Heartland Travel I

I got a sense of the culture of Owensboro, KY yesterday evening when I drove up to the Holiday Inn Express. The first building next door to my hotel was a place called White Lightning Liquors.

Now I have actually seen the genuine Kentucky moonshine only once. I was at a party in Lapeer, MI back in the early 1980s with my former colleagues on the Lapeer County Press, and one former County Press journalist had come up from down south somewhere with a bottle of moonshine, a liquid clear as water in a two-liter Coke bottle. To northerners like us, it was something of a novelty, and people passed it around. When the bottle got to me, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff. The stuff smelled so foul that I could bring myself to take a sip.

I later recounted this story in an APA (Amateur Press Association) I was writing for at the time. Another APA hacker, a gentleman from Alabama, replied to me saying, "Hell, Ed, you ain't sposeta smell it! You're sposeta drank it!"

So after checking into my room, I walked over to White Lightning Liquors to see if they had any. It was a pleasant night for Kentucky in July, after a very hot day. A rabbit skittered out of my way as I walked across the lawn.

As it turns out, it's White Lightning Liquors in name only -- it was a standard-issue liquor store, with no illegal stuff anywhere in sight. It did, however, have a drive-through, which tells me that Kentuckians in this part of the state take their drinking at least somewhat seriously. (I heard of a place in Wyoming that actually had a drive-through bar -- now that's really taking your drinking seriously!)

I bought some cabernet and took it back to the room, which was equipped with a refrigerator, where I deposited it. I was thinking I might need it later. I'd been to Owensboro once before on business, about 10 years ago to visit a soy processing plant alongside the Ohio River. At the time, the place struck me as dirty, smelly, poverty-stricken, and without much of anything to do except sue your neighbors recreationally -- in other words, a lot like Decatur Fukking Illinois, only smaller.

Things seemed to have improved at least a little. This time, Owensboro actually had gotten a handful of chain restaurants. I'm not generally a fan of chain restaurants, but in this case, it was a definite improvement. I wound up going for dinner two exits down the U.S. 60 Bypass to a Texas Roadkill, where I figured I could at least get a decent steak. It was, although at one point -- part of the restaurant's theme, I guess -- about six or seven of the wait staff lined up next to the booth where I was sitting and started performing a line dance to the kuntry mewzik on the loudspeaker system. I just sat there and smiled at them, the sort of smile one might reserve for an autistic sibling discovered painting on the walls with his/her own shit. I tried real hard not to let it ruin my dinner.

Then I went over to the Buffalo Wild Wings down the block and played their Buzztime TV trivia game for a while, then went back to my hotel.

Today, after my first stop of the morning at a Perdue Farms feed mill in nearby Livermore, KY, I headed back in to Owensboro to find a public library where I could go on-line and check e-mail. The library turned out to be located in a fine neighborhood of old Victorian homes, the kind you hope to find in a town in the Upper South. So all in all, my experience of Owensboro had improved over the 1990s.

The place still smells like White Lightning, though.

Yippie Yi Ki Yay Kaboom!

These days, I'm pretty conflicted about celebrating the Fourth of July.

On the one hand, I like fireworks. I mean, I really, really like fireworks. They are one of the favorite things in the whole world.

On the other hand, I don't care all that much for a lot of the other stuff that goes with Fourth of July. For example, I don't consider myself patriotic; I consider myself rational. So all the rah, rah for flag and country never did all that much for me.

It's done even less ever since the United States ceased to be a free country under the present regime in Washington. From the day the Bush regime invaded Iraq, I've ceased to consider myself a citizen of the United States or any other country, for that matter. Last time I checked, they all had governments, too. So when I go to the local fireworks display and have to hear that Toby Keith song about Kicking the Ass of Amerikaz Enemeez played over loudspeakers, it kind of sticks in my craw.

But Fourth of July is a national holiday and, therefore, a day off from work, and there is something to be said for that. Especially if your lawn needs to be mowed, and ours really, really did. So the idea was to sleep in a bit, go get some brunch, then do some work around the house the rest of the day, maybe grill something up on the big new grill we bought for the wedding open house, then light out at the last minute to catch the fireworks.

The whole plan turned out to be problematic, though. To start with, the fireworks had been moved. For as long as anyone can remember, the Champaign Freedom Festival had been held on the big grassy fields near Memorial Stadium on the university campus, which is less than a mile from our house. Weather permitting, we could even grab a couple of folding chairs and walk over there.

Unfortunately, the university has begun a major two-year project renovating the stadium. At the end of the project, the stadium will have a lot of new fancy touches, like skyboxes for the high-rollers. (They'd also better have an Illini football team that can win the occasional game or two, either that or hookers offering free blow jobs in those skyboxes, or they aren't going to be able to sell any of those seats they're paying millions to build. While they're at it, they might try to do something about the livestock smell blowing in from South Farms.)

As a result, the large open area where people gathered to see the fireworks display now is a staging area for heavy construction equipment and building materials.

So the city moved the fireworks display to Dodds Park outside of Parkland Community College up in the far northwest corner of Champaign. That's a good five miles from home, and there are limited entrances and exits to that campus, so traffic was guaranteed to be a big problem.

Secondly, the weather was a big if. The forecast called for scattered thunderstorms throughout the area. "Scattered thunderstorms" in east central Illinois means that not a single drop of rain will fall on our garden plot, but if we try to go anywhere, we'll get drenched and maybe electrocuted. I don't care to sit in a downpour waiting for fireworks that might get canceled, and Penny isn't too keen on the idea, either.

Around the middle of the afternoon, I went online to accuweather.com and checked out the doppler radar map. The eastern two-thirds of the United States looked like it had teenage-grade acne. Indeed, big black clouds were rolling by to the north and south of us, rumbling with thunder and sending Murphy, who is terrified of thunderstorms, hiding under the couch. (Our other dog, Buddy, isn't bothered by thunderstorms in the least, so he kept on sleeping on top of the couch, letting out an occasional doggy snore.) Naturally, not a drop of rain was falling on our garden.

So I suggested to Penny that we take in a movie, then bring back some carryout food for dinner. We checked the listings in the newspaper, and since the patriotic thing to do on the Fourth of July is to watch something explode, we decided to go see Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth and latest in the series of action flicks starring Bruce Willis.

The plot for Die Hard IV is one of those "ripped from the headline" things. The credits stated that it was based on one of those "what if" magazine articles, apparently about how terrorists might attack the United States via computer. In the movie, a former government analyst tries to alert his superiors about how vulnerable the country is to a computer attack. As a result, his embarrassed superiors fire him and slander his good name. In retaliation, the ex-analyst puts together his own terrorist team and launch a computer attack that shuts down the transportation infrastructure, communications, and utilities. (The movie is a little sketchy on how the guy got the money for all that advanced computer equipment, not to mention semi trucks, helicopters, etc.) Just as the country is about to be plunged into chaos, in comes NYPD cop John McClane...

The modern Amerikan action movie generally contains any number of "Nawww!" moments. A Nawww! moment is when the action hero does something that is so obviously impossible that it goes beyond your ability to suspend disbelief, and you go "Nawww!" The first Die Hard movie, which I watched earlier in the week on DVD, has relatively few of these, but in fine Hollywood tradition, as the series has continued, the movies become more and more over the top. Live Free or Die Hard has about one Nawww! moment every 90 seconds.

My favorite Nawww! moment comes toward the end of the film when McClane leaps from a largely destroyed semi-truck going over the edge of an elevated expressway, lands on the wing of a spinning, out-of-control U.S. Air Force fighter jet that is about to crash, leaps from the wing of the jet onto a collapsing section of freeway pavement (which is collapsing because the jet shot a missile at it while trying to get McClane), slides down the pavement, and rolls off onto the ground just as the freeway section crashes into the earth. Then, he gets up and walks away, basically unscratched. That's about four or five Nawww! moments rolled into one.

It's easy for someone of my tastes and politics to despise these action movies, but I don't really. What I like about them is that most of them, when you look past the right-wing surface politics usually espoused by the hero, are actually profoundly anti-authoritarian and anti-government movies. In virtually every case, the criminals or the street gang or the terrorists or whatever bad guy have you are threatening all civilization as we know it, and the official government authorities are always absolutely helpless to stop the bad guys. In some cases, the government is shown to be so incompetent that it makes everything even worse. Along comes the Action Hero, who is always some lone maverick -- maybe a government employee like a cop or a CIA operative or maybe not, like some private eye or an out-and-out vigilante. This character is always a radically individualistic loner at odds with the powers-that-be. They hate him but have no other choice but to accept his help, or sometimes they try to kill him, too. In the end, it is the individual loner hero who always saves the day, leaving the authorities to pick up the pieces of the entire city he's wrecked over the course of his battle with the bad guys.

Of course, that doesn't mean every action movie is worth watching from a libertarian standpoint. I particularly dislike stuff like the TV show 24 where the hero is constantly saving the day by torturing people. I don't worry so much about the influence of such shows on children as I do its influence on adults. Particularly adults who work for the government.

Nevertheless, I hear that the next Die Hard movie is already in pre-production, and I can't wait for Die Hard With a Stiffy.

After the movie, Penny and I went out to Flattop Grill, a sort of Mongolian barbecue place, to get some food for carryout, and then she had an idea. It was just dark enough for the Champaign fireworks to be getting underway, so why not drive out west toward the edge of town to see if we could find some vantage point where we could see the display from the comfort of our car.

So we headed wet out Springfield Avenue, and when we got out to the shopping areas near the west end of town, near where Penny used to live before we bought our house, we found a spot in a parking lot between Za's Italian Fast Foods and the Big Lots retail outlet that gave us a clear view of the fireworks. All that without any patriotic kuntry mewzik over loudspeakers. And maybe best of all, the Goddess threw in Her own natural fireworks with a large thunderhead rolling past well to the north of town, flashes of sheet lightning brightening the sky momentarily as a backdrop to the more conventional city firework display.

Bruce Willis and Astarte. That's what a Fourth of July ought to be.

Big Flood Revisited

I've never cared much for the story of Noah's Ark. Maybe it has something to do with the image of an angry vengeful God so angry with his creation that He would destroy everyone and everything -- although He really loves us, which we would do well to remember lest he Smite Us Into Oblivion out of His Love For Us.

But I suspect a lot more of it the enthusiasm with which religious fundamentalists take to the story. After all, most Christian fundamentalists, at least, really take to the image of an angry vengeful God, so the Noah's Ark story would appeal to them out of the same impulse that produced the horrible Left Behindseries of End Time novels.

Perhaps what appeals to them even more, however, is the way in which this story, in particular, requires a complete suspension of belief in science and reason, which is mandatory, since to a fundamentalist, every last chapter and verse of Scripture must be accepted in the literality of the language of King James I of England. Which means that not only was the world created in seven literal days. but God destroyed the world in a Literal Flood that resulted from 40 days and 40 nights of non-stop rain, producing a flood so deep that it submerged all land, presumably right to the top of Mount Everest.

Now, if you have the slightest respect for science and reason, there are a lot of problems with this story. Like how, once the waters reached a depth of 25,000 feet plus, they somehow didn't freeze in the extremely thin air of the stratosphere, and how was Noah and his family and his zoo able to breathe? The Bible doesn't say anything about life support systems.

To me, an even bigger question was where exactly did all the water come from, anyway? After all, we've known at least since the 1960s -- when I read about it in one of those grade school science books that fundamentalists so detest -- exactly how deep a flood is possible on this planet. Specifically, this biggest story of water available for a flood is frozen in the polar ice caps. If something should happen to cause the polar ice caps to melt all at once, the oceans would rise by about 200 feet.

Now that's a pretty significant flood, and for sure, you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building. But 200 feet does not put an Ark 10,000 feet up Mount Ararat, no way, no how. It just doesn't.

Now, if we were ancient Hebrews, we would have no problem figuring out where all the water came from. To the Hebrews of 1000 BC, the earth was a flat disk floating in a vast Universal ocean. What kept the water of this universal ocean off the surface of the earth was a great big inverted bowl overhead, which we call the sky and the King James fundies called the "firmament."

Now this firmament bowl kept the earth very dry -- and in the world of the ancient Hebrews, most places were dry-as-a-bone desert. When God wanted the plants to grow, he would open these floodgates mounted in the firmament just a little tiny bit, letting in just enough water to make it rain for a bit.

At the time of the Great Flood, as described in a certain amount of detail in the Book of Genesis, God opened up the floodgates all the way and left them open for 40 days. The earth filled up with water like one of those crystal ball toys in Citizen Kane.

Of course, no one believes that today... or maybe some do. After all, a widely reported survey from a number of years ago revealed that something like 25% or 30% of Americans did not believe the moon landings ever happened. They believe they were faked on a Hollywood sound stage somewhere. If was a significant enough finding that Hollywood actually produced a movie based on that premise.

The Noah's Ark story did, however, teach me a valuable lesson about the nature of religious fundamentalists and the length to which some of them will go to defend their peculiar take on reality.

Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Michigan State University, I started dating a young woman from Westminster College, a Presbyterian school in New Wilmington, PA. I traveled there to visit her several times, and found that she and her circle of friends were fundamentalist Christians. (That puts them a couple orders of magnitude in faith beyond the college's United Presbyterian Church, which officially does not require its members to believe that the universe popped into being 8,000 years ago or that evolution is some kind of myth perpetuated by godless atheistic scientists.)

On one visit to New Wilmington, I got into quite a discussion with one of her friends over my lack of belief in the literality of the Book of Genesis. Specifically, I brought up the "where did all the water come from" question. He said he had no problem believing in the Great Flood. What convinced him, he said, was the existence of a thin layer of sedimentary rock found at the exact same depth everywhere in the world -- across all types of terrain, under the mountaintops, below the bottom of the ocean, everywhere -- and that this rock layer could only be explained by some sort of Universal Flood in recent history.

Now I was no geologist, ans so I had no direct knowledge to affirm or refute this assertion. So all I could say was that I had never heard of such a thing but would be willing to check it out.

And that's exactly what I did. Shortly after arriving back in East Lansing, I went to see a professor in the MSU Department of Geology and asked him about this alleged layer of sedimentary rock.

The professor looked at me for a moment, then started laughing and laughing. I thought he was going to piss his pants, he laughed so hard. When he finally caught his breath, the professor said that I'd been hoodwinked, and I was far from the first student he'd ever seen who'd been fooled in this way. There was no such layer of rock. The Fundies had just made it up. There were questions they couldn't answer, so they just made something up in hopes that people would be fooled into believing the account in the Book of Genesis.

And so I learned a very valuable lesson. If someone -- for reasons religious, political, or whatever -- is trying to convince me of something that appears to defy all reason or logic, that thing probasbly does defy all reason and logic, and this person is not to be trusted. About anything.