12 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 12th, 2009 @ 04:38:21 pm, using 618 words, 153 views
The sound you’re hearing is the Phat Lady singing here at SMILT. Real Life has called on all us creators of said blog, one at a time, and how it’s time to draw the curtain. We hope you’ve enjoyed or at least gotten something out of the reviews, stories, and ruminations we’ve put up here over the last couple of years. It won’t be as hard to leave as we might once have thought because it gets tough writing about what’s been going on in the last several years. If/when the economy starts recovering in a meaningful way for regular people, we have follow-up waves of weather, water, energy, food, pensions, and, you know, other countries to deal with. We’re at the leading edge of an historical phase transition, with all the implications of that that historians have chronicled for centuries now. Unfortunately for the US, the current administration is the second coming of Adlai Lieberman, with the same prospects.
But the US has faced phase transitions with bought-and-paid-for Congresses, right-wing courts, and the Pierces, Fillmores, and Buchanans and the Hardings, Coolidges, and Hoovers before and managed to come out on the other side. Too often we’ve embraced the stupid and vicious as a country and once in a while we’ve not only embraced them but spread our legs for them. That’s where we are now. But maybe a third salvation is possible. It may be tempting fate, especially considering the truly existential problems facing us (US) this time (see above), but maybe we’ll be able to get past the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas and find real wisdom and leadership when their atrocities are no longer tolerated. It’s just too bad that we’ve always waited until reality got too hard to blow off the way we always want to before we face up to our challenges and muster courage and brains rather than fear and bluster to address what needs to be done. They say God smiles on children, drunkards, and Americans. Let’s just hope he hasn’t been paying too close attention.
What does that have to do with this review of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg? Well, mainly because it places us in the context of blogging history, small a role as we’ve played, well discussed here in this review of the history, performance, and future of blogging. Why should you read it? Consider this catchy excerpt, which should be enough to entice:
Refreshingly, Rosenberg is a blog historian, not a promoter. He casts an even light around the blogosphere, noting the many instances when this self-expression tool has also promoted verbal thuggery. Rosenberg asks: “How much antisocial behavior are we willing to countenance in authenticity’s name?’’
In a style both conversational and compelling, Rosenberg describes how technology and the wider culture converged to help move blogs from their small orbit (“as the quip went, being ‘famous for fifteen people’ ’’ ) to being substantial enough to merit articles like the landmark November 2000 New Yorker article “You’ve Got Blog.’’
“Small orbit.” That pretty well describes us and the 150-300 of you kind enough to check in with us daily to see what “antisocial behavior” we were spewing today. We do appreciate it. But there are other places to visit, some of which we’ve recommended, and others to avoid (The New York Times Book Review [sic] comes to mind, for example). Enjoy. As the review concludes,
How could something done for free, with no guaranteed audience, become so big? Rosenberg puts it all in historical context, and in this context, notes, “Now that we’ve begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping.’”
Not for us.
Thanks again.
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 12th, 2009 @ 08:02:12 am, using 1009 words, 104 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
EPILOGUE
They had never run so fast, so wildly, even Eric. They might fall, each of them did, but they would hurry back up, legs flying again. The wind seemed to push them along, carry them at times. All they could hear were their rapid hearts and their heavy breaths as their feet thundered up and down the uneven ground.
They had reached the second hill when they heard it. Machine gun fire. They all stopped in their tracks for an instant, Anne-Marie’s hand rising to her throat, her mouth gaping. Then she shouted, “Come, come,” and they were flying again up the hill.
At the farmhouse the farmer and the woman also heard the shots from the security of the barn. Their eyes immediately whirled to each other. “Let’s go,” he told her.
She thought for a moment, desperately. “No,” she answered finally, “not yet.”
“I’m not going to wait to be caught,” he said harshly.
“Then go,” she told him. “The shots are still away. There is still a chance.” She bore her eyes into him. “I will wait alone.”
He stared at her angrily but didn’t leave.
The children were slowing. The sound of gunfire, all kinds, had chased them up the second hill and on down. They still had the last hill to climb, though, and their legs didn’t seem able. Eric, in particular, wanted to rest. He was starting to cry. Jean-Paul and Claudette didn’t want to argue with him.
“Keep going,” Anne-Marie pleaded angrily. “Just over this hill.”
“No,” Jean-Paul groaned, shaking his head. He was bent over, hands on knees, trying to breathe. “Let us rest,” he said, panting.
“Please, Anne-Marie,” Claudette begged breathlessly. “Just for a minute. Please?”
“No,” Anne-Marie cried. “We do not have minutes. We have to go. We cannot stop for anything.”
“We cannot go on now,” Jean-Paul told her harshly, looking up at her.
She rushed to him and, taking his shoulders, threw him roughly onto the side of the hill. “They you stay,” she shouted. “And let the Germans have you. You will deserve it. But I will not. I . . . .” She paused. The shooting had stopped. She turned her head back behind them, up the slope of the second hill. Tears welled instantly, without thought. “GO!!!” she abruptly screamed at Jean-Paul, literally lifting him to his feet. They all began to run again up the hill, as fast as they could.
“Woman, it is time,” the farmer told her. “They will be here any moment.”
They were outside the barn now. He was trying to flee, turned toward the tree-line and hills behind the barn, but her eyes were on the other slope. She wouldn’t go with him.
“We have to go,” he said gruffly, insistently.
She was nodding but not moving. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
He growled and went to her. He took her shoulders in his big hands and began to pull her away. “Just one more minute,” she said. “We have one more minute.”
“No,” he responded, shaking his head and pulling her along. “There is no time.”
She sighed deeply and nodded again. “Those poor children,” she said, mainly to herself. “To get so close.” She crossed herself. “That poor man.”
She was about to turn away completely when she saw them. “Stop,” she exclaimed and broke away a few steps. Heads, little heads, were bobbing up over the edge of the hill, growing into bodies, children’s bodies, running at full speed, looking as if they would fall with each stride. They had made it.
“Henri,” she cried, hurrying toward them. “Look. The children.” She waved back at him. “Come. We must help them.”
The farmer cursed briefly but rushed forward, rifle in hand, with her to meet the children as they flung themselves down the long slope. They reached them near the base of the hill. “Come,” the woman half-laughed, half-exclaimed as she embraced Jean-Paul and Eric. “Come. We must hurry now.”
“The American?” the farmer asked as he lifted Claudette into his arms and turned them toward the barn, the cave, and safety.
Anne-Marie stopped and looked back up the hill. The air was silent except for the wind. She swallowed and bit her lower lip. “He will not be here,” she then answered, evenly, in control.
The woman nodded and picked up Eric without commenting. They began to run again, Jean-Paul and Anne-Marie keeping pace with the adults, side-by-side. They ran past the barn toward the hill and the trees. “There is a cave up here,” the woman told them breathlessly as they reached the hill and started to climb. “It is hidden well. We will be safe.”
Anne-Marie nodded. Then she noticed. Claudette in the farmer’s arms. Her coat. The pocket. The envelope. It was gone. “No!!” she cried. “Claudette! The envelope!”
Claudette frowned sadly. “I fell down,” she said softly. “It came out. The wind took it. It blew away. I am sorry, Anne-Marie.”
She stared back at the long sloping hill, clenching her fists tightly. “I have to find it,” she said. “I have to go back.”
The farmer took her arm. “Don’t be ridiculous, girl,” he told her, pulling her up the grade into the trees. “Come on. Now.”
Her gaze was still on the slope, but she slowly climbed the hill with them. She nodded at last. “I remember,” she whispered at the wind. “I will never forget.”
The wind seemed to answer. It sang and moaned and whisked along, through the trees, across the grass, over the hills, carrying her message away. In the distance a wrinkled, white rectangular piece of paper whipped through that air, jerking back and forth on the current, as if dancing, to a special tune of its own, bright, cheerful, but with an odd touch of melancholy, a tune that clung to the mind
09 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 9th, 2009 @ 06:13:57 am, using 188 words, 91 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
23
Just come back to me. That’s all I ask. Come back to me . . . .
The sound of the engine revving brought him back. He opened his eyes and looked down the hill. The truck was rolling, coming up toward him. He would wait until it got closest. If he could stop them, draw them out, make them come up after him, the children had a chance. They should be going up the second hill by now.
He took a few breaths and followed the truck’s course with burning eyes. His bones ached. His muscles felt stretched and used. He made sure the gun was ready, the clip was in. The truck was coming near. He rose and sprawled against the boulder. The wind was strong and cool in his face. Clouds swirled in overhead. He set the gun up in front of him. The truck was reaching the closest point. He touched his pocket and let out a deep breath.
It was time to fire.
08 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 8th, 2009 @ 05:37:22 pm, using 234 words, 113 views
I’m sure it’s not as easy as this review of Ellen Langer’s Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility makes it sound, but it may just be that you have it in your power to use your mind to overcome some serious health conditions. Not cancer, maybe, but listen to this experiment that was done:
Langer says by changing the way we observe and label our experience—specifically, by becoming more aware of the variability we often mindlessly ignore—we can improve our health and quite possibly prolong our lives. In a recent study that makes the point, Langer and a Harvard colleague, psychologist Alia Crum, told cleaning personnel in Boston hotels that the considerable exercise they got every day in their job satisfied government guidelines for living an active lifestyle. Their activity levels did not change, but their perspective did, and they soon lost more weight and body fat than control subjects did.
Langer attributes outcomes such as this one to the placebo effect: when people are persuaded to think mindfully about what they are doing, they adopt more positive and empowering beliefs about themselves, and they feel and perform better.
Another cool experiment situated older folks in an environment from their youth and actually affected the participants’ aging. Worth your time, will definitely make you think.
Wish I’d known this when I had allergies really bad. Imagine myself in the Arctic . . . .
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 8th, 2009 @ 05:29:13 pm, using 623 words, 119 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
22
“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
It was one of their last nights together. They were lying in bed, calming down, getting ready for sleep. She was in his arms, her head snug against his shoulder and chest, warm and naked, stretched down the length of him, a thigh over his groin. It would be a long time before they could take nights like this for granted again, they both knew. So they had remained silent, with their thoughts, until she had finally spoken. “Okay?” she repeated.
“So I’m not supposed to get the pilot to fly through barns?” he asked, trying to keep it light, to save the moment.
It didn’t work. “Like getting yourself killed for no good reason,” she answered.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I plan to be very active, dodging and stuff like that.”
“I wish that was true.”
He crooked his head so he could look down his body at her. “Anne,” he said patiently, “I don’t plan to get killed. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid it.”
She rose up on an elbow and locked her eyes on his. “Promise me that,” she said.
“What?”
“That you’ll do everything you can to avoid it,” she replied evenly. “I mean, everything.”
He stared up at her for a moment and then smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. I promise.” He lifted a shoulder. “What kind of idiot do you think I am, anyway? I’m certainly not going to go look for special trouble. I just want to do my part, not other guys’ parts, too. I’m not going over there to be some kind of hero.”
I know,” she said, nodding. “But that’s the kind that always end up being the heroes. . . .” She rolled over onto her back and sighed sadly and angrily at the ceiling. “God, I hate this war. It doesn’t serve any purpose.”
“Mr. Hitler is a definite purpose,” he told her.
She shook her head. “If it wasn’t him, it’d be something else, someone else,” she said softly. “It has to happen, war. I hate it. I hate him. I hate them all, whoever’s responsible, whatever causes these damn things. They just kill off the best we have. Guys like you who end up trying to save dullards and losers who can’t save themselves. And so that’s all we end up with when it’s over—dullards and losers. People who aren’t smart enough or caring enough to stop it from happening again. The good ones are the first to go. It’s so stupid.”
“Anne, I promise,” he said. “I won’t come back with a single medal. You’ll be proud.”
She turned back over onto her elbow and looked down into his eyes. She could see so deep. “I’m serious, Davy,” she said. “I know you. I know very well what kind of idiot you are. I know what you’ll do, how you’ll be. I want you to promise me that you won’t be that way.” A long, warm hand touched gently on his chest. “I want you to promise me that you’ll be a dullard and a loser.”
He smiled at her and pulled her back down into his arms. “I promise,” he said, pressing her close. “Sounds pretty easy.”
She was silent for a moment and then spread her fingers over his chest. “Just come back to me,” she half-whispered. “That’s all I ask. Come back to me.”
07 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 7th, 2009 @ 07:18:58 am, using 1053 words, 109 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
21d
He looked in that direction. Several hundred yards away, stopped but pointed into the valley, was a truck, a gray truck, like the one at Catherine’s. No. He wouldn’t let it be. He jerked the binoculars to his eyes. The black swastika on the bright white circle fastened to the truck door was the first thing to focus through the glass. He let out all the exuberance that had built up in a single breath. His warning system had failed. No fighters or flak. He felt old.
Several soldiers were out of the truck, scurrying around. One, apparently an officer, was waving his hands and shouting angrily at the others. A couple of men were fumbling at a back wheel while two others brought a spare tire from the back of the truck. The three or four remaining soldiers just stood around, trying to look concerned and involved.
They had had a flat tire. They were obviously on their way to the farmhouse, and they had had a flat tire on the rough, uneven ground or something. They were only a mile or so away from the farm. Once they fixed the tire, it would only take them a few minutes to get there, less if there had been a road. Not enough time to get the children back down there. They would need all fifteen minutes or so left at the very least, running full-speed all the way, and probably five or ten more to get up to the cave, wherever it was. There was no way.
Unless the Germans could be further delayed.
He knelt quickly in front of Anne-Marie and took her wrists. “Listen,” he said, his breath hard again. “You’re going to have to take the children. It’s not that far, and it’s just down the next few hills. It’s against the tree-line at the bottom of the third hill. That’s all.” He looked back at the truck. The Germans were still busy.
His eyes came back to hers, which were infinitely troubled. “What are you going to do?” she wanted to know.
“Somebody has to slow them down, the Germans,” he told her. “If I can hold them off for fifteen or twenty minutes, surprise them, get them stopped and up here, you can make it.”
“No,” she said, almost screamed. Her eyes were instantly filled. “You cannot.”
“Yes,” he told her, nodding. “I have to. Now you have to go. We don’t have time to argue.”
“Let me stay with you,” she pleaded. “Jean-Paul can take them. I will help you.”
He had to smile. He shook his head. “No,” he said softly. “They’ll never get there without you.”
“Then let me stay and you go,” she begged. “I can fire the gun.”
He sighed and gently touched the side of her face with his fingertips. There was no time to explain. He dropped his hand and glanced back at the truck. It looked like they were taking the tire off. His eyes found hers, and he shook his head again. “I want you to do something for me, okay?” he asked.
“Let me stay . . . ,” she began to repeat desperately.
“No,” he said firmly, almost harshly. He pulled the envelope from his pocket and hurriedly removed the picture and letter. He put them back in the pocket and handed her the envelope. “Whenever you can, I want you to go to the address in the corner there . . . and tell her what happened,” he told her. “Can you do that for me?”
She studied the return address for a second and turned her pained eyes back to him. She bit her lower lip and nodded.
He forced as warm a smile as he could. “Good,” he said, squeezing her arm. “Now you have to go. Don’t stop for anything. Not for anything. Run as fast as you can.” He looked back at the Germans. They were changing the tire. “Go,” he told her.
Her eyes held his for an instant, memorizing him, and then she quickly moved to the children. She didn’t have a pocket so she jammed his envelope into Claudette’s coat pocket as she spoke. Her voice was firm as she ordered them into action. She took Eric by the elbow and started pushing Jean-Paul toward the valley. The boy and Claudette looked puzzled and frightened. They hardly moved, their eyes back on him. She barked at them.
“Anne-Marie,” he called out to her on impulse.
She turned to him.
“Tell her . . . tell her far more than she can dream. She’ll know what I meant. Okay?”
She studied him for a moment with those too familiar eyes, pained but determined, and then she nodded. She pushed Jean-Paul again and said something sternly to Claudette. They took off on a run down the hill, the boy and girl first, Anne-Marie following, literally pulling Eric behind her, the bulky sweater bouncing, her thick dark hair the last thing he saw.
He picked up the machine gun off Anne-Marie’s shawl and wheeled toward the backside of their hill. These Germans were not helping the Nazi reputation for efficiency. He knelt down and propped himself against a large boulder at the crest of the hill, overlooking their likely path. They might get within a couple of football fields as they passed. He should be able to get their attention.
He looked at them through the binoculars. The wheel was on, getting tightened. They would be rolling soon. He suddenly realized he hadn’t been breathing. His head felt light, and his heart had found a new rhythm. He closed his eyes. They should be to the bottom of the hill, reaching the creek bed, stumbling across, through the shallow water. How many minutes did they have, could he buy them? They had to make it.
He swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat and got it halfway down. His lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air. He hoped they were racing as fast as his mind. His fingers lightly touched his pocket. He could feel the outlines of the photograph.
06 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 6th, 2009 @ 07:15:13 am, using 617 words, 129 views
Even if law and/or politics aren’t necessarily your favorite cup of tea, you should head over to the nat’l poli sci book review site, Law & Politics Review, this holiday to broaden your cranium. Why? Here are excerpts from a few of the really good reviews they have up right now, and we may have missed one you’d like:
In LAW’S ALLURE: HOW LAW SHAPES, CONSTRAINS, SAVES, AND KILLS POLITICS, Gordon Silverstein sets out to provide a narrative framework for understanding the judicialization of policy choices. Central to his inquiry are two questions. First, why and how has judicial involvement in policy-making expanded throughout the course of American history (especially during the twentieth century)? Second, how does judicial involvement in policy-making play out, and what are the consequences of judicial involvement in political policy-making? Through a discussion of the Supreme Court’s growing breadth of engagement with political policy-making and a series of careful case studies, Silverstein provides an insightful “roadmap” for future scholars interested in exploring the causes and consequences of judicial policy-making. Indeed, the analyses in this book should provide considerable grist for the mill as this line of literature moves forward.
———————————
Because there is no dearth of books on the Bush administration’s (mis)management of the war on terror, future authors in this area would be well-advised to eschew the general for the specific. In two separate books, Harold H. Bruff and Peter Jan Honigsberg have done just that. BAD ADVICE: BUSH’S LAWYERS IN THE WAR ON TERROR, winner of the 2008 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, is a critique of the legal advice provided to President Bush. OUR NATION UNHINGED: THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR ON TERROR tells the personal stories of those individuals who have suffered as a result of the government’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its thesis is direct and oft-repeated: Bush’s war on terror has done enormous damage to American values.
BAD ADVICE begins with a question: “Given the indeterminacy of law, how can we minimize the provision of bad legal advice to presidents?” (p.1). Its author, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, is a former senior attorney-adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice (DOJ). That office occupied a prominent role in the Bush administration’s justification for certain tactics in the war on terror. Bruff dissects, and ultimately rejects, those justifications as being at odds with both American law and moral authority.
———————————-
[America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty] offers a collection of twelve essays on the current state of liberal democracy in the United States. Editors Robert Faulkner and Susan Shell, both political theorists at Boston College, state that the purpose of their volume is “to set forth and examine the most important dangers confronting America today.” Toward that end, they “sought out political analysts whom [they] had reason to think first-rate[,]” and asked “each to select a problem that he or she thought particularly serious.” Faulkner and Shell also note that we will not find in these pages the musings of any “visionary reformers, philosophic dreamers, angry revolutionaries, or gloomy reactionaries” (pp.1-2). While some readers might want to quibble with this assessment – I met one visionary reformer, albeit a right wing one, and at least two gloomy reactionaries – as a general matter this volume’s esteemed contributors do struggle mightily to steer judicious courses through our typically shrill and polarized political debates. In fact, the political orientations guiding these analyses range from conservative (sometimes of the Straussian persuasion) to moderately liberal (think Democratic Leadership Council).
See what we mean? Why haven’t you clicked over yet?
05 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 5th, 2009 @ 07:21:02 am, using 1786 words, 98 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
21c
It was as he turned to go back to the children that something registered in his peripheral vision. Just beyond the line of the hill, at the edge of the valley’s boundary with the encircling tree-line, something he hadn’t peered at through the binoculars. Not in the valley, but on the side. He brought the binoculars up again. A house. A barn to the right, in the shade but clear in the glasses. A farmhouse!
His legs were moving before he could command them, down toward the peak of that smaller hill. Rounding third base, heading for home ahead of the throw. He flew as he approached the site. The details were coming into focus. An old stone house, a wooden barn, a small fence surrounding a garden, goats and chickens in the yard. It had to be the place. Not far at all. They were here!
He could feel himself grinning like a fool, but he didn’t care. He just stood there staring for a while, taking in glorious gulps of air, unable to think one thought at a time. It was only as the breathing slackened that he was able to connect himself to his surroundings, to how still everything was. No one seemed to be there except the cackling and scurrying of the animals. He slowly moved toward the house, up a stone walk to the front door. He peaked noiselessly into a window.
The house was empty. Of people, anyway. Oddly, everything was in its place, the furniture, dishes on the small table just beyond the living area. Still lived in, but no one there. Out working? He hadn’t seen anyone, though. At another farm? Time for paranoia?
If Germans were around, they wouldn’t need to be so stealthy, he realized. But it would certainly be nice if he could verify someone was there, someone who was on the map, ready to take them in. He wished he hadn’t left the map with Anne-Marie. It would be so much easier to convince someone. But who?
“Hello?” he let out a cautious call, returning to the yard in front of the house. “Is anyone there? Hello?”
Did a noise come from the barn? Its door was open, a small stack of hay visible inside. Was someone in there? Why would they be hiding from him? He started walking slowly toward it. “I’m an American,” he told anyone who might be there. “I’m an American. Hello? An American.”
When he got to the barn, he found it emptier than the house. No one there. Everything neatly arranged, no sign of recent activity. No one was home. That was the simplest answer. They had gone somewhere. That was all right. He could go get the children, bring them back down here at dark. Surely the people would be back soon. And, even if they weren’t, the barn would be a warmer, safer place to wait than up on that hilltop. He turned to leave.
The gun was what he saw first, the barrel of an old rifle, looking effective despite its age, pointing straight at his chest. He felt his heart leap. His eyes came up to the man pointing the weapon from the edge of the barn door. The classic French farmer, just like in an old geography book, stern, dressed in cap and old clothes, looking fifty, probably forty or less. He raised his arms and tried to smile at the man. “Don’t shoot,” he said in what he hoped was a calm voice. “I’m an American. American.” He said each word very clearly, distinctly.
A small, plump woman in a long, plain dress stepped out from behind the man but said nothing. At least she looked more pleasant, a round face framed in dull blond hair. He directed his plea toward her. “I was sent here by Catherine Williams,” he told her, them, hoping the name would be familiar. They didn’t indicate that it was. “I have children with me. Up on the hill. We need to get to England. To England. I was told you could help.”
The man looked down at the woman but did not lower the gun. She stared back quizzically at the farmer, and neither of them seemed to understand. He knew why they hesitated. He wouldn’t have believed him either. He shouldn’t have run down here. He should have turned and gotten the children, gotten Anne-Marie, who could translate. “I have a map,” he said again slowly. “Not with me. The children have it. But it was given to Catherine by a maquis. Maquis. She gave it to me so I could bring the children. My plane was shot down. I have children. Up on the hill.” He pointed behind them, but the incoherence was clear even to him.
The woman let out a breath. “Children,” she said.
His own breath was far more emphatic as it came out. “You speak English. Great.”
She shook her head. “A little,” she told him. “I talk to pilots.”
Pilots. Yes! This was the right spot. They would be safe now. He calmed himself as much as he could. “We need help,” he said simply. “We need help to England.”
“How many?” she asked.
Children, he guessed. “Four,” he answered, holding up four fingers.
She turned quickly to look behind her, then back to him. “Up there?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “The trees. On top of the hill.”
She turned to the farmer and apparently explained to him in French what David had said. When she finished, the farmer shook his head adamantly and responded in rapid, harsh tones. She said something back, and he again responded negatively. She brought her eyes back to David hesitantly and forced a smile. “We hear . . . the Germans are coming,” she told him, each word carefully prepared. “Our man, our worker, he come from the village. The Germans take some of our people. He hear that they come for us today.”
He eyed her closely. “So what does that mean?” he asked.
“We hide,” she replied. “In the cave. In the trees. Up the hill.” She pointed behind the barn. “We keep the soldiers there. They not find us.”
“Well, fine,” he said. “Let me go get the children . . . .”
She immediately began to shake her head. “There is not time,” she interrupted. “They here soon. Come now. We not be here. We hide. Now.”
He moved toward them. The farmer was an observer now, still stern but not a threat, now studying the hillside, not him. “I can’t leave them alone,” he told her. “Not if the Germans are coming.”
“We hide,” she said, reaching for his arm. “You come.”
He jerked away. “No,” he said. “No. We can’t.” He looked at both of them, pleadingly. “I can have them here in an hour. Less.” His mind thought quickly. “Half an hour. Only thirty minutes. Thirty minutes. Surely you can wait thirty minutes.”
She frowned at him and then turned to the farmer. Her tone as she explained seemed sympathetic, however. The farmer was clearly not persuaded. “No” was the only part of his exasperated answer that David understood, and he heard it several times. The woman finally looked back at him. “We hide,” she said with clear sadness. “Now.”
“Then tell me where the cave is,” David pleaded. “I’ll bring them there.”
She tried to smile. “The Germans, they catch you, you tell.”
“No, I won’t,” he argued, angry now. But they would not tell him, he knew. “Then you have to wait for us, goddam it. “They’ll die out there, or be caught, which is the same thing. You can’t leave them up there. You can’t.” He paused to take a breath and lowered his tone. “Thirty minutes. After that you can go. Just give me thirty minutes.”
Her upper lip tucked inside her mouth as she considered. Her eyes hardened and went back to the farmer. They began to argue. It was like a boxing match, jab, jab, both going at the same time, back and forth, until one would wear down. It was the farmer. Her face was flushed as she turned to David. The farmer pulled a pocket watch from his pants. His eyes went to it, to the slope, to the watch again, then to David. She took a breath and smiled. “Thirty minutes,” she told him, nodding. “That is all.”
He couldn’t contain the energy that burst through his smile. “Deal,” he exclaimed. He sped past them, full-speed by the time he got to the yard again. He turned back to them as he ran. “Thirty minutes!” he cried. “Thirty minutes! We’ll be here! Thirty minutes!”
The wind had come up, strong in his face, bringing in a storm over the tree-line. He didn’t let it or the hills slow him down. The faster he got to the children, the more time they would have to get back. It was their only hope. He’d worry about the complaints from his leg muscles and his lungs later. He just hoped they were already awake when he got there.
He had to have set the world record in hill running. He was sure he had saved them valuable time. If they ran all the way back, the wind at their backs, they should make it in time if they were all up and awake as he got to them. And they were.
“Good,” he said, panting, running into the middle of the circle they had made with their standing. “Come on, we gotta go,” he told Anne-Marie, taking Claudette by the arm. “I found the farmhouse. It’s close. We can leave the stuff here. We don’t have time to waste. We have to get back down there.”
No one moved.
His brows came up as his breathing tried to slow. “Come on,” he repeated. “I found it, the farmhouse, but we can’t wait. We have to go.”
Anne-Marie’s eyes were sad and frightened at the same time. Why wouldn’t she move? He reached across and grabbed her wrist. “Let’s go,” he exclaimed testily. “They won’t wait for us long. The Germans are on their way.”
She stood fast, her gaze trying to tell him something she evidently couldn’t find the words for. Her head turned, looking down the hill toward the far end of the valley. She pointed with her free hand.
03 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 3rd, 2009 @ 07:30:48 pm, using 495 words, 167 views
As a connas . . . connos . . . connoseu . . . fan of the well made teenage sex movie, I of course marvel at how much being a teenager has changed over the years, especially the sex part. I worked with a young woman (with whom my wife now teaches 40 years later) who seriously relayed how her nuns had warned them that girls, once they got going, were just incapable of stopping, so never start, girls. Even after you get married. I think it was the first time I ever snorted an ice cream cone out my nose. Every girl I had ever started had no problem stopping. And when I say every girl, well, my teen years were pretty sad. But at least the guys today had it so much better than me, every teenage sex movie assured me.
Hold on, says Bob Altemeyer in his new Sex and Youth, based on surveys of his students (admittedly not the most representative sample but amazingly well represented in teenage sex movies). If you define “sex” the way Bill Clinton did (and leave that yukky kind out), then today’s youth really aren’t that much more active than kids in 1984 (which, yes, is still well past my teenage years). There’s a brief review here, but a nice long interview follows, with some interesting stats at the end. Want more details before you commit your time to the whole thing? Well, okay, but only to titillate:
You would share the results of the secret survey with the class in February. What were they most surprised by? It was a highly anticipated lecture. There was a real tension in the air, so that the simplest wisecrack got roars of laughter. The students were very curious because they thought they knew what people their age were doing, but realized they didn’t. I think they were surprised by most of the results, but certainly the levels of virginity, the enormously greater experience of the women in the class, the fact that almost all sex was happening in romantic relationships while “hunters and gatherers” were getting very little, the level of cheating, the differences in women’s and men’s fantasies – all of these things usually drew audible gasps.
And some stats:
Less than 1 per cent of all intercourse happened during a one-night stand, found a survey of 265 students in 2007.
Year after year since 1984, 12 per cent of the first years were having oral sex while remaining virgins.
In 1987, the mean age of virginity loss was 16.5 for women and 17.1 for men. While those figures have dropped only slightly, the number of sex acts non-virgins have engaged in has skyrocketed. Women had doubled their count to 100 in 2008 from 50 times in 1987 while men rose to just 38 times from 30.
A 2008 query on what would make them “supremely satisfied sexually” revealed that women want sex with someone they are “deeply in love with.” Men, meanwhile, wanted a woman to take the initiative and be sexually aggressive.
Go on. Read it. You know you want to.
02 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 2nd, 2009 @ 06:03:46 pm, using 1453 words, 103 views
[We’ve started another story here for your diversion. Go here to catch the Prologue and other chapters if you missed them.]
21b
They had been at it for about two hours when they came across their first real sign of civilization since leaving Catherine’s house. The trees cleared briefly, just a break at the base of a hill, and they almost literally tumbled down onto a road. Not a modern road, but clearly used for vehicles and wide enough for a large truck, maybe even a tank, and stretched toward undoubted human contact in both directions.
He set Eric down and stared at the path. It frightened him for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was obviously used at the time, meaning German traffic in the area was very possible, perhaps probable, perhaps frequent. Yet that wasn’t what worried him most. The road wasn’t on the map. He didn’t know if that were good or bad. Would the map-artist have bothered, especially if no one was supposed to use the road? Still, the map was detailed in several ways, and this was an obvious landmark. Why wasn’t it there? Had they gone the wrong way?
The children stared down the small hill at the path, fidgeting and waiting silently for him to do something. Anne-Marie could tell that something was wrong. She caught his eyes, and her expression asked her question.
He frowned. “This road’s not on the map,” he told her. “Either it was just left off, or we’re lost.”
“What if we are lost?”
He let out a breath and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. He nodded down at the path. “That has to lead somewhere. I suppose we could take our chances.”
“It could lead to Germans,” she stated the obvious.
He nodded. He thought back to the path they had followed. Everything else had been right so far. They hadn’t made any sharp turns. The compass still showed them going in the right direction. But he was talking about a crudely drawn map. He sighed. There were more landmarks, another creek up ahead a few miles. If they didn’t get to it before dark, they could double back. Lose a whole day or more and run out of food, but that seemed the best of the available courses.
Good lord.
“Are we going on?” Anne-Marie asked, bringing him back to them.
He picked up Eric and hoisted him back up onto his shoulders. “We are going on,” he agreed. “Be careful going down and get across quickly. Something may be coming.” She repeated his cautions to the others.
Nothing was coming, however. They were quickly back deep into the trees. The sun seemed to be moving faster than they were now. Soon it was directly overhead, signaling afternoon, and they were still scurrying up cliff sides cut out of the hills. Delay clawed at them. A bush snagged, actually grabbed, Jean-Paul at one point, and they had to take time to free him. The scratches managed to bring back his surliness, as did David’s decision to give Anne-Marie the gun that the boy had dropped upon being nabbed.
Claudette tripped again at another point an hour or so later and opened up an ugly gash on her right calf. They had had to combine bags again and use one of the small ones as a crude, bulky bandage to stop the bleeding. The sight of her own blood, in impressive but inconsequential amounts, made her even more frightened, and it ended up taking them longer to quiet her down and get started again than it did to clean and bandage the wound.
Within minutes of Claudette’s injury, however, the trees began to thin noticeably, and more and more sunlight hit them. They were coming out. The valley couldn’t be far, if they had come the right way. And that meant the rendezvous point. He passed on the news to Anne-Marie, and she told the children. Each was less elated than he was, still nursing their wounds, but he got the blood pumping again and picked up the pace. With Anne-Marie’s barking at them, they followed.
The trees broke into another valley. They looked down on it from the top of a hill at the edge of the woods. The land declined away from them steeply, in a series of soft hills, a kind of terrace effect, into the valley. It was much, much larger than the first valley they had crossed. It was definitely farmland, with patches of trees here and there and yellow grass everywhere else. He took the binoculars from Jean-Paul and studied the area. The section directly in front of them was blocked by the nearby, terracing hills, but he could see out into the distance. He didn’t see any barns or houses, but they could have easily been hidden farther away by the rolling land or by the clumps of trees. Below, at the base of their hill, was a wide creek bed with a narrow stream. His heart jumped. The creek. He looked at the map quickly. The creek. They had come the right way. By God, they had come the right way. Somewhere out in that valley was the farmhouse.
But right now it was still daylight, early afternoon, a while before they could cross the fields and that creek in less revealing shadows. As much as he hated to, he knew that they should wait as they had the day before. No point in being foolish when they were now so close.
He had Anne-Marie tell the children to go ahead and eat, then rest for a couple of hours. The trees on the hilltop should still give them enough cover for now. She checked Jean-Paul’s scratches and pronounced him fit with a comment and a small but pretty smile. He frowned but seemed to agree. Claudette’s leg had stopped bleeding completely by the time Anne-Marie got to it, and she was taking it with brave whimpers. It would have to be looked at better once they got to safety, but fortunately that wouldn’t be long now. Eric had decided to eat and rest at the same time, falling asleep sitting up, a turnip in his hand in his lap. Anne-Marie settled him down to the ground and got the other two around him. She told them they were close now and they would need their rest. They agreed by going to sleep.
He was too restless to wait there. “I think I’m going to scout around some,” he told her as she finished getting them down. One man might not look as unusual or conspicuous out there.
Her brows raised but she said nothing.
“I want to see if I can spot the farmhouse,” he reassured her. “I won’t go too far. I’ll leave you the gun. If . . . something happens and I don’t get back, . . . that farmhouse is out there somewhere, okay? Find it and tell them about Catherine.” He handed her the map. “Show this to them and tell them how you got it. You should be safe. Understand?”
She was clearly doubtful and displeased, but she nodded.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll make it back to you,” he said. “I promise.”
She smiled weakly and held his eyes with hers.
He squeezed the shoulder, smiled back as warmly as he could, and was off down the hill.
The next hill, maybe a hundred yards away, wasn’t actually as high as the one where they rested, but it effectively blocked their line of sight toward the heart of the valley. It didn’t take long, just a couple of minutes, for him to reach its top and to discover that another, smaller hill did exactly the same blocking from that point. That dampened his enthusiasm and pace, as did the top of the subsequent hill, which had hidden yet another one. It was like one of those games, a box in a box in a box. He took the binoculars and scanned the far horizon. There were some dark blots at various places in the distance. Farms? Ponds? What?
He felt the doubts about the map well up again. The farmhouse could be anywhere out there. Or nowhere. Or discovered and destroyed by the Germans, by now. He could literally be standing in the middle of nowhere. Or the farmhouse could be just over the next rise. He lowered the binoculars and let out a deep breath. When was this going to be over? How would it be over?
01 September 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on September 1st, 2009 @ 06:40:35 pm, using 629 words, 92 views
When most of us think of studying history, at least those of us who don’t get instantly drowsy, we think about events and famous people and their impacts. But studying history can also mean studying history itself. What is it? How does it get created? How is it used and abused? The answers to these and related questions, of course, actually point us to how history, for all its gaps and innuendos and false trails, really can speak to us in times of need, such as now.
Which is the point in part of Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, a really nice (and short!) overview of the issues raised by thinking of history as a subject unto itself. A noted historian herself, she provides good commentary for those who have never thought of history this way before and for those who have. Here and here are a couple of the many good reviews the book has gotten, and below are bits of each for you to judge.
That sense of a malleable record reveals the essence of a universal problem: that history gets revised to serve the ideological ends of a regime, the political needs of a party, or the concerns of a group that has suffered subjugation or sheer omission from the record. More often than not, historical accuracy and legitimacy suffer in the process. On occasion, however, revisionism serves as a corrective to unworthy causes or lapses that need to be rectified. Late in 2007, for example, after historians, writers, and filmmakers had begun to explore the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the government in Madrid enacted a Law of Historical Memory that has led to the Franco regime being formally repudiated and removed from public commemoration.
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Historians, according to MacMillan, ought to do for countries what psychologists do for individuals: help them see the past for what it is, and make that knowledge the basis for positive action going forward. It’s worth asking then what afflicts the United States today. MacMillan suggests several familiar diagnoses, including guilt (reparations for slavery) and the general malaise that attends lost greatness. (She cites the reverential way we remember World War II and the correspondingly negative light cast on our current conflicts.)
It’s become oh-so-intellectual to talk about how “history doesn’t repeat” and how we can’t use analogies and so on. Bushwah. Maybe history isn’t exact every time, but neither is a chair, a car, or a bullet. There are, nevertheless, common lessons and uses to take from each of them. It may not repeat exactly, like my singing the same song as Willie Nelson doesn’t repeat exactly, but we can learn what’s good and to be valued and what’s not. The same “history doesn’t repeat” folks are the ones who tend to sneer at writing history for us plebes to read anyway. All it does is free those historians from having to engage the present and take the chance of being wrong. MacMillan shows we get history wrong, but, despite her clear misgivings, also how we get it right. As smarter people than professors have said, “the only lesson of history is that we don’t learn the lessons of history.” Ignore the “smart” people who tell you it can’t be done. It can, in varying degrees of accuracy. People misusing history in particular ways is one of the foremost ways history repeats. But keep in mind MacMillan’s general caution, though, that we should all remain humble in our predictions and perceived truths. We can be wrong, but that’s no excuse for not trying.
The alternative is to pay no attention to history. What does history tell us about that???
31 August 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on August 31st, 2009 @ 06:21:24 pm, using 336 words, 127 views
Most of us are trying to make sense of the current economic disaster with historical analogies, primarily of how we compare with the Great Depression. One problem (among many) with that is simply that we aren’t now who we were then. Back then, the world power and economic center was Britain and we were the export nation with massive resources to exploit. Fast forward 80 years, and we’re now in the Britain role, whether we recognize it or want it. Who’s the us now that we were then? (Huh?) Well, most observers think China fills that role, at least to some degree, if imperfectly. So where can you go to find out as well as you can about that opaque nation what they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s likely to happen?
One place is Naked Capitalism, where she has up a book review essay on Asia in general and on China in particular. Here’s one brief excerpt to whet you, but go read the whole thing and feel qualified to speak intelligently. Or at least as intelligently as practically anyone can about China right now.
Midler identifies the process by which buyer demand for cheap products and the Chinese manufacturers willingness to meet the requirements lead to what he characterises in the chilling anodyne term – ‘quality fade’. This is the process by which manufacturers take increasing liberties with quality to eke out profits from unprofitable contracts. This entails cheaper components, altering chemicals, lower hygiene standards and, in general, lower everything.
Midler describes the process whereby manufacturers compete to gain unprofitable contracts to make sought after products. The sole reason is that access enables Chinese manufacturers to gain access to intellectual property allowing the manufacture of lucrative ‘knock-offs’ in places where patents and trademarks cannot be enforced.
Midler acutely records the tensions between buyer and manufacturers and the entire flawed system where ultimately the only true product control and testing is by the final consumer, sometimes, as in the case of the melamine contaminated milk, with tragic consequences.
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