Joseph Hansen: lastwords

Sad Notice of Joseph Hansen's Passing

2004-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

Sadly, unfortunately, Joseph Hansen, the author of this blog, passed away November 24, 2004. He will be truly missed.

Thomas J. Ringers
Friend and Neighbor

LOSING PRIVATE RYAN

2004-11-19T15:45:00.000-08:00

On November eleventh, Veterans Day, the ABC television network chose to air Steven Spielberg's 1995 film Saving Private Ryan as a tribute to Americans who fought and died in World War II. The film comes to grips as few other movies have ever done with the realities of modern combat. Its first 25 minutes are an unflinching depiction of the landing of our troops on D-Day, June 6, 1944, a day of rain, wind, and choppy seas, at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast, where Germans firing from cliff-top bunkers cut our forces to pieces, many before they could even wade out of the surf. The slaughter was horrifying, and Spielberg shows it in relentless, wrenching detail. The surf is awash with blood.

Saving Private Ryan had been shown several times on network television without incident. But this year a funny thing happened. In George W. Bush country, of course. The Heartlanders got on their crank telephones and rang up their local teevee stations to say that Ryan was not fittin' fer pram tam. The actors use the F word. They do. In this week's TIME magazine, an embedded reporter in Fallujah, running in a crouch from street to street with our troops there, has occasion to quote them in moments of crisis. It is now sixty years since World War II, but in the terror and chaos of battle, the F word has not lost favor. Spielberg insisted on it, and in his contracts specified that it not be bleeped even on network showings. The Heartlanders don't care. It ain't fittin' fer teevee. Take the movie off.

This is not surprising. What is surprising is that sixty-five outlets knuckled under meekly and showed a different movie to the just- kick-it-in-the-side-if-it-don't-work television sets of the cotton, corn, and taters crowd. The alternative I saw mentioned was Return to Mayberry. Again, no surprise. But the language of Saving Private Ryan was not the only fault the Heartlanders found. The violence was another thing. Say what you want about them, these Born Againers keep their eyes open. There is violence. Since the movie is about a war, anyone else would have expected it. But connecting the dots is a game beyond the skills of these good folk. Hell, connecting the idea of broadcasting a film about war with Veterans Day is plainly out of their mental reach.

I suggest Steven Spielberg's point in showing in detail the butchery of battle was to make us painfully aware that war is stupid and cruel and wasteful and solves nothing. It is conventional for the hero of a movie to survive once the guns grow silent and the smoke of battle clears. The hero of this film, a Captain sent in the interests of Armed Services public relations on the absurd and wasteful mission of finding and saving the fourth son of a widow whose other boys were killed in battle, dies of gunshot wounds in combat gear at the close of this picture. Let us say that the film does not glorify war.

And I submit that perhaps the folk who called up their local television stations had a different agenda from that of sparing the tender ears of their women and children the F word. I submit that they may have been primed by an alert from Warshnon, Dee See, and their adored Prez'dent, who after all is whining daily at all of us to support his brainless and savage assault on the people of Iraq. Events there are going badly right now. There is (gasp!) a lot of violence and bloodshed, and American troops are being killed at a record rate, some of them dismembered, cut in half, disembowelled by machine gun fire--just as shown in Saving Private Ryan. Surely George W. Bush would prefer the Faithful not to put two and two together with the help of Steven Spielberg.

That the television stations (assertedly because they feared FCC reprisal, as in the matter of Janet Jackson's breast) dropped to their knees and knocked their heads on the floor, I find unsettling. If we don't want to watch hideous deaths and maimings on television, we can click on the remote and find gentler matter on another channel. It is our choice. Back in the days when books were the prime source of education and amusement, Hitler's answer was to burn the books he didn't like. Now that (sad to say) television has replaced books, can the President decide which movies it may show and which it would be best if we did not see? Was this a one-time fluke? I hope so. But it might be wise to remember it. It could be coming soon to your local TV outlet.

AND NOW WHAT?

2004-11-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

My previous blog, WHY, (Nov 04) seems to have confused a few readers, mainly those too young to know the difference between Herbert Clark Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first was a laissez faire (hands-off) Republican able to offer voters nothing but slogans like "prosperity is just around the corner." The second was a Jacksonian Democrat who figured it was time for government to dig Americans out of the dry well that had collapsed on them and that was far too deep to describe as a depression.

In WHY, I was not criticizing FDR. I was remembering how the voters of South Dakota in 1933 jeered at his efforts to make life better for them. My point was that nothing much has changed in the hearts and minds of hayseeds (the electorate of the so-called red states) in the intervening seventy years. The morning after the recent Presidential election, WHY was the question all rational people were asking. And my answer was that fifty-one percent of Americans voted for Bush because they believe he is an aw-shucks hick like themselves and therefor is their friend. He is not. He is nothing like them. He is cagey and conniving, while they are innocent. Such people are ideal supporters and ideal victims for cynics like George W. Bush.

The bright side of the election is that damn near as many Americans voted against Bush as voted for him. And we must not act like willing victims too. Day in, day out, for as long as it takes, we must keep sending him the message that he does NOT have a mandate. Forty-eight percent of us, millions and millions, hate what he stands for, and are going to balk at every move he makes to pillage the treasury and fatten his billionaire friends, to let the Voting Rights act lapse, to wreck the wilderness, to dismantle Social Security and hand Medicare over to greedy insurance companies, to lock medical research into a chastity belt, to gag the free exchange of ideas by cutting off funding for NPR and PBS, and to ram his stone-age religiosity down everybody's throat.

We drove Lyndon Johnson from office over Vietnam, and Iraq is shaping up as a repeat of that conflict, this time in a desert instead of a swamp, but again stubbornly defended by people who for whatever reason love their country and will never give it up. And it's a cinch George Bush having got us into it to show he was a bigger man than his father, hasn't a clue as to how to get us out of it. We must not let him think we haven't noticed. Not for a minute. Nor must we let him shut us up by claiming we're supporting terrorism. That worked on John Kerry, but he was hell-bent to get elected, and didn't really much care what he said. Like most politicians, he gauged that once he got the job he could change his position.

You and I aren't running for anything. We know the truth and we can speak the truth if only we will. Loud and clear and without stopping. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism and never did. It is a horrific waste of lives and money and materiel, and it needs to be ended. The presidential campaign of 2004 isn't over. It won't be over until we drum George W. Bush out of the White House.

WHY

2004-11-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

The middle of noplace is where Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to put a dam in 1933 so farms in northeastern South Dakota could have electricity. And along with a lot of neighbors from my home town, my father and mother, sister and brother and I drove out there one afternoon to look at the place where the dam would be built. I guess it must have been on the Jim river, but don't hold me to that. It was within automobile range of Aberdeen, though not everybody who heeded the President's invitation had a car: horses brought families in buggies and wagons as well. Half of Brown County showed up.

Surveyor's stakes tied with scraps of red cloth were hammered into the hard soil in a vast semi circle, and one of the Interior Department men from Washington, D.C. shouted through a megaphone that we should park beside these, facing inward, so once the sun went down we could turn on the headlights and light up the weedy area that would one day form the promised reservoir. A lake of light, the fellow said. A bright promise for the future, he said. My father hooted. There were jeers and whistles, but the Government fellow wasn't discouraged. He came from around there, and knew they all had voted for Hoover. He was prepared for the contempt, and a good thing too, since no one tried to conceal it: they would have in a parlor, but not outdoors in a crowd. He and his side-kicks told us how gettng the dam built and the reservoir dug would need hundreds of workers. Jobs. Paychecks. Questions were shouted. Answers given and laughed at, and the laughter was hostile and disgusted.

But the Washington men pressed on, telling us about more projects the President planned for northeastern South Dakota, among them the seeding of the desperate land with new breeds of corn created by our amazing Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, corn resistant to drought and disease; and the planting of straight miles and miles of fast-growing trees the President called "windbreaks." The sprawling half-circle of farmers, storekeepers, bankers, shook their heads in grinning wonder. Plainly Roosevelt had never met a Dakota wind.

I felt sorry for the bureaucrats, and today in retrospect I salute their courage. They were telling us what we didn't want to hear. They were talking about change, which nobody wanted, nobody ever wants. Things were bad right now, sure they were, but electric light in the farm kitchen wasn't going to help. Newfangled corn? What was wrong with the old corn? If Roosevelt wanted to send help out here, let him send rain. Rain was all that was needed. What in hell good were twenty-mile rows of cottonwoods going to do anybody?

The farmers of 2004 are better educated and smarter altogether about crop management, soil conservation, animal breeding, all that stuff, but it seems to me from the Presidential election just held that they are no more trustful of change than they ever were. The same for the businessmen that sell them stuff and lend them money. They want the government to keep its hands off. Besides lower taxes and prayer in the schools and keeping out illegal immigrants, they want the right to shoot the cougers, bears, and wolves that kill their cattle. George Bush wants to open up the wilderness to developers, for timber and minerals and oil, and why not? Give the cougers and bears and wolves one less place to hide.

They want a President who dresses as they do, a President who can wink, swagger, and smirk like their pickup-driving buddies down at the diner on Main street. They don't want some tall geek who talks like a professor and looks like a clock. If George Bush's only coherent utterance, day in, day out, is "You can run, but you can't hide," they don't ask for more. Just an elbow nudge to make you laugh. If he starts a war, that's what he's there for, isn't it? To slap down our enemies? It isn't as if the kids in uniform were drafted: they signed up, they get paid, it's a job. As for slaughtering 100,000 Iraquis, well, the Iraquis asked for it. Crazy clothes they wear. Some civilization: haven't learned yet how to make a pair of pants. Can't tell a soldier from a civilian. Who says there even are any civilians? Religious nut cases, that's what they are, all of ‘em!

What other President can you name who actually sent you money through the mail? He came into office, found a great big surplus in the treasury, and sent you a share of it. A refund, good buddy. Your money to do with as you pleased. You can't name another President who ever did that. Sure, he sent his rich friends more than he sent you, but what the hey! That's life. And if John Kerry had been as smart as advertised, his first act as candidate would have been to divide up all the millions he and his rich wife and his supporters had raised to get him the office, and send a check to each and every voter in the land. You want a smart politician? Find one who gives money away. Plainly, there's no beating that.

PLAYOFFS

2004-10-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

It looks as if surprises are unlikely in the match-ups between the Yankees and Redsox, the Cardinals and Astros. It also looks as if no more than four games will be needed in either league.
One outcome I hope for is that Tim McCarver will not be in any broadcast booth during the World Series. How that man can chatter on about nothing!I thought we would never hear the last of Kurt Schilling's bunged-up ankle. It went on inning after inning: about the time it seemed we'd left the issue behind, back it came again. This morning it has been settled. Schilling will not be pitching game five. What game five?

The Presidenial playoffs went on as scheduled, but the New York Times reports the TV audience was markedly smaller due to baseball. And evidently we defectors didn't miss much. What fascinated me about the first two is that though oil was a main point in going to war in Iraq, oil was scarcely mentioned.

The latest New Yorker prints a good piece on the status of oil in the world right now. It stresses the old but neglected news that the U.S.A. burns up by far the most oil of any country in the world, yet we demand and drive bigger and BIGGER automobiles. Nor do we seem to see the connection between today's soaring gas prices and Bush's war, and the car companies have designed even gassier SUVs for the coming year! No wonder Bush didn't bring up the oil issue. Voters don't want to hear about how he failed to restore Iraq's hugely important oil industry as he'd promised. And Kerry isn't about to tell them that under the Democrats, they'll have to start driving wussy little compact cars again.

Politics is a sneaky business. I'll take baseball

UNGODLY

2004-10-08T13:39:00.000-07:00

The big flaw in most public opinion polls is that they don't take into account that people lie. Not just bad people. All people. When a stranger with a quetionnaire telephones an American and asks if he believes in God, if he is of sound mind he is going to answer "Yes." It may not be true. But it saves trouble.

"Do you believe in God" is, at the best of times, a loaded question, And ours is not the best of times. With a President once a care- free drunk now, every time he spots a news camera, kneeling to pray to the God of Rattlesnake Handlers and Speakers in Tongues, with an Attorney General who drapes classic statues in Government buildings to hide their nudity, with a Congress like a Pentacostal revival meeting, we are sliding into a state of ignorance and supersition to rival Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

So it seems smartest, if you're asked, to say you believe in God. "Nearly three quarters of the public," reports the New York Times, "want a President of strong religious faith." Just how many voters were surveyed, or where, or by whom, writers Jodi Wilgoren and Bill Keller do not say. Nor do they mention a margin for error, let alone for protective lying. Time magazine, a week or two back, told its four million readers that to thirty-one percent of American males in a featured survey, "the most important thing in their lives is God."

We live on assumptions, about family, friends, co-workers, even strangers. We know them. This is how they behave, day in, day out. We count on the fixtures in our lives, the buildings we live and work in, the stores where we buy stuff, our cars, the subway, bills, paychecks, hot and cold running water. And God. We take God for granted because everybody in our lives has always appeared to take God for granted. So now we have the pissing contest between the candidates as to which believes in God the bestest and the mostest.

Bush drags God into every issue from stem-cell research to school funding to gay marriage. Kerry wears a "small crucifix" around his neck and carries a rosary and a Bible on the campaign trail, as he says he always did in Vietnam. Neither man believes in God, or in anything except power, armed with which they will if the past is any pointer, make life tougher for the rest of us.

That Americans go on telling interviewers they believe in God because they assume it will keep them from getting in bad with their inlaws, the neighbors, the boss, the town they live in, the nation, the world, the universe—like every other lie can only make things worse. God help us all, you say? I don't think so. Not when the Janjaweed in Sudan have driven a million people from their homes in Darfur, stealing their cattle, pillaging and burning their settlements, raping, starving, and slaughtering fifty thousand men, women, and children simply because they are black. That God of Mercy you and I have heard about so insistently from infancy didn't lift a finger in Darfur.

We have to figure out how to make the best of this wretched Presidential race all on our own. As we in fact have always had to do. It is a tribute to what Bernard Shaw called The Life Force that in spite of all the lousy choices collective man has made when given, as we're given this time, no real choice at all, we have survived.

NAME THAT KID

2004-10-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wal-Mart and its unflagging lust to lower costs, it uses as models in its advertising flyers the children and grandchildren of folks on its payroll. Since their names are printed alongside their pictures, whether they be peddling Halloween costumes, television sets, or cooking utensils, I guess a warm and fuzzy, one-big-happy family notion of Wal-Mart is being promoted here, as it often is in the TV commercials. But I keep wondering if the kids are being paid. And to suspect they're not. It's all done for fun, right? Look, honey, here's your picture in the new Wal-Mart mailer. Isn't Wal-Mart the nicest place for Mom to work? Well, never mind.

What I started out to muse on were the names of these kids. On page one is Staci, granddaughter of Maxine, a Wal-Mart People Greeter. The smiling Staci is surrounded by Go-Go Dancer dolls and Flashback Fever dolls, made by a company calling itself Bratz. On page two, managing a brace of outsize remote-controlled toy Humvees, we meet Jacob, son of a Wal-Mart associate (sales clerk?), and Boston, also the son of an associate. Down the page are chubby Sarah and Casey, riding in a toy jeep, and Jaycee and Kyle in another. All four tots wear crash-helmets.

Mariah, a pre-teen in nifty braids, is operating Leapster, a multi-media learning system. Toddler Kahlani is trying out another Leapster across the page. Ryan shows off what he can do with four different TV games, while Zac poses strenuously with a thirty-inch- tall Spiderman action figure. Next, young Austin menaces us with a Spiderman mask and glove set. Laney and Mya are new to this world, but not too young to work for Wal-Mart, selling necessities like the Fisher-Price Portable Aquarium Swing, and Watch-me-Grow Baby Gym Walkers. On a following page, associates Rita and Laura each have babies named Taylor--one a girl, one a boy. Baby Loren models Child of Mine pajamas (pink).

A boy called Cameron turns up next, age about ten, in an athlete's jacket, followed by teenagers Alexa, Shelby, and Kathy in Danskin gym stuff. Next pre-teens Cort and Jana play foosball in the family rec room while their mom and dad, a Wal-Mart manager, play pool. High school age Christopher watches a DVD player. Twelve year old Juliett helps her mom bake cookies in a sunny kitchen. Trick-or-treaters Mackenzie and Peyton, about six or seven, wear fluffy white as Disney Princesses. Pre-teens Ashley and Megan are costumed as Pauper and Princess, with Alec between them as (is it?) Merlin. They're all cheerful as can be. CeCe and Brianna, also pre-teens, also filled with merriment, are tarted up, courtesy of Bratz outfitters, as a pair of Las Vegas good-time girls.

But the names I prize above all belong to a pair of brothers, one maybe seven, the other maybe ten, both got up as Spider Man. Their names? Winter and Blue. Sons of a Wal-Mart store manager named (what else?) John.

AMENDMENTS

2004-09-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

After they had a chance to sleep on it, the framers of the Constitution had second thoughts and, when they met in the first session of Congress a year later, they added ten amendments. They feared that in their first try they had given far too much power to a central government that, like the British monarchy they'd so bitterly battled to break free from, could end up limiting their liberty. The Bill of Rights was written to avert that. Upon its ratification in 1791, the balance of power belonged to the separate States.

But in less than a century it had become plain that this scheme was flawed. It faltered in any number of ways, from economic to humane. States that felt the need to hang onto it seceded to form in 1861a new nation they called the Confederacy. A terrible war was fought, and after the smoke cleared and the half-million dead were buried, the balance of power had shifted. The United States became at last what it had always been in name. United.

The Bill of Rights was still used by die-hards in the piece-meal surrender of States rights that would go on through the next century and into the present one: the Second Amendment remains a bastion for the gun-and-dog-in-the-pickup set. Just a few days ago they had a small triumph: the ten year ban on the sale of assault weapons ran out. Has anyone alerted the nation's wildlife? Armed with an Uzi, a born-againer even cross-eyed drunk can kill you. Along with your whole family. And all the cows in the adjoining fields.

The Civil War was a clash between past and future, agrarianism and industrialism, but since the agrarianism in question would not work even as poorly as it did without the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and some Northerners felt queasy about their fellow-men being used as beasts of burden, the war was also about freeing the slaves. While the war still raged, President Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation, and once the Confederacy fell, Congress turned the concept into law in the Thirteenth Amendment.

It fared badly. The blacks in the South might be free in name, but they were still "kept in their place," as the saying had it—exploited, brutalized, and terrorized without let-up. So Congress tried again. This is how the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

It seems straightforward, but the rebel States didn't see it that way, so to get the former slaves the right to vote Congress took a deep breath and passed a Fifteenth Amendment. And for the next hundred years or so the rebel States thought up one dodge after another to keep that from working. The last T wasn't crossed and the last I dotted until the 1980s. But then, all the States, North and South, had disregarded the Fourteenth amendment when it came to women, and their struggle for the right to vote took more than fifty years!

The same breed of primate that feared blacks and women is now sweating a new threat: gay marriage. They want to get in the first blow this time: they want their own Amendment. Even they are bright enough to notice that the Constitution nowhere forbids the marriage of one man to another man, or one women to another woman. They scoffed at the Fourteenth Amendment that insured all citizens equal protection of the laws, but now they're howling for an amendment "to protect the family." This has something to do with God: every family is a Holy Family.

Actually, as it happens, marriage is a civil contract and has no more to do with God (whoever she may be) than it has with bridal gowns, tuxedos and organ music. Two persons sign a paper that goes on file with the State, sealing a kind of partnership that assures them, among other delights, certain tax and other practical advantages over single citizens. And the biggest threat to marriage in our time is not the lesbian couple next door, or the gay guys at your backyard barbecue. It's divorce. In our time, fifty-one percent of marriages end in divorce. And most marriages last no more than seven years.

Church-going used to discourage divorce. Maybe the shepherds of the religious right should forget politics for a while, and get back to teaching their Sunday morning flocks how to love one another.

RADDIO

2004-09-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Radio broadcasting was a new factor during the election campaign of 1928. But election campaigns had always been mostly ballyhoo, and here was a chance to increase the rumpus by who knew how many decibels over how many thousand square miles? I was about the same age as radio. Five. But when Al Smith took to a microphone in far-off New York, and his scratchy voice was by seeming magic relayed straight into our house in Aberdeen, South Dakota, I was listening, right along with my folks. Smith himself thought the event was quite a miracle. And said so. "Raddio," he called it. And lost the election to Herbert Hoover.

I left South Dakota but never the USA, not for long, so I've witnessed a lot of presidential campaigns, and watched the power of radio and television grow to the point where it would be easy for a visitor from outer space to think radio and television were what the campaigns were all about. Together they make more noise than any two office-seekers could hope to. The racket is unceasing, night and day. And this year the internet has added to the blather, though when push came to shove, the internet failed to win even Iowa for Howard Dean.

Al Smith mispronounced a word. Howard Dean blew his cool. An earlier presidential hopeful broke down and wept during a speech in the primaries. Another was video-taped riding in circles in a military tank, smiling and waving to reporters. And who can forget Richard Nixon, whom the TV equipment of the time made look like a gangster beside the beautiful John Kennedy? That modern reportage doesn't just record history but changes it, presidential election campaigns prove time and again.

My memory is imperfect, and presidential contests are soon forgotten, but I'd say the campaign going on right now sets a new record for incivility. On the part of the candidates themselves, spurred by ambition run shamefully amok, and by their partisans on television, radio, and the internet. driven by that mass hysteria known to biologists as feeding frenzy. Is some fatal miscue going to occur when either Bush or Kerry jumps the shark, it is caught on tape, and the man's defeat is certain? There's still time.

Meanwhile, as the chest-thumping match between the two eight-hundred-pound gorillas echoes through the jungle, voters are still worrying about lost jobs, rising food prices and housing costs, cancelled pensions, medical fees, aging parents, expensive schools, soaring gasoline prices, a million more Americans living below the poverty line this year than last, a pointless war that wastes lives and money every day. I suppose today's voters are smart enough not to expect to hear anything meaningful about the issues troubling them. From the candidates or from the media. The candidates and the media jabber about bringing democracy to Iraq. How, when they themselves have forgotten how it works?

WAS

2004-08-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

In March of 1888, the worst blizzard in U.S. history killed four hundred people on the east coast. All the world was told about that, and is still told about it. But the 1888 blizzard I was told about happened a month earlier in Des Moines, Iowa, and I was told about it because that blizzard killed my grandfather.

His name was Peter Martin Hansen, and only a few years earlier he had arrived in this country from Norway, hoping to become an artist. He'd helped paint the decorations inside the new Iowa State Capitol building. But such jobs were scarce. He had a wife and four children to feed and clothe and shelter. So he took what work he could, and in writing up his death, the Des Moines Register called him "a laborer."

The morning after the storm, his little wife Bertha had reported him missing, and the police went searching for him, and found his body frozen in the ice of the Des Moines river. In his shirt sleeves. No overcoat to keep him warm. And where were his gold shirt studs, his wedding band with the little diamond in it? Bertha was sure he had been robbed and murdered.

He hadn't. The police tramped patiently through the snowdrifts, tracing his movements on the fatal night. And located the overcoat, the gold studs, and the ring. At a grocer's, who had accepted them from a young immigrant already drunk, in payment for a bottle of whiskey. How soon after that Peter Martin Hansen headed for home no one could say, but there was a bridge to cross, and in the whirling snow he missed the bridge, and toppled down an embankment into the river.

He was thirty-four years old.

CHARISMA, CHARACTER, & COMMONSENSE

2004-08-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

The fall of beautiful James McGreevey had nothing to do with homosexualty, a word that makes good headlines, and everything to do with character, a word that rarely makes it into the news at all. McGreevey's accomplishments lift my spirits as I read them. He fought as hard for gay partnership rights as to save watersheds and make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. When he resigned last week as Democratic Governor of New Jersey, I was sorry to see him go: liberals are thin on the ground, these days.

On the other hand, he made mistakes. The one he chose to highlight in his resignation speech was only the first. He hired a State Police superintendent with a criminal record. A campaign fundraiser, once a high school buddy of McGreevey, offered to help a farmer sell his land in return for a contribution. The Governor's commerce secretary resigned amid charges he'd been favoring his family's businesses with State contracts. There were more. Tacky stuff, mostly. Dumb.

No less tacky and no less dumb was his hiring of a cute young Israeli called Golan Cipel. On the day after inauguration day. To fill a post McGreevey created for him: State Homeland Security Adviser. With a salary of $110,000 a year. Ignoring howls of disbelief from the media and from Washington, Jim hied off with Golan to rent a pricey condo for the new appointee near the McGreevey family home. When he stopped to catch his breath, he got the message: a foreign national cannot hold a Homeland Security job. The Governor tried to console Cipel by making him a $35,000 a year "consultant" but Cipel soon left. And like the baddest of bad pennies, turned up last month.

What happened? The Governor's people say Cipel asked for millions to keep quiet about the Governor's homosexualtiy. Cipel is denying this. But plainly McGreevey believed it. He reported it to the FBI, then figuring all was over, went on TV to tell the voters that he had done a horrible, inexcusable thing, and had no right to be Governor any more. Maybe. But surely not because he is homosexual. When it came to sex, Bill Clinton's brains flew out the window, but no one, not even he, blamed it on his being straight. James McGreevey won high office because he had charisma. He lost it because he lacked commonsense and, more seriously, character.

CHURCH & STATE

2004-08-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

I had arrived in England on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with the idea that I would write a novel. I did. But not there. Not then. It was October, 1974. Sir John Wolfenden had just become Baron Wolfenden of Westcott, and before I had time to turn around, I was part of a boistrous demonstration of gays that gathered in Trafalgar Square and marched to 10 Downing Street with a petition demanding reform of the laws that still only feebly reflected those called for by the Wolfenden Committee twenty years earlier.

That was the day I met Denis Lemon. Denis, who became a friend, and published some of my stuff, is half the reason I am writing this piece. The other half is Francis Crick, who with James D. Watson, discovered the double-helix (DNA) in 1953, won a Nobel Prize, and died the other day. Denis Lemon founded Gay News, a lively tabloid weekly, in London in 1972, and kept it going until Her Majesty's Government jailed him for blasphemy in 1975.

No, Denis, a lanky, sardonic, handsome young man with a resolute Cockney accent, was not given to curses beyond what's common among the writing-publishing crowd everywhere. But Denis wrote and printed in his paper a longish set of verses that more than suggested Jesus Christ was gay.

Now you and I know freedom of the press is as much a British fixture as it is a fixture in the USA. But the UK is a monarchy. Henry VIII, worn out with battling the Pope of Rome for the right to divorce wives that didn't present him with male heirs to the throne, seized the church, its treasure and its lands, and in 1534 declared himself head of the Church of England. All British rulers after him have held that title. And in 1975 Queen Elizabeth II still held it. Her Majesty's government proved in court that by claiming in the public prints that Jesus Christ was homosexual (where is it written that he wasn't?), Denis Lemon had committed the crime of blasphemy.

Henry VIII was not presiding over a democracy. Elizabeth II by grace of parliament is. And the imprisonment and effective silencing of Denis Lemon it seems to me showed that trying to mix religion with government of the people, by the people, for the people is unworkable. America‘s founding fathers saw that and opted for separation of church and state. That this facet of the First Amendment is constantly being hacked at by Fundamentalists,including the President, who demand the laws conform to their professed religious beliefs, disturbs those of us who prefer rationality to faith, which is belief in the empirically indefensible.

This brings me at last to Francis Crick, and a paragraph written about him by his partner Watson for TIME magazine's issue of August 9, 2004. "Crick had no truck with truths arrived at by religious revelation as opposed to observation and experimentation. Upon learning that Cambridge University's science-dominated new college was planning to build a Christian chapel, he resigned from the rank of its Fellows. ‘Perpetuating mistakes from the past' was not Crick's way to move forward."

Hey! It is a proven way to disaster. But who is listening?

TEACH IF YOU CAN

2004-08-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

As a little kid, on one of my father's numberless Sunday drives across the prairie that stretched away in every direction from our South Dakota town, I saw the University. Why they built it in Vermillion beat me. It was a small sunburnt, windlashed town so raw the campus had to be fenced to keep the cattle off it. There were turnstiles to let the students in. Why the name? Simple. The local Sioux painted their faces with a flaming red pigment (mercuric sulfide, the dictionary says) that impressed the French explorers.

My next encounter with the University of South Dakota held off for forty years until, in Los Angeles, I stumbled on a copy of the South Dakota Review. By that time I had published a couple of poems about my South Dakota childhood in Saturday Review and The New Yorker. But the short story I'd written along the same lines no one would print. The SDR didn't look like much, and no place inside did it say anything about paying its writers. I sent it to Vermillion anyway.

John R. Milton wrote back, saying "Mourner" was the best whiteboy-and-Indian story he'd ever seen and he would print it. Matter of fact, he liked it so much he reprinted it twice, once in a big anthology, The Literature of South Dakota (1976), and again in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of SDR. Milton (1924-1995) had founded the magazine in 1963 to show "vertical" New York that there was life and art out on the "horizontal" prairies. And with very little money from the university and only a couple of students to help him assemble it, he sent it off into a mainly uncaring world four times a year.

After that, John printed most of the poems and stories I sent him. I didn't send a lot. By 1970 I'd turned the corner as a writer from small-time paperbacks to big-time hardcovers, and novelizing used up most of my hours at the keyboard. When John accepted anything of mine, I felt proud and happy. He was a shrewd, sensitive editor. And a true friend. We connected. Other writers have said the same. He cared deeply about the art and imperatives of writing and also about those of us who worked at it. When cancer, earthquake, the death of my wife combined to knock me around in the early nineties, he wrote me wise, strong, supportive letters.

So it saddened me when his spirits flagged, and he'd lament that he'd wasted his life editing the magazine and teaching in classrooms when he should have been writing his own stuff. The file of South Dakota Review back-issues, each with his taste and intelligence stamped on every page, will last as long as libraries stand. As to teaching, not everyone can do it. Not everyone should, but on the evidence of his gifts not only as editor but as writer (five books of poems, an arresting novel, and some splendid stories), I'd say he must have been a great teacher.

To leave behind a shelf of honest books is, I hope, a respectable legacy. But books can't cry out "Read me!" And books unread are merely ink on paper. The uncommon lucky youngsters in John Milton's classroom form a living, breathing, breeding, writing, maybe even teaching legacy, which, whether he thought so or not, figures to be uncommon lucky for the world to come.

PARTYING TO THE END

2004-07-29T18:43:00.000-07:00

In last Sunday's Washington Post magazine, David von Drehle boils down the history of U.S. political parties from the days of Jefferson and Hamilton to the present, into a long, solidly researched article, so nimbly written you can't stop reading.

Like most other Americans I'm not in love with the parties, either of them, never was. And for a fantastic moment right at the start of Drehle's artlcle, which he calls "Origin of the Species," it is dizzying to imagine what our lives would have been like without Democrats and Republicans.

It's no use, of course. They sometmes fall apart, but they regroup, hag-ride us from cradle to grave, and every four years stage pandemoniums they call conventions, where the chosen lie about everything and the runners-up get all the applause. Like Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich at this year's Democratic circus in Boston.

They ask for jobs and decent wages and food on the kitchen table and medical care and education and other stuff that real people worry about all day every day, and the nominees talk about war and who is the bravest or the most cowardly, who the most determined to blow up foreigners.

I know George W. Bush from having seen him in action as President for four years. He is as dumb as a sack of hammers and no one that dumb should be in charge of anything, certainly not my life. I have read the new profiles of John Kerry in The New Yorker and Time, and he seems able to take action only when someone is firing a gun at him. Being President rarely offers this incentive.

I don't want either of these specimens in the White House. They are rich, to start with, and can't imagine what it's like to be less than rich. Franklin Roosevelt was rich too, but he lived and ran the country on the principle of noblesse oblige. Bush and Kerry don't know squat about noblesse oblige because it has little to do with money and everything to do with heart. Ordinary citizens need someone in the White House who will look their way once in a while and listen to them.

They've never had that from George Bush but why should they think they'll get it from Kerry? A recent poll showed voters defined Bush as "decisive" and Kerry as "thoughtful." I think that's enough to tell us who is going to win in November. As to the Parties, maybe losing this time will finally put an end to Democratic me-too-ism, and bring back from the wilderness the liberals, so voters can have a real choice again.

WAITING FOR LEAPHORN

2004-07-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

Tony Hillerman's novels of crime on Indian reservations in New Mexico and thereabouts are better than most mystery novels by a long stretch, and they deserve to be good movies. But maybe, as someone once said, only second-rate fiction can be turned into first-rate films. That's probably more facile than factual, but it applies in the case of Hillerman's books.

Until A Thief of Time, the films have gotten at least one thing right. Hillerman's marvelous descriptions of the rugged, sunstruck landscapes of the Southwest have been mirrored faithfully by the camera. But novels are not about landscapes; they're about people. And Hillerman's characters, while far from ordinary, are undeniably real. The movies have done pretty well by the books in this regard.

But turning a murder-mystery plot into a workable frame on which to hang a film is never easy. And sad to say the fabric of clues, lies and witnesses in the Hillerman movies never surprises; It simply comes unraveled. And in A Thief of Time (PBS, Sunday, 18 July), the fabric is so loose from the start that even the unraveling is a given.

The film, which I'd looked forward to, left me feeling sad. Wes Studi, as Navajo reservation cop Joe Leaphorn, was flawless, the cinematography and editing first-rate. But the script (by Alice Arlen) was pathetic. When he read it, did director Chris Eyre simply throw up his hands? That's how it looked. The movie has no shape.

Graham Greene as a rascally Indian con-man, while making the best of his considerable skills, seemed looking vainly for ideas from the director. Peter Fonda as a once-powerful rancher now living out his old age stunned by the dereliction of his son, sleepwalked through his scenes. The script gave the pleasant Adam Beach as Leaphorn's side-kick Jim Chee almost nothing to do. And Dawn Lewis, as an archaeologist, seemed to be auditioning for Sex and the City.

The stoicism with which Wes Studi tried to carry this movie from start to finish all by himself, and damn near managed it, deserves a special kind of award. And Tony Hillerman deserves an apology from Robert Redford and the other producers who turned A Thief of Time into a mess of pottage.

MY OWN 9/11 REPORT

2004-07-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

The report of the Senate committee investigating the 9/11 disaster has been printed up in a fat book said to be selling like crazy, customers lined up around the block, in a sweat to learn what happened. Why? They already know what happened.

Some fervid young Arabs boarded four airliners that sunny Tuesday morning, took over the controls, and crashed the planes into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Pentagon in Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, ending a lot of lives, their own included.

That is what happened. But why did it happen? Do we need a fat book to tell us that? Or even a thin one? It happened because we didn't expect it. In the months leading up to the horror, when a clerk in a midwest FBI or CIA office cried wolf, nobody in power even raised his head. Afterward, television, newspapers, magazines told us this. As they told us of those training schools where a few of the fervid Arabs learned to fly commercial airliners. The operators of the schools shrugged, took their money, and taught them what they could. Misgivings? Until too late, they kept these to themselves.

So don't we need the Senate report to explain how the assassins got through airport security? Do we? Did none of us ever watch airport security at work? I was not a frequent flier, but I can tell you of LAX guards standing up asleep at security gates I passed through. And at Ohare, Logan, Kennedy, when they weren't that sloppy, they were still sloppy.

But I guess most Americans before 9/11 had simple-hearted faith in airport security and were shocked, shocked to learn it didn't work. They stopped flying. Those who couldn't stay home, drove where they had to go, The airline business went belly-up, and had to be bailed out by huge government loans. We all heard about that too.

The Senate report has nothing to tell us anyone of normal brain wattage hasn't long since deduced for him- or herself. The time and money wasted on the hearings might better have been spent working out how we can keep from giving up our freedom in the name of securing it against enemies who, demonstrably, have no use for it, enemies whose number George Bush adds to every day.

ON HEMINGWAY'S BIRTHDAY

2004-07-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

Frank O'Connor, in Mirror in the Roadway, called Ernest Hemingway the best American writer of English prose in our time. Both men are dead now. And those of us old enough to have read Hemingway as his books came out are on our way to the boneyard. So "our time" in O'Connor's phrase is running out.

In our time, any smart kid with a yen to write wanted to write as well as Hemingway. What's become of that? The man left us forty years ago, blew his head off with a shotgun. In Ketchum, Idaho. Far from the green hills of Africa, the blue waters of Key West, the bull rings of Cordoba, the cold trout streams of the Michigan woods. He left them. He left us.

But the books remain. And it's the future of the books that worries me. Forget the content. It's the prose that must not be lost. It's the style. Hemingway it seems to me deceived himself about his own inner nature so much that it sometimes wrecked the truth (a word he leaned on hard) of his novels and stories. I wasn't the first to suspect something false and frightened about his strident insistence on his own masculinity. But I did notice it. And it saddened me.

What never saddened me was the rightness of the way he strung words together, the elegance, the precision, and above all the modesty. Here was where his greatness shone through. If the books don't slide into oblivion, those needing to study how to write in future generations will have the best possible guide. These are dodgy times. Electronics are changing so much in the world of words, so much and so quickly, the fear is compelling that the printed book has a dim future and a short one.

Hemingway rarely came to California. But I guess he was dragged out here on account of "The Old Man and the Sea" movie. Because one day in 1953 a friend took me to lunch at a big, sunny, waterfront restaurant, and there sat Hemingway. On a long upholstered bench under tall windows. Waiting. Massive. Sunburned. With white hair, white beard. Alone. Upright. Panic in his eyes. Which suggested that whoever was supposed to meet him had better step on it, or Papa would be in the bar, telling fish-stories and getting roaring drunk. I never learned what happened. But I hope that was how it went

MILITARY BIGOTRY: THE PAYOFF

2004-07-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

When Harry Truman decided black soldiers were no different from white soldiers and should be treated the same, he sat down and wrote a presidential order to that effect. Part of his job description was Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. And since he had been a soldier, he knew what that meant. The brass howled, but they had their orders and, however grudgingly, racial segregation ended in the Armed Forces.

Running for office, Bill Clinton promised to end discrimination against homosexuals in the Armed Forces. But when he got into the White House, did he use his Commander of the Armed Forces prerogative and sign an order that anti-gay policies should end? No. He chose to interpret the Constitution to mean he could do this only if the country were at war. So he sat down with the brass, "talked it over" and ended up with nothing but a new name for the same old policy: "Don't ask, don't tell."

Why anyone wants to join the Armed Forces I can't fathom. I never did. I still don't. There's no room for popular (or unpopular) democracy in the Armed Forces. You can't fight wars if your troops are free to sleep till noon, or to go fishing. To defend your freedom you have to give it up. Today's kids must understand that. There's no draft. They volunteer. Gays and lesbians included. Take the training. Fill the jobs. The recruiter doesn't ask them if they're gay. They don't tell the recruiter.

But in this week's Time magazine Mark Thompson reports, "over the past six years, the Army has cashiered 6,300 troops" because they are gay or lesbian. The human misery involved is reason enough for disgust. But there's more. Of those discharged, 3,100 held jobs currently in demand--"truck drivers, medics, radio operators, and combat engineers." Yet Iraq and Afghanistan have spun so far out of control that the U.S. Military now has to summon "5,600 ex-active-duty soldiers back into uniform."

The bigotry of the Military top brass that started as abuse of gays and lesbians now begins to wound men and women who have served their tours of duty and deserve a break. It's (not really) hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

ROLLING BACK RIGHTS

2004-07-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

My figures on marriage date back a decade or so. But I haven't read anywhere since of a notable change. If there has been one, I doubt it has been for the better. And what I remember is that fifty-one percent of marriages in this country fail before they've lasted seven years, and sometimes a lot less. Those are poor odds for something called an institution.

Yet today the White House is endorsing a Constitutional amendment to protect and defend that institution by shutting out some of us from enjoying it if we want to. As it stands or, more accurately, totters, marriage, with its many legal advantages, is licit in the United States only between persons of opposite sex.

A few restive and/or festive rebels have noisily defied this in a few places lately, and George Bush says this threatens the very fabric of the nation, and what is needed is a provision in the Law of the Land to quash this uprising of those whose sex lives don't suit his down- home notions of morality. That the Texas law that punished those of us who don't conform was recently slapped down by the Supreme Court doesn't daunt this good ol' boy. He knows what's right.

John Kerry, as in all things, has sort-of spoken against Bush's position, and today leaves the campaign trail to vote against the amendment on the Senate floor. Not, mind you, that Kerry supports gay marriage. Shudder, shudder. He just thinks the amendment amounts to killing a butterfly with a sledge-hammer. But Bush's people insist Kerry is pro-gay, and hence a saboteur of marriage.

It is naive to expect either of these men who so desperately want us to elect them our leader to take a stand that cannot be bought or shifted in a moment on any issue. But if either were capable of it, I wish he would call to mind that famous phrase "equal protection under the law," already in the Constitution. It means that, queer or not, I have the same rights as George Bush and John Kerry.

Not because I think she believes it, but simply because it sums up in a few words what I am trying to say here, I quote Stephanie Cutter, Senator Kerry's spokeswoman, from today's New York Times: "You don't amend the Constitution to roll back rights."

AUTONATION

2004-07-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Until Henry Ford came out with the first cheap and abundant automobile, the Model T, most Americans lived and died never having traveled more than fourteen miles from home. With a crank to start the engine, three floor pedals to control the gears, two levers on the steering wheel to manage gas flow and sparkplugs, and a hand lever outside the door to slam on the brakes, it was harder to drive than a horse, but it would go anywhere in no time at all, and any damn fool could fix it when it went out of whack.

Fifteen million Model Ts were sold between 1908 and 1928. America was on the road (new roads, some of them even paved) to total dependence on the automobile. To write down all the changes it brought about is impossible. To sum them up is easy: no car, no twentieth century. And a recent study shows that at the start of the twenty-first, there were two cars for every American. In a book I'm reading right now about the working poor, that a car of some kind is required for survival in the U.S.A. today is no more questioned than the need for food.

Those towns no one strayed far from before the Model T have mostly disappeared. And those that haven't are not what they once were.
All the beach town I live in has left are restaurants, art galleries, and cottages covered in flowering vines. Apart from groceries, drugs and hardware, to get anything you need, a pair of socks, an ink cartridge, a book, you climb into your car and head into the hills and one of the malls of vast chainstores stretched out in the sun miles away from human habitation. Here, browsing among the mountains of merchandise, you may run into your spouse or child. Who has come in his/her own car. Perhaps to buy a surprise for you.

Dr. Johnson once held forth on how Englishmen from century to century seemed to vary in size. It would be amusing to hear Johnson on the subject of the size of automobiles from decade to decade. Have SUVs a reason for being? Will gas shortages real or imagined bring us to our senses? Will wars? Natural disasters? National disasters (like the Presidency of George W. Bush)? Does anything in fact penetrate the American psyche on the matter of automobiles? Do we even know that they are not us, and we are not them? Why do I have the feeling I'm asking that question too late?

A FOURTH AT THE FAIRGROUNDS

2004-07-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

Holidays jog our memories. So I'm remembering a hot July fourth, seventy-odd years ago, when I sat with my folks in the rickety fairgrounds grandstands, waiting for the sun to set so we could see a fireworks show. The Brown County Fairgrounds at Aberdeen, South Dakota. I don't remember the speeches. The American Legion band is what I remember. It was a crack band. It had won national prizes. My mother said the bandmaster was a drunk. But he led a snappy ensemble. The men marched in all sorts of tricky formations with never a hitch. They played in thrilling harmony. Never missed a drum-beat. Never hit a sour note. Powder-blue uniforms, nickel- plated helmets. I wanted to be in that band!

Darkness is slow in coming in the Dakotas in summer. It was past my bedtime. But excitement kept me awake. And at last shadowy figures stirred in the darkness. Out around a tall temporary trelliswork that held the fireworks at the far side of the field. There was a glint of flame. In the bleachers, we caught our breaths. A few rockets staggered a short way skyward and exploded. Then in one enormous roar, the whole trestle blazed up, teetered, and flopped onto the field. Not backward. Forward. Banging and bucking. The rockets shot across the ground, straight at us. People screamed and scrambled. We didn't. Or maybe only I didn't.

I was watching the Legionnaires, who rushed onto the field in those natty uniforms that made them look like toy soldiers and, armed only with trumpets, trombones, and drums, formed a line and ran toward the fusilade. They had been soldiers once. They were soldiers again. What they did was absurd and useless but to a small boy heroic. A firetruck was what was needed. And I expect a firetruck was lurking offstage, because the ear blasting, blinding, madly-colored outburst was soon only black ashes on a muddy field.

As children will, I had been looking forward to those fireworks for a long time. Yearning for them. Pining for them. And it took some considerable talking by my parents to persuade me it was all over, and the only thing left to do was go home and go to bed. Since then. I've learned it happens to us now and again in this life--the fireworks we most crave to see are the ones we never will.

HERE BE DRAGONS

2004-06-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

Comes now The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, by Gary J. Gates and Jason Ost. It claims to show in 250 color maps and charts where "gay and lesbian families" in the U.S. nest these days. The publisher is Urban Institute Press, and at its website (www.urban.org/pubs/gayatlas) it describes the book as a "resource for the political and public policy communities, public health officials, social scientists, and anyone interested in gay and lesbian issues."

No pandering here to paranoia. No sense of us versus them. No worry that if they know where you cluster it sets you up for easy exploitation, not to mention persecution. Please! That's so not on. We're accepted now, darling. Look at "Will & Grace," "Six Feet Under," "Queer as Folk," and (Oh, my Gawd!) "A Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Maybe. But not every lesbian, gay male, bisexual, transsexual is convinced that everybody loves us. Openness has gained much ground over the past forty years as the courts have scrubbed the laws that made what some of us do in bed a crime.

But if only out of the chameleon caution most of us learn at an early age, gay men and women do not commonly open up about our sexuality to everyone we meet, and hardly to census takers at the door armed with questionnaires and clipboards. Besides, were there questions in Census 2000 about the issue? I didn't think so. How, then, I wondered, did Dr. Gates get the data on which to base his Atlas. In response to an email voicing my doubts, he replied:

The data are drawn from Census 2000 counts of households where one person identified another person of the same sex as either his/her "husband/wife" or "unmarried partner." In work I did for my doctoral dissertation, I was able to show that for the most part these couples are actually gay and lesbian couples. Of course, these data do not include the majority of the gay and lesbian population, who are actually single. But they do provide an incredible [sic] opportunity to better understand a community about which we actually know very little.

A few centuries ago when brave, not to say foolhardy explorers set out in fragile little wooden craft to sail around the world, and came home with maps of the coasts and continents, islands and archipelagos they had discovered, the much larger sections they were certain existed but which they hadn't seen, they marked with fanciful drawings and the words, "Here be dragons." I suspect The Gay and Lesbian Atlas is such a map. Incomplete and in large part fanciful. Never mind. You know where you are, and if you want to be found, that ought to be your choice.

Something to say? Click on COMMENTS. On the next page, ignore the
SIGN ON button and click on OR POST ANONYMOUSLY. Do give your name!

HOW NOT TO WRITE A HEADLINE

2004-06-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," said Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in a speech last summer. Now, the Associated Press announces, the American Bar Association has weighed in with a detailed report that among other things tells us our prisons cost the federal government $49 billion in 1999, as compared to $9 billion in 1982. The chances of someone in the United States going to prison today are three times what they were in 1974. ABA president Dennis Archer writes: "For more than twenty years we have gotten tougher on crime. Now we need to get smarter." Prison terms should be handed down for serious crimes by dangerous criminals, but so-called mandatory minimum sentences for minor crimes should be replaced by alternatives such as drug treatment. All of this makes sense to me. But the gnarly language of the law here invites confusion. The headline on this story reads ABA CALLS FOR END TO MANDATORY MINIMUM PRISON TERMS. To me (and I doubt that I'm alone: a look at any marathon will prove most of us are slow), this suggests that the ABA is now calling for maximum prison terms for all crimes no matter how petty. For the headline to say what it meant, the word "minimum" should have been cut, and the word "some" inserted ahead of "mandatory." Thus: ABA CALLS FOR END TO SOME MANDATORY PRISON TERMS. But since "minimum" was there, and the present administration in Washington seems bent on punishing everybody at home and abroad who doesn't agree with it and, even more ominously, holding hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo without trial, I was alarmed into downloading, printing out, and carefully reading the story. Which shows that, whatever your first- grade teacher may have told you, bad English has its uses.

If you want to comment, click on COMMENT at the bottom of this screen.On the next screen, ignore the SIGN IN button and click on the link under it that reads OR POST ANONYMOUSLY.

REASON FOR BEING

2004-06-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

In this week's TIME, Lev Grossman writes about blogs. The term has edged into my blurry peripheral vision more than once lately. And here was a chance to learn what it meant. The cyberworld is not my world. Yes, as a writer I long ago learned to use a computer. Writing is far easier with a word processor than with a typewriter. But when faced with installing a computer program, user-friendly or not, I screw up. I tried because the TIME article convinced me I needed a blog. I sit around and mope too much. I live as persons my age are apt to do, with memories, not all of them jolly. For fifty years, my wife and I never ran out of things to talk about. She's dead now, as are many other friends I shared my days with. TV is not good company. Books are. But they don't listen, either.
Email is like a nighttime tennis match, where the court on one side of the net is lighted, the other in darkness. You can lob the ball over the net, but you really can't tell if it will ever be lobbed back. If the ball at last does come flying your way, it often is not a tennis ball at all but a football or a muskmelon. The result is not a satisfying game. Too often it leads to the feeling that the other player out there in the dark has twenty better things to do than talk to you. You're just an eighty year old with too much time on his hands. A dismal stereotype.
So I saw blogging as a chance to share every day whatever was on my mind, as I used to do with Jane, and yet not nag for attention. Tom, the best of good neighbors, who can manage computers and grumpy old men at the same time, came and fixed the setup I had bollixed, and now I have Lastwords. Who is going to read them I don't know, but writing them will help fill my days. I will feel less gloomy, my health will be better, and I'll live longer. As to what I'll write about--when the tide doesn't raise wreckage from the past, there's the reliably tragic and trashy flotsam of the present. I don't expect to run out of issues. Or of words. Take a look at them now and then, will you, and let me know what you think?