Friday and Other Bad Songs

(News-Herald, March 24) Perhaps you don’t spend much time on the interwebs and so missed the latest contribution to American culture.
A thirteen-year-old named Rebecca Black received a special present from her folks—a two thousand dollar session with a production company that helped her create and produce a hit-ready pop song with accompanying video. The video was, of course, posted on youtube, where it had at first a few hundred hits, then several thousand, then a gazillion as carbon based life forms all over the earth lined up to experience what has already been called one of the worst songs ever. (To be accurate, as of Tuesday, March 22, Black’s video had 33 million views after less than two weeks. For comparison, Lady Gaga’s most recent hit video was up to just under 26 million views.)
Was the song that bad? Has it, as one iTunes reviewer claims, “ruined the meaning of music forever”? Hyperbole, perhaps, but, yes, the song is pretty bad. Black’s vocals are auto-tuned well beyond the range of robot singing, but there are far more famous singers doing the same. What sets the hit “Friday” apart is its special lyrical flair.
First, our young heroine wakes up and goes downstairs to eat a bowl of cereal (“Gotta have my bowl, gotta have my cereal, seein’ everything, the time is goin’”). By the second verse, she is at the bus stop where the approach of her friends in a car raises a more stirring dilemma: “Kickin’ in the front seat, sittin’ in the back, gotta make my mind up, which seat can I take?” Eventually she arrives at the climactic section in which she observes that yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and after that comes Sunday.
All indications are that this is entirely serious, but you can be forgiven for suspecting it’s a giant goof, because Rebecca Black’s “Friday” belongs to a special category of bad song. People have been trying to parody this insta-hit, but it’s simply not possible because the song is already its own parody, a song so dumb that nobody could possibly make it more ridiculous.
Not every bad song can achieve such invulnerability. “Achy Breaky Heart” may be an awful, awful song, but it is totally vulnerable to mockery (eg “Don’t play that song, that achy breaky song…”)
To mock something one must take its most notable characteristics and exaggerate them until they become silly. An unmockable song has been pre-ridiculified. Take “MacArthur Park”—what can anyone do to worsen a lyric like “Someone left the cake out in the rain, and I don’t think that I can take it, ‘cause it took so long to make it, and I’ll never have the recipe again.” (Plus, for good measure, “Oh noooooooooooo!”) And “Stairway to Heaven”—“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”??
The first time I heard “Wanna put my tender heart in a blender, watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion,” I actually laughed aloud because I thought someone had written a hilarious parody of overwrought emo-boy angstiness. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that “Inside Out” was a real song and a real hit.
Neil Diamond could be accused of having a parody-proof style, but that might not be fair. Still, I defy any Diamond fan to defend the lyrics of “I Am” in which our highly emotive singer declares his deepest feelings and moans that “no one heard at all, not even the chair.” Could anybody possibly make that any sillier? (Maybe, but “ottoman” wouldn’t fit in the line.)
(We could argue that nearly the entire output of the disco era is too ridiculous to be mockable, and I might have trotted out examples except that I don’t really want to revisit disco. Living through it once was sufficient.)
But before curmudgeonly elders start the old, “They don’t write songs like they used to,” I should point out that ridiculously bad songs have always been with us. Practically everything Mantovani recorded makes me suspect that he was giggling at the massive joke he was playing on the music biz. And for fans of the big band era, all I have to say is, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamsy divies.”
Even the classical music whiz Handel calls on a chorus to declare with great stentorian seriousness, “We like sheep.” So don’t feel bad for Miss Black. She has lots of company. Also, her song is making her about 24 thousand dollars a week.

Rex Mitchell

I first encountered Dr. Mitchell when I was in seventh grade at Junior High District Band. He was the guest conductor, and while our home directors regularly made their peace with the motley assortment of musical abilities they faced, he was not so interested in compromise.
Most of us had never encountered someone who was so serious about music who wasn’t our regular teacher. It wasn’t that he treated making music as grim or joyless, but he treated it like it was something important. We played one of his newer compositions in that concert. It was “Song for the Young,” and like many of his pieces it became a popular standard of programming in the band world. For the next fifteen years I think I played “Song for the Young,” somewhere, every year.
Rex was not afraid of a tough crowd. He did guest conducting gigs, which have to be the toughest in the band director world. You walk into a building and for a few days take over a group of teenagers, many of whom are fiercely loyal to their regular director and his way of doing things, and who spend much of their rehearsal time thinking about lunch, homework, and that cute member of the opposite gender sitting over there.
Rex had to know all that—he had teenagers of his own—but he didn’t approach young musicians with the faintest hint of “Well, you’re only high school kids.”
Instead it was the students who asked (quietly, indirectly), “What do you want from us? We’re just kids!”
Rex’s reply (quietly, indirectly) was, “I want you to play as well as you possibly can, because it matters.”
Dr. Mitchell’s musical fingerprints are all over this region. For many years you couldn’t swing a western Pennsylvanian cat without hitting a band or choir director that he had trained. They were not only strong and talented educators, but also a network, like a group of people who had belonged to a select fraternity, a kind of Mitchell mafia. For years many of the players who had first worked together in his seminal Lab Jazz Band at Clarion continued to work together as a grown up dance band.
He was a talented performer in a small town setting, which meant that he could find himself working with other musicians well below his ability. He once hired three of us who were core members of a local Dixie band to work with him for a party at Rockmere. He told us to just use our usual arrangements and he would try to fit in, and then proceeded to play rings around us. He could have been a diva, and he could have shamed us by musically upstaging us, but he was gracious and classy. What could have been scary or intimidating for us ended up being a great deal of fun.
He was a solid composer of works for band—not an easy field to make a mark in. In 1971 he composed “The Silver Cornets” march for the Franklin town band. We still play it at our concerts every summer, and so do many other bands across the country.
And if none of that had been true, he still would have been the man who put together the Venango Chorus and the jazz band concerts in Justus Park. The chorus has given a great outlet to so many area singers. And very few people could put together a band of that caliber; very few performing groups could fill that park with so many appreciative audience members.
Venangoland is not always a nurturing environment for the arts. Some folks would rather take a football to the gut than sit through a concert or walk through an art exhibit. And even some of the same people who will sit and applaud a concert will go home and call the arts an unnecessary frill.
But men like Rex Mitchell (and Bruno Woloszyn and Ed Frye and Carl Brozeski and Bob English) single handedly improve the quality of life here for all of us. Rex gave us the beauty and energy and joy of his own music, and his energy and passion in energized others. His gift helped elevate the gifts of others, both musicians and listeners. We are poorer for his passing, but richer for his time here. He has left his community a legacy of music and musicians, and we will all reap the benefits for years to come.

Corbett's Budget Message to Teachers

(News-Herald, March 10) My kids hate it when I write about politics. But Governor Corbett’s budget address this week hits too close to home for me to ignore.
Much of his speech I applaud. The Commonwealth has been cobbling together odd patches of federal handouts and stimulus money tacked onto one of the worst business and corporate tax structures in the country. PA taxes have managed to be both oppressive and ineffective, squeezing the blood out of some enterprises while other major corporations manage to profit from the pockets of Pennsylvania consumers without returning a single cent to running the state.
Pennsylvania needs to live within its means, and has needed to for a while. It also needs to stop nickel and diming its people into oblivion with new hair-brained schemes like turning I-80 into a toll road.
Some of his speech reads like same old, same old politics. A lot of the money doled out to various local projects has been cut and compressed, the wide and varied plethora of granting bodies trimmed down. Corbett says under the new system, “Instead of individual favors we're trying a market approach. Economic development agencies and providers will compete for taxpayer dollars. If you have a winning idea -- you'll win our backing.”
To which I say, “Um, yes, right, sure. ‘Winning idea’ is a completely objective measure, and I’m sure it will be judged on a completely level playing field. I’m sure places like Venango County will have just as good a shot as Philadelphia.” Corbett’s budget talk did not at all address the balance between rural Pennsylvania and the Big Two, the process by which Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regularly suck the blood from the rest of us. That was a little discouraging.
But nothing was as discouraging as Corbett’s prolonged swipe at teachers. I’m not exactly sure when in the past few weeks that teacher-hatred became the flavor of month; I’m pretty sure that only Charlie Sheen has kept it from the very top of the news cycle.
I absolutely agree that teachers should not be exempt from the sacrifices faced by most Americans (that is, those that are not filthy rich bankers and CEOs). But the sacrifices proposed for education are not on that order; they are proposals for gutting teaching as a profession and with it, public education.
The bill currently making its way through Harrisburg (HB 855) proposes the end of tenure and seniority. Under this proposal, school districts may declare themselves financially strapped. They don’t have to prove it, and they don’t have to make any other efforts to trim their budgets—just have a public meeting at which they declare their financial distress. Then they may fire whichever teachers they wish to fire.
Under these rules, people considering a teaching career face one of two possible trajectories. Either they will work for a few years and then be fired out of the profession, or they can work a full career at wage levels that won’t support a family. How many people qualified to do anything else will choose teaching as a career if it is, as budget mavens like to say, unsustainable? It is theoretically possible that school districts will say, “Damn the cost—we want to compete for the best teaching staff around,” but I wouldn’t bet my career on it.
Yes, others are struggling. But making more people struggle doesn’t build prosperity.
Corbett says the school system’s obligation is to child, parent and teacher—in that order. His answer is correct but incomplete. Once again, we’re discussing public education as if the public are not stakeholders. But even people without school age children have a need to live surrounded by, working with, and dealing with well-educated people. Public education is not a public-funded private school system run for parents; its benefits are as widespread and universal as roads. Corbett would like to see vouchers, further guaranteeing non-parents no educational voice.
Why the selective application of sound economic principles? Corbett is right to believe that businessmen and corporations will not do what they do if the state makes it economically useless and difficult to do it. How is that different for teachers? Teaching remains one of the best jobs in the world. If I won the lottery this weekend, I would still be in my classroom on Monday, but you can’t feed and clothe a family with job satisfaction. I hope that one day I’ll be replaced by someone who would also like to make it his life. It will be sad if nobody with real passion or ability can afford to do that.

Venangoland Politics On Line

(News-Herald, March 3) Like many fans of local politics, I’ve been surfing on over to the venangopolitics.com to see what the new political website has to offer to the local internet landscape.
One of the most basic purposes of the internet is to provide people with an opportunity to say things anonymously that they would never say openly (because doing so would probably get them punched in the nose). This site manages that quite well, though the mastermind behind the site backed off the more obvious slander and libel once he (or she) was called on it. But it still showcases a nice big pile of axes and a thick stone to grind them on.
There’s a type of poster that one finds all over the internet—let’s call him the Righteous Crusader. The not-brave-enough-to-state-his-name operator of VP fits the profile. Righteous Crusaders see themselves as being practically the only people wise enough to see the Truth, and they act a little paranoid about being hunted down by murky mysterious opponents. Mr. VP duly notes that there are people who probably won’t like what he has to say, and ominously reminds us that The Media isn’t telling us The Whole Truth. Mr. VP expects all submissions to come with a name and phone number attached. Mr/Mrs VP’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, though the drumbeat that is raised on the site is a familiar one that gives even the casual student of Venangoland politics a good idea of who is on the short list of authorial candidates.
There’s a place for folks to chime in; the first few posts there are to point out inaccuracies in the municipal information listed, some comment on the value of the site itself, and a few make observations (featuring random spelling) about local politics. So far only one of the 146 people running for County Commissioner has posted his info, but others may yet emerge. And so far VP has delivered its promise of weekly articles. The current one about the county pension fund is reasonably well-researched, if not particularly well-reasoned.
There are what supposed to be connections to local political groups on line, but these are exceptionally sketchy. In this, Ms VP is blameless, because Venango County political groups remain blissfully oblivious to the internet.
Venango County Republicans have a multipage site (www.republicanvenango.com), including a calendar of useful information about the election season. For 2010. The site has no actual content to speak of; certainly nothing that would pass for a statement of what local Republicans see as issues or proposed responses to them. The site itself has a cobbled-together look, perhaps because it appears to have been assembled on wix.com, a set of free website-building tools popular with many teenagers.
It could be worse. I was going to make a joke about Venangoland Democrats being so out-of-touch that their only web presence was an ugly old empty MySpace page. Then I went looking for them on line and found nothing but… an ugly old empty MySpace page. The Venango Young Democrats have a facebook page with no information and three “likes.”
In other words, in an age that gives organizations an unparalleled opportunity to communicate their message to the people, an historic chance to let voters know what they stand for, the two major parties in the county have used that tool only just enough to embarrass themselves.
The Libertarian and Green Parties—those great RC Colas of the American political grocery—provide nationally based web tools on which to hang local groups. And of course you know who is head and shoulders above the whole pack when it comes to making use of the web to get message out—the Tea Party Patriots of Venango County. If I were suddenly wanted to check out local politics, see whose views I sympathized with, and find a way to become involved, only the Tea Party Patriots provide any useful information at all, and what they provide is fairly thorough.
So while venangopolitics.com remains the biased and fuzzy-headed product of someone who hasn’t the guts to sign his/her work, I give it a big round of applause for trying to start the kind of open(ish) conversation about local politics that the major parties are completely failing to engage in.
If there’s something solid on line from the two majors that I’ve somehow missed, I welcome the opportunity to stand corrected. In the meantime, to Republicans and Democrats, shame on both of you.

Squeezing the Middle Class

(News-Herald, February 24) Miles of words have described how the middle class is economically strapped, squeezed between the filthy rich and the ever-poorer wards of the state. But the middle class is increasingly squeezed in another, more subtle vise.
Many Americans choose a middle class life with a middle class profession because it offers a chance to make a difference. Become a teacher, lawyer, doctor, manager, the dream goes, and you can use your education and training and smarts and character and professional judgment to make a difference for the people around you. But over the past few decades that dream has been grabbed by the neck and slowly strangled.
A professional life was many peoples’ answer to the question, “how can I make a difference?” At the end of their working life, they could look back and think, “It mattered that I was there, that I was the person filling that job. Somebody else could have done it, but not exactly as I did.”
We’ve celebrated doctors and nurses as heroes in countless movies and tv shows and the ways in which their character, personality and skills left a mark on the people they met. Dr. Manly would flex his stethoscope heroically and bark, “No, no, no—it’s not lupus! Get me an IV drip with Ringer’s lactate and call the ER stat—cancel my dinner date, because I’m gonna crack this guy’s chest. We’ll stay here all night if we have to—nobody dies on my watch!!”
Today, heroic medical personnel are instead required to bark things like, “We’ve got a call in to the insurance company—they’ll get back to us with how much treatment they’ll allow” or “We’ll get you the very best treatment that law permits.”
Teaching is another field where middle-class professionals are hemmed in. The state and federal governments are increasingly interested in telling teachers what they should teach, and how and when they should teach it. And of course the state will to give the final exam.
Those are, of course, only two areas where the feds (with enthusiasm unchecked by either party) are stepping in to regulate us into a better world. With every new bit of oversight, a bunch of middle-class folks lose the right to exercise their professional judgment.
The desire to make a difference has always driven some upward career mobility. Some people pursue that promotion because it means bigger bucks, but many believe that if they could rise a step higher, they could solve some of the problems that they see—a move up on the ladder would let them make more of a difference. But these days only ladders that lead to the highest levels of bureaucracy give that kind of view.
Middle class folks used to choose professional careers so that they could make a difference, but the push from the Powers That Be has been in exactly the opposite direction. The new ideal is that the results should always be the same; the matter of which particular person is doing the job should make no difference at all.
This is a hard issue to raise without seeming whiny. As with money, some people don’t want to hear a doctor complain about having less of what those people have never had at all. If you’re a chef who thought he’d be making gourmet steaks, and you discover you’ll only ever get to make fast food burgers, saying “This is not what I signed up for” isn’t very compelling to people who just want something to eat. Particularly in an era in which college-educated folks are called “our elitist overlords.”
The fear of a personal touch is not unfounded—nobody wants his kid to get the Bad Teacher or the Bad Doctor. But a bureaucratic straightjacket that keeps everyone on exactly the same page does not breed excellence. Make everyone cook and eat the same, and you don’t get universal filet mignon—you get endless tv dinners. You get soul-crushing, stifling mediocrity. And you get people who could have been excellent, who could have made a difference, leaving professions where their new, improved role is to be button-pushing faceless implementers of some stuffed suit’s canned spam.
It’s not just that the wallets of the middle-class are shrinking, but that their hands are increasingly tied. It’s one of the things people are trying to articulate when they call for smaller government. So many people are capable, caring and committed to making a difference for good. They want to live in a country where all that matters.

Grief

(News-Herald, February 17) Sooner or later, everybody dies.
Of all the universal truths, of all the inescapable pieces of cold, clear knowledge, this is the one we least like to admit. We might let it stand around in the lobby of our brain, but we rarely invite it to come in, sit down, and make itself at home in our hearts.
It’s almost impossible to ignore death, but we get pretty good at letting it become a background noise, like the tv in the next room tuned to a show that we don’t really follow.
And not all deaths are created equal; some are easier to cope with than others. William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis,” once a staple of funeral services, suggests that after a well-lived life, death is an opportunity to “lie down to pleasant dreams,” and I suppose sometimes death is like that.
But sometimes death jumps up and clubs us in the face. We are suddenly reminded of death’s finality, how completely it erases possibilities for the future both for those who pass and for those who love them. No more opportunities, no more shared joys, a future slate that will remain forever blank. It is gut-wrenchingly horrible to see someone swept up suddenly by that oblivion, even harder to see someone willingly embrace it with either a quick final choice or a slow steady spiral.
It’s a grief that renders us stumbling and mute, because there is suddenly so much that we want to say to someone to whom we can no longer say anything at all. There is so much that we want to have explained to us by someone who will no longer explain anything. And it’s just plain unfair.
The responses to such untimely death are such familiar clichés (be nice to others, don’t waste time, honor their memory with good work, blah blah blah) that is surprising how real and compelling they are when you really mean it. You can go through the motions of love or prayer for years, but when the day comes when you really do it, do it with your whole heart and intent and energy, the power of it knocks you off your feet and you whisper, amazed, “Oh, so that’s what it is.”
This is like that.
You grieve, sometimes a huge grief when the loss itself is huge. But there’s more. You carry forward the work of the departed, do for them the things that they no longer have the power to do for themselves and in so doing, you become a forward extension of their too-shortened lives.
That means you give love to the people they would have loved if they had been here to do it. And you work for the causes that they would have worked for had they stayed longer. You become their heart and hands in a world that they can no longer touch for themselves. You do the best you can for all the Jamie’s and Mike’s and Molly’s and Leslie’s and Chris’s who can no longer carry on for themselves.
And you remember that sooner or later, everybody dies.
It is so easy to slip into denial. People talk about just zipping through a day, as if, on the other side, there is an infinite supply of days. People make choices—or DON’T make choices—as if they are simply rehearsing for some infinite supply of opportunities ahead. Some people slip into the ultimate version of the old lie “If I don’t really try, I can’t fail”—“If I don’t really live, I won’t actually die.”
Our lives are powered by our passions and commitments; that flame which we carry forward has been fed by the people we have known and loved, and many of them are no longer in a position to carry their own flame. That’s our job now, and when we stop feeding our own fire, theirs dims as well.
Life can break people in places that no doctor can reach, and death can be cruel. Sometimes people lose their way, or their strength fails. But mostly human beings still get a choice about how to care for each other, how to use our time, who and what to hold in our hearts. It is not always a bad thing for us to remember to conduct ourselves with love and care, because we have an unknowable expiration date, and so do the people around us. Sooner or later, we are all going to die. But in the meantime, we live.

Tenure

(News-Herald, February 10) It’s time once again for politicians around the country to wind up the educational wind machine. And this time the big wind is trying to blow away teacher tenure.
Tenure, the argument goes, is no longer necessary or desirable. With tenure swept away, classroom teachers will be subject to market forces that will justly reward the strong and punish the incompetent. That makes a certain amount of sense, though I do have one question—will these be the same market forces that have been kicking many of America’s best workers in the teeth for the past twenty years? Or maybe the same market forces that have insured that the crooks who ran the megabanks into the ground stay fat, happy, out of jail, and raking in massive bonuses after doing their best to trash the US economy?
I cannot take people seriously when they start suggesting that teachers live on an insulated island, protected by a wall of fluffy bunnies and unicorns from the Real World Outside. This RWO, the story goes, is a survival-of-the-fittest meritocracy, where to thrive you must be excellent and the weak and incompetent are kicked to the curb. And yet, this is the world in which Snooki and Paris Hilton are famous celebrities and ER nurses are not. This is the world where the Herb Baum’s get to retire in rich comfort and the people whose jobs they trashed get to consider working as a Wal-Mart greeter. Surely we have higher aspirations for schools.
I would still concede the point if tenure really were a magical insulator that protected the most incompetent teachers, but it isn’t. Teacher tenure is not a guarantee of a job for life.
First, tenure is not automatic. Here in Venangoland, a teacher is not granted tenure until a few years in the classroom. Before the teacher receives tenure, the district can let him go for any reason. Districts have a window during which they can watch a teacher closely and determine if he is filled with promise or with something that doesn’t smell nearly as nice as promise.
Second, tenure doesn’t guarantee the teacher a lifetime job. What it guarantees is due process in case the district attempts to fire him.
Tenure is insurance that teachers don’t work in fear of being fired for reasons having nothing to do with competence. It is not hard to imagine a school board member asking a teacher out on a date or demanding more playing time for his child on a sports team. What happens if such complaints can be coupled with credible job threats?
Some guarantees of due process have improved considerably since tenure first appeared. Back then female teachers were fired for getting married or wearing pants. Today, as Cranberry Schools learned years ago, you cannot fire a teacher for being gay—and it doesn’t take tenure to provide that protection.
Like many legal processes, tenure has grown a variety of extraneous limbs and branches, particularly in big city districts with gargantuan teacher staffs. This can make getting rid of a teacher an expensive and frustrating proposition.
There is no denying that tenure is one of the perks of teaching. Teachers don’t get promotions, and we aren’t getting rich any time soon, but we have some job security, and we would be smart to recognize how enviable that is to many Americans.
Likewise, critics should recognize that good teachers have no interest in saving the jobs of their incompetent colleagues. A teacher who can’t or won’t do her job annoys to the teachers who must pick up her slack. But they don’t want to live in fear of an axe that may fall without warning at any time for any reason.
This is not a problem with a simple solution. Some folks would like teachers’ jobs simply tied to student test results, which is a great idea if you think you should pick your surgeon based on how nice his manicure is. Finding incompetent teachers isn’t always that easy (but we’ll discuss that another day).
Reform tenure, or pass new due process laws—either way, it’s still in a school district’s best interests to know that they can work to gather a top notch staff without a rogue board member or administrator becoming the capricious bull in the educational china shop.
All of the tenure debate sidesteps another issue. Few of the best and the brightest are drawn into teaching, and many quickly run right back out. After you fire a teacher, then what?

NW PA's Unloved Minority

(News-Herald, February 3) They live among us. Some keep their difference hidden as a secret, afraid to shame their family and friends. Others live defiantly, proudly out in the open. Some are accepted by their friends and family for who they are, while others find themselves ostracized, cut off from those around them. Many are pressured to change their lifestyle to something more socially acceptable.
I’m speaking, of course, about people who don’t care about the Super Bowl.
Maybe places exist where it’s not so big a deal. But this is a sports-intensive corner of the world. You may hear people complain about welfare recipients who spend money on fancy food or cell phones, but I’ve never heard a person in Venangoland question someone on the dole buying tickets for a sporting event.
Some non-fans will try valiantly to blend in this week. They’ve got a black and gold t-shirt somewhere, maybe a jersey that some well-meaning relative gave them for Christmas. They know how to nod enthusiastically at certain familiar names, and to glower menacingly at others.
The advantage of living in such a sports-steeped environment as Western PA is that even the densest book-wormiest couch-potatoest non-fan of sports has picked up the basics simply by osmosis (though there are always exceptions— what in the name of all things Pittsburgh were UPMC brass thinking when they picked for their new corporate color purple? Purple?!?!).
Any Western Pennsylvanian who knows a college student has heard first or second or third hand stories about Big Ben and his sorry record of off-the-field pass attempts, but they’ve also heard via every form of media up to and including smoke signals that we are all forgiving the New, Improved, Better Behaved Ben. We all know that Polamalu is more or less godlike, and that the team is gritty (just for fun, I googled “steelers” and “gritty” and got 824,000 results).
Take this basic knowledge and throw in some comments like “Well, that secondary will just have to do their job” or “I look for the offensive line to make things happen” or even just grunting “Seven, baby, seven, oh yeah!” and even the most apathetic non-fan can avoid attracting attention in a crowd. (It’s also best not to critique others’ comments by saying things like, “You realize that it’s mathematically impossible to give 110 percent.”)
Not all non-fans adopt protective coloration. In fact, some can be pretty aggressive in their non-interest. These anti-fans will be the ones at the party pointing out that one hard working nurse will not make as much in a lifetime of healing people as a star athlete will make chasing a bag of air up and down a field for half a year. They’ll try to inject fun facts into sports events, such as the number of people who have starved to death in third world countries in the time it took the Steelers to make one first down. Other hard core grumps may throw in little bon mots such as, “I wonder if the Chinese workers doing American jobs worry about spending a day watching football.”
This is simply mean-spirited. People are entitled to their entertainment, and while most NFL players have little real personal connection with the cities they are paid to represent, the city fathers of the burgh have certainly made sure that every citizen within spitting difference of the stadium has had a chance to help pay up. But “Of course they’re our team—we paid for them,” lacks a little something as a cheer, and that grit does have a Western PA blue collar feel to it.
Yes, some fans get a little carried away. St. Clair Hospital in Mt. Lebanon is wrapping all newborns in terrible towels this week, and I really don’t want to know more about celebratory tattoos. And despite the similar amount of coverage given each, the only thing that the Super Bowl and the fall of the Egyptian government have in common is that, sitting here in Venangoland, we can’t really do much about either one.
Closeted non-fans will eat the food, watch the commercials, and try to grunt loudly in the right spots. More Americans will watch the Super Bowl than voted in the last election. More Americans will watch the game Sunday night than will attend church Sunday morning. Non-fans could do worse than join in one of the last American community events, and fans could do worse than display the American virtue of tolerance. Also, Polamalu, gritty secondary, and seven, baby!

What Democracy Is Not

It's a snow day, so here's an old column from June of 2003 (because the purpose of technology is to make me less bored) in honor of the mess in Egypt.

(News-Herald, June 2003) Now that we’ve completed the conquest of Iraq, we move on to the trick of helping them pull a new form of government out of their turbans.
This is no small feat, not just because our own form of government might not be well-suited to Iraq, but because we don’t generally understand, really, what kind of government we actually have.
For instance, I am unceasingly amazed at how many people have no idea what the founding fathers considered the actual purpose of government.
It is not “to keep people under control” or “force people to behave” or “to make life fair” or “to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t want.” The Declaration says we’re all born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s the government’s job to see that these rights aren’t taken away.
That’s important to understand, because although we call our government a democracy, it’s less notable for the way it insures democracy than for the ways it protects citizens from democracy.
We cannot, for instance, change our constitution very easily. This is undoubtedly a good thing; otherwise we would be changing the laws every year to suit whatever current craze is making the rounds. We often come up with reasons to abridge various parts of the Bill of Rights; a month doesn’t go by that we don’t try to get rid of that pesky First Amendment freedom to say annoying, stupid things. If these rights were not set in a sort of institutional cement, we would have thrown them out ages ago.
And who protects this document that says the majority can’t change the rules every time they’re in the mood? Why, that would be the Supreme Court, the nine wise judges who, in our very democratic system, are elected by absolutely nobody. Democratically elected officials can go through the democratic process of concocting laws that the majority of citizens clamor for, and then be told by the Robed Old People Who Can Never Be Voted Out of Office that such a law isn’t allowed.
And that’s not always a bad thing.
We like to think that Democracy is a system that is the very opposite of tyranny. It isn’t. Democracy can accommodate tyranny quite easily. Democracy would have made it entirely possible to perpetuate the abomination of slavery forever. The Jim Crow laws were democratically produced; we sometimes forget that Rosa Parks was not bucking prejudice—she was breaking the law. Democracy in Iraq could make it entirely possible to legally, legitimately, democratically outlaw the kurds or the shi’ites just as effectively as any pogrom by Saddam.
Our legal system features similar protections. We could democratically decide to toss people into deep dark holes. We could democratically choose to strip people of every single right the moment they emit even a whiff of suspicious behavior. It is easy and human to decide that certain people do not deserve to have rights, and occasionally we do just that. It was perfectly democratic to lock up Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.
The glory of our system of government is not just our representative democracy (which is a good thing, since so many of us would rather complain than vote), but the restraints placed on that democracy. It’s not just that every citizen can have a voice, but that no amount of democratic process can take away any single person’s right to life, liberty, or that all-too-elusive pursuit, no matter how many votes the majority rounds up.
The problem in Iraq is not that citizens do not have a voice. Most citizens have both a voice and a semi-automatic amplifier to go with it. The problem (well, one of the problems, anyway) is that the Iraquis, like many folks in this world, are too willing to accept the notion that restrictions should only apply to people who are wrong (that would be you), but that people who are right (that would be me) should be free to do whatever the heck they want.
Democracy is not really the foundation of our system. Democracy (or our republican form of it) is simply our recognition that it goes against the laws of nature to deprive any human being of his voice, no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or just plain stupid that voice may seem. Our form of government is supposed to recognize that people do not exist to preserve the system; instead, the system is only valid as long as it protects the people. And as a citizen, I have to believe that compromising with opposition to have a stable country that works is better than insisting on having it all my own way, but creating an unstable powderkeg doomed to explode. That’s not an easy lesson to export.

Complain Well

(News-Herald, January 27) As much as human beings like to complain, you’d think we would be better at it. But there are many folks who remain remarkably ineffective as complainers.
There’s a script that seems to play in people’s head: I will tell him how outraged I am and horribly wrong he is. I will verbally kick him in the keister, and he will suddenly cower and declare, “Heavens, but you are so clearly right and I am so clearly wrong. I bow before your verbal mastery, and I will crawl on my knees to fix my terrible wrongness.” And yet, it never happens.
There are a few simple things that people can do to be better, more effective complainers (there are also things complainees should do, but we’ll tackle that list another week).
First, figure out what effect you want. There are times in life when you have a choice between saying what you really want to say and getting the result you really want to get. You can have one or the other, but not both. Before you start complaining, decide which one you want. If you just want to rant and rave and vent your anger, that’s fine. But you’re unlikely to end up with the result you want, so you can safely ignore the rest of this list.
This is why people are reluctant to enter local politics or school sports officiating—too many people who want to unload on officials like an angry drunken internet troll. These sorts of complainers never accomplish anything except making complainees very tired.
Own your complaint. There’s nothing less effective than the anonymous complaint. It is hard to convince somebody that you are standing in the courage of your convictions when you don’t have courage enough to say who you are.
Complaints are hard to dismiss when they come from real, live flesh and blood humans; they are easy to dismiss when they come from anonymous shadows.
Stay focused. What, exactly, are you complaining about? Stick to your point so that your message doesn’t get muddled. This is a good rule of argument in general—if you want to complain about the serving size of the gelato, it doesn’t help to observe that the server always has been a cheap jerk. If you want a refund from a business, don’t wander off into a discussion of how stupid and ugly the owner is.
Broadening your attack increases the collateral damage. In the midst of disagreement with me over a service being provided, a gentleman added the observation that I am a well-known Big Fat Jerk. The misunderstanding about the service was settled fairly quickly, but the observation about my disreputable character (accurate or not) was then impossible to retract.
“There’s not enough mustard on this hot dog,” is easy to erase. “I always have hated your mother,” is not.
Losing focus makes it easy to lose sight of your actual complaint. Once we’ve opened up the issue of how much you hate your mother-in-law, mustard serving size will quickly fade into the background.
Why should they care? County commissioners and city councils are often subjected to constituents who believe these officials should care about a pet issue. You can’t really address whether or not to start a meeting with prayer until you get people to see why the question even matters.
Know what you actually want. Many complaints are a burst of bluster followed by an awkward silence. The silence is because the complainee is too smart to say what he’s thinking, which is something along the lines of, “Yeah, so…?” or “What do you want me to do about it?”
Sometimes the complainer wants the impossible. “Get in your time machine, go back to last week, and say different words,” is not possible. “Die and/or get off the planet,” is not likely.
Knowing what you are complaining about matters, but simply sputtering, “That really bothers me!” invites the complainee to respond, “Bummer. Hope you feel better soon.”
What you want doesn’t have to be concrete. “I want you to understand that this was a real problem for us,” is good enough, perhaps even more motivational than, “I want you to give me a pile of money to improve my mood.” But if the complainee is on his A game, at some point he should ask you, “What can we do to make this right?” If you don’t have a reasonable answer to that question, all of your well-crafted complaining will have been wasted.

The World of Swim Meets

(News-Herald, January 20) Sometimes love takes you into interesting new places. In my case, it has taken me to swim meets.
Swimming is not one of the bigger spectator sports. If the world of sports were a high school cafeteria, swimming would not be sitting at the table with the popular kids. More likely it would be back in the corner, sitting with just one or two other friends (all of whom packed their own lunch), laughing and carrying on and making fun of what everybody else was wearing.
Swimming as a sport is defiantly viewer-unfriendly. It makes no concessions to the uninitiated; if you want to watch, you really must bring an interpreter. I believe that swim teams could draw bigger crowds—they just don’t care to.
There is an announcer, perhaps one of the most futile jobs in sports, because the average pool-area PA system works only slightly better than an set of empty coffee cans connected by 100 feet of heavy yarn. It is easier to find recognizable English words in the off-screen teacher voices in Peanuts cartoons. Once interpreted, these announcements turn out to contain only tiny nuggets of info on the order of “Some people are going to swim a bunch for a while.” I have no doubt announcements in clear English with some actual informational content would help newbies settle in.
And settling in is the operative concept. I’m used to the habit of grabbing some food after a sporting event, but I have learned that it’s wise to eat before a swim meet. That’s because swim meets last anywhere between two and 147 hours.
Part of this is just a general lack of urgency. During actual races swimmers move like lightning, but between events the arena could be mistaken for relaxed open pool time at any Y, where some folks are just hanging out. This is what football would be like if coaches could call time outs for as long as they felt like.
And there’s diving, a sport that is unaccountably sandwiched into swim meets. There is nothing comparable in the sports world. It would be like pausing a football game between quarters for the golf teams to play eight holes. Because, after all, both sports are played on dirt and grass.
I hate to ostracize divers further, but they need their own separate event, on their own separate day.
Other issues are harder to address. For instance, telling the swimmers apart in the pool. Hard-core fans will tell you that they can identify Nathan swimming even though he is mostly under water wearing a scrap of cloth that you couldn’t write his zip code on. But these fans have been watching him swim since he was three years old and have memorized the pattern of freckles on his shoulder blade. The newbie fan’s best hope would be the swimmer’s name tattooed across his or her back. This may be too much to ask.
There are lots of subtleties to study. Before the meet even starts, everyone knows who is actually fastest. Swimmers need extraordinary mental toughness both to face opponents who they know are better, while battling the water and their own bodies, alone. And swim coaches need the minds of chess masters to place the right people in the right event, because there are points to consider for the team win (though until the muffled announcement at meet’s end, you will have no idea how that is going).
Much of this would be a concern for the casual swim fan, but making accommodations for the casual swim fan is like making accommodations at Leonardo’s for talking snow men or refitting the Venango Airport for landings by spacecraft from Mars.
Swim fans are a hardy and deeply committed breed, usually with a personal connection to someone down in the pool. Someone may decide to go see one Venangoland football game just for something to do; people don’t just wander into swim meets. The fans and swimmers belong to an elite group, and they don’t appear to be in a hurry to let any shmoe off the street just wander in and join the club.
Maybe they feel that they’ve never been invited to sit at the popular kid table, so they have realized they just don’t need it. Or maybe they like sitting in the corner where they can do things the way they like without apologizing to anyone. I’m just glad I have a native guide to help me enjoy it all.

New Years Exercise Place

(News-Herald, January 13)About 18 months ago, in a fit of household cost-cutting, I ended my membership at the Y.
I figured that with a bit of discipline and determination I could exert myself at home for free. I already own a lazy treadmill (it used to let you run to nowhere indefinitely, but now shuts itself down after twenty minutes). I even invested in a nifty stand that lets you turn your outdoor bicycle into a housebound bike that also doesn’t go anywhere. Going nowhere may seem like a boring way to exercise, but the advantage is that when I collapse from exhaustion, I do not have far to drag my weary carcass home.
I gave myself a year to try the home sweatiness plan. Then I gave myself another six months to convince me that my year trial hadn’t been an utter failure. And then I slunk back to the Y and became one of those people who started out the new year resolving to turn over a new leaf. A big, fat, heavy leaf that has to be turned over again and again until my heart rate is elevated into the fat burning cardio zone.
I’m not sure what to blame (well, other than me) for my home fitness failure. The big bike ride to nowhere did get monotonous, and this last summer I was somehow too busy too often to bike and kayak as much as I really intended to. Although I am to athletics what Twinkies are to fine dining, I don’t fear physical activity. Yet somehow, my exercise regimen slowly devolved from a daily routine to a grudging celebration of the first day of each new month. It was time to admit I needed help.
Not that the Y provides me with a personal trainer or a chauffer to drive me to the weight room. They do provide motivational programs (the Silver Sneakers are using their exercisial accomplishments to create snow men), and since my last membership they have filled up the gym—excuse me, I mean “fitness center”—with nifty new machinery.
The new machines have little attached televisions, so by rejoining the Y I have also reattached myself to cable tv. It has been over two years since I cut off the cable, and it turns out that I missed the exercise machinery more than I missed regular tv programming. But the shiny colorful things moving around on screen help distract me from the complaining parts of my flailing physique. It also turns out that Dr. Phil is much easier to take when I’m gasping and sweating and can’t really hear him talk.
Mostly, though, I think what I’m experiencing is the power of place. As much as we think of ourselves as self-contained masters of our domains, we are often slaves of location. As infants we are unrestrained impulse; we will do anything anywhere. But as we age and learn self-control, we also learn to associate certain behavior with certain places.
We like to have our own special places to live, and even sub-divisions within them. I write these columns every week sitting in my personally accoutered man-cave. Occasionally, I have been forced to write them in other rooms, even other buildings, and I can certainly do it—but I don’t like it, and it’s almost uncomfortable.
We build our own little nests for our various purposes, and even multi-purpose rooms rarely are. Parents of sleep-averse infants are advised to make bed only for sleeping—not playing or reading or snacking. Couples experiencing a lack of marital harmonious activity are given similar advice.
I associate my home with many things, but not working out, and I have no space assigned to that purpose. So part of what I have hired the Y for, again, is a place that is only for getting sweaty and winded. When I walk into my living room, there are many things to do. When I walk into the fitness center, there’s nothing to do except hop on a machine.
We don’t generally buy hardware in a restaurant. Businesses are designed to be places dedicated to certain activities, and new places for familiar activities can feel awkward. The importance of place is likely also why folks are suspicious of church-skippers who declare they can commune with God any old where. The importance of place probably also explains why folks who grew up in Venangoland find, even when they wish it were not so, that no place feels quite like home.

Christmas Retail Lessons

(News-Herald, January 6) Some of the hard data is in for the 2010 Christmas shopping season.
Some of it isn’t all that useful. Super Saturday 2010 (the last Saturday before Christmas) shopping was way up over 2009, but in 2009 there was an East Coast blizzard on Super Saturday.
The narrative about how Americans have mended our spendthrift ways and are now huddling in our bedrooms, stuffing carefully preserved dollar bills under the mattress—well, as it turns out, not so much. According to the folks at MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse, the pre-holiday fifty day spending total was $584.3 billion. In 2007, prior to the current crooked-banker-induced wave of financial debacle, the total was $566.3 billion.
Of that, $36.4 billion was spent on line (same source). That’s a 15% rise over 2009.
I was part of that trend myself. I came into a bit of e-money, so in addition to my usual local retail fieldwork, I did more-than-usual shopping in the cybernetic storefronts, and I’m beginning to understand some of the appeal.
It’s not just selection and the fact that many on-line stores can “stock” anything (or even something, since the bookstore chains have decided to get out of the bookstore business). That just makes it harder to browse. It’s not price. Once you factor in shipping and handling, an online purchase can be pricier. And bargain hunters have had their parties largely pooped by online retailers—online competition virtually guarantees that retailers all arrive at the same price point. But there are other lessons that Venangoland businesspeople can learn from the webland sellers.
First, no service trumps bad service. There are plenty of websites that provide no help at all. For example, Barnes and Nobles is a major book retailer, but trying to find anything on their site is like searching for a needle in the scrambled haystack in the dark uncleaned attic over your crazy aunt’s garage. There are many other selling sites that also leave it to the customer to solve the Mystery of How to Buy Something.
Traditional brick and mortar stores used to think they had an edge because they provided a warm human touch. But that edge only exists in stores where the human touch is actually warm and helpful. Unfortunately, too many Venangoland retail workers clearly wish that customers would stop asking for help, messing with the merchandise, and just generally intruding on the employee’s personal time.
It’s not that I don’t understand the source of many salesperson’s irritation, because that’s another things that makes online shopping attractive. I refer, of course, to other people in the stores. Most seasonal shoppers are perfectly fine, experienced, wise and considerate. But there is that ten percent, oblivious, inconsiderate, just plain rude, that make major annoyances for the rest of us.
When you click “proceed to checkout” on line, you don’t get stuck behind the person who wants to stop and chat for an hour with the checker, or the person who thinks store employees are stress-relief punching bags, or the person who is always apparently surprised when they’re asked to pay for the merchandise, or the person who wants to pay in check filled out with quill and ink. Nor do you find yourself in a store where management is trying to save a buck by hiring one tenth the employees they really need to handle the traffic.
The real irony about on-line shopping is that web-based retailers are spending big bucks to implement features that bricks and mortar stores can have for free. Online retailers hire people just to answer customer questions, investing in personnel, phone systems, and on-line chatware. In a physical store, the employees are already there—they just need to be trained, empowered and encouraged to help. It should be so easy for real stores to beat web stores at the human game, but many web stores are trying really hard, and many real stores are trying not at all.
I love love love many of our local retailers, the specialty shops, the places where there is a real personal touch. But the history of retail is the story of people who can’t afford to get comfortable. Franklin and Oil City downtowns ruled the roost, and then there was a mall. The mall thought it had a lock on the local market, and then there was Wal-Mart. Some folks adapted, and some folks folded, and we achieved a new equilibrium. But before anyone gets too comfy, they’d better take a look at the internet.

New Years Customs

(News-Herald, December 30) Time for the finale of the holiday trifecta. We’ve had our day of enforced family togetherness and our day of enforced love and warmth for fellow humans, so now it’s time for the holiday of enforced merriment and partying good times.
Of course, just as Thanksgiving and Christmas are based on more substance than current custom might suggest, so does New Year’s have a history of being more than a mandate to drink deep from the pool of bad behavior.
Observing the start of a new year is almost as old as human history, though the ancients often had some arguments about when that first day fell. The current kickoff champ was only one of many contenders in the ancient world until Julius Caesar in 46 BC supposedly established the Julian calendar cementing January 1 as its starting date. (January was named for Janus, the god of doorways, entrances and beginnings. He was usually depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one backward.)
There have been a wide variety of New Year customs, some of which are still practiced and some of which have morphed into newer forms. The Scots give us two fine traditions. One is “Auld Lang Syne,” which was not actually written by the poet Robert Burns, but transcribed by him from its rendition by an old Scotsman. There are at least five verses, all of them fairly incomprehensible unless you have a hardy Scots-English dictionary, but all of which lament that time and distance now separate folks who were once close friends.
The Scots have also preserved First Footing, the notion that the first person to cross your threshold after midnight signals your luck (or lack thereof) for the coming year. There seem to be some differences of opinion about the details, but authorities agree that a tall, dark-haired man is the best sign for a fortunate new year. First foots should bring a practical gift such as coal or bread for the household. They may be actual members of the household, though they should still knock and be invited in.
John Wesley (founder of Methodism) liked the Moravian tradition of Watch Night and so appropriated it. These services start late at night and continue into the new year, giving thanks for the previous year and asking for more divine assistance in the year ahead.
Other traditions include letting nothing go out of the house on New Years Day—no deliveries, no presents carried out, not so much as taking out the garbage. This strikes me as a particularly tough regimen for folks with housepets; I guarantee you that the Labrador puppy that lives in my house will be taking something outside on January 1.
On the other hand, I can easily comply with the tradition that says no laundry must be done on New Years Day (apparently wash means that someone will die in the upcoming year).
Many traditions build on the notion that anything happening on January 1 will set a tone for the whole year. So crying, paying money to others, and breaking things are all to be avoided, lest you have a weepy year of broken poverty. On the other hand, some customs suggest that you succeed at a job related activity to guarantee a year of similar success. And obviously kissing someone pleasant and appealing makes a good trend-starter.
For the last century in Spain, folks eat twelve grapes at midnight, one on each chime, for each of the coming months. In many cultures hog is considered a sign of prosperity (as in “high on the”), so eating any forms of it is recommended. Black-eyed peas and cabbage should provide sufficient good luck for vegetarians. For people who want to be sure, I suspect that somewhere in Venangoland, pork and sauerkraut will be available, as well as grapes in one form or another.
Fireworks and noisemakers were intended to drive away evil spirits for the new year. Many cities have added modern touches, most famously in New York City, where thousands of tourists gather to watch the ball drop. I am told that this event is carefully avoided by all authentic New Yorkers, except for authentic New York pickpockets. And many American cities have embraced the notion of First Night as a means of creating memories one can share with his children instead of stories that need to be hidden from them.
Pick the custom you like. On a day for saluting the past and embracing the future, a buffet of traditions seems perfect. Just don’t mess with the Rose Parade.

Christmas Viewing

(News-Herald, December 23) Christmas is almost here, which means that homes throughout Venangoland are filled with the sound of joy and cookies and tradition and impending nervous breakdowns. At some point it may be time to sit in front of the tube and do your yuletide viewing. What to watch? I’m glad you asked.
You’ll have to watch somebody’s version of Dicken’s Christmas Carol. While there are many fine knock-offs and interpretations, most miss the point of this holiday horror story. The George C. Scott version does pretty well, but believe it or not, one of the most faithful versions is the Muppet Christmas Carol. And an earlier production starring Mr Magoo has become available again; it has some great songs in it. The book itself is short enough to be read in one sitting, and worth your while.
The indispensable How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Charlie Brown Christmas are both reminders of why you need to watch your own copy of these classics—both are so brutally trimmed when broadcast that they are barely recognizable.
Both manage to avoid the worst trap of Christmas programming, which is to create something so sickly sweetly treacly that A) nobody believes a word of it and B) anybody who does slips into diabetic shock.
These two classics also have the virtue of being undeniably about Christmas (what production these days would actually quote scripture a la Charlie Brown?). So much so-called Christmas entertainment is simply regular old entertainment with a fuzzy red hat plunked on its head. “Well, this whole bunch of stuff happened, and then this other guy did some stuff,” says the story-teller. “Oh, and by the way, it happened AT CHRISTMAS!”
Yes, beloved Frosty the Snowman, I’m looking at you. Yes, several hundred schmaltzy Lifetime-ish weepers with “Christmas” jammed into your titles, you, too. And how did It’s a Wonderful Life ever become classified as a Christmas-only treat?
The anchor of the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas empire, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, barely makes the cut. It’s really a kid’s adventure story that trots Christmas out for the grand finale, but, hey, there are elves. And immortal lines like “Let’s be independent together” and “That’s a mighty humble ‘bumble” are so awesomely and repeatedly linked with Christmastime that they provoke a Pavlovian drooling for candy canes.
Besides, there are works solidly grounded in Christmas turf that can be safely skipped. The Year Without a Santa is an open invitation to laugh at Mr. Kringle and his clan, and not in a jolly way. Real Christmas content is no guarantee of entertainment quality.
Many works tack Christmas trim onto ordinary material, but some modern classics make solid Christmas elements the foundation of stories that hold up year round. If you have avoided Elf because you usually find Will Ferrell obnoxious and annoying, now is a good time to rent or buy this flick which dares to pit sweet Christmas spirit against a recognizably mundane and harsh world (Miracle on 34th Street without the cheesiness). Likewise, you may have skipped Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas because it appears to be creepy animation. It is, but the sweetest, gentlest, hummably tuneful creepy animation you’ll ever see. Both are great reminders of Christmas at any time of year.
Any look at Christmas viewing must consider the age-old question—White Christmas or Holiday Inn? Fred Astaire makes a better partner for Bing Crosby than Danny Kaye—I love Kaye, but his hyperactive terrier clashes with Crosby’s laid-back hound dog. White Christmas, however, provides a more potent emotional punch at the finish. Inn has some culturally insensitive moments (blackface!!??) and Christmas can feel like it’s about twelve hours long. Both only use Christmas as a peg on which to hang Crosby’s classic rendition. Watch Holiday Inn, then switch to White Christmas for the last twenty minutes.
There are other lesser-known Christmas viewing treats. In particular, Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, a Muppet special the Jim Henson created for HBO before he started making movies, is touching in a quiet muppety way. We haven’t even scratched the surface of variety programming (find Pee-Wee’s Christmas Special). And in the interests of full fake journalist disclosure, I must admit that I have never actually watched A Christmas Story all the way through.
There are plenty of riches available for a home video Christmas. Pass the razzleberry jelly, and if you end up watching Ernest Saves Christmas or Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Rand at Christmastime

(News-Herald, December 16) Ayn Rand has been experiencing a sort of revival in popularity which, given the current currents in politics and culture, is not surprising. In all the twentieth century, there may be no other writer who so clearly distilled the demand that the whiners shut up, the sob stories dry up, and the strong individuals stand up.
Some of her observations can seem pretty pointed these days. For instance, her view of charity was that a society that values charity will end up rewarding people for being the most compelling and sad failures, rather than rewarding folks for success. Anyone who ever railed against the welfare state knows exactly what she was talking about.
There is appeal in Rand’s view of the world. Her philosophy of Objectivism was based in the belief that there is one absolute truth, one set and unchanging world, and that reason was the only way to perceive it.
In her breadbox-sized masterwork Atlas Shrugged she wrote, “There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." When an interviewer for Playboy asked her, “Isn't this a rather black-and-white set of values?” she replied, “It most certainly is.”
In Rand’s world there is only good and evil, and no excuse for choosing anything but the good.
For Rand, the worst evils were committed in the name of collectivism, the notion that the needs of the many can ever outweigh the needs of the few. Government was at its worst when demanding sacrifice, forcibly taking money and resources away from those who had rightfully earned them. For Rand, there was no greater good than the individual’s pursuit of his own self-interest. Rand didn’t consider selfishness okay—she considered it the only way to live a rational and moral life.
Her world, as laid out in Atlas Shrugged, is one in which great and brilliant men build and create, while the small, weak, puny scavengers that make up the rest of the population live off the sweat of the great few.
It is hard not to see some of Rand’s philosophy as a reflection of her experience. She lived through the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism, and that’s enough to make anyone leery of governments that ask for a few pints of blood so as to help the greater good.
She liked capitalism and reason, and she was adept at creating quotes in their honor. “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.” And “The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.”
Libertarians might like “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” But Rand didn’t like Libertarians. And while some people of faith might find Rand’s absolutes appealing, Rand was an unwavering atheist who saw religion as one more attempt to rob individuals of their free will.
By the 1960’s she was noted for a variety of controversial positions. She supported abortion rights, opposed the draft (but also opposed draft dodgers), backed Barry Goldwater for President, said that European conquest of Native Americans was just. In 1964, she wrote the essay “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
One oft-repeated quote is “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” It sounds appealing, but not even Rand could manage to live by it in her own messy personal life. Later in her life, Rand took Nathaniel Branden as a lover, with the consent of her own husband and his wife. She set him up in business as the keeper of an early think tank devoted to her own philosophy (by this time she considered herself on par with Aristotle). Dissent and disagreement with Rand were frowned on, and when her lover moved on to yet another extramarital entanglement, Rand closed the institute and denounced Branden; he apologized for perpetuating a cult.
None of this has entirely healed. Branden’s wife still has a website presenting her side of the story for all the internet to see. The Ayn Rand Institute’s biography simply omits the Brandens and their work.
Why bring up Rand now, in a season that celebrates everything that she considered evil and wrong? Perhaps for a change of pace. Or perhaps to ask the people who do celebrate this season and yet revere her ideas… why?

The Threat of Technology

(News-Herald, December 9) Recent removal of an old foundation at a noted European archeological site turned up an important work, which I’m going to reproduce in its entirety here:
My dear sir;
I have been told that you intend to drag our school forward, willy nilly, into the use of new technology, a technology that is unproven, undependable, and prone to enormous abuse. I fear that this new technology will seriously disrupt the work of both teachers and students, and I think we need to think long and hard about implementing this.
I am speaking, of course, about your intent to introduce the use of paper and pencils into our classrooms.
Let’s consider the impact of this new technology.
Paper is fragile, undependable and untrustworthy. It is easily torn and crumpled, and the simplest bit of mis-applied pressure pokes holes in it. If pencils are kept too sharp, they will jab right through the paper. But if the pencils become too dull, they will barely make a mark. The technology is therefore completely unreliable.
This means that students will have to be taught to maintain and protect the technology. They will have to be trained how to keep the paper flat and clean, and will have to learn special techniques for transporting it between classroom, home, and school. I foresee our students having to find and purchase special protective devices for their paper.
And what of the pencils? What if my students arrive with a pencil that is too dull, or they have simply forgotten one? When the technology malfunctions in these ways, will my classroom be forced to grind to a halt??
Adopting this new technology will play hob with our academic setting. I know that you foresee a system in which students are made familiar with paper and pencil from a young age so that the use of this technology is so familiar that students use paper and pencil without ever thinking of all the hundreds of ways that they must care for and maintain the technology. I believe you grossly over-estimate them. I envision a classroom in which learning grinds to a halt as students clumsily snap pencils in half as they mistakenly try to write upside down papers that, accidently moistened by tears of frustration, collapse into sodden clumps.
Furthermore, you realize that these students can use pencils to write anything on the paper. Anything at all!! They could write naughty words. The more talented ones can even draw naughty pictures. By passing papers back and forth, they can communicate with each other at will. At the very moment I need their attention focused on an important matter of verb conjugation, they could be passing notes back and forth about what Fiona said during the barn raising yesterday.
Since paper is malleable, they can easily hide these notes behind legitimate work, and unless I walk around and pay attention to what they’re up to, I have no way of knowing whether these students are on task or not.
Can you not at least provide specific instructions on why, when, where and exactly how this technology is to be used? Your insistence that we can just experiment, try things out, and use common sense to find the ways that paper and pencil can be helpful is too vague. What if a student tries to fold the paper into a hat? What if he tries to write on the edge instead of the flat side? The technology offers too many possibilities, and frankly, that scares me. Can’t we take some of them away. Would it not be better, for instance, to make one side of the paper black so that it cannot be written on?
Yes, I know that most of the adult working world uses paper, and yes, I know that students use paper and pencil as part of their daily lives. I see no reason that my classroom should not linger in the past. Let them deal with this unfamiliar and difficult technology on their own time. Our job as teachers is not to prepare them for the future, but to make them comfortable in the past.
This technology is scary, hard to master, and requires new skills that will never, ever become second nature. We will never ever learn to handle the problems that the technology raises. Our old technology is more than equal to the task, as this letter attests—I have carved it into these stones in less than a week, and that is fast enough for any man.

Venangoland in Nebraska

(News-Herald, December 2) You may recall that I have an interest in the name “Venango.” It’s short, distinctive and should be a great tool in branding and marketing the region. There are dozens of places named “Oil City” and a gazillion Franklin’s, but only four places on the planet that use the name “Venango.”
The village in Crawford County is nicely close to home, but the other two Venango’s are in Kansas and Nebraska. How did our place name, which is a mistranscription of a Native American term and therefore not really a real word—how did it end up out West?
The Kansan “Venango” is barely a place—a dozen houses next to the Venango Public Use Area set by the Kanopolis State Park and Kanopolis Lake. There’s a beach, a place that looks like an RV camp, and several roads with “Venango” in the name (as well as a Horsethief Road and Avenue Q).
It’s the Nebraskan Venango that really interests me.
It’s a small place almost on the western border of the state, with a population generally under 200 people. But if you have any doubts about its connection to Venangoland, consider the street names: Pennsylvania, Mercer, Dauphin, Allegheny, Washington, Fayette, Chester, Crawford, and Lincoln. There’s also a Ziemer Street—some digging suggests that it’s named for a family of long-time residents.
One source says that Venango was settled first in the 1860’s, spurred by the Homestead Act , but “the buckle of the wheat belt” didn’t seem to really take hold until the 1880’s, when the railroad came through. But the railroad cuts across one corner of the city’s grid at an angle, seeming to suggest that the town was there before the railroad. Across the tracks from the town are the grain elevators that dominate the landscape.
In its history the town had banks, several newspapers, schools, and a town band. Its World War I veterans formed an American Legion Post, and by the 1930 it had reached a peak population of 287.
The Depression and the Dust Bowl both took a huge toll on Venango, but over the following decades it reconfigured itself again. The school added a gym in the 50’s and a new music room in the 60’s. It celebrated its centennial in 1987 with parades and celebrations.
In 2009, it achieved a true 21st Century landmark—it was Google-Earthed. That means that visitors can now take a virtual walk through the streets of Venango.
There’s not much in Venango to suggest its history. The homes are mostly simple one-story constructions—certainly nothing to suggest a city over a century old. Google earth even captures the cars parked in driveways or on the streets (some of which are wide and paved and some of which are dirt tracks), and they are mostly pick-up trucks. Where Google indicates a car dealership, the photos show a vacant lot. There are some new buildings—most notably a church and an elementary school—but the real estate on what was once the main drag looks like a shell of the central street of earlier decades. The median household income is $24,444.
Most striking to an Easterner’s eye may be the edge of town. When you get to the edge of the grid, the streets curl back around into the town, but you are looking into a great big wide bunch of flatness. There’s no other structure or town within eyesight. Venango, Nebraska could be on the moon.
Still, the records suggest that families have stayed there for generations. The 2000 census lists 175 people, 68 households, 51 families. There is even a facebook group for present and former residents of Venango. The place looks hard, but not beaten.
So far, not much hint of how our name ended up out there. There’s a Levi Hafer who might have ties back here. There are plenty of people who left the right part of PA to head west, but landed in the wrong part of NE. Early settler names include Steinke, Watkins, Busch, Hopkins, Morton, Grothman, Strack, Wostenberg, and Fulscher.
Where is that guy who transplanted Western PA to the wide open wheat fields of the west? I’ve made a contact with a historian in Nebraska, and my brother has been poking around quite a bit, but frankly I’m hoping someone who reads this will know the story of what Venangoland ties connect us to this distant cousin of a community. Barring that, perhaps my bosses at the News-Derrick will decide to send me on a fact-finding tour.

The Thankfulness Thing

(News-Herald, November 25) It is ironic that Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday, because we Americans do gratitude so very poorly.
We love the idea of being self-made, self-sufficient, self-supporting, even though there isn’t one American in a billion who actually is any of those things. But we get our big steely squint and grunt on and declare, hands clenched before us, “I’ve made this life for myself with these two hands.” We have trouble setting aside pride long enough to pick up gratitude.
When looking for ingrates, people of faith will note non-believers who fail to honor the Deity which gave life and breath to all that we experience, and they have a point. It’s an easy step for people to slip from believing in no God to believing in themselves as the micro-God of their own mini-universe.
But people of faith can also fail gratitude school. Since a Pharisee first said, “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like other men,” religious folks have fallen prey to the prayer, “Thank you, God, for giving me what I so richly deserve.”
“I thank You that I am so awesome,” does not qualify as gratefulness.
So it’s not faith (or lack thereof) that gets in our way when it comes to gratitude. The road black is our tendency to believe that our successes and failure prove something fundamental about who we are. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we want to believe that bad things happen to stinky people while the Good are justly rewarded. Even when we see living proof that life doesn’t always work that way, we see it as a violation of natural law, not evidence that our ideas about natural law are incorrect.
If something good happened to us, we reason that it must have happened because we deserve it. We look at our good fortune and think, “I must be awesome!”
But it’s not as if life is a random roll of the dice. Good choices tend to lead to better results than bad choices. Sitting on the porch and waiting for your ship to come in doesn’t work for much of anyone. Work hard, be smart, choose wisely, pay attention, keep trying, and maintain good character—these are all likely to be the part of any success story.
So if you’ve done all these things, if you’ve done most things right to bring you to that good place that you are today, what should you be thankful for? If you are a do-it-yourself success story, where should you direct your gratitude today?
The people who raised you: No three-year-old is a self-made man, and there’s no grown human who doesn’t have a personal three year old tucked inside. The folks who raised you, even if they did a lousy job, shaped you. Be grateful that they helped equip you for success.
Timing: So many choices only look smart after the fact, because they are only smart at that moment, and you can’t know if the time is right unless you take the jump. Some folks got rich buying and selling houses; some are going broke. No doubt someone with a natural aptitude for computer math was born in ancient Egypt. Fat lot of good it did him. Be grateful that you came along at the right time.
Lack of consequences: Nobody is perfect; everybody makes bad choices. Sometimes a bad choice ends the story, but sometimes the piper never shows up to demand his payment. Think of your bad choice and be grateful it didn’t derail your life.
Health: There are plenty of diseases that do not care whether you’ve chosen wisely or not. Be grateful no such disease ever chose you.
Other humans: Walt Disney had a vision and drive, but he ran out of money every other month. Had other people not backed him financially, he would have been a glorious short-lived failure. Had his wife and brother not backed him personally, he would have flamed out before he was thirty. There are people in your life you have helped carry you over one pit or another. Be grateful they were there to stand by you.
It’s good to be grateful. It reminds us not to get snotty and full of ourselves, reminds us to treat others well, and reminds us of the debt we owe the world around us. Enjoy your day, remember you’re fortunate to have it, and be grateful.

Life and Personal Heroes

(News-Herald, November 18) Every year at this time I invite you to recognize your own personal heroes.
We ought to do it more than once a year, and it’s hard to see why we don’t. We complain that the news is all bad, that we ought to look on the bright side, but we miss the chance help solve the problem even in a small way.
Our biggest problem is that we insist our heroes be perfect. We are so insistent that we often fall for people who give us a bright glossy lie and step right past people who present a messy truth.
Yet when someone dies, we can suddenly see right past the less admirable parts to praise those qualities that we always loved and which we now must ever after miss. So every year I come back here to suggest that tell your heroes how much you value them at some place better than their graveside. If you can do it then, you can do it now.
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard numerous versions of the old “Life is _____.” Life is teaching. Life is football. Life is Frisbee. Life is a good peanut butter sandwich.
Well, life isn’t any of those things. It’s human of us to think so. We see people whose life is in their great driving passion, be it rugby, rap or rapelling, and we decide that if we just followed that discipline, we would discover that same great passion for life.
This is backwards. Life is energy, excitement, passion, power, focus, love and endless growth. But not a one of those things can exist in itself.
Life is like a billow of smoke, without shape or direction unless contained and directed somehow. Our pursuits, sports, arts, and vocations are the vessels into which we pour all the heart and passion that is a life. Life is our breath; our pursuits are balloons.
Some lucky people find the container that fits them best. Some are more suited to one form than another (Few things give me the zing of fatherhood or making music). The biggest mistake is to assume that our own form is the only form (as in “The only way a person can feel truly alive is through basketweaving—everything is just a waste of time.”)
My heroes include people who have taken this to the next level, people who have figured out that they can inject that same fire and drive and life and growth into whatever they do.
Take Al Shilling for instance. I have to believe there aren’t many people whose resumes include wrestling coach, phys ed teacher, and a long stint in musical theater. But there’s Al, whose successes span all three arenas.
I’ve known Al for years, watched him as a teacher, a coach, an advisor, a director, a performer, a father/husband/grandfather, doing it all with a drive and energy that is always admirable. It’s a life that never stops to wave and call attention to itself, but which simply keeps moving forward.
I associate that same sort of energy with my own parents. My folks are many things, but probably not the people who light up the room when they walk in. Yet they have devoted themselves to numerous projects over the year, treating each one like an important labor of love.
These are people who inject life into all that they do. They treat each project like it matters and each commitment like one that they’re serious about. And for that reason, they are heroes of mine.
We all know people like this, people whose energy and devotion we admire, whose life displays great focus and intent. They do everything like they really mean it. They don’t wait for activities to inspire them; they bring their inspiration to all that they do. They aren’t trying to get a life; they’re making one.
These are easy people to take for granted, which brings us to your homework. Take out some paper and an envelope, then write and send a note to one of your heroes. Don’t hedge or waffle—simply write “You are my hero because…” and add a few lines. Then send it.
People who put so much devotion and energy out into the world deserve to get a little something back. Don’t wait until your heroes are perfect (it will never happen) or dead (it will happen all too soon). Write a letter to your hero this weekend.