Pretty in Purple

I spent July 4th making my first batch ever of plum jam. It's a bit rough, given the state of the plums that drop in my backyard, but those who have tasted it tell me it's sweet and pleasant. Maybe I'll start selling it for $5 a jar, first come, first served? More likely, I'll just give it away, first come, first served. You know, better to seed the market...

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After a recount and an audit, we here at HotWeir World Headquarters are pleased to announce that we in fact NOT yet reached the 1,oooth post milestone. Nope, there were several never-posted "drafts" in the queue, which fooled the automatic counter. In fact, this is post #998, so two more will be required before we hit that big mark.

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Happy Birthday, America

Photo by Sarah

On this celebration of our nation's Independence Day, I'm honoring our diversity, our optimism, and our magnificent First Amendment. My lovely grandson James is a poster boy for America's future. A very serious young man, as is evident already by age one and a half, when he chooses to smile, he has the power to light up the world around him.

Six decades hence, when he reaches my age, I truly hope the things that make this country great are still in place. Early this morning (I'm always up by 6 a.m., workday or not), I read Sy Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker about the Bush administration's secret covert efforts to provoke Iran into doing something stupid, and therefore creating the pretext for Dick Cheney's greatest remaining wish -- an excuse to bomb and then invade Iran.

I've known Sy for many years, and am quite familiar with the quality of his reporting. He has the best sources within the U.S. military and the CIA of any journalist in America. When he writes a story like this, it is coming from the deepest sense of patriotism that any American could possibly have.

Our best military and intelligence minds fear the civilian hacks like Cheney who continue imposing their private-sector values on a public-spirited military-intelligence establishment.



Obviously, if the unqualified maniacs currently in power in Washington, D.C. have their way, they will drag this great country of ours into yet another quagmire that results only in turning yet another generation of potential friends into fanatic jihadists.



The Iranians are a great people, with an ancient civilization rich with a linguistic tradition that has spawned literary greatness and a mathematical tradition that has yielded fabulous mercantile genius. Not to mention artistic and entrepreneurial contributions that dwarf those of its neighbors on all sides.

A wise leader would realize that the ancient empire of Persia is a natural ally of America. Idiotic leaders, drunk on the inherited and no longer enforceable power of compelling the import of cheap oil to power our absurd civilian fleet of Hummers that truly represent an ineffable national embarrassment of epic proportions are so out of touch with the cycle of history as to be laughable -- except we have not yet rid ourselves of these fools.

Those who criticize Barack Obama for his apparent willingness to reconsider his former position to withdraw our forces from Iraq are hypocrites. To me, his statements recently are comforting, because I am old enough to remember when we left Vietnam precipitously (under a Republican administration) and what a disaster ensued as a result.

I hope President Obama proceeds cautiously in both Iraq and Iran. Thanks to Sy's article, it is clear he will inherit covert ops much like those John F. Kennedy found himself saddled with in 1961. We all know (or should know) what happened then -- the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost led us into an unsurvivable nuclear war.

The Bush-Cheney team aims to push Obama into a similar no-win corner. Only a person deeply committed to our greatest national strengths -- diversity, optimism, and freedom of speech/press/religion and assembly can do what needs to be done circa 2009.

And that is to keep our troops firmly in place in Iraq until stability reigns; to negotiate a new relationship with Iran, Syria, and other powers in the Middle East; and to relentlessly pound Al-Qaeda and the Taliban along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

I believe Barack Obama is the person best qualified to implement these policies, and I also think he will be our President next year. Therefore, even though I also respect John McCain almost as much as Obama, I believe that peace, finally is at hand.

And even though I am utterly non-religious, I can say "Thank God." (Whoever you think (s)he may be.) Why? Because I believe for the first time in my adult life, we have two truly great Americans running for the Presidency, either of whom will help us find our way to a better future.

The problem for McCain is he now seems to be heading backwards in time, rather than where I suspect his heart would go, but he cannot seem to stop himself from being pragmatic politically. I guess he has given in to the lust for power, and therefore, is abandoning his core principles.

Obama, on the other hand, represents a beacon to the future. But if I detect a similar shift by him, I will denounce it just as quickly as I am doing tonight, against McCain.


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War: My View (3)

This is post #1,001 here at Hotweir.com. I can't believe I didn't notice yesterday that we had reached a milestone, but there you have it; I've been so busily engaged in my new job that I missed what should have been a moment of celebration.

When I was a young teenager, my cousins George, Jr., Dan, and Gordon and I had one of those conversations that only young boys have. We discussed the various ways we might die and which one would be preferable. My memory may well be flawed, but I believe we all agreed that dying in the service of our country would be the best way to go.

I probably still held this view when I started attending classes at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1965, because I was (1) naive, (2) conservative by nature, and (3) pro-war, in the sense that I agreed with the 1964 GOP Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's proposal to drop a nuclear bomb on Vietnam.

But, in this new environment, where people were openly debating every sort of question, for the first time in my life I was able to honestly reflect about what my own beliefs were. Slowly, I came to realize that I was, both by instinct and experience, an outsider.

In January 1966, an older friend on campus, Ed Herstein, and I went to the basement restaurant in the Student Union, where we discussed all the pluses and minuses of my country's war in Vietnam.

I emerged from that conversation, based in logic, as an opponent of that war. And that has made all of the difference ever since.

Baseball Season Surprises

Considering that I am an official MLB blogger, you could easily reprimand me for being MIA in posting about baseball this season. It's been a strange year here in San Francisco. Our long-time hero, Barry Bonds, discredited by almost anybody in professional sports as a steroid-user, no longer wears the Giants' uniform that he cherished.

The team was widely expected to be a pathetic also-ran this season. Last place was a certainty, according to conventional wisdom.

Well, mid-season is here and the Giants are not in last place in their division. They are in 3rd place, five games out of 1st. But here is the most shocking fact -- of the 16 teams in the National League, the Giants have the third best road record! Only the Cardinals and the Phillies, both legitimate contenders for the NL pennant, have been better on the road.

Long-time baseball fans understand why this statistic matters. A team that has been doing badly at home will often rectify that weakness in the second half of the season. But being able to win on the road is an indication that a team is much stronger than the competition.

So, you read it here first.

The divisional champs in the National League this year will be the Phillies in the East, the Cardinals in the Central, and the unheralded Giants in the West

(I just hope somebody connected with professional baseball reads this obscure prediction. Otherwise, it truly will not mater at all what I think...)

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War: My View (2)

When I went to Ann Arbor for Freshman Orientation, in late 1965, it was a week or so before I would return for the real thing. I had to be one of the most naive new students, in all senses, of all time:

* I'd never tasted alcohol.
* I'd never had sex.
* I didn't know that "writing" could be a career option.
* I'd never seen a naked woman.
* I didn't know what "pot" was.
* I didn't know what leaving a tip in a restaurant meant.

Now, before you choke to death laughing, there were a few things I did know:

* All the universe is based in mathematical patterns, which I could "see."
* Fantasy can be as good as, or better than, reality.
* Trees held more silent wisdom in their beings than most human beings ever will.
* Hitting a baseball begins with strength in your legs.
* Girls were astonishing creatures; their mere presence could make your knees quake, and your pants bulge.
* Cigarettes tasted crappy, and weren't worth the quarter you had to muster to acquire them from the corner gas station.

When I was on the University of Michigan campus for my orientation, I'm quite sure my parents worried that somehow I would be blown away like a leaf in a foreign wind, never knowing what had hit it.

Mine had been a strange childhood.

Labeled as a math genius at an early age, placed in front of every class as an object of curiosity, since I could add faster than any adding machine of the era, I of course felt awkward and weird. Chosen by the local bank as a young teen as their ideal "sponsored" future banker, due to my math skills, and carefully tested as to my potential computer skills (then barely a fantasy machine), I only experienced rejection as "not sufficiently motivated" to be a banker. I keenly felt my immigrant father's disappointment at my failure.

Identified as athletically gifted, particularly as a baseball player, plus being the (by far) fastest kid in our neighborhood, only to be soon condemned by my father and my brother-in-law as "lazy" when I stopped being able to even run down a routine fly ball, courtesy of an undiagnosed case of rheumatic fever that was eating away at my heart, I again felt the searing disappointment of my father toward his only son.

This deepened when our family doctor diagnosed my heart problem as "psychological;" I agreed, and embraced all of the negative interpretations of me. The future indeed, by age 11, seemed bleak.

This was the boy who for the very first time walked over to the "Diag" on the U of M campus, that summer of 1965, and was appalled by the sight of frat boys taunting a small group of anti-war students, sitting in a circle, holding candles, protesting the Vietnam War.

I was wearing the most ridiculous clothes imaginable, a ridiculous black sports coat over ridiculous white pants, and I was desperately fleeing a dance on the last night of orientation week, because I wouldn't have known how to dance with a girl if she asked me to, when I encountered this awful, life-changing scene.

The people doing the taunting were "my" people, I suppose -- athletes, loyal Americans, future soldiers, conservatives like me.

The people sitting in the circle, possibly risking injury or worse, were people the likes of which I'd never met -- gentle, bearded, thoughtful, outside of the mainstream.

I don't think that I knew it then, but I'd just encountered my natural fellow travelers -- those of us who could never quite fit into the accepted options then available to Americans. Those, who by virtue of skin color, sexual orientation, ideological instinct, or just plain old outsiderness didn't fit into the socially acceptable parameters of the American Dream.

I returned home after this experience in a deeply confused state. Now I knew who I was not, but I did not yet know who I was. The next chapter of this story is how I discovered my true place as a civil rights activist, an anti-war protester, and an advocate for outsiders of all stripes.

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War: My View

You don't have to scratch my personal life history very deeply to determine that I have never been one to advocate going to war. Let's press the reverse button and try to better understand the context within which my opinions were formed.

As a little boy, my hero was Davy Crockett, as portrayed by Walt Disney in my all-time favorite TV series. I had my own coonskin cap (and in those days, it was a real raccoon skin), my own (fake) rifle, and a loyal band of followers, all of whom happened to be girls.

"Let's go, men!" I would shout, as Susie, Bonnie, and Kathy fell duly in line behind me in the field behind our house on North Wilson in Royal Oak, Michigan, circa 1953.

Years passed and I got my own real guns, first BB guns, then a shotgun, my prized 16-gauge, which still sits safely under my bed to this day. My teen years were spent, more often than not, with my dog trudging through the corn fields and woods behind our house on the edge of Bay City, Michigan, hunting game.

That sounds good, but I must admit I never actually harvested any game. I had my chances at pheasants, rabbits, even (with slugs) deer, but I never actually bagged anything.

Nope, I never killed anything except for rodents, fish, and a few unlucky birds.

When it came to the age where I might have taken my place in my country's armed forces, I was a deeply conservative Republican who felt that Barry Goldwater would be the best man to lead our country.

It was 1964, and I was 17.

Up until this moment, as far as I can tell, I was straight on track to do what my dear cousin Dan in fact did, which was go to Vietnam and fight on behalf of our country.

But then something deep inside me changed. I'd done well in high school and won a tuition scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. My high school class went to Ann Arbor the June of my junior year, when President Johnson delivered the commencement speech.

None of that affected me, but orientation week later the following summer, did.

(end of part one)

1,000 Fires

The northern coast of our state is blanketed not only with seasonally appropriate fog, but with the smoke of 1,000 angry fires igniting a countryside tinder-dry from the effects of a record drought. One lightning storm (without rain) set most of these fires off spontaneously a little over a week ago.



My younger kids called last Tuesday night from a pay phone in their campground deep in the Sierra to say there was a 50-50% chance they would be evacuated on Thursday. That never did happen, but they smelled smoke in the air all the rest of the week until they returned home Saturday.



I was taking care of Charlie Russell here. And worrying not only about my kids but about my friend Allan's house in Big Sur, where one of the worst fires is bearing down on his property, and if the weather doesn't help, it may reach there tomorrow. He lives next door to Esalen, which is also threatened.

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Rainbow Love

(All photos by Junko Sasaki)


Ours is a city that celebrates love.



Love between men and women.



Love between men and men.



Love between women and women.



Love between those who are not quite sure which sex they are or which sex attracts them.



In the end, to us, it's only about love. The details can be debated by the angry people, those who think they know right from wrong in a rigid sort of way.

We don't share that certainty here. San Francisco is a place that attracts people willing to push limits, transcend boundaries, embrace diversity. This is the city of love, however you may wish to define it.

This is Pride Weekend, and every one of us, gay, straight, bi or uncertain share our collective pride. "If you come to San Francisco, wear a flower in your hair," said the singer.

If you come to San Francisco, come with an open mind and an open heart. We'll take care of the details, sweetie.

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