The Width of a Circle

An ending, a start

2010-06-09T12:09:00.002-05:00

After keeping this blog for nearly two and a half years, I have decided to close it for now and move on to another project. I've started "The Post-Punk Dad," a blog contrasting fatherhood with a punk rock past, at:

http://thepostpunkdad.wordpress.com.

Thanks to the three of you who read this, and please keep reading!

JLP

12:12 p.m. 9 June 2010

The meaning of Memorial Day seems to be missing in action

2010-05-27T16:50:00.002-05:00

The old man walked up to the three of us and squinted up from beneath his visored baseball cap.

“So what goes on in here, then?” he asked, motioning to the ugly newspaper building we worked out of.

I looked at the writing on his hat. It read “U.S.S. Darke APA-159 Tokyo Bay 1945.” My mind jumped into action. Imperial Japan surrendered to the United States Sept. 2, 1945, after the dropping of the two atomic bombs. And this man was there to see it.

“So how close were you to the U.S.S. Missouri when the Japanese delegates were on board for the surrender,” I asked.

He didn’t even blink.

“Oh, I’d say a block or so,” he replied.

His name was Burt Falk, and in his youth, he’d served on the U.S.S. Darke, a 455-foot attack transport that earned two battle stars during its time in the Pacific. It took part not only in the landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but also practicing for the planned invasions of the Japanese home islands.

During the ensuing 25-minute conversation, which meandered between fishing and war stories, Falk showed us his Navy dog tag (“Not the real one. Some idiot from Hopkins lost that one when we were doing the landing on Iwo”) as well as a tattered airmail letter that had a commemorative stamp from Tokyo Bay.

My seemingly random encounter with Falk reminded me of something important. Memorial Day in the minds of many people equals a Monday off with a good chance of barbeque over the weekend. In fact, one of the staff blogs at the newspaper started correctly, with the assertion that Memorial Day is under-appreciated, but in the wrong direction from there: “Memorial Day is an exciting time because it marks the kick-off of summer activities.”

The column (here) goes on to say that the holiday also kicks off the summer garage sale season and that we should all de-clutter our homes because “In a way, we are no different than the dung beetles.”

An excuse for a sale. A chance to watch the Indy 500. A good reason for a barbeque. “A kick-off for summer activities.” Am I missing something?

The roots of this holiday are darker, stained with the blood of soldiers and the tears of those left behind. It originally began as Decoration Day, when relatives of soldiers lost in the Civil War paused to remember the husbands, fathers and sons who had fallen in the service of their county. Over the years, it gradually developed into what we now recognize as Memorial Day, which was declared the official name of the holiday in 1967.

Several veterans’ organizations have been trying to undo to change Congress made to the holiday in 1971, when it was changed from a specific day (May 30) to a weekend with the National Holiday Act. A 2002 Memorial Day address from the VFW stated: "Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day."

I agree.

We owe these men and women our thanks. Many towns have remembrances of various scales. I wonder how many people attend. I know I shouldn’t throw stones, as I’ve not actually attended one of these events, but I have at least realized they exist, and find it sad that people can’t crawl away from the air conditioning for just a few minutes to honor those who made the entire day possible.

I wonder what Falk will do to celebrate. Personally, I think he’ll go fishing.

“One day, they came over the loudspeaker on the ship, and said, ‘The war is over. We dropped the a-bomb,’” he recalled. “The guys and I just laughed. We misheard them. We said to ourselves, ‘What do you mean, a [as in ‘single'] bomb? How dumb do you think we are?’”

Falk told us his memory was failing. He couldn’t remember his daughter’s wedding or his current phone number, but could remember the complex formula for U.S. navy gunpowder, a memory as fresh as the day it was created in July 1942.

“Why do I remember that,” he said, gently tapping his forehead. “What good is that doing to do me?”

The U.S.S. Darke was withdrawn from service in 1995 and sent to the breaker’s yard in 1974. Some day, Falk will be gone too, taking his story with him.

Memorial Day is designed for men like Burt Falk. It’s the one day of the year we are actually asked to recognize veterans, both living and dead, and to give them the thanks that is their due, even if in passing thought only. It’s not an excuse for a barbeque, a sale or a multi-hour race, because without men like Burt Falk, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy those freedoms in the first place.

I’m not saying not to have fun or enjoy the extra time – but at least remember how it was bought and paid for. I think our vets would enjoy nothing less.

Re-purposing of old church building combats 'real-estate Disney World' mentality

2010-05-25T16:53:00.004-05:00

I stood in the back of St. Joseph's Catholic Church with my parents, a 9-year-old in a pair of grey slacks, a navy blazer and, insult to injury, a tie.

As we started down the blaze orange carpet heading towards the altar, I could feel hundreds of eyes on me, and I felt like I was going to melt into my penny loafers. I fought the rising panic.

“Just look holy, look up at Heaven,” I repeated multiple times to myself, trying to remember to put one foot in front of the other. I felt a full foot shorter by the time I reached the front of the church, and stared up at Father Francis Roach’s benevolently bespectacled face before accepting my First Communion. My walk up to the front had been the hard part; I'd inadvertently learned what it must like to be a bullfighter.

Twenty-one years later, I stared down at the same piece of ground I’d trembled on years earlier while doing a story on the church becoming an arts center. The orange carpet was gone, uncovering old black-and-red tiles I had never known were there. The whole floor was much the same, stripped of pews and carpet left with bare wood floors worn thin by the constant traffic of dress shoes and intentions. It was as if the workmen had literally peeled off the decades with each layer of flooring removed.

My professors in journalism school always stressed the need for detachment with the stories I cover and the people I interact with. Most of the time, I completely agree that this is necessary, but when it comes to St. Joe's, it’s hard to completely free myself from part of what formed me. I went to its school, had my first communion there and spent nearly every Sunday morning of my childhood in its pews, pretending desperately that I was someplace else.

Still, when the church moved to a new building in 2002, I felt I’d lost something. I felt I’d lost a comforting place that had never changed, some idyllic reflecting pool in the midst of life’s sometimes-chaotic whitewater rapids. The new St. Joe's building was beautiful and well made, sure, but it just wasn’t the same. There was something about being around so much living history that made the messages I heard somehow resound a little deeper.

I'm glad I've been able to return to both the school and the church in this career to document the changes taking place. After years of living in the suburbs, I've determined that "heritage" is something that gets destroyed in the process of expansion, with old farmhouses being churned into the ground to make room for more strip malls that will become blight 20 years down the road.

Later, when people share the assumption that something of value had been lost with the torn-down farmhouse, clever development companies come in and make exorbitantly expensive idealized versions of what once was, coating them in pleasant little names like "Heritage Oakes." It's a real-estate version of Disney World, contributing to the nonsense idea of some sort of mythical small town America that has never existed outside the pages of a Ralph Lauren catalog. It's Lake Wobegon at a higher price point.

In the case of the old St. Joe's building, it's good to see that people sometimes have enough foresight to hang on to their past and find a way to carry it into the future. And at a price tag that everyone can afford.

Walking towards the entrance, I looked town and saw a scrap of familiar blue carpet in a trash pile. I remembered the shade well. My family and I had gone on vacation in the summer of 1991, and when we returned, the blaze orange carpet was gone, replaced with a resplendent shade of royal blue. It sounds silly now, but the change excited me, and made the old church look somehow more regal.

"Looks like you've found something for your scrapbook," my guide said, smiling.

Think of it like a molting from a snake, or a cocoon from a butterfly – it's the shedding of a past life on the way to a new one. It's the kind of metamorphosis I'd like to see happen more often.

Review: "A Plague Upon Humanity" outlines real-life weapons of mass destruction us - 65 years ago

2010-05-21T13:46:00.002-05:00

Ironically, wartime sometimes brings out the best in human ingenuity while simultaneously bringing out the worst in the limits of our cruelty.

War is sometimes the source of some of most important inventions in human history. World War II-era inventions that still impact our everyday lives include the jet engine, radar, some of the first computers, synthetic rubber and penicillin.

Another World War II-era invention doesn’t seem to be as widely known in the United States, but it had quite an impact among civilians in other parts of the world. Before and during the war, Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 developed biological warfare agents and not only tested them civilians, including Allied prisoners of war, but released them into the general Chinese public, killing between as many as 1 million people. Compounding the shame, most of the perpetrators of these crimes not only went unpunished, but some even ended up sharing their discoveries with the United States in return for immunity.

The whole story is outlined in “A Plague Upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program,” a 304-page by Daniel Barenblatt. While I knew the facts of the program and what it produced, I was unprepared for the utter dehumanization that went along with the development process. As Barenblatt outlines in the book, prisoners were not only infected with diseases like bubonic plague, they were often dissected alive so scientists would have the freshest results to view.

“When I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming,” a 72-year-old former medical assistant told the New York Time’s Nicholas Kristof. “I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Not only did these scientists develop bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, they bred fleas and rats to spread them along with specialized bomb cases for germ warfare attacks. Japanese soldiers would poison village wells, or distribute candy laced with germs to children. Barenblatt asserts that rats in China still test positive for antibodies to the Japanese-developed plague germs nearly 65 years after the end of the war.

Japan didn’t limit the scope of its bio-weapons attacks to the Chinese mainland. The Imperial Japanese Navy developed some of the largest submarines in the world during the war, equipping some with hangars to launch several aircraft on a one-way mission. Another excerpt from the Kristof piece:

“Toshimi Mizobuchi, who was an instructor for new recruits in Unit 731, said the idea was to use 20 of the 500 new troops who arrived in Harbin in July 1945. A submarine was to take a few of them to the seas off Southern California, and then they were to fly in a plane carried on board the submarine and contaminate San Diego with plague-infected fleas. The target date was to be Sept. 22, 1945.”

Sept. 22. Slightly more than one month after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

According to ww2pacific.com, an Allied War Crimes Tribunal brought 30 people to trial in March 1948. Charges included vivisection and wrongful removal of body parts. Twenty-three were found guilty of various charges, and five were sentenced to death. None of the death sentences was carried out, and by 1958, all the convicted were set free.

When the war ended, Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself requested that the Japanese scientists be exempted from prosecution.

“Information about vivisection useful," he allegedly explained in a 1947 radio message.

So, as it did in Nazi Germany, the U.S. made another deal with the devil, sparing punishment in exchange for information. Shiro Ishii, the mastermind behind Japan’s bio-weapons program, allegedly worked on bio weapons in Maryland. Another, Dr. Masaji Kitano, led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company.

While Japan wasn’t the only country to develop bio weapons during the period, it stands out not only from the extensive use of human subjects, but also because the products were actually used on a pretty widespread basis.

Barenblatt’s book wasn’t an easy read. It was a mixture of dry historical facts and incredibly disturbing passages about incomprehensible human suffering. But knowing about what Unit 731 did is important, if only to give perspective.

Japan seems more than willing to play to victim when it comes to the suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but remains mute when it comes to the suffering its own forces inflicted on civilians in the territories it occupied and the civilians it would have attacked in the U.S. if given the chance. Books like the one Barenblatt wrote remind us that there are both victims and perpetrators on every side involved in a world war – something Japan itself seems loathe to officially admit.

Thirty years of puppets, probe droids and paternity: "The Empire Strikes Back"

2010-05-20T12:14:00.004-05:00

Things don't always go your way. Sometimes, you do your best to hide in the garbage dumped by an Imperial Star Destroyer only to be tracked to Cloud City by a persistent bounty hunter. Other times, you do your best to prove yourself only to end up losing limbs and discovering unpleasant genealogical truths along the way. Some days, sometimes you find out the hard way that the carbon freezing process does indeed work on humans – namely, you.

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the world finding out that Darth Vader was really Luke Skywalker's father. That's right – "Empire Strikes Back," the second film in the hugely successful "Star Wars" trilogy (yes, I saw "trilogy" – those other three don't count) was released in theaters May 21, 1980.

That's not true. That's impossible! Thirty years?? To quote some dialogue from the film:

"Search your feelings. You KNOW it be true."

"NOOOOOOO!"

I don't remember the first time I'd ever seen "The Empire Strikes Back" in its entirety. Being born less than seven months before it came out precluded me from seeing it in theaters. I likely caught it as a movie-of-the-week on network television. Even at a young age, the movie's highs and lows were legendary among the kids of Hemlock Court: Darth Vader being revealed as Luke Skywalker's father; Han Solo being frozen in carbonite and taken by the mysterious Boba Fett; and of course, the introduction of the benevolent, linguistically scattershot Jedi master, Yoda.

My appreciation for "Empire" really didn't start when I was a kid. Sure, it had some cool parts, but the Death Star trench run of the first film and the Ewoks from the third seemed to captivate me more as a young boy. As I grew, however, so did my appreciation for "Empire," and in time, I found it to be my personal favorite.

The reason? Simple. It's dark. Really dark. Basically, everything bad that COULD happen to the Rebels DOES happen to the Rebels. Hoth attacked? Check. Han Solo put in to carbonite to face an uncertain future? Check. Luke Skywalker not only losing a hand but also finding out that he's the scion of the most evil man in the galaxy? Check.

The tone is a marked departure from the breezy optimism and fun of the first film, and serves as a weight counterbalance to the admittedly lighter third film, which according to Randall from the movie "Clerks" just had a bunch of Muppets.

"Empire" taught me a valuable lesson I can't recall seeing in many other movies of the era: the good guys don't always win. Coming from an time when children's programming was saturated with saccharine messages about inevitable personal success by the time the credits rolled, "Empire" seemed a refreshing dose of doom and gloom. Its message of triumph from the fact that our heroes were determined not to give up in the face of everything that had gone wrong. It's a good message to learn, and one that is more relevant in a period where a whole hell of a lot is going wrong.

So happy birthday, "Empire." I can't wait to show you to my kids and see the look of quizzical disappointment on their faces when the movie doesn't end the way they thought it would. After all, life is sometimes like that, too.

Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons - Why I Detest "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"

2010-05-17T11:47:00.001-05:00

I only needed to hear a few seconds of the audio track coming from the TV in the other room before I made a dash into the viewing area. Alas, I was too late.

“It’s just ‘The Simpsons,’” my wife scowled as the changed the channel. “It’s on like, every day, all the time.”

Her fingers worked the buttons on the remote, and eventually, the screen was filled with Ty Pennington’s smiling face.

Time to leave.

My wife and I agree on many important things, but when it comes to television, we are night and day. My wife, you see, happens to really like “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” ABC’s home remodeling show that has produced 162 episodes during seven seasons. The basic premise is that Ty and his diverse crew of lovable re-modelers will send a deserving family on vacation and re-build them a new home, often with modifications for disabilities, in a week. The families, from what I’ve seen, also have medical bills and mortgages paid, and sometimes receive cars.

I have no doubt that the needs of the families on the show are genuine. What I take issue with is how the entire thing is presented. It reinforces the same sort of “deus ex machina” moral portrayed in CBS’s “Undercover Boss.” In TV land, people who have problems are helped only when someone with far more power than they (like a television network) swoops in to fix the wrongs. Unfortunately, it’s about as likely as winning the lottery.

What bugs me the most about “Makeover” is the sort of ham-handed sentimentality that drapes everything in the proceedings. The warm fuzzies culminate in the citizens of whatever no-name town the build is happening in to come over a hill wearing matching t-shirts with stirring music playing, ready to tear down the house.

“When we heard about the [blank] family’s troubles, we just couldn’t stand by and do nothing,” a resident will say.

Really? How coincidental that your desire to help just happened to occur when a major network is filming a television show on the same family! Remarkable! It almost makes me forget that if your town really had its act together, and really cared like you claim, Ty Pennington and crew would have never heard of it. There would be no need for “Extreme Makeover” to even be here, because the Johnsons wouldn’t have to be living in a cardboard box near a pig farm. You would have already taken care of them.

The homebuilders who get some face time are just as cloyingly humble, mumbling memorized statements about building the house on behalf of the blah-blah company. “Makeover” is really nothing more than business PR disguised as do-gooding. Next time you watch the show, pay attention to how many needless close-ups of brand names there are during the build process. Once you notice, you can’t ignore it. Also, Ty seemingly never forgets to mention “the good folks at CVS Pharmacy” who pay peoples’ medical bills, or Ford, who donates cars.

“Makeover” is a prime example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. How many people, I wonder, would show up to build this house were the cameras and fanfare not present? And how many write-offs do businesses, ranging from contractors to Sears, get in the process? In “Makeover,” everyone wins: the family, ABC, Ty Pennington, volunteers and the corporate donors.

Building a house for a family in need is an admirable thing, but when was the last time you saw Habitat for Humanity workers on prime time every Sunday night? Somehow I can’t feel dirty after watching “Makeover,” as the exposure seems to contradict the inherently invisible humility in giving:

Matthew 6:2 – “When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret.

“And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.”

Life's many blessings, and how easily they are forgotten

2010-05-14T14:20:00.000-05:00

The Ford pick-up's driver couldn't make up his mind, and obviously didn't see me behind him in the adjacent lane. The F-150's bulk began to drift closer as we both pulled up to the stoplight. At the last second, he realized the error, and corrected course. By this point, with eight hours of work and three hours of class under my belt for the day, I was too exhausted to really care.

I've been taking a class on business communications at the University of St. Thomas' Minneapolis campus. While it has been helpful (reminding me that I went into journalism for a reason), the three-hour classes preceding Friday deadline days are wearing me down. There are two more sessions left, and I will be glad to have Thursdays back soon.

When the latest class on creativity ended, I grabbed my stuff and practically RAN to the car. My mind drifted as I slowly wound the Sunfire down a set of narrow ramps leading me to the exit of the Spartan concrete parking garage. I paid for my time, and took a right onto the now traffic-free downtown street. The F-150 and I got acquainted, and I sat at the red light, feeling my eyes glaze over in the LED glare.

While we were waiting, I saw some shadows moving out of the corner of my vision. It was a man carrying a duffel bag, and two boys (twins?), who looked about three or four years old. It was 9:30 on a Thursday night; what were they doing out on the streets so late? My eyes traveled back to the father, and then to the small duffel bag in his right hand.

Oh.

Homeless?

It was easy to imagine that they were headed towards some sort of shelter. If the kids were concerned, they didn't seem to show it in their body language, following their father in the sort of trusting way that kids do. The father had his head down as he purposefully strode down the street and into the darkness, each brisk step taking him past the school edifice that I'd unappreciatively come from.

Comparisons made me feel silly. Here I was in nice clothes, in a decent car, on my way home to a beautiful wife and daughter in a quiet neighborhood. How dare I complain about having a long day?

I kept driving south, making my way over to Interstate 35W. One of the last sights that greeted me on the way was a Native American woman sitting on the sidewalk talking to a police officer. She was crying, and the officer had his hands on his hips. As I accelerated onto the freeway, the last thing I caught in the rearview mirror was a glimpse of her tangled mess of hair, bathed in the red and blue lights of the squad car.

Accelerating and merging, my mind drifted: "Should I delete my Facebook account? That blog I read sure make some good points. What the hell was with those two guys in class tonight? Why are they so rude? Am I hungry? I wish I was riding my motorcycle."

All of a sudden, I felt ashamed that I'd already forgotten what had so genuinely moved me mere minutes earlier. How was it that I could see something, feel it and internalize it, but find a way to reconcile it and move on to minutia again? What happened to the sincerely thankful prayers that I wasn't in this guy's shoes? Had they meant nothing?

When I got home, my daughter was in her crib, crying from the pain of the new teeth slowly making their way through her gums. I gave her some Tylenol, and took her in my arms. As we sat in the darkness, she fell asleep again as I rocked her back and forth in the white leather glider chair. She was lucky, I realized, to sleep in the same place every night. And so was I.

Why is it so hard to keep that in perspective?

Possible Side Effects: Drug Marketing and the American Consumer

2010-05-13T11:18:00.001-05:00

My entry today starts with an imaginary commercial. The following voiceover is read over warm and fuzzy slow motion footage of a woman taking pottery classes and playing with Golden Retriever puppies with what we assume to be are her grandkids...

“Reading this blog is not for everyone. Talk to your doctor about possible side effects. These may include nausea, dizziness upon standing, shortness of breath, loose stools, demonic possession, hair loss, voting, using a food processor, and talking to houseplants.

“Talk to your doctor today about this blog entry. This blog. Live a better life.”

Since when has real life had disclaimers? And how long will it be before my daughter turns away from the TV to ask me what “erectile disfunction” is?

There have been many sweeping changes to our world since I was in high school more than a decade ago. The dominance of TV pharmaceutical ads since they became legal in 1997 is not one of the positive ones. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t bombarded with Baby Boomers looking earnestly at me (through the TV screen, of course) and telling me how hard it is to mention to their doctor that their pee-pee doesn’t work anymore. Or that they are ashamed by their ugly foot fungus. Or that “restless leg syndrome” has made their lives miserable.

Can’t we just go back to seeing the occasional Tylenol ad?

No. Drugmakers spend nearly $20 billion dollars a year to advertise their wares to the public. Nearly $4 billion of this goes towards patient-targeted ads. To make a comparison, James Cameron’s “Avatar” cost $500 million to make. So for the same price of these ads, the drug industry could remake “Avatar” eight times. Each year.

Melody Peterson, a former New York Times reporter, wrote a book, called “Our Daily Meds,” about how these drugs are marketed. Americans, she writes, “increased their spending on prescription drugs by 17 times between 1980-2003.” She also catalogues how these ads have become commonplace in everyday life, with Viagra logos on everything from stock cars to the pens in your doctor’s office. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“A very powerful technique that the drug companies spend millions and millions of dollars on is hiring physicians to give lectures to other physicians on their drugs. It looks like the physician is up there giving his independent position on this drug, but often he’s been trained by an advertising agency. His slide presentation has been created by an ad agency. It looks like independent science, but it’s not.

“They want to get as many articles published in our medical journals as they can that show their products in favorable lights and will get physicians to prescribe them, so they often hire a Madison Avenue ad agency to write up an article for them or a study. The name of the ad agency rarely appears in the published version; instead, they hire doctors to put their names on as author ... It’s gone so far that some independent scientists are starting to view our medical literature as propaganda.”

Thankfully, at least small changes are being attempted. The FDA announced two days ago that its new “Bad Ad Program” is urging doctors to report ads and sales that violate FDA rules. Also, representatives from Pennsylvania (Democrat Robert Brady) and Virginia (Democrat James Moran) introduced a bill in the House last year called the “Families for ED Advertising Decency Act” that calls for the prohibition (“as indecent”) of any ad for a medication for erectile dysfunction.

It calls for non-broadcast of these ads between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., and at last check, the bill had been referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

As much as I’d like to see this happen, I doubt it will. When even the FDA argues that ‘“direct to consumer” ads like these help educate and engage prospective patients about their healthcare options,” no one is going to put the brakes on the pharma gravy train any time soon.

Not when you are spending enough money to make “Avatar” eight times in a single year. Besides, according to in-depth analysis from the website visiongain.com (“an independent business information provider”), 2003 revenues for erectile dysfunction drugs alone was $2.12 billion – and were set to more than triple by 2009.

When that one particular (albeit high-visibility) category is doing that well, it makes me wonder how much money is changing hands, and what possible side effects this increasing dependence on pills for everything (“overactive bladder”) will have on the American public. Definitely nausea, anger, disgust…

In it for the glue fumes?

2010-05-12T13:48:00.003-05:00

As I write these words, I am this close (pinches thumb and forefinger together) to finishing the 1/72 scale B-24H Liberator that has turned this week's free time into an exercise in Murphy's Law.

The Liberator, a World War II heavy bomber, was awkward in real-life, and its scale counterpart is no less homely. This particular kit was made by Mini-Craft, a Japanese brand known for making decent replicas of large aircraft. Unfortunately for me, the kit, as it is Japanese, was not designed for my clumsy American fingers.

I decided early on to have the Lib sit on its own landing gear, which I usually don't do. Unfortunately, the model was notoriously tail-heavy, meaning that I had to add weight to the nose to make it sit on all three landing gears. One "AAA" battery and .45 caliber bullet later, the thing was still sitting on its tail, despite the improvised weights glued into the bomb bay. In a moment of genius, I came up with the idea of adding lead fishing weights behind each of the four engines.

Nothing changed.

I got so frustrated that I ripped out the entire bomb bay and cracked the fuselage in half trying to extract the weights. Most of my model airplanes come close to becoming airborne while I am working on them, but this Liberator had me on the verge of throwing my paints, glues and supplies along with it. Everything that could go wrong WAS going wrong.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I boxed the broken kit and let it sit for a night. When I came back in the morning, the damage was pretty severe. I'd torn out a very narrow plastic grid that held the bomb bay doors in place, wrenching it into several parts while doing so. It took a lot of Crazy Glue and four-letter words, but eventually, I got it back together, and closed it up with a generous helping of putty.

As of this afternoon, the Liberator is complete, awaiting only the decals that will finish its construction

My wife asks me why I make models when it's obvious that they aren't the least bit relaxing. I think that's a bit of a generalization. I relaxed two kits ago while building a Japanese dive-bomber because it went together so smoothly. But in general, she's right. I've been making these damned things for 23 years now, and I have pretty high expectations of what I'm capable of. The day of slapping something together that's less than museum quality are long gone.

If I thought really hard about it, and were given enough time, I could probably list every single of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of models I've ever built. I'm like "Rain Man" when it comes to this stuff. My brother showed me a random model part he found while cleaning the house, and I was able to name the exact kit (A Revell 1/28 SPAD biplane) what part it was (the left engine exhaust) and when I'd built it (summer 1994). It's one of the few things in life I can claim to know more about than anyone else I've met. It's a bottomless hobby, because there is always something out there I didn't know about, some rare version of some plane no one has ever heard of, and I enjoy the relative obscurity.

It will be interesting to see what happens to models as we go into an increasingly computer-dominated future, when people can play simulators that ape a P-51 Mustang, rather than take an afternoon to build one and use their imagination. As for me, I am perfectly happy sans microchips. Give me an old kit and a tube of glue and I'm a pretty happy camper.

Despite the headaches and complications, it's rewarding to be where I am now with the Liberator – 90 percent done, and on the verge of completing yet another kit that I thought for sure would destroy my interest in the hobby forever.

"Turning Blue" with Jay Reatard: Joe reviews "Singles 2006-2007"

2010-05-11T14:00:00.002-05:00

The first time I heard of Jay Reatard was when I saw an upcoming concert listed in City Pages, and thought to myself, "Man, that's a horrible last name."
The next time I heard about him, he was dead.
Reatard's death earlier this year (he died in his sleep in January as a result of, a Memphis media outlet reported, "cocaine toxicity, and alcohol was a contributing factor in his death") garnered widespread media coverage, which is ironic, given that he already had an amazing thing going for him. During his short 29 years on this planet, he performed with several different bands in addition to performing as a solo artist. He recorded an amazing 22 albums and was featured on nearly 100 other releases. It seems he packed a lot of living into a few years.
So, it was a pretty easy call to make this week to grab Reatard's "Singles 2006-2007" when I saw it sitting on the shelf at the Hennepin County Library. There are 17 tracks on the double-disc set (with disc two featuring a DVD a live performances from around the world), making this two-year glimpse into his career about as lengthy as some other singles collections from bands that were around for far longer.
I didn't know what to expect when I threw the disc in the car stereo on the way home. The first two tracks, "Night of Broken Glass" and "Another Person," seem to channel, respectively, Big Black and Devo, and neither sounds very locked down. By the third track, however, the gorgeous "All Over Again," Reatard's footing steadies, and when "Feeling Blank Again" hits, it's clear that the fuse has hit the payload. The next 13 tracks are an amazing mix of early punk rock energy (think the Damned or the Adicts) with the sort of sloppy tunefulness that reminded me why I like garage rock in the first place.
Reatard's sheer productivity seems to attest to a theory I've long held: rock music is meant to be recorded minimally and released as soon as possible without any tinkering. Each of the songs on "Singles 2006-2007" sounds as if it was recorded on a boom box and released the week later. And that's a great thing, because the energy and enthusiasm completely comes across, with positively crackling results.
The Smiths knew this theory. The Birthday Party knew this one-shot recording theory. When you get bands like Nine Inch Nails spending five years on an album, Axl Rose spending a decade on "Chinese Democracy," or Brian Wilson spending almost 30 on "Smile," what you get sounds exactly like what you'd expect: a labored opus. Jay Reatard's music is refreshingly free from this trend. It's almost tempting to think, while listening to these songs, that you are listening to a tape of a really good high school band your friends are in: the quality is low, but it doesn't matter, because what you are hearing is refreshingly alive and new.
Ironically, one of the songs on "Singles" is called "Turning Blue." It seems to foreshadow Reatard's eventual end.

"You got me sweating/ shaking in my skin/ I know it's nice/ to find beginnings and ends/ As sad as it seems/ you're turning blue in my dreams"

I'm upset that I won't be able to see Reatard live. I can only imagine what that would have been like. But he's left us an impressive amount of material to wade through, and if his other stuff is anything like "Singles 2006-2007," count me in.

Rogers Waters and "The Wall" - Irony Coming to a Concert Hall Near You

2010-05-10T10:48:00.002-05:00

"So ya thought ya might like to go to the show?"

-Opening lines of Pink Floyd's "The Wall"

There is something sobering about the various warnings one receives while purchasing anything online with a credit card. In this particular instance, I was about to spend a three-digit sum on two tickets to see Roger Waters, the former singer and bassist of Pink Floyd, perform the album "The Wall" live at the XCel Energy Center. I don't remember the EXACT wording of the process, but it was something along the lines of:

"If you click 'continue,' your credit card will be charged. Do you wish to continue?"

Yes. Yes I do. Consequences be damned.

I hit the button, the screen refreshed, and I was instantly poorer. It's a far cry from the days when rock fans used to have to line up around the block, or even sleep out overnight, to get tickets to a particular show. If it had been me back then, I wouldn't have bothered. I'm famous for buying tickets (MUSE, X, Paul van Dyk, etc.) and finding reasons not to go on the day of the concert ("I'm by myself," "I just broke up with my girlfriend and need quiet time," "Parking is a hassle," "It's only Rammstein," etc.)

I don't see that happening with the Waters concert. Not only have I been obsessed with the album since 2003 (when I saw the movie and BAM! the entire thing made sense to me) but I've gone so far as to write a 10-page communications class paper analyzing the symbolism in both the music and the album art (still wish I had that!). I have a bootleg live video shot at a New York show in 1981 proving just how over the top the stage show for this album was. Even if the video an nth-generation copy and nearly unwatchable, the sheer attempt at spectacle comes through, as full-size model planes crash on stage and an entire wall is built and demolished as part of the finale.

There is a lot of irony in seeing Roger Waters bring "The Wall" back on the road. From what I've read about the band, doing the shows and the album the first time were more nails in the coffin between Waters and fellow Floyd members David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, as Water's control of the band's direction became more unbearable. The album, with its themes of disconnection and alienation from the audience, stemmed from a 1977 incident in which Waters, burned out from the road, beckoned a fan onstage at a Montréal concert and spat in his face.

"It just became more and more oppressive," Waters recalled in a 1994 MOJO interview. "Those places weren't built for music, they were built for sporting events, and it's not unnatural to experience a ritualisation of war, because that's all sport is. What was going through my mind – my whole body – was an enormous sense of frustration, a feeling of 'what are we all doing here, what's the point?' And the answer that kept clanging back monotonously was: cash and ego. That's all its about."

Cash and ego, indeed, and good for him. Now, he's taking the irony back on the road, selling it to schmucks like me who can't resist seeing the ultimate rock and roll spectacle. And I can't wait.

Literary Coroner - Joe reviews punk rock book, porn star autobiography

2010-05-05T15:34:00.002-05:00

I go to the library several times a week. Here's some of what I've been reading lately.

During senior year of high school, two books dominated the top of my reading agenda: "Rotten," an autobiography of Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, and "Last Gang in Town," a 600-page book about the Clash that took me two months to read. There was something about the history of punk rock that really excited me, and it tied in to my natural tendency to remember dates, names and places as I'd done in the history classes I'd earned A-pluses in.
I recently revisited this territory when I read "London's Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977," a 328-page history book of sorts written by Dave Thompson. Thompson claims to have experienced all of this as an impressionable teenager, and his insights lend a unique, ground level perspective to a history that has become dominated by people at the top, like Johnny Rotten and the Clash. For example, it's one thing to hear about members of the Sex Pistols being attacked by people who thought they'd offended the Queen. It's another to read Thompson's breathless accounts of being chased through the streets as a teenager.
One particularly troubling episode comes when Thompson and his girlfriend are being chased by three men, only to see things get worse when some Rastafarian friends step in to help:
"And what was Linton doing? He was waiting for a bus, the huge red bus that was now bearing down toward hum….was almost level….was about to pass. With a grunt as loud as the engine, he hurled his load against it, a six-or-seven-foot gap that the flying body crossed in no time, but which seemed forever as time slowed to a crawl. There was a crash like she'd never heard before, flesh and bone meeting steel and glass, screams from inside the bus."
Perhaps more chillingly, no one believes the two punks that the Rastafarian blacks were helping them, and one policewoman goes so far as to say, "But what do you expect to happen, if you go out dressed like that?"
***
Another book I read recently was Ron Jeremy's a43-page autobiography, "The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz." Jeremy, an adult film star with more than 4,000 pornographic movies to his credit, has become something of a pop-culture phenomenon. Much of this has to do with his unlikely (i.e. homely) looks, and the fact that he has been so utterly prolific in his career.
The picture Jeremy paints of himself in this book is that of an educated man (he says he has a masters degree in special education that he has never used) who wanted to break into serious acting but found porn instead. I finished this book in two days. Not only is it a quick read, but also it's really quite funny, with Jeremy providing amusing anecdotes of the strange world he works in. Take what happened after he sent in some nude pictures to Playgirl using his real name. The phone calls to his parent's house started soon after.
"Ronnie," my grandmother told me one morning over breakfast. "Some sissy called you last night."
I nearly spat out my eggs. "I'm sorry, what?"
"A sissy boy called and asked if you'd be willing to meet him in a gas station downtown. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Uhhh..."
"I assume it was one of your drama friends. He sounded like a sweet fellow, although he was breathing awfully heavy. I'm guessing he has asthma."
It's hard to write about working in the adult film industry without being graphic, but Jeremy writes ABOUT porn, not porn itself. Still, the proliferation of genital-related material can be overwhelming at times, as can the depersonalization of sex that pornographic films by their very nature inspire. I wouldn't recommend this book for someone who is squeamish about such things.
Say what you want about the industry he chose to work in, but Jeremy's had an interesting life, and met plenty of interesting people along the way. All in all, this was an interesting (albeit "vulgar in a way that makes me glad libraries have auto-checkouts") read.

COMING SOON: My review of "A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation."

Writing the old-school way, one clackity-clack at a time

2010-05-04T15:40:00.001-05:00

As I write this, my latest acquisition is sitting naked in the garage, doused with carburetor cleaner and deskbound.

Wait, that sounds bad.

It's not what you think. My latest acquisition is a lime green IBM Selectric typewriter that I found in storage at work yesterday. It weighs about 35 pounds, with the inner workings protected by two extremely thick steel shell pieces. It's solidly built, to say the least. I've got it sitting in the garage because it needed a good cleaning, as, according to the sticker on its underside, had last been professionally serviced when Nixon was still in office.

This isn't the first time I've brought home such a treasure. My habit of collecting typewriters has raised eyebrows. Walking out of work with my prize yesterday, I caught the curious eyes of one of my co-workers looking at me, and I cheerfully told her that the company had FINALLY bought the new laptop for me that I'd been begging for. She spat out a small laugh, and I was pretty sure I could see her hand reaching for the mace. I thought I was funny, anyway. In our old Eden Prairie office, I would bring a small one outside to write letters with, and I could see people from an adjacent office taking turns to look out the window at the anachronistic masochist and his infernal machine.

"What a weirdo!" I could picture them guffawing. "Doesn't he know that people haven't used those in like, 10 years?"

Yes, actually. Many people who have discovered my hobby have asked a very relevant question: "WHY? Why do you collect machines so completely obsolete that even Goodwill refuses to take them? Why do you want something that is so eclipsed by technological descendents that is it beyond even a joke, like the Eight-Track tape?"

Well, that's the point, actually.

Typewriters have many virtues. They don't get viruses. Some of them don't even use electricity. Yes, you can't go back and fix mistakes or rely on spell check, but those are probably good habits to develop anyway. There's a certain appeal in the rhythmic, syncopated sound of metal keys hitting one after another, as the genius flows out onto whatever paper is in the chute. It is instant, tangible creation, free from all of the unreality of the plastic keyboards and Internet fancy that has come to dominate our lives. Typewriters are like fountain pens or thank-you notes (two other concepts I enjoy on a regular basis). They don't allow you to "multi-task" (a term which represents a sick age of distraction from what one is doing in the name of alleged "progress"). No, if you are using a typewriter, that's all you are doing, because if you take attention elsewhere and make a mistake, you are going to be there for a long time.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who is interested in typewriters. There is a place in Richfield called Vale Typewriters that services all makes and models. I called the guy earlier today, and he told me that a complete chemical cleaning for my Selectric would be about $85. Ouch. That's $85 I don't have. So, I went out to the garage and found the carb cleaner.

I realize that computers and Internet give me the ability to reach a worldwide audience. But typewriters don't, and that's one of the reasons I like them. They sequester my thoughts from the larger world, creating a more intimate and tangible final product than the glorified set of ones and zeroes that this missive will no doubt be coded into for publication.

Of Missed Connections with the Famous and the Ordinary

2010-05-03T11:14:00.000-05:00

People are in our lives for only so long before we pass like ships in the night.

My neighbor and I were chatting this past weekend, as male homeowners often do, about what lawn projects were currently making our lives interesting. I was trying to tackle the shady dirt patches allergic to grass, and my neighbor was digging a pit for his wife’s rain garden project. We talked about a particular old house on the block, and I mentioned that the guy who grew up there in the 1920s still was still living not far away. My neighbor blinked.

“Lived,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Did Wally die?”

“Yeah, he passed away last fall,” my neighbor replied.

Oh.

I’d met Wally at a National Night Out party in 2008. He was probably into his late eighties by then, and lived four blocks away from us. He told me about flying cargo planes over “The Hump” (a nickname for the Himalayas) during World War II in the China-Burma-India theatre of U.S. operations. Between 1942-45, nearly 1,000 men and 600 planes were lost doing this. Wally, who had played in big bands before the war, ended up going to school for radios, and flew up on Curtiss C-46 Commandos going over the Hump.

I walked away that night glad I’d gone, glad I’d met Wally and hoping to visit my new friend and talk more about history. I would drive by his pink house with the chipping paint, and wonder how he was doing. There was always a faded American flag flying by the door.

I meant to go over there. I really did. But I kept putting it off, and now, I won’t get the chance.

This has been happening a lot lately. For years, my mom told me to contact Brian Anderson, a man she’d worked with years ago when he was the editor of Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine. She remembered how kind he’d been to her, and said that I could probably benefit from talking to him. I would nod, and put it off. Eventually, that stopped the day I read that Anderson had gone into hospice care after a battle with leukemia. He a short while later at age 65, and everything I read about him showed me that I had truly missed out on meeting a great man.

We all have brushes with people or things greater than ourselves. I still kick myself for not seeing the opening act of a concert I covered for a college paper in 2004 at the Seventh Street Entry. They were a little band no one had ever heard of called the Killers.

“Come on,” I remember saying to my friend who was with me. “Opening bands always suck anyways. Let’s go get some drinks.”

Six months later, the Killers would be one of the biggest bands on the planet, and I was left only with a so-so story about what might have been.

My mom recently told me a story that has really made me think about pursuing these connections while the opportunity exists. When my parents lived in Baltimore in the 1970s, my mom debated reaching out to a TV reporter who was also new to town. As they were both young women in the communications industry, they may have found a lot of common ground, doing similar work in a new place. Time passed, and it was a meeting my mother didn’t pursue.

That TV reporter? Perhaps you’ve heard of her. Her name was Oprah Winfrey.

A cast of characters supports journeys through life. Some, like parents and siblings, are there for a long time. Others, like strangers on the streets, are mere living scenery dressing. Regardless of whom these people are, they all share one thing in common: none of them will be around forever. Wally was a member of our Greatest Generation, which is dying at the rate of 1,000 per day. By the time my daughter is old enough, very few of these men and women will be around anymore.

It’s an extreme case, perhaps, but it reminds me to make those phone calls now, to ring doorbells sooner than later, and to not forget that all relationships are offered on for a limited time only.

The darker side of a troubled nation: "If you want to live here, learn English."

2010-04-28T14:32:00.001-05:00

"This is Alabama; we speak English," Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James says in a new ad. "If you want to live here, learn it."
This is the latest development in a week that's seen the darker side of a down economy come out. Earlier, Arizona enacted some of the toughest anti-immigration laws yet seen in the country, enabling law enforcement to stop people based on "a reasonable suspicion" of their immigration status.
James' ad is a double-whammy for the conservative base. Not only would giving the state's drivers license exams in English-only completely force people to learn English, it would also, he claims, save people money. Which really, after the past eight years, we can see that conservatives are just as bad at as democrats. Name one thing that the Bush Administration shrank or cut. Hell, they CREATED new departments, new bureaucracy. After all, who knew we had a "homeland?"
Both of these actions boil down the theatre, and deliberate pandering to a right-wing base that seems terrified of the changing world around them. While it may be tempting to crack down on immigration now, we do so at our own peril. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Even Tim James relatives once came here as newcomers, and in time, they adapted, as most newcomers do. So when is it fair to say that the tap gets to be shut off? And who gets to say that? We do that at the risk of becoming exactly the same sort of stale, old-world European countries our relatives fled from in the first place.
I am hard-pressed to believe that we would be throwing quite the same fuss if white Canadians or Russians or Scotsman were flooding our borders illegally. Hell, we probably wouldn't even notice. But if you change the look of the border jumper and give him ties to an "invasive" culture, he becomes a threat. While I imagine many involved in this legislation would deny that the people's ethnicity is a factor, I think it's the elephant in the room.
If we really wanted to target illegal immigration, why don't we really go after the people who hire illegal immigrants in the first place? Kill the jobs, and they'll stop coming. Also, if this is such a problem, how come we have not seen significant reform to our immigration system? Third, if the drug violence in Mexico is so bad and spilling over our borders, why don't we target the major source of the cartels' revenue: American consumers?
It is tempting to think that these problems can be solved through building another wall, or sending more people across the border in police vans. They'll keep coming. They will keep coming so long as the great shining beacon of hope gleams across the border. And while it is tempting to say, "Well, they should to it legally," we are lucky enough to not be the ones wearing the border-jumper's shoes, aren't we?

Conveniece at a price - but at what cost?

2010-04-27T21:47:00.000-05:00

As Flo mouth-breathed on the cans of spray paint that I was purchasing, I realized that the only reason Home Depot still had people like her working was because the robots meant to replace her simply hadn't been built yet.

I watched her scan the items using a laser, and a computer on her terminal automatically add up the totals for how much money I owed. When prompted, I slid my credit card through a separate, smaller terminal, and my receipt came out a few seconds later without me having to sign. Flo's entire job consisted of wheezing me a "Good afternoon," putting my items in a bag, and handing me a receipt.

That's it.

I give it another 10 years before the cashier has gone the way of the do-do bird.

I haven't given much thought to this, but I'm struck by how dehumanized workplaces and regular business transactions are becoming these days. I went to Target after I went to Home Depot, and had the same thing happen: a clerk's sole function was to not look me in the eye, mumble and incoherent salutation, and hand me the things Visa said I had the money to afford. Each employee no doubt was a number in a computer somewhere, easily replaced with another combination of numbers 1-9. It makes me wonder when I as a customer will be replaced by a robot.

How many jobs has this mechanization taken? While the efficiency is no doubt appreciated by the corporate bottom line, how is it a beneficial long-term approach when jobs become scarcer due to people being replaced by machines? There is a double-edge to this: with the same technology that allows us this rapid-fire consumerist ease, we've managed to conquer or at least tame many of the things that kept human populations low for years (famine, disease, wolves, war, etc.). Where is everyone supposed to find some form of work? How are those mouths to be fed? We can't ALL be important big-shot people who can't be replaced by machines. Can we?

There are many people who are obviously very comfortable with the changing world around them. I am not one of those people. In the past two years, I've seen the job I worked for five years to get be usurped by changing media and people willing to do it for free. Other people have seen their jobs shipped overseas to cheaper labor markets because technology allows people in India to work on projects for people in Eden Prairie. It's not enough to be educated in this country anymore – and that was one of the best cards I think a lot of us had to play. I wonder how much of this current 10 percent unemployment rate is due to jobs simple vanishing. If that's the case, what is supposed to replace them?

My parents could enter the workforce with a certain expectation that they could spend a long time in a given career with the same company. I came into the work force knowing that I was simply a number that would be cut if the monthly books said it would benefit the bottom dollar. And all of the alleged "convenience" hiding behind the dehumanization I saw today has me convinced that I am closer to starving than I would ever think possible.

Welcome to the real world. Paper or plastic?

Goodbye to a Good Boy

2010-03-29T11:42:00.001-05:00

There are many clichés when it comes to dog ownership: they are your best friends, they never judge you, and they will always forgive you.

With Charlie, all of those “clichés” were the absolute truth.

Charlie was an 11-year-old black-and-white Springer Spaniel owned by my parents. While he was always kind to us, time was not so kind to him, leaving him arthritic, incontinent, deaf and nearly blind by the time the hard decisions had to be made. We said goodbye to Charlie last Friday, and in doing so, closed a chapter of our own lives as well.

The whole family fell for Charlie pretty quickly after he came home for good in early 1999. All dogs are special in their own way, but Charlie was a real character. I’ve never met a dog that talked so much. He’d grumble and whiney when you petted him, and still acted like a lap dog even after he’d reached 70 pounds. After experiencing several birthdays, he would go crazy when he heard the song “Happy Birthday,” as he’d figured out this was a harbinger for a helping of delicious cake.

Chuck loved the garden my father worked on every spring and summer. I have fond memories of him squashing flowerbeds as he sat to lean in and smell a tulip on a nice day. It seemed to sum up his gentle nature.

Charlie had a front-row seat to the joys and sorrows of our lives. He was a comfort to me when came home from college in disgrace. He spent nearly every moment of my parent’s respective bouts with cancer by their sides. He was a constant presence in our lives, and we were always thankful for him.

As he grew older, Charlie began to show the ravages of age. He grew arthritic, and would often vocally complain about this in his own way. His vision grew poor, his hearing failed, and other health problems began to mount. We were faced with a decision no one wanted to make, and last week, the die was cast.

I stopped by Friday afternoon to see him one last time. As was his usual wont, he was relaxing in his kennel, oblivious to his upcoming rendezvous with eternity. I took him outside to get some photos, and it was obvious that, in another dog cliché, the mind was willing but the body unable to do what dog and master had once taken for granted.

I could see the pain he was in as we darted back and forth in play, and after 30 seconds or so, his whining increased to a yelp, as if to say, “Sorry, I can’t do this anymore.”

I left that day without saying anything to him, because what can you say to a creature that doesn’t understand its impending fate? I patted him on the head and turned to walk out the door, confident that I would be OK with the absence I knew was coming.

My plans went awry when my dad called me from the vet’s that afternoon. Someone had locked the keys in their car, and they needed a spare to get home. I was ushered into a peaceful room at the vet’s office, where Charlie lay on a blanket covering the floor. He died right when I walked through the doorway.

There was something unbelievably sad in seeing my friend like that. Charlie looked peaceful. I picked up his paw, and found to my surprise that the limb moved freely, having been liberated from the arthritis that constricted it. I tried shutting his eyes, and they wouldn’t stay closed. It was if he were sleeping on the kitchen rug as he’d done so many times before – only this time, there would be no waking up.

We’d done the right thing – but it was a hard decision to take. There were many tears that night. I cried not only for my friend, but also for the chapter in our lives that had closed with him. It’s hard not to notice the passage of time and the advancing years coming upon us with the speed of a freight train. Losing such a constant presence only reinforces just how little control we have over time’s giving and taking of such gifts.

That night, my parents heard a noise in the back hall and found Charlie’s kennel open kennel door had somehow shut by itself. I’d like to think this means our friend and faithful companion is not lost to us, but will always be there, at least in spirit – a gentle presence that never missed a chance to stop and smell the tulips.

U.S. kids: Making the move to "constant eating"

2010-03-02T09:46:00.001-06:00

According to a new article released today by Reuters, a new study is calling into question if our psychological need to eat is being "deregulated."

The article, "Snacks mean U.S. kids moving toward 'constant eating,'" examines how childrens' daily calorie intakes have increased by nearly 113 calories per day since the 1970s. More than 27 percent of those calories, the article states, come in the form of daily snacks, mainly "salty snacks and candy. Desserts and sweetened beverages remain the major sources of calories from snacks."

The extra calories are adding up quick, it seems. According to the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, the obesity rate for children 10-17 was 14.8 percent in 2003. By 2007, it had jumped to 16.4 percent – an increase of nearly two points. If the same trends continue, we could logically deduce that today's childhood obesity rate is around 20 percent.

While politicians wring their hands about a crisis they can use to score face time, I think another culprit is to blame for at least some of this behavior: the food industry. I'm not meaning the people who sell apples. I'm talking about the companies like Kraft Foods, whose smiling faces-laden website nearly crashed my old computer. The company owns both Oreo and Nabisco, makers of such fine, healthy treats as Oreo cookies. Both branches have annual profits approaching $1 billion.

The extended reach of influence of these snacks' marketing prowess is capable of stirring real or imagined hunger in viewers at the drop of a hat. Years ago, cigarette ads on television were discontinued after mounting research proved that cigarettes were unhealthy. Now, they are disappearing from print, too. Why shouldn't we expect to see the same sort of regulation regarding ads that target a demographic that doesn't even know how to spell "demographics?" Has "childhood" become another marketing category on a whiteboard in some anonymous boardroom? I think it has, and that's unfortunate.

Ironically, Phillip Morris (or "Altria," the deliberately-forgettable new name it has been given) now owns both Kraft and Nabisco. I know the argument about "free will" would be bandied about, but let's face it – "free will" isn't exactly working out so hot for our kids, is it? Or that matter, for adults, whose collective waistlines (mine included) expand by the year.

I know there is a burden on consumers to regulate themselves. I know that each of us has the choice to make – to eat healthy and take care of ourselves, or to give up. But the balance of choice is upset in a day and age when food is marketed to us as a panacea for all things: a drug, a secret lover, an indulgence and a reward. We want all of those things, and marketers know that. In the end, the adults are just as bad as the kids – only the adults should know better.

I think we'd all be better served if the sort of in-your-face constant marketing we've grown up with would stop. In the end, food is many things, but at its base, it is simply a way for us to stay alive for another day. At its core, it is nothing more than sustenance – and I think it would benefit all of us to remember just exactly what that means.

Can the government be trusted? In "The Crazies," the answer is "no"

2010-02-28T09:16:00.003-06:00

In the case of this year's remake of George Romero's 1973 film "The Crazies," the message is simple: the government wasn't trustworthy then, and it isn't trustworthy now.
Both films focus on the after-affects of the accidental release of a government chemical weapon on a small American town. The weapon, designed to destabilize large population groups, does exactly what it is designed to do, and soon, chaos ensues. A military quarantine is called, and soon, troops in bio suits are randomly killing infected (and in 2010's remake) non-infected civilians in an effort to keep order. One of the story's central themes is distrust of the government, but the new remake takes that and adds a different twist through the use of characters and situations we've seen more recent "social collapse" films, like "28 Days Later" and "I Am Legend." The results of this experiment are mixed.
One of "The Crazies" strongest assets is its story line. It's perhaps not a stretch to imagine that the government WOULD order a quarantine/culling to ensure the maintenance of the prevailing social order. The original tapped into this fear by focusing almost exclusively on the heavy-handedness of the military response, as evidenced in a scene where soldiers in bio suits turn flamethrowers on infected civilians (known as "Crazies") to a stirring score of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Part of what made the original so disturbing was the reversal of every day logic and situations, like a scene where a normal-looking elderly woman attacks a soldier using her sewing needles. It was effective because it was the everyday turned upside down.
Unfortunately, the remake is a bit heavy-handed in its own attempts to scare us. The infected civilians in the remake eventually morph not into normal-looking insane people (which made the original version more disturbing) but into blood-spattered zombies. By the end of the film, one of the last infected people we see almost has what looks like green skin and scales. So are these people the living dead? Or just crazy? We're never quite sure. This inconsistency, combined with cheap "quiet/loud, jump out of a quiet corner" scenes, comes off as an over-the-top attempt to disturb the viewers. It doesn't quite work as a thriller, but it has too much of a story to be the B-rate horror it aspires to.
I couldn't help but notice several cultural differences as well. In the original version, written during Vietnam, all of the soldiers are portrayed as faceless killing machines. In the updated version, there is a scene when one of the soldiers is captured by uninfected survivors, and revealed to be a whimpering, double-chinned teenager under all of the bio gear. He promises not to tell about the survivors if he is let go, and, in the end, keeps his word. It's perhaps emblematic of the nuanced anti-war sentiments that developed in the wake of Vietnam. Unlike then, people today from all political spectrums seem to agree (or at least pay lip service) to the idea of supporting the troops even if they are against the war.
The remake, much like the original, attempts to tap into the anger people have (for different reasons) against the United States government. One scene in the remake seems to speak directly to this theory. A government official is captured after the uninfected survivors cause his car to crash. He acts haughty, and asks the sheriff, "What do you want? An apology?" It unsubtly speaks directly towards the anger people have against the government hubris that lead to the film's catastrophic consequences (and the real-life government's bailouts and spending in the midst of dire job forecasts). Government, in both films, is the main hindrance to a truly humanistic response. An example: the sheriff figures out that the water supply of the town is tainted with the chemical, and the mayor (who seemed to be chosen based on how he would look as "an infected") stares up at him from his swimming pool (subtle) and says he can't shut the water off on a hunch. The sheriff ends up doing it anyway, but by that point, it is too late.
After some (spoiler alert) really impressive nuclear special effects, the film ends with the two main characters walking towards Cedar Rapids, which, unknown to them, has been selected for the same kind of quarantine they just escaped from.
While I enjoyed the remake of "The Crazies," I think the original was superior, even if its production values were far less, because it relied on the story more. It was a simple fable about how easy it is to disrupt the fabric of every day living, and how the impersonal bureaucracy we think we can turn to for help can sometimes turn out to be worse than the problems we are running from. Ruling structures, these films remind us, will do what benefits the status quo, and if everyone benefits, great. If not, there is plenty of fuel in the flamethrower tank to wipe away any discontent. It is a valid warning now just as it was then.

‘Time’ now is different than ‘time’ then – isn’t it?

2010-02-26T10:35:00.000-06:00

Part of growing up is realizing that some things get better with time (“Caddyshack”) and some things get worse (“Porky’s”). But lately, the nature of time itself seems to be changing for me.
I remember very distinctly how slow the days once passed. The summers of 1993 and 1994 were, according to me at least, the slowest times ever recorded in the history of the planet. Minutes would languidly crawl by under the glare of a hot July sun, trailed by the still-distant vulture of an approaching school year. It was this same kind of boredom that I’m convinced wiped out the dinosaurs.
I pictured myself aging like Rip van Winkle – spending each passing day waiting for something, anything, to happen. The coming school year was a welcome break, if not exactly a blessed release.
Nearly 20 years later, I find that entire years have gone by before I’ve realized it (2009? Where are you?). I’m still trying to figure out how my wife and I can sit down on Monday nights (if there are no meetings for me to attend), turn to each other and say, “Didn’t we just watch ‘Big Bang Theory’ yesterday?" No. Sadly, it was a week ago – when we asked ourselves the exact same question.
So why is it that time itself seems to pass faster as we age? A recent story on National Public Radio asked the same question. Scientists have many theories on the subject, including one focusing on how the brain records experiences. Part of this is common sense – for example, you wouldn’t remember driving somewhere the fourth or fifth time as much as you would the first. It is simply routine by that point.
“The brain records new experiences – especially novel and exciting experiences – differently,” the article (available NPR.org) states. “This is even measurable. [Neuroscientist David Eagleman’s] lab has found that brains use more energy to represent a memory when the memory is novel. So, first memories are dense. The routines of later life are sketchy. The past wasn’t really slower than the present. It just feels that way.”
It sure does. There is much in an adult life that is routine and unmemorable: getting dressed in the morning, driving the same routes to work day in and day out, having the same types of lunches in the same boring break room, picking up children at daycare, making dinner and then collapsing into a heap on the couch wondering where the day went. Yes, that sounds about right.
I’ve had a few friends tell me they have only recently started to notice that something they considered "relatively recent" (like Kurt Cobain being alive) turned out to have happened 14 or 17 years ago. A friend and I were talking about this concept not long ago.
“It sucks getting old, and I feel like I’m too young to be saying that,” he said.
“Be patient,” I replied. “It’s our first time.”
Life, I’m told, moves in stages. Growing older is just a means to that end. I take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone in feeling that the very measurement of life itself seems to be moving at a faster pace.
Maybe too much time seems to have passed because I am at another formative point in life where the otherwise-routine nature of existence is starting to change through new and different experiences (hearing Evelyn say “Daddy,” trying new things like volunteering with the Commemorative Air Force) thus creating “denser” memories and an impression of life lived at a slower pace.
Maybe it’s an elegant way to remind me that I need to stop and smell the roses.

‘Time’ now is different than ‘time’ then – isn’t it?

2010-02-26T10:32:00.000-06:00

I remember very distinctly how slow the days once passed. The summers of 1993 and 1994 were, according to me at least, the slowest times ever recorded in the history of the planet. Minutes would languidly crawl by under the glare of a hot July sun, trailed by the still-distant vulture of an approaching school year. It was this same kind of boredom that I’m convinced wiped out the dinosaurs.

I pictured myself aging like Rip van Winkle – spending each passing day waiting for something, anything, to happen. The coming school year was a welcome break, if not exactly a blessed release.

Nearly 20 years later, I find that entire years have gone by before I’ve realized it (2009? Where are you?). I’m still trying to figure out how my wife and I can sit down on Monday nights (if there are no meetings for me to attend), turn to each other and say, “Didn’t we just watch ‘Big Bang Theory’ yesterday?" No. Sadly, it was a week ago – when we asked ourselves the exact same question.

So why is it that time itself seems to pass faster as we age? A recent story on National Public Radio asked the same question. Scientists have many theories on the subject, including one focusing on how the brain records experiences. Part of this is common sense – for example, you wouldn’t remember driving somewhere the fourth or fifth time as much as you would the first. It is simply routine by that point.

“The brain records new experiences – especially novel and exciting experiences – differently,” the article (available NPR.org) states. “This is even measurable. [Neuroscientist David Eagleman’s] lab has found that brains use more energy to represent a memory when the memory is novel. So, first memories are dense. The routines of later life are sketchy. The past wasn’t really slower than the present. It just feels that way.”

It sure does. There is much in an adult life that is routine and unmemorable: getting dressed in the morning, driving the same routes to work day in and day out, having the same types of lunches in the same boring break room, picking up children at daycare, making dinner and then collapsing into a heap on the couch wondering where the day went. Yes, that sounds about right.

I’ve had a few friends tell me they have only recently started to notice that something they considered "relatively recent" (like Kurt Cobain being alive) turned out to have happened 14 or 17 years ago. A friend and I were talking about this concept not long ago.

“It sucks getting old, and I feel like I’m too young to be saying that,” he said.

“Be patient,” I replied. “It’s our first time.”

Life, I’m told, moves in stages. Growing older is just a means to that end. I take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone in feeling that the very measurement of life itself seems to be moving at a faster pace.

Maybe too much time seems to have passed because I am at another formative point in life where the otherwise-routine nature of existence is starting to change through new and different experiences (hearing Evelyn say “Daddy,” trying new things like volunteering with the Commemorative Air Force) thus creating “denser” memories and an impression of life lived at a slower pace.

Maybe it’s an elegant way to remind me that I need to stop and smell the roses.

The Ballad of Joe Stack

2010-02-23T11:27:00.002-06:00

The similarities are there: taking control over an airplane that isn't yours and flying it over civilian territory before crashing it into a building filled with civilians. But one of these incidents represents, in most people's minds, one of the worst days in America's history. The other, which happened only recently, is spawning American-made Facebook fan pages and approving Twitter posts.
What is happening here?
When Joseph Stack crashed a single-engined plane into an IRS office in Austin last week, one of my immediate fears was that both the man and the act would become twisted into some sort of mythic folk-hero status about standing up against perceived tyranny. Nearly a week later, the New York Daily News is reporting that there was a Facebook fan page (since deleted) with quotes like, "Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the Constitution," and Twitter posts praising Stack's action, including this one: "Joe Stack, you are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand."
So how come there is such a vast gap between the horrors of 9/11 and Stack's last flight? I don't think we'd see any Americans praising Mohammed Atta on Facebook, so why does Stack get a page?
It reminds me of the aphorism "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." While I don't agree with much of what Stack wrote in his rambling six-page suicide note, I can understand his frustration facing what he felt was a monolithic wall preventing him from succeeding. I understand the pain he felt when he wrote about being unable to find work. I understand when he railed against the perceived injustices of the United States tax code, and how needlessly complicated it could be. But that's where I draw the line.
I'm afraid this is just the beginning for the myth-making regarding Stack's last flight. I fear that, in some circles, his example could be used to inspire others. It's a reminder to me that the same type of seething hatred of the federal government that inspired the homegrown militia movement in the 1980s and 1990s didn't fade away in the wake of 9/11. It merely laid low until the time was right, and, with the election of Barack Obama, has come back. We've seen the Barack/Joker "Socialism" posters and the town hall meeting shout-downs last summer. There is obvious anger towards our government, which I can empathize with to an extent. I get the distinct impression that Stack's action would have been met with something different in some of these circles than the wave of repugnance that the average American citizen probably felt at the thought of a man deliberately crashing an airplane into a building full of American citizens.
What I don't understand is how anyone could fully justify Stack's action as one of patriotism. While no one likes the IRS, they perform an essential function in collecting the revenue the government uses to maintain the physical infrastructure of the roads we drive on, the police and fire departments that keep us safe and the very armed forces that maintain our dominant status in the world. If it weren't them, it would be someone else doing the same job. While I empathize with those who find tremendous difficulty navigating through the tax code and the perceived notion that tax money pays people to be lazy, I don't believe this in any way is a justified reason to crash an airplane into a building full of people working for the organization.
Bottom line: if a foreign citizen crashed an airplane into an American building, there would be no doubt in people's minds that it was a terrorist attack. Get a white American male behind the control column, and the lines apparently begin to blur.
"But Stack was just angry at the government and he wanted to make a point," I imagine one of his defenders saying. Maybe. But on 9/11, Osama bin Laden wanted to make a point. He wanted to show his extreme displeasure with the United States by crashing four airplanes into two buildings. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack wanted to make a point by crashing one airplane into one building. No matter how you look at it, it is still a person/persons crashing airplanes into buildings with civilians, despite the ideological basis or scale of impact. So why is one detested and one revered?
Perhaps "one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter."

The "Biggest Loser[s]?" All of us.

2010-02-21T08:46:00.000-06:00

The more I look at it, the more one of TV’s more popular shows raises issues that go more than skin deep.
NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” is a game show that takes obese contestants away to a health ranch and rewards the person who loses the highest percentage of weight with $250,000. During this time, contestants are shown how to work out and eat a healthy diet. While I applaud the thought of an out-of-control person taking the courageous step to change their lives, I think “Loser” shortchanges both them and us, and here is why.
The scenario, while appearing ideal, is far from it. Weight gain happens over time. As someone who used to be 230 pounds, I can tell you that such a thing doesn’t happen overnight. The habits that created the situation are also complex, and go beyond mere intake of food. For many people (myself included) food is more than mere sustenance – it is a reward, an indulgence, a painkiller. I imagine that many of the people on the show have the same issue. So how is it healthy to merely help them lose weight and not address the underlying issues? It’s akin to having someone shoot themselves only to have a doctor stop the bleeding and let them out of the hospital. In the end, the old habits come back, as we’ve seen with former winners who gained all of their weight back when they return to the non-structured environment of the real world.
The real world isn’t like the highly-structured environment on the ranch. The ranch wouldn’t feature brownies in the break room during a highly-stressful day at the office. The ranch wouldn’t feature friends or family whom, not understanding you goals, gently cajole you into eating pizza. In the end, any sustainable weight loss program comes from within, not from a ranch with two health trainers encouraging you to spend a few more minutes running on the treadmill while your 400-pound bulk hits the footpads (does this strike anyone else as a really, really bad idea? Shouldn’t they walk?)
I’m not the only person to question the healthiness of the show’s sometimes-amazing weight loss (as high as 15 pounds in a week). A New York Times article in November 2009: ‘Kai Hibbard, the runner-up from the third season, has "written on her MySpace blog and elsewhere that she and other contestants would drink as little water as possible in the 24 hours before a weigh-in" and would "work out in as much clothing as possible" when the cameras were off. Two weeks after the show ended, Hibbard had gained about 31 pounds, mostly from staying hydrated.’ Also in the same article, Dr. Charles Burant, director of the Michigan Metabolomics and Obesity Center, was quoted as saying he was waiting for the “first person to have a heart attack.” I can’t disagree.
The popularity of this show also makes me wonder what TV audiences have become. It used to be that audiences were treated to some somewhat intelligent programs, like “Cheers,” Seinfeld,” “MASH,” etc. Now, one of the most popular shows on television focus on watching morbidly obese people putting their lives at risk for weight loss and a financial reward? It sounds sadistic to me. Do we have nothing better to do on Sunday nights but watch people who shouldn’t be engaging in heavy exercise in the first place cry into cameras about how hard things are? Do I really want to see people collapse under the strain of physical exercise they shouldn’t be doing in the first place? Pure freudenshade.
Also, in an age where one in three adults in the United States is considered obese (sciencedaily.com), NBC has obviously found a show that taps into the cultural zeitgeist. While one could make the argument that “Loser” could serve as an inspiration for people to lose weight (I don’t deny it could happen), I could also see the opposite happening. I could see someone saying, “If only I had a few weeks/months at the ranch, I could really do some good. But I don’t, so, well, I won’t bother trying.” Again, sustainable real-life weight loss doesn’t happen in a matter of 10 TV episodes. It happens over a much longer period of time, and only when some of the issues that caused the problem in the first place are taken care of. But “Loser” doesn’t address this. Instead, contestants work out six hours a day and eat a closely-monitored food regimen – something nearly impossible to do or sustain in the real world.
I applaud anyone who tries to take control of a weight problem through healthy means. But “Loser” doesn’t strike me as something very healthy. It strikes me as a game show masquerading as some sort of holy quest to help people who have let themselves go. If contestants are able to use this to jump-start a healthier life, more power to them. But from what I’ve seen of past winners on this show, the results are fleeting (Erik Chopin, Ryan Johnson).
We should be careful not to confuse health with entertainment.

Therapeutic throwing: Lakeville man credits part of stroke recovery to pottery classes

2010-02-19T16:52:00.002-06:00

By Joseph Palmersheim - Sun Newspapers

Published: Thursday, February 18, 2010 3:19 PM CST

Don Krukow, a Lakeville resident who survived a stroke in 2006, never thought he'd be able to live an active life after his life changed so suddenly at 2:30 a.m. on an otherwise ordinary March day.

"I remember going up the stairs, and I just fell down," he said. "My eyes were open, but I couldn't speak. I had no feelings in my right or left arm. And that's all I knew."

Krukow, a PhD who had spent a 30-year career with the Minnesota Department of Education and spoke five languages, faced the prospect of learning how to read and write again. The stroke also affected his hands.

He's been able to recover much of the feeling and strength in both with exercises - and nearly a year of pottery classes at the Lakeville Area Arts Center. He and Jo Anne Andres of Lakeville, an Arts Center pottery instructor, will speak about the therapeutic uses of pottery 1 p.m. Monday, March 2, at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park.

"When Don came in a year ago, he was a little tentative," Andres said. "It was about two weeks after we first met. I was really excited for him to come in. His dexterity has improved a lot. When he first came in, he was sticking his fingers through the first pots he made when he took them off the boards for drying. Since then, he's been very successful, and his pottery has become much more proficient."

As he kneads a lump of clay, Krukow elaborates on how pottery improved his life in addition to his dexterity.

"I thought my life was over," he says. "I thought all I had to do was watch life on TV, until I came here. This is such a great place."

He looks over at Troy Dahnke of Forrest Lake, another stroke survivor who also throws pots at the Arts Center.

"It's amazing what we've done," Krukow muses, smiling.

As he seats himself at an electric wheel, Krukow begins to wrangle the uneven clay into a smooth, even shape, occasionally dripping water over the surface to keep friction to a minimum. His foot controls the electric motor that spins the wheel

"Having it centered before you start opening [it] is real important," Andres says, referring to the metaphorical blooming process that raises walls out of what minutes before was a spinning lump of clay. "You can't be distracted by other things. You have to be concentrating on the clay. You have to be centered yourself. Now, you can see the clay has settled, and Don has gone into his 'Zen state.'"

As Krukow makes a hole in the center of the spinning mass, he begins to raise the outer edges, and with each pass of his rising hands, the walls of the bowl become more defined.
"I felt very thankful when I made my first pot," he said. "I felt I could do nothing anymore. When I could [do this], well, damn it, I was happy."

A few minutes later, the bowl is roughly half a foot high, with the outline shape of an upside down lampshade.

"I think this one will be white, and dark blue," Krukow says, easing his foot off of the wheel pedal and allowing his latest creation to spin to a halt.

"I think pottery is about learning to use your hands in a balanced way," Andres said. "You have to use your hands pretty evenly. As a stroke survivor, I'm guessing he used his weaker hand less than his stronger hand, and he's been able to use both of them and get good balance. It's the fine motions, dexterity at the fingertips. I'm thrilled for him - and he wants me to work with more stroke people, and build their confidence."

Andres said she and Krukow were in the early stages of planning pottery classes specifically for stroke survivors. For more information on Krukow's upcoming speaking engagement, call 952-993-6789 or e-mail strokeinspire@parknicollet.com.

History underneath my fingernails

2010-02-16T15:57:00.000-06:00

As I scrubbed the dripping de-greaser from the B-25’s left wheel well, I was struck by the notion that making models of the same aircraft as a child never included so many stinging dings on my hands from the unsoftened edges of pre-1940s metalwork.

I recently began volunteering with the Commemorative Air Force Minnesota Wing. It is based in a World War II-era hangar at Fleming Field in South St. Paul, and houses several vintage aircraft amidst a rather extensive museum collection of uniforms, equipment, and other historical bits and pieces. I’d daydreamed about becoming involved with the group for years, but made the plunge this year after one too many weekends at dance competitions.

What I’ve experienced so far has been eye-opening. I have built model airplanes since I was 7 years old, and thought I knew my way around a B-17 nose compartment or a P-51 cockpit. Models, being as small as they are, greatly simplify everything as a matter of economy. For example, a cockpit in a model kit, depending on the scale, could consist of a floor, and instrument panel, two control columns and two seats. In the real thing, it’s slightly different.

On my first day at Fleming, I was able to crawl around the inside of “Miss Mitchell,” a B-25J medium bomber, a type most famously associated with “The Doolittle Raid” on mainland Japan in April 1942. It was my first time inside of one of the aircraft I thought I knew so well. That familiarity ended the moment I crawled through the too-small floor hatch and into the dark insides of the aircraft. There is no way to convey the cramped, everything-on-top-of-the-other sense of claustaphobia I felt in that cockpit.

When I sat in the pilot’s seat and stared through the Plexiglas canopy, I remarked that the entire pilots’ area was about as big as the two front seats in the old Chevrolet Cavalier I used to drive. It’s something that has to be felt to be understood. I couldn’t even fit into the top turret, having shoulders that are apparently wider than those of the flight engineers who manned the same guns in combat 65 years ago. Later, I thought I was going to get stuck in the tunnel connecting the cockpit to the bombardier’s expansively windowed compartment at the front of the plane.

When I popped out of the same belly hatch I’d crawled into minutes before, I felt as though I’d been doing contortions. These machines were not designed with comfort in mind. They were designed for one purpose – to deliver a payload on an enemy target. If your feet didn’t go numb during the ride, so much the better. Part of me wonders how this people from today’s relatively soft “Sleep Number bed” society would handle the unforgiving nature of this design philosophy if it were inflicted on them today. They’d probably talk to their therapists, and then sue.

Another thing I’ve learned: these machines may be old, but they are astoundingly complex. I was amazed at how many parts were inside the wheel well I was cleaning, and how many of them had to work together to accomplish a specific task. It’s not just the big things, either – the little things are impressive, too. During my first visit, someone showed me some rust-encrusted gun sights that had been pulled from a wreck of a B-25 that had crashed in a lake years before.

The sights, which I’d never seen before, used a system of mirrors and lights to reflect the target and help the gunner more accurately aim. It was something so tactile and clever that I couldn’t help but be amazed. Many of the relics at Fleming fall into the same boat. Things from that era are still impressively engineered and well made, and I respect the creators all the more because they designed these things with slide rules and pencils.

I came home with part of history underneath my fingernails last Saturday after cleaning out that wheel well. When I got home, I looked at the stack of un-built model kits in the basement that await my time and patience, and found them somehow lacking in comparison to what I’d just done. For years, I’d only tasted pale imitations of the historical machines I’d admired from a distance. Now, I’m getting my hands dirty, and it feels great.

Quitting swearing: blankety-blank-blank

2010-01-15T13:48:00.000-06:00

As I heard the stomping footsteps hit the floor above me, I realized that my foul-mouthed tirade had been overheard.

It was late. My wife had gone to bed and I was downstairs on my ancient eMac (hey, it was free) trying to accomplish something of moderate importance. As the computer did its best to keep up with me, I let off a foul-mouthed verbal tirade that would have made Denis Leary blush. I was confident that no one could hear me – that it was just unemotional circuitry and overemotional me.

“Cut it out!” my wife shouted down the stairs. I blushed. I knew I’d been caught.

With our child growing smarter by the day, I’ve known for a while that I would have to give up swearing. My wife and I started a swear jar as a New Year’s resolution, and so far, I’ve racked up a tremendous debt while contributing nothing. I’ve quit smoking, and quitting smoking is easy compared to quitting swearing. It’s one thing to go through withdrawal for a week. It’s another to quit what has been a lifetime habit.

My first experience with the power of vulgarity came when I was 5 years old, and started swearing at uncooperative Legos. My mother asked me where I’d learned those words. I told her. I’d learned them from my father. Four warnings later, she washed my mouth out with soap, which she still feels bad about. I remember grinning as I looked into the mirror and saw the foam around my lips and on my chin. I resembled a rabid dog from a cartoon. Besides, it was hotel soap, and didn’t taste that bad.

I was fascinated with the power these words had. A few years later, I decided that I wanted to swear on a regular basis. I got off the school bus and ran upstairs without dropping my book bag. Staring into a sun hanging low in the afternoon sky, I smiled, and, with all of the dramatic emphasis I could muster from my eight-year-old body, cultivated and unleashed my first deliberate post-soap obscenity.

It felt good. It felt powerful. I liked swearing. I decided to do it more often.

I managed to keep my habit a suppressed secret into the teenaged years, when swearing was as common as the cans of Mountain Dew we had permanently glued to our hands. We had some good times, swearing and I – reciting the dirty bits from Adam Sandler comedy albums, and quoting Dr. Dre on the way home from the video store. There was something about it that made me feel edgy and alive.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. I face the prospect of letting this part of myself fade into the past. I like swearing. I don’t like obscenity, per say, but I find a properly applied swear word to be artful at times, as a more earthy and earnest way to express one’s frustrations.

Still, my wife is right. I can’t keep doing it – not in front of ears and eyes that hear and see my every move and seek to mimic it. I don’t want my daughter’s idea of “Daddy” to be synonymous with a cantankerous, foul-mouthed ogre. It may be hard in the short term, but in the long run, the best thing to do is to set a good example – even if it means using “fiddlesticks!” as a much-less-than-satisfying substitute for it’s unprintable swear word counterpart.

I’m going to be prepared. I’m keeping a small stock of hotel soap, just in case. It’s not for my daughter, you see – it’s for me. If I know anything about myself, I quit things the hard way. I quit smoking by eating cigarettes. Now, I have to eat words, and it makes me want to choke.

James Cameron's "Avatar" - the face of things to come?

2010-01-11T12:40:00.002-06:00

Apparently, all of the hype has turned out to be true. “Avatar,” rushing past the $1.4 billion revenue mark this past weekend, truly is a game changer.

While the storyline, with elements lifted from familiar movies like “Dances With Wolves” and “Aliens” isn’t anything remarkable in itself, director James Cameron’s true triumph is in creating a world that seems so real that an online topic thread called “"Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” has more than 100 members on the “Avatar” website. Like he did with the “Terminator” movies and “Titanic,” Cameron has once again changed what is possible with movies.

After years of hype (how Cameron invented much of the technology to make it, how he spent 12 years doing it, etc.) my hopes were pretty high. When the first trailer previews came out, the movie looked, well, awful. It looked like another computer-generated adventure in a world that looked like a video game. There was a reason for that – the 3D effects, the movie’s true coup, weren’t there.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, “Avatar” uses 3D in a way that makes you forget it is even there. It’s not like an old 1950s-era movie, where 3D was a gimmick. No, this time, you lose track of the concept minutes in to the movie. I immersed myself in places that seem so real that I questioned whether or not they had always been in my memory. When I left the theatre, my brain was humming. I felt like I’d lived it – like I’d been to these places before, and had some sort of ancestral tie to them.

The story line of “Avatar” revolves around a greedy corporation that is trying to save a dying Earth by mining a mineral (called “Unobtainium”) on a planet called Pandora, which is populated by a race of 7-foot-tall aliens called the Na’vi. The Na’vi’s main village is on a huge deposit of Unobtainium, so the corporation develops simulations of the creatures, called “Avatars,” that are remote-operated by humans. One of the humans, sent to infiltrate the Na’vi, instead falls in love with the culture, and becomes one of its greatest heroes when times runs out and the company starts the military assault to clear the area.

James Cameron has several elements from “Aliens” in this movie – the greedy corporation putting profits before people (apparently, in space, all corporations like to hear you scream), powered robot suits, aircraft making atmospheric entry from space ships, hypersleep, Sigourney Weaver, etc. Cameron isn’t the only one to reference his own past work in “Avatar.” Soundtrack composer James Horner’s score uses motifs from other scores he has written. In fact, one of the main themes for the Na’vi rips off the first part of the main motif from “Glory,” another Horner score. Some of the action cues are also reminiscent of fragments of “Aliens,” “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan,” and “Titanic.”

The plot boils down to simplification: all corporations are bad, all native cultures are good. I doubt our troops in Iraq will be seeing this movie. There are several unsubtle references to some of the perhaps less-diplomatic aspects of America’s foreign policy this decade, including use of the phrase “shock and awe” in conjunction with the final assault.

The idea that people on Earth would pay a corporation using armed forces to forcibly remove other cultures on other planets and steal their resources also sounds like something that would actually happen. It appears that making any sort of sacrifice in lifestyle isn’t any more popular in the future than it is now. Out of sight, out of mind – just as long as it isn’t in my back yard.

It’s easy to draw parallels between this plotline and others taken through human history. The parallel between the story and what happened to Native American tribes in the United States is so obvious that it practically smashed the viewers’ glasses with a baseball bat. There are other references in “Avatar” to the native peoples’ gods failing to protect them.

I am reminded of how the Inca saw this happen in real life where, in November 1532, 168 Spanish conquistadors arrived in the holy city of Cajamarca. They faced 80,000 troops and the Incan emperor, yet within 24 hours they had killed more than 7,000 and had the emperor in chains. Within hours, an empire was destroyed. Eventually, more than 95 percent of the entire native populations are wiped out. The “savages” in “Avatar” face the same fate.

In the end of the story, though, it is the god of technology that fails, as well-equipped and powerful military forces are crushed (sometimes literally) by the powers of nature. It’s perhaps an unintended reminder to another technologically proud culture (us) that no gods are truly infallible.

“Avatar” is just a story – albeit one which draws on history and current events and presents these in such a way that it wipes the movie-making slate clean. If “Avatar” is any indication of what we can expect for the future of cinema, it could be more amazing than we could imagine. This new technology could elevate cinema to the place it once held in the pantheon of entertainment as the place where you go to see things you can’t see anywhere else. All it took was a $238 million gamble from James Cameron – a gamble that appears to have succeeded.

Sticks, stones and cyberspace: online behavior has real-life consequences

2010-01-07T14:58:00.001-06:00

While many saw the possibilities and potential of the Internet as it gathered momentum in the early 1990s, I doubt that many people could have foreseen how ingrained it would become in people’s everyday lives.

While many aspects of these developments are positive, there is a downside to this blend of real and online living: it's easier than ever for people to be verbally abusive, saying things online that they might not say in a face-to-face conversation. Go to any online comment board for a story featuring the word “Obama,” Pelosi,” or “Palin,” and you’ll see what I mean. Within a few posts, the name calling starts, and 400 posts later, the message stream ends with "No, YOU’RE an idiot."

The problem doesn’t stop there. Online bullying has driven people to suicide – people like 13-year-old Megan Meier, who hanged herself after being told off by a neighbor pretending to be a boy who liked her on MySpace. When a 19-year-old Florida man who committed suicide in front of a live audience in 2008 relayed his intentions in an online forum hours before he committed the act, he was greeted with responses like, “You want to kill yourself? Do it, do the world a favor and stop wasting our time with your mindless self-pity.” He swallowed a fatal dose of pills as hundreds of people watched online.

Hundreds. Did any of them call the police? Did any of them think that this was something worth a second thought about?

Hours later, as police broke down the door to Abraham Biggs’ apartment, nearly 1,500 people were watching a video stream of the long-dead man's body. Biggs isn’t the first or the only person to have killed himself in front of Internet viewers and he won't be the last – but would people who wrote messages like the one above responded the same way if they’d seen Biggs about to jump off a bridge? I think not. So why write such statements? Has the line between fantasy and reality blurred to the point where we cheer people online to their deaths? And if so, why?

We can do and say things we might not get away with in real life because there aren't any apparent consequences on the Internet. The very nature of the technology fosters this disconnection between strangers, and makes such behavior possible. It illustrates one of the secondary findings from a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Milgram’s experiment focused on the willingness of subjects to obey authority figures who instructed them to administer electric shocks to a “learner,” who was in fact an actor who would plead with the test subject to stop and later pretended to die if the shocks continued.

It was easier for Milgram’s test subjects to shock the learned to “death” when that subject was hidden from their view – when all it took was the push of a button. In fact, the closer the learner was to the test subject, the more the test subjects resisted the command to carry out the shocks. Milgram's experiment didn't set out to prove it, but it illustrates that it is easier to hurt people when they the farther away from you – like on a computer screen.

The new world we have entered continues to amaze me. We have the ability to be in constant contact with the ones we love, to hear about things moments after they happen, and to enrich our lives with the goods and only a truly worldwide market can provide.

I'm not against the opportunities this technological revolution can provide – but it has made it easier to say and encourage previously unspeakable things. It's akin to being in a dark theatre watching something on stage. It's easy to should insults and heckle when you are in the dark. In the Internet's case, it's done behind a handle like "Wampa12" that reveals little, if anything, about the user, and thus guarantees this anonymity.

While technology has changed the way we interact, it hasn't changed who we are as humans or the realism of the emotions we feel. It is important, now more than ever, to remember that there is a human being on the receiving end of any message, despite how many digital walls stand between sending and recipient.

I'm tired of seeing the callousness, the hatred, and the gross insensitivity to anything close to civility. The old saying about sticks and stones was incorrect then, and it is incorrect now: words can hurt, and do. Use them wisely.

Modern warfare: drones attack public connection to battlefields far away

2009-12-17T13:11:00.001-06:00

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, insurgent forces in Iraq are using a $26 software program to compromise U.S. Predator unmanned flying drones.

The insurgents are using programs like SkyGrabber, which captures live feeds from the drone’s cameras, allowing them to see what is getting beamed back to U.S. forces. U.S. officials are saying that there isn’t any evidence that insurgents were able to take control of the drones, but the intercepted imagery could give an advantage “by removing the element of surprise” from certain missions.

U.S. military forces have thousands of these drones in service, some of which are capable of carrying out missile strikes. Robotic technology has advanced greatly since the first primitive unmanned recon vehicles (basically glorified remote-controlled airplanes with cameras) used during the first Gulf War. Now, Predator drones can linger silently over a target for hours or days at a time, controlled by U.S. Air Force handlers half a world away.

The abilities these drones possess create new ethical issues. Jane Mayer, author of a New Yorker Magazine article called “The Predator War,” raised a good point during an NPR interview this fall.

“If we can’t feel the impact of the people that we’re killing and we can’t see them, and none of our own people (are) at risk, does this somehow make it easier to just be in a perpetual state of war because there’s no seeming cost to us? ... My sense is that (with) this kind of technology, there’s going to be no turning back.”

P.W. Singer, author of “Wired for War,” put it another way.

“This is leading some of the first generation of soldiers working with robots to worry that war waged by remote control will come to seem too easy, too tempting. More than a century ago, Gen. Robert E. Lee famously observed: ‘It is good that we find war so horrible, or else we would become fond of it.’ He didn’t contemplate a time when a pilot could ‘go to war’ by commuting to work each morning in his Toyota to a cubicle where he could shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away and then make it home in time for his kid’s soccer practice.”

If the American populace knows that U.S. troops will be sent in harm’s way, they ask troubling questions – like ‘why are we doing this?’ With robots, there are no such questions, because robots aren’t people. They aren’t citizen soldiers whose parents and spouses raise holy hell when a loved one doesn’t come back from the battlefield. The impact of a loss of a drone doesn’t dent approval ratings or political capital.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other night called “Why We Fight.” It states the opinion that real opposition to the Vietnam War at home started in earnest when the lottery system made it so that middle and upper class children faced the real risk of being drafted. The armed forces responded, in the wake of Vietnam, with an “all-volunteer force.”. While this may, as some have argued, created a better military, it also had the effect of removing the commonality of military service from American life.

In the decades since, it seems that the military has become more and more of a detached entity from the lives of the average American, who may know few people in the service. Removing this connection has, in my opinion, removed some of the human cost from recent military decisions. Dead soldiers still come home at Dover Air Force Base, sure – but public outcry over their deaths is muted.

Robots will only carry this detachment to another level. Removing the human element from a military operation will negate questions regarding said operations. After all, who cares if we lose a drone? It’s just a robot. Now, if that same mission were being carried out by a human pilot, and that pilot were shot down and taken prisoner, the resulting firestorm of criticism would be damaging. Removing the human removes this risk – and gives those in power a freer hand for performing consequence-free operations.

Remember this, though – those robots perform missions against human beings. They may be our enemies, but their deaths are very real. Sept. 11 may have come as a shock to Americans, but not to those in other countries who’d seen our cruise missiles destroy targets in Iraq or Sudan during the 1990s. We’ve been at war for a long time – and will continue to be ignorant of this war so long as the costs are hidden from us.

In the wake of 9/11, many of us asked, “Why do they hate us?” It seemed a logical question, but only in the insulated bubble that most Americans had been living in. Our leaders take great pains to assure us that each new operation will be bloodless, that we will indeed “be greeted as liberators.”

Robots taking more and more of the work load, combined with the public’s increasing apathy towards years-long operations so long as the body counts are low, will likely only result in us re-asking the same question when another tragedy happens.

I've become one of "those guys" at McDonalds

2009-12-14T11:32:00.000-06:00

As my daughter tottered through the dimly lit maze of plastic tunnels and absorbent floor material that made up the McDonald’s PlayPlace, I realized that I’d become “that guy.”

I’m “that guy” who chews his food like cud and keeps an eye on the child whose motion seems less guided as it is compelled by forces she doesn’t understand. I’m “that guy” who utters slowly progressing warnings when his daughter is grabbing on to another child: “Evvvveeeeeyyy? Evvvvey?? No. Let that kid goooo. I meaaaannn it.” I’m “that guy” whose Friday night wardrobe has devolved into a sweatshirt and “comfy jeans” – you know, the “relaxed fit” ones your previous self would have never admitted to owning?

While I always knew I would be a father someday, I never knew what this actually meant. I never thought that I would ever have to fight for time to iron a shirt. I never thought that my ears could train themselves to recognize the particular frequency of my child’s cry and be able to pick it out of a crowd. I never EVER gave any thought to the idea that I’d ever be one of the anonymous balding fathers whose benevolence contributes to make the carefree experience of childhood possible.

It struck me there that my own happy childhood was no accident. It was created and nurtured not only through my parents, but also through the other adults involved in my young life. Now 30 years old, I have moved from taking advantage of this protective cocoon to doing my best to create one for my own offspring. It’s a powerful feeling – and one I am just beginning to understand.

That was my Friday night. I’ve determined that life is divided into distinct modes of operation. In this case, it’s “pursuit” and “maintenance.” Friday nights used to be spent in pursuit of a significant other. Now, those nights are spent maintaining and developing what that significant other and I have created, be it a massive pile of laundry or giving my daughter a trip through a Play Place.

I used to work at this same McDonald’s location when I was 16, sweeping floors and mopping up accidents of the last decade’s children. At the time, I cursed the parents who let their kids made ketchup messes, let them run around with sticky hands, and just seemed so detached from the experience, like they were so stone on Valium that they could care less. Now, I realize that these parents were probably exhausted and, like me many days now, craving a minute or two of what passes for tranquility.

I also realize now the awesome marketing firepower that McDonald’s aims at children and parents. For children, it promises a cheap toy, the luxury of fast food, and a trip to a wonderful place to play. For adults, it offers a trip to relive those same times, all while being able to eat a meal in relative peace as their children run through a plastic maze of diminished responsibility. For every minute my daughter spends in a plastic tube, that’s one more minute that I can eat my French fries and stare blankly into space.

Laws and Those They Don't Apply To

2009-12-08T14:24:00.002-06:00

I know sports players are treated differently from regular folks, but this is ridiculous.
In the past two weeks, two Minnesota Vikings (Adrian Peterson and Bernard Berrian) were both pulled over after being clocked at speeds well over 100 mph (Peterson: 109 mph in a 55-mph zone; Berrian: 104 mph in a 60-mph zone). Both were let go with tickets – but if my reading of Minnesota state law is correct, they should have gotten far worse.
According to Section 171.17 "REVOCATION" of Minnesota statute, "The department shall immediately revoke the license of a driver upon receiving a record of the driver's conviction of ... violation of an applicable speed limit by a person driving in excess of 100 miles per hour. The person's license must be revoked for six months for a violation of this clause, or for a longer minimum period of time applicable under section 169A.53, 169A.54, or 171.174." In other words, having exceeded this speed limit, both of these men should have lost their licenses. If it had been you or me, that's probably what would have happened, and I would be writing you from my new home in the garage.
But that didn't happen. If anything, Berrian and Peterson got off with tickets, which don't add to much given the fact that Peterson has a salary of $2.8 million and Berrian has a $13.7 million salary. I'm sure the speeding tickets, which would have seriously dinged yours-truly's budget for the month, will probably end up being a drop in the bucket of a never ending sport-cash waterfall.
Had I gotten pulled over, I would have lost my license and likely been thrown into the back of a squad car. I wouldn't, as Berrian and Peterson did, have gotten a ticket. And I sure as hell wouldn't have one of the troopers, as he hands me said ticket, wish me luck against Chicago. No, I wouldn't have gotten any of this. Why? Because I am no one. I don't throw a ball, I don't get paid millions for it, and I'm certainly not connected to the image of the state. No. I'm jail fodder for sure.
What bothers me so much about both of these instances is that these men acted like they were above the law, which, seeing as how they've been let off easy, seems exactly correct. It's a great message to send to people: I can drive 60 miles over the speed limit on the same public roads you and your children travel on because I am famous. And if I were to hit you? Well, I'll probably get out of that somehow, too.
These sorry incidents are symptomatic of the sports-worship that I think misplaces our priorities as a culture.
To use an old argument, the people who teach our kids get paid squat, but thoroughbred athletes like Peterson and Berrian are paid millions to play a childhood game that's been inflated and distorted beyond any sort of playground fantasy. This is nothing new – the Romans had well-paid gladiators who were no doubt spoiled by success – but I would like to think that the vast gulf between the salaries of those who contribute to society and those who suit up on Sundays would close someday. I guess it won't.
The world can really be divided into two categories: those who can get away with driving 109 mph and those who can't. Where do you fall into this scheme of things?

An entire retail world at my fingertips - but is it worth the cost?

2009-11-30T09:57:00.005-06:00

As I walked through a Best Buy this weekend, I was amazed to see how many artists were still represented in their CD department.

Remember those? The five-inch shiny disks we used to buy music on before people under 30 (and some over) started going to the digital convenience of iTunes? Yeah, I thought they were gone, too, but they aren’t. I can remember the last CD I purchased (a Nine Inch Nails album in 2007) like it was yesterday. It was unlike buying something on iTunes, which is convenience itself. I had to drive to the store, walk through said store, use my eyes to find the disc, walk it up to the register, and purchase it. Once I was in the car, I had to unwrap it and manually insert it in the disc player. How exhausting!

While I love the fact that iTunes offers rare and strange things that I would never, ever see on a Best Buy shelf, I wonder if the shift between online and offline retailing is something that truly benefits us. I’m no economist, but it would seem that offline retailing would be more beneficial in the long term, because it requires employees, people to maintain the physical infrastructure, contracts with the people who make the merchandise, people who ship the merchandise – a long chain of economic ties. Online retail, however, requires far less of these – no employees to speak of (or at least not nearly as many as an actual store) fewer shipping needs (as items are likely shipped from a warehouse directly to the customer) no physical infrastructure to build or maintain, greatly-reduced local tax base and so on.

It’s become apparent that technology has changed how we live our lives in ways that unimaginable even several years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that digital camera technology would become so dominant as to render all of the Pro-Ex and Ritz locations an endangered species (taking with them all of the film manufacturing jobs)? Who would have thought that we’d see shrinking CD selections at stores like Best Buy? Who would have thought we'd see formerly-vital video rental locations like Blockbuster Video shuttering stores because it can't compete with RedBox and Netflix? Who would have thought that the U.S. Postal Service, an organization that was formerly seen as a lifetime job, would be posting billions of dollars in losses and shuttering facilities because people don't write letters anymore? Who would have thought that’d we’d see entire large chains like Circuit City fall under the combined weight of Best Buy’s market dominance and the Internet?

If it seems like the so-called economic recovery isn’t apparent, I think part of it has to do with entire industries as we knew them not even a decade ago no longer existing in a meaningful form. Circuit City alone took more than 30,000 jobs with it when is collapsed earlier this year. And if you take away those jobs, there are going to be people spending less money, right? How does this benefit us?

While the Internet has all but turned the retail world on its head, I don’t think it’s something that benefits us long term, much in the way that I don’t think that shipping off many of our entry level manufacturing jobs overseas has done us any favors. No one can stop the inexorable march of technology, but I can’t help but think that there’s a price to be paid in terms of human employment, be it here or elsewhere in the country. Remember, behind every shuttered Ritz Camera and Circuit City facade lingers memories of employees with families to feed that contributed to the local tax base. Can we really say that Amazon or eBay (both of which I happen to love, full disclosure) have that same benefit?

Here’s a glimpse of things to come. When my dad was looking at a dual VCR/DVD player at Best Buy, he asked me to run to Target to price compare. When I came back with the answers, he asked me an interesting question. “Where else could we go to look for these?” We sat there in silence. No easy answer came to mind - at least anything in the physical world that we could drive to. Perhaps this is the future of commerce – sending money to people unseen in places unknown, and then wondering why local retail seems to be withering on the vine.

There is a cost to have this convenience we’ve all come to expect, and whether or not we realize it, it’s something we’re all paying, be it as a customer with few local options or someone who worked in an industry that no longer exists.

My Heart Will Go On-Board the Titanic

2009-11-27T22:36:00.005-06:00

From the moment I saw the first pages of the December 1986 issue of National Geographic, the RMS Titanic had me hooked. I talked about the disaster to anyone in my first-grade class who would listen. I read, and re-read, the article to the point of memorization. My biggest Christmas gift next year was a book about the expeditions to find the wreck written by Robert Ballard, the man who was featured in the National Geographic articles. I made Lego Titanics. I was able to draw the ship from memory by age eight, and would tell anyone who would listen that the fourth funnel was actually a fake. I read every singles scrap of information on both the ship and the sinking. For some reason, it spoke to me, even at a young age. It felt, to put it simply, mine.

One of my most prized possessions is an original copy of a 1912 book, “The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters,” published mere months after the disaster. I found it when I was 12 in an antique store, and gladly paid the $10 price that guy wanted for it. It shot up in value in 1997, when James Cameron’s “Titanic” created another legion of fans.

While I appreciated the interest, part of me felt jealous in the sharing. Where had you people been, I imagined asking, when I was making sand Titanics on the beach in Door County in 1989? Still, the movie did a lot to bring awareness to the event, even if no one named Rose or Jack had sex in the cargo hold in an act of rebellion against a cruel fiancé. One of the offshoots of the interest created in the movie was the traveling exhibitions that were made available for public viewing across the nation. I attended my second one tonight (the first being in 1999) at the Science Museum of Minnesota. I'm glad I was able to go (it was a birthday present), because any time you can stand next to the salvaged D-Deck gangway door from your icon and look through original window glass, it's a good time. It was a well-produced and informative display, but again, I found my old jealousies coming to a head. As I was standing next to a silhouetted outline of a lifeboat on the floor, I suppressed the urge to grab the person standing next to me and scream, with froth coming out of my mouth, “How many men were used to test these in Southampton before they were put on board? How many?” (The answer: 70). I wanted to bomb the crowd with the trivia that is lodged in my brain, to prove that I was somehow more Titanic than they were.

Still, I thought there were many moving artifacts presented in tasteful displays. What moved me the most was a simple pair of black woolen socks that belonged to someone who had died. They were found in his suitcase, along with a pair of pants and a vest, and brought to the surface years later. They moved me because they were so simple and humble. The man had taken them off to pack them, and died before ever getting a chance to wear them again. It’s tragic, in an infinitesimal way. The Titanic is a rare tragedy. If someone had a traveling exhibition on the Hindenburg, maybe a tenth of the people would show up. If someone had a traveling exhibit on the worst air disaster in history (two 747s colliding at Tenerife, Spain, which killed more than 580 people in 1977) it would be just me, and only if I wasn’t busy that day. No, Titanic is special – special because the people on board had so much time to decide whether or not to attempt to change their fate – to fight against an order of “women and children first;” to fight against an English class system whose raw survival percentages (63 percent of first-class passengers survived; 25 percent of those in third-class did) indicated just who was on top of the pile in life. The sinking is also unique because it took more than two-and-a-half hours for all of this human drama to play out, with all of the emotion and dreadful majesty that the spectacle encompassed.

The sinking wasn't even the only one of its kind in that era. The Empress of Ireland, another White Star liner, sank with more than 1,400 people aboard in May 1914 off the coast of Canada. She took nearly 1,000 of those people to the bottom with her - but most of those people were poor immigrants, and that ship sank in less than 20 minutes, making any sort of memorable dramatic narrative far less memorable than the agonizingly slow death of Titanic. With World War I less than six months away, these deaths would seem paltry in comparison to the millions lost on both sides during a four-year slog through the trench warfare meat grinder.

Towards the end of the exhibit, I saw a placard that explained how the artifacts were preserved, and how “even as you read this,” items still on the sea floor were rotting away due to the passage of time. These items, it said, needed to be preserved because (paraphrasing here) of their historical significance due to the era they represent. I take issue with this claim. It’s one thing to take items from the Titanic simply because you can make a whole hell of a lot of money doing so, but it’s quite another to claim that you are doing it in the name of preserving some era that people really don’t care about anyway. Items from this era are regularly cleaned out of Grandma’s house and given to Goodwill (if they are lucky), or thrown away out right. The only reason that these particular artifacts are worth preserving is because they were on the Titanic, pure and simple. To claim anything else is disingenuous.

I think Robert Ballard had the right idea in wanting to leave the site alone after he found it, to not take anything except photographs. Since 1986, the wreck has become something of a tourist attraction. Countless relic recovery expeditions have been launched to the site, and a couple even got married in a submersible on the wreck in 2001. Any dignity this site once had has been stripped by the same sort of greed and lust that drove men to build the biggest ship in the world in the first place. In its day, Titanic was the latest product of a culture whose sense of cleverness had swelled to the point where they had the nerve to create something and say, in the words of an anonymous deckhand, that “God himself could not sink this ship.” If anything, it reminds me that the same sort of smug satisfaction that we’ve somehow mastered fate through technology is just as alive and well as it was before April 14, 1912, when 50,000 tons of steel and iron began to rot away on the Atlantic seafloor as an unseen reminder of the costs of hubris.Perhaps an exhibition like the one I toured tonight is simply a reminder that time heals all wounds. I can’t imagine that it would have been a big hit had it been done in 1925, when the people who’d been on it and those who’d read about it in the papers were still alive, but now that they are all dead and gone, a new generation is curious and emotionally detached enough from the original event to find interest in it. It makes me wonder if, 90 years from now, my great-great-great grandson will be touring a 9/11 exhibition and yawning in boredom as his father explains that the steel column in front of him came from Tower Two. One irony with Titanic is that sea travelers were safer in the wake of the disaster. Ships of the time, where were getting bigger and bigger as creators designed new ways to build them, only had to carry a small amount of lifeboats. Remember, Titanic had the legal number of boats that was required – it just happened to be enough for 40 percent of the people on board. Also, radios of the time could be turned off, making a distress call pointless if no one was around to hear it. Both of these things changed in the wake of the sinking of Titanic.

The final irony? Had Titanic stayed afloat, she would have only been “the biggest ship in the world” for another month and 10 days. In May 1913, the Hamburg American Line launched the SS Imperator, which was 30 feet longer and 1,600 tons heavier than Titanic. In all likelihood, she would have ended up being sold for scrap, as her sister ship RMS Olympic was in 1934. She would have been forgotten by all except a handful of ship buffs, like yours truly, who also remember the RMS Britannic, the RMS Empress of Ireland, the SS Normandie, and many others who met their end at the end of a scrapper’s torch.

So, as I walked out of the exhibit with my replica third-class coffee mug and a photo of my family and I superimposed against the grand staircase, I felt a bit guilty, like I was an accomplice to being a disaster voyeur. On the other hand, it’s perhaps appropriate to quote a t-shirt which was popular as a form of late-90s backlash to Cameron’s blockbuster movie: “The ship sank. Get over it.”

The haves, have-nots, and state dinners that make me lose my appetite

2009-11-25T13:44:00.003-06:00

Usually, the haves and the have-nots are a little more subtle than this, but the evidence on how both are being treated are slapped all across the front page of today’s issue of the Star Tribune.
The bottom story, “Charities trimming turkey dinners,” is about how local charities have cut back on Thanksgiving dinners for poor people in the wake of the current economic state. According to the article, ICA Food Shelf gave 900 turkeys away last year. This year, the number dropped to 430 because of a lack of funds. Next to this article, in a green sidebar on the right side of the paper, a small snippet speaks volumes: “Nearly 1 in 7 parents with grown children say they had a “boomerang kid” move back him in the past year, said a Pew Research Center study. One in seven. That’s a quarter of a grade school classroom living with their parents.
Up higher on this page, in the same column, is a teaser called “A Festive Feast for the Obamas,” which outlines a “lavish outdoor feast” for their first state dinner. Close to 320 people attended the event, which is given more coverage on page A3. When I say “coverage,” I don’t mean, “article.” This is a full-page spread about the menu (created by guest chef Marcus Samuelsson), the entertainment (provided by Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, among others) and the gown Michelle wore (a champagne-colored number by Naeem Khan). The lead paragraph in the story drips with palpable awe and enthusiasm: “Each table for 10 was draped in green apple-colored cloths and napkins, offset by the sparkle of gold-colored flatware and china, including the service and dinner plates from the Eisenhower, Clinton, and George W. Bush settings. Floral arrangements of hydrangeas, roses and sweet peas in plum, purple and fuchsia were meant to evoke India’s state bird.”
This isn’t journalism. This is public relations fluff, and I am ashamed that news services spent the time and money to cobble this pageantry together. This smacks of the trappings of royalty, which, if memory serves, is one of the main reasons we split from the British in the first place. I’m also ashamed at the very fact that such luxury exists when so many are suffering. If George W. Bush had done this, in the midst of a recession, I could foresee calls from various corners saying that he is out of touch with Main Street and the common man (bear in mind, I am no fan of W.). But with the Obamas? It’s all apple-colored cloths and napkins, apparently.
This honeymoon crap needs to stop. The man has been in office for a year now. I for one would like to see an end to this type of fluff coverage. I understand – I get that Barack loves to play golf and basketball. I get that Michelle has an organic garden. I get that the kids love living in the White House. I get it. It’s been pounded into my brain over and over again by PR machinery that rivals the treads of an M-1 battle tank.
I get it – and I’m tired of it. It makes me angry that someone in Obama’s position could be so tone deaf in how this appears to people like me – taxpayers who can barely afford a meal at McDonald’s. I think the right thing to do in this situation would have been to take the money used to buy all of the glitz at that state dinner and donate it to the same food shelves that are trying to feed the have-nots, who don’t have the type of political connections to eat a “mostly vegetarian” meal off the White House finery. I think it would have been appropriate, given the current situation, to have a more restrained meal, perhaps even taking the time to recognize those who are going hungry or relying more on their local food shelves now than ever.
During the Civil War, Lincoln was outraged to find that his wife, Mary Todd, had been remodeling the White House without telling him.
“It would stink in the land,” he said, to ask Congress for more money “when the poor soldiers could not have blankets,” and paid the costs himself rather than approve any more bills for “flub dubs for that damned old house.” (“Did Lincoln own slaves? And other frequently asked questions about Abraham Lincoln” by Gerald J. Prokopiwicz).
It seems that Obama is unwilling even to give up the excesses of a state dinner. Is this the departure from “politics as usual” we were promised? If so, I’m disappointed.

Hanging up.

2009-11-23T11:52:00.002-06:00

My finger wavers over the power button, moving closer and closer to turn the device off, but in the end, my cell phone always wins. It never turns off.

I was listening to an interesting NPR commentary this morning from a woman (I didn’t catch her name) saying that she had spent more than $7,000 on a cell phone over the past decade and had never once used it for the sorts of emergency calls (stuck in a ditch, stranded at the airport, etc.) for which they are apparently most useful. The commentary ended with her saying that she was going cold turkey, and shutting the phone off. I wish I had her courage.

I don’t like the thought of being reachable at all times. The simple answer I get to this statement is usually something along the lines of “Well, why don’t you just turn the phone off?” My reply is equally simple: because of voicemail. Even if I shut the phone off, someone could leave a message – a message that I, being the completist that I am, would feel compelled to answer. So, along those lines of thought, shutting the phone off saves me nothing but the ring of the phone. Its obligation is still there. Waiting.

Cell phones have changed us, as this commentary stated. We’ve become ruder, we have shorter attention spans and, perhaps most egregious of all, are more self-centered. I think cell phones are perhaps a prototypical antecedent for why Facebook and Twitter exist. It is communication not for a purpose, but for simple communication’s sake. I don’t really need to tell anyone that I am having a sandwich for lunch, but with modern technology, I can, and, according to media professionals whom I seek to emulate, should. Remember – it’s not what you say, it’s how much you can say it, and in how many platforms.

I don’t want people to be able to reach me at any given time. I don’t want my work to be able to reach me whenever they want. Granted, neither of these things happens very often, let along at odd hours of the night, but they could, and that’s what bothers me. The potential for interruption has become an interruption in itself.

In the end, I think we were all lied to. Cell phones haven’t improved our lives; they’ve simply changed them, in my opinion for the worst. We all buy into the advertising, showing photogenic people talking to their photogenic friends in their photogenic calling circles, and the implication is made that we too could be one of those people – wanted, needed, and reachable for all sorts of fun and excitement. My reality does not jibe with this. If anything, the silence that my cell phone’s lack of activity during its first few days of operation reminded me that nothing had changed, that I was not one of these people – but before, it wasn’t an issue, because there wasn’t a phone not ringing to prove it.

I wish I had this woman’s courage. I wish I had the ability to just chuck this stupid thing in the water where it belongs, and have enough faith in myself and in those who know me that I could still hear something important in a timely manner without this electronic ball and chain. I wish I had the courage to hang up, and really start living in the moment, without the distraction of what might happen when the phone rings, and brings me an electronic stimulus that never fails to make me drop what I am doing in the hopes of some greater reward.

"Old Dogs" has me barking mad

2009-11-13T10:55:00.000-06:00

How does John Travolta keep getting work?
For the past week, I’ve been assaulted with previews of his latest movie, “Old Dogs,” which seems to be a variation of “Wild Hogs,” his 2007 comedic outing, only without motorcycles. Let’s hear the plot of this sure-fire Oscar winner: “Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins.” I can almost imagine the pitch at whatever board meeting green-lit this cinematic turd: “It’s Robin Williams! AND John Travolta! WITH TWINS!”
Everything about this movie, judging from the preview, smacks of bland inoffensiveness. Let’s face it: Robin Williams isn’t Robin Williams without being coked to the gills, and Travolta isn’t Travolta without disco music or witty Quentin Tarantino dialogue. These two have made so many insulting movies during the past decade (Travolta: “Swordfish,” “Wild Hogs,” “Battlefield Earth;” Williams: “Bicentennial Man,” “License to Wed,” “A.I.”) that they gone totally beyond the pale of what passes for acceptable Hollywood conduct. Have our standards fallen so low that these two has-beens can keep cranking out clunker after clunker and still find work?
Oh, I can hear the screams already. “Robin Williams is funny!” Yes, Robin Williams CAN be funny. I admit that. I loved “Death to Smootchy.” But he’s guilty of at least this much: it seems he will do any movie, no matter how terrible, for a paycheck. He’s become a comedic Robert DeNiro, turning in performance after performance of the same shtick. He’s almost become a parody of himself. Travolta is much the same. “Pulp Fiction” brought him back into the mainstream as a legitimate star, and ever since, he’s proven that the comeback he earned with that performance was a fluke. Come to think of it, these two belong together: Mork from Ork and Vinnie Barbarino, lighting up the silver screen. That’s right, folks – the 1970s never ended.
Watching the preview for “Old Dogs” is so painful that the only humorous item I find in it is that the movie itself will probably do OK in the box office, given that there is a relative scarcity of movies that both adults and kids can see and not be completely bored to death. If anything, it’s evidence that movies marketed to appeal to more than one age group have a higher failure rate than those aimed at a specific audience. I wonder what this film’s investors were thinking. If I were them, I would have sunk my money into a safer bet, like a direct-to-DVD “National Lampoon” movie loaded with innuendo. It’s a sure-fire moneymaker.
As a new parent, I have accepted the fact that I will more than likely have to sit through at least one variation of “Old Dogs” in my parenting lifetime. You’ll be able to recognize me pretty quickly: I’ll be the guy in the front row with duct tape over my mouth and steam coming out of my ears, boiling over at the fact that I can pay nearly $10 per ticket and this is the best that Hollywood can give me.

When someone great is gone

2009-11-09T20:46:00.001-06:00

As my wife’s relatives sat around a dining room table and discussed what to include in her grandfather’s obituary, I looked down to see a copy of the days newspaper open to that particular page. It was a mixture of tiny text and smaller photos of happy-looking people, gazing out to the world with all of the wonder and delight their faces could muster. It was, I thought, the end result of the discussion the relatives were having at that particular moment.
It had been a good day up until I got the message. The sun was out, the winds were warm, and I faced the prospect of a birthday party that night for all of the family members who were having birthdays in November. I knew that Julian, my wife’s grandfather, would not be there that night, but from what we’d heard, the knee surgery he’d undergone earlier in the week had proceeded smoothly. After getting home from church and laying my daughter down for a nap, I happened to look at my phone. I saw there was a message.
“Hi, Joe, this is Kitty (my wife’s aunt). I’m sure you’ve already heard, but Julian passed away this morning…”
The November birthday party was still on, she assured me, because we’d all need to convene and figure out what we’d do regarding the funeral arrangements. I saved the message, and put the phone down. The silence in the house was startling. My wife, whom I presumed did not know about her grandfather passing away, was at dance rehearsals. I called her several times, and finally told her the bad news.
I never realized this before, but every single obituary on a typical newspaper page is a product of the same resonating bad news. It starts at a main source, and spreads like a ripple in the family waters, reaching ever-distant shores, inspiring the same reactions of sadness and disbelief. It’s also a reminder of our own precious mortality, which never seems as vital or fleeting as it does when someone who was always there before now isn’t.
I wasn’t terribly close to Julian, but I knew him well enough to say that he had a long and fruitful life. In fact, many of the people on the obituary page seemed to have had that much in common. As a writer, it raises a serious question: how do you summarize someone’s life, with all of its joys, slings and arrows, in a single paragraph? It seems an impossible task – yet it is done hundreds of thousands of times every day.
I will never look at the obituary page the same way again.

“The worst is all the lovely weather,
I'm stunned, it's not raining.
The coffee isn't even bitter,
Because, what's the difference?
There's all the work that needs to be done,
It's late, for revision.
There's all the time and all the planning,
And songs, to be finished.”

-LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great”

Don't turn the page on the humble book

2009-10-21T15:28:00.004-05:00

I’m going to start today’s entry with a little parable. Don’t worry; this will make sense with what’s coming after it.

Euripides rolled up the papyrus scroll and placed it on the table with nearly a dozen others containing the original of Aeschylus, the Greek playwright. The scrolls were among the million or so that made the Library at Alexandria one of the marvels of the modern world. As he rolled up the scroll, he turned to his co-worker, Hypatia.
“You know, this place is great and all, but is it really a smart idea to have all of our ideas in one place?” he asked. “I mean, paper burns, right?”
“Oh, come on,” Hypatia said. “This is Egypt. Nothing’s going to happen to us, or to this library…”

Of course, that proved to be untrue. The library was burned to the ground in 391 AD as part of Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all "pagan" (non-Christian) temples. Now, nearly 2,000 years later, not one of the million scrolls remains. Why? In my opinion, this happened because the Egyptians put all of their eggs in one basket. They thought, as I’m sure we do now, that their information was going to be somehow permanent because of it, but history, as it often does, has other plans.
I was reminded of this while making breakfast this morning, while a host on NPR was discussing how Barnes and Noble, the venerable bookseller (and one of my former employers) was getting into the business of developing their own electronic reading device to compete with Kindle.
The device, called a “Nook,” sounds impressive. According to an article in Wired.com, it can hold digital versions of 1,500 books. The Nook also comes with built-in WiFi, 2GB of internal storage and an MP3 player. If you go by features alone, it beats a book hands-down.
In fact, in a digital age, it makes sense to NOT make books: you have to cut down trees, make the paper, print to pages, bind them, ship them, and finally, hire some snotty kid who just graduated from St. Cloud State with a journalism degree to sell them for $7 an hour. A digital book, on the other hand, exists as the sort of miraculous “ones-and-zeroes” that make our modern lives possible. It’s cleaner – it doesn’t create paper waste, doesn’t involve manufacturing in the traditional sense, and, best of all, it’s sold by computer, not a snotty college kid.
Here’s my worry with this stuff. For now, the humble book is more or less holding its own as the dominant literary format, but the Internet, and devices like the Kindle and Nook, are closing the gap with each passing year. It’s like cell phones were in the 1990s – a luxury item that now, a mere decade later, is a ubiquitous household fixture. I could foresee a future where the book is eventually eclipsed by these sorts of electronic mediums – mediums that require infrastructure, power, constant Microsoft updates, etc.
The ancient Egyptians were probably much like we are: smugly confident that whatever we build will last forever, that nothing will ever happen to the sorts of self-aggrandizing towers we build for ourselves. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and all it would take to have our own “Library at Alexandria” moment is for a series of solar flares to destroy all that we have worked so hard to create – including the digitally-store knowledge we’ve accumulated along the way. Here’s where books come into their own. Unlike their digital brethren, the only things they require to operate are a decent light source.
I’m not against digital progress. But at the same time, I think humanity needs to temper this desire to relentlessly “improve” everything to death. Our world, and our society, is more fragile than any of us would like to imagine, and if the unthinkable were to happen, I’d like to know that all that we’ve learned along the way would not be lost because we converted it into a format that ceases to exist when the society that created it does.
We shouldn't face the prospect of an intellectual dark age simply because we ran out of battery power.

A Front Row Seat to "Progress" at 12:26 a.m.

2009-10-17T10:19:00.002-05:00

With each concussive blow, the shock wave traveled from the heavy moving equipment working on the Crosstown reconstruction project to my house, shaking the house, and making it impossible to sleep.

That’s right. They were doing this at 12:26 a.m. this morning.

Sleep. Ha.

For the past few weekends, work crews working on the project have been taking down parts of the old freeway infrastructure (as there is a freeway wall in the way, I can never tell which) starting around 10 p.m. Friday nights, and going until the early morning hours. Usually, this is something we can eventually tune out, but last night was the worst yet. I’m not sure what they were doing, but it sounded like a war zone outside.

The jackhammers were the machine guns, the heavy equipment (probably bulldozers) was the tanks, and whatever was hitting the ground and causing my house to shake was the artillery. I’d gone to bed reading a book called “One Soldier’s War,” written by a Russian solider who had fought in Chechnya, and it reminded me of a passage he’d written about being on the front lines in a trench, trying to sleep. I’ll paraphrase: you sleep, but you don’t really sleep.

After 15 minutes of this, my normally-calm wife let loose a torrent of profanity, and went to go look out the front window. Not only were they working, but they lit up the entire scene using four or five of the brightest floodlights I’d ever scene. It was like they were playing night baseball with Cats. I shot some video of the scene, providing my own narration, and went back to bed, or tried to. Somehow, our 10-month-old never woke up.

My wife borrowed my earplugs and eventually went to sleep, and I contented myself, using “One Soldier’s War” as a sort of metaphor: I was behind the front lines, I was warm and safe, and I could deal with the noise. Eventually, I fell asleep.

This project has been going on for more than a few years now, and in that time, we've seen our freeway wall taken down (meaning friends could see our Christmas tree from the freeway, a sort-of nice benefit) and rebuilt, our front street torn up and redone, and have fallen asleep more than once to a symphony of back-up alarms, compacting rollers and the banging gates of dump trucks.

We've had windows crack. We've had things fall off of shelves. We have worried, at times, that our 60-year-old house won't take the strain. Somehow, the old girl always holds together.

There have been times when I've wanted to go out and ask the workers when they'll be done, or if they have any clue how much this activity affects the lives of the people who are closest hit by it. Ultimately, I realize that these workers are mere cogs in a huge machine, and talking to them would be about as effective as sneezing at a dragon. I scheme about recording the noise with the best equipment money can buy, renting a flatbed truck covered in speakers, finding the homes of the heads of the project, and blaring to them, in the middle of the night, just exactly what we fall asleep (or don't) on a regular basis).

"What's that, officer? You say this noise level is criminal? Well, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make!"

It's evil, I admit. But a lack of sleep can do that to people.

I understand the need to fix the infrastructure we use every day, and I understand why they do it at night. But this is our home. We can't go anywhere else. the reconstruction project is something that’s easy to understand during the daylight hours, when you aren’t trying to go to sleep amid utter cacophony. It’s amazing how important things can shrink in comparison when matched against needed sleep.

The best part about this entire experience is that, as in the past, we will no doubt get some form letter from MnDOT on Monday morning, days late and written by someone who lives in a place like Prior Lake and doesn’t fall asleep to construction noise, that we could expect some noise disturbances from night construction Friday night.

I’ll hang on to that letter. I will no doubt use it, in the form of chewed up paper, to make crude earplugs to try and blot out the sounds of “progress.”

"It was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there" - Columbine parent breaks silence

2009-10-15T10:00:00.001-05:00

In the 1990s, Generation X was spared much of history’s cruelty – the job market (in the latter half of the decade) was booming, there was no draft, no pandemics, and the high point of fashion for the better point of a decade was comfy flannel.
For me, that innocence of that decade shattered April 20, 1999, when two young men killed 11 others before taking their own lives at Columbine High School in Colorado. I watched the event live on CNN, spending nearly five hours in front of a flickering screen that promised death at every angle. The legends started early: the boys did it because of Marilyn Manson, they killed Rachel Scott because she believed in God, they were bullied, etc.) For weeks afterwards, it was hard to talk about anything else. Part of this was the unspoken fear that the person next to you, or even you yourself, could be capable of such an act if pushed too far.
While we heard from plenty of victims and the families, we never heard from the two shooter’s parents. In a way, I don’t blame them. What do you say when your child does something so unspeakable? Are there even words in the English language that can convey the depth of trauma that would likely result in knowing that your progeny was responsible for the deaths of 11 people in the worst mass-shooting at a school in American history (until 2007)?
This week, one of those parents broke her silence. In an interview with O Magazine, Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, wrote that she could not accept Dylan's participation in the massacre until she connected it with his desire to die.
"Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide."
In a video shot that morning, Dylan and Eric Harris posed in their military-style clothes, and Dylan said goodbye to his mother (transcript found at www.acolumbinesite.com).
Eric: "Say it now."
Dylan: "Hey mom. Gotta go. It's about a half an hour before our little judgment day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate as far as (inaudible) or something. Just know I'm going to a better place. I didn't like life too much and I know I'll be happy wherever the f-ck I go. So I'm gone. Good-bye. Reb..."
Eric: "Yea... Everyone I love, I'm really sorry about all this. I know my mom and dad will be just like.. just f-cking shocked beyond belief. I'm sorry, all right. I can't help it."
Dylan: (interrupts) "We did what we had to do."
Even after the echoes of gunshots and police sirens faded away on the high school campus, the hatred took more lives. Carla Hochhalter, whose 17-year-old daughter was paralyzed in the shootings, shot herself in a gun store while the clerk had his back turned to do a background check. She later died at the hospital.
In a way, I think part of all of us died that day – the part of us that wanted to believe that school was a safe place; the part of us that wanted to believe that evil was something that existed somewhere else; and the part of us that knew, deep in the back of our minds, that it was possible to leave for school one day and never come home.

Confessions of a thrift store shopaholic

2009-09-30T10:09:00.000-05:00

They were diamonds in the rough, but once they were rubbed to a shine, their dazzle was brilliant.
This past Saturday, I went shopping for a new pair of dress shoes. After search several thrift stores, I found them – although they weren’t quite “foot worthy” yet. Whoever had last owned them had apparently not known how to take care of leather, and the exterior was caked with snow salt. The interior, however, was in good shape, and the leather foot liner bore a more important mark of quality – the words “Cole Haan.” A little while later, after I’d cleaned the interior and exterior, and polished the black leather with several coats of polish, the shoes gleamed like new. The best part? This pair of shoes originally retailed for $130 – and I bought them for $2.99.
I’m addicted to thrift shopping. To me, there’s no better present in the world than going into a thrift store and having someone say, as my friend Becky did on my 24th birthday, “Here’s $20. Buy whatever you want.” I don’t remember what I bought that night – but I remember being on top of the world, feeling like the entire store was mine for the asking. It basically was – Savers in those days was the type of place where you could find jeans for $5, and shirts for even less. Hell, you could find pretty much anything there – like Russian army jackboots, World War II leather flying trousers, and the metal detector I bought could attest to. It was like having access to the ultimate garage sale; open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
You see, a good thrift store is like the beach where cultural detritus washes up after the consumer storm that created it has died down. Want to know what was really popular 5-10 years ago? Go to Goodwill. You’ll find plenty of copies of “The DaVinci Code,” George Foreman grills, and Backstreets Boys dolls (not that I’ve looked for the latter). It’s all of the stuff that people wanted when it was new, but get rid of after a few years, when the novelty is gone and they’ve moved on. In a way, I’m a forager, going through the cast-offs of a consumer-based economy, where “more” is always better. This has changed with the economic downturn – as people are no longer just getting rid of perfectly good designer clothing simply because they can – but there are still good things to be found.
I don’t know how I ended up like this. My parents always bought me nice, new things when I was growing up. I never wanted for clothes. As I grew older, I developed a fascination with thrift stores, simply because I enjoyed the mystery of them. I never knew what I was going to find, and I loved that. By the time I met my wife, I was addicted. My wife, however, took my game up a notch, telling me that she never paid more than $5 for a shirt and $10 for a pair of pants. My jaw dropped. How did she do it? Years later, I’ve learned her secrets, and then some. I’ve learned how to clean pretty much any stain out of a garment. I’ve learned that leather is a forgiving material always open to the possibility of a resurrection. I’ve learned how to hem my own trousers, and do my own dry cleaning at home. I’ve learned how to do more with less, because on a journalist’s salary, I don’t have much of a choice.
I’ve got this down to a science. Yesterday morning, I walked into the officer wearing a pair of wool dress pants ($1, church yard sale), a blue dress shirt ($1, church yard sale), a lamb’s wool v-neck Gap sweater ($6, Unique) and my new shoes. I looked like a million bucks, but had spent under $10. The confidence that comes with looking good on a budget, however, is priceless.

Kill the Messenger

2009-09-24T12:53:00.003-05:00

Apparently, after all of the reporting on the town hall meetings, the tea party rallies, and anger over Obama’s policies, we in the media still don’t get it.

“Operation: Can You Hear Us Now?” plans to put the media “on trial” Oct. 17. The event (using information found at operationcanyouhearusnow.com) charges that the “defendants (MSM outlets) have been charged with the following misconduct: journalistic malpractice, Yellow Journalism, extreme bias, unfair and unbalanced reporting, reporting that reflects a political agenda, complicity, cover-up and deceit, partnering with Big Government, reporting of self-commissioned polls as “News,” willful misrepresentation of facts, and loss of all objectivity.”

Where do I even start?

First, I find the entire premise of this event to be just the slightest bit political in nature by itself, much like what the “Mainstream Media” is being accused of. Let me see if I get this straight: for eight years of a Republican administration, the media was doing OK? At least to the point where it was the target of a campaign like this? Or does this have more to do that the people who are behind this being more uncomfortable with the state of the world (and the media that reports it) now that Obama and his agenda have taken hold in the White House? As Rush Limbaugh said in September, “The media [are] no longer reporters. They are repeaters.” How is this any different than what happened during the Bush or even the Reagan years? How is this any different than the hook, line and sinker cheerleading that the media fell all over themselves to promote during the run up to the Iraq War? Answer: content.

“Extreme Bias?” This charge comes from an event being reported on by the World Net Daily, one of the most extreme right-wing news sources (Example: today’s headline is “Author confirms Bill Ayers helped Obama write “Dreams.’” This organization is touted as a news source – and the organizers have the nerve to talk about BIAS??

“Partnering with Big Government?” I share the opinion that Obama is a media whore. But as for the charge of complicity (which isn’t outlined any further than the mere statement) there is a difference between reporting on something and actually endorsing it. For example, when the news reports cover a plane crash, they don’t endorse it. They simply call it as they see it. It’s not much different (except for scale and lack of jet fuel) for something like Obama’s bailout plan or the economic downturn. There is a difference in being an observer and being a cheerleader – and the fact that the “The plan” page describes Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, notoriously biased in themselves, both as “American Heros” really undermines the whole “no one should be biased” idea (p.s. – not to nitpick, but whoever wrote this misspelled “heroes”). In this case, it’s simply a matter of wanting another “truth” over what’s actually being presented during the evening news.

“Obviously, the "main stream" media are hard of hearing and seeing. About 2 million mad-as-hell taxpayers assembling in Washington, D.C. for the largest-ever (most well-behaved ever, most respectful ever) protest did not make it onto their radar screens (or our TV screens).” Actually, this is wrong – it WAS covered by the “main stream” media, although obviously not as much as the people behind this event wanted it to be. Also, as far as they “most well behaved, most respectful ever,” are there any police incident reports to back those statements up? Can they be verified? In response to being “ignored,” event organizers want “freedom-loving, American-loving, free-speech loving friends” to go and demonstrate their right to free speech in front of local news outlets (in the Twin Cities, they picked KARE 11). What’s ironic about this concept is that they are basically protesting because they disagree with the content. So let me get this straight – one person’s free speech isn’t as valuable as another? Is that what I’m supposed to take from this?

The idea that media is some liberal bastion of Communist sympathizers is an old one, but I am tired of it. In fact, due to an ever-shrinking amount of organizations and corporations who own media outlets, the ability to ruffle feathers is probably not what it was even 20 years ago. I would imagine media outlets are probably more conservative now than ever before (in terms of oversight and final say), despite what its critics say. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s easy to tar-and-feather the media – but how would it sound if the same people who called Limbaugh and Back “heros” were in charge? Would it be any better? No, it would probably be worse – not because of any lack of ability, but because of the obvious fact that there would still be a bias, albeit one that the “American patriots” planning to protest Oct. 17 are more comfortable with.

One person on the site commented: “I love the idea of taking the battle to them! If, after this, they still ignore our movement, then it will be obvious to the world that they have taken themselves to “fringe” media status. Pravda. We’ll take the ball and run with it from here.” Ignored? How many reports do I have to watch on TV about people prattling on about Obama’s “socialist agenda?” How many more times do I have to hear reports about Obama’s face being decorated with Hitler mustaches at protests? Or see elected officials get shouted down in heated health care town hall meetings? In short, we get it. You are angry. You are upset. But you are most definitely not ignored, despite how persecuted you feel to the contrary.

In the end, this is less about media bias and more about the fact that the people behind this and affiliated with it are fed up (which I can understand, by the way) with the state of affairs as they see it. But to cloak this in the language of some sort of persecuted and ignored sect of society is disingenuous at best, and the fact that they crave the media’s recognition makes me wonder how serious this “trial” is supposed to be.

Leno's new show: more "sit down" than "stand-up"

2009-09-19T10:33:00.003-05:00

Well, after all the hype, Jay Leno’s show really isn’t living up to much of it.

I’ve watched most of the episodes this week, and if I were to ask myself for any comment on them, I would say something like, “Ehh, they were OK.” Leno’s last episode of “The Tonight Show” reminded us all why he was so beloved in the first place, and the last bit he did, when he brought out all of the children who had been born to staff while the show was on the air, he ended with the kind of gentle sweetness that separated him from David Letterman in the night time talk world (and in my opinion made him better to watch).

Leno’s new show, after an entire summer of hyping, premiered Monday night, and featured Jerry Seinfeld, who hosted an awkward and obviously pre-taped interview segment with Oprah Winfrey, which sort of fell flat. Come to think of it, a lot of the non-studio interviews have fallen flat, from Tom Cruise trying desperately to act like a human to Mel Gibson’s creepy, painful and too-long interview from last night’s episode. If you missed it, let’s just say that Mel’s brain has now fully surrendered to madness, and not the charming, quirky kind.

Some of the segments he carried over from the old show, like the bits where he reads headlines or goes over to people’s houses to ask them random things or dress them up to re-enact TV shows or movies, are still funny. A great bit from last night’s show featured Rachel Harris, most recently in “The Hangover,” doing a really funny and biting bit where she redecorated her entire living room with stuff she bartered people for. During that bit, she was like a less cuddly Tina Fey, but just as funny and self-effacing.

Unfortunately, the same standard isn’t applicable to the rest of Leno’s new show. A particular example of this that comes to mind was from last night’s episode, in which actress Drew Barrymore did two laps on a racetrack specially built for the show in a Ford hybrid. The “gags” on this racetrack included cardboard cutouts of Al Gore and streamer cannons. I don’t want to even guess how much NBC paid for the 40,000 square-feet of track for this bit, but it was really, really pointless – in fact, it almost seemed like NBC was creating an unfunny sort of “vulgar display of power” just to demonstrate A) How much money they have behind this show, and B) How far they will go to please a sponsor (Ford). In either case, we lose.

I think NBC made a mistake. Something’s missing from Leno’s show: heart. I think he's going through the motions, and after nearly 20 years on TV, I probably would be at this point, too. Part of what made his original show so successful is attributable to the fact that he was a pick-me-up after the 10 o’clock news, which is nowhere near as funny (except when you make a game of counting KARE 11’s technical errors, of which there seem to have been many lately). Before, he could pick you up in the way a funny guy can, a sort of way of saying, "Yeah, the world's a mess, but some of it can be funny." Now, you get the half-heartedly giggle at half-baked skits just in time to watch the real news that Leno used to skewer.

In my estimate, this show isn’t going to go away anytime soon. But I also think it’s not going to be anywhere near the runaway success NBC was desperately hoping for.

'Reach for the Stars'

2009-09-14T12:07:00.001-05:00

Rounding out the weekend news, rapper Kanye West once again proved what a gentleman he is, Brett Favre threw 110 yards in Sunday’s game, and a man who saved millions of lives died. Which one do you think most people are aware of?
I admit, I hadn’t heard of Norman Borlaug until before this weekend, but after I did, I was amazed that I hadn’t before. Simply put, Borlaug developed a hardier type of grain in the 1960s, which possibly saved millions of lives in India and Asia. He was honored with a Nobel Prize in 1970. According to an Associated Press obituary, one of his favorite sayings was “'Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch them, if you reach hard enough, you will find that you get a little 'star dust' on you in the process.” It sounds really, really dorky, especially in this cynical age, to talk about ‘star dust,’ but this man did just exactly that – he touched the stars when his work ended up saving many, many lives.
Admittedly, there is nothing sexy about grain. Even when measured against other forms of produce, grain is the Chevy Cavalier of contenders: it’s reliable and plain, and gets you from A to B without any fuss. But life as we know it would not be possible without it. And in places like India and Asia, where population combined with limited farmland creates a potential starvation bomb, this is even truer.
I hear no keening for Norman Borlaug. Like I said, I hadn’t heard of him before Saturday, a week after he died. But I do find it sad, to ply a common cliché, that more people could recount Brett Favre, an insignificant (in the scope of history) sports player than they could the life of a man whose efforts helped humanity. Even in his 90s, when an average person may have been tempted to slow down, he still worked.
“We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability,” he said in May 2006 at an Asian Development Bank forum in the Philippines. “Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.”
Borlaug – it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and his work wasn’t glamorous. But I think we’d all do well to remember someone who contributed so much to the world, even if many people in that world didn’t have a clue who he was.

Keeping up with Moore's Law

2009-09-09T17:28:00.000-05:00

It’s amazing how fast things have changed.
My wife and I are planning a garage sale for sometime soon, if we can get our acts together enough to pull it off. What is interesting to me about some of what we’re getting rid of in the process of preparing for this sale was highly desirable less than a decade ago. Things like the Brother fax machine in the back of my wife’s Jeep, which no doubt cost a pretty chunk of change and turned the business world on their ear when they were introduced in the early 1990s. Now, thanks to technological evolution, it’s about as quaint as a typewriter. When I think about it, this era has moved so quickly, in terms of what is defined as the “cutting edge,” that we all struggle to keep up with it.
I can imagine that this is a fairly recent phenomenon: I can’t imagine that cavemen found themselves upgrading rocks every five years to keep pace with technology. No, I imagine that many of humanity’s first inventions (primitive textiles, knives, etc.) had a pretty long shelf life. Even as recently as 150 years ago, I don’t think trappers and hunters were making a huge rush to get rid of the flintlock and percussion cap rifles that served them so well for so long. No, this is a more recent phenomenon, in my opinion.
Progress isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Progress and technological innovation is what allows me to bring this message to a potential worldwide audience with the push of a button, something unthinkable even 20 years ago. But with progress comes complication – complication like the $3,000 iMac that I probably couldn’t get more than $25 for now. Complications like the digital converter box in my basement that makes it even harder to get a decent television signal. Complications like the millions of tons of consumer waste generate each year in the pursuit of an upgrade.
Yesterday’s gold is today’s garbage. I don’t see this trend stopping anytime soon, but I think, given the economic slowdown, that it will falter in its pace. Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law? Described on a Wikipedia page, “Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years … This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore's law describes this driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”
In time, I can picture that history books will see this entire age as nothing less than a Second Industrial Revolution, when society and the traditional order of things was turned upside down due to new and rapid advances in technology. It may be comfortable to read about – but living through it is less than satisfactory. As I see it, when things settle again, we’re going to see more machines allowing more people to do more work that used to be done by more people, meaning potentially fewer jobs. After all, why pay for another person when you can enable one worker do the work of 10?
Unlike a computer, I can’t double. Not every two years, not every four years, not ever. What I am is likely, in terms of capacity, all I will ever be. I’ve become less than the sum of my parts, someone whose role in the “driving force of technological and social change” has been limited to sighing as he moves his outdated devices to the garage sale table to be cast on the winds of thrift-shopping fate.

Conservatives: Keep Obama out of the classroom!

2009-09-07T14:12:00.003-05:00

During a speech to junior high school students in November 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan exhorted the values of low taxes and the American version of self-government, and told kids about the time he received a letter from a man while he was governor of California:

"I got a letter from a man in San Quentin prison, and from the prison he wrote me the letter to tell me he was in there for burglary. He was a burglar. And he said, ``I just want you to know that if [a gun ban] goes through, here in San Quentin there will be celebrating throughout the day and night by all the burglars who are in prison because'' he said, ``we can watch a house we plan to rob for days. We can learn the habits of the people living in that house, to know when is the best time to go in and be a burglar -- rob it.'' He said, ``The only question we can never answer is: Does the man in that house have a gun in the drawer by his bed?'' He said, ``That's a risk we have to run.'' He said, ``If you tell us in advance they won't have a gun in that drawer by their bed,'' he said, ``the burglars in here will be celebrating forevermore.''

I have no memory of of this particular speech, and neither does the rest of America, apparently, as conservative pundits have been spouting off for days about how this represents Obama's desire to brainwash America's children into wanting socialized medicine and government abortions.

I, for one, think the reaction this planned speech has gotten ("They do this type of thing in North Korea and the former Soviet Union ... very cultish" - Andrea Tantarnos, FOX News) is completely misreading the message. The prepared text of Obama's speech can be found online, and after reading, it, I found that I approved of its basic message of hard work and planning educational goals. I find this a marked contrast to Reagan's speech, with its conservative anthems of low taxes and no gun control. I also find it difficult to believe that a junior high student, as the remarks illustrate, would care enough to ask a question about whether or not "Saturday Night Specials," small, cheap handguns, should be banned. I can almost hear the grandfatherly chuckle in Reagan's response:

"Well, I don't have very much of a quarrel with the very cheap weapon and
so forth that makes it so easy for the wrong people to have a gun. I would like to see us
concentrate on what I described in California: of making sure that anyone who buys a
gun is a responsible citizen and not bent on crime."

Can you imagine what would happen if Obama's speech even contained the word "gun?" Conservatives would be howling for blood, and I can envision countless Americans racking their shotguns just in case Mr. O wants to take them away.

In short, this whole brouhaha is scandalous - not because of what it is, but because of what it isn't. If we've gotten so polarized politically that a president's speech asking children to work hard in school is something worth fighting against, then what is the point? If our two-party system, which it seems to have become, is so hell-bent on tearing the opposition down that everything else, including decency and common sense on both sides, goes by the wayside, then what is the point of even having the system in the first place? Is this endless and pointless political one-upmanship the sort of activity the Founding Fathers had in mind?

Death with a spray can

2009-09-03T10:55:00.001-05:00

Standing above the yellow jacket’s nest with a can of Raid in my hand, I towered like an omnipotent god. I had, to paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer’s famous reiteration of the Bhagavad-Gita, “become Death.”
I saw the nest a few weeks ago, after I’d mowed right over it without even knowing it was there. Standing outside talking to the neighbors over the fence, I noticed motion out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see yellow flits in the distance, coming and going out of a hole in the ground. I slowly walked over to within five feet of it, and saw the hole. It was about two inches across, and Yellow Jackets diligently exited and entered, not taking exception to my presence.
I always joke that one of my pet peeves is flying insects. Twenty years ago, they became the bane of my childhood when I stepped on a wasp nest in some loose grass clippings while trying to reach a glider. I looked down and saw wasps crawling up my little legs, stinging and biting me. I screamed, and ran two laps around the house at full speed trying to get away from them. I was terrified of anything that flew for the next 10 years or so, which proved embarrassing, as the simple sight of a bee or hornet near me would cause me to freeze mid-sentence.
Eventually, I grew over my fear, and took great delight in destroying the pests wherever I found them. I would ambush bumblebees with a Super Soaker, and look in amazement at the naked black bug a direct hit would leave behind. Hit with a powerful enough stream, I could blast every hair off their bodies. I would terminate nests with extreme prejudice, taking great delight in my complete superiority over a subspecies. In time, my anger faded, and I stopped delighting in these activities, as I realized that life is something sacred, despite the fact that it can sting you, and that I shouldn’t seek out what I dislike in order to destroy it.
I was almost sad walking up to the yellow jackets’ nest yesterday afternoon. They were, as before, oblivious to my presence. I thought back to a podcast I’d been listening to earlier in the day about General Curtis LeMay, the man who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, and how the yellow jackets, like the 100,000 Japanese killed in the first firebombing raid over Tokyo, had no idea that this single visitor was the harbinger of their impending doom.
I came back that night, and emptied the entire can into the hole without ceremony or apology. I’ll dig it up when I get home from work tonight, just to make sure I got it all, and I’m sure I’ll discover dozens, and maybe hundreds, of dead yellow jackets – a sight that used to thrill me, but now, reminds me only that life is fleeting, at times cruel, and that there is always someone bigger that may have plans to stomp or spray you.

Not-Quite-Ready-for-Primetime player

2009-08-29T11:21:00.002-05:00

My nine-month old daughter is starting to develop her own sense of humor.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, when, as I was changer her diaper on the changing table, I took the pacifier from her mouth and put it in mine. She was confused for a moment, and then broke into a broad smile and giggled. She thought it was funny – why is Daddy doing something the baby does? – and then she reached up and grabbed it back from me.
It’s strange to think about, but we were all born without a sense of humor. Not that we didn’t develop one in time, of course, but at the moment we came into the world, we probably had what most babies have: a strong cry, minimal reflexes and, in my case, a permanently confused look on my face. None of us came out of the womb knowing anything, let alone what’s funny and what is not. We learn it in time. I’m only realizing this now, as I am seeking a human being develop herself from a little speck in the ultrasound pictures into a beautiful little person.
It makes me consider how my own sense of humor was developed. My first memory of something being truly funny came when I was around 5 years old. The family had just purchased its first VCR, and one of the tapes we had was “Saturday Night Live: The Best of John Belushi,” which we watched many times. I found his extreme physicality and intensity to be hilarious, finding out only years later that it was this same excess that ultimately led to his death from an overdose in 1982.
After this introduction, I was an “SNL” fan, and would watch the old episodes on cable TV with my Dad. As I grew, I became interested in the early 90s cast, with Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman. I watched it, found some of it funny, but always knew in the back of my mind that it didn’t hold a candle to the work of the “Not Ready for Prime Time” players of the show’s early years. In time, Hartman would be murdered, Farley, in an eerie echo of John Belushi, would die of an overdose, and I would walk away from watching SNL for nearly 15 years.
In the late summer and fall of 2008, as my daughter grew closer to being born, my interest in SNL returned with its coverage of the 2008 election, and Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin, which once again showed how powerful a comedic medium this venerable enterprise could be when it measured the pulse of the society it mirrored. I think this one character portrayal did more damage to Sarah Palin’s credibility than all of the gaffes and painfully awkward interviews. After the election, my interest in the show again faded, except for the occasional sketches I would hear about around the coffee maker Monday morning.
Still, I know that when my own daughter is old enough, I will hook up the VCR, dust off the beat-up cover of the Belushi video, and ask, with a twinkle in my eye, “Hey, do you want to watch something funny?”

Shoe on the other foot

2009-08-04T16:09:00.002-05:00

It’s hard to fit the shoe on the other foot.
It has been very interesting to watch the Internet reaction to mysterious posters of Barack Obama allegedly being posted in some parts of the United States. The poster, for those who haven’t heard, depicts the president in “Joker” make-up from the most recent “Batman” movie over a single word: “Socialism.”
According to an KTLA.com article on posters found in the Los Angeles area, Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction “politically mean spirited and dangerous.”
What is interesting about this scenario is that the magazine Vanity Fair portrayed George W. Bush in the same make-up in 2008, and no one said a word. In fact, I remember far worse being said, some of it by yours-truly, about the 43rd president. I even went so far as to install his head on pictures of Adolf Hitler using Photoshop while pretending to pay attention in my college media classes.
For eight years, it was really easy to point fingers and scream about how bad the president was, how opportunistic and insincere he seemed, and how it seemed that he wanted to lead us down a path to our own destruction. When I cast my ballots Nov. 4, I think I did so in the hopes that it would change something - to present an alternative to the ham-fisted antics of George W. Bush. It was, in retrospect, the high water mark for eight years of bumper stickers reading, “Dissent is patriotic;” eight years of telling the other side how bad their president was doing; eight years of smugly telling ourselves that we could do it better.
Well, it’s our side (if there is such a thing) in the White House now – and it’s been somewhat of an eye-opener to me. One of the nice things about being in the opposition is that you can cast stones but don’t have to deal with the bruises. Is dissent still patriotic when someone you like is in the White House? Now, I find myself trying to explain why Obama did this or that to people who didn’t vote for him. It gives me a sense of what it must have been like for the embattled conservatives who tried to join the student newspaper at St. Cloud State - defending decisions you didn't make, and may not have agreed with, on the principal that the party you supported made them.
Here is the most ironic comparison of all: in a way, I've become what I once despised. On a bright fall day in 2004, when W. flew into St. Cloud for a rally, I was among hundreds of counter-protesters who showed up bright and early to express their displeasure with the 43rd presidents. The event went smoothly, until the conservative spectators who showed up to cheer W. on to another White House victory started to leave the baseball stadium that hosted the event, and crossed paths with the counter-protesters. It was as if you'd mixed baking soda and vinegar: it didn't explode, but it sure simmered. One of the most often-hear remarks I remember that day, thrown at us as an epithet from anonymous W. supporters, was the phrase, "Get a job." It stung. We were there because we cared deeply about the future of our country. Or thought we did, anyway.
Now, as I hear about people protesting health care reform, or demanding that Obama produce a birth certificate that proves he wasn't born in Kenya, I find myself saying the same thing: "Get a job."
It's certainly easier to blame than to try, isn't it?

Fifteen-year-old writes about social media, adults set a-Twitter

2009-07-15T12:27:00.001-05:00

At first, I thought this article was some sort of joke from the Onion: “Media execs rocked by 15-year-old's blunt, blistering analysis.”
Unfortunately, it is true. Sadly, sadly true.
The 15-year-old is a Morgan Stanley intern named Matthew Robson. Matthew’s observations on social media and how his peers use it is apparently causing a lot of waves at Morgan Stanley’s European Media Group, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. One executive went so far as to say that Matthew’s work was “one of the clearest and most through-provoking insights we have seen.”
What exactly has these executives buzzing? Matthew’s observations state that teenagers don’t use Twitter, read newspapers, and hate advertisements. Plus, they like free music. While I don’t disagree with the veracity of these opinions, I find it really curious and odd that older people who supposedly know better are giving them such weight. Is it really such a revelation to hear that teenagers don’t like to read newspapers? Or that Twitting via cell phone costs money, and therefore isn’t done?
Except for his opinion that many teenagers have never bought a CD, I don’t think that what Matthew writes about is particularly new, clever, or groundbreaking (see for yourself: www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/twitter-teenage-media-habits). What I find very interesting is how the words of a single 15-year-old are being taken as some sorts of revelatory gospel prophesy by media teams who, until a few years ago, dictated how communication was done. Now, with the rise of social media, the game has changed, and like any adults, they are desperate to find out how the mythical teenager communicates. To hear some of the quotes from the executives in the article, you would think they were dealing with gorillas that had been taught sign language:
‘We published it,' said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley's European media team. ‘We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.' He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team's usual research.”
Ultimately, what this goes to show me is that, despite changing times and lifestyles, teenagers remain and mysterious to adults as ever, and adults, being adults, will do nearly anything to get their foot in the door leading to the path of young, aloof coolness.

Appetite for Destruction?

2009-07-01T16:14:00.001-05:00

One of the funniest things in the delightfully subversive movie “WALL-E” is how humanity is portrayed in the future: morbidly obese on hover chairs, unable to get up or do things for themselves.
Well, if reports issued today by the BBC and Reuters are any indication, we might already be halfway there. Obesity rates in the U.S. rose 22 percent last year, without a single decrease in any state across the union. Of these, Mississippi rated worst, with 32.5 percent of adults considered obese. The Reuters report said that the state has had this dubious title for the past five years. Colorado had the fewest obese adults, with 18.9 percent.
According to the BBC article, “in 1991, no state had an adult obesity rate above 20 percent, and in 1980 the national average for adult obesity was 15 percent.” Now, nearly two-thirds of American adults are either obese or overweight, the Reuters article said.
I’m one of them. I have a BMI of 27. A BMI of 18-25 is considered normal. Like many Americans, I am the victim of two things: one is my own lack of willpower to choose the right food to put in my body, and the other is the fact that much of the affordable food is so high processed that it makes getting fatter much, much easier than it used to be. Throughout human history, and in some places today, getting fat was a sign of wealth and prosperity. Now, perhaps being skinny is the sign of being wealthy enough to eat organic and non-processed foods on a regular basis.
The irony in this scenario is that the poorest people, who buy the cheapest or fastest food options, are now the fattest – something that would have no doubt confused the hell out of any time travelers from the Renaissance. In an era where Americans know how important exercise is, it seems that we lead such busy, complicated and ultimately stressful lives that few actually do on a regular basis. I know I am guilty of this. Also, as times get worse, and people’s stress levels go up, they eat more, adding more pounds to an already vicious cycle.
There’s going to be hell to pay for this. It’s well known that obesity contributes to health care costs. So how are we going to continue paying for premiums that increase nearly 30 percent a year?
I think I just lost my appetite.

We've lost our chance for a happy ending

2009-06-25T21:44:00.003-05:00

Like many people today, I was shocked by the sudden death of Michael Jackson.

I was getting on to the on ramp to Highway 169 North when my niece and I were shocked by a radio announcement. "...TMZ is reporting that Michael Jackson has died. He was taken..." The next half-hour was spent on the phone, trying to confirm that it was true. After all, TMZ being what it is, I held on to the possibility that it wasn't true. I had my reasons.

Michael Jackson was the closest thing to a fallen god that our pop culture will likely produce. For much of his life time, everything he touched turned to gold, as the Pop King Midas hit after hit. He influenced an entire generation with records like "Off the Wall" and the immortal "Thriller." Until the late 1980s, he was unstoppable. Afterwards, the eccentricities and controversies overshadowed his tremendous talent and influence. In time, he became a sad punchline, an easy laugh to make at the expense of a many who in many ways remained a child.

In my mind, Michael Jackson's death denies us what I think many of us wanted for him: a happy ending. After so many false starts, so many missed concert dates and unmet expectations, we wanted that shining moment where we could look at him again as many of us saw him during the 1983 Motown special that revealed his out-of-this-world moonwalk for the first time. We all wanted to see this tortured and eccentric man remind us why we all believed in him in the first place - and I, for one, believed that he could do it.

He simply seemed to have the ability to make magic from absolute nothingness, to take a tragic and lonely childhood and and use it as fuel in a successful quest to make the world love him. I will remember him for that as much as anything else.

Dance, consumer, dance!

2009-06-19T09:08:00.000-05:00

In order to combat the scourge of Internet piracy, the music industry bravely went after the source of the problem: a 32-year-old mother of four from Brainerd.
According to an article from the Pioneer Press, “a federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and the jury awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.” It seems that the sins of millions, perhaps billions, of Internet-savvy techsters have been placed on this one woman’s head, and I don’t think that’s fair. There’s simply no way someone like that can pay nearly $2 million for 24 songs they shared on Kazaa (a file sharing service). It seems doubly cruel that the recording industry would target someone like this, who they know probably can’t afford to saddle up the same legal team they can. It’s a message to the rest of us: don’t download music. Or we’ll screw you up, too.
For years, I think the recording industry has missed the point of downloading. I don’t think it kills music; I think it expands taste. Chances are, and I’ve seen surveys that say this, that people will buy more of an artist’s work once they are exposed to them. With computer-generated play lists dominating most Top-40 stations these days, or seeming to, anyway, as I hear the same six songs over and over again, where is one to hear new music? Not there. Not on MTV or VH1 either, which have seriously gone down the tubes over the past decade (as if I thought that were even possible in the early 1990s). In a corporate-controlled environment, where artists are sucked up and disposed of like so much cocaine or pixie sticks, there has to be an alternative, and for a while, downloading offered that alternative.
This case reminds me of what happened to the Dead Kennedys in the 1980s, when they were sued for a poster contained in their album “Frankenchrist.” They were brought to trial on obscenity charges (eventually dropped), and raked over the coals for what conservative elements in Washington and parent groups saw as an out of control art format that was rotting their children’s brains. Notice what was targeted: a small punk band, on its own independent label. A little guy, charged with the sins of others who could have put up a far stronger fight.
When I was about 17, I found a record at my local Goodwill that contained an insert message on it saying that home taping was killing music. I didn’t believe that ever happened, and I don’t believe it will ever happen with Internet music. I think part of why this happened in the first place is that it was simply easier to click a mouse and get a product rather than actually go through the hassle of finding a physical copy. If you set up a proper Internet music store, like iTunes, people will pay. I wish the music industry would spend more time trying to do this, rather than sue people who can’t afford to pay as a warning to the rest of us to keep our downloading queues clear.

My unabiding love for....Wierd Al

2009-06-17T11:53:00.003-05:00

I have a confession to make: I really enjoy listening to Weird Al. SHHHH!! Don’t TELL anyone!

I recently found a copy of the 1985 Weird Al album “Dare to be Stupid” at the library, and I can’t remember that last time a simple library find brought me so much joy. Unlike many of the CDs I find at the library, which are “important” or “groundbreaking” (like Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”), I actually enjoy listening to this CD. It doesn’t claim to be important, or memorable. It’s simply silly for silly’s sake, which I think we can all use a good dose of these days.
Even when he isn't funny, Weird Al is still funny. He's been entertaining 13-year-olds for nearly thirty years now, which is no mean feat, given how fickle that particular demographic can be. He's like the old Chevy pickup of the music business: he may not be the most flashy thing to come along down the highway, but he's reliable, well-made, and will get you from point A to point B with minimal fuss. His lyrics are well written, and the backing band always spot on. Yes, I've given this thought.
Listening to this album brings me back to the days of riding the bus sophomore year, when my friend Paul Victorey and I would share a pair of headphones to listen to his extensive Weird Al collection. There we’d be, tittering away at something no one else could hear, having a ball in the most socially humiliating way possible. These memories make me smile, because it’s the calm before the storm that was my junior year, when I traded Weird Al for anti-depressants, and I didn’t ride the bus with Paul anymore. For these brief, shining moments, I felt like a child, light and free – free to indulge in a song like “One More Minute” (sample lyric: “I’d rather jump naked onto a huge pile of thumbtacks/ Stick my nostrils together with crazy glue/ I’d dive headfirst into a pool of double-edged razor blades/ Then spend one more minute with you”).
Those aren’t the only Weird Al memories I’ve got. During the summer of 1992, my cousin John Michael and I practically wore out his copy of the Weird Al album with the parody of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” on it. We’d set up a boom box by the tree swing at the summer cottage our families rented for a week, and sing along to every word. At age 12, there’s not much more than you can ask for than Weird Al, a Hi-C or two, and a tree swing. Bliss.
I am fortunate to have married a Weird Al fan. Karla and I actually saw him at the Minnesota State Fair in 2007, and he put on a hell of a show. Even when a song might not have been as funny as it was 20 years ago, he poured his heart and soul into it, even going so far as to don a fat suit for the song “Fat” and dancing with a chorus of Imperial Storm troopers for his Star Wars-inspired take on Don McLean’s “American Pie.” He never stopped moving the entire time he was on stage, and he never stopped giving his audience what they wanted. It was a really great show.
So yes, if you drive by a green car blaring “I Want a New Duck,” it’s probably me. But I can guarantee you that there’s more fun in doing that than there is talking about John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Patti Smith’s “Horses,” or other pompous critic-rock. There needs to be silliness in a world that takes itself too seriously 99 percent of the time, and Weird Al is the doctor to administer the cure.

Pulling the trigger

2009-06-10T17:09:00.001-05:00

When I pulled the trigger, it was like unleashing a power I’d never known.
The .223 round tore through the center portion of the target’s head faster than my eye could ever hope to track it. I lowered the AR-56 so the barrel pointed at the ground, and smiled. There, on the Eagan Police Department’s firing range, I’d just lost my firearm virginity. A co-worker of mine had asked me to tag along to shoot some video footage of firearms training, and I gladly went along. After watching him and a few other people pop off rounds from Glocks, I eagerly jumped at the chance when one of the instructors asked who wanted to shoot a carbine.

Amazingly enough, the trainer let me take a few shots at a human-torso shaped target on a far wall. He went over the operations of the rifle, loading it and pointing out the functions of the rifle’s laser sight on the top of the receiver. My head was drowning under a torrent of realizations: “It’s push-button death;” “It’s the complete opposite of sex yet, just as enjoyable, with an obvious starting, middle and end;” “This is what separates us from the animals,” etc.
After my instruction was complete, I buried the butt-end of the rifle into my right shoulder, and lifted the rest of it to face the target on the wall. My arms shook - partly from tension. I’d never fired a gun before, and I was really sensitive to noise. I’d always hid in the car during fireworks as a kid. Why the hell was I lighting the equivalent to several of them going off inches from my ear? Oh well - too late now.
I lined up the red dot on the center mass of the target, and pulled the trigger. The recoil was less than expected, and the noise was more thunder-sounding than anything else. In that instant, I realized the power of a firearm - not only in terms of the destruction it can wreak, but in how it can resonate with the human mind. For that split second, I was literally a god of thunder, capable of snuffing life with the mere twitch of a finger. My heart skipped a beat when I’d heard the empty casing hit the ground. I’d fired my first gun, and found the experience intensely satisfying.
I managed to beg another set of shots off of another instructor, who clearly hadn’t seen that I’d just shot up another target further down the range. I felt like a chubby kid asking for seconds on ice cream, but how many times would I ever have this chance again? That time, I fired three shots - two went through the target’s “head,” and the other went through the torso.
Guns are more than tools. Guns are the ultimate personification of personal power projection, the ability to push an idea, be it “I wish your government were more like mine” or “I was bullied as a teenager and you are all going to pay for it because you happen to be at my school/the mall/church/fill-in-the-blank.”

With great power comes great responsibility, but none of that was really on my mind as I walked away from the firing range. What was on my mind was the obvious metaphor of the human-shaped target on the wall. Guns have no other purpose, justified or not, than to kill or at best maim/wound. In my glee at hitting the target’s head twice in a row, I’d forgotten what it really represented - and it bothered me. What in particular about it bothered me? I think it was the thought, “Hey, that was easy.”

An interest best hidden away

2009-06-09T14:53:00.000-05:00

The short e-mail from a friend of mine came with a cryptic title. “Thought you’d be interested” was a short message including only the phrase “Thank God for Life, eh?” The entire sentence was hyper-linked. As I ran my pointer over it and I saw the word “Hitler” at the end of the link, I sighed. I knew what this was. I knew, because earlier that morning I’d spend time looking at three recently released galleries of color photographs of Adolf Hitler.
To many people who know me, I’m that one friend of theirs who is interested, some would say obsessed, with Nazi Germany. I can’t even answer as to why, exactly. I saw say a documentary about the Third Reich as a small child, and the interested festered from there. I say, “festered,” because it’s not the sort of polite thing you talk about at parties. Not many people want to associate with someone who has read probably more than he should of about one of the least-loved (and very deservedly so) political regimes in recent memory. People don’t want to hear about how many errors I found in the uniforms on the DVD cover of “The Pianist.” They also do not want to hear about how I spent most of my time at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre’s production of “The Producers” dissecting each of the uniforms to find the sum of their parts (answer: mostly Swedish).
Over the years, I’ve had many people ask me why I am intrigued, some would say obsessed, with Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s certainly not because I agree with any of what it stands for, because I don’t. In fact, I can’t name any tenet of National Socialism apart from “Blame the Jews for everything.” I think a response to this friend of mine outlines the reasons for the intellectual malady pretty well.
“Simply put, the more I know, the less I know. Do you remember the book "The Phantom Tollbooth?" Well, as a historical figure, Hitler is like "Subtraction soup." The more you eat, the hungrier you are. The interesting thing about Hitler was that there were so many other ways he could have gone. He was an intelligent, creative and dynamic personality who ended up doing unspeakable things. It's just a naturally fascinating story. The guy tries to be an artist, fails, finds clarity in war, comes back and within 20 years goes from being homeless, literally homeless on the streets, to being one of the most powerful men in the world strictly through the force of his own will and personality.
It's hard not to write about it without sounding like I'm admiring him - and that's the double-edged sword of the whole thing. He's a conflicted, inordinately complex man who loved children (was often a complete fool around them) and couldn't stand harming animals but at the same time was capable of orchestrating mass murder on a scale previously unseen. You don't get much more complex than that.”
Ultimately, I know I’m not alone in this. I think this enigmatic quality about a mass murderer/failed painter exists in many people. I think the Life photos prove this. If they had put up photos of Mussolini, would anyone have cared? Or how about Stalin? Either would have been a complete waste of time on Life’s part – because Mussolini wasn’t as evil as Hitler, and Stalin was, well, just a jerk. That’s about as simple as I can put it. Hitler still fascinates and revolts us because, nearly 60 years later, there still isn’t any definitive answer to the question “Why?”

Nature vs. Nurture at 2:43 a.m.

2009-06-08T10:44:00.001-05:00

What no one ever mentions about breaking a habit is that it usually breaks part of you.
I realized this the other night, at 2:37 a.m., when my daughter was up crying again for the third time in as many hours. My wife and I take turns usually, but this time, we both sat in bed, pretending to sleep and waiting for the other to make the next move. In the end, I woke up with a bundle of infant in my face. I guess, having actually fallen asleep while pretending to fall asleep, that I won the stalemate.
After blessing us with several months of quiet nights, I think my daughter has figured out that if she cries long enough at night, she’ll end up sleeping with Mommy and Daddy in the Nice Bed, with the dog to boot. This is where the “habit breaking” comes in. It’s one thing to quit smoking – it’s another thing to have a habit breaking that breaks your habit in the process. I can deal with nic fits, but listening to your child scream for you in the dead of night is heartbreaking. There’s a reason a baby’s cry is as effective as it is. It, unlike the parents that hear it, has evolved through the course of thousands of years to be as annoying and heart wrenching as possible. It’s brilliantly designed to provoke a response in those who hear it.
With her head now resting comfortably between us in a warm bed, Evelyn fell asleep right away, and didn’t make a peep for the rest of the night. Chalk it up to baby intelligence to figure out that by doing what comes naturally to them that they can make it work out to their advantage. The next night, Evelyn cried again at 1:30 a.m. or so, and Karla turned off the special anti-SIDS mattress (a glorified air hockey table with a sheet on it) that constantly blows cold air on her in an effort to combat the unthinkable. After that, she was quiet for most of the night. Even last night, the second in which the mattress was turned off, she was quiet for the most part.
Nature vs. Nurture. It’s usually an easy choice, except when its 2:43 a.m. and you’ve got to be at work in six hours.

Hammering out "The Passion"

2009-04-08T11:41:00.002-05:00

Last Sunday, I was feeling particularly motived to get into the spirit and essence of Easter, so my wife and I watched Mel Gibson's "The Passion." The last time I'd seen it was in college five years prior, when it was in theaters. I don't remember being particularly impressed. In fact, I wrote a column about how much more it made me question the Hollywood system as opposed to contemplating my faith. My biggest complaint at the time was that the flogging scene was way too over the top (perhaps a deliberate measure by Mel Gibson, who is perhaps not known as a particularly subtle director).
Sunday night, I was impressed at how detailed the movie was. I hadn't noticed that the first time. It was like watching deleted scenes from "Braveheart" that had Jesus in them. The sounds (believe me, I've seen "Braveheart" enough to notice this) seemed particularly similar. In the end, I was impressed at the merits of the movie, but still not as moved as countless thousands others had been when they first saw the movie. If anything, I found more entertainment in the story about the guy who dressed up like the Devil and went to screenings of "The Passion," interrupting the movie by saying things like "I never said that!" I'm not sure if this happened, or if it was urban legend, but it still makes me smile. It's just such a snotty thing to do.
My experience with the movie contrasted greatly to my experience in church that morning. It was Palm Sunday, and the story of Jesus's betrayal an execution was read in a simply way by a series of readers, and broken up with an interspersed theme that the congregation sang. For some reason, I was really moved by this, and fought the tears that I hope were hidden behind my glasses. I looked over at my wife, praying she wouldn't see them. She didn't. I managed to control myself, and soon, the tears and all traces of them had evaporated.
Why had I found this more meaningful than the multi-bazillion dollar re-telling of the same story with special effects and Aramaic splendor? It baffled me. Perhaps Jesus's story is best told in a simple way, without the overblown histrionics, pomp and multi-million dollar marketing blasts that inevitably taint any movie that Hollywood touches.

With all of this in mind, I wrote this Sunday evening to be read during Good Friday services this Friday.

Luke 23:33-34
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

Crucifixion is not an easy death.
It kills not through the loss of blood through the wounds on the hands and feet, but through heart failure or asphyxiation. There is absolutely nothing merciful or quick about it. After being publicly mocked and flogged, the condemned was forced to carry a several-hundred pound cross to the site where he was to be killed. Once there, he was hung upon the beams using nails or ropes. On the cross, the condemned could do nothing to avoid the jeers of the crowd, their insults, their contempt, their spit, their hatred. With arms held fast on a cross beam, the condemned could not even so much as wipe the sweat from his brow that stung his eyes under a hot, mid day desert sun - let alone fend the crows that would soon be feeding on his corpse.
Any mercies granted during crucifixion are merciful only in context. If a prisoner was thought deserving of mercy, both of his knees would be broken so that he would suffocate faster.
According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus died after six hours on the cross. The historian Josephus called crucifixion “the most wretched of deaths,” as it was possible for someone’s crucifixion to last for days. Only in context is six hours on the cross merciful. Cicero, the Roman orator, said that crucifixions “rarely took less than 36 hours.” After death, the condemned were left to rot in the sun, on the beams where they died, to serve as a message to those the Romans ruled.
Jesus knew all of this in advance, just like we know about the electric chair and lethal injection today. Unlike today’s methods of legal execution, there was no attempt at small mercies, no pretense of trying to avoid that which is “cruel and unusual.”
Jesus knew this - and yet forgave those who gave him, an innocent man, “the most wretched of deaths.” It is the ultimate turning of the other cheek.

"In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire"

2009-04-03T12:33:00.003-05:00

For as long as there have been wars, there have been soldiers coming home to lives interrupted, faces changed and children grown.
Writing about an upcoming event for the “Yellow Ribbon Program,” which seeks to help returning veterans and assist their families while deployed, I couldn’t help but think that the troops returning from today’s battlefield are the latest in a long line of those who have had to readjust to a life that changed in their absence.
Ernest Hemmingway knew this readjustment. The author, who had been wounded as an ambulance driver in World War I, wrote a story called “Soldier’s Home” in 1925, nearly seven years after the “War to End All Wars” had ended. The story deals with a young man named Krebs and his readjustment upon returning home. Even though the book was written more than 80 years ago, it’s hard not to think that the same issues confront returning veterans today.
“By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over.
At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it.”
It would seem natural that returning to civilian life would be a difficult adjustment after experiencing the intensity of a combat zone. Memories of war linger for years. This is nothing new. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the former Supreme Court justice, found this to be the case years after his Civil War service with a Massachusetts militia.
“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. . . we have felt, we still feel the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.”
The men and women returning from today’s battlefields have stories to tell. Their books are not yet written, their history not etched in stone. But unlike soldiers returning from previous wars, efforts are being made to ensure the soldier can once again adjust to the civilian lives they left to defend. It is up to all of us to help with this readjustment process. We simply cannot afford to fail those who have given so much.

This column was first published in the April 9, 2009, issue of the Lakeville Sun-Current

The meaning of "courage"

2009-02-27T13:35:00.002-06:00

If I see one more article connecting the phrase “Patrick Swayze” and “courage,” I am going to barf.
In case you haven’t heard, the former “Dirty Dancing” star (and “Donnie Darko” standout) was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer recently, and has been making himself known on the talk-show rounds. While I sincerely hope that Mr. Swayze, whom I have nothing against personally, as I do not know him, makes a full recovery, I take umbrage at the notion that what he is doing is particularly “courageous.” In order to beat cancer and stay alive, he’ll have to fight it. He doesn’t have a different option to meet that goal. Of course, he could give up, and be all whiny about it, which would also not be courage.
Let’s get one thing straight – courage is what you delve into when you make a decision to do something dangerous when you have other options and could choose to remain safe. Courage is charging a Japanese foxhole to throw a grenade in it. Courage is running into the burning Twin Towers to face immolation. Courage is making a picture-perfect water landing on the Hudson River in a jet (which is highly, highly NOT recommended in any manual). Courage is NOT about choosing to wear a daring dress to the Oscars.
What has happened to the word “courage” is the same thing that has happened to the word “survivor.” You are a survivor if you made it into one of the Titanic’s lifeboats. You are a survivor if you had to eat the dead from a plane crash to survive. You are NOT survivor simply because you’ve won a game show of that title (are you listening, Richard Hatch??). You are NOT a survivor simply because you know all of the words to the Destiny’s Child song and can somehow relate to it.
In a world which, until recently for us anyway, was predictable and soft, throwing around words like the two I wrote about probably gave us a sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Personally, I think our great-great-great grandparents, the ones who fought a hard life after likely seeing at least one person they knew die during childbirth, would laugh at our notions of what is considered “courage” and “survivorship” today, and eat wimps like us for breakfast. Most of what passes for either these days is likely a laughably pale imitation of what the actual words used to mean.
I think, as the world spirals downward chasing the dollar, that we will see a bit of this begin to change, as more and more Americans start to lead lives closer to the conditions of their great-great grandparents. It may be a bleaker existence than the ones we would have hope for, but I’m looking on the bright side – I look forward to the day when “courage” is defined as something larger than Jennifer Aniston’s attempts to find a stable mate after she turned 40 years old.

Blah blah blah

2009-02-25T16:06:00.001-06:00

I think I would have made a good peasant.
At this point in time, I think it’s safe to say I’m overwhelmed by the amount of technology that is competing for my attention. When I come in to work every day, I’ve got voicemail to check, person and private e-mails to be read, an inter-company communication system to sign into, a Facebook to check, etc. etc. It’s hard to keep up with them all, and frankly, I wish I could stop trying. I don’t think human beings are meant to be stretched from so many angles when what they are supposed to be doing is using the technology to “enhance” their lives.
Remember the late 90s? Before everyone and their dog had a phone? I remember very clearly seeing adds for AT&T’s latest creation and finding that I wanted the on-call, on-the-go lifestyle that was portrayed in the ads. Now, nearly a decade later, I find myself in a love/hate relationship with the same technology, loving the fact that I can call for help if I need it, and hating the fact that I feel available all of the time. Oh yeah, people say, you can turn off your phone. But you know what? You’ll just have to listen to the voicemails, sometime or other. Or not, I guess, now that I think about it. But knowing my personality, and how I like to have things finished, I couldn’t stand turning on my phone and not clearing the little “Voicemails” tape-loop icon off the screen. Damn that tendency of mine.
I haven’t done a good job keeping up with my Myspace account. In fact, I still have yet to make any sort of announcement on it that my wife WAS pregnant, let alone had a baby two months ago. It simply seems like too much work, with another system to sign into to check messages from another set of friends who use one of several communications methods.
My point is this – no one who uses this stuff is a bottomless well of worthwhile-reading-creativity. Even Shakespeare would have run out of things to say eventually. So whom are we kidding? Has society become so self-absorbed as to think posting a message about running to the store is something other people want to see? Granted, the curmudgeon in me is writing this column, but sweet Jesus, give me a break. I like keeping in touch with people, but I refuse to constantly update my status or, worse still, Twitter. I simply don’t see the need for any of what boils down to “social busywork.”
So, I don't want to Twit, Tweet, Twoot or whatever the latest trend it. I don't want to Buzz Up a story about the Octomom (a subject for a blog entry in itself). I just want to keep in touch with friends and family. But I could never imagine how much work keeping up with that would entail given the myriad of ways there are to do it.

Left Behind

2009-02-02T09:42:00.002-06:00

Last night, as I was sitting in a comfortable living room watching the Super Bowl, my phone beeped to let me know I had a text message. I ignored it at first, laughing with friends as we played several spirited rounds of “Scattergories.” A few minutes later, I flipped my phone open. What I read took my breath away.
“Mom n dad are in. (A family friend) killed himself.”
I could feel my face slacken as I digested the message’s terrible content. The person in question was the young son of family friends. He’d gone off to college this fall, having shown us all in the years since his birth that he was an incredibly talented person. Now, there are only questions. After I read this text message, I could not help but to stare at my seven-week-old daughter and wonder what it could possibly be like to comprehend that she could one day be taken from me by her own hand. I cannot possibly fathom how parents in this position can go on after such a terrible event.
I am no stranger to suicidal ideations. Even as an eight-year-old, I was fascinated by the sheer drama in the concept. This grew in romanticism as a depressed teenager. I never seriously considered, planned, or tried it, but I knew it was an option, which, in my darkened state at the time, brought me a measure of cold comfort. Only now, years later, do I look at that behavior and realize how impossibly hurtful it must have been to my parents. I understand now, after having the smallest glimpse of parenthood, how hard it is to not be able to comfort a child. In the eyes of a parent, getting a kid through high school cannot be that far removed from comforting them in the middle of the night as an infant, and when that can’t be done, it’s painful for both parties.
When someone commits suicide, they take their own life - but they also take parts of other people’s lives with them. I know our family friend’s parents will never be the same. I know the boy’s two sisters will likely never be the same. I can imagine that they will be haunted by the thought of “Why? Could I have done something to save him?” for the rest of the lives. Will they be able to look back at the boy’s life without a case of “Monday morning quarterback,” wondering if otherwise trivial events could have taken him one step further down the road to the unthinkable?
My thoughts are with a beautiful family today; a family that has gone through many things together, only to be faced with a situation no family ever should.
The first thing I am going to do when I get home is kiss my daughter. And never let her go.

Coping with the present through bad acting and special effects

2009-01-02T14:35:00.004-06:00

I was reminded this weekend how much some of us look to the future to get to the present - even if those futures will never exist.
My friend Bryon visited this weekend, and brought with him a huge box of books, several of which were old Star Trek technical manuals. I know, I know - they sound like real page-turning stuff to you non-science fiction types out there, but back in the dark ages of high school middle age, they were godsends. I get asked a lot why I like Star Wars and Star Trek, and after years of wondering, I've finally come up with a good answer.
In science fiction, the last, as the Bible verse goes, come first. Unlike real life, the beautiful and the popular do not matter. In a usual science fiction story, the unlikely (Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins) end up heroes, and everyone gets a chance based on their ability, not where they rank in the social scheme of things. Once the playing field has been tilted, the former-nothings usually get a chance to do something great an extraordinary (blow up the Death Star, destroy the Ring, etc.) It's a complete disconnection from the way things work in the real world, where ideals are often sacrificed in the name of pragmatism, and the bold and the beautiful often come out on top.
Neither Bryon nor I were bold OR beautiful during high school. I think it would be safe to say that we were both Luke Skywalker-types who had our heads in another place and were waiting for the time when we'd be able to show the world what we were capable of. We were nothing special in the eyes of our peers, and so we retreated into a world that didn't exist. Some people say that punk rock saved their lives. For me, it was Star Wars, and the music of John Williams. It was a reminder to me of the power of imagination over circumstance, of how dreams can influence reality, and finally, how the small and rise to topple the might.
For nearly two years, I lived, ate and breathed Star Wars. I listened to the music every day on the cold bus that drove me to school. During study halls, I drew amazing technical drawings of the various technologies that made up the movies. I spend every day of the summer of 1994 watching "The Empire Strikes Back," memorizing the dialog and developing a taste for dark sequels. Needless to say, as enjoyable as these skills are, they don't translate to popularity, good grades, or even good posture. It's a complete case of escapism - an escapism that in some small way drove us to chase our dreams. Bryon recently earned his Green Beret, and I've been a journalist for nearly three years now.
I've toned it down over the years. I don't pester friends to sell me their older brother's attic-bound action figures anymore. I don't bring the "Imperial Forces Technical Manual" with me everywhere I go these days. I don't imagine myself as an X-Wing in every "Death Star" trench-looking hallway I find myself in. Real life has taken over my previously lofty orbit, for the most part. I try not to spend too much time imagining how cool it would be to have a jet pack, like Boba Fett.
But if you find me not paying attention or staring off into the distance at some random instant, it's quite possible that I've slipped the bounds of convention and put myself into a "long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

A new life caring for a new life

2008-12-23T13:18:00.002-06:00

It hit me today as I was in the thrift store.

I was going through a rack of t-shirts, looking for blank ones to make into band shirts, when I came across a bundle of shirts about "I love my Daddy" and "World's Best Dad." I'd never really paid attention to them before when they were on other people, but now, they make me look twice. Will I be the kind of father who inspires his little girl to wear such a dorky shirt? I sure hope so. And Father's Day? I suppose it will be different when it roles around next year. Instead of running to the store for the usual last-minute "Dad" gift (A DVD, or some bags of M&Ms), I might actually be on the receieving end this year. A strange thought, I admit.

Life has changed around the house here. Our lives are now devoted to this strangle little creature who plays by her own rules at all hours of the day and gets away with it because she does not understand the concept of good and bad. Yet. She sleeps away most of the day, and spends some hours a night complaining to us in her limited way, about various things that ail her (whatever those could be to a 12-day-old). In her own way, she's already living out the teenaged dream life: sit around, eat, sleep, eat sleep, etc. etc.) The only differences are that she talks less, is smaller, and poops herself more. Other than that, I see a lot of similarities.

Our lives have shifted from "being served" to "serving." In a way, I'm glad. I won't claim to know much about parenting, as I've only been a parent for 12 days, but I've learned the following things so far.

1.) Read the instructions on whatever devices you get for your child. Especially breast pumps. They don't work so well when the gaskets are installed wrong because the directions were translated from French.

2.) Babies don't care what you talk about as long as you talk to them. Use this to your advantage, as the baby is likely far more interested in hearing your theories about Star Trek than your spouse is.

3.) When you air out the baby's bottom, make sure to put a diaper under whatever she is sitting on. What can go wrong usually does.

4.) Don't look at a dirty diaper as an annoyance. Instead, look at it as a minature Picasso (or, in some cases, Pollock) painting on a miniature canvas.

An early Christmas gift to the far-right

2008-12-19T13:02:00.002-06:00

It seems George W. has given the far-right an early Christmas gift.

In the waning days of his administration, the president declared that “doctors, hospitals, and even receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments [have the] right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable,” according to a Dec. 19 L.A. Times article. This “Conscience Rule” includes, of course, abortion, a hot-button, no-solution issue that has served the G.O.P and the Christian Right very well over the years.
This latest ruling is another example of Bush pandering to the religious right and conservative elements that have put him in office. With his political capital and popularity at low levels, he has nothing to lose, and many seem to dazzled with the prospect of President-Elect Obama’s coming to power that George W. doesn’t get the attention he used to. In fact, I think the last time I saw him on the news was when the White House issued the last “Barney’s Christmas at the White House” video, in which George woodenly recited lines to the black little canine.
What really bothers me about this “conscience” rule is that there isn’t really any other job in the world (as far as I know) where you can decline or refuse to do something simply because it is “against your morals.” This is especially where customer service (which, after all, medicinal practice is to a degree) is concerned. For example, what would happen to me if I refused to serve an obese person at McDonalds? I would be fired. What would happen if I refused too help someone at Toys ‘R Us because my personal belief is that video games will make their kids lazy? I would be fired.
I can appreciate people’s feeling on this polarizing issue. But what I do not condone is a way for people to get out of doing something that is part of their job description simply because it goes against their morals.
And as far as being a “pro-life president,” George W. is a sham. It’s obvious the man doesn’t practice what he preaches. As governor of Texas, Bush pardoned one out of 153 prisoners executed on death row during his time in office. Even if a man is convicted by a jury of his peers and is executed, is it not still death? Has not a life, however much the dark side of the human soul calls for blood, still been taken? Even with terrible things on its conscience, a life is a life.

Perhaps it is just easier to fight for the rights of the cute white babies we see on the pro-life billboards on the sides of the nation’s freeways.
I guess I should not be surprised. Bush’s pro-life (which, in my opinion, should be more accurately termed “anti-choice”) policies seem a simple matter of political pragmatism and nothing more. How many lives will that pragmatism end up affecting?

Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler Campbell!

2008-12-16T19:32:00.003-06:00

Looks like little Adolf Hitler Campbell, 3, will be getting a birthday cake with his name on it after all.

I found an article about this (“Cake request for 3-year-old Hitler namesake denied”) published by the Associated Press recently. The child's father, 35-year-old Heath Campbell of Hunterdon County, N.J, claims that he isn't a racist. I find that difficult to believe considering he named his son after Hitler and named another child JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell.
"They need to accept a name,” Campbell said in the article. “A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did."
Yes, Heath, a true point; but why do I get the feeling he'd be more than happy should this turn out to be the case?
Apparently, Campbell's wife called the local ShopRite with the cake naming request. The supervisor there, in a completely understandable and rational decision, said it was something they wouldn't do. So, the Campbell's went to Wal-Mart, who were of course happy to do it (why am I not surprised?)
Part of the irony of Campbell's complaining about the matter is that he's asking for tolerance towards his son's name - the same tolerance that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party withheld when they systematically humiliated and murdered millions of human beings between 1933-1945. Tolerance isn't exactly a Nazi virtue. The fact that his daughter has “Aryan Nation” as part of her name makes me less willing to write him off as a random crank. I think Mr. Campbell is narrow minded, and that his children will suffer for it. The article states:
“[Campbell] said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.
'Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That's fine, I don't really care," he said. "That's his choice.'”
A choice Mr. Campbell is simply go along with? I doubt that. What makes Mr. Campbell's comments interesting in this article is that they try hard to sound like they are not coming from someone who is an obvious racist. He crouches behind lofty phrases, like “I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past," that distract from the issue.
I think what really makes me frown after reading this is that an adorable little boy has been named after one of the most evil and forbidden men from the 20th Century, and he has a father who is bending over backwards to justify that choice.

Who wants to be friends with Hitler? How will that work on the playground?

Stirring the Pot

2008-12-09T14:40:00.003-06:00

One of the things that bothers me most about the whole idea of the "New Media" isn't that the formula puts more power in the hands of users to generate both content and comment, but that the current format really allows very little control over what those "outside of the box" provide. Here's one example. In a story in today's Pioneer Press about poor people getting medical help at the Minneapolis convention center, one commenter offered his/her/its two-cents on the matter (note: the following comment is unaltered) on the story's comment board.
"This is communissm. If people want things like this then they should get jobs and pay for them. This is the kind of thing what is going to happen more and more and take money from good Christian folks what work for a living now that we have a socialism president like Barak Hussein Obamma."
This isn't the best example I've seen from the half-cocked netherworld, but it ranks up there. Before I get into further detail, let me say this: I'm all for people expressing a rational, well-argued point of view. But whenever stories with any sort of poor people getting help or immigrants convicted of crimes pop up, it's the last thing we get. Instead of nuanced debate, forums like the one on twincities.com (and others) turn from public discussions into bastions of name-calling and pettiness spiced up with views best left hidden behind cutesy (and unrevealing) monikers.
I know my days of working at a publication that publishes an actual tangible product (how 20th century of us) are numbered. I lament this, not because of the format itself, but because of the controls (on our part) that go along with it. There is no sort of vetting when it comes to a comment board. Part of me thinks this is by design. If you can find a way to bring people to your website by any means, you would be a fool not to take it. However, this isn't most professions. This is history. This is what people look back on when they want a mostly-accurate picture of what happened when. It's one thing to write an angry letter to a newspaper, where there is some checking and accountability involved in getting it printed. It's quite another to fire off half-baked theory on a comment board under an assumed name with the desire of stirring the pot.
The New Media is a field worth exploring if you are brave enough, but I wish there was some way of weeding out the cowards who have A.) little to add to any debate or conversation, of B.) the lack of courage to reveal their true identity to stand by their words.
As a reporter, as a professional, I have to cite sources in stories and use my own name.  I do not have the luxury of hiding behind a veil of Internet anonymity. I have to be able to justify those words and my conduct with not only my readers, but also my superiors. If one has the power to impact lives with words, this is the way it should be.

Count, count, count again

2008-12-04T22:06:00.004-06:00

A quick note here:
I had a thought while watching the news tonight that the 2008 election is 99 percent over, with the exception being the Coleman/Franken race here in my home state of Minnesota. It's strange to think of it this way, but it's the last permeable link we have to the spirit of partisan rhetoric, half-truth and exagerration that are the hallmarks of any down and dirty election season. I get the feeling the many people were exhausted by the intensity of the two-year campaign leading up to the election, with those final weeks in front of the TV set being the worst of all. When the election was (mostly) over, the tentacles of partisan rhetoric, as they usually do, relinquished and receeded, and people regained their senses.
Those connected with the Coleman/Franken recount don't have this sort of luxury. For them, it's Nov. 4 times infinity until the electoral limbo is over. It's the last living vestige of the very worst that politics can out in the human spirit. It's the last living link to "terrorist fist jabs" and "Drill, baby, Drill!" It's the last living link to the sort of maddened frenzy John McCain supporters (sometimes to the dismay of the candidate, as witnessed personally by myself when he visited Lakeville) were able to whip themselves into at the thought of the "socialist" and "Muslim" Barack Obama taking the White House.
At this point, I've been so ground down by years of campaigning that I don't even really care who wins the Franken/Coleman race. I just want it to all be over - to let the past be the past, and to let barking dogs lull themselves to sleep for the time being, until the first faint whisps of an upcoming campaign rouses their animalistic passions again.

Collect Them All

2008-12-02T16:37:00.004-06:00

The Facebook notice came in the e-mail, as all of them innocuously do. Upon opening it, I was startled to see a name of a high school classmate I'd not seen (or thought about) in a long, long time. She ran in different circles than I did, had different friends than I did, and generally had nothing in common with me then other than the fact we were both well-cared for (as private school students usually are)carbon based life forms.
"SO-AND-SO wants to be your friend!" the message cheerfully told me.
I opened the e-mail. I went to my Facebook account, and looked at the former classmate's profile. With the exception of the general flabbiness that the past decade has given to nearly all of us, she looked very much as I remembered.
My eyes narrowed.
I moved my mouse over to the "deny" button near a small picture of her vacant, smiling face. I clicked without thinking twice.

I am not to be collected.

Social media is an interesting thing. When MySpace first came out, there were no real rules when it came to deciding which people made the cut and which didn't. With Facebook, the criteria has narrowed. A lot. Thanks to Facebook, I've been able to skip all of my reunions because I've found out who got fat, who failed and who turned out to be the diamond in the rough we'd never imagined. I've been able to reconnect with old friends, amend old injuries, and find that I didn't turn out so badly after all. It's been a mostly positive experience.
However, in moments of weakness, e-mails from those I call "collectors" still bring me down. It's enough to make me ask - you didn't like me then, so why are you bothering now? Now it's OK that we have an association? Now, when we're on an equal digital playing field, you want to be my friend? No thanks. You missed your chance. Most anything connected with that time in my life (which I've written enough about) is something I'd like to forget. I'll put it this way - I like the way I turned out, but I would never want to put anyone else on the road that lead to this point in time.
So, to all the collectors out there, save your mouse moves; I'm not a name on a list, a flag on a map, or piece of the puzzle. If we weren't friends before, don't expect us to be now. It's just easier that way.

A Past Alive In This Week's Headlines

2008-11-20T10:26:00.002-06:00

This week, I've seen two news stories that illustrate how, even with all of what is going on in the world, people are fascinated with parts of the past that somehow remain a source of fascination:
1.) Pirates off Somalia
Granted, these aren't the sort of dashing Johnny Depp pirates we might envision when we hear the word, but these guys are the real deal. After all, the open sea is a very, very lonely place, and it wouldn't take much for even a small gang of armed men to take over a ship many, many times bigger than the one they left from. This week, however, the pirates upped the ante by taking over an oil tanker full of crude oil – a first in any part of the world. From what I've read, the oil tanker's crew are being treated well, as most hostages taken by these pirates seem to be well cared for. However, I can see this changing, and I'll give you a historical example as to why.
In the First World War, and in parts of the Second, German U-Boat crews would often surface and give warnings to the crew of the ships they were going to sink. They would give them time to take to the lifeboats, and would sometimes even radio in a distress signal to make sure help arrived.
However, as the war went on, the merchant ships became more and more heavily armed, and would often attack a submarine that surfaced top attack it. So, with this in mind, the submarines would attack without warning, and the whole idea of helping the crew of the sunken ship went by the wayside. So will it be with these pirates. The more heavily armed the opposition becomes, the worse the victims will be treated by their captors. I'm not saying that these pirates don't deserve what they get, but people should read the writing that's already dripping from the wall: this is just the beginning, and pity the poor crews who may find themselves as "guests" of the pirates in the future.
2.) Hitler HAD only got one ball.
The British newspaper Sun reported this week that a former Imperial German Army medic confessed to a priest, shortly before he died, that he treated then-Corporal Hitler for World War One injuries that resulted in the loss of one of his testicles. It serves as confirmation for what the English thought for years (as evidenced by the nursery rhyme "Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is hanging on the wall") What makes this interesting is that Hitler has been dead for (checks calendar) 63 years now. It is interesting to me how much a character of fascination he remains to people. I admit; I'm one of them.
Now, let me put this out in front: there is a vast difference between being "interested" in something and "actively condoning it." But that said, Hitler remains very much an enigma even after all of the books I've read about him and Nazi Germany. Usually, evil is somewhat simple to explain away: Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin were simply bad men who took it out on others. But for some reason, Hitler remains an aloof and detached historical figure. I suppose it makes sense; the people who were closest to him said they never really got to know Hitler as a man, so why should we find any sort of insight through second- and third-hand accounts?

The past, contrary to what some think, is more than musty pages on a library shelf or a dusty exhibit in a museum. It's alive - as these stories illustrate. Pirates remind us that, despite our technical mastery of the world around us, problems from the era of Julius Caesar still remain. Hitler's one ball medic confession reminds us that memory serves us better than we think; we remember that the actions of one man can ripple across both the world and the ages.
Even if he's only got one nut.

A corresponding target value

2008-11-11T11:15:00.002-06:00

I think it’s a telling sign that Barack Obama gave his Nov. 4 acceptance speech from behind three inches of bulletproof glass.
Being a leader holds with it a corresponding “target value.” Four presidents have been assassinated during America’s existence, and while the reasons vary, the presidents all had one thing in common: they were simply ordinary men who reacted in the way that many men do when they are shot: they bled, they suffered, and ultimately died from their wounds. It’s a natural thing for any leader to be a target – but I don’t think I’ve ever been so worried about a presidential assassination before. Obama, to many in the white nationalist and supremacist community, represents the sort of pan-international-multiculturalism they abhor, and the fact that he is black only adds to the anger.
News articles like “White Supremacist Rage Boils Over After Obama Victory” (Marketwatch.com) are indicators of a large (and potentially well-armed) portion of the country who are not exactly happy with our new C-in-C. The Anti-Defamation League posted samples of some comments from white supremacist websites in “White Supremacist Rage.”

-David Duke: “I really believe tonight [Nov. 4] is a night of tragedy and sadness for our people in many ways…[we’ve lost] the fundamental values of the United States of America…the country is not recognizable any more.”
-“A person using the screen-name "KOS" declared, "America will become another third-world shithole like Africa if it is run by people like Barack Hussein Obama and other minorities." Another extremist, posting as ‘Himmler SS,’ wrote, ‘America [sic] flags should be flown upside down as the international symbol of distress.’”
-On White Revolution, ‘Fallschirmjager173’ claimed that ‘the recent election of a negroid as president of America, was brought about by dumbed down white traitors, to this nation." An anonymous poster made a similar comment on Hal Turner's blog: ‘Congratulations to all you f-cking sleeping mesmerized race traitors who just made the United States a 3rd world country filled with Illegal Mexicans and f-cking N-ggers who will run free and have a N-gger commander and chief looking over their shoulders. You all make me f-cking sick. I have burnt the American flag in my front yard.’”
- This wasn’t posted on a white supremacist site, but I thought it was telling. Ted Nugent: “I was in Chicago last week, I said, ‘Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!’ Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun!”

I don’t write about these statements lightly, or because I in any way agree with them (I most vehemently do not). But my point in bringing them to your attention is simply to make the observation that there is a lot of hate out there, and the consequences of an Obama assassination would be simply mind-boggling. I believe it would make the late 1960s race riots in Watts look tame in comparison. I remember making the comparison to Bobby Kennedy when Obama received the candidate nod, bitterly noting that he might have a chance “if they let him live long enough.”
The hate stirred up by a bitter election does not simply vaporize once the ballots are counted. No, for every attack ad we watch, for every act of slimy innuendo and distortion we witness, our decency is slowly eroded. I know there are many people out there stewing over what they see as a defeat for the warped racial ideals they may have, and I fear for my president-elect’s safety in a way I’ve never feared for any public figure’s safety before. Obama has great promise ahead of him, but surely he must realize that he’ll be spending his every moment looking over his shoulder, wondering not only if, but when, the hatred might somehow work itself free.
I do not envy him.

What happened to the Post-War Dream?

2008-10-24T16:14:00.004-05:00

The house was like many others on the block 61st block of Third Avenue in Minneapolis. It was older, built post-war, and had withstood the test of time, as the aged trees in the front yard and cracking paint in the windows could attest to.
Looking beneath the faded yellow siding, I could see cracks developing in the concrete foundation of the house, and it made me reflect that it was an anonymous representative of what I am considering to be the decline and fall of the American post-war dream. We’re not the first to go through it; England went through it during the 1980s, as evidenced by the 1983 Pink Floyd album “The Final Cut,” which even has a song on it called “The Post-War Dream.” Now, it seems to be our turn. It was a hell of a ride.
When the bombs stopped falling in 1945, America was the only participant who stood to come out ahead. The industrial centers of Europe, Russia and Asia were damaged or destroyed by the fighting, and the people in those countries were traumatized to varying degrees depending on the severity of the fighting. America, thanks to two ocean borders, was relatively lucky to have not been attacked directly (save for Pearl Harbor, U-boat attacks and the odd Japanese sub shell or paper balloon bomb on the West Coast. Nearly 400,000 Americans were killed in the fighting, which seems a relatively light total compared to those of Germany (7.2 million), Japan (2.7 million) and Russia (23 million). When the war ended, the Americans who served in uniform came home to work, to build, and to raise families. Our neighborhood, built in the 1950s, came so close after this that I imagine that the sweat from war veteran construction workers’ nightmares was barely dry on their sheets. The world, I imagine, seemed a far more optimistic place in the early 50s than it had been just 10 years before. Worldwide conflagrations can sometimes do that.
My wife and I were talking last night about an older woman she met who had traveled around the world, and filled a home with knick-knacks from every continent she had been to. I could not help but envy the time in which she came of age. The Great Depression lived up to its name, but I would like to think that the resulting post-war economic boom and higher standards of living would have been a fitting payoff. As my wife spoke about traveling when we were older and able, I doubted that anyone would afford to be able to travel across the country the way things are going, let alone across the world. I know people who can barely afford to fuel their cars, nevermind their desire the trot the globe.
The pessimist in me thinks we’ve reached the peak of the post-war dream. The harsh reality, put off for so long, is that the standards of living we’ve become accustomed to simply are unsustainable in the long term. I may have been born in a superpower, but I am pretty sure I’m not going to die in one. What I end up seeing in old age remains a unwritten, but I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out as bleakly as the "Mad Max"-meets-Great-Depression imagery that my imagination is capable of conjuring.
Goodbye, post-war dream; you were nice while you lasted.

"The Real America"

2008-10-21T11:22:00.001-05:00

At an Oct. 16 fundraiser in Greensboro, N.C., Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the following remarks:
“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.
“This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”
While I understand what Palin was trying to say, these remarks anger me. The inference, in case you miss it, is that you aren’t a real American unless you are “pro-American,” meaning that you don’t mind that your phones are tapped and don’t mind that Americans are still being killed in Iraq in a war that was started for dubious and politically-based reasons. Get real, Sarah; contrary to what some in your party may believe, those who don’t subscribe to “conservative values” (which, as far as I can tell, revolve around railing against government spending yet driving up record deficits, and telling “Big Government” to stay out of their lives yet demand passage of amendments to the Constitution that would impact the lives of others) aren’t hoping to see America fail. Speaking for myself, I want to see an America that’s different than the one we’ve seen since G.W. took office.
I want an America where I cam be assured that wars will be a last resort, instead of something dead set on before a president even moves his furniture into the Oval Office.
I want an America where any wars that DO happen will be for good reasons, not ones that later turn out to be wildly false and exaggerated.
I want an America where I don’t have to worry about being spied on for my own “protection.”
I want an America where the wealth is shared from the top down, rather than seeing the ultra-rich get even richer while people like me, in the middle, who see that the only number in their life that doesn’t rise is the number of their salary.
Sarah, I’m a pro-American as you. I love this country as much as you. It’s in what we want to see that makes us different. And if this, in your eyes, makes me un-American, then we’ll simply have to agree to disagree.
Before 9/11, I used to consider myself patriotic. I felt that it was a matter of realizing and recognizing the sacrifices made by those who came before you, and remembering that the freedoms we are given are not given lightly. However, in the wake of everything that has happened since, I feel cheated. I feel as though those feelings ended up being used to generate fervor to approve of things that turned out to be less than true. I wanted to believe that Iraq had WMD. I wanted to believe that we were doing the right thing by making this massive undertaking. I prayed every night before the invasion that this war wouldn’t happen. When it did, I tried to get behind it as best I could. My illusion rapidly fell apart, as it soon became apparent that there were no WMDs, that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that we’d committed to something it was proving impossible to get out of.
So long as I have a conscience, I can’t subscribe to the notion of Palin’s “very patriotic, very pro-American” areas of this country.” Patriots come from all over, in all shapes and shades, and none have completely matching views. It is a narrow mind that automatically separates “dissent” and “patriotism” from each other; the terms are sometimes synonymous.

More than just music

2008-09-15T13:04:00.001-05:00

I purged my iTunes library again this weekend, and it’s the latest in a series of add/delete push-and-pulls between the better angels of my nature.
For now, the musical ranks in my 7.7 GB library are dominated by names like Mozart, Chopin and Wagner. I deleted all of my punk and industrial stuff last night while watching “The Sound of Music” with my wife. I’ve added and deleted these types of songs countless times over the past year, and it seems that they end up back there within a week or so. At first, I thought it had to do with music, but upon reflection, I think it had more to do how I’d like to think of myself. I’d LIKE to think of myself as the kind of guy who would like to spend an evening watching “Citizen Kane” with a glass of red wine. In reality, I greatly enjoy watching “Star Trek” movies while eating pudding cups. I’d LIKE to think of myself as someone who can discuss at length the genius of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In reality, I’m more at home discussing the differences between punk music from England in the early 1980’s versus hardcore punk from Los Angeles around the same time.
I am a mixture of conflicting impulses. On one hand, I appreciate righteous anger, and how it can manifest itself in a barking three-chord chorus. On the other hand, I’ve been at best hindered by such anger in the past, and realize that it doesn’t have a place in my future. Classical and choral music calms me. It helps me think in a clear, focused manner, and keeps me relaxed in the sometimes-stressful environment of a newsroom. However, there are limits to the moods it can suit. Sometimes, after an angry day, Nine Inch Nails is the only sound that can tame the savage beast within.
This isn’t about music at all; it’s about me being at a crossroads. I can either proceed down the path of the future, or turn around and head back down the dark path I came in on. It’s an ugly, stark choice, but it seems one that begs to be made with any amount of certainty. The two schools of thought are not compatible; they are fighting for dominance, and control. For now, the better half seems to be winning.
With a CD collection, it’s easy to own a variety of things that you might not be especially proud of (Marilyn Manson, ABBA, etc.) because each CD is its own entity entirely separate from a generic whole. With iTunes, on the other hand, whatever is in the library is a reflection of various facets of the listener’s personality. When I look at all of the ugly on it, it reminds me of the ugly I’ve yet to tame.

Trojan Horse

2008-09-09T13:09:00.003-05:00

I thought of an interesting theory the other day. After considering about how odd it was that John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate (relative unknown, pregnant daughter, etc.), I realized that it was a calculated move on the part of the GOP. It is calculated due to several factors. The GOP could never hope to get another governor with a narrow resume (a la GW) and strong adherence to conservative Christian values into the White House without being torn to shreds under the laser-like scrutiny of both the Old and New Medias. The comparisons to the Current Occupant would just be too obvious. To get around this, the logical move would be to keep the actual candidate hidden until the last possible moment. In this case, John McCain would not actually be running for president in the traditional sense - he's merely a Trojan Horse for Palin, the actual candidate who, when the time came, would replace him. McCain is no spring chicken - he could very easily step down for health reasons and no one would bat an eye.
In doing so, he would be turning over the reigns of power to an unknown and perhaps easily shaped president who would probably be more willing than not to bring in cabinet members with their own powerful ideas (a la Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) and own agenda. Palin, from what I know about her, seems close to the sort of conservative GW is. She is, using quotes from her own speech at the RNC, suspicious of the media, pro-drilling, pro-Iraq War and anti-tax. If it seems the attention on the campaign trail has shifted to Palin, it's no accident. Now, it's all a matter of McCain bowing out and letting the real candidate come through. The sympathy generated from whatever "accident" or "health problem" McCain "succumbs" to could take Palin to a sweeping election victory.

I admit, it's just a theory. But it still scares me.