Something Wrong with the Math

I have a good friend, an economist by training, and the former head of a hedge fund, who is always giving me grief about my liberal economic views.

I like this guy. We usually get together a couple of times when our vacations in Maine coincide and we sit down over seafood dinners and laugh our heads off about things.

By unspoken agreement, we don’t talk about politics and economics and stuff like that because our conversations could easily turn into food fights. I’d lose  because I eat more than he does and I’d run out of ammo sooner.

On Facebook, however, Bob is sometimes driven to near apoplexy by my opinions. (Sometimes that’s because, in my enthusiasm, I sometimes forward postings that are not factually accurate. It drives me crazy when I do that, and I feel really stupid afterward.)

That said I have to say that the charts and graphs and figures that Bob posts are very likely correct; He’s good at math, apparently; my own math skills double when I’m barefoot.

My problem is that I can’t help but think that somehow we’ve taken math and conjured it into a tool of oppression.

Let me see if I can explain.

The way we’ve been figuring our economic structure for the past several hundreds of years, it always ends up with a sliver of the population having jars full of cookies, while the larger portion, having created the avenue for those cookies to get in the jars, wind up with crumbs. Or less.

Recently we’ve heard a lot of noise about those on unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, and other programs being a burden to the society and to all those decent, hard-working people who comprise it. But aren’t most of the people who are at least partially supported by those programs also part of that class of decent, hard-working people who paid for those programs?

Oh, sure: There are welfare cheats, and the unemployed who try to extend their Unemployment Compensation benefits as long as possible before really looking for a job. Just as there are people who vote without being eligible (four in Pennsylvania, where I live, in the recorded history of the Commonwealth, I believe.)

First we have to ask 0urselves if the numbers of people who game the system are of sufficient number to be more than a nuisance. I can’t think that anyone would seriously shut down or cripple those programs because there are cheats. The real answer is to tighten rules and enforcement to stem the seepage.

It doesn’t help that we have a party in the U.S. who, in the same breath, will complain about high unemployment and suggest that those on UC and Welfare “should just get a job.”

Right. There seems to a failure at play, either of thought or heart. Incidentally, minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour. Do the math. Don’t forget to take out taxes. Just sayin’.

And why don’t we hear more about the people at the other end of the spectrum, whose own wealth is, if not caused, then augmented because they know how to game the system. Nobody argues that being able to hide one’s money from the taxman in the Cayman Islands is illegal … it’s not. But is it right? That’s a question the answer to which is more tenuous.

It seems to me that the folks who floated to the top pay loud lip-service to the work ethic while looking down their collective nose at those of us who actually have to do it.

What the hell is going on here? We are well on our way to being a feudal nation of serfs and royals; we are not the wealthiest nation in the world –not even close. Our infant mortality rate is shameful, as are our scores in literacy, math and science. How else to explain the fact that a high percentage of people in the United States believe in the Biblical theory of creation and deny the scientific explanations discovered first put together  Charles Darwin?

I can tell you, from nearly 30 years of covering school districts, that their board memberships included significant number of well-meaning and frustrated board members who nevertheless were less-well educated than the students whose tutelage was their ultimate responsibility.

No, paragraph above is not off-track. Funding for public schools has dwindled steadily, and a lot of subjects are either not touched upon or merely skimmed. It all comes down to money. Public schools in wealthy areas and tony private schools are doing a much better job. The relatively new science of ecology applies to just about everything: Just as causing the extinction of one species can cause devastation to an entire ecosystem, so can pinching off the blood supply to something as important as the care and feeding of a large portion of a culture’s inhabitants.

So, my friend can fume all he wants. I still believe we’ve somehow been putting square pegs in round holes, and too many of us have been trying to convince the rest of us that it’s a good fit.

A math whose vectors result in most of the wealth clogging the heights while those below, including workers with so-called “good jobs,” struggle to choose between owning a home or eating well, or between having healthcare or getting more than a threadbare basic education for their children, or choosing between a second or third job and having somebody home when those kids come home from school -– is simply insufficient.

 

Ghosts in the River

Three days before the year’s end, and the weather had turned suddenly colder.

Scattered fat snowflakes darted through the scrub oaks clinging to the steep banks of the Shenango River in western Pennsylvania, a 100-mile long tributary of the Beaver that eventually flows into the Mississippi River.

Shenango means “pretty one.”

My brother, David, and I joked that if we believed in ghosts, our mother’s would be down there on the marshes along of the Shenango, gigging frogs with her dad, a rough, hard-drinking steelworker.

At our feet, on the heights above the river, were the headstones of our mother and father. Dad was buried there in 1981, Mom just a little more than a year ago.

Neither of their lives or deaths was particularly easy. But all that’s done, now.

Water, flowing water, has always held me fascinated. I grew up in northeast Georgia, along the Oconee, whose name is a corruption of the Creek word meaning “born from water.”

The Oconee’s waters tumble down over the fall line to join the Ocmulgee to become the Altamaha and finally the Atlantic.

I now live in southern Pennsylvania along Marsh Creek, which joins with Rock Creek to become the Monacacy, which flows into the Potomac. The heights between Marsh and Rock creeks were the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. Bullets and other martial debris show up in the farm field behind our house.

The thing about rivers and creeks is that they seem from moment to moment to be fixtures, but in truth they are never the same. Blink and you missed something, something that will find its way to the eternal time-sink of the sea. So they are at once symbols of opportunities lost and of hope. That’s how I think of it, anyway.

David still lives a short walk from Born from Water.

We don’t get here often. It’s a long haul for me, and a longer one for him. Visits to our mother’s sister bring us back, and we always make the trek to Riverside Cemetery. I don’t know how often we would get back if not for her.

This is our first trip back since Mom’s ashes were interred over Dad’s grave.

I will not speak for David, but I usually spend an hour or so sitting on Grandpa George’s headstone, gazing over the tops of my parents’ stones, down toward the river.

I am not there for them. There’s nothing beneath the assorted Burger and Miller stones but ash and the odd discarded mechanical parts, the odd bone or set of dentures.

I go there to address memories, good, bad, indifferent, sometimes surprising, things I had forgotten. I speak, sometimes out loud, about this or that. Long ago, there was not a little anger, as I worked through things as I aged.

I’m in my sixties now. The anger is gone, dispersed by understanding, nubbed by weariness, and sometimes by no longer giving a damn. There were ordinary people, flawed, beat down and badgered by their own past. Who am I to be angry?

I leaned against the big oak above the graves. The wind was picking up, the flakes coming more heavily.

In a few weeks The Pretty One will be frozen over. In the old days, there were spots where you could drive a car over it. In recent decades, the winters have been thinner, meaner, somehow.

David and I climbed back into the car and wove our way through the steel-town blackened gothic stones and back into the end-of-the-year bustle of town, leaving The Pretty One counting down the moments to winter.

A Queasy Bit of Genius

By T.W. Burger

I have to admit that a teeny part of me thinks there is somebody absolutely brilliant behind all this.

 

Americans destroying what it is to be American in order to protect America from people who would destroy what it is to be American.

 

I mean, WOW. It’s like MAD magazine on crystal meth.

 

On Tuesday the U.S. Senate, which, I’m beginning to think, may be the terrorist organization we really need to worry about, voted to keep in place a controversial section of the defense spending bill that would allow the indefinite detention of any terrorism suspect, including American citizens.

 

I can really see the attraction, to be honest. There are, plain and simple, really scary people out there. Some of them are just plain crazy, and some of them are crazy but think they are acting on behalf of Allah, or Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for all we know. Like it or not, they’re out there, walking around, watching the world through the warped lenses of their assorted lunacies, and perfectly happy to go to glory on behalf of their own delusions, if they can just take some of us – preferably a whole lot of us – along for the ride.

 

Well, that’s the picture that’s hung on the side of legislation like this, anyway, a poster to convince us that we must do everything in our power to quell the threat against us.

 

No matter the cost.

 

That last part is not even in the fine print. It is not even mentioned.

 

Of course, we are really pretty vague about whom that threat actually comes from. The terror-of-the-moment is anybody who worships Allah, and there are some good reasons for that. On the other hand, back in World War II, We The People locked up a lot of innocent folks – 110,000 Japanese-Americans and about 16,000 German-born citizens and immigrants for much the same reason we want to lock up people who go to the wrong place of worship on the suspicion that they may be jihadists.

 

Of those Germans, perhaps one in 10 was members of the Nazi Party. Eight were actually suspected of espionage.

 

Eight.

 

I spent an afternoon walking around what was left of the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in Southern California some years back. It had just been handed over to the National Park Service, but nothing had been done to pretty it up. I was OK until I found the cemetery. A number of the graves were very small, only a few feet long, with toys, trinkets, and folded blankets placed over them, by people, perhaps, who are not simply shrugging their internment off as a temporary inconvenience.

 

Guess what happened to their jobs and property while they were gone.

 

In any case, the long internment of so many without due process, based in large part on the way they looked or talked or cooked their sausage has been a matter of some shame to the U.S. Apparently, it has not be so much of a shame that we have been cured of heading in that direction again.

 

Perhaps the fact that our detention camps are not, strictly speaking, on American soil helps make our updated detentions seem more humane, or at least less un-American.

 

Sixteen Democrats, among them Pennsylvania’s own Robert Casey, joined the usual foam-at-the-mouth crowd to vote against amending the legislation to remove the section on authorizing indefinite detention. It gave me the same sensation I had when I once was convinced there was a snake in my sleeping bag.

 

To be sure, there are not very many people locked up at the nominally illegal military prison in Guantanamo. At last count, there were perhaps 170 or so people who are adjudged to be too dangerous to let go, but who for one reason or another cannot be tried under whatever legal rules they are still sticking to down there.

 

OK, so these are arguably really bad people. I’m sure they honestly hate us. If they didn’t hate us when they were thrown into that hot, humid dog-run years and years ago, they do now. Maybe it’s hard for some of us to feel sympathy.

 

But think about it.

 

The renewed authorization would make it possible, LEGALLY possible, to snap you up and haul you away for as long as they want, even for the remainder of your natural life, without ever allowing you to be charged, to have your day in court, without ever speaking to a civilian attorney. And all because somebody somewhere with the right title on his or her door decided you were a threat to national security, based on an informant, an astrological forecast, or the reading of chicken guts. Doesn’t matter. A paper gets signed and you are gone.

 

There are people who like this bill, obviously, who think it’s just the thing for combating the newest crop of boogie-beings that haunt our dreams.

 

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it contains the “indefinite detention” language in it, and hooray for him. The really stupid thing about it is that throngs of people who hate anything as long as Obama is for it, would, when not drinking that particular Kool-Aid, be whooping his praises for standing up for the Constitution that is supposed to protect us from this kind of tail-tucked hogwash.

 

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© 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/

 

It’s always SOMETHING

Some days, I wonder why any of us bother to get up in the morning.

It’s not as though we don’t have enough to worry about, what with the economy in a shambles in just about every place that has an economy. And of course there’s politics, speaking of shambles, with a president on one side whose opinion polls put him somewhere in the neighborhood of a fart in church, and the opposition party offering up a field of candidates who come off as a bad hybrid of Keystone Cops and extras from Night of the Living Dead.

With all this in the air, I go online to read some nature news, thinking that will get me out of the mind-set that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Big Mistake.

On one website, I learn that a piece of ice twice the size of Philadelphia is cracking off from the Antarctic ice shelf. The crack so far is about 20 miles long and up to 200 feet deep, and growing at a rate of nearly seven feet per day.

And it’s not even caused by “global warming.” I forget just now what the scientific term for the effect is, but it basically means “s**t happens.”

The whole thing is supposed to break off and start drifting around in the open sea later this year or early next year. Earth on the rocks, shaken, not stirred.

Nobody seems all that concerned. Maybe I shouldn’t be either. On the other hand, having a chunk of ice the size of a small South American nation bobbing around in the ocean just doesn’t sound like good news. Twice the size of Philly? At least it will be cleaner.

And then there’s the asteroid.

The news outlets describe it as an “aircraft carrier-sized asteroid, a little over four football fields in diameter.” It will pass by our little old home planet, closer to us than the moon.

And the moon is only about 250,000 miles away.

That sounds like a far piece, but in astronomic terms, that’s like having a bullet pass by your head close enough that you can hear it buzz.

It’s supposed to pass us by this coming Tuesday. Just so you know.

NASA, known for calling the catastrophic explosion of a Delta 2 rocket as “an anomaly,” has classified the asteroid as a “potentially hazardous object.”

There was a time when if NASA said it would be a near miss, I’d relax. But not too long ago, the space agency aimed a satellite at Mars and missed the whole freaking planet, so, yeah, I’m gonna chew my nails just a little bit.

If this asteroid hits, it won’t be the end of the world, but it will bust things up pretty well. It would make a 4,000 megaton blast, (nearly 20,000 times the force of the bomb that fried Nagasaki), a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. If it hits the ocean, it could cause a tsunami 70 feet high. The tsunamis that hit Japan earlier this year were no more than a third that high.

One of the wire service stories said “Encounters of objects this large this close to our planet won’t happen again until the year 2028…” That one will be a wee bit closer than this one. Wonderful.

I closed the laptop and turned on CNN, only to see some goon in a suit dodging questions on his candidacy. I flipped over to the USA Network to an NCIS re-run. Give me over-the-top violence and improbable stunts any day. It beats watching a planet on the rocks and under fire, and anyway, I’d rather see the bad guys get blown away than elected.

Is America out of ideas?

(An earlier version of this column ran on RockTheCapital.com)

A week ago, more or less, President Barack Obama blew in to the Penn State campus in State College and blew right out again.

He was there to ballyhoo the work being led by the institution’s researchers at the Energy Innovation Hub in Philly.

We can count our lucky stars that his rapid passage didn’t blow out all the kerosene lamps.

Back to the lamps in a moment.

The EIH project, according to the Huffington Post, will receive more than $129 million in federal funds over the next five years. You will remember that Obama talked a lot in his Jan. 25 State of the Union address about the importance of clean energy technology for creating jobs and protecting the planet.

I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath.

Simply put, Obama planned to use his visit to Happy Valley to lay out his administration’s vision for “winning the future,” a phrase that I predict will wear exceedingly thin by the time it is discarded.

One of the means by which We The People will win that future is by “investing in innovative, clean energy technologies and doubling the share of electricity from clean energy sources by 2035.”

In his own response to the President’s State of the Union speech, specifically the lofty goal of doubling clean energy resources by that date, Alexander Cockburn pointed out that 2035 is five presidential terms after Obama’s last conceivable day in office, in 2016. Certainly Cockburn is correct in guessing that any president’s hold on policy is likely to be a bit tenuous after the passage of nearly a quarter century.

But I would argue that it is a bit unfair to lay the entire burden on Obama. The best ideas in the world cannot catch fire if they don’t land in the proper tinder.

A media hand-out Wednesday stated that Obama wants to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings, which suck up about 20 percent of all the energy in the country’s economy.

“Improving energy efficiency in our buildings can create jobs, save money, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and make our air cleaner,” the hand-out read. The goals listed included: “Achieve a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020; Reduce companies’ and business owners’ energy bills by about $40 billion per year; and saving energy by reforming outdated incentives and challenging the private sector to act.”

Oops. What was that? “Challenging the private sector to act?”

Now, back to the kerosene lamps.

I would be willing to bet that when the “private sector” was confronted with the incandescent light bulb after Thomas Edison invented the thing in the 1870s, quite a lot of them dragged their heels, complaining about the imposition of making the switch to electricity and all that the modernization entailed. Some of them, doubtless, sat squinting in the smoky light, muttering. An ad seen on TV lately shows a woman griping about the government telling her what she can and can’t buy in the grocery store, or what light bulbs to buy. We’re going to hear a lot more grousing about it, because in September, G.E., the last manufacturer of incandescent bulbs in the U.S. shut down, putting something like 200 people out of work.

That happened in part because of an energy conservation measure passed by Congress in 2007 – during the administration of George W. Bush, by the by – that essentially banned regular old-fashioned incandescent bulbs by 2014. The idea was that the ban would spur the development of new, low-energy, low-waste light bulbs that would save a bunch of energy and greenhouse-gas emissions

Enter the new compact fluorescent, or CFLs, which were developed by American engineers way back in the 1970s. But no American manufacturer makes them, because the CFLs with their twisty glass shapes require more hand labor, so most of them get built in China. The CFL bulbs were deemed by the executives at GE and every other bulb-maker in the US to be too expensive because American workers make too much money. I’m not even going to bother digging up the compensation packages for GE executives who, I would point out, make nothing, if you take my point.

So, the fate of light bulbs in the US of A is partly a fault of the free-market system that allows top management to be given – I won’t say “earned” – huge incomes while it ships jobs overseas. But that’s only part of the problem. Look at it this way: Edison patented the first commercially feasible incandescent light bulb in 1879. The bulbs that are only just now beginning to fade away have not changed significantly in their design since then. And now, there is a new design, one that uses less power, meaning it produces fewer pollutants in creating the power for it, and produces less heat. And, like the Edison bulb, was developed here, by Americans.

But we can’t crank up enough brain power to figure out a way to keep those jobs here, and instead whine that maybe we can just keep the old bulbs? It seems that the “Can Do” attitude of Americans has turned into “Done Enough.”

That’s the real slope Obama’s dream has to climb.

The technology, I suspect, is relatively easy. Getting enough of us off our duffs to do something about it will be the real challenge.

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© 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.)

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© 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.
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© 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/

Terror on Trial: Heart vs. Mind

There has been a lot of talk lately about the decision by Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the U.S. and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, among other crimes.

The decision to try Mohammed in a civilian court instead of having him face a military tribunal has been greeted by a lot of outrage and hand-wringing. It’s dangerous, some say. It’s what the terrorists want say others, so we shouldn’t give it to them, say others. It could give the terrorists reason to attack New York again, and threaten the court, the jurors, prosecutors, etc…

My friend Bob wrote to me the other day. “I think it is absolutely insane,” he said. “If these terrorists will be tried under the U.S. criminal justice system, AND it’s been admitted they did not receive their Miranda Rights, AND both the President of the United States and the U.S. Attorney General have admitted they were “tortured,” wouldn’t any competent judge would have to immediately dismiss the case?”

I am certainly no attorney, but I’ve covered my share of court battles. I have some thoughts.

For one thing, yes, a civilian trial will be full of pitfalls. And that’s OUR fault.

The previous administration’s tendency to use the Constitution only as a list of suggestion left us with quite a dilemma.

For one thing, as to the site of the trial, legally, i.e., constitutionally, it only makes sense.

The attacks of that day, for all their scope and horror, were criminal acts, carried out by a criminal organization. Thus, our laws demand that a trial be held in the jurisdiction in which the crime took place, with a chance for Mohammed to face his accusers and have his say.

Of course, there is the worry that Al Qaeda or some other band of holy murderers will seek to avenge the people involved in the trial, or the residents of New York City.

So, we’re supposed to break our own laws because we’re afraid of the terrorists?

The whole reason they are called terrorists is that they want us to be afraid, to abandon what we stand for and do things out of fear and anger, not out of reason and law. The last thing they would want is to be treated fairly under a set of secular laws, removed from the passions of our righteous anger and their feudal, wild-eyed fundamentalism

Yes, another attack could happen. But it’s not as though any of these thugs need a new reason.

It is also not as though we have not been through all this before.

A number of terror suspects have been put on trial in the U.S., convicted and imprisoned and the world did not come to a screeching halt. With a little time on a search engine, I found seven right off the bat.

•    First, let us not forget Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, whose truck bomb destroyed a federal building in April, 1995, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. He was one of our home-grown terrorists, born and raised New York State. He attacked what he believed to be a tyrannical federal government. Tried and convicted in a civilian court, he was executed in June of 2001, less than three months before 9/11.
•
•    Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was tried in New York City in 1997 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Incidentally, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is his uncle.
•
•     Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka “The Blind Sheikh,” is serving a life sentence after he and nine others were convicted of “seditious conspiracy” for planning terrorist attacks on a number of civilian targets in the U.S. In 1996 he was sentenced to life in prison. At the time, he said the U.S. would certainly kill him once he was in prison. Apparently, the paperwork for his assassination in lockup got lost somewhere.
•
•    El Sayyid Nosair stood trial as a co-conspirator of Rahman. He too received a life sentence.
•
•     Richard Reid, whom we in the label-happy media named “The Shoe Bomber,” is serving a life sentence after he tried to destroy a jetliner in flight in late in  2001 by setting off explosives hidden in his shoe.
•
•    José Padilla, charged with planning to explode a “dirty bomb,” was convicted instead on conspiracy charges. He is serving a 17 year sentence.
•
•    Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the Sept. 11 conspirators and the only one who failed to board an aircraft that day, is serving a life sentence.
•
The feds apparently think they have enough of a slam-dunk that they can try Mohammed without falling back on his confession, which was obtained after illegal questioning under torture. More on that in a moment.

We already get tons of criminals who claim not to have been Mirandized or who say they were tortured or coerced in some way. In some cases, it may even be true. But if they can’t offer proof or corroboration in some way, those accusations do not carry a lot of weight.

In this case, Mohammed was tortured, water-boarded more than 100 times, and former Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly saying “oh, that’s not torture” won’t change that fact, or its consequences. Any competent defense attorney will bring up the torture, if the prosecution attempts to use the confession.

Mohammed, by the way, only confessed some time after the torture sessions were ended and more traditional interrogation techniques were applied.

The problem is that you can’t go screwing around with what is really a very good legal system without paying some kind of consequence.

The previous administration played fast and loose with the rules as it suited them, and now we have a real mess on our hands.

This whole matter hinges on how serious “We the People” take the Constitution, truly the foundation of what and who we are as a nation.

We are not some tribal society, in which anything goes as long as it benefits that one narrow group of people. We are distinguished by the fact that we are a nation linked and shaped by a set of codified rules, not by race, creed, or religion. If we cannot abide by our own laws, then we are little more than a very large mob.

Or, to be blunter, we would be no better than terrorists ourselves.

Bob is right. This IS a disaster, but a disaster of our own making.

But surely it is plain how we would compound that disaster to make special cases out of suspected terrorists, to set aside the rights guaranteed them under the document that defines us? To do so would be to grant them victory.

As hard as it is to think about the possibility that these guys could go free, in the greater sense I think we have no other choice than to grant them the rights we would give any other thugs whose crimes were less spectacular.

I don’t think the civilian trials of these alleged terrorists will throw a wrench into our legal system. It may be true that they walk free because We the People set aside the Constitution and took a short-cut. If that occurs, it is we who threw the wrench.

A friend asked, just this morning, asked if I realized that in a lot of countries, Mohammed would simply be paraded out into some public place and summarily shot.

Yes, I know that. That is the point. We are better than that. And the bad guys hate us for it.
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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.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

A Full Moon Over Gettysburg, and the Confederate Colonoscopy

As many of you already know, I live in the Gettysburg area. My house sits about five miles south of the official battlefield park, scene of the famous July 1-3, 1863 fight that saw the high-water mark of the Confederacy, and the much-ballyhooed turning point of the American Civil War.

It was also a portent of great wealth for the Asian manufacturers of little toy rifles and swords with which the darling children and grandchildren of tourists pretend jolly mayhem on one another.

Of course, the battle took up a lot more space than just the 6,000-acre park. The road on which I live, for example, was the site of an encampment of troops serving under Union Gen. Abner Doubleday, who did not, legends to the contrary, invent baseball.

I am not enough of a student of history to know what Abner did in the battle, but according to a neighbor who pokes around the area with a metal detector, his troops apparently gave up sleep for the evening, preferring rather to spend their time peppering the ground with bullets, buckles, and buttons for the benefit of future relic hunters.

We get between 1.5 and 2 million tourists every year. It makes us really cagey about finding ways around town via alleys and back roads so we have a lower risk of getting behind one of our famous double-decker tour buses or some septuagenarian operating a 40-foot motor home while trying to read battlefield markers without actually stopping.

The great thing about all those tourists is that they bring their wallets with them, and when they leave, said wallets are usually a good bit lighter.

This is a good thing.

The bad thing is that we have to deal with tourists for all but the coldest months of the year. There has been, I believe, some intense research into finding a way for the tourists to simply mail their money to us, or transmit it through PayPal, but all the details haven’t been ironed out yet.

I’ll keep you posted.

These thoughts reasserted themselves recently as I sat in one of the restaurants on the tourist strip, writing in my journal and enjoying some ice cream and coffee.

Well, trying to.

Tourist season was already past its peak. Halloween was behind us, so the legions of live people looking for dead people on the battlefield were pretty well gone off to haunt other places.

Still, and mysteriously, one end of the restaurant was filled with a platoon of Confederate re-enactors in full regalia. Fortunately, they weren’t hard-core, that segment of the re-enactor universe who never wash their uniforms, out of deference to historical and olfactory exactitude, and who as a result smell like road-kill.

No, this was generally speaking a bunch of good-ole boys having a grand time with their lady friends over a hearty meal of chicken strips and bluish-ice cream sundaes. Better than hard-tack, you betcha.

They were a rowdy lot, but none more so than one fellow at the nearest table, who spoke with great animation and volume about his latest adventures in the sphere of medicine.

He sat facing me at an angle. Directly across from him, and facing away from me, was the woman who seemed to be with him. She was a substantial lass, with long, lustrous black hair and a deep and abiding passion for fried food, judging from her plate and by her, um, beamishness.

Now, I am the last person to pronounce judgment on a person’s girth, being horizontally gifted in my own right, or their choices in how they garb themselves. My favorite leisure time clothing is a sturdy set of bib overalls and bare feet, so who am I to talk?

Even so, I like to think that if I had the sort of back porch possessed by that young lady, hip-huggers might very well be the very last thing on my list of things to wear out in public.

“Hip-huggers” is perhaps not an accurate description, as these seemed more to be holding on by their fingernails.

The problem was exacerbated by a T-shirt whose reach was far from adequate.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember just how white some white people can be.

I do believe my corner of the room was a lot brighter than it otherwise might be, for all the light being reflected my way. I felt that I had suddenly found myself in the spotlight. I would have risen and given an acceptance speech if I could have gotten a word in edgewise.

He never stopped talking. He was too loud to ignore. And the subject seemed to change every other sentence or two.

It wasn’t so bad, merely annoying, until he started talking about his colonoscopy, his dramatic re-telling of the preparatory arrangements involved, the methodologies employed in achieving the exam, and the results discovered in the process.

By the time he got to the end of the recitation and confessed that his doctor had also discovered a mother lode of hemorrhoids, (“Which I already knew,” he added), I don’t believe anyone on the north side of the Steinwehr Ave. Friendly’s had the least bit of sympathy for him.

His friends either ignored him, or pored over the brochures and notices on the bulletin board by the register…

I, fuming that my chance to concentrate on my journal-writing had been thoroughly smashed, also admitted that if I hadn’t chosen a large serving of super-chocolate fudge ice-cream, I might have gotten through the ordeal with a bit less discomfort.

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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.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/