New Sensations

As you get older it’s easy to fall into a rut, to repeat yourself and to lose the child’s sense of wonder at the world. Fortunately new sensations can be found in unexpected corners of everyday life - you just have to keep your eyes open. Recently I’ve had three such experiences that came out of nowhere and added a little magic to my day. I’m glad each one happened.

#1- Generator of roadkill

American Election Watch III

So, since my last election watch update, a great deal has happened. We have witnessed a major flameout in the Republican race, and the “rising without trace” of a new contender. On the Democrat side, Mr. Obama is still, ah, doing stuff.

First, the flameout. When last I wrote, Rick Perry had just announced his candidacy and leapt to the front of the pack. He’s tall, Texan, masculine, has a good record on job creation… plus he once shot a coyote. The right developed a serious mancrush; the left started raving about a rock Perry’s dad had painted over decades earlier. Meanwhile, Perry opened his mouth.

Mr. Gorbachev Goes To Mexico

Like many children of the Cold War, I grew up anxious about Nuclear Armageddon, so when Gorbachev eased relations between the USSR and the West I was grateful. For many years I viewed him as a hero, pure and simple. It was not until I moved to Russia that I realized his reforms had been intended to strengthen the USSR, not destroy it.

Oops.

Bourgeois Kids Of The World Unite!

When I first saw the mob of pasty-faced bourgeois Bohemian children camped out on Wall Street I thought: not again. Ever since the late 1980s, when all that hippy nonsense turned two decades old, a segment of Western youth has suffered from 60s envy. Thus we periodically witness attempts to rekindle the romantic flame of protest which - we are constantly reminded - burned so brightly in those halcyon days.

Me, I’ve never suffered from 60s envy. Woodstock is to blame: I was 16 when I watched the concert film and was shocked to learn how much of the music was not Jimi Hendrix but rather, puerile and twee garbage like Country Joe and the Fish or John Sebastian.

It was these 60s clowns who were responsible for the wasteland my peers and I inhabited in the 1980s, I realized. The Woodstock generation had jettisoned all that peace and love tosh to pursue money, power and status.

Operation Fast And Furious: A Very Baffling Scandal

A few months back I read about a truly mind-blowing scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco. Apparently the organization had been supplying guns to Mexican drug cartels which - unsurprisingly- had since been used to kill people.

Now in many parts of the world you would assume that corrupt members of the ATF were boosting their income by moonlighting as arms dealers. In Mexico the police, government and gangs are closely interlinked, and nobody is shocked.  In the 1990s some Russian soldiers sold weapons to the Chechen militants they were fighting. Why? Everybody knew: to supplement their miserable earnings.

After The Fire; or - How The Chihuahua Was Spared

Last week, my friend Sandy sent me an email:

“Dan, do you want to come with me to Bastrop? I’m going to shoot some pictures of the ruins.”

Sandy is a photographer who documents disasters, and since Bastrop just suffered the most destructive wildfire in Texas history- a raging inferno laid waste to 1,600 houses and 34,000 acres of land - he was keen to record the aftermath for posterity. As for me, I had never witnessed the effects of Biblical hellfire before, so I was curious. I agreed to go.

Cherokees vs. African Americans in the 21st Century

Recently I saw a fascinating story in the news: the Cherokee Nation had just voted to expel the descendants of freed slaves from their tribe.

Reading on, I discovered layers of suffering spread across multiple generations.  When the Cherokee were expelled from their homelands in the 19th century and forced to resettle in what would become Oklahoma, the richer members of the tribe brought their black slaves with them. This doesn’t quite fit the modern image of the Indian as a New Age guru spouting wisdom about buffalo and rivers, but then again, the myths constructed by guilty white folks to compensate for past sins always disintegrate upon contact with reality.