Anyway, since I wrote about the Chyrsler commercial here, I’m reposting my comment too:

A few years ago everyone said Obama was a socialist. Now we find out he was actually a crony capitalist all along. Name calling can be very confusing!

The fact is, Obama’s plan definitely saved GM and Chrysler. Mitt’s plan may also have saved GM and Chrysler like he says — I’m no expert, but I’m willing to grant him that it’s possible both companies would have survived without a bailout.

But Mitt’s plan would have resulted in massive layoffs, cutting relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs at the moment that Michigan could least afford it. And when the companies finished restructuring those jobs wouldn’t have come back. The best Michigan could have hoped for was lower paying non-union jobs that would have maximized corporate profits at the cost of the state’s work force. In a more likely scenario, those jobs would be in Mexico or Asia today and Michigan would be left with nothing.

And Mitt Romney doesn’t even address the issue of jobs in his editorial. He has clearly thought a lot about the rights of corporations, but he doesn’t seem to have given a second thought to people’s jobs, and how Michiganders would put food on the table. Not just jobs at auto companies either — jobs at every company that does business with those auto companies as well. Today GM and Chrysler are back on their feet, the bailout money has been returned to the Treasury, and a lot of Michiganders still have their jobs. It might not be a shining moment for free market capitalism, but it’s the result all of Michigan was praying for.

Republicans talk a lot about the Real America.  Well, I’m from Michigan and I can tell you that Michigan is what we thing about when we think about the Real America:  tough, individualistic, but also kind and humble.  And Michigan proved it when Chyrsler and GM took government bailouts and, unlike the financial industry did, lived up to their obligation to taxpayers by paying back their loans ahead of schedule and using the money to save hundreds of thousands of American jobs and create thousands more.

Bailing out the auto industry was unquestionably the right decision.  For every job that was saved or created thanks to the bailout, three more jobs were potentially saved in industries that provide parts or service for cars.  In three years, GM climbed from bankruptcy to become the world’s number one auto company again.  And because, unlike the bankers, the Michigan residents who staff the corporate headquarters of the Big Three were human enough to admit that fair is fair, and that one good turn deserves another, American auto companies have reversed their decades-long policy of shipping jobs overseas and churning out oversized, wasteful vehicules that nobody wants.  Because when it comes down to it, these people are human beings who want to look their neighbors in the eye and to sleep at night.  Living in Michigan does that to you.  And, of course, because sustainability is good for business, not just the environment.

Republicans have been bitching non-stop about this ad for the last 24 hours — they say it’s pro-Obama and pro-union, even though the ad doesn’t mention Obama or unions.  It is about teamwork and pulling together in hard times.  The fact that Republicans associate those things with Obama and unions is just a tacit admission that teamwork and pulling together are the charateristics of their opponents, and that Republicans were talking about market forces when they should have been worrying about thousands of people and the livelihood of an entire region of the country.  The Real America is better off today because the federal government was watching out for it — well, half of it anyway.  The truth of the ad is undeniable, plain to see even through partisan blinders.  This time, reality really does have a liberal bias.

And, finally, I just want to say how classy this ad was on the part of Chrysler.  We all gave them a hand, they came through for us, paid us back, and then they said thank you, and told us that generous people like us are what makes America great, and what will make us strong again.  Aw shucks, Chyrsler, you can have my bailout money any day.

Aware that the weekend was something of an experiment, I made a list of what I was taking so I could analyze the benefits and costs after I’d finished. My pack contained: about half a gallon of water, food (apples, carrots, broccoli, whole wheat bagels, peanuts, veggie burgers, etc.), a tent, a sleeping bag, a foam mat, a small ax, a collapsible shovel, a pair of metal tongs (for moving burning logs in the campfire), a mess kit, a camp towel, a cooler, an plastic box for things that might get lost of crushed (hamburger buns, matches), an extra tee shirt, an extra pair of socks, a change of underwear, a bathing suit, waterproof trail maps, a compass, a back-up compass (in case the first one breaks), a monocular, a hunting knife, a flashlight, a headlamp, a small first aid kit, an Ace bandage, two emergency ponchos, three plastic garbage bags for trash, a book and a survival guide (just in case).

It also must be said that backpacking alone is probably the most difficult way to do it, when it comes to packing. When you go backpacking, there are some items that you need to carry one for each member of the group (sleeping bags, canteens, etc.) but there are some items that you only need to carry one for the entire group whatever its size (a tent, for instance). When you’re backpacking in a group the items in this second category are divided up amongst the members of the group but when you’re on your own you’re stuck carrying the whole lot.

On Saturday morning I took the train from Penn Station to Tuxedo, which is about fifty miles north of the city on the southwestern edge of Harriman State Park. After a quick stop off at a newstand for the one item I forgot, a free newspaper for kindling, I found the trailhead and started hiking. On the initial uphill I was still coming to terms with the weight of the big pack. The entry trail was a beautiful climb which skirted some breathtaking rock formations and yet had the decency not to force me to climb directly over them. I dropped my pack for a moment to climb around inside the fissure in one of these formations, which provided an excellent view of the forest I had just hiked through. I also had two wildlife encounters on this trail. The first was with two deer, a white-tailed doe and a buck with the fuzz still on his antlers. The second was with a snake. I have seen snakes before in this forest but they have always been little ones, around a foot long. This snake was about three feet long and wide enough that if you wrapped your thumb and index finger around it the tips of your fingers might not touch! It was an enormous snake for New York State, from what I know, and it was lying directly in the trail. In fact, it was so large and it was lying so still that my first though was that it was a rubber snake and that someone had left it in the trail as a practical joke. But on closer examination its head was moving, so I walked about ten feet off the trail and gave it a wide birth so as not to disturb it.

I had selected the trail to pass by a couple of the shelters in this part of the park, for future reference, so I swung by one of these next. The shelters in Harriman are stone buildings with three walls, a roof and an open side and they are designed to be refuges for hikers on multi-day adventures. Of the five I looked at up close during the whole three days, only one even had bunks (but no mattresses). They’re filthy, badly maintained and thoroughly uninviting but for the fact that you are legally allowed to camp in a tent within three hundred feet of the shelter and there are spots to make campfires—essentially, it’s a campground where you can legally go camping for free. Not bad.

The entry trail went approximately southeast, so after about an hour and a half I turned north, in the Appalachian Trail, which I hoped to reach by the end of the day. The trail I chose took me alongside a lovely lake that was being enjoyed by a few kayakers. I saw on my map that there was a beach at the other end of the lake so I headed that way, picturing a deserted beach in the middle of the woods. As I got closer, however, I could see it was very well populated, and featured lifeguards and a roped-in swimming area where the water was wading depth for a ten-year-old. Needless to say this soured me on the idea of swimming there and I was feeling rather bitter about it when a goose led her four or five babies across the trail about twenty feet ahead of me and right into the water. I decided she had the right idea, so I hid my pack behind some rocks, changed into my bathing suit and got in the water. It was warm and extremely pleasant except for some tendril-like seaweed (yuck) so I swam all the way to the other side of the lake. I tried to climb up onto the bank but slipped and fell on some rocks. I was about to try again when I asked myself what reason I had the get out of the lake anyway, so I sat on the rock for a minute to catch my breath and started to swim back. As I approached the other side I swam up alongside of two men in kayaks who asked if I was all right (I had just switched from crawl to breast stroke to approach the bank and they thought I was in distress). I swam side stroke alongside them, they complimented me on my swimming, we joked about water snakes or Nessie type monsters that might have a taste for swimmers, and then I wished them a pleasant day and swam ashore. Once I was dressed again, I passed by the beach and refilled my water and worked on my tan for a half hour.

I started north again on a trail with more lovely rock formations where I spotted another deer that bolted as soon as she saw me. The trail wound back and forth a bit and finally ended up in a very picturesque valley between two stony ridges. I picked another trail with I thought would take me to the AT a bit quicker but it turned out to be very rugged, requiring me to scramble up rocks using my hands as well as my feet. The thing about carrying a forty pound backpack is that you don’t really notice it on level ground, and on descents only because it affects your balance, but on climbs it makes everything twice as hard! I was rewarded several times with a very pleasant view but when I got towards the peak of my second mountain I began to realize that if I tried to go all the way to the first shelter on the Appalachian Trail, I would be awfully exhausted the next day when I attempted the eastward hike across the park. Fortunately, there was a beautiful, grassy open space at the top of the second mountain surrounding the Bare Rocks shelter, so, taking advantage of the three-hundred-feet rule, I set up my tent.

I hadn’t been camping on my own for years and I was pleased to find my camping skills weren’t completely atrophied. I managed to start a campfire with forraged wood and only one match and cook myself quite a good veggie burger in the frying pan in my new mess kit. I got my tent set up for the first time with relative ease, although I made a rather dumb mistake that I only discovered the next morning—for some reason I thought there were no stakes included, so I used sticks to stake down the corners badly, only to discover the stakes lying in the box the next day. I watched a beautiful sunset and then went to bed.

I woke up the next morning to a very loud crash of thunder. And pouring rain. This did not compute, what with the weather report I had read calling for a small chance of thundershowers in the evening of the second day. Thunderclaps that would rattle your fillings continued for about half an hour and, since I was camped out in a clearing on the top of a mountain, I was alternating between being happy I had set up my tent ten or fifteen feet from a tree that would attract any lightning bolts that came my way and afraid that if lightning did strike the tree it might fall over and land on me (my friend Jeramy told me about a man who had been killed that way earlier in the week). The lightning passed finally, leaving the tree standing intact. The same could not be said for my tent however. The rain was pummeling it good and most of my makeshift stakes had come unfixed so the tent was starting the sag badly under the weight of the water. I quickly did up my pack, put on a poncho and took down the tent in the pouring rain. All of the rainwater I packed up in that soggy tent probably added a few pounds to my load.

Once I had finished this unpleasant chore, hiking through the woods in the rain was actually rather pleasant. I hadn’t hiked in the rain since high school and I had forgotten that it’s quite beautiful. I started down a new path that joined up with the Long Path (an aptly named New York State hiking path that begins in the Jersey Palisades at the foot of the George Washington Bridge and stretches three hundred and fifty miles upstate, most of the way to the Canadian border). The path through sparse, grassy forest, winding in long curves between outcroppings of rock was all the more gorgeous covered in a layer of mist from the falling rain. It brought to mind images of Avalon. I expected to be presented with Excalibur by the Lady in the Lake at any moment. There was one disadvantage to the walk through the rain, and that was that the streams had swollen with rainwater and were very difficult to cross. I must have looked rather ludicrous in my giant pack balancing on a slick fallen log to get across one particular creek.

By and by, the Long Path joined up with the Appalachian Trail. (The AT, in case you aren’t aware, is a 2,175-mile hiking trail from Georgia to Maine. Most people hike it for a day or two but every year a number of intrepid souls referred to a “thru-hikers” attempt the entire route, usually working from south to north with the weather. The whole hike takes them from May till October, and they have to average at least fifteen miles a day to complete it, a ridiculously speedy pace when you consider that they’re climbing up and down the Appalachian Range the whole way.) A signpost informed me that it was 10.1 miles to the West Mountain Shelter, which lies just over the border between Harriman and Bear Mountain State Parks, and where I intended to spend the night. Initially the trail contained a lot of rocky climbs and descents. At the top of one of these, I stood admiring the valley, then turned to discover I was being observed by a doe that had approached within fifteen feet to check me up. I was startled as I turned and saw her, and she took off.

The trail crossed a rocky plateau next, and then plunged back into the forest. The rain stopped about this time. Soon I reached two water towers and I saw on my map that I was only a short walk from a picnic area, so I hid my pack in some rocks and walked down a side trail to refill my water and, as it happened, raid the vending machines for some well-earned candy and soda. Surprisingly a number of people, mostly Spanish speaking, were braving the weather for cookouts. Many had strung up tarps to nearby trees to shield their picnic tables should the rain start again. Mission accomplished, I returned to the trail, got my pack and continued walking.

At this point the Appalachian Trail became deep rolling forest, with a few hard climbs and remained that way for about two and a half monotonous, rainy hours. The only entertaining event of this entire period was an encounter with another doe and a fawn, which was still small but old enough that it had lost its white spots already. I spotted them up ahead right in the trail. The doe saw me, so I immediately started walking backwards slowly to show I wasn’t a threat. This apparently satisfied it because it continued to meander through the forest and allowed me to observe it and its young one for several full minutes. About a half hour later I had a scarier animal encounter. A dog coming in the opposite direction that bared its teeth and growled at me. I backed off and its owner tried to calm it, but when I tried to pass it made a lunge at me, forcing its owner to quickly grab it by the collar and pull it up short. The owner apologized for its behavior, insisting, “She never acts like this!” If I had a nickel for every time a dog owner has used that line to excuse their animal’s bad behavior to me, I would be a rich man.

Finally, I came to a shelter where I sat down for a rest and a snack and met two thru-hikers—a woman who had come up all the way from Georgia and a man who had started in Pennsylvania but was determined to go all the way to Maine by the end of the season. They had decided to sit out the rest of the day at the shelter and avoid the rain. We talked a little about the trail. When I ate an apple they expressed a bit of surprise that I would carry such heavy food, though they phrased it as a compliment about my food being “fresh.” I hadn’t put to much thought into the weight of my food, and had just brought the sort of thing I take when I go day-hiking, except more of it. It didn’t occur to me until this moment that I could have saved a lot of water weight with more strategic choices. I briefly considered staying at the shelter, but I knew that I had to catch the 5:10 train from Manitou the next day. That station is about an hour past the Bear Mountain trailhead and I was uncomfortably far way to call it a day early so after about forty-five minutes of rest I started out again.

However, it was still several more miles to the West Mountain shelter and I was getting pretty tired. The trail from the shelter to the edge of Harriman Park was one steep climb after another, followed by a long, rocky descent to the freeway that separates the two parks. My right ankle started to hurt me at the beginning of this descent, forcing me to go doubly slow. By the time I reached the bottom I was exhausted and in a lot of pain. I was keeping myself going with a silly mental game of picking out a log or a rock in the distance where I promised myself I would stop and rest, and then, when a reached it, rejecting it for some reason or another (too big, too small, too wet) and choosing a farther resting place. I hobbled across the freeway (cars buzzing by at seventy miles an hour and not even a crosswalk!) and entered Bear Mountain State Park, where I promptly sat down to rest for real. I knew from my topographical map that there was another climb ahead and I said to myself, “I think I have one more in me.” Happily, the pain in my ankle diminished greatly after a rest. Unhappily, I got took a wrong turn and got off the trail but found my way back to it without having to backtrack.

It turned out I had spoken too soon when I said I had one more climb left in me because the one climb that remained was by far the biggest of the day, about six hundred feet. Halfway up I was so tired I was stopping to rest every twenty steps. I was panting hard despite the snail’s pace. By the time I finally reached the top, I was talking to myself deliriously to motivate myself and wishing feverishly that I had stayed at the shelter where I met the thru-hikers and worried about the train schedule the following day. I began the home stretch, a half-mile, mostly level trail over a rock ridge to the West Mountain shelter. About half way down the trail I felt I was ready to drop so I decided to play my game of picking and rejecting resting places again… except that when I reached the first resting place I picked out I couldn’t come up with a reason to reject it quickly enough! I started to sit, lost my balance and ended up sprawled out backwards on the trail, resting on my pack. I was so tired I couldn’t even hold my head up so I just rested my head back on my pack and stared at the sky. It looked like it might start to rain again any second. I didn’t care. I just lay there for awhile until my senses started to return. The first proper thought to cross my mind was self-consciousness—if anyone were to come along, I would look pretty silly sprawled here on the trail, panting, exhausted, and only a quarter mile from the shelter. So I forced myself to my feet, hiked the rest of the way there, set up my dripping tent, dried the inside of it with my camp towel, and went immediately to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up early and looked for a dry pair of clothes only to discover that my pack’s water resistance had been no match for the previous day’s rain and all of the contents were, if not soaked, at least rather damp. I put on some clean clothes and hiked down the trail a bit towards to a scenic view of the valley I hadn’t had a chance to enjoy the day before. The sun was coming up, and it looked like a beautiful day. As I ate breakfast and waited for the clothes to dry from a combination of the sun and my body heat, and watched fog roll through the valley. The various peaks looked like islands in a turbulent ocean, and the whole thing remind me of the films you see of the fog-bound mountains of rural China.

Thanks to my extra effort the day before, I was only a few miles from the Bear Mountain trailhead and I knew I had an easy day ahead of me—I could be there by noon, and in my sore state the idea of lazing around in the recreation areas at the trailhead seemed pretty appealing. I had hiked on West Mountain a few weeks earlier and I knew that the most direct trail down was the most annoying of all possible types of trails, a descent on loose rock. I chose a more indirect route in hopes that it would be less challenging (I had had trouble on the other one with a tiny day-hiking pack, let alone what I was carrying this time) but it turned out that the second trail down was even more difficult. In fact, it was so rocky that I spent the entire time looking at my footing and missed a turn in the marked trail. This put me on an unmarked side trail. I was initially worried when I discovered this but soon deduced from my map that this unintentional deviation was actually a godsend—it was more direct and it allowed me to bypass a steep climb that I wasn’t in the mood for. In fact, the trail soon opened up into a wide, flat dirt road and the rest of the walk to the trailhead was mostly an easy one.

There, I found hundreds of picnickers celebrating the Fourth of July but I found an empty, grassy hillside to spread out my tent and other wet gear to dry in the sun. I used the opportunity to give some thought to what I had decided to carry. The small ax was an obvious mistake. If you’re camping in a campground and need to split wood that you’ve bought it’s quite useful, but on a backpacking trip the wood you forage already in small pieces and an ax is very heavy. The collapsible shovel has some obvious uses (digging holes for campfires and latrines) but I didn’t need it at all on the trip and it’s also rather heavy. Other than than, and the idea of lighter foods, the only changes i would make were things I wanted to add: dish soap, rags, more plastic bags, some means for waterproofing my pack, a set of clothes sealed in plastic that couldn’t get wet. As my stuff dried, I spent the late morning and early afternoon laying in the grass reading my soaking-wet book and getting a sun tan. The book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and in it I found the following passage, which seemed particularly à propos, considering what I’d been doing for the last two and a half days:

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

But enough deep literature and spirituality. The hamburgers and the Bear Mountain concession stand beckoned and after wolfing one down, I headed across the Bear Mountain Bridge, where the Appalachian Trail crossed the Hudson. In the very middle, I had a hardy laugh when I noticed, on one of the suspension cables, a rectangular, white AT trail marker.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thoughtthat produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Which I did. So I ended up having a little bit of an adventure.

Most of the mistakes I made were first time mistakes, the kind you make when you haven’t hiked a particular trail before. I love hiking but I don’t really know anyone in New York who likes to do it. Consequently, my information about this trail came from the Internet and a set of trail maps I bought last week. I didn’t know anyone who had actually hiked there before who could give me the inside scoop. I had also read on the Internet that the trail was only 2.5 miles long and would take only 3 hours to hike. I don’t know what route the Internet was talking about—walking from one end of the Breakneck Ridge Trail to the other took me about eight and a half hours.

Leaving in the morning, I didn’t know whether I would want to take the train back that night from the Breakneck Station or from Beacon, NY, so I wrote down both schedules and didn’t buy a return ticket. But when I got off the train at Breakneck, I was surprised to see that we were just being let off by the side of the track and there wasn’t really a station there! I knew what times the train was coming back that afternoon but there was nowhere to buy a ticket except on the train, which is expensive. Oh well, I decided, I’ll just hike to Beacon.

I was getting off the train with a group of other hikers. One particular group’s plans for the day seemed to involve taking a bunch of ecstasy and running around in the woods. They kept raving (pardon the pun) about how AMAZING everything was. It actually took a while to get off the train because I was behind them and they spent quite a bit of time telling the conductor how great he was and how much they loved them. I was not looking forward to walking to the trailhead with these guys, so when I saw another path across from the train, and a quick check of my map showed that it linked up with the Breakneck Ridge Trail, I decided to take a short cut and set off on my own. I climbed up a rather steep, rocky path at about nine in the morning and made it onto the main trail at about quarter to ten.

While I was sitting at the junction taking a rest, debating whether I should go right towards the trailhead and see what I’d missed or just turn left and head for Beacon, I saw two hikers walking up from the trailhead. They informed me that the initial climb from the trailhead was the whole point of going to Breakneck Ridge and shouldn’t be missed. I figured, I came all the way here, what’s an extra hour or so, so I started to back track. The path became a very steep downhill climb and another group of hikers advised me that it got worse and I should take a side trail that would loop around to the trailhead. I found it on my map and off I went. It turned out to be a beautiful, winding downhill trail through the forest at the base of a cliff, as you might guess from its name, Undercliff Trail.

It was a bit longer than I expected and I didn’t get to the trailhead until noon. Then I started the trail from the beginning and the initial ascent in the first twenty minutes of the hike turned out to indeed be unmissable. It was steep, tough climb over gigantic boulders. You needed to use your hands to pull yourself up and be very clever about choosing your route. The trail markings weren’t at all clear here—just the occasional white paint splotch on the rocks. And there was such an amazing view to reward you at the top. Even though I’ve never done any actual rock climbing I felt like a mountain man compared to a lot of the people on the trail. I was making good time and even heard a few people comment on how quick I was as I passed them.

It wasn’t until I reached the top that I started to get an inkling of the other mistake I had made. I had finished nearly half of the water in my canteen and was technically still at the very beginning of the hike. I’d planned to fill up at the trailhead but there wasn’t a tap or a hand pump there. I wasn’t too worried because it wasn’t supposed to be that long, but I decided to eat my wet food (vegetables, an apple) and save the dry food (peanuts, whole wheat bagels) for the end. I started hiking, covering a lot more hilly, rocky terrain, chomping my apple as I went, taking in a few fantastic views including one of a ruined castle on an island that made me happy to have brought my telescope. To tell the truth, I lost track of time a bit and when I got back to the original junction where I’d decided to backtrack to the trailhead, it was about 2:30 in the afternoon.

That’s when I realized something was really wrong. I’d been hiking two and a half hours since the trailhead. I should nearly be done with the trail, but my map showed I was less than a third of the way to Beacon. Checking the scale of the map for the first time, I realized that the information I’d gotten on the Net was wrong, and the trail was probably closer to seven miles than two and a half. Four or five miles to go didn’t sound that serious, but I had only a third of my water and the map showed that I had to climb up two small peaks on the way (1,300 and 1,550 feet, respectively). I’d decided I better start walking and rest as little as possible—no point sitting around sweating when I could be walking.

At this point, the hike got considerably less fun! For the next stretch the trail was only a little bit hilly but it was very stony. There were so many medium-sized stones in the trail that I couldn’t step between them, and had to step on top of them instead. By the time I had climbed up the first peak and was on my way down my feet were killing me and my legs were feeling quite rubbery from the descent. I was also exceedingly hungry and rather thirsty, but I only had enough water for a couple sips every mile, since I was hoping to finish it around the time I reached the end of the Breakneck Trail, at which point only a 45-minute hike to Beacon would remain.

I was kind of bleary by the time I got to the bottom, and I could already see the next mountain ahead of me when I came across a mountain stream. It was clear, stony-bottomed and relatively fast moving, and there was a bit of moss growing on the stones so I knew there was nothing outright poisonous in it, like arsenic. These were all good signs but I knew there was no way to tell if there was any bacteria in the water that could make me sick. I didn’t have iodine or any way to boil it. I hesitated for a moment, reflecting on the fact that I had a big climb ahead of me and couldn’t spare any canteen water until I had scaled the peak and come back down. Not to mention that I didn’t really know how far I had to go, I was just guessing from the map. About the worst that could happen if I drank the water was dysentery, and I’d be back in the city long before it hit. At the moment, that didn’t seem like more than a risk than getting seriously dehydrated if the climb took longer than I thought. I cupped my hands, drank the water from a particularly deep, fast moving part, and it was delicious.

I started to climb the next peak. I was immediately glad I had had the water because I almost instantly began to feel woozy. It was almost as steep as the climb and the trailhead, a hands-and-feet scramble over large rocks, and I was stopping every I was stopping every dozen steps to rest (my body hadn’t processed the water yet). I cut my knee on a rock I was trying to get my foot on top of because my tired muscles didn’t lift my leg as high as I intended. The water from the stream kicked in a little closer to the top and I started to feel better. I reached to top utterly exhausted and was greeted by an absurdly gorgeous view of the Hudson and the treetops in the valley I had just climbed out of. There was an abandoned fire watch tower on the peak and I wish I could have climbed to the top of it but it was about a hundred rickety steps above the ground and I just couldn’t imagine climbing them all and coming back down, no matter how splendid the view would have been.

I started down from the peak and right at the bottom, sooner than I thought, I reached the Casino Trail to Beacon. I drank the last three gulps of water in my canteen and started down. It was about a forty-five minute hike down and the trail was covered with small sliding stones that forced me to make the walk in very small steps. Just moving had gotten kind of agonizing. Whenever I got onto a rare stretch of dirt path without too many rocks I started running, just to get it over with faster. I barely spared a glance for the burnt-out old brick casino, though it was very picturesque. Finally, I reached Beacon, where I went immediately to the nearest convenience store. I chugged the biggest bottle of water I could buy, ate a candy bar and my two bagels. Fifteen minutes later, I had a bad case of dry-mouth again—all that water I’d bought, probably twice what I’d had in the last eight hours of hiking, had barely put a dent in my dehydration!

Despite the miserable last couple of hours, it was a magnificent hike that I would highly recommend. Now that I’ve done it and I know the trails, I feel like I could enjoy it in a lot more comfort by picking a more realistic route and, of course, packing a whole lot more water. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a great hike. Just don’t believe what you read on the Internet about the distance, whatever you do!

This is a letter that Allen Ginsberg wrote to Robert McNamara, LBJ’s Defense Secretary who was the architect of American policy in Vietnam. McNamara probably never read it, but it was reprinted in Allen Ginsberg in America, by Jane Kramer, and I read it this morning on the train to work. It got me thinking very deeply about a lot of things, both things that Ginsberg mentions in the letter and things that are unrelated. I don’t feel like sharing my thoughts right now but I do want to share the letter.

If you aren’t familiar with Ginsberg, I’ll just preface this by saying that, in addition to being a Beat poet and very prominent in sixties counterculture, he was an admirer of Buddhist thought and was dedicated to reaching out to people who thought differently from him. He had a fundamental respect for all human beings and he often played the role of mediator between the counterculture and the rest of America — notably, he testified before Congress on the advantages and disadvantages of psychedelic drugs and brokered a truce between Berkeley peace marchers and the Oakland Hell’s Angels. He had a vast array of friends and contacts in positions of power and in all areas of the counterculture and he relentlessly tried to put people in contact with each other to talk about ideas.

Dear Mr. McNamara,

I am not sure you will respect my advice, but anyway, you cannot help but be interested if I can reach you with this message, so let us try.

The first thing is, be calm, there is no essential threat to anybody’s ultimate being. Not yours, you also are safe, as is one supposed to be your or our enemy. He is also safe.

The reason for this is, as the old Chinese sages recognized earlier in time, that the very flesh universe we find ourselves trapped in is, in its nature, unthreatening because it is empty — illusory — Shakespeare & the Chinese agree — Prospero the Wise Man agrees — everything’s all right because we are inhabiting a very special realm of pure Dream.

But as I get excited as Mao Tse-tung (whoever he is) gets frightened, as you take things so seriously, the dream turns to a kind of physical nightmare, with apparent conflict and — ugh — suffering death — well, death is built into it in any case — but the anxiety and paranoia — fear of a cosmic ENEMY is the stricken-feeling anxiety chord that runs thru

Everybody’s heart in America right now tonight — and in Vietnam and China we can only imagine & — try to calm that panic.

Now, are you doing things to calm that panic, or are you now, generally in fantasy or manifest thought (orders for more bomb), seized by that panic and acting it out? and so creating material conditions for it (the panic-fear-paranoia of Invasion by alien forces from some Outside) to flourish in everybody’s mind — our own mind as well as the minds of China?

I do not know directly personally from contact with you what your subjective attitude is, but from what I read in the reduplicated Images of the mass media, you yourself are sending out waves of anxiety and fear.

Now given your material prominence and TV centrality and known and unknown governmental power-centralization, you must realize that it is your Will, your Fantasy, that dominates the mind-screen images of vast — not all — regions of the populace.

But there are large regions of age and youth whose consciousness operates independently of the sense of fear you manifest. If not fear, the sense of conflict.

A question of staying calm, sitting in the room, the war will end, nobody ultimately wants it, a small area of consciousness living in fear of the shattering of its own Imagery — may prefer that & pain & death to realization — that the war does not actually exist, except in your mind and the mind of your corresponding Powers on the “Other Side.”

Both sides are an illusion — you must by now have read basic Buddhist or Bob Dylan heard, texts & advices how to escape from the trap.

Unfortunately both you and Johnson — seem to me — surrounded by men who have not actually controlled their own Passions — simply, angryness, tendencies towards self-righteous exclusion of the other forms of consciousness. The waves of emotional hysteria — both sides — not any material struggle for space in the universe — are the problem. In Other words the cold war all along has been an Emotional problem of those panicked by power and leadership — they have not been calm & tranquil — They — and you — have separated yourself out, away, from the Communists and other life forms, and have not made sufficient effort to provide conditions for these life forms to “co.” — Yes — “exist.” Coexistance — unless you anticipate a Wagnerian battle for control of the Universe — Dualities and ultimate conflict — do you dream of such a thing necessary — many do. Many posit their whole consciousness on early fear that it’s killed or be devoured — Anyway — Coexistance is the only mode of consciousness which will allow space for both you and the Chinese to exist on the planet. Unless that space is provided and made way for, paid for with cooperation and COMMUNICATION on basic psychic levels — reassurance, etc., such as I am giving you now — has to be given the Chinese — Unless as I say that is given — a straight two-handed calm show of amicability — free joy even — Naturally the Chinese are going to feel persecuted and paranoid. And if they feel that — in response to what is basically the Ill-Will of Americans toward their supposed Threat — then they will act unstable and hostile and we — beginning with what was a fixed white Image, and an artificial Moral image — superiority — will also act hostile.

So we have two life forms — both brothers in their desire for life, both trapped in the dream that it is somehow “Real,” both in separate universes of mental suspicion.

Naturally you’ll have a conflict that way.

If you can find the imagination to break thru that — even if it involves the bankruptcy of your whole phenomenal Purpose, your whole concluded idea system, your SELF and its apparent sensory impressions — yea yea yea — we & you too share in the madness, you are not more Sane than my appeal to you after all, dear — I mean with your vast Armada you’re going to think I’m unbalanced or don’t understand the pith experience of the TRAP? Well, we’re all desperate, myself the most, so certainly you’ll suffer no more in change than me, or Mao Tse-tung —

But the change must begin inside you, not Outside.

I have specific suggestions how to manifest this change — but it would mean a healthy change for America, and China, and be happy and not frightened to see you and talk to you or anyone else you think hath focal Hand in the balances of phantasy & thought.

No war is necessary, it never was outside of our fear contaminating the Chinese and their fear contaminating us — it’s all hysteria — only solution is literally to cut thru the hysteria to a ground — our own natural lucidity and wrinkled eyes and existence is, without the remor and tightening of body and fantasy agitation of mind — into uncontrolled isolation-fear and wrath army consequent.

That’s where “it all is,” no place else, neither in a preordained dialectic or some logical imperative of “History.”

Poets now say History is over; what they mean is that the reality approaching and the possible Doom or liberation from encroaching serpent-fear is a purely subjective matter. It’s already time for you, & Leaders, to take on that subjective responsibility and not set it outside yourself. I’m taking it on by writing you this letter and offering you my Self to come and if need be calm your fear that anyone need be “conquered” any more.

Please reply if you have read and understood this with your own eyes. Thank you,

Allen Ginsberg

When applied in general and not simply to the Vietnam War or the US’s relationship with China, this is as close to a statement of my own political philosophy as I’ve ever seen written anywhere.

February
23: T. C. Boyle
25: Walter Mosley

March
1: Michael Cunningham
8: Tina Fey
9: Joyce Carol Oates
14: Julie Orringer
23: E. L. Doctorow
28: Jennifer Egan

Via Slog

If you missed it, here’s the President’s speech at the Tuscon memorial service. For me, this is one of his greatest. It rates up there with the race speech during the campaign or the 2004 Democratic Convention. It may be the best one at all. I haven’t been getting Obama fatigue (probably because I was a late convert and never had inflated expectations) but if you have been disappointed by the President you may want to watch this video. You’ll be reminded why you voted for him. In addition to a first rate mind and a good agenda which he has delivered on constantly, this man has the ability to find and nurture the best in all of us. The persona he projects lets you see the best possible America. This speech proves that he’s still got that ability — it’s a beautiful tribute to Gabby Giffords and the six people who died, but Obama transcends that message and puts the tragedy into a broader context that speaks to all of us.