Author Archives: The Night Writer

Going for a new record — perhaps a criminal one

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Every four years, people who have been dedicating months, even years of their life in preparation come together in front of the TV cameras to live their dream in front of a world-wide audience. Of course I’m not referring to the Olympics but to protesting the presidential conventions. To be fair, there was a Mount Olympus feel to Sen. Obama’s dais during the DNC, while the poo and urine-flinging anarchists in the streets of St. Paul for the RNC suggest that a rerouting of the Mississippi River through downtown, alá Hercules’ method for cleaning the Augean Stables, might be necessary. While there were a lot of different costumes seen among the protesters, I don’t remember any togas though.

The protesters and anarchists weren’t the only ones who were busy preparing for their time in the spotlight, however. The authorities were also at work with plans of their own, and launched preemptive raids (with search warrants) on known anarchist hang-outs Sunday night before the convention started, capturing bolt cutters, sling shots, six throwing-style knives, smoke bombs, machetes, caltrops (for disabling tires and vehicles) and other devices for blocking traffic or damaging property. It was also reported that several buckets of urine were also confiscated, no doubt for testing to see if the wild ones had been taking steroids in preparation for their protests. A lot of buttons and propaganda were also taken into custody, and the pro bono lawyers who came to town with the protesters were in court Tuesday, demanding the return of all materials. District Judge Kathleen Gearin, however, denied an emergency motion brought by the plaintiffs to have some of the items seized by police returned to them.

“Who should we return the urine to?” Gearin asked.

I think it’s only fair that the buckets be returned full, and with triple damages.

Oh well, God love ’em, I can tolerate and only shake my head in amusement at most of the fey activists. The protests so far have generally been non-violent and even kind of amusing in a precocious way with strange dancing, crude (in craftsmanship and language) signs and trite slogans that perhaps suggest what the TV writers were doing last year in their spare time while they were on strike. At least these folks were willing to show their faces and even to be arrested.

Some, however, dressed oh-so-chic in black garb, masks and hoods, came with the intention of doing property damage, busting windows in a police car and running away; bashing in several storefront windows and running away; one even took a run at cop trying to drag a protester away, knocking the officer down and then running away. These true believers, of course, had to keep their faces covered so that “the Man” couldn’t identify them because, you know, civilized cultures have things like “laws” and consequences, which really frosts the anarchists. At least there’s a precedent in America for people hooding their faces while committing acts of terror in the name of some hateful cause. Before, though, those hoods were white.


(Photo from WCCO slideshow.)

Update:

Related News Stories:
Anatomy of anarchy: Militant protestors meet police on St. Paul streets
Anarchists damage property, block traffic, attack delegates with bleach
St. Paul protest play out on streets, online

I just got back from the 20th century…

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Our internet service crashed Sunday morning and we were disconnected until mid-afternoon today due to a server problem in our area (and fortunately nothing expensive that we have to fix with our home set-up). It’s not like being chased out of your home by a hurricane or, say, having to pee in a bucket like some of the visitors to my city apparently chose to do over the weekend, but it was kind of surprising at how much the internet has entwined itself in our lives.

At any given time on a weekend we’re likely to have two laptops going and sometimes three, all connected to the ‘Net. It’s a handy way to look up a phone number, get directions to some place, reserve a tee-time or knock off a quick game of Web Sudoku while waiting for the charcoal to heat up. At least I didn’t miss it so much on Sunday … until I tried to find the results of the Twins’ game! I had to revert to the near-medieval practice of watching the ESPN crawler at the bottom of the high-def TV screen. Gadzooks! I also had an on-line coupon ($35 off!) that I couldn’t get to in my e-mail inbox that needed to be printed out and used by today; I went over to my brother-in-law’s and used his computer to do the deed.

Today it became a little more stressful. My wife is a police chaplain and is helping out at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. With the RNC changing plans on the fly to cope with Hurricane Gustav, she was concerned that she was missing any emails up-dating or re-assigning her to a different location. Nothing a couple of phone calls couldn’t resolve, and she was able to show up for an interesting afternoon of supporting our local officers. Her group did such a good job today that they were asked to expand their role in order to support another group of officers as well.

She’ll likely have a report and perhaps some photos of her experiences after the event is over; for security reasons it’s probably best that she not talk too much about where she’s at and where the police units are deployed. It has been an interesting couple of weeks of training and orientation for the chaplains. A special “secret location” in downtown St.Paul was set aside for them and I got to see it for myself when we drove down there Saturday morning to deliver some furniture we and our church were providing to the command post. It was an amazing experience driving through downtown as at every intersection we watched a police cruiser go by. This morning we went to Jerubek’s Bakery for breakfast, not far from downtown, and drank coffee and ate our pastry out on the patio, despite the constant thwopping of helicopters overhead. It’s going to be an interesting week, but morale appears to be high. I plan to stay as far away from the convention as possible!

Day 2

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by the Night Writer

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs…and I’m going to feel like an omelet if I don’t take a short break. I’ll be back after the holiday weekend, but the Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly are going to the fair again on Friday and they may do an update on last week’s 2-year-old post — if they get on the stick!

Meanwhile, a fun bunch of guys are tail-gating over at Savvy Daddy for this week’s Manival. Check it out, Tony’s got food!

Sssssssssss….

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by the Night Writer

Sheesh, what a week. It’s budget time at work, which means I have to forecast how much money my department will need next year, how much I’d actually be willing to live with, and how much of a bite the levels above me are going to take just to show they’re serious. And it all has to be turned in the day after Labor Day. Fortunately, the instruction manual for this year’s budget process has been cut down to 236 pages … in a PDF file.

Oh, and someone had the bright idea to move our offices AND install new telephones all at the same time back on Monday. Never fear, the instruction booklet that comes with the phone is 10% of the size of the budget manual and is printed in 16 languages, none of which I understand. So far I’ve unpacked my calculator and my coffee cup; the rest can wait. WHY does that red light keep flashing at me?

I’m thinking it’s high time for a Keegan’s run Thursday night. Who’s with me?

My life of being near beer

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by the Night Writer


Kevin at Return to Manliness had a great contribution to last week’s Manival about the simple pleasures of Cheap Yard Beer; that is, cheap beer you pound down in the back yard while putting up a garage or maybe grilling some brontosaurus ribs. While I’m not much of a beer-drinker these days, and when I do imbibe I favor the heavier ales, his list brought back a lot of warm memories of cold cans of beer, especially the brands my father liked.

When I was a little nipper (pre-elementary school) my dad was in the Air Force and it seems to me a lot of those base-housing backyards featured the familiar shield of Falstaff beer. These were the formative years when I learned what a “church key” was. While Falstaff was a relatively well-distributed beer, a lot of “yard beers” are regional brews favored by loyal locals and offered at bargain prices. When my dad got out of the service and we settled in Indianapolis, he was partial to Weidemann’s. He usually bought this in dark brown, barrel-shaped bottles with a short neck, but for awhile he bought it in miniature keg small enough to lay on its side in a refrigerator with a thumb-tap in one end. Here’s where I learned how to pour a fine glass of beer down the side of a glass, ending with just a half-inch of so of foamy head (don’t worry, Mom, these were all for Dad. Mostly.)

When we later moved to Missouri one of my dad’s friends was the local Stag beer distributor, and dark gold cans of Stag were the standard in the little beer refrigerator behind my father’s basement bar. I was in high school then, so of course my friends and I derided the old men who drank that, though we’d take it if we could get it. I mean, it’s not as if we had the luxury of being more discriminating; beggars can’t be connoisseurs, you know. In fact, one of my (underage) cousins got busted one time for having a case of Olympia (“Oly’s”) in his car and had to pay a “real beer” fine for something that barely qualified as beer. I think he would have been less embarrassed if he had been caught shop-lifting a case of tampons (which were said to be great for cleaning the heads of your 8-track tape player).

When we graduated from high school a lot of my class chartered a bus to take us, immediately after the graduation ceremony, on our “Senior Trip” to Daytona Beach. Missouri was a “21” state so we told the bus driver to wake us up as soon as we got to an “18” state. That turned out to be somewhere in Georgia when the bus stopped to refuel. We had to fuel some foolishness, so a couple of my buddies and I collected beer money from our classmates and headed into the convenience store to stock up. There, in a big cooler case for our taking, were various nectars of the gods (no Stag). We were about to buy several six-packs of something or other when Darrell pointed out that that beer was in 12-ounce cans and cost about $3, while immediately next to it were 16 oz. cans of Old Milwaukee for $1.79 a six-pack. Well, we were high school graduates so we could do the math; we could get a lot more beer for our money by loading up on the Old Milwaukee.

It was swill, of course, which we soon discovered even with our unsophisticated palates. The thing was, we couldn’t just be throwing away beer, or beer money, so our strategy changed so that when we’d pull into our hotel for the night we would go buy a couple of cases of better beer and ice that down in the bathtub of one of the rooms, along with the Old Milwaukee. We’d drink the better stuff until it was gone (and we were nearly gone) and then start in on the Old Milwaukee. Still, there would always be a lot of cans of OM left in the morning and someone had to be delegated to load it on the bus so it could be transported to the next place. I think it was somewhere on the homeward leg when the last can of Old Milwaukee was either consumed or thrown out the window of the bus. We could have cheered, but we probably just belched. The other memorable part of the trip (given the amount of brain cells that died it’s a wonder we remembered anything) was that we started the trip with 4 eight-track tapes to be played on the bus sound system. Within the first three hours, three of the tapes broke. The sole survivor was the “Frampton Comes Alive” double-album, which then was played non-stop. Every. Single. Hour. Of. Every. Single. Day. (Do you…feeeeel like I do?) At one point I begged my friends to buy a new tape of anything — Johnny Cash, Montovani — anything! All funds were being reserved for beer and as we still had a few days left in the trip, there would be no money allocated for non-essentials. To this day, Old Milwaukee and Peter Frampton will both make me gag, though fortunately both are pretty rare these days.

One of my favorite beer memories, however, is of when I was in college when a couple of friends and I decided to drive up to St. Louis to see this new movie that was stirring up a lot of talk; something called “Star Wars.” On the way we stopped at a store and bought a 12-pack of Stroh’s and a foot-long length of summer sausage. We drank the beer and bit chunks out of the sausage as we drove along (don’t try this at home, kids) and it was a great combination. Whenever I see a Stroh’s sign today I always remember that trip. The movie was pretty good, too.

Between Kevin’s post that I referred to at the beginning of this story and my own experiences, a lot of classic, regional brews have been recalled. As I was writing this I started to wonder what happened to some of these; for example, Pabst Blue Ribbon. I did a web search and discovered that PBR is still going strong. In fact, it has become the home and distributor of a lot of these old brands. Visiting the Pabst Brewing website I found many of these “vintage” beers huddled together. Beers like Schaefer, Blatz, Colt 45, Old Style, Schmidt, Stag, Schlitz, Lone Star, Falstaff, Pearl, Rainier and Stroh’s — even Old Milwaukee and Olympia — have found a home there, and preferably it’s a cool, dark and dry one!

Update:

Mr. Dilettante has a more, um, sober, take on a similar topic. (And yeah, Mark, I caught the Wang Chung reference…which may also be appropriate.)

A strong recommendation for The Strong Man

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by the Night Writer

History means the endless rethinking — and re-viewing and revisiting — of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again. –John Lukacs

I was in my early teens when the Watergate saga dominated the news and politics, setting the course of the style and tone of political reporting we take for granted today. You couldn’t avoid the story as it played out, though eventually my attention would not extend much beyond the headlines as things such as girls and getting my driver’s license became more important.

Then, a couple of months ago I heard Hugh Hewitt interviewing author James Rosen about his just released book, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.” At first my long-buried, reflexive mental eye-glazing at the mention of the word “Watergate” had me tuning out but some of Rosen’s statements piqued my interest. Watergate was one of the defining and far-reaching events of our modern history and Mitchell was, next to Nixon, the central character in the drama — yet little was known about him. He himself was largely close-mouthed and much of the testimony by others about his role and involvement was contradictory and self-serving. As I listened to the interview I had to admit that it would be fascinating to get a look at what went on in the mind and life of the man who was the Attorney General not just for Watergate, but also the era of school desegregation battles, campus unrest and Kent State, and the investigations of historical figures such as Lt. William Calley and Jimmy Hoffa.

Before it could slip from my mind I went on-line and requested a copy of the book from my local library (it had yet to be purchased). A couple of weeks ago I was notified the book was waiting for me and I picked it up. I was finishing another book at the time so I didn’t turn to The Strong Man right away. My borrowing period was almost up when I started to read it and I was so taken with the Prologue that I immediately tried to renew the book, only to find that I couldn’t because others were waiting for it. Rats! I seriously thought about keeping the book until I was finished and just paying the fines, but realized that was selfish and inconsiderate of me when other people are waiting. From what I’ve read so far, I think people are going to be very happy to get their hands on this as soon as they can. I’m turning it back in — and I’ve got my name back on the waiting list!

The Prologue does a great job of setting the scene and outlining the significance of Mitchell’s historical role and the irony of there being so little examination of it. Some of this was due to Mitchell’s own reticence, so unlike his contemporaries:

Equally unlike his fellow Watergate convicts, Mitchell never published a book about his years in power, never sold his soul to pay lawyer’s fees, never dished dirt on Richard Nixon to delight university audiences on the lecture circuit or viewers of The Mike Douglas Show. He never “found God.” In electing to tough it out, one columnist wrote, Mitchell stood “up to his hips in midgets among the other Watergate characters…dividing the men from the boys.” “Among the WASP Westchester country club Mafia,” another columnist observed of Mitchell’s behavior in Watergate, “the code of omertà holds.” Richard Nixon, toasting his former attorney general at a post-prison party he threw for Mitchell in San Clemente, put it simplest: “John Mitchell has friends — and he stands by them.”

No biographer even contacted him, though three books were written about his wife Martha, “an emotionally disturbed alcoholic whose late-night crank calls splashed her face across the front pages of every newspaper and magazine in the country.”

Stunningly, no one bothered to chronicle the life of John Mitchell: child of the Depression, World War II combat veteran; Wall Street innovator; gray-flannel power broker to governors and mayors in all fifty states; Richard Nixon’s law partner, consigliere, and winning campaign manager in 1968 and 1972; America’s top cop, as attorney general, during the Days of Rage, the May Day riots, and the Pentagon Papers; and Public Enemy Number One when, in the words of a British observer, “the great black cloud of Watergate seemed to settle over America like a kind of grand judgment, not just on Nixon himself, but on the whole of post-war America.”

In fact, Rosen notes,

John Mitchell bore witness to the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War. After all, it was Mitchell who ran the Department of Justice, and the administration of justice in those years occupies the central role in all lingering controversies from that era: Was justice done in the enforcement of school desegregation and antitrust laws? In the battles against antiwar protesters and radical groups? At Kent State and Jackson State? In the cases of Daniel Ellsberg and Lt. William Calley, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Vesco, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth, John Lennon and the Berrigan brothers, the Black Panthers and ITT?

Rosen devoted two decades to researching and writing the book, poring over relevant secondary sources such as the 500 books written about Watergate, Nixon, the 60s, and the countless newspaper and magazine articles from that time. Additionally, he interviewed

… 250 people, including two presidents, a vice president, two chief justices, three secretaries of state, two CIA directors, and a great many staff members of the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President … Also questioned were party officials and secretaries employed at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June of 1972. These sessions included the only extensive interviews ever conducted with the woman whose telephone was wiretapped in the Watergate break-in and surveillance operation and more than eight hours of interviews with the only man who monitored the wiretap.

He also used the Freedom of Information act to get access to thousands of undisclosed documents from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, including all of Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s 200,000 pages of hand-written notes from their meetings with the President. His research even included the internal files of the staff lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and sworn testimonies from closed-door executive sessions of the Senate Watergate committee. He claims to know “what the WSPF lawyers knew about Watergate and when they knew it.” These details showed key witnesses consciously changing their testimony to implicate Mitchell and hide their own actions. Finally, he had Mitchell’s own private correspondence from prison, as well as Mitchell’s tax returns and other de-classified documents. While he hints at revelations and developments in the prologue it is clear, in Rosen’s own words, “Assuredly (this)… is not your father’s Watergate.”

Whereas the mention of Watergate used to bore me senseless, I am now excited to get this book back in my hands. It’s almost as if I’ve discovered a long-last family album labeled with the names of people I half-remember that promises to explain the past…and describe the future. Oh, hell, forget the library. I may have to buy the book!

The great Minnesota “got”-together

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by the Night Writer

I don’t know if the Reverend Mother, Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly will be favoring us with one of their Friday coffee-blogs today or not, or if the Diva plans to do another cupcake post (or perhaps write about her first home-made salsa). Since the Minnesota State Fair opened yesterday, however, I decided I’d re-run a favorite: the Mall Diva’s and Tiger Lilly’s live blog of their 2006 State Fair adventure (with photos!).

This and that

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by the Night Writer

It’s been a hectic week already and I’ve had little time to ponder blog-postings even if there’s a lot of material just laying around, what with the Mall Diva’s birthday, the arrival of two Chinese students who will be staying with us for a little while they find a place to live, and preparing my notes for the “Are You Marriageable?” class (only one more week to go). Here are a few odds and ends that have caught my attention…

This is a picture of the bike we bought the Mall Diva for her birthday.

It’s very similar to Hayden’s new bike, who didn’t find it so amusing that the Diva and I referred to this style as a “Grandma Bike.” I thought it was amusing, until I discovered that you don’t mess with grandma.

This is the time of year when Beloit college comes out with its annual “Mindset” list for faculty describing the things that happened before the incoming freshman class members were born. I had penciled in doing a post about this, but Mr. Dilettante beat me to it. I guess I can cut him some slack since he’s a Beloit alumnus and he did a great job of dissecting the Academic “mindset” that came up with this year’s list. Currently my mindset is “waste not, want not”, so here are a few things that Beloit left off the list that I added to Mr. D’s comment section:

For the class of 2012…

  • …There has never been a Soviet Union (yet).
  • …There has always been one Germany.
  • …Nelson Mandela has never been in prison.
  • …Salman Rushdie has always been under a death sentence.
  • …”Imelda” has always been the nickname of someone with a lot of shoes.
  • …Ronald Reagan has never been president.
  • …Pete Rose has always been banned from baseball.
  • …There has always been a Sega Genesis.
  • …Bart Simpson has always been 10 years old.
  • …Iran has always been pissed off.

Last year at the end of the season I announced on this blog and to my Fantasy Football league that I was stepping down as Commissioner and retiring from the game. Yesterday I learned that my old league is disbanding because no one else wants to step up and be the Commish. I guess that makes me the MVP…

Finally, I was blessed and surprised to get a link from Mitch at Shot in the Dark for the “Man in the Street” post the other day. In the three-plus years I’ve been blogging, two things have always amazed me. The first is that I’m still doing it (which set in at about the 6-month mark), and the second is how hard it is to predict when a post will get someone’s attention and suddenly drive a lot of traffic to your blog. Certainly there have been “masterpieces” I’ve written and then sat back waiting for a book offer and never even scored a comment, and then something I almost didn’t post doubles my average traffic in one day. It’s moments like that that help explain amazing item #1. Thanks, Mitch, and to everyone who commented!

Filings: Man on the Street

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by the Night Writer

One morning last week I was walking the five blocks from the train to my office, pretty much just thinking about the day ahead. As I waited at the first corner with a crowd of pedestrians for the light to change, an older black man standing in front of me turned around and looked at me, then said, “God bless you.”

“And God bless you, too,” I said, a little surprised but not really uncomfortable even though I could smell the strong scent of alcohol coming from him as he turned back around. I know from the times I’ve spent with the guys in the Teen Challenge program how much they hated, when they were on the street, how people wouldn’t look at them because of their color, or their raggedyness, or both. Since then I’ve tried to make it a habit to acknowledge people with my eyes when they cross my path.

The man was standing with two other rather scruffy looking guys. He turned to me again as the light changed and the crowd moved across the street, the two scruffy guys and my fellow pedestrians subtly leaving a bubble around me and my new friend as we got the inevitable request for money out of the way (which I declined). He then started a rambling description of his birthday being January 1, and how nobody believes that, and how Jesus walks with him, and nobody believes that either. “Do you you believe Jesus walks with me?” he asked.

“I believe Jesus lives inside us,” I replied.

“Does he live inside you?”

“Yes, he does.”

He went on talking about Jesus following him everywhere. By now Jesus was the only one who could have been in spitting distance of us. I was feeling very much at peace, though, interjecting a comment every so often to let him know I was listening. We got to the corner where my office is and my friend was asking me if Jesus walked beside me. I told him that I believe Jesus said he would never leave us or forsake us, that he would be with us everywhere we go. Then I got bold, though I still felt peaceful.

“I believe Jesus is walking beside you,” I said. “The problem is, you’ve been taking him into a lot of places he doesn’t want to go. I wonder,” I said, “what would happen if you started to follow him for a little while instead of having him follow you?” For the first time in our conversation he was still and quiet. I put out my hand. He took it.

“I believe you when you say you were born on January 1. I believe that is a symbol from God that you can make a new beginning, but you don’t have to wait for your birthday.”

There at the corner of Washington and Marquette I put my other hand on his shoulder and began to pray out loud, thanking God for the man’s life and for bringing us together and for the plans that God had for him. I prayed that God would open doors for him that no man could close and that he would close doors that no man could open. I said “Amen” and dropped my left hand. He stood there with a surprised look on his face.

“Thank you,” he said, softly. Then louder, “Thank you very much! God bless you!” Then he turned and walked away.

Now I harbor no illusions that that interlude will turn that man’s life around, but I know God has done greater things. Neither do I have any doubt that I was supposed to meet that man that day. As for myself, I got quite a lift from the unexpected meeting, and I wondered at the peace and confidence I had felt. I hadn’t been self-conscious at all about anyone else around us, or put off by the man’s appearance or condition. Believe me, that is not my usual demeanor! I felt at first as if I had just done something the way my pastor would’ve done it, and then I realized that perhaps I had done it the way Jesus would have — without a thought or care but for the man he had just met.

That may all be very nice but I also realized that, while I likely won’t know the impact I made on the other guy, that God wanted to show me something. I, too, am guilty — in both thought and actions — of taking Jesus into places sometimes that perhaps he doesn’t want to go. In fact, I can go hours without even being aware of him beside me. As the morning went on I was simultaneously buoyed by the experience and humbled that I was able to experience it. I didn’t really grasp the biggest lesson, however, until yesterday when it finally dawned on me.

The experience felt great and was stimulating because it was different, out of the ordinary. It finally hit me, yesterday, that in fact it shouldn’t be that out of the ordinary at all. Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time in church, but was usually out walking, going from one place to another, meeting the people he was supposed to meet, touching their lives with his presence. The same Jesus walks with me, wanting to do the same thing if I will let him; not by preaching sermons or trying to get people to say a prayer so they can be “saved”, but simply touching their lives with a word or a touch that communicates his love for them, showing — as Romans 2:4 says — “the goodness of God that leads people to repentance.”

I want to feel that lift that I felt that day much more often.