Paddycake

Since I didn’t have a root canal scheduled for last night, I watched the Republican presidential candidates’ “debate” on CNN. I use debate in quotation marks because it actually felt more like a gang rape, with almost every question to every candidate turned into an attack on Obama. If anyone tuned in had turned the debate into a drinking game keyed to the word “Obamacare,” participants would have all died of alcohol poisoning in the first fifteen minutes.

The best question from the moderator all night concerned the Bush tax cuts and deregulation, both of which failed to produce any measurable upturn in the economy and surge in job creation. No one answered that question directly, choosing instead to repeat the Republic mantra that the only way to jumpstart the current economy is more tax cuts and deregulation.

Candidates also chose not to direct any attacks against their primary contenders, which is what they have to do if they want to distinguish themselves from each other and win over voters in the Republican primaries. Pawlenty even declined to defend his earlier statement that “Obamacare” would be better called “Obomneycare,” instead once again going after Obama rather than Romney.

All the candidates came across as capable non-debaters, able to turn every question into a recitation of current right-wing Republican orthodoxy aimed at the tea party base. Still, there were some real bombshells. Cain refused to retreat from an earlier statement that he would never appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. Amazingly, Gingrich came to his defense, pointing out that one naturalized American citizen and convicted terrorist had explained that he had simply lied when he took his oath of citizenship.

And then, even more amazingly, Gingrich went on to defend earlier purges of Nazis and Communists, arguing that history had proven them mostly right. I’m not aware of any particular efforts to purge government of Nazis, but this was the first defense of McCarthyism I’ve ever heard from anyone who wasn’t a card carrying member of the John Birch society. Still, since he didn’t actually mention McCarthy, he’ll probably get by with that one.

There were calls to turn Medicare into a voucher system and reform Social Security by making it a voluntary program with an option to contribute to private retirement accounts. This should amount to painting a target on your chest, since the collapse of the stock market has wiped out the retirement savings of millions of Americans, but on stage with a line of fellow Republican candidates, no one ever questioned a suggestion that will inevitably be greeted with hostility from many voters, especially older Americans who are the most likely to actually vote in any election.

In fact, the inevitable answer to every question was privatize, cut taxes, and deregulate, red meat for the exclusively Republican audience that won’t always play so well beyond the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Still, the debate highlights Obama’s challenge in the presidential election. After now three years of Obama’s presidency, we’re still in the grip of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama’s defense of his leadership so far has been a limp assertion that things would be worse if he hadn’t intervened forcefully in saving what was left of financial markets and manufacturing jobs such as the auto industry. Those of us who believe he needs to stop taking jabs and instead start throwing heavy body blows against his critics will feel even greater urgency in his taking an aggressive stand. Sadly, after three years, it may be that we’ve seen he’s more comfortable lecturing in an attentive classroom than he is in the kind of cage fighting he needs to do to win reelection.

Still, it’s early in the game, and we saw in Nevada and other states that given a choice between an unpopular incumbent and a whackadoo opponent, voters will reluctantly reelect the incumbent. Harry Reid, a particularly ineffective debater, eked out a victory against Sharon Angle. Obama, with his far superior debating skills and his proven track record in running an effective campaign, might still mount a spirited offensive instead of always playing an anemic defense. He needs to take off the gloves and start throwing those heavy punches.

Only a fool like me would dare to call the election this early in the campaign. I take it all back. The most anyone can say at this point is it’s going to be interesting.

And I’ll continue to watch the Republican debates since in the end I can’t help myself and I don’t see any root canals in the near future.

A little perspective

Is it just me, or is the idea of a Broadway musical that satirizes Mormons more than a little offensive? I surfed by the Tony Awards last night, and though I’d vaguely heard something about The Book of Mormon, it hadn’t really caught my attention. Then I watched one big production number from the show and I wondered why there hasn’t been a surge of outrage about this. Imagine—it makes me shudder to think about it—a Broadway satire of Muslims called The Koran. We’d have Hillary Clinton flying in to New York in an NY minute to plead with the producers to call off the show.

Just the fact that somebody was pursuing such an idea would cause massive riots throughout the Arab world. Granted, Muslims could loosen up a little and stop killing each other because some cracker preacher in Florida decides to burn their book, but this isn’t just a one-man stunt for a little publicity. It’s Broadway.

The Book of Mormon was written by the creators of South Park, which has no notion of “going too far.” Then again, the opening number for the Tonys was “Broadway: It’s not just for gays anymore.” Was it before? I’ve never been.

Maybe musical comedy based on religion isn’t such a bad idea. As a born-again-and-again agnostic, I certainly take as much pleasure as the next guy making fun of religions. Nunsense makes fun of nuns, who have their own issues with underwear, I suppose. And I mean, Scientology? Come on.

Of course, Jews come in for plenty of satire, but mostly by Jews. For them, it’s a business, but when they get a musical, it’s Fiddler on the Roof.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: I was raised Baptist, sort of, who prohibit standing intercourse lest someone think they’re dancing. I still can’t dance. Other than that, there’s nothing funny about Baptists.

Has anyone done Anglicans? Gay bishops? A laugh a minute.

Jesus Christ Superstar offended a lot of people, but it wasn’t a comedy. It was actually quite a moving testimony, if you like Jesus, and it had some great songs.

Maybe we need a musical that satirizes all religions, Anabaptists to Zoroasters: God: The Joke’s On You.

Funnier to me is Republicans. Nixon has an opera, but I don't think it's a comedy.

Don't call me Ishmael

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but the recent revelations about Congressman Anthony Weiner have led me to take the last step: I’m renouncing my gender. From now on, I will identify as “independent” on all official documents such as driver’s license and passport. I’ll leave blank any boxes I’m required to check for either “male” or “female” unless there’s an “other,” and then only if I can write in “independent.”

I will use neither men’s nor women’s restrooms. Unless there’s a unisex bathroom, I’ll hold it until I get home. This means I'll be spending a lot more time at home.

Not all men are assholes, but there are so many asshole men out there that I’m tired of being associated with them only on the basis of certain equipment we share in common. I’ve long resented that I can’t be overly friendly with the neighbors’ kids for fear of being thought a pedophile. Actually being in the house with a kid when the parents aren’t there is a clear invitation to being officially charged. And taking a neighbor kid camping is just asking for a lengthy prison sentence. Really, I don’t even like kids.

It’s not any safer with women of any age. When I was teaching, I never closed my office door. Never.

On a rare occasion, I’d have a woman student walk in and close the door behind her so we could “talk.” I always recognized this for the set-up it was and reopened the door immediately, then walked out into the hallway with my hands in the air. I kept the door equally open with male students, colleagues of all ages and genders, and even when I was alone for fear that someone might suspect I wasn’t alone.

I left it open when I wasn’t there. If the need ever arose, I wanted a whole slew of witnesses from my building who would swear that they had never seen my door closed.

Never.

Today’s Daily Beast online lists a rogue’s gallery of political sex offenders, concluding that Republicans hold a slim lead over Democrats. The article briefly profiles a discouraging sixty-three offenders, some old, some new, many I’d never heard of. I well remember Bob Packwood since he was an Oregon Senator when he resigned in 1993, but I’d already forgotten John Ensign (Nevada, 2009). I hadn’t heard of congressman Tim Mahoney (2008), a Democrat who campaigned on a very Republican sounding slogan of “Faith and family: Where I stand.” Actually, he apparently spent considerable time lying down with his mistress, whom he then paid $121,000 to keep quiet. She didn’t.

Mahoney replaced Republican Mark Foley (2008), who resigned after ABC released a string of salacious email he sent to male congressional pages. I remember that one. I love it when family-values, gay-bashing Republicans turn out to be gay sexual predators. This happens approximately weekly.

Of course, there are plenty of non-political offenders: Tiger Woods, PeeWee Herman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. These are not three guys you would otherwise name in the same sentence. And don’t get me started on fundamentalist preachers and mega-churches: Gay sex, prostitutes, meth. And this was just one guy.

I’m not ready to be charged as a sex offender (I’m not), or a philanderer (I’m not), or even just a salacious texter (I’m not).

So I renounce my gender. Call me Stacy, not Ross. Stacy happens to be my middle name, and although I hate it, it is gender-neutral and therefore acceptable. Call me Doctor Carroll or Professor Carroll. I don’t stand on ceremony, but Mister is no longer acceptable.

And finally, I did not have sex with that woman, and I will not resign.

Don't know much about history

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Longfellow goes on for fourteen stanzas, concluding

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.


Sarah Palin


"He who warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

Five myths

As part of the Washington Post’s “Five Myths” series, Paul Farhi today offers us “Five Myths about America’s Schools.” It’s not likely to change much in the American discussion about school improvement, but I’d guess that about ninety-five percent of all teachers, kindergarten through university, would agree with his assessment.

Among the myths: 1) Our schools are failing; 2) Unions defend bad teachers; 3) Billionaires know best; 4) Charter schools are the answer; and 5) More effective teachers are the answer.

My take on all this is that, contrary to everyone’s good intentions, there are few if any solutions to our education problems outside of the schools themselves. Certain kinds of assessment, in mathematics for example, are both valid and reliable and can tell us a lot about student performance, though not always so much about teacher performance. In my field, though, writing instruction, despite decades of trying, there simply isn’t any valid, externally verifiable way to assess student writing and improvement. This makes people outside of the profession crazy, but it’s something that we writing teachers tend to accept as a given. The same is true in most disciplines.

Think, for example, of the arts. Critics and the public might largely agree that a certain film is excellent and another is terrible: Say, Citizen Kane and Conan the Barbarian. Still, not everyone will agree. Mexican writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges thought Citizen Kane sucked, and so did I. Others thought Conan was a pop-culture classic. I didn’t, but there you go.

For all the films that fall somewhere in the middle, it becomes virtually impossible to make a purely objective assessment. Does good acting trump a mediocre plot, or do great special effects make an otherwise mundane plot in some way measurably better? Is My Dog Skip a better film because it features a Jack Russell Terrier than if it featured a cocker spaniel? (Of course it is.)

Likewise, it gets much harder when we try to assess competence in the roughly eighty percent of students who fall somewhere in the middle. Does a particular student write noticeably better at the end of a ten-week class than at the beginning? As an instructor, I believe I can assess that, but another instructor might read samples of that student’s writing and reach a completely different conclusion.

Is a particular excellent student more excellent after my able instruction? Is a terrible writer a little less terrible? Yes, but don't ask me to prove it.

Good writing instruction results from a vast network of intangible features of a particular school’s culture, including a good president or principal, a good department chair, a balance of shared expectations among the faculty and a lot of room for originality, a mix of students who are motivated and at least moderately competent to learn (which can vary greatly even from one class to the next), and the luck of the draw in the abilities of individual department members. There are many other factors, not the least of which are a student’s home environment and upbringing.

My answer then, which will never be accepted by politicians or the general public, is to give us some money and get out of the way. Teachers have been teaching with mixed results but generally reasonable success since at least Socrates, without benefit of standardized testing, merit pay, or charter schools.

And remember that Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn’t publish.

Departments tend to seek excellence, even if from the outside they look largely dysfunctional (my former department being perhaps the best example of this since the invention of the pencil). Bad teachers tend to get pushed into other jobs more suited to their abilities, such as parking enforcement. Good teachers tend to get a few pats on the back from both colleagues and students, which is mostly what motivates us to continue teaching and even improve if we can.

We're not perfect, but neither are truck drivers.

So my suggestion for genuine school improvement is benign neglect: Trust us; we know what we’re doing. Show a little respect. Quit blaming us for all the social problems you can’t solve.

You can read the Farhi five myths by copying and pasting this link into your browser. I could easily add five more, but this is a good start.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-schools/2011/05/09/AFunW27G_story.html

Instant dick

I’ve been using an updated version of Internet Explorer the last few days, and I’ve just noted a new feature that I love. When I place the curser over a word, no matter what Web site I might happen to be on, I get a pop-up definition of that word. My Kindle does this and it’s a welcome shortcut from actually getting out a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words, which as often as not I don’t bother to do.

Who cares if George Will knows five words per column I’ve never encountered in my entire life? I've always suspected George makes liberal use of a thesaurus,anyway, (George Will and liberal rarely appearing in the same sentence together).

Now my computer unpacks George automatically. He seems to be saying exactly the same thing whether or not I can define a few unfamiliar words, but now I can be sure he's not putting one over on me. The scabrous jackanapes.

What I just discovered minutes ago is that this dictionary function also works in Spanish. I was on a Spanish-language news site, stumbling along as usual like a low-performing second grader, when I let my mouse hand drift the curser over the text, and up popped a definition, in English. Presunto violador means alleged rapist. Guess who that article was about? (Hint: Mike Tyson is old news.)

Actually, I could have puzzled out the meaning of that one since Spanish is so rich in English cognates, and after awhile one gets a knack for recognizing them, even if they are rather oblique. Still, I might have guessed wrongly that “desalentador” has something to do with desalination, rather than “discouraging,” which is what it really means. Although what desalination has to do with a presunto violador would have troubled me. Something that might come up in the penalty phase, maybe.

I love these new features of my digital life. My Kindle has always had this instant definition feature. Although I get by just fine without a smart phone or an iPad, meaning I have absolutely no apps in my life, these other developments are more than just gadgets. They change how I read. In a small way, they make reading a richer experience.

Now, why doesn’t Microsoft Word have this same feature? You’d think it would be a basic component of such an advanced word processor.

Maybe it is and I just haven’t discovered it yet.

Lucky shot

President Obama was wonderful in his interview with 60 Minutes last night: calm and resolute; neither humble nor arrogant; just, well, presidential. And then, the next morning, he signed the legislation ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” another campaign promise he made.

Just another day at the office for this extraordinary president.

If you missed the interview, I highly recommend a viewing. A story and the full interview are available here (copy and paste into your browser):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/no-evidence-pakistan-knew-of-bin-ladens-hideout-top-security-official-says/2011/05/08/AFxXpNSG_story.html

So now Obama enjoys what I predict will be a growing bump in his approval ratings as a result of killing bin Laden. Gas prices are dropping and are predicted to be down by fifty cents a gallon by summer; job creation in the private sector continues to rise. Maybe killing Osama isn’t the end of al-Qaeda, and some encouraging economic news isn’t the end of the recession for most Americans, but things certainly look a lot brighter today than they did a week ago.

It’s still over a year to the 2012 election, but I have to believe that Republicans are growing increasingly nervous. The best they can come up with for now is a little sniping from the sidelines. First, they criticize Obama for making too many references to himself in announcing the death of Osama. Eight in nine minutes by my count, including some real whoppers such as, “Tonight, I can report. . . .” which could have been better phrased in the passive, “Tonight, it can be reported”; or “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation,” which might have be phrased as, “Today, that tall black guy in the White House launched a targeted operation. . . .”

But I don’t think this kind of petty denigration is going to play well anywhere but on the Rush Limbaugh show. Even worse for the Ree-Pubs, senior Bush administration officials are stepping out of the shadows to take at least partial credit for the kill and criticize Obama for stopping “enhanced interrogation techniques,” also referred to as torture except in the Bush administration. Rummy Rumsfeld said that early tips obtained through waterboarding led to Osama’s bloody end. "Trigger" Dick Cheney said the same and suggested that Obama has put the United States at risk by reaffirming our commitment to national and international law regarding torture.

And Cheney wanted to take the head shot since he has the experience, but that's another matter.

All this from the administration that, after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, got absolutely everything else wrong for the next seven years. I won’t go on about it here. For a partial list of absolutely everything else the Bush administration got wrong for the next seven years, email me privately.

Actually, I’m surprised that no one I’m aware of is making the argument that Obama acted recklessly, despite his fortunate outcome. He gambled his presidency and to a large degree the standing of the United States in the world on intelligence that he described as circumstantial and on an operation that had what he described as a 55/45 chance of success. He said he worried that the Navy SEALs would find only a “prince from Dubai” instead of the terrorist leader responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: “I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been some significant consequences.”

No shit. So it’s no wonder White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan described the decision rather ungrammatically as “what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory." The outcome, one way or the other, fairly or unfairly, would largely define how history would see Obama the man and probably his entire presidency.

The tall black guy in the White House rolled the dice and won. I’m betting that not the least important thing he won is his reelection.

Lucky shot.

Laughter, the best medicine

I wondered how John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would cover the death of Osama bin-Laden because there’s certainly nothing funny about any of this.

Except there is. I should have had more faith. Colbert especially managed to pull off possibly his most hilarious bit ever.

It’s a good thing to gloat; it’s even better to laugh about it. Colbert’s schoolboy glee was pitch perfect.

If you missed the episode, go to Colbert Nation Online and navigate to the May 2nd episode. And then you might as well watch May 3rd too, but I came up with the piñata idea first.

Final respects

Some Muslim clerics have objected to bin Laden’s burial at sea, declaring that it did not meet Muslim standards for a proper burial and was an insult to the faith. Actually, a variety of options were considered, and burial at sea was finally considered to be the most appropriate under the circumstances.

I have obtained a secret partial list of other choices that were ultimately rejected. Personally, I think burial at sea was about the nicest thing we could have done with his corpse considering his storied career.

Here then, the top ten possible options to “lug the guts into the neighbour room,” as happened to poor Polonius in Hamlet:

1. Burial at sea.

2. Strap him into a suicide bomber’s vest and blow him up in Times Square.

3. Chipper/shredder ala Fargo.

4. Cut off his head and throw his body by the side of the road. (An al-Qaeda favorite.)

5. Sell him on eBay.

6. Bury him somewhere in Afghanistan, then release a cryptic treasure map. (Pun intended.)

7. Strap him to a cruise missile and shoot him at Qaddafi.

8. Tie him to the back of a truck and drag him around Lower Manhattan.

9. Osama piñata!

and the last appropriately respectful way to lug the guts out,

10. Bury his ass at ground zero.

Of course, all of this would have been more fun if we'd taken him alive, but still: Good times.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, Utah

Cliff dwellings, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

RIP Opal

Real life continues to happen even though we’re on the road. A few weeks ago, Mary got phone calls from various family members telling her that her step mother, Opal, was in the hospital with cancer and had been given only two or three months to live. Opal lived in Phoenix and we weren’t too far away at the time. When we called her step brother Jim, he told us that he thought Opal was failing and might have only a few days.

We dropped all our previous plans and traveled to Phoenix so Mary could be with Opal while she was still alive.

This was always an extremely difficult relationship for Mary; I’ll just say here that Mary experienced many years of verbal and emotional abuse from Opal, continuing even after she left home and after we were married. For many years, Mary has tried to maintain as much distance as possible while still trying to keep at least a cordial relationship, almost entirely for the sake of her father and to keep peace in the family with her brothers and step-brothers and sisters.

All of this made a final goodbye all the more difficult, but by the time we got to the hospital, Opal was no longer conscious, and it was clear that she had at best only a week or so left. Jim wanted us to stay around for the funeral that was to come soon, but we felt that things were too uncertain just to stay in Phoenix, which we don’t like, and wait for a death that would come in its own good time and not before. We ended up traveling to Santa Fe with the idea we could return quickly when it was time.

In fact, Opal lasted about a week longer without ever regaining consciousness, and with a few days’ notice about the funeral, we headed back to Phoenix for Mary’s one last great effort at keeping her other family relationships alive and healthy.

Difficult as it all was, we actually ended up enjoying the reunion, and surprisingly, the funeral itself turned out to be, for me at least, almost fun. Opal, who never believed it was possible to be too lavish, had planned an open-coffin ceremony in a casket that looked a lot like a Lincoln Town Car, not a bad ride to carry her into the afterlife. The pastor from her church turned out to be quite an elderly fellow himself and seemed to mostly lose track of where he was in the eulogy. At one point, he rather fell into an internal theological dispute about whether Opal was greeted in heaven by an angel or by Jesus himself.

First he said it was an angel, but then he said sometimes in a few special cases, Jesus himself actually greeted the Loved One in heaven, though he didn’t seem quite clear on what conditions would trigger the deluxe reception. It wasn’t something you could arrange with the funeral director, but probably you had a better chance on week days when things were otherwise kind of slow in Paradise.

In the end he came down on the side of Jesus. He managed to piece together a few Bible verses suggesting that death was only a passage from this life to the next, though he didn’t always seem sure exactly what his point was.

At least the whole service was blessedly short. After a drive out to the cemetery, the men among the mourners were informed we were going to be the pall bearers, which alarmed me because I’d never born a pall before and I was convinced the mostly old and feeble men in attendance wouldn’t be able to lift the Lincoln and Opal’s earthly remains and make it over to the grave site without tripping.

In the end, though, we were successful, with only a few alarming stumbles, and after a few appropriate words from Pastor, Opal was lowered into the earth for her eternal rest. This final moment made me decidedly claustrophobic, but otherwise, the service had been mostly enjoyable and sometimes amusing.

I doubt Mary saw it all in quite the same way.

We continued on to a fine Italian restaurant where step-brother Jim hosted an excellent buffet, and we all enjoyed spending some light-hearted time together. When we got back to our trailer, Mary was emotionally exhausted but content in having done the right thing and hopeful she could move on with her life now, free of some of the emotional burdens she’s carried all these years.

I wish her the best with that, but we both know that all of us carry stuff for as long as we live, and the best we can do is to try to live well with our stuff. Mary works harder and with more success at that than just about anybody I know, and it’s one of the things I most love and respect about her. Thus, some good comes from bad, and our stuff becomes in part the clay from which we mold our lives, we hope with some success.

Today we stay over one more day in Phoenix to handle the mundane chores of doing laundry, cleaning the trailer, and stocking up on food and supplies. We leave tomorrow for the canyon lands of Southern Utah and point our compass more or less in the direction of Klamath Falls. We might still stay out the final two weeks we had originally planned, or we might make a more deliberate drive straight through to get back to the comforts of life at home.

In any case, there’s a sense that this year’s winter travels are coming to a close. I’m looking forward to getting back on my motorcycle, among other things, and Mary is missing her horse and other good friends.

And weather reports from Klamath Falls suggest it might not be too soon to return. Spring is on its way. Rebirth and all of that.

Bisbee

Bisbee, Arizona is a former mining town turned tourist destination and artists’ colony. As these things go, Bisbee is worth the trip from Tucson for a stay of three or four days.

The town is notable for several things: sitting in a steep valley at about 5,000 feet, it’s especially picturesque. Depending on where we were standing, the small, colorful houses rising up both sides of the canyon reminded us of either Santa Cruz, Ashland, or the town in the Popeye movie.

As a tourist destination, it seems to offer a higher quality of everything normally found in places like this. The restaurants are excellent, galleries offer art of a much higher quality (and price) than usually found in your typical tourist trap, and among the usual antique and curio shops, there are the occasional specialty stores you would expect to find in a large city. I went into Optimo Milliners, for example, to see if I could get my felt fedora cleaned and blocked. The guy was nice about it, but my hat is a piece of crap and I could buy two for what it would cost to have him do triage on it. And there’s a four-month waiting list. So I thought, well maybe I’ll just buy one of his fancy-ass hats, but that would be an even longer wait, during which I could work part time to come up with a down payment. He seems to have a worldwide reputation, and for all I know he makes the Pope's hats, though he specializes in Panamas.



But come to Bisbee for the mine tour, an absolutely fascinating hour and a half underground in a miners’ train. We went down 1,770 feet in a mine that went down8,000 feet underground and has an amazing 2,000 miles of tunnels. Or so the guide said, a former miner with a terrific dry sense of humor and a bucketful of facts, some of which I took with a grain of salt, even though The Copper Queen was not a salt mine.


The day shift reports for work

By about 1955, they figured out it was cheaper and easier just to eat the mountain and sort out the rocks later, so there’s one spectacular hole in the ground. When the mine reached the edge of the next town over, it just kept going. Don’t follow your GPS to any addresses in Warren.

This was a little bit of a pilgrimage for Mary since her father was born and raised here. He graduated from Bisbee high in about 1935 when it really was a rough and tumble mining town. We went to the museum and looked through some old records. Mary had thought her grandfather was a mining engineer, but turns out he was “Chief Clerk” for Phelps Dodge. We don’t know quite what that means but it sounds important.

Still, Mary doesn’t appear to be the rightful heir to anything here in Bisbee, so we’re moving on tomorrow, despite the many interesting things to see we never got to.

Maybe next year.

Scared north

We’re camping again at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one of our favorite Southwest destinations. At six bucks a night and a three-week limit, it’s also a real bargain and a good way to save money compared to the $35 or $40 fees at state parks and private campgrounds. There are a lot of loyal visitors. The people across from us—possibly the nicest old couple you’ll ever meet—have been coming here for seventeen years.

Still, last year the campground was only half full, about eighty campers and tents on any given day. This year, the number is half that. What’s going on?

Certainly part of the blame has to rest with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona legislature, which have driven away millions of measurable dollars in convention business and probably even more in winter tourism. Not only have they alienated Hispanics, they’ve outraged lots of just-folks who have a low tolerance for intolerance.

But even more than any moral backlash, there must have been considerable harm done by just the rhetoric, highly exaggerated, about how dangerous the border region is. Organ Pipe borders Mexico, and the campground is a scant four miles north of the crossing at Sonoyta. The Fence is clearly visible during the daytime, and the lights of the small town are clear at night.

Brewer has repeatedly fixed on the murder of one borderline cattleman, even though it hasn’t been proven he was killed by illegals. But let’s give her that one. She also stated, though later amended, that there are thousands of headless corpses out in the desert.

Those headless corpses are in Mexico! What’s to worry!

Still, I can see how visitors who thought this might be a nice place to stay for two or three weeks might feel a little uncomfortable and decide to move on. The NatGeo program called Border Wars doesn’t exaggerate by much.

Here’s a sample:

The Border Patrol station in Ajo, about thirty miles north, has grown by a factor of ten in the last few years. They’re currently constructing an even-larger facility that looks about the size of a small prison, and I’m sure that’s partly what it will be.

Border Patrol SUVs are ubiquitous on the highways, sometimes feeling like about one in every three or four vehicles. Many of them pull trailers carrying quads for patrolling out in the desert.

There’s a Border Patrol checkpoint about ten miles north of the park. We pass through with just a few standard questions, but other vehicles get a careful search. It’s common to see vehicles parked on the shoulder before and after the checkpoint, and certainly some of them are picking up and dropping off immigrants and smugglers as they get around the checkpoint on foot.

It’s also common to see Border Patrol SUVs right in the campground, the agents parked and looking out over the desert to the south, slowly patrolling, or driving through fast. This is especially common at night when they also shine spotlights into the desert. Some of them carry tracker dogs.

Helicopters are routine, and a few nights ago one of them worked the desert no more than a mile from camp for over an hour, flying back and forth with dual spot lights playing over the ground. I could also see lights from SUVs out there.

Most eerie, just north of the park I watched one night last year as planes dropped parachute flares which cast a bright yellow-orange light creating an unnatural daylight. And not just one plane, but at least three. I watched almost hypnotized for the whole evening, one flare after another so that there were usually three or four in the sky at one time. This brought back a strong memory from Viet Nam—not to be confused with a flashback—because it was routine there, too, for planes to drop flares outside of the base where I was stationed, especially during the occasional rocket or mortar attack, the biggest difference being the lack here of .50 caliber machine guns firing tracers at the ground. It made a sound not like gunfire but more like the steady staccato buzz of an arc welder, and we called it pissing fire.

At least the runners don’t have that to worry about.

With the help of all the electronic devices which include conventional radar, noise and motion detectors, regular and infrared cameras and probably some secret technologies we don’t even know about, it’s common for agents to arrest groups as large as fifty, though smaller numbers are more common.

And still they estimate four to six get through for every one who is caught. Where they get this number I have no idea. The park superintendent estimates an amazing 1,200 runners cross the park every night. Again, I have no idea how they arrive at such numbers, but eighty percent of the park is closed to the public and even to park employees. Only the campground and a few close-in trails are open.

Still, we love it here and feel completely comfortable and safe. There are some magnificent hikes and drives still open, and just walking the dogs around the campground and looking at the desert and mountains is a pleasure. Actually, I’d rather like to see some runners, which is common, just like I like to see coyotes or javelina.

We didn’t bring passports because we have no plans to cross into Mexico itself, although we’ve talked to plenty of people who have and who say that other than the border towns, Mexico is still safe for tourists. Maybe so, maybe not, but tomorrow begins spring break for Arizona college students, and despite the alarmist pronouncements from their elected officials, tens of thousands will cross the border here and drive down to Puerto Penasco.

Out here in the middle of the Sonora Desert, the Pacific Ocean is only seventy miles away. Maybe next year.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

As expected, the new Tea Party Republicans are going after federal spending with a meat cleaver, demanding $61 billion in budget cuts during the current fiscal year, which ends September 30th, and refusing to pass any budget for more than two weeks that doesn’t meet their demands. Mary and I were hours away from getting thrown out of Organ Pipe National Monument, where we’re currently camped and driving up the national debt with our six-dollar a night Senior Pass camping fee, which doesn’t even cover the cost of a howling coyote. Luckily, the two-week budget extension passed, which will cover our time here. After that, we might be reduced to parking in Wal-Mart parking lots again.

But good for the Tea Partiers. It’s what they promised and it’s what they should try to deliver to the voters who elected them. Voters are rightly concerned about the deficit and the reach and role of the federal government, so this is the debate we should have. But before we start talking about how to reduce the deficit and national debt, we should take a look at what did and did not get us into this mess to begin with:

First of all, virtually all of the programs targeted by the Tea Partiers have nothing to do with the current deficit. Public broadcasting did not cause the deficit. If it did, the fifty dollars a year I send to public television would leave me bankrupt. Proportionally, it’s a lot more than what the Feds spend.

Foreign aid did not cause the deficit. We spend less than one percent of the budget on foreign aid, and we rank 22nd in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. This makes us about the cheapest country in the world when it comes to dropping a dime in a beggar’s cup. Maybe a nickel, but really, get a job.

Aid to the poor for heating assistance did not cause the deficit. I allow my power company to round up my monthly bill to the next dollar in a program to provide assistance to those at risk of freezing in the dark, and those few cents are a much bigger part of my total budget than the federal program is of its total budget. Still, I totally don’t feel it at the end of the month.

The list goes on. Tea Party cuts address only twenty-five percent of the national budget—discretionary spending outside of the military—and focus their wrath on a few programs they’ve always hated, like research on climate change, the EPA, and virtually every program of assistance for the poor.

Curiously, they would also reduce border security, which will not be a big hit here in Arizona. I really don’t get that one except that it shows they truly mean business. But then, so do the Mexican cartels.

Their targeted cuts would do the most harm to the most vulnerable and, equally importantly, they would do little or nothing to reduce national debt in the long run.
It seems obvious that if we’re going to look at reducing the deficit, we need to look first at what caused it. There are three things:

First, a massive tax cut under President Bush that concentrated its largess in the upper and extreme-upper income levels: Not that we in the middle class didn’t get a nice piece of pie out of the deal, but really, nothing that in any way changed our quality of life. More like an unexpected Christmas present, appreciated but soon forgotten. A toaster, maybe, or new pajamas.

Any long-term economic benefit from these cuts failed to materialize. There was, for example, no measurable uptick in employment. Not even billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet wanted the money. “Really, we have enough already,” they said, but Congress and President Bush made them take more anyway. These silly rich people don’t even understand capitalism.

Second, the war in Afghanistan: Almost all Americans including me supported the president in the invasion of Afghanistan to annihilate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, once we had heard of the Taliban and what a bunch of medieval creeps they are. Ten years later, we’re still in the fight. These fighters are tougher than we thought. We should have asked the Russians.

And third,

The war in Iraq: A majority of Americans, not including me, supported the invasion, but then a majority also believed it was approved by the United Nations. Not to mention the whole WMD thing, but let’s not get bogged down in all that.

The really amazing thing about the Bush budget was that all of the expenditures for our two wars were off the books. They never showed as part of the annual budget. It would be like Mary and me saying all of our spending on horses, motorcycles was not included in our household budget. Things would feel pretty, pretty good until we got a note from the bank that we were overdrawn and now had a fifty dollar fine in addition to our empty savings account which used to have $127 dollars in it. This could cause us to seriously look at our spending on Brussels sprouts.

Maybe Obama’s recovery spending added to the deficit and maybe it didn’t. It saved a ton of jobs and almost certainly kept us out of a genuine depression. Lots of economists think he should have spent more, but I’m no economist, and neither are any of the Tea Partiers. At any rate, that spending is quickly phasing out and we’re even being paid back a lot of it from the banks and GM.

So if the tea party boys and girls want to seriously chop away at the deficit, they should go after the programs that caused it in the first place and that could make a significant difference in reducing it: bring the troops home from the longest wars in American history and end the Bush-era tax cuts, or at least reduce them at the highest income levels (exactly what Obama and congressional Democrats proposed for the current budget, but it was promptly shot down by the Republicans.)

In the meantime, I have to give Mary the bad news about the Brussels sprouts.

An island of sanity, sort of

No sooner had I finished writing my somewhat-critical overview of Arizona politics than I came across the headlines of the local Tucson paper: “Pima County wants to secede from state.” Pima County being Tucson and much of Southern Arizona, which is generally considered more liberal than Phoenix and the rest of the state.

I use the word “liberal” guardedly.

This is not something that will ever happen, but the effort is serious, with a number of local representatives and county officials saying they just can’t take it anymore. Actually, one said exactly that: “we can’t take it anymore.”

Politically, such a move is possible but in practical terms, it’s impossible. Still, it’s a good sign of sorts that significant numbers of people in Arizona agree with the rest of the country that Arizona has mostly lost its mind.

Arizona Loco

If you’ve been following the House Republican Follies since the Tea Party takeover, you might be forgiven for thinking that Washington has become the new rabid-bat-crazy center of the political universe, but you’d be wrong. With so much competition coming from the federal level, Arizona has decided to ramp up its claims to being not yet ready for democracy with a flood of new legislation, all of which is aimed at anything but its hopelessly out-of-balance budget. Arizona legislators have apparently decided if they ignore it, the budget deficit will go away—or maybe they could just bury it in the Grand Canyon—but in the meantime, there are a lot of issues more important than a silly operating budget, such as:

In light of its recent mass-murder tragedy, it’s time to do something about Arizona’s ultra-liberal gun laws; we need to make them even more liberal, so one proposal, for example, would allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus. I wish I could have carried a gun when I was a faculty member because it would have cut short a lot of student griping about grades.

And if Arizona students or faculty stop in for a drink after a tough day in the classroom, they can also take their guns into the bar with them, as long as they are not legally intoxicated. In which case I don’t know what. I wouldn’t want to be the bar tender who had to tell someone he was now legally intoxicated and had to turn over any guns he might be carrying. Here in Arizona that might be considered a completely unreasonable request. But could you call me a cab?

Also, Arizona will always resist federal efforts to curtail their gun rights, so they’ve passed a resolution not to comply with new ATF regulations that would require gun dealers to report purchase of more than two assault weapons in a given week. Lots of legitimate gun owners might want to purchase assault weapons for all their friends and family at Christmas. They make great stocking stuffers.

ATF is upset because thousands of assault weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities in their war on drug cartels turn out to have been sold in US border states, with some buyers making purchases in the hundreds. Arizona, with full support from the NRA, says it won’t comply because such reporting would be burdensome on gun dealers.

But what about illegal aliens? It’s been literally a couple of months since Arizona did something to crack down on illegals, so now a new law says that any illegal alien stopped for any traffic violation at all will serve one month in jail for illegally driving in Arizona. Also, they lose their car, confiscated and sold to help reduce the budget deficit. (See, I was wrong about the lack of concern over the budget deficit.) And only then do they get sent back to Mexico.

I assume all illegals are sent to Mexico, even if they’re from, say, Iceland. Let the Mexicans sort it out.

More on illegal aliens: schools are now responsible to check the legal status of suspicious students, such as students who speak Spanish or English with a Spanish accent or have skin darker than Jimmie Smits. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that schools cannot deny an education to any students based on citizenship, Arizona assures us that this law is only intended as record keeping. Although school administrators who don’t report suspicious students to Immigration are committing a crime. Maybe they could lose their car.

Speaking of varmints, a new law now allows Arizonans to shoot varmints at night within city limits, because, of course, most varmints only come out at night so you can’t shoot them during the day. Varmints include skunks, jack rabbits, coyotes and raccoons and the like, although since coyotes are the single-best population control for jack rabbits, it’s unclear if you can shoot a coyote while it’s actually eating another varmint. But safety is always the first concern, so you can’t shoot varmints within ¼ mile of a residence. Which strikes me as a little overly restrictive because most people bring their kids in before dark anyway, so if it’s moving around the neighborhood after dark, it’s probably a varmint.

How about those darn abortions? If a woman wants an abortion for reasons of genocide, the doctor must refuse or go to jail without collecting his two-hundred dollars. Genocide by abortion would include, for example, having an abortion because you don’t like your embryo’s race or gender. So doctors I guess would have to ask “What race would your baby be if it actually became a baby?” and then if the woman said maybe “Chinese,” the doctor would have to say “And how do you feel about that?” and if the woman gave the wrong answer the doctor would have to tell her she would have to have the baby after all and maybe try to adopt it out to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But if she said she actually liked the Chinese, which is how she got pregnant in the first place, but still wanted the abortion, then that would be okay.

Speaking of babies, Arizona has repealed birth-right citizenship by declaring that babies born on American soil are no longer automatically American citizens, but only in Arizona I guess because the Constitution still confers birthright citizenship on anyone born on American soil, although lots of people don’t like that. Thus, you might be an American citizen in Texas, for example, but not in Arizona. Then, if you got caught speeding in Arizona, they could put you in jail and sell your car to lower the deficit and send you back to Mexico, even if you’re from Texas.

You can see how this would be a good deal for Arizona. But still, there are all these burdensome federal laws and regulations, so Arizona has now declared that it no longer has to abide by any federal dictates it finds to be unconstitutional. Is it just me, or does this amount to about ninety percent secession from the union?

Which brings me back to an idea I first expressed here some time ago, which is that states should be legally allowed to secede. At first I thought we could revisit the whole civil war thing, but now I can see it should be on a state-by-state basis. Where in the Constitution does is say you can’t decide you don’t want to be a state anymore? After two hundred years you still can't change your mind? This is like the worst ever cell phone plan. No one would stand for it.

Seriously, I think we’d all be better off if a few states like Arizona and Texas and Alaska could just drop out. Then all the tea partiers who don’t like it here any more could move to one of the new sovereign republics and the rest of us could get serious about everything else again.

Stupid idea? Let’s float it in the Arizona legislature.

Tucson Blues

Friday night, I had my second opportunity to see and hear Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in concert. I had high expectations and wasn’t disappointed.

Marsalis has won more awards, from Grammies to a Pulitzer Prize, than probably any other jazz musician living or dead, with the possible exception of Ellington. Opinion is divided among aficionados, though, about whether he warrants all the honors. I’ll just say that while he’s not my favorite musician, composer, or band leader, I’d never miss a chance to see him in a live performance. And the JLCO is comprised of fifteen of the finest musicians in jazz today, and together they put on a stunning performance of technical virtuosity and improvisational brilliance that leaves me dazzled and drained by the end of an evening.

The first time I saw them about two years ago, they performed a mix of jazz standards and a few compositions by different band members, but Friday night they only performed eight movements of Marsalis’ twelve-movement suite Vitoria, based on his experiences playing with various Basque musicians in Northern Spain. A Marsalis composition is generally very complex rhythmically and wickedly difficult to play, all the more impressive because he uses a lot of high-speed unison passages within his sections. I bought the CD set and have given it one listen. As always, a recording is a disappointment after a live performance, but I’ll give this one several chances. There are certainly lots of brilliant solos, even if the overall emotional effect can’t equal a live concert. And good CDs tend to grow on me, as they should.

Couple of interesting things: I saw the concert at the U of A concert hall in Tucson, where we’re camped in the desert a few miles out of town for all of February. We wanted to include a bit of an urban experience in our travels this year, and though a nice enough small city, so far Tucson hasn’t quite delivered on expectations. It’s no Portland (which is no San Francisco, which is no New York), but then Arizona is Arizona, and politically and culturally, it’s probably worse than you think.

The concert sold out, but I was surprised at the general age of the audience, which in and of itself constituted a drain on our already weakened Social Security System. Other jazz concerts I’ve been to have had a much more diverse audience. What’s wrong with the U of A student body? With small exceptions, this seems a decidedly less-than-hip college town. Basketball is big, though.

Another interesting note: I had dinner before the concert just outside the university main gate, and when I went outside onto the sidewalk, I was amazed to hear a very fine performance of Tuvan throat singing by two street musicians: a singer, also playing a guitar, accompanied by a young woman on cello. Talk about harmonic possibilities.

I had to leave for the concert but waited for them to finish a song so I could tell them how delighted I was to stumble on such an extraordinary thing in the streets of Tucson. I also bought their CD, which is nothing like I expected: either a very authentic folk music with which I am completely unfamiliar, or something very avant garde. Or both.

If you know even less about throat singing than I do, you can check out the entry on Wikipedia. Better yet, get a hold of the documentary film Genghis Blues about blind American blues singer Paul Pena, who discovered throat singing on a short wave radio and learned he had a knack for it. The film documents Pena’s trip to Southern Siberia to meet some of the native musicians and the warm welcome he received there. I got it from Netflix some time ago.

Finally: A total mix of weather here in Tucson in February: two nights in a row it got down to 17 degrees, and I thought we’d never left home.

Wind and rain. But mostly sunny and warm and wonderful on my old bones.

No snow here, but in the mountains around town a little.

Sixty-three

Sometime this week (I’m not sure what day this is), I celebrate my 63rd birthday. I don’t know what life stage this puts me in. We can quickly rule out young and old. I am not sixty-three-years young.

I am also not old. Petroglyphs are old. Coprolites are old. Catfish can live to be one-hundred.

I am, though, no longer middle-aged. I haven’t been middle-aged for some time now, which is good because I never liked middle-age.

This leaves a short list of euphemisms such as “senior,” which I reject, and active-retired, which isn’t too bad. In the end, though, I prefer to just think of myself as sixty–three and not worry about a general category. I’m sixty-three, which is a lot older than I ever expected to live to and which seemed ancient when I was only middle-aged. I think of sixty-three as the age at which, no matter what the question, the answer is always, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Physically, it’s not a great age to be but it could be a lot worse. Wait for sixty-four.

For the last few weeks, Mary has been asking me what I want for my birthday. I try to be spontaneous and genuine in my answers.

-A tommy gun.

I get the stare.

Seriously. Every real man wants a tommy gun. I’m not talking about some girly assault weapon, probably a 9mm that folds up to fit in your pocket and which here in Arizona is more popular than rattlesnake anti-venom. I’m thinking more of one of those fine old firearms gangsters used to shoot at The Untouchables, .45 caliber fully automatic lettuce shredders you can fire in extended bursts and yell manly things like, “Eat lead, Ness!”

It’s clear I’m not getting a tommy gun, so I give it a few more days thought, and when Mary asks again, I say, “a Jeep.” Mary recently invented the word “jeeping” to describe the off-road fun lots of people have out here in the desert. I may not approve of such activities but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want one for myself. We could jeep around together. Also, with a second tow vehicle I could bring down a motorcycle, which I’ve been missing. Lots of guys find ways to bring down a motorcycle for the winter, but our configuration of truck with a canopy and a travel trailer won’t allow it.

I can see right away that I’m not getting a Jeep either.

Finally we settle on a pretty good present, above the arbitrary and capricious limit of one-hundred dollars that Mary originally set, but less than a year in Mexico studying Spanish, which was my third wish: we agreed on a three-day rental of a Gold Wing. Last year I rented a big Harley tourer. Since I can’t have my own bike here, I decided each year I could rent some other bike I never would buy but which I’d like to have a chance to take out once before age-related vertigo makes it impossible to ride and I have to switch to a trike.

This year, it’s going to be a Gold Wing, the Honda luxo-tourer which weighs in at over eight-hundred pounds and is so comfortable it’s reputed to be better than a massage therapist. I noticed that if you rent for two days they throw in the third day free, which should allow me to cross the country and return without ever getting off except to pee. (See above.) Mary said that sounded like a pretty good present, the extra day which becomes two, and I said I thought so, too. About $150.

So sometime next week, right around my birthday, we’re moving down to Tucson where we’re going to stay for a full month in a funky little RV park we found last year, and I’ll call around and see what color Gold Wing I can find to rent. I’m thinking red like the Harley so I can make a fair comparison.

I’ll need something fun to cheer me up, because this sixty-three thing is kind of depressing me. I’m determined to age gracefully, but I don’t have to like it.

Anza-Borrego

For the most part so far, our trip has been distinguished by bad weather, or rather, probably normal weather which has often been less than pleasant. We left Klamath Falls in bitter cold and with a foot or so of standing snow on the ground. We had to have a tractor tow our truck and trailer out onto bare gravel so we could even get under way.

We had heavy rain our first two nights at Shasta Dam. When we got to Mount Madonna County Park in the redwoods between Gilroy and Watsonville it was raining again and wet and densely foggy when it wasn’t raining. In fact, so much water was incessantly dripping off the trees.

After two days of driving, we finally arrived at Anza Borrego Desert State Park in the California desert east of San Diego. It was a beautiful desert after noon as we were setting up, but in the late after noon, a wind came up that hit us without warning as if we’d stepped in front of a train. The wind lasted three days, strong enough rock the trailer and make it difficult to open and close the door. The noise was intense, and after hours and days of it, it felt like the trailer was being ripped apart.

In fact, only minor damage was done. I’d estimate the wind at about forty miles per hour, not that much in the comfort of your home, but in the trailer we began to feel we were adrift in a small boat. And three days of it. It left us ragged, right up to the moment just before bed last night when it suddenly stopped like a switch had been thrown. This morning I was up at dawn for the usual spectacular desert sunrise, and at the moment, I’m outside with the laptop and thinking it’s time to go back in for a few minutes to make a second cup of coffee.


Despite the initial difficult weather, we’re happy to be back on the road. We’re camping on private land about five miles outside of Borrego Springs, surrounded by mountains on three sides. There are about a dozen RVs out here, spread out over maybe a square mile. Our closest neighbor is over a hundred yards away, a nice guy from Idaho staying by himself in a small older trailer. Behind him sits Larry in his truck. Larry is one of the odd fellows you expect to meet in the desert. After him sitting up there for two days, never leaving the cab that I had noticed, I went up and introduced myself. Larry lost his mother and the apartment they shared about eight months ago, and he’s been living on the road since then, sleeping in the cab of his truck since he doesn’t even have a canopy on it. He talked for some time and twice mentioned suicide—in rather graphic detail involving a .45 caliber pistol—but I told him it would be a better idea to get a canopy so he’d have a more comfortable place to sleep and see how he feels then.

I’m worried about the guy but there’s nothing I can do for him.

We’re getting to know the wildlife. We were sitting outside our first afternoon here and had to lift our feet up to let a tarantula walk by. Brazen coyotes call to each other and hunt kangaroo rats just a few yards from our trailer. We have to be careful with our dogs, small dogs being a coyote’s favorite food. Rats are gamey, and rabbits are tough and stringy, and not that easy to catch.



If you look on Google Earth, you can see us here: N33.17.915; W116.17.011. Or not. I’m not sure how often the photos are updated and it’s been cloudy, but that’s where we are, and you should be able to get a feel for the terrain and see some widely scattered trailers, ours possibly being one of them.