Is It Time?

How long does it take for an event to move from the present into history?

I’ve listened to a lot of talks by a lot of historians. It never fails, someone will inevitably ask “how will history look back on the the events of today?” And historians almost always give the same reply: “well, we won’t know until enough time has past. Future historians will have to judge.” Yadda yadda yadda.

I’m wondering: has enough time passed to honestly and objectively look back on 9/11? There hasn’t been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but al Qaeda still makes is presence felt elsewhere.  The administration of President George W. “9/11″ Bush is over, but the resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are still going on. And bin Laden is still out there, somewhere. We don’t know if he’s dying of cancer or plotting the next attack. So I’m not quite sure enough time has past to put 9/11 in its proper context, it seems like we are still living it today. If we are still living it, has it past into history? Hmmm….

Because I’m not sure it has past into history, I’m also not quite sure we can properly memorialize it. Time has to pass before one can honestly reflect on an event. There’s too much emotion otherwise, and you end up acting completely on impulse and make bad judgements that you then have to live with. So has enough time passed to build memorials, things that will stand for generations and generations? Will such a memorial teach the right lesson to those who weren’t here in 2001?

The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was built in 1982, seven years after the fall of Saigon. Here we are, eight years after 9/11, so maybe it is time after all. The only difference, of course, is the Vietnam War actually ended. The conflict itself was closed, the troops were brought home. The scars and carnage remained, but at least the nation had those seven years to reflect, and think, and figure out how those lost lives should be remembered. We now have one of the most moving memorials ever created on the west end of the National Mall.  I want the same thing for 9/11, a symbol that evokes the right emotion and conveys the right message to those who might visit it 20, 50, or 100 years later. I don’t want some rushed hunk of granite garbage that evokes a response of “WTF?”

Regardless of the answer to this heavy question, I do like the design for the memorial to Flight 93. I’ve reviewed it, and I’ve visited the site, and I have to give my own, “mouse that roared” thumbs-up to the proposed memorial in Shanksville, PA. I think it’s subdued enough, thoughtful enough, and emotive enough to qualify as a true, honorable monument to those 40 folks who gave their lives in a senseless, pointless act of violence. I especially like the groves of trees and the low, graceful lines of the design. It fits in with the landscape and the dignity we’d all like to see.

I don’t ask this often, but I hope you’ll take the time to visit the Flight 93 Memorial Project and make a  contribution to the creation of this monument. After wrestling with the issue during the crafting of this post, I think its time has come.

[Pics are mine and appropriately copyrighted. More are here.]

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Links:

Flight 93 National Memorial

Flight 93 Memorial Project

Google map to the Flight 93 memorial

For Your Consideration: The Greatest American

Some time ago, on a long-forgotten internet message board, someone posed a question: who was the greatest American in history?

Of course, the internet being the internet, the argument soon disolved into a flame war (I’m sure someone mentioned “abortion” somewhere and it just devolved from there). Somewhere in the fray, however, I made a case for Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Greatest American. Now you can’t answer a question without understanding a question so, as I did on that tiny little  message board, I’ll start off explaining my interpretation of that particular question.

Most folks, upon hearing that question, will instinctively think only in terms of America itself, as in “which American did the most for America”. A logical answer here would be Abraham Lincoln, a man who not only kept the Union from dissolving, but also had the guts and fortitude to fight the greatest evil America has ever wrought: the continuation of slavery nearly 9 decades into its existence. Slavery was an unholy abomination that should have been extinguished when Thomas Jefferson put the last period on the Declaration of Independence, but it was allowed to exist through the sheer audacity (and utter cowardice) of founders and legislators and presidents alike. No President stood up to slavery until Lincoln, and his actions saved our country. We were not only saved literally (by stopping secession), but also morally. We had no moral fiber as a nation until slavery was abolished. It is as simple as that.

The only problem I have with proclaiming Lincoln as the “greatest American” is his actions really only saved the country. When I hear “greatest American”, I think globally: which American did the most for the world? Now that is an entirely different question. Sure, some could extrapolate “well, America is the greatest country, and Lincoln saved America, so Lincoln is the greatest”. That not only shows a grotesque level of hubris, it’s not really accurate. America wasn’t a world player for nearly a century after Lincoln’s time. We were an isolationist nation. We were protected on two fronts by mighty oceans, and only had two neighbors. No threats = no conflict = no interest in the world. Plus we were a nation of immigrants, collectively giving Europe the big middle finger as we went on our way, making our own prosperity (and driving the native population into their graves, but that’s the subject for yet another post). Saying Lincoln was a great world figure is simply disingenuous.

So, if we honestly answer “which American did the most good for the world”, well, you can come up with a lot of answers. Many (and perhaps rightly) say medical pioneers like Jonas Salk or inventors like Thomas Edison or scientists like Robert Oppenheimer deserve the title.  I appreciate these picks, but I have to ask: is science purely an American endeavor? Isn’t science simply the discovery and application of facts, principles and theorems? What makes it uniquely American? Doesn’t science transcend nationality? Jonas Salk could just have easily have been German, or Spanish, or Japanese. I’m not at all denigrating the work of these individuals in making my pick, I’m actually elevating them beyond simply being Americans.  Well, I suppose Edison was truly American: he was an incredibly shrewd businessman and power broker who set out to destroy his competitors, but, again, that’s a subject for another post …

This leads me to my own approach to the “Greatest American” question. First, did the individual have a postive, global impact; and second, did the individual act with the best of our core American principles (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.)? I say Ike deserves serious consideration as the Greatest American under that context, and I say it for one big reason: World War II.

World War II was the greatest conflagration the world has ever known. Never before, and thankfully never since, has the globe ever been covered in carnage and evil as horrid as during the period between 1939 and 1945. I don’t even know if people can comprehend that evil. I’m fairly convinced Americans can’t, we simply haven’t experienced war firsthand on our own soil since 1865. Let me tell you, it was nasty-horrid. And the Nazis, the Nazis were the worst. They epitomize evil to this very day. Every tyrant since 1945 is judged against Hitler, every evil movement has been compared to Nazism. These people were cold, heartless butchers; utterly disinterested in freedom and liberty; technocrats and bullies of the worst kind; the filthiest type of genetic bigots and medical torturers this world has ever seen. America saw this evil and (after much prodding by FDR) finally decided to confront it. But we brought more than men and equipment to Europe, we brought a secret weapon. We brought Ike.

I don’t know if I’ll make many friends with this paragraph, and I don’t mean any disrespect to any man or woman who ever served in our Armed Forces, but an army isn’t worth a damn unless it has good, strong leadership. Throughout history, there are lots of stories of brave armies led to their defeat and slaughter by lousy generals; and plenty of other stories of underpowered armies led to victory by great generals. Anyone who’s read about our Civil War knows stories like these, and they occur in European history as well. Victory and defeat don’t rest on the shoulders of the soldier, they reside in the brains of the generals.

Ike was one of the better ones. I don’t think he’s rated as the greatest American general ever (I think that title tends to fall on Lee or Patton or even George Washington), but there can be no doubt he had the greatest challenge of any of them. He had to face a highly skilled, highly entrenched opponent, who had (in some cases) superior weaponry and better planning (at least in the early parts of the war). Not only that, he had to rescue no less than an entire continent from the greatest scourge mankind has ever seen. This was an enemy unlike any faced by Americans in our entire history. This was an enemy who actually sat down, in offices, using businesslike precision, and plotted the extermination of, by some counts, 11 million people! [See link below for more on this]. This was much, much more than simple warfare. The stakes were much higher.

I’m hoping that, by now, you see why I’m nominating Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as the Greatest American. Yeah, he didn’t beat the Nazis all by himself (no one achieves anything by themselves). Yeah, he made a lot of blunders and mistakes and some (like the continued delay of the invasion of Europe) probably led to further deaths in the Soviet Union.  I still think his achievement earns him the title of Greatest American. He was a fine president, the 50’s were a good time in this country. He sponsored the interstate highway system, connecting us in a way we never were connected before. He started the battle against Communism (although he didn’t act to combat McCarthyism). He tried to integrate our racially divided nation (with admittedly limited success). He even tried to warn us about the growing power of the military-industrial complex, you don’t hear too many politicians doing that these days.

Most impressive, in my view at least, he was a humble man. His retirement home, now the Eisenhower National Historic Site near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is probably the humblest house ever inhabited by any former President. Hell, it’s not much different than the farmhouse next door to my own boyhood home. Personally, I think humility is one of the best characteristics a human being can ever have. Arrogance is for assholes, humility is for great people. Personally, I think Eisenhower was more of the latter and less of the former.

[I normally don't ask for direct feedback on a post, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the "Greatest American" question. Also, I didn't have a camera when I visited Ike's house, all pictures on this post are public domain photos taken from the NPS or Wikipedia or other sources.]

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Links:

Eisenhower National Historic Site

PowerKills, R. J. Rummel’s works on democide

Atlantic Monthly’s Top 100 Americans and a contrary list

Google map to Ike NHS

American Classics

Edgar Allen Poe is a true American classic. I suspect that Poe is the second most recognized 19th Century American author (behind perennial favorite Mark Twain). Most everyone has heard of Poe through his well-known works like “The Raven”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and that grade-school reader staple, “The Tell-tale Heart”. Some folks may have read one book by Herman Melville or Louisa May Alcott, and only college-level literature students have read anything by Emerson, Longfellow, or Thoreau, but most of us are familiar with Poe’s work and his influence on mystery and the macabre. I suppose it’s sad that he’s better known than his contemporaries (critically speaking Poe’s works pale in comparison to Emerson, Longfellow and Thoreau), but his visceral take on humanity made a huge impact on popular culture. You can trace so many mystery-thrillers directly back to Poe. It’s hard to imagine Hitchcock or Stephen King or even CSI would be here today without his influence.

But a visit to Poe’s old homestead in Philadelphia evokes a different sort of American classic.

Philadelphia wasn’t the only city Edgar Allan Poe called “home”.  Never a wealthy man, Poe and his family led a fairly hardscrabble life. They travelled a lot, always trying to find a new opportunity in another city. Consequently, they lived in many places, from Boston to Richmond to New York. The only Poe home that has been preserved is an old, faltering row house north of Independence Park, on the bad side of I-676. Yes, that’s right: the former home of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the premier poets and authors of his time, is a shitty house in a shitty part of town. And I find that terrific.

I visited Poe NHS on a crappy, drizzly day. I spent the prior gorgeous, sunny day strolling Independence NHS, the well-manicured core of touristy Philadelphia, with its horse-drawn carriages and Ben Franklin impersonators. But the day I visited Poe’s House was sodden and sopping. Rain doesn’t bother me, I threw on a raincoat and headed out. Of course, I didn’t realize I’d be walking about a mile into the slums of Philadelphia. Honestly, that part of town isn’t that bad, but I clearly stood out like a sore thumb. I have to admit I was pretty nervous, but I didn’t run into any trouble. In hindsight, I think it was a very appropriate walk. Too many of us, myself included, stick to the “good” parts of America, and daren’t venture into the rougher sections. A brilliant thing about my National Park Site collection is you see virtually all of America, including some slums. You get a pretty complete picture that way, in my opinion.

By the time I got to the Poe house I was pretty soaked. I entered and took off my coat, leaving puddles in my wake. A retired couple were there, their Lincoln parked in the lot, water beaded from a fresh waxing. We were just in time for a tour. Our guide (a really sharp and well-versed lady, a credit to the NPS) took us through the outwardly rickety building, and told us of Poe. A troubled man, a restless man, a man who struggled with success (both commercial and in life). A man who always tried to find his way, a man who seemingly lost his mind and eventually died a very mysterious death, yet a man who left us with some of the most beloved works in American literary history.

Poe’s story was intriguing, but what I found more intriguing was the relationship the Poe site and the NPS has with the local residents. Obviously that part of Philadelphia has a typical, urban, African-American population: undereducated, underemployed, living their own hardscrabble lives built on single-parent households, gang warfare, drug abuse, and a collage of government entities that don’t give a crap about them. But the folks at Poe NHS have worked really hard to get in touch with the community. They are constantly hosting children from local schools for tours and storytelling and events, and that ranger clearly loved to do it. There was no pretension or hypocrisy in her voice when she told those stories, even when she was talking to three Whiteys from the ‘Burbs. Her love of her job and the locals was pretty evident, and appreciated. She also pointed out the brilliant mural of Poe on a nearby building, and the fact that it has never been defaced by graffiti in all the years it’s existed. That is a telling factoid and really shows that either Poe’s works unites us on a fundamental level, or that if you respect people, they will respect you back.

Poe NHS doesn’t just tell the story of a famous American author, it tells the story of a rough life, a life led by many millions of Americans before and many more millions who came after. Rough living in a rough house in a rough neighborhood, a life lived by more of us than we care to think about. I doubt my tour companions really got the point of Poe NHS. The retired gentleman, who was supposedly making a coffee table book about “homes of great Americans”, clearly missed it when he said “I doubt this house will make my book.” We all didn’t grow up in marble mansions, doofus.

If you want to experience America, you need to experience all of it, including tilting houses in seedy neighborhoods. That is an idea worthy of a coffee table book.

[Pics on this post are mine and copyrighted thusly, except for the mural. I didn't get a good picture of it (crappy photog that I am), so I had to pirate one.]

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Links:

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia)

Tabula Rasa’s History of Horror

Google map to Poe NHS

Somewhere Down That Lazy River

The Delaware Water Gap is a protected stretch of river and shoreline between Port Jarvis and East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Like Catoctin, Chickasaw, and Cuyahoga, it’s mundane and uninteresting. But that’s OK, because like those other national park sites, it serves a purpose: protecting our natural resources, providing habitat for wildlife, and simply giving city folks a place to see what a tree looks like. I go on and on about this point so often in this blog, I don’t really feel like retreading that all over again here.

What I do want to talk about is good, old-fashioned laziness.

I had no grandiose plans for my Water Gap visit. I had an exciting, inspiring trip the prior autumn when I visited Alaska for the first time (a subject for my next post), but for my trip through Pennsylvania the following spring, I wanted to tone it down (although some might say you have no alternative but to ‘tone it down’ when you visit Pennsylvania, but, well, moving on …).

For my visit to the Delaware Water Gap, I went uber-simple. I just rented a kayak from the fine, Bohemian folks at Chamberlain Canoes, and paddled (well, floated really) downstream for a couple of hours. Yes, it was lame and unexciting. A couple of deer playing on an island, a few ducks paddling around, a couple of Class 1 (actually Class 0.5) rapids, that’s about it. There wasn’t a drop of adrenaline for miles around (unless you count the headbanging hillbilly houseparty happening on the eastern shore).  I didn’t even take my camera, didn’t feel like fussing with it. I just wanted to enjoy a calm, early summer afternoon, futzing around on the Delaware River.

As I live my life and travel around the country, observing the society around me (and often looking inward, as I am wont to do), I feel that one ability sadly missing in most Americans is an ability I am calling “soulful laziness”. Our society is high-strung, jittery, overly busy, and tremendously uptight. Everywhere you turn, you see it: the chronic impatience,  the busy little rush-rush for even the most mundane of tasks, that hum of self-created stress for decidely unimportant minutiae, that decidedly un-subtle “me first and right now” attitude that sends psychic ripples of anxiety up and down the corridors of business and the tiled expanses of mall food courts nationwide. I feel this constant buzz-buzz of motion and thought and stress is so damaging to folks that our society would be so much better if we could simply learn to be soulfully lazy.

Now I have to be careful here: I am calling it “soulful laziness” for a very specific reason. It’s the ability to just stop, for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days, and relax. Find a quiet spot, at the beach or in a field or on your own back patio, and take a breather. Get away from the noise. Stop and smell the roses.  Free your mind and the rest will follow. Let not only your body and your mind but the very fiber of your being, your soul (in both the theological and non-theological meanings of the word) take a rest.

Let me also be clear, lest there be no confusion. Laziness (or sloth if you will), is the Fourth Deadly Sin, and for good reason.  Physical laziness is clearly bad, and is a chronic problem in America. Our obesity epidemic is one part bad nutrition and one part physical laziness. Our environmental problems are partly attributable to physical laziness. How many folks are simply too lazy to walk up one flight of stairs and burn unknown amounts of kilo-watt hours using the elevator instead? I even think our economic collapse has elements of physical laziness. So many folks are too lazy to earn an honest living or provide real value to customers or society or business, instead they try to take the short road through lying on home mortgage applications, cheating people via pyramid schemes, or making horribly risky get-rich-quick investments. That’s laziness right there.

Part and parcel with physical laziness is intellectual laziness, as  evidenced by excessive TV watching, vapid internet surfing, pointless shopping sprees or chronic videogaming. Many people are too intellectually lazy to even ask questions of our leaders or their bosses or even their spouses. Fewer and fewer people read or write effectively, or even try to think their way out of problems, instead depending on others to bail them out or praying to God for salvation while having another box of Ring-Dings and watching Monday Night Football. How many people can’t even count change? Lots and lots.

The odd thing is, even lazy folks injure themselves through pointless, self-inflicted stress.  The chronic TV watcher bombards himself with cacophonies of action-packed movies, bitch-slap reality TV bickerfests, or pointless arguments on Fox News. The shop-a-holic exposes herself to a crush of traffic, a swarm of humanity in the checkout line, and that ludicrous self-inflicted drama of “does this look good on me” that serves no purpose. The chronic internet surfer or videogamer literally absorbs himself into a narrow, two-dimensional world where one must constantly point-and-click-and-point-and-click all for the next split-second fix of Flash-animated inanity in order to remain interested. So even the physically and intellectually lazy segments of society clutter themselves up with so much stress and noise, they too can benefit from a self-inflicted heavy dose of soulful laziness.

What we need to do as individuals is occasionally enter that state that allows one to set aside all the petty, self-created stresses, and just sit there in a quiet, low-key space and watch the world go by for a few hours on the weekend, or a few days while on vacation. This type of laziness is a wonder and a marvel. It shuts off all the noise and all the crap that we either willingly enter or (far worse) create for ourselves. Now this brand of laziness must be earned and can’t be abused (you can’t live your life staring out into space or gazing into your own navel, that’s what puts you into “the home”), but, in moderation, this is what we need, what we all need, the entire country, for our own sanity and our own survival.

I think if there’s one hope, one bright & shining potential outcome from our current economic crisis, it’s the notion that maybe people will start to shut out the noise and self-propagated stress in our lives and learn to be soulfully lazy once in a while. I spent $40 for that kayak rental down the Delaware River, and I loved it, but soulful laziness can have the best price tag possible in tough economic times: it’s free.

[The above picture is from Chamberlain Canoes' website. I hope they don't begrudge me using it here, they're nice folks & deserve some props. All the other pics on this post are public domain from the National Park Service website. I also took a hike up to Dingman's Falls, a few pics from that hike are here.]

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Links:

Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area

Chamberlain Canoes

Google map to Delaware Water Gap

I normally have four links per post but I was just too durn lazy

The Glories of Innovation

I love innovation, I really do. I guess I’m just an old techno-geek. I love stumbling across things that are so brilliant, inventions that show not only the intelligence, but the sheer drive and willpower of idea-men and those who craft those ideas into reality. One of those happy little discoveries was the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

This is one of those stories that takes a little while to tell. Way back in the early 1800’s, we really were the United States of America. We were just a collection of states assembled under one flag, instead of the Conforming States of Generica we seem to be now. The only difference between us back then and the modern day European Union is we were all illiterate under a common language. Other than that, the states were really separate entities, each culturally and economically different from the other.

Of course, every state competed with every other state. Who had the better industry? Who had the better cities? Who could attract the most immigrants (imagine that in this day and age)? Most importantly, who had the best economy? Then, as now, wealth begat power, wealth begat influence, wealth begat more wealth. Competition would be quite stiff at times, especially amongst rival Northern states.

In the early 1800’s, westward expansion was really gearing up. The frontier represented opportunity. For settlers, it was the opportunity to find a new life. To the merchants in the eastern states, the frontier represented money. Settlers needed tools, and supplies, and seed. Settlers needed to sell their own products (timber, crops, cattle) to buy those tools, supplies, and seed. The merchants were ready to handle both sides of the equation. The nation, as today, ran on commerce. There were riches to be had on the frontier, that much was certain. But how do you transport all these people and goods back and forth? The answer was water.

The railroads hadn’t begun their dominance over the land yet. So America used its great waterways: the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. Of course, there’s a small problem: how do you get goods from the wealthy merchant cities of Boston, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia, to these great waterways, and back? Well, by wagon, of course … oh wait, small problem: a little thing called the Appalachian Mountains. Sure, compared to the then-irrelevant Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians are nothing, mere bumps on the ground. But to a young nation with nothing more than mules and wooden wagons, these bumps formed a most impressive obstacle, to some states more than others.

New York managed quite well. They had a wonderful thing called the Hudson River that just so happened to run into the Mohawk River, which just so happened to run in a natural channel through the Adirondacks (thank you, Ice Age glaciers!). A little bit of digging across a reasonably forgiving stretch of land, and voila! They finished a little thing called the Erie Canal by 1825. This little gem of a project catapulted slimy little New York City into the financial powerhouse it is today.

Maryland was soon following right along. They had a nice little waterway called the Potomac River running along their southern border. They still had to cross the mountains to match the superiority of the Erie Canal, but their canal system got them pretty durn close. It was only a matter of time before they figured out how to cross the great mountains of what is now West Virginia. Oh wait, what’s that whistling noise? Oh yes, it’s called the railroad. Still in its infancy, the engineers of that famous Monopoly space — the B&O Railroad — figured out how to keep their crude engines carrying freight to the Ohio River and beyond. They would be carrying frontier goods very soon.

But Pennsylvania, oh poor Pennsylvania! What to do? If they didn’t carve a path to the frontier, they would be ruined! New York already took over Philadelphia’s preeminence, and now Maryland? Pennsylvania had a river leading up to the mountains (the Susquehanna). They had a river leading away from them (the Ohio). But what about that spur of the Appalachians, the blasted Alleghenies! The glaciers didn’t come far enough south to scour great grooves in those escarpments. The Keystone State was, basically, screwed. So, what to do?

This is where the brilliance came in. What do you do with mountains? You climb them, of course (well, duh!).

The Allegheny Portage Railroad was the resultant masterpiece. It was a series of inclined railways, powered by fixed engines at various locations. You throw a freight car on it, hoist it up one side and down the other, simple! They even invented canal boats on wheels: you paddle up, hook up one end, and tow it up and down to the next river! Fixed engines made it simple and manageable, and less problematic, than the early railroad engines. The whole thing was brilliant and ingenious, and saved Pennsylvania from ruin.

Well, not really. It ran poorly. It broke a lot, there were a lot of devastating accidents. Have you ever seen a heavily-laden cable snap? It’s called “mass beheading”. Yeah, it wasn’t the best operating system in the world, but it did what it needed to do for 20 years, when the steam engine really came into its prime and men figured out how to lay good track and blast holes through mountains.

Even though, I really love the notion of the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Image floating along on a fine autumn afternoon, watching fisherman, and farmers, and children playing tag. Hawks circling above, looking for some stray rabbit for dinner. Your passenger barge pulls up to the Allegheny Portage Railroad, and you’re hoisted up the mountains. The crisp, cool air refreshes your lungs, the foliage-laden Alleghenies are a perfect backdrop for a perfect day.  You toast your crossing with fellow passengers, and are lowered down to the other river, where your future awaits on the Great Frontier!

All great fun, until someone gets beheaded.

To my knowledge, no one was actually beheaded by a cable during the operation of the railroad. A steam boiler did explode on Incline Plane #6, killing four people, and there were plenty of other injuries. But nothing livens up a story like a good beheading, don’t you think?

[Original photos © 2008 America In Context. Historical maps found through http://www.maphistory.info/]

Sadly, due to poor CD management, many of my Allegheny photos are gone. The few I have, such as they are, are here.

Links:

Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site

Historical Maps of Pennsylvania

Google map to Allegheny Portage Railroad