The Enemy is Us

Most people of a certain age remember the Pogo cartoon that commented, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Well, we're staring the enemy in the face again, and he is still us.

I have been thinking that for weeks, in a dim sort of way, and then today I read an article in the New York Times that claimed that GM had already failed a makeover with its Saturn brand. Again, those of us of a certain age remember the birth of Saturn, which was supposed to be a "different" kind of car brand. In the beginning it was, perhaps, but then GM turned away from the concept to build gas-guzzling SUVs, and Americans bought them like candy.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem with our kind of capitalism-- and perhaps every kind of capitalism-- is that it deliberately appeals to the side of us that we don't really like to look at in the mirror. We'd like to be better people than we are, but if you give us a chance, we'll take anything that isn't nailed down. At least animals are honest about it. When my dog steals a napkin (he loves to tear them up) and runs away with it, he doesn't want to be punished, but he doesn't see anything wrong about what he's doing either. The thinking part of us, on the other hand, knows we should consume less and save more, but we rationalize our bad old ways and keep on doing what we really want to do, aided and abetted by the companies that sell us things.

And those companies really do appeal to the worst that is in us. Despite the terrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the thing that shocked me the most recently was the shoppers in Valley Stream, Long Island who broke down the doors of a Walmart store and trampled an employee to death in their haste to get to the bargains on "Black Friday." How can you be willing to literally walk over someone's dead body to buy a flat-screen TV? Some commentators claim that Walmart and other stores are at least partially to blame for this kind of behavior. In their desire to "get into the black" for the sales year, they inundate us with ads that whip consumers into a frenzy. "We're opening at 5 am. Be there early!" "You'll never get a better deal on all the things you want!" "Act fast or all the best buys will be gone!" Clearly, some people believed the hype and acted on it.

A look at our criminal justice statistics will tell you that plenty of people will kill to get what they want, from Nike athletic shoes to cocaine. But I still don't see how you can run by-- or over-- a 270-pound man lying on a floor littered with broken glass and not stop to help. What are such people thinking? The short answer is that they're not thinking, they're just wanting. The enemy is us all right, and it's a scary thing.

ICE STORM (A Poem)

ICE STORM

Ice came silently

in the night,

covering grass,

coating branches and fences.

Morning light glittered

on frozen stems

and bushes.

Powerlines sagged

under icy weight.

Crowns swayed

ponderously,

bending earthward,

then cracked and fell.

Ice showered down

like tiny shards

of glass.

Quiet of night

fled before

creaks and groans

of dying trees,

and broken twigs

pattered onto rooftops,

each cluster of buds

a crystal globe.

© 2003 Celia A. Sgroi

Pasadena Where?

If anyone needs proof that some major newspapers don't have enough serious stuff to write about, one might consider the New York Times' apparent fascination with a guy named James Macpherson, who has outsourced the local news coverage of his Pasadena news website to India. Today it was Maureen Dowd's turn to discuss this "horrendous" (just a little news-speak, folks) betrayal of American journalism. I had to yawn through six paragraphs before I discovered the name of this online news site, which is called Pasadena Now, and couldn't help wondering why the Times didn't provide a link to it.

Not that there is anything particularly interesting there. It's rather like the local newspapers I grew up with in Oswego County, The Fulton Patriot and the Oswego Valley News, which consisted mainly of photographs, local stories, announcements of pending events, promotion of local people and businesses, and advertisements. You know the kind of newspaper I mean-- if your high school team won a game, your picture would be in the paper a week or two later, and columns of print were devoted to publishing the local schools' honor rolls. Actually, Pasadena Now is more attractive, though not necessarily more substantial, than that. In any case, it's more colorful, and there are more bells and whistles, but I bet if you look deep enough you'll find last week's league bowling scores somewhere.

This isn't the first time Mr. MacPherson and his outsourcing have made the New York Times. Last year, it got coverage in the Times blog "Freakonomics." Could it be because journalists at the nation's flagship newspaper are worried about losing their jobs to part-time workers from Mumbai and Bangalore? No, it has to be the gently bizarre image of someone in India sitting down with various internet references to cobble together news stories for an online newspaper half a world away. According to Dowd, MacPherson pays his writers $7.50 per 1000 words to write local news stories for Pasadena Now. She quotes one of these writers, who lives in Mysore, India: “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always. Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

The Rose Bowl as a food event-- I have to admit that this tickled my fancy enough to make me actually go and look at Pasadena Now and try to figure which stories were being written in India. Of course, they don't just hand you this information on a plate, but the byline "From STAFF REPORTS" appears frequently on brief local news stories, such as "Police Patrols Protect Shoppers." What these articles have in common is that they're short, and most of them are just bare facts. The writing and eccentric punctuation are about standard for newspaper writing these days. If MacPherson and newspapers like the Times hadn't made such a big deal about it, people in Pasadena probably wouldn't have noticed any difference. Well, maybe the seven employees who got fired would have noticed, but I bet no one else would have.

Hello? What Did You Say?

The slang that Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs used on the TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959) probably made adults of the time scratch their heads. You dig?

I have worked in an undergraduate college for nearly thirty years, and I am extremely cautious (not to say paranoid) about using the slang words that I hear students use. Just today one of my students used the word skeevy in a discussion posting in an online course I am teaching. It was obvious from the context what it meant, but I would never use that word to students or in the presence of students. I figure, no matter how well-meaning I am, I'll sound like a jerk. I have enough problems being understood by my students when I use what you might call "educated" language. How would I sound if I tried to use their secret language? It's more educational, not to mention more satisfying, to have them work to understand my secret language!

For one thing, young people now use the same term I recognize from years ago to mean something entirely different. I am told that a young person today might use the letter H to mean very intense (hardcore), as in, "The words to that song are totally H." In my day, H was a slang word for heroin. There's a difference that could get you in trouble. OMG! Don't go there!

In fact, I sometimes wish I could purge some of the old slang words and expressions from my vocabulary. For example, if "Oh, gag me with a spoon!" were to escape my lips, how dated would I sound? (Answer: 1980's.) In German, Grufti (more or less meaning a "graveyard person") used to be a youth-slang term for elderly people. I'm sure it's archaic now. I'd rather sound ancient and overeducated to my students than like an old fogey. "You dig?" as the beatniks and hepcats of the past used to say.

Most slang changes so fast that by the time a Grufti knows what it means, it's already out of date. I mean, how do you get from groovy to rad to tubular to bitchin to sick? (I hope I have those in chronological order. Anyway, you get my drift.) One basic rule of thumb is that if you hear a word in an advertisement on TV, it's already dated, like chillin. Let's face it, if you can talk about chillin and Dr. Scholl's gel insoles in the same breath, chillin is archaic. You dig?

Should GM Go Bankrupt?

I don't imagine there are a lot of people in the world who have warm feelings about General Motors. I know I don't, although I have driven my fair share of GM cars over the years, including my first-ever brand new car, a Pontiac Grand Am. (Most of the paint fell off.) I drove that car into the ground, almost literally, and after that I switched to Nissan. It's doubtful I'll ever turn back. At the present time, I'm driving a 2003 Nissan Sentra that is paid for, and I'm planning to keep on driving it as long as possible. If GM is waiting for me to buy one of their cars, they may as well file for bankruptcy right now.

The fact is, no one wants GM cars anymore. Apparently the company is currently losing $2 billion a month , and GM cars are not leaving the showrooms. At the beginning of the week, GM's tops executives (each in his own private jet) showed up in Washington, DC to ask for a $25 billion bailout, but at that rate of loss, what good would $25 billion be? It doesn't really matter, because Congress sent GM home empty-handed. "Come back when you have a plan," said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. At that rate, they'll never be back.

But if they don't get a bailout, apparently bankruptcy is the only option. Everywhere I look, I see editorials and articles in the media saying that GM should go bankrupt. I think there is a certain element of Schadenfreude in the thought of GM in bankruptcy, but it's hard to say they don't deserve it. The management is lousy and arrogant, the union workers are allegedly overpaid and unproductive, there are far too many GM dealerships, and most of the GM models are big, ugly gas-guzzling monsters. Of course, a lot of Americans enjoy driving big, ugly gas-guzzling monsters. They must, or the Hummer could never have been marketed and sold.

Back in the day, they used to say, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Now the question is, if General Motors goes bankrupt, what will happen to the country? How many jobs will be lost? How many business, even industries, will fold up and disappear? Can we really let them go bankrupt? Wouldn't it be better to bail them out with strict conditions that would force them to completely reorganize and redirect themselves? So far, GM apparently has no plan except more of the same. No one changes organizational culture overnight, and getting rid of two of its corporate jets isn't a reorganization plan. And no, guys, the Chevy Volt won't save General Motors.

I don't know what the answer to all of this is, and it's making me crazy. But if I were pressed to make a prediction, it would only take three words: GM is toast.

First Snow

Fresh snow on the leaves of a Japanese Maple tree.

Let it be recorded: On Monday, November 17, 2008, in Oswego, New York, I had to clean about four inches of heavy wet snow off my car to drive to work. Most of the snow actually fell the night before. During the day on Sunday, which was overcast and very windy, I heard ice pellets rattling against the windows from time to time, but in the evening we had a snowstorm with thunder and lightning, which I always feel is kind of eerie. This morning, with the temperatures in the low 30's, the snow was so heavy and soaking wet that it was hard to get the snowbrush to lift it off the windshield. The streets in my neighborhood had not been plowed, so there were fairly deep ruts where the tires of the cars had driven their way through the layer of snow and slush. I hate this kind of weather. The only thing worse is ice, and that, no doubt, will be coming soon enough.

Mind you, they have already had considerable snow-- measured in feet-- to the north of us. Up there on the Tug Hill Plateau their most abundant crop is snow, and the high time of the year is when the snowmobilers come to disport themselves on the trails over the fields and in the woods. Thank God I don't have to live up there. If I did, I'd have moved out long ago, not to Florida or someplace like that, but to a place where they have "normal" winters. Oswego, maybe. At least, Oswego would be fine if they would only clear the sidewalks, but people don't always do that. Where my friends live in Germany, the law requires property owners to shovel their sidewalks. Not here. And my employer, SUNY Oswego, is pretty lax about shoveling, too, which simply makes me crazy.

There are, of course, many people who would say that a normal winter in Oswego, New York is one with only eight feet of snow. That may be true, but eight feet spaced out over the four or so months of "official" winter isn't so bad. When you get eight feet of snow-- or ten or twelve-- in the course of a few days, I have to admit that it's pretty bad. In February 2007, for example, the city of Oswego got about ten feet of snow in just over a week. Further north, in the town of Redfield, they got about twelve feet. The Governor declared a state of emergency, and Oswego County, which often meant the city of Oswego, because it was more accessible, was filled with reporters from the national media like USA Today and CNN, standing in front of towering snowbanks and shivering as they reported. ABC News reported that Redfield, located perfectly on the Tug Hill Plateau at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, averages 270 inches of snow a year, and joined the other news media in explaining to the uninitiated the mysteries of lake effect snow.

The fundamental reason why the notion of a normal winter in Oswego is problematic at best is the phenomenon of lake effect snow. All of the area immediately to the east of Lake Ontario gets lake effect snow, but some places get it worse than others. Basically, the places of higher elevation downwind of the lake get the worst of the lake effect, by which is meant the Tug Hill Plateau and towns like Redfield, Boonville, and Carthage. Thankfully, most of the Tug Hill is forested public land with a small resident population. You can well imagine that most people are not lining up to live there, but it is great for hiking, camping, and fishing in the good weather. And, amazingly enough, people do travel there from other parts of New York state and out of state to use their snowmobiles in the winter. I think it's wonderful that there are some people who have a use for all that snow, as long as I don't have to be one of them.

In the meantime, I am reminding myself that it is not uncommon to get a few days of snow in the City of Oswego in November and then have practically no snow until mid January. That is what happened in the winter of 2006-2007. Of course, in February 2007 we then got ten feet of snow. But that was an anomaly, I think. I hope so anyway. I really do.

Munich's Hunting and Fishing Museum

Statue of a wild boar outside the entrance of the German Hunting and Fishing Museum in Munich

If you walk along the Neuhauserstrasse from the Karlsplatz to the Marienplatz in Munich, you pass a large statue of a wild boar, usually with one or two people sitting on it. Close by is a bronze statue of a catfish. These statues frame the entrance of the German Hunting and Fishing Museum (Deutsches Jagd und Fischerei Museum).

I couldn't tell you how often I have passed by this museum, but it wasn't until this year that I actually went in and looked around. My nephew Dan and I had spent many hours in the Deutsches Museum, the science and technology museum that is one of Munich's most enduring attractions. After lunch, we had just enough time to go over to Neuhauserstrasse to look at the Hunting and Fishing Museum. Germany has a great hunting and fishing tradition, and the museum is devoted to the activities and equipment of hunting and fishing, the animals and fishes that are or were hunted, and a number of artworks devoted to hunting and fishing.

If you are into taxidermy, you'll love this museum, because every animal, bird or fish that lives in Germany is there. Some of the exhibits are pretty old, but they're still very impressive. On the landing of the second floor, there is an enormous skeleton of a prehistoric elk. It just towers over you when you look at it. This is in addition to all the bears, deer, wolves, foxes, badgers, rabbits, and any other animal you can think of, including quite a number of wild boars. The Hunting and Fishing Museum can be described as quite rich in stuffed wild boars, including the one whose snout is just peeking out between two of the rows of cases of stuffed birds. If you want proof that Germans have a sense of humor, the positioning of this boar will do it.

There is a huge collection of hunting weapons, from spears and crossbows to rifles and shotguns, and all the paraphernalia that goes with them. Some of them are beautifully engraved and decorated. You can certainly see that the German nobility loved hunting. There are also many examples of boats and fishing equipment, including bone fish hooks that go back to the Stone Age. In addition to the animals and weapons, there are exhibits of hunting clothes and accessories.

This may all sound a little strange, but if you're tired of touring churches and art museums and you like history, this may be for you. Dan and I enjoyed it very much.