
Candlemas day by Marianne Stokes, 1901 – Public Domain
Looks like the wood in the shed will get us through this year. Every year has been an adventure since we did the cold-turkey “adios” to the “Chrysler AirTemp” oil burner in 1974. Back then I made what we laughingly referred to as “a living,” playing in a bar band and cutting/delivering firewood in the aftermath of the Arab oil-embargo. Around here there were a lot of people burning wood and some selling wood stoves. Thus there was a “market opportunity.” I seized that “opportunity” and with my relic 1943 Farmall A tractor, a cobbled-together half-cord wood trailer, a chain saw, and a tired GMC 1-ton dump pursued a market niche working up low-quality oak and maple from a woodlot ravaged by the huge wildfire of 1947 which had taken the family’s farm buildings some decades before.
I tended to our wood supply only after my deliveries were done, so we typically had to deal with wood that was not well-seasoned. Thus, our family “heating experience” was ….. well…. iffy.
Then and now, the old adage, “Half your wood and half your hay, you should have by Candlemas Day” was my guide. We’re a week out from Candlemas (i.e. Groundhog) Day and like Bill Murray’s character in the 1993 “Groundhog Day” movie, sometimes the well-worn loop I live in gets my attention.
Murray’s character, a cynical/ egotistical Pittsburg TV weatherman, “Phil Connors” gets an assignment to do a location shoot down the road in Punxsutawney, PA covering a PR stunt/ pseudo-event featuring another meteorologist “seer” in the form of furry “Phil” —— a fat rodent. The local business-types pull Phil out of his cage every February 2nd. If the whistle-pig “sees his shadow” then it’s six more weeks of winter, or so says the tradition and the Chamber of Commerce. Then the crowd heads for the bars and restaurants. Cash registers chime in the background.
But mysteriously Connors now finds himself somehow condemned to relive that same day over and over, rudely awakened each morning by a clock radio blaring Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” In the end he finally, through trial and error learns how to be useful to others, finds a kind of redemption, is allowed to move on to February 3rd, the rest of his life, we fade-to-black and that’s the movie.
And that, (minus the sunny redemption bit) seems eerily familiar this time of year, especially in presidential inauguration season. For most of my life we’ve either been at war ourselves or bankrolling proxy wars targeting people we want dead. For a while we had enough in the tank to enjoy guns AND butter. But with our trillion dollar annual military budgets, our 800+ foreign military bases, and our increasingly grasping domestic oligarchs, these days it’s one or the other. Mostly—more guns, less butter.
The new president has pledged to stop funding the Ukrainian and Zionist blood-letting. In his last term, he reportedly made similar attempts but was deterred by generals, State Department ghouls, and others that media pundits insisted on calling “the adults in the room.” We’ll see. The empire’s habits die hard.
But every year in the run-up to Groundhog Day we glide, anesthetized through Martin Luther King Day where the martyr’s message and life’s work are cynically miscast. Safely dead, he’s beyond correcting the record. Reverend King’s arguments for economic justice, opposition to militarism, war, and consumer fetishism are off-limits. He “had a dream” we’re told, and favored “opportunity.”
The words he spoke a year before his assassination at the Riverside Church (“Beyond Vietnam…” 4/4/67) are worth citing each January, though they seldom are:
“…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin… the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. “
King’s notional “true revolution of values” yet recedes unmentioned like the horizon before us. But maybe if every January 20th, we pulled it out of its shrouded cage like Punxsutawney Phil, held it up for the crowd to see and cheer…..
Well….
I’d drink to that.