Armchair Travel
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
  Looking for Lincoln

We have a nice new housemate, so I'm trying to tidy up around the house and get rid of some clutter, and I tackle this pile of magazines from my mom's house, old New Yorkers where I've already read the cartoons. Maybe I could get rid of them.

I open up the first one and there's one of those great New Yorker drawings, full page, of two little kids, one white and one black, playing on their skateboards in front of the Lincoln Memorial. One of them is looking up at the statue, checking it out, possibly wondering, "Who's that guy?"

Then there's the article, "Set in Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Memory" by Thomas Mallon. I read on a bit and find it's about a book called Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.

Great! That means that not only can I not get rid of the magazine, I have to go out and buy the book. See why I never get anything done around here?

This blog is about used books -- great reads for a quarter -- but as Archie Goodwin says, "There are times when a principle should take a nap." This is a book that everyone who admires Abraham Lincoln and should go out and buy new.

It's about how our country, in an effort to patch things up with the South, went back on just about everything Lincoln ever stood for. Blog entries aren't too great for going into detail, but here's one: in 1908 one of Lincoln's friends, a bootmaker named William Donnegan, was lynched in Springfield, Illinois.

A year later Springfield held a 100th birthday party for Lincoln and no African Americans were invited. The country was yearning for reconciliation and the rights of black people seemed a small sacricifice for that great end.

The book also chronicles the career of Lincoln's son Robert, who declined to go to Ford's Theater with his parents o that fateful night because he had to study Spanish. Oddly enough, he was present at the assassinations of both Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901. How weird is that?

The Kunhardts are scholars of the first order, chips off the old block of their father (and grandfather) Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., the editor of Life magazine for many years (and also the creator of People).

Their grandmother, Dorothy Kunhardt, was the author of Pat the Bunny, a perpetual bestseller, and an avid collector of Lincoln memorabilia, especially photographs.
 
Monday, November 16, 2009
  The Enemy is Retreating; It's Time to Charge
I believe it's time to take over the party of Abraham Lincoln and restore it to its original principles. I believe the best thing people of conscience can do right now is to join the Republican Party.

I am an ardent supporter of President Obama, but that's because he's carrying our flag. He's carrying the flag of the very first Republican president. Need some time? He's on the money.

I don't know a single Democrat who has not at one time or another been disgusted by a party that is wedded to futility. You probably don't rememberr Eleanor Roosevelt refusing to support JFK and throwing her support to two-time loser Adlai Stevenson, but we all lived through the last expensive months of the Hillary Clinton campaign...

On top of that, a significant percentage are on the take, as you can see clearly from the health care debate.

What if we had principled opponents on the other side of the aisle instead of right-wing nut jobs? The answer is (and Charles Dickens noticed this in 1840) that the principled candidates gain no support... Why? Not enough moderate Republicans.

What if we had a wave of moderate Republicans? Especially a wave of moderate women Republicans? That would be a nightmare for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, because they would no longer have a party organization to glorify them.

The first thing that's needed is to get moderate Republican candidates into the pipeline as school committe members and selectmen and city councilors and state reps. We should have a (chaperoned) internship programs to educate moderate Republican young people who have an interest in serving their community and their state and their country.

At this early stage, they might have to serve their internships with Democrats, but that's only because, as I said, the Democrat are carrying the flag of Lincoln.

Now the Republican strategists, if they're smarter than I think they are, might counter by running a bunch of right-wing nutjob Democrats like Joe Lieberman. But I don't think they have the resources to do that, and if they do, the Lincoln Republicans can always cross back over.

If you want to identify a moderate Republican, you need only ask one simple question: "Do you believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth for hundreds of millions of years?" A moderate Republican will answer yes.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Who's with me? The enemy is retreating in disarray. Let's fix bayonets and charge. I'm speaking here for Abraham Lincoln and Vesta Roy and Susan McLane. Let's cleanse the Augean Stables and restore the party of Lincoln to the principles of decency.
 
  Hadley History

I went to two very interesting lectures in Hadley yesterday. Hadley is just south of Sunderland, where I live, and the town recently celebrated its 350th birthday.
Part of the observance was the publication of a book called Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, edited by Marla R. Miller, which I'm rarin' to read.
Two essay authors spoke at the Senior Center Sunday, Elizabeth Chilton, who co-authored the chapter on Hadley from 100,000 BC to 1700 AD -- quite a span! -- and Alice Nash who wrote about the multi-faceted interactions of Europeans and Native Americans.
I love reading about history and archaeology, but it's even more fun to have actual real-time conversations with historians and archaeologists. Both talks were really fascinating for an archaeology / history buff like me, and I learned a lot I never knew before.
 
Thursday, November 12, 2009
  Moments of Delight

My daughter Sarah is just back from Oaxaca, Mexico, and I'm just tickled that she went there for GoNOMAD and had a great time. It's not exactly a free vacation, because it's work, but it's the kind of work you want.

Just talking about Sarah, I noticed this urge to shut up. It goes back to her earliest childhood. I told some other parents that Sarah liked to play happily in her crib until seven or eight or even nine o'clock in the morning. They gave me nasty looks and never liked me after that.

Then Tyra Banks picked her for her model show, and if you want people to not like you, try bragging about that for sixty seconds. Frankly, my reaction was, "God made them all. They're all beautiful."

There are lots of ancient taboos against bragging about your kids, and there's a lot of sound reasoning behind them.

I just want to make an exception for moments of delight. I think when people experience moments of delight, they should tell their fellow humans all about it so everyone can be on the lookout for them. They're easy to miss if you're not on the lookout.

And studies show people who have been delighted are less likely to commit crimes and more likely to make important contributions to society.

When Sarah was a toddler, she would toddle into my room in the morning and say, "Daddy, the darkness is over." That was a moment of delight, every time -- little apostle of the sun.

Sarah's first day in first grade, a big girl pushed her down and called her 'buttface.' We talked about it.

"Do you think she made that up herself?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I think someone did that to her." Sarah figured out that the big girl didn't have any friends, so she made friends with her. When I spoke to her teacher about it, she said it made her job a lot easier.

When she was in fourth grade she tutored second graders in reading and the parents of the second-graders said she helped their kids as much as the remedial reading teacher.

When she was thirteen, she found that Grace Metalious, in her bestseller Peyton Place, actually plagiarized several paragraphs from an earlier book, There's One in Every Town by James Aswell.

I was thinking about Sarah's year in first grade because my feelings were hurt this week by some close friends -- no sense in going into particulars. But I remember when some boys were teasing her on the bus, and we talked about it, and she went in the next day.

And they teased her and she told them that they hurt her feelings, and then she said, "I feel sorry for you because you don't have any feelings."

I wasn't there, but I gather that shut them up. Just hearing about it definitely counts as a moment of delight in my book. And now, many years later, I see that I am glad I have feelings that can be hurt, and I feel sorry for those who don't have any.
 
  Baby With Spaghetti

This photo is by Jordan Kauffman, whom I do not know. My Groton buddy Stanley Matthews posted it on Facebook.
 
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
  Cornelia Hancock's Rosy Cheeks
I'm learning a lot from Cornelia Hancock, the 23-year-old New Jersey woman who arrived at Gettysburg three days after the battle. [Letter of a Civil War Nurse] She almost didn't get there. In Baltimore her party met Dorothea Dix, superintendent of Army nurses.

"She looked the nurses over and pronounced them all suitable except me. She immediately objected to my going farther on the score of my youth and rosy cheeks... In those days it was indecorous for angels of mercy to appear otherwise than gray-haired and bespectacled."

Miss Hancock settled the issue by getting on the train, and apparently it was decided that it would be too indecorous to drag her off it by main force, especially considering there were acres and acres of dead and dying men to be attended to.

So we get a sense of who Cornelia Hancock is before she arrives, and I think that's important because then, when she describes what she sees and hears and smells, it's like you're hearing it from someone you know.

And her account -- in letters to her mother and sisters that she never intended to publish -- is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me foraging in old book bins. This book is a resource for anyone who wants to understand war and its human cost, and, for that matter, anyone who wants to find insights into the human spirit.

She tells us about heroism in its true form -- gravely wounded men urging her to tend to a comrade in greater need. And she notes that the regiments that played the most heroic part in the battle suffered the most casualties.

She finds a town denuded of food, clothing and everything else necessary to life. She sits with dying men and writes their letters home.

It's a walking tour of the battlefield at Gettysburg, one of the greatest fields of carnage in human history. When Lincoln gave his famous address there five months later, arms and legs were still sticking up out of the ground.

By the way, Dorothea Dix's concerns about Cornelia Hancock were entirely unfounded. She was as safe as she might have been at home, and there is documentary evidence to show that the wounded men of the 12th New Jersey Regiment had no objection whatsoever to her youth or her rosy cheeks.

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Friday, November 06, 2009
  Futile Care
When my mom was in the hospital in Springfield, we asked them to provide what is called "comfort care only." That means they don't do a lot of invasive tests and IVs and catheters.

A doctor came over to us and told us we were doing the right thing for Sally and he wished more families would do what we did.

A huge percentage of American health care costs are incurred in the last year of life, and much of it is what can be called "futile care" that might make life a little bit longer, but not better.

Here's what an experienced nurse has to say: "As a retired hospice nurse, I can validate the beauty and effectiveness of palliative care. Both the patient and the family get the kind of individualized support and care that makes the end of life a time of peaceful letting go in the serenity of a calm, well-supported family. As an ex-ICU nurse, I can tell you that we not only waste incredible amounts of money on futile care, we torture our dying patients."

President Obama has taken a lot of flack for even discussing the idea of palliative care. He's been accused of organizing "death squads" to decide which elderly people shall be deprived of care and left to die.

But anyone with any actual knowledge of end-of-life situations understands that prolonging life at all costs doesn't help anyone, except the people who get rich from it, and it often amounts to torturing people who just want to die in peace.
 
Thursday, November 05, 2009
  Spartacus and the Essene

He stuck up for the lowly and the oppressed. He preached a new kingdom of peace and justice. He was crucified but he lives on. You know who I mean... Spartacus!
I'm reading The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler and I'm getting caught up in his rendition of this famous story. He has Spartacus, early on, meet up with an Essene prophet who ended up in Rome. That was the group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and plagiarized the words of Jesus before He was even born. Shocking!
The Essene traces a long line of people who have spoken up for truth and justice for the little guy, starting with King Agis of Sparta, who was hanged, and a bunch of others through the ages who met a variety of grim fates. I wonder why that is? Cui bono -- who benefits?
The Essene prophesies as follows: "Neither their silver nor their gold shall save them in the day of the wrath of Y...., but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy.Woe unto them that join house to house and field to field till there is no room, till they possess alone the lands of the earth.
"Woe unto them that decree false laws and take the right from the poor of the people so that these poor may be their prey. Woe for your heads [magistrates] judge for reward, your priests teach for hire, and your seers prophesy for money.
"For he is come, sent by Y...., He who is anointed by the Lord to mend broken hearts, to bring light to the eyes of the blind, to free the oppressed."
"I never heard of a God that curses like that Y.... of yours," says Spartacus.
"Prophecies do not count," says the Essene. "He who receives them counts."
"He who receives them will see evil days," says Spartacus.
"Aye," says the Essene. "He'll have a pretty rotten time."
Made me think of Lincoln and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Benigno Acquino.
This is turning into a heck of a book.
 
Monday, November 02, 2009
  The Will of God Almighty
I have written before about my friend Daoud Nassar, the founder of the Tent of Nations near Bethlehem, a center for international peace and understanding.

The Israelis have been trying to seize Daoud's land, despite the fact that his grandfather paid taxes to the Ottoman Turks and has the receipts to prove it. Still he has to pay thousands of dollars to go to court in Israel to prove that his family owns the land.

Saturday 25 soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces broke through the gates on Daoud's farm and rousted out his family and 45 international visitors at gunpoint. (Daoud was not there at the time.)

Kay Plitt of the Friends of Tent of Nations, North America writes, "The family members who were present were made to leave the house and stand outside in the cold and dark. There were 45 volunteers and international visitors sleeping in the tents, including a group of young German women ages 18-21 and their group leader.

"The group leader was lead outside and held at gunpoint as the soldiers went through the house and the compound searching for who knows what! This took a couple of hours, and was, of course, a terrifying experience - which it was intended to be."

One particular focus of the soldiers' frustration was a large rock inscibed with the words "We refuse to be enemies." They tried to efface the inscription, but were unsuccessful, so they rolled the rock into a crevasse.

I read in the Bible that the Israeli army is doing the will of Almighty God, but it does make one curious why Almighty God would be annoyed by a rock with some writing on it.
 
Sunday, November 01, 2009
  The Most Beautiful Road in the World
I just took a drive down what for me is the most beautiful road in the world, New Hampshire Route 153. For some it's the road to Freedom (about four miles south of Eaton) but for me it's the road to South Conway, where I have traveled for more than 50 years.

We had a wonderful memorial service for my mom in Tamworth on Saturday for all her friends in the Mt. Washington Valley. On Sunday we went to the family home in South Conway to look over and start thinking about what we're going to do with Sally's books and papers and other family stuff.

I took a kind of preliminary inventory of Sally's books and papers, found some priceless mementoes and set off down Route 153. It was a beautiful fall day with not a cloud in the sky.

I stopped to say hi to her pal Phil at the Eaton Store -- he's a big Boston College guy and she taught there -- and then drove on past the beautiful little Eaton Church, past the place that used to have the sign we always noticed that said "Rideing."

Past Round Pond where my dad and I caught a huge trout on a fish eye, and Long Pond, where I foolishly went fishing on an island barefoot and cut my foot open on a broken bottle and was rescued by a former Navy medic who dressed my foot and took me to the hospital.

Past the chain of ponds that make up Purity Springs Resort in East Madison, where many families have been going for more than forty years, a place where time has stood still.

Past a little stand in Effingham where I remember buying my daughter Sarah an ice cream cone when she was a little girl.

Then I turned onto Route 25 in Ossippee where Sarah and I collided with and killed a mother bear -- five feet tall, 350 pounds of solid muscle. Some guy stopped and helped straighten out my bumper so I could drive on, so I gave him the bear. What would I have done with it after all?

Then down Route 16 to the Ocean Job Lot discount store Sarah and I always stop at which we call Oceans Eleven, then onto Route 28 past Small World Miniatures, where they have everything for your doll house, including tiny dart boards and tiny money and even -- get this -- tiny toilets.

On down Route 28 past Chiang Kai Shek's old sumer place and the the WWII museum with the tank busting through the brick wall, past the giant pet cemetery in Alton Bay to the Epsom Circle where the clever Indian guy patched our tire, to Concord, where I worked in the State House...

You build up a lot of memories over 50 years and I was taking them in for maybe the last time. I didn't feel like taking pictures. I believe I can remember them well enough.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Name: Stephen Hartshorne
Location: Sunderland, Massachusetts, United States

Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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MOST RECENT POSTS
Looking for Lincoln
The Enemy is Retreating; It's Time to Charge
Hadley History
Moments of Delight
Baby With Spaghetti
Cornelia Hancock's Rosy Cheeks
Futile Care
Spartacus and the Essene
The Will of God Almighty
The Most Beautiful Road in the World


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