A Voyager Tribute

According to an article posted on Space.com, one of mankind’s robotic emissaries is about to depart our Solar System.  Voyager 1 has travelled nearly 11 billion miles since its Cape Canaveral lift-off back on September 5, 1977 and is now sniffing like an inquisitive dog at a fence, looking for a way to cross the boundary into interstellar space.

Built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and designed to explore the outer gas giants of our solar neighborhood, Voyager 1 looked over its shoulder on the way out to take the first-ever photograph of the Earth and Moon together, before finally saying “See ya!” to its planet of origin.

Voyager 1 and its sister ship Voyager 2, launched about two weeks earlier, completed their primary missions to explore Jupiter and Saturn in flawless fashion, each reaching the imposing Jupiter in 1979 and flying by her famously-ringed sister Saturn two years later.  While Voyager 1’s path led it out towards the cosmos without further interruption, JPL scientists realized they could wring some more science out of Voyager 2.

Boy did they!  Voyager 2 craft completed the “Grand Tour” of the outer Solar System, checking off planetary pit stops as if it was on some sort of interplanetary motorcycle rally: Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus -- stop giggling -- in 1986, and finally sweeping by the last planet we now recognize as a planet – sorry, Pluto fans – Neptune in 1989.

And what pictures these two ships snapped along the way!  We knew about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, but Voyager 2 provided close-ups of that vast, angry, centuries-long cauldron of a storm like we’d never seen before.  Neptune’s Great Dark Spot was a surprise -- all we knew about Uranus and Neptune before Voyager 2 were that they were both probably sorta bluish -- but she gave us a look at that too.  And speaking of surprises, we never expected anything like the incredibly intricate ring structures Voyager 2 revealed around Saturn, not to mention the fact that we didn’t even know Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune even had rings!  Until Voyager 2, that is.

Nearly lost in all that planetary excitement was what these two ships revealed about the many moons around all these worlds. The Voyager spaceships transformed what had previously been 49 anonymous dots, blurry blips of light next to their gigantic parent planets, into achingly intriguing worlds worthy of more exploration and discovery in their own right.

When the Galileo spacecraft launched in 1989, the folks at NASA and JPL designed much of its mission to follow up on the tantalizing morsels the Voyager craft had exposed during their scouts a few years prior.  We may yet find life on Mars, but after Voyager 2’s reconnaissance and Galileo’s detailed exploration, the smart money now predicts that if there is other life in our Solar System, we’ll find it swimming in the salty sub-surface seas beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

If you don’t believe me, just watch the movie 2010.

But, the laws of the universe being the laws of the universe and all, both Voyager spacecraft were destined for one-way trips into the cosmos.  Their primary and secondary missions more than accomplished, both Voyager spaceships have continued to coast “out there” ever since, heading in different directions, following different trajectories.

They aren’t, actually, the first spacecraft to soar past the orbital boundary of the most distant planet in the Solar System.  That honor goes to two earlier spacecraft.  Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, and Pioneer 11, launched in 1973, were the first ships to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull, but they weren’t the fastest.  On February 17, 1998, Voyager 1, perhaps jealous of all the press her sister ship had received a decade or so earlier, overtook Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human artifact in space.

At that point it would have been easy to let the Voyagers go; to simply say “thank you” and bid them fond adieus as they sped off into the depths of interstellar space at 38,000 mph.  However, the science geeks who had already cajoled so much out of the intrepid robots realized they had an opportunity to squeeze yet one more mission out of their twin charges. Thus was born the Voyager Interstellar Mission.

Both Voyagers had been cruising uneventfully through the Heliosphere, a region of space still-dominated by the Sun’s solar plasma and solar magnetic fields that extends out about three times as far as the orbit of the planetoid Pluto.  More recently, they reached the choppy outskirts of the Heliosphere, a region known as the Heliosheath that indicates the growing influence of the interstellar wind.  It’s as if the Voyagers were boats heading out of the calm, protected cove of the Solar System into the windswept whitecaps of an intergalactic open lake.

Scientists know that at some point, a boundary called the Heliopause exists at the edge of the Heliosheath.  This boundary marks the edge of the Solar System and the beginning of true, interstellar space.

They know this boundary exists, they just don’t know exactly where it is.  Recently, however, NASA’s scientists reported that Voyager 1 has entered a previously unknown “transition zone” where the outwardly blowing solar wind is clocking speeds at near zero.  They speculate that the craft has discovered an area where the even more powerful interstellar wind turns aside the solar wind like a blocking hand deflects water from a garden hose.

Scientists expected it would take another few years for Voyager 1 to cross the Heliopause into interstellar space.  With this discovery, they wonder if, in fact, she’s closer than they realized.  Like suddenly-alert sentries detecting unexpected movement, scientists are now keeping close watch over the telemetry that takes 16 hours at the speed of light to reach their computer consoles from the rugged craft out in the cosmos via NASA’s Deep Space Network.  They estimate that anytime between, well, now, and sometime in the next five years, Voyager 1 will become mankind’s first emissary to the stars.  Voyager 2 will eventually follow.

As they head out, each ship carries with it a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc carrying mathematical and graphic descriptions of who we are and where we are in the intergalactic neighborhood.  It contains recorded greetings in 55 different languages, 115 photographs and numerous sounds of our world, and musical samples from different time periods and cultures.

Before the mission began, there was considerable debate about including our location on the disc for fears that such intel might provide any potentially hostile alien race that recovered either craft a veritable homing beacon right back to our world.  In the end, however, the committee responsible for selecting the materials, chaired by the late great astronomer Carl Sagan, convinced the skeptics to include their digital “We Are Here!” sign, probably because they figured that any race that recovered Voyager and discovered the photographs of leisure suit-wearing human beings would be laughing too hard to consider invading us.

So, Voyager 1 and 2 speed onward and outward, carrying their gold-plated mementos of humanity, soon to cross the threshold of the Solar System and head into the depths of interstellar space.  Each has enough battery power and guidance fuel to last until about 2020, after which they will soar on silently into the cold, dark depths of deep space.

And the universe is a big place.  The next rendezvous for either craft will occur when Voyager 1 cruises into the neighborhood of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis, coming within 1.6 light years, or 9.3 trillion miles, in about 40,000 years.  The wait for Voyager 2 is even longer.  It will take the Grand Tour veteran some 296,000 years to wander within 4.3 light years, or 25 trillion miles, of Sirius.

Which makes me wonder.  What will our world be like then?  What will our species have evolved into if, in fact, we’re still around at all?  Will we still be exploring the universe from Earth, or will we be out in it by then?

And will there still be any evidence left that we ever wore leisure suits and danced to disco music?

HUMAN GUINEA PIGS

     I remember when my old roommate Willie came down with a nasty cold and he'd been fighting it with decidedly mixed results.  During this epic struggle, he, like many sufferers of the overly simplistically-named "Common Cold" had been sucking down a popular brand of menthyl-lyptic throat lozenges.  Apparently this strategy had been having some effect since he commented that these lozenges seemed to be helping.  Then he wondered aloud just where exactly did "Menthyl lyptus" come from?

     Now, Willie's one of those people who retains a certain inquisitiveness, curiosity, and wariness about the world around him.  He takes nothing for granted.  I like to kid him that he could find a conspiracy in the fact that oatmeal's gray.

     Suffice it to say, he's a bit of an intense guy.

     I also once referred to him as the "Fountain of Useless Information" because nine times out of ten, he'll know the answer to questions like, "I wonder where Menthyl lyptus came from?"

     Still, too much information may sometimes be a bad thing.  We once set out to watch a four part PBS series on World War I.  The first night was fine.  The second night, however, we tuned in, only to find ourselves watching Episode 3.  By the next night, the series was already up to Episode 5, and so forth.

Damn those Republicans and their assaults on PBS, I thought.  The bastards must've slashed the funding so badly that our PBS affiliate could afford to air only every other episode.  What kind of revisionist history was this?  Even I smelled a conspiracy.

     Then I checked the newspaper listings.  Seems ol' Fountainhead had pegged the program's starting time right but somehow failed to notice that the station was airing two  consecutive episodes each night, not just the single every-other-chapter we thought we were stuck with.  Maybe his head gets so full that sometimes any new information just bounces off.

     Anyway, he's still a pretty smart guy, so when he asked where Menthyl came from, I was pleased to be able to inform him that it's extracted from mint leaves.  So then, he asked the exact same question that I ask about a lot of things:  "I wonder who first discovered that?"

     It's generally something we take for granted, but everything we consume; every food, every drink, every drug, every whatever had to be tried by somebody for the very first time.

     In the case of the modern day Menthyl liptus cough drop/throat lozenge, it's fairly easy to imagine a swampy, humid early spring day in some pre-historic forest eons ago.  The Mold and Pollen Counts are way up, (though, given the blessed absence of local TV weathermen, primitive man was spared the tedium of such tangentially weather-related filler as Mold Counts, Dew Points, Degree Days, and the exact value of pi.)

     Even though Grog may not know the difference between a Lightning Tracker and the First Look Doppler Radar, he knows that he feels like heck.  His nose is stuffed, his eyes are watering and itchy, and he's sneezing his fool Caveman head off.

     On this particular day, maybe he sneezes, trips on an exposed tree root, falls into a patch of mint plants, and knocks himself silly.  He lies there for a half an hour or so, breathing in the fresh minty air until he wakes up.

     Grog may now have a bump on the noggin but he realizes that, by golly, he can breathe again!  Perhaps being a bit of a klutz, Grog's conked himself on the head before while suffering from similar symptoms and never before noticed any such relief.  His primitive neurons sputtering and sparking like a loose light bulb, he's able to come to a realization:  Smelling those minty leaves cleared his sinuses and made his allergies feel better.  Grog has started mankind on the road to the modern day Menthyl lyptus cough and cold lozenge.  Too bad for him, the patent laws hadn't been invented yet.

     Plenty of discoveries and inventions have come about in a similarly scattershot fashion throughout man's history.  From Ben Franklin foolishly flying his kite on a stormy day to Isaac Newton's famously plummeting apple, the great discoveries of mankind have always required a guinea pig.

     Someone has to go first.

     For the big ticket items, the rewards for being first generally fit the risks.  If you're the first to do or discover something big, baby, history is likely to remember your name.  Grade school teaches us that Ferdinand Magellan was the first man to sail around the Earth.  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.  Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit the Earth.  Louis Pasteur advanced the cause of the dairy industry.  Even the Earl of Sandwich slapped some meat between two hunks of bread and invented the Big Mac.

     Or something like that.

     But what about the really brave souls?  There's a theory that the ancient Egyptians were the first civilization to make beer.  Supposedly, during the construction of the Great Pyramids, they soaked bread in water, then fermented this sludge with yeast and flavored it with dates, figs, honey, and flowers to make something resembling what we today call "beer."

     Yum, yum!  These must've been some pretty thirsty dudes!  Then again, I got this info from a coaster I swiped from a local brew pub, so I can't vouch for its scientific accuracy.

     Still, what if that's the way it really happened?  What if Anwar sucked down this concoction, hopped on his camel, and risked history's first DWI after a long hot day at the job site?  Whatever could have possessed him to quaff a skin of run-off swill from soggy, rotten bread, regardless of what else they added to hide the smell?  Whatever it was, he apparently didn't die or even get sick and he probably copped quite a buzz if he didn't know when to say when.

     We'll probably never know what possesses people like him to try out an exotic new taste sensation or untested miracle drug for the first time.  Maybe it's a sense of adventure; a willingness to risk living on the edge.  Maybe he did it on a double dare with a cherry on top.  Or maybe he had a cold and someone threw in a few of those mint leaves.

     Darn it, Willie should know these things!

DOIN' THE PARK CITY DANCE

It’s a big deal to go to the Sundance Film Festival.  Yeah, the cynic in me knows that Sundance is a far cry from what it used to be.  I realize that it’s strayed from its original mission to showcase independent films and has been largely hijacked by the studios that use it as just another marketing platform for their “art-house” fare.

Even so, it’s Sundance.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s the “Park City Experience” than just Sundance, however, because Robert Redford’s prodigy hasn’t been the only game in that wealthy Utah ski resort town for a long time.  Like the Lutherans splitting off from the Catholics, the Slamdance Film Festival was formed in 1995 when a group of filmmakers whose films Sundance had rejected banded together to hold a concurrent, renegade film festival in a hotel ballroom.  A myriad of offshoots quickly followed, including a couple, such as NoDance and Slamdunk, which achieved some level of respectability and acceptance within the indie film world.

All of this means that for a two week stretch in mid-January, the picturesque burg of Park City morphs into a mecca of desperate filmmakers plying their wares to a motley assortment of well-heeled Hollywood insiders racking up huge cell phone bills.

I’d been to film festivals before.  My adopted home town of Austin, Texas is a hotbed of indie film in its own right and hosts two of the most respected festivals in the business in SXSW and the Austin Film Festival.  It’s also the home of the genre-flavored Fantastic Fest, the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival (AGLIFF), the Austin Jewish Film Festival, and the Cine Las Americas International Film Festival featuring the best in Latin American and indigenous films.

As a longtime film journalist and filmmaker, I’ve been to all of them, but there’s nothing quite like the Park City Experience.  For one thing, you can really “attend” a festival in your own town.  You don’t really get to experience new surroundings, new restaurants, or new nightlife.  Plus, you still gotta get up and go to work the next morning.

Park City is a total immersion experience, especially if, as in my first visit there, you’re wearing more than one hat.  The first time I attended all the Park City “…dances,” I was writing extensively for one of the leading indie film publications and knew that my editor expected me to attend and write reviews for at least 5-6 films per day.  Meanwhile, I was also there to promote a film I had co-produced that was premiering at Slamdance.

Often, the two tasks went hand-in-hand:  Freezing in lines outside theaters while waiting for screenings offered numerous opportunities for shameless self-promotion, as did the seemingly endless shuttle bus rides from venue to venue.

Of course, the best-known venue, in fact what I would consider to be the epicenter of Sundance, is the Egyptian Theatre.  This marquee-festooned old-style movie theater serves as the backdrop for nearly every news report that comes out of the festival.  The Egyptian also occupies a prime perch at the top of Main Street, a steeply inclined 4-lane road that inexplicably remains open to motorized transportation during the festivals, even though the teeming mass of humanity jostling along its overcrowded sidewalks bustles along at a faster pace than the cars and trucks that stupidly attempt to navigate this grossly overburdened thoroughfare.

And then there are the Main Street Flyer Wars.  Filmmakers can get highly creative with their marketing swag, but the single most important piece of promotional propaganda will always be the simple postcard-sized flyer which features full color artwork from the film on the front and information about the film, including its screening times and locations on the back.

It’s literally impossible to print up too many of these, as it’s the primary mission of any film’s producer, director, cast and/or crew member in attendance in Park City to plaster these everywhere.  Bulletin boards set up for this purpose on Main Street are quickly layered four or five deep with these flyers, and the turnover is so fast that if shot in time-lapse, they’d resemble those electronic billboards that flip from ad to ad.

I simultaneously attended screenings at Sundance, Slamdance and at least four other offshoot festivals each and every year I made the Park City pilgrimage.  Our film played Slamdance to a packed house twice before screening at both SXSW and AFF here at home and ultimately going on to a domestic video release, so mission accomplished on that front, while I lost countless hours of sleep cranking out my film reviews.

It’s been a few years since I’ve made the trip, and I’d love to get back to Park City for Christmas someday.  The food’s not great, but remembering its quaint mountain beauty and the leftover Christmas lights twinkling in the January snow, I can just imagine that it would be a great place to spend the Holidays.

For one thing, all those annoying film people like me wouldn’t be there yet.  They’d still be at home packing their bags for yet another Park City Experience.

AN ELECTRIC LIGHT NIGHT

     The coolest thing about getting HBO on cable TV way back in 1980 or so, other than having the ability to watch R-rated movies in our own living room, was the fact that they also showed cool concerts.  In fact, one of the first things I ever watched on HBO was a concert by the Electric Light Orchestra, live from the original Wembley Stadium in England.

     In support of their 1978 smash Double LP “Out of the Blue,” the shows on this tour not only featured the band’s trademark symphonic rock classics and eye-sizzling laser light show, but they also opened with the band emerging from the same gigantic spaceship that was featured on the album artwork.  Sure, it looked like a life-sized version of the classic electronic memory game Simon, but what a spectacle!

     When I learned a couple of years later that ELO was touring again with a date scheduled in Chicago, only about an hour away from the small town in Illinois where I grew up, I knew I had to go check them out in person.  Still just teenagers, my best friends and I all had our driver’s licenses, but there was simply no way any of our parents were going to let us drive into Chicago.  One set of parents drew the short straw and “volunteered” to take us to the show.

     On the day of the concert, the four of us piled into the car with a brave pair of parents and headed up to the Windy City for the concert, which was to take place at Chicago Stadium.  Then home of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks, this venerable old stadium sat at the absolute bulls-eye of one of Chicago’s most decrepit neighborhoods, with parking almost as atrocious as at that other Chicago sports landmark, Wrigley Field.  Nonetheless, we gamely eased our way around the winos and picked our way past the panhandlers, until our party of six finally reached the relative safety of the rickety old joint.

Although nobody knew it at the time, The Electric Light Orchestra had peaked in popularity right about the time of the concert I’d seen on HBO.  This time around, they were on the road in support of their 1980 album “Time,” which marked somewhat of a stylistic departure for the veteran group.  Following the disco-tainted “Discovery” album and a goofy but good half-a-soundtrack for the rather silly movie Xanadu, “Time” was a high-concept theme album about a man transported into a dystopian future who just wants to return home.

     Ironic, then, that “Hold On Tight,” the most popular song on the album, only became famous because it was used in a coffee commercial.

“Time” was certainly a different-sounding album for the group.  Gone was the lush orchestral sound that had become the group’s trademark, replaced by a futuristic, heavily-synthesized embryonic electronica with a dash of rockabilly.  It still sounded like ELO, just an ELO that had, well, stepped into a time machine and been launched into the future.  (Co-founder Jeff Lynne had even taken the ill-advised step of shortening the band’s official name to “ELO,” as if to emphasize the move away from its symphonic roots.  I’d joked at the time that “Electric Light Four-Guys-And-Some-Synthesizers” just wasn’t catchy enough.)

As we settled into our seats, nine o’clock to the stage, and dabbing at the blood trickling from our noses due to our high altitude, we were practically giddy with expectation.  Hall and Oates was the opening act, and I’d heard a DJ speculate in an interview with them a few days before the show, that more people might be coming to the show to see them than ELO.  Their set was met with polite applause.  Then the lights dimmed, the crowd roared, and out rolled…a robot.

“Just on the border of your waking mind, there lies, another place, where darkness and light are one…” Jeff Lynne’s lyrics poured forth from the mechanical storyteller which, no surprise given the date, bore more than a passing resemblance to one R2-D2.  The crowd went wild and the show was underway.

It’s odd that I don’t remember many specifics about the concert itself.  I remember the stage was often bathed in blue; I remember they played all of their huge hits from the ‘70s – loudly – and I remember the sweet scent of my first contact high from pot smoke which hung in the air, visibly blue once the house lights came back up.

Rock concerts are like romances, in that you always remember your first.  The ELO show circa 1980 wasn’t the best show I’ve ever gone to, (the winner there is Pink Floyd’s “Delicate Sounds of Thunder” tour), but it made the type of impression only a first experience of its kind can make.  To this day, some 31 years later, the Electric Light Orchestra, in all of its various forms, remains my favorite band in the world.

About 15 years ago, Electric Light Orchestra, Part II, a spin-off band featuring many original ELO members and the trademark ELO orchestral sound, but not mainstay Lynne, went on the road to support their “Moment of Truth” CD.  Knowing this was as close as I’d ever get to seeing ELO perform live again, I made the short trek down to San Antonio to check ‘em out.

Instead of the 15,000 concertgoers packed inside the old Chicago Stadium, which has long-since been torn down, there were maybe a thousand or so aging, diehard fans tucked inside what was essentially a large club.  Not surprisingly, the spectacle wasn’t nearly the same as that first show, but the music still carried the night…AND the surroundings were so intimate, that I got to have my picture taken with the late, great bassist Kelly Groucutt.

The Electric Light Orchestra rocks on in the eternally young land of Classic Rock radio and YouTube, while Lynne, co-founder and drummer Bev Bevan, and other surviving members of the band in all its incarnations keep ELO’s music alive in performances around the world.

For me, the Light was lit on a cold Chicago winter’s night over three decades ago…and the Electric Light Orchestra still burns brightly to this day.

WALKING BEANS

I grew up in a microscopic smudge of a town.  Ashkum, IL boasted some 600 residents at the time of the 1970 census, when I first became aware of such things.  I'm convinced to this day, however, that those 600 included all the dogs, cats, and otherwise domesticated creatures within the village limits.

     Frankly, I always thought the main job of the Village Clerk should be to sit at the edge of town with some chalk and a chalkboard and keep a running tally of exactly how many folks we had at a given time, changing the sign as cars entered or left town.

     Since my Mom was the Village Clerk at the time, this idea never received serious consideration.

     It was -- still is, in fact, and probably always will be -- a farming town.  Like most metropolises of similar size found throughout the Midwest, the village sprouted up and still huddles alongside the railroad tracks.  The tallest building in town by a long shot is the grain elevator, where the area farmers bring their annual harvests of corn and soybeans to be dried and stored until they're ready to be sold.  The railroad runs right past this elevator, a man-made steel river that provides the farmers a means by which to get their product to market.

     Ashkum's lifeblood was -- is -- the farmers who surround the community.  In conjunction with the 700 souls who now live in the town, the farmers shop at its grocery store, send their kids to its school, attend its three churches and patronize its three taverns, (a nice symmetry, that!)  The farmers don't need Ashkum to survive, but Ashkum sure needs its farmers.

     This has always been especially true in the summertime.  If you were a town kid in the summertime, the farms were an entire industry.  Kids would mow grass, baby-sit, take on a paper route or do a variety of other odd jobs to earn their own spending money in the summer months.  But what they did most was work for farmers.

     Now keep in mind, we're talkin' about a bunch of townies.  It's not as if we had a vested interest in a farm's success.  We were a bunch of mercenaries out for a buck.  Which naturally meant that we got the nastiest, hottest, dirtiest and most insultingly moronic jobs ever bestowed upon humans of any age with IQs higher than your average tree stump.  Generally speaking, there were three biggies, the Big 3 summertime cottage industries for youths in the Midwest.

     Of the three, baling hay was arguably the most reviled and unarguably the filthiest and most exhausting, although it generally paid the best.  Technically speaking, we didn't do the actual baling.  There was a machine for that purpose.  No, when you were on a baling crew, you either worked "on the rack" or "in the barn."

     If you were on the rack, you rode with a couple of other guys on a hayrack -- this being the only one of the Big 3 that was almost exclusively male -- which brought up the caboose of a train behind the baling machine and the tractor.

     The baling machine scooped up the hay, previously cut and piled in a continuous, spiraling row along the ground, in a manner not unlike a slack-jawed whale might scoop through an oceanic cloud of algae.  In a miraculous process I'm betting even those who designed the machine don't fully understand, the baler packed, molded, and tied this hay into perfectly formed, ice cube-shaped bales. These oversized hay briquettes then emerged onto a protruding conveyor belt as if in a bad "I Love Lucy" episode and trundled along to a rendezvous with the waiting rack crew.

     The crew's job was simply to spear the incoming bales with wicked-looking hooks that would've turned Peter Pan's nemesis a positively Pan-like shade of envy and hoist them into neat stacks on the hayrack.

     Moronically simple.  Except when a good bale-soaking rain doubled the tonnage, the rack was full and you were trying to heave this soggy deadweight over your head while balancing on the six inches you had left to stand on, all without knocking your compatriots off the six inches they had left to stand on.

     Being in the barn was similar.  You waited up in the hayloft for the full racks to come in from the field.  When they did, the rack crew downloaded the bales onto an elevator that trundled them up to the loft.  There, the waiting barn crew neatly stacked them to the ceiling.

     While in the barn, you didn't have to worry about falling off a moving rack.  You did, however, have to worry about the lack of fresh air streaming in through that tiny 2' x 3' opening, the fact that, whaddya know, heat does rise, and whether or not you'd reach terminal velocity if you fell from those bales near the ceiling to that floor waaaaay down below.

     After a brutal day of baling, it was not at all unusual to go home with scratched, punctured arms resembling those of a heroin addict.  You'd also be caked with dust and expelling substances from your nose and throat with colors and textures that were completely foreign to nature.

     While baling hay was the Hard Labor of summer jobs, de-tasseling corn was many an innocent youth's first foray into the cold-hearted world of Corporate Hell.

     If you're a city slicker driving through corn country in mid to late summer, you may notice the Dr. Seuss-like puffy brown tufts on top of the corn stalks.  Those are the tassels, the rough equivalent of a flower's pollen.  Since most farmers exhibit loyalty to a specific brand of seed corn with a fierceness scarcely seen this side of the "Tastes Great!  Less Filling!" debate, cross-pollination of different strains of corn is not a particularly welcome development.

     As a result, the farmers hired de-tasseling companies that swept through a community, plucking up unwary children like the Gypsy travelers of old and chaining them to their de-tasseling machines under the watchful eyes of the evil, bullwhip-wielding Machine Master.

     Okay, I'm exaggerating.  He just used a riding crop.

     In any case, this Dickensonian crew of children would ride the detasseling machine, suspended between the steamy rows of a cornstalk jungle, getting smacked in the face and receiving the Death of a Thousand Cuts by the thick, sharp leaves on the stalks.  Your entire existence centered on yanking the offending tassel from each stalk as you passed by, leaving in your wake a rather goofy looking field full of decapitated corn stalks.

     There was very little joy in this work.  The crew chief/slave owners who operated these coldly impersonal detasseling companies were almost universally reviled by the kids under their thumbs.  You were just working for "The Man," not a pleasant concept at any age.

     Of all three summer jobs, however, there's one that conjures up the fondest memories, while at the same time producing the most puzzled expressions whenever I say its name.  That job was Walking Beans.  Ah, even now, the memories come flooding back.

     Oh, don't get me wrong.  This was tough, exhausting, backbreaking work, usually lasting from Sun-up to late afternoon, five or six days a week.  Still, there was something about walking beans that gives it an odd, Rockwellian feeling, even to this day.

     First, lest you begin to imagine little bean plants on leashes strolling through the neighborhood, walking beans simply consisted of a crew walking up and down the rows of beans and pulling, chopping, cutting, hooking, or otherwise eliminating all the weeds in a given field.

     Hay baling was a sporadic, one or two day's worth of work.  De-tasseling corn was indentured servitude.  Walking beans was, in those days before farmers engaged in the chemical warfare practices they employ today instead, a nearly universal fact of life.  It was its own subculture with its own rules and customs.  Farmer Jones’ crew used the nasty, mini-scythes on a pole known as "hooks" to cut the weeds.  Farmer Smith preferred hoes.  Farmer Wilson’s group simply pulled the weeds.

     You knew the farmer you were working for.  Oftentimes you'd get on his crew year after year, starting from around twelve years old on up through eighteen or nineteen, depending on your post high school plans.  Choosing whom to work for forced you to consider a multitude of factors.  Timing was important, as you wanted the work to stretch out for as long as possible:  ("When is Evans starting this year?"  "Should be in a couple of weeks."  "Good.  We should be done with Johnson by then.")

How many breaks you got was important, too.  Were they just quickie water breaks or did the farmer's wife bring some snacks out to the field for a "lunch?”  Was the main, noontime lunch brought out to the field, (ugh!), eaten up at the house, (better), or did everyone pile into the truck to hit the Dairy Queen, (cool?!)

     There were also unspoken rules of etiquette passed down through the ages like ancient tribal customs.  When you reached the end of your row, you turned around and worked your way back to meet the person furthest behind.  If someone hit a particularly heavy patch of weeds, everyone hopped over to wipe out the patch in a brief, furious skirmish before forming ranks again within your own rows and resuming the march, sweeping a swath of land free of the enemy.

     Oh, you were a soldier, no doubt about it.  Armed with your trusty hook or hoe, you were out on patrol, a seek-and-destroy mission against an insidious, cleverly camouflaged foe.  Upon contact with the enemy, you fixed bayonets and charged.  If you survived, you placed your weapon confidently on your shoulder and proudly marched on ahead.

     Of course, not that many actual wars feature barely pubescent girl soldiers in the front lines, their shorts and halter tops enticing their compatriots, hormonally supercharged young boys who were physically 15 or 16 but mentally somewhere in the "Check out this loogey!" stage.

     Aw, but what the hell.  We were young and stupid, without a real problem in the world, making five or six bucks an hour with no rent or credit cards to worry about.

     If life could've stayed that simple and straightforward, and someone could have ever actually persuaded a Village Clerk to take up that chalkboard, I doubt the population count on it would ever go down.

     Ashkum would have had the cleanest bean fields around forever.

Aching Absences at Daytona

There will be an unmistakable presence looming over Daytona International Speedway as NASCAR starts its engines and prepares to drop the Green Flag on the 2011 season this Sunday at the Daytona 500.  Though it’s hard to believe, this weekend marks the 10^th anniversary of the death of one of racing’s most iconic figures, the legendary Dale Earnhardt.

Even non-racing fans know the name.  Everyone can picture the mustached, swaggering figure with the twinkle in his eyes, pilot of the ubiquitous black Mr. Goodwrench Chevy Impala with the bold, white #3 emblazoned on the door.

It’s only natural for Earnhardt’s death to assume a prominent storyline this weekend in Daytona, as the seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup Champion had become the face of the sport for most Americans.  Although Earnhardt was used to leading, not following, the man commonly referred to as “The Intimidator” was following on that day that changed NASCAR forever; following not only the two cars in front of him in what was to be the last lap of his last race, but following what had become a tragic trend in the fastest growing sport in America.  In fact, Dale Earnhardt was the fourth NASCAR driver to die in a crash within a calendar year.

NASCAR had changed for me some 9 months earlier on May 12, 2000, when racing claimed the youngest member of another NASCAR racing family dynasty.  Two friends and I were pulling a racing doubleheader.  Having attended a race at the now-defunct Longhorn Speedway in Austin on a Friday night, we were walking towards the grandstand at Thunderhill Raceway in Kyle, Texas one night later when we heard the track’s PA Announcer ask for a moment of silence and prayer for the Petty family.

Earlier that afternoon, Adam Petty, great-grandson of original NASCAR driver and 3-time Champion Lee Petty, grandson of the legendary 7-time Champ Richard Petty, and son of 9-time NASCAR Cup winner Kyle Petty, had died instantly when the throttle stuck wide-open on his #45 Sprint Dodge in a Busch Series practice session, sending him hurtling head-on into the wall at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.  He was just 19 years-old.

If Earnhardt’s death was the final catalyst to wrack stock car racing to its core, and led the sport -- finally – to enact a series of changes that have made the sport much safer today, Adam Petty’s death started the conversation.  (It shouldn’t be overlooked that his death was followed in rapid succession by an eerily similar accident at the same track that claimed the life of 1998 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year Kenny Irwin, Jr. and a crash later that year in Texas that killed Craftsman Truck driver Tony Roper.  That meant that three drivers had been killed, one in each of NASCAR’s three top touring series in one season, before Earnhardt’s death.)

Like millions of race fans, I had grown up a fan of “The King,” Richard Petty.  As I rekindled my love affair with racing as an adult, I’d quickly become a fan of Kyle Petty, even though it was obvious that, though talented enough to win 9 Winston Cup races and finish 5^th in the points for two consecutive years, Kyle wasn’t the dominant driver that his dad was.

Nobody was, except Earnhardt.

There’s an iconic photo of the four generations of racing Pettys that always sticks in my mind.  There’s Lee, the Founder, Richard, “The King,” Kyle, the Renaissance Man, and Adam, the future of Petty Enterprises.  The roadmap was all laid out for Adam: a full season running in the Busch Series -- sort of NASCAR’s AAA league – supplemented by a handful of Cup races.  In fact, he’d made his first and, as it would turn out, only career Cup start about six weeks earlier, qualifying for the DirecTV 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.  When Adam took the Green Flag along with his dad Kyle, he became the first 4^th generation NASCAR driver in history; a feat witnessed by his great-grandfather Lee, who would sadly pass away suddenly just 3 days later.

Second generation driver Dale Earnhardt, who had run a race the year before with his two sons, Dale, Jr. and Kerry, was running third before his fatal crash, trailing Dale, Jr.  Racing is a seriously family affair.

Petty Enterprises never really recovered from Adam’s death.  Kyle, forced to juggle the often competing demands of ownership and driving, all while coping with his son’s death, stepped out of his #44 car and drove the #45 until the end of his own driving career.  Petty Enterprises nearly imploded before a surviving nugget of the company found new life as the newly rebranded Richard Petty Motorsports.

Similarly, Dale Earnhardt, Inc. (DEI) was merged into oblivion after Earnhardt’s passing, although it took longer and a semblance remains in Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing.

It seems as if virtually every foot of Earnhardt’s last lap on this Earth has been dissected, the footage of the fatal tangle 499.75 miles into a 500-mile race as firmly seared into a race fan’s brain as the last seconds of the space shuttle “Challenger” or the attack on the Twin Towers.  There’s Earnhardt, trying to at least hold onto third, if not protecting eventual winner Michael Waltrip and Dale, Jr. who are both piloting DEI-owned machines.  Earnhardt grazes across Sterling Marlin’s front bumper, right-angling up the race track and into the Turn 4 wall at 160mph with Kenny Schrader’s Pontiac seemingly fused to his passenger-side door.

It all looked so innocent to the casual observer, especially compared to the spectacular crash that had happened about 40 laps earlier, a melee that launched cars airborne and crashing every which way, wiping out or damaging nearly half the 43-car field.  Yet everyone walked away.

Earnhardt’s crash, broadcast live, seemed no worse than a hard fender-bender...but those who’d been there knew better.

“Man, I hope Dale’s okay,” worried 3-time Cup Champion driver – but rookie broadcaster Darrell Waltrip – ecstatic at his brother’s huge win, but knowing in his gut that Earnhardt’s crash was far worse than it looked.  Sadly, he was right.

By contrast, Adam Petty’s crash occurred in obscurity, away from the TV cameras, despite the fame surrounding his name.

Both Dale Earnhardt and Adam Petty live on in different ways.  Building on the momentum initially generated by the deaths of Petty, Irwin, Jr. and Roper the year before, the huge blow dealt by the loss of Earnhardt would at last force NASCAR to make such seemingly commonsense safety changes as requiring all drivers to wear full helmets fitted with head and neck restraints, and building cushioned SAFER barriers over many tracks’ concrete retaining walls.

No doubt, Adam Petty would be making the start this weekend, had the New Hampshire crash not taken his life.  Instead, while Adam Petty’s memory lives on at the Victory Junction Gang Camp, a summer camp for chronically ill children Kyle and Pattie Petty founded to honor their son, the Daytona 500 will start without a Petty in the field for the third straight year.

And while the memory of Dale Earnhardt will understandably be at the forefront of this year’s race, with a moment of silence planned for Lap #3, let’s not forget Adam Petty and the lasting legacy of the Petty racing family.

Super Bowl Halftime? Bring on the Marching Bands!

     The Super Bowl is finally here.  Yea.  Please pardon my underwhelming sense of enthusiasm for this year’s game.  Normally I’m as much a football-crazy loon as the next guy, but I’m just not feelin’ it this year.

     I know some folks who can’t wait for the game to get here.  One good friend of mine is a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan.  My oldest nephew loves the Green Bay Packers, or at least he did during the Brett Favre years.  (What’s even more impressive about that is that he remained steadfastly loyal to the hated Packers while growing up in the heart of Chicago Bears country.)

     Speaking of my beloved Bears, maybe their clunker of a performance against those same Packers in the NFC Championship Game two weeks ago, which kept them out of the Super Bowl, has something to do with my malaise for this year’s game.

     Still, just as the Indianapolis 500 is the one and only auto race millions of non-race fans watch each year, just as we pretend to like soccer every four years when the World Cup rolls around or we become instant experts in the intricacies of short track speed skating during the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl is the one football game almost every American with a pulse will watch every year.

That may be because it provides even non-football fans with a good excuse to get together and have a party.  Come to think of it, in this overly-wired age of the DVR, Hulu, and YouTube, the Super Bowl might be one of the last great American communal viewing experiences left, so we better treasure and celebrate it.

     So, without a vested interest in the outcome, we’ll head over to a friend’s place and watch the Big Game with the rest of the world.  The game will probably be underwhelming, since so few Super Bowls really are “super,” but one fringe benefit of a Super Bowl broadcast is the collection of some of the best commercials of the year.

On the other hand, one indisputable downside of the broadcast is the dreaded Super Bowl Halftime Show.

     Now, the network honchos would argue that the Super Bowl Halftime show is a Major Event, a special showcase for some of the biggest, most popular, and even legendary acts in music history.  With past performances from such venerable artists as Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ZZ Top, and The Who, to name just a few, the line-up of past Super Bowl halftime performers reads like a veritable “Who’s Who” of classic rock.  It’s as if the person – check that, corporate board members – in charge of finding halftime performers have been working through their personal wish list of acts they’d like to meet.

     It seems like a great idea on the surface, except that in reality, it’s Super Lame.  The teams depart for their locker rooms all lathered up, then the roadies throw together frighteningly gaudy stages in an even more frighteningly quick time.  Other roadies push the aging band members out on-stage, whereupon the legends unhook their oxygen supplies, hoist themselves out of their wheelchairs, and stagger through a barely recognizable 3 or 4-song greatest hits set while piped-in cheers add to the din, before the whole procedure packs itself away.  Finally, the teams return to the field for the second half, stiff and out of their groove after the 27-hour break.

     Give ME a break.  I understand the Super Bowl isn’t really about football.  Let’s face it; the last real games of the NFL season are the AFC and NFC Championship Games that determine the Super Bowl combatants.  No, the football game in a Super Bowl serves roughly the same purpose as the hamburger patty at McDonalds:  it’s just there to support the parts that really taste good, like the ketchup, mustard, pickles, and onions.

     Corporate parties, private parties, TV ad campaigns, hookers, promoting the network’s next Big TV Show, and overpriced hotel suites and luxury boxes are what the Super Bowl is really all about.

Which is where the Halftime Show comes in.  It’s simply one more opportunity for a big-money sponsor to climb aboard, one more ancillary event to promote in addition to the game itself.

     As for me, I’ll take a good old-fashioned marching band at halftime of a football game anytime.  Like outdoor stadiums above the Mason-Dixon Line and natural grass, marching bands at halftime is the way God intended football to be.

     Alas, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon at the Super Bowl.  So, you may as well pass the nachos.  Maybe if I crunch loud enough, I won’t have to hear the Black-Eyed Peas.

Healthcare Reform: Fighting the Rear Guard Battle

So U.S. District Judge Roy Vinson up and decided the new healthcare reform law is unconstitutional.  This surprised absolutely nobody, given that the Ronald Reagan appointee had telegraphed his decision as obviously as a bad Jay Cutler pass when hearing arguments in the case last year.

And it surprises nobody that a Republican party that has absolutely no interest in doing anything but pay lip-service to reforming our nation’s appalling healthcare situation while lining their campaign chests with insurance industry cash, loudly cheered Judge Vinson’s ruling.  Democrats, meanwhile, who have been trying for nearly 100 years to fix the mess, largely passed it off as the latest partisan development in what has been a hyper-partisan process.

This makes two Republican judges, including U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson just last month, who have ruled in assorted lawsuits filed by at least 26 states led by Republican governors, attorneys general, or both, that all or significant portions of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, largely forgotten in all the recent hullabaloo, is that two other federal judges, both Clinton appointees, have ruled that the individual mandate to buy insurance, the crux of the dispute, IS perfectly within Congress’ authority to order.  Approximately two dozen other challenges have been unceremoniously dismissed as frivolous.

So for those of you scoring at home, the series record between the two sides currently stands at 2 wins and 2 losses apiece, with about 25 ties.  (Come to think of it, Healthcare Reform is not unlike a chess tournament between Grand Masters.)

This follows the law’s original passage in the last Congress with the help of exactly 1 Republican vote out of 177 Congressional Republicans and 41 Republican senators.  Just last week, every single Republican House member in the new Congress voted to repeal the new law.

What a shame, considering that this law will help the people who need it the most.  I’m speaking from experience here, as up until this past year, I’ve been unable to marry the woman I’ve been with for 10 years.  She is on the Texas High Risk Pool, a state-run pool that provides rudimentary insurance at god-awful rates to people who, like her, are unable to get insurance anywhere else because of their pre-existing conditions.

I work at a small business that miraculously offered group coverage…BUT if my fiancée forever and I ever got married, the rules stipulate that my employer would have had to offer her coverage as well, and she would have had to go on that coverage.  As this would have raised rates on everybody at the company, we made the painful decision to forgo marriage.

Now we can get married after all, however, because the rates under the current PRE-reform rules have skyrocketed so much that my coverage has been dropped anyway.

The Republicans are content with this status quo.  And people wonder why I so-loathe the do-nothing Party of No.

So, yes what a shame.  And what a sham, considering that the individual mandate was originally a Republican idea, urged for consideration by Sen. Orrin Hatch, former Sen. Robert Dole, (his party’s 1996 presidential nominee), and others, back in the days when Republicans were actually interested in trying to help govern instead of simply tearing down the government.

It was not too long afterwards that then-Governor Mitt Romney incorporated the individual mandate into his Massachusetts healthcare reform efforts.  If Romney, who some polls show is the GOP front-runner in the 2012 presidential horse race, happens to win the Republican nomination, he’ll have done so despite having what the goofball tea-sip wing of his party considers to be the healthcare albatross hanging around his neck.

But then, that’s the way Republicans operate nowadays.  Cap and Trade was a solid, free-market Republican-offered solution to pollution and global warming problems…until the Democrats became interested.  Then it became “government overreach and excessive regulation.”  Comprehensive immigration reform seemed doable with border state bigwigs George W. Bush and the “good” John McCain onboard, but when the Dems came to power, immigration reform degenerated into a thinly veiled racist buzzword for “amnesty.”  Nothing said “National Security” like arms control treaties…until it came time for this Democratic president to sign one.

On issue after issue on which they used to offer constructive ideas, Republicans have morphed into bitter, twisted, petty little prunes, interested more in coming up with good bumper sticker slogans than in governing.  “Obamacare” and “Death Panels” might scare the feeble-minded, but such coarse and overly simplest rhetoric does nothing to advance the discussion…which, of course, is exactly the idea.

So it’s no surprise that Republicans are cheering this setback to healthcare reform.  Never mind that it means next-to-nothing, given that it will most assuredly be up to the Supreme Court to decide the case, (which might make Democrats a little nervous, given the Roberts Court’s narrow proclivity to rule in favor of Big Business.)

In the meantime, let the Teapublicans have their moment of false hope.  I doubt very seriously that the President and the Congressional Democrats would work so hard, invest so much political capital, and endure such vitriol and abuse if they didn’t believe their law would help people AND pass constitutional muster.

But more to the point, this is an issue where something clearly had to get done and I, for one, am confident that this President and his party are on the right side of history, regardless of what a couple of Republican judges predictably think of the whole thing.

Honor the Astronauts

     Nobody knew their names.  That’s what’s most striking to me about the seven astronauts who climbed aboard the elevator for the long ride up the gantry alongside the space shuttle Challenger on a frigid January morning 25 years ago this Friday, (January 28, 1986).

     What a far cry it was from the heady space race days of Project Mercury some quarter of a century before that morning, when the American public knew every intimate detail about each of the famed Mercury Seven astronauts…or at least every intimate detail that the tightly-controlled NASA public relations department allowed the American public to know.

     It’s a fair bet that most Americans who were alive at the time can still, some half a century later, reel off the names of most, if not all of those first American astronauts.  How strange, then, yet somehow appropriate, that while we can easily recall Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Wally Schirra and Donald “Deke” Slayton, names with which we are intimately familiar from the dusty newsreels of history, the names of the Challenger 7 who perished aboard STS-51L stir only faint embers of recognition.

     That's because even in those relatively early days of its existence, the shuttle program had already developed the mundane, anonymous, routine workhorse attitude that NASA had promised the public.  Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Sharon Christa McAuliffe probably preferred it that way.  They knew that the glamour days of space exploration were but distant memories; that the time had come for the United States to embark upon the business of space flight.

It wasn’t about moon shots or beating the Soviets anymore.  It was about establishing, step by painful step, a permanent human presence in space, and adapting to that hostile environment for the benefit of mankind.

Challenger’s cargo on that last, fateful mission was a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, or TDRS, intended to improve communications between space shuttles and mission control, as well as a miniature space probe intended to observe and study the tail of Halley’s Comet.  Nuts and bolts space infrastructure with a dash of good old-fashioned space science.

     Similarly, the crew of the Columbia who died when America’s original shuttle orbiter disintegrated on reentry February 1, 2003, was on their way home from an equally unglamorous mission.  Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark, and Israel’s Ilan Ramon had just spent 16 days in space on STS-107, minding an assortment of microgravity and Earth science experiments contained in the SPACEHAB science module that was mounted inside Columbia’s payload bay.  Like the Challenger 7 before them, the Columbia 7 died doing what they loved; work they felt was of critical importance to our species.

     These fourteen astronauts weren’t the first to die pushing the boundaries of space.  Back in the beat-the-Russians-at-all costs days of the early American space program, Mercury and Gemini veteran Grissom, Edward H. White, II, (the first American to “walk” in space), and rookie Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire inside their Apollo 1 capsule during a test on the launch pad on January 27, 1967.

Thanks to the endless replays shown on cable news networks at the time, however, and the fingertip access to video footage and stills available on the web, the Challenger and Columbia tragedies were the first to sear themselves into our national psyche.

How ironic it is, that all three of NASA’s great space disasters occurred within a 1-week calendar span, albeit spread across the decades.  So how best to honor those who were lost?  By carrying on their work and ensuring that the exploration of space continues in the years and decades ahead.

As NASA draws the curtain on its space shuttle program, with just two, or possibly three more missions scheduled to close it out this year, it’s good to know that the gigantic International Space Station will serve mankind for the next 10-20 years, that plans are in the works for the next generation of space vehicles, and that private companies are finally set to begin carrying out the kinds of space operations that only NASA and other international government agencies like it could handle before.

While we may not recall their names in the years ahead, as we pause to remember those lost aboard Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, let’s also celebrate the fact that their sacrifices have helped return us to the stars from which we came.

That’s the cause for which they gave their lives.

KNOCK-KNOCK, HU’S THERE?

Who the heck is Hu?  If you’ve been paying attention to current events this past week, you’d notice that two main news stories have been soaking up most of the oxygen.  First, there’s been all the talk about Democrats and Republicans playing nice in the wake of the Tucson shootings, and perhaps even sitting next to each other during President Obama’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night.  This is ironic, given that the new GOP House majority seems hell-bent on waging retroactive mortal combat over virtually everything the President has accomplished in the previous two years.

And speaking of bitter rivals playing nice, news story number two focused on Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington, D.C., inviting a collective yawn if not the faintest hint of nostalgia.  Let’s just say that being a superpower just isn’t the same without having the Soviet Union to kick around anymore.

It used to be simple, black hat, white hat type stuff.  We were the good guys, the Soviets were the villains, and there wasn’t a heck of a lot of wiggle room in between.  Our summits with the Soviets used to draw wall-to-wall media attention.  We knew their leaders as well as we knew our own.  Khrushchev banged his shoe and Kennedy shooed him out of Cuba.  Nixon and Brezhnev went eyebrow to bushy eyebrow.  Gorbachev and Reagan became best buds even as Gorby presided over the unexpected if welcomed collapse of his “Evil Empire…” and it’s never been the same since.

Back in the day, our proxy wars around the world with the Soviets were deadly, even though troops from the two countries weren’t shooting directly at each other.  Even our athletic competitions were epic events, with the Soviets winning tarnished Olympic basketball Gold over the Americans in 1972 when the refs in Munich gave them three shots at it; or the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” when the American hockey team shocked the Soviets…in the semi-final round.  No one remembers who they beat to actually win the Gold.

But then Solidarity in Poland combined with Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost; a perfect storm whose tidal surge eventually swept away Euro-Asian communism in the sort of reverse Domino-Effect those American leaders in the ‘60s could only dream about.  Good for us, good for the Russians, and good for a global population that no longer had to worry – as much – about their planet being incinerated in a barrage of mushroom clouds.

But we seem to be built on the binary system.  Apparently we crave the simplicity and neatness of two opposing sides locked in a blood-feud; Democracy vs. Communism, Pepsi vs. Coke, Red vs. Blue, the Bears vs. the Packers, and so forth.

As such, we’ve spent the years since the collapse of the USSR searching for a surrogate.  Putin helps, because let’s face it, it was tough to demonize the Russians with Yeltsin in charge, but it’s still just not the same.  So, we’ve tried to make do, elevating a rotating assortment of not-quite-ready for primetime players to Public Enemy #1 status the way a football coach without an all-star running back rushes the ball by committee.  Iraq’s been the bête-noir a couple of times, North Korea makes a handy foil, and Iran might make a good sparring partner, but China seems to be the current nominee.

They’re not a new rival, with America sworn to defend the Republic of China’s democratic government in Taiwan against a communist invasion from the mainland since the 1950s, and Chinese support of North Korea remains a nagging thorn in our side.  Then there was the tragic Tiananmen Square protest back in 1989, which recaptured our attention, but only briefly.

It doesn’t help that with the possible exception of Chairman Mao, none of their leaders have exactly been household names; in fact we sometimes don’t even know who their leaders are.  As Wikipedia so succinctly put it, “…in 1982, China perceivably had four main leaders: Hu Yaobang, the Party General Secretary; Zhao Ziyang, the Premier; Li Xiannian, the President; and Deng Xiaoping, the ‘Paramount Leader,’ holding title of the Chairman of the CMC.”  The Chinese didn’t make it easy to know who to get mad at.

But now the People’s Republic of China has but a single leader. The President of China isn’t democratically elected, of course – that whole “People’s Republic” part of the name only goes so far, after all -- but Hu Jintao has held the job since 2003.  While Russia continues to atrophy, the Chinese economy, population and global influence are growing by the day and they are rapidly developing the military and technological sophistication to match.

Ultimately, if America has been craving a worthy foil, China just might fit the bill…which means we better be careful what – or “Hu” -- we wish for.