Think, Sarah, Think

Before watching the science fiction movie District 9 on On Demand the other night, we first watched Sarah Palin’s speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville. Nothing she said changed my mind about her.

My wife and I were John McCain supporters in the Republican primary, but questioned our decision when he picked Palin as his running mate and we realized that McCain had lost his groove. And as the campaign continued and Palin spoke out more and more, we decided McPalin wasn’t for us.

You can pick your favorite Palin statements, from her claim to having foreign policy experience because she could see Russia from her front porch to her inability to answer a softball question about what periodicals she read. (I had to answer that question for a three-officer review panel when as an enlisted man in the Navy I was applying for a college program, so I could never understand why it flummoxed Palin, who as a candidate for vice president was in a pay grade much higher than mine.)

The most revealing part of Palin’s Nashville performance came not during her speech, but in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, whose Fox News Sunday I watch faithfully, even during football season. Frankly, I had to watch it twice and then read about before I understood what she was really saying.

Turns out, Palin is advocating a war with Iran. When I realized what she was saying, I was stunned. This is a politician who belongs to the party of the president who got us into a war over weapons of mass destruction that have yet to be uncovered, a president who never really went after Osama Bin Laden, but instead mired us in Afghanistan. And now she wants the United States in a third war!

Palin made my old hero Barry Goldwater sound like a pacifist.

Which part of a military stretched thin doesn’t she understand? Which part of an astronomical federal debt doesn’t she understand?

Palin also told Wallace that she’s getting daily e-mail briefings from people in Washington. Instead, she ought to start reading periodicals so she knows what’s really going on in the world.

And then she needs to think, not talk. The more she talks the deeper she digs herself into a hole.

On second thought, talk, Sarah, talk.

An Illustrated History of Tamaqua

Gifford H. Albright and R Thomas Berner are pleased to announce the publication of An Illustrated History of Tamaqua. The 120-page book contains photos and short historical essays about the photos. Albright is a native Tamaquan and Berner grew up there. Albright graduated from Tamaqua High in 1948 and Berner in 1961.

The following comes from the book:

From the Authors

This endeavor has enabled us to reminisce and we hope it will do the same for you. As we were compiling this, we remembered places we had played as children, train rides we had taken to faraway cities, politicians who had come to town on trains to campaign, schools we had attended that no longer exist.

We have benefitted from the work of others and while we list our sources at the end, we happily acknowledge the work of Paul Scherer, whose Musings of a Chronicler were compiled on a CD—with old photographs—by Bob Betz. A third person whose work made our job easy was David Bensinger, who compiled old postcards of Tamaqua, some of which appear here.

We especially salute Bob Betz for taking the time to look at our final manuscript. And we thank Micah Gursky for providing a copy of an old map that we tweaked in Photoshop to create the cover.

We note a certain irony in this compilation. We never set foot in Tamaqua to do any research, but were able to find our sources either online or, in the case of the Scherer collection, on a CD purchased many years ago by one of us. We communicated via e-mail.

We need to emphasize that we are not historians and have not sought out primary sources to confirm what we learned from secondary sources. We also want to emphasize that this in no way is a definitive history. If we did not have a particular image, we did not write an essay. We debated how far afield to go in each essay and decided that for the most part, each essay would focus on the image and that we would seldom update to provide current information. Sometimes we used an image to represent something larger. The Tamaqua Unions allowed us to mention modern championship seasons.

In our selection of photos, we aimed to be representative. We had three times as many photos as we used but wanted to keep the book to a reasonable length and price. In order to hold down the price, the authors are forgoing royalties.

Would Jesus Play Football?

When I was in high school, I used to get a kick whenever a player from the opposing team would step to the foul line, bless himself—and miss. While I was borderline irreligious by then, I suspect my glee came in part from having been raised in an evangelical environment that was decidedly anti-Catholic. My church found a way to campaign against JFK without losing its tax-free status.

Unlike Michael Vick, who claims that abusing dogs was a way of life when he was a child and so he never gave it a second thought when he became an adult, I have reflected on my past and hope that after more than six decades I am an accepting person, that your religion or race or gender doesn’t matter to me. Well, race and gender.

I remain conflicted about religion. I’ve read about the dark side of so many “devout” people that my cynicism has grown exponentially. I still can’t believe that given all the highly religious people in Congress that we would need a code of ethics. I learned my ethics in Sunday school and still practice them.

The latest mixed message occurred recently in a professional football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Miami Dolphins. In the second half of the game, a Pittsburgh player, in tackling a Miami player, knocked him unconscious. It was immediately evident that something was wrong. The victim wasn’t moving. That’s never good.

Within minutes, if not seconds, a group of Steelers joined in prayer on the field. I understood.

But then I reflected on the situation and it made me wonder.

Would Jesus play football?

Here we have a very violent game in which the object is to stop the opposing team by knocking down the person with the ball—and not gently. (Remember Darryl Stingley?) And so these men participate in this violent game, and when someone is hurt, they pray.

There’s a big contradiction there. The story of Jesus is not one of violence. He was not competitive in any sense of the word. I don’t think he’d even play a friendly game of touch football with the apostles.

Thus, I question the faith of those who would pound their fellow man into unconsciousness—and then pray for his recovery. Doesn’t compute.

Restructure Legislature for Efficacy

(Published in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Jan. 3, 2010.)

Gov. Richardson has made a eminently sensible proposal—a statewide ban on the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. He said he’ll introduce a bill when the Legislature convenes in January.

Why wait?

Well, as everyone knows, New Mexico government is structured in such a way that very little gets done except when the Legislature meets (and some might say very little gets done then anyway). And so everything is crammed into a 30-day or a 60-day session—or isn’t acted on at all.

I’d like to suggest that we hold a constitutional convention and bring New Mexico’s governing structure into the 21st century.

What changes would I propose?

We might have a fulltime legislature, meeting or on call from the day after Labor Day until the day before Memorial Day. That way we don’t have to wait for the annual session to have problems addressed (and solved—or not).

If for some reason, the Legislature must convene beyond Memorial Day, the legislators work for free. There’s no such thing as overtime pay, not even per diem. Get the people’s work done in nine months and go home.

I’d also suggest that the new legislature be unicameral like Nebraska, which has about 200,000 fewer residents than New Mexico and does just fine with a one-house legislature and 49 senators (compared to 112 legislators for New Mexico). Checks and balances will occur naturally, even within a one-party structure. (Think Democrats and health care reform.)

And one more thing: term limits. Eight years is enough. It works at the county level; why can’t it work at the state level?

(R Thomas Berner, a former town councilman in another state, now lives in Santa Fe.)

Merry Christmas

I finally created something on my graphic tablet worth sharing.

How A Mortal Sin Was Erased

Even though we were in the same room as each other, I never met C.D.B. Bryan. He was at Penn State with his mother, Katharine, the widow of John O’Hara, to dedicate the opening of the O’Hara study early in 1975, an event I covered for the Centre Daily Times. After all, O’Hara and I went way back, although I had never met him either, hadn’t even been in the same room with him.

Years later, after Bryan had published Friendly Fire, I caught up with him via the telephone and tried to lure him to Penn State. I was, at the time, in charge of getting judges for the Katey Lehman Writing Contest and I thought Bryan would make a good judge. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it work but it was then that I learned that he had been at the dedication of the O’Hara study.

I used the phone call to apologize for a mistake I had made with his name. Perhaps to some it would be a venial sin, but in the newsroom getting someone’s name wrong is a mortal sin and I had carried the burden of this sin long enough.

I confessed that I had cited him in a essay or a book somewhere (I can’t find it today) and referred to him as O’Bryan. Maybe it was the O’Hara connection that made me do it.

He laughed. He told me that his sister had gotten him personalized pencils as a gift and they bore the name C.D.B. O’BRYAN. She never noticed the error and so my mortal sin was instantly reduced to a venial sin, my penance done for confessing, erased from the Book of Sins.

I took notice of Bryan with the publication of Friendly Fire, a book about the skepticism of an Iowa mother after the death of her son in Vietnam. Friendly fire comes from your friends, not your enemy, and the soldier’s mother could not grasp how her son had died. She suspected foul play.

What held my attention was the way Bryan told the story. A mystery, the book is written in the conventional third person for the first two-thirds of the pages, as we follow the parents—and primarily the mother—dealing with the mystery of their son’s death and how the mother evolves into an anti-war advocate.

And then Bryan shifts—unwillingly, he says—to the first person because he has to tell us what he learned from his investigation of the soldier’s death. The shift is jarring, but as you read on, it works. The story is no longer about the soldier’s death, but what Bryan learned in his investigation. The shift makes sense.

Bryan wrote several books in his lifetime, but the author of his obituary in the New York Times last week said his career was distinguished by Friendly Fire. I would agree. I still have the book and would urge anyone interested in good nonfiction to read it and study Bryan’s methods. They’re still good today.

Voltage Flows

The most important thing I learned in the Navy’s radio school was not Morse Code. I could barely copy 20 words a minute when I graduated from radio school and was pretty much useless when I got to the fleet. It was a good thing most of what we did was done on a teletype machine. I can type.

No, the most important thing I learned was when something electrical didn’t work first make sure it’s plugged in. You laugh, I’m sure, but I’ve seen it time and again with others who didn’t do that simple step first and wasted a lot of time trying to make something work that wasn’t broken.

One of my radio school classmates was a guy named Fisher. I think he came from Buffalo. He was a really intelligent person and grasped most of what we were taught quite quickly. But there was one lesson that eluded him: the difference between current and voltage.

Current was easy to grasp. That’s what flows through electrical wires (when they’re plugged in). Fisher could not grasp voltage. The rest of us did because we took orders unquestionably. But Fisher, as I said, was intelligent and he needed a better understanding. In his mind, voltage flowed with current.

Turns out, voltage is a rather complex thing to explain, as I learned in doing research for this essay. But I remember what our instructor in radio school told Fisher: Voltage is a measurement taken at a certain point in the wire. It doesn’t flow. It can be found anywhere along a wire, but it doesn’t flow. It’s there and there and there, but it didn’t flow there.

Fisher could not understand that, and when we graduated, we marched to our ceremonies with our homemade class banner that proclaimed: THE FISH KNOWS THAT VOLTAGE FLOWS.

The same problem arises with the people on television who claim to be meteorologists. They don’t understand that temperature is a measurement of the air. It’s just like voltage. It’s there and there and there. It goes up and down.

But what temperature does not do is get colder or hotter. The air does, but the temperature is unfeeling. It just measures how hot or how cold the air is and leaves the rest to us. We’re the ones who decide if it’s hot or cold.

That’s why I cringe when I hear TV weather people say that temperatures will be warm or cold. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Fisher and the flawed logic of flowing voltage.