Jan. 22: “We have (Corona virus) totally under control.” (Just ask Kellyanne.)

Feb. 25: “We’re very close to a vaccine.” (May be a year.)

Feb. 26?: U.S. is the ”most prepared country in the world.” (After proposing budget cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health.)

Feb. 28: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (Twenty days later the U.S. has nearly 13,000 cases and 176 deaths.)

March 4: Flu is worse than corona virus. (It’s not!)

March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it . Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.” (Maybe a brain surgeon?)

March 7: “Anyone who wants a test can get one.” (Not even close!)

March 17: Knew it was “a pandemic, long before it was called a pandemic.” (Feb. 28: “it will disappear.”)

March 18: I’m a “wartime president” in the Corona virus fight. (What?)

Canceling and postponing events to avoid spreading the Corona virus got me thinking about air. In high school chemistry, Mr. Tuft taught us pure air is a mix of gases. Mostly Oxygen, right? Wrong! As memory serves, pure air is around seventy percent Nitrogen and twenty percent Oxygen. Hydrogen, Helium and other inert gasses make up the rest.

Most animals can’t live without Oxygen, without air. But everyday air carries a host of freeloaders: water vapor, methane, CO2, scents, dust, fungi, bacteria, viruses, God-knows-what else? For our biological wellbeing this excess baggage can become a Really Big Deal!

Back to public events. Portland’s Moda Center seats 19,393. At a fully-packed Trailblazer game, 19,392 others—the jerk in the sweaty T-shirt two rows down, the squealing teenager behind me—are sucking in and blowing out the very same air I’m sucking in and blowing out. The same Nitrogen and Oxygen—our lungs capture only a small percent—the same vapors, gasses, dust, pollen, fungi, germs, viruses, not to mention farts. I’m told farts are flammable methane. In a three hour basketball game how many lungs suck in and blown out the very same air my lungs suck in and blow out!

Just our little Moda Center. How about swapping air with thousands at a rock concert, tens-of-thousands at a World Series or Super Bowl game, two million circling the Kaaba at Mecca? Think about it—or maybe better not.

It’s disturbing.

Socialism: Free Enterprise with a conscience

Fearing that our Ship of State had listed dangerously to port, a cabal of passengers and crew hired a new captain. Grasping the wheel, trimming the sheets, sailing into the wind, the new skipper employs all means at his command—some he doesn’t—to reverse course to safe, familiar water.

More than half those aboard are alarmed by this abrupt list to starboard, this frenzied struggle to change course. Since turning back is never an option, we search for a stable-minded captain. Before turning keel-up or hitting an iceberg, we need someone to chart a forward course, adjust the rudder and balance the cargo. Most important, we need a skipper to muster all of us amid ship, pass out the grog and lead in an ol’ sea chantey. With storm-tossed water ahead we need a commander who can deliver us and the cargo to distant, uncharted shore.

Abraham Lincoln knew, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.” It’s a challenge to cross Captain Ahab’s eyes.

Who,

• publicly mocked a physically handicapped man?
• promised Mexico would pay for “The Wall,” then shut down the government when Congress wouldn’t and now funds it with taxpayer dollars appropriated for our military?
• said “I love the old days when campaign (protesters) would be carried out on a stretcher folks.” “I’ve actually instructed my people to look into” paying legal fees for supporters who punch out protesters!?
• boasted of grabbing women by the “pussy”?
• paid a pornographic movie star $135,000?
• had children separated from parents in families seeking asylum,?
• called Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us!”, driving a car into a crowd killing a young woman, “good people”?
• with gun deaths Daily News and mass shootings in America commonplace, with Australia’s and Britain’s restriction on gun ownership resulting in drops in gun related crime, with Canada’s parliament considering a “full ban” on handguns and assault weapons, welcomed Wayne LaPierre to the White House?
• with his own intelligence agencies in unanimous agreement that Russia meddled, and continues to meddle in, our elections, believes Vladimir Putin that they did not?
• establishing a model for discrimination, even violence, against Muslim, and by extension all non-Caucasians and non-Christians, bans citizens of Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen and Somalia—his “Muslim Ban”—from entering the United States?
• boasts and blusters liked a Sixth Grade Bully?
• ignores, indeed flaunts, centuries-old protocols of civil decorum and discourse?
• appears ignorant of, again indeed flaunts, standards for ethics, morals and honesty?
• disputing irrefutable evidence and scientific proof of Global Warming, puts corporate profit over the future of the planet?
• stunned a National Prayer Breakfast by responded to Arthur C. Brooks’s call to love your enemies with, “Arthur I don’t know if I agree with you.”
• as the Washington Post reports, “In 2017 . . . made 1,999 false or misleading claims. In 2018 . . . added another 5,689, for a total of 7,688. Now, with a few weeks still left in 2019 . . . has more than doubled the total number of false and misleading claims in just a single year. . . .  (After) 1055 days in office . . . made 15,413 false or misleading claims”?
• was never loved?
• and on
• and on
• and on

Will it never end?

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
–Macbeth, Act V, scene v
–William Shakespeare

Morose sentiment notwithstanding, the corpus of he who penned poor Macbeth’s prose is testament to a profound belief in Life’s significance!

As always, the Bard’s metaphor is spot on.  Life is theater.

To expose and explore the human experience, theater employs props, busy-ness and dialog.  Live Theater’s props, our “Stuff,” go far in defining its performers.  When I was a kid, props were few and simple.  Today, costumes in an average American’s closets, shelves and drawers would clothe a neighborhood.  Overflowing great-rooms, kitchens, bed- and  bathrooms, props fill garages, basements and attics.  Rented storage spaces are stacked with chairs, sofas, tables, beds, boxes, PCs, TVs, and microwaves with like-new exercise bikes, dirt bikes and road bikes parked against the walls.  Auctioning contents of abandoned storage units is cottage industry.  Wal-Mart, Costco and Amazon are Live Theater’s Prop Masters.  Since few can’t afford a ticket, for upwards of twelve percent interest and penalties, Visa, Master Card and American Express sell stage money

Then the busy-ness!  Blaise Pascal postulated, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But who would pay, much less sit, to watch a silent performer stage-center for ninety minutes, even with an intermission?

After a five-thirty a.m. alarm and a stop at Starbucks, we crowd Interstates and streets in fender-to-fender combat with Jaguars, Kia, F-350s, eighteen-wheelers, pickups with dented fenders and Harleys.  Ten hours later, following a commuter combat act encore, we retreat to happy hour at “Larry’s Lair” or home to crash in front of the thirty-five inch, flat-screen Motorola.

In Live Theater much of what passes as dialog is serial monologs.  While a twenty-four hour tally of the words spoken on planet Earth may not rival the number of atoms in a kumquat, most of us don’t really listen.  iPhones, iPads, lap-tops and social networking propel dialog into forms few imagined even three decades back.  Echo, Alexa and the www render notions of privacy anachronistic.

So what makes Live Theater significant?  What did Shakespeare and poor Macbeth know?  What drives the sound and fury?  What powers the strutting and fretting?  Hiding among the props, the busy-ness, the dialog, what makes Life not “a tale told by and idiot”?

Relationship!  People!  Life Theater takes significance in the comedy and tragedy,  the confusion and conflict, the pain and joy, the love and, yes, the hate, the everyday vitality of human relations!  What matters, really matters, and, ironically, makes me happy is your happiness.  Caring for others almost as much as for my own dear self makes Live Theater worth living.

Donald Trump calls Bob Mueller’s report and Congressional impeachment inquiries “Witch-hunts.” Lest we be unsure about the term, by Trumping-up allegations regarding Hunter Biden our President provides a textbook example of a Witch-hunt.

Mind is a snow globe, a crystal sphere with tiny people, animals, trees, houses inside.  Thoughts and feelings are snow flakes.

A child, I became obsessed with shaking my little globe, fascinated by the mini- blizzard, not realizing the swirling flakes make the people almost impossible to see.  So I build snow people, images of how I think others think, feel, believe, even I suspect, look.

I continue to shake, plan, scheme, worry, to build snow people.  What if I stopped?  If I allowed the snowflakes to settle, what would I see?

I’m told if I stopped creating my blizzard, let the flake settle, if I’d just sit and look, really look, I’d see others, and myself, as we really are.  Even in knee-deep drifts, snow on our heads, flakes on our noses, we’re all perfect just as we are.  No need for snow people.

June 15, 1906, the night Mama was born, a Biddlecome girl drowned in Ferron Creek.  Mr. Biddlecome’s wagon was caught in a flash flood.

After finding the body, the searchers stopped at Grandpa’s cabin near the mouth of the canyon.  His daughter’s birth became wallpaper where the image of an alabaster body with hair fanned like a raven’s wings on a wagon’s floorboards hung like a gilt framed daguerreotype in Grandpa’s memory.

Ferron, Utah, owes its name to U.S. Deputy Land Surveyor A.D. Ferron, its settlement to Mormon faithful sent by Brigham Young to colonize a half-dozen, what many would call “God forsaken” outposts, on the east flank of a southern tip of Wasatch Range.  Ferron owes its existence to that slim green artery meandering among sandstone cliffs and clay hills.  Apart from an atmosphere, without water human survival here  is no different than on the gray landscape where Neil Armstrong took his “great leap for mankind.”

Most times Ferron creek meanders among sandbars, swirls around fallen tree trunks and limbs and pauses in pools barely large enough for suckers and minnows.  But once or twice in summer the northerly jet stream swings south pushing Pacific clouds over southern California and north.  When dark clouds bank up against Big Mountain, thunder reverberates down Ferron canyon and locals know a flash flood is coming.

If ten square miles catches a third of its annual rainfall in thirty minutes clay hills shed water like a duck’s back.  Raindrops form trickles and trickles grow to streams pushing eleven months’ leaves, twigs, branches, tree trunks, mud and rocks down the main canyon in a moving dam.  At the mouth of the canyon the six-foot tall morass surges over the creek banks in a flash flood!

To call a flash flood a “religious experience” is a stretch, but for me the first one came close.  With rain or snowmelt I expect a stream’s level to rise, slowly, sometimes quickly, never all at once.  First it’s a grumbling from upstream.  Then, under the cottonwood and willows branches or around a bend comes a rolling wall of debris.  An out-of-control display where men in straw hats pause beside half-loaded hay wagons and cat-skinners in hard hats throttle back to watch.

In summer I lived with Uncle Grant, the South Ditch Water Master.  When dark clouds banked up and thunder rumbled on Ferron Mountain, we’d drive to the head of the ditch to raise the “sand gate” so the flash flood would continue down the main creek, saving the South Ditch from being clogged when the debris dam rushed from the canyon.

Around age ten I became Keeper of the “Crick.”  After Daddy died Mama gave me his long-barreled, single-shot twenty-two.  In the coldest of winter I’d race home from school, grab my rifle, crawl through a barbed-wire fence and cross John Cook’s field to the Crick.

I knew every twist and bend, channel, sand bar, and pheasant roost.  I’d wriggle through secret rabbit runs under thickets of wild currant.  I checked out Louie’s cabin.  Epileptic and with one bad eye, Louie lived in a never-painted frame house at the crick bridge.  Built from scraps and driftwood with a clay bank for a back wall, Louie’s six-foot-square cabin was a cobbled-together affair with a small table, chair and  mud fireplace.  A hideout only a ten-year-old farm kid could appreciate.

Then, it was almost dark!  I had chores!  I’d leap the Crick, sprint across John Cook’s pasture, lean my twenty-two against the trunk of an apple tree and sneak to the woodpile to split kindling and fill coal buckets in the dark.

The Crick wasn’t about rabbit trails or Louie’s cabin.  It was about Being, here, now!  What you saw was what you got.  A dependable place where time stood still.  No agendas, no egos, no parents, no teachers!  On the Crick life made simple sense.  Even flash floods belonged.  Feelings I lost.

I wonder about my last day on the Crick.  I couldn’t realize how supremely significant turning my back on it for the last time was.  Then I sat behind Janet Jenkins in seventh grade math and suddenly a brown-eyed freckled-faced girl with a black ponytail became somehow  .  .  .   different?

Ferron has grown but hasn’t really changed much.  The biggest change is the Millsite dam where the creek’s backed into a reservoir.  There’s a marina, even a golf course.  Up at the mouth of the Canyon, where the Biddlecome girl drowned.

Curious?  rootsaction.org/trump-articles-of-impeachment   Check it out.