The Great Divide

I've crossed a great divide. I feel it.

Moving across the country is what we all must do from time to time, I'm certain, to get a feel of the American scope, the enormity of this nation, and to remind ourselves that nice little lawns and suburban shopping centers make up a tiny part of the United States.

We don't own this place. We belong to it. It isn't crowded but huge and remarkably lonely in its spaciousness. It's anthropomorphic narcissism to assume our nation is what we see in our own gerbil cages. Getting out onto the American ground is humbling and sobering.

Long, long desert stretches. Wide prairies, horizon to horizon. A few clusters of folks here and there. This is a major chunk of the world, and shortly we may wake from our doze and discover that rats and mice and cockroaches have been plundering our wealth for their own aggrandizement. When that happens, when we compare the real physical breadth of our nation and its weight of resources, we'll be obliged to squash the rodentine corporations that are squirreling away our wealth.

Who are these piss-ant speculators, juggling numbers and derivatives and robbing pension funds? Well-dressed, self-congratulatory, puffed-up thieves. At some point it's going to be critical that we remember our grampas. They worked willingly within codes of self-restraint and ethical boundaries that were essential to their identity. They couldn't respect themselves without the codes. They would not look kindly on legislating ethics, morality and logic out of existence, a process that's ongoing in Washington.

Seeing the big-ness of this nation puts the money pests in perspective as embarrassingly trivial frauds. Isn't it time to get angry?

This is a wonderful land. It's easy to hear Woody Guthrie out here on the road. Get out in the big spaces and listen.

One expects a mighty ridgeback for the Continental Divide but I crossed it this afternoon on a flatland Interstate, I-10. Without the sign, announcing the geographic fact and the height, around 4500' above sea level, I wouldn't have noticed. But that sign struck a harmonic. It occurred to me that my life has crossed over into another watershed phase, and that I'm following the downslope gladly, looking forward to a natural return to family and closeness. Big medicine.

The land speaks to us. No doubt about. It can sound like Woody, or it can sound like a brief thundering rainstorm whacking the windshield as you drive the desert floor, or like wind over gravel at a rest stop. I don't know for certain what it's saying to me, yet, but the message is crucial, stirring, important. I must listen louder.

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself has been in the car too long. He's gone a bit woo-woo on us. He's wringing significance out of desert rocks and finding messages in rainstorms. But this is what he does. It's my job to keep him on-task and out of bogs. Perhaps it's his job to hear language in running water. From each, according to his ability . . . 

Elegance Without Lushness

It's easy to be trivial about the desert, ripping across it at a skimming rate in air-conditioned pods. But even from such a patrician perch, the size and scope and hammering heat of it intimidates.

Beside I-10 East, as the Subaru and the Dovekie and I ascended a pass in one of the mountain ranges that lie athwart the Great Southwestern Desert, an old gravel road appeared again and again. I realized that the Interstate engineers had followed one of the old stage and freight passes. On reflection, it was the natural thing to do. The Old Guys tried every pass and settled on the best crossing. I began to feature mule-drawn wagons on that scrolling, wayward track whenever it reappeared, and to notice that it took every possible advantage of topography and natural shape. The Old Guys had shovels and blasting powder and an eye for advantage. Damn, the trip across these mountains was epic, unthinkable in our cushioned lives. The West wasn't "won," it was endured.

But the mountain passes may have been the easy part. How to cross sixty miles of desert between ranges in Sonoran heat? 110°F at the rest stop. so hot that I almost fell back into the car when I opened the door and stepped out.

Wagons moved at the pace of a slow jogger – though I don't know a jogger who could manage a 10 K in heat like this – making twenty or thirty miles on a good day, camping in the cold, starry nights among the inquisitive sidewinders and scorpions. How could you carry enough water for yourself and the mules? Jolting over rocks, avoiding big creosote bushes, finding eroded edges into and out of the waddies, constant focus in brutal sunlight that had to erode focus.

I crossed one waddie named Palen Ditch out on the vast, flat, gravel platter of the Sonoran Desert. Suddenly I was treated to a rainstorm in the bright sunlight. It lasted exactly thirty seconds and didn't darken the road a whit.

I crossed a larger watercourse, the Hassayampa River, but it was not being used at the time for carrying water. Perfectly good river,  broad and deep, but no water. It was flanked by warnings against sudden dust storms that kick up quickly and reduce visibility to zero. I didn't experience one this crossing (yet) but this particular bit of local meteorology must have been plenty interesting from the seat of a freight wagon.

I enjoyed passing Sore Finger Road, plenty of Ditches (I'm not sure that having a ditch named for you is an honor or an official insult), and watching those giant Quixotic desert inhabitants, the high-tension electric towers, march across the planar land.

Desert colors are muted, though there are occasional gray-green bushes and stunted trees and saguaros. Like the old B&W cinema, however, the beauty is often in lighting rather than chroma. From the desert floor, the distant foothills have a horizontal hachure, a delicate texture seen at a low angle that resolves into parallel lines. At a distance, the creosote bushes resolve into a dot-stippling that shade the rugged hills. A joshua tree standing out among chollas and low bushes seems always like an event, and the saguaros, which top forty feet, are remarkable desert statements.

I remember reading a copy of an old letter at Death Valley National Park, commenting that some birds flew across the desert on their way to some bird rendezvous and simply dropped dead out of the sky from the heat. Understandable.

It would be terribly hard, but it would also be a thrilling challenge to ride with a few friends and some friendly mules across one of these desert stretches, to savor just how it felt, to camp out with a fire and a lot of snake repellant (I'm sure I can Google that), and to lie under the stars talking to the Old Guys.

I want to explore the desert at length if I can. It's spare and harsh and mysterious and elegant. Like Marlene Dietrich, but more gravel.

Braxinoso Speaks

Listen to him, as if. The desert requires lean young men who don't sweat much. Himself is an old fat man who sweats buckets at the least exertion. When we arrive in Florida, I'll nip at his heels a bit about losing weight. He needs to move fast with those boyos about.

BON VOYAGE!

An alien place without hearth-gods, the lares fled – or were they imprisoned in the moving pod sitting under my computer studio window? Bare, dusty, tatty, the former den of an untidy bear.

No, I decided where my particular lares reside: in my Weems & Plath Admiral's ships clock, which chimes the half-hour watch bells. Clever lad, I boxed the clock and it rides behind my seat in the car. I can hear it faintly keeping faith with the time and my household gods, which will inhabit the Taj Garage with me and my boyos soon.

Tears, of course, hugging Laura who has been a strong, warm, loving friend. My advocate and spur. A daughter or a sister, but I often sat in the role of child. Of course, tears.

I 580 through Oakland could be Anyplace, USA. That ugly. No concept of architectural dignity, merely commercial ballyhoo wherever possible.

Once on I 5, however, my little cavalcade – Adkins, Subaru and boat trailing behind – rode south through an inimitable place: the vast, fertile plain of the San Joaquin Valley. Dry, dusty, with wind devils and tumbleweeds, but lavishly irrigated to grow marvels – garlic, artichokes, almonds, plums, pistachios, and wine grapes. Distant mountain ranges watercolored in light, cool shades that emphasize the mighty size of the Valley.

The boat trailers well. I'm happy for the money I spent getting new tires and lights and a bearing lube-job for the trailer. Cruise control is ducky on that long, long road, 60 to 64 mph all the way.

A surprisingly political journey through the Valley. An Adkins rule: ken the quality of the signage to judge the message. These were frequent, expensively painted, well-mounted, all-weather signs that blamed the Democrats for curtailing water, jobs, progress and human rights in the Valley.

"No Water = No Jobs"
"Democrats Kill Jobs and Plants"
"Dust Bowl Courtesy of Democratic Administration"
"Get Rid of Barbara Boxer and Get People Back to Work"
"Water Crisis! We All Need Water!"

Apparently some rich planters didn't get their water allotment and they're using their famously discretionary income to shout about it – without a word of argument or logic – to the passing motorist.

Impressive money. More impressive: a simple prestressed concrete overpass bridge patterned with hundreds and hundreds of perfect, tiny swallows' nests, natural architecture gracing industrial architecture.

And at dusk, passing from I-5 on CA 138 in a smaller valley, the purple somber shape of the hills against darkening indigo skies, with tiny red blinking lights of a high tension line defining the desert floor plane.

Even though I started crying, and continued by driving off with my local gas station's pump handle still stuck in my gas tank (a $173 tank of gas, all told), it was a lucky day full of sighs and long looks across.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself did well on the trip. Very little narcolepsy, a short nap in the shade of a building, walking around at rest stops. His right leg is cramping and the knee is bothering him but he's remarkably sane for a prime neurotic going through a massive change. He bears watching.

EXTRACTION

I hate moving.

Dr. Ludgero Gomez was a big man. He had been a mountain trooper in the Army and did not look like a man who was often insulted. He was a delightful person with many virtues but what impressed me most about him, and what lodges in my memory, was how much brute force he applied as he bent over me with a pair of pliers in my mouth.

Dr. Gomez was extracting two wisdom teeth. It was not an elegant or subtle operation. It required a basic gripping tool, an artist’s deft experience, and muscle. In simple terms, Ludgero was pulling out a pair of four-rooted bone processes firmly grown into my jawbone. The mandible is a formidable hunk of material. He was muscling against living bone, tightly clinging tissue, and ripping out perfectly fine wiring in the case of multiple nerve fibers connecting teeth that had expected to stay in place and bite things.

It was a struggle. Dr. Gomez and dental science won. The aftermath was grisly, painful, disorienting, bloody and unpleasant for me and everyone around me. The only person who dealt with it well was my mentor, Dr. Matt Finn. I walked unsteadily from the Gomez Dental Office down the Main Street of Wareham, and stepped from Town Dock onto Matt’s Tartan 36 for a sailing cruise out to the Vineyard and Nantucket. Matt handed me a very naval tot of rum. “It’s an old anaesthetic but it still works,” he said. I told him I was already taking some opiate pain killer. “You bet,” he said, “get that rum down, now.”

Logically, we don’t expect to retain our wisdom teeth past a given age. But your jaw doesn’t know that. It needs opiates and rum to realign its reality.

Logically, we don’t expect to live in the same place for the balance of our lives. But your emotions don’t know that. Your indwelling, heedless heart’s logic balks at the insane ripping out of perfectly good wiring and the foolhardy destruction of comfortable navigation ordinals: this is where my jacket hangs, here is my spoon, there is my favorite chair, I look out this window to Mt. Burdell’s golden slope. all is well.

You only think you’re a logical being. In your picayune life you make decisions based on what you want to happen, on self-interest, on ethical principles, on goals. Yet in retrospect your life is most likely a surprising series of mistaken premises that you can now see were often self-destructive. “Why did I sign up for that?” or “What was I doing with that dame?” Your emotional life isn’t practically accessible but hidden behind camouflage all of us are childishly willing to accept.

“Yes, but I’m older and wiser, now. I’ve got my ducks in a row and I’m on top of the game.” Good luck with that. Your ducks are sniggering at you, and you’re once again convincing yourself that will and sense will overawe deep needs. We do our best, which is all we can do, but the real truth is that we aren’t completely in control of that world of feelings and hurt and wishes beneath the concrete pavement of our street life. What changed the twentieth century as much as electricity was the revelation that the unconscious – the hidden awareness beneath conscious thought – not only exists but exerts more powerful leverage than daily decisions.

I’m reminded of marine architects designing sea vessels, strong and powerful, proof against anything. Once offshore, logical engineering and strength of materials are subjected to primally limitless forces, stresses and loads no one can foresee. In the early 60’s a Royal Navy cruiser more than 600 feet on deck plunged into one of the freak troughs the Agulhaus Current produces and went down. To the bottom. All hands lost. The ship was a marvel of modern engineering and enlightened understanding. To the bottom. Is your life as well engineered as a Royal Navy cruiser? Perhaps yours is; mine isn’t. Facing the brute forces of Life, I can expect to be battered even when my ducks seem lined up in Prussian precision.

My point is that moving is emotionally dangerous and shouldn’t be lightly regarded by you or by your friends. “You’re going to love the new place!” one says, certain that your discomfort is mostly indulgence in illogical thinking. Heartily patronizing, friends tell you that moving is healthy and you shouldn’t sweat it. Why worry about it? Look on the bright side! You’re getting yourself in a lather over nothing!

Anglo-Saxon epithets don’t have the punch they had before HBO and can’t really address this kind of puffed-up posturing. Thinly disguised behind a friend’s “assurance” is the self- aggrandizing pity: “Poor Adkins. He believes in faeries and UFOs and global warming. Of course a person of such weak mind will crack under the mild stress of simply moving.”

Recollect the lares. For the Romans these were household gods. (The singular is lar.) They differed from the great gods in that their influence was localized, operating only with a given household. Each family home had its own chosen lares. Beyond the home, there were local lares for glens and brooks and waterfalls, shops, bridges, and streets. These were short-range deities but powerful, and they were intensely important to the families or the artisans that acknowledged them. Later lares were the Scottish brownies and the Anglo-Saxon elves, localized spirits caring for homes and inhabitants.

Strange territory for a science reporter but lately I’ve been confronting the idea that principles of the heart and feelings are not incompatible with scientific principles. Do I believe in brownies? I do not. But I believe that they may be a cipher for important emotions and ideas about home and hearth and the holiness of places. Any scientist who has sat in a redwood grove for more than a few minutes will admit to a feeling beyond simple observation.

It’s possible that we disturb the household gods at our peril. They don’t have the power to curse us but they are avatars of ideas important in our human development – this is a significant place, a home, a small place of safety and calm my heart knows well.

I’m moving. I would do so gently and without Ludgero Gomez’s massive strength of demolition. My heart is sore and my emotions are flighty. I am probably the Wimp of the World, and yet I believe that moving one’s heart is perilous and painful.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS           

You would not credit the mumbling, rapid breathing, lower tract distress and angst Himself has invested in this cross-continental endeavour. Even I, as the voice of reason within the home, caution him to pay attention to these intense feelings and not to throw himself too rashly at the game. Beyond the emotions raised like dust around the moving, both of us look forward to being part of a sweet family with boys and the new little girl. I’ll have new challenges to meet with those little Adkins/Burger larvae. Both of us are excited. Half way across the Great Southwestern Desert, we may begin to rejoice.

The Arrogance of Patronizing Blue Collars

The following is a diatribe directed at John Fahey, the chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society. It's from Society Matters, a blog for which I'm an advisor and occasional contributor; it's a band of ex-NGS employees who are concerned about the editorial direction the magazine has taken, and even more about the dreck presented as factual and educational on the Society's cable channel.

It should be said that Geographic, following the gimlet-eyed greed of its former president, Gilbert Grosvenor (the grandson of the first editor-in-chief, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, son of the great e-in-c Melville Bell Grosvenor, but "the blood ran thin") sold 70% of the channel to the King of Sleaze, and the Enemy of Journalism, Rupert Murdoch. Even so, the channel carries the Society's "brand" and is cheapening the venerable image built painstakingly by extraordinary explorers, writers and photographers. My nine years at Geographic were proud times for me. The Society's standards today are much-degraded.

But this isn't merely about Geographic. There is a corporately imposed disconnect between learning, journalism, honesty and the working people of our country. Giving citizens bread and circuses is cynical but understandable. Giving citizens lies and assuming your own citizens are cattle is short-sighted, wrongheaded, and enormously damaging to the fabric of society with a small "s."

I'm a fussy elitist in my own way. But I have enormous respect for the American working citizen. I reject the notion that working people are lazy, prefer welfare, are stupid and dull. No. It simply isn't true. We had, not too long ago, a lively and discerning middle class. With a few notably dented exceptions, everyone I've ever met would prefer doing good work to being given government doles. We're in a crisis when the Geographic Society and the politicians in DC consider the citizenry as a herd of biddable, predictable, mindless sheep.

"The fix is in. Everyone's crooked. You'll do anything for enough money. If you don't do it, someone else will – you might as well get paid for doing it. Miracles don't happen and governments are corrupt; it's always been that way, always will be. Why complain about politics? It's all a show. People are so dumb and lazy that it's worthless to offer them anything of quality. Joe Six-Pack likes it dumb."

This is what Alexander Pope was worried about in his "Essay On Man":

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Our Devolved Geographic Society is operating on the cynical principle that its audience is so imbecilic that it will only favor bright lights, candy and scandal. This debased Society also embraces the fiction that "reality shows" are something the public desired.

First, Joe Six-Pack is a hell of a lot smarter than the TV vice-presidents and the boardroom think. He lives in a complex world of compromised possibilities and is more aware of broader issues than his grandfather or great-grandfather. Joe has been exposed to more cultures and religions and places. He's been relieved of much sentimental surety about faith and politics and permanence. He's seen the world change drastically. He is trying – and this is an ongoing, difficult effort – to retain balance.

Joe didn't want "reality shows." They were a function of the Writer's Strike in the 80's, when it was discovered that a small production company that paid only a few of its subjects could – by being in-your-face provocative – provide passable air-time for less money. The formula was so successful that "reality TV" proliferated.

Given a chance, Joe Six-Pack could make intelligent decisions. Cleverly, his corporate government has narrowed his access to information and overview by actively restricting information, unashamed propaganda, disinformation, and even by flooding the internet with spurious data (we're beginning to learn that much of the right-wing no-climate-change web myth has been generated by oil-paid bloggers).

Not only does Joe's government try to confuse his balance, but a venerable ally of education and exploration – The National Geographic Society – has surrendered its virtue to the myth of Joe's idiocy. A Society that once addressed cutting edge technology and revealed archaeological wonders is serving up junk-food – scripted soap operas insulting their subjects and disregarding facts. These "shows" play to gullibility, lubricity and scorn. They stray as boldly across the lines of good taste as Hiram Bingham strode boldly through Inca jungles.

The central and most damaging principle on which the Devolved Society functions is that it MUST provide such dreck programming. If it doesn't, John and his boardroom cronies suggest, the Society could fail, lose its audience, disappear, go the way of the dodo.

Very well, then. The National Geographic Society has had a good run, has done great work, and perhaps it should close its doors before it disgraces itself so grievously that its stellar reputation is tarnished beyond retrieval.

Sell, off, John: the buildings and equipment – location, location, location – are worth a mint! Give up! Conclude finally that Joe Six-Pack doesn't deserve good journalism or honest facts, tidy up your desk, and everyone goes home with a nice bonus.

The alternative is more difficult. It will require a trip back into the Age of Reason to fetch the notion that Man Is Perfectable, that given tools of truth and skill Joe Six-Pack could see the world more clearly. It would require effort on an Herculean scale, John, and a few – ahem – shifts in policy. It might even require the dreadful admission that "after some thought and soul-searching, we've decided to re-direct our editorial navigation and get closer to the spirit of the Society's founders and the giants who made it great."

You could be one of those giants, John. Honestly. It wouldn't be easy! My God, the flak you'd take, and you might lose some advertisement, too. You could lose a lot. But you might regain the soul of the Society.

Relying on a perceived stupidity should be more dangerous than it is. The only explanation for getting away with it is that elections and Congressional decisions are so predictably in favor of corporations over citizens, that to recognize the corruption would mean the whole damn system is broken. If it is, we'd all be obliged to go through a vast social upheaval to build a new system. This loss of surety, comfort, predictability and the specter of real discomfort is – even to the intelligent working people I trust – unthinkable. We're stuck for a time in a denial mode: "No, it's the pendulum swinging. We're a democracy. We just gotta get to the polls and vote in the right folks."

That time is past. The big corporations control both parties. The parties determine who will run. We're given a choice between senatorial and presidential candidates who are all approved by big business. Choose one party or the other and we're still powerless.

What's the answer? Unthinkable.

Braxinoso Speaks:

Himself is about to make an enormous shift from California to Florida. Out of the frying pan, so to speak. He plagues himself with these ponderous problems of state, injustice, human rights, heritage, revolution. Honestly, I wonder if he is merely avoiding practical focus on the problems HE has. He makes sense but he has no real forum, no following, and before he leads a charge he must feed his horse. It's my task to persuade himself to be prudent of his time.

July 4, 2013

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other on the Fourth of July, 1826, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. They were friends and opponents, each deeply respectful of the other's intelligence and humanity and even of their opposing views. Jefferson died around one in the morning. Adams died around four, before sunrise, with the words, "Independence forever," and "Jefferson survives." He was wrong. Twice.

Both Jefferson and Adams regarded the growing power of political parties with suspicion but for different reasons. They argued bitterly about this trend. Both saw the possibility of abuse if overwhelming power were to be invested in blocs of influence. Neither imagined the disaster of two massive parties controlling the political dialogue of their nation. Neither conceived that the death of their hopeful and logical social experiment in democracy might be a logical step away from two-party control: the ultimate oligarchy of both parties quietly controlled by the same billionaires and global corporate "entities."

How refreshing it would be if our billionaires were progressive humanists. Alas. The global megacorporations that fund both parties are massive and massively powerful clay "men" without souls or ethics or – most dangerously – nationality.

This Fourth of July, 2013, may be significant to future historians as the end of Jefferson's and Adam's ideals for a nation. We are governed by a legislature and presidency and court that makes extravagant claims of democracy, diversity and morality, but the difference between this administration and the last is disappointingly monotonous. Better diction, same results: a seamless erosion of basic legal rights, privacy, dignity and volition.

A recent article in The New York Times reveals a shadow government controlling the daylight laws by which most of us live. Suddenly and without our consent there are secret courts trumping the rights we assumed were absolute.

It seems to work in an Animal Farm way: there are laws for sheep (that's us), and secret, overriding laws for pigs (that's the unrestricted Gestapo of Homeland Security and the NSA). Most of the time we have the right to a trial by jury, the right to counsel and legal procedure, the rights against self-incrimination, &c. Most of the time, in sheep matters. But when a matter interests pigs, we have no rights. By pig-law, under Homeland Security legislation, we can be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, even executed without counsel or formal charges IF the pigs declare us a threat. What are their criteria for threat? Dunno, it's a pig secret.

In the article you'll find that there are eleven judges on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, ten appointed (not elected) by the conservative right of the two-party-same-funders power bloc. One judge reviews and signs off on about 1800 requests for data gathering (what we might in days of yore call "search and seizure") each year. To date, we're told, not one has been refused. Little wonder: this comprises about 5 legal documents a day, a heavy "case load." No refusals.

The pigs have law, power and surveillance completely controlled. The sheep have a desperate need to believe their pastures are the greenest, sweetest, most moral farm in the world. If they didn't believe that, they'd be obliged to protest against a monolithic power structure, they'd be upset and nervous and sad, and many of them would be disappeared. Pigs and sheep thus achieve a balanced harmony. Jefferson and Adams would both be in the custody of Homeland Security, somewhere, and proud of it.

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself talks about the NSA's surveillance lightly, as if he isn't subject to it. Their algorithms connecting firebrand words and patterns have almost certainly earned him at least a file among other dissidents. What the NSA can't plumb is that my inkfish master is about as dangerous as a grumpy groundhog. Still, we hope for literate and pleasant cellmates in the FEMA camp, the NSA lockup, or Guantanamo. There's also the possibility that he only hopes to have a file. A case of wishful paranoia.

ADDICTION AND BOSTON

THE GREAT ADDICTION isn't drugs, alcohol, sex, religion or even money. The most abused addiction is Drama. Every parent of a teenager, especially in the new era of entitled children and laissez fair parenting, should recognize this. Give any kid the tiniest opening for High Drama and he/she will make the most of it.

There's a counter-intuitive factor, here: Drama is desirable whether it's positive or negative. Over and over we watch our children and our grandchildren "stir the pot" to their own disadvantage; they seize an opportunity for spinning up the drama even when they know they'll lose privileges, make us angry, alienate themselves from friends. Drama – high-contrast life, crisis, anxiety, wailing, pain – is more seductive than quiet approval. "Please, God, rescue me from normal!" In many, many young people drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms of drama addiction.

Of course kids live in a world of exaggerated drama. They take their cues from frantically dramatic music and, I'm ashamed to say, from current journalism.

I still consider myself a journalist, and I still regard journalism as one of the noblest professions. But I was embarrassed for my profession as I watched the "coverage" of the Boston bomb incident (note the exclusion of the word "massacre" or "terrorist" or "attack"). Even sober veterans like Wolf Blitzer were scratching and begging for sensationalist, flammable material, the ghosts of maybe-truths, "opinion" and speculation, snap-crackle-and-pop to fill the space between commercials.

The public and official reaction was hyperbolic. Tanks in the streets of Boston (okay, APCs), "lockdowns," and de facto martial law out of 1984. The jumped-up "security" did NOT help capture the culprits; brother 1 was mortally wounded during a sudden firefight; brother 2 was noticed by an emerging citizen after the lockdown, and might have been noticed far earlier on streets with pedestrians and normal traffic. The fact is that the officials wanted to stir the drama pot, as well, to look authoritative and feel powerful, to trot out their black vests and crisis faces, "Back into your homes! This is the police!" Cops want drama, too, and only serious training can convince a law officer not to overreact to every situation. No one in charge of the Boston Incident counseled against overreaction. Everyone had a fine old melodrama.

More fact: We've dramatized ourselves into more domestic terrorism. Copycat, homegrown, wannabe jihadists will now come out of the woodwork to embrace the fame and esteem (remember, "good" drama and "bad" drama are equally appealing) the Chechyan Brothers got, and will hope that an afternoon's work will bring them into a blaze of attention. Forget self-interest, fear of death, and common law. Leaping onto the world stage is an emotional lightning storm, not a discussion group.

The only hope we have to avoid constant domestic strikes is to drain the drama from our electrified anchor-people, to promote sober and factual reporting of facts, filter out speculation and rumor, to minimize sensationalism and sentimentalism in sidebar interviews and features, and to portray "terrorists" as largely half-baked neurotics rather than blazing dragons of evil. Leave "evil" to sermons. Killers are garden-variety whackadoodles and don't deserve vast terms. Call a sicko a sicko, not a glittering demon.

We don't need the might and glory and authority of a super-power nation to suppress violence. This will only yield a police state (Boston during the lockdown) and more drama, more reasons to rebel against The Man. Who will come forth, please, as a sober, calm Grampa Walton to settle our fears and refocus our panic toward getting back to our work? We need maturity much more than Sensational New Developments After the Commercial!

Braxinoso Speaks:

Himself is making sense. We lived on those Boston streets and know those people. The brothers who planted crude bombs, in a pitiful attempt at glory, and the overlarge "crisis team" of officials took Boston for a softer, more sheeplike city. Traditionally (and that's Boston all over) that city doesn't take kindly to royal OR federal mandates and martial control. One Revolution started there. Another is due.