News Control is Mind Control

There are parallels between the Vietnam War and our war with Islamofascists today, but not the ones our mainstream media look for. The first is media’s willingness to be manipulated by our enemies. The other is the fallacy of fighting a limited, prolonged conflict. When we don’t go all out, we’re at the mercy of the pampered, blame-America-first types who dominated our press corps then, as now, and who report only quagmire from their hotel rooms.

Teaching Vietnam as part of my 20th century US History course, I use PBS’s “Vietnam: A Television History,” a ten-hour series produced by Stanley Karnow in 1983. Karnow interviewed Viet Cong veterans after the war who boasted about setting mines and booby traps around villages, about shooting at US soldiers from civilian homes, then escaping through tunnels into surrounding jungle. They considered themselves heroes for hiding behind civilians and then sneaking away to let villagers suffer the retaliation they deserved. Karnow played television footage of burning villages and peasant wailing, the footage Americans back home watched almost every night on the evening news.

Reports from the Middle East today are similar. Al Qaida terrorists use Iraqi and Afghan homes and villages as bases to attack American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, then hide out in populated areas. American viewers see wrecked homes and women and children crying. Hezbollah terrorists shoot rockets into Israel from civilian homes in Lebanon, then let civilians suffer retaliation. Our media films the suffering while ignoring the cowardly tactics causing it. Reuters uses doctored photographs exaggerating civilian damage and deaths until US bloggers expose them. Vietnam is a blueprint for media coverage in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Lebanon: Exaggerate whatever suggests quagmire and ignore what may indicate progress.

After an all-out attack on American bases during the Tet “truce” in 1968, the Viet Cong and NVA were soundly defeated. Their defeat, however, was portrayed as a victory by our media. An account in Wikipedia describes it well: “Following [CBS anchor Walter] Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’ Soon after Cronkite’s report, Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race.”

When Vietnamese village leaders resisted communism, the Viet Cong tied them up and cut off their heads in front of villagers. Radical Islamic terrorists kidnap Americans and Iraqis who cooperate with the US-backed government and behead them on videotape for internet broadcast. American reporter Daniel Pearl got his head cut off because he was Jewish and wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal.

Mainstream media is unscathed so far. CNN voluntarily censored its broadcasts from Iraq under Saddam so they could remain in Baghdad. Walter Cronkite’s CBS successor Dan Rather fawningly interviewed Saddam Hussein. CBS’s allegedly tough journalist Mike Wallace obsequiously interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Earlier this week, however, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a reporter and a cameraman for conservative Fox News. Will they be decapitated too?

How many times have American TV cameras filmed Muslims burning American flags and stomping on them? Dozens? Hundreds? Are they staged for the cameras? Why are the signs in English? The role media played in Vietnam is well understood by Radical Muslim terrorists today. They know their enemy but we don’t know ours. They play our media like a fiddle.

News control is mind control. It’s power. Whoever wields it decides what people see or don’t see, what they hear or don’t hear - what they think. In a democracy, people vote accordingly. Perception is reality and media controls perception in war. Limited, protracted wars like those in Vietnam and the Middle East are most vulnerable to media influence. If we’re going to fight, go all out or don’t go at all.

Former students who became soldiers are appalled by mainstream media coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. “All they show are the negatives. They ignore good things we do,” is a typical comment. By “mainstream media,” I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. I also mean the “Alphabet Networks” like ABC, CBS and NBC as well as newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek. Although their power is diminishing with competition from talk radio, weblogs and cable news like Fox, the mainstream media still have control over what most Americans know.

MSM journalists believe they were responsible for US forces leaving Vietnam and they’re right. However, they don’t believe they’re responsible for the consequences - millions of Vietnamese boat people and millions of dead Cambodians in the killing fields. If history is any guide, MSM coverage of today’s war may result in the premature pullout of American forces from the Middle East just as it did in Vietnam. Consequences for that will be more September 11s - or worse. The Viet Cong didn’t follow us home. Islamofascists will. They’re already here.

Backcountry History

People don’t like to see ATVs coming. The very first time I climbed onto one - my brother’s - an angry land owner waved me down before I’d gone a mile. His wife and daughter came out too and explained how 4-wheelers had raced by his house and trespassed on his property. After he recognized me as the guy in the newspaper who likes to explore old roads, cellar holes and cemeteries, he let me through, but I learned that ATV riders before me had given the machines a bad reputation.

Last spring I bought my own 4-wheeler and I’ve explored much more country than I ever could on foot or in my truck. I’m discovering a lot of old roads, cemeteries, neighborhoods, mines and gravel pits. This probably doesn’t sound like fun for most people, but I’m a history geek and this is how I get my jollies when I’m not teaching.

Before venturing into an area, I study maps, starting with the most recent - usually the DeLorme Street Atlas. From that, I go to USGS (United States Geological Survey) maps, which are the most detailed. These can be purchased from the State of Maine for $5 per quadrangle. Some are updated within the past ten years and others - like the one for my own town of Lovell - go back to 1962. They depict topographic features like elevation, swamps, ponds and lakes, but also fields, woods, orchards, and even buildings. The University of New Hampshire has historic USGS maps available online from the early 20th century for all of New England and New York state. Most towns are depicted in the 1940s and some in the first decade of the 20th century. From Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg, I’ve purchased mid-19th century maps of every town in Maine and New Hampshire arranged by county. Most recently, I purchased maps of the towns within a 30-mile radius from the Oxford County Atlas of 1880. All these early maps show family surnames of people who lived in every area of town, as well as churches, schoolhouses, saw mills, grist mills, fulling mills, stave mills and cemeteries. From these, I can determine what areas of a given town were once settled and are now abandoned. Studying a succession of USGS maps I can determine when the old settlements were reforested after the descendants of early settlers stopped farming them and moved westward after the Civil War.

Most of the old roads still exist as rugged trails and, if they’re not closed off by the present owners, I can explore them. Some have wires across and others are barred by elaborate gates. Many will have “keep out” signs specifically aimed at 4-wheelers. They let in snowmobilers, but not ATVs and I guess that’s because so many inconsiderate riders have dug up the ground by spinning tires or other reckless behavior. I’ll see a lot of this in gravel pits which interest me because I like to examine layers of sand, clay, gravel and stones deposited by glaciers from 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago. During that time span glaciers came and went at least four times. Maps of glacial activity are available from The Maine Geological Survey in Augusta and I’ve purchased several (called “Surficial Geology” maps) for only $5 apiece. Conveniently, they correspond to USGS quadrangle maps. More detailed geological descriptions are available on each quadrangle for an additional $5. Going back even further in history is a bedrock geology map of the whole state depicting what kinds of rocks and fault lines underlie the glacial sediment we all walk on. Bedrock is exposed in several places like cliff faces, hill tops, mines and road cuts. When I pull over and study these, I’m looking hundreds of millions of years into the past when Maine was attached to northwest Africa - long before there were any humans on earth.

Last weekend, I spent an entire day exploring in Greenwood, Maine. The western half of the town is bisected north to south by an abandoned road that is open to ATVs. There are numerous mines to see as well as settlements. Few parts of west Greenwood ever had electricity and there are very few buildings left standing - mostly hunting camps and a scattering of original homes now used seasonally. I found cemeteries miles from any paved roads and containing veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. These guys cut roads into steep hillsides, built homes and barns with elaborate foundations, cleared land, and died. Their descendants buried them and then moved on to do similar things in America’s west.

Lately I’m realizing that even with my new 4-wheeler, I won’t likely have time to explore all the abandoned places in just my part of Maine before I’m buried under one of those stones myself, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

It's Our War Too

On a tour of Israel in May of 2000, my wife called me from the northern city of Tiberias. Minutes before, I watched reports on the “Newshour” of Hezbollah rocket attacks and I asked her if she’d seen anything. “No,” she said, “but I can hear explosions in the distance.” We have reservations for another trip in October but it’s been postponed to May - too many rockets hitting along the itinerary.

Cowardly Hezbollah terrorists hide rocket launchers among civilians. They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the civilian population as Israel counterattacks. When Israel was attacked openly, it finished off invading armies in short order. In 1967 it took six days. Muslim Arab countries staged four open attacks on Israel - 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Each time, their forces were annihilated by tiny Israel. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen - various combinations of which attacked in each of the four wars - were humiliated. After the fourth consecutive rout they learned Israel would not be defeated in open combat, so they resorted to terrorism and economic blackmail.

Following the 1973 war, the Arab oil embargo caused major damage to our economy. People my age remember gas lines, inflation, and skyrocketing interest rates. Then terrorism increased. Even before Israel became a country in 1948, Jews endured decades of vile attacks on civilian settlements in Palestine. Between the wars, Israel was continuously hit by artillery and rockets from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt and they continued after 1973. During Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel and financed Palestinian suicide attacks for years after, sending $25,000 to the family of each jihadist suicide bomber.

Hatred of Israel is a unifying force for Muslims. Shiites and Sunnis who have been killing each other for centuries will work together to attack Jews. With the rise of Radical Islam they work together to kill Americans as well.

Radical Islam comes in two basic forms:

The Shiite version dates from the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s and continues in Iran under the mullahs. To them, we are “The Great Satan.” With their petrodollars, Shiite Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon and in other countries around the world. They’ve murdered hundreds of Americans as well as Israelis.

The Sunni version takes the form of Wahhabism which originated in Arabia in the mid-1700s and got stronger by its association with the House of Saud and the oil revenues of Saudi Arabia. The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda are incarnations of Radical Sunni Islam. Shiite and Sunni radicals cooperate in attacks on Israel and the United States, as well as India, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, etc.

Though some of us knew it already, all Americans learned they were targets of Radical Islam on September 11th. Since then, however, the Democrat Party and their mainstream media mouthpieces have persuaded many that only al Qaeda is our enemy - not Hezbollah, not Saddam Hussein, not Iran, not Syria. They couldn’t be more wrong. A parade in Tehran, Iran September 22, 2003 displayed missiles draped with banners proclaiming: “Israel should be wiped off the map” and “We will trample America under our feet,” “Death to America,” and “Death to Israel.”

At a rally last year, Sheik Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah in Lebanon, shouted, “Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’” Tens of thousands of his followers shouted, “Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!”

Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command appeared on al Jazeera last Saturday. Ayman al-Zawahiri said al Qaeda will not stand idle while Israelis “burn the Muslim brothers in Gaza and in Lebanon.” With a poster of the burning World Trade Center behind him, he continued saying “All the world is a battlefield open in front of us.”

Last week, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked if President Bush believes current fighting between Israel and Lebanon “is as much the United States’ war as it is Israel’s war.”

“No,” he said and my heart sank.

President Bush is going wobbly on us. Immediately following September 11th, he said the United States would go after terrorists and the countries supporting them. Now, Iran and Syria are calling his bluff and he’s folding. Instead of pressing for a cease fire he should let Israel destroy Hezbollah, then give them bunker busters to drop on Assad’s palace in Damascus. If Iran responds openly to that as they threaten to, bring it on. Get it out in the open again.

As the reporter suggested in his question to Snow, it’s as much our war as it is Israel’s. Our only choices are: 1. We fight it over there or over here. 2. We fight a non-nuclear Iran now or a nuclear Iran later.

We can postpone our trip again if necessary, but if I were a young man with a determined commander-in-chief, I’d go there in a uniform with a weapon.

Sick Water

It was a beautiful lake if you looked at it from a distance. There were fields sloping down to the water’s edge on the far shore and rolling hills visible beyond. Several nicely-built homes dotted other stretches of waterfront but the lake was dying.

This wasn’t what I expected to find. Exploring back roads on the other side of Lewiston last week, I’d picked up a sandwich and pulled over to a sandy beach on Sabattus Pond next to Route 126. It was a humid ninety degrees and one would expect the beach to be packed with cars, children and mothers on beach chairs; but it wasn’t. Mine was the only car and the only life in evidence was a couple of crows hopping along past the occasional soda can or discarded food wrapper. Further down was a boarded-up old bath house. This was mid-July, the height of Maine’s summer, and the beach looked like a moonscape. I got out, walked to the water’s edge, and looked down. The lake was almost opaque in a yellowish green haze, a kind of thinned-out pea soup. Depressing.

Sabattus Pond is a misnomer. It’s big enough to be a lake and that makes its impending death more tragic. I had questions - like when did the lake get sick, for instance, so I checked out my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found a boat landing along the western shore. Two guys were backing up a trailer to a floating bass boat and I asked one how long the water had been like this. He’d only been around about six years, he said, and the algae blooms occurred every year. He’d heard there was a chicken farm on a river flowing into the lake that had fouled it. “Killed it,” was more accurate I thought. Looking at the atlas again, I noticed one of the in-flowing rivers was aptly named - the Dead River. “The bass fishing is good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t dare eat any of them.”

Further along the Sawyer Road next to the eastern edge of Sabattus Pond, there were smaller roads leading to the shore. Exploring these, I noticed cottages with water frontage in fairly good repair, but on the inland side of the roads many were not maintained. Quite a few displayed overgrown lawns, rusty old “For Sale” signs, and generalized disrepair. Some appeared outright abandoned. It was depressing.

As I crossed the town line from Sabattus into Greene, the road moved away from the shore and properties were typical of rural Maine - some were kept up and others neglected. At the top of a hill was a beautiful farm with meticulously managed grounds. Next to it was a handsome stone building called the Sawyer Memorial, but its parking lot hadn’t been used for a while and I wondered why. There was grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. On the other side of the road I was surprised to see dozens of big old post-WWII army trucks parked in rows. I wondered what were they doing on a horse farm. A mile further on was a huge, fenced-in area containing several hundred old trucks painted in green camouflage. Researching online later, I learned they were M813, 5-ton, army vehicles manufactured in the 1980s. This compound looked deserted also. Tall grass growing up around them indicated the trucks hadn’t moved in a while. In my gloomy mood, the endless rows of metal and rubber seemed a huge waste.

Further along, I came to an old cemetery in the town of Wales. Gravestones dating back to the early 1800s had been pushed over and several were broken. Obelisks were toppled and though the grass had been mowed, no one had seen fit to repair the damage. The scene depressed me even further. Veterans of every conflict since the Civil War were buried there and I wondered who would wish to dishonor the graves of patriots. Was it an antiwar protest? Mindless vandalism by purposeless young men with nothing else to do? I couldn’t tell. Neither could I decide which would be worse.

A bit further on, the lake was back in view and I looked down across rolling hay fields to the sparkling water. Had I not stood on its shore, I wouldn’t have known it was dying. It was still beautiful from high up, reflecting the sun back to me, but its condition was critical. My circumnavigation showed not a single person swimming in it. Could the lake be flushed out and brought back to life? If so, what would it take? I thought of Kezar Lake in my own town. Its waters are still pure and I realized how important it is to keep them that way.

Sabattus Pond is dying. I strongly suspect, after my two-hour tour around it, that the economic and social health of the three communities on its shores is also suffering as a direct result.

The Eyes Have It

“I care more and more about less and less,” said the old man.

He’d just recovered from two brushes with death, each requiring major surgery and I had asked him how he was feeling. That was his answer. He looked me in the eye and waited for me to respond. For several seconds I thought about it and then asked him what he meant. “The number of things that concern me has narrowed as I get older,” he explained, “but I care more about those things than I used to.”

I understood that. He’d chosen his words carefully. He continued to look at me and I could see in his eyes that he was okay. He’d accepted that he would die sooner or later and probably sooner, but he didn’t seem anxious about it. He was a religious man and he’d had many heartaches in his long life. He was no stranger to suffering - physical, emotional and spiritual. We were friends because he let me know him and I wondered if our friendship was one of the things he still cared about. I didn’t ask, but I believe it was. We had discussed much about what troubled us and what made us happy, but words were not the only way we communicated. Silent eye contact said a great deal. He didn’t look away when we talked or when we paused and I could see no guile in his eyes. There’s wisdom in that old Yiddish proverb: “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” and also in the quote from Emerson: “The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.” The old man had lived through a long life with many hills and valleys and swamps. He didn’t look forward to dying, but there was no fear in his eyes.

When I was a young man, death was part of my job. My college classes were all in the morning and I worked a 3-11 shift every night at a geriatric hospital where people didn’t get better and go home. They went there to die and if they had their marbles, they knew it. As an orderly, I fed them, cleaned them up when they soiled themselves, put them to bed at night, and brought them down to the morgue when they died. During my two-and-a-half years there, many dozens died on my shift. I cleaned their bodies, tied on their toe tags, wrapped them in their shrouds, lifted them onto the stretcher and brought them down to the “cooler” from which the undertakers would pick them up. Most didn’t go gracefully, but some did and I’ll always remember those. Often I could tell how they would deal with their deaths by looking in their eyes.

Some people I’ve been acquainted with for years don’t let me know them. They guard their eyes in various ways, and they have a repertoire of personas they put on and take off like a set of clothes, only more quickly. Whatever is real under all that I never see. Maybe I wouldn’t want to if I could. G. K. Chesterton said, “There’s a road from eye to heart that does not go through the intellect,” but for these people, that road is blocked. Some block it on purpose; some aren’t even aware.

Other people let me know them. After we get friendly, a few will confide that I made them nervous by the way I looked at them when we first met. They were intimidated. That surprised me at first; then it started to bother me because I didn’t intend to make them uncomfortable. Lately though, I’m coming to accept it. I’m just not very good at small talk and I don’t often engage in it. If there’s nothing to say, I prefer to look and listen silently to people, and that makes some of them nervous. Sometimes my mind will wander while I’m trying to listen. That’s rude, I know, but I can’t help it. If I think of it, I’ll smile more when I’m looking at someone to try and soften whatever their impression might be, but only if it’s a real smile. I don’t want to fake it. Life is too short for pretense.

Familiarity with death isn’t morbid. Awareness of death can enrich life. One of life’s few certainties is that we all die. It’s just a matter of how and when. Though I can’t say for sure, I believe there are worse things than death and a meaningless life is probably one of them. We humans need to believe in something greater than ourselves. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Music, Politics and Culture

There were few if any country music stations where I grew up in suburban Boston. Nobody I knew wore cowboy hats. My musical tastes were heavily influenced by my peer group. It was rock and roll, folk music and protest songs we listened to in the car and at dances. Later, at college, it was more of the same.

My first exposure to country music was after my best friend Philip quit high school, joined the army, and went to Vietnam. When he returned, he had developed a taste for Johnny Cash and other country singers. He was almost embarrassed to tell me because it wasn’t considered cool to like that kind of music. I wasn’t confident enough to withstand criticism of my peer group in those days, so I resisted listening to country music if anyone else was around, but I kind of liked Johnny Cash too.

My college friends believed it really was possible to put an end to war for all time and their musical tastes reflected that. The lyrics condemned war and capitalism while extolling pacifism and socialism. Country music seemed its polar opposite, producing songs with lyrics like: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. We don’t take our trips on LSD.” Singer/songwriter Merle Haggard actually did smoke marijuana - maybe not in Muskogee, but certainly in several other venues. He said he wrote the song to describe how his long-dead father would have looked at the 1960s.

Country music celebrated patriotism, family, God, and other traditional American values. Aficionados understood that the necessity for a strong military defense was constant. The idea that there was anything shameful in our military heritage was completely foreign to them. Just as it would always be necessary to defend oneself against bullies on the playground, it would always be necessary to defend our country from threat of invasion or takeover. Such was the human condition. Views like that were horrifying to people at the colleges I went to.

The boy meets girl theme was also common in country music but it was always monogamous. As Haggard sang: “We don’t make a party out of lovin’.” It wasn’t Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” No. Country music fans saw that as cheating. If someone strayed, country singers wailed sadly over the heartbreak that always came with it.

A condescending view toward country music prevailed where I grew up and it’s still with us here in much of the northeast where people like to listen to NPR. they think country music fans are dumb rednecks. NPR listeners are intelligent and sophisticated. There’s a definite red-state/blue-state correlation also. David J. Firestein, career State Department diplomat (working on his own), analyzed the distribution of country music radio stations in areas that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. He concluded: “[I]f you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region, probably right down to the county level.”

Would you want to bet that the NPR fan base would coincide pretty closely with the blue-state map? I would.

In his “Nashville Skyline” column, Chet Flippo describes country music fans thusly: “So Red pretty much means conservatives, upholders of traditional values, NRA members and beer drinkers. Blue is shorthand for liberals, tree-huggers, NPR listeners and wine sippers.” Flippo categorized James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen as country singers who appeal to blue state fans and Charlie Daniels and Toby Keith as country singers appealing to red state fans. Further distinctions between the two he describes this way: “It’s not geographic so much as it is mental. If it wears a cowboy hat, it’s Red. If it wears a beret, it’s Blue. Beer is Red. Merlot is so Blue. If your SUV is a Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover or Hummer, you’re Blue. If it’s a Jimmy or a Jeep, you’re Red. If your pickup truck is a Cadillac, you’re Blue. If it’s a Ford F-150, you’re Red. It’s snowmobiles vs. skis, power boats vs. sailboats; USA Today vs. the New York Times; Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Starbucks. Is your lawn mower a riding John Deere or a walking illegal alien? The first is obviously Red; the second, Blue.”

My pickup truck is a Toyota T-100 and I’m a wine sipper. The radio buttons in my car and my truck are set on talk radio stations, an oldies station, the local Conway, NH station which plays a nice mix of stuff, and NPR. One button in each vehicle is also set on a country music station. When NPR gets too smug, it’s a welcome antidote.

Distress Signals

We’re in trouble. As evidence, I saved four related articles with a common thread. Three are from lifesitenews.com - a Canadian Catholic newsletter, and one from the Boston Herald.

The first is about Spain. Last winter, the new Socialist government banned use of the terms “mother” and “father” on birth certificates. The father was to be listed as “Parent (progenitor) A” and mother as “Parent (progenitor) B.” Lesbian groups objected immediately, complaining that “progenitor” is a masculine term. They wanted “progenitora” which is feminine.

The second is from Ontario, Canada. The provincial government there is banning use of the terms “man,” “woman,” “wife,” “husband,” “widow” and “widower” from all Ontario law. The changes are an outgrowth of legalizing homosexual “marriage.”

The third is from Prince Edward Island, which is also banning traditional terms referring to members of families the way Ontario did. In PEI, there will be no more references to “bride” or “groom” on legal documents either, only the generic “spouse.”

The fourth is from The Boston Herald which reported last month that: “A Quincy [Massachusetts] mother says she was humiliated when an employee of the [Victoria’s Secret] lingerie franchise’s Faneuil Hall store flatly refused to allow her to breast-feed her daughter, directing her to a public restroom outside.”

All four articles represent disturbing, deconstructionist efforts to separate western perceptions of heterosexuality from reproduction, and from marriage and family. The story of a breast-feeding woman being shooed from Victoria’s Secret is telling, and not an isolated incident according to the Herald: “Last year, a woman was told she couldn’t breast-feed her baby in a Victoria’s Secret in South Carolina” and “[last month], sales associates at a Wisconsin Victoria’s Secret told a mother her exposed breast might offend some customers.” Can you believe this? Exposed breasts considered offensive by Victoria’s Secret?

Victoria’s Secret profits from the sensual display of women’s anatomy, especially breasts. While some may think such display immoral, I’m not necessarily one of them. As a lifelong heterosexual male, I’ve always appreciated women’s breasts. Even as an aging one whose other faculties are in decline, that appreciation doesn’t seem to diminish. Attracting male attention is one of the functions of the female breast and not an unhealthy one. Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie business is based on this fundamental human fact. However, to suggest that the other function of the breast - the nurturing function - could be offensive, is a dangerous bellwether for our time.

First Amendment cases adjudicated over several decades claim the display of women’s breasts can be protected speech, but according to the Herald article: “Massachusetts is one of the few states that doesn’t have laws to protect breast-feeding women. Women who breast-feed in public in Massachusetts can be charged with indecent exposure or lewd and lascivious conduct. A bill that would prevent people from booting breast-feeding mothers from public places and police from charging them has been stalled at the State House.” Yet, ultra-liberal Massachusetts is the only state to have legalized homosexual “marriage.” Maddening.

The US Supreme Court in “Lawrence vs Texas” somehow found a Constitutional right to sodomy. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court somehow found a state constitutional right for homosexuals to “marry.” The Socialist government of Spain and the Liberal Party government of Canada established similar rights. The reader has figured out by now that I consider these developments preposterous. They’re part of a concerted effort by the left to dissociate sexuality from reproduction, and to uncouple heterosexuality from its natural role in reproduction, marriage and family. Such intrinsic connections are “offensive,” they claim, and “heterosexist.” Homosexual activists lead the charge, relentlessly pressuring governments across the western world to cave in to their petulant demands.

What about the rest of us? What if we’re offended when we can’t be referred to as husbands and wives on marriage documents or as mothers and fathers on birth certificates? Why do we give in so timidly to bizarre demands from radical sexual minorities? What’s next? Abolishing Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day? Will we instead be forced to celebrate “Progenitors’ Day”?

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but listen up: Forget what they told you in college. Men and women are different and they’re supposed to be. Most men are aggressive. Most women are nurturing. Women attract men, get them to commit, and tame them. We call this marriage. Sex is a tool for this - heterosexual only. Homosexuality has no place here. When men see women use their breasts to nurse their children, it taps instincts in them to stick around, be fathers to their children - especially their sons - and to use their aggressiveness for the protection of their families and communities. This is an important part of our cultural glue. To the extent that we follow this plan, our culture is strengthened. To the extent we deviate from it, our culture is weakened. The last four decades are testament to this.

I’ve been watching with alarm as the left eats away at that glue and puts us all in trouble. I’ve had enough. Have you?

Angry Voters

Ordinary Americans are infuriated. Between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens live in the United States with more sneaking in every day. The federal government virtually ignores them. State governments ignore them. Local governments ignore them. No. It’s worse than that. All three levels of government don’t just look the other way; they implement policies to make the problem worse. They provide benefits to illegals like free schooling, free medical care, free food, subsidized housing, heating assistance, etc. When taxpaying citizens object through referendum votes to cut off funding, federal courts declare the cutoffs unconstitutional. Our federal government has sole authority to stop illegal immigration, but refuses to. Then it has the gall to use its courts to force states, cities and towns to pay for its malfeasance. Governors in states like Maine order welfare officials not to ask if an applicant is here illegally, and they face penalties if they do. Mainers already shoulder the highest tax burden in the whole country and our governor is telling freeloaders from around the world to come on over. Anybody from anywhere can force the rest of us Mainers to pay for them to live here free just by showing up. How long will this go on?

It used to be just a border state issue, but now the whole country is mad. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are dealing with it, but suddenly it’s a major issue for the November elections. It’s been big in border states for a while now, but as illegal aliens spread all over the country, so does the anger. Both parties avoid it but for different reasons. Democrats see illegals becoming citizens eventually and voting Democrat as so many ethnic-minority-victim-groups traditionally have. Republicans have two reasons: Businesses comprising a big part of the Republican base profit by hiring illegal low-wage workers and not paying benefits and passing those costs to taxpayers. Businesses also profit when wages for blue-collar Americans are kept low because millions of illegals work cheap nearly everywhere in the country. America’s working poor suffer the most.

Legitimate small businessmen suffer too when illegitimate competition with an illegal workforce is able to continually underbid them. Illegals cost about a third of what legitimate workers cost when you add in Workers’ Compensation, Social Security taxes, and all the rest. When illegals get sick or injured and are treated at emergency rooms without health insurance, those costs are passed on as higher taxes and higher health insurance premiums. Legitimate businesses pay for this along with the rest of us, but, with competition getting stiffer all the time, the temptation to go under the table increases.

Competition from illegal aliens is the worst problem, but legal aliens are displacing low-wage Americans as well. A woman from Sweden, Maine emailed me recently because her seventeen-year-old son lost his job to a foreign student. He worked at a local summer camp the past two summers and wanted to return this year. Though he worked at the camp, his employer was a large foodservice firm called Sodexho - a multibillion dollar, multinational food service company based in France. The boy had a good work record, but Sodexho informed him they were employing international students this year and he had to look elsewhere. This would seem to be in violation of Maine State Law, which states that employers may bring in foreigners only “. . . in cases where it can be demonstrated that there are insufficient qualified U.S. workers available and willing to perform the work . . .” Clearly that was not the case here. But, after September 11th, the new federal Department of Homeland Security assumed authority for granting and policing temporary work visas for international students and states don’t police it anymore. Nearby North Conway, New Hampshire brings in hundreds of foreign students to work in retail and tourist industries there during summer. The federal government can’t possibly assess the impact of legions of foreign workers on wages scales locally. Fighting terrorism is one thing, but feds should leave it to the states to regulate local economic impact of temporary foreign labor. Students working summer jobs to avoid huge student loan payments later must be able to negotiate a decent wage. The Maine woman who contacted me about her son is complaining to Senator Olympia Snowe even though she and Senator Susan Collins recently voted to grant amnesty to illegal aliens across the United States. Somehow, I don’t think she’ll be getting any satisfaction from our congressional delegation on immigrant labor issues.

Though President Bush - along with both Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate - want amnesty for illegal aliens, there is some hope from House Republicans. When they passed a strong bill calling for deportation of illegals and strong penalties for businesses who hire them, hundreds of thousands of illegals marched in the streets of Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities carrying Mexican flags and demanding “civil rights.” They thought they were flexing their muscles, but they only made it worse for themselves in the eyes of taxpaying citizens who will be going to the polls this fall.

Like I said, ordinary Americans are fed up. They’re infuriated and most of our representatives in Washington don’t even have a clue. It’s going to be an interesting election.

Hippie Pizza

After years of nagging from by wife about eating healthier, I’ve begun to tolerate hippie pizza - you know, the kind with little or no meat on top and no tomato sauce at all. Instead, there’s some goat cheese and vegetables of various types, some of which you’ve never heard of before. She promises they’re good for me, which usually means they won’t taste good. If you’re really, really hungry though and there’s nothing else to eat, they’re edible.

My first hippie pizza experience was at a restaurant with a lot of ferns in ceramic pots hanging from the ceiling on macramé straps and with fat candles around. I was very hungry and chowing down my little mini-pizza - an old-fashioned one with pepperoni, tomato sauce and lots of cheese. While I was eating it, my wife offered me a taste of hers several times, but I declined. “It’s very good,” she’d insist, “you should try it.” I’d say no and continue chewing my retro pizza. It wasn’t big enough though and I was still hungry when she stopped eating hers and there were a couple of pieces left. She saw me looking at them and asked, “Now do you want to try it?” I took a few bites and they weren’t bad if I sipped a little wine with them.

My wife and daughters love Flatbread Pizza, a chain of hippie pizza restaurants spreading around New England lately. So far, I’ve only been to North Conway and Portland but I notice patterns. Some customers have matted dreadlocks tucked up inside bulging Grateful-Dead-type knit hats. Others wear Phish-type bandanas tied in the back. Aging hippies prefer the old-style pony tails and few if any hats. They may be bald on top, but enough graying hair still grows on the sides to put an elastic on. Waitresses are skinny vegan women or smiling, Mama-Cass types. Dress is yard sale chick with nothing tucked in. One important difference between my generation of aging baby-boomers and the next group coming up: we tuck in our shirts and they don’t. Younger people want to project the image that they don’t care as much about appearances, taking great pains to select clothing which reflects that.

Most of the waitresses had little tattoos on them. I think there are more tattooed women in their twenties and thirties than men, a reversal from previous generations. I don’t know for sure what the tattoos portrayed because my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t want to put on my reading glasses and stare closely at their arms while they were writing down orders. They might consider that rude. One thing I didn’t see was facial jewelry - no lip studs or rings in nostrils, tongues or eyebrows and that was a blessing. Such ornamentation would be an appetite-suppressant for me and perhaps for some other patrons as well. Shaving legs or armpits is optional but that doesn’t bother me.

Around the Portland restaurant there are children’s drawings hanging on clotheslines resembling Tibetan prayer flags. Tibetans are hip because they’re more in tune with nature and the cosmos than heterosexual Republicans like me. The chairs and benches in Portland are yard-sale-chick too, painted over with different colors in their lifetime with newer layers worn away to reveal older, contrasting layers beneath. I think the message is that it’s better to use recycled wood than cut down trees to make new ones.

The menu proclaims organic vegetables, phosphate-free meats and free-range chicken toppings. The salads are organic, of course, and contain seaweed. It’s an old fisherman joke that when you reel in some seaweed instead of a fish for the dinner plate, someone will say you caught the salad. Well, there it was at Flatbread in Portland. The Pizza arrives on a typical round pizza pan, but the crust is oval-shaped and overlaps on each end. I think they could make it round if they want to but don’t in order to appear nonconformist. They don’t cut it up in the usual way either with the trusty roller blade making diametric cuts into wedges. No, they make one cut lengthwise through the oval and then perpendicular cuts across that, creating little rectangles instead. When the check arrives, it’s clipped on a cedar shingle with an old clothespin. Pretentiously unpretentious.

Flatbread’s website declares that it supports the community and the North Conway restaurant has a reputation for doing that. However, if it’s true that we are what we eat, I fear that if I continue eating there I may start wearing Birkenstocks and signing on with the Green Party. I going to have to load up on phosphates and nitrates when I eat at home just to preserve my way of life.

It's The Jihadists, Stupid

My fourteen-year-old students understand better who our enemies are than most elite journalists in our mainstream media. They know we’re not just fighting Osama Bin Laden and al Qaida, but a radical brand of Islam being spread around the world. It’s not a “War on Terror” as our president calls it; it’s a war on jihadists whose prime tactic is terror.

Televised reminiscences of September 11th proliferate as the school year begins so I go with the theme in class. Together, we watch planes hit the twin towers and Americans jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. We watch buildings collapse and panicked civilians running for their lives through the streets. I tell my students that others who sat at their desks a few years ago are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq now to defend America and western civilization itself and that they may choose to don a uniform themselves in a few years. Therefore, they should know why our enemies want to kill us. I can think of no greater responsibility as their US History teacher.

After the TV specials we do some background. We examine the 1979 US embassy takeover in Iran and the numerous attacks against Americans since - in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia. We study hijackings of ships and planes before 9-11. We study a map of the Middle East to locate relevant countries and cities. We study the Holocaust, the re-creation of Israel as a country, our alliance with Israel, and numerous Arab-Muslim attempts to destroy Israel. We compare and contrast Judaism, Christianity and Islam historically and in the present. We examine the economics and politics of oil in the region. We study the rise and fall of Islam over fourteen centuries and Muslim desire to reclaim past glories. Last fall, we examined Muslim immigration to Europe in light of French riots and the orchestrated Muslim riots protesting Danish publication of Mohammed cartoons.

On its web site, the National Association of School Psychologists warns teachers like me that: “watching replays of the [September 11th] attacks, predictions of future attacks, assessment of Homeland Security, or even stories about the history and whereabouts of the terrorists can raise anxiety levels.” Hmm. Radical Muslims are trying to kill us because we’re Americans. Relatives and friends of my students are fighting them in the Middle East. Former students are fighting over there too, and I should worry that teaching the causes of these things might raise students’ anxiety levels? Obviously, I don’t follow the advice of the NASP. What would they have me do in the face of all this? Teach complacency?

After Christmas break, a former student who had just finished a tour in Iraq as an Army intelligence officer visited and spoke to all five of my classes about what we’re fighting. When seventeen terrorist wannabes were arrested last week in Toronto, I used the occasion to review what we’d been learning all year. Three or four hundred miles away, students their age were learning jihad, purchasing tons of ammonium nitrate to blow up the Toronto stock exchange and Parliament, then cut off the prime minister’s head.

Nearly five years after September 11th, we should realize we’re fighting a radical offshoot of Islam - “holy” warriors who call themselves jihadists. Our enemies think their “purified” Islam will bring back the glory days of Islamic civilization in decline for centuries. We are their biggest obstacle. We didn’t declare this war on them; they declared it on us. In class, we watch a PBS Frontline video of Bin Laden declaring war in 1996. He instructs his jihadists to kill Americans wherever they can, whenever they can.

If all this should raise student anxiety levels as the National Association of School Psychologists warns, then I assure my students that our country has the finest military the world has ever seen or even imagined - as the Taliban discovered. The British empire, the most powerful on earth in the 19th century, tried twice to take over Afghanistan and couldn’t. The Russian Army tried for ten years and failed. It took the United States a few weeks and we did it from halfway around the world. Saddam twice discovered what the United States could do once we made up our minds. Zarqawi discovered it last week. But unlike the British or the Soviets, the United States goes in to take out the bad guys, rebuild the country, turn it back over to its citizens, and then encourage them to avoid dictators and run their government democratically. During World War II we did this in Germany, in Italy and in Japan and we’re doing it again today in the Middle East.

Though it’s out of fashion in academia these days, I teach my students that they live in the greatest country in history - one well worth fighting for. Elite, mainstream media journalists don’t seem to have learned this wherever they went to school, so they’re welcome to visit my class in September if they wish.

Animal Lover

I love animals, especially on the grill. Lately, I prefer domestic animals all cleaned, cut up and wrapped at the supermarket meat counter. Some guys like wild animals better, but for me they’re too much bother now that I’m an aging baby boomer. I’m a decent shot with a rifle or shotgun but it’s a lot of work to hunt them down, shoot them, disembowel them, drag them to the truck, butcher them, wrap them up and freeze them. I’m getting too old for all that.

There are other kinds of animal lovers who consider them equal to humans, but I’m not in that category. Growing up, I did get friendly with some dogs though. We had a German shepherd named Trixie which, if an older boy tried to push me around, would show her teeth and growl menacingly. I had to like that dog. She got old and died and my parents got a mongrel named Tootsie. He had a brave heart too, but lacked the strength to back it up. Consequently, he got thrashed in clashes with other dogs. Still, he never backed off and I had to admire that. As they say, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

Two years ago we buried a wonderful mongrel named Molly after seventeen years. She was gentle and smart and knew her place. She got expensive near the end of her life, but she was worth it. Her replacement is a large, unintelligent Yellow Lab/Irish Setter cross. Neither breed is known for smarts and Hannah is no exception. She’s huge and high-maintenance - a black hole of need, constantly seeking to be patted and stroked. And, she eats a lot. I may get a hernia carrying in huge bags of dogfood from the car. It doesn’t take long for Hannah to gobble it all down and what comes out the other end is of commensurate size. When she drinks water from her bowl in the kitchen, she slobbers about a quart all over the floor. You know how it feels to step in water right after putting on fresh pair of socks? Not a pleasant sensation. In winter, her hairs are all over the fleeces I wear and the back of my wife’s car is covered with them. When I ride in the passenger seat, Hannah is right by my left ear breathing and drooling. She’s not allowed in my car or in the cab of my truck either. She barks whenever a stranger approaches so she does serve as a kind of organic security system, but if I had my ’druthers I’d replace her with an electronic one. I tolerate Hannah only because my wife likes her.

Other kinds of animal lovers consider them superior to humans and I’m certainly not in that category. These are your rabid animal lovers. They would rather humans were extinct so we could turn the planet over completely to animals. When alligators ate three women in Florida last month, rabid animal lovers blamed humans for encroaching on the alligators’ habitat. It was the women’s own fault the alligators ate them.

Speaking of predators, a big black bear has been hanging around my neighborhood lately. I went out my door at 6:45 one morning and he was sniffing around my grandson’s swing set. He looked at me and sauntered down the hill into the woods like he owned the place. My wife has a counseling practice here and she told me some clients noticed the bear again outside her office. One said the bear was “brazen,” not afraid of people at all. Then I read about a black bear attacking a young family after climbing over a fence in Tennessee. The bear killed a six-year-old girl, mauled her mother and critically wounded her two-year-old brother after picking him up by the head and holding him aloft. Rabid animal lovers claim such attacks result from increased human encroaching on bear habitat, but Forest Service biologist Laura Lewis said in USA Today: “People don't want to think it is a natural behavior on the part of the bear [to eat people], but I really think it is.” I’m with you Laura. It’s natural for alligators to eat people too.

Why is this so hard for animal lovers to accept? Do they think all animals are vegetarians like they are? It should be obvious that bears love humans too - as tasty morsels. My six-year-old grandson plays on that swing set and the next time the bear comes around may be his last. He’s encroaching on my habitat now. Rock musician and hunter Ted Nugent wrote a book recently called “Kill It And Grill It,” with a recipe for “Bar-B-Que Black Bear.” I’m going to Amazon now and order it. Maybe I could learn to love bears. I’ve never tasted one on the grill before.

Missing Stub

Lovell’s Board of Selectmen didn’t need to meet twice a week but Stub insisted, so we did. His real name was Gordon Eastman, but nobody called him that. “Stub,” I learned later, was short for stubborn, and he was that. Mostly, the attribute worked in his favor but not always. People knew Stub as a kind and generous man, but you didn’t want to get him riled. Stub died last week at 89 and I’m feeling the loss.

I was the first “flatlander” selectman and I thought I’d have an impact on the way things were done. Looking back on it now though, I’d have to say that with Stub on the board and others like Dave Fox, the way things were done had much more influence on me than I ever had on it. I’d recently moved from Massachusetts and was still a liberal Democrat in the Boston-Irish-Catholic tradition. Stub was a Yankee Republican. We disagreed on much but he was patient with me. When people ask what caused me to become so conservative, I say there were many factors, but one of them was Stub Eastman.

Tuesday nights from 7:00 to 9:00 and Saturday mornings from 9:00 to noon, the selectmen had open-door meetings. Anyone might walk in and many did, usually Stub’s friends. In early spring, it was often Nucky Wilson, the public works commissioner, carrying a bowl of fresh smelts - fried in corn meal and still warm. When I asked where he got them, he’d wink and say, “Just enjoy ’em.” Some of Lovell’s best brooks were officially closed to smelting by the game warden and he was always on the lookout for violators. Nucky’s smelts were delicious. Later, longtime summer people like George Olive or George Stone (also conservative Republicans) would drop by and chew the fat. At selectmen’s meetings, we spent a lot of time just talking while Stub and his friends were having more of an influence on me than I realized at the time.

For centuries, small towns in Maine and Massachusetts have been governed by “Selectmen, Assessors, and Overseers of the Poor.” They comprise the executive body of a town with voters at town meeting serving as the legislature. Stub was chairman, or what some towns call “First Selectman.” Though paid a meager salary, he was in the town office every morning and kept things running well enough that Lovell didn’t need a town manager. When I was first elected back in the early 1980s sometime, Stub wanted me to be General Assistance administrator because I was the new guy.

The experience significantly modified my liberal view of the poor as hapless victims. Of the many applicants for general assistance during my tenure, two out of three had dubious claims. In a small town of 800-1000 people, we got to know each other. If people moved in and lied on their applications, we usually found out about it before long. In my first year, most of the chronic transients knew more about Maine’s General Assistance law than I did. I had to learn fast or be taken advantage of. The really needy often got more help from us than they requested, but deadbeats were so closely scrutinized that they either got a job or left town.

Stub was a selectman in the 1940s and took a long view on poverty: “We have the poor and the poor have us,” he’d say. Having pondered that often over the years, I take it two ways. First, the poor will always be among us no matter how much society tries to eliminate poverty, and we will always be obligated to them. They have us by the short hairs, so to speak. If they have no heat or food because they’ve squandered their resources on alcohol or other frivolous things, and they’ve faked disabilities, we have to help them whether we want to or not. In another sense, we’ll always have the poor to challenge us in our very humanity -and we’ll have to answer to God someday about how we deal with them.

Stub grew up on a farm with no electricity until he was an adult. That meant his lifestyle had been little different from someone growing up in the 19th century. As a young man, he logged with hand tools and horses. By the time I knew him, he’d seen more change in his lifetime than most, and he’d accumulated wisdom that few others have the opportunity to gather. We were from very different backgrounds. I’d lost my father shortly before moving to Lovell and Stub had lost his only son at nineteen back in 1959. I won’t get all mushy here, but we each had a hole and there was a kind of symbiosis. We met twice a week for eight years and got to know each other well. I can say without reservation that Stub was a man I admired and thoroughly respected. I shall miss him. Lovell is diminished by his passing.

Generation Fallow

On Mothers’ Day, three generations of mothers gathered at my house and I noticed something: my extended family is shrinking. My mother gave birth to eight children. My wife bore half that many - four. My oldest daughter has one child and my second-oldest is pregnant. Neither is talking about having any more. Birth rates are declining in my family and we’re not unique. Our children’s generation isn’t generating much. Many have only one or two or none at all. For a society just to maintain itself, each woman must bear 2.1 children. For it to expand, the birth rate must exceed that. American society as we’ve known it is static or declining.

When I ask today’s young people why they want so few children I hear a lot of different answers, but the two most common responses go something like: “I can’t afford them; children are too expensive these days,” or “I don’t want to bring them into this crazy world; it’s too scary.”

I’m not sure what to make of answers like that when I think about the so-called “Greatest Generation.” Commenting on his lifetime, my 84-year-old father-in-law said, “The happiest times in my life were when we were eating onion sandwiches.” Asked what he meant by that, he explained that his family was very poor while he was growing up and all they could afford to eat sometimes were onions and bread, but those times were his best, he claims. He and his wife raised seven children after living through the Depression and World War II. Compared to all that, what has today’s generation faced? Nothing nearly so daunting, yet they fear the future. Their standard of living is much higher, but they can’t afford children? Are they in despair? Are they selfish?

My wife claims she was happiest when the kids were little and we ate soup. We struggled every month to pay the bills then and she stretched the food budget by making a lot of soup. We had four kids and, on my teacher salary, we were officially below the federal poverty line. We’re not poor anymore but I can’t say we’re necessarily happier.

Why did hard times and war make people optimistic enough to usher in the baby boom, but relative peace and prosperity have made young people today fearful and fallow? Have they had it too easy? Some blame the decline of traditional family and marriage, or single parents, birth control, abortion or homosexuality for declining birth rates.

Some of this came into focus recently when bronze statues depicting a traditional family of four at a baseball game were offered to the city of Portland, Maine as a gift from the AA baseball team’s owner. The city council referred the matter to their Public Art Committee which voted 6-1 to reject them. The committee, according to the “Portland Press Herald,” felt that: “...the statues fail to reflect Portland's growing diversity, both in its people and its artwork. Portland has significant minority, single-parent and gay-parent households, and committee members have said they want fewer statues of white people.”

White people? The statues were bronze. However, nonwhite immigrant populations, both legal and illegal, have much higher birthrates here and elsewhere in the country even though they tend to be much poorer than the native-born who claim they can’t afford children. If poorer immigrants are confident enough to bear children, perhaps their progeny are more deserving of America’s future more than the more sparse descendants of the native-born.

The same thing is happening in Europe, but even more so. To quote from a recent article in “USA Today”: “Not a single Western European country has a fertility rate sufficient to replace the current population, which demographers say requires 2.1 children per family. Germany, Russia, Spain, Poland and Italy all have rates of about 1.3 children, according to the U.N. The Czech Republic's is less than 1.2, and even Roman Catholic Ireland is at 1.9 children. (The U.S. rate, which has remained stable, is slightly more than 2 children per woman.)”

Concurrent with this is the abandonment of Christianity on that continent. Are the two trends related? Perhaps. The great European cathedrals, built with the labor and sacrifice or much poorer people are almost empty on Sundays as prosperous Europeans of today have abandoned them.

Here in the U.S. assaults on religion in the public square and on the traditional family continue. Both, however, are holding out, and many are pushing back. A lot of Americans still attend church on Sundays. They still have enough hope to bring children into this world. In spite of 45 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade, America’s birth rate hovers at replacement level.

Where do we go from here? It’s either grow in hope or shrink in despair.

Stranger Than Fiction

If students lose interest in my lessons, I’ll catch the brightest ones surreptitiously reading fantasy novels about good and evil and wizards under their desks. Last week they learned that what’s happening in Iran is fully as fantastic as anything in their novels. On the blackboard, I wrote “Twelfth Imam”; “Ahmadinejad” and “well.” Then I told them to take out their laptops (which are equipped with wireless internet), google those terms, and find connections.

In prior weeks we discussed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s statements claiming “Israel should be wiped off the map,” that the “Holocaust never happened,” and that Israel could be relocated to Alaska or eastern Europe somewhere. They were amazed that a leader of a country could possibly deny the Holocaust. “Hasn’t he seen the pictures?” they asked. I responded by shrugging my shoulders and sticking out my lower lip. “That’s ridiculous. Is he crazy?” they asked. Again, I shrugged. I knew what they would find in their search and it only took a few minutes before one raised his hand and said, “Ahmadinejad believes the Twelfth Imam will come out of a well at the end of the world.”

“The Twelfth Imam is also called the Mahdi,” said another, after struggling with the pronunciation a bit. “His name is Mohammed Ibn Hassad, and he’s a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“He went into occlusion in the 9th century” said still another student, after struggling to pronounce occlusion. “He went into a cave. Allah kept him alive and now he’s down in the well, waiting to come out.”

“He’s been waiting for over a thousand years?” I asked.

“That’s what it says.”

“It says here that Jesus will be with him when he comes out,” said another. “The Twelfth Imam will come out of the well when there’s chaos on earth. The ‘Twelvers,’ are people who believe the Twelfth Imam is coming. Twelvers think they can bring him out by making the chaos. Ahmadinejad is a ‘Twelver’ and so are some others in his government.”

“The Madhi will calm everything down after the chaos,” said a girl. “He’ll bring a thousand years of justice and peace.”

“Okay,” I said. “Supposing Ahmadinejad wanted to create enough chaos to bring the Mahdi out of the well, what might he do?”

“He could shoot a nuclear missile at Israel,” said the student.

“Israel has nuclear missiles too,” I said. “Several of them. If Iran and Israel exchanged missiles, would that bring chaos?”

“Gosh, I think so,” he said. Others nodded solemnly. Some bit their lips as they considered the implications.

One girl was waving her hand enthusiastically and looking at her screen. I called her name and she said, “Ahmadinejad talked about the 12th imam in a speech to the UN last November. I have some of it right here. Should I read it?”

“How long is it?”

“Two paragraphs.” I nodded and she started reading:

“ ‘Dear Friends and Colleagues,
‘From the beginning of time, humanity has longed for the day when justice, peace, equality and compassion envelop the world. All of us can contribute to the establishment of such a world. When that day comes, the ultimate promise of all Divine religions will be fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being who is heir to all prophets and pious men. He will lead the world to justice and absolute peace.

‘O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.’ ”

“Thank you,” I said. “Ahmadinejad didn’t mention the Twelfth Imam by name though. You think that’s who he was referring to?”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” said the girl.

“Assuming you’re right,” I said, “Can the United States reason with someone who thinks the way Ahmadinejad does?”

She shook her head. “No way. He’s crazy.”

“What if the United Nations started a trade embargo?” I suggested. “Might that prevent him from building a nuclear weapon and shooting it at Israel?”

“I doubt it,” said a boy. Others shook their heads.

“What should we do then?”

“Nothing,” said the boy. “Let Iran and Israel wipe each other out.”

I pulled down a wall map of Asia, took my pointer and said, “Iran is here. Right next to it is Afghanistan, here, where we have troops. On the other side of Iran is Iraq, here, where we also have troops, and Iraq is right between Israel and Iran. A lot of the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz, right here next to Iran. If nuclear missiles start hitting, it will be difficult for all that oil to get through. There would be severe shortages all around the world.”

“Maybe we should send someone in there and shoot him,” said a boy.

“Maybe the Mahdi will come out of the well and fill the world with justice and peace,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

Consequences

Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, my father liked sitting in his chair watching episodes of “World At War” and “Victory At Sea.” I’d sit with him through the black-and-white, 30-minute programs and occasionally, he’d point at the TV and say, “I was there,” or “That’s the kind of ship I served on.” I’d see a gray warship with its bow plowing through large waves. Sometimes he’d point and say, “Your Uncle Bobby was there with General Patton,” or “Your Uncle Joe flew on a plane like that.” He didn’t display much affect as we watched and we sat through a lot of those programs. I was proud that my father had been involved in dramatic battles like D-Day, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa but I couldn’t brag about it to my friends because all their fathers were in the big war too.

Author Studs Terkel called it “The Good War,” and wrote a book by that title. No war can really be good. Terkel called it that because everybody was behind it, soldiers and civilians alike. If there was dissent, it was silent. America had been attacked and the country was united. Everyone realized that we could lose if we were not. We were fighting against Germany, Japan and Italy. There was no doubt that those countries, very different from one another, would nonetheless cooperate in the effort to defeat us. We were their biggest obstacle to world domination.

“The Good War” came out in 1984 and the contrast with Vietnam was obvious. At first, America was united against communist North Vietnam, but we all know how that changed. Comments from North Vietnamese leaders afterward acknowledge how much opposition to the war in the United States helped their effort and contributed to our ultimate defeat. Over 58,000 Americans died and over a million Vietnamese. Another million Vietnamese boat people fled the country after our defeat. Cambodian communists, called the Khmer Rouge, killed another two million people after taking over that unfortunate country. North and South Vietnam were reunified under communism, but now they’re realizing it doesn’t work. That’s difficult to admit now though, after all the misery they went through to get it.

Americans who opposed the Vietnam War wear their opposition as a badge of honor and they’re correct when they brag about how they forced the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. They don’t like to acknowledge however, that their efforts also led to the misery of the Cambodian Killing Fields and the Vietnamese Boat People but they own part of all that too. They don’t like to hear Vietnam Vets talk about how they felt when they heard about people back home pulling the rug out from under them while they were fighting and dying in the jungles. Americans have freedom of speech and the press and we exercise them often, but we must take responsibility for what we say, what we write, and what we broadcast. All that dissent affected our effort in Vietnam and it affects today’s war against radical Islam.

Today’s activists try to deflect that, claiming they oppose the war but support our troops. Come again? How is that possible? When senators, congressmen, and journalists claim the American war in Iraq is based on lies, they’re also saying our soldiers are dying over there for nothing. Empty statements like, “but we support the troops” only add insult to injury. They may salve the consciences of the dissenters, but our soldiers are not comforted. Ask them. They’ll tell you. Several of my former students who served there have told me they wish reporters and broadcasters wouldn’t focus constantly on the negatives, that we’re doing great things over there but all that’s being reported is gloom and doom and quagmire.

It sounds just like Vietnam after 1968. American soldiers were disheartened then, and they’re disheartened now. Likewise, our enemies were encouraged then and they’re encouraged now. Television networks choose not to show footage of Americans jumping from the World Trade Center, of Zarqawi cutting off the heads of American hostages, of terrorists dragging the bodies of American soldiers through the streets, or of Palestinians cheering the September 11th attacks. No. Footage like would remind the American public of what we’re fighting against so let’s keep that film in the can. Instead, we’ll show footage of endless car bombs and pools of blood in the streets. We’ll call terrorists “insurgents” and claim that, even though Saddam Hussein used nerve gas against the Kurds and the Iranians, he had no weapons of mass destruction. Even though he harbored terrorists like Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Al Qaida training camps, he had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden.

Yes, there are consequences for the drumbeat of negativism about our efforts in the Middle East. If we lose in Iraq, and the wacko Iranian President Ahmadinejad gets a nuke and makes good on his threats to “wipe Israel off the map,” will antiwar activists continue to claim there’s no connection between any of these Islamic terrorists?

Get this: They all hate Israel; they all hate the United States; they all hate Europe, and they have special contempt for western liberals. They want to make the world Muslim. If they win, there will be no women’s rights or gay rights or anything resembling civil rights at all. Those will be the consequences for your smug anti-war activism, and you better realize it before it’s too late for all of us.

Exploring Local History

Migrating birds have been looking over my property for nesting places. I’m trying to persuade tree swallows to take up residence in the houses I built for them overlooking my lower field, but they’ve declined so far. Phoebes, however come back every year in places I’d rather they didn’t, like under the eaves on my porch roof. Lately they’re over my wife’s new hot tub, and when the babies are big enough, they’ll hang their rear ends off the the side of the nest and let go on the cover. She’s in the hot tub several times a week, but I join her only once in a while now. I bought a four-wheeler this spring and I’m out on it often. She joins me only once in a while.

I also bought old maps of every county in Maine and New Hampshire. Studying old maps of the western Maine region, it’s evident that early settlers in the steeper hill country around here searched out hidden valleys to set up households the way birds do each spring. They’d clear some land, build a house and barn, and raise families. Cutting roads into the more remote regions with only hand tools and animal power must have been daunting, but they did it. I spent half of my Easter vacation exploring some of the remotest and steepest areas around here and I can only marvel at the work ethic they obviously possessed. I can barely access these places in the 21st century, and I can only imagine how hard it was in the 19th or the 18th. It also helps me understand why they abandoned their homesteads after two or three generations and migrated west.

David Crouse, publisher of Cold River Chronicles, informed me a few weeks ago about historical USGS maps scanned and published online by UNH. Some go back as far as the 1890s. I’ll print out a map for each area I plan to explore and take along hard copies of 1858 maps published by Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg. The maps show who lived in the houses which where only cellar holes are left. Depending on the region I explore, I can have maps from 1858, 1909, 1941 and 1962. I drive my pickup in as far as I can, then unload the four-wheeler to venture in further. When the terrain is too difficult even for that machine, I go on foot the way the early explorers did. Still, some of the old roads are difficult to make out even in the spring when there’s little foliage to camouflage them. My respect for the pioneers who first carved a home from these areas goes up with each exploration.

While I was in the middle of writing this column Crouse emailed me with a link to aerial photographs of western Maine taken within the last five years or so. They’re published by the Maine affiliate of Global Information Systems (GIS). Clicking on these, I could zoom in closely enough to identify the back roads I’d just traveled on last week in Stoneham, Lovell, Waterford and Sweden. They’re detailed enough to make out existing houses and even individual white pine trees if they’re big enough. I found my house and my neighbors’ houses too. I could see where large parcels were cut over more recently than neighboring large parcels. A definite grid pattern emerge when you see the country from high up.

Crouse sent me the GIS link because I’d just emailed him with the news that the Lovell Historical Society’s Bob Williams and I found what we strongly believe is the actual site of Calvin McKeen’s murder in 1860, about which Crouse and Williams are planning a presentation June 27th at the library here in Lovell. Exploring the area in the spring, I could see features like an abandoned roadbed which provided an additional reference point and made the old maps suddenly understandable. Crouse zoomed in on the aerial photo of the area and saw evidence of the old roadbed.

Exploring further into old West Stoneham neighborhoods puts me in the White Mountain National Forest. There are several abandoned communities even further in that I’m salivating to explore, but the WMNF gates are closed in spring - the best time to look around. Having just written a hefty check to the federal government earlier this month it chaps me that, while private landowners don’t fence me out, “public lands” are off-limits until summer when foliage will hide most of the historical evidence I’m looking for. I’ll also have to pay an additional fee to park and hike in, without my four-wheeler, which is banned.

The birds are still free to fly in there. The early settlers were able to cut roads and build houses in there without government assistance or regulation, but I, a member of the “public,” am not.

Illegal By Definition

There was an automobile accident in front of my father-in-law’s house in Lowell, Massachusetts last summer. When police responded, they discovered the driver and occupants of one vehicle were illegal aliens from Brazil. They had no driver’s licenses, no registration and, needless to say, no insurance. One cop said sarcastically to the other, “What a surprise.” In other words, it was no surprise at all because such accidents happen frequently there. The driver of the other car, who was not at fault in the accident, would have to pay for the damage to her vehicle herself or deal with her own insurance company and see her rates increased because she won’t be able to collect anything from the illegal aliens. They were ticketed and released, but the police doubted they would ever show up in court. Federal immigration authorities were not even contacted because they routinely tell local police to just release illegal aliens found in violation of traffic laws. If you or I were driving with no license, registration, or insurance, we would have to suffer the consequences.

Incidents like these are more and more commonplace and US citizens are understandably irate about the federal government’s refusal to enforce our immigration laws. Illegal aliens can show up in most states and get Section 8 housing, food stamps, and medical care. If they have children, they are educated for about $10,000 per kid per year, all paid for by taxpayers like the woman whose car was smashed up in Lowell that day. You want to guess how she feels about granting amnesty to 11 million illegals here in the United States?

When illegals apply for welfare benefits here in Maine, state employees may not ask them about their immigration status or they will be violating an executive order from Governor Baldacci. That means anyone, from anywhere in the world can come to Maine and get free housing, free food and free medical care, not to mention free education for their children. Maine’s taxpayers have to support them whether we like it or not, even if they violated our laws by sneaking in here. If they’re here, they own us. While only 20% of citizens collect welfare, more than 30% of immigrants, legal and illegal, collect it. What’s wrong with this picture?

Most illegals come from Mexico, whose government encourages them to sneak into our country. However, Mexico’s government has a much different policy for Guatemalans or Salvadorans who sneak into Mexico from the south. They don’t complain to the Mexican government. They get no benefits. Instead, they’re arrested and deported. Two weeks ago, a half-million illegals demonstrated in the streets of Los Angeles waving Mexican flags or upside-down US flags and demanded citizenship. A week later, another half-million demonstrated in Dallas, but this time “immigrant rights” groups like like the communist-dominated A.N.S.W.E.R (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), and National Council of La Raza (the race), distributed American flags and told them to hide their Mexican flags because they didn’t look good on TV.

According to a Zogby poll quoted in a recent Claremont Institute essay by Victor Hanson, 58% of Mexicans believe that “the territory of the United States’ southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico.” The also believe “they should have the right to cross the border freely and without US permission.” Hanson quotes former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, saying “the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders . . . [and Mexican migrants are] an important - a very important - part of this.” Hanson quotes Mexico’s national newspaper Excelsior which writes: “The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot.” Indeed, the Democratic governors of Arizona and New Mexico have each declared a state of emergency because of the illegal alien problem down there. Hanson quotes Mario Obledo, former California Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, saying, “California is going to be an Hispanic state. Anybody who doesn’t like it should leave.”

How did it get this bad? For decades Democrats and Republicans have avoided dealing the problem except to define it out of existence by issuing periodic amnesties. A stroke of the pen and no more illegal alien problem. That’s what President Bush says his “guest worker” program is not an amnesty, but most Americans know better. Such policies don’t eliminate the problem; they only make it worse by encouraging more Mexicans to sneak in and wait for the next amnesty. Mexico isn’t going to make any changes in its corrupt government as long as it can ship its discontents north to the United States. Why should it?

Meanwhile, local police in our states, cities and towns can continue to take illegals into custody for various offenses, call federal immigration authorities, and are instructed to just release them. Illegals don’t have to obey the laws the rest of us have to obey. In the rare case they’re actually deported, they sneak right back in. When the federal government refuses to deal with illegals, how can we expect legal immigrants to continue obeying the rules? How can we expect anyone to? If we can’t control our borders, how long can we call ourselves a country?

And that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say. It’s not likely to change much either, unless US voters send a clear message to congressmen and senators this November: Stop illegal immigration, once and for all.

Heterosexual White Guy

I don’t feel guilty being a heterosexual white guy, but evidently there are many people who think I should. Three years ago, a friend working in the mental health field showed me an essay entitled: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” distributed to everyone, every year, at the agency where she worked. Written by Peggy MacIntosh, Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, it was full of the usual leftist, victim-group buzzwords, like: empowered, outraged, systemic, consciousness, heterosexism, etc. MacIntosh said that while spending years bringing materials from Women’s Studies into the regular curriculum at Wellesley, she “often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged . . .”

My reaction is: thank God that back in 1988 there were still some men expressing that unwillingness among the Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, bicycle-riding, sensitive he/shes MacIntosh be likely to encounter around the Wellesley College campus. But that was nearly two decades ago and I fear there are fewer men left who are willing to to tell MacIntosh she’s crazy in those trendy, blue-state, Boston suburbs. Twenty years of mandatory sensitivity training in universities and work places have done a lot of damage to men down there. Testosterone is ebbing dangerously in the region that gave us Michael Dukakis back in 1988, and then John Kerry in 2004. At least those two had an excuse, catering to their coo-coo constituency in Massachusetts. But what about Al Gore in 2000? He wasn’t sure how to be a man either and he came from Tennessee. Then again, he did go to Harvard for four years. That time in Cambridge must have damaged him so much that, during his presidential campaign, he had to hire feminist Naomi Wolfe at $30,000 a month to tell him what a man should be like. And it didn’t work, did it Al. All that money wasted.

Speaking of Naomi Wolfe, I saw her on Book TV last week giving Harvey Mansfield a hard time about his recent book “Manliness.” I was gratified that Mansfield wrote such a book in spite of having taught at Harvard, where he was the only faculty member to vote against establishing a Women’s Studies Department there. I watched the whole interview waiting for him to bring up Wolfe’s work with Gore, but he never did. It’s good to know there’s at least one person left to represent the male sex down there in Cambridge now that Larry Summers has been run out of town.

But back to MacIntosh’s essay. I asked my friend if there were any objections at her agency when it was passed out. She said there weren’t and that disappointed me. “No one spoke up?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “And nobody laughed either the way you did.” That surprised me and made me wonder what kind of men she worked with.

A couple of years passed and I had nearly forgotten the essay when a student-teacher in my classroom said, “Tom, check this out,” as he handed me another copy of MacIntosh’s diatribe. There it was with its list of twenty-six white “privileges,” such as #12: “I can swear or dress in second hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.” Not answering letters? Is this the kind of thing they’re outraged about at the Wellesley College Women’s Studies Department? How much does it cost to send a kid to that school? Isn’t that where Hillary Clinton went?

After we read sections like that aloud and chuckled about them, I asked the intern if anyone spoke up about the essay to the instructor. “No,” he said. “We have to pass the course if we want to become teachers.”

Trying to hide my disappointment, I asked, “Well, do you mind if I write about it?”

“Not until I graduate, okay?” he said. “I really need this course. We get these kinds of things a lot and I have to keep my mouth shut or I won’t make it through. After I get my certificate, I won’t care. Write about it then.”

“Okay,” I said. “What will you do if you should get a testosterone surge before June? How will you handle it?”

“I’ll get a muzzle,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble now.”

That’s how it is on campus nowadays for a heterosexual white guy who is unwilling to grant that he’s overprivileged. If he spoke up, he’d be a racist, misogynist, heterosexist oppressor.

Number 22 on MacIntosh’s list of white privileges said: “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.”

Excuse me? Affirmative action puts women, blacks, hispanics, Eskimos, and just about everyone else ahead of heterosexual white guys in hiring, awarding contracts and admission to colleges and universities, awarding scholarships, etc. HWGs are last on the list and we’re supposed to be overprivileged?

No. I don’t feel guilty being a HWG. And I don’t feel guilty about not feeling guilty either.

French Economics

My lesson plan for the day included showing part of a video on the Vietnam War to each of my five 20th century US History classes. I had to rewind the tape as each new group filed in. I watched the VCR’s on-screen display of footage while Fox News was on in the background. Watching over my shoulder, my students were fascinated by live coverage of French students throwing bricks and stones at riot police in downtown Paris. Fox’s correspondent was in the middle of the melee as demonstrators threw balloons filled with paint as police used Plexiglas shields to protect themselves and many were covered in yellow. Occasionally police would grab a hold of an unruly young man and subdue him as he writhed against their grip. Other police would surround the officers holding him down and it appeared they were stomping on him. We couldn’t be sure since the camera’s view was obscured. My students were quite interested so I let them watch a bit longer after finding the right place on the videotape.

“Are the police kicking him?” a student would ask in each class.

“I’m not sure,” I’d say. “What do you think?”

“It looks like they are,” some suggested. Others would nod, their brows wrinkled with concern. On the TV, the Fox correspondent said similar demonstrations taking place in over two hundred locations around France. Other unions were calling for strikes. Airports, trains, busses and subways were shut down in a transit workers strike. Students and labor unions were demonstrating because a new government policy would allow private companies who hired young people under twenty-six years old to fire them or lay them off during their first two years of employment. Previous government policy dictated that, once people were hired, their jobs would be almost guaranteed for life. Students and union members wanted to keep it that way.

After a few minutes, I pressed the “mute” button, turned to the class and asked: “Do you understand what the fuss is about?” Most continued to look at the now-silent television as a phalanx of helmeted police with shields moved forward against the mob, then retreated, over and over. Nobody answered my question though. “Muslim youths were rioting across France last fall,” I said. “but this is different. These are ethnic French kids, not immigrants.”

“Are they burning cars?” asked a student.

“Some are,” I said, “but not as much as the Muslim rioters did.”

We had been studying communism, socialism and capitalism in the context of the Cold War - hence the Vietnam film in the original lesson plan. Students knew that socialist countries closely regulated business compared to capitalist countries which favored a laissez-faire policy. “This is a good example of government regulation of business. France was moving toward socialism but is now trying to relax some of that regulation and demonstrators are resisting. French workers get thirteen weeks vacation per year. Government forces companies to give the new worker five weeks paid vacation after he’s worked only one year and it goes up from there. Companies are reluctant to take on new employees if forced to keep them for life. Businesses resist expanding and as a result, France’s unemployment rate is about 23 percent among young people.”

Then I explained how the unemployed get generous welfare benefits from government. That gets very expensive, so French workers must pay up to 68% of their salaries in taxes. “For every three dollars they get paid, two go to the government,” I said.

Policies the French government proposed for beginning workers are quite similar to policies for public school teachers here in the United States. I explained the provisions of my teaching contract for each class. Teachers get about 14 weeks vacation per year. In most American school districts, teachers may be let go after the first year and after the second year without explanation. However, if a teacher is hired for a third year, it becomes extremely difficult to ever get rid of him. Should a district want to fire him and the teachers’ union helps him fight it with legal help, the district can expect to spend an average of $200,000 in legal fees before it’s over.

If student enrollment goes down, American teachers can be laid off. But, if business slows down for French companies, they keep paying their workers because it’s usually cheaper than the legal costs of laying them off. Workers can request government help for legal fees to fight the layoff. Companies pay the legal fees themselves. Workers are almost guaranteed jobs for life, but companies are reluctant to expand if they have to assume all the risks. As a result, France’s economy stagnates and unemployment goes up. Government tries to ease regulation; unions and students riot.

Some students seemed to get it, but others were puzzled. Economics can be like that. It is the “dismal science” after all. Everyone, however, was interested in watching the riots. “What will happen next, Mr. McLaughlin?” one asked.

“Good question; I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

A Long Ago Killing

This is the best time of year for exploring lost neighborhoods. The snow has melted and no undergrowth has leafed out yet. Last fall’s leaves are flattened down by the snow pack, though not as much as usual after a mild winter. One can see far into the woods in early spring, and the stone walls, the cellar holes and abandoned roads are least concealed.

Finding old roads can be difficult. Not only are they overgrown, but many have also been used for logging at least once, and sometimes two or three times. Landings were bulldozed and skidders dragged hundreds of twitches along and across them. In some cases, the roads were improved for logging trucks, but not necessarily along the original routes. Conscientious loggers preserved some old roads by constructing water bars at regular intervals where they’re steepest, thus preventing washouts by spring runoff and summer thunderstorms. Trouble is, the water bars are sometimes too big to drive my truck over and I have to hike in with my aging legs. This may be the year I finally buy a four-wheeler.

Stonewalls have been breached in some places by skidders or bulldozers or just plowed under. Cellar holes have been filled in or buried in slash and cemeteries damaged. I ran into all these problems while exploring the abandoned neighborhood on the Lovell/Stoneham town line where Calvin McKeen was killed by John Coffin in 1860.

My first information about the incident came from the August, 2000 edition of “Cold River Chronicle.” It’s an old, but familiar story. Two men were drinking more than they should. One, McKeen, had a reputation as a hothead. The other, Coffin, had a gun. There were rumors that McKeen’s wife was involved with Coffin, an occasional boarder in the household. Over a bottle of rot gut rum, things got out of hand. McKeen evidently went after Coffin with a butcher knife. Coffin, a blacksmith, caved his skull in with a hot iron and then shot him. After a highly-publicized trial, Coffin was found guilty of manslaughter and served five years at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.

Coffin was defended by Attorney David R. Hastings of Lovell whose photo appeared in Cold River Chronicle. Knowing his descendant and namesake, attorney and current Maine State Senator David R. Hastings III of Fryeburg, I was struck by the strong resemblance between the two though they’re separated by a hundred forty years and however many generations. Coffin’s sister later married the son of Maine’s governor Garcelon and they built an impressive mansion on the opposite shore of Kezar Lake from the abandoned neighborhood which still stands.

David Crouse, publisher of “Cold River Chronicle,” included a map of the old neighborhood. Looking around last spring, I ran across a solitary gravestone. It seemed out of place all by itself on a knoll beside an old road. There was no other indication that a cemetery ever existed there - no fence, no other gravestones, nothing. And it was not a primitive stone. It was innately carved marble on a granite pedestal and inscribed: “Caroline” most prominently, and beneath that was: “wife of William Sawyer. Died June 8, 1882 AE 65 yrs. 5 mos. 11 ds.” Caroline and William Sawyer lived in the house closest to the murder scene and were the first people informed on the night of Calvin McKeen’s death by both his widow and his killer.

Carrying 1858 and 1963 maps of the area as well as a DeLorme Atlas, I found several cellar holes and roads, but so far I’ve been unable to determine for certain which ones belonged to Calvin McKeen and Caroline Sawyer. Using the bridge over Cold Brook as reference point, I was thrown off. It’s a modern bridge and quite elaborate for what is now a sparsely-populated area. I asked Lovell’s John Chandler if the bridge was rebuilt on the site of the one it replaced and he told me it was. Exploring further, I found stonework upstream that may have been part of an older bridge. After the mud dries a little more, I’m going back in there and hopefully reach some conclusions.

But for cellar holes, stone walls, cemeteries and obscured roads, nothing is left of a 19th century neighborhood with at least two schools, a mill, two shops, and many farms. A few camps and houses have sprung up in the past few decades but most of the land is now part of the White Mountain National Forest.

Cold River Chronicle’s David Crouse and Robert Williams of the Lovell Historical Society are offering a program on Calvin McKeen’s murder at the Charlotte Hobbs Library in Lovell June 27th at 7:00 pm.