"The War"

Like many others, I suspect, this week Ann and I watched the PBS series on World War II. Well, truth be told, we watched part of it. I hope it doesn't sound unpatriotic, but it got to be a bit much, and by Wednesday we began drifting away. Sticking to it for the whole series was just more of a commitment than we were ready to make, so we'd leave it on and watch sporadically through the evening as we turned our attention to other tasks.

Don't get me wrong. "The War" was a moving and apparently reasonable recounting not only of what actually happened, but also of what its impact had been back here on the home front. It was a war fought not just by the military but by everyone who bought War Bonds and counted ration stamps, who blanketed windows during blackout drills, and who learned the sound of air raid sirens. (Interesting to compare this to the current war.) Like all the other works which Ken Burns and crew have done, the program was powerful. We particularly appreciated the absence of historians and other experts, and found the personal recollections of ordinary folks to be especially moving, more so because they caused us to do some recollecting of our own.

My own memories of WWII are pretty hazy. (I was eight years old at the time of Pearl Harbor.) Most of them are not my remembrances of actual events, but of my parents' reaction to what was going on: cutting short our Stone Harbor vacation when Poland was invaded, moving to New York City when dad became involved with the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, a rare moment of tears on my mother's face when the news broke of FDR's death, the wild celebration around the Columbia University campus when the Navy V-12 students heard of the war's end.

More mundane recollections, but far more personal, included remembering the boring tasks of flattening tin cans and peeling tinfoil from gum and cigarette wrappers for recycling into we knew not what, knitting squares which were supposed to be used for some unknown war-time purpose, the Victory Garden dad had us work in but which never produced much more than a few scrawny radishes, and memorizing the silhouettes of the German airplanes, with pre-adolescent laughter about the Fokkers.

I remember the Blue Star flags in the windows, sometimes turning into Gold Stars, and never thought that the family would two generations later have one for our own grandson who's now in Baghdad. I remember going to the movies and cheering for our guys during the March of Time newsreel, our only graphic of the war. Most of all do I remember mom's tearful reaction to the news of Hiroshima's bombing, when she suddenly realized what her husband, my dad, had been doing in New York.

Although I served my time in the Marine Corps, I'm not, in the usual course of things, much of a fan of wars. I'd lived here nearly 30 years before going onto the battleship North Carolina, coaxed there by excited grandchildren, and I know that the canonization of the "Greatest Generation" is a new definition of hyperbole. Nor have I ever understood the basic differences between kamikaze airplanes and suicide bombers and high altitude bombing. War is, I know, something that falls under the category of a necessary evil, or the lesser of two unattractive alternatives, but it ain't pretty.

So for me, perhaps the greatest gift of "The War" is that it didn't sentimentalize or sermonize, it just told the story. And a powerful story it was, and is. I'm glad it was told.

Puzzlement

Some people are serious puzzle fans. Hard core puzzlers. Addicts, you might call them. There may be, for all I know, a Twelve Step program for them. In its milder form, puzzles are no doubt great fun for lots of people, a way to be doing something without actually doing something, so that the cultural Calvinism which says busyness is a sign of superior virtue can be achieved with an absolute minimum of effort. Puzzles are, in other words, good for you.

The wholesome lady pictured above is a demonstration of how easily puzzles can control us. Ann has never been much of a puzzle person. She'd rather spend her free time painting or reading, but she got hooked on a 700 piece monster (actually, turns out it was a 697 piece monster, but that's another story) that spent several weeks developing, emerging first on the dining room table, reaching mid-life on the living room coffee table, finally ending its life covering half of the breakfast bar. It was always, "Just this one more piece", and we nearly turned the house upside down looking for those three lost pieces. We both breathed a sigh of relief when all the pieces (well, 697 of them anyway) were in place.

Nor have I ever considered myself a connoisseur of jig saw puzzles, or puzzles of any type, for that matter. They always reminded me of golf and its perpetual search of perfection. Mother enjoyed working the New York Times crossword (in ink, yet), but I always stopped in frustration or boredom, whichever came first.

Then daughter Jennifer introduced me to Sudoku, and now I'm the one who's hooked.

It began, harmlessly enough, with the "Easy" ones in the newspaper, ramped up to the booklets in the supermarket checkout rack, and now I download them a couple dozen at a time to print and hold in a clipboard where I do one a day. (Does that sound like the familiar trail to degradation?) I buy mechanical pencils by the 12-pack, work the hardest level I can find, and have been known to ignore phone calls, delay meals, and skip responsibilities in order to finish the darn thing. There are even newer and more diabolical forms known as "Killer Sudoku" and "Kakuro", but that sounds far too ominous. A serious addiction, indeed, and now I'm part of the puzzle world.

Another manifestation of this phenomenon is the publication by the New York Times of "Picture Puzzles", which quickly shot up to #1 on the Best Seller list. According to its promo advertising, it's "the puzzle craze that's sweeping the nation", but as near as I can tell it's a rehash of the old grade school puzzle where you tried to find the differences between Picture A and Picture B. The answers, of course, were always printed in the back.

Where's all this leading? Goodness knows. In its milder forms, puzzle addiction is pretty harmless, I suppose, and maybe it's been around for years and years but I just fell under its spell. Whatever. I suppose we could wax philosophical about the human need to create order, or look for connections with the physicists' "chaos theory". Or, even better, we could go finish today puzzle.

Southern Sensibilities

This is not a character defect, just a simple statement of fact: I was not born in the South. My actual birthplace is Reading, PA, which I can barely recall, and other than a few childhood years in New York and a stint in the Marine Corps, I have spent all my life in the South. My parents were quasi-southerners (dad from Texas, mother from Baltimore), I married a lady from Memphis, and I graduated from the University of the South. End of credentials recitation.

I bring that up because I've been thinking lately about this place we call The South. (I've always appreciated Ray Blount, Jr.'s comment that the South is a place, north is a direction.) After last week's comments here about globalization, Bill Robertson gave me a heads up about an interesting TV interview with James Peacock, author of "Grounded Globalism", a book which explores the implications of this international phenomenon with our regional home. I hadn't heard about the book, and it was a fascinating interview. More later, I hope, about this.

While I haven't yet had a chance to read his book, I suspect it's another in the huge bookcase of efforts to describe and understand the South. Scores of people, maybe more, have written about our region's distinguishing characteristics, those things which make it different from, say, the midwest or the northeast or (heaven forbid) of Florida. Scores of people, that is, except me, so without any pretense of originality, let me weigh in with a few of my own experiences with these southern sensibilities.

Like Diogenes' endless search for an honest man, I'm looking for a citizen of the South who might, for once in life, say, "Gee, I don't know what to think about that." Folks down here have opinions, major league opinions, on just about everything from barbecue to basketball, and we aren't at all bashful about unloading them on the unsuspecting inquirer. Usually these discussions will begin with playful jesting, but it's easy for them to quickly deteriorate into acrimonious woundings which leave scars that last for years, even generations. So forewarned: if you think politics and religion are hot button items, don't even go near basketball.

Another field in which southerners obsess has to do with their fascination with family. Not just with history and genealogy and charts, but with real skin and bones people, their kin. It was only this morning, at breakfast (over a bowl of grits, of course) that I heard someone speaking intimately of his third cousin, twice removed. Seriously. Years ago, when we arrived in Wilmington, the gracious and unforgettable Miss Fanny deRosset (and you'd better pronounce that right) greeted Ann by asking, "...and who were you?" People who live in Des Moines or Scranton don't talk like that. Who you are is a part of who you were.

Again: Southerners are gifted (or cursed) with a communal memory, and for better or worse we spend a lot of time talking about "how it used to be". Nor am I fussing about that dead horse, saddled with the corny euphemism "The Recent Unpleasantness". Spare me. The only people I ever hear talking about the Civil War are from, as we say, "away". No, I'm talking about more important memories, like dances at Lumina or Junior Lenten Choir or when Oleander Drive was two lanes. The memories of how it was enter into just about every conversation, for these are not just interesting or peculiar acts of history but a part of who we are today. In Sacramental Theology class we called it "anamnesis", but that's a subject for another time and another forum.

I can't close these ramblings without noticing the Southern sensibilities for religion. Ann and I have enjoyed driving through very state (save Hawaii, until the bridge is built), and one of the defining characteristics of the South is the fact there are more churches than liquor stores. More churches, in fact, than anything else. Old story: two Baptist churches on the courthouse square, and the distinction is explained, "That one says there ain't no hell, the other one says the hell there ain't." However this is explained, and trust me, there are a zillion explanations, the fact is that in the South we take religion seriously. The bumper sticker theologies and the guilt-driven threats drive me nuts, but in the South one of the first questions asked of a newcomer is, "What church do you go to?"

This list could go on and on. I haven't even touched on the South's singular contribution to America's musical heritage, or that it may be the most racially, culturally, religiously, or economically integrated society in the entire country, or that it is the home of America's greatest writers, or that it has the most exotic taste in food combinations since the invention of chittlins and livermush and burgoo. All those things are part of the Southern sensibilities.

Globalization

It's a familiar picture, taken in 1972 from Apollo 17, Mother Earth as seen from 18,000 miles in space. "The Blue Marble", it's called. (For more on this, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble.) This dramatic image totally knocked me out when I first saw it, and got me to begin thinking about the whole concept of globalization as a phenomenon that actually impacted my life, something that personally affected me. The Blue Marble became more than only a symbol of just another cultural crisis, a passing phase to go along with Zero Population Growth and cork filled baseball bats. It was, for me, nearly as dramatic a photo as seeing grandchildren in the womb, and every bit as life changing.

What put flesh on the skeleton of globalization for me was the publication in 2005 of Thomas Friedman's, "The World is Flat", a detailed description of a world I was only beginning to sense. For example, Friedman describes the Dell notebook he's using to write his book as having a microprocessor from the Philippines, a memory card from Korea, a graphics card from China, a cooling fan from Taiwan, a motherboard from Shanghai, and on and on. Today I'm driving a German car made in Mexico from parts shipped from China and Australia to be sold by an American dealer.

And what's even more awesome is that the book, only two years from publication, is already badly out of date, almost obsolete. Friedman himself advises potential readers to get the paperback, revised this year. But it's probably out of date by now, too. The world moves fast.

All these thoughts came to me as a result of three experiences. One was our eight year old granddaughter's brief visit to Disney World, and her comment that so many people were "speaking Mexican". Actually, her daddy told me, they were speaking French and German and Italian and Lord only knows what else, as well as Spanish. Disney World is well named: a microcosm of our shrinking Blue Marble today.

It happened again at a motel in St. Augustine. Ann and I were sitting around the pool, seeking some respite from the heat and enjoying some people-watching (one of our favorite past times) when a Muslim family, Mother, Father, another adult, and two small children arrived. While the males and children wore what we could call appropriate swimming pool attire (bathing suits), the adult females wore the head veil and full length chador, even going down the long water slide and into the pool, fully clothed. Actually I have no idea whether they were from Saudi, Iran, India, or Philadelphia, but the world got a little smaller.

The final experience was a trip Ann and I took to the beach on Labor Day. It was a beautiful afternoon to enjoy the beach and visit with old friends. As we walked up the ramp to the Carolina Yacht Club, a bastion of local tradition and values, a family from India (or perhaps Pakistan or Turkey) passed by us, their lilting but foreign language portending serious changes in our Yacht Club and our world. Another notch on the belt of globalization.

There's still much to learn about this new world of ours, and Friedman's popular book, while opening many windows and doors, still leaves much unsaid about our world neighborhood. What about Africa, for instance? Or the dark side of China? Or what about the potential for having pollution cause the Blue Marble to become dingy gray? What about all that space that's outside our globe? Lots of questions and uncertainties.

And where, in all this, fits the Church and Christianity? We've been called to "go into all the world and preach the Gospel", but how well do we handle it if all the world comes to us? How can the arrogance of institutional faith communities (as they're now called) be channeled to serve the rest of our globe?

Many, of course, approach globalization with the same mindset as they do global warming, whistling past the graveyard as the inevitable continues to be denied. Denial is never a very good strategy for dealing with life, whatever the issue might be.