Giving Us the Business

I don't know if it is just me getting older, but I am becoming increasing annoyed at the quality of writing I am finding in both print and electronic media these days. I am not talking about grammar, punctuation, or syntax. I am talking about the shallowness of the thinking that seems to underlie so many articles. It is bad enough that both Time and Newsweek have degenerated to the point where I am not sure whether I am reading a serious news magazine or a tabloid aimed at Wal-Mart checkout lanes. And if I have to turn past another "Special Advertising Section" I think I will puke. But it is what passes for business writing these days that make me wonder about the future of journalism. Please allow me to cite but two examples.

Apple Computer, has been the subject of almost unbelieveably shortsighted and ultimately inaccurate business reporting by people who seem to have decided on their conclusion and then chose their facts accordingly. (sound familiar?) For at least ten years now business writers and computer industry observers have decided that the company must be going out of business, sustained only temporarily by cult-like zombies who don't have better sense than to just do what everybody else seemed to be doing, buying a generic Wintel PC. In fact a website has been keeping track of the Apple deathwatch for a number of years. The Mac Observer currently cites 46 "declared dead" articles since 1995.

Inconveniently, the company not only has survived, it is thriving. These articles seem humorous in hindsight until you think about how many people shied away from buying an Apple computer because of them.

Now with the obvious success of the iPod & the iTunes Store (Apple is no longer a computer company) and the pending switch to Intel processors (The mystique is gone and the cult will disappear) these same geniuses are predicting again the fall of Apple.

Yes, Apple has had its market failures. That sometimes seems to be the price of innovation and leadership. And as long as most PCs are bought for someone else to use - the enterprise market - price and not value will be all some of us choose to see. But one should remember it was only when Apple was run by suits - business types - and started to do what all the business analysts wanted them to do did they go in decline.

Happily for Apple and their customers Steve Jobs is back, that decline is over, and for those of us who simply want the best computer we can afford, we still have a choice; no thanks to Business Week, Money Magazine, PC Magazine, TheStreet.com, and just about every financial analyst on Wall Street.

Check out today's "Apple Courting Core Meltdown" at TheStreet. Core Meltdown? Why doesn't the author take one step further and write "The Possible End of Life on Earth" or "The Sky May Fall"? Yes, there are risks associated with the move to Intel chips. But this article is a great example of the usual glass always being - at best - half empty at Apple Computer.

If you want to really understand Apple, and the poor coverage they get in the business press, I suggest either of the MacJournals.

Did you know that General Motors vehicles have included in their sticker price between $1,500 and $2,000 of pension and medical costs while their (foreign) competitors generally have much less? Did you know that is one of the main reasons it lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2005? Well if you did not know you certainly have not been paying attention to the business news recently. For the past couple of months we have been reading over and over this same story in the business press.

GM is now blaming their financial weakness on workers who accepted their generous compensation packages. In effect GM is seen as the victim of it's past labor agreements. Further, if the UAW does not rush back to the bargaining table and see to it that the workers give back some of this money there will be hell-to-pay. After all, what is good for General Motors.... Even George Will became an economist for a day with this message.

I suspect what we have here is a concerted effort by GM management and their PR flacks to put pressure on their union to negotiate money back into GM coffers. So business writers are fed all this pension and medical cost smoke and mirrors, the public believes it is getting expert inside analysis, the publishers their eyeballs, and hopefully - for GM - political pressure will mount on the union. Could George Will really be a shill? You betcha.

At least one business magazine refused to play along. The Economist included in their June 9th issue an article titled "The Lost Years." It said in conclusion that,

The carmaker lost $1.1 billion during the first quarter and will not even make a forecast for the rest of the year. The reason for the collapse into loss was a slump in revenues caused by weak products.

The general thrust of the article is that GM has not been making cars good enough to succeed in the market place. That, coupled with other management induced failures, accounts for their current predictament. I suggest you read this article for a whiff a clean, non-Detroit, air.

I also suggest if you want to spend some time in the fountain of youth, drive a current GM car. I drove a recent Pontiac Grand Prix yesterday. It was like 1985 all over again.

GM is a classic example of the failure of success. Not even fawning writers can put this humpty dumpty back on that wall.

the U.S. Open

Yesterday, my wife, sister, brother-in-law and I attended the first practice round of the U.S. Open, played this year on Pinehurst #2 just a short drive minutes from my home.

As it was a practice round, the mood was as relaxed as could be expected at the beginning of arguably the most important golf championship in the world. The clouds and light wind brought a measure of relief as the temperature hovered around 90. The $2.50 bottled water was worth every penny.

This was my first time walking Pinehurst #2, always ranked among the finest tests of golf in the world. After a difficult spring the weather had cooperated over the past few weeks; the course was in great shape. I have putted on greens that looked worse than the fairways we walked. As for all Opens, the roughs were thick and punishing.

But the main feature of the course is the genius of its designer, Donald Ross. Number 2 is just jaw-dropping beautiful, but it ways that test one's golf, not imagination. I was lucky enough to play as a youth many times on a Ross course, although I did not know it at the time. Those holes - among the last he ever designed - always seemed special to me. Watching from outside the ropes yesterday was difficult. I wanted to pick up my clubs and play!

Finally I was again reminded of the considerable gap between my golfing skills and those of the players we saw yesterday. Vijay Singh, currently the world's number 2 player, hit a drive shortly after I took the photo above that was longer, higher, and straighter that any I ever hit in my prime. Then he took a three-wood and did it again. Sure, modern equipment accounts for some of the difference, but not all. I am sure I hit a 300-yard drive or two in my career. Vijay averages over 300 yards and hits the fairway over 60 percent of the time. Damn! These guys are really, really, good.

Pinehurst #2 is a player's course, not a spectator's course. Given that and the even larger crowds once the tournament starts, I will be happy to be watching on TV this weekend as the championship is decided. But then I will have a bit more understanding of what it takes to play #2.

Follow the Money

So, who gave us,"Follow the money"? Was it Deep Throat, a.k.a. Mark Felt? Apparently not. No, the most famous single line to come out of the Watergate scandel - other than that show stopper, "I am not a crook." - one that is welded deep in the American psyche, did not appear in reporter Woodward's notes, the pages of the Washington Post, nor Woodward and Bernstein's subsequent book. It was written for Hal Holbrook who played Deep Throat, in the movie version of the book, All the President's Men.

William Goldman, who also gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride is the author.

That revelation leads off todays Frank Rich column in the NY Times. I recommend it strongly, especially for you who either have only a hazy idea about what Watergate was about, or who have been wondering about the current state of news reporting in this country; or both.

Unless you want to pay to read the column, please be advised that NY Times.com on-line articles are available for free for only seven days. After that date I will edit this post using the old cut and paste.

June 23rd - As promised here is the full text:

June 12, 2005
Don't Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.

The Seven Deadly Sins

In my youth I spent a week in the city of San Francisco, just missing by a few months (!#&**!!!) the Summer of Love. I stayed with a friend on the campus of San Francisco State College, soon to become one of the most visible examples of 1960's college campus unrest. It was like going to the circus. I knew I didn't quite belong with the performers; but I knew that somewhere under that tent was a place for me.

Among the places I visited was the Haight-Ashbury district and nearby Golden Gate Park, where I attended an early spring "Human Be-in." I went to the Winterland and heard a band called Cream. My host suggested one afternoon that we drop by a house where some guys he knew lived. They had a band called the Grateful Dead. I opted instead to go to the famous San Francisco Zoo. My friends love this story.

Somewhere on Ashbury street I bought a comic book called The New Adventures of Jesus, one of the first "underground comix," although I didn't know it at the time. I still have it, somewhere. The author, Frank Stack as Foolbert Sturgeon, has Jesus say at one point when confronting a mob of dim-bulb Galileans that, "The problem isn't sin, it's stupidity." For some reason that phrase has stuck with me since.

Given, IMHO, that there is only a very fine line between sin and stupidity, I have been thinking recently about the Seven Deadly Sins. For those of you who need reminding, they are (in ascending order of severity according to Dante): Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. I am personally thankful to Dante for that order.

When I was younger I thought these small fish to fry; I was after bigger game. Besides, although not in much official favor today, at one time the Seven Deadly (aka Capital or Cardinal) Sins were closely associated with the medieval Catholic Church, an institution I did not admire. In addition, they seemed so.... familiar, so....American.

Recently I have come to reassess my position. Large things from small things grow. Maybe looking at our lives and the choices we make through the lens of these sins is not a bad idea. It would also be tempting to begin a critique of the last 60 years of American life - including our foreign policy - from within their framework. But this is a blog post, not a dissertation.

So I invite you gentle readers, who are likely as free from these sins as I, to consider along with me the many ways we all might benefit if others would just get grip on their seven deadly sinfulness.

the Oxford American

Like a good idea that just won't go away, the Oxford American is back.

The magazine, which bills itself as "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing," was founded in 1992 in Oxford, Mississippi by Marc Smirnoff. It lasted only two years, folding for the first time in 1994. Author John Grisham, who was living in Oxford, resurrected it. While the critics loved it, it was a money loser. Grisham support ended, and so did the magazine, in 2001. By that time I was subscriber.

Having moved editorial offices to Little Rock, Arkansas, the magazine reappeared in 2002, only to fold again a year later. Now operating as a non-profit (not much of a stretch) it is enjoyed its fourth trip to the plate courtesy of the University of Central Arkansas, which has made a three-year investment of nearly $500,000.

With an editorial mission to "explore the American South," it has published original writing by many fine writers, including Donna Tartt, Charles Portis, Barry Hannah, Roy Blount, Jr., Tony Earley, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wendy Brenner, Steve Martin, and Susan Sontag, not to mention William Faulkner, Walker Percy, James Agee, and Zora Neale Hurston. Its Southern Music Issue, complete with a CD, has been featured on NPR three years in a row and has won two National Magazine Awards for Best Single Topic Issue, most recently in 2004.

Smirnoff loves the south as only a "come here" can. I have just finished reading the latest issue, the first food issue, cover to cover. I laughted; I cried; I got hungry. The music issue is next. I can't wait.

If you care for the south, not the Southern Living version but the real one, the one that matters, and enjoy good writing, the Oxford American is for you. Subscribe to help ensure the magazine survives, or pick up issues that look interesting from a well-stocked magazine stand. Better hurry, ya hear?

John Harper Brent, Jr.

Harper Brent could have been my father, but he wasn't. He was my stepfather. We laid him to rest last weekend in the family cemetery at his childhood home, "Roanoke," in Heathsville in Virginia's Northern Neck. He was 85.

"Roanoke" is adjacent to Heathsville High School. It was there in the early 1930's when my mother and Harper began dating. But they drifted apart after mother moved to Richmond after graduation and Harper enrolled in V.P.I. - what today is called Virginia Tech. In 1940 Harper graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Soon thereafter mother met another recently graduated electrical engineer, this one from UVA. He would become my father.

But before marriage or parenthood would come World War Two. Harper joined the Army, my father the Navy. Harper ended up in Europe while my father remained close to the US coast installing a new weapon of war, radar, on Navy ships. If Harper fired a gun or came under fire he did not speak of it to me. Instead he told stories of military support roles he played and the time he was almost caught behind the lines during the "Battle of the Bulge." I expect he saw more than he cared to talk about. He eventually rose to Captain, earned the Bronze Star, and developed a love for the nation he was helping liberate, France.

While his attempts to find employment in France after the war were unsuccessful, he had better luck with Gilberte Jeanne "Jean" Mourice, who became Mrs. Brent in early 1947.

Harper and Jean moved back to the states, spending their years together in the New York metro area. Harper had several employers as he came to specialize in industrial, commercial and military batteries. Jean excelled in her role as the Parisian war bride, providing a bit of the exotic for her new southern in-laws. Although they had no children, they devoted themselves to their numerous cats, and, it seems, to each other.

Meanwhile, in 1942 my mother and father were married in - of all places - Harvard Chapel, Cambridge Massachusetts. My father was taking classes there in preparation for whatever assignment the Navy would have for him. A few days after VJ Day in 1945 they decided to start a family. I was born in May 1946, among the first of who would be called “boomers.” About the time Harper and Jean were sailing to America my father took a job in Southside Virginia with a small electrical cooperative. These electrical distribution companies were collectively known by the name of the federal governmental program that spawned them, REA co-ops. While Harper designed and built batteries, my father designed and built power lines to rural customers.

In the early 1980’s both Jean and my father died of cancer. A high school classmate told mother of the death Harper’s wife. Mother sent him a card of condolence. Before long exchanges of letters and phone calls led to visits. Harper married his high school sweetheart in 1983.

Harper retired and moved to mother’s home in Southside Virginia the following year. As much a traveler as my mother was not, Harper yanked mother out of her kitchen and to Alaska and France, among other destinations. Although both were by now set in their ways and often got along like oil and water, they were good for each other.

A couple of years ago Harper’s health began to fail. His lungs were weak, probably as result of industrial asbestos damage. His bones became brittle; osteoporosis ran in the family. Finally his short-term memory began to fail. Like the parson’s one-horse shay, last week Harper just gave out.

Harper was always kind and thoughtful to my sister and me. He was sensitive to the memory of my father and devoted to my mother. While he fought his growing disabilities, Harper complained little as his health failed, occasionally finding humor in his reduced circumstances. He was an inspiration to my daughter, instilling a love of France and the French language that is embedded deeply in her being.

Harper is back home now, lying beside Jean. We are sad; we will miss him. But perhaps we should be happy as we remember him, and his long and good life.

the Bonny Blue

Last week-end, my wife and I took a two-day excursion aboard the Bonny Blue. Amid our concerns about my step-father's failing health and my wife's new responsibilities as co-administrator of her late father's estate, the trip was a welcome bit of R & R. It was also a commemoration of our tenth wedding anniversary. It was like staying in a floating Bed & Breakfast.

It looked for a while as if we had chosen a bad week-end for an outing. The weather in Norfork on Friday was cool, windy and rainy. However both Saturday and Sunday, though still a bit cool, were wonderful days to be on the water.

Travel on this portion of the inland waterway is slow and peaceful. Most of the time we spent on the historic, man-made Dismal Swamp Canal. I had prepared for the trip by starting to read the recent The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company by Charles Royster. The remaining portion is on the scenic Pasquotank River.

The Captain and crew were wonderful. With only sixteen passengers at a time the ship is not crowded and we had plenty of time to get to meet the other passengers and be waited on. The crew, high school students, were fun to watch. Several were new, learning both their hosting roles as well as how to crew a ship. They all agreed that it is the "best summer job, ever!"

Once docked at Elizabeth City, North Carolina we walked around, had great seafood dinner, and returned for a concert in the piano bar provided by Captain Jeff and the boat's designer and builder, Merritt Walter. We slept like ballast.

Merritt Walter was a "passenger" for this trip as he is turning over daily operations of the Bonny Blue so he can work on other projects. Captain Walter is a retired Navy diver, boat builder and captain of federal research vessels. He is best know for his traditional "Rover" series of masted wooden sail vessels. An example is the Downeast Rover. The American Rover is another. He was a pleasure to talk with. He plays a mean "piano bar" keyboard too.

The return trip was equally relaxing, just what we needed. It was not quite the proverbial "slow boat to China." But last week-end it was close enough.

MouseRug

Last fall while visiting my daughter I noticed her unusual mouse pad; it looked like a rug. I used it a while and thought, "Christmas Present!"

I dropped a few hints. I even sent her the URL for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation design I wanted, which they seem to no longer sell. So on Christmas day I was very pleased, but not surprised, to open the present from my daughter and find a new pad.

I have been using it for almost five months and would like to report it is the best mouse pad I have ever used; no pad comes close. Besides looking way cool, this pad does something no pad I had previously used had done, it cleans my mouse.

Twenty years of using a mouse and the story had always been the same. Yuck collected under every mouse I owned. What a drag. It was especially bad before optical devices replaced the rolling ball style. At least once a week I would have to turn the little booger upside down and clean it. But not with MouseRug. The rug may get dirty, but the mouse stays clean. I have not had to clean my mouse since I began used MouseRug.

What a elegant solution to one of my most nagging personal problems. If all of life was this easy...

I'll Always Remember...

Alzheimer’s is a progressive brain disorder that gradually destroys a person’s memory and ability to learn, reason, make judgments, communicate and carry out daily activities. As Alzheimer’s progresses, individuals may also experience changes in personality and behavior, such as anxiety, suspiciousness or agitation, as well as delusions or hallucinations.

Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, a group of conditions that all gradually destroy brain cells and lead to progressive decline in mental function.

Increasing age is the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer’s. One in 10 individuals over 65 and nearly half of those over 85 are affected. Rare, inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease can strike individuals as early as their 30s and 40s.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer's is a fatal disease.

Taken from the web site of the Alzheimer's Association.

Over the past two months my family has been dealing with the direct effects of Alzheimer's on two of our loved ones, and the indirect effects on the rest of us. Last month my wife's father passed away from the disease less than a year after her mother died, her health weakened trying to take care of her husband.

At almost the same time my stepfather's Alzheimer's, along with other health problems, finally required his placement in a nursing home. My mother's mental resources, likely now suffering the early effects of some form of dementia (she is 86), have been further strained by both her attempts to deal with his failing health and her loss of a companion.

There are many myths that surround Alzheimer's; that the stress and strain of dealing with Alzheimer's patients can quickly lead to physical and mental issues for the caregivers is not one of them.

While suffering from the same condition and demonstrating many of the same behaviors over time, my father-in-law and step-father were examples of the different ways the disease can manifest itself in individuals.

My father-in-law seemed to us to slide into the disease with little awareness of what was happening to him. A strong, robust man, he was otherwise generally in good health almost to the end. Like many men of his place and time he seldom shared his "feelings," preferring talking about events and the trials and tribulations he had seen around him. In his last years his stories grew more personal; he would tell the same ones - almost word for word - over and over to anyone who would listen. My wife said that through these stories, many she had never heard before about his youth and war experiences, she came to know him better.

My step-father's health had been in decline for a number of years, osteoporosis and probably asbestosis being the most difficult. But he must have recognized early on that something else was happening to him. He has been fighting his growing memory loss since with every ounce of his strength. Looking back it is evident that he developed coping mechanisms that hid his worsening disease from the rest of us. By disposition orderly and detailed, a professional engineer, my step-father tried to become more so. He used Post-it notes to record his daily activities as if he was conducting a lab experiment. I believe he purposefully steered conversations to things he remembered well - like the day in 1946 when he was discharged from the Army - and away from those he could not - like if he had eaten lunch today. When he thought he was alone he would practice his numbers aloud - telephone number, mailing address, social security number - over and over so he would not forget them. Recently I watched him struggle to answer the doctor when he was asked what year it was. He just slumped when he realized that 2039 was not the right answer. Just a couple of weeks after being placed in the nursing home he asked me to please tell the doctors that he was not crazy.

These men spent their youth in the Great Depression and young adulthood fighting in WW2. Both then worked many years contributing to the material wealth of this country. Both valued their family and community life. They lived long and well. But in their 80's both lost the ability to look after themselves. As they once took care of others, it became our turn to care for them. We all did the best we could given what we knew at the time, but it has been difficult.

Alzheimer's is a terrible enough disease without being made worse by ignorance. It is clear now that - unless a dramatic scientific breakthrough occurs - the huge number of us baby boomers now approaching retirement age will swell the number of Alzheimer's patients. This will stress families and severely stretch the resources of our health system. We owe it to the previous generation - we owe it to ourselves - to learn about this disease, support those in need, and find the resources to develop treatments, cures, and maybe a prevention.

Ask not for whom that damn bell tolls...

Old & in the Way

Old and in the Way was a a bluegrass supergroup in the early 1970's: David Grisman, Vassar Clements, Peter Rowan, John Kahn, and Jerry Garcia. Their name was taken from a Grisman song:

Old and in the way
That's what I heard him say
They used to heed the words he said
But that was yesterday
Coal will turn to gray
And youth will fade away
They'll never care about you
Cause you're old and in the way

I was thinking about this lament the other day as I thought about approaching another birthday. Then, as I was thinking about how it had been thirty years since I first heard those words and it never occurred to me then I might get old and much less, in the way, I had an epiphany of sorts.

I may be getting "old and in the way" but I plan to keep getting older and staying in the way for a long time. Those expecting me to step aside easily will be disappointed; further, they can kiss my arse.

Kid of Speed

Ever so often I run across a website that illustrates what a fascinating World Wide Web we weave. Allow me to introduce Elena Filatova, a Ukrainian woman with stories to tell, maybe more than she is letting on. To make a long story short, this is adapted from Wikipedia:

Elena (Lena) Filatova (Russian: Елена Филатова) (born 1974) is a Ukrainian motorcyclist who gained Internet fame, under the nickname KiddOfSpeed, after her web site was mentioned at Slashdot and other online news sources.

On her web site, she posted photographs of her alleged motorcycle trips in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 18 years after the nuclear accident there. She mainly visited the virtually abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine.

The photos are arranged in the form of a story presented as an account of a biker's trip who somehow got a permit to travel alone in the radiation zone. The accuracy of that story has since been questioned. It has been alleged that Filatova visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone only as part of an organized tour. The story itself showed a number of discrepancies and factual inaccuracies called for criticism of her initial account. Later versions of the story were corrected.

Nevertheless, the actual value of Elena's story is neither her degree of personal involvement nor her narrative, but the photos themselves. While some of them could have been staged to a degree (one of the points of criticism), she obviously could not have staged the whole ghost town. While there are numerous accounts of the consequences of the catastrophe, Elena presented it to the world in a way never done before.

Recently Elena's original homepage was replaced with a new photojournal about the Serpent's Wall near the city of Kiev, her home. The new journal contains photos of Elena's exploration of an ancient wall and more modern World War II fortifications built among its remains.

Indeed there does seem to be something not quite right about her Chernobyl trip story. At least one illustration seems to my eye "Photoshopped." It also appears she has made multiple rides in the vicinity of Chernobyl and has compressed them without actually saying so. Maybe she was just trying to make a good story better and expected neither the tremendous interest in her website nor the critical attention it received.

But all that aside, what is not discountable are the photographs showing the effects of the world's worst nuclear accident on the surrounding countryside. Her other photojournal that discusses the battlefields around Kiev are not under question and stand on their own. Her site is a testimony to the power of the internet and WWW to both tell a story, open a window into another part of the world, and invite critical assessment.

The link associated with the title is to her most commonly linked site. However here is her Anglefire hosted site that seems to have been update recently.

RRE @ Merlefest

Last Friday my daughter and I headed for the hills. It was Merlefest week-end in Wilkes County, North Carolina and we wanted to hear our new favorite band, Railroad Earth.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a while know that I have posted about the band before, first after I heard them in Floyd and later when they fell in with Phil Lesh last winter. They had not been in the area since last September when my wife and I heard them in Charlotte.

The timing of their appearance could have been better for us. My daughter was battling a nasty sinus infection. However, RRE was schedule to play twice that evening, justifying both the steep one-day ticket price and the frown of her doctor - had he known. I needed to get back to my mother's by Saturday to attend to family medical business, so Friday evening was all I had. And it was the last day of the semester at my wife's college which made it inappropriate for her to cancel her classes, as would have been necessary. So she had to make do with the RRE t-shirt and hat I brought back.

We were early to the Hillside stage and enjoyed front row center seats for the first performance.

And as the band closed the Watson stage that night, nice ushers allowed us to sneak into a relatively empty part of the reserved section. This allowed us to get much closer than 250 yards to the band. As you can see in this daytime photo, the Watson stage is a large venue.

Of course, both sets the band played were wonderful, as was all the music that evening. But what made last Friday so special were the two members of the band, Andy and Tim, who took the time to talk with my daughter and me. My wife had enjoyed their music when both were members of Blue Sparks from Hell, an east coast jump blues and swing band, in the early 1980's. So when I recognized Andy on the sidewalk before the first show, we approached him. He proved happy to chat with total strangers about the Blue Sparks, as well as more current events, as we walked toward the Hillside stage area. Parting, my daughter and I settled in at the foot of the stage under threatening skies to enjoy the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble. This photo lifted from a website shows Andy and Tim doing the same behind us.

After RRE's Hillside set I caught Tim during a pause in striking the stage and asked him if he would shake hands with my daughter. I knew from his web site and talking with him in Charlotte that he had recently played for the Dalai Lama in India and shaken his hand. My daughter's affection for His Holiness being considerable, I knew she would be thrilled to talk with him and shake the hand that shook the Hand. Tim was also most gracious and the two of them talked for some time. I noticed afterward that the cares of her day had seemed to melt away; even her sinuses felt better.

Few things in life have proved as joyful over the years as seeing my daughter happy. She told me on the phone later that while she liked their music before, now she was a Hobo. I could almost hear her smile.

You Look Wonderful Tonight

Amid the sad news and distress of the past few weeks was one Saturday night to remember. My sister's eldest son and his bride, fresh from their barefoot on the beach at sunset marriage at Key West, held a "Celebration of their Marriage" at a country club in Virginia.

The event was "an evening of dinner, drinks and dancing." Everything was perfect; even the thunderstorms left the area before the guests started to arrive. I had a great time, and it appeared everyone else did too. Our newest family couple sure know how to throw a party.

My nephew provided the light entertainment by asking me to give a toast. He cleverly realized I would take the opportunity to give him a light roasting as well as leading the guests in wishing him and his bride well. I refrained from making embarrassing remarks about the bride, much to the dismay of at least one table of her friends who indicated I would have had plenty of material to use.

After dinner the dancing started, the DJ mixing the songs with skill and taste. The photo shows my daughter and I slow dancin' to Eric Clapton.

So here is to Kevin and Heather, from Neil Young's "Long May You Run."

We've been through
some things together
With trunks of memories
still to come
We found things to do
in stormy weather
Long may you run.

Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
have come
With your chrome heart shining
in the sun
Long may you run.

We Have Gas

After almost 4 months without a furnace, we now have gas, and heat. Just in time for that late spring cold snap, should we have one...

Go, Go, Go Johnnie Go!

Almost two weeks ago Johnnie Johnson passed away at the age of 80. With illness and death closer to home, I failed to acknowledge the loss of who some call "The Father of Rock & Roll." At the very least he was the "Father of Rock & Roll Piano."

One of the first 45 rpm records I bought was "Johnny B. Goode." I was twelve. I still remember picking it off the shelf. Rock & Roll was new then, lighting my world on fire. And Chuck Berry's anthem was a tribute to Johnnie Johnson, his keyboard player, and much more. A member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the "sideman" category, his influence was well appreciated by his peers, if not the public.

Jerry Garcia once introduced a live Grateful Dead version of "Johnny B. Goode" as "the one it's all about." He may have been right. It is impossible to think of the early years of Rock & Roll without it.

Johnnie's death occasioned several tributes. NPR's Day to Day had one. Rolling Stone, published an interview of Keith Richards. ABC News published a remembrance by Chuck Berry.

Rock On.

Full Faith & Credit

Reprinted below is one of milder editorials written in response to our President's latest display of either ignorance or a willingness to say just about anything to further his far right-wing agenda. This from the leader of those fiscally conservative Republicans. I wonder just how he got that M.B.A. Maybe we don't want to know.

Shameless Photo-Op
New York Times
Published: April 7, 2005

Imagine this: On his next trip to Japan, President Bush visits the vault at the Bank of Japan, where that country's $712 billion in United States government bonds is stored. There, as the cameras roll, he announces that the bonds, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, are, in fact, worthless i.o.u.'s. He does the same thing when he visits China and so on around the world, until he has personally repudiated the entire $2 trillion of United States debt held by foreigners.

Mr. Bush rehearsed just that act on Tuesday, when he visited the office of the federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.Va. He posed next to a file cabinet that holds the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the Social Security trust fund. He tossed off a comment to the effect that the bonds were not "real assets." Later, in a speech at a nearby university, he said: "There is no trust fund. Just i.o.u.'s that I saw firsthand."

Social Security takes in more money than it needs to pay current beneficiaries, and the excess is invested in the Treasury securities that Mr. Bush was discussing. They carry the same legal and political obligations as all other forms of Treasury debt, every penny of which has always been paid in full and on time.

In his speech, Mr. Bush went on to acknowledge that future generations would have to make good on the debt. But the intended meaning of the photo-op was clear. In the hope of persuading people to privatize Social Security - a move that would only add to the growing debt burden for future generations - Mr. Bush wants Americans to believe that the trust fund is a joke. But if the trust fund is a joke, so is the full faith and credit of the United States.

Fortunately, the governments, institutions and individuals who hold United States debt can tell a publicity stunt from a policy statement. Still, casting aspersions on a basic obligation of the United States government is insulting and irresponsible.

Not a Problem?

It happen again yesterday. I was in a store. I made an inquiry of a salesperson. They helped me. I said, "Thank you." They said, "Not a problem."

Not a problem? Hell Yes, there was a problem, actually two problems. I needed something I did not have. That is why I was in the store. I was not sightseeing. Then I could not find what I was looking for. I asked for help. The salesperson provided that help, solving both problems. After thanking them for their assistance they advised me there was not a problem, at least as far as they were concerned.

Would they have still helped me if they thought it was a problem? Was my situation so trivial that helping me barely qualified as a good use of their time? Were they boasting of their mastery of the situation? Was it a subtle put-down?

What ever happen to, "You are welcome"? Or, "I'm sorry you could not find what you were looking for." Or, "Thanks for shopping with us." Or, "Glad to help."

"Not a problem" or "No problem" is becoming an all purpose response and closing remark. It is of recent origin. I have had some choice moments recently thinking of more inappropriate usages. Add your own.

"Doctor, thank you for saving my life."
"No problem."

"Wow Honey, you were great"
"No problem."

"Waiter, there is a fly in my soup."
"No problem."

"Gee Dad, Thanks for the bike."
"No problem"

I don't know where it came from, but I would just as soon it return. I am having a problem with it.

Linkages

Well, it finally happened. A link to this blog can now be found on another blog. I guess Analog Man and I are on our way to the big-time.

I first knew the owner (author?) of the said blog when she was a very little girl. Our fathers worked together for many years. I have not seen her since she was....well it has been some time. I have been keeping up with her third-hand since. In fact it was an off-hand remark by her father over lunch last summer that she had a blog that first stirred my interest in this whole enterprise.

She has recently moved back to Virginia after living for a number of years in New York City. From our common rural Virginia perspective that alone puts her in the Exotic Jeopardy category. Now I can keep up with her without going through our mothers.

Her new blog is much more sophisticated than mine, probably a result of those years "up north." Actually, now living in the paved part of Virginia seems rather "up north" to me, given where I am. Maybe one day I'll graduate to Typepad or Movable Type. Maybe one day I'll get to see her and her sister again. Until then we have our blogs.

So here is a link back to her site. Click on over and see what she is up to.

Jane Gets It Right

In the spring of 1968 I had this now-hard-to-find photo of young actress Jane Fonda taped to my dorm wall. She was hot. I was not.

As the Vietnam War was winding down she became better known for the second photo, taken in 1972, of her sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

Fonda then became known to many as "Hanoi Jane," a result of her joining an anti-war delegation for a trip to North Vietnam. She appeared to many Americans as giving, at the very least, moral support to those who were holding American prisoners of war and confronting American solders on the battlefield. While few today can remember the names of others in those anti-war delegations that visited Hanoi, they remember Jane. To say she has been vilified by many to this day is an understatement.

Now a 68 year-old grandmother who has remained in the public eye as an actress, workout video star, political activist, famous wife (Roger Vadim/Tom Hayden/Ted Turner) and "born-again" Christian, she has written a memoir and recently appeared on 60 Minutes. During her interview with Leslie Stahl she expressed regret at posing for that second photo (and indirectly the first). Her quote about the second photo taken from the CBS News website...

"I will go to my grave regretting that. The image of Jane Fonda, Barbarella, Henry Fonda's daughter, just a woman sitting on a enemy aircraft gun, was a betrayal," says Fonda. "It was like I was thumbing my nose at the military. And at the country that gave me privilege. It was the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine. I don't thumb my nose at this country. I care deeply about American soldiers."

Notice that she used the term "lapse of judgment." She did not say it was a mistake. They are not the same thing. I think she knows the difference, unlike so many of our public figures.

A mistake is locking you keys in your car. A mistake is mispelling a word. A mistake is dialing the wrong number. A mistake is missing your exit on the interstate.

A lapse of judgment is stealing a car, writing a statement you know is false, calling in a bomb threat to a public building, or being drunk behind the wheel.

I trust you too can tell the difference.

What Jane Fonda did was a lapse of judgment; she called it correctly. It was a willful act that she must live with for the rest of her life. I have some of those lapses of judgment in my past too; if you don't have a few also by now, you probably will.

So listen along with me as those who violate all manner of laws and public trust stand before the microphone and try to minimize their actions by calling them mistakes. Mistakes are easy to understand and to forgive, deliberate willful acts that harm others require much more of us.

P.S. While allowing herself to be used by the North Vietnamese for their propaganda purposes and needlessly offending millions of Americans was a lapse of judgment, Jane Fonda's assessment of the war, then and now, is I think, the same as my own. The war was not a mistake; it was a huge lapse of judgment on the part of our government and indirectly by the American people. However, there were those on both the "America, Love-It-or-Leave It" and "Anti-War" sides who demonstrated poor judgment. We seem to have learned so little from them.

Happy Birthday, Mac

It was 20 years ago this month I bought my first personal computer, the Macintosh "Fat Mac" you see before you, still working. The memory was doubled to Plus status (1024K of RAM) a bit over a year later; a hard drive replaced the second 400K floppy. It outlasted several printers, hard drives, and modems. No repairs necessary. I used it almost every day for 10 years.

No, I don't use it anymore. But it is just as capable of doing now what it could do then. I wish I could say the same.

Any of you c:\> folks out there have a 20 year-old machine that still works?

The black-and-white world of Walter Ashby Plecker

Blog posts are supposed to be short, what is on one's mind today. Well, this post is not short, but this is what is on my mind this April Fools Day.

I first read of Mr. Walter Plecker several years ago in a book by Helen Rountree about the Powhatan Indian tribes of eastern Virginia, Pocahontas's People. I had never heard of Mr. Plecker. We all should, especially self-satisfied Virginians.

When I was Assistant Principal at King William High School in the mid-1970's I knew children who's families were torn apart by his actions. I did not understand then what they were trying to overcome. I do now. If you take the time to read the recent newspaper article below, you will too. I will leave it to you to find the Fools in this story. If I sound angry, I am.

The black-and-white world of Walter Ashby Plecker
By WARREN FISKE, The Virginian-Pilot
© August 18, 2004

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood. There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name “Plecker.”

Soon, only Hearl’s immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

“I thought Plecker was a devil,” she says. “Still do.”

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide.

He worked with a vengeance.

Plecker was a white supremacist and a zealous advocate of eugenics – a now discredited movement to preserve the integrity of white blood by preventing interracial breeding. “Unless this can be done,” he once wrote, “we have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.”

Plecker’s icy efficiency as racial gatekeeper drew international attention, including that of Nazi Germany. In 1943, he boasted: “Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”

Plecker retired in 1946 at the age of 85 and died the following year. The damage lives on.

From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

“It never seems to end with this guy,” said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.”

It’s likely that Plecker didn’t see himself as the least bit hateful. Had he not been so personally aloof, he might have explained that he believed he was practicing good science and religion. Perhaps he would have acknowledged that he was influenced by his own heritage.

Walter Plecker was one of the last sons of the Old South. He was born in Augusta County on April 2, 1861. Ten days later, the cannons at Fort Sumter sounded the start of the Civil War. His father, a prosperous merchant and slave owner, left home to fight for the Confederate Army with many of his kin.

Some 60 years later, Plecker would recall his early days in a letter to a magazine editor expressing his abhorrence of interracial breeding. He remembered “being largely under the control” of a “faithful” slave named Delia. When the war ended, she stayed on as a servant. The Pleckers were so fond of her that they let her get married in their house. When Plecker’s mother died in 1915, it was Delia “who closed her eyes,” he wrote.

Then Plecker got to his point. “As much as we held in esteem individual negroes this esteem was not of a character that would tolerate marriage with them, though as we know now to our sorrow much illegitimate mixture has occurred.” Plecker added, “If you desire to do the correct thing for the negro race … inspire (them) with the thought that the birth of mulatto children is a standing disgrace.”

Plecker graduated from Hoover Military Academy in Staunton in 1880. He became a doctor, graduating from the University of Maryland’s medical school in 1885. He moved around western Virginia and the coal fields of Alabama before settling in Hampton in 1892.

Plecker took special interest in delivering babies. He became concerned about the high mortality rate among poor mothers and began keeping records and searching for ways to improve birthing.

Public health was first being recognized as a government concern at the turn of the last century, and Plecker was a pioneer. In 1902, he became health officer for Elizabeth City County (today, Hampton). He recorded details of more than 98 percent of the births and deaths in the county – an amazing feat during a time when most people were born and died at home. When lawmakers established the state Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912, they asked Plecker to run it.

Plecker’s first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator – a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp – that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns.

Plecker was all work. He did not seek friendship. Although married most of his life, he did not have children. He listed his hobbies as “books and birds.”

“He was a man you could sometimes respect and admire, but never love,” said Russell E. Booker Jr., who grew up in Plecker’s neighborhood, delivered his newspaper and worked in the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1960 to 1994, spending the last 12 years as director. “He was a very rigid man,” Booker added. “I don’t know of anyone who ever saw him smile.”

Plecker was tall, bone-thin, had wavy, white hair that was neatly combed and a trim mustache. He took a bus to work and lunched every day on just an apple.

He was a miserly taskmaster. Plecker scraped glue pots, mixed the gunk with water and sent it back to employees for use. Booker said that, according to office legend, “You didn’t get a new pencil until you turned in your old one, and it better not be longer than an inch and a quarter.”

Plecker never looked before crossing streets. “He just expected the cars to stop for him,” said Booker, who still lives in Richmond. “One time a woman grabbed him just as he was about to be hit, and he laid her out like she’d just touched God.”

Plecker was a devout Presbyterian. He helped establish churches around the state and supported fundamentalist missionaries. Plecker belonged to a conservative Southern branch of the church that believed the Bible was infallible and condoned segregation. Members of Plecker’s branch maintained that God flooded the earth and destroyed Sodom to express his anger at racial interbreeding.

“Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality,” Plecker wrote in a 1925 essay.

Plecker described himself as a man of science. And at the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was internationally heralded as the thinking man’s science.

The term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, a year after Darwin’s death. Galton defined it as the science of “race improvement.” It was viewed as a practical application of Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection.

The early aim of Galton and his followers was to promote selective marriages to eliminate hereditary disorders. It wasn’t long, however, before they focused on perpetuating a superior class of humans.

As the science swept across the Atlantic, it picked up more ominous tones. Eugenicists began espousing mandatory sterilization of “wicked” and mentally retarded people to eliminate their bloodlines.

All the major colleges, including the University of Virginia, taught the science. It was embraced by such great minds as Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Margaret Sanger won support for legalizing contraception by arguing it would lower the birth rate of undesirables. Winston Churchill unsuccessfully proposed sterilization laws for Great Britain in 1910. As governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson signed that state’s first sterilization law in 1911. The next year, he was elected president. Virginia’s gentry embraced the fad. Eugenics was the perfect way to deal with race and the underclass.

“Virginians thought of themselves as more progressive than their neighbors to the south,” said Gregory M. Dorr, a University of Alabama history professor who is writing a book on eugenics. “There was a feeling that we don’t need to do lynching or the KKK. We’re not savage. We can handle our problems in a rational way.”

The leader of the state movement was John Powell of Richmond, an internationally acclaimed pianist and composer who would work closely with Plecker for more than a quarter of a century. Powell was rich, well-connected and a compelling speaker.

Plecker stayed behind the scenes, supplying Powell with copies of all the major correspondence of his office and drafting racial separation bills for the legislature’s consideration.

Their work paid off in 1924 when the General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act and a mandatory sterilization law that would be invoked 8,300 times over the next 55 years.

Although 31 states would pass eugenics laws, none was tougher than Virginia’s.

The Racial Integrity Act essentially narrowed race classifications on birth and marriage certificates to two choices: “white person” or “colored.” The law defined a white as one with no trace of black blood. A white person could have no more than a 1/16th trace of Indian blood – an exception, much to Plecker’s regret, legislators made to appease the descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, who were considered among Virginia’s first families.

The act forbade interracial marriage and lying about race on registration forms. Violators faced felony convictions and a year in prison.

Plecker strongly supported sterilization laws, arguing that feeble-minded whites were prone to mate with Indians and blacks. He had no role in administering the law, however.

The Racial Integrity Act, on the other hand, was his to enforce, and Plecker went about it obsessively. Gov. E. Lee Trinkle, a year after signing the act, asked Plecker to ease up on the Indians and not “embarrass them any more than possible.” Plecker fired back an angry letter.

“I am unable to see how it is working any injustice upon them or humiliation for our office to take a firm stand against their intermarriage with white people, or to the preliminary steps of recognition as Indians with permission to attend white schools and to ride in white coaches,” Plecker wrote.

The governor retreated.

Plecker saw everything in black and white. There were no other races. There was no such thing as a Virginia Indian. The tribes, he said, had become a “mongrel” mixture of black and American Indian blood.

Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. He was convinced that mulatto offspring would slowly seep into the white race. “Like rats when you’re not watching,” they “have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.

He called them “the breach in the dike.” They had to be stopped.

Many who came into Plecker’s cross hairs were acting with pure intentions. They registered as white or Indian because that’s how their parents identified themselves. Plecker seemed to delight in informing them they were “colored,” citing genealogical records dating back to the early 1800s that he said his office possessed. His tone was cold and final.

In one letter, Plecker informed a Pennsylvania woman that the Virginia man about to become her son-in-law had black blood. “You have to set the thing straight now and we hope your daughter can see the seriousness of the whole matter and dismiss this young man without any more ado,” he wrote.

In another missive, he rejected a Lynchburg woman’s claim that her newborn was white. The father, he told her in a letter, had traces of “negro” blood.

“This is to inform you that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white,” he wrote. “You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

“It is a horrible thing.”

Plecker’s no-nonsense approach made him a celebrity within the eugenics movement, which was increasingly losing support among scientists and becoming a platform for white supremacy. He spoke around the country, was widely published and wrote to every governor in the nation to urge passage of racial laws just as tough as Virginia’s. He dined at the New York home of Harry H. Laughlin, the nation’s leading eugenics advocate and an unabashed Nazi sympathizer.

In 1932, Plecker gave a keynote speech at the Third International Conference on Eugenics in New York. Among those in attendance was Ernst Rudin of Germany who, 11 months later, would help write Hitler’s eugenics law.

In 1935, Plecker wrote to Walter Gross, the director of Germany’s Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics. He outlined Virginia’s racial purity laws and asked to be put on a mailing list for bulletins from Gross’ department. Plecker complimented the Third Reich for sterilizing 600 children in Algeria who were born to German women and black men. “I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed,” he wrote. “I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia.”

Plecker wrote to Gross on state stationery. He sold copies of eugenics books in his office. He was occasionally rebuked for turning official publications into diatribes against racial interbreeding and mailing them at government expense. And when the Racial Integrity Act failed to meet his needs, Plecker stretched it.

He pressured superintendents to remove children from white schools based on complaints that they had “negro” features. “As to deciding the point of race, you and the sheriff, and any other intelligent citizen of your community, are as capable of judging from the appearance of the child as the most learned scientist,” Plecker wrote one superintendent. “There is absolutely no blood or other test to determine the question.”

Plecker demanded the removal of bodies from white cemeteries. He tried to evict a set of twins from a Presbyterian orphanage because they were illegitimate and, therefore, the “chances are 10-1 they are of negro blood.”

Plecker maintained that all of his racial designations were based on impeccable records. There was, however, a secret Plecker revealed to only a few trusted allies: A lot of the time he was just guessing.

He acknowledged the sham when a Richmond attorney questioned his authority to change the birth certificate of a woman classified as an Indian before 1924. Plecker quietly admitted he had no such power and rescinded his designation of the woman as “colored.”

Plecker fretted that he would lose his hold on Indians if word of his retreat got out. “In reality I have been doing a good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could never be legally sustained,” he wrote to his cohort, John Powell. “This is the first time that my hand has been absolutely called.”

The setback was temporary, however. The attorney kept quiet. And Plecker began developing his ultimate weapon against the Indians.

In January 1943, he sent a list of common surnames from each of the state’s tribes to local officials where the clans lived. He instructed them that anyone with those names must be classified and treated as “negro.”

Today, the Indians call it Plecker’s hit list. It was the last indignity for many of them, the act that convinced them there was no prospect for happiness in Virginia. It was the reason Lacy Hearl’s relatives pulled out for other states. Why she got married in Maryland, which recognized her heritage. Why her son couldn’t get into a Boy Scout troop.

Hearl’s maiden name – Branham – was on the list. Although Branhams and most other Monacans lived among themselves and attended an Indian school, many of them had light complexions and could move freely. Suddenly, their freedom was gone.

“You had to lie about your name and hope the person at the door didn’t know you,” she said.

Hearl had always loved going to the movies and dances. That stopped. She could no longer get in. “It was the end of my family,” said Hearl, now 74 . “I was lonely. It’s sad that a family has to depart from each other just because of a name.” Other tribes tell similar stories. “The worst thing about Plecker is how he screwed up the community,” said Kenneth Adams, the chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “People just left.”

Indian schools did not go beyond eighth grade. White schools were off-limits. Black schools were not an option for most Indians because attending them would be a concession to Plecker’s racial classifications.

“We were the third race in a two-race state,” said Stephen Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe. “I remember once traveling with my father and we pulled into a gas station because I had to go to the bathroom and there was one bathroom marked 'white’ and one bathroom marked 'colored.’ I said, 'Dad, what do I do?’ ”

After his retirement, Plecker planned to write a book about the decline of the white race. Before he had a chance, he stepped into traffic without looking.

Legend has it that he was hit by a bus. “I know it’s kind of cruel to say this, but I hope the last thing he saw was an Indian driving that bus,” said Sue Elliott, Hearl’s daughter.

The truth is that he was hit by a car driven by Kenneth R. Berrell, whose racial origins have fallen into oblivion. Plecker died in a hospital two hours later. It was 1947.

Plecker’s racial records were largely ignored after 1959, when his handpicked successor retired. Virginia schools were fully integrated in 1963 and, four years later, the state’s ban on interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional. In 1975, the General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act.

During the past two decades, Virginia has tried to erase Plecker’s legacy. It has established councils on Indian affairs and has conferred official state recognition on eight tribes, a designation that provides no privileges. But Indian leaders say recognition equals respect.

In 1997, then-Gov. George F. Allen simplified procedures for people to correct inaccurate birth records. Hearl had her race changed from black to Indian.

“I know who I am and I’m proud of it,” she said. The going has been tougher in Washington, where Virginia Indians are trying to join 562 tribes around the country that are federally recognized. The Bush administration, while sensitive to Plecker’s destruction of records, has been unwilling to ease application rules.

Allen, now a U.S. senator, is again championing the Indians’ cause. The Republican has authored legislation that would bypass bureaucratic requirements and allow Congress to federally recognize the tribes. Allen, during a Senate hearing last year, lamented Virginia’s racist past.

“Virginia Indians were not extended the rights offered to other U.S. citizens, and the years of discrimination and coercive policies took a tremendous toll,” he said.

The bill has been approved by a key Senate committee and may come up for a floor vote later this year.

The legislation faces major opposition in the House of Representatives, however, where Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Fairfax County, has raised concern that federal recognition would open the door to Indian-run casinos in Virginia. The tribes, most of them devout Christians, say they oppose gaming. Allen and Gov. Mark R. Warner say there are many safeguards that would prevent casinos from opening in the Old Dominion.

The Virginia tribes are moving decisively. Six have banded together to ask Congress for help. They have brought Plecker’s story to Capitol Hill, hired a lobbyist and meet regularly to plan strategy, which includes deciding whether to participate in the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in 2007.

Indian leaders say that’s a big change from the days not long ago when all of the tribes went separate ways.

“We have a bond now,” Adkins, the Chickahominy chief, said. “It’s kind of ironic, but Plecker has made us stronger.”

Reach Warren Fiske at (804) 697-1565 or at warren.fiske@pilotonline.com. Information for this story was gathered from interviews, books on the history of eugenics and the collection of Plecker’s writings on file in the John Powell papers, kept in the special collections department of the Alderman Library.

The Question

My question a couple of weeks back received six responses. Only one opted for A. Oddly, (fittingly?), it was from the person who unknowingly years ago started me thinking about the question in the first place.

In the early 90's I was asked what college course of study I wanted for my daughter. This was when emerging computer driven, high-technology (pre-internet I might add) was rapidly changing practically every business and occupation. This was causing many to question the value of the traditional liberal arts education. The future was going to reward specialized, technically savvy individuals. So those with a crystal ball were advising young people to take math and the sciences, become technicians, programmers, and engineers, not dead-end graduates in the humanities.

At the time I was responsible for training in a large, ultra-modern manufacturing facility. I was seeing first hand the need for greater technical skills for even the most entry level factory worker. I watched office functions wired together for the first time in local area networks. Learning the latest software became the key to success for "white collar" workers and entry-level managers. Those who could not make a database sing or express themselves with a fancy Lotus spreadsheet were doomed.

So when the question came up - I can't remember the exact circumstances - I was a little surprised at my response. I said that I wanted my daughter to be able to understand the natural and man-made world around her, to understand herself and others, love the process of learning, and, most practically, develop the skills to convince others to take a particular course of action. I reasoned that no matter what specialized knowledge one might have, high-tech or not, without the ability to change the behavior of others - to "make the sale" - even the most profound knowledge, best ideas or most brilliant insights have little value. As we moved deep into a "service" economy within the "information age" it seemed to me those who were good at manipulating others were more likely to be successful than those who could just manipulate data with the latest digital device.

Time passed. My daughter indeed found herself a good liberal arts college. She majored in French, met all sorts of people, traveled abroad, and graduated - pretty much the full package. Good fortune then placed her in a very small law office doing everything from watering the plants, writing legal documents, to appearing before a judge on behalf of the boss and their clients. With no formal legal training, it was OJT without a net. She didn't fall. I doubt she even looked down. A second job in another law office gave her a chance to expand her skills working with clients and their adversaries. Today she teaches middle school students, maybe outside of a used car salesman the most manipulative profession of all. Tomorrow, who knows?

Now back to the question and the two choices. Yes, imbedded none too deeply in the choices is the looking-at yourself-in-the-morning-mirror issue of who really benefits from those well-developed manipulation skills. Is it the manipulator, the manipulator's employer, or those who have changed their behavior? Ideally, of course, one gets to convince others of the truth, at least as it is best understood. Then all benefit - a win-win. But those same convincing skills can be used successfully to sell a lie, to get people to act in ways good for others rather than themselves. You don't have to look far for examples. Within this win-lose situation we still have winners, at least in the short term.

Am I suggesting that my daughter learned her liberal arts lessons too well? After all she wrote that she would rather be successful in convincing someone of a falsehood than a failure at convincing someone of the truth. Not really. Remember the other things I wanted her to leave college with? Contained within those are the values, knowledge and skills that should moderate any tendency to misuse her considerable and growing powers of persuasion. Such is my trust of the full liberal arts package. She could have learned many of those same persuasion skills in a business program. Ugh!

Maybe the most complete response that would have been closest to my own came via email.

I think that success or lack thereof is tied to human ego (though I'm quite a fan of it myself, being a human with an ego), & as such the higher, grander thing is to be honest to truth, regardless of fulfillment of ego.

Being "honest to truth" is what a good liberal arts education is all about. Having the skills and opportunity to convince others of the truth - to create win-win's for all - is as good a situation as one can hope to find in our international, digital, 24/7, high-tech, brave new world marketplace.

Road Trip Report

My visit to Richmond went well. In the Library of Virginia I found just about all the information I was looking for, and stumbled across more that I did not expect. The Virginia women's history conference was wonderful. It was energizing to see and hear these professional historians who were so passionate and thoughtful about their work.

I also had a chance to have dinner Saturday night with a couple of wonderful friends I miss so much. It really did not seem like all those years had passed. Sunday I visited the old family homeplace on the banks of the Pamunkey River and my cousin, its current mistress. I had not been inside the building in almost 50 years. Some of my earliest memories of family holidays have me running its stairs, playing with my cousins under the porch, and annoying the grownups. Now I am one of the grownups. Conflicting emotions were noted.

My sister served a gracious hostess, feeding me, letting me sleep as late as I dared, and even taking me Friday night to hear the Richmond Symphony which was performing nearby with the Richmond Symphony Chorus. The venue was a large Baptist church, nice but carefully not too nice; they are Baptists after all. Fitting the surroundings the program was mostly sacred German choral music, with a Mozart symphony as balance.

I was once again reminded that whatever your musical taste, live music can take you places recorded music cannot. Turning off that MTV, unplugging that iPod, and finding some live music is like visiting again with old friends and revisiting childhood memories, real almost beyond words.

To Beslan, With Love

The TV cameras are mostly gone now; the short attention span of the world is directed elsewhere. Local School # 1 in Beslan, southern Russia, stands torn and silent, a memorial to the terrorist attack last year. In the midst of the wreaths, stuffed animals, and wilting flowers that have joined the rubble is a poster from 7th graders at a middle school in western North Carolina. “You are not alone,” it reads. “Your loved ones will not be forgotten.” The message from my daughter's students sits among the debris of tragedy, doing what it can to help the survivors make it through another day.

Early last September the world watched in horror at a terriorist act aimed at children. More than 1,300 hostages were taken at during their traditional “Welcome to School” ceremony. Hundreds of young children spent over two days without water and food in an overcrowded hot gymnasium, wired with explosives. They witnessed the beatings and murders of family members, friends and teachers. After one of many bombs surrounding the hostages detonated, a series of explosions and a firefight followed. Fire and the collapse of the roof completed the devastation. After the smoke cleared three days later 344 were dead, mostly children, with an equal number wounded, many severely. These are the official numbers, the actual number may be much higher.

My daughter, who had only a few days earlier begun teaching students of the same age as those killed, was outraged, hurt, and determined to do something positive. She quickly found someone to make the poster and someone who could write a message in Russian. Her students completed the poster with their best wishes and signatures. Finally she found someone who might be able to deliver it.

This month the Ashville Citizen-Times published two followup stories, March 6th and March 13th. In the photo gallery of the second article were photos taken by Constance Richards of the poster.

I suppose this is why we have French majors. Non?

National Women's History Month

This month is the 25th Anniversary of the first National Women's History Month. I am doing my part this weekend by attending the Virginia Women Through Four Centuries: A Women’s History Symposium sponsored by the Library of Virginia in Richmond.

As some of you know, I have gotten it into my head that I should write a history of my family and Pamunkey Neck, the area of Virginia where they have resided for about 300 years. Among the difficulties I have faced is the relative lack of information about the women in my family, the males so dominating written records. So I am hoping to better learn about not only the lives they must have lived, but also how to include my female ancestors in my history.

I will get a chance to again see Linda Sturtz, history professor at Beloit College. She, and her book Within Her Power – Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (2002), was most helpful as I began my research. She is on one of the panels.

I also will do some more research in the Library, see some family members and old friends, and do some shopping. We are out of ink in both printers and almost out of toilet paper, again.

And the Winner is....

For those of you who keep up with this blog, you will remember that about 6 weeks ago our heating system, an old oil burning Williamson unit, gave out. Since then we have been in negotiations with our insurance company, the local natural gas company, and several HVAC contractors to determine what will come next.

We were able to secure a service agreement with the natural gas company which narrowed down our heating choices. Lucky for us our small community has three local multigenerational, family-owned HVAC companies. In a small community like ours contractors that develop a bad reputation soon must get their jobs elsewhere. Each company sold a reliable product and the prices were very close. As we were also replacing our 23 year old AC system, this became an expensive and important decision. I liked all three companies, but finally chose to install the Carrier unit you see. We should see about a 40% reduction in heating and cooling costs.

Work begins in about 10 days. By then most of the heating season will be behind us, we hope.

A Question

I have a question for you. If you HAD to choose, would you rather

A) be successful in convincing someone of a falsehood, or
B) be unsuccessful in convincing someone of the truth?

I'll hang up and take my answers in the comments section below.

Informed Comment

As the Vietnam War was winding down I read Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald. After reading the 1972 Pulitizer Prize winning book I thought if the real story of Vietnam and its people had been known by our politicians and their advisors, the war need not have happened. We were constantly mislead by people who did not know what they were talking about. Then, as it started to fall apart, we were lied to by our leaders. For the most part Americans swallowed it whole. Of course after then reading David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, I was less sure that reality mattered at all. That brings me to Juan Cole and his blog, Informed Comment.

Like FitzGerald and Halberstam, Mr. Cole has drawn the ire of the political right wing, the guys now in power. Cole has serious questions about the wisdom of our military involvement in Iraq, as did FitzGerald and Halberstam about Vietnam. As a professor, author, and Middle East expert, Cole is "reality-based" which would quickly put him at odds who those now overseeing our foreign policy and their media shills. His recent exchange with Jonah Goldberg would be funny of it were not so serious.

Professor Cole does have a considerable amount of knowledge about the Middle East which he shares on his blog. His recent short history of Lebanon is a good example. Unlike Mr. Goldberg, he does not believe it is wise that ideology and resulting judgments about that part of the world should precede knowledge. And he does not suffer fools gladly.

If you would like to learn more about the Middle East I recommend Informed Comment. If you think that to question American foreign policy at this time is disloyal and makes you a bad person, I suggest you stay away. You might learn more than you want to know.

Sitting on My Front Porch, Part Two

In December I posted a photo taken in the summer of the park across the street from our house. Here is what that same view is today. The temperature is about 44 degrees.

This is for my friends in Wisconsin who may not think we have seasons in southeastern North Carolina. We do, sort of.