Along the Independence Trail, Part the Oneth

Memorial Day weekend. Three days to try to put some stamps in our Texas Independence 175th anniversary passport.

After a bit of research, I decide we need to visit Goliad and Gonzales. We'll stay in Victoria because they have more choices, and it's close to several stops we'll make on Sunday.

We rise late -- when did I come to believe that 7:30 is late? -- but still manage to hit the road by mid-morning, pretty good for me nowadays. I used to have the traveling thing down. Knew exactly what needed to be packed.

Now, I pack most of the needed items, then remember I forget something, then remember I forgot something else, and finally remember I forgot one last thing. Then, after we leave the house, I'm likely to remember something else and have to go back.

But not this time. We manage to pack everything with limited remembering and don't have to return for anything. Won't have to buy anything on the road, either.

The wind blew strongly from the south, and I fought it the whole way. One of the bad parts of owning a square car, I suppose. After leaving the Interstate behind at Waco, the adventure began.

Sharon's dad and I used to occasionally have a discussion about the best way to travel. I used to favor Interstates and U.S. Highways with bypasses. He like to travel the state highways and farm-to-market roads. The trip was the thing, not the arrival. I've come to appreciate that point of view.

Like traveling through the town of Rosebud, where a painted sign at the city's edge proclaimed, "We call it home."

Now, I'm sure they meant that in a positive way, but as we drove through the town, I was reminded of the phrase, "It's not much, but we call it home." That's usually uttered ironical when referring to spectacular digs, or honestly when the home really isn't much. Rosebud fits the latter category.

On the Interstate we would have missed the road sign in LaGrange that showed a nearly vertical truck on a steep incline on the left and a wavy line on the right -- not the usual "curves ahead" wavy line, with a couple of curves, but multiple curves.

"What does that mean?" I asked Sharon. She didn't know for sure. A short way later, we see an exit for trucks, so we figure this incline is pretty steep, but still aren't sure about the wavy line.

Turns out the steep incline has multiple switch backs to enable vehicles to climb the hill -- as I'm sure you've already figured out. A road that could have been at home in San Francisco.

And of course, we're behind a large truck that's lumbering up the hill, straining to do 20 mph.

In Halletsville, we pass a Cobra attack helicopter near the side of the road raised about 10 feet in the air. We have to turn around and find out what that's about. Can't do that nearly as easily on the Interstate.

Turns out the helicopter is part of a memorial to Vietnam veterans from Lavaca County, with a fairly large number of names listed.

And almost all the towns have cool houses, like the green Victorian we saw in Cameron, or a spectacular structure like the courthouse in Giddings that's being restored.

You just don't see those sights from the Interstate.

The day ends in Victoria. While driving to a restaurant for supper, we pass a large field nearly covered with flags, a relatively recent Memorial Day event apparently created as a fund-raiser/Memorial Day tribute by a local soldier. Residents can purchase a flag in memory or in honor of a soldier, or buy a POW/MIA flag, and the profits are used for Warriors Weekend, which provides wounded veterans from the war on terror with a fishing weekend each year.

A book that lists the placement of each flag along with the donor and the soldier being honored lies on a stand at one end of the field, and each flagstand bears a ribbon with the name of the honoree attached. One lists a soldier from the Revolutionary War.

The road alongside the field is under construction. Had I known that ahead of time, I probably would have given into to the old urge to find the better, faster route.

I'm learning.

Addicted to the History Channel

The famous quote is that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A brief, say 15 seconds, search of the Internet shows that quoted credited to Winston Churchill, with the original version, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, belonging to George Santayana.

People utter that quote often to support a wide variety of opinions they believe have roots in history.

The problem: We really don't know history and have little desire to learn it, much less take the time after learning it to understand how it really applies to a current situation.

I don't know what it's like in the public schools today, but I know that in the stone ages, most of my history teachers were coaches assigned to teach history, and their credentials for teaching the subject tended to be iffy.

The only teacher I had who had actually been a history major in college taught my 9th grade world history class and managed to make it interesting. We spent less time studying dates and names to be regurgitated on multiple-choice tests and more time studying the flow of events and how they related to each other.

Of course, that history was mostly Euro-centric, as though nothing of consequence happened in Asia, Africa or any of the Americas outside the United States.

In seminary, I had another wonderful history teacher who helped understand the context of religious history in relation to the events happening in the world at the time and who enjoyed taking class time to discuss the similarities of current events to the events we covered in class.

I read much more widely in history these days than I did as a kid, though I'm not sure I could be called a history buff. My wife and I often visit historical sites, where I learn stuff I was never taught in school.

All this has made me impatient with much of the discussion I hear going on these days. Two phrases tend to turn up with regular frequency: "Never in our history ..." and "The [fill in whatever group from history you're trying to use to support your point] never intended ..."

The latter phrase, of course, is usually filled in with "the Founding Fathers."

These phrases, and the arguments that ensue from the premises they introduce, suffer from two problems.

The first is our woeful ignorance of history. Almost every time someone utters the phrase "never in history," I either immediately think of a time in history when virtually the same circumstances occurred, or within a week or so, I will hear a historian discuss virtually the same situation that happened during the period he or she studies.

While watching Ken Burns' epic documentary on the Civil War right after Christmas, for example, I heard echoes of many current debates.

Then I heard and read stories about celebrations connected with the anniversary of the war's onset, which brings me to the second problem. We know or learn just enough history to support our point of view and ignore the rest.

Many of the interviews I heard and read tried to support current political movements based on reasoning that helped trigger the war. Historians asked to comment in response generally framed a "well, yes, but that doesn't take into account these other factors occurring at the time" kind of answer.

We cherry-pick events and quotes from the past to support our positions so often that we end up believing that the version of history we're constructing is the whole story.

The Founding Fathers debate is a great example. The Founding Fathers intended [fill in the blank] when they wrote the Constitution. Or my personal favorite, the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation.

Quotes are pulled out of context, both the context of the passage being cited and the context of the era in which it was written or uttered, and used to bolster a debater's favorite point.

But the broader scope is ignored. Quoting Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson in support of the Christian nation theory, which I've heard some folks do, is ludicrous. Even broadening the concept to use them to support the 21st century propositions about God's relationship to the nation fails utterly because we fail to take into account what they meant in the context of their 18th century Deist and Enlightenment understandings.

That you can find pastors religious figures among the delegates to the various conventions that eventually produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution doesn't necessarily prove the point either.

All it really proves, in fact, is that a number of different people with different ideas came together and hammered out a grand compromise that has worked for all these years.

And perhaps it has worked for all these years because it was a compromise between those competing points of view. Maybe that's the real lesson of our history.

Maybe Santayana's quote should be something less poetic, along the lines of: Those who cannot remember their past, or deliberately choose to ignore parts of it, are dumb, so they will repeat it.

Nah. Better stick with the original.

Can we just stop being so nosy?

I don't know who to be madder at: The L.A. Times, TMZ, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but for now, I pick Arnold.

I never believed the denials the governator and his wife made about his various escapades, and I wasn't surprised to find out this latest bit about the maid and the child.

But our fascination with celebrities and their foibles is such that media-savvy twerps like Arnold ought to know when to keeps their traps shut.

The Times had figured out the affair and the resulting child and asked the maid about the situation. She said the child was her husband's.

But when news outlets go to Arnold, he just chirps away, admitting the whole thing.

The Times refused to identify the woman or the child, enough information has now been given that TMZ, a scuzzy "entertainment news" outlet proceeds to identify the woman and where she lives, thus making continued secrecy about the child's identity a moot point.

Given TMZ's predilection for ferreting out this kind of information, they probably would have come up with all this on their own. Shoot, they were probably already on the story before Arnold opened his yap.

That doesn't mean he needed to say anything about it. He needn't have denied anything, adding another lie to the pile, but he could have said he wasn't going to talk about it. He knew that confirming any of the information would inevitably lead to the revelation of who the relevant parties were.

And that meant the child, who shouldn't have to be dragged into this mess, would be.

But as I think about it, as mad as I am with the Times and TMZ and Arnold, I now think I'm maddest with us, this society that we live in, because we believe we ought to know these so-called bits of news.

If there were no audience for the stupidities committed by Paris and Lindsay and Charlie and now Arnold, not to mention a host of other less recent bad boys and girls, TMZ wouldn't exist and major news outlets would go back to leaving that nonsense to the tabloids and seedy gossip rags.

Shame on Arnold. Shame on TMZ. Shame on the Times, but most of all, shame on us.

More from the "Say what?" department

While browsing the clearance aisle at Half-Price Books, I stumbled across "The Party of the First Part," a humorous look at legal language and its development across the ages.

Now that I work for a lawyer, I thought I should study up a bit, and when a book's on clearance at Half-Price Books, you're paying a pittance for what could turn out to be a gold mine.

The author, who is a lawyer, is a bit too give to bad puns, but I did learn quite a bit that helped me to understand some of the arcane phrases I run across in the documents I look at day after day.

Much of legalese, according to the writer, comes about from the use of boilerplate -- prewritten material that has passed the test of time and can be safely used again and again. Objections from those of us who have to read it and would like to have it put in plain English will be told that all the verbiage is necessary to make sure all the contingencies are covered. That the language is necessary to ensure precision.

I've run into similar situations. While working as communication director for one organization, I had to review and edit our various manuals. The organization heads were OK with my changing just about every change I wanted to make until it came to the employee handbook.

That language had been carefully reviewed by the lawyers, and everyone would be better off if I didn't try my hand at simplifying it.

So, you would have phrases like Failure on the part of the employee to perform the duties as prescribed and/or directed by a supervisor could result in disciplinary action and/or termination.

You can almost always tell a lawyer has worked on a document if "and/or" shows up.

What that long sentence translates to is: If you don't do your job the way you're told to, you're in trouble and could be fired.

I realize that my version doesn't include a reference to discipline but that could be dealt with fairly simply as well.

The real killer in this is that lawyers will defend long, impossible sentences on the theory that the legal jargon constitutes a kind of legal shorthand that would result in even longer documents if it weren't used.

A lawyer responsible for writing the small print that accompanies credit applications made this point in an interview I heard recently on the subject. She pointed to the word "herein" as an example. If she had to say "in this document," she'd be using three words instead of one, she said, and where's the economy in that?

Of course that totally ignores the padding of words in the rest of the document.

Take this example I ran across last week.

"Grantor does expressly reserve unto himself/herself/theirselves, his/her/their heirs and assigns, all minerals of which the Grantor is possessed (including but not by way of limitation oil, gas, sulfur, coal, lignite and uranium) in, under and that may be produced from the land herein conveyed, including all royalties, bonus and delay rentals due and payable under any applicable oil, gas and mineral lease covering said land, provided, however, Grantor agrees he/she/they will not use or occupy any portion of the surface of the property ..."

The rest of the sentence takes up an equal amount of space. Yes, that's right. That sentence is twice as long therein.

The essence of the portion quoted is, of course: I'm selling you this property but I'm keeping the rights to all the minerals and any income they might produce.

Even if you successfully argue that all the contingencies have to be included so some other clever lawyer can't find a way to sneak some of your rights away from you, the sentence could at least be broken into simpler chunks.

And perhaps the worst problem is that after using the himself/herself/theirselves, which should have been "themselves," way of avoiding sexism or whatever problem that wording avoids, the document includes this standard language that appears in pretty much every deed I've seen:

"When this Deed is executed by more than one person, or when the Grantee is more than one person, the instrument shall read as though pertinent verbs, nouns and pronouns were changed correspondingly, and ..." (I really won't subject you to the rest of that sentence, which is also twice as long as I've quoted.)

What that standard does is say, hey, I'm going to use singular and masculine throughout this document, and you should make the appropriate substitutions when you read it because it's simpler that way.

Only in this case, it's not simpler.

And don't be fooled; even though you make be tempted to take up an instrument and execute the writer of this, um, what to call it, hmm, let's just say "stuff," that's not what those words mean therein -- I think I'm beginning to like that term.

This, folks, is probably not the meaning of the proverb, "The pen is mightier than the sword." Unless you're trying to sign the swordsman to a waiver of liability, in which case he'll probably decide it's not worth the trouble to read all the words and walks off in disgust.

You can make this stuff up

I tried to stir something up on Facebook the other day, but it didn't work.

A few days before a co-worker propounded the theory that Obama having released his birth certificate in an effort to draw attention away from Ben Bernanke's press conference, the first ever by a sitting Fed chair.

Now the fact that the press conference took place a couple or more days after Obama's announcement would seem to put a bit of a damper on that theory, but this particular person isn't given to thinking that way.

Following that lead, however, I posted something about Obama's announcement of his re-election bid, the release of his birth certificate and the death of Bin Laden. I was hoping someone would pick up on the possibility of a conspiracy on the part of the administration to create events that would aid the re-election bid, but no one bit.

About the same time, a church friend sent me an e-mail that claimed Obama was going to honor Jane Fonda as woman of the century, or some similar nonsense -- I can't quote it because I trashed the e-mail.

The missive recounted all of Fonda's sins from the Vietnam era, real and imagined. In the minds of many those activities made her a traitor who is never to be forgiven.

The e-mail was a hodgepodge of other e-mails and rumor campaigns that date to before the widespread influence of the Internet, with the added twist of throwing Obama under the bus for good measure.

Now, a whole cottage industry has grown up on the Internet centered on the proposition that you can take any kernel of truth, distort it into a lie, add Obama's name to it, and cause a tizzy among a whole group of people who, at best, oppose the president, and at worst despise him pretty much for two reasons: He's a Democrat, and he's Barack Obama.

That is a subject for another post, but I began to wonder, who makes this cra ... er, stuff up? And how to they achieve such widespread success in disseminating it? And I'm not just talking about Obama.

I would include the rumor that won't go away that Madalyn Murray O'Hair is trying to end all religious programming, or the one about the soft drink company that dissed Christians by not putting "In God We Trust" on their can, or any of the other easily refuted lies that run around the Internet on a frequent basis, which has created a whole other cottage industry devoted to exposing the deceptions.

Coincidentally, I now receive e-mails about the sites that debunk this nonsense that claim those sites are the real liars and shouldn't be trusted. Though a natural development, the naysayers rely on the fact that most people who receive and pass along bogus e-mails would rather believe a lie than do a little research on their own.

But again, who are these people who try to convince me that soft drink companies, and coffee companies, and soap companies, and politicians are the essence of evil? And do they really not have anything better to do with their time?

Often, after someone has spun an incredible tale they insist is factually accurate, they will wind up the account the well-worn, "You can't make this stuff up."

But judging from my electronic inbox and the comments of people I know, you can make this stuff up, and someone will believe it.

Unless, apparently, I make it up and post it on my FB wall.