Road Trip!

It's taken as an article of faith in my family that "Brennans love road trips." All of my siblings, though my brothers in particular, have elaborate stories about epic trips when they + another brother/ friend/ hitchhiker went from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in an AMC Rambler in 27 hours, and how much fun they had doing it.

I am not immune: One evening, after wrapping up business in Cincinnati, I drove to visit a sister-in-law who was laid up during a difficult pregnancy. When I walked into her Knoxville hospital room, surprising her, she asked "What in the world are you doing here?" I answered "Well, I was in the neighborhood..." She loved that line, but to my mind there was truth to it - Cincy is a lot closer to Knoxville than Chicago, so why not?

I have an atlas on which I've highlighted every road I've ever driven in the US, and I will look at it before I take a trip and drive new roads, just to have more to highlight, more to see, more memories to steal away. I've had some epic hitchhiker experiences as well - from Denver to LA, from Sacto to Tahoe, across Nevada, in Hawai'i, outside Arcata, the length of California - and I've always loved throwing a bag in the car and heading out.

Why is this, this centrality of road trips in our shared family lore, and individual pride, and myth-making? We all cut our teeth on the same road trips growing up, after all. We spent the same number of interminable hours on sticky vinyl seats, with no air conditioning, fighting or avoiding fighting with siblings, being sick or avoiding the physical manifestations of sickness of siblings, shoving siblings' things out the window.  And all of this while our - well, what else can be said? - heat-crazed, exhausted, clearly en-maddened parents drove us across four states to get to a campsite, or a lake, or a historical marker, and all while they yelled at us to "Wake up!" or "Put that book down!" so we could "Look at the scenery!" or "Pray the rosary!" So why, given this background, did we all, without fail, as soon as we each had the resources to buy, beg, or borrow (or rent, in my case) a car, grab a sibling or a friend or a hitcher and an atlas and go on a road trip?

But we did. (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?)

My first childhood memory of a family vehicle is the Tan Van. It was a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan, or what some friends have since called the church bus, with two bucket seats up front, an engine that protruded in between them, three bench seats, and an extended storage area in the back. (Driver's view, right, exactly our model.)

Each bench seat could accommodate three seated people, which is nine, plus Mom and Dad in the front bucket seats, which is eleven, which leaves me, #10, to sit on the engine, facing backward.

It wasn't the safest perch in the van. Had we hit anything I would have been thrown into the windshield at such an angle that my head would have been forced into my sternum, snapping my neck instantly, before the glass shattered and spewed me out of the van into whatever it was that had just been hit - but it was the 70s. No one had accidents.  Which was just as well, because no one had seat belts.

I don't mean that metaphorically - literally, no one in that vehicle had seat belts. Our Tan Van had rusted out so badly that you could see the road rushing past underneath you, and finally it got to the point where my dad or a brother sawed a piece of 3/4" plywood to bolt onto what was left of the van floor so no one would fall through. They drilled holes in the plywood so we could bolt the seats back in, but no one was drilling holes for the seat belt posts. They got left behind in the modification.

The plywood floor was an improvement on the rusted metal floor that had been there before on a safety level, sure, but the main advantage of plywood over rusted metal?  It was quieter. The previous floor was deteriorating sheet metal.

Know the sound of rain on a tin roof? Or the sound of a rock being thrown by a lawnmower into the side of a car? Imagine that incessantly, at highway speed, while you are lying on the metal in question. Throw in the whine of the tires, and you're there. That old floor had transferred the energy of every rock kicked up by a tire, every pothole not avoided, every drift onto a gravel shoulder into sound. We slept on the floor, on blankets, and we heard and felt it all. Despite that, we slept so soundly that when we'd arrive back in Fowler we'd have to be carried up the steps and into bed, but I guess that's being 7.

Until siblings aged up into driving, Mom or Dad would usually drive and the other rode shotgun; then behind them older kids on benches, then younger kids on the floor. Given that math, any more than three kids in the van and I slept on the floor. Which was a piece of plywood bolted into a van. With a bigger older sibling stretched out on a vinyl seat immediately above me unrestrained in any way. Going between fifty and seventy miles an hour on mostly two lane roads, for the 8 to 10 hour circuit from Fowler, to Raymond, Illinois, to Springfield, and then home.

God, I miss the 70's.

Sometimes we'd do the whole circle route in one day - leave Fowler at 6 am, get to Grandma and Grandpa M's in Raymond, Illinois, at 10:30 or so, stay for lunch, drive to Springfield to see Dad's relatives, possibly stay for dinner, and drive home, leaving at 8:00 at night for the four hour drive back.

My parents had to have been just nuts.  They had to have been!  But at least on those trips to Illinois we were visiting relatives, so they had a putative objective.

For our summer vacations, there wasn't even that.

It couldn't have been the traditional objective of a vacation: how could taking one or two weeks, loading us all up into the van, and driving to Michigan, or Philadelphia in 1976 to see the Liberty Bell, or Dallas, Texas, in the middle of summer after the eldest moved there for school (god help us, I think I'm still hot from those drives), have been a vacation? And it's not like the Tan Van was worry free driving. One Dallas summer trip, the axle broke in Sikeston, Missouri - on hour six of a fifteen hour drive. (I clearly remember it was Sikeston, because there was a road sign that had the US highway shields for routes 60, 61 and 62 together on one post. I was thrilled!) We sat in a city park, all of us who were on that trip (and I don't remember numbers, but I remember there were a lot of us, and I remember it was damn hot), waiting while it got fixed. That can't have improved our moods, and there were nine hours to go, packed into that van, sticking to those seats, fighting with those siblings.

Can you imagine doing that, now? No DVD players, no headphones, no video game controllers of any sort - only AM radio, books and the rosary. We would play car games to pass the time, and talk to each other in between the fighting, and see the country roll by us. From my perch up front, facing backward, sitting on a folded up blanket in the summer to protect my butt from the heat of the engine, I got to see things I'd read about flow out behind me: the Mississippi River, the Gateway Arch, interstate highways cut through rock in southern Missouri, rice and cotton fields in Arkansas and Texas - fields with standing water, fields with crops you couldn't eat - all things that made me realize that the way things were done in Benton County wasn't the only way to do things.

It was my introduction to travel as education. Through the encyclopedias I'd take on every trip so I could learn about the the crops and cities and state trees, birds, and flowers, as we'd pass through. Through the atlas I'd stare at for hours, memorizing the roads and the numbers and the counties. (I won't say that this initiated my lifelong love of maps and geography, because I don't remember a time I couldn't stare at maps for hours, but it certainly cemented it.) Through the stories read to me by my sisters, when I was a real little guy, and by my father when it was mom's turn at the wheel. He'd cycle through the Little House on the Prairie books, and when we got to "The Long Winter," regardless of time of year or where we were, we'd have to bundle up in blankets if we wanted him to go on. Through the stories my brothers would tell me about people they knew, from Chicago or Detroit or Minnesota; and what they'd learned in school, and they'd talk about music, or their worldviews, or family stories which, even then, involved cars.

After all I guess they were fun, those trips. I never realized the generosity that my exhausted and harried parents demonstrated by taking us on them.  To connect with cousins and grandparents, to learn something about the history and geography of our country, to give us shared experiences as a family were all great lessons and great experiences. It was cheap entertainment, on one level, as gas was 29 cents a gallon, campgrounds didn't charge us much, and we bought food in a grocery store and made sandwiches and lemonade at city parks along the way, which was good, because we couldn't have afforded anything more.

Whether we were driving to Watseka, Illinois, for Dairy Queen on a hot summer's night (dilly bars, 39 cents), or to Lincoln, Illinois, for a family funeral when it was so cold our great aunt couldn't be interred because the ground was too frozen, and the heater in the tan van didn't stand a chance of keeping us warm, we were having the shared experiences that comprised our youth.

Maybe that's what the road trip experience has come to mean for those of us in my family - some nostalgia-suffused combination of freedom, the wonder of new experience, and familial bond that we have tried to recapture.

But maybe that's just my view, why I love them, and what I have tried to recreate. Maybe that's what I'm hoping for when I'm driving west on US 56 outside of Clayton, New Mexico, watching the sunset behind the Rockies and seeing "purple mountain majesty" for myself; or when I'm waking up after spending the night in a rented Chevy Cavalier on a cold, foggy morning in Port Angeles, Washington.

Maybe I'm just hoping to see it forward this time, as an adult, instead of sitting on the engine, looking down at the map, choosing a path, and then looking up to see it roll away behind me, backward, gone before I saw it.
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Losing battle

The reason that some Conservatives and Evangelical Christians (and Venn diagrammatically, there is near perfect overlap there) are so biliously against gay marriage to the point that they want a Constitutional Amendment outlawing it is, I suspect, because Constitutional Amendments are so hard to undue. That would be the only way to give a ban staying power; they can read headlines and polls and tables as well as I can, and they know they have lost.

Evidence? Headline in tomorrow's NYTimes: "Bush's Daughter Backs Gay Marriage."

This would be W's daughter, the same W. whose wife (as quoted in the article and elsewhere) has said that people in committed loving relationships ought to have the same rights as others. Who else thinks the queers marrying is a pretty good idea in a secular, modern democracy that values fairness and equality? Meghan McCain, Senator McCain's daughter.

And there are many, many, more.

More than 50% of people 18 and over in eight states have given explicit support to gay marriage (in a 2008 poll and study, here). More than 50% of Americans between 18 and 29, in every state in the Union that didn't secede for the right to own black people (plus, it kinda goes without saying, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Utah).

In every state except the hopeless ones, over 50% of people aged 18-29 gave explicit support for gay marriage in a 2008 poll.

So the Evangelical Right knows they've lost. It's not over, by any stretch. First, their voters vote at much higher rates than the 18-29 year olds. And they care more, way more, in the negative than many younger voters in the positive on this issue. And the Evangelical Christians will spend millions of dollars fighting it, and telling lies about what kids are going to have to learn in public schools, and how men will be able to marry their pets if gay marriage passes - but they've lost.

Millions of Americans, like Ms. Bush, have gone to school with out, happy queer folk, have worked with us, have been treated and taught and entertained by us, and these millions of hetero Americans can't imagine that we shouldn't have the same rights that they have.

It's not arguments showing the role of the 14th Amendment, or on the relevance of Brown vs. Board of Education and separate not being equal, for these Americans - it's a decent, human reaction to increased knowledge and familiarity, it's their friends and neighbors, it's reaping the years of all of the coming out. It's the new normal.

From the same study:

"I also think it’s interesting that, even in states that we normally consider quite hostile to gay rights (the ones at the bottom of the table), there is still a significant age difference: 18-29 year-olds in Alabama, for example, are more supportive of gay marriage than people 65 and older in Massachusetts."

It will take years and a lot of money, and I know I'm not writing anything that many others haven't already said, and said better, but the religious right has lost on this issue. The queers are gonna get married. Even in the hopeless states.

Welcome aboard, Ms. Bush.
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Headline: "Halliburton knew..."

Do you really need to hear the rest? I bet you don't. Can you guess? I bet you can.

It's not surprising that an entity designed to do one thing, make money, does everything it can do to achieve that one aim. I'm not surprised when fish swim, when pitchers pitch, or when bloviating blow hards get on the radio and bloviate, hard.

What is surprising is how many Americans seem to think that these entities designed with only one goal in mind, to make money, should not be looked after, that there should be no limit to what they can do or to whom they can do it, that oversight is evil ("socialist", same thing) and that the public good isn't worth protecting.

It's not surprising, it's just staggering. Unfathomable. Irrational. Why do some Americans, who are troubled, economically insecure and making less for more productivity than at any time since the 1970's (yes, that's right - the 1970's were far better for most Americans than the 80s and 90s were) think that putting government back in the hands of those who think business does just fine on its own, thanks, is the way to go? How can that be the answer? What kind of logic - or at least thinking, since it doesn't seem to be logical - leads a person to that conclusion?

So Halliburton, about as solid an example of a poor market actor as I could find, "...knew of cement flaws before spill..." and didn't act on the knowledge. Why is the cement important? From the NY Times article:

The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop the well and is supposed to contain a well bore blowout, also failed.

In an internal investigation, BP identified the faulty cement job as one of the main factors contributing to the accident and blamed Halliburton...

It reminds of that old Saturday Night Live fake commercial: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Except in the 1970s it was a matter of inconvenience, not the death of workers or whole ecosystems.

Apparently, my countrywomen and men read this and think "Hey, we need less governance, less oversight, and less control over who is doing what in the public sphere. They'll do the right thing."

How did we get so short sighted, as a country? How did we get so fearful of government? How did we get so manipulated as to believe what is so demonstrably false and not in our best interests?

We got here because that's what capitalism does - it is designed to make money, and whatever it needs to do it will do to that end. This includes flaunting safety standards, yes, of course, but this also includes getting five old white Catholics (Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts and Alito) to believe in the Citizens United case that companies are people, too, and can do whatever they want in elections, just like people. Well, except vote. Well, so far.

So now we have a government of the people (which now includes corporations which have no interest except to line their own pockets), by the people (and the corporations who can spend as much hidden money as they'd like in elections) and for the people (including corporations who get to benefit from lax laws or no laws since they will be gutted by Congressmen and Women they've bought and paid for).

And now we have a midterm awash in more cash than ever, as reported in the Superior, Wisconsin, Leader-Telegram, among others - no McCain Feingold, no disclosure, no limit - and that cash is directed to one purpose: electing people who will look out for business interests.

It's the lies that money is telling that seems to be tipping the scales. I don't understand how the GOP can even be in a position to take back the House since they are the ones who got us into this economic mess, but they seem to be.

Wednesday could be a bad day for American democracy, but a good day for corporations. That's also something that Halliburton knew.
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Burning questions

Okay, let's think about this.

A crazy Christian pastor in Florida wants to burn a Koran. This rises to the level of national security because doing so will "...inflame the sensibilities of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims" according to some. And such inflamed sensibilities will then put American servicemembers lives at risk. So President Obama and General Petraeus and various clergy members inveigh upon the nutbar - who is milking every second of his fifteen minutes of fame - to cease and desist. He does. Day saved.

Wait a minute.

First of all, why do we have to be so delicate about religious sensibilities? Burning books is odious - burning ANY book is odious - but really, if that isn't protected speech I can't think what is. If Rev. Shameless thinks that Islam (and Judaism and Hinduism and, and, and) is "of the devil," well, why not? It's all made up anyway, right? I mean the whole "My fake omnipotent creature in the sky who looks like me could beat up your fake omnipotent creature in the sky who looks like you" argument - well, it isn't. It doesn't even rise to the level of argument.

As a secularist and atheist who thinks the Constitution is about as close to "hallowed" as we get in this country, I think Rev. Lookatme absolutely had the right to burn the Koran, or the Bible or whatever. Over a billion people around the world would have been annoyed? Well... so? The only reason we care that those billion plus people would have been annoyed is because we don't have an energy policy in this country and therefore we have enriched a tiny fraction of those billion who have 12th century ideologies and 21st century weapons.

It's called "pluralism" - sometimes we're gonna disagree about stuff that makes us crazy. Grow up!

Don't like what one deranged nutbar in Florida thinks about your religion, so you're going to take to the streets in angry mobs and burn crap and shoot Americans? Really?

Okay, first, a.) if your god is so delicate that he (invariably he) is going to be umbraged by the burning of a book, I can't help you. Isn't he supposed to be omnipotent, etc.? You really think that he cares what one man - a man who isn't on board with his project ANYWAY - thinks about him and his book? Wow. That's a fragile god. Then b.) if you are so unhinged as to believe a.) to the point that you need to violate what the book itself says about how to behave to make a point on behalf of the book's alleged writer, how can we even have a conversation with you? Why the hell should we even care what you think, at that point?

Oh, we don't want to offend "deeply held religious beliefs." Why the hell not? Some people's "deeply held religious beliefs" teach them to think that humans and dinosaurs are contemporaries. As Lewis Black says, how can you even have a conversation with people who think that the Flintstones is a documentary!? You CAN'T! Deeply held religious beliefs can be just wrong. Just plain wrong. Women ought not to be covered head to toe. Or be kept from owning property. Or be kept as property. All of that is wrong, and just because someone's religion tells him it's right doesn't change that.

Personally, I think it's obnoxious to burn the Koran. I would think it similarly obnoxious for a practicing Muslim (or anyone) to put on a dress and fake a Mass. I think it's similarly obnoxious for tourists to get drunk, put on coconut bras and do fake hula. Mocking, appropriating, or denigrating someone's religious beliefs is juvenile and counterproductive, and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of discourse.

But just because we're fighting - for no good reason, by the way - a war in that part of the world doesn't mean that we need to sacrifice the gains of the Enlightenment and secularism so as not to offend "Deeply Held Religious Beliefs."

Where was this outrage when Muslims dynamited the beautiful Buddhas of Bamiyan? We can make more Korans - but statues that had stood for 1500 years and which were sacred to another religion, and which were a testament to human ingenuity, devotion, commitment and achievement, those can be dynamited because of deeply held religious beliefs? Wha...? Where is the balance? Unbelievable.

The liberal, secular West has lost its nerve. We are in danger of abandoning the values and progress of the Enlightenment. We are caving to thugs who have no sense of proportionality or regard for pluralism. We need to stand up to the bullies and psychopaths who scream at us not to burn the Koran or they'll take to the streets and kill us and not be afraid to say that they are craven, hypocritical and deranged. We need to say this exactly to the extent we need to stand up to nutbars who say you can't build an Islamic Cultural Center in Manhattan. Yes, you can.

It's all irrational, all this fear of sacrilege and talk of hallowedness, and we forget the wondrous intellectual legacy of the west - and its fiery commitment to reason, excellence, rationality, and discipline at its best - at our deep, deep peril.

And if your god is so delicate that he's offended by a burning book... how the hell does he get out of bed in the morning if he looks at Haiti?

What is hallowed is a school where girls can learn along with boys without getting acid thrown in their faces; what is sacrilege is women being stoned for adultery.

Now THAT would be a riot about sacrilege that I could get behind.
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Good news in the news -

For once, some good things going down.

1. Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was captured in Thailand in 2008 in a sting operation led by the US, has finally been extradited by the Thai government to stand trial in the United States. As reported by the Bangkok Post and others, Bout has dealt arms to the FARC in Colombia, to Angolan rebels, and to murderous villains around the globe. This is a win for US diplomacy and law enforcement, and for people around the globe caught in the crossfire of armed conflict.

2. Talks! I know, I know, we've been down this road many (many!) times before, but direct talks have been restarted between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. From the reports today on the News Hour, we'll know they're serious if the principals involved are Netanyu and Abbas, not delegations, but this is a hopeful first step. There were no pre-conditions set for talks, and everyting is on the table. We'll see where it goes.

3. And in a story covered by the NY Times, there has been a shift in who is holding our nation's debt - away from other governments and toward us. For the first time since 2000 foreign governments were net sellers of US bonds and most of the rest of the new debt is held by Americans. This has significant implications for foreign policy, long term solvency, and the ability of the Treasury to issue more bonds.

"In calendar year 2007, the Treasury borrowed a net $237 billion. Of that, 81 percent came from foreign governments, mostly from central banks. Private foreign investors took up the rest, as American companies, banks and individuals reduced their combined Treasury holdings by $13 billion.

It's a step in the right direction - there are many, many more to take, but it's a step.

Good result, but...

Prop 8, the gay marriage ban in California, has been ruled unconstitutional.

No, I'm not elated. I'm not relieved. I'm perhaps a tiny bit pleased, but that's all I'm allowing myself.

Of COURSE it's unconstitutional.

And of course it isn't over.

There was no other way the judge could rule, really. A majority of my neighbors, no matter how much they hate me, can't vote to take away my civil rights. Sorry. Even if they are motivated by centuries-old superstition or belong to an out of state cult that believes the Garden of Eden is in Missouri, and even if they lie and lie and lie and lie to get 50% + 1 of my neighbors to share the belief with them, it doesn't matter. The Constitution gives me protection. Or it should. I'm sure my fellow citizens of African descent can tell me what cold comfort that is - to be guaranteed things in writing that people will kill you to prevent you from having - even as they voted in favor of taking away my civil rights.

This decision means nothing. We have the most conservative Supreme Court in decades sitting now in DC, and Ms. Kagan is unlikely to have any effect on that. Justice Thomas, that intellectual light weight who is the ultimate of all affirmative action hires, is the most activist judge in the history of the court; Alito and Scalia are mean spirited, mendacious bigots, and Roberts give it all a pretty face. No, it comes down to Justice Kennedy to decide if equal protection before the law means what it has been read to have meant since 1954 - or not.

So the decision by U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker - a President Bush (père) appointee - is welcome, of course. It was a good result, and was reasoned in a way to make overturning it very difficult. We're not done, though.

The fight isn't over, I'm not elated, and I see no cause for celebration.

Well funded superstitious people - the same folks who would have made a constitutional amendment to allow witch burning because of their "faith" - will keep pouring in millions to keep the queers from having their same legal protections.

Until I get to vote on their marriages, why would I be happy? Until the Supreme Court rules, why would I be happy? Until a majority of my neighbors decides that the 14th Amendment DOES apply in California, why would I be happy?

I'm not.

I remember November mornings in Colorado in 1992; in California in 2000; in California in 2008...

Until I wake up with MORE civil rights than I had when I went to bed, well, I'll believe it when I see it. When it has some sense of the final.

Until then, it's a good result, but...

One Death in Newark

A man was killed in Newark last Friday night. A black man, unarmed, was killed by a cop, shot in the chest at point blank range.

The shooting happened in Branch Brook Park, and the man who was killed was back in town for a high school reunion, returning from his current home in Atlanta.

The policeman who fired the fatal shot has said that the suspect was resisting arrest, that he had tried to flee, and that when cornered the suspect assaulted the officer.

Why was he a suspect? The Newark police were conducting a sting operation in Branch Brook Park - "scouring the park" according to the NY Times account of the story - and caught Mr. Dean Gaymon, 48, in the sting. There are no other witnesses, so we have only the perspective of the Essex County police officer in the matter.

Mr. Gaymon was President and CEO of a Credit Union in Atlanta, and he was married and leaves behind four children.

Newark, New Jersey, had its first murder free month in 40 years in April, 2010. Crime is dropping, and maybe police have the resources to focus on quality of life crimes instead of reacting to murders, assaults, and shootings - of which there were three on the night in question.
Maybe Mr. Gaymon, despite his wealth and position or perhaps because of it, was afraid to come out for fear of the opprobium of his community. Maybe he didn't see himself as gay at all, but as a happily married man who had interests in same sex sex.

Maybe being back in Newark, especially for a high school reunion, inspired regret and longing, and led Mr. Gaymon to use poor judgment. And when he was caught he panicked, seeing in that moment the ruin of his life's work, of his reputation, of his relationships, and so he tried to run.

Maybe Mr. Gaymon assaulted the arresting officer in that panic - an assault so fierce that the 29 year old officer felt compelled to shoot him, point blank, in the chest.

What we do know is that four kids don't have their dad, and a woman is left with a lot of grief and a lot of questions.

They don't at all rise to that level, but I have to say that I have a lot of questions, too. Was Mr. Gaymon able to integrate his life fully and (apparently) chose not to, or was he unable to live an integrated life? If not, why not? Was Mr. Gaymon raised in a religious home? If yes, to what extent did all of the lies he was told in that context affect him as he was going through his adolescence? Did Mr. Gaymon identify as gay at all? Did he prefer rough trade and public sex, or did he feel that was the only outlet open to him? On a different tack, is Essex County really so adequately policed that catching guys in the bushes is a good law enforcement spend? Its murder rate was 8th in the country in 2008, and nearly eleven cars are stolen there every day; there are twenty seven property crimes committed there every day; there are over three robberies every day... you get the point, and the Essex County police work the County park to make "easy" collars and ruin lives. Chances are that we wouldn't have heard about Mr. Gaymon's story if he weren't shot, point blank, in the chest, by an Essex County officer, but had he only been arrested and not killed, his life - his career, his marriage - would have been irreparably damaged.

It's an intensely human story, and it's heartbreaking. I can't help but think of the wastefulness, the wanton wastefulness of the taking of a gifted human life, and of the chain of events that led to it. It's one death in Newark, a city that saw 80 murders in 2009, and each one of those lost lives is a damn shame.