I Spy

July 16th, 2010  |   

A couple of weeks ago I saw a clip on CNN that featured news about spying. The woman being interviewed described a number of fancy spy devices that anyone can purchase. No CIA or FBI credentials are required, for example, to buy called Spyglasses.

Here’s how the glasses work. They’re equipped with a hidden video camera inside the frames, along with a device that records conversations.  All you have to do is slip the glasses on—like a pair of sunglasses—and you can record all the sights and sounds in your line of vision. This is accomplished without anyone knowing they’re being spied on.

Spying has a long history and the subject holds a fascination for most of us. It starts at an early age and may extend for a lifetime. Remember the game, “I Spy” often played with children, on a car trip?  Someone says, “I spy something that begins with the letter ‘F’” and the kids look around in search of it.

My grandson, Jesse, when he was very young, wanted most of all to go to the International Spy Museum in Washington. He left the building that day with a spy kit and went home ready to play spy.

Back when I was a kid, I was fascinated by the book and television series, “I Led Three Lives.” I was intrigued by Herbert Philbrick who for nine years did lead three lives— average citizen, member of the Communist Party, and counterspy for the F.B.I. Looking back on this phenomenon, I can see how interest in the series fed stereotypes prevalent during the McCarthy Red Scare of the 1940s and early 1950s. 

Spy fascination isn’t confined to the young. It’s alive and well in the adult world. It’s what accounts for the popularity of Graham Greene and John Le Carré espionage novels. And don’t forget the enormous interest in the spy film genre—films like Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and, of course, the James Bond series. I’m also of the belief that biography-lovers have that voyeuristic urge to spy on someone else’s life.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt like we’ve returned to the Cold War days as Russian and American spies surfaced in the news. We are still playing the I Spy game with one another. 

So, let’s play I Spy. I’ll sit beneath my fig tree on this hot and humid July day and tell you what I’ve seen through my Spyglasses since the last issue of Notes.                                                                                             

Looking Through Glass At A Man In Jail
 
Right after finishing my last edition of Notes, I drove over to Logan, West Virginia, to visit Roland Micklem who was serving a thirty day sentence in the Southwestern Regional Jail. Roland was convicted of blocking a road to the Massey Energy headquarters near Charleston. In his 80s, Roland is a Christian who stands up for his belief that mountaintop removal is a sin against God’s creation.

The jail is located some 60 miles from downtown Charleston, just outside Logan. A sharp right turn off route 119, following a sign to the jail, I found myself on a steep climb up a mountain road. What I realized, when I got to the top, was that I was parking the car on a flat surface. As if to add insult to injury, Roland was confined in a jail situated on a mountaintop removal site.

Inside the facility, I was escorted into a visiting room—more like a closet—and seated in front of a large piece of glass. This would be a non-contact visit with Roland on one side of the glass and me on the other. As I’ve done so often in jail and prison visits, we greeted one another by placing our hands up against the glass. Cold glass replaced warm flesh.

What I saw on the other side of the glass was a man who refused to complain about the jail, his cellmates or the guards. He had been assigned to the laundry where his work offered a possibility that he might get a few days shaved from his sentence.

What I heard, during the course of the hour-long conversation, was a story Roland wanted to tell me, and which he has now written for publication in a Charleston Gazette article. It was a Jesus story, and it goes like this.

Inside Pod-A-1 was a steel table where Roland ate, wrote letters and kept his journal. Someone, unnamed, and no longer confined, had left carvings on the table. A cross was located at the center, with a pair of praying hands on one side and a Bible on the other side with the inscription “John 3:16”. The scene was framed by intertwining grape vines.

Roland told me that this became a shrine for him—a place of hope. Here’s what he wrote in his newspaper piece about the man who did the sketch. “He needs to know what an inspiration he was for me. Even though I was treated well and came to care for and respect each of my jail mates, the mere fact of being locked up and unable to come and go as one pleases is enough to undermine morale, and I am indeed grateful, as much for his courage and commitment as for his talent.”

Riding home I had this thought: What etchings do we human beings, myself included, leave behind for those who arrive on the scene after our departure? And will they engender courage and hope for others? We shall be known by our sketches.

Roland has now been released from jail. I talked to him by phone the other day. He is back home in Savannah, New York, where he is taking time to discern what the next chapter in his life will be—mind you, in his 80s planning another chapter.

Looking At The Fourth Of July

I’ve had a long love affair with hot dogs. I know, I know, a hot dog is not such a hot item for health conscious eaters, but what’s a woebegone weakling like me going to do when I pass a hot dog vendor and give thought to that dog, wrapped in a bun blanket and covered with mustard and onion?

I have read that Americans eat more hot dogs than any nation on earth—20 billion every year, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Out of that number, 150 million are eaten on the Fourth of July. Typing these words reminds me of my youthful days in Baltimore when I would walk to Mandell’s Delicatessen and order a Hebrew National kosher hot dog, split and fried, wrapped in a slice of fried pastrami, lathered in yellow mustard, and placed in a chewy sesame seed roll.

This Fourth of July I caught sight of the news coverage of the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest. Everywhere I looked—in newspapers and television news—I found the story of people trying to win the contest by eating as many hot dogs as they could stuff in their faces in a brief ten minutes. The event was sponsored by the organization, Major League Eating, and televised on ESPN, the sports channel. Living in the most obese state in the nation, I suspect this organization must have an office here.

Anyway, I decided to write about this on my Facebook page. I asked my friends, “While oil is regurgitating into the sea, and blood from the bodies of our troops, isn’t this Fourth of July gluttony, and the media voyeurism, obscene?”

Lots of folks responded with confirmation that this Fourth of July farce was obscene. One friend, however, surprised me with the comment, “lighten up.” It made me stop and take stock of myself. I require a lot of my readers, both in my Notes and on Facebook, not to mention the numerous conversations I have with folks about the dark state of the world.

Do I need to lighten up, go easy, step back away from the war we are fighting and the BP oil spill? Can’t I just watch the fireworks, be quiet and leave the Fourth alone?

After some thought, following my trip to the river to watch the fireworks, and I might add, eating two hot dogs, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t quit doing what I do.

The troops deserve a better nation to defend than one consumed by its own gluttony. The sea life and beaches deserve more than polluted water and oil balls along the shore. And last but not least, hot dogs deserve a more dignified epicurean ending than they got at the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Looking At A Wedding

Author Scott Turow, reviewing the book “Mr. Peanut,” recalls the words of his creative writing professor, uttered forty years ago. He told us, says Turow, “that the one subject he had always feared writing a novel about was marriage, because it still seemed to him the most complex and frequently unfathomable of human relationships, despite his long and successful marriage.” Truer words were never spoken—complex and unfathomable.

Last weekend I traveled to Virginia to do a wedding. It was held outdoors in a beautiful setting. As the preacher, I always have the best seat in the house at a wedding. I can see everything from my vantage point.

Looking down the aisle, I saw the flowers, the bridal party decked out in fancy dress, the faces of family and friends gathered for the celebration, and, of course, the bride walking toward her groom to make commitment to one another by the taking of vows.

Ah, the vows! Every time I say the words and hear them echoed by couples, staring lovingly at each other, I recognize that I am standing before a work of art in progress. The term chiaroscuro, a Renaissance art term, seems appropriate.

Chiaroscuro is the Italian word for light/dark. It describes the bold contrast of light and dark that goes into creating a fine painting—the interplay of light and shadow—dissimilar qualities that reflect complicated, often contrasting moods.

Judy and I just celebrated our fifty-second wedding anniversary. Fifty two years ago we stood before an Episcopal preacher in a Presbyterian church in Batavia, New York, and took our vows. Hardly realizing, at the time, the power of their implication, we said we would love one another “from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.”   

Chiaroscuro-like vows—the lightness of the words—better, richer and health—blended in with the darkness of the words worse, poorer, sickness, and the shadow of death.    

These vows are a reminder that no painting can extend beyond the limits of its borders—no commitment beyond the border of death.

Two days before the wedding on Saturday the bride’s grandfather died. His death threatened to hang like a pall over the ceremony. But, instead, it became a reminder of those words “to have and to hold until we are parted by death.” The advice I always give to couples at a wedding rehearsal goes like this: When in doubt as to what they should do during the ceremony—just hold on to one another, then and forever.

In a very mysterious and unexplainable way, death is a gift to the living. The passage of someone’s life makes room for the narrative to continue in those left behind. 

Looking At Senator Byrd’s Memorial Service

Four days after writing my last Notes, Senator Byrd died. Judy and I attended his memorial service at the Capitol here in Charleston. Without belaboring or exhausting thoughts about Byrd and what I’ve seen of this man over the years I have watched him, I’d like to cap the well of grief that poured out here in West Virginia, with a few comments about the past, pork, and privilege.

• The Past: Each one of us writes our own narrative from womb to tomb. Robert Byrd wrote his. It extended from the days when he was so poor he had no socks to wear to school, all the way to his having served for fifty-eight years in Congress—52 as a senator. On the dark side of the ledger there was the Klan, his racist views, and his support of a war in Vietnam. But, like the old saying—“God is not finished with me yet”—life was not ever finished with Bobby Byrd. He grew up until the very day he died—opposing the war in Iraq, and being critical of Big Coal. What each of us has been in the past is important, likewise the present, but what counts is what is in us to become—what we will be. And Robert Byrd was always in a becoming mode—that’s what was at the heart of his greatness.

• Pork: I’m a big fan of pork barbecue but I’m critical of political “pork.” There are more equitable ways of distributing government pork without favoring the hogs. But I get irritated when I hear folks criticize West Virginia and Byrd for all the pork this state has received. Hey, the nation comes here for troops to fight our wars, and for coal to fuel the economy, so quit belly-aching about money that has come back down our country roads for many fine and much-needed projects.

• Privilege: I choose not to romanticize Senator Byrd, because what begins with syrupy sentiment too often winds up as patronizing praise. Give the devil his due, in all of us. If there is not much to forgive in any one of us, there is really not much to love. So, returning to that word— chiaroscuro—Byrd’s life portrait mixed light with shadows. Looking at his long tenure in Congress, I must say, in all honesty, I don’t like a long running political show. Longevity guarantees privilege and privilege is a threat to democratic renewal and the fostering of new leadership. Mark my words, we’ll have to see a silk purse made out of a sow’s ear when it comes to a replacement for the man with a fiddle—Senator Robert  Carlyle Byrd.

Looking At The Oil Spewing Into The Gulf

For eighty-five days I have been watching, as I am sure you have, the devastation of millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. As I write these Notes, I hear the news that there is no more oil leaking into the Gulf. If the cap can hold the oil without blowing a new leak in the well, we may see an end to this nightmare.

The Gulf has been bleeding, and cameras placed deep below the water’s surface have been our submerged eyes allowing us to witness this terrible environmental disaster, twenty-four hours a day.

Naomi Klein, in a thoughtful article in The Nation, reminds us that “In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit…until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans—like indigenous people the world over—believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate ‘the mother,’ including mining.”

Those who believe that human beings can mine the sea for oil or the earth for coal, in a relentless fashion, without serious consequences, would do well to wake up.

A friend has just advised me to look at Dan Beauchamp’s (www.talesofcoppercity.com). Good advice. In his piece, “The Elephant in the Pews,” he writes: “I believe that we are like the fish in the sea that Bishop Ambrose wrote about in the late third century, the fish that lives in the ocean of life with its constantly shifting currents and its deep, deep darkness below, the womb that gave all of life and the world its birth and the ocean of life that sustains us until we die and return to that larger life.”

A reminder, indeed, that we best not foul the nest we live in—“this planet earth, our island home,” as the Episcopal Eucharistic prayer describes our residency. Wrath will come, for sure, from whatever source you wish to name—an angry God, the Laws of Nature, or Mother Earth.

Naomi Klein writes about our nation’s perverse path to enlightenment: “They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.” That sounds like William Blake—“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

One Last Fig For My Readers

A final thought from a man who has seen lots of wounds—physical and emotional—over my 47 years of ordained ministry. It’s a fig passed on to me, and now I pass it on to you. Chew on these words, if you will: Scar tissue is vastly stronger than the standard issue.    

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives