All posts by Steve Stern

Identifying with the Cliff Swallows

Americana, Psychological Musings

Kachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National MonumentKachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument

A week ago, or so, I saw a post on Ta-Nehisi’s blog that I keep thinking about. He is reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder and the book prompted him to make a series of posts, one of them – I think – is about accepting Evil. The post, Grappling With History’s Greatest Gangsters , is well worth reading (uh…if you are into thinking about good and evil):

How can men commit such acts? The question is not answered by empty invocations of “evil” or vague invocations of “sociopathy.” The question is not answered by memorializing victims (though this has its place) or the construction of national oaths (though that too might have its place.) On the contrary the question might best be answered, not by identifying with history greatest victims, but by identifying with its killers. This is in fact, as Snyder argues, the moral position: It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

I remember walking with Michele late in the afternoon, we were somewhere in the Colorado Plateau – probably in Escalante, but I am not sure – and we were walking up canyon, wandering is more accurate, soaking in the afternoon. Just below the rim of the canyon – about where you might put a picture rail if this was a hall rather than a 200 feet deep canyon – there was a line of mini caves, sort of like the mini-caves in the picture above.1 We watched a Raven flying along the edge of the rim and every once in a while the Raven would circle back to a mini-cave to check it out. It was warm with a slight breeze and the Raven was effortlessly, silently, gliding up canyon.

Ravens don’t get the credit they should, they lack the style of hawks, but they are graceful flyers when they want. This guy was beautiful and then we realized it he was checking out the Cliff Swallow nests in the mini-caves and eating their eggs when he found them. Both Michele and I instantly started feeling sorry for the Cliff Swallows. The eggs were their babies, their future and the Raven was just cruising along, like walking a buffet, eating their eggs.

Walking up canyon, we started talking about how easy it is to identify with the victims rather than the Raven. I think our country, and I suspect alot more countries, are like that. We remember the Alamo – well, the Texans do anyway – we celebrate Pearl Harbor not our victory at Midway. I know I feel that way when I read about pre-civil war slavery or the holocaust. Reading about what the Germans did, I retreat into How could those people do something so inhuman? it is incomprehensible, they are monsters.

It is hard to get past that – often very hard – but they are not monsters, they are people like us. I don’t say that lightly.

Our national narrative is that we are the good guys and we would never do anything like kill people wholesale, especially innocent people. But, we would and we have. During World war II, on 9–10 March 1945, we killed an estimated 88,000 to 100,000 civilians – and wounded another 40,000-125,000, depending on who is counting. We did this on purpose during a raid by 334 B-29s on Tokyo.The purpose of  this raid was not to bomb airfields or munitions factories, it was to kill people. Because we were not doing enough damage to the Japanese homeland with conventional bombing, we had changed tactics to create more damage. First, we bombed Tokyo with high explosive bombs and then came back with incendiary bombs to create a firestorm. According to Robert McNamara, in The Fog of War, after the raid, General Curtis LaMay said It’s a good thing we are winning this war or we would be tried as war criminals.

In his book, War Time: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Paul Fussell writes about an American platoon killing a group of unarmed Germans who were trying to surrender.  But that wasn’t the part that shocked him later, what shocked him how much everybody enjoyed it and how it became a platoon joke to be used when they need cheering up.

Yes, these are wartime stories and war brutalizes everybody and it is easy to tell ourselves that our acts of inhumanity are different from, say, Amon Goeth the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. That is the point, it is easy to make Goeth the other, incomprehensible, like Goeth made the Jewish people he killed the other. It is not a direction that makes us more human. I want to end with a poem – I remember it from a LP record of poetry my mother often played – that we have probably all heard and forgotten, it is by John Dunn: No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Watching the 49ers lose, thinking about crab for lunch

Family, Food and Drink

Cooked crab draining in colander -0755

 Fresh cooked crab (with a torn part of a paper bag in one of its claws, it had been trying to hold on when Michele put it in the boiling water).

As Michele and I were getting ready to watch the 49ers beat the Seahawks, Michele suggested she get some popcorn and hot dogs. She thought it would be a nice touch, typical football game food; I thought, What? Crab is much more typical playoff food after all it comes in season just in time for the playoffs, before I caught myself , realizing that hot dogs are – indeed – the quintessential game time food. At halftime, as we waited for the teams to come back so San Francisco could finish off Seattle, we ate our hot dogs. But, in the second half, as it became increasingly certain that Seattle would win, I started thinking about watching those Super Bowls with my mother and stepfather.

Growing up, college football was a much bigger deal than Professional Football, my stepfather – who my mother had married while I was stationed in Korea and did not feel like much of a father figure – however had season tickets to the 49ers at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was a much smaller stadium – only 18,000 people between the goal lines – than Cal’s Memorial Stadium or Stanford Stadium, and watching the 49ers play there, in the early 60’s, seemed more amateurish than watching the actual amateurs (and I think college players were amateurs in the 60s).

I was living in Oakland at the time and, a couple of years after the Raiders came to town, I got season tickets. Oakland was a great place to live that always seemed to be getting the wrong end of the stick compared to the much more glamorous San Francisco and that carried over into football. The 49ers were in the NFL and the Raiders were in the new AFL which was considered inferior. My stepfather, Sherry, was very gracious about the NFL’s superiority however, and several times we took each other to our team’s games.

After the first Super Bowl, Sherry and I talked after the game. We both agreed that Green Bay was almost unbeatable, after they beat Kansas City Chiefs 35 to 10 (most people considered the real Super Bowl to be the NFL Championship game in which Green Bay had beat the Cowboys). During the second Super Bowl, while Green bay was crushing Oakland, Sherry called me several times to talk during the game. We agreed to watch Super Bowl III together at his home.

My mother was not especially interested in football, college, professional, or otherwise. As an aside, I played football in highschool and it occurs to me that my mother never came to a game. End aside. As uninterested as she might have been in the game however, my mother was interested in having a nice lunch for the occasion. In those days, going to a professional game was more formal and the men would wear sports coats and ties – maybe this is where the term sports coat came from, something to wear to watch a game, that would be more casual than a suit – and I am sure that I showed up for Super bowl III wearing a coat and tie.

Going to my mother’s was usually a formal occasion and this luncheon was no different even though the occasion was a football game. The women were probably wearing dresses, the TV was probably black and white, and most people expected the NFL to – again – beat the AFL team. In this case, the NFL team was the Baltimore Colts that had gone 13-1 during the regular season and the AFL team was the New York Jets. The Colts had crushed the Cleveland Browns 34–0, in the NFL Championship Game, and the Jets had to come from  behind to beat the Raider’s in their Championship game (they had previously lost to the Raider’s in the infamous Heidi game, named that because NBC had cut away from the game, with the Jets leading, to broadcast the film Heidi). 

At halftime, we broke for lunch, in the diningroom, with the Jets leading 7-zip and we were served fresh crab with a salad. Today, it seems so incongruous, even slightly archaic, but it started a Parsons/Stern family tradition of getting together for the Super Bowl with fresh crab.

Unlike the 49ers, the New York Jets increased their lead in the second half and beat the 19-point-favorite Baltimore Coats 16-7.

Drought

Photography, Politics

Cathedral -

Cathedral in the Desert 2005, exposed by low water level in Lake Powell (really a reservoir). © srstern

On January 17th, Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a drought emergency in the state. He also asked all citizens to cut back at least 20% of their water use. In typical  Jerry Brown fashion, he had lots of charts and photographs showing us how bad it is and it is very serious. Last year was the driest year that California has had since we started keeping records in 1895. The Department of Water Resources said that Gasquet Ranger Station in Del Norte County has only 43% of normal and Sacramento is even worse with 5.74 inches of rain instead of the typical 18 inches.

This is probably not news to anybody who lives here and has gone outside this year. I have never seen it this dry and I have lived here since 1940 and paid attention since about 1956, when I started backpacking. The scary thing is that we don’t really have enough water for our lifestyle even if there were no drought. The good news is that the drought, which is aggravating the problem, may actually make us think about the underlying problem.

Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus

 Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus. © srstern 

That is not something we – we meaning, probably, all Homo sapiens, maybe all mammals – are good at doing; looking at subtle, underlying, problems and correcting them before they become big emergencies. Jerry Brown was the first politician that I remember who talked about national limits, saying The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits. He got laughed off the stage as Governor Moonbeam. Jimmy Carter was the first president to really face an energy crisis, complete with gas lines. He asked everybody to turn their heat down to save energy, and he was belittled for it, losing to Reagan’s It’s morning again in America campaign.

As an aside, Carter had several firsts as a president; he was the first president born in a hospital, he was the first president to wear jeans in the White House, he was the only president – so far – to have lived in subsidized public housing, and he was the only President to have been interviewed by Playboy. End aside. My friend Ed Cooney is in love with Jimmy Carter, Ed is an amateur presidential historian and smart enough to know that, in many ways, Jimmy Carter was not an especially effective president but enough in love to want to overlook these Presidential flaws. However, I think that he is actually in love with Carter because of Carter’s political flaws.

What hurt Carter as a president, is partially what made him admirable. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Annapolis and later did graduate work in atomic reactor technology and nuclear physics; he was a rational man more than a political man. He knew we weren’t going to solve our energy and resource problems by ignoring them, and we haven’t.

I am not sure if I have become more or less cynical over the years. I used to think that we would know when we really have a water problem when they stop watering the golf courses, now I am not so sure. Now I think that water flows towards money more than downhill and we can be in a very serious drought with very green golf courses.

Silverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srsternSilverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srstern

Justified

Television

justified_rayboydWe watched the second episode of Season 5 of Justified last night. It is, by far, my favorite drama on TV. I’m not sure drama is the right word but comedy doesn’t fit either. The program is partially written by and based on a book – and, more importantly, characters – by Elmore Leonard who wrote movie sources like Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, and 3:10 to Yuma.

Leonard had a stroke in July of last year and died a month later so I am not sure how that will reflect on the coming season of Justified, hopefully everybody will energize their inner Elmore and it will continue to be good. Graham Yost – Speed with Sandra Bullock in her first major role, Broken Arrow, and Boontown, a short-lived L.A. cop program that Michele and I wished had lived longer – is now the writer and producer.

What I like about Justified are the great characters, the language, and the plot twists that we didn’t see coming but look obvious in retrospect. The hero is  Raylan Givens, a US Marshall that is not very good at relationships including that of his estranged wife who has left town with his daughter. The bad guy is Boyd Crowder who does have a good relationship with his wife and is easily the smartest, most morally ambiguous and, interestingly bad guy on TV. The third main character is Harlan County, Kentucky, a way-past-its-peak coal mining area that plays similar to Winter’s Bone with Jennifer Lawrence.

Check it out on FX.

Watching the Golden Globes, thinking about the ads

Film

Globes Winners 2014Watching the Golden Globes last night, with all the glittering stars, what I most remember is the Bing Ad. For some reason, I have decided that am a Google guy and Microsoft, in general, sort of bugs me. Maybe it is because, when they ruled the world, Microsoft quit innovating. Maybe it is because they were never an innovator to start with, just a company built around making money off of other people’s ideas.

There were so many good movies this year that I wasn’t particularly rooting for anybody. I had my favorites, but it is impossible to argue that the winner weren’t terrific. I haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street and have no idea if Leonardo DiCaprio should have won for best actor, but both 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle both winning for best picture, was great. Woody Allen got an award he deserved and didn’t ruin it by showing up, and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were funny for the second year in a row. But all that is a blur the next morning and I still remember the Bing Ad and the Apple Ad. They are both well worth watching.