Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

There is no accounting for taste, or for how people learn and use new technology.

While I am an avid student of how people use the Internet, especially, I hate to be called a preacher or even a teacher. Although I’ve been called both – sometimes as a compliment; sometimes not.

But I’ve been thinking lately that it would not be a bad idea to start one’s own church in the good old US of A, considering the penchant on the part of the masses to search out someone else with the aura of authority to tell them what to think and how to live – and considering the tax laws.

Present company excluded, of course, since I suspect most of the readers lurking here are more likely to search out a great watering hole than a church. But there are several points worth considering for even the most intelligent audience in what I am about to say.

One of the smartest guys to ever walk the earth, Albert Einstein, once said: “Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

There is a lot of technological change going on. Some for good; some for bad. And there are some attempts being made to explain it, but you have to search them out – or find a journalist or blogger to find them for you and provide a free and easy summary you can get to on your computer screen.

That is my job, in a way. So here goes.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Glynn Wilson

Sometimes I wish I had Harry Potter’s amazing wizard powers to fight for good against evil in the world.

Alas, all I can do is blog about injustice and the maneuverings of the corporate b-b-bastards now running things like the corrupt Ministry of Magic that oversees the World of Wizarding and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I woke on Satuday morning and immediately got into a major tiff with Charter Communications. Why? Because as they continually change their channel line up of late to try and sell customers on upgrading to digital cable, Saturday morning was the second day the public television channel failed to work on basic cable.

Frantic and angry phone calls and e-mails to the charter technical help people in, of all places, Nova Scotia, Canada, with threats to take the issue to the FCC – along with phone and e-mail messages to Alabama Public Television offices in Birmingham – resulted in a restoration of that service.

But just as I was about to shut down the computer for the night and vege out on some more lame TV after watching a couple of Harry Potter movies this afternoon and tonight, this story flashed across the local TV news screen and popped up on the regional AP wire.

It turns out Alabama Power company is going to seek a major rate hike before the Alabama Public Service Commission Dec. 12, and they are going to try to blame environmentalists.

Alabama Power to Seek 5.29 Percent Rate Hike

And, according to the AP, President Bush is deciding whether to try and lift a ban on oil and gas drilling in federal waters off Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to endangered whales and sea lions and the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, sources say.

Bush May Try To End Drilling Ban in Alaskan Bay

Could all of this action be coming now, during the holiday season when people are not paying as much attention to the news, and as the lame duck Congress gets ready to wrap up its business before Christmas without doing much of anything?

The Washington Post is reporting on Sunday that Congress will convene on Tuesday for what some fear will be the lamest of lame-duck sessions, and GOP leaders have decided to take a minimalist approach before turning over the reins of power to the Democrats.

Lame-Duck Congress May Run Out the Clock

Also according a column by Historian David Brinkley in Sunday’s Washington Post, while it’s dangerous for historians to wield the “worst president” label like a scalp-hungry tomahawk simply because they object to Bush’s record, Brinkely says, “we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of miracles, it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder.”

Move Over, Hoover: Is Bush The Worst President Ever?

We are wondering what Harry Potter would do to stop these bastards. And we are wondering what you think. Feel free to let us hear from you.

You don’t need your own magic wand. All you have to do is hit the comment link below and let it fly…

You can’t fake it. If you’re gonna make it you’ve gotta live it.
- Hank Williams Jr.

by Glynn Wilson

There is no way to escape it. It is too late. America is a car country, especially in the American South.

This fact hit me in a traffic jam at the Alabama-Georgia line the other day while I was driving the Chevy van from Birmingham to Atlanta to buy a used Macintosh laptop computer from a woman in Buckhead.

I wrote a cover story for The Southerner magazine about this during the summer of 1999 after researching the issue for a chapter in a Sociology textbook: The War on Sprawl.

I have made a point of living in places where you can walk to a neighborhood store and ride a bike along the water, including Gulf Shores, Alabama, where I used to ride every day along the Gulf of Mexico. In Knoxville, Tennessee, I used to ride along the Tennessee River. In New Orleans, for almost four years I rode along the great Mississippi every day and even shopped at a Whole Foods store on Magazine Street, using a backpack for a grocery bag.

But for most people in this country, walking or biking is just not an option. Our living spaces are organized into sprawling suburbs with no significant mass transit. So the only way to get around is in a car.

Not surprisingly, people come to love their machines like they do their pets. They name them, and who can blame them?

I love my Chevy van, especially when I can get the canoe on top and the Cannondale in the back and head off for some adventure without having to fly commercial.

The Eisenhower administration first started building the Interstate highway system for defense purposes in the 1950s. Now it has become the primary travel route for moving people around the country for work and play.

So it was inevitable that “the road” made its way into the American arts, literature and folklore.

Willie Nelson is perhaps most famous for the song “On The Road Again.” He was recently arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for smoking pot on the road in his tour bus. The fact that a musician can get away with that in Bush’s America of 2006 is cool for us Baby Boomers who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the coolness of classic rock and pot were at their zenith.

It is also inevitable that Americans love older cars. The antique car movement in America is almost as big as religion itself.

America is also a country of technology, where Apple computers and the Internet were invented. Americans tend to love their computers. I’m no different. I love my Mac. And I am not enamored of new computers any more than I am drawn to new SUVs.

The best era for the American automobile came in the late 1950s and lasted until the early ’70s, when rising gas prices and technology began to favor the smaller cars made by the Japanese.

The best era for personal computing occurred from about 1996 to 2006. It is going to be downhill from here, because the corporate bastards are taking over the business and making it harder for the little guy to break through.

So it should come as no surprise that I tend to use a car metaphor to describe why I just bought a seven year old Mac G3 Powerbook instead of something newer. I love the way it drives, like car aficionados may swoon for the 1973 Mustang.

When I talk to computer geeks about this, I have to preface my remarks with the statement: “I know I’m driving a ’73 Mustang. But hey, I like driving a G3 and building Web pages with the fat version of Simpletext that holds a bold command and allows me to see what I’m doing amongst all the gibberish computer code.”

They understand exactly what I’m saying, if the average non-computer geek doesn’t.

It may not be possible to continue driving a computer of this era much longer, although seeing all the ’73 Mustangs still on the road gives me some hope. Where do they find parts for their old machines? Someone’s making them.

The thing about this machine business is that we use the best machines to do something, either for work or entertainment or both. You have to have tools in this world to do what you are meant to do. A crappy car or a shitty computer just doesn’t get it.

Back in The Bunker Saturday night, I ran across a special on the Country Music channel with Kid Rock playing alongside Hank Williams Jr. They sang a song about the road called Hamburger Steak Holiday Inn. It is a song about the road, and has a message for would be musicians who buy cheap guitars and play all by themselves on the side of the road and never learn to finish a song.

I take this message to be just as true in journalism or politics. Some people think they can fake it and make it. George Bush comes to mind, along with most of the corporate PR press.

If you are reading this far you must understand it. You are looking for alternatives to the fake journalism and fake politics that passes for understanding in Bush’s America.

We are doing our best to put together the tools we need to provide that alternative and gear it up even more in the coming months.

Like Hank sings, “You can’t fake it. If you’re gonna make it you’ve gotta live it.”

We ain’t faking it folks. It may not be making us rich, but the way we live and work is rich in experience. We are determined to live it – and make it. So come on along for the ride…

by Glynn Wilson

Waking up early to a cooler morning on Labor Day 2006, and with some important labor tasks out of the way that have kept me busy and distracted from the journal in recent days, I decided to entertain you, dear intelligent readers, by finding some idiocy in Alabama’s newspapers to make fun of this morning.

It didn’t take long.

Turning to the Montgomery Advertiser editorial page from the Alabama news links page, in a matter of seconds I was laughing at the ignorance that passes for understanding. Is it any wonder newspapers are having such a hard time keeping enough readers interested in their clap trap these days?

Get this for a lede.

Reflecting on the ancient words of Sophocles may not be the way you’d planned to spend your Labor Day holiday, but the old fellow did have a way with words and some serious insights to offer. As the nation celebrates Labor Day, it’s worth noting a pithy observation of his:

“Without labor nothing prospers.”

The point of the editorial came down to this: Celebrate (the) Value of Work Today

A quick search online for quotations from Sophocles turned up that misused jewel, but also this one:

“Ignorant men don’t know what good they hold in their hands until they’ve flung it away.”

For a history on this famous Greek philosopher who knew absolutely nothing about modern labor, you could turn to the online encyclopedia the business editor of the New York Times has declared off limits for that newspaper’s reporters to quote, Wikipedia.Org.

For a better search to understand the U.S. Labor Day holiday, try this in Google: “History of Labor Day.”

Right away you can read a page that somehow survives on the Bush Labor Department’s Web site: The History of Labor Day.

Skipping down to one important part on the first Labor Day, you learn that it was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, planned by the Central Labor Union. In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, first named “workingmen’s holiday.”

“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers, according to the site. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity and well-being of our country.

As it was first proposed, Labor Day involved a street parade to exhibit “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families.

Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labor convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.

The character of the Labor Day celebration has undergone a change in recent years, especially in large industrial centers where mass displays and huge parades are not as common as the labor movement has shrunk significantly and lost much of its political clout. Newspapers, radio and television news stations inevitably cover the speeches and the barbecues, although quite obviously, the anti-union newspapers of the American South only misguide their readers on what the holiday is supposed to be all about.

“The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy,” the labor site claims. “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.”

So the holiday is not a celebration of work. Nothing much is made in the U.S. today anyway, since most of the jobs have been “outsourced” oversees to places such as China and Central America.

But the holiday is a tribute to the workers themselves, who in 1882 did not have the benefit of a Fair Labor Standards Act which said they only had to work 40 hours a week. There was nothing to prevent factory owners from working women and children six days a week, 12 hours a day, and paying them a nickel a day.

That changed in the late 1930s, when Sen. Hugo Black of Alabama, a Democrat, teamed up with President Franklin Roosevelt, also a Democrat, to try and save America from the Great Depression by forcing business owners to pay a living wage to American workers. They passed the first minimum wage law, which of course hasn’t been raised in a decade.

Since at least one politician in Alabama seems to have a sense of what this holiday is about, I will show up at Birmingham’s Sloss Furnace today to see what Lucy Baxley has to say about raising the minimum wage in Alabama, a plan to go around the do-nothing Republican Congress and do the right thing at the state and local level.

We may not make much of anything in America, although we do make a few cars in Alabama and we raise chickens and grow pine trees. Most people here work to keep those cars running, maintain the roads they run on, and count the money of those who control all the capital. Many work in the hospitals to keep those workers alive, if not healthy.

One of the quotes used in the Advertiser editorial did make some sense and it is worth remembering.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital,” Abraham Lincoln said in his first message to Congress in 1861. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Of course that rarely happens in Bush’s America. So let’s pay tribute to that – at least for this one day of the year.

And while we think about it, we could quote another philosopher who knew far more about capitalism and the industrial worker. Remember what Karl Marx said? “Workers of the world unite.”

Unfortunately, the undereducated American worker has been brain-washed into thinking that Marx was a bad old Socialist-Communist. So his dream of seeing an egalitarian world rise from the ashes of run amok corporate capitalism has yet to be achieved.

If Bush and company continue to have their way, all aspects of government will be privatized and handed over to the Haliburton’s of the world. And we may yet see wages go back to the inflationary equivalent of a nickle a day.

by Glynn Wilson

It looks like another JonBenet Ramsey kind of day on cable TV news.

So this would be a good time for a boycott or a vacation from the news – like President George W. Bush does every day, and more so in August, when he hangs out at the ranch in Crawford, Texas.

The last time we checked, the Bush administration was still spying on Americans in spite of a federal court order to stop. There are still wars going on in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. And hundreds of thousands of Americans are still scraping by on low wages with friends in low places.

The once great Ford motor company is slashing production, shutting down plants and laying off workers. The BP oil pipeline is still leaking. The city of New Orleans is still suffering from the post-Katrina blues, while no-bid contractors laugh all the way to the bank.

But a little, rich, white blonde girl from Colorado – who has been dead for 10 years – can enthrall the talking heads because there is some intrigue about a former substitute school teacher from Alabama who has confessed to the crime.

Even the local talking heads cannot resist leading their broadcasts with the JonBenet Ramsey story, with a close second the latest crack down on drunk driving.

What the moralists could not accomplish with national prohibition in the 1920s, the MAD mothers are trying to accomplish by using taxpayer dollars to deploy more cops to stop people from drinking beer and getting home from the bars. The churches must be hurting financially. They don’t want you to drink and gamble. So you can either go to church, or go to jail, and to hell with you if you disagree with the president.

Even the church people bitch about the heat, but are too hoodwinked to do anything about global warming or suburban sprawl. In a place like Birmingham, Alabama, how in the fuck are you supposed to get home from a party without driving?

There is no mass transit to speak of here. No sidewalks either. A cab ride from one side of this town to the other costs more than a night out in New Orleans. You can’t even ride a bike around or walk anywhere in this culture.

But by all means, hire more cops and put more people in jail for drinking beer.

Want out of this asylum called America? No, you can’t carry your own shampoo on an airplane or take a fast jet out of here without being checked on the “no-fly” list.

Is that the “terrorists” fault? Or the complete incompetence of our current political leadership?

Or is it the fault of half of all Americans who either don’t bother to vote or who are too uninformed to vote intelligently?

A successful democracy depends on an educated populous. Since more and more Americans do not read and depend on talking heads for their news and information, is it any wonder that we have such a screwed up situation – when all they want to do is run old footage of a little girl in a dance class and talk about whether her confessed killer is really guilty or not?

A jury will decide the fate of John Mark Karr. Meanwhile we are off to put the boat in the water and take a vacation from the talking heads. We’ll be back when y’all decide to cover the real news again.

And hey Mr. Softball question Larry King. Isn’t it about time for the retirement home man? You just look more silly every day.

At least on MSNBC, former conservative Congressman Joe Scarborough asked the question the other day: “Is George Bush really an idiot? Or is he just inarticulate?”

Hey Joe. We say it’s both. And the polls show more and more people are finally realizing it.

The only thing we have to say about the 30 percent of the people who still support this dumbass president is: It takes one to know one.

In other words, you have to be a real dumbass to think George W. Bush is anything other than a dumbass frat boy who got himself elected by virtue of his family connections.

And it is pretty clear he has not learned a damn thing in office. Remember, he depends on Condi for his news and views.

Funny, she seems to have disappeared of late – since they kicked her out of Lebanon and Bush had to distance himself from the news that they were hot tub buddies.

Here’s drinking to you kid. This is the end of a beautiful friendship.

“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”
- Edward Abbey

It’s Bush’s Fault

by Glynn Wilson

It’s hard to concentrate on the luscious flavor of the homegrown tomatoes with cheese grits, scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits with St. Clair County honey and ripe cantaloupe, what with all this news cramming the airwaves of the escalating violence in the Middle East.

When will the religious dumbasses on this planet learn that war and religion are contradictory things? Ditto for politics and religion?

The Washington Post and other news organizations reported this weekend that the leader of Hezbollah promised an all-out war after Israeli warplanes attacked his residence and Hezbollah’s main headquarters Friday in an apparent assassination attempt. Israel vowed to press its offensive in Lebanon until the Shiite Muslim militant group was disarmed, leading to a quick succession of violent events.

While the Lebanese government urged the U.N. Security Council to establish a cease-fire, how did the Bush White House respond? By releasing a statement that said President Bush would not press Israel to halt its attacks.

Let the war games continue.

Speaking of games, meanwhile back in St. Petersburg, Russia, Bush was out riding his mountain bike like any rich kid would be, while Rome burns.

But a senior correspondent for the Associated Press was at work, writing about Bush’s “chilly summit prelude,” in which Bush reportedly blocked Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization on Saturday, leading President Vladimir Putin to mockingly suggest that Moscow doesn’t want the kind of violence-plagued democracy the United States has fostered in Iraq.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that Bush would take this position, knowing that we are trying to get Russia’s cooperation in a program to detect and track terrorists who are trying to get their hands on nuclear and radioactive materials?

What a complete dumbass.

It will be interesting to see how Bush responds to the latest invitation to meet with the leaders of the NAACP, now meeting in Washington and fighting for the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. The law is under attack in the U.S. Senate by a few conservative Southerners, including our very own Alabama dumbass – Sen. Jeff Sessions of Mobile.

Again according to the Washington Post, the Voting Rights Act has been credited with stopping the systematic disenfranchisement of black voters through barriers such as poll taxes and literacy tests in the 41 years since its initial passage in the mid-1960s.

Several key provisions of the law were passed as temporary measures and will expire next year if not renewed by Congress. One provision requires certain states with a history of voter discrimination to get federal approval for voting law changes. Another imposes a language assistance requirement on jurisdictions with a high percentage of voters whose native language is not English.

The House voted to extend the provisions last week after GOP leaders quelled a rebellion among some members from Southern states who objected to it as an affront to “states’ rights.”

Bush has turned down invitations to attend five previous NAACP gatherings, and we suspect he will decline this one too – and take off instead to ride his little bicycle.

In other news, as I woke up this morning and started the coffee, columnist Bob Novak was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” spilling the beans on his role in outing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson, who sued Bush political aide Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney this week for ruining her career and violating the very national security they claim to love.

Coming up this week, Bush is still throwing red meat to his conservative Christian base by threatening his first veto as president, to of all things, stop stem cell research on fetuses that are slated for the trash heap anyway. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has seen the political writing on the wall and defected from Bush’s position on this issue, in part since he is a doctor and knows that the research would save many more lives than banning the research.

Dumbass.

Meanwhile back in Alabamaland, I was called a dumbass and a socialist myself this week by a little conservative Republican blogger in Montgomery. His entire idea for a blog is to focus on his own attendance at Republican dinners and Alabama politics, as if there were not far more important things going on in the world, like war in the Middle East – and homegrown tomatoes with Sunday breakfast.

I tried to explain to him in the comments section that I was in fact not a socialist at all, but a liberaltarian.

I believe in real freedom, not police state stateism like we’re living under today. I certainly do not believe in run-amok corporate capitalism either, a system we’re also living under with Bush on the handlebars.

If these kinds of so-called “Christian conservatives” had their way, a large chunk of the country’s population would be forced to live off of scraps from the garbage cans of local fast food joints, like their jailed former hero, Eric Rudolph.

They don’t believe in any kind of a safety net for people who start out poor in life and have precious little chance of advancement. And they call that Christian?

I don’t know what Bible they are reading, but it’s not the one I grew up on. Maybe that’s why I don’t read it anymore. Most of the people who throw it in your face have not actually read it anyway. Or in any event, they don’t practice what Jesus taught.

They want to use it to get elected – then enrich themselves and to hell with the rest of us.

But you know what the good book says about the chances of the rich, like the Bushes, getting into heaven. It would be like a camel making its way through the eye of a needle.

I would like to see Bush try that trick. Will Congress please get on with impeaching this guy so we can go about the business of creating a better world where we do not fight each other over oil or religious differences?

Thank you very much for all the wars, Mr. President. If there is a heaven and a hell, we suspect we know which one will claim you in the end.

Dumbass.

Birmingham Loses Ozone War

by Glynn Wilson

After waking up Monday morning with an asthma attack after spending Saturday and Sunday trudging around in the heat at City Stages, and then reading the newspapers online this week, a couple of things are becoming clear about my home town in spite of the ozone haze.

The Birmingham News editorial department is reporting that the City Stages Music Festival is saddled with debt and may lose money again this year, right alongside an editorial saying the city is losing the war on ozone.

Here’s a connecting the dots moment. Ozone builds up in the summer heat thanks to Alabama Power’s coal-fired power plant pollution and the area’s suburban sprawl, which makes it necessary for the people of Birmingham to drive everywhere they go. So why hold the city’s premiere music event of the year during ozone season?

Move the festival to, say, Mother’s Day weekend instead of Father’s Day weekend.

Birmingham had an incredibly cool spring this year, in part due to a quirky side effect of global warming – a cooling effect in the Southeast. Mother’s Day weekend would have been a great time to hold an outdoor festival this year. It might be a better time of year every year.

And here’s another clue. Don’t try to compete with the New Orleans Jazzfest or the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. Birmingham is not a world class city and City Stages is not a world class festival. Sorry to say it, but it is our job to call them like we see them and tell the truth.

The Fairgrounds in New Orleans draws people from all over the world because New Orleans has a long history of creating original musical talent. Taylor Hicks may be the winner of a stupid TV talent show, but he’s not an original talent. He’s a copycat. So is City Stages.

Here’s another message for the organizers of the festival. If any media outlet, even a blogger, wants a press pass to the event, give it up heartily. You need all the publicity you can get. Why be arrogant about it and act like you hold the golden key to some sacred temple? It’s a piece of plastic to get into a second rate concert.

Chances are, the media coverage will help draw people in the future and, if other reporters and bloggers are anything like us, they will eat enough food and drink enough beer to more than make up for the revenue you would lose on a day pass.

Here’s an alternative suggestion. If you just have to hold the festival on the third weekend in June, why not come up with a theme to make City Stages about helping the Birmingham environment? Rather than promoting Alabama Power at the festival, why not use the event to pressure the Southern Company subsidiary to do more to clean up the air?

Maybe then more people would come to the festival – and not wake up after it’s over with asthma.

Disappointing day sales

Entering the ozone zone

by Glynn Wilson

If readers are a writer’s true companions, as Edward Abbey said of Henry David Thoreau, then perhaps I owe you, dear reader, another bit of writing today.

The explicit fact of the matter is, I don’t owe you a damn thing. But I’m going to do it anyway. Because I can.

This thing called a blog started out as a form of online diary. I have a different view of how to use this new technology, although it is hard to escape the temptation to go personal at times, if not postal. People seem to like reading people’s diaries. Maybe it is the hope that one might learn a secret.

Here’s a secret. I hate to lecture, which is one of the reasons I do not teach anymore, almost as much as I hate being lectured to, especially via e-mail.

But sometimes there is no other way to get a point across in this traumatized world where the name of the game is explicitness. Irony doesn’t work anymore, or at least it doesn’t seem to.

Be comforted that at least for now, it is still possible in this world to pick up a book and go read it by a river.

I almost made it to the river today, but visited friends instead. One of them loaned me a book. Not a new book, but one I should have read before. Today is as good a time as any, and may be just the right time.

In Down The River, a series of essays by Abbey, a Western author, environmental journalist and self-described “agrarian anarchist,” the ghost and writings of Thoreau are taken along on a trip down the Green River in Utah.

It seems like a trip well worth taking. I wish I were there now.

When I read a good book, it is hard to do it without a pencil in hand to mark the quotable parts. Otherwise, how would you go back and find them again when you write the review?

Here’s a jewel from the preliminary notes.

“None of the essays in this book requires elucidation,” Abbey says. It is a lie, but let him continue . . . “other than to say, as in everything I write, they are meant to serve as antidotes to despair. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry, and other bad habits.”

I don’t know if he stole that line or not, but it is one of those lines just about any writer would wish he or she had written.

Poetry indeed.

I will one day get around to writing more about the river, the Locust Fork that is, the river that will haunt me for the rest of my days like the Mississippi haunted Twain.

That is hard to explain in a sound byte. But for those of you who are new here, perhaps you have heard of a sprightly fellow from these parts by the name of Spider Martin? His photographs of the civil rights days are a testament to another time. I won’t write his obituary here today.

But a few summers back, he and I spent a number of days running just about every run you can make on the Locust Fork in a 17-foot Kevlar canoe. We did it with two coolers in the boat, one full of food, the other full of beer.

If you ever got to know anything about him, you would have known that Spider didn’t do anything the easy way.

So imagine being in the front of a canoe approaching white water and the river runs naturally to the left, but the guy steering the boat in the back takes you to the right. Looming ahead of you are several large, slippery rocks, and there appears to be only a sliver of an opening for a boat in the foaming water ahead, growing louder with every approaching foot.

It is one of those fear-gripped moments in nature when you suspect the earth is about to teach you a lesson in humility. I used to spend more time searching out these phenomena in nature than I do lately, although I need to get out there and do it more.

Have you ever experienced anything like this? Have you ever gone body surfing in the Gulf of Mexico and ridden a wave all the way into shore and been slammed like a little piece of flotsam on the beach? It is humbling. To do it right, you have to make sure the wave catches you exactly in your center of gravity at the waist. BLAM!

Or, have you ever gone water skiing and been ripped away from the rope and your skis by a wave, turned a flip in the air and landed on your face in the lake? Now that is humbling. It hurts good.

Photo by Kenny Walters

LocustFork.Net Editor and publisher Glynn Wilson atop Ruffner Mountain overlooking Birmingham, Ala.

Down The River, Abbey makes it seem as if he were writing the story at the same time he is floating down the river. Even though you know he must have taken some notes on the trip and written the story up later on a typewriter, the story has a first person, present tense feel to it. He brings you along for the ride, so to speak.

I’ve written a few stories like that myself – when the editors have paid for them. But they’ve never given me the freedom to write something like this. Maybe there is a good reason for it besides the profit. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what that good reason could be.

The blogs are proving that people like to read stories like this. It’s just that the corporate publishers have not yet figured out how to make enough money from them in a way that protects them from criticism, political retribution and libel suits.

They will. Give them time. They will steal the idea one day soon and ruin the entire enterprise, like we suspect the oil companies will do to “alternative energy” sources.

One more reason to like Abbey. He didn’t like the energy companies either, and he didn’t like being lectured to. He had this to say about science, which just about sums up my own views of the social sciences.

“The face of science as currently construed is a face that only a mathematician could love. The root meaning of ‘science’ is ‘knowledge;’ to see and to see truly, a qualitative, not merely a quantitative, understanding. . . . That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.”

Thoreau was aware of this tendency even in his time. It is an epidemic today, an epidemic that can only be cured by finding a writer whose talents include the ability to synthesize information and put it into a readable fashion. Sometimes we call that connecting the dots . . .

by Glynn Wilson

U.S. Rep. Terry Everett, a back bencher Alabama Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Birmingham News Monday that he supports Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination as CIA director.

“He’s the best guy in the country for the job and he probably knows more about intelligence than anybody in the country,” Everett said.

Hayden was nominated Monday by President Bush to replace Porter Goss, who resigned under a cloud of scandal involving late night gay poker parties.

Everett, who claims to have been an Air Force intelligence specialist in Germany in the 1950s, according to the News, took issue with critics – Democrat and Republican – who argue that Hayden’s active duty military status would conflict with his CIA role.

Hayden most recently was the deputy under National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, a job that also required Senate confirmation, although the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings indicated Hayden’s responses were less than totally forthcoming.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., told a reporter on National Public Radio this morning that he was not satisfied with Hayden’s answers about the NSA domestic spying program and would use his confirmation hearings to try to obtain more and better answers.

Negroponte, best known for directing the covert funding of the Nicaraguan Contras and the coverup of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Central America in the 1980s, was Bush’s pick for the new position of Director of National Intelligence after the uproar that erupted when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and then-CIA director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet resigned in early June, 2004.

Everett, who used to be the publisher of Gulf Coast Newspapers in Baldwin County in the early 1980s but sold out to Worrell Enterprises, the now defunct weekly newspaper chain started by a former FBI agent, told the news: “To say this will be disturbing the balance between the (Department of Defense) … and the intelligence community is a red herring. I just find it frankly disappointing that this kind of rationale has sprung up.”

Everett’s position is in sharp contrast with the Republican chairman of his committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who called Hayden the “wrong man” for the job.

Hayden’s confirmation will also involve additional scrutiny of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, which he directed at NSA. Everett said the controversy over the program may be troublesome during confirmation hearings but shouldn’t derail Hayden’s appointment. But then, what does he know?

When contacted in Washington last year on a visit there, it became clear that Everett spends most of his time working to speed America into the space weapons war against China. That’s a big mystery, unless there is some secret space weapons manufacturing plant somewhere near Enterprise.

Everett defended NSA’s ability to listen in on communications between Americans and suspected terrorists, which so far has bypassed review by the secret court that oversees government wiretapping.

“I feel like that, whatever the method, if somebody in this country is talking to al-Qaida, I want to know about it and I think most of the public feels that way,” Everett said.

Well, Mr. Everett should read more polls. A majority of Americans now list warrantless domestic spying as one of the reasons they support Bush’s impeachment.

Although Everett said he’s satisfied with the NSA program, he would “feel better” if the law was changed to clearly define it. So why hasn’t he done some work to do just that?

Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville, the other Alabama member of the House intelligence panel, would not take a position on Hayden’s nomination. He issued a written statement that said:

“Through my position on the intelligence committee, I have worked with General Hayden and have a great deal of respect for him. The next CIA director needs to understand the relationship the agency has within the DNI (Office of the Director Of National Intelligence), and I think General Hayden recognizes this and the other challenges that face the CIA.”

But who cares, really, what Alabama’s Congressional delegation thinks on these issues? They are all a bunch of featherweights anyway – who mostly just kiss Bush’s ass…