Are We Wondering About This?

On Sept. 27, retired U.S. Air Force officials disclosed that on multiple occasions over the last 30 years, structured craft displaying flight characteristics inconsistent with any terrestrial technology appeared over diverse U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons facilities, while simultaneously nuclear missiles at the various sites were alternately armed and disarmed--not under the control of the facilities.

It seems that enough of these people with solid credentials--after all, they were in charge of our nuclear arsenal--have come forward, that we ought to be wondering what it all means. One retired Air Force man, since deceased, maintained that, although there were some "true unknowns," there had been "no meaningful contact." The story of nuclear weapons being remotely disarmed at the same time unidentified aircraft are seen certainly falls into the category of meaningful contact.
We can speculate endlessly about where they came from, how they got here, and what they're up to without ever coming up with a logical, reasonable answer. One thing should be obvious however: if we don't blow ourselves up, the next thirty years are going to be an extremely interesting time.

On Mindless Boosterism and Babbitry

We are living near a small rural town, the type of place where people are friendly, down-to-earth, and decent. As of late the town fathers have been presenting their plans for future growth. The economy has slowed things up recently, but during the go-go years leading up to the latest "adjustment," plenty of farmers made megabucks selling their cotton fields and pastures to developers.

The town built infrastructure for the coming real estate boom that didn't happen--yet. You'll see fire hydrants along country roads out in the middle of nowhere.

They're talking about attracting young people and new businesses. Mainly they were talking about franchised businesses. One fellow, who likes to voice his opinion on everything (he's a retired schoolteacher), said he would really like this-and-such a fried chicken franchise to come in. "It's a shame we don't have one of those, and a few others."
Who doesn't like progress? But the problem is, that if even one more franchised restaurant came within easy commuting distance, the first thing to happen would be that the good old boys' favorite breakfast places would go under. They're struggling to stay open now.

There's no point in saying anything about that, though. You'd get labeled a trouble-maker, or anti-development, or a Jim Kunstler type. What they don't realize is that what they have now is much better than any plasticine "miracle mile" seen outside every major American city.

Of course, American homogeneity seems to be what the public wants. But it's a shame some of the locals don't remember what their grandma used to say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

A Christian pastor who I know and admire once remarked, "I can't imagine allowing a yoga class in a Christian church."

I'm thinking to myself "did I hear that right?" He must think it's some kind of Eastern religion. I mean, I've practiced yoga exercises, even taken a few classes. I've known yoga teachers--even the late, celebrated physical education guru Ruth Bender, pictured on the book cover above. In all that time I never heard anything incompatible with "Christian doctrine." Our church even had classes in Tai Kwon Do for a while.

Yoga may have come out of Indian culture, and aspects of it did come out of Hindu tradition, but the simple stretching and breathing exercises associated with the yoga of American popular culture are basically just that. Moreover, it's a good idea, especially for an aging population.

But now Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.

I've read many articles by Dr. Mohler in the past and generally agreed with him and found his messages to be inspiring. No, yoga might not be a "pathway to God," but that doesn't mean that it's not a really good way to make sure our bodies stay relatively limber into a ripe old age. Maybe if we called it "Christian Calisthenics" it would be acceptable to him.

Now the press has picked up on his putting his foot into his mouth--figuratively that is. If he practiced "Christian Calisthenics" he might still be able to do it literally. And bend over to tie his shoelaces without grunting and groaning.

Dogs, Boats, and Politics

Bunch of the guys I worked with liked to go down to the Keys, when they got some free time. Capt. Gabby, who was “between jobs,” had two large skiffs sitting behind his trailer on an island just north of Key West. The guys needed a couple boats, Gabby needed money; we made a deal.

We spent the day snorkeling and fishing along the reef, where the shallow waters of the back country ease off into the Gulf of Mexico. One of the bunch, a nice enough guy by the name of Russell, brought along his dog, a husky. We let the husky run along the beaches on one of the islands, hoping to tire it out. It was young and excitable.

After the guys had a cooler full of fish, crabs, and assorted collectibles, Gabby, who had decided that the life of a fishing guide was not for him, shouted “I’m heading back!” He had his wife and some of the girls, who had had enough sun, with him. “You know the way!”

We knew the general direction, but without a chart finding our way through the basins and banks of the back country wasn’t going to be easy. We had only out been there a few times before. There were six of us on board, plus the dog. We hadn’t gone but a couple of miles, before it became apparent that we were lost. And after another mile or so of looking for a channel deep enough to get back in the general direction of Key West, we were out of gas. Thanks, Gabby.

As we sat there pondering what to do next, the dog began to run from one end of the boat to the other. I had been swimming with an old pair of Dacor fins. There was a sharp edge that always dug into the joint on my big toe. I usually brought along a pair of socks to keep this from happening, but hadn’t done that this time. “I sure hope that dog doesn’t hit me on the toe,” I thought. Sure enough, the next time through, he stepped right on it. I let out a yelp. To make things worse, the bottom of the boat was filled with sandy grit and oil. Every time the dog ran by he would step on my toe. As if it was working some intentional, insidious torture, every time it ran by, its long sharp middle toenail found its way into the place on my foot, grinding sand and oil into the wound.

After a while I thought, “This is going to be inevitable. That dog is going to nail me every single time, and there is nothing I can do about it but sit here and quietly endure the pain.” So that’s what I did. After a while somebody pulled out a bottle of rum. We passed the bottle around and swapped stories. That helped a lot.

The present mid-term political campaigns, with candidates leveling outrageous charges against each other and diatribes coming from the left and right, remind me of being in that boat with Russell’s dog’s grit-coated nail finding the hole in my foot every time it ran by.

Eventually a young kid in a small skiff came by and towed us in, wisecracking all the way about how stupid we were. When we told him where we were going and that it was Gabby’s boat, he got quiet and acted scared. I just read recently that that “the northern end of [that island] has developed a negative reputation and come to be known as ‘Little Beirut.’” Some things never change.

War Is Hell

"It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." --Sherman

A friend arrived home yesterday after a 36 hour trip from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. He's a reservist who served a short four-plus month hitch this summer. He looked tired, but very glad to be home. No one pressed him to talk about what he saw over there. He volunteered that his base had been attacked just before he got there and one man was killed. He said that he heard the sound of bombs in the distance almost every night. He believed that the period he was there saw the heaviest fighting since our involvement in that region had begun.

Suddenly the reality of the war was brought home. For a number of reasons we don't see nightly clips of the fighting. Our network news seems filled with meaningless fluff about female celebrities going into rehab. Pundits and polemicists handing down pronouncements on stimulus funds, bail-outs, and government spending seem filled with Yeats's passionate intensity. But we see very little about the guy that is actually doing the dirty work.

Whether we're pro-war or anti-war in general, we have to realize that we are involved in a fight with a rural commonality halfway around the world and an enemy that threatened both our security and our way of life. And those fighting for us are our neighbors--regular working people. They don't make the rules, but they do the tough stuff. For the most part, like our friend, they handle their job quietly and competently.

No one knows how long it will take and what price must be paid to achieve a satisfactory level of stability in the world. Looking back at the last century, it's fair to say that somehow we did a lot better in the second half than in the first. War is really Hell. And we're glad that our friend is home safe.

"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . ." -- Matthew 24:6

A Point of View

A number years ago I was working on a construction project in a foreign (non-US) country. Among the subcontractors on the job was a Israeli company, doing some of the mechanical work. The Israelis ran a tight, businesslike operation. One of their go-betweens was a normally jolly fellow by the name of Joseph, who coordinated the use of cranes and heavy equipment with us.

Someone had hung a strip of toilet paper on the wall of our office. On every piece was printed a picture of the president of the United States. (An approximation of what it looked like is posted above.) It had been hanging there along with notes and memos for some time, before I even noticed it. To me it didn’t seem much more scurrilous than other avant-garde political cartoons of the time. I mean, look what we did with Nixon.

But the it had apparently caused a stir among our non-American coworkers. One day an extremely agitated Joseph burst into our office and pointed out the presidential toilet paper.

“I cannot believe that you allow this outrage!” He said. “A thing like this is a disgrace! It is a terrible insult! Yet you leave it there on the wall, for everyone to see it!”

I looked at it again, trying to see his viewpoint. To tell the truth, I couldn’t imagine who from “our side” would have put it up there. Our boys’ conversation tended toward beer, babes and baseball, not current affairs or politics. “Well, you see,” I said (this was back in the day), “a lot of construction workers are Democrats . . .”

“Then you would just leave it there? I cannot believe you would put up with such a thing!” he said, storming out, before I thought to explain that partisan mudslinging has been an American tradition going back the expiration of the Alien and Sedition Acts. We left the toilet paper up for a while as a mute paean to the First Amendment.

Sometimes it seems–as in the present climate–that the stridency of partisan voices goes too far. But who would limit them without endangering our basic right to freedom of expression?

Igor and Them

Igor became the fourth hurricane of the season Saturday evening as it headed farther west over the open waters of the Atlantic. The storm has since intensified rapidly, reaching powerful Category 4 status Sunday afternoon.

Still being waylaid, so to speak, and absent from the tropics (having gone back to the land in North Carolina: more on this later) we’ve been again neglectful of putting up our annual, strictly nonscientific (but highly accurate) hurricane predictions. And here we are already at our ninth named storm!

So once again we've managed to contact our old time prognosticator "Typhoon" O'Connor (who otherwise refuses to be named or depicted) for this year's belated reading on the thickness of caterpillars’ fur, the direction in which land tortoises are crossing the road, near and offshore water temperatures, and a general sniffing of the tropical breezes leading to an uncannily accurate prediction of what will come.

“This is one a them La Niña years,” he says, “and as such, th’ hexperts say there’ll be more storms than usual. But knowin’ as how th’ Titanic was built by hexperts, and th' Ark was built by amatoors, I’ll be going with the amatoors this year. Thems as have dipped their dainties in th’ local waters tells me, th’ water’s on th’ cool side this year. That means, for whatever reason, th’ hooricanes-- what there’ll be of them-- will be stayin’ offshore. Do pull down your coconuts, and doon’t be cancelin’ your inshoorance, but doon’t be chewin’ your nails neither.”

So that’s it. The pressure’s off. Now, we wonder if that’s what we were thinking just before Wilma? Still, October it’s over, isn’t it?