The Voice of Treason

And after the media mocked Bush when a microphone picked up his conversation with Tony Blair. Ms. Phillips’ powder room chit-chat was benign stuff and no one - except maybe some family members - will remember it.

Now if Shepard Smith had a live mic in the urinal…that might be interesting.

I caught the interview with Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig on FNC where they explained that their captors told them that all the West needs to do is:

1. Stop calling us Islamofascists.
2. Convert to Islam.

Bush dropped his drawers and bent over this week, taking on the responsibility of Katrina. I certainly hope he doesn’t apologize for calling Islamofascists Islamofascists.

I have to say that I have no interest in converting to Islam. And this only reminds me that I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood when I was a kid and have known many, many Jews in my life and not one has ever suggested that I convert to Judaism. Not one has ever suggested that Judaism is superior to all other faiths and should be adopted by the rest of the world.

I’ve never known a Jew to tell me how I should think, what I should and should not eat, or who I should call God. I’ve never met a Jewish recruiter.

I have more respect for a club that isn’t desperate for members.

I’d mentioned that we’d paid the neighbor kids to keep an eye on my container plants while we were gone. Between the monsoon rains and the kids watering, when we got back from Kansas City, my little plants looked pretty spectacular.

I’m talking simple pots filled with a combination of geraniums, verbena, and zinnias that I manage to revive every year. Nothing exotic, nothing priceless. Yet when I went out this morning to water the roses, I couldn’t help notice that half my container plants had disappeared.

Who would be so tacky and petty to steal flowers? Geez, that’s a new low. And I can only hope that whoever took them has the sense to keep them watered so they don’t dry up and die.

Incredible.

“That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

– Mayor Ray Nagin

Yes, let’s. So I’m actually gonna cut Ray some slack here. I can’t say I was in either New York or Nawlins, but I was in the Bay Area during the Loma Prieta quake. Everybody remembers the damage to the bridge and the structures in the City, but how many remember the damage to the South Bay?

My friend Jack was living in Los Gatos at the time and I was amazed to see how many homes - including Victorians - had shifted off their foundations and were slumped over as if something had come by and whacked them just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bedroom walls in my mother’s home in the Bay Area cracked and separated under the window sills, leaving cracks three to four inches high.

In 1906, most of San Francisco was completely destroyed by an earthquake and the fire that resulted from the ruptured fault. Over 28,000 buildings were ruined, yet the city was rebuilt in just over four years.

I like San Francisco, yet I rarely praise it. The City by the Bay managed to put itself together; it’s time for New York to do the same.

I was a little off kilter before our road trip and I hadn’t been paying close attention to the news. On the morning of our departure I reached into a closet to grab a white Oxford shirt and discovered that ants were all over it. In fact, they were on everything. Fine, I thought, I’m on my way out of town and I’ve got a closet full of ants.

Made the decision to deal with them upon our return, shook out the shirt, and took off. On the trip I’d made a conscious effort to avoid cable news and The Kansas City Star, so I really didn’t hear about much beyond the John Mark Karr fiasco.

So when I woke up in the middle of the night and heard Shep Smith announce the release of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, I felt bad that I’d been unaware of their abduction for what — well over a week? Days without access to news…it was almost as if I’d been abducted.

And I couldn’t make up my mind if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“I am amazed, o wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers.”

– Graffiti discovered on a wall in Pompeii, preserved for two thousand years under volcanic ash

Local teens are angry (of course they are — they live in the number 14 city) because the mayor has given the big thumb’s down to their upcoming graffiti contest. This is the same mayor who ended the city’s relationship with COPS because the show was making the city look bad. Truth be told, it wasn’t the show that made the city look bad - our criminals made the city look bad.

Anyway, this mayor has been waging a war against graffiti and, like episodes of COPS, doesn’t want any seen. Wall scrawl suggests gang activity, crime, and a certain lack of community pride. No contest, then, that might encourage such behavior.

I might have disputed this decision except that I saw these teens’ protest signs. If these kids were trying to make the argument that graffiti is art and a healthy form of self-expression, they didn’t win me over with their crappy signs.

Children, take an art class.

I love these surveys. This one’s based on the percentage of men with high blood pressure, FBI rates of aggravated assaults, the number of workplace deaths from assaults and other violence, traffic congestion, and the number of speeding citations. Based on T’s spiking blood pressure on the trip back here, the assault of my friend, the shooting death of a coworker, the persistence of animal and child abuse, and the string of reported murders ever since we got back in town, I’m wagering we’re fairly high on this list.

New York is 57, Kansas City’s 56, and we’re 14. Sounds about right.

“Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?”

I had told Todd that his state was blue, but according to 2000 and 2004 election results, Missouri is decidedly red. I stand corrected. Perhaps it was because I was thinking that the citizens of Missouri voted for Bill Clinton twice and I never forgave them. Or maybe because Kansas is so red, it just makes Missouri look blue. Who knows? But I need to get this information to Todd before he puts his house on the market.

Not to worry. Unlike me, Todd is normal and doesn’t make major life decisions according to presidential elections. See, twelve years ago I’d had reservations about moving to New Mexico because I felt that in five to ten years it would turn into California. I’d lived in the Bay Area long enough to see residents turn their state into something unbearable, then flee to Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona, only to turn those states into…well, California. When we were looking at moving to New Mexico, the state was boasting about their expanding high-tech empire: Silicon Mesa. But, this being a desert, that too was a mirage.

One reason to seriously consider a move to the Kansas City area is this: I’m not aware of any exodus from the Left Coast to either Kansas or Missouri.

The trip had taken a morbid turn. We drove through Rocky Ford and the Arkansas Valley and there was fog. In literature there are devices writers employ to warn the reader that something ominous this way comes. Devices, cliches. One is a black bird.

We were driving and saw an entire flock like a black cloud - not in the sky, but rather on the road. All dead, as if they’d flown directly into the path of a semi. Later I saw two cows, dead, lying side by side.

“Maybe they were just sleeping,” T offered.

Then dead baby horses. Then a sign for the Ludlow Massacre. We drove through Trinidad, then through Raton where I saw buffalo in great numbers on the landscape. There’s something about the silhouette of these wooly-headed creatures that makes me sad.

“No offense, but this trip is bringing me down.”

We stopped to walk the dog in Las Vegas, NM. I remember the last time we were there - it was with our Barbara over ten years ago - and I’d thought then the town was charming. Yesterday I looked around and could see and feel the change. That town is turning to crap. And I couldn’t help notice that ever since we crossed the NM state line, T’s blood pressure was on the rise. Mine started rising when I couldn’t tune in our big AM station until we were practically on top of it. And that’s when I heard the news report that confirmed the message that I received in Limon.

My friend is tall, statuesque, and vibrant. Though she would never think to admit her age to anyone who knows her, we’ve always guessed that she’s somewhere between seventy-four and eighty. While T and I were in Kansas City, a Mexican national - we don’t refer to them as illegal aliens in Nuevo Mexico - broke into her house, beat her severely, and attempted to rape her.

He would have succeeded but she was able to pull a framed print off the wall and crack him over the head with it. We’d recently met up to see a mutual friend in a local production, and she was preparing to have cataract surgery the next day. I understand her attacker shattered both her eye sockets. I know her well enough to know that she won’t bounce back from this. She’s currently hiding out in a relative’s home and refuses to return to hers. She won’t see anyone, she doesn’t want friends to visit.

Ah, life in a border state.

“…Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away — behind the moon…beyond the rain…”

I tend to look for signs. When we were approaching Dodge City earlier on our trip I looked out the window and saw an enormous rainbow over the plains. But then I saw Dodge City. Again, not to tarnish the fine city of Dodge, but it’s not a place I would want to call home.

T stopped in Colby, Kansas to run into a store. When he came out he handed me a postcard that has one word - Kansas - and nothing but sunflowers under a blue sky.

“Is this the one?”

“It is.”

On his first trip to Kansas he scoured the state for the perfect postcard because I told him all I wanted was for him to send me a postcard from Kansas. Simple as that. I checked the mailbox every day and never received the card he insisted he mailed. Because simple just isn’t all that…well, simple.

T felt he had to find just the right card. He finally did. He wrote the perfect message on it. He took the card to the front desk, bought a stamp, and asked that it be included in outgoing mail.

It had the perfect photo, the perfect message, and just the right amount of postage. What it didn’t have was my name and address.

It was five o’clock when we got into Colorado yesterday afternoon. I saw a sign that says: “Happiness is a crock of beans.” Food for thought.

In Kansas, Dorothy has a house in Liberal; in Colorado, there’s a river called the Republican. There’s something odd about that. It’s like when I told Todd that Missouri’s a blue state.

“Is not!”

“Is too. Very blue. Kansas is red.”

“But it doesn’t feel blue.”

“It’s blue.”

The plan was to spend the night in Limon. Put de Limon de coconut. I’m reminded of the scene in Field of Dreams when “Moonlight” Graham asks Ray Kinsella:

“And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?”

Ray tells him that there is a place and he can take him there, but “Moonlight” tells him he can’t go. He just can’t leave Chisholm, Minnesota.

“This is my most special place in all the world. Once a place touches you like that, the wind never blows so cold again.”

Limon isn’t that place for me. All I could imagine was a voice asking:

“What form of Satan brought you to Limon?”

It’s no fault of the town, of course, but I’ll always remember that this was the place where I received the message about my friend back in Albuquerque.