¶ “The Network News Hour”

This is a month old, but it illustrates perfectly my feelings about cable news and John Stewart. (A warning — it’s Flash video. I’m sorry.)

Entire Jon Stewart Interview – Video – FoxNews.com.

There are actually a couple points of Bill O’Reilly’s with which I agree. But there are more upon which I feel the need to expound. One being news versus opinion.

Mr. O’Reilly argues that Fox News, like a newspaper, has news and opinion, and in newspapers, one page is news, you turn the page and bam! Opinion!

Fox News is not like that. I have not watched a show yet on any cable news channel, for that matter, that clearly labels non-news shows as “opinion.” And this as meant as no slight to Fox News fans, but people watching cable news channels who see some people sitting around a desk with papers on it, dressed as anchors, will not easily make the distinction of news/opinion.

When we run analysis pieces in the newspaper — analysis pieces, i.e., stories that may by some be construed to seem opinionated — we clearly mark them as such. We run opinion columns in a completely different section of the paper.

Just as companies are verboten from creating ads that look like news stories, opinionated shows should place on their screens something to clearly let people know they are watching opinion.

And before I hear the “Are you saying viewers are too stupid to tell the difference?” argument, let’s be clear here. Why should we make it harder for people to understand what they are watching? The answer, of course, is ratings. Money. It always is.

I don’t watch cable news and other programs on cable-news channels because I don’t like the way they make me feel about journalism.

¶ Gross National Happiness

Bhutan

The Taktshang Monastery, also known as the “Tiger’s Nest”.

The Haa Valley

Bhutan is one of the world’s most conservative nations. It does not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States, although it has been a member of the United Nations since 1971. In 1999, it lifted a ban on television and the Internet, and in 2008 it became a complete democracy.

It has painstakingly guarded its land from deforestation and development, and, for all intents and purposes, it is what Tibet could have been if the People’s Republic of China had left well enough alone.

Bhutan is the only nation to measure happiness, and it’s people are quite happy.

On top of all of this, it is one of the most beautiful and striking places you can find on Earth. Or so it seems via photographs like those above. It’s on my map of places to go before I die.

¶ Hercules

In November 1947, a giant bird took flight, however briefly, over the California coastline. This wasn’t an avian creature, nor was it a plane as many people think of planes. On Nov. 2, Howard Hughes’s dream, the H-4 Hercules, flew. All eight engines. All 320 feet of wingspan. All 400,000 pounds of loaded weight. The Impossible Task left terra firma (actually, aqua firma) and proved that no matter the restraints, man breaks through, beyond, above. It flew only once. But by God, it flew.

It’s detractors mockingly dubbed it the Spruce Goose, even though it was made of birch. And the War ended—thank God—so the Army never needed a fleet of wooden airships to transport more souls from the shores of America to the charred fields of Europe. It now sits in a museum in Oregon, the only such institution apparently willing to go through the trouble of moving such a beautiful behemoth from its berth in hangars that were being converted to soundstages, swapping a Herculean effort for the production of Herculean tales.

Howard Hughes, it should be no surprise, became less…grounded in reality…as time went on. But it was not perceived psychoses that gave birth to the aircraft with the largest wingspan in history. It was the Army. It was the War.

By putting its shoulder into arms production, the Army and its contractors were eating up metal faster than it could be mined. But soldiers needed tanks. And tanks needed ammunition. And the soldiers, tanks and ammunition needed to get to the Western Front and the Pacific Theater. Spread it too thin, and we all know what happens to aluminum. The Army issued a challenge: Build a plane. A big plan. One capable of hauling troops and cargo across the Atlantic. But don’t build it out of metal.

Henry Kaiser accepted the challenge, and Howard Hughes brought it to life. But the stakes were high. Said H.H. himself at a Senate hearing,

“The Hercules was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built. It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”

The Hercules sported a wingspan like no one had ever seen before—no one has seen it since. Built in 1947, it has yet to see a larger bird take the air.

A Boeing 747′s wings stretch a mere two-thirds of Hercules. The Russians’ An-225—the plane they built to haul their Space Shuttle across the Kazakh desert—is 10 meters shy.

Hughes’s Hercules is a shining achievement in the history of man. One day, a plane will lift off with wings longer than hers. But it won’t do it with quite so much style.

¶ Thank God for Shippensburg's farmers

All I have to say is, thank God for the good farmers of Shippensburg, Pa. Because of them, whenever I pass rows of corn or fields of grass that reek of manure, my mind flashes to memories of sweaty days at band camp, cool fall afternoons and crisp November nights walking around campus. Biking my seven-mile loop well after dark and football games in the hot sun followed by a shower and parties into the night.

I am now eternally grateful for what was a horrifying realization as my parents’ Jeep drove south on Interstate 81 in the early fall of 2006, past Harrisburg and into the unknown gyre of South Central Pennsylvania: I had applied to, enlisted in and taken out loans to go to a school situated in farmland, smelly, smelly farmland.

For a kid who wanted to go to The Pennsylvania State University’s main campus because he was tired of “living in the woods” and wanted a city-like college experience, but lacked the guts to actually apply to a school, say, in a city, this was quite the stomach-turner.

That day, when we toured the campus, I was just glad to be going to school, as I had found out weeks ago that I was not good enough for PSU — unlike, I might add, about 80 of my fellow students. Add that feeling of outsider-ness to being a fat, weird kid, mix well and bake at 400 degrees.

When I went down for “freshman orientation,” which should really be called “waste a day day,” I was enthusiastic about college, but still nervous about where I had chosen. But the chemistry department seemed really nice, and, hey, it was college! Brick buildings, an atmosphere of academia. I could do no wrong.

When I went down again, this time “for good,” I moved in. The next day band camp started. I knew exactly three people’s names: Rachael Meixell, my band “big” — whose job it was to make sure I knew what was what and to whom I could run with any questions, Ryan Fredericks, some kid with shiny blue Oakleys who first greeted me as I stepped sleepily out of my dad’s Jeep in the parking lot of the residence hall, and Steve Thomas, a trumpet player who helped my parents and me move the bulk of on what I would subsist from said Jeep and attached trailer to the top floor of my dorm, into a room that was quite possibly hot enough to broil something.

Over the next two weeks, I met more people, mostly in my section, and realized while I was an outcast in high school, this was a clean start. No one here knew my secret life as a nobody, and therefore I was afforded some freedom in creating the new me.

Things changed. I broke up with my high school girlfriend, whom I had dated for two and a half years. I lost about 75 pounds (most of which I have painstakingly gained back. Insert sad kitten here). I left my glasses in their case at the bottom of my desk. I began my slow descent to my 1.5 GPA and semester spent on academic probation.

I lived in four different buildings my four years at Shippensburg: A dorm, a university-owned residence apartment, a house in town and a townhouse in a student-populated complex.

I met the woman I am going to marry that freshman year, but it took me two years to realize next to whom I had plopped down onto a couch at probably the third party I had ever attended.

I gave up on being a high school chemistry professor and wandered aimlessly for a semester before realizing that writing, not math and science, had been my strong suit all along.

Things changed. But the smell never did.

It became a sort of “welcome home” banner. I would spend three hours in a car with my parents, and open the doors in Shippensburg to a simultaneously disgusting and wonderful smell: Manure.

It reminded me of walks in the pouring rain and driving snow to the grocery store, of biking to a house in town as a hurricane blew overhead and spending Saturday mornings practicing or on a bus traveling to other universities.

College is a wonderful time, and thank god I went to Shippensburg, because now whenever I smell cow shit, I will not be disgusted or wrinkle my nose.

Inexplicably, I find myself taking deep breaths and thinking back to college.

¶ No gene for the human spirit

Whenever I tell people I remember watching the 1996 Atlanta games and staring in disbelief as Michael Johnson outran the camera NBC has on a rail next to the track, no one gets excited with choruses (chori?) of, “Me too!” or, “Yeah, wasn’t that great?” Actually most of the time they stare at me, as if I am the type of person who will applaud with gusto the nonchalant.

But they just do not understand. That day, Johnson was the epitome of the human spirit. He was a human being. He was humanity, in all its glory and potential. And that was what got me so excited: Potential. He had just torn through the brick wall of potential. Not his own potential, certainly. And probably not the potential of a studied track coach or judge. But whoever it was that said, “20 miles per hour, yeah, that’s fast enough. No one can go faster than that,” when setting up the rail camera.

They had to be blown away. And I remember the announcers being blown away by it, so I am not the only weirdo in this world who chooses to champion that moment as a shining light in humanity’s sometimes rather dark history.

As “Gattaca” states, there is no gene for the human spirit, and we can all achieve well above our potentials, because what is a potential but a taunt from society and the status quo?

¶ Through the sky, fading

I think last night I went through a sort of epiphany. There was nothing religious about it, I just do not have a thesaurus with which I can approximate the realization that came to me as I laid awake, staring at painted-over glow-in-the-dark stars — and one comet — stuck to the ceiling of my bedroom by a family long gone from the building.

The only way you can tell the stars once provided comfort and maybe a good dream of interstellar travel to a child is by the faint outline they make against the whitewashed ceiling. In my apartment, that is the way it is: Whitewash. Lightswitch covers, electrical outlets, doorknobs and hinges. Nothing can stop the brush in a teenager’s hand, as he contemplates the $50 he will earn at the end of the day for painting this building’s octet of apartments.

The comet, and the amoeba of leftover childish decoration surrounding it, are textured with the scars of hot, humid summers perforated by intermittent blasts of cold, crisp air-conditioned atmosphere. Tonight it is in air conditioning, and has been for several weeks.

I think it is time to turn it off, but it is so hot outside.

I took stock in a lot of things last night. My self worth, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my fears.

My life.

And as much as I like to think I am urbane and sophisticated beyond my years, that is not the case. It is a crackling, thin layer of whitewash slopped on an overweight, lazy, self-important, self-righteous, snobbish boy from Nowhere, Pa.

Self deprecation, it seems, is my way of punishing myself. My battered pop-psychology-addled mind dredges itself and to the surface comes the flotsam: Old memories of mistakes I have made, new fears of mistakes I will.

I wish I could say I grew, mentally, in college. I wish it was the maturing experience I like to think it was. Sometimes I wonder.

They say you are supposed to learn from your mistakes. Underneath this acerbic papier-mâché exterior, I should be nothing short of J. Robert Oppenheimer, then.

Fear is paralyzing. There is no easier or more difficult way to say it. Choices are paralyzing.

Maybe I think ahead too much.

When I was in college, failing the major I had known for seven years I would excel in and graduate cum laude, I was afraid I would never leave Lake Wallenpaupack. I would be doomed to live with my parents, never having enough ambition to venture out on my own.

I was going from the four-year plan to the four-and-a-half-year plan to the five-year-plan.

And it all turned around, rather quickly, as I joined the journalism program, realized I liked writing and — somewhat miraculously — made it out of college in four years.

In chemistry, that great industry in which I aspired to work, reactions like this come from catalysts. Chemicals added to the mix that kick the reaction in the butt.

Three guesses who the catalyst in my life was.

As Nicholas-Sparks-novel as it sounds, there it is. I owe a lot to her, and I do not think she nor I will fully understand how much.

But now I fear slipping off this tightrope, and into the circus below. It is perhaps my one true fear: Squandering what is obviously too-good-a-gift. Making a mistake, slipping.

Pearls, indeed, before swine.

Of all the fears bubbling to the surface, that one spoke the loudest, its gravity echoing off the walls and obscuring from view that lone comet.