Spirit of '10?

We're in a war against some dangerous people who are willing to use any means they can come up with to kill as many people as possible. But it seems that we're thrusting our heads deeper and deeper into the sand to avoid confronting this reality.

The latest -- and maybe the most disturbing -- example of this refusal to acknowledge reality is being played out today in many airports where controversial new search techniques are being used by the Transportation Safety Administration to screen airline passengers before they board airplanes.

News reports say that the new security measures, which had been planned for some time, were implemented when an Al Qaida plot was uncovered last month to ship bombs aboard cargo airplanes and explode the bombs over the U.S. Airline passengers now have the option of either going through a new full-body scanner or being hand searched by a TSA officer.

MSNBC describes the search as an "open-palmed pat-down that many travelers, and even some security officers, feel is too personally invasive." Passengers can avoid the search by going through the full-body scanner. The scanner displays a nearly nude image of a passenger to a TSA officer who is out of the public view.

So, one way or the other, airline passengers are being required to submit to something that is seriously discomforting. Still, the Los Angeles Times reported recently that the TSA said that 28 million people boarded passenger planes during the first two weeks of the new security procedure, and only one percent of those passengers declined to go through the scanner and had to undergo the hands-on body search.

The Times reported that TSA said it received fewer than 700 complaints about the hands-on searches. That's a tiny proportion of the millions of people who had to undergo security checks before boarding airplanes.

It's easy to understand the annoyance of passengers who have to undergo these new search procedures. It is unsettling and humiliating to have your privates groped or displayed on a screen. But there is this war going on, and we are continually reminded of how fiercely our enemies hate us and how intensely they want to kill us, preferably in large, spectacular numbers. They would love nothing better than to explode a passenger airplane crammed with Americans over a large city so that chunks of flaming wreckage and body parts rained down on horrified witnesses who would then blame the government for not preventing this tragedy.

So it's hard for me to understand the mentality of those who are the loudest in protesting the increased scrutiny. And it's also baffling to me that the complaints of such a small group could explode into the broiling scandal that has erupted in the past few days.

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, editor Graydon Carter notes that Americans seem to be "full of inchoate rage, and . . . constantly throwing fits and tantrums". Carter published his comments weeks before the latest outrage. And our enemies are playing this anger like an instrument.

I've long been fascinated by the history of World War II. As I've gotten older, I've realized how propaganda was used to shape public opinion and persuade people to get with the program. And propaganda always makes me uneasy because it's used to emphasize one point of view and diminish or conceal other points of view. So when I see a poster like the one above that I've altered for this post, I also realize that the same techniques were being used by the Allies and their enemies.

I can't help but compare that era to today. However misleading the propaganda images from that time may have been, it's clear that people were willing to put up with much more danger and inconvenience than we are now. For example, beginning in September 1940 and continuing for months, Nazi Germany bombed London and other British cities every night. By May 1941, about 43,000 civillians had been killed in the attacks that came to be known as the Blitz. That means that far more people were killed every month during the Blitz than were killed in the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

But as Carter noted in his Vanity Fair column, a poll taken at the time showed that the British were more upset by food rationing than they were by the constant bombing. They simply were determined to carry on in the face of Hitler's savage onslaught.

What we're being asked to put up with isn't even on the same scale as what Londoners endured during the Blitz. But my god, how we're complaining. And how gratifying this must be to the thugs who are determined to kill us.

Recalling an Infamous Home Run

I've been down with the flu for several days and it's disrupted all the normal routines. It's a pretty nasty bug. I'm at the stage now where it's a low-grade fever and general aching malaise interrupted by occasional fits of violent and rather painful coughing. And there are powerful sneezes as well.

So I've spent most of the past few days in the guest bedroom. We have a stereo in that room that has a cassette tape deck, and I've dug out old tapes that I haven't played in years, tapes that in some cases I'd forgotten I have. And I've passed much of the time by drifting in and out of sleep as I listen to, among other things, Garrison Keillor monologues.

I've also spent the last several nights in that room so Jane can sleep without being awakened by my sudden noisy coughing and weary groans of exasperation. Around 3:30 this morning I woke up coughing and couldn't go back to sleep. So I sifted through the old tapes looking for something to put on the stereo.

One of the tapes I'd forgotten I have is a copy of the radio broadcast of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates. So I put that one into the player.

I was 10 years old when that game was played, and I remember it very well -- at least the final few innings. I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but that World Series game and the 1960 Major League baseball season was the end of an era. In 1960, there were still only 16 Major League teams -- eight in each league -- and the teams played a schedule of 154 games.

In 1961, Major League baseball would begin an expansion that would eventually swell the number of teams to 30, increase the regular season schedule to 162 games, and lead to a post-season playoff that stretches into November.

When New York met Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series, I was at the peak of my passion for the Yankees. I'm not sure how a hick kid from a tiny rural town in the South became a Yankees fan, but I think it must have had something to do with Mickey Mantle. I'd learn later that Mantle was about as tragically flawed a man as has ever lived, but in 1960 he was a god walking among mortals.

I lay there in the dark listening to broadcaster Chuck Thompson's account of the game, which was played on October 13, 1960. At some point I realized that the 50th anniverary of that memorable game is only a few days away. The fact that I'm getting old enough to recall events 50 years ago is a little unsettling. I remember all of the fanfare surrounding the 50th anniverary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which occurred years before I was born, and so that anniversary celebrated an event that, for me at least, was safely in the distant past and wasn't a reflection of my own aging.

But now, I'm old enough to remember things that happened half a century ago. Time passes.

The game itself was a wild, high-scoring, see-sawing affair. After two innings, Pittsburgh led 4-0. But the Yankees rallied, and by the sixth innning they held a 5-4 lead.

In 1960, World Series games were played during the day, and October 13, 1960 was a Thursday. So that meant that I wasn't able to turn on the game until after I'd gotten home from school. But I got home in time to see the end of the game.

In the top of the eighth inning, the Yankees extended their lead to 7-4, and it looked like it was all over. But in the bottom of the eighth, a fluke occurred that changed the course of the game. With Gino Cimoli on first, Bill Virdon hit a bouncing ground ball to Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek. It should have been an easy double-play, but the ball hit a pebble, took a wicked erratic hop, and hit Kubek in the Adam's apple. Everyone was safe, Kubek had to leave the game, and before the inning ended the Pirates had taken a 9-7 lead.

Still, the Yankees came back in the top of the ninth inning to tie the score at 9-9, and I was confident that the Yankees would hold the Pirates in the bottom of the ninth and win it in extra innings, especially since the bottom of the Pirates' lineup was coming to bat in their half of the inning.

Listening to the tape last night, of course, I knew what would happen. Bill Mazeroski would lead off for the Pirates against Ralph Terry. He'd take Terry's first pitch for a called ball. Then he'd hit Terry's second pitch over the left field wall, the Pirates would win, 10-9, Pittsburgh would go berserk, and I'd trudge quietly upstairs to my room with tears of disappointment running down my cheeks.

Listening to the game in the dark through a feverish haze 50 years later, I didn't start crying. But I still shook my head in disbelief that Terry gave Mazeroski a pitch that he could knock out of the damn ballpark.

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post was shot by George Silk for Life magazine. It shows University of Pittsburgh students watching from the tower of the Cathedral of Learning and cheering Bill Mazeroski's home run that won the 1960 World Series.

Jane Returns with Irish Whiskey

So Jane got back a few hours ago from her trip with her mom to Ireland, and she brought many presents -- including a bottle of Irish whiskey that supposedly isn't available in the U.S.

So we sat on the front porch and listened to the stack of Irish folk music CDs she brought, and I sipped Irish and Jane drank wine and we watched the rain that's been falling all week. I read that

we've had more rain in the past two days than we had during the infamous Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which put most of the area around Plymouth under eight or 10 feet of water. But since the wetlands around the Roanoke River here haven't been developed, we stayed dry.

Anyway, Jane brought me a bottle of Green Spot Irish whiskey. I've been drinking scotch for years. The Irish whiskey is sweeter than scotch, but not as sweet as bourbon, which I've never cared for.

She also brought me a mini-bottle of Irish potcheen, or moonshine, as it's known in these parts. Note that the label says it's "Now Legal" in Ireland. Haven't opened that yet.

And, oh yeah, while in Ireland she went to some restaurants and visited an old castle, and some writer's thing in Dublin.

OK, OK, I'm Finally on Facebook . . .

. . . but I'm a tad uneasy about it. And the story by David Carr in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section about the new movie, "The Social Network," didn't do anything to diminish my uneasiness about plugging in to this giant online virtual-socializing and snooping enterprise.

The movie is based on the story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, a socially clumsy young man at Harvard who, in a sense, executed the uber-geek's ultimate ironic twist. He channeled his frustrations, social ineptitude and exceptional intelligence into creating what the Times calls "the largest engine of social interaction in the history of mankind."

And he made a gigantic amount of money in the process.

Here's how the Times described both the movie and the phenomenon of Facebook: "Social media -- with the technology that allows people instantly to inform dozens or hundreds of thousands of people about where they've been and what they've done, in pictures and in words -- become a kind of self-replicating organism in the film, feeding and consuming all who mouse over it."

So Facebook ranks up there with the invention of the printing press and the telephone in terms of ideas that have altered our world. Many innovations have claimed to make the world smaller, but Facebook has used the Internet and the proliferation of personal computers to reduce the world to the size of a telephone booth, if anybody still remembers how small a telephone booth is.

And, like a cranky hermit living in a cave high in the mountains, I've deliberately avoided Facebook until it seems like I'm the last person in the civilized world to join the fun. Even people whom I thought had jumped off the grid long ago have Facebook pages. The New York Times says there are 500 million people with Facebook accounts. So, clearly, the rest of the world doesn't have the reservations about Facebook that I have.

Why have I avoided it? Partly just simple orneriness. The older I get, the less comfortable I am with cutting-edge technology. And there's also the fact that I'm lazy, and maintaining a Facebook page is a form of work.

But mostly, I've avoided Facebook because I'm afraid of it. I read George Orwell's novel, 1984, a long time ago, and it affected me. 1984 describes a world in which an oppressive, authoritarian government knows everything about you and can observe your every move.

Facebook is a massive central data base into which one deposits detailed acounts of one's likes and dislikes, comings and goings, political and religious beliefs, sexual preferences, favorite colors and football teams, and recent purchases. That's an awful lot of info for someone somewhere -- or anyone, anywhere -- to have access to at the click of a mouse button. It's like Big Brother with a smile, to borrow a phrase I picked up somewhere, probably while browsing the Web. And I worry about what some people might do with that info.

Still, it's fascinating and absorbing to be able to tell the world about your favorite movies, your favorite books and quotes, and post favorite pictures of your cats or your friends in unguarded moments. And I'm enjoying it.

And if you're wondering why I finally decided to jump into Facebook, you'll have to go to my page to find the answer. I'm going there now to add 1984 to my list of favorite books and add a personal news update that I've posted a new entry on "Drye Goods."