Check Your Snopes

(News-Herald, September 25) The invention of e-mail is one of the great advances in recent human history. There is, however, one major flaw in the design. The guy who invented email should have a parade, but the guy who invented the “forward” button should be spanked soundly and repeatedly.

Some folks use these judiciously; I have two friends who keep me regularly supplied with the finest in internet humor. It is the people who feel the urge to forward things that are “interesting” or “informative” who give the world a big bandwidth headache.

But the internet has also given us snopes.com, a website that provides scholarly study and background checks for the flotsam and jetsam of the internet. The folks at snopes use actual research to determine whether the many threads in the tapestry of urban myths are true, false, or undetermined.

Snopes has a handy search feature, so you can log on and immediately determine that no, there is no group petitioning Congress to outlaw breast feeding.

If you like to browse through the many strange items that people have chosen to perpetuate, snopes offers categories from politics through science. There’s also a listing of the top twenty-five myths that people are checking up on.

The current top twenty-five subjects include political figures (no, Barack Obama was not sworn into office on the Quran and no, there is no real list of books that Sarah Palin tried to ban). For people with a real interest in political smoke and mirrors clarified, I recommend factcheck.org.

If we skip the politics, there are plenty of other fun subjects.

No, there are no verified reports of people being dosed by business cards soaked in date rape drugs.

No, your cell phone number is not about to be given to telemarketers.

No, Jay Leno did not write the positive attitude essay that “hits the nail on the head.”

No, the video clip about the Australian official and the tanker disaster (the front fell off” is not real.

And, no, neither Bill Gates, Microsoft, nor AOL are giving cash to people who help test their email forwarding system.

But (yikes) it IS true that the Chinese were discovered to be making hair bands with recycled condoms.

Certain categories can be tough to sort out. Promises that forwarding an email will bring rewards are almost always fake, but when it comes to prayer requests, Amanda Bundy and Brayden Hembree are fake, but Katie Fitch and Kevin Downs are real.

Even forwards that are meant to brighten and uplift someone’s day are not entirely trustworthy.

Charles Shultz did not write a quiz to show the importance of having people care about you. Mel Gibson was not the basis for the movie “The Man without a Face.” Maya Angelou did not write the poem “I Am A Christian.” There is no waiter named Stevie with Down Syndrome who received a large donation from a truck driver customer. The email about aging isn’t really by George Carlin, and Kurt Vonnegut did not deliver “wear sunscreen” as a commencement address.

Snopes is also a place to learn interesting tidbits of useful information. For example. Kentucky Fried Chicken did not change their name to KFC in order to deflect attention away from the friedness of their chicken. Actually, the Commonwealth of Kentucky trademarked their name, so that anyone who wanted to use “Kentucky” owed the state some money. Not only did this spawn KFC, but the Kentucky Derby became The Run for the Roses, and feed stores started selling Shenandoah Bluegrass.

We’re a little more sophisticated than we used to be about the internet (I think people have mostly stopped corresponding from the guy in Africa with the millions of dollars he wants to sneak out of the country), but it seems as if we could do better. After all, when you’re getting ready to forward that e-mail, the whole world of information is literally at your fingertips.

If snopes.com isn’t enough, I can also recommend straightdope.com and the ever-educational Mythbusters as places to encounter actual facts. The internet is great for helping Stupid spread quickly, but it can also be a powerful medium for real information as well. Remember to use it before you hit “forward.”

What Side Are You On?

(News-Herald, September 18) We’ve reached hard days in topsy-turvy land. It used to be that certain positions on the issues lined up with certain parts of the political spectrum, but it becomes increasingly confusing to figure who’s sitting in which cheering section.

This isn’t new. Being a political conservative used to mean that you believed in keeping government out of various aspects of American life while spending a minimum of tax dollars. But for the past eight years, the ranking conservatives in DC have not supported either of those things.

The nomination of Sara Palin has prompted such an epidemic of ideological whiplash that one begins to worry about political mental health. Conservatives like Phyllis Schafly, previously vocal in their opposition to working moms (“the flight from the home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman, in pursuit of false hopes and fading illusions”), suddenly think Mom should hire a sitter and get a job running the country. Liberals who previously opined that having children in no way obligates a woman to change her life a whit are suddenly shocked—shocked!!—that Palin would try to be VP when there are children at home who need her.

And at this point some people have changed their position on the matter of experience so many times that I’m surprised they can remember where they stand.

Of course, for all these people, the major problem is principles—they don’t appear to have any. One of the most insightful observations made by the old John McCain was that the Republican Party had lost its way by valuing power over principle. I do miss that guy.

It’s backwards, but it’s not unusual. Many people like Palin or Obama and want them to win (or dislike them and want them to lose). That judgment comes first, from the gut. After it’s made, political leaders and followers alike will twist their principles into any shape that supports the judgment they’ve already made. Yeah, you can insist that you’ve chosen your candidate because s/he so well represents your principles. Just excuse me if I start to laugh because I can remember what you used to claim your principles were.

That’s one of the great advances of modern politics. A politician can say one thing on Monday, reverse himself on Tuesday, even denying that he ever said any such thing, even though we have it on video. And nobody seems to much care.

Even if one has principles, sorting them out can be difficult. Take McDonalds. The home of the Big Mac used to be an easy target for left-wingers— low paid workers slinging beef that was harvested under non-PETA-approved conditions while making lots of money (never popular with the left) and peppering the American landscape with plastic cookie-cutter arch-laden temples.

Except that now the Golden Arches have crossed the political watchdog group AFA, who have accused Ronald McDonald of making too many friends with The Gays. Actually, the AFA, ever-improving their skills at press-release construction, has accused Micky D’s of “not remaining neutral in the culture wars.” This is a bit disingenuous as the AFA is not exactly noted for the clarion call to neutrality about the “homosexual agenda.”

But the AFA has deployed its political weapon of choice—a call for boycott, which means that tree-hugging vegan PETA fans are now stuck. Do they continue to avoid McD’s for all its alleged sins of the past, or do they break out some “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” bumper stickers and eat at McDonalds as a gesture of support?

At the very least, people who choose to eat or not eat at McD’s should probably fill out a form so that the poor corporate bigwigs have some idea of what kind of pressure each order of fries is meant to exert. Otherwise all of this economic posturing will be wasted. I picture some confused marketing suit poring over figures and emails and scratching his head. “I’m not sure, boss. I think the public wants us to set free all the gay cows.”

The pretzelicious twisting of principle creates many of these challenges. Will voters choose Palin because she has a uterus, will they run from Obama because he’s black, or will some stop to examine candidates’ policies and history? Will they do it with an open mind, or just look for justification for decisions already made? Do you want to make a statement, or are you just hungry for fries?

Politichristianity

(News-Herald, May 2004) The Franklin Ministers Forum is in the midst of 40 days of prayer to renew and revive county churches (you can find them at the First Baptist Church tonight at 7:00). The timing is good, because earlier this month, Barna Research Group released results of a survey looking at church involvement in the US. It includes a variety of statistics, but the bottom line is this—since 1991 the number of unchurched US adults has almost doubled from 39 million to 75 million.

How did the church lose so many people, particularly when preachers and televangelists and politichristians were so vocal about a resurgence of faith. Like everyone else, I have a few theories.

I am not, for instance, a big fan of politichristianity. This is the brand of faith in which I declare that God endorses my own personal political agenda. I think we’re on pretty shaky ground when we decide that God wants our country to reign supreme over other countries. When we declare that God supports this candidate or wants Congress to pass that bill, we’re just being silly. Politics is a human invention; to believe that God takes it as seriously as we do is foolish.

In fact, it’s worse than foolish. To claim that a victory for the Wrong Presidential Candidate is a defeat for God is human hubris, a self-important presumption that our political games will somehow change the fate of the Creator of All That Is, Was and Will Be.

So yeah, I think the politichristians drive people away from the church. Whether they’re insisting that God wants Bush II to give people a tax cut or claiming that the Almighty supports the establishment of refuges for rare Lithaunian iguanas, politichristians are so transparently hypocritical that it’s hard not to be turned off.

But I think a more damaging trend is the rise of anti-evangelism.

The traditional evangelical view is that Christians are called to go into the world, bringing the news of God to all people.

But the anti-evangelists would rather not go into the world, in fact do all they can to build a wall between themselves in the world, in the belief that the world is an evil, unholy place and if they’re not careful, they’ll get some on them.

It’s not a new view; the pilgrims were at Plymouth Rock to build a city on a hill, literally an ocean away from the evils of their world. That’s the ideal for the modern anti-evangelists—a place apart from the world and all the other people in it. The milder antis see the world as merely threatening and ungodly; the more virulent antis see the world as their mortal enemy.

They socialize only with people from their church (which they may have changed a few times because their old church was letting too many worldly influences seep in). They home school their children to keep them undefiled by the common herd.

At best, this is just plain lousy witnessing. They set no example because no one who doesn’t already agree with them ever sees them. For example, every home schooled Christian is one less person of faith that students in public schools will ever meet. “Oh, yeah. Christians. I’ve heard of them, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually met one.”

The anti-evangelists become too cliquish, exclusive and elite to ever meet someone who’s beneath them. They’re happy to talk about their faith—but only to the Right People. They may use technology like websites or tv broadcasts and consider that great outreach. But there’s no actual witnessing to live humans, and they’re kidding themselves about who’s really watching.

Of course, the virulent anti-evangelists don’t even want to pretend they’re reaching out. They’re more likely to talk about the need to gather the chosen few together (with a hint of impending End Times).

It’s not that anti-evangelists have forgotten the part of the message about love. They’re filled with love. For people who see things the right way. And while they probably won’t come right out and say it, the underlying assumption is that if you’re not right with God, that’s your fault and your problem. They’ll be happy to talk to you, once you’ve got your head on straight.

Even the least religious folks expect the church to be able to answer this question: how do we love and embrace and get along with people that we think are just plain wrong? If a church has no answer (or, worse, answers such as “Blow them up” or “Burn them at the stake”), people assume it has no more to offer than a country club or a neighborhood bar. And when that happens, the church will have trouble bringing people to the building, let alone to God.

Autumn Anniversary

(News-Herald, September 11) I’m not unaware of today’s date, the significance of this anniversary. I am. But I’m also aware that many real journalists and writers better than I will unleash a barrage of retrospective examination of Our Nation Today.

I don’t think I can add to that. But with each succeeding anniversary of that attack I find myself reflecting that despite the wars, the botched peace, the mis-steps and success, the changes in how we conduct ourselves as a country—despite (or because of) all that, I am still able to enjoy a fine life in a good place that remains undisturbed by much of the post-9/11 rubble. I live safely and comfortably in a beautiful corner of the continent.

Such reflection comes easily in the fall; if there is any better time in Venangoland than the fall, I don’t know what it could be. Winter weather is charming, but it would be a lot more charming if nobody had to go out in it. Spring is an ugly muddy mess. Summer is warm enough, but our heat always seems to come packaged with enough humidity to make mold and mildew grown on air. The best parts of summer are the ones that are like fall.

My favorite weather is shorts and sweatshirt weather. It’s comfy and cozy, nice weather for being active. But it can be easy to overlook the opportunities for fun while managing the excitement of a new school year, so I’m going to remind you of some of the things you should get out and do before things finally turn cold and ugly.

Do some local traveling. Tell the truth—you keep hearing about Foxburg and all the cool stuff that’s down there, but you haven’t gone yet. Check the schedule of performers for Lincoln Hall, or just head down to dine. What better time to be cruising through the hills and rivers than the fall?

And speaking of the river, you need to do that as well. One of the most beautiful resources we have, a massive park that we didn’t even have to build, the waterways of Venangoland are easily accessible and wonderfully enjoyable. Certainly basic safety precautions must be taken; the river deserves your respect as well as you’re appreciation.

My kayak is the best investment in entertainment, mental health and physical activity that I’ve ever made. Everybody should own one. And not only is it not too later to get out there this year, but fall waters are often the most tame and manageable (French Creek actually comes close to being a hiking path at this point). For someone just starting out, this is a great time to start learning the waters, and there are several easy and completely local trips that you can complete in just a few hours.

Equally accessible and rewarding is the network of bike trails. This time of year you don’t have to navigate swarms of bugs and the air is just cool enough to keep you from overheating. The trip south from Franklin takes you through some gorgeous wooded stretches (though I will admit that the old railroad tunnels get a bit on the frosty side as fall comes on).

On top of the usual pleasures of small town and country life, there are often new treats. Next weekend Oil City, Emlenton and Franklin will host a three-day festival of films by regional filmmakers and/or about regional subjects. The first two nights (Friday at the Crawford Center in Emlenton and Saturday at the Latonia in Oil City) will feature two different film line-ups. Viewers will choose the top films which will then go head to head at the Barrow in Franklin on Sunday. All three showings begin at 7:00 with a five dollar admission.

Who would ever have imagined that the region would have its own film festival? And yet here it comes.

There are other things to look forward to—not just Applefest in Franklin, but Oil City’s pumpkin festival.

We’ll be able to enjoy all of these things, these natural beauties and projects of our fellow Venangoland citizens, without a thought about our safety, without a worry about attacks, death, or destruction. Lots of folks will spend today considering the question of whether, seven years on, we are winning or losing. But if one measure of victory is the ability to enjoy the simple small pleasures of American life, victory must look a lot like Venangoland.

Pres 08: Everything but Substance

(News-Herald, September 4) If nothing else, the Presidential election has opened up chances to prod every single raw nerve in the American psyche.

The Democrats started things off by serving up race and gender. It has been a remarkable two-layer conversation. Hardly anyone will come out in public and say, “I won’t vote for Obama because he’s black.” And yet it seems almost everyone knows a person who has said privately, “I won’t vote for any black guy.”

But Obama, like every other raw-nerve prod in the election is two-fer—not only the tripwire of being a black American, but a name that evokes the Muslims that we aren’t quite sure how to address these days.

And he’s young. Like most folks, I define “young” as “younger than I am.” Which means I’m feeling like quite the fossil, because now we have TWO people younger than I am running for high office. How the heck did that happen? And how can we give leadership of this country to either of these children?

And Obama beat Hillary, who many people hate because she’s Hillary, and because her presence drags Bill Clinton, another raw American nerve, back into the public spotlight, leading to yet another tough American dialogue about whether it’s better new history to elect an African-American than a woman. Which of course brings up the issue of whether Obama is African-American enough. Or at all.

But give the Republicans their due. McCain calls up the specter of Bush’s incredibly brutal previous primary campaign (in which the Bushies suggested that McCain fathered an illegitimate black child). McCain is also a two-fer, at least, evoking the war in Iraq and the Vietnam war.

And he’s old. Really old. So now we can talk about how we feel about old people and how much we trust them. Since the first boomer was born, we’ve been beaten tired over the clash of generations; here it is again on our November ballot.

Family values? Where to begin. John Edwards was willing to risk the Dem chances on an affair that he’s definitely, probably, maybe, ended. More or less. What kind of politician would take up with another woman while his own wife was fighting terrible illness? Well, say some, that was McCain, too.

Don’t have enough to argue about yet? Here comes Palin with her daughter, brought up under the abstinence-only education that her mother championed and now pregnant at age 17. Lefties think this is reason enough to laugh Palin off the political stage, failing to understand that people don’t back abstinence-only education because they think it works. They back it because they think it’s right. So lets drag out sex-ed, birth control, and responsibility as topics.

Abortion is not an option for the daughter, as it wasn’t for Palin’s downs-syndrome baby. But that raises another issue—should a woman with so much on her motherly (and grandmotherly) plate be leaving hearth and home for DC? But isn’t it only fair to leave families out of this mess? But if that’s so, is it okay to hold children in the spotlight when they do admirable things like serve in the military? Exactly how much should family be a factor in an election?

The hot buttons just keep coming. How much experience is too much? How little is too little? Are we too racist or too sexist? Should women be expected to vote for a woman, no matter what her policies?

Or we can get into personalities. Is Obama too upperclass, or is that just code for uppity? Are we voting for the new McCain, savvy deal-with-the-devil politico, or the old maverick McCain, who was loose and open with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show (as opposed to Obama, who is only slightly less stiff than Al Gore)? Joe Biden opens his mouth and rambles. Palin is at least photogenic, a passable double for Tina Fey. But once we open those worm cans, we’re into a new discussion—exactly how much do we demand that our President resemble a television celebrity?

What’s most notable to me about this election cycle is how we have managed to shoehorn so many unresolved cultural issues into one simple election. Maybe that’s good thing in that it will spur a lot of thought and debate about significant issues (well, debate anyway).

But on the downside, we have an opportunity to argue so many issues before the election, without once talking about which candidate’s policies and plans would best serve the nation’s future.

Challenge for the New School Year

(News-Herald, August 28) If you’re a parent, you’ve prepared yourself for the moment next week when your child makes the big trip toward another year of education. But there’s still time to pick out some piece of Parental Wisdom to impart to your offspring. If you haven’t come up with anything, here’s my suggestion for the new year.

It’s simple, really. Accept the challenge.

We talk a lot about raising the bar, about making our students more competitive, about being the best. But that’s the generality, the broad picture. As parents, our more natural impulse is to make sure that our own children are never unhappy, never suffering, never pained, never disappointed, never feeling the sting of failure. And so, with the best intentions in the world, we identify the biggest challenge our child could face, and we help him avoid it.

No Child Left Behind is supposed to address this and push all children toward excellence. It won’t. Two important things to remember about NCLB:

1) Within the next six years (if the law doesn’t change) every school in America will fail.

2) When reports say that students are being better educated, what they actually mean is that students are doing better on standardized tests. You can get students to score well without educating them; in fact, educating them often doesn’t help. And in the end, all you’ve proven is how well they do on a standardized test.

So NCLB doesn’t address the challenge of challenge. Neither does the idea of school choice.

Proponents claim that, free to choose, parents will choose the best, toughest, most challenging schools. That, unfortunately, is not true.

Right now, the high schools of Venangoland already offer choice. Most students can choose classes that challenge them a lot, a little, or not very much. Some choose the big challenge. Some have parents who force them to accept the big challenge. And plenty avoid any sort of challenge like the plague.

If school choice became law, someone could make a fortune opening a school that promised students would never have homework and would always get B’s.

Why do students shy away from challenge?

Sometimes it’s that parental desire to protect. We want our children to experience nothing but success. We hope they never feel pain, disappointment, frustration.

But the only way to do that is to duck the challenge. Lifting heavy weights to build muscles is hard and makes you sore; lifting two pounds is easy and doesn’t make you uncomfortable at all. Running a mile in four or five minutes leaves you exhausted and breathless; strolling a mile in an hour or so is much less uncomfortable.

Sometimes it’s simple short-sightedness. We have students who can take the long view about practicing long painful hours at a sport because they believe the sacrifice will pay off in the professional career they imagine having ten years from now; these same students then blow off academic assignments because they’d rather be at the movies tonight. Students spend a gazillion hours worrying about how to get in to college, but no time at all worrying about how they’ll handle the demands once they’re there.

Challenge, with its discomfort and strain, always looks bad in the short view. That’s when the long view matters. Ten years from now, how likely is it that you’ll be thinking, “Thank heavens I skipped every Monday and ate KFC in front of my Playstation” or “I’m glad I prepared by the world of work by never showing up on time for school.”

The long view of challenge is one of the areas where young folks in China and India have us on the run—they’ll put up with almost any level of discomfort and challenge now in order to have a shot at a better life years from now, while Americans declare that reaching the ripe old age of 15 entitles them to kick back and take it easy.

Now, accepting a challenge is not the same as beating your head against a brick wall or trying to run a two-minute mile. Everyone has their limits, and a good part of wisdom is learning to stay within them. But you can’t find your limits without testing them. You can’t build the big muscles without lifting heavy weights. And you don’t get anything out of a year of school by trying to just ease comfortably through it (and that goes for teachers, too). Make this year count for something. Take the challenge.

Obfuscation

(August 21) Deliberative bodies in this region seem doomed to repeat the same basic mistake. Faced with a difficult decision, a hot potato likely to create a shower of heated spudly agitation, they decide to obfuscate, to avoid giving information or explanation.

It’s an understandable impulse. If you know the news you’re about to deliver will cause dismay or anger, you may want to postpone delivering that news as long as possible. Nobody wants to go through the drama of argument and agitation that accompanies difficult moments. People break up by letter, hide their report cards, “forget” to mention the bounced check until the spousal unit is on the way to work.

But this kind of obfuscatory bobbing and weaving is not helpful in the grown-up world. It makes for bad management and bad government.

I’m not talking about a moral imperative or idealistic set of Proper Rules. I’m talking about practicality; if you are a manager or a government official or a school board member, being a good manager also means reducing the amount of agitation directed at you.

When you have to make a decision that affects people’s work and/or lives, there’s no doubt that some folks will be upset. But you can’t avoid that, and trying to avoid it only makes things worse.

A certain percentage of folks will be okay (or just won’t care much). Another group will back the bosses no matter what. And another group will be really angry. Nothing you do will change the folks in those three groups much. But there is a fourth group, the largest group, that could become supporters or opponents depending on how you handle matters. These swing voters can make a big difference in the tone of public reaction.

When you have to make a tough call, a controversial call, swing voters want to know a couple of things.

First, they want to know how you made the decision. What were your criteria? Did you look for the contractor with the best price, the fastest tractor, or the cutest owner? Once you selected the yardstick for your decision, what were the facts that you gathered, and how did they line up with your criteria?

People want to know that you had a reason for your choice and that you followed some process more complex than flipping a coin or picking whatever made things easiest for you.

If you don’t tell the people how you made the decision, they will guess. They will rarely guess, “Although the process is apparently a secret, I’m sure it’s wise and fair and honest.” They won’t guess that because it’s hard to imagine a wise, fair and honest process that needs to be kept secret.

Second, they want to know that you heard and understood their feelings about the issue. Some bosses appear pathologically terrified of listening, as if the mere act of hearing a different point of view will somehow destroy their position.

Listening is a powerful tool. People want to be heard. If they don’t feel they’ve been heard when they are speaking, they will keep raising their voices until they are hollering. By that time, they’re angry, too.

Our deliberative bodies, our boards and bosses, only need to be able to say, “We understand what you’re telling us. But here’s what we’ve decided, and here’s why.”

Admittedly, this is a hard position to take if you are a governing body that has not done its homework. If you don’t have a good reason for a particular course of action, it’s pretty hard to make a public case for it.

But in Venangoland, we specialize in making what may be correct decisions in the worst possible way. Leaders who are afraid of facing the anger of a few people end up stirring up ten times as many irate citizens, taxpayers, and employees. (Insert usual references to hospital mess here.)

Economic realities will keep forcing tough decisions. The folks who have to make these decisions don’t have the option of choices that will make everyone happy, but they do have some control over just how many cranky people they will have to face.

You may have a lawyer working for you advising you not explain anything to anyone; the lawyer’s responsibility is not to make sure you’re doing your job, but to make sure you don’t get yourself in trouble. When you’re making decisions, talking can get you in trouble. But it may be trouble that you’ve earned. And not talking will create even more.

Taking Advice

(News-Herald, February 2003) “Hey! Your house is on fire!”

There are any number of responses that you might expect to get to this observation. Here are some of the less sensible ones.

“How could you possibly know that? I’ve lived in this house for years, and you’re just passing by. You just don’t understand how this house is.”

“You never liked this house. You’ve never accepted my living in this house. This is just a low cheap way of getting back at it.”

“You’re too young to know about fire or houses. Come back when you’re more wise and sophisticated.”

Taking advice is a real art, almost as difficult as giving it.

It’s a mistake to listen to everything that anybody tells you. Some people will look at the steam rising from the soup on the stove and insist that you dial 911. Some people are easily panicked; others will yell “Fire” just for the entertainment of watching you run around like a cranium-deprived chicken.

But there are many times when you should heed the advice you get. The trick is knowing when to listen.

For me, one sure clue that someone is giving me advice that I should pay attention to is that I am busy coming up with reasons that I shouldn’t have to listen to it.

There’s an old saying— even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I’m convinced that there is nobody who is so dense and dopey that s/he is never, ever right about anything.

So if I’m concentrating on why I shouldn’t have to listen to the messenger instead of taking a look at the message, that’s a good sign that I don’t want to take a look at the message because I don’t like it.

For instance, I still know people who can give earnest arguments about why the data about smoking is inconclusive. Is that because they are such deep, objective scientific-minded folks? No, they’re just people who don’t want to quit smoking, so they search for reasons to suspend common sense. They argue with the messenger, not the message.

This kind of advice-resistance is doubly damaging. On the one hand, there’s the obvious damage if the advice you’re ignoring happens to be right. You can argue with the surgeon-general all you want, but it’s very hard to win an argument with lung cancer.

The less obvious damage of this type of advice-resistant behavior is the wear and tear on the human spirit. When everyone who has ever loved you, cared about you, and invested in your life is telling you that the kitchen is on fire, and you insist on turning off the smoke alarms and coming up with reasons that these folks should be ignored, you pay a price in your relationship with them.

Now, sometimes the price is unavoidable. Sometimes you’re the one who sees the fire and it’s your friends and family telling you there’s no reason to bother the fire department.

But when you stake your self on believing that they are all ignorant, bad, insensitive, and incapable of appreciating why your house really isn’t aflame, that tends to weaken the bonds between you. “I really love you, you ignorant fool,” just doesn’t read well on a Christmas card.

And then once you’re invested in denying their advice, you drift further and further away from reality. “That’s not smoke,” you declare, gritting your teeth. “It’s a special atmospheric disturbance created by rogue aromatherapy saleswomen. It’s a very small fog bank. It’s the dust from dancing fairies.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re an elected official dealing with constituents, a boss dealing with subordinates, or an average human dealing with people who think of themselves as your friends. It is hard to keep your house well when you are more devoted to proving that your would-be advisors are wrong than to doing whatever the house needs to stay healthy.

The secret is to stop arguing with the messenger and start evaluating the message. Listening to what someone has to say, really listening, and considering what’s there costs you nothing. You don’t give up the chance to say, “I’ve looked all over the house, and I don’t see any flames anywhere; therefore, I’ve come to the conclusion that the house is not on fire.”

But by considering what they have to say, you build your relationship up instead of breaking it down. And as an extra bonus, sometimes you even keep your house from burning down.

The Masons Celebrate 150 Years of Conquering Franklin (Secretly)

(News-Herald, August 14) This Saturday, the Masons will descend upon Franklin in celebration of the 150^th birthday of the local lodge (or shrine or club or coven, or whatever you like to call a gaggle of Masons).

There are many histories of the Freemasons. The most ambitious put the origin of Freemasonry back before 800 BC, with the building of Solomon’s Temple. Some like to link them to the Knights Templar or the stone mason guilds of the Middle Ages.

There’s all sorts of scholarship, some of it by reputable people (there’s also research about the Masons conducted by people who apparently made their tin-foil hats a bit too tight), to suggest some Freemason activity in the 1600’s, but the widely accepted kick-off date for modern Masons is 1717, the year the first grand lodge was formed in England.

Throughout their history, the Freemasons have set the gold standard for conspiracy theory; if your only background for this stuff is watching the National Treasure movies, you haven’t even seen the top of the iceberg. They engineered the French Revolution. They engineered the American Revolution. They got the Russians in the UN. Pope Clement XII actually fixed it so that any Catholic who became a mason would be excommunicated. And many fundamentalist Christians will tell you that Masons are, if not Satanic, at least anti-God.

This anti-God theory will come as news to Masons, who are under the impression that one of the few requirements for membership is a belief in a supreme being. But the conspiracy ding-dongs have an explanation—the five million Masons in the world are dupes, manipulated by a secret cabal that pulls the strings in the world of Freemasonry. If you keep following these wheels within wheels, you eventually arrive at the wellspring of all nutburger conspiracies—yes, the Freemasons are tools of the Illuminati.

Some conspiracy theorists point to the many well-placed members. George Washington, Ben Franklin, and John Hancock were Masons. Fifteen US Presidents were Masons (Reagan was the last; neither Obama nor McCain are Masons, at least not yet). Other important Masons: Napoleon, J. Edgar Hoover, Sir Winston Churchill, W.E.B.DuBois, the Marquis de Lafayette, several Supreme Court Justices and (gasp) Edwin L. Drake.

Other Masons include Duke Ellington, Bud Abbott, Irving Berlin, Ernest Borgnine, Gene Autry, Bronson Pinchot, Red Skelton and Col. Sanders. So if they’re really trying to conquer the world, they perhaps need to become a bit more selective about membership. Though as world conquering secret organizations go, the Masons have many flaws (which may help explain why after 300 years, they’re still not in charge).

For one thing, they need to close down freemasonstore.com, “Your Masonic superstore with 3500+ items on sale.” Secret world-conquering organizations do not set up super stores to sell caps and belt buckles with their logo affixed.

In general, the Masons stink at secrecy. The vast amount of charitable and service work they’ve done over the last three centuries keeps putting them in view. Locally we’re well aware of the Shriners Hospital in Erie, but that hospital is just one of a network of over twenty Shriners hospitals providing health care for children. For free. Free. Clearly this is no way to be sneaky.

Masons have a long history with entertainment and parades (John Philip Sousa, also a Mason), and really, what could be better than watching grown men wearing funny hats and driving giant motorized tricycles (unless it’s watching grown men drive motorized bar stools). The best-known wing of Freemasonry in Venangoland may be the Zem Zem Shriners.

Now maybe this is just double-clever sneakiness. Maybe we’re supposed to be lulled into a false sense of security and think, “Those cute guys on the giant tricycles couldn’t possibly be part of a giant conspiracy to rule the world.”

But after looking at the record, I’m inclined to think that the Freemasons, in all their shrines and lodges and clubs and other component parts are just what they claim to be—America’s first fraternal organization, dedicated to the notion that some men, who believe in God and are willing to ignore the differences that might otherwise separate them, can get together and make their world a somewhat better place.

Saturday night’s parade looks to be one big fat party, and any local organization that can exist for 150 years deserves one. We should come enjoy the fun and help celebrate. Or, if you’re still afraid of the vast conspiracy, put on your best tin-foil hat and come keep an eye on them.

Olympic Torch Memories: New Years in Erie

In honor of the current wave of Olympic-mania, I'm digging out these two columns from years ago when I had the treat of being part of the Winter Olympic torch run through Erie.

(News-Herald, December 2001) I’ve found myself part of an unexpected event or two in my lifetime. But nothing tops what’s coming up on New Year’s Day.

It was, as is often the case, a student who got me into this. Scott McCleary, now a Franklin High graduate, last spring noticed the Coke ads that invited folks to send in the name of someone in their town, so he did. And now, believe it or not, I’m going to be an Olympic torch bearer.

This has provided an interesting inside look at how this particular part of the extravaganza is put together.

I received a multipage form (registered mail) that asked a variety of useful questions (like, how well can I actually move under my own power) and bits of personal information. It also included lots and lots of directions and rules for me to keep in mind.

No, I could not have anyone run right along with me. Actually, someone will be running with me—they’re called Support Runners and they trot right along with the folks who do the carrying. Plus the security runners, plus the support van. I think I’m going to get to experience what it’s like to travel with an entourage.

I may not ride a scooter. I may not change my running route. More importantly, I cannot carry along any signs, insignias, logos, etc etc etc. No stapling a Leonardo’s menu to my forehead.

In fact, the Olympics (note to editor—check to see if we need the little copyright symbol to go with that) provide all torch bearers with an official running uniform, including shirt, pants, gloves and a hat. Shoes and socks are our responsibility.

I had half-expected the suit to carry a logo or two (Chevrolet is also sponsoring the torch run) but in fact there isn’t a commercial millimeter anywhere on it. It’s mostly white, with some tasteful Olympic logos, and some sort of blue jaggedly thing—it might be a stylized mountain. I’m not sure.

I get to keep the uniform. My corporate sponsors (it just gives me shivers to type that—I never had a corporate sponsor before) even purchased each Coke runner’s torch for them; I’m really not sure where I’m going to put mine yet. I don’t really have a room in the house that says “Olympic Torch.”

The torch run is very tech-savvy. There’s a web site where you can track the torch, read the stories of the various carriers, and see pictures from the various celebrations. There’s also an opportunity to buy lots of Olympic torch stuff. The flame, of course, has been on the road for weeks.

It is, frankly, one of the more humbling things I’ve ever been involved in. The torch has been carried by sports figures, celebrities, and people who have overcome tremendous hardship to become inspirations to their fellow-citizens. I’m pretty sure that Mario LeMieux, Diane Sawyer, the woman who gave her sister a kidney, and I are cut from somewhat different cloth.

But I look at it this way. I do think people from little out of the way areas like ours ought to be represented, and I think teachers ought to be represented, and I’ll be proud to carry it for all of us.

My leg will be in Erie on January 1 at 12:30ish, on West 6^th Street from Colorado to Nevada Drive. My instructions assure me that nothing short of a hurricane will pre-empt the run. And while all the running I’ve been doing will be helpful, in actuality every torch bearer only carries the torch about two tenths of a mile (that’s roughly once across the 8^th Street bridge). Even allowing for holding one arm steady instead of swinging it, I think I can manage.

The torch relay is a cool thing. We don’t pass the torch—we pass the flame. And there is something a bit mystical about that. After all, a flame isn’t really an object, a thing. The flame started in Atlanta and 45 states later what arrives in Salt Lake City won’t be the same object, exactly, and yet in some indescribable way it will.

Despite our increased technology, our accumulated wisdom, our growth over the centuries, a flame is still the best symbol we have for spirit. A flame cannot be captured, cannot be frozen in place; it can only survive by being fed and allowed to grow. There’s just something cool about this little piece of spirit moving from person to person across the face of the land.

I’ll be back next week with a full report.

(News-Herald, January 2002) Tuesday morning, while most of the world was blissfully (or painfully) slumbering, I was driving to Erie to keep my date with the Olympic torch.

I arrived a bit early; the weather was cold but better than expected, and I tend to show up early for important events, just in case my car is struck by meteorites or continental drift moves my destination. But an early arrival put me directly in line for the Girl Scout Photo Ops.

The torch-bearers convened in Erie city hall, as did the girl scout troops that were handing out American flags to attendees of the days’ events. The girl scouts wanted to have their pictures taken with torch type people, so a mail carrier from Union City and I filled the need for appropriately uniformed props.

The rest of the runners did eventually arrive. We were all greeted by Olympic torch relay officials, mostly twenty-something people who volunteer to spend a few months away from job, school, and/or home in return for the opportunity to see a big chunk of America, eat junk food, and live out of duffle bags. Not a bad trade.

Our host was named Steve. Steve just left a job that he’d had for about four years; after the Olympic Stuff is over, he’s headed for school in New York. Steve showed us how to handle the torch and told us the various logistics of the whole business.

It really is a well-honed science. We all piled onto a shuttle bus, which dropped us off, one at a time, at our designated spots.

Once I was deposited on my street corner, a man in the lovely official periwinkle and lapis uniform ran up and turned on the gas. Then the prior torchbearer ran up and lit my torch. Then a support runner reminded me to move my legs and lumber to the middle of the street, where I ran directly behind the big official picture-taking truck and tried to stay out of the slush.

A few blocks later, I lit the next person, and then the pick-up shuttle swept me up to return me to our starting point. All very neat and efficient.

Despite the large convoy of vehicles, I ran pretty much alone on the street except for my support runner. The torch is not really light, not really heavy. It really is a nicely crafted little piece of flaming sculpture. At last check, they were going for $1,200 on eBay.

There were plenty of people there. I definitely saw Scott McCleary, the student who got me into this in the first place, and members of my actual family. I know from later in the day that some of my students were there. And there were several people who spoke to me as if they knew me. I’ll admit to having been a bit overwhelmed by the moment. One woman asked me my name; it took me a second to answer her. Frankly, any of you can claim to have been there and I would never know the difference. It was a humbling experience.

Because of the nature of the set-up, the twenty or so of us on the out-of-Erie leg spent more than an hour together. Our group included an anchor guy from Channel 35 news, a retired school teacher who had lost part of her leg when hit by a car, a hockey coach who dedicated her run to two teen team members who died last year, and a woman who carried a torch in ’96. There was a man who will travel to Antarctica next month; after he runs a marathon there, he will be the twenty-fourth person in the world to run a marathon on every continent. I was technically the only Franklin resident there, but running just a bit further up the street from me was Cootie Harris, who may live in Meadville but certainly counts as a Franklinite in my mind. Oh, and there was also a sophomore from John Carroll who won gold and silver medals for swimming in the last Olympics. Did I mention that I felt humbled?

So I had the chance to feel like a part of history and to pass on a piece of something that has been carried by every sort of American imaginable. I had my picture taken more times than in the last ten years put together (not even counting all those girl scouts who will someday look back on this event and say, “Who was THAT guy, anyway?”) and I didn’t blow another New Years watching the Rose Parade in my pajamas. All in all, it was an excellent way to start a new year.

Road Rage, or At Least Crankiness

(News-Herald, August 7) Thanks to unexpected circumstances, last weekend I hopped into the car (actually, “hopped” may be an overstatement) and made the twelve-hours-or-so road trip to Maine.

Combined with my earlier trip to LA, this gave me a full continental span of travel for the summer. I have had my feet in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. I have freeloaded on both coasts (if you must travel, I suggest destinations where you have family who can put you up for free). And I have sampled driving on both coasts.

New England drivers have a bit of a reputation. Massachusetts drivers are supposed to be the worst on the planet, but on this trip it was Connecticut that seemed to be celebrating Hand Your Car Keys to a Mentally Challenged Person Day.

LA drivers drive fast and aggressively, but they at least drive as if they are going somewhere. In Connecticut, people observed the unofficial interstate speed limit (65 MPH must be the speed limit posted in base-fifteen)—right up until the point that they randomly slowed down to contemplate birds or pretty clouds or their navels. Then traffic backed up very quickly.

New England drivers also proved to be merge-challenged. Instead of gliding smoothly into one forward-moving line of traffic, these drivers—well, it’s the same maneuver your grandmother uses when she comes to a dead stop in the middle of the road before entering her driveway.

One other thing that LA gets right is the use of automotive cell phones. In California it’s against the law to drive while using a handheld cell phone (those bluetooth headpieces are okay). It used to be when someone in the car ahead of you was doing something stupid or erratic they’d turn out to have a cigarette in hand. Nowadays nicotine idiots are rare; the guy swerving back and forth across three lanes of traffic is using his cell to conduct some important business (“Definitely rent the first Ghsotbusters, honey”).

I think California is on the right track. If you’re caught talking on the phone while driving, you should be fined enough money to operate a school bus for a year. And your phone should be taken away. If you are caught texting while driving, your phone should be taken and smashed into your carburetor assertively enough that you will never be able to use either the phone or the car again.

But my greatest heap of road rage is reserved for Left Lane Bandits. These are the folks who pull out into the passing lane, move up beside the next car in the right lane, and then match speed, blocking the road for the next hundred miles.

I am always interested in the workings of the human mind. I am particularly fascinated by the ways that we find to rationalize the things that we have already chosen to do. Hardly anybody thinks that they’re doing something wrong. In our heads, we find a way to make it right.

If you have a problem with someone, and you really want to solve it, you don’t need to know why you believe they’re wrong; you need to understand why they think they’re right.

It’s been the sticking point with the hospital, the county park, whatever it is that Bedow and Company are upset about this week—if you are sure that the other side is choosing to oppose you because they are misguided/stupid/evil, you will have real trouble ever bridging the gap between you, because I guarantee you, they do not believe they are any of those things.

I find the self-justification process fascinating, but there are times when I have trouble imagining its workings.

What do left lane bandits tell themselves. As they drive along, miles of cars backed up behind them, making no discernable attempt to let others pass, what are they thinking? “I’m a hero—I’m saving these people from driving fast.” “HahahahahaHAAAAAA! The raw power is all mine!!”

Maybe they’re just oblivious. Maybe they’re thinking “I love being all alone on the open road” or “How great that the government built this road just for me. Me me MEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

There are scientists out there trying to create a system to have all traffic controlled by computers instead of humans. I’m not a supporter; I can’t think of any activity so simple that a computer hasn’t screwed it up. But after my time on the road this summer, I can understand how someone would think computer-controlled traffic would be a good idea.

Sound of Music Auditions

I'm directing the Applefest production of "Sound of Music" this fall. I know, I know-- but I believe that buried in the original script, somewhere under the sugary treacly delight of the movie, there's a pretty good little story. Give me a chance to see if I can't get rid of the cartoon nazis and nuns, rinse off a bit of the icing, and find a decent little slice of cake under all of that. I'm not out to produce something that will alarm and offend the movie fans, but I think there's a good story to be told about two people who find themselves making some difficult choices in a real-life difficult time. And really-- the best way to have your bright and shiny moments is not to surround them with a bunch of bright and shiny, but to hold them up against a dark background.

For all of that, of course, I'll need some actors. So if you're game, auditions for grownups will be this Saturday at 10, and Sunday at 2 at the Barrow. Those interested in being a Von Trapp urchin are invited next Saturday at 2. In addition to the familiar leading roles, there are several non-singing roles for acting men and several non-acting roles for singing women. Note too that Elsa and Max, so underserved by the movie, actually have two songs in the play.

Music director for this production is Steve Luxbacher.

And as a side note, isn't it interesting that this show is set in the same time and against the same historical backdrop as Cabaret? Now there would be a fun theatrical mash-up....

Cell Phones

(News-Herald, July 31) It’s not very often that a piece of technology comes along that reshapes a culture. Certainly the automobile did. It’s not just that people could transport themselves farther and faster and at their own convenience. The car changed the shape of community.

For example, personal automobiles killed Monarch Park, a place where virtually every resident of Venangoland previously gathered on major holidays. After the rise of the automobile, people would never gather so completely as a community ever again.

There were more subtle effects. Automobiles gave rise to Rural Free Delivery, and that ate away at rural communities. There was a time when country folk had to travel to the post office (often a country store) to pick up the mail. That was why, even in rural farm territory, everybody knew everybody (and their business)—because everybody made regular trips to that central hub.

Businesses, roads, moving away—automobiles changed the way the culture defined much of itself. We haven’t seen a shift that massive in a long time, but I think we might be living through one now.

No, not computers or the internet— not directly. I nominate the cell phone.

Cell phones are more than simple conveniences, though they are certainly that. And they are more than a new way for the phone companies to just print money, though they certainly do that as well. The phone company can charge for both sending AND receiving a call, even as they manage a system that doesn’t depend on sixty gazillion miles of wires. The phone company can charge a big chunk of change if you want to leave them (phone company alimony), in addition to various extra charges for everything from Federal Mystery Voice-related Surcharge to Extra Percent Tacked On Just Because.

In all fairness to the phone company, I have no doubt that it takes a lot of money to maintain the largest, most complicated automated customer service denial system in the known universe. But I digress. None of this is culture-changing; it’s merely a great business plan (our own beloved Verizon reported a profit increase of 12% last quarter).

Just as the automobile completely changed our concept of the boundaries of our personal world, cell phones bring a new measure of mobility.

I can recall an evening thirty-some years ago when Joe, Bill and I decided it would be fun to go bowling, and even more fun to take real live female girls with us. Lacking regular girlfriends and personal transport for six, we began a convoluted process of calling girls, contacting Seneca Bowling Lanes, and negotiating with parental car-owning units. We three were parked at home, next to the phone, calling endlessly back and forth. I don’t remember anything about the actual bowling outing, just the process of trying to get it arranged (“Okay, I’ve got a lane and a girl. You? Okay, a car but no girl. Okay—call me back in five.” Rinse and repeat.)

Today, of course, that never happens. People can make plans on the fly. Nobody has to make plans or arrange meeting times. Sad teenaged girls will never again sit home waiting by the phone for him to call.

Since Bell said, “Watson, come here, I need you” into a funny black tube, home has not been where our hearts are or where they have to take us in. Home is where our phones are, and in the age of the cell phone, we’re always home, wherever we are, all the time.

Cell phones are also the warm fuzzy face of the internet. Parents who are terrified of letting their eight-year-old spend a single unsupervised second on line will blithely put a phone in that child’s hands.

Here’s what they need to understand. Everything you’re afraid your child might do on a computer—chat with scary people, trade inappropriate pictures and words, become electronically addicted, make plans that would make you graying hair curl—all that and more they can do on a phone as well, just as easily and with far more privacy. The internet does change things, but putting the internet in your pocket accelerates the revolution.

We watch computers carefully, because for those of us of a Certain Age, computers are New and Scary. But that little wireless phone, well, it’s just a phone, right? As Blackberries and I-phones are beginning to show us, no, they’re not. They’re net-enabled computer-driven multimedia platform doorways to the world. They are our new homes, the leading edge of the next big change.

Feeding the Enemy

(News-Herald, January 2003) I don’t know that it’s an irony, but it’s an often-ignored principle of combat. Your actions feed your opponent.

The principle, perhaps, does not apply to one-on-one hand-to-hand individual contest. But then, that’s a rare contest these days. Our contests are between groups, and that’s when this principle kicks in.

Say you’ve entered into a dispute with the Bayer family, the one that lives just on the other side of the backyard. Chances are the Bayers are not all of one mind on the matter.

“They’re a stupid and unreasonable threat to us, and they need to be stopped,” says Mama Bayer.

“They’re decent people and we have nothing to fear from them. Let’s just take a chance and work this out,” says Papa Bayer.

“By reaching for understanding, we can better come in contact with the force that binds the universe and confront the existential angst that confronts all humans; at the same time we will create positive karma for ourselves,” says Baby Bayer. (Baby Bayer is currently a philosophy major at Clarion).

Our behavior toward the Bayers will feed one of those points of view. If we start lobbing stink bombs over the fence, Mama will say, “See, I told you so” and Papa will be hard-pressed to answer her. If we take over a nice bundt cake, Papa gets to say “I told you so,” and Mama has to overcome his objections.

Granted, what we feed our opponents is not the only factor involved. Mama can throw the bundt cake in the trash and continue to declare, “They must be stopped.”

But every stance in a contest costs energy. And if you can’t draw the energy from your opponents, you have to draw from your own resources, and that costs as well. You can lie to your own people, or try to hold down your own dissenters, but in the end that carries an enormous internal price.

That’s why political activists love it when their opponents say something outrageous; it feeds their point of view and pumps in energy without costing them a thing.

And to some extent, that’s how we have turned Saddam Hussein into the heroic leader of a solid regime. Instead of the next Fidel Castro, we’ve made him into George Washington. And Saddam, being a wily little oil-country despot, seems to understand how to avoid feeding his most rabid opponents.

So we watch the inspectors, not hoping that Saddam turns out to be threatless, but hoping we can catch him at something that will prove he needs to be spanked. I have no trouble imagining policy-makers in DC wishing that Saddam would gas a bunch of people or blow up some orphanages or just do somthing that would make the USA hawk argument stronger.

And that is the ironic part of this—as our designated opponent, Saddam has almost as much ability to control America’s agenda as any suit in Washington. Sure, we can go to war without him. But if Saddam won’t feed the hawkish viewpoint, our leaders will have to do it themselves, and that means feeding it with our own resources, and we can already see the results: dissent, disunion, and distrust in some quarters that our government might say anything to get us to back the military play.

This really is ironic; despite the notion that opponents are somehow separated, two distinct and isolated sides, the truth is that we are usually tied as closely to our opponents as we are to our allies.

In this strange symbiosis, we cannot strike out at them without paying a price with our own teammates, and the strength we feed at them becomes theirs to use against us. This is why the Roman Empire worked in a way that few others in history ever did; they understood that you cannot wipe out your opponents without sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

If you feed your opponents fear, they fill up with fear, and a frightened human is a dangerous human. If you feed them respect, that can grow as well.

In the end, the gulf that we reach across to grapple with our opposition is a problem that we share with them; it is almost impossible to unilaterally solve. That doesn’t mean we should all join hands and start in on “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” or that we should stop standing for what we believe in, or that we should accept wrong for right; but if we think the solution will be that we beat our opponents into submission, we might as well hope that Santa Claus will come settle it all for us.

My Summer Vacation

(News-Herald, July 24) I took my first trip to Los Angeles, to visit my son who’s out there to learn the acting biz. He’s spending the summer as a bookstore coffee barrista at the corner of Sunset and Vine, living in sumptuous bachelor digs (hey, how much furniture do you really need, anyway). It’s a challenge to send your child off to the scary American West, but awesome to see them turn into courageous grown-ups.

I didn’t hit the whole LA megalopolis; most of my adventures were in the general area of Hollywood. LA didn’t make a big impression. Unlike New York or Chicago or even Cleveland, there’s no place to stand on the curb and let your hick flag fly while you drawl out, “Dang! Lookee there! We ain’t got nothing like that back home!”

LA is mostly spread out and flat; it looks a lot like Erie but just goes on a lot longer. However, LA cleverly avoids monotony by planting mountains right in the middle of things. Actually, not so much mountains as two-sided cliffs.

Eastern cities have grown up in harmony with their geography. The lay of the land sets the shape of the city, and so most Eastern cities, whether we’re talking Buffalo or Franklin, have a harmony with the land.

In the West, it’s different. Las Vegas is the ultimate western city—it could have been plunked down a half mile in any other direction and it wouldn’t have mattered a bit. The cities exist on top of the land, independent of it.

But much of LA is in open combat with the land it sits on. Houses are clawed and clamped onto and into the hillside, like they’d been designed by mutant offspring of Frank Lloyd Wright and Dr. Seuss, barely hanging to land that looks like one pail of water would put quits to the whole thing.

The Hollywood Hills are a meandering maze of roads that are twisted and narrow, like passing slowly through the intestines of a large snake wrapped in a blender tossed in the spin cycle, the hilly parts of Oil City on crack. Mindy Eshelman helpfully demonstrated for me that even someone who lives there and drives with a GPS system can still have trouble getting where they want to go. I can’t imagine anyone ever standing and saying, “Yeah, this would be a great place for a house,” and yet there’s nothing but gazillion-dollar homes.

The driving was surprisingly easy, few things crowded. People are all going somewhere, but they don’t actually stay there. I didn’t see many bizarre Californian fashionistas. Most people I saw would not look out of place at the Cranberry Mall (and most who would were clearly tourists).

We are sometimes told we have much to learn about regional boosterism from other small towns like Frankenmuth. But I’ve come home thinking we can also learn from Hollywood.

100 years ago Hollywood was fields, nothing. Today it’s a really well-developed nothing, a busy nothing. Busloads and planeloads converge on it because they’ve heard that once upon a time something cool happened there. The famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine is indistinguishable from a million other street corners. A tour of the Universal backlot lets you see hundreds of locations where cool things you once saw in a movie happened. But right at this moment, they’re empty.

Some folks are disdainful of events like Oil Heritage Week, in which we celebrate stuff that happened long ago (but isn’t happening now). I say that Oil Heritage Week and Hollywood are just two versions of the same principle at work. One or two little attractions may not convince someone to even cross the street; put a hundred of these side by side, and crowds gather.

We need to stop thinking this is small potatoes, not enough to merit attention. There are only a handful of attractions on the planet that need no puffery, that inspire awe on their own. Things like the Grand Canyon, the Colorado Rockies. The rest of our Great Cool Places have been made into Great Cool Places by some combination of willpower, cheerleading, ambition and willpower.

It takes a lot of individual work. Hollywood wasn’t created by a single bureaucratic entity—just a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different dreams. We can be that cool.

Did I see any famous celebrities? No, but I wasn’t really looking. I got to see my son, and that was all the celebrity I needed.

Special FSCB Concert Bulletin

This week's Franklin Silver Cornet Band concert will feature an appearance by tuba pro Jim Self.

Self was born in Franklin and raised in Oil City. Consequently, though he's come back and appeared in the area a few times, I'm not sure that people in these parts get how enormous he is in the biz. He's the heir-apparent to the great Tommy Johnson, the go-to guy for film scores-- Self has appeared in everything from his famous mother ship solo in Close Encounters to more recent films like Lemony Snicket, War of the Worlds, & Sin City. He has way over a thousand film credits, as well as recording credits with everyone from Leon Redbone to Maynard Fergusun to Barbra Streisand. He has worked with orchestras and jazz groups around the globe. He is without a doubt one of the top low brass players in the world.

This Thursday night he'll be playing a couple of solo features with us, as well as sitting in with the band for the rest of the concert.

In a nice piece of book-ending, this week's concert will also feature the Junior Silver C's, a band composed of 5-8th graders from throughout Venangoland (Yes, it's the kind of summer music enrichment program that school districts used to do and could do today, but they don't, so we do). So the audience Thursday will get to see both the start and the peak of some musical careers.

So if you only make the trip to catch one or two concerts a summer, this Thursday's would be a good choice.

Hildegarde in Concert

Just came from the Dittmans' one-woman Hildegarde Dolson show at the Barrow Little Theater, and if you missed it tonight, you have a chance to catch it tomorrow. It's a quick introduction (or re-introduction for those of us who already knew who she was) to one of Franklin's most successful native daughters, a midcentury writer with a keen eye honed in the small town and refined in NYC. Not as domestic as Erma Bombeck, not as pissy as Dorothy Parker, not as political as Art Buchwald, not as berserk as Dave Barry-- she has her own special voice and Mike's script paired up with Amy's delivery help bring her alive.

It's a mere five bucks and just 45 minutes out of your life. You should go!

Saturday, July 19, 7:00, Barrow

Leadership: Want It Bad, or Non-existent?

(News-Herald, July 17) “Well, it couldn’t get any worse.”

How many times have folks in a workplace uttered those immortal words as some dysfunctional boss headed out the door for greener pastures? And how many times have they learned that it’s a mistake to underestimate just how low the bar can be set.

Sometimes it’s hard to make a comparison—is the new boss really worse than the old boss? There are just so many different ways to be a dysfunctional leader.

For instance. Is it worse to provide bad leadership or no leadership at all? This is a tough choice, because each has its particular weaknesses.

Bad leadership generally involves forcing people to get behind something that is either stupid or wrong or both. Bad leadership does its best to squash anyone who has a different idea. For bad leaders, the problem is never that they are making bad choices for the organization—the problem is that you won’t sit down and shut up and stop disagreeing with them.

Non-leadership, on the other hand, leaves plenty of room for a variety of voices. The best sort of vision or direction you can expect from non-leaders is the things that they hope won’t happen; a non-leader will be happy if, for instance, he’s not taking any phone calls from people who want to yell at him. Since there is no vision or direction from the top, everyone else is free to do whatever he feels like doing.

In quiet times, that can work reasonably well. The problems come in times of crisis. When the bus is headed toward a cliff, and the passengers realize that nobody is driving, the next thing you see will be a mad dash for the steering wheel. Driving from the passenger seat is hard to do; therefore, the people most likely to try are those who don’t really understand the situation. In this way, non-leadership can often lead directly to bad leadership.

Bad leadership has the advantage of being predictable. Given a certain problem, you know the boss is going to say something stupid, but you can usually predict what stupid thing he will say.

This makes it easier for the organization to adapt and compensate. Most organizations have people who function as institutional enablers; they work to buffer the organization from the consequences of one stupid management decision or another.

It’s a tough line to walk. On the one hand, if you always fix your boss’s idiot mistakes, he’ll never learn anything. On the other hand, it’s no fun to live with the consequences of his idiot mistakes.

Good team players also try to enable a non-leader, but it’s much more difficult. Every once in a while, a non leader will realize that he hasn’t actually decided anything in days (or weeks, or years) and so he strides out of the office (or fires off an e-mail) in which he Makes Decisions. Where and what and how and why are hard to predict.

This process can throw institutional enablers for a loop. Nine days out of ten, the non-leader is happy to let someone else carry the ball. But, often as the ball is almost in the end-zone, non-leader will run onto the field, yank the ball away and do—well, who knows. Run it in for the score, run into the stands, throw it at the concession stand—there’s no predicting anything other than he will expect a big round of applause after he does it (Look!! I made a Decision!!)

Bad leadership can cause major dysfunction, but non-leadership can be the result of it.

For instance, we haven’t had much in the way of political leadership in Venangoland over the past several decades. Mostly we’ve had non-leadership—don’t rock the boat, don’t disturb the status quo, don’t try anything noticeably new or different.

That may be because we just haven’t had many people emerge who have had the vision or the skills to be local political leaders. Or it may be because the electorate hereabouts, for the most part, tends to greet new kinds of vision with as much enthusiasm as someone finding a pack of rabid weasels in their dishwasher.

In a business organization or government agency, the blame for bad or non-leadership rests squarely on the people who do the hiring. But when it comes to politics, we all get what we demand (or are willing to settle for).

Schools vs. The Real World

(News-Herald, July 10) In late June, the Associated Press released the results of their poll of US attitudes toward education. They sampled just under 1700 adults (about 50/50 parents/nonparents), which is statistically valid albeit tidy. And they forgot to ask me any questions.

Education still rates as a big point of concern. Only terrorism, gas prices, the economy, and health care caused greater concern (immigration, same sex marriage, abortion, not so much).

The headlines reported the survey results as “public thinks schools not preparing students for life.” That’s sort of correct. The public thinks that schools are pretty okay for college prep, medium okay for workplace prep. “Giving children the practical skills they will need to survive as adults” came up short for the greatest number of respondents.

I don’t disagree. I think there are several reasons it’s at least partly true.

Schools reflect society, and as a society we don’t really agree on what skills are needed to be an adult any more. We know that India and China are producing workers with enormous motivation and computer skills, but they also possess the skill of being willing to exist on wages that would not allow an American worker to live in a van down by the river.

We want our students to value hard work and honor and ethical behavior, but one need not search long and hard to find success stories that involve none of these qualities. One of the ironies of No Child Left Behind is that it’s a school reform spearheaded by the most successful scholastic-slacker-with-family-connections in American history. But never mind the White House; young people need only look as far as tv to see people in their early twenties whose fame and fortune is based on their willingness to make their poor choices in front of a camera. What “real world” skills are demonstrated there, exactly?

Those excuses aside, schools fall short in preparing students for the Real World because schools generally fear the Real World. Part of it is habit—it makes good sense to keep young children shielded from the Real World, and so we just keep doing it on through high school. Part of it is fear of litigation—every time a student interacts with the Real World, schools are blinded by visions of a thousand potential lawsuits.

When people interact with the Real World, there is always a possibility that Bad Things will happen. Schools are often less concerned with preparing students for that moment and more concerned with making sure it doesn’t happen on the school’s watch.

When listing problems as “most” or “not at all” serious, respondents gave the highest urgency to lack of discipline, fighting/gangs, and getting and keeping good teachers. We’re fairly low on Venangoland gang violence. “Lack of discipline” is vague enough as to be meaningless. Getting and keeping good teachers has been a nationwide issue for years; young teachers are leaving the profession almost as quickly as colleges crank them out.

We are disadvantaged here because we can’t offer the kind of juicy salary other areas can; our advantage is that we can offer things like juicy housing costs. But very few districts anywhere behave as if they serious about recruiting, training, and retaining the best teachers.

Local school districts will be pleased to note that the respondents gave much less urgency to issues such as “condition of school buildings” and “access to athletic facilities.”

The majority felt that schools are worse than they were twenty years ago. I’m not sure I agree; at the very least, I’m pretty sure I’m doing a better job than I was twenty years ago.

The majority also felt that if more students finished high school and college, the US economy would be better. I wish we knew why exactly they thought so.

Responders were 70-30 in believing that classroom work was a better measure of student achievement than standardized tests.

One of the few times that parents and non-parents split in the survey was the question of linking teacher pay to student achievement. Parents were 50-50 on the matter, while the general population was 61-37 in favor of it.

And 80% of the parents called their own children’s school “excellent” or “good.” That’s typical; people tend to say that their own school is okay, but all those other schools are messed up.

It would be interesting to see how a survey like this would play out locally. Perhaps local districts can include it when they start merger talks.

One More Column About Patriotism

(News-Herald, July 3) A love affair with one’s country is like any other kind of love affair—there are lots of stupid ways to get it wrong.

There’s blind patriotism. Like any other blind love, this is just an invitation to disaster.

There’s nothing wrong with patriotism as a kind of unconditional love. But there’s a big difference between “My country—right or wrong” and “My country is always right.” The first is loyalty; the second is stupidity.

We’ve made some mistakes, gotten some things wrong. That does not make us unique—we are not, for instance, the only country to ever institutionalize slavery. We are, however, one of the few countries to ever get rid of it on our own.

Monarchs, despots, tyrants, totalitarians—they all depend on a belief that the government is always right. We have always had the flexibility to change our collective minds, to move in another direction.

But that can only happen when people are able and willing to speak up and say, “I don’t think this is working.” Refusing to question the government is not love of country; it’s just blind obedience to the tyrant of the month.

We have always needed dissenting voices. They require a tolerance for a loud chorus, arguing and disagreeing, inefficiently tugging in many directions. We’ve been that way since day one. Our constitution is a cobbled-together mess of compromise and disagreement, and our government started arguing about it immediately, often in fairly vigorous, abusive and violent ways. Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” but he also said “George Washington stinks and this government is a bollixed-up mess” (I’m paraphrasing a bit).

It’s not patriotic to say, “My country’s wrong, so I’m going to leave and become a citizen of Slobovia.” Neither is it patriotic to say, “My country’s never wrong, and people who criticize it should be thrown in jail.” (We actually had that law under John Adams, but critics convinced the government it was wrong, and we got rid of it.) It is no act of love to say, “Oh well—if my spouse is driving toward a cliff, I should just not look ahead and not criticize.” You can’t fix what you refuse to see.

Blind patriotism often connects to ignorant patriotism. We Americans have plenty of stories about our history that we love to tell, and many are wrong. For example, neither “America was founded to establish government free of all trace of religion” and “America was founded to be a Christian nation” are both wrong. (I’m not getting into the details today, but feel free to start writing those letters.)

Our arguments about law and society are laced with “proof” that isn’t true. And our many attempts to transplant the tree of liberty to other gardens have been hampered by our lack of understanding of how it took root here in the first place.

Ignorant patriotism is like your daughter who brings home the fiancé that she met yesterday; she knows nothing about him, she “just feels” that he will make a great husband. Not a great plan.

Finally, there’s inactive patriotism. This is like the couple that gets married secretly; they have the piece of paper, but they never do anything about it and nobody sees a hint that they’re together.

Saying you’re a patriot doesn’t cut it if you used a lame excuse to get out of jury duty and you haven’t voted in ten years. We don’t even need to talk about what you’ve done for the entire country—our country is made out of many small places, each in its own way like the many slices of Venangoland. Our townships that can’t find enough people to serve in local office are suffering from inactive patriots.

Fourth of July is the great community holiday. You can celebrate most other holidays at home in your own way. Nobody celebrates July 4 at home in his own way.

That’s because patriotism means taking responsibility for some portion of your community. Patriotism is about being part of a larger body of people and so it takes a gathering, whether in Cranberry last night, Oil City tonight, or Franklin tomorrow, to properly mark the occasion.

If you want a worthwhile discussion of patriotism, never mind the question of whether ours is a great land. It is. The real question is what have you done to help make it great. You say you love her; what have you done about it?

Cutting a Wide Swat

(News-Herald, November 2000) I have long wondered how the name "Venango" made it to western communities in Nebraska and Kansas. Some folks have suggested that the Indians might have taken it west. The Ottawas, for instance, are noted in one source as ranging as faar eaast as Venango, Pennsylvania, and as far west as Kansas and Oklahoma. (They also lived at Mackinac Island in Michigan, giving us a slim but usable excuse to hold our qualifying round for Mackinac Island's stone skipping nationals.)

I have trouble accepting this explanation because "Venango" is usually presented as non-Native Americans' best guess at rendering a Native American word. So the search goes on. But while searching, I turned up something else. Let me introduce you to Samuel J. Crumbine.

Crumbine was born here in Venango County in 1862. As a young boy he would sit and watch local pharmacists mix various cures and practical medicine. At age 8, young Samuel was admitted to the Mercer Soldiers Orphan School. The interest in doctoring never left him; he eventually enrolled in the Cincinnati School of Medicine and Surgery, where he tried to make ends meet by distributing handbills for patent medicine. But after a year, he was out of money.

Crumbine headed west to seek his fortune, or at least enough fortune to finish medical school. By 1885 he had landed in Dodge City. His training and experience made him the most medically knowledgeable man in the neighborhood, so he opened up a practice. That put Crumbine in Dodge City at the same time as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. It was still rough territory, but Crumbine must have liked it because he went back to Cincinnati, finished med school, married, and returned with his wife to Dodge City.

Apparently Dr. Crumbine cut quite a figure out West. The "young feisty" doctor would appear in his Prince Albert coat, packing a six-shooter. Says a source, "he bullied his patients into good health habits, scolded victims of gunshot wounds (Why didn't you duck?), and generally earned the respect and loyalty of the townspeople."

But our native son's career as Kansas public health crusader was only beginning. His first crusade was to convince Fred Harvey's Diner in Dodge City to stop serving milk from an open pitcher. Small potatoes, you may say, but every crusader has to start somewhere.

Dr. Crumbine opposed pesthouses, the practice of putting victims of communicable diseases (like smallpox) in a building to recover (or not) while everyone else in town was quarantined in their own homes. This was hard on both public health and the economy (though the day after Thanksgiving might be pretty pleasant if everyone were required by law to stay home).

His stand against pesthouses led to a job as the head of the Kansas Public Health Board. In that job he pioneered food and drug testing. We take this sort of protection for granted, but back at the turn of the century Dr. Crumbine's department was discovering that one cure for "all nervous troubles" was 75% alcohol; another cure for several diseases had turpentine for its active ingredient.

But it was in his next crusade that Dr. Crumbine made his greatest mark. Noting the connection between houseflies and typhoid documented in the Spanish-American War, he decided to rid Kansas of the little pests. "Swat the fly" was the campaign slogan, and it brought out of the woodwork a teacher named Frank Rose who showed Crumbine his new invention: a yardstick with a mesh square mounted on the end. With clearly too much free time and too little gift for language, Rose had named it a "fly bat." Crumbine amended that to "fly swatter" and its immortality was assured.

The doctor also promoted the use of those little cone-shaped paper cups to stop the spread of tuberculosis from common public drinking cups. He took on the crime boss of Kansas City, threatening to quarantine the whole town to stop the spread of venereal disease, and generally annoyed politicians so much that he was eventually forced to resign. He moved on to run the American Child Health Association. There's an award given in his name every year.

Now Johnny Appleseed lived here very briefly and then went on to become a famous American loon. Here's a guy who was born and raised (a bit) here and who went on to do great things. If Johnny rates Applefest, surely Dr. Crumbine deserves a festival of his own, a giant fly-swatting festival. I can see it now; a giant fly swatter poised over Liberty Street, giant fly pageants, fly races, fly cooking contests-- I think the tourism promotion folks had better get on this right away.