Bats have a bad rep. Think bat and you likely think bat with rabies. Think bat and you likely think dirty bat or bat as vampiric bloodsucker. Think bat and you likely think evil harbinger of doom and destruction. (Okay, that last one’s a tad over the top … but you get the idea.) Bats have fewer defenders than fear-laden critics.

But bats, the only mammal structurally capable of sustained flight, are just creatures with significant ecological — and economic — roles. Hate mosquitoes and other insects? They’re on the nighttime menu for bats. Like bees, many bats pollinate plants and spread seeds. Bat shit (sorry; bat guano) is rich in nitrogen and is a profitable fertilizer. Bats’ ability to navigate in the dark (echolocation) is a subject of significant scientific study.

But in the past five years, up to 6.7 million bats are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Three species face extinction — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tricolored bat. A malady called white-nose syndrome is killing them.

Researchers gleaned the estimate by counting bats in winter trips to caves. Bats roost densely, reports Darryl Fears of The Washington Post. So researchers take digital photographs of bats snoring through winter and literally count noses of bats. In 2009, researchers estimated bat deaths at about 1 million. The new figure has alarmed scientists. Says Mylea Bayless, conservation programs manager for Bat Conservation International in Austin, Tex.:

We’re watching a potential extinction event on the order of what we experienced with bison and passenger pigeons for this group of mammals, The difference is we may be seeing the regional extinction of multiple species. Unlike some of the extinction events or population depletion events we’ve seen in the past, we’re looking at a whole group of animals here, not just one species. We don’t know what that means, but it could be catastrophic.

White-nose syndrome, reports Fears, is caused by a fungus called Geomyces destructans. The fungus eats through the skin and membranes of bats. The syndrome was first observed in in 2006 in Howe Caverns near Albany, N.Y., a popular tourist destination down the road from me. Reports Fears:

Since then, biologists in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Indiana and other states have returned to caves and mines during the annual winter hibernation of bats and reported alarming numbers of fresh dead to wildlife and gaming agencies.

The extensive demise of bats threatens forest health — and segments of the economy based on forests.

The paper products industry could also be hard hit if pests such as the emerald ash borer proliferate in the absence of bats. Loggers in states such as Vermont “ought to be concerned, but I don’t think the word has really gotten out to these folks,” said Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity in Richmond, Vt.

“It certainly behooves people concerned about the health of forests — loggers or ecologists — to pay attention,” Matteson said. “But it’s hard to make a direct connection between 7 million bats dead and what happens to forest pests.”

I still don’t like bats. I’ll still duck when they flit over my deck. But none of us should be happy that nearly 7 million have died with no apparent recourse to a cure. The potential extinction of any species — even one that fills many of us with fear and loathing — must concern us.

More on bats:
• white nose syndrome
• the economic cost of losing bats
• the science of bats (video)
• Bat Conservation International
• Organization for Bat Conservation

photo credit:
• vampire bat by Michael & Patricia Fogden/Corbis

Just in case you want in on the awesome, and you want to celebrate Christmas in an unconventional way, check out Marvel Comics’ adaptation of A Christmas Carol—with zombies!

Zombies Christmas Carol, published in September, might at first blush seem like yet another adaptation of a classic tale with zombies thrown in, a trend kicked off a couple years ago by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Zombies Christmas Carol seems particularly well-suited to the zombie treatment, though, and not just because the story is already filled with supernatural creatures.

Eisner Award-winner Jim McCann (author of Return of the Dapper Men) adapts the Charles Dickens tale with a deft hand, making it his own while still maintaining surprising fidelity to the original. In the adaptation, Scrooge must not just give to the poor—he’s the only one with the financial means to stave off “the hungry death” that threatens to burst out of the poorhouses and hospitals.

“And so with Scrooge laying as mankind’s last hope,” McCann writes, “Humanity might as well have extinguished its final fires this very Christmas Eve.”

Zombies Christmas Carol features the art teams of David Baldeon & Jordi Tarragona and Jeremy Treece & Roger Bonet. Their art styles mesh well enough, particularly since Baldeon & Tarragona handle everything set in the present, which anchors the story. Flashbacks and flashforwards to the past and future fall under Treece & Bonet’s domain, accentuating the differences in timeline at convenient points.

Marvel Comics has made a cottage industry of zombies, putting the zombie spin on most of its main characters in its Marvel Zombies series. The comic publisher has also had excellent success adapting classics through its Marvel Illustrated line. That the two ventures would somehow intersect—collide?—shouldn’t surprise me. That the result was so good shouldn’t, either.

Zombies Christmas Carol turns out to be delicious fun and way cool.

Few characters are as recognizable as the patron saint of Christmas.

Santa, as well as his Canadian and British counterpart, Father Christmas, both derive from the legends surrounding Saint Nicholas, a former bishop who lived in the third century in the city of Myra, in a region that’s now part of Turkey. His feast day is celebrated December 6.

The Dutch abbreviated Saint Nicholas’s name as Sinterklaas, which is where the name Santa Clause comes from. The Dutch depict Sinterklaas much like a Catholic bishop with a tall hat, full white beard, and a staff.

Our own depictions of Santa Claus predate date back to images of “Father Christmas” from 17th century in England.

That depiction appears most famously in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1943, when Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Present:

clothed in one simple deep green robe…bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure that its capacious breast was bare…. It’s feet…were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles.

In America, Santa has taken a much different shape. His transformation first began in 1823 with the publication of Clement Clark Moore’s poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which appeared anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel. (The city of Troy was also the birthplace of another icon, Uncle Sam.)

“His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! / His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” reads the poem, which goes on to describe “the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.”

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

The poem also mentions Santa’s sleigh for the first time and gives names for all eight reindeer.

The first picture of Santa came in 1863, in a sketch by Thomas Nast for the cover of Harper’s Weekly. (Nast’s artwork, as it happened, helped make the aforementioned Uncle Sam so iconic; his depiction of Santa would have similar lasting impact.)

Nast’s drawing of Santa appeared on Saturday, January 3, 1863. As sketched by Nast, Santa wears what are described as red pants and a blue jacket with large white stars. It is also reputedly the first time Santa appears as fat and jolly rather than as a tall, slender man.

In the picture, he sits on the back of a sleigh packed with presents, visiting a somewhat dejected Union army, passing out gifts to soldiers. A sign in the background says “Welcome Santa Claus.”

After that, Santa made other appearances in other places, including a 1902 book by Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.

But it was Santa’s appearances in advertisements for the Coca-Cola Company that made his appearance iconic. Prior to that, Santa still appeared in clothes of various colors, but the Coke campaign, designed by artist Haddon Sundblom, put Santa in red and white—and he has remained in that outfit to this day.

With any luck, he’ll slide down the chimney at your house tonight!

————

Adapted from a piece cross-posted at Emerging Civil War. 

I’m going to read 25 books over the next 30 days. At least that’s the plan.

And my goal is to share my reading with you.

It’s partially by design, partially by doctoral requirement. The PhD program I’m enrolled in requires three “field exams”—areas of specialty that I want to focus on as part of my doctoral work above and beyond the coursework I have to take.

My first, which I’m reading for over Christmas break, will focus on the way creative nonfiction writers write about place.

My list started out with twenty-eight books on it, but it’s grown a little over the past few days:

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away.

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never.

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. The John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I’ve had other people offer some great suggestions to me, too, and no doubt I’ll dabble with some of those along the way, too, and I will certainly look at those suggestions in more earnest once the “official” list gets knocked out.

Here’s how this works: Students work with a faculty member to compile a reading list. Once that’s been finalized, the student reads, reads, reads. As the student begins to find patterns and themes, he/she (in this case, “he”) works with the faculty member to develop a question related to the list. Then, when the student is ready, he says “OK.” The English Department e-mails him the question on a Friday and he has 72 hours to write an answer, due Monday morning. The faculty member reads the paper and assigns a pass or fail.

But because I can never do things the easy way, I’ve decided that as I read a book, I’m going to write about it. It’s my attempt to process what I’ve read. It’ll help me organize my thoughts as I go. It’ll help “set” in my mind what I’ve read so that, as I barrel through these, they don’t just become a blur. After all, this is not about quantity but, in the end, quality. By writing about the books, I hope to make this a more qualitative, albeit intense, reading experience.

My goal is to read twenty-five of these books before the start of the semester on January 25.

As I go, I’ll share. Feel free to skip. Feel free to add your own thoughts. Most importantly, feel free to ask your own questions.

Let’s see what places these creative nonfiction writers take us.

There is, he suggested, “a kind of heroism and commitment missing from contemporary American poetry….”

Hoagland’s own poetry is filled with heroism of the everyday kind: slightly broken people trying to move through the world even as they’re besieged by consumerism, vapid media, and stuff. He’s wry and witty and keenly insightful, and everything always comes back to the struggle to understand what it means to be human.

Much contemporary poetry—at least of the post-New York School—forgets that struggle, though, and instead gets preoccupied by all that stuff.

Hoagland characterizes the New York School as being “[s]paced out on the page, distracted, full of domestic minutiae and vagrant parentheticals, dropped lines of though, and goofy asides” that “declare their harmlessness with a vengeance.” They are ruled, he says, “by the muse of deviant triviality: Dissheveled Lite.”

As someone who recently considered poetry a foreign language, I freely admit that much of Hoagland’s essay went right over my head because there was much name-dropping I didn’t recognize—poets so famous and influential that they obviously made no dent on me, an innocent bystander outside poetry circles. (Frank O’Hara, I at least recognized, and his infamous off-the-cuff casual happenstance poetry.) Hoagland also assumed a familiarity of poetic traditions and trends I could only scratch my head at. I’m not a poet or a literary critic; I’m just some schmoe who occasionally consumes poetry as a casual reader. This semester, I even tried to write some, and I was such a novice that I felt like I needed a lot of handholding to get through it.

But to suggest that much contemporary American poetry lacks “heroism and commitment” seems like a big enough statement that even I, in my ignorance, have to sit up and notice.

After all, as a writer and teacher of writing, I preach the Gospel of Risk: something must be at stake in the writing; something must be at stake for the writer; something should even be at stake for the reader. Such risk-taking requires courage—some might say “heroism”—and commitment.

That’s what I like so much about being here at S&R: there’s an urgency about much of the writing here.

Hoagland argues that the malaise affecting poetry results from “many forces.”

He cites “middle class manners, shyness, a learned humility, media saturation, a sense of powerlessness as citizens and humans, and embarrassment for same.”

My stomach dropped when I read his list because it articulates exactly the very things I’ve struggled with recently in my own writing. I’ve even tried to capture my frustration and disappointment in my poetry, but I’ve failed miserably. I’ve not been able to find a voice to articulate the discontent I feel with my artistic self—but Hoagland suddenly nailed it for me.

Some of the poetry I’ve heard from my own contemporaries at Binghamton University have absolutely amazed me. My peers—most of them at least a decade or more younger than me—struggle in their poetry with loss, addiction, poverty, alienation, and the terrifying feeling of being unloved and unlovable. I have seen honesty and rawness and anguish, all on display in the least pretentious, most vulnerable sorts of ways. It’s the old writing saw “in the specific lies the universal” put into action in the very best of ways.

Much of the success comes from the guidance of poet Maria Gillan, who urges poets to “go to the cave”—that dark, haunted place inside ourselves where our scary stuff lives. Go to the cave, she says. Spelunk.

Whatever a poet brings back from the trip must be honest and true. The best poets have taken that truth and given bold voice to it.

In comparison, I’ve felt like I write in the vanilla voice of the polite middle class. I don’t have angst to exploit. I don’t have a bunch of horrible things in my past to exorcise. I have the constraints of courtesy and the privilege of a white, middle-class, middle-age man.

Don’t get me wrong: I thank my lucky stars that I’ve not had to live through personal calamity and misfortune. I have heartbreak to draw on, and that’s no small thing, and it’s universally recognized.

Besides, if I’m honest with myself, I realize that an anguished past is not a prerequisite to be an artist. I don’t need angst to make art.

Part of it, I know, is my own frustration with the times—because I am very much a product of them, like it or not. “Our present environment,” says Hoagland’s friend David Rivard, “is already speeded up, superficial, bright, distracted, sensation-filled, and wholly approving of personal pleasure as a birthright.”

Good God.

I’m doomed.

It doesn’t help, Hoagland argues, that “a more insular and self conscious poetry world” has largely failed to engage that present environment in a meaningful way. The result, he says, is a shortage of “the visionary.”

“Can the pleasures of mobility, deflection, fragmentation and wit be joined to the resonance and gravity of adulthood?” Hoagland asks.

I don’t know enough about contemporary poetry to know the answer to Hoagland’s question. I don’t know enough to know if he’s right about a shortage of “the visionary.”

But I’ve sat in a room with a bunch of young poets who have struggled to engage the world and their place in it in meaningful ways through their art. They have gone to the cave and have confronted themselves there. They have found words to express the truth they’ve found, and they have done so without gimmicks, without detachment, without “distractedness and haplessness.”

So, perhaps, I’m not doomed after all. The visionary is out there. I have seen it and have seen that it comes from within, from those with the courage and commitment to go to the cave to confront what they find. In the struggle, they continue to find those things that make them—that make all of us—human.

Well, whoever it is who gave us this as our logo, and these guys as our mascots, is still around, because the new batch of official London 2012 Olympics posters was released a little while ago, and they’re pretty dreadful. Uninspired is probably a better word, since they’re among the most boring posters you will ever see. It clearly follows from the fact that whatever committee this was decided to go for name artists, rather than run some sort of competition. So we’ve got the gaggle of usual suspects. Here’s probably the best of the bunch, from Adrian Hamilton:

And here’s the lot.

Honestly, this is getting embarrassing. What sort of posters would they have gotten if they’d avoided hiring their buddies and actually opened it up to a competition? How about these? Or, even better, these? A sample of which is here:

Any of which would have been an improvement.

I found her, just this autumn, because of some owls.

In my attempt to feed my head full of poetry this semester, I picked up one of Mary Oliver’s many volumes from the bookstore shelf because the title caught my eye: Owls and Other Fantasies. Just the idea that a writer would look at an owl as a fantasy held promise.

The poems in the 2003 collection hooked me at once. Filled with beautiful description, thoughtful metaphor, and peaceful insight, the poems seemed like everything I thought nature poems should be.

Take, for instance, “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard”:

His beak could open a bottle
and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder—
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation….

I can only imagine what an owl might read in Revelation, but even the thought of it wowed me.

I mentioned Oliver’s name to a colleague, and she shrugged and nodded and sort of brushed Oliver off with the casual tag “Nature Poet.” It wasn’t quite a slur, and it wasn’t quite dismissive, but it wasn’t an “Oh yeah, she’s awesome” either. I felt sad because, I admit, I had been quite charmed.

Oliver doesn’t necessarily put a lot of herself out there in her work. She’s not taking a lot of personal risks, which seems to be the currency of good poetry these days. But what I do appreciate about her work, aside from the imagery, is her willingness to let the nature challenge her.

“I live in the open mindedness of not knowing enough about anything,” she writes in her poem “Luna,” which appears in her 2004 collection Why I Wake Early.

Her poems continually celebrate nature’s ability to teach her new ways of understanding the world and herself. In “Goldenrod, Late Fall,” she says, “The weeds let down their seedy faces / cheerfully, which is the part I like best, and certainly / it is as good as a book for learning from.”

“O, good scholar,” she says in “Mindful,” from Early,

how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Her poems often cascade down the page in interesting arrangements (which I can’t capture here). I did find some of the poems in Early to be too distracting in their line breaks and physical dishevelment and alignment on the page.

She best articulates her wonder at the natural world in a selection from “Sometimes” in her 2008 collection Red Bird:

 Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Yeah, I can get into that, for sure.

Oliver has published some twenty-eight poetry collections, so I have some catching up to do. A trip through one of her books, though, is like a quiet walk in the woods.

…but of course the birds were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
As comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.

(from “This World,” 2004)

 Gary Marmorstein

While Ed Ritter was on the land line with the manager of Mobility Lift and Elevator, he had to keep a finger in his other ear so he could hear above the noise of the giant vacuum cleaner upstairs.

“I’m sorry, sir, could you repeat that?”

“I asked, if I’m not being invasive or anything, what’s your father got?”

“He’s got lymphoma,” Ed said, then immediately regretted splashing the emphasis back in the manager’s face. In the months he’d been coming to New Jersey to see his father Joel through doctors’ appointments and visits with friends—visits that had recently acquired a valedictory tone—he was learning to forgive the awkward questions and comments of people who meant well. “He believes he’s going to die in the next few days. I was hoping to get you guys out here before that.” The first time Ed had called Mobility, he had followed the manager’s instructions and measured the width of the staircase in the mock Tudor house, and the manager had pronounced it too narrow for the brackets they had in stock to hold the chair’s track in place; the manager would call as soon as the special bracket came in from the supplier. But no one from Mobility had called again, and Joel was becoming impatient. “I want to die upstairs,” his father had been repeating at least twice a day.

“Tough, tough break,” the Mobility manager said sympathetically. “I have to remind you there’s no resale value on stairs installed to specification.”

“My father knows that,” Ed said. “He wants it, even if he uses it just once.”

“Then I’ll get the bracket today. My guys’ll show up tomorrow in the a.m. and we’ll get the chair in. Okay?”

Ed told his father Joel the chair would be installed by late tomorrow morning; by tomorrow evening, he said, it would be as though Joel were riding the roller-coaster at Palisades Park again. Joel nodded. He would have to tolerate one more night stuck downstairs in a hospital bed in the sunroom, which was bisected by the tentacle-like tube running from the oxygen condenser to his nostrils

*

     Almost a month earlier, in June 1999, Ed had left his wife Laurie and their daughter Rachel in Los Angeles to come east to stay with his father. Ed had been doing this, off and on, since Joel’s diagnosis the previous year. After two rounds of chemotherapy, Joel’s cancer had gone into remission. When the numbers looked bad again, his longtime girlfriend Zina, seething because Joel was still resisting marriage, announced she was not a nurse and needed to protect her future. Joel, a decade older, continued to work through chemo and radiation at his law firm in Hackensack, while Zina, at 59, took a retirement package from her brokerage company and now had time on her hands.

Her frequent departures played havoc with Ed’s marriage. If Ed were being honest with himself, however, he dutifully hurried to New Jersey each time because it had become simpler, if not easier, to be with his dying father than with his wife and daughter. In Teaneck, Ed’s purpose was clear—to care for his father; in Los Angeles, Ed, a writer who hadn’t sold a script in years, no longer knew what purpose he served. Laurie, a casting agent, paid most of their bills now.

At a Sherman Oaks poker game in June, Aaron Gitler, one of the un- or underemployed writers at the game, said to Ed, “You’re abandoning your own daughter to go east and play nursemaid to your father?”

“Somebody in this game has to go to work,” Ed said, annoyed, and the others went “Ooooh,” and Ed, dealing the cards, said, “Omaha, eight-low qualifier.”

On his most recent flight to Newark, the previous week, Ed misplaced his cell phone on the plane and didn’t even bother to contact the airline about it. The instrument was encoded with too many of his failures.

*

     They were waiting for Zina to return from another pre-vacation shopping spree, but Sylvia the hospice nurse, a Swiss woman of frightening efficiency, arrived first. Sometimes Sylvia came in the morning, sometimes the afternoon, her voice ringing with Alpine cheer. A few days earlier, when Joel could no longer negotiate the narrow stairs to go up to his own bed, Sylvia ordered a hospital bed placed in the sun room. To ease his increasingly labored breathing, Sylvia also ordered an oxygen condenser. The only pleasure Joel took from being in the sunroom was listening to the radio, tuned to WCBS-AM, its All News All the Time format underscored by the sound of a phantom teletype machine. In the New York senatorial race, Hillary Clinton has agreed to debate Rudy Giuliani. WCBS news time: ten-forty-seven. It looks like the swift-serving Mark Philippoussis, who forfeited at Wimbledon due to torn knee ligaments, will forego the Davis Cup as well.  

“Vitals are good, Joel!” said Sylvia shouting as though her patient were on the other side of a lake. She went through Joel’s meds, their bottles arrayed on the overtable like sentries: Allopurinol and Allegra for his allergies, Lactulose for bowel movements, Compazine for nausea, Dyazide for the edema, Megace for his non-existent appetite, Amoxocillin for the teeth rotting in the back of his mouth, those high-octane pain-fighters, Oxycontin and Percoset, and the steroid Prednisone. Making notes on a chart, Sylvia said, “We don’t need some of these anymore”—meaning Joel no longer suffered the symptoms treated by them, or that he was about to die? Ed couldn’t be sure.

“What I need,” Joel said, “is to be upstairs in my own bed.”

“Oy. Here we go,” Ed said.

A car trunk closed in the driveway. “That must be Zina now!” Sylvia half-yodeled. Joel’s eyes moved to the window facing the driveway, as though Zina might appear there. Earlier that day, Joel had sworn Zina was going away with her new boyfriend. “A boyfriend?” said Ed, skeptical. “I thought she was going to the Catskills overnight to place tennis.” Joel replied, “The guy’s name is Lenny. She says she’s enrolled in Total Tennis, but who goes to a tennis camp for one day? She’s with Lenny.”

Zina entered the house and set two shopping bags on the floor. Magda and Kristofer, the Polish housecleaning couple—each wore a wedding ring and Ed only assumed they were married to each other—excused themselves to get past her as they carried mops, squeegees, and an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner out the front door. Ed could hear them loading the equipment into their van. Zina came into the sunroom and kissed Joel on the head. “How are you feeling, honey?” she asked, placing a manicured hand across his forehead. Sylvia busily tucked in the coverlet at the end of the hospital bed. Then the housecleaners poked their heads into the door frame. Ed thought it was turning into the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera in there.

“Finished for the day,” Kristofer said, who touched Joel, then nodded to Magda to do the same. “God be with you, Joel,” he said. “Zina, we will phone you about the paint.” The couple retreated; within another few seconds they were outside.

Ed said to Zina, “You’re having a room painted?”

“The cellar floor,” Zina said. “This is a realtor’s secret you can have for free. Now Joel, honey, once they start painting, you know the cellar will be off-limits.”

My father’s not dead yet, Ed thought, and already she’s making arrangements to unload the place. And yet, over the past few weeks, Ed had tried to imagine what he and Laurie would do with their house in Los Angeles if they divorced. Where would Laurie and Rachel live? Where would he live?

“I don’t care about the basement,” Joel said, “as long as I can be upstairs.”

“He doesn’t understand,” Zina said to Ed, as though Joel’s lack of interest in the cellar floor indicated dementia.

While Zina was changing into clothes she had just purchased, Ed saw Sylvia to the door. “I’ve left some Roxanol with Zina to give to your father,” said Sylvia, peering at him over her half-glasses, “but only if he needs it. When he dies, what’s left must be flushed down the toilet. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Ed nodded. “Does Zina?”

“She knows what to do,” Sylvia said.

*

     Zina twirled into the sun room modeling her new tennis outfit, showing off her thoroughbred legs. Ed invariably went cold at these runway moments. But Joel admired the outfit and grunted his approval.

“Oh, Lenny will like that,” Joel said.

“You’re delirious, honey,” said Zina. Half-pivoting to Ed, she said, “Names from his past just seem to just float up, don’t they?”

Ed carried Zina’s valise and hat box out to the driveway, where her SUV sat behind Joel’s old Volvo.

“Ed, you are a true gentleman,” Zina said, jingling more keys than a school janitor.  “I’m sorry to have to bring this up, but now’s the time to call some mortuaries. All I know is Guterman’s, but you’ve probably got several options.” He knew Guterman’s; they had handled the funerals of his grandparents.

“I’d feel funny making those calls when he’s right in the next room,” Ed said.

“Oh, that’s right! Lost your cell, poor boy. Just call from the upstairs phone here so he can’t hear you. Be sure to ask if he should be buried in a Jewish shroud.”

“Joel? I think he’d prefer being rolled up in a tortilla.”

“You don’t know your father very well, do you?” said Zina. “Believe me; arrange it now and it could be half the price. After all, it’s your responsibility.” Ed knew she wasn’t wrong; as executor of his father’s estate, he was the one to handle funeral arrangements. “Mwah,” Zina said, presenting her perfumed cheek. “I’ll be back tomorrow night. You’ll be fine with him, won’t you?”

“We might not make it to the Mercury Lounge tonight, but we’ll hold our own,” Ed said. “Big day tomorrow. Mobility’s coming and putting in the stairs he wants.”

“Oh? I was under the impression they couldn’t get the quote unquote part.”

“They’ve expedited it, or something,” Ed said.

Zina looked up at the house she co-owned, started to say something, then apparently thought better of it. “I have my cell with me,” she said, firing up the SUV. “You boys behave.”

When Ed went back inside, he found Joel asleep. Although there would be another three hours of daylight, he felt it was time for a gin and tonic. He deserved it. To keep noise at a minimum, he made the g & t without ice and, holding the perspiring glass as though it had been grafted to his fingers, carefully turned the pages of the day’s Times as he read through it. Saudi’s Visit to Arms Site in Pakistan Worries U.S. Pete Conrad, Commander of Apollo 12 and the Third Man to Set Foot on the Moon, Is Dead at 69. My father’s age, Ed thought; one man flies into space and earns glory; the other goes to an office each day to defend the indigent and disenfranchised. Soon Ed had worked up enough courage to tiptoe up the stairs, get out the Bergen County white pages and find the phone number for Guterman’s, its name and number larger than any others on the page. Emboldened by the alcohol buzz, Ed phoned. Was this an emergency? No, Ed said, not yet. In that case, he was told, Barry Guterman would call him back.

*

     In the evening Joel, no longer able to swallow food, took his glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast. “Join me?” he said, raising the glass to Ed.

“I’ll stick with my Percoset and lime,” Ed said, actually mixing his fourth or fifth gin and tonic. Ed put on a Jo Stafford CD—it was a present he’d given Joel because she’d been Joel’s favorite singer during his high school years, and her liquid amber voice was comforting to him; yet Ed knew he’d bought it also because Jo Stafford was missing from his own collection and he would surely inherit it. I want a Sunday kind of love, Jo was singing. They went through a shoebox of photographs—emulsion-rich Kodachromes and muddy-looking Polaroids—of Joel’s old girlfriends. Some of them were, to Ed’s eyes, lovely camera subjects, but Joel recalled the names of only a few. It irritated Ed, this self-absorption of his father’s, yet he forgave it. Following several rounds of chemotherapy, Joel’s hair had grown back surprisingly darker, but his body was otherwise withered and flaccid. Sex was only a memory now. Maybe, Ed thought, that’s one reason Zina kept taking trips: a woman who has defined herself by her desirability suddenly discovers she’s no longer lusted after at home; her desirability is affirmed only when she goes out and attracts healthy men.

“Where do you think she is now?” said Joel, as though he could read Ed’s mind.

“Zina may surprise you, Dad. Try her cell.”

Joel grunted and said, “Go over and get David Bar-din. He’ll get me back upstairs.” Ed tried not to feel insulted: he was smaller than his father, even now, and David Bar-din was the size of a buffalo.

“Dad, it’s nearly eleven o’clock. I am not knocking on David Bar-din’s door to ask a favor.” Ed wanted nothing to do with the man. Now and then Ed would see him in his driveway. “Ah, so, Mr. Ben Hecht is in from Hollywood,” David Bar-din once called out to him. “Our cup runneth over!” “Do you need a napkin?” Ed called back, and David Bar-din smirked and shook his head. Ed was used to such condescension, though it usually came from people who worked in show business.

“I thought you were here to help me,” said Joel.

“Help you? I’ve changed my life for you!” Even as the words leaped out of his mouth, Ed knew it wasn’t quite true. “Lie back, Dad. Let me get under here.” Ed removed his father’s khaki shorts which, after three days stuck to Joel’s body, had begun to smell like mushrooms, and put a new pair of Depends on him. Two weeks after his final radiology appointment, traces of the radiologist’s henna-colored, Aztec-like markings were still visible on Joel’s chest. Through the humiliating process and the chatter of the radio, Joel kept a forearm stretched across his eyes. His body began to tremble. It took Ed fully half a minute to see that his Joel was crying.

“Dad?”

“Ed, do you hate me?”

“No, I adore you,” Ed said, and this, at least, was the truth. He kissed his father on an eyebrow and turned the radio down. Sitting in the Naugahyde chair facing the hospital bed, Ed finished the day’s Times and drank himself to sleep.

The lamp was still on when he woke to the irregular flatulence of the oxygen condenser, and a man’s voice barely decipherable beneath it. WCBS news time, four forty-seven. Estimates are that ninety thousand people were in attendance when Mia Hamm and the USA team win the Women’s Soccer championship. Joel’s tongue seemed to be straining for moisture. Ed put lemon glycerin on a cotton swab and put it to his father’s mouth, which closed around it. Ed turned the light out. How much longer could his father—feeble, incontinent, and occasionally hallucinating—hang on? Why would he want to? In another hour dawn began to creep through the wooden Venetian blinds. Ed was awake for it.

*

     Sylvia brought him a coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts in Englewood. In the next hour she would change Joel’s bedding and run her tests. With Sylvia there and the Mobility installers scheduled before noon, Ed took a break and drove to Edwards, an air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted super-cavern giving shoppers asylum from another near-hundred degree day. Ed liked to pretend that Edwards was his store, named specifically for him, and if anyone made a crack about the package of the Depends on his shopping basket, he could ban the offender forever. He also bought tonic water for himself and pre-made things like potato salad and cold cuts—foods he didn’t have to cook and disturb Joel’s sense of smell—and, because the store had run out of Carnation Instant Breakfast, Joel’s preferred nutrition drink, a case of vanilla Ensure.

When he returned to the house he found Sylvia in the kitchen talking on the wall phone. “Yes, he has just walked in,” she said, declining to meet Ed’s eyes. Her voice was unusually subdued. It must be Laurie, Ed thought as he put away the groceries; I should have phoned her yesterday. His fingers brushed against a refrigerator magnet half-covering one of the first directives Sylvia had written out after the hospice had sent her over: Please, No Bad News.  Sylvia cleared her throat and said to Ed, “Zina would like to speak with you.”

“Steffi Graf!” said Ed into the handset. “How’s that backhand?”

She was not in the mood. Zina explained to Ed that she had called off Mobility. It was her decision about her property—50% now, 100% upon Joel’s death—and she did not want the place disfigured for an eleventh hour whim.

“Zina, you’re a regular Clara Barton,” Ed said.

“You little shit! You’re trying to run my house and you won’t even stay in yours!”

Ed heard her click off. He could feel his blood racing. He had been called many names over the years, but never a little shit. Trying to keep the fury out of his voice, he phoned Mobility. The manager told Ed that his stepmom had canceled the job.

“She’s not my stepmom,” Ed said, “and I’m overriding her. Come anyway. It’s what my father wants.”

“Ach, I already sent my guys to another job. Think about it and call me tonight if you want to reschedule.”

Unsatisfactory as it was, they left it at that.

When Ed stepped into the sun room, Sylvia was fussing with the buttons of Joel’s denim shirt. The air conditioning had turned the room downright cold. Joel gazed past her shoulder, up at Ed. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ll tell you later, Dad,” said Ed, indicating Sylvia with his eyes.

Sylvia grabbed her medical bag and snapped everything shut. “Until tomorrow, Joel!” she shouted, no more eager to stay than Ed, irrationally feeling betrayed, was eager to have her stay. Off to see other patients, she closed the front door behind her.

“Ed, what did you want to tell me?”

“I . . . They were out of Carnation Instant Breakfast,” Ed said. “I picked up some  Ensure. I hope you won’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. You can do me one favor, though.”

“Anything.”

“Get me upstairs,” said Joel, his desperation aimed like an arrow between Ed’s eyes.

“Okay, we’ll try.” Ed suspected they were just going through the motions, but he quickly went up and turned on the air-conditioning because the big bedroom, unoccupied by Zina the previous night, had become unbearably hot. Back downstairs, it took four or five minutes to get Joel out of bed. Joel grunted, mashed his swollen feet onto his moccasins and tried to stand up straight. Ed allowed his father to lean on him as they began the slow shuffle to the bottom of the stairs.

“Ready, Dad?” said Ed.

Joel gripped the banister. Ed braced his whole body behind him, his cheek intimately flush against his father’s lower back, just below the beltline of his khaki shorts. By the eighth step, more than halfway there, Ed’s thighs were straining for purchase. Ed took a breath and pushed Joel up one more step.

Upstairs and downstairs, the phones rang; Ed could hear them in a kind of stereo trill, the two rings harmonic but not identical. Ed prayed it wasn’t the mortuary guy. Later, he wouldn’t be certain if he’d dropped away from his father because he was surrendering to a well-trained impulse to answer the phone, or if the sudden ring had caused Joel to let go. In another half-second, however, Joel had crashed into the banister. The railing cracked, unmooring several balusters from their bases, but remained sturdy enough to keep Joel on the staircase, though on his stomach, his denim shirttail rolled halfway up his back. The phones stopped ringing.

“I’m so sorry, Dad. Let’s get you up.” Ed squatted next to his father’s left leg.

“This is Kristofer!” said the voice exploding from the answering machine upstairs.

“Let me just lie here a minute,” Joel said.

“Zina,” Kristofer continued on the answering machine, “we have called your mobile many times, but never an answer! We have bought the paints! Call us back, please, when you get this message!” Ed could hear the machine click, punctuated by a moment of dial tone.

Ed surveyed the damage. The banister buckled grotesquely, like something out of a German Expressionist film. One of Joel’s moccasins was lodged between two broken balusters, its scuffed mate turned upside down on the floor below. Ed had inadvertently knocked a framed photo of Zina and Joel, evidently taken at a bar mitzvah or a wedding—both of them were smiling; Joel was wearing a yarmulke—and now the frame was tilted between the first and second steps, each step sprinkled with broken glass.

“I don’t suppose that was Mobility calling,” said Joel.

“It was Kristofer about the basement. Should I call him back?”

“Better leave it to Zina. You know how she needs to be in control.” Joel groaned.   Ed was amazed to hear the groan become a laugh. “She’ll be good and pissed.”

“I certainly hope so,” Ed said, laughing too. Then he bent over and placed his father’s arms around his own neck, and together they made it to the top of the stairs.

***

The challenge was to beat 2500 gallons per minute of oil with an oil recovering efficiency (percentage of oil vs. water in the recovered gallons) of 70% or greater. The previous record was less than 1100 gallons per minute. Two companies beat the challenge, with the winner more than doubling the goal.

2nd place went to NOFI of Norway:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the winner was Elastec of Illinois:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The complete videos from all the challengers are available here.

Image Credit: Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X-Challenge

[Dr. Nepomuk Otte and his colleagues] spotted gamma rays with energies of far more than 100 GeV, and there were further hints that there may be teraelectronvolt rays; that puts them nearly on a par with particle energies at the Large Hadron Collider.

If you recall, back when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was about to be powered up in 2008 there was a great deal of fear expressed by non-scientists that the LHC could result in the creation of black holes that might eat the Earth, or that the LHC might create theoretical “strangelets” that might eat the Earth. Regardless of the theory, everyone agreed that they were afraid that it meant the end of the world. I wrote a post debunking this lunacy by means of theoretical Hawking radiation, quantum mechanics, and some basic particle physics, but some commenters were not convinced. One went so far as to label the LHC’s creators as worse than Nazis because the Nazis weren’t trying to kill the entire planet, just commit genocide. *cough*cough*are-you-fucking-kidding-me!?!*cough*cough*

The main reason that the LHC wasn’t going to make Earth-devouring black holes was simple logic: scientists have observed collisions between galactic cosmic rays and the Earth’s atmosphere that have way more energy than the highest energy collision that the LHC can create. By “way more energy” I’m talking trillions of times more energy.

If the observational hints about the Crab Nebula are right and there are teraelectronvolt (TeV) gamma rays coming from the pulsar, then that’s another observation that might indicate that the LHC is safe. True, a gamma ray isn’t a cosmic ray – the former is a photon of light at really high frequencies and the latter is a particle of matter accelerated to very high speeds, but fundamentally the two are identical (you know, according to that old E=MC² thing someone smart came up with). And who knows, when the scientists get around to figuring out why their stellar models differ from the observed gamma ray energies, they might find that the most likely source is particle collisions.

OK, so maybe that’s a stretch. Maye. But the Crab Nebula thing is still cool, and last I checked, the LHC has been run at half its maximum power (3.5 TeV, in March 2011). And if I twist an ankle out jogging, it’s pretty clear to me that the Earth’s still here too.

So much for the end of the world.

Image Credit: American Institute of Physics, from NASA originals

The Massachusetts Democrat may have scored a few points with voters. But his decision is really only inexpensive grandstanding. He said in August he’ll seek a sixth term in 2014. And he’s a shoo-in to win. He won his fifth term in 2008 with 66 percent of the vote and faced a primary opponent for only the first time in decades.

And who would want to face a sitting senator who has, thanks to his leadership PAC and campaign committee, $3 million in the bank and zero debt? And whose personal wealth, tops in the U.S. Senate, hit nearly $190 million entering 2010?

So Kerry enacts his no-lobbyist rule:

I’m not meeting with a lot of lobbyists; I’m meeting with people I choose to meet with, who can inform me, assist in the process of crunching numbers and dealing with consequences, and so forth.

Kerry doesn’t need to deal with lobbyists or fundraise to be re-elected. So his pledge is specious. This is not a harsh criticism of Kerry; it’s merely political reality. And it’s the context The Globe left out of its online story. It would have taken only five minutes and a few quick Web searches to do.

Readers deserved more. The Globe should have provided the context surrounding Kerry’s simplistic political theater.

“Come in,” I say. You stride in and sit in the chair next to me. The phone in your hand chirps. You glance at it, then at me. I frown. You sigh and put your phone in your pack.

“What can I do for you?” I ask.

“I want to write well,” you say. “How do I do that?”

I nod. “How much do you read?” I ask.

“Not a lot,” you say.

“Why do you not read more?” I say.

“I do not like to read,” you say. “It takes too much time.”

“That is too bad,” I say.

“Why?” you ask.

“To write well,” I say, “you need more words to choose from. When you read, you find words you do not know but need to know.”

“Why do I need more words?” you ask.

“If you have more words in your mind,” I say, “then the voice in your head will be clear to those who read the words you choose to show your voice. That is a great boon to those who write and those who read.”

“So I should read more?” you ask.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Learn a new word each day. Or each hour, if you can.”

“What should I read?” you ask.

“Find those who write well,” I say. “Then ask them what they read.”

“If I read more, will it be worth it?” you ask. “I like to write, not read.”

“No one who writes well likes to write,” I say. “It is a hard search for just the right word, then the search for the next right word. And the next. That is why you need more words to choose from. To write well is pain; it is blood sweat; it is to pluck just the right word from all the words in your mind, time after time after time.”

“But,” I say as I smile, “after you write — if well — it is joy with no end.”

You rise from the chair. As you do, you reach in your pack and grasp your phone.

“Thank you,” you say. I nod, but I sense you are not sure what I have said to you has worth.

As you leave, you punch at your phone with your thumbs.

I watch you text as you leave. I doubt you will read more.

I sigh, and turn back to my book.

h/t to Stephen King: “Read a lot. Write a lot.”

If I wish, I can own a firearm. I can assemble peaceably with others. I can criticize the government. I can practice a religion — or not — without governmental dictation. The Constitution protects me from unreasonable search and seizure (Patriot Act not withstanding). When I was a journalist, the government could not abridge the freedom of my press. I can own property. I can depend on contracts being enforced. I have more constitutionally guaranteed rights as an American than any citizen of any other country.

Yes, I have duties as well. I must pay taxes for the general welfare and the common defense. I must be willing (and able) to stand in judgment of a citizen charged with a crime by the government. I ought to be sufficiently knowledgeable and intelligent to vote wisely.

I love my country. Most of us do. But I no longer have faith that my elected leaders love it as much as they love power and the ability to demean those they oppose. I don’t like, respect, or trust my elected leaders any more, and their public personae and political actions show they don’t give a damn about me in any way beyond my ability to cast a vote.

Our national political leaders now have little in common with me. On average, each is worth millions of dollars. Membership in Congress for many is a lifelong sinecure with a government compensation more than six times Americans’ per-capita income. I can only envy political leaders’ health care and retirement benefits.

When our elected political leaders return to their districts each weekend, they have little interest in listening to me; I cannot afford the level of campaign contributions that catches their attention. Their district “town meetings” are scripted affronts to the dignity of their office.

Their common cry — We’re here to do the business of the American people — is a platitude rather a meaningful practice. That’s because, it seems, they are at war with each other — but none will endure the cost of the conflict as much as those they nominally represent. Unlike political leaders of times past, they do not respect, trust, or even like each other. Commitment to eternal fundraising trumps constructing collegial, legislatively fruitful friendships.

This generation of national political leaders has not learned to deliberate wisely or thoughtfully. The Congress they inhabit is a model of rancor for selfish children to emulate.

Many of our national political leaders have placed a pledge to prevent tax increases above their oath of office — or their pledge of allegiance to the nation. How can one issue trump their obligations to so many others?

None should survive the next national election. Re-election should be stricken from their vocabulary. They should be cast out as they have tossed aside their concern for you and me.

But that won’t happen. Not in my lifetime. So much power enabled by so much money, much hidden from our view, will keep them right where they are.

I love my country. But I detest what these powerful men and women, liberal and conservative alike, have done to her — and us.

• First, thanks to the supreme Susie Madrak, who gets the empathy with which we deliberate the question far better than most people. I can’t recommend her site highly enough.
• Next, Riverdaughter gives voice to the frustration that I know a lot of us are feeling, and I’d encourage you to give her a listen, as well.
• Finally, no less than Peter Daou, one of the progressive front’s most informed and dedicated leaders, explains that the source of much of our problem lies in the fact that the debate, such as it is, is still being conducted on the Right’s terms. Peter is always thoughtful and insightful, and this analysis is no different.

So, a tip of the hat to these folks, and thanks for acknowledging the ambivalence and outright turmoil that so many intelligent progressives are dealing with right now.

As a child turning teen in the late 1950s, the black-and-white RCA in the living room received only three channels … well, four, but we didn’t watch PBS. So I read. Newspapers, of course (after Dad finished sports and Mom finished news). And books. The library was only two blocks away, so I spent afternoons there sampling the stack. I was a small-town boy at the end of the idyllic “Father Knows Best” decade of Eisenhower placidity, a geeky kid feeling the first pangs of puberty.

I longed for adventure beyond being a Boy Scout or tossing a football with neighborhood pals. In the library I found adventure stories set in space, spun with well-chosen words and exquisitely crafted plots.

I discovered Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.” Then Robert A. Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Empire.” Science fiction (or, in Clarke’s case, science prediction) captivated me. I became a sci-fi cognoscente.

Then, in 1957, came the shocker: Sputnik. Later, in April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. The Soviets appeared poised to dominate the Age of Space. Those early days of the Cold War meant little to me; I was barely in high school. But those nascent orbital flights stirred hope for adventures forecast by Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov. They allowed me to imagine I would visit the Moon, maybe Mars, and defeat time and the speed of light to orbit Proxima Centauri in a warp-drive space ship.

I’ve been re-reading them because, a half century after dreaming of travel to other worlds, I remain grounded. I won’t leave footprints on the Moon, let alone orbit a star 4.2 light years away. Only 12 people have stood on the lunar surface, and I’m not one of them, and I never will be.

What the hell went wrong?

The American desire to conquer space began so grandly. Six weeks after Gagarin orbited the Earth in Vostok 1, President Kennedy stood in the well of the House and told the nation to prepare to mount the heavens:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto Mare Tranquillitatis while Michael Collins waited in the orbiting command module. The cost: 2 to 4 cents of every tax dollar, or about $136 billion in 2007 dollars, and the lives of three men: command pilot Virgil Grissom, senior pilot Edward H. White, and pilot Roger B. Chaffee, killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire.

More missions and more successes followed. NASA’s program of unmanned space explorations in and beyond the Solar System — Voyager, Pioneer, Magellan, Mariner, Galileo, and Cassini–Huygens, among them — over the decades returned to us data and images, especially images, that kept you and me enthralled with dreams of possibilities. For a while, science, math, and engineering ruled. Full-page science pages and even sections blossomed in dozens of American newspapers in the 1970s, my little 14,000-circulation daily among them, fueled in part by growing public interest in and demand for environmental protection of air, earth, and water.

NASA and its various programs represented, perhaps, a pinnacle of and consuming national belief in American exceptionalism (the theoretical view that the United States differs qualitatively from other nations).

Then so much about us and our collective national motivations began to change. And so did the bright beacon of American exceptionalism.

The nation literally enlarged. When Aldrin climbed down the ladder from the lunar lander, the American population was about 203 million. That has increased by a half to nearly 312 million over the past half century. Such growth in population inevitably altered social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics in America. We began to differ about what government should do, how it should do it, and how it should be paid for.

Government spending has been redirected from what we, the governed, might have wished for over the past half century. And we, the governed, share the blame with the government.

We went to war with credit cards, beginning with Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon in Vietnam. Today we fight two wars (three? four?) half a world away. None has a definable “victory.” They are costly in time, treasure, and human life. One estimate pegs the cost of the Iraq war alone at $3 trillion (including impacts on the broader economy). The 10-year-old Afghanistan war is nearing the half-trillion-dollar mark in direct federal spending.

During the 1970s, the national gross public debt (the total dollar amount of public and private financial liability) as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered around 27 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The 1980s saw that percentage increase to 41 percent of GDP. In the Clinton decade, the 1990s, it rose to 50 percent before falling to 39 percent. In 2010, it hit 62 percent of GDP.

In February, based on President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget proposal, The Washington Post noted this potential impact:

Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending. Only the amounts spent on defense and Social Security would remain bigger under the president’s plan.

In the federal corridors of power, wrangling over the money the Republic owes continues without permanent resolution, beset by ideological bickering.

Over the past half century we became eager consumers, leading to what political pundit Kevin Phillips called “conspicuous opulence” — the Greed Is Good Decade of the 1980s. We bought cars, light pickups, minivans, and SUVs. America now ranks first in number of vehicles per capita (779 per 1,000 people). We bought TVs, owning nearly 750 sets per 1,000 people. And lately we’ve bought all things digital — computers, iPods, and cellphones. Sheesh — we bought 300,000 iPads on the first day they went on sale.

Wealth concentrated from the wallets of many to the offshore accounts of the few. For many, if not most, Americans, growth in family wealth stagnated or lost ground to inflation. Financially, life just got harder for the lower and middle classes, making it more difficult to dream of space flight. Making the monthly mortgage nut overrode all other considerations. Political power shifted from the many to the few as corporatism’s emergent role in politics shifted politicians’ attention from helping us to placating them.

As a nation, we stopped spending sufficiently on the foundations of the Republic that matter — roads, bridges, dams, refineries, airports, facilities to produce safe drinking water or treat wastewater, levees, and school facilities at every level. The national infrastructure needs at minimum a five-year investment of $2.2 trillion. No political will exists to fully repair or invest in the systemic needs of the nation’s infrastructure. State governments, facing scores of billions of dollars in budget deficits, are too broke to act. In Congress, talk is plentiful, but backing pricey infrastructure projects doesn’t win votes.

I can’t even begin to calculate the moral, economic, cultural, social, or political costs of the Cold War and its attendant arms race. That, and the financial drain of America’s self-assumed role as the world’s cop on the beat, have saddled the Republic with debts in the many trillions of dollars.

In the 1960s, NASA harnessed our national dream and goal of manned space flight to the best and most motivated scientific and engineering minds in the nation (and a few “borrowed” German minds). Science and math became cool for young people to study (I did). But that has changed. A 2002 RAND think tank study found that a young adult’s probability of obtaining a science or engineering degree has risen much less in the United States than abroad. The United States ranks 37th in spending on education as a percentage of GDP (5.7 percent), a figure just ahead of defense spending (FY2010) of 4.7 percent of GDP.

Our kids are leaving college today saddled with an uncertain future amid 9.2 percent unemployment and student loans averaging nearly $23,000. The class of 2011 has the dubious distinction of being the most indebted class in history. Yet federal loan support has grown insufficiently to give them a decent, less indebted start in life.

Our educational system from bottom to top has become ideologically charged, budget- and facility-challenged, and driven by a regimen of standardized tests. We graduate young people with fewer skills and bodies of knowledge than modern life demands. Dreaming of space flight is predicated on more than wishful thinking: It requires creative insight, a well-trained imagination, and the conceptual knowledge to see the impossible as possible. We did the impossible in the 1960s. When’s the last time we did so?

As manned space flight became routine (but not monthly, as NASA first promised, and not cheap, as NASA also promised), press attention drifted away — save for the focus following the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. As former CNN science reporter Miles O’Brien said Sunday on Reliable Sources, the press came to view the shuttle as a “space truck.” The press image of the astronauts, O’Brien said, was transformed from the Tom Wolfe superstars of the Mercury Seven to the bland “airline pilots” of the Space Shuttle era.

Television, O’Brien argued, became less enamored of science coverage. So did newspapers. Science pages and sections vanished — because they could not be supported by advertising. We, the public, no longer read about science. Our eyeballs went elsewhere — and the advertising dollars followed.

Budget stresses challenged NASA’s own flight path beyond the Shuttle era. The Shuttle’s intended successor, the Constellation program, has been axed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does American enterprise. NASA’s lack of a clear, publicly supported and demanded mission of continued viable human spaceflight has been left to commercial entities. Cue the majestic, swelling musical overture, please, that disguises the profit motive.

Don’t misunderstand, please: Entrepreneurship has been an innovative engine and lies at the heart of my view of American exceptionalism. If Richard Branson and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan want to make a buck with Virgin Galactic at $200,000 a seat, by all means, let them. May they live long and prosper.

But those among us who lived through the 1960s, even with its turmoil over an unpopular war, probably distinguish between the financial motivation of commercial space flight today and the broad, eyes-on-the-stars nationalism standing firmly behind the mission of Apollo. NASA, not necessarily or entirely through its own fault, is now adrift without that national consensus, let alone clear congressional or presidential direction. We are standing still. We have not built exceptionally on the promise that took us to the Moon in less than a decade. I do not expect to see in my remaining years an American man or woman planting a flag in the dust of Luna. And been there, done that.

This depiction of the last half century and its relationship with a dream of extra-planetary space flight lies wide open to challenge or ridicule. Cherry-picking of facts and observations is not formal analysis, but this has become my view of unpleasant-to-contemplate change in American exceptionalism and its consequences on that dream. The view of America as qualitatively superior may still be seen in many aspects of American domestic and foreign affairs … but that exceptionalism has been eroded.

However, part of American exceptionalism is the constitutional expectation that the governed challenge the governors. It is that civic duty of questioning government performance and authority that helps fuel our exceptionalism. But it should also mean that we turn an introspective lens on ourselves, the governed. What have we wrought in the last half century?

It is difficult to imagine American successes in space — or any other important exploratory arena — in the near or distant future because we have yet to resolve our diminished present.

I would have liked to have flown in space. Returning, after a half a century, to reading Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov has been enjoyable. They have been exceptional storytellers, and I teach storytelling for a living. Their stories are brilliantly conceived human comedy and drama. But more than five decades ago Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov wrote with the assumption of successful human exploration of space. For them, humanity among the stars was a given.

Re-reading these marvelous writers, however, has been tinged with melancholy — because we can no longer make that assumption of success. That is a tragedy, among others, of a flawed American exceptionalism.

I knew little about copy editing. So I asked my newsroom godfather: “Neil, what do copy editors do?”

He looked over the rims of those 1950s spectacles he favored and said, “Defend your reader.”

“Against what?” I asked.

“Error,” he said. “Any error possible.”

The memory of, or, perhaps, even the desire to exercise that dictum may remain in today’s newsrooms. But the ability of copy editors today to defend readers against error has inexorably been eroded. That decimation of editing capacity has been fueled by computerization beginning in the late ’70s and continued in this past decade by the sacking of newsroom staffs and the insatiable demand of management to get stories online or winging to mobile devices right now.

I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on my BlackBerry in the evening. Occasionally, I’ll look at The Times‘ website in my office during the day.

I see errors each day. This post, however, is not about the big errors — such as “there are, irrefutably, WMDs in Iraq” — but rather the small.

Each night I see errors in language use — and more than I used to find in years past in print. A comma splice. Spelling errors, usually homonyms run amok. A serial comma error. An appositive or non-essential phrase or clause missing the back-end comma. A run-on sentence (mostly in The Post). Lengthy sentences easily cracked in half or thirds. Unnecessary passive constructions. A typo in a headline that lingers for a day. I see similar errors at online news sites, but not as many as I see on my BlackBerry.

A newsroom’s tolerance for small errors provides fertile ground for overt or covert misrepresentation of events, context and background. As Charles Seife wrote in his book “Proofiness,” “Error obscures reality.”

These errors are no surprise, given the recent revenue history of newspapers. They have cast off older, more experienced reporters and editors. Younger, less expensive, less experienced staffs remain. A desire to drive down costs has thinned the wall between reader and error. Then there’s speed kills: Online and mobile journalism can be likened to the mortal combat between the AP and UPI of generations ago to be first on the wire. If speed is the premium, error and inaccuracies are the costs.

Admittedly, newspapers need to shed costs. And it must be frustrating for them to spend what they do on reporting, writing, editing — all those infrastructure costs — only to have news aggregation sites with no overhead costs rip off their work and profit from it.

Earlier this year, Alan Mutter reflected on the costs of copy editing at his Newsosaur site. He articulated those costs in detail and compared them to that of aggregators. The imbalance is remarkable, an imbalance attended by consequences. Writes Mutter:

With the fat (if ever there were) long since trimmed from most newsrooms, the choice for many metros now may be coming down to whether to rein in news coverage or relax their traditional standards by editing out some of the editors. In some ways, this already has begun.

While it would be heretical at most major news organizations to “railroad” stories from a reporter’s keyboard directly into print, several publications, including a few surprisingly large ones, are allowing reporters to point, click and post words and images directly to the newspaper’s website. If the work is good enough to slap on the web without further human intervention, why isn’t it good enough to go directly on a web press?

Good question. His answer?

On the other hand, a compelling case can be made that newspapers would debase themselves journalistically, commercially and, perhaps, even fatally by abandoning the disciplined reporting and professional editing that makes their content uniquely valuable in an age of frequently impulsive, often repulsive and usually unverified Twittering. [emphasis added]

There’s general agreement, methinks, that mobile and Web work suffers more from editing lapses than print work. That may be because of changes in traditional newsroom routines. As Brian Cubbison wrote nearly four years ago before the massive move to mobile:

In some newsrooms, there might be six people between the reporter and the reader. That’s just in the editorial process. When a reporter posts directly to a blog, there are zero. … A reporter who posts directly to a blog is taking care of layout, paginating and even the headline writing. Form is supposed to follow function, but each of those tasks has been determined by the technology of putting ink on paper. As the technology changed, some tasks moved from composing rooms to copy desks. Now they’re moving again. Copy editors need to ask themselves: Where do they really need to be, and where do they add the most value?

“Throw it up on the Web” is a phrase commonly heard in newsrooms. “Throw it up” implies imprecision. Perhaps that’s why Cubbison titled his post “Web first, edit later.”

I know editors who have told me, bluntly, that they don’t mind reporter-direct-to-mobile-or-online because errors in those media can be fixed easily. But, as many in Mutter’s comment thread noted, fixing an error on a news organization’s website or mobile stream is no guarantee that all iterations of that story veining through the Web via aggregation will be fixed as well.

Further, that fix-it-later attitude about mobile and online news privileges the ability to correct error over the public-service mission of getting it right the first time.

Revenue considerations in news organizations surely complicate addressing the issue of preventing error in online and mobile news. But, frankly, if the word “news” exists in front of “corporation,” an obligation to defend your reader remains.

Keep in mind your readers’ wishes:

Show us something we don’t know.
Explain why we want to know it.
Let us see it. Show it to us.
Get it right. Don’t shortchange us.
Never, ever forget us.

Beck will launch, with partner Mercury Radio Arts, GBTV, an online video network, on Sept. 12. Here’s Beck himself in a five-minute pitch describing his “global plans” and how he will be “champion of man’s freedom” for the mere cost of a “cup of coffee in today’s world”:

Whether Beck is certifiably insane is not the issue here: Rather, he and his partner need to insure that revenues exceed costs. Now that he’s leaving the ready mega-megaphone of Fox News on June 30, that’s not a certainty.

Beck enjoyed high ratings at Fox that declined as 2011 unfolded. More difficult still for Beck has been the sharp drop in advertisers refusing to sponsor his program.

Presumably (I’m not an expert) production costs of an Internet program are far lower than those of a cable network show. But Beck envisions GBTV as more than his two-hour 5 p.m. show. From The New York Times:

Eventually, Mr. Beck said, his goal is to have an array of scripted and unscripted shows alongside his own daily show, which will simply be titled “Glenn Beck” and will run for two hours on weekday afternoons.

“If you’re a fan of Jon Stewart, you’re going to find something on GBTV that you’re going to enjoy,” Mr. Beck said. “If you’re a fan of ‘24,’ you’re going to find something on GBTV that you’re going to enjoy.”

Who is sufficiently engaged with Glenn Beck to pony up at least $4.95 a month to watch?

From Politico:

Forbes’s Jeff Bercovici writes that the move might not be so risky after all. Mercury is planning to charge $4.95 for access to Beck’s two-hour daily program, or $9.95 for access to a whole array of programming. With those prices, he’ll only need 50,000 subscribers to make more than he did from his Fox News contract – a fraction of the more than one million who tune in regularly on cable.

And Beck has something that few others in the television business do: a pre-existing audience of 80,000 paying digital subscribers, who already subscribe to his Insider Extreme service. They’ll automatically become GBTV subscribers.

I’m not so sure Beck can create a network, even online, that extends beyond his personal programming initiatives — the radio show and his daily program. There just aren’t that many wingnuts of his intellectual stature out there.

Has becoming her own network succeeded for Oprah? Her OWN network has lost its second CEO and struggles in the ratings. Even as her viewership slipped from 9 million in 2005 to 7.3 million in 2007, her numbers were three times as high as Beck’s usual 2.5 million before that number, too, tanked 30 percent in late 2010.

When audience numbers decline in any medium, financial backers demand change — usually in content and presentation. What will happen to Beck’s firebrand persona and the targets of his ideological utterances should GBTV audiences be financially insufficient to those holding purse strings?

A new, kinder, gentler Glenn Beck? Oh, well. We’ll see.

Such is the case with a Friday NPR story that commingled analysis, reporting, and commentary (without a commentary label) about the impact of “tough economic news” on President Obama’s re-election prospects.

Some phrasing in the 1,081-word story represents guessing or labeling instead of reporting: seems, perhaps, hardly has a pulse, appears, near certainty, dismal harbinger, liberal wing, political environment, seems a distant memory, progressive community, recent experiences, some in his own party (tell us who, please), and a pervasive view.

But it is proclamations of knowledge of public opinion that irritate most.

The story quotes William Galston as a domestic policy expert who worked in the Clinton administration:

Public opinion has coalesced around the proposition that meaningful deficit reduction is needed. The credibility of a Democratic-Keynesian response to joblessness is much diminished in the eyes of the public. [emphasis added]

It’s not apparent that after hearing this the NPR reporter asked Galston: “Where’s your evidence that public opinion has coalesced?” Similarly, support for Galston’s “much diminished” claim is inadequate at best.

The reporter, three grafs later, provides this: In 2009, polls showed that about 60 percent of Americans favored the stimulus effort: that dropped to 42 percent the following year. How does this support Galston’s claim about meaningful deficit reduction? (And polls do not show that “60 percent of Americans” believe such; they only show that 60 percent of poll respondents believe …)

Galston is allowed to make two claims about public opinion without explaining the basis for either. But hey, say readers: He’s an expert. He once worked in the White House. Therefore, he must be credible. But readers should not assume that; they should expect a story to adequately demonstrate credibility.

(It would have been helpful, too, if the story had explained the phrase “a Democratic-Keynesian response to joblessness.” Or does NPR expect all its readers to have a working knowledge of Keynesian economics?)

Later in the story, this:

Poll after poll shows that Americans now believe that cutting federal spending is the preferred path to job creation and expanding the economy, not government investment.

I spent an hour looking for such polls. I found one that applied to this generality — a New York Times poll published May 2. (See question 34.)

I found many polls that deal with which candidate or party has the ability to deal with the nation’s economy or the deficit here, here, and here. Reading the polls shows that respondents favor some aspects of budget cuts over others. For example, some polls show respondents favor cutting defense but not the social safety net or vice versa. Few deal with the singular question of “cutting the budget” wholesale that the NPR story claims “poll after poll” demonstrates.

This story is online. All the NPR reporter — or tech geeks or an editor — needed to do is provide links to the polls that the story says support points made. Claims about public opinion based on polling should not be made lightly, nor should readers accept them uncritically. Journalists should give readers more ability and authority to assess claims.

Use more detail; reveal more truth. Too many stories in too many media fail to adhere to this simple truth. This NPR story is just one example.

And this: If NPR had slapped a commentary label on this piece, you wouldn’t be reading this post.