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Name: Lynn
Country: United States
State: Illinois
Metro: Chicago
Interests: Writing, reading, tennis, more tennis,baseball (Cubs!), fiction writing
Expertise: writing, a little singing, journalism, editing, talking endlessly about my cats
Occupation: journalist, writer
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
8/18/2004
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| Here's the Debut of my review at www.Blogcritics.org, a division of Technorati.
I will also be doing blogs for Technorati. The technical hills to climb were a bit steep, but I'm here now.
Here's the book review:
“He was a quiet man. Reclusive, really. But he didn’t seem capable of this.”
“Kept to himself.”
“Come to think of it, he was a little odd…but all this…”
The stories after horrific mass killings are nearly always the same. While circumstances and locations differed — students in Colorado or Virginia, federal workers in Oklahoma — all the victims were killed, targeted without mercy by loners no one would have noticed the day before.
Television and radio pundits have waxed eloquent discussing the recent slayings at Ft. Hood, Texas, by a heretofore unknown Major Nidal Malik Hasan. This signifies the topping off of unrelenting pressure in society, they shriek. We’re at a node in time where everything is going haywire, opines another. Millennial madness!
Arnie Bernstein of Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (University of Michigan Press) knows better. He’s written an harrowing account of the first American school bombing, which took place in 1927. It was that long ago that a seldom-noticed, odd, but harmless-seeming man began planning the deaths of 38 innocent children and nine adults in the town of Bath, Michigan. There’s no modern explanation for that. No "end times" or Mayan prophecies. Maybe total havoc just pops up in American DNA from time to time.
Bath Massacre is almost like a look into the mind of total psychopath. While not quoting perpetrator Andrew Kehoe directly, Bernstein takes the reader on a journey of strange “accidents” in his family, minuscule slights from neighbors that he doesn’t forget, and an all-out hatred for the Bath School’s superintendent that has no rhyme or reason.
The reader watches as Kehoe orders large amounts of dynamite from Lansing, MI (perfectly legal — and normal for farmers who needed to blow up tree stumps). He learns the intricacies of electricity and wiring. When he becomes the school’s treasurer, he also becomes the handyman. People bumped into him at the oddest times And something was askew in the basement:
"Smith (the janitor) wasn’t sure, but in the fall of 1926, he had a feeling there was a leak in one of the basement pipes. While Superintendent Huyck shined a flashlight along the ceiling, Smith followed the length of pipe with his eye. Nothing. No leak, no rust, no loose joints. He didn’t notice something else in the ceiling that was out of place."
Compare this with 2009’s Major Hasan buying civilian guns (perfectly legal) even though he works in a job that was rife with guns every day. He also paid for a six-month lease up-front. Not illegal, but not the usual way of renting.
Each man had plans, probably months in the works, that made such simple actions deadly.
Because the killers were methodical, for the best of what we know, they had no remorse. (Hasan is still in an Army hospital and the Army is not making him available for comment.) This draws many to the popular conclusion of psychopathy. In the Bath Massacre, which took place when psychiatry was in its infancy, the general public had all sorts of fancy explanations for why a grown man who want to blow up a school full of children. However in today’s world, Dr. Robert Hare has created “The Hare Psychopathy Checklist,” which has become indispensable for psychologists. In his long list of traits a few stand out in many of the killings we have seen: the ability to lead a double life, lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for actions, and lack of realistic long-term goals. Kehoe, the child killer had them. Maybe so does Harlan.
There even is a test, the fMRI, or the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging procedure that lawyers want to present in court to prove that their clients are psychopaths and have no emotional connection to the crimes they commit. Right now, defense attorneys for Brian Dugan, who admitted to raping and killing a young Illinois girl in 1983, tried to get the DuPage County courtroom to accept Dugan’s unusual fMRI test results. The trouble is that juries don’t seem to care much if the defendant is mentally impaired. Mostly they vote for execution, if it’s a choice. Dugan was sentenced to death.
Test or no test, Bernstein’s grueling but personal Bath Massacre shows us that violence on the level of the Ft. Hood shooting is no sudden show of modern derangement. There probably have been wild-eyed killers back in the days of the Mayflower, only there was no CNN to record it all back then.
While not the most comforting book, it’s a fascinating look at how resilient Americans were in the face of tragedy then and now. It brought out the best in people. Then people were opening up their homes to be makeshift hospitals and morgues. Today, soldiers ripped up their uniforms to serve as makeshift bandages.
"It's the same as it ever was", as the old Talking Heads song goes. But somehow, it’s more interesting to go back in time to see how Americans handled such brutal violence just shy of 90 years ago. Bernstein does that with beautiful prose and deep reverence for his subject.
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| While I continue to wait for Technorati to send me their instructions on how they want me to format this blog, i thought I'd discuss an interesting turn my life has taken.
My avocation has been tennis. There was a time when it was tennis just about every day of the week. It didn't matter that I reached a plateau and never got any better, I just kept on playing. I was hooked. There were a thousand reasons, but mainly I got the endorphin rush from the exercise and I also never became bored. Running and hopping on treadmills always bored me to tears. In fact, except for lifting weights, there really wasn't any other kind of exercise that I liked. It all bored me silly eventually.
Except for t'ai chi. I took that about fifteen years ago and truly enjoyed it. I had learned more than half of the Yang long form (which takes forever to learn because the style is so exacting), and then the whole school fell apart. The person running the place had little business sense and he had a meltdown. The students scattered far and wide and I was too busy with my job to figure out where they went. So, I never continued.
Now, I've found a new school and started up again and I must say it's just as wonderful as it ever was. The teacher is completely different. The style is totally new (Chen, not Yang), so the movements are new. The studio is smaller and has no mirror. Everything should feel foreign, but instead it all seems like an old friend. The studied movement. The slow, disciplined action that transitions from one shape to another in seemingly effortless fashion--it's all there. And I just love the way it looks so beautiful and easy, yet it's a killer on your muscles. Our teacher introduced one new move last Wednesday and my neck and back haven't been the same since.
Yet it's productive movement. If you believe in the movement of chi, which I do, it's beneficial to the body. I've already experienced that in the reduction of various symptoms I've had. This made me curious about chi gong, the cousin of t'ai chi that is performed almost standing still. It is almost completely dedicated to meditation and the movement of chi. Very difficult to learn, it is also extremely powerful when done correctly. I remember being in a Japanese restaurant and watching a man bend spoons with nothing but chi gong. And, no, this was not a Yuri Geller trick. Chi gong masters have done things much more impressive than little parlor tricks than that. But it takes many years to learn such skill and I doubt I'd ever have that kind of patience.
Still, it's been interesting to put down the tennis racquet once in a while and move slowly and smoothly, thinking of nothing but the present. I still do run around the tennis court, pounding my legs and knees, banging my arms and shoulders, and I can really feel the difference now in the way I use my body. The Western way is all about power and winning. The Eastern way is simply about being.
I think I like the Eastern way much more.
Lynn Voedisch,
t'ai chi, | | |
| I'm terribly sorry for starting this blog and then ignoring it for so long, but there are reasons for everything. I was waiting to find out if Technorati (the powerful blog service that distributes blogs just about everywhere) would accept me as a general info blogger, based on my past newspaper experience. And I'm in! So, perhaps starting today I will be a dual Xanga/Technorati blogger, although I'm sure I'll have to get all the coding down.
OLYMPIC MISS
While everyone was taking potshots at President Obama (wrongly, because the Chicago bid for the Olympics was never his project), few stopped to consider what Chicagoans were thinking. They believed ridiculous polls that claimed most Chicagoans didn't want the Olympics or that the numbers had pulled even by the day of the decision. Actually, the official poll conducted by the Olympic committee showed that 70% of Chicagoans wanted the games--and that certainly made sense when I considered the many people I talked to in the days leading up to the vote. I'm not going to get into the "Nolympics" people, because so many of them had individual oxes they believed were being gored. There was a general confusion about taxes--the funding was to be taken care of by donors, with only over-runs going to taxpayers. However, the influx of jobs and increase in property values would have been a major shot in the arm for an American city, if not the entire region.
It was horrifying to see the far right standing up and cheering when Chicago was bounced out on the first vote just because they don't like Obama. I remember when conservatives leveled the anti-American label at liberals. Well, now they've claimed it for themselves. They'd rather see another country get the prize, and the economic benefits, than see the president get a dubious honor. (One wonders if they'd slam Obama if he hadn't gone to Copenhagen and we didn't get the Olympics.) But they aren't really trampling Obama, they are stepping on Chicagoans, hard-working urban Americans who have never questioned their own patriotism. And we don't like it one bit.
I'm not going to belabor the reasons why Chicago lost the vote. International Olympic Committee politics seem more fraught with danger than our country's. Members of the U.S. Olympic Committee have been on the outs with the IOC for years and the U.S.O.C. members say there are myriad reasons the fix was in from the beginning.
However, I'd have loved to see Chicago get the games if only to revamp its image with the rest of the country. That's because after I read comments after news stories, I realized that much of the country still thinks we are the city of mobsters, housing projects, slums surrounding downtown, sleaze, constant cold weather, and, oh yes!, Al Capone! I thought that we had finally shed that Al Capone thing when I went to Mexico and the residents said, "Chicago? Oh, Michael Jordan!" Yes! Michael Jordan! But now we are back to Al Capone again.
Let's take this one by one.
1. Mobsters: They haven't run rampant since the end of Prohibition. Do you realize how long ago that was? The 1930s. This also was the end of Al Capone. (One benighted soul even said White House adviser David Axelrod was a political crony of Al Capone's. This is not only impossible, but Alexrod was never a politician, just a former newspaper reporter.) There is something called the Outfit, but they are hardly high on the police wanted list. The Sopranos they are not.
2. Housing projects. Torn down in the 1980s. 'Nuff said.
3. Slums surrounding downtown. This is patently absurd. Yes, there are slums, but they are off in neighborhoods that tourists are never going to visit--the South and Far West sides. We own property in the South Loop. If common thinking were true, we'd be slumlords. Instead, we have a little slice of a rapidly rising chic neighborhood.
4. Sleaze. Confined to City Hall. Cleaned out of the governor's mansion.
5. Constant cold weather. Gosh, we actually have four seasons! We have a summer! (well, last summer hardly counted, but still.) It does not snow year round. We grow flowers! We go to the beach! We have swimming pools! We play tennis outside! If we had an Olympics, people could actually see this.
6. Al Capone. See #1. Dead.
We have a gorgeous lakefront, wonderful outdoor art, the playground (for all ages) of Millennium Park, The Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, which used to be the World's largest building, but is still the tallest building in the Western world. And I'm looking at you, New York. Great shopping, terrific restaurants, world-famous theater, the Joffrey Ballet, the Art Institute of Chicago with its well known Impressionist collection...well, I'll stop bragging now. But the idea is that for some people we are still flyover territory and they haven't bothered to do much more than change planes at O'Hare Airport here.
The Olympics would have changed all that. So stop cheering, Richard Steele. Better yet, why don't you come out here and take a look at the changing leaves? You actually might like them.
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| The morning after Ted Kennedy died, I was perusing the online version of the Chicago Sun-Times and went to Lynn Sweet's blog. There she had several quotations from many famous people talking about what Teddy Kennedy meant to them. Some were inspired, some were short and to the point, but each one made me want to read on. So, I was scanning the screen, and suddenly I came to "Mary Jo, you can finally rest in peace."
Wait? What? Where did that come from?
I realized that I had read straight through to the readers' comments. Some jerk saw fit, less that 24 hours after Kennedy died, to put that at the end of a story about his legacy. Nice touch. I suppose he takes all the handicapped seats on buses, too.
But it turns out this creep was not unusual. The far, far right was all ready with the cheap Mary Jo Kopechne references before the body was even cold. Why should they wait? When have they ever been gracious or thoughtful?
For those who are either too young or not particularly up on political history, Mary Jo Kopechne was a young worker for the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign who, about a year after Bobby's death, was at a reunion party for the workers in Massachusetts. Late at night she went for a drive with Ted Kennedy across a bridge leading to Chappaquiddick Island in Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy's car flipped off the bridge into the water. He managed to get free, but she died. Details were never clear about the event. He said he repeatedly dived to save her. Detractors said just about everything...up to and including cold-blooded murder. The inquest never solved what really happened. He received a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.
In retrospect, the worst that could have come out of it was an involuntary manslaughter charge, although it was chalked up to negligent driving. Murder was never even considered. The people of Massachusetts overwhelmingly elected him to a new term. Grousers never forgot the event.
It was the worst blot on his career, and many say it was the reason he lost his challenge to Jimmy Carter for the presidency in 1980.
That was in 1969. One can hardly find space to list all the accomplishments this man had in the Senate since then. If people believe in second chances (and you should have seen the responses I got when I doubted that Michael Vick deserved his), then Kennedy certainly took advantage of his. His passionate leadership for civil rights legislation, his defense of blue-collar laborers, his angry challenge to those who stood in the way of an increase to the minimum wage ("Where does the greed end?"), his support of women's rights, and his life-long hope for universal health care--all of these things add up to a man who was larger than a callow young man who drove off a bridge. He had made a grievous error, yet spent a lifetime making up for it, and then going further. There is such a thing as rehabilitation. Good Christians are supposed to believe in forgiveness. I believe Ted Kennedy earned his.
As he said when he endorsed Barack Obama for president, "the dream lives on." Sadly, so does the hate. The hate of the Kennedy family may never leave this country, and we are a smaller country for it.
Lynn Voedisch
Ted Kennedy | | |
| I didn't really believe this story. Well, I had to, since my sister swore it was true. However, I looked it up anyway to be sure. As Chicago was enjoying temperatures in the 80s (and I say enjoying, because much of our summer has been more like a cold spring), the lake suddenly cooled off to the 50s. Swimmers went to take a dip and bolted out of the water freezing. Dogs, used to playing fetch at the dog beach, refused to jump into the water. People, used to the summer-warmed water, couldn't figure out what was going on.
It turned out that the surface water took off and went eastward to the state of Michigan. Here's the Chicago Tribune's explanation of what happened. Some other people say it was a seiche. Whatever it was, we want our water back! My nephew at his day camp can't go to the beach anymore and it's highly unlikely that the water will warm up before school starts on Aug. 31.
A total bummer ending for a total bummer of a summer. And if I hear another person say they liked this cool summer, I'm going to slap them. Summers are supposed to be hot--or at least warm. That's why we endure the winters.
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Setting up my son in our downtown Chicago condo was great fun. He's really calm and ready for the new law school semester to begin tomorrow. No jitters or anything. He's matured so much and I can't help but be so proud of him. What a great young man. What a great lawyer he will make. | | |
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