My Tragic History of Breaking Strings

- Keene, Texas circa 1966

It started when I was 12. My friend Leslie Gilley, a male person despite the ambiguous first name, lived on 10 acres on the outskirts of town. You got there by crossing the public school grounds, ducking through a pasture inhabited by hostile cattle and climbing over a bob-wire fence.

Leslie had his own creek. his own pond and an assortment of plastic guns, cap guns and Army helmets.  My brother and I had similar military accoutrements.  We all used to get together in the dry creek bed and throw dirt clod hand grenades at one another for fun.

Part of the fun was the Tarzan vine he had strung across the creek at its deepest, most gorgelike point.  The Tarzan vine was little more than a glorified string, badly frayed on the end you clung to.  You really couldn't tell much about the condition of the rope at the top end because the tree was 30 some odd feet tall. Leslie's older brother had tied the rope up there somewhere back in the dim past.

We must have been pretty dim ourselves to rely on its integrity after all those years being exposed to the elements, but we were to enjoy several months of high test swinging on that Tarzan rope.


You had to climb out on a tree trunk that bent out across the creek bed.  There was a spot over the middle of the creek where you could stand up on the limb, grab the rope and fling yourself into space. You would swing down the gravel creekbed lengthwise, up along a bank where the creek curved sharply and then back up the creek toward the tree like some demented pendulum. You'd cling to the rope till your swing slowed down enough at the bottom that you wouldn't lose toes when you set your bare feet down in the one sandy spot along your glide path.

One day, Les, feeling generous I suppose, made the unusual gesture of allowing me "first swing". I should have smelled a rat, what with him glancing nervously at the top of the tree and his solicitude in handing me the rope and reassuring me that it was my turn to go first.

I swung clear of the tree in perfect form, feet together, hands in the baseball bat grip we'd learned to use.  As I descended, I swung my feet out in front of me.  At the bottom of the arc I was doing a good 20 to 25 miles an hour when the rope parted high up in the tree and drove me butt first into the gravel creek bottom.
As a very light person, the damage to my bones was surprisingly minimal.  My butt hurt for a week though.  The damage to my brain which rattled around in my skull for some time after the impact, might have been more permanent. The 30 feeet of rope coiled down out of the tree on my head.

As my hearing returned, I became aware of Leslie screeching at me from the bank.  "You broke my rope! You broke my rope!" he shrieked as he slid down into the creek in front of me.

I looked up at Les, standing there red-faced with his hands on his hips.  "You broke my rope!" he said accusingly.

"I'm sorry," I said a little confused.  "Did you want to break it?"

I've made it a policy to this day. I don't borrow other people's musical instruments, weed eaters or anything else with strings or string-like elements. I don't want to break anyone else's strings, ropes or vines for them. It's always painful when it happens and my friends always get mad at me no matter how nice they try to be about it.

Also, I change my strings, rope or vines once in a while. Helps keep my butt out of the gravel!

Beware the Penguins!

Someone whose advice I respect suggested that if you want to be a writer, you should WRITE!

That seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many would-be writers ignore that bit of advice. I suppose they hope someone will bump into them at the mall and go, "Hey, can you write? I really need someone who can write the great American novel for me. I'll give you a million dollars in advance!" Of course, that's not very likely and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen. I seems that being a successful writer requires some hard work and something else that is foreign to many of us who would like to live the writer's lifestyle.

I'm speaking of self-promotion. Publicity is the lifeblood of a successful writer. Getting your name up front is the name of the game in the publishing biz, or so they tell me. Emily Dickinson called it "telling your name the live long day, to an admiring bog." Of course, Emily locked her work in a drawer and wasn't published till after she was safely dead. Someone more aggressive than poor Emily found her poems and sent them to a publisher. While a successful method of self-promotion, the die-and-be-discovered method leaves a lot to be desired and is not terribly effective anyway.
You wouldn't know it just looking at me or my work, but I am a shy person and self-promotion is always painful to me.  I'm awkward at it and when I do screw up the courage to push my own "brand", I come off like one of those pathetic geeks with delusions of grandeur they make fun of in those movies about cool teenagers in love. Heck, my own kids make fun of my pathetic efforts at self-promotion.

I am the Napoleon Dynamite of the American literary scene. I've written a book that has a huge potential audience, but I think I went with the wrong publisher (which wasn't hard since they were the only ones to offer to publish it). So, to make the book fly, guess who gets to push the marketing of it?

The shy guy!

My writing mentor suggested that if you want to be a writer, you need to discipline yourself to write a minimum of 500 words a day. I have been doing that for about 5 years now. As a result, I've got a couple of other books done (one co-authored with my Sweet Baboo). Several are almost done and others are in various stages of completion. I've got a magazine article that was accepted, but may never be published. I've written hundreds of thousands of words on my various weblogs, a poetry site, dozens of forums and a cooperative book writing site, not to mention an old journal and tons of uncatalogued bits that are sitting around in my computer of file cabinet.

What's missing for me, I suppose, is the ability to be aggressive in behalf of my own cause. Over my career in education and in the nonprofit sector, I've fought for so many causes for others, I can't begin to count them. Where I fail is in being able to fight effectively for my own cause. That I've never been very good at. I once wrote a successful federal grant for one million dollars. I think I made 4 months salary out of it (and I worked 40 additional hours a week for 4 months to get that). I got almost nothing for my 6 months of solo work on the grant. I walked away and gave the organization to people with disabilities who are still running it as a self-help independent living program.

I can't tell you how many people have asked me, "Are they paying you to do that?" and then looked at me like I'd just landed from Mars when I explained that I'd volunteered to do whatever it was I was doing for nothing. I'm always embarrassed to submit an invoice for services rendered. Lots of people (who drive nicer cars than mine) have no problem with that at all.

In the movie Madagascar, there are these insane penguins. The penguins have the kind of aggressive streak I wish I had, but probably never will. They probably don't have any trouble submitting a bill. They may roll in like gangbusters and then proceed to wreck the place, screwing up whatever it is they're doing in the process, but nobody fails to notice them and I bet they collect a paycheck. They have that whole "purpose driven life" thing going.

I don't think I'll ever have that - at least not the kind that gets you a career as a writer. I'm trying to learn the art of self-promotion, but I probably am going to look like a self-conscious penguin doing it.

Jesus says the meek shall inherit the Earth. Boy I hope so, cause I sure could use the cash!

I'm just sayin'

Tom


* Note:  Since writing this blog I've written and sold close to 1000 stories to various web-based publications. For these stories I was seriously underpaid. I put up with it because I am still a shy person and am continually surprised when someone actually proposes to give me money for what I do. Publishers love shy people when they can get their claws into them. - Tom King, 2/15/2012
 

*That by the way was my 500 words for today.

The Road to the "Mother" land.

Socialism is like government by your mother. Let me explain how I came to this conclusion:

1. Everything is provided for you (including your laundry).

2. You are told what kind of job you need to have.

3. You are told where you should live (usually mother provided housing)

4. You are told who to date (and don't worry about getting married - no rush. Your mother loves you, that's all you need to remember and use protection).

5. You are told how to spend your money.

6. You have your health care paid for.

7. You have free food, but they make you feel guilty for taking it.

8. Mom & Dad pay for pretty much everything and Dad gripes about it all the time.

9. If you try to move out on your own, Mom cuts you off the free stuff and you have to start paying for everything.

10. Eventually, you wind up 40 years old and living in your mother's basement eating Ding Dongs, playing Halo III 12 hours a day and trading Pokemon cards on eBay to earn spending money.

Welcome to Socialism!!!

Now if they'll just legalize marijuana, how sweet would that be?

Tom King
(c) 2009

The Punisher Cometh...

Boy howdy did we get a little peak inside Obama's head this past weekend. In a memorable shoving of the foot in the mouth, the Senator from Illinois said that if his girls ever made a mistake he wouldn't want to "punish" them with a baby.

Predictably the pro-life folks are way up in arms at the idea of a baby being punishment. While the whole tenor of Obama's comment makes me a little crazy too, pro-lifer's have a wee bit of a problem getting irate about the baby as punishment idea. After all, it comes straight out of the Bible.

When Adam and Eve bit the big one, God tossed them out of Paradise and commanded, "Go forth, be fruitful and multiply!" He was mad at them when he said it. I can hear God mumbling under His breath, "See how you like it when those little rug rats grow up and break YOUR heart!"

Children are the instructors God has presented us with to teach us how to be like Him. You want to learn how to be unselfish? Have a kid! You want to learn about self-sacrifice? Have a kid! You want to know how to give though it's breaking your hear? Walk your baby girl up the aisle with a little Mozart playing in the background. Want your faith to be tested to its limits? Watch one of your children suffer an illness or lose them to death.

Are kids a punishment? You could say that, but I think they're more of a teaching tool. It's how God molds our character. He gives us the most precious gift in the world when he gives us a child and he shows us how to love without limit, to give without asking the cost and to be willing to lay down your life for another person without even thinking about it.

My wife and I have been grieving for more than two years for our precious son. We understand how hard it must have been for God to watch his own son die.

Obama is looking at it all wrong. Kids are not a punishment. They are a gift. It's nice that the senator wants to teach his girls morals and values but without consequences for your actions, morals and values aren't worth much. Like faith without works, a vague sense that someone somewhere ought to be chaste and faithful and unselfish and honest is dead if there are no consequences that tie my behavior to those values. Having kids as a result of participating in an act of intimacy teaches you that love is something serious and important, not something you do just because you're bored some weekend and had too much tequila.

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

Forget Their Very Names

When I wrote this, in the wake of the Omaha Mall shooting, the news media is rushing to get the killer's image on their front pages as quickly as possible. In the next two weeks we will be treated to an exhaustive study of the young man who killed 8 innocent people - his history, his psyche and his motivation. 

 

Endless television, radio and print media reporters will beat their chests and cry "Why, why, why?" As I return to update this blog, a tatted up, drug-addled skinny white kid who fancied himself a progressive anarchist rapper opened fire on a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, killing 6 and putting 24 in the hospital including children. So far in this second year of Joe Biden's administration, we're already over 300 mass shooting so far this year.

Why? The media is answering its own question.

The news media will now trot out pundits who cry for more gun control and for less gun control because political fights are fun for reporters, who enjoy tossing raw meat in amongst the hyenas and watching the fun that follows. The wise men amongst us will speculate as to who is to blame as though the issue were entirely black and white.

It is not. I have extensive experience confronting violent people. I worked for many years with violent children and teens. I've stood nose to nose with a young man who had a 6 inch hunting knife pointed at my unprotected belly and talked my way out of it. Violent behavior cannot be understood in black and white. Many speculate about whether allowing mall patrons to carry guns would have made a difference and in the ensuing verbal smoke, we all ask ourselves whether, if we had been there and we had been armed, would we have been able to fire the shot that ended that young man's life - even if it might have saved the lives of the innocent bystanders.

I know that answer for myself because of my training and experience with violent people. If I were the only one in the line of fire, I would think twice. I used to work with mental patients and with a patient who was having a violent episode, I would always try to talk him down before doing any sort of restraint of physical intervention. I am prepared to turn the other cheek so long as that cheek is my cheek alone.

However, if there is another person, in danger, threatened especially by an armed individual, I would not hesitate to take the attacker down. The large teenage boys I dealt with in the psych facilities where I worked, soon learned that so long as they only threatened me, they were not likely to suffer the indignity of being taken to the ground by a paunchy old guy and were more likely to walk away with some dignity in tact. They also knew that if they continued to attack or seriously threaten someone else, especially someone smaller, it was the quickest way imaginable to find themselves pinned to the floor by said paunchy but surprisingly strong and agile old guy. The sudden ignominious end to the confrontation entirely spoiled the drama for them, so they quit threatening others in those situations and confined themselves to shouting obscenities at me - much more dramatic and satisfying for them.

There is a reason every major massacre in recent years has taken place in a gun-free zone. No homicidal killer wants to raise his gun and have someone shoot him in the head before he can start killing people. This actually happened recently at a graduation party where a gunman drew his weapon on a crowd and a lady reached into his purse, extracted a large and impressive pistol, took careful aim and put an end to a potential bloodbath. It totally ruined the effect he was aiming for and saved lives. It takes away all the drama for reporters when nobody but the bad guy dies. All that's left for them is naval gazing and "what iffing" in an attempt to serve the anti-second amendment narrative.

 

My work with deeply troubled teens gave me a real insight into what goes on in the minds of people who resort to large scale violence to cope with their unhappiness. I actually had kids in therapy who told me that their career plan was to "die in a hail of police gunfire". They wanted to die spectacularly and to become famous. For them a mass shooting was the best way to get their suicide note to the largest number of people possible. It's a pathetic search for a way to leave a mark in a world that they feel they have no stake in.

But, if we deny them the fame, then we deny them the very thing that motivates them to kill. The most effective tool we have to prevent this sort of mayhem is to make sure that whoever does this kind of thing is wiped from our collective memory - their names forgotten for all time. It's the only thing that will work. To ever do this, we would need to re-invent our culture and make our morbid curiosity generally unacceptable. We could still allow for the morbidly curious to get their news fix about the perps - simply use obviously fake names.

Those who want to die in a hail of gunfire have a deadly fear of being anonymous. The last thing they inevitably say in this life is something to the effect that "I'll show them. They'll never forget me."

How about let's show them? How about let's forget them? Let's not even remember their names. It would be a kindness to their families. It would be a kindness to the victims' families. It might even dissuade others from copying these young men's examples. It might just save some lives and all it requires is that we give up our morbid fascination with mass murders. How hard is that?

Sure, with a free press, you'll always get bloggers and sensational newspapers that won't go along with it, but even then, if they are in the disapproved of minority, the killer still loses his or her desired fame and attention and, more importantly, sympathy. If you're only going to be remembered by some obscure blogger or weekly gossip rag, what's the point. These guys are going for national news media and front page headlines, not a place beside Bigfoot and that space alien that tells the presidents what to do.

I'm doing my best to forget them all. When I read a news story, I deliberately avoid paying attention to the name of the killer at all. To this day I couldn't tell you who the Virginia Tech guy was or name a single high school shooter or the McDonald's guy, the Killeen shooter or any of the other mass murders of the past 20 years. You can deliberately forget someone if you try hard.

So....

What if every one of us pledged to never say or write the name of a mass murderer again? What if we each told ten friends and asked them to do the same and they, in turn, told ten friends and so on and so on. In just a few repetitions, you can wind up with an astronomical number of people who have heard the idea. If half of us took the pledge, we could create a cultural phenomenon where a culture (or at least a sizeable chunk of that culture) consciously decided to change itself and renounce the glorification of these people.

What if we threatened to stop watching news media that ran endless photographs and profiles of the killers. I noticed today that I haven't seen one single photo of the victims, yet, but that smarmy delinquent that murdered 8 innocent people is on the front page of everywhere. It makes me sick and it's cruel to his family.

So, let's just stop it. I'll write my ten letters. How about you?

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

PS:  Since I first wrote this a large number of mostly conservative news outlets have ceased telling viewers the names of mass shooters and terrorists. It seems others have had the same idea. It's a good sign....

© 2007, 2022

Advocacy 101 for Conservatives.

It's funny that I've always been drawn to folks who were advocates for the poor, downtrodden and oppressed. I became an advocate myself over the years despite the fact that I'm a died-in-the-wool conservative on issues like taxation, the war in Iraq and the size of government. I like folk singers, activists and do-gooders, even though we argue violently over politics. Someone once said I should explode from the sheer contradiction between my work for seniors, children, people with disabilities and low income families and my right wing views.

Me, I never have understood the lure of left wing socialism and communism for advocates of human rights and freedom and practitioners of the Golden Rule - other than that the left has always portrayed itself as the opposite of the bigots of the times.

But pretending to be a friend of the workers is something much different than being a friend of the workers. I never got Communism as it has been practiced since the days of Lenin and Stalin or socialism as practice by Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jung Il and half-heartedly by much of Europe today. To me a system that tries to legislate equality by taking away freedom is a serious mistake. For that matter so is a system that denies equality in the name of majority opinion disguised as freedom. Both extreme left and right have real problems doing both freedom AND equality at the same time. It's either "freedom for me, but not you" or "equality for me, but not you". They can't seem to find a system that works well for guaranteeing both freedom AND equality. I suppose that's because freedom is easier to legislate than equality. It's easier to enforce a person's right to do what he wants than it is to force everyone to treat others as equals I guess. You can't write a law upon the heart. Only God can do that.

If you remember 7th grade, you know what I'm talking about - especially if you were a geeky 90 pounder with glasses and good grades. Junior High was a socialist system if there ever was one.

I love the guys that marched for civil rights - don't get me wrong. I marched with them. But as soon as they start advocating the passage of laws that arbitrarily take from some and pass it to others while creating a permanent elite to tell everyone what to do, they lost me. Such a system, however idealistic, only kills individual exceptionalism and discourages people from exceling at their chosen pursuits, just as it did in junior high. Did we learn nothing in school people!

That's what the cheerleaders and jocks did in junior high and high school. It was not an equitable system. It was socialism at its ugliest. Some were always more equal than others, however much they talked about what was "fair" for everybody else. There was an elaborate unspoken legal system in junior high in which everyone was allowed to participate equally as long as no one stuck his or her head up out of the crowd and did anything spectacular. Exceptional effort was always seen as "unfair" in the tribal world of pubescence. The consequences of doing better than your peers at anything (unless you were one of the privileged class) were often painful for the poor geeks that tried it. I remember. I have the scars.

My favorite activist story was told me by my Uncle Art. There was a boy in his 8th grade class named Chester. He stood nearly 6 feet tall and weighed close to 190 pounds. He was a gentle soul in a large body. He never fully fit in with the elite social crowd although they respected him. Instead, Chester made friends with the smaller, geekier kids in the class, treating them with the respect that he, himself received from everyone due to his size and athletic prowess.

One of the chosen few decided one day after lunch to torment one of the boys. My uncle was the 8th grade teacher (it was a small parochial school). He had a firm rule against fighting and in those primitive days, he gave swats to both combatants when a fight broke out. That day, when he came out to supervise the playground, he found Chester standing in front of a small boy shielding him from the larger, more popular boy. Words were exchanged. The jock told Chester he couldn't always protect the 'little punk'! To demonstrate that he could, indeed, defend his friend, even if he were not around, Chester instantly flattened his opponent (an early form of the proactive defense policy later practiced by the Bush administration in Iraq). In so doing, he delivered a very effective message to the bully in question that there would be consequences for tormenting Chester's friends, even if Chester weren't around. The lesson was not lost on the bully as he lay stretched out in the dirt contemplating the clouds spinning overhead.

Uncle Art broke up the one-sided fight and took Chester inside as the instigator. The other boy was released on the grounds he had never hit anyone. My uncle didn't want to punish Chester. He liked the boy. Also, Art Bell was one of those teachers that paid attention and knew what was going on in his school. He knew Chester was defending his smaller friend from a boy known to bully the smaller kids. To avoid spanking him, my uncle offered Chester 3 days of after school detention as an alternative to taking 3 swats.

Chester pulled himself up straight, "I'll take the swats, Mr. Bell," he said firmly. "I knew I was going to get 'em when I hit him." You hear parents say, "This is going to hurt me worse than it does you." You never really believe that, but Uncle Art says he really suffered as he delivered the swats. He didn't take any of the heat off them either. The rest of the school would have known if he went easy on Chester and he would have become less effective as an impartial arbiter of justice. Chester took it without flinching. When it was over, he wiped away a tear, said, "Thank you, Mr. Bell." and left the room with his head high.

Word quickly got round the class that Chester would not only pound you, but would also didn't mind taking a whipping for it if you messed with his friends. My uncle said it was one of the most peaceful school years he'd ever experienced as a teacher.

Now that's my kind of advocate!

Just one man's opinon.

Tom

Keepers of the Earth

I had the privilege this week of spending time with a collection of some of this world's most beautiful creatures. I spent an enthralling afternoon with Brian Werner and his wife, Terri of Tiger Creek Wildlife Refuge. Tiger Creek is a tribute to the vision and mule-headedness of a man who believes deep in his soul that God has called him to a sacred task.

Tiger Creek is home to more than 36 tigers, lions, cougars and other big cats, rescued from abuse, neglect and abandonment. Brian's team collects tigers from all over the nation from private owners who find the task of caring for one of these beautiful creatures is too much.

These amazing cats chuffed a raspy how-do-you-do to Brian whenever they caught sight of him. As the day ended, they began roaring at each other, one after another bursting out in a sharp basso profundo burst of sound that must have had every deer, javelina hog, possum and racoon in the surrounding woods diving for cover. It was an amazing sound.

It reminded me of what man was put here for in the first place. We have two things we were supposed to do on the Earth. First, we were put in charge of keeping up the gardens. Then, Adam had to name the animals and I expect since we named them we were expected to take care of them.

Sadly, like children with their pets, we have proved irresponsible in that duty. Of 8 subspecies of tigers at the beginning of the last century we're down to 3. Scientists think two varieties have disappeared within the last few years.

I agree with Brian. We do have a sacred duty from God to take care of the animals, to dress the garden and clean up our messes. Some on the far right believe you can exploit willy nilly and it's okay since we're the big kahuna species on Earth. On the far left, many believe we shouldn't interfere with nature at all and withdraw to a few human reservations and let nature go "natural".

I don't buy either option. I think God expects us to keep and tend the Earth. I think we should intervene, especially when it is our fault for the mess nature is in. I think we ought to try and fix it if we can.

What a lovely thing to do for your life's work. I envy Brian and Terri.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom

Fear Itself

In almost 6,000 years of recorded history, the names that ring down the corridors of time are the names of the brave. In every nexus of history, at every turning point, stand men and women with the courage to face the eternal bugaboo of every titanic ego since Cain used a rock to shut up his overachieving brother – FAILURE!

People who seek power for the sake of power all seem to have one thing in common – a deep dread of not getting it or not holding on to it. As a result, an endless stream of history’s bureaucrats and placeholders never did anything if there was even a slight chance that they’d lose hold of the reins of power. History’s bullies never attack unless they have overwhelming superiority of numbers (or at least believe they do). They never defend to the last man if they can negotiate a surrender that leaves them in their nice cushy palaces – often literally selling out their own grandmothers to preserve their well upholstered tushies. It’s a shameful litany of compromise, betrayal and thuggery that marks the interstices between the rare moments when someone does something actually brave.

Then there are the heroes – those who stand out for their courage. These are the men and women who believed in something and bravely stuck to a course until they went down in flames – again, often literally. Jesus and his disciples died almost to a man at the hands of terrified bureaucrats who saw Christianity as a threat to their retirement plans. The English set fire to Joan of Arc because her example of courage to her fellow Frenchmen in facing English troops, threatened their empire so they maneuvered her into their clutches by convincing some cowardly French bureaucrats to rat her out (big shock there).

A string of popes sent thousands of protestant preachers and their followers to their deaths during the middle ages and the reformation era to protect the Catholic Church’s hegemony over the Christian faith. Santa Anna overran a fort full of Texicans hoping to punish a weak province for its rebellious behavior and protect his control over the Mexican nation. Jefferson Davis and his followers figured with all the good generals and the power of the slave economy that he and his fellow plantation owners could slip out of the Union and preserve their way of life. The string of weak-kneed generals who led the Union armies early in the war were so afraid of losing that the threw away opportunity after opportunity to end it. The Romans got so decadent in the later empire they split their capitals, negotiated with a succession of invaders, and gave up territory till there wasn’t anything left.

Luther, Huss, Jerome and Wycliffe stood up to the church and changed the face of Christianity. Bowie, Travis and Crockett stood up to Santa Anna buying Houston time to gather his forces. Houston’s men dragged a reluctant Sam into a fight that won Texas’ independence. Commodore Edwin Moore disobeyed Houston (a consummate weak-kneed bureaucrat) and pounded the Mexican Navy into submission and saved the young republic from invasion. U.S. Grant lost virtually every battle he fought with the Army of the Potomac and kept on advancing and attacking until he beat Robert E. Lee and ended the war. Abe Lincoln once asked wimpy General McClellan if he could “borrow the army if he wasn’t going to use it!”. The English Navy, outnumbered and outgunned, stood up to the Spanish Armada (a gang of politicians who had no stomach for a fight it turned out) and sent them flying into the teeth of a convenient hurricane. A tiny little band of colonists stood up to the mighty British Empire at the risk of their lives and property and made it too inconvenient for them to hold on to the place – creating what turned out to be the most powerful nation on Earth in a mere 200 years. There was FDR who said, "We have nothing to fear except fear itself." and quietly rebuilt America's military while everyone else was trying to figure out how to talk Hitler and Tojo out of attacking us.

Historically, those who accomplish something worthwhile have been those willing to run the risk of failure. Unfortunately, the United States has gotten older and is afflicted with the same sort of weak-kneed bureaucratic mentality that afflicted the Romans, the Spanish, the Israelites, the Mexicans, The French and the British once the bloom was off their particular rose!

Today we face calls by media, academics, left-wing politicians, ex-generals and government bureaucrats for “more negotiation”, compromise, retreat and ‘diplomacy’. Get out of Iraq. Apologize to the Islamic nations. Use more diplomacy.

The sunshine soldiers and crafty politicians who have dominated US foreign policy really believed we could have wars without casualties, that we could bend the world to our will (or at least get them to leave us alone and not attack us) by being smarter and craftier than everyone else. Diplomacy it’s called. The military doctrine of the past has always been that we should only go in if we have overwhelming (and expensive) firepower which is developed and purchased by retired generals working as consultants for defense contractors. The diplomatic doctrine of the past century focused on appeasement and negotiation to accomplish American goals.

Did it work? Let’s see. There was World War I, World War II, the unfinished Korean War, the failed Vietnam War, the unfinished Persian Gulf War, a string of terrorist attacks on American soil and American interests abroad and an interminable Cold War. Into that breached stepped a starry eyed actor/president name Ronald Reagan. An affable old geezer who believed America was strong, smart and could do anything it wanted to. He walked away from weapons negotiations with the Russians (against the advice of every politician, media pundit and diplomats everywhere who predicted a nuclear holocaust) and wound up ending the Cold War and dismantling ICBM’s that were pointed at us. He told the Russian president to tear down the Berlin Wall (against the advice of every politician, media pundit and diplomats everywhere who predicted we’d set back relations with Russia by decades) and got the Russians to do guess what? That’s right – tear down the wall.

I hope the majority of people who have been polled recently about it who believe we should cut and run from Iraq will rethink the matter. Are we running a chance of losing (or at least taking losses)? You bet. Is it worth it? So far, we’ve confined the conflict to the middle east. Could we do it better? Definitely. My main criticism of President Bush’s approach is that he hasn’t seriously suggested we go ahead and kick butt in Syria and Iran to keep them from continuing to support terrorism. If we don’t stop the funders of terrorism, we’ll never stop terrorism. The funders are nation states, not isolated fanatics. Most Arabs and Muslims would rather do business than blow themselves up, but as long as the greatest nation in the world remains cowering on the borders, afraid to take on the local bully boys, freedom will never catch hold. We need to get Pakistan’s attention too and get a serious effort going to take out Al Quaeda where it lives in the mountains of western Pakistan.

You can’t build a wall around America and keep evil people out forever. It won’t work. No fortress has successfully withstood all sieges raged against it. They all fall eventually. When Rome quit expanding its borders and went on the defenses, it soon got its Italian butt kicked. When Spain settled down to defending its property, it wound up losing it. When the Catholic church started defending its power, it lost its power. And you can't talk evil people out of hating you or wanting to take away your property or your money. Ask the French, the world's preeminent diplomats, just how well that's worked for them the past 400 years.

One thing I admire about the President is the thing he is most criticized for – his stubborn vision of what’s right. His policies have been called naïve because they risk failure and disaster. He’s called stubborn and single-minded and is accused of refusing to listen to his advisors because he insists we can and should win in the middle east.

Good for him. I’m a Texan like George. If it hadn’t been for Commodore Edwin Moore’s stubborn insistence on defeating the Mexican Navy, Sam Houston would be remembered as the Texas President who fiddled while Austin was sacked and burned and I’d be pledging allegiance to Vincente Fox and trying to sneak across the border to find a job in Oklahoma! Thank God there are men in history who are willing to risk their lives, their reputations and careers because they are impelled to do the right thing, whether it’s politically expedient or not.

You cannot win if you are afraid of losing.

God bless America and God bless the President. The rest of you – get some cajones for crying out loud!

Just one man’s opinion.

Tom King

A Place For Everyone, But Not Everyone Stays in His Place in The Me-Me-Media

In this month’s Readers Digest, there was an article about the new personal media – iPod’s, blogs, personalized news, satellite radio, cell phones, e-mail, text messaging and the like. RD cited one University of Chicago professor (there’s always one) who predicts that if people have the capacity to filter out stuff they don’t want from their media experience, then we’ve created a recipe for extremism. Dr. Sunstein calls it the “echo effect”. The theory is that if everything we see and hear is an echo or reflection of our own opinions and preferences, then gradually we slip farther and farther from the mainstream and into a fractured collection of fringe groups. Many media pundits are predicting a return to tribalism if the trend continues.

I respectfully disagree. Here’s why:

1. In order to personalize your media choices, you first have to hunt around for things to put into your iPod or bookmark in your browser. You see a lot of opposing ideas and opinions, new music and cool stuff while you’re figuring out what you want to include in your personalized media universe.
2. The next thing is, in order to support one side of any argument, you pretty much have to, at some point, listen to the other side in order to know what you’re against and don’t want to hear. Despite this pundit’s gloomy prediction that we’ll all become narrow-minded drones only listening to ideas we like, I’m seeing out there a whole lot of guys who listen to both Rush Limbaugh AND Al Franken, if only to shout at the radio in frustration at things they disagree with. I’d be willing to bet there are a whole lot more people out there with increasingly eclectic tastes. I made a “soundtrack of my life” tape the other day (one of my kids had to do one for a college project and it looked like fun – it was!). My CD includes folk protest songs and the Eagles’ “Get Over It”. It’s got Bing Crosby singing “Would you like to Swing on a Star” AND “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” (the Noel Coward version, not the rock n’ roll one!). A real mix of themes and ideas. A lot more people are like that out there than you think. People get tired of the same old thing after a while and move on. My son’s CD was a lot more homogenous musically, but even he threw in some bluegrass with his rap anthems.
3. I believe the new media opens doors for all sorts of creativity. The new tools can make anyone a pundit or a producer. If you spend any time at all surfing the net, you can find some wonderfully creative communities that pop up spontaneously around some theme or idea or event. Remember the “Star Wars Kid” series that turned an embarrassing moment caught on film into a whole string of delightful promos and spoofs and made the kid a minor celebrity. There was even a huge Internet petition going around that demanded George Lucas give him a part in one of the Star Wars movies – I think it was a form of collective guilt over everybody making so much fun of the kid. It was fascinating to watch. Oh and have you ever seen the “Trunk Monkey” commercial. Try googling that one – very funny!
4. Finally, I believe humans are all tribal by nature anyway. Some of us huddle in small geographic communities. Others create virtual villages where a guy from East Texas can share ideas and interests with people from Australia, Brazil, Israel and Japan if they can find a common language. Slot car racers have a community. I didn’t even know anyone still did that. I dug out my custom designed 1/32 scale Mustang GT and plan to visit the local track I found listed on a slot car webring. I found another for luthiers and learned enough from the guys there to rebuild a damaged Goya Guitar (the kind Willie Nelson plays with the hole in it) that I got for $35 on the Internet. I couldn’t have afforded a guitar like that for years, but thanks to personalized media and eBay, I was able to pull it off. I refelted our old pool table last Sunday thanks to instructions I found on a billiards community on the net – saved myself about $250. Just because we live in a tribe, doesn’t mean we won’t visit other tribes – especially not now that it’s so easy to get there!

I think what the professor worried about was that Americans (well, for that matter, anybody in the world with access to what she called the Me-me-media) wouldn’t receive the benefit of the opinions and influence of all the really smart people that have controlled the networks news and programming for all these years.

Well, that’s arguable. I took two years of graduate psychology courses. One thing I learned that really startled me was that there were as many smart people out there as there are stupid people. For everyone whose IQ is below 100 (the average score), there’s one above 100. So there are as may geniuses as there are mentally challenged out there. Even if you limit your definition of who are the really smart people to just 2% of the population, that’s still 20 people out of a thousand that are really super bright. In a town the size of Tyler, (around 100,000 now) that means there are 2000 really smart people – as smart as the average TV anchorman or smarter. So, Dr Sunstein, if we make it easier for all those smart people to get their own blog or to put their film on the net or create a site about something they really love and are passionate about, doesn’t that mean that the new media makes even more smartness available to us all. Sometimes I wonder if this is not just the pundits merely protecting their own turf? What threatens a paid pundit more than one who is every bit as erudite, but who isn’t charging a massive speaking fee?

Those who view the mass of people as too stupid to think for themselves may believe unsupervised personal media is a threat to society. Of course, most of those guys believe they are in the top 2% by the way – not at all surprising that they should feel threatened. Before we go further I want to assure you that I am well aware there is a lot of bunk, falsehood and just plain hooey out there. Dozens of nuts claim Nutra-Sweet is a deadly toxin. Hundred believe (and post on websites) that George W. Bush is Beelzebub’s personal representative on Earth. But for every crank out there, there is another genuine expert, easily accessible, who will teach you how to cook brownies to die for or how to rebuild and sail a catamaran. There’s Wikipedia, potentially the largest encyclopedia anywhere, built by thousands of individuals who know something about something they think is important and who are willing to research and create tens of thousands of useful articles to post on the site. Often the articles are the work of dozens of contributors correcting and updating information constantly. The system is amazing and Wikipedia is now a tremendous living information resource.

So rather than fracturing and dividing us, I think we are creating a more diverse set of communities than ever before, but ones that are even more connected to each other than before (behold the hyperlink if you don’t believe me) . In the age of personalized media, I don’t have to watch or like or be what everybody else watches, likes or is. If I collect toy soldiers, I don’t have to put up with my family of non-collectors badgering me all the time about my hobby around the old barbecue pit. Instead I’ve got ready access to a community who takes the hobby seriously too. Okay, maybe I don’t keep up with reality TV anymore. So, I won’t do well on pop culture trivia because I don’t care who won on Survivor this year. I tape or Tivo my favorite shows no matter when they’re on and watch them when I want. I choose to make differences of opinion part of my personal media package because it’s stimulating. Bloggers, surfers and micro media personalities contribute to the incredible diversity in today’s electronic media.

Computers have taken us to a new level. Freedom of the press used to be limited to people who could afford a press. The new media makes press ownership affordable to everyone. Brains and talent is ever more becoming the primary criteria for getting your opinion out there where once financial resources acted as the filter. I think that’s healthy.

Two decades ago they said AM radio was dead, but they’d never seen anyone like Rush Limbaugh before. This almost unknown, bright ex-Dejay/sportscaster raised AM radio from the grave, linked it to the Internet, got onto the Internet, into podcasting early and made himself very rich in the process. People include him in their personal media universes because he says things they want to hear, he’s witty, intelligent and entertaining. Almost as often, ironically, others listen because they hate and despise everything he stands for. Surprisingly, he’s almost got as many people listening who hate him as he does listeners who love him.

Here’s your homework: I want you to make yourself a CD on your computer. Imagine you were making a movie about your life. Create a soundtrack CD like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “50 First Dates” or something. Make it so the music complements the scenes you see in your head. My first track is Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons”.

Born on a mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine,
Got up early went to work in the mine.
Loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal.
The foreman said, well bless a my soul…

It was the first song I ever learned the words to (at age two). Since then, there have been lots of others. Here’s the play list if you’re curious:

SONG ARTIST
1. Sixteen Tons..............................Tennessee Ernie Ford
2. Would You Like to Swing on a Star..........Bing Crosby
3. Right Field.......................................Peter, Paul & Mary
4. Feelin’ Groovy................................Simon & Garfunkel
5. Oh Very Young...........................................Cat Stevens
6. Fire & Rain................................................James Taylor
7. Morning Has Broken.................................Cat Stevens
8. My Sweet Lady........................................John Denver
9. Catch the Wind...................................Donovan Leitch
10. Java Jive.................................................Greg Brown
11. In the Mood............................................Glenn Miller
12. Ballin’ the Jack......................................Danny Kaye
13. Mad Dogs & Englishmen.......................Noel Coward
14. Dona Dona........................................Donovan Leitch
15. If I had a Boat.........................................Lyle Lovett
16. Superman Song.....................Crash Test Dummies
17. The Happy Wanderer........................Brave Combo
18. The Dinosaur Song.........Trout Fishing in America
19. Get Over It!............................................The Eagles
20. The Hand Song....................................Nickel Creek
21. Lookin’ Out My Back Door ......Creedence Clearwater Revival
22. Don’t Fence Me In............Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters
23. Happy Trails.......................................Roy Rogers & Dale Evans

I defy you to find a disk jockey that could even imagine programming an hour that matches my playlist or for that matter an hour that matches your soundtrack. If you’d like, type up your own track list and post it in the comments section of this blog. I’d love to see what’s on your soundtrack. I've never seen a personal soundtrack yet that didn't have at least one surprise in it.

I think the Me-me-media is just a lovely idea. It could be the best thing to happen to the media since television and FM radio. Sure a few highly paid guys may lose their prestige and not be able to demand those 10 million dollar bonuses any more, but isn’t the idea to spread the wealth around a little anyway. Hasn’t the media been criticizing corporate greed and corruption and damning overpaid business executives for years? Then, shouldn’t we start the proposed leveling of the playing field with the media industry? I mean, if we’re going to do some redistribution of wealth, let’s let the entertainment industry lead the way -- you know, show corporate America how it’s done. Money where your mouth is so to speak. More actors and news guys and pundits would be able to work that way wouldn’t they, albeit at somewhat reduced salaries?

I say, “Viva la’ iPod!”

Just one man’s opinion…..

Tom King