Probably, I started paying attention to football when I was about eight years old. I remember playing at recess in the third grade at Blessed Sacrament school in Tallahassee, Florida. I remember it because the son of the Florida State University football coach, Tom Nugent, was in my class. His name was Terence Daniel Nugent, but he liked to be called TD, for obvious reasons.
Many of the eight-year-olds had helmets, so I began annoying my father to get me one. I wore him down and he bought me one, but it was an old leather kind of helmet and the other kids had new shiny plastic headgear. I was a little embarrassed to wear it.
That same year, I recall watching Notre Dame play Oklahoma on television. The Sooners owned an enormously long winning streak, I think forty-seven games in a row, but the Irish won, seven to nothing, much to my satisfaction. I had been told, after all, that Notre Dame was a Catholic school, and I already had some slight feelings of inferiority as a Catholic in Tallahassee.
By the time I was ten, the family had moved back to Miami, and my father began taking my brother and me to Miami Hurricane games. Aside from the father-son bonding, I guess the highlight of those games was seeing the Heisman Trophy winner for 1959, Ernie Davis, when UM hosted Syracuse in the Orange Bowl. Syracuse didn't do much passing in that game, I don't think. Their offense was pretty much, "Davis to the left, Davis to the right, Davis up the middle." Years later there was a movie about Ernie Davis called, "The Express" which I recommend.
By ninth grade I had become pudgy and I had always been a slow runner, and asthmatic, so I quickly gave up efforts to make the Columbus High junior varsity team. I watched a lot of football games, in person and on the tube. I do remember seeing a Miami Dolphins game, in 1966 I guess, the only pro game I've ever attended. In those days the Dolphins, only one year removed from their expansion team origins, were practically giving tickets away. I had a grandstand seat in the Orange Bowl for one dollar. That night, th e Houston Oilers clobbered the Dolphins and their rookie quarterback, Bob Griese.
At Florida State, I went to many games, often alone, sometimes with a date. Football games were formal occasions then. Men wore ties and coats, women wore dresses, stockings, and make-up. It seems very quaint to think of it now.
Since then, I've been to a few high school and college games, but most of my exposure to football has been via television. Gradually. I've become disenchanted with the sport and with the entire football culture in American life. I guess this started when I heard that an FSU offensive lineman had to come out of a game because he was bleeding from both ears. He was bleeding because the opposition lineman was jamming his fingers through our boy's helmet earholes on every play.
Aside from dirty play, there was the matter of illegitimate payoffs of one kind or another to college players. I read that one high school player decided to go to Syracuse after making a visit to campus where one of the cheerleaders was encouraged to spend twenty minutes in the back seat of a car with him. I doubt they were discussing defensive strategies. Rumor had it at FSU when I was there that the star wide receiver on the team was being paid a large stipend for turning out the lights in the physics building each evening. I don't think anyone became upset with him if he forgot to do it.
Sex and money, the two motivators in many a young man's life. In the years that followed it often seemed that prize athletes - not just football players, though they seemed to get most of the press - came to believe they could get away with anything. Sex assaults, bullying behavior, stupid behavior while driving are hardly confined to football players, but they do seem particularly prone to them.
And the money. Football coaches are almost always the highest paid employees at state and many private universities. I ask my readers, does it make sense at an institution of higher learning, to reward a coach with something like twenty times the salary a tenured professor makes? Or more, as it often is now?
And the injuries. "Football is a rough game," I still can hear coach Aiello telling us during my brief effort to play high school ball. Rough I can support. Broken bones I can tolerate. Men I have known who did play high school ball often tell me how difficult it is to get out of bed in the morning now, how their knees creak, and pop.
The simple truth is that anyone who plays football for any length of time is just about guaranteed to have health problems later in life.
What has finally tipped me away from football, however, is the head injuries. It appears that concussions are endemic among football players, and brain damage occurs all too often. Young men are selling out their later years for a chance at fleeting fame and fortune.
It isn't right. I venture to say it's immoral. And I have decided that I'll have no part in it. So no NFL Sundays for me, no BCS bowl games, even though FSU might well play for the national championship. I'll have none of it.
I miss it already.
And don't even get me started on the exploitation of the young women who become pro football cheerleaders.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Immigration Revisited
Friday, July 23, 2010
On Immigration
I pity the poor immigrant, who wishes he'd stayed at home
--Bob Dylan
The immigration issue has been heating up in recent months, especially here in the west. Arizona has passed draconian measures to control illegal entry to their state and similar proposals are before other state legislatures. Hispanic residents of these states are indignant, feeling they are being subject to police harassment and are being used as a political football.
The number of people living in the US illegally is estimated as somewhere between four and twenty million. They came for numerous reasons, but economic opportunity certainly is the most often cited enticement for people to enter the US. In this, they are no different from generations of people who came to America in the last four hundred years.
Current immigration law favors people who have a skill or profession that will (allegedly) be of benefit to our country, or who have money to invest here. So, if you're a doctor, or can hit a breaking pitch, or have a large wad of cash in your pocket, you can go to the front of the immigration line. Such folks are not exactly your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Other applicants are admitted by quotas among the nations on a lottery basis.
Naturally, the numbers of people in foreign lands who want to reside in America vary widely. People in nations where there is a huge demand for legal emigration might wait all their lives for a chance to come here legally. Is it any wonder that desperate people are not willing to wait patiently for legal status?
Since illegal immigrants risk deportation to the place they risked their lives to leave, we can hardly expect them to come forward and meekly accept expulsion. Even if all immigrants did volunteer for repatriation, however, the logistics of removing them are daunting. If we use the commonly cited total of twelve million illegals and an average capacity per airplane of two hundred (a generous average) then it would require sixty thousand flights to carry all of them out of the country. The country's bus lines could help take deportees to adjacent lands, but this would not diminish the number of flights very much. I'm not saying it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done, but lets not kid ourselves into thinking it would be quick, easy or inexpensive.
This also gives rise to another question. Can we ethically just dump deportees in the country they left at a border town or their capital? It might be argued that what happens to them once they're across the line is not our business, but the problems of one country often become the problem of other nations. Economic stress in other countries is the reason we have this situation in the first place.
The Obama administration has proposed that illegal immigrants will be obliged to pay a fine for entering the country and back taxes and then can be placed at the back of the line for those awaiting citizenship. Much as I like and respect President Obama, I think this is ludicrous. Illegal residents of the US are paid in the underground economy and records of their earnings will be spotty at best. Would you tell the truth about your earnings if doing so would cost you money you worked hard to get, and the government couldn't check your statement? I suspect this proposal is just a sop to conservative critics.
So here's my immodest proposal. The quota of legal immigrants from high demand countries like Mexico should be raised drastically. Three million legal permits per year is reasonable to me. Applications for legal entry could only be received and processed in the individual's home country. A criminal check would be made on prospective immigrants, confined to felony warrants or convictions or outstanding judgments against the person. No fees or taxes would be collected.
What would we get by doing this? Well, start with regaining control of the border. Once there is a real chance of coming to America legally, I suspect the incentive to enter by breaking our law will diminish. In addition, once immigrants have legal status they can take jobs in the above ground economy, pay taxes and contribute to social security. Five million additional contributors to social security would not solve all the problems of the fund, but would certainly help.
And why would anyone who is here already return to his native land to re-enter legally? They could demand at least minimum wage for their work. They would not have to fear the police, and if victimized by crime could seek justice in the legal system. They would have the same chance to advance and prosper as any American citizen.
There is one exception to this policy. The parents and siblings of so-called "anchor children" must be given legal status immediately. I realize this is not fair to other immigrants, but there is no other workable solution. Kicking the family of such a child out of the country effectively means deporting an American from our country, or leaving the child behind. Neither of these constitutes a family value in my opinion.
For those who want to expel illegal immigrants from the US, I ask that you examine your motives. If you're outraged because our laws have been broken, I'm with you, but if your objection to illegals is cultural, or you think they drain the economy, we part company.
I welcome comments on my plan.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
The Life and Times of Jesus
Recently, I read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. This is my book report.
First of all, let us say that Professor Aslan has excellent credentials concerning the first century and events in southwest Asia at that time. That is to say, he holds a PhD degree in religious studies and is a tenured professor, I think I recall, at North Carolina State University.
Dr. Aslan says in his preface that he became absorbed into the Christian tradition and fascinated by it as an adolescent. Since he has become an adult, however, he has decided that Islam is the truest reflection of God's desires for humanity. He is able to look at the life of Jesus with some detachment therefore. The first question any Christian would ask, of course, is whether Aslan is prone to prejudice concerning Jesus. Let's allow him to speak for himself, through his book, and then decide.
Judea, Galilee, and to a lesser extent the Jewish diaspora in Greece and what's now Turkey, were in a state of ferment at the time Jesus was born. Occupied and tyrannized by successive foreign powers, most recently the Romans, the Jews could hardly have helped being resentful and living in anticipation of a great leader, a warrior king, a messiah, who would expel the pagans and restore the kingdom of David in all its glory. That, Dr. Aslan writes, is what they believed in as the messianic tradition. Also, the Jews were furiously resentful of the priestly caste who lived in (comparative) luxury while trying to appease the Roman authorities. More than one high priest was assassinated during the years around the lifespan of Jesus.
The time and place were rife with would-be messiahs. Often considered outlaws by the Sanhedrin and the Romans, they zealously proclaimed the coming kingdom and offered themselves as kings. Almost all came to violent ends, usually at the hands of the Romans.
It was into this world that Jesus was born. Professor Aslan dismisses the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke out of hand, however. He claims that Caesar Augustus never ordered a census, though Quirinius did. This occurred in 6 CE, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. No shepherds, no wise men, no birth in Bethlehem, and no virgin birth.
He does believe that Jesus was a Nazarene. Nazareth was a tiny hamlet then, perhaps home to one hundred people. Certainly, it was not populous enough to support a carpenter, much less a family of carpenters. (Dr. Aslan pays considerable attention to James, Jesus' brother, as well as at least one other brother and possibly sisters.) There was a new Roman town abuilding near Nazareth, however, Sepphoris by name, and Aslan speculates that Jesus would have found work there as a day laborer.
Exactly when Jesus encountered John the Baptist is not known with any certainty, but the professor feels it was a hugely significant event. Jesus remained as a disciple of John until the wild holyman was arrested. Only then did Jesus start a ministry of his own.
The men who wrote the gospels, of course, emphasized that Jesus was unlike the false messiahs of those times, that he proclaimed a kingdom not of this world, and by inference at least, that good people must comply with civil authorities, even tyrants. Dr. Aslan just doesn't think this was the real Jesus at all. "I come not with peace but with a sword," Jesus says, contradicting this view of a non-violent savior. That's the Jesus of Dr. Aslan.
Now, about the passion and death of Jesus. According to the professor, Jesus arrives in the big city of Jerusalem for the passover, perhaps greeted by enthusiastic crowds, perhaps not. He does go to the temple on Tuesday for the ritualistic cleansing and there causes a great disturbance. The temple was huge, however, and Aslan tells us it's likely that many people there that morning never noticed what was happening.
The Jewish priestly class certainly noticed, however, and decided Jesus had to go. By Thursday night they had assembled a large arrest party, and, tipped off as to Jesus' location by Judas Iscariot, they made the pinch in the garden of Gethsemane. Please notice, Aslan says, that they took a bunch of people, expecting a brawl, and that Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus, confirming the professor's view of Jesus as not abjuring violence. Jesus, however, knowing his arrest must lead to his death, tells Peter to stop. He skips over the episode of Jesus putting the high priest's servant's ear back on, perhaps not believing it happened.
Of the trial, the crucifixion, and Jesus' death, Aslan follows what many other secular historians believe. Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin, taken before Pontius Pilate (And there is documentary evidence that he existed.), who sentenced him to death after only a moment or two - just one more bit of business on a Friday morning - and Jesus suffered an awful death in the time honored Roman way.
What happened then? The gospels tell us that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared to many people before ascending into heaven. Dr. Aslan does not believe in the resurrection - it does contradict everything we know about death after all - saying it's irrelevant what happened to Jesus' body. What is important is that the apostles began telling the Jews about Jesus and gathering a small number of believers. One of them, Stephen, was soon stoned to death in Jerusalem for blaspheming.
The murder of Stephen was a great event, Dr. Aslan claims. It clarified the thinking of the apostles and placed them squarely outside the mainstream of Jewish thought and practice. Led by James, Jesus' brother, they continued to tell any Jews who would listen that Jesus was the messiah and the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophesies. (Aslan says the Hebrew prophesies cannot be interpreted as leading to Jesus by any reasonable person.) Gradually the apostles and their followers became more and more estranged from the Jews of Jerusalem, though still complying with the Hebraic laws concerning diet and circumcision.
Enter Paul. Sometime during the two or three decades after Jesus' death Paul, who had been a Pharisee, comes to believe in the Jesus of the apostles and begins preaching to the Jews of the diaspora and to gentiles. He is soon summoned to Jerusalem by James and the others to answer for what they regard as apostasy - that gentile believers need not abstain from foods the Bible forbids, or undergo circumcision. Paul agrees to mend his ways, though he does call Peter to book for trying to have it both ways, but now carries his message further afield, ultimately to Rome, though Peter arrives first and warns the church there to be wary of Paul. How or when the two men died is not very important to Dr. Aslan.
What is important is the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the suppression of that rebellion by the imperial legions. Wholesale murder, rape and destruction accompanied the Roman army, culminating in the famous mass suicide at Masada. Thereafter, the locus of Christianity shifted away from Israel and the church grew among the gentiles much much more than among the Jews.
Dr. Aslan thinks it would have been impossible for Jesus to have become knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible, growing up in what was almost literally the back of beyond. His scanty knowledge of the Bible explains the often confusing acts and sayings attributed to him. Now, I quarrel with that. I much prefer to think of Jesus as a bookish boy, a real Yeshiva paragon, devoting every spare moment to studying the Torah and the other books of the Bible. It's hard for me to imagine any other version of Jesus arguing successfully with his neighbors, much less the Pharisees.
Likewise, I think Dr. Aslan takes some interpretive liberties. Documentary evidence about Jesus by contemporaries is almost entirely non-existent, it's true, and the historian must speculate a bit. Aslan is right to say the first gospel, Mark's, was written something like forty years after Jesus' death, meaning by someone who probably didn't know him, but that doesn't give him license to guess about Jesus' life any more than it gave to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. (On the other hand, if Mark was writing his gospel at about the age I am now - sixty-four - he might well have known Jesus, or known of Jesus, as a young man.)
Get this book and read it. I think Dr. Aslan has made an honest effort to explain Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity, though his version of it is much different from what we learned in Sunday school.
First of all, let us say that Professor Aslan has excellent credentials concerning the first century and events in southwest Asia at that time. That is to say, he holds a PhD degree in religious studies and is a tenured professor, I think I recall, at North Carolina State University.
Dr. Aslan says in his preface that he became absorbed into the Christian tradition and fascinated by it as an adolescent. Since he has become an adult, however, he has decided that Islam is the truest reflection of God's desires for humanity. He is able to look at the life of Jesus with some detachment therefore. The first question any Christian would ask, of course, is whether Aslan is prone to prejudice concerning Jesus. Let's allow him to speak for himself, through his book, and then decide.
Judea, Galilee, and to a lesser extent the Jewish diaspora in Greece and what's now Turkey, were in a state of ferment at the time Jesus was born. Occupied and tyrannized by successive foreign powers, most recently the Romans, the Jews could hardly have helped being resentful and living in anticipation of a great leader, a warrior king, a messiah, who would expel the pagans and restore the kingdom of David in all its glory. That, Dr. Aslan writes, is what they believed in as the messianic tradition. Also, the Jews were furiously resentful of the priestly caste who lived in (comparative) luxury while trying to appease the Roman authorities. More than one high priest was assassinated during the years around the lifespan of Jesus.
The time and place were rife with would-be messiahs. Often considered outlaws by the Sanhedrin and the Romans, they zealously proclaimed the coming kingdom and offered themselves as kings. Almost all came to violent ends, usually at the hands of the Romans.
It was into this world that Jesus was born. Professor Aslan dismisses the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke out of hand, however. He claims that Caesar Augustus never ordered a census, though Quirinius did. This occurred in 6 CE, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. No shepherds, no wise men, no birth in Bethlehem, and no virgin birth.
He does believe that Jesus was a Nazarene. Nazareth was a tiny hamlet then, perhaps home to one hundred people. Certainly, it was not populous enough to support a carpenter, much less a family of carpenters. (Dr. Aslan pays considerable attention to James, Jesus' brother, as well as at least one other brother and possibly sisters.) There was a new Roman town abuilding near Nazareth, however, Sepphoris by name, and Aslan speculates that Jesus would have found work there as a day laborer.
Exactly when Jesus encountered John the Baptist is not known with any certainty, but the professor feels it was a hugely significant event. Jesus remained as a disciple of John until the wild holyman was arrested. Only then did Jesus start a ministry of his own.
The men who wrote the gospels, of course, emphasized that Jesus was unlike the false messiahs of those times, that he proclaimed a kingdom not of this world, and by inference at least, that good people must comply with civil authorities, even tyrants. Dr. Aslan just doesn't think this was the real Jesus at all. "I come not with peace but with a sword," Jesus says, contradicting this view of a non-violent savior. That's the Jesus of Dr. Aslan.
Now, about the passion and death of Jesus. According to the professor, Jesus arrives in the big city of Jerusalem for the passover, perhaps greeted by enthusiastic crowds, perhaps not. He does go to the temple on Tuesday for the ritualistic cleansing and there causes a great disturbance. The temple was huge, however, and Aslan tells us it's likely that many people there that morning never noticed what was happening.
The Jewish priestly class certainly noticed, however, and decided Jesus had to go. By Thursday night they had assembled a large arrest party, and, tipped off as to Jesus' location by Judas Iscariot, they made the pinch in the garden of Gethsemane. Please notice, Aslan says, that they took a bunch of people, expecting a brawl, and that Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus, confirming the professor's view of Jesus as not abjuring violence. Jesus, however, knowing his arrest must lead to his death, tells Peter to stop. He skips over the episode of Jesus putting the high priest's servant's ear back on, perhaps not believing it happened.
Of the trial, the crucifixion, and Jesus' death, Aslan follows what many other secular historians believe. Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin, taken before Pontius Pilate (And there is documentary evidence that he existed.), who sentenced him to death after only a moment or two - just one more bit of business on a Friday morning - and Jesus suffered an awful death in the time honored Roman way.
What happened then? The gospels tell us that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared to many people before ascending into heaven. Dr. Aslan does not believe in the resurrection - it does contradict everything we know about death after all - saying it's irrelevant what happened to Jesus' body. What is important is that the apostles began telling the Jews about Jesus and gathering a small number of believers. One of them, Stephen, was soon stoned to death in Jerusalem for blaspheming.
The murder of Stephen was a great event, Dr. Aslan claims. It clarified the thinking of the apostles and placed them squarely outside the mainstream of Jewish thought and practice. Led by James, Jesus' brother, they continued to tell any Jews who would listen that Jesus was the messiah and the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophesies. (Aslan says the Hebrew prophesies cannot be interpreted as leading to Jesus by any reasonable person.) Gradually the apostles and their followers became more and more estranged from the Jews of Jerusalem, though still complying with the Hebraic laws concerning diet and circumcision.
Enter Paul. Sometime during the two or three decades after Jesus' death Paul, who had been a Pharisee, comes to believe in the Jesus of the apostles and begins preaching to the Jews of the diaspora and to gentiles. He is soon summoned to Jerusalem by James and the others to answer for what they regard as apostasy - that gentile believers need not abstain from foods the Bible forbids, or undergo circumcision. Paul agrees to mend his ways, though he does call Peter to book for trying to have it both ways, but now carries his message further afield, ultimately to Rome, though Peter arrives first and warns the church there to be wary of Paul. How or when the two men died is not very important to Dr. Aslan.
What is important is the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the suppression of that rebellion by the imperial legions. Wholesale murder, rape and destruction accompanied the Roman army, culminating in the famous mass suicide at Masada. Thereafter, the locus of Christianity shifted away from Israel and the church grew among the gentiles much much more than among the Jews.
Dr. Aslan thinks it would have been impossible for Jesus to have become knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible, growing up in what was almost literally the back of beyond. His scanty knowledge of the Bible explains the often confusing acts and sayings attributed to him. Now, I quarrel with that. I much prefer to think of Jesus as a bookish boy, a real Yeshiva paragon, devoting every spare moment to studying the Torah and the other books of the Bible. It's hard for me to imagine any other version of Jesus arguing successfully with his neighbors, much less the Pharisees.
Likewise, I think Dr. Aslan takes some interpretive liberties. Documentary evidence about Jesus by contemporaries is almost entirely non-existent, it's true, and the historian must speculate a bit. Aslan is right to say the first gospel, Mark's, was written something like forty years after Jesus' death, meaning by someone who probably didn't know him, but that doesn't give him license to guess about Jesus' life any more than it gave to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. (On the other hand, if Mark was writing his gospel at about the age I am now - sixty-four - he might well have known Jesus, or known of Jesus, as a young man.)
Get this book and read it. I think Dr. Aslan has made an honest effort to explain Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity, though his version of it is much different from what we learned in Sunday school.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
This is a post from three years ago, but it seems as relevant now as it was then.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Wing Nuts
This morning while driving I tuned in to one of talk stations I refer to as "right wing radio." The host today was a man named Bob Beauprez who two years ago was the Republican candidate for governor here in Colorado. I was deeply disappointed when he agreed with a caller who claimed the Obama campaign deliberately brought about the economic downturn of 2008 in order to win the election!
Here was a supposedly responsible politician accusing a member of the other party of wrecking the nation's economy on purpose, putting millions of people out of work, causing massive defaults on home loans and subsequent foreclosures, probably shortening many lives, to win an election. And all this, according to the caller, with the connivance of the (Republican) Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulsen.
I bring it up as one more example of the insanity, the paranoid hatred that parts of our American population are exhibiting. The credulous are being driven by hate mongers who, for reasons known only to themselves, have adopted the old Bolshevik strategy for gaining political power: "The worse things are, the better they are for us." They are pursuing a deliberate course aimed not merely at defeating a president and his party but at dividing the nation into two warring camps. They will have a heavy reckoning before the bar of history.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
More on Obamacare
There were no comments concerning "Obamacare" after my last piece, so I guess either everyone agrees with me and Time magazine, or no one read the darn thing. Therefore, I'm going to wing it with a few more remarks of my own.
Just what do opponents of the law object to? Public opinion polling is touted by the Republicans to the effect that most Americans don't like the law, but it only takes a second looking at the poll numbers to realize that part of that opposition is from people who don't think the act went far enough. If those people are included with supporters of the law, there's a rather healthy (Irony intended in use of this word.) majority for it, or for a more comprehensive involvement of the government in health care.
Perhaps we could parse the law to find out what the objections might be. Young people can remain on their parents' health insurance policies until age twenty-six now, instead of nineteen or twenty-two. I doubt anyone outside the insurance business finds that onerous. Applicants for insurance cannot be denied coverage because of pre-existing illnesses. That too seems innocuous, actually I think very popular with the public. Premiums for women cannot be higher than premiums for men. Some men might object, thinking they're effectively subsidizing women's health care, but I think they must be very few in number.
We've knocked down the straw men, so now lets consider what I imagine people really do find troublesome. Obamacare obliges people to buy health insurance coverage or pay a tax penalty that starts out kind of small, but becomes larger over several years to the point where it is truly punitive. The fury of the opponents of the law centers on the cost of non-compliance and the infringement on individual liberty they think the law comprises.
Given the changes the law makes, that I pointed out already, it seems to me there must be some negative incentive to get people to buy a policy. If you can't be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, what's to stop people from doing without insurance until they're truly sick, then rushing to buy coverage, literally on the way to the hospital? Normally I'm not sympathetic with the insurance companies, but I can see that they wouldn't stay in business very long under those circumstances.
My readers, a small but honorable group of people, say they would never abscond on a bill, or declare bankruptcy to get out from under a mountain of debt. Still, it must be admitted that a majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States come about because of large medical bills, and part of the reason those bills are so high is because a percentage of hospital patients don't pay for their treatment, effectively sticking the rest of us for the cost of their care. Most of these people, I'm convinced, truly want to pay their own way, but either don't know how expensive medical care is, or are of such modest means that they would be hard pressed to buy a plan, and decided to take a chance that they wouldn't get sick.
My brother is a perfect example of this. Insurance is a racket, he said for years, and when he was ill he paid cash for doctor services. "But what if you need surgery?" I used to ask him. "You could be wiped out financially by a week in the hospital."
Now he's covered by Medicare, and he managed to keep all the money he might have spent on health insurance. He's a lucky winner, and there are other people like him, but for the great majority of us, there will be a need for expensive hospital care before we're on Medicare. A Facebook friend posted not long ago that he spent a week in the hospital after a heart attack and (I presume) heart surgery, and received a bill for $144,000. He did have a very good policy that paid all but $500 of his bill. Without it, he'd be working until the day he dies to settle the cost of one week of his life.
And what about people who have no intention of paying for emergency medical care? There are some, we all know it, whether we like to admit it or not. How do we get them to do the right thing? Obamacare requires that they buy insurance too, or pay the tax penalty. It might be a weakness in the act that there will still be people - drifters, the chronically unemployed, substance abusers, and their children - who don't file tax returns and therefore won't be troubled by any provisions of the tax code. To opponents of the law, this is egregiously unfair, but the solution, I think, lies not with getting rid of Obamacare but in strengthening it.
By the way, the tax for not buying insurance is a civil matter. No police officer will call on anyone who decides not to get insurance, a la my brother the Libertarian.
Once again, I welcome comments, and will print them in a future posting.
Just what do opponents of the law object to? Public opinion polling is touted by the Republicans to the effect that most Americans don't like the law, but it only takes a second looking at the poll numbers to realize that part of that opposition is from people who don't think the act went far enough. If those people are included with supporters of the law, there's a rather healthy (Irony intended in use of this word.) majority for it, or for a more comprehensive involvement of the government in health care.
Perhaps we could parse the law to find out what the objections might be. Young people can remain on their parents' health insurance policies until age twenty-six now, instead of nineteen or twenty-two. I doubt anyone outside the insurance business finds that onerous. Applicants for insurance cannot be denied coverage because of pre-existing illnesses. That too seems innocuous, actually I think very popular with the public. Premiums for women cannot be higher than premiums for men. Some men might object, thinking they're effectively subsidizing women's health care, but I think they must be very few in number.
We've knocked down the straw men, so now lets consider what I imagine people really do find troublesome. Obamacare obliges people to buy health insurance coverage or pay a tax penalty that starts out kind of small, but becomes larger over several years to the point where it is truly punitive. The fury of the opponents of the law centers on the cost of non-compliance and the infringement on individual liberty they think the law comprises.
Given the changes the law makes, that I pointed out already, it seems to me there must be some negative incentive to get people to buy a policy. If you can't be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, what's to stop people from doing without insurance until they're truly sick, then rushing to buy coverage, literally on the way to the hospital? Normally I'm not sympathetic with the insurance companies, but I can see that they wouldn't stay in business very long under those circumstances.
My readers, a small but honorable group of people, say they would never abscond on a bill, or declare bankruptcy to get out from under a mountain of debt. Still, it must be admitted that a majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States come about because of large medical bills, and part of the reason those bills are so high is because a percentage of hospital patients don't pay for their treatment, effectively sticking the rest of us for the cost of their care. Most of these people, I'm convinced, truly want to pay their own way, but either don't know how expensive medical care is, or are of such modest means that they would be hard pressed to buy a plan, and decided to take a chance that they wouldn't get sick.
My brother is a perfect example of this. Insurance is a racket, he said for years, and when he was ill he paid cash for doctor services. "But what if you need surgery?" I used to ask him. "You could be wiped out financially by a week in the hospital."
Now he's covered by Medicare, and he managed to keep all the money he might have spent on health insurance. He's a lucky winner, and there are other people like him, but for the great majority of us, there will be a need for expensive hospital care before we're on Medicare. A Facebook friend posted not long ago that he spent a week in the hospital after a heart attack and (I presume) heart surgery, and received a bill for $144,000. He did have a very good policy that paid all but $500 of his bill. Without it, he'd be working until the day he dies to settle the cost of one week of his life.
And what about people who have no intention of paying for emergency medical care? There are some, we all know it, whether we like to admit it or not. How do we get them to do the right thing? Obamacare requires that they buy insurance too, or pay the tax penalty. It might be a weakness in the act that there will still be people - drifters, the chronically unemployed, substance abusers, and their children - who don't file tax returns and therefore won't be troubled by any provisions of the tax code. To opponents of the law, this is egregiously unfair, but the solution, I think, lies not with getting rid of Obamacare but in strengthening it.
By the way, the tax for not buying insurance is a civil matter. No police officer will call on anyone who decides not to get insurance, a la my brother the Libertarian.
Once again, I welcome comments, and will print them in a future posting.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Obamacare
This week's issue of Time magazine contains an article on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, that's worth the time and trouble it takes to read it. So, if you don't have a subscription to Time, hie thee to the public library and get ahold of it.
According to Time, there have been significant computer glitches associated with the roll-out of the health care exchanges. Moreover, there is a real concern that many people - particularly healthy young people - will not sign up for insurance and pay the tax surcharge instead. Without a base of younger people, the program will be crippled by insurance coverage for people who are in poor health to begin with, and will make larger claims to the insurance companies than they can pay from the premiums they collect.
Moreover, Time says that 27 states have opted out of the state health exchange part of the Act, and some state officials are doing what they can to sabotage the whole scheme. (I used that word "sabotage" deliberately, and I don't think it's too strong a term for what is happening.) Here's an excerpt from the Time article.
"The day before a federally operated exchange launched in Missouri, the state's lieutenant governor urged residents not to sign up. In Florida, a directive from Governor Rick Scott blocks navigators - consumer-assistance workers paid through the ACA - from working with county health departments. And Georgia's insurance commissioner has said his department will do 'everything in our power to be an obstructionist.' Such efforts guarantee that a federal law may look very different depending on what part of the country you're in."
There is a certain amount of confusion about the Act. Subsidies are available for people who are living in poverty as defined by the government. Also, people who are above the official poverty line but not very far above it can qualify for Medicaid, unless they live in a state that has decided not to expand Medicaid coverage, even thought the federal government will pay the entire cost for three years and ninety percent of the cost in perpetuity. Here's more from Time.
"It is not a coincidence that the marathon speech meant to defund the Affordable Care Act was delivered by a Texas Republican. Senator Ted Cruz's 21 hour sermon on the danger of Obamacare was just the latest broadside against the law from Lone Star State lawmakers. Under Governor Rick Perry and the Republican-controlled state legislature, Texas has opted out of nearly every aspect of the law it is legally allowed to.
In addition to not expanding Medicaid, the state has declined to set up its own insurance coverage, ceding the task to the federal government. The Texas department of insurance says it will not enforce ACA regulations, like those requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. In September, Perry called for a law limiting the role of navigators, and the day enrollment began, he called the ACA ' a criminal act.' Unlike the robust public-service campaigns in some states that support the law, in Texas, ACA information is not even available on the state's official website."
And,
"In Texas, opposition to the ACA is both philosophical and financial. The law is seen as an unwelcome federal intrusion into the affairs of a state that doesn't want any part of a massive new entitlement program. Perry also points out that expanding Medicaid would add costs to a program that already consumes one-quarter of the state's budget. About half of all children in Texas are covered by existing government programs. Medicaid alone pays for more than half of all births in then state. The law is 'a recipe for disaster. . . an asteroid about to enter the atmosphere,' says Representative John Culberson, a Republican who represents southwest Houston in Congress.
But the terms of the Medicaid expansion might seem to cast doubt on such economic reasoning. The federal government would pay 100% of the cost of covering those newly eligible for the program until 2017, phasing down to 90% after 2020. . . A recent report by Texas' former deputy comptroller found that while a Medicaid expansion would increase the cost of the program, much of the extra spending would be offset by savings in other state-funded programs that pay for health care for the poor. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Texas will leave $79 billion in federal funds on the table over the next 10 years by not expanding Medicaid."
One thing that bothers me about the opposition to Obamamcare -aside from the apocalyptic rhetoric being used - an asteroid? - is that the opponents never come to grips with why they are so adamantly against a law that would provide - at no cost to the states initially - decent health coverage to people who otherwise would be clogging emergency rooms and often absconding on their bills. I'm honestly curious. Can any reader explain how providing people with insurance is worse than what we've had before the ACA was enacted? I promise to listen and to reprint rational comments on my next blog entry.
According to Time, there have been significant computer glitches associated with the roll-out of the health care exchanges. Moreover, there is a real concern that many people - particularly healthy young people - will not sign up for insurance and pay the tax surcharge instead. Without a base of younger people, the program will be crippled by insurance coverage for people who are in poor health to begin with, and will make larger claims to the insurance companies than they can pay from the premiums they collect.
Moreover, Time says that 27 states have opted out of the state health exchange part of the Act, and some state officials are doing what they can to sabotage the whole scheme. (I used that word "sabotage" deliberately, and I don't think it's too strong a term for what is happening.) Here's an excerpt from the Time article.
"The day before a federally operated exchange launched in Missouri, the state's lieutenant governor urged residents not to sign up. In Florida, a directive from Governor Rick Scott blocks navigators - consumer-assistance workers paid through the ACA - from working with county health departments. And Georgia's insurance commissioner has said his department will do 'everything in our power to be an obstructionist.' Such efforts guarantee that a federal law may look very different depending on what part of the country you're in."
There is a certain amount of confusion about the Act. Subsidies are available for people who are living in poverty as defined by the government. Also, people who are above the official poverty line but not very far above it can qualify for Medicaid, unless they live in a state that has decided not to expand Medicaid coverage, even thought the federal government will pay the entire cost for three years and ninety percent of the cost in perpetuity. Here's more from Time.
"It is not a coincidence that the marathon speech meant to defund the Affordable Care Act was delivered by a Texas Republican. Senator Ted Cruz's 21 hour sermon on the danger of Obamacare was just the latest broadside against the law from Lone Star State lawmakers. Under Governor Rick Perry and the Republican-controlled state legislature, Texas has opted out of nearly every aspect of the law it is legally allowed to.
In addition to not expanding Medicaid, the state has declined to set up its own insurance coverage, ceding the task to the federal government. The Texas department of insurance says it will not enforce ACA regulations, like those requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. In September, Perry called for a law limiting the role of navigators, and the day enrollment began, he called the ACA ' a criminal act.' Unlike the robust public-service campaigns in some states that support the law, in Texas, ACA information is not even available on the state's official website."
And,
"In Texas, opposition to the ACA is both philosophical and financial. The law is seen as an unwelcome federal intrusion into the affairs of a state that doesn't want any part of a massive new entitlement program. Perry also points out that expanding Medicaid would add costs to a program that already consumes one-quarter of the state's budget. About half of all children in Texas are covered by existing government programs. Medicaid alone pays for more than half of all births in then state. The law is 'a recipe for disaster. . . an asteroid about to enter the atmosphere,' says Representative John Culberson, a Republican who represents southwest Houston in Congress.
But the terms of the Medicaid expansion might seem to cast doubt on such economic reasoning. The federal government would pay 100% of the cost of covering those newly eligible for the program until 2017, phasing down to 90% after 2020. . . A recent report by Texas' former deputy comptroller found that while a Medicaid expansion would increase the cost of the program, much of the extra spending would be offset by savings in other state-funded programs that pay for health care for the poor. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Texas will leave $79 billion in federal funds on the table over the next 10 years by not expanding Medicaid."
One thing that bothers me about the opposition to Obamamcare -aside from the apocalyptic rhetoric being used - an asteroid? - is that the opponents never come to grips with why they are so adamantly against a law that would provide - at no cost to the states initially - decent health coverage to people who otherwise would be clogging emergency rooms and often absconding on their bills. I'm honestly curious. Can any reader explain how providing people with insurance is worse than what we've had before the ACA was enacted? I promise to listen and to reprint rational comments on my next blog entry.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
The Tic-Tac-Toe of Foreign Policy
"It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart."
from the Broadway musical comedy "Pippin"
This morning the television round-table discussion on CNN concerned the situation in Syria and the Obama administration's efforts to force President Assad of that country to divest himself of all his chemical weapons. The panel was composed of a number of talking heads of a variety of opinions.
The first speaker claimed that the crisis is averted, that the President and Secretary Kerry have obtained their goal by having Assad place all his poison gas in the hands of the Russians, who will oversee their destruction (Question: how are they destroyed?) Then a woman who I would characterize as a hatchetman. tore into the president, saying this is a disaster, that the Syrians will undoubtedly cheat or President Putin will, and the US was operating from a position of weakness throughout this crisis. She said that Putin is playing chess and we are playing tic-tac-toe.
Newt Gingrich chimed in, saying the president is a lucky tic-tac-toe player.
So I'm wondering: isn't it said that luck is the residue of design? Obama was placing the US navy in position to attack Syria. There didn't seem to be any way to avoid attacking Syria without backing down on the statement that their use of chemical weapons was unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, it was clear that public opinion was against intervening in the Syrian civil war, and it was becoming very clear that the Republicans in the House of Representatives would not authorize use of force there.
Then Secretary Kerry made this supposedly off the cuff remark that an international solution might be found. Right away the Russians volunteered to act as the nation that would receive the Syrian poison gases, and the solution was at hand. Obama and Kerry were careful to keep the pressure on Assad by saying we would not wait long for the transfer and it must be verifiable.
How is this inept in any way? We get what we want, not a shot has been fired by us, and we have dodged involvement in the morass of Syria. What's not to like? If our side is playing tic-tac-toe, I'd say they played it very well.
As an aside, one has to wonder why Assad used these terrible gases knowing that President Obama had said their use would require a response from us. Is it possible that he didn't order it, that some general made the decision without Assad's approval.
By the way, it's raining hard here, and after all the rain we've had lately the ground is saturated and there's a lot of potential for more flooding.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
It's Me Again (More gramatically, "It's I again.")
It's been three months since I posted a blog entry, and there's a simple reason for the lull. Somehow, I managed to change the format for my page and couldn't figure out how to add new entries. It took my son Joe about five minutes to fix things this morning. Here's a few things I've been thinking about.
My cousin Bob issued a kind of challenge back in May, urging his friends to read the Christian Bible this summer. He says reading the whole thing will change the reader's life. At about the same time I heard of a new book, The New New Testament, that adds recently discovered early Christian writings to the canon we all have known since childhood. I admit I've been slow to do the reading. I read the Gospel of Thomas, really a compilation of Jesus' sayings rather than a narrative of his life, and the first twelve chapters of Matthew. Honestly, I haven't noticed any change in my beliefs or behavior yet.
I admit that my powers of concentration aren't what they used to be. A few minutes of serious reading are to often followed by time spent on computer games, or pulling weeds, or Facebook nowadays. Still, I promise myself I'll make a special effort to get through the rest of it soon.
A few weeks ago I looked at a right wing webpage. Now I'm getting all kinds of conservative come-ons in the margin of my Facebook page. One of them tells me that Ken Buck, defeated narrowly in his race for the US Senate from Colorado two years ago, will make another try for the same office next year. Buck is pictured flanked by two American flags. Occasionally I find myself wondering if the people who wrap themselves in the flag, as Buck does, wouldn't be the first ones down to the beach to congratulate an invader if one ever showed up.
Baseball. The Red Sox are leading the American League East by four games over the Tampa Bay Rays as I write this. It's too early to say the Sox have the division title in the bag, but right now the outlook is very good. The Sox prove the adage that it's a team sport. Not a single Red Sox player is having an outstanding year. Heck, their number one pitcher has been mediocre, their number two has been unavailable with a neck strain for two months, and the remainder of the staff rank as three four and five on merit. Their bullpen has been good but not outstanding. They're on their third closer.
The catcher strikes out too much and won't match last year's home run totals. The first baseman has gone ice cold at bat, the second baseman is excellent, but having an average year for him, the shortstop has been very good lately, but his batting average for the year is something like .240, third base has been a black hole for power production, though Jose Iglesias, now traded, was a marvel at the plate for the first two months of the season. There is no regular left fielder, though the platoon of Gomes, Nava and Carp (Sounds like a law firm, doesn't it?) has been good. The center fielder leads the league in stolen bases but his power numbers are poor. The right fielder has been good but not great.
Contrast all this to the Colorado Rockies, a team I also follow. The Rockies have two great star players, Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez. They are respectively the best shortstop and left fielder in all of baseball, bar none. Nolan Arenado at third base is an emerging star, DJ LeMahieu has solidified second base, the right fielder, Michael Cuddyer, is having a standout season, and the combination of Jorge de la Rosa and Jhoulys Chacin is a very good top of the pitching rotation. Yet the Rockies are floundering and will be hard pressed to avoid a losing record for the year.
Why? Because the supporting cast is weak. The Rockies lacked the depth to cover for injuries to their stars, and overuse weakened their bullpen. The number four starter has been very inconsistent and the fifth starter position has been a disaster.
And now to happier news. I am becoming a grandfather again, pretty much as I write this. Jennifer and Brian are moving Jeremy Shepherd into their home today and will proceed with adoption as soon as the courts allow. I couldn't be more pleased for them. Congratulations to them all!
That's all for today, I think. Must get back to civilizing the world.
My cousin Bob issued a kind of challenge back in May, urging his friends to read the Christian Bible this summer. He says reading the whole thing will change the reader's life. At about the same time I heard of a new book, The New New Testament, that adds recently discovered early Christian writings to the canon we all have known since childhood. I admit I've been slow to do the reading. I read the Gospel of Thomas, really a compilation of Jesus' sayings rather than a narrative of his life, and the first twelve chapters of Matthew. Honestly, I haven't noticed any change in my beliefs or behavior yet.
I admit that my powers of concentration aren't what they used to be. A few minutes of serious reading are to often followed by time spent on computer games, or pulling weeds, or Facebook nowadays. Still, I promise myself I'll make a special effort to get through the rest of it soon.
A few weeks ago I looked at a right wing webpage. Now I'm getting all kinds of conservative come-ons in the margin of my Facebook page. One of them tells me that Ken Buck, defeated narrowly in his race for the US Senate from Colorado two years ago, will make another try for the same office next year. Buck is pictured flanked by two American flags. Occasionally I find myself wondering if the people who wrap themselves in the flag, as Buck does, wouldn't be the first ones down to the beach to congratulate an invader if one ever showed up.
Baseball. The Red Sox are leading the American League East by four games over the Tampa Bay Rays as I write this. It's too early to say the Sox have the division title in the bag, but right now the outlook is very good. The Sox prove the adage that it's a team sport. Not a single Red Sox player is having an outstanding year. Heck, their number one pitcher has been mediocre, their number two has been unavailable with a neck strain for two months, and the remainder of the staff rank as three four and five on merit. Their bullpen has been good but not outstanding. They're on their third closer.
The catcher strikes out too much and won't match last year's home run totals. The first baseman has gone ice cold at bat, the second baseman is excellent, but having an average year for him, the shortstop has been very good lately, but his batting average for the year is something like .240, third base has been a black hole for power production, though Jose Iglesias, now traded, was a marvel at the plate for the first two months of the season. There is no regular left fielder, though the platoon of Gomes, Nava and Carp (Sounds like a law firm, doesn't it?) has been good. The center fielder leads the league in stolen bases but his power numbers are poor. The right fielder has been good but not great.
Contrast all this to the Colorado Rockies, a team I also follow. The Rockies have two great star players, Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez. They are respectively the best shortstop and left fielder in all of baseball, bar none. Nolan Arenado at third base is an emerging star, DJ LeMahieu has solidified second base, the right fielder, Michael Cuddyer, is having a standout season, and the combination of Jorge de la Rosa and Jhoulys Chacin is a very good top of the pitching rotation. Yet the Rockies are floundering and will be hard pressed to avoid a losing record for the year.
Why? Because the supporting cast is weak. The Rockies lacked the depth to cover for injuries to their stars, and overuse weakened their bullpen. The number four starter has been very inconsistent and the fifth starter position has been a disaster.
And now to happier news. I am becoming a grandfather again, pretty much as I write this. Jennifer and Brian are moving Jeremy Shepherd into their home today and will proceed with adoption as soon as the courts allow. I couldn't be more pleased for them. Congratulations to them all!
That's all for today, I think. Must get back to civilizing the world.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Retirement
Although I'm still on the library's books as an employee until May 31, and although I have two days as a substitute booked during the summer, practically speaking I am now retired.
This isn't my first rodeo as a retiree. I left the National Park Service at the end of 1997 on an "early out" option, and declined to continue teaching high school in 2004. So I know the ropes about not working. This time it's for keeps though. My working life is over.
And I don't know how to feel about that. I hear you saying, "There's always plenty to do around the house - there's always cat vomit to clean up after all - you could volunteer someplace, join clubs and discussion groups, go hiking, take day trips to interesting places. That great American novel isn't going to write itself, you know, so get busy."
You're right, and I'll do those things, but there's still a kind of void. As that great social critic Homer Simpson once said, "My job is my identity. If I'm not a whatchamacallit, I'm nothing!"
So my first day out of the work force has me thinking, "The vacuum cleaner belt is broken. I have to check to see if we have a spare, or go buy a new one. I promised to bring lunch to Kris and take a hike with her. Our yard is full of dandelions that need to be dug out. Is this what my life is going to be from now on?"
I don't want to paint a bleak scenario here. There's a chess club here in town that I might join. I could do some political things. I haven't walked all the trails in the nearby state park. (Some of them are going to require a better level of physical conditioning than I have right now, and that's another thing to point at as a goal.) I want to do some volunteer work helping homeless people. But I'm going to wait a month and see whether I can fill the days or become awfully bored. Kris is already asking me to volunteer at the park.
Retirement is a real break in a person's life, akin to getting married or divorced. It remains to be seen how I'll take to it. I know I don't want to become a grumpy old man, or someone who sits by the side of a pond, feeding the ducks and waiting for death.
I'll be more upbeat about this by tomorrow, I promise.
(Oh yes. We're going to France next year, so I plan to spend a considerable amount of time sprucing up my French language skills. Adieu.)
This isn't my first rodeo as a retiree. I left the National Park Service at the end of 1997 on an "early out" option, and declined to continue teaching high school in 2004. So I know the ropes about not working. This time it's for keeps though. My working life is over.
And I don't know how to feel about that. I hear you saying, "There's always plenty to do around the house - there's always cat vomit to clean up after all - you could volunteer someplace, join clubs and discussion groups, go hiking, take day trips to interesting places. That great American novel isn't going to write itself, you know, so get busy."
You're right, and I'll do those things, but there's still a kind of void. As that great social critic Homer Simpson once said, "My job is my identity. If I'm not a whatchamacallit, I'm nothing!"
So my first day out of the work force has me thinking, "The vacuum cleaner belt is broken. I have to check to see if we have a spare, or go buy a new one. I promised to bring lunch to Kris and take a hike with her. Our yard is full of dandelions that need to be dug out. Is this what my life is going to be from now on?"
I don't want to paint a bleak scenario here. There's a chess club here in town that I might join. I could do some political things. I haven't walked all the trails in the nearby state park. (Some of them are going to require a better level of physical conditioning than I have right now, and that's another thing to point at as a goal.) I want to do some volunteer work helping homeless people. But I'm going to wait a month and see whether I can fill the days or become awfully bored. Kris is already asking me to volunteer at the park.
Retirement is a real break in a person's life, akin to getting married or divorced. It remains to be seen how I'll take to it. I know I don't want to become a grumpy old man, or someone who sits by the side of a pond, feeding the ducks and waiting for death.
I'll be more upbeat about this by tomorrow, I promise.
(Oh yes. We're going to France next year, so I plan to spend a considerable amount of time sprucing up my French language skills. Adieu.)
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Poli Sci 101
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio today. Honest, I only had him on because the same AM radio station carries Colorado Rockies games in the evening. I could only stand it for a minute before I turned him off. (And oh, if only we all could turn him off!)
Limbaugh's rant today had to do with the Constitution. According to Rush, the whole thrust of the Constitution is to create limits on the power of the national government, thus to prevent any tyranny from arising on our shores.
That's bad history.
The constitutional convention met not to limit the federal government, but to strengthen it. The Preamble says, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...." (Italics mine.) The delegates were dissatisfied with the first United States government, the Articles of Confederation for the very reason that it was inadequate. The Articles had no independent executive, no federal judiciary, and a Congress in which each state had one vote. It was a league of states, little more.
The same Preamble says the government is charged with providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Clearly, the framers felt the government of the Articles incapable of doing these admirable things.
The Constitution specifies what powers the new government would have, substantially greater powers than the Articles had provided to the federal government. Read those powers and you'll see what I mean.
After the Constitution was agreed upon by the convention, it was submitted to the states for ratification. Proponents of the new framework were known as Federalists and the opposition as Anti-Federalists. George Washington, who presided over the convention, was a Federalist. So were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and a host of others. Patrick Henry led the Anti-Federalists in Virginia, but by and large the opponents of the Constitution could not match the numbers or abilities of the Federalists. Thomas Jefferson was out of the country, and though he said he had substantial reservations about the Constitution, he soon became Secretary of State, then Vice-President, and finally President.
It is true that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are meant to limit the powers of the national government. But we should not mistake the amendments for the body of the Constitution, the great organic document of our country. Neither should Rush.
Limbaugh's rant today had to do with the Constitution. According to Rush, the whole thrust of the Constitution is to create limits on the power of the national government, thus to prevent any tyranny from arising on our shores.
That's bad history.
The constitutional convention met not to limit the federal government, but to strengthen it. The Preamble says, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...." (Italics mine.) The delegates were dissatisfied with the first United States government, the Articles of Confederation for the very reason that it was inadequate. The Articles had no independent executive, no federal judiciary, and a Congress in which each state had one vote. It was a league of states, little more.
The same Preamble says the government is charged with providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Clearly, the framers felt the government of the Articles incapable of doing these admirable things.
The Constitution specifies what powers the new government would have, substantially greater powers than the Articles had provided to the federal government. Read those powers and you'll see what I mean.
After the Constitution was agreed upon by the convention, it was submitted to the states for ratification. Proponents of the new framework were known as Federalists and the opposition as Anti-Federalists. George Washington, who presided over the convention, was a Federalist. So were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and a host of others. Patrick Henry led the Anti-Federalists in Virginia, but by and large the opponents of the Constitution could not match the numbers or abilities of the Federalists. Thomas Jefferson was out of the country, and though he said he had substantial reservations about the Constitution, he soon became Secretary of State, then Vice-President, and finally President.
It is true that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are meant to limit the powers of the national government. But we should not mistake the amendments for the body of the Constitution, the great organic document of our country. Neither should Rush.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Who Deserves What?
Yesterday, on my way to work, I drove up the exit ramp of the Interstate highway to a traffic light where I take a left turn. On the side of the road was a man in a wheelchair and another man standing next to him. Both looked scruffy. The man in the wheelchair held a cardboard rectangle with homemade writing saying, "Disabled veteran. Anything helps."
By the time I dug my wallet from my back pocket and thumbed a couple of dollar bills from it, the light had changed to green. There were two cars behind me and I decided I couldn't hold them back, so I went ahead and didn't give the guys any money.
Almost immediately I started thinking about the parable of the good Samaritan. Didn't the first passers-by decline to help the bleeding man by the roadside because they were too busy? At least in their own opinions? Was I any better than they were?
The man in the wheelchair wasn't bleeding - he'd done his bleeding some time ago - and who knows what his circumstances are now. Possibly he shuns work and prefers to make a career of sorts from begging. Our local newspaper, whose editorial policy is somewhere to the right of the Hapsburg monarchy, featured a story once about a man who uses an Interstate exit for begging, and manages about twenty dollars an hour, much more than he'd get with a minimum wage job. Clearly the message was that roadside beggars are undeserving of anyone's charity.
But, who cares, really, what his motive is or whether he deserves any of my hard earned money? The good Samaritan wasn't concerned at all about the history of the man he helped. Jesus never mentioned in the parable how the injured man "fell in" with robbers. Maybe he "fell in" with robbers because he was used to their company, being a robber himself. Possibly they caught him trying to take their ill-gotten loot, and beat him up for that reason.
My point, and I do have one, is that it's a waste of time and energy to try and determine if a roadside beggar deserves our help. And I'll try to do better in the future, even if it inconveniences motorists behind me.
By the time I dug my wallet from my back pocket and thumbed a couple of dollar bills from it, the light had changed to green. There were two cars behind me and I decided I couldn't hold them back, so I went ahead and didn't give the guys any money.
Almost immediately I started thinking about the parable of the good Samaritan. Didn't the first passers-by decline to help the bleeding man by the roadside because they were too busy? At least in their own opinions? Was I any better than they were?
The man in the wheelchair wasn't bleeding - he'd done his bleeding some time ago - and who knows what his circumstances are now. Possibly he shuns work and prefers to make a career of sorts from begging. Our local newspaper, whose editorial policy is somewhere to the right of the Hapsburg monarchy, featured a story once about a man who uses an Interstate exit for begging, and manages about twenty dollars an hour, much more than he'd get with a minimum wage job. Clearly the message was that roadside beggars are undeserving of anyone's charity.
But, who cares, really, what his motive is or whether he deserves any of my hard earned money? The good Samaritan wasn't concerned at all about the history of the man he helped. Jesus never mentioned in the parable how the injured man "fell in" with robbers. Maybe he "fell in" with robbers because he was used to their company, being a robber himself. Possibly they caught him trying to take their ill-gotten loot, and beat him up for that reason.
My point, and I do have one, is that it's a waste of time and energy to try and determine if a roadside beggar deserves our help. And I'll try to do better in the future, even if it inconveniences motorists behind me.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Spoon River, Wider Than a Mile
Back when I was in high school, sometime during the presidential administration of Zachary Taylor, my American literature teacher, Brother Steven, told us about "The Spoon River Anthology." The anthology is a series of poems written by Edgar Lee Masters about a hundred years ago, centering on the fictitious town of Spoon River, located along the very real Spoon River in Illinois. I don't remember anything else Brother Steven said, but then it was a long time ago.
(Some of you might be wondering how I could have been in high school during the Taylor presidency, 170 years ago, and studied poems written only one hundred years ago, but I am employing a device called "poetic license" you see.)
Anyway, in the intervening years the "Anthology" has never been far from my thoughts. (And if you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.) Not too long ago, I spotted a copy of the anthology at the public library and borrowed it. I've been going through the poems since then.
It turns out the poems are all in the voices of various deceased residents of the town, writing from the graveyard. Taken together they are an indictment of small town hypocrisies and greed. What follows is one of them, in the voice of the town prostitute.
(Some of you might be wondering how I could have been in high school during the Taylor presidency, 170 years ago, and studied poems written only one hundred years ago, but I am employing a device called "poetic license" you see.)
Anyway, in the intervening years the "Anthology" has never been far from my thoughts. (And if you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.) Not too long ago, I spotted a copy of the anthology at the public library and borrowed it. I've been going through the poems since then.
It turns out the poems are all in the voices of various deceased residents of the town, writing from the graveyard. Taken together they are an indictment of small town hypocrisies and greed. What follows is one of them, in the voice of the town prostitute.
Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received For supporting candidates for office? Or for writing up the canning factory To get people to invest? Or for suppressing the facts about the bank, When it was rotten and ready to break? Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge Helping anyone except the "Q" railroad, Or the bankers? Or did Rev. Peet or Rev. Sibley Give any part of their salary, earned by keeping still, Or speaking out as the leaders wished them to do, To the building of the water works? But I Daisy Fraser who always passed Along the street through rows of nods and smiles, And coughs and words such as "there she goes." Never was taken before Justice Arnett Without contributing ten dollars and costs To the school fund of Spoon River!
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Chancellorsville
It's May 1, and 150 years ago today the battle of Chancellorsville began, the battle that's often called Robert E. Lee's masterpiece. What follows is written from memory, so there might be factual errors.
Actually, it started off pretty well for the union Army of the Potomac. Major General Joe Hooker had restored the morale of his troops in the aftermath of Ambrose Burnsides's disasters at Fredericksburg and on the "mud march." Furloughs and better food had worked their magic, and the yankee troops were in reasonably good shape as Hooker led them into the scramble of new growth woods known as the Wilderness. Also, Hooker's intelligence gathering apparatus had told him how many troops Lee had and where they were.
There were two factors working against Hooker as he set out to defeat Lee and end the rebellion. First, he seems to have feared that someone on his staff would leak the army's plans to the Confederates, and so he kept his strategy to himself. This would have important and disastrous consequences. Second, the army was relying on a new telegraph apparatus that often failed to work. This too would prove to be a great hindrance to his operations.
Hooker's army got off well, flanked the Confederates west of Fredericksburg, and reached the crossroads at the Chancellor house deep in the forest. Then they halted. Whether this was by design is something historians are still arguing about. (Historians, as we all know, will argue about almost anything.)
Hooker's move took Lee by surprise. He had been guarding Fredericksburg, the mid-point on the direct route from Washington to Richmond, but he reacted quickly when word reached him concerning Hooker.
Historians who defend Hooker claim this is just what the yankee general wanted. Lee was rising to the bait Hooker dangled in front of him. Cannonading and infantry clashes broke out on May 1.
And then fate took a hand, not for the last time in this battle. Next day a Confederate cannonball struck the porch of the Chancellor house as Hooker stood nearby. Part of the porch collapsed and Hooker was hit hard on the head. Undoubtedly, he suffered a concussion. Alas for the union, the symptoms of concussion make the affected person appear to be drunk. Hooker was alternately alert and incapacitated for the rest of the day. He issued few orders and provided little direction, but refused to surrender command to his senior corps commander, Darius Couch, who mistakepunly thought Hooker was drunk.
Lee audaciously divided his army, ordering his best subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, to make a flank attack on the union right. Dividing your army in the face of a numerically superior foe is usually a prescription for disaster, but Lee sensed that the yankee forces were suddenly inert and he could take the gamble. Jackson's men smashed into the union's eleventh corps, generally considered the weakest of the army at sunset. The eleventh collapsed, and panic spread to neighboring yankee troops. Only darkness and the nearly ready union dinners halted the rebel advance.
Then it was the Confederates who experienced a disaster. There was a full moon that night, enough light for the attack to continue. Jackson rode forward to check the situation and became the victim of friendly fire. Shot three times, he had his left arm amputated that same evening, and died a week later from pneumonia.
Meanwhile, Hooker pulled himself together enough to order his detached corps at Fredericksburg to attack Confederate forces there the next morning. The order was issued that evening before midnight but not dated or timed. The telegrapher sent the message after midnight, dated and timed at the moment of transmission. Sixth corps commander, John Sedgewick, assumed he had an entire day to prepare, thus giving Lee time to reinforce his own men there.
All of Hooker's plans had come to nothing, but his army was not defeated despite taking huge losses. He might have continued the battle, but although his army was not beaten, "Fighting Joe" was, and ordered a retreat. "My God," President Lincoln exclaimed when told the news. "What will the country think?" Union losses in killed, wounded and captured totaled 17,000.
In the aftermath of his victory, Lee decided to repeat his strategy of 1862, invade the north and fight a decisive battle to win Confederate independence and end the war. He would have to do so without Jackson, who would be replaced by General Robert Ewell, who did not possess Jackson's intuition for the enemy weaknesses or aggressive spirit.
In addition, as Lee began to maneuver north, his cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, fought a battle against union men at Brandy Station, and for the first time the yankee horsemen gave as good as they got. This was a good omen for the north, but not for Lee's hopes as he advanced towards Gettysburg.
Actually, it started off pretty well for the union Army of the Potomac. Major General Joe Hooker had restored the morale of his troops in the aftermath of Ambrose Burnsides's disasters at Fredericksburg and on the "mud march." Furloughs and better food had worked their magic, and the yankee troops were in reasonably good shape as Hooker led them into the scramble of new growth woods known as the Wilderness. Also, Hooker's intelligence gathering apparatus had told him how many troops Lee had and where they were.
There were two factors working against Hooker as he set out to defeat Lee and end the rebellion. First, he seems to have feared that someone on his staff would leak the army's plans to the Confederates, and so he kept his strategy to himself. This would have important and disastrous consequences. Second, the army was relying on a new telegraph apparatus that often failed to work. This too would prove to be a great hindrance to his operations.
Hooker's army got off well, flanked the Confederates west of Fredericksburg, and reached the crossroads at the Chancellor house deep in the forest. Then they halted. Whether this was by design is something historians are still arguing about. (Historians, as we all know, will argue about almost anything.)
Hooker's move took Lee by surprise. He had been guarding Fredericksburg, the mid-point on the direct route from Washington to Richmond, but he reacted quickly when word reached him concerning Hooker.
Historians who defend Hooker claim this is just what the yankee general wanted. Lee was rising to the bait Hooker dangled in front of him. Cannonading and infantry clashes broke out on May 1.
And then fate took a hand, not for the last time in this battle. Next day a Confederate cannonball struck the porch of the Chancellor house as Hooker stood nearby. Part of the porch collapsed and Hooker was hit hard on the head. Undoubtedly, he suffered a concussion. Alas for the union, the symptoms of concussion make the affected person appear to be drunk. Hooker was alternately alert and incapacitated for the rest of the day. He issued few orders and provided little direction, but refused to surrender command to his senior corps commander, Darius Couch, who mistakepunly thought Hooker was drunk.
Lee audaciously divided his army, ordering his best subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, to make a flank attack on the union right. Dividing your army in the face of a numerically superior foe is usually a prescription for disaster, but Lee sensed that the yankee forces were suddenly inert and he could take the gamble. Jackson's men smashed into the union's eleventh corps, generally considered the weakest of the army at sunset. The eleventh collapsed, and panic spread to neighboring yankee troops. Only darkness and the nearly ready union dinners halted the rebel advance.
Then it was the Confederates who experienced a disaster. There was a full moon that night, enough light for the attack to continue. Jackson rode forward to check the situation and became the victim of friendly fire. Shot three times, he had his left arm amputated that same evening, and died a week later from pneumonia.
Meanwhile, Hooker pulled himself together enough to order his detached corps at Fredericksburg to attack Confederate forces there the next morning. The order was issued that evening before midnight but not dated or timed. The telegrapher sent the message after midnight, dated and timed at the moment of transmission. Sixth corps commander, John Sedgewick, assumed he had an entire day to prepare, thus giving Lee time to reinforce his own men there.
All of Hooker's plans had come to nothing, but his army was not defeated despite taking huge losses. He might have continued the battle, but although his army was not beaten, "Fighting Joe" was, and ordered a retreat. "My God," President Lincoln exclaimed when told the news. "What will the country think?" Union losses in killed, wounded and captured totaled 17,000.
In the aftermath of his victory, Lee decided to repeat his strategy of 1862, invade the north and fight a decisive battle to win Confederate independence and end the war. He would have to do so without Jackson, who would be replaced by General Robert Ewell, who did not possess Jackson's intuition for the enemy weaknesses or aggressive spirit.
In addition, as Lee began to maneuver north, his cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, fought a battle against union men at Brandy Station, and for the first time the yankee horsemen gave as good as they got. This was a good omen for the north, but not for Lee's hopes as he advanced towards Gettysburg.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Addventures in Vacationing!
When we last communicated, we had struggled into Dave Walley's Resort, south of Carson City Nevada, near the crossroads hamlet of Genoa, the first settlement (by white people) in what would become the Silver State. The muffler on their 1996 Honda was dangling precariously from the back end of the car and it was late Saturday afternoon.
Sunday required a trip to the supermarket about five miles away for groceries. Minden and Gardinerville are small towns adjacent to each other that boast several casinos between them, somme very chic boutiques and one very well appointed grocery store. Supplied with victuals and constantly listening for any sounds of an exhaust system being jettisoned, we made our way back to our little vacation paradise and spent the remainder of the day getting to know the pool and hot baths.
It turns out that the resort is right on a geological fault line and the water is heated from deep beneath the earth's surface. We weren't very concerned that a volcano would suddenly erupt under our feet, and, since Kris loves the water, made the most of our Sunday afternoon.
Monday morning concerned a trip to the muffler repair shop, located across busy highway fifty from another casino, where the car was fixed and our credit card was burdened with new charges. Then it was off across the mountain to Lake Tahoe.
Lake Tahoe lives up to any superlatives you might ever have heard about it. The water is at one and the same time remarkably clear and a variety of stunning shades of blue. The lake is nearly surrounded by mountains that - at least in April - are snow covered. Near the south end of the lake is Emerald Bay, as scenic a place as you can imagine. The shoreline rises several hundred feet above the lake surface, providing majestic views. There are big trees too, probably puny compared to the redwoods of California, but plenty large enough for a transplanted easterner such as me.
Before getting there, however, the traveler must pass through Stateline Nevada, aptly named, a community devoted to extracting as many dollars as possible from Californians who want to gamble. Casinos almost on top of one another right up to the "Welcome to California" sign.
After looking at the bay, we ate a picnic lunch and took a scenic detour through some very nice forest country back to Nevada, Dave Walley's, and the pools.
Tuesday was our day for Virginia City. Readers old enough to remember the "Bonanza" show on television might recall that the ranch called the Ponderosa was shown on the show's opening map as located near Virginia City and Lake Tahoe. In fact, we probably were staying on the fictional ranch.
Virginia City owes its existence to the famous silver strike of 1859, the Comstock Lode. Eventually, huge amounts of silver were taken from the area, fortunes were won and lost, and the landscape was forever altered by the detritus left by the miners. Comstock himself turns out to have been a drunk and a braggart whose name is attached to the strike because of his efforts at self-promotion.
Nowadays, the town relies on tourism to keep going. Saloons, hotels, the ubiquitous gambling parlors, and museums front the main street in town. My favorite saloon name was the "Bucket of Blood."
We strolled the streets and had lunch there. I only mention it because the saloon we stopped at featured a beer called "Ichthyosaurus" I think. The menu urged, "Order an Icky!" Somehow the name didn't deter me, so I did order an Icky, which turned out to be rather bitter. Take a tip from me and don't order an Icky.
One other thing I might mention. Along highway fifty east of Carson City on the way to Virginia City there are billboards advertising the "Bunny Ranch." If you should be in the mood to get a pet rabbit, stop in. I can't think it's very profitable though, ranching rabbits. We gave it a pass.
Wednesday was our chance to drive all the way around the lake. There are plenty of photo opportunities, especially on the Nevada side. We walked in a state park, watched an osprey hover over a small lake not far from Tahoe, had a picnic lunch at another state park with a beach on the north shore, crossed into California again, and drove along the western side through more very large trees (and some road construction sites that we were assured have been going on forever), until we arrived back at Emerald Bay for another look at some world class scenery. It was all wonderful.
Thursday and Friday I'll cover briefly. We made little side trips, saw a pair of golden eagles soaring high above us, and spent an afternoon strolling around Genoa. We stopped at what was called the oldest bar and eating establishment in Nevada, where I won a couple of bucks on video poker, sampled some Teriyaki jerky (seriously) that didn't appeal to me, and learned more about the history of the pony express.
Friday was our wedding anniversary, which I'll not write about except to say it was very low key, and quite nice.
Saturday was checkout day, so we left Dave Walley in the rear view mirror, found the eagle's roadside nest and watched as a western kingbird tormented a much bigger eagle. We'd never seen anything quite like it.
East of Carson City, highway fifty is called the "Loneliest Road in America." It lives up to itsome s name. Fallon, fifty miles east, is a fair sized town, but then it's about two hundred miles through sagebrush, relieved by winding roads through mountains, before you see another town.
About thirty miles west of that town, Ely Nevada, Kris suddenly started shouting at me that there was something in the road. At first I couldn't see it, but then I did and braked just in time to avoid hitting a dog that was running right down the center line. At Kris' urging, we pulled over to the side and she coaxed the dog into the car. It was a medium sized black dog, looked to me to be part beagle, was wearing a collar but no tag. There was no human habitation within miles.
The dog looked thin but was not starving or anything and didn't smell gamey, so we guessed it hadn't been in the wilderness very long. Obviously it wouldn't survive very long, though, running down the middle of the road, even in the very light traffic of the Nevada desert.
We drove on to Ely with the dog, Kris giving it water, and stopped at a Shell station (You have to take advantage of your chances to buy gas in this part of the world.) where the attendant directed us to a local animal rescue operation in town. We went there, arriving just as they were closing, and the woman there refused to take the dog from us. When asked, she provided directions to the pound north of town.
Kris and I were in a serious contest of wills by this time. She was adamant that we could not leave the dog at a pound where it might be euthanized, and I didn't want to take the dog all the way back to Colorado Springs. (I bet you're all rooting for Kris to win the argument, aren't you.) She did agree that we could take a look at the pound.
Alas, though we drove all over north Ely, we couldn't find a pound. By now it was late afternoon on Saturday, places were closed or closing and wouldn't reopen until Monday. We were both having bladder issues, so went to another Shell station - Ely is a two-Shell kind of town it turns out - took care of our little personal issues and went inside to buy some dog food. Kris asked the people there if they would like a dog and the young man behind the counter agreed to take her (the dog that is). So it all turned out well.
I'm cutting this short because Kris is up and showered now and we're almost ready to hit the road again, bound east to explore Arches National Park and then head for home.
Sunday required a trip to the supermarket about five miles away for groceries. Minden and Gardinerville are small towns adjacent to each other that boast several casinos between them, somme very chic boutiques and one very well appointed grocery store. Supplied with victuals and constantly listening for any sounds of an exhaust system being jettisoned, we made our way back to our little vacation paradise and spent the remainder of the day getting to know the pool and hot baths.
It turns out that the resort is right on a geological fault line and the water is heated from deep beneath the earth's surface. We weren't very concerned that a volcano would suddenly erupt under our feet, and, since Kris loves the water, made the most of our Sunday afternoon.
Monday morning concerned a trip to the muffler repair shop, located across busy highway fifty from another casino, where the car was fixed and our credit card was burdened with new charges. Then it was off across the mountain to Lake Tahoe.
Lake Tahoe lives up to any superlatives you might ever have heard about it. The water is at one and the same time remarkably clear and a variety of stunning shades of blue. The lake is nearly surrounded by mountains that - at least in April - are snow covered. Near the south end of the lake is Emerald Bay, as scenic a place as you can imagine. The shoreline rises several hundred feet above the lake surface, providing majestic views. There are big trees too, probably puny compared to the redwoods of California, but plenty large enough for a transplanted easterner such as me.
Before getting there, however, the traveler must pass through Stateline Nevada, aptly named, a community devoted to extracting as many dollars as possible from Californians who want to gamble. Casinos almost on top of one another right up to the "Welcome to California" sign.
After looking at the bay, we ate a picnic lunch and took a scenic detour through some very nice forest country back to Nevada, Dave Walley's, and the pools.
Tuesday was our day for Virginia City. Readers old enough to remember the "Bonanza" show on television might recall that the ranch called the Ponderosa was shown on the show's opening map as located near Virginia City and Lake Tahoe. In fact, we probably were staying on the fictional ranch.
Virginia City owes its existence to the famous silver strike of 1859, the Comstock Lode. Eventually, huge amounts of silver were taken from the area, fortunes were won and lost, and the landscape was forever altered by the detritus left by the miners. Comstock himself turns out to have been a drunk and a braggart whose name is attached to the strike because of his efforts at self-promotion.
Nowadays, the town relies on tourism to keep going. Saloons, hotels, the ubiquitous gambling parlors, and museums front the main street in town. My favorite saloon name was the "Bucket of Blood."
We strolled the streets and had lunch there. I only mention it because the saloon we stopped at featured a beer called "Ichthyosaurus" I think. The menu urged, "Order an Icky!" Somehow the name didn't deter me, so I did order an Icky, which turned out to be rather bitter. Take a tip from me and don't order an Icky.
One other thing I might mention. Along highway fifty east of Carson City on the way to Virginia City there are billboards advertising the "Bunny Ranch." If you should be in the mood to get a pet rabbit, stop in. I can't think it's very profitable though, ranching rabbits. We gave it a pass.
Wednesday was our chance to drive all the way around the lake. There are plenty of photo opportunities, especially on the Nevada side. We walked in a state park, watched an osprey hover over a small lake not far from Tahoe, had a picnic lunch at another state park with a beach on the north shore, crossed into California again, and drove along the western side through more very large trees (and some road construction sites that we were assured have been going on forever), until we arrived back at Emerald Bay for another look at some world class scenery. It was all wonderful.
Thursday and Friday I'll cover briefly. We made little side trips, saw a pair of golden eagles soaring high above us, and spent an afternoon strolling around Genoa. We stopped at what was called the oldest bar and eating establishment in Nevada, where I won a couple of bucks on video poker, sampled some Teriyaki jerky (seriously) that didn't appeal to me, and learned more about the history of the pony express.
Friday was our wedding anniversary, which I'll not write about except to say it was very low key, and quite nice.
Saturday was checkout day, so we left Dave Walley in the rear view mirror, found the eagle's roadside nest and watched as a western kingbird tormented a much bigger eagle. We'd never seen anything quite like it.
East of Carson City, highway fifty is called the "Loneliest Road in America." It lives up to itsome s name. Fallon, fifty miles east, is a fair sized town, but then it's about two hundred miles through sagebrush, relieved by winding roads through mountains, before you see another town.
About thirty miles west of that town, Ely Nevada, Kris suddenly started shouting at me that there was something in the road. At first I couldn't see it, but then I did and braked just in time to avoid hitting a dog that was running right down the center line. At Kris' urging, we pulled over to the side and she coaxed the dog into the car. It was a medium sized black dog, looked to me to be part beagle, was wearing a collar but no tag. There was no human habitation within miles.
The dog looked thin but was not starving or anything and didn't smell gamey, so we guessed it hadn't been in the wilderness very long. Obviously it wouldn't survive very long, though, running down the middle of the road, even in the very light traffic of the Nevada desert.
We drove on to Ely with the dog, Kris giving it water, and stopped at a Shell station (You have to take advantage of your chances to buy gas in this part of the world.) where the attendant directed us to a local animal rescue operation in town. We went there, arriving just as they were closing, and the woman there refused to take the dog from us. When asked, she provided directions to the pound north of town.
Kris and I were in a serious contest of wills by this time. She was adamant that we could not leave the dog at a pound where it might be euthanized, and I didn't want to take the dog all the way back to Colorado Springs. (I bet you're all rooting for Kris to win the argument, aren't you.) She did agree that we could take a look at the pound.
Alas, though we drove all over north Ely, we couldn't find a pound. By now it was late afternoon on Saturday, places were closed or closing and wouldn't reopen until Monday. We were both having bladder issues, so went to another Shell station - Ely is a two-Shell kind of town it turns out - took care of our little personal issues and went inside to buy some dog food. Kris asked the people there if they would like a dog and the young man behind the counter agreed to take her (the dog that is). So it all turned out well.
I'm cutting this short because Kris is up and showered now and we're almost ready to hit the road again, bound east to explore Arches National Park and then head for home.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Ah, Vacation
Here I sit at a place called "Dave Walley's Resort" south of Carson City Nevada, on Sunday morning. My bride of nearly twenty-seven years is still asleep and I've checked the news, the baseball scores, and one other matter on the Internet. I'm looking out the living room window at a very attractive mountain and despite some sinus problems, it's a very good day.
Carson City is a bit more than a thousand miles from Colorado Springs. We decided to drive rather than fly here so we could see more of the sights and especially stay over at Salt Lake City, which neither of us had ever seen. We took what has become the usual route from Colo Spgs, as the big green road signs call our town, west to Hartsell Colorado (Don't blink or you'll miss it.), then north through Fairplay and Alma in the mountains, over Hoosier Pass, down to Breckenridge and Frisco, then boogied west on the interstate to Utah.
We had to brake hard to avoid killing a fox, saw another fox at a distance, and the largest herd of elk either of us had ever spotted. There must have been forty or more beasties grazing at a ranch north of Hartsell. Don't misunderstand, they were wild animals, just taking advantage of the rancher's grass.
After crossing a lot of desert in Utah, scenes of austere sublime beauty, we arrived in Salt Lake just after dark and checked into a hotel about a mile from Temple Square. We wanted to see the very center of the Mormon world, so after a short hiatus, we drove over.
The great Mormon temple is a huge edifice, topped by a golden angel - I guess Moroni - blowing a trumpet. It's all alabaster, looks to my unschooled eye to be Victorian in style, and is surrounded by very pretty courtyards with statues commemorating scenes from the Book of Mormon and the history of the LDS devotees. The most attractive of them depicts a family making its way across the plains with a large handcart which doesn't show much in the way of supplies. The man's pants are ripped at the knee, both the man and the woman look rather gaunt, and a child is cuddled up asleep on the cart. I marvel at the fortitude of the Mormon pioneers who did walk across the plains all the miles from Missouri to the Salt Lake.
Yesterday morning, after a little misadventure involving directions, we set out west for Nevada. The Great Salt Lake truly deserves its name, we saw miles and miles of slat flats, two salt harvesting plants and many seagulls. I wonder how seagulls originally got there, the lake is a thousand miles from any ocean. Anyway, we began seeing signs for the little town just over the state line, advertising casinos and strip joints. (Lap dance, $10.) There's a world of difference between Utah and Nevada. I'll bet there are any number of sociology papers about backsliding Mormons sneaking over to Nevada for sin. I mentioned that to Kris, who quickly replied that there are lots of people in Utah who are not Mormon. And she's right of course.
Nevada is greener than Utah, at least eastern Nevada is, but as we drove farther west it looked more and more arid. The foothills are eroded, there are talus piles at the bottoms of them, and very little vegetation. (Aren't you just impressed that I know a geology term, though I think good geologists would say "talus cones.") There are a few small towns along Interstate 80, all of which seem to feature casinos, but the country seems almost uninhabited otherwise. There was an occasional hawk or vulture and a lonely pronghorn or two.
About a hundred miles east of Reno we heard a noise from the back of the car and we began to sound more like a motorcycle than an automobile. Clearly there was an exhaust problem. By the time we reached Reno we started to hear dragging from the tailpipe. We got off the highway immediately, actually pulled into the parking lot of a furniture store and took a look. The muffler appeared to be hanging by a thread.
We walked into the store, explained that we weren't in the market for a Lazyboy, and asked if there was a muffler repair place in the vicinity. The sales clerks were very nice, checked the Internet and made a few calls, but it was already late afternoon on Saturday, and repair shops were closed. After a good deal of palavering, the clerk directed us to a Walmart where we could get some wire and kind of jury rig the muffler until Monday morning. So there we were in the Walmart parking lot, while I crawled under the car to tie up the muffler. There was very little clearance and not much in the way of places to actually tie the thing off. Finally it was done, and we were able to continue, following the not very helpful directions to Dave Walley's. And that's why I'm sitting here telling you this story. By the time we arrived the wire had stretched or broken, and the muffler was again almost on the ground.
I'd like to say we'll just flop today and get to a muffler shop tomorrow, but unfortunately we're short of groceries, so either we eat at the resort - very expensive - or risk the muffler finding a grocery store from this rather remote location. I checked the Internet and there is a Meineke shop in Carson City. That's the other matter I mentioned. I'll probably be sitting around there tomorrow morning. Ah, vacation!
By the way, I think Dave Walley was a pony express rider. At least there's a big pony express motif here.
Carson City is a bit more than a thousand miles from Colorado Springs. We decided to drive rather than fly here so we could see more of the sights and especially stay over at Salt Lake City, which neither of us had ever seen. We took what has become the usual route from Colo Spgs, as the big green road signs call our town, west to Hartsell Colorado (Don't blink or you'll miss it.), then north through Fairplay and Alma in the mountains, over Hoosier Pass, down to Breckenridge and Frisco, then boogied west on the interstate to Utah.
We had to brake hard to avoid killing a fox, saw another fox at a distance, and the largest herd of elk either of us had ever spotted. There must have been forty or more beasties grazing at a ranch north of Hartsell. Don't misunderstand, they were wild animals, just taking advantage of the rancher's grass.
After crossing a lot of desert in Utah, scenes of austere sublime beauty, we arrived in Salt Lake just after dark and checked into a hotel about a mile from Temple Square. We wanted to see the very center of the Mormon world, so after a short hiatus, we drove over.
The great Mormon temple is a huge edifice, topped by a golden angel - I guess Moroni - blowing a trumpet. It's all alabaster, looks to my unschooled eye to be Victorian in style, and is surrounded by very pretty courtyards with statues commemorating scenes from the Book of Mormon and the history of the LDS devotees. The most attractive of them depicts a family making its way across the plains with a large handcart which doesn't show much in the way of supplies. The man's pants are ripped at the knee, both the man and the woman look rather gaunt, and a child is cuddled up asleep on the cart. I marvel at the fortitude of the Mormon pioneers who did walk across the plains all the miles from Missouri to the Salt Lake.
Yesterday morning, after a little misadventure involving directions, we set out west for Nevada. The Great Salt Lake truly deserves its name, we saw miles and miles of slat flats, two salt harvesting plants and many seagulls. I wonder how seagulls originally got there, the lake is a thousand miles from any ocean. Anyway, we began seeing signs for the little town just over the state line, advertising casinos and strip joints. (Lap dance, $10.) There's a world of difference between Utah and Nevada. I'll bet there are any number of sociology papers about backsliding Mormons sneaking over to Nevada for sin. I mentioned that to Kris, who quickly replied that there are lots of people in Utah who are not Mormon. And she's right of course.
Nevada is greener than Utah, at least eastern Nevada is, but as we drove farther west it looked more and more arid. The foothills are eroded, there are talus piles at the bottoms of them, and very little vegetation. (Aren't you just impressed that I know a geology term, though I think good geologists would say "talus cones.") There are a few small towns along Interstate 80, all of which seem to feature casinos, but the country seems almost uninhabited otherwise. There was an occasional hawk or vulture and a lonely pronghorn or two.
About a hundred miles east of Reno we heard a noise from the back of the car and we began to sound more like a motorcycle than an automobile. Clearly there was an exhaust problem. By the time we reached Reno we started to hear dragging from the tailpipe. We got off the highway immediately, actually pulled into the parking lot of a furniture store and took a look. The muffler appeared to be hanging by a thread.
We walked into the store, explained that we weren't in the market for a Lazyboy, and asked if there was a muffler repair place in the vicinity. The sales clerks were very nice, checked the Internet and made a few calls, but it was already late afternoon on Saturday, and repair shops were closed. After a good deal of palavering, the clerk directed us to a Walmart where we could get some wire and kind of jury rig the muffler until Monday morning. So there we were in the Walmart parking lot, while I crawled under the car to tie up the muffler. There was very little clearance and not much in the way of places to actually tie the thing off. Finally it was done, and we were able to continue, following the not very helpful directions to Dave Walley's. And that's why I'm sitting here telling you this story. By the time we arrived the wire had stretched or broken, and the muffler was again almost on the ground.
I'd like to say we'll just flop today and get to a muffler shop tomorrow, but unfortunately we're short of groceries, so either we eat at the resort - very expensive - or risk the muffler finding a grocery store from this rather remote location. I checked the Internet and there is a Meineke shop in Carson City. That's the other matter I mentioned. I'll probably be sitting around there tomorrow morning. Ah, vacation!
By the way, I think Dave Walley was a pony express rider. At least there's a big pony express motif here.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
The Young Baseball Season
The national scene is so depressing that I for one can't bear to post anything about it. Instead, I'll talk about baseball.
We've only gone through two and a half weeks of the season, less than ten percent of the scheduled games have been played, but still there have been some developments the pundits did not anticipate.
How about those Colorado Rockies, certainly the most pleasant surprise of the young season. The emergence of Dexter Fowler as a power threat - seven homers already from the lead-off spot - along with the resurgence of Troy Tulowitzky and continued excellent play by Carlos Gonzalez have propelled the Rocks to an eleven and four start. The supporting cast is good too, with Michael Cuddyer and second baseman Josh Rutledge, a young player poised for stardom. Granted, Todd Helton is not nearly the hitter he was a few years ago, but Jordan Pacheco is being eased into the first base position and Helton will play fewer games in hopes he'll stay fresher with more rest. Nolan Arenado, considered a super prospect, waits in the wings, ready soon to take over at third base. Catching is in the hands of Willin Rosario, not considered very good defensively, but baby can he hit with power.
In baseball, it all depends on pitching. The Rockies have cobbled together a rotation of starters that few people outside of Colorado know anything about. Jorge de la Rosa can be a top leftie, now that he's recovered from elbow surgery. Juan Nicasio, whose neck was broken last year by a line drive, is back and pitching well. Jhoulys Chacin can be very good or very bad. The last two starters, Jeff Francis and John Garland, are retreads, but both might be able to provide quality starts. The bullpen looks like a strength with Rex Brothers and Rafael Betancourt, both very capable on the back end.
In the end, all will depend on the five starters, but if they falter Drew Pomerance and Christian Friedrich are available at Colorado Springs.
One thing the Rockies will have to prove they can do is beat the Giants in San Francisco.
Almost as nice a surprise as the Rockies has been the play of the Boston Red Sox, consensus choice of the experts to finish last in the American League East. Red Sox pitching has been dominant so far and there has been enough offense to bring ten victories in the first fourteen games.
I like the Red Sox' chances, especially considering that David Ortiz is about to join the team after the almost endless rehabilitation of his heels. Big Papi's big bat in the middle of that lineup should make all the other hitters better. Certainly, the first three hitters, Ellsbury, Victorino and Pedroia, will see more strikes to swing at as opposing pitchers will be reluctant to walk them ahead of Ortiz.
What's best about the Bosox, though, is the tandem of Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz. The Sox will go as far as those two bulwarks of the rotation take them.
Disappointments? The Los Angeles Angels are off to a slow start. They might recover, but will have to do so without Jered Weaver. I don't think they can catch the Oakland A's. Likewise, the Tampa Bay Rays and Toronto Blue Jays have not performed as everyone thought they would. The Giants, aside from that three game sweep of the Rockies, have been mediocre, but it's always a mistake to count them out.
I can't say I like either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Yankees. All that money spent and they seem to have assembled teams composed of players on the downhill side of their careers. The Yankees, despite winning some games recently, are relying heavily on older players and second stringers. I don't think they can last.
Maybe I'll try for some social comment in my next entry. Then again, maybe I won't.
We've only gone through two and a half weeks of the season, less than ten percent of the scheduled games have been played, but still there have been some developments the pundits did not anticipate.
How about those Colorado Rockies, certainly the most pleasant surprise of the young season. The emergence of Dexter Fowler as a power threat - seven homers already from the lead-off spot - along with the resurgence of Troy Tulowitzky and continued excellent play by Carlos Gonzalez have propelled the Rocks to an eleven and four start. The supporting cast is good too, with Michael Cuddyer and second baseman Josh Rutledge, a young player poised for stardom. Granted, Todd Helton is not nearly the hitter he was a few years ago, but Jordan Pacheco is being eased into the first base position and Helton will play fewer games in hopes he'll stay fresher with more rest. Nolan Arenado, considered a super prospect, waits in the wings, ready soon to take over at third base. Catching is in the hands of Willin Rosario, not considered very good defensively, but baby can he hit with power.
In baseball, it all depends on pitching. The Rockies have cobbled together a rotation of starters that few people outside of Colorado know anything about. Jorge de la Rosa can be a top leftie, now that he's recovered from elbow surgery. Juan Nicasio, whose neck was broken last year by a line drive, is back and pitching well. Jhoulys Chacin can be very good or very bad. The last two starters, Jeff Francis and John Garland, are retreads, but both might be able to provide quality starts. The bullpen looks like a strength with Rex Brothers and Rafael Betancourt, both very capable on the back end.
In the end, all will depend on the five starters, but if they falter Drew Pomerance and Christian Friedrich are available at Colorado Springs.
One thing the Rockies will have to prove they can do is beat the Giants in San Francisco.
Almost as nice a surprise as the Rockies has been the play of the Boston Red Sox, consensus choice of the experts to finish last in the American League East. Red Sox pitching has been dominant so far and there has been enough offense to bring ten victories in the first fourteen games.
I like the Red Sox' chances, especially considering that David Ortiz is about to join the team after the almost endless rehabilitation of his heels. Big Papi's big bat in the middle of that lineup should make all the other hitters better. Certainly, the first three hitters, Ellsbury, Victorino and Pedroia, will see more strikes to swing at as opposing pitchers will be reluctant to walk them ahead of Ortiz.
What's best about the Bosox, though, is the tandem of Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz. The Sox will go as far as those two bulwarks of the rotation take them.
Disappointments? The Los Angeles Angels are off to a slow start. They might recover, but will have to do so without Jered Weaver. I don't think they can catch the Oakland A's. Likewise, the Tampa Bay Rays and Toronto Blue Jays have not performed as everyone thought they would. The Giants, aside from that three game sweep of the Rockies, have been mediocre, but it's always a mistake to count them out.
I can't say I like either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Yankees. All that money spent and they seem to have assembled teams composed of players on the downhill side of their careers. The Yankees, despite winning some games recently, are relying heavily on older players and second stringers. I don't think they can last.
Maybe I'll try for some social comment in my next entry. Then again, maybe I won't.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Civil War Sesquicentennial Update
It's time for a Civil War sesquicentennial update! When last we checked in about the great American calamity, it was 1862. The Union Army of the Potomac had won an equivocal victory over Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam Creek, but their commander, General George B. McClellan, had allowed the Confederates to escape back to Virginia.
President Lincoln used the victory, such as it was, to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he made permanent on January 1, 1863. Then, disgusted with McClellan's lackadaisical conduct, he fired the boy wonder and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside.
Meanwhile, in the trans-Appalachian west, Confederate forces advanced as far north as Perryville Kentucky before being turned back.
Burnside understood he was expected to attack Lee's men, and did so in December 1862, at Fredericksburg Virginia. The result was a lopsided Confederate victory, a Union retreat, and what became known as the "Valley Forge of the Civil War" for the Yankee army. Burnside led his army west during the last days of the year into a severe sleet storm. The men, the wagons, the artillery, everything was soon coated in heavy ice and completely bogged down. The storm was not Burnside's fault, but it made him seem to be a luckless general, and Lincoln soon replaced him with "Fighting Joe" Hooker.
The series of defeats and botches during 1862 had bred a great deal of dissatisfaction among the men of the Army of the Potomac, so much so that desertion now became a major problem. Hooker moved quickly to confront it by improving food supplies, and by granting furloughs to the troops on a rotating basis. Hooker also worked to improve the northern spy service, so that by spring he had very good intelligence about Lee's army. As he planned a new campaign he knew within a thousand how many soldiers Lee had, and where they were located.
West of the Appalachians, Ulysses Grant was now commander of a Union army charged with opening the Mississippi River to northern shipping and denying it to the rebels. Controlling the river also would effectively sever Texas and Arkansas from the rest of the Confederacy. Grant's target was Vicksburg, a citadel overlooking the river whose guns shut out northern boats.
To get at Vicksburg, Grant, after several other efforts failed, decided to work his way south along the west bank of the Mississippi until he had bypassed Vicksburg, then cross to the eastern bank, swing around behind the city and take it from the land side. But to do this he would have to jettison his supply wagons, leaving behind all hope of reinforcement. His men would have to live off the land.
In fact, they lived off the land quite adequately. Moving swiftly once they were across the river, they stripped southern barns and animal pens, and enjoyed what amounted to a huge camping trip. Mississippians, both white and black, would suffer very serious privation as a result, but by 1863 northerners were in no mood to worry about southern sensibilities. Denying foodstuffs to southern civilians and soldiers meant a shorter war. By June, Grant had Vicksburg cut off.
Next month: the battle of Chancellorsville, and the prelude to Gettysburg.
President Lincoln used the victory, such as it was, to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he made permanent on January 1, 1863. Then, disgusted with McClellan's lackadaisical conduct, he fired the boy wonder and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside.
Meanwhile, in the trans-Appalachian west, Confederate forces advanced as far north as Perryville Kentucky before being turned back.
Burnside understood he was expected to attack Lee's men, and did so in December 1862, at Fredericksburg Virginia. The result was a lopsided Confederate victory, a Union retreat, and what became known as the "Valley Forge of the Civil War" for the Yankee army. Burnside led his army west during the last days of the year into a severe sleet storm. The men, the wagons, the artillery, everything was soon coated in heavy ice and completely bogged down. The storm was not Burnside's fault, but it made him seem to be a luckless general, and Lincoln soon replaced him with "Fighting Joe" Hooker.
The series of defeats and botches during 1862 had bred a great deal of dissatisfaction among the men of the Army of the Potomac, so much so that desertion now became a major problem. Hooker moved quickly to confront it by improving food supplies, and by granting furloughs to the troops on a rotating basis. Hooker also worked to improve the northern spy service, so that by spring he had very good intelligence about Lee's army. As he planned a new campaign he knew within a thousand how many soldiers Lee had, and where they were located.
West of the Appalachians, Ulysses Grant was now commander of a Union army charged with opening the Mississippi River to northern shipping and denying it to the rebels. Controlling the river also would effectively sever Texas and Arkansas from the rest of the Confederacy. Grant's target was Vicksburg, a citadel overlooking the river whose guns shut out northern boats.
To get at Vicksburg, Grant, after several other efforts failed, decided to work his way south along the west bank of the Mississippi until he had bypassed Vicksburg, then cross to the eastern bank, swing around behind the city and take it from the land side. But to do this he would have to jettison his supply wagons, leaving behind all hope of reinforcement. His men would have to live off the land.
In fact, they lived off the land quite adequately. Moving swiftly once they were across the river, they stripped southern barns and animal pens, and enjoyed what amounted to a huge camping trip. Mississippians, both white and black, would suffer very serious privation as a result, but by 1863 northerners were in no mood to worry about southern sensibilities. Denying foodstuffs to southern civilians and soldiers meant a shorter war. By June, Grant had Vicksburg cut off.
Next month: the battle of Chancellorsville, and the prelude to Gettysburg.
Friday, March 29, 2013
World War II Veterans
Yesterday at the library where I was working, there was an elderly man wearing a cap that said, "World War II Vet." I helped him check out a book and as he turned to leave with his wife I said, "Thank you for serving." I don't think he heard me and he didn't respond.
But I wondered if this wasn't the last time I'd have any interaction with a veteran of WW II. The youngest veteran of that awful conflict would be about 86 now. (That's eighteen years old in 1945, plus the 68 years since then.) It was a rather painful reminder that the men and women who won the war are passing from the scene quickly. There will be living veterans for another twenty years or so, but superannuated and probably living quietly within their homes or in various degrees of assisted living.
Thank you to all of them, and to the millions who have already passed away.
Twenty or so years ago, I was in a Richmond Virginia hotel for some reason, and came upon a reunion of marines who had fought at Guadalcanal. For those of you who don't remember, Guadalcanal is an island in the Solomon chain of the Pacific Ocean, not too far from Australia. It was the scene of a desperate fight between the American marines and Japanese army in 1942 and 1943, contesting who would hold possession of a small airfield there. Keeping the runway would allow the possessor to post land based aircraft there and dominate the area. Losing it would make it much harder for the United States to protect Australia and New Zealand. It took almost six months and much bloodshed for the marines to secure the island.
I went over to the dozen or so veterans there and said something like, "You guys went up against the best soldiers Tojo had, and you beat them. For all of us who weren't born yet, thank you."
It was little enough thanks, but I've always been glad I took the few seconds I spent thanking those men.
But I wondered if this wasn't the last time I'd have any interaction with a veteran of WW II. The youngest veteran of that awful conflict would be about 86 now. (That's eighteen years old in 1945, plus the 68 years since then.) It was a rather painful reminder that the men and women who won the war are passing from the scene quickly. There will be living veterans for another twenty years or so, but superannuated and probably living quietly within their homes or in various degrees of assisted living.
Thank you to all of them, and to the millions who have already passed away.
Twenty or so years ago, I was in a Richmond Virginia hotel for some reason, and came upon a reunion of marines who had fought at Guadalcanal. For those of you who don't remember, Guadalcanal is an island in the Solomon chain of the Pacific Ocean, not too far from Australia. It was the scene of a desperate fight between the American marines and Japanese army in 1942 and 1943, contesting who would hold possession of a small airfield there. Keeping the runway would allow the possessor to post land based aircraft there and dominate the area. Losing it would make it much harder for the United States to protect Australia and New Zealand. It took almost six months and much bloodshed for the marines to secure the island.
I went over to the dozen or so veterans there and said something like, "You guys went up against the best soldiers Tojo had, and you beat them. For all of us who weren't born yet, thank you."
It was little enough thanks, but I've always been glad I took the few seconds I spent thanking those men.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Alternative History
People like alternative histories. Harry Turtledove has made a whole life from writing novels that begin with some implausible event. For example, time travel is possible, and white supremacists go back to 1864 and give Robert E. Lee's army modern weapons. The Confederates quickly win the Civil War, with all kinds of ramifications. Space aliens appear on earth, ready for conquest, so Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler must put aside their petty differences to battle the space invaders.
When I was teaching history, I used to challenge my students by asking what history is. For many years, historians and history books told the stories of great men - Alexander and Washington and Napoleon and so forth. Then, Lev Tolstoy said history is about ordinary people and those "great men" are incidentals. The metaphor was the monkey riding the back of the elephant. The monkey screams and chatters and pulls the elephant's ears, and thinks he's steering the elephant. Meanwhile, the elephant goes about his business, devoting his thoughts to getting something to eat, and avoiding lions, and making little elephants. The monkey represents the movers and shakers of the world, and the elephant is the rest of us.
So do the great men matter? Does it make any difference whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is president? Both would build incrementally on the foundations already laid down by their predecessors, dating back to 1789.
To put it more drastically, would there have been National Socialism without Hitler? Would there have been a World War II? Would the Germans have lusted to conquer France and Poland and Russia without Adolf to spur them on?
I support the idea of a kind of combo pack. The "great men" act as catalysts, but they cannot get the rest of us to do anything we didn't have some predisposition to do. There must be a period of preparation before people are willing to do wild crazy things. I can't imagine that the German people would have supported genocide against the Jews in 1933. Hitler had to harden their hearts with incessant propaganda and more and more draconian decrees. Even then, there had to be a substantial amount of anti-Semitism among the German population prior to the coming of the Nazis.
Why do I bring all this up? Because I've been working my way through volume three of William Manchester's monumental biography of Winston Churchill. Last night I read the part concerning Churchill's visit to Washington in December 1941 and January 1942. Churchill stayed in the White House as a guest of President Roosevelt. War was raging, and the two men were meeting to decide on a strategy to win the war and mull over what the post-war world would be like.
One night, Churchill woke up feeling very warm - the room was overheated - and tried to open the window in his bedroom. He strained himself and experienced a mild heart attack. The illness was not reported in the press, and Churchill's own doctor did not tell him the truth about what had happened.
Then, after taking a train trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, Churchill flew to - of all places - Pompano Beach Florida for a short vacation. Taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean, Churchill noticed a large shark swimming near him. At the behest of his staff, he beat a tactical retreat and did not venture any further into the water than the shallows.
Suppose it had been a major heart attack rather than a minor one. Or, suppose the shark had been thinking about lunch and decided Churchill would make a good repast. How would history have been different?
Back in London, the war cabinet was headed in Churchill's absence by Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party. Bland Clement Attlee could never have rallied the British population the way Churchill had, and another defeat or two - the British had known almost nothing but defeats to that point - might have produced political turmoil in Old Blighty, to the advantage of the Germans.
And that, it seems to me, is a much more plausible starting point for a fiction writer than time travel or space aliens.
(Here are a couple of additional metaphors for history. History is like a roller coaster, with highs of intense activity and lows of ordinary times when things go along without much happening. History is like a coiled snake, so events that might be far apart chronologically might be close together thematically. History is like a poem, that doesn't repeat itself, but does rhyme. My favorite, one I thought of myself, is that history is like a trip to the fun-house at the carnival. The mirrors will never give a true reflection of what happened in the past, no matter how hard we might try to see one.)
When I was teaching history, I used to challenge my students by asking what history is. For many years, historians and history books told the stories of great men - Alexander and Washington and Napoleon and so forth. Then, Lev Tolstoy said history is about ordinary people and those "great men" are incidentals. The metaphor was the monkey riding the back of the elephant. The monkey screams and chatters and pulls the elephant's ears, and thinks he's steering the elephant. Meanwhile, the elephant goes about his business, devoting his thoughts to getting something to eat, and avoiding lions, and making little elephants. The monkey represents the movers and shakers of the world, and the elephant is the rest of us.
So do the great men matter? Does it make any difference whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is president? Both would build incrementally on the foundations already laid down by their predecessors, dating back to 1789.
To put it more drastically, would there have been National Socialism without Hitler? Would there have been a World War II? Would the Germans have lusted to conquer France and Poland and Russia without Adolf to spur them on?
I support the idea of a kind of combo pack. The "great men" act as catalysts, but they cannot get the rest of us to do anything we didn't have some predisposition to do. There must be a period of preparation before people are willing to do wild crazy things. I can't imagine that the German people would have supported genocide against the Jews in 1933. Hitler had to harden their hearts with incessant propaganda and more and more draconian decrees. Even then, there had to be a substantial amount of anti-Semitism among the German population prior to the coming of the Nazis.
Why do I bring all this up? Because I've been working my way through volume three of William Manchester's monumental biography of Winston Churchill. Last night I read the part concerning Churchill's visit to Washington in December 1941 and January 1942. Churchill stayed in the White House as a guest of President Roosevelt. War was raging, and the two men were meeting to decide on a strategy to win the war and mull over what the post-war world would be like.
One night, Churchill woke up feeling very warm - the room was overheated - and tried to open the window in his bedroom. He strained himself and experienced a mild heart attack. The illness was not reported in the press, and Churchill's own doctor did not tell him the truth about what had happened.
Then, after taking a train trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, Churchill flew to - of all places - Pompano Beach Florida for a short vacation. Taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean, Churchill noticed a large shark swimming near him. At the behest of his staff, he beat a tactical retreat and did not venture any further into the water than the shallows.
Suppose it had been a major heart attack rather than a minor one. Or, suppose the shark had been thinking about lunch and decided Churchill would make a good repast. How would history have been different?
Back in London, the war cabinet was headed in Churchill's absence by Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party. Bland Clement Attlee could never have rallied the British population the way Churchill had, and another defeat or two - the British had known almost nothing but defeats to that point - might have produced political turmoil in Old Blighty, to the advantage of the Germans.
And that, it seems to me, is a much more plausible starting point for a fiction writer than time travel or space aliens.
(Here are a couple of additional metaphors for history. History is like a roller coaster, with highs of intense activity and lows of ordinary times when things go along without much happening. History is like a coiled snake, so events that might be far apart chronologically might be close together thematically. History is like a poem, that doesn't repeat itself, but does rhyme. My favorite, one I thought of myself, is that history is like a trip to the fun-house at the carnival. The mirrors will never give a true reflection of what happened in the past, no matter how hard we might try to see one.)
Monday, March 18, 2013
Fareed Zakariah and the Keystone Pipeline
Sitting in the dentist's chair this morning, waiting to have a temporary crown re-attached (It keeps falling out.), I read Fareed Zakariah's column in this week's issue of Time magazine. Mr. Zakariah writes that President Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline through the middle of America, carrying tar-sands oil from northern Canada to refineries in Texas.
The case for the pipeline, as Zakariah makes it, is this. Canada is going to extract the tar-sands oil whether or not the pipeline is built. The oil sludge will be transported south by railroad if there is no pipeline. The columnist says fifteen trains a day, each of one hundred tanker cars, equal what the pipeline would carry. Diesel engines produce carbon emissions, adding to our pollution problems. Although Mr. Zakariah doesn't mention it, there is a small chance of a derailment with spills from all those tanker cars.
Alternatively, without routing their oil across the United States, the Canadians could build a pipeline to the Pacific coast and ship the oil to China. This of course would add to the amount of exhaust gases produced there, and so the level of global pollutants would remain the same. Americans would get our oil from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
What we need to do, the columnist argues, is attack the demand side of the energy problem, rather than supply. Weaning us, and everyone else, away from fossil fuels is the answer.
I like Fareed Zakariah and respect his opinions. I differ with him on this one, however. Not being an engineer, I won't try to critique the proposal about routing the Canadian pipeline to the Pacific, except to note there are some very high mountains they would have to cross. I suspect the rationale for the Keystone project is that it's cheaper to go south than to go west.
I think there is a moral component to this as well as a business one. To say it simply, "If we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem." It's right to say we should be converting as quickly as possible to use of renewable energy. It's correct to say that other countries will use the dirty oil from Canada even if we don't. China's air pollution inevitably affects us, as ours does them.
Still, it's insufficient to argue that because someone else will make a foolish mistake we should make one too.
The case for the pipeline, as Zakariah makes it, is this. Canada is going to extract the tar-sands oil whether or not the pipeline is built. The oil sludge will be transported south by railroad if there is no pipeline. The columnist says fifteen trains a day, each of one hundred tanker cars, equal what the pipeline would carry. Diesel engines produce carbon emissions, adding to our pollution problems. Although Mr. Zakariah doesn't mention it, there is a small chance of a derailment with spills from all those tanker cars.
Alternatively, without routing their oil across the United States, the Canadians could build a pipeline to the Pacific coast and ship the oil to China. This of course would add to the amount of exhaust gases produced there, and so the level of global pollutants would remain the same. Americans would get our oil from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
What we need to do, the columnist argues, is attack the demand side of the energy problem, rather than supply. Weaning us, and everyone else, away from fossil fuels is the answer.
I like Fareed Zakariah and respect his opinions. I differ with him on this one, however. Not being an engineer, I won't try to critique the proposal about routing the Canadian pipeline to the Pacific, except to note there are some very high mountains they would have to cross. I suspect the rationale for the Keystone project is that it's cheaper to go south than to go west.
I think there is a moral component to this as well as a business one. To say it simply, "If we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem." It's right to say we should be converting as quickly as possible to use of renewable energy. It's correct to say that other countries will use the dirty oil from Canada even if we don't. China's air pollution inevitably affects us, as ours does them.
Still, it's insufficient to argue that because someone else will make a foolish mistake we should make one too.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Free, Intemperate Speech
- This was on my Facebook page today, courtesy of the Christian Left. It's like a banner located on state road eighty-five about halfway between Colorado Springs and Fountain. That banner says in large professionally produced letters, "OBAMA, I BUILT THIS BUSINESS!" and "OBAMA, YOU DIDN'T BUILD THIS!"
The business in question is a parking lot for trailers. The business owner fenced off about an acre of land adjacent to his residence, topped the fence with barbed wire, and allows people to park their recreational vehicles there for a fee. It doesn't look like a labor intensive business. There doesn't appear to be any security, so I think all the owner does is unlock the gate each morning and lock it again at sundown. There is a corrugated building at one side of the lot so customers can keep their vehicles under cover, I guess for an extra fee.
Like the man in the photo, our man in Colorado relies on the public roads, public police and fire protection, sent his kids to public schools (Unless they were home-schooled and even then there were state developed curricula and professional aid when needed.), has access to public libraries, and so forth. Since his business is next to his residence, I wonder if and how he obtained a zoning variance for the business.
I wonder where the lumber yard in the picture is located, so I can refrain from doing business there ever. And may I say, whether anyone approves of President Obama's actions as chief executive, there is no excuse for such abusive speech.
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If we don't want people working here illegally and not paying taxes on their work, then clearly, we need enforcement not on the illegals, but rather on the companies that hire the illegals and make it profitable to cross the border illegally. If it is more expensive to pay the fines for illegals than it is to hire people legally, these companies will stop flouting the law.
I have to think that it must not be much of a secret where all these illegals are working. Our government turns a blind eye to the companies that exploit these people to their detriment and ours. Meanwhile, they toss a 'bone' to the people frothing at the mouth about this out-of-control problem by promising to enforce the incarceration of the illegals. The system continues to self-propagate because it is in the interests of some very rich people that we have a shadow population - one that works for a tax-free pittance from them while enjoying some of the government services the rest of us have paid for (probably not the police, but fire, medical, schools, water etc).
The illegals aren't the problem. The companies hiring the illegals are the problem.
I hope no American is so hard-hearted as to deny these people or their children access to needed services. "Sorry, Maria, your parents brought you here illegally, so you can't come to our public school."