Readers and writers blog

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.

– Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1850

I’ll tell you what this country has come down to: The other day, I told Ma Bell I didn’t trust her.

Never before, in my long personal and professional life with the telephone, have words like that come out of my mouth and into the mouthpiece. True, as a reporter for many years and a curmudgeon for even longer, I have had many colorful conversations on the telephone, some of them even involving profanities. But never, ever have I told anyone on the phone: “I don’t trust you.”

But I did the other day. Because the operator was asking too many questions for my comfort level.

I was trying to get the operator to call a local business and tell whoever was sending facsimile transmissions to our telephone to stop it. We don’t have a fax machine at our house, and I know whoever was sending us faxes was just a knucklehead with a wrong number. In fact, I called the business — a local doughnut shop — and told them they had a wrong number. But the faxes kept coming.

Part of the reason may have been that it was just after 7 a.m. and whoever was making the doughnuts had breathed in too many fryer fumes to think straight. But that’s also why that first phone call was disquieting. My wife and I are in our 60s (me still barely), and everyone who knows us is aware that we don’t get up much before 8 a.m. Phone calls that wake us up are usually bad news, like one I got some months ago that my mother, who was in the hospital awaiting surgery, had died.

So I wasn’t in the best of moods when I told the fax story to one operator at Verizon and then was transferred to another who wanted the story again. I was trying to tell her the number where the faxes were coming from, but she wanted to know our phone number first. Then, instead of inquiring about the other number, she asked me my name.

I know, I know, it was a reasonable question. And I’m sure if I had given her my name, her next request would have been the other phone number.

But something went off in my head.

“I’m not going to tell you. I don’t trust you.”

I heard the operator’s last words as I hung up the phone: “Whaaat? You don’t . . .”

We Americans didn’t find out until 2006 that George W. Bush five years earlier, just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, had bypassed the federal court that oversees domestic spying and had ordered secret phone and email surveillance of any and all of us. And three of the phone companies — AT&T, BellSouth and, yes, Verizon — had agreed to cooperate in this spying, again without telling us^*.

That’s what went off in my head.

My wife thinks I’m being a bit paranoid. But she went to high school in the 1960s. I went in the 1950s, during the height of the McCarthy witchhunts. One year, every student in our school had to sign a loyalty oath. Students. I remember thinking if I were a communist agent, the last thing I’d refuse to do was sign a loyalty oath. But I didn’t dare say that. Not then.

Later, I got a college degree in Russian language and culture. In the Army, I was a translator familiar with Soviet military and civilian operations. The Soviet system reminded me not of America’s left-wingers but of its right-wingers. Like McCarthy, the Soviets were big on suspicion, surveillance, wiretapping. And now we Americans, thanks to the Bush administration, have fallen into the same trap again.

My mother-in-law, who retired from the phone company after many years of loyal service, had a different take on the current situation:

“Ma Bell,” she said, “died years ago.”

That’s true. In 1984, the local operations of AT&T, parent company of the Bell system, were broken up into seven independent companies known as the ‘Baby Bells,’ including the three who in 2001 agreed to the domestic spying.

The phone company divestiture was the result of a complicated legal and legislative process that involved a lot of participants, many of whom I cannot identify. So I don’t know who brought about Ma Bell’s death.

But I do know who killed three of her babies.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

* Only Qwest refused. It was worried about getting sued by customers for handing over information about them to the government without warrants. It’s that same worry that led the Bush administration last year to seek immunity for the three companies that did cooperate.

I don’t go shopping very much, but I wound up the other day at our local Wal-Mart. I wish I hadn’t.

I would have preferred to go somewhere else to get an iPod MP3 player, a birthday gift for my wife, but the only outlet for Apple products in our neck of suburbia is Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has such a poor reputation both for its business practices — pressuring its vendors for such low prices that manufacturing jobs get sent overseas — and for its treatment of employees, forcing unpaid overtime and paying so little for regular hours that a one-earner family lives well below the poverty line. It’s come a long way down since Sam Walton ran the place.

And me, a retired union member, patronizing what Wal-Mart has become. But it was too late to order through the Internet. And that iPod — recommended to me as the best choice — would make it so much nicer for my wife at her job, where she works on a sometimes-stalled computer and would like to listen to music while she waits. And she works hard. And she’s so close to retirement that she deserves all the comfort she can get.

And so I went.

The parking lot at the local Wal-Mart overlooks the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, which still have the same beauty that Thomas Cole and Frederic Church saw when they painted them more than a century ago. The store, on the other hand, appropriately fits the expression ‘big-box.’

And when did people start hanging out at the entrances of mall stores? I can’t remember when they stopped hanging out on downtown street corners and moved to the mall. (And when did I start sounding like Andy Rooney?)

The atmosphere inside the Wal-Mart was not happy. The customer herd was roaming loose, foraging for employees for assistance. One of the employees was standing on a huge Wal-Mart ladder, fixing something on the Wal-Mart ceiling. Others rushed to and fro, meeting some invisible schedule. The iPods were behind lock and key, and the young woman who let mine out looked more like a corrections officer.

It was sad. So I took my goods and got out.

As I was driving into town for another errand, I came to a stop sign where a young, bewhiskered man, wearing old military clothes, held a sign identifying himself as unemployed and homeless. He didn’t look like a grifter. Because when the woman in front of me rolled down her window and handed him a bottle of water and a box of crackers — I don’t know why she had them handy — he broke into a smile, put the water to his lips and began to open the crackers.

All I had was a debit card and an iPod. I drove on past, feeling guilty.

I visited an ATM during my errand and drove back to that intersection to give the guy a couple of bucks. He was gone. And I felt worse.

On the way home, I stopped at another intersection — a three-way where everybody stops — and gave hand signals for the guy to my left to move through ahead of me, but he was too busy on his cell phone to notice.

The trip wasn’t a total loss. In my 15-mile itinerary, I got tailgated only once, and he was an old guy peering over the top of his steering wheel, so he’s entitled.

What makes me the saddest about my trip is that most of us allow ourselves — myself included — to be drawn into Wal-Mart by its low prices and big product line at the expense of some of us who end up working there. Or end up not working at all.

When I saw that the homeless guy had moved on, an ironic image flashed through my mind — him applying for a job at Wal-Mart. Well, I thought, he’d be better off. Just not much.

– Sid Leavitt

A railroad runs within two blocks of our house, and when I hear those long freights rumbling through late at night, it puts me right to sleep.

Railroads always have had a soporific effect on me.

Of course, it’s now all Conrail where we live. The closest Amtrak passenger service is across the Hudson River. But it always was the freights that put me to sleep.

When I was a kid in Rochester, N.H., the Sanford and Eastern tracks ran within a hundred yards of our house. Those diesels ran past at all hours of the night, and like John Steinbeck, I used to listen to them and drift off fantasizing about jumping one of them, just to see where it would go. Unlike Steinbeck, I never did — but I read most of his books.

My first memory of trains is magical, with strains of excitement, suspense and jealousy — as much as those feelings can occur within a 5-year-old.

It was 1945, and the first trainload of soldiers was returning from World War II. We lived in Silver Lake, a hamlet of Madison, N.H., where our house was at the top of the lake and the railroad tracks ran along the west side. It was night when that first train came steaming north, and the lights from the passenger windows shimmered in the water, swimming along with the train like an electric eel.

The closest image I’ve experienced since was the lights from the enormous passenger ship coming out of the fog in the Fellini film “Amarcord.”

I shared the excitement of those people awaiting the train, but on it I knew there was a soldier I didn’t want to see. The war years must have been difficult for women in a peculiar way. They longed for the men who went, but they also cherished the ones left behind, even the boys, perhaps because they didn’t want any of them to have to go, too. My ‘girlfriend’ in those days was a young friend of my mother whose husband had served through the entire war. (My father didn’t go — he had a deferment — but a few years later, he died for his company, the local electric utility.)

I didn’t want to see that soldier, but his wife introduced me to him as her ‘boyfriend,’ and he laughed and hugged me, and that was the end of my jealousy. Now he was my friend, too.

When I was in high school, I took a train trip from Rochester, N.H., to Dallas, Texas, for a Key Club convention. One morning somewhere in the Midwest, the train stopped near a farm — they must have put our section off on a sidetrack — and we were led into the farmhouse for a huge breakfast of pancakes, sausage, bacon, eggs and milk served by a grandmotherly woman. Stuffed and stunned, we then got back on the train and proceeded southwest.

When I worked the overnight desk at a wire service in Boston in the 1960s, I commuted to the office on the MBTA trains, which went overland into the city and then underground. Our office was on an upper floor of a building that long since has given way to Government Center, and on the first floor was the Boston Tavern. Our shift ended at 7 a.m., and after a hectic night of writing for hourly deadlines, we young journalists didn’t even have to leave the building to gather for drinks. When the government employees showed up around 8 a.m. for their prework bracers, we just joined the crowd.

Many’s the morning I woke up at the roundhouse in Newton, having slept through my stop.

Mothers with their babes asleep,
Rocking to the gentle beat,
And the rhythm of the rails is all they dream.*

You know, those overland trips back to Kenmore Square were always pleasant, despite the blossoming hangovers.

As I’m sure many of you know, or have been told, people used to get dressed up to go on the train. Of course, they also used to dress up to go to the movies.

While those sartorial habits may not resurge, perhaps the trains will. With the price of gasoline rising and the environmental damage wrought by automobiles increasing, maybe we’ll depend more on the efficiency of train travel.

Or maybe that would make too much sense.

– Sid Leavitt

* From Steve Goodman’s song “City of New Orleans,” 1972.

Has the Internet seemed a bit more crowded to you lately?

It’s hard to find up-to-date figures on how many weblogs and other personal websites now inhabit our blogosphere, but I saw a half-hour commercial the other night on TV that indicates the site population is exploding.

Although I don’t usually watch infomercials longer than it takes to click the remote, this one caught my attention: You are set up with 10 Internet businesses each month, up to 120 per year, and it’s as simple as using email. And then you make thousands of dollars per month, per week, maybe even per day. All for $39.95 (plus shipping and handling).

Pay no attention to the tiny caveat at the bottom of the screen — ‘Unique Experience. Individual results will vary.’ — because even the two hostesses on the program, their ample breasts pushed together to portray their brains as less ample, found the program easy. One of them in the first week made something like $1,500, although I don’t remember the exact figure because I was distracted by the cleavage.

Ah yes, it’s the infamous Jeff Paul again in his latest promotion, “Shortcuts to Internet Millions.” Look him up on Google and you will find literally millions of entries either praising him as a marketing genius or panning him as a ripoff artist.

But that’s not the point. Whether or not Jeff Paul serves commerce or crime, it is telling that a hustler like him finds it easy to put up websites — and attract customers for them (after all, somebody is paying for those infomercials).

Of course, while websites like those sold by “Shortcuts” are personal sites, they’re really not weblogs. I guess they’d qualify more as spam blogs — or splogs, as my computer-literate friends say. I’d also guess that at least half the comments we receive at Readers and Writers Blog are from splogs. (Most of the others are just plain spam.)

So let’s talk about blogs. The latest count I can find is from Technorati, which by December estimated that it was following more than 112 million blogs. Now a weblog indexer like Technorati, or its counterparts Google, Yahoo and IceRocket, has complex procedures for weeding out spam and other questionable blogs that I don’t pretend to understand.

For example, I’m not sure how many blogs there are whose total content is “Hello, World,” the words from the automated start program used by idiots like me when they launch a weblog on some free host and then suffer instant writer’s block.

But whatever the head count in today’s blogosphere is, a more significant finding comes from Technorati’s founder, David Sifry, who judges from his data that the total number of blogs doubles every 150 to 200 days.

“Can this possibly continue?” he asks in his most recent biennial State of the Blogosphere report. “I can’t imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace — it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in seven months than there are bloggers around in total today. I shake my head as I am writing this . . .”

So do I. Because as Sifry goes on to imply, it probably will continue. After all, it gets easier all the time to put up a blog and there are 6.6 billion people in the world.

If you’ve ever been to or read about one, you’ll know what I mean when I say this blogosphere reminds me of a New England town meeting — those annual meetings where anyone in town can go and express an opinion. But at least, there’s a moderator to keep the discussion, arguments or gunfire down to a dull roar.

There’s no moderator in the blogosphere. And probably there shouldn’t be one. But, to use the word another way, something in the world of blogs has to moderate.

Because as some guy with a pair of smarty pants hanging in his closet said a while ago, the blogosphere is getting to be such a thicket that you not only can’t see the forest, you can hardly see the trees.

– Sid Leavitt

Buried amid the trash were two female greyhounds, their bodies emaciated and covered with ticks. One was barely conscious, her skull having been bashed in with a hammer. The other, a breathing skeleton, cried softly. Humans had done this to her. Yet when she saw the face of her rescuer, the dying dog wagged her tail.

That paragraph is one of the most effective I’ve seen in a newspaper story. It was written a few years ago by an old friend and coworker, Nancy Shulins¹, then a national feature writer for the Associated Press, reporting on retired racing dogs that literally had been thrown away by their owners.

That 56-word paragraph, following a short lead, uses only four descriptive adverbs and adjectives. And yet, if you have even the smallest feeling for animals, you don’t need adverbs and adjectives to be moved by the last gesture that a dog neglected beyond hope could manage — an instinctively hopeful greeting. To someone who would have to help her die.

The other day, as I was looking at two of our cats in their various activities, I had that strange feeling I have every now and then, a feeling that occurs when I take notice that there are animals living in and around our house. Not pets. No, animals with fangs and claws and their own realities.

How seamlessly they work their way into our lives.

Now I suppose I’m an animal lover. But I’m not nutty about it. I don’t fawn over our animals, and I don’t expect them to fawn over me, which they don’t. And, as I’ve written earlier in this weblog, I’m not attracted to other blogs that are plastered with pictures of family dogs and cats.

It’s like anything personal. You have to know them.

So let me introduce you to our three cats — two who live indoors and one who has his own separate door in and out. No, the greyhound pictured above is not one of those in the story, and it’s not our dog². Our dog, Emily, died in August.

Emily was a good, non-fawning dog — a small yellow street dog from Savannah, Ga., who a few days before she was to go back to the pound jumped in my truck and came north with me. She was quiet, unobtrusive and went about her business of being a dog. She charmed my wife-to-be (I never could have done it without that dog), and the three of us, plus three cats, all moved in together.

At age 17, Emily developed lymphoma, and after months of having steroids shoved down her throat, stood one morning looking at my wife and me with hollow eyes, unable to eat and barely able to move. She still was able to wag her tail a little, which she did just before I picked her up and the three of us made her final visit to the vet. She’s buried in our back yard under a marker that holds her leash and food dish.

I think seeing that marker in the snow the other day is what got me thinking about writing this.

So anyway, one of our indoor cats is named Nothing. A stray barn cat, she came to me from a coworker whom I asked what she had named the cat. “Nothing,” she said. Nothing is a tricolor cat, mostly dark, with white cheeks and neck and a splotch of tan on one side of her mouth that looks like a half-mustache.

The other indoor cat, Blackie, is a longhaired cat who is, well, black. She originally was named Something. I got her from an animal shelter because Nothing was lonely and I wanted to get her something (get it?). That joke quickly wore thin, and my wife renamed her Blackie.

The third cat, the outdoor one, is named Guy, pronounced the French way (’ghee’) because he was named after one of my favorite hockey players, Guy Lafleur. Guy is all gray, so my non-French inlaws next door call him Smoky.

All the animals I’ve ever had — make that ‘lived with,’ because most of them had me — were strays or from animal shelters, the latter because I visited a lot of them over the years as a newspaper reporter doing features about adopting animals and often couldn’t leave without taking one.

And as I left those shelters — an official at one of them told me a dog’s chance of survival by adoption is about 50-50, a cat’s chance only one in five — I often thought about people who breed animals on purpose, despite the overpopulation in shelters, and how much I would like to see the breeders spayed and neutered.

Not to mention guys who leave greyhounds, still not old but no longer able to run as fast as they once could, lying beaten, starved and dying in a dumpster.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Nancy Shulins is author of two books on love and marriage — Every Day I Love You More: (Just Not Today) and its sequel, Every Day I Love You More: Lessons in Loving One Person for Life — published by Warner Books.

2. The greyhound photo is an image from the website Metroblogging Chicago.

I never got a chance to tell Tony Randall what I really wanted to say, and so he hurried through a perfunctory answer to my perfunctory question and turned away before I could say anything else.

I felt like an idiot, which I was, but not for the reason most fans are idiots.

You know, for a print journalist who in 38 years never worked for big newspapers and didn’t win big awards, I met a lot of celebrities. Including face-to-face meetings with four of our last six presidents.

I’m not trying to impress you. Because it wasn’t due to any particular skill or importance of my own. Some of the meetings were happenstance, but most of them were because I worked in places where public figures congregate — specifically, New Hampshire and Maine.

Having worked for two of New Hampshire’s seven daily newspapers, I can tell you that national politicians are easy to find every four years — that is, before the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Of course, you can’t find them after the primary.

“Do you want to talk to Jimmy Carter,” said a head craning into the doorway of the Valley News bureau in Claremont, N.H., in February 1976. “Not particularly,” I told the advance man. I was alone in the office and busy. “Oh, all right, come on in.”

We had a polite conversation, much of which I didn’t catch because of Carter’s then-thick Georgia accent, but the conversation never made the paper, anyway. Because the story was that he went on that afternoon to the local high school for a student assembly where, even though most of them didn’t understand him either, they loved him. In the post-Nixon days, an honest face was welcome. Later that month, Carter won the New Hampshire primary.

I met both Bushes in 1980 at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, when I worked for the Portland Press Herald. The elder Bush, running that year for president, was charming and gentlemanly. His son, on the other hand, treated reporters with an imperious, nasty temper.

Bill Clinton I met in Georgia in early 1992 when I was working for the Savannah Morning News and went to one of his campaign rallies. Clinton, I told a companion, could easily win the Democratic nomination, “but he’d get killed in the general election.”

Perceptive, huh?

I also met celebrity entertainers. Ask me sometime about my dinner with Pavarotti. I know, no one but a few family members believes it, either. But it was when, like many of the politicians visiting New Hampshire, he wasn’t famous.

Short version: In 1972, I was writing features for a college arts center in New Hampshire where Pavarotti was to appear. He showed up on a small plane, joined a few of us for dinner, then we went to the auditorium. When he sang the first note, the audience’s jaws dropped collectively to its chests. A few days later, he got a record 17 curtain calls at the Met.

But Tony Randall wasn’t just a celebrity to me. He was a hero. Not for “The Odd Couple” or any of his movies. No, it was a 1952 TV show called “Mr. Peepers.”

That was a bad summer for me. I was 12, and the hormones were raging. I was depressed. I was anxious. I was convinced I was going insane or maybe going to die. I lived from day to day, looking for anything to soothe me. And then came “Mr. Peepers,” a summer replacement show that I fell in love with — a quiet science teacher played by Wally Cox and his smart-guy pal, fellow teacher Harvey Weskit, played by Randall.

That gave me Thursday nights to live for. Other positive things followed over the next few years, and I eventually realized I was going neither crazy nor to my death. But that show was the first positive thing that summer.

I met Randall only five years ago in Poughkeepsie where he was a guest speaker. My wife, Bonnie, had interviewed him by phone for a story she did for our newspaper, and she met him after his appearance and introduced me.

I started to tell him how I worshipped him when I was 12. Then I realized that in 1952, he already was an adult in his 30s. Now Tony Randall always looked younger than he was, and I, once prematurely and now just gray, have always looked older than I am. I couldn’t tell him that someone who looked older than him had idolized him as a 12-year-old.

So instead, I told him I couldn’t remember who played Mrs. Gurney on that show, even though I knew full well that it was Marion Lorne.

“Marion Lorne,” he said, then turned away. Another dumb fan.

He died the next year. So, Tony Randall, wherever you are, I want to thank you. Because 56 years ago, you helped save my life.

– Sid Leavitt

I was ambling along on my treadmill one recent day, clicking between my two favorite afternoon TV shows, when the following thoughts occurred to me:

What do Wall Street and the New York Yankees have in common? Well, other than their employees making far more money than most of us, I find them both fascinating and yet, to me at least, irrelevant.

Now I suppose if Wall Street crashed badly enough and brought the U.S. economy tumbling down with it, I would be affected. My wife certainly would — she’s approaching retirement and has a 401k portfolio. (So I’m keeping a good thought about all those brokers, hon.)

But me, I’ve already cashed out. In my last years at work, I crammed as much money as I could into a 401k and, as sheer luck would have it, saw those securities peak out just when I converted them to a standard savings account. So, through no financial skill of my own, I now don’t owe anybody any money, and with the help of Uncle Sam and Social Security, I have enough saved to carry me through a year or so of living expenses.

Now don’t get the wrong idea. I’m no Daddy Warbucks. As I mentioned in an earlier post about retirement, I live a frugal life. And since I get by on a small budget, any major expense — like having to pay for a new car or, say, a new hip — could wipe out my finances.

The sad thing is that most of you, even those with far more money than I, are probably in the same predicament. But I digress.

As for the Yankees, I guess I’m a fan, what with living in New York and all, but it’s not the games I find fascinating. It’s the talk. And you thought the baseball season ended in October. Uh uh.

My favorite TV show, Mike and the Mad Dog, talks about the Yankees year-round. After the World Series, the subjects were whether Joe Torre would survive as manager (he didn’t), whether third-baseman Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) would stay (he did, for $275 million over 10 years), what about pitcher Mariano Rivera, the team’s ninth-inning closer (he signed for $45 million over three years), and so on.

It’s like a never-ending soap opera. It doesn’t matter to me whether the Yankees win or lose because, whatever happens, the talk goes on.

So there I am on my treadmill, clicking between Mike and the Mad Dog and the Dow Jones ticker on CNBC, realizing that neither one of these worlds really affects me and yet wondering why I’m so fascinated by what these big-money people are doing.

Now that treadmill . . . that’s one of the best investments I ever made. A ProForm model J4 that I bought nine years ago for about $400 and spent another $90 for the TV set that hangs in front of it. I’ve walked on that treadmill nearly every day since. At first, it was three miles a day, but now that arthritis has gotten to my hips, I’m down to about a mile a day. Even averaging a mile a day, I figure I’ve walked at least 3,200 miles on that treadmill — the distance from New York to San Francisco and back to Salt Lake City with 100 miles to spare. (I might go that extra 100 miles, considering my experience with Salt Lake City.)

You know, average Americans haven’t always been as dependent on Wall Street as they are now. But somewhere in the 1980s, we were told we had to take more ‘responsibility’ for our retirement. Company pension plans were phased out, and we were told that was a good thing. Because we should decide what to do with our own money — thus, money market funds, IRAs, 401ks.

I resisted. I knew nothing about finance and didn’t have the years to learn it. For the same reasons, I also don’t do my own dental work or brain surgery.

Some cynics say it was just part of a Republican attack on Social Security, graduated taxes and anything else FDR came up with. Well, they failed on Social Security, but check out today’s tax tables.

And what has this ‘ownership society’ done for us? Well, the national debt, after declining during the Clinton years, is now right back up there where Reagan and the first Bush left it — creeping toward 70 percent of our (annual) gross domestic product. That’s about $9 trillion. Individual Americans are now more indebted than ever, many of them having refinanced their homes and then used the extracted equity to buy a bunch of stuff like gas-guzzling SUVs just in time for the spike in gasoline prices and the plunge in home values. And, oh yeah, we’ve got a war in Iraq that’s going to cost about $1 trillion — if we get out fairly soon, that is.

I wonder what the Yankees are doing.

– Sid Leavitt

This is a year for another presidential election, but I don’t think this one is going to settle the Civil War, either.

Oh, make no mistake, it’s still on.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent entry in the weblog Axis of Evel Knievel about South Carolina’s decision on Dec. 20, 1860, to secede from the union. The blog’s author, University of Alaska history professor David Noon, summarized the decision in blunt terms:

‘The state of South Carolina,’ Noon concluded, ‘chose to commit treason in defense of the principle of eternal black subjection.’

Now Noon’s entries generally focus on the dark side of history — hence, the blog’s odd name and its equally unusual subtitle, ‘Another day, another pointless atrocity’ — and generally draw a few comments. But this one drew 10 comments as readers went back and forth with the author about the South’s motives for secession and particularly about the word ‘treason.’

You’d think an event that supposedly ended 143 years ago would be settled by now. But obviously, it is not. Because that war wasn’t as much a military or a political event as it was a cultural clash. It was a culture war long before the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, and it is still going on.

Now there’s nothing particularly astute about these observations of mine. We’ve all witnessed the culture war at least through the terms of our last two presidents. In fact, one of them got impeached.

That impeachment seemed to be over sexual habits. The nation’s first impeachment, not coincidentally, took place only three years after the Civil War ended and was initiated by, yes, the Republicans, too. But the GOP in those days were staunch advocates of civil rights for the freed African-American slaves, a goal not shared by President Andrew Johnson. Although a union loyalist and the only Southern senator to remain in Congress, Johnson as president was seen by Republicans as siding too often with white Southerners during Reconstruction — among other things, revoking Gen. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slave families and vetoing the nation’s first Civil Rights Bill in 1866.

Considering what a backward mess Reconstruction later became, it’s easy to think not only that Johnson deserved to be impeached, but that he shouldn’t have survived by one vote.

Noted historian James Ford Rhodes, who was in college when the Civil War ended, later wrote of Johnson:

As (Massachusetts) Senator Charles Sumner shrewdly said, ‘the president himself is his own worst counselor, as he is his own worst defender.’ Johnson acted in accordance with his nature. He had intellectual force, but it worked in a groove. Obstinate rather than firm, it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness.

Sound like anybody we know?

Now I definitely am a Northerner. With only two brief exceptions, my current residence, New York, is the southernmost place I have lived in the United States. One of those exceptions was California in the Army. The more recent was Georgia where I worked a few months on the night desk at the Savannah Morning News, a genteel sort of newspaper where the front-page headlines were polite through three editions, all home delivery, but needed to scream in the fourth edition, which was sold on the street. I was just the New Yorker to produce those gory words.

One of the other editors told me how glad he was to see me: “Before you came, I was the resident Yankee,” he said. He was from Kentucky.

I apologized for an error one day by offering that I was just “a dumb Yankee.” The city editor, a clever guy, smiled at me and said, “Why, Sid, I think that may be redundant.”

What I don’t understand about the South would fill volumes — state’s rights, creationism, hillbilly music, homophobia, Rush Limbaugh. And what’s the deal with Nascar, thousands of people driving to a place to watch other people drive around in a circle?

Well, maybe there’s hope. Barack Obama, a guy described by many as black although he looks sort of tan to me, just won his party’s side of the Iowa caucuses.

Of course, the other winner is a creationist.

– Sid Leavitt

I have described myself in this weblog and elsewhere as an “old white dude.” I would like to amend this. I am not just white — that’s just my hair. I am predominantly pink.

No, that’s not a statement of socialist views. Other than a few brown spots — the freckles I got in my youth and some speckles added by age — my skin is pink. Just look and . . . well, take my word for it.

And yet a lot of people still describe me and themselves as white, which is why, I guess, that I do it, too. It’s not something a perceptive kid would say about anybody except an albino. It’s something we learn that, for whatever reason, overrides our raw perceptions.

In 1992, I was in a laundromat in Savannah, Ga., when a fellow patron, an African-American man, asked me if I was from Canada.

“Pretty close — northern New Hampshire,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he said, “you’re the whitest dude I ever saw.”

Now this was part of a friendly conversation, and I wasn’t about to discuss stereotypes — nor to observe that he wasn’t exactly black. More of a medium brown, I would say.

I had written about this a few years earlier. It was after I met Gene and Lorraine Stanton, also at a laundromat, this one in Comanche, Texas, in 1989. The Stantons, a 60ish couple from a long line of hardworking families, had given up their farm in Iowa and were spending a lot of time in their 10-year-old Ford 460, a long-body pickup with a camper in the back.

“I guess what we finally decided,” Gene said, “is that our time was being consumed rather than used.”

It sounded to me like the scions of the family tree were growing wild again. And here’s some of what I wrote about that in Chapter 54 of ‘Adrift in America,’ a book found elsewhere on this website:

That’s a good thing in botany. Breaking away and hybridizing is what gives the new plants their vigor.

In my own family, most of us have pink skin and blue eyes, but then there’s Granny’s mother. Etta Wiggin Sanborn was such a wonderful great-grandmother – she used to plant big wet kisses on my young face – that it wasn’t until years after her death that I noticed in photos of her that she had straight black hair and coppery, high-cheeked features, including one blue and one hazel eye, that fit neither the Sanborn nor the Wiggin mold. Granny has no explanation, although she suspects Indians. I’d guess either that or Africans. Frankly, high cheekbones and large teeth look pretty on my mother, and I’m comfortable with them, too.

The point is, genealogies are generally a crock. And not just historically. Tracing any family through one name becomes genetically pointless after a few generations. If I’m a descendant of Thomas Leavitt (or was it his brother, John, the other ne’er-do-well Brit locked up in the Portsmouth, N.H., brig shortly after their arrival in America?) . . . and if there are 15 generations between us (that’s 300 years at 20 years per generation), I’m not just carrying the genes of Thomas and 15 other guys. I’ve also got to count my mother, her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on and my father’s mother and her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. In three centuries, the number comes out to 32,768 ancestors. That’s a small city. And if I can find an ancestor only three generations back who’s an unusual color, I can only imagine those who jumped into the genetic pool before color photography was invented.

This color business bothers me, and not just because of my liberal, socialist view of the world. I’m not white, I’m pink. And I’ve never known any black people, although I’ve met many shades of brown, including some that were lighter than my pink.

If we have to categorize people in this country of immigrants, it makes more sense to do it by place of ancestral origin. The easiest seems to be by continent. Euro-American, Afro-American, Asian-American. Anything that fits two syllables before ‘American.’ If we have to do it at all. If we insist on genealogies.

Actually, we could do it by color. But we’d have to get a lot better at identifying colors. In one of his more brain-damaging speeches, Ronald Reagan promised that his administration was dedicated to having a color-blind society. Frankly, that’s not the solution. That’s the problem. We’ve been color-blind for centuries, and it has hurt a lot of people.

Any junior high school science student learns the optics of color. White is all colors. Black is no color. And yet we go out into a society where we are expected to see no color in white and the deepest of color in black.

We’ve got a lot of problems in this country, and many of them begin with the fact that we colored people consider some of us black and some of us white.

Well, this old pink-and-white dude rests his case.

– Sid Leavitt