3 Killed in Wreck

Three men were killed early on the morning of April 29th when the Carden-Johnson-Clyde Bros. Circus prop semi slammed into a railroad bridge at Houghton, Mich. Three other men who were also riding in the truck were injured, one seriously.

An eyewitness said he heard a semi coming coming down the hill on Bridge Street in Houghton – faster and faster it came — people were screaming – it crossed busy US 41 – and crashed into a Soo Railroad bridge. One survivor said the last thing he remembered was the sound of leaking air — then awful silence.

A borrowed truck was used to bring what props could be salvaged to the show’s engagement at Menominee, but gone were some sections of the ring curbs, the organ, drums, amplifier, the PA system and lights, plus some props and rigging.

A turnaway crowd was on hand to greet the circus for both shows that day, as local citizens welcomed the circus in its moment of tragedy. It was a sad show, but a good one, is the way one spectator expressed his reaction.

Killed in the accident were Carl A. Nordin, 43, of Lubbock, Texas, driver of the truck; Anthony Gilio, 61, of Corona, New York; and Wayne Lee Sater, 38, of Springfield, Mo.

Jacques Mesrine

Browsing the shelves of the DVD collection at the Carleton library the other day, I happened across the DVD boxes for Mesrine, a two-part French film that was blurbed as being a “French Goodfellas” and a “French Godfather.” I like those kinds of movies, so I checked Mesrine out even though I’d never heard of it before – maybe the only time I’ve ever tried a movie based on the DVD-box copy.

They weren’t wrong: Mesrine (part I: Killer Instinct; part II: Public Enemy No. 1) was fantastic – a four-hour biopic about the infamous French criminal Jacques Mesrine (pronounced “may-reen,” not “mes-rine” – say it wrong and he’ll beat you up), starting from his days in the French army in Algeria and running all the way to his execution-style killing by French police in 1979. Though the movie includes tons of (well-done) gunfights, stunning criminality, and quite a few liaisons with molls, overall it felt less like Goodfellas or The Godfather than like the Sopranos, being as much about the psychology – or pathology – of Mesrine as about his outlaw exploits. The guy is both likable and thuggish, terrifying and endearing – a lot like Tony. I highly recommend watching the movie, but only reading the Wikipedia entry on the man himself after the fact.

Though this was pleasing, I was well prepared to realize this goal. Having studied an awful lot of history in my life, I was equipped to understand the periodization of jazz, and to start to map the connections and disconnections between periods – say, the swing era that ended during World War II and the bebop era that started then. Putting particular musicians and pieces into those periods was no harder.

Where I did falter, and had to work pretty hard, was in trying first to understand some of the technical dimensions of jazz music (or, really, any music) and then to apply that understanding in an analysis of particular tunes. 32-bar AABA form? 12-bar blues? I barely remembered (from junior high band) the definition of a “measure,” much less how to keep 4/4 time or, worst of all, how to read music.

I’ll be darned, though, if knowing how to study and learn didn’t pay off. Though I probably had the worst tune-analysis skills of anyone in the class, I did acquire a rough facility for analyzing a song, and – what’s more – found that process remarkably interesting and fun. For my final project, I analyzed a little-known Duke Ellington tune, one which I’ve loved for a long time and which gradually revealed its inner structure as I listened over and over to it. I probably replayed the song about a hundred times to get it down for my paper – and even then I missed two key features of its structure.

What helped me even more than a facility for learning new things – even things as inconsequential as how to hear and diagram a 12-bar blues form – was being able to write clearly about what I was hearing. I found it was pretty easy to describe songs, artists, styles, et cetera, both objectively (“What are three main characteristics of bebop?”) and subjectively (“Explain why you like this song.”) Before I could get too high on myself, though, I did the math and realized that I’ve been writing fairly intensively for more than half my life – longer than most of my classmates have been alive. I’d better be halfway decent at it: I’m old.

Old Red

Old Red was real “long underwear.” I got them in 1994, when my parents, in what must have been a huge splurge, gave them to me as a gift. I had just started cross-country skiing then, and the polypropylene fabric was a huge improvement over the white cotton waffle-knit long johns that were then ubiquitous – but that were (and are) awful to wear during exercise.

I dunno how many kilometers of skiing were eased by wearing these long johns over the last 17 years, but it must be in the thousands by now. I wore Old Red both times I skied in the Michigan state championships, and in a dozen other races. Through it all, Old Red held up very well, getting a bit thinner every year but always doing its job.

Because of all that, I am a little bit sad to have to retire Old Red. My sadness is mitigated by three things, though. First, I’m going to cut Old Red up and use the strips to clean my skis when I wax them. Second, I still have Old Red’s partner, a great “baselayer” turtleneck that I wear when skiing in the coldest temperatures. Third, it’s very silly to be sad about long underwear.

I’m sitting on the floor in the upstairs hallway outside the girls’ bathroom, monitoring the proceedings in the bathtub and folding the day’s laundry. I have unmatched socks draped over both legs and folded clothes all around me, not to mention an unfolded shirt in my hands.

Vivi climbs out of the tub and hugs herself tightly. “Daddy, I’m coooooooowd! Get me my towel!” Her towel is hanging no more than a preschooler’s arm’s length away. “Honey, I’m further away from it than you are and I’m folding laundry. Can’t you grab it? It’s right there!” I point at it.

Pretending to shiver now, she says, “Nooooo, I’m muccccch too c-c-c-cold! You do it!”

Seeing that I can grab the towel or I cause a meltdown by making her do it, I get up, walk six feet, and hand her the towel from twelve inches away. “Here, honey.” I turn away. “No, Daddy! Dwy me too!” I turn back, crouch down, and start to dry her off with the towel.

Immediately, she scowls and says, “I’m still all wet. You’re doing it wrong! I’LL do it!” She grabs the towel back from me and dries herself off, scowling at me as I sit back down to finish the laundry.

While I have a dim view of the Tea Party – its activists, its ideas, its candidates, its rhetoric – I don’t think that the 2010 midterms are going to turn out to be the disaster for the Democratic Party or the president that pundits have predicted and conservatives have hoped for. Sure, tonight and the next few months are going to smart, and the next two years are going to be intermittently painful, especially if the GOP wrangles control of both houses of Congress.

But partly because I’m optimistic and partly because I think I know American history better than the average American (better than most pundits and better than pretty much all of the Tea Pariers), I don’t think that the Tea Party is going to either derail the Obama presidency or have any serious long- or short-term effect on the Republic.

First and foremost, I’m confident that President Obama will be able to outmaneuver the GOP. Though he’s made some serious missteps so far in his administration (climate-change legislation!), he’s also accomplished a great deal, as the progressive commentator Rachel Maddow effectively argued:

These accomplishments were all realized in the face of massive resistance on the part of the Republican minorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. With the GOP likely to be the majority in the House, though probably not the Senate, the onus will now fall more heavily on the GOP to present a positive agenda – something they’ve been manifestly unable to do so far. And the president always has the power to veto bills coming out of Congress – a veto that the GOP will not have the numbers to override. Thank the Founders for checks and balances, and the president for his wiliness. It’s time for Obama to raise his game, as he might say.

Second, I won’t get freaked out about the GOP wins this year because they have been predicated on implicit and explicit appeals to the fear of white men and women about the “losing” “our” country. Did the Tea Party message (such as it is) have a better slogan than “Take Our Country Back”? (Right now, for instance, Marco Rubio (R-FLA) is giving his victory speech at a podium bearing a sign that reads “Reclaim America.”) But America was never only a white man’s country, and America is less and less that place. The Tea Partiers’ appeals to fear of difference won’t be the last time such appeals are made, but I think they’re one of the last times that those appeals will work – and even now, with the returns rolling in, it’s clear that not all Americans – not even a majority? – fear a black president and his supposedly shadowy agenda.

Third, I don’t fear the Tea Partiers or other Republicans in Congress because I know that Congress, for better or for worse, is designed to slow momentum, to dilute ideas, to compel compromises, to frustrate ambitions. Look back to 1994 and how the “Contract for America” class immolated itself with the government shutdown. When the likes of Rand Paul enter Congress, they’ll discover that their respective chambers are designed to impede individuals’ power, if not quite to mute individuals’ zeal. Because of the way Congress works, we won’t see this happen, at least right out in the open, but it will happen. Reactionaries like Paul will have to compromise or to get out. I look forward to seeing how they make that choice.

Last, I refuse to freak out about the election because the Tea Party is fundamentally based on ignorance and rage – the former an unchanging state of humankind, the latter a quick-dissipating reaction. I don’t think that many, much less every, Tea Party supporter or candidate is an idiot or a racist – only that they don’t care to understand to how the world in 2010 looks or works. Tea Party ideas (small government! no debt! liberty above community!) are just not suited for a country that is simultaneously an information-driven service economy, a (truly!) liberal democracy, an ever-less-white society, and an increasingly international and global culture. We’ll see all this proven in the next twenty-four months, if not the next six.

Digital Nation: Electronic media are radically changing the way this generation of students thinks, learns and socializes–perhaps for the better, perhaps not. Join us as we view a brief segment from a PBS “Frontline” program that explores these issues, and discuss the potentially revolutionary implications of these changes.

The core of the presentation was a segment from Frontline‘s “Digital Nation” broadcast. Though I haven’t (yet) seen the entire show (which is available for viewing online), the featured segment unequivocally made the case that technologically-driven multitasking by college students (and, by extension, by others) is a practice that actually hampers the multitasker’s ability to accomplish tasks, alters the brain functioning of the multitasker, and even dumbs down American culture.

Those are heady claims, ones which the psychologst, Mija Van Der Wege, deftly qualified with information about multitasking and divided attention in general – not just the kind of technologically-driven multitasking villified (with some justice) by Frontline. The problem, Van Der Wege subtly argued, isn’t so much that technology makes us (pick your category: Americans, adults, humans) bad at multitasking, it’s that our brains are bad at it, whether the multiple tasks are checking Facebook, talking on the phone, listening to music, and writing a paper (the sort of scenario depicted in the show) or, say, tending children, singing, gathering berries, and watching for lions. We as organisms are just not wired to simultaneously do all that stuff – or, at least, not to simultaneously do all that stuff very well.

Van Der Wege’s point led naturally into a good Q&A session, which in turn led to a short post-presentation chat with a computer scientist (seriously: there aren’t many workplaces that allow a person to casually talk to scientists about their fields of expertise!) about the Frontline clip and the Q&A. As a self-described “technologist,” she didn’t take to the show’s contention (or the subtext in some of the Q&A exchanges) that technology per se was to blame for students’ multitasking, which jibed with my own reaction as an erstwhile historian of technology.

One key lesson that I gleaned from the history of technology is that problems that seem to be technological are often actually social problems which have been somehow folded into a machine, a factory, a process. Dividing the technical from the social often reveals that the real problem reside in social arrangements such as power differentials, resource allocations, or methods of learning. As one historian famously said, technologies are “frozen politics” – social decisions, capacities, knowledge, resources that have been literally engineered into a tangible form.

In the case of technologically-driven multitasking, the problem is less that our technologies allow, say, a constant feed of status updates from Twitter and Facebook and, I think, more that we have chosen to maintain many of our interpersonal connections through technologies. If the 24/7 social media world becomes too onerous, we could choose to disembed some of our relationships from technology, and in fact we see that happening with, for instance, “tweetups” – real-world parties attended by people who follow each other on Twitter. But the point here is that we’ve chosen, consciously or not, to allow technologies to constitute many of our social arrangements, and to shape many other aspects of life, such as how we read or write. As the Frontline piece pointed out, this isn’t new: the advent of print, for instance, destroyed the need to memorize huge quantities of knowledge – and the social role of those with that task. Similarly, the telephone has now been reshaping our social relationships for more than 125 years.

In questioning the value of being a “digital nation,” then, we should shift blame away from our technologies – with their seductive screens and sounds – and toward our own individual and collective decision-making. Just as we can choose to let Twitter and Facebook become tools for making friends (or to let the phone interrupt dinner), we can choose to turn off the smartphone and shut down the browser so that we can, say, tranquilly write for an hour on the laptop or sit in a comfy chair and read a book.

Which I’m going to do right now.

poised to undergo tremendous transformation over the next century. As a booming population increases the demand for the Earth’s natural resources, and as lands closer to the equator face the prospect of rising water demand, droughts and other likely changes, the prominence of northern countries will rise along with their projected milder winters.

Moreover, due to its vast territory, the relatively untapped state of its natural resource base, the lawfulness and orderliness of its constitutive states, and to the existence of some sizable cities,

the New North is well positioned for the coming century even as its unique polar ecosystem is threatened by some of the most extreme climate changes on Earth. But in a globally integrated 2050 world of over nine billion people, with mounting issues of water stress, heat waves and coastal flooding, what might this mean for motivating renewed human settlement of the region? To what extent might a wet, underpopulated, resource-rich, less bitterly cold North promise refuge from these broader global pressures?

Interesting and worrisome questions.

a huge celebration centering on the town’s counterattack and defeat of Jesse James and his gang when they tried to rob the First National Bank of Northfield in 1876.

Though, inevitably, our couple hours of total time at the festival were not the angst-free, we did have fun. The girls enjoyed seeing some of their friends marching in the “kiddie parade” this morning, and they really liked hitting the carnival this afternoon, as this great photo from our friend Todd shows.

DJJD Carnival Ride

Beyond being impressed by the tininess of this boat, I was struck by the sheer number of people – including lots of friends and neighbors – who were wearing cowboy hats, an item otherwise mostly unknown (for lots of good reasons!) here in town and the towering irony of standing in a long line for the ATM at the bank the outlaws tried to rob in 1876.

Tomorrow, we’re going to go see the DJJD parade, Northfield’s only real annual parade. The girls will surely enjoy it.