Category Archives: Musings

Not such a good idea

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Some of the blogs I follow set what I consider a good example in avoiding political posts, and when I started this blog, I intended to follow their lead. But recently Georgia began offering specialty car tags with a Confederate battle flag theme for the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), and I don’t want to let that pass without saying something about it.

According to the Sons of Confederate Veterans (I debated linking, but I want anyone who wants to be able to read the things I mention), the tag commemorates Southern heritage. I tend to take people at their word, so my original intent in writing this post was to question exactly what they meant by Southern heritage. I assumed they meant what people usually say they mean when they talk about Southern heritage. You know, chivalrous plantation owners sipping bourbon on their front porches, or fighting and dying heroically for a noble but lost cause, or just the polite manners of Southern society. I was going to ask about other aspects of Southern heritage, like slavery; Jim Crow; lynchings; racial discrimination in voting, education, and public services; or laws that prevented blacks from drinking from the same water fountains as whites, or eating at the same restaurants, or staying in the same hotels. I was going to contrast what I assumed was their view of Southern heritage with a grimmer view of it.

But then I read their Web site.

There I learned about General William Tecumseh Sherman’s war crimes, Little Mary Phagan Day in Georgia, the Lincoln movie myth, and the removal from the grounds of the state capitol of a statue of a post-Civil War politician named Tom Watson.

Sherman’s war crime was removing about 400 mill workers from near Atlanta and shipping them north, where most of them disappeared forever. According to the SCV, at least some of these 400 mostly women workers died on the trip.

Mary Phagan was a 13-year-old mill worker who was raped and murdered in 1913 at a pencil company in Atlanta where she worked. On the day she was murdered, she was going to collect her wages of $1.20 and then was going to attend a parade celebrating Confederate Memorial Day. This was apparently enough connection for the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans to designate a day to honor her.

The myth of the Lincoln movie is that Abraham Lincoln wanted to free the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, when in fact, all he really wanted to do was win the Civil War.

Tom Watson was a post-Civil War politician in Georgia. According to the SCV, he was a populist, a champion of the poor and an opponent of socialism and communism. They were offended when current Governor Nathan Deal removed a statue of Watson from the state capitol grounds.

The SCV Web site tells us about these things, but it fails to tell us more of the story, and in that failure, tells us more about the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

First, William Tecumseh Sherman apparently did arrest and remove about 400 mostly women mill workers, and apparently few are known to have returned home after the war. The Web site civilwartalk tells a somewhat different story from the SCV Web site. According to the civilwartalk account, the workers were allowed to take what they could from the company store before it and the mill were burned, and were then taken to a temporary camp in Marietta (where, the story goes, a Union officer ordered a Union soldier to return a family Bible that he had taken from one of the female workers.) The workers were then taken to Kentucky where they were given the chance to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and then to work at factories in the North. Many apparently accepted this offer and never returned home. Perhaps not quite up to modern standards of military behavior, but not quite the atrocity portrayed by the SCV.

The story of Mary Phagan is notable mainly because of the fact that Leo Frank, a northern Jew who was a superintendent at the plant, was convicted and sentenced to death for the crime amid a great deal of publicity both in the North as well as the South. His sentence was commuted by the governor at the time because of grave doubts about his guilt, thereby ending his political career, and apparently his residency in Georgia for 10 years. Some of the most notable citizens of Marietta objected to that miscarriage of justice by forcibly removing Frank from the state prison, taking him back to Marietta and hanging him. In some quarters, Leo Frank’s most serious crime was that he was a Northerner Jew who was a superintendent at a Southern factory.

In the SCV account of what they call the myth of the Lincoln movie, they argue that Lincoln felt basically the same about slaves as everyone in the South, and only issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a way to further the war against the Confederacy. They quote an 1862 letter in which Lincoln says his main goal was to save the Union, and he would free slaves if that helped, or not free slaves if that helped.

The SCV might have made a more convincing argument if they had left it at that, but they didn’t. They continued to advance their story by saying that slavery had nothing to do with southern secession and the Civil War. The words of the secessionists themselves contradict that claim. One of two documents issued to justify the secession of South Carolina was titled, “The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States.” Why do they call themselves that? Well, in addition to objecting to the United States becoming a democracy, and objecting to majority rule, and objecting to having to pay taxes, they also fear that the non-slave-holding states will end slavery. The paper says that “the most civilized and prosperous communities, have been impoverished and ruined by anti-slavery fanaticism.” The paper also says, “In spite of all disclaimers and professions, there can be but one end by the submission of the South, to the rule of a sectional anti-slavery government at Washington; and that end, directly or indirectly, must be–the emancipation of the slaves of the South.” It seems pretty clear that the Southerners feared that they would lose their slaves, so they had to secede. So, there is a myth here, but it’s the myth that the Civil War was not about slavery.

The Tom Watson story is also a little more complicated than the SCV would have it. He started as a populist, but he ended up as a supporter of a renewal of the KKK. He originally advocated for letting blacks vote, but ended up advocating the disenfranchisement of blacks. He also agitated for the lynching of Leo Frank and celebrated it in his newspaper after the fact. He wrote anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish articles for his newspaper. So he’s not quite the hero the SVC says he is.

When I was young, I had a Confederate battle flag hanging in my window. I played with a set of blue and gray plastic Civil War soldiers (gray always won after desperate battles). I laughed when people talked about “The War of Northern Aggression.” And then I learned a few things about the Civil War and it wasn’t so funny after that. But the SCV isn’t talking about fun. My opinion is that the Sons of Confederate Veterans want a Confederate battle flag on their car tags because they’re unreconstructed. They consider the old days of the South better than today, and they would love to go back, not just to the romantic, mythical Old South, but to the real Old South.

 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a habit of this.

Letting go

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folding chair

I go over to check on my mother’s house every so often now that no one’s living there and it’s up for sale. There is still some furniture there, and the power and water are still on. Sometimes I sit down on the living room sofa and look for ghosts.

So far I have not seen any. My mother is not stirring in the bedroom or in the kitchen. My father is not puttering around in the basement. I do not feel their presence, and I don’t expect to turn around and see either of them coming around the corner into the living room.

My father died 14 years ago. I felt his presence strongly for a long time after that. I was building our house then, and when I did something I was particularly proud of, I found myself thinking that I had to show it to him. That feeling faded over the years. I was used to having my father around for 50 years, and my internal model of the world still contained him after he died. But in the last 14 years, my internal world has changed to accommodate his death.

My mother’s case is different. She died only about a year ago, but her last years were not like the previous ones. She had serious balance problems, and thus falling problems. She had urinary tract infections and blood clots. Her world shrank to basically her bedroom, her bathroom and her living room. When we went to visit, we never knew whether we were going to find her lying on the bathroom floor, standing at the kitchen counter reading the paper, or snoozing in her recliner while NCIS reruns played on the television. She wasn’t the self-reliant, smart woman she had been, and her declining health lasted long enough that the old image faded. And then she spent nearly a year with my brother and sister in law in Virginia, and after that the last few months of her life at an assisted living facility. I didn’t get a chance to form a really strong new image of my mother in my world.

So by the time my mother died, my internal model of the world didn’t really have her or my father in their old roles. And so their presence doesn’t echo in their house.

What I do find is that various things evoke memories. My father kept his tools in a corner in the basement. Most of them are still there, and when I see them, I think of my father. My mother’s jewelry and art glass are gone, but there are still things in the kitchen and in the bookcase in the living room that make me think of her

I have a few of those things that make me think of them at our house. One of my favorite sets of memories is of going with them on a few long RV trips. They started traveling with an Airstream trailer in the early ‘70s before they retired. They started out towing their trailer with their 1966 Buick Wildcat coupe. They continued RVing until the late ‘90s, and for a time in the mid-90s I was able to go with them for a couple of months at a time.

They traded for various RVs, including other brands of trailer and a couple of motorhomes, but they always kept a pair of folding chairs that they bought early in their RVing lives. They were solid, high-quality chairs. They used them outside for sitting under the awning, and inside if they needed extra seating at the dinner table.

Now those chairs are in our garage. I see them every time I pull in, lying folded up against the wall. We have a travel trailer, but we don’t need or use the chairs, and, to tell the truth, they aren’t all that comfortable anyway. But there they sit.

The associations with my parents and with good experiences with them are so strong that it’s hard to think about disposing of them. But we don’t really need them, and we don’t need physical objects to remember my parents. I guess it’s time to let them go.

Grasshopper revolution

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If you watch Fox news or listen to much AM talk radio, you have probably heard of Dave Ramsey. He is a popular personal financial advisor with books, seminars and a call-in radio show. When I was working more regularly in Huntsville and had to drive somewhere around lunchtime, I would sometimes listen to his radio show because there was nothing else on. If you can get past his self-satisfied expressions of his Christian beliefs and right-wing politics, he has some reasonable advice for people who buy cars they can’t afford and run up huge credit card balances. What he tells them to do is to stop using their credit cards, pay off their debts, stop buying things they can’t afford and get onto a budget.

Fine advice, but I sometimes have to turn off the radio when he gets too deep into his personal religion and his politics, which don’t seem too … let’s say, progressive. “Christian financial advice” seems self contradictory to me. I am pretty sure there are no words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament that are favorably inclined towards wealth or the accumulation of it. The verses I can remember are things like Jesus telling the rich man to sell all he has and give the money to the poor, or how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven, or that a man can’t serve both god and money. I never heard Dave Ramsey advise anyone to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. Not even close, not even once. He is far more likely to advise people to follow the habits of the rich.

But, back to the point.

One thing Ramsey likes to tell people is that if you live like no one else today, later you can live like no one else. Putting aside the weak rhetorical structure, what he is advising is that people should live frugally, eating rice and beans, saving their money and paying off their debts, so that later they can live like rich people.

I have no problem with most of that. Leah and I have no debt. We own our house and pay off our credit card in full every month. We are pretty frugal. And I like rice and beans, although I can’t convince Leah that they make a perfectly good meal, even without meat.

But I don’t like the principle behind Ramsey’s saying. Basically, it’s the old puritan principle of deferred gratification.

My work history, as shown in my Social Security earnings record, looks kind of spotty. I have spent a large percentage of my working life not working. In fact, I have a pretty solid record of quitting whatever it is I’m doing if I don’t like it. I’ve dropped out quite a few times, both from school and from work. Since about 1997 I haven’t even had a full-time job. I have worked as an independent contractor, which has allowed a work schedule more suited to my personality.

For 55 years, or at least the adult part of that, I never gave much consideration to money or what I would do for money in Dave Ramsey’s “later.” When I traveled, I usually spent the nights in the bed of my truck with the dog, and I figured I could always do that “later.”

All of this is just to point out that I am not an ant. It’s not that I have spent all my money, I just never really planned for retirement. That is, until I got married. Leah has never thought it was very funny when I suggested our retirement home should be under one of Rome’s bridges. We’ve been doing some serious work on retirement savings, so I don’t think we’re going to have to do that, but I still don’t believe in Dave Ramsey’s deferred gratification philosophy. I don’t think you should put off doing thing until later, because later may never come. Instead of “live like no one else today”, how about “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or “carpe diem” or even “there is no time like the present”?

Or, how about one of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy sayings? Charles Schulz died almost 14 years ago, but his comic strip Peanuts has lived on. I’m glad, because I have been looking for one of the Peanuts strips, and it recently appeared in the Atlanta paper. In this strip, Charlie Brown brings Snoopy two bowls of food and tells Snoopy that he will be gone the next day, so he should save one bowl for tomorrow. Snoopy eats one bowl and returns to lie on his doghouse. He resists for a while, but is eventually overcome and leaps on the second bowl and eats it. Then he lies on the roof of his doghouse and says, “I’m glad I ate it … I would have hated myself if tomorrow had never come!”

I’m with you, Snoopy, you and the grasshopper.

A few things

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Paper cups, plastic cups, Styrofoam cups.

Plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles.

Beer cans, soft drink cans.

Cardboard fast food containers, Styrofoam fast food containers.

Paper bags, plastic bags, empty garbage bags, full garbage bags.

Bundled yellow commercial telephone directories.

Automobile tires, wheels, bumpers, grills.

Child safety seats.

Plastic tricycles, plastic basketball hoop stands, plastic sandboxes.

Plastic storage boxes, wooden boxes.

Chairs, sofas, televisions, toilets, shower stalls.

Plates.

Half-butchered deer carcasses.

These are a few of the things I hate. I don’t hate them for what they are, I hate them for where they are.

All of these things are strewn along Fouche Gap Road on both sides of the mountain, and both sides of the road, although mostly on the downhill side. I played a game today when I walked the dogs. I tried to see whether I could find a place where I couldn’t see some kind of trash or garbage. It couldn’t really be done, not fairly anyway, even with freshly-fallen leaves covering a lot of sins. I was always within sight of some kind of trash. Maybe something big, maybe something little, like a piece of paper or a broken piece of a cooler.

And if you think that’s bad, you should see what ends up on the dead ends of Lavender Trail. Sometimes it’s construction or demolition debris, and sometimes it’s objects of a more personal nature.

I haven’t walked on any other country roads nearly as much as I have on Fouche Gap Road. I don’t know whether there is this much trash along Texas Valley Road, or whether it’s a function of the elevation of the road, like some kind of orographic trash precipitation.

I blame this at least partly on Floyd County. There is a garbage transfer station about three miles from our house just off Huffaker Road. They accept household garbage and some kinds of recyclable materials, but they don’t allow other types of trash. For that you have to drive about 14 miles across the county to the landfill, and they charge you to dump there. When I was building our house, I made lots of trips to the landfill to dump construction debris, and I made the trip to dispose of the old, falling-down greenhouse my father built behind my parents’ house. But it seems to be too much trouble for some people.

Once I was dumping our garbage at the transfer station when someone came up and tried to dump an old picnic table. The attendant told him that he had to take it to the landfill. So he left. When I went back home, the picnic table was just off the side of Fouche Gap Road.

The county ought to provide free disposal of all types of trash and garbage, including things like picnic tables and toilets, at least for private citizens. But instead they send prison crews once a year out to all the county roads to pick up the trash they didn’t allow to be dumped at transfer stations. Some more civilized communities allow all kinds of trash to be dumped at transfer stations. But not my own community. I guess that would cost money, and no one wants to pay not to have a trashy county.

It’s not all the county’s fault, of course. It’s the people who make up the county, all the people who prefer to dump their garbage near us. My opinion of human nature, at least Floyd County human nature, is not high. Are people in other parts of the country as trashy as they are here?

A world unto itself

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A man named John Allen died of a heart attack in 1973. He left behind a railroad empire centered on a house in Monterey, California. John Allen’s railroad empire was one of the most highly regarded in the world, and he, himself, was one of the most highly-regarded railroaders in the world.

And yet only a very few people ever heard of him, even during his lifetime, because his railroad empire was contained entirely within the 1200-square-foot basement of a house he bought specifically for the unfinished basement. His empire, the Gorre & Daphetid (pronounced Gory and Defeated) Railroad, was a work of art within the model railroad community. His railroad covered about half the area of the basement, which, in case you don’t know, is an exceptionally large model railroad. Its scenery consisted largely of huge mountain ranges, with valleys extending to the floor, deep enough for the model railroad operators to walk through, and mountains that extended to head height. He constructed detailed models and populated the scenery with little 1:87 scale figures. He invited friends over to run the railroad, modeling not only the physical appearance of the trains but also their actual operation.

His model railroad was almost certainly the best-known and most admired layout in the world, largely because of the many articles he wrote about it in model railroad magazines. It was museum quality. His layout had mythical status, and he was the hero in the myth.

Ten days after John Allen died from a heart attack, fire destroyed most of the Gorre & Dephetid Railroad. A group of his friends had held an operating session, and someone apparently dropped a tarp over a heater, which later ignited.

It was a shock within that world. It had elements of tragedy, tinged with absurdity. John Allen was, based on everything I have read, obsessed with model railroading. An inheritance plus some business gains and wise investments allowed him to retire at 40 and devote the remaining 20 years of his life to building his railroad empire and spreading his message of fine modeling to the faithful. It apparently was his world. It was as if he lived in his model railroad and visited the rest of us in our world on occasion.

I don’t completely understand that intense devotion to what seems like a trivial activity. But then I can’t honestly say that I understand that kind of intense devotion to much of anything. I’m interested in a lot of things, but I can’t imagine devoting my life almost exclusively to any one of them.

My father was interested in model railroads and dabbled with them for most of his adult life. Of course that influenced my brother and me. When we were little boys sharing a bedroom in the little four-room house where we grew up, my father built a folding table to hold a model railroad for us. It folded up against the wall between two sets of shelves, and dropped down and unfolded between our beds. We had our own American Flyer train set, which we preferred over Lionel because it had two rails instead of three, and was thus more realistic. My father had his HO scale models.

I continued to read model railroad magazines for a long time, up into my teen years. I imagined building a layout, and even bought some of the equipment to do it. But I never did it. Even today I like model trains. Not so much model railroading, but the engines themselves. I don’t do anything with them, and haven’t for years, but I occasionally wish I could find a good model of a steam locomotive.

I ran across this old HO scale model of the General while cleaning out my mother’s house. This was a birthday or Christmas present from more than 50 years ago.

I have this ...

I have this …

... because I can't have this.

… because I can’t have this.

This is the real thing, a narrow-gauge steam engine with train. It’s a former Denver & Rio Grande Western RR engine, now running as the Durango and Silverton tourist line. This was taken in Silverton, Co.

The General, for those who never saw the Disney movie The Great Locomotive Chase, was the steam engine that James Andrew’s Union raiders commandeered from around Kennesaw, Ga.,  and ran north towards Chattanooga, destroying as much of the Confederate rail lines and as many bridges as they could. The Confederates eventually captured him and his crew and hanged most of them.

I wonder what drives people (almost always males for some reason) to build and have and look at models. I think part of it is simply to be able to own things that you can’t ordinarily own: fighter jets, expensive sports cars, ships, and, yes, steam locomotives. You can hold them in your hand and imagine operating them. Model railroaders often push imagination further towards reality by operating their scale railroads as much like the real thing as possible. I believe that when they go into that world, it’s very close to a real world, at least for a while.

But the depth of the appeal still escapes me.

This fits in some way with something else I have been thinking about, but it’s going to have to percolate for a while before I can write about it.