Dr. Jack

What Happens Next?

It took a while, but the votes have all been counted, and the election is finally over. It was certainly no landslide or “Blue Wave” as some were predicting, but the final decision was clear and decisive. If it didn’t seem that way, that’s because we live in an era in which close elections are the norm. A few points of historical perspective:

1) Because of the heavy turnout (over 65%), both candidates received more votes than any other person in history. Biden won by over 6 million votes, 51% to 47%. Biden also had a solid majority in the electoral college, 306-232, the exact same numbers as Trump had in 2016, when he claimed that he had an overwhelming mandate.

2) While the 4% margin might seem thin, only three elections since 1960 have seen the winner claim more than 53% of the vote: LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984. All of the other 12 elections have been decided by a less than 6% margin.

3) It is difficult for an incumbent president to lose a re-election campaign, as only four have managed to accomplish the feat in the past century, Herbert Hoover in 1928, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bush Sr. in 1992, and now Trump. In all of those cases, the incumbent president was seen as failing to take decisive action or deal effectively with a crisis. For Hoover it was the Great Depression, Carter had the Iran Hostage situation, Bush had a serious recession, and Trump had Covid and an economic implosion.

4) A little historical trivia: Trump is only the 3^rd man since the Civil War (William Jennings Bryan, 1896 & 1900, and Thomas Dewey, 1944 & ’48, are the other two) to lose two the popular vote in two consecutive elections.

Okay, so what happens now. Historians are loathe to predict the future, as am I, especially when dealing with this most unpredictable of presidents. Again, however, we can look to the past for a hint of what to expect.

—Prediction number 1: The economy will improve. That’s a pretty safe guess, since we’re in a mess at the moment. While Trump has been proclaiming “the greatest economy in history,” job losses have been astronomical, lives hang in the balance, and Congress has failed to enact a second relief bill. Before we see any improvement, however, we will see some dark days ahead. Trump’s failure to even acknowledge the Covid Virus, let alone do anything about it, has created this incredible spike in the number of cases and deaths. That will force state governments to reinstate shut-down measures, a process that has already begun. Thus economic recovery will be delayed.

–Prediction number 2: It’s also safe to say that Biden will provide more leadership in the battle versus Covid than Trump has, and he will base his actions on science, not political expediency. In recent days, we have had good news about the development of two new Covid vaccines. To be fair, Trump’s push for the development of a vaccine at “warp speed” probably hastened it’s progress. Of course, it’s now clear that he did this for political gain, not because he cared about the lives of Americans. And let’s not give him too much credit; that would be like congratulating a drunk driver who is weaving down the road and accidently wanders into the correct lane on occasion. Even many people who voted for Trump feel more confidence in Biden in terms of organizing distribution and inoculation efforts. Still, this has been a befuddling virus thus far, and we are learning more about it every day. So stay tuned on this front.

—Prediction number 3: The stock market will do well over the next four years. The market has rebounded significantly since election day, both because of Biden’s election and the Covid vaccine news. It’s not that investors like Democrats more than Republicans; it had more to do with the election removing the cloud of uncertainty that has hovered over Wall Street for so long. The fact is, however, that, over the past forty years, the stock market has performed considerably better under Democratic presidents than under GOP leaders. Here are the numbers by president for the S & P 500 performance since 1980:

Clinton, + 210% improvement

Obama, + 182%

Reagan, + 117%

Bush, Sr., + 51%

Trump, + 45%

Bush, Jr., – 40%

Of course, the stock market is not the entire economy; it is more of an indicator of investor confidence. It does, however, reflect economic growth. And many people, myself included, are dependent on a strong stock market for their retirement incomes. In terms of gross domestic product, which is a more accurate indicator of economic strength, Clinton has a slight edge over Reagan, with the others trailing significantly. All three Democrats (if we include Biden) inherited an economy in serious distress. Both Clinton and Obama, however, handed their successors a robust economy that was getting even stronger. (Few seem to remember that the US was operating on an actual surplus for the last few years of Clinton’s administration—the government was taking in more money than it was spending.) Here’s hoping that Biden can do the same thing.

Moreover, for generations, the Democrats were decried as the “tax and spend” party, while the GOP was seen as the party of financial restraint. From the 1930s to 1980, Democrats dominated the national government, implemented relatively high taxes on the wealthy (when compared to today), regularly paid off government loans, and kept the national debt low. The post-War economy hummed along beautifully under those circumstances until the 1970s. The party positions have been reversed in recent years. Republicans have become the “borrow and spend” party since 1980, spending money at a much higher rate while also cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations. That means that we have had to borrow much more money in order to function. Then, of course, the US has to repay those enormous loans along with the considerable interest that has accrued along the way. The end result is that our national debt (the amount of money the government owes banks) has grown exponentially, quadrupling in the 12 years of Reagan-Bush leadership alone. That growing debt keeps being pushed forward to the next generation, and, until we get responsible fiscal leaders who will combine spending restraint with a more equitable tax system, the national debt looms over the country like a mushroom cloud.

In the end, as a recent Forbes Magazine article stated, the stock market doesn’t really care who the president is. It does, however, love gridlock.

—Prediction number 4: Gridlock will continue. There are still two senatorial races facing run-off elections in Georgia on January 5^th. Despite that, I believe the Republicans will retain control of the Senate. That’s bad news for Progressives in the Democratic party who are hoping for wholesale changes in the political system. It’s good news for investors who do not want to see dramatic changes that could disrupt the economy. As long as the two parties share control in the executive and legislative branches, we will not see any significant new laws, and government will avoid swinging to one extreme or the other. Further, while the Democrats united to defeat Trump, the various branches of the coalition disagree significantly on important issues. Progressives wanting to “defund” the police and other such reforms will be disappointed, because, despite the ridiculous claims by Trump and the GOP that Biden is a dangerous, screaming radical, he is and always has been, squarely in the center on most political issues. He has made a career out of compromising and working with Republicans. There is no reason to believe that his presidency will be any different, despite the pressure he will receive from the left wing of his party. That said, the GOP has become so radicalized by Trump, Fox, Limbaugh, etc., that the party will remain completely unwilling to compromise, despite how much that intransigence hurts the nation. Result: more gridlock.

—Prediction number 5: In the eyes of the world, the US will be stronger and more respected under Biden’s leadership. This is another no-brainer. Trump took a nation that was admired worldwide under Obama, a US that provided leadership on many important issues, and he turned us into a laughingstock. The only country that will be disappointed by Biden’s victory will be Russia, which treated Trump like Putin’s personal lapdog. Within the US, the diplomatic corps, intelligence agencies, FBI, CIA, and military leaders will all breathe a sigh of relief on January 20^th. Trump demanded that all of those people use their non-partisan offices to help re-elect the president, rather than do what was best for the security of this nation. He also insulted our fighting men and women and all veterans by saying they were “losers” for fighting to defend their nation. All of that will stop.

Last night, Kathleen and I finished watching the brilliant WWII series, Band of Brothers. We started watching it, for the 2^nd or 3^rd time, on Veterans Day. If you are not familiar with the series, you owe it to yourself to see it. The ten-part factual history drama follows one unit of American soldiers, from training camp to the end of the war in Europe. Interspliced with the film are interviews with the actual soldiers. The commitment and sacrifice of those men, along with their willingness to put their nation ahead of themselves is astounding. The series is inspiring, emotional, and thought provoking.

During the last two episodes, Hitler is being smashed by the Russians from the east and the Americans and British from the west. There is no longer any hope for a Nazi victory. Rather than give up and admit defeat, however, Hitler orders his elite SS troops to retreat into the Alps and continue fighting a guerilla war—to the death if necessary. Sound familiar?

Our own autocratic, would-be dictator has refused to accept reality. He, too, has ordered his stalwart supporters to fight to the death on his behalf. Thus, we are subjected to frivolous lawsuits that have led even the obsequious Tucker Carlson on Fox to urge Trump to “give it up.” It all came to a ludicrous pinnacle a few days ago when Trump’s $20,000-a-day lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gave a bizarre press-conference that serves as a metaphor for the entire post-election charade. While making wild accusations (my favorite was the one about a Venezuelan president, dead since 2013, being part of the conspiracy to defeat Trump), without any evidence, of course, Rudy began to literally melt down before our eyes. Not only did his torrent of lies cause him to sweat profusely, but the rivulets of perspiration became mixed with dark-colored hair dye that ran down his face in a grotesque display of the ineptitude of Trump’s doomed attempts to steal the election. Ironically, the president’s efforts to undermine the democratic process before the election led voting officials to employ extra safe-guards against fraud or any other possible corruption. The result was the cleanest and most unimpeachable election in history, which left Trump no avenue through which to overturn the results by fraudulent means.

—Prediction number 6: Despite all misgivings you might be feeling about the Covid crisis and the election, we will get through this. The cavalry (and the vaccine) is on the way, and January 20^thwill arrive. Finally, remember the example of those brave men depicted in Band of Brothers. They serve as healthy reminders of what this country is capable of accomplishing when its people are united in purpose and direction.

A River Runs Through It

On Thursday, I was overwhelmed by uncertainty. The Covid epidemic is seething in Wisconsin. This morning, I awoke again to the sound of a helicopter landing at the nearby hospital, taking a patient to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The uncertainty stems, of course, from the fact that we have no idea when this will all end and when—or if—we can return to our normal lives. On top of that, the presidential election is still undecided three days after the fact. The counting continues in many states to ensure that every vote is tabulated, but more uncertainty is the only result we have at the moment.

So, beset by these uneasy feelings, I decided to go for a walk. It was a gloriously warm, November day, with bright sunshine and temperatures in the high sixties, and I thought I’d wander to the Kinnickinnic River downtown. After all, what could be more constant and assuring than nature. That little river has run through this area since the last ice age. It is something solid and consistent. Just what I need to settle my troubled mind. For those unfamiliar with the area, the river enters the town from the northeast, runs north-to-south through downtown, then turns west where it flows to the St. Croix River about seven miles away. In town, however, two dams interrupt that meandering path. Right at the edge of downtown, the Junction Dam blocks the river and forms Lake George. The runoff from that dam continues south where it is joined by the water from the South Branch of the Kinnickinnic until it is again blocked by the Powell Dam. Behind that dam is another man-made body of water called Lake Louise. Powell Dam was built in 1904 to facilitate a flour mill, and it was later adapted to generate electricity. Thus, for 116 years, the Kinnickinnic River and its two lakes have run through town, looking from the air like a giant boa constrictor that has swallowed two large animals.

I parked downtown and crossed the bridge to the bike path that follows the river. As I walked next to Lake George, hundreds of geese were honking as they rested in the shallow water on their annual pilgrimage to the south. Above me, other geese flew in perfect vee formations in an impressive aerial display. I paused to watch the water rush over the Junction Dam before crossing the swinging bridge into Glen Park. As I left the park, I entered the woods and followed the dirt footpath back down to the river. Deep in thought, I looked down through the trees to my right expecting to see the fifteen-acres of Lake Louise.

It was gone.

Having grown used to seeing a sizable body of water in that spot, it was remarkable to see instead an expanse of mudflats cut by a meandering stream as it ran toward Powell Dam. During the thousands of years in which the river ran down that channel, it had knifed its way through the bedrock and formed a miniature Grand Canyon right here in River Falls. Perhaps a “Petite Canyon” is more accurate, as it appeared, from my distant vantage point, to be only about ten or fifteen feet deep. To get a better view, I cautiously moved closer to the steep cliffs above the water, trying not to tumble over the edge into the muddy plains so recently exposed. Looking down, it was a bit like returning to a childhood home only to find that it had been torn down and replaced by a different house. It jars the system.

I researched this situation and discovered that the dam had been opened on October 1 in order to see if the June 29 flood had caused any damage to the concrete dam. Earlier, in April, 2019, the City Council had voted to take down the dams over time, with Powell Dam scheduled to be dismantled in 2026, and Junction Dam coming down ten or fifteen years later. So this is a preview of what things might look like in six years.

Until then, the current condition of Lake Louise presents a view of the river not seen since 1965, when heavy winter snowfalls led to spring floods that damaged Powell Dam. That was the only other time that the lake had been drained.

I’m not sure how long the river will remain in its present state. Those who long lobbied the city to dismantle the dams used the rallying cry of “Free the Kinni.” This is a rare opportunity to watch the river run free, as it once did in the past and will again in the future.

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

It snowed a bit on Saturday (October 17^th). I was out for a long walk in the morning and it started to spit some big, fluffy, white stuff for a few minutes. It was pretty, and no big deal, especially since it was five days later than last year’s first snow, which came on October 12^th. Then we had some more flurries on Monday. On Tuesday, I woke up to a winter weather advisory and the expectation of several inches of snow. I guess the most alarming part about this prediction was the phrase which our local newspaper meteorologist used at the end of this forecast: “this snow will probably melt.” In other words, he was saying he can’t promise anything, but he’s hopeful that this particular snow won’t still be on the ground in late March, or whenever the thaw comes. When we went out to vote on Tuesday, the snow had started. I had left my driver’s license in my running clothes, so we had to go back home to get it. Then we were stopped for a TV interview on the way out of city hall. (I think they were intrigued by the fact that I wore a Chicago Cubs facemask, while Kathleen wore her St. Louis Cardinals mask.) The upshot of all of this is, that by the time we were winding our way back home, the snow was several inches thick and getting deeper; the streets were so slick that we couldn’t make it up the hill to our home. Luckily, Ben and his family lived right there, at the bottom of the hill. I borrowed a shovel and cleared two tire tracks up the steep, 150-yard hill, so we were able to get home. We received 8 or 9 inches of snow officially before it stopped, the biggest October snow since the “Halloween Surprise” of 1991.

Still, I’m not scared. Hell, I’m a Wisconsinite now, with one mild winter under my belt, so a little snow can’t frighten me. When I was a child, though, I feared many things. As Halloween approaches in this, the strangest of years, I thought back to those early days in Chicago and some of the things that scared me.

Growing up across the street from a cemetery, I suppose it was inevitable that ghosts would figure prominently in my childhood fears. In fact, my neighborhood of Mount Greenwood was surrounded by cemeteries. Even our local gang called themselves “The Graveyard Gents.” There is a reason for all of the cemeteries. Back in the 1800s, city officials determined that it was a health concern to have disease-ridden corpses buried within city limits. At the time, my neighborhood was outside the city, and at least ten cemeteries existed within about three miles of our house. Later, when those health concerns subsided, Mt. Greenwood was annexed by the large metropolis and became a Chicago neighborhood ringed by graveyards containing tall trees, green grass, and, to my young mind, ghost-infested graves.

Many of Chicago’s best stories about haunted places and ghostly spirits originated in this area and probably stem from the presence of so many cemeteries. People still talk about the ghostly parade of monks that supposedly visited St. Rita Catholic Church in 1961. The Batchelors Grove Cemetery in the nearby forest preserves has produced stories of mysterious lights, phantom cars, and ethereal apparitions. The most famous tale, though, is that of “Resurrection Mary,” a spectral woman dressed in white who was spurned by her boyfriend at a nearby dancehall in the 1920s and has been seen hitch-hiking along Archer Avenue late at night for nearly a century. We knew all of those stories while growing up, and even engaged in a graveyard challenge that was designed to test our fortitude. Al Capone was originally buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, directly across the street from our house. Later, his body was moved to the suburbs, but a family plot and a large marker remains in Mt. Olivet. The game consisted of climbing under the fence and entering the cemetery, alone and after dark, going in several hundred yards and touching Al’s grave, then running like hell back to our secret entrance without getting caught by ghosts or the Mt. Olivet night watchman. I believe that my later prowess as a runner developed in those stress-filled excursions into the graveyard. (The picture above is from my brother’s Christmas greeting from a few years ago. That is the Capone family gravestone in the center)

My house proved to be no haven from such terrors. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a nightmare involving some Halloween novelties that we owned. My siblings and I had these scary-looking, life-size, plastic heads on sticks that we would carry while trick-or-treating. One was a white skeleton skull, and the other was a red devil’s head, complete with sinister horns. In my dream, I was down in our basement—which was dark and scary under the best of circumstances—when these two heads suddenly became animated and began bouncing in the air and chasing me. I woke up screaming, with cold sweats, and I never again felt safe going down to the basement alone. Of course, soon after that terrifying nightmare, my parents built a bedroom for my brother and I down in the very place that produced such uneasiness. On many nights, I slept with my eyes open, ever alert for dancing skulls and devils.

Like many children of my generation, we also had a “witch” living on our block. It should be noted that, as in the Middle Ages, any older woman living alone was suspected of being a witch. Ours was a widow named Nellie Shevlin and she lived in a big, imposing home built on the corner in the early part of the 20^th Century. The rest of our houses on Sacramento Avenue were new,1200-square-feet, tract homes, all indistinguishable from the others. We tormented poor Mrs. Shevlin by calling her nasty names or running through her yard to avoid capture. Chicago folksinger Michael Smith had his own neighborhood witch, as he explained in his song, Crazy Mary:

“Crazy Mary from Londonderry, lived next door to the cemetery;

How many lovers have you buried?” we would shout

As we ran along the green and golden path

That took us home away from Crazy Mary.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Mrs. Shevlin while writing this article. She died in 1984, at age 95, and was buried across the street from her huge house, in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The centerpiece of any Halloween for most kids was the wonderful ritual of trick-or-treating. You knock on a stranger’s door, yell some nonsensical phrase, and they give you candy. Great stuff. One year in particular stands out in my memory. In 1964, I was ten years old, and Halloween fell on a Saturday. As soon as my brother Dan and I realized that we would have a longer time than usual for trick-or treating, we planned our attack as if it were a military operation. We had maps, charts, timetables, and contingency plans. We carried pillow cases, assuming our puny paper Halloween sacks would prove unequal to the task of carrying multiple loads of heavy candy. We had to plan carefully so that each time we ventured out, we ended our route just as our bag was filled and ready to empty. We started before noon and continued, with only a short break for dinner, until nine o’clock at night. Each time we circled back to our house, the mountain of candy in our basement bedroom grew larger.

As time has passed, the legendary nature of that eventful Halloween has been aggrandized in the hyperbolic recesses of my memory. I seem to recall other kids in the neighborhood lining the streets and cheering our efforts as we trudged out, time after time, with a dogged determination to fill our bags yet again. I could even swear that at one point General George S. Patton himself stood on the side of the road, his be-medaled chest swelling with pride as he said, “Never before in the history of trick-or-treating have two kids engaged in a major conflict before dinner, emptied their bags at home, and marched right out to do battle again in the evening. By God, I’m proud of those boys!” Then, as the theme music swelled, he fell into step with us and marched along by our sides, just to share in our glory. At least I’m pretty sure it happened that way.

This year, like everything else, the annual cycle of holidays, events, and rituals will be disrupted by the Covid crisis. We have decided that it would not be safe to open the door repeatedly to dozens of kids while Wisconsin Covid cases are spiking dramatically. So no trick-or-treaters this year. Abigail and Lucas are busy building a haunted house, so we will probably just visit with them and give them way too much candy.

That is, unless their haunted house is in the basement. I’m not going down there alone.

Anniversary of the Great Fire

This week marks the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Every school-child in Chicago learns about the Great Chicago Fire that occurred on October 8, 1871. The terrible flames that swept the city that night killed over 300 people and leveled 2000 acres of wooden homes and businesses. The popular myth about a cow belonging to Mrs. O’Leary having kicked over a lantern that started the blaze persists to this day and is part of Chicago folklore. The city rebuilt rapidly, with the best architects of a generation flocking to Chicago to use the blank slate created by the devastation to experiment with new building styles, materials, and techniques.

Few are aware, however, that 149 years ago, on the same day as the Chicago Fire, a much more deadly and destructive fire broke out near the lumber-mill town of Peshtigo (pronounced PESH-tig-oh), about 260 miles north of Chicago right here in Wisconsin. That conflagration raced over 1,250,000 acres (600 times bigger than the Chicago Fire) in less than two hours, obliterating a dozen towns, 2,400 square miles of old-growth timber, and killing an estimated 2500 people. The exact number of dead is impossible to ascertain, because many people were reduced to ashes, while hundreds of unidentified people and body parts were interred in a mass grave. To this day, after a century and a half of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and forest fires, only one disaster has claimed more lives in the U.S. (The five worst disasters have been, 1) The Galveston Hurricane, 1900, 2) Peshtigo Fire, 1871, 3) The Johnstown Flood, 1889, 4) The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, and 5) The Tri-State Tornado, 1925 in Mo, Ill, and Ind.) As is the case in many horrible catastrophes, however, there were human factors that made the Peshtigo fire much worse that it would otherwise have been.

Peshtigo lies on the western side of Green Bay, a finger of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. It was a lumber town that sprang up to take advantage of the gigantic white pine trees that grew in the area. These trees, many of them six-feet and more in diameter and stretching two-hundred feet into the air, were part of a virgin forest that once spread across the northern US, from Maine to the Dakotas. Lumbermen in the area harvested the trees, cut them into 12- or 16-feet lengths, dragged them to local rivers, and floated them to sawmills along Green Bay. There, they were cut into boards, loaded onto ships, and taken to Chicago. The treasured wood made its way via railroads to the treeless prairies of the Great Plains to be turned into houses, stores, railroad ties, wagons, and myriad other items. In 1871, lumber was one of the most valuable commodities in the nation, and northern Wisconsin was the center of that industry.

Peshtigo was surrounded by forest, although some of the land had already been cleared by loggers and farmers. To make access to the valued trees easier, lumbermen cut down every single tree in a contracted forty-acre lot, but they took out only logs that were bigger than two feet in diameter. Further, loggers were notoriously sloppy about what they left behind after they clear-cut an area. Everything else—smaller trees, branches, sawdust—was left on the ground to rot. Thus, much material around Peshtigo had been there for years, drying in the sun. Loggers left a virtual desert landscape behind them—a desert piled high with dry, combustible kindling.

Local farmers often sold the lumber rights on their land to companies who would do the heavy work of clearing the big trees from their property. The farmers then pulled the stumps and dragged the remaining material—stumps, dead trees, branches, etc.—into huge piles and burned it. Fire was just another tool for many farmers, and black ashes swirling in the autumn air was a familiar sight. That summer, however, the northern Midwest had experienced a summer drought so severe that the local swamps had all dried up and were as desiccated as tinder. There had been only one sprinkle of rain in Peshtigo since July, and every piece of vegetation was parched. Cranberries, the state fruit of Wisconsin, were a big crop in the area, and they grew in the many marshy bogs in and around Peshtigo. These bogs, too, had dried up. Even the two-to-three-feet-thick layers of peat beneath the surface were dry as dust. A strange phenomenon had been reported repeatedly before the fire in which whisps of smoke or even flames would be seen emerging from the ground to dance along the forest floor or curl around tree trunks. This indicates that fire was smoldering beneath the surface in many areas. All through September, people would be called to fight these fires with bucket brigades before they spread. Dense smoke in the area blocked out the sun on many days and led people to wear handkerchiefs as facemasks that would look familiar in the Covid year of 2020. By October, these fires had become so frequent that people were exhausted from fighting them, and a sense of impending doom was palpable in the town.

On October 8^th, something sparked the flames. Like the Chicago Fire, no one knows exactly how it started, but conditions near Peshtigo were primed for a fire. Making matters much worse, a perfect storm of weather conditions was closing in on the area. A warm-weather system from the Gulf of Mexico that had driven Wisconsin temperatures into the eighties—unusually high for the upper Midwest in October—collided with a low-pressure cold front moving in from the West. That collision produced “cyclonic” winds that gusted to over 110 miles per hour and spun off F-5 “fire tornadoes” that slammed into Peshtigo and generated funnels of fire that stretched high into the sky. The tornadoes ripped houses from their foundations and tossed railroad cars high into the air. That terrible day in Wisconsin, the small, existing fires coalesced into a massive wall of flames and spread rapidly, whipped into a fast-moving frenzy by those hurricane-like, swirling winds. Further, a forest fire often generates winds of its own while sucking all of the oxygen from its path. These flames erupted into an actual firestorm that reached temperatures of 2000 degrees—hot enough to melt iron and metal. The only previously recorded firestorm of this intensity had been the Great London Fire of 1666.

Horrible scenes unfolded in which people tried to survive by jumping into the Peshtigo River only to have their hair or clothes catch fire; many drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water. Dozens of people huddled together in a plowed field, but were consumed by the fast-moving, overheated air. Some people jumped into wells to avoid the blaze only to suffocate when the flames sucked all of the oxygen from the confined space. Because of the strong winds and flaming debris, the fire jumped rivers and destroyed everything in its path. Peshtigo had been a thriving town with lumber mills, a large boarding house, a factory that made wooden implements of various sorts, hotels, churches, homes, and stores. Nothing was left standing. Forests, farms, and towns were destroyed. At least 2500 people in the area were completely vaporized or left as unidentifiable lumps of charred flesh. In an area ten miles long and forty miles wide, well over a million acres of timber were burned.

Because it took place in a large city that was quickly rebuilt, the Chicago Fire on the same day has over-shadowed Peshtigo historically, but this blaze was much worse. Peshtigo never recovered from this disaster, and today, it is only slightly larger than it was on the eve of the fire.

The combination of landscape, wind, and specific conditions that created the firestorm have been studied numerous times since 1871. Scientists began calling it the “Peshtigo Paradigm,” and American and British military tacticians in the 1940s examined the blaze closely. As difficult as it is to believe, they were trying to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing raids against Germany and Japan. In February and March, 1945, similar firestorms were purposely generated by incendiary bombs in Dresden, Germany and Tokyo, Japan, killing a combined 125,000 people in those two crowded cities.

Next year will mark the 150^th anniversary of these fires. You’ll hear a great deal about Chicago, Mrs. O’Leary, and the city that, like the mythological Phoenix, rose from the ashes to become greater than before. Don’t forget Peshtigo, however, and the incredible natural disaster that took place on that same day.

The Wit and Wisdom of Raylan Givens

One of my all-time favorite TV or movie lines comes from Elmore Leonard’s Justified, a long-form television show chock-full of memorable quotes. In one particular episode, US Marshall Raylan Givens explains his basic philosophy: “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

I was reminded of this line while watching the latest smear commercial by the Donald Trump campaign. In the ad, the GOP tries to paint Joe Biden as unreliable by showing a film clip from 1987 in which he lied. That in itself is no surprise; that’s what politicians do. They lie, exaggerate, or spin everything to make themselves look better. What makes this ad so amazing is that they had to go back 33 years to find such a clip. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting with the president in which he devised that brilliant strategy and decided to use the clip. His aides would have been looking uneasily at each other wondering who would speak up. Finally, one of them would mumble, “Umm . . . sir . . . Mr. President . . . according to the latest impartial fact-check count, you have misled, deceived, or outright lied well over 20,000 times—and that’s just in the four years since you have taken office. Last weekend, you told four lies in one tweeted sentence. Do we really want to go there?”

Trump, of course, operates by the philosophy of “Why tell the truth when a lie will do?” and has doubled down every time someone calls him on this multitude of prevarications. He simply points to someone else, says they are the liars, and indicates that they are out to get him. (This is, by the way, the definition of paranoia.) According to him, the “liberal media,” which includes every news source on the planet except the bobble-headed sycophants at Fox, lied. The Democrats lied. The generals and officers such as Colin Powell, James Mattis, and Alexander Vindman lied. The journalists who reported that Trump called military personnel who gave their lives defending this nation “losers” and “suckers” lied (even Fox verified that one). The doctors and scientists who actually care about the number of deaths in the US lied. The women he assaulted lied. Authors who write about him—even close family members—all lied. His own appointees who insisted on doing the right thing, rather than what they are ordered by him to do, lied. The few Republicans with the guts to speak out lied. Our own intelligence agencies, from the FBI to the CIA, lied. You get the picture: He met liars in the morning. He met liars all day long. The poor man is inundated with liars.

What would Raylan would say about that situation? I have a pretty good idea.

So, in Trump’s disturbed mind, or at least in his bombastic political rhetoric, the entire world is part of a massive conspiracy to discredit him with “hoaxes,” “fake news,” or other falsehoods. He constantly assures his followers that he—and he alone—is capable of telling them the truth. To students of history, this must all sound eerily familiar. It’s a technique called “The Big Lie,” and has been used by such luminaries as Benito Mussolini, Joe McCarthy, and the man who perfected it, Adolf Hitler. The “Big Lie” means that the speaker makes up something outrageous, and repeats it so often, and with such conviction, that people stop questioning it, regardless of the ridiculous nature of the statement. Followers become hypnotized by the Big Lie in a cult-like fashion. Hitler, like Trump, harangued his audiences with a barrage of messages designed to generate fear and distrust. He created a fictional conspiracy and convinced the German people that the Jews were responsible for the Great Depression and every other problem they faced. Newspapers, radio stations, and anyone who disagreed with him were labelled liars, and he contended that only he would tell them the truth. Amazingly, this strategy worked, and he slowly eliminated all opposition within the government and news media until he had dismantled a republican form of government and replaced it with a personal dictatorship. You all know the rest of that story.

With an election coming up, a Nazi-like disaster can still be averted. The bigger concern, though, is the long-term damage that Trump’s tsunami of lies has done to democracy and our nation going forward. The recently released tapes of Trump talking to Bob Woodward indicate that he absolutely understood the lethal nature of the Covid virus back in February and March, but consciously chose to lie about it as a political strategy. The fact that about 40% of American voters still support this man despite the relentless lies, the complete destruction of our national reputation, and the staggering failure of his response to the Covid crisis, indicates that the truth and competent leadership are no longer expected from our president. A significant portion of the country just wants to hear comfortable lies that fit their world view. Or, more accurately, most of his followers actually believe the fictional version of the truth that is manufactured by Trump and his Fox allies, regardless of how preposterous the lie and despite all evidence to the contrary. And now, thanks to the Woodward tapes, we know that he purposely creates those lies and falsehoods; they are not slips of the tongue or “jokes” as his spin masters disingenuously try to characterize them. They are intentional, because he knows that those 40% of the people will accept them as the truth. I can’t imagine a more dangerous development than this.

In a different Justified episode, Raylan Givens attacks a criminal while trying to elicit information about the location of a missing and endangered person. While the man is still on the ground, Raylan ejects a bullet from his gun and tosses it on the man’s chest. Then he says, “Next one’s coming faster.”

As a metaphor for our current situation, that guy on the ground is us, the people of the United States, laid out flat by the string of disasters wrought by Donald Trump and his audacious lies. Raylan personifies the warning about what will happen if Trump is re-elected. “Next one’s coming faster.”

Covid Summer

We’re approaching the end of summer now, as the fall season officially begins on September 22. The end of one season or the start of another always represent nice break points in the year. Most people just ignore those artificial landmarks and plow on with their lives, satisfied with surviving another season. Others change their smoke-alarm batteries or their heating-system filters on those days each year. The anal-retentive side of me applauds those people, but I usually forget to take such responsible actions. Instead, I like to pause on those milestone days and take stock of the previous season. So, how will I remember the summer of 2020?

Certainly, this has been the strangest year of our lives. When spring officially began back in March, Kathleen and I were returning home from Florida under surreal conditions. The Covid emergency was just beginning, and no one was quite sure what was going to happen next. Most businesses were closing up and we weren’t even sure we would be able to find food, gas, and lodging on our return trip. Despite the fact that numbers of infected were skyrocketing and people around the world were dying by the thousands, our president assured us that, if we just did nothing and removed all restrictions, the virus would magically disappear. Nearly 190,000 American lives later, he is still saying the same thing and continues to provide zero leadership during this national emergency. People often refer to September 11, 2001 as “the day the world changed.” This virus, however, has been much more traumatic and will produce many more life-altering changes than that terrible day at the start of the new century. Still, as they say, life goes on, and everyone has tried to cope with this bizarre situation in their own manner.

Many people have embraced their families as a haven against the storm. Others, forced to work from home while simultaneously teaching school lessons to their children, would probably prefer a little less family. One of the highlights of the summer for me occurred on a night in which the grandchildren were staying overnight with us. Luke (7) and Abigail (10) were sitting at the counter in the kitchen, starting their dinner, and Kathleen went to the refrigerator to get them something to drink. Since we are the grandparents, and our job is to spoil the kids, she agreed to give them a soft drink. She pulled out a two-liter bottle of Sierra Mist and, for some inexplicable reason, began shaking it. I’m not sure if she thought it was some sort of “shake-before-using” fluid made from concentrate, or if she was so engrossed with her conversation with the kids that she forgot what she was doing. But there she was, one of the smartest women I know, moving the bottle of carbonated liquid up and down vigorously. Of course, the predictable happened: when she opened the top, the clear, sugary juice exploded in a volcanic eruption. We’ve all seen this scenario in cartoons or bad sitcoms, where a hapless character just stands there as liquid from a broken faucet or some other source blasts them in the face for an extended period of time. They don’t move away, they are simply immobilized while the dousing goes on and on. A real person would never do that, you might think. Any normal person would quickly move away. Not so, my friends. The kids roared with laughter as the sticky soda shot into Kathleen’s face until its energy was spent and the carbonation subsided. Not only did she not duck away, I swear she actually leaned into it. I must admit that I was laughing right along with the kids. That is, up until I realized who was going to have to clean that viscous mess from the cabinets, floor, and the various items we had on the counter-tops. It took two days and multiple cleanings on my hands and knees before we stopped sticking to the floor. On the bright side, though, the kids have an indelible memory of Nana Henderson from the Covid Summer.

We also remodeled our master bathroom in July. We had planned to tackle the project next year, but moved it up when the shower grout and tile began to crumble, creating water stains on the ceiling below. The room was gutted and everything either re-built or replaced in a 2 ½-week project. Our contractor had already done several things for us in our first months in the duplex/condo, and this, too was excellent work. It cost considerably more than we originally planned to spend, but the end result is a master bath you might find in a high-end hotel, complete with a state-of-the art bidet. As you might guess, the bidet was not my idea. I have to admit, though, that the heated seat is pretty nice. Also, whenever you walk into the room, a light goes on and the outer lid opens up automatically. It’s a nice demonstration of respect. I feel like a Four-Star General walking into a room full of Privates. Also, when I need to . . . do what men do in a bathroom . . . I just reach to the left and press a button, mechanically lifting the seat. No more bending over to raise the lid like some sort of a cave man. Another press of the button lowers it when I’m done. Very civilized.

As the world ground to a halt this summer, the slower pace actually created one of those “stop-and-smell-the roses” moments for me. During my many ambulatory explorations of River Falls, I finally noticed that this town is a hotbed of Little Free Libraries. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, it is an informal program that began about ten miles from here, in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009. Using scrap lumber, a man named Todd Bol built a box in the shape of a schoolhouse on a post, put a few used books in it, and installed it at the end of his driveway. The idea was that anyone who happened by could take book or leave a book in the box in order to encourage recreational reading in an inexpensive way. This simple concept took off, and today there are more than 100,000 of these little boxes registered around the world, with thousands of other, unregistered libraries springing up every day. This summer, I have discovered at least a dozen of these around town. There is a whimsical, serendipitous quality to opening the door and seeing what treasures might be hidden inside. In a regular library, you tend to know what you’re looking for and go to that section of the building. With the LFLs, however, you never know what you’ll find. This summer, I’ve read several books that I stumbled onto in this way. So, if you’re seeking something new to read, look for a little box shaped like a house and take a peek inside. Or drop off one of those books that are just gathering dust in your basement. You might be starting that book on a journey that will take it far from home.

The other thing that has happened recently is that I have started a new job. I have tried golfing this summer with terrible results. I enjoy playing, and I hit just enough good shots to give me hope and bring me back for another round. I finally came to the realization that, if I want to improve, I have to play more often. Golf is an expensive hobby, however, and I can only afford to go out once every other week or so. I also go to the park to hit fairly regularly, but I spend more time looking for my balls in the tall grass than I do hitting them. So, when I saw a pop-up, “now Hiring” ad on the website of the Kilkarney Hills Golf Club a few minutes from my house, I thought it must be fate. During my interview, I was asked why I wanted that particular job. At that moment, I realized that there is a wonderful freedom that accompanies applying for a job that you don’t really need. So I just waxed poetic about how, since my days as an 11-year-old caddy, I have loved the sight of a golf course in the morning, with the silver dew glistening on the green grass. He hired me on the spot. It probably had less to do with the poetry and more to do with the fact that all of his summer employees were returning to high school or college, but I am now gainfully employed once again. I will be working the pro shop, the kitchen, and the bar simultaneously, but it’s a small operation and it should be fun. I even offered to mow the fairways, should my services be required. The best part is that I get to play golf and use the driving range for free as often as I want. Actually, it just dawned on me as I was typing this: I have no idea how much I will be paid. I probably should have asked that during the tense salary negotiations that accompanied my interview. The phrase “minimum wage” springs to mind, but the free golf is the perk I was after.

Okay, so the past three months haven’t been, in the words of an old Nat King Cole song, “Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer,” and you may not want to “dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.” (If you want some campy fun, check out the film clip below of Nat entertaining a bunch of really, really white people.) Most Americans have not been able to take their usual vacations, cruises, or trips to exotic lands. Instead, it has been a summer of simple pleasures, and, for me, the season had its moments. Take a minute to stop and think about what you will remember most from the Covid Summer of 2020.

2020 Vision

This year will certainly be remembered as the year of the Covid virus. It’s the year that the world came to a halt, people were confined to the home for months at a time, and everyone desperately sought some form of escape to break up the monotony and boredom. I think back to the simpler days of my childhood when black-and-white television shows such as The Roy Rogers Show and Perry Mason showed the world in terms of black-and-white problems and simple solutions. Today, though, the black-and-white vision of the 1950s has been replaced by one in which all is grey and desolate.

In recent days, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my favorite Elton John/Bernie Taupin songs, Roy Rogers, from the 1973 Good-bye Yellow Brick Road album. If you’re not familiar with the song, it’s about a workaday everyman stuck in his miserable existence without any hope for change.

Sometimes you dream, sometimes it seems
There’s nothing there at all;
You just seem older than yesterday,
And you’re waiting for tomorrow to call

The only respite he has from the relentless monotony of his life is watching old re-runs of the Roy Rogers Show. I suppose it’s a sad song, but the listener can’t help but share in the protagonist’s anticipation in the chorus when Roy comes riding his horse, Trigger, into the living room every night, bringing him a little escapist relief.

Oh, and Roy Rogers is riding tonight,
Returning to our silver screens.
Comic book characters never grow old,
Ever-green heroes whose stories were told.
Oh, the great sequined cowboy who sings of the plains,
Of roundups, and rustlers, and home on the range.
Turn on the TV, shut out the lights:
Roy Rogers is riding tonight.

One verse in particular, resonates with me lately and encapsulates the world in which we live.

Nine o’clock mornings, five o’clock evenings
I’d liven the pace if I could
Oh I’d rather have ham in my sandwich than cheese
But complaining wouldn’t do any good

While The Roy Rogers Show is a bit simplistic for Kathleen and I, we can understand the appeal. After all, in each episode, bad guys do something bad, and Roy comes to the rescue and sets things right again. Good triumphs over evil, and justice is restored to the world. For us, The West Wing is more to our taste and provides escape from the bleak reality of the Covid world. The series, which aired from 1999 to 2006, still crackles with excellent writing, good humor, and crisp dialogue. More than that, though, it presents a fictional White House team that battles foreign and domestic issues with intelligence and compassion while trying to provide strong, moral leadership and do the best they can for the American people. You can see what I mean by escaping reality. After almost every episode, Kathleen and I turn to each other and say, “Don’t you wish it were like that in the real world?”

A new series that we just finished is the 1^st season (8 episodes) of the HBO prequel to another 1950s series, Perry Mason. It’s an excellent long-form series starring Matthew Rhys (of The Americans). In this update, Mason is more like the hard-boiled detectives of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett than the Raymond Burr interpretation that people my age will remember. In each of the original hour-long episodes that ran from 1957-66, Mason, the strapping lawyer, buttoned down in a Brooks Brother’s suit, defends a client accused of murder. With the help of his assistant, Della Street, and his investigator, Paul Drake, they uncover evidence that proves the innocence of their client. Mason then spars with prosecutor Hamilton Burger in court before eliciting a confession from a key witness, the actual murderer, often while on the stand. Every episode was tied up neatly, and, as in the Roy Rogers Show, justice was served and order restored. The simplistic formula appealed to Americans of the 1950s, and the show created the model on which most lawyer shows have been based since then.

The original novels and radio shows on which the character of Mason was based were written in the 1930s and ‘40s by a former lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner. This prequel is set in the gritty streets of LA at the height of the depression in the early 1930s, and is, in many ways, the opposite of the original. While the Raymond Burr, 1950s version fit the celebratory national mood after WWII, when we believed that right would always triumph in the end, this new one is set in a dark, atmospheric world, filled with corruption that runs from the police to the DA to the churches. In the current series, Mason is not yet a lawyer. He is a seedy private investigator who suffers from PTSD due to his experience in the trenches of WWI; he drinks heavily, and has a moral compass that fluctuates by the day. Moreover, Della is a lesbian, Drake is a Black cop who deals with discrimination on a daily basis, and Burger is an ambitious, homosexual lawyer. While these changes may seem designed to fit current, politically correct sensibilities, they all work and make the series much more realistic than the 1950s version.

This first season’s case involves the kidnapping and murder of a small child, including the horrific sewing of its dead eyes wide open. The cynical and damaged Mason is the investigator who follows clues that expose a wide-spread conspiracy to conceal the truth and convict the child’s mother of this heinous crime. When the lawyer for whom he works dies, Mason becomes dedicated to proving her innocent, passes the bar exam, and steps into the role as defense attorney. The deck is stacked against him and the small team that coalesces around him, and he is warned, in a nod to the original series, “No one ever confesses on the stand.” (Spoiler alert—stop reading this paragraph if you don’t want the ending revealed) In the end, unlike the original show, there is no witness-stand confession, and the trial ends with a hung jury.

I suppose the ending might be unsatisfying to those seeking pleasant, Hollywood conclusions to their escapist viewing. It struck me, however, that this version of Perry Mason is much more a reflection of our current times than the original could possibly be. Over the past four years, the bad guys, and one in particular, have repeatedly managed to escape justice despite a mountain of evidence proving their guilt. Trump sneers at attempts to bring him to justice, knowing that the spineless Republicans in the Senatorial jury box have been bought and paid for and will never convict him. On a daily basis, he admits his guilt from his witness-box podium, but still walks away. The vision of 2020, unlike that of the 1950s, is decidedly bleak. We are confronted with both an enemy we cannot see, an invisible virus, and one we see all too often, our lying, corrupt, and unapologetic president.

So, in the grim situation in which we find ourselves today, escapist TV is all we have for solace. The last verse of the Elton John song captures that feeling perfectly:

Lay back in my armchair, close eyes and think clear
I can hear hoofbeats ahead;
Roy and Trigger have just hit the hilltop
While the wife and the kids are in bed

I’m not sure what Roy Rogers would look like today if he were around and fighting against injustice. Perhaps he would be like the new Perry Mason, with a beaten demeanor and a three-day growth of beard, but determined to continue the fight against all odds. All I know for certain, is that he would not have an orange face, dyed hair, and a neck-tie that hangs between his knees.

Field of Dreams

As the Covid-19 crisis drags on, and our president continues to refuse to acknowledge that it is even a problem, boredom is a constant fellow traveler for many of us. We take our antidotes and diversions wherever we can find them, and, for us, it has often been sports.

For the past week, daughter Kristin and her husband, Kevin, visited with us in River Falls, and we had a great time with them, albeit confined to the house most of the time. Monday, on Ben’s day off from the clinic, the four of us went golfing, while Kathleen stayed with the two grand-kids and the three dogs. As Abigail later explained it, Nana Henderson was on “poop and barf patrol” following the dogs around Ben and Amber’s house and cleaning up after them. So, while she took one for the team, we had a great time golfing.

Golf has been a big part of their visit, because we spent the previous four days watching the PGA Championship from San Francisco. I had devised a somewhat-complicated pool of sorts for the tournament, and everyone got involved including the kids and Ben’s father-in-law, Tom. Thus, we all had a rooting interest, and we watched the tournament every night until 9:00, since it was held on the West Coast. Ten-year-old Abigail was on a team with her brother, but didn’t really get interested until the day after the tournament. At that point, Ben showed her how much money the leading golfers received for playing that weekend. Abigail, who has a decided mercenary side to her, said, “Holy cow! The winner of Survivor had to spend 40 days in the jungle to get one million dollars, and these guys just play golf for 4 days and can win two million!” I believe she will be more interested in golf in the future.

The tournament was, of course, played without fans, which gave it an eerie, silent quality when a player would make a great shot and you expected to hear a roar from the crowd. This is the way virtually all sporting events are being played in this age of Covid-19. It’s hard to believe, though, that a relatively short time ago, all sports were played that way.

Organized sports teams and leagues really began in earnest in the years just after the Civil War. One thing that happened was that, by the late 1800s, people began to worry about becoming too “civilized” from living in an urban environment, with few parks or open spaces, and working at sedentary jobs. By the early 20^th Century, this fear of becoming overly citified manifested itself in several ways. People like Teddy Roosevelt advocated a strenuous life in the outdoors, thus helping boost organizations such as the Sierra Club and the new Boy Scouts, and set aside federal land for national parks. Popular books began to encourage people to take up a more active lifestyle. In an example of this, Jack London’s Call of the Wild used dogs as a metaphor for people who needed to return to a more primitive state to reach their full potential. Finally, every major city began to set aside green space for their citizens to enjoy the outdoors and play sports. Another development of the late 1800s was that the Industrial Revolution had progressed to the point that the growing middle-class of businessmen, merchants, and managers had something that, for the first time, people referred to as “leisure time.” Even working-class people, because of the efforts of labor unions, were able to negotiate shorter work weeks. That meant that they had Sundays off, and many worked only half-a-day on Saturdays. People, primarily men at the time, began to fill this new-found free time with sports, games and other recreational activities. Middle-class athletic clubs in every city and town began to organize baseball teams to play against each other or even travel from town to town for competitive games. These two developments led to an explosion in sports for adults to get physical exercise or as an outlet for competitive juices. Those games were usually played in any available open fields, and, like today, with few or no spectators.

Then, as crowds began to gather to watch these contests, entrepreneurs realized that they could build an enclosure around those fields and charge people to observe others playing games. So, ironically, sports that started as a way for city people to get more exercise, quickly evolved into games played in stadiums in which a handful of men played, while thousands more paid good money to sit and watch them. Colleges got into the act as well. Intramural sports such as football began as a way to get students out of the classrooms and onto the playing fields for exercise. Quickly, though, administrators realized that they could make money from these sports and, if your team was good enough, their school could attract national attention and broaden the pool from which they could recruit top students. The top universities even hired “tramp athletes” who would play football for a different college each week, selling their services to the highest bidder.

In my nostalgic mind, then, baseball games, golf tournaments, track meets, and other sports being played in empty stadiums hearkens back to a time when these sports were played for fun and exercise, rather than to make money. I want to say that there is a purity to these games today, but in order to do that, I would have to ignore the fact that sports are a billion-dollar industry, and we wouldn’t see them at all unless someone had figured out a way to make money off of them.

Still, in a surreal world in which we are confined to the house most of the time, watching sports and feeling a connection to something outside our living rooms is a distinct pleasure. Adding to that surreal quality are the cardboard cutouts of fans in the baseball stadiums and artificial, piped-in crowd noises. We purchased the MLB Extra Innings package in order to watch as many games as possible in this truncated season. Kathleen is feeling ripped off because her Cardinals only managed to play five games before an outbreak of Covid sidelined the entire team. But me, . . . hey, the Cubs are six games in front about a third of the way through the short season. They’re off to their best start since 1907. This . . .could . . . be . . . the . . . year!

And the cardboard cutouts go wild.

Monuments Men

In 1997, on my first parent’s night at Harpeth Hall, I concluded my remarks to a roomful of attentive mothers and fathers by opening up for questions. This was a rookie mistake, as any experienced teacher will tell you. You should never allow time for questions—it can only lead to trouble. Before I had learned that lesson, however, I had a confrontational father ask me if I was a “revisionist” historian. He practically spit the term out as he spoke it, having learned from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to disparage all practitioners of such blasphemy. “Revisionist History” was a term that surfaced in the culture wars of the 1990s, created by those who longed for the good ol’ days when history classes consisted solely of stories about the Great White Men who, with God guiding their hands, founded this nation, forged a heroic path to the West, won numerous wars, and made the US the greatest country in the world. Those on the right didn’t want to hear about the role played by women, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, or workers in that glorious story.

I responded with rhetorical questions: “Would you go to a doctor who had ignored the latest literature of his profession and continued to practice medicine the way it had been practiced fifty years ago? Or, if you were audited by the IRS, would you enlist the aid of a lawyer who was completely ignorant of the changes in tax codes over the previous half-century? Of course you wouldn’t, and, of course I am a revisionist. I would hope you want your daughter to have the benefit of the most current research in all of her classes, for that’s what ‘revisionism’ means.”

History, after all, is not a science; it is an interpretive art and therefore is subject to constant revision. Each generation, a new group of historians, with new sources, technologies, and viewpoints, takes a fresh look at our past and reaches new conclusions about the people and events that comprise our history. It has been that way since the days of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and will continue to be so in the future. To believe that history is a static “truth” that is carved in stone somewhere is simply wrong.

Since the 1960s, the interpretation and teaching of history has changed dramatically. When I was a kid, women, minorities, and working people were largely absent from the textbooks and lectures to which I was exposed. Sure, they might have thrown in a mention of Betsy Ross, Pocahontas, or Susan B. Anthony, but only in a cursory way. Most minority groups were characterized as a passive, collective group (such as “slaves” or “immigrants”) who were acted upon by those white men, but did little to help themselves. Because of the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and other social movements of the ‘Sixties, however, historians suddenly discovered the presence of those other people. They began to explore history “from the bottom up,” and discovered that those neglected individuals and groups had rich histories that were, in fact, often more interesting than those of the wealthy, Great White Men. They found that those other people did not simply sit there passively and accept their fate; they had agency, and they fought back against their oppressors in creative ways. They shaped their own histories and made enormous contributions to the story of America, despite the fact that the deck was stacked against them.

As this new information slowly found its way into the textbooks and classrooms of America, conservative forces pushed back. The main battles started in Texas, where a couple named Mel and Norma Gabler led the attack from a Christian Right position. Similar to the efforts of fundamentalists of the 1920s to keep Evolution and new scientific ideas out of textbooks, the Gablers spearheaded a national battle against what they perceived to be “Godless, atheistic, and un-American” history books. Since Texas purchases more textbooks than any other state, publishers began to cater to people like the Gablers and similar-minded interest groups. Textbooks began to roll back changes implemented by revisionists, downplay the role of slavery in causing the Civil War, ignore the near-extermination of Native Americans as part of Westward expansion, sugarcoat the violent importation of shackled African slaves as just another wave of immigration, and return to the notion that US history in general was part of God’s divine plan. Liberals, of course, returned fire, and, for the past 30 years, the conflict has raged in courtrooms, school-board meetings, newspaper editorials, and other battlefields across the country with the pendulum swinging first in one direction, then the other. The end result, though, is that we will never turn back the clock completely and return to a time where those formerly invisible groups disappear again. As Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I say all of this to put the current battles over statues and monuments into context. This is, in many ways, another phase of that same culture war. For many decades, people in various minority groups have fostered simmering resentment toward monuments that glorified people who had oppressed their particular group at some time. The recent protests have brought those resentments to the surface. As in the battle over textbooks, we can see extreme arguments on both sides. The “Down-With-All-Statues” group often go too far in their demands, while other groups can look ridiculous in trying to defend the indefensible.

As usual, I sit on the fence in this debate and try to look at both sides. The no-brainer concerns symbols of the old Confederacy. First, remember what those people did—in order to preserve the institution of slavery, they fought a bloody, military rebellion to destroy the nation as it then existed. You don’t need a legal interpretation of the word “Treason” to know that their actions met the standard. Second, in any other nation, at any other time in history, the leaders of a failed insurrection of this nature were rounded up and executed. We didn’t do that. Instead, in the South, we erected statues to those men. The historical period of monument-building actually occurred between 1890 and 1910, a period in which the South was trying to re-write history and paint the Civil War in terms of a “Lost Cause” in which they were fighting for high ideals such as states’ rights, rather than to defend slavery. It is no coincidence that that same twenty-year period was the era in which the South created the segregation system. Each state and local community in the former Confederacy tried erase the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments and deny Blacks civil rights by means of voter repression (sound familiar?) and new “Jim Crow” laws. Moreover, they built statues honoring their former generals and leaders, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, a cavalry general who also started the KKK in Tennessee after the war. (See the grotesque statue from Nashville, above) These statues must come down. Celebrating the men who tried to perpetuate the ownership of one person by another because of their skin color should have no place in a land in which “all men are created equal.” Similarly, the Confederate Flag was not a common symbol in the South until the 1950s, when it came into popular use as an emblem representing white supremacy and resistance to integration. It needs to go.

On the other hand, the tearing down of all statues because the people depicted were not perfect is wrong. We go too far when we try to hold all historical figures to a modern standard of perfection in terms of race relations. Yes, political expediency had a lot to do with motivating Lincoln to end slavery. But he grew in office, and he did, in fact, end the odious institution. Yes, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others owned slaves. They definitely lose points for that, and Jefferson loses more for having a lengthy, sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, with whom he had six children (This was after his wife, Martha, had died; Hemings was a mixed-race, half-sister to Martha Jefferson by way of Martha’s father. This situation illustrates the omnipresence of miscegenation on plantations, as well as the complexity of Southern society racially). But being “slave owners” was not the sum total of who those men were. They were also incredible intellects who inspired Americans to break away from their colonial masters and establish a new government based on democracy and republican principles, rather than monarchy and hereditary privilege. Yes, they were flawed, but they knew it. They even acknowledged the fact that the nation they were creating was a work in progress in the preamble of the Constitution. The phrase, “in order to form a more perfect union” indicates that the US was unfinished, that it was not perfect or complete as yet, and it needed improvement. That could also be said for these men as individuals. They were imperfect men who strove to be better than they were and regarded their slave-owning status as somewhat embarrassing.

I’m not trying to apologize for them, or minimize their flaws, but we have to also recognize their contributions. Washington provided a sterling example of presidential dignity, and, just as important, he relinquished power after two terms in office—the first time that had ever happened, anywhere in the world. In the way he carried himself while president, and in not trying to put himself above the law or rule as a dictator, he set an example that has been followed by every other president except Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Jefferson, like Washington and Madison, struggled with the obvious contradiction between his written words and the ownership of slaves. Yet, he wrote or co-wrote two of the most powerful statements of liberty in history (the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution). People and nations have been inspired by those statements ever since and the world is a better place because of it. James Madison is known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his many contributions, including the Bill of Rights, and for co-writing The Federalist Papers that helped persuade the wavering states to ratify the new Constitution. In his biography of Madison, historian Garry Wills writes, “Madison’s claim on our admiration does not rest on a perfect consistency. He has other virtues … As a framer and defender of the Constitution he had no peer … The finest part of Madison’s performance as president was his concern for the preserving of the Constitution …That was quite enough.”

The founding fathers were not infallible deities we should worship unconditionally; nor were they monstrous humans deserving of scorn and derision. They were just people, with the faults and imperfections that we all have. In fact, I would argue that it was the inconsistency, the flaws, and the contradictions of these men, along with their aspirations to improve, that makes them interesting and worthy of study. I guess what I’m trying to say, to use a hackneyed phrase, is “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.” We’re at an exciting time in our history, and we have to be careful not to go too far. The demolition of symbols and images that represent hatred or oppression is long overdue. Many other monuments, however, need to be preserved. If nothing else, they serve as reminders of our own imperfections as individuals and as a nation. And, like Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison, we should constantly aspire to improve and make our country a “more perfect union.”

The Call of the Wild

Growing up in a city, nature has always held a certain fascination for me. I realized this fact again on Sunday night and Monday morning when we had some serious rainstorms roll through the area. I didn’t realize how severe they had been until I ventured out for a walk right after the lightning stopped on Monday. There are four parks or fields where I go to hit golf balls on a rotating basis; three of them were under several feet of water, while the other looked like the Brad Pitt film, A River Runs Through It. The deepest one was in a grassy bowl officially known as the “Greenwood Detention Basin,” as if that’s where all recalcitrant waters have to go if they misbehave in school. The water in there was at least ten feet deep with more gushing in every second. (I guess I’ll never find those golf balls I lost). It turns out that River Falls received 7.25 inches of rain in about 12 hours, while neighboring towns had over 9 inches. After lunch, Kathleen and I went down to check out the Kinnickinnic River where it runs through the center of our town. It was eerie. We walked out on the downtown bridge and the water was only a few feet from the highest point of the arched overpass. The fluid was positively roiling just beneath our feet as it rushed by. It was moving so fast that we became a bit dizzy looking over the edge at the murky brown liquid. At the Swinging Bridge a few blocks away, the scene was equally impressive. The normally calm observation point was thunderous with noise as water cascaded down the South Fork of the river before colliding violently with the main river artery as it poured over the Junction Dam, spraying mist high into the air. I think we need this sort of unexpected weather outburst on occasion to remind us what a powerful force nature can be.

I’ve never been much of a nature lover. In Chicago, the cemetery across the street from my boyhood home offered the only substantial swatches of green in our neighborhood. Between my house and the cemetery was a narrow street and a 30-feet-wide, flat area of grass that gradually rose to an embankment for the Grand Trunk RR tracks. This strip of grass, rocks, and cinders provided fields for all sports. In the spring and summer, we played baseball or softball (Chicago style, with a 16-inch ball, of course) on an elongated diamond custom-tailored to the narrow shape of the field. In the fall, we played football there. The only problem was that most of the punts changed directions in unexpected ways after hitting the power lines above us. In January, it was usually cold enough for hockey, and the fireman on our block accommodated us by rigging a firehose to the hydrant and flooding the slightly recessed field for us. By blocking off the ends of our field with dirt and waiting for it to freeze, we created a reasonable facsimile of an ice rink.

Aside from that, we also played on the rapidly disappearing vacant lots scattered around Mt. Greenwood. Kathleen is always amused by the way my family refers to those postage-stamp lots as “prairies,” a word that, for her, conjured up images of pioneers, wagon trains, and vast expanses of tall grass. Even when developers starting building homes on those lots, we saw an opportunity for childhood games. Being less than two decades removed from WWII, “playing army” was always a favorite pastime. A dirt-hill that resulted from the digging of a foundation and basement could be converted quickly by our imaginations into a Japanese stronghold somewhere in the South Pacific. The newspaper clipping above is from 1964, when an Allied victory over such an entrenchment was memorialized by an intrepid, battlefield photographer. (I want it noted for the record that I was described as “virile,” despite the fact that I later got yelled at by my mom because I was still wearing my pajama top late in the afternoon.)

None of those places, however, offered much of an opportunity to encounter wildlife. My only clear recollection of meeting dangerous animals of any sort occurred when I was about seven years old. My best friend, Johnnie Rock (also depicted above) and I were coming home from school for lunch, and we cut through someone’s backyard. While running through the yard, Johnnie tripped over a chain, that unfortunately was attached to a large German Shepherd. The dog attacked and bit off part of Johnnie’s ear, an incident that traumatized me for life. Since that day, I’ve never been a person who likes to commune with nature in any significant way.

I do, however, enjoy running or hiking on trails in the woods. In Nashville, I learned to enjoy the beauty and solitude that trail-running afforded. Running on dirt or rock trails is great fun as you use the momentum of a downhill section to carry you up the next hill, or careen around downhill curves with reckless abandon. The Warner Parks in Nashville provided miles of isolated trails in the middle of the city. Fairly often, I would cross paths with a deer, and I once saw a timber rattler sunning itself on a trail, but I found few other animals in my sojourns through the park. River Falls, of course, is much smaller in size, but I have explored every state park trail within a ten-mile radius. Having been running or hiking on these trails through autumn, winter, spring, and now summer, I have been able to witness the dramatic changes of the seasons. Suddenly, I gained a new appreciation for the hundreds of paintings Claude Monet made of haystacks, cathedrals, or lily ponds. He would paint the same scene multiple times, at different times of the day or the year, to study the effect the altered angle of the sun had on the particular image. The paths on which I run every week or so at “The Mound,” a steep ridge near our home, have gone from leaf covered, to icy and slick, to muddy. The last time I was there, the summer foliage had grown so thick that many of the trails have narrowed from several feet across to a few inches. Running in the morning involves breaking through the many gossamer cobwebs that have been erected overnight.

Another thing I have discovered in recent months is that, in Northern Wisconsin, if you are in the woods, you stand a good chance of running into wild animals. As an addendum to that statement, I would add that, regardless of where you are, you are never far from the woods. Therefore wildlife often has the run of the place. While running, I have been startled by huge wild turkeys, I nearly stepped on a sizable snake of indeterminate species, and a few weeks ago, a deer nearly took me out as it bounded across my trail. I am currently reading a novel set in the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the northern border of Wisconsin), and a cougar figures prominently in that story. I have discovered that, while bobcats are frequently seen in the area, their larger and more dangerous cousins, the cougar, are pretty rare. Still, there have been sightings of these predatory creatures along the Willow River near here, and some authorities believe there may be a breeding population in the state for the first time in over a century. I have become fascinated with these wildcats, and I am ever-vigilant on my hikes, hoping to catch a glimpse of one—albeit from a great distance.

A more realistic expectation of a dramatic encounter would involve black bears. The only bears I’ve ever known have been Chicago’s professional football team and the cute “Honeybear” mascot of Harpeth Hall School, where I taught for many years. According to the Department of Natural Resources, however, “Wisconsin is home to a thriving black bear population estimated at more than 24,000 bears.” I believe this is true, because one of the critters has apparently decided to call our neighborhood home. In recent days, there have been half-a-dozen sightings of a black bear on our street and elongated cul-de-sac, one just two doors down from us. There are woods and steep hills just behind our home and all around the horse-shoe-shaped cul-de-sac. This big guy has appeared from those woods in search of food and found the many bird-feeders in the area to his liking. On my last trip to “The Mound,” just a few blocks from here, I made as much noise as I could as I hiked through the thick foliage, hoping to scare away any lions, tigers, or bears that might be around. Every time a squirrel scurried through the underbrush, I pictured a bear the size of a Buick or a tawny cat that outweighed me by 20 pounds launching itself at my throat.

So if you happen to be walking through any woodsy paths around River Falls, and you hear a lot of coughing and throat-clearing, or perhaps someone rattling their car keys like Jacob Marley’s chains, don’t be alarmed. It’s just me trying to avoid a close encounter of the natural kind.