By The River

On this last day of the year, I woke up with a nasty backache thanks to Elvis the cat.

He was howling outside the bedroom door at 3:30 a.m. so I let him in and he, of course, jumped into the bed and curled up by my legs. He has a nasty habit of nipping you if you deign to move your legs, so I ended up (my wife is away) in a weird diagonal position for the next three hours.

And then I recalled what happened yesterday: I accidentally sent my cellphone on a trip through the washing machine. I had been cooking some pie filling on the stove, stirred it a little too hard, and it splashed out onto my jeans. No burns, but a big mess, so I rushed up to change and tossed my jeans and shirt into the laundry basket. Then it was into the washer. I of course felt my pants pockets to make sure they were empty, but the phone had apparently slipped out when I tossed the jeans in the basket. I just grabbed everything up and shoved it in the washer. The phone was a total loss--the slightest bit of dampness kills a cellphone--but at least it's insured.

Am I glad 2007 is almost over? Yup. But I discovered a great New Year's song--Jimmy Buffett's "Changes in Latitutes, Changes in Attitudes." Check out the lyrics at the link and tell me that isn't the perfect song to sing along to at your New Year's party tonight. "Good times and riches and son of a bitches, I've seen more than I can recall..." Gotta love it. Beats "Auld Lang Syne" by a mile.

This is the 334th post on By The River since I began blogging in the spring of 2006. In November, I began subscribing to Google Analytics, a free service that tells you how many people are viewing your blog every day and where they come from. It's been quite interesting, to say the least. I had wondered some days whether anyone was reading it at all beyond the 4-5 regular readers who posted comments. It turns out I range between about 30 and 100 readers per day, with the average about 50.

They're from all 50 states (North Dakota took awhile, but West Fargo finally checked in) and as many foreign countries. Some of them spend a good bit of time on the site reading more than just the current post. Here are the past month's most serious visitors, or rather where they come from:

1. Wausau, Wisconsin. Up in the north woods. Four pages, 37.30 minutes.
2. Dubai, United Arab Emirates. What else can you do in Dubai? Two pages, 18:30 minutes.
3. Perth, Australia. You should be out swimming, but watch out for box jellyfish. Two pages, 18:04 minutes.
4. Thomasville, Ga. No clue what goes on there. Six pages, 17:03 minutes.
5. Yorba Linda, California. Get back in your grave, Richard Nixon! I only mentioned you a few times. Fourteen pages, 15:47 minutes.
6. Brodheadsville, Pa. I get more visitors from Pennsylvania than any other state. Four pages, 14:04 minutes.
7. Shreveport, La. Isn't this where the distinguished Spears family is from? Five pages, 12:02 minutes.
8. Soignier, Belgium. Your guess is as good as minue. Two pages, 10:51 minutes.
9. Safety Harbor, Florida. The marlin are running. Five pages, 9:11 minutes.
10. Harrison, Arkansas. Up in the Ozarks. Probably read my Huckabee stuff. Two pages, 8:53 minutes.

I truly do get readers from all over the world. Some of the other places that checked in more than just briefly were Calgary, Alberta, Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Pontypridd, Wales, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Slough, U.K.--setting for the original BBC version of, "The Office"--Leighton Buzzard, England, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin, Germany, Anjouleme, France, Monreale, Sicily, Tampere and Kuopio, Finland, Nykobing, Denmark, Stockholm, Sweden, Gdansk, Poland, Prague, Czech Republic, Durban, South Africa, Pune, India, and Ipoh, Malaysia.

And a special thanks to my most regular of readers: Mareike in Los Angeles, Phil in Ithaca, N.Y., Elena in Charlotte, N.C., and Jim, in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.

I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year. We'll be heading to a party at Jeff and Julia Duthie's house in Shipoke tonight, which is a quick walk around the corner.

Posted by David at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you make a film about the life of the enigmatic American singer Bob Dylan, who is prone to "reinvent" the facts about his life at every opportunity?

Martin Scorsese did it one way, in an acclaimed, two-DVD documentary, "No Direction Home," that covered Dylan's career between 1961-1966. And Todd Haynes did it completely differently and just as well in the new film, "I'm Not There," using six actors, including Cate Blanchett, to portray Dylan during the key periods of his amazing and brilliant career.

I saw "I'm Not There" at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg, Pa., on Friday night and liked it a lot. It is almost an anti-documentary. If you don't come to the film with a lot of knowledge about Dylan's life and music, it's not going to make a whole lot of sense. But if you do, just sit back and let the film roll over you. I have every non-bootleg Dylan album up through "Slow Train Coming," and have read both Anthony Scaduto's 1973 "Dylan: An Intimate Biography," and Dylan's own autobiography, "Chronicles, Vol. 1." But even I didn't get every reference; you'd need the Dylan equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for that.

Complicating things is that different names are used for just about every person in Dylan's real life except for the poet Allen Ginsberg. Some of the portrayals were obvious, such as Julianne Moore playing a woman who was Joan Baez. French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays Dylan's first wife and major muse, Sara Lownds. But I have no clue, for example, who Michelle Williams is supposed to represent.

I can tell you that the scenes with Richard Gere as Billy the Kid were inspired by the 1973 Sam Peckinpah movie, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," in which Dylan played a small role and wrote the soundtrack (including, 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door'). The spider crawing across the screen and the poetry represent Dylan's 1971 book of stream-of-consciousness poetry, "Tarantula." (It is a difficult read at best.) The exchange between Dylan and British fans, one of whom calls him "Judas," can be heard on "Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert."

Of the six portrayals of Dylan, Cate Blanchett's was far and away the best. The others were good, but she is the one who could get an Academy Award nomination. Best Supporting Actress or Best Supporting Actor? There's a topic for discussion. She looks the most like Dylan.

Haynes got the rights to use actual Dylan songs sung by Dylan in the film, although the official soundtrack, with one exception, is Dylan songs sung by others. That exception is "I'm Not There," a song from the Bootleg Tapes that has never been released by Dylan until now.

Posted by David at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's odd the things that come to mind when a news story of world importance bursts onto the Internet.

When I read the news yesterday about Benazir Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan, I couldn't help but think back to a Halloween party I attended with some of my Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News colleagues back in 1988. I think it was Halloween and I think it was 1988, the year Bhutto began her first stint at prime minister of Pakistan. In any case, one of my colleagues came to the party as her. She did a good job of it, too, bearing a certain physical resemblance that was topped off with the traditional costume Bhutto wore for public appearances.

Many kudos for the costume--Bhutto was a big deal then as the first female to head a Muslim nation. She was just 35 at the time, which I can easily remember because she was born a month before me in 1953 (and a month after former British prime minister Tony Blair, that other 1953-born political leader).

I'm sorry she was murdered, but my sense of loss is tempered by the belief that she probably wouldn't have accomplished great things had she returned to power. Her previous two terms in office were both ended early by military coups. Yes, she was against Islamic terrorism and that may have gotten her killed, but would she have delivered Osama bin Laden to George W. Bush? I doubt it. More likely her reign would have been more of the same delicate balancing act that the current President/dictator Pervez Musharraf has carried out.

The Indian sub-continent of which Pakistan is part has to have some of the more violent politics in the world. Think of the assassinations of Mohandas Gandhi and Indira Gandhi in India, and the hanging of Bhutto's own father after he was overthrown as President of Pakistan by General Zia. Not that America has been much different. What is it that makes one country prone to political assassinations and lets another escape them entirely?

Posted by David at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I want to slip in something about Rev. Bill Hillegonds, who was chaplain of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, when I was a student there from 1971-75. He died Dec. 23 at the age of 85, and will be greatly missed by all the students who knew him. He was chaplain at Hope from 1965 to 1978.

Hillegonds was the Rev. William Sloan Coffin of Hope College. He was, I suspect, one of many politically liberal college chaplains in the 1960s and 1970s who were cut from the same cloth as Yale's Coffin, who was immortalized by Garry Trudeau in "Doonesbury" as the Rev. Scott Sloan. Hillegonds was smart, funny, friendly, and probably never told anyone they were going to Hell. He won you over with charm and Christian love, not Calvinist doctrine.

You won't find this in the Holland Sentinel obituary above, or the one on the Hope College website, but Hillegonds was opposed to the Vietnam War and acted on his beliefs. As I recall, the draft counseling center, where you could go to find out how to be a conscientious objector, was in the basement of Dimnent Chapel on Hillegonds' turf. Chap was a veteran of World War II, which probably turned as many American men against the idea of war (e.g., Sen. George McGovern) as fed hawks into the American Legion and VFW. He started as a 23 year-old freshman at Hope in 1945, the same year my mother enrolled. And it wasn't just the war: Hillegonds advocated many of the social changes that came out of the 1960s.

But his opposition to the Vietnam War was front and center. My good friend Tom O'Brien, who started at Hope a year before I did, recalled coming across a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Holland's Centennial Park during the annual Tulip Time Festival, probably in May 1971. Hillegonds and about 35 students were laying on the ground with signs on their chests proclaiming that they were dead Vietnamese. Tom, who took his anti-war beliefs much further than I ever did, laid down with them, and had many conversations with Hillegonds in the years to come.

Given the sharp rightward turn Hope has taken since Tom and I were there, it is hard to believe that moderate and even liberal winds once blew through the Pine Grove at the center of campus. Speakers like activist black comedian Dick Gregory, Black Panther and now U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush (the only candidate to ever beat Obama in an election), and the Rev. Philip Berrigan (Tom had a hand in that one) have been replaced by the likes of rightwing darling Oliver North, gay "conversion" preachers, and others who flatter the retrograde beliefs of the more conservative members of the Hope board of trustees and big donors.

Those of us who attended Hope between 1963 and 1975 have President Calvin VanderWerf to thank for that all-too-brief period of liberalism, according to the book "Can Hope Endure?" by James C. Kennedy and Caroline J. Simon. VanderWerf recruited Hillegonds as chaplain and set in motion a series of reforms that eliminated compulsory chapel and made the campus more friendly to women students (and, lets be honest, their boyfriends!). VanderWerf was forced out out by Reformed Church conservatives in 1970, but the reform period didn't end immediately.

The advent of President Gordon VanWylen in 1973 brought that about. I remember those of us on the Hope College anchor, the student newspaper, writing about VanWylen's announced goal of an "all-Christian faculty" and wondering what that would mean for one of our favorite history professors, Bill Cohen, who was Jewish.

Hillegonds left Hope in 1978. I don't know if it was because of Van Wylen's conservatism or because he just wanted a change, but he eventually took up the pastorate in a church near the always-liberal University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. His son Paul, a Republican (Chap may have been as well), was elected to the Michigan legislature from Holland and rose to Speaker of the House.

Bill Hillegonds lived a long and wonderful life, and I salute him.

Posted by David at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I worry about a lot of things where my children are concerned. In the back of my mind, I've thought about what would happen if one of them was critically ill and my health insurance company refused to pay for a life-saving procedure-- and let her die--to make their quarterly numbers. In other words, to increase profits for their shareholders.

Thankfully, my kids are in great health, but that nightmare scenario appears to be one possible explanation for what happened to Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old California girl who died after the health insurance division of Philadelphia-based Cigna Corp. denied her a liver transplant earlier this month. As often happens when the press gets involved in a care-denial case, Cigna subsequently reversed its decision and said it would pay for the operation and follow-up care, but by then it was too late to save her.

This case has caused revulsion across a large spectrum of American society. Check out the comments on the Cigna message board on Yahoo! Finance. The American public has had it up to here with this sort of cold-hearted, profit-driven denial of care. The Sarkisyan family's well-known (and accomplished) attorney, Mark Geragos, who like them is Armenian-American, has urged the Los Angeles County DA to file criminal charges against Cigna executives involved in the care denial. Film maker Michael Moore, whose film "Sicko" chronicled a number of similar cases involving care denial by insurance companies, has also called for a murder or manslaughter prosecution.

That might be the only way to stop this sort of thing. Investors didn't punish Cigna for their cruel treatment of young Nataline--its stock is up slightly since the story broke on Dec. 21. The Sarkisyan family's expected lawsuit against Cigna will likely succeed and result in a large judgment, which will be covered at least in part by liability insurance. The only thing that can scare corporate executives sufficiently into changing their ways is the threat of being put in prison as a felon.

The political ramifications of this case could also be huge, in part, sad to say, because the victim was a white teenager and not a poor black child. White victims just get a whole lot more public sympathy in America than black ones do.

As Michael Moore notes in his statement on the Sarkisyan case linked above, all of the President candidates save one--Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich--favor keeping profit-driven health care as part of their approach to national health insurance. But you can see where the need to make profits in health care takes you. It costs a lot more, and you get dead children like Nataline Sarkisyan whose care costs more than Wall Street is willing to pay. I'll say it again: we need a national health care system like France has, paid for out of general tax revenues and covering everyone.

Posted by David at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As you drag yourself out of bed this morning and prepare to face wrapping a mountain of gifts--or even worse, negotiating traffic-choked roads to get to a mall overrun with shoppers to finish buying gifts--here's a bit of political cheer from the folks at BarelyPolitical.com to mark the start of George W. Bush's last year in office, assuming he doesn't stage a coup.

And have you been wondering what Vice President Cheney was burning in the wastebasket when his office caught on fire earlier this week? Here's a speculative list posted on Daily Kos!

Posted by David at 06:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of late, the John Edwards campaign in Iowa appears to be surging. Whether that will bring him victory in the Jan. 5 Iowa caucuses over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton remains to be seen, but the Southern Political Report's Insider Advantage Poll on Tuesday had him in the lead at 30 percent of likely Democratic caucus goers. Clinton was second at 26 percent, and Obama third at 24 percent. Other polls show Edwards in second or third behind the other two, but not far behind.

If Edwards wins, it will because voters want a President who will be their champion against domestic enemies--the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the faceless corporate figures who close American factories and send the jobs to China to boost already heady profits. There is a growing unease about Obama's tendency to shy away from fights and controversies--the New York Times reports today that he frequently voted "present" rather than yes or no on controversial issues when he was an Illinois state senator. Clinton is somewhat better, and more liberal than she presents herself, but like Obama seems destined to be a President who will negotiate crumbs from powerful corporate interests rather than force them to do things they don't want to do.

Edwards was a successful trial lawyer before he became a U.S. Senator from North Carolina. He is used to facing down insurance companies and other corporations and making them pay damages to people they or their policyholders injured. In his speeches this week, he has argued that business interests "have a stranglehold on your government." He has talked of how his father taught him never to start a fight, but never to run from one either. And the killer line: "They'll give their power away when we take their power away," referring to the corporate enemies that have put fear into the lives of so many average Americans.

I'm not totally enamored of Edwards, but I'd feel safer with him in the White House than Obama. We need a President who will handle domestic enemies of the American people with the same firm hand he or she would use with foreign foes.

Posted by David at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has written one of the more sad and disturbing articles I've ever read, about how much damage George W. Bush has done to the U.S. economy in his seven years in office. In other words, he's not only the worst foreign policy president, he's even worse than Depression-enabler Herbert Hoover when it comes to our economic future. What sort of future should Bush have after 2009? Exile in Paraguay, maybe?

I'm off to New York City in a few minutes, but just wanted to dash this off. Thanks to Vanity Fair for printing Stiglitz's important article.

Posted by David at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Half of my Shipoke neighborhood in Harrisburg, Pa., remains without power this morning. Fortunately for me, it's not the half where I live. The region was hit by a classic and severe ice storm Saturday night, which left trees, utility wires, and just about everything else coated with a shiny and deadly layer of ice. The weight of it caused a utility pole at the corner of Race and Tuscarora Streets to snap in half--it appeared to be rotted inside--and out went the lights (and out poured the transformer oil onto the street). Our beloved stick burner (see photo below) was practically begging for a fire to warm its rusty metal.

Surprisingly, the streets were okay, not slippery at all. I drove over to the Weis Market on the West Shore yesterday afternoon on a mission to buy a bottle of wine for dinner and marveled at seeing the forested islands in the Susquehanna River and all the trees along the river bank covered in ice, like a scary vision of some future climatic hell. It was beautiful, but some of those trees were going to die, possibly taking an unlucky human being with it.

When I returned home, I made sure to park the car away from trees and utility poles. High winds were predicted, and that meant some of those ice-covered trees would fall. It seemed the prudent thing to do. But I suppose if I'd been George W. Bush or one of his deluded followers (sarcasm alert) I'd have parked next to the biggest tree in the neighborhood and called for further study on the threat of ice making it fall over. Or, har har, joked about how it sure didn't seem like global warming was a problem today.

Speaking of global warming, America and the Bush Administration took another battering in world opinion over the past 15 days at the international climate talks in Bali, Indonesia. The talks did produce a framework for negotiations that will hopefully lead to a climate change treaty with teeth by the end of 2009. The American delegation--from the nation which contributes the most greenhouse gases-- was booed and hissed for its obstructionism.

While I do agree with Bush that China and India must be made subject to the same future greenhouse gas reduction requirements as America and Europe, I also believe that was a convenient excuse to cover up the administration's deep-seated hostility to doing anything at all about global warming. It isn't hard to figure out why Bush feels that way when you look at the strong ties between his administration and the energy industry, and with fundamentalists who believe that because God gave us coal, it must be okay to burn as much of it as we like. And if the end times are near, why bother to cut back?

When the books are written about America's eight lost years under Bush (this may need to be a multi-volume series), you can be sure that his stubborn refusal to do anything substantive about climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence will be a central theme. The Democratic President who will likely take office in 2009 will have his--or her--hands full trying to make up for lost time.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the mysteries of our modern world is that women seem to do better overall under communist and certain other forms of dictatorial rule. They have more rights and more opportunities, and more equality with men than they do under democratically-elected governments, or, in the case of Iraq, under a sort-of half-assed democratic government that provides a thin veneer of "freedom" over religious and tribal anarchy. The Guardian in the U.K. has a disturbing story about the precipitous decline in women's rights and freedom in Iraq since the U.S. invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This anomaly doesn't exist in all dictatorships, only the ones in which the government is hostile to organized religion to one degree or another. So you didn't see it in Augusto Pinochet's Chile and especially not in Francisco Franco's Spain, which glorified the Catholic Church. But you did, for example, in Communist East Germany and in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As the Guardian article notes or implies, women in Saddam's Iraq were among the more educated, free and equal in the Middle East (while still far short of their Western sisters), because the government decreed that should be the case and was in a position to suppress religious hostility to women.

And that's really what it comes down to: Christianity and Islam in their most conservative forms are profoundly hostile to women, although sometimes the cultural beliefs of the tribe are mistaken for those of the deity. Not all Christian denominations are hostile to women, far from it, but there is constant tension between conservative and moderate-to-liberal Christians over the proper role of women. The current troubles in the Episcopal Church, where I belong, are nearly as much about conservative hostility to ordaining women as ministers as they are to ordaining gays and lesbians.

America, with its constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state, splits the difference. It doesn't allow Southern Baptist clergy like Mike Huckabee to enforce their belief that the Bible dictates the only proper role of a women to be submissive wives and stay-at-home mothers, nor does it pass an Equal Rights Amendment or give women the sort of serious support for working outside the home that East Germany did. American women are somewhere in the middle of those extremes.

No one wants the ugly aspects of the East German or Saddam regimes to return, but it would behoove us to find ways to better support the equality of women, just as those improbable champions did.

Posted by David at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not too late to order my book, Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire, as a holiday gift. All the online booksellers carry it, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Buy.com. It is also available overseas, including from the Amazon.com store in the United Kingdom and from Chapters in Canada.

My book is the only comprehensive history of the underground coal mine fire that destroyed the village of Centralia, Pennsylvania, between 1962 and 1985. The Centralia story was the inspiration for the movie version of Silent Hill and for any number of novels. Today, all that remains of Centralia is about 10 houses. The other 400 or so were torn down after the residents relocated in the mid-1980s to escape the mine fire. I covered the Centralia story as a reporter for The News-item in nearby Shamokin, Pa., from 1976 to 1986. It was the central story of my journalism career.

Posted by David at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You don't hear many protest songs on the radio anymore.

I'm not sure if a song like Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (1965), or Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" (1967), or, God forbid, "Ohio (1970), by Neil Young, would even come up for air today in an American radio world choking under the grasp of corporate radio monsters like ClearChannel and Cumulus Media. Back then, radio station D.J.'s could often decide or at least influence what they played on their shows, as I did when I spun the disks at the Hope College radio station, WTAS.

So if you never heard a great protest song like "Christmas in Fallujah" recorded by Jefferson Pepper in 2005 on his own American Fallout label, you are forgiven. But if you confuse it with the song with the same title by Billy Joel and budding corporate rock star Cass Dillon that just came out--it is completely different--you're headed straight for that special Hell where the only music you'll hear all day long is "Precious and Few" (1972) by Climax, a sappy ballad that presaged the worst of corporate rock.

But I digress.

Pepper lives in Newberry Township, Pa., south of Harrisburg, and is married to the writer Lauri Lebo. He recently put a video of his original "Christmas in Fallujah" up on YouTube as a response to the Joel-Dillon video on YouTube. The songs and videos are as different as two songs with the same title can be. Pepper's is a true protest song, a tribute to a neighbor, 22-year-old Army medic David Maples, who spent a year in bloody Fallujah. It is also a larger tribute to American troops who are in a hellhole for George W. Bush and must deal with the severe mental wounds from the collateral damage they inflict on Iraqi civilians in the name of something or other.

The Joel-Dillon song, on the other hand, is support-the-troops propaganda that will be popular at Young Republican rallies and evangelical church youth group meetings. It says nothing against the war in Iraq, nothing at all. It has the unmitigated gall to imply that Osama bin Laden is actually living in Iraq and directly responsible for the carnage in that sad and dying country. In other words, it could have been penned by the Republican National Committee. Imagine if a singer in Germany during World War II had released a song called, "Christmas in Stalingrad" about the brave and valiant German troops fighting the beastly Russians under horrible conditions and you'll get what I mean. George W. Bush will be humming along to it on the Stairmaster.

Pepper sings his own "Christmas in Fallujah" over photos and words of David Maples. It is a mournful portrait of young Americans caught up in a beastly conflict they don't understand and only barely support. When it is done, you feel relief that Maples came home safely and you hope against hope that his fellow soldiers will soon follow. It is very patriotic, unless your patriotism has no room to admit that George W. Bush led America down the road to disaster.

Posted by David at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The last time I saw Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on stage, in the band's televised 1985 performance at Live Aid, his long hair was jet black. When the band performed in London yesterday in its first concert in 22 years, his hair was still long but had turned snowy white. You can see for yourself in the photo that accompanies the Los Angeles Times review.

Not that age seemed to matter, based on the rapturous reviews of the concert, a 16-song set which was part of a tribute to the late Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun. Here are the reviews from the New York Times, Reuters, London Times, Belfast Telegraph, and Associated Press. And here's a late arrival from the Washington Post.

Jason Bonham, now the drummer for Foreigner, filled in for his late father, John "Bonzo" Bonham, who died one of those classic early rock star deaths back in 1980, after which the band broke up.

I saw Led Zeppelin in concert once, at Earls Court Arena in London in 1975. I was on a three-week May Term course there to finish out my Hope College degree. I needed three more credits to graduate, having withdrawn from a statistics course along the way because my work on the college newspaper, the Anchor, made it impossible to keep up with the daily homework. I will say that London was far better than a statistics course.

We saw the concert advertised and three of us--myself and two other Hope students, the Londono brothers from Colombia, went to the show in high spirits. It was a classic 3-4 hour Led Zep extravaganza, and it was one of the concerts on the "Led Zeppelin" DVD released in 2003.

Apart from everything else, Led Zeppelin's triumphant return to the stage yesterday--an event awaited by legions of fans around the world--shows the triumph of the 1960s culture. It is easy to despair sometimes over the rise of the religious right and movement conservatives in America, who routinely disparage our culture as depraved and decadent. But the truth is, the 1960s, with the youth/rock culture, and the 1990s (when Bill Clinton was President), with the Internet boom, were the premier decades in the American century.

I've always suspected that conservatives really hate the 1960s (defined as the period between the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the Nixon resignation in 1974) because they were listening to "Chicago" and wondering why the cute hippie chicks would have nothing to do with them. But basicly, it's even simpler than that: we won.

Posted by David at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If trends continue, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will be the winner in the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses on Jan. 5. That isn't a guarantee he will win the Republican nomination; others have won those caucuses and ultimately gone down to defeat. But his apparent ascendancy forces all Americans, whether Democratic or Republican, to take him seriously.

My own conclusion: We don't need another creature of the religious right occupying the White House. You think George W. Bush was bad? Just wait.

Behind the affable, joke-cracking facade lies a thin-skinned religious fundamentalist, a Southern Baptist preacher who renounces none of his church's core beliefs. Indeed, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of the late Bible thumper, has given Huckabee his morality seal of approval. Why?

Huckabee doesn't believe in Darwin's Theory of Evolution and favors teaching so-called "Intelligent Design" in the public schools. In 1992, he favored locking up AIDS patients. He believes gays and lesbians are sinners of the worst order. He is against abortion in all circumstances and would make that belief a litmus test for appointment to "relevant" jobs in his administration.

Or how about on the issue of marriage? Huckabee would work for a Constitutional Amendment barring gay marriage, and would bar divorce by heterosexuals if he had his 'druthers. That isn't likely: more fundamentalists get divorced than moderate or liberal Christians do. Huckabee pushed hard for "covenant marriage" as governor of Arkansas.

And on and on. Most of this, apart from the AIDs quarantine and gays-as-sinners bit, can be found on Huckabee's website. He doesn't hide it, because that's who he is. Any moderate or liberal from either party who think he'd "be okay" as President is engaging in the same self-delusion that brought us George W. Bush and the eight lost years.

Postscript: The Drudge Report today linked to a 1998 article from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about an address by Huckabee to the Southern Baptist Pastors Conference in Salt Lake City. This article should remove any doubt that Huckabee is as much a Bible thumper as the late Rev. Falwell. Among other things, he attributes school shootings, including the one that year in Jonesboro, Ark., to "a nation that has forgotten God." None of what he said in the speech was particularly surprising for a Southern Baptist minister speaking to other Southern Baptist ministers, but since he says on his website that his faith and life are inseparable, we can expect he would make his entire administration into one big faith-based initiative.

If you have the same fundamentalist Protestant beliefs he does, you'll probably be happy. If you don't, you won't.

Posted by David at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is it possible that former Arkansas Gov. and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, a strong contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2008, was so caught up in the rightwing hatred of President Bill Clinton in 1996 that he engineered the release from prison of a convicted rapist? Who had raped a teenage girl who happened to be the second cousin of Bill Clinton? Because he believed against all evidence, including letters from other victims of rapist Wayne Dumond, that Clinton had railroaded an innocent man?

That's the story that's beginning to emerge, led by the reporting of Murray Waas in the Huffington Post. But it gets much worse. Within weeks of his release in 1999, Dumond sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman in Kansas City, and possibly raped and murdered a second woman before he was arrested (he died in prison of natural causes before trial). Huckabee is refusing to release his papers as Governor that relate to the pardon.

Younger readers and those in the now 46 countries outside America who occasionally provide a reader of this blog may be forgiven if they don't remember or understand the intense rightwing hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton that dogged them from the day they returned to Arkansas to enter political life.
Huckabee became governor of Arkansas in 1996 when "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" was at fever pitch and President Clinton was facing wild accusations from the right of having orchestrated various murders.

Huckabee, who had been lieutenant governor, moved to the statehouse after the resignation of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor. He needed wingnut support if he was going to win a full term in 1998, and the wingnuts, especially in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, had proclaimed Wayne Dumond to be yet another victim of the vengeful, murderin' Clintons. Here's another Huffington Post story on the influence of the anti-Clinton zealots in the case.

One might argue that Huckabee was simply a coldly calculating politician back then, just as today he refuses to admonish supporters who call Mormonism a "cult."

But I think he really believed the rightwing garbage about Clinton railroading Wayne Dumond. After all, Huckabee knew what had happened to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the Willie Horton affair. Horton, a convicted murderer, committed robbery and rape after he was let out for the weekend on a controversial weekend furlough program that Dukakis had not started but had supported. Republicans hammered away at it in the 1988 Presidential election and it was one of the factors that cost Dukakis the election.

Just as the Wayne Dumond affair may ultimately sink the Presidential hopes of Mike Huckabee unless he comes clean on what he did and why he did it.

Posted by David at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Call me obsessed, but I can't get enough of the story, now two years-old, of how a man's body was accidentally picked up by a trash hauler at a funeral home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and then dumped in the nearby Auburn Hills landfill owned by Waste Management. Where amazingly, he remains (can you think of a better word?) to this day.

The latest, as reported by the Holland Sentinel, is that officials from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth have reopened their file in the case after meeting with lawyers for Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home, Priority Arrowaste, and the family of the man in the landfill, Erwin Jordan. Funeral homes are among the businesses regulated by the department.

Now I'm a newspaper reporter, and as a group, we have a pretty dark sense of humor. It's sort of a technique for mentally coping with the murder, mayhem and other tragedies we write about on a regular basis. We'll yuck it up over weird suicides, odd accidents, and (most recently) the local woman who tried to strangle her boyfriend with her bra (underwire? Victoria's Secret?). Which segued into a discussion among the photographers over whether, if you were going to kill someone, would you want them naked or clothed?

But I struggle to find even the blackest of humor in the Erwin Jordan case, although I'll forgive you if you do. What sort of society leaves a human being's body in a landfill rather than inconvenience either the landfill owner or the taxpayers with the effort of finding it? Especially when the costs can logically be charged back to the idiots who put our Mr. Jordan there to begin with.

Hairsplitting legalities aside, find the body. If the FBI can find crime victims in Pennsylvania landfills, there is no reason what is left of Erwin Jordan can't be found and given a proper burial.

Posted by David at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

NPR was interviewing some Iowa voters this morning and I'm still angry and blown away by one of them and her pure selfishness.

She proclaimed smugly that she "makes a lot of money" through her "own hard work" and is "tired of paying so someone else's kid can have breakfast at school." To be quite honest, I was hurling F-bombs at the radio before she was half through with her self-satisfied little speech.

We live in a community, and it is necessary and yes, desirable, for those of us with more money to help--through taxes, not charity--those of us with less. I don't begrudge my federal and state and city taxes. I just wish the amount of my federal taxes that go to finance George W. Bush's insane war in Iraq would instead go toward my share of a single-payer national health insurance program.

The greatest period in American history--the liberal democratic hegemony from 1933 to 1980--was also the period when federal taxes on the wealthy were at their peak. Things have gotten progressively worse beginning with Ronald Reagan, interrupted only slightly by Bill Clinton's eight years, the last time fiscal sanity reigned in Washington.

I wonder if that woman in Iowa would mind if the rest of us stopped contributing to the highways she drives on, the public library where she checks out books, and the public schools her children attend? Maybe be billed by the police if they investigate a burglary at her home? Or charged by the fire department--cash in advance, please--to put out a fire in her house?

Of course she would mind. But when it comes to helping the poor, the door slams shut.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who--quite reasonably--thought that Judge John Jones III's 2005 decision in the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board "Intelligent Design" case would kill this vampire belief was wrong.

It seems Judge Jones mistakenly used a steel spike instead of the customary wooden one, and so Intelligent Design--which posits that life is so complex that an "Intelligent Designer," i.e., God, must have "designed" it all--has escaped to roam the land.

Vampire beliefs--a phrase I coined just now--are beliefs, ideas, or concepts which have been proven wrong, are harmful to the public good, but prove nearly impossible to kill. They often have a shred of plausibility that allows their deluded supporters to continue to cling to them. Other examples include the belief that large numbers of American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were spit upon by war protesters--there is not a single verified incident--and, locally, that agriculture is the number one industry in Pennsylvania. You can laugh about that last one (it actually ranks about 35th, according to federal statistics), but it has profoundly negative effects on taxpayers and public policy here and has proven nearly impossible to kill.

If there was anything the Dover trial here in Harrisburg proved, it is that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is backed by solid science, that Intelligent Design is not, that there are no "troubling questions" about Darwin's Theory, and that Intelligent Design is merely creationism under a new name. For that latter knowledge, the scientific community has Barbara Forrest to thank. Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, is the co-author of "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design." She is Public Enemy No. 1 to Intelligent Design supporters.

Of late, the vampire belief of Intelligent Design has turned up in Texas, where the Director of Science for the Texas Education Agency, Christine Comer, has been fired from her job, accused of not "staying neutral" on the subject of Darwin's Theory of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Here is one of the smoking gun memos.

Ms. Comer made the mistake of forwarding an e-mail to the staff about an upcoming (at the time) lecture in Austin, Texas, by Ms. Forrest. Within hours, Lizzette Reynolds, who is senior adviser for statewide initiatives for the TEA and closely tied to George W. Bush, had instituted the move to fire her.

Texas will rewrite its standards for the teaching of science next year, which may be the real reason Reynolds and the right wanted her out. The new president of the Texas Board of Education, Don McLeroy, is a rightwing conservative who believes strongly in Intelligent Design and other positions of Texas religious conservatives.

Next time, Judge Jones, please use a wooden stake. Had you allowed Court TV to televise the trial, as you now regret not having done, it would be less likely that this vampire belief would still be claiming new victims.

Posted by David at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)