The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • from 2003: Synchronicity, in memoriam Robert Hauter Myslik

    [edited 2007 0130 to correct Rob’s middle name, which was Hauter and not Hunter.]

    This piece dates from around 2003 February 10. I wrote it about three weeks after the death of a legendary colleague and true friend, Rob Myslik. Rob taught at Hun for nine years, including two while I was there, and then went off to pursue his dream of being an even-more-world-class writer. He went to Missoula, MT in the summer of 2001 with Susan Bogue, the love of his life; in summer 2002, they wed. Rob came back to the East Coast in 2003 January to catch up with his relations and friends. Then, on 2003 January 21, while heading out to the Sundance Festival, Rob was involved in a tragic car accident and killed. It was devastating to many people, and I count myself among them. I wrote a quick piece that day but it took three weeks before I could truly find my voice.

    By the way, some people quibble with my opinion on the Pink Floyd connection. If you’re one, I hope you’ll keep reading anyway.

    God keep you, Rob Myslik, wherever you are now.
    -=-Bernard HP Gilroy
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  • The true America-haters

    I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time, but it turns out that Cenk Uygur got there first and said it well: The people in power, who wrap themselves in the flag, don’t really love America. They don’t even understand America — and so, not understanding it, they hate it. They hate it virulently and passionately, with all their might and will. They wish it would go away, revert to an ordinary nation. They identify America with the patch of land it happens to occupy, but they don’t grasp the true identity of America as a beacon of human dignity and freedom. Freedom offends them, unless it’s carefully circumscribed so that only the “right people” have a say.

    Here’s where he hits it dead-center:

    I mean that they philosophically never bought into the concept behind the country. America isn’t a bunch of rocks that happen to be on a certain longitude and latitude. America isn’t a bunch of people who happen to live in certain states between 1776 and 2007. America is a noble and grand idea. And it is that idea the Dick Cheneys of the world work hard to tear down every day. It is that idea that they do not trust, do not believe in and that they commit ideological treason against.

    I know that, in the next two years, there will sadly be reason to revisit and resay these fundamental truths. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one out there seeing and saying them.

  • Review: Oryx and Crake

    Oryx and Crake (a novel)
    by Margaret Atwood

    InstaRating: 4 out of 5

    In brief: Snowman is the last (traditional) human alive in a world curiously empty. He bears the secret of what happened to civilization and slowly reveals it to himself as he watches over the successor species: humans carefully designed to thrive in the ecologically-devastated world of tomorrow.

    Spoilers and a more complete review follow.
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  • Where’s Our Rosie?

    For no particular good reason, I was trawling on the Net about Rosie the Riveter, an icon from World War II. If you don’t know about Rosie, you really should check out the Wikipedia article. Another good page on Rosie can be found at the eponymous website. I’ve always liked Rosie because she represented not only American can-do spirit but — perhaps without anyone realizing it at the time — she pointed to a time when the United States would more fully live up to the ideals it claimed to be fighting for. I am always fascinated with what I call the “Gorbachev paradox”, when cynical leaders conscript high-sounding and idealistic words to cloak their pragmatic and sometimes nefarious deeds… and then get hoist up on those same words, forced to live up to them by people who’ve had the gall to actually believe the noble sentiments.
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  • Cross-comment: Does the Left “Hate” America?

    Through the Daou Report, I wandered (against my better judgment) over to Dr. Sanity to read the post “Go Wide Mr. President“. Then I read the comments and I was shocked to see something I actually agreed with, posted by someone named GnuCarSmell replying to someone named Garry:

    You have it exactly right. It is literally impossible for the jihadists to defeat America in Iraq (or anywhere else) and they know it. It is possible, however, for us to surrender. An American defeat can only be self-inflicted.

    Totally. We can only lose in the struggle against terrorism if we surrender… if we surrender our history, if we surrender our decency, if we surrender our fundamental rights and our habits of freedom. We can lose only if we parlay a losing war of choice (launched under false pretenses) into an epic struggle of us against everyone. We can lose only if we give up our history of tolerance and tradition of fair play.

    If Iraq is “the central front in the war on terror”, it is only because President Bush made it so. And if we are losing, it is only because he and his cronies completely flubbed the war they chose. The left doesn’t “hate America”. We hate seeing America made over into less than it should be, we hate seeing American soldiers squandering their lives on a war we didn’t have to fight and which our “leaders” chose to fight poorly. We hate seeing the future of our country, in a genuinely dangerous century, being decided by ideologues with willful blinders on, people who can’t “go wide” because they can’t see the imbraglio they caused without reason or justification.

    Hate America? If we hated America, we’d be cheering on the Rabid Right as it paves our way to destruction…

  • Health of the Republic down 3.3%, to 30%

    After hearing that the President of the United States has asserted his untrammeled power to read even physical mail, without warrant or other legal constraint, I have decided to move the Health of the Republic bar to 30%. It’s only a 3% shift because in the end this is only slightly more outrageous than the earlier warrantless wiretapping to which the President has already admitted. Also, today, the Democrats return to the majority and, perhaps, oversight returns to Washington.

  • Unintentionally ironic; unintentionally chilling

    During this morning (Wed Jan 3)’s Morning Edition on NPR, they ran a story on the detention of Jose Padilla. Quite without intending to, the story bespoke the parlous times and the threat to our Republic.
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  • Congress, the Koran, and Oaths

    So for about a month there’s been a tempest-in-a-teapot “raging” over the decision by newly elected Democratic Representative Keith Ellison to use a Koran in his private swearing-in ceremony. Some loudmouths, including Rep. Virgil Goode, have decried this and insisted that Mr. Ellison use the same traditional book as all previous representatives, to wit, the good old Christian Bible. Never mind that Mr. Ellison is a practicing Muslim. Never mind that there are as many “one true Bibles” as there are sects of Christianity. Never mind that no representative swears on a Bible — they take the public oath in, well, public and without swearing on any book. (Mr. Ellison plans to use the Koran at the also-traditional, private photogenic ceremony.)

    But according to The Washington Post, Mr. Ellison’s gone one further: He’s requested (and been granted) that the Library of Congress loan him a special Koran — one owned by Thomas Jefferson. How’s that for polishing the symbolism? On issues of faith and politics there are few sources more hallowed than Jefferson. Take that, Virgil Goode!

    This does raise an important question, almost unthinkable a few short years ago: What if the Democrats are finally learning how to play the symbolism game on par with the Republicans? What if the Democrats stop automatically yielding the photogenic spotlight and the symbolic high ground? What if — Heaven astound us — the Democrats have learned to deal with matters of faith in public? Can you even imagine an America where the religious right has lost its default supremacy, where the symbolism tactics cancel out and people are forced to start talking about, you know, the issues again?

    That could well be the best gift Mr. Ellison could give his country.

  • Late Night Blogging

    So it’s about 1:15 AM local time and here I am sitting at my computer starting a blog entry. A sure sign I’m becoming addicted? Probably not. It’s just one of those nights when sleep seems determined to stay away and, since once of my New Year’s objectives is to write more, this outlet seems as good as any. Fortunately for me, I don’t tend to suffer much from insomnia. It’s often the other side I have to worry about — getting out of bed in the morning, staying awake through the day. (I don’t think I’ve taken a train ride in the past three years without nodding off. Luckily this seems to afflict me only on trains.) Still, here I am now, typing away in the wee hours.
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  • The Library’s the Thing

    OK, I’m admittedly behind the time on this whole “social networking” thing. Back in my day, you used computers to avoid interacting with people, gosh darn it! And you liked it!

    But today I finally stumbled across one of these sites that might actually entice me into being (Internet) social: LibraryThing, a site where you can catalog the books you own (or read) and share them with millions of others. Then you can look for recommendations or anti-recommendations or just odd patterns. I’ve only entered a handful of books because I am fundamentally lazy. I think that, every time I start a new book, I’ll enter it plus one other. (Also, since I’m a sucker for USB gadgets, I ordered one of their CueCats. Allegedly it makes it really easy to scan-and-enter books.)

    Anyway, as a lifelong bilbiophile, I’m excited. And the sharing aspect gives me a little extra push to finally catalog my books.