Facebook Primer

(News-Herald, Feb 26) Facebook turned five years old this month. If you aren’t sure why you should care, this column is for you.
Facebook started out as a simple college project. Colleges have long collected high school pictures from incoming freshmen and slapped them together into a book that newly arrived students could use to answer burning questions like “Who is that hot girl in my chem. Class?” One young whiz realized that this was a perfect task to feed to a computer. At first the site was used by a few colleges and allowed only students and family. Then it opened the doors to the world, and now facebook is the pre-eminent social site on the net.
Is that successful? Well, the creator of facebook has reportedly been offered as much as a billion dollars for his slice of website heaven. Clearly some folks are impressed.
There are two fundamental differences between facebook and the previous cybersocial champ, myspace.
The first is that myspace is ugly. It’s messy ugly, as if a five-year-old threw some neon paint, glitter and monkey innards in a blender, hit puree, and tossed the results at a computer screen.
The second and probably more important difference is that myspace was designed to let you make new friends with a bunch of total strangers. Facebook is designed to let you stay in touch with people you already know, and that removes a whole layer of stalkery weirdness that myspace includes.
But what do you actually DO there?
Facebook lets you stay in contact with people. It lets you know what they’re up to, and it lets you tell the world what you’re up to, all in whatever level of detail you prefer. You write updates; all your friends read at will.
For instance. Charlie and I don’t talk all that often. But I knew when Charlie’s divorce was final and also when he started dating again, as did all of his facebook friends.
I also knew when Mark was getting over a cold, when Beth was having trouble sleeping, how Julie’s writing project is going, the time and date of Rick and Deb’s choral concert, and where George and Melissa live now.
I know what my old college friend’s kids look like, not in the one stiff portrait at Christmas way, but in the dozens of photos in the family album way.
Facebook provides, basically, the same sort of surface intimacy and steady detail that you get from living or working next door to someone.
For families this can be great. My daughter is an awesome photo queen who greets each occasion with camera in hand. There are thousands and thousands of her pictures on her facebook pages, and I can look at them any time I want to and leave comments. My son has an exceptional skill at locating online clips and sites, all of which he can share with me through facebook. I can look at them, send some back, and it’s like we’re sitting and surfing together. And none of this daily sharing has to be affected by the three hour time difference between us.
Find this kind of transparency more scary than heartwarming? Your facebook only includes what you put there, only shows what you want to be shown, and you have complete control over who your facebook friends are.
There are always caveats. The smart user assumes that anything on the internet is forever, and facebook is no different. And while you may be wisely discrete, there’s no controlling your friends. One of my former students has a facebook group started by her college friends for everyone who was ever a victim of her projectile vomiting.
Though indiscrete collegians still abound, we oldsters are the fastest growing part of the site’s boom (though in odd patterns—my college class shows almost 100 facebookers, but my high school class shows two—counting me). It’s easy to read, easy to understand, and there’s neither special freakish jargon nor bizarre social customs to learn. You don’t have to bare your soul and you certainly don’t have to use any of the extra bells and whistles and games that are available.
Those on dial-up are at a disadvantage (again). But this is an easy way to stay in touch with old friends, far-away family, and people you just generally don’t want to lose track of. Maybe it’s lazy, but I see nothing wrong with an easy way to make the world a little smaller, to give us all a few more close neighbors.

Googling Venango

(News-Herald, February 19)Every few years I report back to you about how the Venangoland web presence is faring. Googling “venango” is uniquely instructive because it is a very unique name. “Oil City,” “Franklin,” and “oil region” all turn up a gazillion hits that have nothing to do with us. I have not yet solved the mystery of the Venango’s in Kansas and Nebraska, but they are mere drops in the Venango-related ocean.
As a side note, I think it’s also cool that there are streets named venango in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles. And I am really intrigued to discover that “Venango” also exists as a surname. But I digress.
When I first reported on this almost a decade ago, googling “venango” only turned up a few thousand hits. Three and a half years ago (hey-nobody said I was on a regular schedule for this) we found 1,350,000 hits. I’m not prepared to interpret my newest results, but today’s google actually turns up fewer hits—a mere 1,140,000. This may have as much to do with increased google efficiency as with actual internet shrinkage.
If quantity is down, quality is up. The county website now sits at the top of the heap. This official website continues to be a model of how it’s done, with actual services like dog licenses. You can follow links to the “Invest Venango” campaign, a push to shift business spending back locally. And there even video of the latest commissioners’ meeting. Most local agencies are equally well-represented.
Also close to the top of the googlepile are the ubiquitous wikipedia entries. Wikipedia is a great idea, an encyclopedia that anyone with a computer can edit; once I finish this column, I plan to add the story of how my great-grandfather, Wallace R. Greene, personally discovered the Ark of the Covenant under the Eight Street Bridge. I think the whole wiki-world needs to know.
Some groups need to get up to date. The Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry had almost caught up to the present, but still provides a list only for events in 2008. For those who are particularly nostalgic, their other website, last updated in 1996, is still on line. Meanwhile, the “next meeting” for Focus on our Future is in January of ’08.
If I were interested in looking at birds (well, actually, I like birds, but I bribe them with assorted seeds to come close where I can watch them, so I guess I qualify as a extremely lazy bird watcher) I would enjoy Gary Edwards site, which provides a great deal of info.
That site is a rarity. Google is so well-organized now that you have to dig way down to find the curiously quirky sites, like the one that tells you which parts of the county get fluoridated water (fluoridation is no longer a Communist Plot, but part of the Corporate Global Pollution Conspiracy).
Googling also reveals that some developer nears Mars, PA, has poached our name for an apparently gated community down by the intersection of the Turnpike and I-79. Venango Trails offers ponds, acres of woods, bike and walking trails, and lovely Victorian homes. In other words, even as people carp and complain about how awful it is to live here, elsewhere people are spending buckets of money to build a replica of our area. I suppose there are two significant differences—theirs is much closer to crowded commercial urban sprawl, and way more expensive.
But I digress. It’s much easier to actually get things done on line than it used to be. You can find plenty of local real estate listings (including foreclosures). You can go to the Humane Society site and see what animals they have awaiting adoption. You can find a lawyer, oddly enough, with much greater ease than you can find a doctor. You can do a great deal of genealogical research, including searching through an increasingly large number of old books that have been placed in their entirety on line.
You can make local hotel reservations, and you can get involved in the sport of geocaching, an activity I promise to look into as soon as the ground is not cold and hard (say, June). This is, in fact, part of the beauty of being able to do so many things on line, because I just got my heating bill for February and if I’m going to spend this much money on warm air, I plan to stay right here and enjoy every last molecule of heat.

In Praise of Anorexia

This column scared me a little bit when I did the original research for it four years ago. I did a quick search before re-running it here, and see no reason to believe that it is any less true today than it was back then. If anything, the pro-ana sites have gotten more subtle and clever in their non-disclaimer disclaimers.
(News-Herald, January 2005) I should tell you up front that this week’s column is absolutely straight, that I am making up nothing, exaggerating nothing, inventing nothing. What I’m writing about is not news, but it was news to me (and so may be news to you) until one of my students showed me the extraordinarily scary world of pro-ana.
You’ve heard about anorexia and its cousin bulimia, eating disorders in which people (mostly women) slowly starve themselves in an attempt to erase what they see as gross, fleshy excess.
There are numerous theories about the cause of the disease—cultural worship of size 0 models, an irrational compulsion to be perfect, physiological chemistry gone haywire. Karen Carpenter is perhaps the most famous fatality, but I’ve known students who struggled with it all the way into their adult lives.
This is a behavior with deep roots. Only the ignorant would suggest, “Well, they should just eat and get healthy.” Sure. And if every single one of your senses says that you’re on fire, you stand still because someone else says you’re not.
Treatment is hard. The Harvard Eating Disorder Center says that of those treated, 50% recover, 30% make partial recovery, and 20% have no improvement at all.
Into this comes the pro-ana movement. Pro-ana’s and pro-mia’s (that’s for bulimia) reject the notion that anorexia is a disorder and that anyone needs to be treated. They assert that it is a lifestyle choice; one site calls is a spiritual path and discipline. Treatment is just society’s attempt to control and dominate the ana’s.
This is another movement that the internet has helped connect and power. A google search on “pro ana” turned up 32,200 hits. Many of those are “anti’s”—people who are speaking out against the pro-ana movement. And many sites disappear quickly, because web hosting services often remove them upon discovery. But the ones that are pro and still there, well—it’s stunning.
Here are some real quotes (often called “thinspiration”) from real sites.
“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.”
“Food hinders your progress.”
“One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh. Just the pure clear shape of me, bones. That is what we all are, what we’re made up of and everything else is just storage, deposit, waste. Strip it away, use it up.”
“Like a plant, surely the body can be trained to exist on nothing, to take its nourishment from the air.”
They salute and celebrate the strength of will, the enormous control that it takes to keep their food intake to a minimum. “We are the epitome of strength among a population of complacent, over-weight human beings.”
“For me, food’s only interest lies in how little I need, how strong I am, how well I can resist—each time achieving another small victory of the will.”
There are many message boards where ana’s share tricks, words of encouragement. They post thinspirational pictures, photos of fashion models like the barely-there Kate Moss.
One talks about how light and free she feels. Colors are brighter. Her head feels lighter; lights flash in front of her eyes. She has eaten nothing for three days. Other writers applaud her example. Another boasts that she hasn’t had her period in three months, proof that she is approaching her goal.
They share tips. Lists of things to do to avoid thoughts of food are on every site (and I saw sites in at least six different languages). There is advice on how to keep calories under 200 per day. One girl recommends canned chicken broth and another responds that you should buy the boullion cubes, which have 5 calories instead of 20.
There’s more practical coping advice. “Lie in fetal position and curl up. It helps your stomach stop hurting.”
There’s lots of advice for hiding anorexia, not because of shame, but because the rest of the world won’t understand, will try to control you, will try to break your will. There’s a continuing theme of becoming a shelled-up person, open only other ana’s. One site sells three-strand red bracelets as a sign of solidarity with other ana’s.
It’s tempting to take the hard line. I’m sure there are people that say that
if these loons want to destroy themselves, the gene pool is better off without them. I’m sure that none of those people are the parents of an ana.
I can’t imagine how scary it would be to discover your daughter suffering from this. The only thing worse would be discovering people cheering her on.

Rendell's School Consolidation Plan

(News-Herald, Feb. 12) Last week, Governor Rendell declared his intention to make 400 school districts vanish. Now, I’ve said that Venangoland needs four school districts like an octopus needs extra arms. But the governor’s announcement does not have me clicking my heels.
First, as seems to be typical of Smilin’ Ed’s proposals, there’s no hint of details about how this might actually work (see also: gambling money tax relief and I-80 toll). So this plan could be a real winner or a massive disaster.
The stated consolidation aim is to reduce administrative costs, but I have my doubts. Imagine four lemonade stands, each with one manager. I consolidate them to save money on managers—keep one, fire three. Only now with no manager on the sites, I hire a manager for each branch. And to get the benefit of buying lemons bulk, I need a procurement manager. And a secretary for the top dog, who now has to interface with his command structure. By consolidating badly, I go from four lemonade administrators to seven. Savings? Not so much.
In the ed biz, it’s potentially worse than that. Sometimes when a district administrator can’t do his job, he just hires assistants and consultants to do it for him. Savings? Even fewer.
Another key factor in consolidations is that they are usually coordinated by the people that we are supposedly going to winnow. Combine school districts, lemonade stands, or even, say, hospitals, and all the high-priced administrators stick around with new titles. When it’s time to cut payroll, it’s the worker bees that are shown the hive exit. Savings? Small. Loss of services provided to customers? Larger.
Different districts could feel different impacts. According to state figures, Cranberry Schools are 377 out of 500 districts in size, but 50 out of 500 in Administrative Cost Per Pupil (Greater Nanticoke SD is #1, with less ACPP than anyone else in the state). Franklin is 256 for size, 365 for ACPP. Oil City is 239 for size, 333 for ACPP. Titusville is 253 in size, but a whopping 404 for ACPP. Valley Grove is a teeny 428th in size, but ranks 243 in ACPP.
The most consolidated school district hereabouts? County-sized Forest SD comes in at 492nd place in low administrative costs per pupil.
The wild card in many districts is transportation, but since that’s a rural issue, I don’t expect any of the suited dopes in Harrisburg to get it. In some cases, such as Franklin/Valley Grove and Cranberry/Oil City, transportation is part of what makes a merger sensible. But if four out of every five school districts are going to be merged away, some serious transportation problems are going to emerge. All those massive administrative savings are going to be spent on buses (plus therapy for the students who will ride them for four hours every day).
School sports will become prohibitively expensive, given the amount of travel needed to get to the next nearest high schools. But Philadelphia schools will be happy to wrestle for money with 99 other districts instead of 499.
The biggest problem with the governor’s proposal, beyond its use of a broadsword solution for a scalpel problem, is that it puts the broadsword in the wrong hands. The best people to handle school consolidation in Venango County are not Harrisbugian suited dopes who couldn’t find Venango County if they were hungry dogs and we were a pile of sausage.
Smilin’ Ed offers other concerns. He figures that the 80% of PA districts that have fewer than 5000 students raise “questions about the diversity of courses offered to students.” I wish the state were this concerned about educational diversity when they’re suggesting we stop teaching everything except the material on the PSSA tests.
Consolidation is a good idea. We should do some. But a top-down mandate slapped together out of arbitrary ill-considered numbers backed up by no real plan is not my idea of how to do it. Want to save some administrative costs? Cut the PA Department of Education budget by 90%.
Not that what I think matters—nor anyone else, either. This plan has one more thing in common with some of Smilin’ Ed’s brainstorms. The state legislature will have a chance to vote on it. And if they vote it down, the State Board of Education is directed to go ahead and do it anyway.
Still, some have embraced it. In fact, my sister-in-law likes it so well that she suggests merging some states. Think of the money we could save by getting rid of a few governors.

Jesse Reno

Mike Dittman at Venangago-go a few weeks back posted a reference to local war hero Jesse Reno, which reminded me of this piece that saw print ten years ago. It[‘s reprint time!
(News-Herald, May 1999) My friend Richard brought to my attention the book Remembering Reno by William F. McConnell, recounting Jesse Reno’s life and military career. Reno was born in 1823 and raised in Franklin. His West Point graduating class (1846) included George McClellan and Stonewall Jackson.
24-year-old Lieutenant Reno was part of Winfield Scott’s force attacking Vera Cruz, Mexico, in March of 1847. The war with Mexico trained many young officers; Captain Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant distinguished themselves against Santa Anna.
In 1853, Reno surveyed a road to run roughly 280 miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Upon completion of the nearly three-month trip, Reno submitted his report to U. S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
Reno was thirty before he was able to marry. He and his wife settled into a fairly cushy posting at a Philadelphia arsenal for a few years, but then Reno was called up when Pennsylvania’s own President Buchanan decided to sic the US army on the Mormons.
The tension had been building since the 1846 settlement by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah; the Saints were determined to maintain control of their territory, while some other portions of the country were unwilling to admit a polygamous state to the union.
President Buchanan attempted to remove Brigham Young as governor of Utah; Mormon fanatic John Lee reportedly incited a band of Native Americans to kill 120 settlers bound for California.
Reno was part of the federal force sent to get matters back under control. The whole business might have turned ugly (or uglier, at any rate) except that commanding officer Colonel Alexander dithered until the troops were forced to dig in for the winter and devote all their energy to staying alive, far away from any remotely grumpy Mormons. By the spring thaw a peace had been brokered, and Reno could return to his family after nearly two years.
When the Civil War broke out, Reno was jumped from captain to brigadier general in order to serve under old friend Ambrose Burnside, who was serving under Reno’s old classmate McClellan. Reno’s first work under Burnside was successful; unfortunately, he next served under Pope in the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run.
I can’t look at the Civil War without being struck by how many men faced familiar opponents. Reno found himself battling Stonewall Jackson, former classmate and good friend, three separate times in his last months in battle. They would cross paths one more time. John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized Barbara Fritchie, a 90-year-old Union supporter in Frederick, Virginia, who waved her flag at Jackson’s troops. When one raised his musket to shoot, the poet gave her the line, “Shoot if you must this old grey head but spare your country’s flag.” Two days later, Reno passed Fritchie’s home and was invited in for a glass of homemade currant wine. Upon departure, the widow presented him with the large bunting flag from her window. It was that flag which would cover his casket at his funeral.
Shortly before the Battle of South Mountain, Reno met future President Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes. It was not a particularly pleasant meeting; the terms “sons of bitches” and “court martial” both came up.
A week later, while traveling up a line of troops, Reno was shot. At the rear he was greeted by old friend and classmate Brigadier general Sam Sturgis. “Hello, Sam, I’m dead,” said Reno.
Reno was thirty-nine years old when he died.
His wife never remarried; she died in 1880. Of their five children, only two lived to adulthood. Conrad was a prominent Boston lawyer. His brother Jesse was an engineer who perfected a plan for the construction of subways in New York City and invented the escalator. The brothers also supposedly introduced Dwight F. Davis to the game of tennis; you may have heard of a small cup named after him.
Reno, Nevada, was named after Jesse in 1868. Reno, Pennsylvania, was dedicated to his memory in 1865. According to Hildegarde Dolson, the Pithole to Reno railroad hired as its head engineer Reno’s old classmate and commander, Ambrose Burnside.
Reno is a good reminder of how much soldiers sacrificed. Not just the premature death in battle, but all they gave up before then: the opportunity for a home, a stable family life, the emotional cost of being pitted against old friends in battle. I think that all deserves at least a moment of silence before we light the charcoal on Memorial Day.

Good-bye, Midnight

(News-Herald, February 5) I didn’t have my first dog until I was an adult. She was a humane society dog. We named her “Buffy” as a not-particularly-imaginative tribute to her color.
Buffy was eventually stricken with a condition that made her unable to process food (it has a fancy name, which I’ve long since forgotten). A shot would bring her back to normal for a week or so, and then food would pass straight through and she would lie there miserable, essentially starving to death. I don’t really remember how many times I put her through that process; I hope it wasn’t as many as it seems. I believe I had some vain hope that she would magically get better. One of the last great kindnesses that my ex-wife did me was take Buffy to the vet the last time. It’s funny the euphemisms we use to make our responsibility easier; not just “we put him to sleep” but “we had to put him to sleep.”
Soon I brought Midnight home from the Humane Society. He was a peppy, friendly dog, two or three years old, a collie-shepherd-mystery dog mix.
Midnight was not an indoor dog. He viewed walls with suspicion, even outright dislike if they weren’t decorated properly. He hated floors and would search in vain for a place to put his feet down that didn’t bother him.
He liked the outdoors and was inclined to explore the greater Hannaville area. He was no dummy—he would get off his line, wander abroad and then come back and sit in his rightful place, wagging his tail. “Who? Me? Were you looking for ME? Clearly I am right where I’m supposed to be?”
We acquired a humane society cat. The cat taught Midnight how to catch chipmunks. When he was excited, he jumped straight into the air, like a kangaroo or mutant bunny. He ate grass. He liked to burrow and push his nose into fresh dirt. Midnight seemed to have some species identification issues.
He had two basic barks. One was his challenge, a “who the heck do you think you are” bark. This might have been helpful had he used it on strange humans, but he never met a human he wasn’t glad to see. This bark was reserved for unfamiliar dogs who ventured into his territory (defined roughly as “Planet Earth”). Once we moved to town, he used this bark on me when he caught me taking off in the kayak. His other bark was the Bark of General Distress, reserved for moments when he had gotten himself stuck.
He liked snow. He wasn’t so crazy about water. He hated the Fourth of July, or at least the fireworks portions; he would climb into the burrow he’d dug under his shed and stay there until the next morning.
He consented to walk the bike trail with me, despite my unwillingness to stop for proper underbrush inspection every two feet. He didn’t mind having me sit and read with him outside, though at times he was concerned that if I stared at the book for more than two straight minutes, I might forget he was there.
He found the neighborhood entertaining. The geese and ducks, the neighborhood dogs, the neighborhood children—he was happy to lie in the sun and watch all of them.
He had steadily mellowed with age, but last winter he finally started to slow down. I bought a space heater for his shed. The neighbors contributed some straw and he had more cast-off blankets than a Salvation Army collection box.
This last year he could no longer climb into his burrow under the shed. His back hips began to stiffen. He ate as much as ever, but seemed to be losing weight. He had trouble getting up. He was uncharacteristically easy to sneak up on; he either couldn’t hear or didn’t care.
Ten days ago he finally couldn’t get up at all. I took him to the vets, who gently suggested it was time (human doctors should all take bedside manner lessons from veterinarians). I wasn’t prepared. I almost didn’t have the nerve to stay with him, but it’s good I did. Anything I could have imagined would have been worse. It’s comforting to consider how easy his passing was, terrifying to contemplate how simply life can be gone.
It’s a hard call for every pet owner; when is it too soon, too late. Midnight was 16 or 17 years old. He was a good old dog. I’m sorry he’s gone, glad I knew him.

Newer Self-Esteem Issues in Schools

(News-Herald, January 29) I recently read yet another columnist complaining about the self-esteem movement in public education.
On the one hand, I agree completely with the arguments that lay a host of ills at the altar of self-esteem worship. On the other hand, complaining about the self-esteem movement in schools is like complaining about disco music on the radio. It’s not that criticism isn’t well-grounded—it just doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on today.
There’s no question that the cult of self-esteem was seriously misguided. It’s not that self-esteem is worthless—people usually make sure that they get what they think they deserve in life, and when they think they don’t deserve much, they can make a mess out of themselves. But studies have also shown that lots of street criminals have extra-super self-esteem. Large egos are not always good.
It has been years since I’ve heard any teacher seriously suggest that a student should receive special kid-glove treatment or manufactured success in order to preserve that student’s self-esteem.
True, education is still haunted by fake success and systems that are jiggered in order to make sure that little Johnny has only happy moments. But this no longer has anything to do with Little Johnny’s self-esteem. The average school is not worried that Little Johnny will feel bad—they worried that Little Johnny’s parents will feel bad. So bad that they’ll call their lawyer.
Years ago we heard about schools where there was no valedictorian because the administration didn’t want the also-rans to take a hard blow to their fragile self-esteems. Nowadays schools can expect phone calls from the also-rans’ moms and dads, threats of lawyers to follow.
Cut a student from the team? Expect a call. Send a student to the office for cheating? Expect a call.
A student in California was suspended from all school activities after he was convicted of fraud in federal court. He sued the school for cutting him from the ball team, claiming he had a future in pro sports.
In Florida, an 18-year old student mooned his teacher at a school event. The school gave him a suspension; his parents are suing the school.
In Connecticut, a student is suing a teacher who woke him up by making a loud noise in class. And there are more lawsuits than I can count filed by students and their parents against teachers who gave them failing grades for plagiarizing or not completing assignments.
One of my favorites—a student was caught hiring a hit man to kill his teacher. The school district expelled him. He sued the district.
Now, I’m a fan of accountability. As a teacher, I assume I ought to be able to justify anything I’m doing in my classroom.
I’m also a fan of parents sticking up for their children. Parents should advocate for their children. After all—if your own parents aren’t in your corner, who will be?
However. Advocating for your children sometimes means making sure that they learn some lessons for life. A basic lesson is that actions have consequences, that you can be forgiven for messing up, but you still have to suffer the outcome of the mess-up. Ten years from now, you don’t really want to be saying to your kid, “Look, stealing that car wasn’t really your fault. The police are just picking on you, and if you’re convicted, we’ll just sue them.”
School districts, for their part in a perfect world, should both make sure their actions are justified, and then steel their backbones. Too many schools suffer from a sort of pre-emptive paralysis, a search not for the right action, but the action least likely to provoke an angry parental phone call. A handful of belligerent parents make schools fearful of all the other good ones.
We have an advantage in small districts—we know which parents assume Johnny’s eternal innocence and who keep the lawyer on speed dial. If Little Johnny sets a classmate on fire, we know that giving Little Johnny a detention will just be picking on him. The down side of that is we will sometimes bend rules to avoid Dadzilla; some day we’ll get sued over that, too.
Venangoland is filled with good, decent, responsible, rational, loving parents, who must sometimes wonder what keeps us from taking some seemingly obvious steps. But I can assure you—we stopped worrying about the self-esteem of students years ago. Nowadays, it’s parental self-esteem we have to worry about.

Investing with Dopes and Crooks

(News-Herald, January 22) The folks who manage my investment portfolio sent me a nice note at the beginning of the month.
Actually, when I say “investment portfolio” I mean the little wad of money that I’ve been squirreling away in the teacher equivalent of an IRA. I confess to not being a great money manager, a confession that does not come easily because, like many people, I have a vague sense of shame floating over the monetary portions of my life. It embarrasses me that I am not, somehow, in better financial shape.
I have never undertaken a large financial transaction in which I did not lose money. My personal financial planning and cash flow management skills are slightly more impressive than a magic eight ball. I don’t want to be rich; if I can just get one more kid through college, it won’t bother me to eat macaroni every day until I retire at age ninety. But I will be embarrassed.
I started the retirement account years ago, and figured I had at least done that part right. Turns out I would have been better off burying the money in the back yard, and somehow I feel ashamed of that as well.
My retirement fund is run by one of those companies that somehow makes money move in and out of thin air, represented locally by a nice man who gets ahold of me every few years or so to make sure that, I don’t know, I’m still alive or something. They periodically send me little letters to tell me about the thin air that my money moves in and out of.
Now, given the economic meltdown, I expected that this newsletter might contain a little something extra like “Ooops” or “Sorry” or “Really, don’t freak out.” Instead, this newsletter included puff pieces on the order of “How to make the most out of family time” or “Our friend, the amazing toaster oven.”
Maybe they just weren’t sure how to proceed in the midst of financial chaos. Maybe they didn’t want to disturb me. Maybe it’s hard to type up the newsletter with everyone crowded together on the window ledge. I don’t know. But I feel moved to write them a note to help them with this daunting task.
Dear Nameless Investment Firm:
Perhaps you’re unsure what to tell me at this point in your charming quarterly communications. Well, here’s what I need to know.
See, even out here in the cheap seats, we’ve been able to get a vague sense of the causes of all this mess, and they seem to boil down to two things—people in the financial industry who are crooks, and people in the financial industry who are dopes.
So what I really need to know is, which are you?
Did you figure to make money trading in things that were, at best, shady and, at worst, unethical?
Or did you get involved trading in “instruments” that were created by the crooks and traded by people too lazy, dumb or unimaginative to see the signs of impending disaster?
Please pick one. Please note that the “We just didn’t know this could happen” defense means you’re choosing “dope.” The “We knew there were potential issues but we figured we could skate past them” defense means you’re choosing “crook.”
I understand that it’s hard to spin either choice. There’s no easy way to say, “Yes, we’re run by a bunch of crooks and/or dopes, but you should still entrust us with your retirement fund.”
It could help to follow that up with something along the lines of “Lessons we have learned from this.” But maybe you haven’t learned any yet other than “Welfare is only for people who make a really REALLY big mess out of their business.”
Still, you’ll have to trust me when I say that I can be forgiving.
After all, I haven’t been doing any due diligence, either. I didn’t study up on you, follow up on your work, or insist that your local representative talk to me more than twice a decade. I have been a lazy dope, too, so I can relate. True, it’s not my chosen profession to pay attention to these things, but it is my money and my life, and I handed it over to you, grateful, frankly, not to have to think about it any more. I know that I have to do better. It would just be comforting to hear that you know that you do, too.

Time for a Cardio Stress Test

This is from January of 2005. I reprint it here mostly as a reminder to myself that I should probably go get one thing or another checked up.
Here at the News-Derrick, we like to probe the frontiers of modern medicine and bring back updates for our readers. Or, to put it another way, last week I went to the doctor for a stress test. For those of you who’ve always wondered about that experience, today is your lucky day.
My trip was prompted by an informal check of my blood pressure at a handy grocery store blood pressure chair. I came in somewhere between “Yikes” and “Dial 911,” so I decided it was time to see a real doctor.
I don’t call the doctor often. I did not inherit this trait from my Grandmother Binmore, who believed that illness sprang into existence because a doctor examined you. My problem is that my Puritan New England upbringing leads me to believe that any illness or injury I have is because of some misbehavior. Going to the doctor feels a like some shameful combination of having to admit that I’ve messed up and asking someone else to fix it for me.
I’m old enough to know better, so I call the doctor when I should. Well, mostly. Okay, the last time a medical professional had taken my blood pressure was nine years ago.
After calling I read up on hypertension. Big mistake. As near as I can tell, hypertension has no symptoms, except that eventually it makes all of your internal organs squirt out your nostrils. Maybe I read that wrong, but it was too late. I was soon imagining that every headache signalled the collapse of my eyeballs.
My doctor is Will Fee, because you have to trust a doctor who sings. Will has a remarkably pleasant and personable staff. I am always impressed that medical folks can spend their days surrounded by sick people and stay pleasant.
The whole process involves chatting over some fine conversational points, like my dead ancestors and their medical problems. There’s no place like a doctor’s waiting room to meditate on your mortality.
The test itself involves a great deal of waiting. They take some pictures (I sat with my arms strung up in the same slings that Sea World uses to cart Shamu), and inject some dye into your veins.
Injecting is always an adventure for me—I have small weaselly veins that have been known to burrow and hide behind internal organs. A very nice woman apologized for having to stick and restick me, but she actually did very well. I still have unpleasant long-ago memories of some trainee who inserted the needle and ground it around as if he was trying to work a few scoops of Baskin-Robbins out of the crook of my elbow.
Once the dye is injected, I sat. Actually, stress testing involves a great deal of sitting. I read about 150 pages of a fine biography of Alexander Hamilton (by Ron Chernow—fine gift for the history buff). You’re also supposed to drink roughly a few gallons of water. If you’re scheduled for this, I suggest you bring your own; I love Will, but the water in his waiting room tastes almost as bad as Franklin tap water.
Eventually I arrived at the main event. A nice lady attached some electrodes to me, and then put me on a treadmill. Then I had elevate my heart rate. I’m not sure what the formula is—five times your mother’s age or something. Everyone congratulated me on being in fine shape, but all that meant was that the treadmill was inclined so that it pointed at the ceiling and the speed was set at “very frightened gerbil.”
Then, once I was shooting sweat waves out of my head just like in the cartoons, and my calve muscles were screaming that they intended to secede from my legs, I was notified that I needed to just skootch to the front of the treadmill and hold my chest against the picture taking equipment. This procedure requires three medical people—a doctor and nurse to holler encouragement and a technician to put her hand in the middle of your back and shove you the rest of the way forward. Then the treadmill is set back to “collapse in heap.”
I got to sit down, and Will asked me some questions that seemed odd at the time; on reflection, I suspect he was checking to see if my brain was, in fact, still getting any blood.
Then more waiting (another thirty pages) and a trip back to the Shamu seat for final pictures. My favorite part was discovering I would be radioactive for 24 hours. The picture taking is done with gamma rays. I waited the rest of the day for signs of turning into the Hulk. No such luck.

Franklin Needs a Mayor

(News-Herald, January 15) As you may have noted in last week’s paper, we’re in the market for a new mayor in Franklin
Mayor Heller did a nice job, and I’ll be sorry to see him go. It’s hard to find a good mayor for a small town, and I’m not exactly sure where we should turn for our next one. Retired folks might have more time for mayoring, but employed folks might be more in touch with the current flow of life. Age brings experience, but youth brings vitality and an eye on the future of the city.
I’m not convinced that we need someone with governmental experience. We have professionals to know about the nuts and bolts of keeping the city functioning. For mayor we need someone who can run a meeting and who can be the voice and face of the city. It would be nice to have someone who is positive and upbeat about Franklin, even nicer to have someone who has some vision about our future. In Venangoland politics we settle too often for people whose vision is to just kind of keep doing more or less what we’ve been doing. That’s not really enough any more.
I’m not sure who might step forward at this point, and really, why should we wait. Let’s draft someone for the job. I have a few thoughts.
Toby Saltarelli would make a fine mayor. He already knows a large percentage of the population of Franklin. His long years with Joy put him in touch with the business sector. His long association with Franklin Civic Operetta, particularly in managing and overseeing the building of the Barrow, put him in touch with the arts. His wife’s years working for the county put him in touch with that sector of government. And his years as a church choir director put him in touch with, well, Presbyterians, anyway.
On top of his many qualifications, I confess that I also like the idea of being able to walk into Leonardo’s most nights of the week and say hi to the mayor and his family at their table. That strikes me as small town in the best sense of the word.
I’d also be happy to draft Jeri Gent. She did exceptionally fine work for years heading up the Chamber of Commerce. She knows who to see to make things happen in Franklin, and she knows how to get things organized and promoted. She has a background that includes some big city expertise plus solid roots in our own community. She’s articulate, experienced and already knows a giant chunk of the local population, but she also has lots of connections to the surrounding areas that would be a bonus to Franklin in these days of intra-municipal cooperation.
I know I said No Government Professionals, but I would make an exception for Gary Hutchison. Gary’s experience as a county commissioner would give him a solid background in the business of navigating endless bureaucratic bologna, particularly state-level bologna, which I imagine is an all-too-present part of governing any city in the commonwealth.
Gary would inherit the fine old Franklin tradition of teacher-as-mayor (tip of the hat to Bob Olson). He would have the disadvantage of being a Democrat, which means that if my dog ran against him as a Republican, my dog would win (though I should note that my dog has declared that he has no interest in running for mayor).
But I’m not even at the end of my short list. Judy Grandelis has been a successful local businesswoman several times over; she knows how to organize and get things done, plus she knows the community inside and out. And while, decades ago, she and I were about the same age, I’m pretty sure while I got old, she did not. So she has the whole youth thing going for her.
Or Lou Slautterback, who can do promotion and motivation like nobody’s business. Lou knows every Franklin citizen who ever spent a day in elementary phys ed, and he knows every foot of street where someone might have ever wanted to buy a snow cone.
And every one of my candidates raised kids in Franklin, so they have that perspective as well. Oh, and the other thing they have in common is that I haven’t consulted any of them about tossing their names into the ring. This is a fun game anyone can play. Call someone and tell him or her to run for mayor today!

Mistreating Employees

(News-Herald, December 2003) There are many reasons not to treat employees badly. I’m not talking about moral or ethical considerations. If a manager doesn’t already understand those ideas, it’s probably too late to educate him. I’m talking about practical, business functionality type reasons. Treating employees badly is bad business.
First, there’s the whipped dog principle. You can beat a dog into submission, but the dog that you train to cower before you will never give you a warm doggy welcome, is never going to rush to your aid of its own free will. Some day you’ll need it, and it won’t come. And if you’ve failed to crush every molecule of its spirit, someday it will find a way to bite you in the butt.
Managing your employees by breaking them simply gets you spiritless, miserable employees. This is a particularly large drawback if your business deals with people; I can always tell when I’m in a store that’s managed this way because the service is lousy.
Other bad management techniques have more subtle ill effects. These bad management techniques get one simple message across to employees—management can’t be trusted.
Maybe a manager makes clear through his actions that he has more important things to do than help employees do their jobs. Maybe he proves himself erratic and unreliable. Maybe he simply turns out to be a liar.
Employees will probably cut the manager some slack, even beyond the honeymoon period. They may view his decisions with a raised eyebrow or a questioning glance. But eventually, once he uses up his slack, things will change.
People will put up with a lot from someone that they believe means well. That’s one of the foundations of a functioning marriage. You know I’m committed to our future together and that I love you very much, so when I bring home the gas-powered wall-mounted deer-intestine stretcher, you find it annoying, but not a serious threat. And I know that you love me and want the best for us together forever, so when you yell at me for buying that monstrosity, I know that I may have to sleep on the couch, but this will still be my home.
But once that belief in the good intention is gone, the world looks different. If I no longer believe in your commitment, everything is suspect. If you want to pick out vegetables by yourself in the grocery store, I start wondering if you’re also cruising the yellow pages for a good divorce lawyer.
The same principle applies in the workplace. People who don’t believe that the boss wants what’s right become more difficult to manage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I can believe my boss’s plan to achieve his noble goals is stupid; he can chew me out for what he feels is an error on my part. Those things can happen without my losing faith in his good intentions.
But once I no longer believe that my boss wants what’s right, once I stop giving him the benefit of the doubt, the whole work environment changes.
With the benefit of the doubt, employees back their boss’s plays. If a deadline suddenly requires extra effort, if plans fall through, if problems arise, employees just shrug, say, “Well, stuff happens” and pitch in.
But without the benefit of the doubt, employees start to scrutinize everything with suspicious eye, wondering if they’re being set up or stabbed in the back. Maybe the plan fell through because he wants an excuse to phase us out. Maybe that deadline requires extra work because he wants to teach us a lesson and put us in our place. Maybe it rained today because he’s trying to stop our picnic.
Hours are wasted on piddly complaints and what should be minor issues. Average bosses are simply annoyed by silly employee complaints. Really good bosses hear the real hurt and dismay behind those complaints. Really lousy bosses think that employee discontent is proof management is doing a good job.
Every little issue is perceived as a twitch on the trigger of a gun pointed straight at the employees. The workplace becomes tense, testy, cranky. Less gets done, and it gets done less well. It’s all well and good to tell people that they should stop feeling that way. You can tell someone hanging by his fingers from the side of a cliff to be more cheerful, too. But when people don’t feel safe, they don’t feel safe. You can’t order someone to have faith and trust.
Faith is reserved for God; imperfect humans are incapable of deserving it. What we have for each other is trust, which is lost or gained based on behavior, and once it’s gone from a workplace, it’s a long hard road to earn it again.

The New Year with Walt and Tila

(News-Herald, January 8) The down side of Christmas ’08 was that my son’s Hollywood bookstore job kept him from celebrating with my daughter and me. The up side was that my gift was a personally autographed copy of Tila Tequila’s book from a signing at his store.
Ms. Tequila is one of the new brand of celebrity, a young woman who has made herself famous simply by repeatedly insisting, via myspace.com and other media, that she is famous. It’s emblematic of our age; if you simply insist repeatedly and loudly that you are the greatest waffle juggler in Montana, eventually many people will take your word for it.
I received this treat in person because daughter Barbara and I made the trek west to join up with son Thomas for some family holiday face time. Family holiday gatherings are always fraught, but I have the advantage of two children who love and like each other. And despite the jet lag, busy schedules, and time-squeeze pressure, we had one other secret weapon—Disneyland.
I’ve never been to any kingdom, Magic or otherwise. And like a good curmudgeon, I was fully prepared to poop on Walt’s party, to be unmoved by Disney, the great plasticizer of pop culture product. But I liked it. It was fun. And not just post-modern ironic I’m-too-cool-for-this fun (the kind of fun you have with Tila Tequila’s book).
I’m not going to shill for Disney—they have that covered. But I noticed several lessons that any operation interested in tourism (such as, say, the Oil Heritage Region) can learn from Disney operation.
Total commitment. Nothing in the Magic Kingdom is just good enough to get by. For example, one tiny part of one minor attraction, with a handful of questions, tells you which Disney character you resemble. It is a simple computer program that could be housed on a pedestal next to a water fountain, but Disney puts it in the Beast’s library, a fully realized set from floor to ceiling.
Point is, nobody decided to make something that sort of kind of suggests the idea of the library without trying too hard. It is easy in any job to define “done” as “whenever I’m tired of working on it.” That is not a definition that leads to success. A good excuse is not the same as a good result.
It’s a mistake to do things halfway. The successful festivals in the area (Applefest, First Night) succeed because a group of volunteers makes a commitment to do what it takes. The not-so-great festivals flounder because there’s nobody behind them making that kind of commitment (“Yeah, we can, uh, put a couple of codfish on a card table and call it Codfest”).
Give the people what they want. And not what you want to give them. One of the great banes of small town attractions is people who plan based on what they want people to want. (“So what if people don’t like codfish. They should, so we’re only putting codfish on the table.”)
Simple example: People invariably want to eat. That’s why the combination of Franklin On Ice and a chili competition made sense. Yet there are some local events at which people cannot get food. That’s a mistake. At Disneyland, there is always food.
Details matter. The attention at Disneyland is mind-boggling, right down to artistically coordinated shingle styles on the lovingly constructed faux buildings. Disney’s world may be fake and plastic, but the difference between a cheap cartoon and a real creation is attention to detail. Again, Applefest and First Night are models, with attention paid to getting the little things right. I have heard too many planning processes involving phrases like “Oh, I’m sure someone will take care of that. It will just work itself out.” This is never a good sign. (If you’re a church group, substituting “God” for “someone” doesn’t help.)
People matter. The people doing the work, that is. At Disneyland, every person I dealt with treated me like someone they were glad to see, even people who didn’t have to “notice” me. And local employers-- if employees are grumpy and treat customers poorly, the fault lies not with them, but with management. (Hint: threatening and belittling them will not improve their performance.)
Can Venangoland be Disneyland? Bradensburg Road in an ice storm makes a lousy thrill ride, and the County Commissioners will never pass for Mickey, Donald and Goofy. But we can always learn from people who do the job as well as Disney.

Making a Difference

(News-Herald, January 2) Resolution season often raises the question of futility. Not just the futility of changing our own nature (“I will climb off this couch and become an Olympic athlete”), but the futility of individual action. People may feel this year, because of one mess or another, that in the face of economic collapse and general governmental bollixation, there is nothing one person can do.
There is a standard uplifting shiny sweet answer to “What difference can one person make?” Big groups of people are made out of single individuals, and if just one person brings along just one more person, then it grows and grows and suddenly we can all hold hands and change the world together. Cue the violins.
It’s not that I think that notion is wrong, exactly. I just think it’s beside the point. To debate whether or not one person can make a difference is like debating whether or not a person is going to breathe.
If you are alive, you are making a difference. The question that matters is “What kind of difference are you making?”
Every day you make choices. Every choice you make has consequences. The fact that these consequences don’t alter the course of Civilization As We Know It does not make them any less real.
If you choose to shop at one place and not another, that has economic consequences. If you choose not to shop at all, or to shop with a bunch of money you don’t actually have, that has economic consequences, too. Whatever you choose to do with your money, it has consequences, both for you and for other people. I remain endlessly amazed at people who do not spend money in a local store or restaurant, but who complain when it closes.
It’s not just economics. Organizations throughout the area go begging for volunteers, for people to help out. There is this notion that sitting on the sidelines is a neutral act, that it doesn’t make a difference. That’s wrong. If you could have stepped up and you didn’t, you have made a difference, and not a positive one.
Circumstances put choices in our paths. Sometimes we had some control over the circumstances, and sometimes we find ourselves unexpectedly plunked down in the midst of them. But wherever we find ourselves standing, we are making a difference. We can’t help it. We just have to choose the difference that we make.
Choosing to wish really hard that we didn’t have to choose—well, that’s a choice, too. But if you have the power and skills necessary to deal with the situation in front of you, then the choice is yours. Saying, “Well, what difference could I make, anyway” is a cop-out. Circumstances and your own capabilities have determined that you will make a difference. What kind of difference is it going to be? If you can step up, you must step up.
In a way, I’m defining responsibility. Some people try to duck their responsibilities. Some try to trade them for responsibilities they don’t really have. Some can see their responsibilities, but pretend those mountains just can’t be climbed. “That would be hard,” they say. The world is filled with people who simply aren’t doing their jobs, and every one of them is making a difference. Just not a good one.
In the course of most days, you meet people, even just to walk past them. At each meeting, you will make a difference. If you smile and are pleasant, that makes a difference. If you are gruff and cold, that makes a difference. If you ignore the person and act as if he doesn’t exist, that makes a difference. It won’t alter the course of that person’s life, but it will affect how he views the world, his life, or you. You can’t avoid making a difference.
It’s possible that, living in the small environment of Venangoland, we make a proportionally larger difference than someone who is one among millions. I don’t know. But I do know that how we handle the circumstances and moments and people that we encounter makes a difference, whether we want it to or not, whether we believe it will or not.
It’s typical at resolution time to reach for something outside the normal, to add some new element to our lives (“This year I will definitely go hang gliding”). But I remain convinced that there is more than enough material and challenge in our daily lives to make for a year’s worth of new resolve and positive difference.

Christmas Odds and Ends

(News-Herald, December 26) I am one of the few remaining people I know with an actual live (well, previously live but now dying in a seasonally picturesque manner inside my house) Christmas tree. The market must be shrinking because it has gotten progressively harder over recent years to track down a chunk of non-artificial holiday lumber in Venangoland.
After years of bouncing between road-side vendors, I’ve been driven to Home Depot. Apparently I’m not unusual; according to the Associated Press, Home Depot is the top seller of yule foliage in the US, with anticipated sales of 2 million trees. That doesn’t seem like a large number, but last year there were only 31.2 million live trees sold nationwide.
Other tree facts from the National Christmas Tree Association: In 2007, there were 17.4 million fake trees sold. Of the real tree sales, 23 percent were at chain stores, 21 percent at cut-your-own farms, 20 percent at garden/nursery centers, 12 percent from some lot, and 15 percent from “other.”
The NCTA wants you to know that real trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, that real trees are biodegradable while fake trees are not, and that there are more than 4000 US Christmas Tree recycling programs. They also helpfully note that almost all fake trees are made by impoverished Chinese laborers out of materials that may include poisonous lead. And on top of that, fake trees were first marketed by the Addis Brush Company, whose usual products were toilet bowl brushes. Or, as the NCTA website puts it, “the first fake Christmas trees were really just big green toilet bowl brushes.” I want to root for the real tree guys, but they do sound just a tad desperate.
I am not sure how a recycling program for trees would work. Old friends of mine would occasionally leave the tree up till it had dropped every needle, then repaint the remainder white and call it an Easter tree. I have never gone quite that far, by which I mean that I have never painted one of my dead, nude trees white. As far as recycling, I find the tree makes a nice June campfire.
Before you start mocking those of us who keep festive trappings up, I will remind you that Christmas, properly observed as a religious holiday, consists of twelve days (sound familiar?) of which December 25 is merely the first. Christmas is not over till January 5, so I will leave my lights up for a while yet, thankyouverymuch.
According to the federal agricultural census, if you want to rank states’ Christmas tree-inees by number of trees or number of tree-yielding acres, Pennsylvania is #4. By number of farms, we are #1. Alaska, Nevada, and Arizona bring up the rear in all three categories.
I like my live tree, though I can’t offer much of a rational explanation for it. I suppose that’s also true of the date. While most of us know of December 25 as a date co-opted from pagan celebrations, I have actually seen a theory for a more Christian background. Some ancient Jews believed that the prophets of Israel died on the day of their conception. So early Christians could have worked from the widely believed March 25 crucifixion date and come up with December 25 as Jesus’s birthday.
Neither chopped up fir foliage or dates of dubious origin serve as the oddest of seasonal factoids. Researchers claim that the holiday season is a peak time for making holiday whoopee, a claim supported by a reported spike in September births.
And no holiday tradition beats the Spanish habit, particular in Catalonia, of including a caganer in nativity scenes. For those who are unilingual, “caganer” translates roughly as “pooper.” Since the 17th century, folks in Spain (and parts of France) include one, off in the corner somewhere being indelicate. Children apparently enjoy this tradition as a nativity Where’s Waldo game.
Since 1974, American Christmas has also been marked by large gatherings of tuba players; Tuba Christmas has cropped up in over 200 cities with peak numbers of over 450 players.
Do we humans become ridiculous at this time of year? Perhaps, but I like to think that it just highlights our humanity at the same time that we are remembering and honoring the Divine. Tradition is also useful because we don’t have to argue about what we want to do or who’s in charge or what it all means; just smile sweetly and follow what we already understand.

Holiday Online Timewaster

I don't do a lot of site recommending here, but this is solid gold for television fans Of A Certain Age (i.e. over five). Virtually every tv theme ever, including openings and endings and , in many cases, variant forms from different seasons. When you need a break this week, here's a quick killer of time:


TV Theme Music and Songs

Christmas Stress, Wars, and Spirit

(News-Herald, December 18) The final stretch before Christmas is a time to settle back and really think about the meaning of stress.
Usual Christmas stress is a personal thing. It’s one of those take stock type of holidays that can make us panic, like learning that the News-Derrick is coming to take pictures of all the rooms in our house. There’s nothing like a holiday built around idealized images of home and family to help us really remember how non-ideal our actual homes and families are.
That kind of personal stress is old hat. The last decade has added a sort of community stress. It’s not enough to make sure that our own Christmases are perfect—now we have to make sure that everyone else is celebrating properly as well.
The so-called Christmas wars are only the most ridiculous manifestation of that. On the one hand we have retailers desperately trying not to alienate anyone (or their money) and behaving as if Holiday Season were a natural cultural event when it’s simply the result of ever-expanding marketing ploys, only slightly more deep than Swimsuit Season.
On the other hand, we have People of Alleged Faith insisting that Jesus deserves a place of honor in the appliance aisle. The notion that a Christian nation would throw itself into the celebration of Christmas would appall our most pious founders. The Puritan’s handled Christmas celebrants by putting them in the stocks, chastising them severely, and throwign them out of town.
I suspect that some people desire to have Christmas recognized commercially to salve the conscience. Maybe a lot of religious-ish signage will help me feel as if shopping for plastic doo-whingies actually has something to do with the birth of Christ.
But this year, even mindless economic activity is an uncomfortable pursuit. Just as we were (mostly) applauding ourselves for the coolness of Democracy, along come brutal reminders that much of our fate is in the hands of people that we don’t get to vote on. There is no election for stupidly stubborn corporate executives or selfishly dimwitted financial wizzes, and yet these bozos have put our collective future on the line without so much as a by-your-leave.
So the usual joyous spending spree is overshadowed by a vague financial uncertainty, adding more soggy fuel to a sputtering fire.
I have talked to people who, in the face of all this, despair of finding any joy in the season. Eternal optimist that I am (really, stop snickering), I believe it can be done.
I believe it can be done because, first, I believe we have rarely actually done it in the past. Too many people, when discussing the Joy of Christmas are talking about a fake plastic joy, a childish belief that we can have it all and pay no cost.
We like to talk about how this is the season where everyone can show love and kindness to his fellow man. Baloney, say I. Mostly it’s the season in which folks strike a short-term deal: you will act as if you like me, and I will act as if I believe you.
And then someone inevitably says, “If only it could be Christmas all year round.” Well, if it were Christmas as we Americans celebrate it all year round, we could raise the stock market back up on the strength of prozac sales alone.
But let’s turn that notion around. Instead of a hopeless wish to extend the imaginary state of manufactured Christmas grace to the rest of the year, let’s imagine what we really wished the rest of our year looked like, and then plant the flag of THAT bold conquest in the soil of this one day.
Do you have hopes and dreams for what you wish your life looked like? Don’t focus on what you fear it should be like; make this the season that you commit to those hopes and dreams.
Do you have relationships you want to mend or strengthen? Make this the season for starting the real work instead of faking it.
We can spend this season stressing about what we’ve lost, what we don’t have, where our world comes up short. Or we could focus on what we can build, how we can grow. When the plastic wears out, we have a chance to go for something real. This is the part of the story before the manger, in which conditions are far less than ideal, but nevertheless, there is still a beautiful new life waiting to be born.

Wizard of Oz and 50th

(News-Herald, December 11) This weekend Franklin Civic Operetta marks the end of its 50th anniversary season. That’s no small achievement. Theater takes an investment of considerable time and effort. Finding people to make that investment is a challenge; there are communities far larger than ours that can’t do it. It says something about Venangoland that not just one, but two theater groups can flourish here.
Time demands are big. Turnover is frequent; burnout not unheard of. There can be plenty of extra drama; nobody ever stepped out to perform on stage because he had a tiny ego.
Broadway producers have big budgets and their pick of thousands of talented hopefuls; community theater directors work with a couple of bucks and hope they will have at least as many auditioners as they have roles to fill.
Sometimes community theater can achieve greatness that you only get from gifted amateurs. Sometimes, not so much. Sometimes community theater can take bold chances, and sometimes it plays it safe. Sometimes it provides its audience with a challenge, and sometimes it goes straight for the theatrical comfort food. In fifty years, Civic has done all that.
Civic celebrates its fiftieth even as its theater, the Barrow, celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. It has been an impressive trip from a barn and a concrete slab to a fully functional showpiece of a theater.
In my universe, a great community theater production has a little bit of everything—something for audience to look forward to, something familiar, something they’ve never seen before, something they can only get from live theater. This weekend’s mounting of the Wizard of Oz is the perfect finish to the anniversary season.
Part of the work has been done by the writers, who have kept everything anyone ever loved about the classic movie, but added small twists, additions, and expansions (I always wondered why, at the end of the film, Miss Gulch didn’t just come back for Toto and start the whole mess over again). Musically, you get extras as well—the verses that you’ve never heard, and the long-lost musical number that was cut from the film in production.
Director Ted Smith has avoided the mistake of simply trying to reproduce the movie on stage. First, he has opened up the Barrow; the show blossoms right off the stage and fills every corner of the house. I would never have thought of Oz as an intimate theater-in-the-round sort of show, but the depth and space that this staging opens up (a whole new section of stage was built for this) creates a world that is both more intimate and at the same time broader and bigger than anything seen previously.
Second, there’s a whole new visual element to this Oz, particularly in the costuming. This Oz looks feels familiar yet new, comfy yet fresh (bolstered by the set work of Ed Ramage, possibly the single most valuable person in all of Civic). You recognize it and remember it, and yet at the same time, it’s full of surprises. The end effect is like seeing Oz for the first time and not the six hundredth.
The cast itself is outstanding. Local theater fans will see old favorites, including Jacob Krupitzer doing some of his best work ever as the Tin Man and Mike Leisher (the Cowardly Lion) proving once again that he is a great comedic actor trapped in a leading man’s body. Wicked Witch Jamie Agnello’s return to the local stage is absolutely triumphant, and Linda Leisher was born to play Glinda.
But audiences also get to see something new. RGHS student Molly Burkett’s Dorothy is the emotional linchpin of the show; her “Over the Rainbow” is the audience’s assurance that they are in good hands for the evening. And BCT newcomer Brett Sloan manages to both honor Ray Bolger and create a magical new scarecrow of his own.
These leads are absolutely superb, and they are surrounded by a crowd of munchkins, Ozians, flying monkeys, dancing ghosts (courtesy Jackie Fike) and winkies who make Oz come alive for just a too-short evening. A great orchestra led by Steve Luxbacher creates a lush carpet of sound, and an army of stage hands complete (literally) the picture. A small army of people of all ages from all over Venangoland stretch themselves and the beautiful theater to bring a great finish to the anniversary year.
Word of caution. Tickets are in short supply, but rumors of a sell-out always start way before it actually happens. Call for tickets. You don’t want to miss this one.

Living Where You Work

(News-Herald, December 4) Personally, I agree with residency requirements.
My first reason is the obvious one. If you are paid by the taxpayers of a particular city, township, or school district, the money that those taxpayers give you should go back into that community.
You should pay taxes there. More than that, you should do your shopping there, eat in restaurants there, buy your gas there, drop your change in the Salvation Army bucket there, pay your parking fines there.
I don’t care if it’s good economic times or bad—those of us who are paid with local tax dollars should be using those dollars to prime the local economic pumps as much as possible. Local taxpayers support us. We should support them.
But there are reasons beyond the economic for local employees to have local addresses.
I’m convinced that one of the ills of our culture is the distance that has grown between people who make decisions and the people who bear the brunt of those decisions. Giants of Wall Street can play stupid games with other people’s money without ever having to face those other people. CEO’s don’t have to explain their obscene pay packages to either their employees or the customers who foot the bill.
One of the advantages of small town life is that we see each other in a variety of settings. A public official can’t hide behind an office door and a press release; he’ll get a chance to explain himself in the grocery store, at the ball game, in the choir loft at church.
It provides unparalleled accountability for both sides of the coin. If you know you’re going to have to account for your choices to your friends and neighbors, it gives a whole other perspective on the decisions you have to make. Knowing that your mistakes will come back to haunt you—for years—is great motivation to try to make fewer mistakes.
And members of the public have no excuse for not making their voices heard. If you didn’t let a public employee know your reaction, whether it was good or bad, there is no excuse. If the public figures don’t know what you think, that’s nobody’s fault but your own.
Granted, this kind of localized dynamic is never perfect. Some public officials can be unremitting jerks, regardless of public reaction (the plus here is that, when you get in trouble, all you have to say is “It was Officer Jerkface” and everyone says, “Well, say no more”). And some members of the public have trouble telling the difference between “being heard” and “being obeyed.”
I have known teachers who didn’t want to live anywhere near their students. But I believe it’s a great attitude adjuster to teach students as if the might be your neighbor, or grow up to be your mechanic, plumber, lawyer, or colleague. All public employees should put more than their money back into the community that supports them; they should also contribute sweat and time and effort, and young people in particular should see their teachers doing so.
I recognize there are limits. People on the public payroll often have spouses, and those spousal units have residency requirements of their own. It’s also true that selling a previous house to move into a new neighborhood in our market can be an exercise in prolonged economic suicide.
So while I’d like to see a residency requirement for all tax-supported jobs in our area, I’m realistic about the practical obstacles.
And, of course, I’d never require anyone to live in Cranberry, that downtrodden land of totalitarian tyranny run rampant, where Big Brother suppresses people’s God-given right to fire howitzers at 3 am and erect carcass and car-frame sculptures on the front lawn.
Thank goodness so many outspoken citizens have taken every opportunity to get the word out, from ranting at public meetings to erecting signs. Cranberry is an awful, awful place.
It’s an artful piece of PR. Were I resident of Cranberry, I might be tempted to brag about the growing tax base, the booming business district, the new school and hospital facilities, and the fact that Cranberry, by population, is the modern center of the county. Not to mention lots of pretty countryside.
I would, in short, be thumbing my nose at Franklin and Oil City instead of at myself.
But that’s okay. Since Venangoland is one big community, I see no reason that people who are scared away from Cranberry can’t settle in Oil City or Franklin.

Gratitude 08

(News-Herald, November 27) Americans don’t always do gratitude well, and Thanksgiving comes at a particularly challenging time. The weather is turning harsh and the days are shortening. With election results only a few weeks old, some percentage of the population is always warning that America Is About To Be Destroyed.
And yet, after over two centuries of electing supposedly evil, incompetent men (the last President to be elected without receiving similar invective was George Washington, and even he had his detractors), the Republic still stands.
Perhaps that’s something to be thankful for as Americans—that what we imagine as The Worst can happen, and yet life goes on and we can all survive and thrive.
Governments promise “Give us lots of power and we’ll insure that Bad Stuff will never happen.” Of course, it’s not just governments that make that empty promise. Lots of individual humans try to live by the same principle—if I do X, Y and Z, then no Bad Stuff will ever happen to me.
It’s good to take that kind of personal responsibility, certainly better than people who live by the rule “I’ll make any choice I feel like, and the consequences should not be my problem.”
But it’s a mistake to believe that with total control of your life, you can guarantee it will turn out exactly as you hope. First, you can’t have total power (other people and disease, to name just two forces you can’t control). Second, even if you have it, there’s no guarantee that things will turn out as you hope.
I know you can find people who will claim to have done it. “I’ve eaten a box of saltines every day and never had a moment’s sickness” or “I always listen to my mother, and I’ve never been hit by a truck.” Which is just another way to take personal credit for the luck and grace in one’s life.
This brings us back to my first point: Americans have trouble being thankful. We prefer to believe that we have earned every good thing in our lives, that we don’t owe anybody anything.
Since it’s Thanksgiving, let’s consider what the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock would think. They would think that “we don’t owe anybody anything” is exactly backwards. I don’t have room for their long answer, so let’s shorten it to this simple principle: God (and therefore the world) doesn’t owe you squat.
By all rights, the Pilgrims should have been steamed. They could have been standing there, shaking fists at heaven. “God, first you suckered us over to this dump, and then you killed our friends and family, half our entire group,” Brother Grumpy McPilgrim could have shouted.
But the Pilgrims, dour and stern, never believed that they deserved better, that they had earned easy treatment by God. If anything, they believed that the Almighty had let them off easy. And so, instead of being angry about what they had lost or self-satisfied about what they had achieved, they were grateful for what they had. They took focus off what they had lost and put it on what was still strong and alive and growing.
It’s trite but true; there is always something in your circumstances to feel unhappy about, and always something to be thankful for.
Despite the occasional frustrations, I’m thankful to be doing a job I love. I’m thankful that 99% of the people I deal with are likeable and decent. I’m thankful that I’m reasonably healthy.
My son claims that I am overdue to mention him and his sister in this space; today seems like a fine time to remedy that. I am grateful for both my children, grateful for how much they love each other and their parents and the rest of their far-flung family.
I could be grumpy about how far away their trails have taken them for the time being (and some days I am), but mostly I am thankful for their courage and their adventurous spirits. I am awfully proud of them, and while it takes some sacrifices of time and space right now, I admire their willingness to stretch in pursuit of their dreams, how much they have grown up and keep growing. At the same time, I am thankful for cell phones and the internet.
We have our full share of whiners and doomsayers in Venangoland, and they have plenty of material to feed their carping. But today of all days we can be thankful for the good parts, grateful for what’s alive and strong and growing.

Holiday Season

(News-Herald, November 2003) Time now to enter the holiday season. Really, finally time—I do my best not to acknowledge any pre-Thanksgiving Christmas activities.
I remember Christmas. I’m sure many of you middle-aged or older folks do, too. I’m not sure what younger people are going to remember when they grow up.
There was a time when it was kind of fashionable to complain about the commercialization of Christmas. Now it hardly seems worth mentioning; Christmas has been swallowed up like a rabbit going down an alligator’s gullet.
In stores, the Christmas displays go up when Halloween items go down. Thanksgiving, once the opening salvo of the Christmas season, is now just a small speed bump on the rocket train to Consumerville. Thanksgiving has been dropped from the mainstream of consumer advertising; Lord knows, if we spent too much time reflecting on what we were truly thankful for, it could occur to us that buying a bunch of stuff might not be the highest, finest expression of the human spirit.
And of course I’m in error to refer to Christmas anyway. In an attempt to broaden commercial appeal, we now lump it with Hannukah and Kwanzaa and National Pickle Day and heaven knows what else into some vague sort of Be Nice and Buy Stuff season.
It is now “the holidays” or “the holiday season.” Christmas has literally become the generic holiday, stripped of every speck of meaning or purpose, except of course to buy stuff. God bless all the music programs in the area that present Christmas concerts instead of “holiday concerts”—may they have large, appreciative audiences until the day the ACLU comes to cart them away.
And poor Santa, still the most shamelessly exploited pitching device in advertising; in recent years the American flag has given him a run for his money, but the usually big poorly bearded guy still leads the pack. Santa pitches everything from soft drinks to furniture and barely bats an eye. In a way, I’m thankful for his existence as a crass commercial symbol, because otherwise I’m afraid we might be treated to the spectacle of, say, the three wise men bringing a twelve-pack of Coke to the manger while Mary decides she really needs to rest by kicking back in a La-Z-Boy recliner.
I have thought for years that it was time for a Take Christmas Back movement, but I think we’ve all been too busy shopping to organize it. Perhaps it’s the kind of battle that can only be fought guerilla-style. So let me offer some possible acts that you can commit on your own to help reclaim the season.
Turn off the TV. At least some. The constant stream of advertisements contributes to the debasement of the season. Even if you’re watching a decent and respectable holiday program on the tube, every 42 minutes of program comes with 18 minutes of advertising.
Would any of us really, seriously announce, “I thought we’d sit down and get in the mood for Christmas tonight by watching a half hour of commercials.” I doubt it. Not that I don’t appreciate my seasonal tv—the original Grinch and Rudolph are must-see’s in my home. But the beauty of technology is that I can now watch those on tape or dvd without a barrage of sales pitches along with them.
Enjoy local Christmas stuff. There are plenty of real live people making real live Christmas stuff happen right here in the county. Franklin’s Light up Night is such a great spectacle that I can just about forgive it for happening before Thanksgiving. Franklin Civic Operetta’s annual presentation of Messiah highlights along with some more modern Christmas music makes a great night of musical decorating, like a gorgeous Christmas painting in sound. Every high school in the county offers seasonal musical treats as well. None of these events include commercials.
In addition, the vast number of churches in Venangoland guarantees a wide assortment of Christmas events to suit just about any taste. I know there are some folks who get uncomfortable with talk of God and Jesus and stuff, but in all fairness, They were there long before Santa and Coca-Cola.
Plan to extend the season in meaningful ways. At this time of year, many many groups decide that it would be nice to go sing carols for shut-ins or at an old folks home. If you have the urge to spread that holiday cheer, that’s a good thing. But while you’re at it, why not make a commitment to come back and visit in February or March, when winter is dragging on and the Christmas Outreach Season is long past.
Remember—money can be replaced, but the time you give to someone is irreplaceable, and therefore the most valuable gift of all.