Occupation of Independence

It is that time of year, when visitors to the desert rhapsodize about red sunsets.  Here is my contribution:   I didn't deliberately do anything to enhance the colors, and yet it didn't look this red in real life.  The lying cheating camera added the color.  Even the cameras of the world have now been programmed to shoot for the maximum number of hits and clickbait income.  Sigh. Most people probably run their sunset photos through the editing software and then scream about how red the sunset is.  Who do they think they are fooling?  Hell, these days, you could take a picture of dog crap and then edit it into blazing red. There was a time when a red sunset was impressive and real; when a Jimmy Buffet song said, "Sunset is an angel weeping...holding out a bloody sword."  No longer.  I started losing faith in photography ten years ago when photo editing took over. For an analogy, consider when I was shopping for cars a few years ago.  I h...

It is strange  that "hiking" usually means walking in the mountains, when in fact, there is nothing in the mountains in  the desert Southwest.  Mountains are just heaps of rubble.  Sharp rocks.  Nothing green.  No animals, except a "borrego."  Stumble and bumble, slip and slide. In the arroyos in my neighborhood, the world seems lifeless, too, but only from a distance.  Close up you are surprised by all the green vegetation.  The ironwood trees can be 30 feet high!   I can't resist pronouncing the name, ahhrrrnwood.   I am camped low, where the arroyos flatten out.  The "streams" split and then rejoin in the most confusing way.  This is not true closer to the mountains, where the arroyos have steep banks or sidewalls and where the confluences are sensible and predictable.  This put me in a whimsical mood.  My mind drifted off to a Jimmy Buffet song that by chance I had listened to again, a few days back...

Maybe my little dog needed a Christmas present.  It can be frustrating and expensive to bounce around with different doggie boots before you finally find something that works.  Arizona might well convince you the trouble is worth it.  Surprisingly my little darlin' has pretty tough feet. We humans are so spoiled, walking around in shoes, in this gawd-forsaken wasteland.  Stickers, thorns.  Even the damned rocks are so sharp you wouldn't touch them without leather work gloves.   How does she do as well as she does?!  An Arizona dog needs hooves rather than pads. It is almost operatic to dwell on how awful the land is here.  Let it sink in.  Surrender to the horror.  It is quite cathartic.   The good news is that there is a way to beat it.  There are two types of terrain that are kind and gentle for those doggie pads.  Well-traveled two track roads are mercifully easy.  But the supreme highway to heaven in the dese...

  Quite a few Christmas movies have been made.  Most are pure schlock of course, but there is a noble exception.   E very year I like to give an advertisement for the Christmas movie,  "Joyeux Noel."   Its combination of hope and tragedy is quite touching.  A feeling of Hope seems to persist after you see the movie.  It seems especially timely with my own country responsible for two murderous wars right now.  But I don't expect the change of administration to improve the situation. What a shock the Great War must have been to people who believed in the automatic increase of Progress!  And what does the same person think today when they see Israel acting like genocidal German Nazis of World War II?  What was the old saying -- 'Never Again?'

I admit to being a man of the Hinterlands.  When I encounter people from the Left Coast, camping in the desert during winter, they don't seem like they are from the same country as me.   That in itself is not a bad thing.  But it seems like every topic, no matter how mundane, becomes a chance for them to intrude their fanatical ideology. At times it seems like we couldn't discuss the best shoestrings for hiking boots without hearing their tendentious preaching about racism, Trump, fascism, the next Hitler, what happened to the Native Americans, abortion, capitalism, or Climate Change.  They are emotionally addicted to moral indignation and moral posturing, as if screaming at somebody else long enough proves them to be a good person -- at least better than the person they are screaming at.  How do you tell them politely, "Let's just discuss shoestrings, shall we?" from abc.net.au This can get so frustrating.  But maybe that suggests an opportunity.  Tha...

  The recent invasion, conquest, and chaos in Syria seem to have taken the world by surprise.  I think I am using this event in a good way: as a spur to learn something about Islamic history.  Without a newsy and timely spur, it is too easy to put off such a project. I read a couple previews on Amazon.  It was disgusting how obsequious the authors were.  What a double standard!   Western intellectuals hold nothing back when it comes to "higher criticism" of the Bible and Christian traditions.  This seems like a mistake.  A person can be skeptical about a theology without 'throwing the baby out with the bath water.' And then they talk about Islam like they are walking on eggs.  One way to look at that is to call it condescending.   So I bounced around on Amazon and Kobo until I found a book that was rationally critical of the Islamic tradition.  The book was "Did Muhammad Exist?" by Robert Spencer.  It is refreshing to...

Lake Mead.  People have always been fascinated by eclipses, and rightly so.  I felt a different kind of eclipse the other day.   In mid-winter the mighty sun, Sol Invictus, weakens.  You can experience it but you still hardly believe it. High filmy clouds happen in the winter in the Southwestern states.  The sky is bright and cheerful.  But something is missing.  It is a little bit scary. Such clouds are not my favorite.  Recently I had a chance to experience puffy cumulus clouds in the tri-state, time-zone whiplash hell of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. These photos might appear to show a freakishly variegated geology.  Believe it or not, it is just the lucky lining-up of shadows and mountains.  

Nobody knows for sure how Trump 2.0 will be sabotaged.  Political tricks are like military ones and terrorist ones: you can't use an old tactic a second time because the world has become wise to it.   So this time around it won't be "Russian collusion."  The obvious choice will be to turn Biden's lost and unpopular war into Trump's lost war.  A fair number of Trump's supporters are flag-waving jingoes who want their president to be tough.  Making America Great Again means roaming the world and telling other people who their government should be.  This will make it easy for Trump to stake out a tough position relative to Putin.  Trump's ego needs to show the world what a great deal maker he is. Russia will ignore this game and keep doing what it is doing: winning.  That will cause Trump to bluster a little harder.  In a matter of weeks, Biden's debacle will have become Trump 2.0's debacle. A movie metaphor came to mind.  The reader might ...

One can not praise stoic mental discipline too much during the winter camping season.  You have escaped heat and insects.  Congratulations!  But you must lose on something else, such as neighbors and motorhead yahoos.    Still, a person does have a bit of control over the situation.  In general, physical or geographical relocation does not help too much.  Rather than looking for a spot where you can get away from noisy neighbors, it might work better to be pro-active and give a welcome to good neighbors.  Encourage them to cluster around you.   Even more, maybe solar campers need to work as an organized group. That said, I had a bit of luck at a place where you really shouldn't expect to have much luck.  I was geographically separate from the morons but didn't expect it to last for long.  Still, it lasted long enough for a pleasant surprise as I stepped out of the trailer one morning: What was this beast doing a hundred yards f...

It takes a lot of mental discipline to camp in the desert Southwest in the winter.  It is difficult to escape neighbors with generators.  Some of them specialize in door-slamming or loud music. It helps to keep a sense of humor about one's own aversion to neighbors.  When I manage to get away from the hordes of moron-assholes, and feel pleased with my situation, it is only a matter of time before some vehicle is prowling around, looking for a spot close to me.     Did they see my white box from two miles away and then drive down the bumpy road just for the joy of ruining my camping?  What a look of pure malevolence must be on my face! What part of "Get off my lawn!" do they not understand?  That is when I laugh at myself.   Most of the time the invaders are not as bad as I fear.  It helps to have a plan B if they do turn out to be professional assholes.   From a big picture point of view, a dispersed camper has nothing to complain...

Occasionally a walker in the desert finds something a bit gruesome, in this case a dead burro I guess.   Naturally it will get used as a visual metaphor from time to time on this blog.  Even today I am tempted to put captions underneath it, such as: The last month of the Blinken/Sullivan administration. The state of American diplomacy. Trump's anti-war image. The future of NATO. The German economy. And then my favorite:  'It's only a dry heat.'  But it is winter, so that won't work. It is unpleasant to focus this post purely on the gruesome, so let's get some relief with some nice eye candy from Utah this autumn:

Every year I stop in at a canyon system in southeastern Nevada.  It is the official beginning of the  crowded desert camping season.   As  a newbie camper I made an effort to talk to my 'fellow'' campers.  That ambition has died over the years.  So it was a pleasant surprise to talk to three camping neighbors on the first day.    Perhaps some momentary good luck at conviviality is the perfect way to start the holiday season.   Why have I disliked the Holidays so much?  Perhaps it is the music that we are tortured with in virtually every store, and these days at the gasoline pump.   Can I do better than listen to soft-rap versions of 'Frostie' or 'Rudolph' blaring over crappy speakers at the grocery store?  Yes!  It works great to listen to sprightly baroque music, played by small ensembles. Such music evokes images of folk traditions, feasting in the village, folk dances, flirting between the young people, and e...

Many people are already feeling betrayed by Trump II.  He has appointed quite a few warmongers to his team.  Is he just staking out a really strong position against Putin?  Maybe he just wants pull off a deal with Putin that makes Donald Trump look like the great master of the "Art of the Deal." But will he get the last laugh?  Or will he just get sucked into the trap of turning the old president's lost war into the new president's lost war?  Remember how Americans thought they were getting out of the Vietnam debacle in 1968 when they elected Nixon on a peace platform.  Then he fell into the "peace with honor" mistake.  The agony dragged on to 1975.   Until Trump proves me wrong, I will continue to believe that the best way out of the Ukraine mess is to come in as the new president and announce that: 1.  Expanding NATO was a mistake made by a Democrat president in the 1990s. 2.  Helping the coup d'état in Kiev in 2014 was a mistake made ...

Northwestern Arizona.  It is never wise to get greedy with Mother Nature, and I wasn't.  I accept that "weather" in the Southwest does not consist of temperature or rain, but only of hellish wind on some days, and not-so-hellish on other days. And yet, we had a generous rain of a couple hundredths of an inch.  Everything smelled wonderful the next day.  There was enough moisture to actually form pretty cumulus clouds.  And what fun they can be, as they dapple the lunar mountains with dark patches and shadows.  

Recently I was watching some old Charlie Chaplin movies that were edited and re-issued by him in a later era.   He added music and replaced the captions with his own voice-overs.  I thought it was an interesting -- and effective -- combination of old and new techniques.   Perhaps this suggests how a modern media consumer can be more than a passive consumer.  As an example, consider how numb and passive we have become to news of slaughter in Gaza.  It bothers me that I object to the sadistic murder of children in a purely intellectual or philosophical way, but don't really feel anything. It's not that I consider feelings more important than thought.  There are people who do consider feelings a more essential and authentic part of their soul.  Recall the classic movie, "Lawrence of Arabia:" the newspaper reporter asked the Arab king, 'Isn't mercy a passion with Lawrence?"  The king replied that yes it was with Lawrence, but with the king ...

One of the many things that the "Wizard of Oz" movie did right was to use the new invention of technicolor in a creative way: they essentially made a character out of technicolor by starting the movie in black and white, and then shifting to technicolor in the land of Oz. When an RV traveler is blown out of Utah by another "blue norther", and heads downriver along the Colorado River, they are doing the Wizard of Oz thing in reverse.  They are going from technicolor to brown and grey.  Does this mean disappointment? Not edited by software or AI Not necessarily. This is certainly good news and is worth explaining.  Years ago I started losing interest in landscape photography because it was too edited to believe.   I will not go ga-ga over a photo just because Photoshop Pro has reddened it too death.  It is understandable that newbies would go crazy over red rocks, but most of them will probably notice the effect wearing off pretty quickly. It is natural and h...

There are people who genuinely appreciate paintings, poetry, and other arts.  I wish I did.  It seems like I only respond to music, occasionally writing, and even "architecture" once in a while. Be that as it may, this is time for our annual pilgrimage to a stony picnic table in southwestern Utah. This stone picnic table is almost a religious shrine to me. Who is responsible for it?  Surely not some BLM bureaucrats!   For one thing, the picnic table is not ADA (wheelchair) compliant.  Besides that, it is too imaginative for bureaucrats.  Perhaps the BLM offered a competition to the local schools, and one of them came up with this. There is a patio stone quarry a mile away.  In the backdrop, the photos show Gooseberry Mesa.  This picnic table should be offered in the dictionaries for the word, autochthonous.  It seems to grow right out of the rocky ground nearby, as if people didn't have to do anything to build it.  I literally flutt...

When a person follows the news, they must be careful.  They must accept good news, such as  Trump blocking certain well-known neocon warmongers from his cabinet.   But considering what a failed president Trump was in his first term, we should not be naive.  While everyone has been fooled into thinking that Trump is going to be anti-war this time around, the neocons could flap their leathery wings (I am plagiarizing Kunstler) and fly in under the radar with a lesser-known neocon who is even a viler piece of human filth than the better known ones.  That way, both sides would feel like Trump is their man.  And Mrs. Adelson would feel like she is getting a good return on her investment. It is how politics is played.  War really is the "health of the state."

Oldsters remember the troubles of 1968 and much of the world's disgust with the Vietnam War.  They remember their surprise when President Johnson announced he was not running for another term.  Nixon took advantage of the unpopularity of the war to stage a big political comeback.  In a couple years you could hear a song on the radio: "Tin soldiers and Nixon comin', 4 dead in Ohio." The Vietnam War had become the new president's war.  "Peace with honor" was the trap that Nixon fell into. The Duran laid out the Neocons agenda for the next couple months: how to turn the Ukraine debacle into Trump's debacle.  In his first term as president, he would have fallen for that trap.  Will he be smarter this time around? Ahh dear.  I must try to be hopeful without letting my expectations become naive. When the Biden administration started off by withdrawing American troops from the Afghan quagmire, he took a lot of criticism for how it was done.  But most A...

  Whether you feel like the winner or the loser of the recent election, there is lots to think about and learn by asking the right questions.  As I get older I get lazier and am reluctant to step into tedious expository prose.  I prefer to look for vignettes or metaphors, each better than 'a thousand words.' Cold, high winds were interrupting my usual 'backcountry babushka' duties at camp.  So I deigned to carry some dirty clothes to a laundromat I used to use.  Prices were 50% higher than expected.  I am glad I started hand-washing clothes a couple years ago, lest I have to put up with these high prices all the time. Then I dug my heels in, picked up my basket of clothes, and simply walked out.  They didn't have many customers.  I had never done this before at a laundromat.  H igh prices can be fought to some extent by substitution.  Perhaps a lack of skills or imagination hold us down sometimes.  Perhaps we are slaves to habit. B...

Let's hope that this is the worst election the USA will ever have.  How could it come up with two shittier candidates?     Western media is saturated with election coverage.  But there are some people who don't care too much.  Regardless of who is elected, apartment buildings in Lebanon will keep getting bombed by American/Israeli planes.  The mass-slaughter in Gaza will continue. After all, America is just choosing their new Zionist-in-Chief.  I suspect Trump would be a little more reckless than Harris with Iran, but at least there is an explanation -- Rapture Christians in the American Bible Belt are a core constituency of his.  What would Harris's excuse be? I think Trump would wind down the Ukraine debacle faster than Harris.  Either candidate will continue deficit spending until the "bond vigilantes" come back strong or inflation becomes double-digit and the main political issue.   How many votes will be cast by people who...

On an early morning walk to the canyon edge I heard a large animal moving around, and pretty close to us, too.  And it was getting closer. Soon I could see him.  A bighorn sheep ram -- let's call him El Borrego -- was actually walking towards us.  Hopefully my little dog would not see him and start barking.  I tried to freeze and get my camera ready at the same time. El Borrego saw me.  He kept making direct eye contact with me, the same way that coyotes sometimes will.  At first I wondered if El Borrego was crazy, rabid, or something.  Closer inspection of his collar might provide the explanation:  Gosh, is it possible that the Utah state wildlife people are over-managing the wildlife a little? But at the time I was so excited that I didn't see the GPS collar, and instead thought only of freezing, to see how close El Borrego would come.  He came up to the rim of the canyon, maybe 75 feet away from me, and coyly looked at me while hiding behi...

  What changes will occur with You Tube or with viewers' habits over time?  It is quite a guessing game.  As a viewer I am turning off channels that offer heavily accented English, tedious talking heads, interviewees that go into a 15 minutes speech, cacklers and frustrated comedians, and people who won't give a straight answer to a legitimate question.  Perhaps vaunted AI technology will someday do a better job of translating heavily accented jabbering into normal American speech. It is easy to be a critic of You Tube screw-ups, and I certainly do my share of criticizing.  But today let's praise a You Tube channel.  Anybody who has been to an animal shelter to adopt a dog knows how important it is for the dog to audition well.  Some dogs are terrible at auditioning.  They are fearful and hide at the back of their pen and do not even make eye contact or wag their tail when a prospective customer approaches.  What happens to dogs like that?...

 What is your favorite landform in the Utah area?  The "monuments" (aka, buttes) of Monument Valley made a big impression on movie audiences in 1939 when John Ford's "Stagecoach" came along.  They have been icons ever since.  Or maybe you prefer steep canyon walls, mesa edges, hoodoos, arches, or just plain ol' mountains.  Some people go crazy over rock that is reddish. All well and all good.  But what happens when you aren't a newbie tourist anymore?  How do you maintain a long-term love affair with the landforms of Utah plateau and canyon country?  This is the time for my annual advertisement for a little book I bought years ago in the visitor center in the Escalante region.  (Kanab, UT)? Not sure where to get this book by William Lee Stokes. The trick is to stop thinking of these landforms as a static tourist postcard, and try to imagine how they formed.  For the most part, land was uplifted a long time ago because of collision betwe...