By The River

Every journalist has a few heroes. One of mine was Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who managed to combine great literature with great investigative reporting in exposing the brutality of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union.

Solzhenitzsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, first became famous for his novella, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which detailed a single day in the life of a Soviet political prisoner in the camps, a life Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand, having been a prisoner himself. It was allowed to be published in 1963 by Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev, who hoped it would help discredit his murderous predecessor, Joseph Stalin.

But I revered Solzhenitsyn most for his three volume history of the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, the first volume of which appeared in 1973. Gulag was investigative reporting as literature, laying out all the crimes of the Soviet Union from its beginning in 1918 through the 1950s. I could only imagine the work that Solzhenitsyn did to collect and verify the terrible tales he relates in his magnum opus. I read every word, and indeed have read two-thirds of all the books he wrote, excepting only the last three historical novels in the Red Wheel series.

Solzhenitsyn led a difficult life. He was thrown into the camps originally for referring to Stalin originally as "the man with the mustache," and barely survived stomach cancer. After Kruschchev was deposed in the mid-1960s, he led an increasingly perilous existence, collecting stories, writing them down, and secreting what he wrote to keep it away from the Soviet secret police. Gulag was published after the police interrogated his typist, who gave up the location of one of the copies and then hanged herself in shame.
Solzhenitsyn's fame around the world kept him alive, but he was thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He spent 18 years living in exile with his family in Vermont, and managed to alienate many of his western supporters with his writings and speeches. I don't hold that against him. Many great artists and great investigative reporters (Sy Hersh comes to mind) have personality issues. They aren't necessarily people you would want to hang out with, but you value their work.

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It is a strange experience to see yourself on the big screen, larger than life, talking about some topic on which you are an expert. In my case, that would be the mine fire that has been burning near or under Centralia, Pa., since 1962. It is one thing to see yourself on TV, on the little screen, but another thing entirely to see yourself in giant size in a darkened theater with hundreds of people hanging on your every word.

I had that experience Saturday night in Pottsville, Pa., during a screening of "The Town That Was," a feature-length documentary about the Centralia mine fire. I wrote a book, Unseen Danger, about the mine fire, and I appear or am heard a dozen times in the documentary. Pottsville is 18 miles southeast of Centralia along Route 61, and this was the first screening of "The Town That Was" within easy driving distance of where the bulk of Centralia residents went to live after the mass relocation of the 1980s. The film played at the Philadelphia Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival last year, but hasn't to date gotten a broadcast deal, which is a shame.

I drove up to Pottsville with my younger daughter, Lydia. The Sovereign Majestic Theater, where the screening would be held, had been a silent film palace until 1930, then spent the next 70 or so years as a farmers market. Earlier in the current decade, the city fathers of Pottsville converted it back to an arts center. It holds about 225 people, and most of the seats were taken. Tickets were $5. I was curious who would come to see it. Many of the people who walked in were older, but there was a fair number of young couples, even a few who appeared to be there on dates. Maybe they thought it would be like "Silent Hill," the horror film loosely, very loosely based on Centralia. Or not.

"The Town That Was" centers on John Lokitis, Jr., the youngest of the dozen or so people who refuse to leave Centralia. Lokitis, now in his late 30s, lives alone in his grandparents' former home and tries to keep what's left of the town alive. He mows some of the lawns, puts up the municipal Christmas decorations, and briefly was Centralia's mayor. He inspires both respect and derision among people who see the film. But the film is more than just about Lokitis--viewers learn the history of the mine fire (Cliff Notes version) and see what Centralia used to look like. Some of my photographs of Centralia in its final years were used in the film, but what's great are the Super 8 home movies the directors were able to dig out of the attics of former Centralia residents.

I was there anonymously, and didn't know if anyone would recognize me as we left. Lydia and I walked out and people were standing in front of the theater, still talking about what they had seen. We walked up to the Greystone Restaurant, but it was packed and so we walked back. I saw people looking at me funny, and we heard them whisper, "That's him, he was in the movie." This is not an experience I ever expected to have. A young guy came up and addressed me by name. He told me he had read my book and was a big fan. An old guy was right behind him, shaking my hand for a long time and explaining that he had grown up in Centralia but left in 1942, no doubt for the war. Eighty years-old now, he was grateful the film had been made. "I never thought I would live to see something like this," he said.

Moments like this help make up for all the crap any writer goes through.

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I'm fascinated and repulsed by liars, especially in the literary world, where it seems doubtful any memoir by anyone who isn't a bona fide celebrity will ever again see the light of day. I say that in reaction to a story tonight in the New York Times about yet another pathological liar who passed off pure fiction as the honest-to-God story of her own life.

This one is almost comical. Almost. Affluent white girl from Sherman Oaks, Calif., writes a "memoir" in which she claims to be a half-white, half-Native American girl who ran with gangs and sold drugs in South Central Los Angeles. It was published by Riverhead Books, a reputable publisher, and received glowing reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere. Here's an interview with the purported memoirist, Margaret B. Jones, on her publisher's website, while it lasts. Her older sister saw a story about her and dimed her out, and last night Margaret Seltzer, the real author, confessed that Margaret B. Jones and "Love and Consequences" were pure fiction. She brings to mind James Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces," another purported "harrowing" memoir.

And therein lies part of the problem. The literary world wants ever more screwed-up lives in its memoirs. Just having an interesting life, full of lively characters and well-told, is not enough anymore. I was told this myself when, three years ago, I was suddenly besotted with the idea of writing about my early journalism career. I thought my story, of moving from a midwestern town known for its Tulip Festival, to my first journalism job in hard-boiled Shamokin, Pa., at least had some interesting possibilities. Especially when I threw in the Centralia mine fire, the central event of my early life as a journalist. A literary agent I knew practically laughed in my face. She asked me if I had abusive parents, or had some other horrible aspect to my childhood. Told that I didn't, she wouldn't even look at my sample chapters.

What Seltzer did is far from a victimless crime. Her editor, for all her foolishness in not ordering a fact check on the story, seems to have been completely bamboozled. She wasn't in on the scam, but her career will likely be destroyed anyway. Lies are like that. People believe them, and their own lives fall apart. Seltzer says she's sorry. Big deal.

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I'm here in New York with my family, looking down from the 27th floor as the city comes to life on Sunday morning. As a Hope College graduate, the view is ironic: I can see Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, that East Coast citadel of the Reformed Church, and the statue of the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who pastored the church from 1932-84. Both the church and Peale (and his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale) were major supporters of my old alma mater in Holland, Michigan. Peale wrote the best-selling, "The Power of Positive Thinking," an early self-help volume.

Peale was an old-line Republican, not the movement conservative type of Republican that controls the party today. He had veered toward an early version of that in 1960, when he infamously (as spokesman for 150 Protestant clergymen) urged a vote against John F. Kennedy for President because he was a Roman Catholic. "Faced with the election of a Catholic," Peale said, "our culture is at stake." He was widely criticized for that statement, and of course Kennedy narrowly won the Presidency. Peale then withdrew from partisan politics, other than remaining personally close to Richard Nixon and presiding at the wedding of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower in 1968.

Peale was slow to recognize that American culture, political or otherwise, was changing rapidly. The same can be said for many politicians of both parties today who don't understand the appeal of Barack Obama to Americans, especially young Americans, tired of old white guys like Dick Cheney and Co. screwing up their lives. Given the way American politics is trending this year, Obama seems headed for a historic victory over Sen. John McCain, who seems older in every photo we see. Smart, young, urban, hip, and black/white seems destined to triumph this year over old, white, and suburban.

You could see a lot of this this Zeitgeist in a new Broadway musical, In the Heights, which we saw last night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The play, written by 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, is one of the best musicals I've ever seen. The music is as good or even better than that of "Rent," and the dancing is first-rate. It is ostensibly about the lives and loves of the Hispanic community in Washington Heights, a neighborhood near the top of Manhattan where the George Washington Bridge lands on the island. Yet like Obama, In the Heights transcends ethnicity to offer a story that is simply human and real, about people dealing with change. The actors received a thunderous standing ovation at the end of the show, one of the final previews before the official opening night later this week.

I don't know if Obama has been to see In the Heights. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain (New York Times columnist Frank Rich ties them together as evil twins today) ought to, if for no other reason than to understand the cultural changes in America that seem destined to make them seem as irrelevant to the modern day as Norman Vincent Peale.

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It was great to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win the Oscar for Best Song tonight. They were nominated for 'Falling Slowly,' the infectious main song from "Once," a low-budget Irish film written and directed by John Carney. I saw it at the Midtown in Harrisburg, Pa., last year and couldn't stop humming that song. You can listen to it here. "Once" is about a struggling street musician, Hansard, who insists on playing his own songs. He meets Irglova one day and it turns out she is an accomplished pianist. He bets everything he has on producing a great CD of songs, and she is with him all the way. The ending isn't quite what you expect, but it is real.

Hansard, front man for the band, The Frames, and Irglova, who is Czech (neither are trained actors), dedicated their award to struggling artists everywhere. You just know they haven't had an easy time of it. The music business these days is almost as troubled as journalism, and with no fewer trolls who don't care a whit about what is good and right, only what is perceived to sell. "Once" is the antithesis of that kind of thinking, and Hansard and Irglova couldn't have looked happier to be up on stage.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I've been reading Ted Anthony's enjoyable new book from Simon & Schuster, "Chasing the Rising Sun," which is a travel book of sorts about the author's quest to find the origin of the song 'House of the Rising Sun.' The best-known version of the song was recorded by The Animals in 1964, but dozens if not hundreds of other artists have recorded their own versions. I wondered how an entire book could be written about a single song, but there is enough interesting history here to more than merit the treatment he gives it.

I know Anthony and worked with him at the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News. He started as an intern out of Penn State University in 1990 and worked into a regular reporting job. From here, he went to Associated Press in 1992. His goal was to be a foreign correspondent in China and cover the British handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. He did both and much more, serving as an AP foreign correspondent in China from 2001-2004 and news editor in Beijing for the last two years he was there.

Anthony devoted more than five years to off-and-on research for this book, his first, and manages to incorporate even China (hilariously) into his quest. But most of his research takes place in the United States, and not just in New Orleans, the locale celebrated (or not) in the song. He traces the modern version of the song to one collected by Library of Congress folk song researcher Alan Lomax in 1937. Lomax recorded 16-year-old Georgia Turner singing "our song" in Middlesboro, Ky. While versions of 'House of the Rising Sun' date back as far as the beginning of the 20th century, it is Turner's version that evolved into New York folk singer Dave Van Ronk's version, which became Bob Dylan's version, which, in 1964, classicly and hauntingly, was recorded by Eric Burdon and the Animals, a band from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.

Anthony wasn't able to interview Van Ronk or Dylan, but did talk to Burdon at length in New Orleans, where he was staying for a time. Burdon and most of the other band members never got any publishing royalties from the song because it was credited to "Trad: Arr. A. Price." Alan Price was the organist for the Animals, and his playing is heard prominently in the song. He profited handsomely, but Burdon and the others never saw a dime. That hasn't stopped Burdon from performing the song at every concert he gives, and then some. Anthony tells a story about how Burdon wandered into a non-descript and nearly empty Seattle karaoke bar one night and, unannounced and unrecognized, went up and did his song.

The bartender commended Burdon for his performance, offering him a free margarita. "Chasing the Rising Sun" is full of good stories like this, enlivened by Anthony's wry humor and obvious devotion to American pop culture. The danger in reading it is that you won't be able to get the song out of your head.

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I watched Nova's very intelligent, two-hour show on the Dover, Pa., intelligent design trial last night. It is worth watching if your local public television station ever broadcasts it again. You will come to realize what a stunning defeat for the religious right this was.

Parents sued the Dover Area School Board after the school board majority attempted to introduce a religious alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, known as Intelligent Design, into high school biology classes. Intelligent Design, as the trial proved, was thinly-disguised creationism, a concept ginned up after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of Genesis creationism in public schools in 1987. It posits that some living things are so complex that an "Intelligent Designer," i.e., God, must have put them together in his workshop. It was a clear and classic violation of the U.S. Constitution's mandated separation of church and state, but this took place around the high-water mark of the Bush Administration and the fundamentalist Christian right was feeling its oats.

The trial was held in U.S. District Court, Harrisburg, in the fall of 2005. Judge John Jones III, a moderate Republican, handed down a ruling in December of that year ordering the Dover Area School Board not to teach "Intelligent Design" in its schools. Scientific testimony at the trial demolished the critics of evolution, while other testimony revealed the subterfuge behind the school board's scheme. Sick and tired of lies and evasions by the I.D. advocates on the Dover board, Jones slammed the "breathtaking inanity" of their transparent effort to introduce conservative Christian beliefs into the public school curriculum.

My overall reaction to "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," was wonderment about some of the people who get elected to run our schools. Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell, the chief architects of the Intelligent Design fiasco at Dover, are about as qualified to run a public school district as advocates of using bleeding and leaches in medical treatment would be to run the Penn State School of Medicine at Hershey.

There isn't any intelligence test required to be a school director. District Justices in Pennsylvania aren't required to be lawyers but must still complete and pass a course of instruction after they are elected. Not so for school directors. Any idiot who gets more votes than the next guy can serve. The Intelligent Design fiasco cost the taxpayers of Dover a million dollars in legal fees.

My other reaction from watching the show was that the science teachers at Dover Area High School were true heroes. They fought the school board's effort to fundamentalize the biology classes at more than a little risk to their jobs. This wasn't just passive resistance; they put their strong objections into a firmly-worded letter to the school board and made it public. If they have not been given formal honors by their profession for their courage, they ought to be.

Many of the trial participants and observers were interviewed for the Nova production, including Judge Jones, former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo, whose own book on the trial comes out next year, and Buckingham and Bonsell. Michael Behe, the Lehigh University scientist whose writings are a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, and who has been disavowed by his Lehigh colleagues, declined to be interviewed.

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I've watched all of the episodes so far of "The War," Ken Burns' epic documentary on the American involvement in World War II.

And so far, I'd give Burns and his crew an 'A' for effort and a 'B' for content. I commend him for showing the brutal reality of the war and driving home the point that American soldiers, while overall disciplined and effective, were not always angels. Our side executed prisoners for convenience sake just as the Germans and Japanese did. It was not a "Good War," as Burns points out, but a necessary one.

Last night's episode on the Battle of the Bulge and the rescue of the American civilian internees in the Santo Tomas camp outside Manila was particularly good. In one of many examples of his overall fairness, Burns juxtaposes the little-known Japanese imprisonment of American civilians in the Philippines under increasingly brutal conditions with the American internment of Japanese civilians in the mainland U.S. That's progress; most documentaries on the war show only what we did to Japanese-Americans.

Yet Burns holds back on Santo Tomas. I know a lot about this because I researched it several years ago for a yet-unwritten book on the history of GPU, the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg. GPU, then known as Associated Gas & Electric, owned Manila Electric Co. All the white collar workers at Meralco were Americans, many from Reading, Pa. William Snyder, who later supervised the early stages of construction of TMI-1 for Metropolitan Edison Co., was among the prisoners, although he was later moved to the Los Banos camp. I interviewed several of the GPU Santo Tomas survivors for the book and examined documents of the post-war war crimes trial of the Japanese officers who ran the camp.

Burns gets the increasing starvation right, but he never mentions that it was deliberate Japanese policy in the last months of the war. Many camp inmates believed that the Japanese Army was preparing to murder them outright. The very dramatic rescue of the Santo Tomas inmates didn't come across well in the documentary, but to be fair it was probably a matter of not having time to show everything. Burns does sort of link Gen. MacArthur's grandstanding visit to the camp to the decision of the Japanese to target the camp with their artillery, which killed several American civilians. Most of the former prisoners I talked to had little good to say about MacArthur personally.

My other complaint about the series is the repetitive footage of cannons and machine guns firing. The footage appears to be linked to specific battles on specific days, but the claim of direct link is never made and I wonder if a lot of generic war footage was used. Those army cameramen on both the American and German sides seem to have been everywhere.

And a final note: did anyone else notice how the volume of "The War" is noticeably higher than whatever show you were watching before it? I have to get up and turn it down when each episode starts. I guess Burns knew who his primary audience would be--older Americans who are increasingly hard of hearing. If it wasn't public TV and sponsored entirely by General Motors, I suspect Miracle Ear would have been right in there.

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I watched the 1990 film "Lord of the Flies" on the Chiller Channel tonight with my daughter Elizabeth, who is 14. I had never seen the film (and didn't know there was a Chiller Channel), but of course had read the William Golding novel of the same name back in 9th grade. As I recall--here comes a guilty admisson--I bought the Cliff Notes at Reader's World in downtown Holland, Michigan, to help me with my book report. Elizabeth was assigned the book as summer reading going into 9th grade at Harrisburg Academy. She has been plugging away at the book and didn't buy the Cliff Notes.

I hasten to add that I did read "Lord of the Flies" and it did stick with me. How could it not? Fourteen is the perfect age for a boy or girl to read Golding's 1954 masterwork, which helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The idea of being stranded on an apparently deserted tropical island starts out very attractive. No more parental rules, no more teachers, just fun in the sun. Of course, the boys rapidly shed what turns out to be a thin veneer of civilization and revert to jungle savagery, complete with spears and loincloths and bloody violence.

The movie is a relatively faithful rendition of the book, although the English boys become Americans and the time is the Cold War rather than World War II. They don't find a dead flyer hanging by a parachute from a tree, but they do kill Piggy with a boulder to shut him up. That scene always gave me a chill, symbolic as it is of the triumph of a brutal mob over civilized life.

In 9th grade in 1968 we were confronted with the Vietnam War. Classmates' brother were dying in the Tet Offensive, and we wondered if the war would still be on when we were old enough to be drafted. Fourteen year-olds do wonder about that. What do they think about today when they read "Lord of the Flies?" The bloody hell of Iraq, where the civil war in what, long ago, was the cradle of civilization has become slaughter for slaughter's sake? Where 250 innocent people in a small village die at the hand of faceless bombers?

Yes, do read "Lord of the Flies" whether you are 14 or 41. And think of that thin veneer of civilization and the terrible power of the cruel and brutal mob to strip it away.

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What is it about riding a bicycle as an adult, or a putative adult, that turns one into a self-righteous zealot?

I write in defense of poor Sheila Rothenberger of West Hanover Twp., Pa. Ms. Rothenberger wrote to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., on June 20 complaining that bicyclists ought to be more careful in how they ride. She suggested they stay off certain roads entirely, such as one where a 19-year-old woman from Lebanon, Pa., was killed tragically in early June while riding her bicycle.

From the reaction, you'd think that Rothenberger, who I've never met in my life, had confessed a desire to take part in the annual baby seal hunt in Canada. First to take up the stick and beat Rothenberger to the ground was Mike McKenney of Mechanicsburg, who suggested that the fault was entirely Rothenberger's for being angry at slow-moving bicycles and that she ought to confine her motoring to interstate highways. Or else, he sniffed with moral superiority, she ought to slow down. Then came a letter from someone who said bicycles have a legal right to be on the same roads as cars, blah, blah, blah.

In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, I distinctly remember my first encounter with bicycle zealots. It was on the busy street that runs past my parents' house. It has two lanes and is divided by double yellow lines, which means, of course, no crossing into the opposite lane to pass. There would be plenty of room to pass a single bicycle, or a procession of them, except that these two bicyclists insisted on riding side by side and blocking the entire lane. I tapped on the horn once, then again when there was no reaction. After the second time, one of the riders turned around with a look of pure hatred on his face. I don't recall if they moved to the side of the road or not.

Of late, bicyclists in my bike-loving hometown have proclaimed a right NOT to ride on bike paths built for them at taxpayer expense. Some Rothenberger out there (probably Van Rothenberger, given the town) had complained about bikes being on a really busy road with lots of fatal accidents. Why couldn't they use the adjoining bike path? Silly woman. She was cudgeled into the ground by the bicycle zealots and informed that the bike path ALSO HAD PEDESTRIANS, which forced dedicated bicycle zealots to slow down, greatly annoying them.

I do most of my daytime driving in the city of Harrisburg, where I observe bicyclists without helmets weaving through traffic, running red lights, running stop signs, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and generally behaving in a dangerous and obnoxious manner.

Rothenberger is right. There are some roads where bicyclists don't belong. No one in their right mind, for example, would commute to work on a bicycle on Second Street in Harrisburg at 7:40 a.m. You can ignore common sense but you can't ignore the laws of physics. Big crushes little in an accident. We may not be South America, where the big vehicle has the right-of-way over the smaller one, but it's time for the bicycle zealots to be a little more considerate if they want the right to ride where they please.

Posted by David at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written before about how Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has more than its share of really weird, brutal murders. Everyone remembers the slaughter of the Amish school children by Carl Charles Robert IV in West Nickel Mines on Oct. 2, but that was only the latest in a long string of murders in the county.

The latest is the arrest of 16-year-old Alec Devon Kreider of bucolic-sounding Cobblestone Lane, Manheim, for the knife slayings of three people who lived a half-mile from his own home. Supposedly he went there to kill only his friend, Kevin Haines, but doing a Jack-the-Ripper on the parents, Tom and Lisa Haines, as well. A daughter escaped. Kreider supposedly confessed to his father, who then turned him in to the police. Keep in mind that knife slayings--remember Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman?--are often bloody messes, with repeated stab wounds or slashes.

Lancaster County. Call it the land of crazy white people, I suppose. Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" that he got more scared when he encountered a white man on a dark street because statistically, they commit most of the serious crime. I don't think there's another rural/suburban county in Pennsylvania with crimes like this on such a frequent basis.

There really ought to be a psychological investigation of the culture of Lancaster County, where conservative religion dominates life, to figure out what factors lead to these murders. I have an idea about why one 16-year-old boy might be driven to kill another 16-year-old boy, a friend no less, but I'm going to keep it to myself for now and see what comes out as the investigation unfolds.

Posted by David at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was one of those miscarriages of justice that are so egregious that you think it can't be happening in 21st century America. But today came good news that a nightmare may be ending for a 40-year-old Connecticut school teacher.

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT, faced 40 years in prison for being convicted of intentionally showing pornographic images to students on a classroom computer. Her life was close to being destroyed, and she isn't out of the woods yet because the judge in the case only ordered a new trial. She did not throw out the case, which would have been the proper response. And Amero and her family likely face crushing legal bills that really should be paid by the school district, the police, and the prosecutor's office that brought this case.

Basicly, Amero was a victim of spyware that took over a classroom computer and sent repeated pornographic pop-up images to the screen. She had no training in what to do if that happened. The school had stopped paying for updates of its web filtering software, and it failed to stop the porn onslaught. At her trial, the defense was blocked by the judge from introducing testimony from a computer forensic expert who examined the hard drive of the Windows computer Amero was using. And the prosecution never ran a spyware scan on the computer.

It's tempting to pass this off as another New England sexual hysteria case, like that infamous Fells Acres daycare prosecution in Massachusetts a few years back when children were induced into giving fanciful testimony about implausible sexual horrors. People went to prison in that case and did serious time before reason was restored, largely because of crusading columns by a Wall Street Journal writer. The real villains here are the Norwich police and prosecutors who seemed to lack any common sense and were willing to let an innocent life be destroyed to win a case that wasn't a case at all.

Judge Hillary Strackbein, in granting a new trial (which probably won't happen, meaning Amero will be in the clear) had the lack of grace to criticize the bloggers around the world who targeted this miscarriage of justice and focused critical attention on Connecticut justice. She accused them of trying to "improperly influence" the court. Too bad, lady.

Posted by David at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had the enjoyable experience of seeing myself on the big screen Saturday afternoon when a terrific new documentary about the Centralia mine fire, "The Town That Was," played at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

The photo is from the Q&A session that followed. I'm second from right. The others, from left, are Malinka Thompson-Godoy, producer, Tom Larkin, a former Centralia activist who also appeared in the film, Georgie Roland, co-director, Chris Perkel (with microphone), the other co-director, and at far right, Paul Henning, who composed the film's haunting score. I wrote the book "Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire," and covered Centralia as a newspaper reporter. I'm in the film to talk about the history of Centralia and the mine fire.

Centralia, Pa., was a small town with a long history and strong community ties. The mine fire started in 1962 when a clean-up project at the town dump went horribly wrong. Underfunded and occasionally misguided attempts by the state and federal government to stop the fire all ultimately failed. Beginning in the winter of 1979-80, the fire broke through the last barrier and began moving under Centralia, sending dangerous gases into homes and causing the ground to collapse without warning. Relocations of the most endangered residents began in 1981, and the entire town was relocated beginning in 1984.

But not all of them. Some chose to stay. About 12-15 mostly elderly people out of an original population of a little over a thousand remain, but also John Lokitis, Jr., who is in his early 30s. John lives alone in the former home of his grandparents and carries on a quixotic effort to keep a semblance of the town alive. But viewers of the film come to see the futility of the effort, and understand that what had been a real town with real families is gone forever. "The Town That Was" leaves many viewers with a sense of sadness or melancholy at what was lost.

The film drew extended applause from the audience in the Prince Music Theater. There were 200 advance ticket sales and the house was nearly but not entirely filled. Chris Perkel at one point asked how many former Centralia residents or people with ties to Centralia were in the audience, and about 10 hands went up. Among them were Joe Coddington, whose sister, Colleen Dwonczyk appears in the film, and Shannon Buckley, who I had last seen as a six-year-old in 1981. Her family was in that early group of relocatees. She suffered from asthma, which was aggravated by the mine fire gases in her home, and her parents appeared in Tony Mussari's 1983 PBS documentary "Centralia Fire."

Chris, Georgie, and Malinka invited Paul Henning, Tom Larkin and I onstage afterward, and we all answered questions from the audience. I think the Q&A would have gone on for another half hour at least, but we had to clear the house for the next film. All in all, it was a great experience. "The Town That Was" will screen one more time at the film festival, April 16 at 7 p.m. at International House in Philadelphia.

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I'm about four hours into the live telecast of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and I'm not going to bed.

This is the first time it has been broadcast live in its entirety (with no commercials!), and you have to wonder why it has taken this long. Well, maybe it isn't that hard to figure out. This is one of the more over the top and unpredictable award shows you'll ever see, with bleeped and un-bleeped obscenities and general craziness. Rolling Stone Keith Richards got things off to a rousing start when he came to induct the Ronettes and, with a twinkle in his eye, thanked advances in medical science for allowing him to be there. That was followed by Ronnie Spector's 17 page acceptance speech in which she seemed to thank everyone in creation. And Paul Schaefer came out at the end to read a message from Phil Spector--he of the murder rap--in tribute to the group he created.

Patti Smith, always a favorite of mine, was next. She was touching and tearful and seemed hesitant in her first two songs, a cover of the Rolling Stones 'Gimme Shelter' that's on her new album, and then 'Because the Night.' But she ended with a kick-ass performance of 'Rock and Roll Nigger,' which she said was her late mother's favorite song of her's.

Van Halen was represented by Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, Eddie Van Halen having gone off to rehab and David Lee Roth not showing. They were inducted by Velvet Revolver, which performed two of Van Halen's songs before Hagar and Anthony and Paul Schaefer came out to do the third in what seemed an impromptu decision.

Gotta run. R.E.M. is coming on. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is doing the induction.

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I was waiting for something like this, and now it appears it will happen. The Intelligent Design controversy in Dover, Pa., and the trial in 2005 in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., that demolished the concept, is coming to the big screen. No date has been set even to begin filming, but it is for real.

The "untitled Dover project" will have a script by Ron Nyswaner, who has a distinguished scriptwriting pedigree that includes the Oscar-winning "Philadelphia" in 1993. Nyswaner is a native of Clarksville, Pa., a small town midway between Uniontown and Washington, Pa., in the southwestern corner of the state. His most recent script was for "The Painted Veil," which played recently at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg. The Dover film will be produced by Lynda Obst, who has an equally long production pedigree ranging from "Adventures in Babysitting" in 1987 to "Sleepless in Seattle." Her most recent film was Kate Hudson's "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days." No word yet on a director.

U.S. District Judge John Jones III, who ruled that Intelligent Design was not science and could not be taught as science in public schools, said in jest afterward--in the glow of positive attention he received for the decision--that he wanted to be played by actor George Clooney. He bears a passing resemblance to Clooney, but a judge doesn't seem a George Clooney type of role. I suspect the meaty parts will be those of the school board members who forced Intelligent Design on the Dover schools, and the ACLU lawyers who litigated the case.

The Dover film is unlikely to be friendly to the proponents of Intelligent Design, especially the school board members, but I hope it will show restraint and be fair to the Dover residents who were misled by their clergy and other evolution opponents into believing that Intelligent Design was real science. They paid a price in humiliation, in some cases shattered belief, and real cash--the legal fees incurred by the school board will take years to pay off in taxes. The story is loaded with drama, perhaps as much as that other film/play about evolution, "Inherit the Wind," which is being revived on Broadway this spring.

Judge Jones has said his one regret in the case is rejecting a petition from Court TV to televise the trial so people could see the evidence for themselves. If Nyswaner's film is a good one, and there is no reason to think it won't be, perhaps the public will get a second chance.

Posted by David at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Admit it. You were wondering if Prince was going to get electrocuted performing in a driving rainstorm during Sunday's SuperBowl halftime show.

But the Minnesota marvel survived--wireless electric guitars make electrocution far less likely these days, although that mike stand, if it had a ground wire, was definitely dangerous. Prince, who is 48, looked not a day older than during his glorious Purple Reign in the early 1980s.

And what a performance! Despite the rainstorm, he and his band and dancers put on one of the best halftime shows in my memory. Opening with "Let's Go Crazy" and closing with "Purple Rain," he gave not an inch to the weather, unlike the fumblin' Bears and Colts. Picking him to do the show was an inspired choice by the NFL.

And how loud will the demands in Miami be tomorrow to build a domed stadium?

Posted by David at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It has been just over a year since U.S. District Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg, Pa., demolished so-called "intelligent design" in his ruling in a lawsuit brought by parents against the Dover Area School Board. The school board, if you recall, tried to put intelligent design--the idea that a complex world "must have had" an intelligent designer, i.e., God, on an equal footing with Darwinian evolution. Jones ruled that it was not science, and that the religious right-dominated school board had pretty much perpetrated a fraud at taxpayer expense (and oh, the expense). For those of us who want real science taught in schools and real religion taught in churches, it was a moment of triumph.

Four books on this seminal case--the most historically important event in central Pennsylvania since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979--are either out or will soon hit the stores. Matthew Chapman, a great-great-grandson of Darwin who attended part of the trial, has written "40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania." Gordy Slack, a writer with Salon.com, has written "The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA". The third, already out, is "Monkey Girl" by Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Last in line--it was only just signed by a publisher, so it's a minimum 8 months to a year away--is former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover: Dogma vs. Darwin in Small-Town America." She covered the intelligent design trial for her newspaper, but brings a unique perspective to her book. Lebo comes from an evangelical family, and has an insider's view on the beliefs and emotions that led to the intelligent design showdown. I may not read all these books, but I'll definitely read her's for that special local insight.

Posted by David at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The eyes of the literary world are on the Fairfax County Public Library system in northern Virginia, and those eyes are set in a cold, hard stare. A recent Washington Post article highlighted the library system's practice of removing books that haven't been checked out in two years and either dumping them or putting them up for sale. It doesn't matter whether the book in question is a classic by Hemingway or a potboiler by Ludlum, although the latter is far less likely to hit the scrap heap. This has provoked howls of outrage.

Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of technology. Integrated library system software from SyrsiDynix in Huntsville, Alabama (ever notice how much of the bad in corporate America these days comes from the South? Just an observation) is used to check out books, probably via barcodes, so it is no great shakes to program the software to spit out a literary death list of books gone unread in two years. The outrage stems from the many classics consigned to the scrap heap, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I suspect more libraries than we authors care to imagine engage in this practice. My parents in Holland, Michigan, periodically check out my book, Unseen Danger, from Herrick District Library to keep it from meeting a similar fate (although they tell me last time they went to do this somebody had it out). I would find it quite depressing to have my book tossed to make way for some trash popular novel of the moment.

The issue, expressed brilliantly by writer John J. Miller in the Wall Street Journal of Jan. 3, is whether it is right for public libraries to cater primarily to middlebrow public tastes. Is it right for a library branch to buy five copies of some trash novel to meet public demand, possibly bumping books of more lasting quality. He argues that popular books are incredibly cheap and available these days. For libraries to buy them anyway, he says, subsidizes tightwad middle class patrons who could easily afford to buy the books. He argues that libraries must be cultural repositories where people can go to find knowledge and enlightenment. Librarians, he says, need to use their training to select and retain books the public ought to read, not just the ones they want to read.

Newspapers over the last 10 years have gone through a similar wrenching shift aimed at appeasing the supposed interests of the masses, who are generally defined as middlebrow white suburbanites. We in the business are told we must be "reader driven," not use our training and knowledge to decide what news is best for the public to read. In the new regime, the public orders the hamburger and we deliver it, and don't ask if they want fries, too. The result, predictably, has been dumbed-down newspapers with less and less real news, especially government news. Someday someone will figure out that the newspaper industry's destructive turn against government news was driven as much by conservative politics as any supposed public desire for more chicken dinner reporting and "news you can use." Journalists can't uncover the next Watergate or Jack Abramoff scandal if they can't get the stories in the paper.

For those of you who care about books and libraries, there is something you can do. The next time you're at the library, check out a classic. Even if you don't read it, check it out and then return it in a few days. Spare it from the bonfire so your descendants can still read it.

Posted by David at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We just got back from our annual pre-Christmas weekend in New York City. I'm tired, but happy, and ready to blog again.

The highlight of the weekend was taking our daughters to see the very enjoyable Broadway stage version of "Mary Poppins," the 1964 film that starred Julie Andrews and Dick VanDyke. Ashley Brown did well in the eponymous role, but Gavin Lee excelled in the role of Bert, the chimney sweep. The original songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are supplemented by several new compositions by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The special effects are amazing, notably when Lee tap dances upside down across the proscenium arch of the stage. There wasn't an empty seat in the house, and I see from the ad in today's New York Times that weekends are sold out, or nearly so, through March. Try StubHub.com. That's where I got my tickets.

Now if you thought you'd escape politics in this post, you're wrong. Both the 1964 film and the 2006 Broadway production were/are creatures of their time. The film, no matter how you remember it, was actually quite subversive, suffused with a mid-1960s ethos of rebellion against conformity and rules. Consider Mr. and Mrs. Banks, the couple whose efforts to find and keep a suitable nanny for their unruly children, Jane and Michael, lead to the magical arrival of supernanny Mary Poppins.

In the 1964 film, George Banks is a stuffy banker who proclaims himself the lord and master of his house, wife and children. He sings that, "a British bank, is run with precision. A British home, requires nothing less. Tradition, discipline and rules, must be the tools..." (That song is mostly gone from the new production, save for a few bars near the end.) In addition to trying to tame his unruly children, he is vexed by a wife who is an active suffragette, trying to win women the right to vote. Mary Poppins and Bert introduce the children to a different world, one where rules and conformity are far less important than being a creative free spirit. They visit their father at the bank, where Michael inadvertently triggers a run on the bank by complaining that they won't let him see his money.

In the 2006 Broadway production, George Banks seems more like an over-stressed Yuppie trying to find a nanny with a Green Card than a striver seeking to maintain the rigid social standards and rules of Edwardian England. Mrs. Banks is a former actress, not a suffragette. The conflict with her husband is over his refusal to allow her to continue to work on the stage. When the Banks children visit George at the bank, it seems more like Take Your Children To Work Day than an opportunity for rebellious non-conformity. Michael doesn't cause a ruckus. The bank threatens to fire George for turning down an Enron-like financing deal that another bank snaps up. His career is saved not, as in the film, because George repeats a dumb joke he heard from Jane and Michael that causes the stuffy bank chairman to die laughing, but because the deal implodes for the other bank. The non-conformity is there, but it's not the subversive be-all and end-all it is in the film. It becomes just another lifestyle, like the Apple guy versus the Windows guy.

I suppose one can argue that because the hippies and other rebels of the 1960s essentially won, and non-conformity is the new norm, some other approach had to be taken. Despite its muddled message, "Mary Poppins" on Broadway is well worth your time and money. The wonderful songs, especially "Feed the Birds" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and the great dance routines make for an evening that will entrance even the most stuffy non-conformist.

Posted by David at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry, couldn't resist. It's true, according to the Washington Post. Now, back to politics and the continuing Democratic sweep.

To make the moment even more bizarre, I just saw a commercial saying how fun it is to raise alpacas. The website is www.ilovealpacas.com. Maybe Kevin Federline can do that after Britney throws him out of the house.

Posted by David at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I had an opportunity to watch a staged reading of an exciting new musical, "A Shelter In Our Car." A staged reading has the actors on stage speaking the dialogue and singing the songs, but with no costumes or sets or much movement. This was performed in the basement of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church at 65th St. and Central Park West in New York City. The book and lyrics were written by Sophie Jaff, and the wonderful music for Jaff's lyrics was written by Robert L. Wilson III. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, of Indian-Bahamian descent, is the director. Tony Perry, an old friend of mine from The Patriot-News, is one of the seven actors.

The play, which is billed as being for children but which will likewise be enjoyed by adults, is about an immigrant Jamaican woman and her daughter who have sunk into homelessness in New York City after her husband and chief breadwinner died. She is a trained nurse, but cannot work in her profession here without a New York nursing license, which she is working hard to obtain. In the meantime, she and her daughter, Zettie, live in their car. Mom makes a few dollars now and then handing out fliers.

Both homelessness and the current Republican campaign against immigrants are addressed in this musical, but it is a human story at heart. That is often the best way to address issues in art, by showing the impact and not preaching.

The play is based on a children's boook by Monica Gunning of the same name, and is being produced under the auspices of the Making Books Sing program in New York. It will be performed in New York schools beginning in January, but I have to think with songs this good it will have a life beyond that. I would even like to see it expanded a little bit beyond the short attention span of grade schoolers.

Posted by David at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Much has been made of how the Amish in Lancaster County have forgiven Charles Carl Roberts IV for gunning down 10 of their young girls Oct. 2 in a one-room schoolhouse in West Nickel Mines, Pa. Five have died so far, and the others will be scarred for life. Yet the Amish have very publicly forgiven Roberts for his hideous crime and expressed their personal condolences to his widow and children on his death (at his own hand after he shot the girls). This is being hailed in rapturous terms in the mainstream media as the epitome of Christian love and devotion to Jesus, and how it will bring "healing" to the community. Go Thou and do likewise, fellow doormat.

Sorry, I disagree. To forgive Roberts for what he did belittles the horror of what happened to those young innocents. Worst case, it might even encourage some other simpleminded idiot to do something similar. I know forgiveness is an old Christian virtue stressed by Jesus himself, but my reading of that 70x7 passage is that He was talking about the petty annoyances of everyday life, such as bothersome family members, not an evil man who murders your children. I would argue that some crimes are indeed unforgiveable except by God. You don't see Jews, even Jews for Jesus, rushing to forgive Hitler for the Holocaust.

Jewish teaching on the subject of forgiveness is somewhat different than Christian teaching and I like it a lot more. They believe that forgiveness is fine, but don't rush into it. Insist upon sincere efforts by the one who caused you harm to atone for what he or she did. Fix the damage, then seek forgiveness. Mrs. Roberts, though innocent of any involvement in this horror, could help atone for the shame that will inevitably attach to her family name and that of her children by working to help rid America of the sort of weapons her husband used in the slaughter.

Or perhaps by speaking at some events to raise money to pay the medical bills of both the living and dead children, which must be enormous. I understand that charitable donations have been pouring in and will pay some of those expenses, but I find it hard to believe they will cover everything.

Posted by David at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine this. You are a veteran and respected art teacher with nothing but good job evaluations from your superiors. You take fifth graders from a suburban school district on a principal- approved field trip to a major downtown art museum. You have signed permission slips from all parents. During the trip, one of the children observes a nude statue and tells Mommy. Mommy freaks out, complains to the school, and you are fired.

That, in a nutshell, is the fate so far of Sydney McGee, a teacher for 28 years in Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. The story took on a new, national prominence today when it appeared in the New York Times, but it was first "brought north" earlier this week by Raw Story, a website which aggregates news stories it suspects will appeal to its liberal readership, just as the Drudge Report does for conservatives. The Frisco school board's assertion that her dismissal had nothing to do with the field trip and was related to other, unspecified "performance concerns" is dismissed as so much hogwash by Ms. McGee and her lawyer.

Who was the puritanical parent who stuck the knife in Ms. McGee's back? We don't know, of course. That likely won't come out until the almost-certain lawsuit. If I had to guess, I would say it was fundamentalist Christian parents unhappy about having to send their child to the "Godless" public schools but unable or unwilling to "home school" them or pay private school tuition. No one has yet raised the specter of this being yet another assault on our freedoms by the Christian right, but then, stealth is their watchword these days.

And what about the school board? As we have seen here in central Pennsylvania with the former Dover Area School Board and their reckless attempt to foist "Intelligent Design" on biology classes in the district that was slapped down by the Federal courts, rightwing religious fervor can lead to incredibly stupid and costly decisions. I would not be at all surprised if we find out eventually that some members of the school board had long wanted Ms. McGee axed for her lifestyle, whatever that might be. Controlling female sexuality is a sinister obsession with the fundamentalists. I always like to say there's no intelligence test for getting on a school board. All you need are more votes from your fellow know-nothings than the other guy gets.

An unintentionally revealing look at how far we have fallen during the six years of Texan George W. Bush can be observed in these stories about Sydney McGee from a Dallas TV station. In one of the two stories, the TV station showed footage from the Dallas Museum of Art, but placed black blocks over the breasts and genitals of some of the classical art. They are no doubt concerned, and rightly so, about the increasingly censorious Federal Communications Commission and the prospect of a huge, crippling fine if one viewer happened to take offense at seeing nude art. That's all it takes in Bush's America.

A few people have written to the Dallas Morning News to condemn the school district's surrender to puritanism. But you can be sure there are just as many in that state expressing quiet satisfaction at one more blow against the modern world.

Posted by David at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think chicken pox parties are about as nutty an idea as I've ever run across. Actually, it's more than nutty. It borders on child abuse.

The Patriot-News ran a story Tuesday about this phenomenon. The idea is that instead of having your child vaccinated against chicken pox and NOT getting this highly contagious disease, you deliberately expose them to some kid who has it. That way, instead of a momentary sting while the injection goes in, your kid can suffer and miss school for two weeks and get his or her immunity the "natural" way.

What's more, you'll stuck it to the medical establishment and all those selfish mothers who would rather work to get money for "fancy vacations" (the usual vice of choice) and expensive clothing than stay home with their children. Sure, your child may be one of the 40 or so who die of chicken pox every year, or who get an extremely painful case of shingles as an adult because he or she had chicken pox as a child, but isn't that natural, too?

Full disclosure: I had chicken pox as a child, but did not aquire it at a chicken pox party. I spent two miserable, itchy weeks in bed and then had to catch up on my school work. When I was in my 30s, I came down with shingles, but fortunately it was caught by my doctor and zapped with prednisone before it could morph into climb-the-wall pain. My older daughter was born in 1993, two years before the vaccine was approved for use. When the FDA gave the okay in 1995, we rushed to Jones, Daly & Coldren to have her get the shot. Same with my younger daughter born in 1997.

My father worked for Parke, Davis & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and I've always taken a very benign view toward the wonders of medical science. People live a whole lot longer now because of pharmaceuticall advances. A lot more men used to die in their 50s from heart disease than do now since the advent of anti-cholesterol and blood pressure pills (and the great drop-off, too, in cigarette smoking).

There are really two things driving chicken pox parties. One is a general, sort of libertarian distrust of the medical establishment and embracing of "natural" cures. The other is antagonism by conservatives, religious or otherwise, toward mothers who work, whether for personal fulfillment or (more likely) because their family needs the second income. The doctor quoted in the Patriot-News article who suggested that chicken pox vaccinations are really for the convenience of working parents (read: mothers) had that written all over him. For families with two working parents of modest means, chicken pox and the need to stay home to nurse a sick child for two weeks can be financially devastating.

I used to wonder, before my daughter got vaccinated, what we would do if she came down with chickenpox late in the year when we either couldn't take vacation (my wife is a speech pathologist for Capital Area Intermediate Unit) and all my vacation days for the year were gone. Fortunately, that never happened, and now that they're vaccinated, it probably won't.

So I say Yay! for chicken pox vaccine. It's worked so far.

Posted by David at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times is reporting that Google has introduced a new search engine that allows a person to search through many different newspaper archives at once. I tried it out this morning and could barely drag myself away to go to breakfast at the hotel where I'm staying.

I searched on my own name and discovered, in addition to my Patriot-News articles, several articles that mentioned me in my hometown newspaper, the Holland (Mich.) Evening Sentinel. Cub Scout awards and promotions, my appearance with the Holland High School team in High School Quiz Bowl, a local TV show, and a number of other highlights of my young life. My parents and uncles and aunts appeared in other articles. Definitely fun.

Most of the articles must be purchased to be read in full, but the prices aren't too bad. My only complaint is that th