The Never-ending Story

or,

No good deed goes unpunished.

or,

Just when you thought it was safe to go up on the roof …

Rats IV!

Performing my minimum monthly requirement of house maintenance, I swept biomass from the edges of the roof. The oak tree that dominates our yard seems to shed its weight in branches and acorns and nutlets and thousands and thousands of little husky shapes (but no leaves) on the roof, where it piles up against the screens over the gutters.

The screens serve no other purpose except as a place for the biomass to bank like snowdrifts.

Unreasonably confident it will rain long and hard this winter (Go, El Niño!), I swept off the debris as the first step in clearing out the gutters. Which I'll do next week. Can't rush these things.

The roof has odd pockets where the roof planes don't quite meet. They're very hard to reach, unless you're a branch or an acorn or a nutlet, in which case there's plenty of room, make yourself at home! Unjamming these spaces requires a questionable balancing act and a certain twisty-pully motion with a broom to clear.

Which I was attempting to do when out rolled a ball of lint.

Which first rolled down the roof slope until it reversed direction and climbed the slope at great speed and over the crest and gone.

A rat.

Rats!

I was so sure I had made the house rat-proof, after numerous campaigns, rat after rat after rat, and here was a speeding fur-bearing bandit to declare, um, no.

With dusk dwindling, I grabbed weapons from my garage supply of rat defenses — scraps of metal screen and steel wool — and fashioned yet another woolly guard which I stuffed into the odd roof nook with a broom handle. I wondered without success how I would fasten the out-of-reach screen to the walls beneath the roof line.

Though I got some work done yesterday, I mostly daydreamed about the rat, and hit upon a plan to fasten the screen which, of course, proved unworkable as soon as I got home to look at the problem again.

"Just reach in with your drill and some grabber screws," said the kindly, knowledgeable man at the hardware store. "You've got long arms! You've got a cordless drill, doncha?"

He sold me some grabber screws (drywall screws) and washers, and I went home, hoping my cordless drill worked. It hadn't before.

Dusk dwindling again, I endeavored to reach in with a regular old hand-powered screwdriver and a grabber screw, hoping the screw would stay on the screwdriver for the long stretch into the odd space.

Leaning in as far as I could go, I saw it — a rat, nestled dead in the gutter. I think it was dead. I'll check today.

Not the same rat. Maybe. Probably.

The little barrier of screen and steel wool remained up. The hardware store gentleman said steel wool was a good choice. Rats hate it. Maybe the rat hated it so much, it died of bitterness.

With darkness falling, I set a trap for now (I've become good at this, wearing rubber gloves so the rat wouldn't smell humans, and putting just a tiny dab of peanut butter on the snap trigger so the rat would have to work for the food) and decided to see what sunlight would bring today.

Wish me luck. Wish the rat(s) likewise.

OK, now it's over

The Giants did as I figured.

Though I didn't figure them to fall short in so painful a way, they did. No World Series repeat this year.

The Giants did me a favor.

They freed me.

I crawl out now from under my self-imposed tyranny, of following the Giants' every move, every triumph and torturous pratfall.

I am relieved of the sweet burden of having stayed with my team for the last seven months.

I cast aside the nightly yoke of watching the Giants perform dinner theater for me, of tracking them surreptitiously by radio devices at work. I am pardoned from trying anxiously to follow the postseason by text at church: "Score?" I'd type from behind the hymn book where the choir sits at Mass. "3-2! Posey just doubled in Pagan," my wife would answer from her seat in a far-off pew.

As much as I enjoyed hanging on every pitch through the crisping fall last year, as the Giants clawed their way to the national title — and two years before that, and two years before that — I needed a break.

The Giants did too, I suspect.

This hot-and-cold pattern has gotten so routine that I've decided the year after a championship is hard on the Giants, and makes me appreciate all the more those teams that win back-to-back titles. Not only have the Giants played longer than all but one other team in their championship seasons, they wear themselves out the following season with pregame ceremonies commemorating their glory.

I don't know how other teams do it — I've heard more than once that the Giants "do it right" — but the Giants' ceremonies are exhausting, to fans and players. They cram festivities too full of pomp and circumstance, and speeches and novel ways to deliver trophies, and orgasmic variations on The Natural's theme song — that the players lose momentum come game time.

Time for the Giants to rest up, take month-long naps, refrain from celebrations. Time for me to be normal again.

No more baseball until April. No more sports, for that matter, certainly not football, which has more and more become a sad microcosm of our American ills — corporate cartels, violence and its encouragement, celebrity worship and soap-operatic bad behavior, reported breathlessly and daily in the media.

No baseball playoffs. I'm not a baseball fan; I'm a Giants fan. I have no interest in other teams.

It's sort of like being facebook®™ friends with people because of one common interest, and then being ushered in pictorially to their children's proms or their parents' birthday barbecues. I wish them well, of course, but I have nothing invested in those events, nor is it my place.

Time for other fans of other teams to enjoy the drama and take up the burden through the long, cooling autumn.

Although I'm glad the New York Yankees are already eliminated, and hope the Los Angeles Dodgers go quickly. It's a Giants thing.

Now I join the masses who wait 'til next year, with the potent stuff of daydreams to get me through winter. Rightfielder and charismatic leader Hunter Pence, benched first with a broken arm and then with muscle strains that kept him out most of the season, will be back. So will sure-hitting second baseman Joe Panik, out the last months of the season with back injury; fans hope, anyway.

Rookie Matt Duffy, who came up from Double-A as a bench player and soon owned third base and made everyone forget about the contributions of Pablo Sandoval, who fled to the (American League East last place) Boston Red Sox, is most likely to raise fans' hopes.

The Giants have late call-up rookie Kelby Tomlinson, a skinny Clark Kent, who took over for Panik at second and might likely get turned into an outfielder because the team will want his bat. Leftfielder and leadoff hitter Nori Aoki and first baseman Brandon Belt, both felled by concussions, will be back, though if I had to bet I'd say Belt will get traded for some pitching.

Catcher Andrew Susac should return too. Boy, the Giants crumbled with a lot of injuries, losing outfielder Gregor Blanco and his good year; centerfielder Angel Pagan, hurt during big chunks of the year; outfielder Juan Perez; and utility infield Ehire (yeah, the broadcasters can't pronounce it, either) Adrianza, who had finally, finally, finally figured out how to hit in the Major Leagues before he went down with a concussion.

Four season-ending concussions. You'd think this was football.

Still, the Giants stayed hopeful right into the last week, losing to the hated Dodgers at home and officially getting eliminated from postseason play. The Giants had to watch the Dodgers use their home turf for celebration.

The Giants finished the season ignobly, taking the last game into the ninth inning with a 3-0 lead before the last-place (by 24 games) Colorado Rockies broke out with seven runs and marred a day already heavy with the retirement of relief pitcher Jeremy Affeldt (and yet another ceremony). The Giants also watched veteran starting pitcher Tim Hudson retire, having given him the opportunity to win a World Series ring last year after 17 seasons in the majors.

Someone else will take Hudson and Affeldt's places. Someone good, we hope.

We'll make do with old episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (just as bad as I remember; worse) and look out the window, until April beckons again.

45

Three things stood out to me after the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon last week:

• It's the 45th school shooting in the United States this year. Forty-fifth.
• When the shooter announced his plans and his anger on niche social media, some people responded by encouraging him, and even recommending weaponry.
• Umpqua Community College is only 15 minutes from where my in-laws used to live. A young father, who sang with my mother-in-law in their church choir, recommended we take a look at the campus where he teaches, telling us it's lovely. And it is, nestled in a bend of the North Umpqua River, hilly and thick with trees, and Oregon green. Students, I thought, are lucky to go to school here.

Though Will McAvoy is fake, a creation of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for the defunct cable drama The Newsroom, he speaks the truth via Sorkin. His shows, including The West Wing, work as oracles through which Sorkin reminds us we're screwed up and need to fix things. And can fix things.

"The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one," McAvoy says in the powerful opening moments of the first episode, destroying the assertion that the United States is the greatest country in the world.

Do we recognize there is a problem? I'm talking primarily to those who run the guns in this country, who control the money and the message about guns, and to those who own the guns that the legal gun runners run, and buy into the gun runners' message.

Is that a problem, that a shooter could walk onto a college campus and kill eight and wound more before killing himself? Does that seem wrong – really, really wrong?

Do you recognize a problem with forty-five school shootings this year, a year still young? Do you see a problem with parents sending their children into a safe haven for learning — a hilly campus sparkling with aspen leaves and the whisper of a river flowing by, this time — that becomes a killing ground?

Do you recognize that more and more people now think twice about sending their kids to school, or going to the movies, or shopping at a mall, or eating at a restaurant, because the idea is born now that a shooting could take place.

Do you who make the guns and buy the guns, who promote the guns and buy the votes — you who stir the fear and stand your ground and bristle in the fear — do you see nothing wrong with guns so available, with people who are angry or out of their minds using guns to punctuate their fear and phantoms?

Nothing at all?

To you who howl now at the gun runners, who are furious at yet another shooting — and to me and people like me in the middle, still wondering what we could possibly do to effect improvement — do you see a problem in everyday gun deaths all around you? At least twice a week my hometown newspaper reports a shooting death in the greater metropolitan area.

Eight dead in one fell swoop, wring hands. One dead in a dispute outside an apartment, ho-hum.

Do we recognize a problem? Do we?

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. If we don't see the problem, if we don't yearn for a solution, then we become OK with sending our children, our families, ourselves, into harm, the price we pay for the questionably constitutional right to bear arms.

If we don't recoil at the thought that anonymous people over the Internet encourage others' violent intentions, as if it's another video game, what's wrong with us?

We move on, scab over, and hope for the best; and if not, oh well.

The majestic flag that flutters on the soaring flagpole where I work has been lowered to half staff. It's no easy task: It takes a skilled maintenance worker maneuvering a hydraulic lift, and it requires a windless day. But it's done, to honor the dead in Oregon. From where I work, I can see three other flags lowered too.

I get the gesture, but I'm not sure I agree. The dead deserve honor and remembrance, of course, but you can see where this is going if we don't recognize this as a problem. In fact, if this is our tradition now, I think the flags should be set to half staff most days, and if a day occurs in which no one is shot and killed within the immediate vicinity, then the flags should be raised to full height.

It'll be like the shop steward's sign "____ days without an accident." We can note the days no one died because of guns.

The first step.

Undone

Detritus defines me.

Though the space in front of me, the path ahead, is always clear, it's only because I've pushed aside so much miscellany into piles that teeter beside me.

Literally.

It's true of the desk where I'm writing now, my desk at work, and this blog.

These piles of stuff are important, I reason — I have always reasoned — yet not important enough, too vague, to put somewhere safe. There the junk sits, beneath my elbows, in case I need it.
I never do.

It's a problem that will remain with me for life, a problem that plagues those around me by association. Though I can't seem to do much with the real piles, I can dispatch the virtual, starting now.

Out of the 532 posts I have written since the end of 2010, 41 are drafts. They are aborted starts, malformed bits of anger and angst, or whole rants that served their purpose in the writing of them, but then seemed not worth giving daylight.

I present them to you, in the briefest form, and then purge them from my hard drive and my life.

In chronological order:

The first known corruption of the
beloved shawn turner illustration brand

• "Let us now praise a fantastic consultant," was going to be about a great guy and the savior of all things computer, Michael Zolen. I drew a really cool caricature/logo of him, but he didn't want it published once he saw it. So you'll never see it. But it's really cool. And he is a great guy. (Jan. 25, 2011)
• "Why I hate iFreelance" (March 15, 2011) was my diatribe against one particular online freelancing site, but I suppose it applies to all. I had just resumed my freelancing career, tried to be like all the cool kids and market myself through social media.
  
  iFreelance is like a casino, except the house always wins. Always. It's supposed to be a marketplace for freelance illustrators and designers, which sounds reasonable, but it's literally a global market: You pay to be able to bid … someone asks for a bid on a project, proposing an unlivable fee and ridiculous timeframe, and no rights to the creator, and the world's illustrators and designers bid on the project. Oh, do they bid! Artists in the United Kingdom see the bids hours before their American counterparts, and make their pitches way ahead of time. Even with an early start to the day, scanning the list of bids, I'd find many of jobs already won by UK.
  
  I'm not sure how logo designers created their marks in a day, except by combining existing shapes with type and calling it good.
  
  I didn't post the rant because, believe it or not, I got a job off the site. It was a fun job, but the client never responded to my followups for additional jobs. Probably he found someone far, far cheaper.
• "Rogue's Gallery: Logos I don't like" (July 29, 2011) was about the Washington State Cougars logo (just abominable!). I ran out of steam being snarky. Better you shouldn't see it.
  
  The same with "Logos only a mother could love" (Aug. 4, 2011) in which I didn't get very far tearing down someone else's work. The particular kind of contempt wears on a person.
• "The hour that the morning comes" (Dec. 7, 2011) came from a James Taylor song, and appeared to be some kind of reminiscence about swimming in the early morning during the time I was a teacher. It was probably going to go somewhere else entirely, but I don't know where.
• "Ghosts of Christmas Past" (Dec. 8, 2011) was merely an excuse to post one of my old editorial cartoons. I get so few legitimate windows to run these cartoons, which cover the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (and, in California, the George Deukmejian/Pete Wilson era). Even this excuse seemed flimsy. Here 'tis:
  
  
• "The darker side of comic strips" (Dec. 8, 2011) meant to explore the work of Stephen Pastis, creator of the strip "Pearls Before Swine," and Francesco Marciuliano, artist for the strip "Sally Forth," because I had come upon Pastis' blog and Marciuliano's alternate work, which fascinated me for its bitter and bizarre views that don't appear in family comics. Except I didn't have anything to add except, "Look how weird these guys are!"
• "No no, Noriega" was another thin attempt to post an old cartoon. Former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had made the news, having been returned to Panama. It was Christmas time (Dec. 30, 2011), I got lazy and didn't finish the post; here's the toon:
  
• "Did not … see that coming …" (Oct. 30, 2012) was a totally wrong synopsis of my beloved San Francisco Giants, whom I wrote off shortly before they won their second World Series in three years. So you won't see it.
• "All aglow" is an upbeat showcase of work I had done, except the client didn't want me telling the world it spends money on such frivolity as holiday cards (Dec. 12, 2012), so I didn't run it, and you won't see it. It's nice work, if I do say so myself. Merry Christmas.
• "Anatomy of a swim" is a pictorial story of my regular open-water swims, which I'd still really, really love to do, but it's ambitious and since Jan. 13, 2013, I still haven't figured out how to make it happen.
• "Where are they now?" was going to be a glowing report on people I knew in high school and the amazing things they do now, and how I knew them. Really interesting to me, perhaps, but an unwarranted invasion of privacy, so I didn't get far. I still am amazed at what people grew up to become (Feb. 22, 2013).
• "Someone else's shoes" (March 11, 2013) was going to be about Aaron Swartz, a young brilliant man, a computer programmer and Internet freedom activist who killed himself when the federal government indicted him for data theft and his backers said the government was trying to prosecute him into silence.
  
  I try to have something intelligent to say about topics, or at least arrange words just so to appear smart, but this man and this matter were too much for me to say anything smart about.
• "Drunk with ideas" (March 25, 2013) would have been a long showcase of work I had done for a chain of brewing magazines, but I decided later to publish the work in small batches. Get it? Batches?
• "How different is your loving life?" was my first attempt to demonstrate the ridiculous emails I get. The title of one from May 22, 2013 comes from a sexual come-on that appears to have originated in a language other than English. I eventually wrote one or two posts about the same thing.
• "Water floods my dreams now" is not really the title of this Aug. 14, 2013 post, because I never came up with one for this reminiscence about open-water swimming. You will probably agree I have written quite enough about open-water swimming, and it was OK to let this one drop.
• "Tell me more!" from Aug. 20, 2013 was another attempt to rant about my emails. Eventually I wrote an actual and complete rant or two.
• "Swim post" was me making fun of swimmers, always bad form. Be glad you didn't see it, on Aug. 25, 2013 or any other day.
• "Great moments in television" was going to be an Aug. 25, 2013 remembrance of the wonder of TV I felt as a kid. True wonder and excitement, when I wasn't jaded. I might still write this one someday.
• "So round, so firm, so fully packed, so free and easy on the draw," was a half-baked examination advertising and the lying liars to make it, Oct. 3, 2013.
• "Nejib Belhidi" was about a Tunisian long-distance swimmer who likes to organize global swims for peace. I just didn't have anything thoughtful to add on Oct. 29, 2013.
• "You just missed him" was about a young nephew who died tragically and suddenly in a motorcycle accident. For many reasons, it felt false for me to talk about it; though I will tell you, he seemed like a great kid, and he had many friends who grieved for him. March 4, 2014.
• "First-world Pet Peeves 2" was a sequel about me whining. Who needs that?! Not you. May 6, 2014.
• "Whither logoest thou?" is really a placeholder for some logos I had done for a client. I may still come back and write it, May 7, 2014.
• "Art in Everyday Life," is the title of a book I found in a community center, and was going to be an examination of public art that's all but hidden away in a part of my city I don't normally, and wouldn't normally go. But I felt myself too strange in this strange land, and had no business writing about the artwork and the people who make it. Amazing, though, what hides behind walls most people will never see. May 28, 2014.
• "Cosmosis" was going to be me talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson, the rock star astronomer. Like he needed more publicity from me. I had nothing. June 2, 2014.
• "Baseball leavins," was just more hand wringing about my Giants. Better I should spare you. July 5, 2014.
• "Vocal fry" was going to be my take on the peculiar way I hear some people talk. It's a thing, look it up. But I realized, after reading more about it, I didn't know what I was talking about, and no amount of typing was going to make it any better. July 18, 2014.
• "Owned" is still one I'll finish about our dog. I'm still taking notes. July 21, 2014.
• "Mother tongue" is about language nowdays. I'm still working on this one from Aug. 19, 2014.
• "Veterans Day Redux" was to be about Veterans and how they're treated, but not being a Veteran, I shut my own mouth Nov. 20, 2014.
• "Who is this Shawn Turner you speak of?" is yet more examination of my strange emails, of which I have waxed on plenty. Dec. 11, 2014.
• "Charlie Hebdo fallout" was not the post I wanted to write about the killings of cartoonists and editors by terrorists at the French satirical weekly. So I didn't post it Jan. 12, 2015.
• "Playing possum" was simply a false start for another illustration post I eventually completed. Feb. 27, 2015.
• "This is the day!" I was going to say something April 2, 2015 about Trevor Noah, the new host of The Daily Show taking over for Jon Stewart. Like I was going to say something no one else had already said.
• "Named by a poet" was a swimming blog post that became something better later. My opinion anyway. May 3, 2015.
• "Places I remember" and "I've got mail," July 27 and 28, 2015, were false starts to other posts I wrote. "I've got mail" was another rant over email, and began with one of those fake threats I get from people who want me to open the attached document so the document can create some kind of trojan-horse havoc on my computer. The threat went like this:
  

  do i even know you?
  why did you send me this email?
  you are full of shit.

Whew! That's over. Thanks for sticking through this, and now I can move on. Build another pile maybe. I've got time now.

As Hawkeye Pierce said, it's not much, but it's really nothing.

It ain't over

Masters of malaprop and malfeasance: From left, former Mariners' manager and Yankees®™
star Lou Piniella, former Dodgers©® manager Tommy Lasorda, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra,
Reds superstar and Hall of Fame®™ reject Pete Rose, and Yankees®™ and Mets manager Casey Stengel.
Cover for a book collection of baseball quotes and stories.

My wife says I should write about Yogi Berra, and so I shall, late as usual to the eulogy.

The Associated Press' initial story of Berra's death last week referred to the Hall of Fame®™ Yankees©™catcher as "Yogi Bear."

The error makes perfect sense to me; I will not pass judgment. Having lugged around a Yogi Bear doll through toddlerhood, I was shocked in childhood to discover an actual human named Yogi Berra.

The human had to have been named after the cartoon bear, I reasoned, because cartoons were more real to me at that stage in my life.

In reality, Berra's representatives sued animators Hanna-Barbera unsuccessfully to stop its use of "Yogi Bear" for the porkpie wearing, pick-a-nick-basket-stealing cartoon denizen of Jellystone National Park.

Sued for what, defamation?

Yogi Berra died a cartoon, for all the good and awful that word implies.

For people my age who remember Berra, he was the old baseball manager known mostly for mangling English. He's one of those public figures who became magnets for unfortunate but funny twists of phrases, including those they didn't actually say.

What Berra did actually say:

• "You can observe a lot by watching."
• "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
• "I can't think and hit at the same time."
• "I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."

What Berra might have said, though probably not as we know it:

• "Ninety percent of the game is half mental." (or "Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.")
• "It ain't over 'til it's over." (About his 1974 New York Mets rallying from fifth place to win the division). He might have said instead, "You're not out until you're out." 

What Berra probably didn't say, but seems so darn likely that it's tattooed into his mythos:

• “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 
• "Nobody goes there anymore (to a restaurant). It's too crowded."
• "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

Berra appeared to have embraced this malapropping persona, which I and everyone else expected of this grandfatherly little guy with the big black beetly eyebrows behind giant glasses and a bulbous nose above a rubbery grin. He even authored a book subtitled, "I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!"

Even the source of his nickname — Lawrence Peter Berra is his real name — is fuzzy, maybe or maybe not applied by a baseball teammate for the way he sat, like a yogi, waiting for his turn at bat.

But the gentle buffoonery masked the mastery of his baseball career. Wherever Berra was, championships were sure to follow. The New York Times reports he appeared in 21 World Series from 1946 to 1985 as a Yankees player and a Yankees and Mets coach and manager. Nobody has played in more World Series games, gotten more Series hits or whacked more Series doubles.

Newsreel footage made me think he was an unlikely baseball superstar, and his peers apparently thought likewise. His Yankees manager, Casey Stengel — master of accidental witticisms himself — said, “Mr. Berra is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

He looks so tiny in the newsreels, so much smaller than the catchers I grew up watching, and still see today. His bat looked too big for him, but obviously appearances deceive: Berra hit .285 over 19 seasons, with 358 home runs, and was a 15-time All Star®™.

My image of him as a baseball player comes in black and white and gray, when he actually leaps like a little kid into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen pitches a perfect Game 5 in the 1956 World Series.

God bless Yogi Berra. He's why I love baseball: Funny names, rich lore, humans playing a game.

I don't do numbers. Though I can tell by a batting average where a hitter stands in the pantheon of the day or of history, I still couldn't tell you with confidence what an earned run is. I am vaguely aware that  a low earned-run average tends to portend a good pitcher. All these other new stats? OPS? WHIP? I'm lost.

Give me a good story, any time. Give me Willie Mays turning a double into a single so the pitcher would be forced to give a good pitch or two to Willie McCovey, hitting next in the batting order. Give me Roberto Clemente, tortured soul on the field, gigantic bleeding heart and soul off it. Give me Coco Crisp, Rusty Staub, "Three Fingers" Brown, Shooty Babitt, Preacher Roe, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Joe Garagiola and Buster Posey, just because.

The San Francisco Giants this week are trying hard not to break my heart. Barring a miracle, they will. They're five games out of first with five games left in the regular season, fielding a starting lineup half of whom were in the minor leagues a month ago. The Giants have to win all five, and the first-place Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing right now, have to lose all five for the Giants to get a chance at winning the division.

It would make quite a story, the Giants flopping into the playoffs on kids and fumes. The odds are not in their favor. It ain't over, though.

Win or lose, the Giants always manage to make new rich memories of the people who played the game, not their statistics.

As Yogi said — or didn't — "The future ain't what it used to be."

Suffer the children

Yesterday would have ticked off my mom.

She eventually left the Catholic Church, upset with its history of treatment toward native cultures, especially toward native Americans. Or so I gathered: It was yet one more family matter I learned indirectly.

Wednesday's canonization of Fr. Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system, would have outraged her. Pope Francis elevated Serra to sainthood on his trip to the United States.

I share her anger, failing in my misplaced righteousness to comprehend this gesture, built on a pyre of reed-thin apologies.

I have heard from Catholic authorities that Serra deserves sainthood for the greater good of bringing the Gospel to the Chumash and Cahuilla and Ohlone and other native California cultures. Never mind supplanting hundreds of years of these cultures own beliefs and rituals. Never mind that the missions who gathered/captured native people under the authority of the Church forbade them to practice their own cultures. Some cultures even today carry the names given by the mission system — identified as mission bands, as Gabrieleños, Luiseños, Diegueños, as Serranos.

Never mind that native people were decimated under mission "care," from mistreatment and displacement and disease.

I have heard from Church authorities that Serra protected the gathered/captured from the brutal might of Spanish soldiers who helped carry out the grand plan of missions up the coast of California. Never mind that the Church was the law of this grand plan, and Serra allowed beatings and abuse of his neophytes (gathered/captured) in demanding obeisance to Church authority. Never mind that they were forced to stay and work at the missions.

I have heard it was a different time, that should be judged within context. I have heard that soldiers were whipped for their transgressions too, no different than for the native people forced to live at the mission.

My knowledge of saints is limited, but I can't think of any whose life comprised allowing others to be beaten and abused into submission. My personal sainthood meter would not include that as criteria.

A new explanation for Serra's sainthood surfaced this week — that it's an acknowledgement to Latinos of their culture's long history in what is the United States, an acknowledgement of Latino growth in the U.S. Catholic Church.

If that's so — if it's a political parlay — I feel sorry for Latinos given this burnt offering, this legacy of conquest as validation; and for native Americans, sloughed aside, not mattering now as they didn't matter then, screwed once more.

I read this week that as a result of Fr. Serra's canonization, Catholic schoolchildren in California will study a more nuanced story of the Mission Indians — that was the term used — and their hardships.

Too small consolation.

I grew up a couple of miles from Mission La Purísima, now a pastoral state park. Fr. Serra had died before this mission was founded, and Purísima was run by Fr. Fermin Lasuén, serving for a few years as the system's mission control. It's a beautiful, peaceful mission, stately sunbaked adobe buildings and cool gardens with stone fountains shaded by olive trees.

To be there is to forget that it was a prison enforced by the Word of God. The Chumash reed and bamboo homes are off to one end of the mission grounds, a token few; they must be rebuilt every once in a while.

In our home are a couple of pieces of furniture that one might describe as Mission Style. That's the legacy of the missions: We have adopted architectural touches as our own, reflecting a romanticized time that never really was.

My mom had an affinity for native cultures that, despite her eloquence, she never really articulated to us. She loved looking at Indian basketry in museums, a love lost on her children until we became her age. She liked having grown up in Washburn, North Dakota, near where Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery wintered at the Mandan village on the Missouri River 210 years ago.

Their traces are almost gone now, pushed aside, put in a museum, compartmentalized, as has befallen native cultures across this country. Everything I do, everywhere I go — almost all that we are as Americans — came about by the pushing aside, the wiping out of people before me, by my father's father's fathers, and mother's mother's mothers, to get their land and impose our own cultures, by whip and pox and foreign authority.

In California, the missions still stand as monuments, some as parks, some as active churches, refurbished and generously placarded. We regard their bucolic grandeur, and think how that lantern would make a great sconce over the garage.

To the victor, as always, has gone the spoils.

Pope Francis made it official and holy.

What would Jesus do, indeed.

Pander-Ama™

All you need to know about presidential politics is that Arnold Schwarzenegger will take over from Donald Trump as host of Celebrity Apprentice.

It's the only way any of this makes sense.

Schwarzenegger became governor of California, I firmly believe, on the novelty vote: "Yeah, sure, what the hell? It's not like state government does anything anyway. Let's put the Terminator in office! I might finally vote this time!"

So we installed Schwarzenegger and watched him chew up yet another role — larger than life, narcissistic, hedonistic, every-man-wants-to-be-him-and-every-woman-wants-to-be-with-him, AhhhNohd!!

Or some such.

He made his political move at the right time, propelled on a movement to recall the sitting governor who epitomized all that is boring and perfunctory and defacto defunct about government, including his name: Gray Davis.

Enter Schwarzenegger from stage left, in such a raucous coronation that his handlers were already talking about tweaking the Constitution so the Austrian Oak could soon become the American president.

Schwarzenegger tilted the ship nearly overboard the other way instead. Jerry Brown came back to clean up the mess, including the cigar ash that got everywhere. Arnold's wife, Maria Shriver, got a divorce after everyone including her learned Arnold had fathered a child from an out-of-wedlock affair. The deposed, disgraced star fell and fell into that deserved pit of shame: A multi-picture deal in which he gets to play a caricature of his caricature, and now the Celebrity Apprentice gig.

That'll teach him.

It's the same for Trump, I gotta believe. I gotta believe that all his so-called supporters are just yanking our chain, seeing how far this frat prank can go, seeing if this buffoon can actually cover all the bases — base, debased, off base, baseless — on his way to the White House. Doesn't matter anyway, what's the worst he can do?! Let's vote!

Teflon®™ Reagan had nothing on this guy. The stupider, more insulting, more juvenile, the more outright outrageous Trump gets — and he tops himself daily — the more his poll numbers seem to rise. The more he trumpets his catch-all platform of "We're gonna look into it, and a lot more other things, believe me!" the more attention he gets.

The more attention the news media give him, rather. The media follow the money and open their troughs to catch it, and spill the slop on us. They don't particularly care whether he's racist or xenophobic, they just point the camera and the money comes pouring in.
 
It's why I, the casual victim of social media, know that Bristol Palin is upset that President Obama invited to the White House a 14-year-old Texas kid was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. Why does the media care — and why would we? — what Bristol Palin has to say about the matter, except the media give her attention because she's the daughter of Sarah Palin? Cha-ching!

It can't possibly be what the pundits said last week, that the public is so disappointed and disenfranchised by the status quo that they're reacting in anger. (I heard this three times from three pundits last week, with eerie similarity, making me question their independence of thought.)

And Trump is their answer?! Donald Trump?! Who is nothing like the average American? Who's the poster boy for the 1%? Whose empire is a house of cards? The Donald Trump who led the campaign to insist Obama was not born in the United States? That's who we want to change the world with?

Are we on Candid Camera?

The other Republicans envy Trump and gnash their teeth and rend their garments about him, which is appropriate biblical language given the theocracies that a third of them propose for us as president. They should embrace Trump instead, for making them look almost normal.

Even Ben Carson, who said this weekend on Meet the Press, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that." He looks sane alongside Trump.

The conservative media have tried so desperately to describe what Carson could possibly have meant, that he was referring to radical Muslims; Carson himself tried to help by saying he could support a Muslim who pledged loyalty to the Constitution. I'll let you think about the stupidity of these comments, about the ironic fallout of someone saying "I would not advocate that we put a black/woman/Jew in charge of this nation," and say Carson is a brilliant joke.

Maybe I'm too hasty. Maybe I should remember that, as usual with campaigns, most of these candidates will fall away, and quickly. Promising theocrat and union buster Scott Walker dropped out this week, following theocrat and government buster Rick Perry.

We will have expended too much envy on these trivial pursuits, as usual.

I'll know sanity is restored when we resume our war on Christmas and Trump takes back his leather seat on Celebrity Apprentice. So Schwarzenegger can run.