Gilbert and His Guns

I don’t know how tuned in the general public is with pro basketball player Gilbert Arenas’s recent gun troubles, but in the world of sports its been the top story in recent weeks. Given the fact that no guns were actually fired and nobody was injured, in the end, it is much ado about nothing, although Arenas has pleaded guilty to felony gun possession. And, it is yet another example of a country with an unhealthy obsession with guns.

Of all the major countries in the world we are the only one who’s origin is directly tied to the gun. We are the new kid on the block. The other major nations of the world came into being well before the invention of the firearm. Battling with stones, clubs, swords, spears, and lances offered a different kind of etiquette, it made battle personal and it made your opponent human. During the heat of battle you had to look into the enemies eyes and perhaps feel the heat of his breath and hear the anguish of his pain. It required a lot of time and energy to kill your enemy. With the advent of the bow and arrow, the precursor to the gun, ranged attacking changed the dynamic of the battlefield. The living, breathing, enemy was reduced to a dehumanized target. Yet the bow, due to it’s lack of high volume ammunition, was only a supplement to the mainstay of hand to hand combat.

The creation of the modern firearm was a quantum leap. If you had the means to produce metal and powder you had the means to produce firearms and ammunition. The courage that was required to fight mano y mano on the battlefield was no longer required. Where a battle could be turned on the skill and courage of the warrior, now it was more about remote military strategist sending wave after wave of soldiers into hails of bullets. The warrior was now just cannon fodder. Warriors were no longer a special class, they were disposable conscripts. In the 21st century soldiers no longer fight soldiers. Now they are trained to fight their own protesting citizens, or citizens of other nations who have taken up arms to fight what they perceive as invading organized armies. Outside of organized armies the firearm has allowed the flourishing of mercenary forces, urban gangs, drug cartels, and provincial warlords.

It wasn’t the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that enabled us to dominate North America, it was the firearm. The gun was the enduring symbol of Manifest Destiny. Go West Young Man, and bring plenty of guns. It is our period of romance and adventure. Fighting on the frontier, it was our guns vs. the indigenous people’s bows and arrow. When the U.S. army took Los Angeles from Mexico, the Mexican army fought on horseback with lances.

Our constitution allows every citizen the right to bear arms, and unlike being in the army where your firearm is mandatory, citizens want to have guns because citizens want to be badasses. The spirit of the warrior has been replaced by the phony bravado of the gun. We live in the era of Columbine. Even our children are capable of massacres. Every disgruntled worker is a potential mass murderer. Even our higher institutions of learning are not immune as we saw decades ago at the University of Texas and more recently at Virginia Tech.

It is arguable that guns, like tobacco, are a health hazard, but we can’t do to guns what we have done to tobacco. Gun ownership is protected. Tobacco was once sexy, so sexy it was a key ingredient in advertising and movies. We’ll probably never get guns out of the movies, because violence sells. While watching the NFL playoffs today the two movies I saw advertised starring the big names of John Travolta, and Mel Gibson, were all basically films about violence with guns being featured prominently. These guys are made men in Hollywood yet they still are relying on the crutch of the gun to churn out hit movies. You probably can’t even be an actor today unless you have had gun training since it seems to be the most used prop. How many actors and directors owe their careers to the gun? Where would Scorcese and DeNiro be without the gun? How popular would Clint Eastwood be today without Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name? Denzel Washington plays a violent character in The Book of Eli but his most popular role in recent memory was playing the dirty, gun toting cop, in Training Day. Chow Yun Fat gained his fame doing ballet like gunfights in John Woo’s Hong Kong shoot em ups. George Lucas and Harrison Ford jumped started their careers with the gun toting characters in Star Wars, a spaceman shoot em up, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with the gun toting adventurer/professor Indiana Jones. Megastar Will Smith built his career on Michael Bay’s Bad Boys movies. Clive Owen first starting getting noticed after playing a government assassin in the Bourne Identity, which of course stars a gun toting Matt Damon. What would Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and Apocalypse Now be without guns? Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone is transformed in an instant from mild mannered college boy to violent Mafia Don by shooting two of his father’s enemies at point blank range in a public restaurant. Who can forget Mo Green getting it right in the eye?

I love movies but I really I’m getting tired of movies with guns. Two of my favorite actors are Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and part of the reason is they both have been making movies for decades yet it is hard to picture them with guns in their hands. The roles they are most known for have nothing to do with guns. It’s not like guns can not play a dramatic role in a film, I just think that the use has become exploitive. My first ever significant moment while watching a movie is the first time I saw West Side Story when Tony gets shot and a crying Natalie Wood as Maria picks up the gun and points it at all the gang members, uttering the words, “…now I have hate too!” Even though I was just a kid it was a very powerful moment for me and it was just one gun and one gunshot. The irony is the two warring gangs, at their war council, agreed not to use guns and to fight like warriors, hand to hand, up close and personal. The agreement is violated which leads to the shooting of Tony, who is unarmed and gets shot in the back. Shooting someone in the back is the ultimate coward move. In many ways, West Side Story was way ahead of its time in its views on guns and violence. It may well be the first major anti gun movie made in Hollywood.

It is not easy to not be seduced by guns in our culture. I played guns and robbers and loved watching violent gun play in movies when I was a kid. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I used to love drawing guns. One of the first things I ever saved up money to buy was a blank gun that looked like a real .38 special, it was plastic but it had a metal revolver. I was very proud of that gun. In my neighborhood, every year the most coveted item was a bb gun. We used to wear thick jackets and put on football helmets and have bb gun shoot outs in the neighborhood. My dad kept his hunting rifles in his bedroom closet and every now and then my brothers and I would go into the closet to look at them, to see the real thing. BB guns were one thing but a real gun was cold and intimidating.

My first experience shooting a real gun was completely negative. On a hunting trip with my Dad at about age 10 I shot my father’s shotgun. Being a naïve kid who had only seen guns shot in movies I held the butt of the gun on my bicep instead of my shoulder just like they do in the movies. The kick of the shotgun bucked against my bicep so hard it caused me to fall to the ground writhing in pain and shedding buckets of tears. My dad thought it was funny. I didn’t. I was done for the day and vowed I would never go hunting again. I didn’t touch a gun again until I went on a four day backpacking trip in the San Gabriel mountains when I was in my mid twenties. I borrowed my Dad’s ancient Winchester .22 rifle. I told people I was taking it for protection but that was basically a line of BS. I was really taking it because I romanticized myself as being a frontiersman in the wilderness. During the hunting trip I only used the rifle once, to shoot at a quail. To my shock and amazement I actually hit the darn thing. I am a horrible shot and never ever expected to hit the bird but I did and I felt terrible. My buddy Craig Catimon, my partner on the trip, spent an hour consoling me.

By the time I was in my twenties I had lost my naivete about guns and gun violence, although I still enjoyed them as part of popular entertainment. One of my favorite comics as an adult was the 1990 comic Hard Boiled by Geoff Darrow and Frank Miller. The violence in Miller/Darrow’s comic was so over the top there was no way it could taken seriously. It was black comedy, it was a darkly satirical statement against guns and violence. Nixon, the violent protagonist of the ultra violent world of Hard Boiled is an android death machine in the disguise of a tax collector who is married and has a family. Nixon malfunctions and goes on a killing spree. Miller’s writing is thin, it is Darrow’s incredibly detailed graphics that bring the story home.

This was where I had gravitated to in terms of my view of guns. In the 80’s I witnessed the transformation of South Central LA as a place where I used to go to visit relatives and play on front lawns to a shooting gallery like war zone. I was active in a college groups working with refugees from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Lebanon and experienced first hand accounts of the gun violence happening in those countries. It brought back memories I had as a child of the gun violence in the 60’s assassinations of Civil Rights leaders, the Kennedy’s, and the National Guard shooting students on college campuses during protests against the Vietnam war. As an adult, I definitely identified as anti gun.

I’ve been tracking homicide rates in major cities since I moved to San Francisco in 1991. Mostly because of the disturbing number of gun homicides that I would read about in Oakland and Richmond. After two decades the numbers have not abated. Baltimore, DC, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, and some other cities have gun homicide rates in the 300 plus range annually. That is obscene. Although I enjoyed the HBO series The Wire, I didn’t find it to be eye opening as many other people did who liked the show. To me it seemed like a lot of people who think the show is brilliant had no idea of what goes on in the inner cities, like it was something new. It’s not new, it has been going on for decades and for a person to have just discovered this violent world through a television show and think it is something new and revolutionary is ludicrous.

So that brings us back to Gilbert Arenas. He is a self certified goof ball who calls himself Agent Zero. He thought he could use his unloaded guns as a joke on one of his teammates. It is a sad affair if it represents how the younger generations view guns. Arenas is not a thug, he grew up middle class and attended college like many of today’s athletes. Yet there are too many stories that involve athletes and guns. Plaxico Burress has a Super Bowl ring from two years ago but now he is serving time in jail for shooting himself in the leg at a nightclub. Arenas already had a gun violation from his rookie year. It is not enough for some of these guys to have the bling, they need to have a gun too. Everybody wants to be a badass these days and it’s not just rich, young athletes. Some people want to make it into a racial thing and that is just ridiculous. That is just the myopia that chooses to ignore the biggest gun backers in the country, the NRA and the many other parts of the country and people who covet guns as shown in Michael Moore’s, Bowling for Columbine. Is it any accident that the most ardent and visible spokesperson for the NRA is an actor? Alzheimer’s be damned! Who will ever forget his famous speech at the 2000 NRA National Convention:

“From my cold dead hands”

This in reference to Al Gore saying it was the only way he would be able to take away his Second Amendment Rights. Guns are now sexy in the way tobacco once was. There is even a reality show on tv now about people and their guns. Some people see owning their guns as a God given right which I find very interesting. In this Christian country, where would Jesus stand on guns?

I haven’t touched a gun in years, but at the same time I have never voted against or aided any movement that sought to deny people the right to own a gun. I think all the legislation involving guns is a waste of time. If we allow people to have guns we will continue to have people getting killed by them no matter how many laws you make. Why? Because the purpose of a gun is to kill people! To think otherwise is pure folly. That is why I do not have a gun. It is not my intention to kill any other human being on this planet. I believe it comes down to how you carry yourself in this world. I have no fear of other people or bad neighborhoods. I have ridden my bike through the worst areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond without fear. I know that I am not bullet proof but I don’t expect anyone to start shooting at me. That’s just how I carry myself. I know I could be robbed but that’s not how I see other people. Am I the one living in a fantasy world? Maybe I am, but so far it’s working for me.

Besides, most gun homicides are not committed by strangers during the course of a crime, the majority are crimes of passion. About four years ago one of my best friends in San Francisco had a tragic event happen in her family. She is from Redding, CA. which is in the far north of the state where it is still rural and conservative and hunting is very popular. Definitely a part of the state where gun ownership is very popular. When we were roommates I would always look forward to my friend bringing back fresh venison in the fall after visiting her family. They were nice friendly people. I met the entire family when I went to her wedding in Redding. During a domestic dispute her father and her only brother were victims of a double homicide. They killed each other. During an alleged argument over access to the family guns the son stabbed the father in the chest. The father managed to get a gun before he bled to death and he shot the son who died of the gun shot wound. I was stunned when she told me the news. There are no proper words to console a friend when a tragedy like this occurs. Like I said, they were regular folks and nice people. If she hadn’t told me herself I would have never believed it.

None of us is going to live forever. If my time is to come by way of the bullet then so be it. It is not a strong enough belief for me to change how I am about guns. My power as a human being can never be measured by a gun. It can only be measured by what I action I take in this world to either contribute to making it better or making it worse.

Slips of the Lips

Often what we say and the words we use reveal a lot about who we are as people. We are a language oriented species. We have a strong desire to communicate. So what was Harry Reid trying to communicate when made his statements about Barak Obama?

Reid was outed recently in the news media by the release of the political trails gossip manifesto, Game Change, written by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. He used what some would consider inflammatory language, or rather an inflammatory word. He used the word “Negro”. This, coupled with the phrase, “light skinned”, definitely opened the doors for some criticism.

The problem with the news media is that statements made are often divorced of their context. Reid, in his own twisted way, was actually trying to pay Barak Obama a compliment. This is the quote from the book:

"He (Reid) was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,' as he later put it privately,"

The GOP and their Right Wing Army of Justice have been calling for Reid’s head. In their view he made a racist statement, yet they have failed to identify what part of the statement they consider racist, or how the whole statement in itself is racist. Everybody knows they don’t give a damn about racism. They saw an opening to bring down someone on the opposing side and went for the jugular.

Somehow for them it is all about Trent Lott. Like I said they could care less about racism or if black people were offended. They and the news media never came to talk to any of us or asked how we felt about it. It just political gamesmanship. Every story I have read about the GOP’s viewpoint always mentions Lott. They are making the most noise and their issue is not if Barak Obama or black people were offended, their issue is their perception of a double standard. Their mindset is, if our guy can’t get away with it, neither can theirs. The “it” being a racist statement. They aren’t concerned with the racist statement, they are concerned with the fact that they can’t get away with making racist statements. Lott didn’t step down because his party was ashamed and embarrassed by what he said, he stepped down because he made his party look bad due to the public reaction.

Well, what did Lott say?

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either,"

Lott said this in December 2002, on Capitol Hill, during a celebration for Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday. It was in reference to Thurmond’s failed 1948 presidential bid, running on a pro segregation platform. What was Lott implying by his statement? Was he trying to pay someone a compliment? Doesn’t seem like it. It seems to me he was saying he was a supporter, and still is a supporter, of legal segregation. It is a statement that is going to get a lot of people fired up. It brings up images of school kids being escorted to school by National Guardsmen. It brings up images of Leave it to Beaver Families holding up signs with some very ugly and hateful language, containing words way worse than “Negro”. It is a period of American history that Americans of today look back with shame and embarrassment, except for people like Trent Lott, who seem to be bitter because of that era’s passing.

When you get down to the bones, who wants to go back to how things were back then? Or maybe more precise, who is willing to publicly admit it? It’s the kind of thing people only say when they are angry and lose the ability to censor themselves, like Michael Richards when he lost it during his live comedy show. Americans have a lot of racial baggage. It is unfortunate because we live in a country with people of many different ethnic backgrounds who have to live together, but some don’t want to live together, some want to be separate. “White flight” replaced segregation when it was legally ended and still continues today. There are a lot of “white flight” people out there, silently supporting people like Trent Lott.

Harry Reid could be one of those people. Barak Obama and the Democrats are giving him a pass, but he doesn’t deserve it. He is not getting a pass from me. What he said does deserve some scrutiny. What he said gives insight to a broad issue that is not discussed very often, something that is overlooked in favor of bellicose reactionary behavior and finger pointing. Anger does not always have to be the reaction to racism, real or perceived. Incidents like this are the perfect opportunity to bring out of the shadows and into the light, something that really shapes people’s racial views, and that is myopia and tunnel vision.

Myopia is something that affects all groups of people in how they see other groups of people and individuals, different from themselves. It is the fallacy of solely focusing on any set of undesirable characteristics that are exhibited by a group or individual and completely ignoring all the rest, even going as far to paint all individuals associated with the group or individual with the undesirable traits. It is one thing to be indoctrinated into a way of thinking about certain groups of people as a child, where for the most part one is just parroting what they experience. At some point as the individual approaches adulthood and claims responsibility of their behavior and thought processes, they can choose to change as they accumulate life experience and learn and adopt progressive philosophies that deal with human thought and behavior.

Most people who do not change, it is because they have given themselves over to the authority of their peer group. It is the peer group that defines and sets the boundaries of thought. Peer groups are the oldest dictators and purveyors of propaganda on the planet. It is the empire and domain of hypocrites. It is not surprising in a world where people of independent thought are often chastised, ostracized, and belittled, while adherence and blind following to the peer group is often rewarded. How often has this been the case in school or in the workplace?

There are two things to look at in Reid’s statement. First is his need to inject “light skinned” into the conversation. For black people this opens up an can of worms that goes back all the way to slavery. Light skinned slaves were often “house negroes” because they were closer to the standard of white, able to live in the house with the Master and serve him directly, literally, making his beds, serving his food, rearing his children, and attending to the Master’s families intimate needs, including sexual duties for the Master himself. The House Negro was treated much better than regular slaves and often identified with the Master, seeing themselves as a part of the family. They might even be taught how to read and write. The dark skinned negro, or the “field negro” was the regular slave who labored hard in the fields and mostly dealt with the Master’s foremans who’s tools of control were the gun, the whip, the branding iron, shackles, and hound dogs. The Field Negro was considered an animal, like a cow or a pig, to be treated and bought and sold as such. Obviously there was friction and animosity between the House Negro and the Field Negro because of the difference of how each were treated. In post slavery, segregated America, light skinned blacks attempted to “pass” themselves off as white to get better jobs and living conditions and to be free of the harsh treatment that was the everyday life for people who obviously identified as black.

W.E.B Dubois and Marcus Garvey were enemies, and much of that was rooted in the fact that Dubois was fair skinned and Garvey was as black as coal. Jesse Jackson didn’t call Barak Obama a House Negro, but saying he wanted “cut his nuts off” arose from that bitter soil. It may be something we do not want to talk about but it is something we all know about, even Al Qaeda second in command Ayman al Zawahiri, who called Obama a House Negro when he won the election. Michelle Obama has had to endure many crude comments about her looks and personality because she is not light skinned. If she looked more like Halle Barry, Thandie Newton, or Zoe Saldana, she would have all of America eating out her hands and she would be the most adored woman on the planet. Many of the first successful African Americans were light skinned because they were more acceptable to the white standard. This is directly what Reid was referencing when he chose to focus on skin color in his assessment of Barak Obama, positive or not.

The second thing to look at in Reid’s statement is “negro dialect”. WTF is a negro dialect? Can somebody please tell me because I’ve been black my whole life and I do not know what a negro dialect is. I am aware that black people from New Orleans speak differently than black people from New York, who speak differently from black people in Chicago, who speak differently from black people in Los Angeles, but none of those ways of speaking is a negro dialect. Those are regional differences, just as it is with when comparing the speech of a white person from West Virginia to a white person from Massachusetts. So what the heck is Reid talking about? Ebonics? I think the man is suffering from a myopic view of black people. Can someone please tell Harry Reid that is is 2010 and he needs to get an update. If he is still using the word “negro”, it indicates his views about black people may be stuck in the past. He may not be as far from Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond as many people are trying to portray him.

So continues the saga of President Barak Obama, the first black man to hold the top office in the allegedly most powerful, and perhaps racially sensitive country in the world. We have made much progress in our views on race, but I think much of is more like the child who cleans up their room by throwing all the dirty stuff in the closet. Every so often something causes that door to open, even slightly, and the crap just spills out on to the floor in a heaping mess.

Muslim Air

I have an idea for a new airlines. Venture capitalists, are you listening? My idea is simple. Muslim Air, an airline for Muslims. It would eliminate most of the problems us regular folk face with commercial flying, and as an added bonus, would make it unnecessary for the U.S. to wage war in, and occupy, Muslim countries.

The latest incident in an attempted airline bombing has resulted in the U.S. launching Operation Overreact. When it comes to so called safety measures, our government is awesome in reacting after the fact. Our government apparently had the intel it needed to identify the alleged bomber but the system failed. The system always fails. No system is perfect, whether the vanguards of that system be human or machine.

In the aftermath of the failed attack, more invasive preboarding procedures have been instituted. All Muslims are now being profiled. Non compliance with any rules during flight is now met with extreme response. A drunk person locked in a bathroom results in the scrambling of two F-16 jets. If the person was a bomber what were the F-16’s going to do, shoot the plane down? Seeing that kind of response can only make the people who plan real attacks giddy. They’ve been using low tech, now they can go no tech. All they have to do is send people on planes and have them act suspicious. They could coordinate a massive red herring attack and have the air full of jet fighters threatening to shoot down planes full of travelers, and while all this confusion is happening they could pull off something really devious. For all of the billions we spend on national security, there seems to be no answer to low tech. Remember, Timothy McVeigh sheared a building in half with just a rented truck full of ammonia nitrate and fertilizer, substances that were obtained from commercial outlets. McVeigh was hardly an Einstein. Any fool can blow stuff up, all they need is the proper motivation.

If we aren’t going to trust any Muslims and profile them for any flight why not just give them their own airline? Wouldn’t Americans feel better and safer if there were no Muslims on the planes they fly on? Muslim Air would be awesome. Non Muslims would no longer be subjected to over-the-top preboard searches and in the air they would have piece of mind because they wouldn’t have cause to think their plane is going to get blown up. Muslim Air would be even better for Muslims. There would be no security checks at all, just get your boarding pass and get on the plane. The planes would have Muslim pilots and Muslim flight attendants. They could have Muslim movies, Muslim newspapers and magazines, and Muslim food and drink. If terrorists are targeting infidels then there would be no reason to bomb a Muslim plane, and if one was blown up who would care? The world doesn’t seem to care too much when Muslims are blown up, so the terrorists wouldn’t get any symbolic mileage out of blowing up a Muslim plane. Many Americans would actually applaud the blowing up of a plane full of Muslims and the last thing the terrorists want to see is happy Americans.

Funding a Muslim airline would not be a problem. Tax exported oil from Muslim countries. Tax the Saudi Royal Family and a luxury tax on all the other wealthy Muslim families that hoard their countries wealth, they can afford it (isn‘t it ironic that most of the Muslim bombers come from well to do families? Let the poor and working class ride for free!). I’m sure Wall Street would love to get in on the action. It would be a win-win for everybody. We embraced Separate But Equal once, why not again? When you count the billions of tax payer money we don’t even have, spent daily on waging war in Muslim countries to defeat terrorist, wouldn’t Muslim Air make much more sense economically? Even better than that, think of all the lives that would be saved. American soldiers would not have to spend their days half way across the world trying to avoid stepping on land mines and Muslim families would not have to be shot and bombed to death in their own homes and neighborhoods, well, at least not by us.

Outrageous you say? Is not what is going on in the world right now not outrageous? In my mind we are well past outrageous. I’d fly on Muslim Air. There is no fun in flying as it is so what would I have to lose? I could just as easily get run over by a car in San Francisco riding my bike (it has happened twice already) than get blown up in a plane. I believe if terrorist really just want to kill people we can’t stop it. With all the arms and bombs being manufactured and sold around the globe, killing lots of people has become one of the easiest things in the world to do. From one disgruntled employee or college student who goes to work or school armed to the teeth, to organized and heavily armed drug cartels and terrorists cabals, to organized and tax payer funded armies supplemented by private mercenaries under contract (who are the best armed of all), killing people by the dozens has become ubiquitous. We are becoming desensitized to it, and it’s not because of video games or movies, that is just a reflection. It is because of what is actually happening out there in the world everyday, with a worldwide, instantaneous media to keep the score and tons of internet forums and partisan websites for average citizens to use the fodder to point out how good their guy is and how bad the other guy is (Bush vs. Obama).

Something has to give. Economically and socially we are starting to more and more resemble the Soviet Union. Muslim Air could be part of fixing the problem. The Muslim countries lie between Europe, the America’s and their number one business partners, Japan and China (well, they own our debt). It’s where western civilization started. It’s the land of Biblical tales (talk about irony). The Romans, the Ottomans, the British, and the Soviets, have all failed in their attempts to dominate them, and we in America seem to be the next big loser in the Middle Eastern/Central Asia Exploitation Sweepstakes. Flying is the ultimate symbol of freedom. Maybe we should let them in on the action. Muslim Air, it could change the world.

History Lessons By Way of Alabama Football and the Rose Bowl

When thinking of the Rose Bowl most people tend to think of the Pac 10 and the Big 10, even in the BCS era. It's the granddaddy of all bowl games and it has quite a history. It wasn't always the Pac 10 vs the Big 10. Alabama will be playing Texas in the 2010 Rose Bowl BCS game to decide the national championship. It won't be the first time Alabama plays in the Rose Bowl. Unknown to most people the Rose Bowl holds a significant place in the history of the University of Alabama football program and the history of the south in general.

Alabama last played in the Rose Bowl in 1946, besting the USC Trojans 34-14. The game was significant because Alabama handed USC its first loss in a bowl game. Up to then USC had been 10-0 in bowl games. It would also be the last Rose Bowl game featuring schools from the south. After the 1946 game the Rose Bowl entered into an exclusive contract with the Pac 10 and Big 10 that still stands today. Alabama's all time record in Rose Bowl games is 4-1-1.

The most significant game in University of Alabama football and southern football in general is the 1926 Rose Bowl game. Alabama defeated the heavily favored University of Washington 20-19 in a game that is hailed as "The game that changed the South." Alabama was the first football team from the South to be invited to the Rose Bowl. The South was still suffering from being defeated in the Civil War. Poverty was widespread and the region was politically and socially isolated. The South had an inferiority complex. Nationwide it was thought that its football programs were inferior, and by proxy, the South was inferior. Knowing this may give some insight into why SEC fans are so rabid about their football. For them it's about pride, a pride that goes back to the Confederacy.

Alabama was invited to the 1926 Rose Bowl game because Yale, Dartmouth, and Colgate, turned down invitations on the grounds that athletics were becoming more popular than academics. Seeing how things are now, they were probably correct in that opinion. The invite was huge, not just for Alabama, but for the whole South. They had something to prove. Alabama would be playing for the honor of the entire southern states.

By all accounts it was a great game. Washington was up 12-0 at halftime but Alabama scored three touchdowns in the 3rd quarter and held on to win the game 20-19. The team returned to Tuscaloosa to a hero's welcome. Traveling by train, every southern town the team passed through was met by adoring fans and brass bands. Southern pride had been restored.

The victory greatly improved the image of the South and southern colleges. Southern schools would go on to play in 13 of the next 20 Rose Bowl games. The victory was also a boon for recruiting students from other parts of the country. Out of state students paid extra tuition so the incentive to recruit out of state was very high. The University of Alabama used the victory to recruit students from New York which resulted in some strange, unintended consequences.

Anyone reading this blog know that I am a fan of history. Some years ago I picked up a book called Mud on the Stars by William Bradford Huie. My mother was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and I have always wondered what life was like growing up for her. Mud on the Stars was an autobiographical book that partly covered how life was in Alabama in the 20's, 30's, and 40's, the decades my mother and her siblings were born into, so the book appealed to me. It was from this book that I discovered Alabama's 1926 visit to the Rose Bowl. I grew up less than two miles from the Rose Bowl yet I was completely unaware of its history. To me the most fascinating part of the book was what happened in Alabama after the Rose Bowl victory.

As I mentioned before, the University of Alabama advertised itself in the newspapers of New York city. In the 20's most of the universities in the east had quotas or outright bans for Jewish students. The advertisements for the University of Alabama had no mention of quotas or bans for Jewish students so many Jewish students applied for enrollment at the University of Alabama in 1927. Hundreds of Jewish students were accepted. Most of the incoming freshman class was Jewish.

This caused quite a stir in Alabama. Jewish people were not new to Alabama. The Lehman Brothers (Mayer and Emanuel) came from Alabama. We all know what happened with them. They built their empire on cotton, they were cotton brokers. They moved their business to New York right before the Civil War broke out. Jewish people who had been in Alabama were more southern than they were Jewish. There was actually a lot of friction between the local Jewish people and the Jewish students who came to the University of Alabama. They were "New York Jews". Most people in Alabama had never met a person from New York and New York Jews may as well been aliens from another planet. They were people southerners had only heard about or read about in the magazines and newspapers, and they were Yankees.

The New York mentality and way of day to day living completely clashed with southerners. The South was full of rules and etiquette, mostly based on the appearance of civility and upward mobility. In the South you always wanted to appear better than the social class you were actually in. That's why you didn't want to be known as a redneck, with literally, a redneck from wearing a collarless shirt and bending over all day picking cotton or some other type of hard labor. That was considered low class.

The Jewish people lived many to a dorm or apartment. They cooked in their dorm rooms and apartments on hot plates using lots of garlic. They wore short pants...outside. These was strange and unwanted customs to the students of Alabama. There were many complaints. In the classroom there things were no different. The Jewish students were outspoken, and well armed with ideas about socialism, marxism, and worker's rights. They were considered radicals by their fellow students. They had worldly knowledge of writers, the theater, and geo-global politics. The local students were taken back by the argumentative and in-your-face debating style of the Jewish students.

Not all of the students had issues with the Jewish students. Some were attracted to their particular brand of intellectualism. William Bradford Huie was one of those students. You may have not heard of him or know of him but you certainly may know some of his work as a journalist and writer. Many of his books have been turned into feature films and many of his books deal with significant events in American history. Mud on the Stars was adapted into a 1960 film by Elia Kazan called Wild River, starring Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. Huie was the journalist who paid Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam $4000 for their version of how they brutally murdered Emmett Till, which was published in Look magazine. Huie and Look magazine received much criticism for paying the murderers for their story. Huie wrote He Slew the Dreamer, an account of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., based on interviews with James Earl Ray. His book, Three Lives for Mississippi, was a reporters investigation into the slaying of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. In 1967 he wrote, The Klansman, which was an expose of the inner workings of the Klu Klux Klan. For that he was threatened with bodily harm and had a cross burned in his front yard. His best known work is The Execution of Private Slovik, the story of the only American soldier to be executed for desertion in WWII. The book was made into a televised movie starring Martin Sheen. When it aired in 1975 it became the most watched movie in television history.

Wow, how did we get from the 1926 Rose Bowl to the major events of the Civil Rights era and Hollywood movies? That's what I love about books and history. You open up a book and start reading and the world starts to unfold before you, leading you to places you never intended to go but glad that you did. Today we have the internet, and it is a great tool for research, but personally, in the end, I always find myself turning to books to get the best information, to get the depth of knowledge that is required to truly understand something. The history that we know and have been taught in school is generalized and sanitized. I find that true history, real history, is in the details. Just keep that in mind the next time you read a story in the headlines.

The Ghosts of Everest

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is The Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine. It is definitely a must-have for anyone who has a respect for the mountains and the brave, pioneering souls who climb and explore them.

I have always loved the mountains having grown up literally in the shadows of the San Gabriel mountain range on the north end of the Los Angeles Basin. Though the range is relatively unknown it has a rich and intriguing history for locals. John Brown, one of America's greatest unsung heroes, is buried there. John Muir wrote in his journals of the difficulty in navigating it's steep canyons. It was once the destination of the rich and famous who were ferried to the peaks by railroad where they cavorted at an exclusive resort. All over the peaks stand remnants of railroads, cobblestone foundations, and abandoned missile silos, acting as ghosts of what once was. A great part of my fascination with the mountains has always been the mysteries that exist there.

As I became older I started reading about mountaineers like Reinhold Messner and Royal Robbins. For a time I even entertained the idea of following in their footsteps. Unfortunately that never panned out but I did become an enthusiastic hiker, a novice climber, and a lover of mountain literature. The first book that really captured me was Annapurna, by french climber Maurice Herzog. It is the story of the first successful ascent of an 8000 meter peak. Among many things it was an education and history of Nepal and its way of life and how climbing used to be before modern technology began to exert it's influence on the discipline. It was the romance of human and beast powered transport across parts of a world unseen. It's the type of travel that allows a traveler to absorb a people and their culture firsthand and unfiltered and to experience the land as nature meant it to be, with respect. It was a story who's drama and intrigue hinged on a glorious ascent and a death defying descent that resulted in the loss of many body parts.

Mt. Everest has always loomed as The Mountain of all Mountains. It was one of the last great mysteries on earth. It wasn't until 1953 that it was successfully climbed by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay. The story of Hillary and Norgay is gripping and fascinating but sometimes the stories of valiant failures can be more compelling than the stories of valiant success. I find the story of George Mallory's attempt to climb Everest to be such the case.

Mallory climbed for the glory of the British Empire, or so it is believed. It was part of the English mindset of the time to prove themselves superior to all other people on the globe. They established their superior presence on every continent. As a person of color, I can't say that I support what they did in Central Asia, South Africa, and the Americas, but I do have respect for individuals like Mallory, who were driven not by notions of British supremacy, but by the notion of the limits of human capability. When asked why climb Mt. Everest, it is Mallory who is quoted with the famous saying, "Because it's there."

Mallory's ill fated attempt was made in 1924 when the most advanced piece of equipment was the oxygen bottle. Initially he disdained the use of oxygen as he was a purist but he conceded to it after watching others use it to surpass the 8000 meter mark in the Himalayas. Other than oxygen, all Mallory had at his disposal was wool clothing, leather boots, ice axe, a wind up watch, pocket knife, sewing kit, pencil and paper, and a camera. Probably what aided him best was his courage, superior climbing technique, and the heart of a lion. Those who climbed with Mallory always mention his unique technique which was powerful and fluid, almost serpentine. He made climbing look effortless even when climbing the most difficult and technical routes.

It is still a dangerous and daring undertaking to climb Everest but today's climbers are aided by computers, satellites, radios, video cameras, topography maps, fixed ropes, pre established base camps, helicopters, high tech clothing, medical support, paid guides, and armies of Sherpas in support . Hundreds of people a year climb Everest, at times there are literally traffic jams to the summit, but even with all the support and equipment people still die up there every year. Back in the time of Mallory, if you were on Everest it was just you, your climbing partners, and handful of Sherpas in support. It was a lonely undertaking on the loneliest place on earth.

Mallory made his ascent just shy of his 38th birthday with a group of about eight British climbers led by Edward Norton. It was the third attempt by the British to climb Everest and Mallory had been on them all. This was to be his last try at conquering Chomolungma, the Great Goddess Mother, as Mt. Everest was called by the locals. Six camps were established with last being at 27,000ft. At the time it was the highest anyone had ever been. Before Mallory made his attempt there was a failed attempt by Norton and Theodore Somervell. They made it past 28,000 ft, without oxygen or ropes, just below the famous Second Step, but due to their deteriorating condition could go no further. To go further in their minds was to invite certain death. Labored breathing, and damaged throat linings, along with loose rocks on the Great Couloir convinced them to retreat. They were approximately 900 ft. from the summit and barely made it back to Camp VI alive. Somervell nearly choked to death on the desiccated mucous membrane of his throat.

Despite the failure of Somerveld and Norton, Mallory decided to make one last attempt at the summit. He chose Andrew Irvine to be his partner because of his technical expertise with oxygen tanks. Noel Odell would go up with them in support. On June 6, 1924, Mallory and Irvine set off with their oxygen tanks to reach the top of Mt. Everest. Odell would be the last human being to see Mallory and Irvine alive. He last saw them as they were climbing past the Third Step, about 600 ft. from the summit. When they did not return Odell searched in vain but was unable to get to the place where he last saw them.

For decades the climbing community debated on whether or not Mallory made it to the summit. Given where he was seen by Odell it certainly was possible. Nobody had a clue what happened to Mallory and Irvine until 1933 when an ice axe was found by Percy Wyn-Harris as part of a British expedition. The axe was found on the Northeast Ridge at about 27,760 feet. It had to belong to Mallory or Irvine because nobody else had been up that high on the mountain since their ill-fated summit attempt. The three notches on the axe's handle indicated it belonged to Irvine. The finding of the axe only fueled speculation, it was not proof that Mallory had reached the summit. It would be 42 years until the next evidence of Mallory and Irvine was found. In 1975, Chinese climber Wang Hongboa found a body that he described only as an "Englishman". He described the body to a Japanese climber as having the cheeks pockmarked from being pecked by birds. Hongboa died in an avalanche the day after finding the body so he was never properly interviewed, but it was enough to revive the interest in the fate of Mallory and Irvine.

In 1999, 75 years after their disappearance, the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition team set out to find Mallory, Irvine, and the 1975 Chinese camp. They calculated a small search area based on the Norton's ascent, the location of the ice axe, and Odell's last sighting of the pair. The team of climbers discovered a half dozen bodies in the search area. It was like a graveyard of climbers. The dead climber's bodies were twisted and mangled which indicated they had died from long falls. Judging by their clothing, they were also climbers from recent times, wearing plastic boots and Gore-Tex. After discovering the dead bodies, one of the climbers, Andy Politz, on instinct, decided to head further down the slope. You have to understand, any deviation on the planned search area was a great undertaking due to the conditions they were working under. After climbing down a few hundred feet Politz saw a patch of white that was whiter than the snow and rocks around it. The patch of white was a body, a body that had been there for a long time. Dave Hahn, the first climber to reach Politz described what he saw.

"There was absolutely no question in my mind that we were looking at a man who had been clinging to the mountain for seventy-five years. The clothing was blasted from most of his body, and his skin was bleach white. I felt like I was viewing a Greek or Roman marble statue."

The hobnail boots told them the body had to be Irvine. No Westerners had been allowed in Tibet between 1949 and 1979 and this type of boot had been out of style since well before WWII. Nobody had died at this altitude between 1924-1938. At first they thought it was Irvine. On inspection of the clothing they found a laundry tag with the name "Mallory" on it. This wasn't the body that had been found by the Chinese, this was the body of George Mallory. They had been searching for Irvine and they found Mallory instead. They figured if one of them had fallen it would be the less experienced Irvine not Mallory. The photographs of the body are some of the most amazing I have ever seen. The body is completely preserved, the muscle tone still very visible. The body is clinging to the mountain, like Atlas holding up the world itself. Wrapped in tattered rope, fur lined cap, and almost completely disintegrated wool clothing, one almost expects the body to extract itself from the mountain and start climbing again. The skin truly looks like smooth marble, like a statue. The boots are off so the bare feet are exposed. One leg is broken. It was impossible to free the body as it was solidified to the mountain in rock and ice. The expedition team chipped away just enough to find several artifacts on Mallory's body. They found several handkerchiefs, perfectly preserved hand written letters, a tube of petroleum jelly, nail scissors, a matchbox, a tin of meat lozenges, a pair of sun goggles, a pencil, a pen knife, and an altimeter. They were unable to locate the one item they wanted to find most and that was the Kodak collapsible camera that Somerveld gave to Mallory for the summit ascent. If found it was believed the film would still be in good enough condition to be developed, and would solve once and for all the mystery of whether Mallory and Irvine were truly the first humans to ever reach the top of the Mt. Everest, at 29, 029 feet, the highest place on the planet.

We live in a world today where the derring do of men like George Mallory is rare. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to climb Mt. Everest today using only the clothing and technology that was available to Mallory in 1924. I wonder at times what price we have paid in terms of the loss of the human spirit for our love and reliance upon modern technology. We love our automobiles but most of the world was discovered by humans on foot or using wind powered ships and boats. The pyramids in Egypt have stood for thousands of years yet the World Trade Center towers were brought down in an hour's time. The empires of Persia, Alexander, and Rome crossed mountains, deserts, and continents without the use of machines or vehicles. We marvel at our GPS devices and i-Phones but how good are they once the batteries run out? How long would our infrastructure last without fuel and electricity? The machines can't live without us and we can't live without the machines (or so we think). Have we gone too far? Are we too dependent on technology? Sometimes I think our fascination and dependence on technology is only hastening our existence on the planet. Sometime I think to myself, "What's the hurry?" A traffic jam is a fitting metaphor for our times. Wrapped up in our cars with satellite radio, leather seats, and heating and air conditioning, we are stuck on a highway going nowhere fast. We can always choose to just get out of the car and be free but rarely do we. We have bought into the system that says we do this or that because we "have to". I tend to believe life is more about what Mallory said. I do life because, "It's there."