I'm taking in the scenery from the seat of my bike. One foot is still clipped in to a peddle, the other is holding the bike and me up as I stand here in the middle of everywhere. The middle of everywhere, I should explain, is my term for what others like to call the middle of nowhere. It's funny how frequently these " scenery stops " come around now that I'm a cyclist of a certain age. They often happen on steep sections like this one. That has to be a coincidence. All of a sudden a whirlwind of mirth arrives. A pack of pinion jays lands in a nearby juniper, squawking, and mewing, and laughing. They're not there for long. This tree has gotten boring already. They're off instantly, just as loud as the came. They're diving for another tree where they'll keep the party going, and on and on from tree to tree for the rest of their lives. The party never stops.
     But ,were they really laughing? That's probably just me imposing my anthropomorphic view of things on every thing else in the universe. Can animals really laugh? Do they have a sense of humor? I don't know, but I'm willing to think about it for the rest of the day. Here's what I came up with, all of course subject to revision when I come up with something better.
    Even if the day to day struggle of being a jay  to eat, to reproduce, to work out their place in the pecking order ,doesn't lend itself to humor, we can't exclude the possibility that they find humor in observing us. We've been surrounded by other animals for as long as we've existed. They even knew us at our earliest stages of development. A million or so years ago we were already peculiar among animals. We were the ones least likely to succeed.  We were naked, without thick fur or feathers to protect soft flesh. We had neither claws nor fangs. We were small and weak. We scavenged the kills of more powerful predators, we looked for fruits, and seeds, and insects, lizards, and fish to eat. And yet in our helplessness, our lack of speciality, and most of all in our adaptability ,we found strength. Over the course of a hundreds of thousands of years we exploited every small advantage thrown to us and grasped for ever more .Eventually we managed to reach the point of overall dominance of whatever environment we found ourselves inhabiting. Clever us, poor them. It's a story unique to humans, full of missteps, full of irony, tragedy, and humor. 
      I can't help but take the more orthodox scientific view that among our fellow creatures with whome we share so much ,we are maybe alone in this. We may be the only beings truly in on the joke, in on any jokes at all. We may be the only creatures capable of humor. The joke is on us, the joke is us, and nothing else out there can appreciate the farce, or needs to.
      Shakespeare wrote many plays. Some are categorized as comedies, some as tragedies. His comedies contain some tragedy. His tragedies contain some humor. They are mixed because human life is mixed, sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, sometimes both at once. His plays live today because he was one of the greatest observers and expositors of the human condition ,more insightful than Freud or any of the mind scientists that followed him. To Shakespeare we were still as frail and preposterous a creature as once walked the African savannah of a million years ago. The same fears stimulate us, the same striving animates us. We're a patchwork of old and new, cruel, generous, noble and ridiculous. Add to that millennia of conditioning, millennia of advancement and culture, ingenuity, blindness, presumption, a thousand other contrivensess and  you have modern mankind. Shakespeare got the joke and used it to his advantage.
     A Mormon leader whose lecture I attended in my youth said that God certainly has a sense of humor, " If you doubt it, take a look around you ". We all did,. We all shared a good laugh. Is there any other way to get through a day, a year  or a lifetime sanely as human beings? Humor is imperative. It's lack in us, not properly turned inward, as well as outward, condemns us, freezing evolution in its path. We are the animal that laughs at itself. And that makes all the difference.
      Even little human babies laugh. Four and five year olds are masters at it. They remind me of a certain bird of the Painted desert.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Federalism gone to pot
From: David Brankley <kleybran@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2015, 3:51 PM
To: "mary@telluridenews com" <mary@telluridenews.com>
CC:

    
       I'd like to say a few nice words about pot. It's legal. Come to think of it ,so are a lot of things. So is adultery. So is ruining your health in a thousand different ways. Maybe legality alone doesn't count for all that much.
       I'm not a user. Maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time saying something really positive about pot smoking. Ill say this for it, it does so much less harm than a few more universally legal and accepted drugs. It has also contributed to several cultural achievements; Reggae, and the Beatles White Album (or was that LSD?)
        "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.", wrote James Madison. "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this : you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself." If anything of great value has been lost from the founding generation of Americans to present generations it's been the principle Madison so eloquently stated. Along with the insight that the powerful will always use their power to gain more power, the insistence that those who govern must be strictly governed themselves by instruments of internal and external control, have become museum artifacts like the Constitution or a fading copy of the Declaration of Independence.
          Madison designed a system of government that would not be particularly efficient or quick to respond, except in moments of great crisis. He believed that containing the power of government by pitting its branches and distinct interests against one another was more important than streamlining it to move decisively and easily. He knew that would be the fast track to despotism. Granting to the states the lions share of responsibilities in this overall project was one way of laying the greater power closer to its citizens while at the same time limiting Federal, centralized power. This idea was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, article ten, the most widely ignored and often abused sentence in the Constitution.
          This brings us back to marijuana. In my lifetime I've watched the principle of states rights come under assault. In the 1950s and 1960s it was commonly referred to by defenders of segregation in the South to justify  policies out of step with the national consensus. Way to discredit constitutional republican government Alabama! Tenth amendment checks and balances have been out of kilter ever since, although they were pretty rocky under Lincoln, and FDR made sure they were irrelevant during the New Deal era. The Supreme Court played its role in centralizing more and more power to the North bank of the Potomac while Madison and Jefferson spun furiously in their graves. Then along came the movement to legalize pot use. If anything holds the potential of reversing the trend to invest all power into the hands of a few Washington elites and spreading it outward again where the rest of us reside it's the pungent herb.
         The movement began by targeting a select few states with rampant pot use and liberal or libertarian voting habits and getting legalization or decriminalization language on the ballots.  States like Colorado soon saw financial reasons for allowing pot use as millions flow into state coffers in the form of sales and excise taxes, and increased tourist revenue. Now that several states have liberalized pot use and have found reasons to defend it the best thing that could possibly happen is for the next administration to put its foot down and remind the states that when it comes to drug policy, they get to call the shots. 
          With the Feds once again pulling rank on the states and enforcing federal law, the states effected would not be likely to roll over this time. They'd ban together and take it to the supreme court, the first supreme court in seventy years that seems inclined to overturn constitutionaly unsound precedence from past Supreme Court decisions . The entire effort to undermine Federalism ( a term that unfortunately sounds like the opposite of its actual meaning) would be jeopardized.
         Past generations of Americans ran rum across the Atlantic through British blockades. The Whiskey Rebellion became our first internal insurrection. Rum running from Canada and the Caribbean came back in style again during prohibition. Marijuana is grown and sold on a massive scale especially where it is not yet legal. 
         Our antecedents toasted liberty with their contraband. Let us remember to toke up for freedom, the Constitution, decentralization of power, and limited government. This puff's for you James Madison.