Gridlock solution

Well, just how close did you come to falling off the fiscal cliff?

By that I mean just how ticked off were you that Congress took until after its self-imposed Dec. 31 deadline to reach a pseudo agreement on tax increases and spending cuts when, in truth, this entire sorry exercise probably could have been settled months earlier.

This circus was the latest episode of governmental gridlock in a partisan-driven Congress that can't seem to get much of anything done. Consequently, our national legislators have an approval rating of something like 18 percent.

That high, huh? It kind of makes you wonder who those approving 18 percent are, and what are they thinking?

Anyway, it's clear that gridlock is the problem. I think I have the answer.

Wine. Beer. Whiskey.

For the legislators, I mean. (Well, maybe for me, too, considering the pace of this government)

The current bouts of gridlock made me wonder if this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they framed the Constitution. Of course, there was gridlock back then, too — even among the 55 delegates while drafting the Constitution.

(I once heard in a movie a description of the Founding Fathers as "white, rich, chauvinistic slave owners who didn't want to pay their taxes." The movie was meant to be a comedy but it's hard to deny the truth of that description — all the delegates were white males; all but two of the delegates were wealthy landowners; it took until the 19th Amendment in 1920 before women could vote, and 25 of the 55 delegates were slave owners. Plus, it required a costly civil war to end slavery in a constitution that allowed it without naming it. Cowards.)

Nevertheless, the delegates managed to compromise their differences, which seems to be a lost art these days. I wondered how that was possible until I realized that they — the delegates — were probably soused most of the time. They started their mornings with low alcohol "small beers" and worked their way through each day with supplemental Madeiras, ports, porters, sherries, ciders, whiskeys and ales.

Sometimes alcohol was consumed during the convention itself (possibly because the water was so foul). And yet, despite all this imbibing, it took the delegates just a little over four months to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. That's less time than the current Congress had to settle the fiscal cliff.

There's plenty of documentation about the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers (see here for one example, but there are countless other citations to be found in Google), who ultimately produced a brilliant form of government that we hold in grateful high esteem. So, based on this working model, wouldn't it seem logical to send your congressman a bottle of Chablis along with your next letter of pique about his performance? Or maybe a six-pack of Leinenkugel's to make him more comfortable and therefore more compromising during debates? Or maybe even some Cordials to make him more cordial? A bill for a draught while he's drafting a bill? Sheesh.

Of course, under today's media microscope, any legislator caught popping a cork or a beer tab that isn't a legitimate photo op is liable for censure. Plus, there were no cars back then, and therefore no DUI arrests. Not too many horse wrecks, I guess. So maybe the answer lies somewhere else.

Or not. Maybe it's worth a try anyway.

Happy New Year?

There was a time when I looked forward to a new year.

But not so much anymore.

I think I might have outgrown the New Year's concept. I mean, it's all arbitrary anyway. January 1 basically serves as the demarcation date for starting over. And "starting over" basically  implies a series or collection of goofs, mistakes, errors, miscalculations and Lord knows what else that were made in the previous 365 days that got us to where we are anyway.

This sounds grossly pessimistic, although I am by nature (I think) not a pessimistic person. It just is,  because there is no such thing as perfection in our human condition.

So we muddle on.

Yes, yes, yes. Good stuff does happen, and that, too, is part of our condition. But very few of us wish each other a happy new year for the good stuff to keep continuing. Peel back the layers and it's likely we'll see that we wish each other happy new year in the hope that things get better for all of us.

It's a good wish to have.

I used to like New Year's because it is a continuation of the holiday season, coming on the heels of Christmas, as it does. We're in winter, and we need reasons to celebrate while freezing our tails off. Plus, we get a lot of time off. Holiday time off from school all those years, which actually conditioned me in my adulthood to expect time off from work. I still feel it. Talk about entitlement, sheesh....

Anyway, I'd park myself in front of the television around 11 p.m. and watch Dick Clark count down the new year, drink some cheap champagne, kiss my wife, and hope the new year would somehow be better than the old one.

Turns out, the new year almost always pretty much resembles the one we just put into the history books. It usually takes me to Jan. 2 to figure that out.

Still... I don't have to stay up late to see the crystal ball drop in Times Square. I don't have to drink my bubbly vinegar, or kiss my friends on the cheek, to reach another demarcation date. But I still do, only now with a seasoned eye and an earlier bed time.

So Happy New Year. Toot the horns and let the streamers and confetti fall.

We get to start over, my friends. Muddle on.

A holiday feast

Christmastime is a feast for the senses, full of sights, sounds, smells and tastes.

So what is the one thing that sensuously stands out in my mind?

I miss the smell of ozone. Specifically, electric ozone. And more specifically, the electric ozone that wafted from the Lionel HO scale train that circled endlessly underneath the Christmas tree.

When we lived in Fountain Hill, Pa., back in the 1950s, and Santa Claus was still a believable annual visitor to our house (What, you mean he isn't?), one of the things he brought was the train set.

No, wait. You don't understand me. He brought the train set, along with the gifts. And the tree. Each year. Yep, that's how Santa worked at our house. My brother and I would go to sleep on Christmas Eve in an undecorated house, save for a single wreath on the front door, only to wake up in the morning with a fully lighted tree in the living room soaring from a mound of gifts. Oh, yeah, and with a six-car Lionel steam locomotive chasing its caboose — and nearly catching it — around the tree.

I can't imagine how my parents hustled to get all this stuff together in a single night. I mean, a tree? With lights and tinsel and glass balls and all those other ornaments? C'mon. Really. A different time, I guess. A different era.

Anyway, dad was the engineer of this train. After the presents were opened, we'd sit by the tree. Dad would flick on the control box, and the little engine that could sprang immediately into life, jumping into full speed like a sprinter from a cloud of blue ozone.

Ahhhhh.

The thing was, my brother and I could never operate it ourselves. That was dad's domain.

Over the years, as we got older and Santa was less believable, the train display grew. It eventually took over our living room year-round, set up as it was on an old Ping Pong table, and included scenery: tunnels, trestles, crossing gates, water towers and train stations. There were two trains: the original steam locomotive, and a diesel. It was great. I wonder how mom ever let dad get away with it. I don't recall us ever entertaining guests, other than dad bringing in his male friends to the house to check out his train display. They could play with it — but we couldn't.

There is one other vivid memory I have. A few years later — maybe our last in Fountain Hill, around 1958 — and I was beginning to understand that Santa was more of a Christmas sentiment than a Christmas sentinel — dad had the entire family trudge through our quaint little hillside village to purchase a tree a few days before Christmas. It was snowing, and it was in the evening. It could have been a scene stolen straight from the Norman Rockwell collection.

But we bought our tree, put it on the sled we brought with us and lugged it back to the house, snowflakes kissing our faces along the way. How could I know then that this would stay with me for more than 50 years?

We set the tree up that night, without Santa's help, and turned on the string of colored lights. The ozone was gone, but the Fraser Fir more than compensated.

So did the Tollhouse cookies and the hot chocolate.

Merry Christmas all.

The heavy heart

My original intent today was to write about a childhood Christmas memory, particularly about selecting and then decorating a tree. As a child, those were awesome days for me, and awesome times.

But I can't seem to shake the horror of Newtown, Connecticut.

Of the mass shootings in my lifetime — the first one I can remember is the shooting spree from the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin in 1966, in which 14 people were killed (among them the shooter's mother and his wife) and 32 were wounded — the slaughter in Connecticut seems most grievous and most heinous to me.

This is no doubt because of the 26 people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 20 of them were first graders, 6 and 7 years old, all with multiple gunshot wounds. Somehow, to my mind, this transcends Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora — as if it were even possible to raise the bar on senseless horror.

But, geez. Kids. Kids at Christmastime. Their time.

We're learning that many of the teachers at this school performed heroically, perhaps saving untold scores of young lives. And that is wonderful, and amazing, and a triumph of human spirit, until I realize that teachers should not be heroes in the soldierly sense. I want them to be my heroes in the professional sense. Dodging bullets should not be in the job description.

So my heart is particularly heavy. I'm glued to the television news until I can't stand anymore, walk away for a little bit, then come running back for more to fill my information vacuum. I don't think it's a ghoulish voyeurism that motivates me here — I think it's more a quest to try to understand why. Why. Why.

The answer most likely will not come from television. It might even be unanswerable, I don't know.

So I'll continue to shed the unchecked occasional tear, swallow hard my emotions and try to balance the heart that weighs heavy on my soul.

The end is near, Part DOH!

Kim and I were fitfully running around earlier this week, trying to get the rest of our Christmas shopping done.

We even made a dreaded trip to Winston-Salem Thursday night to go to the mall, hoping to beat the crowd as Dec. 25 approaches.

Then it hit me: Dec. 21 is the end of the world. What am I worried about?

This is probably about the 33rd Doomsday Proclamation that I've been so forewarned in my lifetime, and miraculously, I've survived them all. This one has something to do with the end of the Maya long count calendar on Dec. 21 and is somehow connected with an impending collision on that date with a planet called Nibiru that nobody has ever heard of before.

I don't know how the prescient ancient Mayas knew this would happen or even why the Mayas seem to have so much credibility — as opposed to the ancient Aztecs or the ancient Incas — in this matter. I'm not sure I'm going to spend the next 12 days worrying about it, though. What you don't hear too much about is that the Maya calendar begins a new cycle on Dec. 22, which in itself implies continuation of life as we know it, even for the Mayas.

Buuuut, you never know.

NASA has put out a nice FAQ page explaining why it's best not to stop wrapping your gifts (see here), but I wonder if it's still best to hedge your bets. Anything can happen. I suppose we could wake up Dec. 21 and the atmosphere has suddenly turned to hydrochloric acid, or better yet, nitrous oxide. Then we could laugh ourselves to death. Maybe the seas will rise up or maybe the sun will explode. Who knows?

I always kind of wondered what it would be like if gravity simply stopped working.

I do find it a little disturbing that this end-of-the-world event is scheduled just a few days ahead of Christmas.

So now I'm thinking I might hedge my bet in the opposite direction. I'm betting I better not stop shopping for Christmas gifts. Anyway, not until I get my 34th Doomsday Proclamation.

Getting ready

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which means we have just a little more than three weeks left until Christmas.

Usually, the First Sunday in Advent is the last Sunday in November. I'm not quite sure why it's waited to fall on the first Sunday of December this year, but if I was industrious enough to find out, I might learn that that extra 29th day back in February might have something to do with it: ah, yes. Leap Year.

Leap Year might also go a long way to explain why there are five Sundays this month as well as five Saturdays. But maybe not. I don't know. That calendarian Julius Caesar is long gone, no doubt buried under all those centuries of 29-day Februarys.

My Moravian star and flag announce the Advent season.

Anyway, it's now the Advent season. The First Sunday usually is my signal to get started decorating the house, and this happens in spurts and fits. Most of our decorations are hidden away deep in the back corner of a walk-in closet upstairs. That means climbing steps. Then it means groping through a forest of old clothes and winter jackets while tripping over bags of storage on the floor to get to the Christmas candles and artificial wreaths bagged on a back shelf.

And you don't want to step on a bag. If you do, and you hear a sound like Styrofoam crunching under your heels, well, it's probably best to tell the wife right off what happened so as not to spoil the rest of December for either of you. I'd probably feel so bad I don't even think I could look inside the bag to see what crunched.

My closet strategy is to keep the the stuff I use most often near the front for easy access. But somehow, during the course of the year, stuff migrates. I don't know how this happens. Consequently, it took me 20 minutes to locate my bag of candles, which I thought were up front but turned out to be near the back of the closet, underneath a bunch of other stuff. It took me less than 10 minutes to put the candles in four windows after I found them. Sheesh.

I also hung my Moravian star. This requires converting my front porch light into a receptacle for the star, which in itself is not difficult. Unless you're me. I have to climb a two-step ladder to get to the light, which does not lend itself to a stable sense of security as you might think. Plus, the star itself is not particularly easy to handle what with all those plastic points jutting out everywhere.

Making matters somewhat difficult is the fact that my star is about 10 years old now. Some of the plastic rivets holding the points together have become brittle and have broken off, or are about to, so now I handle the star with extra care. I halfway expect to see star debris on my porch one morning.

I also noticed that after I hung my star and turned on the switch, the light momentarily flickered. Uh-oh. My star has given me good service over the years, but it's time may be near. Look at it this way: I keep my star lit through all of December. That's 31 days. Now figure I've done this for 10 or 11 years, and you suddenly realize I've had it lit every day for a full year. Can I get another season out of it? We'll see.

I also hung my oversized Moravian Love Feast flag, which features a mug of coffee, a Love Feast bun and an iconic Moravian candle with curled ribbon at the base. It's a great flag.

I haven't hung the wreaths yet. That's a combined project with the wife, and we'll probably tackle that one in the next week or so.

At least I know where they are in the closet.

Lincoln

Full disclosure: My birthday is Feb. 12. It always has been and I suspect it always will be. So even as a child, I found what I took to be a personal connection with Abraham Lincoln, with whom I shared my birthday. It gave me a way to touch and admire greatness. I regarded then — and still do — the connection as something special.

It is no doubt at least partially because of this accident of birth that I came to be inexorably interested in the Civil War. I grew up reading the age-appropriate books about Lincoln and the war and, when finally reaching adulthood, my interest grew to where I now have a personal library of more than 100 volumes on the conflict.

This doesn't make me an expert; it just makes me a history buff.

In any case, when I learned several years ago that iconic movie director Steven Spielberg was planning a flick on Lincoln, I was both joyous and cautious. While a magnificent storyteller (I still shudder at the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan), I had some reservations about Spielberg doing something on Lincoln, especially with his predilection for occasionally going over the top and into deep space (recall the final sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

What was I worried about?

Kim and I went to Salisbury Thanksgiving Day morning to take in the 11:40 a.m. early bird showing of Lincoln (only $4.75 apiece, although the shared large diet Coke and ginormous bucket of popcorn nearly bankrupted me for the week). Good idea. There were only 20 people in the theatre.

I was taken aback almost immediately by actor Daniel Day-Lewis' appearance as the 16th president. Based on photographs we know of Lincoln, it was eerily right on. So were the resemblances of other actors to their historical counterparts: Sally Field was great as Mary Todd Lincoln, as was David Strathairn as William Seward; Bruce McGill as Edwin Stanton; Joseph Gordon-Levitt as son Robert Lincoln; and quite spectacularly, Jackie Earle Haley was spot-on as Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens.

Aside from the physical resemblances, the script was engrossing. The movie is really about the backroom machinations to get the 13th amendment to the Constitution — the one that abolishes slavery forever — passed through the House. This is something that Lincoln was passionate about; he eagerly signed the passed amendment even though as president he was not required to do so. The movie clearly defines Lincoln's passion for the project.

Consequently, this is a movie full of intelligent dialogue and not so much of saber light swords and exploding planets.

While Hollywood has a tendency to distort history in an effort to entertain and keep bottoms in their seats, Lincoln was still very compelling. Because it's history, we know how it ends. That's what makes the challenge even more gripping for Spielberg, et al, and I believe they succeeded.

(Curiously, I just watched, for the first time, The King's Speech on television last night. This is another almost exclusively dialogue movie, and I was hooked. Hey, I like to see stuff blow up as much as anybody. But sometimes it's refreshing to be treated as an adult by smart screenplay.)

Yes, there might be a nit to pick here and there. The opening sequence where a couple of soldiers end up reciting bits of the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln is no doubt a fabrication — nobody was reciting that speech two years after Lincoln gave it — but coupled as a bookend with a flashback scene of the Second Inaugural (a speech arguably even greater than the Gettysburg Address), this storytelling device is powerful.

Full disclosure: Lincoln is an exceptional movie, more than I expected with my boatload of expectations. I can't recommend it enough.