Same-Sex Marriage, Confederate Flags, and Women's Soccer

No no no, I'm not going to try to thread all of these disparate things together.  That would be impossible.  It's just that a lot has been going on recently and to stay silent on any of them just doesn't seem fitting.  My opinions are certainly worth very little, and reflect the rather muddled and confused way I view the world as I go through life with a series of "well....."s and "on the other hand"s.  But I can't let such momentous events go by and say nothing at all.  So....

Same Sex Marriage

Hooray!  Same Sex Marriage is now a legal right in all states throughout the land.  My own views on homosexuality and same sex marriage have tended to evolve with the rest of the nation's over my lifetime, and in the end with a classic gaelic shrug of indifference I say that Love is Love is Love.  Marriage is an important part of a persons's life and our society and to deny people the right to marry based on sexual orientation, which is not a choice or a sin but an unchangeable expression of one's self,  is wrong.  That is what I believe.

When I saw the news on CNN I felt like dancing a little jig, but I didn't because there are plenty of people I work with who feel the opposite and to do so would invite argument. So I let them alone and mentally ran across the fields of justice, sliding into the corner flag, arms raised in triumph, as if I actually did something to forward the cause of human kind when in reality I was the most passive of observers.

Happy People

I actually went through the trouble to thumb through the court's opinion on my I-phone.  I haven't read a Supreme Court decision since I was in high school, and this is certainly the first I have read of my own free will.  The historical import of the document compelled me to do so this time.  There are excerpts of the majority opinion that beautifully express the importance of marriage as an institution, and if I were to get married again I would even consider having some of those thoughts read aloud at the service rather than troll out the usual "Love is this and Love is that" sort of thing from one of Paul's letters that is so popular.

But then on the other hand I also read the dissent by Chief Justice Roberts and I got to say....maybe he has a point.  His argument, I think, is that the due process clause guarantees certain rights but does not allow the court to create new ones.  In re-defining marriage as, effectively, a legally recognized bond between two persons rather than between a man a woman, which has long been the accepted definition of marriage by our society, Roberts believes that the court has overstepped it's bounds.  He goes out of is way to say that he has no objection to same-sex marriage on moral or philosophical grounds...but the court is not the moral consciousness of the people, and constitutionally he feels that the majority opinion is not valid.  Roberts would rather the individual states and the People had been allowed to continue the democratic process which, in his opinion, was working as it should have.

While I am of course happy about the outcome of the decision, I can't wonder if maybe Roberts is right.  Of course if we continued to let the states decide Virginia probably wouldn't have legalized same sex marriage for a hundred years.  I guarantee we'd be the last state to do so.

And while we are on that subject....

The Confederate Flag

The tragic shooting at Emanuel AME Church a week and a half ago has swung the "Heritage not Hate" debate fully towards "Hate" and as we speak this symbol of southern defiance is being expunged from the market place, state flags, and maybe even from the South Carolina state capitol grounds.

I've wanted to address this subject ever since, but couldn't find the words.  I know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.  Even Bud Robertson, one of the most Confederate-centric Civil War scholars I know, told us that on the very first day of his class.  "Slavery," he said simply, "was the cause of this war".

But when you grow up in the South and you have a father who reads about the Civil War as a hobby for half the year, it is very difficult not to have some admiration for the men who fought for the Confederacy and those who led them.  One of my fondest memories is riding up I-81 with my dad to some place or another, some band event or track meet or scouting function, and my dad pointed at a gap in the ridges running parallel to our right and he said "Stonewall Jackson marched his men right through that ridge", and we'd remember for a second what a great solider, what a great military leader he was.  Neither of us revere the South or "The Cause", but any student of military history cannot but be impressed by Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign.

Growing up in Southern Virginia there were plenty of confederate flags around, plenty of people with t-shirts stretched over their beer-bellies proclaiming that "The South will Rise Again", which I've always felt was the dumbest of sentiments.  I've also seen a number of people running around with both the American flag and the Confederate flag proudly flying from their pick-up trucks or plastered onto the back of their Cameros seemingly in a great nose-thumbing fart to our federal government, and expression that strikes me as odd. Those two symbols are like oil and water, pork rinds and diet soda, the Kardashian sisters and a reasoned discussion on David Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature".  They simply don't go together.

Maybe we would have been better off without them....

If the rebellious sentiment is non-existant for me there is still this nagging respect for the butternut clothed Confederate soldier, even though the cause he fought for was so odious.  I've often tried to compromise by telling myself that while Slavery started the war the normal confederate soldier was defending his home from invasion, as anyone else would do, fighting for his family and friends or simply because he was bored with life at home and wanted to give soldiering a chance.  Slavery was perhaps the furthest thing from the average soldiers mind.

Maybe that's fair, and maybe it isn't.  I'm probably lying to myself.  But it's hard to let go of that.  No government should be flying confederate flags on their grounds, no state flag should incorporate what is to many a symbol of hatred, but I do worry about how far this will go.  Are we really going to rename streets currently graced by the names of Confederate generals?  Are we going to have to take down all those monuments to the Confederate war dead that feature in so many southern towns?  Are we going to let political correctness - however correct that may be in this case- significantly alter what is to many their heritage?  Or can we somehow hold an honesty about the Civil War in tension with some respect for the men on both sides who fought in it?

Holding different ideas in tensions is hard, it takes a certain level of maturity to do so, and I wonder if we have lost that ability due to a hypersensitivity over offending anyone, that greatest of sins in the media age.

Women's Soccer

After all that, all I can say is thank god for sports.

I've been watching the US team's matches and handful of other games.  Congratulations to the US National Team in their 1-0 victory over China.  The US has looked shaky this world cup but their performance last night was, in my opinion, markedly better.  I wonder if they are actually better without Rapione, being willing to explore other options in attack....it would be a ballsy move to leave her out of the side that will play against Germany, but the manager has shown a willingness to make the tough personnel decisions before.  Of course, that supposes that leaving Rapinoe out is the right thing to do, and I am not so sure it is.  I don't think there is any real cause and effect between Rapinoe's absence and the pressure and flow that the US showed yesterday.  It might be a function of a Chinese team that is a little weaker than we'd like to think, or maybe the US has finally gotten it's act together.  Germany, as always, will be a tough test.

All due respect to the USA, the game to watch yesterday, the best match of the cup so far, was the 1-1 classic played out between France and Germany last night.

The French, whose red socks that harkened back to the red pants worn by the French infantry at the outset of the First World War (pants that may have been emblematic of French elan but provided an easy target for German infantry), looked to be the better side, darting down the flanks and attacking with great speed.  But the German defense was organized enough to withstand an endless barrage of crosses into the box and they were able to tie the game off a penalty kick late in the second half.  The two sides struggled with each other through extra time and the game was decided on penalty kicks.  France lost on the last kick when Claire Lavogez took a poor penalty;  the German keeper for once guessed correctly and the shot wasn't good enough to beat her.

Lavogez had come on as a sub and played really well.  In the second period of extra time she fought down the German wing and put a perfect ball into the box - Thiney had a virtually open goal mere yards away and she put the ball wide left of the goal.

So it was a shame that kick that lost the game had to come from her.  As she melted down on the field, at one point biting a teammates jersey in a futile effort to hold back tears, it was hard not to shed a few tears of ones one.

Strange that that, out of all things over the past few weeks, would elicit the most emotion from me.  Such is the crossed wiring of my soul; such is the glory of sport.

Books: The Vows of Silence (A Simon Serrailler Mystery) by Susan Hill

Every reader worth his or her salt has a detective series in their back pocket.  I thought in Simon Serrailler I had found mine.

But you know, I am not so sure.

This is the fourth book in the series.  Simon Serrailler is the Detective Superintendent of the village of Lafferton, in Engalond, where terrible things just seem to happen.  In the first book there was a serial killer on the loose, in the second book some children go missing and the perpetrator is not found until the third book.  Here in the fourth book Lafferton is once again haunted by a killer on the loose, shooting women seemingly at random.

Serrailler himself is my kind of guy.  He leads a double life, one side police detective, the other side an introverted artist, specializing in drawing.  He's rather good at it, taking trips to Italy to draw various pieces of architecture and maybe some birds, women sitting idly at cafes;  he's even had a few exhibitions.  But he does it all under a nom-de-art of....I can't exactly remember.  He is a man that takes after my own heart, in many ways.

The problem with Hill's books is that there is not really enough of him.  She has populated the books with other characters - Simon's father, mother, sister, all doctors and still in Lafferton.  There are the people working under Serrailler who come and go, move up and get demoted.  And then of course there are a few ancillary characters who are usually involved with the story somehow but not as much in this book, and then there are several chapters written from the point of view of the killer himself.  The shifting points of view can be distracting, and Hill feels it necessary to fill in the details of all her characters, and it can be a bit much.

She packs a lot into her books.  In this one Cat Deerbon (Simon's sister, whom he loves dearly) has just returned from a vacation in Australia only to find out her husband has a malignant brain tumor.  Jane Fitzroy, a woman who ran away from Simon to a convent after he had confessed his love for her (a very big deal for a man as introverted as mister Serrailler) is back, sort of, the convent life decidedly not for her, and she is set up to play a bigger part in the next book.  And then there is the story of Helen Creedy, who falls in love with a man online who seems a bit odd, and we think all the time that something horrible is going to happen to her. Could her new love be the killer?  What about her disaffected and incredibly religious son Tom?  Could he be killing in the name of?

Amongst all of this there is a killer that Serrailler must catch.  This books seemed more of a continuation of the Serrailler saga with a murder or two thrown in just because Serrailler is a detective and that is his job.

Clearly, looking back, these books have been good enough to get me this far into the series.  The first and second were excellent.  The third was maybe a little so so.  This one was probably the worst so far, but it still held my interest.  I'll give Susan Hill another chance on this one, and meet the good people of Lafferton again in a bit.

Incidentally, Susan Hill is the author of many books, notably the Woman in Black, turned into a movie starring that cheeky little Englishman....what was his name.....Radcliffe.  Yeah.  THAT was a scary book.  A good old fashioned ghost story.  She is a talented writer....I just don't think the Vows of Silence is one of her best.

Books You May Not Like (Especially if you are French or Prussian or Dutch or Pretty Much Anything But British) -- Waterloo, by Bernard Cromwell.

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you had an English grandfather, a man who had spent the better part of his life pouring over English history in general and the Napoleonic Wars in particular,  and you asked him "Grandad, could you tell us about the battle of Waterloo"?

Well, you needn't wonder any longer.  All you have to do is read Bernard Cromwell's book Waterloo, published in 2014. I came upon it because, with the 200th anniversary of Waterloo coming tomorrow (June 18th), I figured it was high time I read a book about "The Battle".  The Economist said this one was good, so I downloaded it.

The Economist, it should be said, is British.  So are these hard ass bastards:

The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras, Elizabeth Thompson

The Book gets pretty well ripped by some on Amazon because it is "biased" and "repetitive" and "doesn't offer any new knowledge about Wellington or Napoleon".  Those people are entitled to their opinions, and I actually think I agree with them.

But unlike them, I don't give a rip.  I thought this was a great book.

If you've never read much military history before, this book will be great.  A lot of military history can become mired down in units and numbers and blocks moving across the battlefield, which can make it confusing and distant to the uninitiated.  Cromwell tries to avoid doing a lot of that, only referencing unit numbers when necessary, and keeping things at the general level (the corps, the wing).  You'll learn a lot about the battle.

If you have read a lot of military history before, this book will also be great.  Sure, the facts of Waterloo are the facts.  You can read them all on Wikipedia and know how the battle went.  But I thought Cromwell's writing really brought the battle to life.  The book almost read like a novel (which, as Cromwell did write the Sharpe series and a number of other novels, you would kind of expect).  He wraps some things in hyperbole (I think he says, as the Imperial Guard begins their charge, that the entire world was watching) but it actually doesn't sound misplaced.  You get a sense of how desperate the battle was, particularly the defense of Hougamont.  You can get a feel for what it was like to see the Guard's bear skin hats peeking over the ridge as they advance, the drums beating a relentless pas-de-charge.  Few things I have found paint Napoleonic-era combat quite so vividly.

Is it biased?  I'm not so sure.  Cromwell never, ever discounts the Prussian contributions to the battle (Wellington would have been beaten if the Prussians had not arrived or had arrived much later , I think most people would say that with certainty), but I do wish he had spent a few more words on the fighting in Plancenoit which was just as harsh as anywhere else on the field.  If Cromwell is hard on Napoleon and the other French generals for their leadership, and rather in praise of Wellington and his presence on the field, it is because such distinctions are probably deserved and the contrasts were real.  Napoleon led from a distance, watching the battle next to La Belle Alliance.  Wellington left little to chance and road all over the field, exposing himself to the dangers, inspiring order in his men.  I think it may be possible that Cromwell has Wellington in two places at once, but perhaps that is a testament to how much the Duke actually did during the battle.

Best of all?  There are maps!  Every chapter has a map showing the situation that will be covered therein.  They are even easy to see on your Kindle Fire.  A number of military histories I have read recently have eschewed maps for some ungodly reason;  this one has them aplenty and I was ever so glad.

In short, I couldn't be happier.  A great read.  If you hurry, you may be able to read it by the 200th anniversary of the battle's end, about 2000 tomorrow.

Oh crap, wait.....that's 2000 tomorrow Brussels time, which is....2:00 in the afternoon Eastern time.

You better get going.

Lacrimosa

So we are at the beach, my immediate family, my parents, and I; there is a screened in porch attached to the side of the beach house my parents have rented for all of us.  In this screened in porch this evening an impromptu game of Dodgeball develops where I am pitted against my wife and my oldest daughter Elizabeth.

It's 2 against 1, close quarters, good old fashioned Dodgeball, played with 4 lightweight rubber playground balls.  I am holding two balls and keeping my family at bay; Elizabeth attacks to my left, my wife to the right. I take a shot my oldest daughter and miss, and I turn my attention to my wife to try to ward off her attack with the remaining ball. This is the moment when my daughter unleashes a sharp throw and she connects ever so well.

She hits me right in the groonies.

Like I said, lightweight playground balls so it doesn't hurt TOO bad, but it's still enough to drop me to me knees for a moment, and as I am falling my wife fires and hits me right in the side head with force. BLAM! That is the sound of a hollow playground ball a bouncin' off my noggin.

In a moment, I have gone from tall Dodgeball warrior to a man curled up in a fetal position on the ground, trying to ward off the continuing blows, a mere shell of who he once was. Meanwhile in the distance I hear my youngest daughter, merely 17 months old, laughing with the simple glee of a young child.

That is love, no?

Yeah, I suppose that it is.

What a Cleveland Championship Would Mean

And no, I don't mean the Cavaliers.  But if you clicked on this link because you thought it was about the Cavs, well, consider this a good old fashioned clever trap.

This past weekend was a big weekend in sports.  For me the most significant moment was when Barcelona defeated Juventus 3-1 in the UEFA Champions League Final.  I didn't have a lot invested in the match emotionally, though I like watching Barcelona (and in particular Messi) play when I can and so I was happy that they won.  They took the treble, having won their league, their domestic cup, and the Champions League all in the same season and that is a huge achievement.

Most significant for most other people was American Pharoah's Triple Crown win.  We'd been waiting for this for years, FOR YEARS, and I remember as a kid thinking how awesome it would be if another horse could finally break through the deadlock, and getting so excited when a horse would get through the Derby and Belmont Stakes, and the disappointment when that horse inevitably lost in the Preakness.  And yesterday it FINALLY happens and...

...And everything is the same.  Nothing has changed. I feel no different in a world where we have seen a Triple Crown winner than I felt in a world where it had not been done for nearly 40 years.  The sun shines no brighter, beer doesn't taste any better, cheese doesn't keep in the fridge any longer than it used to.  It has changed my life not a jot.

In all truth sports has very little effect on me.  I am buoyed if my beloved Chelsea FC wins, mildly happy when the Orioles win, a little bummed for a very brief time if they lose.  With a few notable exceptions championships are won and lost, glory is realized and defeat is tasted, and all in all the effect on my life is practically nill.

There is one Championship that would change everything though.

If the Cleveland Browns win a championship, that will effect me directly.

The effect may not be huge, admittedly, but it would be noticeable.  As I've mentioned before I work with a diehard and delusional Cleveland Browns fan and if they ever win a Super Bowl I know that I will never hear the end of it.  I will be reminded of it daily, with T-shirts and commemorative hats and God knows what else, but if they can slap "Cleveland Browns Super Bowl Champions" on it I guarantee you it will be bought, horded, and held for future reminiscence and re-sale for some serious moo-lah.  Wouldn't be surprised in the least if he got it tattooed on his on person, on his back or ass or maybe in tiny letters on his calves.

Thankfully it appears I have little to worry about.  Vegas is currently giving odds between 66 - 100:1 for the Browns to win.  The odds of the next "Expendables" movie being not good but merely watchable are better even than 100:1, though not by much....

The saddest thing about all of this is that if I had never met Mr. Cleveland I'd probably be overjoyed to see a lovable bunch of ragtag bran muffins win the Championship.  To go from such depths to the Super Bowl and win? It would be an incredible story, the kind of thing Disney movies are made from.

But now?  It can never be.  That particular avenue of potential happiness has been closed off for me, perhaps not forever but certainly for a good long while.

So my favorite football team this season?  The Steelers, always.

My second favorite team:  Who is playing those gosh-darned Cleveland Browns.

My Undelivered Acceptance Speech for My Third Place Finish in The Daily Press Poetry Contest

*Ahem Ahem*

Now I am not one to toot my own horn.  But you know what? I think that this little victory deserves to be celebrated.  So....

Toot.  

When I started writing poetry a year ago I told someone that I wanted to make enough money to buy a sandwich.  Now that I have taken the $50 third prize I can say that I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.  I can buy not only one but....

I guess it depends on the type of sandwich.  On the high end, I could buy 2.5 Hindenburgs from Macado's at $20.00 a piece...on the other end of the spectrum you have the White Castle Crave Crate at $49.99 containing 100 White Castle Sliders and a grand total of 13960 calories.  You can live on that for 8 - 10 days easily, if the colon cancer doesn't get you first.  

Aside from the sandwich money the best think about winning this award is knowing that my poetry at least isn't terrible, that it's maybe okay even.  The people at my open mic night at Saint Alphonso's Lutheran Church and Pancake House always say that my poetry is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but you are never really sure if they are just being polite because they are full of the Holy Spirit and pancakes (though sometimes I think those things are actually synonymous with each other).  

But to have people you don't know read your poems and say "Hey, this one's pretty good"?  It's a nice feeling.  I'd like to thank the Daily Press and....the rest of you people.....for that.  

Where do I go from here?  Now that I have my sandwich money I have to set my sights a little higher.  My new goal is to be a guest panelist on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," the NPR news-quiz.  I'm reviewing my current events and bad puns daily, and working to make my laugh extraordinarily loud and annoying.  I'm going to play, and I'm playing to win.

So, Who Wants to Hear a Nice Story About a Bridge?

This week I finished David McCullough's book The Great Bridge, which is about the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and was one of McCullough's earlier books, written back in the 1970's.  My uncle gave it to me for Christmas some time ago and I finally sat down to read it.  

And it was good, as most things by McCullough are.  The book examined the construction of the bridge but also the stories of the people behind and around it (Washington Roebling, Emily Roebling, Tweed, Kingsley, and a host of others).  Most interesting to me was the construction and sinking of the towers in the East River.  Compressed air was forced into a cavity at the bottom of a caisson that formed the base of the towers.  That kept water out so that men could excavate under the towers - as the caisson sank deeper the towers were built on top of it.  

Of course, one of the problems with compressed air is that it can give you the bends, which is something that scuba divers are familiar with but in actuality it was discovered during work on caissons such as the ones used to build the bridge (the official name of the disease is actually Caisson's disease).  It was a reliatvely new phenomenon but people had drawn the correlation at least between the pressurized air and the devastating disease.  Still, men went into the bridge to work.  Washington Roebling himself got the bends while oversseing work in the Caissons and he dealt with the after-effects for the rest of his life.  

McCullough does a pretty good job of describing how the bridge was built without going into overlycumbersome detail.

And....that's really about it.  It was a fascinating read, and I'm in awe of what they were able to do in the past.  The nineteenth century was an engineer's dream....