And So It Goes

When I was a child, I was unusually drawn to anything foreign. Coins from Korea, postcards from Paris, folk-crafts from Brazil; these were my planes, trains and automobiles taking me all over the planet.

I look back on those days with a sepia-toned fondness; my desire to see the world as a celebration of cultures. National Geographic and PBS taking me to places that I couldn't find in my neighborhood. Other children with bright smiling faces playing strange games and dressed so colorfully drew me to them.

Today, my love of other cultures and need to travel beyond my borders has taken me all over the world. The best part, I think, is that I still have the wonder of a child as I traverse this planet. It has never become old or routine.

Coffee in Turkey. Tea in Japan. The sharpness of the wind in Moscow, and the softness of the rain in Tuscany. Reeling in the power of Victoria Falls and relaxing in the stillness of a lake in Scotland. The structure of a visit to China and the free-form walks through the streets of La Paz.

I've almost done it all. And the child inside of me is loving every minute of it.

On Secession

Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels, put out the idea that Seattle should secede from the rest of Washington state on Thursday.

While I'm not from Seattle, and in fact have never even visited that fair city, I fully support his notion. I think several other states and municipalities should also take this idea seriously.

There are many areas of this country, like Seattle, that literally support an entire region and are dragged down by surrounding areas. NW Arkansas, for example, is a great community with a thriving economy and an excellent school system while Arkansas ranks next to the bottom on nearly every category you can think of. Take away the cities of Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville, Rogers and the surrounding area, and Arkansas would rank last in everything. If that region of Arkansas were its own state, it would rank in the top 10 in many categories. Having lived in that area for half my life, I have thought for years that the NW Arkansas area should remove itself from the rest of that state and become a state itself. If that happened, I would move back there tomorrow.

Same goes for entire states. Nearly all states have some fringe groups calling for independence. Among those, Texas and Vermont seem to be the most vocal and organized. Depending on whose numbers you look at, Texas would be the fourth or fifth largest economy on the planet if it were independent. Hardly a backwater.

This all brings me to my main point. Over the centuries, civilization started in small areas. Over time, these areas became city states and then nations and then empires. Empires collapse and the cycle starts all over again. We are seeing a resurgence in regional identity of late. While in the United States, we all call ourselves 'American', we also call ourselves Texan or Californian or Virginian or New Yorker. The framers of our nation thought that the states should stay very independent, but have a central governing body to unify them, not to subjugate them. Over the last 200 years, we have stopped thinking of ourselves as a group of states brought together by common self-interest but more of a homogeneous society where our regional identities are discouraged.

I've felt a change over the last five years, however. Perhaps this has been brought about by a dissatisfaction with the Bush administration or it may be that it is just an idea whose time has come, but I would be very surprised if there were still 50 states 20 years from now.

All it takes is one municipality to secede from a state or a state to secede from the Union. Then the dominoes will begin to fall. I see the people of this nation still defining themselves as 'American', but more in the way that the French or Germans think of themselves as European. We will be more like the European Union - a collection of nation-states, completely sovereign, yet held together by a common constitution and currency,

So I say to Mayor Nickels. go for it, man... I'm right behind you.

The Curse that Almost Was

I love baseball. I am also very superstitious when it comes to sports. So this story from the New York Post has me intrigued.

Apparently, construction worker and Red Sox fan, Gino Castignoli, thought it would be fun to bury a Sox jersey beneath the concrete at the new Yankee Stadium. Seeing as how the only team I despise more than the Red Sox is the Yankees, I found this idea to be nothing short of genius. However, Professor Castignoli blabbed about it to the friggin' NY Post, of all places.

The Yankees found the jersey and apparently had some sort of 'extraction ceremony'. Why? Because we all know that sports curses are bullshit, so we have to have a big production about retrieving a dirty jersey from three feet of concrete at considerable expense.

If this guy, Castignoli, had any brains at all he would have kept quiet about it until the new stadium opened and then wrote an anonymous letter, or have gone to a bar and started rumors about the "curse of the Buried Jersey". He could have passed into legend. But he had to brag to the New York Post. The NY friggin' Post! If you have to tell a paper, why not the Boston Globe?

So much for your sports immortality there, genius.

Giamatti Adams

I've been watching, with great interest, the HBO mini-series John Adams based on David McCullough's best-selling book and I have enjoyed it, for the most part. However, the portrayals of both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson leave somethng to be desired.
Now, I realize that these were not perfect men. Franklin was a womanizer, as was Jefferson. Jefferson had slaves and fathered at least one child with one of them. (Not something you would expect from the author of the Declaration of Independence.) But the film portrays them as merely bit players in our nation's struggle and rise from Great Britain. Not only that, but it also seems to say that these men were barely competent with the tasks given to them.

Franklin is played as a withering opportunist who was non-committal in nearly every aspect of his public service, preferring to advocate whichever position granted him the most ease and least work.

Jefferson is seen as little more than a man-child. Bad posture, seemingly always distracted and openly flirting with Abigail Adams.

While the men we are raised to know as the Founding Fathers were not deities and were certainly not perfect, I think the film does a dishonor to these men by emphasizing their weaknesses, both real and imagined, in place of hardly any mention of their rightful place in our history.

John Adams was indeed a great man, warts and all. Yet to portray everyone around him as incompetent or over their heads while the great Adams alone fights mightily on is a bit much, I should think.