By The River

Everytime I read about the alleged Nov. 19 massacre by U.S. Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, which becomes more confirmed every day, I think of the hacked up and dying Col. Kurtz in the film "Apocalypse Now" gasping out, "The horror. The horror." It was meant as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, but it looks like it may now apply to Iraq as well.

Despite what happened in Vietnam in well-known massacres such as My Lai, where about 500 civilians died, Americans retain the ability to be shocked that our boys could willfully murder innocent civilians, especially children, to avenge a slain comrade. We retain mental images of our heroic liberation of Europe in World War II, and of G.I.'s tossing Hershey bars to the kids. U.S. Marines simply couldn't do that, we insist. But they can, and they did. The question is why. It isn't a defense to say, quite correctly, that the other side is worse. We are supposed to be better. It is the mark of a civilized nation.

Soldiers of many lands have committed atrocities: Germans, French, English, Americans, Russians, Japanese and no doubt others. Americans are not exceptional. They are human. In the stress of battle, if military discipline breaks down, as it apparently did in Haditha, bad things can happen. It is the price we inevitably pay for fighting wars that have no purpose beyond the ideological or idiotic. Saddam Hussein was bad, sure. So was the Argentine junta in the 1970s, which threw leftist dissidents out of airplanes. Nothing was done. So was General Pinochet of Chile, but America didn't invade Chile. We sent conservative economists to remake their economy into a Republican fantasyland, complete with privatized Social Security.

I wonder where the sergeants and officers of the Marines were while this massacre was going on. How far up the chain of command did knowledge of the Haditha massacre reach before it was first reported by Time magazine? The My Lai massacre remained secret for much longer, about a year, until reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story. The Army went after officers in that one, including Col. Oran K. Henderson, who later moved to Carlisle, Pa., and became the first director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. Henderson was accused of covering up the massacre but was aquitted at court martial, although the findings of the case were devastating. No one, in fact, was truly punished for My Lai. Perhaps if they had been, the atrocities of the Iraq war, from the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to Haditha, would have been less likely to happen. But I doubt it. War is hell.

The saddest outcome of this, other than the deaths themselves, will be the tarnishing of the reputation of all American soldiers. Most Marines do their job and do it well without a hint of scandal. We need to bring all American troops home now. That is the only thing that will prevent Haditha from happening again.

Posted by David at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for librarians and archivists. They are among the more diverse and quirky people you could ever hope to meet, but they share a passion for helping people find the information they need. That's true whether you're a writer working on a book, like me, or a third grader like my daughter looking up information for a school project.

The word "hero" is thrown around rather loosely these days, but I would use it without hesitation to describe four Connecticut librarians who took on the Bush Administration Justice Department over the so-called Patriot Act. The law, rammed through Congress by the President in the terrifying days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist atttacks, among other things gives the Federal government the right to demand lists of books checked out of public libraries by specific individuals. No probable cause need be shown. FBI agents can issue a "national security letter" and go snooping away.

But it doesn't stop there. Recipients of a national security letter are warned under penalty of fine or imprisonment that they may not reveal "to any person" that they received a national security letter demanding library information. It was a thuggish attempt by the Bush Administration to suppress the howls of protest they knew would erupt every time FBI agents went snooping in library files.

Yesterday, after the Justice Department backed off, the four librarians in Connecticut went public about their role in fighting this part of the misnamed "Patriot Act." Peter Chase is a librarian in Plainville, George Christian, who first received the national security letter, is director of the Library Connection, a small library consortium in Windsor. The other two are Barbara Bailey, a librarian from Glastonbury, and Janet Nocek, a librarian from Portland. They were represented in their court action against the government by the American Civil Liberties Union, which does so much in these trying times to preserve our freedoms.

The librarians took a real risk in even contacting the ACLU because of the law's bar against revealing the national security letter "to any person." They quickly won a challenge to the non-disclosure order in U.S. District Court in Connecticut and again before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the Bush Administration wouldn't back off until it got a reluctant Congress to reauthorize the "Patriot Act" for several more years.

These four librarians defended freedom of information at great risk to their own freedom. We can all express our gratitude by voting for Congressional candidates this November who will begin to bring an end to the horrors of the Bush Administration.

Posted by David at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Bush went to Exelon's Limerick Nuclear Plant near Pottstown yesterday to push for an aggressive program to build more nuclear plants. As is well known, no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.

The reasons not to build more nuclear plants are many. It is an unforgiving technology that is beyond the ability of some electric utilities to employ in a way that does not endanger the public. All the talk about a new generation of nuclear technology that is supposedly meltdown proof sounds too much like the assurances pre-TMI that such an accident could never happen. We still don't know for sure what the longterm health impacts of the TMI accident were. It is ironic to the extreme that Bush chose to go to Limerick to make his announcement. Limerick came in years late and well over budget, and saddled customers of Philadelphia Electric Co. (now part of Exelon) with electric rates that were among the highest in the country.

Yet there are reasons America should build more nuclear plants. They don't create greenhouse gases when they boil water to create electricity. Global warming is real, as former Vice President Al Gore is said to make clear (I haven't yet seen it, but have read the reviews) in the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. We need at least a few more baseload power plants that don't use natural gas so electric rates can be kept at a moderate level. Power plants eventually wear out and must be replaced. While wind and solar power and conservation can make serious inroads in the nation's power needs, they can't do it all.

Can it be done safely? That is the major issue in a nation that has not forgotten TMI or the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. Can we finally open a safe storage facility for nuclear waste somewhere? Perhaps in both the East and West halves of the country? I would hate to see all nuclear waste travel west by rail through the St. Louis, Mo., chokepoint to get to the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada.

I suspect part of Bush's push is motivated by a desire to defeat the environmentalists, just as he hopes to do by allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Much of that oil would be sold to Japan and China. It's a symbolic thing, a boot on the throat of anti-Bush enviromentalists. But global warming is real, and nuclear power could be part of the solution. That's not a ringing endorsement from me, only a resigned nod to what may be necessary.

Posted by David at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the less wise things Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania did was sign a bill in 2003 allowing motorcycle riders in the state who are older than 21 to shed their helmets. The helmet law repeal bill was widely opposed by doctors and the rehab community, who have to treat the head injury carnage that occurs when a cranium hits the highway, assuming the biker survives. But the legislature and Rendell gave in to persistent lobbying by a biker rights group called A.B.A.T.E., and so picked up a few hundred votes in exchange for potentially millions of dollars in extra medical costs for society. I'm writing this now because the group rallied at the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., yesterday to thump the tub about their great victory three years ago.

A.B.A.T.E. says its initials stand for Alliance of Bikers Aimed Toward Education, a warm and fuzzy name guaranteed to offend no one. If you poke around, though, you'll discover that in the past those initials stood for Alliance of Bikers Against Totalitarian Enactments. I've also seen "Excess" in place of "Enactments" on various websites. Either name is much more in keeping with the, "It's my life, go to hell if you don't like it," spirit of Easy Rider libertarianism that pervades the group.

Trouble is, society as a whole ends up bearing the cost of the wind whistling through their hair on the open road. Head injuries cost a fortune to treat. Whether or not a biker has insurance, the costs of treating his or her head injury eventually come back on everyone through higher health insurance premiums. Helmets are like seatbelts. They just make sense. Would you want your son or daughter riding on a motorcycle without one?

Perhaps a better name for the group--one that would allow it to keep its A.B.A.T.E. initials--would be Alliance of Bikers Aimed Toward Extinction. Get your motors running!

Posted by David at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Patriot-News took a break from its fratricidal war over union decertification to receive a whole bunch of journalism awards this past weekend in State College. I myself won first place awards from the AP Managing Editors and in the Keystone Press Awards for my coverage of the impact of the 2004 state law that made it easier for utilities to shut off service to people behind in their bills. The law led directly to five deaths and as many or more serious injuries in fires and carbon monoxide incidents in houses where the power had been turned off. Ford Turner won for feature writing, Jan Murphy for her capital coverage, Joe Hermitt for photography, and many more. The Patriot-News won the Division I sweepstakes in the Keystone Press Awards, beating out the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

We aren't the only newspaper people whose papers have declared war on them because they want to be represented by a union. At the York Daily Record, which won the sweepstakes in Division II, the Guild local is in a death struggle with newspaper magnate Dean Singleton of Media News. Singleton acquired the Daily Record a couple of years ago in a strange deal that the Newspaper Guild is pushing to have investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. Singleton is a hardball publisher. He hired King & Ballow, the Tennessee law firm which specializes in newspaper union busting, to "negotiate" a new contract with the Guild at the Daily Record. When a new owner acquires a newspaper, they must negotiate with the existing union but can force them to renegotiate the entire contract from scratch. That is a long--in many cases, years long--process. And when King & Ballow is involved, expect a war of attrition.

During the cocktail hour after the APME Awards, I chatted with Lauri Lebo, who is active with the Guild at the Daily Record. She was the lead reporter for the Daily Record on the Intelligent Design controversy at the Dover, Pa., school district, and is writing a book about that. She told me how the Daily Record, apparently at the advice of King & Ballow, won't let members of the Guild contract negotiating team, including herself, take unpaid time off to negotiate the new contract. They are forced to use up their vacation days. That's virtually unheard of in labor negotiations, and arguably a violation of federal labor law, but whether the National Labor Relations Board will do anything about it is hard to say. That's the reality unions face after 25 years of Reagan and Bush union bashing (Clinton could ease it only a little because of his weak influence on the Congress). The NLRB might rule that what the Daily Record did was an unfair labor practice, but it might take 1-2 years to issue that ruling. Labor law is meaningless without strong enforcement.

The Patriot-News has taken a different approach to union busting, dangling economic incentives in front of members to entice them to vote out the Guild on June 2. If that happens, everything the union has negotiated since 1934 will go in the trash. Some of the decert proponents are saying, we can always vote the Guild back in if the company doesn't live up to its promises. Fat chance of that. The company can do much to make sure that never happens. And if we did vote the Guild out and vote it back in, we would start from zero in negotiating a new contract. Just like the Guild at the Daily Record.

Newspapers face a host of economic and cultural challenges, most of which stem from a perception that they are irrelevent in the Internet Age. But instead of working together with their talented professional newsroom staffs to showcase the real value newspapers still have, they pursue ancient vendettas against the Newspaper Guild.

Posted by David at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So Anheuser-Busch, manufacturer of some of the nation's most execrable beers, is buying Rolling Rock. Worse, they plan to move production of the beer in the little green bottles from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to one of its breweries in New Jersey. They will likely put the Latrobe Brewing Co. up for sale, but if there are no takers, a lot of people in Latrobe will lose their jobs.

I have a love-hate relationship with American beer. I love some of it and hate a lot of it. When I was in college in Michigan, the bar most popular with students served Schlitz and Budweiser. I drank the latter most of the time, both in Skiles Tavern and when we bought beer at Columbia One-Stop, the drinking age having been lowered to 18 in 1972. If we were poor, we drank Old Milwaukee, which was the worst one of all but was really, really cheap. Bud is slightly better than Schlitz, but all three are pallid, watery imitations of what beer ought to taste like. Most of the beer I buy to drink at home is foreign. Canadian, Mexican, German, Irish. Tour the world with beer.

So it is with some trepidation that I view the acquisition of Rolling Rock by the maker of Budweiser. I'm sure Anheuser-Busch would tell you that Rolling Rock will taste the same whether it is brewed in Latrobe or New Jersey. I don't believe that. Beer isn't as tied to the local soil and climate as wine is, but I think the water used in the brewing plays a part. I originally wrote that Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville won't allow anyone else to brew their Lagers, but have since been advised by Sara Bozich that they own a second brewery in Tampa, Florida. I hadn't been aware of that, but I'll bet true afficionados can tell the difference between the Pottsville and Tampa brews. And in any case, you still have the family supervising production.Maybe beer just seems to taste better because you know it was brewed in a specific place by people devoted to turning out a good product.

As for Latrobe, it might look to the example of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, former home of the G. Heileman Brewing Co. Some of my relatives worked there, and one was president of the union in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of years ago, G. Heileman was sold to some Texas company, which kept the brand names and allegedly the recipes but moved brewing elsewhere. After a few years, some of the former managers at the brewery in LaCrosse bought the facilities and brought them back to live as City Brewing Co. Still, the employment numbers aren't nearly what they were in the G. Heileman days.

Pennsylvania's economic development folks ought to do more to keep the state's distinctive products here. Local products, just like local restaurants, make a city or state stand out. Last summer, we visited friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Nice city, but almost nothing but chain restaurants, the same ones you find everywhere. Olive Garden, Red Lobster, the usual list. Life gets blah without local.

Posted by David at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alternet reports that former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the one who spent time in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, was tipped off to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks earlier in the summer of 2001, but that she and her editor decided not to do a story because they were afraid of being accused of "crying wolf."

As a journalist, I understand to a point what she is saying. This was an explosive story, and came from a very good, highly-placed source in the White House. It had to be nailed down solidly. But couldn't she have done something? Sometimes you need to publish what you know, even if it isn't the whole story. You publish to get the story out there, and follow up as more details become available.

What other secrets are out there about 9/11?

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today comes news that teachers in Carlisle, Pa., have voted to go on strike rather than submit to a demand by the school board that they pay one-quarter of the cost of their health insurance. They pay nothing now, which is how it was for nearly all workers 15 years ago. Similarly, teachers in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, are fighting attempts by the school board there to move them into an inferior health plan to save money.

It's happening everywhere. The main issue in the contract negotiations between my union, The Newspaper Guild, and the Patriot-News is health insurance. The company demands that we pay one-third of the cost of our premiums, which would mean several hundred dollars a month for family coverage and would likely force a few people into bankruptcy. Publisher John Kirkpatrick used this as a cynical tool to induce a decertification vote to throw out our union. The vote will take place on June 2. He made clear for months that while union members would have to pay these onerous sums, non-union departments at the newspaper would continue to pay nothing. Now he's furiously backpedaling on that "pledge" to the non-reps, as they're known here, saying they'll likely have to pay something as well.

What a different world we live in than 15 years ago. A generation of business executives has come to power which sees health insurance as merely a cost item on the balance sheet, not a moral responsibility to their employees. They look at the books, and if they screwed up somewhere else, they try to squeeze it out of employee wages and benefits to make up for it. Cutting health insurance or forcing employees to pay more and more of the premium cost has become a manhood test for too many business executives. We in the newsroom at the Patriot-News report the news every day and do it well. This weekend, many of us, including me, will receive awards from our peers for our work last year. But if management can't bring the new printing plant in on time, or goes off on a half-baked crusade to publish a compact edition of the paper that almost no one wanted, or can't persuade advertisers that we are the place to be, that's not our fault. Yet we are being asked, in effect, to pony up for the losses.

What a different world this would be if America had a Canadian-style health system--which no matter what propaganda you hear, is very popular in Canada--or if the Clinton health plan had not been shouted down by Republicans and the insurance lobby in 1994. This is tearing the country apart and ruining American economic competitiveness.

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So now the President wants to send 6,000 National Guard troops to guard the border with Mexico and supposedly put a stop to illegal immigration. That's what he said in a speech to the nation last night, although if we've learned anything about Bush, it is that he only on occasion delivers on the promises he makes. His red-blooded conservative supporters, who ginned up the immigration issue several months ago, cheered lustily. The question of where these troops will come from when the armed forces are having increasing problems persuading poor youths to sign up for duty in Iraq was not answered. NPR reported that $2 billion to pay states who send Guard units was stripped from the Iraq budget. No doubt they'll make that up with cuts to some program that helps the poor.

Understandably, Mexican President Vincente Fox was a bit concerned by the potential movement of 6,000 U.S. troops to his northern border. Mexican presidents have seen this all before, and it usually ennds badly for Mexico. A couple of years ago, I spent a day in Tijuana, Mexico, with my family and visited the excellent history and cultural museum there before heading down to Avenue Revolucion for the shopping. The museum includes a history of U.S. border incursions, including some you never find in history books here. It's more than the Mexican War of 1848 (in which Mexico lost nearly half its territory to the U.S.) and President Woodrow Wilson's invasions in the 1914-16 period.

Still, serving in the National Guard in southern Arizona, say, is a lot better than serving in Iraq. Great Mexican food in Tucson, U.S. infrastructure, and no one shootinng at you or setting off roadside bombs. You can date and marry the local girls and have a great time. Lets just hope there aren't any "incidents," e.g., rancher approaches Guard checkpoint too fast and gets blown away by nervous Guard troops who saw it all in Iraq.

So rejoice! The President has shown strength! He will stop illegal immigration by ordering it to stop! Tomorrow: President Bush orders National Guard to solve the energy crisis.

Posted by David at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With President Bush's approval rating down to 31 percent (and falling) in the latest polls, and virtually all of his policies and programs having failed miserably, the most depressing thought one can have these days is this: he's in office for 2 1/2 more years.

I can't say with certainty that a similar situation has never occurred in our history. But in the modern era, it is pretty well unique. One would have to go back to the final three years of the President Herbert Hoover's administration, 1930-32, to find a President so hobbled by the fatal combination of bad policies, ideological rigidity and bad luck that the country was essentially treading water, waiting for his successor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, brought the nation both hope and solid policies to ameliorate the worst pain of the Great Depression. But why should we have to wait so long when the need for a new approach is obvious?

It is a basic defect in our Constitutional system that there is no provision for early elections. There is no way to throw out the current government and bring in fresh faces. If Bush was the leader of Germany, France, or the United Kingdom, all parliamentary systems, his government would have fallen by now. New elections would have been held, and John Kerry or someone like him would have formed a new government.

Impeachment is not the answer, as emotionally appealing as it may be. Realistically, it can't be done unless the Congress is firmly controlled by the opposition party. That's how it was in 1974 when the impeachment of President Nixon was attempted (he resigned when it became clear he had no more support among Republicans), and in 1998, when the ridiculous and damaging Clinton impeachment for his extra-marital sex life was attempted and defeated. Even if Bush could be impeached and removed from office, we would be left with Dick Cheney as President, a truly frightening thought.

So what is the answer? Frankly, I don't know. When Nixon did the right thing in 1974 and resigned, his Vice President was the popular and competent Gerald Ford. Ford, who had been House Minority Leader, was elected by the Senate to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew, a corrupt and angry man, after Agnew resigned in 1973 over bribery and tax evasion charges stemming from when he was Governor of Maryland. I'll never forget the Doonesbury strip that appeared the day after Nixon's resignation. It showed the sun rising over the White House and birds singing, perfectly capturing the sense of national relief that Nixon was gone.

The Republicans are arguably heading for historic defeats in both the Midterm elections this year and the Presidential election in 2008, assuming the Democrats can get their act together. But until then, we are treading water, trying not to drown before the lifeboat arrives.

Posted by David at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

German life and culture is often the subject of stereotypes in America. I got a huge laugh Thursday night from my cousin, Florian Penkwitt, and his friends when I said the popular perception of a German beer garden is of fat men and burly waitresses in Bavarian lederhosen swilling huge mugs of beer. There was plenty of beer being swilled at the Amadeus beer garden where we were, but Germans as a whole are a lot slimmer than Americans and dress pretty much like we do.

And here are some other thoughts:

--German drivers stop for pedestrians, by and large. I had drivers stop and wave me across the street when I didn't proceed immediately out onto the crosswalk, which can get you killed in America. German pedestrians rarely jaywalk. They'll stand and wait patiently for the light to change even if no car is in sight. The real risk to pedestrians is bicycles. Bicycles share the sidewalks with pedestrians, and often have a marked bike path that American pedestrians invade at their peril.

--Restaurants in Germany don't rip you off when it comes to wine. It was quite easy in Berlin to get a half-liter carafe of good wine for 6 or 7 Euros, or about $7-8. Waitresses inevitably ask you if you want water to go with it. You can be arrested for d.u.i. in Germany with a blood alcohol count of 0.5. In Pennsylvania, it's 0.8.

--Most public toilets charge between 0.30 and 0.55 Euros for the privilege. Even McDonald's Restaurants, the haven for free toilets in the U.S., do this. German toilet paper is definitely of the character-building variety. You can also use it to sand down that old table you've been meaning to refinish.

--Germany seems to have more slim, fine-featured, classically beautiful women than just about any place I've been. Kein Wunder, as they say, that so many American soldiers stationed here get themselves a Fraulein. You can't bring home the beer, but you can bring home the babe.

--My wife will probably kill me for that last observation.

Posted by David at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Germans couldn't stop talking about the beautiful May weather they had last week. Winter here was long and hard, with record amounts of snow. This is not a warm country in the best of times--few homes have or need air conditioning for the summer, and "shorts day" is a meaningful phrase. After concluding my lecture tour, I spent the weekend visiting my relatives in the impossibly beautiful Tauberland/Hohenlöhe region of Baden-Württemburg. Rolling hills, forests, vineyards, and manicured farm fields cut by narrow and winding paved roads make this a step back in time. I shot the photo above near the tiny village of Lindlein.

Many Germans in this region have given up farming, stymied by the low prices and end to price supports brought about by globalization. My Freudenberger relatives in the village of Lindlein have thrown in the towel and now rent out their fields. So do the Dummlers in Elpersheim, the village where my grandfather was born in 1901. Only Walther Kilian, my cousin in Oberndorf, still actively farms. He raises hogs in an indoor system and farms 40 hectares of wheat, corn, oats, and rapeseed. Walther, like many German farmers, has a second job, in his case working for the local water system. Another thing I noticed since my last visit in 2003 is the number of windmills that have risen in the region. The state government here partners with farmers on these projects. Walther considered it, but decided he is too old (58) for it to have time to pay off. Renate, his wife, doesn't really like to see them on the horizon, a common sentiment.

My ulterior motive for the visits was to copy old family photographs. I brought along my laptop and a very small but effective Canon scanner and found a treasure trove that was both moving and disturbing. I always knew my grandfather's brothers and cousins, the ones who stayed in Germany, were drafted into the German Army during World War II like most men their age. But to see old black-and-white photos of them in uniform was jarring. In conversations with family members, it was clear they have moved on from the terrible losses of the war that Hitler started, but still think about them everyday. They are just below the surface.

Heading back to America where I can have pancakes for breakfast instead of cold cuts--a German standard that is great for a few days. I enjoyed the food, especially the spätzle noodles with beef stroganoff that my aunt in Lindlein prepared. And I'll miss that great, great German beer. Nothing like it in the world.

Posted by David at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are two kinds of cities in Germany: those which were bombed heavily during World War II and those which weren't. Stuttgart is one of the former, bombed more than 50 times. Nearly every historical building in the central city was damaged if not destroyed. The city created a mountain, Birkenkopf, out of the rubble of the destroyed buildings. You can follow a path to the top, where, like in Planet of the Apes, pieces of historic buildings lie out for the passerby to contemplate. The view from the top is spectacular, but the rubble forces you to contemplate how a beautiful city was destroyed to avenge the unleashing of demons by Nazi Germany.

Some of the historic buildings were rebuilt, and rebuilt well, but you can always tell. They look a little too perfect. The empty spaces in Stuttgart were filled in with 1950s-1960s Modernist buildings from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le Corbusier, according to Frommer's Germany 2006. But I had guessed the parentage just from looking at them. The downtown reminded me in some ways of the state office complex in Albany, N.Y., where an historic 19th century neighborhood was torn down and replaced by office highrises and a state library that still look futuristic.

With not much of a past to display, Stuttgart focuses on the present, especially on the arts. The new art museum, opened in a glass cube a year ago, contains one of the world's premier collections of the paintings of German Surrealist Expressionist Otto Dix. Dix's paintings in the 1920s foreshadowed the end of the troubled Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. Mangled German veterans of World War I beg for crumbs from rich parasites. Then in "The Triumph of Death" (1934), he foretells the destruction of Germany in World War II, showing a skeletal king wielding a scythe that is about to cut down, soldier, mother, baby, old man, and young lovers alike. Dix was one of the painters labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis.

Last night was the last in my lecture series and probably the best. About 12 people attended, and of those maybe half were recruited by my cousin, Florian Penkwitt. I talked about the Centralia mine fire and the upcoming midterm elections in America. The questions came thick and fast.

Florian invited me to come out for beers with him and his friends afterward. We walked to a nearby beer garden and settled in for some more conversation. Turned out that not everyone there was German. One guy was from Spain, another from Hungary, but they were studying in Germany. Tabea Kilian, another cousin, came along, too. The Spanish guy was carrying a box that Kai, Florian's friend, said contained "religious relics." Actually, they were 350 euros worth of World Cup tickets, ordered a year ago. Germany becomes more obsessed by the day with the upcoming quadrennial world soccer finals, which will be played here this summer. He held them like they were the bones of saints. A woman from another table came over and asked to see and hold them as well.

After two glorious beers and a burger, I said my goodbyes and walked back to my hotel. Tomorrow I head up into the pastoral German countryside where my grandfather was born.

Posted by David at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Look at this photo of young Germans riding bicycles in Heidelberg and tell me what you DON'T see. Give up? Not a single one is wearing a bicycle helmet. This is no aberration. Until I arrived in Stuttgart, where the culture is clearly different, I saw almost no one in Germany wearing a bicycle helmet. Not in Freiburg, or Eisenach, or Berlin, or Heidelberg. Many Germans ride bicycles, especially in urban areas, and they just let the wind blow through their hair.

Asking around, I was told that most people won't even consider wearing one. They didn't as a child and they're still here. Why should they now? Rainer Czarnecki, my cousin in Frankfurt, said helmets are considered "uncool" among kids--as they would have been when I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s. For us, it would have been a ticket to permanent dorkdom.

I explained to several Germans that in America, one is considered to be irresponsible if he or she fails to wear a bicycle helmet, and that some states have laws requiring children to wear them. What about head injuries? Answer that, Mr. German Devil-May-Care (not you, Rainer). Nah, still not interested. I did feel guilty when Rainer's children headed out the door the next morning wearing their bike helmets for the ride to school. Of course, he also told me that some kids are known to peddle out of sight of their parents and then ditch the helmet.

It's different in Stuttgart, where I see many bike riders wearing helmets. Tabea Kilian, my cousin who lives here, said the city is considered to be a dangerous place to bike. Perhaps that's why bikers here make the sensible choice to wear a helmet. Still, it brought back good memories of childhood seeing so many people riding without an uncomfortable plastic appendage on their heads.

Many things about Germany evoke an earlier time that we Americans often regret having lost. Cities have thriving downtowns with big department stores and small shops both. Bookstores are practically on every corner. Real bakeries--not the supermarket kind--are everywhere. A public university education is still free, although the government is trying to change that. The shocking proposed tuitition? About $750 a year.

There are reasons some of these things still exist here, including some that would make a free marketeer run screaming from the room. But you can't argue that they don't enhance the quality of life.

Posted by David at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I arrived in Stuttgart today and was met at my hotel by Bernd and Barbara Penkwitt, parents of my cousin, Meike Penkwitt in Freiburg. I've known Bernd and Barbara for years and always enjoy seeing them, even though my limited German makes it difficult for us to carry on a full conversation. We get along with smiles and gestures and much good will.

Barbara is my mother's cousin, though much younger. Technically, I am her "first cousin once removed," but just "cousin" will do. Her father, Hermann Kilian, was the brother of my grandfather, John Kilian. Hermann was just a boy when my grandfather and two of his other brothers left Germany in 1924. The family was separated by the Nazi era and World War II, and not really reunited until around 1961. My aunt Joan, married to an Army doctor, took advantage of living in Stuttgart to seek out her father's surviving German family. I completed the job in the late 1980s, compiling a chronicle of of names, dates, and places that spoke of war, death, and survival. One of my grandfather's brothers and five or six of his cousins died on the German side in World War II.

At dinner last night, we were joined by Bernd and Barbara's son, Florian, Florian's buddy Kai, and my second cousin (again to be technical) Tabea Kilian. All three are young and speak excellent English. Things got cracking and we had a great time over beers discussing Florian's two months of bumming around Morocco, Tabea's trip to Wisconsin last summer with her 75-year-old grandfather, and Kai's relation to the American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein and his various experiences talking to Floridians about George W. Bush.

They don't call it the language barrier for nothing. Most Germans learn English and a second foreign language in school. Unlike us, they have a ready ability to practice their English in everyday life, which is the key to retention of a foreign language. I tell Germans that it is entirely possible for an American to go through his entire long life without ever encountering a foreign language speaker. I took German every year from the seventh through 12th grades and again in college, yet I struggle now with even basic conversations. I had worked with language tapes for several months before coming over here, but nothing stuck.

I wish it was otherwise. I know I am missing mountains of family history from the war years and other years because of my inability to converse easily in German. They would happily tell me if only I was able to listen.

Posted by David at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was last in Heidelberg 31 years ago, right after I finished my four years at Hope College and was wondering how to begin my planned career in journalism. I needed three more credit hours to graduate, the result of an unfortunate encounter with a statistics class while spending night after night working on the college newspaper. Hope offered a three-week May Term course in England that would put me over the top. After three weeks in England, I still had some time, and decided to go to Germany for a long weekend.

To certain young Americans of that period, especially those who studied German in high school, Heidelberg resonated as an impossibly romantic place. One imagined students still dueling with swords in the street (I had done well in a fencing course in college and felt myself fully prepared). There is a large university here and has been for hundreds of years. There was even a student jail, last used in 1914. Mark Twain spent several happy months in Heidelberg getting over writer's block and penning "A Tramp Abroad" about his travels through Germany. Erica Jong used Heidelberg scenes in her famous novel, "Fear of Flying," although that came out shortly after my visit.

I had forgotten how truly beautiful this city is. Heidelberg belongs on a short list with Paris, San Francisco, and a few other places as one of the more beautiful cities in the world. It sits snug in a tight valley of the Neckar River, flanked on either side by forested mountains. Yesterday, I strolled the "Philosopher's Walk" on the other side of the river, gazing back upon the city, its castle, and the leafy trees. This was one of the first really warm days of spring here. Students were everywhere, lazing in the sun and necking on the Neckar.

And of course, I ran into someone I knew. Or rather, who knew someone I knew. I was in a shop in Heidelberg completing a purchase and mentioned Pennsylvania to the store clerk. A woman standing nearby, an American, asked where in Pennsylvania? Harrisburg, I said. Oh, she said, my brother lives in Mechanicsburg. It turned out she was from Mount Carmel, Pa., just down the road from Centralia, was a Bucknell University graduate and the daughter of Joe Swatski, the former superintendent of Shamokin Area School District. I knew Joe well when I was a reporter at The News-Item in Shamokin. Another woman in the store chimed in that she lived in New Castle, Pa. Much more of this and Heidelberg will be a campaign stop for the candidates for governor of Pennsylvania.

I got that job at the Shamokin News-Item a few months after returning from Heidelberg. I suppose you could say things have come full circle.

Posted by David at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I am here in Germany on a trip long planned and paid for, the Patriot-News is moving forward with its plan to decertify the Newspaper Guild local that has represented reporters, editors, and other newsroom employees there since the late 1930s. Our strong effort to fight decertification is in the capable hands of Guild officers Chris Millette, Janet Pickel, and Chris Courogen, as well as Bruce Nelson, who is with the national staff of The Newspaper Guild.

Oh wait--technically, the decertification effort is being led by Pete Shellem and Fred Sprunk, two former Guild members. Pete has a longstanding personal grievance against the Guild because he was hired too late to qualify for a "retro pay" provision that earlier hires get. He's a contract "notch baby" and can't get over it. This dates from the late 1980s and I won't bore you with the details. The sports department, where Sprunk works under Nick Horvath, has been aggressively anti-Guild for years, and I've always suspected, though have no evidentiary proof, that it's made clear that plum beats and promotions will not go to a Guild member. We lost all our members there over the years.

But to say that Shellem and Sprunk are really in charge of this is a polite fiction for legal reasons. The company has been actively preparing for decert for over a year, softening people up by issuing increasingly scary forecasts of what it planned to charge them for health insurance. We don't pay anything now. Publisher John Kirkpatrick all but said that if we decertified, we wouldn't have to pay anything. He is now backtracking on that "pledge" as fast as he can. In truth, the company has been trying to decertify the Guild since the early 1980s. There used to be several craft unions in the building as well, but they were picked off one by one by the former publisher, Ray Gover.

Why does the newsroom still need a union? For economic security for starters. In an industry driven by crazy men who seem to have forgotten that our purpose is to write news, not entertain people, and who want only to cut costs, I feel a lot better with a contract. But there's another reason as well. If we reporters do our job well, we on occasion make powerful people angry. The Guild contract prevents anyone from being fired except for "just cause." An editor can't fire you on the spot because you disagreed with him over the editing of a story, or because an advertiser called to complain.

So how did we come to this?

By using part-time sports "phoners" (they take info over the phone on game nights) who we don't believe are members of the bargaining unit, the Patriot-News got enough signatures to have a decertification election. Now editor David Newhouse is calling in people in small groups for the full-court press on why they should vote to decertify.

The Guild is fighting back aggressively and will win this election. It's really quite simple why decertification is a bad idea: Here's what I tell people:

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking decertification so they can pay you more. They can do that now, and in fact we are bargaining for a new contract.

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking decertification to give you more control over your personal lives. We have a fair arrangement on that now through the contract, and protections against abuses.

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking to stop bargaining with the Guild so they can negotiate separately with each and every one of you. They will tell you what the terms of your employment are if you decertify, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.

--Together we can beat this back and win a new contract. But it takes each and every one of you.

Posted by David at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)