An Award-Winning Blog

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

liebster2A nomination for a “Liebster Award” is something of a blogger’s—or at least a WordPress blogger’s—rite of passage. In German, the word “liebster” means “dearest” or “beloved,” so sharing a nomination for the award and asking the nominee to pass it on (which is one of the stipulations of the award) is a way to make the world a little more dear. Billie nominated me this week, so I am a dear in her headlights. Please visit her website—it is worth your time, and her design and approach have given some direction to my plans for this website.

As I have detailed elsewhere, my column won a prize from the New York Press Asssociation some years ago, but most of my pride that day was for the writers I edited who won awards for their work, themselves. Those were some of the best phone calls I have ever been asked to make. This is the first time work of mine has been nominated by someone other than my employer. A Liebster Award nomination is the same thing as winning—as long as I pass it on and nominate several blogs that have fewer than 1000 followers each and give them some props and ask them to take part. (This award is kind of a pyramid scheme, minus the con. It’s actually just a cool way to build readership and showcase some blogs that are worth getting to know.)

Besides “Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me,” my nominated blogs are “Mywordsontheline,” “Words, Words, Words,” “Read. Write. Teach,” “Writing with Purpose,” and “black is white.”

If I have nominated you, and you choose to accept my nomination of your blog and continue with the Liebster award process, here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.

2. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget.” (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)

3. Answer eleven (11) questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.

4. Provide eleven (11) random facts about yourself.

5. Nominate five to 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, blogs that have less than 1000 followers each. (Note: you can always ask the blog owner for this information since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know how many followers they have.)

6. Create a new list of questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer.

7. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to then:

8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster Award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of this prestigious honor).

Here are the questions that were sent to me and that I now send on with my replies: (in the case of the first question, change “Ireland” to “upstate New York”)

What do you think of when you think of Ireland?
The Hollywood version, probably: “The Quiet Man,” etc. I studied James Joyce in graduate school and have ambitions to reread “Ulysses” this year. I also have ambitions to see Ireland in person someday …

What food is too much work for you to eat?
Anything too hands-intensive. Lobster. I can still work chopsticks.

Did you ever have a tree fort growing up? How about a secret club?
My dad laid some planks in a tree in our backyard, and I remember some steps nailed to a tree. I never liked climbing trees or even jungle gyms. I seem to have developed my healthy fear of falling from the start, before ataxia.

What technology (if any) in today’s world are you suspicious of?
Anything controlled remotely or automatically—drones, online bots.

What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?
Start boiling water for coffee (I love my coffee press). Fall asleep watching Netflix.

What (if anything) would you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances? Why?
Physically injure an animal.
Hum. I don’t hum.

If you could ask one person one question and get a completely honest answer, who would it be and what would you ask?
Maybe my great-grandparents (great-grandfather, I suppose) on my mother’s side about what made them leave Russia and move to America.

What is the first thing you learned to cook? Did you enjoy the experience?
The first thing I actually remember cooking for myself (or knew that I knew how to) is french toast.

What thing sucks most of your free time away? Do you enjoy it?
Online social media. Yes, I enjoy being in touch and expanding my circle of friends.
When my health insurance starts up again, I will be spending a lot of time in doctors’ offices. Because of my ataxia, I have a neurologist and a cardiologist.

Describe a time when a small decision by you brought big consequences (good or bad).
If I knew that the night I drank my last drink was going to be the night I had my last drink … it was not a decision, not one made by me, at least, and it was small in the scheme of things. The universe did not change when I stopped, but when I stopped, my universe changed.

What major historical thing(s) happened in your lifetime? Has it changed your life?
In my lifetime, there have been many major news stories. There were two presidential impeachment cases, one of which provides me my earliest memory of a news story, and the later one I wrote about in a newspaper. Space exploration accidents. The realization that climate change is happening and more man-made than not.
Mandela.
The social neuroses caused by the Cold War. I probably still have those echoing in my psyche.
September 11.
Chernobyl.
The announcement last year that Voyager 1 had left the solar system affected me deeply; the “pale blue dot” photo.

Eleven random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.)

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinocerebellar ataxia as an “illness” versus a “condition.” The latest feature of this condition that I have been noticing of late (first noticed last year) is that when I can not see my feet, I lose track of which is which. I may think I’m tapping my right, but it’s my left that’s annoying people around me. After going to bed, I may think my left leg itches, only to scratch it and find it was my right, or worse, that I am scratching the mattress.

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then interpret to my parents as a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am one of the least ambidextrous humans on earth. When I sprained my right side a few years ago (falling asleep in an office chair), I learned that I could not write my name left-handed. This was a severe disappointment, as I spent many hours as a child trying to become ambidextrous and had trained myself to write at least my name with my left hand. The skill has left me.

6. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

7. I see words as I speak them.

8. If you have a trivia team, I am an asset. My areas are American political history, baseball, English literature, broadcasting history.

9. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the T-Rex and walk away.

10. I remember most people’s names after one hearing, especially if I also saw it written down. I can not, however, remember jokes or poems.

11. Formal logic is a weakness. In Geometry class, it once took me eight steps in a proof to establish one leg of a triangle equal to itself. It amazes me that I can design this webpage.

A Conspiracy Theory of Conspiracy Theories : A Rant

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is a conversational moment that I have come to dread over the years, the moment I learn too much about what is going on inside the head of a new acquaintance whom I so much want to respect.

The other night my girlfriend and I were chatting convivially with a new friend of ours about many topics, and the two of them were finding with greater and greater rapidity and excitement that they shared opinions and even a mindset; they were having an “I knew I knew why I liked you” moment, and our new friend even said those very words out loud.

I sensed what was coming. Our friend’s shoulders relaxed, she drew us in closer and spoke loudly because of her new confidence in us, “I knew I knew why I liked you. You think like me! You probably know all about the chemtrails and what they are doing to our water and food.” My girlfriend continued smiling but betrayed no such knowledge. “You know, how they’re killing us for money. It’s outrageous what they’re doing to us all.”

I was surprised but not shocked. It was not the first time I had heard someone I thought was a rational-minded person with unimpaired critical thinking skills give voice to approximately three conspiracy theories in ten words or less.

(There are real outrages in our world and society, of course. Before those of you who feel legitimate outrage about “Big Pharma” and its effect on modern medicine … or those of you with gripes about corporate agriculture and its effect on our ecology, economy, and general health … or those of you who feel that our various layers of government present heavy-handed restrictions on fair-minded business people or restrictions that are infuriatingly not heavy at all … before you decide to take up arms and keyboard and aim angry words attempting to correct my insouciant attitude about the legitimate threats these pose to our greater welfare, please re-read the clauses opening this extra-long sentence. And please read on. There are legitimate dangers in this ever-complicated world and I am outraged by them. I vote my conscience. I write letters and this blog, and I sign petitions. I have marched and I will again. (Well, maybe it’ll be in a wheelchair.) We do not need belief in ever-complicated conspiracies posed by a mysterious and infernal “them” to get in the way of believing that maybe just possibly we can affect what “they” are doing to our lives.)

(I am glad I found that soapbox nearby; can someone help me down from it?)

When one lives in the Northeast, as I do, during every winter storm one hears this sentence at least too many times to count: “Heh. So much for global warming.” I have heard people who have explained to me fairly complex physical realities (okay, indoor plumbing) utter this inane sentence as if they do not understand the difference between our Hudson Valley weather on a given Tuesday in January and a global climatological condition. Come summer, these people inevitably give voice to the opposite idea, without minding the contradiction, when they note, “Summers seem warmer than when I was a kid.”

We all want to feel in possession of some special insight or know that our facts are more fact-y than other peoples’, to feel that we know more than the people “in the know”—our elected officials, our scientists, our religious leaders. Because there is so much dogma in our daily lives, we think that everything we read or hear is dogmatic. From Will Rogers to Lewis Black through every heroic iconoclast of the last several generations, we have taught ourselves that we “know better,” that we must “question authority,” but without questioning one authority: our own. We may in fact know better, but that only comes through a skeptical weighing of all evidence, including my own state of mind and knowledge.

I admit that as a skeptic, I question questioning authority. I question my own, which makes writing this post a tad ironic. What do I know?

I am by nature a non-confrontationalist, so when I learn that someone I have been getting to know possesses a conspiratorial mindset—is a person who treats beliefs as facts—I shut down and do not involve myself in a debate over the merits of the thinking. If you already think that water fluoridation is a part of a government plot to make people submissive subjects, instead of what it is, I am not going to get into a detailed discussion about the number of gallons of distilled water we need to start consuming.

Instead, I will make slightly agreeable-sounding sounds that can be easily mistaken for words and statements by my interlocutor but in fact are not. I will find the soonest conversational exit, which is what my girlfriend and I did with our new friend the other evening. Before we learned too much about her worldview, because I still wanted to have some intellectual respect for the friend and myself.

Maybe I should engage people more forcefully and in the name of logic and skepticism … no. No. Because, oftentimes, the other person has come to these insights and beliefs by employing the tools of critical thinking, which is the shame of it. They think that they are questioning authority by reflexively denying the possibility that the facts as presented by authorities are the facts. This is a way of thinking as blind as automatically assuming that anything we are told is true.

It is as if there is an item on the critical thinking checklist that is ticked off every time we declare ourselves a “skeptic,” but only of the official line. By believing that there is something more complicated going on than we are being told. We cheer ourselves believing we are thinking for ourselves.

I love thinking that does not involve thought. It gets me to really not work out those mind-muscles at all but still use my gym membership to get in the sauna. For me, some forms of gambling scratch the same itch in my head and feel the same way as conspiratorial skepticism: the game of roulette, for example. There are books and pamphlets outlining patterns one should be aware of and gambling practices one should adhere to at the roulette table. But you know what the most detailed, complicated thought I have ever had at the roulette wheel is? “I like 4. I think I’ll bet on it.”

It is not critical thinking to posit that simply because the “government denies it” certain fabulous tales must be true. In logic, there is a principle called “Occam’s razor,” which simply states that among several hypotheses, the one requiring the reader to make the fewest assumptions is the one to pursue. Are those lights in the sky vehicles from light-years away? or something earth-based? The earth-based explanation might be less complicated but more frightening.

Are the patterns of condensation left in an airplane’s wake a part of a nefarious plot to poison the populace into a submissive agreeability from the sky? Without evidence, this asks us to assume quite a few things.

Is our government poisoning us into a state of dependence on it? I do not know, and I do not see evidence to support it, but isn’t the idea that corporate agriculture, in the name of the profit motive, producing food with ever less nutrition per volume in fact scarier? Yet that sentence is the one that asks us to take action and do something for ourselves, because we can still. Somehow, underneath it all, I am an optimist.

My conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories is that the powers that be prefer us speculating wildly about hidden plots and nefarious powers “behind the scenes” and thinking that the knowing is enough. They love it when we think we are doing something but aren’t. In the ’90s, one of my co-workers at a bookshop used to angrily relocate the paperback sci-fi books inspired by “The X-Files” TV series from fiction to non-fiction. My conspiracy theory is that this is exactly the sort of fight corporate America wants us to wage. Because then, the only causes we are taking to the streets over will sap us of our “precious bodily” intelligence.

Farewell, Pete Seeger

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1996, in my job of assistant editor at a weekly newspaper, I awarded myself the title of music reviewer for a single issue and attended a concert given at a local high school by Pete Seeger, who died today at age 94. (Our newspaper’s actual title-holder was only interested in rock concerts.) I wrote a review, knowing full well that a review is not what one writes regarding a Pete Seeger concert. An appreciation. A thank-you note. But not a mere review judging aesthetic merits.

It was a great night out, by the way.

For someone who grew up in the Hudson Valley during the 1970s like me, Pete Seeger was as much a part of the environment as the river itself and as real as the Catskills, and his effect on our lives was incalculable but tangible. His ship, the sloop Clearwater, brought attention to the polluted state of our beautiful river and helped lead to change. Launched in 1969, he and its crew sailed it to Washington, DC, in 1972 to deliver over a hundred thousand signatures to Congress during debate over the Clean Water Act, which was passed over President Nixon’s veto. The Hudson River that I remember standing beside as a little boy, bubbling with a soapy scum that became and remains my personal image of the word “pollution,” is not that river any longer.

Thousands of public school students in the mid-Hudson Valley visited the sloop at least once as a part of the checklist of things our local schools brought their pupils to; it was the first boat I ever set foot on.

Pete (no one called him “Mr. Seeger,” it seems) was an elderly man by the night I saw him sing in 1996, but he stood through the entire, intermission-less, two-plus hour show. He complained that his voice had lost a lot of its range, but really, that was his cover story for getting the audience to feel more comfortable with singing along. “You can reach the notes I can’t any more,” he stated, and then strove to hit them anyway.

And then came what remained for me the centerpiece, watching this master showman split the audience up by voice type and urge us in singing the lyrics and the “Hallelujah” chorus to “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”—just like he did in his legendary “Children’s Town Hall” album.

Pete Seeger was born to an artistic family and introduced to folk music at an early age. With plans to be a journalist, he attended Harvard, but dropped out after a couple years to forge his own path, first working for John Lomax and the folk song archives at the Library of Congress, then, after meeting Woody Guthrie, traveling alone and with Guthrie to wherever the music could be found and made.

His music career took off in fits and starts through the 1940s and ’50s, but it seemed that whenever he grew too popular, an accusation that he was too anti-war—before World War 2, he sang antiwar songs, but switched to entirely antifascist songs after America entered the conflict—or, later, a Communist—would almost derail that career, but not him. In the 1950s, his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to him being blacklisted and fighting a contempt of Congress indictment for several years.

In one of the eternally great performances of a witness facing an unfriendly committee, Seeger refused to use the Fifth Amendment to protect himself and steadfastly refused to answer questions he called “improper.” The transcript, which I link to above, shows how Kafka-esque the proceedings were, and what a nightmare of single-sided questions the committee thrived on forcing people to answer. Several times, Seeger even offered to sing his answers, only to be rebuffed. If he had merely pleaded the Fifth, he would not have faced the contempt of Congress indictment, but Seeger was not the type to plea for anything.

Blacklisted from television and the major concert stages, he sang in church halls and high school auditoriums and helped found the Newport Folk Festival. Many years later, in 1967, Seeger was invited on to the Smothers Brothers prime-time television show to end the ban. He chose to sing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a parable he had written that is set in WW2 but was very translatable to the futile war we were fighting at the time. The show’s network, CBS, censored the song from the broadcast, continuing the blacklist. The Smothers Brothers fought hard, and Pete was re-invited to sing it in 1968.

Once upon a time, songs and words could get the attention of the powers at hand. It has been a privilege to share some time on this earth with this thin, powerful-voiced, banjo-picking, attention-getter.

* * * *
While I was writing today, I came across this video, produced by our local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, of Pete Seeger singing and leading an audience (at a local high school, where else?) in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He coaxes a lovely rendition and offers an editorial comment that rouses the audience to cheers. It was recorded just before his 90th birthday—he was performing up until very recently, and appeared at a benefit concert in my town of New Paltz last fall—and it captures almost everything one needs to remember this grand man.