I looked at my counter this morning and saw a secret message.

I’m in my second term in the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m a Republocrat. I like the job. It pays $174,000, has great medical benefits, provides a really nice private gym to use, and lots of people have to be nice to me. And there are those $110,000 in taxpayer-funded fringe benefits I get (including plush retirement plans, paid time off, and contributions to Social Security and Medicare taxes). I’ve got a staff to answer the phone and email, run my Twitter and Facebook stuff, and deal with those damned constituents. And I’m in a relatively safe district, thanks to that Republocrat-friendly redistricting bill passed in my state last year. Hey, sometimes people let me use their corporate jets! (Well, as long as I keep quiet about those trips and pay commercial airfare for it.)

Yeah. This is a sweet gig. I want to stay here. In fact, I want to … move up. Be in the leadership. Be a mover and shaker. Now how am I gonna do that beyond kissing the speaker’s ass (and those of his damn deputies, too) and voting however he (or she) tells me to?

It will take money for that Republocrat to ascend higher in the House’s toadying ladder of leadership. Lots of money. And as we know, House members (and senators) have a vehicle to collect and dispense money to other House members — the leadership political action committee. A principal reason for the existence of leadership PACs to is buy friends and influence on Capitol Hill. Apparently, hard work and intelligence are insufficient.
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Nope.

I predicted Romney to win and I am sticking to it. Let the kids at the Tea Party sleepover have their fun, sooner or later the grown ups are going to come upstairs, turn off the music, make everyone get back into bed and cut out the lights, just like they always do. Post-Eisenhower, the Republican Party has worked on the principle that the great unwashed should just shut up and do what their betters tell them to do. And when push comes to shove, they will.

So what do the results really tell us?

Three things, I think.

First, the average IQ of any large group of randomly selected people should be a hundred, but it may be quite a bit lower than that in South Carolina. Full story »

Previously: the 2011 Gold LPs and the Honorable Mentions.

The Platinum LPs, awarded for exceptional artistic merit, are always the point where this process begins to wear on me. I want to make sure I have included all the worthy bands and that my words do those acknowledged justice. I never feel like I have succeeded on either count, and this year seems even worse than usual. So my apologies to the artists here: my remarks are in no way up to the standards of the music you produced last year.

[sigh] So here we go.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong
It seems like each year there’s that one band, sort of an accessible, trendy indie outfit that pegs everybody’s hip meters and makes it okay to like intelligent guitar pop. Full story »

#25: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism by Thomas B. Kohnstamm (2008)

I don’t know much about Brazil beyond the fact that the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived there on some branch of the Amazon. I also know that a different branch of the Amazon, the River of Doubt, nearly killed Teddy Roosevelt. And I know Rio is there, but what happens in Rio stays in Rio, so I don’t know many details.

So when I stumbled across Kohnstamm’s book about being a travel writer in Brazil, I thought it would be a good chance to learn something about the country. The book looked interesting, too, because it implied a good ethics lesson: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?

Well, I didn’t learn much about Brazil, and I didn’t get to ponder writerly ethics so much as a get a pretty explicit lesson on what not to do, but Kohnstamm kept me entertained with his Thompsonesque antics. This was “travel hedonism” at its gonzoest. Full story »

Joe Paterno is dead. Lots has been written and more will be added to the pile in the coming days and weeks. So let me add my two cents while the thoughts are fresh in my mind.

Had the last few months not happened we’d now be anointing JoePa for sainthood. As you’ve been told so many times before, and are now hearing all over again, he was all that was good and true in collegiate athletics, a man who did things the right way, etc. The thing is, that’s a woefully simplistic commentary on Paterno and how he did business. Also, the last few months did happen. So we now find ourselves needing to address Paterno’s legacy in two parts. Let’s do the ugly bit first. Full story »

The heat continued.  With it came horrendous Santa Ana winds and subsequent allergic reactions.  In order to steer clear I would have to stay inside with windows and doors shut.  But it was sweltering and this was not possible.  I took a stiff hit of Gale’s old nasal spray and felt the sting and uplift that halted my sneezing spell.  There was the sound of a dog yelping at his owner, and the owner’s dangling keys as he shouted, “Good boy!  That’s a good boy!”

The phone rang and it was Alexandra panicking that her father wasn’t home.

“He’s a big boy.  Leave him alone,” I said, going outside and taking a seat on the deck.

“Hank, you must know where he is,” she said in her throaty smoker’s voice.

“What am I, his mother?”

“You’re his brother.  You’re like the Hardy Boys but a century older.”

“That’s no way to talk about your father.” Full story »

After visiting Nashville, Tennessee on the fourth night of our road trip, my sister, Julie, and I geared up for a day of historical site-seeing along the Natchez Trace Parkway.

Our brother, Dan, and I attempted this drive once last summer after receiving a recommendation to take the famous byway from Nashville to Southern Mississippi before cutting South to New Orleans. Not 30 miles into our trip, we crossed a park ranger who threatened us off the parkway with a ticket and authoritative scolding. Unbeknownst to us, a 14-foot yellow Penske truck is considered a “commercial vehicle” and eyesore on a scenic byway.

Though Dan could not join us on this road trip, Julie and I took advantage of having our compact Toyota Camry and picked up where Dan and I left off. Full story »

#24: The Land of Lincoln: Travels in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson (2007)

The Lincoln Memorial looked like frost tonight. The flurry that had blanketed the lawn white earlier in the day had been glazed with rain and then turned to ice, so the whole landscape shimmered under the Memorial’s lights.

Frost or no, the Memorial still has that beacon-in-the-dark look, which is, I suppose, its main purpose. It is, as I’ve noted before, as close to a temple as we have in America. The man who sits inside has become such an icon he’s lost humanity.

I’m here because I’ve just finished journalist Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, an exploration of the man and, in the end, a defense of that icon. I’m here for the icon, too.

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New trouble is brewing at Penn State, though the school is operating within the state’s Right to Know law. ABC News has reported that the five current and former Penn State employees enmeshed in the Sandusky abuse scandal are all still on the school’s payroll.

The five are fired football coach Joe Paterno, former president Graham Spanier (who remains a tenured faculty member, as does Paterno), assistant coach Mike McQueary (who is on paid leave), former vice president for finance Gary Schultz (who resigned), and former athletic director Tim Curley (who is also on leave). The latter two are facing criminal charges of perjury and failure to report alleged sexual abuse. Penn State is reportedly paying for their legal defense, as well. Full story »

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#23: Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historians Journeys to the American Civil War by Emory Thomas (1987)

“Historian travels to battlefields and writes about his experiences.” Sounds right up my alley. After all, I do a lot of that for Emerging Civil War, and my dissertation is going to take me in that direction, so it’s always interesting to see how other people do it.

That’s how a professional colleague of mine described Emory Thomas’s Travels to Hallowed Ground. He recommended it to me particularly because Thomas takes his son on some of his journeys, and my colleague knew that I got into battlefielding because of my daughter. Thomas’s book, then, might potentially offer some interesting ways at looking at the fields. Full story »

In any functioning community there are three different levels of responsibility, namely legal, ethical, and moral. The least of these is our responsibilities as defined by local, state, and federal law. That former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno met this lowest of expectations is not in dispute – Sandusky’s prosecutors have explicitly stated that Paterno met the legal requirements of reporting child sexual abuse to his superiors at Penn State. But when the police were not notified, when Sandusky was not shut out of the athletic facilities, why did Paterno not rise to meet his ethical responsibility as an authority figure, or his moral responsibility to report the abuse to the police? I don’t know, and after Paterno’s interview, I’m not entirely sure that he knows either.

Regardless of Paterno’s reasons, it was his failure to meet his higher responsibilities that resulted in the Penn State Board of Trustees voting unanimously to fire Paterno as head coach of the Nittany Lions. The Trustees are charged with guaranteeing the reputation of the university, and as an alumnus (1995, BSEE), I applaud them for having the courage to fire a Penn State icon. Full story »

I do not like bats. Once, as a college student living in a third-floor apartment with no air-conditioning, a bat landed on me during a hot summer night. I fled my room, shrieking. Even today, on summer nights at my rural home, when bats fly low over my deck, I instinctively duck.

Bats have a bad rep. Think bat and you likely think bat with rabies. Think bat and you likely think dirty bat or bat as vampiric bloodsucker. Think bat and you likely think evil harbinger of doom and destruction. (Okay, that last one’s a tad over the top … but you get the idea.) Bats have fewer defenders than fear-laden critics.

But bats, the only mammal structurally capable of sustained flight, are just creatures with significant ecological — and economic — roles. Hate mosquitoes and other insects? They’re on the nighttime menu for bats. Like bees, many bats pollinate plants and spread seeds. Bat shit (sorry; bat guano) is rich in nitrogen and is a profitable fertilizer. Bats’ ability to navigate in the dark (echolocation) is a subject of significant scientific study.

But in the past five years, up to 6.7 million bats are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Three species face extinction — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tricolored bat. A malady called white-nose syndrome is killing them.
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Can’t make this stuff up, folks. I mean, you could, but everybody would think you were, well, making stuff up.

On tonight’s episode of Modern Family (perhaps TV’s best sitcom), one of the storylines deals with what happens when a young child starts using curse words. One of America’s more prominent gatekeepers of the public morality, the Parents Television council, immediately lurched into a galloping conniption. That they haven’t actually seen the episode, and hence, have no fudging idea what they’re screeching about, is beside the point.

“It’s not suitable language for a child that young in the real world, and it’s not suitable language for a child that young on television, either.” Full story »

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#22: Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey Into the Heart of Darkness by Jeffrey Tayler (2000)

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

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“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Full story »