lummi island wine tasting July 18-19 ’25
Hours this weekend:
4-6 pm Friday (loud & crowded) & Saturday (lower key)
to move a mountain is easy
to change one’s nature is more difficult…
This week’s wine tasting
Novelty Hill Stillwater Creek Chardonnay ’22 WA $22
Aromas of lemon verbena, thyme and apple blossoms; creamy fruit flavors of mango, lemon curd, pineapple, and crème brûlée.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’23 California $16
Fruit-forward with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, rich cherry, and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that over-deliver for the modest price.
Can Blau Can Blau ’20 Spain $16
From the lovely Montsant wine region SW of Barcelona; aromas and flavors of cocoa bean and ripe, dark fruits and berries; seamless texture and silky finish that improve with aeration.
Economics of the Heart: The Politics of Anger
Jemez River, NM (Wikipedia)
Years ago I did numerous meditation retreats at a Zen center on the Jemez River in New Mexico. A friend from those days told me he had been hosting a morning group s at his home in Colorado for a few interested locals.
He told me a fellow had come sporadically but after a while told my friend he was stopping. “That’s okay,” said my friend, “when you’re miserable enough, you can come back.” Some months later the fellow showed up at the door early one morning, saying, “okay, I guess I’m miserable enough.” They both laughed, and he kept coming.
This memory came up while reading several articles today on “the politics of anger” invented, fostered, and refined into a potent political weapon by Republicans since about 1990.
First came the angry talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, and more. Their attitudes were snide and insulting, their politics mean-spirited and angry and their comments targeted whichever Democratic politician had been chosen by the editors as the Target of the Week (or month or year) for their slanderous, false, mean-spirited narratives.
Those broadcasts dovetailed perfectly with Gingrich’s angry Speakership in the early 90’s, and set a tone for Republican politics which has only grown more arrogant, hostile, and vicious, to be emphatically punctuated by Mitch McConnell’s blocking of Obama’s Supreme Court nomination and their whole party’s failure to impeach the Tweetster either of the two times he was convicted. And now, of course, Project 2025.
Over the last six months the nation has been bombarded with a mountain of lies to bring us to this moment where we cannot rely on our Constitution, because it is deliberately being ignored. We cannot rely on Congress, because it is controlled by Republicans who want to abandon it. We can’t rely on the Constitution, because even though the lower courts generally stick to it for guidance, the Supreme Court majority still leans toward a replacing the Constitution with a Christian autocracy ruled by white billionaires.
So with all that going on, hopes dimming, tension and anxiety building, there is beginning to appear a small light growing not in our government, but in ourselves.
Below are links to three articles worth a read. In a way, these ideas take us back to our founders, who united in revolution against a tyrannical king.
ref 1 “We have become an indig-nation where discourse is replaced by discord, and debating one’s rivals turns into debasing them, all backed by self-serving tones and punctuated by reddened faces, bulging veins, and wild gesticulations of irritation.”
ref 2 “Prior research has shown that political attacks communicated by independent actors (rather than candidates) can be especially influential in shaping political beliefs. Social media algorithms reward and amplify attacks precisely because they’re engaging. Studies show this makes outrage more potent and visible, giving users a warped view of what the public believes.”
ref 3 “political cynicism as an attitude that’s rooted in distrust of political actors’ motivations. It goes further than healthy skepticism, they say, because it involves wholesale rejection of people and processes in democracy, and an underlying belief that politicians are guided by corrupt, self-serving, personal interests, rather than service to the public good.”
ref 4 “recent civic uprisings in authoritarian regimes often involve ordinary individuals — novices with no prior links to organized activism…despite the threat of repression, presenting a puzzle for traditional theories of political participation.”
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