Oh, for Pete's Sake!

Sometimes the short-sightedness, weirdness, and stupidity of people and organizations leave one sputtering, speechless:

• First up, a story of the Bureau of Prisons, which had at first refused to let a prison inmate read Barack Obama's books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The bureau's reasoning? "The books contained material 'potentially detrimental to national security,' prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September." However, in November, the Bureau allowed the man to read the books.
  
  
• Next, another fight is brewing in Texas over curriculum standards for public schools, this time in social studies. Three men appointed by Republicans to a panel to "help guide" the teachers, community representatives, and academics who are charged with writing the standards have complained about the credit given to some civil rights leaders. One of them has "questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure." Another thinks Cesar Chavez "'lacks the stature, impact, and overall contributions of so many others'"--and thus is not as worthy of discussion.
  
  The condescension of these men is captured very well in the tone evangelical minister Peter Marshall adopts toward the inclusion of Anne Hutchinson in the social studies text. (Hutchinson was "a New England pioneer and early advocate of women's rights and religious freedom." She was later invited by Roger Williams to "help establish a colony in what became Rhode Island.") According to Marshall, Hutchinson "does not belong in the company of these eminent gentlemen" [William Penn, Roger Williams and other early leaders]. Can this short-sidedness and stupidity be topped? Oh, yes, for David Barton, a former vice-president of the Texas Republican Party, "said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be 'republican' rather than 'democratic.' That means social studies books should discuss 'republican' values in the U.S." (from "Conservatives say Texas Social Studies Classes Give Too Much Credit to Civil Rights Leaders," published in The Dallas Morning News, 9 July 2009, and written by Terrence Stutz)
  
  
• Oh, and, finally, Sarah Palin. I know that she is the darling of certain conservatives, but, please, give me a break. She speaks of responsibility and leadership, yet she resigns her governorship before her term is up--and blames her shortcomings on others: just another person falling back on the politics of victimhood. While I certainly disagree with Peggy Noonan on many issues, I think her criticism of Sarah Palin in The Wall Street Journal is pretty accurate: "In television interviews she [Palin] was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way,' 'I'm not a quitter,' 'I'm standing up for our values.' I'm, I'm, I'm."
  
  Noonan ends her editorial with a call to arms for the Republican party: "Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think." I may lean liberal, but I'm behind you on this one, Peggy.

Torture Probes in the UK

Scott Horton links to an article in The Guardian about a torture suspect whom British intelligence allowed to fly to Pakistan and then tipped off Pakistani intelligence to arrest the man. In Pakistan, the suspect was tortured, including having three of his fingernails removed, and British intelligence worked with the Pakistanis, knowing that torture was used, to question the man. Cozy. David Davis, former shadow home secretary, brought these details to light and had this to say about Britain's and the United States' examination and prosecution of those who used, or who were complicit in the use of, torture:

The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, whilst explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction. We have done the opposite. As it stands, we are awaiting a police investigation which will presumably end in the prosecution of frontline officers. At the same time the government is fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up both crimes and political embarrassments, to protect those who are the real villains of the piece, those who approved the policies in the first place. (quoted in "Revealed – the secret torture evidence MI5 tried to suppress," Ian Cobain, The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 July 2009).

David Davis ended his speech to the the British Commons with these words:

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

The entire speech can be read here: "David Davis on Torture: Statement in Full, The Guardian, 8 July 2009.

Chance Encounters

This weekend I've been reading my old letters and journals in order to bring to light for my son and daughter some stories from their childhood, the funny things they said and did. Just a few minutes ago, I came across this entry (which has little to do with the kind of journal entries for which I was searching), in which I recorded a chance encounter at an art museum in Columbus, Georgia, February 28, 1997:

The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley, California (1938)

A dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, excitedly walks up to me as the kids and I are viewing the Dorothea Lange Photo Exhibit at the Columbus Museum. "Those men," she says, "don't they look like they come straight out of the pages of GQ? Those faces, that bone structure. No fat bellies there. Like hundreds of Gary Coopers. Where can one find men like that today?"

"Yeah," I reply, "they're hungry--It's the Depression."

A few minutes later the same woman comes up to me again in a different section of the exhibit. She wants me to look at a particular photograph, that of a woman looking out of the oval window of a black hearse-like car, from the title of the photograph, one in a funeral procession. The woman in the photograph looks pensive; her left hand partially obscures her nose and the bottom of her face. The middle-aged wrinkles around her eyes add to the pensive and sad air of the woman.

"Look at the clouds reflected in the window," points out my momentary friend. "They give the impression of eternity--all those clouds going on & on behind her. Look at how her eyes follow you. She's a spirit--in reality because she's dead by now but that moment captured forever in this photograph. She reminds us that we too will be like her."

"Even the oval frame of the car window suggests a family photograph hung on a wall," I add. "She reminds us of our own mortality."

As the woman walks out of the exhibit, she says, "I'm glad you were here for me to share my thoughts with. You've got to talk with someone when you're affected so by art."

"And I appreciate your sharing them with me," I told her. "I know the feeling."

The older we get, the more we rely on the kindness of strangers.

Driving in Georgia

A mother in Kennesaw, Georgia, has come up with an idea to identify new teen drivers on the road. She has created large magnets to be placed on cars of teens, Caution: Newly Licensed, which she sells nationwide. Now she has the support of a Georgia state senator to get a bill passed to require all newly-licensed teens to have this magnet and a window decal displayed on their cars: "Should Georgia Teen Drivers Sport Warning Magnets?", posted on the website of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 5, 2009.

Anyone who has driven in Georgia, especially around Atlanta, would sympathize with this mother's campaign, I think. I have lived in several states, and the drivers here are among the worst I have ever encountered. Unfortunately, LOTS of people drive as if they've just been newly licensed. Just last night, on our return from Lithonia, where we dropped our daughter off at a party, we were turning right at a green light when four drivers turned left right in front of us: one, two, three, four, without slowing down, as if they had absolutely no knowledge of right-of-way rules. Then, later, on our way home after picking up our daughter, someone ran a red light as ours was green, and at least two people absolutely RACED through caution lights. These experiences and observations are typical. AutoAdvantage Road Rage Survey reveals that Atlanta is among the top five cities as the worst for road rage.

I think part of the problem here is that Georgia does not have a good driver's education program. To get her learner's permit, our daughter attended several classes and then had to complete only a few hours of in-car instruction with a licensed instructor, hours that she completed in one weekend. And I wasn't impressed with the driving instruction, at all. To get her unrestricted license, our daughter is expected to complete 40 hours of driving under parental instruction. But I wonder how many teens actually complete those 40 hours. Susie Kessler, the mother who is marketing the magnets for new drivers says:

I talk to the state licensing people that actually give these kids the test … and I’ve asked them how many of these kids have really had 40 hours with parents. And they’ll tell you [some of the kids] don’t know how to turn the lights on in the car. It’s scary. Even if they do the minimum of 40 hours, that’s nothing.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, car crashes are the leading cause of teenage deaths, "accounting for more than one in three deaths in this age group.1 In 2005, twelve teens ages 16 to 19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries." Those are awful statistics.

Fourth of July

Yesterday evening, our daughter attended a Fourth of July party with friends, and Tom and I headed to the local downtown center, within walking distance, to watch the Fourth of July parade. The parade consisted of local folks walking with their kids in strollers or wagons and on bikes. Some strollers were decorated with small flags or banners. Two years ago I drove my art car in the parade, the strangest element in the parade, I'm sure, and while I received an invitation to do so again this year, I declined. The car has been exposed to inclement weather and needs some work before I put her on the road again--or attempt to sell her.

Before the parade was over, Tom and I headed to a local restaurant near the town square and settled on a table outside where we could watch all the folks gathering for the evening's festivities. We could hear the faint strains of martial music from the bandstand while we feasted. In honor of our president, I ordered an arugula salad with feta cheese (very good) and a crisp cold glass of hard cider. When I ordered the fish and chips--a dish we associate with England--Tom commented that the choice seemed appropriate since Georgia was loyalist in the Revolution.

I, however, am a patriotic American, despite what the far-right says about liberals.

Below are views of the parade from our table and of the crowd gathering for the evening's events.

Going West

In a few days, my family and I will begin what may be our last long trip together, a car-camping journey to the west coast of the United States and back to Georgia. The kids are adults or nearly adults: our son will be a senior at the University of Texas this fall, and our daughter will be a senior in high school. Maybe we will take more long trips together, but as the children grow, one realizes that the time one can expect to spend with them is increasingly limited. Living only an hour's drive from Austin at the time, we then left our son in Texas to move to Georgia. He has proven to be very self-motivated, getting involved in clubs and activities that suit his science and engineering-tuned mind, but I miss the time we would have spent together had we stayed nearby. Having grown up in a family that remained in the same area for six generations, I realize too clearly what one loses in our very mobile society. I am the only one of my siblings to live out of the state of Texas (from Louisiana to Minnesota to Georgia), and, frankly, I am ready to move on now, having lived only two years in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Some people, I think, have a tendency to wander. Perhaps I am one of those.

This tendency may explain why I hold on so fiercely to tangible connections to the past. I have kept over the years all the letters my friends have sent me; every year I send Christmas cards to friends and family from whom I haven't heard in years and from whom I really never expect to hear. And my husband's family: Lord have mercy--we have letters going back to the mid-1800s. Those people kept everything, from letters to photographs to advertisements from magazines to recipe clippings.

As we prepare for this journey West--or, rather, as I prepare, for I'm the organizer in our family, the one who plans the route, the places to camp, the attractions from which the rest can choose to experience--I think of all those ancestors who traveled west before us: the original Abraham Dugast who headed across an ocean from France to the New World; the descendants who traveled south and west to Louisiana when the British were so unfriendly; the Scotts and Coles and Deweeses and Bentons who migrated across the country from Virginia and Alabama and Delaware and North Carolina. Something propelled them west, a similar something that produces this restless spirit in myself. Oh, I know what it's like to be a part of a community for generations; for twenty years I stayed in the same place where generations of my family had lived. Even today, years after leaving my home, I long for that kind of connection, but it's never occurred again. Instead, I drag my restless body from state to state, and behind it? journals and letters of all I have ever loved.

I am tempted, sometimes, to burn it all. But I can't let go. Maybe someday I'll meet my Death Valley and leave all I've loved beside the wagon-rutted roadway. Until then, well, it's westward ho and a stagger as I drag my past behind.