1. Back about thirty years ago, I used to make a vegetarian chili. The recipe came from Laurel's Kitchen, or a similar cookbook, and at some point Mom copied out that recipe on to a note card that's been magneted to our refrigerator for a while. Today, I perused that recipe and realized that the recipe is incomplete -- she must have carried copying that recipe over to a second card.
Well, I jumped on to Pinterest and, before long, I found a similar recipe. All I had to do was cook up a chopped onion and garlic for about seven minutes, add a half cup of bulgur and chili powder, oregano, and cumin to it, let that cook a while, and then add 28 oz of diced tomatoes, a can of pinto beans, and about 2 1/2 cups of chicken stock. I let that simmer uncovered for about ten minutes, put the lid on and let it simmer for another twelve minutes or so. The bulgur was tender. The flavors had combined. Everything was suitably medium hot and this chili was great.
I don't remember the last time I made vegetarian chili, but I'm really happy it's back in our rotation of meals.
2. Bill, Diane, Colette, and I had a superb time for over two hours this afternoon talking together on Zoom. Colette is currently working on an MFA at Eastern Oregon University. She's loving it. She is especially happy with the tone and spirit of the program and with her professors' dedication to sharing their passion for stories and poems and their constructive ways of teaching and leading workshops. Her experience got us talking about what we find admirable in teachers and about egotistical, cutthroat, competitive stuff we are disheartened to know happens in too many educational settings, especially graduate programs. None of us who went there experienced this negative stuff at Whitworth nor did Diane at Pacific Lutheran University. Talking about academic bullies got us talking about bullies when we were kids and this got us talking about what kind of kids we were in high school and what we enjoyed.
I talked about how I was involved in all kinds of activities: band, choir, basketball, theater, declamation, golf, and other activities away from school, how I was what is known of as a jack of all trades and a master of none. I loved doing all those things, but all through high school I was, at best, average at all of them -- not a great horn player, an average singer, a mediocre bench warmer in basketball, a player of small parts in theater, and I hardly ever made the traveling team in golf. I mostly enjoyed the social aspect of all my activities. I secretly enjoyed feeling like I was a little different and explained to my friends today this private love I had from the eighth grade on for George Gershwin. I loved either being in the house alone or taking the record player into my room and playing Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris repeatedly. I also loved to play a record we had of marches by John Philip Sousa and, when home alone, I pretended to conduct the band while listening to those marches.
3. This evening, Debbie and I watched the second and concluding episode of George H. W. Bush. It's a part of the PBS series, American Experience. If nothing else, watching this biography of the elder President Bush helped reinforce in my mind the way events during Bush's administration (1989-93) and his own party's response to them contributed to the polarizing divisions in politics that continue into the 2020's. Bush was vulnerable to the polarizing tactics of opponents because he wasn't particularly polarizing himself. Bush was a moderate. His instincts and temperament moved him toward bipartisanship, working to build coalitions, and away from strict ideological responses to things. His instincts also moved him to abhor hardball politics and negative campaigning. When he did campaign negatively, it was out of character, done because his aides, especially Lee Atwater, persuaded him it was a necessity.
Members of the Republican Party who drew harder lines regarding taxes and government spending and who were outraged by Bush's 1990 budget agreement to raise taxes, in part to fund his legislative commitment to clean air, to helping the disabled, and to clean up the savings and loans crisis that was well underway when he was elected, created factions in the G.O.P. that Bush could never come to terms with. Temperamentally, Bush wasn't a knee-capper. He wasn't good at playing rough. He governed best from above the fray by employing his conciliatory negotiating abilities and working to bring people together. What to Bush (and others who were inclined this way) was regarded a great strength was, by his opponents, turned into a weakness.
In the long run, knee capping, polarization, negative campaigning, and playing rough have won the day. Many voters regard only negative talk as being genuine and see hitting hard and counter punching harder as signs of strength in politicians and leaders.
Bush didn't.
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