to Iowa—a critical scrutiny George W. would never have survived at a similar time in his previous campaign—Dean (like Gore in the last election) finally has only himself to blame. Politics is the nastiest, scrappiest business imaginable. Any candidate that emerges reputation intact from the process is deeply flawed, however “electable.” With up-to-the-elbow involvement of powerful interests, the nominee will certainly be a “centrist” acceptable to the elite, who, being a centrist, will have little chance of getting enough disenfranchised folks to the polls to elect a Democrat this year. Given the outrageous war chest Bush has accumulated, Democrats will probably gain more press attention by not anointing their nominee prior to the convention. With any luck New Hampshire won’t second the Iowa results and saddle us with John Kerry. Meanwhile, in his State of the Union our Napoleon boldly utters his stunning lies and obfuscations, punctuated by the poseur’s grins and smirks, so sure that the sycophantic press will give him their usual pass. A world away in Afghanistan and Iraq we’re serving up model democracies but here at home it’s please pass the imperium.
Bette’s scrumptious special was “two eggs any style, chicken-apple sausage, and banana-walnut pancakes.” Wow. Something is right with the world! On the way home I took the bicycle path that skirts Aquatic Park. By the estuary edge the crisp weather had produced a wide assortment of sea and shore birds. Rounding a curve in the bicycle path, I caught the flash of an egret’s white plumage among the tall reeds of a feeder creek. “They say it’s your birthday, well, it’s my birthday, too.” Happy Birthday!
posted by Paul at 11:22 AM
