A Confession

Sometimes in life, you just have to admit that you’re a terrible person. This is one of those times. I’ve been in Atlanta the past couple of days on business, so I was out of my morning routine and consequently missed this story. In the aftermath of the crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214, a San Francisco television news anchor broadcast the names of the four Korean pilots of the ill fated plane. The names had been confirmed by none other than the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington. She read the names on the air:

     Captain: Sum Ting Wong

     Wi Tu Lo

     Ho Lee Fuk

     Bang Ding Ow

Apparently, a “summer intern” at the NTSB had come up with these names as a prank and the folks at KTVU in San Francisco fell for it hook, line and sinker. The info-babe read the names on the air without batting an eye. See for yourself: http://youtu.be/BFDwgJa7JOI.

Was this prank insensitive, racist and juvenile? Yes, yes, and yes. Then, why did I laugh so hard, I nearly wet my pants? Judge me all you want, but if you can watch that clip without at least smiling, then, well… you’re a better person than I am.

This, on the heels of the Chicago Sun Times issuing an apology for their headline announcing the crash: “Fright 214”, seen by many as an insensitive jab at Asian-American pronunciation. Let’s just say, it was a busy week for the politically correct language police.

On some level it bothers me that this sort of thing is funny to me. I blame it all on Mel Brooks, and his influence on me at a young age, but tasteless jokes have always made me laugh. Although I can sit for hours reading Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and C.S. Lewis, I still find a well timed fart hilarious. I am confident that I harbor no animus towards Asian Americans; in fact, I have never known one who wasn’t fairly awesome, but when I heard that the Captain of flight 214 was someone named, Sum Ting Wong, well my first thought was, that summer intern at the NTSB has a bright future at the Onion!

2.5 Million Gladys Kravitzes'

With very little fanfare or public comment, President Obama issued an executive order in October of 2011 called the Insider Threat Program. You’ve never heard of it, have you? See, that’s the great thing about executive orders, no Congressional hearings, and no annoying media to generate negative feedback. It was in response to the leaking of classified material to WikiLeaks by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. The idea behind the Insider Threat Program, or ITP for short, is to turn all federal employees into snitches, a two and a half million strong horde of spies, all trying to be Gladys Kravitz.

You remember her, right? Well, if you’re under 50, probably not. She was the nosy neighbor on Bewitched who was constantly peering through the window, seeing some supernatural thing going on over at the Stephens house, but by the time her beleaguered husband would come to look, things were back to normal. Eventually, he stopped paying attention.

Well, here’s what the ITP is asking each federal worker to do:

            

  Watch lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors...
·  Odd working hours, unexplained travel...
·  Monitor co-workers stress, divorce, financial problems...
·  Track online activities...
·  Those failing to report face penalties, criminal charges...

 

 

I love that last one…snitch, or else! So, now when I go to the Post Office, my 30 minute wait in line will be more like 45 minutes, since all the employees will be busy keeping a sharp eye out for stressed out divorcees in their ranks.

I suppose this is designed to prevent leaks of classified material by identifying potential threatening employees who might be so inclined. Whether or not any of this would have worked on Pvc. Manning, or Edward Snowden is hard to tell. Seems to me a better way to prevent these sort of leaks is to limit access to classified material to Army personnel with the rank of Private first class!

 

But, in the age of NSA spying on ordinary American’s phone calls, why shouldn’t Government workers be ordered to spy on one another? It seems to have become our national pastime.

 

All of this reminds me of one of the most disturbing yet powerfully moving movies I’ve ever seen. It’s called, The Lives of Others, and is about a Stasi officer who is ordered by the East German government to spy on a playwright. As he hides in a room on the roof of the apartment building where the playwright lives and listens to every word that is spoken inside the apartment, he hears poetry for the first time. What happens to this Stasi officer is both beautiful and chillingly tragic.

 

It’s a German film which could never have been made in Hollywood, since the villain in this picture is totalitarian Communism and it’s destruction of the human spirit. When I watched it in 2006, I never dreamed that one day, agents of our own government would be up to many of the same tricks.

 

Do yourself a favor and find The Lives of Others on Netflix.

"This Time We'll Keep it in Our Pants!"

Just how far has the dignity of public service fallen? Consider New York City. The citizens of that fine city will have quite the entertaining ballot in front of them as they enter the polling booth this fall.

Running for mayor will be Anthony Weiner, the recently disgraced former Congressman, who shrunk from public life after admitting that he had exposed himself to young women on the internet. Despite the existence of several disgusting photos of his manhood in circulation, and a mere 18 months since his disgrace, there he is atop the polls.

This morning brings news that Elliot Spitzer has thrown his hat into the ring for the job of Comptroller. You remember Spitzer, right? He was governor of New York when he was caught up in a Prostitution sting by the FBI. It was revealed during the proceedings that “client number 9” was in fact the governor himself, that mysterious customer who oddly insisted upon wearing nothing but his black dress socks during sex …THAT Elliot Spitzer. Well, a mere five years have passed and apparently, that’s enough in New York. There he is, the instant frontrunner, asking to be trusted with the city’s finances.

Who will he be running against, you may be asking? Well, in a twist dripping with more irony than Mark Antony’s funeral speech in Julius Caesar, Kristin Davis will be giving him a run for his money. Who is Kristin Davis, you ask? Wait for it….. the Madam who ran the high priced call girl ring that provided Spitzer with his prostitutes! I am not making this up, I swear.

What a ticket! The new wave of Democratic party leaders for the 21^st century. Try coming up with a slogan for these two…”This Time, We’ll Keep it in Our Pants!”, or, “Weiner and Spitzer, Thrusting Forward For Change”.

Some may not see this as an embarrassment for democracy like I do. Some may see this as some grand example of grace and redemption, two talented (and reliably liberal) public servants overcoming the transgressions in their past, rising like a phoenix..no strike the “rising”, overcoming and atoning for past sins by recommitting themselves to fighting for justice. Reasonable people can disagree, I suppose.

 

Meanwhile, Paula Dean can’t be forgiven for using the “n” word in a 14 year old legal deposition.

 

Humidity...God's Wrath

All week on Facebook, I have been treated to pictures of my friends vacationing. Here’s a lovely shot of someone basking in the breezy bliss of a beach in Hawaii, there’s one of someone sitting outside in the middle of the afternoon drinking COFFEE somewhere in Michigan, while still another is wearing a long sleeve sweatshirt posing in front of a giant lobster in Maine. Meanwhile I’m dealing with 92 degrees and 90% humidity. Being from Richmond, Virginia, this is my lot in life from mid May all the way through mid October. Humidity is God’s cosmic retribution to the South for the sin of slavery; I am convinced, since I believe God to be a just God and someone who will not be mocked. For my readers who don’t live here, how shall I describe what humidity feels like? Here goes.

I wake up at 6 am. I don’t have my contacts on yet so I throw on my glasses and go downstairs. I get my coffee and open the door to the deck so I can protect my tomato plants from the early morning squirrel raids so common in my neighborhood. Since it’s already 85 degrees, my glasses instantly fog over so I have to feel my way to the loveseat. Once seated, my hair begins to rebel against such ungodly climate by desperately trying to escape the body heat escaping through my scalp. A million strands of hair stretch and pull, contorting themselves into a frizzy explosion of sticky curls making me resemble a maniacal Shirley Temple.

Then I begin to sweat, tiny beads of perspiration appearing on every square inch of my body, especially my back. Soon, the cotton shirt I am wearing begins to cling to my body like angry spandex. It now weighs 10 pounds and is plastered onto me like a death mask. As I peer across the back yard I think I see a squirrel dancing along the edge of the fence. But I can’t be sure because the heat waves rising up from the ground distort my view, washing everything I see in a roiling mist. I think it’s a squirrel, no it’s definitely a squirrel. I raise my Daisy Powerline 35 and draw a bead when I realize that it’s actually the neighbors’ 6 year old boy wearing a coon skinned cap. Crisis averted.

When I consider the fact that I grew up in a house with no air conditioning, I can hardly imagine how I survived. It was certainly no thanks to this: http://doug-thetempest.blogspot.com/2012/09/bertha-window-fan-of-death.html

I suppose it’s all what you’re used to. I see pictures of Theodore Roosevelt in a wool suit in an un-air conditioned train car in Panama…in August, signing some sort of treaty with a bunch of other men in wool suits and I shake my head in wonder.

"How's the Shoulder Feel?"

One of the manifold frustrations of having shoulder surgery is that it is so difficult describing how it feels to someone, especially your physical therapist. He will be in the middle of contorting the thing into some sort of pretzel torture and will ask you, “how’s that feel, tight, any pain, or just uncomfortable?”

How does one answer that question while maintaining one’s composure? I usually try to hide any hint of a grimace and answer, “ok”, when what I really want to say is, “How does that FEEL, you say? How about all three! It’s an uncomfortably tight pain!”

It’s high time I developed a better answer to the question I get all the time, “How’s the shoulder feeling?” But it won’t be easy, because honestly I’ve never felt anything like it before, but here goes:

When I wake up in the morning, after a long night where the shoulder has been immobile, it feels like there’s an army of fire ants, each with a tiny ball-peen hammer in one appendage and a chisel in the other, hammering away at what’s left of my rotator cuff. Then I get up, go downstairs, brew some coffee and let my arm hang down and move it in small circles, round and round until the coffee’s ready. Then I take a pain pill. I picture hydrocodone warriors in war ships flowing through my bloodstream until they reach the fire ants at which point a blessed massacre takes place, the bodies of a million fire ants strewn across the battlefield of my supraspinatus tendon, (and yes, I had to Google that). This triumph is short lived however, for roughly 5 and a half hours later the pesky fire ants return for a counter offensive. More hydrocodone, more ant carnage.

Then bedtime comes around and an entirely different enemy visits this blood soaked battlefield. Gone are the fire ants, replaced by legions of microscopic worms playing tubas and other low register musical instruments, creating a dull throbbing ache, which can only be overcome by the application of ice. Once my shoulder is nice and blue, I crawl into bed and wait for the blessed relief of sleep.

And, THAT is what my shoulder feels like.

The good news is, that each morning there seem to be fewer ants, their ranks decimated as they have been by the mighty Hydro-warriors, and each evening one or two fewer tuba playing worms. This is progress and I am grateful for it!

Travel Day

My Son will get in his 1996 Volkswagen Jetta today at about 1:30 in the afternoon, and make the most dangerous drive in America, from Princeton, NJ to Short Pump, Va. via I-95. He is coming home for the three days of July 4th to sleep in his old bed, eat some home cooking and see his family and for this I’m very grateful. But, beginning at 1:30 today, my stomach will be in knots and every time my phone rings my heart will skip a beat. Every parent of a college-aged kid reading this knows exactly what I mean, when I say that I worry more about my kids when they are on the highways coming home than at any other time. It is a dreadful thing, one of the few curses of being a parent.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not one of those helicopter parents who can’t let their child out of their sight for two seconds. If anything I have always been quite lenient with my kids, anything but overprotective. My wife might even accuse me of being negligent with their safety. I’m the guy in that awesome commercial that keeps telling his kids “Don’t tell Mom!” Pam was always the one who held her breath while I was doing some crazy thing with the kids. But something strange comes over me when one of them gets behind the wheel and disappears down the street. It all started in 2006 when I endured the most terrifying 30 seconds of my life.

I was in my office with a client, wrapping up a presentation when the phone on my credenza behind my desk rang. Usually, calls don’t come through to me when I’m with someone, so I thought this call must have slipped through by accident. I apologized to my client for the interruption and asked his forbearance. When I picked up the phone, a man whose voice I didn’t recognized asked me, “Are you Mister Douglas Dunnevant of Richmond, Virginia?”

What came next was nothing short of the most horrifying words any parent could hear. “Mister Dunnevant, I’m Sergeant Tom Smith with the Ohio State Police, and your daughter Kaitlin has been in an accident.”

In that terrible instant, all the air rushed from my lungs, my heart began to beat loudly in my ears and according to my client, all the color drained from my face. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion. His next line wasn’t any better than the first, “She is in the hospital and I am here with her.”

My hands started to tremble; all the moisture in my mouth was gone. I said nothing. Then the wonderful words from the Ohio State Trooper, “Don’t worry Mister Dunnevant. Your daughter is fine, she hardly got a scratch, she’s only here for observation. Would you like to speak with her?”

Everything after that was a blur. She had hydroplaned off of an on-ramp to the interstate in a downpour, tore up the guardrail and her car, but I hardly heard any of that. My daughter was unhurt, and my heart started beating again. Ever since that day, I dread travel days. I stay busy, fiddle with things, sit still even less than normal, while the minutes crawl by. Every phone call sends my blood pressure reading into the stratosphere. Then they pull up to the curb in front of the house, and I breathe again, and feel silly for all the worrying. But, something tells me I’m not the only parent who goes through this. It’s part of the territory.

So, from 1:30 this afternoon until around 7 tonight, please don’t call me on my cell phone. Give a father a break!    

Finally, Some Good Spying

It’s 6:08 am and I’m sitting in my study drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling on my nutritious breakfast of two lemon-Oreo cookies. That’s right, there is such a thing and if you haven’t tried them, you should. I browse through the overnight news. It is dependably upsetting but often hilariously funny, sometimes at the same time. Like this one story I stumbled upon where according to Twitter, there is a rather large group of mostly young, white and oddly blonde women who think it’s a crying shame that New England Patriot tight end Aaron Hernandez has to go to prison because, he is “so very hot!!” Apparently, the alleged murder charge does nothing to dampen feminine enthusiasm for his tight end. Lovely.

While I slept, the leaders of France and Germany continued to whine, moan and complain about the revelation that the United States has been spying on them, bugging their offices etc. I could break out a Shakespeare quote and go all “methinks they do protest too much”, but that’s probably the most overquoted passage the Bard ever wrote. Suffice it to say that I make no apologies for THIS type of spying, after all, this is the only type of spying that my government should ever be doing in the first place, and frankly, I’m shocked that we still have the balls to do it! I thought with this “we are the world” bunch running Washington at the moment that good old fashioned espionage would have been a thing of the past. I’m impressed, Mr. President.

The most hilarious reaction has been from the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She confessed SHOCK that the United States would be spying on such a stalwart friend and ally. She went on to say that relationships between allies must be based first and last upon trust, and that this alleged bugging violated said trust in the most egregious way.

Cry me a river, Angie.

If there is anyone in my readership who believes that the nations of the European Union are our stalwart friends, then I have a couple dozen baseballs signed by Mickey Mantle  himself up in my attic that I bet you’d be interested in. Here’s a newsflash for all of you who might be upset by the news that we routinely spy on our allies. My guess is, there isn’t an office of anyone in Washington DC who really matters that isn’t already bugged by France, Germany, even Great Britain. Well… maybe not France ( much too decadent to bother with self preservation ). All of this screaming is for domestic consumption only. They have been embarrassed by Mr. Snowden’s revelations and are trying to save face, and I find it hilarious to watch. Thanks, Ed!

So, well done CIA. It’s about time this country got on with the business of protecting our own interest in dealings with our fickle European “allies”. More of this kind of spying, and less spying on US, please.