I hope someone out there is wondering just what the heck has happened to my blog and I. Well, I’ve been a bit distracted by real life, and haven’t had my wits about me enough to put cogent thoughts into bits and characters. For my regular readers, I hope you hang in there. I will be back.

A Difficult Birth

I watched HBO’s excellent mini-series “John Adams”, about the famed patriot and second President of the United States. As I posted waaaaay back in December of ‘07, John Adams is my favorite Founding Father, and I think HBO did him justice, flaws and all. Beyond a fairly accurate portrayal of Adams himself (although I do think HBO downplayed the staunch religious beliefs shared by John and his cousin, Samuel Adams), the mini-series gave a very accurate portrayal of the nation’s gritty past.

There’s this great mythology around the birth of this nation. We have this image, inspired by John Trumbull’s famous painting, of nattily-attired statesmen, gathered in a great hall, proudly proclaiming our independence for all the world to hear. Unfortunately, that image is not at all accurate. I won’t go into all the factual details here, sites like Americanrevolution.org describe them well enough. I do want to go into what our vaunted image, and even a nitpicking of the facts, does not convey, and that is how risky and dangerous, and messy and complicated, the birth of this nation really was.

This was such a dangerous endeavor that the members of the Continental Congress were rarely, if ever, all present at the same time. They would appear in shifts, as it were, with individual representatives of a colony present but almost never a full quorum of a delegation. Some of the notables, like the Adams cousins and William Ellery of Rhode Island, had open warrants for their arrest by the British colonial government long before the 2nd Continental Congress convened, and would certainly have been hanged if they were caught travelling to Philadelphia. Almost the entire New York delegation would be missing at times, most of those delegates lost home or property, and the wife of one (Francis Lewis) was captured and held prisoner by the Brits for many months during the Revolutionary War. This type of personal danger is almost never conveyed in American mythology.

There were also health and transportation problems. Yellow fever was not uncommon in Philadelphia in those years, and travel was risky. British blockades and privateers made sea travel dangerous, forcing travel over land. It took weeks if not months to ride the roads to Philadelphia, and in some circles families would weep from grief if loved ones had to travel, it was so dangerous. Remember this was the early days of America, cities were small and far apart, and there were great tracts of land void of civilization and comfort. It wasn’t the highly developed contryside that marked Europe in the 18th century, this was something far wilder. Getting all these great men to Philadelphia to draft the Declaration, create and fund a Continental Army, and plead for help from France and Spain was not an easy affair.

After the Revolution, things were still sloppy and complicated. There’s a sordid mess surrounding the crafting of the Constitution itself. Yes, it’s a beloved document and has served us well, but in reality, it was a contentious and difficult document to craft. The nation first had to go through the sloppy failure of the Articles of Confederation, a configuration so weak it nearly allowed the 13 states to break apart or, even worse, rejoin Great Britain. It was not easy to keep the Union together, and in the end, the only way to guarantee continued independence as well as undivided strength was by guaranteeing the continued enslavement of an entire race of man for decades thereafter.

People shouldn’t forget that our founding fathers enabled that greatest of travesties, but in a way, these men were forced to do so in order to avoid becoming servants again, through dissolution of the Union and potential reconquering by Britain.  I’m sure that last sentence can be debated: what if our founders banned slavery in 1787? Would we have been split into two, or perhaps more, nations? And would that have been a bad thing? It’s an interesting debate, but the fact still stands: slavery stood for 89 years after the Declaration of Independence  was first read to an assemblage in Philadelphia. All men created equal? Hardly, it would appear.

In my opinion, it’s vitally important for all Americans to understand that we are a flawed nation. We had a difficult birth and a flawed childhood and, to this very day, we struggle and wrestle and fight with our greater ideals and our conscience. We’ve fought unjust wars, we mistreated our own citizenry, we’ve “prospered” ourselves into great poverty, and we’ve poisoned our waters and air and land. But we’ve also had successes: we freed Europe from the ravages of war, our scientists have stopped polio and invented transistors, we’ve created unique and beloved forms of art and music, and we’ve been an example to the world in terms of freedom and liberty. Best of all, we’ve managed to survive and thrive in spite of our great mistakes and failures.

Success and failure, failure and success. Hmmm, sounds like we’re human. And part and parcel of being human is being flawed. It can be said that the greatness of a person can be judged by how well that person responds to his or her own failure. We all make mistakes, and we all have to learn from them and overcome them. This is true for people and true for nations. Those who think they themselves, or the United States of America itself, are incapable of making mistakes and deserve continuous adulation are not only inaccurate but incredibly arrogant.

It has always been my view that arrogance is the worst human characteristic. Arrogance, that belief that you can do no wrong and can make no mistake, is that characteristic that prevents you from ever learning anything. And the inability to learn guarantees an inability to succeed and thrive. It’s a flaw that guarantees stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Individuals should strive to never be arrogant in anything, even those things in which you are an expert. Nations should also strive to never be arrogant, even in areas in which that nation has succeeded in the past.

If I could ask all Americans to do anything for this country, I would ask them to be honest with our country’s flaws and failures, and strive to continuously improve the health, welfare, and integrity of this nation and all of its citizens. Only through understanding of our flaws can we ever improve our lot in life.

I hope everyone had a happy, fun-filled Independence Day weekend, and I wish nothing more than a just and prosperous future for the United States of America on this, the 233rd anniversary of it’s birth.

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I know I haven’t been posting regularly as of late. There have been a few real-life issues keeping my muse at bay, or perhaps in full retreat. Regular postings of my National Park trips will resume shortly, I promise.

I just came back from my spring National Parks trip. With all the economic uncertainty, plus my need to pay off credit card debt (like the rest of America), I kept it small. Drove through upstate New York, then Ohio, across West Virginia, then home via Maryland. Hit eight more, albeit small, sites on the list, bringing the total to 185.  Still not quite halfway there.

During this trip, I also visited my two all-time favorite museums: the amazing National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio (about which I’ll post at a later time) ; and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.

The poor Rock Hall doesn’t get a lot of respect. Some think it’s self-serving to a lot of rich, arrogant, rock egos. Others think it’s unfathomable that you could put the energy and rebelliousness of rock music into something as stuffy as a museum. Still others can’t get over the fact that non-rockers like the Bee Gees or Madonna have been inducted, while their favorite act (KISS or Journey or Emerson, Lake and Palmer or whoever) still aren’t in there.

I love the place, absolutely love it, loved it from the beginning. I was there during the opening, 8-hour concert on Labor Day weekend in 1995, where I saw everyone from Chuck Berry to Johnny Cash to Dr. John to Aretha Franklin to Iggy Pop. That was a fantastic experience. The next day I saw James Brown sauntering through the crowd, surrounded by some of the biggest, scariest bodyguards imaginable, on his way into the Rock Hall. I’ve been back several times since, and love it more and more every time I go. For me, it goes beyond being a fan of rock music. My love of rock & roll dovetails nicely into my love of American history.

Most countries or cultures are defined by their art. For the Greeks, it’s architecture and epic tales. The Italians have religious iconography and works by Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The French have Impressionism, the Germans and Slavs people have composers such as Beethoven, Tchaikovzky and Mozart. Africa, China, Japan, Polynesia, even the Native American tribes have unique art tied directly to their culture and their history. America has its own unique art form, developed straight from our culture and history: Rock & Roll.

Rock & roll is uniquely American because of it’s “origin story”. Rock’s primary grandfather was The Blues. Political correctness aside, The Blues was the black man’s music. It’s basically a lament about hard times and suffering set to a quick-paced but rough tempo. The Blues was fostered in a segregated South and derives directly from music sung by plantation slaves. This is Part I of why Rock is uniquely American, it’s the only positive thing to ever come out of our slaveholding past. Without the caustic cauldron of atrocity known as antebellum slavery, and the emotional agony of Jim Crow, the genetic material of The Blues would not have been created. No Blues, no Rock.

Another grandparent of Rock & Roll was Folk music (and its close cousins called Country and Bluegrass). All three of these forms sprouted out of the barrenness of the Depression. Yes, the Depression affected lots of countries, not just the USA, but there was something special about America’s experience that led to the birth of these three forms of music. Maybe it was the rural nature of Depression-era America, maybe it was the unique experience of the Dust Bowl, maybe it was the influence of our unique take on the religious revival. Whatever it was, folk, country & bluegrass evolved as uniquely American styles.

Then there’s Jazz. Jazz, in my view, represents the independent American mentality applied to music. People wanted to play what they wanted to play, and wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. It’s improv, blending, mixing things up, and doing what you want. It’s throwing away musical convention, just like we threw away monarchial convention. We tossed out the King and made our own government, then we tossed out musical conformity and made our own Jazz. It’s the Declaration of Indepence set to music.

All of rock’s “early influences” were masters of these forms of music: Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Louis Jordan, Elmore James. But it took something else, something more. It took the lightning strike known as Capitalism to give Rock & Roll life. It took people like Alan Freed and Ahmet Erteghun and Jerry Wexler to realize that money could be made, people who had the savvy to prop up firebrands like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and make all this roughshod music palatable to the young masses and their disposable income. Only in America could art be turned into something so immensely popular, and therefore immensely profitable.

Rock has then been changed and modified and altered by so much more since then: the injustice of the Vietnam War draft, the poverty of inner cities, the rebellion of angsty white suburbanite teens, plus America’s penchant to abuse mind-altering substances …. All of these things are, again, uniquely attributable to the U.S. and the unique mix (or train wreck, if you prefer) of our culture.

Now I know some (er, most?) will shout back “but what about the Beatles or the Stones or Led Zepplin, asswipe? These are Brits who revolutionized rock!”. Well, yes, that’s true. But all of these bands will tell you themselves that they got into rock because of Muddy Waters, or Bo Diddly, or Buddy Holly. Besides, just as the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, so too is rock a music of immigrants. Artists from all over the world have morphed and shaped rock to suit their needs, and have influenced other artists in return. It’s a great melting pot of music styles and cultures.

I highly recommend going to the Rock Hall. It does a great job showing the continuing evolution of a great, rebellious art form, a form of music whose greatest contribution is giving convention the big middle finger.

[Only the picture of the Rock Hall is mine. The others are from allmusic.com, a great web site for music research. Copyrights apply in some cases, this is a not-for-profit blog so I think it's OK here. I'm sure lawyers will call if it ain't .]

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Links:

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

allmusic.com

Looking for college credits?

Google map to RRHOFM

I meant to post this immediately after my Denali posts, but forgot. Life kinda gets in the way of blogging, ya know? Anyway, Grizzly Man is a film, by noted director Werner Herzog, about Timothy Treadwell, a surfer-turned-actor-turned-grizzly activist who decided to spend several summers living amongst bears in Alaska, to “bring awareness to their plight”.

This recommendation dovetails not only into Denali, but also into my Chiricahua post. That post was about man’s stupidity (specifically my own stupidity) in the face of nature. That post and this film tell a valuable story: nature is not to be trifled with. It doesn’t care who you are, or what you do, or how “in tune” you think you are with it: when nature needs you to be food, you will become food, regardless of how high-minded you think you are or how many trees you hug.

So here’s the spoiler: Treadwell eventually gets eaten. Well, it’s not that big of a spoiler really, it’s pretty much said right up front this story is a tragedy. What makes this film so compelling is you see what’s coming, the ending is so patently obvious, yet Treadwell plods right along to that ending, making bad decision after bad decision, all leading up to a certain, gruesome fate. I won’t spoil it any more, it does have to be seen to be believed.

Some watch Grizzly Man and feel sadness for a poor, kindhearted soul who only wanted to do the best for the poor bears and paid the ultimate price. I see this as the story of an egotistical idiot who, like Steve Irwin, though nature was his playground, mealticket, and the means to inflate his own arrogant self-worth. In his case, like Irwin’s, nature turned its mighty claw and gave him a swipe.

Just to remind him, and us, who’s boss, I suppose.

So it’s been about a year since I started this little blog. I wanted to thank all my readers for their comments & support, and hope everyone has a great New Year.

I stumbled across this one the other day: the NASA Earth Observatory. It’s the main website for earth observatory pictures and articles. Lots of fascinating content there, subscribing to the “image of the day” isn’t a bad idea.

The search feature is pretty cool, too. Here’s a search for all national park images captured from space: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Search/index.php?g=2&q=national+park&search=search

Neat stuff!

I have returned!

Just got back from a two-week jaunt to New Mexico (with a few side trips to Arizona & Texas). Another 18 National Park Service sites down!

I hit NM at a great time: temperatures were mild but still pre-snowfall, and the aspens and alders were ablaze with golden color. Haven’t been through my pictures yet, but I’m expecting some fantastic shots.

If there is an overriding theme of New Mexico parks, it’s ‘historic tribal life in the shadow of extinct volcanoes’. Cliff dwellings are carved into the ash piles of ancient volcanoes. Petroglyphs are carved into well-patinaed volcanic rocks. Trading roads criss-cross waterless lava fields. Natural flint mounds, formed from the pressures of hot ash, form the basis of Indian economies.

From a wide view, New Mexico represents what this blog is all about: forces of nature directly lead to forces of society. One cannot separate the natural world from humanity, and, when you throw in the effects of Spanish exploration and conquest, one cannot separate one segment of humanity from another. Events a million years ago lead to events 2000 years ago lead to events happening yesterday. Only when you put all these elements together, in context with one another, do you truly understand America.

This trip also re-energized my interest in America’s National Parks, and I hope to be posting regularly again soon.

An Independence Day Essay

This is going to come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, or to anyone who has read a few pages of this blog, but I love American history. Care needs to be taken, however. I am not a rabid “rah rah” American, parading myself around swathed in red, white & blue, attacking all critics and keeping myself oblivious to the dark side. I love American history because American history makes a great story.

Let’s take a look at what makes a great narrative. In my view, a great story revolves around a flawed main character. Typically, this is a person who constantly wrestles with any number of personal weaknesses. The story is the struggle, the struggle by a troubled soul to accomplish something meaningful in a troubled world. Sometimes the story ends happily, sometimes the story ends badly. The thrill is in the story. Can Joe Malfunction make it to his goal without destroying himself in the process?

America is the perfect Joe Malfunction. It was founded on great principles: that absolute power is bad; that the people deserve a say in their government; that people, all people, have a fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was a wholly novel concept, especially applied on a scale as large as the original thirteen colonies. Never before have just principles such as these been applied across an area as wide and a population as large.

But this character, the United States of America, is a flawed character. Right off the bat, America, our hero, had a slave problem to deal with. How does one proclaim one’s liberty whilst enslaving an entire race of man? With hypocrisy, that’s how. Slavery was the drunken, abusive father of Our Hero. Slavery would keep the country down, keep it weak, keep it from coming into its own greatness. The pressures of this chronic abuse would fester, and fester, until, like a teen-ager finally fighting back, America would explode during the great Civil War, leaving disastrous carnage in its wake. The old America would go through a painful puberty, beat the abusive father into submission, and become an honorable man.

But that was not the end of the story. Our hero struggled to get on his feet. America faced the difficult task of Reconstruction which, although horribly flawed and poorly implemented, would end with America facing the historic 1890s. This was adulthood, this was America finally trying to live up to the ideals on which it was founded. It made a lot of mistakes, including native American genocide and Jim Crowe, but blacks would vote, women would vote, economic prosperity would be wide-spread, and America would venture into the Great Unknown: the Industrial Age and the era of global influence.

Soon, our hero would face two great challenges. Like Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey, twin wars, one spawned from the other, would test the nation in ways not seen before. The horror of war, and inner reflections known as isolationism, proved to be a tremendous strain on the nation and the people within. But, like Odysseus, our hero would emerge from these trials almost unrecognized. America would emerge as a great superpower, a juggernaut both military and economic. Some would try to break America’s dominance, but none would succeed. In fact, most would, in the end, try to emulate Our Hero in any way they could.

But, like some great Shakespearean play, superiority begets arrogance, arrogance begets stagnation, stagnation begets weakness, and weakness begets defeat. Unchallenged, our hero turns slothful. He forgets there are still challenges out there, some of them even created by his own misdeeds. His actions (both just and unjust, for he is undoubtedly imperfect), come back to haunt him. New enemies are determined to bleed him in any way possible. He also has forgotten his own roots. He is slowly becoming the bullying father he shrugged off all those years ago, but his conscience, the voice of the people, still gnaws at him.

Today, that Great American Narrative continues. We know the story so far, but there are so many great unknowns. What will happen to Our Hero in the next chapter? Will America remember those principles on which it was founded, and reclaim its honor? Or will it become paranoid, trusting no one, damaging its friends and citizens until it falls at the hands of its enemies? Will it struggle through energy and economic hazards and emerge stronger than ever? Or will it succumb to its own unwillingness to change, and die a cruel death?

Putting all metaphors aside, I think America has its problems. Some of its past is horribly dark and disturbing, and would make children weep if they knew the truth. But the United States was founded with the best of intentions, and its core, being the U.S. Constitution and its attendant Bill of Rights, is sound and noble and has set an example for democracies worldwide (even ones now better than our own). For that fundamental reason, even with its flaws, I love this country and am proud to be an American. I want the story to end well, I want our hero to succeed and live happily ever after.

So wave your flags and light your fireworks this weekend. Come Monday, help write the next chapter, guide Our Hero back on the right path, and maybe the story will have a happy ending.

Happy Independence Day, America!!

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According to promos, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition is going to be running a series of stories on America’s National Parks this week.

This NPR junkie will definitely be tuning in.

NPR’s Morning Edition

Oof, I’m terrible sorry for being terribly late with my next post! 

I’ve been very busy and unavailable for the last few weeks, but I’m back now. I’ll be putting up a new post in a day or two, so please stay tuned!