Lost

My brother left his home in Georgia the day after Christmas, planning to make the 600-plus-mile trip to our aunt’s house in western Pennsylvania for a belated family Christmas.

It was our first family gathering since our mother’s funeral in September.

There are not a lot of us left. Me, David, our Aunt Shirley, a few cousins scattered around. It used to be that a holiday dinner would fill Shirley’s downstairs with people.

This year, all of us who could show up fit around a regular dining room table.

Sue and I left Baltimore, figuring we would get to Shirley’s roughly the same time David did.

We got there at 9:30 p.m., ate, drank some coffee, and waited for David.

And waited.

I sat for a couple of hours in a chair where I could see the street. Finally, at 1 a.m., we all turned in. Which is not to say any of us slept well. Shirley slept hardly at all. Sue and I awoke, I think, at every passing car, or sudden noise.

We were not especially close as children, David and I. We were not estranged. That word implies a rending. For whatever reason, we never got particularly close.

Until our mother’s final illness, that is.

First, I have to say that he was always sort of a hero to me. He always did things his way, even if doing so made his life harder.

He took care of Mom for years, though sometimes you would think they hated one another, as much as they fought. As she sank into dementia and physical disabilities, he had a lot to deal with. It was hard on all of us, but him most of all. Dealt with it, god knows how.

We talked more during that time, I think, than we had in the previous several decades.

Back at Shirley’s the phone rang at 6 a.m. on Monday.

In a stupor, I tried to get the call on my cell, though it was coming in on Shirley’s land-line. By the time I figured that out, the message had gone to the machine.

“I’ve had some trouble. I should be there in a couple of hours,” David said. That was it.

More than “a couple of hours” later, close to lunchtime, I got on the phone. I looked up the phone number David had called from – he refuses to carry a cell phone – and discovered it to be in a little town in the middle of nowhere in the Pennsylvania mountains, far from any major roads.

Did some quick estimating. He really should have arrived some hours before.

I did some quick checking on the computer and called the several state police barracks between Shirley’s home and David’s last position. No wrecks reported involving any cars of the kind David drives.

That was a relief, but 25 years working as a newspaper reporter gave me plenty of mental images to fuel my worry. Out of gas on some back road, or some other car trouble. Off in a ditch or ravine in some remote area. And on and on.

I laid on the floor for awhile and tried to think about anything else but what might be wrong. Sue had been looking out of the window as often I had been.

I could hear Shirley praying quietly as she busied herself in the kitchen.

I fell asleep, but my dreams were dark.

In the early afternoon, I awoke to find my oldest cousin and his wife walking into the house. I’m afraid my welcome was a little distracted.

Maybe half an hour later, David pulled up in the driveway. He walked into the kitchen, looking a little chagrined. Just in time for our post-Christmas feast.

I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him.

I went for the hug. Life is too short, and we’re both on the shady side of it.

But I confess that I’m a little frustrated that he won’t say what happened. On the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing. I can imagine all SORTS of adventures for him.

==============================.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

Saying goodbye to Davy Crockett

Note: This column appeared in the March 20, 2010, edition of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg.

Known for his coon skin cap, Fess Parker as Davy Crockett was an idol to many young baby boomers.

When I opened up the Web site for my hometown newspaper, out of the corner of my eye I saw a photo of Fess Parker in the far left column, the one reserved for the obituaries of famous or infamous people. I hesitated before I would let myself look.

Davy Crockett was dead.

“LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Fess Parker, who became every baby boomer’s idol in the 1950s and launched a craze for coonskin caps as television’s Davy Crockett, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 85.”

He got me drunk once. Well, a little tipsy. More on that in a minute.

If you’re of a certain age, you remember that tall, lanky figure dressed up in fringed buckskin, fighting his way across the mythic American frontier of the first half of the 19th century, wrestling bears, fighting or befriending Indians and besting bad guys.

OK, it was the frontier as imagined by Walt Disney, which had little relationship to reality, but never mind. Disney was all about imagination, and he gave us somebody bigger and better than real life — a hero, a straight-shooter (literally and figuratively) and a guy we all wanted to be.

Parker later sort of reprised his role as Crockett in a TV series about Daniel Boone, playing the title role and, for all appearances, wearing the same suit, expression and personality.

Back in the spring of 1997, I was in the Santa Barbara area on vacation with Sue. Her dad had worked for Disney for a long time and during an occasion where he and Parker were receiving Disney Legend awards, Parker had said if we ever got up his way, to stop in and visit his winery.

A few years later, we did. We went in, sent a message to the offices upstairs, and went to look around in the gift shop.

“He’s not going to come, you know,” I told her. “Somebody will come down and say Mr. Parker is tied up, but they will be happy to give us a tour.”

A few minutes later, I’m poking around wondering if I could live with myself if I bought a Fess Parker golf shirt, because I don’t golf, when a voice, THAT voice, called out Sue’s name as a question.

Sue, Fess Parker, and me, slightly inebriated.

I turned, and there stood Davy Crockett.

He looked about nine feet tall, with a mop of white hair, a cotton shirt and blue jeans. Solemnly, I shook his hand and introduced myself. I am a newspaper reporter. I have interviewed my share of famous and notorious people. I am cool.

In my head, though, a small blond boy inclined to chubbiness and wearing a coonskin cap charged forward to the front of my mind and squealed “It’s DAVY CROCKETT!”

It went pretty much like that all day.

It was like hanging around with an old friend. Part of that, for me, was because I had known him forever, had been him, in important ways, wearing my coonskin cap and slaying swarms of bad guys in scores of backyard battles.

He invited us to a private wine tasting. My memory is foggy, but it was from nine to a dozen wines. He was giving me a lesson in why wine lists use words like “earthy” and “woody” to describe background flavors in various wines. By the end of the tasting, I was pretty buzzed.

He piled us into his enormous old Mercedes sedan and hauled us into the village of Los Olivos for lunch.

On the way, he told a story about little Fess riding his dad’s mule into nearby Fort Worth. The animal got into the middle of an intersection and decided he had had enough traveling for one day, and simply stopped. Parker said his father had to come to town to jump-start the beast.

All the while, though I remained outwardly calm, that dumb kid in the coonskin cap kept running around in my head, issuing war whoops and being obstreperous.
Finally, I told him about that little hellion stomping around in my imagination.
“Don’t worry,” he said, with that lopsided grin, “I get that a lot.”

I’ll bet he did. Goodbye, Davy.

King was ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things

Note, this “Burger to Go” ran as an item on the Review & Opinion page in Jan. 17,2010 Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa. Part of the text was adapted from an earlier “Burger to Go.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 81 this year, perhaps gone frail and a little dotty. Thinking back on his arc as firebrand and martyr, that is frankly hard to imagine.

Those of us who were around in his day remember him differently than younger folks do.

While he was alive he was, depending on where you stood, a visionary, a man of God who held his country’s collective feet to the fire of its own founding documents or a royal pain and a threat to the (white) American way of life. Some saw him as the devil himself.

Since his assassination in the spring of 1968, he has undergone a sort of apotheosis and elevation almost to a kind of deity. That’s too bad.

What was remarkable about King was that he was, in the end, an ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things. His death by an assassin’s bullet was unusual only in that he was in the forefront of the national awareness when it happened.

The Ku Klux Klan and any number of groups and individuals scattered fear and death across the landscape in those years, indeed, for decades beforehand.

One of the most heinous Klan murders happened 15 minutes from the house where I grew up in Athens, Ga. I was 14. It was in the summer of 1964, just nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The victim was Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn of the Army Reserve, and a Washington D.C.-area educator, husband and father.

He and two colleagues were on their way back from a Reserve event at Fort Benning, Ga., when three KKK members pulled up next to the out-of-state car and gave Penn blasts from a pair of 12-gauge shotguns, blowing off the back of his head.

That happened at home, MY home. This wasn’t a grim photo of a lynching in the rural South. This was now.

People I didn’t know, but knew by sight, had done this. The world looked just like it always had. People went about their business, shopped for groceries and did laundry. Adults talked about it in hushed tones, some fearful, some gleeful. Some of the kids at school joked about it. A good start, some said.

Years later, one of the Klansmen involved in that murder, though not one of those in the car, owned a greasy spoon called The Open House Cafe across from where I worked the night shift at a print shop.

I used to go there for coffee and watch him. If it was me the way I am now, after 20-plus years as a reporter, I’d have asked him what he was thinking that night, what they thought they’d accomplish. But I was 19 or 20 then and afraid.

It was a different time. Almost a different country.

I mean in the sense of “Whites Only” signs over water fountains, and public rest rooms labeled “Men,” “Women” and “Colored.”

Fast forward nearly 50 years. Things are different. Not perfect but different. Change has come to America, as President Obama said in his acceptance speech, if at a glacial pace. It wasn’t fanaticism we saw on those faces in Chicago’s Grant Park that election night, despite fearful comments to that effect.

To be sure, there were and are fanatics on all sides, some of whom would deify Obama and some of whom would gladly put him in his grave rather than see him succeed.

The light in those faces late on Election Night was not the deification of Obama, but that of people who have for centuries stood out in the cold of our nation’s further reaches, allowed only to look in the windows and dream. On Nov. 4, 2008, they suddenly saw the door to that house open and a hand beckon them to come in.

Yes, there is still racial hatred and violence. Witness the 2008 beating death of a Latino man in Shenandoah, not so far from where you probably sit reading this.

But I can tell you that in 1963 that story would likely have never made even the local news outside of a one-inch police blotter entry, if that.

Even if it had, nobody would have investigated to the point that five locals, including three cops, would have been indicted in the case.

Back then, it would have been a thing whispered in bars and in sitting rooms. Some might even have called it a shame.

We can only speculate as to what Dr. King’s take would be on the movement he helped spark.

On the one hand, the same nation that once enslaved African-Americans has elected one to its highest office.

On the other, well. Look deep into your own heart. What do you see?

(Note: I believe all four of the Klansmen are now dead. One of the triggermen was shot in the chest—by a shotgun, ironically—by a man with whom he had been arguing.

The last time I drove by The Open House Cafe, which had been closed for some years, it had become a church.)

==============================.

© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Some Random Thoughts at the launch of 2010, and a Thought on Health Care Coverage.

Happy New Year!

For those of us of a certain age, writing “2010” is a real adventure.

I write for a newspaper for most of my living, a trade that seems to be fairly precarious these days. I’ve stopped reading articles in the trade journals. They made me feel like a sword-swallower with hand tremors.

So. 2010 is the sort of date we all saw written in science fiction stories when we were kids. Years beginning with the digit 2 were the Years of The Future.

And here we are. Funny, it doesn’t look all that much the way the sci-fi writers thought it would.

I distinctly remember we were supposed to have colonies on the moon, and probably on Mars. Every home would have a car that would fly. People would wear form-fitting clothing that looked like it was made out of spandex.

Energy mostly came from safe nuclear fusion reactors.

Look around.

Obviously, we missed a step, here and there.

The closest thing we have to a space colony – outside of Congress — is the International Space Station. Think of an Airstream trailer with solar panels.

Our cars? Well, except for some hybrid vehicles, the basic technology of the automobile is the same as it was in Henry Ford’s day, with sexier bodywork. Today’s cars don’t go airborne unless something has gone terribly wrong.

Some people wear form-fitting spandex clothing. Few of them look good in it.

Our energy still comes from old-fashioned sources, hydro-electric, coal, and a few generation plants powered by nuclear fission. Fusion reactors cannot maintain a nuclear reaction and so will not melt-down, and produce little or no nuclear waste. No more TMI nonsense.

Naturally, nobody has been able to figure out how to make a fusion reactor yet that didn’t take more energy to run than it produced.

So, we’ve still got poverty, as always, wars everywhere, as always, and a nation that seems to have no sense of adventure, certainly nothing like it had 40 years ago when humans left their first footprints – and their first junk – on the face of the moon.

This is not to say that I’m one of those old crabs who think nothing has turned out right.

Well, not much has turned out right, but I’m not all that crabby about it.

Today is my 25th anniversary as a newspaper reporter. That much time in these trenches teaches you that few things turn out as planned, usually cost more than they were supposed to, and are usually late to boot.

I come from an era of party lines and rotary-dial phones, black-and white TV, from a time when everything in the world was far away and a long distance call was a marvel, even if filled with hisses and odd acoustical events. And it seemed as though everybody read the newspaper.

Earlier this week, I watched a TV program on my iPod.

I regularly check the weather, read and send email, and take photos and video on my cell phone.

Sometimes I even talk on it.

Attending government meetings or court hearings, my colleagues and I often write stories and file them on-line…while the meeting or court business is still going on.

Every news story and most of the contacts I have made in the past quarter century exist as a pattern of electrons on my laptop or an external hard-drive. A few years back, I ditched four file cabinet drawers full of files, because almost everything that was in them is available on-line in less time than it would take me to walk over and find the file.

And, to be honest, I usually read my own paper online in the morning before I make the 50 mile trek to work where I can get my hands on a dead-tree version.

Yeah, the news industry is going through a lot of changes right now. I have no idea what will happen next. That’s scary, especially for those of us on the shady side of 60 with pesky things like mortgage payments to keep up with.

Even so, it’s also exciting. When the dust settles, there will still need to be people who can sort fact from conjecture and rhetoric and tell a good story.

I hope I’m still one of them, partly because I can’t afford to retire in this economy anyway, and because reporting has GOT to be more fun than shuffleboard.

I think of the opening of this new decade the way a novice skydiver looks at the open door of the airplane on his first jump.

Enough talk. Let’s get to it.

AND ANOTHER THING:

This is just something to think about.

On Christmas Day, independent singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt died in Athens, Ga.

He was 45.

He died from an overdose of muscle-relaxants.

Chesnutt was partially paralyzed from a car crash when he was 18.  He got around by wheelchair.

He was facing a lawsuit filed by the local regional hospital following surgeries that left him owing about $70,000.

Chesnutt, who was signed to a Canadian record label, often worked with musicians from there. In an earlier interview with the Athens Banner-Herald, Chesnutt said his band mates were stunned by his situation.

“…It’s something that blows their minds; there’s nowhere else in the world that I’d be facing the situation I’m in right now. They cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population. It’s terrifying…I’ve been nearly suicidal over it,” he said.
In other news, CNN reported just last week that tests performed on conservative talk-show guru Rush Limbaugh after he was admitted to a hospital for chest pains found nothing wrong.

The network reported that Limbaugh praised the work of the medical staff.

“The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer….I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine.”

I would like to note two things.

1.    The health care debate has not been about the quality of health care available to Americans. If they can pay for it. It has been about who can pay for it. Meaning, who can get, afford, and keep health insurance.

2.    In the summer of 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year deal to stick with his radio show. The deal is reportedly worth $400 million, with a $100 million signing bonus.

3.    Vic Chesnutt may have committed suicide because he was being sued for as much money as Limbaugh makes in about three hours.

Just something to think about.
==============================.

© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Father’s Day: A miracle in the book of stone, In memory of Ralph W. Burger.

Note: This piece was originally written shortly after my father’s death in 1981. I have re-posted it, with some changes appropriate to my own life and sensibilities as a write require, on occasional Father’s Days ever since.
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The essayist Loren Eiseley once wrote that: “Everything drifts by fire and flood and ruin into the final ambiguous lettering of the Earth’s own book of stone.”

I was startled to realize that my father has been gone for nearly three decades now. His passing marked the end of a period of several years in which most of the giant figures from my childhood faded and fell; my grandmother, an aunt, two uncles, and then my father.
They have faded in my memory now, shadowy figures sitting on the front porch, or the men, in slacks and white t-shirts, standing on the postage-stamp front lawn, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and talking about work at the mill.

They are almost all gone, now.

That untamed, indefinable thing that once swept up the mute salts and minerals of the earth to fling them about in a mad dance has departed as mysteriously as it arrived.

The weary particles sifted down, stunned and silent.

I read once that the universe in which we live was created from the dust of previous generations of stars. I don’t have enough science to argue either for or against the notion, but it pleases me to believe it.

At funerals I have heard the solemn clerics speak of death as a mystery.

They are wrong. Death is the common denominator of existence. Almost everything that is, is dead or dying, from stars to salamanders.

Whatever life itself is, that is the mystery, the one great joke that flouts itself in the face of the vast, stony cosmos.

Speak if you will of water into wine and conversations with burning shrubbery; I say look around; every square foot of our own back yards bears enough miracle to keep us staring and breathless every waking moment, if only we would shake of the blinders of familiarity. A square foot of typical soil can contain as many as a million microscopic spiders.

It beggars the imagination. The poet Dylan Thomas once remarked that the books in his school could tell him everything there was to know about wasps except why.

Look at you. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, a little sulphur, if I remember my biology, wet with a generous portion of water and stirred like a wizard’s concoction into a spell of action, thought, poetry, baseball scores and how to score a dart game.

The whole construction takes in energy, grows, stands, strides about the world making a great noise. Then, and one day, the strange vortex subsides, or goes on to other business, and all the clever pulleys and wires fall away to nothing, vacant and bare, clattering into the darkness, discarded toys.

Now and then, plowing through boxes looking for something, I will come upon something of his; a pistol that belonged to his father, a dedicated drunk and a hard man from a hard time; a construction-paper shield, with a crudely crayoned dragon and coat of arms, with childish letters on the back spelling “Lolly Boy;” a photo of him near the gun emplacements he commanded on a Navy ship in the Pacific, shirtless, his hat far back on his head, younger by many years then than I am now, and a whole lot more “go-to-hell” glint in his eyes than I have in mine now.

It has been nearly 10 years since I visited his grave. I had meant just to stay for only a few moments.

But I sat under the old maple on a hill overlooking what used to be a steel town and talked with him, or with his memory, for a full hour.

I’d like to say he left me some profound legacy; pithy wisdom, secret lore. I can remember little, and nothing profound. He liked Glenn Miller’s music, and the women in my family said for all his size, he could dance like nobody’s business.

I have a tin ear and dance like a footsore bear.

So, in all those ways he is truly gone.

But he is still here in other ways. I hear his humor echoed in my own, and in photographs of myself I see that same impudent and sometimes imprudent grin.

At the cemetery, the sun had gone, a cold wind had begun to tease its way from the river and through my clothes.

The throaty calls of the crows seemed briefly more harsh, and then died away.

I stood up from my perch on Grandfather George’s headstone, noting a stiffness in my joints that I hadn’t remembered from earlier visits. The bronze plaque over his grave gave his Navy rank, his name, and the dates that formed the ark of his life in time.

In my mirror, and in the faces of my brother and my half-sister, I see him sometimes peering out; the shape of skull, the ridge of bone over our eyes, the eyes themselves. Something of him walks across my face when I am angry. I see him, gazing out when I am quiet and take time to look for him.

This is what I have of him, then; no heavy philosophy, but shreds and tatters of memory; no monuments, but a certain heaviness of bone, some movements and gestures that I think I have forgotten until I make them.

What else is there to say? He was an ordinary man, a particular stirring for 64 years among some particular stardust, a miracle, certainly, but of ordinary proportions. It will have to do.
==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Talking About the Weather(men)

The voice on the other end of the line dripped with conspiracy, and dragged me back in time.

He was unhappy over a piece I’d written about a former 60s radical-left activist who was to come speak at a local university.

Long before the students he was to address were born, William Ayers, now 64, was a founder of the radical Weather Underground, a group whose name was inspired by a line from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Weathermen were responsible for riots and the bombing of several public buildings in the late 1960s and 1970s. Most of the Weather Underground’s activities were in protest of the Vietnam War, which the group believed to be illegal. Ayers’ appearance on the state university campus was funded by private money, and his presence had nothing at all to do with his colorful and violent past. His lecture was about finding better ways to provide education in urban areas where there is little money or parental involvement.

My caller was eager to uncover a liberal conspiracy because I hadn’t written the story the way he thought I should. Oh. Well.

He did open a door for me though, back to the 60s, the decade when I grew from a boy to a man, the decade during which the whole country went absolutely crazy.

From his voice, I am sure my caller was not old enough to remember anything from 40 years ago.

I was there. I wasn’t in the middle of much violence, but that doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t living under a flat rock.

Try to imagine this: I grew up in the 1950s, in a safe world of gray flannel, of Eisenhower’s America, of booming factories and a stable world. Everything, at least to a kid in the ‘burbs, was pretty safe and reasonable. I mean there were personal drama, schoolyard bullies and the myriad insults of growing up, period. But there was structure to everything. It made sense, even if it wasn’t all friendly.

And then along came the 60s.

Here are some snapshots, things that were everywhere, in the newpapers and TVs, and laced themselves into our days and nights:

Click:   In the summer of ‘63, four little girls were killed by a KKK bomb blast in Birmingham.

Click:    Two months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and two days after that, the whole country watched on national TV as his accused assassin was shot to death by a man with the dime-store-gangster name of Jack Ruby.

Click:    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved by the Senate 73-27. Two days later, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia Miss. (their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.).

Click:    President Johnson signed a sweeping civil rights bill into law, and two days later, Lt.Col. Lemuel Penn, a black U.S. Army Reserve officer was gunned down by the KKK near my home.

Click:    The next summer, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the voters’ rights law. A few days later, rioting that claimed 34 lives broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles.

Click:    The following summer, July of 1966, eight student nurses died in Chicago at the hands of Richard Speck, and only a few weeks later Charles Joseph Whitman set himself up in a tower at the University of Texas and killed 15 people.

Click:    The next summer, a month after I and most of my close friends graduated from high school, race rioting broke out in Newark, NJ. 27 people died, and 10 days later, rioting claimed more than 40 lives in Detroit.

Click:    That October, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington D.C. The Census Clock at the Commerce Department ticked past 200 million.

Click:    In the new year of 1968, three college students were killed in a confrontation with highway patrolmen in Orangeburg SC during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley.

Click:    Though we didn’t find out about it until about a year later, that March, the My Lai Massacre occured in Vietnam, with the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed men, women and children.

Click:    Three weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and three months after that, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary.

Click:    Of symbolic significance, 12 days after My Lai, Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the very symbol of the America we all felt we were losing, died.

Click:    In August, a riot broke out between Chicago police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention.

Click:    Four months later, Ted Kennedy’s car plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne, and a few weeks later Charles Manson’s bizarre cult murdered actress Sharon Tate and eight other people in her L.A. home.

Click: Five days later my friend Herman T. Fields, a couple of days into his second tour in Vietnam, stepped on a landmine and pinwheeled into eternity.

Click:    That November, 250,000 protested against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. and, in the final month of the decade, four people died at a Rolling Stones concert in California, including one who was stabbed by a member of the Hell’s Angels.

Click:    On May 4, 1970, four students were killed and nine wounded at Kent State University in Ohio by members of the Ohio National Guard. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, but other students who were shot had merely been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. Reaction in the nation was immediate, and was, along with the reaction to My Lai, directly responsible for the end of popular support for the war, and the country became even more divided.

Today, William Ayers the “domestic terrorist” is a professor, an urban education specialist with 15 books on the subject to his credit. He was somebody entirely different 40 years ago. I wonder how many people are very much like they were 40 years ago.

My caller wanted to know why on Earth somebody whose ideas were so dangerous THEN would be allowed to speak to students NOW.

I probably don’t even have to mention the whole First Amendment thing. And I have to guess that my caller’s idea of education is NOT to expose students to all sorts of ideas and viewpoints. But part of functioning in the real world is to be able to tell the difference between butter and bullshit, you should excuse my French. If you believe anybody’s party line without question, your toast is going to taste funny.

By the way, the group Ayers was associated with never killed anybody. A nail bomb they were building blew up in a Greenwich Village building, killing three Weathermen, including Ayers’ girlfriend.

That bomb was, in fact, being built with the intention of killing some military personnel, but the truth is that it never happened, though my caller seemed to believe that thinking about killing somebody is the same as actually killing them.

If that’s true, I think most of us would be locked up by now. I know I would.

That said I’m not sure how much credence I can give to somebody who speaks with so much passion about an era he did not live through. I can remember feeling throughout the 60s and 70s and beyond that the entire world I had known had flashed like tissue in fire and become something else, someplace else. Nothing, nobody, no sensibility, came out of it unscathed. We burned, smashed, and tore at our social fabric. Even now, four decades hence, it is not entirely mended.

Was Bill Ayers a terrorist back then? Maybe. More to the point, I think he was simply part of a larger terror. As were we all.

==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

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Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin

On Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in his little log cabin in Kentucky, and Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.

The two could hardly have been from more opposite socio-economic poles.

Lincoln was born in a tiny cabin to poor settlers. Darwin was born to wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin. He was the grandson of naturalist Erasmus Darwin on his father’s side, and of pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood on his mother’s side.

Abraham Lincoln, or a tweaked and deified facsimile thereof, is recognized the world over as the emancipator of slaves, martyr to freedom and the Union.

Charles Darwin is recognized throughout most of the world, at least the parts of the globe that actually have secular education, as the man who freed us from sorcerous mythologies about how life shaped and continues to shape itself.

Darwin and his research came along at a time when a number of thinkers, including his grampa Erasmus, were pondering such things as the origins of life and the age of the earth. It was Darwin who wove it all together into a cogent theory

Sadly, the good ole U.S. of A. isn’t one of those enlightened countries. In fact, among all the first-world countries, the U.S. is the only one where a relatively high percentage of its residents – just shy of half – do not believe in evolution.

Their disbelief is rooted, bluntly, in an enforced scientific illiteracy.

Back in 2004, the school board of the Dover (Pa.) Area School District put out a policy that required teachers in the middle school science department to inform the kids that there were books available for them at the school that gave an alternate view of evolution than that proposed in Darwin’s work.

The books were provided through the efforts – and funding — of some of the board members and their fundamentalist church.

It’s probably a good time to point out that the world’s understanding of all life and how it interacts is based on Darwin, up to and including the cures for disease and understanding of genetic disorders. To the credible scientific community, there is simply no debate about evolution. On minor details, yes. On the theory itself, absolutely not.

The “alternative” was so-called “Intelligent Design,” which is the latest expression of the Creationist’s holding on to their corner of the argument by postulating that evolution is real, but argues that even the most basic life-forms are too complex to have come along without a “designer.”

Anyway, back to the point.

Eleven parents sued the district in federal court. During the course of the six-week trial, one witness after another got up and showed ID for the sham it is. They did this by explaining, in layman’s terms, the scientific facts that back up the “theory” of evolution.

The witnesses for the district, including a scientist or two, made fools of themselves, because their arguments were shown up for what they were…religious dogma dressed up to look like science.

The upshot was that the judge threw the whole ID thing out because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In short, you could teach it as religion, but not as science.

The key point here, though, how my friend Lauri Lebo, an author and former newspaper reporter, described the journalists in the court and their reaction to the perfectly understandable explanations of evolution by the scientists on the witness stand.

“We were looking at one another, saying ‘why didn’t we learn this in school?”

(By the way, Lauri wrote a book about the trial, which took place in the area where she grew up, and it’s a terrific read. “The Devil in Dover.” I recommend it.)

The answer, of course, is that the religious right, in its various shapes and permutations, has intimidated public schools everywhere from purchasing science texts that go into Darwinism to any depth.

As for private schools, well, the bulk of those are backed by, if not outright owned by religious organizations, some of them quite zealous, so I think we can rule them out as havens for real scientific educations.

The biggest misconception about evolution is that it is antithetical to religious belief. Well, to fire-breathing fundamentalism, maybe. But plenty of people who understand and believe that life evolved over time are also believers in one or another of the world’s endless buffets of religious faith.

Another misconception is that Darwin was an athiest. He was not. In fact, he was deeply troubled by the implications of what he was discovering through his research and thinking.

Read that paragraph again. He was a scientist. He let the evidence lead him where it would, no matter that what he was finding in his notebooks and specimens was forcing him to re-examine the dogma in which he was raised.

I think it is time that we, this country, have the grit to do the same.

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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
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Dispatch From Maine, Sept. 30, 2008 Leonard Osier’s tomcat

Perhaps driving to New England by land as it was being approached by sea by Hurricane Kyle was not a good plan.

On the other hand, this was the time my vacation was scheduled for, so, by god, we were going.

It rained late into the night Friday when we took off after I had filed a story news story.

It was still raining at 1 a.m. Saturday when we stopped for the night. It rained the entire time we wandered around Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., and visited the replica of Henry David Thoreau’s tiny cabin, and the site where the actual structure had stood.

I had wanted to visit the spot for years, but figured I had better read the actual book, rather than keep snippets of its text posted here and there by other people. I read Walden over the winter and spring, and thereby, by my own lights, figured I had met the qualifications.

Statue of Thoreau and replica of his cabin

I kicked myself, though, because I had not thought to bring something I could swim in, because it is, after all, autumn. About a half dozen people bobbed around in the pond, which is a very popular swimming hole for folks in the Boston area. The water was about 70 degrees. I should have liked to have swum there. A baptism of sorts.

Ah, well.

Anyway, it rained all the way from Concord to New Harbor, stopping long enough, thoughtfully, for us to unload the car. I’m told we had about five inches of rain in total up here.

The rain, mind you, is no problem for us, who come here with reading and writing in mind. We’ve both done plenty of both.

Today, however, the sky bears no hint of cloud, though there is more rain in the forecast. It will be a day to head into town, to check email, raid the library’s used book store, and hit the health-food store and Reny’s department store for a few things. Did I mention that Reny’s is very near the King Eider Pub? No? Must have slipped my mind.

The Osprey, I am happy to report, is back on its feet. Some of you may remember that a year ago, as we sat eating ice-cream on the night before our departure, the cabin’s stone pilings slipped out from under it and the entire joint slid down the hill toward the harbor. With us aboard. Nobody was hurt, and The Osprey actually suffered very little damage. This year we found the cottage standing about 10 feet further up the hill than before, on solid concrete and 4X6 foundations.

Oh, and the owner, Leonard Osier, now has a new buddy, a strapping big tomcat, whose name I have not yet discovered. Taffy-colored, with pale blue eyes, and friendly.

Leonard Osier’s Cat

Anyway, as I said, it’s clear and sunny, in the 60s, with a gentle breeze. The tangle of berry vines, monk’s hood, and other wildflowers about 12 feet from this window is alive with butterflies and birds. Trees in low-lying areas burn with reds, yellows and oranges. The doors and windows of The Osprey stand wide open. The sound of lobster boats in the harbor compete with Mozart piano sonatas on the stereo. A trio of cormorants, whom I’ve named Manny, Moe, and Jack, stand on the gunwales of a small open boat moored in the center of the harbor, drying their wings and gossiping. The blue heron that had stood at the water’s edge grooming himself maybe 30 feet away just left. Perhaps he dislikes Mozart. Life is good.

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© 2008 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

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The Cellist of Sarajevo

I’m afraid that we’ve had so much war in recent years that we have forgotten that heroism comes in many guises.

Sometimes the greatest acts of heroism come not from the use of weapons and force, but rather in acts of beautiful defiance that are simply breathtaking.

Only recently I learned of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of Sarajevo.

It was 4 p.m. on May 27, 1992, two months into the three-year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nasty war involving more than a half-dozen factions that changed objectives and allegiances several times during the conflict. In short, it was a dog-pile of a mess, and there were no winners. Not there ever really are.

Smailovic, then in his mid-30s and principal cellist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, was watching from his apartment window as an artillery shell landed amid a bread line in front of The National Library. The explosion killed 22 people, scattering stone, bone, blood and body parts.

The next day, Smailovic, dressed in his tuxedo as though preparing for a performance in one of Europe’s great halls, took his cello and an old stool and sat in the center of the shell crater and began to play. It was exactly 4 p.m.

He played Albinoni’s Adagio in G, music that can make you believe in angels.

He finished playing despite continued shelling and gunfire nearby. And then he left.

The next day, he was back, and played the same piece, paying no mind to the mayhem around him or to the risk.

And the next day. And the next. Until he had played 22 times, once for each of the 22 who had died before his eyes.

He played, not to cheering crowds in their finery, but to cratered streets, rubble, to bone fragments and terror and the smell of smoke and decay. He played for more, I think: To that in us that is better than our familiar role of angels of death, of harrowers of the innocent. He played, perhaps, for what is possible, for what Lincoln called “our better angels.”

A journalist at the time asked him if he thought he was crazy, playing on a battleground.

Smailovic reportedly replied: “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”

He was right, of course. By the end of the slaughter, more than 100,000 were dead, and nearly 2 million had been displaced.

Why is it so hard to see which of those two actions – the destruction of a city and the lives within it, or a sole man defiantly standing up to the insanity and horror – is the act of madmen.

If Vedran Smailovic is crazy, then I say God bless the lunatics, and give us more.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/