Burnsville, Minnesota
Sunday, August 22, 2010
As the Westboro Baptist Church would say, Welcome, depraved sons and daughters of Adam! In the news recently has been the controversy over the construction of an Islamic center near the former site of the World Trade Towers in New York City. Good old fashioned picketing and demonstrating, in what passes for a political issue in the post-intellectual, religion-obsessed 21st century. On one side are believers in the myth that all religions are entitled to respect in this country, and on the other side are believers in the myth that Ground Zero is a sacred shrine to the onslaught of Islamic extremism against innocent Judeo-Christian America. Both groups are of course wildly deluded. If these people were arguing the relative merits of syphilis and AIDS they couldn't be more off base, but at least then we would all understand how wrong they are.
The problem of course is that no one recognizes what an incurably evil presence ALL organized religion is in the world today. We shouldn't be promoting religion, or even tolerating it. We should be working to eradicate it! A pox on all houses, I say.
I just finished reading a biography of George Washington. In it the authors discuss the attitude of our first president (and of most of the founding fathers) toward religion. What led to the strong feelings of these men in favor of the freedom and equality of religion was their conviction that religion of any stripe had the virtue of assisting the government in maintaining moral order for the good of an essentially secular society. In the words of Washington himself, a nonreligious man of vaguely deist convictions, "I care not if men are Mahometans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or Atheists." He believed that mere tolerance was not enough, since tolerance implied "the indulgence of one class of people" in permitting others to practice what that class in fact had no right to abridge, or even to pass judgment on, in the first place.
But what happens when religions do not benignly promote moral order for the good of all? What happens when religions teach things that are anti-democratic and basically intolerant? The truth that no one wants to admit is that all religions, in claiming to reveal rules and creeds handed down by the Master of the Universe, teach something that is fundamentally antithetical to the principles of a free, majoritarian society. In a nutshell, how can you fall prostrate at the feet of an absolute monarch of the heavens and earth on Sunday and reject dictatorship the other six days of the week? Even the imagery of religion--king, ruler, lord, master, father--militates uncompromisingly against free thought and mature action.
What Washington and his contemporaries didn't fully grasp at the time (although they certainly should have, given the history of Europe which they all knew well) was the infinite capacity of religion to do evil in its own name and in the name of God, and to undermine the republic they had devised. Maybe they were cockeyed optimists, or maybe the penny-ante religions of North America just hadn't fucked with them as much as the Pope and the Church of England had. What they were perhaps attempting to do by treating all religions equally in a hands-off way was to thumb their noses at the religions that presumed they were better than the others (all of them, in other words), and to neutralize the potential for any single religion to work its will on American society in anything but the most harmless and platitudinous way. If so, the 21st century would have scared the shit out of them and probably caused them to rethink the First Amendment.
Most people forgive religions for the excesses of their most radical adherents by blaming individuals, rather than the creeds themselves, for the damage they do. But a religion is only as good as its worst and most reckless adherents. Most were founded by reckless and intolerant people. One of the pernicious things about all religions is that they have the inherent tendency to adopt the conviction that they are paths to truth, rather than paths to self-perpetuation through mumbo jumbo, bullshit, and the collection plate. The more intolerant religions believe they are the ONLY path to truth, and the more liberal believe they are one of several, or perhaps many, paths to truth. Either way, religions all commit the same absurd error, namely, thinking that they know anything at all about the cosmos outside or beyond the narrow, palpable confines of mother earth. William James, Alfred Adler, and others who studied the positive aspects of religions believed that they are useful to help us achieve balance and strive for goodness. Some people believe religion exists as a manifestation of the inherent human quest to know the unknowable. Others, no more or less off-base, believe the gods are aliens from other planets. Most people can't be satisfied that the unknowable is indeed just that, so they use religion to help them arrive at empirical conclusions about things that simply cannot be ascertained. Then they systematically view all other ideas in the light of their religion, including or excluding them on that basis. All that would be bad enough if religions existed solely on the high plane of intellectual inquiry. But most people are, alas, not too bright. One of the most difficult realities to face in this vale of tears is that an IQ of 100 is the average within our species, and not at the lower end. Thus inadequately armed against the forces of illogic, we let religions take on lives of their own. Even worse, we let individual nut jobs, like the Hebrew prophets, St. Paul, Mohammad, and Joseph Smith, write manifestos which we then call the word of God and swallow whole.
Which leads us back, somehow, to Ground Zero in New York City. It is a symbolic place, to be sure. First, it's where two of the most architecturally uninspired large commercial buildings of the late 20th century once stood. Second, it's where a dozen or so dedicated men got more bang for their buck than in perhaps any other single military operation, causing a country of 300 million to fall into panic and disarray, then to embark on a pointless, endless, financially ruinous, and dispiriting war. And finally, it's where the real face of religion has found its modern expression--in the self-righteous act of the bombings themselves (which, let's face it, would have been the envy of medieval Crusaders, Zionist freedom fighters, and Catholic IRA partisans alike), and now in the posturing of Jews and Christians and Muslims, all of whom seem to be oblivious of the real enemy, which is their own sick conviction of the correctness of their beliefs--beliefs which do not stop harmlessly at the doors of their houses of worship, but invariably intrude into the realm of secular public discourse, where they can do no good, and much harm.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Where's The Hate?
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
I'm feeling very left out. Dissed, in fact.
I know I don't command a very large audience; even when I was walking there were only a dozen or two followers, and now that I'm off for the summer I'm writing for myself and a small handful of friends. Okay. That's not what I'm complaining about.
Here's the thing. Today on the AOL home page I read that the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing Justin Bieber's concert in Kansas City tonight. That led me to do a little research. I knew a bit about the Westboro Baptist Church already--a fundamentalist, predestinarian outfit out of Kansas who have become famous as the traveling "God Hates Fags" picketers. They're also the folks who show up at military funerals holding signs saying "God Hates Dead Soldiers," and the like, in order to spread their message that God hates America for being wicked, and that that's why soldiers are dying.
What I didn't know much about was Justin Bieber. I looked him up on Wikipedia, then sampled a few of his songs. As far as I can ascertain, he's a 16-year-old boy from Canada who sings love songs in a girlishly high voice to teenage girls who also, no doubt, have girlishly high voices. In that respect he's pretty ordinary. But according to the Westboro Baptist Church web site, they're protesting him because he "has a platform given to him by God to speak to this world," and a "duty to teach obedience by his actions and words." But instead he teaches sin and rebellion, and worse that that, poses with President Obama, who is the Anti-Christ Beast. The two of them are leading us all to hell.
Okay, okay. Take a deep breath. I know what you're thinking. How could the Westboro Baptist Church condemn a nice, innocuous young man like Justin Bieber--a Canadian, no less!--just because he hung out a little with the Anti-Christ Beast Obama? Does one photo-op have to ruin your whole life? And furthermore, by what superhuman power do they think that Justin, or anyone else, could teach anything to a bunch of teenage girls?
In the AOL home page article they mentioned that Westboro Baptist Church also has condemned Lady Gaga. Here again I was caught flat footed. I did have a vague idea that she is a sort of latter-day Madonna. First, I took advantage of the presence at my house this summer of my 16-year-old grandson, and asked him for more information. He says that it has been widely rumored that Lady Gaga has a penis. Why this should be such a big deal I don't know. I mean, Justin Bieber probably has a penis. Is that a bad thing? Then I checked her out on Google and played a few of her songs, and my original understanding was pretty much confirmed. Lady Gaga might be a bit more postmodern than Madonna was in her time, and has more cultural threads to unravel, but she seems to have nailed the tacky Italian girl look about as well as Madonna ever did (perhaps because both of them are, after all, tacky Italian girls). Westboro Baptist Church's take on Lady Gaga is pretty straightforward, in any case. They call her a "simple slut," which isn't as far off the mark as I would have expected.
Well, I said I have a complaint, and so I do. Here I am, toiling in the Devil's vineyard on a regular basis, and I'm being totally ignored by the Westboro Baptist Church! I deserve some hate, here! Aren't I at least as much of an abomination in the sight of God as some boy singer from Ontario or some cheesy Material Girl wannabe? I like to think I've strayed pretty far from the paths of righteousness. And I have a platform I could be using to teach obedience to the world. But do I? No.
I know it might just be that the folks at Westboro Baptist Church haven't caught on to me yet. Or it might be something else again. When I read their web site I was struck by a couple of things. First, I couldn't take issue at all with their attitude toward the war America is fighting and toward the so-called "heroes" who come back in boxes from our vain and counterproductive military adventures. True, Westboro Baptist Church and I might have reached the same conclusion about the war for different reasons. They believe that America has condemned itself by tolerating homosexuality, worshipping the flag as a false idol, and supporting debauchery and wickedness in all its many forms. I wholeheartedly agree with the bit about the flag worship, but mostly I believe we are trying to fight a war against one idiotic ideology while clothed in the raiment of an equally idiotic ideology of our own. Either way, the Westboro Baptist Church's own words say it better than mine ever could: "When you step out onto the battlefield for a rebellious nation who daily lifts up her finger to flip off God, you are walking into the cross hairs of that raging mad God." Amen, and duck!
Another thing that strikes me is how correct the Westboro Baptist Church is in its belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I defy you to find one passage in either the Old or New Testament that states otherwise. But you won't have to look far to find verses that say things like this one, from Leviticus 20:12--"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death." Or, if you're partial to the more enlightened New Testament, how about this one, from I Corinthians 6:9--"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind."
So what's a girl to do? If, like me, you don't believe there's anything wrong with homosexuality, but your so-called "holy book" tells you otherwise, there's really only one thing to do. Shitcan the holy book, and for that matter, all the rest of the holy books in the world that lead people down twisted paths toward hatred and destruction of one another. Don't try to pull items out of context and ignore inconvenient things to make the scripture make sense to you. And don't try to turn your religion into a kinder, gentler version of its true self. That's a complete waste of time.
There. If all that doesn't earn me some hate, I don't know what will.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
I'm feeling very left out. Dissed, in fact.
I know I don't command a very large audience; even when I was walking there were only a dozen or two followers, and now that I'm off for the summer I'm writing for myself and a small handful of friends. Okay. That's not what I'm complaining about.
Here's the thing. Today on the AOL home page I read that the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing Justin Bieber's concert in Kansas City tonight. That led me to do a little research. I knew a bit about the Westboro Baptist Church already--a fundamentalist, predestinarian outfit out of Kansas who have become famous as the traveling "God Hates Fags" picketers. They're also the folks who show up at military funerals holding signs saying "God Hates Dead Soldiers," and the like, in order to spread their message that God hates America for being wicked, and that that's why soldiers are dying.
What I didn't know much about was Justin Bieber. I looked him up on Wikipedia, then sampled a few of his songs. As far as I can ascertain, he's a 16-year-old boy from Canada who sings love songs in a girlishly high voice to teenage girls who also, no doubt, have girlishly high voices. In that respect he's pretty ordinary. But according to the Westboro Baptist Church web site, they're protesting him because he "has a platform given to him by God to speak to this world," and a "duty to teach obedience by his actions and words." But instead he teaches sin and rebellion, and worse that that, poses with President Obama, who is the Anti-Christ Beast. The two of them are leading us all to hell.
Okay, okay. Take a deep breath. I know what you're thinking. How could the Westboro Baptist Church condemn a nice, innocuous young man like Justin Bieber--a Canadian, no less!--just because he hung out a little with the Anti-Christ Beast Obama? Does one photo-op have to ruin your whole life? And furthermore, by what superhuman power do they think that Justin, or anyone else, could teach anything to a bunch of teenage girls?
In the AOL home page article they mentioned that Westboro Baptist Church also has condemned Lady Gaga. Here again I was caught flat footed. I did have a vague idea that she is a sort of latter-day Madonna. First, I took advantage of the presence at my house this summer of my 16-year-old grandson, and asked him for more information. He says that it has been widely rumored that Lady Gaga has a penis. Why this should be such a big deal I don't know. I mean, Justin Bieber probably has a penis. Is that a bad thing? Then I checked her out on Google and played a few of her songs, and my original understanding was pretty much confirmed. Lady Gaga might be a bit more postmodern than Madonna was in her time, and has more cultural threads to unravel, but she seems to have nailed the tacky Italian girl look about as well as Madonna ever did (perhaps because both of them are, after all, tacky Italian girls). Westboro Baptist Church's take on Lady Gaga is pretty straightforward, in any case. They call her a "simple slut," which isn't as far off the mark as I would have expected.
Well, I said I have a complaint, and so I do. Here I am, toiling in the Devil's vineyard on a regular basis, and I'm being totally ignored by the Westboro Baptist Church! I deserve some hate, here! Aren't I at least as much of an abomination in the sight of God as some boy singer from Ontario or some cheesy Material Girl wannabe? I like to think I've strayed pretty far from the paths of righteousness. And I have a platform I could be using to teach obedience to the world. But do I? No.
I know it might just be that the folks at Westboro Baptist Church haven't caught on to me yet. Or it might be something else again. When I read their web site I was struck by a couple of things. First, I couldn't take issue at all with their attitude toward the war America is fighting and toward the so-called "heroes" who come back in boxes from our vain and counterproductive military adventures. True, Westboro Baptist Church and I might have reached the same conclusion about the war for different reasons. They believe that America has condemned itself by tolerating homosexuality, worshipping the flag as a false idol, and supporting debauchery and wickedness in all its many forms. I wholeheartedly agree with the bit about the flag worship, but mostly I believe we are trying to fight a war against one idiotic ideology while clothed in the raiment of an equally idiotic ideology of our own. Either way, the Westboro Baptist Church's own words say it better than mine ever could: "When you step out onto the battlefield for a rebellious nation who daily lifts up her finger to flip off God, you are walking into the cross hairs of that raging mad God." Amen, and duck!
Another thing that strikes me is how correct the Westboro Baptist Church is in its belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I defy you to find one passage in either the Old or New Testament that states otherwise. But you won't have to look far to find verses that say things like this one, from Leviticus 20:12--"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death." Or, if you're partial to the more enlightened New Testament, how about this one, from I Corinthians 6:9--"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind."
So what's a girl to do? If, like me, you don't believe there's anything wrong with homosexuality, but your so-called "holy book" tells you otherwise, there's really only one thing to do. Shitcan the holy book, and for that matter, all the rest of the holy books in the world that lead people down twisted paths toward hatred and destruction of one another. Don't try to pull items out of context and ignore inconvenient things to make the scripture make sense to you. And don't try to turn your religion into a kinder, gentler version of its true self. That's a complete waste of time.
There. If all that doesn't earn me some hate, I don't know what will.
Monday, July 26, 2010
So Many Channels, So Little News
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Monday, July 26, 2010
The news gets stranger all the time. I already take it for granted that the line between fluff news and "real" news has been smudged beyond recognition, with the top stories being things like whether Angelina Jolie's new movie is outgrossing Leonardo di Caprio's, and all that. (When, exactly, did the public start caring about how much money a film makes? Movie tickets aren't shares of stock, after all.)
I've talked about the way this marriage between reality and pure silliness has visited the political scene, with the Sarah Palin phenomenon. One of my faithful readers suggested that it took some brains for Palin to become governor of Alaska. But seriously, Alaska? The mayor of Anchorage probably has a tougher job than the governor does. (With over a third of the state's population, it's still only the 75th largest city in the U.S.) The state is mostly owned by the federal government and pretty much all the rest is run by oil companies and native American tribes, and its enitre population is less than that of Kent County, Michigan. The few white people who do live there all believe that government shouldn't govern any more than absolutely necessary. So Bullwinkle the Moose could handle the job. The fact that Palin got elected governor says a lot more about Alaska than about her.
Right away you're probably remembering that California, a state to be taken much more seriously than Alaska, has been governed by not one but two movie actors. But really, folks, they were celebrities in their own right before they became politicians. They were already part of the news, just like Lindsay Lohan and Kourtney Kardashian and the president of BP are. But Sarah Palin, who was she? A nothing. It's a matter of timing, above all. It would be like if I tried to become a serious politician without first having been on my own reality show or having played a forensic pathologist or a cop. I mean, c'mon guys. No chops, no votes--I think we can all agree on that.
So back to how it got this way. In part, it has to do with the fact that there are too many channels and home pages chasing after too little news. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, AOL, Yahoo, and some that I'm forgetting. Oh, and CSPAN, for those of you who like your inanity straight from the horse's mouth without the intervening drivel and mock concern of an anchorman. When TV started back in the late 40s and early 50s newscasts were shorter and there were fewer of them. The people who ran the stations knew that on any given day there's only about fifteen minutes of real news the American public cares about or needs to know. Well, maybe back in the olden days, you say, but surely today's world is more complex. Just what was happening in the world at the time? The Nuremberg Trials, the Korean War, the formation of NATO, the Communist takeover of China, and McCarthy's witch hunt come to mind immediately. It still took only a few minutes to recap those stories on a daily basis without repeating anything. Today any one of those events would practically generate its own channel, for God's sake. Katie Couric wouldn't know whether to shit or go blind. In fact, there are few daily news stories now that could hold a candle to those I just mentioned, particularly since the media has made a conscious decision--with the encouragement of the government, I'm sure--not to cover the war in Iraq/Afghanistan too closely, but instead only to celebrate the brave "heroes" who die in it and to mention Osama bin Laden's name once in awhile. (The lesson of Vietnam was learned well; if you show people on a daily basis what happens in a war, they begin to recoil in horror and want to end it. And we certainly can't have that.)
In 2010, to cover that fifteen minutes of real news (i.e. important political happenings and miscellaneous natural disasters throughout the world) we have half a dozen 24-hour news channels in addition to the three old tired networks. Immediately the problem is this: assuming it's reasonable to broadcast this fifteen minutes of news maybe four times a day, what do you do with the remaining 23 hours? Enter the pundit, the analyst, the scrolling bottom line, the news special--in short, repetition. Enter celebrity news. News about celebrities who make news. News about news stories celebrities are interested in. News about celebrities who don't care about the news. News about news stations that try to get celebrities to make news even when they don't want to make news. Etc. More channels mean more space to fill, which somehow leads to even more channels.
True enough, we have been fascinated by stars for decades. We followed famous people who joined the war effort back in WW2, and ones who may or may not have been commies, and ones who married each other. In '64 Barry Goldwater ran a series of ads in which movie stars--Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Raymond Massey, Ronald Reagan--endorsed their man. And sports has always had its own sort of info-tainment niche. But at one point we used to think that something had to happen to someone first, and then it would become a news story. Now an individual can be, by virtue of his or her very existence, an ongoing news and entertainment story.
Some think our attention span is shorter than it used to be because of TV, but I'm not so sure. Fifty years ago could we have stayed interested for over five years in the story of Angelina taking Brad away from Jennifer? Yet there it is on the covers of the tabloids to this very day. Back then the equivalent stories involved Liz Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Richard Burton, or Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, but those dramas had relatively short shelf lives. I think if anything our appetite for such shit has become greater and more indiscriminate, just as our appetite for food has grown in the same way. How else could an individual with a personality as utterly vapid as that of Sarah Palin have held the public's attention for as long as she has without having done anything at all? Not even so much as a movie, or a L'Oreal commercial, or an endearing sitcom role, or a dance contest, or an arrest.
Monday, July 26, 2010
The news gets stranger all the time. I already take it for granted that the line between fluff news and "real" news has been smudged beyond recognition, with the top stories being things like whether Angelina Jolie's new movie is outgrossing Leonardo di Caprio's, and all that. (When, exactly, did the public start caring about how much money a film makes? Movie tickets aren't shares of stock, after all.)
I've talked about the way this marriage between reality and pure silliness has visited the political scene, with the Sarah Palin phenomenon. One of my faithful readers suggested that it took some brains for Palin to become governor of Alaska. But seriously, Alaska? The mayor of Anchorage probably has a tougher job than the governor does. (With over a third of the state's population, it's still only the 75th largest city in the U.S.) The state is mostly owned by the federal government and pretty much all the rest is run by oil companies and native American tribes, and its enitre population is less than that of Kent County, Michigan. The few white people who do live there all believe that government shouldn't govern any more than absolutely necessary. So Bullwinkle the Moose could handle the job. The fact that Palin got elected governor says a lot more about Alaska than about her.
Right away you're probably remembering that California, a state to be taken much more seriously than Alaska, has been governed by not one but two movie actors. But really, folks, they were celebrities in their own right before they became politicians. They were already part of the news, just like Lindsay Lohan and Kourtney Kardashian and the president of BP are. But Sarah Palin, who was she? A nothing. It's a matter of timing, above all. It would be like if I tried to become a serious politician without first having been on my own reality show or having played a forensic pathologist or a cop. I mean, c'mon guys. No chops, no votes--I think we can all agree on that.
So back to how it got this way. In part, it has to do with the fact that there are too many channels and home pages chasing after too little news. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, AOL, Yahoo, and some that I'm forgetting. Oh, and CSPAN, for those of you who like your inanity straight from the horse's mouth without the intervening drivel and mock concern of an anchorman. When TV started back in the late 40s and early 50s newscasts were shorter and there were fewer of them. The people who ran the stations knew that on any given day there's only about fifteen minutes of real news the American public cares about or needs to know. Well, maybe back in the olden days, you say, but surely today's world is more complex. Just what was happening in the world at the time? The Nuremberg Trials, the Korean War, the formation of NATO, the Communist takeover of China, and McCarthy's witch hunt come to mind immediately. It still took only a few minutes to recap those stories on a daily basis without repeating anything. Today any one of those events would practically generate its own channel, for God's sake. Katie Couric wouldn't know whether to shit or go blind. In fact, there are few daily news stories now that could hold a candle to those I just mentioned, particularly since the media has made a conscious decision--with the encouragement of the government, I'm sure--not to cover the war in Iraq/Afghanistan too closely, but instead only to celebrate the brave "heroes" who die in it and to mention Osama bin Laden's name once in awhile. (The lesson of Vietnam was learned well; if you show people on a daily basis what happens in a war, they begin to recoil in horror and want to end it. And we certainly can't have that.)
In 2010, to cover that fifteen minutes of real news (i.e. important political happenings and miscellaneous natural disasters throughout the world) we have half a dozen 24-hour news channels in addition to the three old tired networks. Immediately the problem is this: assuming it's reasonable to broadcast this fifteen minutes of news maybe four times a day, what do you do with the remaining 23 hours? Enter the pundit, the analyst, the scrolling bottom line, the news special--in short, repetition. Enter celebrity news. News about celebrities who make news. News about news stories celebrities are interested in. News about celebrities who don't care about the news. News about news stations that try to get celebrities to make news even when they don't want to make news. Etc. More channels mean more space to fill, which somehow leads to even more channels.
True enough, we have been fascinated by stars for decades. We followed famous people who joined the war effort back in WW2, and ones who may or may not have been commies, and ones who married each other. In '64 Barry Goldwater ran a series of ads in which movie stars--Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Raymond Massey, Ronald Reagan--endorsed their man. And sports has always had its own sort of info-tainment niche. But at one point we used to think that something had to happen to someone first, and then it would become a news story. Now an individual can be, by virtue of his or her very existence, an ongoing news and entertainment story.
Some think our attention span is shorter than it used to be because of TV, but I'm not so sure. Fifty years ago could we have stayed interested for over five years in the story of Angelina taking Brad away from Jennifer? Yet there it is on the covers of the tabloids to this very day. Back then the equivalent stories involved Liz Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Richard Burton, or Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, but those dramas had relatively short shelf lives. I think if anything our appetite for such shit has become greater and more indiscriminate, just as our appetite for food has grown in the same way. How else could an individual with a personality as utterly vapid as that of Sarah Palin have held the public's attention for as long as she has without having done anything at all? Not even so much as a movie, or a L'Oreal commercial, or an endearing sitcom role, or a dance contest, or an arrest.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Can They Handle It?
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
I think I've figured out the whole Sarah Palin thing. So far it has pained me to even think about Sarah Palin, so I've dismissed any such thoughts. But the media, in particular the AOL home page, has kept her photo out front on an almost daily basis, and today there was a bit about her daughter's plans to marry.
I know I'm not the only one who's thought along these lines, but I often have to convince myself that I've arrived at conclusions all by myself in order to feel that they're valid. Only later do I discover that it's all been written up, more comprehensively and eloquently, in an article in The New Yorker.
Politicians and would-be politicians have long been creatures of the media, going back on this side of the ocean to the very beginning of the nation. George Washington's image was in large part the creation of his media handlers; Parson Weems's biography created the myth of the cherry tree, among others. In the election of 1800 the newspapers backing Adams and Jefferson furiously slung mud, hoping some of it would stick. Adams was accused of being aristocratic and anti-democratic largely because of the definitely undemocratic Alien and Sedition Acts passed during his term; Jefferson was accurately accused of having fathered children by one his slaves and of being an atheist (maybe, maybe not, but definitely not a Christian). And on it went, up to the present day. Senators and Congressmen get caught in men's rooms. Governors say they're going hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Presidents sit at their desks.
The thing about Sarah Palin is that she seems to be almost completely a creature of the age of the "reality" television show. Other pols get their share of coverage, but it's mostly stump stuff--where did they speak, what did they say. But it was clear from the start, when she was nominated for the vice presidency last summer, that Palin's role was to be largely symbolic--that she would represent the banality of ordinary people--former cheerleaders who talk with whiny twangs and don't have IQs much above average (c'mon guys, let's get goin'); folks who have to put up with getting divorced and with their kids getting knocked up and with their own unexpected pregnancies and with tattoos, piercings, dope, embarrassments on facebook and all the rest. The problem in 2008 was that there was already too much banality at the top end of the Republican ticket. We don't want the guy who gets shot down and captured and held prisoner to be our president. We want the guy who shoots other people down and captures them. In comic book terms, we might elect Gladstone Gander or Uncle Scrooge, but never Donald Duck.
The Republicans have always had more of a knack for propaganda than the Democrats have, no doubt about it. For a long time they were like Avis, trying harder, because they were number two. When it comes to telling lies and repeating them over and over for strategic purposes, they're the masters, and have been since the days of Reagan, at least. Democrats are too diffuse and unorganized to be much good at the Big Lie. They don't so much want to govern as they want to include, which makes them nicer human beings, to be sure, but less effective as rulers and far less ruthless. As for the GOP, when your party essentially peddles hatred, religious bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and finger-pointing, it's counter-productive to greet the public with open arms. At this point I'm reminded of that great line from the movie The Usual Suspects, taken in turn from Baudelaire: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled was convincing average Americans that the interests of unfettered capitalism are entirely compatible with the welfare of the working class. That no taxes or responsibility or consequences for the rich somehow equals utopia for all. On the face of it an absurd idea, one against which common sense would seem to militate, but one with an amazingly large number of adherents. Anything the government does, however tepidly, to try to help the least among us gets labeled socialism and dismissed out of hand--as if anyone in this country has any but the most muddled notion of what socialism is. The idea of government-funded medical care for everyone, for example, is derided as impossible to achieve and unacceptably leftist, unless, of course you happen to be 65 or over, in which case it's just good old American Medicare. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, no Republican ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Which brings us neatly back to Sarah Palin and the age of reality TV. Reality television is the fairly logical outgrowth of the Oprah/Jerry Springer/Judge Judy genre, where everyday yahoos and freaks parade their pathetic shortcomings and lack of circumspection for all to see. The idea is that when we watch such folks we relate to their situations but feel at least a little superior, and therefore not quite so hapless ourselves. "Man, I may be fat, but she's really fat." "He has no idea what a pompous ass he's being." "If she only knew what a ridiculous slut she looks like in that outfit." After years of putting these losers on talk shows and in front of actor-judges, the television people got a brilliant idea: why not build entire shows around groups of unselfconscious nimrods competing with one another in some elaborate game on a desert island, or for a husband or a wife. Then, after that idea had been wrung for all it was worth, the TV people said, "Let's see if they can dance, or sing. Let's do the Gong Show, but play it straight."
Out of all this emerged, quite seamlessly, yet another idea. I can almost hear it being pitched, in Hollywood or Washington DC, those entertainment capitals of the two coasts. Let's take a dull tool with lots of camera appeal and political aspirations, set her up as the front for a manufactured political movement, and follow her for the entire four-year presidential term, culminating in her triumphal march into the Republican convention in 2012. Work her family into it, even in ways she might not approve of. Keep her connected to the audience at a human level. Let them feel her pain. Like Kate from Jon and Kate, or Vienna from The Bachelor, or the fuckups from Celebrity Rehab. It'll be like Legally Blonde meets Triumph of the Will! (At this point the Hollywood and Washington types scratch their heads. "Triumph of the whaaaa?" The pitchmen quickly regroup. "Okay, okay. Imagine Julia Roberts starring in a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)
The deepest secret fear of some, of course, is that Sarah Palin might actually get nominated, or worse yet, elected. In Europe they're used to this sort of thing, having a centuries-old tradition of being ruled by simpletons and preening megalomaniacs. In general, the American electorate prefers presidents whom they perceive to be smarter than they are, and more blessed by fortune in various other ways. Good looks go a long way, true, even coupled with mental mediocrity. Look at Warren Harding. Or Gerald Ford. But there's a fine line between mediocrity and downright idiocy which the voters don't generally cross. Still, it would be interesting. And not really all that scary. The republic would survive. In fact, if she's nominated, whether she's elected or not it might turn out to be the greatest gift the Democrats have had dropped in their laps since Watergate. The question is, can they handle it?
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
I think I've figured out the whole Sarah Palin thing. So far it has pained me to even think about Sarah Palin, so I've dismissed any such thoughts. But the media, in particular the AOL home page, has kept her photo out front on an almost daily basis, and today there was a bit about her daughter's plans to marry.
I know I'm not the only one who's thought along these lines, but I often have to convince myself that I've arrived at conclusions all by myself in order to feel that they're valid. Only later do I discover that it's all been written up, more comprehensively and eloquently, in an article in The New Yorker.
Politicians and would-be politicians have long been creatures of the media, going back on this side of the ocean to the very beginning of the nation. George Washington's image was in large part the creation of his media handlers; Parson Weems's biography created the myth of the cherry tree, among others. In the election of 1800 the newspapers backing Adams and Jefferson furiously slung mud, hoping some of it would stick. Adams was accused of being aristocratic and anti-democratic largely because of the definitely undemocratic Alien and Sedition Acts passed during his term; Jefferson was accurately accused of having fathered children by one his slaves and of being an atheist (maybe, maybe not, but definitely not a Christian). And on it went, up to the present day. Senators and Congressmen get caught in men's rooms. Governors say they're going hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Presidents sit at their desks.
The thing about Sarah Palin is that she seems to be almost completely a creature of the age of the "reality" television show. Other pols get their share of coverage, but it's mostly stump stuff--where did they speak, what did they say. But it was clear from the start, when she was nominated for the vice presidency last summer, that Palin's role was to be largely symbolic--that she would represent the banality of ordinary people--former cheerleaders who talk with whiny twangs and don't have IQs much above average (c'mon guys, let's get goin'); folks who have to put up with getting divorced and with their kids getting knocked up and with their own unexpected pregnancies and with tattoos, piercings, dope, embarrassments on facebook and all the rest. The problem in 2008 was that there was already too much banality at the top end of the Republican ticket. We don't want the guy who gets shot down and captured and held prisoner to be our president. We want the guy who shoots other people down and captures them. In comic book terms, we might elect Gladstone Gander or Uncle Scrooge, but never Donald Duck.
The Republicans have always had more of a knack for propaganda than the Democrats have, no doubt about it. For a long time they were like Avis, trying harder, because they were number two. When it comes to telling lies and repeating them over and over for strategic purposes, they're the masters, and have been since the days of Reagan, at least. Democrats are too diffuse and unorganized to be much good at the Big Lie. They don't so much want to govern as they want to include, which makes them nicer human beings, to be sure, but less effective as rulers and far less ruthless. As for the GOP, when your party essentially peddles hatred, religious bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and finger-pointing, it's counter-productive to greet the public with open arms. At this point I'm reminded of that great line from the movie The Usual Suspects, taken in turn from Baudelaire: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled was convincing average Americans that the interests of unfettered capitalism are entirely compatible with the welfare of the working class. That no taxes or responsibility or consequences for the rich somehow equals utopia for all. On the face of it an absurd idea, one against which common sense would seem to militate, but one with an amazingly large number of adherents. Anything the government does, however tepidly, to try to help the least among us gets labeled socialism and dismissed out of hand--as if anyone in this country has any but the most muddled notion of what socialism is. The idea of government-funded medical care for everyone, for example, is derided as impossible to achieve and unacceptably leftist, unless, of course you happen to be 65 or over, in which case it's just good old American Medicare. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, no Republican ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Which brings us neatly back to Sarah Palin and the age of reality TV. Reality television is the fairly logical outgrowth of the Oprah/Jerry Springer/Judge Judy genre, where everyday yahoos and freaks parade their pathetic shortcomings and lack of circumspection for all to see. The idea is that when we watch such folks we relate to their situations but feel at least a little superior, and therefore not quite so hapless ourselves. "Man, I may be fat, but she's really fat." "He has no idea what a pompous ass he's being." "If she only knew what a ridiculous slut she looks like in that outfit." After years of putting these losers on talk shows and in front of actor-judges, the television people got a brilliant idea: why not build entire shows around groups of unselfconscious nimrods competing with one another in some elaborate game on a desert island, or for a husband or a wife. Then, after that idea had been wrung for all it was worth, the TV people said, "Let's see if they can dance, or sing. Let's do the Gong Show, but play it straight."
Out of all this emerged, quite seamlessly, yet another idea. I can almost hear it being pitched, in Hollywood or Washington DC, those entertainment capitals of the two coasts. Let's take a dull tool with lots of camera appeal and political aspirations, set her up as the front for a manufactured political movement, and follow her for the entire four-year presidential term, culminating in her triumphal march into the Republican convention in 2012. Work her family into it, even in ways she might not approve of. Keep her connected to the audience at a human level. Let them feel her pain. Like Kate from Jon and Kate, or Vienna from The Bachelor, or the fuckups from Celebrity Rehab. It'll be like Legally Blonde meets Triumph of the Will! (At this point the Hollywood and Washington types scratch their heads. "Triumph of the whaaaa?" The pitchmen quickly regroup. "Okay, okay. Imagine Julia Roberts starring in a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)
The deepest secret fear of some, of course, is that Sarah Palin might actually get nominated, or worse yet, elected. In Europe they're used to this sort of thing, having a centuries-old tradition of being ruled by simpletons and preening megalomaniacs. In general, the American electorate prefers presidents whom they perceive to be smarter than they are, and more blessed by fortune in various other ways. Good looks go a long way, true, even coupled with mental mediocrity. Look at Warren Harding. Or Gerald Ford. But there's a fine line between mediocrity and downright idiocy which the voters don't generally cross. Still, it would be interesting. And not really all that scary. The republic would survive. In fact, if she's nominated, whether she's elected or not it might turn out to be the greatest gift the Democrats have had dropped in their laps since Watergate. The question is, can they handle it?
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
8,000 Miles From Graceland
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
I went to the movies this evening with two of my grandsons. They’re 13 and 6 years old. We saw The Last Airbender which, for those of you without young kids (boys especially) or grandkids, is a live-action film based on a popular television cartoon show called The Avatar. And as some of you certainly know, the movie title Avatar was already glommed, last year, and given to an elongated version of the Blue Men routine, so that this, the real Avatar story, had to choose another name. The TV program, from my superficial knowledge of it, features a young boy of indeterminate race, but leaning toward Asian, who possesses supernatural powers and is, somewhat against his own will, the Chosen One, or something like that. He’s sort of like a young Dalai Lama, with liberal doses of ninja fighter and magician thrown in. Basically your typical reluctant boy-hero-demigod, on whom the fate of the world hinges. Sound familiar? It should.
In the movie I sat between my boys, offering grandfatherly comments, as is my duty. To the thirteen-year-old I whispered, “If he’s an Airbender, does that mean he can fart around corners?” With the six-year-old I kept it more on the up-and-up. “Are you cold? Do you want any more popcorn?” As we were exiting the theater I asked for first impressions, since both are avid followers of the cartoon. The little guy loved it. The big guy, being older and more discerning, thought the movie lacked the requisite blood, mayhem, and high body count of a quality production, and was thus unable to give it the Ebertian thumbs up. So, mixed reviews.
My own impressions are as follows. The dialogue was about a millimeter deep and the acting was amateurish. The little kid who played the Avatar was pretty good at conveying that quintessential amalgam of angst, fear, and anger you see on the faces of actors either in the kabuki theater or in choppy-choppy movies, but with a bit more gentleness and perplexity, since he was only slowly coming to the realization that he was destined to master the bending of all four elements (air, water, earth, and fire, for those of you who didn’t take medieval chemistry in high school). The young man who starred in Slum Dog Millionaire, Dev Patel, had a key role, and was probably the most professional member of the cast. The movie also featured a large woolly beast on which the good guys rode, which resembled a cross between a gigantic fat musk ox and the creature played by John Candy in Spaceballs. (“Hi, I’m Barf. I’m a Mog—half man and half dog. I’m my own best friend!”) M. Knight Shama-lama-ding-dong directed this dubious offering, confirming that he is truly a one-hit wonder whose only decent movie was The Sixth Sense, and that probably more because of Bruce Willis and the kid than because of him.
My other impressions were, I suppose, equally superficial. For instance, I noticed that all the principal good people were very white, and that many of them had blue eyes. Not everyone to be sure—the Avatar himself had brown eyes. But the most virtuous character, a beautiful and slightly cross-eyed young princess who sacrificed herself to reinvigorate a carp, no less (all right, a spirit in the form of a carp, but most definitely a fish) had the bluest eyes of them all. And all the bad guys, the fire benders, looked like Arab Elvis impersonators, with jet black hair and long pointy sideburns and stylized costumes. And brown eyes. As brown as shit. As dark as crude oil. You expected them to all fall prostrate facing Mecca at any moment.
So what does that tell you? Well, if it isn’t already obvious to every American, it should be. It’s not bad enough that they knocked down the World Trade Towers. Now they’re trying to look like our most sacred icon, the King himself. When is someone going to do something? For the answer to that we’ll have to wait for the sequel to the Airbender movie or for the end of the seemingly interminable war in Iraq/Afghanistan. Until then, keep supporting our troops, who, I’m pretty sure, are over there for the express purpose of fighting these fire-bending, would-be hunks of burning love, 8,000 miles from Graceland.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
I went to the movies this evening with two of my grandsons. They’re 13 and 6 years old. We saw The Last Airbender which, for those of you without young kids (boys especially) or grandkids, is a live-action film based on a popular television cartoon show called The Avatar. And as some of you certainly know, the movie title Avatar was already glommed, last year, and given to an elongated version of the Blue Men routine, so that this, the real Avatar story, had to choose another name. The TV program, from my superficial knowledge of it, features a young boy of indeterminate race, but leaning toward Asian, who possesses supernatural powers and is, somewhat against his own will, the Chosen One, or something like that. He’s sort of like a young Dalai Lama, with liberal doses of ninja fighter and magician thrown in. Basically your typical reluctant boy-hero-demigod, on whom the fate of the world hinges. Sound familiar? It should.
In the movie I sat between my boys, offering grandfatherly comments, as is my duty. To the thirteen-year-old I whispered, “If he’s an Airbender, does that mean he can fart around corners?” With the six-year-old I kept it more on the up-and-up. “Are you cold? Do you want any more popcorn?” As we were exiting the theater I asked for first impressions, since both are avid followers of the cartoon. The little guy loved it. The big guy, being older and more discerning, thought the movie lacked the requisite blood, mayhem, and high body count of a quality production, and was thus unable to give it the Ebertian thumbs up. So, mixed reviews.
My own impressions are as follows. The dialogue was about a millimeter deep and the acting was amateurish. The little kid who played the Avatar was pretty good at conveying that quintessential amalgam of angst, fear, and anger you see on the faces of actors either in the kabuki theater or in choppy-choppy movies, but with a bit more gentleness and perplexity, since he was only slowly coming to the realization that he was destined to master the bending of all four elements (air, water, earth, and fire, for those of you who didn’t take medieval chemistry in high school). The young man who starred in Slum Dog Millionaire, Dev Patel, had a key role, and was probably the most professional member of the cast. The movie also featured a large woolly beast on which the good guys rode, which resembled a cross between a gigantic fat musk ox and the creature played by John Candy in Spaceballs. (“Hi, I’m Barf. I’m a Mog—half man and half dog. I’m my own best friend!”) M. Knight Shama-lama-ding-dong directed this dubious offering, confirming that he is truly a one-hit wonder whose only decent movie was The Sixth Sense, and that probably more because of Bruce Willis and the kid than because of him.
My other impressions were, I suppose, equally superficial. For instance, I noticed that all the principal good people were very white, and that many of them had blue eyes. Not everyone to be sure—the Avatar himself had brown eyes. But the most virtuous character, a beautiful and slightly cross-eyed young princess who sacrificed herself to reinvigorate a carp, no less (all right, a spirit in the form of a carp, but most definitely a fish) had the bluest eyes of them all. And all the bad guys, the fire benders, looked like Arab Elvis impersonators, with jet black hair and long pointy sideburns and stylized costumes. And brown eyes. As brown as shit. As dark as crude oil. You expected them to all fall prostrate facing Mecca at any moment.
So what does that tell you? Well, if it isn’t already obvious to every American, it should be. It’s not bad enough that they knocked down the World Trade Towers. Now they’re trying to look like our most sacred icon, the King himself. When is someone going to do something? For the answer to that we’ll have to wait for the sequel to the Airbender movie or for the end of the seemingly interminable war in Iraq/Afghanistan. Until then, keep supporting our troops, who, I’m pretty sure, are over there for the express purpose of fighting these fire-bending, would-be hunks of burning love, 8,000 miles from Graceland.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
And Then What?
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Sunday, June 27, 2010
I was saddened recently to learn that bachelor Jake and his fiancee Vienna have called it quits, even though they appeared happy on the last episode of Dancing With the Washed Up Network Reality Goofballs, or whatever it is called. Allegations of betrayal abound. Is there no faithfulness anywhere? The president's approval rating slipped a bit today, as well, on the perception that he hasn't done enough to try to keep Jake and Vienna together. If the leader of the free world can't do even a simple thing like that, then what good is he, anyway? Wall Street reacted to the news by closing on a down note, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its seventh lowest finish of the month.
Elsewhere in the realm of reality TV, the Republicans are battling one another for the chance to run the state of Michigan. The commercials all go (or should go) something like this, and you out-of-staters will recognize the patter, if not the names: “As we are all aware, the Michigan economy is in shambles. Putting aside the fact that the big three auto makers allowed their market share to erode by building shitty products they hoped would sell anyway based on the entrenched habits and knee-jerk patriotism of the public, and ignoring the fact that these same corporations have been systematically moving jobs elsewhere for several decades, Michigan’s mess is nevertheless entirely the fault of our current governor, Jennifer Granholm, whose extravagant tax and spend policies (wasting the public's money on repairing roads and meagerly staffing the state government, for instance) are the direct cause of Michigan's record-high joblessness. Hi, I'm Mike Cox/Pete Hoekstra/Mike Bouchard/Homer Simpson/Daffy Duck. When I was in the Marines/Army/Navy/Boy Scouts/Brownies, polishing my brass belt buckle and touching my sword to my nose, Governor Granholm was in Canada or California or somewhere, avoiding military service by wearing a skirt and hiding behind her foreign nationality, like you’d expect a Democrat to do. When I become your governor, I will attempt, as so many of my predecessors already have, to bring jobs back to Michigan by offering to assess no taxes whatsoever on businesses, a promise that will make my corporate masters happy, but will be to absolutely no avail, due to the immutable fact that the savings achieved by sending labor south or to Asia far exceed any tax benefits that any state is capable of conferring. After I have failed at this fool’s errand, I will pass the baton to yet another mealy-mouthed meat puppet, who will blame me for fucking up the economy and will promise you, the voters, that by decreasing taxes on businesses we will once again make our state strong. Thank you. God Bless Michigan, God Bless the United States of America, and God bless God.”
I just finished reading a book called The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, from about 2006. It concerns the last bad cholera epidemic in London, in the early 1850s, and how they figured out what was causing the disease (water contaminated with cholera-infected human waste) and how to stop it (removing the pump handle from one particular well on Broad Street in Soho, for starters). As often happens, it was a matter of supplanting a superficially logical theory (that the disease was carried in the stench, or "miasma" coming from the contaminated Thames River and from the profusion of shit, human and animal, everywhere in the densely-packed city) with a more logical, and ultimately correct, theory (that the disease’s cause was a water-borne pathogen). It turns out, quite reasonably, that the correct theory was the one that explained all the cases of the disease, not just most of them. But for the most part medical science (one uses the term almost ironically in this context) was content with a theory that explained the majority of cases, then ignored the rest as purely anomalous or tried to shoehorn them into the dominant theory. Of course this was before medical folks fully understood that diseases like this are caused by by microscopic organisms, and all that, so they must be excused on that basis. But, microscopes and other modern gizmos aside, the study of logic—the application and extension of known facts to the unknown so as to develop solid bases for predicting things—has been fully developed since well before the days of Aristotle. Which means that as learned as were the great minds of Victorian medicine, they still fell prey to sloppy and fallacious reasoning, despite the availability of the almost mathematical templates of formal logic, which has been among the few almost universally-taught disciplines in the western world throughout the past several millennia. These latter conclusions are mine, not the author's. He just tells the story, and does it quite well. But it gets me to thinking about logic, generally, and, apropos of the gubernatorial election, how incredibly easy it is to persuade ourselves and others of illogical things on a quadrennial (and indeed daily) basis. It's odd, almost. People don't routinely try to make 2 plus 2 equal 5. They know better. But when it comes to perceiving basic logical fallacies—argumentum ad hominen, begging the question, red herrings, circular reasoning, to name a few—they generally can't navigate the murky waters of bullshit on which we all must sail. Granted, logic employs a greater set of variables than does arithmetic—2 is after all pretty much always 2 on an everyday basis. And like higher mathematics, higher and more abstract theories of logic can get pretty abstruse for the average person. But on the whole, and in certain contexts invariably, basic logic should govern our thinking, helping us to realize that a single politician among many will not be able to bring about the extravagant changes he or she promises. And that all the monies used to build bridges, protect citizens and their property, educate children, and so on must come from a common fund, and that that fund derives itself primarily from taxes of one kind or another, and therefore, that taxing and spending are not the evils of a government run amok but rather the essence of why governments exist at all. These are things that every adult should know. And yet .....
Getting back to the medical aspect of The Ghost Map, though, two really chilling things struck me. One was how very recently we have been delivered up into the relatively safe confines of what we consider to be modern medicine, founded on the microbial disease theory and armed with antibiotics, and based also on the assumption that hygiene, especially among medical personnel, is essential to keeping patients alive and well once they are sick, mostly because all those microbes are out there. Less than 150 years ago, which is really nothing in human history, everyone was at the mercy of people we would today consider to be quacks and incompetents--little better than witch doctors. President James Garfield died unnecessarily in 1881 because distinguished men of medical science stuck their unwashed fingers into his bullet wound and helped it to become infected, then could do nothing at all to stop the infection. The wound itself was far less serious than the one Ronald Reagan received a century later in 1981, from which he pretty easily recovered. And even at that Garfield lived on for a couple of months, fighting with his natural immune system until the infection overwhelmed him. During the cholera epidemic, people died of acute dehydration within 12 to 48 hours, when merely drinking lots of water while they were sick would have saved the majority of them. But medical science hadn't figured out even that simple little thing. Instead they tried giving laxatives and sometimes bleeding the patients (guess what--it didn't work). But as amazing as all that seems in the light of today's everyday knowledge, the other scary thing to contemplate is how profoundly stupid we must be today in certain medical matters, compared to where we'll be in another 150 years. I think that's a safe and logical assumption. Many people have laundry lists of complaints about doctors and treatments and are more than willing to subscribe to the theory that modern western medicine is all messed up. That I don't buy, personally. Especially the bias in favor of treatments from other parts of the world where, if you look at how the people in those places are living (and dying), you have to say, "Who would ever assume that anybody around here knows jack shit about medicine?" Yeah, grind up a dessicated tiger's penis and drink it in your tea. That'll work, all right. Get in touch with you holistic inner blah blah blah. Put a few needles in it. No, I'm not talking about what folks call "alternative" medicine. What I'm referring to is what might be called "undiscovered" medicine--the extension of what we know now, cleaned up and freed from illogical and sloppy thinking based on the misapplication of shoddy research. It's nothing I could figure out, any more than I could have discovered the cure for cholera if I'd been living in the 1850s. But it's out there. Cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, spinal injuries--all the stuff we haven't figured out yet. So let’s get busy and start thinking logically! Jerry Lewis ain’t gonna be able to put on telethons forever, you know. And then what?!?!?
Sunday, June 27, 2010
I was saddened recently to learn that bachelor Jake and his fiancee Vienna have called it quits, even though they appeared happy on the last episode of Dancing With the Washed Up Network Reality Goofballs, or whatever it is called. Allegations of betrayal abound. Is there no faithfulness anywhere? The president's approval rating slipped a bit today, as well, on the perception that he hasn't done enough to try to keep Jake and Vienna together. If the leader of the free world can't do even a simple thing like that, then what good is he, anyway? Wall Street reacted to the news by closing on a down note, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its seventh lowest finish of the month.
Elsewhere in the realm of reality TV, the Republicans are battling one another for the chance to run the state of Michigan. The commercials all go (or should go) something like this, and you out-of-staters will recognize the patter, if not the names: “As we are all aware, the Michigan economy is in shambles. Putting aside the fact that the big three auto makers allowed their market share to erode by building shitty products they hoped would sell anyway based on the entrenched habits and knee-jerk patriotism of the public, and ignoring the fact that these same corporations have been systematically moving jobs elsewhere for several decades, Michigan’s mess is nevertheless entirely the fault of our current governor, Jennifer Granholm, whose extravagant tax and spend policies (wasting the public's money on repairing roads and meagerly staffing the state government, for instance) are the direct cause of Michigan's record-high joblessness. Hi, I'm Mike Cox/Pete Hoekstra/Mike Bouchard/Homer Simpson/Daffy Duck. When I was in the Marines/Army/Navy/Boy Scouts/Brownies, polishing my brass belt buckle and touching my sword to my nose, Governor Granholm was in Canada or California or somewhere, avoiding military service by wearing a skirt and hiding behind her foreign nationality, like you’d expect a Democrat to do. When I become your governor, I will attempt, as so many of my predecessors already have, to bring jobs back to Michigan by offering to assess no taxes whatsoever on businesses, a promise that will make my corporate masters happy, but will be to absolutely no avail, due to the immutable fact that the savings achieved by sending labor south or to Asia far exceed any tax benefits that any state is capable of conferring. After I have failed at this fool’s errand, I will pass the baton to yet another mealy-mouthed meat puppet, who will blame me for fucking up the economy and will promise you, the voters, that by decreasing taxes on businesses we will once again make our state strong. Thank you. God Bless Michigan, God Bless the United States of America, and God bless God.”
I just finished reading a book called The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, from about 2006. It concerns the last bad cholera epidemic in London, in the early 1850s, and how they figured out what was causing the disease (water contaminated with cholera-infected human waste) and how to stop it (removing the pump handle from one particular well on Broad Street in Soho, for starters). As often happens, it was a matter of supplanting a superficially logical theory (that the disease was carried in the stench, or "miasma" coming from the contaminated Thames River and from the profusion of shit, human and animal, everywhere in the densely-packed city) with a more logical, and ultimately correct, theory (that the disease’s cause was a water-borne pathogen). It turns out, quite reasonably, that the correct theory was the one that explained all the cases of the disease, not just most of them. But for the most part medical science (one uses the term almost ironically in this context) was content with a theory that explained the majority of cases, then ignored the rest as purely anomalous or tried to shoehorn them into the dominant theory. Of course this was before medical folks fully understood that diseases like this are caused by by microscopic organisms, and all that, so they must be excused on that basis. But, microscopes and other modern gizmos aside, the study of logic—the application and extension of known facts to the unknown so as to develop solid bases for predicting things—has been fully developed since well before the days of Aristotle. Which means that as learned as were the great minds of Victorian medicine, they still fell prey to sloppy and fallacious reasoning, despite the availability of the almost mathematical templates of formal logic, which has been among the few almost universally-taught disciplines in the western world throughout the past several millennia. These latter conclusions are mine, not the author's. He just tells the story, and does it quite well. But it gets me to thinking about logic, generally, and, apropos of the gubernatorial election, how incredibly easy it is to persuade ourselves and others of illogical things on a quadrennial (and indeed daily) basis. It's odd, almost. People don't routinely try to make 2 plus 2 equal 5. They know better. But when it comes to perceiving basic logical fallacies—argumentum ad hominen, begging the question, red herrings, circular reasoning, to name a few—they generally can't navigate the murky waters of bullshit on which we all must sail. Granted, logic employs a greater set of variables than does arithmetic—2 is after all pretty much always 2 on an everyday basis. And like higher mathematics, higher and more abstract theories of logic can get pretty abstruse for the average person. But on the whole, and in certain contexts invariably, basic logic should govern our thinking, helping us to realize that a single politician among many will not be able to bring about the extravagant changes he or she promises. And that all the monies used to build bridges, protect citizens and their property, educate children, and so on must come from a common fund, and that that fund derives itself primarily from taxes of one kind or another, and therefore, that taxing and spending are not the evils of a government run amok but rather the essence of why governments exist at all. These are things that every adult should know. And yet .....
Getting back to the medical aspect of The Ghost Map, though, two really chilling things struck me. One was how very recently we have been delivered up into the relatively safe confines of what we consider to be modern medicine, founded on the microbial disease theory and armed with antibiotics, and based also on the assumption that hygiene, especially among medical personnel, is essential to keeping patients alive and well once they are sick, mostly because all those microbes are out there. Less than 150 years ago, which is really nothing in human history, everyone was at the mercy of people we would today consider to be quacks and incompetents--little better than witch doctors. President James Garfield died unnecessarily in 1881 because distinguished men of medical science stuck their unwashed fingers into his bullet wound and helped it to become infected, then could do nothing at all to stop the infection. The wound itself was far less serious than the one Ronald Reagan received a century later in 1981, from which he pretty easily recovered. And even at that Garfield lived on for a couple of months, fighting with his natural immune system until the infection overwhelmed him. During the cholera epidemic, people died of acute dehydration within 12 to 48 hours, when merely drinking lots of water while they were sick would have saved the majority of them. But medical science hadn't figured out even that simple little thing. Instead they tried giving laxatives and sometimes bleeding the patients (guess what--it didn't work). But as amazing as all that seems in the light of today's everyday knowledge, the other scary thing to contemplate is how profoundly stupid we must be today in certain medical matters, compared to where we'll be in another 150 years. I think that's a safe and logical assumption. Many people have laundry lists of complaints about doctors and treatments and are more than willing to subscribe to the theory that modern western medicine is all messed up. That I don't buy, personally. Especially the bias in favor of treatments from other parts of the world where, if you look at how the people in those places are living (and dying), you have to say, "Who would ever assume that anybody around here knows jack shit about medicine?" Yeah, grind up a dessicated tiger's penis and drink it in your tea. That'll work, all right. Get in touch with you holistic inner blah blah blah. Put a few needles in it. No, I'm not talking about what folks call "alternative" medicine. What I'm referring to is what might be called "undiscovered" medicine--the extension of what we know now, cleaned up and freed from illogical and sloppy thinking based on the misapplication of shoddy research. It's nothing I could figure out, any more than I could have discovered the cure for cholera if I'd been living in the 1850s. But it's out there. Cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, spinal injuries--all the stuff we haven't figured out yet. So let’s get busy and start thinking logically! Jerry Lewis ain’t gonna be able to put on telethons forever, you know. And then what?!?!?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Rest of the Story
Cedar Springs, Michigan
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Paul Harvey, that folksy beloved right-wing radio geezer-icon, used to do a show called The Rest of the Story. It featured looks at mysterious or obscure aspects of commonly-known stories of famous people and events. Old Paul was on the radio so long that he outlived a couple of generations of listeners. I remember my grandfather listening to Paul's jingoistic version of reality back in the '50s, and assumed he was old back then, since grandpa was old. Maybe it was also that creepy, creaky timbre his voice had even when he was relatively young. Paul Harvey died last year at 91, an age many thought he had attained long since, having become, over more than half a century, a sort of animated rendition of the Reader's Digest--an American version of the Word Become Flesh if ever there was one.
All that has nothing to do with the rest of my trip, except for the coincidence of the name I chose for this entry. I left readers hanging in the middle of Nebraska, that vast and uneventful chunk of land in the center of the country. On the final day I traversed Nebraska and Iowa, merging onto what might be the most tedious route in the country, or at least in the midwest--Interstate 80 across northern Illinois from the quad cities to Indiana, then the familiar but equally boring I-94 and I-196 in Michigan.
Did my heart leap up when I reentered the Great Lake State? Of course I was happy to be home and reunited with Laurine, but I must say that this state as a destination or a choice of a place to live leaves me cold. During my absence I tried to muster wistful memories of my home state, something that would make me say to myself as I passed the welcome sign, "Ah yes, Pure Michigan." Nothing doing. In fact, I didn't miss it at all. More than that, as I thought back over sixty years I had to admit I've never really liked Michigan very much. It's possible that I'm incapable of attaching myself emotionally to a spot on the map. But I'm not so sure about that. Much of the west is beautiful and alluring, as is New England, where I resided for many years. No, I think Michigan itself produces the geographic ennui I'm feeling. But on the positive side, at least it isn't Nebraska or Iowa.
One bright spot during my last day of driving was an hour-long detour into the Nebraska capital. I try to tour statehouses when I can. They're open to the public and usually contain a surprise or two. In Lincoln is one of the most interesting capitols going. Built in the 1920s in the grand and muscular art deco-influenced style I love, this building isn't the usual imitation of the U.S. Capitol, but a small skyscraper, rising fourteen stories out of a block-square granite base, topped with a small gold dome and a statue.
Inside and out it is reminiscent of a secular synagogue, devoid of religious icons but reaching mightily toward the sky in a salute to the gods of justice, democracy, and good government we used to revere in this country before our eyes were dimmed by the cataracts of religious fundamentalism and before we commenced our unabashed worship of capitalism. The arched hallways of the interior, rising three stories and covered with murals and stained glass windows above mosaic-tiled floors, are filled with a combination of sinewy Romanesque personifications of civic virtues and more modern depictions of the great natural and human resources of the Cornhusker State. Standing in the midst of all this it's possible to breathe in the vapors of the national mood that gave birth to the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center in New York, the Fisher Building in Detroit, and many others. As a nation our aspirations certainly overreached our realities, especially in the area of civil rights, but the very fact that we chose to showcase our ideals rather than just our tawdry lust for money bespoke a different set of priorities, at least for the common man.
Of course I visited the locus of the nation's only unicameral legislature, which is housed in the old state senate chamber. It wasn't until the 1930s that Nebraska adopted one-house, nonpartisan rule, so there's still a state house of representatives chamber, now used as an auditorium. Having spent my career working for states, and the latter part of it interpreting and administering the newly-minted products of the state legislature, I can't overstate my contempt for the citizen lawmakers who inhabit these chambers. Words like moron, nitwit, scallywag, blowhard, and poltroon come readily to mind, but don't really describe the combination of ignorance, ambition, and puffery that prevails inside these chambers when they're open for business. Imagine Ted Knight from the Mary Tyler Moore Show being in charge of the government and you begin to get the picture. So the idea of having a one-house parttime state legislature consisting of only 49 persons seems eminently sensible to me, or at least a step in the right direction.
I wouldn't recommend a trip to Nebraska for the express purpose of seeing the capitol in Lincoln, but if, God help you, you're there on business, by all means drop in.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Comedown
North Platte, Nebraska
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
This morning as I drove north out of Moab, Utah I was convinced that I was in the midst of the most beautiful mountain scenery I was likely to see on this trip. But as I hopped on the interstate and headed east into Colorado it was obvious that the Kodak moments weren't over. For this comparative flatlander it was hard to resist stopping every ten miles or so to take pictures, even when I realized that at some point all these photos were going to look pretty much alike.
Then I drove through Denver, and things began to change dramatically. Suddenly I wasn't in the Rocky Mountains any more. As they receded in my rear view mirror I was greeted by low hills and plowed fields and the overwhelming stench of manure. I'd gone from beauty to bullshit in a matter of a few miles. What a comedown, literally and figuratively. I thought about the hundreds of miles of driving I had ahead of me through terrain that was, if anything, even less attractive than this. My impulse was to turn around.
People don't write songs about Nebraska, nor should they. To tell you the truth, certain people shouldn't have written songs about the Rocky Mountains, either, but they did, and I guess their exuberance was understandable.
Now I'm in the middle of a state that has only one thing to distinguish it as far as I know. Well, two. The country's only unicameral legislature and a pretty damn good college football team. That just doesn't seem like enough.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Uranium and Cigarettes
Moab, Utah
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Coming up through the Navajo reservation, which is mostly in the northeast corner of Arizona but also spills into Utah a little, I was convinced that the Indians had the best scenery all to themselves. But Utah is no slouch when it comes to photo opportunities.
I said southern California looked familiar, but it turns out this spot is almost as much so. With its red rocks, snow-capped mountains, and natural bridge formations, southeastern Utah has been used in movies for years. The director John Ford first filmed Stagecoach near Monument Valley in 1939, then did several more around Moab, including Rio Grande, in 1950. If you saw Thelma and Louise or Once Upon a Time in the West or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or City Slickers II, you saw Moab. And also The Greatest Story Ever Told, which is either about Jesus or the invention of Viagra.
The real boom took place when they started mining uranium here for nuclear bombs and electricity in the 50s, and Moab began to call itself "The Uranium Capital of the World." Not sure that's what I'd want my town to be famous for, but there it is. Then those pinko wide-eyed one worlders and tree huggers started scaling back the weapons and power plants and the radioactive bubble burst. Now Moab is back to trading on its scenery.
In terms of media exposure, perhaps the most familiar images of the Moab area are from the Marlboro Man advertising campaign. It was here that the rugged cowboy, astride his horse, paused to survey the breathtaking scenery and light a smoke. For a whole generation of TV watchers this was cigarette central, and the theme from The Magnificent Seven was the musical accompaniment to pure rich tobacco pleasure.
When the town was first settled back in the last quarter of the 1800s and given the name Moab, some folks objected because in the Bible the city of Moab was known for incest and idolatry. Feathers were ruffled and petitions were signed. Evidently, though, the cooler heads of the golden calf worshippers and sister rapers prevailed, and the name stayed the same.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
No Past Necessary
Flagstaff, Arizona
Monday, May 3, 2010
Spent three days in Palm Springs, California, then over to the Los Angeles area and after that a quick stop in Las Vegas. Each state deserves its own blog entry, but things are moving too fast for that.
I'd like to thank Uncle Ed for his Palm Springs hospitality. Besides showing me around the city, he took me out to the Salton Sea and up into the mountains to a town called Idyllwild.
If you're famous in Palm Springs, when you die they name a street after you. I got off the freeway onto Gene Autry Trail in the middle of a dust storm. On the way in I passed Dinah Shore Boulevard and Bob Hope Road. In Palm Springs and all the neighboring municipalities along California 111--Palm Desert, Cathedral City, Ranch Mirage and so on--the motto is Live Long, Play Golf, and Die, sort of a riff on the Vulcan benediction from Star Trek. In fact, driving along i11 is sort of a star trek of its own. Surrounded by mountains.
There's something about Southern California that an outsider can't put his finger on. Not that there are anything but outsiders there. Or rather, insiders who came from somewhere else. It would take about a week and a half to fit in as if one had been born there. No past necessary. I've lived in places where you don't officially belong unless you've been in town for five generations. Not in California. No accents to speak of, no traditions to uphold, no mysteries to penetrate. Just get in your car and hop on the freeway and drive. Get there, get out, and stay.
Maybe it's the feeling you get that you've been there already, all your life. In the movies and on TV. With the Lone Ranger and Tonto and John Wayne in the dusty desert back lots, with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in the hot ghetto streets of LA, with Eric Estrada on the endless miles of crowded highways, with Jed Clampett and Granny in the terraced hills of Beverly.
A twisted two hundred fifty miles to the northeast, past arid mountainsides and flat empty deserts, lies Las Vegas, the strangest city in America. There's no excuse for it, really, especially now that there are Indian casinos in every corner of every state. But it keeps getting bigger and more bizarre and outdoing itself for unmitigated tastelessness year after year. This is a city that simply could not have been imagined by the likes of Nero and Caligula and one that would have seemed like a fond pipe dream to the denizens of Sodom and Ninevah. Beside the gluttonous and greedy neon and steel of the Vegas strip Walt Disney's goofy imaginings look trite and amateurish and comparatively classy. Illegals stand on the sidewalks handing out cards advertising call girls. Senior citizens with walkers pump Social Security money into slot machines. Vacationing middle Americans galumph through the streets sipping brewskis and looking for the next buffet. Las Vegas is a city that celebrates shlocky former boy sopranos, louche German animal tamers, washed up comedians. And of course Elvis. Elvis the bloated, the purple, the dead on the toilet. Michael Jackson's death was the perfect career move for him, Vegaswise. He's just getting warmed up.
Having said all that I hasten to add that I had a great time in Las Vegas. I met Laurine, who was there on a business trip, and daughter Katie. We stayed in a modest suite in the Venetian, which was only about the size of a small Cambodian village. And I won more than I lost in the casinos.
After all that the utter practicality of the Hoover Dam seemed trivial. Hydroelectric power? Is that all? No gambling? No decadence? I slipped over it and out of Nevada and up into the mesas of Arizona and it was like shutting the door on a frat party and walking over to an ivy-covered library. Quiet and meaningful and clean, at least by comparison.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Aliens In Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
It's hotter in Arizona than in New Mexico. Must be the lower elevation. Definitely a taste of things to come all across the desert, and it's making me glad I stopped walking when I did. When I say hot, of course I don't mean hot in the way that word is understood here, which implies three digit Fahrenheit numbers. Picture the tops of thermometers exploding and lemon-sized drops of sweat popping off your head, like in the cartoons. No, the heat this week has been relatively mild except to a denizen of the northern climes like me. Only in the low 90s. People still jog and bicycle, like the mad dogs and Englishmen they are. As for it being a dry heat, well I suppose that's the case, but then sticking your head in an oven is partaking of dry heat, too.
I explored Phoenix a bit on Monday, visiting the Heard Museum downtown, an extensive collection of Indian art and artifacts. Very informative about the many tribes and the variations in their approaches to jewelry, pottery, and other crafts. What struck me during the tour was how many times the guide mentioned that such-and-such a group had modified its techniques to incorporate materials and tools introduced by Europeans or to make their stuff more commercially attractive to tourists. Nothing wrong with that, but it exploded the impression (in my mind, at least) that these tribes were doing things exactly as they had done them since time immemorial--part of the Rousseauian noble savage myth, I suppose, and an idea they themselves like to exploit. In truth they were busy adapting, like humans do everywhere. For example, according to the guide the Navajos and their ancestors had been making cloth from cotton for a couple thousand years before the Spaniards introduced sheep into the southwest, after which they started raising them and using the wool for which they have become famous. And of course the Spaniards brought horses, too, which many nomadic groups, like the Apaches, took to with the vigor of Scythians. Before that I picture them prancing along on foot like King Arthur and his knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, somebody bringing up the rear with sound effects from a pair of coconut shells.
I suppose the underlying message here is that what we sometimes think of as an ancient line of tradition unbroken for millennia isn't that at all--it's just the latest variation in a pattern of continuous cultural evolution, just as in the European world. Nostalgia, bolstered by with religion, keeps people longing for a past that never really existed. Even for the Indians, who without a doubt got the shits put to them pretty decisively, the only thing worth doing now is to move forward. Hence casinos, involving a concept that was largely alien to the mostly-communal societies of the pre-Columbian era, namely, greed for something that belongs to one's neighbor. Of course at this point they're not trying to get each other's dough so much as ours. Wonder how all that will play out.
Speaking of cotton, I wonder how cotton came to North America? It's a perennial plant, so perhaps it existed in the wild all around the sub-tropical belt of the world. It's been used in this hemisphere for at least 8,000 years.
Phoenix has a new light rail system, and I used Michael's pass to ride out to Tempe to sit among the ASU students. Later we went and ate at a place called Poncho's, sitting at a table where Bill Clinton had dined when he was El Presidente. There's a mural of the Man of Many Appetites on the wall, and another of one of his Secret Service guys on the opposite side of the room.
The big buzz in Arizona currently is a new law the state just passed that requires local law enforcement to inquire about citizenship, and gives the state some power to arrest illegals. There's a question as to its constitutionality, involving, I assume, the issue of whether the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration matters. In the meantime the state seems to be counting on what might be called the "hassle factor" to deter illegals from south of the border from choosing to come to Arizona. Look for Texas, New Mexico, and California to take the fallout, and maybe to try to follow suit.
Of course by European standards our immigration laws are still somewhere between lax and nonexistent, but then we are a land filled with squatters, from the first nations who walked across the land bridge from Asia, to the Conquistadors who brought horses and chickens and sheep, to the zany Brits with their Puritanism and their slaves, to all the farmers and cheap laborers who came during the last two centuries. It's pretty absurd to try to close the border now. Anyway, who else is going to work out in that hot sun? Are you?
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Nukes In New Mexico
Deming, New Mexico
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Yesterday I delivered the motor home and the towing dolly to the buyer in Westbrook, Texas. Everything went smoothly. In case you're wondering, I did pretty well on the sale, getting back what I paid for both of them.
Squeezing everything from the motor home into the car was a challenge. I ended up with just enough room to sit in the driver's seat, and since I can't sit anywhere else while driving, that's enough. Right after the sale I drove up to Snyder and got there just in time to have coffee with the boys one more time. Tommy and Lonny where there, as well as George and Mr. Gomez. We talked farming (or rather, they did), and when the subject of turkey farming came up, I was able to contribute from my personal experience.
I asked about the Mennonites in Seminole, and George said some of them were from Mexico, and just spoke Spanish, and maybe German. It seems that some Mennonites settled in northern Mexico generations ago. Now they go back and forth pursuing various enterprises, including the manufacture, assembly, and sale of trailers of some kind. There are several different groups, as I had thought, which might explain why some women had black bonnets and others wore black scarves.
After the party broke up I said farewell to the Boys of Snyder, and said I'd see them again in the fall on my way back to New Mexico. Then I started driving west, through New Mexico, to visit friends Michael and Phyllis Roberts in Phoenix.
Before I got out of Texas I drove through a dust storm, which was blowing all along the route I'd walked just days before. There's so much land under cultivation that when the wind gets strong enough there's plenty of dust to blow, particularly before the cotton's been planted. Couldn't see a hundred feet in front of me for a few stretches. Definitely not walking conditions.
The drive across New Mexico to Arizona is giving me a preview of what's to come when I start back again. The first 150 miles or so west of Hobbs was pretty much a repeat of the last 150 miles of Texas, minus the crops--lots of grasslands and oil wells and very little of anything else.
Then, somewhere between Artesia and Alamogordo, the terrain got hillier and real mountains appeared in the distance, and soon I was up in the alpine hills, complete with steep grades and winding switchbacks. At a place called Cloudcroft, at almost 9,000 feet, there was snow on the ground and on the rooftops, melting from a sudden storm yesterday, even though it was in the 70s today.
Down on the other side of Alamogordo I stopped at White Sands National Monument, a beautiful area of otherworldly-looking white dunes, where I took a short hike. At the welcome center I overheard a park ranger talking to a man who asking whether it was possible to see Trinity Site, some miles north, where they detonated the first atom bomb back in 1945. She was explaining that it was a restricted area, and that there were only two days every year, in the spring and fall, when the public could visit. As a joke I said, "The great thing is that they explode nuclear bombs there on visiting days, and they give you little pieces of dark glass to look through." The ranger, a woman of about 30, said with a straight face that she hadn't realized that. The man, who was about my age and most certainly should have known better, also took what I said seriously.
My mission accomplished, it was time to move on.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Day 118: Perseverance and Repetition
Seminole, Texas to New Mexico line. 23.6 miles/2242 total
Thursday, April 22, 2010
I leave the parking lot of Walmart on the west side of Seminole and climb a hill on Highway 180, heading west to just across the New Mexico line, in Lea County. And when I say just inside, I mean about twenty feet in.
Lots of high clouds and sunshine today, with the wind blowing in from the southwest. It’s already warm, and should get into the low 80s. Rain predicted for tonight.
The west side of Seminole is the business side. I can see a refinery from here, and numerous small oil wells scattered around the fields. Also there are several cotton gins and grain and peanut warehouses. All the way to the state line there’s a succession of such businesses, in contrast to the deserted stretches in the past several walks. Which is not to say that the highway is a beehive of activity—just that it’s got some buildings at regular intervals. In the distance as far as the eye can see are fields and grasslands.
I neglected to mention yesterday that there appears to be a sizable community of Mennonites in and around Seminole. In fact, there are no fewer than three different Mennonite churches in town, each perhaps differing slightly in theology.
The place where all the Mennonites seem to love to go as much as church is Walmart. Sitting in the parking lot for the last three evenings I’ve watched a steady progression of them. These folks don’t eschew all the modern conveniences, anyway. They have pickup trucks, and from what I can see, love to shop. I don’t know if they buy TVs and DVDs and such, but Walmart was literally crawling with them last night when I went in.
The men don’t look any different from regular Texans—maybe they wear their hair short, but then so do most other people. They dress like regular farmers and cowboys. Maybe a tiny bit geekier, I’m not sure. It’s the women and girls who are subject to restrictions. They wear long dresses, big and loose, which come down to about mid-calf. And on their heads some wear small black bonnets and others wear black scarves. The women look serious, like they’re not having much fun. The men just look vaguely peeved, like a Baptist minister might if he were walking down the Vegas strip with his family.
I don’t know what their teachings and traditions are, but the essence of it seems to involve keeping the women folk looking as homely as possible. Which isn’t at all difficult, because I must say that the adult women are pretty ugly. Serious tire biters. Makeup and modern hair styles wouldn’t help much, if at all. I don’t say this spitefully; it’s just a sad fact. The guys are no better looking, to be sure. Maybe it’s from generations of inbreeding. It’s probably just as well that they should stay out of the general gene pool, or at least confine themselves to the shallow end.
This morning at about 5:30 I awoke out of a pretty sound sleep, as I sometimes do, not knowing whether it was dark or light outside. Sleeping in lighted parking lots will do that. I was in the middle of a muddled dream, and when I became conscious I found myself uttering the words, “Perseverance and Repetition.” The words came out of a swirling cloud, as happens in dreams. It’s not profound, exactly, the way it seemed to be in the dream, but it sure does apply generally to the human condition, and particularly to what I am doing. I think maybe I’ll have a coat of arms made up with those words on it. Maybe in Latin, or in the infinitives. To Persevere and to Repeat. Over the image of a flattened coyote, rampant, like in the photo.
Trees around here, I’m told, have probably been planted by someone. They don’t occur naturally much, except the occasional mesquite that gets out of hand. But the trees I’m seeing are mostly in peoples’ front yards or around buildings.
Today I’m thinking of that old song we used to sing, “I’m Going to Leave Old Texas Now.” One person would sing each line, and everyone would echo it. Sort of a campfire song. It seems particularly appropriate today, for obvious reasons.
I’m going to leave old Texas now,
They’ve got no use for the longhorn cow.
They’ve plowed and fenced my cattle range,
And the people there are all so strange.
I didn’t think much about the meaning of the words until I got here. The plowers and the fencers have definitely prevailed, although the long horn cow seems to be doing okay as a variety of breed.
Here and there among the neat and modest farm houses a mighty and out-of-place house arises, showing that someone got some serious money, probably from oil. Here’s one, set way back from the road, that looks like a French chateau. It’s enormous, and pretty striking.
Since this is the last day in Texas, it’s time for a statistical wrap-up. I walked in Texas for 35 days. I came in on February 12 and sixty-nine days later I’m leaving. I walked 734 total miles in Texas, and have averaged 20.97 miles per day in this state. And my overall average daily mileage for the 118 days is up to 19 miles. I reckon that I’m just about two-thirds through the entire trip now.
I got 59 ride offers over 35 days. But I must say that probably 50 of them were from west of Austin. Part of the reason for that is that during the first part of the Texas walk I was on four-lane divided highways, where you almost never get ride offers, and part of it was because I was in more urban areas, and city people just don’t offer rides.
More statistics. I got a total of $6.72 in change from the roads of Texas. Also a Hong Kong 20-cent piece from the early 1990s, which I found down by Austin. Odd, because it doesn't even resemble a U.S. coin.
Another important category is roadkill. Raccoons and deer were tied for the most with 47 each. Third is 45 birds of all kinds that were big enough to count—owls, hawks, waterfowl, etc. Next come 38 skunks, 20 possums, 16 cats, 15 armadillos, 13 turtles, 12 rabbits, 11 coyotes (most of them in the last week), 8 dogs, 4 snakes, 4 things that looked like nutrias, 2 pigs, one frog and one squirrel. In addition, I saw hundreds of mammals, in various states of decay, that I couldn’t identify. Patches of fur on the asphalt. I predict that coyotes will be among the most frequently seen roadkill in New Mexico.
At about a third of the way through the walk I arrive at a place that the map says is Paynes Corner. It’s anchored by a large grain storage facility, and it has a sand and gravel yard. In the distance are perhaps fifteen modern-looking houses.
At the halfway point I pass a gigantic complex called West Gaines Seed and Delinting, which also has a peanut storage warehouse. It consists of seven or eight enormous buildings, about three hundred feet by seventy-five feet, sheathed in vertical sheet metal siding, painted gray or blue. The whole thing is about a half mile from one end to the other.
With two miles to go, in the distance I can make out the yellow and red colors of the New Mexico welcome sign. In the foreground is the Texas community of State Line, consisting of two open gas stations and two closed ones and a few other crappy structures. On the north side of the highway is Hester’s Self Serve. I think I met Hester herself when I stopped in there earlier. She was about five feet tall and a hundred years old, and was holed up in a little booth, behind bulletproof glass. But she couldn’t hear anything from in there, so she kept having to open the door and come out.
As I approach the border of the tenth state on this journey, I think back to when I entered the second one, Indiana, in September. At that time I wondered if the people in the new state were going to be different merely by virtue of living on the other side of an artificial political line. Of course in some respects they must be—they pay different taxes, go to different schools, perhaps see themselves differently based on their state’s reputation and image. But in the most basic human terms, they were the same. So many myths and fears abound concerning people from "other" places. It's part of our unfortunate tendency to slip into paranoia when faced with the unknown.
It might be that New Mexicans, since they are not taught that manufactured Texan mythology about their supposed heroic fight for freedom and independence, think differently about themselves. However, the eastern half of New Mexico, from the Rio Grande, once was part of the Republic of Texas, and even after Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona became part of the U.S., Texas sought to exert some suzerainty over New Mexico and Arizona (at one time combined and called simply New Mexico). They were both slave territories which the Confederacy tried to control. So eastern New Mexico might carry some awareness of its history as part of Texas. But I have sensed, from visiting New Mexico before, that New Mexicans are more comfortable with their mixed Anglo, Mexican, Indian, and African American ethnicities.
At long last, at 23.6 miles, comes the billboard that says, “Welcome to New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment.” And I step over the line at 4:51 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time and prepare to be enchanted.
This marks the end of this portion of my walk across the country. I will now take a break until fall, when I plan to pick up right here at the border. This will not be my last blog posting, however, and I invite you to stay tuned. I still have the long trip back to Michigan ahead of me.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Day 117: Seminole
Eastern Gaines County to Seminole. 21.2 miles/2218.4 total
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
It’s overcast and foggy as I walk west on Highway 180 from eastern Gaines County toward Seminole, but the fog is burning off slowly, and it promises to be mostly sunny, with a high in the 70s. Right now it’s about 60.
Today is my penultimate day of walking before my break. The plan for tomorrow is to walk to just the other side of the Texas-New Mexico line, still a few miles short of Hobbs. It will be a little longer than my usual walk, and will accomplish my goal of making it out of Texas. I figured all this out yesterday when I drove into Hobbs.
Yesterday in Seminole I talked to the proprietor of an antiques mall who used to be a cotton farmer and also ran a cotton gin. He told me that Gaines County is the top cotton producing county in Texas, and also the top peanut producing county. He didn't say in the country, or the world, or the galaxy, so it was a more modest claim than some I’ve heard over the months as I’ve walked through cotton country.
Apparently one of the preferred ways to grow both cotton and peanuts around here is in circular fields. They start with a quarter section, which is a half-mile-square piece of land. Ordinarily that would be 160 acres, but with a circular field it comes to 130 acres. This enables them to set up quarter-mile-long irrigation lines that travel around from an axis at the center of the field. The corners outside the field, which are about seven acres each, are usually planted in some feed crop, like wheat, which needs less water. I’m sure this is done in a lot of other places, but it strikes me as ingenious and efficient. Another thing he said is that Gaines County has the best underground water supply in West Texas, so the water can be pumped with a minimum of mechanical power. Good water, not too deep, with some natural pressure to it.
With all that in mind, I’m now beginning to observe the circular fields and the corner sections as I walk along. There’s plenty of regular square planting done, too. Another thing I’m observing is piles of sand that look like dunes along the roadside. According to Tony in Lamesa these dunes were created by sandstorms, which can get pretty bad around here, especially in March. Between the pale red tilled fields lie long expanses of untilled land, perhaps never broken, dotted with mesquites and sagebrush.
Like all farmers I’ve talked to so far, the man in the antique store loved talking about his crop—cotton in this case—and could have gone on for hours about it. Of course that’s true of many people in many occupations. It’s the case with me in fact, and my own professional specialty—state tax law. I would be more than happy to discourse on the subject for hours on end, with a wistful twinkle in my eye, but for the fact that I can’t find anybody with the stamina or interest to listen for that long. On the few occasions I converse with people at length on this journey, I try to work it into the conversation. “So, what’s your sales tax rate here in Texas?” I’ll ask, and they'll answer. “And that’s a combined state and local rate, isn’t it? Well, in Connecticut we didn’t have the local option, but . . . .” And I generally lose them soon after that. But I keep trying. Maybe some day I’ll hire a toady, like the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Big Lebowski, and make him listen and nod and act interested and ask the occasional question. “So tell me, Pete,” he’ll say, “does the sales tax exemption for 501(c)(3) organizations apply only to purchases by such groups, or to sales by them as well?” Until then I’ll continue to walk the roads of America, looking for the person who knows almost nothing about state taxation but has the burning desire to learn. I imagine I’ll be on that search for a long time, like a knight errant looking for the grail.
As I reach the top of yet another long steady incline, I can see, at a distance of eight or nine miles, the water tower of Seminole. Otherwise I am rolling along in the middle of an undulating sea of grey-green grass and red-brown earth.
I mentioned last time that I was observing more white pickup trucks around here than I am used to seeing. Because I have nothing but time on my hands, I decide to conduct a semi-scientific test, and watch the first one hundred trucks going by in either direction to see how they break down by color. I count only full-sized trucks that look like they're for personal use. After about four hours I complete the test, and the results are 51 white trucks and 49 of all other colors. What makes it unscientific is that I don’t know how many white ones are manufactured and offered for sale versus trucks of other colors. If half of all trucks made are white, then my test doesn’t prove anything in terms of the preferences of local drivers.
Another thing I notice that I think is significant is that of those one hundred trucks almost none of them are old or beat up. In fact, only about five of them look as if they had been made before 2000. That indicates some level of economic comfort, I think. In other parts of the south (and in Michigan, for that matter) it’s common to see vehicles that are old and falling apart. I wonder what happens to the old ones when they trade them in? Maybe they send them to Mississippi.
At the intersection of Highway 180 and Texas Route 1429 are the beginnings of the outskirts of Seminole. Houses now appear regularly where there were virtually none before, spaced about a quarter of a mile apart. These farmhouses are set back about two hundred feet from the road and are mostly one-story ranches. Idle farm equipment sits in the large yards and sheep, goats, horses, and some cattle graze in the pastures between them.
As I draw closer to the actual city limits of Seminole the farmhouses give way to yards filled with oil drilling and cotton farming equipment, as well as auto junkyards.
Highway 180 curves off to the right a bit and here’s the first sign welcoming me to Seminole. It says “Seminole, Gaines County, #1 Oil Producer, #1 Cotton Producer, #1 Peanut Producer, #1 People Anywhere!”
Seminole, with a population of 5,910, takes its name from Seminole Wells, which was a watering area near here when they were establishing the town back in the late 1800s. That gets me wondering about why the Seminole Indians were in Texas, since I associate them with Florida. So I check out the Seminoles on the internet and find some interesting things. I won’t launch into a whole discourse on Seminoles, but in a nutshell here it is. They were originally Creek Indians who were encouraged by the English to go into the Spanish territory of Florida and wreak havoc on the local tribes there, which they duly did, establishing themselves as the dominant group and absorbing some local indigenous Florida tribes into their ranks. Gradually their ties to the Creeks weakened for various reasons, and they began to be considered a separate tribe. “Seminole” was a Creek word meaning pretty much "people who went off and did their own crazy thing," which is what they were. The Seminoles began to acquire a number of African people among their numbers, in some cases as their slaves and in some cases as runaway slaves seeking refuge among them. These became known as Black Seminoles. This brought the enmity of the Americans, who in that part of the country hated and feared nothing more than runaway slaves, and for whom the idea of black Indians was a sort of double anathema. They began to want the Seminoles eliminated. The U.S. fought them around 1817, and Andrew Jackson enhanced his military reputation by killing Seminoles. About twenty years later they were deported from Florida and sent out west, as were many other Indians. During that time some of them opted to go to live in Mexican Texas, then later in Old Mexico, and groups of Seminoles went back and forth for some time thereafter between Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. So there were, or had been, Seminoles in this part of West Texas around the time it was officially settled.
The Gaines County Courthouse is ugly. There’s no getting around it. From one angle it looks like a hospital, and from another a high school, but from every angle it is ugly. This is because although it was built in 1936 it was “restored” in 1964, about the time when U.S. public architecture was going through one of its worst periods so far. On the outside it’s got the aluminum window frames and turquoise panels next to the windows that are two of the wretched hallmarks of the era. (I know I keep going on about the architecture of this period, and I can’t help thinking that it has something to do with the junior and senior high schools I attended. On the whole I had a pretty good time at those places, but I remember even back then thinking how hideous they looked.)
The rest of downtown Seminole is nothing special—I checked it out yesterday. Nice enough, but with the usual vacant stores and wide empty streets. I'm headed for Walmart, where the real action is.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
It’s overcast and foggy as I walk west on Highway 180 from eastern Gaines County toward Seminole, but the fog is burning off slowly, and it promises to be mostly sunny, with a high in the 70s. Right now it’s about 60.
Today is my penultimate day of walking before my break. The plan for tomorrow is to walk to just the other side of the Texas-New Mexico line, still a few miles short of Hobbs. It will be a little longer than my usual walk, and will accomplish my goal of making it out of Texas. I figured all this out yesterday when I drove into Hobbs.
Yesterday in Seminole I talked to the proprietor of an antiques mall who used to be a cotton farmer and also ran a cotton gin. He told me that Gaines County is the top cotton producing county in Texas, and also the top peanut producing county. He didn't say in the country, or the world, or the galaxy, so it was a more modest claim than some I’ve heard over the months as I’ve walked through cotton country.
Apparently one of the preferred ways to grow both cotton and peanuts around here is in circular fields. They start with a quarter section, which is a half-mile-square piece of land. Ordinarily that would be 160 acres, but with a circular field it comes to 130 acres. This enables them to set up quarter-mile-long irrigation lines that travel around from an axis at the center of the field. The corners outside the field, which are about seven acres each, are usually planted in some feed crop, like wheat, which needs less water. I’m sure this is done in a lot of other places, but it strikes me as ingenious and efficient. Another thing he said is that Gaines County has the best underground water supply in West Texas, so the water can be pumped with a minimum of mechanical power. Good water, not too deep, with some natural pressure to it.
With all that in mind, I’m now beginning to observe the circular fields and the corner sections as I walk along. There’s plenty of regular square planting done, too. Another thing I’m observing is piles of sand that look like dunes along the roadside. According to Tony in Lamesa these dunes were created by sandstorms, which can get pretty bad around here, especially in March. Between the pale red tilled fields lie long expanses of untilled land, perhaps never broken, dotted with mesquites and sagebrush.
Like all farmers I’ve talked to so far, the man in the antique store loved talking about his crop—cotton in this case—and could have gone on for hours about it. Of course that’s true of many people in many occupations. It’s the case with me in fact, and my own professional specialty—state tax law. I would be more than happy to discourse on the subject for hours on end, with a wistful twinkle in my eye, but for the fact that I can’t find anybody with the stamina or interest to listen for that long. On the few occasions I converse with people at length on this journey, I try to work it into the conversation. “So, what’s your sales tax rate here in Texas?” I’ll ask, and they'll answer. “And that’s a combined state and local rate, isn’t it? Well, in Connecticut we didn’t have the local option, but . . . .” And I generally lose them soon after that. But I keep trying. Maybe some day I’ll hire a toady, like the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Big Lebowski, and make him listen and nod and act interested and ask the occasional question. “So tell me, Pete,” he’ll say, “does the sales tax exemption for 501(c)(3) organizations apply only to purchases by such groups, or to sales by them as well?” Until then I’ll continue to walk the roads of America, looking for the person who knows almost nothing about state taxation but has the burning desire to learn. I imagine I’ll be on that search for a long time, like a knight errant looking for the grail.
As I reach the top of yet another long steady incline, I can see, at a distance of eight or nine miles, the water tower of Seminole. Otherwise I am rolling along in the middle of an undulating sea of grey-green grass and red-brown earth.
I mentioned last time that I was observing more white pickup trucks around here than I am used to seeing. Because I have nothing but time on my hands, I decide to conduct a semi-scientific test, and watch the first one hundred trucks going by in either direction to see how they break down by color. I count only full-sized trucks that look like they're for personal use. After about four hours I complete the test, and the results are 51 white trucks and 49 of all other colors. What makes it unscientific is that I don’t know how many white ones are manufactured and offered for sale versus trucks of other colors. If half of all trucks made are white, then my test doesn’t prove anything in terms of the preferences of local drivers.
Another thing I notice that I think is significant is that of those one hundred trucks almost none of them are old or beat up. In fact, only about five of them look as if they had been made before 2000. That indicates some level of economic comfort, I think. In other parts of the south (and in Michigan, for that matter) it’s common to see vehicles that are old and falling apart. I wonder what happens to the old ones when they trade them in? Maybe they send them to Mississippi.
At the intersection of Highway 180 and Texas Route 1429 are the beginnings of the outskirts of Seminole. Houses now appear regularly where there were virtually none before, spaced about a quarter of a mile apart. These farmhouses are set back about two hundred feet from the road and are mostly one-story ranches. Idle farm equipment sits in the large yards and sheep, goats, horses, and some cattle graze in the pastures between them.
As I draw closer to the actual city limits of Seminole the farmhouses give way to yards filled with oil drilling and cotton farming equipment, as well as auto junkyards.
Highway 180 curves off to the right a bit and here’s the first sign welcoming me to Seminole. It says “Seminole, Gaines County, #1 Oil Producer, #1 Cotton Producer, #1 Peanut Producer, #1 People Anywhere!”
Seminole, with a population of 5,910, takes its name from Seminole Wells, which was a watering area near here when they were establishing the town back in the late 1800s. That gets me wondering about why the Seminole Indians were in Texas, since I associate them with Florida. So I check out the Seminoles on the internet and find some interesting things. I won’t launch into a whole discourse on Seminoles, but in a nutshell here it is. They were originally Creek Indians who were encouraged by the English to go into the Spanish territory of Florida and wreak havoc on the local tribes there, which they duly did, establishing themselves as the dominant group and absorbing some local indigenous Florida tribes into their ranks. Gradually their ties to the Creeks weakened for various reasons, and they began to be considered a separate tribe. “Seminole” was a Creek word meaning pretty much "people who went off and did their own crazy thing," which is what they were. The Seminoles began to acquire a number of African people among their numbers, in some cases as their slaves and in some cases as runaway slaves seeking refuge among them. These became known as Black Seminoles. This brought the enmity of the Americans, who in that part of the country hated and feared nothing more than runaway slaves, and for whom the idea of black Indians was a sort of double anathema. They began to want the Seminoles eliminated. The U.S. fought them around 1817, and Andrew Jackson enhanced his military reputation by killing Seminoles. About twenty years later they were deported from Florida and sent out west, as were many other Indians. During that time some of them opted to go to live in Mexican Texas, then later in Old Mexico, and groups of Seminoles went back and forth for some time thereafter between Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. So there were, or had been, Seminoles in this part of West Texas around the time it was officially settled.
The Gaines County Courthouse is ugly. There’s no getting around it. From one angle it looks like a hospital, and from another a high school, but from every angle it is ugly. This is because although it was built in 1936 it was “restored” in 1964, about the time when U.S. public architecture was going through one of its worst periods so far. On the outside it’s got the aluminum window frames and turquoise panels next to the windows that are two of the wretched hallmarks of the era. (I know I keep going on about the architecture of this period, and I can’t help thinking that it has something to do with the junior and senior high schools I attended. On the whole I had a pretty good time at those places, but I remember even back then thinking how hideous they looked.)
The rest of downtown Seminole is nothing special—I checked it out yesterday. Nice enough, but with the usual vacant stores and wide empty streets. I'm headed for Walmart, where the real action is.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Day 116: White Pickup Trucks
Lamesa to Eastern Gaines County. 21.5 miles/2197.2 total
Monday, April 19, 2010
I’m leaving from vast and underused parking lot of the Dawson County Senior Citizen Center in Lamesa (there can't be enough senior citizens in the entire county to fill the lot), heading west on Highway 180 into eastern Gaines County, about halfway between Lamesa and Seminole.
It’s cloudy and cool, probably in the low 50s, with temperatures going up into the 60s. The clouds are arranged in subtle layers of pale blue and pink, giving the promise that later they will lift a little and let in some sun.
Even though its downtown is pretty empty, Lamesa seems like an economically viable place. As I go through the west end, I pass progressively nicer houses, first just some modest brick bungalows, then an upper middle class subdivision next to a golf course. That’s the second golf course I’ve seen in Lamesa, and it's a pretty good measure of the economic condition of the city. Poor and depressed areas don’t indulge in bourgeois recreations. Or, as Robert Duvall put it in Apocalypse Now, “Charlie don’t surf.”
One last factoid I should mention in connection with Lamesa. According to the Wikipedia article I read last night, it is widely considered to be the birthplace of chicken fried steak. It may be that the Germans and Austrians who came to Texas had something to do with this, due to the similarity of chicken fried steak to Wiener schnitzel. Same general idea—breaded tenderized meat, pan fried.
I took my new friend Tony up on his offer to have coffee at his auto repair shop, and at 8:00 this morning I showed up and spent an enjoyable hour chatting. And, just in time, his wife showed up with a box of donuts, so that worked out well. We talked cars, mostly. I saw a nicely restored white 1956 Cadillac in front of the shop, which (except for its color) reminded me of presidential motorcades from my youth and funerals and Nixon in South America. I commented on it, and we fell to talking about various classic cars, and how many nice old car bodies there are here, waiting to be restored. I had a bit of an ulterior motive in joining him for coffee, too. I noticed this morning that I needed water in the motor home, and I figured I could use an outside faucet at his shop to fill it up. And he proved to be very obliging on that score. But I think I would have gone anyway. Having these talks with the likes of Tony and the boys of Snyder reminds me of how starved I get for human companionship on this solitary journey.
One of the things I never fail to mention when I’m talking to people at length about my experiences on this journey is my discovery (or rather confirmation) of the fact that people are pretty nice and decent and willing to be helpful, no matter where you go in this county. For that I believe we can thank the relative prosperity, order, and liberty we enjoy up and down the socioeconomic ladder, compared to many grimmer places in the world (although I don't usually share this opinion with casual acquaintances). No bandits waiting to descend from the hills; no barbarians at the gates. Things could always be better, of course, I don’t deny that, and our economic system could use a great deal more work--an overhaul, in fact. My own person and property have been respected wherever I’ve gone so far. True, this may owe itself to the fact that I’m a fairly well-dressed white man of advancing years, who presents no threat to anyone, symbolically or otherwise. In that I am fortunate, since I certainly haven’t earned that status.
There are those, even among the readers of this blog, who take a darker and more melodramatic view of things, and see danger lurking behind every bush and across each new state border. I don't think I could approach life with such a narrow stance. If I did, I would never have undertaken this project.
I try to preach this message on the road because I believe it to be an antidote to the right-wing hysteria that fills the airwaves and has seeped into the fragile brains of so many. Republicanism, after all, is a sort of amalgam of fear of outsiders, hatred of those who are different, and selfishness in all its other forms. Yet I meet people daily who are undoubtedly Republicans who, on a one-to-one basis, behave with admirable generosity. If I can somehow convince them that others—from different regions, races, groups—conduct themselves the same way they do, they may be inclined to fear them less.
Out here in the country west of Lamesa it’s all cotton fields and the occasional oil well. And I’ve noticed that the vehicle of choice is the white full-sized pickup truck. Probably half the trucks are white. The brand doesn’t matter—Dodge, Chevy, GMC, Ford, Toyota—the truck has to be white. I suppose that’s because they’re better in the heat, but they sure do show the dirt. I can imagine a news story about a robbery in West Texas, where they’re describing the suspect as a white man, about five feet ten, with a pot belly, wearing a t-shirt and a ball cap, and driving a late-model white pickup truck. That wouldn’t narrow it down much.
Tony told me I’d pass several gins between Lamesa and Seminole, and not much else. I come to the King Mesa Gin, at about two hours into the walk. He says the gins were busy into March with the cotton from last year’s harvest, which was late and in some cases didn’t get picked until January. To me the King Mesa Gin seems like an oasis of buildings in the middle of nothing, but the truth is more the reverse—the “something” is what’s growing, or will grow, in these vast fields, without which there would be no gins or equipment or white pickup trucks.
I see a large herd of cattle at about the halfway point, perhaps a hundred of them. When the cow closest to the fence catches sight of me she turns and begins running, along with some others. But today I'm prepared and immediately begin singing “Werewolves of London.” On the howls, they all stop and stand still and look at me, bewildered. I think Warren Zevon still has the power.
Well into the walk I leave Dawson County and enter Gaines County. I can feel the road going gradually uphill amid the sagebrush and furrowed fields. Gaines County was named for James Gaines, a signer of the Texas declaration of independence. This is the last county in Texas on the route I’m taking.
Toward the end of the walk I begin to see some small patches of blue sky, as the wind shifts around and blows at my back from the east.
Monday, April 19, 2010
I’m leaving from vast and underused parking lot of the Dawson County Senior Citizen Center in Lamesa (there can't be enough senior citizens in the entire county to fill the lot), heading west on Highway 180 into eastern Gaines County, about halfway between Lamesa and Seminole.
It’s cloudy and cool, probably in the low 50s, with temperatures going up into the 60s. The clouds are arranged in subtle layers of pale blue and pink, giving the promise that later they will lift a little and let in some sun.
Even though its downtown is pretty empty, Lamesa seems like an economically viable place. As I go through the west end, I pass progressively nicer houses, first just some modest brick bungalows, then an upper middle class subdivision next to a golf course. That’s the second golf course I’ve seen in Lamesa, and it's a pretty good measure of the economic condition of the city. Poor and depressed areas don’t indulge in bourgeois recreations. Or, as Robert Duvall put it in Apocalypse Now, “Charlie don’t surf.”
One last factoid I should mention in connection with Lamesa. According to the Wikipedia article I read last night, it is widely considered to be the birthplace of chicken fried steak. It may be that the Germans and Austrians who came to Texas had something to do with this, due to the similarity of chicken fried steak to Wiener schnitzel. Same general idea—breaded tenderized meat, pan fried.
I took my new friend Tony up on his offer to have coffee at his auto repair shop, and at 8:00 this morning I showed up and spent an enjoyable hour chatting. And, just in time, his wife showed up with a box of donuts, so that worked out well. We talked cars, mostly. I saw a nicely restored white 1956 Cadillac in front of the shop, which (except for its color) reminded me of presidential motorcades from my youth and funerals and Nixon in South America. I commented on it, and we fell to talking about various classic cars, and how many nice old car bodies there are here, waiting to be restored. I had a bit of an ulterior motive in joining him for coffee, too. I noticed this morning that I needed water in the motor home, and I figured I could use an outside faucet at his shop to fill it up. And he proved to be very obliging on that score. But I think I would have gone anyway. Having these talks with the likes of Tony and the boys of Snyder reminds me of how starved I get for human companionship on this solitary journey.
One of the things I never fail to mention when I’m talking to people at length about my experiences on this journey is my discovery (or rather confirmation) of the fact that people are pretty nice and decent and willing to be helpful, no matter where you go in this county. For that I believe we can thank the relative prosperity, order, and liberty we enjoy up and down the socioeconomic ladder, compared to many grimmer places in the world (although I don't usually share this opinion with casual acquaintances). No bandits waiting to descend from the hills; no barbarians at the gates. Things could always be better, of course, I don’t deny that, and our economic system could use a great deal more work--an overhaul, in fact. My own person and property have been respected wherever I’ve gone so far. True, this may owe itself to the fact that I’m a fairly well-dressed white man of advancing years, who presents no threat to anyone, symbolically or otherwise. In that I am fortunate, since I certainly haven’t earned that status.
There are those, even among the readers of this blog, who take a darker and more melodramatic view of things, and see danger lurking behind every bush and across each new state border. I don't think I could approach life with such a narrow stance. If I did, I would never have undertaken this project.
I try to preach this message on the road because I believe it to be an antidote to the right-wing hysteria that fills the airwaves and has seeped into the fragile brains of so many. Republicanism, after all, is a sort of amalgam of fear of outsiders, hatred of those who are different, and selfishness in all its other forms. Yet I meet people daily who are undoubtedly Republicans who, on a one-to-one basis, behave with admirable generosity. If I can somehow convince them that others—from different regions, races, groups—conduct themselves the same way they do, they may be inclined to fear them less.
Out here in the country west of Lamesa it’s all cotton fields and the occasional oil well. And I’ve noticed that the vehicle of choice is the white full-sized pickup truck. Probably half the trucks are white. The brand doesn’t matter—Dodge, Chevy, GMC, Ford, Toyota—the truck has to be white. I suppose that’s because they’re better in the heat, but they sure do show the dirt. I can imagine a news story about a robbery in West Texas, where they’re describing the suspect as a white man, about five feet ten, with a pot belly, wearing a t-shirt and a ball cap, and driving a late-model white pickup truck. That wouldn’t narrow it down much.
Tony told me I’d pass several gins between Lamesa and Seminole, and not much else. I come to the King Mesa Gin, at about two hours into the walk. He says the gins were busy into March with the cotton from last year’s harvest, which was late and in some cases didn’t get picked until January. To me the King Mesa Gin seems like an oasis of buildings in the middle of nothing, but the truth is more the reverse—the “something” is what’s growing, or will grow, in these vast fields, without which there would be no gins or equipment or white pickup trucks.
I see a large herd of cattle at about the halfway point, perhaps a hundred of them. When the cow closest to the fence catches sight of me she turns and begins running, along with some others. But today I'm prepared and immediately begin singing “Werewolves of London.” On the howls, they all stop and stand still and look at me, bewildered. I think Warren Zevon still has the power.
Well into the walk I leave Dawson County and enter Gaines County. I can feel the road going gradually uphill amid the sagebrush and furrowed fields. Gaines County was named for James Gaines, a signer of the Texas declaration of independence. This is the last county in Texas on the route I’m taking.
Toward the end of the walk I begin to see some small patches of blue sky, as the wind shifts around and blows at my back from the east.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Day 115: It's Always Something
Western Borden County to Lamesa. 21 miles/2175.7 total
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Leaving from Highway 180 near Texas 1054, heading west into the City of Lamesa (pronounced La-MEE-sa).
It’s cloudy here, but it was sunny in Lamesa when I left. Warmer than yesterday, and it'll probably get into the low 70s. I expect these clouds to break up and thin out in a few hours.
Traffic is even lighter today than it was yesterday, this being Sunday morning. It’s just me and the cattle right now. Some are looking at me from fifty feet away or so, and can hear me. Cows are indifferent to vehicular traffic, but a person walking down the road always catches their attention. I try singing to them, and since I’m in the wide-open spaces of Texas, I try an old Jimmie Rodgers song, “Waiting for a Train.” They turn tail and trot away from me. Guess they only like the Warren Zevon stuff. Or else I’ve lost my touch.
I’m still climbing gradually uphill. Lamesa, at 2992 feet, is about 700 feet higher than Snyder.
During today’s walk I’ll pass another milestone, of sorts. By the time I finish I will have exceeded the length of the Appalachian Trail, which most people agree is 2,169 miles. In noting that I don’t by any means liken what I’m doing to walking the AT. On the contrary, it gives me pause to think that through hikers on the AT walk, over a six month period, the same distance I’ve covered in almost eight months, and under much more rigorous circumstances. They’re lucky if they do fifteen miles a day. Sort of puts things into perspective.
After an hour and a half I leave Borden County and enter Dawson County, named for Nicholas Mosby Dawson, who fought in the Texas revolution. Dawson is quite a bit larger in population than Borden, with about 15,000. Oil and cotton are what it’s all about here.
At about seven miles I reach the top of a long hill and come out on a plateau. As far as I can see are plowed fields. No hills in the distance. It’s mostly cotton. I think they’re going to be planting over the next two weeks or so. The rows are mounded up, with troughs between the rows. That, I presume, is to catch the rain and prevent runoff, and to keep the plants from rotting. But maybe there’s another reason.
They’ve had more than the usual amount of rain here in Texas so far this spring, and that’s good news, although farmers will find something to complain about in just about anything. Too much rain, not enough rain, crop prices, not enough heat, too much heat, equipment prices, you name it. It’s never quite right. If the streets were paved with gold, they’d say it was too bumpy a ride. As Rosanne Roseannadanna said, “It’s always something.” When I was having coffee with the boys on Thursday, it was raining. One of them was complaining that as a farmer you couldn’t get anything done when it was raining like that. I thought, well what kind of rain do you want, exactly? But I think I know already. It would be rain that fell only in the middle of the night, not too heavily, and on a regular and frequent basis.
It strikes me that the biggest difference between these cotton fields and those along the Mississippi River is the size of the fields. With no way to know who owns what, I'd still venture to say that the individual farm size is much larger here.
At the intersection of U.S. 180 and Texas Farm Road 176 is the community of Key. On one corner is a large collection of farm implements. On another is a Baptist church. On a third are a couple of tin-roofed farm buildings and an abandoned house. And on the fourth, where I’m sitting, is the Key Mercantile building, a white painted peeling place with a broad porch held up with rough hewn cedar posts. Of course it’s closed, and when I look in the window I see that it’s been cleared out long since. The pumps out front show that the last price at which they sold gas was $1.25 a gallon. There’s a working soda machine, but I don’t have the right change. I sit and rest on a bench on the porch.
The internet says Key reached a high population of 75 in the late 40s, and it’s been downhill ever since. No official population is listed, but I estimate it at around twenty, if you go out to a radius of a mile or so.
I imagine that a century ago it wasn’t uncommon to be born and live your whole life and die in a place the size of Key, going into a “big” city like Lamesa maybe once a month for supplies, and to raise a little hell.
In the ditches, along with beer bottles and other junk and the bleached bones of animals killed last year, bloom a variety of wildflowers, varying in size and shape and color, but always presenting a feast for the eyes. Oranges, yellows, purples, pinks--varieties in the dozens. These are flowers I’ve come to admire but whose names I won’t ever learn. I’m just not that interested, and I’ve made a conscious decision not to pursue the matter to find out. I do know blue bonnets and Indian paintbrush. And I know that many of the rest have interesting names, like dog piss and cat’s meow and wolf tooth, but I’m content to appreciate them the way the other animals do, without naming them. And if it turns out the other animals do name them, they can keep those names to themselves.
After ten miles through this flat, tilled earth, with only the county roads, lettered and spaced one mile apart, to mark the passage of time and distance, U.S. 180 merges with U.S. 87, and takes a turn to the north into Lamesa.
On the outskirts of Lamesa I come to a working drive-in movie theater, a rarity. It’s called the Skyview. The two movies that are playing are current ones—Clash of the Titans and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, so I know they’re open at least some of the time. It’s one of fourteen working drive-ins left in Texas, according to Wikipedia. The same source says that Buddy Holly once performed on top of the concession stand at the Skyview.
I enter Lamesa, population 9952. Unimpressive, spread out and filled with one and two-story buildings. Off to the right is the high school football field. I can see its lights. A church spire pops into view. I pass the Spike Dykes Ford dealership. That sounds like the name of an edgy girl group—The Spike Dykes. Or maybe Spike Dykes and the Fister Sisters.
I stop for a long chat with a guy named Tony, through the window of his pickup truck. He'd seen me back on the other side of Key and offered me a ride. He rounded the corner here in Lamesa and said, “Well I see you finally got here.” We ended up conversing for quite some time. I told him what I was doing, and he asked good questions, like how many miles I got to a pair of shoes. Tony’s from Lamesa, and runs a car repair place or a body shop, I forget which. He told me that Dawson County and neighboring Gaines County, which I’ll reach tomorrow, are the two largest cotton-producing counties in the country. (It’s funny, but I could swear I’ve been through other counties that have made the same claim.) Tony also confirmed that the average cotton farm out here in West Texas is a lot bigger than it is east of here. Here a 640-acre section, one-mile square, is considered a fairly small farm. Tony invited me to come to his place of business for coffee tomorrow morning. I may take him up on that.
I wend my way into the center of town, where the Dawson County Courthouse sits on a very shady square, surrounded on all four sides with wide brick streets, perhaps restored to their original appearance. The courthouse itself is undistinguished, made of brick and very functional, perhaps dating from near the founding of the city, which was in 1903. About three-quarters of the storefronts around the courthouse stand empty.
There's more blue sky than clouds now, as the afternoon wanes. The motor home is in the parking lot of the Dawson County Senior Citizen Center, waiting patiently.
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