Tom Watson

Money and Blood

Last year, I wrote a post about Army Staff Sgt. Courtney Hollinsworth, a career NCO from my hometown of Yonkers, New York. Assigned to the 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kansas, Sgt. Hollinsworth was 26 and had spent nine years in the uniform in his country when he died during an attack by insurgents in Baghdad. He'd already done two tours - in Afghanistan and one in Iraq - when he was called up and did what soldiers always do: he went.

My post excoriated President Bush for his execrable and dishonest reasoning in a national speech, when he argued that this country has invested in the Iraq war and that the deaths of soldiers like Sgt. Hollinsworth argued for pursuing a “return on success.” In that speech, the President infamously promised to pass the war along to his successors: "The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” he told the nation.

I'm as guilty as the next guy of focusing too much heat on this little intramural squabble of ours while the meatgrinder in Iraq turns on and on - but the great thing about a blog is the open channel of communications it can create, and the surprises it can hold in store for the even the most hard-boiled authors.

I got an email this week from Specialist Rangel, who served with Sgt. Hollinsworth on his first tour in Iraq. And with his permission, I'm sharing it with readers -  it's a soldier's-eye view of the political process that we all need to listen to from time to time:

Mr. Watson - I've read your work on SSG. Hollinsworth and greatly appreciate it. Hollinsworth was a personal friend of mine that I served my first tour in Iraq with and lived with him in Germany. Its sad to see these politicians bicker over human lives. Our service members have lost hope in our country. Most like me who joined to protect our great nation only fight for our brothers in arms now. America was built on bloodshed, now we must keep her alive and continue to bleed. It sucks, there is division within our country, money and blood. There are people who would do anything to attain the "American Dream" and there are those who go unnoticed that make the ultimate selfless sacrifice to give others that chance.

I don't have much to add - "money and blood" pretty much says it all. Sometimes it's good to get one right across the chops.

The Off Season

Holgate, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

A few days in the quiet and near-solitude of an East Coast beach town in March is a tonic. Down along the Jersey Shore, the for-sale signs are as thick as the gulls, as the sub-prime collapse and sinking economy drives the mood to sell over-designed three-story beach shacks, all pastel awnings and soaring multiple decks. At the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge at the southern tip of this barrier island, the realty price is just right for early-arriving plovers - and you can still walk the beach, which closes to non-avians on April Fool's Day. The kids found some brilliant beach glass and shells, even as the wind seemed to slice across Holgate from the ghostly towers of Atlantic City to the south across the inlet. The boulevard is almost empty and the traffic lights are still on blink. Over by the bay, most of the boats still shiver under shrink wrap, and the fishing season is a month a way - the stripers may hit the surf around the time of the Pennsylvania primary.

Number 9 Dream

Nothing like a filthy sex scandal to set light to the media's puritanical tinderbox, and this time it's a trifecta: a crusading moralist, a Democrat, and a Clinton superdelegate. Yes, Elliot Spitzer's stunning fall this afternoon had the acceleration of a plummeting political suicide - one minute, it was an unconfirmed report on the Times' blog (and what does that say about deadline shifts in the digital age), and the next there were blind sources claiming the New York governor would resign momentarily. He did not, but may soon.

It all seemed remarkably well-coordinated, from the Times post to the leaked FBI affidavit to the rushed news conference, in which a pinched and dour Spitzer read a statement of regret while his wife stared at the podium and held back her tears. I suspect there's more to this story than we know tonight, but I also agree with Digby: talk of invoking the Mann Act over an expensive call girl's Amtrak ticket made the black and white B-roll of fedora-clad G-men run on that old reel-to-reel projector in my brain.

When you build your career as a self righteous crusader, you don't get the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this. But there are questions that should be asked. It is unusual to release the names of johns and it's weird that we still don't know why the feds were wiretapping on some seemingly inconsequential prostitution case in the first place. Is that something the feds spend a lot of time doing these days?

Of course, the requisite Clinton angle made the rounds almost as quickly as prurient photos of the human merch at the Emperors Club VIP website on cable - at The Field, for example, Obama blogger Al Giordano gloated that "at the moment when NY Governor Spitzer resigns, Clinton’s delegate tally will drop by one." One of his regular commenters, Mary in Seattle, pushed her belief in the audacity of hope a bit further: "The only good thing about the Spitzer deal is that some of the MSM will be rehashing the pecadillos of former politicians. ABC already is, and the last of the group is Hillary’s Bill. I don’t think this hurts, though don’t know if it helps either."

The only good thing indeed, the downside consisting of  a progressive agenda squashed, a career destroyed, a family broken, a state party without a leader - and as Chris Bowers noted, a Democratic presidential bench short one contender. But what the hey, it's good for Obama.

Elliot Spitzer came to office on a moderate platform, driven by a vague, advertising-hyped promise to change "everything." We've had a lot of big promises lately - and plenty of arrogance - but this seedy little chapter shows that mostly, the song remains the same.

Out With the Old

We close 2007 with the most appropriate video message possible - Leonid Brezhnev's historic 1970 New Year's address, the first televised January 1st address to the nation by a Soviet leader.

A strange choice, you say? We're living in strange times, I say. Old Brezhnev really livens up the joint. And he looks just like Jonah Goldberg's idea of a liberal.

Anyway, a happy New Year to my friends and readers. Not my idea of a holiday really; more of an obligation to flip the calendar and defrost Dick Clark.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out Jon Swift's truly inspired compendium of many bloggers' self-nominated best posts of 2007, my own included.

A Life Well-Remembered

Every year, I find myself engrossed in the New York Times Magazine's collection of brief epitaphs of Americans, famous and not-so-much, who died during the previous year. But when I pulled the issue from the blue plastic wrapper this morning and thumbed through it, there was a stronger, more personal reaction to one remembrance.

Matt Bai's piece captures Steve Gilliard's life beautifully, and leans on his contribution to a national discussion from his perch in East Harlem. As readers here know, I was a big Gilliard fan - we were acquaintances and occasional correspondents. Steve was generosity personified, generous with links and advice; when I launched newcritics.com in January, he eagerly signed on as an occasional contributor, planning to write about his beloved classic rock. Sadly, those few, short posts came during the early part of his final illness - but they struck me as yet another example of how it was impossible to buttonhole Gilliard. He was an angry progressive with a love for military history, a black guy who dug the Beatles and the Stones, a generous, warm-hearted misanthrope. I think Bai captured the inherent conflicts in Steve's life that made him so interesting:

It was a life both short and loud. What began with a bad cough just after Valentine’s Day became a spiraling infection that ravaged Gilliard’s vulnerable heart and kidneys, and he spent most of his last four months hospitalized. The identities he kept separate for most of his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

Please read the whole piece. I was saddened to come upon it this morning over my second cup of coffee, but also thrilled that Steve's prominence in our ongoing discussion was so well-recognized.

UPDATE: Wouldn't you know, seems to be some trouble over Bai's characterization of Steve's live and what some see as his description of a lone black blogger in an overly white blogosphere. Here's Jesse Wendel in the GroupNewsBlog (which succeeded Steve and Jen's blog after he died) and Pachacutec at FDL. Jesse writes:

Matt Bai was also wrong about Steve's life. Gilly didn't lead a lonely life. It was rich and filled day to day with his work, family, friends and sports. From his niece and nephew, his mother and father, to his co-publisher Jen, and the bloggers and friends he hung out with on a regular basis in person and on-line, this was a man who had a full, rich life.

And Pach is particularly tough on Bai: "...he keeps showing up like the guy who never really felt quite cool enough, who tried always to insert himself into the "it" cafeteria table by whatever means necessary." I think that's unfair - Matt Bai did a good thing by recognizing Steve's life in the Times' yearly "lives" issue. Now it's become a tussle over whether Gilliard's circle of blogging friends was multiracial, whether the lefty blogosphere and the Times are paternalistic, or whether some of Steve's mourner had ever been to Harlem before. Come to think of, Steve might be loving that.

UPDATE II: I like how Matt Browner-Hamlin handled this, and agree entirely with this sentiment so let his be the last word here:

Every time I spoke with him, I learned something, be it about military history, electoral successes, or Steve's unerring critique of the mainstream media. I've never met someone who responded faster to emails and I can recall debating with Steve into the wee hours over political strategy. Steve had one of the clearest moral compasses of anyone I've ever met. He was a blogger's blogger - someone who taught me how to write more clearly about what I believe by living the example himself every day.

On Firing the Gardener

We got rid of the gardener this fall, just as the leaves in the yard began their late turn to golden brown and red. This was no Mitt Romney move on our part - I've never uttered the phrase "your papers please" like some character actor in an Otto Preminger flick. We don't do police state too well, around the Watson acreage. We're not that orderly and in general terms, any new arrivals willing to do work we don't have the time for at a very reasonable rate are - as they used to be in around the Romney shack before the head of household was forced to turn into a snarling, hate-mongering national Republican, much like our formerly liberal New York City mayor - quite welcome.

No, it wasn't legal status of any sort that sent the gardener and his crew packing. Two other factors entirely drove the decision. One was the dreaded, gas-powered, super-hemi, fuel-injected leaf blower - those infernal strap-on machines than can exceed 100 decibels of Saturday-crushing roar, and infuse my stucco and screens with a thick film of organic matter. I hate them - and while we couldn't banish them from the neighborhood, we could send them from our little slice of suburbia. Now, I can just stand at the windows and shake my fist at the neighbor's gardeners - thereby indulging my love of the theatrically misanthropic, the well-loved "Mr. Wilson Snarl."

Still, the gardeners may have remained - blowing beasts and all - if not for another factor. The young 'uns. My son turned 13 on Friday, and in that coming of (teen) age arrived a moral imperative, in my mind: the importance of some physical labor, some turning of the soil for the common good of our little clan, something to sustain us on the arrable semi-urban land. For Lance Mannion, that moment involved a snow shovel:

All teenage boys aren't naturally averse to hard work.  If they were, family farms would fail after the farmer himself hit fifty, no car engines would ever get rebuilt, every marina on every lake in the country would have to shut down, and the parking lots of all the supermarkets would be stacked up with empty shopping carts.

But there are periods in most adolescent male's daily lives when a natural indolence overwhelms, when a simple request to straighten their rooms strikes them as announcement that slavery has returned, when getting them to budge off the couch to take out the trash is like trying to get a mule to climb a barbed wire fence, when handing them a pick and a shovel and helmet and sending them down into a coal mine couldn't be more onerous or unfair than pointing them out into the backyard with a rake.

And for us, it was that rake. Why, thought I, should we fork over cash to some brutes strapping the aural equivalent of a stack of Marshall amps on their backs to create a whirlwind of dust and grime just to gather a few harmless leaves. Why, the rake would do just fine, thought I. Especially with my 13-year-old wielding it.

Too many video games, too much computer, too many afternoons in front of the television, too many spectator sports, too much sloth. Why should my new teenager learn my bad habits! It was time to contribute. And besides, being a practicing capitalist, I knew it was important to link his rewards (some cash) with his action. So we agreed on a weekly retainer as a base - plus a per-bag (biodegradable, of course) bonus.

It's a form of social entrepreneurship on my part. I'm priming the pump in a growing economy, rewarding labor and energy, and saving money by not paying my gardeners. Plus, there's the lesson. Other kids may sit around as pure consumers. But you, son, will produce and you will be rewarded. (He went for this, good lad).

Gosh, Mr. Wilson. You'd think a chest-thumping, tax-cutting capitalist like Mitt Romney would have sent his own boys in the yard a long time ago? Then he wouldn't have had to undergo the sad ethnic cleansing of his landscaping staff.

Tinkering With 'Democracy'

President Bush says that General Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf "truly is somebody who believes in democracy." Perhaps he does; he just doesn't practice it. His declaration of martial law and his war on the opposition does not demonstrate that belief, but as Ralph DeMarco points out, perhaps that makes the perfect partner for this administration:

Of course, Musharraf is not the first leader whose rhetoric does not match his record, especially on fighting extremists. But, you see, the war on terror demands that today's rule of law and democracy be suspended in order to preserve the rule of law and democracy in the future (I'll bet you anything that Cheney is sitting back toasting Pervez with a glass of 30 year old Scotch every night after dinner).

Musharraf is full of contradictions. During his rule the Pakistani press has opened up and more voices are being heard. At the same time he has cracked down on the press when it suits his interests. Now it seems that some of the outside pressures have pushed Musharraf to release 3,400 detained since martial law was imposed. Let's hope that he steps down before the scheduled elections and restores the constitutional government in Pakistan. The moderates are the only ones who can save Pakistan, and they have lost all faith in Musharraf.

Ralph also reminded me that one of my personal heroes, Mukhtaran Bibi, faced up to Musharraf and his bullies. Perhaps she's the best symbol for the troubled nuclear nation.

The Great War

Lt. Thomas J. Quinlan in France 1918, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

My grandfather flew fighter planes in the First World War, and instructed the flyers of the Second World War. So I was moved by today's column by Richard Rubin in The Times on the last living combat veteran of what was once known as the Great War, 106-year-old Frank Buckles. Rubin's take:

It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

My kids were off from school this Veteran's Day, but I worked. There were no big parades, no real recognition of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. I'm not sure we honor our veterans in proportion to what they deserve. I think we hide them away all too often. Why isn't Veteran's Day a national holiday any longer?

Global Warming, Local Summer

Kelsey in October waves, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

School started six weeks ago, and pumpkins adorn many front porch in our neck of the woods. The leaves have turned their golden red hues of autumn. Yards are filled with Halloween decorations and scarecrows. but the weatherman didn't get the memo.

Summer here in lower New York State continues, little more than a week from November. This weekend, our scout troop took our overnight at Hither Hills state park in Montauk, and we'd planned for a chill that never came. [The photo above shows just how summer-like the weather was, and Kelsey took full advantage of the sun and warm surf to swim.] So we sat around and talked about global warming, but we really weren't talking about global warming. We didn't get to carbon emissions, sea levels, and desalinization of the oceans.

We talked about New York and how we've become - by consensus estimate - Virginia, or possibly farther south. The Virginia of our childhoods, that is - because the New York of our childhoods is gone, cilmate-wise. Lakes that froze over in winter don't anymore. Plants don't go dormant that once did. Summer arrives in May and stays toll November, like the south. And we can camp in 75-degree weather in Montauk in late October.

It's amazing to me how climate change has quickly moved from roll-the-eyes wonkspeak to accepted fact of life. Talk this weekend was of the virtual end of the ski industry in the lower Catskills and the mountains of Pennsylvania. And then there are the maple trees in New York State. The trees tell the story.

Modern Buzzcut

After my annual physical this afternoon at the doc's (I should be blogging for some time, thanks) I walked over to the barbershop. Let's just say that what's left was shaggy, like wispy tendrils from a failed plant. In any case, there was a change and in certain areas, I really despise change.

The barbershop is one of those areas. I want it to stay the same - four chairs, tiled floor, sports magazines and the odd Maxim, lollipops for the kids, old manual cash register, and opera on the radio. A group of older Italian men in blue coats. A certain polite quiet, punctuated only by small-talk about the weather or the stock market. A half hour of relative quiet. Okay, okay. An old school place for men, I'll cop to it. Indeed, when it's really quiet there and the Puccini is ascendant, I'll often extend the visit with a shave.

Today, a difference. The last septuagenarian barber has retired. The young guys, who only a few years ago were callow trainees (or so it seems), have taken over. And they've installed a television. Which was blaring loudly when I sat down in the first chair, some teen show on "the CW." A television. What are they thinking? Prices up a buck or two as well.

I got a decent haircut, but there was another difference. When they held up the mirror to show me the back of my head - and their handiwork - at the conclusion of the haircut, the older guys would always angle it a certain way to spare me the increasing shine emanating from the skin-white wattage of my pate. One of life's small courtesies. No more. Today, the glare was in full view.

So I ask you. What's a fella to do in this modern world?

Hanging Tree

Don Imus has been gone from the morning airwaves for four months now, and that national dialogue on race that the ad sales suits at CBS promised us still hasn't happened. Color me shocked. The I-Man's unwitty, cool dude wannabe "nappy-headed ho's" aside had Al Sharpton on the march, successfully demanding the morning man's job. Besides, it was one lame-ass departure for a man who claims Mort Sahl as one of his comedic role models.

Defended by the lawyer for Lenny Bruce - another I-fave - Imus came in for a six-figure settlement of his contract, but his name has entered the lexicon of race relations as roughly the synonym for "white man who is clueless about black people." There are nuances, depending on the particular edition of your dictionary. Liberals generally order up a secondary definition: "also, a racist scalawag." The conservative dictionary reads: "also, victim of a media witch hunt."

Meanwhile, WFAN here in New York replaced the Imus morning zoo (and its regular roster of Matthews, Russert, McCain et al) with a washed up lefty quarterback boasting less than half the pro resume of Ken "The Snake" Stabler, and a guy named Craig Carton - a shock jock in the Stern mode who made his jump from Triple-A on the back of such hilarious material as "Operation Cucha Gotcha," his humorous attempt to incarcerate Hispanics in the Garden State. Mort Sahl, indeed. You have to love the ethics of CBS management and "National Dialogue" Moonves.

There may be nothing on whilst I run a razor blade over my jowls each morning, but the discussion of race in a post-Imus world proceeds apace. Indeed, many are the mornings I miss the voice of the late Steve Gilliard and his fearless writing on the black-white divide, here in New York and elsewhere. I was wondering this week what Steve would have made of the extraordinary events in Jena, Louisiana, where a runaway prosecutor named Reed Walters and the local judiciary have kept a 17-year-old high school student in jail for nine months for his actions in attacking a white student after three nooses appeared on the notorious whites-only oak tree on the grounds of the local high school.

"I can be your best friend or your worst enemy," Walters told students at the school. "With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear."

The Jena case involving black six students charged with crimes and a group of white students facing the horror of in-school suspension is every inch the miscarriage of justice that the Duke lacrosse case was, and DA Walters' actions are as bad as the disbarred and jailed Mike Nilfong. Yet, they happened on the other side of the racial divide in this country - the political divide that lets prejudice hide under the cloak of "conservatism."

So it's not surprising that wingnut bloggers like Glenn Reynolds declared a kind of hands-off policy toward the debate over Jena (wait till all the facts come out), while others fell into paroxyms indignation over the appearance of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson down south. Michele Malkin: "I’m not going to join the knee-jerk race-hustlers in celebrating the “civil right” to beat white people unconscious to rectify institutional racism. Is this the legacy Martin Luther King, Jr., would have sanctioned?"

The insane over-charging of a minor as an adult with attempted murder (carrying a minimum sentence in Louisiana of 20 years) in an incident where the victim attended his class ring ceremony the same night did indeed have the "knee-jerk race-hustlers" out by the thousands in the streets of Jena, where letters defending the town as preserving a way of life from the 1950s are presented on the municipal website without a hint of irony. But that cluelessness (to be kind) or willing blindness (to be accurate) is endemic of at least half of the American political landscape.

In other words, Malkin's knee jerked alright - and just the way conservatives tend to flex those particular tendons when race is the topic.

It's 2007 and the gap between black and white on the right side of the political blotter couldn't be wider or more apparent. Witness the surprise registered by Bill O'Reilly when he visited a restaurant in Harlem and realized he wouldn't be accosted by thugs and subjected to gang rules.

"And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin... That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.'"

Apparently, that fear is what's keeping the major Republican presidential candidates from attending a debate moderated by the wildly popular mainstream talk show host Tavis Smiley - who has never been reported to have shouted "more iced tea, mofo!" to anyone - at historically black Morgan State University this week. John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson all snubbed Smiley and the debate will go on with the five lesser GOP hopefuls, a development that had the likes of Newt Gingrich decrying the snub as a "terrible mistake."

I think Smiley's reaction to the empty chairs he'll face at Morgan State was unblinking and correct:

"No person, black, white, or brown, Democrat or Republican, male or female, no person should be elected president in 2008 without speaking to communities of color."

And that's because race is still a problem in these United States, and too few of us want to face up to it. It tinges the national debate on immigration, it brands a scar of prejudice on law enforcement policy, and it clearly taints this administration's greatest domestic failure.

Imus has become a verb, but I for one would have been very interested to hear an honest discussion of race from a prominent - if humbled - white man's point of view. Sometimes humor unleashes more honesty than endless talking heads stacked end to end. Some of the material Larry David has used on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in particular, does the job of shining a light on a cultural gap many liberals would rather wish away into the past. David plays himself as a clueless, rich, white guy stumbling through an almost alternative cultural landscape whenever he meets someone with brown skin. It is hilarious, almost without exception.

But it also portrays a cultural divide - one that allows some Americans to wear Confederate flags without community  censure - that we all ignore at our peril.

Selling Grief and Fear

God Bless America, originally uploaded by The Fuzzy Squid.

Six years on, New York's post-9/11 world is all fading (or recurring) PTSD  , a graying supression of horrific memories that the rest of the nation won't allow. We insist on mourning in public, returning to the rhetorical pit, piling on the karmic layers. Was it a day of patriotism? It's been named such, but in the details, in the history I just don't see it. As a nation, we trifled with the clear path to retribution and briefly at that. The mastermind of the great attack lives on, and his movement - once a small band of outcasts - has metasticized in almost direct proportion to the strange and scandalous flailings of our government.

Meanwhile, our Diana-like self-rending and its attendant mass hysteria continues, though blessedly muted (no special sections in today's papers). That the memories live on, that one living American will ever forget, that no living New Yorker will ever   forgive are a stipulation to human nature. We don't need to be reminded of it by Presidential campaigns and talk show hosts. Indeed, dredging up that mass wave of grief on the same date each year does the event itself - and its very human survivors - a disservice. It's offensive to tell New Yorkers to remember, as if these grief-sellers and fear-mongers and campaign managers think that any one of us doesn't know what the number 343 stands for.

Yes, this goofy coupon for cheap fries "in honor of our fallen heroes" is a  sad commentary. So too is the request for more soldiers in the wrong country - or for primary votes - written on Twin Towers requisition forms.

On Staying Put

The 50th anniversary of Kerouac's consensus classic On the Road, and Sal Paradise's travels continue to dissolve into disappointment like my own, I find. A shocking confession lurks from a lit major, a Columbia man, a liberal, a New Yorker, and a dreamer and it must come out at last: I've never found Kerouac compelling.

It's the so-called automatic writing, spewed forth on the famous scroll, and the soul-of-a-generation ambition, I guess. Thick as mud. A mid-level blog of a book. I went back in this summer for the first time since it appeared on some long-ago reading list, and I didn't make it to Mexico with Sal and Dean.

Last night in National Airport (as all the cabbies still call it, despite the re-naming for the Gipper a while back), I was thinking about the modern road and musing on Kerouac's famed cross-country journey inspiring many imitators in the years since. I've never bummed it across the continent, alas. I tend to fly, stay in decent but unfancy hotels, and still arrive at either end entirely exhausted, and feeling no more noble or enlightened by the process. Sometimes it's the lighting, of course. The illumination of airport concourses is among the sickliest in the world - why, the last time I was in DC, it made Tim Russert look positively ancient as he checked in on the shuttle ahead of me.

Then too, I can be easily annoyed by  many different kinds of people. All of them loud. There was this fellow on the train the other morning, early. Met a friend on the platform, and proceeded to blather on at high volume, face turning red and arms gesticulating like a crazy man, the entire way to Grand Central. Property values in Bronxville. His job (God preserve anyone who has to work with this lout). His investments. I know the names of his wife, his kids, his firm, and his favorite porn star. And if I wrote them here he might well be identified. But I'll let the fool go, unless I get stuck one seat away next week at 7 am. Then he's blog meat.

Open question to Bobby, my b-roll conductor friend from Metro-North: how do you deal with people like this? The entire car wanted him to shut up. People exchanged knowing looks. One lady kept shushing him. but he rattled on, oblivious, like a fat cicada in summer. What's the correct procedure, Bobby?

Some of the taxi drivers went on strike in New York this week. Strange issues, though: GPS tracking systems and credit card scanners in cabs. I don't care about the former, but the latter would be convenient. Except that the city wants the drivers to pay the credit card fees. I think that's wrong, and wouldn't mind a 5% surcharge for the convenience of swiping a card, much as I often fork over a couple of bucks to take my own money out of somebody else's bank. The margin on cab work is thin enough, and most drivers don't own their own vehicles or medallions. One of my favorite columnists, Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News, said it's Bloomberg elitism and a battle for the drivers' soul.

Then there was the guy at LaGuardia yesterday who asked me for $300 as I checked in. His story: he was in town for a big interview for an engineering position. He'd checked out of his nice hotel (he showed me a dog-eared receipt) but had missed his flight. He offered me his driver's license if I'd run over the ATM and hand him $300 in cash for a room. (This was 10 am, mind you). "I'm a good guy, it'll be a mitzvah. I'm Jewish, you can trust me." I demurred, as most would. He instantly lashed out: "you prick, you balding prick. Get some Rogaine, asshole!" And he shuffled off.

Nice. I'd failed the humanity test. The airline staff at the desk said he'd been hanging around pestering people as they arrived, and they changed my middle seat to a window - in the emergency exit row. I stretched out all the way to our nation's capital, and meditated on the comely inverse of the wonders of travel. Staying put.

The End of Summer

We did the Revolution in reverse this summer - the first trip took us to Yorktown in southeastern Virginia, and our last foray brought us through Lexington and Concord. It was a driving summer, hundreds and hundreds of miles and dozens of hours spent on Interstate-95 and its tributaries up and down the east coast. Those memories are a wicked blur: big box stores, rest-stops, exit signs, tunnel entrances and bridge abutments. From south of Richmond to north of Boston, the Eisenhower Highways were thick with semi-trucks, road debris, and buses. A nasty business that gets the job done. But a thin memory.

The names were better.

All were either Indian or Anglo, English or Native American. Towns and places named for royalty or titled Englishmen: Yorktown, Mount Vernon, Jamestown, Georgetown, Lake George, Gloucester, Cape Ann, Essex, Williamsburg. The simple English-language place names: Brant Lake, Eastham, Provincetown, Beach Haven, Rockport, Cape Cod. And the indigenous names: Annisquam, Saratoga, Mashpee, Barnegat, Sacandaga, Adirondack, Nauset.

This is old country and we rambled about in history. This last jaunt (a free-loader's delight) was a contrast - only five days and more than 600 miles of driving cobbled to gorgeous shorter days in the deeper color contrast of late summer. The first two in a favorite spot on the Annisquam River, in an old fishing cottage on the water. Watching the tidal changes and the nautical traffic was better than anything on cable this summer - constantly changing, filled with personality. We took the boat over to the beach, hit the flea market, ate several pounds of lobster each, and worked it off in the kayaks. Cape Ann is an oft-overlooked summer destination, north of Boston and packed with history and this was our third visit with our good friends Doug and Suzanne and their kids.

Then a run down the coast, around Boston to the bigger Cape. First though, an hour's side trip to Concord and a brief stop at Minute Man National Historic Park, part of our history theme this summer. We raced through Concord - there goes Emerson's house, hey was that Hawthorne's place - got a few pictures by the Minute Man statue and merged back onto I-95.

It's a long way out on the Cape to Eastham, where we spent two great days with Steve and Carla. More lobster and two beaches - Coast Guard Beach (part of the Nauset Beach section of the incredible Cape Cod National Seashore) and First Encounter Beach on the bayside, where the native Indians first encountered the pilgrims in 1620 - followed by a long shopping stroll through Provincetown. We didn't hit every gallery, but we came close.

A huge moon near full lit the way back along the giant dunes, and the next morning we drove the great, winding arc from out on the Cape, around Block Island Sound, around Long Island Sound, and down into New York - and the end of summer.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Light verbiage in these parts till next week. We're on the final turn of a summer that has put me behind the wheel for a good thousand miles at least. Lots of rest stops, from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Northway and the MassPike. Too many trucks. But tonight we're in Gloucester on Cape Ann, overlooking the Annisquam River - a fine harbor, many boats under sail and power, and an old house full of friends and children. Lobster rolls and a sunset. Heading to the Cape on Sunday for more of the same, visiting and such (don't you dare call it freeloading, pallie). The final long weekend of a strange summer. Then it's on the road...again.

Shore Leave

I'm an indifferent vacation blogger. Sometimes, the change in setting inspires me and I hunt up some bandwidth and post, but other times, I leave the laptop in the bag. I'm not a post-everything guy anyway; my Twitter stream runs dry all the time.

Lance Mannion is a great vacation blogger. In the years we've known each other, I've come to look forward to his annual Cape Cod sojourn. Somehow, Lance always manages to overhear an interesting discussion down at the coffee shop, or find a decrepit fishing boat to write about.

Blue Girl's also a vacation blogger, but not so much a completist (more like me, actually). Her posts have an enthusiasm about actually being off - from work that is. Bet she's always organizing hikes, and outings, and visits to interesting new restaurants. And when she hits the long, long road from the upper midwest to the beach - she brings the blogging equipment:

I'm taking my laptop so I can remain connected to the world.  Because if I didn't, I would get anxious and worried.  And Stressed.  Out.  I'd feel lost and out of the loop.  And I would hate that.

Jennifer at Saying Yes turns off the blog - but seems to be up for sneaking back from time to time. James Wolcott leaves the laptop and picks up the binoculars on his September journeys to Cape May.

Well, I'm at the shore myself, a few exits up the Garden State from Cape May, in Beach Haven, where a few old Victorians compete for air and light among the late building boom. Longish weekend, just a quick getaway really - to the place I've been visiting for nearly four decades now. Drove down late Friday night (after battling a ghoulish 24-hour virus) and we'll head back on Monday.

Truth is, I like it here better in September in October - or even in February, when it's silent, except for the wind and all the traffic lights are set to blink. Late August creates a jam of people and vehicles. Put down a blanket and open a chair, and somebody puts one so close to you, you may as well be fighting for a seat on the four train.

More for-sale signs on the pebble lawns, too - and I suspect many, many more to come as the sub-prime exotic mortgage market falls into the ocean and takes this real estate bubble with it. Foreclosures on second homes are likely, the local papers say. Some of the pols here worry aloud about the tax base. That may be an extreme scenario, but I do think the over-valued tar paper and two-by-four sand palaces may take a value beating for a while.

There's another factor that may lower property values here - less property. The beach isn't as wide as it used to be, despite many millions in Corps of Engineer replenishment projects. Back in 1990, James Titus of the Environmental Protection Agency (under Dubya's Daddy, please note) worried about the gradual rise in sea level stemming from greenhouse emissions and he focused in on this narrow barrier island in New Jersey - the very spit of land I'm sitting on now.

His report makes fascinating reading and his conclusions aren't pretty: either allow erosion as the ocean rises and "migrate" the island across the bay toward the mainland (thereby costing ocean-front taxpayer their multi-million dollar investments) or raise the island in place, with sand and pilings, and perhaps a series of dikes. His view was that narrow beaches would eventually slow down development anyway, as recreational opportunities would be curtailed. Of course, in the 17 years since his report was released, Long Beach Island has been in non-stop development mode - tear-downs and build-ups, and all the vacant lots I played in as a kid covered up with shingles and hideous pastel paint.

The beach was narrow today, as I popped Quadrophenia (what else?) on the iPod and hoofed it between jetties. On some stretches, the breakers rolled into edges of the dunes. What's next - foamy seawater washing under beachfront homes like in Westhampton? I'm not sure, don't know how long it will take. But the big, wide beach here of my younger days has disappeared. Doesn't make for the brightest vacation blogging.

Stars and Bars and Cars

Coming upon some faux Confederate regalia in an upstate New York rodeo souvenir shop, the scouts were understandably outraged. So they discussed their horrific discovery (a belt buckle and some flags) in heated terms along the Thruway on the way back from camp.

"They shouldn't sell that stuff. It's wrong."

"The Confederates were brave but they were traitors."

"Yeah, but some of their generals were better than ours."

"They wanted slavery."

"Yeah, in chains."

"But the Civil War was about states rights."

"No it was really about slave states and keeping their slaves. It was economic too. All wars are economic. Thatr's what Mr. Nameredacto told us."

"Yeah and Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. Then they joined the army and fought."

"That was a great movie."

"What movie?"

"Glory. It was great."

"Yeah but they wasted those guys in that battle."

"The Civil War was like that. Old-fashioned tactics and modern guns."

"Gods and Generals was good too. Dad, can we go to Gettysburg?"

"It still doesn't answer the question."

"What's the question?"

"Why are they selling Confederate junk in New York?"

"Yeah, we won."

Lake in the Adirondacks

Adirondack lake, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

From summer camp, early in the evening, August, 2007.

The Muddy Walden of a Life in the Woods

Home for a week, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

There is a purity of experience that some ascribe to wilderness solitude, an almost-philosophy of transcendental escape and isolation that lies two-to-a-bunk with the mourning of mankind's simple, pastoral ways. Great American minds from Jefferson to Thoreau have poured forth scratched lines of sorrow at city life and industry, praising the democratic simplicity of life on the land.

It is all a fantasy, of course, a vacation from reality - as a week in scout camp teaches better than the philosopher's text. Only teamwork builds the kinds of communities that allow for the leisure time to think and write; and only those communities and their advances extend human life expectancy and health, all the better for consuming and discussing those deep thoughts of nature scrawled by the campfire.

I did no writing over the past week and was as close to off the grid of the wired world as I've been in a decade. But as I waited tables, scrambled down trails, tied down tent flaps in the rain, policed fires, picked up trash, and used the foul latrine, some form of wisdom did drop in with the pine needles - 15 boys and five parents stuffed into musty canvas tents in the Adirondacks for a week of rather noisy solitude was a worthwhile endeavor for this city slicker and his two lads.

For all the work of muddy chaperoning and the discomfort of cold, wet nights and early morning chores - and that horrendous latrine - there were moments that won't fade with the grime. Playing guitar and mandolin (an instrument that  was my self-improvement project for the week) around the fire late at night. The rafting trip down the Sacandaga River. The horseback trip high above Lake George. Sharing a tent and its duties with my nine-year-old, while his older brother went about his routine with the rest of the boys.

Best of all was the teamwork of the unit, all 20 of us. There was no choice but to pitch in; no option but to suck it up and make the best of occasional glitches and drenching. All in all, it was an argument against isolation - one that convincingly stated and support the idea that a life in the woods is best lived with others.

Into the Woods

Expect the silence of a mossy glade deep in the Adirondacks here  over the next week - because that's where I'll be, shepherding twenty boys at camp, sleeping in musty old canvas tents and getting ourselves as filthy as possible.  Bug juice, mac and cheese, and s'mores are on the menu for the next week, in between catching frogs, riding old nags, climbing hills, tilting canoes, and marveling at massive bugs of every biting variety.

So this blog goes silent -  except for your comments, and keep 'em coming - over the next week. I'll return (hopefully) from my Walden with the wisdom of nature permeating every little line of the RSS feed.

In the meantime, please revel in the blogroll to your right - some incredible writers there - and tune in on Thursday evening at the recharged newcritics, where the fabulous M.A. Peel will be hosting our weekly Mad Men soiree in my absence.

Right, where's that Deep Woods Off...

It's Grand to be Tom Watson

Oh, not me. Well it is actually, at times. Much of the time. Certainly when I'm with friends and family. Or behind a good book. Or in front of a decent ballgame. But not for the purposes of this post.

No, I meant this fellow. And this fellow as well.

The first Tom, who hails from Kansas City, showed his continued mastery of major golf tournaments in Britain, by winning his third senior British Open championship at age 58 yesterday. With his five regular tour Opens, that makes eight major titles in the British Isles for Tom Watson, my favorite golfer.

The other Tom, who hails from Britain, is a Member of Parliament, specifically a party whip for new PM Gordon Brown, he of the competent, Iraq-stand-down wing of the party. His political team easily swatted aside an over-hyped play for a by-election seat by the slick Tory leader David Cameron, and drove conservative UK bloggers nearly crazy in the process.

Well done, lads.

Mind The Gap

So the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 14,000 today and across zillions of flat screens came the breaking news. Was there ever a bulletin so devoid of meaning? The asset class with asset classes already knows up to the minute or so what its money is doing. And for the rest of the nation, fourteen thousand doesn't carry much zing. The Dow is an indicator of one group of investments - the stock of thirty large public companies - but it's not an indicator of economic wealth.

Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Democratic candidate John Edwards a good question:  "Can you get an audience for poverty or are people too obsessed with the Dow Jones going up?"

Edwards said yes, and pointed to the rare instance in our public consciousness when Americans did face up to the fact that in history's richest country, many still live in real, gut-clutching poverty. He referred to New Orleans, of course, where nearly three years ago now government abdicated its responsibility and where entire neighborhoods continue to lie in ruin and decay. Edwards is trying to broaden the attention paid to American poverty with his eight-state anti-poverty tour - and to zap his flat-lined poll numbers in the process.

Good for him. One of the little-reported stories in this country is "the gap." Working poverty in our culture is like cancer and not just because it's spreading - because everyone knows someone who's living in it. Perhaps it's a poor relation, or an employee, or the guy running the little store down the block who works 15-hour days and has no savings. Or it's you.

As Edwards said today in Cleveland: "Poverty has many faces. It's everywhere."

I've been thinking about this a lot, especially this summer, as people who can move to take their ease.  The other day, I was having a beer with a Jed Emerson, a brilliant guy who coined the term "blended value" to measure investments where the return isn't just monetary (sometimes this is referred to as the double bottom line and it's a driving force behind the social ventures movement). We were discussing all the innovations in American philanthropy, the large-scale commitments, and some of the hurdles that remain before putting money to work for a better society becomes a more widespread notion. He asked me what I worry about and I hesitated a bit - but I had to mention the gap between rich and poor in the United States. All the best-funded social movements will founder if it continues to expand, and public attitudes will harden and yes, react.

As Edwards said on his tour: "People who are working and trying to do everything they can to support their families are living at or near the poverty level. And that's not right."

I've seen this in some of the research conducted by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank where I sit on the board. DMI frames its policy reports around the middle class broadly defined, with a strong focus on the working man and woman. It's not a socialist or anti-capitalist notion to worry about the distribution of wealth and its current lack of balance. James Webb, one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate, answered George Bush's state of the union address this year by arguing that the "measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street."

No less of a sturdy capitalist than the country's richest man explicitly agrees. Giving the Harvard commencement address last month, Bill Gates argued that "humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.  Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement." His godfather in wealth accumulation (and bridge strategy), Warren Buffett, has repeatedly called for keeping the American tax on inheritance to redistribute wealth and encourage meritocracy; doing otherwise, he argued, would be like "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics."

David Mixner, whose blog is a wonderful read (if just for the Walden-like wildlife tales), sees trouble brewing on our social commons and I'm inclined to agree. Mixner fingers the stingy minimum wage as major policy culprit, and makes a strong point:

Most Americans desire the dignity of work and are desperate to improve the lives of their children. They work long hours and still are unable to find shelter or feed their children...The fact is that some of the poorest people in America are its ‘working poor’. These are Americans working for the minimum wage, with no insurance and no daycare for their children.

Ah, insurance. That's where the growing restlessness out there among Americans who realize they've been voting against their own economic interest, those many millions who feel left out of the glitzy new Gilded Age chronicled so brilliantly in Robert Frank's Richistan, may well hang the noose over the heads of politicians. John Edwards is right to call attention to the poverty in America that's hardly lurking in the edges, but lives in plain site. As Edward Wolff, a New York University professor and expert on the wealth gap, told USA Today last fall: "If you don't counteract the extreme inequality trends, I see some social upheaval coming. That's my worst fear."

Wolff is far from alone, and closest safety valve is health care, which devastates the uninsured and burdens a fraying system ill-prepared - even with a boom in philanthropy - to overcome. My not-so-bold prediction here is that some of the biggest, wealthiest names will reach for that steam-lever in this election cycle to avoid societal blowback. The wealth gap is putting universal health care back on the table, and don't be surprised if it gathers steam well before next fall - with some very prominent and successful capitalists behind it.

Names on the Wall

Names on the Wall, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

This is not the wall to end all walls, beautiful as it is. We'll need another one of these, sadly. I took this in Washington last week with my family.

Well, I'm Southbound

(Note: Updated, several times, below. I've decided to do one post for this trip)

Clyde's last night was a bit rich after a long, hot day of driving and then riding the rivers of water vapor that hung in the stale, swampish air over the simmering National Mall. The crab tower, the crab cakes, the beer. Heavy, too heavy, before the warm window-shopping walk through Georgetown back to Foggy Bottom and the hotel.

Still, when the little guy pointed and shouted, "hey look, there's Abe!" it made my day. Yeah, I'm on one of those fatherly journeys straight out of the Griswold Playbook - Washington, Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown - a journey on which every turnoff overlooks a battlefield of stunning 140-year-old hatred and bloodshed. Grit my teeth, gas up, and head out.

"Aw, they'll never forget it, Tom," said one my friends in the office last week. And she's right, of course. My back and barking arches won't forget it either.

And the weird thing is, this is a city I spend a fair amount of time in during the rest of the year - wearing a suit and tie, taking meetings, talking to clients and colleagues. Humping around in baggy shorts and sneaks wearing an old Max's Kansas City t-shirt means I'm here in disguise. For one, I drove here, pounding pavement with rubber all the way down 95. "Delaware doesn't look like much, Dad," said the little guy. And he's right (though my EZ-Pass statement shows an automatic incorporation I must've racked up at 60 mph outside Wilmington). And I really hit the worlds-colliding mode when I did an NPR interview in shorts (the artist and the kids watched through the glass).

Today, it was the museums. Air and Space the terrific kid-pleaser it always is; I commune with my  Spad-flying grandfather of Great War service, who I never met but whose presence I've always felt. The kids hit the simulators. The National Gallery for Jasper Johns drawings and the odd Winslow Homer. [Note: free and so much better run than the sadly declining Met].

Yesterday it was memorials - Lincoln, Vietnam, and World War Two - which I visited for the first time since making a small contribution at the behest of Tom Hanks (I got a personalized Dear Tom letter and all) a few years back. It was emotional, for one good reason - there's going to be another memorial going up on the Mall during our lifetimes. As Maya Lin's jagged wall slices its black slab of names through the earth to emphasize only the earthy sacrifice of the Vietnam War - not the phony "success" some revisionists are now peddling - so too will there be a national hat-tip to the dead of Iraq.

We know not how many.

***

Picked up the 12-year-old at American University - he was attending a junior leadership conference for pre-teens, which included a trip to Harpers Ferry to learn about John Brown and slavery and the spark that set off the Civil War. Then we drove down the still-gorgeous George Washington Memorial Parkway through Alexandria and on into Mount Vernon to commune with the greatest U.S. President.

Yes, greatest.

My friend Ray and I were debating the top Commanders in Chief the other night at his place in Maryland, and we both came up with Washington as No. 1.  (I've got Lincoln in the two spot, with FDR taking the bronze - everyone else is second-tier at best). Most Americans go with Lincoln. but Washington gets my vote because he so willingly gave up power after to astutely acquiring it - and generally using it well.

At Mount Vernon, the most brilliant place to bring a curious child on the eastern seaboard, Washington really comes alive. For one, the fantastic new visitors center now features three life-sized figures of Washington - as a 17-year-old frontiersman, the 45-year-old General, and the 58-year-old President. They were created by a team of artists working from the life mask of Washington, his actual clothing, and hair samples.

But it's the house that brings Washington to life: he built it from a small farmhouse he inherited and it still feels as if the General will return home from an evening ride, hand his reins to a slave, and walk into the study. Further, the house and ground are run by the nonprofit Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and they have been since the 1870s - the commitment to Washington's legacy here is extraordinary.

Thunder rolled down the Potomac as we piled back into the Honda and rolled south. On I-95 between DC and Richmond, every exit sign is a market of death or glory from the 1860s. Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Mechanicsville.

But our destination is the 1770s, not the 1860s, to it's to the Rockefellers' monument to Colonial charms that we retire.

***

Williamsburg was also a Civil War battleground of some considerate size. On May 5, 1862 Joe Hooker's invading Union force ran into James Longstreet Confederates at the start of the ill-fated Peninsula Campaign, an early attempt to invade Virgina, capture Richmond, and end the traitorous adventure.

But the Civil War is not really in vogue on this peninsula. When the Rockefellers bought up property around old Williamsburg in the 30s, the moved the monument to Civil War dead from in front of the old colonial palace to a side street. Then then tore down every building constructed after the Revolution, and began rebuilding what never existed: a kind of eye-pleasing colonial Xanadu that celebrates a sanitized version of American history.

Thing was, they left out the black man. Decades before the cowardly judicial liar John Roberts broke the vow of his Senate confirmation and abandoned Brown vs. Board of Education as settled law, the arriviste city fathers of Colonial Williamsburg didn't admit African-Americans to their carefully reconstructed taverns to dine amidst the vacationing white man.

I was thinking of Roberts and his legal activists - Kennedy clearly had a pang of conscience when he wedged his tassel-loafered foot in the door to preserve some vague notion of educational affirmative action - when I listened to the re-enactors here at Williamsburg. These days, there's an attempt at honesty (though slavery is not as front and central in this reconstructed town as it is at Washington's plantation; there, the story is told in cold, honest and brutal terms, despite Washington's historic reputation as a "good" master who detested slavery and freed his men and women after his death).

You see, so much is so recent. And trips like this one reinforce my recurring feeling that the past is very near.

I often play this mental game of generations. Growing up, I was very close to my grandmother, who was born in 1895 in New York. Civil War veterans were contemporaries of adults living when she was born. The last veteran of the American Revolution died in 1869. The last Civil War veteran died in 1958. When my father was born, the oldest Civil War veterans were in their 80s. The oldest former slaves were in their 70s.

And the last American slave died in 1979 at age 137. Or maybe it was 1948. Accounts vary, and records can be unreliable.

The point is, the past is near.

Reconstructing it can remind us of that fact. Not that reconstructed history impressed the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who blasted the historical Virginia Disneyland in a 1965 Times article:

Williamsburg is an extraordinary, conscientious and expensive exercise in historical playacting in which real and imitation treasures and modern copies are carelessly confused in everyone's mind. Partly because it is so well done, the end effect has been to devalue authenticity and denigrate the genuine heritage of less picturesque periods to which an era and a people gave life.

Huxtable also hated South Street Seaport, Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and the renovated immigration hall at Ellis Island. I sympathize, but I've also got history-hungry children. They enjoy the march into the past; indeed, they embrace the dive into fantasy, a version of the past in tri-corner hats and leggings. They know it's not real, no more than Harry Potter or Gandalf are real. Still, there is some insight gained, however idealistic the view. And when the horses walk their clip-clip down cobble-stoned lanes and red coats pitch their camp on the village green, that gap with the past closes just a bit.

Because the past is near.

***

Lying under a 200-year-old oak to get out from under the late afternoon southern sun while you chug ice-cold Chownings Tavern root beers with your 12-year-old as  a bunch of summer soldiers works at 18th century musketry -  a wonderful thing.

***

Later, the 12-year-old says simply: "Dad, I want to enlist."

We stop for a moment on the colonial street.

"Run that back."

"I want to enlist in one of the re-enactor regiments someday."

"Oh, okay."

But it's not. How to begin.

"You know there are real soldiers out there fighting and dying for a cause that may not work out."

"Yeah, I know."

"So, let's just think about this. Is it okay to join a fake army when the real one's getting beat up - again, for something that may be wrong. But they're our soldiers."

"Yeah, they could be us, Dad."

"Right. But they're not. We're on vacation at a fancy resort. The food is terrific."

"And they're firing blanks."

"Right. Blanks."

"But I still think it's okay, Dad, because they teach kids about history. They reach people where we came from."

"You may be right. So you still want to enlist."

"Maybe some day."

***

Today, we visited Redoubts 9 and 10 just outside of Yorktown, Virginia. From a military history perspective, these grassed-over hillocks are among the most important patches of ground in American history.

These earthen defensive works were the settings for brutal carnage in October, 1781 - when French and American soldiers put the defending British troops to the bayonet and took the strategic high ground on the British left flank along the York River in a swift night raid. The French took Redoubt 9 and the Americans - led by a central-government loving New Yorker who modern-day  conservatives foolishly look fondly upon - stormed Redoubt 10, closest to the York. (It was the start of Lt. Colonel Alexander Hamilton's fame).

Taking the redoubts effectively ended the Revolutionary War and were the last feat of arms under General George Washington. A day after the redoubts were taken, British Commander Lord Cornwallis realized that with American guns a mere two hundred yards from the British lines and a French naval blockage locking down the Chesapeake, his situation was hopeless; he ordered the surrender of 7,000 men and their arms.

Yorktown is a small battlefield - two major offensive lines and one major defensive line, all surrounding a still-small town by the York River a dozen miles from Williamsburg and across the peninsula from Jamestown. You can stand on Redoubt 9 and see the hopelessness of Cornwallis's position. We also drive out to Surrender Field, a mile from the Yorktown lines, where the British surrendered their arms and colors.

Then we drove into Yorktown for crab, and a view of the pleasure boats. Cornwallis didn't have it that good.

***

One American haunted this trip, rode with us every mile, showed his great character on every field and street and crossroads. Washington, of course. We didn't plan it this way, but crossing the George Washington Bridge this afternoon, we all exclaimed: "Washington, again!"

Indeed, I gave an impromptu lecture (yes, the kids suffer these - barely). The great gray bridge, I blathered blearily after seven hours on I-95, was constructed at roughly the scene of another key episode in Washington's life. A retreat is certainly less glorious than a victory of arms, but this retreat was no less important to the fledgling American nation than the strangling of Cornwallis at Yorktown. When Washington fled from Fort Lee in the fall of 1776 - the last in a long line of retreats that included Brooklyn, Harlem Heights, and White Plains - he kept his army (and the newborn republic) alive, even if just barely. The British missed their incredible chance at a knock-out blow. And Washington emerged the victor five years later.

And then he gave up power, resigning his commission at Annapolis. After presiding over the difficult Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he became the unanimous choice as President. After serving two terms, he again willingly gave up power. And thereby, with a force of personal will that matched his feat of arms, Washington established the American precedent of a peaceful transfer of executive power - some say that's the real American revolution.

Even in these difficult times, we can anticipate a peaceful transfer of power in roughly 18 months. Even Dick Cheney, the corrupt and criminal manipulator of American power, will give it up when his successor is sworn in. Not even he could possibly imagine a grab for dictatorial powers. And that's all on the Big GW, the man who could have been the King of America (apologies to Elvis Costello).

All along the way,  we could see the  Washington legacy - in the capital city he planned before his death, at Mount Vernon, at Williamsburg - the colonial capital where Washington met with his planter peers, was disappointed by the British in his soldier's career, and where he received his commission to the Continental Congress - and at Yorktown.

Washington has had worthy successors, and he has had men following his the office he occupied first who are lesser leaders than the lowliest soldiers in his rag-tag army - and certainly not as valiant. But he established the great American precedent. Further, he embodied another American ideal: self-improvement. Like Franklin and Adams and Jefferson, Washington was a social and economic climber. He built and he invented. He was an entrepreneur, and he was open to radical ideas - ideas with the power to change the world.

When the British laid down their weapons at Yorktown in October, 1781, the British military bands were quite careful with the tune they chose to play as the defeated army marched from its camp. They played The World Turned Upside Down, an old English ballad. And they played in odd but definite tribute to George Washington and the new American nation. Perhaps the Marine band should consider it for a cold, January day early in 2009.

Pre-Murdoch Ranting at WSJ Scorns U.S. Troops

With 3,500 dead in the fast-descending hellfire of Iraq, there is one man the opinion-mongers on the right do not want to leave behind on that sacred battlefield: Scooter Libby. Yes folks, in a sickening rant that quite literally spits on the grunts doing the fighting and dying in George Bush's war, Journal guest columnist Fouad Ajami equates a paper-pushing perjurist with fallen American troops. The column is entitled "Fallen Soldier: Mr. President, do not leave this man behind," Ajami actually brings himself to type the following paragraph - and the Journal's editors, sniffing Murdoch several floors above their heads, actually bring themselves to post it:

In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

Ajami is one of the most politically influential Arab-American intellectuals of his generation, a confidant of Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relation. He was a war hawk, and clearly remains one. Dick Cheney cited his "expertise" in Middle Eastern affairs when he said in a famous 2002 speech that the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans."

Like a lot of the conservative think-tankers who got us into this war, Ajami has no clue as to the blood and sacrifice of troops on the ground and their families back home. If he did, he could never have seriously written this sentence:

Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.

This &quo