We had ignored the invitation from the mainland Chinese mission to the UN. It was Spring 1989, and the Dean of the law school and I had gone to other dinners at the Chinese mission. They were large affairs with steam-tray food and had not been particularly enjoyable. We assumed that the latest invitation was to another similar open house and did not respond. Then an urgent message came from my student. He was a translator for the Chinese diplomats at the UN, and because of his urging, the law school was planning to put on a program with the Chinese mission. The translator told us the day before the scheduled dinner that the dinner was a private one because of our joint program, and it would be a huge insult if we did not go (and perhaps a blow to the translator’s career). The Dean and I started scrambling to get sufficient attendees.

I implored the spouse to go. She mentioned this to her associate, a Chinese citizen with an American green card, trained in China as a medical doctor, now helping the spouse to do biological research. He was one of those forced into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, an experience about which he did not want to speak. Chinese students were at the time holding Tiananmen Square, and no one knew what was going to happen there. The spouse’s associate quietly said that we should not go to the Chinese mission because it would be an act of support for a regime that did not deserve support. But we did.

It was a memorable evening on many fronts.  We had our images of Chinese officials spouting a party line, but the diplomats were professionals, not political appointees.  The ambassador and his wife got into an argument about her work for women’s rights at the UN.  A number of the diplomats talked quietly against their government.  One of them had a son who was in Tiananmen Square. That father had not had contact with his son for days and was clearly scared. I realized that my views of Chinese government officials were simplistic.

And then there was the food.   It was unlike anything I had eaten before or since.  This was not a Chinese restaurant meal.  It was prepared by the ambassador’s personal chef, and it was dish after dish of exquisite things presented at a round table where we were served lazy-susan style.  One course consisted of only a single, hard-boiled quail egg.  The spouse was proud that she got the slippery little morsel into her mouth with chopsticks, while the Chinese diplomat next to her failed.

A few days later the slaughter in the square occurred. The translator came to me almost crying and asked that we call off our program.  The program was to be about how China was operating under the norms of international commercial law and was entitled something like “China under Law.”  The translator choked out that we could not have a program like that because we had all seen that China was a lawless place.  (We did eventually have the program.) Tiananmen Square was not mentioned, and we never learned what happened to the diplomat’s son.

“It was 27 June 1930 that Chief Inspector Maigret had his first encounter with the dead man, who was destined to be a most intimate and disturbing feature of his life for weeks on end.”  Georges Simenon, Stonewalled.

“Among all the home businesses touted these days, I can think of none that is easier to get into, cheaper to start, or offers more potential for recognition, respect, and reward than nonfiction book writing.” Marc McCutcheon, Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That? How Ordinary People ore Raking in $100,000 . . . or more Writing Nonfiction Books & How You Can Too!

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.” Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates.

“No one in the tiny Ozark town of Mill Springs, Missouri, was likely to have been surprised when William McFadden decided to drink himself blind one day in 1873.” Mark Adams, Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr MacFadden Transformed the Nation through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.

“Various are the pleas and arguments which men of corrupt minds frequently urge against the yielding obedience to the just and holy commands of God.”  George Whitefield, The Sermons of George Whitefield.

“It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair.” Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.

“Both sides in the American Civil War professed to be fighting for freedom.”  James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

“Not all the gallantry of General Lee can redeem, quite, his foolhardiness at Gettysburg.” Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.

“If Samuel had known his mother was leaving, he might have paid more attention.” Nathan Hill, The Nix.

“Just as the German Reformation was largely the work of a single individual, Martin Luther, so the Scottish Reformation was the achievement of one man of heroic will and tireless energy: John Knox.” Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything In It.

“The air still smelled of charcoal when I arrived in Venice three days after the fire.” John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels.

“Thirst is deadlier than hunger.”  Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

“When Europeans began imagining Africa beyond the Sahara, the continent they pictured was a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of the ferocious and the supernatural.”  Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”  David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.

Awhile back I read Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right by Adam Clymer. The book did not get much play as far as I know, but it had some important themes that have stuck with me.

Clymer maintained that the fight over the Panama Canal Treaties helped fuel the rise of the modern Right.  The two treaties were signed in 1977.  One treaty gave the United States the right to use force to assure that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations.  The second treaty gave Panama, starting in 2000, control over the canal.

The treaties, of course, had to be ratified, and after Panama did so in a plebiscite, a political battle ensued in the United States Senate over their ratifications.  According to Clymer, this led to the emergence of Richard Viguerie, a founder of modern conservatism, the use of direct-mail marketing, and the rise of single-issue PACs to raise money and defeat moderate Republicans.

Although it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the treaties, the negotiations had started under President Nixon.  The treaties were thought desirable because they gave America the right to make sure that the canal remained neutral and they removed a flashpoint for much of Latin America, and Panama in particular,  by giving Panama control over the canal.  Those supporting the treaties maintained that the treaties would increase the security of the canal by helping to remove the threats of guerrilla attacks, which were almost impossible to defend against.

The treaties were backed by some prominent conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, but the treaties were also attacked by other conservatives in near-hysterical terms.  This was a surrender of American sovereignty, and furthermore, the military leader of Panama was pro-Communist.  Communists would control the canal and Panama, and the harm to the US as a result would be tremendous.

What is surprising to a modern surveyor of the political scene is that a number of Senators supported the treaty simply because they thought it was right even though they knew that their ratification votes would harm them politically.   The single-issue PACs targeted some of these Senators and through direct-mail marketing, inflamed a cadre of voters. A number of the moderate Republicans who supported the treaties were defeated when they stood for reelection.  Ronald Reagan opposed the Treaty, and some, including Bill Buckley, maintained that the treaty controversy helped make Reagan president.

This was an issue that is now largely forgotten even though its aftermath still affects the United States. A lesson from the controversy has been absorbed, even if that lesson’s source is not remembered.  Republican politicians are in fear that if they don’t toe some single-issue lines, a portion of conservatives will target them and defeat them in the primaries.  The result is that the politicians cannot develop nuanced positions; compromises are verboten.  There must be complete acceptance of the NRA’s positions.  Abortions are absolute evil.  Tax cuts are always absolutely essential.  All government spending, except on defense, is bad.  Back in 1978, some Senators studied a complex situation and decided that a ratification vote was in the best interests of the country even though their decision would harm them politically.  What is remembered is not that their position was right, but that they were harmed politically. What was learned is not try to figure out what is best for the country, but only to take actions that will not produce personal political harm.

This history is also striking because the opponents have been proven wrong. The Canal functions just fine. Panama is not a hotbed of anti-American Communism. Those who were wrong, however, did not pay a price for their belief. They continued in office. And most of us have forgotten the debate.

The daughter and I just visited Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. Can you say ”Lake Titicaca” without smiling? I can’t.

Non-trivia: What is America’s longest war?

On the recent trip, I learned that Bolivia once had access to the ocean, but lost it in a nineteenth century war. Maybe you already knew that.

I know of females named “Tiffany,” but I have never heard of one called “Cartier” or “Bulgari.”

The sign in Peru said “Joylong.” I was told that it was a Chinese car company. But I thought that it had something to do with sex.

President Trump, according to recent articles, does not believe that exercise is good for the body. Instead, he believes that, like a battery, a person is born with a finite amount of energy, and exercise needlessly dissipates it. In his view, those who don’t exercise are in better health than those who do. Perhaps with the proposed Trumpcare, insurance companies will be required to offer lower premiums to those who just watch television and read tweets. Certainly, at least, we can all sleep better knowing that our future healthcare system is in the hands of such a sound thinker.

I expect the President to be proclaiming, “Preserve your body’s finite energy.”  This reminds me  of General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Jack D. Ripper believed that there was a communist plot to sap and pollute American’s “precious bodily fluids” through the fluoridation of our drinking water. (Back in the 1940s and 1950s and probably beyond, conservatives did maintain that fluoridation was a commie plot against America. Is this the only thing conservatives have been wrong about?) Jack D. Ripper hesitantly admits that he gained this knowledge during the “physical act of love” which left him profoundly fatigued followed by an empty feeling. “Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.” Ripper reassures his listener that he does not shun women. “Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women. . . . But I . . . I do deny them my essence.”

So my question, “Does General Jack D. Ripper help explain Donald J. Trump?”

All citizens of Peru have to vote. The mandate is enforced by a heavy fine. How would it affect this country if all citizens were required to vote?

Ancient cultures always seemed to have many more memorials to death than to birth. Discuss.

The daughter and I ate alpaca in Peru. Quite tasty. The daughter also ate guinea pig. Not so tasty.

“Question: Why are there plenty of televangelists in America, but not a single tele-ecologist?” Lawrence Millman, At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic.

A portion of a museum had erotic ceramics from cultures that predated the Incas in Peru. I wondered: “Surely they did not refer to it as the missionary position.  What did they call it?”

The sister of Jared Kushner, the first son-in-law appointed by the President to solve all the world’s problems, was trying to raise money in China for a Kushner family real estate venture in Jersey City, New Jersey. A tagline told the potential investors, “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.” This was a reference to the EB-5 visa program.

That program provides a way for foreigners to get a green card if they invest half-a-million dollars in an American project that will create at least ten new jobs in the United States. Although the program is available to many industries and enterprising startups, real estate development has garnered the most attention for getting such foreign investments. And although investors from around the world can participate in the program, most of the EB-5 money has come from China.

This program is supposedly being re-evaluated, as it should be. At first glance, we seem to be selling visas; on the other, American jobs are being created because of the program, or so it is said. But surely there should be more questions. For example, are these investors the kind of immigrants we want? They must have an impressive set of skills because they apparently have made enough money to pony up $500,000. On the other hand, they have amassed fortunes in China, a communist country that often depends on cronyism and corruption. It must take great ability to navigate and succeed in that society, but will those skills further the America we want?

Most of all, however, we should question how many jobs are actually created by the program. The spokeswoman for the EB-5 Investment Coalition (Isn’t it amazing the diverse array of lobbying groups this country creates? Does this Coalition count as part of the swamp that was supposed to be drained?) states that “job creation is the focus of the program” and that the “program has helped create at least 175,000 jobs across the country.” I suggest that you get out the grains of salt before you accept that number.

Assume I have a potential project that would create ten jobs, but I need $500,00 for it. You have $500,000 to invest. I ask you to lend me the money, and I say I will pay you one percent interest. You say that is not enough. I offer you two, then three percent and so on. Let’s say that you say you will lend me the money at four percent. I then have to decide whether at that interest rate the project makes financial sense for me.

Instead, assume I can utilize the EB-5 program and go to a Chinese investor. This foreign investor gets two considerations for his money—the interest rate and the visa. This means I can offer him a lower interest rate than I have to offer you, perhaps instead of the four percent offered to you, only one percent for the Chinese rich guy who desires to get into the United States.

If I take the Chinese investment, ten jobs are created, but they also would have been created if I had borrowed the money from you at four percent. Under these circumstances, it is misleading to say that the visa program has actually created any jobs. Instead, what has been created are not jobs, but greater profits for me since I can borrow the money at lower interest rates because of the EB-5 program. Whenever I could have borrowed the money without the visa incentive, albeit with a higher interest rate than with the visa, the government in the EB-5 program is not creating jobs, only creating more money for the developer. And, in essence, the government has taken money from those who would have lent the money at four percent.

Of course, the interest rate the developer might have to pay in a free market might be so high that the developer abandons the project as uneconomical, and then the jobs are not created. Only in this situation–if the developer could borrow the money under the EB-5 program at a rate that allows the project to proceed when he could not otherwise borrow at a workable rate–has the visa giveaway program actually created jobs. In all other circumstances, it is a government program that does nothing more than increase the wealth of some developers. In other words, it is a government handout to the rich through allowing immigration of a select group of other rich people.

I consider myself rather ordinary looking, neither good looking or its opposite. I just sort of blend into the woodwork, at least when I am alone. But even so, I am part of a highly visible family.

The spouse, on the other hand, has always been conspicuous.  She was born with the right leg significantly shorter than the left, and she has always worn a brace on that leg. The brace has taken various forms, but since I have known her, two pieces of metal on the side of the leg extend above and below her shoe. The shoe sits on a metal plate and is attached to the plate by a T-bolt. She drills through the sole of the right shoe, forces the nut part through the hole, and fastens the bolt from under the plate, which has a hole, to the shoe. A crosspiece is at the bottom of the brace covered in tire rubber, and this is what she walks on. A leather cuff with Velcro is at the top of the brace, and this wraps around her leg. Of course, this makes her noticeable, and that does have a benefit. People do not have to meet her three or four times, like they do me, to remember her, and acquaintances from decades ago instantly recognize her.

On the other hand, strangers everywhere regularly stare at her.  Sometimes we have joked about it. In my small northern hometown, we stood outside Prange’s department store. Some wonderful Wisconsinites stopped about ten feet away and stood and gaped. She looked uncomfortable, and I said, “They have never seen anyone from Florida before.” She laughed.

Little kids do not always stand ten feet away to stare. Many come up right to her with eyes locked on the brace. Some ask about it. The wife has a patter for these situations—“I was born that way; were you born with a short leg?”–but sometimes it is wearisome. And often the parents get embarrassed or get angry at their child for their apparent rudeness, and this only makes things worse.

In my initial years with her, I learned to accept what she had long before accepted—not to be surprised by the stares and comments. These experiences, however, did make me reflect on some childhood behavior. My hometown, like many small places in the Upper Midwest, was all white. Six miles north of us, however, was a small Army base. (Gunnery practice was held there. Shells were fired at targets carried by pilotless planes towing targets over the lake. If invaders flew at fifty miles per hour like these planes, I knew we would be safe.) Some of the soldiers were black, and on a few occasions these soldiers would come to our downtown. They stood out, perhaps even more than the wife. I know that once at the very corner outside Prange’s where she was stared at, I stood motionless across the street and stared and stared at the black soldier. Because of the wife, only decades later did I get an inkling of what that man might have been feeling.

Then along came the daughter.  We were not the first couple to adopt an Asian child, but when she entered our lives, Korean adoptees were not as common as they would be later. Now not just the spouse, but the daughter could bring stares and comments when she was with two white adults. (Apart from us she is, of course, less noticeable if she is in a community that has more than a sprinkling of Asians, but sometimes that is not the case. The daughter and I just came back from a trip to Peru along with fifteen white people in addition to me. The daughter stood out whether or not she was with me.) When the daughter was still a toddler, the spouse was sitting on a park bench. A girl maybe six years old looked at the daughter and then up at the spouse and then back at the daughter and then at the spouse again. After this had gone on for a while, the girl approached the spouse and stood there for a moment. Finally she asked, “Is that your baby?” The spouse replied, “Yes.” “Funny,” the girl felt compelled to say, “she came out sorta Chinese.”

I was in Venice on a water bus with the daughter when she was three. A man kept staring at us. He started talking to me in broken English. I gathered he was asking whether the daughter was mine. I replied, “Yes,” but he was not satisfied. He kept jabbering, and since my Italian consists of a few words that might appear on a menu, I did not understand him. Finally, I grasped that he was asking if she truly was my daughter, why was she Asian. I told him that she was born in Korea, and my wife and I had adopted her. His loud and insistent replies indicated that he did not understand. How come she was Asian? I tried to find a simpler way to convey this in English, but he just kept getting louder. He was making me, and others on the boat, feel uncomfortable. Finally, I said, “Wife. Chinese.” He said the Italian equivalent of “Ah,” and walked away.

I am part of a conspicuous couple and conspicuous family, but I do not feel the center of the attention. I am the barely noticed person with The Woman with the Brace or the unremarkable white man with The Asian Female. Perhaps only one time did I feel personally conspicuous because of the family.

The daughter was maybe four, and we were in New Hampshire for a week in a rented cottage. I took the daughter to a toy store. The spouse for part of the week was at a scientific conference, and she was not with us. It was a weekday, and I was the only man in the store. A vacuum cleaner was a demo toy, and the daughter starting “vacuuming” the carpeted stairs that went from one level of the store to the next. She went on and on trying to clean each step. I felt that the mothers were all looking at me out of their peripheral vision and thinking, “Oh, he is one of those men who have traditional notions for girls. Next he is going to tie one of those little aprons on her and bring her to the toy stove.” And I wanted to say, “I would never give her a vacuum cleaner. She has trucks and Legos and I play ball with her all the time.” (The daughter is no longer a girl, but she still likes to vacuum. Maybe I should have bought that toy for her.)

On this same trip, I decided that as long as we were going to be in a New England village we should experience as much small town life as possible. I had us do things like go to a church dinner at some ungodly hour like 5 PM (the food was not good; I did not buy this church’s cookbook) and to a chicken barbecue in the town park (the food was quite good, but there was no cookbook). We had gone to both the grocery stores and the specialty food shops and, of course, to the gas station as well as a trip to the hardware store. Towards the end of the week, we were back in the park for a band concert.  I stayed with our picnic packings while the spouse and the daughter went closer to the bandstand. A seemingly nice man came up to me and said, “I have seen you around town, and I want to say, God bless you for all that you have done.”  I must have looked dumbfounded. He then indicated that he meant that I must be wonderful for having married a cripple and adopted an Asian.  All I could do was smile politely and say, “Thank you.” But as he walked away, I thought how little he understood. I had not adopted out of a sense of charity, and I had merely married the woman I loved. I was not somehow apart from those two, however, conspicuous they might be to others. The three of us were simply family no matter how others might stare or wonder.

Being conspicuous and part of a conspicuous family, however, must have affected the three of us—our images of ourselves, each other, and how the rest of the world reacts to us individually and as a family. The daughter has written, amusingly and touchingly, about her identity. Perhaps someday I will get her to post about that.

Take it nice ‘n’ easy said the old song. ”Nice” and “easy” seem to belong together. On the other hand, there is a big difference in saying,“She is nice” from saying, “She is easy.”

“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Your Name is the highest-grossing anime film in history. It is quite a movie with a distinctive, touching (albeit somewhat confusing) story with remarkable art. And the animated people have five fingers.

“And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Perhaps we can bring back the T-shirt from 2002: “I never thought that I would miss Nixon.”

I was taught that it was improper and disrespectful to clap after the singing of the national anthem, but many, if not most, people do applaud at its conclusion.

“Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.” Patti Smith, M Train.

While I was having a heart event, I felt that I was being whisked down a long, dark tunnel. I could do nothing to prevent my movement. Finally, I saw a blue light at the end of the darkness.  It started to pulse, and I felt myself being pulled even quicker down the tunnel towards the pulsation. But as I started to glide into that abyss, I heard a voice shout, “No!  No!  That’s New Jersey.” I returned to the living.

“Marriage is something we make from available materials.” Don DeLillo, The Names.

The man was in his 50s. He said that he now lived in Virginia but that he was raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn and was a retired New York City firefighter. I asked if it was hard to give up the adrenaline rush of being a fireman.  He replied, almost sounding wistful, “One day you have it, and then it is just gone.”

“The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

In every tennis match, whoever wins the last point wins. Remember, all you have to do is win the final point.

“Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed to him.” Ian McEwan, The Children Act.

LT’s parents had been devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, meeting at a Kingdom Hall and getting married young.  As LT said, “JWs do not allow premarital sex.” They are also not tolerant of homosexuality, but a friend from the church “came out.” The now openly-lesbian friend was, I think the phrase is, “de-fellowshipped.”  This requires shunning by the rest of the congregation, but LT’s mother continued to be a friend to the rejected gay woman. As a result, LT’s mother was banished from the JWs as was her father.  This was a huge act of rebellion for one immersed in the church as LT’s parents were. There are all sorts of stories of courage that are not known.

[Note: After today’s post, the next one will be on May 19. Off to Machu Picchu.}

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Harry G. Frankfort, On Bullshit.

“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness—the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Sam (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”  David Kamp with Lawrence Levi, The Film Snob’s Dictionary.

“In 1934, the summer before I entered third grade, my grandmother mistook Andrew Imhof for a girl.” Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife.

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well.” Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

“Imagine yourself on a moonlit night in mid-August in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.”  Garland Allen and Jeffrey Baker, Biology: Scientific Process and Social Issues.

“To be honest I thought the road trip would be a caper.” Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain.

“Once, in those dear dead days, almost, but not quite beyond recall, there was a view of science that commanded widespread popular and academic assent.” Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions.

“Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or a lozenge or like a paramecium (what remains of the protruding piers, its cilia) or like a gourd or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.”  Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan.

“Making one’s home in an unpublished novel wasn’t without its compensations.”  Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots.

“She was running, running as she had done before in her dreams, except this wasn’t a dream, even though with the flares dropping, as slowly as petals, and the yellow light, and the dark streets with the orange glow on the skyline it could easily be a dream, a horror dream.”  Robert Wilson, The Company of Strangers.

“The girl screamed once, only the once, but it was enough.” Ian Rankin, Exit Music.

“When the old man died, there was probably no great joy in heaven; and quite certainly little if any real grief in Charlbury Drive, the pleasantly unpretentious cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses to which he had retired.”  Colin Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3.

Like most of you, I learned to ride a bike as a kid.  I rode my bike around our town to visit friends, to get to ball games, and to go to school.  The grade school was lined with bike racks.  High school was different.  We walked to high school and did not ride bikes.  I am not sure how this developed, but the convention was firmly entrenched.  Maybe because we expected to get driver’s licenses in high school, biking to school seemed like little kid’s stuff.  Of course, teenagers don’t really use logic to determine what is fashionable or not.  We followed other dictates in high school that now seem to make little sense.  Thus, in this era before backpacks or book bags, girls carried school book in one fashion and boys in another.  None of us wore hats in the winter even though temperatures could get below zero, and I am not talking Centigrade here, but we did wear ear muffs. So as convention dictated in my town, daily bike riding ended when high school began.

I still rode occasionally through the years, but I was not a regular bicyclist again until I was near 40 when both my doctor and my body told me I had to give up running.  All my running, however, and it was a lot, had made me addicted to exercise.  I replaced jogging to and from work and long training runs with biking to work and beyond.  One activity, however, did not really substitute for the other.  I had learned to run in the City.  I knew how to deal with traffic, vehicular and pedestrian.  I did not feel unsafe on the sidewalks and streets.  I could enjoy the views from the bridges and the waterfront paths.  It was different on a bike.  Of course, I had to pay close attention to cars and trucks.  The City then made few efforts to be bike-friendly, and the comparatively few bikers around then almost always seemed to come as a surprise to drivers who weren’t expecting them. But moving vehicles were only a small part of the problem.  I quickly learned that bikers were invisible to many exiting parked cars.  Time and again people opened a vehicle door into my biking path forcing me to swerve into the portion of the road where cars drove. My heartbeat would increase from more than the exercise.  And then there were the jaywalkers coming out between parked cars, a common experience.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I jaywalk.  I do not like cities where pedestrians wait for the light to change even though no cars are in sight or where walkers won’t cross in the middle of the block when it is convenient. (Yes, I am looking at you, LA, but also Madison, and sort of Washington, D.C.) But at least back then, while the jaywalkers may have looked out for the cars, trucks, and buses, to them bikers were almost invisible.  Again, I often had to swerve into the car lanes to avoid the pedestrian, and again the heart rate went up from more than exercise,

I don’t always learn quickly.  I biked to work for several years before I would accept the fact that while running to and from the office had actually relaxed me, biking the same routes often left me jangled.  Then the day came when I thought the gods were talking to me.  After biking to work, while making coffee, I looked at the newspaper and spied the obit of a biker who had been killed the previous day in a car accident.  I went about my business and thought that news was out of my mind, but going home that night, I turned a corner on my bike and saw a man on the pavement next to a mangled bike next to a bus.  The man was not moving.  I did ride my bike home that night, but I never again rode it to work.

How about you?  If you have biked in a city, have you, or how much have you, been afraid?

P.S. I do now occasionally ride a bike in the City. I avoid certain areas that I think will be problematic for me on a bike, but it is clear to me that the City is now better for bikers than when I gave it up as a major activity—more and better bike lanes and both drivers and pedestrians more aware of bikers.  The world sometimes does get better.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Pogo

A few weeks ago the Florida House of Representatives issued an apology to the survivors of the Groveland Four, also known as the Groveland Boys. I had known nothing about the four black men accused of raping a white teenager in Groveland, Florida, in 1949 until I saw Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King at Greenlight Bookstore. I looked at the back cover of the paperback and saw that the book was about racial injustice stemming from a rape charge. I put the book back down thinking I essentially knew this story already since I had read much about the Scottsboro Boys. And, of course, I had read To Kill a Mockingbird. But finally, the third or fourth time I picked up the book, I bought it.

I was surprised. I found King’s book a page-turner, and while it bore similarities to other racial tragedies, the story was not something I had read before. That would have been impossible. I learned many things from Devil in the Grove including that every story of injustice is unique. Every story of injustice is worth telling and hearing.

This story started when a seventeen-year-old said that she and her husband had been attacked in their stalled car and she had been raped by four black men. Three of those men were quickly arrested while the fourth fled. A hundred-person posse using tracking dogs found the fourth in hiding. When the fugitive emerged and supposedly threatened that posse with a pistol, he was gunned down.

Meanwhile, an angry crowd besieged the local jail. When that mob learned that the arrested men were being held elsewhere, it rampaged in the black section of Groveland firing guns and burning buildings. After several days, during which most of the blacks fled their homes to seek safety elsewhere, the National Guard quelled the rioting.

Although the police said two suspects confessed, those two said the confessions were beaten out of them. At trial, the confessions were not presented. The doctor who examined the married teenager did not testify. (It had been suggested that the girl cried rape to explain her bruises from her husband’s beating.) Footprints at the scene did not match the suspects’ shoes. The trial’s result, of course, was a foregone conviction. The youngest of the three men was given a life sentence. He never appealed to avoid the possibility of a death sentence if an appeal were successful and a retrial held. The other two were sentenced to death. They appealed.

The executive director of the Florida NAACP protested the convictions and called for the removal and prosecution of the sheriff. On Christmas night of 1951, a bomb exploded under the bedroom of the NAACP’s director’s house. He and his wife were killed. Nobody was identified as responsible for this double homicide until a 2005 investigation named four then-dead, long-time members of the KKK as suspects.

The two appealed convictions were reversed, and a new trial order. The prisoners were then being held in the state prison, and the sheriff of Lake County, which included Groveland, picked them up to take them back to Lake County ostensibly for trial. The sheriff reported that the two attacked him and that he shot each three times. One was killed at that scene; the other feigned death and lived.  The sheriff was exonerated of any wrongdoing in the shooting.

Represented by Thurgood Marshall, the surviving defendant was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death again. The Florida governor later commuted that sentence to life in prison.

Gilbert King presents strong evidence to show likelihoods that the girl was not raped; that the prisoners were beaten; that forensic evidence was fabricated;  and that the sheriff shot his two prisoners without provocation.  This information has now led to the apology by the Florida House of Representatives.

King, however, does much more than relate the injustices done to the Groveland Four. He places the rape charge and its aftermath into a broader picture of northern Florida society in the post-World War II era. Black’s houses were burned; black veterans were threatened for wearing their uniforms after their discharges; other blacks were simply beaten; black maids were raped by white employers. Blacks could not vote; they could not serve on juries. They were not allowed to hold jobs of importance in the white society. The schools were segregated, and few blacks could obtain a meaningful education.

All this might seem to be a product of simple racism, but King shows that the situation was more complicated than that. The citrus industry boomed after WWII. The government had improved roads so citrus products could be more easily distributed around the country.  Processes to concentrate juice had emerged, and government contracts to buy concentrated juices had been let. But Lake County had a problem; the labor force was thin. Of course, believers in free markets would predict that the cost of labor would increase, but the Lake County citrus growers and canners did not want that free market. They wanted cheap labor.

Racism is a large part of the reasons that blacks were kept “in their place,” but the maintenance of a cheap labor pool was also important. Thus, when workers were needed, blacks were arrested and charged with vagrancy. They got heavy fines and had no choice but to work for the low wages in the groves, often under the watch of armed guards, as part of a process called “debt peonage.” All this required the wealthy whites to urge an interesting line; to keep blacks in their place, but don’t make the oppression so bad that they leave the area. Some places in Florida had been so harsh that blacks had fled to other parts of the country depleting their cheap labor forces. Lake County did not want that. Be harsh, but not so harsh that the black workers left. This more subtle, economic racism turned a blind eye to the actions of the KKK and its ilk as long as it did not cause the Lake County blacks to find homes elsewhere.

We can properly call the society presented by Devil in the Grove racist, but we should also put another label on it. This was terrorism; a word headline writers used in the 1950s to described the happenings in Lake County. The terrorism did not come from isolated pockets in the community; it was a society of terrorists. If it was not state-sponsored terrorism, it certainly was state-condoned terrorism.

Lake County was not alone. Such terrorism was accepted through a large swath of the country for an extensive part of the country’s existence.  Even if slavery should not be formally labeled as terrorism because it was legal, the unchecked terrorism that was inflicted on black society lasted from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s when it tapered off . . . somewhat. The largest group of terrorists who have ever operated in this country were not foreigners; they were good red-blooded Americans.

Many of us want to deny that the Groveland travesty was typical. Surely it was an outlier. It happened in the South after all. This is captured by a blurb attributed to the Chicago Tribune on my copy of King’s book: “A powerful and well-told drama of Southern injustice.” Southern injustice, not American injustice. As if we are not all one country. (We will ignore that NAACP facilities were bombed in Boston in 1976; in Tacoma, Washington, in 1983; and in Colorado Springs in 2015.)

We should also recognize that the “benefits” of this terrorism extended far beyond the citrus grove owners. For example, the bankers who loaned money to those owners benefited. The canners of grapefruit sections gained from the artificially low cost of the fruit, and, of course, consumers throughout the country benefited from lower costs. It was not, however, just the Florida citrus industry that benefited from our racial terrorism, but all employers, including the genteel white lady with a black maid or cook, seeking cheap labor.

Today we fear terrorism against our country. It is a diffuse fear, one spread to all parts of our society. The terrorist is seen as other; one with roots or connections or sympathies to something foreign; one who has dark skin. This terrorism seems incomprehensible, but perhaps we could better understand it if we our examined our own history. This country’s foundation has many pillars, but one of them has been terrorism.

The victims of this homegrown terrorism were seen as “other,” and that made it easier to target them.  The concept of otherness is powerful. Surely it has been easier for us to wage military actions in places where we see the population as “other,” but we should realize that to those societies we are seen as the foreign outsider.  For the terrorist we now fear, we are now the “other,” and that makes it easier for terrorism to occur against us.

Perhaps we can better grasp today’s if we can understand our own history and how our homegrown terrorism flourished, for then we might recognize “We have met the terrorist, . . . “