May you feel the warmth of love this Valentine's Day

We're seeing reports that new low temperature records are being set over much of the North Country. We hope all of you get enough love today to keep your hearts warm and pumping. Beginning tomorrow, temperatures are forecast to slloooowwwwly increase. (We won't say "get warm" until they actually get above freezing.)

may your day be full of sweetness, light and warmth

Photo by J. Harrington

Later today the Better Half gets her very own first shot of COVID vaccine. We've been starting to feel guilty about being the only one in the family selected in the Minnesota lottery for vulnerable / older folks. Now we get to hope we've recovered from any effects of our second shot in time to drive her to her second shot in a month. Stay tuned.

Today's issue of The Writer's Almanac has a not very Valentiney report about today being Carl Bernstein's birthday. (Since he was born in 1944, he is definitely more than the 74 year's listed in the Almanac. Probably a typo.) Since he was one half of the journalist team that broke "Watergate," we find the observation attributed to him quite relevant after yesterday's Senate vote that failed to convict our former (fake) president. You should go read the whole piece, but here's what we find to be the money quote:

In 1992, in a cover story for The New Republic, Carl Bernstein wrote:

“For, next to race, the story of the contemporary American media is the great uncovered story in America today. We need to start asking the same fundamental questions about the press that we do of the other powerful institutions in this society — about who is served, about standards, about self-interest and its eclipse of the public interest and the interest of truth. For the reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation. They — or more precisely, we — have abdicated our responsibility, and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.”

Had Mr. Bernstein not been so prescient nor accurate, this would have been a happier Valentine's Day for many of us. Transforming an "idiot culture" requires much more love, patience, forebearance, and other redeeming qualities than voting out one or several idiots. We have work to be done if we love this country  and its ideals.

Idiot Psalm 12

By Scott Cairns

A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness

O Being both far distant and most near,

             O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender

             Tether binding us together, and binding, yea

             and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves,

Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One

             whose dire energies invest such clay as ours

             with patent animation, O Secret One secreting 

             life anew into our every tissue moribund,

             afresh unto our stale and stalling craft, 

grant in this obscurity a little light.

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