International action to save Troy Davis

Advocates for justice staged an international day of action, May 19, to raise awareness of the plight of Troy Davis, a 40-year-old man who has spent the past 18 years on death row in Georgia for a crime he evidently did not commit. Davis was on the scene when a law enforcement officer was murdered and was convicted on the basis of witness testimony which has since been recanted. Jurors have come forward to insist they were misinformed about evidence in the case. No weapon was ever found. Furthermore, one of the witnesses who testified against Davis is a principal suspect in the case.

In Asheville, more than three dozen people gathered at the Brooks-Howell Home, for a candlelight service and vigil Tuesday evening. Dr. Kiran Sigmon, a local physician and friend of Davis, led the service, describing her family’s contact with Davis over several years, and reading a profoundly moving letter the inmate had sent to his supporters around the world last November. Sigmon’s daughters participated: Joy played a quiet piano accompaniment and read a list of states which still embrace capital punishment, together with the number of inmates on each state’s death row; Lee lit a candle of hope for each state as the names were read. The ceremony was interspersed with song, “How can I keep from singing?” and poetry.

State Senate twists RJA

Yesterday the NC Senate approved the Racial Justice Act on the second reading but added a provision that will make it easier to execute people in this state. The amendment was added in apparent reaction to the NC Medical Association rule prohibiting doctors from participating in executions. (Anyone recall, “First, do no harm” ?)

The Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court ruled last week that the medical group could not impose penalties on its members if they helped kill people. Their convoluted ruling said, in effect: Lethal injection is not a medical procedure, therefore it is appropriate for the state to require a doctor to oversee the execution.

Huh?

Well, the pro-execution majority in the Senate has now moved to enshrine that rule in the Racial Justice Act. If the bill passes as now written, we can only hope that the doctors themselves will simply refuse to participate.

Any questions?

This says it all. We need to pass the NC Racial Justice Act.

NC Racial Justice Act

It’s urgent that we contact our legislators to encourage support for the NC Racial Justice Act. It has passed in the state House and is now in committee in the NC Senate.

Race is a major factor in death sentences in our state (as in many others). While murder rates across racial lines are constant, the population of death row is largely black. Convicted murderers of whites are far more likely to be accorded death sentences than murderers of non-whites. In at least one case, the white man who planned a murder was given life in prison while the black man he hired was sentenced to death. And death penalty juries in this state have historically been mostly white.

(Here’s the story of one innocent man convicted, in large part, due to his race.)

This law, when passed, will permit convicted murderers to argue that race played a role in their sentencing and, if successful, would change the sentence to life without parole.

Sen. Martin Nesbitt
300 N. Salisbury St., Room 300-B
Raleigh, NC 27603-5925
919-715-3001
martin.nesbitt@ncleg.net

Sen. Tom Apodaca
16 W. Jones Street, Room 1127
Raleigh, NC 27601-2808
919-733-5745
828-696-3510
tom.apodaca@ncleg.net

Concerning butterflies

A letter in this week’s Mountain Xpress reminded me of an essay that was aired on WNCW and in print nationally about 15 years ago (and updated in 2002 to reflect the bee catastrophe then unfolding). (Thanks to Kristen MacLeod for her lovely tribute to the Mourning Cloak.)

On a wing and a prayer
by Cecil Bothwell

Last August we had out-of-state visitors on our mountain. They were impressed with the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains and enjoyed the relative cool above 3000 feet. But the highest praise and loudest exclamations were reserved for the insects.
“So many butterflies!” they exclaimed.
Fair enough. We do enjoy a great diversity of beautiful butterflies. If that were the only comment you might think that we just happen to have more members of the order Lepidoptera here than they do back in flatland. But listen to the next line.
“I haven’t seen so many since I was a child!” said one. “We don’t have butterflies like these anymore,” lamented another.
Do you hear the drumbeat of death in those words? No? Well, you should. There is a slow change moving across the land and it is at minimum profound and disturbing. It may be a catastrophe.
Pollinator populations are collapsing in many places around the world. That is, the insects, birds and mammals that fertilize flowers by transferring pollen from one to the next, are in sharp decline. Last year the disappearance of honey bees in the mid-west and Carolinas made the news, but honeybees are only the most familiar of the pollinator species.
Without pollination we and the rest of the animals on earth would lose our lunches. And our breakfasts and dinners. Most flowering plants need help with fertilization of their seeds, and the animal forms that have co-evolved with them do the job perfectly. There are butterflies and moths with long probosci that can reach deep into tubular flowers, and hummingbirds with a similar long reach. Many varieties of bats pollinate night blooming flowers while they feed on nectar. And thousands of species of bees, from tiny bright colored sweat bees to the huge dark carpenter sort, move pollen grains from anthers to stigmas on weeds and trees and orchids and peas. There are beetles and ants and even mosquitos who each have an important role to play.
In many cases flowers and the critters that fertilize them are very tightly entwined, one-on-one, so that neither can survive without the other. Others depend on just a few species of plants or animals. In every case they are part of the great chain of life which created and maintains the living world we inhabit.
But, back to the butterflies. Why did my guests react so strongly? They live in Ohio in a residential area between a city and surrounding farms. Because of pesticide sprays on lawns and fields, wild insects and flowers have disappeared. Many of the plants that sustain butterflies and moths are considered weeds and are subject to eradication programs.
On top of the chemical assault, habitats are fragmented by cleared fields and lawns that replace native vegetation with imported monocultures. If a butterfly, or a hummingbird or bat for that matter, cannot find a high enough concentration of food in an area, it will move on, or starve to death.
The problem would be merely aesthetic if we lost life forms that we find beautiful and appealing. But our understanding of the web of life is still very rudimentary. We have only a sketchy appreciation of the intricacy of plant and animal interactions that maintain soil fertility, atmospheric oxygen levels, water purity and other chemical systems that are the foundation of life. We know that humans cannot live alone without any other species, but we have no clue which species those might be. Pollination is the crucial juncture for all flowering plants, and the disappearance of pollinator animals will impact our lives in ways we cannot foresee. Yet we continue to abet an extinction spasm that will take hundreds or thousands of critters and plants out of the loop forever.
You can help. Encourage weeds and wildflowers. Let part of your lawn go wild. Learn to live with wasps and bees and beetles and ants and even mosquitos. Repel insects with screens, long sleeves or incense instead of killing them. If you garden choose organic controls. In silviculture avoid herbicides and allow space for mixed stands. Oppose clearcuts. Remind others of the vital services living systems provide us, and the urgent need to protect whole natural communities. Learn more by contacting the Forgotten Pollinator Project. Email .
If you marvel that a fragile Monarch butterfly migrates thousands of miles, or that a delicate swallowtail survives a tornado, remember this: those tissue paper wings very likely carry our own future as well.

(This essay is included in Gorillas in the Myth: A Duck Soup Reader, Brave Ulysses Books, Second edition 2008)

MSNBC is polling on Obama’s first 100 days

It’s one of those relatively meaningless polls that anyone with too much time on their hands can game by deleting cookies and re-voting. But for what it’s worth, click here.

An important new documentary about mountaintop removal

The filmmakers believe post-production work will be complete this summer. Click on the title below to see a short trailer.

On Coal River Trailer from On Coal River on Vimeo.

Donations, however small (or large) are welcome. I wrote them a check the other night at a fundraiser because I believe this story needs to be told.
Click here to help them out.

Support voter-owned elections!

Here’s a reminder from the folks at Democracy NC.
I fully support their campaign and will press for voter-owned elections in Asheville when I’m serving on City Council.

***
Check “Yes” on Your State Income Tax Form To Support Fair Elections &
Fair Courts in NC

Would you rather have North Carolina judges raising campaign money from
the attorneys and business interests who appear in their courts – or get
a campaign grant from a public fund if they agree to strict spending
limits and prove they are viable candidates by meeting small donor
thresholds? Which system promotes fairness in our courts and gives all
qualified candidates a chance, even if they are not personally wealthy?
Since 2004, North Carolina has had the nation’s first public financing
program for statewide judicial candidates. It’s a major breakthrough for
Voter-Owned Elections in NC — but it won’t work without public
participation and your support!

Click here to check out another quick video about supporting the NC Public
Campaign Fund on YouTube from our friends at Democracy North Carolina:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DemocracyNC.

Strange stories from my latest book

I’m releasing the latest update of my city guide, Finding your way in Asheville, at Malaprop’s, this Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. But I’ll also be reading from my about-to-be-released short story collection, Can we have archaic and idiot? Here’s one of those quirky tales, written in 1998:

Hard Cases Make Bad Law

• Copts and Robert
It wasn’t that Bob particularly minded the three Egyptians. He had had roommates before, in college. He wasn’t racist. He rather liked the smell of exotic foods being prepared, and the excited chatter of foreign tongues: Arabic, he believed, though it might as well have been Swahili or Greek. If their coffee was a little strong, so be it. He had offered them organic Kona, they preferred French Roast Arabica.
Go figure.
It wasn’t that he even particularly minded knowing that deep inside, practicing or delinquent, devout or agnostic, they held to the One Nature business as a cultural norm—their Savior’s humanness hopelessly lost in the divine as a wine drop in the sea.
Hey, you’re brought up in a culture, it is going to affect you. It affected him. It affects everybody. There isn’t an end run around it.
He wouldn’t call them “monophysite” to their faces, but, you know (and I know), they were. Insofar as they didn’t appear to understand a word of English, it wouldn’t make a small hill of weeny beans what he called them, if he were so impolite. He was not. They, too, were polite in their alien way: nodding, even bowing a little, and smiling broadly.
They didn’t carry on late or wake him early. Didn’t leave dishes in the sink or a ring in the tub. No clothes draped over chairs. No magazines or papers lying around. No unpleasant organic odors. Smoked outside and never parked in his slot.
Even (and yes, this is a BIGGY!) even left a check for three quarters of the rent on the kitchen table on the first of the month—though how on earth they knew the correct rent amount was entirely beyond him. How did they even grasp the concept that it was the first of the month? Isn’t the Egyptian calendar different? Ten day weeks and all that?
But (and here we arrive plunk on the Nub) but coming home to find strangers living in his apartment had been sort of a shock. Clear up until the morning of the twenty-third of March he had lived alone. That evening he had three roomies.
When he stepped across the threshold he heard strange voices. (Am I being robbed?) As he closed the door behind him he smelled the exotic food. (Am I being practically joked? surprisingly partied?) Stepping into the kitchen he had found the threesome sharing a lively conversation, which halted abruptly with his appearance—for nods and smiles and a gesture to the fourth place-setting and the steaming dishes of extrinsic food—and then resumed.
“Excuse me,” he had interjected. “Were you fellows aware that this apartment is occupied?”
They have not answered.

• Copse and Robergé
If he had cut down that tree once, he had cut it down a hundred times. (This, clearly, is an exaggeration. But you know the French. And, heaven help us!, this one was a golfer. A French golfeur!) He had had it. Kaput!
“Mont Blanc!” he had cried aloud. “Mon Niblick!”
(I didn’t say I knew “French.” I know the French.)
But I do know trees. And this one was a maple, a red maple. Acer rubrum. It had stood for nearly a century in the middle of what passed for a lawn, in the tiny yard that sloped steeply to Kennebunk Street, before the neat Cape, which had once belonged to a morbid and properly depressed poet of minor repute. Robergé had purchased the place at auction after the poet’s compulsory suicide. (A triple axle, as it happens, under a train car. Was it followed by free skating? Poets who aspire to the Olympian must follow the rules.), Our protagonist moved in, lugging an insatiable hunger for green grass. “Le putting green—vert de mise.”
Never mind that the topography of the place precluded “Le put.” A rolling ball before the Cape would go straight to K-street, where, if same had been lately swept and sucked by the dutiful Public Works crew, it would continue it’s dimpled spin unencumbered clear to the Shell station on Main. Eight blocks downhill.
And so, a chain saw. His first. And he no woodsman. Took down the power lines with the tree and had to do some fast explaining. (Not hampered in the least by frequent resort to his native tongue.) “Mon dieu!” he moaned. “Monet!”
And then the suckers soared. Where there had been one tree there were eight. After a month-long late winter vacation on the links in coastal Carolina, he returned to find three foot tall sprouts. “Le ruff!” The stump precluded mowing. “Le gran ruff!” So, out with the chain saw which promptly threw it’s linky blade when he hit a rock.
“Mon Day!”
He dropped it off at the repair shop. Tuesday it snowed.
By late spring our maple murderer had found time to consider. To plan. An early thaw. A rented back-hoe on the twenty-third of March. His first, and he no excavator. Around and around. A ten foot circular pit. (“Le cup?”) And finally the massive root ball was lifted and balanced on the melting verge.
Robergé turned off the machine and sidled down the walk to admire his work. The maple (seeking revenge? “Mon Odrama!”) rolled.
Kaput!
They found him later. Too late. The stump had cut down the man.
After the auction, the topsoil, the tamping, the toil, the seeding, the liming, the wine and the oil (You, like all the rest, may have forgotten that poor, misunderstood poet. I cannot.), a sapling emerged. No, not planted by the new owners (photographers, not silviculturists), but lurching skyward from a piece of root Robergé had missed, and now, frabjous day!, he/she was permitted to grow. To resume an interrupted life.
“Mon Oecious!”

• Clops and Robyn
Most of us have very little trouble coping with one-eyed neighbors.
Robyn was different.
Perhaps he wanted therapy. A chance to work it all out in Group. A little dab of Prozac. A Freudian explanation of repression and lust. A Transactional goose to the noodle. Electroshock.
Maybe he just didn’t know how to get along. A splintery square peg in the smooth round hole of life. A dodecahedron in an urgently icosohedral world.
Could it be he simply needed a slap in the face? Or a bucket of ice cold mountain spring water over his sleepy head in the middle of the night? An audit?
The fellow next door was every inch the solid citizen. Many inches, to be sure, standing as he did nearly ten feet to his singular bushy brow. But he pruned the hedges, mowed the grass, scraped and painted, cleaned the gutters, picked up litter along the curb, washed and waxed his car at appropriate intervals, applied tasteful seasonal ornaments to the front door and bought candy from fundraising high school band members and Boy Scouts.
Is it normal to fret about how many eyes One brings to One’s world view as long as that One is keeping up appearances? (Albeit from a somewhat unusual height?)
And if that One now and again eats a pollster or a census worker or a Jehovah’s Witness? What then? Is it a singular sin to speed souls along to heaven or hell if those souls earnestly seek same? (Or back to heaven or hell if such be their point of origin?)
Did anyone actually miss those (tasty) missing few?
The question answers itself. But Robyn could not abide.
“Do something!” he demanded of the helpful woman at 911. “That guy eats people!” he complained to the local constable. “My neighbor is a Cyclops!” he declaimed to the city attorney.
Authorities huddled. No one missing in the city. No one missing in the county. No one missing in the entire state! They rattled excitedly over the statistical improbability of the revelation—and the electoral implications. (!)
“Re-elect Governor Dwink! He didn’t lose track of anyone in his first term!”
But, for Robyn, this meant no enchilada. If something were to be done, it were to be done by him.
Not surprisingly, he didn’t have a wrinkled clue where to start. To be sure, there was the time honored method of yore —i.e.: round up a boatload of Argonauts and set off on a quest. But “argonaut” does not appear in the Yellow Pages. (Not even the Real Yellow Pages, which says worlds, don’t you think?) And although Robyn liked spanakopita okay, basically he was not Greek hero material. More in the way of a whipped, stuffed, brocolli’n’cheese baker with a side of onion rings couch cushion.
So, he tried the Internet. He dropped in on the “Snuffing an enormous neighborhood Cyclops” chat room, but it was all loose talk. (Mostly hot and bothered masturbatory twenty-somethings faking one-eyed orgasms, at that.) He found car bomb recipes, and mail-order automatic weapons, and free-lance terrorists for hire, and lists of super killer put-downs and scathing asides—all sorts of uplifting and effective solutions for the blizzards of interpersonal brouhaha we each face every single day. (This is—let me underline, bold face, capitalize and italicize that last—THIS IS the information age, by Jing!)
But nothing that really suited. Robyn seethed.
And then it happened. Not on the Net. Not even on the TV. It happened on the good old fashioned radio: that instrument of fireside chats, and Orson Welles, and declarations of war and rock and roll and Prairie Home Companion and insufferable, chubby, right-wing air-heads with porcupinegiac egos. The hot medium that is oh so cool. Ah, the radio.
Robyn heard news of a West Coast Forensic Pathology Department that had been caught nabbing corneas from stiffs without consent. It smacked of steaming seaminess. It evoked the dizzying whiff of ethical lapse. But, Lo!, it was completely legal. (!) (I don’t make this stuff up. You can’t make this stuff up.)
More exciting still (and one must understand that Robyn was already spinning into a double-whipped broccoli’n’cheese lather at this point) was the news that corneas fetch a couple of big bills at the eyeball bank. Serious Big Bills, not those Canadian looking Big Bens the Feds try to pawn off as cash. Real money.
Robyn’d been around the block. He knew the score. Anytime you have a commodity that goes legit for two Gs, there’s a smooth dude in a Beemer doing some sort of black market commodity spec’ who will slip you a C-note for the goods.
And he was right.
On March 23 he met a guy we’ll call “Jason” in a one hour lens shop out on West Circa. The size of the cornea even impressed the hardened street dealer. “Just one?” “Just one.” “Too bad.” Problem solved.
When the house was sold at auction the new owners found several bundled stacks of Watchtower and Census Bureau forms in a locked closet.

Most of us have very little trouble coping with Zen Buddhist neighbors.
Robyn was different.
Perhaps he wanted therapy. A chance to work it all out in Group. A little dab of Prozac. A Freudian explanation of repression and lust. A Transactional goose to the noodle. Electroshock.

(excerpted from Can we have archaic and idiot?, by Cecil Bothwell, Brave Ulysses Books, 2009)

The times they are a changin’

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: March 19, 2009 [The New York Times]

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

Click here for the rest …