Home At The Shore

I grew old in many different places, but I came of age DTS, Down the Shore in New Jersey. I fell across this yesterday afternoon and have watched reached it repeatedly, some might suggest incessantly and they would be right but so what? since then. Mesmerizing almost describes it, as does magical.  

It is a remarkable piece of work (and that may be the understatement of the decade, so far), a short film that must be viewed, in all likelihood, on the biggest screen possible and far more often than once to be fully appreciated. 

Forget the MTV Jersey Shore morons, the Guidos and Guidettes, and the struggles to survive for families and businesses in a post-Sandy economy, The former is ephemeral and the latter may prove to be closer to eternal but this is different-a shared memory that is somehow unique for each one who has experienced it. Together and yet alone, at the same moment. 

Can you feel the sting of the salt from the ocean on your lips and tongue and sense more than see it on your eyelashes? The slightly soggy but still satisfyingly solid crunch of the damp sand where the waves have retreated from the shore under your bare feet as you troll the shoreline scouting for washed-up starfish and over-turned horseshoe crabs? Do those damn seagulls ever stop yammering, even through the headphones and ear buds at max vol?  

I've grown old in a dozen different places across multiple continents, but I came of age in only one and now I'm there again. Home, At The Shore. 
-bill kenny

Judge a Man by His Questions Rather than His Answers

The last meeting of what is now the "old" City Council will happen this coming Monday and with it, perhaps an opportunity to reopen the City Charter, the operator's manual if you wish, to create a process and a product for the new City Council to own.

If you haven't yet visited the city's website to offer your ideas on areas in the charter that could be improved, it's pretty easy and very quick. You already have a good idea of what the object of the exercise is supposed to look like, so what you're really doing is working on questions of procedure rather than philosophy. And if you're not comfortable on line, be in Council chambers Monday night and voice your ideas in person.

Once we agree on the basic functions of government, and here's a few areas where I think we already can see eye-to-eye: public education, public safety, emergency services, infrastructure, and utilities, we can expand and/or concentrate on related areas to create an environment of excellence in which we, as a community, can better thrive and succeed.

How we do those tasks we view as 'our government' is what the city charter is all about-it tells us and everyone who would do business with us, from new residents to new businesses, 'these are the rules of the game' so everyone going in knows what  the results should be coming out. Until surprise makes the periodic table of elements, there's no need for it to make an appearance at City Hall.

Sometimes there's mutterings and murmurings about a Norwich for insiders whose workings seem to be very different from the city in which the rest of us live. We've all heard that but that doesn't make it true unless you choose to believe it. A lot of times, we don't know what we don't know and if you think a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, just imagine how much damage ignorance can do.

That's why, be it on an as-needed or on an as-scheduled, basis sometimes it's best to take "The Charter" (capital letters deliberate) off the shelf, set aside the reverence for history and habit we always have for things that have stood the test of time, and visit with one another to examine areas and practices that we may discover we have concerns or questions about.

You can choose to not ask a question, that's your right, but understand that by so doing you then cannot complain when you don't like the answer.
-bill kenny

Good Planets Are Hard to Find

I have always liked the idea of being 'special.' Not as in rode the 'short bus to grade school special,' more like the really 'should have been picked up in a limo bus special.' But you can't always get what you want and as for trying, my wife assures me that I can very trying very often and she would know.

Anyway, I'm still trying to process this news item from last week which has very much harshed my 'special' world tour and victory lap ambitions. Not so much the chance of maybe another 'other earth' someplace but more likely a certainty that there could be close to countless 'other earths.' That hurts. A lot.

Talk about not calling the next day like promised, we've never heard from any of these places that could be just like us in the first place. Snotty and stuck-up, just the kind of planets we should be running with, indeed. Mean Girls on steroids and with asteroids I guess.

Small solace department: they will soon, or have already, make the discovery that we're out here as well. So much for their special, too. Here, have a moon rock, fellow space vagabonds. They're delicious.
-bill kenny

The Cleanest Dirty Shirt

This is Veterans Day across the United States and Remembrance Day in Our Neighbor to the North, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Actually that was an attempt at light-heartedness that may have struck you more as light-headedness, as our neighbor to the north is Canada, as you hopefully already know. Geography and sophistry in the same ether at the same time! 'Murica!

Patriotism, George Bernard Shaw once offered, is the misguided belief that one country is superior to another because of the accident of your birth. I'm proud to be an American and particularly delighted I'm not Lee Greenwood.

I'm proud of my nation because of who we are as people and what we do as a country when we follow the voices of our better angels-though I'm sometime disappointed by we who are and how we sometimes behave towards the rest of the rest of the world and one another.

This time a month ago, I watched political leaders in my nation's capital use veterans as a political fulcrum and prop in a passion play of pandering and posturing that led many of us to cry out 'a pox on your houses' as they held one another and all of us hostage.

A month later, there's still a lot of talking but it doesn't look like a lot of listening is happening. This column from the NY Times' Thomas L. Friedman captures our dilemma, I think, quite nicely.

I'm a veteran, but not a Sgt Rock of Easy Company (that position was filled; I asked). I didn't have a hard job in my eight years in the US Air Force and what difficulties I had, I concede, I mostly made for myself (and were probably deserved). I didn't fix planes, dig ditches, rescue people or hump cargo (or vice versa; okay, some payday weekends I only have the fuzziest of memories).

I worked for the American Forces Radio and Television Service as a broadcaster. Yeah, I know, who'd have thunk it, right? My big worries were a record skipping on a turntable, or an audio splice separating. I had a small, nearly minuscule job but like the millions with whom I served, I took what I did seriously and attempted in my shambling way to do it to the very best of my ability. And, at least for today, I'd like to believe each of us in, and out, of uniform did (and do) the same.

This isn't Memorial Day, dedicated to preserving the memories of all those who gave their lives in the defense of their nation. Today honors everyone who has ever served in our Armed Forces. The distinction between the two observances is important, I think, when I recall Joseph Heller's Catch-22 where Yossarian tells LT Nately 'it makes no difference to a dead man who won the war.'

It's a reminder it's incumbent upon those who survive 'the war,' whichever 'war' you wish to cite, to help fashion a more peaceful world that follows. A world where Carl Schurz is correctly and completely quoted, 'My country, right or wrong; if right to be kept right, if wrong to be set right.' Beginning with each of us, everyday. Forever.
-bill kenny

And All That ....

I always forget how true the old saying is, 'no one man steps into the same river twice, because both he and the river have changed.' Considering how often I walk around in damp swimming trunks, you'd think I'd have caught on by now. And yet, here we are in a moisture-challenged environment. Seems like old times.

I will concede this item is more than appropriate as we are mid-way through the Veterans Day Holdiay weekend (brought to us by one of the thousands of Army-Navy stores across the country with over priced, cheaply made knock-offs of clunky cumbersome stuff you remember from the service but had forgotten you hated having to produce during locker inspections and duffle bag showdowns.

"Steadfast Jazz"-sounds like one of those music programming services Frank Magid and Associates might have come up with back in the day. And the reference to The Cold War is softly nostalgic without the warmth of reminiscence.

For just about forty-five years, the armies of ignorance stood armed and ready all across Europe alert to the first sign of trouble so that the really big war could start and amazingly, despite frailties and fallacies on both sides, we managed to NOT blow everything up.

I assume the Warsaw Pact had names for their readiness exercises though I always understood us to have an entire department that created the names NATO used. While I was there we had Constant Guardian Roman Numeral Who Knows What which many of us tended to call Constant Turmoil.

By the way, who, aside from the NFL's Super Bowl, still uses Roman numerals and how come they don't use them on the scoreboard during The Really Big Game, so that on screens all around the world people could read: Denver: XXVII, Seattle, XLIV, end of the IIIrd Quarter? Vatican City would eat that stuff up with a spoon and probably sponsor a novena for a field goal.

 Yeah, those were the days. During the war games, excuse me readiness exercises, we were always the Blue forces and the bad guys were Orange (I think because making them Red would have caused an irony overload) and we knew all about them and they, us. The term du jour was Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD always said without a trace of a smile.

We kept our eyes peeled around the Frankfurt PX for SMLM vehicles (Soviet Military Liaison Mission) whose troops were allowed to shop in the Exchange and we'd all watch them warily from a distance as they bought up 'blue jeans' (always more bitten off than actually enunciated) by the shopping cart full and shipped them back to Mother Russia where they sold them at such a mark-up they could probably afford a stylish dacha on the Black Sea.

And then, peace broke out and the world as we knew it shifted and then shifted again. We now live in an asynchronous wartime environment, often fighting phantoms and apparitions, confronted by soulless savages with literally nothing to live for making them martyrs with something to die for, and wanting us to die for it, too.

A world without war, really a shared goal of anyone and everyone who has ever worn a uniform of any military anywhere in the world remains a dream as we struggle against the nightmare. -bill kenny

The Heart of Mankind

If the Shoah, The Holocaust, was an unfinished symphony of genocidal annihilation for Europe's Jews (and it was only unfinished because the rest of the world finally wrested the controls of the killing factories from the True Believers before they achieved their Endlosung), then today, seventy-five years ago, the first notes of the overture to that murderous symphony, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), were played.

When you look at the pictures of death and destruction, and listen to the softly told tales of survival, often by the purest of coincidences, if you have a heart, it is sickened and if you have a conscience it is outraged. But to keep the next exercise of extreme intolerance from ever reaching this point, we all need to retain the memories of the events as well as the circumstances that allowed the events to happen.

The Nazis did NOT leap out of bed seventy five years ago this morning and cause the German nation, the land of Luther, Schiller, Liszt and Beethoven, to lose its collective mind and soul.

For decades leading up to this day in 1938, and not just in Germany, but all across Europe, East and West, the systemic and systematic marginalization of Jews, apartheid before that word was in fashion, was in practice and a part of everyday life. The Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935 helped dull all Germans to the slaughter to come.

The ability to use language in reducing those who are the object of your animus to something somehow less human than yourself so that the acrimony and injury inflected upon them has no more consequence than stepping on a bug is a critical tool in the creation and construction of the crematoria and concentration camps and no less vital to that than the jackboots and the armbands.

You have a lot on your plate today-it's the weekend and the holidays are coming. Finding the time to go online or to your local library and invest an hour into researching the decay and depravity that began with Kristallnacht is asking a lot, I know. So how about a deal?

What if you and I promise one another to take an additional breath before using a racial epithet to characterize someone on the other side of the political spectrum with whom we disagree? Or to refrain from suggesting (at the top of our lungs) what a person with whom we are arguing may attempt to so with her/his logic and conclusion, as anatomically difficult as it might prove to be.

Instead of counting to ten, we try to count to eleven, and then twelve and just keep counting until the gorge in our veins recedes just a bit and our blood has gone off its boiling point. And, most importantly, when we see someone else in mid-screed, we mitigate and mediate to help assure a more rapid return to civil and civic discourse in our interactions with one another.

Germany was not a nation of Nazis on Kristallnacht-they were, believe many, in the minority even when in power. It isn't so much just the sins committed on this day seventy-five years ago that should live in infamy forever, but, rather, the sins that could have been prevented had two or more people joined and raised their voices in opposition. We must never forget the lesson of what happened next.
-bill kenny

Another Limited Time Offer

Are you as saddened and sickened by the number and frequency of "holiday gift" commercials airing on television already as I am? We are outnumbered, my friend, and soon will be relics from another, more bucolic if not benighted America. It's weird enough we have made Halloween a 'holiday' with cards, parties and gifts.

I find it funny how the costumes and customs preceded the cash-in but I've been told I'm a funny Guy but this year retailers are already at SalesCon4 because there are six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas and that could be calamitous, so hurry!! As merchants everywhere say to their accountants about those early morning Friday sales after Thanksgiving, once you go black..... 

In truth, I hate this time of year with its pseudo bonhomie and fake fellowship-people who cross the street to walk away from me the other eleven months of the year now wish me a Merry Christmas or, much safer, politically, a Happy Holiday. 

And now all of it is creeping up sooner and sooner on the calendar. I saw the first holiday decorations and shop window displays before we even turned the clocks back last weekend, making my mood as dark as the afternoons that have followed. 

I recognize we are spirits in the material world but we've allowed the rate and pace of our lives to be driven by others whom we cannot name if we were to even bother to try to think about it. Instead of just all of us, we have 'us' and 'them' and 'they' (always without names) are who push the the pace to breakneck, turn the knob up to eleven and punch us into hyper-drive as we run through each and every day. 

Without looking it up, and I won't know if you cheated, but you will, what was the #1 International News story two weeks ago? A month ago? Yeah, gets foggy fast doesn't it? Especially when so much of our 'news channels' are devoted to Cher's tour, Kim's Kid, and what movie star is playing professional sports or did I get that backwards? Sort of all marinates together after awhile and bubbles through.

We know the names of Britney's kids, but draw a blank of those of our Supreme Court Justices. I may not know how many tiers of coverage are offered through healthcare.gov but I can't help but believe devoutly on or more of the voices screeching about how its architect is really from Kenya. This week. He was from Indonesia last week (there's a schedule on-line if you can't keep track of it in your head). 

It can't be just me who is starting to see life as something to be gotten through. I struggle and sometimes fail to resist the temptation to just shout 'next!' as I watch reports of unrest on TV, or struggle with (self-inflicted) unhappiness at home or in the workplace. Talk about drilling a second hole in the boat to let the water out, that’s me and my impatience. 

Not sure it’s clinically crazy but it’s certainly foolish, especially since I'm actually afraid of 'next' because I know nothing about it. As awful as now maybe, and each of us has to decide that for her/himself it beats the snot out of whatever is around the next bend. 

It's not just the devil you know, it's the time and money you can save on getting your horrors wholesale. Maybe Sartre is right and Hell really is other people. I had hoped that was going to be more reassuring. Next! 
-bill kenny