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Quoting from the Warren Sentinel, June 30, 2006 (emphasis added):

Warren [Air Force Base] now has a “Giant Voice” system that will be used to play reveille, retreat and taps. The sounding of these honors is a special part of military culture and all base personnel will be expected to follow tradition and protocol.

Monday through Friday, reveille will be played at 7:30am and retreat will be played at 4:30pm. … Taps will be played at 10pm. The following outlines what both military and civilian personnel should do during reveille and retreat:

… At first note, all personnel in uniform and not in formation should face the flag or the music (if the flag is not in view), stand at attention and render a hand salute. Hold this position until the last note of the music has been played.

When not in uniform, personnel should, at first note, stand at attention facing the flag for the music (if the flag is not in view), remove headdress, if any, with the right hand, and place the right hand over the heart. Hold this position until the last note of the music has been played.

All vehicles in motion should stop at the first note of the music and the occupants should sit quietly until the music ends.

This scares me. Oh, and more than that, infuriates me.

As to the first– just the idea of a “Giant Voice,” that commands the absolute obedience of an entire group of people– eesh. The wording of the article is very specific: “will be expected to follow tradition and protocol.” This isn’t a voluntary sort of thing. The article doesn’t say personnel are encouraged to honor this “special part of military culture” (a sarcastic side note: ah, yes. The military! And culture! Age old allies!). No. You “will.”

And I shudder to think of the repercussions if one fails to meet expectations. I mean, is it so inconceivable that failing to stop and salute could place me in a secretive, illegal military prison under suspicion of terrorism or subversion? Could I be beaten and tortured and held indefinately without trial? Is our military above this? And if so, what really happened in the American military controlled Iraqi prisons? What’s really happening in Guantanamo? … I digress.

As to my fury– am I not a free individual? What right has any government to dictate to me what I will or will not do, and which hand it will or not will be done with? What do I care if they choose to play their favorite patriotic cheer? I’m sorry, but no. No! I will not stop. I will not remove my headdress. I will not hold my right hand over my heart. Only by the use of physical force will you master me. And even then, you’ll not have mastered my heart, and I’ll spit in your face as you force my hand over that very organ which you cannot control!

How Orwellian is this? How like a totalitarian state?

On a completely unrelated note, allow me to quote another source– this time, Chen Village, an account of a rural Chinese village under the Mao Zedong regime. From a section titled “Broadcasting the New Order”

Henceforth, to reinforce such thinking, two or three nights every week the peasants were required to meet with the team or brigade level Mao Thought counselors to learn new revolutionary songs and Mao quotes. …

These counselors had a powerful new medium of communication to help in their proselytizing. This was the production brigade’s wired broadcasting system, set up when the village acquired electricity in 1966. The system consisted of thirty loudspeakers positioned throughout the village, with four large ones installed in the village’s main meeting places. The volume was tuned loud enough that even while indoors people could hear the announcements. …

The new broadcasting system altered the peasants’ lives on more than one way. … About half the broadcasting time was given over to music and reports from the provincial radio station. The other half was devoted to brigade news and pep talks composed by the brigade broadcaster with the help of the Mao Thought counselors.

How is this different? And how is this the same?

Random life suggestion: if you’ve been drinking and you order a pizza, let me suggest you pass out after the pizza arrives, rather than before, to avoid a somewhat awkward situation for the pizza guy.

=)

Hope, you may be appalled. And William, you may well approve. But: the floor in my room is littered with the brass casings of .22 shells. Or, the floor in my room near my window, that is.

Yeah, I’m still a firm believer in gun control. Probably for reasons exactly such as this. But as long as gun use isn’t controlled or restricted (in Wyoming, no less)…

Allow me to explain. One of my side-projects this summer has been to turn the weed-patch around my house in to a lawn– or something generally green, soft, and resembling a lawn. So I’ve planted seed and hauled in tons (literally) of top-soil, etc. And, what-d’ya know, there’s actually grass growing. It’s small and feeble, as of yet, but mmm… It makes me happy, strangly.

Enter stage right: the gopher invasion. All over the lawn. *ahem.* Did’ja miss the sign, gopher punks?! MY lawn. Well. Apparently, small and feeble, in gopher parlance, is codeword for tasty and tender. So look out my window at any given time, and you can just count the gophers, crawling, slithering, eating my small, feeble grass.

I live on the 2nd floor, you see. And, yeah, I get a great view of the Colorado Front Range from my room. It’s nice. But I also have a great view of my back lawn/weed-patch, which is nice, too, but more in a Lee Harvy Oswald sense than, say, an aesthetic one, if you catch my drift. =)

So yeah. I dug out my grandfather’s old single-shot, bold-action, open-sight .22 rifle (from under my dad’s bed). And, as I write this, empty brass casings litter my floor.

You do the math. =)

Mean …
Senile people suck!

Heh. Can I say that? No, I suppose not. I mean, she’s my grandmother and all. But it’s just that, well, she’s always been ornery (what a great English word!), but now… god help us, she’s senile AND ornery. My dad is seemingly a man of infinite resourcefulness, but she seems to have even HIM at his wits end.

It’s like … karma … for all the senile jokes I’ve made over the years. =P

So… yeah. Life will calm down a LOT in that regard (we hope!) once the grandmother is comfortably settled in her new assisted living facility.

That is all.

Man. Being sick is miserable. Heh.

It’s curious, really, how two degrees difference in the temperature under one’s tongue can humble one from running miles to agonizing over trivial distances. Huh.

I return from Duluth with a single poignant question: is our high standard of living in the West (and America specifically) built on the backs of the impoverished, manufacturing East? Or, rather, is our high standard of living a consequence of our exceptional productivity, via science and technology?

Or, asked a different way, does a sustainable pattern of living more closely resemble India with its crowded quarters, vegetarian diet and clambering auto-rickshaws, or America with its wood-built houses, red-meat diet and Volvos?

Or, asked a different way, is our prosperity a result of our vaunted Western values, or simply the exploitation of others?

that

Your people I do not understand
So to you I wish to put and end
And you’ll never hear surf music again.

er… no. Thanks, Jimi. That’s actually exactly what I had in mind. But no.

rather, that I’m leaving you. And by you, I do mean you, chere reader. But don’t despair– it’s only for a spell. A few days. Then I’ll be back. Eventually. Probably. I promise.

It was a thought process something like this: “oh, the airlines. Baggage restrictions. carry-on bag blah. Blah not checking blah blah. Along which blah… which blah should I take my laptop in? Blah blah laptop? Wait… do I need my laptop. No. NO! Eureka! NO LAPTOP FOR ME!!! … blah blah blah.”

Heh. Well, I’m excited. For some reason. Probably because I hate the stupid thing.

Or maybe because I received my copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra tonight. “Smellest thou not already the shambles and cookshops of the spirit? Steameth not this city with the fumes of slaughtered spirits? / Seest thou not the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? — And they make newspapers also from out of these rags!”

But anyhow. I’m headed up to Duluth (MN…) to 1) cheer my dad as he runs in Duluth’s annual Grandma’s Marathon and 2) speaking of Grandmas, to pack and move my … grandmother.

My grandmother, you see, is getting old and (ostebsibly) losing her mind (like Meekyung, I suppose–at least the getting old part =P). 86 years, in fact. And it’s time for her to move to a retirement home, of sorts. Oh, yes. Kicking and screaming, perhaps. She’s managed to convince herself that she has Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t, it seems, but it’s like this: if you live alone in a rather-too-large house, your husband and friends having long since died off, and you spend your days thinking your foot hurts, eventually, OW!, you’ll probably manage to convince yourself. Your foot won’t actually hurt, but you’ll act like it does– hobbling around your house: “OW!”–step–“OW!”–step–“OW!”–step–etc.

Now convince yourself that you have Alzheimer’s. Ya. How do you act? Rather erratic, I suppose. The sort of erratic that lets you appear, unannounced and unexpected, at the DIA airport for your grand-daughter’s wedding. The sort of erratic that, when your daughter, while helping you fill out some papers, asks you for your social security number you stubbornly reply, “I don’t give that out over the phone.”

… So yeah. It’s time for “the home.”

Unfortunately, as much as my grandmother is willing to convince herself that her mental fitness is failing, she doesn’t seem likely to convince herself that she needs help. She’s stubborn. And a little off-center. What a way. … What a way.

Anyhow. Such my adventures will be. So to speak. I’ll be back Sunday morning. Presumably. Presumably with my grandmother. No one really knows, though. So… wish us luck. =)

(I’ll have my mobile, so if you need/want to chat, try the digits, rather than the letters @ more letters dot com thing. Ya.)

Question:

If there was no sickness or disease in the Garden of Eden and if it was God’s plan that we should live in the Garden, in fellowship with him for all eternity, then why does the human body have an elaborate and intricate immune system?

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

So… Yeah. Answer that one, Mum. =P

Let’s see… I suppose I’m overdue for one of those boring but obligatory personal updates. So. Without further ado…

My sister, Jenny, was married on Sunday. The ceremony was, of course, beautiful–an outside wedding at a flowering and mountainous bed & breakfast outside of Loveland–and the reception, of course, would have been a lot more enjoyable if I had any social graces whatsoever. Huh. Her (now) husband is a super solid guy, though, and their mutual happiness and excitement radiated throughout the event.

They’re now on their way to Lubbock, Texas, where Tory will complete his board exams and year of residency before going into private practice in pain management.

I might note that my grandmother’s attendance was appreciated, but entirely unexpected. Unexpected as in, as far as anyone knew, she wasn’t coming to the wedding. Or, at least as far as anyone knew until 10:00 or so on Thursday morning, when she called from the DIA airport wondering where my dad was. Apparently, she decided, at the last minute to come. She got up at 4:00am and took a cab to the airport in Duluth, bought the last seat on the plane, and was in Denver by 8:00am. Unbeknownst to anyone, much less my father, who she expected to pick her up at the airport. Heh.

Admittedly, she’s losing her mind a bit– all old people do, I guess– but she’s still getting around pretty well (as her sudden appearance in Denver would suggest).

—

In other news… there is no other news. That is all.

I drove past
a herd of antelope
today–
strong, free, proud.
Spirit of the West.

funny thing, though
these antelope
these antelope they stood
on a road, black pavement.

antelope, standing quietly.
on a road.

but wait: yesterday

i drove past
a crew of pavers.
hardened, brown, sweltering in the sun.
a new road for
a new subdivision

a field of grass
brown, green and waving
in the warm, wyoming wind.
the eye follows the fence
to the horizon. barbed wire.

except where it breaks:
an entrance for a new road.

what is this? so hard,
black, smooth, unnatural.
will our grass grow here?
can we run here now?

will we be pushed out?

their questions, or
mine. as I drove past
a herd of antelope today

standing (perhaps bewildered)
on a new, black road
for a new sub-division.

Here’s an empowering thought: culture isn’t static. The moment culture ceases to develop, to change, to be active and relevant, becomes little more than history. What’s more, culture is just a conglomeration of a thousand contributing members– the aggregate sum of everyone within the culture. So the empowering thought is this: we, as a generation of the 21st century, play a role in the development of our cultural tradition– American culture.

Though a bit trite, the point is this: we can be shaped by our culture, or we can shape our culture. And shaping our culture is a lot easier than one might think. It starts by awareness: becoming cognizant of one’s place and role within America. We are the next generation– the next generation of musicians, of business owners, managers, executives, etc, or politicians, of activists, of consumers– for better or for worse. We are a swelling mass pushing up from underneath. We are displacing what’s above us, and replacing with broader, bolder, distinctly 21st century ideas, trends, foods, styles, etc.

And we’re in control. It’s not the multi-billion dollar marketing corporations and not the flashy over-polished fashion shows that define what our trends are–what tomorrow’s style will be–it’s us. It’s the people who buy, or don’t buy, into the marketing schemes. It’s the people who buy, or don’t buy, a particular fashion. There’s a lot of different groups competing to help define our culture, but at the end of the day, it’s up to us to decide which groups we want to identify ourselves with.

So yeah–sure, MTV (for example) is one of these groups. MTV wants to define our culture. Period. To control what’s hip, stylish, trendy, etc. To tell us what music is valuable, and what music we can do without. And here’s the thing: as inheritors, and now possessors of American culture, we can choose to give or deny this right to MTV–and to a thousand other media and marketing conglomerates. How do we choose? Simple. Don’t tune in. Change the channel. Turn off your television.

The cool thing is, though, that we have a choice. To continue the MTV example, if we like what we see– if MTV is providing valuable, relevant programming, then by all means– endorse it! Support it! If it’s valuable, if it’s representative of yourself, of our generation, of how American culture should look, then we, as owners, can buy in to it. Support it. Watch it. Tell our friends about it. And if we don’t like it–remembering our place–we can turn it off. Change the channel. Start our own music television broadcasting station. Why not?

And it’s not just music. It’s not just pop-culture. It’s broad and all-encompassing. Every dollar we spend–every organization or company we support–shapes tomorrow. If we want businesses in our community to pay their employees fairly, we can make it happen? How? Shop at the businesses that do. Don’t shop at the businesses that don’t. Easy, huh? If we want our culinary tradition to include more vegetarian options, we can make it happen. How? By ordering vegetarian options when available. By requesting vegetarian options where not available. By experimenting– making tasty new vegetarian foods ourselves. Sharing with friends. Etc.

Every decision we make, every item we buy, every item we don’t, every restaurant we patronize, every restaurant we don’t, every vehicle we drive, etc– it’s all significant. Our choices shape our culture. It’s a privilege and a burden. It’s a privilege in that tomorrow can be exactly what we want it to be, but a burden because we’re forced to evaluate each of our decisions in terms of our roles and shapers of culture.