Going to stretch out a bit here, twelve minutes instead of ten.  You know, what the hey?  But to make things more interesting still the timer is counting down three minutes.  Then I’ll leap up, put the frozen pierogies in boiling water and then do the last nine.  I’ve wasted a minute telling you that.

I’m thinking about a friend who was a huge fan of Howard Fast’s.  So huge a fan, in fact, that she actually arranged a meeting with Fast to see if she could assist him in his work.  Fast was hostile when they met, and she left him after a short, disappointing meeting, but her admiration for him and his work was undiminished by the sobering display of misdirected anger.

Howard Fast is a name like Woody Guthrie to me, or Zero Mostel, or one of those talented people who were around and dreaming big dreams of changing the world. (The water is boiling, pardon me)   (At the risk of overboiling my pierogies I’m back for the next nine minutes)   The system we have here, Capitalism, offers freedom to anyone who can afford it.   One bi-product of Capitalism is a permanent underclass.  It is nothing we’re proud of, it’s nothing we want, but there it is.  If you speak of a more fair way to distribute work and wealth you are called a Communist and a hater of freedom.  As Fast was called, and Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled a machine to kill fascists, as was Zero Mostel and countless others.  

Here’s the puzzle I’m puzzling over.  How does someone so idealistic she’d arrange to meet Howard Fast change her views so completely that, although politically independent, she defends Sarah Palin against unfair liberal attacks and recommends Glenn Beck as a reliable source for information on Woodrow Wilson, a man he apparently reviles?   Wilson did some terrible things, including his White House screening of “The Birth of A Nation”, D.W. Griffith’s rewriting of the post Civil War period that cast the Ku Klux Klan in a heroic light.   “Wilson was a member of the Klan,” more than one black person I’ve talked to about this has told me.  

The thing I’m puzzling over, as the game clock dips under 4 minutes, is how a person who believes in brotherhood, freedom, civil rights, justice, civil liberties and the perfectability of society and the individual can support things like Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq and the torture, or at best extreme mistreatment, of those captured person’s subjected to Dick Cheney’s lawyerly-nuanced ‘enhanced interrogation’.   I suppose it is a mystery I will ponder as I go to stir the pierogies, and stop the clock with my final time-out at 1:49.

Man, those pierogies smell good.  They are filled with potato, spinach and feta cheese.  They are steaming now as I approach the one minute mark.  Soon fans will begin filing out, as the game is all but over, and I will make my way to a spot on the floor where I can stretch at full length, do a few push-ups, wipe the dust from my hands and tuck into those delicious smelling Polish raviolis.  Fifteen seconds to the buzzer and…. game time!