LIEUTENANT ROBERT F. BARNA

LIEUTENANT ROBERT F. BARNA

 

Ed Barna

        As we approach the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th year—when the armistice ending World War I took effect in 1918—I want my readers to know about a man who was born on February 28, 1918. He was my father, and he was my English teacher for my sophomore and junior years at Otter Valley Union High School. By the time those two years ended, I knew I wanted to become a writer.

  

   

    When Robert Francis Barna was two years old, he climbed over a Jersey City second-story porch railing, fell, and hit his head. After that, no one expected much from him.

       Certainly his father Albert Barna was bright enough. Though he came to America from Hungary at three, and only went to school through fourth grade, he studied on his own to take the examination for becoming a railroad engineer—a much-prized occupation at the time—and passed. With his earnings, he bought a small farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the family—with five boys and one girl—moved there.

       In Girard’s one-room schoolhouse, Bob was put in the back with others considered impossible to educate. In fourth grade, he raised his hand: “Teacher, I know how to read now.” In fifth grade, he won a schoolwide spelldown.

       They lost the farm in the Depression, and had to move back to New Jersey, where Al got a job as a truck driver. At Woodbridge High School, Bob did not stand out, in large part because he had a hernia that kept him from playing sports. His parents, Old World in their beliefs, did not trust doctors, and refused to let him go “under the knife.” He realized that if he was to get operated on, he would have to get a job and save the money and pay for it himself. But how could he pass a physical examination to get a job?

       He did sit-ups, hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups, until he was able to close the hernia so tightly that the doctor at Calco Chemical did not find it. He saved his money, went to the best surgeon he could find, and got the problem fixed. The doctor said afterward that he had never seen anything like it: he had to sew through an inch of stomach muscle.

       The big star at Woodbridge High School was a fellow Hungarian, Lillian Kapellari. She lettered in three sports, was the first girl president of the athletic association, and was so gifted in mathematics that one of her teachers lent her the money to go to college at Ursinus in Pennsylvania. She lettered in three sports there, too, and had been “pinned” by the captain of the hockey team (given his fraternity pin) as his intended.

       Meanwhile, Bob’s younger brother Francis was courting Lillian’s younger sister Mae. One day, Francis needed a ride to the tiny Kapellari homestead down by the railroad tracks (horse, cow, chickens, garden, fruit trees, spring house for water; oil storage tanks are there now). The father, too, had been a railroad engineer, so after his early illness and death, the trainmen would sometimes open the chute at the bottom of a coal car and leave the family a strip of fuel for the kids to pick up along the tracks.

       It so happened that Lillian was home from college, and while Francis and Mae went off to talk, Bob and Lil got to talking, too.

       She handed back the hockey captain’s pin. She and Bob would be married in 1943, at Langley Field in Virginia, before his B-24 took off for air service in China; their honeymoon was in a hotel near the sea in nearby Hampton Roads, where they could see warships being readied for their next campaigns.

       The war had intensified to the point where men in their 20s were being called up, so Bob had enlisted in the air force. Unable to become a pilot due to flight sickness, he expected to be sent to Germany as a gunner.

       But he returned to base after a personal leave to find his entire outfit had flown to Germany, except for him and one other guy. As part of his basic training, he had taken the Alpha Speed, the IQ test of its day. “No,” they told him, “you’re going to navigator school.”

       Much later, one of his sons would take the Alpha Speed. Nothing will be said here about the score, except to note that the three sons went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

       There are many ways to die in wartime, and physical strength sometimes makes all the difference. To reach China, a B-24 had to fly to Brazil, then to Dakar in Senegal, then through Africa to India and the main staging area for flights to China, in Assam.

       Having some time off in Senegal, Bob went for a swim in the ocean, and was immediately carried out to sea by an undertow. He knew enough to swim parallel to shore then swim back in, but that he that meant swimming half a mile.

       On his way back, he came to a fruitselling stand. The three women there started singing something and swaying and stepping to its beat.

       He came over afterward and asked, “What was that dance you were doing?” “Dance?” they said, “What dance? Us, dance?” A culture in which rhythm was so much a part of life there was nothing special to moving with it.

       He was like that, always inquisitive about the people where he went, and perceptive and responsive. The airmen had a chance to go see the Taj Mahal, but most said, “Aaa, we’d rather stay here and play cards.” At the Taj, his guide realized this was not a casual tourist, and invited him to see the sacred turtles fed at a nearby fort.

       “What are they fed?” “Poor women’s dead babies.” He declined the invitation.

       On another occasion, he snuck away from the base at Assam to attend an Indian festival. Watching, he realized that although this culture was far more explicit about things sexual, it was a healthy celebration, not prurience.

       In China, based at Kweilin (now Guilin), he spent some of his time off from duties roaming the landscape, which he said later looked just as it did in Sung Dynasty paintings. Once he came upon a woman working in a field, and she ran in fear.

       As she watched from a distance, he put beneath one of the plants his week’s pay—in Chinese money--and went to a hillside to watch. The expression on her face when she found the treasure—which would let her survive for months—was better than anything he could have bought, he said.
       It was nothing for him to walk 15 miles in a day on such expeditions. Farmboy strength: when he arrived in Assam, he and another crewman discovered that others there like to pitch horseshoes, too. They beat a pair from the base, who went and found a better team, and they beat that one, too.

       By then they were hot. Team by team, level by level, they went through the best the massive airbase had.

       His style was unique: rather than holding the horseshoe by the iron and throwing it underhanded, he would put it on his fingertips like a waiter holding a tray, then loft it to the stake with a three-quarter turn. No one, even at the New England championships, was using it.

At one point his eldest son, as an adult, took a serious interest in the game, and first tried his father’s style—but couldn’t do it at all, let alone do it well. It took phenomenal hand strength.

       But it wartime, luck mattered, too, or fate. Flying “Over the Hump” of the Himalayas to China was no joke: on one trip. 21 of 22 planes iced up and crashed.

       Over Hangkow, 17 searchlights and “the biggest, reddest ack-ack I ever saw” all missed. One time they found a Japanese destroyer, dropped bombs, missed, then turned around and made another pass, and got it.

       The Distinguished Flying Cross is a medal awarded to any officer or enlisted member of the United States armed forces who distinguishes himself or herself in support of operations by "heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight, subsequent to November 11, 1918." By the end of his tour of duty, he had been awarded two of them, along with two Air Medals, for particularly meritorious service.

       He spoke little of these honors, but probably one of the DFC’s came from mining Hong Kong harbor. Two planes had been sent out to do the job, and neither had returned.

       They reached a place along the coast that looked like the entrance to the harbor, as it had been described to them. “No,” said the navigator, “it isn’t far enough.” They went on, mined the harbor, and were rewarded for their achievement by being sent back to do it again.

       Had they turned into the first “entrance,” they would have found themselves in a cul-de-sac, with cliffs too steep to rise over on all sides and no room to turn around. The speculation was that the other two planes crashed there.

       On another mission, he had to take five celestial fixes to get back. Not only was there no GPS then, there were no radio signals—not even lights at the runway until a plane arrived.

       Reckoning their position meant calculating on the basis of where the stars were located. In years afterward, he would point to Arcturus, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and others, as if saluting old friends.

       Another mission that demanded precise navigation had its target in Tonkin China—what we know today as Vietnam. En route, one engine died and another began smoking, and had to be run at half strength.

       At that point the two-and-a-half engine Liberator was living up to its unofficial name, The Vibrator. They were at low altitude, and didn’t have the power to climb higher—and between Vietnam and China there is a mountain range about 6,000 feet high.

       So they jettisoned everything: the bombs, the radio, the guns and ammo to ward off Japanese fighters (one of which they outdueled on another mission), anything that wasn’t bolted down. In a written account, Bob wrote, “The architecture of the  ancient imperial city of Hue is very beautiful—especially at the height we were flying.”

       They rose higher and higher, realizing that was mainly because the fuel tanks were getting lighter.  They cleared the mountains, though as he wrote, “An enemy soldier with a rifle could have brought us down.”

       Then it was a matter of aiming for the base. In due time, they arrived, landed, and went to the debriefing room.

       While the pilot was describing what had happened, someone came in from the airfield. My father asked, “How much gas was left in the tanks?” and got the reply, “What gas?”

       Eventually Shadrach did crash, but with a different crew on board.

       As the war went on, the number of missions required before returning home kept increasing, Catch-22 style, to 50, then 55. Realizing these crews were under a lot of stress and were getting so close they might not take risks, air command tried to give them easier jobs.

       Like hauling gasoline. Like the time they were hauling a full load of the stuff and the panel board started burning, and they got chewed out for returning to base.

       Like reconnaissance. Out over the South China Sea, they flew right up on an aircraft carrier--certain death, had any planes been on the flight deck.

       Much has been said about The Greatest Generation, but if this was true, it was only true of the entirety of the war effort, not of all those who took part. On one mission, clouds covered the target, so they had to return to base, which meant they had to drop their bombs before landing.

       “Let’s drop them there,” said the pilot, pointing to a Chinese village at the bend of a river.

 “Do you realize how many people live in those river villages?” protested my father. “Those are the Chinese! Those are the people we’re fighting WITH!”

       “Aaa, they’re all the same,” agreed the pilot and bombardier. So the Greatest Generation proceeded to perpetrate a massacre perhaps greater than My Lai—but amidst all the carnage of that era, no one in authority would have cared.

       The Japanese would bomb their airfield, my father said, and as soon as they were gone, a swarm of Chinese workers would repair it. If you wanted to know when the next Japanese air raid was, all you had to do was ask any of those laborers.

       “Twentee meeneet.” Sure enough, 20 minutes later, over would come the Japanese bombers. My father said he never figured out how they did it.

       During those raids, the Americans would take shelter in one of the natural caves common in the limestone rock of the area. One time, a Chinese infantry officer came in as well.

       The men began one of their favorite games: delivering vicious and filthy insults in English while bowing and smiling as if they were offering compliments. The Chinese man kept smiling and bowing back. Barna sat to the side, reading.

       When the air raid ended, the officer went to the entrance of the cave, turned around, and said in perfect British English, “Gentlemen: the next time we meet, I hope we can have a philosophical discussion of the relative merits of the philosophies of Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson.”

Then he spun on his heel and left, to lead his men to almost certain death on the coastal front. Barna sat to the side, clutching the book he had been reading: a biography of Jefferson.

Finally, it was time to come home, and to be discharged with the nominal rank of captain. Home to Lillian, who instead of being Rosie the Riveter had been the one helping Rosie to work at maximum efficiency, as a time management specialist in the Merck pharmaceutical company’s human relations department.

Merck wanted her to stay, badly, and offered her $500 a week—phenomenal pay at the time—to do so. But she gave up the job so Bob could follow his dream of studying languages on the G. I. Bill, at Middlebury College in far-off Vermont.

He earned a master’s degree in German, learned enough French so he could have taught that, too, but couldn’t teach anything in the public schools because he hadn’t taken enough teaching courses. So for three years he became Captain Barna at the Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia, where she taught as well.

They were rescued by a fellow Middlebury graduate, Thomas Whalen, who had become principal at Brandon High School. She taught math and science, he taught physics and chemistry then finally English—classes in which the students would try to “get him going” telling stories about World War II—and coached the cross-country team.

He wanted to be a writer, too, and would have been a fine folklorist, having being friends with people like Fred Wyman, Doris Eddy, Charlie Mraz, Alphonse Quesnel (who gave his kids their first plane rides), Charlie Sanderson, Bobo Sheehan, Arthur Healey, and more. But it was too late.

His eldest son had him as an English teacher for two years, and by the end had learned the key lesson—always have an inner world going on—and had determined to be a writer. Bob tried to capitalize on his friendship with Rutland Herald photographer Aldo Merusi to wangle a summer internship for his son, but the idea was rejected.

It is now more than 12 years since Bob Barna died, more than 25 since his son became a Rutland Herald reporter, and 43 since he became a published poet. A motheaten woolen dress uniform remains in storage, and despite its condition will not be discarded, if only because of the patch that says “Flying Tigers.”

 

WRAPPING UP OCTOBER 2009

WRAPPING UP OCTOBER 2009

 

We hear than Afghanistan needs a runoff election. We hear there’s a runoff problem from some dairy farms. Too much manure.

 

This morning I heard a sound that was part of my childhood, but hasn’t been that common in recent years. With the weather cloudy, a jet flew nearby, at a much lower altitude than a commercial liner, followed by a second jet. During the Cold War, bad weather served as an opportunity for military exercises out of the Burlington Air National Guard base, and perhaps this is becoming the case again. But I doubt it will reach the proportions it did when I lived in Brandon and owned one of two historic barns at the east end of town. On one occasion, a fighter jet slowed and banked and circled the barns, perhaps to get oriented. I put that incident into a poem that begins “My son, your fears/  I can do nothing to relieve/ But agree:” .

       It ends, “Like your mother/ You fear the dark;/ Like me,/ The knock at the door by night.”

       Someone at a poetry reading asked me, “Why would you be afraid of someone knocking on your door?” Ah, the innocence of America.

 

 

       Today’s “Vermont Edition” on Vermont Public Radio concerned the Champlain Bridge. As a professional copyeditor, I recommend to Vermont Secretary of Transportation David Dill that he stop using the expression “have really gone overboard” when talking about the efforts of those operating ferries.

 

 

       I’m surprised people haven’t started calling the new epidemic the High-knee virus. That’s how it would be pronounced; I’m not sure how that would be spelled.

 

 

 

       The health care bill’s provision for a 12-year period of exclusive rights for new biotech medications doesn’t look like a pure power play when virtually all of your nest egg (such as it is) has been invested in one biotech company for about a decade. It isn’t discovering a new drug that is a costly process, it’s going through the stages of approval, which involves testing to determine any toxicity and side effects, testing how it interacts with other drugs, and testing its effectiveness in randomized blind trials. The company in question is so deeply in debt that it had to assign 90 percent of its American and European rights to the profits from its leading candidate to get the backing of a big pharmaceutical company, which in return will make “milestone” payments for going through the stages of approval, and will use its worldwide network to recruit test participants and do marketing if the drug is approved. Call it personal interest, but I think the greatest power the biotechs are wielding, in trying to get a sales window free from competition from generics, is a compelling argument.

 

 

       “Health care reform will destroy the doctor-patient relationship.” So why is the American Medical Association behind it? “Health care reform will harm older people’s Medicare coverage.” So why is the American Associated of Retired Persons (now just AARP) backing it? “It’s a government takeover, it’s socialism,” at the speed of an elderly doctor walking with a cane.

       Grow up. Come off it. Remember what I wrote before, citing the Quaker rule for conflict resolution: be able to state your opponent’s point of view in terms that your opponent would accept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Look at the Champlain Bridge

A Look at the Champlain Bridge

In keeping with this blog's mission of serving in part as a photographic supplement to the printed Rutland Herald, I thought I'd post some of the pictures I've taken during trips this fall to the Champlain Bridge, also known as the Crown Point Bridge, that connects Addison, Vermont with Crown Point, New York. Or at least it used to. This is the bridge you've been reading about and hearing about because it is in such bad shape that it's closed for safety's sake. Before that, it was possible to walk out onto the closed lane and see the structure as never before. And, as the photos of deterioration will show, maybe never again.

See all that rust staining on the pier? It's worse close up. Ask yourself: would you buy a used car with rust like this? Would you have the undercarriage checked out to see if it would need repairs that would cost more than the price of the old clunker?

The truss members look like they could use a truss.

I leave it to you to decide whether the next picture indicates a lack of basic maintenance or not.

Walking on it, a truck would make it shake, and even an SUV would make it tremble. A key point re the closing, for any engineering types: it wasn't just that some of the concrete piers had deep cracks, it was the fact that the expansion joints, which were meant to give the bridge operational flexibility, had locked up.

An unexpected pleasure of being on the bridge was having a good view of boat wakes. Each has a personality that fits the craft making it. This guy's testosterone-fueled sportster was skipping over the waves.

Could there be a ferry at the site, at least temporarily? One local said there had been one, before the bridge. The boat landing under the bridge looks like it has the beginnings of a landing. The boat in the picture is a good example of why there won't be a pontoon bridge unless it has a way of letting waterborne traffic continue along the international waterway: a knowledgeable fisherman said this was a yacht carrying snowbirds south; in the spring, he said, they will all come back to to their Champlain summer residences in their boats.

I'll close with a view of the Champlain monument in the park across the highway from the Crown Point ruins in New York. This was, after all, the 400th anniversary of the "discovery" of the lake by Samuel de Champlain, whose statue is on the monument.

What's this? What does it have to do with Lake Champlain? Well, this was the bottom of a lake, or sea, many many moons ago. It's the Omya marble quarry in Middlebury--I'll have pictures from their open house, always a festive occasion (seriously), in another posting. Meanwhile, consider this: as part of the open house, they have a 480-foot--long trail that describes what happens to make marble over a 480-million-year period. Step forward one foot and you've gone a million years. An 80-year human lifespan takes less than the width of a human hair.

This, too, shall pass.

THE GATE TO OLD AGE

THE GATE TO OLD AGE

        I have a college classmate, a sometime Benson resident, who is a sculptor known for creating gates. Not the garden gate kind, but stand-alone portals more to areas of meaning that physical territory. The next time I see him or contact him, I’m going to suggest a Gate to Old Age: the crosspiece would be the human skeleton’s pelvic area, including both hips, and the support would be two crutches instead of legs.

       The biggest reason I haven’t been blogging more often this year is my back—or at least I thought it was my back. Anyone who has seen me limping and gimping around, hitching and hobbling like an old farmer dragging himself to Town Meeting, knows what I’m talking about. In a hundred ways, it keeps me from going the extra step to get things done, and they pile up, sometimes literally, especially in a small office. Mine is about nine feet square; for two days now I’ve been trying to get to the other side of it, and I’m not there yet.

       I went to Brandon chiropractic doctor Chuck Foster, who has always been able to help me with my back, and this time the adjustment lasted about 100 feet from the office door and BANG the pain was back. It wasn’t his fault, though, as I found out last week from Dr. Eric Benz here in Middlebury, a back specialist.

       X-rays showed the back to be a bit twisted out of line, but not too bad. The hips, on the other hand, were shot. Massive arthritis, so bad there wasn’t any gap at all between the ball and socket in the joint, just fuzzy white. “It’s sort of a good news-bad news thing,” he said, beginning a summation that ended with “You need two hip replacements.”

       I answered, “In other words, hip hip, but no hooray?”

       I had heard of them, but had never thought much about them, because that was for old people. Old? By next year, when it will be possible to take the time to have them (winter is coming too fast to do it now), I’ll be 62, and eligible for Social Security.

       It isn’t the whole hip that gets replaced, it’s the ball part of the ball-and-socket joint. I tell my covered bridge acquaintances (I wrote a book called Covered Bridges of Vermont) “I’m afraid I need a little Glulam,” that being an artificial wood product that covered bridge preservationists want to keep out of the wooden bridges as much as possible.

       On the good side (aside from not needing back surgery), Benz said it’s his favorite operation, because almost always it goes well and gives the person a whole new life. Son Damon, now operations manager at the First Avenue music club in Minneapolis, emailed back “That good about your back, but whack about your hip, pop. At least once it's over and done with, you'll be able to move about relatively pain free, right?” Brother Joe, a year younger, replied “Sorry to hear it, but I do know that it is one of the few operations I know of where

everyone seems to have no problems and ends up extremely happy with the results. Keep me posted on plans.  Maybe my gall bladder removal will end up being at the same time!”

       There’s a song by Rambling Jack Elliott that has the refrain “Arthritis is the thing to miss—it will leave you walking with a double twist. And it’s all kinds of trouble gonna find you somehow.” It’s almost 5 a.m., maybe the acetominophen has started to work, and maybe it will do better than the megaibuprofen that’s been prescribed, so that I could get at least a few hours of decent sleep.

       Good luck with yours, Mrs. Calabash, whatever it is.

  

WRAPPING UP SEPTEMBER

WRAPPING UP SEPTEMBER

  

New term: stodgical lopping place, as in “My writing has come to a stodgical lopping place—my brain is getting stodgy so I’d better cut out working right now.”

 

 

My next poetry compilation will be “Fool’s Errand,” three-line poems which, rather than owing to the haiku tradition, draw more on syllogisms. Or perhaps boxing: boom boom POW. Or maybe the Mafia: “Two to the body, one to the head.” Here’s something that recently went onto a five-by-eight file card, to be put in a three-ring binder with the rest, awaiting final sorting and revision:

 

It’s taken me sixty-one years, and I’m not done yet.

Must men always be a force for farce?

In one womb and out the other.

 

Note that I did NOT say “logical syllogisms.”

 

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Around Middlebury, masses of trees have been showing stress, from the long rainy period then a three-week drought. Now I’m seeing a lot of stress color: leaves that are green except for a bright red border, rather than having a healthy spectrum of hues. I’ll put an example of this at the end.

 

 

       I’m not one of FairPoint’s customers, but I sympathize with those who are. The other day I called a number where the subscriber had decided to use the phone system’s message recording system rather than an answering machine.

       “At the tone, please enter the number of the person you are trying to reach, including the area code,” came the message. I did so. The result was to activate a message that said, “At the tone, please enter the number of the person you are trying to reach, including the area code.”

       For investigative purposes, I entered the number again—all I had to do was push my repeat button—and so did Hal, or whatever obsolete droid they had acquired for the purpose.

       A company that can’t manage an answering service shouldn’t be entrusted with the task of expanding Vermont’s broadband access. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice….

TAXING THE RICH

TAXING THE RICH

        In deciding how to extricate ourselves from the burdens of our national debt, we need to cross-apply something we have learned about countering insurgencies.

       To defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, our best experts say, we need to do three things: stabilize the military situation, rebuild the lives of the people, and work with a functional Afghani government to continue those efforts. The problem, as it was in China after World War II, then Vietnam in the Vietnam War, is corruption—systematic, endemic corruption that has become a way of life.  No rule of law, no human rights, no economic transparency can withstand the corrosive effect of individuals seeing governmental authority as their path to personal enrichment.

       Now shift to one of the most contentious debates in our own society, that of the right to levy taxes. No matter how sacrosanct the Bill of Rights AMENDMENTS to the Constitution may be, the 16^th Amendment, which enabled the progressive income tax, is ignored by some as if it had never been enacted. Someone who is rich got there by his or her own efforts, goes their argument, and The Government does not have any right to what they have earned.

       But without the social stability, the privacy, and the complex system of expectations that makes it possible to take reasonable risks to gain ample rewards, being rich would be impossible. Being powerful, in a world of ruthless and dangerous competition, perhaps, but not the kind of affluence that has made this country the envy of the world. Say what one may about strong government, the fastest way to appreciate it is to live for any length of time where it does not exist: in the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, in which the great idealist of Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness” ends by gasping out “The horror! The horror!”, and where little has altered that summation in a century.

       Taking half the yearly income of someone who is super-rich amounts to nothing more than sending some of the money back to those from whom it was taken. The money was not earned, in the sense that a roofer earns his daily pay by sweating his way through a strenuous and perhaps dangerous day, but rather was made—that is, made off others. Using that money to create a strong, effective, and responsive government will allow the superrich to enjoy luxuries  beyond the wildest dreams of those who are in the employ of the businesses they own. That should not be taken for granted, and in the great scale of things, it ought to be regarded as enough.

 

WRAPPING UP AUGUST

Sorry this is arriving so late. Computer problems. A thousand bucks and a couple of hard drives later, here we are.

 

 

WRAPPING UP AUGUST

 

 

       Prosecute the torturing interrogators? Hell, no. Waterboard them! And while we’re at it, let’s disbar the lawyers who approved such simulated drowning to be used 183 times, for one person.

       In our popular magazines, we read articles that prolonged sleep deprivation is harmful to health. We read articles in the winter warning of the dire effects of hypothermia. In our newspapers, we read of both being used to try to get alleged terrorists to talk.

       The Bush-Cheney administration doesn’t have a legacy, it has an arm-and-a-legacy.

 

 

       Here’s how rainy it’s been. Lying half-awake, thinking about getting up, I reach for my glasses and the car’s windshield wipers turn on.

 

      

       I’m delighted to see sites appearing where people share tips on how to save money. Since I grew up in the Thirties as much as the Fifties and Sixties (my parents were both shaped by the Depression and the years of wartime ration tickets), I think of a few myself. Like this morning: why not take all those packets of ketchup and soy sauce that are piling up and get two jars and squirt it all in where it’s much more likely to be used? Teaspoon-size quantities can be handy on the road, but can become a nuisance at home. Why didn’t I think of that before? As I said in another blog, quoting a Pennsylvania Dutch saying,  “Too soon old, too late shmart.”

 

 

       Oh, here’s another one: if you go to the Rutland Wal-Mart, don’t buy a cold drink at the vending machines out front. There’s one back by the bathrooms, mainly for the employees mainly but not off-limits to the general public, where the same can costs less than half as much.

       Nearby is the latest posting of the Wal-Mart stock price, along with a sign telling employees, who probably have the stock in their retirement plans, that the future number is up to them. Watching how the price has risen, I’d say the company could sell a bundle of the stuff if it was available along one of the aisles. “Stack it high, stack it deep, hear those downtown merchants weep. Stack it deep, stack it high, hear those downtown merchants cry.” Maybe in the same aisle as the plastic containers.

 

 

       A sure sign that summer is ending: fewer Japanese beetles. When THEY decide to bug out, you know the really bad stuff is coming.

 

 

       Recent research has proven that obesity damages the brain. Which probably contributes to the poor choices that continue or increase obesity. If you rarely leave the Rutland area, be assured that other areas, too, have people heaving from one place to another despite a profundity of rotundity. My wife, than whom I know no observer with a better eye for detail, says that in old yearbook pictures, you never saw fat people, except the few who clearly had something wrong with them. As we used to say at Otter Valley, this country is cruising for a bruising.

 

 

THOUGHTS ON WOODSTOCK

 

THOUGHTS ON WOODSTOCK

 

       I didn’t go, though one of my brothers did. There was no sense at the time of it having been an epochal event. I did go to the Highgate Grateful Dead concert, with my 15-year-old son; afterward, we did father and son reports on it for the Valley Voice in Middlebury, with Damon, aka The Cub Reporter, reviewing the music and me talking about the event generally. Wouldn’t trade that one.

 

       The Monterey Pop Festival, which preceded Woodstock, had better music. Rent the video, if only for Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar.

 

When you hear announcements of media retrospectives preceded by someone singing “I’m going up country, baby do you want to go,” remember that in the original, one of the more inaensitive of the old blues songs, the next words are “May take me a high brown, may take one or two more.” “High brown,” like “high yaller,” was code for a woman who had higher status among the black men at the time because she was only fractionally black and showed it in her skin color. Arguably, the lyrics were more of a political statement than anything about women, because it was as close as a black man could come at the time to singing, “I’m just as good as a white man, and I have a white woman who knows it.”

       There’s another blues song, “France Blues,” that edges even closer. It starts as a lament for the death of the singer’s beloved, then veers off, as blues lyrics often did, into other territory. Why the odd title? Because one verse says, “When I die, gonna go by Paris, France…Just want to give those girls a chance.” One of this country’s great milestones in civil rights, though you will never find this in high school history texts, came in World War One, when black soldiers on leave in Paris discovered that the white prostitutes not only didn’t reject them, but sometimes even sought them out. Was Woodstock as important historically as this?

 

       A mystery: I’ve heard supposed recordings of Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock in which the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” is proceeded by the “Fish Cheer.” Country Joe steps up to the microphone and yells “Give me an F!” and a hundred thousand minds instantly realize all that comes next, having been to all those high school games where the cheerleaders megaphoned “Give me a T! E! A! M! What’s that spell?” “Team!” “What’s that spell?” “Team!” “What’s that spell?” “Team!” “Go, team, go!” The recent versions continue with I-S-H, and it’s the Fish Cheer.

       But the first vinyl recordings told a different story. Country Joe’s next words are, “Give me a U!” and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about the rest. “What’s that spell?” You don’t have to have been through the Sixties to imagine, but if you were part of those times, you know. And you realize that, with the media rules we have now, there is not the same freedom of speech. That’s what comes first, children, freedom of speech. Look it up: The Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio at the University of California at Berkeley, signaled the transition from civil rights to The Movement, which was only fractionally the anti-war movement.

       While I was in college, the great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes came to the literary society, and afterward their magazine carried an interview. He said, in effect, “You have no idea what it is like to be responsible for telling the real history of your people, in your fiction, because the official versions are lies.” Ironically, he said that during an era which has since been distorted and demonized so as to blot and blur and block its insights and experiments and prototypes and deny them to future generations.

 

       When the first vinyl recording came out, I listened to get some idea of what I had missed. I reached the point where Sly and the Family Stone transition into a bass line worthy of Bach’s C Minor Passacaglia, and Sly starts singing “I want to take you higher!” and the crowd shouts back “Higher!” It wasn’t about drugs—well, yes, it was, but it was also about a lot more, of which the drugs were only symbols, and sometimes a gateway. I started crying, thinking to myself, “We gave up this in favor of spending the political capital from World War Two on someone else’s civil war.”

 

       Gone but not entirely, like something waiting to go viral again. I think of the TV ad for the Olympic Games whose soundtrack was Jimi Hendrix starting the National Anthem on his guitar, establishing his mastery in six notes while saying, “Something great is about to happen.”  And saying, in a way that only music could, “In spite of our differences, we are all Americans together.”

        

       

WHY STUDY ENGLISH?

WHY STUDY ENGLISH?

        This morning my wife said, “Yesterday I got two message at work saying  my email-box was full.” After I stopped laughing, she went on to describe some online incidents that were breathtakingly scary.

       After she did not click on either of those messages, later in the day she got one from the Middlebury College Help Desk saying her email address had been used to send spam—click here to find out more about it. She didn’t bite for that one, either. She has seen phishing scam artists produce nearly perfect imitations of supposedly official communications, such as one from the President and Fellows of Middlebury College.

       But—and here is the point—the English usage wasn’t right. Being the President’s receptionist, she knows how such a message would read, and this one smelled, well, phishy.

       So there you are, all you high school kids asking “Why do we have to read this novel?” and “Why is it important for us to know grammar?” (by which they usually mean usage) and so on. A true, deep, fluent knowledge of your native language may be the only barrier between escaping and falling victim to fraud. For you kids who have an advanced understanding of English already, it’s worth pointing out that you will have to evaluate people you meet hundreds, thousands of times in your life, and how they use spoken or written English will tell you worlds about where someone came from and where they’re going.

       If you happen to be a strong Christian believer, this does not exempt you from the task of weighing in the balance the people you encounter, in life or online. Go to the Old Testament and reread the story about using the word “shibboleth” as a way of detecting enemy infiltrators. Same difference when you get an email message saying “This job made just 4U!” or “your email address as indicated was drawn and attached with serial numbers xxxyyyzzzz” to make you a winner or…or go to Scambusters, which also has a section on Urban Legends. It will make you a believer, or it won’t.

       The day may come when subtleties of language use are one of the few remaining ways of determining whether or not your interlocutor is robotic.

       The few of you students with the potential to become contributors to the state and estate of your native or chosen language probably need no convincing. After all, why NOT hone one’s skills at using humanity’s most complex and powerful tool?

 

 

 

REMEMBERING MCNAMARA

REMEMBERING MCNAMARA

        The recent death of Robert McNamara, who was so influential in setting the course of the Vietnam War and regretted it so much so much later, reminded me of his appearance on my college campus in the fall of 1966. At that point I had still not made up my mind about favoring or opposing the war, partly because I had a student deferment, but mainly because I had been briefed on the subject by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So was everyone else at American Legion Boys Nation, thanks to the clout of the veterans’ organization. Not long ago, I bought a set of CDs about Vietnam that proved to be American propaganda films of the era: a peaceful democracy in the south of Vietnam had been invaded by the godless Communist North, and we were there to help those good people defend themselves. As at the Pentagon briefing, films showed the might of American power, especially air power. How could a primitive country like North Vietnam defeat us?

But some of my Harvard classmates—the most perceptive and thoughtful of them, not the slugs—were vehemently opposed to our position in the conflict. I was keeping my eyes and ears open, still trying to make up my mind, when McNamara’s visit was announced. I went to hear him and to see what would happen.

       A crowd surrounded his car as it went near  Quincy House, one of the places where upperclassmen lived and ate and socialiazed.  Protestors blocked his progress, with some yelling “Down in front!”  and others immediately sitting in front of the car with a speed that showed how much the antiwar movement owed to prior experience in the civil rights movement (a connection I have yet to see adequately explored). To his credit, at one point McNamara climbed on top of his car and did his best to conduct a dialogue with the protestors, but the concerns went deeper than any discussion could have addressed.

       From the windows of the multistory building, students had hung sheets painted with slogans, so that the façade had become a gigantic poster. “Stop the War,” “Peace Now,” and so on were the most common, but off in one corner, some irrepressible wag had hung out a sheet saying, with true Harvard skeptical wit, “Black Day for Gordon Linen.”

       The films “Inside North Vietname” and “In the Year of the Pig,” finally swung me to the antiwar side, especially the latter. Independent, financially independent filmmaker Emile de Antonio ferreted out, through interviews, that the Gulf of Tonkin incident upon which American intervention was based had been a complete fabrication—among many other perceptive observations. For anyone wishing to gather a comprehensive view of the domestic front during the Vietnam War, I cannot recommend this film too highly.

       But for me, the turning point came on April 15, 1967, in New York City, during the protest march to the United Nations headquarters called by its organizers “The Bread is Rising.”

       I rode a bus down and joined the marchers, not to protest but to observe. On one side I saw thoughtful, caring people exercising their rights to assembly and free speech; lining both side of the street, I saw the face of Homicidal America, red-faced, screaming obscenities, ready to rush into the street and attack had not the police been there to intervene.

       Back on campus, I told friends, “I may not know all the arguments, but now I know which side I’m on.”

       One more memory: in one of the bookstores around Harvard Square, I believe in 1968, I saw a Folkways record “Vietnam Will Win,” and bought it. The title came from the material: songs from North Vietnam, gathered during the war. It’s still available, through Smithsonian Folkways.

       I expected Communistic marching songs and patriotic anthems, but found instead folk music. A few expressed determination to fight, in a way that presages the later Vietnamese victory (does anyone know what “Eh-way tah! Eh-way tah!” means?)

       But the track that stuck in my mind was a slow, melancholy song that seemed to express how much had been lost, not how much could be won. Even now, a half century, later, the strangeness of the paradox continues: the song that brings back to me that era most strongly is a Vietnamese lament, whose words I do not know, but which I do not need to know.