Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Actually I'm Sure They're Reading Lots Of Things

But Thursday I had an alert on Facebook that I had a Message. Actually, I've gotten a lot of Messages lately, all on two topics from friends and family. So I was surprised to see a new name. And further surprised to find that this came via Afghanistan.

A Staff Sergeant in the US Army Reserves had found a copy of Writers of the Future Volume XXIV and had enjoyed my story "A Man in the Moon". That's nice. And he wanted to know if I would be willing to sign his copy for him. Sure -- always happy to sign a copy, especially to someone serving in uniform, and honored that he'd go to all the trouble from so far away. And finally next month he'll be back home in Allendale MI.

Huh. In one short message we are shown how large -- and how small -- our world really is.

And yes. Damn straight I'll meet the staff sergeant and his 13-year-old son. And sign his book. And probably print out some other stuff.

You can't write this stuff. Not even in Science Fiction.

Dr. Phil

Eight Years Out From Nine-Eleven

On the eighth remembrance of the events on 9/11 in the U.S., I note in passing that the times are changing. It would be so easy to just say, "Well, it's a new Administration and...", but that's not it. It's the eight years.

Realize that a typical age for a college freshman is eighteen. 18 - 8 = 10. Ten years old is about fifth grade. So today's freshman might've been in elementary school on 11 September 2001. While I was a pretty aware ten year old, I freely admit that I am weird and an outlier. The impact of that day's events on them would've been, I think, more about seeing the worry on the faces of the adults.

How many fifth graders would've notice how empty and quiet the skies got in the couple of days after 9/11?

I have a clear memory of Eisenhower giving a speech on television. I apparently pointed at the screen and declared, "I like Ike," which got a lot of amusement at the time. This had to have been 1960, when I was two. It is more typical, I am told, to have clear memories of events when one is three or four. 2 + 8 = 10. 4 + 8 = 12. Children who were just aware of the world around them are now finishing elementary school and are in middle school.

Because of the impact of the day's events on schools, this cohort differs from the rest of the elementary school children, who grew up or were born in a post-9/11 world. This latter group has always lived with excessive airport screen procedures and lived with a Department of Homeland Security -- an organization whose purpose I understand, but whose name still makes me uncomfortable.

The memories of 9/11 have softened and faded somewhat, jarred back into reality if one sees a really good 9/11 documentary. Quite a number have shown up on cable in the last week, but surprisingly, a quick scan of channels around 1pm EDT showed only the History Channel showing a line-up of 9/11 shows. It is interesting to me that I can still learn things about the events of that day -- one show documented the calls made by the flight attendants on American Flight 11, essentially the first salvo of a new war. A second documentary showing pictures from Ground Zero in New York brought back the apocalyptic hell-on-earth nightmare of the scene deep into the collapse and debris zones. How does an aluminum street light manage to stand upright and seemingly undisturbed in the same frame as the starkly unreal peeled metal bark of one of the World Trade Center towers?

The other thing about the post-9/11 world of 2009 is that I still see a great deal of respect and honor paid to fire fighters, soldiers and, to what I think is a lesser extent, police officers. In the last few years I've had a lot of my students at WMU either in ROTC, National Guard or having just returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one blinks when a trio of students comes into a lecture hall wearing digital camouflage fatigues or a uniform and jacket over shirt and tie. High-and-tight haircuts on men, whether in the service or not, are as mainstream as any other hair style.

Meanwhile the rest of the channels go on with TV judge shows, soap operas, sports events, reruns of comedy and reality shows, etc. As it should be, probably, recognizing that life goes on. Others may spout and vent about the sacrilege of this tragic day, but it will continue to be a generational thing. A where-were-you-on-9/11 thing. A defining moment thing. And eventually just a faded memory thing, like Appomattox or Flanders Fields or Bastogne or Desert One.

Of course on this eighth remembrance of 9/11, we still have considerable troops in the fields and have not neutralized the threats against us completely -- and perhaps never will. Hate is a commodity which can circulate with great rapidity and raining down destruction on civilians is a favorite tactic/pastime of too much of the world's violent minority of haters.

The world exists, as it has for several years, in an odd mixed quantum state of peace and war. I am not so naive as to believe that the terrorists have been stopped and will never attack us again. But Tuesday 11 September 2001 dawned as a beautiful blue sky day over much of the United States, and continued so even into the afternoon. Even after our world had changed forever.

Dr. Phil

Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009

The Voice of Reason from my childhood, legendary CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite, died just about two hours ago at age 92. In those days we had just three national TV networks in America, and while we watched the news on NBC with The Huntley-Brinkley Report and later the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, we still watched Uncle Walter, especially at major news events -- and most especially switching between NBC and CBS during the US space program. It is perhaps telling that I remember Frank Reynolds was the anchor on ABC at the time of Apollo 13, but I cannot remember the name of anyone anchoring the ABC news during the rest of Walter's tenure at CBS.

Watching some remembrances on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, everyone was talking about Walter crying twice on air -- announcing the death of President Kennedy and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. But what I remember was Walter Cronkite breaking into programming one night to announce in tears the loss of Grissom, White and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire on the pad during a test at Cape Kennedy. The moon program and JFK, brought together in one sentence. You might consider that my generation's Hindenburg. How ironic that Walter Cronkite died just shy of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing itself. Perhaps it best that his resonant voice will be played out this week and he will be remembered along with the first men on the moon -- and not drowned out by the recent weeks' tumult over Michael Jackson.

There are those who say that reporters of the news shouldn't be the news itself. A sentiment which is sorely breached by those who merge news and commentary and, may I suggest, creating news and things meant to look like news. Yet Walter is also best known for one simple commentary, where after traveling to Vietnam in 1968, he announced on the air that the war was unwinnable. As a result, President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election, citing that if he'd lost Cronkite, he'd lost middle America.

He left CBS before he was ready, that is probably true. Yet he managed to continue to do things like host the Kennedy Center Honors and the Vienna New Year's Concert. And he sailed his boats for a long time.

The Most Trusted Man in America is now gone. Would that we see the likes of his kind grace our lives again... but I fear not.

Good night, Walter.

Dr. Phil

On Turner Classic Movies Tonight

First was Above and Beyond (1952) and then The Dam Busters (1955). The first was about the Enola Gay and the run on Hiroshima, the latter about taking out German dams with an innovative "skipping stone" five-ton bomb which would get spent along the edge of the dam, fall down thirty or more feet, detonate, and use the reflection of the water blast to punch out the dam.

The obvious similarity is that both missions require a specially trained unit and a very special weapon. And both are WWII movies. After that, the differences are considerable.

The US Army Air Corps B-29 Superfortress was a high performance, high altitude, pressurized cabin bomber. It required reinforced concrete runways at an isolated island base at Titian. And the uranium fission bomb required care, radar altimeters and crew safety precautions.

The British Lancaster bomber also had four engines, but had an unpressurized box fuselage and used grass landing fields in England. Their bomb required low flight, with altitude determined by a crossed floodlight system and a simple Y-shaped bombsight.

The Hiroshima bomb was a one-off. The other planes flying that day were weather and camera planes. Indeed, a lone B-29 flying weather patrol was not considered a threat and so they were not fired upon. The dam busting bombs were used in multiple planes over multiple targets on their one mission. They were subject to ground attacks and lost several planes.

And then there's this. Part of the reason for making Above and Beyond was to show the strains on marriages in the young Air Force. To try to show that this was a necessary job, despite the secrets and the away time. As for the Brits, there's a glaring bit of controversy about the name of the black dog who served as the units' mascot -- being a black dog he was called "Nigger", a word I thought I'd never have to type in this blog or hear being uttered as a term of endearment by the white British flight crews. Certain prints for television have the dog's name either censored or redubbed as "Trigger".

Wikipedia mentions that Peter Jackson is working on a remake of The Dam Busters. They may use the actual alternate nickname of "Nigsy" for the dog -- under the theory that they are damned if they do and damned if they don't over historical accuracy versus offensive language in 2009. The Wikipedia article also points out that the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars, i.e. the original which is now Episode 4, is based on The Dam Busters.

An interesting pair of movies -- the sterile high performance of the Americans versus the gutsy lower tech British "Cook me a kipper, I'll be back in the morning" fliers.

Dr. Phil

11 September 2008

Driving to campus on the 11th is always odd, because it was on a drive to campus in 2001 that the attacks took place. Today it is clear, but high haze -- and contrails in the east. I cannot think of 9/11 without thinking of the clear, planeless skies over West Michigan for several days.

9/11

I thought I was done with the 9/11 remembrances for the day, the last being the reading of a moving piece by retired Chief Warrant Officer Jim Wright -- to which I had commented about my drive in and how the university has been affected. But as I settled in to do some late night writing, I flipped channels and ran smack into MSNBC.

They were doing once again the NBC essentially realtime version of "9/11 As It Happened". It's the realtime part which gets to me. This isn't an edited documentary, a docudrama or movie feature. This is people trying to get information, who don't know what it happening, and all the speculations and rumors. And to be very truthful, many of the commentators were very circumspect against making outrageous statements.

But it is the relentless of the clock which is the key. The voices, the phrases, the images -- the shock of it all -- which brings back a flood of emotions.

I Wasn't There, But I Was Here

Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo played very little part in all this. I know some flights were grounded at GRR in Grand Rapids. However, I was around.

Many of my students were just kids seven years ago. We are already divided into those who lived through either the event, the cities or the news, and increasingly we will be divided with those who never experienced 9/11 in realtime.

There'll be no visceral gut wrenches with certain parts of the realtime narrative. No shock in the unrealness of it all. To the those who were too young, not tuned in or coming in future generations, 9/11 will indeed just be special effects from a big action movie.

I shall endeavor to be kind to those in the future -- and continue in my role as teacher.

Dr. Phil