Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know.

…

The announcement is timed beautifully – just before Super Bowl Weekend – and they’re hoping that the combination of the pretend apology and the big game will insure that, come Monday morning, nobody will remember what they did. They can then find a reason to deny those future Planned Parenthood grant apps when nobody is paying much attention.

The title of that post wonders if the American public will be stupid enough to fall for it. Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: why are America’s copy editors stupid enough to fall for it? Witness the headlines from some of the nation’s more prominent purveyors of journalism:

• Komen Drops Plans to Cut Planned Parenthood Grants – ABC News
• Komen reverses Planned Parenthood move – angering antiabortion activists – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Komen reverses move to cut Planned Parenthood funding – Reuters
• Komen backs off decision on funding cuts – msnbc.com
• Komen Reverses Stance on Planned Parenthood – Bloomberg
• Web Fury Spurs Komen Reversal, $3 Million for Planned Parenthood – BusinessWeek
• Cancer Group Backs Down on Cutting Off Planned Parenthood – New York Times
• Komen does about-face on cuts to Planned Parenthood – The Seattle Times
• Komen changes course on Planned Parenthood funding – Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Charity Does an About-Face – Wall Street Journal
• Komen Caves Under Pressure, Reinstates PP Funding – Forbes
• Komen Charity Reverses Planned Parenthood Grant Cuts – PBS News Hour

It’s frightening how much journalism has changed in a generation. For instance, there used to be a subtle game of cat-and-mouse between the PR hacks who wanted their clients’ stories told a certain way and the journalists who wanted the story told the right way. The pros would tune up a pitch and present it to a reporter or editor so that it put the organization in the best light. There was something of a negotiational process. And the publisher went to press with a headline (written by the copy desk) that, in their view, best summarized the nuts and bolts of the story. The PR pro/journalist relationship was a professional one, with each side understanding the demands of the other’s job. A good PR exec would work to make the reporter’s job easier by making sure the pitch was tailored to the publication’s audience and the reporter understood that the PR industry could be a helpful source of information – after all, communities have a vested interest in the businesses and private organizations that serve them, right? Reporters often resented the high salaries that PR professionals earned (and any number of reporters eventually migrated over to “the dark side” for this very reason – in fact, most of the best PR people I have known in my career followed precisely that path), but there was a productive symbiosis that worked well so long as everyone did his or her job well.

I remember the frustration on the 50th floor at 1801 California in Denver back in the late ’90s when US West would go to the press with a story and they’d spin it differently than we wanted. This happened often enough, and especially with quarterly earnings reports. The Media Relations and Investor Relations teams would hone the story to a fine edge, release it to the world, and what appeared in the papers the next day often bore very little resemblance to what we had put out. Why? Well, the PR group’s job is like that of a lawyer – represent the client’s interest, period. The reporter, on the other hand, was more like the judge, making sure that due attention was paid to the facts themselves. The audience was the jury.

That was then, and this is now. While the nature of financial reporting is such that you still get some actual journalism when earnings are released (thanks to the laws and regulations around corporate finance), the rest of the newsroom might as well be on the payroll of the PR firm doing the pitching. My colleague, Dr. Denny, spent 20 years on the copy desk and has dedicated significant energy here at S&R to explaining why our papers are increasingly populated by unedited PR copy (and to the corrosive impact this exerts on our democracy). The next time you’re thinking of buying a book on why the republic has gone to hell, save your money. Just click that link above and spend a few hours reflecting on his analysis. It’s more illuminating than just about anything on the virtual shelves at Amazon. And it’s free.

I don’t want to put words in Denny’s mouth, but I suspect had yesterday’s “reversal” story broken on a day when Denny was running the copy desk he’d have taken the time to:

• actually read the release;
• consider the established context of the story and the motivations of the players involved (no, he wouldn’t project his politics into the story, but he would be aware of the politics of the organizations because that’s at the center of the controversy);
• take a moment to think about the importance of the story to the community he served – what was their interest?
• Oh, yeah – he’d consider how much space he had and whether there were other more pressing stories.

Then he’d have edited the story according to these factors and he’d have written a headline that summarized what Komen had actually done. If, in his professional judgment, Komen was legitimately reversing field, that’s what the headline would have said. If, on the other hand, he had read the facts of the case the way I do, he would have ignored the cleverly crafted 48-point bold headline that Komen’s PR folks had put at the top of the page.

But yesterday, all across America, copy editors who are in too many cases inexperienced, poorly trained and swamped with more responsibility than one person can reasonably manage, did what they usually do. They took the headline at face value and ran the press release pretty much as-is.

And what landed in front of the public, flying under the banner of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, and, the gods help us, the PBS News Hour, was unfiltered crisis PR put together by hacks paid not to think about the best interests of the public, but about the financial and political agendas of their client. Put in the terms of my courtroom analogy above, it’s like we’ve made the defense attorney the judge and jury, as well.

The lesson, sadly, is that with this story (and just about all other stories of importance to the citizens of the US), we cannot look to the press for help. They have become nothing more than the publication arm of the American public relations industry. Typists. Transcriptionists. Gofers. Foot soldiers.

So it’s up to us to read closely, to think critically, and to keep each other plugged in, using whatever tools are available, so that we can make informed decisions in the public interest. If we don’t, nobody will.

#25: The Land of Lincoln: Travels in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson (2007)

The Lincoln Memorial looked like frost tonight. The flurry that had blanketed the lawn white earlier in the day had been glazed with rain and then turned to ice, so the whole landscape shimmered under the Memorial’s lights.

Frost or no, the Memorial still has that beacon-in-the-dark look, which is, I suppose, its main purpose. It is, as I’ve noted before, as close to a temple as we have in America. The man who sits inside has become such an icon he’s lost humanity.

I’m here because I’ve just finished journalist Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, an exploration of the man and, in the end, a defense of that icon. I’m here for the icon, too.

When Abraham Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” More than that, though, Lincoln belongs to all of us—and we can each make him into the person we want him to be.

That’s what journalist Andrew Ferguson sets out to explore in Land of Lincoln. The state of Illinois may claim that as its motto, but Ferguson discovers Lincoln’s presence in the most unexpected of places. “I wanted to know what we know about Lincoln, and I wanted to know how we know it,” he says.

Land of Lincoln chronicles Ferguson’s quest to discover the true Abraham Lincoln—the one who doesn’t belong to the ages, the one who’s not chiseled from granite and sitting vigil in a temple-like memorial, the one who’s not known just for writing “Four score and seven years ago.”

“More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American—nearly fourteen thousand in all,” Ferguson writes, “and at least half of those books begin by saying that more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American. This book, you’ll notice, is one of them.”

Ferguson’s book is simultaneously charming and earnest. It’s hard not to be amused when he hangs out with 175 Lincoln impersonators in Santa Claus, Indiana, during their annual convention. “It began with the beard,” one impersonator explains to Ferguson.

“Talking to other Abes, I discovered that this is how it almost always happens,” Ferguson writes. “A fellow, minding his own business, decides to grow a beard. Soon, multiple people are telling him that he bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. It doesn’t matter that very often these people are wrong. So strong is the lure of Lincoln that when people tell a man with a beard that he looks like the greatest of all Americans, he believes it.”

Ferguson goes to Gettysburg to sit in on a leadership institute’s Lincoln-themed training session. (The book Lincoln on Leadership, after all, is one of the best-selling business books of all time.) Gettysburg, he notes, has “a dazed, dull feel to it—the consequence, I suppose, of taking a scene of blood-drenched horror and unspeakable heartbreak and trying to make it a pleasant vacation spot.”

Ferguson travels to the area around Lincoln’s boyhood home where he watches a musical theater production based on the young Lincoln’s life. He visits the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, where Disney “imagineers” created a museum that creates a powerful emotional experience but somehow manages to avoid information. The primary purpose, says Ferguson, is to make Lincoln “fun.”

“Get their hearts and their heads will follow,” the imagineer tells him. “You lead with the emotions rather than the intellect. And remember, it’s not any old emotion—the emotion they feel is the one we want them to feel.”

Ferguson visits historical sites, National Parks, and museums. He examines statues. He follows the old Lincoln Heritage Trail. The Land of Lincoln, Ferguson discovers, exists as much in our national subconscious as it does in any geographical spot. This was useful for me because, like Confederates in the Attic, the book becomes a portrait of a cultural landscape.

The supporting cast proves to be highly colorful. Ferguson meets people cult-like in their devotion to Lincoln. He talks with Lincoln scholars, Lincoln collectors, and even Lincoln critics. “Who could object to Lincoln?” Ferguson asks. “He seems too big even to have an opinion about.” Yet when the National Park Service installed a Lincoln statue at its Civil War battlefield park in Richmond, commemorating a visit Lincoln made to the city in April 1865 when the city surrendered, controversy erupted.

Throughout, Ferguson continues to ask, “Who is Lincoln? Why is he important to us today?” He never draws firm conclusions but instead presents a wide array of evidence for readers to consider—just as he himself considers it, too.

“What if Lincoln the man was, as I’d come to suspect, unknowable, as most men are 140 years after their death?” he writes. “And what if the icon—big, grand, unmistakable—is more real than the much smaller, custom-fit Lincolns that each of us creates for ourselves?”

Serious in its goals but light in its tone, Land of Lincoln successfully weaves together history, travel, cultural studies, and even memoir to sketch a thoughtful portrait of one of America’s most known—and perhaps least knowable—figures. Land of Lincoln doesn’t try to debunk any myths but instead tries to figure out how the man grew into myth. Both have value.

Ferguson finishes his journey on the steps of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. “It’s the unavoidable Lincoln,” he says. “Anyone who wants to understand the Land of Lincoln has to account for it.”

That’s why I’m here tonight. I’m accounting for it. I come here two or three times a year, in fact, and I always make it a point to see what Lincoln has to teach me.

Juxtaposed against the experience was a stop earlier in the evening at the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial. Prior to that, I’d visited the National Holocaust Museum to see an exhibit on Nazi propaganda. I was chilled to realize that Hitler, King, and Lincoln all really do belong in the same league when it comes to their skill as communicators, although they employed those skills for very different purposes. I’m still, I admit, wrapping my head around that.

To start the day, I visited Ford’s Theatre, a site Ferguson skipped, but a place I wanted to visit so I could see the newly installed exhibits in the theater’s museum and in the new museum across the street adjacent to the Peterson House (the house where Lincoln died). The exhibits are marvelous and thoughtful, but a quote from one exhibit panel in particular jumped out at me. As the Lincolns were getting ready to head to the theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, the president said to his wife:

“Mary, I consider this day, the war, has come to a close … we must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling [son] Willie—we have both been very miserable.”

Scholars spend a lot of time trying to find “the real Lincoln,” as Ferguson points out, but here was a simple quote from Lincoln himself that humanized him for me more than any scholar’s work.

I juxtaposed that against the great marble man sitting in the Memorial. It’s useful to see Lincoln as human, but ultimately, his status as an icon is perhaps more important to us—we who live in a cynical age that dismisses heroes and revels in its iconoclasm. If we’re ever to stop our bitterly partisan political bickering, if we’re all to lend a hand “with malice toward none, with charity toward all,” if we all want a good and decent future for our children, then we all need to aspire to be those very best things that America has always stood for.

Lincoln, I think, personifies that. He really does stand like that beacon in the night. We just have to get over ourselves long enough to admit that it’s okay to aspire for values that we’re usually quick to paint as quaint and old-fashioned. We have honest differences about how to achieve those things, but we’ll never figure out solutions if we don’t stop yelling at each other and decide to talk. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural. Hear, hear!

“Maybe that’s why icons are dismissed as unreal these days,” Ferguson said. “Icons aren’t complicated enough for the wised-up world. Nuance fits the times. We can be consumed by nuance, argue about it on TV, blog about it, fill our scholarly monographs with its infinite refractions—even when, like the forest and the trees, our obsession with it obscures the bigger, unarguable facts that are plain in front of us.”

That’s what Lincoln has to say to me tonight: Aspire to be a better person. Aspire to be a better people. Aspire to be a better nation.

Otherwise, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on earth.”

I’d hate for our own cynicism to be the death of us.

Government buildings are closed, the post office is closed, most K-12 schools are closed and many universities cancel classes for the day.

The idea behind the holiday was so people could focus on the good works of Dr. King.

Years ago, when I was a faculty member at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, students had protested the fact that campus remained open and classes, except for two hours midday, met, as usual. Top level administrators responding to student pressure decided to change the calendar and cancel classes. The only one objecting was then-Vice President Wilma Ray Bledsoe, the only African American (and, I believe, woman) on the cabinet at that time.

Wilma Ray objected because she believed students on campus would turn the day off into a three day weekend rather than join the campus in marches and other ceremonies of remembrances and study of the life of Dr. King.

She was right. MLK Day for most college and K-12 students now is just that – a three day holiday from studies. The local ski resorts, thankfully covered in the white stuff now, are having their best day of the season so far. The malls are busier, too. Many other students are sleeping in today or enjoying the pleasure of being home.

There are marches on campuses, the media has covered the holiday, but I have to wonder.

A mother I know asked her 12 year-old son who Dr. King was. He had no idea. He was miffed because his school wasn’t closed today. His cousins had the day off. None of them knew who Dr. King was either.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

#18

Most Civil War historians in the Park Service feel a little battlefield when it comes to Gettysburg. It’s the great Granddaddy of All Battlefields in North America, marked and monumented with enough granite, marble, and bronze to sink Rhode Island into the sea. Pennsylvania, being bigger and more landlocked, isn’t in such danger. In fact, Gettysburg’s location in the Keystone State, so relatively close to the major metropolitan areas of the east coast, ensured its place as Hallowed Ground—not because it represented the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy” but because it was certain to attract tourists. Lots and lots of tourists.

(The notion of the “High Water Mark” just a widely successful PR ploy basically engineered by one man in an attempt to attract those tourists and reinforce his own version of the battle history).

In Spotsylvania, where we get a sliver of the visitation Gettysburg does, we put an advantageous spin on the discrepancy: note how pristine and undisturbed our battlefield is compared to Gettysburg. In Petersburg, south of the James River, some of the rangers feel like the forgotten red-headed stepchildren compared to Gettysburg. In the Western Theater, at Chickamauga-Chattanooga, I know a ranger who refuses to even mention Gettysburg by name.

If people have been to only one battlefield, it’s usually Gettysburg. For me, it was my first, and for years most frequented, battlefield. As an elementary school student growing up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, I boarded a big yellow school bus every year for the obligatory field trip to the battlefield. It was about an hour drive or so. Once there, I clambered through the rocks at Devil’s Den, wandered through the buckshot of monuments at the “High Water Mark,” and swooned with the sheer awesomeness of the nearby wax museum. It wasn’t until I grew up a bit that I appreciated the magnitude of what the place really meant.

“More than any other place in the United States, this place is indeed Hallowed Ground,” says historian James McPherson, best known for his Pulitzer-winning Battle Cry of Freedom. He’s also author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

“I have toured the battlefield by car, by bus, on a bicycle, and on foot,” McPherson says, explaining that he’s given so many tours there he’s lost count. Hallowed Ground is his attempt to take readers along on one of those tours. “Join me for a walk on this hallowed ground,” he says.

I intentionally read this book following Confederates in the Attic as a way to bring the two books into conversation with each other. In Confederates, author Tony Horwitz explores the landscape of Civil War writ large with an immersive year-long field trip that takes him all across the South. In contrast, McPherson gives readers a much more intimate experience over a much smaller landscape.

Like Horwitz, McPherson is a character in his own story, but beyond that, McPherson takes a vastly different approach. As with Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Hallowed Ground represents an “outer limit” of creative nonfiction. This is the boundaryland, where the first-person memoir fades back into straight nonfiction because the first-person is a nearly negligible factor.

McPherson shares some of his personal experiences on the battlefield, such as a stop by some of his students from Princeton near the monument of the Twentieth Maine on the edge of Little Round Top. The regiment had executed a maneuver that arguably saved the Union left flank. The incident was made famous for modern buffs by Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Killer Angels and by Ken Burns’ The Civil War, turning the regiment’s commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, into the subject of a veritable one-man cottage industry. One of McPherson’s students had written her thesis about Chamberlain.

“As we came to the place where the Twentieth Maine fought, she could no longer hold back the tears. Nor could the rest of us,” McPherson shares. “Although I have experienced other powerful emotions while walking other Civil War battlefields, none has ever matched that April day in 1987. The world has little noted what I said there, but it can never forget what they did there.”

That’s about as personal as he gets—which is to say, not very. He’s not using the first-person perspective to reveal anything about himself. It’s just a convenient conceit for sharing stories.

He makes the reader complicit by using the first-person plural “we” at times, such as when he literally gives directions for getting from one place to another. For instance, when bringing readers to Pickett’s Charge, the culminating action of the battle’s third day, McPherson writes: “Our next stop is the jump-off point for that attack. To get there from East Cavalry field, we return to town on the Hanover Road (State Route 116) and continue west through downtown Gettysburg on Middle Street, which becomes the Fairfield Road….”

He’s equally unpoetic when he urges visitors to look around at carious spots. “A stroll around this ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy’ is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department,” he writes.

He talks about the Park Services then-plans for landscape restoration, chopping down some trees to open view sheds so that the battlefield looks like it did in 1863 when the armies fought there. The plan was to make it easier to read the ground and experience the landscape the way soldiers did. Most of that work has been carried out since the book’s publication in 2003. Such references, however, immediately date the book, making a read-through now obsolete.

That’s what makes Hallowed Ground so disappointing to me. It often feels like McPherson just phoned it in, like he needed a few bucks so he cranked out a quick book on Gettysburg. Slap “Gettysburg” on something and people will snatch it up (says the guy who slaps “Stonewall” on things and has people snatch them up…).

McPherson plays to the general audienceship, too. He makes sure to tell as many quaint war stories as he can, such as that of Sallie the War Dog, a regimental mascot who appears in bronze, lying at the feet of her regiment’s monument. He talks about Chamberlain. He talks about Amos Humiston, a dead soldier who lay unidentified until except for a photo of his three kids clutched in his hand, eventually spotted by his wife months later when it was reproduced in a newspaper article. (Amos came from Portville, N.Y., a town literally seven miles down the road from my house, so I’m a fan of the story.)

McPherson debunks myths of Gettysburg and sometimes even explains why he’ll continue to perpetuate a myth supposedly debunked by other historians. It’s the kind of stuff a general reader would enjoy–one who maybe has that “I visited there once” level of knowledge of the battle.

I don’t get much about McPherson himself, but I do get a lot about the battle. His battle narratives are easily the strongest part of the book. He “walks” visitors place to place, and then uses what he sees and where he stops as his springboard into the history. Such narrative is always readable and excellent.

But overall, the book was clinical and not especially thought-provoking. I didn’t get to muse over much. I sensed McPherson’s respect for the place, but I didn’t get any sense of awe about it. For a guy who’s toured it so often, I expected to feel a little more love about the place. I expected it to feel hallowed.

It’s a short book, so a read-through isn’t going to be a waste of time, especially for people who like anything Gettysburg-related (slap that name on it!). It’s probably the best short account of the battle available. But Hallowed Ground still feels like a far battle cry from McPherson’s best work.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

Wednesday morning, my sister, Julie, and I woke up in South Bend, Indiana only 95 miles from Chicago, Illinois. Though we grew up in Rochester, New York, Chicago has been the next closest city to offer me that warm and welcoming feeling of home. The city was finally within reach, and I couldn’t have been more excited.

Julie and I began this day of our trip with a leisurely drive through Notre Dame’s campus. We saw the university’s football field, snapped photos of “Touchdown Jesus” and awed over the grand and expansive size of the campus. We had both seen the university before, but it appeared just as beautiful the second time around.

Though we had both been within miles of the Michigan border on several occasions, neither Julie nor I had ever stepped foot in the state. So, for the next stop on our trip, we took a quick detour off Interstate 90 to find the Michigan state line. When we saw the “Welcome to Pure Michigan” sign, Julie pulled her car to the shoulder and I jumped from the passenger seat into the knee-deep snow to snap a photo.

Now, we have both been to Michigan.

We walked across the sandy beaches of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore wearing winter boots, hats and gloves. The Sand Dunes are open year round, and we lucked out with an unusually warm 35-degree day for Northwest Indiana. These sand mounds looked small compared to the overpowering dunes of North Carolina’s Jockey’s Ridge or the Colorado Sand Dunes I visited in the past, but the stop was well worth it. In some areas, thin layers of ice covered the beach and cracked chunks of sand in half, a natural occurrence we had never witnessed before.

My stomach jumped when Chicago’s skyline became visible from the interstate. I only moved away from the city four months ago, but have missed its skyscrapers and Midwest culture.

We parked near a friend’s house in the Lakeview neighborhood, rode the El train into the Loop and ate lunch with my former colleagues at a Willis Tower restaurant. We passed my old apartment building in Old Town and toasted from multiple bottles of Lambrusco at Benchmark Bar Wednesday evening.

Few life events beat those joys of reuniting with good friends. And, I enjoyed every second of reconnecting with those who made my time living in Chicago as wonderful as it was.

Through the many stops we have made and plan to make on this road trip, I know my time in Chicago will be one of my favorite. I lived in this Windy City for two years before moving to New Orleans in August, but my return felt nothing short of a visit home.

#17

If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago (I can hardly believe it’s been that long). Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. He immersed himself in the story.

This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do. They take the time to do the story justice—and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood.

Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began.

The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered. “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….”

One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again,’” the man told Horwitz. (Reenactor friends of mine have since told me urine doesn’t really work, but it sure makes a colorful story.)

What makes these men tick, Horwitz wondered. Why does the war hold such sway over them. In fact, he thought, why does the war hold such sway over so many people?

And thus begins one of the oddest of odysseys. Horwitz submerges himself in the South, since that’s where most of the war was fought, to find out for himself. The resulting exploration of place turns into a memorable cultural portrait of the South.

Horwitz decides to start in Charleston, South Carolina, at the site of Fort Sumter, where the war’s first shots were fired, but the War waylays him well before he gets there. On his way south, through North Carolina, he’s sidetracked into the world of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom attend Civil War-related meetings seven nights a week. To commemorate “Lee-Jackson Day,” a holiday once widely celebrated across the South that combined the birthdays of long-dead Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the folks play Civil War trivia games.

At times, Horwitz acts as a fly on the wall as he takes in the things going on around him. But at his best, he is a full-blown participant, taking sides in the trivia games, dressing up for a reenactment, and offering his unique, submerged perspective on what he sees and experiences. Best of all, he strikes up conversations everywhere he goes, asking, asking, asking.

Horwitz tracks down the legend of Tara from Gone with the Wind. He meets the last living Confederate widow. He rushes through Virginia with a hard-core reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, hitting as many Civil War sites as they can in a week, what Hodge calls a “Civil Wargasm.”

In one of my favorite encounters of the book, he talks with Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer who penned the sweeping three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and who gained national exposure as a kindly grandfather-looking “Voice of the South” in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. “It’s the sort of experience we never forget,” Foote told him. “I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

While Horwitz discovers that the Civil War is very much alive throughout the South, he also discovers that it’s a Cold War. The lines are no longer just geographic, either: they’re racial, social, and economic, too.

That’s what helps make Confederates in the Attic more than just a fascinating collection of eccentric people—although that is what makes it so captivating. Horwitz manages to write an intensely thought-provoking book. Every eccentric brings a new shade of meaning to the discussion. For every hardcore reenactor like Hodge, who can lay on the ground and “bloat” to look like the dead Confederates in wartime photos, there’s a Michael Westerman, the nineteen-year-old victim of a racially motivated murder, killed while flying a Confederate flag from the bed of his pickup truck. Citizens of Richmond who debate the placement of a statue to the late tennis great Arthur Ashe bring up incredibly nuanced arguments that transcend notions of mere “pro” and “con.”

Horwitz doesn’t shy away from any of it. Confederates in the Attic astutely explores racism, political correctness, national and regional identity, and the relevance of our own history as a way to understand ourselves. Like any good journalist, Horwitz doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but he lays out as many sides to the story as possible so readers can think for themselves.

Horwitz does get a few facts wrong, and sometimes his interpretation is shaky (I take particular exception to the way he tends to portray Stonewall Jackson as a total crackpot). He leaves a few things out, and he stirs up trouble, too. I know some of the people involved in some of the stories, so I have the inside scoop on a few things. Horwitz commits no unpardonable sins, though, and I can forgive much because of the earnestness with which he approaches his quest.

“The present is just a split second,” Hodge tells Horwitz. “The past lasts forever. You can keep going back to it.”

Indeed, Confederates in the Attic is much the same. This marked my fifth or sixth time through the book. It stands as a landmark piece of feature journalism and was  easily one of the best books of the 1990s. Although almost twenty years old, I can keep going back to it, over and over.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The producer of the video, Scott Siepker, is an Iowa State University grad and host of Iowa Outdoors on Iowa Public Television.

“The main objective was just to make people laugh,” Siepker, 29, said.

The video, titled “Iowa Nice,” does have more serious purposes as well. Because there is no Democratic challenger for President Barack Obama, a one-sided perspective of Iowans is being highlighted with the national media in town for the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Siepker said.

A friend asked me this morning what this piece was in response to, exactly. Everybody loves Iowa, he said.

I don’t know Siepker, obviously, but I do know a bit about Iowa, having spent two years there in the late 1980s earning my MA from Iowa State. I responded that I think the caucus process has put a real bender on Iowans this time around. For months there’s been all this attention on barking gongbat candidates and the voters who love them (seriously, the only way the Republican Party can get any crazier is if the candidates start running around naked, picking lice out of each other’s hair and debating in trees). And all those idiot voters are Iowans. Perhaps the feeling among intelligent Iowans is that the abuse being heaped on the morons, richly deserved though it may be, has generalized a bit too much.

As someone born and raised in the South, I have plenty of experience when it comes to ridicule. You almost can’t help getting a little sensitive, even when you agree with the criticisms. Even when you know, firsthand, that the real story is worse than everybody outside the region realizes. There’s always this little part of you that wants to defend yourself, at the least, to make sure that everybody knows that all citizens of your state or region aren’t like that.

This is what I think is going on in “Iowa Nice” and I think the piece is fantastic. It’s smart, it’s perfectly attuned to what people are saying, and best of all, Siepker crawls up in your grille with an attitude that isn’t at all what we expect of Iowans, who are easily the nicest people in America.

Thing is, all the ill-will being projected Iowa’s way today is a result of a faulty electoral process that every four years manages to drag the nation even deeper into the mire. The US is well and truly fucked, and thanks to the ways in which both major parties are rigged against the citizenry it seems likely to remain that way for the indefinite future. When you structure a nominating process the way we have, kicking the game off in Iowa is like starting the Super Bowl by shooting both starting quarterbacks in the head. What ensues might be interesting. It might be competitive and dramatic and even entertaining (in the way that mud wrestling night at a truck stop is entertaining). But it isn’t going to be the sort of thing that either team can walk away from feeling proud about.

In 1988, I got a good up-close look at the inside of the Iowa Republican Caucuses. At that point in my life I was a young GOPer who had voted for Reagan twice. I was educated and moderate, but I had significant problems with the Democratic Party. Looking back, I am not proud of those days, but that’s a subject for another post.

I arrived at the caucus with my friend Kristen, not really knowing what to expect. What unfolded was nothing short of earth-shattering for me. If you’ll recall, that was the year that Pat Robertson was running, and at caucus time Jack Kemp was another front-runner. Nobody was really taking Vice President Bush, the eventual nominee, seriously. For my part, the main frustration was that the man who was clearly the best candidate available, Howard Baker, didn’t seem to be running at all.

The scene in the caucus looked like an outtake from a Ma and Pa Kettle movie. I lived in Ames proper and spent all my time either on campus or at the club where I DJed, so I had never seen the local white trashery in all its glory before. Sweet hell, you could have cast a sequel to Deliverance out of that room. Some speaking in tongues and serpent handling wouldn’t have been entirely out of place.

I’m making sport at people’s expense, I know, but the truth is they were by any measure I can think of some of the most stupid human beings I had ever been in the same room with, and given where I grew up, that’s a considerable statement. And these people, they were going to dictate who America got to choose from in November. If memory serves, Kemp won the precinct and Rev. Pat took second.

Miraculously, I was able to get myself elected as a delegate to the county convention. (I was picked as an alternate, and then one of the electees couldn’t make it.) I did so as a vocal Baker supporter, using a strategy that leveraged the man’s loyal support of Reagan, whom everybody worshipped.

The county convention was more of the same, though. It was a better dressed class of entitled fundamentalist hillbilly, to be sure, but the five moderates in the room got nard-stomped on every vote. You have to understand, too – this was a major university town. Way back in the 1980s. Before FOX News. These days, we’re accustomed to a GOP where you win by proving that you’re the most unhinged, I will bomb Canada the day I’m elected motherfucker in the race. Science is a liberal Jew-boy conspiracy and you’re not 100% certain about elementary math, either. Iowa Republicans were a generation ahead of the rest of the nation in pure, off-its-meds psychopathology. Proto-teabaggers, if you will. I cannot fathom what the place is going to be like tonight.

This was the day that I finally realized that I had no business being a Republican, in the same way that just a few years earlier the Southern Baptist Convention had demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, that I had no business associating with them, either.

I feel for Scott Siepker and the rest of Iowa’s rational citizens. I know they’re embarrassed and I know they wish they could make it stop. But it isn’t going to as long as Iowa insists on going first because leading that political charge is so important to the self-image of a state that leads the nation in very little besides corn and brain-drain. I asked one of my classes in 1988 how many were leaving Iowa after graduating. 24 hands out of 27 went up. If you’re not going to farm, there’s not a lot to do. That’s a shame because the state has more to offer culturally than you’d think, and its public educational system (then, at least) was among the best in the US.

That said, we’d all be better served if the first shots of the electoral war were fired in places that were a little less at the mercy of slobbering hillbillies. You might argue that in this day and age Iowa’s argument that it represents real America is dead-on, but is representative really a worthy goal when things get as bad as they are? Wouldn’t we better served by aiming a little higher, by emphasizing those ideals that we admire and aspire to?

I don’t know which state ought to go first, ideally, but if it were my decision I’d give California and New York a shot. I can hear the howling from the right already, but I don’t much care. Those folks are the problem, and I’m more concerned about the solution.

I first became aware of this issue by following Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) on Facebook. A comment there challenged Sen. Tester’s stance on job creation by calling attention to a vote several weeks ago where he broke with party on job creation. Sadly, the comment didn’t provide any salient details. Since it piqued my curiosity, I started to dig. Just that very day (well, of the comment), Sen. Tester had voted against party lines, so that couldn’t be it. As I scanned back through his voting record, sure enough I learned that he voted with the GOP on October 20, 2011, On Cloture on the Motion to Proceed (Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to S. 1726). But what the hell does that even mean? This voter intended to find out.

As it turns out, cloture is a parliamentary procedure. If a motion for cloture passes, debate on a bill ends. In the US Senate, motion for cloture is essentially a call to break a filibuster. From wisegeek.com:

In the United States, which has a long history of filibuster in the Senate, cloture was not adopted until 1917, with Rule 22. If a motion for cloture is put forward in the Senate, it requires a three fifths vote to pass, and there can be no more than 30 hours of debate on the topic after the motion for cloture passes. In this sense, cloture is used to limit debate and to hasten a vote, rather than to cut off debate entirely.

Tester broke ranks from the Democrats to vote with the GOP to break filibuster (debate) on a Motion to Proceed for a bill. GOP needed 3/5 (or 60 votes). Final vote was 57-43. GOP missed it by 3 votes. Dems avoided the end of debate, but no thanks to one of their own.

But where in that is any of the context? The comment that triggered all this volunteered nothing but the clue that led to the date on which Tester’s vote for something was cast, and now we know what that something was. At first pass, it doesn’t look like much.

Before we get to the substance of the something, however, let’s take a look at the timing and context of this vote. From Congress Matters:

The last cloture vote, on the substitute, was expected to pass without much Republican opposition, even though normally Senate Republicans have come to oppose such measures by rote, just to cause trouble. Now, there was a time in the now-distant past where once the amendment process was over with, appropriations bills generally passed in the Senate with large, bipartisan majorities. But those days are over with, and I expected a large majority in favor of cloture on the substitute primarily because Senate rules say that when cloture is invoked on a measure, that measure remains the exclusive pending business of the Senate until there’s a vote on passage. With the weekend coming, and a recess to follow, allowing cloture on the substitute means the Senate breaks for a week without any further consideration of any part of the American Jobs Act, including any reconsideration of the cloture motion on it that was rejected earlier yesterday. Not such a bad outcome, if you’re a Republican. And if you’re a Democrat, well, progress was made. So… cloture!

There won’t be any more action today. The Senate meets in pro forma session twice next week, and reconvenes the week following. That puts us into November, with the bulk of the appropriations work still unfinished, about two weeks left (at that point) on the current continuing appropriations bill that’s keeping the government open, and about three weeks from the supposed Super Committee deadline. So when the Senate returns on Halloween, we start the countdown on yet another government shutdown scare. Boo!

As it turns out, Tester’s vote was part of Roll Call 178 at 10:24 PM, the last cloture vote of the day (even though there was still quite a bit of other Senate activity that followed).

It might not seem like it yet, as the nuts ‘n’ bolts can be damned tedious things, but this is actually the plot thickening here. Tester broke ranks with the party to end a filibuster going into a weekend and a recess with much Senate work pending, Obama’s American Jobs Act matters to clear, and the 24/7 news cycle darling, the Super Committee, schedule to explode fabulously one way or the other within a month. As if that’s not juicy enough, we also have a bit of understated chicanery from no less than McConnell. See, he’s the one who moved for cloture. Faux pas! Also from Congress Matters:

And by the way, it’s pretty unusual for the Minority Leader to be filing cloture motions on his own. It’s one of those things that’s “simply not done” in the Senate. By golly gee, it is being done! Will you look at that?

For the moment, let’s just go ahead and be generous. This was merely McConnell being a little tired and cranky at the end of a long, well-paid day in the Senate, right?

So we know the Tester vote, what it was for, the timing, and even have some inkling that there was something unseemly in the whole thing. Surely Tester knew that it was impolitic for McConnell to be the one moving for cloture, after all.

Now, exactly what the heck is the bill under consideration, anyway? The short version is that the Withholding Tax Relief Act of 2011 would “repeal a tax code provision scheduled to take effect in 2013 that will require the government to withhold 3 percent of its payments to contractors and vendors” (Chicago Sun-Time Post-Tribune). And what would you know, it’s McConnell’s bill, co-sponsored by 20 Republicans, including the likes of Scott Brown, Marc Rubio, David Vitter and John McCain. This can only be good. Oh, I get it. Sponsor a bill these guys like and then move to cut off debate. “It’s mine, dammit, we can’t debate this.” Unseemliness heaped on unseemliness, of, for and by McConnell. Color us surprised.

If the short version is finally starting to get the hair on the back of your neck to prickle, just you wait. To fully understand what the Withholding Relief Act of 2011 is all about, first you’d probably want to read the text of the bill. For now, don’t worry about it. As bills go, it’s really short and sweet. However, to understand it in its entirety, you’d just need to research the following (just kidding, skip the text in green):

• It repeals Section 511 of the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 (it’s a tax cut – Bush years, lest we forget)
• Internal Revenue Code of 1986 then applies as though it had never been so amended (Reagan years!)
• It rescinds $30 billion in appropriated discretionary funds (oh, it’s a spending cut and a tax cut)

Of course, since it mentions something else outside the present bill, we don’t know off the top of our heads what section 511 has to say. Yet. To see what it is that McConnell and his tittering, jeering cronies are so eager to cut, I guess we’d best go look that up, too, while we’re at it. To understand that, we only need to understand this:

• Just add a new paragraph (t) to the end of Internal Revenue Code, § 3402, Income Tax Collected at Source (which is only 6,000+ words of tax law, if you want to know what (t) changes)

Luckily, this proposed (t) only has three sub-paragraphs and (2) only has nine and (3) only has one. How bad can it be? Now we just need to look up and comprehend all of the ramifications of the following:

• “This chapter” United States Code, Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, Collection of Income Tax at Source on Wages, which is where § 3402 happens to be
• “Chapter 3″ U.S.C., Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 3, Withholding of Tax on Nonresident Aliens and Foreign Corporations
• U.S.C, Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, §3406 – Backup Withholding
• U.S.C. Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part III, Subpart B, §6050M – Returns Relating to Persons Receiving Contracts from Federal Executive Agencies
• U.S.C. Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, §3403 – Liability for Tax
• U.S.C. Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, §3404 – Return and Payment by Governmental Employer
• U.S.C. Title 26, Subtitle F – Procedure and Administration (except for Chapter 75, Subchapter A, Part I, §7205 – Fraudulent Withholding Certificate or Failure to Supply Information) as it relates to Chapter 24.

Naturally, looking all that up is just the hairy, scary beginning, because each of those references is likely to be rife with more references veritably infested with if’s, and’s, but’s, then’s and not’s.

The short and sweet of it, as I figure it, is that back when the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 was hammered out, the GOP had to throw at least a few bones to the Dems to get the rest of their agenda through, and Section 511 of that act was one of those bones. Now that Obama’s American Jobs Act is getting sliced and diced, the GOP is falling all over itself to take back a six year-old bone that levies a mere three percent tax on payments to contractors and vendors.

Naturally, the right wing casts a 3% withholding as an attack on jobs because it inhibits job creation by private contractors. However, just how many jobs would $30 billion in spending create or, alternately, how many jobs would a $30 billion cut destroy? As with most things Congressional, we won’t get any straight answers because the real answer is that the actual number of jobs affected would the difference between what’s “stifled” in the private sector and what’s created by government spending, plus or minus. And that’s just from this one very un-sexy debate in which Jon Tester runs a fifth column play for the GOP.

With that kind of complexity, is it any wonder our government is seen as a three-ring circus? I humbly submit that it’s so much worse than that. To follow the metaphor of the three-ring circus, the typical voter would have to at least be somewhat fluent in the basics of the three rings. Study after study shows that they are not. The American public has been dumbed down to embarrassing levels. As a result, rather than having a largely intelligent, informed and politically active electorate that at least relies on trustworthy sources to thoroughly and reliably do this kind of legwork for them and offer up a reasoned analysis for somewhat easier consumption, we have a largely under-educated, mis- and dis-informed, apathetic electorate content to let ill-considered sources let them know how to interpret what they see. And what do they see? A full circus? Not anymore. That would be too complicated.

Now all they get is a single Klown Kar with two clowns, a red one and a blue one. Blue Klown piles out of the left side from the back and wields a huge inflated mallet. Red Klown piles out of the right and wields a huge, floppy pair of rubber scissors. And we hoot and holler while Blue Klown tries to bop Red Klown and Red Klown tries to clip Blue Klown’s mallet. Think Tom and Jerry, but less smart. As for the car, you might notice that nobody is driving. For that matter, nobody even really understands the engine anymore. Now the engineers just place bets in the back alley as to whether the Klown Kar should even run at all.

As for me, I’ve got my popcorn and my cotton candy. For the most part, I’ll root for a clown based on my best guesses, gut instincts, and general principles. That’s all I’ll have time for. Sometimes I’ll do the legwork, at least some of it. I’ll raise some questions and pose some concerns. I’ll continue to rely on sources far better informed (I hope) than I. And I’ll try to not think too much about the time I first peeked under the hood. The clowns are so much… oooh! Shiny!

_____________

Dear ______________:

I know you’re aware of the issue so I’ll keep this brief. If the developers are allowed to blight the Highlands with high rises I will work aggressively for your opponent in the next election.

This cannot be allowed to happen, period. My guess is that about 90% of my neighbors feel the same way.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Sam Smith

Ala. GOP leaders have 2nd thoughts on immigration
By PHILLIP RAWLS

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Republicans who pushed through the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants are having second thoughts amid a backlash from big business, fueled by the embarrassing traffic stops of two foreign employees tied to the state’s prized Honda and Mercedes plants.

The Republican attorney general is calling for some of the strictest parts of it to be repealed.

Some Republican lawmakers say they now want to make changes in the law that was pushed quickly through the legislature.

Sometimes I think the problem is Democrats see the likely results of Republican policies ahead of time and argue against them  rather than just letting these fools go ahead and do dumb stuff and see what happens.

This also happened in the state next door. In Georgia, they lost some of the crop last year because of lack of labor. Any competent economist could have told them that not allowing immigrants in would either reduce agricultural output or raise wages in agriculture to a level where unemployed Americans would take those jobs, which would reduce farm profitability, neither one of which is good for the Republicans who wrote the law.

I realize letting Republicans do what they please is dangerous, because the negative effects of some of what they want to do will only become obvious in the mid to longer terms, and they can do a lot of damage in the interval, e.g., the end of Glass-Steagall and the resulting financial crisis. Also, we will never get the satisfaction of having them admit they were wrong since they rewrite history, like they have explained away the Great Depression.

My high school had a chemistry teacher nicknamed Chrome Dome, who was legendarilyy tight lipped. School lore had it that student once asked him if he drank a beaker of a magnesium solution, if it would kill him. CD thought for a moment before saying no, the kid drank it and ended up in the hospital. Probably apocryphal.

Still, some times you have to let people make their own mistakes.  Can you say “Newt?”

A Washington state fruit processor that supplies the nation’s schools and a baby food maker is under scrutiny by federal health regulators for repackaging applesauce contaminated with several kinds of potentially dangerous, multi-colored molds, msnbc.com has learned.

Repackaging? What the hell is that?

Food and Drug Administration officials this week posted a warning letter to Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., saying the company cannot ensure the safety of moldy applesauce and fruit puree that has been reconditioned for human consumption.

Wait–I thought it was just repackaged. What is this?

“Your firm reprocesses moldy applesauce product … using a method that is not effective against all toxic metabolites,” read the FDA letter sent Oct. 20 to Jimmie L. Davis, Snokist’s president. “Several foodborne molds may be hazardous to human health.”

What? Processes moldy applesauce product? What’s “applesauce product?” Is that like “cheese food?” Wait, I don’t think I want to know. It doesn’t matter, though–whenever you think it can’t possibly get worse, it does:

Products recalled earlier this year by Snokist were blamed for illnesses of nine North Carolina children who became sick after eating applesauce at school.

The latest warning came after FDA officials said Snokist failed to adequately address problems identified during a June inspection in which regulators found large, laminated bags of fruit products that were supposed to be sealed and sterile, but instead were broken open and tainted with white, brown, blue, blue-green and black mold. Some of the compromised bags were bloated and one had “a strong fermented odor,” the report said.

Well,I’m sure these guys are out of business by now, right? How could they possibly stay in business? Especially since

The FDA’s letter identified at least eight instances last year in which Snokist had reprocessed the moldy applesauce into canned goods for human consumption. The inspection report said Snokist documents showed the company had reprocessed mold-contaminated applesauce at least 13 times between January 2008 and May 2011, repackaging food into 15-ounce cans, 106-ounce-cans, 300-gallon bags and 4.2-ounce, single-serve cups.

It’s not clear whether the mold-tainted applesauce went to schools. However, the June inspection followed a voluntary recall of more than 3,300 cases of canned Snokist applesauce in May after North Carolina schoolchildren became mildly ill after eating the fruit product. The recall was blamed on faulty seals on cans. The children have since recovered.

I’m getting really confused here. These guys are still in business? And why are children in North Carolina getting sick from moldy “applesauce product” being canned in Washington? You just know what’s coming next:

Snokist officials admit that they “rework” some moldy food for future use. But in an e-mail to msnbc.com, company officials said that the contaminated fruit represents only a fraction of the company’s products, that compromised product is typically separated and destroyed, and that any reprocessed food is heat-treated to kill toxins.

“If rework occurs, our thermal process is more than adequate to render the product commercially sterile,” Tina Moss, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

See, no problem. Tina obviously sleeps well at night. I’m still not sure what to call this stuff, though. “Food” seems to be too generous. The company uses the term “rework.” The FDA says “reconditioned,” a term I normally think of as more appropriate for luxury cars and baseball mitts, but if the FDA, an agency of the US government, is using it, that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, MSNBC goes on:

The company said it has begun testing for patulin, a common toxin produced by mold in rotting fruit.

However, the FDA said the company’s tests are not adequate and that officials must prove they’re testing for other dangerous microbes: “Most mycotoxins are stable compounds that are not destroyed by heat treatment,” the letter said.

Well, it sure as hell doesn’t sound like much is adequate there. Here’s the really, really good part, though:

FDA regulations to allow companies to “recondition” food, but the final product must be free of contamination. Firms aren’t required to notify the agency they’ve reprocessed food unless they’re required to under terms of an inspection or other action, such as an injunction. In addition, rules prohibit mixing contaminated product with sound product to get to acceptable levels of filth, said Pat El-Hinnawy, an FDA spokeswoman.

Those italics are mine. I’m just stunned to learn that these guys don’t need to tell me, or the FDA, if they’re using “reconditioned” food. So what’s the point of food labeling if these guys don’t have to tell us stuff like this?

Here’s the rest, in one fell swoop, just to get this over with:

A 2009 consultant’s report showed that the types of molds in the Snokist fruit products included Alternaria, Fusarium and two types of Pennicillium, all of which can cause illness in people.

That report was commissioned by Snokist after a baby-food manufacturer returned dozens of bags of the company’s fruit product in 2009 because they were contaminated with “a large amount of mold,” according to the FDA inspection report.

In early 2010, the consultant recommended six steps that Snokist could take to fix the problems, but during the FDA’s June inspection, company officials said they’d implemented only two.

Snokist sold more than 3.3 million cases of processed fruit with sales of $53 million in 2010, according to the company’s annual report. That represents more than 50,000 tons of processed fruit.

In the past, Snokist has supplied applesauce to schools nationwide through federal nutrition programs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A spokesman said he couldn’t comment directly on whether Snokist had been removed from the program, but added that no firm under investigation by the FDA would be allowed to participate.

Snokist officials said they were working to address all of the concerns raised by the FDA and were awaiting a new inspection to confirm progress. FDA officials said the company has 15 days to respond to the warning letter.

So this goes for baby food, too. Jeez.

So let’s sum up. Food producers can put “reconditioned” food into their products and they don’t have to tell anyone–that means you and me–unless they’ve screwed up and made people sick. Wait, that’s not quite right. They still don’t have to tell you and me–but they do have to tell the FDA. Which apparently responds by sending letters. And even if they’ve screwed up–by making people sick, that’s my definition of screwing up here– they can still put this into baby food until they’re told to stop? Although it looks as if they can’t foist their reconditioned product onto unsuspecting schoolkids at some point–although we don’t know if these guys are, or are not, currently providing reconditioned moldy “applesauce product” to children. Any bets?

The topics dominating the discussion about the Republican primary for president – Rick Perry’s inability to recall the details of his own campaign proposal and the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain – may be captivating, but they don’t tell us what we need to determine who is best equipped to serve in the Oval Office.

Sure, we’d like our leaders to be pillars of virtue, but there have been some very effective presidents, governors and mayors whose personal lives were not exactly role models. Likewise, Perry’s gaffe in the CNBC debate was downright embarrassing, but should our judgments on the next leader of the free world be based on a 53-second YouTube moment? There must be better ways to gauge who would be a good president.

Mitt Romney would have us believe that a proven track record of running a successful business will produce similar results in the White House. It’s a message that resonates well with voters who often lament that government should run more like a business. It sounds good in theory, but how it plays out in practice is a different story.

Leadership in the public sector requires a different skill set than in the business world. CEOs can put their initiatives into action without having to negotiate and broker deals with legislatures and without worrying about transparency, public opinion polls and re-election.

Take former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine for example. With experience as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he appeared to be a perfect candidate to lead fiscally challenged New Jersey. But Corzine – even after having spent a few years in the U.S. Senate – did not have political skills that matched his fiscal experience. After a tumultuous first term, he failed to win re-election, and returned to Wall Street (and now is at the center of a major fiscal controversy).

When I was part of a new administration in Woodbridge Township, N.J., in the early 1990s, we thought it would be a good idea to tap some of the fiscal and management expertise in the Fortune 500 companies operating in the township. We invited them to explore the municipal budget and develop recommendations to run our government more cost effectively.

Their proposals would have saved money, but they were not feasible – unless we could have figured out legal and politically viable means of eliminating labor unions, Civil Service regulations, and costly programs that provided needed services, such as health-care screenings for individuals who otherwise would be unable to afford them.

So, if business skills are not the answer, what qualities should we look for in the candidates to determine who is best to lead the nation?

When I was working at the Hall Institute of Public Policy, I asked that question to Michael P. Riccards, the institute’s executive director, who also is a presidential scholar.

Leadership was at the top of Riccards’ list, but he noted that our greatest presidents not only were great leaders; they also stood for something greater than themselves. They were linked to a larger ideology.

Secondly, he said great presidents need the ability to assemble a good, working team. Like a successful baseball manager, they need to bring out the best among a group of highly talented, often egocentric individuals and convince them to work together.

Making the right judgments also helps, Riccards said, as does a little savvy – the ability to live off the capital of past presidents who laid the groundwork for programs that achieve success after they leave office. Building consensus also is critical, but very difficult in today’s political environment, he said.

Lastly, Riccards said a great president must be articulate in the media of his or her time.

I am sure there are compelling arguments for other factors that make great presidents, and I also am certain that some people would disagree with Riccards’ suggestions. But as a starting point for discussion, they are much better place to begin than Rick Perry’s debating skills or charges leveled against Herman Cain that may or may not be true.

Richard A. Lee spent more than 30 years as a journalist and government communications professional in New Jersey. He now is an assistant professor in the Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication at St. Bonaventure University near Olean, N.Y. Read more of Rich’s columns at richleeonline and follow him on Twitter @richleeonline.

These Washington rules — America shall protect and, more importantly, project American values because they are derived from American exceptionalism — require great military expense born by you and me, the taxpayers. That expense now faces a congressionally mandated deficit reduction process.

Come the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, six Democrats and six Republicans must identify at least $1.5 trillion in cuts in federal spending over the next decade. If they do, then Congress must vote yea or nay by Dec. 23. If they do not, the Budget Control Act triggers automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, slashing, among others, military spending. (Note that some folks are trying to detrigger the trigger.)

The so-called super committee, formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, exists because Congress demonstrated neither the political will nor moral courage to tackle deficit reduction in a rational, non-confrontational, non-ideological way. None of its members has the stomach to cut military spending; the political cost would be, they think, unbearably high.

Advocates of cutting military spending would become, in a word, electoral collateral damage, labeled as isolationist and unpatriotic foes opposing American security.

Instead of examining the debatable merit of America’s global military presence balanced against its high cost, the joint select committee is decidedly silent in the face of so many voices demanding defense spending not only remain untouched but also have earlier cuts restored.

Already, chieftains of the military and the intellectual and corporate enterprises the military budget supports have, akin to Chicken Little, argued these cuts would devastate the armed forces.

“Do the right thing,” said Leon Panetta, defense secretary: Look elsewhere to cut spending. Rep. Buck McKeon, Republican of California, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who heads the Senate counterpart, wrote the cuts “will compound deep reductions Congress has already imposed and critically compromise national security.” The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in a joint effort with the American Enterprise Institute and Foreign Policy Initiative, posted a report titled “Defending Defense: Warning: Hollow Force Ahead!”

House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, argued the Pentagon budget was cut more than enough in the debt accord reached this past summer by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. “I would argue that they’ve taken more than their fair share of the hits,” Boehner said.

That accord calls for cuts of $350 billion in projected spending over 10 years, although Pentagon planners believe it will be $450 billion. The joint select committee’s cuts will be in addition to those assumed in the summer debt accord.

What does America spend on its military?

Given the claims of devastation to America’s military if further cuts are triggered, how has defense spending fared in the past decade? What’s the materiel condition of America’s military?

Obviously, many answers from many sources — all with different ideological or financial motivations — confront that question. Let’s look at one: A report by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington, provides a detailed compilation of procurement spending by the armed forces over the past decade.

Begin with overall defense spending from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2010: That’s about $6.4 trillion in visible spending, including war funding. (Visible is applicable here. In 2008, USA Today reported that black, or secret, military spending had “increased by nearly 48% since 9/11 — from $18.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $26.9 billion this year [2008] — according to figures compiled by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.”)

The Stimson report, written by center co-director Russell Rumbaugh, focuses on visible procurement spending — what the military bought, what it paid for it, and the consequences of procurement spending patterns by each service branch. In sum, taxpayers’ money bought at least $1 trillion worth of military materiel from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2010. And that’s with two wars (and assorted dustups) driving American foreign policy and military planning.

Rumbaugh’s executive summary concludes that modernization of the American military — a principal goal of procurement over the past decade — was accomplished:

• Procurement funding grew dramatically — from $62.6B in FY01 to $135.8B in FY10.
• Supplemental war funding significantly enhanced the resources available for procurement, making up 22 percent of all procurement funding.
• Most procurement programs already have been almost completely funded.
• The Army had its next-generation acquisition programs cancelled, but that freed resources — enhanced by significant supplemental war funding — to expand and upgrade its primary combat vehicles and supporting capabilities, giving it a fully modernized force.
• The Air Force modernized its force by fielding the next-generation systems of the F-22 and C-17, and also introduced an entirely new capability — unmanned aircraft. The Air Force bought fewer fighters than it projected because it made a conscious choice to pursue high-end and expensive next-generation systems.
• The Navy achieved the modernized force it projected at the start of the decade, and relied on the dramatic expansion of procurement funding to achieve that force.

Reading the details of military procurement is fascinating, especially the spending decisions made by some branches that favored advanced technological capabilities against amounts of materiel sought. For example, the Air Force bought the F-22, the most advanced air-to-air fighter in the world. But that extraordinary capability is expensive — so the Air Force bought only 260 fighters over the past decade. It had bought 2,063 fighters from 1981 to 1990 — and even those F-15s and F-16s have demonstrated they can defeat any other nation’s combat aircraft.

Here are the report’s summaries of each branch’s procurement spending and its impacts.

The United States Army

At the start of the decade, the Army planned on devoting its procurement funding to the next-generation systems it intended to field. When these programs were cancelled because they were underdeveloped and already unaffordable, the Army instead spent the increased procurement funding it received on modernizing its existing forces. Programs that were originally slated to received only limited funding instead received significant funding, especially from the $124B in unexpected supplemental war funding, resulting in nearly the Army’s entire inventory being modernized. Its combat vehicle fleet has been expanded and upgraded with state of the art technology, including digital situational awareness and communications suites. It also expanded the fielding of its supporting vehicles and small arms. Whatever its future needs and plans, the Army today is better positioned with modern equipment than any other army, due largely to its procurement investments. In the past decade, the Army almost unintentionally acquired a fully modernized force. [emphasis added]

The United States Air Force

In contrast to the Army, the Air Force consciously pursued the procurement of expensive, next-generation aircraft. Having made that choice, the Air Force today has already fielded its next-generation systems in two of its primary areas: fighters and airlift. For fighters, that choice has meant the Air Force has less than it projected despite the dramatic increases in procurement funding it received. But the Air Force offset some of that smaller quantity by buying unmanned aircraft in significant numbers. Here, too, the Air Force chose to pursue the next-generation system. The Air Force chose to use the past decade’s procurement funding to modernize its forces and field those next-generation systems. [emphasis added]

The United States Navy

Like the other services, the Navy ended the decade with a modernized force. Unlike the other services, it did so largely by achieving its original plan. Although it expanded its modernization plan when procurement funding began increasing, it also reduced that expansion when its new plans became unaffordable. The Navy relied on the increased procurement funding of the last decade to execute its plan; nevertheless, today it has a force that has achieved the capabilities it projected it would need. The Marine Corps had a mix of modernization; fielding one high-end, next-generation system but also capitalizing on supplemental war funding to upgrade its vehicle fleets.

Rumbaugh’s analysis concludes that the American military remains the most advanced — and modernized — in the world. He recognizes that what to buy and how much to buy for America’s armed forces remain a source of contentious debate. His report does not address that issue. Rather, he focuses on what has been accomplished through procurement:

At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, US military capabilities and technology are the most advanced in the world. Although much of the US military strength is rooted in the professionalism and dedication of the people in the services, they are also outfitted with the best equipment in existence. The Army has higher quality and more modern tanks, fighting vehicles, supply trucks, small arms, helicopters, and support equipment than it had at the start of the decade. The Air Force has better fighter, airlift, and unmanned aircraft. And the Navy and Marines have better ships, aircraft, and support equipment. Even as the debate of what we should buy rightfully continues, we should not dismiss what we have already bought. [emphasis added]

The Stimson report provides astonishing detail about what each service branch bought, right down to the Army’s 228,377 M249 squad automatic weapons and M240 medium machine gun (more than 1.5 times the intended buy); the Air Force’s 352 Predator and Reaper drone aircraft; the Navy’s two aircraft carriers ($16.8 billion), 10 attack submarines ($28 billion), and 18 destroyers ($28.9 billion); and the Marines’ 155 V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff and landing aircraft ($14 billion). The taxpayers bought a helluva lot of top-notch stuff for the American military in the past decade. The study has other tidbits as well, such as this: The Army has spent at least $1 billion a year since 1996 on canceled weapons systems.

Cui bono?

Given its findings, the Stimson report should inaugurate a discussion about the appropriate level of American military spending — and the incentives driving it — over the next decade. But such discussion is unlikely.

First, as Bacevich argues, the Washington rules about American power are deeply embedded in the national consciousness. The public accepts the status quo, in part because it believes it does not need to question the projection of military power by the United States or the reasons proferred for it.

Second, an intricate network of intertwined ideological, economic, military, and political institutions populated by elites would collapse if the Washington rules were publicly discussed and ultimately discarded. Writes Bacevich:

Who benefits from the Washington rules? The answer to that question helps explain why the national security consensus exists.

The answer, needless to say, is that Washington itself benefits. The Washington rules deliver profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security apparatus, media personalities, and policy intellectuals from universities and research organizations.

Each year the Pentagon expends hundreds of billions of dollars to raise and support U.S. military forces. This money lubricates American politics, filling campaign coffers and providing a source of largesse — jobs and contracts — for distribution to constituents. It provides lucrative “second careers” for retired U.S. military officers hired by weapons manufacturers or by consulting firms appropriately known as “Beltway Bandits.” It funds the activities of think tanks that relentlessly advocate for policies to fend off challenges to established conventions. “Military-industrial complex” no longer suffices to describe the congeries of interests profiting from and committed to preserving the national security status quo.

An overpowering narrative

The Washington rules as articulated by Bacevich have no single author. Rather, the narrative has been constructed by many architects since World War II. America’s self-assumed image of its exceptional place in the world fostered a mythical but militaristic ethos of global power projection. That ethos — the rest of the world should mirror the American enterprise of democracy and its definition of freedom — has survived revision and revolution in military technology and tactics, strategic planning, sensibilities in the officers corps, political leadership, voter attitudes, and narrative management.

The Defense Department’s $691 billion budget request for fiscal 2012 continues to underwrite the narrative of American power projection as global arbiter and definer of proper “international order.” In one breath, the DoD budget overview pins the American mission on its presumed historical mandate and “successful Cold War strategy,” granting it a central role in the maintenance of global order. From the DoD overview:

NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
America’s national security strategy calls for comprehensive global engagement aimed at underpinning a just and sustainable international order. This strategic approach has its roots in the central role the United States played in the years following World War II – creating an architecture of international institutions, organizations, and standards establishing certain rights and responsibilities for all nations. This international architecture was a critical enabler of America’s successful Cold War strategy against an ideological adversary, and it remains central to the maintenance of international order today.

But in the next paragraph, the DoD pays lip service to the “norms and values of the international community.”

America’s ability to lead stems from the timeless resolve to support liberty, freedom, and open access to markets and ideas. The United States can only lead when others trust it to carry forward their best interests, to listen to their concerns, and to conduct itself in line with the norms and values of the international community.

Is the magnitude of American military power lodged overseas “in line with the norms and values of the international community”? Bacevich details what “comprehensive global engagement” actually means. According to Bacevich in his book “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War“:

The United States currently has approximately 300,000 troops stationed abroad, again more than the rest of the world combined (a total that does not include another 90,000 sailors and marines who are at sea); as of 2008, according to the Department of Defense, these troops occupied or used some 761 “sites” in 39 foreign countries, although this tally neglected to include many dozens of bases in Iraq or Afghanistan; no other country comes even remotely close to replicated this “empire of bases” — or to matching the access that the Pentagon has negotiated to airfields and seaports around the world.

Make that 762 “sites” in other countries if President Obama’s promise to place 250 marines in Australia (eventually increasing to 2,500 personnel) represents a new site for power projection. It appears the tiresome wars in the Mideast are giving way to shouldering aside a presumed Chinese threat to traditional trade routes with good, old-fashioned saber rattling.

Global military spending in 2010 hit $1665 billion; the United States accounted for $636 billion, or nearly 40 percent of the global total. Is this level of military spending “in line with the norms and values of the international community”?

This post does not argue for specific levels of American military spending. Nor does it argue the joint select committee ought to dramatically reduce military spending. It calls for, instead, far more introspection about the American global mission by far more Americans. It asks for plain talk about the Washington rules articulated by Bacevich. It suggests academics do far more research on American exceptionalism and its connection to American global power projection. It asks that America’s civilian elected leaders — yep, those folks on the Hill with the dismal approval rating — reconsider how taxpayers’ dollars are spent at a time when 30 million Americans want jobs, and now.

Reconsider how best to project American values. If Americans believe that they can outcompete anyone, then they should demand that American foreign policy be based on the projection of economic power. Frankly, China has our number. America is addicted to its low-cost wares. The money we pay to China for cheap electronic goods has helped the most populous nation on Earth increase its military spending and begin to annoy its neighbors around the South China Sea.

A dialogue over the Washington rules and their hold on maintaining high levels of military spending will not happen. When a member of the Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” threatens to quit the joint select committee if it argues for cuts in military spending, a desperately needed deliberation ends, let alone begins. That’s what Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, did. And Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, backed him up:

This pisses me off beyond belief that our party would subject the Department of Defense not just to more cuts, but to the end of the finest force ever created in the history of the world. This budget deal is a philosophical shift that I will have no part of.

The United States is continually at war. We need to consider why — and the discussion cannot begin and end solely with fears of terrorism. Being continually at war reflects who we are. That’s how the world reacts to us — as a nation at war.

If our elected leaders follow the refusal of Kyl and Graham to even discuss how and why we spend so much of our money on our military, we’ll never reach a national consensus on what relationships America ought to have with the other nearly 200 nations on the planet.

The Port of Oakland was chosen as the protest site because the International Longshore and Warehouse Union has a rare contract clause that allows workers to honor certain community picket lines. If workers arriving for a 7 p.m. shift decide not to cross the line, a shutdown could result. LA Times

So i suppose that neither sort of report is true, or even knowable yet.
There are also reports of wildcat strikes inside the port, but those may well be work related. It’s possible that the longshoremen will walk out when the Occupy protesters form their picket line outside the port. Anything’s possible at this point. OPD says that it will help marchers get to the port safely, which seems strange given that the picket is the most likely thing to bring about the port closure.

I crossed a picket line once. My best friend and i were probably ten years old, and had a little money for goodies. We really didn’t know why all the people were in a line in front of the grocery store. It was back in the olden days when even grocery store workers were unionized. There were like two workers and no customers. I can vividly recall that it was uncomfortable. When we got back to my friend’s house, his dad glared at our purchases and asked where we got them. Our answer brought about a short lesson in economics and labor. Mark asked if we liked all the things that made our lives pleasant; he asked if we liked the roof over our heads and the food on the stove; he asked if we enjoyed the summer trip to Cedar Point. And then he drove home the point that without the unions we’d likely have none of it. The lecture, i should add, was filled with coarse language and seething anger, delivered by a guy who did two tours as a door gunner in the 101st.

That was the only picket line i’ll ever cross. My guess is that most of the longshoremen in Oakland feel even more strongly than i do. If they walk, the Occupy movement goes to a whole different level.

Latest update is that marchers leave for the port in 30 minutes. There are also reports of vandalism, and almost no police presence.

Update: At the moment, the Port of Oakland has been closed by thousands of people blocking the entrances and bridge. No announcement from the Longshore and Warehouse Union.

And yet, and yet…. I’m bothered by something, and I haven’t really seen anyone focus on what is actually being demanded here. Well, not demanded, actually, since people’s motives here are broad and wide. But there’s a broad insistence on economic justice, as if that could be satisfied by lower CEO pay, or sending some of the obvious crooks on Wall Street to jail. I suppose the latter might happen, but not nearly enough to matter, frankly. But there’s clearly more at issue here—it’s the lack of work, the lack of mobility, the fact that the American Dream no longer seems attainable.

But it’s a shibboleth, an illusion. The only person I’ve seen articulate the concerns I have is Gwyneth Jones, who writes (in a longer and much better thought out piece than I could come up with):

The trouble is, in real life as opposed to outer space, there is another value… and it’s the worth of the living world, the only planet we have. This present crisis looks “bad” but the environment we live in can still be squeezed. Fossil fuels can still be extracted, at horrible cost but in mighty volumes of natural gas, even if the oil is running a little low. Forest and wilderness can still be cleared for agribusiness, in staggering enormous swathes. The oceans can be killed stone dead. And this is what will happen, and this is what must happen, if the middle classes and the masses are to be given enough of a “share of the wealth” to shut them up again.

I admire the Occupy movement very much, but I’m afraid their mass support is coming, has to come, not from those who want something new, but from the angry people who simply want the machine to work again. They want economic growth to go on, forever and ever, so that ideally (and this is what dresses the mass movement in idealism) everyone, every single one of the 7 billions and counting, can have the good life. But I don’t want that, even if it were possible. I don’t want to share the wealth, I want the wealthy to share my frugal sufficiency. I don’t want my rights restored (the right to a new car, two weeks in the Maldives and a new gadget, every six months). I want those “rights” withdrawn from circulation. I want to trade them for a future I can look forward to without dread and grief.

The whole thing in America the past three decades has been an illusion, a house of cards, a trick with mirrors. It all comes down to credit. People got more and more credit, and thought they were rich. So the bigger house, and the extra SUV, the endless supply of gadgets. And everyone got to move to the Sunbelt even as the industrial economy was being hollowed out, and homebuilding became the most important industry in America.

And it all depends on energy being cheap. This has been America’s natural advantage for decades, perhaps even longer. Energy in America has always been cheaper than in Europe or Japan. It’s what let the country expand the suburbs, so that everyone could have the four bedroom monster with central air conditioning and SUV or two in the driveway. And a lifestyle where you have to drive everywhere—it’s not optional. In most parts of the US, even in most cities, you can’t not drive. Which is why every time the cost of energy goes up, the country has a conniption fit.

Well, the current period of adjustment, if nothing else, would have at least offered the prospect of weaning America from its energy addictions. It looked for a while there as if the prospect of cheap energy, and the artificial economy based on artificial credit that enables it, would disappear. But that might not be the case now. There is, in much of Europe and some of the rest of the world, a recognition that adaptation to and mitigation of global warming will mean that energy, yes, will become more expensive. The American policy elite, both Republican and Democratic, remain in deep denial. This is what I find deeply scary about shale gas—not so much that America might have cheap energy again, but the price it’s willing to pay to have it. In any choice there days between jobs and the planet, the planet usually loses. It didn’t take long to BP to get a new permit for deep drilling in the Gulf again, didn’t it? In this regard the Obama administration’s decision regarding the Keystone Pipeline will be telling. I’m not optimistic.

So where does this leave Occupy? Well, according to Michael Moore, Occupy is beyond party politics. Moore occasionally has useful things to say, but this is not helpful. If this isn’t political, what’s the point? I have no idea what Occupy should be about. Economic grievances are obvious, and curing them is a necessary part of whatever transition we’re about to undertake–if that’s what is going to occur. But it’s not sufficient, and may even be counter-productive if, as Jones intuits, it simply becomes a return some familiar old mantra of jobs jobs jobs, which can take on an aura of Drill Baby, Drill if we’re not careful. But the goals here seem so inchoate that, really, this could go anywhere. Maybe a working democracy not owned by the usual suspects would be enough. It would be fantastic, in fact. But that next step—towards a voluntary simplicity and greater localism in our economic expectations—that remains to be seen.

Shortly after finishing his three-month, 3,312-mile run from the coast of Oregon to the Rhode Island shore, Glenn Caffery visited his physician and complained that his feet were numb.

“What’d you expect?” the doctor replied.

Caffery, a 49-year-old data management teacher at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, lives in Leyden, a small town in the Connecticut River Valley that borders Vermont. His cross-country pilgrimage was to raise awareness about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed his father at age 68.

“He was diagnosed at 55,” said Caffery, “but it was symptomatic at least two years prior to that.”

On May 19, Caffery stuck his foot into the Pacific Ocean and began his long, arduous journey across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota on toward the Northeast and into New England. On Aug. 17, surrounded by friends and family, he splashed into the Atlantic Ocean at Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island.

Along the way he had jogged through towns named Mud Butte and Faith and avoided roads with rumble strips that rattled the three-wheeled stroller he kept packed with supplies and camping gear. “It was kind of comfortable to have it with me. I never gave it a name. I’m glad it never came to that.”

His wife, Colleen, shipped Asics DS running shoes and multivitamins to designated truck stops every 350 miles. Truckers learned of his cause and gave him leeway on the highway. Railroad engineers leaned on train whistles for encouragement.

South Dakota was the most grueling part of the journey, a daunting 560-mile trek in 100-degree weather through desolate territory where the state mammal is the coyote.

“It got discouraging,” said Caffery. “There was no shelter. There were no trees. I was by myself and totally dependent on the people around me.”

He was grateful for people like the owners of the Ace Motel in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who gave him a roof over his head and a fresh bar of soap in the shower stall. “Ceramic tile, toilet, shower … Compared to sleeping on the side of the highway, it couldn’t have been better.”

A nasty case of shin splints set him back a week, but his arthritic hip never barked and he was able to average 50 miles a day while burning 600 calories an hour.

“I was amazed with my body’s ability to bounce back every morning,” he said. “My left hip was pain free and my right arm wasn’t sore from pushing the stroller, but my left shoulder bothered me. It did nothing, but a person’s body responds to work.”

Most weight-conscious people try to maintain a caloric intake under 2,000, but Caffery needed 7,000 calories day to keep up his energy level.

“Food was the single hardest part of the trip,” he said. “The problem was, I had no appetite and the stuff I ate was high calorie and not particularly healthy. Mostly I got sick of things. They had really gross ice cream (in South Dakota) called Blue Bunny, and another problem was I was a vegetarian in one thousand miles of beef country. But I did eat a lot of eggs and drink a lot of chocolate milk.”

Jogging on thoroughfares built for fast-moving vehicles provided a shocking, near slow-motion perspective of death on the highway.

“Dead things were horrible, so many dead things in the road,” he said. “The stench was a constant companion. Cars are so disruptive, and I saw so much killing…. Two Canada geese crossing the road with their offspring and I thought how beautiful, and a car went smashing through them, just a swirl of feathers. The car never slowed. That was hard.”

At night in the West, snakes came to bask on the warm roads.

“I had to be careful. The really big snakes were the bull snakes and they camouflaged well on the road,” said Caffery. “When I saw my first prairie rattler I knew I had to keep getting fresh batteries for my head lamp.”

In Ohio his father-in-law died. He rented a car and drove to the memorial service in Easton, Pa., then returned to where he’d left off.

“It made me wonder whether my run was truly separate from my life or really just the same,” he said. “I don’t think it was as separate as it seemed.”

The country’s diverse geography didn’t affect him so much as the people he met.

“They have forever changed me,” he said. “I feel really blessed they brought me into their world. I came to learn that the U.S. is a big community and I’d never thought of it that way. I was given two flags along the way. I’ve never had a flag in front of my house but I cherish these two flags.”

Life has returned to normal for Caffery. He’s back teaching at UMass and on Oct. 18 he spoke at an Alzheimer’s symposium in Boston. Although he’s raised $25,000, he said, “Alzheimer’s been a part of my life but I don’t consider myself an activist, surprising as that sounds.”

His feet still hurt and his weight is down and he’s quick to admit, “I’m in pretty bad shape right now.”

Yet he’ll recover physically and keep the memory.

“It was the classic step-a-time and big things happen,” he said. “It’s changed my attitude about life and adversity, and I’m a better person for having done this.”

Monies raised by Caffery’s effort go to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund in Wellesley, Mass. “They’re a lean and mean operation and have the top Alzheimer’s scientists,” said Caffery. “Every dollar goes to research and it’s a very efficient operation with a very deliberate roadmap. They redirect every single dollar. If they donate $100,000 to a university researcher, they won’t allow the university to take any overhead.”

Contributors can donate by going to alzrun.org or curealz.org or by calling the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund at 781-237-3800.

Photos from Glenn Caffery’s website, http://alzrun.org/.

This wasn’t the first time that language was used to make people look stupid and it certainly wasn’t the last, as various political engines these days seem to exist for no reason other than to crank out vocabulary for dummies.

Perhaps the best case in recent memory came during the 2004 election, when then-president George W. Bush stapled “flip-flopper” to John Kerry’s face and made him wear it like a dunce cap. It was bad enough that the Future of the Free World^® had to hinge on such cynical and empty manipulation, but now it’s clear that the term is like a bad case of herpes – it ain’t never going away.

Just the other day, for instance, I was reading a story at PR Daily on the wise, if belated decision by Netflix to 86 their Quikster service, which had managed to alienate seemingly all of their customers even before it got launched. Right in the middle, I encounter this:

Twitter lit up on Monday morning after the blog post went live. Many PR and marketing professionals expressed confusion over the company’s “flip-flopping.”

“Oh this makes my head hurt,” Gini Dietrich, the CEO of a PR shop in Chicago, tweeted.

“What a mess,” tweeted GolinHarris’s Len Kendall.

“I’m frequently thrilled I’m not in PR for Netflix,” tweeted PR pro Natalie Ebig Scott.

There it is. The company flip-flopped. And people were confused by it. Well, stupid people, anyway (which, I’m sad to say, aren’t hard to find in the PR industry). Because clearly it would have been better had Netflix stuck with the bad decision, right?

Any time I hear somebody using any form of “flip-flop,” I know that I’m listening to one of two things. Either a) the speaker is an idiot, or b) the speaker is using the phrase ironically and is making fun of the idiots who use it seriously.* Let’s face it. You have three options in life (and business):

1. Get it right the first time, every time.
2. Get it wrong and leave it that way once you realize you made a mistake.
3. Be a flip-flopper.

My experience is that there aren’t many folks in category #1. Maybe you know people who are perfect, who never make mistakes and therefore never have cause to worry about what to do in the event of a screw up, but I don’t.

Category #2 represents the philosophy epitomized by Mr. Bush. In a nutshell, no matter how badly you fuck up, it’s better to ”stay the course” than to admit you were wrong and make the changes required to get it right. You may be on the highway to hell, but by god you’re making good time, so put the hammer down.

Category #3? These are people who, like everybody else, make mistakes. And when they do, they realize it and they take action to fix those mistakes. I’ll probably be back soon with a demand that we banish “accountability” from the language, too, but in the meantime, this is what true accountability is and ought to be: a commitment to recognizing and acknowledging mistakes and correcting them, because it’s not how you start but how you finish. I mean, seriously – what are you supposed to do when new evidence comes to light that proves you were wrong? (Or, once you make a decision, are you to conclude that you’re now omniscient and should therefore avoid accidentally learning anything new on the subject? Let’s call that approach “strategic ignorance.”)

In other words, when you hang the “flip-flopper” label on someone, you’re staying they should stay the course instead, that it is better to devote yourself to maximizing an initial failure than it is to getting it right. Either that or you think nobody should ever make a mistake in the first place. In any event, this makes you an idiot.

If you’re looking at the Netflix debacle and thinking “wait a second, no, what I meant is that this was obviously a mistake to start with and that there was plenty of opportunity for it to have been avoided,” then I probably agree with you. But say that, because that is a very different argument from “their flip-flopping gives me the vapors.”

So there. You’re on notice. “Flip-flop” and all its corrosive, idiot-bolstering forms are hereby banished from the vocabularies of all intelligent people everywhere.

Then again, intelligent people weren’t the ones abusing the term in the first place, were they?

* Unless you’re talking about those cheap sandal thingies. And they should probably be banned, too, but that’s another argument.