Another Old Column

It must have been about 20 years ago, so I don't remember many of the details, ya know, like the guy's name and such. The gangs in Antioch were kind of a novelty then, and their members hadn't gotten around to killing near as many of each other as they do now. So this incident got a lot of interest.

I suppose we have grown accustomed to the murders, and so we hardly notice anymore. Murder on the streets is just a routine part of day to day life now. Progress, I guess. I call it that cause it sometimes seems the “progressives” like it this way.

Anyway, this guy was wanted by the police in the murder of a gang member. The cops had been looking for him for a while, like several months, and they went about this by watching for him in the places he hung out and by talking with people who knew him, like his friends. Antioch was a small town then, so that's what the police did, cause everybody knew everybody back then. Turns out this guy's friends knew where he was most of the time, because he was hanging with them, living with them, partying with them, and that sort of thing. They forgot to mention that to the cops

After about 6 months of looking for him, the cops gathered around the house where this guy was hiding, and they invited him to come out. As I recall, it was night, and there was some considerable discussion between the cops outside and the guy inside before much happened, and then the guy came out and pointed his gun (he had this gun cause even though all his friends thought he was a cool guy, he also happened to be a criminal and so he had this gun that he pointed at folks he didn't like, like the dude he allegedly murdered) at the cops. And they shot him! Right there on the front lawn, next to the pink flamingos.

No, you're right....I don't know if they had pink flamingos on the lawn. Who remembers these things? I do remember that the cops killed this guy cause he pointed a gun at them, and I remember the outrage over this. The paper didn't think the cops handled that very well. And I specially remember the girl the paper interviewed, one of the criminal's friends, (one of those friends who could have helped the cops arrest the guy peacefully, but of course did not) because she didn't think they needed to shoot this guy just because he pointed his gun at them, cause they coulda just shot the gun out of his hand, like they do on TV, and then everything would have been OK, ya know?

Those of you who followed my column for a while have heard this story before. I keep bringing it up cause it is such a perfect illustration of how, uh, mistaken some people can be. I'm one of those weirdos who shoots guns for fun. I used to spend hours on the range with my target pistol, which was far more accurate than the service pistols the cops carried, and as good as I got at that sport, I could not have shot the gun out of the hand of a criminal, in the dark, thirty yards away. That's movie cowboy nonsense, and it doesn't happen in real time.

But the cops suffered for that one, so when the next time rolled around, which it always seems to do, the cops surrounded the house in Antioch where the next murder suspect was holed up, with his baby daughter held hostage, and this time the cops didn't shoot him. Instead, they waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally the criminal killed the baby girl. Not surprisingly, the cops caught all the criticism that time, too. And each year after, as the paper showed the baby's mother, the misguided child who chose to reproduce with this murderer, placing flowers on the baby's grave, the cops caught it anew. Progress, again. 

I wrote for that paper, and we all know how that worked out. Now, I have no evidence that anyone from that paper was down there in Oakland rioting and breaking windows, and assaulting police officers the other night after the judge handed out the sentence in the BART station shooting case. Or as some of the locals, collectively named the “community” in the paper, call it: the “execution” of a pure innocent “father and peacemaker” by a police officer. So don't jump to the conclusion that the paper actively supported those riots. And I don't know what the paper wrote about those riots, cause I don't read that paper. I only know how I feel about the people that did that rioting, and those who support them.

Subtle hint:   If I'm paying attention to the rules of proper writin' of the language, when I want to say that a person, WHO did something, I won't say that a person, THAT did something, cause that would be incorrect. THAT did something, should be reserved for animals and things and such, and it's only humans, ah, WHO do something. So if I write about the people, THAT did that rioting, well you figure it out.

I don't much like the folks that riot about situations like this. Rioting does not help their argument, whatever that argument might be. I don't think the cops are perfect. I do think I like what they do more than what the murdering gang members do. I like what cops do more than the anarchists that fed that riot, and that use any excuse to burn down our civilization. I trust cops more than I trust the average criminal.

I cannot escape the fact that most of the yelling over the BART shooting is about race. The criminal killed was Black and the cop was White, and apparently that is all that counts with the anarchists, the progressives, and the “community” that supports the rioters.

And I'm completely hung up on the words of a flawed man who once said some really fine words. Perhaps the most important thing Martin Luther King ever said was that someday we would have a world where people would be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. I cannot argue with this wish.

By any definition, Oscar Grant was a criminal. Twelve times he was charged with crimes, and he was only 22 years old. He did prison time for drug dealing. He once tossed a gun out of his car when he was being chased for a traffic violation. He was high on prescription drugs, illegally obtained and consumed, when he found himself drunk and rowdy and fighting and terrorizing the innocent riders on a BART train at two in the morning. He resisted arrest. And he got shot and killed in the total chaos that followed. Should he have been surprised by this? Was he killed because of the color of his skin? Or was he there, misbehaving, because of the content of his character?

Johannes Mehserle was an unprepared, under trained man thrust into a situation he was completely unable to handle simply because the officers with seniority got the holiday off. He tried to arrest a criminal that was acting like a criminal, resisting arrest, struggling and behaving badly, and a threatening crowd surrounded him. Perhaps he had memories of four police officers murdered only months earlier by a misanthrope not much different from Oscar Grant rattling around in his young head. He panicked. He lost all control of this thinking and actions, and he killed that man. Because he was White? Or just because he was woefully unable to do what he was supposed to do?

In an environment where the “community” hardly raises any comment over a hundred gang related murders each and every year, suddenly the “community” is outraged over the killing of one man by one man. I wonder how this becomes only about race, when it really is about content of character?

And for the progressives who state that we should simply accept a few riots, because in this country's history the police sometimes did discriminate against minorities, I suggest we stop living in the past and instead consider what we can do to survive today. That is how we progress.

And those despicable mobs that use this tragedy as an excuse to riot, loot, burn, and assault...if that is not indicative of a corruption of content of character, we are losing any semblance of our civilization, and if the “progressives”, and the media don't get that, they are as much to blame as those cretins in the streets.

Meanwhile, the anarchists are already planning the next riot, and while smiling, they announced this to a panting media that cannot get enough. The following item in the news program I was watching this morning was about two more gang members murdered by gang members. I must have missed the part where the “community” was organizing to put a halt to this ongoing tragedy. Because that item just seemed to fade into the routine of day to day.

Another Old Column From Last Spring

On Sept 11 2001 some of the world's evil people tried to take down this great nation. Don't quite understand what their beef was, but we were a big target, and big targets are always easy to blame, and easy to hit. And they hit us pretty hard. Like most reasonable folks, we hit back. We have the ability to hurt the people who try to hurt us, and we elected to express that ability. We've put a dent in their leadership, and are working on the rest. And although some among us think that self defense is silly and impolite, more rational folks are still in charge, and thus we still have a country. It is a country worth defending, and I thank those who have and are defending it.

Sentient people know that we are still a big target, and that we will always be vulnerable to terrorist attack, because cowards and terrorists like to go after the gentle and un-defended, and that's how lucky we are, cause most of us are gentle and un-defended. Our life is so wonderful that most of us can be this way. If evil people want to hurt us, we present oh so many easy targets. 

Sure, we work to inconvenience the terrorists. We have finally started to keep track of the worst of them, and we make an effort to keep them out of our country. We endure those security lines at the airports, and we gladly get groped so we can board an airplane, because as soon as we stop doing that those evil ones will strike us again, as they once did. We are a soft people, spoiled by our success, but we have enough among us with the right stuff that we have held the storm at the gates. And we are finding the ways to live our lives and still not make too easy a target for the evil in the world.

I don't know about you, but after 911 I looked around my neighborhood to see where the best targets might be, just in case. The professionals did the same, and they keep an eye on some places we really don't want to loose. I suppose the Golden Gate Bridge is no longer well guarded, cause it is too close to the softest among us, and to those who root for our enemies. But I had to open the lid on the bed of my pickup truck last year before the guards let me drive over the Hoover Dam, and I didn't mind. I hadn't hidden a bomb in there. The Hoover Dam is not only very important, but it is also kinda neat. Would be a shame if the bastards tried to destroy that one.

This year we will drive over the new bridge at Black Canyon. Now commercial traffic won't be stopped from driving over Hoover Dam, but instead they can use the new bridge to bypass the dam. And if the scum want to get that dam to hurt us, they will have to find another way.

A thousand feet long and 900 feet above the broiling river, the cement arch bridge is a wonder of engineering achievement. I cannot wait to see it. The bridge has been needed since before 911, but we erected it as a consequence of that threat, and the builders did a wonderful job. Evil set us down, but we got up fighting, and now our genius is showing us the way to our future. I plan on celebrating when I cross that bridge.

Mike O' Gallaghan was once Arizona's governor and a Korean War veteran. Pat Tillman stared in the NFL and then died fighting for us against the evil that brought 911. They named the bridge after these two. I'll tip a glass to them, too.

8/28/11

I watch the faces, I think. The ‘I think’ part is because I’m not really sure what I do all the time, or even some of the time. I watch the faces in the exam room because so much of what happens in the exam room has nothing to do with what the people think they know, or what they want me to know.

 I’m looking for the truth, and for those bits of useful stuff that I learn from folks when they don’t know they are telling me these things.  This is all a part of that thing somebody once said about veterinarians, that thing about how the animals can’t talk, so the vet just has to know. Well, we don’t just know, but we can often find out.

To do my job I need to know what my patient has been doing. I’m hoping the people have seen what the animals are doing. I ask questions of the people, and they generally answer. Sometimes they tell me what the animal is doing, and sometimes they tell me why they think the animal is doing it. The difference between these two answers is that sometimes they tell me what the animal is doing and I get a useful answer, and sometimes they tell me what they think is the why the animal is doing what it is doing, and that is often wrong. If they fool me, and I accept as fact their why instead of their what, I may make serious mistakes in my diagnosis and treatment. And these mistakes can have grave consequences.

The best example of this dilemma would be an old friend of mine, a retired physician. He has brought his pets to me for the best part of 40 years. I believe he was once a skilled physician. He certainly thought he was a pretty special doctor, but he was only trained on that one species of animal, and not all of his knowledge transfers over to the species I work with.

When I watch his face in the exam room, he puts on his “I’m the real doctor here, so shut up and listen to me and I’ll tell you how to take care of things” face, and I guess I’m supposed to be impressed, and compliant. As a client bringing his pets to me, he was, and is, a trial. Mostly, he is a trial because he will not, or cannot, tell me what his animals are doing, without injecting the why that his doctor brain has already concluded. Now, all this would be fine, except that he generally is wrong. And that makes my job much harder.

I walked out of surgery the other day after amputating this physician’s dog’s tail. All because of that cancer on the tail that he had been treating on his own with the antibiotics because he thought for a while it was just an infection. We had talked about the thing and how it could be a cancer, and he was convinced that the old dog could not survive a surgery to remove said tail, so he simply discarded that notion and did what he thought best, which was wrong. And finally he decided to do what I told him to do, which was to amputate the tail, and I let it be his idea and I did the surgery. And the dog is fine now.

And then later that day I went into the exam room with another man and his young, innocent child and their puppy. He was a nice man, and the boy was bright and asked good questions, and the puppy was a doll. And when I did my examination, and I listened to the puppy’s heart with the stethoscope, and it was OK, and I handed the stethoscope to the boy and he listened to a puppy’s heart for the very first time, I watched his face.  His face was quizzical at first, and his eyes moved back and forth, and then he heard the lub-dub…lub-dub of a living heart, and his eyes froze for a second, and the astonishment came, and then the smile, and I saw it in his face, and my heart sang with his. And in that instant I knew that he had learned a precious thing that I could not have taught him any other way. 

I will never know what becomes of this child, but I will always know that he knows that a heart beats inside a puppy, and that may change him just a little as he moves on into this harsh world.

The day before, I bent over a friend’s kitty that had had the misfortune of beating up a car, and there was a hole in this kitty’s diaphragm that let his guts slide into his chest, where they certainly didn’t belong, and they made sure he couldn’t breathe right. And I was needed to close that hole. On paper such a surgery is a simple thing. You anesthetize the kitty, and open the abdomen, and pull those things out of the chest and put them back where they belong, and then you find the torn parts of the diaphragm and suture them together, and all will be well with the world.

In reality, such a task is a bit more exciting, and when you contemplate such a task, it feels a bit like Bullwinkle the moose, and “Hey Rocky…watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.” 

You don’t want to know how often, “That trick never works.”

I have this machine that sits in surgery, and its job is to beep every time my patient’s heart beats, and show me numbers that mean the lungs are taking in oxygen and putting it into the blood. It is a useful machine…

But when you are doing the surgery, and you can actually look into the kitty’s chest through that hole in the diaphragm, and you can see the heart beating, and it bumps into your finger as you putz around in there, and the lungs are blowing up and emptying out, it just means so much more to you than a machine can convey. If at that point you could look into my face, you might see the quizzical look, and then my eyes might freeze for a second, and the astonishment might come, even after all those decades of playing this game. You might not be able to see into my future, but you would know that I know that a heart beats inside this kitty… and that is a precious thing.

From last June

My best photographs have long or interesting stories behind them. The big photo that hangs in my exam room is one of these. I took it in September 1979 while visiting the Tetons on my motorcycle. The photo shows the length of the Teton Range from the view point you can drive to on the top of Signal Mountain, a view you can’t photograph anymore because the trees grew up too much, and now you can’t even see the forest for them. Sure, you can walk over there and look around the trees and get some of that view, but it’s not the same. In the photo, lots of fresh snow colors the peaks, for it was well into September and the first snowstorm had already come through. 

The storm that brought this snow had also visited the Uinta Mountains in Utah, where I camped high in an aspen grove off a gravel road, and awoke to a winter wonderland that was something less than conducive to motorcycle travel. Later I crossed into Wyoming on I-80 along the only lane that was plowed, and spent the night in Kemmerer, the home of the original JC Penney store, and then rode on the next morning with the thermometer hovering around the 14 degree mark in order to get to the Tetons that day. The things I did for fun….

The motorcycle was a divorce present to myself, one of those self-indulgent things you do to help rebuild your self-esteem in the wake of certain un-pleasantries. I camped alone beside Jenny Lake, in the campground that was closed and nearly deserted for the season, and I squatted to take clear cold water from the lake for meals and drinking, with the mountains looming overhead. I didn’t think about climbing the Grand on this trip, because the last journey to this place had kinda soured me on that plan. And I knew the climbing school and guide service was closed for the season. Did I mention that this was a long story?

Dad and I had talked of climbing the Grand from the very beginning, when we first saw it in the mid 60’s. Mom gave us the look, you know the look, the one that silently suggested we take up some other nonsense and forget this one. So the notion sat on the shelf, to be talked about only in the abstract. And when his doctor told him that no way was Dad getting his permission to climb a mountain at his age, his dream seemed dead.

I still thought about doing the climb. Two years before the motorcycle trip I had driven to the Tetons in September, alone. That marriage was terminally ill already, but the truth hadn’t been revealed to me yet, although she would have known. I drove the new car, the one that I took off the dealer’s lot on 7/7/77, which I had figured was a sign of good luck, and it wasn’t. Approaching from the Idaho side, I had a brief look at the Grand from near Victor, and it felt just a bit weird. And after transiting Teton Pass, where you can turn left just past Wilson and take the back road to Moose, and the Grand fills the sky in front of you, I got this terrible feeling in my gut looking up at the peak, and since I harbored the notion that I would seek out the climbing school and actually try to climb the Grand on this trip, I asked the mountain if it was going to kill me. And the mountain laughed. At me.

That was an annoyance. I was trying to create something positive in my life, cause things were clearly spiraling out of control about then. The Grand Tetons had always grounded me and given me meaning in my life, and here they were taunting me, and I didn’t get it.

That trip was cut short, just like the one before we got married, when she called me, and I drove home at her request. She only did it to see if she could tug the string and I would snap back, and then of course when I got home, I got the who-are-you-and-what-do-you-want look upon arrival and that was a disappointment. Both times. And I knew why the mountain laughed at me. I wasn’t ready for the mountain.

The motorcycle trip felt better cause I felt better, and I think the mountain knew it. I was still looking up at the Grand and thinking about climbing it. So I mentioned it to Dad and he still wanted to climb it, too. He found another doctor, the one who told him he should go, and he somehow got the idea past Mom, and then at age 59 he began beating himself into shape. And that’s how the other photograph came to be.

Our climbing guide used my camera to take the other photo, because Dad’s had kinda got ruint during that little dunking we took when we paddled our kayak into deep trouble in the spring runoff on the Snake River. But that’s another story. In this photo, the coil of rope lay in the foreground, and the line led to its tie off on Dad’s waist. He wore one glove cause the other had floated away, and I stood at his shoulder. Behind us stretched snow covered mountains and then the haze over the distance of Idaho. Everything else was rock, the top rock on that big piece of rock, the Grand Teton (el 13770 feet). We were on the summit. And we be smilin’.

So I was talking with some clients in the exam room, and we looked up at the photo on the wall, and I showed them the Grand, and then I mentioned that we had climbed it on June 25, 1980, and it just happened to be June 25 as we talked. Thirty one years later. And they asked, “Why?”

“Because it was there.”

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. My sister had a shirt made up with that photo on the front and gave it to Dad when he turned 90. I’m thinking he just might have been wearing that shirt while I talked to that client last Saturday. And that would be OK.

Old Studebakers, from a while ago

The clinic exit door is glass, so I can see out to a slice of the parking lot from the hallway in front of the exam rooms. A variety of cars and trucks, and the occasional motorcycle take their turns in the two slots closest to the door. I check them out, like I always do. Some are more interesting than others, just like the folks who arrive and depart in them. Such is life. Much of life is routine, and perhaps will become a blur in memory, and then there are those unforgettable moments, and the people with whom you share those moments.

I don’t know if cars remember much from their past. Like us, they probably pass through their time in a colorless rush to the next place, and they pass by without seeing the bulk of things. But I’m sure they remember some. And when you see an old car parked in a driveway or garage, and you realize that it doesn’t get out on the road as much as it used to, or perhaps it doesn’t get out at all, don’t ya wonder if it doesn’t reminisce about the special times and places it has seen, while it quietly sits there? Surely it now has the time to do this. And like us, as we mature, old cars spend more time with, and savor, the memories. 

A while ago I looked out the glass door, and sitting there was a 1963 Chevy. I did the math quickly in my head. Forty –eight years old. That is older than Norm’s Studebaker. 

Norm was my best friend through high school. I’ve lost touch with him over the years. He wanted to be a concert pianist playing for the assembled masses, and he tried really hard for that. He ended up running his dad’s lumberyard in our little town instead, and he did well enough at that to buy a concert piano, a twenty-foot long or so Bosendorfer I think it was, and it sat in his living room and he played it every day, for himself.  Alone.

Anyway, back in the late 60’s Norm bought a ’27 Studebaker. In the 60’s you could go to the Sears catalog and find any part for an old Model T Ford you wanted, and if you were trying to rebuild an old one you just wrote a check and the parts came and you rebuilt the car. Studebakers were just a bit less ubiquitous than Model T’s, and in the 60’s, if you wanted to fix one old Studebaker you needed another old Studebaker from which to cannibalize parts. So even with a few friends helping, that old Studebaker never regained its former glory. I think Norm finally ended up giving up and selling the car to someone else. Poof…gone.

I recall that driving that old car around was really neat for us. Cars had changed a lot from ’27 to our time. I loved the old pinstripes we found when we took off the old paint covering the older paint, cause that told of the proud past of this car. And I remember how forlorn the car felt. 

That old Studebaker had an aura of sadness about it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is what I now remember most of it.

And I got a completely different feeling from that ’63 Chevy in the parking lot.

Now, this Chevy was not one of those absolutely perfectly frame off restorations you see at the custom and classic car auctions on TV, the ones that sell for a king’s ransom. Far from it. In fact, it died in the parking lot, and if the car parts store wasn’t walking distance away, and a new battery was thus forthcoming, it wouldn’t have made it home that night. And the folks who owned this old car were as far removed as you can imagine from those people who write six figure checks to buy restored vehicles with the same ease as the rest of us buy a sandwich down at Togo’s . Heck, this guy could have spent his few discretionary dollars on teeth, and no one would have minded.

But with the new battery, the engine fired right up, and settled into a contented idle. I told the guy that it sounded happy. He agreed.

Turns out this car had been in his family since day one. Through forty-eight years of the evolution of the nation, and the progression of a family, this car had stuck around, and the folks in this family have kept it alive and part of things. And the car felt happy.

Somewhere in this there may lay a lesson. I started writing about something way different than this, when I began this thing rather late last night. And I ended up here. Don’t know why. The fun columns always seem to end up way different from where they start. Maybe next week I’ll write the column I started this week. Meanwhile, I’ll just think some more about where this one went.

This old column is from early June this year

I prefer a window seat. All those rumors regarding my alleged agoraphobic and antisocial tendencies notwithstanding, I prefer a window seat for the view from the airplane. So if you note that I sometimes open said window and stick my head out and scream, well that has nothing to do with how much I enjoy being TRAPPED in an aluminum tube for any length of time. No, it’s just about grabbing a bit of fresh air, and taking a peek around.

We did a touch and go to Germany last week. A United 747 carried us from San Francisco to Frankfurt, and the 777 brought us home, and I had window seats both ways. We stayed long enough to watch the kids get married, and for me to eat all of the German food in that fair city. The local citizens were likely happy to see me leave, as they now face famine until the next crop of sour kraut and snitzel comes in. I can only imagine the horror our pilot must have felt as the end of the Frankfurt runway rapidly approached, and his aircraft was struggling to lift my newly acquired weight off the ground.

I enjoy the view of our earth from high above. I pull out the road atlas prior to any flight and imprint into my brain the landmarks that I will watch for as we fly over. I like to look for places I’ve seen from the ground, and for the big landmarks, like Half Dome and the Grand Canyon. Once I spotted a dirt road in the Nevada desert that I had bounced over in the truck years earlier. So I was looking forward to this aspect of the long flights to and back from Germany.

We took off headed north, veered to the left of San Francisco and quickly banked directly over the Golden Gate Bridge, heading northeast. Gorgeous as usual. And then we ran into the clouds. I already knew what clouds looked like from the inside, so this was no thrill for me. But the bigger disappointment arrived when the flight attendants asked all us window sitters to pull down the shades to darken the cabin, just in case anyone aboard wanted to sleep all the way to Germany, to somehow help cope with those nine time zones in between. So except for those few moments when I cheated and peeked under a barely opened window shade, I couldn’t watch much of where we were going.

During those peeks, I saw some Idaho mountains, and what I figured was North Dakota. Not too many large landmarks in North Dakota except the Missouri River. And then the water soaked center of Canada rolled by below us. In between movies, the big screen at the front of the plane showed a gps map of our flight, and some pertinent facts relating to our progress. Over Ontario we enjoyed a 120 mile per hour tailwind, which nudged our ground speed up to 720 MPH. I snuck a peek out the window just as we left the sun behind, and somebody’s contrail glowed pale pink just below us on the starboard side. And then it got real dark outside.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, between Iceland and Ireland, we found the sun again. I was sitting on the shady side of the aircraft, so I missed out on the actual sunrise, but the colors cast upon the clouds below did not disappoint. Remember the last time the washing machine overflowed, and those billowing puddles of suds spread across your new hardwood floor? Well, that’s what these clouds looked like from above. Only ours were spread over an already wet ocean so they didn’t wreck anything, and they were turning pink to red just for me, and the pilots, cause they didn’t have screens over their windows.

The movie screen said we were at 43,000 feet altitude, and the outside temperature was minus 60 degrees F, so I left the window closed.

Scattered cirrus clouds well above the cumulous puddles turned color first, and then the billowing ones below got the treatment. Another airliner, following a parallel path a few miles to the south, glinted silver when painted by the sun. Those poor folks who actually got some sleep on our plane missed the show. For their sake, I pulled down the shade again.

Another Observation From Last Winter

Notes from I-5, and beyond…

I could learn a lesson or two from the truck.

I was worried over nothing. It was one of my classic worries. Would we get to the campground early enough to get a site or would it be full already? My mind… it was too busy conjuring up what-ifs. You know, with my luck there would be only one campsite left on this three day holiday weekend, and it would be too small for the trailer and truck, or just too difficult to back the rig in to because of one tree or a rock in the wrong place. And then I'd have to conjure up someplace else to camp and keep on driving when I wanted to stop, when I'd already be tired and cranky. I had my heart set on this place. Grumble, grumble...worry, worry, worry. You know how I get.

We pulled the trailer along with us to the clinic on Friday morning so we could leave right at closing time. Driving over Kirker Pass first thing that morning, I realized just how happy the truck was to be working again. With the truck it's all about the journey. The destination is not important. Destination is just another place to park while everybody else gets to have fun. Trucks have to be patient when parked. Nothin’ else to do.

Now pulling a trailer...that's a worthwhile endeavor for a truck. You can tell he likes it. Driving daily, empty, back and forth to work and home is no trick. Heck, he can idle along in sixth gear to get us there and not break a sweat. Packing a load makes him happy. The trailer makes him happy. You can hear it in the suddenly joyful rumble from the exhaust. He was made for this. That gear selector is meaningless without a load, but when ya pack him up, all those gear ratios start to make sense. And set him to work on a long uphill grade and he leans into the harness and the grin spreads across his grill.

Heck, when loaded the truck even likes long, boring I-5.

In the dark, in the rain, in the Central Valley, there's not much to see, but I can still notice things. Cruise control set on a few over legal, we plod along in the number two lane while the crazies wail past on the left, cut us off to pass two mini-vans on the right, and then zip back into the hammer lane in time to slam on the brakes again behind the next idiot who is only going fifteen over the limit. Maybe two seconds shaved off a six hour trip. The truck is a slow and steady kinda dude. Down the long, seemingly endless ribbon of asphalt he rumbles. Content just to pull.

That collection of fast food outlets, closed fruit stands that lean a bit in the wind, cheap motels, and peddlers of fossil fuel at each freeway exit is like one frame, where the miles of interstate highway filled with vehicles is the movie. It gives you a slice of the whole, frozen for the time it takes to fill a tank, a stomach, and a toilet. In such places you get to meet the people who infest all those cars you saw lined up, lights stretching to the horizon in the dark. And if you are not careful, or just a bit bored, you might draw conclusions from these brief encounters.

Like:

Whoever coined the term, “the dumbing down of America” was like, totally right. Apparently, even though the process of taking an order, nuking a burger, stacking the right stuff on a bun, and getting the correct collection of un-healthy food into the correct bag has been simplified beyond all reason, as a society we can no longer produce anyone clever enough to do even this rudimentary task in a timely manner.

Nobody speaks English in this country anymore, and that includes the folks born and edjumacated here.

Milling around in a colorful crowd in the confined space in front of the hamburger store counter, waiting ever so patiently for two hamburgers, fries and diet sodas, I looked around at my fellow travellers. Taking up two tables, a family of Southern California type cast stamped from the mold just like everybody else people talked among themselves, oblivious to the poor lady calling out their number, two bags of burgers dangling from her hands. Back under the heat lamps the bags went.

Save for the plastic people and me, everyone in the building was Hispanic, and most stood quietly, looking around furtively, waiting to get caught and sent back to whatever hopelessness they had fled, hoping to do better as slaves here. One guy was duded out in black cowboy had, pearl button shirt, serving plate belt buckle and TIGHT jeans, with his Saturday night boots on. He was skinny as a rail. Everybody else was fat, especially the too many kids and the moms with the blank looks. They waited patiently for their food. They looked like they have survived on patience for an eternity. They tolerated the retched inefficiency of the place much better than I.

The lady behind the counter called out #31 again, and this time Barb and Ken and The Kids heard, and he quickly fetched their dinner. By that point the pictures of the burgers on the sign likely would taste better, but they hardly noticed as they crammed rubbery burgers into their orthodonitically perfect mouths.

Remember the time long ago when the guy selling you gas could also fix your car? Well, don't try that now. That product of California schools behind the counter in the gas station mini mall sold me well aged coffee, but when I mentioned the condition of the bathrooms to her, her blank face lost even more detail, cause that wasn’t her job, YOU KNOW.

California collects taxes on all that fuel you buy, specifically intended to keep the roads in some semblance of repair, but for years, in case you haven’t noticed, they haven’t spent much on road repair. All that tax money has gone into the general toilet, er fund, and the roads have been left to rot. And boy can you tell. I-5 is just a bit smoother than a slightly used minefield.

Back on the road it doesn’t get much better. Really strange people call talk radio in the dark when you are trapped on that endless black ribbon in the rain. At first you shake your head in disbelief, but to change the station is the only true coping mechanism. Problem is, in the valley in the dark the only choices seem to be whether you get to listen to idiots in our language, or in Spanish.

Satellite radio helps. It offers some choice in the listening. We dialed up the Road Dog, the professional truckers channel on Sirius. Plodding along in the two lane pulling the trailer eventually lends itself to listening to the truckers as they complain about us. An item on their news broadcast: A professional clown was elected to the Brazilian senate. His campaign slogan? “What the heck, it can't get any worse.” Along with the lady porn star who was once elected to national office in Italy, it would seem that we all get the governments we deserve, or at least that our choices in characters running the place are somewhat limited. The rest of the news simply follows from this.

We turned left at Bakersfield. Bakersfield is best done in the dark. It smells the same, but ya can’t see as much. Consider that a blessing.

Surrounded by generica, the Wal-Mart parking lot was dotted with parked RV's. Nice new rigs used by retired people who have nosed the grindstone, done well in their lives, and can now reap some of the reward, at least until the price of diesel destroys their lifelong plans, sat next to some less inspiring vehicles no doubt occupied by artists, writers, or similar bums. With our well-seasoned trailer, we are almost ready to blend in with that second group for our golden years. We joined them all for a few hours of sleep. Then in the early hours of a fresh day we gave the diesel its head as we trotted over Tehachapi Pass. Mike's Cafe waited for us in Mojave.

Breakfast at Mike's can happen all day long, and it's worth the price. Don’t tell em, but they could hit you up for a cover charge, just for the entertainment. The old pedal cars still line the shelf rimming the place high on the wall. We’d love to learn the stories of each of these treasures. They each made some kid happy on a birthday or Christmas, and those kids are now old or gone, and ya wonder if they remember those times.

Our harried waitress was a short chubby perky young Hispanic lady in a low cut blouse, with a red white and blue American flag tattooed on the, uh, left one. The café was crowded, and the patrons kept her flag waving as she hurried about the room.

They have thin paperback books on the tables, humor writing revolving around coping with life’s little trials. The book I was sampling was titled, “Things To Say To Idiots.”  Ben Goode, the author has much to tell and ya’all could benefit from his observations. The one sentence I read while waiting on my pile of home fries, eggs, salsa, and spicy sliced beefsteak had something to do with folks who think like they have had their brains pierced, too. I figured I could use that description sometime, and I would be sure to give credit where due for this brilliance. (I wonder if Mr. Goode now lives in a tilting, rusting, seen better days RV?)

The loud crude guy at the booth in the corner was complaining to his friends about how he had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and no he wasn't gonna do all that silly stuff they wanted to force him to do to take care of himself. His friends were trying to talk some sense into his head, but it would have been pretty lonely in there. Sometimes, I have learned, the less some people know about something, the louder they proclaim their ignorance. This guy did a splendid job with that.

The quiet older fellow in the next booth got up to leave, and he turned to wish the mouth well as he passed. He hobbled in serious pain, thanks to his diabetic neuropathy, he said, and he now viewed a murky world through bottle thick glasses. He mentioned this to the loud mouthed lout, along with a statement that the narcotic pain meds he was compelled to take had just about wrecked his life. This fate, or worse, would be the stubborn man’s own if he didn’t listen to his (ours? Since we likely paid for them) doctors. The lout's only retort was that he had once been a junkie, so he knew all about that, and he didn’t much care. Shaking his head, the gentleman left the mullet behind.

Mr. Tard was annoyed and annoying, but he soon got up with his friends to leave. Watching him, I believe he did have a brain piercing to go with his tats and backwards ball cap. I shook my head, too. He had been offered good advice, and it was nothing to get pithed about. He left the place clouded in uncomfortable silence, having wasted all that oxygen while he was there.

I-15 was like I-5, except the traffic ran much faster. It looked like all of Southern California was needed in Vegas, and they were all in a hurry to get there. We let em go on without us at a lonely exit, and traded crowded asphalt for a far more primitive path.

Three miles, plus or minus, of washboard gravel road. All the way up to third gear on the straight-a-ways. Enough inconvenience to keep most of the rabble out. Most everybody on the interstate was headed toward a city. We weren’t. Nobody else was on this road, even though for a while you could see the cars on the freeway in the mirror, so we hadn’t gone far. Fifteen miles an hour and still the fillings rattled in our teeth. Lovely desert desolation on all sides. Round the last corner and we could see the silver cantilever bridge where the railroad crosses the river, and the bushes where the Phainopeplas perch and chirp, and the campground. Nearly empty. All that worry for nothing. I felt better, but we disappointed our truck. Parked for a day of nothing but reading, writing, napping and looking. He will get over it.

Rain drummed on the trailer that night as we slept. The wind pummeled. A few trains rumbled past in the dark. Dreams came and went, odd dreams fueled by the crud dump happening in my brain as it realized it was free to do what was necessary to fix that which was bent in my head, out in the desert and the empty. You will need to reboot when the delete process is complete. And make a cup of strong coffee in the morning.

Morning quiet. Pink clouds. Wet ground. Slaked vegetation. A desert cottontail runs through the campsite. Someday, if he doesn’t learn to stay under cover, he will make that hawk over there very happy.

It always rains when we go to the desert. This time it snowed on Mountain Pass, and the Joshua trees and yucca wore a mantle of white, which is kinda weird. Southern Californians stopped on the freeway shoulder to take pictures of each other in front of the strange white stuff. Brief stops, because they don’t do cold.

Everybody on earth was in Vegas that weekend. I’m happy for the merchants. Even those uh, affiliated folks who profit, win or lose, through the decades in this God forsaken place. Those prognosticators on the news who tell us the economy is getting better, or simply doomed, should see this place. It’s either the mercury rising or the end of the world is at hand, take you pick, but the decadence is thriving. Crowds of wide-eyed tourists mobbed the Strip, a mass orgy of imitation fun, which will all stay in Vegas when they leave, along with piles of their dollars.

We left Vegas, and that was clearly the best part of our time there. I should learn from this. When leaving Vegas becomes the highlight of the trip, it’s time to find another place to go to put in my time listening to those lectures I need. The oppression of the city spilled off our shoulders as we ran screaming away from that place. And right outside of there was the glory of the colored hills surrounding Lake Mead and the wonder of the new bridge at Hoover Dam, and short hours later we were camped in the desert again, listening to a babbling stream. In a land of improbably colored rocks, Saguaro cactus, ocotillo, cholla, and blue herons we found a flat spot, turned on the songs, and watched the sun course toward the southwest, and I found some words again instead of just the frustration of a blank computer screen. It takes so little with me. I should learn from this, too.

8/14/11

I’ve never owned a Ford. Thought about it a few times, but never pulled the trigger and bought one. Over the decades I’ve purchased Chevys, Hondas, BMWs, VWs, and now a Dodge. Heck, I’ve even sprung for a couple of Fiats back in one delusional period. But never a Ford. 

Some Fords have attracted me. Those first Mustangs hold a certain appeal. And just about anything that Carroll Shelby has left his impression on sets my soul on fire. I could spend some time with any of the performance oriented versions of the Mustang that prowl the streets these days, if circumstances permitted it. But sit me in a Ford pickup, which I have done prior to buying the Chevys and the Dodge, and I just go all icky. They just don’t feel right. And that’s just fine with the folks who designed and build Ford pickups.

Now, on the surface ya might wonder why those Ford designers would deliberately run me off, but that is not what’s happening here. They’d love it if I liked their product, and bought their product, and laid my hard earned money upon their doorstep. Nothing would make them happier than to have me send them money every few years for the rest of my life. But you see, they’ve got this whole bunch of other guys out there who like Fords and have bought Fords for their whole lives, and that bunch likes a truck that looks like a Ford inside and out, and the Ford folks know that they have to sell to those guys first, and just hope that I’ll see the light some day and join them. So they build a truck that Ford buyers like. And that’s just a different truck than the ones I like.

Way back in the olden days, come the end of summer, the next year’s new model cars used to begin showing up in the dealerships. This was a big deal when I was a kid. The whole process was shrouded in secrecy. Trucks brought the cars in, and they had canvas covers hiding them, and if you were in the car following the truck you would try to sneak a peek up under that cover as the wind blew it about, and catch a glimpse of the 1958 model before the actual release day. An aura of excitement surrounded this, and probably those car guys left those covers just a mite loose just to fan that excitement. Kinda like ladies skirts, if you catch my drift.

The car companies needed to develop each new model, and test it and such before they felt they could sell them, so from time to time cleverly disguised cars could be seen driving around back roads not too far away from the development facilities. These were road test mules built to work out the pre-production kinks. They didn’t want to give away their design secrets before the official release of these new models, so it was all very hush hush. Except something generally happened to give away the identity of these disguised cars. Like the sound of the starter motor.

Any kid knew the familiar cough of a Ford starter. So as soon as that disguised Ford was started, the kids would go, “WOW!! There’s the new Ford!” And you remember the familiar whine of a Chrysler Corp starter, cause in the seventies when the first restrictive smog regulations gave us a whole generation of Chrysler Corp cars that wouldn’t ever start, ya got to know the sound of that starter motor far too well.

Your dad was a Chevy guy or a Ford guy or a MOPAR guy, and that was it. So you grew familiar with how a Ford looked inside and out, and that’s what a car or pickup should be, and the rest just feel icky.  This is how brand loyalty gets going, and the car companies like brand loyalty because they know you will come back and buy their cars for the rest of your life if they can just get you hooked. 

That’s why they paint a Ford grill on a NASCAR race car. All those cars are virtually identical, so they paint on a bowtie or a tail light so you’ll know you are cheering for a Ford or a Chevy. It’s still win on Sunday and sell on Monday in the car business.

Only now we can also get hooked on a particular driver, and you can wear number 24 on your hat, and the guy with 16 on his hat will look at you like you are nuts. And then he goes out and buys two t-shirts and a jacket with 16 on it, to prove he is more loyal to his guy, and the money goes to the corporation that is that other driver. Brand loyalty.

Are you a VISA or MasterCard kinda guy? Did ya notice how we got sucked into that deal? Do you find yourself reaching for one particular credit card outta that stack in your wallet? You like one better, right? Maybe it’s the airline miles you think you are building up, or the picture of your dog you got printed on the front. Do you like the Chase ad on TV better than the Capital One? Somebody is making a buck off the card you use, every time you use it. Because you like that one better.

Remember when money came from the government? The government had complete control over printing dollar bills and punching out nickels. We wanted money…we went to those guys. Who buys stuff with government money anymore? Now ya reach for plastic. Who’s in charge of the money in this country now? The government? Or the banks? Wonder why the government can’t fix the economy? Heck, they don’t even run it anymore. Want to thank someone for the current sorry state of things?

We the people hire the politicians, but the banks pay them. Guess who they really be workin’ for.

My invisible friend has been reading her Marx again, and she has all the answers. She’s always liked that line of thinking, which leads to some of our more interesting discussions, cause I like other ideas. I find her stuff icky. Guess what she feels about mine? We have our own brand of brand loyalty.

Know what happens when folks like her get their way? All we do is get a different bunch of people in charge of the world. Different than the bunch in charge now.  

Funny how that happens. One bunch takes over government here, and another bunch over there. One bunch worships this god, and that other bunch has theirs. Somebody likes the Yankees and another likes the Red Sox. We get the league championship series or Stalin verses Hitler and World War II.

Are you a Chevy guy or a Ford guy? Humans aren’t all that hard to figure. We give our loyalty here or there. And each time we do this, we give up a little of ourselves, our money, our options, and our freedoms.

Not telling ya which car to buy. Am telling ya to check it out first. Trust your icky feelings, but check it out first.

This Old Column From Last Winter, Just For Fun

Perhaps it is a bit early, but I'm beginning the process. I’m getting excited. I used to get in trouble for this, for spending far too much time and effort pouring over maps and guidebooks, planning for a trip that was still weeks away, frittering away time getting excited when I could have been doing something productive. I would defend myself by claiming that I was expanding the fun of some fun times with all this research and planning, but that never got me off the hook. I was still in trouble, and subject to criticism and complaint.

I had a therapist once who told me she thought that this was one of my more endearing characteristics, but I wasn't married to her. The one I was married to would turn her back, leave the room and close a door. So I would put away the maps and books, and try to find something useful to do. And not have as much fun, until the fun actually started. The one I was married to finally left, (with someone far less fun than I, as far as I could tell) and I can now stack the maps and books beside my chair in front of the TV, and have some fun before the fun starts, and again it is one of my more endearing characteristics. I hope. The sweet lady who claimed me for the duration of our lives seems to understand.

It's time to go to the desert again. Well, in three weeks it will be time. We like going to the desert as much as going to the mountains and the seashore. I figure that makes us lucky, because we can go to places that make us happy. And that leaves all those other places that make us less happy, like Paris and New York and Honolulu, to those folks way different than us. I truly hope they have as much fun studying the maps and guidebooks before going to those places as I have looking at mine. Sure, we have to go to Las Vegas this trip, which must be endured, because I can't just go out to have fun without getting in some class learning time to justify shutting down the clinic for a week. But just you watch...

We'll find us some nice places going and coming, and enjoy some quality time with my dad in the process, all crammed into one well-organized week. That's why I plan these things so obsessively. Quality time. Can't be wasting that time, ya know, cause you only live so long. That said, this will not be a week laid out to the second, where if it is Tuesday 1PM, we must be in Wickenburg. Nope. We have to be in Vegas for a certain time, and we will be with Dad as much as possible, but in between we will turn left or the other left as feels right, and all that research I do to get ready will provide the fodder we will chew upon as we make these decisions. And that often results in taking the road where we have never been, and we have no idea where we may come out.

I spent some time on the computer today, stolen from the short gaps between client appointments. I was trying to learn more about a bird called a phainopepla. These birds live in the Mojave Desert in California, in southwest Arizona, and in Mexico. If the plan comes to fruition, on the way to Vegas we could spend a night and a day or so in a campground surrounded by desert hills, a shallow river, the train tracks complete with trains, and some brush thickets just teaming with phainopeplas. And if we are lucky, the place won't be so packed with low achieving kids riding dirt bikes and ATV's that we cannot hear the voices of these busy birds.

Phainopeplas are small birds, a bit taller than a sparrow while weighing about the same. You see the males most often because the ladies are shy. The males are very black and they carry a fine crest upon their heads. They like to eat seeds and berries, particularly feasting upon mistletoe seeds when the price comes down in season. Flying insects fill out the menu when the seeds aren’t around. So when in the desert you can find these pretty fellows perched atop the various armed and armored plants, that crest on the head visible in silhouette, just waiting for the errant fly to buzz past. Then they zip up and nail the little pest.

And they talk. Quite a nice talk, if you ask. The pervasive quiet is one reason we visit the desert, but that hardly means we don’t wish to listen to birds. We just don’t find too many songbirds there. That’s how things go. But when we go to where the phainopeplas chirp, we have desert music. And that’s a trip worth planning.

Osama's Death, from shortly after

I was watching the wedding.  And no, I don’t usually watch weddings on Sunday night. I don’t get up at two AM to watch weddings either, which is why I had not already seen this one. But my wife said I really needed to check out the absolutely ludicrous hats some pharmacologically misaligned maniac had stuck atop women who apparently didn’t know any better, and who frankly would have been better served by dark veils over their faces. Somehow, somebody let these circus clowns into the wedding, so an unfortunate world got to witness as the wedding of Kate and what’s his name was turned into Alice in Wonderland. And I was watching the replay.

It wasn’t near as entertaining as the replays that would normally preoccupy my weekend, like those on ESPN. So I was tapping away at my computer all the while instead of remaining glued to the tube, trying to turn 3500 words worth of mush into 3000 words worthy of another magazine story, and I barely noticed the rest of the wedding. The wedding reruns morphed into Geraldo on Fox, and he prattled on as only Geraldo can, while the President frittered away some more of his only term as President. Obama was almost an hour late for his scheduled teleprompter read before the nation. Maybe he was in the bathroom.

By the time our President finally got around to speaking, the cat was out of the bag, and all the news services had already announced to a grateful world that Osama bin Laden was dead. It says a lot about the guy, Osama not Obama, that the whole world noticed when he croaked. 

Ya have to piss off a bunch of people to get this kind of a response from the world just because somebody put a bullet into your brain. But that is what Osama did. He set out to rule the world, and the proven way to do this is to get the unsuccessful of the world stirred up against the successful. Question his methods if you wish, but at this he was good.

Osama had the gift. He was an emotional leader. He stirred up people desperate enough to listen to his rants, mostly by promising to kill as many of us as he could, and then to enslave the rest. And the folks he wanted to murder all felt it, because when he looked into the camera, with those raptor eyes, (I wish I came up with this description, but I stole it) everybody he threatened to kill felt very much like he meant it, personally, and so he was pretty much the scariest dude on earth for a while.

Osama was very successful at killing people. Or at least in ordering others to kill people for him. Thousands of innocent people died because of him, for no more reason than it is far easier to kill the unarmed and unsuspecting than it is to kill folks prepared to defend themselves. And since one definition for civilization is that folks living in one have the luxury of not having to face murderers at every turn, Osama found easy pickings among the civilized nations, and in those borderline civilizations, like post Sadam Iraq, that were struggling to find peace.

The only reason Osama didn’t kill far more people, in the nine years since his infamous celebratory dance after the slaughter of 911, was that he was ducking and running much of the time. The civilized nations were after him. Constant pressure on him and his minions, by those people hot on his trail, no doubt saved thousands of lives. Because unless all those threats by Osama, as he tried to stir the losers of the world into hatred for the decent folks, were just campaign promises, one can only wonder how many more innocents would have been slaughtered in those years.

Lots of the good guys were on Osama’s trail. Thanks are due to the Brits, the Israelis, and the occasional Islamic leaders who would like to see at least some parts of the Islamic world someday considered civilized, too. But the bulk of the load was carried by the United States, under the urging of former president Bush.

The search for Osama was not a constant chain of successes. No mechanism was in place in 2001 to deal with the type of threat Osama and his terrorist minions presented. It was learn as you go, and learn from the mistakes. America’s critics had little tolerance for the mistakes, but that is nothing new. Even when we approach perfection, we can’t do anything right in the minds of some.

A series of small victories beginning early in the chase and continuing right up to last weekend, some hard found information carefully assembled, the coordination of intelligence assets and superbly trained military units, the evolution of technology aimed at counter terrorism, all came together to put an end to this evil man.

Small wonder that some people around the world celebrated when they heard the news of Osama’s death. Osama had inflicted himself upon the lives and wellbeing of millions. For nearly a decade, people around the world awoke each day with at least part of their consciousness haunted by that threatening visage. Ding Dong! The witch is dead! The universal sigh of relief was palpable.

These celebrations were a bit unseemly, but none approached the level of delirious joy that we witnessed in places like Palestine, and various other monuments to the 12^th century, when the news of the massive slaughter of innocents on 911 spread round the world. But then, we are talking the civilized world this time. These celebrants will go back to their lives soon enough, with just a little less to worry about.

Some were embarrassed by celebration. America caught the brunt of the criticism. How dare we celebrate? Shouldn’t we instead be so embarrassed by our hard work and success over the last hundred years, that we should instead bow down in apology because our success gave this terrorist his excuse to murder in the first place? To this I simply ask…HUH?

Even the President was caught up in the celebration. Which was just a little bit embarrassing. Apparently, as he stood in front of the nation Sunday night, and took much of the credit for the mission that ended Osama, Obama forgot all about his promises to his supporters, (to get himself elected), that he would eviscerate the very military and intelligence assets that pulled off this remarkable mission. Of course, now he is running for re-election and trying to appeal to the political middle, so I guess we weren’t supposed to notice this little flip.

Fortunately, once he found himself mired in the running of a great nation, Obama moderated his attacks upon the people who defend this country, as he listened to folks who actually know what they were doing, instead of the usual pack of community organizers surrounding him. So America still had the ability to hunt down and eliminate this evil man. 

Obama facilitated the hunt for Osama by shutting up and getting out of the way. Our Hero.

Some referred to Obama’s granting permission for the execution of this mission as a gutsy move. For someone so accustomed to doing the wrong things, finally doing the right thing must have seemed gutsy.

I hope that when the time comes to select our next president, voters will pull out a copy of that photo showing Obama in the “Situation Room” surrounded by serious looking folks as they monitored the attack in Pakistan. The man with the look of abject terror on his face….sorry folks, but that is our leader. Maybe he should have been in the bathroom then.

I watched Hillary playing Secretary of State on the tube this week, talking about the death of Osama. If you turned down the sound, you could pretend to see what she really meant to say, “Dammit, DAMMIT! If I hadn’t talked Bill out of offing that bastard back in the 90’s when WE had the chance to do it right, but instead worried about those few points in the polls, it would be ME in that presidential chair instead of that hack!!!”

More embarrassing would be the question asked by some network journalist who really should know better, “Does this mean the war on terror is over?”

Ahhh, no honey. Go back and study some history, which you should have done before you went to journalism indoctrination, sorry…school. When fanatics use religion as an excuse to wage war, said wars tend to last generations. Try not to let down your guard just because we stopped one of the savages. 

Aug 8, 2011

Received this e-mail in response to my column from last week. I believe this cancels my statement that the folks who think I am an idiot have stopped reading my stuff.

“Pull out your Merriam-Webster and look up the powerful word "Reification." And no, you don't know the meaning based upon your...columns.

That will clarify for you the real problem in this country. One example: the Supreme Court's decision to make entities out of corporations.

Yes, the country appears doomed. But only because "you people"
(Isn't that Limbaugh's expression?) thrive on ambiguities and abstractions.

Soon the division between the super-rich and the rest of us will become obvious to you, but by then it will be too late.

Fortunately, being in the final stage of COPD, I won't be around to witness it.
And unfortunately, you're too deeply ingrained in a tea-bag mentality. What a shame. I'm sorry to see a fine mind that has gone wanting.                      Friend.”

So I wrote back…

Sorry, but I’ve not had my coffee this morning, so if I seem a bit dense just chalk it up to a caffeine deficiency. In response to your critique of my latest column…I’m not real sure what your point might be. I expect you know what you wanted to say. I’m just gonna have to fake it here, and trust that you will set me straight, as usual. That said…

I don’t listen to Mr. Limbaugh and have very little knowledge of, nor interest in, the tea party folks. Curious how any criticism of the nonsensical rush to bankrupt the country is always met with the same attacks. Isn’t anyone allowed to question the direction we are headed without being accused of being a dupe of some talk show host or Sarah Palen? I got that nonsense from my editor, and another columnist (who should have stayed in East Germany) when I was still with the paper. Who sets out the talking points for this?

I do sometimes toy with abstractions, but attempt to avoid ambiguities when possible. I am aware that the law recognizes corporations as individuals in certain contexts, but I don’t see how that relates to my last column. I have few people I would describe as rich in my circle of friends, and even fewer super rich, but I think I would know one if I saw one. Whether you refer to that rabble of overpaid actors and athletes or to the crooks who brought us the latest credit crisis, you certainly know that I have no use for either. And I don’t care whether it’s the Democans or the Republicrats that are overspending my taxes to corral power and perpetual re-election. They both suck.

I once had to look up the word iconoclast before I replied to Joie’s personal ad in the newspaper, cause I didn’t want to come off as a complete idiot if I didn’t remember it completely. So yeah, I looked up reify before replying to you. And this refresher perplexed me for a moment, for I saw no connection with my column. So I did a search, and way down at the bottom of the page I found reference to the writings of Karl Marx. Apparently, he liked to use the word, and those apologist self-proclaimed intellectuals who have tried to clarify his theories in the wake of the many failures as folks tried to live those theories, and in the process simply clutter up the language with unnecessary jargon, seem to love it.

Wow. I haven’t read Marx in thirty years. History has kinda run off and left him in the dust some time ago, as the carnage of once great nations still smokes following the disasters his thinking brought about. So I pay him little heed. That said, even Marx must have realized that a government that continues to overspend far beyond any hope of repaying its debt is going to crash some day. Certainly, the communists learned that lesson.

Marx would have raised taxes to balance the budget, at least on the folks he didn’t have to kill to gain power. To fund his utopian society, Marx would of course milk the wealthy first, to punish them, and shortly thereafter the rest of us until all were equally broken. But once he had bankrupted a nation he would have had to resort to government oppression, just like all those other folks who took his theories to heart. For once the government goes broke and begins to disappoint the gullible who fell into the trap of trusting it for their every need, they get cranky. And they too must be punished.

Socialism sounds great in the abstract. All them folks sacrificing for others out of the goodness of their hearts, and all leaning into the harness for the good of society. Problem is Marx never took human nature seriously. He never admitted that the people he claimed were so terribly victimized were just as selfish and crooked as the ones who squatted at the top. He attaches all the evil in man to the wealthy, and thus ignores the reality that every other life on earth walks around with that same evil.

Like Rodney King, Marx and his apologists wondered “why can’t we all get along?” But that is a naïve childlike expectation. Each time folks tried to live his theories, they failed, and they ended up crushed by the operational arm of the left, communism, or some other form of totalitarianism (consider the Nazis), to keep the righteously angry folks in line. And what a joy that was.

Marx’s notion that folks are too stupid to see when they are being duped into working by their very freedom, which I guess sorta sums up his whole reification theory, won’t wash. For they are far less anesthetized by promises than are those others who expect that all should come to those who merely sit and wait (while drinking).

I’d like to see some solution to our credit problems without having our nation end up living under marshal law, but I don’t have much hope for that. This country thrived and its citizens faired better than in any nation in history for two hundred years. But that success stemmed entirely from the ambition and hard work of a bunch of free people, not by the interference of government and its oppression, or by those who would sacrifice all to an overreaching government because they find that easier than striving to succeed on their own.

 Once people fall victim to total reliance upon government for their every want and need, societies and economies grind to a halt. Ambition, despite its obvious drawbacks, moves society forward. We are losing this virtue in our nation, and we are trading it in for a lowest common denominator mediocrity. And this is a shame.

Old Column From Last December

Unless you were across the international dateline in Japan, the attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust the US into World War II happened on Dec. 7, 1941. Tokyo had it as Dec 8. John Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980. Lennon would have turned 70 this year. My father-in-law’s baby brother would have turned 85 this year. Frankie was serving on the battleship Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He never had a 17^th birthday.

Not too many people remember Frankie. There is a plaque in a small town park in Massachusetts with his name on it. Maybe a sailor or airman said a little “here’s one for you, Frankie” when he pressed the trigger or released the bomb later in that war. Mostly, Frankie has been forgotten.

Used to be, on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack everybody took notice of the date. There were speeches in Congress and in small parks around the country. The History channel talked about it, and some TV network would run one of the movies. Old men remembered. Every one of ‘em.  Sometimes they went silent for the day, cause they remembered lots.

This year Dec 7 came and passed with little notice. I don’t recall seeing anything about it on the History channel. If they said anything in Congress, I missed any reference to it on the six o’clock news. The old men remembered, but there aren’t near as many of them anymore. It was almost as if it had never happened.

As I saw it, Dec 7 this year was all about John Lennon, cause that was what filled the radio and TV. Rather a large fuss was made about him this year on the anniversary of his death. Maybe that’s because the baby boomers are getting to the nostalgia stage of life. And most of my contemporaries would rather remember the Beetles than some long ago war. I turned to the History Channel to see what they had on special for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and got Ice Road Truckers or some such drivel. 

I grew up reading about WWII, watching documentaries and movies about WWII, and listening to the stories about WWII. My bookshelves are peppered with books about WWII. So I don’t mind at all when my wife comes home from one of her forays into the second hand stores with a history book or picture book pertaining to that war. You should see the one she brought back last week.

This one has over a hundred full-page photographs, most in black and white, taken by Navy and Marine Corp cameramen, most captured during the heat of action. Page one has the shot everyone has seen of the Shaw exploding during the Pearl Harbor attack. And the last few show solemn looking men signing the peace document in Tokyo harbor.

About halfway through the book, on a right hand page, they show a low altitude aerial photograph of a Japanese aircraft carrier. It was a clear South Pacific day, with excellent visibility, and the photo jumps off the page. The flight deck sports a distinctive camouflage, painted to resemble a battleship or cruiser from the air. In the South Pacific, no one wanted to look like an aircraft carrier, because these ships were the threat, and thus became the targets. Battleships stopped being the prime target that Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.

Looking carefully at the photo, I can see a 5” anti-aircraft battery on the starboard bow, twin barrels pointed at the camera, essentially useless when the aircraft was that low. Early in the war, no one took low altitude photographs of Japanese aircraft carriers. No one who survived, anyway. But this airplane was pretty safe.

The ship is turning sharply to starboard, black smoke pouring out of the stack, showing full power from the engines, and white smoke billowed from the stern, from those holes blasted through metal. No aircraft sat on the flight deck, which was buckled from an interior explosion. If an aircraft carrier could look scared, it would look like this ship. The book’s index confirms the inevitable, stating that she was sunk later that afternoon. The date was 24 Oct, 1944.

You can see a few men standing on the flight deck. Their shadows stretch across the deck. They were just standing, powerless to stop the attack. I decided that I needed to find out all I could about this ship. I wanted to learn her name, and hear her story.

So I wandered into a vast internet, and hiding in there, waiting for me, was a list of the Japanese fleet carriers, with their life stories and the details of their destruction, including dates. One, the Zuikaku was listed as sunk on 25 Oct 1944. Japan time. Right date. Bombs and torpedoes found her off the coast of Luzon, while the Japanese were being blasted out of the Philippine Islands.

She was the last of the carriers that had decimated Pearl Harbor in 1941. The other five were long since gone to the bottom. The pictures of her on my computer were not good, but this clearly was not the carrier in my book. She had a different camouflage pattern, and she sported a raised island on the starboard side and three aircraft elevators. My carrier only had two, and no superstructure.

But in her history it was mentioned that she was accompanied to this battle by three light carriers, the Zuiho, Chiyoda, and Chitose. The paltry remaining aircraft assigned to these four ships totaled perhaps 102. The US Navy fleet that attacked them had ten carriers, with somewhere between 600-1000 aircraft. None of the US ships sustained damage in this battle. All of the Japanese carriers were sunk. Once their few planes were shot down, these ships were nearly defenseless.

The first photo I found of Zuiho told me I had found the carrier in the book. The flight deck had the proper camouflage, and two elevators. The date of her sinking matched. Heck, it was the exact same photo. So I had the name of my ship.

In the 1930’s treaties limited the size and number of Japan’s warships. So she built other ships, like luxury passenger liners, and then converted them to aircraft carriers right before the war began. Zuiho began her life as a submarine tender, but during that construction they switched her over to be a light carrier. She was ready in 1941 to play a support role in the Pearl Harbor attack that started the war. She also was in support during the battle of Midway, the carrier battle that finally turned the tide of war against Japan.

I found much on the net. I could have read about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor where the large and very effective Japanese carrier force killed over 3000 Americans. I could have read about the war Japan's military leaders brought to China earlier, and the city of Nanjing where for fun, Japanese soldiers massacred many thousands of unarmed civilians. I could have read about the prisoners of war they herded onto the beach and machine-gunned near Singapore or about the Bataan Death March.

The Japanese military had it pretty much their own way early in that war because they had a war machine no one could resist. It took a while before the combined resolve of the American people built the weapons and filled the ranks in the army, navy, and marines and put an end to that nightmare. By the time they carried the fight to the Philippines, the tables had turned. By then, it was the Japanese army and navy that could no longer resist.

Zuiho was sent all over the South Pacific during the war, but as Japan’s stolen empire was slowly ripped from her bleeding fingers, her few remaining carriers became almost an afterthought. They could no longer defend even themselves, and the remnants of the once invincible air fleet were pressed into duty in the kamikaze attacks. The admirals had sent Zuiho and the other three carriers to the Philippines as bait, rather than as an attacking force, and the 800 defenseless men aboard when that photo was taken, like those guys on the flight deck in the photo, were just hoping not to die. Kinda like Frankie, three years earlier.

A recent colum from this spring, about family and life

They do things differently on ships. They call stuff by different names. For instance, you can’t just go to the john. You have to go to the head. And ships don’t just move…they make way. And they do other stuff along the way, like when they launch a ship, once it is built to the point where it will actually float. Because if you haven’t noticed, you cannot build a steel ship in the water. 

So ya see, they build those big steel ships on land on top of a wooden framework. Then later, when they figure it’ll hold water (out), they build a big slide, called ways, and then shift the weight of the ship onto wooden sliding thingys, called sliding ways, and with great swings of heavy hammers, they remove the various things holding things together until the crash of a champagne bottle provides the straw for this camel, and the ship goes, “WHEE!!!!!” all the way down the ways and into the water. With a nice splash. And hopefully, the thing stays right side up, cause when it doesn’t, it is SO embarrassing.

They always leave at least one rope tied to the ship, lest it wander off and get into even more trouble. With this rope, you can pull the ship back to shore and hold it there until all construction is finally finished, and then eventually you let other people drive the ship away and it heads for places all round the world.

So one of the things we got done when we went to Germany for the wedding, was the first re-gathering in about five years, of our brood in its entirety. We’ve seen the kids in ones and twos a few times, but not since the famous diarrhea summit in Wyoming have we snuck as many as three into one room for our enjoyment, and longer than that for all four. I had borrowed a trick taught me by my own parents. They found the best way to get the kids together when we didn’t want to be called kids anymore, was to set the meeting in Wyoming. Worked every time for them. Well, apparently watching one of them get married works, too.

We sat in a jet lag fog in Frankfurt, watching them interact, admiring them, and marveling at the simple reality that they all were still afloat. 

I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, but I remember it well. It was shot in black and white, like all the newsreels. The workers stood about in hard hats and leather gloves, large heavy hammers in hand. And the dignitaries in their dark suits and the designated champagne bottle smasher, a large women slightly overdressed, were perched on the stand by the bow. Intricate scaffolding surrounded the hull of the ship. The bottle swung from its ribbon, and burst in splendor against the bow, men swung hammers against the last shims, and then the ship slowly started down the ways, building speed, and finally splashing into the water. Where it promptly turned turtle, and sank below the dirty water. Bummer.

I once described a high school graduation by recalling the opening scene from “Top Gun”, where amid the chaos and noise on the deck of a nuclear aircraft carrier, stern but excited looking pilots were launched, along with 14 million dollar aircraft, from steam catapults on the bow of the ship. Well, this week’s cheap trick will try to compare the assembly and final release into the world of children with the construction and launch of a steel ship. Neat, huh?

I know…it ain’t the same. But bear with me.

You can’t build a kid in the water, either. Sure, sometimes you wonder if you shouldn’t just kick them in and let them sink or swim, but most of us prefer the traditional way. So we assemble a complex of scaffolding and supports in a safe place. We start with a blueprint, which we follow up to a point. Sometimes when the parts we ordered don’t fit just right, we will ad lib the thing for a while until you can’t see light through the cracks any more. For it doesn’t pay to blindly follow the rules if you can see they are leading you to a serious leak.

There is a schedule, but leave some room for overtime that you didn’t plan for. Cause there is always overtime. Don’t hesitate to call in an outside consultant if needed. And never hesitate to buy that retired foreman a beer so you can pick his brain when ya just can’t figure where that one piece of the puzzle goes.

It’s always more difficult than you thought, and even when you work from the same blueprints, no two ships ever turn out the same. And when you are standing there watching, when the work seems finished, and you see the men hammering away the shims so the ship can begin to launch, and the fat lady swings the bottle, that knot still forms in your throat, each and every time, no matter how many ships you have successfully launched, cause ya just never know what can go wrong.

So you get the big splash, and then you wait while the ship sways back and forth in the water for a moment, and then it settles down perfectly straight, and the cheer reverberates through the crowd, and you know ya did good. And then you tug on the rope and pull the ship back in, and you finish the rest of the assembly. Then there are sea trials, where you test the ship on short journeys and there is no rope to tug it back, and then finally you watch as the ship heads across great oceans, to far distant ports, and you hope the folks that take over for you and sail with that ship are capable and wise. 

And you know that there are storms. And you wonder just a bit if you see your ship sailing in loose circles while it seeks its best course, and you wonder even when you cannot see the ship, if it has yet found its course. But you cannot change a thing once it has sailed.

What we saw when our fleet came together last month made our hearts soar. Four ships, each looking shipshape. We no longer follow every inch of every journey of these ships, because we don’t have to.  They are doing just fine, on their own.