Hi again and welcome to The Northstar Journal Theatre of the Absurd. Despite my pledge to swear off stupid news until at least after the Easter/Passover holidays, I had a relapse or, as several of my not-too-quaint “associates” put it, a brain fart.
After watching the Wall Street Journal slide into the “Defeat Obama At All Costs Camp” that Rush Limbaugh started earlier this month, I’m convinced that sometimes political factions act a lot like outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Outfits like the Hells Angels comprise about thirteen percent of those clubs who share a common love of two-wheeled motorized transportation. Though small in numbers, they’re a boisterous and vocal lot who also tend to generate press that gives every other Harley Davidson, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Triumph or BMW, et al aficionado a bad name.
I can relate. I’ve taken a 350 cc Honda round trip three times from Los Angeles to Sacramento, including one memorable trip over the Grapevine Pass in December on the same bike that almost made me a double amputee below the knees several months before.
If there had been a club for idiots like me, I might possibly have joined. Had I, I imagine that to this day, I’d be making annual runs to such well-publicized tourist destinations as Placerville, Grants Pass or Puyallup to drink wine coolers and pine for the days when motorcycles kick started and had suicide switches.
I wonder, though, if I’d have joined an outlaw Honda gang dedicated to Americanizing the import motorcycle industry and fiercely opposed to the notion that without Yankee engineering and parts, no other country could build a better bike. And probably at half the cost. I wonder if I’d have remembered transistor radios and pocket calculators.
Well, possibly but not probably on the joining part. Plain fact is, I’m not much for membership cards. In the sixth grade, I got involved in the Cub Scouts for the same reason I volunteered to be a school crossing guard. Yep, to impress chicks.
A couple of real rainy weeks in front of Hollywood Park Elementary shepherding kids so bundled up that gender was difficult at best to determine dampened my ardor some. And a snowy dead-of-winter weekend in the High Sierras wrapped up in a soggy sleeping bag on a pine bough mattress in this Boy Scout instruction manual built igloo with an adult and six other guys as wet and cold as I was, on top of a granite mountain, with nary a skirt in sight sort’ve put a permanent kibosh on the whole Fraternal Order of Anything trip. It also explains why I don’t go camping in the winter. You couldn’t pay me enough. Trust me. Not for all the snow bunnies in… Nevermind.
I had the same kind of experiences with several religious denominations I’ve tried. The pastor of one of them was my best friend for quite awhile. We got together at my place on Sunday afternoons for some pretty good theological discussions.
He got to take his collar off, drink beer on Sunday in an 8-1/2’ x 10’ travel trailer parked by a beautiful lake, and have the forbidden pleasure of associating with someone his congregation would have considered a heathen at best and a heretic, most likely. He also got to spend time with a friend who respected his priorities and didn’t take it personally that the congregation was not as hospitable.
Larry was softspoken but tough and in his life had been a mountain climber, an anti-war/human rights activist and a Christian minister in South America. He also authored three books which critically examined the viability of the faith he served to serve the larger humanity in return.
Sophisticated, articulate and incredibly perceptive, he was an essentially humble man devoted passionately to his wife and family, to his small community and to the members of a simple church in a rural community in the Pacific Northwest. He needed someone to talk to and I’m glad I was there for him. And even though I was never invited to his home, he was always welcome in mine and I’m proud that we were friends.
I suspect that I have been a profound disappointment to a lot of good and well-intentioned people who tried to dissuade me from my dissolute ways and set me on the path of righteousness.
Funny, though. For all of that, I do not feel eagle/eagle scout, elk, kiwani (somebody knows what a kiwani is, right?), lion, moose or son of anything I haven’t already been called -- impaired.
I’m a member of a lot of stuff, including a species I mostly share with you yahoos.
I’m one ten trillionth of the population of planet earth. I’m what, one five-billionth of the human part of that. I’m an American, so there’s 330-million or so. Take it on down to the region, state, city and neighborhood I live in and into the house I share with 17 other people.
So no, I don’t think I’d have joined an outlaw Honda motorcycle gang to lobby against free trade. I’d have been more likely to push for a better bike and hope that Harley and Honda got together behind it.
Until next time, then, folks, and thanks for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless.
Rusty
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