.
I didn’t really know Dr. George Tiller, but I liked him.
I spoke to him at some length once when he called to thank me for some work I was doing on the Pro Kan Do database. I was in his presence perhaps another dozen times, several of them just to hear him speak, but I could tell that he was a decent man, who thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it and did his best to do what was right.
I didn’t always agree with him on that. Third-trimester abortions bother me. I wouldn’t have one myself and would discourage anyone else from having one. But I figure that I’m not alone in those sentiments and that most of the women who have a third-trimester abortion do so for reasons more compelling than forgetting to make an appointment to end the pregnancy before the end of the second trimester.
Whatever their reasons, however, it’s their business, not mine.
That is part of where I differ with people motivated by the ideas held by the man who is now in the custody of the Wichita police. But it is only part.
The real question, of course, is how we define human life.
The other side believes that a sperm and an egg become a human being at the moment of fertilization. I don’t.
I do believe that a fetus that can survive outside the womb without heroic measures is certainly a human being. Some in the pro-choice movement would deny humanity even then, holding that the woman has the right to end her pregnancy right up to the moment she goes into labor.
Somewhere between those two moments, the fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I’m willing to let each woman make that determination for herself. It’s her business, not mine – or yours.
The people who like to call themselves “pro-life” think it is their business. They think not only that the woman should not be allowed to make that decision, but that no one should. They think every pregnancy must take its course. Every life is sacred, they say.
This morning, someone who agreed with them walked up to Dr. Tiller and shot him dead as he stood in the foyer of his church.
There is no doubt that Dr. Tiller was a living human being.
I guess his life wasn’t sacred.
-------------------------
Let’s not rush to judgment.
Police have taken a suspect into custody. The media report that the evidence is compelling. But mistakes have been made in the past, and suspects are still “innocent until proven guilty” in this country.
Try to avoid talking as though this man has already been convicted.
.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Two Enlightening Books
.
I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Solving Problems
.
How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
.
How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Value of Her Education
.
A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
.
A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Crazy Horse Revisited
.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Devils Tower
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Mount Rushmore
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Crazy Horse
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Speed and Luck
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Torture is back on the radar
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Un-American to the last
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Once more into the breach, I guess
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
.
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