Rodger Martin

NOVEMBER 29, 2013 3:50 p.m.M

Butter Churned Comet Ison

       When I began this post Comet Ison had broken up—a bad relationship with the sun.    Instead of watching football, I had spent two hours with thirty thousand other geeks logged on to Google/NASA live this past Thanksgiving afternoon watching Ison fly into the sun hoping it would survive.                

       It didn’t. (Well—24 hours later—maybe it did.)  The reports of its death seem to have been greatly exaggerated thereby again pleasing Mark Twain as he enjoys his own comet circling back around to us about 2061.           

       Still what fun to watch.  At the end it zoomed about at 845,000 mph. That’s the equivalence of 338  times around the Earth every sixty minutes or a complete trip about every ten seconds—puts our satellites to shame.  Add the tail and it reminds me of that childhood story about the tiger chasing its tail around a tree, faster and faster until it finally churned itself into butter.  May we get to see a greenish spread of Ison’s butter in the December skies.           

        This was the internet at its best—real time, live conversation with four scientists from across the globe—the best kind of football:  Four scientists at the top of their game and none of them sure about anything.  And all excited simply because they weren’t sure.           

        There in a nutshell exhibits the human mind at its finest—moving into territory it had never experienced before–skeptical, uncertain, curious, and eager just to find out what it didn’t know.           

        Then one travels back inside our atmosphere to Washington, Wall Street, radio, or television, and one experiences the other kind of human mind—a mind absolutely certain it knows everything exactly as it was, exactly as it should be, and exactly as it shall be.  A mind terrified of any concept which might point otherwise.            

        This tension between the two minds likely has been going on with humans for about a million years.  Those determined to keep things the way they are and those who can’t wait to see what tomorrow will bring.  No question curiosity has killed a cat or two along the way, but here we are a million years later and a bunch of us are spending Thanksgiving afternoon watching a comet zoom around the sun.              

        Sorry Washington, sorry monopolies, sorry television and radio, you can put as many blinders up as you want, but as long as humans remain human, some of us are going to peek around them.   Can’t wait for tomorrow.

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NOVEMBER 24, 2013 11:19 p.m.

Memo, Milton & Mark Twain’s cat:
What goes round comes round

       In the weeks running up to the 50^th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Slate’s Lexicon Valley blogger Mike Voulo asked why the authorship of JFK’s phrase “Ask Not What You Can Do for your country . . . “ in his 1961 inaugural address remains in dispute among Kennedy and his speechwriters.   If memory serves me, one might look in David Masson’s nineteenth century biography of poet John Milton, particularly at a letter Milton wrote to his friend Charles Diodati who in 1639 had asked Milton why he was cutting short his Italian sojourn and returning to England to choose a side in the English civil war. 

       Milton wrote back, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”      (As for cats and Twain, patience please.)   

       Similarly one might look to the Congressional Record during the Mexican War to find where Lincoln as a congressman likely heard or read his Gettysburg Address’s “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” phrasing.        

       Or, if one happened to be in London this week at the Natural History Museum, one might have enjoyed the unveiling of a statue to Alfred Russel Wallace which illuminates some late credit to the naturalist who was writing letters to Darwin about a theory of evolution at the same time Darwin was contemplating what became his own theory on evolution.         

       This does not disapprove of Kennedy or Lincoln using those phrases or Darwin publishing his ideas with minimal credit to Wallace.  All three had the good sense and the good ear to use them on a public stage properly weighted for their content and made them an indelible part of the English language rather than permit the words  to lie dusty and forgotten in letters and a musty record book.        

       What disturbs me is the feebleness of contemporary investigators.   It’s like a homicide detective thinking he can investigate a murder by beginning at the scene of the murder and proceeding only forward in time, investigating the murderer’s act and escape rather than moving backward in time to seek planning and motive.   At least The Globe’s Liz Leyden, writing on Wallace, had done her homework well enough to get her credits and timings front and center thereby opening for readers a new window on an old story.          

       And that breath of fresh air now allows a kitten’s leap to Volume 2 of Mark Twain’s Autobiography.    Clemens, rather than opening new windows on an old story, is relishing in 1906 the opportunity to say whatever he pleased because most of what he said would not see the light of day for a century.    And with the passing of those 110 years, the autobiography lets a reader close the window to the feeble sounds of the 2013 infotainment which passes for news and open another to a worldview circa 1906.       

       Refreshingly, instead of listening to ranting about Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan; genocide in Rwanda, religious massacres in Kosovo or Syria, and a morally senile church trial convicting a minister for officiating at his gay son’s wedding; one hears rantings about Andrew Carnegie and U.S. Steel, King Leopold’s genocide in the Belgian Congo, Russian Christians massacring Russian Jews; and a diatribe on morally bankrupt religions with Christianity again front and center.           

       Twain dictated many of these passages during the summer while he sojourned in Dublin, New Hampshire.  Refreshing might seem an odd term except that if you are reading this, your human ancestors survived the robber barons, colonialists, and fraudulent thinkers of the Gilded Age; therefore, I suspect we current humans will survive the corporate  war lords, neocon colonialists , and fraudulent preachers, rabbis, imams, and priests of the Twenty-first Century—though I also suspect, knowing the price the Twentieth Century paid to survive the Gilded Age frauds will mean the Twenty-first Century price will also come steep.         

       Refreshing because I teach young, bright, curious students at Keene State College, a public—not private—college. where the best of them, the coolest cats I know, know history as well and see right through the Humpty Dumpties of this current Gilded Age.  That means I can still walk with a less than heavy heart to the overlooks and see the same Mount Monadnock  Mark Twain saw from his Upton House porch over a century ago and utter to no one in particular, “Not bad, Sam.  Play it again, Mark.”   A pretty good place for any old Monadnock Pastoralist  curled up with a warm kitten traveling into the holidays.

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OCTOBER 11, 2013 9:41 a.m.

The Sum of our Parts

       Last Sunday afternoon, a Symphony New Hampshire concert  in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a town of just over 6,000 souls, of which less than two hundred had gathered to listen to Beethoven’s Seventh, and a Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto  might seem an odd place to ponder diversity.  Particularly since New Hampshire’s unspoken concept of diversity is a wavy sort of nebulous shopping list that reads some thing like “We’ll have one each, but let’s not have many more than  one of each.”

       But this day, here in front of me was a finely tuned orchestra of faces which covered five continents, Antarctica being one exception and Australia the other—had heard them all converse, perhaps there may have been someone from Down  Under there as well.  But I didn’t hear them speak.  I heard them play.  What is about music that, when played well, erases the barriers of color, belief, and politics?

       Here in front of me was a British soloist, Ruth Palmer, whose entire body channeled itself into a violin just to create the passions of sound a Russian composer heard in his head over a century ago.    So focused, she was no longer in Peterborough, New Hampshire, but gliding on ballet slippers in some ethereal, tolerant place that  music brings us to if we only listen.

      And it wasn’t just the audience enthralled, the orchestra too was enthralled, musicians smiling as she lifted them as well to that plateau beyond the Monadnocks where, as the maestro noted about Beethoven’s Seventh, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

       Later in the week, at an out-the-way trattoria named Del Rossis,  two Celtic harpists, one from Scotland, one from Ireland, plucked music from their homelands with that same exquisite joy.  Inm that smaller audience, were new faces from at least four continents and we listened to music near a thousand years old in the harpists telling, but really those strains went  much farther back—to the Fertile Crescent and  the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Nebuchadnezzer.

       If only there were maestros in Congress, in Syria, Mexico, in every corner of the polluted planet who could create music out of chaos, remind off-key solo screeders that our whole is greater than the sum of any one part. We are all part of a chorus.    If only. . . but at least for a rainy, autumn afternoon ,  and a cool autumn evening in a small, very non-diverse corner of a New England state,  a soloist, musicians, and small audiences managed to get to that place.

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Oh Say Can You Prism

     The Washing Machine Media is burning up its bearings as it agitates the hogwash that whatever has been leaked by whistleblowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden  is seriously damaging anything other than bloated NSA/CIA/  Congressional/Military/Executive and overwrought Silicone Valley egos.

     Just like the “slam dunk” weapons of mass destruction (not) in Iraq, these latest episodes only reinforce the oxymoron that has become  Military and NSA Intelligence.  But then with Dick Cheney as an enabler, what else could one expect except birdshot in the face.

     The mistake Cheney and the following Executive have made is thinking you can trust any political entity with unchecked power. You can’t.   It’s like placing hundred dollar bills in front of a bank CEO, oil in front of a speculator, gold in front of Glen Beck, or a smart phone in front of an adolescent–they just can’t resist the temptation.  Their only hope is a twelve-step AA meeting once a week.So while the U.S. Government only sinks deeper into the quicksand of its own making, there is a simple solution to Prism collecting our e-mails, cell phone calls, geo locators, credit card bills, ad infinitum.

     Storing information is important—researchers need it, teachers need it, historians need it, investigators need it, businesses need it, descendants need it.  We all need it to learn what to do next and what not to do next.

     The question is whom can you trust to store it properly.   Verizon?  There hasn’t been a corporation since Rome which would not sell its customer’s information for thirty pieces of debased silver, maybe even a buck.    The security agencies?  J. Edgar stored his information and look how that got put to use.

     History has provided us only one group that can be trusted with the storage of information—librarians.  You heard me right.  Let me say it louder:  LI-BRAR-I-ANS.

     Don’t tear down those Utah Complexes, don’t shut down the NSA, don’t remove the “I” from CIA,  simply retire the bosses and bring in the librarians.   Not only will they store the information carefully, they’ll catalog and archive it so a patron can find it.  Librarians exist for only one purpose—to gather information and protect it.  What’s even better is that they love doing it.  They wake up in the morning thinking, “Oh joy what will I get to catalog today.”    Find me a spy who enjoys that.

     Librarians can spot a fish in a school, the cow in the herd, grain in the sand.   A librarian would know the difference between a German fellow joking about bird-watching for rare spies along the barbed wire of an NSA collection agency  and a Mossad agent bugging the American Embassy.

     Speaking of “Protect and Serve, ” who were the only people to actually say no to the FBI, CIA, NSA when they, laden with Patriot Act smugness, came looking  for library check-out records?  You guessed it,  librarians.

      And now that we know the FISA Court is a rubber stamp, who will demand to see a real warrant , not a FISA facsimile, before they give access to their card catalogs?  Librarians.   Who knows better than historians the Fourth Amendment (and the other XXVI to boot [That’s 26 to non-librarians.])?  Do I need say more?

     If language were a religion, librarians would rule heaven, lawyers would rule hell.  You can trust a librarian to guard your privacy.  Think of Hypatia—she made the Romans burn both her and her books rather than give up stored information to patrons who didn’t know how to use it.   I’d like to see  James Clapper try to get a shred of improper information out of Bertha Pease (God-rest-her-soul) without a properly served warrant.  She’d have his ears boxed so quickly he’d never deceive Congress again.

     The only reasonable solution to our security dilemma is to turn the whole surveillance system over to The Library of Congress, then hire a lot of MLAs to staff the Maryland, California, and Utah storage sites.     We could hire them based on Congressional districts: 535 librarians apportioned from each state by population, 100 tall, stentorian librarians (two from each state) to man the front desks,  plus four or five librarians for the territories and D.C.  And I guarantee every librarian from Alaska will know whether you can see Russia from her house or not.

     Each Saturday morning the librarians could hold story time and invite the House of Representatives down to listen to a story.   Imagine 535 Representatives quietly sitting cross-legged on the floor listening to a tale like “How Amazon Hates Competition.”   True Darryl Issa would probably have to be sent home for telling a fib, but then a librarian would be the only person one could count on to call him on it. All those months of Benghazi hearings?  A librarian would have known within three days whether Susan Rice had told a whopper or not.

     Librarians also know the only way we grow-up is with accurate information so they know when and how to help.  If they see an FBI agent with the wrong cellphone calls, they’ll cluck, “Dear, dear, young man, try this list instead.  And don’t forget to sign it out.

     “Finally, this is a fiscally sound idea.  Librarians are so good at organizing, they would make it easy for all the intelligence organizations in the government to trim excess management to help meet the sequester cuts and still not lose a single e-mail.    And I salivate at the income from overdue web searches.

     Unlike the IRS, librarians never forget.

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