Wintry Mix-and-Match

There was a time in recent memory when a meteorologist would come onto the radio or television and state with precise scientific certainty what the forecast would be for the next seven days. One of these television scientists even had a local “3-degree guarantee”. Since the weather in our hemisphere usually swings across the nation from the west to the east, it seemed fairly easy to predict what was happening in the plains states and guess how pressure systems off the coast and rising out of the gulf could affect us. If a suited weather person stood in front of a green-screened map and told us that unseasonably cold temps would be coming and that snow was likely, we would nearly always get those cold temps and snow or ice. The occasional surprise storm could pop up, but even then, prolonged emergency coverage would interrupt regularly scheduled programming and show up-to-the-minute “live track” radar of “tornadic activity” as we once heard a person in a nearby diner booth call it.

Something might have slipped. Last week, no meteorologist could say with anything like their usual hubris whether or not it would snow or how much we would get. It was cold enough and precipitation was in the forecast models, but something prevented an accurate prediction. As iron-grey clouds lowered and temps fell into the teens, the air felt and smelled like snow. Weather apps on our phones (I have four) all had different temps, each was forecasting a different amount of snow and even the TV meteorologists seemed baffled about what the skies would do. Each radar screen showed bright blue blankets over our area describing snowy precipitation, yet there was nothing. 

I came home from work at the regular time, expecting fine flakes but there was nothing. As I was preparing to go to a meeting that evening, my family talked about all the different data available. I took the dogs out before temps got too arctic and there was extremely fine, sandy and sparse precipitation but it was certainly not snow. 

I brought the dogs in, and was changing my shirt and shoes when Micki came in and said, “It’s snowing!”. I was just out there, so I was in disbelief. “No,” I said, “It’s super fine grit, not snow.” She told me to go look. I protested. “I just came in. It’s not really doing anything.” She gestured emphatically at the kitchen door, so I went back out. In the time between when I entered the house and went back out (perhaps three minutes), the ground had gone faintly white and snow was falling thickly. I went back through the house to the front door. Both halves of our front garden were already dusted. The street, our front walk and the roofs of the neighboring houses already had a fine covering, too. It really was snowing.

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In March of last year, we drove to New York for Micki’s maternal uncle’s funeral. Whenever we drive up north, it is usually to see my brother and his family and Pops. However, this time, we had to pass right through my home state and keep going. Pennsylvania has odd and persnickety weather and it sometimes is quite unpredictable, so we try to keep our travels to the Keystone State during more clement parts of the year. As soon as we crossed into the state’s southernmost reaches, the wind became violent and we experienced a severe snow squall.

 

Snow squalls are intense short-lived bursts of heavy snowfall that lead to frighteningly fast reduction in visibility. In our situation, the wind dropped temps enough to cause a passing thunderstorm to blow thick snow and for a few very fraught and nerve-wracking moments, we could barely see the road in front of us. It was lost, as was everything else, in a paper-white blankness. Within the hour, it was gone (the wind continued to pelt) and the sun came out and it was over. PA had welcomed us. 

Growing up there, I learned early on that the weather was not to be trusted. It could be sunny and sixty during the daytime and then suddenly and without warning, cloudy, rainy and near freezing. Prolonged outdoor activities in PA require careful selection of possible needed clothing. A day hike could turn dangerous in just a few minutes. In the mostly settled suburban region between the Susquehanna and Lehigh rivers, weather could be so unpredictable that from when the buses left the stop and arrived at school, things could change drastically. 

Time of year rarely has anything to do with it. I remember snow flurries as late as May, and swelteringly hot days in mid-November. Sunny, hot summer days where shorts and a tank top felt overdressed could suddenly turn into a temperature-dropping deluge that left one drenched and shivering. In 1993, a blizzard in late March caused temperatures to crash from the mid-60s to 25 degrees in a day. In another twenty-four hours, almost three feet of snow smashed onto the region with some windblown drifts reaching man-height. Within another day, temps were rising so quickly that the heavy snow collapsed flat roofs. Fields, creeks and streams flooded, as did roads. When temps dropped back below freezing at night, those wet and flooded zones refroze causing perilous hazards. 49 Pennsylvanians died. Thousands more were left without power and heat. 

And that was just March.

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The day we were supposed to get snow, everyone at work buzzed about closing early. When I left the library at 5, it was still an open question. Some argued that an “abundance of caution” required closing, especially for employees who lived far away. Others suggested that, with predictions as wonky as they had been lately, it might not snow in the next month. By half past 5, standing on my front stoop gaping at the white wonderland spreading before me, I pulled my phone out and alerted my friend that I wouldn’t be making our meeting. While I spoke to him, a car speeding by frantically fishtailed into the middle of the intersection, nearly missing another car coming down the hill from the other direction. After hanging up with my friend, I texted the library director in my official capacity as the unofficial safety officer and offered the unsolicited opinion that it would be wise to close as soon as possible due to quickly deteriorating road conditions. He replied that the library was closing at 6. I went back inside but kept peeking out at the snow that was rapidly coating everything. By seven, the world was silent except for the faint static-like hiss of heavy snowfall. It shut down schools and delayed county office openings and caused days of perilous road conditions. 

And we got less than an inch.

In Louisiana (you read that correctly) where our nieces reside, five and a half inches of snow fell. In no time, videos hit our phones of our eldest niece’s young family playing in the snow. We remarked that their little ones who were in full frolic in the white stuff, would likely never see so much snow again. We were sure that they would remember it and tell their grandkids when the time came though they would probably not be believed.

 

Videos shared online showed deep southerners using rigid hull inflatable boats (RHIB) as makeshift sleds and improvising snow removal procedures in a land where snow shovels and snow blowers never make the inventory of big-box warehouse stores. Others had people standing out in their front yards looking down at the snow with expressions of shock and confusion on their countenances. For a few short days, people from Georgia to Eastern Texas got to see what a “Yankee winter” is like. It may not be their last chance.

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Some centers for weather prediction certainly did foresee (to the extent possible) oncoming winter weather and made it clear that something was certainly coming. They just couldn’t say precisely what to expect. This waffling on the part of once-trusted scientific information makes me more than a little nervous. In the last year, alone, devastating weather has caused no end of harm to people all across our nation. If North Carolina and Pennsylvania are unpredictable and dangerous, how much more so is California, where a persistent six-month drought turned Los Angeles into a tinderbox fanned by Santa Ana winds? Within days of the fires coming under control, record rainfall caused the once arid soil to go crashing down mountains as nightmarishly huge mudslides. The manic weather seems to get a little worse every year.

Until this year, our winters have been generally mild. Frustratingly so. Cold temps kill mosquito larvae, ticks and fleas and help to cull other harmful and pest populations. This year's brutally cold winter (so far) has been tough for travelers and rough-sleepers and the elderly alike. All over our neighborhood, water pipes burst under the street in the prolonged sub-freezing temperatures. Stiffly bundled city water department workers jack-hammered and repaired the mains, even as the water froze as soon as it hit the air. I felt a pang for them this year. We have gotten a few cold days strung together in recent winters, but this year’s cold just stayed around.

Like pain or bad sickness, the brutality of the deep cold (and whatever the year has in store for us after the current brief warm up) will fade quickly as spring storms bring tornadoes and torrential downpours and strong winds. Long before the dreaded hurricane season descends on us, big trees will fall and kill power in our neighborhood and all over the state. Winter’s quiet white snows will seem like a dream by comparison. And then the pollen will coat everything and then it will get hot again. Intensely, brutally, lethally hot. We won't remember just how cold it got, if the pipes froze or if it was frigid enough to kill skeeters. By then, we would gladly trade the muggy awfulness of July for snowy weather. No matter what happens, we won’t be prepared for it or happy about it in the moment.

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Science may (have to) catch up. Weather prediction apps may have to become more rigorous to notify us accurately in advance of drastic weather. Drastic weather is a foregone conclusion. Knowing about it well enough in advance is key. We already know it’s going to be rough, regardless of whatever the season is. What we need is a way to prepare far enough in advance to keep people safe and make informed decisions before it is too late.

North Carolina, at least our part of the state, has been fairly fortunate over the years. We have had “bad weather” but not to the degree that other states routinely get it. Hurricanes have usually lost some of their bluster by the time they sweep up the eastern seaboard to us. We get snow, but it is rarely catastrophic. We might get tornadoes, but they are probably not going to be anything like what will touch down in Tornado Alley. We get forest fires, but nothing on par with the monstrous conflagrations that burn hundreds of acres an hour elsewhere. In short, we’re extremely fortunate. At least we have been until this year, when Hurricane Helene hit the state from the south and took a hard left over the mountainous western region of NC.

In just a few days, torrential rains caused mudslides that washed away major interstate highways and county lanes alike. Rivers flooded and washed away low-lying neighborhoods. Telephone and power poles came down like dropped matchsticks. The winds left trees bare of leaves and branches. Others were snapped in half or wrenched from the ground. Debris and destruction remained. Whole towns were submerged. Chimney Rock and Lake Lure, tiny towns on the Broad River were washed away. It is impossible to put into a few words how that storm affected the residents of our state or how devastating it truly was. Between when the first rain fell and now, 104 North Carolinians were killed or died as a direct result of the storm. Thousands more were without power or access to clean water for months.

Our middle son and his wife and daughter endured an Odyssey-like escape from the destruction, winding through neighboring states and going miles and hours out of the way to find safe roads, but finally got to our house on September 29th. This past weekend, his wife and our granddaughter were finally able to make plans to return to their home. After almost four months, though, things are still not “back to normal”. They will now have to live in constant fear of the word “hurricane”. 

And this is just here in NC. Other states have fared far worse.

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We have no way to know what will happen next. 2025 has already been an unquiet year. The groundhog has yet to make his predictions but regardless of what he sees, we will have six more weeks of winter that could continue to be dangerously cold and snowy. Time will tell. Without an accurate and reliable way to see what is coming. We’ve put a man on the moon, for heaven’s sake. I think we can begin to focus on the urgency of weather prediction without it becoming a battle of partisan political proportions. 

Given the increasingly erratic and severe weather patterns we face, the need for accurate, long-range forecasting is no longer a matter of convenience, but of survival. We may marvel at the sudden appearance of snow in Louisiana or find ourselves inconvenienced by late-season blizzards. Localized events are but small indicators of a larger, more ominous trend. From devastating droughts and wildfires in California to the unprecedented hellscape left in the wake of Helene in North Carolina, the atmospheric message is clear: our planet is changing and changing rapidly. Whether we fully understand the causes or not, we must acknowledge the reality of this shift and invest in the scientific tools and infrastructure, safety and preparedness education necessary to navigate this new climate reality. The ability to anticipate and prepare for extreme weather events is not just a scientific challenge; it's a fundamental requirement for ensuring the safety and well-being of communities across the globe in the 21st Century.

The Moving Finger Writes

The title of today’s essay comes from a poem by Omar Khayyám:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

My wife's beautiful handwriting was one of the many things that first captivated me. It helped me to fall in love with her. Notes she wrote to me early in our romance I still admire, not least for their sentiments but also for how gorgeously they swept across the page. I envied the effortless grace of her script and the elegant efficiency of her printing. Her teachers might have taught her well, or maybe she was one of those students who easily emulated the daily cursive practices, but whatever the reason, one thing is true: I will never be able to write like she can.

My handwriting is—to borrow the term that four subsequent elementary school teachers wrote on my report cards—atrocious. When I first brandished writing implements in Ms. Dierwechter’s kindergarten class, I could see that the middle-aged spinster was less than effervescent about my work. In kindergarten, in the early 1980s, no handwriting was on the curriculum. We used chunks of fat crayon to trace big letters (one per page) that had been cranked out from a Xerox mimeograph machine, and we spread white paste (some of my classmates ate it) on fibrous construction paper and that was about it.

The girls in my class, among them Stacia Logan and Kasey Heisman (both of whom were the offspring of teachers) could already tie their sneakers and write their names and print numbers up to 10 when school opened that Autumn. Ms. Dierwechter burbled and crooned over their work. She squawked and honked at the rest of us, craning her long neck and casting a beady black eye on our pages with barely contained derision. I sensed her dislike early in the year when she ignored me despite raising my hand. In response, I deliberately ignored her when called on, and our relationship developed some dudgeon henceforth.

At age five, I was a doodler, swirling the chunk of broken crayon on the page and humming to myself, with complete disregard—or, more likely, just blissfully ignorant—of the rules. When the scolding remarks from Ms. Dierwechter didn't swing me back in line with her perfect pet students, my mother got a note sent home safety pinned on my jacket. “David talks too much, doesn't pay attention, and has poor penmanship.” By the end of the year, ‘poor’ became ‘atrocious’. 

Not much has changed.

By first grade, of course, I was settling down a bit, and becoming more solidly talkative, distracted and hyperactive. I was never deliberately disobedient, but I think sometimes I couldn’t sit still. It didn’t help that my house was visible across the valley from the windows of our classrooms and so, I was often lost in reveries and missed teacher instructions. So, imagine if you can, a tall-for-his-age blonde kid with a beaming smile, dressed in patched hand-me-downs, rambling on about some cartoon or other, humming a lively tune and not being able to trace a D. This, in essence, was my "portrait of the artist as a young man," with respect to James Joyce.

The lovely and mother-like Mrs. Cave was far more generous of spirit than my kindergarten teacher who had been more than a little the basis for my fear and loathing of any anserine birds. My friend Shannon Drum once said in awed tones, “Mrs. Cave reminds me of Momma.” Shannon's mother was four hundred pounds of stout farmer’s wife stuffed into shabby men's overalls, work boots and a whip-like braid down her wide back, but I knew what he meant. Mrs. Cave was a sweetheart and we all loved her. Her patience was endless and her kindness was sincere. Later in my life, I realized that she bore more than a passing resemblance to Barbara Eden.

However, even this saint of a teacher had her fill with me by the end of the first quarter. Once again, I was sent home with a note pinned to my jacket, “David talks too much, is distracted, and has poor penmanship.” She added, perhaps aware of the harshness of her statement, “He is a very bright boy and very curious. He loves learning and is a careful reader.” Later, just like the year before, my final report card had the word ‘atrocious’ written behind the line for penmanship. 

Over the next few years, we moved from learning how to print letters to writing cursive. Above the blackboard in every classroom was a line of laminated cards that showed each cursive letter and had little directional arrows showing how one ought to direct their pencil to accomplish it. This throwback to a Victorian style called The Palmer Method—and the reason that all the adults in my family wrote the same way—appealed to me. There was no need to pick up the point of the pencil from the page. I could write three words in the space of time it took to print just a few letters. I liked writing in cursive. It felt strangely historical and it suited my limited patience.

Around this same time, my young imagination had already taken its first steps into a lifelong trek into history. I was fascinated with our forebears. Television, cinematic and literary examples of frontier life that happened right where I grew up were very much on my mind. One Christmas or birthday, someone gave me the gift of a bottle of ink, a quill pen and a sheaf of parchment paper and I immediately started researching how to write in an archaic way at our tiny local library. By the time I was making my first forays into the upper grades of elementary school, I was still getting unsatisfactory in talking and paying attention, was excelling at reading, but was still drawing negative comments from the teachers about writing.

My historical cursive writing deviated significantly from the school's prescribed style, causing friction with my teachers. I was impatient with the primary school pace. Teachers back then did not put any faith into ‘self-taught’. When it came time for me to write “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in cursive, I did it but it looked more as if it had been written by Alexander Hamilton than a studious elementary school student. Mrs. Hower (2nd Grade) had a parent conference, where she scolded my mother for not forcing me to adopt the curricular style. She had no truck with my attempts and she made it perfectly clear. 

This woman, who was built on the lines of a naval mine, had a snappish and abrasive manner. When she laid into my writing, my mother stopped her flat. I can still proudly remember her getting a bit red and telling the teacher that she was proud her son had taught himself to write cursive. Later, she did ask me over an ice cream cone to try to write a little more like what they were doing in class, just to stay off the teacher’s radar. I tacitly agreed, but I never stopped writing like Hamilton and Thomas Paine.

If Mrs. Hower was coarse and crotchety, when I matriculated to third grade, Mrs. Sechrest was pleasantly oblivious, which suited my learning style beautifully. She was pregnant with her third child during my third-grade year, and her pregnancy understandably distracted her from her teaching duties. We spent most of the year listening to calming piano music on a boombox on her desk and reading or coloring and going to lunch and recess. Except for Matt Mock doing his best impression of a possum in the front of the room, it was a quiet and delightfully easy year. Or would have been. In the last quarter, Mrs. Sechrest departed to have her child and the substitute who took over disrupted the zen-like calm of that classroom like a V-1 buzz bomb.

In the film The Great Escape, the prisoners' relentless escape attempts eventually lead to the replacement of the camp's commandant with the brutal Oberst Werner Braune, who favored swift and decisive action, even if it meant resorting to lethal force—usually a machine gun. The long-term substitute, Mrs. Braune, was as bad as her namesake in the movie but without all the whimsey. She hated children and teaching and gave everyone sour remarks on their report cards. Even the usually favored teacher’s pet girls, Stacia and Kasey, were reduced to tears when they tried to win the sub’s favor. Several parents came together and bombarded the principal with threats to go to the superintendent if she wasn’t replaced, but by the time anything could be done, the year was over and we staggered out of her class like freed P.O.W.s. Rumors began to circulate that while cleaning the school that summer, the janitorial staff found a cleverly concealed excavation in the coat closet at the back of the room, that tunneled into the girl’s restroom. I wasn’t surprised.

My fourth-grade year was a contentious one, again, but that was because one of my best childhood friend’s mother taught the class. Mrs. Bill did not like me or that I was friends with her son. She spent most of the year arguing with me about things I had already learned at the library. I don’t remember what my grades were, but I remember she didn’t like my writing, either. However, since she also attended our family church, I think more than once, she pulled my mother aside and told her that I was on my way to the life of a heathen or convict. I’m not sure if my mother believed her, but by then, she was also distracted with other things. Years later, as a high schooler, I visited my friend at his house and took every opportunity to leave kind thank you notes in illegible script for his mother.

Mr. Grubbs was a too-tan doppelganger of Richard M. Nixon and was the only male teacher in the whole school, taught fifth grade. He had a strange preference for velour sweaters and brown polyester trousers. He surprisingly used my unique writing as a positive example for my classmates, encouraging them to develop their own individual penmanship. His pedagogical style was based on the idea that by fifth grade, instead of little cookie-cutter kids, we ought to be developing our individuality. This got me bullied and into trouble with the principal for “fighting”. Tony Leopold and Luke Loeb pinned me down in the mulch at recess and pulled my shirt up to give me a “cherry belly”. I flailed out at them to get away and made contact with both of them, leaving bruises. Although it was the only year in my career where I didn’t get bad notice for my handwriting, I had other problems that cast a pall on my grades and scholarly career in general.

After this, too, I was far less interested in proving my handwriting skills or drawing unwanted attention to myself. In the coming years, educational focus shifted to typing, computers, and word processing. By my first year of college, everyone had an email address and many of us were already communicating via online chat platforms. 

I can and occasionally do still write in cursive, but my scrawl is worse than chicken scratch, now. For the previous generations who only had pen and ink, it was necessary to at least try to be legible. Once typing took over and morphed into texting, which required a QWERTY keyboard and active thumbs, handwriting went the way of cuneiform and papyrus. Sometime in the new century, cursive fell out of the curriculum and most young people today cannot “sign” their name, but they usually don’t have to.

I am not one of those “old people” who laments this fact. I recently had a training where the instructor said that, because children are always on their phones, soon all kids will be nonverbal. This is the next stage in the evolution of the ludicrous idea that, if kids cannot write in cursive, they will be illiterate. It is born of an inability to see that as technology changes, so do our ways of communicating. Anyone who gets a handwritten letter from me will be glad that I can type faster than I can scribble and will breathe a sigh of relief that I have chosen to hunt and peck out a note to them, rather than sending them an indecipherable message in impenetrable scrawl. 

And while it is lovely to get a handwritten letter from someone, the process of typing is not much different. Although there is some science to prove that handwriting wakes up much more of the brain than typing does, I believe (for now) that script and typing are no different than reading a book or listening to it being read. They essentially awaken the same parts of the brain and constitute ‘reading’. If you type a letter, it has still been written and the parts of the brain necessary to transcribe ideas from the imagination to the page are still activated. Only the hand gestures necessary to get it there are different.

I’m not sure if any of my former teachers are still walking the earth, but if they are, they will be happy to know that at least one of their former charges is still writing letters occasionally to his long-suffering good aunt, but that his handwriting is still ‘atrocious’. It hasn’t prevented me from being literate or from finding success in my professional career. So, despite all they tried to instill in me, learning how to teach myself to write did me no harm and I hold the same to be true, today. Kids don’t have to learn cursive to learn how to express themselves. All they need is encouragement and modeled behavior and not regressive ideas about what will happen if they cannot write, or if they teach themselves.

The Barrow/Parker Cultural Violence Problem

There is something intoxicating to Americans about outlaws. I used to think it stemmed from the twenty-five-year period of the 19th Century we now call The Wild West, where such lawless renegades were as prominent as mosquitoes in a bayou, but access to the Internet and many books on the era suggests that this may have begun during the Revolutionary War when men stood against the Mad Hanoverian king. These original outlaws—Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Hamilton, etc.—would have been hanged for treason had their desperate Enlightenment ideals and guerrilla tactics failed to liberate 13 English colonies from tyranny. Their lawlessness, which we call patriotism, delivered to us our independence, and yet, from a different perspective, they were effectively violent criminals, even terrorists.

There is something romantic about this disregard for the law that benefits those in need. When the law is seen as corrupt or those who enforce it cannot be trusted, anyone who moves against the established power seems to be a hero. They may even rise to legendary status in the public eye. However, what happens when those outlaws are truly dangerous people, killing recklessly, with no real motivation except a penchant for violence or greed, reaping no real punishment for their crimes, but continuing to derive great social adoration? How do we reconcile our love of freedom and liberty and rugged sense of individualism with the fact that many of the people we have idolized over the decades and centuries have been reprehensible and despicably violent criminals?

Enter Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow; the figureheads of a notoriously violent gang of thieves and murderers who racked up between them a heart-stopping 13 murders, nine of whom were police officers. Despite their violent behavior, they were so beloved by the people of America that their hair and clothing styles were copied and grew into fads. People heard the news reports and still rooted for them. The entire country was captivated by them, although they were violent killers. 

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It was a time of brutal poverty in America. The wake of the financial crash and the heart of the Great Depression lowered over the nation like an iron-black storm. Shanty towns (called Hoovervilles in a scathing rebuke of President Herbert Hoover's disastrous economic policies) lay spread around small towns and cities. The flat, dusty Texas landscape was no exception to this exhausting national nightmare.

It was around this time that Bonnie and Clyde had, over about 21 months, robbed many small businesses in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Missouri and Arkansas. Their rampage created a media sensation, as each time they hit a business or killed, the news broadcasts sensationalized the two as anti-hero, modern-day Robin Hoods.

To law enforcement and beleaguered state government officials, though, the problem of the Barrow Gang was a very violent and deadly situation. Families of their victims sought redress for their loss. Local police worried that they might become victims of the gang’s murderous attacks. J. Edgar Hoover’s federal agents got involved in a flailing campaign to catch the outlaws in a dragnet, to no avail. Public opinion was such that attempts to capture and arrest Bonnie and Clyde were hugely unpopular and the gang had networks of support helping them behind the scenes in many of the places they frequented. As each week passed, the death toll ticked up. Something had to be done to stop Bonnie and Clyde.

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Clyde Barrow was from a poor family that migrated from the rural emptiness surrounding Dallas to the urban slums of the city when he was quite young. Legend has it that Barrow stole a chicken as a child and never got free of police persecution. His actual story is much more violent. 

By all accounts, he was a troubled youth with a penchant for safe-cracking and theft, but it was his time in prison that made him into a hardened criminal. While he was incarcerated, Clyde learned to kill and that was probably where he learned to hate law enforcement officials. 

Once his sentence was up, Barrow went right back to committing minor crimes, but friends who knew him as a youth related that the young hoodlum had come out of stir no longer the fun-loving, mischievous boy he had been. He was now a cold-blooded criminal with the dead eyes of a killer.

In 1930, Barrow met Bonnie Parker, a petite teenager from Dallas, when Barrow attempted to steal her mother’s car. Their love was instantaneous. Parker lived with her mother and waited tables and had already been married at age 16, but found in Clyde Barrow her soul mate. Over the next few months,  Bonnie, aged 19, was corrupted by his darkness and learned to love killing. Over the course of their crime spree, the two were inseparable and, according to the poems that Parker wrote and entries in her diary, she knew and believed that their misadventure would eventually end in a fiery death for both of them. In the meantime, they became heroes to the American people.

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For years after they were killed, Bonnie and Clyde continued to generate an incredible amount of public fascination. Their period of murder and robbery filled America with a deep sense of rural lawlessness, infused with the same cultural fascination that made Frank and Jesse James and Billy the Kid icons. Even when historians and biographers began the long and arduous process of unraveling the lives and family history of Bonnie and Clyde, the hero worship didn't end. Their names became synonymous with an aura of fame that overshadowed and eventually outlived the memory of the brutality of their crimes and murders. 

Troubling as this is, of course, it is nothing new. Americans love their criminals and the media has always added a dash of romanticism to “the bad guys”. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone all had a considerable influence on the American mindset around the same time as The Barrow Gang was ruling the country roads of the southern midwest. The adoration of criminals likely arose from the sour distaste for the establishment that had so blatantly failed people's needs over the years. 

Most Americans in the early 1930s mistrusted banks and the government, of which police were seen as aiding. But there was also the sense that Bonnie and Clyde was a tragic love story, like Romeo and Juliet, doomed and yet fighting back against the dominant social limits of the day. Behind it all was the gruesome shadow of American violence.

Thirty or so years later, Bonnie and Clyde's fame had begun to fade in light of events with more gravity, when a nostalgic and well-received movie, released in 1967, reawakened their popularity for a new generation. Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunnaway as the infamous duo, the film recreated a far more romantic version of events. The film, directed by Arthur Penn, but produced by Beatty, made Bonnie and Clyde seem like slightly bumbling, stupid hicks, affable and engaging, but not the brutal killers they were. There was nothing of the hardened “rattlesnake” in Beaty's performance, nor the cold-blooded murderer in Ms. Dunnaway's role. By their inevitable and well-publicized end, Parker and Barrow have the sympathy of the audience, who have been fooled into thinking that their heroes deserve to live and ride off into the sunset. The film also drew criticism for making American cinema even more violent and gory than it had been to that point.

Thought at first, not a blockbuster, the film continued to engage audiences and once again, the implacable love for Bonnie and Clyde woke up in the American psyche, now even more augmented by media sentimentalism and the strange worship of violence, all caught permanently in the blinding quadrilateral of light on the silver screen. 

Bleached of its folkloric mythology and the public’s love for violence and fame, the tale of Bonnie and Clyde is a uniquely American horror story. For just shy of two years, the southern midwest was terrorized by a gang that saw no value in human life and would stop at nothing to escape capture. Motivated in part by the media's shameless pandering and blinded by their fame, a young man and woman and a rotating cast of side characters raced across the dust-bowl states carrying heavy machine guns and stealing and killing recklessly. They consistently avoided Hoover's FBI agents, who were the only law enforcement able to, like Barrow and Parker, cross state lines freely.

Desperate to capture and stop the deadly killing, Texas Governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson temporarily reactivated the defunct Texas Rangers, charging Frank Hamer and Maney Gault to do what no other law enforcement agency had been able to do: stop Bonnie and Clyde. In 2019, the movie, The Highwaymen, released on Netflix, dealt with the manhunt that the Rangers conducted that eventually led to the end of the crime spree.

The film captures just how popular Bonnie and Clyde were, but stops short of giving the pair their faces, upending the mistake that the 1967 eponymous film so blatantly and flippantly made.. Rather than romance, the film focuses on the efforts to capture them and scours the tale of its  hero-worshipping mythos while also being shocked and critical about the level of fame Bonnie and Clyde had attained in their short-lived criminal careers.

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Evidence collected by Hamer and Gault eventually led the pair to Louisiana, where one of the accomplices of Bonnie and Clyde had family. The rangers set up an ambush, just outside of Bienville Parish. They convinced the father of the accomplice to set his truck out on a back lane in order to lure Clyde to help.

The trap worked. As Clyde pulled his car up to help, law enforcement, led by Hamer and Gault, shouted for the duo to put their hands up. Bonnie and Clyde reached for their weapons and the rangers opened fire.

The infamous occupants of the car were machine-gunned to death. In less than 20 seconds, one-hundred and fifty bullets riddled their vehicle. Though their almost two-year run of violence, murder and havoc was at an end, their deaths merely cemented them in the public consciousness and created a kind of secular martyrdom, wherein their legends could grow unhindered by fact or the violent reality of their lives.

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Today, America's fascination with outlaws is no less potent though it has been compounded with a more broad and terrifying disinterest with facts or reality. When Bonnie and Clyde were riding the highways, guns blazing, news organizations sensationalized the duo, but still reported the facts, such as they were, as the situation unfolded. In the modern era, social media, news silos (where people can get information that claims to be news but that confirms or solidifies their inherent biases) can create a reality where the worst possible people are taken by some portion of the nation to be good guys and beyond reproach. All criticism of these people is, to their supporters and fans, created to bring them down. If the Barrow Gang had decided to rev up the dust of west Texas in 2024, one-half of the nation would be for them and the other half against them, but the people who supported and aided them would be lining up to help until the Barrow Gang was a million strong.

Preachers and priests would share their support in foam-flecked sermons that the criminals were the hands of God, bringing about His Will. Politicians would say disparaging things about them in public, but in private, they would tank legislation that aided the police in their attempt to capture them. The men who eventually trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde would be, in the modern polarized mind of America, the real bad guys.

This is not just speculation. In the past several years, the court of public opinion is on full display in our nation and there is an undeniable adoration of the worst possible mammals as they are voted into the top levels of power. 

Though access to information has increased in the intervening 90 years, people’s opinions are no less easily manipulated. 20,000 people lined up to see Bonnie Parker’s body at her funeral. Only slightly fewer did so for Clyde Barrow. In the wake of their horrible deeds, the nation has long struggled with whether to call them folk heroes—modern-day Robin Hoods-or scourges and a symptom of a national addiction to violence and outlawry that has at its foundation the brutal frontier Calvinism and prudish repression that led to the westward expansion. This mindset is very much alive today and has continued to embrace a deep and poisonous loathing of authority and the rule of law. America today is a country that still struggles with this disparity: it is the etching on the soul of the nation of our greatest moral failing.

Today, Bonnie and Clyde retain a toehold in the cultural memory. Few would know the names of Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, the Texas Rangers who brought the terrible duo down without the provocation to look them up after watching the movie. We might blanche at the brutality of how they were taken down, but we might see, as the rangers likely did, that the only way to stop Bonnie and Clyde was to rise to their level of violence. The story seems to be that, when the violent have control, only violence can strip their power. This is the biggest and most dangerous lie at the heart of this topic.

The enduring fascination with figures like Bonnie and Clyde reveals a deeply troubling aspect of American culture: a romanticization of violence and a dangerous disregard for the consequences of lawlessness, particularly when fueled by social and economic anxieties. Here we are again. In this modern moment, the disparity between the classes is evident. Distrust with the government and with law enforcement is a backstop of many of our societal issues. 

Criminality is now a problem of relativism; certain groups decide what a crime is without due regard for what the law says. People with wealth get off “scott-free” even when their crimes are egregious and deadly, while regular people have no recourse if they become victims of crime. This topsy-turvy dystopia mirrors the Texas roads of 1935. Whether we can survive this moment, may be a discussion for another day, but the question at the bottom of it all is whether America can face its deep affection for violence and if it can, once and for all, decide to repent from its love of the outlaw.

New Year Noodling

As sometimes happens in my inconsistent brain, I get several ideas that all pile up like cars on an icy highway. I want to write about each of them and usually start a few drafts, only to realize that the topic either departs from my usual fare, or I get bored with it or I read it back to discover that I have been far too preachy. 

During my freshman year of college I took an English writing class with a gravel-throated professor who looked like a heavy in a spaghetti western. Once a week he accepted stories or topic papers as extra credit and his motto for when students couldn't think of a single topic was, “If in doubt, potpourri!” So, obeying his dictum, this year's first essay will briefly cover several of those crowded topics.

New Year's Disillusions 

If I had a chance to stand up in front of a group and discourse on any subject, it would be how much I loathe the social and cultural pressure of New Year's resolutions. I think few things could be more nakedly Capitalist. They also tend to dig deep into the root of the American tendency toward self-loathing, body shame and ridiculous addiction to “healthy eating” which is a euphemism for “You're too fat”.

Mega-gyms run entire campaigns, including handing out swag at Time Square on New Year's Eve, to get people to start “new routines” that they have no mental power to stick to. The gyms make tons of money, either way, profiting in our unhappiness. By February, those gyms are still collecting their $10 per month fee, but we are not going anymore, having given up on our resolutions already. 

There is a better way. It takes time, effort, mental and physical endurance and discipline. That process is worth it only if our motivation is not from a fatuous holiday tradition. To make these big changes, it is necessary to believe in oneself, make a plan, stick to it as best one can. One day at a time is the only way to manage it, no matter what. And the great news is, we can start any time, not just with a new year.

Censoring Offence

I have been a subscriber to the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) for about fIve years. In that time I have been generally pleased with the work that this powerful non-profit has done to sure up the wall between church and state.

Recently, an LGBTQ+ advocate penned an article for the FFRF, outlining that a person's gender is defined less by biological factors and far more by lived experience and personal realities, stating that, “a woman can be anyone she wants to be”. I heartily agreed with the author's premise.

But gender is a hot-button topic and some people are still squeamish about having honest discussions about transgenderism and homosexuality. In response to the well-written article, biologist and prominent anti-religionist, Jerry A. Coyne wrote a rebuttal, stating that the former piece was not “grounded in science”. The outcry against his article was such that the FFRF took it down from their website. Within moments, Coyne resigned from the board of the foundation. Hours after that, other honorary board members for the foundation, Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins, also stepped down, all three bellowing “censorship”.

I had not been able to read Coyne's piece right away because of this and couldn't formulate my own position on either his piece or the foundation’s rapid removal of it. 

However, censorship is a topic I am familiar with and professionally interested in.  Any time we are forbidden from reading something because someone (or many people) are offended by it and it is removed from public access, that item has been censored. Can an organization that promotes free access and free inquiry also censor items?

Instead of taking the piece down, the FFRF might have given it a header warning that the piece might cause stress or emotional harm. They also might have thought more seriously about publishing it in the first place. They didn't handle this with the care it deserved.

The modern world is so polarized because we are allowed to hide away from ideas that challenge and criticize our own positions. When we are faced with something that offends us, we scream and cry until it is removed. This is not the soil in which robust civil  discourse grows. It isn't always a black and white issue, nor is it that both sides are equally valid. In this case the original article was far more valid because it came from a place of expression and not knee-jerk reaction. And yet, hiding from offence only promotes a one-sided position.

Coyne's piece finally went up on a “secular humanism” website that seems to be fully in his corner on the topic of gender—unsurprising. As I suspected, his article was tone deaf, even offensive, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't know his positions.

Had the FFRF published a piece critical of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, and had the SBC screamed out that the piece was offensive, the foundation wouldn't have taken it down despite that outcry. It is not a perfect analogy, of course.

The LGBTQ+ community deserves to be respected and defended, but it cannot become a source of protection and freedom in itself if it cannot bear criticism or face primary challenges to its existence. I am an advocate for this community and reserve the right to be offended on its behalf but I want to know the argument so I can more fully understand. I knew, being familiar with his work, that Coyne's piece would upset me. It did. I think it would be better though, if we didn't run from offense or seek to censor it. That way lies trouble and the FFRF ought to know better and be more thoughtful in the future.

Music Notes

I love Jazz music. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Cannonball Adderly, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey for heaven's sake, are all on my list. The Bop and Hard Bop eras are on the top of that list. 

Of course, I like all music and have always had an eclectic taste and an archivist’s need to add to my catalogs and collections. Both of my parents, my good aunt, my brother and my cousins are all musical, if not all playing or performing, certainly by being fans, singing, listening and enjoying. I assumed that this was natural in our family. 

With our baby granddaughter in the house with us, though, I now believe that an affinity for music is, while obviously at some level genetic, formed by access and exposure. This child loves music of all kinds. She bops and wiggles with it. She sings along. She listens hard and is eager for the part of our evening where Mimi and PopPop put on music videos so we can let her listen and dance.

It has been so elevating to watch her respond to music that she really enjoys. And so far that has been every genre I can think of except for hip-hop, because she may be a bit too young for that, still. Even so, I have doubled down on trying hard to influence that affinity, and getting her as much exposure as her little spongy mind can take in. Especially Jazz music.

A Moose is Loose!

My good aunt sent me a picture over the holidays of her great-granddaughter peering out of a window at two huge moose. Her grandson Jonathan lives in Alaska and so moose are a part of life there.

My eldest cousin's son is used to the wilderness creeping in, because he lives, we might say, at the fringes of society, at least, where the wilderness is more prevalent than say downtown Los Angeles. And yet the picture put me in mind of something I hadn't really considered before. All of this civilization around us is incredibly recent.

Despite A.I. chatbots and fraught election cycles and fracking and billionaire-owned rockets and Netflix and electric vehicles and reality television, we all live way closer to nature than we realize. The wilderness is just below the hard candy shell of modern infrastructure. The bones of our ancestors lie just under the thin crust of mud and roots beneath our toes. 

Everyday we seem to turn our backs and staunch our ears to reality, and yet right around us, and even within us, nature thrives. My hope is that we can remember this pervasive and insistent fact, and begin to understand that, like my baby cousin's two moose (meese?), we are part of the web of nature, not apart from it and as a result we must behave ourselves with this in mind. 

Another Year of Essays

When I took up this “blog” again in April of ‘23, I had no real long-term expectations. Each time I have reflected on how many essays I have written, I get a little woozy. 

But my love of this format has been ratified by those of you who are subscribed. I have extended my number of readers this past year and am hopeful that this expansion will continue. For all of you who read even a tithe of what I put out, I am deeply grateful.

With this in mind, I have started a brief and tentative draft for a book. That's all I'm  saying just now. I have one or two draft readers, dependable, honest and trustworthy, giving me their input on the topic, format, subject matter and style. 

If I can write 43 essays in one year's time, we might assume that I could write one book with 43 chapters, right?

Lights Go Down

This past weekend, after a glorious and joy-filled holiday, I took down the outside Yule lights and we packed and hauled the other indoor lights and decorations back up into the attic. 

Taking all this stuff down has the same sensation as finishing an excellent book. As each day passes and each page is turned, we understand that things have to go back to being “blah” and unlit again. But in the meantime, it adds lovely charm.

This year, I feel a little different.  I'm a little glad that we're getting back to normal again. It is an odd realization for me, but with that normality the residuum of the upheaval and lack of routine of the holidays also get packed away. Suddenly, the easygoing regularity of ‘the rest of the year’ returns and with it the comfort of a stable status quo. 

With everybody coming to our house for Christmas, this year, we both looked forward to it with inordinate longing. Our youngest son, a resident of Oregon for over a year, came home for the first time, and it was wonderful to have all three boys and their significant others here to celebrate. 

Now, it is time to brace up and wade into the oncoming year, and do it without a tree in the house or extra brightly colored lights. A little sad perhaps. Redolent of finishing a good book and being a little blue it's over, true, but also, with the hopeful mindset that the year will be full of adventure, challenges, joys, celebrations and growth that must be enjoyed in the fullness of each day.

Happy New Year! See you Thursdays!