A major winter storm is expected to hit Cincinnati beginning tomorrow afternoon, and continuing into Monday. The storm will bring sub-zero wind chills, sleet, and 3 to 6 inches of snow, if forecasts are to be believed.
Cincinnati, located right on the old Mason-Dixon Line, is neither fully North nor South. It lies in an intermediate zone, so far as winter weather is concerned.
We are not far enough north to develop a ho-hum attitude about winter. Most of our winters are relatively mild, by national standards.
On the other hand, we are far enough north to occasionally get socked by a bad winter storm, like the one that seems to be coming. This brings jokes about ‘Snowmageddon’: a local tendency to overreact to impending snow.
There is something to the jokes. Grocery stores here are often crowded in advance of a snowfall that Minnesotans or Wisconsinites would regard as light to moderate. Winter weather is a source of considerable anxiety for many people in Cincinnati.
My maternal grandmother was one such person. She was still working during the blizzard years of 1976 to 1978, and she obsessed over every weather forecast during those winters.
As for me: I don’t like winter weather, but it’s a part of life here one year out of three, from late December through the end of February. And we seldom have a winter that is miserable all the way through. Our cold and wintery patches are usually interspersed with warm spells.
For example: on December 26, afternoon highs climbed into the low 60s (Fahrenheit). I was comfortable outside in shorts and a tee shirt.
Don’t get me wrong, though: if the forecasted storm tracks completely to the south or north of us (as sometimes happen), I will be quite pleased. Like I said: I don’t like winter weather, even as I cope with it.
Based on the early indications, it appears that the war in Ukraine will come to an end in 2025, and probably sooner than later. All sides—Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s western backers—are exhausted with this conflict.
It would also appear that Russia will get most of what it wanted in 2022: the Crimea, the oblasts to the east, and a long-term deferment of Ukraine’s admittance to NATO.
This raises the question: wouldn’t it have been better to end the war by negotiation in 2022, and thereby spare the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians who, in the final analysis, will likely have died for nothing?
There are two realities that must be acknowledged here:
Ukraine was never capable of beating Russia on its own
The collective West was never willing to come through with the one measure that might have defeated Russia: Western (NATO) troops on the ground in combat.
And number 2 above was always the big sticking point. We cared about the cause of Ukrainian nationalism so long as Ukrainians were doing all the fighting and dying.
Almost no one in the West (including all those posers with Ukrainian flags on their social media profiles) is willing to risk nuclear war for Ukraine. Nor are many westerners willing to see their children die in order to reestablish Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
A callous viewpoint? Perhaps. But we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect outcomes. The end of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2025 is going to be a textbook example of a very imperfect outcome. A negotiated peace in 2022 would have been considerably better, with many more people left alive and unmaimed.
President-elect Donald Trump has made some eyebrow-raising statements about the Panama Canal and its ownership. These are matters that no one has talked much about for almost fifty years.
Trump recently stated that the USA should negotiate a new treaty for its use of the Panama Canal. And of course, Trump had a scapegoat for the current “bad deal”. Former President Jimmy Carter, according to Trump, “foolishly gave away” the canal back in the 1970s.
(Note: The president-elect took this jab before Jimmy Carter’s recent passing.)
This has led to speculation on social media that the USA might be invading Panama sometime next year.
Don’t worry: that is unlikely to happen.
What’s the story behind the Panama Canal?
The Panama Canal is an extremely valuable piece of real estate because it permits sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. This obviates the need for a longer, more hazardous trip around the southern tip of South America.
The United States constructed the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1914, and administered the canal for decades after. No one thought too much about this arrangement in the pre-Cold War era. That was just the way things were done: the industrial north ran things for the developing south, with varying degrees of equity and heavy-handedness.
Yes, such arrangements are now called imperialism. But there was a time when many people (in the industrial north, anyway) saw imperialism as a win-win proposition, or at least a necessary evil.
By the middle of the 20th-century, though, imperialism had acquired a bad name. Nothing bolstered Soviet claims of Western imperialism like…unapologetic Western imperialism.
Plus, the war-ravaged countries of Europe could no longer afford their overseas empires. France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom were giving up their colonial possessions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In such an environment, it was no longer copacetic for the United States to maintain control over the Panama Canal, a revenue-generating asset located on another country’s territory.
Did Jimmy Carter “give away” the Panama Canal?
Negotiations for the transfer of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government began in 1974, under a Republican administration. Nevertheless, Democrat Jimmy Carter signed the resultant Torrijos–Carter Treaty in 1977, which began the official transfer process.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, this led to widespread charges that Jimmy Carter had “given back” or “given away” the Panama Canal. This wasn’t entirely accurate, but nor was it entirely inaccurate. Jimmy Carter didn’t simply wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I think I’ll give the Panama Canal back to Panama today!” The wheels were already set in motion. Carter, though, was the president who signed off on the transfer.
The narrative that “Carter gave away the Panama Canal” was part of a larger narrative: that Jimmy Carter was a weak and ineffectual president.
This was the same Jimmy Carter who tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to free the American hostages in Iran by force (Operation Eagle Claw, 1980).This was also the same Jimmy Carter who formulated what has come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. Promulgated in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter Doctrine declared that the USA would use military force, if necessary, to defend its legitimate interests in the Persian Gulf.
Nevertheless, I remember the narrative, and I was a kid at the time. Donald Trump, who was by then entering early middle age, remembers it, too. In 1977, not all Americans agreed with the transfer of the Panama Canal to an arguably unserious country like Panama.
(And maybe there was something to that. Let’s not forget that the US had to invade Panama in 1989 to oust its dictatorial, drug-dealing leader, Manuel Noriega.)
We can be reasonably certain that back in 1977, Trump was not on-board with Carter’s decision. Hence the recent statements from the president-elect.
What will Trump “do” about the Panama Canal, if anything?
Trump so far hasn’t challenged Panama’s basic ownership rights of the canal. He claims that he wants to see the US given fairer terms for the usage of a canal it built and paid for.
According to Trump, “it [the canal] was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions. You got to treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”
In other words, these veiled statements about the Panama Canal are a negotiating tactic, as are (probably) Trump’s threats to impose new tariffs on all goods originating in a slew of countries, from China to Canada.
“Big stick diplomacy”, or boorish bluster?
I won’t lie to the reader. I’m a 20th-century man. There is a part of me that longs for the sober, measured communications of 20th-century presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. But our Democratic alternative in 2024 was a long way from that 20th-century benchmark, too. This is simply the Brave New World in which we’re living.
Here’s another interpretation. President-elect Trump has expressed admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, who articulated “big stick diplomacy”. TR famously said, “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far”. Donald Trump does not always speak softly, of course. But neither did Teddy Roosevelt, by hypersensitive 21st-century standards.
A 1904 political cartoon, depicting US President Theodore Roosevelt carrying a “big stick”
Over the next four years, it will be necessary for us (and the rest of the world) to discern the US president’s real intentions from his opening statements, which will often be mere negotiating positions.
I can put one such position to rest…sort of.
We are not going to invade Panama (again, as we already invaded it in 1989) anytime in the foreseeable future. But the powers-that-be in Panama City have been officially put on notice. Changes are coming to the conditions by which the US and its shippers utilize the Panama Canal.
Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate for one reason: during his 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had vowed to select a female of color for his vice president. Kamala Harris represented a plausible individual who fit those criteria, and so she became his running mate.
That was it: a cynical marriage of convenience. Not the first one in the history of American politics, certainly. But let’s not kid ourselves about what it was really all about. The two never worked particularly well together. Nor do we get the sense that Biden and Harris, separated by a wide gulf of age, ideology, regional affiliation, and lived experience, ever had much in the way of personal rapport.
Neither Trump nor Biden performed particularly well in their June 27 debate. But Trump at least remained coherent, while Joe Biden often appeared confused and disoriented onstage. That debate was an unmitigated disaster for Biden, who already faced concerns about senescence and cognitive decline.
Days later, the Democratic Party establishment, with the collusion of the mainstream media, pushed Biden aside in a coup-like process that was anything but Democratic. There were no primaries; Democratic voters did not get a say. The party’s elites anointed Kamala Harris, and told the unwashed rank-and-file to get in line with the [new] program.
Kamala Harris nevertheless lost on Election Day, despite a poor showing from Trump in their September 10 debate. Despite numerous public gaffes by Trump and his surrogates. Despite the best efforts of the celebrity class and the mainstream media.
And so now, with only a few weeks remaining in office, Joe Biden is reportedly expressing regrets about dropping out. In what must have been an authorized leak to the Washington Post, Biden has claimed that he could have beaten Trump in November—if only his party would have stuck with him.
Biden’s reported claims are difficult to square with the evidence. First there was Biden’s horrific showing in every poll. Kamala Harris, despite her many flaws as a candidate, did at least energize a portion of the electorate. (Just not as big a portion as her cheerleaders had hoped.) Had he continued to head the Democratic ticket through Election Day, Biden likely would have lost to Trump by an even wider margin.
The Democratic Party should have run a moderate centrist: someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But therein lies the root of the Democratic Party’s actual problem. The Democratic Party did not lose the election on the outward visage of its standard-bearer, but on its basic sales pitch.
As recently as the Bill Clinton era, the Democratic Party was the party of the working class. Yes, there was always an element of social liberalism: abortion, gay rights, and protest culture. But Bill Clinton won the 1992 election primarily on kitchen-table issues. Hence the famous rallying cry of the Clinton-Gore ’92 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Economic issues are barely mentioned in progressive circles nowadays. Gone are discussions about healthcare reform, to cite just one example.
Bernie Sanders once tackled CEO pay, a cause that brought him into line with conservatives like Lou Dobbs and old-line populists like Ross Perot. No Democrat in 2024 would have dared raise the issue of CEO pay. CEOs, after all, are at the core of the Democratic donor class, along with the millionaire celebrities: Lizzo, George Clooney, and Taylor Swift.
A progressive of 1994 would barely recognize a progressive of 2024. A “progressive” is now someone whose highest priority is championing the cause of pregnant men, and making sure that every pregnant man has a right to an abortion.
The Democratic Party has combined these positions with a stubborn refusal to address both crime and the breakdown of our southern border. That is simply not a platform with any broad appeal, as the results from Election Day proved.
That platform could not have been carried to victory by either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. But “Kamala or Joe?” is the wrong question. The Democratic Party has a more fundamental problem appealing to the American voter.
For quite some time now, we have known that Jimmy Carter’s passing was imminent and inevitable. But for some of us, it is nevertheless hard to believe.
I can still remember Jimmy Carter’s election to the White House in November 1976. I was in the third grade. I am 56 years old, and Jimmy Carter has been a part of the political landscape for basically my entire life. Almost 50 years.
My maternal grandparents, both lifelong FDR Democrats, were big fans of Jimmy Carter.
In 1980, or thereabouts, my grandmother wrote Carter a handwritten letter, assuring him that he had performed admirably as president during a difficult time. Carter sent my grandmother a signed reply. I don’t remember the exact wording of either letter, but I do recall that Carter’s missive was personalized, and reflected a reading of my grandmother’s letter.
Jimmy Carter’s time in office (1977 – 1980) was a good time for me. Those were the last of my elementary school years, and I had a notoriously happy childhood. I was a lucky kid.
Jimmy Carter addressing Congress in 1978
I realize that in the wider world, many problems occurred: inflation, the energy crisis, the Iranian Revolution (and the accompanying Tehran hostage crisis)…Oh, and also the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jonestown, and urban decay in most large American cities.
The Jimmy Carter years were not a good time, in the big scheme of things.
But Jimmy Carter inherited a difficult, post-Vietnam world, characterized by stagflation, upheaval in the Middle East, and renewed Soviet aggressiveness. Some presidents (Bill Clinton comes to mind) have had it comparatively easy. Jimmy Carter did not have it easy.
Jimmy Carter was a man of conscience, of the kind that rarely enters politics at the national level anymore. He cared deeply about human rights—and not just in politically correct venues. Carter pushed back against the Soviets for their shabby treatment of the refuseniks. Carter was a Democrat who was personally and vocally pro-life, even though he toed his party’s line from a policy perspective. Carter was also a man of faith who was not afraid to talk about his faith. After losing the 1980 election in a landslide, he dedicated his long remaining years to charity and peacemaking. He became the face of Habitat for Humanity.
A saint? No, far from it. Carter was first and foremost a politician, let us not forget. The term “saintly politician” is an oxymoron. But he was probably the best all-around human being to occupy the Oval Office during my lifetime, even though his results in that office left something to be desired.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
In those days before a zillion cable channels (let alone the Internet), there was TV Guide.
Launched in 1953, these little weekly magazines would be familiar to anyone from the Baby Boom generation or Generation X. (Some of the older Millennials may have dim early childhood memories of TV Guide, too.)
Each issue of TV Guide contained a listing of the week’s programming, of course. There were also articles in the front of the magazine that were sometimes worth reading. (If you were interested in television and Hollywood happenings, that was.)
The covers, moreover, were often minor works of art. Like this one from 1986, which depicts the cast of Cheers, one of the most popular shows of the 1980s.
TV Guide was always on my mother’s shopping list. It was on everyone’s shopping list. Why? Because without this publication, you would have a hard time knowing what programs were on, on which channels, and at what times.
The magazine was cheaply priced. (The 60¢ May 10, 1986 issue shown above would equate to only about $1.70 in today’s dollars.) But TV Guide was nevertheless essential.
With a shelf life of only one week, these weren’t magazines that anyone saved for posterity. Sometimes, though, one of them would end up beneath a sofa or behind a recliner, only to turn up months later.
TV Guide still exists as a going concern, but it’s a shadow of its former self. The TV Guide website probably gets some traffic, but the stripped-down, printed version of the magazine is no longer the weekly grocery-cart essential it once was. Not in this era of cable, Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. I could not find a copy of TV Guide at my local Walmart, Meijer, or Kroger. The publication now seems to rely on a shrunken, hardcore base of snail-mail subscribers.
Yes, another casualty of our digital age of hyper-abundance. TV Guide’s original mission has become not just obsolete—but impossible, even if someone wanted to attempt it.
Network and cable listings are only a small part of the viewing options nowadays. On-demand is where the real action is…not just on Netflix and Hulu, but on the endless sea of variety that is YouTube. On-demand viewings, loosely organized by search engines, defy the bounds of itemized printed lists.
It would not be incorrect to say that the original TV Guide is a relic of pre-Internet times; but this description would be insufficiently precise. The old TV Guide is a relic of a time when the scope of available programming for a single week was small enough that it could be completely curated, listed, and described in a single publication.
Needless to say, those days are gone; and—barring some cataclysmic change that restarts everything from scratch—those days are gone forever.
The H1-B is the program that large corporate employers use to recruit technical employees from lower-wage nations. These workers, most of whom are low- and mid-level programmers from India, work for a fraction of the wages paid to their American counterparts.
Indian programmers are not “better”. But most of them are “good enough”, and they are almost universally cheaper.
(I’ve actually worked with Indian programmers in a corporate IT setting, so I have firsthand insight on this one.)
Let’s be blunt here: the H1-B is a cost-saving program for big corporations.
Both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have recently come out in favor of expanding the H1-B visa program. This comes amid an atmosphere of anti-immigration sentiment practically everywhere in the Western world, but especially in the United States. Trump won the 2024 presidential election for a handful of reasons, but dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ open-door immigration policies was near the top of the list.
And here are Musk and Ramaswamy, both nominated for positions within the incoming Trump administration, saying that we need to increase H1-B immigration. This presents a problem…or at least a contradiction.
If we clamp down on immigration, pretty much every business is going to have to pay more for labor. That is a fact of economics, supply-and-demand.
We seem prepared to tell restaurant owners and farmers that they must raise wages in order to employ Americans. Are we prepared, in the same breath, to declare that Intel, Microsoft, and Apple should get an increase in low-wage foreign labor, because they and their jobs are “special”?
And is there really no local talent available to fill these jobs? The United States isn’t Latvia (population: 1.8 million). We aren’t even Germany (population: 84 million). We are the third most-populous country on earth. The current population of the United States is 335 million. If an employer can’t find the person they need out of a pool that size, well, maybe something else is wrong (?)
Yes, plenty of young Americans are airheads, but I happen to know that many are quite intelligent and hardworking. They aren’t all majoring in gender studies and/or basket-weaving. We have computer science majors. And engineers. And chemists.
(Actually, the job market for computer science majors is a bit soft right now, with applicants exceeding jobs. So why the rush to bring in foreign talent?)
This seems to me a matter of fairness and consistency. I don’t know what the average family farmer or independent restauranteur makes, income-wise. But I would be willing to bet that it’s substantially less than the typical annual paycheck of a Fortune 500 tech CEO.
In 2024, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, received $79 million in compensation. Microsoft could hire a lot of American-born computer science majors for a mere fraction of that.
If anyone should get a dispensation on cheap foreign labor in the Trump 2.0 era, it should be the mom-and-pop restaurants and the family farms, not the tech giants.
Members of my generation lived to see plenty of changes in the ways popular music is consumed. We were born in the golden age of the vinyl album. As adults, many of us are learning to cope with streaming music services.
Throughout most of the 1980s, the audio cassette tape was the most popular means of buying music and listening to it. When I see nostalgic Facebook posts about physical music media from the 1980s, the cassette tape is most often the subject.
But there was another musical format that was already dying out as the 1980s began, but which was actually quite good, by the standards of the time. I’m talking about the venerable 8-track tape.
The 8-track was a plastic cartridge that had dimensions of 5.25 x 4 x 0.8 inches. Like the audio cassette, the 8-track contained a magnetic tape. But unlike the audio cassette, the 8-track was much less prone to kinking and tangling.
The 8-track was actually 1960s technology. The 8-track took off in the middle of that decade, when auto manufacturers began offering 8-track players as factory-installed options in new vehicles. Throughout the 1970s, 8-track players were popular options on new cars. 8-tracks were further popularized by subscription music services like Columbia House.
Columbia House magazine ad from the 1970s
I purchased my first home stereo system for my bedroom in 1982, with money I had saved from my grass-cutting job. I bought it at Sears, which was one of the best places to buy mid-level home audio equipment at that time. The stereo included an AM/FM radio, a turntable for vinyl records, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player.
I quickly discovered that I liked the 8-track format the best, because of its relatively compact size and ease of use. That spring I bought 8-track versions of Foreigner 4, Styx’s Paradise Theater, and the Eagles Live album. All of these produced good sound (again, by the standards of that era), and none of them ever jammed or tangled. I was convinced that I had found my musical format.
It has often been my destiny to jump on a trend just as it is nearing its end. Little did I know that my beloved 8-track was already in steep decline.
8-track sales in the USA peaked in 1978, and began falling after that. The culprit was the slightly more compact, but far more error-prone audio cassette. This was the format that all the retailers were suddenly pushing. By the early 1980s, cassette players were also replacing 8-track players in cars.
I would like to say that I yielded to the march of technological progress, but this wouldn’t be truly accurate. The audio cassette, invented in 1963, was slightly older technology than the 8-track.
I did, however, yield to the march of commercial trends, simply because I had no choice. Nineteen-eighty-three was the year that retailers began phasing out 8-tracks in stores. You could still purchase them from subscription services, but they were disappearing from the shelves of mall record stores and general merchandisers like K-Mart. By early 1984, the venerable 8-track had completely vanished.
In recent years, there has been a movement to resurrect the vinyl record. I’ve noticed no similar trend aimed at bringing back the 8-track. At this point, in the early- to mid-2020s, I may be the only person left on the planet who still fondly remembers this bygone musical medium.
Thirty-three years ago today, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.
I am not old enough to remember everything, but I remember this. I was 23 years old. Much hope was in the air. Optimists like Francis Fukuyama were trumpeting the End of History.
Based on subsequent events in the 1990s, and current events between Russia and Ukraine, those 33 years have not been happy ones, on balance.
With the possible exception of the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), the former Soviet republics have not become “normal”, prosperous European countries.
There is as much distrust between Moscow and the West today as there was during the darkest days of the old Cold War. We are just as close to nuclear armageddon in 2024 as we were in 1984. Perhaps more so.
Back then, not everyone was an optimist. In his then much derided “Chicken Kiev speech” of August 1991, US President George H.W. Bush warned the Soviet nationalities against “suicidal nationalism”. Bush was speaking to ultranationalist forces in Ukraine, but also in Russia, where Boris Yeltsin was already ascendent.
Bush clearly believed that it would be better for the USSR to devolve gradually rather than suddenly, with so many unresolved issues on the table. Like, for example, the future of Crimea, and the Russian-dominated oblasts in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
Oh, and then there was the question of NATO’s future in a post-Soviet world. Lots of people were wondering about that in 1991, too.
In August 1991, no one was much interested in heeding the cautionary words of George H.W. Bush, a member of the generation that had fought World War II, and thus knew firsthand the dangers of both extreme nationalism and utopianism.
After an abortive coup attempt by Soviet hardliners later that same month, the course for the abrupt, pell-mell dissolution of the USSR was set in stone. The Soviet Union ended that same year, with ill will between the constituent republics, and distrust between Russia and the West regarding the future of NATO.
And 33 years later, here we are. An authoritarian super-state like the Soviet Union was probably never going to dissolve without any bloodshed. But it might not have come to all this.
Maybe we should have been a bit less optimistic in 1991. Perhaps we should even have listened to the warnings of George H.W. Bush. In retrospect, Bush seemed to have a better handle on the future than Francis Fukuyama, or the impatient nationalists in the USSR.
“The Trooper” appeared on Iron Maiden’s 1983 album, Piece of Mind. Both the song and the MTV video are now regarded as classics.
But when I first saw and heard this, it was just another new song in the MTV lineup.
Not to me, though. I immediately recognized something special about “The Trooper”. I can’t say I predicted that it would become a timeless classic. But I’m not exactly surprised, either.
Yes, of course, there is the hard-driving beat. Also, the juxtaposition of old movie footage with studio clips of the band in the video. (This would become a signature technique for Iron Maiden music videos.)
Even more than all that: this is a heavy metal song about the Crimean War, inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1854 narrative poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.
In the early 1980s, heavy metal bands like the Scorpions and AC/DC were singing about the usual, tired topics: sex, parties, and rock-n-roll. Iron Maiden was writing songs about 19th century warfare. And the musical results were pleasing to the ear.
Now, if you don’t think that’s cool, well, I don’t know what to tell you. This is why I’ve been an Iron Maiden fan for over 40 years.
I am an occasional fan of the YouTuber from New York City who goes by the nom de guerre Sabbatical.
Like me, Sabbatical is an enthusiast of foreign languages. Unlike me, Sabbatical is also an enthusiast of travel. (I have never been a fan of the logistics of travel. I like my comforts, and this includes having my own space, and sleeping in my own bed at night.)
Sabbatical recently had a severe misadventure in Russia, when he was locked in prison for a few weeks in a provincial Russian town. I recommend that you watch his video if you are interested in Russia in particular, or foreign travel in general.
Because of the war in Ukraine, almost all of the information one sees on social media about Russia nowadays is heavily biased toward a specific political agenda. On one hand, there is Jake Broe, an American YouTuber who has basically become a Ukrainian propagandist. (Yes, Ukrainian propaganda is a thing, too, right along with Russian propaganda.) On the other hand, there is Sasha Jost (aka Sasha Meets Russia), whose gushing videos about her idyllic life in Moscow veer to the other extreme.
Sabbatical is not a propagandist. He doesn’t have a dog in most political fights, and he strikes me as honest.
After venturing too close to the Chinese border while traveling in provincial Russia, Sabbatical fell into the hands of some local officials, who apparently wanted to make an example of him. Watch his video for the rest of the story.
Did Sabbatical make any obvious mistakes? Perhaps.
First of all, one can genuinely ask if travel to Russia as an American is a wise idea at all right now. As I type these words, our Ukrainian proxies are firing American-made ATACMS missiles into Russian territory. One does not have to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (I do not, for the record) in order to acknowledge that we have effectively declared war on Russia, a country that did not attack us, and did not seek war with us.
As a result, there will likely be some Russians who aren’t in a friendly mood toward Americans at present. Especially in military and law enforcement circles.
Secondly, Sabbatical journeyed to the Russian hinterlands. He should have remained in Russia’s big, cosmopolitan cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, if he was going to visit Russia at all.
Finally, the process of making YouTube videos in public necessarily means drawing attention to oneself. That is generally fine, within reasonable limits, in a friendly country like Canada or Japan. Not such a good idea in Russia.
***
Certainly there are some social media influencers who are overrated and massively overhyped. (The legions of young women who do nothing but simper and cavort in scanty attire on TikTok come immediately to mind.) But the best travel bloggers work hard to earn whatever money they are making through platforms like YouTube.
I am glad that Sabbatical made it safely out of Russia in the end. His is one Internet space in which I have no desire to compete.
One day in 2004, I was browsing through the bargain books bin at my local Borders bookstore. (Yes, we still had brick-and-mortar bookstores back then, though only for a few more years.)
I came across a hardcover copy of a mystery novel, Chasing the Dime. The author was Michael Connelly, whose name I recognized, but whose books I had yet to read. The price of the hardcover book was cheap, even by 2004 standards: $5.99, or something like that. I decided to give Chasing the Dime a try.
Drawn in by the story, I read Chasing the Dime in a few days. I then moved on to Michael Connelly’s series mysteries: those of Harry Bosch and Jack McEvoy, and then Mickey Haller, aka the Lincoln Lawyer.
Chasing the Dime is a standalone novel, of the “amateur sleuth” genre. Originally published in 2002, this is the story of a tech entrepreneur, Henry Pierce, who gets a new phone number after he changes his residence. The new phone number was recently held by a woman named “Lilly”.
Pierce gets numerous calls from men, many who are phoning from Los Angeles-area hotels. These men all seem eager to make evening appointments with Lilly.
Pierce quickly determines that Lilly is an escort. He also learns that Lilly went missing about two months ago. The phone company reassigned her number when she failed to pay the bill.
Pierce becomes obsessed with finding Lilly, or discovering what happened to her. (Not far into his investigation, Pierce concludes that foul play is involved.) This leads him to neglect his work and personal life. The search for Lilly also leads him to risk his physical safety.
Twenty years have gone by since I first read the novel. I recently decided to listen to the audiobook version of Chasing the Dime. As is often the case when I watch a film or read a story for the second time, I noticed things.
There are two major challenges in any “amateur sleuth” story. The first is: how does the amateur sleuth become involved in the mystery? The second: what motivates the amateur sleuth to investigate?
Michael Connelly plausibly answers the first question. In a big city like Los Angeles, just before the iPhone era, it is easy enough to imagine the phone company quickly recycling abandoned phone numbers, with some odd coincidences resulting.
The amateur sleuth’s motivation is less believable here. Connelly does create a childhood backstory for Pierce that partially explains his sudden obsession with Lilly’s fate. Also, Pierce has just broken up with his girlfriend, so he is emotionally vulnerable.
But as numerous secondary characters tell him, missing persons cases are best left to the police, or a trained private investigator. Also, Henry Pierce is a very busy man in the middle of some all-consuming, high-stakes endeavors. Would such a man really devote so much time to investigate the whereabouts of a stranger?
But that’s a flaw I noticed on the second reading/listening. There is no such thing as a perfect story, and Chasing the Dime is not a perfect novel. But this was the book that got me hooked on Michael Connelly. Twenty years later, I’ve been a fan ever since.
I was poking around on YouTube when I discovered the above trailer. Apparently Max (formerly HBO Max) has created a new screen adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s 1975 novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine.
I saw the original TV miniseries when it aired back in November 1979. I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade. There were some scenes in the 1979 original adaptation that were genuinely creepy–especially to the 11-year-old me.
When I started reading Stephen King’s novels in 1984, ‘Salem’s Lot was the one I started with. About five years had passed since my viewing of the miniseries. And I was then a sophomore in high school instead of a sixth-grader.
I read ‘Salem’s Lot in about three days. I found the book an absolute page-turner. (I seem to recall doing poorly on a geometry test, because I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot when I should have been studying!)
I’ve reread the book several times since then. From my more critical (and more jaundiced) adult perspective, I can see some flaws that I didn’t notice back then. But no matter. ‘Salem’s Lot is still a humdinger of a story, at the end of the day.
‘Salem’s Lot has a modern (1970s modern, anyway) feel to it. You don’t get the sense that you’re reading a story set in a remote location in 19th-century Europe, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot therefore seems like a story that could happen. (If vampires existed, that is!)
Moreover, ‘Salem’s Lot is a real vampire story. Not a fake, teen girl romance tale masquerading as a vampire story, like that Twilight nonsense. (Don’t even get me started on Stephenie Meyer’s high crimes against the vampire genre.)
The 1970s/80s paperback version of ‘Salem’s Lot that I read in 1984
The new Max film version of ‘Salem’s Lot looks scary, based on the trailer. I will doubtless get around to seeing it a some point, but this is one that can wait, in my case.
‘Salem’s Lot, great story that it is, is one that has been with me for 45 years now, in one form or another. I watched the original TV miniseries at age 11. I read the novel for the first time at age 15. I’m now 56, and I know this story so well that I cannot help anticipating all the major plot points before they occur.
But such are the vagaries of age, and of rereading books, and watching their screen adaptations over decades. If your history with ‘Salem’s Lot is less extensive than mine (and it probably is), you’ll want to rush to the new Max version of it. A younger version of me would have felt the same way.
