Another thinker moment from the BBC

An essay on this morning's broadcast of BBC's "From Our Own Correspondent" described two back to back political protests in Egypt. The first was led by moderate academics from Cairo University who called for more political freedoms and less corruption. It attracted about 50 protestors and about five times as many riot police. The second protest was composed of university students from the Moslem Brotherhood, an quasi-banned Islamic fundamentalist group that made gains in recent parlimentary elections. This rally drew 300 students to the square in front of Cairo University, who shouted similar reform slogans , but also held up copies of the Koran. Non-commital students watching from outside the ring of riot police criticized the first protest, stating that the academics were going too far, and also neglecting the importance of Islamic values.
That highly-organized, tightly-bonded hardline Islamic parties are winning elections and gaining supporters across a gradually awakening Middle East should not be a surprise. After all, the U.S. civil rights movement was led by African-American churches, and the ANC struggled for decades as a highly centralized and idealogical guerrilla organization before the collapse of South Africa's apartheid regime. The least corrupt, and most passionately organized groups will be the best at attracting followers who suddently find themselves free to hold political opinions. And in the Middle East, those parties are almost always religious. Policy planners who wished for agnostic political revolutions and election results in the Middle East similar to the hued models of Ukraine and Georgia forgot the vast differences between Kiev and Cairo.
But in a wink to real-politik, those Cairo protestors who adopted a religous mantle to their slogans also must realize that governments who require the backing of Muslim authorities to rule are much less likely to club and imprison moderate protestors holding up copies of the Koran than those holding up law books.
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Presidential sunset

Looking west from the hills above Santa Fe.






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Requiem for a device

The nearest thing to my pride and joy died last week: my Cowon iAudio U2 digital music player. It's demise was unexpected, and rather... shocking. You see, it was static electricity that did it in. I was listening to my Slate.com podcast while biking to work, with the iAudio u2 stashed safely in my coat pocket. Arriving at my office, I took of my coat and ZAP - the invisible voices were silenced forever. A rogue bolt of blue lightning turned my podcast carrier/voice recorder/airplane savior/sleek black beauty into a 0.8 oz. plastic paper weight. It was the battery, I think. It's lithium core jolted into blue jello by a few extra volts flowing the wrong direction. Damn this low-humidity, high-mountain air. No amount of firmware updating, reset-button pushing, or tech support harassing could bring it back. It was dead as Windows 98. I was pissed because not only did this device entertain me, but it was an invaluable work tool as well. I used it to record dozens of phone calls and interviews for Outside, and also to capture my family's old-time stories and histories at a December 2005 reunion. I used it often and therefore I miss not having it.
So last night I went on Amazon.com and bought a new digital music player. This new device runs on AA batteries. I hope it's more grounded.
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The Cartoon Riots

How can crudely drawn cartoons spark riots and demonstrations from London to Jakarta? It's easy, actually. After all, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which lasted for two years and killed thousands, is traced, at least in historical mythology, to ordinary bullet cartridges.
Once the Indian soldiers, known as Sepoys, discovered that the cartridges for their Lee-Enfield .303 rifles were coated in pig and beef grease--their British colonial masters were in deep trouble. The soldiers, after all, had to bite through the tops of the cartridges before loading them into their rifles. And for devout Muslims and Hindus, respectively, the fat of pigs and cattle is not something they should be chewing on. Not that the Lee-Enfield company really cared, though.
But ignorance, more than cartoons and bullets, is the real factor at play in the current outbursts and reactions over depictions of Mohammed. It's ignorance about how people live and what they believe. Freedom of press is as foreign to Iranian students as the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed are to a stockbroker in Chicago. And this ignorance allows radical leaders, especially in the cities where the riots have taken place, to exploit the mindless energy of the masses to consolidate their power, and improve their credentials. These leaders thrive in places where the young men lack both economic opportunity and a global comprehension--a description that can be applied to many big cities across the Middle East.
How big is the barrier between the West and the Islamic world? Won't globalization and the promise of democracy break down even that high wall? Today's cartoons show that these two worlds, increasingly intermingled, still know as much about each other as they did in the 19th century.
One ironic counter-example that reporters on the ground in Iran and Pakistan like to point out is that teenage protesters shout "Death to America" on the street, and then approach western journalists with whispered pleas to help them get a US visa. What does this show: Perhaps that many of the world's marginalized societies are hedging their bets--playing both radicalism and westernism to see which one will win. Plenty of Americans can relate--after all, even if we badmouth our boss to co-workers, we'll still kiss up to get a raise.
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Six more weeks of mild... spring?

Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is a long way from New Mexico, and so I don't fault Phil for today's forecast of a prolonged winter. Since we haven't had winter yet in Santa Fe, I imagine that we are in store for six more weeks of 55F days and cloudless blue skies.
But more seriously, the lack of snow (or of any precipitation) has increased fears that the national forests will be closed this spring and summer due to fire dangers. Two summers ago rangers blocked the road to ski basin--cutting off all access. So I am planning, with some co-workers, to do more hiking and camping in February and March--before the fire restrictions arrive. The nights might be a little chillier this early on--but the views will still be worth it.
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New addition - photo albums

I've begun to add my photo albums to this site -- starting with the Outside Magazine gear testing trip to the Grand Canyon last December. Check them out by clicking on the Albums button above.
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On the way to Montreal

Free Wifi Internet access in public places is still somewhere between a nice trick and a useful tool. The idea of sending e-mails from a lovely park in the center of a city is tantalizing - but when I am actually in that park and can send e-mail - I can think of a dozen other things I would like to do (including traditional park activities like people watching, and doing nothing).
So here I am in Albuquerque's airport (or, as they rightly call it, the "Sunport"), and I've sent a few e-mails to my co-workers about magazine stories I browsed in the book shop. I've also checked the New York Times headlines to read about Oprah's retraction, and President Bush's party photos with Jack. But now I'm ready to close my computer and pull out a magazine. After all -- I spend ten to twelve hours a day socketed into a high-speed Internet connection. Sometimes I relish the chance for a break.
On my way to Montreal for the weekend.
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The BBC's "From Our Own Correspondent"

Since I began "podcatching" a few months ago--that is, listening to podcasts downloaded from the Web, one of my favorites has become the BBC's "From Our Own Correspondent". For fifty years the "Beeb" has allowed its foreign reporters to let off steam or tell a story through these spoken-word personal essays. "FooC," as its fans like to call it, provides listeners with revealing, eye-level perspectives on regions of the globe where U.S.-based reporters never tread--the lost Hejaz railway in Arabia, a re-born school in Monrovia, the wind-swept Kazakh capital of Almaty, and the teeming streets of Mumbai. The world listens to these reports--one correspondent recalled being summoned to the office of the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir after he described her legs as "stumpy" in his FooC broadcast. I listen to the segments to keep up with news from around the world, and to discover good ideas for Outside magazine to cover. If you want to take a wider look around, check it out.
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A matter of altitude

On Saturday afternoon I played tennis outdoors and went skiing. Only in Santa Fe, I might add. The tennis courts sit on Old Taos Road, where the radio towers that mark the location of the ski mountain are visible 16 miles and 2,500 feet in elevation away. The winter sun, still strong even at its weakest angle, heats the town to over 50F degrees by noon and makes possible a quick tennis match. The same sun divides the ski runs into shadow and light, and warms the long, slow chair lift up the mountain. Lack of snow this year has allowed only the lower mountain to open, though the bright, balmy days have moved up spring skiing to January. More snow is forecast for tonight and tomorrow, and all skiers hope to wake to a white-shrouded world in the morning. But the last few weeks of unchallenged blue sky and sun -- and tennis and skiing in the same day -- have their appeal too.
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Starting to write

Now that writing has become something of an occupation for me, I've learned to ask other writers how they go about it. When faced with a blank computer screen or piece of paper--where do they go for the inspiration to fill it? What do the first random words of a 4,000 word article look like? Is it better to outline, or just dive into an opening scene? Do they need a deadline and a badgering editor, or can they write to completion on their own? I get dozens of different answers, although coffee shops, rough outlines, and harassing editors are common themes.
I'm facing one of those empty pages as I start a feature story on my family's farm in Pennsylvania. I try to think back to previous articles I wrote, but my memories of the first drafts are always swallowed up by the stronger impressions of the final revisions. I can never remember that magic moment when my sentences and paragraphs cease to be fragmented ambitions, and merge to become the hot, spinning core of a story. Each time, it seems, I must rediscover how to write.
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Always archiving

Growing up in Ohio, every Sunday night I would sit on the family-room floor and cut out stories from the three newspapers we received at home: the Hudson Hub-Times, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Sunday New York Times. By the time I graduated from high school I had assembled several thick folders of clippings--mostly about the church-state and First Amendment issues that rocked by hometown during those years, but also about important national issues like the Gulf War and the collapse of Communism. Nowadays I don't subscribe to a daily newspaper, so my kitchen scissors are replaced by digital cut 'n paste on my laptop. I maintain dozens of virtual folders stuffed with hundreds of articles on topics ranging from Science to Books/Literature to Media. I don't know why I collect these articles--I've referenced them only a few times over many years of archiving. But I still keep gathering them, perhaps adhering to the midwestern motto: "Might come in handy some day." So anytime I see an article on topics that interest me--from the evolutionary connections between animals through time, to analysis of important Supreme Court decisions--I always clip and save and wonder when I will use it again.
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Family land

Wednesday night my girlfriend Jackie and I drove over to western Pennsylvania to attend the Cramer family reunion, a gathering at the Fredonia, PA home of my Uncle Ed, who worked a cattle farm in the area for fifty years. There surrounded by cousins of all degrees and plates overburdened with delicious family recipies, I recorded hours of stories told about my father's family. Many of the tales recalled my great-grandfather Frank Austen Cramer--known to all as 'grandpap'--who was a man of tremendous strength and a skillfull axeman who ran a saw mill to put his three daughters (including my grandmother Martha) through school in the height of the Depression.
On Thursday we went driving with my Uncle Ed, who is now 91 years old, to visit several local cemeteries and sites like the one-room school house where my grandmother taught, and barns that my great-grandfather built. We also visited Ed's old farm, once a 120-acre cattle farm called Anterra where as a child I spent many holidays tromping the fields and plinking away with a .22 rifle , and now a rodeo and barrel-riding showplace with an 140,000 sq-ft arena.
Much of the history of my ancestors in this place is as weathered as the family gravestones and the caved-in barns, but I hope by writing that I can bring some of it back for the future generations.
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Second leg

I'm ready for the next destination of my winter travels today -- my homeland of northeast, Ohio. For this trip I'm loaded down with Christmas booty from New Jersey, including a ski bag in which the requisite skis make up about 2% of the bag's cargo. My family celebrated the first night of Hanukkah last night, and a shortened Christmas (literally, as our tree was 3 and 1/2 feet tall) and dangled with only a few of our kid-made ornaments. Now my whole family hits the skies for a day of international comings and goings, and one (mine) return to home.
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Packing magazines

My ammo for a circuitous flight home today is two New Yorkers, the latest Economist, and a Vanity Fair. I decided not to bring the book I am reading, The Path to Power, volume 1 of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, because a) it's heavy, and b) magazines make for better airplane reading than dense non-fiction. I'm enjoying the book, however, and gaining even more respect for Robert Caro's interview skills. The first few chapters are chock full of Johnson family anecdotes from the 1920s Texas Hill Country--stories that Caro pulled from now-elderly aquaintances of LBJ some fifty or sixty years later. Caro does seem to be attracted to the fault of egomania--first Robert Moses, now LBJ.
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Post holiday-party holiday

Isolation is actually a good thing about living in Santa Fe. All the New York City-based magazines get their holiday party fandangos broadcast the morning after on Gawker or in the NY Observer (Jann Wenner's roped-off table, etc). Our party, small but stylish at the Inn of the Anasazi last night, gets nary a nip in the local papers. Are we too boring? Perhaps. But I think it also shows that news can be created about anything--as long as there is a willing, reading, audience.
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Three homes in three different places

On Friday I go home to New Jersey for a quick day and a half with my parents before we all hit the skies again on Christmas day. I go to Akron, Ohio to stay with my girlfriend Jackie's family, while my folks head over the ocean to Australia. Since I was born and raised in Akron, my week in northeast Ohio will be like a second homecoming, including a visit to Hudson to see old high school friends. And then between Christmas and New Year's , Jackie and I will drive over to Pennsylvania for a family reunion in Greenville, the town where my father grew up and a place that imprinted strongly on me during numerous childhood trips to my Uncle Ed and Aunt June's farm. This part of western Pennsylvania is like a third home, including the rows of my ancestors laid out in Stevenson Cemetery, and the still-standing barns built by Grand'pap Cramer, my great-grandfather. I will be writing a story about my aunt and uncle's farm for Pennsylvania Magazine, trying to describe how strong foundations and a sense of place can make a home, and even many homes, possible.
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Going skiing this weekend

Real snow has finally come to Santa Fe, dusting the mountains above the city. But I am behaving like a spurned suitor and driving to Colorado for a weekend of skiing at Copper Mountain resort. Last night I found the right parts to fix my car-top ski carrier, so now my Subaru looks like the other 10,000 ski-equipped Subys in this town. I'll be back Sunday evening--a little wind-burned and hopefully in one piece.
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Chevron wants me to drive less.... huh?

Sitting down at breakfast this morning to read my latest issue of the Economist, I came across a full-page Chevron advertisement with an accusatory claim in bold: "You use 25 barrels of oil a year." and then the question, "So are you ready to do something about it?" The ad puzzled me, as why should Chevron care about energy conservation. The more gas I buy, the more money they make.
But since Chevron made a $3.6 billion profit in the third quarter of 2005, maybe they are getting sensitive about their image. These days I can't avoid these contradictory messages from Exxon-Mobil, ADM, Pharma, and Wal-Mart when I tune into NPR, PBS, or crack open a fresh New Yorker or Economist--these elite media outlets are bombarded with soothing Iago-like messages of corporate responsibility and good stewardship. If a person got all their information from these advertisements, they'd believe that Exxon-Mobil loves baby seals, Pharma cared about the uninsured, and Wal-Mart is the best thing for low-wage workers since the weekend.
Chevron has the best spin yet -- turn the responsibility for conservation back on us, the consumers. And they are partially right--resource conservation doesn't happen unless a critical mass of people buy into it. But the people who want to save the world are already doing it. To get the rest of the crowd to do it, you need leadership, innovation, and some dramatic steps by industry. A full-page ad in the Economist costs about $30,000 -- a small price for Chevron to pay to offset the billions it rakes in by doing business as usual.
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Added new blog feature to the site

I'm now importing a full-fledged blog into this Website--a nifty trick of the Internet that I don't fully understand, but am pleased that it works. If you want to add this capability to your Website, check out this informational site, and then go to this feed site to create the right script.
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The good thing about novels

Finished a novel last night, Swimming in the Volcano, by Outside correspondent Bob Shacochis. He gave it to me when I visited him at his northern NM off-the-grid writing cabin. I read fiction rarely, about one in every five or six books I pick up. It takes me a lot longer to read novels--those big purple passages, mind-bending flashbacks, and entourage of characters to keep track of. My mind is better wired for historical non-fiction, tying old facts onto new ones to create a stronger knot of events. But history books never supply the same satisfaction as a novel when the final page turns over--a World War II book has a known ending, but a novel can curve into something so surprising that it can take a day to absorb even after the last words are read. That's what it was like with Swimming in the Volcano, a part of me is still marooned on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Catherine, wondering what will happen next.
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