Mother Nature's Son.

When I was a kid, my family started taking annual vacations Out West, this being my father's preferred part of the planet in exactly the same way as Europe eventually became mine.

Yes, there are photographs. When I finish digitizing the last 35 years, maybe I can get to them. 

Rog Sr. was an outdoorsman at heart, and the point of our journeys was to avoid spending any more time than necessary in cities -- of which there were quite few in the Dakotas and Montana, anyway.

The first westward extravaganza came in 1969, when I was nine years old. The secondary motivation for making these trips was my father's desire to reconnect with a few World War II buddies; one was close to Denver, another near Laramie in Wyoming. For some reason we were in Utah for the moon landing, and watched it on a motel room television.

As a result of these holidays, America's national park system became an obsession with me, as well as a peek into the way my brain works, or doesn't.

Nature in the abstract was all well and good with me, at least from a distance, and I enjoyed walking through the fields and woods in pre-subdivided Georgetown. The same was true of places like Yellowstone and Glacier parks, but what grabbed me at the time was the very concept of a national park, the manner of its adfarm-near-me/">ministration, and the way the concept was presented to visitors.

Specifically, I became aware that each national park unit we entered would have someone on duty to hand us a small interpretive brochure at the visitor's center, with a map and basic information.

These became a collector's item for me. Back home, I'd write letters to the various parks throughout the country, asking them to please send me the official government printing office pamphlet, as well as other information. I'd check out library books about the national park system and make lists of the various formats (national monuments, national historic sites, etc).

I was ten, maybe eleven.

At some point later, the National Park Service changed the design, and I was aghast at this shameless assault on tradition. Not only that, but the park offices began asking for stamped, self-addressed envelopes.

Blasphemy!

And yet the bug still managed to bite, even in high school. Grudgingly, when I was in junior high school, my father had agreed to organize trips around visits to the designated battlefields and historic sites pertaining to the American Civil War.

The topic mildly interested him, but the problem was that these places (a) were not located Out West in God's Country, and (b) tended to be too near major cities. But we managed somehow, and as a Civil War buff, I was delighted.

(It occurs to me that my mother was a part of all this, naturally, and it is a measure of her sphinx-like demeanor throughout her life that I couldn't begin to tell you what her opinion was about any of it. She literally never expressed a preference.) 

Anyway, I decided to become a park ranger, although not because the natural world drew me to this career choice. I merely wanted to be the guy in the uniform at the visitor's center, giving the talks about what the site meant, especially the stories about its history.

As you might imagine, eventually it dawned on me that history itself was the lure, and this had little to do with natural parks in any specific sense.
Consequently, my university major was philosophy; however, this will have to be another story for another time.

Until then, here's every U.S. National Park ranked.

This, this -- and this again: "The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken."

I've read it twice and can't find much to disagree with. It's what I've been saying for as long as I can remember, herein articulated more skillfully and comprehensively than I can imagine doing. There's nothing else left to be said. Just read it. I reprint the ending, with a lethal crescendo concerning one Jared Kushner ... self-anointed genius.

Whatever happened to Nicu Ceaușescu, anyway?

We Are Living in a Failed State, by George Packer (The Atlantic)

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

 ... To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

"Militarization Has Become Our National Religion."

By means of introduction, The Nation explains.

America’s twenty-first-century wars have been coming home in another way as well: in the increasingly worshipful attitudes of so many Americans (especially those in the seats of power in Washington, D.C.) toward the Pentagon and the U.S. military, as vividly described today by retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore.

Astore's list of "what we believe" is chilling, and sadly correct.

In Wars and Weapons We Trust: America’s Militarized Profession of Faith, by William J. Astore (Tom Dispatch)

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church) and to the soaring warbirds of the U.S. military, which I believed kept us safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American technological superiority over the godless Communists.

With all its scandals, especially when it came to priestly sexual abuse, I lost my faith in the Catholic Church. Indeed, I would later learn that there had been a predatory priest in my own parish when I was young, a grim man who made me uneasy at the time, though back then I couldn’t have told you why. As for those warbirds, like so many Americans, I thrilled to their roar at air shows, but never gave any real thought to the bombs they were dropping in Vietnam and elsewhere, to the lives they were ending, to the destruction they were causing. Nor, at that age, did I ever consider their enormous cost in dollars or just how much Americans collectively sacrificed to have “top cover,” whether of the warplane or godly kind.

There were good and devoted priests in my Catholic diocese. There were good and devoted public servants in the U.S. military. Admittedly, I never seriously considered the priesthood, but I did sign up for the Air Force, surprising myself by serving in it for 20 years. Still, both institutions were then, and remain, deeply flawed. Both seek, in a phrase the Air Force has long used, “global reach, global power.” Both remain hierarchies that regularly promote true believers to positions of authority. Both demand ultimate obedience. Both sweep their sins under the rug. Neither can pass an audit. Both are characterized by secrecy. Both seem remarkably immune to serious efforts at reform. And both, above all, know how to preserve their own power, even as they posture and proselytize about serving a higher one.

However, let me not focus here on the one “holy catholic and apostolic church,” words taken from the “profession of faith” I recited during Mass each week in my youth. I’d prefer to focus instead on that other American holy church, the U.S. military, with all its wars and weapons, its worshipers and wingmen, together with its vision of global dominance that just happens to include end-of-world scenarios as apocalyptic as those of any imaginable church of true believers. I’m referring, of course, to our country’s staggeringly large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, just now being updated -- the term seems to be “modernized” -- to the tune of something like $1.7 trillion over the decades to come ...

"There are reasons to be cheerful. These are the dying days of a rancid old order."

On the one hand, the essay linked below by Will Sutton bears a degree of thematic unity with my column last week.

ON THE AVENUES: Unless you open your eyes, “resistance” is an empty gesture.

But it's an ideal link for posting because the Democratic Party swamp meme needs to be seen as often as possible between now and November.

There are reasons to be cheerful. These are the dying days of a rancid old order, by Will Hutton (The Guardian)

In the UK and the US, the political wind will soon change in favour of those demanding good government

Don’t despair. We may be living through an attempted rightwing revolution, but its foundations are rotten. There may be a counter-revolution, as there is after every revolution, and it will be built on much firmer ground. The charlatans may be in control in both Britain and the US, but their time is limited. Their programmes are self-defeating and destructive and they do not speak to the dynamic and increasingly ascendant forces in both our societies ...

Looking for bipartisan consensus? Unfortunately, endless wars fill the bill.

Follow the money.
Follow the money.
Follow the money.

Rinse and repeat.

How to Challenge the Elite Consensus for Endless War, by Andrew J. Bacevich (The Nation)

There’s only one way: ​We have to harness the energy of millions of fed-up voters.

 ... the contours of basic policy evade critical examination, and American wars continue as if on autopilot.

The circumstances permitting this mindless undertaking to persist are so well-known that they hardly bear repeating. They include a brain-dead policy elite; a military system that insulates the vast majority of Americans from sacrifice; a cynical decision to saddle future generations with the responsibility to pay for today’s wars while the present generation enjoys tax cuts; congressional abdication of its constitutionally assigned war powers, compounded by more than a few members of the House and Senate being deeply in hock to the military-industrial complex; the hiring of what Tom Engelhardt has dubbed “warrior corporations”—profit-minded contractors, proxies, and mercenaries—effectively hiding the magnitude of war from American view; the absorption of available political energy by eminently worthy causes—the anti-Trump resistance and #MeToo offer examples—that inadvertently consign war to the margins; and finally, divisions within the feeble anti-war camp, one wing leaning left, the other leaning right, with neither willing to make common cause on matters where their views coincide.

Of course, underlying these is the enduring conceit, regularly celebrated in Washington, that Providence summons the United States to exercise global leadership now and forever, with that leadership expressed primarily through threatened or real military action. All of these together create a layered and interlocking defense that insulates the militarized status quo from challenge.

Even so, the profound American disregard for actual policy outcomes remains something of a puzzle. After all, at some level we see ourselves as a pragmatic people, preferring what works to what doesn’t. Yet as far as our wars are concerned, the gap between declared intentions and the results achieved continues to grow from one year to the next, while political elites, for the most part, pretend not to notice. Let Afghanistan, a conflict now promising to extend into eternity, serve as the prosecution’s exhibit number one.

Here, I submit, part of the problem lies with Trump himself, widely viewed by members of the intelligentsia as a noxious charlatan. For this very reason, when the president, however inadvertently, utters a self-evident truth—that our post-9/11 wars cost a lot and aren’t working—his endorsement of that truth drains it of significance. It’s akin to an involuntary reflex: If Trump says our wars have achieved nothing, then surely they must have done some good, right?

Yet, however ironically, Trump’s own ascent to the presidency might itself offer a clue about how to extricate ourselves from these “forever wars.”

Achtung Baby: "This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts."

I may not have any children, but Germany's always been good to me -- and as usual, you're entitled to my opinion.

Volk Heroes, by Rebecca Schuman (Slate)

This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts.

In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent.

Zaske argues that thanks in large part to the anti-authoritarian attitudes of the postwar generation (the so-called “68ers”), contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom—to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both. This freedom makes those kids better, happier, and ultimately less prone to turn into miserable sociopaths. “The biggest lesson I learned in Germany,” she writes, “is that my children are not really mine. They belong first and foremost to themselves. I already knew this intellectually, but when I saw parents in Germany put this value into practice, I saw how differently I was acting.” Yes, Zaske notes, we here in the ostensible land of the free could learn a thing or zwei from our friends in Merkel-world. It’s breathtaking to rethink so many American parenting assumptions in light of another culture’s way of doing things. But it’s devastating to consider just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever adopt any of these delightful German habits on a societal level.

This is not just because Americans pride ourselves on eschewing the advice of outsiders, though that certainly doesn’t help. Our political and social institutions are so firmly entrenched that no amount of wise Germanic advice can help us. “We’ve created a culture of control,” Zaske laments. “In the name of safety and academic achievement, we have stripped kids of fundamental rights and freedoms: the freedom to move, to be alone for even a few minutes, to take risks, to play, to think for themselves” ...

This being America, of course auto-centrism plays its sad part once the family returns stateside.

For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t. In the contemporary United States, even in larger cities (with New York being the only notable exception), school is so synonymous with the interminable “drop-off line” that its vicissitudes are the subject of bestselling mom-book rants.

In open defiance of this custom, I ride my daughter the 4½ miles to preschool on a bike—she gets pulled along the mean streets of St. Louis in a Burley trailer—only to get yelled at by moms in idling SUVs outside the school. A few weeks ago, all of us parents even got a sternly worded email from the director, chastising the few who do pick up their children on foot for blocking the valet-style “carpool line” with “pedestrian traffic.” This is unsurprising; most children in the U.S. do not walk to school, even if they live close enough to do so—to the detriment of their physical fitness, independence and joy, and of course also the environment. (Zaske experiences this culture shock in reverse when her family moves back to the U.S. and she makes the unheard-of suggestion of a solitary “walk to school day” at Sophia’s new San Francisco elementary.)

I really, really wish that stork would have been sober, and dropped me somewhere in Mitteleuropa as specified on the invoice.

Denmark, America and democratic socialism.

I didn't watch the Democratic presidential debate ...

Guess Who Else Is a Socialist?, Timothy Egan (New York Times)

One of the side benefits of a well-watched national political debate is the exposure it brings to something obscure and forgotten — like Denmark. Who doesn’t love a country that gave us a dish of frikadeller and rugbrod to go with paid parental leave and universal health care?

 ... but I love Denmark, and have spent more time there than anywhere else in Europe, with the exception of Slovakia and possibly Germany. Here is a reflection from our most recent visit in 2009.

Today's Tribune column: "One fine weekend in Copenhagen."

The crux of Egan's essay is this:

Once you label something socialist, it brings to mind dour Soviet types trotting out dreary worker clothing for the spring fashion line. Or, here at home, those insufferable parlor room Marxists who think it would be utopia if only we nationalized every Starbucks. In that sense, the worst thing about socialism is the socialists.

Free of the label, a hybrid economy where health care, education and pensions for the elderly are provided, side-by-side-by-side with creative capitalism, works pretty well in the Nordic countries, Britain and Canada. And most of the tenets of what is considered democratic socialism have majority support in the United States.

Road Kill 1: "Despite improvements, driving in America remains extraordinarily dangerous."

From the article.

"Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being." -- Bill Bryson

Not to mention it being hazardous to one's health.

Traffic accidents: Road kill ... Despite improvements, driving in America remains extraordinarily dangerous (The Economist)

 ... Drunk-driving is just one of the perils of American roads. In 2014 some 32,675 people were killed in traffic accidents. In 2013, the latest year for which detailed data are available, some 2.3m were injured—or one in 100 licensed drivers. These numbers are better than a few decades ago, but still far worse than in any other developed country. For every billion miles Americans drive, roughly 11 people are killed. If American roads were as safe per-mile-driven as Ireland’s, the number of lives saved each year would be equivalent to preventing all the murders in the country.

In most of the rich world, far fewer people die in road accidents these days; cars are much safer than they were, with crumple zones, airbags, anti-locking brakes and adaptive cruise control. Use of seatbelts is widespread. But compared with other countries, America has not improved much. And in some ways things have been getting worse. For example, between 2009 and 2013 pedestrian deaths jumped by 15% as the economy recovered. In Britain, over the same period, the number fell by a fifth.

Many states are as safe to drive in as Europe: New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts all have low accident rates, for example. But in rural, sparsely-populated areas, where people drive long distances on long empty roads, the death rates can be shocking. In Wyoming in 2014, 131 people were killed in fatal crashes—a traffic-accident death rate higher than in most of sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Wyoming Highway Patrol, many deaths involve drivers who refuse to wear seatbelts.

Hand me those knitting needles, because we're all truck drivers now.

See the map change, and read about the most common (not to say "proper") jobs in each state. Thanks to B for the link.

The Most Common* Job In Each State 1978-2014 (NPR)

What's with all the truck drivers? Truck drivers dominate the map for a few reasons.

Driving a truck has been immune to two of the biggest trends affecting U.S. jobs: globalization and automation. A worker in China can't drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can't drive cars (yet).

Regional specialization has declined. So jobs that are needed everywhere — like truck drivers and schoolteachers — have moved up the list of most-common jobs.

The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category. Other jobs are split more finely; for example, primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are in separate categories.

"There is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and ... it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other."

This isn't food for thought. It's a five-course meal.

Two Views on Speech, by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)

... The absolutist American view, let’s stipulate at once, still has much to be said for it. It says that once the state gets into the business of distinguishing acceptable dissent from unacceptable dissent then what we have is no longer dissent. Instead, we have state-sponsored and defined dissent, like that of the tiny “dissident” parties that were allowed to persist, once upon a time, in Eastern Europe, pendant to the chief Communist one. As John Stuart Mill said, in what is still the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written, the free contest of ideas, even bad ones, is necessary to discover the truth of things. Or, to borrow a turn of phrase from the N.R.A.: it takes a good man with a pencil to stop a bad man with a pen.

But the view that governs the opposite position, in Canada and Europe alike, is not irrational or truly hostile to liberty. The laws and rules vary, but all have a simple distinction at their core, which is that criticizing an ideology, including a religious ideology, however vociferously, is different from inducing hatred of a people or persons. In plain English, hate-speech laws are based on the simple truth that there is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and that it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other.

Car dependency in nine historical lessons, absent an 11th commandment.

A factual rendering, although it omits the part where God commands Americans to go forth and drive a lot.

9 Reasons the U.S. Ended Up So Much More Car-Dependent Than Europe, Ralph Buehler (The Atlantic Cities)

Between the 1920s and 1960s, policies adapting cities to car travel in the United States served as a role model for much of Western Europe. But by the late 1960s, many European cities started refocusing their policies to curb car use by promoting walking, cycling, and public transportation. For the last two decades, in the face of car-dependence, suburban sprawl, and an increasingly unsustainable transportation system, U.S. planners have been looking to Western Europe.

The numbers show the need for change. In 2010, Americans drove for 85 percent of their daily trips, compared to car trip shares of 50 to 65 percent in Europe. Longer trip distances only partially explain the difference. Roughly 30 percent of daily trips are shorter than a mile on either side of the Atlantic. But of those under one-mile trips, Americans drove almost 70 percent of the time, while Europeans made 70 percent of their short trips by bicycle, foot, or public transportation.

The statistics don't reveal the sources of this disparity, but there are nine main reasons American metro areas have ended up so much more car-dependent than cities in Western Europe ...

More socialism to brighten a dreary Monday: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.'

Riffing on Eugene V. Debs, Pope Francis and Slavoj Zizek brought me to this spot-on indictment of the capitalist mess we've dug (Simon's words). The following excerpt is no more than a tease; you really must read the whole article.

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' (The Observer/The Guardian)

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract

... And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse ...

Garton Ash: "Americans need to discover how the world sees them."

Read up, tea partiers. You too, KZ.

Americans need to discover how the world sees them, by Timothy Garton Ash (Guardian)

There's little awareness of how the budget crisis has eroded US credibility. It's time for a reverse Christopher Columbus

On Monday, government offices were closed in Washington DC, to mark Columbus Day. Except that most of them had been closed anyway, because of the US government shutdown. As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who, in the service of the Spanish crown, supposedly "discovered" America and reported its potential to a wondering world. I have spent the summer in the United States watching, with growing alarm, a country engaged in a degree of self-harming which, if observed in a teenager, would lead any friend to cry "call the doctor at once". As I set course back to Europe, my conclusion is this: America should do a reverse Columbus. The world no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to discover the world's view of America.

Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted – while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers.

Bill Maher: Is the US the world's policeman, or a schoolyard bully?

Bill Maher quite simply rocks.

The US: world's policeman or schoolyard bully? Ever since 9/11, it seems America's just been itching for a fight – and any Muslim country will do. Really, who acts like this?, by Bill Maher (The Guardian)

New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, "Why do they hate us?" Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we're always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we're starting to look not so much like the world's policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it's because we had no choice.

Now, I'm against chemical weapons, and I don't care who knows it. And there's no doubt a guy like Bashar al-Assad deserves to get blown up: using toxic chemicals on unsuspecting civilians is purely and profoundly evil.

But enough about Monsanto ...

ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

To begin, I recommend “Washington: A Life,” Ron Chernow’s recent biography of George Washington, but with appropriate cautionary notes, prime among them being that these many years later, there exists no sure, non-speculative way to know what was in the mind of a man who was Colonial America’s most impenetrable sphinx.

Whenever Chernow is able to augment scant primary testimony with contributing evidence from record provided by outsiders, the results are good. He is especially skilled at evoking the time of Washington’s childhood and early adulthood in colonial Virginia; in these instances, Chernow corrals an impressive array of surviving accounts, and weaves it masterfully.

Unfortunately, as the narrative progresses, the author frequently opts for pure guesswork, which amounts to the usual litany of phrases like, “He must have felt,” “Perhaps it was the case” or “Maybe there came a twinge of regret.”

Chernow cannot resist them, and in honor of our eternally prurient bedazzlement with sex, most of this amateur psychology comes in periodic analyses of Washington’s purported dalliances with Sally Fairfax, wife of a fellow planter further up the social chain of the Virginia planter’s aristocracy than Washington himself.

Was the Father of Our Country in love with Fairfax, both before, during and after his marriage to the immensely wealthy widow Martha Custis? Can we read between the lines of frequent classicist references in his letters? Was the relationship consummated?

(As a side note, perhaps no other prominent male Colonial figure profited as early and as often from his richer and better placed relatives marrying properly, and then dying prematurely. Washington inherited early and often.)

As for love and carnal happiness, there remains not a scintilla of evidence to suggest wayward, greased naked play between Washington and Fairfax, occurring in the fetid grove out back of the slave quarters at any of his four or more plantation properties.

Nor do we know whether they met illicitly in a rough-hewn cabin located somewhere in the middle of the tens of thousands of acres Washington connived to be awarded as compensation for his service in the French and Indian War -- not that Washington would have left used condoms for “Smoking Gun” to find.

That’s because Chernow persuasively describes a man with an unusually defined sense of self, possessed with propriety from a very early age, constantly obsessed with how he appeared to the eyes of others, and performing the nuanced role of Geo. Washington at all times. While we cannot know about Fairfax, it is clear that Washington anticipating the personal “brand building” of later times.

---

It certainly helped to be “Geo. Washington the Mythic Deity” when debt was high and pocket change fleeting, as was the case throughout his adult life, reflecting the land-rich, cash poor existence of the founding baronial planters. Periodically, Washington was obliged to pause from nation-building to hector his tenants and collect rents, but even this tenure as Slumlord Papa, borne of the aforementioned calculated grab of prime acreage in “new” western territories, did not help the household ledger to balance.

Washington and family customarily lived large, simultaneously complaining and indulging incessant impositions from guests. With most pre-war finished goods imported very expensively from England, therein is found a significant (and grubby) portion of the rationale for independence.

Later, while serving as the country’s first president, Washington launched what we would refer to now as a “buy local” campaign to reduce America’s dependence on imported goods. How would he view our addiction to China and Saudi Arabia today?

---

In terms of military accomplishment, Washington had a lopsided losing record, with more defeats in battle than victories.

This lifelong devotee of the theater achieved martial success not as a tactical genius, but as a thespian, portraying himself as the calm rallying point amid the storm, one underfunded by an inept, willfully impotent political structure that he freely criticized for effect, his stature remaining constant as each year’s Continental army came and went after their bare-bones, one-year enlistments expired, and overall, always just barely staying alive – living to stall and sometimes fight another day, and waiting stolidly for the Brits, who never committed themselves entirely to the cause of keeping the Colonies, to grow weary of their losses.

It worked … when the French came aboard.

All the while, Washington carefully hoarded all letters and dispatches in huge trunks for the purpose of burnishing posterity’s judgment of his performance. However, what succeeded in uniform was less beneficial in civilian’s clothes, and at this juncture, with a new nation imploring its idol to serve, matters become more factual, and also muddied.

Chernow’s persistent characterization of the early Federalists versus Republicans struggle as a fundamentally unfair fight, pitting the lofty and irreproachable ideals of Washington and Alexander Hamilton against the shrill, self-serving machinations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, grows tiresome as the pages turn.

Granted, America’s political honeymoon of intellectual content over supercharged hyperbole barely lasted through Washington’s first administration (he was twice unanimously elected by the pre-suffrage Electoral College), but the author’s propensity to depict Washington’s saintliness wounded by the evil, conniving Jefferson veers ever close to sheer hagiography.

More balanced accounts surely exist, and readers are asked to recommend such choices.

In the end, tottering on the edge of an insolvency compounded by his many years of military and political absence, and unable to square the circle of slavery either theoretically or at Mt. Vernon, Washington endeavored to enjoy a truncated two-year retirement before dying at the age of 67.

Had his doctors (and Washington himself) not extracted multiple pints of blood in search of an elusive cure, he might have survived a bit longer. As it stands, his departure from humanity’s mortal coil merely set into motion the process of deification that continues more than 200 years later with founding father pop psychology, in which Chernow’s biography snugly finds a place.

---

As an addendum, it appears likely that Washington, who fancied himself the thinking’s man’s planter and agriculturist, managed to grasp early on that slavery was a losing proposition economically, and perhaps to a lesser extent, also was unacceptable in the sense of human rights as informed by the inescapably and hypocritically Christian atmosphere of the age.

While humane by the standards of his contemporaries, Washington generally internalized his views and did nothing more about slavery until just before his death, when a revised will stipulated the freeing of his slaves – that is, only those owned by Washington himself, as opposed to “dower” slaves legally attached to his wife’s estate.

I am familiar with the exculpatory apologetics: Those folks simply could not be expected to think outside the constraints of their milieu, etc, etc.

And yet, when it comes to deities, I prefer mine to be a tad more prescient. By knowing and not acting, Washington falls short, although two centuries of worship constitute a hard habit to break.

ON THE AVENUES: Hauntingly multinational.

ON THE AVENUES: Hauntingly multinational.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

According to the dictionary, “to haunt” is to visit or inhabit as a ghost. Not unexpectedly, “to be haunted” is to be visited by these spectral non-corporeals, or to be inhabited by them.

Seeing as in theory, ghosts are immaterial spirits – more prosaically, we think of them as having been alive (in the past tense) and now dead (in a passed sense) – it’s probably neither incorrect nor particularly original for me to suggest that ideas have the power to haunt, too.

And there are memories, too; shadowy recollections of things passed, subjected to the human brain’s self-protecting preference for airbrushing, and often regurgitated as nicely pruned and tidied nostalgia.

In short, one glosses over the bad parts. Because of this safety mechanism, it is my view that memories themselves often are hazy hauntings, adorned by remnants of ideas propelling actions, which in turn prefaced the memories.

Ideas endure and are less adaptable than memories. They’re stubborn this way, and perhaps the haunting emanates from the dissonance. With distance from the source and the time, the spookiness is compounded, perhaps even exponentially, and that’s why aging is about more than mere physical deterioration.

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It is now clear that my 50th birthday last year qualifies as a watershed event (I wrote about it at the time). In the realm of thoughts and ideas affirming and animating my interior world, something as yet indefinable keeps churning, collating and coagulating. I sense future change, and seek to remain alert to its possibilities. Just the same, I’m haunted by the past.

It is a cliché, but the only constant is change. It occurs. Most of the time, it comes slowly and imperceptibly. Given the age of the planet and the “deep-time” pace of evolution, none of this is a surprise, and yet we humans are creatures of otherwise irrelevant habit, locked blithely into our daily personal and cultural constructions, and surfacing only periodically to notice the alterations in our landscape, be it local or global.

Then, belatedly, we exclaim: “What happened?”

Usually, whatever it is actually has been happening for a long, long time. We didn’t notice the gradual transformation, because as John Lennon presciently noted, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

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So it is with me. I am midway through my second year of circumstance-enforced absence from the European continent. As the time passes, my attitude evolves.

From 1985 through 2009, I generally took one trip each year, longer and less frequent journeys in the beginning, and then as the years passed, shorter jaunts taken more often.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the intense geo-political lure of the prevailing Cold War climate disappeared overnight, even if history did not stop, and the focus of my subsequent travels increasingly was applied to beer’s European contexts in history and culture.

The current travel hiatus owes to an absence of time as well as financial and philosophical realities coming in the aftermath of Bank Street Brewhouse’s inception in 2009. Briefly stated, my company’s expansion project has required herculean efforts, drained all the coffers, and led to an unexpected top-to-bottom rethink of my personal and professional position in the world of beer and brewing, some of which I’ve shared previously.

There’s also been an obvious dove-tailing between NABC’s growth and an escalating interest in the community where I live, culminating in my recent failed candidacy for city council. As a result, a temporary suspension of European visitation has been the most practical course, and my wife and I fervently hope that in 2012, we’ll be able to make a trip overseas.

Less obviously, perhaps remaining stateside for more than six months at a time, exploring my own terrain and experiencing various epiphanies in my 50th year have combined to produce an altered outlook. It is retrospective, yet also forward-gazing.

I’ve come to realize that during my early trips to Europe, whether I accurately fathomed it or not, an era was coming to a close. There’s a considerable difference between the 40th anniversary of war’s end in 1985, and the 65th in 2010. Obviously, a whole generation has passed on since then.

The Cold War’s end hastened European integration, and European unity has profoundly altered the landscape in every conceivable way, including in the areas of beer and brewing. We’re now a full thirty years removed from the traditional European beer culture described so lovingly by the late Michael Jackson in his seminal volumes.

Much of what Jackson documented, which inspired so many of us to emulate him, is now as obsolete as his “Beer Hunter” series on VHS videotape, decimated by consolidations, familial sagas, changing tastes and just plain time inexorably passing.

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Naturally, there are certain lamentations, but in truth, the mind reels at the joyous extent of what has arisen to take the place of the disappeared.

Craft breweries and brewpubs are seemingly everywhere, from Scandinavia to Italy and beyond. American brewers like Stone are making plans to brew American-style craft beers in Europe, for a local niche market.

Being part of a business in the midst of such an unprecedented flowering means more to me than money, although of course, a small piece of the largesse would be nice.

The final verdict remains murky, but goes something like this: I’ll always be a European, and I’m haunted by the ideas and past experiences that compelled me to comprehend this nationality, but during the course of transitioning NABC to a position of emphasizing its brewing operation, I’ve been serendipitously rediscovering something inside, which is about being an American.

Is it time for dual citizenship?

Out and about: At long last, a staggering admission.

But the whole point of liberation is that you get out. Restructure your life. Act by yourself.
-- Jane Fonda

Writing should be about the intimate link between personal liberation and public defiance, shouldn’t it?

This certainly was the case prior to television. In earlier times, when something important needed to be said, you were expected to compose manifestos, polemics, confessionals and apologetics. Like Martin Luther, these were intended to be nailed literally or figuratively to the cathedral door.

In the current age of solipsism, you need do no more than post a self-made YouTube video, sit back to count the hits as word circulates through e-links, and calculate the extent of your newfound notoriety.

It just isn’t the same … is it?

No, it isn’t. My topic today is difficult, but it’s the right time to discuss it, and what better way than in writing … especially since I don’t know how to make an Internet video.

I can’t remember when it first occurred to me that I was different from the others. There was neither a singular epiphany nor an earth-shattering revelation, only a dawning recognition that my attractions and desires were directed toward other places than those classified as "normal."

For more than twenty years, I’ve known the truth, but the immensity of it overwhelmed me, and the implications blinded me to the realities of the situation. I kept going both directions, back and forth, never willing to admit that my life’s orientation might be other than that considered typical for a male of my upbringing in a small Southern Indiana town and in a conservative, traditional society.

As a youth I wanted nothing more than to be like my friends, and after all, we were not readily exposed to alternative lifestyles as part of our formative educational experiences. You might read about such matters in books and see them on television, but here, where you were born and raised? It was the sort of thing that dared not speak its name aloud.

I was tormented by the usual doubts and questions. Nature or nurture? Had I done something wrong? Was I being punished? Did I have control over my real feelings and possess the ability to change them, or were they hard-wired and non-negotiable?

To be blunt, I can’t go on this way.

After much soul searching and heartfelt discussions with loved ones, dear friends, longtime customers, local politicians, cherished teachers, and even that dude whose name I can’t remember in White Castle the other day, I’ve come to a momentous decision, and I’m able finally to reveal it to you and the world.

I’m really a … a … European.

There, I’ve said it.

European. Not American. Apparently the stork erred, and I’ve spent 47 thoroughly depressing years trapped in the body of a hamburger-eating, swill-slugging, mindless patriotic church-going, NASCAR-gazing idiot (sans savant), one reviled throughout the civilized world and for fairly good reason.

It is profoundly unfair.

I should be riding on affordable public transportation through thoughtfully planned, human-scale communities to important soccer matches; vacationing in Libya or Bali or Cuba; drinking Belgian ale and Greek ouzo and Spanish wine from their sources; gratefully choosing between many more than two political parties, and ones that actually might reflect my own belief system; enjoying competent and universal cradle to grave health care; having no reason to fear the harmful encroachment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy or to argue for the usefulness of religion apart from those pretty church buildings; refusing to own a firearm because my status as genuine citizen and "real man" isn’t predicated on it; speaking a half-dozen languages fluently; and understanding that my tax burden, while high, is being distributed to the benefit of my community as a whole.

I need a document of authenticity.

Anyone seen that damned negligent stork?

(Note: The preceding was originally blogged over at the author's MySpace site, where he's been rehearsing new material on a smaller stage. You're cordially invited to peek in.)