The Blaisdell Blog

In my hand I am holding a small pin bearing the Presidential seal and George H. W. Bush’s name written on the back.   It was a gift for the work I had done on his White House advance staff.   I met President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, just once.   It was 1992, Bush had been President for four years and was in a campaign against Bill Clinton.   I had spent a life time working for Republican campaigns and had slowly moved up the ranks from walking door to door for Goldwater in Greeley, Colorado to looking up names and making calls in Florissant, Missouri all the way to the state speakers’ bureau for Reagan/Bush and finally as an aide to the White House Advance Staff when there was a Presidential visit to the St. Louis area.   I had a low-level security clearance, giving me “proximity” to the President.   In most cases I was a gofer who knew how to change the toner in the copy machine and could navigate the occasionally bizarre St. Louis streets when on an errand.  

This Tuesday, November 6 th , is Election Day.   Oddly, I am not going to ask you to vote.   [More on that later.] Voting patterns are interesting; some are predictable, others present a mystery.   For example, why do Minnesotans vote more than anyone else in the country?   Why are Texas and West Virginia, two states with nothing in common in size, geography or demographics, at the bottom of that list of voters?   If you are female, older, and well educated you are more likely to vote.   Eighteen to 29-year-olds are the least engaged—strange for people who are sure they know it all.   In the last election 2 million (!!!) minority voters who had voted for Obama twice did not bother to go to the polls for Clinton.   Obama won Michigan in 2012 by 350,000 votes, Clinton lost by roughly 10,000 . In Detroit and Wayne Counties more than 75,000 Motown Obama voters simply stayed at home. If even 2% of those who stayed home had voted for Clinton, Michigan would have stayed blue.   If

This Sunday, the church was a sea of red.  This is my favorite secular day of the Lutheran church year.  In honor of this day, I am reprinting an article I wrote for the Mensa Bulletin several years ago.  This issue was the first time Mensa had allowed articles about religion.  They solicited several regular contributors to write on any religious theme they wanted.  When I was contacted I said yes, but that I would have to write about basic, vanilla flavored, Lutheran church based Christianity.  It was the only thing I knew!  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.   Martin Luther is often depicted as a brooding, personally troubled man.   The pictures of him show a square-jawed German with a grim mouth and a furrowed brow.   Growing up in a Lutheran home, I was sure he had been a brave but angry man, nailing his 95 Thesis on the door of the church in Wittenburg and starting a religious revolution.   Even his decision to enter the priesthood, a vow t

The Sami are the reindeer herders of Northern Scandinavia.   They are native to Norway, Sweden, Finland and the adjacent areas of Russia.   They total only about 80,000 people and almost half of them live in Norway.   Early pictures of them show a people with gently Asian features, though modern Sami tend to resemble their fellow Scandinavians more rather than less. Their language is a part of the Uralic linguistic group (think Hungarian and Finnish) but has no relationship to Norwegian.   They speak in dialects, rather than one, unified language.             In many ways the Sami mirror the Native Americans of the New World.   They prefer their traditional lives (hard as they are).   Their clothing is colorful, multi-layered and reminiscent of the Inuit.   Traditional homes are small, primitive and functional.   Tents are not unknown.   Their artistic forms are primarily expressed in the decoration of clothes and useful objects.     Musical expression is in the form of chants wh