Senator George McGovern redux

Politics

Re my post on McGovern, Mike Moore points out that McGovern …didn’t actually fade away; he kept working and working; against world hunger, for the Dems, etc…we saw him speak at the Ludlow Memorial in June of 2008, same day we got Aggie, and, down among the rednecks and the cowboys and the miners of Las Animas County, he was brilliant on behalf of Obama.  I’ll never forget it. Mike goes to say We wish for more like him…

I do too, and reading this reminded me of the time I saw Thomas Eagleton speak at a backyard gathering in Piedmont, California in – about – 1974. That was almost forty years ago and, like Mike, I still remember it clearly.  He was actually standing on a tree stump – a real stump, which, because it was cut at a slight angle, was not that easy to stand on – and gave, probably, the best political speech I have ever heard. Eagleton had been McGovern’s running mate for 18 days until it was revealed that he had had shock treatment for depression and was forced to  withdraw from the campaign.

What struck me at the time with Eagleton was his ability – willingness – to get back up after a huge, public, humiliation and keep fighting the good fight. And, as Mike points out, it was even more so for George McGovern. He took the biggest electoral dubbing in our history and got back up, dusted himself off, and reentered the fray.

Starting in 1998, McGovern served a three-year stint as United States Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Later, he worked with Bob Dole to  expand school lunch, food stamps, and nutritional help for pregnant women and poor children and continued to work in this area both nationally and internationally. He may not have ever been on the center stage again, but he continued to fight for what he believed. As Mike says…We wish for more like him.

 

 

 

 

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Senator George McGovern R.I.P.

Politics

Senator George McGovern died yesterday. He was a mensch and I would like to say that the world will miss him, but, in reality, he has been gone a long time and the world has pretty much gotten over missing him. I would also like to say that McGovern was the first politician, that I can remember, who was Swiftboated, but he really Swiftboated himself.

In World War II,  he was a B-24 pilot which is probably the shittiest job that an Air Force pilot could have during the war. The planes were very hard to fly because of their thin wing – designed to give them good gas milage –  which enabled very long flights. Those long flights – with no fighter cover – were dangerous and B-24s suffered very heavy losses. Typically, 10 to 20% of the planes didn’t come back. And the crews had to do 35 missions before they were relieved.  McGovern refused to run on this record and was disparaged as a Peacenik over Vietnam.

Nixon won and the rest was history pretty much with McGovern. Too bad.

George McGovern was that rare politician, a principled man. Our country need more people like him and, even if he isn’t, he should be missed.

An east side of the Sierra Nevada detour

California, Photography, Sierras, Travel

On Tuesday morning, Aston and Eileen got up early and drove to San Francisco to go to work and we started a little later to drive to Lee Vining to meet Karen Amy and her friend Chris. The first stint took us along the east shore of Lake Tahoe so we could marvel at its blue gem-likeness set in a granite ring. From there, we picked up Highway 50 to crest the Carson Range at Spooner Summit and drop down into the Great Basin of  Nevada just south of the state capitol, Carson City.

From there, it is Highway 395 all the way south to the backdoor to Yosemite at Lee Vining. We cross back into California at Topaz Lake about 60 – some odd – miles south of coming into Nevada . I was born in San Francisco and have lived in California all my non-Army life. I was brought up to think of myself as a Californian more than as an American. As much as I love Nevada, I think of California as my home and even though we have only been in Nevada for a little over an hour, I get a little coming home tingle as we look down the valley with California in the hazy distance. This border crossing, back into California at Topaz Lake seems so archetypical: we drive through high Nevada – it may be dry enough to be called – desert, cross a long flat pass at about 6,000 feet, and then head down into the Topaz Lake Basin with green fields on the California side.

The Walker River flows into Topaz Lake and we go up river as we head south up a long canyon. About 15 years ago, the Walker River overflowed taking out the road and we had to detour about 50 miles out of our way to get to Death Valley. A year or two later, we drove through the denuded canyon on a new road and marveled at the devastation. Now, going up canyon, I am not sure, even, where the river took out the road.

Our plan is to meet Karen at noon at the Mobil Station cafe but we start to run late because we keep running into unexpected traffic controls. It turns out that we are caught up in construction of Digital 395, a 583-mile fiber network whose motto is Connect on the Wild Side. The project seems to be a public/private partnership with lots of semi-official – but unidentifiable –  sounding names like the Eastern Sierra Connect Regional Broadband Consortium and the California Advanced Services Fund. Among others, it is funded by the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Commerce under the Recovery Act. I couldn’t help thinking that alot of the people who moved here to get away from civilization and are now getting broadband would use it to badmouth big government. Our trip through Bridgeport is the worst with twenty minutes waits for a slow, controlled, crawl through town which is having all its roads repaved;

iPhone photo by Michele Stern

meanwhile, Karen has shown up an hour and an half early. We finally show up about 30 minutes late and the four of us have a quick lunch so we can scurry twelve miles back to Conway Summit at 8,138 feet where the Aspens are starting to turn.

Portrait by Michele Stern 

After we wandered around the Conway Summit area, going to Virginia Lake and then back down to the view overlooking Mono Lake and, way in the distance, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, south of Mammoth.

By now, Michele and I were in full tour guide mode, wanting to go down to the edge of Mono Lake to better show it off.

Mono Lake is, of course,  not a lake but a dead sea and it is the major rookery for Seagulls on the west coast. Still, it is always a shock to see them here, hundreds of miles – by road, at least – from the sea (which is, after all part of their name). But, here they are, chowing down on Alkali Flies and Brine Shrimp. Somehow, they seem both tamer – as in less frenzied – and wilder – as in less dependant on humans – than on the coast. As we watched the Seagulls, I ended up watching the soft waves, lapping the shore, and marveling at how different these waves are from the waves at Virginia Lake, 45 minutes and 3,200 vertical feet away.

By now it was getting close to our 4 o’clock cut off time, so we took a quick peek down the June Lake loop, looking for fall color, and then headed back over the hill. Karen and Chris to Yosemite Valley and Michele and myself to Portola Valley. At 8600 feet, it was already winter at Tuolumne Meadows.

 

 

The debate

Americana, Politics

Michele and I watched the debate with two guys that love politics and we fell into rooting like we were at a football game. So my perception may be flawed, but it seemed to me that Obama was having a better time than Romney. A more fun time (we thought he crossed over into arrogant once when he kept talking way past the shut-off point and we all started yelling Shut-up, you’re winning). He seems to have found a more presidential zone and his lecture to Romney on Benghazi seemed especially powerful to me.

And, then of course, Romney said Women in Binders. Eerily enough I totally understand what Romney means just like I did when he said The trees are the right height. It is not where I don’t like Romney, but this time I recognized Women in Binders was going to be a big deal. What I didn’t expect was a Tumblr on it (mostly because I don’t really understand Tumblr).

The long way home

Americana, Travel

 

Coming back from Boise was the trip going in reverse except that the views and sightlines are all 180° off so that it is really never the same trip. I might not be the best authority on this, however, as Michele and I have driven across Nevada – probably – more than 20 times and, to me, it never seems the same. And all the trips are great, but maybe, it is an acquired taste. One trip, I remember, it was snowing – but right on the edge of the freezing line – for the whole trip which meant that every mountain pass had wet snow and every valley was misty rain (except for worrying about what the weather would be like in Utah – our destination – the trip, ensconced in our heated car, was magic).

The Owyhee Mountains seemed much more mountain like this time around and, what seemed like richer farms and ranches coming in, now seemed poor.

After the oasis of Boise with its soft green-ness, even the green floodlands of the Owyhee River seemed lost in the endless, late summer, Dry.

As we drive through the high desert, watching it float by us as if on TV, we chat and joke, we listen to Eileen’s iPhone music collection, we sense, more than hear the ever present car noise. But, when we stop, when we get out of the car, it is a deep quiet.   In Scenes in America Deserta, Reyner Banham talks about the silence of Drylands, Silence  heat and light. The silence flowed back around us, like a filling pool, as I switched off the engine of the car….In Basin and Range, John McPhee quotes Freeman Dyson It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing….You are alone with God in that silence. We weren’t alone, and our chatter followed us out of the car when we stopped; but the background silence was always there. One one stop, Eileen and I took pictures of each other, and I think Eileen’s better captures the silence and immensity of the space.

At one point, as we drive along, I watch a truck – on a parallel road but in a life sharply divergent from ours – throw-up a dust trail. It starts me  thinking about how hard it would be to sneak up on somebody out here. We left Boise after lunch and now the sun is getting low as we get close to Winnemucca and the Interstate. The mountains are soft in the fading light and we start thinking about where we will have dinner in Reno (a Thai restaurant south of the airport won) .

To be continued….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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