Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Looking down on bikes from the Tower of Babble


This is America. This is 2013. Everybody's a radical.

Especially our dominant stripe of "conservatives."

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the kind of radicalism I'm talking about like this:
b : favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions
c : associated with political views, practices, and policies of extreme change
For all of human history, mankind has had to recognize a simple constant -- there are limits. To everything. We are not gods, though some have aspired to the job, and though over millennia we have managed to expand our human ones, the expansion has come at great cost, and that expansion of limits has not meant elimination thereof. 

Like many of their party cohorts, a couple of "conservative" Republican candidates for mayor of Omaha never got the memo about the limitations inherent to the human condition. Apparently, Dan Welch and Dave Nabity think Almighty God has decreed that Americans have a limitless right to burn limitless amounts of petroleum in a limitless number of automobiles on a limitless expanse of concrete and asphalt.

IN A political culture as deeply silly and shallow as our own, this inevitably leads to an assault on . . . bicycle lanes. Do reporters at the Omaha World-Herald even try to keep a straight face when covering politicians exercised over the Civic Menace of Bicycle Lanes? God, I couldn't. 
The Omaha mayoral candidates were all over the road Tuesday on those two big-city issues, with several questioning the wisdom of Mayor Jim Suttle's decisions to hire a bike czar and to develop bike lanes downtown.

Republicans Dan Welch and Dave Nabity both criticized Suttle for parts of his bike initiatives, including the hiring of a czar from California for $65,000.

“Not wise,” said Welch.

“Out of touch,” said Nabity.

Both men questioned the bike lanes. Welch said he drives Leavenworth Street every day and believes that the lanes are tough on traffic.

“I haven't seen a bike yet, but we're backing up traffic,” Welch said.

Nabity agreed: “It was a lot of energy about something that wasn't really moving the ball down the field.”

Suttle, the only Democrat in the race, stood by his bike-friendly initiatives.

He said that when he became mayor, he decided to adopt an all-inclusive transportation policy that took into consideration all modes of movement, including foot traffic, trolleys, buses and bikes.
I GUESS nothing screams "raging irresponsibility" like making an effort to reduce the amount of complex hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide we daily spew into the atmosphere over our fair city, save a bit of money we'd otherwise be dumping into our gas tanks, conserve a limited natural resource and burn a few pounds off of our limitless backsides.

For the sin of championing conservation, Jim Suttle has earned the ire of self-proclaimed "conservative" mayoral candidates, pontificating from their political towers of Babble and apparently as in love with the notion of the human ego unrestrained by notions of excess or modesty as the most committed utopian revolutionary.

All you need is gas.

Make cars, not bikes.

Power to the Porsche.

Because that's how we roll.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Andy Taylor is dead, and I'm feeling nervous


It's becoming an annual event, and it needs an official name.

How about the (Fill-in the blank) Annual Omaha Police Excessive-Force Festival. Below is a bit of the World-Herald article on the latest in what's become a long line of incidents where local cops seemed hellbent on escalating a minor deal into a WWE smackdown.

Oh. . . . Seven words: Twelve cop cars for a parking dispute.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer on Friday temporarily reassigned an officer involved in the arrest of three men whose relatives allege the use of excessive force by police.

Schmaderer, who also ordered an internal investigation, and other police officials watched a video of the arrest posted on YouTube, according to a police statement issued Friday.

The video shows officers near 33rd and Seward Streets just before 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

Officers were there to investigate a parking complaint. The incident quickly escalated, with about a dozen police vehicles responding. It ended with the arrest of three brothers.

Police and a family member gave different accounts of what happened.

Officers said they were impounding vehicles with expired license plates when Octavious Johnson, 28, pulled up at a high rate of speed in front of the officers.

Johnson was “argumentative and aggressive'' and had to be wrestled to the ground by an officer to be arrested, according to a police report.

The video shows another officer assisted in subduing and handcuffing Johnson. Later, it appears that one officer strikes Johnson three times.

Officers also can be heard on the video yelling at a second man on the sidewalk.
 
After that man — Juaquez Johnson, Octavious's 23-year-old brother — went inside a nearby house, several officers raced after him. Officers came back outside with him and the third brother, Demetrius Johnson, 22.

The police report indicates the officers who initially responded were Matthew Worm, Dyea Rowland and Bradley Canterbury, though the specific role each played was not clear. None was placed on administrative leave. One of the officers was reassigned until the investigation concludes, a police spokeswoman said. She declined to identify the officer.

Sharon Johnson, the men's aunt, told The World-Herald that Juaquez Johnson had been filming the incident as it unfolded and was told by police to stop. He ran inside the house to get away from them, and they followed to get the video, she said.

Juaquez Johnson didn't post the video on YouTube. The video posted there was shot by a neighbor from an upstairs window across the street.

Sharon Johnson, 45, who uses a wheelchair, said as one officer ran onto the front porch he knocked into her. She said the wheelchair fell backward, and she hit her head.

“My legs were up in the air, and my head hit the ground,” Johnson said. She said the family planned to file a formal complaint with the Police Department.
OF COURSE, we don't know exactly what happened here. And, of course the local police union wants everybody to hold their horses . . . and withhold judgment.

"The most responsible course of action at this point is patience," was the word from the Omaha Police Officers Association. "Let the investigation run its course." This came at the end of a blog post pointing out that incriminating videos sometimes mislead.

Obviously, we also know the video looks bad for the cops. And, if you watch the whole thing, what one big-mouthed cop says might be more incriminating than what we actually see: "Why were you hiding behind your frickin' mom? Why were you hiding behind your frickin' mom? Why did I have to jump over a frickin' old lady to get to you?"

This kind of thing, unfortunately, has become a regular deal for Omaha cops.

We know that the Omaha police have in the past been awfully quick to beat the hell out of -- or shoot -- people first and then ask questions later. Search for the names Vivian Strong or Marvin Ammons. North Omaha burned after a cop shot Strong, a 14-year-old girl, in 1969. It got kind of dicey nearly 30 years later after police shot Ammons for, as it turned out, having a cell phone in  his hand.

We also know that Omaha police officers have been fired -- or worse -- on a more-or-less regular basis for excessive force or after allegations of criminal activity. And we know that the police union only is satisfied with "letting the investigation run its course" if the chief finds that the officers in question were as pure as the driven snow.



INVESTIGATIONS that run their course and result in an officer's sacking for cause are "politically motivated" and the union will move heaven and earth to overturn them. So pardon my skepticism, and pardon my belief that there's more than a even chance that what looked bad on video was as bad -- or worse -- in person.

A lack of public trust in a police force -- no matter how justified or unjustified it might be -- comes from somewhere. I suggest that Omaha police look within themselves and consider just why that might be.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Go (to) Big Red!

  
If your university is going to do a social-media campaign to create a little buzz and enhance the ol' profile, you just as well have a little fun with it. YOLO!

Wait a sec . . . I'm not sure I used "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) correctly. What University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman is doing here isn't dumb at all. (See the YouTube video. Ol' Harv has a point on that particular catchphrase.)

What's a delightful surprise in these UN-L videos is this: The chancellor, 71, is a funny, funny guy. Not only in front of the camera, but as a writer, too. He rewrote everything that the ad agency and university marketing staff put before him, and if it says it in the Omaha World-Herald, it must be so.

Or good enough for newspaper work.
The “Perls of Knowledge” spots have been tweeted and re-tweeted and re-re-tweeted. The ad campaign has gotten a mountain of free publicity, courtesy of media outlets from Sioux City to San Francisco and from Columbus, Ind., all the way to China.

The jury is out on whether “Perls of Knowledge” will result in more students for UNL — Perlman, when he's not fighting zombies, has vowed to get UNL's current enrollment of 24,207 to a nice round 30,000 in the next four years.

But what seems clear is this: For $40,000, a tiny fraction of the university's marketing budget, UNL has gotten the kind of publicity that most wannabe Carly Raes — and most universities — would kill a whole zombie army for.

“It worked because of (Perlman's) really bitey sarcasm,” says Dan Kohler, UNL's senior assistant director for digital marketing and the aforementioned 27-year-old. “The tone actually speaks well to a younger generation ... and it's packaged in a way that takes a traditional brand and throws it into this very nontraditional environment.”

I figured I would pull back the curtain on “Perls of Knowledge” and learn that the chancellor was just a glorified prop in this digital marketing strategy, a willing and able participant in an experiment hatched and run by people younger than I am.

But the real story is stranger: Perlman himself came up with the general idea. He enlisted allies, including Amber Hunter, UNL's admissions director, and Kohler.

“He had been paying more attention to pop culture, spending more time with the admissions office — we're one of the youngest offices on campus — and asking a lot of questions,” Hunter says. “A lot of this comes from him just trying to understand how we could share something all over the country.”

They brought in Archrival, a Lincoln marketing firm that cultivates an edgy reputation.

Archrival employees and UNL's five-person digital marketing staff together wrote the video's scripts. And then Perlman took those scripts with him on a long, long flight to China. When he came home, he had rewritten every last one.

On taping day, Perlman nailed most of the scripts with one or two takes.

“He's a pretty funny guy,” admits Clint! Runge, Archrival's creative marketing director and a man with a “!” purposefully embedded in his first name.
 THE CHANCELLOR, as I said, is a funny guy. Dryly hilarious, even.

Almost as funny as putting an exclamation point behind your first name. YOLO!

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Nostra culpa, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa


Well, I think Pat Buchanan certainly summed up the Iraq War pretty thoroughly on the 10th anniversary of its start:
So, how now does the ledger read, 10 years on? What is history’s present verdict on what history has come to call Bush’s war?

Of the three goals of the war, none was achieved. No weapon of mass destruction was found. While Saddam and his sons paid for their sins, they had had nothing at all to do with 9/11. Nothing. That had all been mendacious propaganda.

Where there had been no al-Qaida in Iraq while Saddam ruled, al-Qaida is crawling all over Iraq now. Where Iraq had been an Arab Sunni bulwark confronting Iran in 2003, a decade later, Iraq is tilting away from the Sunni camp toward the Shia crescent of Iran and Hezbollah.

What was the cost in blood and treasure of our Mesopotamian misadventure? Four thousand five hundred U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded and this summary of war costs from Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

“The decade-long [Iraq] effort cost $1.7 trillion, according to a study … by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Fighting over the past 10 years has killed 134,000 Iraqi civilians … . Meanwhile, the nearly $500 billion in unpaid benefits to U.S. veterans of the Iraq war could balloon to $6 trillion” over the next 40 years.

Iraq made a major contribution to the bankrupting of America.

As for those 134,000 Iraqi civilian dead, that translates into 500,000 Iraqi widows and orphans. What must they think of us?

According to the latest Gallup poll, by 2-to-1, Iraqis believe they are more secure — now that the Americans are gone from their country.

Left behind, however, is our once-sterling reputation. Never before has America been held in lower esteem by the Arab peoples or the Islamic world. As for the reputation of the U.S. military, how many years will it be before our armed forces are no longer automatically associated with such terms as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions and waterboarding?

As for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christian communities of Iraq who looked to America, they have been ravaged and abandoned, with many having fled their ancient homes forever.

We are not known as a reflective people. But a question has to weigh upon us. If Saddam had no WMD, had no role in 9/11, did not attack us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us, was our unprovoked attack on that country a truly just and moral war?
THERE'S NOT really anything to add to this, is there? Except that a lot of us -- me included -- should have learned our lesson after Vietnam. But no . . . we f***ed up. We trusted our government.

The degree of the catastrophe we set in motion a decade ago wasn't exactly the sort of "shock and awe" we were counting on, now, was it? May God forgive us, because He's the only one who probably has it in Him.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

It is finished . . . enough

After a couple of months of work, worry, planning, painting and stringing lots and lots of audio cable, here it is.

Welcome to the newly remodeled and reimagined 3 Chords & the Truth studio. It's all done, right down to a new office chair. Comfy, it is.

The only thing left to do -- apart from catching up with a decade's worth of advancements and changes to the audio-editing program I use (changing from Windows to Mac meant getting the new OS X version of Adobe Audition) -- is getting the old reel-to-reel deck fixed up right and returned to the studio. Other than that . . . we're back in bidness. The Big Show will resume presently.

Pretty spiffy, isn't it?


WHILE Y'ALL are looking at the pictures of your Mighty Favog's remodeling handiwork . . .



. . . your Mighty Favog is going to go take a nap.

Or something.


FINALLY, here's another look at what used to be but is no more, thanks be to God.

And Lowe's.

And several electronics and computer vendors. Nighty night.

Friday, March 01, 2013

This is not the end.


But I can see being done from here, despite losing most of a week to a nasty, nasty winter cold. (I don't think I've ever had a "slight cold" in my life; I get Almost the Flu or nothing at all.)

Anyway, most of the furniture refurbishing and "repurposing" is done. I'm painting the last piece that needs painting now.

Don't ask about getting it out of where it was and getting it to where it is.

After the furniture phase is done comes the wiring of the studio equipment phase. No, bringing you 3 Chords & the Truth is no job for wimps . . . or the technically challenged.

Hang on a sec -- one of my favorite songs is playing on WSM right now. "Aimee" by Pure Prairie League. Yay.

OK, I'm back. And that's about it for now concerning the Great Remodeling.

Aloha.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

In the ghetto


The account of Baton Rouge's latest murder was brief and routine -- as brief as the lives of too many young black men and as routine as fatal shootings have become in my hometown.

It went like this in the Sunday paper:
Baton Rouge police found the body of a male late Saturday after responding to a call of shots fired on Geronimo Street, a news release says.

Officers received the call about 11:45 p.m. Saturday that shots were being fired on Geronimo Street, near Mohican Street, Capt. Dwayne Bovia said in the news release.

They found the body of a black male in a grassy area in the 3800 block of Geronimo Street, the release says.

Police did not provide the name or any other information about the victim.
JUST ANOTHER nothing story about the mundane destruction of human life and entire worlds. Entire worlds? Yes, entire worlds.

Naturally, you have the destroyed world of yet another destroyed inner-city neighborhood, and you have the destroyed world of deviance and death that its inhabitants must somehow navigate against all odds.

Then, you have the destroyed civic world of a city where murder is so routine as to barely be noticed by the daily newspaper. If it's true, as the Talmud says, that "Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world," what's to be said about a place as deadly as Baton Rouge?

What's to be said about the destruction of the world of every Baton Rougean who beholds this mundane obliteration of worlds and thinks "Meh." Or that it's just another day in the 'hood, what are you going to do?

How can we think of apathy, think of acceptance in the face of everyday death and creeping urban moonscapes as anything but the view from a destroyed world?

Me, I saw this little item and once again was reminded of the destruction of part of my world -- or at least its passing away decades ago. On Geronimo Street.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Waiting for the paint to dry

That's pretty much it, the headline on this post.

I'm sitting here in the big blue chair, drinking Community coffee, listing to BBC Radio 2 on the Internets . . . and writing this on the Surface as I wait for the paint to dry on the former dining room table that's being repurposed for the remodeled 3 Chords & the Truth studio. 

The pictures tell the story. We're getting there.

I rather like the studio curtains, don't you?

Monday, February 18, 2013

I. Hate. Painting.


But, in the ongoing remodel of the 3 Chords & the Truth/Revolution 21 production studio, the painting is done. Alas.

Eventually, these 60-something-year-old wood windows will be replaced; they're fairly well shot. Still, they got a coat of paint -- it may help hold them together for a while longer, who knows?


THE IMPORTANT thing here is that, throughout the whole process, the Wi-Fi never went out. That took a little doing, it did, keeping the Internet plugged in. Yay, me!


DID I mention that I hate painting?

Of course, I'm now moving on to painting the parts of the studio furniture, old and new, that need painting or repainting. One piece that's already fallen under the brush, however, has gotten the coveted Mrs. Favog Seal of Approval.

So, there's that, at least.

Monday, February 04, 2013

Good Lord


Yes, I'm still here. No, I haven't quit the blogging thing or the 3 Chords & the Truth thing.

It's just that this studio-remodeling thing has taken on, to use an overused term, "a life of its own." This, actually, is kind of an understatement.

Please help.

For one thing, the amount of sheer stuff  I had accumulated in there over the years. Scores of old reel-to-reel tapes, for example -- many of them historical treasures from the 1940s and '50s. Man, did I underestimate the process of cleaning it out.

THAT, I don't dare pitch into the trash. Webcor "Electronic Memory" Recording Tape, you are safe . . . as are the 50-something-year old wonders hidden in your ferrite coating.

Anyway, the room now is empty. The walls have been washed and spackled. So has the ceiling.

And the dirty old drapes are gone. And the floor has been rejuvenated. And the light fixture has been replaced. Much cursing was done in the process.

Fortunately, electrocution was avoided.
 

MEANTIME, the new iMac waits in its carton. As do all other manner of gadgetry.

The old production PC sits, unhooked, on a cabinet in the middle of the dining room. I write this on my Microsoft Surface tablet.

Now comes the painting. Stay tuned, folks. We're getting there.

Friday, January 25, 2013

The golden age of local television

Here's your media geekery du jour. Why don't we call it something pithy yet classy?

Something like "The Golden Age of Local," courtesy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

God, I love this stuff.
Loveitloveitloveitloveitloveit.

Honest to God. As if you couldn't tell.

In other words, sometimes just one blog post on this level of coolness just isn't enough. I mean . . .  GADGETS!
Cool old gadgets!

Artifact on artifacts


The journalism building at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is something of a shrine to one-time tools of the trade, both print and broadcasting.

A museum, actually. One spread throughout the college, amid the classrooms and conference rooms and broadcast-production studios and computer labs. Turn one corner and there's a vintage RCA TK-30 black-and-white camera from the early days of television.

Like this one, dating from between 1946 and 1950.

Turn another corner, there's a wire recorder and a turntable that cuts transcription discs. And then there's that vintage television transmitter (?!) against a wall of the basement lecture hall.

But what had me reaching for the Geritol was how bloody many "museum pieces" I actually have used at some point. Before they were exhibit fodder.

NOT ONLY that, I own and still use a not-insignificant number of things in the Nebraska journalism-college exhibit.

That TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder below is newer than the one I salvaged from an estate sale and still use -- which is much like what passed for "state of the art" when I was learning the craft of radio in high school.


I AM NOT sure what that says about me. Probably nothing good.

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Going . . . going . . . going. . . .


This is the studio where 3 Chords & the Truth is recorded. Or, was the studio as of last week.


Here's the same studio a day ago as the deconstruction and remodeling proceeded . . . deliberately. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Honestly, the crap I've had to take apart. The cables I've had to clean and neatly bundle. 


The books and knickknacks I've had to box up and store. The stuff I've had to knock apart and move out.

The vacuuming! Oy!


Which leads us to today. It's getting there -- or not there, as the case may be.

Deliberately, alas.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Talk about the penalty box. . . .


I know there's some truth in the one-liner "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out," but isn't it assuming the worst to play your games at the county jail? I mean, really.

Yes, I realize having your penalty box be maximum security has its benefits -- chief among them savings in transportation costs and crowd control -- but we must remember these are college kids, not hardened NHL types. Couldn't the University of Nebraska at Omaha at least play hockey at a halfway house or something?

I'm surprised no one has pointed out to playing home games at the "clink" no doubt will be an ongoing public relations disaster for the university and the state. Frankly, it puzzles me that other schools agree to play inside a maximum-security corrections facility.

What? What about a missing hyphen?

It should read "C-Link," as in the CenturyLink Center downtown? That's very different, then.

Never mind.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

The constitutional right to bear nukes?


There seems to be a revolutionary fringe in this country -- one most recently animated by President Obama's modest proposals on gun control -- that is so far beyond being capable of engaging with reason in a reasonable manner that these folks probably couldn't even engage with Uncle Earl, Louisiana's late Gov. Earl K. Long.

Still, futile as it might ultimately prove with folks who have effectively careened into being anarchists, you've got to try.

Gun nuts and nullificationists and armchair revolutionaries, this is for you, taken from the biography of the arch-segregationist, anti-federal government Plaquemines Parish president, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta:
But, because conservative principles were more important to him than party loyalty, he opposed every Democratic presidential nominee from Harry Truman in 1948 to Hubert Humphrey in 1968. The Judge was further frustrated by finding the Republican party too liberal for his taste, although he reluctantly supported Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956 and somewhat more enthusiastically backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. His political dogma was simple, unchanging and almost entirely negative: he opposed racial equality, federal ownership of tidelands oil resources, national welfare and public works programs, socialism in any form, and the mere existence of labor unions. Because the United States government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, to some extent endorsed all of these, Leander became an indomitable foe of federal power in any form. Although he concentrated authority entirely in his own hands in Plaquemines, he denounced every vestige of centralized power in the national government. His antipathy toward Washington became so notorious that Earl Long once asked, "Whatcha gonna do now, Leander? The feds have got the atom bomb."

Friday, January 18, 2013

The prophet was a soldier

"Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves and incite them to rise up and kill their masters; I know this is a delusion—but when people believe a delusion they believe it harder than a real fact and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live."
-- William Tecumseh Sherman, 1860


You knew William Tecumseh Sherman was a great Union general. You know what he did when he marched through Georgia, and you might even know that in the process, he invented modern "total" warfare.

But did you know that the general was also a prophet? That months before Louisiana's P.G.T. Beauregard set his Confederate batteries upon federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Sherman told his wife in Ohio and a secessionist Louisiana friend that there would be a war, why there would be a war, what would start the war and where it would start. Everything came to pass just as he said it would.

In December 1860, the founding superintendent of the fledgling Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, known today as Louisiana State University, sat down to pen a note to his little daughter Minnie back home in Lancaster. It begins with a papa telling his little one about their new house in Louisiana. It ends as a very grown-up lecture on the cold, hard facts of life.

Sherman writes another note to Mrs. Sherman, telling her his letter to Minnie drifted into something more appropriate for her, adding that she should just read what she saw fit to their little girl. Then, he added this:
There is an evident purpose, a dark design, not to allow time for thought and reflection. These southern leaders understand the character of their people and want action before the spirit subsides. Robert Anderson commands at Charleston, and there I look for the first actual collision. Old Fort Moultrie, every brick of which is as plain now in my memory as the sidewalk in Lancaster, will become historical. It is weak and I can scale any of its bastions. If secession, dissolution and Civil War do come South Carolina will drop far astern and the battle will be fought on the Mississippi. The Western States never should consent to a hostile people holding the mouth of the Mississippi.
But, oh, what he earlier wrote to Minnie!
Alexandria, La.,
Dec. 15, 1860
Dearest Minnie,

I have been intending to write you a good long letter, and now I wish I could send you all something for Christmas, but I thought all along that Mama and you and Lizzie, Willie, Tommy, and all would be here in our new house by New Year's day. The house is all done, only some little painting to be done. The stable is finished, but poor Clay has been sick. . . In the front yard are growing some small oak trees, to give shade in the hot summer days; now however it is raw and cold, the leaves are off and it looks like winter, though thus far we have had no snow. Maybe we will have some snow at Christmas. In the back yard I have prepared for a small garden, but the soil is poor and will not produce much, except early peas, lettuce and sweet potatoes. The house itself looks beautiful. Two front porches and one back, all the windows open to the floor, like doors, so that you can walk out on the porch either upstairs or downstairs. I know you would all like the house so much - but dear little Minnie, man proposes and God disposes - what I have been planning so long and patiently, and thought that we were all on the point of realizing, the dream and hope of my life, that we could all be together once more in a home of our own, with peace and quiet and plenty around us. All, I fear, is about to vanish, and again I fear I must be a wanderer, leaving you all to grow up at Lancaster without your Papa.

Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves, and incite them to rise up and kill their masters. I know this is a delusion - but when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact, and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live. You cannot understand this but Mama will explain it to you. Our governor here has gone so far that he cannot change, and in a month maybe you will be living under one government and I another.

This cannot last long, and as I know it is best for you all to stay in Lancaster, I will not bring you down here at all, unless some very great change takes place. If this were only a plain college I could stay with propriety, but it is an arsenal with guns and powder and balls, and were I to stay here I might have to fight for Louisiana and against Ohio. That would hardly do; you would not like that I know, and yet I have been asked to do it. But I hope still this will yet pass away, and that our house and garden will yet see us all united here in Louisiana.


Your loving papa,
W. T. SHERMAN.

"WAR IS hell." Sherman told that to graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, recounting "cities and homes in ashes" and "thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies." Though he certainly knew it from his Louisiana days, maybe it was unnecessary then to belabor the point that war also destroys the fondest dreams of even its eventual winners -- really, more like its lesser losers.

That's a lesson we never learn, and everybody's always spoiling for a fight. Especially in the South. Especially now -- it's all over Facebook . . . if you dare go on Facebook anymore amid the latest existential conflict (gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre) swirling about President Obama like leaves caught in an autumn whirlwind.

"Men are blind and crazy . . . when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact." In other words, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." 


IT'S PROBABLY no historical accident that so much of This Present Nuttery has its genesis below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Having lived for a quarter century some 1,100 miles and a world away from the peculiar stew in which I was reared, I think I've gained a little perspective on my home state, Louisiana, and what we of a certain age were indoctrinated into as sons and daughters of the South. I have found that that perspective goes something like this: "Holy sh*t!"

In this angry day, during this troubled age, you could be forgiven for thinking nuttery has become the norm in America, and the vortex of the granola cyclone -- a perfect storm of nuts and flakes -- is moving slowly up the lower Mississippi River basin.

So, for all the secessionist, nullificationist, insurrectionist folks back home whose outrage has assaulted me at every cyber corner, I have just one more quote from LSU's founding father, W.T. Sherman. The then-superintendent of a little military academy delivered it, weeping, to his friend, Professor David F. Boyd:
You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don't know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing. . . . If you will have it, the North must fight you for its own preservation. Yes, South Carolina has by this act [its secession --R21] precipitated war. . . . This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the entire country, of every section and every man will be destroyed, and yet you know that within the Union no man's liberty or property in all the South is endangered. . . .

Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. . . .

You people speak so lightly of war. You don't know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war of sickness than are killed in battle.At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people. . . .

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight, too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. . . .

The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth -- right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.
"WITH A bad cause to start with." You could almost forget we're talking about an anguished warning on Dec. 24, 1860, and think the future general was trying to talk some sense into today's laptop revolutionaries, heat-toting gun nuts, and the seceders, nullifiers, Obama-impeachers and insurrection-seekers who love them.

In a lot of ways, America today is as much a powder keg as it was in 1860. And just like 1860, there is no shortage of people, with hotheaded Southerners in the forefront, pitching lit matches in the arsenal door.

Eventually, someone will light the right match in the wrong spot, and something's gonna blow. And there will be blood.

Because some people never learn.