The Domino Theory, Revised

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, when I was a kid and all the Soviet missiles were aimed at me and my kin in North Dakota, the domino theory held that if one nation fell to communism, so too would all of its neighbors. The process was liable to end with Minnesota toppling, and then bringing down North Dakota.

I snark, but the domino theory was used to justify all kins of hideous mischief, from American involvement in the Vietnam War to our endless meddling in Latin America.

It strikes me as a huge irony of history that the most notable instance of a regional domino effect is the wave of democratization that swept through eastern Europe in 1989/90. And now the desire for democracy seems to be doing the same in North Africa and the Middle East.

I don’t buy into any teleological approach to history. Democracy is still far from a foregone conclusion in Tunisia or Egypt, never mind Bahrain or Yemen. Still, it’s fascinating to see that the domino dynamic is so much stronger for nascent democracies than it ever was for authoritarian communist states.

Maybe the theory would have been more accurate if we’d added some Legos to it?

(Image by Flickr user John-Morgan, used under a Creative Commons license. I do love those Legos!)

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Memo to New York: Sometimes A Snow Day Really Is a Snow Day

I kvetch a lot about snow days on this blog, because the North Dakotan girl in me is annoyed and appalled at how my little town in southeast Ohio shuts down as soon as a dozen snowflakes stick to the ground.

But this North Dakotan girl also knows the difference between a snow flurry and a blizzard. When the weather forecasters tell you that a foot and a half of snow is about to whomp your town, you locate your flashlights, make sure you’ve got food in the house, and then you hunker down.

“Hunkering down” ≠ getting in your car and driving.

And so I am amazed and appalled at how New Yorkers compounded their quandary by putting their cars on the streets where snowbanks could form all around them and block the plows. People! When Minneapolis got an equal dump of snow earlier this month, did you see the Minnesotans turning their city streets into impromptu parking lots?

I feel for the folks who are camping out at the airports and train stations. Their predicament was a stroke of rotten luck. But the motorists? Except for those few who were responding to an emergency, they were captured by hubris and willful stupidity, which they then inflicted on the whole city. It makes me think of this very cool puzzle/one-person game my kids got for Christmas, where you try to unsnarl gridlocked traffic …

… except that in real life, there’s negative fun and everyone loses.

Oh, and staying home in a blizzard isn’t a sign of the “wussification of America,” no matter what Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s thinks. Real men are smart enough to hunker down during the storm (again: not in their cars!!). They’ll have plenty of chances to prove their mettle when the digging out begins.

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Tuesday Recipe: Howard’s Cream Candy

Howard was a singular figure: a gay man in a tiny mid-North Dakotan town in the middle decades of the previous century. Courtenay had just under 300 in-town residents according to the 1940 census (trend: declining). It had lady elders running the Presbyterian church (first and foremost, my grandma), a general store, and plenty of orderly, hard-working, meat-eating farmers. Courtenay had its own grain elevator. It had various misfits and outsiders, most of whom my grandma befriended; some she even took into her home as boarders. What Courtenay didn’t have: a mate for Howard.

Howard, you see, was the misfittiest of the misfits. He was the only gay man in Courtenay and – we believe – for miles around. He did excellent work at the store. In his spare time, he perfected various housewifely arts: knitting, crochet, sewing, candy-making. Still no mate was forthcoming. It goes without saying that my grandma befriended him warmly. (Today she’d make a fine fag hag.) I was the greedy beneficiary of this, because he was still stitching up snazzy Barbie clothes circa 1970.

Howard didn’t get such a sweet deal. He lived an unpartnered life, alone (except for a few friends like my grandma) and I suspect celibate, until late in his days, when he went into retirement and moved to the next largest town, Jamestown. There, he met another like-minded and like-oriented gentlemen. Together they enjoyed their golden years.

Whenever I think of the joy Howard found in his final years, I don’t know whether to smile or weep.

His cream candy just might make you do both. It’s simple to make, though it takes some time and patience while you’re cooking it.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups evaporated milk
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 stick butter
• pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla – be generous

Using a very heavy pot, melt the butter, sugar, and 1 cup of the evaporated milk until it reaches a boil. I needed to go pretty close to high heat to get the process started. Once you’re boiling, set a timer for 10 minutes and turn down the heat. You want to keep the candy at a boil for 10 minutes. If your heat source is too strong, you’ll see chunks of caramel begin to form at the bottom of the pot. That’s a signal to dial back the heat. (I saw enough of those chunks that I started frantically bailing them while stirring vigorously with my other hand.)

If you don’t already have a candy thermometer, an hour ago would be a good time to have bought one. If your candy is at a boil and you’re lacking a thermometer, corral a lover, roommate, or random wino on the street to buy you one.

When your ten minutes are up, add the second cup of evaporated milk, then go back to your stirring. You are aiming to hit a sweet space just above “soft ball” stage but still below “hard ball.” This will take a while – for me, perhaps 20 minutes? Once you think you’ve got the right temperature, remove the pot from heat. Let it cool for three minutes or so – not much longer or the candy will have reverted to solid. Beat it with a mixer on high, adding the vanilla and salt. Then smear into a pre-buttered dish. I used an 8 1/2 by 11 inch pyrex pan, but I don’t think this is critical. At this point, Howard’s candy will behave a bit like fudge. Let cool in the pan at room temp, cut, and serve! (If the pieces are super-sticky, you probably didn’t cook it long or hard enough. Expose them to air overnight.)

Serve to anyone who appreciate a good sugar confection with no nutritional value – unless you consider a good backstory to be healthy for the soul. Howard left this earth over a quarter century ago. If there’s an afterlife worth living, it surely includes his candy.

(I thought about trying to illustrate this post, but frankly, the candy is beige, and I’ve got nothing purty to decorate them.)

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As We Age: A Short Argument Against Gun Possession

My father has always kept guns. Like most men in North Dakota, he was a hunter. Indeed, during my 1960s and 1970s childhood there, you could hardly be a man if you didn’t own a gun. He shot deer, mostly to my mother’s dismay, as she recalls trying to deal with preparing the meat through the miasma of morning sickness. He shot duck and pheasant. We ate some of those. I remember having to pick out the beebees. My brother learned to hunt at his side. One of his early Halloween costumes was “hunter.” He was all cute pudginess and colorful shotgun shells. Even with my early pacifist stirring, I loved those colors!

Once our family moved out to California in 1979, hunting was relegated to a yearly trip back to North Dakota, usually timed so that the guys could partake of the annual community supper in Dad’s hometown. The guns remained. As time passed and we acclimated to a world where no one left their back door unlocked, Dad’s guns tended to gather dust even as his worries escalated. In this new, not-always-golden state, you had to fear crime – or so the media told us, relentlessly.

By the mid-1990s, my father kept a handgun in his nightstand. It was loaded. There were also murmurings about a loaded pistol under the driver’s seat of Dad’s car. When my first baby was born in 1999, these guns sounded like worse than a bad idea; they sounded potentially lethal.

‘Round about that time, my dad blew a hole in the carpet of his home office. He had taken a gun out of the locked cabinet (to clean it? just to hold it?) and pressed the trigger, certain it was empty. It wasn’t. Luckily for him, the carpet didn’t bleed.

This month, my brother will travel back to North Dakota with my dad, quite possibly for the last time. Their original plan was to hunt duck and pheasant. Then my dad started to skid away from reality; he started talking about shooting antelope (which don’t exist in central North Dakota). My brother decided he’d swap blanks for live ammo. Now, even that seems dicey, and he’s planning to plead a sore foot and avoid hunting altogether. Honestly, they’ll have far more fun just visiting people and eating buffalo meat with people my dad has known for decades.

As for the guns in his house, my brother spirited them away earlier this week, as I wrote yesterday. What I didn’t know until I spoke with my sis today: My father immediately noticed they were missing, before my brother had a chance to trot out the cover story about him “cleaning” the guns.

My dad called the police. He called the fucking police! They came to his house and took a report about breaking and entering and burgling.

This snafu will be straightened out. The police will learn that my dad is cognitively impaired before they pick up the “perp” (my dear brother, who may well have saved a life by removing those guns). They’ll have it in their records that my dad is non compos mentis.

What can’t be fixed: the fear. All these years, my father has stewed in it. Guns were his talisman.

It’s not true that the only thing we need fear is fear itself. We need to fear the combo of guns and fear. After a lifetime of relying on guns to keep the bad guys at bay, my father has no shield in the very moment when he feels most vulnerable. And yet, if he continues to have access to guns, odds are astronomical that someone will die.

I know plenty of people who are responsible gun owners. My dad was once one, too. But I think anyone who owns a gun would be wise to ask: What will happen as I age? Can I be sure I wouldn’t accidentally use the gun against someone I love?

Because that’s exactly the danger with my dad. He’s often confused enough that he doesn’t recognize his own wife. He could shoot her, or his beloved dog, or even his newly beloved cat. I know damn well he’s not the only aging gun-owner with too much exposure to Faux News and too little ability to cognitively filter real threats from those imagined.

Might we be wiser to find other ways while we’re still young to master our fears, however well founded they may be?

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Sue Lowden? Meet My Grandpa, the Chicken Doctor

So Sue Lowden – the Republican challenger to Harry Reid – is waxing nostalgic for the days when we could barter for health care, instead of having to mess with all that expensive, bureaucratic health insurance. Here’s the money quote (or the bartered-chicken quote?) at Big Think:

“You know, before we all started having health care,” she recently said in an interview, “in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

Badtux suggests paying Lowden in chickens, should she become the next senator from Nevada. What an excellent idea! She can run her budget like my paternal grandfather did.

My grandpa was one of those country doctors who did accept payment in kind. Born in 1879, he earned his M.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1907, one of a graduating class of 18 (including one woman). He wound up practicing in North Dakota – whether for humanitarian reasons or due to a love affair gone bad, we’ll likely never know – in a poor part of the state populated mostly by German-Russians. These folks were originally from southwest Germany, where inheritance patterns split landholdings into ever smaller, less sustainable parcels. They migrated to the Crimea in search of an easier life, and thence to North Dakota. I know, I know – they must have had a very flexible notion of the “easy life.”

Once tucked into their large but chilly homesteads, the German-Russians stayed. Where else would they go? They were still poor, for the most part. And they continued to catch smallpox, measles, cancer, and the occasional pregnancy.

My grandpa was the doctor for much of south-central North Dakota. There were a few midwives in the area, too, but over time he attended more of the births.

And yes, sometimes his patients paid him in chickens. My mom describes him thus:

He had a gruff exterior and a very soft heart. I know that the people in Streeter idolized him (some may have feared him a little), and nearly everyone could tell of a time that he came to their farm in the middle of the night and dstayed until the patient was out of danger and usually refused to take any payment, especially if they were poor.

There were days when a chicken was more than a family could spare.

At the end of his life, the town’s very modest public park was devoted to his memory. I like knowing it’s there, even if the play equipment is decrepit. I never knew him; he died in 1961, two years before I was born. It’s a lovely testimonial to his putting patients above profits, which really does seem quaint and almost saintly in the new millennium.

But here’s the trick. My grandpa could afford to work for chickens – or eggs – or even a big old goose egg only because he also had patients who paid him! What’s more, he had much more substantial savings than his neighbors, having invested in Standard Oil around 1900. He and my grandma lived modestly, despite her pretensions to being the town’s aristocracy. (Well, the town was small enough that she sort of was the queen bee.)

My grandma fought with my grandpa over his generosity. He saw the grinding need up close. She saw it at a remove, and only through the lens of a trying to maintain a reasonably bourgeois household on the prairie. They fought bitterly anyway, and the chickens (and all the other bartered goods) became just one more bone of contention.

My grandpa did quite a lot of good, I believe. But it was no way to run a practice, and even less so today, when new doctors may start out burdened with six-figure debts. It also was no way to nurture a marriage. The whole thing was unsustainable, even then. Add in an MRI and a CT and an angiogram … and my grandpa could never have worked for free.

I suspect, though, that he would have been fascinated by the new technologies. He was smart and curious – qualities solely need in the practice of medicine as well as in the debates over its reform.

Frankly, though? As much as I like chickens, I don’t see much of a place for them in Washington. We’re gonna need tougher critters than chickens to fix our broken health system. Unless, perhaps, they’re as fierce as this guy looks – yet not bird-brained.

“Black Rock chicken” from flickr user Todd434, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Locking Down

I grew up in a small town in central North Dakota, population 488 in the 1970 census. No one locked our doors. Why would we? The only time anything got stolen was when a punk teenager my dad had disciplined in class got revenge by taking our 1969 Pontiac for a joyride. He drove nearly as far as the Montana border before running out of gas.

That car was easy pickins: It was unlocked. With the keys in the ignition. And left running.

After I moved to California as a teenager, I figured I’d never again live in a town where people were so casual about their locks. But when I moved to my current house Athens, I learned that pretty much everyone on my street left their back door open during the day, and often their front door too. I slid back into the unlocked habit as if it were an old pair of slippers. I thought I had the best of all worlds: a 1950s small-town atmosphere combined with hippie style and progressive politics. (Our county voted 2/3 for Obama, and in town I’m sure it was reminiscent of East German election results.)

But two nights ago, thieves struck. I’m fine, my family is fine. But a house just a couple of blocks away was broken into by cover of night. They woke up to find all their electronics missing, along with a collection of musical instruments. They have a boy who’s a classmate of my older son’s. Everyone was home, asleep. (It’s that last point that gives me the chills.)

Of course I feel for them. But beyond their personal losses, I think everyone in the neighborhood feels as though we’ve all been robbed of something rare and precious. Now everyone is reminding each other to lock their doors when they go out. Mine are locked right now.

We’ve been outrageously privileged to not worry about this. Our security was probably a cotton-candy illusion all along. I’ll miss it anyway.

I think I might just sleep with my computer under my pillow tonight.

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Charting Class Privilege

Daisy at Daisy’s Dead Air has put up a class privilege meme. It was originally intended to be a classroom exercise (full instructions are here), but Daisy’s discomfort in completing the exercise even anonymously online has convinced me: It’s as likely to shame the poor kids as the rich kids. That’s surely not its intent, but when you’re teaching, you’d better think of the consequences.

Good intentions alone are never enough. I once led a classroom discussion on gender and work in which a bunch of college gals vented about the piggish middle-age men who felt entitled to hit on them when they worked retail or restaurants. I thought we’d had a productive discussion. But at the end, after everyone else had left, a woman who’d been very quiet said: “Look. I don’t even know where to begin with these people. I know what it’s like to earn my money by literally shoveling shit.” It was a pedagogical FAIL for me. For her, it was an awkward and probably painful experience.

So, I’m not sure what I can glean from doing this meme, either, except that I think it’s important to talk about class, and maybe my experience shows how class privilege can come in different flavors. Here’s what I came up with. The italics indicate my editorializing – a bent that in itself might indicate a certain degree of privileged. (The most dispossessed people are unlikely to assume that anyone else cares what they have to say.) The bold statements are the ones that hold true for me:

• If your father went to college before you started
• If your father finished college before you started
• If your mother went to college before you started
• If your mother finished college before you started (college was taken for granted for all three of us kids)
• If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor (my paternal grandfather was a country doctor; I had older cousins who were lawyers, doctors, and chemists, as well as farmers and teachers)
• If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers (both my folks were teachers – though at annual salaries of less than $12,000 in the mid-1970s)
• If you had a computer at home when you were growing up (no, but that would’ve required devoting a room to a mainframe! I’m just that old)
• If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up (no, but my eight-year-younger sister did during high school)
• If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up
• If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up (pretty sure we did; most likely the majority were mine)
• If you were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up (every night – and practically every night my dad fell asleep – but hey, that was an incentive for me to learn to read so we could finally finish the stories)
• If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen
• If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen (French horn for a year, plus six weeks of piano – lessons required a sixty-mile round trip to the next largest town, so mostly my mom taught me piano, then I taught myself)
• If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively (well, at least until Fargo came out)
• If you had a credit card with your name on it before college
• If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate (just under – in mid-1980s dollars)
• If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate
• If you went to a private high school (there were none where I lived)
• If you went to summer camp (music camp and Bible camp!)
• If you had a private tutor (but if I’d needed it, my parents would’ve made it happen)
• (US students only) If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen (I went once, with a touring band, when I was 16, and already thought that was massively privileged)
• (International question) If you have been to the US more than once as a child or teen
• If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes (we crashed pretty shamelessly with relatives, but where none were available, we stayed in motels because my dad suffered from Crohn’s disease and needed a nearby bathroom)
• If all of your clothing has been new (heck no! that would be plain stupid)
• If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (I got a 1974 Maverick from them in 1985, and called myself lucky)
• If there was original art in your house as a child or teen (by my grandma, who sometimes let me experiment with her paints)
• If you had a phone in your room
• If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen (nearly everyone did, in Medina, North Dakota, even if was just a trailer – but we had the biggest house in town, a wonderful old white elephant)
• If you had your own room as a child or teen (always, until I went to college)
• If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (they barely existed in 1980, and I didn’t even know that the SAT was coming up until friends clued me in; I missed the PSAT altogether and I’m still pissed I didn’t get a crack at National Merit Scholar!)
• If you had your own cell phone in High School (not yet invented – is this also an old-fart meme??)
• If you had your own TV as a child or teen
• If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College (also not on the radar circa 1980, and WTF is up with capitalizing high school and college?)
• If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
• If you ever went on a cruise with your family
• If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen (there aren’t really any in North Dakota, unless you count various pioneer historical exhibits, and on our big trip to California the highlights were Disneyland and Johnny Carson)
• If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (but my folks also had to shovel coal in my early years)

[By the way, if your background is so poor that none of the above applies, Daisy has another checklist that captures serious hardship.]

Compared to Daisy and many others, I’ve enjoyed heaps of class privilege. But looking at the pattern that emerges from my answers, I notice it’s a little complicated. I’ve experienced tremendous educational privilege. I was born the child of two teachers, both of whose mothers were also schoolteachers. My mom owned a book entitled something like Games to Make Your Child Smarter. (You be the judge whether it worked!) My dad taught music, so he was happy to spring for lessons as long as I practiced.

On the other hand, my parents’ combined household income was less than $20,000 in the early 1970s. That’s just how teachers were paid in North Dakota. My dad had some family money as a cushion, but times were tight when his health forced him to retire from teaching in 1976, leaving my mom the sole wage-earner. My grandpa was a doctor, all right, but he served the sort of clientele where payment was often in some form of barter. He was still able to invest some money in Standard Oil around 1900, and that became the aforementioned cushion for our family.

When it came time for college, I was clueless about the process, and so was my family. But when my folks moved us out to California, they took care to find a decent (though not top-flight) school district. I was a high school (not High School) junior. My classmates (not my parents or counselor) nudged me to take the SAT on time, and to apply to one fancy-pants school – which admitted me and then coughed up generous financial aid when divorce decimated my mom’s finances and put my dad out of the picture for a while.

If there’s a more general point to be drawn from my answers, it’s that educational privilege is largely fungible for economic privilege. It won’t trump it, but it sure acts as a buffer. I may have had an English/social studies teacher in junior high who spelled subpoena as “supena,” but my mom made up for it at home, as did heaps of books. And educational privilege tends to beget more of the same; after surviving some piss-poor teachers in North Dakota as well as benefiting from a few great ones, I went to some of the best schools in the country for both undergrad and grad school. (They weren’t just prestigious; I really did get a great education.) I didn’t know the right etiquette and I was always dressed wrong, but I only came in contact with those “inadequacies” because I’d already been catapulted into the milieu of the very rich.

Don’t anyone tell me I earned these privileges (although I did have to bestir myself to finish my Ph.D.). If I’m smart, it’s due to genetic serendipity and my mom’s silly book. If I’d been born into a family that didn’t care about education, I would’ve done well to go to college at all. I was a lazy student until college and am still a horrible procrastinator. That’s the thing about privilege: It compensates for our failings and lets us do well despite our flaws. If you don’t have any of it, the world is a pretty unforgiving place.

And yes, my boys are growing up in a house full of books. But the count is probably closer to 5000 than to 500. So the pattern repeats itself, every generation accumulating a little more cultural capital.

If your father went to college before you started

If your father finished college before you started

If your mother went to college before you started

If your mother finished college before you started

If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers

If you had a computer at home when you were growing up

If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up

If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up

If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up

If were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up

If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen

If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen

If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively

If you had a credit card with your name on it before college

If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate

If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate

If you went to a private high school

If you went to summer camp

If you had a private tutor

(US students only) If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen

(International question) If you have been to the US more than once as a child or teen

If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes

If all of your clothing has been new

If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

If there was original art in your house as a child or teen

If you had a phone in your room

If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen

If you had your own room as a child or teen

If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course

If you had your own cell phone in High School

If you had your own TV as a child or teen

If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College

If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline

If you ever went on a cruise with your family

If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen

If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

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Tuesday Recipe: Rhubarb Dessert

Rhubarb dessert is one of my favorites from my mom’s cookbook. Yes, she has authored her very own cookbook, composed 80% of yummy sweet things, mostly from North Dakota. This dessert is about as North Dakotan as it gets, and I mean that in the best way possible: It’s tart-sweet comfort food with meringue on top. Rhubarb grows well in North Dakota, and this is one of my favorite things to do with it. Rather unfairly, my mom doesn’t have a good local source of rhubarb where she now lives in California, while I was just given a heaping armful by my friend who tilled my garden.

Rhubarb Dessert

Mix together (I use cold butter and zap it in a food processor until crumbly):

1/4 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup butter or shortening

and pat the crust mix into an 8 x 11 pan. Bake at 350° for 10 minutes.

Beat together (in the same, unwashed food processor, if you like):

3 egg yolks
3/4 cup cream
1 3/4 cups sugar
3 or 4 tablespoons flour

Fold 4 cups rhubarb into the cream mixture, then pour it onto the crust. Bake one hour, starting at 375° for ten minutes, then at 325°.

Beat three egg whites (which you’ve saved from when you separated out the yolk) until they start to appear glossy. Then gradually beat in five tablespoons sugar. Gingerly spread the meringue onto the dessert (you don’t want to squish out all its lovely little air pockets). Bake for about 10 minutes, taking care not to get the meringue too brown.

Mine looked like this:

It’s sort of beige so I made it into a still-life-with-Tiger-artwork. It won’t look like this for more than a few hours, as we’ll demolish most of it after soccer practice tonight. Leftovers – should we be lucky enough to have any – will need to be refrigerated due to egginess.

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Pragmatism Prevails in North Dakota’s “Personhood” Debate

Unrepentant Old Hippie reports that by a 29-16 vote, the North Dakota Senate has rejected the bill (previously passed by the state House) that would have granted fertilized eggs legal personhood. I’d predicted this, and now I get to gloat about it. Not because I was right (of course I was!) but because this sends a signal to the 15 other states where Personhood USA has put similar bills on the legislative docket.

The vote also confirms that North Dakotans haven’t turned into a mob of frothing extremists since my childhood there, 30 years ago. They remain pragmatists. When the Red River rises, they turn out in force to fortify the banks (and they sing and crack wry jokes while they’re working; you could hear this on an NPR report I heard a week ago). When they encounter meddling by out-of-state agitators that would ultimately embarrass the state and drag it into ruinously expensive court battles, they just say no.

Yay, North Dakota! I’m proud of my former neighbors.

More gratuitous pansies from my garden.

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Seattle: Outpost of North Dakotan Imperialism

Months ago, I groused about how Sarah Palin swiped my accent. Sure, she’s faded back into the Alaskan tundra, but I still can’t let loose a nice “you betcha!” without being mocked. I guess I can thank the Ceiling Cat that I’ve got no talent for winking.

Now, from a faithful reader and longtime friend (who shall remain nameless unless he chooses to out himself in comments) comes evidence that elements of the North Dakotan vernacular survive in … Seattle? Apparently not all Scandivanian immigrants got stuck in Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. Some realized that winters were milder in the Pacific Northwest. (Conclude what you will about the less clever ones who never made it past North Dakota and ultimately spawned … me.)

Here’s the evidence for North Dakotan/Scandinavian cultural imperialism. It’s probably not news to people who actually live in this neighborhood, but I was floored. And no, I don’t know when this clip was made, but both the cars and the driving techniques remind me of my youth. All that’s missing is a dirt section-line road. To this day, I like Braille approaches to parallel parking.

You’ve gotta watch it clear to the end – and suffer the super-cheesy laugh track – before you come to the telltale “uff da.”

Now I’m wondering if they tell Ole and Lena jokes in Seattle, too. My mom knows dozens of them and she’s got perfect pitch on the accent. (My favorite involves Ole, Lena, Betty Crocker, and sex, but you’d really need my mom to tell it. Trust me.)

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Personhood Provocateurs in North Dakota

Photo of North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user JJSchad, used under a Creative Commons license. This somewhat gratuitous picture is included lest you think North Dakota boasts nothing but snow and gophers and pro-life zealots.

North Dakota’s new “personhood” law, which made it halfway through the legislative process on Tuesday, may no longer be the reproductive folly du jour, but it’s still preoccupying me. Why would my home state even consider such a silly law – one that, much like Colorado’s failed Proposition 48 last fall, could criminalize not just abortion but also most forms of birth control, IVF, and even normal miscarriage and menstruation? How the heck did this happen?

My husband said to me, “Curb your patriotism.” But it’s not just loyalty that’s got me wondering. North Dakotans are churchgoing and God-fearing, yes; but they’re also deeply pragmatic. Or at least they used to be when I lived there.

That’s not just childish nostalgia speaking, by the way. Not even the abortion controversy has historically negated North Dakotan’s basic pragmatism. Faye Ginsburg’s wonderful ethnography, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community looked at activists on both (or actually, all!) sides of the issue in Fargo during the 1980s. While she found plenty of drama and conflict, she also found that activists of all stripes shared a basic set of values regarding family and women as nurturers.

Perhaps the growing season in North Dakota is just too short for extremism to thrive.

Leslie Unruh, you say? Nope. She belongs to South Dakota.

So what planet did HB 1576 come from? How did a bunch of part-time legislators dream up the idea of conferring legal personhood on fertilized eggs even prior to implantation? Because that’s what the text of the bill does:

[F]or purposes of interpretation of the constitution and laws of North Dakota, it is the intent of the legislative assembly that an individual, a person, when the context indicates that a reference to an individual is intended, or a human being includes any organism with the genome of homo sapiens.

If this language is eerily reminiscent of the Colorado referendum, that’s because this is not an indigenous product of North Dakota. It’s written and promoted by the same people who brought us the Colorado foolishness.

In other words, the Colorado referendum wasn’t a one-off. It has spawned an apparently new tentacle of the pro-life movement, Personhood USA, whose ultimate aim is to pass “personhood” laws in as many states as possible, ultimately setting up a judicial confrontation with Roe v. Wade. Here’s their call to arms:

The fight for life is raging nationwide right now like never before and we wish to thank you for your conscientious decision to support every preborn child’s right to life. We are Personhood USA and our goal is simple: Together, we will glorify Jesus and then stop the dehumanizing of and destruction of preborn people.

The organizers that got personhood on the ballot in Colorado, would like to help in North Dakota as well. By getting personhood on the ballot, we force the question that the pro-death side does not want to answer, “when does life begin”?

Personhood USA claims grassroots support, and I have no doubt that North Dakota has its fair share of pro-lifers (even if the North Dakota League for Life’s website is pretty rinky-dink and years out of date). Here’s how Personhood USA describes its campaign in North Dakota:

“North Dakotans have gotten used to cold temperatures like -44 degrees, but they haven’t gotten used to child-killing. We applaud and support their efforts to protect every baby by love and by law,” commented Cal Zastrow, who, along with his family, worked on the North Dakota bill on the grassroots level.

Reading this, you might reasonably believe that Cal Zastrow is part of a burgeoning pro-life movement among North Dakotans. That’s the implication, right? But Zastrow would be a mighty unusual name among all those grandchildren of Germans and Norwegians. So I couldn’t resist googling Cal Zastrow. He’s from Michigan – two states over! No, Personhood USA didn’t lie about this; it just used the term “grassroots” to insinuate. Here’s how Michigan Citizens for Life describes him:

Cal Zastrow resides in Kawkawlin [Michigan] with his wife, Trish, where they homeschool their children. They are missionaries to the preborn who speak in churches, schools, and on the streets. Cal trains pro-life activists and conducts seminars to make the killing of preborn children unthinkable and unavailable through peaceful means.

Ordinarily I include links to groups like this just for substantiation, not because I think you need to waste any time going there, but Cal Zastrow has a such a dorky, douchey picture that he’s worth a visit if you’re in a snarky mood. Also, maybe you’ll discover WTF it means to be a missionary to the preborn. I’m still mystified.

So the success of the personhood bill in North Dakota depended crucially on the work of a provocateur from out of state.

I have to admit, though, that the bill’s sponsor, Dan Ruby, is a completely homegrown zealot who claimed “This language is not as aggressive as the direct ban legislation that I’ve proposed in the past.” Nor can I claim that the 51 legislators who voted for the bill (against 41 opponents) were bussed in from out of state.

What are the prospect for this bill actually becoming law? According to Kay Steiger at RH Reality Check, the bill’s introduction caught Planned Parenthood – the only pro-choice group with any presence in North Dakota – by surprise. That surely won’t still be the case when it comes before the state senate in a few weeks. At that point, Tim Stanley, senior director of government and public affairs for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, hopes for a better outcome:

The personhood bill will go on to the state Senate by the end of the week, and Stanley says it is likely not to be voted on until the end of the legislature’s session, in April. Stanley believes that ultimately North Dakotans may not want to draw national attention with a challenge to Roe. If the bill does pass, Planned Parenthood’s affiliate will begin reaching out to the medical and religious community to begin building a coalition of support to fight the measure.

“My experience had been that this legislature is grounded in reality, as opposed to some other legislatures,” Stanley said. “South Dakota is not the most rational legislature when it comes to this kind of stuff. They’re known as being slightly out there and willing to take those high-profile risks to fight this fight. My feeling is that North Dakota is just slightly more reticent to do that. To their credit they’re not a state that looks [for] and seeks undue attention.”

(Source: RH Reality Check)

See, North Dakota doesn’t just have the prettier badlands, it also has a more level-headed legislature than South Dakota. And again – Dan Ruby is no Leslee Unruh! I’m hoping the state senate is rational enough to realize how ruinous it would be to litigate the “personhood bill” all the way to the Supreme Court, as required by the bill’s second paragraph.

But even assuming this bill dies before the tulips are blooming in Bismarck, Personhood USA won’t stop its quest. According the the American Life League, similar “personhood” legislation is pending in 15 other states. Even if there’s good reason to be relatively sanguine about the North Dakota state senate stopping this foolish bill, odds are good that it will pass somehow, somewhere, and ultimately land in the laps of the SCOTUS.

Another ominous aspect of this: the “personhood” movement is trying to shift the discourse. To some extent, they’re already succeeding. Just look at how RH Reality Check and I are both repeatedly referring to the bill and the movement within their frame: “personhood.” Repeat it often enough, and people may start believing that a fertilized egg is indeed a person.

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Dick Armey: North Dakota’s Worst Export

North Dakota grows a lot of durum wheat. You’ve surely eaten it in your noodles. North Dakota is first in the nation in exporting sunflower products. It also ships out sugar beets and other wholesome foodstuffs.

Years ago, however, we sent a rather toxic export south to Okalahoma. Having made a career as an economist, he wandered onward to Texas and thence to Washington, DC, schlepping the sludge of free-market fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and general mean-spiritedness wherever he went.

That unfortunate export was Dick Armey, who turned up this week on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” program insulting Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon.com:

I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife cuz I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.

(Quotation courtesy of Henry the Cat of Henry’s Travels)

Joan Walsh had a great, real-time comeback: “Well, that makes two of us.”

Henry – who also posted the video – tried and failed to determine whether our pal Dick actually has a wife. He consulted Wikipedia, which was so sadly worthless, you have to wonder if it was sanitized by Dick’s own people.

But Henry: If you want to know something about a North Dakotan – even one in the diaspora – you ask another North Dakotan. Because we know each other. And if we don’t, we know someone who knows someone. That’s me: well-connected at the top levels of North Dakota society, and shamelessly willing to dish. It’s all hearsay, of course. But that’s what you’re here for, right?

So I happened to know that Dick Armey went to Jamestown College. (This is confirmed by his online hagiography.) That’s where both my parents got their degrees (my dad in music, my mom in English and bridge … but mostly bridge). They weren’t classmates – Dick is too young for that – but Mom taught school with a woman who knew him directly.

From that connection, I knew that Armey had been married – I think to a gal from North Dakota – but at some point he dropped his first wife. My mom’s friend was indignant about this, but I don’t know the details, and Mom’s not clear on them anymore, either. I seem to recall hearing he traded Wife #1 in for a younger model, but I’m not certain.

At any rate, even if I’ve gotten every insinuation wrong, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around. According to the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast, Dick distinguished himself by preaching fundie “values,” but prior to his political career, he allegedly sexually harassed some of the students he taught … and traded up to a second wife who just happened to be a former student.

Dick Armey’s “documented conduct along the lines of the President’s” was reported in the May 4, 1995, Dallas Observer. Three women who had been students when Armey was a professor at North Texas State University went on the record to document Armey’s “inappropriate” behavior. Susan Aileen White (who earned a master’s in economics from the institution), Anna Weniger (who subsequently acted as an economist for the New Mexico legislature) and Anne Marie Best (a future economics professor at Lamar University) all took offense at Armey’s inappropriate behavior toward female students. Weniger left the university for several months, partly because of Armey’s actions.

Not all the women at North Texas State were offended by the professor’s advances. Armey’s current (and second) wife had been one of his students.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of their report, but the hypocrisy sure rings true, based on what my mom’s friend told her.

Or, as my mom said to me on the phone last night: “Well, from what she said, he’s just an asshole.” Coming from my mom – who is literally a former church lady – that’s salty language. And for that allegation, Dick Armey’s political career provides evidence galore.

So Henry, is there a Mrs. Armey? I’m not sure if there’s currently one. But if there is, I sure wouldn’t blame her for kicking him to the curb.

P.S. You have no idea how much self-control it cost me not to play with – nay, diddle with! – Rep. Armey’s first name in this post. I’m trying to act like a grow-mutt. I was doing pretty well until, oh, ten seconds ago.

Update, 1-31-09, 12:30 a.m.: Salon has a much better sourced account of Dick Armey’s misogynist misadventures. It largely confirms my version, except that his first wife, Jeanine Gale, was the one who filed for divorce. Makes perfect sense, if she’s a smart woman and he is, indeed, an asshole. The money quote from Salon:

Armey’s brother Charley, who has stayed close with his first wife, says Jeanine Gale, who had a master’s in education and taught school, was “a women’s libber” who didn’t put Armey’s needs first. Armey’s second wife, Susan, his brother says, is nearly the opposite.

No wonder poor Joan Walsh – and I – will never stand a chance!

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A Catty Comment on the Weather

So this is how people react to winter where I grew up (and yes, I’m from North Dakota, but the mindset is identical – so laconic that you’d think tempers had frozen solid):

[S]ome Minnesotans took it as just another winter day, even in the state’s extreme northwest corner where thermometers bottomed out at 38 degrees below zero at the town of Hallock and the National Weather Service said the wind chill was a shocking 58 below.

“It’s really not so bad,” Robert Cameron, 75, said as he and several friends gathered for morning coffee at the Cenex service station in Hallock. “We’ve got clothing that goes with the weather. … We’re ready and rolling, no matter what.”

(Source: AP via Columbus Dispatch)

And this is what happens here in Southeastern Ohio: Monday morning, with a scant 3/8 inch of snow on the ground, school is delayed two hours, with my husband – and our one and only car – out of town for the day.

Another 3/8 inch fell this evening, again on bare ground, and I’m already wondering what’ll happen tomorrow. Not to mention Friday, when we’ll get subzero temps, which also typically crash the school system. Adding to my antsiness, the radio station that posts closings is super-slow to update and the school’s website has been down for over a month.

I realize that the root of these hassles is poverty. Well, okay, also an absurdly nervous superintendent. But if the region weren’t so poor, roads might get cleared. The school district’s website might get fixed. And there’d be less worry about kids being underdressed for the conditions. Those same kids don’t get subsidized meals when school is off, nor do their parents typically get paid if they can’t make it to work.

Failing that, I’d love at least an improved weather prediction service. Like this one (via Lynn Gazis-Sax at Noli Irritare Leones).

(Translation: Temperatures have been pretty darn brisk in Germany, too – at least for those not snuggling their own personal furry heat source.)

Frustrated as I am with the capriciousness of my school district’s snow day policy, I’m not blind to my blessings. A friend of mine, a transplant from Indiana, loaned me her car Monday so I could haul my kids to my office, meet with students, and then schlepp the kids to school by eleven. When I thanked her that evening, she said:

None of us have family here.
And so all of us have family here.

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Boom Times, North Dakota Style

Photo of North Dakota sky at sunset by Flickr user Pete Baer, used under a Creative Commons license.

I just loved last weekend’s New York Times article on North Dakota’s so-far resilient economy.

As the rest of the nation sinks into a 12th grim month of recession, this state, at least up until now, has been quietly reveling in a picture so different that it might well be on another planet.

The number of new cars sold statewide was 27 percent higher this year than last, state records through November showed. North Dakota’s foreclosure rate was minuscule, among the lowest in the country. Many homes have still been gaining modestly in value, and, here in Fargo, construction workers can be found on any given day hammering away on a new downtown condominium complex, complete with a $540,000 penthouse (still unsold, but with a steady stream of lookers).

While dozens of states, including neighboring ones, have desperately begun raising fees, firing workers, shuttering tourist attractions and even abolishing holiday displays to overcome gaping deficits, lawmakers this week in Bismarck, the capital, were contemplating what to do with a $1.2 billion budget surplus.

And as some states’ unemployment rates stretched perilously close to the double digits in the fall, North Dakota’s was 3.4 percent, among the lowest in the country.

North Dakota’s cheery circumstance — which economic analysts are quick to warn is showing clear signs that it, too, may be in jeopardy — can be explained by an odd collection of factors: a recent surge in oil production that catapulted the state to fifth-largest producer in the nation; a mostly strong year for farmers (agriculture is the state’s biggest business); and a conservative, steady, never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer sudden booms of wealth like those seen elsewhere (“Our banks don’t do those goofy loans,” Mr. Theel said) and also fewer tumultuous slumps.

(More here.)

North Dakota’s secret? Its people just are not prone to excess. In fact, any excess is liable to freeze up in the winter and fall off.

If anything, North Dakotans can be excessive in their rejection of excess. I say this as an expat who’s still got a streak of this. Also, you grow up eating hotdish, and something happens to your DNA to keep you from ever getting terribly impressed with yourself. Certainly it’s hard to imagine North Dakotans cockily trading toxic mortgage securities or even getting irrationally exuberant.

So if North Dakota is now experiencing a relative boom – or at least seems to be cushioned from the worst of the recession – it’s due primarily to a culture that’s so far removed from Wall Street, it might as well be another country altogether.

I don’t want to romanticize my birthplace. It does get really, really cold. And it’s not that North Dakota is immune from economic woes. The farm crisis of the 1980s was pretty devastating.

But I do wonder if the rest of this country might take a page from North Dakotan commonsense and humility, dial down our expectations, and put community over commerce.

Oh, and we might all learn to wave laconically at every vehicle we pass while you’re driving down two-lane country roads. You do this by barely lifting a finger or two off the steering wheel, whether you know the other drivers or not. (No, not that finger, remember this is North Dakota!) It’s a small thing, yes, but I think it’s one of many influences making it unlikely that people will write “those goofy loans.”

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My Modest Bike Brag

I don’t often brag about my athleticism. Frankly, there’s not much to brag about. Oh, I look athletic enough – especially with clothes on. But functionally? I’m a klutz and a sloth. At best, I’m good for an occasional short burst of activity, much like your average feline but completely minus the grace and power.

So no one is more amazed than I at my perseverance in biking to school this fall. I used my bike every single day, with just three exceptions: once when my husband’s complicated schedule required me to drive our car home again, once when I had an appointment at the far end of town, and once when I saw the eye doctor right before teaching and my dear spouse chauffeured me. (By the way, it is downright imbecilic to get your eyes dilated and then expect to function well in the classroom. I don’t recommend it.)

I even biked to the post office through sleet yesterday. Well, the truth is that I got caught in sleet on my way home – the sky was clear on the trip over – but the first version of the story sounds more intrepid, don’t you think?

This morning I biked through actual snow. Here’s the scene mere seconds before takeoff.


Okay, I just exaggerated for effect once again. The roads were clear this morning, although the air was sub-zero (celsius, that is).

I’m sure you’re wondering about my snazzy fender ornament, so here he is: the original Janosch Little Tiger. He’s not only cute; he also makes me look way faster than I’ll ever actually be.

Seriously, I don’t expect to keep this up throughout the winter. This morning, my sinuses wanted to pack up and move to San Diego. I realize that as a born-and-bred North Dakotan, I ought to be hardier; today, a friend opined that I used up all my cold tolerance in my first sixteen winters. I like his theory since it makes me sound like less of a wimp.

I’m still a sloth (or feline) at heart, and in every other muscle, too. But I’ve gotten just old enough to realize that I have to do something to fight decrepitude, or entropy will prevail.

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Sarah Palin Swiped My Accent

Sarah Palin’s positions on the issues are fair game for criticism: they’re mean-spirited, environmentally dangerous, recklessly aggressive abroad, anti-woman, and objectionable in every other way. I also think it’s fair to question actions that show major lapses in judgment: her foolhardy behavior after her water broke, her copying the First Dude on all her official emails, her unblinking acceptance of the VP nomination.

But picking on her accent? I’ll admit that’s not entirely fair. I’m going to do it anyway, because she’s trampling on my territory. Bear in mind, this isn’t a political argument. It’s just me defending my turf as a North Dakotan.

So I took this quiz and it told me I have …

North Central What people call the “Minnesota accent.” Sounds almost Canadian. You may have even been asked if you were from Canada before.

Click Here to Take This Quiz

This is not exactly a news flash. I’ve been getting cheerfully teased about this for nearly three decades, ever since I left North Dakota. I discovered everyone in California said “cow” differently than I did (as if they knew more about cows!). I still sometimes get recognized by flight attendants on Northwest Airlines as a fellow Minnesotan/Dakotan. On the upside, those south-central North Dakotan vowels (think: Lawrence Welk) came in pretty handy when I started learning German.

Lately, people have been asking me how come Sarah Palin and I sound a bit alike. No, I don’t think I ever used the phrase “Joe Six-Pack” until last week. I will never say nukular. I don’t wink very often, either.

Here’s my beef: Sarah Palin seems to have swiped my extra-long, North Dakotan O. Listen:

Last weekend, Steven Pinker explained in the New York Times just how the heist happened:

[Palin's] dialect is certainly for real. Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from “Fargo” when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression.

But the story turns out to be slighly more complicated. As The Biblio Files point out on Open Salon, Palin doesn’t exactly have a Minnesotan accent. (They mean North Dakotan, of course. But thanks to them anyway for linking to the quiz I took.) Once her ancestors moved to the Mat-Su Valley, their accent started to morph, as language is wont to do. That’s why Palin says “fill” when she means “feel” – and I don’t.

Now, I have been known to use phrases like “doggone” and “darn it” and “yah, youbetcha.” And I resent Sarah Palin horning in on them! I’m not saying you ought to vote against McCain-Palin just so I can reclaim that territory. But if she doesn’t disappear after November 4, there’s a word for what my verbal style will be:

Kittywampus. (And yep, that’s a good North Dakotanism, too. Yah, youbetcha.)

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Ten Reasons Why I, Sungold, Am Qualified to Be Vice President

Underneath the seemingly mild-mannered surface of Sungold the professor is a cauldron of seething ambition. I think John McCain is already regretting he didn’t cross party lines – not for Joe Lieberman, but to pick me as his running mate. Here’s why I would be ultra-qualified to become vice president:

1. I’m from an even smaller state than Sarah Palin! According to Wikipedia, Alaska ranks 47th with 683,478 residents, while North Dakota is in 48th place with 639,715. She’s got me beat when it comes to low population density, though.

2. My state of origin borders a foreign country, too! Granted, I couldn’t see Canada from my window, but as a teenager, while Palin was sharpening her barracuda teeth on the basketball court, I spent a few of my summers attending the International Music Camp at the International Peace Garden, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Palin now touts her proximity to Russian airspace; I can claim to have shared a cabin with actual Canadians.

Oh, and besides having spent a decade in Germany, I sleep next to an actual foreigner every night. That makes me at least this prepared to face down Putin:

more about “CBS Video“, posted with vodpod

3. Curiosity: I has it! It might be hazardous to cats, but in political leaders, it’s generally considered a Good Thing. Unless, of course, your only mission is to memorize talking points at Joe Lieberman’s School of Foreign Relations.

4. Like Palin, I too had a perm in the mid-1980s! Unlike hers, at no point during the 1980s was my hair easily mistaken for a mullet.

Collage from cityrag, who I hope won’t mind my borrowing it; go there for more.

5. I too am 44 years old, which appears to be exactly the very bestest, most optimalest age for a vice presidential candidate! You’re old enough to have some experience (see point 2, above) but still young enough to be hot hot hot. Okay, so most days I’m merely lukewarm. No amount of silicon could ever put my boobs in the same league as the gubernatorial mammaries. But I’m still way cuter than John McCain. Why, I’m sexier than Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney combined!

6. I took some economics classes in college! And so I understand not just the human but also the economic rationale for coupling any Wall Street bailout with an effort to slow housing foreclosures. That is, if all these bad mortgages can be rendered less-than-worthless, the mortgage-backed securities that are currently tanking Wall Street will also be worth something again. Of course, I can’t roll as many garbled talking points into my explanation as she did:

7.

more about “Exclusive: Sarah Palin – CBS News Video“, posted with vodpod

I only went to one college, not five, but I’ve still spent my whole adult life in universities!

8. During my first pregnancy I flew from California to Germany while so bulky I couldn’t flip the tray table into a fully horizontal position! That’s way farther than from Dallas to Wasilla. This oughtta prove my chick-cojones … even if I wasn’t leaking amniotic fluid along the way.

9. I love me my lipstick!

That’s me, Sungold. No pit bull here, just feline cunning.

10. I too can hide my inner viciousness behind perkiness – yay exclamation points!

Update September 27, 1 p.m.: When I posted this I meant to ask about your qualifications for the vice presidency, dear readers. Then I hit “publish” precipitously because the debate was starting. So: If you want to turn this into a meme, as Heather at Knitting Clio has threatened to do, please leave a comment linking to your list of awesome qualifications!

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A Tornadic Threat

Photo from OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory, posted to Flickr by pingnews.com, used under a Creative Commons license.

I watched Hillary Clinton’s speech tonight in the penumbra of a tornado warning. Not a watch – a fucking warning.

Like any good North Dakota girl, I recognized the color of the sky at dusk, well before the official warning was issued. It had a yellowish, pinkish cast – and yes, that touch of sickly green that strikes me blind with fear.

I was all set to move the children into the basement for the night, but my mate vetoed that, knowing that they’d never fall asleep down there and believing that the danger was probably less than dire.

Of course he was wrong about that; by definition, a tornado warning is the scariest thing in the world. At least in my prairie-gal world. But so it came to pass that we watched Clinton’s speech with the picture-in-picture feature tracking the Weather Channel.

The tornado warning was lifted shortly before 10 p.m., just as it became apparent that no concession would be forthcoming. It wasn’t the visionary speech on gender that Anna Holmes yearned for in Sunday’s New York Times (though that was always an exercise in wishful thinking anyway). It sounded a heck of a lot like a standard stump speech. In fact, as Alex Koppelman observed in Salon’s War Room, it “sounded like nothing so much as a victory speech.”

And that’s when I learned a cool new word. The Weather Channel’s alarming red crawl announced that the storm had weakened and now “posed no tornadic threat.” Yes, “tornadic” is a real word – either that, or Google is hallucinating.

But beyond southeast Ohio, the tornadic danger hasn’t lifted entirely. I assume that Clinton may be negotiating with the Obama camp, perhaps angling for the VP slot, perhaps inching toward another compromise. Maybe she’s looking for a role in health care, judging from the intersection of her speech with Obama’s gracious remarks on her?

Or maybe she’s going to try to take this to the convention in Denver, arguing that she won the popular vote and trying to strong-arm some of Obama’s superdelegates into her camp?

I realize that the “nuclear option” – which I hereby rename the “tornedic option” – is not the most likely scenario. It may be no more likely than my house getting hit by a tornado tonight (although the tornado watch goes until the wee hours). But I’ll feel a lot better once Clinton takes it off the table. I’d prefer not to hide in the basement until the convention.

And while we’re at it, how ’bout getting a tornado siren for my little town? While I was writing this my neighbor just called me and told me we don’t have one.

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Oil in Them Thar Badlands

Anyone who grew up in North Dakota perks up when their home state makes national headlines. So this week, when I saw that there may be massive oil fields in the wild western half of the state, I got excited even though I haven’t lived there in nearly three decades.

According to Andrew Leonard at Salon, earlier estimates ranged as high as 500 billion barrels in the Bakken shale formation, which extends from North Dakota into Montana and Canada. (I hope this doesn’t mean we’ll have to invade Canada.) Even if that figure were correct, no more than half would be recoverable in the best-case scenario.

Now, with the release of a United States Geological Survey report on Thursday, the amount of technically recoverable oil there has been estimated between 3.0 and 4.3 billion barrels, as Leonard reported. (See his post for links to the actual report.) Note that this is technically recoverable, which still doesn’t tell us if or when it’ll make economic sense. As Leonard further notes, the extraction process for shale oil usually involves pulverizing mountains. Here, companies would likely use “horizontal drilling,” which the AP described as follows:

Oil companies began sharing technology about two years ago on how to recover the oil. The technology involves drilling vertically to about 10,000 feet, then “kicking out” for as many feet horizontally, while fracturing the rock to release the oil trapped in microscopic pores in the area known as the “middle” Bakken.

If it seems like there ought to be a better way, I’ve got a fine idea. North Dakota has another major resource that’s never been a secret to its sons and daughters: wind.

Way back in 2000, the New York Times reported:

Together, South Dakota, North Dakota and Texas have sufficient wind resources to provide electricity for the entire United States, according to studies cited by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Being a good North Dakotan, I read that piece. And then I saw dollar signs. My dad still owns six quarter sections of land. It’s not prime farmland, but wind? Boy, have we got it!

What we don’t have is transmission capacity to move all that electricity out of the Dakotas and into the rest of this energy-greedy country. We also don’t have clever ways of storing really massive amounts of electricity. Those are the the two things that would lay the groundwork for large-scale exploitation of wind power.

Of course, revamping our transmission grid and reinventing the battery would require huge investments. It’d take a major public initiative. But it might still be cheaper than pulverizing or drilling under the western half of North Dakota. It would certainly be cheaper than invading any more countries for their oil – yes, even cheaper than attacking Canada, never mind Iran.

Photo of the North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user zanzibar, used under a Creative Commons license.

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