Where Are My Teeth?

Woodland Succession

Somehow it had escaped our notice that the 60-foot pine in the little strip of woods between us and our right-front neighbor didn't have needles on it any more. (a couple of the topmost branches did, but nothing else. And the woodpeckers had started knocking, which is generally also a bad sign.)

So one of the itinerant tree guys came and leveled the sucker. He had a cable tied taut to his pickup with the motor revving to guide the fall, but it dropped in pretty much the opposite direction anyway. (I think a couple of those foot-thick, 25-foot-long branches on the south side may have skewed the balance.)

We got the bottom of the trunk, which was still mostly sound wood, sliced into a couple dozen roughly 8-inch-thick slabs, which may serve as a border or stools or something in the back yard. (I built a bowsaw speciallly for dealing with them.) The tree guy was just as happy to slab the wood up rather than hauling it to the Stump Dump -- that much less work for him.

(On a side note, watching him cart off half a dozen truckloads of smaller branches and sections of trunk was a pellucid reminder of the tradeoff between labor and capital. The bigger tree service that we used before has a 20-odd-foot truck and a goliath chipper trailerered to it, and they generally turn whatever softwood they cut into mulch before your eyes. But for someone without a ten or twenty or fifty thousand dollars to invest in equipment, a few extra hours at $10 or $20 an hour do just about as well.)

Gotcher Frost Heave Right Here

If you had any doubt the winter was a tenacious occupying force, surrendering only reluctantly and determined to leave as much of a mess as possible in the wake of its departure, a short walk in the park would disillusion you. (If you thought that I just had to get some purple writing out of my system, you'd be right.) Where the ground isn't still frozen under the surface it's boot-deep mud.

I'm not sure how many more days that will be true, though. Highs above 40 for the next week or more (funny how winter gets into your thinking) and daylight getting longer. This time of the year, before the trees begin leafing out, is as birght as it gets in the woods, and you can see how the old leaves soak up the sun's heat.

Rainy Sunday Afternoon

This brightened my day immeasurably. It beats mitering shoe molding any day of the week.

Juden Raus

Today was an interesting day to go to the mailbox. Along with the bills and fliers and stuff was a small, thick bulk mail envelope from some outfit called Progressive Vision International, of Anaheim. "OK," I thought, "so I've gotten on another lefty mailing list."

Nuh-uh. Inside was the "New Millenium 7th Edition" of Let My People Go, subtitled "the struggle of the american jew to come home to israel". The 170 pages of this tract are, so it says, devoted to convincing jews around the globe that they should leave their current residences and head for the Holy Land with all deliberate speed.

One reason for this departure, writes the "Christian Zionist" author, is that only by gathering all jews to its rocky bosom will Israel be able to become the beacon of light to the rest of the world required to bring about the (second) coming of the Messiah.

Another is that it just isn't safe for jews anywhere else, yaknowhatimean? There's antisemitism sweeping Europe, and hard times coming in the U.S., and distressing though it may be for the author of the book's foreword to point this out, christian nations' favorite scapegoat for market crashes, depressions and wars is almost always "The Jew." (In case you don't read too well, the cover has a picture of a red-headed jew trying to free himself from ropes tethering him to a lamp post that bears the street sign, "Wall Street".)

To those who protest "it can't happen here" he responds that jews in Germany thought just the same thing. Best for christians and jews both to read the book and get with the program: namely getting all six-million-odd jews out of the US and "back" to Israel where they belong. The author and his pals aren't antisemites, of course; they have the deepest possible concern for the welfare of jews. In their place.

I have to say that I haven't read this weirdass piece of crap in any depth. I skimmed the beginning, and some of the part about how jews in New York were held captive (by their materialism) in the modern Babylon, and something about how god meant the World Trade Center Attacks as a wake-up call for jews to get out while they still could.

The last time I felt the hair starting to prickle on the back of my neck like that was on my first visit to Berlin back in 1990, when my sister and I were sitting in a real estate agent's office talking about the possible value of my grandparents' old house, and the little guy across the table from us began a riff about how the jews were coming back to Berlin. They were buying up some of the buildings that they had owned before the war (always "before the war" or just "before", never "before they were stripped of their property, evicted from their homes and killed"). They were buying the buildings, he said, and raising the rents, and drawing onto themselves the same resentment that they had in the past...

I'm sure that if I'd suggested to that man that he was an antisemite he would have been shocked at the thought. Why, there he was talking perfectly comfortably to people two of whose greatgrandparents had been jews. He was just explaining how today's jews were setting the stage for bad things to happen to them. (Indeed, by bringing the matter up at all I would have been proving just how hypersensitive some jews still are.)

When you live in enclaves of people who aren't religious nutcases, it's easy to forget that there are other enclaves all across the country of people who are. I don't know what mailing list these folks got my name from (the address was wrong in a particular way that might be possible to trace), but I guess I should thank them in a way. They spent a fair chunk of money that could have gone to advancing their cause to remind me of the clear and present danger that such would-be theocrats pose to life and liberty.