My recent lack of postings reflects the fact that this is one of the busiest times of the year for the small business I run with my husband. The computer has been occupied with clearing away a backlog of data entry and the personal time I've had to devote to thinking, reading and writing has been limited.

But, by next week my schedule should open up. I plan to spend a bit of that extra time making this site more interactive -- with links to other sites and a mechanism for feedback.

There's a lot going on in the broader world at the moment, and I would like to comment on it. And, read the comments of others in return.

Until that happens, I'll fill you in with a little autobiography: The person behind this blog is an ex-advertising copywriter and marketing professional who runs a small business catering to one of the thousands of niche enthusiasms that fuel the American economy. In this case, restoration and performance parts for old Chrysler cars and trucks. Our specialty is kits that allow our customers to put great big engines in light-weight cars and enjoy all the fun that ensues from that. Not a very politically correct occupation in the age of global warming, I'll admit. But then, another way of looking at it is that we're in the business of automobile re-cycling, aren't we?

If someone brighter than us ever comes up with a fuel-efficient, environment friendly, powerful and cost-effective alternative to the combustion engine -- that could be retro-fitted into older automobiles -- we would be just the people to come up with the mounting systems to help our customers make the swap. $60,000 hybrids and more efficient mass transit may be the right solution for Blue State suburbanites, but, a $10,000 engine (and various required accessories) that a shadetree mechanic can install in that $750 clunker that's propped up on blocks at his brother-in-law's place, might be a more realistic way to entice auto-dependent, small town and rural Americans into the anti-pollution, energy-conservation camp.

Just a thought.

Some thoughts for our times:

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” - Thomas Jefferson, 1814

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is
destroyed.” -- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

“Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions. . . . The first requisite is knowledge, full and complete; knowledge which may be made public to the world.” - Theodore Roosevelt, 1901

“The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. . . In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

My printer isn't working. It's an HP Color Laserjet that always makes a big production out of getting itself started in the morning. Lots of whirling, grinding, calibrating, honks and whistles and groans -- before it finally flashes its little "ready" sign. The whole production is too drawn out and pretty annoying. But this morning, no production at all. Dead silence. No lights, no whistles, no printer.

I've got a ton of stuff in the work day ahead of me that requires its cooperation. But its down for the count, out on strike. I've explored all the options I can think of to get it to wake up and get to work. I'm hoping that when the rest of our tiny crew wakes up and turns up for work they'll have some more ideas. I do not want to buy a new printer today.

My thoughts have been taken up with my personal, family and work life recently. My feelings about what is going on in the broader Republic have been, in some ways, too overwhelming for comment.

What is America anyway? What do I think it is? In what ways have I been wrong?

Why does what America is matter so much to me?

On a different note: Mickey Kaus and Josh Marshall have been objecting to the concept of "Homeland Security" as vaguely Germanic and unAmerican sounding. And Kaus has been soliticiting alternative names for the government's new department. What's wrong, I wonder, with the term "civil defense." It's a term that's served us well for as long as I can remember (and that's a fairly long time.) Why not Department of Civil Defense? (I not only object to "Homeland," like Kaus and Marshall do, I object even more to "Security." It's a term, it seems to me, for wishful thinkers and weenies.

Mark Morford, in his SFGate column yesterday, touched on something that I have been thinking about too; the strange vulnerability President Bush projects. Although he did not use that word exactly, he did describe, accurately I think, the phenomenon:

"...there they are, trying so hard. Especially Bush. Look at that earnest, constipated, caught-in-the-headlights expression. Trying trying trying. Please do not hate him."

And:

."..the common wisdom: It is unpatriotic to criticize the president ...

Or rather, you can criticize if you like, but Bush's image is now being so carefully controlled you feel a little ashamed and slightly guilty doing so, like that feeling you'd get if you teased, say, a quadriplegic. Or a child."

Normally, we Americans treat our Presidents badly. Very badly. It is not, usually, a job for the thin-skinned and sensitive. Which is why there is something disorienting about this administration's constant admonishments against criticism, and their quick to take offense, defensive response to even its mildest forms. Plus, his handlers work 24/7 to provide a steady stream of non-stop excuses or overly detailed explanations for everything and anything: Did the President seem snappish at times in Europe? It was jet lag. Did he stumble and hit his head on a table? Trot out the medical experts and give us a long explanation of how this was really caused by his excellent state of physical fitness.

The truth is, the more "carefully controlled" the President's image is, the more excuses and explanations and spin applied to even the most minute events, the more vulnerable and childlike he seems. The more scripted and handled and protected from the rough and tumble of the political and public arena he is, the lonelier and weaker he appears. The more anxiously they try to protect him from the normal sorts of political abuse, the more anxiously we wonder if he can "take" the normal sorts of political stress.

His army of image spinners are hoping, of course, to present us with John Wayne; a strong, plain spoken man of the West. But what we're getting, at best, is Roy Rogers; a cleaned-up cowboy with a whiff of the nursery about him who never gets his hands, or his richly embroidered and fringed shirt, dirty. Or, at worse, a Roy Rogers fan; a little boy in felt cowboy hat and tooled boots playing alone with his shiny cap pistol.

Morford complains that this over-protectiveness doesn't allow us to "hate" the President. My complaint is that it doesn't allow us to laugh at him.

Morford's column: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

"I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well the weakness and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results. Both of our political parties, at least the honest part of them, agree conscientiously in the same object--the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side...fears most the ignorance of the people; the other, the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove." Thomas Jefferson

I've been on vacation

Three days of sunshine, a beautiful view of the Sound, no phones, no news, lots of much needed sleep.

It was perfect.

Then a mad day of catching up with everything left undone for my business.

All of it has made George W. Bush, current events, the various crisis here and abroad seem exceedingly unreal and disconnected from me, personally.

But, of course, it's not. The country over the last 17 months has been in the process of profound transformation. Obviously that will mean something for all of us at some time or another. Although what exactly it will mean for each of us personally is impossible to predict. Can a thought I express here, now, have some surprising, unexpected, unwanted, unpredictable consequences years down the road? As the result of new monitoring of political speech and increased paranoia among Americans in general? What will the increasing loss of confidence in the ethics and honesty of American enterprise and global corporations mean in the long term -- to my customers? to my business? to America's relations with the world? to our economy in the long term? How will climate change, and the course of non-resistance the country appears to have decided will be its response to it, affect our future? What does it mean to be an average American in an era when the idea of democracy appears to be losing its appeal to so many -- especially so many of our most influential citizens? If we, at the highest, and, surprisingly, lowest, levels, no longer believe in the possibility and efficacy of compromise, the wisdom that can arise from honest conflict among a multitude of views, the necessity of tempering the "selfishness of rulers" (as Jefferson said) with the modifying influence of "the people," what do we believe in?

Do we believe in W? In Cheney? In Rumsfeld? In Ashcroft? Are we to abandon our faith and confidence in each other and place it all in the hands of a few men somehow deemed, or at least extolled as, wiser, or of a better cast of character, than others? When we abandon a politics of issues, interests and conflicts -- aren't we left with nothing but a politics of personality and power? And isn't that something extraordinarily close to what our forefathers despised and overthrew?

The current administration took office with a firm conviction that much that was done, through democratic means, in the past had to be undone. And with long-cherished, long-deferred ideas of what they would, could, should do. They've moved with energy, with disdain for consultation with anyone outside their limited circle, with the firm conviction that it was not part of their job to respond to the wishes and perceived needs of the people -- but rather to shape the wishes and needs of the people -- to translate their plans into actions.

There will, of course, be unintended consequences to all of this. What will those consequences be? How will we, average Americans, who still, nominally, retain some democratic power, if we choose to exercise it, respond to those consequences?