"Liberty they cry when license they mean"

During the Vietnam War, young men like me faced a life-altering choice:  participate (and perhaps die) in a war any of us considered immoral or assert our consciences and convictions and pay the price.  I obeyed my draft notice but failed the induction physical.  Some friends, though, chose the second option; one renounced his American citizenship and has spent the rest of his life in Sweden, and another claimed (and was confirmed in) conscientious objector status.  In the latter case, he still wasn’t off the hook; had he been drafted, he’d still have had to participate in the war in some non-combatant capacity.

I’m a huge admirer of Henry David Thoreau; in fact, his work, along with the writings of other American Transcendentalists, was the focus of my professional career.  Especially influential was his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience.  It was an extremist’s argument, a call to follow one’s conscience above all else (in fact, the full title is On The Duty of Civil Disobedience.)  It was a response to two great evils:  slavery and the Mexican War.  “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” he wrote.  Powerful stuff.  Gandhi adopted it to win India’s independence.  Famously, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement applied it as the core principle of the movement against racist oppression.  And, of course, it was immensely attractive and inspirational to those resisting the Vietnam War.

Once again, it’s become a powerful influence in American politics.  Opponents of same-sex marriage are claiming the right to provide commercial or governmental services to same-sex couples, and they have strong religious convictions to invoke.  Legislators in states such as Kansas, Georgia and Mississippi have pushed “religious liberty” bills designed to shield such claimants from punishment for their acts of conscience. 

Don’t they deserve my respect in the same way that Civil Rights and anti-war activists do?  Aren’t they following in the hallowed footsteps of my hero Thoreau?

No.  Absolutely not. There is nothing moral or heroic about it.

A true act of conscience involves sacrifice.  Thoreau refused to pay a tax that would, ultimately, fund the Mexican War—and he went to jail for his act.  He wrote: “… if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.”  Those who refused to obey Jim Crow laws were jailed, often beaten, even murdered.  Those who refused to be drafted were jailed or forced to leave their homes and families for a foreign country.  Such is the price of true civil disobedience.

What does a baker who refuses to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple sacrifice?  Their business license? So be it. A business license is a contract, a civil duty, to serve all citizens, whether they adhere to one’s religious precepts or not.  To willingly lose it is a truly courageous act, worthy of my respect.  But to be protected by the State, free from consequences?  That’s not courage; it’s a cop-out.

Gone to Shiloh

"Gone to Shiloh" (Elton John, Leon Russell, Neil Young)

Last year, we visited the Shiloh battlefield in Southern Tennessee.  It was a soggy, drippy day—perfect for a somber inspection of a place where nearly 24,000 young men were either killed or wounded in a two-day battle.  Most of the land is densely wooded, just as it was in 1862, and that somehow brought home the horror of the battle.  A soldier in those woods could know little, see little, and understand nearly nothing of what was going on around him, just smoke and slaughter.

Statues and monuments dot the battlefield.  Some commemorate Federal units, some Confederate. Most of them show where units were stationed, or the sites of the bloodiest battles.  Few honor individuals on either side, for their purpose is to help us learn and remember what happened here and its cost—and, perhaps, to warn us not to ever let it happen again.

Throughout the South, and much of the North as well, other statues honor the generals and leaders of the Confederacy.  A groundswell of people demands their removal, at least from public spaces.  Those who defend them argue that they remind us of our (or their) “heritage.”  It would be unthinkable to bulldoze the Shiloh battlefield and build strip malls on it.  How, then, is removing these statues any different? Aren’t we, in both cases, “erasing history?”

Not at all.

It is right and proper to commemorate what happened in those awful days.  The event can be divorced from the motivations of the young men who gave their lives there. I suspect that quite a few didn’t really know what they were fighting for; they were there because of loyalty to their family and community, because of a vague sense of “patriotism”, because of fear of “Yankees” (or, conversely, “Rebs”), because of a thirst for adventure.  Not so, though, with a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis, or any of the other “heroes” of the Confederacy.  These commemorate motivations, the cause for which they chose to lead their troops.  And that's the problem. 

To honor Robert E. Lee is, for all his qualities of courage and leadership, necessarily to honor treason.  To honor Jefferson Davis is to be proud of one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity ever committed, the institution of human slavery.  Stonewall Jackson was legendary for his bravery, all right—but it was the bravery of German soldiers in Normandy on D-Day.  They devoted their service to the cause of white supremacy. And not just to that, but to the oppression and exploitation of human beings they relegated to the status of livestock.

What, then, about such figures as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson?  They were slaveowners, and they too committed acts of treason.  Should their statues, their portraits, their images on our money—should these be erased too?

Yes, they were deeply flawed.  But they articulated an ideal that they themselves couldn’t live up to, but which became the country’s cause.  Washington refused a crown, and broke the concept of “divine right” once and for all.  Jefferson established the concept that “all [people] are created equal,” a concept so radical at the time that we’re still having trouble implementing it.  They set in motion a system that, while deeply flawed like them, has a noble, liberating vision to guide it, and us.

But you know … maybe the Old Testament injunction against “graven images” is the best practice.  Maybe we don’t need statues of “heroes” after all.  Not to get all Platonic here, but heroes usually have clay feet (or, in this case, bronze). A statue of George Washington or Robert E. Lee is really just a sculpted filter through which certain qualities pass to us.  The qualities are what’s important, not the particular representation of them.  What’s happening with the current controversy over Confederate statues is that, for perhaps the first time, large numbers of Americans are aware of just what these figures stood for and realizing that we don’t all agree on what those values should be.  It’s a discussion we need to have. 

It’s the sort of thing you think about on a rainy day in a forested field in Southern Tennessee.

Wet Dreams

Seattle lost a huge chunk of its soul last Sunday.

For 66 years, local television had devoted a day of live coverage of the Seafair Cup hydroplane races.  This year, KIRO declined to cover the event live, but promised to at least show highlights in the evening.

Came the highlight show:  twenty minutes of the Blue Angels, softball interviews with logboom spectators, some fluffy chatter.  Of the hydroplanes, nothing.  Oh, yeah—they announced who won.  At the beginning of the program, killing any interest we might have had in watching a clip of the race ourselves.  If, of course, they had shown one.

I can understand KIRO’s decision to end the live coverage.  There’s an awful lot of “dead air” to fill between heats.  In recent years, more spectators have come to watch the Blue Angels than the hydros.  They just weren’t that interested in watching a. small number of boats that sound like vacuum cleaners run around in circles three laps at a time.  Sure, they’re bright and colorful and they look spectacular when they run, but few know the names of the drivers or feel any bond with boats with names like Homestreet Bank or Graham Trucking.  But surely there are enough of us who still care to support a lousy highlight show.  There are hundreds of cable channels, after all, not to mention streaming on the internet.

For some years now I’ve felt defensive trying to explain why I’m a fan of hydroplane racing.  I watched the first race on the new technology of television when I was three.  As a child I, like many other young Seattle boys, made crude wooden hydros and towed them behind my bike.  I drove a patrol boat for one of the events when I was a teen.  And, as an adult, I spent a few years racing boats myself.

The boats of those years were woodworker’s art, dark wood polished to the sheen of a grand piano or painted brilliant colors, like the fabled Hawaii Kai’s coral and pink.  Stuffed into them were World War II fighter plane engines with over 1,000 horsepower.  And driving them were heroes, former pilots like Bill Stead  and Russ Schleeh, or even Cold Warriors like the popular Mira Slovak, who’d escaped Communist Czechoslovakia in a motorized glider.  It was a horribly dangerous sport; quite a few drivers, including the best of all like Bill Muncey and Ron Musson, died in crashes.

Seattle had no professional sport—no Major League baseball, no NFL team, no NBA basketball, not even hockey.  But we had hydroplanes, ever since a local car dealer, Stan Sayres, took a radically different boat back east and trounced the competition for the Gold Cup in 1951.  It was a major declaration to the East Coast and the sports media who paid attention only to them:  Seattle may have been out on the frontier, but it could excel at something. A rivalry quickly developed between two major hydroplane cities, Seattle and Detroit, and it was as passionate and fierce as Ohio State and Michigan or USC and Notre Dame.

Some of the boats had sponsors and some, owned by wealthy Captains of Industry, didn’t, but they all had histories and lineages that enabled us to form a bond.  My crude bicycle-powered model was pink like Hawaii Kai (when it retired I shifted allegiance to the Green Dragon, the Miss Bardahl).  Local television covered not only the Seattle race but other races around the Northwest, places like the Tri-Cities or Lake Coeur d’Alene, and we’d be glued to our fuzzy black-and-white tv’s for each of them.  When they’d test, I could hear the snarling modulations of the engine from my house, miles away.

But I’m old now, and it’s not the same.  Perhaps the sport lost its soul and detached from Seattle long ago.  Sponsors may change from race to race, and the drivers are faceless lookalikes. It’s impossible to form much of a bond with a billboard for a furniture store or a tire dealer.  And the boats have dwindled; only eight showed up for this year’s race.  The absence of television coverage just confirmed that something as precious to a city as any historic building or natural landmark has gone away. Seattle is a city for Amazonians and Microsofties now, and they have other dreams.

Loose Cargo

“We are stardust, we are golden …”

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Sorry, Joni, but let’s face it:  we are cargo.

A passenger is dragged violently off a plane to make room for late-arriving airline employees.  A mother is assaulted by a flight attendant confiscating her baby stroller.  A peaceful passenger is removed from a flight because, after a lengthy delay, he desperately needed to use the plane’s restroom. If we fly these days, we are squeezed into a space so small that our legs cramp and   been shrunken, and we’re fed tiny packages of nuts and pretzels.

But this isn’t a rant against the airline industry.  I’m an English major, and I tend to think metaphorically.  And these outrageous episodes make a great metaphor for what’s happened to us as people.

Those in the cockpit consider us cargo. Now cargo has value, of course. But it’s passive.  It must be stowed correctly, sorted by shape and weight, and carefully restrained.  And one package is pretty much interchangeable with another, unless it’s really valuable; then it deserves, and gets, special handling.  Sometimes it gets tossed around and damaged in transport; it’s all part of the process.  For efficiency, it’s cataloged, classified and crated, stored like with like. 

Kind of like us.  Politicians see us as separate voting blocs:  Urban middle class, Rural working class, African-American, Latino, Jewish or Roman Catholic or Evangelical, etc.  Marketers divide us into “lifestyle segments.” Our habits are assessed and analyzed, increasingly efficiently, and we’re crated into a convenient box until they need to open us up and use us.  And increasingly, we’re doing it to each other.

We’ve become Amazon when we should be Etsy, a mass commodity rather than a boutique craft.

Well, I for one, am tired of being considered a package.  And I suspect it’s the same with those who are part of Black Lives Matter and the Women’s Marches and even those who voted for Trump.  We deserve, and we should demand, to be treated with dignity and respect on this flight we’re all on.  We have much more in common than those who exploit us would have us think; we need to recognize and assert that.

“…and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

The Home Front War

Remember October 7, 2001?

It’s a date that should live in infamy, but probably doesn’t for most of us.  It’s the date the war in Afghanistan started—and it’s still going on, over a decade and a half later.  Early on, the United States dropped a huge bomb on a cave complex where Osama Bin Laden was thought to be hiding.  The other day the United States dropped an even huger bomb on a cave complex where ISIS is believed to have been hiding. Plus change, plus c’est meme chose.

Operation Enduring Freedom.  I’m not sure about the “freedom” part, but the “enduring” is right on.

Now that’s not yet up there with some of the other wars in Western history, like the Hundred Years’ War or even the Thirty Years’ War, but it’s getting there.  And its twin, Operation Iraqi Freedom, drags on as well, with a spillover into neighboring Syria.  But it’s far, far longer than any of the previous American wars (except maybe the Indian Wars of the 19^th Century).  It’s lasted so long that it’s become the norm.  And you have to wonder what that’s done to us, the ones who ignore it at home.

Without legal justification or any stated objective, we fire missiles into Syria, a country we’re not even (supposedly) at war with.  We drop the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on Afghanistan and refer to it, with a disturbing overtone of pride, as the “Mother Of All Bombs” (the phrase itself a nod to the beginning of the Iraq War.)  A few people take to the streets in protest, but soon go back home.  And we dutifully make our comments on Facebook and Twitter, and the people who already agree with us like them.  But increasingly we passively accept the firing of the missiles and the dispatch of carrier battle groups by the President without Congressional authorization or the slightest nod to the Constitution.  We’re a nation permanently at war, and we increasingly seem to be okay with that.

What has it done to us?  To be desensitized would be bad enough—but have the effects gone even deeper?

For over a decade and a half, we’ve sent our young people into an environment where the enemy wears no uniform, where the good guys and the bad guys speak the same languages and, from day to day, can become interchangeable.  An environment in which the ground underfoot may conceal an IED, where every building may conceal a sniper, where every car could be a bomb. An environment in which paranoia is a valuable survival tool, and suspicion of others a necessity.

And when they come back home, does that all spread to the rest of us?  Has their war environment become the home front environment as well?

All of the above was true of Vietnam too, and I vividly remember the bitter divisions between us that war brought, divisions that tore apart families split us into warring tribes and created a cultural bitterness that persists into the present.  But it seemed so much more apparent at that time; we knew it was happening.  Now it just feels like an inchoate simmering anger.  Maybe the real war started fifty years ago, and we’ve just become so used to it that we hardly notice any longer.

Can we survive decades of war?  

Song of the Closing Road

I heard a story once, probably apocryphal, about a guy who drove his new motorhome for the first time.  He set out on an interstate.  Then he set the cruise control—and walked to the back to fix himself a drink.

Very soon, that story might not have the outcome we all know it had.  Tech companies like Google, Uber and (reportedly) Apple, as well as traditional automakers including General Motors, Ford, and Tesla (or is that a tech company?  It’s so confusing) are racing to perfect “autonomous vehicles”—self-driving cars.  Already you may see test vehicles on the road, marked by any array of spinning sensors on the roof.

This could, in many ways, be a good development.  Let’s face it:  driving, in most urban areas at least, isn’t fun any longer; it’s become a stressful chore.  Immobile in traffic, breathing toxic fumes, worrying if the guy who just shouldered into your lane has a gun … who needs it?  Maybe it would be nice to program in your destination, sit back with a beverage of your choice, and read or surf the net, or even catch up on sleep.  And let’s face another thing:  a distressing number of drivers these days are distracted, intoxicated, or just plain inept.  A car that drives itself, always paying attention, always acting predictably—what’s not to like about that? But, as with all new advances, something valuable will be lost.  We won’t drive anymore.

Duh.

Okay, but think about it for a bit.  For over a century now, any one of us has had the opportunity to control one of the most powerful and, at the same time, deadly devices ever devised.  We have been behind the wheel of a multi-ton mechanism that can propel us at speeds up to and, in many cases, well over 100 miles an hour.  We take this power for granted, but it’s been one of the most important gifts of the industrial age.  And it may be coming to an end.

To turn 16 has been to assume a status previously granted only to locomotive engineers and steamboat captains and aircraft pilots.  It’s been a grant of independence.  To deny it is to engage in repression; just ask a Saudi woman.  To take it away is a cruel confirmation of decline; just ask an elderly or infirm person.  Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Route 66, Jack Kerouac, Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde … driving has permeated every aspect of our culture.  It’s not just the ability to move that’s significant; a self-driving car won’t take that away.  It’s the acquisition and perfection of the skill itself—that will be lost.

Already, in this country, only five percent of the new cars sold have a standard shift.  Stories are told of people who try to steal a car, only to suddenly, and grindingly, find that they can’t drive it.  Just about every week comes a news story of somebody who’s driven a car into a building because they mistook the gas pedal for the brake. To drive well, to really control a car, is to know how to get moving and stay moving on a snowy road, to know how to recover from a skid, to drive with an awareness of what’s happening half a mile ahead, to make it safely through fog and torrential rain, to know what to do when a tire goes flat, to know when to accelerate past a potential accident and when to yield.  These are great and valuable skills, the marks of truly alive and awake individuals.  They are the skills of someone who controls technology rather than one who is controlled by it.

Maybe they’ve become irrelevant.  Increasingly, young people are foregoing the acquisition of a driver’s license and ownership of a car.  And maybe that makes sense in today’s environment.

The road may still be open.  But our mastery of it is coming to a close.

Ned Ludd, Where Are You?

When I was a kid, Dad would take us for rides in the Rambler and, of course, occasionally stop for gas.  He’d pull up to the pump, turn the engine off, and (usually) grind out his cigarette in the pull-out ashtray, rolling down the driver’s side window about halfway. A young man, a teenager usually, would hurry over to the car; sometimes there would be two.  He’d wear coveralls at some of the stations, or at least a twill shirt with his name embroidered over the pocket.  It wasn’t always clean.  While the tank was filling, he’d squeegee the windshield and the back window.  My perfectionist father would point out spots he’d missed and he would cheerfully (okay, at least not grudgingly) go over them again.  Dad would pay, the attendant would make change, and we’d be off.

Oregon is, in this respect at least, a time machine.  It’s a shock to purchase gas across the Columbia, because Oregon refuses to let me pump my own.  I still relive the day of the attendant.

In 1951, Oregon opted to stop the clock, passing a bill prohibiting customers from pumping their own gas.  Ostensibly, it was on the ground of safety; gasoline is, of course, explosively volatile.  But, whether intentionally or not, it preserved an entire genre of entry-level jobs, available to even callow high-school students:  the gas station attendant.

I thought about this recently as I watched a television news report about a new experiment.  Amazon.com has opened, of all things, a grocery store in Seattle. At the moment, it serves only Amazon employees (Amazonians?), but if it succeeds, the internet behemoth plans to open 2,000 across the country. What makes it remarkable is that customers can browse the shelves, choose whatever foodstuffs they wish, and walk out the door.  There are no checkstands.  And, of course, there are no checkers.

If these 2,000 stores become a reality, they could do to traditional grocery stores what the infant Amazon did to brick-and-mortar book stores, in the process eliminating another full genre of entry-level jobs, from stockers to checkers, even to managers.  And they could easily become a model for other retailers like pet supply or hardware stores.  Already, Wal-Mart is exploring the same concept.

And then there’s Uber.  The car-sharing, app-driven service has already severely disrupted the traditional taxi industry.  But they, too, are exploring automation, developing self-driving cars that are already on the road in Pittsburgh and, soon, San Francisco. Although taxi-driving isn’t exactly an entry-level job, it has provided opportunities through the years for those with lower education levels, those without specialized skills, and recent immigrants.  A recent count showed that, across the country, almost 234,000 people earn a living driving cabs. Bus driver and even long-haul truckers could face the same future.

Donald Trump won election largely on a promise to restore American jobs, the kinds of jobs that created and maintained the middle class.  Good luck with that, Mr. President.  Imagine that you’re a young person, freshly graduated, either from high school or even community college.  uHow are you going to enter the workforce?  How proficient are you at coding?

I’m not a Luddite.  I embrace my high-tech gadgets, from my smart phone (and now smart watch) to my flat-screen television.  And I recognize that robots can provide much benefit to consumers.  No waits for attendants or long lines at Costco.  No need to carry on awkward conversations with drivers.  No need, even, to wait for a UPS or FedEx truck to bring us the goodies we bought online when drone might do the same.  Oh, what a brave new world that has such gadgets in it!

But … what of the workers displaced?  Can we afford this future?  Or should we consider taking a bold step, like Oregon did in 1951, to declare that inefficiency is a social good if it provides jobs to the unskilled among us?  Or will we just close our eyes to the vast tent cities that will inevitably grace the public spaces of our cities?