Met First Cyclist on the Way to the Airport

Amtrak Conductor and cyclist Don Austin Tucker

On the train from Philadelphia to New York one of the conductors looked at my computer and asked "Are you going to do an Ironman?"

He saw the brag stickers on my MacBook.

I told him I did an Ironman more than five years ago and a knee replacement last year meant I will never do another one.

He told me he was becoming an avid cyclist. He did his first century (100-mile ride) last year and was cycling more and more. He told me how his first distance ride was on a mountain bike with cleated tires.  "That was 50 hard miles," he said. We talked for a while about tires and wheels and types of bikes and types of training.

Don rides the trail along the Schuylkill River and in Valley Forge Park.  We talked about riding in Philadelphia and the surrounding region.

Then Don told me he rides with MS. He is also living with cancer.  A group of his friends formed to walk and ride with Don. The group is called: Team Don Austin.

Don is hoping to ride the Covered Bridge Metric Century in Lancaster County in August so we may see each other again outside the train.

Vermin, Cockroaches, Human Scum: Words That Lead to Death

Three who described their opponents as human scum: 

Josef Stalin, Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler

Every tyrant needs an enemy.  In the malignant moral world of tyranny there must be Us and Them.  The Them for a tyrant is never spoken of as human.  Hitler called Jews vermin; Stalin called many groups "enemies of the people" then slaughtered them; Hutu leaders called the Tutsi cockroaches, then Tutsi men, women and children were butchered in Churches with machetes.  The two most murderous leaders in the 20th century are being quoted in the 21st century by the U.S. President when he refers to his enemies as human scum.

So far, in every case but America, calling the opposition vermin, cockroaches, enemies of the people and human scum has led to murder.  America may take longer to go from words to murder than Germany or the Soviet Union, but Trump's words will eventually cause death.

This week I am leaving on a five-week trip that will include visits to some of the places where 20th century genocide was at its worst: Dachau and Flossenberg, Germany; Kiev, Ukraine; and Rwanda. Since the summer of 2017, I have been to most of the countries in which The Holocaust occurred, as well as the Yugoslav genocide. I want to see how countries recover from mass murder.

For me, The Holocaust is just as much about the 400 million Christians between the Pyrenees and the Urals who participated in or turned a blind eye to the slaughter of six million Jews.  I am convinced that a Church with temporal power will eventually kill or condone killing.

Trump's Church of white Evangelical power seekers and idol worshippers will bless every outrage he commits. And when Trump's words lead to death, the false prophets like Graham and Falwell will say dead Americans are God's will.

The Cynical Sinking of John Kerry—The Attack on the 2020 Nominee will be Worse

How did the Republican Party sink a decorated Navy veteran and make a pair of war avoiders into heroes?  It was brilliant. And it will happen again. 

John Kerry was a veteran of one of the more dangerous duties in the Vietnam War. He patrolled the Cambodian border on the Mekong River in a Swift Boat, a small gunboat.  John Kerry was a Swift Boat captain.  So how did a guy who took and returned fire on a hostile border get trashed for his service? 

Jerome Corsi and other Republic hacks attacked Kerry for lying about his war record.  When I first heard this attack, I couldn’t believe it. Soldiers, sailors and everyone who ever served in the military has exaggerated a war story, or any story.  When I was in Basic training, pimply faced 18-year-old boys bragged of prowess in lovemaking that left a half dozen women breathless and begging for more. They competed about who had the worst stepmothers, fathers, sisters, whoever. In the muscle-car obsessed 70s they all bragged about the Corvette Sting Ray, or Road Runner, or Hemi ‘Cuda they had back home.  We made $283 per month.

Liars in the military are as rare as liars on fishing boats.  Or in barrooms. 

The political hacks knew that soldiers were held in the highest regard since the attack of America on September 11, 2001.  He also knew that the vast majority of Americans did not know a soldier personally.  So, Corsi could make Kerry’s exaggerated war stories into a real sin for the plurality of Americans who don’t know soldiers and sailors. 

Could it work with veterans? There were still a lot of veterans who heard lies in tents and troopships and drafty barracks. But Rove knew that most veterans, me included, hated Kerry for what he said after the war, calling all Vietnam War veterans war criminals.  And worse than that John Kerry went to a Paris conference attended by the North Vietnamese and Jane Fonda.  The vast majority of Vietnam War veterans hate Jane Fonda for going to North Vietnam and posing with Viet Cong soldiers. 

Corsi knew that old ladies across America love Jane Fonda, so if he attacked Kerry for his connection to Fonda, it would backfire. He also knew that veterans needed only the flimsiest excuse to hate Kerry. So, lying was enough, even for the veterans. And combat veteran Kerry became a liar while Bush and Cheney, who both avoided service in the same war, became the veterans choice.

In 2020, the attacks Republicans make on Democrats will take the worst of Corsi and amplify it with Trumpean hate. 

As a veteran and a communications guy, I will be interested to see how low the Republicans go in attacking Democrats.  I won’t be surprised however they attack.  And it will be sophisticated. The attack on Kerry was a brilliant piece of communications strategy, taking one misleading message and twisting it to give veterans an excuse to hate Kerry while convincing idiots that soldiers are heroes who would never lie about their war records. 

February: My Month for Big Trips

Twas the Night Before Basic--The Plane Ride Was Rough

Forty-eight years ago this week, I was saying goodbye to my family and friends before flying to Basic Training on January 31, 1972.  The photo above is the drunk 18 year old who flew to Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, to get a serious haircut and begin training.  On February 1, I was shorn and dressed in green fatigues and getting my first instructions in marching.

Spring 1977 in a German woods on top of my tank

In 1975 I left the Air Force and re-enlisted in the Army. In February of 1979, I made the first of three trips from Rhein-Main Airbase in West Germany to Dover Air Base, Delaware.  I was getting out of the Army in November of 1979 and had to sign up for college at Penn State University. The round-trip to America on military flights was $20, plus $2 each way for the box lunch.  On these trips I flew three times on a C5A Galaxy, a plane so big it could carry a platoon of tanks inside.  It was so smooth that on one trip the Loadmaster woke me up after we landed. I slept through it.

C5A Galaxy transport plane

After active duty, I traveled only in North America until the late 90s.  In 1998 I got a job in communications that took me overseas every month until 2001 all over the world.  In February 1999, I made my first Round-the-World trip from America to France to Singapore, then Perth, Australia, Hong Kong, and back to America by way of Los Angeles.  

The night before deployment to Iraq

January 31, 2009, I had dinner in Harrisburg with my battalion before an early morning flight to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and two months of training before deployment to Camp Adder, Iraq.  February 1 was the first flight on that long journey.  

Team Africa Rising

And now in the third decade of this century February is the month I will begin a five-week trip that will take me to more than a dozen countries on four continents and each hemisphere: northern, southern, eastern, and western.  I will be a few hundred miles south of the equator in Kigali, Rwanda.  There I will visit the memorial of the 1994 genocide and the professional cycling team that has been part of bringing the country back together.

Most of the trip will be in Asia and Europe.  I will meet my friend Cliff in Darmstadt then spend a week with him in Jerusalem. After that I will visit Georgia, Azerbijan and Armenia, followed by Athens and several Balkan states followed by Rwanda and then Germany again to visit Dachau and Flossenburg. The whole trip begins and ends with a 200-mile train ride from Lancaster to JFK airport and back, so I actually do travel in North America too. 

Re-Reading "The Prince" for the 10th Time: So Different Under Trump

Since 1980 I have read and re-read The Prince every four years. I have been delighted anew each year as I read his advice to rulers.  His central advice:

"A ruler must take power and keep power because without power the ruler can do nothing."

Until this year, reading Machiavelli was an act of cultural translation as well as being translated from 16th Century Italian.  I was reading advice to a monarch as a citizen of a republic.

That was then.

This year when I read The Prince I was reading as a citizen of a republic which is slouching slowly towards authoritarian government.

With Trump in office, I don't have to translate into democracy. His every instinct is authoritarian, so he grasps for power. He is limited only by his own willful ignorance and laziness.  But that limitation is glaring.

Machiavelli said the leader should constantly study war.  He recommends the leader go hunting to allow him to see his land up close and to know how it feels to live off the land.  Trump could not be farther from this advice. He is soft, delicate with no exposure to hardship, so some of the pathetic errors he makes would be remedied if he were not a physical and moral coward.

Trump wants to control and close the southern border.  If he spent time on the ground on that border, many of the issues would be clear to him.  The blazingly stupid foreign policy of abandoning the Kurds would not have happened if he were capable of exposing himself to hardship.

Thankfully, he is a gelatinous coward. Many of my worst predictions of what Trump would do have not come true, overwhelmed by Trump's own aversion to actual hardship.

Machiavelli says people are cowards and fools for the most part. They will swear loyalty to the leader when times are good and desert him when times are bad.

Trump knows and believes this. There are things Trump does exceedingly well because he knows he is talking to fools.  Machiavelli says the leader need not have actual religious faith, all that matters is the appearance. Despite bragging about breaking every commandment and being entitled to break every commandment, he draws thunderous applause from white Evangelical and conservative Catholic audiences.  The gaggle of millionaire televangelist that gather around to worship Trump declare Trump's true faith.

Machiavelli says that the leader must never use half measures. He must either pamper people or destroy them.  He also said if the leader has a choice either to be loved or feared, he should choose fear, because people will easily betray love but respect those who can hurt them. Within the Republican Party leadership, loyalty to Trump is based on fear of his twitter account.  In a party where the primary is the election, a Trump tweet can end the career of any red state Republican.

Another glaring Trump failure from Day One has been his inner circle. Machiavelli says we can judge the quality of a leader by the quality of his inner circle.  In this Trump is beyond pathetic.  Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Betsy DeVos, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, the rogue's gallery is endless. Trump's deplorable quality is evident in those who surround him.

Chapter 23 of The Prince says the leader should avoid flatterers.  This advice is pathetically funny. The vile chief of flatterers Mike Pence leads the worship of the Dear Leader. Kissing Trump's dumpy rump is a requirement for continued service in the administration.

Machiavelli ends his little book discussing fate and luck.  America has been lucky for nearly two and a half centuries to avoid the incarnation of idiocy that is Trump, but now it's here. Trump has been lucky at every step of his improbable rise from failed casino owner to the Racist-in-Chief.  Can his luck hold? I wish him and his minions nothing but failure, but the odds are with an incumbent, so I will fight until he is out of office.  And I will look for other places to live that will accept Americans and re-read The Prince in 2024 from somewhere far away from Don Junior's 2024 campaign.

In the meantime, I am re-reading On Tyranny for how to handle the present.

The Line Between Good and Evil: A Confession

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” says Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his book The GULAG Archipelago.

Until this year I agreed with Solzhenitsyn, at least I believed I did. Then I read Not in God’sName: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks agrees with Solzhenitsyn. The line between good and evil cuts through each of us—until it doesn’t.

Sacks said seeing good and evil as an inner struggle is the mark of the major monotheistic religions. Other cultures put the line between good and evil at the at the border of their settlement, village, state, country—outside themselves. 

Sacks is well aware that even if the line between good and evil can cut through the heart of each person, the line easily moves outside.  Before I read Sacks’ book, I could have testified under oath that I agreed with Solzhenitsyn.  But Sacks showed me that my ideal was history, and probably had only existed in my better moments.

Since 2015, the site of every Trump Nuremberg Rally was certainly, in my view, a line between good and evil—inside evil, outside good.  Then after November 2016, the line between me and the 63 million Trump voters became the good and evil line.  I would not have asserted the claim at that moment, but it was true. 

I would ask, rhetorically, how anyone but a racist could vote for a Birther.  That’s not a question. Those who vote for a Birther are racists or are idiots who do not know they are racists. The march of Trump tweets and policies just made my belief deeper: the Muslim ban, attacking POWs, attacking Gold Star parents, saying Nazis are fine people, Trump’s whole Addams Family bouquet of hate, the bouquet of thorns without roses that define his character and his actions. 

And so to my confession. If I ever truly believed the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, I don’t know.  The lists of community and personal sins of Yom Kippur confession are, to me, almost quaint. What do the Ten Commandments mean in a nation where the head of state brags about breaking those commandments, brags about being entitled to break those commandments, and is cheered by people who claim to be believers?

When the President backed by all of his cabinet and by his propaganda ministers at Fox News declares me and those I love and admire “enemies of the people” we live in a nation that officially says good is Us and bad is Them. In Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Rwanda, and Serbia after Yugoslavia, people like me became Them.  And the record of those slaughtered says they did not know it or could not believe it.

German Jews after Kristallnacht thought Hitler could go no further. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 went to Easter services with Hutus. Starting the next week, the same Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in those Churches. The Russian Jewish émigré Masha Gessen says when a tyrant tells you what he is going to do, believe him.  Timothy Snyder says the same in his book OnTyranny. Trump has been calling the news media the enemy of the people since his campaign started. Sooner or later, journalists will be killed by people wanting Trump’s approval.  When that happens, the killing won’t stop with journalists.  There is no end to a list of enemies of the people: professors, protesters, comedians, the deep state, democrats, anyone who criticizes the Dear Leader.

I know Trump supporters who tell me they will defend The Constitution of the United States if Trump or anyone goes against it.  I think they are sincere.  But they are deluded. 

When Trump used his office to extort an ally for political gain, he could not have more thoroughly violated the Constitution, yet they defend the Dear Leader more fiercely. Those pathetic patriots will swallow every excuse Trump makes for every violation of The Constitution and cheer at his next Nuremberg Rally. 

I aspire to believe that the line between good and evil cuts through my heart, but for now, for as long as America is marching toward the end of democracy, I believe good and evil is Us and Them.  I want to see every Republican defeated and out of office beginning with Trump and McConnell and the Freedom Caucus. I want them utterly without power. 

When the government does not officially hate the people I admire most, when the government does not attack the weakest, when the government does not turn away refugees, in other words when the Republican Party is utterly out of power, maybe I can return to the view of Rabbi Sacks. But for now, I am going to do what every Jew in Germany should have done in 1933. I am going to assume that when the President will point at American citizens in public and call them the enemy of the people, that same President will soon point at me and say the same thing. 

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Real Rail Fan by Philadelphia Tracks

A Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 Electric Locomotive 

I met Tom as he stood beside the tracks that run north-south through Philadelphia along the west bank of the Schuylkill River. His place to watch trains is where the freight tracks run along a roadbed 20 feet above the river and 30 feet below the Schuylkill Expressway.  He stands at a spot close to the Philadelphia city line near his childhood home in Manayunk. Trees line both sides of the tracks rising up to the expressway on the east side and making a wooded border between the tracks and the sheltered picnic area below the tracks close to the river.

Tom is a lifelong railfan. He was born within sight of a bridge in Manayunk where the freight tracks cross a creek.  He knows now that a house within sight of a busy freight tracks means he grew up poor, but at the time he thought himself incredibly lucky. Day or night year-round he saw long freight trains roar as the accelerated from the city and heard the clash of couplers as long trains slowed going into the city. 

While we talked a long train passed with many cars painted bright green or blue. A few were red or orange. They had no logos and looked like an odd cross between sea-going containers and freight cars.  Tom told me we were looking at a trash train.  Since it was going north it was empty. Unit trains of eighty cars roll out of New York City filled with demolition waste from construction and regular trash also.  The trains go south to rural areas in poor inland southern states willing to “bury the trash for New York cash.”

A container train went past with long-slung flat cars holding double-stacked forty-foot containers from ships. I said something about these container trains being the highest priority trains. Tom quickly corrected me. “The highest priority trains are the two UPS trailer trains every day. One goes New York and one to Atlanta each day.  Everything else moves to a siding when they go through.”

We talked about Philadelphia being a rail town and great place to watch trains. Four miles south of where we were talking freight tracks pass through the city on a long trestle thirty feet above Drexel University. The double-track steel structure supports trains with nearly one hundred cars and four engines.  These mile-long trains can weigh more than twenty million pounds.  When the trains pass over Market Street, they are above 30^th Street Station. Just below the freight trestle, SEPTA trains go into and out of the station on six tracks on the second floor of the north side of the huge station building. 

Below street level, Amtrak passenger trains going to New York and points north, Washington DC and south, Harrisburg and the west, roll in and out of the station on ten tracks.  Even below that are the Market Street El and trolleys to the west side of the city.  Four levels of trains above and below the main street of the city and even below the river. 

Tom grew up watching the trains from his window and riding into the city on a banana-seat bicycle seeing SEPTA and Amtrak trains along with the El and the trolleys as they changed over the years.  His main interest is freight trains. Steam engines were taken out of service on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1957, a few years before Tom was born, but he saw electric freight engines when he was young. 

As mist started to gather on the cool afternoon as we spoke, we saw a unit train of crude oil tankers go past. He talked about how new and well designed the cars are. He would prefer that crude moved in pipelines, but thinks rail is vastly better and safer than trucks. Tom remembers when long trains of coal hoppers moved up and down these tracks daily.  He works at a small chemical plant making road repair products, sealers and tar.  “I’m in my late 50s. I’ll retire in a few years. They can’t find young people to replace us. It’s tough work.”  When he does retire, Tom plans to stay in the Philadelphia area.

Tom stands by the tracks that were built by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The same tracks were part of Conrail at the end of the 20^th Century and are now owned by CSX.  He takes pictures and videos of the trains as they pass. He said he has been chased away from trackside by the CSX security guards. But they don’t bother him very often. He brings lunch, an umbrella and a camp chair and watches the Saturday trains go by.

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Secrets of the Universe on AMTRAK

On the train trip back from Philadelphia I sat with Calvin, an electrical engineer who I have seen on the train for more than a decade. We had never spoken before except to say hello.

He took his computer out and hoped to work, but his hotspot was intermittent, so unable to work he turned to me and said, “You’re some kind of long-distance cyclist, right?” I said yes. “Didn’t you do an Ironman.” Again, I said yes. He then said he rides inside on a Peloton stationary bike because riding on the road is so dangerous. He immediately told me about a friend who got hit by a car and had eight broken ribs, and about the complications three months later and…

…I interrupted and said, “I have a friend who will soon become a Blackhawk helicopter pilot. I told her that when she becomes a pilot and meets new people who find out she is a helicopter pilot; they will start talking about someone they knew or a friend of a friend who died or was maimed in a helicopter crash.” 

He understood and we changed topics to communications technology. He said, “I am not for net neutrality. I want to pay for better access to the internet. Not share overburdened networks with gamers and music downloads.” 

We started talking about 5G and how long it would take to overwhelm even that much bandwidth. Then he remembered seeing that I was in the Army not too long. He asked what I did. I told him tanks in the 70s and 80s and helicopters recently. 

It turns out that when I was in tanks, he was an engineer working on guidance and targeting systems. The technology he was designing for aircraft was transferred to the new (then) M1 Abrams tank that could shoot on the move. I told him about tank gunnery without computers, what the process was for engaging a target with no electronic assist. 

He no longer works in defense but designs electronic systems for advanced networks.  From there, we talked about chemistry and engineering. He said he had trouble with both physics and organic chemistry in college, but now physics is a hobby for him.  When he said that, I guessed the next turn the conversation would take.    

After a pause in his otherwise rapid and sustained speaking, Calvin said that God designed the universe with a beautiful and consistent underlying mathematics.  He said he was led to this belief through the physics of electron flow in a wire and how utterly consistent it is. He then began to tell me about how he discovered this underlying mathematical principle.

ASIDE: When I worked at a museum of the history of science, the people I met or corresponded with or heard who knew the secrets of the creation of the universe were more likely to be engineers than any other professional group. I also met a few doctors who were ardent creationists, but mostly engineers. I remembered an engineer who helped to design the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-attack aircraft who retired to write several books about how the Earth is 6,000 years old. 

At that point, I saw an open seat a few rows up. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and changed seats when I came back. We shook hands as we left the train in Lancaster.