I Love Panama; It's Like Florida without Rednecks!

 

The Panama Canal near Panama City

So far, I have traveled to 59 countries on all six inhabited continents. In some countries, I feel very much at home. In some, I feel like I am on another planet.  

Panama is among the most familiar and easiest to be in.  The plugs are just as in the US.  No adapters. There is local currency, but US dollars work everywhere. The countryside is tropical. It seems very much like the Everglades and other tropical parts of Florida, but without rednecks and their ridiculous Trump and Rebel flags.

Also, there is a Mormon Temple near the canal:

And a cemetery that has many US military graves:

On my second day here in Panama, I bought a bike and rode up to the first lock of the Panama Canal. 

Traffic laws seem much like the US. And the cars are left drive like the US. Of course, the official language of Panama is Spanish, but I can speak a little Spanish and understand a lot from so much Spanish culture in the US.  

The Contrast

When I first went to China in the 1990s, I really knew I was in a foreign country and culture.  I took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. It had a uniformed Chinese Communist crew.  Two hours later I was in the smoggiest place I had ever seen. Brown haze everywhere.  

A van took us from the train station to the hotel.  The driver hit a bicyclist and kept going. The bicyclist was supposed to get out of the way of the van. There is no tradition of chivalry I would later learn riding in Beijing, Shanghai and near the Great Wall.  

So Panama is just like home--if it rained every day.

 

Buy or Rent? I Bought a Bike in Panama

 

My second day in Panama, I bought a Giant SCR 16-speed aluminum road bike.  I bought the bike for $500 at a used bike shop in a residential neighborhood near the canal called ReCyclingPTY. They had road and mountain bikes of many vintages.  They also rent bikes for $50 per day  or $200 per week so $500 to buy for 6 to 9 months is a much better deal for me.

Andre, the owner, will also sell the bike on consignment when I leave. 

Right after I bought the bike I rode to the first lock on the Panama Canal.  Soon I hope to ride the length of the canal continuing on the same road.   

What Do Trump Voters Look Like?

 

This week I talked to a guy I have known for three decades--a lifelong conservative Christian. He is a retired professor of literature.

We like some of the same books and authors, but never agreed on politics.  From things he said, it seemed he did not vote for Trump in the last two elections. He certainly did not vote for the Democrat. But this election he is voting for Trump. Enthusiastically.  

When we spoke he was parroting Trump's lies about President Biden, about VP Harris, and despite his comfortable suburban life is willing to say the country is a disaster with 10 million illegal aliens killing Americans.   

Like his hero, this Trump voter dodged the draft.  He did it more artfully than Bone Spur Deferments, but he, like so many Trump lovers, is a Never-servative. He and Trump and other rich kids stayed home. Poor kids went in their places.  

Thirty years ago the professor felt a little bad about dodging the draft. Not now. He has been justified by his orange god.   

In 2016, I met a Trump voter with a 12-car garage. Also a draft dodger.  

Thunder Ridge Family Event: Lauren Runs, I Ride

After my rain-soaked descent of Thunder Ridge on the Blue Ridge Parkway, my daughter Lauren, who lives in Richmond, returned with me for Round Two, two days later.

She runs. We drove to base of the hill and started together for what would be a slow climb for both of us.  Lauren ran uphill until her Garmin said six miles, then turned around and ran back.  She climbed 1,400 feet then descended.  

I rode to the top of the ridge and a little past the top.  It was a slow twelve miles. I kept checking my Garmin and keeping my heart rate down so I could make the climb in 90-plus-degree heat. The elevation gain was more than 3,400 feet.  (1,047 meters)

The descent was so long that my neck started to get tired. The road is smooth and most of the turns are wide sweepers with only a few hairpins and even those are not really tight. Most of the way down I was either side of 40 mph.  The grade is averages 5 percent with a few steep places. The fastest I went was 48mph but that was on just a few of the steeper straight stretches. 

In my usual way, I was one of the slowest on the climb.  On the longest uphill segment, 19.93km,  I was an hour slower than the fastest guy in my age group.  Bernie Sanders (no kidding) climbed the hill in 1:17.  I did in 2:19.  Apparently, Bernie went down another way. He has no time on any of the descent segments. On all of the descent segments, I am the fastest by 20-30 seconds. 

What goes up must come down.  Unless it's Bernie. 

Lauren and I talked the whole 2.5-hour drive to the climb. On the way back, we were both exhausted and subdued. But after an hour we got food, felt better, and figured out how to bring peace to the Middle East as we drove back to Richmond. 

Pain Up; Rain Down: Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway

 

The climb to Thunder Ridge on Virginia's Blue Ridge Parkway is a smooth, steady, winding climb of 3,300 feet at five percent for just over twelve miles. I drove to the base of the climb on the James River and began the climb in bright sun; the temperature just over 90 degrees.

The forecast was for more of the same.  

That was true until the tenth mile. The sky to the east was bright and sunny. The sky to the west was suddenly gray.  Sprinkles began, but it was so bright to the east, I thought I could get to the top before it got bad.  

The sprinkles became light rain. The mountain to the east almost disappeared in haze.  Then with one kilometer to go, I heard thunder.  

Shit. I was too late.

I turned around and rode in increasing rain at down the hill for about a mile, then sheets of rain and crosswinds hit me.  I watched water swirl and eddy on the road in front of me.  I took off my sunglasses and tipped my helmet low so I could see.  I let myself roll for a while at 35mph then started squeezing the brakes. After riding slower for a while, I let the brakes go and went back to coasting in the torrents.  

Raindrops stung my face and arms when the wind turned and whipped toward me.  At one point after miles of descending I thought, 'At least there are no bugs!' Bugs buzzed around me all the way up.

I passed the turnoff for the ranger office and knew I was close to the bottom of the hill.  The grade lessened.  Then I was pedaling slightly uphill across the James River to the parking area.  I pulled up to the car, opened the door and emptied my pockets onto the passenger seat. Then I took the wheels off the bike, put it in the car (I have a 2001 Prius; the bike rides in the back seat; it won't fit in the trunk.) and stripped off my soaked clothes. 

I dried off with an old sheet I had in the trunk and sat on an old camouflage shirt.  It was so humid I turned on the AC and the rear window defroster. 

Tomorrow I am going back to Thunder Ridge.  The forecast is good and I want to get all the way to the top!

----

When I arrived in Richmond for a few days, I  searched on line for the toughest climbs in the area. A group called PJAMM listed their top ten climbs in Virginia.  Thunder Ridge was the longest. Here is their site.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011.  Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries.  The book was much more vivid in this reading. 

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts.  Later in the year the essays were published as a book.

Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust.  She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.  

The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the  cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.  

In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war.  In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better.  More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.  

Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year.  Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.  

The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil.  The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann.  Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).

The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Twenty Guns: A Sign of Mental Illness?

 

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A very smart friend just posted that the father of the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Trump owns 20 guns. He thought that indicated Dad was mentally ill.  

If Dad is mentally ill, he is part of a mass psychosis.  There are nearly 400 million guns in America yet the majority of Americans don't own guns, so a large, vocal minority owns a lot of guns.  

Twenty is not far from average for an avid gun owner.  When I was deployed to Iraq, I asked soldiers I served with how many guns they owned.  I should have made a careful but the number that came up most often was sixteen.  They included soldiers of every rank, enlisted and officers.  

According to Pew Research, 32% of Americans own guns, just over 100 million people.  

The majority, 62%, own one hand gun. That's more than 60 million people.

More than 25 million people own three to seven guns. 

The top 14% own 8 to 140 guns.  The average of 17 guns was in line my informal survey in Iraq. That's about 15 million people who own an average of 17 guns, or a total of 250 million guns.  

If you combine all the multiple gun owners that group is more than 40 million people. Can 12% of the population be mentally ill?  Not in any sane definition of mental illness.  

The 40 million people who own multiple guns are part of a community in which owning many guns is normal.  Nearly all of them have jobs and are part of communities.  They made a choice the majority would not make, but they are not mentally ill.

Today, I talked to an 80-year-old guy who is a life-long resident of Lancaster County. He volunteers with community groups and has been part of emergency communications teams that help in disasters. He has five guns: two pistols, two shotguns and a hunting rifle. They are locked in a gun safe.  He is part of a community in which five guns is not even remarkable.