I DEPLANE INTO A COMMUTER terminal at DIA at 9 PM on a Saturday and there is pandemonium. The place is jammed. Really, the airport is jammed. I know semesters are ending and holidays are approaching but that’s not entirely it. More like what happens at the end of a war.

Norman Rockwell and The Saturday Evening Post capture this moment from another era in “The Homecoming.” The weary, bedraggled, young man standing there as his family explodes with joy.

In their desert camo carrying huge packs effortlessly man and woman or disguised as civilians with very short haircuts they are everywhere. Most are searching for their next flight. Some are meeting family under the bigtop that is Denver’s main terminal building. I see the family members as I rise out of the underground on escalator. Waving signs. WELCOME HOME FRED. Looking just like the people in the image above. I stop for a moment and watch them when the soldier in question makes his appearance. THERE HE IS someone shouts and he turns seeing their signs huddled so close together they look as though they are a single being … an Aspen grove.

For just a moment he stands there. No smile on his face. A few tears start running down his face as he realizes one part of his life is over and another is beginning. Then out of this collective leaps a young woman. Somehow she flies over the stainless steel barrier and is in his arms for an embrace that seems to have no end.

Those young people still wandering around out in the commuter terminal waiting for their flights to little towns in Nebraska, Wyoming or Colorado will collide with their own family mass of waving arms, cheering, hugging, crying. These children who fight all wars — OUR children — are at last freed from fear of bombs and bullets; of redeployment (hopefully). They have come home. Returned to us from a fight that most Americans barely knew was going on except for the headlines on CNN or Fox News. But for the families receiving their children from this fight, the joy is no less than the moms and dads, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, sweethearts of another time.

Inside, Panera’s Bread Company is nearly devoid of customers. My staring at the menu and series of probing questions draws the attention of the General Manager who knows exactly what she has on the menu that is gluten free. Tomato soup. Bean soup. But the bean soup isn’t on today. I can’t help but think of a certain scene from a Jack Nicholson movie, Five Easy Pieces, as I suggest one of the breakfast sandwiches without the bread. “We can do that” she almost shouts cheerfully. So I am sitting at my table staring at the colorful image captured above when my repast is delivered to me: A seriously flattened and very dry fried egg, a thin slice of cheese, two bits of bacon. No prizes for presentation will be won here but it is sustenance.

If I think about it (which I don’t) my world has closed in more than a little. My life now is devoid of pretzels, beer, toast, most breakfast cereals, virtually every pastry known to man, Campbells tomato soup. It’s not the most complicated diet imaginable. But society just isn’t ready for it. We live in a world of Gluten Gluttons. I imagine some great evil to associate with this. None occurs except the reason I went on this diet in the first place.

The blue line marks the way of the new wall

On the west side of “The Wall” is a teeming community that has been there as long as I can remember. Google Earth shows streets on the east side of the wall but few structures. There are more now, plus two car washes. The new is a work in progress. And it’s actually not a bad development with mixed use and relatively dense concentration.

I don’t know how people on either side of The Wall feel about each other. The newbies are tolerated I expect by the manufactured homes park folk on the west side. The newbies to the east are, I expect, worried about their property values. Neither can do anything about the other. Maybe both are happy The Wall is there. But if it weren’t; what then?

NEARLY ALL of the north side of this block of downtown Bozeman is affected.

A WARM SATURDAY AFTERNOON and a stroll through a busy downtown Bozeman. One block, just west of Rouse Ave, nearly isn’t there except for some ruins. Downtown Bozeman is back in business but up and down the street are stores with boarded up fronts and signs saying “open for business.” Some of these buildings are more than a block away from the scene above. Click on the photo to see it in full size,

What is worrying is the fate of the building on the far right. See the detail below. It seems intact but clearly there is fire damage inside. See detail below:

BUILDING JUST TO RIGHT of the VFW

I have always known that some day the Republican Party as we know it would bring about its own destruction. Implode in a large cloud of dust like the demolition of the giant Montgomery Wards building in Saint Paul. It was only a matter of the right conditions. That awareness dates to 1995 when a moderate Republican friend of mine in Dubuque, Iowa, said to me: “I want my Party back.” What she meant, of course, is that she had been marginalized by extreme, doctrinaire, right wing religious fanatics who had taken full control of the Dubuque County Republican Party apparatus. They became a party of only a few very narrow issues. Of course, fiscal responsibility wasn’t one of them. This phenomenon occurred in Iowa before most other places in the United States. I was starkly aware of it because I was battling the same extremism as a candidate for the local school board. In those days the fanatics imagined they could take control of government by first electing their people to school boards — in Iowa separate elections to which very few people paid attention. Once elected to the school board their people could matriculate upward to higher office — city council, state legislature, Congress and, well, who knows.

Sarah Palin - the future of the Republican Party?

IT WAS A CHILLING notion but one we in Iowa quickly discovered was a largely overblown concern. Yes they could quietly get some of their folks elected by mobilizing church members through “stealth” campaigns. We would wake up one morning and find ourselves represented by people who didn’t believe in public education. People who were home schooling their kids. In Dubuque, where two of seven school board members were of this ilk, they would take the reins of power over a $60 million a year enterprise. In other Iowa cities, Davenport, and I can’t remember where else, the products of this sinister strategy were popping up.

But their plan didn’t work for very long simply because the people they got elected couldn’t be cool. They started ranting and raving on all manner of issues, alienating virtually everybody. Eventually the electorate got sick of them and kicked them out. This gave me some confidence that right wing crazies couldn’t take over our government. Turned out I was right and wrong and maybe now right again. They did manage to capture the highest office in the United States and from there proceeded down a path so destructive that hundreds of thousands of people were maimed or killed, hundreds of thousands more pushed out of jobs, public debt in the stratosphere and, in a final flourish, managing to bring the American economy to its knees. It took all of that and a very smart guy who may be our next FDR to finally get the American people’s attention.

We might ask now, wither the Republican Party? I suggest they go to my disillusioned friend in Dubuque and ask her what it will take to get her back. I think she might say that all of the single-issue crazies have to go. That the Republican Party has to reach out and find those soccer moms they’ve pushed aside for failing the wacko litmus test and convince them they have a future as a Republican.

So I submit that it is not Sarah Palin who has a future with the Republicans because if she does, there probably won’t be a Republican Party pretty soon. John McCain, at his core is a pragmatic moderate, is the future of the Republicans. But I’m not optimistic anyone will see that. To be truthful, I don’t care a whole lot because I believe that after eight years of hell the right people are finally in charge.

Winning a caucus is a way of proving you know how to win a caucus. Your campaign faithful can be prepared and trained to wait patiently in line for harried precinct volunteers to register and distribute little slips of paper. They will fight the traffic and the parking.  

THE GENERAL ELECTION coming up in the fall looks a whole lot more like, well, an election. Regular people come out because they know they probably won’t have to stand in line in an overcrowded hallway. In other words, one needs a broader appeal.

Where are those free washing machines?

I also wonder whether the full electorate can get behind the emotional mumbo jumbo of Barackism. Take a look at this article in an Australian paper.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the fact that a member of the Lake Elmo city council is NOT NICE is front page news today in the Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Pi Press reports that this council member has a lot to say and goes to the trouble of analyzing three city council meetings. The results of their work may be seen in the chart below.

The article jumps inside and goes on for quite a ways. This guy has created a real sensation in Lake Elmo. But it’s not as though he just joined the council. He’s on his third term. So he must be doing something that his constituents like. No doubt he’s having a tough time getting things done with the many, many four to one votes. Democracy is built upon compromise. One might say it is necessary for the minority to compromise with the majority. Consider that this situation may call for the opposite. In any event, the whole thing is very funny. In New York, Chicago, Boston or, say, Philadelphia, we might not be able to hear what this guy has to say above the din.

The look on this lady’s face reveals it all. Minnesota Nice. Not!

At last, an insightful American cartoonist GETS the real reason for Karl Rove’s resignation from the Bush Administration effective the end of this month. Click here or on image to see scalable version. To see the This Modern World archive, click here.

In Minnesota, here in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, we are some distance from the agricultural economy. We know from lawns and gardens. I have very little of the former. A lot more of the latter. And we have a lot of trees on our property. The sun rises and gives us a cloudless day every day. The temperature rises to the 90s and then cools off in the evening. It is beginning to feel like Havre, Montana.

What doesn’t get watered, dies. 

So right now I am watering my hedge in the front. I had neglected one of the front gardens while my attention was focused elsewhere and the plants started turning brown. There is a bush in my back yard that somehow must have been out of the typical arc of watering because its leaves are wilted. It may well be gone though I soaked it last night and this morning. All of the volunteers growing in the dog run on the side aren’t growing anymore. They are brown and crisp.

Welcome to Desert Minnesota.

We’ve sort of given up on the boulevard grass. We try and keep some of it going in selected areas but there is just too much square footage to keep going with a measly little 5/8 inch garden hose. When I finish bucking up the front yard vegetation I have to haul the big hose around so I can water the Fry Street gardens including a new one we’re working on right now. It’s constant. But I know that all of this soaking style watering I’m doing is reaching tree routes. And our trees, a few of which I’m guessing were planted by soldiers from Fort Snelling when the military road went through here, are looking reasonably good. No shortage of sun.