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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
The Valley of the Pinons
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Valley of the
Pinons
Taos,
New Mexico is so cool that it doesn’t need a Starbuck’s. More than that, Taos coffee is blessed with
pinon, making it the best in the world.
Although
Taos is an international vacation destination, especially in ski season, it remains
a small town (only some 5,000 residents), with farms inside the city limits. One can dine in the elegant La Fonda (lafondataos.com), Doc Martin’s in the equally
historic Taos Inn (taosinn.com/restaurant), or the more recent but equally
famous and excellent Michael’s Kitchen (michaelskitchen.com), and ponder that
the provider of one’s morning glass of milk might be contentedly munching grass
in a small pasture only a few blocks away.
Taos
is centered on its plaza, as it has been for hundreds of years, and the very
walkable area features numerous shops, galleries, museums, coffee shops, and
restaurants. People still park on the
plaza, and although you might have to circle a time or two you’ll probably find
a place to rest your Texas plates. You
needn’t go early, though, for any shopkeeper in Taos who opens before ten is
considered something of an eccentric.
The
plaza itself offers benches, statues, a bandstand, trees, and bits of green for
picnicking, and on weekends and holidays musical groups queue up for
performances: a mariachi band might be followed by a nasal hillbilly claven,
and that by a dance troupe or gospel singers.
Taos is truly multi-cultural, and in a charmingly unselfconscious way.
The
multi-cultural thing hasn’t always worked, though, and First Nations, Spanish,
Mexicans, and Americans took turns slaughtering each other through the
centuries. Things are pretty quiet now,
but last week the Taos County Commissioners fired the county manager. He should consider himself fortunate; many
Taos governments in the past were modified through murders, executions,
revolutions, and conquest.
In
1861 many of the Anglo residents of Taos were pro-Confederate, and the First
Nations and the folks of Spanish heritage, roughly treated by the Americans,
were open to suggestion. Kit Carson and
several other patriots, in a come-and-take-it act worthy of Gonzales, Texas,
nailed the American flag to the pole in the plaza in Taos, and guarded it day
and night. As the war progressed, the Taosenos,
as part of the New Mexico Volunteers, were essential in the victory at Glorieta
Pass. Because of the loyalty of Taos,
their Plaza is one of only seven sites where by law the flag is displayed for
24 hours.
Hippies
migrated to Taos a generation ago, and in their senescence they mumble around
in their clattering Volkswagens and bad wigs.
Their influence continues in old-fashioned head shops, dime-store
mysticism, and dusty store-front healing centers. The crystals have been replaced by magic
rocks, and Moby Dickens (mobydickens.com), the best-known local book shop,
features Tarot card readings on Saturdays.
Little-old-lady superstition does not logically gee-haw with literacy,
but Taos is tolerantly loopy about that sort of thing.
English
and American artists found Taos a century ago, liked the light and the pinon,
and made it home. The Euro-Taos style of
painting tends toward impressionism on the cusp of expressionism, with much use
of orange, yellow, blue, and green. The
merciless brushes of the less-talented can deteriorate these colors into cliché’,
but there is a great deal of good work accomplished in Taos. The earthernware is of course influenced by
the various First Nations groups, who still dominate this art, and also the
jewelry. There is also the usual pretentious
clutter; someone will carve a misshapen face onto a stick, glue a feather or
some weeds to it, and sell it in the streets as, oh,
nature-rain-dancing-woman-spiritual something-or-other.
Down
the road a few miles is the community of Ranchos de Taos and its much Ansel
Adams-ed and Georgia O’Keefe’d church, St. Francis of Assisi / San Francisco de
Assiz. Photographs and paintings portray
the church as standing in isolation, but in fact it has always stood within its
own plaza and is now fronted with utility wires, road signs, and advertising. On a Wednesday morning a nice lady set up her
easel and her paints, surely by accident, on the spot where an American
lieutenant was shot dead during the 1848 revolt. And yet, though artists and revolutions and
centuries pass, Mass is still offered daily at the parish church.
Nothing
about Taos is Disneyfied; the area is layered in history and cultures and
repeated changes of national flags, and yet it continues as a rural community
which mostly defines itself without lapsing into preciousness and
insularity. Whatever happens in Taos,
there will still be breakfast at Michael’s Kitchen, and the sweet scent of
pinon will still drift over the plaza.
-30-
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Forward to the 19th Century
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Forward to the 19th
Century
Governor
Brown and the California assembly have just discovered railways, and are
anxious to introduce them to the Golden West.
Next
thing you know, California’s democratically-elected government will hear about
electric lights and the wireless.
Specifically,
the California Coven proposes to spend some ten billion dollars of state and federal
money – your money - to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San
Francisco. They ignore four salient
facts:
1. There is already an
excellent, heavy-gauge, well-maintained railway line between LA and SF
now. Hundreds of freight and passenger
trains follow it daily.
2. Not many people
take the train anyway.
3. High-speed rail is
as efficient and as necessary as the SST, the last specimen of which decays in
a museum somewhere.
4. California is a
debtor state, and ought to be taking care of the budget, not experimenting with
dangerous and expensive toys.
The
California coast is indeed crowded, and the existing highways are jammed. If more folks could be persuaded to ride
trains, both long-distance and for commuting, life for travelers could be
better.
But
instead of assisting private and public railroad companies in placing light,
efficient, modern trains onto the grid of existing rails, the Magic Circle in
Sacramento propose to tax, borrow, and loot billions for a bullet train, its special
trackage, and the attendant seizure of folks’ houses under the odious doctrine
of eminent domain.
Further,
the Budget-Crusher Express would benefit only the Axis of Preciousness. The world is not centered on San Francisco
and Los Angeles; why should all Californians
and all Americans suffer having their already threadbare pockets picked so that
a privileged few can be sped from Hollywood and Vine to Fisherperson’s wharf
and back again?
The
first stretch will connect Bakersfield and Madera through farmlands, but not
even the first day of construction has been scheduled. Thus, if you are middle-aged and waiting in
Bakersfield for the bullet-train to Madera (and have you ever heard of
Madera?), you won’t make it to the heaven-reaching spires of that fabled Xanadu
in your lifetime. Further, those 130
miles of speeding bullet train will not carry farmworkers or even the first
crate of lettuce anywhere, and when the line is completed, Bakersfield and
Madera will no longer be stops but only rustic blurs glimpsed thought the train
windows.
Finally,
the strongest argument against bullet trains anywhere, not just between rows of
cabbages in California, is that these trains are killers.
China
has had bullet trains for years, which are said to run at 124 miles per
hour. Japan’s bullet trains zip through
that island at 186 mph. France is the
speed champion – French trains average 218 miles per hour. Cool, huh?
Cool
until one breaks.
You
can’t survive the structural failure of anything at 218 mph.
Over
150 years of railway history show us that trains are fast, efficient, essential,
and extremely vulnerable. The
establishment of roadbed, crossties, and rails requires precision engineering,
construction, and maintenance. If there
is a failure at any point – a careless x-ray of a meter of rail, an inadequate weld
joint, a shifting of the sub-soil – then that bullet train is not going to roll
to a stop among Farmer Brown’s carrots; it’s going to launch into the
surrounding soil, rocks, road, culverts,
water, and trees at 218 mph. The impact
alone will kill you, but for lagniappe add shards of glass, fragments of steel
and aluminum, and, for lighting effects, mega-volts of electricity from the
electrical lines.
The
designers and craftsmen will have built into that train and its infrastructure
layers of redundancies – an extra driver, multiple-computer backups of
everything, continuously monitored tracks, the finest steels and alloys – and yet
the bullet train will crash, and everyone aboard will die.
The
Titanic, the Hindenburg, the Cannonball Express, an Air France Airbus, an
Anglo-French Concorde, the tires on your car – every gadget fails. You just don’t need to be in a needless train
at 218 mph when it goes to glory.
Finally,
our national government can’t even keep the lights on in its capital city, a
failure which pretty much defines a third-world nation. Why, then, should anyone have to sit in the
dark and think about paying for Star Trek-y
golly-gee-whiz trains?
-30-
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Stroked While Trying to Escape
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
Stroked While
Trying to Escape
(Hosni Mubarak)
Must suffer a stroke while trying to escape;
Hosni ruled heavily, cruelly, and cold;
It’s his relatives now who wear black crepe
Rain in the Night
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
Rain in the Night
And so
The little frogs are safe from spinning blades
The shades
Of caterpillars will not be dispatched
Or thatched
The misty morning’s soft midsummer air
Is fair
In repose peaceful as the rabbits munch
Their lunch
Tax Appraisal
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
Tax Appraisal
Most
happily the county and the state
Have
no ability to count or rateOur memories singing across the land:
Roaming with Robin and his Merry Band,
Getting the cows up at the end of day
The distant rumble of the Santa Fe
The ancient forest just beyond the fence
The stings of bees that made one yelp and wince
Kissing a girl beneath the old oak trees
(O what a flirt she was, a scamp, a tease!) -
But
Governments
can’t tax our memories or dreams,
So
we are free to fish in Lethe’s sweet streamsAn Old, Old Colossus
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
An Old, Old Colossus
News item: corpses of
stowaways found in a container ship
Foul
darkness, stench, and silence thus entomb
Dead
made-in-China hopes inside a box,Lost souls upon, within, a breathless sea
Among the video games and Christmas toys,
The sneakers that one cannot live without
And fashions fresh from blooded tiny hands
In squalid concrete blocks of suicide.
True bills of lading note the paperwork,
Promissory notes of neatly typed doom,
Free on board, but payable upon our deaths:
The tired, the poor, the huddled corpses wait,
Decaying in an airless metal box,
Afloat upon a golden harbor where
A grim, badged functionary, uniformed
In body-armor and tactical gear,
There lifts his lamp inside the blackened door,
And mourns.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Whose Bible? Whose Army?
Mack
Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Whose Bible? Whose Army?
ABP
(Associated Baptist Press) News reports that the Pentagon will no longer
license Lifeway Christian Resources (associated with the Southern Baptist
Convention) to emboss official military emblems on a line of its Bibles.
The
casual reader will be surprised that the Joint Chiefs of Staff license any
product, as if they were a sports franchise negotiating with Chinese factory
bosses for tee-shirts, water bottles, and underwear with advertising printed on
them.
The
second problem is that the Pentagon is a 70-year-old building in
Washington. It doesn’t license, say, or
do anything; it is a building with a roof and walls and offices and restrooms
and cafeterias and windows. Buildings
are remarkably deficient in intellect, will, or voice, except in late-night horror
movies about lust-crazed elevators. Attributing
a statement to the Pentagon is as careless as attributing one to the
Vatican. The Vatican is a small
city-state, and can’t say anything. One
might as well attempt to attempt to give a voice to Luxembourg or
Liechtenstein.
An
accurate attribution is to report that a properly constituted authority figure
by name within the Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Vatican, or the Pentagon has
made a moral, ethical, legal, or business decision.
Any
variation on “The Pentagon says…” is sloppy reporting, for it does not say what
individual or named committee under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
enjoys the power to license tchotchkes.
And
for me, there’s nothing that echoes the sacrificial spirit of Sergeant York,
Audie Murphy, and Dorie Miller like a committee of commissioned officers in
air-conditioned suites cutting deals for Chinese coffee mugs with the Navy seal
on them.
So
who put the “Eeeeeeeeeeeek!” into the unnamed licensing committee at the
Pentagon?
Mikey
– yes, a grown man who goes by “Mikey” - Weinstein is the recipient of a
first-rate education first at the Air Force Academy and then at law school, all
funded by the taxpayer. He has
demonstrated his gratefulness by suing lots of folks because apparently, in one
of those late-night bull sessions that are an essential part of barracks life, a
sort of Hyde Park Corner safety valve granted by the wiser sort of NCO, he once
heard religious opinions with which he did not agree.
The
horror, the horror.
In
such matters one should, of fairness, not only read about an individual, but
should read what he says: http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org. Note the statement under the banner of the
web site:
When one proudly dons a U.S. Military
uniform, there is only one religious symbol: the American flag. There is only one religious scripture: the
American Constitution. Finally, there is
only one religious faith: American patriotism.
– Mikey Weinstein
Mikey’s
proposed incarnation of the State as a religion, and as the sole religion, is a
novelty of tyranny quite in opposition to the Constitution Mikey purports to
defend.
There
may or may not be ethical and legal arguments for a military symbol embossed on
the cover of a Bible, missal, siddur, or other prayer book. However, to imagine an soldier in the heat,
filth, dust, and danger of Whose-Brilliant-Idea-Was-This-istan being offended
because the fellow next to him owns a copy of a Bible with an Army symbol on
its cover is, to the generous-minded, unthinkable.
If
Mikey, a keyboard commando who apparently has not been in combat himself, wants
to own and read in his comfy office a copy of a Bible without anything embossed
in the cover, under the Constitution he is free to do so. And if an E-2 in 120-degree heat can take a
few minutes to read from a Bible whose cover is different from Mikey’s, he not
only has the same Constitutional right to do so, he has earned and defended that right in ways
Mikey fails to understand.
-30-
Sunday, June 24, 2012
The President and the Deadly Dinner Forks
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The President and
the Deadly Dinner Forks
Last
week the National Association of Latino
Elected and Appointed Officials met at Florida’s Disney World (the National
Association of Canadian Elected and Appointed Officials perhaps had to settle for
Dollywood).
The
President spoke at a dinner for the group, but before he could safely do so,
Raquel Regalado, an official of the NALEO, required the Elected and Appointed
Officials to give up their forks – they were never trusted with knives from the
beginning -- because of the danger of such instruments to the Leader of the
Free World.
There
is no word whether the Elected and Appointed Officials were later strip-searched
for unauthorized teaspoons.
Ms.
(no doubt) Regalado said to the Elected and Appointed Officials: “As you know, we’re having another speaker and there is some
Secret Service involved. So there’s a reason why there’s (sic) no knives at
your table and the forks will be collected…“So, like the good Hispanic mother
I’m here to tell you to please, eat your lunch.”
With that, Ms. Regalado and the Secret
Service promoted layers of stereotypes: according to them, folks who have some
Spanish ancestors are not to be trusted with the safety of the President or
even with ordinary dining-room tableware.
Given reported recent behaviors,
shouldn’t the Secret Service have been disforked instead? Has NALEO busted heads in bar-fights in
Martha’s Vineyard? Did a NALEO official
refuse to pay a, um, fun date in Colombia?
And imagine the President speaking
at a Knights of Columbus dinner. Grand
Knight Feeney comes out and says “Sure, faith ‘n’ begorrah, and because yer
Irish we can’t be trustin’ ye, sure, so we’ll be givin’ ye mashed potatoes and
ye’ll eat ‘em with ye bare hands, sure, so ye won’t be hurtin’ our darlin’
president.”
Or
at the Churchill Club: “Eh, wot, chaps, righty-o, then, just sit quietly while
the staff remove all sharp objects. We who
had an English ancestor centuries ago are marvelously malevolent, and the
Secret Service fear we might fling cutlery, crumpets, and Shakespearean bon mots at the august personage of our
elected President, rather, don’cha’know.”
No,
the President and the Secret Service doesn’t require that forks be confiscated
from other loyal Americans, so why was a Latino organization singled out?
Ms.
Regalado referred to herself as a “good Hispanic mother.” Would a good mother of any cultural heritage
permit a guest to bring his bully-boys to dinner and humiliate her children?
This
incident, reported by The New York Times
and others, is disturbing in its narrative of the fear, distrust, and hubris of
the Secret Service, if not the President.
But even more disturbing is the passive acceptance of such arrogance:
Ms. Regalado, a leader of the National
Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, instead of refusing
the slight, submitted to it and required the audience to surrender their dinner
forks. And if even one courageous member
of NALEO refused to be patronized by such goon-squad behavior, and quietly left
the room with human dignity intact, there is no record of it.
The Huffington Post reports that the
audience applauded and cheered for the President – the President who fears and
distrusts them.
-30-
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Who Defines You?
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Who Defines You?
The 20th Century may not be remembered as much for the invention of radio, television, flight, and broad-spectrum antibiotics as it will for the matter of so many governments putting so many people behind barbed wire.
In
1942 Dr. Viktor Frankl, a middle-aged Austrian psychiatrist considered unworthy
of life in the new world order, was one of the millions sent to Nazi camps, and
in 1945 was one of the several thousand who survived. His intellectual discipline as a physician
remained with him through the horror, making him a rational observer in an
irrational milieu.
In
1946 Dr. Frankl wrote Man’s Search for
Meaning, a two-part book reflecting on his experiences in the prison camps and
analyzing those experiences for meaning that extends to all of life. His conclusion – and this is an
oversimplification - is that all of life has meaning, especially suffering, even
when we do not know what the meaning is.
Dr.
Frankl does not lapse into that tired 19th-century Darwinianism
about the survival of the fittest: he states categorically that the best died
because they helped others, often with their own inadequate bits of food:
We
who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the
huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have
been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be
taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose
one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Just as strongly, Dr. Frankl repudiates
determinism: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess
except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the
situation.”
Dr. Frankl is a bit rough on himself
for making it through, perhaps because of survivors’ guilt, but he never
indulges in self-pity and never focuses on himself. Indeed, his concept of therapy is openly
against that of Freudianism and its ideas of endless introspection and
self-pity. For Dr. Frankl, emotional
healing lies in the individual searching for meaning for his own life but simultaneously
outside his life:
By
declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of
his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in
the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed
system…being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone,
other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to
encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve
or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes
himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for
the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss
it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of
self-transcendence.
One
of the cliches’ of our time is “defined a generation,” a weak passivity that
should be rejected, certainly in the context of such drivel as “The music of X
defined a generation” or “The movies of Y defined a generation.” No, they didn’t. Collective definitions are always flawed, and
in any event a strong individual defines himself and refuses to be a lemming. Dr. Frankl was no lemming sobbing into a
MySpace account:
We have come to know Man as he really
is. After all, man is that being who
invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered
those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Bernard, Jean. Priestblock 25487.
Frank,
Anne, Diary of a Young Girl.
Houston,
Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston, Farewell
to Manzanar. One wonders how much
of this book is by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was behind the wire, and how
much is by James D. Houston, who was not.
Is Mr. Houston a not-so-grey eminence?
-30-
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Graduation Portrait
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
Graduation
Portrait
Dyscostumed
as a polyester monk
The
graduate poses on the railway,Then leans and pouts against an old brick wall,
And then again at the city limits sign,
Or walking barefoot on a dusty road,
And there must be a guitar there, somewhere,
And his pickup truck and the neighbor’s horse,
His letter jacket with a scripture verse,
And maybe a book that he’s never read:
Electronic images in a camera
Made in China, revealing nothing
But a tabula pretty darned rasa,
Unique, because his mother told him so,
Unique in his made-in-Shanghai jeans,
A child of God, according to the minister
Of the Adjective Fellowship of Hope
Where
once he was Joseph in the Christmas play;
A
target audience for Anheuser-Busch,A tapping texter sexter flipping off
The world in a file he thinks is secret.
But
in one frame he’s shyly caught in thought,
And
in that accidental snap one seesThe merest hint of something that might be
Someday a man, a man who’ll stand and dare
To disobey the order of the day,
And then, wilder and bolder yet, obey
The Catena Aurea of eternity.
The Starbuck's on Mount Everest
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
The Starbuck’s
on Mount Everest
The Truth is Out There (whispered in all caps)
Hidden in a tax-sheltered bucket list
Guarded by albino republicans
On the nepallingly deadly ice
Of the something-est mountain in the world.
Where the Sherpas are like, so cool and stuff,
So at one with their, like, inner thing-ness,
Spiritual
advisors to lemmings lined up
Like
padded, rainbow-colored walrusesIn baseball caps, lining up patiently,
Lining up in the cold for group lattes
Lining up in the cold to twit their deaths
Civilization lining up to die
A litter of bodies frozen ice-green
Above, beyond the death-hot Syrian plains.
After making, perhaps, pallid obeisance
To a little god-king playing at cards,
His picture-card death-lists for Nobel peace.
Poor Blind Milton
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
Poor Blind
Milton
Will those who risk the bleak and arid heights
Of grim Paradise Lost require a guide,
A Sherpa of iambics for the trail?
The high blue ice of true discovery
Is littered with the tinkling toys of time:
Manifestos and men of destiny,
Loud ideologies like frail free verse
Evolving night by night, bringing, each dawn,
This morning’s firm eternal verities
Hammered in smoke upon the hissing wind,
For man’s first fall was to believe himself
To be Himself, th’eternal Self-ness,
An Orpheus before whom nothing was,
Or yet a better Vainamoinen
Here now to sing the broken world aright
With his latest electronic Sampo
Recording styled Myself Agonistes.
Their
bodies litter for a time the earth
Beneath
the leaf-fall orchards of the Now.
But
Milton, poor blind Milton, sang the Truth
In
soul-seared pain, in self-awareness bleak,Since Milton, too, composed a song of death,
First-person singular in Satan’s voice;
He knew of Hell: for he betrayed his King.
Telephony Candidates
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Telephony
Candidates
“Is
there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The
dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That
was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver
Blaze”
That curious silence on Wednesday morning of last week was your telephone not ringing, not ringing at last, after weeks of auditory assault on your work, your leisure, and your home.
Mr.
Alexander Graham Bell probably did not anticipate the ubiquity of the ‘phone or
its susceptibility to misuse by governments.
For the past few weeks our ‘phones have been occupied by folks who
proclaim their desire to be politicians by decrying politicians. Governor Palin and Governor Perry wanted to
be my automated best friends forever, and all sorts of strange people interrupted
my day to tell me their opponents are bad people.
Here’s
the problem – candidates use my telephone in order to bother me. They are not paying for my telephone; I
am. Private-sector vendors are now
forbidden to bother people with unwanted telephone calls, but clearly Section 1
of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution does not apply to
political candidates who propose to protect and defend Section 1 of the 14th
Amendment of the Constitution, and that’s some serious irony indeed.
If
someone other than a political candidate telephones you repeatedly, you have a
legal case regarding stalking. Political
candidates get a free pass, a free telephone pass, and you have to pay for it
and you have to put up with it.
Even
the most casual observer would deduce (elementary, Watson, elementary) that
unwanted telephone calls invariably result in negative feelings. A candidate or his minions who bother folks
by telephoning them have given the annoyed citizen one good reason for NOT
voting for said candidate.
Public Utilities Commission of Texas probably can’t do anything about political
ice-calls, but you could write them a brief email letter (block format, six
parts, just as you were taught in school) POLITELY telling them how you feel
about receiving repeated unwanted telephone calls (my personal best is nine in
one day) from political candidates:
Public
Utilities Commission of Texas
1701
N. Congress AvenueP. O. Box 13326
Austin, Texas 78711-3326
customer@puc.state.tx.us
No,
no, don’t call the fat boys on a.m. radio; email the P.U.C.
But
my feelings are really hurt – Governor Palin ignores me now. She just wanted me for my vote. Sniff.
Graduation 2012
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
It’s on the ‘Net;
It Must be True
Alexander
Graham Bell, a Canadian who was born in Scotland, invented the telephone so
that young Americans could use the thing to talk, text, tweet, and twit to each
other during high school graduation and thus ignore high school
graduation. Since Mr. Bell never
finished school, we may appreciate the layers of irony.
In
May of every year, like buzzards returning to wherever it is buzzards return
to, tiresome screeds about the ignorance of graduates arrive to roost in one’s
in-box.
One
of the most popular is wrongly attributed to Bill Gates, another successful
fellow who did not finish school and who does not write silly stuff, and is
usually titled “Rules They Didn’t Teach You in School” or some such, and is
forwarded by the sort of people who never vote in their local school board
elections because they’re too busy complaining.
The
idea of hopeless naivete is not true of most high school students, and it’s
certainly not true of college students.
Very few graduates ever finish a degree on the mummy-and-daddy nickel,
and for those who do, well, good for their mums and dads.
The
reality is that most college students work their way through school, usually in
minimum-wage jobs and at odd hours. A
student who works the night shift flipping burgers can only wonder about why he
is falsely stereotyped as someone who thinks he’s too good to flip burgers.
My
daughter spent some college time shoveling (Newark, New Jersey) in a
stable. Hamburgers would have been
better.
Any
college classroom will feature, yes, a few princesses of both sexes, but they
are far outnumbered by folks who know their way around the loading dock,
Afghanistan, and hospital wards at 0-Dark-Thirty, and who can wield with great
skill an M4, a broom, and a bedpan.
One
of my fish English students was a former sergeant who left the Army after
sixteen years. When I asked him why he
didn’t finish his twenty he said that after three combat tours in the desert he
figured he had pushed his luck enough.
He
and his mates studied English literature in a college hydraulics lab because of
a shortage of classroom space. No ivy
grew on the equipment.
Two
of my students were in their mid-thirties, had been pals from childhood, owned
a roofing company, and were nursing students.
In their late thirties, they said they were getting a little old for
climbing up on roofs all the year ‘round and were going to sell the company and
work in the shade for a while. I asked
them why they didn’t keep the company and spend well-earned time out of the sun
by delegating more authority to their employees. They said that their names were on each roof
(metaphorically), and that they would never sign off on a job if they didn’t
have first-hand knowledge of each square inch of that roof.
Oh,
yeah, some dumb college kids, huh?
Age
and experience are good, but they are only predictors: there are adult students
who become angry when they are required to show up on time (which, presumably,
was required of them on the job) and actually do some work (ditto). In the same class there can be 18-year-olds
demonstrating a far better work ethic (not the one texting behind her
Volkswagen-size purse, second seat, second table on the right) than their
elders.
In
the end, success is almost always the result of an individual’s choice to show
up for work, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom, and hit a lick
at it.
That is, after the individual takes the tin cricket out of his ear. In school we were taught that in ye olden days of yore crazy people who stumbled around mumbling to themselves were kept safely away from others by being chained to a wall somewhere. We thought that was a bad punishment. Silly us.
One
of life’s lessons – it needn’t come from the classroom – is that stereotyping is
wrong. Just because something’s on the
‘net doesn’t mean it’s true. Those giddy
folks waving their diplomae (“diplomae,” he wrote, for he had been to night
school) around and yelling almost surely worked very hard for the moment, both
in and out of the classrooms and laboratories.
+Ray Bradbury
Some years ago I
attended a computer convention at which Ray Bradbury spoke, and I wish I had a
transcript of his speech -- he was so logical, so reasonable, so balanced in his
discussion of civilization and technology.
Afterward we were told that Mr. B would be happy to sign copies of his books, but not other bits of paper -- the man was not naive about marketing! I had with me my boyhood copy of Fahrenheit 401 and wanted him to sign that. I don't think he was happy about signing a thirty-year-old paperback but he did, and an acquaintance took our picture. The expression on his face very clearly expresses his thought: "Who is this strange man and why couldn't the cheapskate have bothered to buy a new copy of my book in the lobby?"
Afterward we were told that Mr. B would be happy to sign copies of his books, but not other bits of paper -- the man was not naive about marketing! I had with me my boyhood copy of Fahrenheit 401 and wanted him to sign that. I don't think he was happy about signing a thirty-year-old paperback but he did, and an acquaintance took our picture. The expression on his face very clearly expresses his thought: "Who is this strange man and why couldn't the cheapskate have bothered to buy a new copy of my book in the lobby?"
Monday, May 28, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
The Drones' Club
Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Drones' Club
The
FAA is expected to grant permission for public and private entities to fling
into the spacious if somewhat crowded skies above the fruited plains of freedom
some 30,000 pilotless aircraft to spy on Americans (http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-spying-memo-leaked-088/)
in addition to the hundreds flyin’ ‘n’ spyin’ domestically now. Further, no privacy rights in public or in
private are recognized; the Fourth Amendment has, oh, evolved. And, hey, is that an electronic eye peeking
through your bedroom window?
There
is some babble about how useful these 30,000 projected drones will be in
finding lost hikers, and, sure, if there’s anything the Founding Fathers
focused on, it was finding lost hikers.
Indeed,
the repeated drone telephone calls that interrupt our days and evenings have
repeatedly stressed how important this election is for lost hikers.
The
Daily Mail recently published maps of
drone-launching sites in use now – there’s one near you: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134376/Is-drone-neighbourhood-Rise-killer-spy-planes-exposed-FAA-forced-reveal-63-launch-sites-U-S.html.
The
drone looking at you can be as big as a fighter aircraft or as small as a toy
rubber-band airplane. Not only are these
almost silent flying Orwellian telescreens capable of face-recognition and wifi
intercepts, they can be armed with a catalogue of missiles, machine guns, and
death rays.
Thus,
when you step outside your door tomorrow morning you can be monitored by a
pimply oaf whose online name is Dork Lord of the Thunder-Sith and who perhaps has
access to a little red button connected to Newarkfire missiles aboard his
remote-control hunter-killer, the USS Steve
Jobs. May it please God he isn’t
still traumatized by that late-night hissy-fit-flap in Starbuck’s over Star Trek versus Star Wars.
Once
upon a time the skies over America were guarded by brave military airmen who
had taken the military oath and who were the products of a culture of honor and
integrity. They protected us by watching
for Soviet missiles flying in over the Arctic Circle or from Stooge Castro’s
occupied Cuba.
Now
we are snooped on by peeping-tom nerds in Pink Floyd tee-shirts.
The
greatest risk to a not-a-pilot in some bunker is tennis-finger from playing
with his joy-stick (Resist the obvious joke.
Resist it.).
A
young man or woman who successfully completes flight training is honored to have
a loved one pin his pilot’s wings to his uniform. A drone-hero asks a guy in an R2D2 costume pin
a plastic thumby-toggle-thingie to his knee-pants.
A
real pilot returning from a successful mission does a victory roll; a
drone-pilot high-fives his Bill Gates poster.
The
dialogue in new war movies will certainly be different: “You’ve got an enemy
fighter on your tush!” and “We have a decaf triple latte at twelve o’clock
high.”
But,
seriously, one is sure we need those drones.
After all, private enterprise clearly reads our emails and site
accessions now, and governments at all levels can do so if they wish. If we travel, we are subject to
identification checks, strip-searches, and touchy-feely-we’re-not-even-married
searches by capos. All that is left to
make control complete is visual spying.
What are you growing in your garden?
Now move your thumb so the Eye can read the complete serial number on
your grandpa’s 1955 J. C. Higgins .22.
Where are you going? Is that a
low-flush toilet, comrade? Let’s check
to see if you possess illegal light bulbs.
There
is an old hymn about how you’ll never walk alone. And it is truer than ever.
-30-
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