Starting the Car on the Coldest Day of 2013

Finally, more than forty below the morning I wrote this. Twenty-three below in absolute terms, wind chill minus forty. According to the U.S. Weather Bureau, it's the coldest it has ever been on December 11th in Bismarck. I love days like this. This is when you truly feel like a North Dakotan! The snow has a perfect blue cast. The air is absolutely clear, crystalline, electric, almost crackly. You feel that if you fired a pistol into the air on a morning like this, the whole sky (the Bible's empyrean) and everything under it would shatter into a trillion miniature ice crystals and just collapse around you in a prolonged tinkling. I watched the sunrise from my kitchen window well after eight a.m., but it seemed as if the real sun was vacationing in Australia and we were assigned a sub from the minor leagues. Plenty of light but no heat. The sun looked like a giant fried egg yoke congealing on the eastern horizon.

When you walk out of the house on mornings like this, the utter windlessness makes things a little eerie. We all know how to handle the usual North Dakota ground blizzard, the day's first bite of raw wind that feels as if it might rip your outer skin right off. But when you walk out the door expecting wind and discover that the great world is unnaturally silent, when you sense how incredibly cold it is rather than immediately feel it, that's a wonderful North Dakota moment. Suddenly you are a character in one of Jack London's Klondike stories—some survival instinct deep in your DNA below the tripwire of consciousness realizes that you are now in a potentially dangerous situation, that there is no room for error on a morning like this, that if you ran out of gas near Glen Ullin (as I did in August), you could die in short order no matter what you're wearing. For Jack London characters up on the Yukon in mid-December, it is always a life-or-death struggle to strike the last match successfully with numb clumsy fingers. For us the question is: will the car start?

My old used Honda has a remote starter. That's the sort of over-civilized gadget I like to sneer at, like heated car seats or hand warmers. I tried it twice from the kitchen window this morning, but my car just wheezed and coughed. So I ventured out to the crisp air, a mere 54 degrees below the freezing point. Silence. The only sound, the faraway crunch-thud of my feet on the snowpack, seemed as if it were miles away, or that it was coming from someone else's feet. It was so cold that when I pulled open the car door it felt as if it might just sheer off from low temperature metal fatigue. I sat down on the seat. It was frozen solid. It didn't give a millimeter. So it was that cold. The seat was as hard and uncomfortable as metal bleachers on New Year's Eve in International Falls, MN.

Normally, when you start a car you just do it without a moment's thought, because it is a habit so deeply engrained that it somehow just happens: key finds its way to ignition switch without aiming, key turns clockwise the instant it is fully inserted, car starts the minute it has the chance. But when it is this cold, particularly if you are out in the badlands or away from a ready back-up plan, you have to have a premeditated internal combustion strategy. I paused for maybe ten seconds before I turned the key. In the course of a long North Dakota life, I have been involved in half a dozen big winter car dramas. About average, I think. There is nothing quite so dispiriting as hearing the battery grind down and finally poop out on those few occasions when it really matters. At best it means you are in for a long day of cracked skin and foot stomping and probably bloody knuckles, and we all know how seldom an extreme-cold jumper cable transfusion works. When the engine does that eh-heh, heh . . . heh ……. heh . . . oh heh! thing and then you hear the click, click, click of system collapse, your heart just falls onto the floorboards and cracks into a thousand shards. "Here we go."

In those ten seconds, as I sat high up on (not in) the frozen solid front seat and watched my breath frost up the windshield on the inside, I reproached myself, for not having a better car, for not having plugged in the head bolt heater, for not living in Bermuda, and of course for having left the hoses out for another bruising winter because I reckoned the mild weather would never end this year. I knew I had to make some choices and get things right the first time. Just turn the key and hope for the best? Feather the gas pedal while turning the key? Press the gas pedal down to the floor once, quickly, and then turn the key? Go back to bed and forget the whole thing? Like an Apollo 13 astronaut, I began by turning off every potential battery drain: the radio, the heater, the dome light.

My trusty Honda started up on the second attempt, with at least half a minute of battery life remaining. When it is this cold, the just-started engine races for the first few minutes as if it's running on espresso not gasoline. The whole car shakes and snorts and rattles as if it is about to lift off or break up. But at least the car was running. Suddenly I felt a little smug and I smirked in praise of Japanese engineering. I turned on the radio and dialed it to KFYR—half-hoping to hear the Ole Reb yodel up the weather report. It was so cold that the speakers in my car buzzed and blared as if the cardboard membranes had cracked during the night.

The last remaining problem was the windshield, which was entirely covered with a thin, quite beautiful, but hard-as-steel frost curtain. This was not one of those occasions when I could just shoot an abundance of wiper fluid over the ice and cheat the frost away. My windshield scraper was buried somewhere in the back seat under many layers of holiday season strata. Rather than excavate it this morning, which would probably have involved getting out of the car and opening the back door, I decided to try to tough it out. I could almost make out the road through the gray crystal screen, if I squinted just right, and I reckoned it would melt before I killed anyone. I was running the defroster at full brassy throttle, thus pointlessly blasting 20-below air at the windshield (and my face) from within. If I bent over until my eyes were just above the level of the dash—a strenuous yogic posture made more difficult by the high frozen seat—I could occasionally find a narrow slit through which I could peer out at the roadway. It was like driving to work wearing a welder's helmet.

I'm happy to report that I seem to have collided with nothing as I drove—at least I heard no big thuds—and now that I have completed this report, I've started to get some feeling back in my fingers.

Welcome to another North Dakota winter.

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Mad Dog Vachon's Death Eclipses the Gaiety of Nations

The recent death of the professional wrestler Mad Dog Vachon (1929-2013) hit me like a metal folding chair or a flying drop kick. Vachon died quietly in his sleep in Omaha on November 21 at the age of 84. He is survived by six children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. I hope they all suited up in trunks and high-top boots for the funeral, like a professional circus family, and I hope the obsequies were held not in a church but in the "squared circle" of a dank wrestling arena out near the stockyards. Rumors that the two officiating priests actually tagged off during the service have not been substantiated.

Mad Dog's death set off a chain of bittersweet memories for me. Such names as Wahoo McDaniel, The Flying Frenchman Rene Goulet, The Crusher, The Bruiser, The Crippler, Nick Bockwinkel, The Very Capable Kenny Jay, Bobby Red Cloud, and Cowboy Bill Watts came flocking in on me for the first time in many years. If I close my eyes I can actually see Dr. X strutting around the interview area in his celebrated mask, hands outstretched like a cat, bawling and bragging and growling and threatening to break Vern Gagne's legs one by one and throw him unceremoniously into the Mississippi River, while mild-mannered host and promoter Wally Karbo tries to talk him back to civility.

I can see Mad Dog and his brother The Butcher breaking the rules and double-teaming Dusty Rhodes and against an exposed turnbuckle, while the 123-pound referee, with an outsized expression of sorrow and disbelief, threatens them with immediate disqualification. Let's face it. Now that he is dead we can for the first time safely declare that Mad Dog Vachon was a thug and a cheater in the ring. (I do not impugn his private life. I'm sure he was a model citizen outside the ring and a doting father who did not—as rumor had it—put his children in a Greco-Roman knuckle lock when they would not go to bed). But once he crawled into the squared circle he was a fleshy desperado with missing teeth, a bald head, and a goatee that made him look a little like Vladimir Lenin on steroids.

He bit. He scratched. He stomped. He choked. All that before the opening bell. And he had a penchant for raking a foreign object across the eyes of his opponents and then hiding the F.O. in his one-shouldered tunic in a way that everyone on the planet could see except the referee, who for some reason was momentarily distracted. Ah, the injustice of the world. `

It is sometimes said that if we got back every hour that we have spent watching TV, we could walk around the planet. Forget that. If I just had every hour back that I spent watching the old All Star Wrestling show that emanated from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I could walk the planet several times.

Almost every Saturday night between seventh and tenth grade, my friend Robert B. and I made homemade pizzas in his kitchen two blocks from my home near downtown Dickinson. We called it All Star Pizza. Clever boys. One of us would knead and spread the dough while the other cut peperoni slices and sprinkled the powdered Parmesan over the canned tomato sauce. We had pretty good timing for a couple of knuckleheads, so the piping hot homemade pizza came out of the oven just about the time the AWA announcer Roger Kent introduced the show. It was broadcast in black and white, of course, and the camera work was primitive. He invariably began by saying, "Good evening everyone, this is Roger Kent ringside coming to you from the Minneapolis Auditorium…" He made it sound as if he had three names, Roger Kent Ringside, so that's what we called him.

Actually, Roger Kent Ringside was a great sports announcer with a mock-heroic style perfectly suited to the … er, ambiguities of the sport. He expressed grave indignation when Pampero Firpo (The Wild Bull of the Pampas) raked another wrestler's eyes against the long zipper on his tunic. At least once per show he'd say, "Ooooh, I hate to see that hold. Ladies and gentlemen, that hold is barred in many states." When Iron Man George Gadaski made his characteristic move, Roger Kent would say, "That's an Arm Bar with a Twist–sounds like a drink to me!" And we laughed every time. When Dr. X entered the ring, masked and menacing, stomping around and making mock runs at the shrieking folks in the first row, Kent would invariably explain: "As perhaps you know, Dr. X has deposited a $1000 certified check in a Minneapolis bank for anyone who can break the Figure Four Leg Lock once it has been properly applied." Oh, we knew! Even then, uneducated as we were, Robert and I knew that Dr. X had left himself an infinite amount of legal wiggle room in those words: "once properly applied."

I'm guessing that Mad Dog was not Vachon's given name. If you name your son Mad Dog, you can kiss the Senate goodbye. Or the Papacy or the ballet. Names matter. You name your son Mad Dog and you should not be surprised when he comes home from Head Start with a trio of pit bulls, or gouges the eyes of his third grade teacher with a number two pencil. Who names her son Mad Dog? Name your son Mad Dog and he's almost certainly going to become a professional wrestler or perhaps night security at an auto wrecking yard.

But I am being facetious. Actually, the man who would later be crowned (well, actually, belted) one half of the Tag Team Champions of the World was christened Maurice Vachon in Montreal. That sounds more like an art historian or wine connoisseur to me, and it would not do for a sport in which the phrases "back breaker," "the atomic drop," and "pile driver" are mere routine. Vachon was actually a serious amateur wrestler before he crossed over to the dark side. He competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, and he won a gold medal at the 1950 British Empire Games.

After a long, brilliant, and criminal career, Mad Dog finally hung up his tunic in 1986 when he was pretty long in his remaining tooth. As MacArthur said, old wrestlers never die, they just slip under the ring. One year after his retirement, Mad Dog was struck by a hit and run driver in Omaha. His leg had to be amputated. I completely discount the persistent rumors that the driver was wearing a mask and that his vanity plates said FGR4LGLK.

I saw Mad Dog fight twice, once in Fargo in 1968 and a year or two later in the auditorium at Trinity High School in Dickinson. Robert's father drove us to a match in Fargo for his eighth grade graduation present. We were thrilled to sit close enough to be spit on by several 300-pound nearly naked middle-aged men. I frowned at Mad Dog after a particularly egregious chokehold, and he smirked back in a sweetly menacing way. I felt we bonded.

How I feel about the death of Mad Dog was best expressed by the British literary dictator Samuel Johnson when the great actor David Garrick died on January 20, 1779. "His death," Johnson wrote, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations."

And I fervently hope when he entered the gates of heaven, Mad Dog and St. Peter enjoyed an Arm Bar with a Twist. A double.

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Thanks to Valerie Naylor for Award-winning National Park Stewardship

As my mother and our guest and I sat around my dining room table on Thursday evening, we explained some of what we are thankful for this year. Our lists are long—health, friendship, family, freedom, longevity, and the abundance of American life. But this year I feel especially thankful that Valerie Naylor is the Superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

A few weeks ago, Valerie received the National Parks Conservation Association's prestigious Stephen T. Mather conservation award. She accepted the award at the 36th annual Ranger Rendezvous in St. Louis. It's an amazing achievement, all the more impressive because Valerie did not seek it and, in her characteristically modest and matter of fact manner, she neither expected it nor, for that matter, ever even thought about it. She just did her job with exceptional skill and thoughtfulness, and those who study the future of North Dakota from elsewhere in the nation realized how important her superintendency has become. She won the 2013 Mather Award for her outstanding vigilance in protecting Theodore Roosevelt National Park from the impact of the Bakken Oil Boom, and for her previous management of the complicated and controversial elk reduction project that reduced the elk herd at TRNP from 1200 to about 200 critters.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park is one of America's 58 National Parks. The great documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has called the National Park System "America's best idea." TRNP is North Dakota's only National Park. It is one of North Dakota's best assets and finest treasures, without which we would be a far less interesting place. It is a relatively small national park, at 70,446 acres, and it is subdivided into three units: the North Unit near Watford City, the South Unit just north of Medora, and the Elkhorn Ranch Unit (218) acres, midway between.

The three units embrace and protect some of the most beautiful and distinctive terrain on the Great Plains. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) had a significant presence in all three units of what became the National Park, especially the Elkhorn, where he established one of his two Dakota Territory ranches between 1883 and 1887. All three units are bisected by the magnificent Little Missouri River. Because the three units are separated and fairly widely dispersed, they present a serious management challenge. They have lots of perimeter, and no single unit is sufficiently large for a visitor to escape entirely the nagging claims of the outside world.

Now that the Bakken Oil Boom has overwhelmed the landscapes, the social structure, the economy, and the politics of North Dakota, the National Park is beginning to resemble a beleaguered trio of wild and endangered islands surrounded in every direction by a noisy industrial revolution. The three units of TRNP are more important to North Dakota and the world every day, because they are becoming the last precious remnants of what was once an endless untrammeled wilderness, what Roosevelt described as "a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman." If that Rooseveltian sentence does not make you ache for our losses, nothing will.

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A No Frills Quiet Thanksgiving on New Dishes

Never in my life have I looked forward to Thanksgiving more. I have been so busy this year that I just feel bewildered, numb, vague, and disembodied. I look on the holiday as an enforced and very welcome day of rest. My daughter is spending the break with her mama in northwest Kansas, so there will be no more than three for the Thanksgiving feast at my house, and perhaps a few ringers for pie and brandy. I do most of the cooking and my mother, who drives in from Dickinson, does the … er supervising. She raises her eyebrows with some frequency, tells me she can never find the spices in my cupboards, says, "Don't you think it is a little early to peel the potatoes?," asks me such questions as, "Are you going to use a measuring cup on that?," and eventually offers, with cheerful exasperation, "Do you want me just to organize your kitchen and at least throw the time-sensitive perishables away?"

The answer to these questions is no.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, by magnitudes. It is one of America's greatest inventions. And it almost alone props up the sweet potato industry. It has, until recently, resisted the commercialization that has buried Christmas in materialism, merchandize, secularity, and economic stress—all things that Jesus would have deplored. Thanksgiving is one of two moments in the year when the vast majority of Americans are doing the same thing at the same time, and like its distant cousin the Fourth of July, on that day we all tend to eat the same things at the same time. It's when we as a national family break bread together. Earlier in my life I knew some perverse iconoclasts who, for no good reason, refused to make turkey, dressing, cranberries, gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, gooey marshmallow sweet potato thingy, and pumpkin pies. They'd do a crab-stuffed pork loin instead, or shish kabobs on the grill, and they'd substitute a syllabub with a mango reduction for good old pumpkin pie.

My answer to that is "why?" spoken in the loudest permissible indoor volume. Twice a year I bake a turkey. Twice a year I make cranberry sauce. That's about the right frequency, and I see no rational reason to mess with so delicious, so blessed, and so traditional a holiday meal.

My mother and I are having our annual squabble about the size of the turkey. She advocates about a 15-pound game hen, and I want a solid 24-28 pounder. "What are you going to do with all those leftovers?" she asked the other day, right on schedule, in precisely the tone and words she has used for the last ten years. "What difference does it make?" I snapped back in a case closed sort of way. "It's Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is about abundance." This debate is one of our Thanksgiving traditions. She knew how this was going to come out before she opened her mouth, and I knew she was going to make her annual lame suggestion. Then, just to be insulting, she said, as she has for the past six years, "You're not thinking of trying a deep fried turkey again, are you?"

Had to bring it up! Ha'ad to bring it up.

Once a few years ago with my friend Tom I deep-fried a turkey in my front yard. It was one of those raw Thanksgiving days with leaden skies, a whipping intermittent wind, a windchill of about five below, and some ground drifting. In short, a perfect North Dakota Thanksgiving Day. After pouring about forty gallons of oil into the new fryer and igniting a propane flame under the aluminum tub that had the sound and fury of a fracking flare, we spent a full hour heating that oil to the boiling point. We stood around the contraption beating our hands on our thighs to stay warm, exchanging views on whether we would be able to put out the fire before we burned the house down, and chanting from Macbeth: "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," (emphasis on trouble), "fire burn and cauldron bubble." My mother had protested this whole operation as dumb and "iffy" from a Thanksgiving point of view. When the $20 of oil finally came to a boil (for the first half hour, it was a dead heat between my modest propane burner and North Dakota winter), Tom and I lifted the cover with a tree branch and with my usual optimism I lowered a beautiful, plump, Dickensian turkey into that seething vat.

Instantaneously there was one profound four-second hissing sound, like a single burst of a train whistle. Then a little mushroom cloud rose up over the fryer to about 35,000 feet. The pot began shaking like the first stage of a Saturn V rocket at takeoff. We looked at each other in an uneasy, queasy sort of way and glanced through the big window at my mother, who was frowning at us from inside. It would not have surprised me if she had been shaking her fist. Numbskulls!

"We're toast," I said. And Tom said, "Actually, the turkey appears to be melba toast."

When we lifted that once-glorious bird out, fifteen minutes later, it had shrunk to the size of a stunted grocery store kiosk chicken. It had a dark brown leathery look (and smell) like a football that had been lowered into a deep fat fryer. The skin was mottled and there appeared to be caverns in several places along the sides of the breast, as if part of the white meat had literally been vaporized. "These turkeys are said to be succulent inside," I said without much conviction. "The idea is that the sudden immersion in hot oil seals the moisture inside the carcass. There may have been some shrinkage, I'll grant you that, but I'm betting it is dee-licious." Tom said, "Sounds good to me. Think your mother will buy it?"

So that one did not become a family tradition, but mother brings it up every year at this time. It's not clear whether she is just trying to shame me for the fun of it, or whether she actually thinks that without her pro-active rebuke I'd be tempted to transform another fabulous turkey into a fist-sized slab of dry jerky again, just to confirm the results of the first experiment.

This year we will light table candles and toast my daughter, her granddaughter, with a glass of white wine, listen to Nora Jones at a low volume, and say a few of the many, many things we are thankful for: "Well, at least you didn't try to fry the turkey!"

"Yes, mother."

The glory this Thanksgiving will be eating our favorite meal of the year on my new dishes, made by the exquisite North Dakota potter and ceramicist Tama Smith of Beach. I helped a little with the design, though the artistry is all Tama. The plates and serving bowls are brown and buff and rust and charcoal—to look like the badlands and the butte country south of Medora—and through the middle of each dish runs a heartbreaking blue trace of the sacred Little Missouri River. When mother and I picked them up the other day in Beach, Tama and I both burst into tears as we gazed at their magnificence. They are far too beautiful to eat on, but we will.

They represent what North Dakota means, and may still mean, if we manage this thing right.

That would be worth thanksgiving.

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"Thanksgiving Dinner, Quincy House, Boston, MA." 1899. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

The Fallout of the Obamacare Rollout Will Plague the US for Decades

The bungled rollout of the Affordable Care Act is one of the worst political disasters of my lifetime. It may mean that Obamacare is doomed. Under a parliamentary system, it might mean that the administration of President Obama would fall in a "no confidence" vote. Before this mess ends, you can expect to hear relatively serious calls for President Obama's impeachment. The colossal failure of Obamacare so far is a setback for the national government that will leave a toxic trail of political fallout on the United States for decades to come, long after Barack Obama has slipped away into his post-presidential career.

The debacle jeopardizes one of the progressive movement's most cherished goals—universal, affordable health care for every American citizen—a dream that goes back at least as far as Republican Theodore Roosevelt. It also jeopardizes the progressive movement more generally, at a time when America is falling behind in the world arena precisely because it has failed to address a range of serious challenges with all the tools that a modern society needs to thrive.

Just when we thought the national crisis of political hatred and unalloyed partisanship could not possibly get worse, the Obama administration has thrown kerosene on the anti-government fire, and given the fading Tea Party movement a new lease on life. It has permitted everyone who predicted that Obama would be a failed President to say (prematurely), "I told you so."

In the month since Obamacare began to come into effect, two fundamental problems have emerged, and more are sure to come. The problems are (1) the immediate and continuing failure of the $300 million website Healthcare.gov, and (2) the fact that the workings of the new system have made Obama's endlessly repeated pledge—"if you like your current health care plan you can keep it"—seem like a filthy lie to the American people. The news that three San Francisco-based knuckleheads with no ties to the U.S. government were able to create a brilliant and efficient Obamacare support site (Help Sherpa) virtually overnight takes us into the arena of pure absurdity.

If the Affordable Care Act was ever going to win widespread affection and convince the skeptical American people that the time has come for a national health care system in the United States, it had to work. It had to exceed expectations from the moment it came out of the gate. It had to be a model of government efficiency. It had to look like something a twenty-first century internet savvy President would do. It had to create a national buzz of renewed optimism: the federal government is back after 30 years on the political robes. Instead, it has been a greater disaster than even its most vicious detractors could have dreamed. Listen to Rush and Sean: how they do crow in pure joy about the failure of an initiative designed by well-meaning people to address one of the principal problems of American life: the failure of the existing health care system to provide portability, absorb people with pre-existing conditions, and provide minimal positive health care to the 30-50 million people who have, until now, been subjected to our heartless "emergency room health care option."

The Affordable Care Act was to be Obama's signature accomplishment as President and it was to be the basis of his historical legacy. That and killing Osama bin Laden. Every American has a right to ask: if this is your signature achievement, and you had years to develop this website at virtually infinite public expense, why would you release it when virtually any serious beta testing would have shown you that it doesn't work? If Obama cannot fix this thing ASAP, and apologize in a completely unguarded way to the American people, he is headed into the gulag of Jimmy Carter, whose administration will forever be symbolized by the failed raid (Operation Eagle Claw!) on Tehran on April 24, 1980.

Now everyone who has hated Obama since before he was even inaugurated (I know scores of such people in my little circle alone), everyone who hates rule by Democrats, everyone who hates Obama's style, his perspective on world affairs, his outsized political confidence, everyone who hates "the liberal agenda," will feel vindicated and empowered. Such folks will be even more strident and obnoxious in the future, and "the failure of Obamacare" will be their rallying cry, like the Alamo or the Boston Tea Party or the sinking of the battleship Maine.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the central mantra of political conservatism has been "government always screws things up." In his first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1981, President Reagan famously said, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Think of the paradox of this! The new President of the United States, the elected head of the American government, begins his eight-year tenure by denouncing government. Every President since Reagan has had to operate under the shadow of Reagan's cynicism—the paradoxical view that government is a disaster except when it is funding and operating the largest military behemoth the world has ever seen. At one of the lowest ebbs of his presidency, Bill Clinton was heard to say—a little pathetically—"government still matters."

I remember hearing former Speak of the House Newt Gingrich, at the height of his intellectual and political power, deliver a lecture at an Inns of Court event. His theme was the inefficiency of government. Why, he asked, is it a hassle to mail a parcel in a U.S. Post Office, and so easy to send a package by Fedex or UPS? Why should a visit to a state's Department of Transportation to renew a driver's license or register a new car be a daylong nightmare? Why does private enterprise provide quick, efficient, reliable, and friendly service to its customers, while public services are typically slow and inefficient, and your transaction is usually handled by a rude, unsmiling, and bored functionary whose salary you are paying.

There is an answer to the Gingrich thesis, but in the last month I have wondered many times why Obama didn't just ask Amazon.com to administer the health care program. After all you can buy books and refrigerators at Amazon.com, DVDs and snow tires. Indeed Google, Oracle, and other internet masters have offered to help fix the broken Healthcare.gov system. I say, turn them loose.

In the end, I predict, the problems with the Affordable Care Act will be fixed, and that some future version of it (Post-Obamacare 3.0) will come to be seen as a central and cherished benefit of American life, like Social Security and Medicare. In the meantime, I believe that Kathleen Sebelius should resign (on the principal of parliamentary accountability), that President Obama should shake up his administration at every level, that he should reach out in an unprecedented way to the Republicans to devise some kind of health care compromise that fulfills his promise that "if you like your health care plan you can keep it," and he should deliver a nationally-televised address to the American people in which he acknowledges this catastrophe and never utters one defensive statement.

Even so, for decades to come, whenever a new government initiative, bureau, or program is announced, we can expect to hear—in the blogosphere and talk radio land—"Oh, yeah, remember the rollout of Obamacare?"

This is not just a setback for Obama and the Democrats. It is a setback for America.

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A Crescent Moon With Eyewitnesses to American History

Last Tuesday, I got to spend the entire day with Dr. Harrison Schmitt, the last man ever to step down onto the Moon, and the second to last man ever to leave the surface of the Moon. He was speaking at the JFK symposium at Bismarck State, and I volunteered to shepherd him to his appearances in Bismarck.

Schmitt lives in Albuquerque. He's now 78 years old. Of the twelve men (all men) who have walked on the Moon, he's the only true scientist. He was put on the last mission (December 7-19, 1972) because NASA had pledged that it would send scientists to the Moon once it worked out the safety and logistical kinks, and suddenly it was determined by an imaginative-starved Congress that Apollo 17 would be the last mission of the series. So it was now or never. Schmitt turned out to be a perfect choice for the last mission. Because of his geological training (Harvard Ph.D., 1964), he discovered what other scientists have called "the single most significant lunar sample" ever collected.

For me, spending time with an Apollo lunar astronaut is as big a deal as spending a day with Paul McCartney or Michael Jordan or Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi. This was the first time in the history of the world when humans left their home planet, and found a way to live safely (for a short time) on another object in the solar system. Dr. Schmitt says the Apollo moment (1966-1972) represents an evolutionary leap for mankind; for the first time we found a niche for ourselves outside the protective biosphere of the good earth. For those who might argue that the Moon landings were not such a big deal, think again. The fact that Moon flights did not become routine, that we have never been back to the Moon since 1972, and we have no plans to go back, that we now don't even have a rocket that could get us there, tells you what a big deal it was. President Kennedy said it just right in September 1962 at Rice University in Houston: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

The Saturn V rocket, designed by the German genius Wernher von Braun, spent the overwhelming majority of its 7.5 million pounds of thrust (the gigantic first stage contained 203,400 gallons of kerosene, and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen) just getting the spaceship the first 42 miles into the sky. Such is the appalling tug of gravity, and such is the amount of force required to lift an object the size of school bus beyond "the surly bonds of earth." The rest, on a lunar journey of 240,000 miles one way, was comparatively easy.

As Norman Mailer put it in his superb study of Apollo 11, Of a Fire on the Moon, igniting a Saturn V rocket is essentially setting off a controlled explosion and hoping for the best. In the evening hours of December 6, 1972, Dr. Schmitt let himself be strapped on the top of that controlled explosion on a rocket 366 feet tall (half again as high as the North Dakota state capitol), and then somebody pushed the "launch" button and the Saturn V shook, rattled, and rolled until three men and tons of equipment were hurled all the way to the Moon. Would you take that chance?

I would in a nanosecond, even knowing the odds. And if someone offered me the chance to fly to Mars, and land on the surface not of our near-neighbor Moon, but on another planet 140 million miles away, I'd sign on immediately, even if there were absolutely no way to return to the Earth. I'd rather die on Mars than in a hospital bed, invaded by tubes, no matter at what age.

I believe we made it to the Moon in the 1960s because of the death of President Kennedy. That's a horrible irony, but I think it is true. Like his stalled Civil Rights bill, his stalled national education funding bill, his stalled Medicare bill, all of which he could not have passed in his first, and probably not even in his second term, Kennedy's signature Apollo Moon program achieved success in large part because his successor Lyndon Johnson insisted that the United States fulfill the New Frontier agenda to honor his martyred predecessor. LBJ, one of the greatest legislative strategists in American history, used Kennedy's death and his own colossal powers of persuasion to accomplish what had eluded his much more glamorous and popular predecessor.

I feel like the luckiest man alive. On the same night last week I got to have dinner with Clint Hill, the secret service agent who jumped forward onto the limousine on the day John F. Kennedy was killed, and who probably saved Mrs. Kennedy's life, and then go to the airport to pick up Harrison Schmitt.

A good friend of mine asked the other day if the Kennedy 50th anniversary hoopla is not just a kind of swan song for the Baby Boomers, who are "once again engaging in national nostalgia for their lost youth." I was startled by the question, and I had one of those inrushes of queasiness that come when someone gets through your complacent defenses and asks a question that really rattles your soul. But I think he was wrong

Clint Hill and Harrison Schmitt. Talk about eyewitnesses to history. November 22, 1963, was arguably one of the four or five most pivotal moments of the twentieth century, and the Apollo Moon program was quite possibly the greatest single moment in the history of technology. Triumph and tragedy. In some respects Schmitt and Hill (space and assassination), summarize the entire Kennedy era. John Glenn and John Connally, Walter Schirra and Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Daniel Ellsberg, Alan Shepard and Allen Dulles. It was an unforgettable decade.

Kennedy captured the spirit of the age in his famous inaugural address, widely considered one of the greatest in American history. After explaining the many challenges he was about to face, the youngest elected president of American history said, "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation." Precisely. Would you change places with the folks of Jefferson's era, or Shakespeare's, or even Woodrow Wilson's? Not I. And if I were a woman, or an African-American, or a gay man or woman, absolutely positively not.

After dinner with Dr. Schmitt the other night I drove over to BSC to hear Clint Hill tell the appalling story of the last two days of John F. Kennedy's life. As I drove west towards BSC I looked out the side window of my car. There was a perfect silvery crescent in the southwestern sky. It was the new Moon and it was astonishingly beautiful. I slowed down to a crawl to gaze out into the night.

I ached with a sense of loss and pride, sorrow, nostalgia, an acute sense of human possibility and of lost possibility, and I nearly burst into tears. "We went there," I said to myself.

"Thanks to John F. Kennedy, we went there."

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"Schmitt Next to Big Boulder." From NASA on the Commons via Flickr.

So What Happens When the Military Industrial Complex Gets Mad?

After months, even years, of planning the big John F. Kennedy 50th anniversary symposium is fast upon us. It starts Tuesday evening at BSC National Energy Center of Excellence with a keynote address by North Dakota native Clint Hill, the secret service agent who crawled up on the presidential limousine when Jacqueline Kennedy climbed up and out of the back seat on 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963.

In the handful of truly searing moments in my lifetime, that's the searingest. School was dismissed (second grade, Lincoln Elementary). I went to Cub Scouts, where I made my mother a Christmas corsage, which she still wears. I think about that day every time I drive by that duplex on Third Avenue in Dickinson. Every time for fifty years.

Think of Clint Hill's burden.

For many months I have been reading Kennedy books—biographies, analyses of his presidency, explorations of particular themes (Berlin 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam), books about key people around him (particularly his brother Robert), and of course books about the assassination. My tired little brain is full to bursting with Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy. He's far from my favorite president, but he is growing on me with all of this reading. I love what I get to do (read for a living), but at some point the brain just goes tilt like an old pinball machine. I've purchased 30-40 books to get ready and read most of them. For the past few days I have been hand-drawing a JFK presidential crisis flow chart on a big sheet of white paper on my kitchen counter. I know this can be done better electronically, but I'm too dense to learn the program in time. The Cuban Missile Crisis (14-28 October 1962) is without question the most significant crisis of Kennedy's presidency (towering on my silly chart), and arguably the most critical moment in the world since the splitting of the atom in 1938.

In my opinion, two men saved the world in October 1962: John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. If two others had been in charge at that time, it seems likely that we would have tripped over the nuclear precipice, and somewhere between 30 and 300 million people would have been killed. JFK's deepest concern was that once the nuclear exchange began it would be almost impossible to stop it because each outrage is so appalling—we take out Moscow, they take out Washington, D.C., so we take out Leningrad, after which they… The generals on both sides were salivating to launch nuclear missiles and drop warheads from airplanes. Kennedy's generals, principally Admiral George Anderson of the Navy and Curtis LeMay of the Air Force browbeat the young president throughout the crisis—teasing and testing the Constitutional line that insists that the American military be under civilian authority. Even afterwards, when JFK called in the Joint Chiefs to thank them for their hard work during the crisis, Anderson said America's response (a naval quarantine that forced the Soviets to back down and agree to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba) was worse than Munich (where the Brits gave Hitler the green light to gobble Czechoslovakia and prime minister Neville Chamberlain called it "peace in our time"). And LeMay called the peaceful resolution of the crisis "the greatest defeat in our history." Flatterers!

So here's the youngest elected president in American history, a former senator with no previous administrative experience, a frightened young man with an admittedly thin (if heroic) military record, being systematically hectored and belittled by the most confident and overbearing career military men in the United States, who assure him that he is endangering the country as well as the Free World, not to mention betraying his Constitutional responsibility. Khrushchev was getting it in equal or greater measure from the other side, in a nation with much weaker constitutional restraints. But when the critical moment came, both men (Kennedy 45, Khrushchev 68) declined to push the nuclear button. They were both under unbearable pressure to ratchet the crisis up to the apocalypse, these two flawed men, both of whom were prone to wild Cold War rhetoric, both of whom felt the need to prove their masculinity in a range of often reckless ways. It would have been so much easier just to surrender to the military. It took courage, indeed something more than courage, to choose the path of peace in that crucible—in which one false step might bring western civilization to collapse.

Think about it. We get to talk about such matters this week in Bismarck, with some of the greatest experts in the world. Our focus is not lone gunman and magic bullet, though we'll do a little of that, too. Our focus is one of the most interesting periods of American history, the gravest years of the Cold War, when humans were deciding, in crisis after crisis, whether to normalize nuclear weapons in what Kennedy called the "long twilight struggle" between two world empires and two fundamentally incompatible political and economic systems.

Here's one reason I find that so fascinating. If we agree that Kennedy and Khrushchev saved the world in October 1962 by standing up, each of them independently, to the military industrial complex, it might be interesting to see what came of each of these beleaguered leaders in the aftermath of the crisis. Less than two years later, Khrushchev was deposed by the Soviet establishment, led by his deputy Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet presidium accepted Khrushchev's "voluntary retirement" on October 14, 1964, after a year of behind the scenes skullduggery. He lived out the rest of his life in bare-bones obscurity.

We know what happened to John F. Kennedy—don't we? He was assassinated in Texas thirteen months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in a mysterious episode that was captured on 8mm film by a Dallas merchant. Although the tidy narrative that the assassination of JFK was the work of an unstable drifter was circulating worldwide by the end of that terrible Friday, well before a serious investigation could get started, the American people have never really cottoned to it, in spite of the massive weight of the Warren Commission's 26-volume report (September 24, 1964). The fact that the lone gunman was struck down two days later, by a shady night club owner with known mob connections and a strangely cozy relationship with Dallas cops, while surrounded by 70 law enforcement officers in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, does not exactly deter the conspiracy theorists.

Honestly, I have no settled opinion about who killed Kennedy. My mind is like a yoyo. When I read David Talbot's superb Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, I lean towards the Grassy Knoll and Oswald's insistence that he was a "patsy." When I read Vincent Bugliosi's Parkland (originally Four Days in November), I see Jack Ruby as a traumatized super-patriot who killed Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy from having to come back to Dallas to testify in the murder trial. When I read William Manchester's magisterial Death of a President, lone gunman, but when I read Larry Sabato's new The Kennedy Half-Century, I want to know why the CIA and FBI both indisputably covered up what they knew about Oswald and the assassination.

This much is certain. Kennedy believed that a coup d'état was possible in the United States. I do too. And both Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy never bought the lone gunman narrative, even though each of them endorsed it for a range of reasons.

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Your Chance to Meet the Second to Last Man to Walk on the Moon

In just over two weeks we get the chance to meet Harrison Schmitt, the second to last man to walk on the moon. He's coming to the great JFK public humanities symposium at BSC (November 5-7) to talk about John F. Kennedy and the space program. At 3:45 on Wednesday, November 6, Schmitt will speak about the extraordinary chain of events that followed Kennedy's May 25, 1961, call to action, before a joint session of Congress, "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

If you want to meet someone who stood on the surface of the moon, this is your best chance, because the Apollo astronauts, like the Beatles, are blinking out, and it is clear that the United States is not going back to the moon in the lifetime of anyone who is reading these words. That, I believe, is both a matter of national shame and a monument to President Kennedy, who argued, at Rice University on September 12, 1962 that, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

If JFK had not said spoken these words, and—perhaps more importantly—if he had not been cut down by an assassin's bullet on November 22, 1963, we probably would not have landed men on the moon as soon as we did, and perhaps not at all, particularly after the Apollo 1 fire on January 27,1967, in which three astronauts were killed while conducting a liftoff simulation at the Florida launch pad, at the very beginning of the lunar phase of the U.S. space program. NASA overcame that terrible setback, in part to honor the legacy of the fallen President. Leadership matters. If Thomas Jefferson had not been captivated, all of his life, by the idea of exploring the deep interior of the North American continent, Lewis and Clark would never have ventured up the Missouri River in search of a "passage to India" between 1804-06. In that case, the remarkable Sacagawea (ca. 1787-1812) would have lived out her life in complete historical obscurity. We need Presidents who are dreamers and visionaries, not mere caretakers.

Schmitt, the only true scientist to walk on the moon, holds a B.S. in geology from Cal Tech (1957) and a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard (1963). Just before midnight (EST) on December 13, 1972, at the end of the Apollo XVII's third and final moonwalk, Schmitt lumbered up the ladder into the Lunar Module. A few minutes later the mission commander Gene Cernan made the climb, one small step for a man, and the end of an era for mankind. Cernan's last words on the lunar surface were prosaic. "As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come--but we believe not too long into the future--I'd like to just [say] what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow." That was almost 41 years ago.

In the history of the world, only twelve individuals (all men) have walked on the moon: Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (Apollo XI, July 21, 1969); Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (Apollo XII, 1969); Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell (Apollo XIV, 1971); David Scott and James Irwin (Apollo XV, 1971); John Young and Charles Duke (Apollo XVI, 1972); and Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo XVII, December 11-14, 1972). Four of those men are already dead: James Irwin (1991); Alan Shepard (1998); Pete Conrad (1999); and the first human ever to set foot on another world, Neal Armstrong, on August 25, 2012.

Cernan and Schmitt had three separate moonwalks in December 1972 for a total of 22 hours, three minutes, and 57 seconds. Altogether they collected 243.7 pounds of moon rocks in several geologically distinct formations. They were one of three moon crews (Apollo XV, XVI, XVII) to employ a Lunar Rover (a moon convertible that looked like an Erector Set project), which at one point took them a full 4.7 miles from their lunar base camp. When Cernan accidentally broke one of the rover's fenders with his hammer, the pair of astronauts repaired it with—you guessed it—duct tape. Cernan later wrote, "I was going to have to get that damned fender fixed, and there wasn't a repair shop within 250,000 miles."

Schmitt was a somewhat controversial figure in lunar exploration. Because he was a civilian, not one of the military breed of astronaut for whom Tom Wolfe popularized the phrase "the Right Stuff," he was at first regarded as an aloof and "all business" interloper by some NASA space veterans. But once he plopped down onto the surface of the moon, on December 11, 1972, he surprised everyone. His lunar geological work was first rate, but he also took time to enjoy the rapture of the experience. He took a few spectacular falls in his clumsy space suit. After one such tumble the ground crew called him "twinkeltoes," and after another spinning fall the Cap-Com on earth, Bob Parker, informed him that the Houston Ballet was enquiring about his availability for a sublunary performance. Schmitt sang two songs on the moon: "Oh, bury me not, on the lone prairie; where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free," and—later, "I was strolling on the Moon one day, in the merry merry month of December, er May."

Years later, asked to describe what he felt in bounding around on the lunar surface, with the perfect blue sphere of Earth reduced to the size of a marble in the black, black sky, Schmitt said, "It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like."

Schmitt served one term as a United States Senator from New Mexico (1976-82), where he was assigned, naturally enough, to the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee. His political challenger in 1982, NM Attorney General Jeff Bingaman, campaigned with the clever but unfair slogan, "What on Earth has he done for you lately?" Bingaman won, and Schmitt became a consultant and college professor.

For many years Schmitt has been one of America's leading advocates of returning to the Moon; and using that achievement as the foundation for a manned journey to Mars. He has a book on the subject called Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space (2006). Schmitt is also an outspoken Global Climate Change skeptic. He has publicly argued that special interest groups and government are using the idea of Global Warming as a means of exerting greater control over the lives and incomes of the American people.

As a lifelong space junkie, I cannot wait to shake the hand of Jack Schmitt on the fourth floor of BSC's National Energy Center of Excellence, and listen to his insights. Meanwhile, if you want to get into the mood, go see the movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. The plot is sentimental and the dialogue lame, but it is nevertheless, in my opinion, one of the greatest movies ever made.

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Eugene A. Cernan & Harrison Schmitt aboard the Apollo 17. From NASA on the Commons via flickr.

On the Death of Mother's Dog Boz

My mother's faithful Schnauzer Boz died this week at the age of thirteen. We all knew this sad day was coming, but it came on suddenly and we were as shocked as if Boz had been hit by a bread truck.

Mother called last Sunday to say that Boz was starting to have seizures and what did I think she should do. I drove out to Dickinson as soon as I could. There on the old couch in the den sat mother looking drawn and sad and tired. She was holding Boz against her chest and petting her head. Mother is 82 and the dog about 94 if we put them on the same biological track. But mother is 82 going on 60 and Boz was 94 going on 118. It was time. Boz is a miniature salt and pepper Schnauzer with a cropped stub tail and reworked ears that pointed up in a posture of comic alertness.

For the last year or so Boz was blind (cataracts), deaf, and apparently deprived also of her sense of smell. She had lost about half of her teeth. Several that remained protruded down over her little black gums in a droll snaggletooth manner. She was cheerful and loving as ever but she frequently walked smack into walls and furniture. When this happened, she pulled patiently away with a snort of self-disappointment and then threaded her way along the baseboards of the house as if she literally had mapped and memorized her territory like blind Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" (1967). Mother carried her all over her little canine universe. I told her that Boz needed a seeing eye human and apparently had found one.

Lets just be clear. My mother loved that dog. No, that doesn't do it justice. My mother loved that dog as well as a living creature can be loved. When we finally went to the vet Monday morning to put Boz to sleep I overheard mother saying she would rather put me to sleep. When I heard the vet agree, I went out and sat in the car with the doors locked. My mother is just about the most self-sufficient person I have ever known, but she gave her heart to Boz the minute she met her as a puppy--the reckless love of total helpless surrender. Boz returned that love in full measure. Her favorite thing in the world for more than a decade was to sit in mother's lap and demand to be petted. If mother ceased to caress Boz for even a few seconds the dog would look up at her like a character in Picasso's painting "Guernica" and extend her long gray-white paw tenderly until it was hooked under mother's hand. That, or she'd nudge mother back into action with her black wet nose.

I used to roll my eyes at this. When mother left the room I sometimes told Boz off--"You're not the favorite, you miserable cur! She's not even your real mother. I bought you off the back of a truck in Chico, California, and I could call INS (immigration) and have you back in Stuttgart by this time tomorrow! You and I both know your nose is not naturally wet, that you go get a drink from your bowl (which, by the way, I bought with my allowance) before you do that nauseating wet nose routine." Then I'd do that gesture where you point two fingers at your own eyes and then turn them menacingly towards your sworn enemy--I'm watching you, Boz. She'd gaze back at me with a withering "what a loser" look and begin planning some new "totally adorable" gimmick to impress mother. I hope I do not seem petty.

Mother walked Boz twice a day all around Rocky Butte Park in north Dickinson, sometimes more than one lap. They formed some sort of band of brothers with other dog walkers and even exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards.  And we wonder why bin Laden hated us. Mother and Boz kept each other fit and young. I doubt that mother ever loved anyone or anything more than she loved that dog. I can tell you this, she never sat around evenings petting my father's head, smoothing his beard, or adjusting his collar, and it has been more than 55 years since she wiped up after me when I wet the carpet.

Boz started out as my daughter's puppy. My late father had always advised choosing the "most alert looking pup of the litter," and that is precisely what I did. At the time i had no idea what a little nuclear reactor I had selected. Back then she could jump up onto a tall kitchen counter from a standing position. When Boz and I roughhoused she would tear around the entire house like a blurry Tasmanian Devil in gigantic figure eight patterns through multiple rooms, fraying the carpets like a backhoe and jumping up onto the ridge line of couches and bolting over the top onto nearby chairs, twenty or thirty times in a row as if she had received an injection of adrenalin. She invariably made me call the truce first. I'd roll over on my back exhausted and nap for the rest of the afternoon, while she trotted off to find other adventures.

She proved to be too manic for my six-year-old daughter so I asked mama if she would take her for a time and teach her some proper manners. Mother's previous Schnauzer had recently died and my father had died a few years before that--apparently for lack of petting (see above). Mother had that frenetic pup eating out of her hand (as it were) within weeks and neither of them ever turned back.

The more you think about this the more marvelous it becomes. Just how dogs decided in their evolutionary struggle that their best bet was to attach themselves to Homo Sapiens as "man's best friend" is one of the great mysteries, but cats have never done it (they just use take our food and shelter in return for their contempt), and cows and chickens bring very little to the equation. If you have read Jack London or watched a cruel dog owner you know that the fact that dogs forgive us our sins and weaknesses (every time) is little short of a miracle. That they seem genuinely to love us, to greet us effusively every time (our best friends and lovers don't do that), to cheer us when we are down, to cut the loneliness of a lonely life, to help heal us when we are sick, and to intuit and snarl at our enemies long before we recognize them, is literally astonishing. Boz was all of that and more.

On Monday morning at the first opportunity we had Boz put to sleep.

Mother held Boz close through the five-minute procedure, and Boz looked up at her friend and master and life companion in complete trust and adoration (and truly some expression of relief). Then for the first time ever I saw mother weep uncontrollably.

Afterwards, I drove mother up to Rocky Butte Park. I would not have missed last weekend for the world. It deepened something between mother and me (I would not have thought that possible), and it began to prepare us both for other losses that are coming as surely as a far-off thunderstorm. I loved that dog, too, though I wouldn't want the little beast to know that.

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The Welfare State, Tax Farming, and the Flat Tax

My friend the barista at my favorite coffee house asked me the other day to write "about how we can convince all Americans to take full responsibility for their lives and so far as possible meet their own needs." This is something I think about a lot. My two favorite presidents—Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt—both believed that sturdy self-reliance was the true meaning of America. I'm not sure they would have quoted 2 Thessalonians 3:10—"The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat"—but they both believed that American should be an empowerment rather than an entitlement society, that nobody owes us anything, and that there is no excuse for laziness.

I'm not with Mitt Romney that 47% of the American people "will never take responsibility" for their lives, that they are a cheerfully permanent dependency class that votes Democratic so that they can continue to live off the hard work of the beleaguered 53% who carry American into the future. In Romney's cruel formulation (admittedly, an off hand toss of red meat to the base), just under half the country is locked into a co-dependent relationship with the Democratic Party: the bums (by his math, 169 million Americans) need the Democrats to keep their food stamps and welfare checks coming, and the Dems need the bums to stay in power. I find this argument so cynical, heartless, and fundamentally offensive that I hate even to put it into words.

Still, we all know that some percentage of the American people (in other words, millions of people) are gaming the system when they are able-bodied enough to take care of, or help take care of, themselves. Roosevelt would want to thump them into good sense. My view is that that percentage (the "sponges") is in fact relatively small, and that it is pretty heartless to blame people who would work if they could for not being able to find work in a lackluster and sputtering service economy just emerging from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Nobody can look at the welfare statistics and not be saddened. Currently, 23,116,928 American households receive food stamps. That's a total of 46,700,000 people on food stamps (13%). Almost 13 million people are on welfare (4.1%). Over one million children receive their first formal education in the federal Head Start program. In 2012 alone, the federal school nutrition programs delivered more than five billion lunches to more than 31 million students nationwide. The federal WIC program (Women, Infants, and Children) provides primary or supplemental basic health care programs to millions of Americans. Currently there are 75 million Americans receiving Medicaid. And on and on. That IS a lot of dependency. And someone has to pay for them.

I'm in favor of all of these programs—proof that we really are a great and compassionate society rather than a ruthless one. And—from the Mitt Romney 47% worldview--it is certainly true that these social programs have all been Democratic Party initiatives, most of which were denounced at their inception by the Republic right as socialist, nannystate, mollycoddling, welfare queen, intrusions into the free flow of a capitalist economy that should just be permitted to do its magic. It is also true, as Romney says, that welfare recipients vote overwhelming Democrat. Still, is there anyone who thinks it is healthy that the United States of America has this much need, this much dependency, this much welfare? We talk about means tests (I'm all for them), but we should probably also find some way to conduct "true needs tests." Let the true bums work or starve.

When I was growing up, most Americans regarded welfare and food stamps as last resort stopgaps to be regarded with some sense of shame. My kin (and probably yours) used to swear that nothing in the world could induce them to accept food stamps or welfare, and they were even a little disparaging of unemployment insurance and workman's comp. That attitude has changed dramatically in the last thirty years. I'm certainly not for stigmatizing poverty, but nor do we want to nurture or perpetuate a culture of entitlement.

In my opinion, it's not the poor that are dragging the country to ruin, though I agree that the existence of a semi-permanent welfare class would violate the fundamental ideal of American life: that in a bountiful land of freedom and opportunity, each individual, each family, takes care of itself by way of hard work, thrift, sacrifice, and resourcefulness. That may sound quaint in 2013, but without that spirit North Dakota could never have been settled. My grandparents represented everything that is right with America. They worked hard every day of their lives. They never had much. But their lives were amazingly abundant. They knew grinding poverty for long periods of time, and yet they never would have dreamed of accepting assistance from beyond the boundaries of their farm. Hurray for them. But we must not assume everyone has such tools and gumption.

Of course we should find ways to reform the "welfare state," but before we do that I suggest that we eliminate corporate welfare (countless billions), upper class welfare (a range of tax dodges, deductions, evasions, amortizations that amount to nothing more than the fleecing of the American dream), and middle class welfare. I have prosperous friends in Kansas who "farm the farm program" in ways that are perhaps legal but in my opinion unethical, wealthy and middle class friends in North Dakota who "farm the Medicaid program" by letting you and me pay for their parents' and grandparents' care in high-end nursing homes. I say, abolish all tax deductions of any sort and see who squawks loudest. It won't be the poor and minorities.

If I were in charge of the universe (which, thank goodness…) I'd scrap the current Byzantine federal tax system, and institute a simple flat tax of 10% of income, no deductions. I'd exempt anyone earning less than $25,000 per year. Well, not quite. I'd insist that everyone who files a tax return in the Exempt Category be required to write a check to the IRS for $500 per year. That would be the Minimum Federal Tax and no working adult would be allowed to escape it. I do believe we all need to have "skin in the game," as they say, to pay something to the national government for the many services it provides us. I think at least once a year every working American should have to write an actual check to the IRS so that we remind ourselves—positively, not indirectly—of two things: that government costs money, and that it is no fun writing that check, however large or small.

Under this system, the person earning $54,000 per year would pay a flat tax of $5,400. The person earning $13.7 million would pay a flat tax of $1.37 million. No deductions for mortgages, children, second homes, medical expenses, farm equipment, charitable giving, etc. I'm not wedded to 10%, because I don't know that it would meet our treasury's needs, but it has the Jeffersonian advantage of being a decimal system that anybody can easily compute. It took me several years to teach my daughter how to compute a 15% tip at restaurants, but 10% she could do from the age of eight.

Here's the basic hypocrisy, I think. When we decry the "entitlement society," we usually think of the "have nots." We'd be better off looking in the mirror.

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Holding America Hostage at the Cost of Constitutional Government

Like almost everyone else, I’m so disgusted with Congress that I wish we the people could force a national vote of no confidence for the whole lot of them, and start over. I believe if we chose 435 people at random from the 340 million Americans, we would do much better. And I feel certain that no group of 435 average Americans chosen by lottery would stoop so low or be so short-sighted as to shut down the government of the United States.

We are a very great nation. Great nations don’t let their governments collapse or for that matter just lapse. They pay their debts. They honor the sanctity of contract. They attend to the hard work of public legislation like adults. They pass budgets. They move forward by way of intelligent compromise. They get things done, even when it is no fun.

The pathetic carnival we have all been witnessing would be hard enough to watch from Bismarck, North Dakota, but this week I am leading a group of 30 cultural tourists on a journey through Jefferson’s Virginia and Washington, D.C. We spend all day every day talking in reverent and earnest tones about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, about the Enlightenment and the Idea of America, and then as we wind down for the night we turn on the television sets in our hotel rooms and watch the latest political pornography in the national capital of the United States 237 years after Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and 225 years after the crafting of the Constitution. It makes you want to weep—or throw up—or just throw all the rascals out.

What happened to America?

If our schedule had been reversed, and we had gone to tour the Library of Congress one day later, on Tuesday, October 1, we would have found the doors locked, and a note on the door explaining that Congress had shut down the U.S. government for no rational reason.

The American people deserve better. We deserve so much better.

For what little it is worth, I believe that while there is plenty of blame to go around, among Democrats and Republicans alike and a Congressionally inept President, in this instance the principal blame belongs to the right wing of the Republican Party. If, as they say, the core issue is the Affordable Health Care Act—Obamacare—and the government of the most powerful country on earth is being shut down by those who just cannot bear to see it take effect, then those sour grapes absolutists bear a very heavy responsibility and I hope they will be held accountable by the American people.

Obstructionism is not ok. It would not be ok if America were a relatively minor nation. But we are not a minor nation, though we are now on a rapid downward spiral that is likely to damage our position in the world, reduce our international credit rating, and make other nations turn elsewhere for world leadership.

The Tea Party zealots appear to be willing to damage the lives of tens of millions of Americans to make their point, to stand by cheerfully while more than 850,000 federal workers are sent home without pay, to precipitate a breach in a wide range of public services from the National Parks to air traffic control, some of which are vital to our national life, and some of which involve the basic security of America.

Not only does the action of a grim and fanatical minority violate the core principle of American political life—majority rule—but it actually threatens the future of majority rule as a concept of civil society. We now begin to reach the point where serious political thinkers, at home and abroad, will ask: is the United States governable? The fact is that the United States is in the midst of a new civil war—being waged between those who like to pretend that they are the modern Samuel Adams and John Hancock heroically opposing taxation and big government, and those who realize that this is now the 21st century and America, with a third of a billion people, necessarily requires a large and complex national government.

Perhaps the obstructionists (the new political nihilists) have forgotten the mechanics of legislation established by our Constitution. Irrespective of the merits of Obamacare as national health care policy, the fact is that the law was enacted by both houses of the United States Congress (March 2010). Then that two-house Congressional legislation was signed into law by the President of the United States. That’s how our system works. Anyone who has taken a basic civics course understands this. You don’t have to agree with this or that law, but we can only function as a civil society if we play by the rules we have all agreed to honor.

After it was enacted into law, Obamacare was legitimately challenged in the federal courts. It went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. On June 28, 2012, the court issued its landmark decision affirming that the Affordable Care Act was indeed constitutional. At this point all three branches of the national government of the United States had endorsed Obamacare. That would seem to have settled the issue. It’s not about whether you or I like the health care law. It is about how laws are passed in a democratic society.

But of course that wasn’t the end of the story. In the 2012 Presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney declared—unmistakably—that the first act of his presidency would be to repeal Obamacare. No one who followed the election could doubt that this was his highest priority. In other words, Romney defined the national presidential election as a referendum on Obamacare. Romney lost that election—not marginally but decisively. So if the election was a referendum on Obamacare, the American people appear to have affirmed the law in spite of whatever misgivings they had about some of its provisions.

The Republicans of the House of Representatives have now voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund Obamacare. None of these bills has been seconded by the duly elected Senate of the United States. If, somehow, a repeal law passed both houses of Congress, President Obama would certainly veto it. Unless a 2/3 majority of both houses voted to override that veto, the health care reform law would stand. That’s civics 101.

I know some, perhaps many, of my readers think Obamacare is a disaster that will raise costs, reduce services, and make an already Byzantine health care system more cumbersome. They may or may not be right. Only time will tell. But that is not the point. No single faction should be permitted to hijack our national political system because it disagrees with duly enacted legislation. The intransigence of the Tea Party position is so great that there isn’t a chance in the world that President Obama can yield to their extreme demands. To do so would be to abdicate his role as President of the United States. It would be giving in to political terrorists. In other words, and ironically, the right-wing Republicans have ensured the survival of Obamacare by forcing everyone who believes in the American system to support it, irrespective of its merits.

My tour group is now on the bus for the hour-long drive from Richmond, VA, to Monticello. I reckon that the serene and rational Jefferson would oppose any national health care legislation whatsoever, but I am absolutely certain that he would defend the sanctity of our democratic process with his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.

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Let's Cut Off Their True Food Supply: In Other Words, Let's Ignore Them Now

So the white supremacists have come to the soil of North Dakota. Our job is to make sure it is not fertile soil.

Now that the initial flurry of angst is over, and the street confrontation of September 22, 2013, has peacefully come and peacefully gone, the best thing we can do, I believe, is to leave them alone to their first winter in Leith. They are in for a considerable surprise. As you and I know, but they might not yet or not quite, winters are very long and not altogether balmy in rural North Dakota, on the northern Great Plains. After six or seven months of high winds, ground blizzards, below-zero temperatures and rawhide wind chill, plus the cabin fever of living almost entirely indoors in a town that doesn't even have a quick shop or a bar, they may choose to pick up stakes and winter hereafter in Scottsdale or Hemet. Or perhaps they'll tuck away their Nazi flags and hateful rhetoric, form an Optimist Club, and start writing rural redevelopment grants for poor little Leith and Grant County. Maybe we should flood them with hotdishes and fleischkuechle—kill them with kindness as my mother-in-law would say—in the hopes that they clog up their arteries, settle into their recliners, and start purchasing the premium NFL Sunday Ticket Package. Once they start watching Real Housewives of Orange County, our troubles are over.

I do not take their presence in our homeland lightly, but I believe that this unwelcome visitation is a test of our character and the robustness of our rural democracy. We would be equally foolish to under or to overreact.

We need to remain vigilant, because such types occasionally do (rather than say) appalling things, but as long as they are just verbal extremists wearing anti-social body art, the best thing we can do now is completely ignore them. They feed on us, on our outrage, on the righteous attention we give them. The way to hurt them is not to call them names or try to cut off their access to rural water and sewer, but to ignore them and assume that as long as they don't commit illegal acts they are free to mimeograph Aryan newsletters and spy a Jew behind every American success story. I don't blame the media for giving them the attention they have received so far—it is big news, national news, when a group of self-proclaimed extremists invades a wee pastoral village of 15-26 people in one of the most unsensational states in the union. But now that we have noted their presence, expressed our displeasure with their silly but dangerous doctrines, and put them on notice that we are watching their every move, we should turn away in quiet disgust.

I'm with Voltaire (1694-1778) and the Enlightenment: "Madam, I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." But the minute they burn a cross on someone's front yard we'll unleash the full fury of the Civil Rights Division the U.S. Justice Department on them.

I had never been to Leith before last Sunday. I have driven past it many times, but nothing had ever compelled me to turn off the highway and drive three miles over gravel roads to see the hapless little village. Now that I have been there I really like it and, like almost everyone else, I wish the supremacists would take their British Israelist flags, their Jewish conspiracy theories, and their dark hearts elsewhere. I defend their right to exist and to spew, but I don't like it that they have chosen us to be their petri dish, and frankly I wonder why. They did not choose Massachusetts or San Francisco. One of my friends said they made a fundamental strategic mistake. Instead of Leith, they should have located in nearby Heil, population 15. They could have painted over the town sign to Seig Heil. In addition to that, New Leipzig is close at hand, and up at the other end of the state is Walhalla, if they are really planning a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.

Meanwhile, I'm a little suspicious of some of the calls on the state's radio talk shows, stoutly defending the newcomers' first amendment and property rights. I agree in theory, but I wonder what the talk show chatter would be if instead of white supremacists Leith had been invaded by a cell of Radical Environmentalists, or PETA activists, or Marxist-Leninists, or Anti-Frackers, or Shoshone Indians, or—God forbid—Sharia Muslims. We'd be more likely to hear "lock and load" than "live and let live."

It would be interesting to know how many white supremacists are scattered across the North Dakota landscape. I don't just mean tattooed and swastika white supremacists (extremely rare), but also "maybe after three drinks at the bar with like-minded friends" white supremacists, and "well, I really don't like to talk about it much, but I do sometimes think we white folks have lost control of our own country" white supremacists, and "I'm not prejudice (the d usually omitted), but I'm noticing an awful lot of Ne-groes in the oil patch" white supremacists, and "why am I supposed to feel sympathy for Indians when they spend their time cashing their welfare checks and huffing—why can't they get their @#X#X together?" white supremacists. I don't know how many full-bore white supremacists there are in North Dakota, but the number is more than zero, and if you add in the percentage of people who would never display a Nazi symbol or fly a Confederate flag, but who are not altogether unsympathetic with at least some parts of the doctrine of chief supremacist Craig Cobb and his friends, you begin to feel a little uneasy

Anti-Semitic incidents are rare in North Dakota, but they do occur. Contempt for the lifestyles and values of American Indians is so routine that we hardly notice ourselves. And to be openly anti-Muslim—well, that's just American patriotism since 9-11.

I listened carefully for a while last Sunday as Craig Cobb explained his views to members of the North Dakota media, who let him hold forth without interruption and made no attempt to argue with him. Much of it didn't make sense to me, but I did hear him say that the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s and 1970s were a social disaster that unleashed a black reign of crime terror in our cities; that Jews control the world, particularly Hollywood and banking; that our lax immigration protocols are producing the mongrelization of the American dream; and that the Founding Fathers intended a White Christian Nation and they knew whereof they spoke. Heck, that's just Rush Limbaugh on a bad day, except perhaps for the anti-Semitism.

The best thing about the protest rally in Leith was the presence of about 50 Lakota Indians and their friends. In their marvelous dignity and their prayerful seriousness of purpose, they made us all realize that the presence of these Aryan skinheads among us is a very grave and disheartening thing, a sad day in the long, hard, uneven arc of social justice that is the unfinished history of North Dakota. A setback, but potentially also a breakthrough.

And I fell in love with the Lakota woman who spoke forth at the height of the tension: "Come set up shop on the Rez—see how that works out for you." The lovely assembly of 300 anti-supremacists laughed.

A long healing laugh.

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Recreating Robert Kennedy's Fifty Mile Hike Fifty Years After

A few of my fascinations coalesced last weekend and left me with foot blisters. In a few weeks (November 5-7), the Dakota Institute and Bismarck State College will co-host a public humanities symposium on John F. Kennedy. November 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. To get ready I've been reading as many books as I can about the life and achievement of JFK.

A couple of months ago, I cannot remember quite how, I learned that in the course of his reading President Kennedy discovered a 1908 executive order by Theodore Roosevelt instructing officers of the U.S. Marine Corps to undertake a fifty-mile hike. TR was worried that our military officers were becoming soft and (to use his term) "effeminate," so he challenged them to hike fifty miles within twenty hours in no more than three days. To quell the public outcry (that he was a tyrant and a bully), the somewhat portly Rough Rider proceeded to ride his horse more than 100 miles in a single day. Kennedy was concerned about the fitness of the American people in the wake of several lackluster Olympics and of course Sputnik, so he wrote to his Marine Corps commandant David Shoup urging him to make his officers undertake the Roosevelt hike.

Before that could happen, JFK's younger brother, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, decided on whim one Friday afternoon to walk fifty miles the following morning, Saturday, February 9, 1963. RFK was 37 years old. Their route would take them along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Georgetown to Harper's Ferry. The towpath along the canal was covered in places with ice and slush. Kennedy had done no training for the hike and he made no effort to obtain appropriate footwear. He walked the entire distance in his street shoes, and yet he completed the hike in just seventeen hours and fifty minutes. Life magazine followed him along with chase vehicles and a helicopter. When the last of his three companions gave up the hike at mile 36, RFK said, with his characteristic rueful wit, "You're lucky your brother is not the President of the United States!"

So it is now the fiftieth anniversary of the fifty-mile hike of one of my heroes Robert F. Kennedy. I belong to a little men's group that dines together from time to time and occasionally undertakes a mild adventure. Although the other three are among the busiest professionals I know, and infinitely more powerful and important in their communities, we all agreed, more or less at the last moment, to undertake at least part of the hike on Friday the 13th (hmmm) and Saturday the 14th of September. Our route would take us from Dan's Super Value in south Mandan out to Fort Rice on the Rough Rider Trail. We'd camp overnight there, and then stroll back to Mandan. That's 27.5 miles out, 27.5 miles back, or—to adopt a heartbreaking metaphor--two walking marathons on successive days. We positioned cars at staging points along the way so that we wouldn't have to carry much and we could deliver injured bodies to walk-in clinics or carcasses to next of kin.

We set off at 7:30 a.m. Friday looking like four guys who took advantage of the RFK hike to buy new gear. One of our group—I'll call him Larry—bought his first sleeping bag in thirty years. With his antique walking stick and his green felt hat, he looked like a middle-aged member of a Bavarian hiking club. The others—I'll call them Niles and Vern—had daypacks full of power bars and moleskin, and as always they breathed good will and determination. I was sporting a brand new orange Camelbak, a giant Leatherman tool I stole from a Lewis & Clark companion last month, and a Cloverdale Tangy Summer Sausage, even though my friend and adviser Melanie Carvell (the famous triathlete), has the absurd notion that those who wish to be fit should not be eating anything that delicious and self-indulgent on the trail. We all agreed to despise her advice, though she is the fittest and most physically accomplished person we have ever met, and though we feared that she would swoop down on us at mile nine to confiscate the contraband salami.

Things went pretty well for the first mile.

Here are some scattered comments I picked up on the trail, mostly from the Bavarian. "Fort Rice is a really long way from Mandan, wasn't Fort Lincoln more historically important?" "Guys, the Rough Rider trail was established for ATVs. Isn't that the right way to do it?" "Forget Carvell, hand over that @#@XX# summer sausage." "I just remembered my root canal was scheduled for this morning, I'm sooo sorry, gentlemen." "Ask not what you can do for those rotten Kennedys, ask what you can do for yourself." "Hey you—suggester of this hike--does that Leatherman have a gutting device, by any chance?"

Not without some strain to our hips, calves, feet, and the human spirit, we waltzed into the campground at Fort Rice around six p.m. We had staged our camp car there at dawn, at a perfect campsite, assuming that we would be the only campers that night. But while we earned our way to Fort Rice in a manner to win the respect of Thoreau, a couple of loutish fifth wheelers with North Dakota plates simply appropriated our site, and actually dragged a picnic table to their common area with a chain and a pickup. The Bavarian and I were approximately 26 miles behind Vern and Niles in reaching camp. When they asked the desperadoes why they stole our site, we were told, "you have to get here early if you want to hold your place." We overcame our urge to engage in a rumble with the rapscallions, and humbly set up camp as far from their RV generators and television sets as we could.

On Saturday there was a rain-induced diaspora. Two of our group went back to town straight away. Niles and I hiked the first 8.5 miles, but when we could hear slushy sounds in our shoes in the downpour, we drove home. At this point, we were no longer a group, but just four weary and disappointed individuals. I took a very long bath. But my conscience was eating at me. I was not alone.

Here's the amazing end of the story. Without any mutual consultation three of us actually finished up the hike in our scattered neighborhoods. Vern did a full 22.5, and Niles and I each did 14 to get to fifty, all within President Roosevelt's timeline. The fourth member of our group had a genuine work crisis that prevented him from completing the hike at this time, but he did say two things as we all parted company: first, that he fully intends to walk at least 27.5 miles in the course of the remainder of his life; and that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was right when he said that he who loves law or tangy summer sausage should never watch the making of either.

Autumn in North Dakota is often the most temperate time of the year. You can still hike fifty miles over two or three days. In doing so you would be serving your health and discipline in a lovely way, and paying respect to the man who may have been the greatest Attorney General in American history.

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Humans Must Love Carbon if They Will Frack the Earth to Get It

Neutral observers from Jupiter would have to conclude that earth humans must really crave carbon, they are willing to go to such lengths to get their hands on it. For the love of oil, they are willing to put up with Saudi Arabia's state sponsorship of anti-western schools (madrasha), and for that matter Saudi princes' sponsorship of anti-American terrorist groups. (I write this on the 12th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and yet the United States subsequently invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Hmmm.)

They are willing to tear the living daylights out of east central Alberta to get at tar sands that can be made—at vast expense—to release a not very clean elixir of oil.

We are willing to fight an endless series of resource wars in the Middle East to insure that the oil comes out of the ground and flows towards America. This is formally known as the Carter Doctrine. In his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." It would be impossible to make sense of the unending Gulf Wars without factoring in the existence of the world's single richest concentration of oil in the region. In other words, if there were no more oil under Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia than there is under Minnesota, imagine for a moment what our foreign policy might look like.

We are willing literally to slice the top off of the mountains of West Virginia to get at the coal that lies underneath.

And now, of course, we appear to be willing to transform western North Dakota beyond recognition to get at the shale oil and natural gas that lie 10,000 feet or more beneath the surface of the most beautiful (and formerly quiet) landscapes of the state. The technology is breathtaking, nearly miraculous. First a series of stiff pipes penetrate vertically to a depth of almost two miles. To get a sense of how much energy this involves, try digging a 10-foot hole this afternoon with a fence post digger. Then the stiff pipes are made to turn a corner at a full 90 degrees (try that with steel fence posts!), and snake out another mile into the heart of a narrow oil-permeated shale formation. Then a sand-bearing slurry is forced down and out all that pipe to a series of perforations (little trap doors) in the laterals, where, under almost unbelievable amounts of hydraulic pressure, it fractures the shale and then keeps the fractures open by depositing countless little sand or plastic wedges in the cracks.

At that point, with the help of additional hydraulic manipulation, oil finally begins to pool from a gazillion fractures. By employing more energy to turn a pump jack at the surface, that oil can be made to slurpy up along a pipe that may be three miles long. At which point, using more energy, it can be made to travel to a refinery, either through a steel pipeline, or on giant trucks or rail cars. At the refinery, thanks to yet another large expenditure of energy, the crude can be forced to separate into some of its ingenious carbon expressions: diesel, heating oil, kerosene, liquid petroleum gas, and of course gasoline. Which is then trucked, at considerable expense, to your neighborhood gas station. Where, for $3.85 per gallon . . . .

Think we want this stuff?

It costs somewhere between $10 and $20 million to develop a single frack well in North Dakota. At the moment, North Dakota is producing over 825,000 barrels of oil per day, which makes us the nation's second largest producer of crude oil. Current American oil consumption (not counting oil-based byproducts) is 18.83 million barrels per day. In other words, North Dakota is now producing about 4 percent of America's daily consumption of oil. If America depended solely on North Dakota for oil, we could at the moment supply the insatiable maw with oil for just 17 days per year. What is happening in Killdeer, Watford City, Williston, Dickinson, Parshall, Stanley, Crosby, and the badlands, is happening in a lot of other places on our watery little planet.

If the only known copy of the works of Shakespeare were trapped in shale two miles below the surface of the earth, do you think we'd take the trouble to go fetch it? Would we fracture the earth to recover 3-5 percent of the musical output of Beethoven or Mahler? Would we organize two thousand truck events to recover the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David?

My point is that we are hopelessly, helplessly, appallingly addicted to carbon. We literally cannot live without it now, and we have to be prepared to do whatever it takes to go get it. If that means an annual US Defense Department budget of $600 billion, we're willing to pay that price. If it means giving the Saudis a pass (not even a slap on the wrist) after 15 Saudi nationals (and the Saudi mastermind Osama bin Laden) perpetrated the gravest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, we appear to be willing to "let it be" to make sure that Saudi oil continues to flow our way. If it means turning western North Dakota into an industrial park, we have to be willing to marshal the cement trucks and lay the pipe, because the existing pattern of American energy consumption requires no less.

We could, of course, revolutionize the way we live rather than the communities and badlands of North Dakota, but addiction is addiction, and my Honda hybrid and your Birkenstocks are not going to break it. We could, of course, throw the same amount of money at developing serious alternatives to crude carbon as we now use to extract crude carbon, but the virtually infinite pools of oil and gas newly available thanks to the magic of first-world technology are more likely to deepen our addictions than tip us into greener alternatives. Alas.

When I ran out of gas near Glen Ullin 10 days ago, at 10:38 p.m. on a dark and stormy night, while musing about questions of this sort—about the future of the soul of North Dakota—I had barely stopped cursing myself for blithering idiocy when I was able to smirk at my hypocrisies. Before that little drama ended, I had hiked 4.4 miles out and 4.4 miles back to fetch a single gallon of gasoline, for which I paid $3.79 (not counting soft tissue damage and the various psychological repercussions). By 3 a.m. I would have paid $37.90 for that gallon of gasoline and by 5 a.m. $379.00.

To supply our insatiable carbon needs, there have been a lot of Bakkens elsewhere in the world, and we have been able to ignore them because they have not disturbed our lovely back yard. But now the chickens have come home to roost, and we have a moral duty—no matter what we do about the North Dakota oil rush—to gaze honestly in that mirror.

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"Spindle Top, an important oil region near Beaumont, Texas, U.S.A." From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

When We Start to Lock Our Doors, Are We Still North Dakota?

Last Friday I had meetings in Dickinson and Medora. I lingered over dinner with one of my friends at the Rough Riders Hotel, and then turned my Honda towards Bismarck and put it on autopilot. It was a lovely evening. The countryside, somehow, was still green in the last days of August. My mind was pre-occupied with the topic that now never goes away: How does the spirit of North Dakota survive the massive carbon boom that has rolled like a great tidal wave over our land and people? My friend had shown me a map of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, now essentially encircled by industrial activity. With much more to come, and no end in sight for the rest of our lives.

What will western North Dakota look like in 2015, 2025, 2035, 2050? Nobody knows for sure, but it is hard to believe that it will ever again look like the North Dakota I love so much: mostly empty and windswept, long stretches of ribbony blue highway with little or no traffic in either direction, fierce little towns hanging on against the forces that are depopulating the rural districts of America and the world. Grass landscapes rolling endlessly in every direction, punctuated by ridges and box buttes, with not much more human "improvement" than fences, cattle, a few scattered ranches, and farm to market scoria roads. The sense that the Great Plains just go on forever swallowing up human possibility and serving as a platform for the galloping escapades of pronghorn antelope. And of course the sacred river, the Little Missouri, meandering through the best of all that country in no hurry at all, carrying its six inches of silted water through one of the most beautiful and unusual landscapes in the world.

I love that North Dakota.

That North Dakota is now gone, except in diminishing and endangered patches. I know we have no right to cling to that North Dakota, given what it had come to represent: decline, outmigration, loss of a sense of the future, economic marginality. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it and feel that its rapid evaporation is tragic.

As I drove home with a perfect dusk in my rear view window, I mused about these things, and wondered what the right response to these developments is. Most North Dakotans seem unambiguously joyful about the oil boom, which has brought so much prosperity and renewal to the state. The sense of the state—taken as a whole—seems to be something close to "Drill, baby, drill," or as one of my friends in the industry puts it, "The best is yet to come." Most North Dakotans seem only vaguely—lip-service--concerned about the impact of the boom on such places as Killdeer and Watford City, and as for Williston—well, most North Dakotans seem to agree that Williston has never been the aesthetic capital of the state, or wished to be.

I disagree with most of that, but I am just one puny little voice, and I confess that my ambivalence eats up my anxiety every time. I do not wish the oil boom would go away. That seems irresponsible to me, given the sad history of rural decline in North Dakota, particularly western North Dakota. But I do wish three things, pretty strongly. One: that the boom would slow down, and move forward at a more orderly, sustainable, conservative, and community-friendly pace. Two: that we could hammer out a broad North Dakota consensus about some few parcels we'd like to spare—the Little Missouri River Valley, the concentric perimeter of the three units of the national park, the Killdeer Mountains and Bullion Butte, the remaining roadless areas of the Little Missouri National Grasslands, Native American sacred sites, historic battlefields. Three: that we would have a serious, open-minded, and frank statewide conversation about the oil rush and the future of North Dakota.

These do not seem to me to be radical suggestions, but sane and essential suggestions. The fact that such ideas are now routinely branded as "radical" or "anti-development" or "elitist," tells you how far the energy politics of North Dakota have rocketed to the right. We are now in many respects a one-party state (never a good thing, no matter which party), and we are in danger of becoming a company-state, like Montana in the age of Anaconda Copper. I believe we can be grateful for the oil boom without becoming servile, and we can maintain the sturdy independence of the North Dakota character without jeopardizing the enormous benefits of Bakken shale to the state.

Meanwhile, if I were the state legislature, I'd try to give the communities in the impact zone everything they need to survive this thing. It would not be a blank check, of course, but it would be something quite close to a blank check. These communities are in a free fall, and some of North Dakota's best local leaders are working 80 hours a week under almost unbearably stressful circumstances merely to keep their communities from collapse—water and sewer, streets, daycare, crime, drugs, gangs, basic zoning, DUIs, schools, waste facilities, dust mitigation, traffic, not to mention the sex trade and human trafficking. Why would we as outsiders want to doubt Stanley's or Watford City's assessment of what they need to get through this with something like their quality of life intact? If we doubt the perspective of the people who actually live in those towns, who do we think knows better what they need?

A month or so ago I was part of a conversation with several residents of Williston and Watford City, plus some serious oil boom executives. A lifelong resident of Watford City said, "I've lived in Watford all of my life. It has never been easy, but my wife and children and I have made a very good life for ourselves here. In all of that time, even when we have been on vacation, we have never locked our doors, and we have always just left the keys in the car wherever we stopped. This year, for the first time in more than fifty years, we have started to lock our doors." To which one of the executives replied, "Welcome to the modern world, Bob."

Because I was just listening to the conversation, I said nothing, but I wanted to shout: No No No No No No No! That's NOT an adequate response. It's not that we live in North Dakota because we don't have to lock our doors here, but the fact that until a couple of years ago you could live your entire life in North Dakota and not have to lock your doors is one of the very best things about this place. It's not the end of the world when you start locking up and looking over your shoulder in the parking lot, but it is the end of something so valuable in North Dakota life that its loss is (to me) profoundly disturbing. Along with the steady disappearance of pronghorn antelopes, mule deer, meadowlarks, eagles, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions.

At 10:38 p.m., as I pondered these things I ran out of gas for the first time in 43 years, a few miles out of Glen Ullin. Before that "long day's journey into night" ended, I was aware of the urgent necessity of oil in a whole new way.

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"Doorway, 26 Chestnut Street, Salem, Mass." From the New York Public Library.

Seeking Renewal on the Wendover Death March in the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

FORT BENTON, MT.

I'm sitting out on the patio of the Grand Union Hotel looking at the Missouri River. This is the halfway point of my annual Lewis and Clark canoeing and hiking trip. We have spent the last three days paddling through the magnificent White Cliffs stretch of the Missouri. Tonight we regroup in a historic hotel (which mostly means showers). Tomorrow we head up to Lochsa Lodge on the Lolo Trail just inside Idaho (west of Missoula), and prepare for four days of hiking along the most pristine stretch of the entire Lewis & Clark trail from Charlottesville, VA, to Astoria, OR.

This year I'm joined by 35 adventurers from all over the United States—and one winsome young geologist from Australia. With my tour partner Becky, that makes our little corps of discovery about the same in size as the permanent party of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1805). The main difference is that we cannot establish military discipline. Last night one of the enlisted men engaged in an unauthorized incursion into our limited supply of liquor. After a wonderful midnight thunderstorm that woke and enchanted our urban guests, he went wandering through our camp like King Lear on the heath, tripping over guy lines, chanting patches of patriotic song, and invading tents of perfect strangers in search of his longsuffering wife. This produced a little chaos. We wanted to flog him at dawn, but he looked pretty self- or spouse-flogged, so we merely pardoned him to nurse his hangover. The mesh cowboy hat that he has been wearing all week looked as if it had gone through a tree shredder. I predict a long run of temperance in his future.

These are minor concerns. Each year for five years my canoe partner Becky has attempted to drown me in the Missouri River. She's a natural water nymph with a heart the size of Montana, but she has two exceedingly bad habits. She stands up from time to time in the canoe, and she turns around to take pictures, adjust her life vest, reach for something in her kit bag, ask me a question, or just tempt the river gods. No amount of caution or rebuke can prevent her from taking appalling risks, and every summer I lose not only my new camera—an expensive sacrifice to what Meriwether Lewis called the "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River"—but books, notes, GPS devices, journals (both my own and the expedition's). I went to my favorite camera store a few days before this trip to buy my fifth annual digital camera. The clerk said, "Ah, it's your annual Montana trip, is it?"

I can now report a miracle. My camera survived the canoe portion of the trip. We'll see how it fares on the Wendover Death March.

I don't know if I can explain why this annual trip means so much to me, but I am going to try. When you are out on the river drifting through some of the most enchanting scenery in America, or placing one foot in front of the other on a serious and strenuous hike directly in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, you get out of yourself. You all know that persona you drag around almost every day of the year, full of fears and frets and frustrations and figments and frauds and foolhardiness. It's almost pure pleasure to check that tinny thing at the embarkation point, and become a more basic and authentic self for a few days. The camping trip tasks are very basic: paddle, hike, perform rudimentary acts of hygiene in rudimentary structures, sleep, eat, warm your hands in the fire in the chill of the evening, and get up in the middle of the night to pee in the dewy grass just outside your tent, and then linger in your shorts in the night chill to watch for a shooting star. The idea is to let the past slip away, put the future on hold at the other end of the journey, and just try to BE for a change. Feel the tinge of sunburn on your face and legs, the affirming strain in muscles you don't much use in what Huck Finn calls "sivilization," and let the long stretches of pure silence redeem your life.

There is also the "same time next year" phenomenon.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said "you can never enter the same river twice." That is true of the Missouri. This year it was down by three or four feet from last year. Last year's gravel-bottomed swimming hole was a mud bog this year. The air was easily ten degrees cooler this summer, and the afternoon swimming was therefore less imperative. Etc. But I also know I bring a different me to the river every year. My left shoulder was not a factor this time. I was more serious, less playful in the evening talks. I know why, though I'm not willing to explain it. People from all over the country insisted on my talking about the Bakken oil boom, even though I came out here in part to escape the oppressive never-endingness of that subject in my life. I threw myself into this year's adventure with none of my usual detachment—in part because there is so much I wish to escape from this year, and I am counting on the journey to provide spiritual renewal.

When we undertake the Wendover Death March Friday morning (nine miles more or less straight up) I will be listening to my body take that severe strain. Every summer I wonder when the year will finally come when I cannot make the hike—or, worse, choose not to make the hike. In a strange sort of way, this summer journey is my way of testing who I am, who I still am, and who I might be able to become, because the one constant is that a full year has passed since the last seemingly-identical journey.

The jury is still out about this year's Death March, which is led by my glorious young friend Chad, now just under 40, who prances and gambols and jibes his way up Wendover Ridge as if he were jogging to the corner post office, while the rest of us bend over and cough up a lung every ten minutes and curse the day Chad was born. The trip would not be worth making without Chad—who knows everything about the Bitterroot Mountains except the trees, which is a bit ironic if you think about it—and it certainly would not be worth making without Becky. They are the north stars of my summer.

Mostly I thank God I live in virtually the only country on earth where this is possible—where the population density is light in the heartland, where there is still plenty of public domain to play and wander in, where the qualities of wilderness and frontier still have some potency in our national soul, and where the words "the West" touch off a long reverie of romance, awe, redemption, mystery, and renewal.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," said Thoreau. That indeed is my quest.

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The Etiquette of Texting in the Age of Electronic Loneliness

Yesterday I was being driven in a taxi from one part of Seattle to another. The taxi driver was a Muslim man who spent the entire twenty-six minutes talking in frenetic Arabic to someone on his cell phone. I don't know if they were making dinner plans or plotting revenge. All I know is that they were talking with great animation, and I didn't understand a single word my driver said. He was driving so fast that I was a little uneasy. Nor did it make my ride very pleasant to have to listen to what seemed like high-energy chatter, but I'm sure being able to multi-task in this way makes his work life less tedious and perhaps more productive. We drove through the fashionable Capitol Hill district of Seattle. On our right we passed a young man on a bicycle riding no hands and texting as he glided through traffic. That was the most creative (and dangerous) instance of texting I have seen so far. I suppose the ultimate would be to text while riding a bull in a rodeo. People must really want to text to take such risks.

What did we do before we could text Homo sapiens have been around for 250,000 years, and somehow we got by without texting until ten years ago. Now, approximately six billion texts are sent per day in the United States alone. Young Americans (18-29) send or receive on average 88 texts per day. The other night I sat at a long bar in a Seattle hotel and all eleven people sitting there were texting alone, concentrating even more on their cell phones than on their drinks. Not a single conversation of any sort was occurring between those eleven bodies. The bartender was texting, too. I was not texting, but I was reading a book on my iPad.

The Internet gave us the capacity to send emails at some point between 1995 and the millennium. The electronic letter phased out the paper-and-postage-stamp letter with breathtaking ruthlessness. I still send traditional letters to my daughter, and occasionally to others. She regards such letters as quaint relics of a forgotten age. She senses that a letter in the mailbox is somehow more significant than an email, but I can tell that she thinks it is a bit silly to deploy the resources of the US Postal System for six or seven days to deliver to her essentially the same words that I could have sent her instantaneously from anywhere on earth. The postal service is a reasonably efficient document delivery system now being displaced by a stunningly more efficient delivery system. I imagine when she receives a letter from me, it feels to her like that birthday card you used to get from your grandmother with a $5 check in it. You shake your head a little, even though you do appreciate the gesture.

I spend a lot of time in airports. Computers, cell phones, and texting have taken a lot of the tedium out of waiting for the next flight. It certainly beats that earlier phase of electronic culture when people carried little game devices around and played them in seat 23b with all their bells and dings and whistles blaring, as if they had a full grown pinball machine in front of them. What bothers me most now are the people who stop dead in their tracks in airport walking lanes, without warning, and when you lurch and scramble to avoid running them down, you discover they merely stopped to tap out a text. Hey Brad, 'sup This happens to me every time I fly now.

Texting is so addictive that once you are in there is no turning back. My mother is a great case in point. Sometime around 1998 I forced her to buy her first home computer. She resisted that rite of passage as if I were trying to put her in a rural nursing home. I'm too old, what would I do with it, I'd never be able to figure it out, I've lived my whole life without a computer, why would I need one now But of course the minute she had her first massive Gateway computer she recognized it as an essential tool of life. We went through the same nonsense about her first cell phone, her first laptop, and her first Nook. She relented in the end in the Battle of the Cell Phone by admitting that it might possibly save her life if she ran off the road in a blizzard. And for several years she used it only when she traveled. More recently we had a daylong argument about getting her a cell phone on which she could write texts. My fingers would be too clumsy on such a small keyboard, why cannot I just pick up the phone and call if I have something to say, I'm eighty years old for the gosh sakes, etc. This summer my amazingly persuasive daughter convinced my mother to buy her first iPhone, even though she had sworn earlier in the week that nothing could ever convince her to abandon a true keyboard for a touch pad. Now she nonchalantly exchanges texts with her granddaughter and with her significant other in Minneapolis, and a few days ago she somehow managed to send me a photograph from Cody, Wyoming. She has a fancy stylus for her phone. I'll look over at her and ask what she's doing Oh, just texting Russ (the S.O.) to see if he thinks Tiger or Phil will win the tournament. Oh my. As Hamlet put it, Is man no more than this?

One of the positive benefits of texting is that it makes us get to the point. It's the modern telegraph system. Nobody likes to tap out a 500-word note. I think it also invites us to be witty. A perfect text is worth a thousand words. It is certainly easier to text in one's regrets for not coming to a dinner party than making that call, which might end in the host persuading you to come, after all, or might leave you feeling like a lout. You can text what you dare not or would rather not say, and you can text at any time of day or night without necessarily disturbing the recipient.

Texting allows us to reach out to someone in a small way, without the duration and heavier implications of a phone conversation. Hey, thinking about you. Just wanted to make sure you are ok Don't forget to make the car payment. Have I said I love you yet today Texting is ideal for some types of communication. Think of how long that car payment phone call might have lasted and what Pandora's boxes it might have opened. The telegraph works better.

I have even heard of instances of people breaking up with their lovers by text—the rare Dear John text. Hard to believe anyone could ever be so barbarous and insensitive, but such things are a fair indicator of where we are and where we are headed as a culture.

C U next wk.

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The Healing Power of Laughter: Oh Larry and Mo Where Art Thou?

One of my favorite people has been in town, and it couldn't have come at a better time. His name is David Nicandri. He's one of the best Lewis and Clark scholars in the country. His book, River of Promise Lewis & Clark on the Columbia (published by our own Dakota Institute Press) has won rave reviews. One eminent historian has called it the best book on Lewis and Clark in a generation.

All that is great, but it is not why I cherish David Nicandri so much. There's an even better reason He has one of the greatest laughs of anyone I have ever known. When he finds something funny—and he does so several times per conversation—he throws his head back and releases an unguarded, unmistakable open-mouthed laugh. His laugh is always lusty and it is often wonderfully noisy. His laughter is no mere hee hee, or a muted uh, huh, huh, ha, huh. He's all in, as they say. If you were from Jupiter and hadn't figured out the human necessity for laughter, you might think he had just been stabbed with a spear. He laughs because he cannot help it. And then I laugh because I cannot help it. In a world of insincerity and disingenuous people (they are legion), I love the visceral authenticity of laughter.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of 18th century London, and the author of the first great dictionary of the English language (1755) defined laughter as convulsive merriment. That's absolutely perfect. I'm not much of a laugher myself, but when I am in front of an audience and I manage to make people laugh—laugh until they double over, and turn and smile at each other—I am for that moment the happiest man alive.

Just why people laugh is something of a mystery. We know that apes laugh, by way of a form of gruff panting, and other animals, including non-primates, produce odd vocalizations during play. First laughter in human infants tends to occur between 3.5 and 4 months after birth, long before our children learn to speak. Most experts believe that laughter has more to do with social bonding than with humor per se. People seldom laugh alone. When I do, I'm always a little embarrassed. We know that laughter is highly contagious.

That's one reason I am so fond of David Nicandri. His laughter over the past few days has had two enormously healing effects on me. First, we tend to find the same things funny, often rather abstract things that only occur in the minds of people who have spent too much time reading about the same episodes in history. His laughter affirms my understanding of the quirks, tensions, and absurdities of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Second, his laughter is so wonderful that I find myself joining in (spontaneously) because I want to get on that bandwagon of joy and affirmation. In other words, his unforced, unconscious laughter triggers mine, because he is my dear friend, because I believe in his life and work, because (below the radar of consciousness) he gives me permission to laugh out loud, hard. And when we laugh out loud, hard, we cheer up. Perhaps we even heal.

My mentor Ev Albers used to laugh more than any serious person I have ever known. His laugh was a kind of heroic chuckle, but what made it so infectious is that it would last so long that eventually tears would be streaming down his cheeks, and he'd have to take his glasses off twice or thrice to dry them off. And he had the very unusual habit of not just inviting you to laugh with him but essentially forcing you to join in. He'd literally bring his massive face within a couple of inches of yours—invading your personal space, looking you straight in the eye from extremely close range—and in the end you'd be unable to resist joining in, if only for self-protection. Ev would close his laugh episode by saying, Oh my! in a sad emphatic sighing way, as if to say, Life is so unbearably painful in so many ways, that the only response to it that is not destructive, is to laugh.

We've all heard the following dialogue. I'm surprised you could laugh at such an awful thing that happened to you. And the response Well, it's either laugh or cry. I know plenty of people who have laughed until they cried or cried until finally they actually began to laugh. These convulsions are related somehow, and it is not always easy to tell the difference. They are both involuntary. They both bring about a release of pent up energy and emotion. They both have the capacity to bring catharsis and relief. How many times have you heard someone say, Afterwards I went home and had a good cry

Both Albers and Nicandri are men who know how to laugh at themselves. In fact, particularly to laugh at themselves. This may be the single most important source of sanity we have. And it makes them immensely likeable.

Back when I was married, I sometimes laughed in moments of crisis or alarm—the death of a relative in an improbable feedlot accident, a child's tumble down a flight of stairs, a sudden divorce filing after 48 years of seemingly happy marriage. She thought my laughter was inappropriate, even obscene, at such a moment. Perhaps it was. But it was something more, I think—an involuntary convulsion in watching the universe pull the rug out from under our complacent sense that we are immortal and that life is what it seems on any given Tuesday.

When they say laughter is the best medicine, the experts really mean it. The late Norman Cousins actually wrote a book about the power of laughter in the healing process. When he faced a seemingly terminal illness, he literally taught himself to laugh many times per day. I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep, he later wrote. He watched episodes of The Three Stooges. When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.

No matter how unhappy I am, if I watch The Three Stooges or any of the Leslie Nielson Naked Gun movies, I cheer up. In his darkest or weariest hours, I would walk in on Ev Albers and find him wiping his eyes along that laughter-crying axis as he watched Mo poke Curly's eyes with a pitchfork.

One of Freud's most brilliant books is called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). It's a really insightful study of what makes us laugh, and why. His view, essentially, was that humor occurs when the conscious mind permits the expression of something that society usually suppresses or forbids—aggression, sexual candor, or disruptive candor of any sort. Thus the old Henny Youngman joke, Take my wife-please, plays on the ambiguity of citing one's wife as an example (as in take the budget surplus, for example) and expressing a barely suppressed desire to get rid of her (take her off my hands). It's not a particularly funny joke, but its structure gets at the essence of what a joke does.

Mark Twain famously said, Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. We are going to need a lot more laughter if we are going to punch through the paralysis of our time.

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