Last month I submitted a letter to the editor, but Lancaster newspaper has so far declined to print it. The letter questions why Lancaster General Health doesn't provide domestic partner benefits for its employees--and suggests that it is placing itself at a competitive disadvantage by not doing so. Here is the text of the letter:

Dear Editor:
Lancaster General already dominates county healthcare, but its leaders aren’t content. Newspaper reports tell us they want to build a medical school and add more residency programs. Even for a heavy-hitter like LGH, achieving those goals would be like moving from the minor leagues to the majors. Is LGH ready to advance? Not yet, and here’s why.

All of the region’s teaching hospitals--Drexel, Hershey, UPenn, and Temple--provide health benefits to the domestic partners of their staff. In contrast, LGH offers nothing for domestic partners. According to the hospital’s rules, only spouses “as recognized in Pennsylvania,” are eligible for benefits.

So why and how do other medical schools and hospitals offer DP benefits? It’s simple. These institutions recognize that doing so makes them more competitive. And DP benefits aren’t limited to Philadelphia and Harrisburg--York Hospital offers them, too. To qualify, employees and their partners fill out an Affidavit of Domestic Partnership, a legal form that can be satisfied by a joint mortgage, a shared bank account, or the mention of the partner in a will.

By rejecting DP benefits, LGH already faces a disadvantage in attracting and retaining top-notch students and staff. This weakness will only spread if LGH becomes a major teaching hospital and starts competing directly with regional powerhouses like Temple and Hershey. So before LGH unveils any new blueprints, they should add domestic partners as eligible dependents. Until they do, LGH will never compete in the big leagues.

Jason Stevenson
Lancaster, PA

No taxation without...

Early this November the Senate decided to ignore an attempt by Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) to add questions pertaining to citizenship and immigration status to the 2010 U.S. census. Including these new questions well after the questionnaire had been finalized would not only cost millions of dollars, but would likely decrease participation by legal immigrants and refugees. The later, of course, is what Vitter and Bennett were aiming for. Both come from states that could potentially lose--or fail to gain more--Congressional representation if all the residents of the states are counted. Plus, bashing illegal immigrants, and legal ones, too, is turning out to be a popular sport for Republicans running for re-election in 2010. I just have one reminder for Sen. Vitter and Sen. Bennett. It's an old phrase that they might remember from their American history lessons in elementary school. It's a saying that is fundamental to why America became an indepdendent nation. And, funny enough, it's an answer to one of the questions on the U.S. Naturalization exam--the test that immigrants take to become U.S. Citizens. That phrase, if you haven't guessed it already, is "No Taxation Without Representation." Because if Vitter and Bennet don't believe that legal and illegal immgirants deserve to be counted and to be represented in Congress, then I guess they don't want their tax dollars either. And I think Sam Adams would agree.

Letter published in the Lancaster Intelligencer-Journal, June 18th

Dear Editor,
Before the debate over health care reform spins out of control, let's make it personal. Ask yourself: 'What is my health care like?'
If you have employer-based health insurance--as 62 percent of Americans do--how much have your monthly premiums and co-pays risen in recent years? Here's a hint: They've nearly doubled the rate of inflation, and they'll keep going up.
If you buy your own health insurance--as about 5 percent of us do--how often have you been denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition or had trouble getting reimbursed?
If you use Medicare--which covers nearly every person over the age of 65--how concerned are you that your benefits will exist five years from now?
And if you don't have any health insurance--a fact of life for 46 million Americans, including 8 million children--when's the last time you had had preventative care like a cholesterol test or a mammogram, or saw doctor who wasn't in an emergency room?
Now ask yourself, 'Is this the health care system that America deserves?'
Right now, during President Obama's first year in office, we can solve the health care crisis by reducing unnecessary costs and providing care for everyone. Forget meddling bureaucrats. Forget greedy insurance firms. Forget politics. This should be about ensuring that babies are born healthier, adults can stay employed, and seniors can enjoy their retirement. Now is the time to demand real health care reform from our elected leaders, or we'll all get sicker together.
Jason Stevenson
Lancaster, PA

All modern speeches owe their greatness to one source

And that would be Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. No other speech is as recognizable for its clarity, strength, and symbolism as Lincoln's two-minute homily from 1863. That's why so many politicians like to borrow words, phrases, and even the cadence from that speech. Heck, even I used it as the basis for my campaign talk while running for National Honor Society president in high school. And it worked. I won.
President Obama followed the trend on June 5 when he spoke at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Here is part of his speech:

And it is now up to us, the living, in our work, wherever we are, to resist injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take, and ensure that those who were lost here did not go in vain. (2009)

Which sounds a lot like this section by Lincoln:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. (1863)

And then Obama cherry-picked this familiar phrasing as well:

It is up to us to redeem that faith. It is up to us to bear witness; to ensure that the world continues to note what happened here; (2009)

As Lincoln said 146 years earlier:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. (1863)

I bet $100 that Obama's chief speechwriter, Jon Favreu, has a well-thumbed copy of Lincoln: Speeches and Writings Vol. 2 in his suitcase. Or because he's a young guy, saved on his iPhone.

Did you hear the one about ol' Abe?

A newspaper article I recently read quoted a New Yorker article that claimed more than 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, our country's 16th president and original log-cabin hero. In the next week there likely will be 15,000 new articles (and perhaps a few more books) written about Lincoln as the 200th anniversary of this birth arrives on February 12th. Of the millions of words that will celebrate his life, I can predict that some of the most popular will be adjectives describing his character like "honest," "self-educated," "hard-working," "compassionate," and "solemn." One aspect of his personality, however, that most accounts will omit is Lincoln's love of a naughty joke. Abraham Lincoln--the savior of the Union, the American Moses, the politician with a poet's touch--was also a serious cut-up. Whether the joke was self-deprecating, or told at the expense of an unfortunate friend, or just a re-telling of an old country fable, Lincoln was as masterful at tavern humor as he was at speeches that thrummed with a Biblical cadence.
When he arrived to southern Illinois as a young man in search of a career, wealth, and acceptance, his reputation for telling stories won him many friends and invitations to gatherings. Years later, as a semi-established Illinois lawyer riding the circuit for many months out of the year, Lincoln would often entertain the other attorneys and judges at the end of each day with humorous anecdotes and stories. Occasionally he would deploy these stories in his arguments before a judge or jury, or mine his court experience as material for an anecdote (the one about the supposed horse expert who put his shirt on backwards comes to mind). And as president, Lincoln would often entertain a visitor or office-seeker with a story based on some aspect of their background or conversation, sometimes leaving these men bewildered by the casual and ribald nature of the nation's leader. It's easy to speculate that had he been influenced early on by a modern book or writer, or not turned to law and politics as a profession, Lincoln might have made a career as a mid-19th century frontier humorist like Mark Twain.
But where did Lincoln, who's melancholy spirit and bouts of serious depression are also well documented, find the source for his humor? And could a man who experienced so much tragedy in his life--the early loss of his mother, the death of two young sons, and a bloody civil war he felt responsible for ending--still be the one with the loudest laughter in the room? Lincoln himself answered that question head-on, and with his usual honesty. The occasion was a cabinet meeting in July 1862 when he unveiled his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. With his stern advisers assembled, and many of them in opposition to the proclamation, Lincoln began the meeting by reading aloud first one than another chapter of a humorous novel by Artemus Ward. None of the cabinet members laughed and several were clearly annoyed by his diversion, which caused Lincoln to cast the book on the table and exclaim, "Gentleman, why don't you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do."
If Lincoln could laugh, both at himself and the curious contradictions of his era, then I think that humor one more of his virtues that should be mentioned as often as his honesty. Being able to laugh at oneself, after all, indicates a degree of self-reflection and confidence that constant seriousness cannot match.

McCain's hero worship?

Dick Cheney = low. General David Petraeus = high. Wall Street bailout = low. Main Street rescue package = high. Political buzz words often have numbers attached to them. Not dollars and cents numbers, but approval/disapproval numbers. Because Dick Cheney's popularity rating is in the low double-digits, you'll see more Democrats than Republicans mentioning the Veep by name. He's a political third rail; invoke his name in a sentence, and the electorate's acceptance of whatever you're taking about (even giving free kittens to kids with cancer) will plummet. GOP pollster Frank Luntz wrote a whole book, Words That Work: It's Not What Your Say, It's What People Hear, about this strategy of using popular language to shape public opinion.
So when Alaska governor Sarah Palin drops the name of Gen. David Petraeus into every answer she gives on Iraq or the war on terror, it's not by accident. A Gallup poll conducted in September 2007, when Gen. Petraeus delivered his assessment on Iraq to Congress, found that Americans had a 61% approval rating of the general--far above the low 30's registered by President Bush at the same time.
But what I find troubling is the worshipful tones she and John McCain use to describe Gen. Petraeus. During the vice presidential debate she said, "I am thankful that that is part of the plan implemented under a great American hero, Gen. Petraeus." During Sen. McCain's convention acceptance speech he said, "[t]hanks to the leadership of a brilliant general, David Petraeus, and the brave men and women he has the honor to command." Midway through the first presidential debate, McCain said almost the same thing, calling Petraeus a "great general." But why stop there. During a July interview with Katie Couric McCain described the then commander in Iraq as "one of the great generals in history." Would Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, or Gen. Dwight Eisenhower (who McCain invoked with significant errors in historical fact during his opening statement at the first debate) care to object?
I am naturally wary of politicians who tie their political fortunes to the poll numbers of buzz words. But I am afraid of those leaders who attempt to chip away at the essential wall between civilian government and military war-fighting for political gain. Would a McCain-Palin administration find room for Gen. Petraeus in their cabinet? Probably. But by telegraphing those intentions so blatantly, McCain is blurring the boundary between the military's apolitical allegiance to the Constitution and the orders of the President and the gamesmanship of political campaigns. It's time for war hero McCain to stop his hero-worship of Gen. Petraeus for the benefit of the TV cameras.

Obama's Nigerian 419 problem

Have you ever received that email forward about Jay Leno's monologue on America's greatness? What about the one that claims funding for Sesame Street and NPR is under threat in Congress? And then there's the famous $250 Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe.
Like a deal that sounds too good to be true, 99 percent of all email forwards (and all three of the above examples) are completely false. And yet, just like Nigerian 419 scams, these forwards trick people into sending them on to friends. So often, in fact, that there's a website called Break the Chain set up specifically to debunk Internet urban legends.
Why do so many smart people who normally catch a friend's spoken lie extend the lifespan of these silly scams by sending them on? One reason is that the best forwards tap into already held beliefs--like that a fancy department store would rip off its customers. They also mix the right levels of detail and newsworthiness (a "recent" Newsweek article and Jay Leno's non-political reputation) to appear credible. So in a time of stretched-thin 24/7 news coverage, some of us are conditioned to believe whatever we see on TV or the Internet, especially if it fits with what we want to believe.
The success of fake email forwards is one reason why I'm worried about Barack Obama's chances to win the White House this November. And then a June 30th Washington Post article about how false anti-Obama rumors are attracting believers in a small Ohio town crystallized my fears. Besides the article's lede, which snidely paints Findlay-resident Jim Peterman as a backwater bumpkin who buys cheap tourist trinkets on his vacations, this is the line that caught my attention:

Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possible gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The article describes how Peterman is under pressure from friends and relatives who feed him false rumors about Obama's religion and background, many propagated by talk radio and the Internet. Voting for Obama, these people tell Peterman, would be surrendering the United States to the enemy. Confused by all the conflicting accounts of Obama's he hears, Peterman tells the Post reporter, "I'm almost starting to feel like the best choice is not voting at all."
With his dark skin and Indonesian upbringing, Obama's exotic past makes him a prime target for attacks that piggyback on hot-button issues like the American flag, Muslim terrorists, and illegal immigration. You don't have to be racist to believe the lies (although they provides a good cover for bigots), just narrow-minded enough to not know any better (like the easy-to-fall for tale of a $250 cookie recipe). And for people who can't imagine voting a black man to be president, these rumors, however false they know them to be, give them a convenient escape clause without appearing racist. 'He's probably a Christian like he says, but what if he's lying?' the rumor-fed logic goes. A few weeks ago I heard a former Clinton supporter named Charles on NPR-broadcast political roundtable sneer that "Obama" and "Osama" have just one letter different between them. He also remarked that Obama's middle name is Hussein, and he comes from a Muslim family. He couldn't vote for Obama, he said, even after he voted for Hillary in the New Hampshire primary.
The Washington Post article got slammed for extrapolating the views of a single Findlay resident to spoil the the town's image, but I don't think the reporter missed the mark. He needed a place to represent the rumor war against Obama, and he found that message resonating in Findlay.
And you don't need to be a conspiracy wing nut--like the type that believes Israel's Mossad executed the 9/11 attacks--to bite on these falsehoods. The Obama rumors circulate in more mainstream circles, and even get occasionally airings on FOX News. Every controversial issue these days needs to have two sides, and the view of Obama as a Muslim sleeper-agent is just the slightly exaggerated opposition to the Democratic candidate's official position. This is why historians smartly refuse to "debate" Holocaust deniers and why creationism merits no official scientific discussion; to do so gives legitimacy to a preposterous position.
What can Obama do to counter the word-of-mouth insurgency against his reputation? Create a war room to fight back against the rumors, as Obama's Fight The Smears campaign is doing? Get everyone to read his autobiographies? That would help, but a woman quoted in the Post article said that even after she hands Obama doubters his books, they refuse to read them.

"They just want to believe what they believe," she said. "Nothing gets through to them."

Or, we can trust the intelligence of the average American voter to separate the rumors and lies from the real story. However, if you've ever received an obviously fake email forward from a friend with the breathless note, "I think it's important you read this," that hope doesn't bode well for an Obama victory.

Keen on the Keystone State

I am moving east again. In four weeks I will load up my trusty Subaru, and cut across a few local roads to merge onto I-76-East. And then drive. By now it's a routine. Eight months ago I put the rolling farm roads of Pennsylvania in my rear-view mirror as I drove west to Boulder. And 16 months before that I watched the smudged caps of the Sangre de Cristo peaks disappear behind me as I left New Mexico and drove for Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Akron, and finally a new job in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Now I'll be moving to Lancaster, PA, a small city about 90 minutes southwest of where I lived before.

But this time something will be different. Sure, I'll have my battleship posters, book cases, and comforting knick-knacks that I've hung on walls going back to Boston, and even before. But I'll also have someone to share this new move and new home with. My wife-to-be, Jackie. We'll get married two weeks before we trundle into Lancaster (pronounced "Lan-KIS-ter," I've been told or warned) with our combined belongings and another open road, one of sharing our lives, ahead of us. And for that road, I don't own a map. Same for my new career as a freelance writer, though I've met some travelers on both. We'll figure it out.

All these changes remind me of a poem called "Old Paths" I wrote years ago when I first learned to drive. The road that inspired this poem was Stoney Hill Drive, not far from the house where I grew up in Hudson, Ohio.

Old Paths
You know you’ve grown up
when one day, driving fast on a road
you realize how many times you
biked up this hill in childhood struggle.
Feet pounding the pedals, body arched in conflict
with the cruel rise.

Now,
the gears slip automatically
to the machine's prescribed rhythm.
The curves dwindle in the background,
memories regulated to a small, rectangular mirror.
Already, I forget what road it was.

Finally finding HMAS Sydney

Last week a search began that is 67 years in the making. In late November 1941 the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney battled the German raider HSK Kormoran off the west coast of Australia. Both ships sank. All 645 men from the Sydney disappeared, while 341 of the Kormoran's crew of 390 were rescued. The resulting mystery has endured for more than six decades: Why did all of the Australians vanish, and most of the Germans survive?
After fundraising for three years, the Finding Sydney Foundation has finally launched the effort to discover the wrecks of these two warships, and solve one of the last remaining mysteries from World War II. Check back here for more updates, and read my account of the ferocious battle.

Reading Crazy Horse

I'm nearing the end of a remarkable book that tells history like I've never read it before. It narrates the life story of Crazy Horse, the Lakota warrior whose life played out at the sunset of the traditional Plains Indian culture. Sure, I knew his name. Most Americans do. But did I know who Crazy Horse really was? Did I believe he actually lived? Or was he like some man transformed by myth, like Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. And how was he different from Geronimo or Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph, other names recalled--but not really understood--from old school textbooks with sepia photos.
But now I'm learning that Crazy Horse was a real man. He was born, near the Black Hills of South Dakota, around 1840. He was Lakota, or Teton, or Brule Oglala, or what we mostly known as Sioux, the buffalo-hunting horse people of the Great Plains. But it was all more complicated than that, of course. And that complexity comes across in Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, the book by Mari Sandoz that I am reading. Sandoz, Nebraska writer celebrated for her histories of the Plains culture, writes in the language of Crazy Horse and his people. October isn't October, it's "the Moon of the Changing Seasons." Cannons are "wagon guns," and railroads are "iron roads." And sprinkled everywhere in the book are the myths, sayings, jokes, insults, and imagery of the Lakota culture, carefully added by Sandoz's careful research and accumulated knowledge.
When the book opens, Crazy Horse is a young boy known as Curly, a nickname earned by his wavy hair and light-colored skin. Later he is given the name His Horse Looking. He became Crazy Horse, also his father's name, after a daring act in battle. But always he was known as "the strange one" by his people and his followers. He lived on the plains and valleys between the North Platte, the Big Horn mountains and the Missouri River. He never joined an agency or camped near the trading posts. He was what the U.S. Army called a "hostile," a Native American who resisted both the overtures and the depredations of government agents and soldiers. He died in 1877, a year after annihilating Gen. George Custer's calvary at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, after a soldier bayoneted him as he struggled to escape his captors at an agency.
Despite illuminating so much Plains Indian culture for me, this book also raises many new questions, especially about the study of history. Because it is told from the Indians' perspective, there is no overarching view of army tactics, settlement pressures, or the drive for westward expansion. Our orderly view of history vanishes into the smoke of pipes for both peace and war. In the book, the action follows much like this: Whites arrive. Indians watch. Warriors ride out to scare the whites. Soldiers come. Warriors fight soldiers. Soldiers attack Indian camps. Warriors raid settlers and forts. And atrocities mount on both sides. Instead of zooming back to Washington or relating strategies discussed at soldier forts, the story lingers in Indian lodges, goes on vision quests, and follows action of the battle from the back of a panting horse. Although I know how Crazy Horse and his people's dream dies, and remember the bloody names like Wounded Knee and Standing Rock, with this book, I feel like I am reading American history for the first time.

Let's get native

I love the history of words and their meanings. Big word people call it semantics, but I think of it as word-sleuthing. I love that Shakespeare introduced hundreds of new words into popular English like "articulate" and "befriend," and how Lincoln employed the simple joiners of "that" and "here" to ground his famous, short speech in the soil of Gettysburg. I love that the right words can make a sentence memorable just by their placement, sound, or repetition.

Because I admire words, I am perplexed by the recent demonization of "sanctuary" and "amnesty" by several Republican presidential candidates. They use these words like vile slurs when addressing the immigration issue. To them, a "sanctuary city" is putting out the welcome mat for crime and lawlessness, and granting amnesty is like giving a gun to a serial killer. Does that sound wrong to anyone else?

My impressions of these words have always been strong, beneficial, and positive. With "sanctuary," I think of the scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame when Quasimodo rescues the Gypsy girl Esmeralda from a hanging, and carries her to the cathedral claiming the right of sanctuary. Even Disney's tidy and sanitized animated version includes 12 mentions of the word sanctuary, and the famous scene where Quasimodo holds Esmeralda's body above his head and invokes the protection of the church boundaries. With "amnesty," I think of reprieve for an unjust sentence, of promoting compassion over revenge, and withholding a punishment that would be punitive. Amnesty erases a small wrong to prevent an even greater one from occurring. Robin Hood sought amnesty from King John for his banditry, Confederate soldiers were given amnesty after taking an loyalty oath to the Union, and more recently, American forces in Iraq gave amnesty to former insurgents who pledged to switch sides to fight al Qaeda.

The positive semantics of sanctuary and amnesty makes the recent political hijacking so perplexing. How can Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani get away with it? Or perhaps the better question is, how long can they do this without generating a backlash. New Yorker political correspondent Ryan Lizza poses that question in his December 17th article, "Return of the Nativist." He analyzes the immigration rhetoric of Romney and Giuliani, as well as John McCain and Mike Huckabee, and paints a picture of a Republican party in disarray. He calls the GOP's anti-immigrant frenzy "Trancredoism" after Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, whose anti-foreigner ideas have influenced the primaries far more than his personal appeal. Lizza also depicts Democratic strategists as gleefully watching this policy train wreck in progress.

But if voters did not support the vilification of sanctuary and amnesty, then Romney and Giuliani would not be sneering these words in speeches and ads. Lizza quoted a poll in South Carolina where 26 percent of the respondents advocated arresting and deporting all illegal immigrants. Where does that angry quarter of the population come from? I think I know. They are the people who are scared of brown-skinned men hanging out near home depots and train stations looking for construction work. They hate signs that show both English and Spanish, and pressing #1 for English on their telephones. They think immigrants are stealing jobs that belong to Americans, and are upset that migrants don't pay taxes. They can't stand that immigrants get free health care at hospital emergency rooms. They believe that most crimes are committed by immigrants against citizens. They see their towns and cities changing, and they want everything to be the way it was before. They are watching their living standards decline, are getting scared, and need someone to attack. Led by politicians like Romney and Giuliani who twist the meanings of words like sanctuary and amnesty into curses, they learn to hate those people, the immigrants to our country, who most embody what the American spirit is all about. Shame on them.

Taped magazines

No, not the kind of magazines you read. I'm referring to the magazines full of bullets. The next time you see a photo of rebels or militia fighters from the Caucuses, central Africa, or the Middle East, look closely at the ammunition magazines clipped into the underside of their assault rifles. Most likely you will see two clips taped together, top to bottom (see photo at left).

A recent Men's Journal article about kidnapped oil workers in Nigeria included a photo of a river delta rebel with no less than four ammo clips taped together (and a guy aiming an RPG at the hostage's head about two feet away from him--not a very good idea). Why go crazy by wrapping duct tape around your ammo clips? It probably has more to do with style than utility. Having multiple clips dangling from the stock makes it look like you're ready to rock and roll on full auto--so watch out! The problem, however, is that taping upside-down clips to the bottom of a gun invites damage to the clip's feed mechanism. Look closely at the photo and you'll notice the top edge of the clip is dented and scraped (the white part). Damage that joint too much and the clip might not fit securely into the magazine feed. Of course, many assault rifles, like the AK-47 featured in this photo, are designed to withstand terrible abuse and still fire reliably. But if you scrape away enough metal, no round peg is going to fit in a rectangular hole.

I realize assault rifle chic is an obscure topic to post about--but I've always wondered how people learn to do something this. Does the newbie rebel watch and learn from the veteran? Is there a manual somewhere which explains the best duct-taping methods, or even the best brands of tape, or the amount of overlap space to leave? What about the Nigerian rebel with the four-pack of taped clips--is that more like a ceremonial weapon, unusable in an actual battle? I've also rarely seen anyone write about this phenomena that nevertheless makes it into hundreds of photographs from war zones all across the world. The non-conflict, western equivalent, I suppose, would be some impractical and expensive item from a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog, say the rope-less jump rope.

Oil on my mind

At some point in the future--perhaps in my lifetime--oil will become more like gold. Both are commodities, but the rarity of precious metals makes us treat them differently.
We buy gold at jewelry shops, which have thick glass windows and complex security systems. Gold is decorative, symbolic, and used in tiny amounts to enable certain electronics to function. Gold is a status symbol, and the color of power. People don't spill gold.
Conversely, today we can buy oil at corner gas stations, where anyone can drive up, and with the swipe of a credit card, fill up their car with gas for $30 or so (depending on your vehicle). Oil is lined up in plastic containers on shelves at PepBoys and hardware stores. We mow our lawns, fix our bikes, and even drink from plastic bottles made using petroleum products. Oil is everywhere, and for the masses.
At some point, however, will gas stations have secure pumps protected by armed guards? Instead of tanker trucks, will oil be transported in Brinks-like armored cars? Will there be a day when the price (and therefore the real value) of oil will be comparable to gold? By then we will have an alternative to oil, or will driving your car to the supermarket become the equivalent of wearing an expensive gold watch?
I'm thinking these thoughts as I read Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. I'm only two hundred pages into the book, but I've already seen how oil--the result of millions of years of decomposing plant and animal matter--became the global elixir in matter of decades at the end of the 19th century. battleships are party to blame. The Royal Navy's switch to oil-fueled ships in the early 1900s led to the establishment of the Anglo-Persian oil company, and the beginning of the great hydrocarbon race in the Middle East. Britain, of course, had no oil buried in its own soil, just sweet Welsh coal.
And then last Friday in the New York Times I read this article, "Rising Demand for Oil Provokes New Energy Crisis," which described the oil market's flirtation with $100 a barrel as "the world's first demand-led energy shock." My recall of supply and demand graphs from Harvard's Ec10 course is fuzzy, but I do remember that unless supply keeps up with rising demand, the price will continue to rise. Is there enough oil buried in the ground to maintain our lifestyle, or have we built a society that runs on something as precious as gold.

Jon Meacham op-ed echoes Lincoln's logic from Cooper Union speech

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek and serious scholar of America's Founding Fathers, wrote a terrific op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. His essay, titled, "A Nation of Christians is Not a Christian Nation," poked lethal holes in the old-line evangelical belief that the United States was founded as an expressly Christian country. When I think of that claim, this famous painting of Gen. George Washington praying at Valley Forge comes to mind. But Meacham, following the logical pattern of Abraham Lincoln in his anti-slavery Cooper Union speech of 1860, explodes the myth of Christian origination by citing numerous examples of how the Founding Fathers left out overt Christian references from the classic documents they wrote, and in their personal communications. He also cites chapter and verse how the Old and New Testaments advocate the division of authentic personal worship and the state. The language of the Christian God, as Meacham wrote, as well as the persona of Jesus, are purposefully, and perhaps surprisingly, absent from the origins of the United States. The Christians (and sometimes deists) who founded our nation were wise enough to leave them out.

Tonight on "The War" - The fight for Monte Cassino

Before heading to Edinburgh, Scotland for a year of graduate school, I knew I needed a primer in Continental Europe. So I left New Jersey on a one-way flight to Rome, and set out on a 30-day tour of central and western Europe. Early in this journey I visited the Italian city of Cassino and the famous Benedictine monastery that crowns a peak overlooking the town. Why Cassino? Because this town and its ancient abbey were caught in one of World War Two's most gritty and blood-soaked battles. From the heights of the abbey and nearby mountains, Germany guns and armor stopped the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula for weeks, then months in the winter of 1943-44. Finally, Allied commanders gave the order to bomb the abbey, which contains the tomb of St. Benedict, to smithereens. The destruction, however, had the result of creating even better cover for the German defenders. Not until May 1944--five months after the battle began--did a corps of Polish troops finally take the abbey. When I visited the re-built Monte Cassino in September 2000, I decided to approach the abbey in a pilgrimage of sort. I walked up the 3 miles of the steep winding road, arriving tired, sweaty, and appreciative of this great height assaulted and defended during the battle 56 years before.

Literature for the road

The morning I drove away from Emmaus I checked out two books on CD from the local library to accompany me on this trip. Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I suspected but did not realize how much these two books take place on the ribbon highways of the American West, and a felt a certain kinship with some of the characters as I checked into motels and ate at diners the same way they did. Fortunately, my cross-country sojourn has so far avoided the missing drug money, psychotic killers, and shotgun slayings that populate the plots of these books. The rawness of the stories, however, and the twang and bite of the language spoken by the versatile readers is preparing me to re-enter the West I left behind almost two years ago. The books I am listening to provide a necessary and subtle reintroduction. Ever since I packed my car in Pennsylvania, got in, closed the door, and started my solitary driving, I sometimes feel like I am traveling in a cocoon. It's as if my car is a spaceship merely passing through these strange, flat lands between my origin and my destination. But I am not removed from the states and towns I pass through, even if they recede in a fast lane blur. I am a part of these places even if I don't know how. After all, I never know where I might move next.

1723.6 Miles

That's the distance between by current and future home, and what I'll be adding to my Subaru's odometer before next Sunday night. After 16 months of living down the street from an Italian restaurant with an unbeatable recipe for Buffalo Chicken Pizza, I'll be leaving Emmaus, PA for a spot on the front step of the Front Range in Boulder, CO. I never thought I'd live in either place; but by now I've learned that where I call home can be the biggest unknown. When people move, they follow opportunity, or love, or dreams as best they can. Only sometimes do they get a chance to plant the flag in exactly the place they imagined. Right now I don't mind the instability, or the slightly disconnected feeling that I get while packing up my life once again. Both my career and my craft require new inputs to keep moving forward, and change does them both good. Perhaps I'm not looking forward to spending 25 hours accelerating across country, but at least heading west I'll gain two hours of my life back.
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Moving West (Again)

I'm packing my bags again, but this time staying with the same job. In May Rodale sold Backpacker magazine to Active Interest Media, a new media company based out West. As a result, the magazine is moving to the mountain enclave of Boulder, Colorado, a setting that seems a much better fit for our interests and content than eastern Pennsylvania. Still, I've enjoyed my year and a half in Emmaus, PA and the relaxing conveniences of smalltown life. Where I live now I can walk down the street and within two blocks I can buy a plumbing fixture from the Wentz's hardware store, fill a bag of produce from the Emmaus farmer's market, grab a mocha at the Perk coffee shop, pick up some spices at the Indian grocery store, and sit down for some buffalo chicken pizza at Armetta's pub. All those familiarities will soon be replaced by new ones out in Colorado, hopefully with the same level of community and ease. As I prepare to move again, I realize that besides Boston, where I went to college, I would not have predicted the other cities where I have lived in the past five years. Washington, DC. Santa Fe, NM. Emmaus, PA. Boulder, CO. But here I am, and there I go.

The Day of Flags

Late on Memorial Day I left my apartment, walked downstairs, crossed the street, and entered a cemetery. I don't know the name of the burial field, but it's one of two near my house with neat rows of gray headstones shaded by willow trees. A few days earlier I noticed that someone had marked all the grave stones of those who served in our Armed Forces with 2-foot tall American flags. I presume it was the cemetery workers, but it could have been the local American Legion, or perhaps a Boy Scout troop. Back in Ohio, my troop used to raise and lower 500 flags at a veterans cemetary every Memorial Day and July 4th. I got very good at folding them into the padded triangles of blue stars that you see at military funerals. But this time I went to look at the flags, and the graves they adorned. I went looking for stories in the names, dates and records told in stone.
I found two markers grouped together sharing the same last name. The larger stone was for the mother and father, the smaller for their son missing in action in North Korea, 1952. The mother died in 1951. The son went missing a year later. The father, who served in the First World War, buried both and outlived them by a decade. Another stone showed a young man, 22 years old, killed as a 1st Lt. in Vietnam, 1972. His father served in the Second World War. All of the Civil War veterans in this cemetery, and there were many, died in old age, some living into the 1930s. They were the men with long gray beards, stiff legs, and faded blue uniforms my grandfather remembered marching in the parades. Each Civil War veteran's grave contained a separate plaque that noted their unit--like "Co. C, 50th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment." Some of the men buried near each other served in the same Union companies and regiments. I found several soldiers who served in the Spanish-American War. The small metal disc attached to the flag said "Cuba." Only a handful of veterans bured there served in the Navy. Same with the Air Force. Most were Army privates, T/4's, and other ranks I didn't understand. A few men served in both World War I and II, and several more in both WW2 and the Korean Conflict. Near the top of the cemetery I found an army private killed in 1944, though it didn't say where. For the most part, however, most of the World War II veterans survived the fighting and died recently. The golf clubs etched into some of the stone slabs told me about the recreational battles they had fought in their later years.
I spent an hour weaving through the cemetery looking at all the graves marked by flags. I stopped in front of each, and spent longer with those that memorialized men who had died in conflict. Besides the flapping flags, most of the graves had no flowers or other decorations. But they really didn't need anything more. Only a few details make it on to most grave stones: your name, the dates of your birth and death, perhaps a Bible verse, and whether you served your country during wartime. And though this last detail seems less significant than the others, it means so much more when you look upon a field of stones and see the flags, hundreds of them, standing at attention just as the soldiers buried there once did for their country.

Frenetic, Complacent, and Applying to College

High school students who apply to competitive colleges are generally divided into two groups: those who understand the challenge; and those who are blissfully unaware. Which situation is better for the mental health of the students and their parents? Hard to say. Is it the kid who agonizes about comma-placement in an admissions essay, and sweats through a half-dozen AP classes and extracurricular activities to ace an application to Yale--and in the process losses all connection to friends and family? Or is it the kid who floats through senior year, unaware that his academic performance isn't good enough for NYU, and then suffers the surprising sting of rejection and the mad scramble to find another school?
All of these applicants, both the supremely worried and the falsely confident, are like runners lining up at the starting line. Some know the race course is brutal, while others think it is similar to races they've won before. The students might think they are running separately, but in fact they are tied together. The college admissions race is a 3-legged race, where the stronger leg of the prepared applicant is roped to the weaker leg of the uninformed student. After all, it's the tens of thousands of students who apply to high-tier colleges unaware that they have little chance for admission who spur the feeding frenzy of ever-rising applicant numbers and shrinking acceptance rates. And it's Harvard's record-setting 25,000 applicants for 2,000 spots and sub-10% acceptance rate that makes thousands of hyper-competitive students agonize through their senior year. No one seems to win with the current process.
On April 29th the New York Times published an essay titled, "Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard" by Michael Winerip about how today's students who accomplish amazing things by age 17 still don't get into the school of their dreams. That's okay, he wrote, you don't have to win this impossible battle to win at life. With that kind of headline it's no wonder the article stayed at the top of the "Most Emailed" list for a week. I was curious about how parents might react to the article, so I visited the online forums hosted by College Confidential, a commercial college consulting company. There I found pages and pages of posts reacting to Winerip's essay--most of them appreciative of his call to take a deep breath about the whole process. Winerip attended Harvard and is now a local interviewer for the school in the New York area. His kids aren't going to attend his alma mater, but he thinks one of them will go to a "good state school." The parents' posts on College Confidential also reflected this reflective optimism that 'everything will come out in the end.' On the student forums, however, I found mostly a demoralized and negative response to Winerip's article. "There goes my college dreams," posted one high school junior. Escaping the pressure, it seems, only comes with being able to win the game, or looking back with fond memories.