You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Driving back from the coast along a rather honky-tonk stretch of highway the other night, my headlights flashed across this sign:
At least, that’s what I think it said. The two blanks, I’m finding, may have said Residential Brokerage.
Still, considering our public life today, the message is disturbing.
How do you read it?
In blogging here, I’ve generally tried to steer clear of current events, as in political and economic news. Even my reflections on the weather have been, I hope, along a larger or more timeless horizon than mere day-to-day changes. Think of watching the grass grow.
But I do live in New Hampshire, and the campaigns for the November 8, 2016, presidential election are already generating daily front-page headlines here. Remember, that’s nearly a year-and-a-half away.
The primary is tentatively set for February 9, but that could move up, depending. We hate when it clashes with Christmas.
The point is, politics is already crackling in our air. How can I possibly avoid it?
Even his own mother and sister are rejecting his claims about the money.
Frank Guinta, who represents half of New Hampshire in the U.S. House of Representatives, is in hot water over $355,000 an investigation by the Federal Election Commission has documented as campaign finance violations.
How serious is this? His explanations from 2010 on have been tangled, leading to Tuesday’s damning FEC report.
As for serious, the right-wing editorial page of the Union Leader, the statewide newspaper based in Manchester, came to the conclusion yesterday: “For the New Hampshire Republican Party, there also remains no choice. It must call for Guinta’s resignation and sever its ties.”
Quite simply, he “received illegal campaign contributions … for the purpose of stealing a Republican primary and a general election, then repeatedly lied to the people of New Hampshire to cover it up.”
In other words, it’s about maintaining the viability of democracy. Both sides of the aisle. And it’s about serving the voting public, regardless of their identity. Without that, we’re left with raw power — and its abuse.
The editorial emphasizes, “The party cannot stand by a politician who has revealed himself to be wholly unworthy of the public trust. Political parties are supposed to stand for ideals, not merely tribal connections. … The party can either lead by integrity or it can stand by Frank Guinta. It cannot do both.”
This is a small state where you often get to meet or question your public representatives. Even when you don’t agree with them, they’re not from another planet, as it can feel elsewhere.
In this case, Guinta serves from my House district. And it hurts.
I’d finished my laps. Was getting ready to exit the building when I glanced at the literature rack. There it was:
I’m retired, like most of the people I swim with.
Still, this matter of pride kicked in.
I have more than enough to do as it is. So I’m telling myself.
No, not all politicians are like that. Let’s get that clear. I’m tired of that line of defense from people who vote for the kind of people we wind up with in Dennis Hastert.
The fact is we’ve had virtuous people – and still do – who devote their lives to public service rather than private gain. Frequently, at a high personal price – and often as the targets of vicious character smears, which too often attack the innocent family as well. And, to be candid, these principled individuals can be found on both sides of the political aisle.
Still, after decades of hearing the Republican Party portray itself as upholding “family values” and other high Godly virtues, here we go again. For that matter, of hearing the party that’s pressed vigorously to defeat monogamy among gays – you know, the “marriage issue” – now shown in more light.
Yes, I’m referring to Dennis Hastert of Illinois, being indicted on diverting millions from his banking accounts in transactions calculated would avoid money-laundering scrutiny. That, in itself, is a very serious charge for someone who’s supposed to be keeping the system clean and accountable. Think of shady accounting or the ways secrecy feeds into lies.
As disturbing for me is the fact that a former high-school wrestling coach could have that kind of money sitting around. As for making it in real estate investments, let me point you to Plunkett of Tammany Hall, a classic of American politics, where George W. Plunkett offers his definition of “honest graft” as buying land you know is going to be quickly repurchased at a much higher price for a public project. The strategy made him very wealthy. You might also say it was crooked. And, essentially, it traded on secrecy.
Of course, in the Hastert case, the plot thickens with the allegations of homosexual pedophilia involving a former high school student.
Remember, Hastert became Speaker of the House in the debacle of thrice-married, twice-divorced Newt Gingrich. Family values?
Remember, Hastert became Speaker of the House of Representatives in part because Gingrich’s intended successor, Rep. Robert L. Livingston, had to step aside amid revelations of extramarital affairs. Oops!
And Hastert’s been outspoken in his opposition to what? Those other folks … never, of course, what he might be doing in private.
The charges and allegations against him retain the caveat that they remain to be proven in court.
Still, we could construct of a long list of false public voices contrasted to private realities in recent American history. (Bloggers in other parts of the world can add their own, for our edification.)
For me, the biggest scandal is the falsehood of pontificating self-righteousness. Yes, that’s what angers me the most. We’re back to secrecy, of course. And the ways it’s been used to intensify partisanship in public decision-making, rather than admit diversity and wisdom to the process.
And to think, this man was second in line to the presidency. Right after the vice president.
Now that’s scary!
To grow a leafy tree requires more than thirty inches of rainfall or its equivalent each year. If you drive west across the United States, you can cross an imaginary line that passes through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and beyond it deciduous, or leafy, trees are quite rare. Soon, so are conifers, the evergreens. Irrigation becomes a fact of life if you want to raise food or flowers or even a lawn.
The Great Plains eventually pass into desert – and you might be surprised to discover that most of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington state is actually desert. The rainy belt is little more than a thin band along the Pacific-facing side of the Cascade and Olympic mountains.
Quite simply, it’s a different world from the one most Americans know.
~*~
As for the Great Plains, let me recommend Kathleen Norris’ Dakota. It’s a unique and marvelous book.
The sign at roadside yesterday still has us wondering:
WE ACCEPT
WHIPLASH
INJURIES
~*~
One thing about being in the news business was how much that we covered was more or less routine. Yes, there were the variations on the given theme, but you could easily fall into a formula in covering them. Think of elections or a football game, for instance. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and you quote from both sides.
There would also be developments that simply fell outside the realm of what we’d covered, and when I started out as a journalist, community tastes were stricter than what now fills the coverage. Pedophile priests and sexually abusive parents, for instance, were never mentioned. Ditto, the private lives of politicians. And pit bull dog attacks were way off in the future.
Not so now, and it’s one of the reasons I burned out editing the low-life stories. After all, not even Hustler magazine would have touched much of the grossness that was now appearing even on the front page.
My goals in journalism were far loftier than soft porn, even in a courtroom setting.
~*~
Still, I was surprised how many times I felt I’d seen and heard all the basic stories, only to be hit by something that seemed completely new.
One of them was the arrest of one of our sportswriters on charges of pimping. Ouch! A professional with children? Somebody we knew?
And then the other day a report took that a couple of steps further.
Seems a man responding to an advertisement for a “social-type service” went to a local motel room only to be met by the woman, as expected. But there he also discovered another man and a pit bull dog, neither of them anticipated on his end.
In the ensuing events, as the story goes, the customer was beaten and robbed before escaping and being chased bleeding and naked by the pit bull into the parking lot before a phone call from the front office summoned police. (There was also something about brass knuckles that were tossed aside in the fray, but let’s stick to the basic outline.)
I keep wondering about the old “honor among thieves” code among outlaws. Aren’t there supposed to be some strict standards of behavior involved? Even among crooks, doesn’t a double-cross draws contempt, as does betrayal? In the case of prostitution, for instance, doesn’t that mean the pimp remains out of sight – or better yet, out of the room? And no dogs, unless they’re part of the, uh, proclivities of the john?
For the record, prostitution was not among the charges mentioned in this case. I raise the issue here more in the theoretical sense of illicit dealings. We could as easily substitute drug purchases or any number of other monetary exchanges. Remember, basic standards are assumed or the economic trade falls apart. Nobody would answer an escort-services listing if this was common practice.
So here we are with the new twists being the presence of the second man and the chase by the pit bull, only to find the ultimate recourse falls back on the police and criminal justice system.
As I said, it’s not your everyday news story. I’m left wondering how we would have handled such a police report in the “old days” or whether we would have published it at all. Or even if things like this even occurred back then.
One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.
On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.
~*~
Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.
I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.
Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.
What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.
At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.
Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.
The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”
All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.
Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.
As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”
Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.
~*~
Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.
