Vandal With a Handle

The family and I caught Take the Lead last evening. Banderas was masterful as the quiet teacher leading wild adolescents toward civilization through ballroom dance. The film is, as might be expected, rather formulaic but it was inspiring and entertaining nonetheless. By the way, for those in the Huntington, WV area interested in ballroom dance, a new ballroom dance blog is up. Check it out.

It is amazing how much we can learn about religion from nonadherents. Nonadherents? Listen to me. The mere use of such a word indicates how far we have come. Or descended. Once they were heretics, unbelievers, infidels, the worldly and unbelieving masses. Now we speak of nonadherents. What once was an actual stance in the world is now a simple negation. Maybe unbelief means nothing because belief does too. Fred has his commonly unsettling and enlightening thoughts here. On a somewhat related topic, he speaks of science and religion here with his thoughts made more interesting because he has no vested interest in religion and some in science.

I didn't know much about Sandy Froman, the Arizona lawyer who is currently serving as president of the NRA. Via The Geek, I learned of this article about her life and perspective on several things, among them firearms and personal defense. He also has a good gun show story that tells more than you might think at first about the empowerment factor and personal confidence that accompanies firearms. I say it accompanies firearms because it does not come from them. It belongs commonly to the people who own firearms but does not come from them. As Jeff Cooper is well known to have observed, you are no more armed because you have a firearm than you are a musician because you have a piano. If you read both selections, you can contrast the helpless distress of Sandy Froman in the description of her experience with a home invader, with the quiet, let's-go-to-work confidence of the people at the gun show. One of the most memorable parts of my Gunsite training was not directly about firearms at all. It was the instruction that when evil does rear its head in a person's experience, there are two possible responses. One is surprise and denial--they say, "I can't believe this is happening to me. What can I do?" The other is confidence and awareness of empowerment--"I thought this might happen and I can do what needs to be done. "

The October 13 issue of Electronic Design features an unexpected pat on the back for the Amateur Radio Service or, as it is most commonly called, ham radio. It appears that for all the high-tech gear that modern science has produced, it mostly went offline when Katrina whacked the New Orleans area earlier this year, leaving the area without reliable communication with the rest of the world. Only amateur radio with its decentralized, localized approach was able to establish communication for emergency purposes almost immediately after the disaster. They could be called the "tech militia". Each operator operates his own equipment which he can build, maintain and operate by himself.
As old as radio itself, hams were here before radio was licensed. They were the experimenters with communication; the tinkerers; the haywire-and-high-voltage people who learned the craft when it was mostly unexplored and uncharted. Hiram Percy Maxim, the founder of the American Radio Relay League, envisioned a national network of operators to carry messages in community service. Now hams occupy spectrum virtually from dc to daylight and communicate with voice, data, and video and still maintain the same focus on community service.
It's good to see amateur radio get credit for what has always been their strength: community service in times of emergency. On a broader view we should see here another strong evidence of the powerful advantages of decentralization and individual responsibility. When the strength is at the bottom of the pyramid it's almost impossible to turn over.

Update: the ARRL has a recap of emergency operations from an in-house perspective here.

The Handle Institute proundly recommends Pierce Pettis for Honorary West Virginian. I understand he is from Alabama but he obviously understands the power of the Appalachian personality. Check out the words of "A Mountaineer is always Free" his collaboration with West Virginian Tim O'Brien. You can listen to a clip and buy cds here and of course here. In my opinion the time is wrong for group singing or I would want to change the state song. I have one ancestor who came to Virginia fleeing Ireland after killing his landlord with a stick and another who married a Cherokee wife and built a family in another part of Virginia now called Kentucky. The song touches the independence, tenderness and toughness of the mountain people. It might also say something about why it is so difficult to move them from their native habitat. They paid too much to get there in the first place to leave without a struggle.

It appears that the SHTF value of firearms has demonstrated itself to Sean Penn as he works in the Katrina relief effort. The New York Post gets credit for capturing the moment and Atlas Shrugged our compliments for the link. Comments in the Atlas Shrugged post contained this gem which has the ring of authenticity although not independently confirmed:

ER: you nailed it. This reminds of the time in the early '70s (IIRC) when Dean Martin was caught at an airport with a gun. A newsbabe asked: "Mr. Martin, do you believe everyone has the right to carry a gun?"

"Of course not," he replied. "Just me." The best reply to a reporter, ever.

Without a doubt, when the forces of order are absent or busy about other things, we may wish to have at hand the means of defending ourselves. See you at the NRA meeting, Mr. Penn.

This blog should keep us watching for the great people we miss because we do not expect them where we find them. Samples:

What I realize now, each night as I stand behind the counter of my little shop, years later on these beautiful Summer nights, is that I was dealing with one of the one people in about ten thousand that I would actually consider sane. He had figured out a truth so profoundly obvious and yet so painful for the rest of our vain, silly selves to accept: we are not truly defined by the things that we allow ourselves to be defined by. We are not our jobs, we are not our clothes, we are not our cars, we are not the opinions of others, or even our own opinions of ourselves. These things are ephemeral and shifting, chess pawns to be traded and sacrificed before the king that is the higher Self. These things do not have the power to make or break our happiness any more than we allow them to do so. They are labels which we were taught to adhere to early in our lives, in order to make us obedient and hence less difficult to control; they are sticks and carrots treating us as pack mules, and the truly daft thing is that we allow our lives, nay, demand that our lives be led this way, thinking that the better sticks and bigger carrots of promotions and new cars and home refurbishments will make us more than pack mules.

And furthermore:

John understood that a man’s greatness flows forth from the confines of his heart, that it is to be found nowhere outside, and certainly not on any line of an IRS 1040 form. Perhaps he even understood, like Jesus and Lao-tzu and Buddha, that he could change more people into good and great people by leading with his quiet, dignified example than with the soapboxes and megaphones that are the trade-tools of loud, blathering, discontented fools everywhere. He certainly knew that finding a job you loved involved not a better job, but rather learning to infuse love into whatever job it is you do. A lot of lawyers are detestable, angry, bitter, avaricious people, despite the fact that they make eight times as much money as convenient store clerks. A few convenient store clerks are really somewhat content being unimportant. At the end of the day, who’s really better off?

My first reaction to the blog was "This guy is too good to be where he is." Then I deduced that I had not yet heard what I read. Read the whole article here and don't miss this one while you're there. Really. Don't.

Laudator Temporis Acti has an interesting post on comparisons of Jesus and Seneca. We may never know but the question is tantalizing, "Was Jesus a bucolic and simple teacher without learning of the larger world or did he know anything of the broader scholarly world?" Certainly it is possible for different teachers to arrive at the same thought without any collaboration. I would guess that the learning of the synagogue in NT times included some study of contemporaries.

Maybe public broadcasting is not an idea whose time has come. Maybe it is an idea whose time has gone. Jeff Jacoby thinks so.

Last week the House of Representatives restored $100 million that the Appropriations Committee had cut from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's federal subsidy. Too bad: the CPB allowance should be cut, particularly when the federal budget is so badly out of balance.

But despite the argument made by some Republicans, the reason to defund ''public'' television is not its liberal political bias. It is that it has no legitimate claim on taxpayer dollars. Maybe it did back when public broadcasting was a lone oasis in a vast wasteland of mediocrity, but that is no longer the case. Thanks to cable, satellites, and the Internet, viewers now have access to an incredible array of offerings, much of it of very high quality. From ESPN to A&E to The Learning Channel, today's private broadcasters more than fill the need it was once said only public broadcasting could meet. They manage without a federal handout. Big Bird can, too.

I have listened to public radio as long as it has been on the air and some truly worthwhile programming has come to light there. A Prairie Home Companion, The Folk Sampler, Below the Salt from Ohio Public Radio, and naturally, Mountain Stage are my favorites. Much as I like the programming, I have to agree that there is no real reason to spend public money for quality broadcasting when plenty is being produced in the private sector.

I remarked in the past about a brief moment of apparent disorientation in Garrison Keillor's life and it is to my sincere pleasure that he is apparently back to his old self. The warmth and pleasures of the summer have brought back the old optimism. It seems to be related to strawberries and sweet corn. I can understand that. Long days, sunshine and fresh produce make everybody feel better. There is too, for the thoughtful, the sobering lesson of the grasshopper and the ant. There is more to the year than summer and for that reason we should enjoy it even more. The knowledge that winter comes only makes the enjoyment of summer more urgent.

The honeybees are enjoying their six weeks of life until their wings wear out and they drop dead, and we humans feel the transitory nature of life, too. Summer is brief up here in St. Paul. Fresh sweet corn has a short season. You boil up a few ears and you say, "G-d is great and G-d is good. And we thank him for this food. Let this meal to us be blest. And now I think I'll skip the rest. Let's eat. Amen." And you slather the corn with butter and salt it and eat it blissfully, row by row, left to right, hit carriage return, next line. And you think that this is the first of many corn feasts.


But it isn't. You're busy. Events press on you. The weeks pass and suddenly it's September and corn is over for the year and those ears are all you'll get. This happens again and again in life. Your friends sit in your back yard one night drinking beer and singing old songs, and you say, "Let's do this again sometime." And you never do. You promise yourself you're going to return to that great stretch of river in Montana and it doesn't happen.

Summer gets people outside for flea markets, county fairs and picnics. You see people up close.

On the Fourth, the adoption of Mr. Jefferson's little peroration against the King, you sit in the shade and think of America at its best, a generous and redemptive land, an amiable people. A nation of optimistic sentimental humorists. Europeans can be shocked at how instantly friendly we can be with people we don't know. We meet strangers over a cup of coffee and suddenly we're telling about the crazy uncle who ran off with the church secretary. We rally to help people we never met. Amiability is the basis of civil politics: You don't cheat people you like, you don't abuse people who might become your friends.

There are still people worth meeting out there and things worth doing, even if it's no more than sitting on the porch watching the squirrels.