As My Grandma Used to Say: "They're All Crooks!"

Since you have read more about it than I have, I will take your word about the railroad crooks. They could never have gotten away with it, though, without government help. It was their government sponsored monopoly that made it possible for them to gouge their customers once they had made them dependent on the railroads to ship all their product. But what would have been the alternative? I read somewhere that, in the early railroad days, there were all these little companies with different gauges of track, and you couldn't ship stuff very far without unloading it from one car and reloading it on somebody else's car that couldn't run on the other guy's track. At some point, they must have standardized things, which must have required the different companies to cooperate with each other. So how did they get from that point to the government sponsored monopolies that characterized the industry in its later days? If the railroad barons bought off the government people, then the government people were just as guilty as the barons were because it's just as unethical to accept a bribe as it is to offer one.

It's true that the government owns a lot of "crappy" land out west, but they also own some valuable stuff like the national parks and military bases. Also, I think that all the Indian reservations are included in that 50%. The way I understand it, the Indians don't actually own their reservation lands, the government owns it "in trust" or something like that. A lot of the crappy land is leased out to modern day cattle, lumber, and mining barons. I doubt that these guys would want to own this land themselves because then they would have to take better care of it and pay taxes on it. I read somewhere that these leases are sweetheart deals that are traditionally passed down from father to son. To be fair, I read this a long time ago, and there was some talk of reforming the system at the time, but I don't know if it ever happened.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are just as many crooks in the government as there are in private industry, so turning everything over to government ownership wouldn't do a whole lot of good. That's what happened in Russia you know, and then, when every thing was privatized, the former government crooks became private crooks, so things didn't change all that much. It's like we used to say in the army: "There is nothing wrong with the army, it's the people in it." I don't think that rich people have a monopoly on corruption either, it's just that they do everything on a bigger scale so it makes the news more often.

The bi-cameral legislative system was formulated long before the big western states were carved out of the wilderness. Without it, I don't think that the United States of America would have ever happened. The original 13 colonies each became independent republics after the British pulled out, and I doubt that they would have gotten their act together if they hadn't made this and other compromises. I have said before that, even today, we might be better off with something like the old Articles of Confederation. I suppose, though, that there must have been problems associated with that too or they never would have changed it.

Maybe the only way to have corruption free government is for everybody to become their own sovereign state like the Republic of Beaglesonia. I mean, nobody is going cheat themselves, are they. There is no disaffected minority in Beaglesonia, we rule with the unanimous consent of the citizenry. Corruption is unknown here, we are all honest to a fault. We don't make war on our neighbors, nor do they make war on us. Our revenues are limited, but we live within our means and have been debt free for decades. Why can't everybody be like us?

Dagny Taggert vs The Robber Barons, who are you putting your money on?

You say it has become fashionable to think of the lumber and railroad barons as crooks, like it’s something people do just to be stylish. I don’t know much about the lumber barons, but I have read quite a bit about the railroad barons, and they were certainly crooks, well it’s hard to say crooks because they sort of did it legally inasmuch as they bought the government officials who let them get away with it, but they were certainly bad men by the standards of those days and the standards of today.

Well it’s like anything where a lot of money is to be made, you have the nice honest guys who play by the rules, and you have the ruthless crooks who will do anything to pile up loot and stomp their competitors flat, and who are you going to put your money on?

I will grant you that they got things done. One of the things that has kept Chicago from being Detroit is its efficient mass transit system, and I believe almost all of that was built by crooks. But it’s not like the railroads wouldn’t have been built without those particular guys, if not them then the next guy who happened to be smarter and luckier and more ruthless, and if our government hadn’t been so easily bought, and we had fair laws, then they would have been built by those nice honest guys, and maybe with less corruption and mayhem.

And maybe built by nice honest guys like you libertarians, who have all these principles, and would set no value on a dishonest dollar. You know you guys are just like the communists. You set up this logical system, which on paper looks pretty good, pretty fair. But the commies assume that this system will be run by their altruistic new men, and you libertarians assume that Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon will be running yours. And in fact both will be run by the most ruthless who will stomp everybody else who isn’t as ruthless as them.

Oh I was just joking about us liberals driving our limousines out to see the buffalo roam. I thought you could tell when I spoke of us spreading brie on wafers, when of course we spread our brie on organic artisanal crackers. It would be nice though if we could scrunch that tier from Oklahoma to North Dakota and the evil triangle to the northwest into one state to make the distribution of senators fairer, and bring our socialist dream closer.

That thing about half the land being owned by the gov is a bit misleading. It is better phrased as the crappiest half of the land (the mountains, Alaska), the land that isn’t good for much, is owned by the government. This distortion is promulgated by the robber barons trying to promote the idea that there is all this land that they would love to develop and build little Cheboygans on because they love the American dream, and all they really want to do is rip out all the mineral wealth and leave the land poisoned.

The American Dream

It has become fashionable to think of those old time lumber and railroad barons as crooks. Maybe they were by today's standards but, without them, the history of America would have been quite different. Sure they exploited people as they made fortunes for themselves, but compared to what was going on in Europe at the time, they weren't so bad. Almost all the land in the U.S., with the exception of the original 13 colonies, was originally owned by the federal government because there was nobody else to own it at the time. The feds wanted to put Americans on that land before some European country filled it up with their own people, and they couldn't have done it so quickly without the help of those barons.

I had a title search of Beaglesonia done a few years ago, and then later came across a book that was written by a local lady about the history of the neighborhood. The area east of Cheboygan used to be known as "Swede Town" because it was settled by Swedish immigrants who came here to work for two of our local lumber barons, J.D. Duncan and Thompson Smith. While Smith was busy buying up all the timber land for miles around, Duncan went off to Sweden to recruit some help. Duncan died shortly thereafter, and the operation became the Thompson Smith Lumber Company, although the company town kept the name Duncan City. When Smith died, his two sons took over the operation, and it became known as Thompson Smith's Sons. (I could give you dates for all this stuff, but I would have to go look them up. Suffice it to say that this all happened in the mid to late 19th Century.)

The Thompson Smith's Sons sawmill burned down three times and was rebuilt twice. The last time it burned was in the 1890s, and Duncan City subsequently became a ghost town. About that time, Thompson Smith's Sons sold what was to become my front 40 acres to Herman Hamburg and Adolph Peterson. There are still a number of Petersons in the neighborhood, but the Hamburg name seems to have died out with Herman's passing. He must have had some kids, though, because his granddaughter Eva eventually married Melcher Johnson and they did some farming here. I don't think they lived on the property, though, they probably lived a few miles away on the site of the former Duncan City. Some of the Swedes moved away after the sawmill burned, but some of their descendants are still in the neighborhood. The Duncan City site was eventually incorporated into Cheboygan, and Beaglesonia is located 1/4 mile outside the eastern city limit.

There is no way of knowing how the area would have developed without Duncan and Smith, but I don't think they did the place any harm. Sure they cut down all the trees for miles around, but that's what trees are for, and the forest has since regenerated. They provided jobs and homes to hundreds of people who had previously been living on the ragged edge of poverty in Sweden. These guys had been tenant farmers in the old country, and they could never have aspired to home or land ownership. Here they obtained their little piece of the American Dream and passed it on to their kids. They didn't do as well as Duncan and Smith, but they never expected to, and they did a whole lot better than they would have if they had stayed in Sweden.

About half the land in the U.S. is still owned by the federal government. It's less than that in the East and more than that in the West, but it averages out to about half. There's lots of buffalos running around out west, some of them wild and some of them on ranches. If you want to see them, just go and see them, no need to dis-incorporate whole states to do it. Actually, there's no need to go that far away to see buffalos, people are raising them all over. If you want to see them in the wild, I suppose you should go out west, but I don't think that a wild buffalo looks much different than a "tame" one. I use to know a local guy who raises them. He told me that there is no such thing as a tame buffalo. They keep a fence around them, but that's mostly to keep the people out, as there is no known fence that will hold up against a determined buffalo. The only way to keep them home is to keep them happy and well fed.

If Ayn Rand came to Cheboygan

Those guys those wannabe pirates, I think they were victims of one of those get rich quick schemes. Remember this guy who used to have those late night commercials where he drove up to his hundred room mansion in his streak of lightning car full of hot and willing babes and looked at the camera and told those poor schlubs watching crap tv at one in the morning that for a few bucks he would teach them all how to be rich like him, and it didn’t even take that much time.

Used to be a lot of guys like that, and as I recall most of the money was in real estate where you did, well The American Dream, you bought cheap and you sold dear. Actually reality was pretty close to that a few years ago when you could buy anything dear on borrowed money, and then sell even dearer, and the only thing you had to know was to get into a chair before the music stopped.

Don’t see those guys on late night tv anymore, I think most of them are in the slammer, and those emails that used to flood your inbox along with the ones about making your dick bigger, but most of them are caught in those classy new spam filters anymore. Actually I think most of those spammers were suckers who bought into some get rich quick guy who told them to send out millions of emails, and since they read in the papers that these guys sending out millions of emails were getting rich, they figured it must be true.

Well Americans used to dream big my friend, and now they don’t anymore. Probably the fault of Obama.

That thing the lumber companies did in Michigan, I’m sure you know the railroads did that big time all across the great plains. The Great American Desert it was called way back before the government gave the railroads huge parcels of it just to lay their rails, and then the railroads discovered this theory that it was only desert because nobody was farming it. Their latest scientific theories proved beyond a doubt that you and your neighbors had only to begin farming it and the heavens would open and pour down sweet rain. And what was a good citizen to do, believe the captains of industry who held out The American Dream, or some crabby commie?

Much of that land is empty today and there is talk of emptying whole states and turning them back to buffalo state parks. For some reason the people who live there, the ones who aren’t in line for getting a pile of their money for their land, are all agin it. As a good democrat though, I am all for it, empty out that whole tier from Oklahoma to North Dakota, and toss in that mini triangle of evil, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, and then we liberals can drive out there in our limousines and admire the wild buffalo as we spread brie on our wafers.

Oh my, what is this? They are shoving money down Beagle’s throat. The same grim fate suffered by the welfare queens and the disability kings, and it appears that, aside his complaining about it in a blog that nobody reads, he is to be letting it happen.

I don’t know why Ayn didn’t write something into her novels about her coming back after her death. That would keep those backsliding libertarians in line. Why doesn’t Beagles become a music star, follow up on one of those schemes he mentions from time to time, invent Reardon Steel, set up a humble, but proud, fish stand by the side of the road?

The Old Shell Game

We used to have something like your real estate pirates in Michigan, but they weren't professionals who did it for a living, at least not around here. Our local pirates were mostly amateurs who had a little money to play with. When property taxes were delinquent for the third year, the pirates would buy up the tax lien from the state. Then the owner had another year or two to pay them back with interest or they would lose their property. They almost always paid the lien off in time to keep their land but, in the old days, that wasn't usually the case.

During the Great Depression, which lasted a decade or two longer around here than it did in the rest of the country, a lot of people just abandoned their land and moved away. Much of this land was originally bought from the state for pennies an acre by the lumber barons. After they cut all the trees, they had no further use for the land, so they either let it go back for taxes or sold it cheap to homesteaders. A lot of this land never was suitable for farming and, when times got tough, many of the homesteaders packed it in and moved to the cities down below. Eventually, the state got most of its land back and paid the counties a "swamp tax" of ten dollars an acre in lieu of the taxes they would have gotten from the private owners. The plan was that the state would re-sell the land when the economy improved but, by the time that happened, there was a lot of interest in keeping the land in public ownership for hunting and other recreational purposes. Probably about half of the land in Northern Michigan is still owned by the state or federal government, and it's a big draw for the tourist trade, so there is little interest in privatizing it. Because some of this state land had been already sold, it's kind of a pitch patch of private and public land in some areas. Currently, the state is trying to consolidate its holdings by selling off some of the isolated tracts and buying pieces that are either contiguous or surrounded by other state land.

Where was I? Oh yeah, at some point they developed the policy of selling the tax liens to private citizens, but they changed that a few years ago. Now they just confiscate the property and sell it at auction, but first they offer it to local governments at the minimum bid price in case they want to make a park or something out of it. During the recent economic downturn, some significant pieces of property were taken that way, but I think most of it was bought by people who had a use for it. During the Great Depression there were few buyers like that, which is why the state ended up with most of the tax reverted land.

Like you, I used to believe that it was kind of unethical to make money by any means other than useful, productive labor, but I'm not so sure about that anymore. Most of the good old fashioned trades like farming, manufacturing, and retail sales have become so competitive that the small operators have been forced out of business. I read somewhere that half of the small businesses fail in the first year, and the other half fail in the second year, or something like that. Since the paper mill closed down, I have made more money sitting on my ass than I ever made working for a living. I didn't ask for this, they shoved it down my throat, so I figured that I might as well make the most of it. When I want to do something useful or productive, I do it on my own time, which is better in some ways. I still believe that there is something wrong with a system that pays you more for not working than for working, but it's not my system, it's theirs. I didn't cause it and I can't fix it, so I might as well get my share before it's all gone.

Work???

I’ve always thought of working as selling your time, and since studies show that you can’t take it with you, all you really have is time.

I used working as a metaphor for selling out, but that’s not really accurate. Selling out is when you are doing something you are against for some kind of reward. If you wanted to be a soldier or a teacher all your childhood, and then became one when you came of age, that would not be selling out.

Most of the jobs I have had have been pretty neutral insofar as I thought they were making a better world or not. I guess being a substitute teacher was the closest I came to having a job I believed in, in that if I did a good job it was a better day for the kids and the staff, and if I didn’t, it was a worse day for them.

The one job I can think of where I didn’t feel like I was doing the right thing was when I worked for the real estate pirates. These are the guys who you see in the papers about once a year where some poor widow has neglected her property taxes for a few years, and now is being turned out of the home she had lived in her whole life for not paying a hundred bucks or something.

Well it’s not really like that, well almost never. The thing is the state needs your property tax money right now, and not when you can get around to paying it. So if somebody will step in and pay it for you, that makes it alright for the state. And the person who steps in is going to want something for their trouble, and what they get is interest from the property holder if they want to get back in the clear. It’s a long and involved practice but what it amounts to is that over a few years, if you don’t pay up, you slide deeper and deeper into their debt, and eventually you may lose your property to them.

So the thing is they are doing good work because they are ensuring that the govt gets its property taxes, and really you have to screw up pretty badly to lose your property, and it almost never happens that a widow gets kicked out of her house. Though I did notice whenever my employers came across a story about a widow losing her house their eyes took on a certain gleam.

In all those deals where money is switched around here and there like the pea under the walnut shell, it never did seem quite right to me, but I needed a job, so there I was. No big deal, I was not there long before I got canned. And like all those stories about getting canned, it was a complicated situation, and it was not my fault.

The thing that has been drilled into our heads since we were knee high to a tall toadstool was that we should study hard and then we could get a job that we would like, and then we would have the best of all worlds. And there is a certain amount of truth to that, but you can have the greatest job in the world with a really cool boss and then he gets run over by a truck and the next boss makes your life a living hell and there is nothing you can do about it, because unlike those wonderful woodsman days of yore, there is not another job just down the block.

And that is the whole problem anymore, there are more people who want jobs than there are jobs, and the people who are handing out the jobs are the rich people, and the rich people have all the money and hence all the power, and any change would have to come from them, and fat chance of that.

We Are all Whores

When you think about it, we all sell out at one time or another. Maybe it's only a partial sellout, and maybe it's only temporary, but the only way to get money is to sell something and, if you don't have anything else to sell, you sell yourself. Another way to look at it is that you're not really selling yourself, you're just renting yourself out. I suppose there isn't much practical difference, but it always made me feel better to think of it that way. That's why I always worked hourly jobs instead of salary jobs.

An even better way would be to think of yourself as a contractor. Of course a real contractor is different from an employee. The main difference is that nobody tells a contractor what hours to work, he agrees to do a specific amount of work in a specific amount of time and, as long as he gets the job done by the agreed upon deadline, he can work any hours he wants. Also, a contractor bears all the responsibility for his own safety, and they usually carry insurance to cover that. If you get hurt on the job, your employer is usually not liable, unless he caused a hazard on the job site that you could not reasonably have been aware of.

Probably the best of both worlds would be to have a job where the pay and working conditions were spelled out in a written contract. This is essentially what labor unions are all about, but the problem with that is it's a collective contract. You pay somebody to negotiate the contract, and then the company and the union both have to ratify it. The union membership votes to do this but, of course, you only have one vote. A better way would be if you could negotiate your own contract, but that's usually not done in the industrial world. There used to be something called an "implied contract" that didn't cover much, but was better than nothing. Nowadays, though, most employers want to hire you as an "at will" employee, which means they can fire you "with or without notice and with or without cause". The only thing good about that is that you can quit the same way.

Back in the lumbering days, if you had a disagreement with your boss, you could quit or get fired and it was no big deal. All you had to do was walk down the road a ways and you would come to another camp where they would usually hire you on the spot, no questions asked. If that didn't work out so well, you could just walk down the road some more until you came to another camp. You might even walk back to your original camp and get hired back there. I guess people didn't hold grudges as long in those days as they do today. These practices led to the coining of an old saying that is still in use today around here: "You keep that up and you're going to be walking down the road talking to yourself."

I'm not sure when it changed, but at some point the employers all got together and agreed that they wouldn't hire anybody who had quit or been fired from another job. This led to the formation of labor unions, which were designed to protect the jobs that their members already had since, if they lost their job, they were not likely to find another one anytime soon. In a manner of speaking, then, companies had unions before workers had unions, and the formation of one led to the formation of the other.

It's been a long time since I went looking for work, so I don't know what the labor market's like today. I understand that there are more available workers than there are available jobs, which must put the workers at a disadvantage. Labors unions are a mere shadow of their former selves, so you can't count on them to help you anymore. What's needed is for all the workers to get together and agree about what they will and will not do for money, and exactly how much money they will demand for their services. It would kind of be like a union, only better. For it to work in today's global economy, it would have to be organized something like an international corporation. All we've got to do now is get all the workers of the world to agree on exactly what they want out of life. Since I have already done the conceptual part, I'll leave the nuts and bolts implementation to others. How hard could it be?

selling your soul

That’s true there was no law against long hair, but what do you do if nobody will rent to you or give you a job? That’s the problem that affirmative action seeks to cure. Not that we hippies had anything like the problem that black people have. True there were some people that didn’t like us, but that was nowhere near the hostility that black people faced.

And we could always get a haircut. Of course that meant selling out. The first time I sold out was when I had dropped out of school and my girlfriend let me know that she wasn’t going to let me sponge of her until, I don’t know, the revolution. I sold out for minimum wage that time.

Years later I got a job at the post office making maybe four times minimum wage which was all I had ever gotten before. When you first start at the post office you are like their slave. You have no real position like the other workers have. You work where they put you and you stay there until they come and put you somewhere else. You work until somebody taps you on the shoulder and tells you to go home, and maybe you will work the next day or maybe they will tell you that you have it off, but you won’t know until they tell you when they tap you on the shoulder.

I came in at three and I worked until whatever. Last call in Champaign was one, and I was always hoping to get off before then. This one particular day I was tapped at eleven, and went into the locker room, and there was a Miller time attitude going on, laughing and joking when suddenly the poohbah stepped in the door and told us they had changed their minds. Everybody had to get back to work.

This was outrageous. We didn’t mind so much having to wait for the tap to go home, and never knowing when it was coming, but once we were tapped, we were surely free, and even more so once we were off the floor. This was a violation of our inviolable rights.

We all filed back to the floor. Nobody said a peep.

I stood there sorting junk mail deep into the wee hours of the morning, seething. Damn, I had sold my soul to the devil. But then I smiled a little when I remembered my hourly wage. At least I had gotten a good price.

They say Tricky Dick was a pretty good barracks gambler. He was such a lousy liar, you could always tell when he was lying, that I wondered how that could be, but then I remembered that he looked like he was lying when he was telling the truth too, so I guess you never could tell, which would make him a pretty good poker player.

About cavewomen having longer hair, that reminds me of one of my favorite Yogi Berra story. He was broadcasting some baseball game back in the time of the streak craze, and sure enough one of them ran across the field. His co-broadcaster had been out of the booth, and when he returned Yogi told him that he had missed a streaker.

“Oh yeah,” the guy asked, “Man or woman?”

“I couldn’t tell,” answered Yogi, “They had a bag over their head.”

Hitler moustache on the Germans, I don’t know. I picture all those Nazis charging a hill with those moustaches, and it just seems funny.

The Rule of Law and the Rule of Men

Actually, you don't need a law protecting your right to long hair because there is no law that says you can't have it. The various incidents of hair discrimination are perpetrated by organizations and individuals, not by the law. If your hair doesn't conform to their standards, the only thing they can so about it is exclude you from the organization or from their individual list of friends.

It's a little different with the military, but not that much. I never heard of anybody In the military going to jail for his hair, but that's probably because nobody ever pushed it that far. They just told us to get haircuts and we did it. I don't know what would happen if a guy just refused to do it, and I have never heard of that happening. When I joined the army I promised to "obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me". If a guy wanted to mount a legal challenge against the hair policy he would need to establish that it wasn't a lawful order. Now that I think of it, I don't know whether or not there are any hair standards written into the official military regulations. Maybe it was just a tradition or something. Something like that occasionally comes up in the military, everybody thinks that it's a rule and then we find that it was just something that somebody made up.

I remember one guy who was caught gambling in the barracks and got off because he found out that there was no military regulation prohibiting it. See, you have the army regulations (ARs), and then you have your standard operation procedures (SOPs), which are policies established by your commanding officer. Almost every outfit in the army had an SOP prohibiting gambling in the barracks, so most people assumed that it was an AR because it was so universal. Come to find out, it wasn't an AR and our outfit didn't have an SOP that covered it. They did establish one after this incident brought it to their attention, but they didn't have one before that.

I don't know if the hair and beard standards were in the ARs or not, but I'm pretty sure that the moustache policy was not, because it differed from one outfit to another. I know that you weren't supposed to alter your appearance from the way it looked on your ID card picture. I think that even the Black guys had to shave their moustaches off in basic training but, when they were assigned to their permanent units, they all seemed to have it on their ID cards, so nobody told them they couldn't have it. The guy I told you about noticed this and figured that, if he could get it on his ID card, he would be allowed to keep it too. I don't think he really cared that much about the moustache, it was just a contest of wills between him and his sergeant, and the sergeant won. It would have been  interesting to see how it came out if he had made a legal issue of it, but he never did.

Twice a year, we went to Wildflecken in West Germany for three weeks to do some training that couldn't be accomplished in Berlin. During those times, we were allowed to grow moustaches, but we were told to shave them off when we got back to Berlin. We were periodically issued new ID cards, I think it was once a year. This guy's time must have come up right after we had gotten back from Wildflecken, and he managed to get his new ID card before he shaved off his moustache. His sergeant was not amused, and told him to shave it off and go get another ID card. So the guy shaved it off, but drew it back on just before his new ID picture was taken. The sergeant wasn't amused this time either, and I've already told you the rest of the story.

I don't know if cave men cut their hair or not, but in the pictures I remember seeing of them, they all had long hair, but the women had noticeably longer hair than the men. Of course these weren't photographs, they were artists representations. The more I think of it, maybe this was the the artists' way of showing you which ones were the men and which ones were the women. Of course, there is another way they could have established this, but it was probably not deemed appropriate for elementary school textbooks in those days.

Speaking of moustaches, my grandfather is the only guy I remember having an Adolf Hitler moustache, except Hitler himself of course. My grandfather was born in Austria, and so was Hitler, so maybe it was an Austrian thing. Now Sadaam Hussein has been compared to Hitler, and he also had a moustache, but not the same style as Hitler's. When Sadaam was in power,  all the Iraqi soldiers seemed to have a moustache just like his. I suppose it was their way of showing how much they admired their leader. When Hitler was in power, however, all the German soldiers didn't grow Hitler moustaches, in fact I don't think any of them did. Why do you suppose that is?

your father's moustache

It’s peculiar. At the time I thought that that long hair discrimination law was so important, that the right to have long hair was something our founding fathers had fought and died for. Anymore I think what a stupid idea. I guess I thought it was a sort of equal rights thing for hippies, although of course somebody who wasn’t a hippie could grow their hair long, and a hippie could decide to try out a crewcut for awhile.

Or could they? I’m not so sure. There was no card a hippie could carry to prove he was one, and there was no Bureau of Hipdom that decided who was and who wasn’t. There was an air force base not far from Champaign and at night the Air Men would come to town to pick up college girls. Sometimes they would wander into our hippie enclave and then they would pull out their California driver’s licenses which would show them with the long hair they had before they had joined the air force, so that we would know that they were hippies who were temporarily in the air force.

The Greeks had this thing for young boys. When you were a young boy you were expected to take up with some older guy and he would kind of be like your godfather, and then when you became older you would pick up a young boy. You would also have a wife who would bear your children, but I think the boy would be your true love because the Greeks thought women were too stupid to have any real relationship with. I think this was pretty common in the mideast at the time. The Romans were notoriously free in their morality. The only thing they wanted you to do was pretend to respect their gods, and of course, never to rebel. The Jews were the puritans of the ancient world, and hence Christianity kept that aspect, and made prudes of us all.

I don’t know about the cavemen cutting their hair, how would they do that? Well I suppose they had sharpened rocks, but that doesn’t sound pleasant. And there must have been a time before they invented sharp rocks, what did they do then? Those tribes they used to come across that were still living in the stone age, I think they had long hair, but not like going all the way down to their butt. Maybe it just gets tattered running around in the forest. There are Supercut schools. Why don’t they found a university to study these things?

I like the story about the guy who drew on his moustache. I’d think the sergeant would kind of chuckle and admire the guy’s cleverness, but then I expect I don’t know sergeants very well.

One of us hippies worked in a grocery store and they made him stay shorn and shaved. He grew a little moustache, just as a way of showing a little rebellion, but when they noticed it, they made him shave it off. There was a black guy who had been working there for years and had a moustache all that time, and just to be fair they made him shave his off too. Our friend felt terrible because if he hadn’t tried to grow his, they never would have made the black guy shave.

I’ve heard that a lot of black guys have some kind of skin condition that is aggravated by shaving, and that was a reason sometimes they didn’t make them shave. Mexicans are the guys who always have moustaches. A Mexican guy I worked with confided to me once that he wasn’t crazy about his moustache, but all the other Mexicans had them, and if he shaved his off, he would feel a little like a traitor.

More on Facial Hair

If you guys had passed that law about hair discrimination, it would have been difficult to enforce. If a potential employer doesn't hire you, it's pretty hard to prove why he didn't. I guess that's why they passed that affirmative action stuff for the colored people. If you had something similar for hair discrimination, it certainly wouldn't have endeared you to the establishment types who were responsible for most of the hiring. Come to think of it, though, many people disliked the hippies as much as they disliked the colored, so maybe you wouldn't have had anything to lose.

I didn't know that the Greeks invented shaving but, if they did, maybe it wasn't the girls that they were trying to impress. People make a lot of jokes about the Greeks, but I have heard from reliable sources that, in the days of Plato, they were indeed bisexual, and nobody thought anything about it. Come to think of it, I have head that about other ancient cultures as well. I think the Hebrews were the first people to condemn it.

My hypothetical wife said that she saw some beard trimmers in the Wal-Mart that were specifically designed to maintain the bum look. I suppose they are nothing but electric clippers with a spacer to keep the cutters a uniform distance from the skin, kind of like the spacers they attach to hair clippers to maintain a brush cut. If you buy a hair clipper kit, it comes with several spacers like that. I use the 3/8 inch spacer to cut my hair, and then I do the beard with no spacer at all. I don't develop the bum look until about a week later, and it only lasts a week or two after that. Like I said, my beard doesn't grow as fast as some people's, so I imagine that the average guy could use one of those bum trimmers about once a week to maintain his beard. This is less effort than shaving with an electric razor every day, and it certainly beats scraping your skin with a safety razor.

Maybe the reason guys first started trimming their hair and beards was because long hair would make it easier for an enemy to grab ahold of you in combat. I think that, even in the Stone Age, young men wore their hair shorter than women. We still associate a long beard with old age, and the old guys probably didn't have to fight any more than the women did, so they could let it all hang out. Fast forward to the Middle Ages and you have the knights wearing those helmets with full face visors. I imagine it would have been a hassle to stuff a long beard into one of those things and keep it from getting pinched when you took the helmet off. They told us in the army that the main reason we had to shave was because any kind of beard would interfere with the seal that is formed when you put on a gas mask. That might have been what started the tradition, but I'm sure that was also a way to keep everybody looking more or less uniform.

Moustaches were a whole nother story. There was no military regulation that said you couldn't grow a moustache, that was left to the discretion of your commanding officer. Moustaches were more common in some units than in others, I suppose depending on whether their C.O. liked them or not. Funny thing, though, almost every Black soldier wore a short thin moustache. It was so common that you didn't even notice it until you saw one of the few who didn't. You could tell that there was something different about that dude, but you had to think about it before you realized what it was. We had one White guy who noticed this and started his own little campaign against racial moustache discrimination. His sergeant told him that the only reason he couldn't grow a moustache was that it wasn't on his I.D. card picture, and you were not allowed to alter your appearance from the way it was on your I.D. card. A little while later, the guy reported that he had lost his I.D. card, so they sent him to get another one. On the day he went to get his picture taken, he drew a thin moustache on his upper lip with an eyebrow pencil, and it came out in the picture looking perfectly natural. After awhile the sergeant noticed that this guy was no longer shaving his upper lip, and he said something to him about it. When the guy proudly produced his new I.D. card, the sergeant confiscated it and made him get another one. This time the sergeant went along with the guy to get his picture taken and made sure that he didn't pull any shenanigans. So much for racial equality in the army!

Santa in the summer

In retrospect, why hair, why did hair become the flag of the hippies? Well one, it was shocking, it’s hard to imagine now, but at the time it was. Remember the first time you saw Tiny Tim? And it was kind of a commitment. It wasn’t like an earring or bellbottom pants which you could wear or not wear, you had it all the time. Again, you couldn’t get a straight job. But hippie chicks could. All they had to do was put on their straight clothes and they could get a job at the bank and bring home the bacon. That was sweet. Until they discovered liberation.

I remember at the height of the sixties our college town, Urbana IL, got home rule and one of the things we wanted to do was pass some law that would make discrimination because of hair length illegal. I was all for it at the time, but anymore it all sounds stupid.

So many things about the sixties seem so stupid anymore, mostly like the clothes, and some of the language. I remember at the time some people thought that we resembled the roaring twenties with their flappers and bees knees and speakeasies and bathtub gin, and I was all like we are nothing like them, but anymore I think we weren’t that different.

And you know fifties had their look, and the seventies had disco, but I ask you, what has happened since then? The eighties, the nineties, the aughts, the teens, just a bunch of life goes on as always.

The beard was a little different. It wasn’t nearly as shocking to have a beard in the fifties as it would have been to have long hair. But as long as you had long hair you might as well have a beard. There were some guys who had long hair but still shaved their beards, and I always wondered what was with those guys.

I’ve never understood what it was with shaving, especially way back when it started, with the Greeks when razors must have been pretty primitive. The answer I most often get is because they wanted to look younger, and I have to wonder what did they want to look younger for? I don’t think women had much choice in who they married back then, so why bother? But then I expect there was a lot of cheating going on, so maybe it had something to do with that.

And then the question I posed to the Supercuts woman when I was in for my biannual shearing. How come our head hair just keeps growing and growing while out eyebrows, pits, genital, hair all stop at a certain point? What evolutionary advantage does this give us? She didn’t know either.

I don’t understand the bum look either. You must have to trim those things pretty often, and isn’t the whole point of not shaving, not shaving?

I heartily approve of taking the razor to everything four or five times a year, but doing it twice a year, is even less bother. Used to be I would trim my beard a few times between shearings, but I always did a pretty crappy job of it, so last July I figured let’s just not trim it and see what happens.

What happened was that come Christmas time was that I looked like Santa Claus. It was great. Kids loved me. Come summer I will see what it’s like to look like Santa in the summer.

Facial Hair

I never did go for really long hair, it seemed like a lot of trouble to maintain although, like you said, some guys didn't maintain it at all, just let it grow wild. I always did like beards, though. I mean, Abraham Lincoln had a beard. Who better to choose as a role model than him? My facial hair never did grow very thick, all I had was peach fuzz in high school. I had an electric razor that somebody had given me for Christmas, and I used it about once a week, usually on a Saturday night. When I got to Alaska, I just gave up shaving for awhile. It wasn't a political statement, I just didn't feel like shaving, and there was no reason to, until I got a job washing dishes at Paxson Lodge. The boss said that, since I was working in a restaurant, I should shave and get a haircut. Coming from a small business background myself, I could see his point.

In the army, they made us shave once a day whether we needed to or not. We usually had access to electricity, but when we were camping out, they still required us to shave, so I bought my first safety razor. Shortly after that, my electric razor broke down and I didn't replace it, couldn't see the point of owning two razors. About that time, my beard started to thicken up a bit. Common mythology said that, the more you shave, the more you have to shave. It was believed that shaving made your beard grow more, just like mowing a field of tall grass will make it come back thicker than ever. I have since read that this is false, the only reason your beard gets thicker as you get older is that you get older. At any rate, when I got out of the army I threw my razor away. There were three things that I vowed I would never do again: shave, wear a hat, or stand in line. This wasn't a political statement either, I had just done all three of those things so much while I was in the army that I was sick and tired of them. Since then I have shaven a few times for employment purposes, but none of those jobs lasted very long except the paper mill and, once I got into the union, I didn't have to shave anymore. I will stand in line when necessary, but I avoid it if I can. I wear a hat when practical considerations require it, but not otherwise.

When I first came to Cheboygan, people were always trying to hassle me about my beard, but I just laughed at them. That hasn't happened in a long time anyway. Like we both said, nobody cares whether or not you shave anymore. Have you noticed that a lot of guys on television these days are growing really short beards? I call it "the bum look". My hypothetical wife doesn't like it, she says they should either shave regularly or grow a decent beard. My own beard looks like that for a couple weeks after I buzz it off with my electric hair clipper. I don't shave with a razor, I just buzz it off close and let I grow back again. I do the same thing with my hair, but not as short. I do this about four or five times a year, when my hair starts tickling my ears. Again, it's not a political statement or even a fashion statement, it's just a convenient and easy way to manage it. I haven't been inside a barber shop in decades. I think there is still one regular men's barber shop in Cheboygan, the rest of them are called "hair salons" and they cater to both men and women. I suppose it doesn't really matter, but it's just one more thing that ain't what it used to be.

more hair

When I went to college, one of the things I was thinking was that I would be seeing people with beards. Beatnik types and maybe kind of radically thinking profs. Because we never saw a beard in Gage Park. It was something nobody had, because if you did, you would have to explain why you did it, and I think no matter what you said people would think you were weird. That’s sort of what I meant about how if you didn’t do what everybody else did people would think there was something wrong with you.

An odd thing is the Prez's. The last prez to even have a moustache was Taft and that was over a hundred years ago. There probably have been a few govs and senators, but I can’t think of any. I guess it’s just that anybody who gets into that rarefied atmosphere doesn’t want to take any chances at all, although Boehner is still proudly orange.

Well most of them are lawyers, and though most all businessmen are lounging around in Dockers and have long ago tossed out their strangling ties, lawyers still cling to suits.

But back to hair. I guess it did all start with the Beatles, remember how shocking their hair was? And it wasn’t even long, it was just uncombed. Like how could you not comb your hair? So rad. And then it just exploded, all the rock stars, all the youngsters without jobs, and what all. You know it all happened so fast. One day we were wondering why those lads from England don’t comb their hair, and two or three years later all our hair is down to our shoulders and we are smoking dope and listening to crazy music and openly dodging the draft.

I think it was because we were all so stoppered up by that 50s conformism, we wanted to do something else, but we didn’t know if we dared, and we had no idea what, and the blokes step off the plane and we are maybe we could do that, and we look at the guy next to us and he is tossing his comb into the trash, and then we look around and everybody is watching everybody else and then everybody is tossing away their combs. And there is the revolution.

Kind of reminds me of the Shah. The Shah seemed to be firmly in power, and then one day one Irani looked at another Irani, and said “You know, I don’t like that guy,” and the other Irani said, “Me either,” and the guys around them said, “Us neither,” and then they are writing up signs and marching and bam, the Shah is on the dustbin of history.

And there were certain things expected of you by other hippies, if you were going to be a hippie, you had to listen to psychedelic music, you had to smoke dope, you had to be against the war, but mostly, you had to grow out your Goddamn hair.

It set us apart, it was like wearing a campaign button, this is what I stand for. And I guess the same way people who wear campaign buttons think in some small way they are helping their cause because other people will see it, and just maybe it will make them more likely to vote for your candidate, so we thought we were helping our cause. And it kind of set us aside, mostly it was hard to get a job, but that was kind of good because we didn’t believe in jobs, didn’t believe in the capitalistic system, so we were taking a stand. Sure we could cut our hair and get a fat job and be rich, but we chose rather to stand up for our ideals.

It wasn’t uncommon to run into your hippie buddy, and he would be all like pissed off because he thought he was going to get a job, but then it turned out that the boss wanted him to cut his hair. Cut his hair??? Outrageous, how dare he??? Wasn’t this a violation of your rights??? What about freedom of speech??? “Well, I told him to shove it,” our disgruntled comrade would say, to the applause of all.

Crazy man crazy. I am exaggerating of course, but we did believe something like that.

Now it all seems stupid. Grow your hair out, cut it short, who cares?

Well I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Long Hair Music

I received your email with your snail mail address and will send you a tape the next time I go to town. Side one was supposed to be my songs about the Bliss Fest, and side two was supposed to be songs about different subjects. After recording all the songs, the recording guy said that side two had to be either shorter or longer than side one, I forget which. It had something to do with the way some cassette players automatically reversed themselves to play the other side. So it came to pass that side one became side two and vice-versa. You will notice how, towards the end of side one, which originally had been side two, my voice gets a little shaky. That's because we did it all in one marathon session, which nobody in the business does. I found out later that most guys record no more than one song a day, and they keep doing it over and over again until they get it perfect. This one was more like recording a live concert, whatever mistakes were made were left in there. I had no illusions about this thing going gold, and I tried to do it as simply and cheaply as possible.

The draft lottery you mentioned was something different than the one I was familiar with. I must have seen this in an old movie or newsreel. They had this rotating wire cage like the one they use to draw the numbers for Bingo. They would give it a spin and then reach in and pick out a name, and then they would do it again until they had as many names as they needed. I don't know if they kept picking until all the names had been drawn, but I doubt it. What would be the point of that?

Funny thing about beards and hair styles in the 60s, people used to get all emotional about it, but nobody cares nowadays. Abraham Lincoln had a beard, as did a lot of other guys in the 19th Century, and I don't think anybody made a fuss about that.

I remember when they gave us all our first G.I. haircuts in basic training. My hair was pretty short already, so it was no big deal for me, but a lot of the other guys had really long hair. When they came out of that barber shop I didn't recognize any of them. Of course, I had only known these guys for a few days, but they still seemed like they became different people after they were shorn. After basic training, they let us grow the hair on top of our heads as long as we wanted, but any part of it that showed when we wore our caps had to be buzzed off short once a week. We used to call it a "whitewall haircut". The British and French armies had no such requirement, they could grow their hair as long as they wanted. I'm not sure about the German army, but most of the German civilians had long hair. We used to wear civilian clothes when we went downtown on pass, but you could always pick the Americans out of any mixed crowd because of their whitewall haircuts.

When I was a young kid, people commonly referred to classical music as "longhair music". I was told that was because most of the classical music stars in those days came from Europe, where long hair was in fashion. Later, some forms of popular music came to be called "longhair", I think to distinguish it from the "greaser" music of the 50s. One day, when my daughter was quite young, we were watching a classical music concert on TV. All the males in the orchestra were clean shaven and had short hair. When the conductor came on stage, we noticed that he had a Japanese sounding name, but he looked like a young American college student with shoulder length blond hair. He had to be younger than anybody in the orchestra, which was unusual in itself, and he must have had as much hair any half dozen of them put together. I said to my daughter, "Pay attention, for this is an historic moment that you can tell your grandchildren about someday: Longhair has finally come full circle."

hair

I think all art is making things up, otherwise it’s just photography, or history or something. Two things that are certainly not art are science and math because they admit of only one truth, you are either right or wrong, the way Michael Weber and a few other of our nerdy group thought way back in 8th grade of Tonti School. What makes it confusing is sometimes scientists or mathematicians speak of a theory that is beautiful, but they don’t mean beautiful the same way as an artist or a poet does, well who ever knows what a poet means by anything? Only thing worse than a poet, is a philosopher.

I’ll be sending my address for Beagle’s greatest hits. Strange, your name so close to the Beatles and of the Eagles, and yet, to my knowledge, you never had a gold record.

About the draft lottery. When Nixon began winding down the war, not everybody was getting drafted anymore. But you never knew if you were going to get drafted or not. You were eligible, I don’t remember, like five years, and maybe you would be drafted and maybe you wouldn’t, so not knowing made it hard to plan out your life. So what Nixon did was set up a lottery so each birthday was associated with a number, and if you had a low one, you were going, and if you had a high one, you weren’t, and if you were in the middle you couldn’t be sure either way.

I was already doing my CO so it didn’t make any difference to me. But it kind of divided the draft eligible types because some knew they weren’t going no matter what, and they weren’t so against the war as they had been when they thought they were going to have to fight it.

It’s kind of a funny thing. We hippies thought the establishment wanted to draft us into the army. They were always so gleeful about us sitting there in all our hirsute glory, and the barber comes by and zip, we are shorn, and we aren’t hippies anymore, we are just draftees, and we have to take orders from the very epitome of the establishment, the drill sergeant.

In retrospect, it wasn’t anything personal, they only wanted someone to fight the war. If they could get volunteers to do it, they would rather do it that way, the same as ROTC didn’t want to be compulsory.

But what about that hair, what was so important about that to us? I shall be thinking about that.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

I can't help you much with that modern poetry, never did understand it myself. The same with modern art. That kind of thing reminds me of that old fairy tale about the emperor's new clothes. Supposedly these clothes were invisible to anybody who was incompetent in his job, so nobody, not even the emperor himself, would admit that they couldn't see them. After awhile, some little kid blurted out that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. The kid couldn't be incompetent in his job because he didn't have a job, so this proved that the emperor's new clothes were fraudulent and didn't really exist. Meanwhile, the tailor who made the emperor's fake clothes had skipped town with the money he had been paid for his services and was never heard from again. So yeah, if you don't know what to write, just make something up, which is what I suspect the rest of them have been doing all along.

I haven't done anything with my music for a long time. I didn't actually "write" my songs, I just composed them in my head. The lyrics were my own and the tunes were adaptations of some generic traditional folk melodies. I did put some of them on tape once, back in the 1990s. I made it in a professional studio at my own expense, and I don't think I sold enough of them over the years to break even. To save money, I recorded the whole thing in one day, which was a mistake because my voice was getting pretty shaky by the end. If you're interested, give me your snail mail address and I'll send you one.

The hoopla about Alaska that you remember from the 70s was probably when they started developing the North Slope oil fields. Last I heard, there are now more people in the city of Anchorage than there were in the whole state when I was there. Of course, Alaska is a really big state, so I'm sure there is still plenty of uninhabited land there. It's not just the cold that keeps people away, it's the mountains. Mountains are pretty to look at, but they're really hard to live in that far north.

I'm glad that a lot of people still like to live in cities because, if you spread them out all over the country, the country would get pretty crowded. I don't exactly hate people, I just like them in small doses. When there are too many of them per square mile, they're not people to me anymore, they're traffic. Living like you do is certainly a more efficient use of land, if all you're talking about is living quarters. If you want to grow a garden, cut your own firewood, hunt and fish, or have a dog, it's better to have more space between you and your neighbors. Some city folks spend a lot of their time driving back and forth to the country, which is fine if you like to drive and can afford the gas. I'd rather just live here and save on the commuting. Of course, if all the things you like to do are in the city, then it makes better sense to live there.

I'm not all that crazy about the cold, especially as I've gotten older, but it helps keep the area from getting over populated. The desert never appealed to me, not enough vegetation to suit my taste. I like to be near water, but not the ocean. Even the Great Lakes are bigger than I need, but there are also plenty of inland waters around here, which are more to my liking. We don't get serious floods here because the land is so flat. Any rain or snow melt we get just spreads out all over and gets absorbed into the ground. You might have puddles in your yard for a few days, but that's about it. Of course we don't have as much paved area as you do, and what we do have drains into the ditches or is piped to the river. The local Wal-Mart drains their parking lot into a lagoon that is fenced off from the public, but most of our surplus water just runs down a ditch until it reaches a lake or stream.

I'm not sure what you mean about the lottery. I think the draft always was a lottery because some guys never got called up. I suppose that in war time, when they need more soldiers, they keep drawing names until the they get enough, which sometimes means everybody. It wasn't long after the Vietnam War that they abolished the draft altogether. Some years later they tried to get the guys to register, just in case they ever needed them, but I don't think that went over too well. I remember one guy went to jail because he wrote a letter to the president telling him that he refused to register, but I think that most guys just quietly didn't register and didn't do anything to call attention to themselves. I don't remember if they ever repealed that law, or just stop trying to enforce it, but I haven't heard anything about it for a long time.

I didn't know it was called a "youth culture" until I read about it in a book decades later. At the time, I was just trying to grow myself up so that I could leave Chicago. I had friends, and I'm sure that they influenced me to some degree, but I never was one who would do something just because my friends were doing it. Similarly, I never let friends or family discourage me from doing something that I had made up my mind to do. I wasn't particularly rebellious or defiant, I just did my own thing and, if other people didn't like it, well too bad for them.

living in the country

For some years I have had a bit of a hankering for that poetry game, but there isn’t any money in it, nor fame, but I just thought I’d like to string words together to make something nice, or maybe interesting would be a better word. But I don’t know, that rhyming stuff sounds bland, and the current stuff like I see in the New Yorker, I don’t know what that is about, and from the little I’ve read about it, it seems that they like to have some kind of meaning in it, and I don’t have any meaning. I don’t believe there is any meaning in the universe, so what am I supposed to do, make it up?

You said you’ve written some songs. Did you write the lyrics to them? Have you written any lately? What have you been doing with that keyboard? What do you do this time of year, trembling under your glaciers? When is hunting season coming around? I think it’s in the springtime isn’t it? But aren’t animals fatter in the fall? Wouldn’t that be a better time? Well maybe it is. Just did a quick google and apparently it’s complicated. Seems like it was November. I seem to remember you telling me about wounding a deer.

While googling I see where Alaska became a state in 1958. I don’t remember a big hoopla then, but hell, I was thirteen. I do remember some kind of hoopla in the early seventies. It was like Alaska was the new west, kind of a wild land, but not dangerous, and not as onerous as the old west had been. Well I think it was chiefly Alaskan propaganda to get people to move there and some tourism too.

Land getting filled up, that is a bit of a problem for folks like you. If everybody felt the way you did, Cheboygan would be like Chicago, although anymore we get deer and coyotes and even the occasional cougar, so there is wildlife, but I guess hunting would be no fun in your own backyard. But then there are people like me who don’t mind, in fact rather like, being stacked up on top of each other, packing more of us onto less land, here in Marina City we have like a thousand people on a bit of land that is probably a hundredth the size of Beaglesonia. I would think you guys would be happy about us city folk taking up less land, leaving more for you.

So am I right in assuming that one of the things you like about Beaglesonia in addition to its remoteness, is the cold? Is that the reason the equally remote desert does not interest you? I have never seen the charm of the desert either, like living in a parking lot.

No floods around Beaglesonia? I would have thought a marshy place would have them. Is that maybe because the area is not all built up, that you have plenty of those wetlands that are lauded for containing excess rain the way a shopping center cannot?

The early youth culture was all about being popular and wearing a certain kind of clothes and Dick Clark, and 180 degrees from what the sixties were. The contribution of the fifties to the sixties was that the fifties made us think that we were important, and thinking we were important, we thought our ideas were important, and that gave us the power to disagree with, well, what seemed like the rest of the country.

Funny thing, at first the rest of the country really seemed to hate us, our drugs, out antiwar, our outlandish dress, and our attitude towards the common culture. But gradually they got used to us, some even thought we were a good thing. Remember The Greening of America? And then we got older, we got watered down, some of us became them, but with a bit of the old attitude still. Some things changed, some things remained the same. Oh I guess you could say that about anything.

You know I read your entry and then I write my response, and the response can wander, and I have forgotten what you wrote, and when I look back at your entry I sometimes see that I am saying something similar to what you have said, but I have forgotten. Yeah I think the winding down of the Vietnam war took some of the fire out of the hippies. Maybe it was the lottery. Before the lottery every young male went through a rite of passage in how they dealt with the draft, but once the lottery was drawn about half of them didn’t have to worry about that anymore. In a sense Nixon compromised with us, and we compromised with him. Wow, I never thought of it that way before, and now I am going to have to think of that some more.

Poetry, Weather, Politics, and Potholes

I have read a few of those haikus, they don't do anything for me. I'm not into poetry all that much anyway. I figure that, if it's a decent poem, you might as well make a song out of it and, if it's not a decent poem, you might as well make prose out of it.

I believe I've told you about this before, but we never get tired of those old classics. When I was seven years old, I decided that I was going to live in Michigan when I grew up. By the time I was in high school, however, Michigan was filling up with people so fast that I figured it would be just like Chicago by the time I grew up. My error here was that I was only familiar with one county of Michigan, and I must have thought that the rest of the state was like that too. Well, there was Freesoil, where my dad had taken me deer hunting a few times. I could have lived there, but it was only a hundred miles or so north of Berrien County, and I figured that it was only a mater of time before that got filled up too. I did notice that, the farther north you went, the less people there were, so I thought that, if I went far enough north, I might be able to get ahead of the curve.

About that time, Alaska became a state and there was a lot of publicity about it. Most of the stuff I read said that Alaska wasn't as cold s most people think, at least not all over the whole state. They said that the summers were really nice, which was true, but they didn't say that the summers only lasted a month or so, which they do, unless you live in the panhandle where it rains all the time and you can't tell one season from another.

I flew up to Alaska, so I didn't get to see any of the country in between. I drove a car back to Chicago and, in the process, learned more about geography in ten days than I had learned living in Alaska for four months. I concluded that, where I really wanted to live was a place like Minnesota or Northern Wisconsin. I also concluded that, wherever I lived, there had to be plenty of jobs and women, both of which were scarce in Alaska at the time. When I got out of the army I went to Cheboygan because I knew somebody there. If that didn't work out I planned to check out Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maine, in that order. As luck would have it, I found a decent job and some decent women in Cheboygan, so I've been there ever since.

Cheboygan isn't that much colder than Chicago, but the colder part of the year lasts a month or two longer. I can tolerate that, but not much more than that, which is what has kept me out of the Upper Peninsula. Since I've been watching the Weather Channel I have come to realize that Cheboygan actually has a better climate than a lot of places in the U.S. Our weather is frequently uncomfortable, but it's seldom life threatening. We don't have hurricanes, tornadoes, devastating floods or wildfires, earthquakes, or serious droughts. Truth be known, a little global warming wouldn't do us any harm but, the way we're making glaciers this winter, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

I think you're right about the youth culture starting in the 50s but it was a different kind of youth culture than what emerged in the 60s. I didn't care for the youth culture of the 50s, and I thought I would like the 60s better, but I didn't, so now I ain't got no culture, and that suits me just fine.

Interesting what you said about how the Russian dissidents kind of found themselves out of a job when Communism went down. Didn't something like that happen to the Hippies after the Vietnam War was over? Like you said, it takes one kind of skill to complain about the potholes and a different kind of skill to fix them. One thing's for sure, them potholes ain't going to fix themselves, are they.

hot and cold

Nice glaciers Beagles. I love them. Maybe we can send Al Gore over to inspect them.

Well I never, Gage Park, Gage Park high school, too avant garde for Beagles. I went to my yearbook and there were two poems, and one of them was a bit of a downer, oh and neither of them rhymed. Well that rhyming, I am not that big a fan, sometimes it seems moronic to me:

Ta da da da, da da da, da, dum de dum, Moon.

Buh buh buh buh, de de de de, ram a dam June.

Know what I mean

Jelly bean.

Now there is a rhyming couplet that never gets old.

Seems to me that you might be a haiku kind of man. There is a form that has strict rules, and an austere viewpoint, and there is something cold about it too, the kind of thing you would write on a lonely mountain top during a snowstorm, and never on the beach.

So amid the petty hurly burly of high school, the dumb clubs, the rallies, the soul-deadening blather of the teachers, your mind was already on Alaska, the eagles cawing, the fish rustling down the icy mountain streams.

Well what was it about Alaska, back then? The isolation, the high ratio of natural to manmade, the cold? I wonder about the cold. There is something about it, even here downtown stepping out of the door to the horns of traffic and the piles of dirty slush, there is something bracing about that cold wind slapping me in the face. But I’ll be getting tired of that in a couple weeks, and there will still be months of winter to go.

You know there has become a sissification of the American people about cold, you know all those showbiz types living in LA, and probably all those weather girls go down there to be discovered and when they aren’t, they come back here to give the weather, and their thin limbs tremble at the sight of that big white mass over Canada, heading right to the windy city, which is not even that warm before the winds arrive. There is just something square about cold, the galoshes, the hats with the ear flaps, dragging that dented shovel behind you, when what you ought to be doing is lounging on the beach with your buff bronze body, sipping on a mojito or a Bud Lite Strawberita, like all the hip kids.

Not many people in Alaska mostly because it is so cold, but then so is the desert, why didn’t you want to live in the desert? Maybe because nature is kind of feeble in the desert? Maybe because in Alaska you always have to be doing something, chopping wood and hunting animals mostly it seems, while in the desert the only activity seems to be crawling along in a ragged t shirt looking for water, seems more boring than chopping and hunting.

I think the official theory is that the youth culture began maybe in the middle fifties when you had all these baby boomers sprouting up, and you had tv just coming up with its commercials, and admen realized that they could sell these kids stuff, and before that if you were a kid you were just waiting to become an adult, but now with the admen wooing us, we began to see ourselves as something important, and then the music. Seems like before us kids just listened to their parents’ music, but now we were listening to our own music, and making a lot of it too.

At first I think the admen were kind of running the thing with their manufactured teen idols and all, but later, when we became older there were drugs and the unpopular war, and the admen lost control of us, and that’s when we had all that cool sixties stuff. Eventually the admen caught on and recaptured all that, but that was later.

But back before the sixties, everything was still controlled by the admen, everybody had to watch Ed Sullivan, everybody had to want a new car, everybody had to believe this was the greatest country ever, and was getting better every day. And the thing was you had to believe that, if you didn’t there was something wrong with you, and indeed you were making trouble by thinking things that didn’t need any thinking about, because everybody already knew what was the right thing to think. I guess that was the part that bugged me, not so much that everybody believed the same thing, but they wanted you to too. A little exaggerated, but that’s how I remember it.

Here’s another story to go along with that commie factory story. I remember hearing on NPR a playwright from some occupied country after the fall of communism, and he was sort of complaining. During occupation all you had to write was some subtle attack on communism, and all your countrymen thought you were telling the real truth and being brave. But once communism fell, you had to think of something new to write. And nobody knew what to think because previously they had been told what to think, and they hated that, so they all got together hating communism, but once they had toppled that statue of Stalin in the town square, what would they be thinking about? And what would they do? They used to complain about all the potholes that the commies let accumulate in the street, but now they would have to fill them in, which was a lot more work than complaining.

Making Glaciers (Extra Credit)

One of the main things that disturbs the global warming people is that glaciers in all parts of the world seem to be melting away at an alarming rate. Not to worry, we are making brand new glaciers in Beaglesonia to replace all those old worn put glaciers. We haven't figured out yet how to transport these new glaciers to where they are most needed, but we all agree that anybody who wants a glacier can have one of ours because we've got lots.

Still More School Stuff

When I had to sign off yesterday I was just about to tell you some more about the Creative Writing Club. I don't remember who was in it, but it wasn't more than a half dozen people. I don't remember the teacher who ran it, but I don't think it was Mrs. Kew. I thought I would like it at first, but it got old real quick. We were doing poetry, but not the regular poetry that rhymes. I never could see the point of that kind of poetry. I mean, if it's not going to rhyme, then why not just make it prose? My interest in school activities was pretty well burned out by the end of my freshman year. I did stick with the ROTC though, even though some of it was done on my own time. By my senior year, I was tired of that too and I disengaged myself from all the extra stuff. By then my mind was already in Alaska, and it was just waiting for my body to catch up with it. I remember all that school spirit stuff too, but only in my freshman year. Maybe it was still going on after that but I wasn't paying attention to it.

You know, I don't remember the teachers trying to get us to all think the same way but, looking back on it now, I suppose they were. Since then I have read some stuff about how the youth culture began to displace the adult culture back in the 60s. If that was true, I'm sure that the teachers were trying to oppose it. I never was conscious of a youth culture in those days, or an adult culture either for that matter. My mother was always talking about "society" but, since she was a big opera fan, I figured that culture and society consisted of people who dressed up in fancy clothes and went to the opera. I certainly didn't want anything to do with that!

Decades later I did become a bit of an opera fan myself when they started showing it on television with English subtitles, but I usually watched that in my bathrobe with a beer in my hand. I don't think that's what my mother had in mind when she encouraged me to expose myself to culture. Nevertheless, she was pleased when I showed her some of my favorite operas on VCR tape. She had some serious health problems by then and couldn't get around much, so she hadn't been to the opera in a long time. She also had difficulty sitting still for long periods of time, so she seldom watched the operas on TV because she didn't have the endurance to sit through a whole one. When I showed her how you could stop the tape anytime you wanted to and come back to it later without missing anything she was really happy about that.

What you said about that guy working in the commie factory makes a lot of sense. Maybe that was one of the big weaknesses of communism. An organization that will not tolerate criticism can never improve itself, or an individual person either for that matter. I don't care how good you are, or think you are, there is always room for improvement. Besides that, conditions around you are always changing, and you need to respond to that in some manner. Maybe you go along with the change or maybe you oppose it but, either way, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over again whether it works or not.

criticizing the state

I wonder how long that slide rule club lasted. I can’t think of anything besides multiplying and dividing, well maybe square and cube and so on, roots and powers, but those are just specialized cases of multiplication and division, and again I wonder what girls, who I generally expect to have more sense, were doing in it.

Well there was one thing I was thinking of. When I was in college there was all this talk about activities, like you had to be involved in all sorts of activities to impress employers when you went out looking for a job. And I think nowadays high school kids are encouraged to take up all sorts of activities in order to get into a good college.

But I don’t think, even in the college-crazed honor classes at Gage, there was that emphasis on activities getting you into a college. I think the only thing that counted were those tests you took in your senior year, and maybe they didn’t even make that much of a difference. When I got into U of I, they took anybody from the state who applied. The year after that they became more discriminating, but I don’t think admitting me had anything to do with that.

Trouble with authority figures, sounds like something you would see in a JD’s jacket when he went into reform school. Well I have to say I did sort of admire those guys, not for the things they did that got them into reform school, but for their attitude, “What’s it to ya, Copper?”

I suppose you’re right about the teachers running the school because if not them who, and I certainly came around to that way of thinking when I became a substitute teacher. Do you remember the movie, Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman is the hero who takes on the mean prison warden? After a hard day of subbing I came home and watched it and I thought that Paul Newman was just some kind of smart aleck, and the prison warden should have been the hero.

Well all I wanted to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, was goof around all day, and the teachers wanted some work out of me, write papers, learn enough to do well on tests, so the struggle between me wanting to goof off and them wanting me to learn something, was fair enough. But then they also wanted me to think in a certain way, that whole school spirit, patriotism, positive mental attitude stuff, that was what chiefly got my goat.

And to some extent yours too, as in that locker incident. I remember hearing this guy talking on the radio after the collapse of communism, and he worked in a factory in Russia, and there was some kind of problem, let’s just say it was crumby lockers. He thought it would be a good idea to do something about it, it would improve the plant and therefore its productivity, and therefore, the state.  All good commie workers should be working to improve the state no?

So he went to his immediate commissar, and there he ran into a problem. If he claimed the lockers weren’t up to snuff, then clearly the guy in charge of the lockers was unworthy, and if he was unworthy then the guy who appointed him must be unworthy, and the guy who appointed him, and so on all the way up to the worker’s paradise. To criticize the lockers was to criticize the state, and that was clearly not what a good worker would do, so shut the fuck up, he was advised. He realized then that since nobody could criticize anything, nothing could ever be changed, and nothing could ever get any better, but now he knew better than to tell anybody that.

I’m not sure if memory of it is correct, but I think it was once I was in the Engager office, did they have an office? Anyway some room, and I was play threatening somebody with a letter opener, like it was a sword, and Ms Kew came in. You know teachers never had much of a sense of humor.

More School Stuff

The Slide Rule Club was formed to teach us how to operate a slide rule. It wasn't part of the curriculum, but some of the guys expressed an interest in it, so they made a club out of it. It was basically just a class run by a teacher, only it was held after hours and there was no credit for it. I seem to remember that you could do a lot more with a slide rule than multiply and divide, but I didn't stick around long enough to learn all the functions. I had the same issue with it that you did, the lines seldom line up and you have to interpolate between them. I thought that it was easier to just do the work on paper, and then you knew what you had. It turned out that we never needed to use a slide rule in any of the classes I took anyway, so I don't think that I missed out on anything important.

Yeah, the whole damn school was run by the teachers....Duh! Who did you think was supposed  to run the school? We were there to learn, and they were there to teach. How could they teach us anything if they didn't run the school? I understand that you've had a problem with authority figures all your life. I've had some problems with some of them, mostly the ones who I thought weren't doing their jobs correctly, but you had trouble with all of them. Anyway, I don't seem to remember you telling me about that letter opener incident. What was that all about?

I got along with Mrs. Kew all right, until the time she told me to write an editorial. I had already written several news articles for the paper, and I knew the difference between a news article and an editorial, so I wrote an editorial that was critical of my gym teacher. The lockers in the gym locker room were junk, and you couldn't put anything in them because it would get stolen in a matter of minutes. I reported it to the gym teacher, who said and did nothing about it. My position was that they should either give us better lockers or post a guard on them, but the gym teacher just mumbled something and walked away. Anyway, Mrs. Kew told me that we couldn't put something like that in the school paper because it was critical of the school, and that it was all just my opinion. I replied that I thought an editorial was supposed  to be my opinion. She said that indeed it was but, in this case, my opinion was unacceptable because it wasn't congruent with her opinion. I told her that, in that case, she should write the editorials herself. She said something about me being a smart aleck, and we seldom spoke to each other after that. She never asked me to write anything for the paper again and, at the end of the semester, I didn't re-enlist for another hitch on the En-Gager.

I've got to sign off now because it's getting late and I have something else I need to do. We can continue this discussion tomorrow.