Fakename On Golf

My post yesterday about fishing mentioned that I think it’s the fourth most boring activity a person can choose to be engaged in.  The top three all involve golf. 

Specifically, in first place is watching golf on TV.  Given the option of watching golf on TV or watching paint dry, I’ll pick the paint.  Here’s a synopsis of TV golf:  Golfer hits ball. (Look at that stance!  Behold that grip!)  Here comes my favorite part:  Ball is airborne.  Camera pans up to the sky to follow the ball.  Look!  It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  No–it’s the sky.  The monotony of which is broken, if you’re lucky, by the tops of some tall trees on either side of the screen.  What you will not see is the ball, unless you really are Superman and have X-ray vision.  And anyway, I don’t care if the ball has been painted Day-Glo orange so that it stands out against your view of the sky, devoid of any reference as to where it came from or where it’s going, watching a ball sail through the sky is meaningless. 

Thankfully, just before you’re ready to slit your wrists to get some kind of mental stimulation, the camera returns to the ground.  Where you can observe the next step in the process.  The golfers and their caddies walking to where the ball fell.  The crowd trudges after them.  Movement!  The excitement is almost too much to take.  Hand me a Valium. 

In second place on my list was watching golf in person.  The difference between watching golf on TV and watching it in person is that you’re there in person.  You can at least be one of the trudgers. 

In third place on the boredom scale was actually playing golf, and I thoroughly covered my experience with that in my post on fishing.  But I have a lot more to say about playing golf. 

I happen to be employed in the business world, and started as one of the few female managers at my level in my particular industry.  My industry involves widget management.  My company doesn’t own or manufacture widgets, we just manage them and their use by others.  Thus, we report to widget owners.  And nothing used to impress a widget owner more than the ability to play (and pay for) a game of golf.

Every boss I’ve ever had in this business (16 years now) has been a man, a fact I don’t begrudge in the least.  It’s the way of the world.  If I worked as hard as most of them do, I might be there myself.  With a few exceptions (whom I survived), they have been extraordinary people.  But to a man, they have all played golf and been good at it.  Their biggest challenge was how to play the widget owner and let him win without being obvious. 

The point is that playing golf was practically a requirement for advancement in business management, and it’s quite amazing that they let me into the management club.  But during the course of this 16 years, a shift has taken place.  More and more of the widget owners are female, and they don’t play golf either.  When I want to bond with my female widget owners, we go to lunch, or to the movies.  Finally, the playing field has leveled quite a bit. 

The fact is that playing golf, until Tiger Woods, had deteriorated into an activity for old, fat, slow, white guys who needed an excuse to go drinking and talk trash about women in the middle of the day.  Okay, that still happens.  It just isn’t considered to be the socially acceptable, almost imperative, activity it once was. 

It seems that golf courses are suffering now.  For one thing, corporations are withdrawing their memberships as a belt-tightening measure.  For another, it’s an environmental issue.  The amount of water it takes to sustain greens in the desert, somewhere like Palm Springs, is crazy.

I never like to see anything die off completely, whether it’s an animal, a native language, a way of life, or even a sport.  But if we lose golf, I can’t say I would miss it much.  I bet Tiger Woods would be good at tennis.

It’s Time for Another Edition of…

…Fakename’s Animal Planet.  This was a great week for animal stories, culminating with last night’s story on the CBS evening news about a little boy named Jud in Lawrence, Kansas who wanted a hedgehog.  Turns out it was illegal to own one there.    (I seem to remember something about hedgehogs passing along diseases.)  But it oughta be against the law for something to be so cute: 

So Jud put together a packet of scientific evidence and presented it to the Lawrence City Commission, which overturned the ban.  Now Jud has a hedgehog.  For this story see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/30/assignment_america/main4765440.shtml

Moving along to horses, it turns out that Barbaro has a little brother named Nicanor, who will this very day race in his first race at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Florida.  Barbaro, you will recall, is the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who shattered his right hind leg in the Preakness.  Getting the most extraordinary treatment, he lived for another 8 months before having to be euthanized.  My generally negative feelings about horse racing aside, I couldn’t help but be moved by the story and Nicanor looks enough like Barbaro that it’s spooky.  Break a leg, Nicanor. 

But today’s post is primarily about locusts. 

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about locusts.  I mainly remember them as being the stars of a biblical plague.  I know they swarm and can eat through entire fields of food crops in minutes, leaving the fields looking like they’ve been napalmed.  I know that they swarm when food becomes scarce.  Makes sense.  But what really causes them to swarm?

It turns out that as food becomes scarcer, locusts, who are normally solitary creatures, get pushed closer and closer together.  When they can feel other locusts around them, it causes an increase in the level of the chemical serotonin in their brains.  (And who knew that locusts have brains?)  This makes them so happy they want to be around even more locusts until a swarm forms. 

The relevance of this to your own personal life is this:  the chemical serotonin is involved in regulating “anger, aggression, mood, appetite, sexuality, and a host of other behaviors”, according to the Los Angeles Times.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-locusts31-2009jan31,0,929188.story  If you don’t read this article, you should definitely check it out for the priceless photo of a young man trying to fight his way through a swarm of locusts high on serotonin. 

The even more important issue to you is that fact that the drug Prozac works by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain.  So if you’re feeling sad and isolated, mad at the world, and neither food nor sex particularly appeal to you any more, you don’t have to take Prozac.  Just go rub your wings against someone else’s. 

Fakename On Fishing

Frankly, Fakename is not well-qualified to discuss this subject.  (Shhh.  Fakename can hear some of you out there snorting, “That never stopped her before.”)

I, Fakename, have never done much fishing.  That’s because I consider it to be the fourth most boring sport or sports-related activity on the planet.  In first place is watching golf on TV.  In second place is watching golf in person.  In third place is actually playing golf. 

In the Don’t Knock It Until You’ve Tried It category, let me emphasize that I have played golf.  In college I was required to take at least four semesters of physical education to get a degree.  One semester was a required course of basic exercise and fitness, and then you had three electives.  One of mine was golf.  My grade was a C.  This was either because I religiously showed up for class each and every time, or because the instructor was on drugs. 

In the same category (Don’t Knock It, etc.), I’ve also fished.  Several times, in fact.  I think it would take two hands to count all of them. 

My favorite fishing experience was the time that 5 or 6 of my girlfriends and I chartered a boat for a half-day and went deep-sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico just off Destin, Florida.  A lot of advance planning and preparation was required for this breathtaking experience.  First, lose 10 pounds so you can fit into your cute new swimsuit.  Remember to bring a sun visor and the family-size bottle of sunscreen.  As I remember it, the experience involved reading a lot of back issues of Cosmo while drinking copious amounts of beer starting at about 9:00 A.M.  Your job is to lie on your lounge chair, peek over the top of your Cosmo from time to time, and squeak if the fishing rod in front of you twitches.  At that point, the beefy Mate rushes out and reels in the fish for you. 

But I’ve tried fishing the regular way too.  I liked the part about catching a fish.  It’s the part about waiting to catch a fish that I have trouble with.  You have to have a sort of Zen personality to fish.  (Zen:  the ability to do and think of nothing until you die of old age.  Synonym:  Fishing.)

My second favorite fishing experience was when I once caught a Northern Pike in Canada.  I was fishing alone from the bank of an island in the St. Lawrence River.  It was the biggest fish I had ever seen in my life, and I single-handedly wrestled it ashore.  It was a foot long!  Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was a mere baby, and I should have thrown it back.  Of course by the time I found that out, it was dead, and we had to eat it. 

I was reminded of that experience today by a great article in the New York Times about ice-fishing–truly one of those activities you have to ask yourself, why would humans do this if they didn’t have to?  And not just ice-fishing, but ice-fishing with spears.  In the UP of Michigan, the lower limit of Pike you can take is 24 inches. 

Now spearfishing seems to be a bit more of a fair fight to me, kind of like bow-hunting for deer, and the article says that spearfishing is more like hunting than fishing.  But the Catch-And-Release proponents are critical of spearfishing because they’ve shown that spearfishers actually take bigger fish.  (My first thought:  catch and release?  Fishing is already boring enough.  Without the reward of at least being able to eat the thing, what’s the point?)  Now you would think that catching the biggest fish is the point.  That’s what all fishing competitions reward.  But it turns out that scientists think there are some problems with that. 

First, there is the mercury issue.  Big fish eat little fish.  Big fish absorb the mercury from the little fish, not counting the mercury they are already absorbing themselves. 

Second, you’re eliminating the oldest and smartest of the fish, so you’re dumbing down the gene pool of fish.  For fishing fans, it probably won’t be as much fun to catch a stupid fish. 

Third, you’re interfering with natural selection, so that fish will eventually become smaller.  What a future.  Catching tiny, dumb, and mercury-poisoned minnows. 

But for a more heartening  story (and to see how humans who are apparently perfectly sane spend their time), see the NY Times story.  http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/travel/escapes/30dark.html?pagewanted=1&hp  Don’t forget the sunscreen.

My Favorite Movies…Otherwise

I sort of hate doing these “favorite” or “Top Ten” type of lists, because shortly after putting them down on paper (so to speak) I’ll find myself smacking myself on the head, going, “How could you have left out (fill in movie name here)?”

Of the movies I’ve seen, I liked every one on Ptfan’s and spencercourt’s lists, but there are some that are, in my opinion, missing.  Either that says I have different tastes, or they will be smacking themselves on the head (see above).  This actually is a “Top Thirteen” list or maybe a top fifteen…and I’ve deliberately left out only one movie which appeared on either Ptfan1 or spencercourt’s lists.  That movie is Silence of the Lambs.  Rarely does a movie capture the essence of a book like this movie did.  And Jody Foster’s acting…stunning. 

In no particular order: 

E.T.  No explanation necessary. 

9 1/2 Weeks.  Besides the fact that it’s a very sensual film, it’s also one in which Mickey Rourke still looks like a human being.  Before the train ran over him and then backed up to make sure he was really dead.  You remember why he became a big star.  I also liked him in Angelheart, which almost made my list.  I’m getting chillbumps thinking about it. 

The Sixth Sense.  If you got what was happening before it was revealed in the end, please don’t tell me and make me feel stupid. 

The Remains of the Day.  If I had to pick a Number One, this would be it.  Anthony Hopkins’  finest performance in my view.  The scene where he continues to serve dinner while his father is dying upstairs is gut-wrenching in the extreme.  The end…ditto.  5 Kleenexes (too sad) but unforgettable. 

The Bridges of Madison County.  Clint Eastwood had to be in here somewhere, right?   I thought about making Unforgiven the Eastwood movie of choice.  Like comedies, I never willingly go see romantic movies.  I made an exception in this case because I was living in Iowa at the time.  It turned out to be more than a romance.  It’s about making the right choice.  It isn’t all about you.  Meryl Streep…our greatest living actress.  First seen, if you will recall, in The Deerhunter.  Which also almost made the list. 

Amadeus.  I love Mozart, what can I say? 

Final Destination.  The cast:  no one you ever heard of.  But for spooky modern horror, it’s as good as it gets.  Not counting The Sixth Sense.  The sequels were good too, but I’m not a big fan of sequels.  Nothing matches that first jolt of surprise. 

Lord of The Rings.  Technically, this is three movies, so that’s how it becomes a top 15 instead of a top 13.  But pick any one of them.  They are all masterpieces.  Here’s where I embarked on my love of Viggo Mortensen.  But after seeing him in Appaloosa, not so much.  I think it was the goatee.  Or maybe it was the wooden quality of his acting.  When he kisses Rene Zellwegger, you can’t work up a single chillbump. 

The Last Emperor.  Its only flaw is being too long.  But the lucky cricket thing.  I will say no more. 

The Truman Show.  This is the Jim Carrey exception.  He is truly talented–too bad he wastes it on juvenile garbage that probably plays well in the boy’s restroom of an elementary school.  I guess everybody has to make a living somehow.  Also, if you got what was happening in the beginning–I didn’t, even when the camera dropped from the “sky”–please don’t tell me and make me feel stupid. 

Fatal Attraction.  Has there ever been a scarier movie?  Forget The Shining.  Rabbits.  You will never look at them the same way again. 

Terminator.  The original.  I like pretty much any movie Arnold ever did.  My favorite may be True Lies.  The scene where he rescues his daughter while flying a jet, heartstopping!  I love special effects. 

And finally, Number 13:  Okay, I lied.  The Matrix.  Which appeared on spencercourt’s list.  If you had any idea what was going on in the beginning, please don’t…well, you know the drill.

My Favorite Movies…Animated and CG

Okay.  I’m jumping on the bandwagon here, and Ptfan1 and Anarchist (aka spencercourt) are far more qualified than I to make such a list.  I may read like a fiend, but I don’t see that many movies.  However, both their lists don’t include any animated/computer-generated movies and what, by the way, is up with that?  Is it, like, unmanly or something?

I never, NEVER, go see a movie that I know to be a comedy.  I love humor in movies, which is not the same thing.  The surest way to turn me off is to suggest I see anything with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey in it (there’s an exception to the Jim Carrey rule.)  If I see a comedy, it’s quite by accident. Such was the case with the one and only comedy I think deserves a “best of” nod:  Clueless.  Very funny and sophisticated. 

Now on to the “best of” animated/CG movies.  In first place is the undisputed king of the genre:  Bambi (1942).  Many argue that Fantasia is Disney’s best classic animated movie, but I disagree.  I chiefly remember Fantasia as the movie that showed every other Saturday at midnight at the local art theater, and it was a big hit with the self-medicated crowd.  (On alternate Saturdays, Rocky Horror Picture Show.) Bambi set the stage for the best that followed.  A truly great movie in this genre ideally has animals, a happy ending, and  it has a message.  Sometimes they will make you cry (on a scale of 1 to 5, it needs to be at least a 2-Kleenex movie.  1 Kleenex=not sad enough.  5-Kleenex=too sad.)

Before I proceed with the other four movies in my top five, let me say that I haven’t seen three of the most acclaimed movies in the genre:  Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and WALL-E.  One day, I hope to correct that, but for the moment, here is my list.  They are in no particular order.  Recently, a writer for the NY Times, Stanley Fish I believe, did a top 10 movies of all time.  If I recall correctly, he said that The Best Years of Our Lives was the best movie ever made.  Number two was Sunset Boulevard.  After that, he said, everything else was tied for Number three.  So to steal his line, the other movies on my list are tied for Number two. 

The Lion King (1994).  No introduction or explanation necessary.

An American Tail (1986).  Oddly, you won’t find this Steven Spielberg movie on anyone else’s list, which truly stumps me.  Fievel is a little mouse who becomes separated from his family as they are immigrating to the U.S.  I don’t believe they were the ones who sang it in the movie, but hearing Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville sing “Somewhere Out There” is enough reason to see the movie.  Fievel sings it to the moon, saying that somewhere out there, his family is underneath the same moon and stars as he is, and he prays they will be reunited.  Geez.  I gotta go get a Kleenex. 

Shrek (2001).  Only a one-Kleenex movie, because most of it is hysterically funny.  Eddie Murphy as Donkey is unmatched.  What it lacks in sadness, it makes up for in message:  It’s okay to be just who you are. 

Bolt (2008).  Three Kleenexes.  It has a dog, a cat, and a hamster.  How could it go wrong?  There is a scene at the end of the movie where Bolt (the dog) is trapped with his beloved person Penny inside a burning building.  He desperately seeks a way out, and finds one, but it’s too small for Penny to follow.  So instead of saving himself, he goes back and lies down next to her, intending to die with her.  You can use up your three Kleenexes in that scene alone.  All the very best things about dogs…the love and loyalty. 

I have to do an Honorable Mention here, which is Charlotte’s Web.  Not the original animated version, because I never saw it.  What I did see was the more recent (2006) version, with Dakota Fanning as the little girl Fern.  I adore Dakota Fanning.  I couldn’t include it in my list, because only Charlotte, the spider, is CG in this movie.  I’m probably the only person on the planet who never read this book as a child, so I was totally unprepared for the fact that Charlotte dies at the end.  (Dang!  Would somebody please pass the Kleenex?)

Gun Violence…Part Three

So I was running away when the police arrived.  I don’t guess that looked too good.  I hadn’t made it too far, maybe halfway down the block, and they caught me and gently guided me back to the house.  They sat me down on a stool in the kitchen, and I kept saying, Can we leave here?  I can’t be in this house.  Take me to the station.  Take me anywhere.  I can’t be here.  There was like an army of people arriving.  I could see the flashes from the photographers, taking pictures of the body two rooms away.  Please, I said.  Let me leave. 

The police gave me a glass of water, and then made me some coffee.  I guess you can see where this is heading.  It isn’t really a good idea to be running away from the site of a dead body when the police arrive.  At the time, however, I had no idea that that was suspicious. 

My first inkling was when a detective came into the kitchen and said, “So.  How long have you been having an affair with Ralph?”  I said, What?!!! Are you crazy?  His wife is at my apartment!  Call her!  She sent me here!  And they did call her.  And I’ll never be sure, but I think what she said was, I think she’s having an affair with my husband.  I asked her to go over there, sure, but she should have been back before now.  She must be sleeping with him. 

On the coffee table in the living room there were two wine glasses.  If you were leaving your husband because he failed to pick up your son from school, why would you have a glass of wine with him first?  The implication was that it was me who had the wine with him.  Also on the coffee table was an ashtray full of cigarette butts.  The two of them and I smoked the same brand at the time, the difference being that they smoked the 100’s and I smoked the regular size.  The 100’s had two gold bands around the filter, and the regulars had only one.  It’s that detail that saved me from arrest.  There were no cigarettes in the ashtray with only one band. 

When I arrived it was about 11:00 P.M.  When I left, it was 3:00 A.M., and they had a police officer drive me home.  I was in no shape to drive.  Just before the officer drove me home, a detective came in the kitchen and said, I want you to know we’ve ruled it a suicide.  I thought, duh.  But until then, I had no clue how close I had come to being a murder suspect.   

When I arrived back at my apartment, Beth’s entire family was there–she had called them–and they treated me as if I was somehow to blame.  My dog was missing, and I never saw him again.  They let him out, and without me there to call him back, he wandered far and was kidnapped.  That is a whole other story. 

I think that what happened was that Beth killed him herself before coming to my apartment.  Later, the police told me that there were questions about the position of the shotgun.  But who could blame her?  If someone left your seven-year old son in the snow because they were drunk, well, hmmmm.  I do take issue with trying to set me up for it.

Gun Violence…Part Two

I arrived at the house of my friend Beth and immediately noted that the sports car, their second car, is parked in the driveway.  I mention this only because it shows how willing I was to make up my own explanations.  My explanation was that not being able to find her, Ralph had returned to the house. 

I parked “Tim’s” car on the street, and walked across the front yard through the snow.  I rang the doorbell.  No answer.  I peered through the front picture window and could see Ralph lying on the couch, by the light of the TV and the Christmas tree. 

Based on what I’d been told, I figured he had just passed out again.  I went around to the side door that Beth had given me keys to, and to my surprise, it was cracked open.  I was very surprised.  They had experienced a robbery recently and I couldn’t believe they would be so lax. 

I walked in, calling Ralph’s name, with no response.  I went from the kitchen , through the hall, into the living room, where he was lying on the couch.  Except for the light from the Christmas tree and the TV, it was dark.  I was very reluctant to touch him, since I thought he was probably passed out and I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t wake up violently.  But I reached down to touch him on the leg, and that’s when I saw the shotgun.  It was lying on his legs .

Then I knew he was dead.  I withdrew to the hall where the phone was, and called the police.  Then I went out and stood in the yard.  It was freezing, but I couldn’t bear to be inside the house.  The ambulance arrived before the police did, and they rushed inside the house–it turns out that the front door was unlocked.  I had this irrational hope all of a sudden that he would be alive, and that the ambulance crew could save him, and so I rushed inside with them.  Just in time to see them shine their flashlight on his head, which was hamburger.  Blood and brains were splattered all over the wall. 

Then, I started running.  I ran out the door after seeing that and kept on running.  I intended to run until I got to Africa.  Leaping tall buildings.  Flying over oceans.  But then the police stopped me.  They were nice.  There is a Part Three here.

Gun Violence…A Personal Story

This week I mistakenly understood that Ptfan1, one of the readers of this blog, had personally witnessed the execution of Oswald by Ruby, and I’m glad I was wrong, as it turned out.  I’ve never seen anyone shoot anyone else live either, but I have seen the results, live, of someone who died from a gunshot wound. 

I’ve almost never spoken of this, but it has informed my attitude about guns and gun ownership for 30 years now.  Before discussing my attitude, let me tell you the story. 

It’s exactly a week before Christmas, 1979.  One of my best friends and a co-worker–we’ll call her Beth–has been married for a year or so to “Ralph”, who was a dentist and professor of dentistry at the local university.  This was a major “catch”.  He’s handsome, respected, and has a lot of money.  They buy a house in an exclusive neighborhood, maybe a couple of miles away from my apartment which is in the same section of town, but light years away from the luxury of the neighborhood where they live. 

Things aren’t going well.  Ralph turns out to be an alcoholic, and he is insanely jealous.  The kind of guy who checks the mileage on her car when she goes to the grocery store or picks up her 7-year old kid (from a previous marriage) from daycare, to see if she’d made any side trips.   He systematically cuts her off from all her friends, except, oddly enough for me.  His reasoning seemed to be that she was a married lady now, and needed to put away activities of the single life, like going out for a drink after work.  I have no idea why I was exempted, but I was allowed to go to parties at their house and have dinner there on occasion.  Which was really stupid, because at the time, I might have been the worst influence she knew.  I was constantly saying, fuck this guy!  Be like you used to be!

On the night of December 18th, 1979, I got a call from Beth saying she was leaving Ralph, and asking if she could come to my apartment and bring her son with her.  Of course.  At the time I was drinking B&B on ice with an old boyfriend who had showed up out of the blue.  When she arrived, we put her son to bed in my bed, and the old BF and I listened to her cry for an hour. 

Here’s what had happened.  Ralph was supposed to pick up the little kid at the bus stop after school, but got drunk and forgot.  When Beth arrived home, Ralph was passed out on the couch.  By the way, it was snowing.  Frantic that her son was out in the snow and scared, she went looking for him, and he was still there at the bus stop.  He said he was cold, but wasn’t scared–he knew they wouldn’t let him down. 

That, so the story goes, was the last straw for Beth.  She made up her mind to leave.  She had threatened before, but Ralph always said if she did, he would kill himself.  The trouble was that on this occasion, she had a few glasses of wine with Ralph and smoked a lot of cigarettes with him first. 

After about an hour of her crying, I asked her permission to call Ralph and let him know she was okay.  No point, she said.  He’s dead.  Nonsense, I said.  He may have threatened to kill himself, but that was just manipulative.  I called.  No answer.  He’s dead, she said.  Nonsense, I said.  He’s out roaming the streets in your other car looking for you. 

She said, “Could you go check on him?”  Ex-BF, whom we will call Tim, said, “I’ll go”.  And she said, No Way!  You can’t go…you’re a strange man…he will immediately think I’m having an affair with you.  Only Fakename can go, she’s the only one of my friends he trusts.  So she gave me the keys to her house, and “Tim” gave me the keys to his car (I’m not sure why I couldn’t take my own–I think it had been temporarily repossessed), and off I went. 

To this day, I can remember what I was wearing.  A maroon leotard with no bra, dark brown corduroy pants, a dark brown raggedy-looking fur coat of some kind (not mink or anything expensive).  Shoes, I can’t remember.  Probably tennis shoes, because I can remember the snow seeping in over the tops and freezing my feet.  To be continued.

Brace For Impact

These, I have decided, are the three scariest words in the English language.  The crash landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River happened a mere 5 minutes after takeoff, and I’m sure when everyone on board heard those words they were convinced they were going to die.  But due to the quick thinking, and ultimately, the skill of the pilot, everyone lived. 

Here’s the question.  Is the pilot, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, a hero?  In my view, absolutely.  But I once got into a debate, which turned into an argument, about the meaning of heroism.  (Here’s my definition of debate versus argument:  a debate is people freely expressing differing views, with respect for the person with the opposing view.  An argument is when extraneous kitchen-sink issues start being tossed in.  Name-calling is not far behind.  When debate turns into argument, I withdraw from the field.)

This debate-turned-argument started because I expressed the opinion that utility workers who come in to restore power to people after disasters like hurricanes and ice storms are heroic.  My opponent said, “They’re doing their jobs, and they get paid for it.” 

If that’s the definition, then I guess Captain Sullenberger isn’t a hero either.  I suspect if asked (and I haven’t heard any interviews with him), he would say something similar.  That he isn’t a hero and was just doing his job.  But with a little more caution and less confidence, a little less split-second decision-making, and a lot less physical skill at wielding an aircraft with no power, 155 people would have died. 

So maybe there needs to be a different word to describe it rather than heroism.

But I’ve been thinking that “Brace For Impact” should be the new slogan of the Obama administration, replacing “Yes We Can”.  We’re constantly being reminded that things will get worse before they get better.   

After Brace For Impact, the three other scariest words this week were “Peanut Butter Recall”.  I was pretty sure I was going to starve, since peanut butter and ice cream are my emergency foods of choice.  But thankfully, peanut butter in jars is so far safe.  Still…no cheese crackers with peanut butter from the vending machine?  Ack. 

On CBS News tonight, the former head of the FDA said that drug safety has been a priority of the agency forever, when clearly food safety is a higher priority.  Everybody eats. 

President Obama (it feels good to say that) has to pilot us back to safety.  I haven’t seen much mention of it, but to me, the most important thing he said was that we should not be asking how big or how small government is, but whether it’s working.  It’s time to make it work.

Peace, Not Apartheid, Part 2

I’ve now finished Jimmy Carter’s book and have a much better understanding of the history and geography of the region.  My last post on the subject elicited two very pertinent questions/comments.  In that post I stated that Carter points out that the framework for peace has existed for a long time, and writer ptfan1 asks, in that case, What is it? 

Writer spencercourt brings up the question of whether Israel has the “right” to exist in the first place.  Indeed, the modern problems can be traced back without a doubt to the establishment of Israel in the beginning, and spencercourt answers his own question:  might makes right.  Or said another way, the Golden Rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules. 

On one hand, it’s understandable that the international community, as personified by the U.N., would want to mandate a homeland for the Jews after the horror of the Holocaust.  It seems like the least we could do.  In addition, I have incredible admiration for the Jews’ resolution never to let themselves be victims on that scale ever again.  I have further admiration for their resourcefulness, intelligence, and even ruthlessness in going after those who threaten them (see:  Munich, Entebbe).  As for a “right” to a homeland, that is now a moot point.  The creation of Israel did not occur by a piece of paper issued by the U.N.  It was accompanied by another war in which an estimated 900,000 Arabs either fled or were driven from their homes in the new, artificially created land of Israel.  They were supposed to be allowed to return, or at least compensated for the loss of their homes and land. 

The creation of Israel called for the two-state solution.  Part of the land went to form Israel, and part to remain Palestine.  An area surrounding Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be an “international” area.  Everyone ignored that part and both sides were intent on annexing the other.  Now we hear about the two-state solution as if it’s a new idea. 

And now:  the framework for peace.  All subsequent negotiations revolve around U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967.  In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel simultaneously attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and then occupied the Sinai (belonging to Egypt), the Golan Heights (belonging to Syria), and the West Bank (belonging to Jordan).  UNR 242 says that Israel must fully withdraw from those areas and be satisifed with the boundaries of their country as established in 1948.  There must be a resolution to the refugee problem.  The Palestinians must have autonomy.  It has been determined to be against international law to establish civilian settlements on land taken by force, and yet as late as 2006, Israel continued to build new settlements in the West Bank. 

Jimmy Carter’s description of the West Bank is hellish.  It’s a land where Jewish settlements are connected by roads that Palestinians are not allowed to use or even cross.  As in Gaza, Israel controls all access into or out of the area (by land or sea or air).  Israel must somehow see its way to giving Palestinians more freedom, because they are perpetuating their own misery and creating more terrorists by the day.

War is hell in the region, but so is working for peace.  (See:  Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin.)

Carter points out that the apartheid here is not strictly the same as in South Africa but is about the acquisition of land.  Israel wants more.  Any time they are pressed to give up their settlements or conform to the agreements they have signed themselves, they come up with onerous conditions that will never be met.  Any attack on Israel, by some single suicide bomber, is judged to nullify any agreement Israel has ever made.  “How are we to guarantee that?” said someone from the West Bank.  “If the presence of 200,000 Israelis troops can’t do it, how will we?”

If this commentary sounds pro-Palestinian as opposed to pro-Israeli, that isn’t the case.  I am reminded of the NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who shared a meal with friends in Egypt during the election process in the U.S. when it looked like Obama had a good chance of winning, and he asked them, Could that ever happen here?  In the U.S., a man named Barack Hussein Obama could become the next president.  Could a Christian do that here?  Their reply:  Are you crazy?  Of course not. 

I was further reminded today of our differences with the Muslim world (not to be equated with terrorists) by a stunning picture in the NY Times of Israel’s Foreign Minister (Tzipi Livni) and the U.S. Secretary of State (Condoleeza Rice) concluding the signing of an agreement whereby the U.S. will help stave off the supply of weapons to Hamas in Gaza.    Here are these two powerful, intelligent women–Condi Rice in this blazingly red suit–signing an agreement that commits entire countries to a course of action.  Could that happen in Egypt?  Or Syria?  Or Jordan?  Or Saudi Arabia?  That two women would be in such positions?  Are you crazy?  Of course not.