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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Thoughts on A Brutal Night 

...in September, 1990, my attractive and provocative young wife and I, accompanied by our toddler daughter, moved from the comfortable civilization of Oregon's Willamette Valley to a dusty little eastern Orygun cowtown for what we understood at the time to be reasons of career advancement. On our last day in town, as our last act, we went to the post office to close out our post office box. In that last batch of mail I found a jury summons for the local district court. Once settled in sufficiently to respond to this notice a few days later, I sent an ever so polite reply to the court clerk explaining that, no longer being a resident of the county, I probably wasn't going to be an attractive juror (not to mention the breathtaking mileage charge I would need to lay on them if I needed to travel 150 miles one-way every day for jury duty. I was excused...

In 1996, my still spouse and I, sporting a second infant child, moved back west to an even smaller "community" fetched hard up against the eastern slopes of the South-Central Oregon Cascades. Two weeks after we arrived at this new duty station, I receieved a jury summons from that dusty recently departed eastern Oregon cattle town, and cheerfully offered the same observations as in the previous case. I was excused. Ironically, during both of these tours of duty, the charming yet incredibly nubile Mrs. Jack K. go sucked into two different jury duty stints. Me..nothin'...

During the past seven years or our residence in Central Oregon's Deschutes county, neither the still-exciting Mrs. Jack K or myself has been tabbed for jury duty...until last week, when I finally got a notice that I couldn't have some fun with. Even worse, it is only now, ant the end of my tour in the Jury barrel, that I have been not only invited to be involved in the process, but have found myself selected in a trial as one of 'The 12 Angry Men' (although the jury I am a part of is more a '12 Angry Women' sort of thing). It's a fascinating process, but draining, so I'm just going to let it flow over me for the next few days...

...but I can't disappear into the Jury Room without noting the discover of a single body in the wreckage of a single-engined light plane roughly 50 miles north of Atlanta earlier today. That body, apparently of the pilot and lone occupant, was identified as Scott Crossfield, one of the early heroes of high altitude test flight. To anyone who ever got lost in the whole story of "The Right Stuff", Crossfield was a hero just less than one step down from Chuck Yeager in the playbill for the story of crazy-brave men who allowed themselves to be flung across the painfully blue eastern California desert skies on flaming projectiles that - at the time - offered far more opportunities for an anonymous death in some smoking desert crater than something representing fame and glory. He was a legend in the realm of test flight, and it is to be hoped that somewhere, someday, his contribution will earn the same acknowlegement as the mundane celebrity that we grapple with today...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:41 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

The Perils of Being a Registered Voter 

...so many things to talk about: gay college sudents being expelled from Christian colleges that just received a wad of state money; who's going to replace Scott McClellan; Congressmen who can't see their way clear to serve the health care needs of their constituents but get the most amazing free ride of their own. None of this matters right now, however, because my number just came up. After having spent the adult portion of my 51 years avoiding this particular affliction of democracy through a combination of bizarre circumstances and strange timing, my number finally came up, and it's off to jury duty for me, for the very first time in my life. I've resisted the urge to drag the last few weeks worth of papers out of the burn pile to see just exactly which crime of the century I might be caught up in. I'm suddenly seeing the wisdom of the law enforcement philosophy of former Attorney General Ed Meese....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:10 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 16, 2006

The Dimming Aniversary 

...it was a grisly act on a grim day. Innocent Americans, going about the mundane aspects of their daily lives, had no way of knowing when they got out of bed that morning that they were going to die in a terrorist attack long before lunch for no reason other than an unfocused nonspecific hatred. The unraveling of the story any any answers as to the "why" of that awful day offered no particular meaning to the survivors or closure to the loved ones of those who were lost...

It wasn't September 11, 2001; it was April 19, 1995. It wasn't the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or Flight 93; it was the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Okalahoma City. It wasn't extremist Muslim jihadist radicals that perpetrated the attack; it was a couple of ultra-conservative American citizens who had been buddies in the United States Army. And people are letting that memory slip from their minds, and we are less safe for that dimming of memory...

There were, in the first few wild hours after that truck full of diesel-soaked fertilizer stripped the Murrah Building of it's facade and 168 lives, active suspicions that this was the work of Islamic terrorists, and the whole country was on a bloodhound-howling scent trail, calling for justice or vengence or whatever might possibly make the rest of us feel a little better, or at least safer. An instructive lesson was that - after home-grown right-wing conspirators clearly came into focus as the reason for that bloody, limp little girl being carried across the pavement into history in a fireman's arms - that Republican leaders like Bob Dole suddenly started preaching a sort of restraint against the sudden rush to track down, isolate, and neutralize all those other homegrown hate groups who see the Turner Diaries as either a biblical text or a blueprint. Dipping into these dark pools with the full force of federal agents would, of course, probably cause the a nation's righteous indignation start to run up hard against some of their more conservative constituency. While they may have stood by in relative silence at the random harassment and violence directed against legal citizens with a suspiciously Arabic look about them, these elected officials had certain qualms about persecution of white conservative Americans just because they allowed to be in their midsts a subset of folks who thought it perfectly fine to blow up a day care center in an effort to kill Federal employees and their customers. An interesting parallel to the news plastered across today's front pages and cable news lead stories: Michael Fortier, who knew that McVeigh and Nichols were cooking up some sort of deadly attack against Americans, got 12 years for not telling authorities about the attack in advance, while Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Moussaoui for essentially the same offense...

We have taken our eyes off of the collective ball. We are spending our focus on external threats while the internal threats continue to fester. While Federal law enforcement agencies may be devoting resources to home-grown hate groups, the fact remains that the main themes and bullet statements and talking points of this administration are directed at external threats, even though both the internal and external threats have the same underlying motive...in fact, that may not even be true, since the external threat - at least the Osama bin Laden version - wants mostly to diminish our influence on Muslim life and get out of its affairs, while the home-grown version actually does want to overthrow our present style of government. Obviously, the 9/11 attacks had a larger and more meaningful impact on this country because of the dramatic loss of life and infrastructure, but the 4/19(/95) attack was instructive as a demonstration of just how tenuous our grip actually is on the sort of life we want to lead and the risks of trying to lead it and just exactly who might want to take all that away from us...

We can never forget 9/11; we don't dare forget Oklahoma City...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:03 PM 0 comments

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