This is what I did for my new book, give it a look, you’ll be amazed. If you open the BOOKs tab in the menu bar you can tap the cover and it will show you retailers in the US and the EU and Asia who are handling Kicking…

Tap PAGES to see the wonderful work of the lead designer at UNP…

Analytics after three weeks: 1,470 visits from 51 countries.

AMAZING.

https://paulvandevelderbooks.com/selected-kicking-the-loose-stones-home

https://paulvandevelderbooks.com

https://paulvandevelderbooks.com/reviews

So voila. After fretting over various options and their costs...I remembered this and threw my hat over the wall...voila! I launched this two days ago and I’m already getting visitors from all over the world - AND I was contacted by a company that wants to discuss translations of KICKING for Europe and Asia...

Paul

https://paulvandevelderbooks.com

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

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Three min. pod cast for the Wash. Post…

New Years Eve. 1924.

Greta Garbo and Isadora Duncan put on silk stockings and high heels and were seen wandering arm-in-arm down the ancient dusty streets and alleys of the town’s center. Their moonlit meanderings finally culminated at the plaza where legend tells us they danced under a beaver moon with a traveling circus of calaveras clowns in the glow of a thousand luminarias on the adobe parapets.

The fling and swish of Isadora’s flaming red hair sprung free little clouds of sparks, a spectacle that dazzled the speechless clowns as the glowing swirl rose into the heavens where it twinkles to this day under Orion’s belt in the Milky Way. The pulsing memory of the event is celebrated nightly by the lighting of luminarias on the plaza to a twilight chorus of coyotes, appointed by the ancient spirits on this mesa as the designated recording secretaries of such storied arcana.

We ventured out last night with friends to channel those bold feminine spirits under Orion’s mute gaze, and asked, in whispered tones, where else would such wonders happen? Where else?

Then come back in to make coffee - Nora is dancing to her favorite music upstairs and singing the lyrics. I smile with gratitudes for the simplicity of life’s routines on this mesa. A pot of beans on the stove. Apple pie. The hawks screeching ‘hello’ when we step outside.

 We think of Taos as a funky little mountain town not far from the United States where a plate of rice and beans and mole chicken enchiladas will set you back ten bucks and your waiter will entertain you with his latest Big Foot story. Just the other day I asked our sweet banker friend, Lucia, if anybody on the mesa cares about the outcome of the election.  She said, ‘We haven’t cared since 1848, why would we start now?’ And smiled.

  Indeed.  My fellow Taosenos live every season with simple expectations.  The irony is rich -  you open up the electoral map on MSNBC and this much forgotten state of Indians, hispanos and Latinos at the northern end of the Camino Real, in this town where Coronado’s men traded with the local Tiwa Indians seventy years before Jamestown was founded, is the only solid blue state in the nation.  These people, for all of their simplicity and magical thinking, know who they are.

And so it goes…be well my friends, abrazos from the mesa

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A veranda in Taos where the Tiwa Indians, Hispanos and calaveras have watched with bemused impunity the histrionics of United States electoral politics for many centuries…

I’ve covered four presidential election cycles, beginning with Reagan/Carter.  Politics is in my blood, a pulsing protein in my DNA. For a time my family shared a back fence in Alexandria, Virginia, with Jerry Ford.  Strom Thurmond lived on the corner and Justice Douglas - a heroic figure to me - lived a block further down. You have to love a Supreme Court justice who mows his own grass. That neighborhood was nothing if not political. My dad walked on campus many evenings with Werner VonBraun.

When I was a kid we escaped a coups in LaPaz, Bolivia, by driving over the mountains to Lima where we stayed with friends of my parents, a couple who met after the liberation of Dachau.  They were beautiful people, Jim and Edith.  It was the first time I saw numbers tattooed in flesh.

Dad joined Ivan Illich and other theologs when they launched Liberation Theology in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the 1960s.  Liberation Theology swept through Latin America and brought on the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 70s and 80s.  Jesuits were slaughtered by rightwing death squads after Bishop Romero embraced Liberation Theology in San Salvador.  I had to go and see/cover the aftermath of what my dad had been involved in twenty years before.  As my colleague, Joan Didion, noted in the New York Times Magazine, “terror was the given of the place.”  The crushing apathy I encountered back in the states, when I returned, was a terror of a different kind.  It bristled with the portents of a society unplugged, detached, disassociated from itself and the world, as if everybody went to Disneyland. That’s when I first fully appreciated the deep peril facing democracy in America.  In the perennial contest between principle and capital, principles get shredded to confetti and capital prevails to rule.

In my middle years I grew to detest religion and ethnic identification for the roles they played in that dynamic.  I covered conflicts in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and watched them unfold elsewhere. The death and brutality in every one seemed to be driven by religion and ethnic identity.  The great documentary work by Salgado, the Brazilian photojournalist, reinforced this impression, ten fold. He nearly lost his mind looking through the viewfinder.

These things - religion and ethnic identity - held societies together many centuries ago.  Today, they rip them apart.  Right wing governments are ascendant around the world.  They ride to the top in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel and elsewhere on the antipathy grown and amplified by ethnic and religious divisions.  Two centuries ago, James Madison came around to the view that all religions were poison in a world struggling to preserve the enlightenment era principles of liberalism: tolerance, diversity, plurality.  However, banishing religions in the 18th century was neither feasible nor desirable. He hoped that one day the moment of desires would arrive. An anonymous rabbi put it this way: “It matters not what religion you are a part of so long as you’re ashamed of it.” I agree with him. I agree with Madison.  Any future worth living will be free of religiosity and ethnic identities.  Until all of us identify as members of one human family we are doomed to cue up dehumanizing battles over ethnicity.

When the Democratic convention in Chicago was over in August, the bubble of euphoria lifted up dispirited millions.  I told friends to avoid the intoxication of the froth and check back in three weeks to a month.  Then they would see a clearer picture, the lay of the land, how this election was shaping up in the clubhouse turn.  The horses are now in view and racing to a photo finish. I steadfastly resist surrendering to the notion that our grand experiment in representative democracy has disintegrated into a binary conundrum in a race to a bottom where no one wins.

The primary candidates at the top of my ballot are almost irrelevant to the battle being waged in this country (and in many others).  They are proxies for the real war. White nationalism and the evangelical politics of grievance is the pre-civil war vestige that resides an inch beneath the wrought surface of this troubled society. It is the mirror image of the nationalist movement in Germany, of Zionism in Israel, of nationalism in Russia and elsewhere.  As I’ve written in books and in many publications, Zionism is another label for the tyranny of pernicious human wastes and brutality that followed the rise of Manifest Destiny in the United States the 1840s.  As bad as these modern manifestations are, we seem incapable as a species of emancipating ourselves from the very ideologies that are killing us and making us strangers to each other.

So, I watch the madness in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Taiwan, unfold from a distance knowing that the true hell awaiting mankind is right around the corner.  Climate chaos is going to unleash massive waves of human migration and dislocation around the world.  The turmoil that is already written but as yet unseen resides in the realm of the unimaginable. To put it in context, I noted - for what its worth - in the Seattle Times, “The current plan is to conduct 8 billion funerals over the next 70 years and to turn the devastation wrought in our lifetimes over to 9 billion people who aren’t here yet.”

I see the child weeping for his lost family in the rubble of Gaza, his head rocked back in a searing flash of agony, and I feel the tremors in the shoulders of the child I held in the refugee camp in Soyopango, El Salvador.  And I know, in the face of all other uncertainties and mindless cruelties, that the karmic wheel is coming around. There’s no stopping it, now, and neither of the candidates for the presidency has articulated a vision that promises a reprieve from that terminal vortex, from that event horizon. What they promise - each in his or her own way - is more of the same, the unhinged fascism of Donald Trump, and the closet Zionism of Kamala Harris. A Democratic House will hobble Donald Trump’s fascist madness, and a Republican Senate and hostile Supreme Court will stymie Harris’ loftiest ambitions.

Meanwhile, here on the mesa where the Tiwa and Hispano populations have watched the electoral circus of the United States for centuries, we dance with the calaveras on the mesa to music made by fiddles and guitars, and the beat goes on…

In 1204 AD, Pope Innocent III had a vexing legal problem: how to raise an army of secular conscripts in order to fight a religious war in the Levant?  This was no mean trick, conjoining natural law with ecclesiastical law, even for a medieval prelate with legendary legal skills.

But the brilliant young pope was determined to launch a Fourth Crusade against the infidels and Saracens of Palestine - so called since 149 AD when the Romans kicked out the Jews – in order to raise the Christian cross over the ramparts of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands.   Innocent III’s answer to his legal dilemma was an exotic edict, Quod supra his, that would shake the western world for the next eight centuries.

         Quod supra his made the novel claim that as head of Christ’s earthly flock, the pope could use the levers of natural law to accomplish his religious objectives, however far afield.  This shotgun wedding of legal theories was fraught with unintended consequences and outcomes. Scholastic era philosophers in Salamanca, Spain morphed Innocent’s esoteric edict into a Discovery Era legal pretext for the Spanish crown to lay claim to distant lands occupied by ‘heathens and savages.’  Seventeenth Century English kings liked this idea so much that they ordered royal courts to codify the Spanish law into the Doctrine of Discovery in order to take title to lands and resources ‘discovered’ by English explorers in the New World.

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Since true-believers could declare that God had chosen the citizens of the new republic to ‘civilize the land,’ no other earthly power could limit or hinder their right, or their progress, across the continent. 

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This ‘discover and conquest’ construct was robustly embraced by the rebellious founders of the United States, and in 1845, as national expansion was all the talk east of the Mississippi River, John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review in New York City, merged the Doctrine of Discovery with ‘eminent domain’ into an electrifying new concept: Manifest Destiny.  “To state the truth at once in its neglected simplicity,” wrote O’Sullivan, “our claim to Oregon (and lands of the West) is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

         O’Sullivan’s potent phrase was immediately picked up as a meme by citizens and expansionist politicians in Congress.  President Polk began using the phrase in conversations with his cabinet.  The Constitution be damned.  He now had Manifest Destiny to power the wheels of national expansion without having to adhere to the messy requirements of the Constitution, marrying the hot new idea of ‘continentalism’ with the unseeable hand of divinely ordained providence.  As for the unsettled western lands, O’Sullivan wrote: “We are entering them…with the truths of God in our minds…and with clear conscience unsullied by the past.” 

Since true-believers could declare that God had chosen the citizens of the new republic to ‘civilize the land,’ no other earthly power could limit or hinder their right, or their progress, across the continent. 

With these stiff social media winds at his back, President Polk instructed General Zachary Taylor to provoke a war with Mexico, at Matamoros, on the Rio Grande River.   Taylor tipped his hat and obliged.  A young congressman from Illinois protested this unlawful provocation and declared the war to be illegal under international law.  Polk snarled, undeterred.  Lincoln was voted out of office for his secular betrayal and the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico dropped the territories of Texas, the southwest, Utah and Nevada, California and the Oregon Territory into the nation’s lap, doubling its size.

But wait, not so fast!  In his 1804 treaty with President Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte insisted that Native Americans must be recognized as the titled owners of all the French owned lands known as Louisiana.  Consequently, in 1851, Indian Commissioner William Medill told Congress that hundreds of treaties would have to be brokered with western tribes and ratified by the Senate in order to make way for national expansion and settlement.  Under the relentless wheels of Manifest Destiny, every one of those treaties - legally defined by Article VI of the Constitution as ‘the supreme law of the land’ - would be breached by the interlopers in coming decades.

Emboldened by Manifest Destiny and gold, empowered by the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon and the Winchester repeating rifle, tens of thousands of pioneers took to the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.  Their journals described Native people as ‘vermin’.  When they overran Indian lands, Congress looked the other way.  Soldiers at the Sand Creek Massacre eviscerated the vaginas of Indian women and marched into Denver playing flutes and wearing the female body parts as hat bands. Congressional hearings into these atrocities were so gruesome they had to close the doors (a complete transcript of those hearings is reprinted in Savages & Scoundrels). When General Sherman was asked by reporters to describe an Indian reservation, he replied, “It’s a parcel of land set aside for the exclusive ownership of Indians, surrounded by thieves.”   The term ‘genocide’ would have to wait another seventy years to be coined by the United Nations.

 In 1204 AD, little could Innocent III have imagined that his late-night musings in the privacy of his Vatican bed chambers would one day let lose numerous kings, queens and unborn nations of religious zealots and racist outlaws.  History isn’t just, right or pretty.

In 1204 AD, little could the pope have imagined that eight centuries hence, two millennia of peaceful ownership and occupation of the Holy Lands by Palestinians would come to a violent end with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the reintroduction of Jewish people who would proclaim their own brand of Manifest Destiny in a new term of art, Zionism.   But history isn’t just, right or pretty.

Nor, little could Innocent III have imagined that Quod supra his would spawn so many virulent offspring, including the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny and lately, Zionism, that entrained religious justifications for lawlessness over civil rule, religious nationalism, racism and intolerance, land theft and, finally, dominion.   

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When I heard Biden speak a few minutes later, I thought, as a historian, what is this man smoking?   Then came all the others, parroting the same vacuous phrase: ‘there is no place in this society for political violence.’

This nation was born in political violence.  The earliest citizens were brazen, crude, violent people.  Upon hearing alarming reports about  political violence in settler communities on the Appalachian frontier, George Washington and the 1^st Congress sent Major Caleb Swan to investigate.  Swan reported back that the white settlers “are the most abandoned violent wretches that can be found anywhere…there is scarcely a crime but some of them has not been guilty of.”  American Exceptionalism had been born.  Blood flowed like a river.

The 19th century was a blood bath.  Ethnographers estimate that political leaders like Jackson and Polk initiated policies that wiped out millions of Native Americans.  In 1842 Congress hired Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the grandson of the Revolutionary War hero, to investigate atrocities on the Trail of Tears.  President Tyler’s secretary of war, John C. Spencer, told Congress that Hitchcock’s final report would never be seen ‘without my heart’s blood.”  The ensuing brawl on the House floor entrained dozens of representatives.  Guns were drawn before Capitol police restored order.  The report has never been found.  

The following decade saw one out of six California Indians survive the first years of statehood.   We followed that travesty by killing 700,000 men in a Civil War that arguably accomplished NOTHING to address the character defects in American society, to say nothing of the Indian Wars, wherein U.S. troops marched into Denver after the massacre at Sand Creek wearing the eviscerated vagina’s of Cheyenne women as hat bands. Lest we be duped by deference into thinking these were male oriented monstrosities, the good women of Denver sewed together those vaginas into a frieze they hung over the stage of the new opera house for the Xmas pageant.

While those atrocities were winding down to Wounded Knee,  eleven thousand black men and women were strung up in the South during Jim Crow and not one white man ever spent a day in jail for those crimes.  Teddy Roosevelt turned a blind eye to all of that and exported the taste for mayhem to the Philippines,  killing tens of thousands as a prelude to the murderous race riots in Washington D.C., in 1919, and the slaughter of the Bonus Army protestors in 1932. 

These events were all a dress rehearsal for the killing of millions in South East Asia at the request of corporate America, justified by an absurd notion advanced by John Foster Dulles - ‘the domino theory’ - at the added surcharge of 54,000 American teenagers.  The year, 1968, was  in the middle of all of that wherein political violence raged from the first day to the last. The night King was assassinated eighteen American cities were ablaze, followed by the singular political event in many of our lives, the assassination of Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles.  Then came Bloody Chicago, the free wheeling political violence of Mayor Daly’s uniformed thugs at the Democratic convention in August.

Political violence has been and IS, sadly, an embedded feature of America's political DNA.  Our leaders - from Jefferson and Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Trump and Biden, have been deft at finding proxies to do the dirty work, whether in Selma, Saigon, San Salvador, Santiago, Wounded Knee, Grenada, Kabul, Baghdad, Gaza, Tulsa. No matter, we're always there, more than willing to pull the trigger, drop the bomb, light the fire, launch the missile. You can count on us.

The unasked, unanswered question hanging over all of this in 2024 is, to my mind, simply this: When is a leader in this country going to step up to a podium and call a spade a spade? Who - more than Trump - has been calling for, ne, demanding, violence in the streets to flex his will?  Who is going to stand up and call out Trump and his sycophants, not to mention Biden and all the other politicians with Palestinian blood on their hands.  They would all do well to remember an ancient Roman political axiom: ‘that which begins in blood usually ends in it.’

Political violence is America's first and last name. Until we own that, it will  continue to own us. Shame on Obama. He should know better than to utter such vacuous, cynical words. Shame on Biden.  He can’t help himself.  Shame on Josh Shapiro, and on the New York Times editorial board, and on the Washington Post editorial board, and all  the cartoon politicians who parrot the nonsense that “there is no place for political violence in America”.  Political violence may not have been born here, but surely, we adopted it before we were ever a nation and made it our own. It lies at the heart of America’s story, and if you could remove political violence from that story the entire narrative would fall apart. There’s no hiding from that. There is only wave after wave, generation after generation, of denial.

For two hundred plus years, American society has been the embodiment of political violence.  So called American exceptionalism - a la Heritage Foundation - drips with blood.  Give me one politician with the spine to call out all of that.  Just one. Many many millions of us are waiting.

Then, maybe then, we’ll have a leader with the spine, the vision, the courage, the honesty of soul, to lead us out of this house of darkness.

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10) When they let you out of jail the only person interested in your excuses is your mother. She needs a meeting.

9) Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may never get here, but every today you don't drink, you win.

8) If you think being sober, going to meetings, doing service work and working the steps with a sponsor, sucks... give booze another chance.

7) Your happiest nows are building a bonfire out of your unhappiest yesterdays.

6) Fear of financial insecurity is here to stay. The old timers blew this one. They were coming out of the Great Depression. They're metrics were different. Leave the way you came in - penniless and sober.

5) By year 10 of sobriety you'll know two things with certainty: A) Drinking is for whimps, it takes courage to face everyday madness without a drink in your hand, and B) 99% of your life is none of your business.

4) In terms of romance and sobriety...we don't pick the healthy ones - until that magical day when the healthy ones start picking us. Does anyone need me to repeat that?

3) Sobriety will try to break your heart, but fear is no match for living when you're happy, joyful and free. Until you fully get this, keep coming back.

2) Your last drink was your salvation. Your next drink will be your ruin.

1) I never went to a whore house to learn how to kiss.

Jose and his new friend, a rufus hummingbird, become acquainted…

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What a day, and it's not even noon. Jose, the redtail chick with all the bluster and bravado in the nest over our house, decided to try out his wings today. His experiment didn't work so well at first and he landed atop the huge pile of bark mulch in our front yard. We watched from the dining room window as he tried to figure out what to do next, as his parents were off hunting and he’d forgotten to plug in his cell phone.

Alas, he finally hopped down off the pile and tried out his legs, walking over to the cottonwoods along the edge of our property, probably thinking (perhaps) that was a nice safe place to wait for assistance from a parent. I slipped out the front door and walked to a spot about thirty feet away and sat down. He knows us, so he didn't seem at all disturbed by my presence, but his hawk-eyes were definitely fixed on me and mine on him. For the longest time. Thirty minutes? Forty? I didn't move. Until, to my astonishment, a baby rufus hummingbird swooped in and hovered right in front of Jose and the two of them took a long moment filled with curiosity to check each other out.

I've had the opportunity to capture many astounding things with a camera...but this one leans into the miracle category...I got to watch this moment of discovery with my own eyes…

A few minutes later mom arrived and took her favorite perch on a limb in the silver leaf poplars. She let out a loud SCREECH and that seemed to be enough encouragement for Jose to try again. He lifted off the ground and struggled to climb but those wings lifted him up to a skinny branch where he landed and gathered his wits…before leaping into the air for the real thing, a test flight soaring in circles high above our heads…it was a beautiful thing to watch. Nora and I didn’t say a word…we just looked at each other and smiled. And smacked our hands together…witness to these tiny miracles…

Little did we know that we were moving into a neighborhood, a spectacle of non-human spirits that surround us here on the mesa in Taos. Redtail hawks come back to the same nest year after year to create the next generation of magic, an extraordinary point in the universe where form and function are inseparable. This year our resident 'couple' had two chicks, and not knowing whether they're two girls, two boys, or one of each, we threw our hats over the wall and named them Jose and Maria. Mom and dad are now furiously hunting snakes and mice on the neighboring 'pueblo lands' to keep up with these appetites, occasionally dropping the aforementioned critters when they reach the nest. How do we know? Because they bounce off the skylights in our kitchen...BONK!...a sound that resonates through the house. Last year we had arborists trim these trees with 'roosts' to make flying lessons easier, and a less challenging arrival and departure for the parents. It worked. They all seem to love the 'roosts,' where they now perch, studying the world below, and spread their wings to feel the lift that will be their ticket to the world in a few weeks...a joy to watch all of this unfolding over our heads...as it has for tens of thousands of years.