GOODBYE COLUMBUS and HANGING A BOOK

GOODBYE COLUMBUS

      The dreary October morning heated up a bit when I started chipping about how Columbus Day was a fraud.

      I was part of an early morning radio team and in what I thought was harmless chat suggested that if we were going to observe Columbus we should also make accommodation for Leif Erikson or even nameless Chinese sailors who may also have reached the continent before Columbus. I also took offense to the idea that native Americans were "discovered" since they had been here a while.  The switchboard almost blew up. The program manager liked it.

      Years later when doing a couple of documentary programs for Discovery and TLC we profiled how the Taino people of Hispaniola were ultimately slaughtered and savaged by the "discovering" forces of Christopher "Christ on his Shoulders" Columbus. The Taino were good, trusting people who were exterminated by the representatives of the "advanced" European Court civilizations.

     I think Indigenous People Day is a marvelous idea and centuries over due.  It can't make up for historic offenses but it can begin to educate succeeding generations.

     But I think we should also have an "Explorers Day," celebrating the courage, daring, intelligence and effort of those who have pushed the boundaries.  For the sake of this discussion I nominate those who were Americans and those who's efforts touched or opened knowledge about our continent and our life. 

     Here's a partial list, a conversation starter.  Add your own nominees.

     Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Glen, Christopher Columbus, Leif Erikson, Magellan, Balboa, Jim Bridger, Richard Byrd, Lewis and Clark, Adriaen Block, Robert Ballard, Cabrillo, Jonas Salk, Watson and Crick, Bell, Edison, and

you get the idea. A day to celebrate the accomplishment of intellect and courage as well as exploration of the planet and life we inhabit.

HANGING A BOOK

   Dear friends John and Deanna Schleeter of Indianapolis

provide this next account.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art has opened an exhibition by British sculptor Richard Wentworth-False Ceiling. 

  It is a striking presence in the Efroymson entrance Pavillion.

Thanks to John and Deanna's efforts a copy of my first novel THE SANIBEL ARCANUM hangs there.

As most authors will tell you, there are always extra copies of your books someplace.  That someplace for me included John and Deanna's garage. Amongst their distribution efforts is the IMA. I am grateful.

   See you down the trail.

BACK IN TIME and RESERVATIONS IN A LAKE OF FIRE

THE DARK LORD AND EGYPT

   Dick Cheney and Egypt have things in common. That follows below, but first-

INTERSECTIONS OF TIME

Reunion Ramblings

   Strange to be a visitor where once you lived. Things look differently, and indeed they are.

       Arriving in time to "enjoy" a severe weather outbreak, wondering if the locals realize how precious is the rain.
    It has been a while since my last thunderstorm and it is an appropriate commencement for a kind of "magical mystery tour."
     Even more appropriate the Beatles' movie of that name played on the local PBS station as I prepared for a 50th reunion. 50th?! Really?

   But first, there were tasks.  Miles to drive. Indiana countryside, flat and rich with corn well on the way to "knee high by the fourth of July."

   Obligations and remembrances down the road, while also

 invoking an old family custom-a visit to the Pizza King, after cemetery visits or funerals. 

    Memories too of college dates. Where else can you find a barbecue hamburger, thin crust delicious creation, still changeless after 50 years?  

 More highway views, ingrained memories,  

  more changed vistas, 

 and calming traditions and sights.

Amazement at bushes, trees and a lawn we planted, now a few years on.  Our design worked, as a park like setting ensues. Happy that we've made a place more green.

Amazement too at who we have become, while still only 18, in some place in our being.

    While old institutions gain a new face. The Indianapolis Museum of Art continues to re-invent itself and to spread its influence

   even to the new trendy Alexander Hotel, where art is celebrated and abounds.

         Reunion journeys where memories old and new gather.
     I grew up learning of Madame CJ Walker, probably America's first African American woman millionaire. Now she's a work of art, though I over heard young members of a wedding party identify her as a "famous singer." Time does its tricks! 
 What do I wish I could have again, or take back to my home in California? Certainly I'd take an abundant cure to our drought.

  And we leave a piece of history behind, while taking the memory. 40 years ago my radio employer staged what became known as the Great Raft Race. As old is often new, it is the subject of media attention and there is discussion of a reunion of another sort. That is one I'll sit out, though an old image of my colleague Bob, in the cap, and me booms out from the past. Those were the days.

    Confluences in the river of time. A 50th High School reunion. Stirrings of a 40th anniversary for a major cultural event and I'm still at a loss to believe my generation has made so many orbits around the sun.

     Years ago when Lana and I settled into our first house, a neighbor, a great old guy in his 80's, rode his bike over to our porch to visit. He said he didn't have the endurance he used to, even though he could only think of himself as an 18 year old.  At the time we thought what an odd notion. Now we are beginning to understand.
      As the great Indiana writer Kurt Vonnegut puts it,
"and so it goes."

RESERVE SPACE IN THE LAKE OF FIRE

   Dick Cheney and a recent ruling by the Egyptian courts are travesties. The judge and the discredited ex-vice president would be bound and gagged and put in public stocks were this my world to control.

   The Egyptian courts have sentenced 3 journalists to long prison terms for telling the truth.  

    The truth is something Dick Cheney does not tell. He is a liar and probably indictable on several charges of corruption to say nothing of his potential as a war criminal.  Cheney  became so toxic that even the not so bright George W. Bush and his other advisers shunned him in the last term as though he was a ham sandwich left in a car trunk over the summer. That same idiot is running his mouth again.

  America should not forget those weapons of mass destruction that Cheney "knew" were in Saddam's Iraq. Nor that Iraq would become a Democracy. Or that Iraqi oil money would repay the war effort, etc. Nor should we forget Cheney's famous "One Percent Doctrine," which contributed to the ill fated invasion of Iraq and war on terror all the while Cheney's old Haliburton pals and subsidiaries earned billions in war profiteering in no bid contracts.  

    Pulitzer winner Ron Suskind's book One Percent Doctrine, published a few years ago, reveals how Cheney's sick mind and devious politics spun us into the web of violence, war, death and bad diplomacy that plagues the planet now.

    No one should take a word this malevolent jack ass spews with anything but contempt.  It is after all a free country, despite Cheney's poisonous misadventures and crime. In his transplanted heart he probably applauds the decision of the Egyptian court.  You can't help but think this evil cretin has contaminated that new heart with his own hovering greed and darkness. Dick Cheney is the worst of America. 

     See you down the trail.