Those.  I was close enough that over her shoulder I could see some of the story headlines and, of course, the pictures.

The appeal of this literature is curious, and since this blog is about “life and other curiosities” I engaged in some reflection.  The subjects are well established and repetitive. Who’s addicted to what? Who’s cheating on whom? Whose new clothes do we love or hate? Whose weight is out of control? Who’s having plastic surgery and for what? Who is divorcing or marrying whom?

I wondered about the writers and editors of these publications.  Are they true believers in the truth and importance of their labors, or do they do this as a game, as a comic diversion?

Recently I watched “The Wrestler” with its Oscar-nominated performance by Mickey Rourke.  The film portrays the men who engage in the violence and “drama” of professional wrestling as actually a band of brothers in reality and completely conscious of the fact that they are acting out their parts for the entertainment of others.  The question remains as to whether the audience is similarly aware.

I found myself studying the magazine woman for clues.  She was middle aged and did not look at all like the women whose pictures she was observing.  She looked as if she might be the teacher of a children’s Sunday School class or the business manager for a decent restaurant.  But I made secret judgements (being Myers-Briggs INFJ) as to her taste and character and level of intelligence.  Then I tried to tell myself that actually she could be a Ph.D. is cultural anthropology and doing research for an article.  I accused myself of jumping to conclusions and possibly being a snob.

I remembered that the evening before my flight I had met with a book club where literature of importance and social value was discussed by certified intellectuals.  They had not discussed the latest reports about Brad and Angelina and whether Jenn is still in the picture or not.  And I am listening to music by Copland or Mahler, feeling somewhat good about myself.

But what does all this matter, really?

We spend our days as a tale that is told, and the fact that the tales are different does not make one better than the other.  It is better not to judge, or be judged.

I am inclined to start explaining when an armed guard starts walking toward me.  I quickly explained that we had never seen one of these things before and had just stopped to look.  I kept my hands in sight and spoke in the least threatening way I know how.  The guards smiled and said that was fine.  They came down to the fence and began telling us about the windmills.  They told how much they cost and how many homes each one can power.  One guard went back to the trailer and brought us some literature.  It was all very interesting.  They explained how fast the blades turn and how there is something that keeps them from turning too fast when the wind blows too hard.  We asked lots of questions and the guards seemed to love having company and someone to appreciate the windmills.

My last question was different from the rest.  I wasn’t sure if I should ask it, but I did.  ”Why is it that these windmills have to have armed guards here?”

His face changed expression.  Then he told us that people had come and shot at the windmills and almost hit a technician who was working on one of them.  After that the company decided that they had to guard the windmills.  He said they hoped that someday they would not need guarding any longer.

As I asked myself why anyone would shoot a windmill, I remembered some signs I had seen down in the valley.  The signs said “NO turbines in Bedford County.”  I later examined one of these signs and visited the website of the organization that sponsored them.  I expected to find something extremist and perhaps ill-informed.  Instead I found an environmentalist approach to the subject.  ”Save our Allegheny ridges” is their name and slogan.  And being an environmentalist myself I have sympathy for their position.  But I also recognize the need for renewable energy to replace our dependence on the oil we are running out of and paying more and more to get.  I recognize that drilling miles deep under the oceans and in riskier and riskier places will inevitably lead to more and more disasters like the one we are now seeing.

It is strange to me that people in the Gulf region still support “drill, Baby, drill” despite the effects of the oil spill on their environment.  The lure of jobs and money is too strong, I suppose.  And if this holds true for all of us it means that we will keep moving irrationally toward ruin, despite all warnings to the contrary.  On the other hand, I do not live on the Gulf and my livelihood does not depend on the oil economy.  I wonder what my position on these issues would be if I were in their places.

I have read the “NO turbines” materials on their website and I see their side of the debate.  I’ve read that the North Carolina legislature is blocking any windmill building on ridges in the state.  There certainly are no easy choices to be made.

My one and only experience with one of the windmills was not unpleasant.  They are very large and they certainly detract from the beauty of the mountains.  But no more so than transmission towers and microwave relays and power plant smokestacks.  They are remarkably calm and quiet things, actually, especially being so large.  Given the alternatives, they might not be so bad.  We certainly don’t need to be shooting them.

Being thus acquainted, you follow this car down the road, observing.  You imagine that he feels your displeasure behind him and is now ashamed of himself for his rude behavior.  Then you scold yourself for having such a stupid thought.  Then you imagine that he is laughing at you and gloating.  You are a poor slob of a driver he has beaten.  But then you know that he does this all the time with little notice of other cars.  He is a superior car, a privileged car among them, and he gives them, gives you, little thought.

But he does give thought to the car in the new merge lane that just passed you and seems bent on passing him as well.  Same situation as before, only the roles are reversed.  The new car wants to do the same thing, pass him and cut in.  But there is no way he will let this happen.  His bumper is almost touching the rear of the car ahead of him, riding it, as we say.  The ambitious car gives up, slows down, and pulls in ahead of you.  Congratulations, you are now two cars down.  Of course, you could have fought off this new car like the guy ahead of you did, but you are not that kind of person.  You are a good person and a courteous driver, although sometimes you hate yourself for this behavior.  Were you to play the aggressive driver you would feel guilty as a result, but now you feel cheated.  Those seem to be your choices, guilty or cheated.

It is strange how the anonymity of driving allows these games to be played.  If they were driving their grocery carts to the check-out station, and you were ahead of them in line, they would not push in ahead of you like this.  The contact is too close and personal for that.

We do things as strangers that we would not do as neighbors.  A few of our family or neighbors wronged is a big deal; thousands of strangers wronged is but a passing concern or thought.  Our dead soldiers are carefully counted and tracked because they are ours and we know them.  The greater number of others dead is not counted or tracked.  They were strangers.

In theory most religions assert that we are fellow human beings and children of the same god.  But the practice is much different.  In theory we would treat each other on the road as we would in the supermarket.  But the practice is different, as we know well.

So how do we handle ourselves in such a world?  Do we “do it unto others before they can do it unto you,” or do we treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves?  And further complicating this choice is the factor of anonymity.  There are a lot of people who will choose to be kind and fair with others when they are in close contact, but will easily support the torture and killing of strangers.  So we behave morally as individuals and immorally as societies.

Living in the South in the 60′s, I had friends who would vote for every segregationist who came along, call Martin Luther King a Communist, and say that civil rights protesters were only getting what they deserved when beaten or killed.  But individually, with known Black people in their community, they were kind and respectful and helping of those in need.  This is the paradox of moral man and immoral society.  This is the hypocrisy of practicing our personal morality while supporting public immorality.

And these were my thoughts while driving down the road.

You get used to all the swim team noise.  You get to where you seldom even notice it.  But then, nearby, I heard unusually loud hollering.  Angry hollering.

One of the swim team “coaches” was giving the devil to a young boy.  Face red, arms waving, fingers pointing.  The poor kid just standing there with his eyes staring down at the pool deck.  I put the word coach in parenthesis because I’ve never seen a one of these guys doing what I would call coaching.  Their job seems limited to getting the kids organized in the water, timing their laps, and urging them on.

“Go, go, go!”  “Don’t let him pass you, Cramer!”  “Alright now, I want to see some better times.”

They do not teach about swimming.  Their deal is to motivate the kids to try harder at doing it the way they came there doing it.

I felt sorry for the boy who was being berated by his “coach.”  Although warm and comfortable in the adjoining hot tub, I felt his pain, his embarrassment.  It made me wonder about the men who do this.  Were they super athletes when they were this age?  Or are they taking it out on these kids as a make-up call for their own lack of achievement?  Do they have jobs where someone bosses them around, where they have to take a lot of crap, and this is a way of getting to unload on someone else, even a poor kid?

When I was the age of the swim team kids, I had a wonderful Boy Scout leader.  His name was John Murphy and we called him by his last name, Murphy, like we called each other by last names.  Murphy was devoted to us boys and we knew it.  He deserved to be called a leader, both in leading by example and also through his advice and encouragement.  There were certainly times we disappointed him, but never did he berate anyone.  Achievements were about us, not about him.  Murphy was someone I still feel indebted to.  My better self would like to be such a person and be remembered so long and so fondly.

To be sure, there are times for urging people to try harder.  There may be times for taking people to task.  But showing them the way, teaching them how things are, those speak louder and last longer.

Adirondack Shelter

The park lies astride two lines on the map: the Tennessee/North Carolina state line and the Appalachian Trail.  The trail held the most interest to me.  Along the trail there were camp sites with rustic Adirondack Shelters like the one pictured here.  They were made of logs and very solid.  They were open on one side and that’s where you built your fire and did the cooking.  A good spring was always nearby with cold, running water.  If I could add up all the nights I spent in these shelters it would be measured in months.

As boys, our scoutmaster taught us that staying in these shelters was both a privilege and a responsibility.  He said that the next hikers behind us might get in late or arrive in the rain.  We must leave some good dry wood and kindling.  We must leave the place clean.  And some left-over canned food would be a good idea too.  We must think of those who would come after us, and we must leave things for them as we would like to find them for ourselves.

Being a serious and thoughtful young man, I took these instructions to heart.  I felt satisfaction when I left a shelter in good order.  I felt guilt if I did not.  I rarely failed to leave things the best I possibly could.

I have hiked in and found shelters exactly as I would have left them, and I have found them trashed and without a stick of dry wood.  On those occasions I would wonder what kind of people had left things in such a mess.  Had no one ever told them about their responsibility?  I supposed they must have been from somewhere far away.  People who had not been raised right.

We pulled into such a shelter late one day in a solid downpour.  We were tired and soaked and cold and looking forward to a warm fire.  As my buddies huddled and rested, I went back out in the rain with my double-bit axe.  Across on the ridge I found a dead chestnut tree.  I knew there was dry wood inside.  I chopped and chopped and brought back logs to split under the shelter.  After considerable effort I got a hot blaze going.  The next party would find a nice stack of that wood all ready to go.

Why do I think back on this and feel that same kind of guilt as crude oil floods the Gulf of Mexico from an exploded oil well off the coast?  The fact that we are drilling for oil a mile deep and far out to sea highlights the fact that we have already plundered all of the underground oil that is easily within our reach.  We are going for the last of it, no matter the cost or the consequences.  For those who come down the trail behind us there will be none left, but who cares?

I once pulled into an Appalachian Trail shelter and found that people needing firewood and unwilling to climb the nearby ridge and fell a dead tree had taken apart and burned the entire outhouse, excluding the seat.  The seat sat oddly by itself in full view of the world.  Like the mountains in West Virginia that are stripped off to get the last of the coal and then left behind as so much waste.

Waste is the word for it.  The land, the trees and plants, the air and water, the buried resources, the wild living things that fly and run and burrow–we are wasting it all.  Those who come after us will surely wonder what sort of people could have done this.

Being snowbound here, I have tried to make pictures of these crows.  I find it is very hard to do.  They are constantly alert for the slightest threat or movement and take off immediately if they sense one.  As carefully as I try, I cannot ease open the back door and appear with my camera without sending them into flight.  It is amazing that they have such detection and also that they need to be so wary, or think they do.

Compare the two pictures I made, one of a crow and one of  a visiting squirrel.  These were made through glass from inside the house.  They were made from the same spot, with the same camera, with the same focal length lens.  The munching squirrel is unworried that I am only a few feet away.  The crow in the distant tree is likely to fly away at any moment.

How to account for this difference?  There were hawks overhead this morning as our skies calmed and cleared.  Crows chase the hawks without fear, but a hawk will make a meal of a squirrel.  You would think a squirrel would be more wary than a crow, but it is not.

The word “wary” means “cautious and alert for problems.”

But how much caution is enough?  Down in nearby DC someone spots a “suspicious package” and entire buildings are evacuated, streets closed, workers sent home, robots and sniffing dogs brought in, and millions of dollars spent.  Telephoned bomb threats by anonymous strangers bring similar responses.  Much like the crows.

When I traveled through the towns and cities of Mexico, I observed the living places of the desperately poor and the very rich.  The poor live in flimsy, makeshift huts.  The rich live in mansions.  But their mansions are surrounded by high walls with sharp glass and razor wire on top.  Their entrances are locked gates with all sorts of electronic security devices.  They have armed guards.  I’m sure their homes must be nice inside, but they resemble prisons.  If the rich venture outside their walls and gates, they do so with caution.  Much like the crows.

Just look at my visiting squirrel.  Isn’t this a contented squirrel or not?  I’m sure she is practicing reasonable squirrel safety, but it isn’t ruining her day or driving her to paranoia.

There are people, perhaps whole societies, who live hunkered down and constantly afraid that some terrible thing is about to happen.

If that’s the case, I think maybe it already has.

Swimming pool signs in Montgomery County, MD

But the floor had not been wet.  In all my trips to this familiar pool I have never see that floor wet.  And the sign wasn’t one of those yellow ones they stand in the hall while someone mops.  It is permanently mounted on the wall.

That sign is like a stopped clock.  Most of the time it is dead wrong.  But once every 24 hours it gets to be right.  How effective is a warning as stupid as that?  And how often are we warned of harms that have such a long shot at being actual?  So a family may go to the mall and come home with box after box of stuff with stickers warning of trivial harms.  But nothing warned about the agreement made with the credit card that was used to pay for it all.

Chicken Little was in the woods one day when an acorn fell on her head.  It seems that she was the excitable type, and nervous as well.  She cried out “Help! Help! The sky is falling.”  And we accept that CL actually believed this, for she had indeed been hit on the head.  But as she runs in fright to tell the king, she tells all her friends that the sky is falling and they believe it too–they who were hit on the head by no acorns at all.  They believe it because CL tells them so, and because she is frightened.  Her fright is catching.

It seems that all fright is catching.  Tell people that things are good and they doubt you.  Tell them that things are bad and they believe you.  Write a story about a good deed done in the city and no one will print it because no one will read it.  Write a story about a bad deed done in the city, whether real or imagined, and they put it on the front page with pictures and people devour it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Write about a plan with factual information about improving society and the result is either apathy or argument.  Write about a threat to society with no basis in fact and people take it for the truth. Fright is catching.

As Chicken Little ran to tell the king about the problem with the sky, she created a procession of friends who had become instant believers in the threat.  Ducky Lucky, Henny Penny, and others.  How convenient for Foxy Loxy!  Here was this crowd of frightened citizens who were ready to believe anything, ready to be manipulated, ready to follow.

“Follow me, and I’ll show you the way to the King” said the fox.  And with that he led them straight into his den.  They would never see the king to tell him the sky was falling.

It seems that fear of imagined threats is distracting.  Those possessed with it become easy prey to harms they never suspect.

Sign in Bedford PA

Solid and Bailout Free

The local bank is not associated with any of the giant financial conglomerates that are said to be “too big to fail.”  Were it not solid as claimed, this bank could fail easily and almost unnoticed outside of Bedford County.

This bank is proud not to be associated with any government bailout.  How then does such a bank feel about the handouts of public funds to its wealthy relatives?  If, indeed, the bailouts were necessary to prevent a general financial collapse, then they were also in the best interest of Bedford banking.  A general collapse could doom a Bedford bank, no matter how solid.  But this local bank still takes a different view.  No government would come to its aid if IT were about to fail.  Why should the larger banks get special treatment?

I do not know about the validity of claims that large financial and insurance institutions must not be allowed to fail.  There are smart people who say yes and others who say no.  I do not know what to think about this.

What I do believe is that we should not allow these companies to become too large to fail.  For if we allow this, we risk becomming hostage to their size and influence, as we clearly are now.

U.S. hostage in Iran

“America Held Hostage” was the nightly news when Iranian radicals took and held our citizens for 444 long days.  What else can we call it now that we must donate unimaginable sums to help companies out of the holes they dug themselves into?

The way things are working out, federal rescue isn’t about need or about fairness, it’s about size.  If you’re a small bank in Bedford–or any small business, or any individual homeowner–and you get in financial trouble, tough luck.  But if you are huge in size and your downfall is perceived to be threatening enough, the public treasury must come to your rescue.  This is our double standard.  And the result of the double standard is, at best, to suspend accountability based on size.  At worst it results in the reward of deliberate abuse and wrongdoing.

I do not know if we are doing the right things or the wrong things in response to our economic woes.  Let us grant for sake of discussion that we are doing necessary things that will bring a turnaround eventually.  My point is that steps need to be taken to prevent such a hostage situation from taking place ever again.  And it has to do with size.  The public must be protected from the arrogance and misuse of power that derives from size.

Bedford pickup truck

Most of us prefer to have as little government interferance and regulation in our lives as possible.  I’ll wager that’s the feeling of the Bedford pickup owner I noticed over the weekend, and his dog as well.  But all of us need protection from the abuse of power, especially where life’s essentials are concerned.  We are prone to regulate the small details and keep hands off the ones that really matter.  Is it really more important to regulate the composition of paint in a child’s toy than to protect the assets of her family from financial predators?

Power corrupts, and monopolistic power does so even more so.  How fortunate the world is that the Internet has emerged as a free and open resource.  Can you imagine the consequences if it were owned and controlled by a multinational corporation?  And what if there were only one airline, free to fly any routes it wanted and charge any amount of fare?  And what if there was one giant conglomerate in charge of all lending, investments, credit cards, pension funds, savings and checking, ATMs, all of it?  Well, that’s exactly where we have been headed.

We need to be smart as hell and not allow it any more.

We drove a long way up into the mountains and parked at the end of the road.  Then we took our gear and began hiking.  We hiked on and on, following mountain streams toward where they came from.  I wondered why we were walking so far and climbing up so high.  There was plenty of water to fish in down where we parked the car.

When he finally slowed down and I caught up with him, I asked John Smith about this.  Weren’t there fish in the streams down where we came from?  Why had we climbed all the way up here?  Down there the streams were big enough to hold a lot of fish, but up here there were some places you could almost jump across.

This is how I learned about stock trout and native trout.  Most all the fish in the lower streams have come from the stock farms.  They were raised in ponds and fed by hand several times each day, then released for people to catch.  They are easy to catch because they’re used to just gobbling up whatever food is tossed in front of them.  Bait your hook with some whole kernel corn, throw it in, and haul them out.  That wasn’t the kind of fishing John Smith had in mind for himself, or for me.

John Smith would not have gone out with rich Texans to blast farm-raised quail just released from their cages.  He would not have considered that hunting, even if one of them was the Vice President.

The trout up here in these streams are native trout, he said.  Born here, raised here.  They’re smart, and to catch one of them you have to be smart, not just lucky.  And then he began to tell me about what to use, and how to walk noiselessly, and how to approach a pool, and how to cast into the churning water and let it float down, and other things like that.  There was a gleam in his eye as he spoke about these things.  There was contempt in his voice when he spoke of the crowds that line the bank to catch the stock fish as soon as they get released.

Why is it that some people walk farther and work harder as a matter of choice?  Why do most stay on the broad and level roads, while others deliberately choose the road less traveled?

Americans have gotten used to the idea of an easy living.  We’ve gotten spoiled on easy work, easy money, easy fishing in the streams right beside the road.  But the times, they are a-chang’n.