40 years later: Welcome home, Sgt. Comer

On Jan. 1, 1970, my dad, Gray Comer, landed back in the U.S. after a year in Vietnam.

Gray is the middle child of three brothers. His father, my late grandfather, was a career employee at RJR who’d been a Marine MP during World War II. Gray went to Wingate College for a year before transferring to Wake Forest, where his grades fell off far enough for him to lose his draft exemption. But Gray kept qualifying for officer training programs. At the time, the Army had a regulation that one couldn’t be deployed to Vietnam for less than 12 months. Gray was weeks away from the cutoff date that would’ve kept him home when, as he says, “The Army figured out was I was doing,” and off he went to Vietnam for the entire year of 1969.

Gray was 22, and a sergeant, leading other, younger men. He turned 23 in April; Arthur Cama, the man who took his place while Gray had a 24-hour liberty on his birthday, was killed by a sniper. Gray himself would sustain four wounds in his few months of active combat. He also rescued an Australian soldier (who gave Gray his uniform hat in appreciation – it’s still in his office) and saved the lives of several men, one of them a neighbor from back home, earning a Bronze Star.

Gray doesn’t brag about his service in Vietnam. His brothers, my mother, my sisters and I are in awe of the courage he showed, and the horrors he must have seen. But Gray de-emphasizes it, maybe preferring to let the rest of his life speak for itself. So, I will, too.

In the 40 years since Gray came home, he married, had two beautiful daughters (my sisters Karla and Julie); remarried my mom, welcoming my sister Maria and me into his heart; and had a fifth daughter, my sister Elizabeth. He finished college at Appalachian State, taught science in Winston-Salem public schools; went to work for the city as an arson investigator; then went into business for himself selling home fire protection. He went to Heaven-knows-how-many dance recitals, plays, softball and football games and Scout meetings, and later pinewood-derby races with his grandson. He danced at weddings (always shagging, no matter what the style of music playing). He loaned money to family and friends. He huddled outside on cold mornings before sunrise, thawing out the frozen water pump with a hair dryer so a certain middle child could wash her hair before school. He bought a lot of prom dresses and cars. He built a treehouse for his grandson. He buried his father, and visits his mother nearly every week.

He worked 60- and 80- hour weeks so his family could live in a gorgeous house and pay for college, still managing to find time to volunteer at his church and in his community. He’s always been the one people go to for advice, or a job, or a little extra money. He’s been there, always there, solid and uncomplicated, at least on the surface. But that short time in combat left an indelible mark. Gray can’t hear out of one ear, courtesy of a grenade that went off too close to him. He still has scars, and sometimes nightmares.

As I’ve gotten older and endured hard times of my own, I’ve gained a much greater appreciation for what it must have taken him to move through the trauma of combat to lead not just a productive life, but an extraordinary one. My sisters and I joke that the reason none of us are married is because we’ll never find a guy who’ll match our dad for honor and integrity.

I’m immensely proud of my dad’s service to his country. But I’m so much more proud of the love and support he’s shown his family and community over the ensuing four decades.

"Big Tent" FAIL

A) there are gay conservatives. B) at least one person wants a gay conservative group, GoProud, barred from attending next year's CPAC convention.

Just seems like a bad idea to be booting supporters when you're already in the minority.

I heart parlimentary procedure

This is what a slap-fight in the U.S. Senate looks like:

One hell of a “single issue”

The topic of the day is not so much the fact that Democrats in the Senate corralled the 60 votes needed to advance health insurance reform legislation, but the compromises they had to make with conservative and independent members of the caucus in order to get there – namely, ditching the public option (still a piece of the House bill) and increasing restrictions on abortion funding.

It’s the second one I want to talk about. I can’t speak for every pro-choicer out there, but I for one have had to do a lot of soul-searching over the past two months. I’ve had to think about my priorities. Namely, is true reproductive freedom – where contraception and surgical abortion are not merely legal, but available – enough of a deal-breaker for me to support jettisoning reform altogether? Am I truly a “single-issue” voter?

That’s the situation we find ourselves in today. In both the House and the Senate, the reform bills arguably would not have passed without concessions to anti-choice Congresspeople. While it continues to piss me off that health issues almost exclusively concerning women (or at least perceived as such) always seem to be at the top of the list of bargaining chips, I can’t ignore that fact that, if reform fails, women will also be hurt. Among those millions of uninsured Americans are women – pregnant women, women with breast cancer, women working two or three hourly-wage jobs to put food on the table.

Also, it’s plainer to me than ever that my personal position on reproductive care is well to the left of many Americans, and that this is largely due to the average American’s un-engagement with issues of women’s health. So those of us who support full reproductive freedom have the continuing responsibility to move the conversation away from inflammatory (and inaccurate) blow-up pictures of Photoshopped fetuses and educate our communities about how anti-choice laws are bad policy for everyone.

In other words, I’m okay with preserving the status quo on federal funding for abortion if it means we can improve the overall health care for millions of Americans. But the provisions in the House and Senate versions of the reform bill go far beyond that. Since 1976, it’s been illegal for federal funds (through Medicaid and other Department of Health and Human Services programs) to pay for abortions. Yes, this has disproportionally affected low-income women. Yes, there’s not a single abortion provider in nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties.

But that’s not good enough for Congress, apparently. For instance, the Senate bill that narrowly overcame a filibuster last night would affect everyone who gets a stipend to buy insurance (which would be quite a lot of us if the new law mandates that everyone buy coverage). According to RH Reality Check, the bill:

"Requires every enrollee--female or male--in a health plan that offers abortion coverage to write two separate checks for insurance coverage. One of these checks would go to pay the bulk of their premium, the other would go to pay the share of that premium that would ostensibly cover abortion care. Such a check would have to be written separately whether the share of the premium allocated for abortion care is .25 cents, $1.00, or $3.00 of the total premium on a monthly, semi-annual or annual basis. Employers that deduct employee contributions to health care plans from paychecks will also have to do two separate payments to the same company, again no matter how small the payment."

Sooo… It’s not enough that an individual writes a check, and then the insurance company itself divides the premium into pots (which several states already do with their federal Medicaid money in order to comply with the Hyde Amendment). Nope, everyone has to write two separate checks. Which of course will have the effect of reminding every single person writing that premium check once a month that abortion exists, and that people get them – and would do so in a more abstract way than, say, personally knowing a woman who needs an abortion halfway through her pregnancy for medical reasons. Remember that this will affect private insurance companies that currently cover abortion, and which have chosen to do so because their market demands it – so much for the idea that conservatives are A-OK with private enterprise!

It’s a blatant attempt to drum up negative feeling for reproductive health. If you think I’m being paranoid, ask yourself – where’s the separate “pot” for funding prescriptions for Viagra, or medicinal marijuana? Going beyond health care, why aren’t our income tax payments apportioned into the War Fund, or the Death Penalty Fund, or the Federal Subsidies for Factory Farms Fund? My tax dollars go to fund plenty of things of which I personally disapprove.

I am willing to support this initial effort to reform our broken health insurance system, which would benefit women in many ways (eliminating discrimination in premium costs for one thing; ending dropped coverage for actual sick people, another). But the current proposals go far beyond the restrictions on abortion funding we’ve had for more than 30 years. It’s patently unfair for anyone in Congress to hold reproductive health hostage as part of such a critical piece of legislation. If they want to further restrict access to a legal medical procedure, let them write and submit a separate bill.

NASCAR is hockey, and NASCAR fans are Boof

Full disclosure: I don’t follow the NHL. I didn’t even know that the Carolina Hurricanes were in the Stanley Cup Finals this spring until I found myself fighting through traffic on the way to my youngest sister’s graduation from N.C. State at the same time as a finals match the night before. (Although I have to give major kudos to the staff of the RBC Center for turning an ice skating rink into a chair-filled floor in roughly six hours.)

So I never really thought to make the comparison between the NHL and NASCAR until I read the second part of Bill Simmons’ e-mail exchange with Malcolm Gladwell:

"The league had 24 teams when [Gary] Bettman took over, including eight in Canada. Now they have a whopping 30 teams, including more warm-weather American teams (L.A., Phoenix, Nashville, Carolina, Tampa, Florida, Atlanta, Anaheim) than Canadian teams (only six). Here's Canada, the country that loves hockey more than anyone loves anything … and it only represents 20 percent of the National Hockey League. This is the single dumbest true fact in sports right now. And it happened on Bettman's watch."

Gosh, that sounded familiar. A lot of long-time NASCAR fans feel that the sanctioning body has moved from its loyal base in the same way. Since I started really following NASCAR in 2002, The Body has removed all top-series races from N.C. Speedway in Rockingham and shuffled other parts of the schedule around, such as moving the traditional Labor Day weekend race away from Darlington.

The schedule doesn’t really reflect the extent to which NASCAR has moved away from its base in the rural South, though. For instance, remember the first year that Nextel (now Sprint) signed on as title sponsor, and the pre-season fan day was moved from Winston-Salem to Daytona? (And got, what, roughly 10 percent of the attendance that our fan day drew?) More than that, there’s a perception problem among long-time fans in what had always been NASCAR’s core geographic area. When I interviewed fans at a local track for my undergrad thesis back in 2004, I found a very real belief that NASCAR as an institution was abandoning the very people who made the sport the multi-billion-dollar force that it is. The complaints ranged from ditching Rockingham and North Wilkesboro to competition changes (such as the “lucky dog” rule) to a suspicion of younger, unproven drivers who were better corporate spokesmen than the Ward Burtons of the world.

Why? Let’s be very, brutally realistic: it’s true that, as the auto racing critics say, watching 40-some cars go around an oval for four hours is not, in and of itself, terribly compelling. What made stock car racing interesting was two things: the spectacle of raw machinery and ingenuity – who is clever enough to build the best car, and bold enough to push it to its limits? – and personal identification with the sports’ participants.

And that, more than dumping Rockingham, is what has sapped NASCAR of its intrigue in the last few years. Jimmie Johnson just won his fourth championship in a row. And I yawned. Nothing against Johnson – he’s a talented driver on an incredibly well-managed team, and I’m sure he’s a lovely person. He’s not the first driver to win multiple championships, even successive championships. Hell, Richard Petty and David Pearson used to regularly win races by multiple laps. But NASCAR fans still cared then, where they don’t so much now.

Why? Part of it is a failure to personally identify with the drivers who currently dominate the cup series, for whatever reason. I for one don’t think it’s as simple as geography (Johnson being from California). I think it’s a shift from drivers from a blue collar background to drivers who came up racing from childhood. Not horrible… but it does mean that fans who felt a kinship with Dale Earnhardt (age 28 in his 1979 “rookie” season) won’t relate as closely with drivers who come up through development programs and land their first full-time rides in their teens.

Can you imagine the media obsession that we’d get if, say, the Patriots won four Super Bowls in a row? None of that happened with Johnson. Which, to me, says that the national sporting collective consciousness doesn’t really care that much about NASCAR or who wins its championship. Which further suggests to me that, if NASCAR wants to keep the fans who a Sports Illustrated survey found had close to a 90 percent loyalty to sponsors, they should forget trying to catch the general ESPN audience and go back to what made them.

I could be wrong… People who are far more in-the-know than me obvs don’t feel the same way. But I can’t help but think that, if this were a romantic comedy/sports flick, we’d now be at the point where our hero NASCAR has all the money and success he always dreamed of, but felt strangely unfulfilled and found himself dreaming of the sorta rednecky gal next door who loved him when.

Remember who's using you, military

I got home late from a Christmas party last night, and indulged in one (more) glass of wine while scanning the evening headlines. When I read about how GOP Senators were planning to filibuster a military spending bill, openly admitting that their goal was to disrupt a health care reform vote, I just assumed I was reading it wrong. So I read the article again - nope, no misunderstanding. Just disgust. (Luckily, they failed.)

"Most of us are going to support the Department of Defense appropriations bill when the time is right, but I think it is very important to have the opportunity to talk about the health care bill,” said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

Asked if he would vote for the defense bill, which Republicans routinely support, Senator Sam Brownback Republican of Kansas, replied bluntly: “No. I don’t want health care.”

The idea was that, if the Republicans had thrown up a roadblock to a routine military appropriations bill, the Senate would have had less time to debate and vote on a health care reform bill before the session ends for the holidays. So, in other words, all but three Republican members of the Senate voted to hold up funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a cynical attempt to screw the president.

How full of shit is this? Sen. Russ Feingold, who reflexively votes against any funding for anything defense-related, voted to end the filibuster (even though he'll probably vote against the final version of the funding bill later this weekend).

Money for military operations [was] due to run out Friday under a stop-gap bill and the Senate needs to either complete the bill or pass another extension while the spending bill is completed.

The Pentagon measure also includes a two-month extension of unemployment benefits and health insurance for out-of-work Americans as well as temporary renewals of several expiring federal programs and laws.

Democrats chided Republicans for forcing the procedural vote on a measure they would normally support, saying it was a flawed strategy to slow down Pentagon money in their anger over health care.

“There is no more important bill for the safety of our troops,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “I think they picked the wrong bill.”

Question: if the Democrats had pulled this at any point during the Bush Administration, how loudly would the entire population of the Fox News Network be screaming? How many years would this be brought up to demonstrate that Democrats are anti-military?

Tea Party movement fracture?

According to various media reports this week, the Tea Party movement is splitting into different factions based on differing priorities.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Teapocalypse - The Tea Party Split
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

This reminds me of a joke I heard once. A ship traveling the South Pacific notices a distress signal, and discovers a small, uncharted island in the distance. As they approach, they see three huts built on a bluff. Well, the ship reaches the island and finds a lone man who'd wrecked there months earlier. He's thrilled to meet his rescuers, and they're naturally fascinated by how he managed to survive on a desert island for so long.

The crew asks about the three huts on the hill, and the man tells him about building shelter for himself. "I'm a Southern Baptist," he goes on. "And so, once my personal shelter was taken care of, my first priority was building a place where I could worship God."

Wow, that's really cool, the crew said. So, one hut for you to live in, another for a church. What about the third hut?

"Oh," the rescued man says with a disdainful sniff. "That's the church I used to go to."

Krugman on cap-and-trade

One of the reasons I love Paul Krugman is that he's a pundit with a memory that goes back further than last week. Case in point: in assessing whether instituting a cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions would work or would cripple the U.S. economy, Krugman looks at the way our country handled the acid rain threat back when I was an earnest elementary school budding environmentalist:

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today’s fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Cap-and-trade isn't the government telling businesses what to make and how to make it - it's offering a mechanism by which businesses can profit from reduced emissions.

Last week, I interviewed the owner of Leon's Beauty School in Greensboro, who just installed 165 solar panels and four geothermal panels on the school's roof. She did it because she found out she could get a tax break for doing so, and is now looking for other "green" modifications that will make her business more profitable. Or, as we also call it: capitalism.

Look, right now we have a system of incentives dictated by coal-corporation lobbyists. Cap-and-trade shifts that agenda-setting function to the public, in the form of governments full of people that you and I select to make decisions, and whom we can influence. Between the two, I'd rather have a system where I can have a voice.

Cal Cunningham enters U.S. Senate race

Cal Cunningham, a veteran and former state legislator from Lexington, had initially demurred... but a healthy grassroots movement encouraged him to enter the race against Sen. Richard Burr next year. Along with N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and Kenneth Lewis, Cunningham will run in the Democratic primary next year.

Target: Mommies

I have a very clear memory of going to Mayfest in Pilot Mountain with my sister Maria and my nephew Alex when Alex was about three months old. I was away at college when he was born, so this was the first time I’d really been around him with any regularity. Anyway, at one point Maria pulled the stroller into the side street across from Hardee’s, next to the funeral home that’s now a bed & breakfast, to reapply Alex’s sunscreen. Since his hair was still pretty thin, it went all over his scalp, over the backs of his ears, down his neck – basically every bit of skin that wasn’t covered by clothing.

Alex did not enjoy this; he started crying. Or maybe he was hot and he started crying, or irritated by the constant banjo music and he started crying, or just pissed off at the world because sometimes infants get that way and he started crying. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, we hadn’t made it 20 feet back down Main Street before Alex’s face had turned beet red.

A woman passing us glanced down at the red-faced, wailing baby, then glared up at my sister. “That baby’s got a sunburn,” she said – using the same tone with which most of us would say “Your baby’s playing in traffic. With knives” – before waddling on her merry way. I was furious – a) who the hell do you think you are? And b) his mother JUST slathered him with half a bottle of Coppertone, and c) seriously, who the hell do you think you are?

Maria just let it roll off her back. You need to understand, she told me, that once you have kids, everybody and their brother assumes that you need and want their advice, and have no compunction about sharing it with you. Even if they’re perfect strangers passing you on the street.

Our culture still treats women as if we’re public property**, but you’d think that mothers of all people would be exempt from the Greek Chorus of What You’re Doing Wrong. But no – mothers might even have it worse than the rest of us. Recently, a breastfeeding mother was kicked out of a Target store in Michigan for doing what society would judge her for if she HADN’T been doing it. It’s like a psycho patriarchal choose-your-own-adventure book:

You don’t have kids? Man-hating whore.
You do have a baby? Ah, but what birthing method did you use? WRONG!
You dared to leave the house with your baby, and now the baby’s hungry and crying in the store/on the plane? Why don’t you feed that baby already?
Oooooh, you breastfeed? Why don’t you use a breastpump and bottles, or formula?
You can’t afford a breastpump and its accessories, or they just don’t work for you? Hmm, well, I don’t know, but you’re still wrong.

Mothers can’t win. Despite the fact that they’ve brought into the world and are rearing children, mothers are treated as children themselves, with perfect strangers who know nothing about their circumstances questioning their every decision. I don’t even HAVE kids and I’m already sick of it.

Can we please just stop? Can we collectively stifle this urge to second-guess the parents of other people’s children (excepting cases of clear abuse)? We can’t, as a culture, claim to value families and then throw up crazy barriers in the faces of those same families. If I see a woman breastfeeding in Target, or changing a diaper in a restroom, or anything else… I just can’t see how it’s any of my business.


**I talk a lot about the experience of women because, duh, I am one, but I’d very much like to hear from men who also feel that our culture objectifies their lives and experiences.

Quickie: Meet Marc Trestman

The Charlotte Observer's Tom Sorensen is going for "reality check" in this piece, arguing that retired Steelers coach Bill Cowher might not be the best replacement for Carolina Panthers coach John Fox, should Fox be fired at the end of this season. His suggestion? Montreal Alouettes head coach Marc Trestman.

Trestman is older than I would like for a hypothetical new Panthers head coach, but his resume looks intriguing.

THIS IS NOT FUNNY

Is anyone else getting REALLY tired of the “Ha, ha, Tiger got his ass beat”-type remarks we’ve been hearing all week? I feel like I can’t get away from them. Bill Simmons managed to slip three into one column today, including a segment allegedly written by his wife:

"I wish Mrs. Tiger would admit what she did, if she did anything. She won't because Florida has strong domestic violence laws. California does not. If Bill ever follows Tiger's skank-chasing footsteps, I am going to beat him to death with his 2.8-pound book, while also having sex with cabana boys and masseurs. There will be no mystery about what happened.”

Okay… let’s just hop in our time machines a minute and go back a few months to when Chris Brown beat up his then-girlfriend, Rihanna. If Simmons had joked about beating his wife to death, should she have acted like Rihanna (having the temerity to demand that he not cheat on her, apparently) – oh, my hell, I can’t imagine how quickly ESPN would yank him off their Web site and set fire to the server holding his column archive.

But it’s okay to joke about Tiger Woods? For the record, none of us will ever know if Woods’ wife did in fact physically attack him early last Friday morning, and he’s saying she didn’t. But that’s beside the point. Why is this supposed to be funny? Oh, yeah, because men can’t be victims of domestic violence or something. Hardy frakking har.

Men are also apparently un-rapeable, if you ask the dipshit that wrote this in the New York Observer. Let’s put aside for a moment the revelation that there is now officially no single demographic category of women who can’t be described as animals (cheetah, really?). The behavior described in this piece (exaggerated for effect though it may be) isn’t douchey or predatory – it’s rape. Feministe switched up the genders in one exchange… see what you think:

Sharon had allowed the open bar to get the better of her. She knew she was completely wasted. What she didn’t know was that a predator was watching her every move…

Jennifer said, “O.K., I think she needs to go home.”

David, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”

“I wanna go home,” Sharon warbled.

“O.K., I’ll take her home,” David said.

Jennifer gave Sharon a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take her home.”

“Don’t worry about it,” David said, hailing a cab and then bundling Sharon inside…

A few months later, Sharon found herself watching helplessly late one night as David picked off one of her pals much the same way he had her: The girl was babbling, stumbling drunk…

“He knows what he’s doing,” Sharon told me.

Comedy is about transgression; turn something commonplace on its head, and it’s automatically funny. A male victim of domestic violence or sexual assault is supposed to be humorous because it goes against the far-more-typical case of a female victim. The problem is that there ARE male victims of the type of intimate partner violence we normally associate with women.

Don’t believe me? Ask Fred Lane. The wife who murdered him got out of prison earlier this year. ROTFLMAO.

"Everyone suffers"

Actor Patrick Stewart on his experience living with domestic violence:



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi_27bpIb30

Crimes against women are crimes, too

Maurice Clemmons, the man suspected of murdering four Seattle-area police officers yesterday morning, was out on bail on a charge of raping a 12-year-old girl. Clemmons, a multiple-felon with a previous rape on his record (for which then-Governor Mike Huckabee granted him clemency in 2000), had a $15,000 bond.

In October, a short walk from my house, a man who had assaulted two different women murdered Sgt. Mickey Hutchens and wounded another officer when they responded to a call from his ex-wife. Monte Denard Evans had convictions for robbery, in addition to the assault charges for which he apparently served no time.

Is is time to finally admit that, if we start taking seriously violent crimes against women and girls, that MAYBE we'll protect the wider community (including law enforcement) as well?

True Colors

On the Saturday before Election Day last year, I volunteered at an early voting site in the northern part of the county. Being that we were there for three hours or so, the volunteer from the county Republican Party and I got to chatting. He was a pleasant elderly man, and I enjoyed talking with him despite our differences. At one point, he asked me why I didn’t support the McCain/Palin ticket since I was a woman myself.

He wasn’t being snarky; he genuinely didn’t understand why progressive women – feminists – weren’t falling in line behind then-Governor Palin. I told him that her gender was irrelevant to me, and that her stated positions were pretty much the polar opposite of mine. But I don’t think he really got it – how I could separate a candidate’s identity from her issues.

I was reminded of that conversation today when I heard this segment from Glenn Beck’s radio program, where the popular Beck jokes about the impossibility of a Palin/Beck ticket in 2012. Beck/Palin would be okay, he says, but:

"I was just thinking, what, I'm going to take a back seat to a chick?" Beck quipped, to laughter from the studio. "Go shoot a bear, make some stew, I'm hungry in here."

"So while she's considering it ... I just want her to know, I'm ruling it out. A Palin-Beck ticket, I'm absolutely ruling it out… I'm just saying, Beck-Palin, I'll consider. But Palin-Beck -- can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? She'd be yapping or something, I'd say, 'I'm sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I'm not in the kitchen.' I mean, you'd have to live up to the evil conservative stereotypes, you'd have no choice but to do so."

Wow. I mean… wow. Before making this statement, Beck had made fun of Palin’s speech (the same folksiness that conservative pundits keep insisting to me is part of her charm). Then there’s the “make me a sammitch” BS, followed by some weak attempt to say that he doesn’t really think that about Palin, but those crazy liberals just think he thinks that.

Except that, before today, I never would’ve thought that of Beck. I would’ve assumed that, as the standard-bearer for the tea-party wing of the conservative party, that Beck would have an affinity for the politician who’s hugely popular among that contingent. It was surprising, and disturbing, to see that Beck apparently sees Palin as a “chick” first (a stereotyped one at that), and a political figure second. Given recent complaints from conservative talking heads that it’s the left wing who unfairly targets female conservatives, Beck’s comments are that much more bizarre. Whether Beck’s view represents a larger problem with tokenism in the Republican Party – rather than treating women and minorities as human beings – I can’t say.

Look, I disagree with Palin’s politics and worldview in nearly every way, and I think she needs to do some serious work before she’s qualified to hold national office. But she deserves far better than this. I hope she field-dresses that whiny little weasel.

The NFL is playing through the pain

If you know me, you know how much I love football. I love offensive linemen and blocking tight ends, and I love quarterbacks who are willing to scramble through the line to pick up a first down. I get irritated at sloppy tackling, and I hate watching a running back or a kick returner lose 20 yards trying to run around a gang of defenders instead of plowing through them.

So this is a problem when I think about how much the physical play that I consider to be “real” football takes a toll on the players themselves. Just this evening, for instance, I learned that Ben Roethlisberger will not start against the Ravens on Sunday night due to concussion-esque effects of an injury he sustained last week in the Steelers’ loss to Kansas City. Roethlisberger is possibly my favorite single current player, in large part because of his style of play. His absence in a division game with wildcard playoff-spot implications is devastating. At the same time, the decision will be better for his long-term health (and the team’s), so it’s ultimately the right thing.

After years of anecdotal evidence indicating severe consequences of those hard hits, the NFL is finally taking begrudging baby steps to address the seriousness of concussions. Sports Illustrated’s Will Carroll has been recommending that players use outside neurologists, as opposed to team doctors, for some time now. An NFL commission has now recommended the same thing. (This week, the commission’s co-chairs resigned; one of them is notorious for denying a link between repeated head injury and later cognitive problems, including dementia.)

The league could move to take the decision to start away from the players. It could make new rules to protect defenseless players (like popular quarterbacks), or maybe increase the penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits. None of that will keep a QB from sliding head-first into a crowd, as Roethlisberger did last Sunday.

When NASCAR addressed this issue a few years ago, the worry was that drivers would hide concussions in order to get around rules requiring them to sit out until they’d healed. There’s the same danger in any sport. After all, you’re talking about highly competitive people who are rightly petrified of being labeled injury-prone. When you’re weighing a handful of games, not to mention the attendant glory and salary bonuses, against the abstract risk of developing Alzheimer’s in your 40s, it’s easy to talk yourself into playing through the pain.

So changing the culture of the NFL in an effort to reduce concussions is an uphill battle. One doesn’t become an elite athlete by playing it safe. Athletes at any level succeed by convincing themselves that discomfort is part of the battle, whether it’s two-a-day practices in August or adding another 10 pounds to what you lifted in your last set. The people (like me) who don’t feel that this type of physical sacrifice is worth it simply don’t become the Roethlisbergers or the Lance Armstrongs or the Serena Williamses of the world.

And isn’t that why we love sports? It’s the spectacle of these super-humans pushing themselves to nearly impossible feats. Sports are the ultimate drama; as my hero Roland Barthes said of auto racing, “To stop is virtually to die.” But the physical toll that athletes sustain in the process of cheating death on the field ultimately endangers their real lives. Another Steeler, Mike Webster, shows us that – while an extreme case, Webster is hardly an isolated one.

Professional athletes make a calculated risk and are highly compensated for it. But the vast majority of athletes in this country will never get paid a dime for it. When sports commentators praise the Detroit Lions’ Matt Stafford for finishing a game with a mangled shoulder, or rip officials for supposedly giving Tom Brady special treatment, players at the high school level hear them, too. It matters.

So, what do we do with all this? Just stop playing or watching sports? Yuck, I hope not. What I would like to see is sports leagues and teams – from small town T-ball programs to the NFL – do a better job of explaining the impact of injury to their participants, and to stop abetting the instinct to play hurt. I’d like to see better, more holistic conditioning. Instead of making a pre-teen pitcher toss 200 softballs every day during the off-season, get her some yoga lessons. Send your star defensive end to ballet class. (Yes, I’m serious.) Do more on the front end with nutrition and rest, and de-emphasize the players-as-cannon-fodder model. Our athletes, and by extension, our sports, will be better off.

Quickie: Fox News discovers journalism

In light of some recent high-profile on-screen errors, such as implying that b-roll shot at one event is actually from a totally different one, the brass at Fox News issued a memo stating in no uncertain terms that there will be "zero tolerance" for future screw-ups.

All snark aside, the memo's statement that "It is more important to get it right than it is to get it on" should be standard operating procedure for any news organization.

Chris Matthews and Bishop Tobin

I'm not a big fan of Chris Matthews, but I love what he does in this interview with Bishop Tobin, the Rhode Island archbishop who's allegedly told Rep. Patrick Kennedy not to take communion because he supports keeping abortion legal:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It occurred to me while watching this that I have no idea what Rep. Kennedy's personal views on reproductive freedom are. It's entirely possible that he is personally pro-life. But he took an oath to vote for legislation that represents good policy, and outlawing abortion has proven to be very bad policy. Matthews is exactly right - the archbishop has no business inserting himself into the complicated, sometimes murky business of crafting and passing legislation. Bishop Tobin admitted as much himself.

“The Blind Side”

I went with my parents and nephew last night to see “The Blind Side.” You may recall that the first trailer for “The Blind Side” raised my hackles, appearing to turn the story of a young black man into a feel-good story about a white woman. On the whole, though, I was pleasantly surprised. I really, really liked it.

I was expecting the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book to dumb down the football; it doesn’t. (There’s even a replay of the infamous Joe Theismann leg break that starts off the book – you’ve been warned.) The film does compress Michael Oher’s high school career and ends with him going to college, but that’s because the film chooses to focus less on Oher’s development as a football player and more on his extraordinary personal journey.

In a nutshell, Oher was an essentially homeless ward of the state with no educational background when he was accepted into a tony Christian private school along with a family friend. A wealthy white family first lets him crash on their couch, then starts buying him clothes, and then gradually welcomes Oher into their family, finally becoming his legal guardians.

The film actually tones down the more Dickensian aspects of Oher’s life before meeting the Tuohy family. We see him carrying his one change of clothes in a grocery bag everywhere he goes, spending the night in laundromats and scrounging popcorn left in the stands after a volleyball game. At times it seems emotionally manipulative, but the thing is, is all true (at least as told by the book – I have no idea how accurate that was).

And the film gives Oher more agency than I was expecting from that first trailer. Too often in these “magical negro” movies, where people of color only exist to help white people reach enlightenment, the black characters aren’t allowed to have their own opinions or anxieties. But, even though Oher doesn’t talk much, we do get to hear how isolated he feels in the nearly all-white, affluent school, and we do see his protectiveness of the people he cares about and his fear of being abandoned or used.

Unfortunately, every other black character is presented as being exotic, threatening, otherworldy. The character of a drug dealer in Oher’s old neighborhood, who’s meant to represent what Oher’s trying to escape, is a total cliché straight out of an after-school special… but as a symbol, that’s kind of what he’s supposed to do. We briefly glimpse Oher’s mother and a brother, and these peripheral bits have the effect of reminding us how totally Oher is apart from his blood family.

While the film adaptation (like the book) acknowledges the problem of racial privilege, it doesn’t go much beyond that. Mrs. Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) has to call out the ladies-who-lunch friends who worry about having a young black man around her teenaged daughter, and she admits the reality that so many men from Oher’s background – athletically gifted or not – too often get caught up in gang violence, sometimes fatally.

But the same questions that the book occasionally brings up go unanswered here. While the Tuohys’ charity is remarkable, even radical, and certainly altered the course of Michael Oher’s life, what about the institutional problems that disadvantaged him to begin with? What role do racism and poverty play there? The Tuohys are conservatives – did they change their opinions about the importance of government safety-net programs in alleviating these problems? Above all, if Michael Oher were a 150-pound piano prodigy, would this story end the same way?

My hope is that people seeing “The Blind Side” will be inspired to look further into these questions, and not just take the film at its well-made face value. So, as a film, I’d give “The Blind Side” somewhere between 2.5 and three stars. As a cultural artifact, it’s not quite there.

A grammar nerd nit-picks

Just now I clicked on a link that took me to a poll on the Fox News Web site, and I noticed (for the first time, really) their logo. I've long thought that their motto was "fair and balanced," (we can debate the veracity of that), but it turns out that it's actually "Fair & Balanced," with an ampersand.

And I quote, directly from my AP Stylebook: "The ampersand should not otherwise be used in place of and."

Philosophical inclinations aside, I simply can't place my trust in a news organization that can't follow basic rules of punctuation. Unless "Fair" and "Balanced" are the names of people who work within the Fox News organization, the use of the ampersand is just plain wrong.

N.C. GOP clubhouse: members only

My first thought when I read this morning that the N.C. Republican Party is considering closing its primary - a thought that popped into my head before I finished the first paragraph - was, "Oh, this is a very bad idea."

The rationale for closing the primary - allowing only registered Republicans to vote in primary elections - is that open primaries dilute the pool, meaning that the Republicans who win and go on to the general election aren't as conservative as they would be without the influence of unaffiliated voters, who tend to be more moderate. To which I say, "And this is a problem?"

Apparently is IS a problem for many actual Republicans, who think that many of the candidates they've nominated aren't true-believery enough, like that Commie John McCain (sarcasm alert). The problem is that, in this state, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by over 800,000 voters. And there are 1,3 million voters who are registered as unaffiliated - 22 percent of all registered voters. Altogether, registered Republicans are only 31 percent of voters in North Carolina.

As things stand now, a registered unaffiliated voter can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. This is a big part of the appeal to voters who want to register, but don't want to allign themselves with any particular party. They can tack toward one party or another from election to election without having to change registration. The open primaries make a place for a lot of people who would otherwise not get involved in politics at all.

And these free agents, who really do impact elections, are unaffiliated largely because they're allergic to partisan politics. So, telling them, "You can't vote in this primary election unless you stamp yourself with an 'R'" doesn't strike me as the best way to reach them.

Moreover, restricting your primary so that you produce candidates who are going to be more conservative than 70 percent of registered voters are comfortable having seems to me to be a perfect recipe for losing every election from now on. I suppose it depends on one's goals - is the N.C. GOP interested in finding and electing candidates that will truly represent the needs of a majority of constituents, or only in growing progressively more partisan?

Dan Savage on Carrie Prejean

Savage Love's Dan Savage, a gay husband and father, feels sorry for Carrie Prejean. He sees her as a flawed human being pushed into being a Christian icon by people with their own agenda, which is kind of how I feel about her:

"I thought Perez Hilton went too far when he labeled Prejean a bitch for her response to his question. But I quickly came around to Perez's position—she is bitch—after Prejean leapt into bed with Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization for Marriage... Anyway, back to Prejean: I thought Perez Hilton went too far when he labeled Prejean a bitch for her response to his question. But I quickly came around to Perez's position—she is bitch—after Prejean leapt into bed with Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization for Marriage... It seemed like a transparent effort on Prejean's part to cash in, to parlay her loss at the Miss USA pageant into a career as a spokesmodel for the religious right. Prejean's sudden passion for anti-gay politicking seemed insincere and opportunistic—she hadn't been publicly religious, politically active, or rabidly homophobic until after the pageant—and that's why she drew the scorn of mean-spirited bloggers everywhere.

And now we have proof that the person Prejean pretended to be after that pageant—the good Christian girl with a strong moral code who was chosen by God to stick it to the homos—doesn't jibe with the person she was before the pageant, i.e. a highly sexual and sexually active young woman with breast implants and a string of ex-boyfriends to her name... And honestly—now that this is all over—I feel kind of sorry for Prejean. She thought she was being attacked by All Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (AGLE) after one gay dude, Perez Hilton, called her name. And then Maggie and NOM and the conservative Christian movement offered her a chance to get back at the homos and make herself a huge pile of money in the process. The praised her, advised her, and pretended to be her friends. All she had to do was play the martyr and tell her story. But when her real story got out—when those pictures and videos got out—Maggie and NOM and her new friends dropped her. Perez abused her, Maggie used her, and now she's done."

Where no religious body seeks to impose its will

I'm getting seriously pissed off at the extent to which the Catholic Church has lately inserted itself into political issues. In the last few weeks, the church leadership has called out pro-choice Congressmen, publicly attempted to influence the issue of abortion coverage in health care reform legislation and threatened to cancel its contracts with Washington, D.C., if the district okays same-sex marriage.

First of all, since when do religious groups openly lobby political figures? I'm not talking about the passive-aggressive stuff we've seen for years now. I'm talking about a bishop telling Rep. Patrick Kennedy that he shouldn't be allowed to receive sacraments unless he starts voting the way the bishop wants him to. (Yes, out of all the pro-choice Catholics in Congress, Bishop Tobin goes after the one whose last name is guaranteed to grab headlines. Total coincidence, I'm sure.)

It wasn't even 50 years ago that Rep. Kennedy's uncle, running for president at the time, gave a speech to a group of nervous Protestant ministers about his views on the relationship between personal faith and public governance. You should really read the whole thing, but one section is particularly relevant, given recent events:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote ... where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

My other objection is on purely moral grounds. I am so sick and frakking tired of alleged Christians who behave as though their top priority is making other people's lives as miserable as possible. So, Washington Diocese, you're going to stop sheltering the homeless and finding homes for orphans as long as two men can get partner benefits, really? You think THAT'S what Jesus wants you to do??? You're going to help trash legislation that would relieve suffering for the sick and poor because some woman somewhere is taking advantage of her Constitutionally protected right to control the timing and number of her pregnancies? That's your idea of social justice? (What would Jesus do? Not take his ball and go home, I'd bet.)

But what's the most disturbing is the church's implied threat that elected officials who don't vote exactly as they're told will be exiled from salvation - as if Bishop Tobin and his ilk have any say in the matter. I suppose this is my Protestant bias showing, but I have always believed and always will believe that no earthly bureacracy gets to dictate what my beliefs should be - that's between me and God. So, for Bishop Tobin to tell Kennedy or any other Catholic that receiving communion is contingent on casting Bishop Tobin-approved votes is not just a gross intrusion into government - it's also an abominable overstepping of bounds into Kennedy's personal relationship with God. Who the hell does he think he is?

I understand that the Catholic Church's official positions on many things are counter to mine - reproductive freedom and LGBT equality being two. And I don't expect them to keep their mouths shut. Bishop Tobin and any other minister can counsel and preach on their understanding of Scripture 'til the cows come home. But what they *don't* get to do is a) threaten people elected by the public to govern civic affairs, or b) threaten ANY member of the congregation with some Earth-bound litmus test.

It's Veterans Day, y'all!

At 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, the war we now call World War I entered a cease-fire, or armistice (to be officially ended the next year with the Treaty of Versailles). President Wilson designated Nov. 11, 1919, as Armistice Day, and called for citizens to pause in their business for a few minutes at 11 a.m. Through the years, the day of remembrance moved from a year-to-year proclamation to an observance made in some states in late October, but since 1978, Veterans Day has been set at Nov. 11.

So, go hug a vet, will ya?

And, on a personal note, thanks to my Grandpa Butner, PawPaw Comer, my bad-ass step-dad and all of the millions of men and women who've sacrificed more than I'll ever comprehend. I just have no words.

Johnny Cash, American protest singer

Salon.com has a must-read about Johnny Cash's artistic activism on behalf of Native Americans, chiefly his 1964 album "Bitter Tears." Cash doesn't get enough credit for this kind of thing. Now that he's dead, dutifully memorialized in Hollywood film and celebrated by hipsters, it's easy to ignore the radicalism in songs like "Man in Black":

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.

Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Til things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black.

Still Whining

Carrie Prejean has a book out, and apparently a years-old sexting tape. And I really don’t care. But I DO care about defending myself.

Carrie, honey, you’re young and you’re going to make many more mistakes in your life. You got fired from your beauty queen job because you violated your contract. You’re still in the public eye because you choose to be. And, for the record, here’s how this particular leftist “attacked” you last May:

It's easy to defend people that you approve of. It's not easy for me to defend Carrie Prejean. I think her views on same-sex civil rights are elementary and based on a faulty interpretation of both scripture and law. I think she's letting herself be used by bigots who wouldn't give her the time of day if she weighed 300 pounds and had bushy eyebrows. But I also think that, as poor as her reasoning is, she has every right to her opinion. I also think that the nudie-picture/implant shaming of her is as sexist as when Laura Ingraham tried to shut down Meghan McCain by calling her "plus-sized." As Feministing wrote today, it's not okay to fight homophobia with misogyny.
So stop your whining. I never did anything to you.

Historic preservation vs. "property rights"

Last year, someone drove into my cousin Spring's mailbox. Shortly after it was replaced, Spring got a letter from her neighborhood association informing her that the numbers on her new mailbox did not fit the development's approved template. Seriously. Now, me personally, I don't like the idea of living in a place where they even HAVE approved templates for mailbox numbers, let alone where someone would go to the trouble of noticing the mailbox numbers and sending a multi-page letter to the offender. But Spring and her family knew when they bought a house in this particular neighborhood that there would be restrictions on what they could and couldn't do with their property, and the benefits outweighed the pain-in-the-ass factor.

Almost 30 years ago, Forsyth County named an 18th century home in Lewisville a local historic landmark, which meant that its owner could receive a substantial tax break in return for preserving the property. This isn't revolutionary. Certain places - such as extant historic landscapes, parks, etc. - belong to the public trust. This is something we as a society decided long ago. And it's fair that a property of public historic significance, but that is maintained by a private family, should be eligible for tax benefits in return.

But now the River John Conrad House's current owners, who bought the property in the late 90s, want to remove it from the list so that they can add a 6,000-square-foot addition, including a swimming pool. Not only would this radically alter the house, but construction of that size would destroy the property's archaeological record. And, in my view, it would also set a very dangerous precedent. If the current owners can successfully argue - decades later - that the act of historic restoration itself destroys the property's historic value - we're talking about standard practices such as replacing floorboards here - then why even HAVE the LHL designation in the first place?

I attended the September county commissioners meeting, where the board voted to ask the county's Historic Resources Commission to take a more detailed look. The board will hear the HRC's unanimous recommendation to keep the Conrad house of the LHL list tonight. Despite this recommendation from the board of local experts appointed to make these very sorts of recommendations, not to mention the State Historic Preservation Office's two cents, certain commissioners are just not hearing it. Two of them should arguably recuse themselves from the vote entirely given personal relationships with the petitioner.

I'm not going to call out certain allegedly moderate Democratic commissioners who are up for re-election next year, but who haven't changed their position on the de-list despite, literally, volumes of historic record, testimony from preservation experts and pleas from dozens of citizens. I'm just going to say that the "property rights" argument in favor of removing the Conrad house's status is horsesh*t. (Ask my cousin Spring's mailbox.)

Despite the common libertarian fantasy of no public standards whatsoever (or, as I call it, Somalia), our society has pretty much settled the idea that we give up a small amount of personal license for the good of the community. That's why I get nasty letters from the city when I let my grass grow too high. And that's why scuttling a decades-old policy that's helped build our community's unique character just because a commissioner whose name rhymes with Schmed Schmaplan has a buddy who wants to build a swimming pool is a REALLY bad idea.

Well, that didn't take long

It didn’t even take a full 24 hours for “Fox & Friends” to go there: should the military have special screenings for Muslim soldiers?

While he doesn’t challenge the BS assumption that the military and society at large have grown too “politically correct” (or that being aware of the sensitivities of non-white, able-bodied, hetero men is a negative), Geraldo at least mentions the fact that there are millions of Muslims in the military already. No one had the balls (or maybe the knowledge) to bring up Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine (and youngest-ever Eagle Scout) who killed 14 and wounded 32 in the 1966 University of Texas sniper attack. Should we have special screenings for white male Christians?

When I was reading about the alleged Fort Hood gunman this morning, what struck me was how familiar it all sounds: socially isolated, often under-employed man tries to attain some significance by getting a weapon and going out in a blaze of glory. From Lee Harvey Oswald to Whitman to Mark David Chapman to the man that shot up that gym in Pennsylvania this summer, it’s the same, sad story.

It’s going to take a lot more to convince me that one set of religious beliefs had anything to do with it.

A letter to Virginia Foxx

(Just sent... will let you know if I get a response)

Rep. Foxx,

I am incredibly bothered by the comparison you made today between health care reform and terrorism. It was offensive to people who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and in the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those that continue to fight terrorism in the military and law enforcement.

Anyone who has followed the debate over government-driven health insurance reform has concerns, particularly with the impact on our nation’s debt. But I think you and I have very different priorities.

I work at Guilford College, where my employer pays 75 percent of the cost of my health insurance. We’re in the process of re-bidding, and are looking at increases of between 3 and 25 percent. Aside from the substantial impact this increase will have on the college’s budget, which could reduce our ability to serve our core constituency, our students, higher-cost premiums will negatively affect employees.

For me, it's a pain, but it won't break me. For some of my co-workers, the additional expense will definitely be a hardship. I'm not just speculating here... I head up the staff association, and we're in the process of settling our winter service project. In the past, we've collected gifts, "angel tree" style, for staff members who need extra help around the holidays. These are employed, hard-working people who nevertheless couldn't afford to buy presents for their children, let alone paying heating bills, without assistance.

Last year, we collected money for a staff member who contracted an infection during her pregnancy that put her in a wheelchair, probably permanently. She couldn't afford to buy the wheelchair, though; we had a bake sale to raise money for her. She still comes to work every day in that same wheelchair.

Of course I’m concerned about increasing national debt to pay for health care reform. But I’m far more concerned about people who - no BS, no hyperbole - have to decide every month between paying the doctor or paying the light bill. They are not myths; I work with them every day.

Please reconsider your position.

I promise we're not all like this!

Question: why are people who think that government is somewhere between useless and evil so anxious to be part of it? In other words, if Rep. Virginia Foxx honestly thinks that health care reform is more dangerous for our country than this guy, why doesn't she run screaming out of the oh-so-scary House chamber back to her bunker? (Loan forgiveness for veterinary students! Horrors!)

Answer? She doesn't believe it. There are plenty of honest reasons to oppose this specific bill, but it's more fun to frighten her constituents with lies. For frak's sake, Virginia... if you have issues with the bill, then use your Constitutionally mandated authority to change it. Don't make everybody in northwest North Carolina look like an idiot.

Cautionary tale, meet victim-blaming

The blog Helpful Comments has compiled comments from an AOL news story about the girl who was gang-raped at a school dance last week. All I can say is, they have stronger stomachs than I do. She – a 15-year-old, by the way – was drinking. She was wearing a skirt. She was female in the presence of rapists. All of which are apparently mitigating factors in the minds of these commentors.

When I take a cleansing breath, I can give great benefit of the doubt to these commentors and assume that they’re not *actually* blaming the victim of a gang-rape that put her in the hospital, that instead they’re trying to dig out from this awful incident some sort of cautionary lesson.

Unfortunately, in the rape apologist’s scramble to find some way to find fault with the victim in order to assure him/herself that something like this would NEVER happen to them, or their daughter, or their sister, they ARE, in fact, blaming the victim. I can promise you that this young woman is revisiting every decision she made that night, second-guessing, asking herself, if I’d only done this, not done this, then I wouldn’t have been in the position for this thing to have happened to me. I can promise you that she’s feeling every iota of her part in what happened to her that night, and will for the rest of her life.

Every rape-prevention program in this country does the same thing – don’t walk alone at night, don’t dress provocatively, carry mace, etc. How about this… DON’T RAPE PEOPLE. It just seems so much simpler, no?

My favorite local ghosts

So here I am on Halloween night, hanging out at home instead of trick-or-treating for free drinks (‘cause I still have the sniffles), but there’s a “Ghost Hunters” special on SyFy, so it’s all good. I have a long-standing fantasy that Jason and Grant and the rest of the TAPS team will roll into my neighborhood and spend a solid week investigating my favorite creepy spots. (A girl can dream…)

When I worked at Old Salem, it seemed like every historic interpreter had spooky first-hand experience. Certainly, spending as much time as we did in old buildings heightened our senses, so I’m open to the idea that we can chalk up most of these experiences to the power of suggestion. I don’t put a lot of stock in the most often-published Salem ghost stories, the Tavern Ghost and the Single Brothers House’s “Little Red Man,” for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. Likewise, in my time at Salem Academy and College, I heard a few creepy stories, some of which seemed more believable to me than others.

So, should the Ghost Hunters ever make their way to Winston-Salem, here’s my wish list:

Old Salem – the Tavern Museum
Yes, I know I just said I don’t believe in the “Tavern Ghost.” According to that legend, a Charleston businessman traveling through Salem died at the tavern and was buried in the strangers’ graveyard. Shortly after, tavern servants reported seeing an apparition in the attic, which communicated that it was the ghost of the dead man, and that his brother/fiancée/wife (depending on which version you read) could be contacted in Charleston. The tavern keeper sent a letter to the relative, who traveled to Salem to claim the man’s belongings and ask that he be reburied in God’s Acre. Once this was done, the haunting stopped.

According to the town records, a man named Samuel McClary died at the tavern the night of Sept. 6-7, 1831. He was very ill, and apparently was returning home to, yes, Charleston, after an unsuccessful trip to a hot spring. He was buried in the strangers’ graveyard either Sept. 7 or 8, then reburied Sept. 10 in God’s Acre, where you can still see his gravestone. Here’s the weird part – while the strangers’ graveyard, at the south end of Church Street, was intended for people who did not belong to Salem’s Moravian congregation, after about 1816 it was almost exclusively used for African Americans in the town, a refection of Salem’s deteriorating race relations. It’s not inconceivable that McClary’s relatives didn’t want him buried here, and asked that his body be moved up the hill to the cemetery with the white people. Such were the times.

But it’s hard to imagine a letter being mailed Sept. 7 even reaching Charleston in less than three days, let alone McClary’s family traveling back to Salem before Sept. 10. They must have already been close to Salem, which casts doubt on a ghost intervening to get them up here. (Thanks to my former Old Salem colleague Linda Cody, from whose paper much of this information is taken.)

That said, I think there’s *something* in the tavern museum. I always found it to be a supremely creepy place; it was by far my least favorite place to work. On the days when I was responsible for opening the building, I would unlock it and wait outside for someone else to arrive. And I was petrified of going upstairs, even with other people. I felt fine in the kitchen even the attic above… but upstairs where the guest rooms are always felt very sinister and threatening.

If you believe that people leave emotional energy behind, the tavern museum would be a rich spot. Some unhappy, even angry things happened there, particularly during the American Revolution. The tavern keeper and his wife lived in the building, but weren’t allowed to have their young children living with them. Entire families of enslaved people worked there at times. And some of the people who stayed there were sketchy, even violent.

So, basically, the place is *begging* for an extended EVP session and some electromagnetic field measurements.


Salem Academy – Patterson Hall
The facilities and housekeeping staffs at Salem A&C are bursting with stories of creepy encounters. Many of them told me about catching glimpses of the Academy’s resident ghost (doesn’t every school have one of these?), the “Lady in White.” But the story that I buy the most is much simpler… One of the staff, Darrell, told me about a time when he was working in one of Patterson Hall’s twin staircases (which go from the basement to the fourth floor), and hearing the sound of girls laughing, and footsteps that seemed to run down a flight of stairs right past him. This, and most of the other stories, happened during breaks when the building was empty.


Salem College – Main Hall
In my informal survey of campus haunts, I heard several independent stories of a figure spotted around the back on Main Hall – one moving along the back porch, and another few on the lower level of the History wing. Most described the figure as a woman wearing a black cloak or floor-length dress, with no face visible. It’s possible these people made the assumption that the figure was a woman simply because almost all of Salem’s population, past and present, are women. Again, all the sightings happened during the week in the winter where the campus is closed, and even faculty and staff are gone.


Salem Academy and College – Rondthaler-Gramley House
The R-G House, used for so many parties, weddings and other happy occasions, is the site of one of the most hair-raising incidents I’m aware of on Salem’s campus. In its history, it’s been a residence, a class building, an office building and now a guest house. One of my professors, who in her first year of teaching commuted from her home 90 minutes away, stayed there during the week. One night, something kept opening and closing the door to her room. She found the experience so frightening that she left that night, driving all the way home and refusing to enter the building alone after that. Even years later, she told me the story only reluctantly – even the memory was unpleasant. The R-G House is another building that I’ve never liked being in by myself.


Old Salem – Private home, Church Street
Though it’s in the historic district, this house is owned by the college, which rents it to staff members. I first read this story in a book about Triad hauntings. In the 1960s, a young couple moved in and found every door in the house stacked in the attic. They reinstalled them, and shortly after, various doors would slam shut day and night. Eventually, a medium told them that the ghost of an elderly woman lived in the house; she wasn’t a threat, but slammed the doors more for her own entertainment. Here’s the fun part: when the college bought the house (in the 90s, as best I can tell), the maintenance staff found all of the doors stacked up in the attic. The staff member who lived in the house when I worked there never reported any problems, so maybe the elderly ghost finally got bored and gave it up.


And, where the Ghost Hunters should NOT waste any time:

Old Salem – Single Brothers House
Here’s the documented information: in the late 18th Century, the men living in the house were digging a cellar underneath the south wing. One man, Andreas Kremser, had the unenviable job of digging out the bottom of an earth bank, which would then be allowed to collapse. Unfortunately, the wall of red clay collapsed on top of Brother Kremser. Several hours after obtaining massive internal injuries, Brother Kremser mercifully passed away.

The legend of the “Little Red Man,” which didn’t pop up for another century, has Kremser, a shoemaker, tapping his hammer all over the house (by that time, a residence for older women) and disappearing around dark corners, leaving only flashes of his red waistcoat behind. This pushes my BS button for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the story didn’t appear until an era where it was fashionable to live in a haunted house.

Nevertheless, it’s still the legend most popularly associated with Old Salem. For me, the Single Brothers House has always felt more like a college residence hall than anything.

It’s Hallowmas, y’all!

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I planned on doing a post about the origins of Halloween. I’m particularly interested in what Halloween “means,” or, why it’s still something we celebrate – its cultural purpose, as opposed to “because the Costume Industrial Complex tells us to.”

The good ol’ History Channel is a font of information – check out http://www.history.com/content/halloween for more than you ever wanted to know about everything Halloween.

In a nutshell, Halloween has its roots in the ancient Celtic new year’s observance Samhain, which marked the end of happy summer and yummy harvest, and the beginning of the many months my ancestors would spend holed up in their peat moss huts with their own livestock. The Celts’ belief system taught them that Samhain was a time where the line between the worlds between the living and the dead was thinner than normal, so it would be easier to tap into the spirit consciousness and predict the future. They would use flames from the ritual bonfires to light each home’s hearth, a fire that would kindle all winter long.

From a sociological perspective, that’s some deep stuff, even if you don’t buy into pagan beliefs. Northern Europe was not a happy place to be in the Hundreds A.D., and the Celts’ religion was as much an attempt to understand their world as any religion is. Ancient people had no way of understanding disease or weather; transportation and communication, particularly in what’s now Great Britain, was damn near impossible during the winter. One can see how a religious observance based on figuring out death and the future would appeal to them.

Native Americans also had late-fall celebrations (I KNOW you didn’t think the Pilgrims came up with that…), but it’s hard to find information about them online without turning up 50 thousand Slutty Pocahontas costumes.

When the Romans reached what’s now Britain, they brought their own beliefs, which also included late-fall celebrations: “The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.”

The Christians who came next also celebrated what we call Halloween (take that, stupid church in Canton). Pope Boniface IV designated Nov. 1 All Saint’s Day, a time for honoring the church’s martyrs and saints. Says the History Channel: “Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.”


But, even today, the juxtaposition seems a little funny. Christianity teaches its believers that they have everlasting life in God; other religions also preach communion with God upon death. My Moravian ancestors, like most 18th Century pietists, didn’t do Hallowmas (or Christmas there for awhile, but that’s another post). Despite Old Salem’s belated cashing-in on its spooky legends, the people who lived there didn’t believe in ghosts.

Halloween in America really emerged as a phenomenon in the mid-19th Century (as did Christmas, coincidentally). Harvest festivals – sorry, Protestants, we’re not giving up on those – merged with the Samhain traditions carried over by Irish and Scottish immigrants, turning into the secular, community festivals that we know today.

So why do we still fool with all this? The easy answer – hey, any excuse to party – is surely a piece of it, and always has been. Are the Slutty Fill-in-the-Blank costumes of today the descendents of the 19th Century girls who played at conjuring their future husbands by carving apples and pumpkins or looking backwards into mirrors? Maybe.

But I think it’s more than that. There must have been something elemental about Samhain. Even thousands of years later, with cell phones and Internets and tweets, we still haven’t shaken this primitive need to look death in the face and shake it off. Sure, it’s counter to the Christian idea that faith should be comfort enough. But, as I think God would be the first to understand, we’re human. And as long as humanity is finite and fragile, we will be drawn to events like Halloween that dare us to confront our mortality.

Quickie: Obama signs hate crimes bill

The House voted on it in April, and the Senate passed it a few weeks ago. Now President Obama has signed the law that will make it a federal crime to target someone for a crime because of his or her sexual orientation or identification.

The law is named after Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, two men who were brutally murdered in 1998. Byrd's killers chose him because he was black, Shepard's because he was gay. But until today, the Justice Department couldn't help local authorities investigate crimes like Shepard's as they could with those like Byrd's.

It's really sad that this took 10 years...

Just when I needed another reason to hate Natalie Portman…

Okay, I don’t *hate* Natalie Portman. I’ve always thought she was a mediocre actor, but I had nothing against her personally. But I couldn’t get through the piece she wrote for HuffPo yesterday because it pissed me off so much. I’m talking flames shooting up the sides of my face like Madeleine Kahn in “Clue.”

Portman, a long-time vegetarian, writes that she’s now a vegan, and will henceforth be more vocal about her choice. Alright, whatever. Good for her. My concern about what other people can and can’t eat extends only to events where I’m providing the food, and that’s only because I don’t want anyone to starve. So I think the people Portman says “interrogate” her about being vegan are a-holes.

So, my frustration with this piece isn’t with Portman’s dietary choices. It’s with her sanctimonious tone. When Portman lectures us about the evils of factory farming, she comes across like an over-privileged twit.

Wow, Natalie, how did you find out about water-table pollution from hog farms in eastern North Carolina? Oh, that’s right… you read a book. No need to come down here and talk to people in the communities who are perfectly aware of where the dead fish are coming from, but who continue to support factory farms because they need paychecks. No need to examine the systemic problems that might cause a community to sell out their long-term health for a short-term economic gain. Oh, no, it’s much easier to pretend that those people are just evil and stupid, and to tell me once again about how Miss Piggy has a soul.

I have long-standing problems in general with affluent vegetarians who can’t seem to yank off their blinders to ask why people find it easier to eat high-fat, high-carb food. The same goes for the local-food and organic movements. We can debate which type of diet is healthier, which is better for our environment or best for the local economy. But we won’t get anywhere until we confront the reasons why, in much of this country, it’s easier to find a McDonald’s than a bunch of fresh asparagus.

Newsflash, Natalie: vegan food is expensive, and hard to come by if you don’t live in a large city. And for those of us with life-threatening allergies to nuts and soy, being vegan is pretty much an impossibility, despite one’s intentions.

One last thing… Portman writes that, for her, not speaking out about eating meat is ethically on par with not stopping a rape. Aside from the analogy’s poor taste (in light of the well-publicized gang rape of a teenager in California), it – assuming it accurately reflects Portman’s thinking – further reveals her utterly skewed perspective. By the way, she signed the “free Roman Polanski” petition, so as far as I’m concerned she can take her faulty rape analogy and go f*ck herself.

Don't look now

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly says she refuses to watch or review "torture porn" like the "Saw" franchise. I have to say I completely agree with her, and I think it's admirable for a film critic to admit that she finds a particular genre so irredeemable that she can't physically sit through it.

Judging by the weekend's grosses, she's not the only one. "Paranormal Activity," which relies more on imagination than gore, beat "Saw VI" like a rented mule. (I'm going on reviews from friends here... I plan on seeing "Paranormal Activity" this weekend, if I can find someone to go with me, 'cause I'm too chicken to go by myself.)

I just don't get the appeal of movies and TV shows that titillate their audiences with gratuitous, gory violence, especially when there's so much real violence in the world. I feel like the people who enjoy the Saws and "Criminal Minds"-type stuff are after some vicarious brush with danger because they've never encountered any real evil themselves. It's just not entertaining to me.

Stimulus $$$ cleans up atomic dumps

I didn't realize just how much of this year's $787 billion stimulus bill has gone toward cleaning up the various sites used to develop atomic energy and weapons in the middle of the last century. According to this article in today's New York Times, over 10,000 people have been hired to clean up waste at places like Los Alamos and Hanford, Wash.

The downside? "... the Department of Energy is responsible for cleaning up 107 sites, with as much acreage as Delaware and Rhode Island combined, in work that could take decades and cost up to $260 billion to complete." Ouch.