The St. Albans Raid

Since I've lived in the Northwestern Vermont, I've heard references to and seen signs for the St. Albans Raid. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I assumed it was something that happened related to the War of 1812 or something more obscure. I did not realize until recently that it was an American Civil War event. When I think of Civil War battles, I don't think of Vermont; I think of Pennsylvania or Virginia. Vermont is too far north yet, the St. Albans Raid was a American Civil War event, not so much a battle, unlike any other.

Bennet Young was a Confederate soldier who escaped to Canada. He made his way back to the Confederacy by way of Nova Scotia and Bermuda. He met with Confederate Generals with his idea to attack Northern cities. St. Albans, Vermont was a railroad town about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. At the time St. Albans had around 4,000 residents, now it has over 6,000. The railroad in town, the Vermont and Canada Railroad, was owned by the governor at the time, J. Gregory Smith.  The town had three banks. The idea was to attack the city, rob the banks and then burn it to the ground. The intent was to help the Confederacy with their financial problems and divert the North's attention to protect their cities from surprise attacks. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant and given a group of 21 cavalrymen to return to Canada with to organize the raid.

They arrived in St. Albans via train from Montreal in cells of 2 or 3 men on October 10th to the 19th of 1864 with the cover story that they were on a sporting vacation and took rooms in local hotels. On the morning of October  19th, Young sat in the hallway of the American House awaiting, reading his Bible as the soldiers gathered. He was posing as a preacher. At 3pm, they stood on separate street corners which is now Main Street and started yelling something about taking the city for the Confederacy. The townsfolk quickly understood that this wasn't a joke when their three banks started getting rob simultaneously while many of them were held at gun point in Taylor Park for their horses.

Obviously, the town was never burned to the ground. The damp rainy day prevent them from lighting their bottles of Greek fire. One of these buildings is still a bank (TD Bank), another holds an art gallery now and the other building no longer stands, the local Toyota dealer is there now. One town person was killed and another wounded as they got out of town heading north with $208,000.00. The only building that was destroyed was a shed. As they headed out of town, they diverted their trip north to go northeast and then east. They headed toward a town called Sheldon because it also had a bank, but the bank was closed. They set fire to a bridge that was put out immediately by the local preacher. The bridge survived for another 100 years. They stole a horse while in town from the house in the picture below. In the upstairs bedroom lie a Yankee veteran who was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia earlier that year. Ironically, he was the nephew of Reverend Reuel Keith, who married Robert E. Lee and his bride, Mary.

Reverend Keith is buried next door behind the Presbyterian church in downtown Sheldon. 

This was the time of the telegraph. So word got out of their approaching the border so they split up as they reached Enosburg, a larger town than Sheldon. The raiders made it into Canada where they were arrested but eventually freed. Only $88,000.00 were recovered. Local legend is that one of the local farmers found the remainder in a hole in the ground and built a beautiful brick house that still stands. 

At the time, the raid was considered a success. Yankee General Philip Sheridan was ripping through the Shenandoah Valley so any victory helped the spirits of the Confederacy. The raid did scare many of the American towns on the border of Canada thinking they were next. Canadians at the time were still British subjects and were afraid to be pulled into the war. The raid turned popular opinion against the Confederacy.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls and the Magical Negroes

If you ever get the impression that American society is not white-male-centric, you don't have to go very far to change your mind back. Just watch a movie.  When I look at Wikipedia's list of top grossing films of all time very few of them have a female lead and I can't find one with a non-white lead.  I guess you can't blame Hollywood if they are marketing their films to their audience ... but do white guys watch more movies than other demographics?  I don't know, really.

It is not just who the lead of the film is but the tone of the films. The story arcs of most American films revolve around white people. An all too common trope is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  This term was created by the film critic Nathan Rabin back in 2005 after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, but the term can apply to films much earlier. It refers to a stock female character in a film that influences the main character (a white male) and is usually his romantic interests. She is quirky, attractive and girlish. A majority of the mainstream films made in America have a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Why create something new if an old trope will suffice? Most people won't notice that they are watching the same old thing. We have Barbara Streisand in What's Up Doc?, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Carrie Fisher and Natalie Portman in the Star Wars flicks, Natalie Portman in Garden State and to a lesser extent Beautiful Girls, Emily Watson in Punch Drunk Love, Kate Hudson and Meg Ryan in pretty much everything they have ever been.  They have no growth, very little depth and merely revolve around the protagonist like a satellite, not doing much but influencing the tides.

Things are changing I hear. Of the 40 movies released this summer by major studios, 17 of them had women leads. This is less than half but higher than most years. But is this really an improvement?  The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media did a study of 122 recent family films, of 5,554 speaking roles only 29.2% were female. This is the same ratio as 1946. Of these 40, there was only one female director. Perhaps that is where the studio needs to start to fix this problem. This is a problem!

A lesser used trope is the Magical Negro or as Spike Lee called it the Super Duper Magical Negro. The Magical Negro doesn't always have magical powers but when they do, they help out white people. Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance appears on golf courses and helps white men with their golf game or Michael Clarke Duncan's character in The Green Mile is a magical prisoner on death row that uses his magic to help the white guards. I am not making this shit up. I don't think there is a single black person in any Stephen King book that doesn't exist to help white people. Mother Abagail in The Stand (the magical old black lady), Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers' character) in The Shining and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman's character) in The Shawshank Redemption are example of this.

I want to say that this trend can't continue, but since woman are a majority perhaps this is just naive. According to the Hollywood reporter, 54% of film goers this years were Caucasian while making up 60% of the population. White movie-goers decreased while Hispanic and black movie-goers increased. Will we get more Forrest Whitaker and Steve McQueen (the director) in the years to come? I hope so because I love those guys. This year's Best Movie Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave was a great film. But please note, it is not on the list of the top grossing films. Most Americans want an escape at the movie theater, not introspection. We'll save that for our Netflix queue. I watched it on the plane. No one wants a downer when you drop $8.00 at the box office.

The First of the World Wars

This year marks the 100th year anniversary of the start of World War I, but we could easily call the war between France and Britain in the 18th century (1754 to 1763) a World War. Here in America and in English speaking Canada, we refer to it as the French and Indian War.  It spanned most of the continents of the world: Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. The belligerents were mainly France and England but their empires spanned much of the globe at the time. In French Canada they call it La Guerre de la Conquête (the War of Conquest). The French name has a lot of meaning for them in that it marks when France was removed from the North American mainland and French Canada (New France) was taken over by the British. We now know this land as Quebec just a few miles north of me. They still grapple with maintaining their French identity in an English nation.

Europeans call this war, The Seven Year War, which is odd because it lasted nine years. The name Nine Year War was already taken, The seven years refers to the most active years of the war, '56 through '63. The Swedes and Prussians referred to it as the Pomeranian War which describes the region that they were fighting over. This theatre ended in a stalemate. In India it is referred to as The Third Carnatic War which was basically French and British troops battling over the India. Britain's victory left them as the dominant colonial power on the Indian sub-continent.

This all started on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio when a 22 year old Colonel in the British Army, named George Washington, left Fort Pitt (aka Pittsburgh) to inform some French settlers that they were encroaching on British land.  The French refused and continued to build Fort Duquesne. Washington returned with an army to remove them and war began. The British were allied with the Iroquois Confederacy (which was huge) while the French were allied with the Abenaki, the Algonquin and the Shawnee among many other native people that I never heard of.

France cared more about gains in Europe and maintaining possessions in the Caribbean. Canada was a money loser for France and didn't care if they lost it that much. The sugar crop from the Caribbean Islands were too important to their economy. While Britain decided to concentrate on North America. By 1759, Britain controlled Quebec and by 1760 Montreal surrendered.  Britain attacked many of the places that were vital to French economy (the slave, sugar and gum trade) in Senegal, Martinique and the Caribbean. In the Treaty of Paris, Louisiana goes to Spain and Canada goes to Britain while France ends up keeping their major Caribbean Islands.

It was this war that put Britain in debt.  If not for the huge war debt accumulated during this war, American independence may not have ever happened just a few years later. Britain raised taxes on the colonies to pay off the debt sand rebellion ensued in responses to over-taxation. The American Revolution may have lasted longer if Britain could afford it and the US would never exist.  George Washington started the war that indirectly lead to our country being created. He really is the father of our country.

The Strangers I Have Come To Hate

I walk along the road in front of my house and I see the same trash on every walk: Budweiser beer cans, cigarette butts and disbursed lottery tickets. I hate these people who can't keep their trash in their cars. Okay, maybe hate is too strong of a word.  Not sure why people don't think they have to keep their own trash in their own cars. I have a social worker / minister friend who is very analytical. She would say that they are not invested in their society. Of course, I take the other route. I just think they are dickheads. A few weeks ago, I went kayaking in St. Albans VT in a lovely alcove of Lake Champlain. This is one of the few places in New England that you will see a Northern map turtle. They are all over the place.  You wouldn't know that there was a patch of pristine wilderness hidden away from the huge pile of trash that lie at the entrance of the boat launch. I almost didn't put the boat in because of how disgusting the launch was. People were fishing there and other boaters were going about their business ... no one was picking up the trash. Maybe hate isn't too strong of a word. I picked up what I could. I don't think I will ever understand how someone can go fishing somewhere but not be interested in the long term health of where they fish. Are they not invested or do they just not connect the dots? Do they think that someone else will pick it up?  I am not sure, but I think it has more do with people not seeing how their actions affect the rest of the world. Dots not connecting or synapses not firing.

Several years ago, my wife and I had to make the decision on whether to have children or not. It was a complicated decision with many factors. I mentioned in an earlier post about the environment being a factor, but that was a minor factor. The biggest factor was my wallet. Both my wife and I spent a good part of our lives being poor. For me, it was my 20's, when I lived in Boston, that I was flat broke. I didn't want to revisit that era in my life. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I became financially stable. Having kids would have brought me right back there. One of the other minor factors is that we really didn't like the world we would be bringing a child into. People's priorities seem so wrong. If I had a child, I think I would be unbearable, especially about the environment. I don't know why everyone that has a child isn't an environmentalist. What kind of world are we leaving them? How can I think that we are going to resolve this when I can't even expect a fisherman to clean up the shoreline where they fish? The fishermen that day are lucky I didn't have any progeny, I think I would have yelled at them. The world should be grateful ... I have dogs instead.

Three of the four dogs that I have had could be considered rescues. I don't know who owned my dog Rex before we did. I am glad I don't know them. It has been two years since he has passed and I still get very sad when I think of him. The act of missing him is a grab bag of emotions. I laugh a little, I cry a little and occasionally I get angry. When we got him from the Humane Society, he was damage goods. He was six months old and had a lot of fear aggression. When he got afraid, he got aggressive. He bit two people that I know of, one of my neighbors and an incompetent dog sitter. We noticed early with him that if you raised your hand too fast, he'd duck thinking we were going to hit him. We don't know the details to how he got that way. I know nothing about the strangers that had him before us. They are strangers to me, but I hate them. I have no problem using that word. They are the scum of the earth, the wrong kind of people, the bane of humanity, the dregs of mankind, the unclean masses, the riffraff, rubbish and vermin. At this point I have thank Thesaurus.com for actually have an entry for Scum of the Earth.

I still have my German Shepherd, Cokie. We got her at six weeks old back in 2002. She is getting quite old now and has difficulty walking. I have to carry her down the stairs a few times a day for her bathroom breaks. When we got her she was only a few pounds, half of her body weight was worms. The dog that we got free from an ad in the paper cost us a fortune at her first vet appointment. We found her at a trailer park in Crowne Point, NY. The people who had her said no one wanted her because she was a runt. She was living outside about to be put down. She might be the best dog I ever had. She is the only dog we've had since she was a puppy and our best behaved dog, so I think we've done well by her.

Stray and neglected dogs are the unfortunate residue of irresponsible humans. After my lab Max passed away a few months ago, we realized our house was very quiet. Too quiet. We went from having three dogs to having one, in about a year. The two dogs that passed were the loud ones. The one remaining was the quiet well behaved dog that is now so lame and old that she doesn't leave her bed all day long.  We need more dogs, but we could not handle a puppy just yet because Cokie is just not up for that amount of energy just yet.  We joined a fostering group for dogs in transition. These dogs are rescued from bad situations and need a place to stay while a permanent owner can be found.  So far we have fostered one dog, named Tammy, a black lab from the Carolinas. Apparently, she was bred by a irresponsible breeder for hunting. After they determine which pups will be good hunting dogs, they dispose of the rest of the litter. She was left somewhere out in the woods to fend for herself. She was found and brought to the rescue facility. This was the most screwed up dog I've ever met. She was afraid of doorways, wouldn't walk on a leash and would pee when I picked her up. When I brought her outside in my fenced-in yard, she would hide under the porch all day. Luckily, a wonderful family in southern Vermont adopted her and I only had her in my home for a few weeks. The family that adopted her had three old labs and had just lost two of them due to cancer. Their one remaining dog would not eat because he was lonely. When Tammy came to live with them, he started eating and I hear they are best of friends now and she is walking on a leash.

Sometimes people adopt dogs and don't realize how much work they are going to be. But instead of finding a good home for them or bring them to a shelter, they just let them go. Most Vermont shelters are non-kill so you can drop a dog off without it being a death sentence.  Our latest dog, Hazel (she's a keeper) was caught after six weeks of wandering around a town here in Northern VT. Obviously, someone didn't want her and didn't do a good job of finding her a new home. The people in this town tried hard to catch her and a few people tried to kill her, I hear, with poison traps. She is an awesome dog with one obvious problem. She has major separation anxiety. She just loses it when we leave her alone. We are working on the problem with her. In the three weeks that we've had her she has destroyed two screens, a metal crate and has ruined part of our fence. I got home one day and she was waiting for me outside the fence. We've been able to leave the home once, so far, without incident. Perhaps she is figuring out that we are coming back.

In his novel, Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins writes that "There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.” I guess I am one of those people who aren't smart enough to know better because I think there are two types of people in the world: those that cause most of the problems and those who are, at least, working on the solutions. I like to think I am in the latter.  Do I seem self righteous, here? Sure, I am self-righteous and if you are one of those douche bags who is being so casual about the lives of these beautiful animals, you really need to know, I am better than you. You are the strangers that I hate and I don't think that is too strong of a word. I think it the perfect word to describe how I feel about you.

The Cop Show Formula

I can't imagine a television show based on my workday. It would be very boring, no drama, just typing and an occasional shot of me yelling at my screen. Every episode would be the same. No Emmy's expected here. I am often envious of people whose jobs are out and about in the world driving around and interacting with the world. It seems stimulating. Yet when I say this to people who have these type of jobs, they are envious of my boring existence. Grass is always greener? Perhaps.

Being a cop must be filled with drama. Even a traffic cop must see more drama than me in any given day. I have no idea really. The best I can do is watch a cop show. Cop shows are so ridden with cliche is it hard to imagine that they are at all realistic. Cliches are usually a clue to poor writing. When a writer uses cliches, they are relying on preconceived notions of archetypes established already by society, literary or otherwise, through over usage or stereotypes. Yet sometimes they work. Perhaps it is because I grew up when television was quite bad, especially the cop show: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, Baretta and Kojak. I have low expectations. Some of the better shows rely heavily on cliches. Perhaps this is an example of form dictating content. The writers are under a lot of pressure, have a short amount of time to produce and have many obstacles. On commercial television they only have 42 minutes in an hour to produce content. They not only have to satisfy the public, in an increasingly competitive saturated market, but they have to satisfy network execs who are often clueless. It is impressive that anything good gets produced at all.

Like all genre drama, cop shows have a built in structure. A crime is committed, a cop or two are assigned, the crime solved either by the end of the show or with the newer shows, using a longer story arc, by the end of the season. Perhaps it is the formula that begs for formulaic characters. Regardless of why, the American cop show is better than it has ever been.

The most common cliche is the cop on the edge, lets call him/her Dirty Harry. Dirty Harries operate by their own rules. They can't follow the constraints their commander puts on them. On "True Detective" this is Detective Rusty Cohl,  this is Detective Tim Bayliss on "Homicide: Life On the Street",  Jimmy McNulty on "The Wire," Detective Catherine Jensen on "Those Who Kill," Vic Mackey on "The Shield" or US Marshall Raylan Givens on "Justified."   These are good centerpiece characters. They are often protagonists stirring up trouble. This trouble gets McNulty demoted, Givens and Cohl investigated, Bayliss arrested and Mackey eventually, presumably, killed. The Vic Mackey character was particular compelling because the show would have been nothing without him. He is a dirty cop that feels justified in his corruption. Every character is either trying to catch him, trying to be like him, trying to sleep with him and eventually, trying to get away from him. He is a fulcrum for all the action in the show.

At least one cop per show has difficulty with their relationships, usually caused by the job. They put their jobs over their children, wife and/or girl friends. This is Joey Quinn on "Dexter,"  Detective Marty Hart on "True Detective," Detective Kima Greggs on "The Wire," Detective Sarah Linden on "The Killing," Detective Lydia Adams or Officer Sammy Bryant on "Southland" along with Mackey and McNulty again. Cops have a very high divorce rate so I would imagine that this is more than a cliche. They work long odd hours and are exposed to much darkness. We often see these characters lose control over their personal lives sublimating their professional lives, the squad room replaces the family, the partner becomes the surrogate lover. Chaos at home is unmanageable while the chaos at work is understandable ... it has a rule book called the law. This is a typical plot device that works.   

The young naive and idealistic cops that start a series usually end up corrupted by the end of the series. This is Officer Ben Sherman on "Southland" and Julien Lowe on "The Shield." It is difficult to watch them fall. Women cops, more often than not, end up pregnant. Adams on "Southland" and Danny Sofer on "The Shield." Both of these are usually sub-plots.

The cliche that always sucks me in, the one that make me think, maybe I should have been a cop, is the smart cop. Let's call them Sherlocks. Our Sherlocks are Det. Frank Pembleton on "Homicide: Life on the Street," Det. Lester Freamon on "The Wire," Det. Sonya Cross on "The Bridge," Dutch Wagenbach on "The Shield" and again the existential Rusty Cohl from "True Detective." They are what are called "natural police" for they seemed to have been born to solve mysteries. The Dutch character on "The Shield" is a little different than these others because he is a buffoon studying the psychological makeup of killers and he is almost always wrong and goes by the book. This works well in contrasting him against the corrupt protagonist Mackey who is street-wise and much more effective. The American version of "The Bridge" uses this contrast as well. The two main detectives the American Sonya Cross and the Mexican Detective Marco Ruiz are foil characters. She is passionless and by-the-book completely lacking in social skills. While Marco is street-wise and cunning. He works his network of friends while Sonya hits the computer. He buys flowers for the receptionist while Sonya doesn't even know her name. "The Bridge" that separates El Paso, Texas and Chihuahua works as a good metaphor for the relationship between these two characters that are forced to work together.  I have a lot of pent up paranoia about cops.As a working class kid from Southern New England, I have been pulled over more than once as a young man for driving a car that looked like it couldn't afford the neighborhood I was in. Not DWB (driving while black) but DWP (driving while poor).  The exposure to the smart cop has done me some good.

Are these characters anything like real cops? Perhaps. Do I watch too much television? Definitely. I used to laugh at television as a medium, but since it has become good, it has become a new obsession. It is one of my new excuses for why I don't read as much as I used to. It is too easy to turn on the tube and see something good.  Not a bad problem to have.

What I Learned in Spain

The most important thing I learned from my recent trip to Spain is that I am probably too old for short trips to Europe. I left my home in Vermont in the late afternoon on a Friday for a 10:30pm flight in Montreal. I flew overnight to Paris. With a two hour layover we were in Malaga, Spain by 3pm on Saturday. Most of that part of our trip went smoothly. Landing in a foreign country, tired as hell, doesn't make for a good start of a vacation. Our car rental agreement charged us way too much money and we didn't notice it. Our luggage was put on the wrong belt so we thought it was lost. Then our 20 minute drive to our condo rental took 2.5 hours to find thanks to some very bad directions and negligent street signage. Driving in a foreign country is difficult enough but try it on no sleep. By the time I recovered from the jet lag and caught up on my sleep, I had two days left to my vacation. I need more than a week for this kind of trip. A younger man would have bounced back a lot easier. It is that quandary of not affording the trip when I was young; now that I can afford it, I don't have the energy.

To make things worse, Spain is in the wrong time zone. While I was there I was wondering why the sun was setting so late. We were in southern Spain, close to the equator, the days should be shorter. But they were shorter, they just didn't seem like it. The sun just rises later as well. If you look at the map, Spain is aligned geographically with England, Portugal and Morocco, but its time zone is the same as Germany. During World War II, Hitler visited Spain attempting to woo Franco into joining the Axis. Because they were still recovering from the Spanish Civil War, they didn't have much to offer and stayed neutral, but they turned their clocks ahead an hour to be aligned with Nazi Germany. They never changed back. So if you drive to Portugal or take a ferry to Morocco, you have to change your clock. Blaming Hitler is a good standby for any problem in Europe.

The Spanish get up later than most of us. If you want to buy a coffee early in the morning, you will have to wait until 9am or so for a coffee shop to open. Due to the mid-day siesta, you may have to wait for a supermarket to open in the late-afternoon. This is a tradition that dates back to before air conditioning. So that workers didn't have to work during the peak heat of the day, they could nap in the shade. Now it makes for a long workday. Modern professionals complain that they get home too late. This makes for a later rush hour and less time at home. For me, the late coffee was fine because I was sleeping late most of the days (it was  vacation).  The coffee is great in Spain, made stronger than ours in the US so the portions are much smaller.  The weather was so hot, I wasn't always into a hot coffee. Iced coffee doesn't seem to be a thing. I was grateful to find a Dunkin' Donuts (aka Dunkin' Coffee) in Malaga for an American iced coffee.

With all its quirks, Spain is a fantastic place for a vacation. The Spanish tiled barrios polka dotting the mountain desert fauna on the Mediterranean, you can't beat it. The food alone is worth the trip. We spent two days on the beach drinking sangria, reading and taking dips. The temperature hovered around 85F with some wind and no mosquitoes. When we took day trips inland to Seville and Granada, it was about 10 degrees warmer with little wind or humidity. The language barrier wasn't too bad. Spanish/English translation is fairly close and almost everyone we talked to had at least a little English and my wife knows some conversational Spanish. We got by fine. Everyone was very friendly. One guy offered me his dessert when I asked him what it was. Eating fresh fish from the Mediterranean is my kind of vacation. Grills with fresh sardines were setup right on the beach. Not sure if restaurants could get away with this in the US.

Often when I travel I ponder, "hmm, I could live here."  I had that feeling about Ireland and Prague. That feeling overwhelmed me in Hawaii. This did not occur in Spain. I liked it and I would visit again (if I were independently wealthy) but no, I couldn't see myself living there.  I had two problems with the place that would make living there unbearable. It is a feeling that when you ask yourself, "Why is this okay?" that makes me think that I'd find a lot other problems with the place if I lived there.

The first thing was the driving. I have driven in Europe before, it was culture shock, but I acclimated. My only time driving in Europe was Ireland. Some don't even consider Ireland to be European. I remember telling an Irish lady, "we didn't even come close to the speed limit," and her reply was classic, "oh gee, I hope not." Like their speed limit is actually a limit, not like here in the States where it is the speed at which we start and only slow down below the limit after we see a cop. They just drive slowly in Ireland because the roads are tiny, winding and surrounded by walls. Spain was the opposite problem. Unlike Ireland, they drive on the same side of the road as the US, yet I felt less comfortable driving in Spain. Not only are Spanish drivers speeders but they are incredibly impatient. If you are backing out of a parking space, cars on the road will not stop and wait for you. They driving around you. The only time anyone will wait for you to pull out is if someone wanted your space. If you accidentally drive down a dead end (which aren't labeled) and have to back out, which I did in Granada, if there is another car that wants to get around you, they will not wait for you back out. They will drive around you regardless of how little room there is. I don't think this is something that I could get used to. I had heard that Spanish drivers are the worst in Europe. I have seen nothing to disprove this. Motorcycles were everywhere and seem to do what they want. I saw a lot of cops when I was there, but no one was being pulled over. I am not sure what they are doing but they are not monitoring traffic.

The other thing that I didn't like was being bothered by street vendors. If you are laying on a towel on the beach, they will come over and try to sell you sunglasses. If you are eating outside in a restaurant, they will approach you to sell you a pocket book. If you are enjoying the World Cup along the boardwalk in Marbella, they will approach you trying to sell you a Spanish flag. They don't let up. I can't tell you how annoying this is. Most of the vendors seem be from Africa. They probably come over on the Ferries from Morocco. Here in the US, we are all about business, but I don't think this is something that we would tolerate. You have to wonder why any business would tolerate vendors coming up to their customers at restaurants. I don't know if this is something that happens further inland. I don't remember seeing them in Granada or Seville so perhaps, this is just a coastal issue.

As an American, whose definition of old are the sites I see in Boston which aren't even three centuries old, I am overwhelmed when I visit Europe. Some of the sites we visited in Spain were held by the Romans and then the Moors and then then Spanish spanning a couple of millennium. I felt quite small.  That is a good thing. We should always be humbled by our travel destinations. Dare I quote Twain (from Innocents Abroad) without seeming too pretentious:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

One cannot enter the halls of Alhambra without marveling at the wonders of humanity ... regardless of how badly you had to risk your life in traffic to find the place.

Trigger Warning: This Blog Post May Cause Some Pansies to Whine

In grad school I took a class in "The Teaching of Literature."  It was a fine course, the only problem with it was that the professor was obsessed with racism. It should have been called "Teaching Racism in Literature" because that was her only concern, it seemed. One of our assignments was designing a lecture and teaching a class on a work of literature. My work was Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness which I chose because I was interested in narrative structure, particularly in works of literature that had an unreliable narrator. I was planning on writing my graduate thesis on the subject so every class I took, I tried to work that into my projects. I did my lecture, about a half hour, and got some great feedback from my fellow students. The only feedback I got from the professor was that I "didn't mention racism." This was maddening of course because, I do agree that racism is an important subject in colonial literature like The Heart of Darkness, but it is not the only aspect of the book. If you talk about the narrative structure for a half hour, you could easily not bring up racism. This story has become my anecdotal reason for the problem with American liberal arts education ... the American left are really fucking it up.

It is becoming more and more difficult to be left wing in America. I am left wing, aka a liberal, meaning that I do believe in the ideals of being liberal, but I am not so sure anymore about the movement. People who call themselves liberal are getting more and more annoying ... and some of them ... seem outright insane. The eyes are not only not on the prize but have turned inward. The self-righteous a-hole has replaced the selfless hippie as the poster child of the left. Protests are cliques. Discourse has become therapy. Education is becoming a politically correct circle jerk. I used to be proud to say that I was on the Left.  I am still proud, I cling to the ideas, but not so much to the movement. The latest madness: trigger warnings.

Triggers warnings are statements that some professors are being asked to put on syllabi on certain works of literature and/or film warning students of their content. An example would be a warning that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains racism or that The Great Gatsby contains domestic violence. Apparently, this started to accommodate students with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Stressful events in books and films can trigger trauma in the victims of PTSD. But I would think that if you had PTSD and you were attending a college course, shouldn't you go in prepared that perhaps everything you read or view could contain a trigger? If the trigger warnings stopped with PTSD, it wouldn't be so absurd, but being extended much further. 

The first problem I have with this is that knowledge comes from being challenged. You go into college believing the world to be a certain way and you are challenged to think something else. You shouldn't be prepared or warned for this challenge. You should be knocked over the head with it. College is the place where the world should be in your face challenging your every fiber of belief.  If it makes you cry or scream so be it, you are young, you will get over it. Students at Oberlin College, University of California (Santa Barbara), University of Michigan, Rutgers University and George Washington University among others have asked for trigger warnings to be put on syllabi. When I was in college we asked our colleges for really stupid things too. It was a great learning experience to be told NO. College is a great place to mature. 

This brings me to my second point, what kind of pansies are we bringing up in this country? Huckleberry Finn was read by slaves. That's right some of them could read! Their victimhood (violence, rape, racism etc.) is far greater than any of us had to face. Mark Twain toured the country with other abolitionists reading his work. Former slaves attended these readings. If they didn't need a warning, you shouldn't either.  Regardless of how traumatic your experiences have been, it pales in comparison to these people. The first step to higher learning ... get over yourself.

My third point is where I really lose patience with the left. Labeling anything, however well intentioned and innocuous is censorship, even if you are doing so only on a syllabus. You are changing the perception of the reader. If you label The Merchant of Venice with a warning of anti-Semitism, the reader is going to read it differently than if you didn't see that label. In doing so, you are altering the experience of the reading, tainting the discourse and worst of all, destroying the text. You are putting your perceptions of the text over the readers. If I am warned that Mrs. Dalloway contains a suicide, I am going to reading it expecting suicide on every page. You might as well rename trigger warnings, spoiler alerts. A trigger warning ruins this book for all the readers, just in case, there is someone in the class that was traumatized by suicide. The left is usually against censorship, unless it is the left that is censoring, then they are fine with it. Actually, they are gleeful in their righteousness.  Stamp an R on that movie, stamp an M on that video game ... the left know better than you do on what you and your kids can be exposed to. This is what the left spends their time on. You really have to wonder how the left will respond when a right winger comes along and demands a warning on a Leaves of Grass because of their homo-phobia or on Things Fall Apart because of their xenophobia. No, that isn't allowed. Censorship is only allowed when the left does it!

Where does this lead? Warnings on syllabi surely will lead to warnings on books. The pansies will graduate and wander into a bookstore with their new expendable income. They might buy a book that has sexism in it and they weren't warned about it (insert dramatic music here). Bookstores, Amazon and libraries will have warnings on books. Once there is a rating system on books, then publishers will publish for the rating. Presently Hollywood test screens films and will often send them back to the director saying they need more sex to get the R rating or remove a word or two to get the PG13 rating. Is this where publishing is going? 

I am grateful that most professors are fighting this.This is where the strength of tenured positions come in. Young untenured professors are afraid to fight this because they fear retaliation. Freedom to pick and chose what is in your course and how to approach the subject, should be in the teachers hands ... not the students. If you fear being challenged as a college student, perhaps college is not the right place for you. If you can't handle Huck's racism, you are probably not ready for the workforce and world outside your campus.