Road Trip Report, Part 3

"I don’t know

if Jesus

could straighten

this mess out."

--Barry Strong,

retired educator

Searching for the

reel America:

pay dirt at the drive-in

Not every day do you meet an educator who can laugh about slapping handcuffs on his students.

That’s Barry Strong, a retired teacher and principal we found Thursday in about the unlikeliest place – a drive-in movie theater, in broad daylight.

We’d been driving south on Interstate 81 from Harrisonburg, Va., and turned off on what you might call a blue highway in search of some real America. We found it a bit past noon along Route 11, on the outskirts of the town of Lexington.

The marquee said it was closed, the season ended, but there was a pickup truck parked inside the fence and no barricade at the entrance lane, so we rode in hoping for my wife Bonnie to get some pictures of the empty place that might be symbolic of a dying but of Americana.

The truck belonged to the 61-year-old Strong, who was methodically waving a fancy metal detector over the dirt and grass in a back parking row searching for stray coins. Not that he needed the money for gasoline or anything; it was just a little pastime that sometimes turns up an old silver dime or half-dollar, but more often worthless debris.

“It’s been metal-detected before, but nobody gets it all,” he noted. “The trouble with metal detecting in a place like this is there’s so much junk in the ground, like pop tops. But it’s like fishing – you never know what you’re going to catch.”

Strong said he’s a Hull’s Angel – a member of a group of supporters and helpers at the drive-in, which remains a popular place around Lexington on warm summer nights. “They bring their blankets and get out on the grass. It’s a family-oriented place.”

The conversation quickly turned to politics, as I asked his views on the campaign. He says he expects to vote for John McCain, despite -- not because of -- his selection of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. For Strong, the choice is because he sees McCain as the most experienced candidate for president.

“I watched most of the debate last night,” he said. “I think McCain did a little better.”

But he acknowledged that “I got tired of hearing Joe’s name,” a reference to now-politically ubiquitous Ohioan Joe the Plumber, and lamented of that profession that “they won’t come out to see you for less than a hundred.”

“I read the Roanoke Times – I read the editorials every morning. They said they ought to vote all the incumbents out and start over. They couldn’t do worse than that. I don’t know if Jesus could straighten this mess out.”

Now about those handcuffs:

Strong said he started his career in 1970 as a sixth-grade teacher at Hartman Elementary School in Clarksburg, W.Va., at a salary of $6,000 and a classroom of 46 children. (Bonnie noted she had started her career in Baltimore in 1967, at then-Ben Franklin Junior High, making all of $5,800.)

Strong had some wonderful tales of those early days, like teaching the twin brothers Neil and Don, and the hot day in the un-air-conditioned school when Neil fell asleep at his desk and was directed out into the hall for the then-customary punishment: a paddling.

“He was crying and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Strong. It was hot, and we just ate....’ And he was right. So we went back in the classroom and I apologized to him in front of all the other children. And I handed him the paddle and told him to paddle me.”

Did he? You betcha.

“He reddened my ass,” Strong chuckled.

Later in his career, Strong said he became a teacher and administrator in juvenile detention facilities, including an assignment as assistant principal at the juvenile correctional prison in Beaumont, Va., where some of the students “were murderers.”

And that part of his career pretty much explains why “you could handcuff the students.”

Coming tomorrow: Outrageous roadside attractions

Road Trip Report, Part 2

Cemetery dust-off

trumps debate for this blogger

Something you didn’t know: There’s folks who travel around the country spending their valuable free time cleaning up old tombstones.

We met two of them Wednesday in the bury patch high above historic Harpers Ferry, W.Va. – women ignoring a late run of biting flying insects to get down on their knees, gently brush dirt off and rub a length of chalk across time-weathered names and inscriptions.

Their T-shirts bore the name of their organization, Cemetery Surveys Inc., which is endeavoring to document online the names and histories gleaned from this painstaking work. The chalk makes the names and at least some of the old inscriptions a little more visible, enabling the women to record them with a digital photograph.

The Harper Cemetery had plenty of work for them, with burials dating back two centuries.

Nema Mobley (shown in Bonnie’s photo above) was one of the volunteers, a retired middle school teacher from Cherokee County, Georgia, who probably got no more appreciation from most of her students than she received from those long dust in the ground beneath her aging knees.

You can check out the organization’s Web site at http://cemeterysurveysinc.org. It has information on thousands of the documented departed, but talk about an uphill struggle – they’ve probably got millions to go before they sleep.

Other sights along the way

As I noted, the cemetery is high above the town – and climbing the many steps up the hillside was the biggest ordeal of the day aside from swatting away the gnats and biting bugs awakened by a warm October.

I hadn’t been in the streets of Harpers Ferry for 40 years, and was impressed by restoration work that has kept the nucleus of the waterfront town alive and the friendly and informative National Park Service staff.

I asked, in the old general store, about one of the items in a display case labeled as a piece of the rope used to hang John Brown – the leader of an anti-slavery band that staged the ill-fated raid for which Harpers Ferry draws its most lasting fame.

A young Park Service guide on duty there noted an old history of the event written by a resident from that era, which pointed out that if all the purported pieces of the rope sold as souvenirs were authentic, it would have been long enough to hang John Brown from the moon. (The author, it was also said, was also a bit of an Irish drunk whose accounts may have been... well, embellished is a kind word.)

After nearly four hours in Harpers Ferry, we headed south through Front Royal and along about 75 miles of Skyline Drive – which on weekends is packed with visitors gawking at views of fall foliage. There was little traffic on a Wednesday, however, but foliage at the lower elevations had not yet peaked.

Still, it was a nice drive that got us within a 150-haul of our next destination in Blacksburg, Va., and to a decent Comfort Inn at Harrisonburg well in time for the Great (Last) Debate of the presidential campaign. So, it’s on to....

McCain v. Obama, Opus Three

Cut the crap, you Republicans. McCain got clobbered again.

For one thing, maybe I missed it somewhere, but I thought Palin had an infant with Down syndrome, and McCain kept talking about her expertise with autism. A little forgetful? I'd hope that Palin is expert in all manner of developmental disablities, particularly Down syndrome, and that she and her family do a great job in raising their newborn to achieve all that is possible.

And I hope she does it without ever having to leave Alaska.

Obama, meanwhile, missed a great opportunity when McCain told him if he were running against George Bush, Obama should have run against the president four years ago.

McCain’s comment was facetious. And Obama should have retorted: “Why didn’t you run, John?”

Speaking of John, let’s talk about Joe – the poor plumber guy from Ohio.

I don’t feel a whit sorry for Joe if he can’t get a loan to expand the business where he puts in 12-hour days of labor. Plumbers bill 100 to 200 bucks an hour, and I’m sure Old Joe is making a tidy sum off hapless homeowners like me. He's doing just fine compared to many Americans, and will get all the money he needs once the Bush administration's banking meltdown ends.

He’s Joe the Plumber in my book, not Average Joe Sixpack.

(I know, I shouldn’t have said that. Next time the toilet goes blooooey, I’m gonna pay bigtime.)

Which reminds me, it’s time to get the septic tank pumped out.

Politics has filled it to overflowing.

History Lesson

Old Republican playbooks
haunt American politics

Question: What do William R. Horton and Spiro T. Agnew have in common?

Answer: Their political ghosts are riding high in the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Horton was serving life without parole in Massachusetts for the 1974 robbery-murder of a 17-year-old gas station attendant when he was given a weekend furlough, and didn’t bother to return. Ten months later, in 1987, he was arrested after the rape of a Maryland woman and attack on her fiancé that got Horton a double-life term. (He’s still behind bars in Maryland, as far as I know.)

Horton’s prison release was possible because of an inmate furlough program being extended to killers by a court decision. The Massachusetts legislature then passed a bill to prohibit furloughs for killers, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Yup, that guy – Dukakis, who beat Al Gore and Jessie Jackson, among others, to win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. (Gary Hart was in that battle, too, until he was caught up in a sex scandal – belatedly prompting a Muckie nod of recognition at the 2008 mess of John Edwards.)

The Republicans and their 1988 nominee, George H.W. Bush, seized on the case, and the specter of “Willie” Horton dominated the campaign. And it didn’t help Dukakis’ chances when he offered a wimpy answer to the famous presidential debate question posed by moderator Bernard Shaw – that if wife Kitty “were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

These days, it’s easier to remember Willie Horton than the name of loser Michael Dukakis. Such is the power of a pounding negative campaign theme.

Agnew was the first-term Republican governor of Maryland whose criticism of black leaders during the 1968 King assassination rioting led to his unlikely selection as running mate in the successful presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

As vice president, Agnew became Nixon’s attack dog, a specialist in delivering scripted negative rhetoric that included the famous description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” (He was also a crook – and avoided prison in 1973 by resigning the vice presidency and pleading no contest to evading income taxes on the bribes he got as governor. Agnew died in 1996.)

All this history brings us to 2008, and a first-term (Alaska) Republican governor and “hockey mom” unexpectedly named as the running mate of John McCain.

Attack dog? As she so famously (and unoriginally) put it, the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick.

So no surprise, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin hammering in speech after speech about the Willie Horton of 2008 – Barack Obama’s supposed “terrorist pal” William Ayers.

So far, she hasn’t renamed him Willie.

What does this teach us? The Republicans are digging deep into old playbooks, looking for tactics to distract voters from the very real and frightening issues of the day – including a divisive war and a collapsing economy.

No matter that William Ayers’ transgressions played out four decades ago, as a founder of the violent Weather Underground – likely the most dangerous of the many protest groups formed to oppose the Vietnam War – or that his relationship with Obama is relatively minimal. It includes their simultaneous service on the board of an anti-poverty organization in Chicago, where Ayers became a college professor and respected member of the community.

McCain, as noted in an earlier Real Muck blog posting, is still hung up about Vietnam and victory as America seems snared in another winless war.

Bill Ayers? He’s the fall guy.

Some will say that Ayers deserves it.

But Obama doesn’t.

Neither does America.

The Great Debate

They both screwed up, but
Biden came through at the end

Joe Biden muffed it. For more than half the time, he forgot to look into the camera and failed to talk directly to Middle America in straight and simple terms. Even so, he came closer to answering questions and – at the end – gave everyone a rare gift: A glimpse of his soul.

In the epic science fiction novel “Dune,” the desert-dwellers are stunned when the young exiled prince “gives water to the dead” by crying.

In American politics, tears don’t always play well in election campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s tears helped her, but only briefly, in this year’s Democratic presidential primary battle. In 1972, supposed tears in New Hampshire helped short-circuit Edmund Muskie’s quest.

Thursday night, near the end of his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden welled up emotionally, fighting back the tears as he recalled the tragic highway deaths decades ago of his first wife and their daughter and the ordeals of his injured sons. It was all there for America to see.

Palin was ice cold by comparison, after being sequestered and rehearsed for a week in mystical Sedona, Ariz.

She learned her lines very well: “Wall Street greed” was hammered on half a dozen times, although once she mixed up Main Street and Wall Street, and she looked like a pleased schoolgirl at her successful pronunciation of “Ahmadinejad” (learned so nice, she said it twice).

While Palin was short on substance and avoided answering questions as she returned to her repetitions and obviously concentrated on the talking points she had been taught, Biden spoke too often away from and above his audience.

Biden failed to challenge Palin’s qualifications for the vice presidency. Some observers had expressed the opinion that directly confronting her lack of knowledge and her inexperience beyond the borders of one of America’s least-populated states would backfire, but to my eyes, Palin’s embarrassing answer about “only being here five weeks” could have been repeated by Biden. He was far too deferential, instead giving toothy smile after toothy smile.

When Palin went on the attack, she did it with a smarmy smile, cloying winks, and folksy “aw, shucks” manner sure to distract many voters from any misinformation, mistakes and lack of knowledge. She was back to being good old Hockey Mom, and she’s carrying the Republicans’ big stick.

Who won? That's a matter of, well... debate.

"Religulous" overkill

Movies, continued:

If you like Bill Maher, you’ll be forgiving enough to like his new movie tirade “Religulous” – a little.

As unfair as it is amusing, “Religulous” is pretty much an equal-opportunity attack on major religions of world, and a few of the minor ones, by a comic zealot proclaiming his own devotion – to doubt.

I, too, am a doubter. But I admire people who have and live by their beliefs, so long as they don’t attempt to impose them on others – particularly through government.

Mutual respect works for me. But it doesn’t really work for Maher. He harshly takes on Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons and Muslims – oh, and not to leave out Scientology (ridiculed without even a mention that it was invented by a hack science fiction writer).

But, I must add, there were plenty of laughs before the punchline, which is the Apocalypse – whether the work of God, or a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of true believers. There were plenty of images of mushroom clouds.

The theater was packed Wednesday night for the Baltimore preview (it opens Friday), including all three rows set aside for reviewers (and their dates). Maher attracts crowds with controversy. But my prediction is that “Religulous” will have a quick Exodus to Blockbuster, perhaps slowed a week or two if protesters bother to turn up outside theaters and thereby generate publicity.

One person seemed annoyed enough to leave the preview screening amid the lampooning of Judaism. I thought maybe he just had to pee, but didn’t notice him returning.

Muslims won’t be very happy, either. One hopes the most extreme among them don’t throw a fatwa fit over it.

Best performance goes to the actor playing Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, who held up well to Maher’s questioning – even offering a metaphor to the comedian’s disbelief of a Holy Trinity, likening it to the three forms of water as solid, liquid and vapor.
That is followed by the scene of tackily-dressed Florida tourists sitting on benches and enjoying the brutal and bloody crucifixion reenactment. (The attraction’s Web site is hoot unto itself at http://www.holylandexperience.com/. )

A shame the movie was made pre-Palin. She would have fit right in. But she’s getting plenty of attention on Maher’s weekly “Real Time” show on HBO.


Upcoming

The Great Debate is still on, and I cancelled plans for yet another movie when a TV-less friend suggested coming over Thursday night with his girlfriend and making a party of it.
And I hope you’ll be reading my take on Biden-Palin soon after.

Channeling Bristol

Today's little rant

I know it’s too easy, and probably unfair – but it’s also Sarah Palin’s fault. After all, she’s the one who brought up the “family values” stuff that makes her such a model mom to the religious right (as distinct from the right religious). It was all about teaching only abstinence, and putting up some sort of iron chastity curtain to block out many of the realities of life in 21st Century America.

Haven’t heard much about daughter Bristol lately. She’s off the front pages, not even evident in the inside pages, and her Hockey Mom hasn’t been saying much about the 17-year-old’s pregnancy situation since that storm blew over.

And whatever happened to the foul-minded goalie boyfriend who slipped a got-lucky shot past the family values defender and scored. Last I saw him, he was up there on the stage in St. Paul, Minn., sharing the climactic moment of the Republican National Convention with the McCain team, dressed up in his Sunday best and furiously chewing a wad of gum; then there was the little matter of his ugly but disappearing presence on the Internet.

The point is that Sarah Palin would like to see her spin on family values imposed across America, when they didn’t even work inside her own little igloo. And it’s about how big a lie you can spin to make teen sex OK in the eyes of do-no-wrong Republicans because, after all, her daughter’s going to keep the baby and marry her self-described “fu**in’ redneck” boyfriend, almost as if it were planned.

It’s just good old Republican retroactive hypocrisy. Paint it in the bold colors of “we’re doing it right, even when we did wrong, by golly.” Now everybody applaud.

But I can’t applaud. I feel sorry for Bristol, who at worst is an ordinary teenage girl with an all-too-common problem, revulsion for her caricature jock boyfriend, and scorn for the mother who shamelessly thrust them into the national spotlight.

Any bets out there on the long-term prospects for this teen romance? You can have two guesses – one predicated on a Republican win in November, the other on a loss that sends Sarah Palin home to carry her current job to term, assuming she’s even on the ticket come Election Day.


Now that I’ve gotten it out of my system, at least for today, we move along to a new feature of this almost-as-new blog:

Movie Reviews!

I’ve gotten into a serious movie habit lately, thanks to a membership benefit of Friends of the Maryland Film Festival, and a Web-based network called Gofobo: Free movies, usually before they’ve officially opened. There’s a row or three set aside for movie reviewers, not that the Baltimore area has actually got three rows worth of reviewers, and most of the other rows are filled with festival members and invited guests.

I confess I’m not a movie expert. My wife Bonnie and I attended a recent screening of “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys,” and I had no clue about who is Tyler Perry. But I found out, because the African-American actor-producer-director personally showed up to introduce his film to the predominately black audience at what was said to be its first public screening.

It’s been open now a couple of weeks, and done fairly well at the box office. We enjoyed it – particularly the acting of stars Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates, which largely made up for the film’s soapy plot.

Last week, I saw “The Lucky Ones,” courtesy of the Friends group, and was awed by the performances of co-stars Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena as three wounded soldiers returning from the Iraq war – the former presumably ending his service, the others on 30-day leaves. It’s a buddy movie, and they embark on a cross-country road trip that at times channels “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with a tornado and a dog. Not sure who the wizard was, but “Oz” was portrayed by Las Vegas. Great casting of that, too.

Eloquent in its empathy for the American soldier, the film did not fall at all into the trap of being antiwar. It was, if anything, pro-humanity and inspiring.

The next night, I lucked into gofobo tickets for an advance screening of “Eagle Eye,” being shown all of four hours before its midnight opening at a suburban IMAX-equipped theater. It relies on nonstop action and spectacle as two ordinary people (played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) get snatched up as pawns in a runaway computer’s effort to bring down the American government for being what it viewed as unAmerican. Runaway computers, now there’s an original idea. (American government acting unAmerican, now there’s another original idea.)

Did I mention, it was shown in IMAX? Two hours of big, loud, explosive, car-crashing IMAX?

The IMAX was terrific.

Politically Impaled

Sheer Torture

Impaled: It was my favorite word in 40 years as a journalist.

It’s a word so evocative of horror, yet one that could rarely be used. There was the police department horse that fell down a hill onto a spiked fence, or that truly horrible motorcycle accident best left to the imagination. Impaled just didn’t happen very often.

But now, there’s a new word for what’s happening to Americans: Impal(in)ed.

Politically, it’s sheer torment.

For Democrats like me, it’s the fear that Sarah Palin could become vice president, and as for John McCain – well, that melanoma keeps coming back. Look at all the makeup hiding his face in TV appearances, his pained expression and the way he holds himself so stiffly.

For Republicans, there’s also some fear – that Sarah Palin will continue to be an embarrassment every time she opens her mouth.

I have a hard time imagining a Republican victory.

Eight years of Republican administration have produced one disaster after another – chief among then a failed war premised on false warnings and outright lies, and the collapse of the United States as a moral and economic compass for the world.

I wonder at what difference McCain might have made had he defeated George Bush in the Republican primary elections eight years ago, and gone on to claim the presidency. But he didn’t – and that failure at a crucial time in American history does not make him worthy of the presidency now.

McCain’s choice of running-mate belies his own campaign slogan of “America First,” proving that he will go to any length to appeal to the party’s right-wing even if it means putting America at risk of being Impal(in)ed.

Do Americans care?

We’ll find out Thursday night, when the TV ratings show how many people watched the Biden-Palin debate.

Pushing the Right Button


I wore my Obama button today – a big red, white and blue oval that some clever soul was marketing two months ago. It boldly reads: “I like Barack Obama but is America ready for a President with a brain?

And I noticed that people were looking at it, a few smiling, others with bland expressions that suggested they didn’t quite understand the message or didn’t like it. But while I was checking out bargains in a newly-opened Goodwill secondhand thrift store (yes, sometimes dead men’s clothes aren’t bad), an African-American employee walked up to me and said rather hopefully: “Do you think he really has a chance?”


Flag Hunt

The main goal of my shopping trip was finding a small American flag. Amazing how many stores don’t carry them. I tried a couple of “dollar” stores, places selling party goods, even the Goodwill store, figuring that a little American flag would be a popular item. The best I could find was a tiny 15-cent paper flag, poorly printed in faded ink.

At a party “super store,” a clerk said the flag is in stock only around Independence Day – and when the flag isn’t in demand at other times (even for the Veterans Day observance coming in about six weeks), it’s not available.

But the clerk suggested I try a nearby Kmart store.

Clerks there remembered seeing them.

One suggested the sporting goods section, where there was enough camouflage gear, bright orange hunter vestments, fishing rods and gun oils to supply three towns the size of Wasilla, Alaska, but no flag.

Another clerk recalled seeing them in the garden section a few months ago, and sure enough – there they were, on a high shelf, in several sizes. I picked out a wrapped pack of two small flags, about the size that adorn graves in veterans’ cemeteries, but with Old Glory stapled to cheap wooden sticks topped by plastic points.

They were labeled as made in America – an increasingly rare phenomenon in 21st Century retailing – and there was no sales tax on the $2.99 price.

Except for the wrinkles of the cheap thin polyester-and-cotton fabric that need a little ironing, the flags were just what my wife wanted as a backdrop for some planned stock photography images of Iraqi and Afghan currency.

When she’s done, maybe I can find a patriotic use for them.

I love my country, after all – and retain an optimism that its people are not going to be fooled again.