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She prefers to be called Mama, an echo from younger days with her five children, so that's what I'll call her here, now and again. She once told me after reading a column I'd written for Mother's Day, that I never have to buy her another gift. I'm tempted to take her up on it. Does that make such articles as this a conflict of interest? Shhh, don't tell anyone.

Mostly, such columns are about her gifts to me—appreciation for nature, music, literature, her bubbling awe for all creation--and this one is no exception. So gather round the hearth while I tell a story—rather, paint a picture--intended to warm the heart.

It was Saturday, Feb. 18, and I was glad to be driving into Knoxville for a group reading at Carpe Librum bookstore. Often on such outings, I'll swing by Mama's house, about ten miles away, and take her with me, a chance to catch up and give her a glimpse into different aspects of her middle child's life. I'd intended to do just that on Feb. 18, but time has a way of contracting in unexpected ways. So, running behind schedule, I drove in alone that morning.

The ride was snow-spangled and beautiful, and the reading left me buoyant. Several friends and acquaintances were at the bookstore, and I made the most of my morning. For one who works out of his home, it felt good to be out. One thing troubled me, though. I hadn't been around to check on my mother in a while. So, as I started my car in the parking lot of a restaurant where I'd stopped for coffee, I decided to swing by her place and look in on my way home. By the time I got to her house I was feeling sheepish. I pictured her sitting in a dusky room, alone and neglected, as I got out of my car and walked to her front door.

The porch leads past her kitchen window and some flicker of motion from the corner of my eye as I passed made me stop and peer into the familiar room, paneled in cedar.

My worries evaporated along with any stray traces of guilt, for there, framed in the window like characters come to life in a storybook illustration, Mama turned round and round with two happy friends. I see them as clearly now as I did three months ago: A little blonde neighbor, maybe six years old, with smiling elfin face, her slender form draped in a flowing dress. A black curly-haired dog with long bangs and a snub nose. And my beautiful, white-haired mother dressed in slippers, slacks and shirt. Her face alive, wide eyes and mouth laughing, feet dancing nimbly, turning her round and round. Her fingers were snapping and snapping to keep that dog, Oreo—fur and muscle and tongue and skittering feet--jumping and turning mid-air. He barely touched down before leaping vertically, bosom high to Mama, as he danced in response to snapping fingers of two good friends. Oblivious to the years and other superficial differences, youthful hearts made these three dance as one in this moment. And in this moment, I was absolved.

I just stood there on the porch and watched. A Strauss waltz played in the background from a 33 rpm vinyl disk atop a music box disguised as an old-fashioned tabletop radio. Some combination of my four siblings had bought that for Mama, maybe on her last birthday.

Standing there I basked in the moment, letting the picture gather and paint itself in my heart and mind. Oh the joy of their dance. Maybe five minutes I watched without interruption, before going inside where they greeted me with chatter and laughter before resuming a game of Chinese checkers. Well, the two actual human beings involved did. Then we had lunch from whatever Mama had on hand. It was delicious.

Tim and Amy, I'm happy to report the Shih Tzu you bought Mama was an inspired choice, despite that funny sounding name. She's dotty for that dog. You should hear her carry on. Well, I'm sure you often do.

Rebecca, Kathleen, Rodney, the old-timey looking music box works great.

Lord or Mother Nature, nice job on the joy for life you planted in Mama's heart.

She's passed along more of it than she even knows.

* A slightly different version of this column first appeared in the Knoxville News-Sentinel (Copyright by Don Williams, All rights reserved 05/12/2006.)

** At 79, Mama still gets around. We took a mile-long walk along a riverside arboretum, on Friday.

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First, I urge you to support healthcare reform by contacting your U.S. Representative (visit www.house.gov/ .) Send letters, faxes and phone now. Not because the healthcare reform bill is a great bill, but lest we become....

A Nation of Wolves and Sheep
by Don Williams

We are becoming a nation of wolves and sheep. A nation, moreover, in which the shepherds routinely set the wolves on the sheep. You see it in every walk of life.

Doctors who charge outrageous fees for many procedures patients don’t even need.

Insurance companies that lavish billions on CEOs and board members at the expense of the ailing and dying.

Pharmaceutical companies who get sweetheart deals from lawmakers, so they charge fellow Americans more than, say, Canadians.

But it’s not just in the healthcare industry.

Despite reform banks are allowed to raise rates well into the 30 percent range for credit cards, and trick customers into paying all sorts of outrageous fees.

Coal peddlers are allowed to blow the tops off green mountains and dump the slag into the nearest stream.

Arms dealers sell Americans on the fatuous idea that a nation with enough guns to arm every man, woman and child will be made safer by allowing guns into parks and bars. Meanwhile, a river of guns flow South to Mexico.

Weapons sellers and politicians boost defense spending year after year (to about $750 billion this year, half the world’s total), ensuring there’ll always be a lobby for war.

As I say, we are become sheep led bleating from our homes to grim streets, indignity and, yes, even slaughter.

Might I suggest it’s way time we the sheep grew fangs.

Might I suggest we start by supporting the healthcare reform bill.

Though it seems a modest plan to those who’ve taken the time to study systems of more progressive nations, don’t kid yourself.

If this bill fails, the Obama presidency is all but lost as a tool for meaningful change, and Democrats will face a drubbing come November.

On the other hand, this could be the start of something big.

People acquainted with the concept of Tipping Points know that sometimes just one show of gumption is enough to turn the tide of history.

I wish this healthcare bill were a Cadillac limousine instead of a used Chevy. It’s not a great bill. It’ll leave the insurance company in charge of healthcare by and large.

Still, my advice to people who support a brighter future for our country is to support this bill. It places limits on abuse.

And if Democrats find themselves possessed of the gonads to pass healthcare reform, who knows, they might next find the courage to put an end to outrageous usury. They might find ways to fund higher education in ways that don’t ruin families. They might find ways of keeping more people in their homes. Of fighting greenhouse gases. Ending mountaintop removal and building down defense spending.

So much depends on healthcare reform.

Every day momentum grows toward passage. Dennis Kucinich and others are lining up, and you should too, if you believe in equitable healthcare. Phone, email and fax your representatives, your senators, your cousin Myrtle and Uncle Darryl who suddenly have ceased to bring up those death panels. Maybe they’ve come to realize death panels have been convening for decades. They’re composed of insurance executives and actuarial analysts who routinely drive the last nails into tens of thousands of coffins annually through tactics that should’ve long since become scandalous.

You know what I mean. By sandbagging just claims, by citing pre-existing condition, by trapping people into providing false information on deliberately confusing registration forms. I know people who shy away from going to doctors from fear of getting diagnosed with a condition that will disqualify them from future coverage.

Somewhere along the lines, the majority of Americans forgot how to be scandalized.

It’s time we the sheep grew fangs and struck back against the wolves running our country into the ground.

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Celebrating My Country Within-A-Country
by Don Williams

So, whattaya know, at least one organized entity exists who thinks I might've had a point with all those ornery columns I wrote the past 10 years on behalf of peace and clean energy.

As you read this, I’m still celebrating an award I received on Saturday from the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance. OREPA, as it’s known, is dedicated to the challenge of stopping nuclear proliferation, preserving the environment and making the world a safer place for us and our descendants. You don't know what it means to have people I hold in such high esteem acknowledge that my columns might've got a thing or three right the past decade. This is an award I'll treasure.

I used to win lots of awards, if you'll pardon the immodesty. That was before I woke up one day and realized I had a decision to make. It was after my wife and I went to a soccer game and saw a headline in USA Today detailing how this country planned to visit Shock & Awe on Iraq. When I showed the paper to other soccer moms and dads sitting there, I realized they weren’t much bothered. Later I learned that about 85 percent of Americans favored the invasion, and so after I took the time to Google Iraq, it took me about 15 minutes to realize what a lousy idea it was to blow the lid off the place. And so I thought, I am not going to wave the flag for such a bad and inhumane idea. But what would I do?

I tell people in my writing class when faced with writers block just write down the truest thing you know. And so what I wrote was that the war in Iraq, like a lot of wars, would be based on a big lie. I got a few clues that I might be in trouble when the Knoxville News-Sentinel, where my column ran for 22 years, came out and endorsed the invasion, and later re-endorsed Bush-Cheney for re-selection.

The great historian Howard Zinn, who wrote A People's History of the United States, and who died Jan. 27, once said that the only reason governments get away with doing such mean and stupid things is because people are so often so obedient. If reporters stop reprinting government propaganda and good men and women in Lions' Clubs and Rotary Clubs and high schools stop spouting jingoistic slogans, and stop buying products that pay the BIG LIARS at Fox News and elsewhere, they can't prevail.

And that's what I tried to do. I reflected on what the great philosopher Immanual Kant famously advised--that we should live by that rule we’d have to be a universal principle of conduct. I thought, OK, if every journalist just tells the truth, we'll stop this war. I knew it was a long shot, but I was determined not to be the weak link.

Eventually I pulled my column from the News-Sentinel rather than obey editors who repeatedly directed me to stop writing about national issues. And what a hullabaloo was ignited. Letters and emails and phone calls flowed in every direction.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss being one of those little gray faces in the newspaper. I grew up reading James Reston and Bert Vincent and Mike Royko and Wilma Dykeman and Carson Brewer. Being a columnist was a dream come true.

But I don't miss the lies and innuendos about me that regularly ran on the Sunday morning letters to the editor page, and I don’t miss thinly veiled death threats that ran on the News-Sentinel website, and I don’t miss the radio campaign an obscure talking head named George Korda mounted against me in a transparent effort to hijack my fame and infamy to his own advantage.

For a while I felt like an outsider in my own hometown, my own country. Like a lot of you, there were times when I didn't recognize my country anymore, and more than once when I've heard somebody say America, love it or leave it, I considered leaving. Especially following the shootings at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church, where I teach my creative writing class and where two people were murdered—and several injured—for the crime of being liberals. I've Googled around, and there are times that Costa Rica or Denmark or Sweden looked pretty good to me.

But the hullabaloo involved in quitting my News-Sentinel column taught me one thing I’ve cherished. It taught me just who my country is. I'll never forget coming home the first Friday my column didn't run to discover my good friend Will Rickenbach sitting on my front steps with a hand extended. He didn’t have to say a word, we’ve been friends a long time. Or the delegation composed of seven gracious church ladies who came up to me after a Father Rob sermon and said how much they appreciated me. Or the surprise of discovering every chair filled for my creative writing class at Tennessee Valley Unitarian a couple weeks later. Or the outpouring of letters and emails from all over Tennessee, the United States and other countries.

Sometime along in there I realized I do belong. And that's because I live in a country within a country. It's made up of neighbors on Panther Creek and Indian Gap roads. It's includes good folks at Tennessee Valley Unitarian and at St. Joseph’s Episcopal, in Sevierville, who've kept a Peace Fellowship going for over a decade.

And it's Father Rob and Russ and Rick and Carol Brown and my friends Will and Nancy and Liz and Steve and Jim and Louise and the folks from my writing classes--Lucy and Lansing and MaryAnn and Donna and Bob and Tommy and Doug and Rebekah and David and Sarah. And its my beautiful sisters, Rebecca and Kathleen, who were there Saturday, taking a break from slaying dragons in and around Nashville on behalf of healthcare reform and Kathleen's FOREVER GREEN TENNESSEE campaign, and yes, my thick-headed brothers and other relations. And it includes my sweet mother. How many times in my life have I heard her call out in unexpected moments, often so full of passion that it was nearly scary. OH DAH-ny! I'd hear her say. Come see! Just look at this beautiful sunset. Oh come see, come see!

And it includes my dear children, Alexis, and Travis and Justin, so full of light and wonder and generosity of spirit. Most importantly it includes my wife, Jeanne, whose deeds in defense of the downtrodden or at-risk or abused children--the time she's stood up in the face of angry cops or street thugs or government officials to defend those deserving of justice or human compassion--are becoming legend.

More pertinent to Saturday night’s proceedings, my America is the one that includes all the good folks in OREPA and elsewhere who have the courage to stand up and disobey. To cross a line, to loft a giant or puppet or unfurl a banner, to post an all-too-true photograph, or simply to say to a friend spouting some mean-spirited idiocy uttered by Limbaugh, "Honey you be drinkin' the wrong kinda tea…."

We all have corners we can light up, some just happen to be a little bigger than others. So let me finish by saying, you’ll never know what it means to count you, faithful reader, as part of my community, my country. And if our beautiful blue-green Earth survives the 21st Century it will be because of You and You and You and people like you everywhere. There are millions of us in America, and that's MY country.

God bless you, and God bless our Good Green Mother Earth.
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At last, we've entered the New Millennium... sort of
by Don Williams

As the curtain falls on "a low, dishonest decade," in the words of W.H. Auden, things are looking up.

Just maybe we've entered the spirit of a new millennium so many yearned for prior to 2001, the year progressives like me wrung our hands as the wheels of civilization began rolling backward into an era of needless war, greed and environmental decline.

On good days, it seems those days are ending. The train of progress is building up steam again. There's a hopeful litany to point to.

Start with the cultural. Avatar, the flashiest and most popular new film in years proffers a message born of a Whole Earth mentality. James Cameron is a product of the first generation to see photographic images of the Whole Earth while we were still dewy-eyed and impressionable. He's of the generation that venerated multiple points of view, empathy, raised-consciousness, the global perspective, and it shows in this work.

Cameron's is a green world view, an anti-colonialist vision, a voice for tolerance and understanding, intelligence and imagination. Such movies as this serve as indicators and teachers of a new generation who mostly want nothing to do with torture, discrimination, wars for oil, global warming, economic exploitation, mindless violence and other vestiges of the dysfunctional 20th century.

Then there's the political. At last we have another president of intelligence and good intentions, bolstered by a majority in Congress. Yes, there's plenty of reasons for disappointment among progressives, but Obama got much more right in Year One than any president in a long time. Name one president since Roosevelt who's been dealt a worse hand. Some would argue Obama should've rolled the dice, found a way to throw Bush-Cheney in the brig for war crimes, brought down Wall Street and the insurance companies, distributed money to the masses and immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a word for those who advocate such unilateral acts. They're called radicals.

Likely as not, such actions would've ended in a new Great Depression and an old-fashioned bloodbath a forces from the right and left clashed. You and I might well be standing in bread lines. Thanks anyway. Radicals rail for revolution.

Progressives embrace progress. It's demonstrable that Obama has made some. Grant him an empathy implicit in acknowledging that he's navigating perilous waters. One wrong move and catastrophe pertains on any number of fronts. He's being cautious in the political capital he spends, because there are not shortages of problems on which he might fritter it away. Yes, he's flawed, but I say give him another year before judging too harshly, bearing in mind the old notion that The Perfect is often the enemy of The Good. Thirty-five million more Americans might have healthcare under Obama than under Bush. That's progress, and it's something to build on. There'll be other initiatives to expand and fine-tune healthcare, to put limits on untenable charges that show up on our hospital bills.

On the environmental front, things appear to move slowly, but really we're on the front end of a Green Revolution. Again, there's plenty of room for improvement, but progress has been made. It took Bush years to even acknowledge the human impact on global climate. Over and over he downplayed what scientists from NASA and many others revealed about our world. Obama has made energy and climate central to his administration. Yes, Cap and Trade is flawed. Yes, a carbon tax is needed. Yes, we could do more to open and expand the grid to embrace new technologies, the massive wind resources of the northeast, the amazing solar capacity of the southwest, and advances in bio-fuels technologies that could render them independent of corn and other food-sources linked to petroleum-based fertilizers.

Still, we should acknowledge that scientists are freer to speak their minds, action is being taken, energy companies are being forced to install scrubbers, mountaintop removal has been curtailed if not halted, and other nations are being encouraged to get on board the Green express. Many are actually leading us in green technologies. This movement will only move forward, a far cry from just one year ago, when Drill Baby Drill was the war cry of the right.

The right notwithstanding, it's a more pluralistic society. Not only do we have a man of color as president, we have an attorney-general of color, yet another woman at State, a female Hispanic on the Supreme Court, and progress for gays in states like Iowa. It's a different world from the one in which I grew up hearing racist jokes.

Despite such gains, the rosy scenario painted above disguises darker tones.

Stay-tuned.
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Say No to a New Nuclear Bomb Plant
by Don Williams

If you love our world, drop everything for ten minutes and visit www.Y12SWEIS.com. Leave a comment there telling the US government to get behind a vision embraced by unlikely bedfellows Barack Obama, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, the late Ronald Reagan, Jimmie Carter and others who have envisioned a nuclear-weapons-free future. Specifically, ask our politicos and bureaucrats to drop plans to build a ruinous new weapons complex in Oak Ridge, TN.

Building such a plant could turn out to be the worst decision our country ever made, unleashing a new upward spiral in the arms race on an already dangerous world.

For readers within driving distance of Oak Ridge, I ask you to get out to one of two public meetings and, in your own words, tell them we don't want more nuclear bombs—we have thousands already--especially at a time when we're trying to convince Iran and others not to build them.

In case you missed it—and I’ve seen little about this in the media--the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will build a new, $3.5 billion bomb plant in Oak Ridge unless we stop them. NNSA published a Notice of Intent in the Federal Register several years ago to build such a plant, and Congress has budgeted startup funds.

Although the program is being sold as a way of shrinking the nuclear footprint in this country—consolidating and streamlining much of the nuclear weapons stockpile--the plant would create scores of new nuclear weapons per year, ensuring their viability into the 22nd century! by concocting new thermonuclear devices from a variety of materials. Further, it would have the capacity to create new kinds of nukes in keeping with the pea-brained visions of Cheney/Bush.

In order to move forward, the NNSA is required by law to take comments from the public as they prepare their final Evironmental Impact Statement. The first hearing is 6:30 to 9 p.m. tonight (Tuesday, Nov. 17) at the New Hope Center in Oak Ridge, TN, with a repeat performance 10 to 12:30 p.m. Nov. 18.

Other Ways To Comment:

As mentioned above, comments from across the country can also be submitted on-line at www.y12sweis.com , by fax to 865-483-2012, or in writing to: Pam Gorman, Y12 SWEIS Document Manager, 800 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Suite A-500, Oak Ridge, TN, 37830.

To maximize the impact of your comments, send them also to:

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20500

or on-line at www.whitehouse.gov/contact

or call the contact line at 202-456-1111

Also send your comments to your Senators and Representatives, and send a Letter to the Editor version to www.knoxnews.com and to your local newspaper. Why? Letters to the editor put an issue "on the map," said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, a highly respected watchdog group. "If you mention your Senators and Congressperson, their staff will clip it and it will land on their desk."

"The idea that the United States should invest two or three billion dollars to build more bombs when the President has declared a firm commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons is as preposterous as it is perilous," said Hutchison. "Who’s making policy in the United States these days? What we need in Oak Ridge is a realistic plan to maintain our nuclear arsenal in a safe and secure manner while the stockpile is reduced to zero. Building a new bomb plant now, under the guise of ‘modernization,’ corrupts the President’s vision and negates all our efforts to constrain nuclear proliferation. It will place the US at the forefront of a new global nuclear arms resurgence. That’s not modernization, it’s throwback—and it’s clearly the wrong direction for the country."

No doubt any final draft of the EIS will mention the effects on birds and other animals, on groundwater, air, native plants and the health of nearby residents. But I wonder if it will contain the phrase, "Could result in the destruction of the planet."

Please, resist this deal to make us all complicit in future horrors we can't begin to predict. A few corporations will profit, a few politicians will brag about new jobs, but it's a devil's bargain--jobs now, against the possible death of our world, as a new arms race begins in earnest.

Let's not be gullible. If we build new nukes, countries around the world will follow our example—or the example of Iran, which has yet to violate the letter of the NPT, but is expanding its options by building a nuclear infrastructure. Japan, Brazil, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others could follow suit, as owning nukes takes on the glamour of status symbol and power of military might. What's amazing is the brazenness with which our government is proceeding to break the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and how the national press yawns as, once again, we begin walking toward the brink of nuclear annihilation.

The new bomb plant can be stopped by political power—your voice joined with thousands of others. You have a right to a future free of nuclear weapons, and a world without nuclear weapons is possible—but only if people like you and I act now. For information about alternatives to a new nuke factory and other background information, visit: http://www.stopthebombs.org/

Please do what you can.

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To all the late lamented boys and girls of summer, come back, go away, come back...
by Don Williams

Of all the stories of celebrity deaths blown my way by media none slammed body and soul like John Lennon’s passing. Not the Kennedys. Not Elvis. Not Ken Kesey, whom I knew, not Martin Luther King, not Cronkite.

Word of Lennon’s passing struck me dumb Dec. 9, 1980, as I reported for work at Blount County Center for the Handicapped, and my boss, Annie—a 95-pound firecracker who would be dead from cancer five years later—met me at the door to ask if I’d heard the news?

I couldn't answer, as John Lennon’s death entered my eyes and my ears, my heart, my belly. If I’d had a womb, I would’ve felt it there.

Cliché, yes, but a part of me died that day. The gig was up. All gigs were up, save for the Great Gig in the Sky. The universe morphed into a dark and implacable host. Whatever fibers remained from the Age of Aquarius twined into just one more colorful and necessary thread in the tapestry of our times. And though we lit candles and raised them high on the waterfront that night, my youth curled up and fed itself to Grief.

Doubtlessly millions took one or another of the many public deaths of spring and summer, 2009, in just such personal ways, and summer’s not even over. In any case, the list is incomplete, status-based, broken on both ends. Still yet, here it is, in part…

Patrick Swayze, Steve McNair, Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahan, Koko Taylor, David Carradine, Wayne Tisdale, Dom Deluise, Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp, Marilyn Chambers, Natasha Richardson, Michael Jackson, Robert Novak, Socks the Cat, Eunice Shriver, Don Hewitt, Les Paul, Walter Cronkite, Robert McNamara, John Hughes, Corazan Aquino, J. G. Ballard, Jim Caroll, Teddy Kennedy, Karl Malden, and now Henry Gibson.

It’s a litany from our flown or fleeting youth.

There’s a sweet and edgy piece of creative nonfiction in Ken Kesey’s 1986 book, Demon Box, called "The Day After Superman Died." It’s about how Kesey—OK, his fictive persona, Deboree--learns that his old friend Neal Cassidy—OK, his fictive persona, Houlihan, has died. Bear with me, I promise to bring this round again….

Cassidy had long been a cultural touchstone. A dozen writers based characters on him. Journalist Tom Wolfe spread his fame in that classic of new journalism, The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, but Kesey knew Cassidy personally. Had spent time on the road with him in the world’s first magic bus, and at concerts, be-ins, vision quests and more. They were brothers-in-arms, so to speak. Voyagers who’d braved wine-dark roads.

So when a former flower child gone-to-seed drove up Deboree’s Oregon driveway to deliver the news that Houlihan had been found dead along the railroad tracks linking Puerto Sancto to Manzanilla, the news sent Deboree mind-tripping through all the deaths, public and private he’d ever known.

One thing he couldn’t get past was Houlihan’s last words. They were: "Sixty-four-thousand-nine-hundred-and twenty-eight." Later, as he bathed his sorrow in cheap wine and weed he’d found on the farm, Deboree learned that Houlihan’s words referred to a crazy bet he’d made. Houlihan (Cassidy) had bet some unknown soul he could count all the railroad ties between Puerto Sancto and Manzanilla.

Deboree finds a sort of solace in that number. "He was counting for us." His mind starts bringing back all the late great faces of his times, not so much counting as recognizing the wonder of their existence, a way of blessing.

"The dark space about him is suddenly filled with faces, winking off and on… LBJ with your Texas cheeks eroded by compromises come back. Khrushchev, fearless beyond peasant ignorance, healthy beside Eisenhower, come back both of you. James Dean all picked apart and Tab Hunter all put together. Michael Rennie in your silver suit the day the earth stood still for peace, come back all of you.

"Now go away and leave me.

"Now come back….

"Come back Vaughn Monroe, Ethel Waters, Krazy Kat, Lou Costello, Harpo Marx, Adlai Stevenson, Ernest Hemingway, Herbert Hoover…"

Soon Kesey’s litany begins mingling faces of the dead and yet un-dead….

"Harry Belafonte, Timothy Leary, Ron Boise, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lee Harvey Oswald… John O’Hara and Liz Taylor, Estes Kefauver… Aldous Huxley, Edith Piaf, Joan Baez, Bob Kaufmann, Lawrence Ferlinghetti," still alive even yet!

It’s a mournful yet hopeful dirge, this litany, bearing scant relation to 2009, save for the fact that it’s all passing, and with it… all of us. The faces still wink on and off….

So come back Patrick Swayze, Steve McNair, Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahan. Come back feisty Koko Taylor, David Carradine, Wayne Tisdale, Dom Deluise, Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp. Come back Marilyn Chambers, Natasha Richardson, Michael Jackson, Robert Novak, Socks the Cat, Eunice Shriver, Don Hewitt, Les Paul, Walter Cronkite, Robert McNamara. Come back John Hughes, Corazan Aquino, J. G. Ballard, Jim Caroll. Come back Teddy Kennedy, Karl Malden, and now Henry Gibson. Come back, go away, now come back.

Raise candles high. Lift them to the face of time and darkness and whatever holiness pertains.

In the words of Kesey….

"Young Cassius Clay.

"Young Mailer.

"Young Miller.

"Young Jack Kerouac…

"Young Dylan.

"Young Lennon.

"Young lovers wherever you are. Come back and remember and go away and come back…."
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Kennedys' earthy darkness never quite eclipsed their lunar glow
by Don Williams

To look back through the Greek tragedy known as The Kennedys is to witness players who attract stones and roses like the moon attracts craters.

Such contrasts were on display over 40 years ago, July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

The Apollo 11 moon landing remains the most dramatic public monument to Kennedy vision and courage. It was John, after all, who made going there a national quest and who set rockets in motion to make it happen. All the Kennedys might've basked in the moment.

Fate had rather more artful ideas. Even as Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins navigated their way toward the moon, a quarter-million miles distant, JFK's younger brother Edward took a short drive toward a dark drink of water with a young woman not his wife. Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. The event robbed the moon of Kennedy luster, and Edward of any real chance at the presidency.

Such ironies strike with TNT force, leaving scars and lines on aging faces.

Take this one. Richard Nixon made that most famous of long-distance phone calls to the moon, hijacking JFK's glory. It's understandable. Nixon had lost the 1960 presidential election to JFK by perhaps the narrowest margin in history. In the pithy words of commentator William Safire, "Nixon looked down on the Kennedys with utmost envy." In 1969, Nixon's revenge was complete, as he basked in the glow of a moon program he was even then strangling.

Lesser ironies strike obliquely.

Here's one: Lyndon Baines Johnson would have made that famous phone call to the moon had fortune been kinder. It was Johnson, some would claim, who fathered the space program. His enabling legislation while a senator in the 1950s, made NASA possible. Unfortunately, Johnson's thunder was silenced--his reign curtailed--by the guns and bombs of Vietnam and a challenge from Robert Kennedy, another name redolent of tragedy. So it was Nixon's call.

Safire, a Nixon speechwriter in 1969, prepared a somber message for his boss to deliver in case things went tragic for Apollo. This speech would have made special mention of widows of astronauts who might have died on the moon. Instead, the moon ship JFK famously uttered into existence traveled millions of miles with scarcely a hitch. Rather, it was Teddy's midnight ramble of a few miles that turned to tragedy--a tragedy etched into lines of his aging face. Few ironies have been greater than those surrounding the moon landings and Kennedy tragedy, for they magnify all the others.

Ten years ago, during the thirtieth anniversary of that first trip to the moon--even as JFK's name was again being hailed for sending us there--another Kennedy landed in a dark drink of water. John Kennedy, Jr., who saluted his father's casket so memorably--courageously it seemed--and who was heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, robbed the world of his own potential by flying a high-performance aircraft into the sea. He was an heir indeed. To heartbreak and death. After a respectful hiatus, during which the Kennedys tastefully buried their own at sea--a debate was joined. Was John Jr.'s decision to fly into a cloud-shrouded night an act of Kennedy bravado or was it life-affirming courage in the face of danger? Either way, it was at least akin to the optimism and bravado that marked the careers of John, Bobby and Teddy--optimism and bravado that took us to the moon, initiated the Peace Corps, turned back the Russians, helped roll back segregation, uplifted the poor and downtrodden and so much more. History and Greek tragedy show that vivid virtues, which shine so bold in certain settings, darken to fatal flaws in others. So it ever was with the Kennedys.

In Teddy, as in John and Bobby, however, the darkness never quite eclipsed the brilliance.

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Lamar: Our mountains are not for sale, keep your hands off
by Don Williams

(Note: To support the cause, scroll to the end of this article and click a link--DW.)

Senator Lamar Alexander walked in on my young wife and me one night while smooching in the kitchen. It was autumn of 1982 at a place called Blackberry Farm, an upscale lodge nestled yes in the Smoky Mountains. Jeanne was working as an assistant chef and I was trying to write a book.

Alexander was our youngest governor ever at the time, having won lots of votes by virtue of walking across Tennessee in hiking boots. A multi-dimensional man, he’s famous for playing classical piano in the great outdoors.

Our politics have diverged and bent together since that night in a pattern as whimsical as meandering rivers separated by mountains, yet headed for the same sea. We disagree on many things, such as nukes (which he supports) and windmills (he opposes). But a shared love for Tennessee’s mountains won’t let me write him off as I do some politicians. There comes a fork where rivers blend.

I say that to grant Alexander this. He’s got guts and he’s got convictions. I hope he has clout when it comes to mountaintop removal.

Environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr., has called the practice of blasting tops off whole mountains and dumping the slag in the nearest valley, America’s worst environmental disaster. Like him, Alexander believes this gross technique must come to an end. The Cumberlands are among the most bio-diverse and beautiful eco-systems on earth. Lands where mountaintop removal occurs become nearly lifeless in comparison to their pre-blasted state. Most of the flora and fauna that existed there for thousands or millions of years can no longer survive in the slag-heap once it’s been "reclaimed" by invasive species. The travesty sullies headwaters of dozens of streams that flow into the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Obed and many other rivers.

Alexander and seven other legislators are co-sponsoring a bill that would ban coal companies from blasting away mountaintops to unearth coal.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. In a move about as cynical as it gets, a company called Coal-Mac, Inc., in West Virginia, has asked its 300 employees not to vacation in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains anymore, and is urging fellow mountain blasters in Virginia and Kentucky to join them. They claim it’s because Alexander’s bill would eliminate lots of jobs.

The Sierra Club of Kentucky has responded in support of Alexander's proposal by calling on members nationwide to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and other Tennessee tourist sites. The Sierra Club has about 800,000 members nationwide.

Three points:

First, we’re not talking about multitudes of downtrodden miners having bread taken from their mouths. That’s because mountaintop removal is about as job-friendly as robotic assembly lines. All one needs to set up shop are a few trucks, dozers and lots of dynamite. Only a few thousand miners work in mountaintop removal mines where many hundreds of thousands once worked in more traditional mines.

Second, coal thus ripped from the earth mostly serves to line pockets of coal company owners and Chinese manufacturers. Such coal leaves the state bound for Asia, where it sullies the air and encourages the building of hundreds of new but old-fashioned power plants in China burning dirty coal.

Third, I’d urge senators and representatives to consider the world they want for our children and theirs. Is it a world in which we’re willing to trade off one of the most bountiful eco-systems in exchange for temporary prosperity for a few? Or do we want a world in which concepts such as "balance of trade" and "gross domestic product" take into account the unprecedented drawing-down of resources and the huge cost in damage to our rivers, lakes, streams, the air we breathe and the very contours of our earth.

As far as boycotters of Tennessee tourism go, to them I can only say, yes, please stay home, and keep your trucks and dynamite well away from our beloved mountains. They’re not for sale. Not at that price.

To help end mountaintop removal, by contacting legislators, click the following link and scroll to the bottom.

http://www.ilovemountains.org/appalachia-restoration-act/

or visit http://www.ilovemountains.org/write-your-officials/

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