Negotiation, The Myth of Bi-Partsianship

When it was announced that the leaders of the West Bank Palestinians and Israel were going to start meeting bi-weekly, I'm quite sure many people took heart. Regional leaders and experts have been saying for years that the problem in the middle east is not Iraq, it's Palestine, or rather the lack of a free Palestinian state. Than with the equally shocking news out of Northern Ireland yesterday, regarding the meeting between Adams and Paisley, one could believe that anything is possible. Anything, it seems, except civility and co-operation between Democrats and Republicans in our national legislature.

What makes for progressive and meaningful agreements is not total capitalization by one side or another, but the true negotiations of all issues and a compromise that all parties can live with. It's a long and painfully slow process and certainly has been highlighted as a flaw in the democratic process. Reacting with anger and vengeance is always easier on the emotions, but rarely does anything but allow for short term gratification.

On the other hand, in a recent interview on NPR and expert said, "You should always talk to your enemies, but if they are dedicated to your destruction and elimination, it's hard to take anything they say seriously." Competition for the hearts and minds of the audience is one thing, genocide is something else.

Our problem is that current day politicians are looking at politics as war rather than the deliberation process that it should be. I listened to an interview with former House Leader, Tom "The Hammer" Delay, in which he fortified his reputation as a tough and unyielding legislator by repeating his intentions of the past. His creed was to seek no negotiation, rather he sought to secure capitulation. He was very successful for a long time by whipping his troops into order and requiring loyalty to the extent that he ran candidates against his own party members if they didn't toe the line.

You can and do make a lot of enemies that way and he did. His lack of familiarity with power and seemingly easy access to it caused him to cut corners. His opponents used those lapses of judgement against him. The lesson learned here is that power, justice and peace gained by the use of a force can and usually will backfire. General George Washington famously turned the harden heart of his enemies troops by treating his prisoners of war as well as he treated his own men.

However, the bottom line in any negotiation is both parties to an agreement need to want an agreement and have to be willing to meet somewhere in the middle. If like Mr. Delay you term compromise as capitulation than you have no negotiation room. And if you refuse to talk to the other side than the only recourse is continuing and probably escalating conflict.

At the present time, we have a environment in Washington that is in transitional. Republicans have suffered a severe blow in the recent election, with their loss of a majority in both houses and the dwindling lack of support for the administration. I don' t think they realize at this point or refuse to recognize how this War is hurting them. Either they are living in a state of denial that the current strategy in Iraq will save the day or look enough like success that they can claim victory. Or they are still in the Delay don't admit defeat, no compromise and insist on capitalization mode.

The Democrats are so lacking in confidence, they can't seem to get their wagons in a circle much less launch a counter attack. While I realize their left wing wants immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the rest of the country is not convinced that is the right thing to do. What they have to do is propose a reasonable settlement that insists that Bush negotiate with all the parties in this fight. If he doesn't, and I would bet he won't, he will fail and hang himself with his own rope. In this effort he will do more harm and likely take the rest of the Republican party with him.

In this likely event, the Democrats should concentrate on domestic issues and prepare the country for their agenda when they take the White House in 2008.

On Being an Orphan

My father died many years ago. I miss him still. I have done so many things I want him to know about and so many things I would love to talk with him about.

My mother died last Saturday. She was a good woman and I loved her, but we didn't have a relationship like my Dad and I did. Mom was always the person who set the rules and Dad enforced them. When we were young enforcement could mean getting a butt whipping.

Somehow, I always knew that he didn't like being the "cop", but felt that was his role or maybe just his lot in life. When I was very young he started treating me more like an adult than his son. I don't mean that there weren't rules, but he let me learn more by experience than keeping me out of trouble.

After I moved out and he and mom were alone, he started to drink to much. I was having the same problem. We both quit. He quit earlier than I did, but he did it and it gave me strength when I finally faced the reality of my addiction.

Mom was a women, I think, who feared life beyond the very close area of security that Dad built around her. She was dependent on him for most everything. She never worked and she stuck as close to her family as she could. Mom was oddly uninformed about the larger world. She had opinions about things, but for the most part they were constructed from opinions she formed in her youth. She did not change her opinion about anyone or anything easily.

I say this is odd because my father was much the opposite. He was always interested in new things and new ways of thinking. He was a salesperson and traveled extensively throughout Minnesota and Iowa. For a few years, we moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he managed a manufacturing plant that produced tubular steel scaffolding.

It might sound like I'm being tough on my mom, but from my perspective she was a tough person to get to know. To be fair, she was a conservative Catholic and my two divorces and drinking did not endear me to her. I understand that aspect.

When Dad died and I became the man in the family, I did my best. For the first few years, she got along fine in her apartment. I truly think she was happy even though I did the mean thing and convinced her to quit driving. My frequent business trips allowed me to see her regularly and she would travel to Texas to visit my sister and visit me in Wisconsin at least once a year.

It started to become obvious she was having more and more trouble taking care of herself. Her memory slips stopped being funny and incontinence became a problem she wouldn't deal with on her own. We got her some help, but eventually constant care was required.

Very quickly, my mother became someone nobody knew. She became wheelchair bound, lost what little hearing she had and became remote and private.

She had tenacity. I do not know what she was getting out of life, because her mind was in place where no one else could go But there was something worthwhile for her because she lived in
Franciscan Care & Rehab for almost nine years before she let go.

Mary Jane Blaylock-Jordan died at approximately 2:00am on Saturday, March 24, 2007. She would have been ninety on May 6, 2007. She left behind my sister, Marie and me,. ten grandchildren and nine grandchildren. Unfortunately she hadn't met them or wouldn't recognize them if she did. She is in a better place, if my Dad is by her side and the Vikings are winning Super Bowls

Slow Movie Season

You only have to look at the listings of films being shown at your local theaters to know that we have hit that part of the season I call the slow season. In late winter and early spring, film makers are releasing films that are going to appeal to the teen and date night crowd. I know your thinking, isn't that's the only audience that Hollywood thinks about and you not far wrong. But timing is everything concerning a movie release.

If you, as a producer, think your film has "Oscar" potential, releasing the film in late fall to December is almost mandatory. Academy voters seem to be loyal to the last thing they see. Remember all of the buzz about "Sideways", the wonderful buddy film that was staged in Napa
Valley wine country. It was hot for a long time, but was released to early to sustain the enthusiasm.

Movies that are shown on two screens on the last week of December and than are the subject of intense promotion have a better chance of winning, because of the out of sight, out mind flavor of the week mentality of a the majority of Academy voters.

When we get past the early spring drought, we are subjected to the battle for box office. We are talking about the season in which the majority of movie tickets are purchased. Films that are released during this time must have broad appeal. They are for the most part films that can be categorised as heavy budget, star leaden, and blockbuster. I have to confess that normally I do not see these films. Call me a snob, but I don't find over acted, extravagant special affected, and over hyped blockbusters entertaining.

Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood that supports theaters that feature independent films. Not all of these films are worth seeing, but I find that when I am disappointed in films like this, it is for reasons of effort rather than content.

Consider the film "The Italian". This Russian film about an orphan who takes great risks, including the opportunity to be adopted by a nice Italian couple, to find his mother. The film was good only because the little fellow that played the orphan was irresistible. On balance, other aspects of the film were okay, but this was not one of these films that would make my top ten list. However when I compare it to comparable film from Hollywood, the Home Alone saga comes to mind, I am inclined to inch the Russian film up in my evaluation.

The slow season extends than, only to the mall palaces. Our boutique movie houses will still provide challenging and exciting films

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Yesterday I had a pretty tight schedule. After I dropped Maria off at work, so I could have the car, David, our handyman had to be admitted to the building. We discussed the work that had to be done. I was than required to listen to laundry list of all of the things that could go wrong when he started the tasks I asked him to do. David has to do this because he is an honest man and he doesn't want to surprise me with anything. I think he feels it's better to paint a picture of gloom and doom and than let the sunshine in later.

I had to go to the clinic and have a test. This is part of my ongoing effort to find out what to do about the pain in my right foot. This test didn't take long and soon I was back home listening to more of the problems we might incur by snaking out the drain in the bath tub. Our plumbing is ancient so many of David's concerns revolve around getting replacement parts or totally replacing whole sections of plumbing stuff.

Leaving David to his tasks and I moved on to my biggy of the day. I had to put up a website on the host server. Maria and I had designed the site for her client and they expected it to be on the Internet that day.
My first effort failed and I could not figure out why. I went through the log in procedures again. F*%#@K!!! I admit I have no patience for these things. After e-mailing the support desk at the host, I made lunch.

David has found something else that might turn to into a disaster. "Corrosion", he said. I assisted by monitoring water flow while he snakes the drain. So far so good. I finish my lunch.

Back on the computer, I get an answer from my site host. This quick response does not surprise me since I've always received good service from these guys (Omnis.com). His advice however does not get the desired results. I double check and e-mail him again.

My problem is a job ticket with a number now. My ticket will be picked up by the tech that doesn't have a job at the moment, so I'm not necessarily dealing with the same support person every time. This can be a good thing. One person may see something the other didn't. This time it works that way, but again the new advice doesn't work. I e-mail them again and go on to another task.

I write this brilliant biographical memory of seeing Willie Mays play in the minor leagues and than again in the major's. I do the research and find out that I was older when I saw him play in Minneapolis and my article is good a good story, but not as factual as I thought. Than I discover that what I really wanted to write about was my memories of being with my Dad when I was a boy and the article begins shinning again.

David finishes and the bill is a lot less than what I thought it was going to be. Maybe it's because none of the disasters that David envisioned happened and he finished in less time than he budgeted. I'm getting pissed at my good friends at the Host server company.

I decide to put the whole thing aside and maybe just veg in front of the tube. I watched CSI, the good one with Petersen and Helgenberger, but I can't get the problem with the website out of my head. Gill bags the bad guy and Brass admits he killed his fellow police officer and the widow forgives Brass, AND WHY IN THE HELL WON'T THAT GOD %&()*%%*()_Website go up on the Web?

I sat down at the computer. I tried a new strategy. No luck. I thought to myself, I work on two other sites in this same software with the same host company, what's different? I looked at the upload section of one of the other sites and I noticed a pattern in the assigned user names. I looked at my new site and it hit me, I was missing one digit in the numerical expression of the user name. I went back to the new site, put in the missing digit and boom it went up like a hot air balloon on a calm day in Taos, New Mexico.

I slept well last night.

Say Hey Willie and Walt.

This is a true story about unintended outcomes, a father trying to bond with his son and well... you define it. I was ten years old. My father, Walter or Walt as everybody but his sister called him, was a white collar middle class guy, who in retrospect I guess was trying hard to figure out how to be a Dad. It's like Cher said in one of her films."Kid's don't come with instruction books".

In 1951, Minneapolis was not a hot bed of professional sports that it is today. The only major league professional sports team we had were the Minneapolis Lakers. They would be there until the 1960 when Bob Short would take them to LA

Dad took me to the Laker games. For those that don't know it the Lakers were named for the state with ten thousand lakes I saw George Mikan play, the first big man in the NBA. I wanted to be like Jim Pollard, the guy that got the ball up the court so that "wide body' Mikan could take it to the rack.

Years later, I worked at Golden Valley Country Club, where Mikan was a member. I always marveled at how he rolled his head underneath the doors so he wouldn't hit his head. You could tell he had been doing that most of his life and never even thought about it anymore.

Dad took me to the Golden Gloves fights. Besides the Golden Gloves, Dad was an avid fan of "The Wednesday Night Fights" on television. I asked him once if he wanted me to become a fighter. I think the question surprised him. I probably had mistook his love for boxing as a hint that he wanted me to become a boxer. Fortunately he didn't encourage me or push me. He told me that it was up to me, but if I wanted to box, he'd help me out in anyway he could. I say fortunately, because the whole idea of beating on someone while they pummeled me was and still is repellent to me.

In those days we had minor league baseball team the Minneapolis Millers. That season, one of the big league players was down either working his way out of baseball or rehabbing from an injury. I remember that it was Johnny Mize, but I checked and Mize was with the Yankee's by than. Besides, who ever the big hitter was, the buzz was all about this young negro player who was flashy and talented at the plate and in the outfield, Willie Mays.

I can't remember much about what happened that night. The thing that stuck with me is the atmosphere. The Stadium was one of those romantic places like in the movie "The Natural". I was just so glad to be with my Dad and the other men. Dad was treating me like one of the guys. It wasn't don't do this or do it this way. It was relax, have fun, your one of us.

We moved to Cleveland. In 1954, the Cleveland Indians established the best win percentage record in baseball. They earned the right to play the New York Giants in the World Series. My friends father got two tickets to one of the games. I sat in the right field seats and watched Willie play again. No, I didn't see the over the shoulder catch that robbed Vic Wertz of a possible game winning hit, that was in game one. But I did see him play. The Giants shocked everyone and won that series in four straight games. Cleveland went on to be a contender for a coupe of seasons after that, but we moved back to Minneapolis and I didn't follow baseball much after that until I fell in love with the Chicago Cubs in 1969. (See a trend here)

So, I saw Mays play in the minor league and the majors. And the thing I remember most is being with my Dad. Tells you something about all of those moments you spend with your kids that you might not even think much about or remember. But they just might and it may become real important to them.

Faith v. Hope

If you have faith, you have belief. If you have hope, you are basing your belief on something resembling evidence. If your lost on a mountain and people know where you were going you can have hope you will be found. If no one knows where you are, you need to have faith you'll be found.

That faith may be nothing other than the gut feeling that it is not your time to go, or that some one for some reason will miss you and figure out where you are. The first case, for hope, is obviously better and I guess in most all cases I would opt for hope.

Faith gets into the illogical area of as my father used to say,"When your wishing in one hand and defecating in the other, you know which one will fill up first." Not a pleasant analogy and a commendation that might be too strong for the faithful, but it makes the point.

We all seem to have faith is something. I belief that our spouse will not cheat on us or lie. We have to believe, even the most sceptical of us, that mot people are honest. Why in God's name would we be giving out our credit card numbers on the phone or over the Internet if we didn't.
We have no proof that we won't get ripped off, but we believe we won't so we do. Maybe it's because we want that book or record so badly we're willing to forget or ignore the possibilities.

Hope sounds more vague and ethereal than faith. Faith in God sounds so much stronger than hope in God. But hope is usually based on evidence that things may work in our favor. We beat their team twice this season, so we should bet them again, shouldn't we? One would think that to be true, but in reality it's just hoping.

The lesson here? When you go mountain climbing, tell some one where you are going. If you do get lost, hoping for rescue is better than faith that you will.

I still believe.

I'm a bit older and I hope wiser. Many thing in my life have changed, but one thing remains constant. I still believe in the liberal concept of community solutions to community problems. What has changed in the last thirty years is a loss of the sense of community and with that the growing belief that everyone is in this for themselves.

The current wave of conservative political popularity has put me and like thinkers on the outside of the discussion. Conservative thinking has thrived on an anti-government wave of reaction to unpopular and sometimes controversial laws and government supported social positions.

We have large numbers of people who do not trust the public organizations Americans have typically trusted. Home Schooling and private schools are the fall back to parents that mistrust the public schools. This has lead to a resentment toward supporting public schools, since they pay for them through their taxes, but do not get any benefit from them.

Many police and law enforcement organizations are mistrusted. Whole neighborhoods have fallen into the control of small gangs of thugs, because no one trusts the police to call them when they see a crime being committed. Citizens in these communities see the police as a greater threat than the gangsters that rule their neighborhoods.

Urban against rural. Race against race. Region against region. It seems that we are looking toward our differences in order to define ourselves in relation to others and in the end separate ourselves from what remains as a community.

We've allowed our society to become involved in a struggle for power. We are told that we are either red or blue. Conservative or liberal and Christian or professing another faith. We are told that we are Republican or Democrat. Are we truly feminist or chauvinist? And what does sexual orientation have to do with citizenery. The fact is that we are far more difficult to categorize than this but given the two party system, we don't have much choice.

We do not have a meaningful discourse on problems that affect all of us and are crying out for solutions and we need to do that. Returning to the social contract and trying to find community solutions to community problems is not going backwards. It is the basis for the founding of this country and it has been the method of assuring it's success. I have had enough of the "government is the problem" rhetoric. If the government is the problem than we have the duty and responsibility to fix it.

One way to fix it is to move the national dialogue out of the belt way and into the homes and communities of the rest of America. We need to send a message, as we did last November that this government is not satisfactory. We need to remind both parties that we are watching and will hold them responsible for their actions. The Democrats were not given a vote of confidence on November of 2006. They were given an opportunity and frankly I don't know if they are living up to expectations.

The climate is now warm with aspirations for the 2008 election. I see the candidates positioning themselves to secure the nomination by pandering to their base. It is a cliche, but the truth. The litmus test for both representatives of the major party is how far to the extreme they can go to secure their parties nomination and than how they hop over the fence to appeal to those of us in the middle so they can win a general election.
Take the statements they make now when they are running for nomination and compare their rhetoric when they are running in the general election. You wouldn't be wrong in assuming that your looking at the words of two different people.

The question in my mind is how is the candidate going to bring this nation together. He or she can do that by bringing the debate toward reality. Forget abortion, guns, gay marriage and flag burning. Let's talk about a new globalized foreign policy that truly represents the interests of the American People. I want to hear about reform of the heath care delivery system. Where are the plans to help individuals who are harmed, through no fault of their own, by globalization? What's the plan for reducing carbon based emissions? Lets debate a new approach to rampant drug use in this country and how we are going to rebuild our failing infrastructure. In other words, let's make the government the solution to our problem, by forcing a change in the focus of the government. The easiest and traditional way of doing this is to change the people in government.