Pencil Me In

 

Pencil Me In

Charles Peek

On one of the walls of our home there hangs a pencil collection.  I haven’t touched it for years—except to rehang it place to place as we shuffled rooms around or fixed them up in this old (1915) house of ours.  But once, the pencil collection was my principal preoccupation. Well, that and a post-card collection, a rock collection, a collection of coins, and a collection of arrow heads that somewhere disappeared from among our sacred possessions. Dad was surprised to find the rock collection in McCook after we’d moved there, when he had told me in Salida, “That is not going with us.”

When I set about the pencil collection, I didn’t know much about pencils, and outside of the sort of odd facts you pick up now and then just in passing, I still don’t know much. I do know, of course, that the designation “lead” pencil is misleading.  First, the material is graphite (on some occasions mixed with clay), not lead.  So, no lead in lead pencils even though the word for pencil in many language means “lead pen.” I didn’t know until recently that Henry David Thoreau’s father was a figure in the American adoption and manufacture of pencils.  I wonder if like Nabokov, Thoreau used mostly pencil.

If you see an old WWII movie set in London, you will most likely see someone sharpening a pencil with a pen knife.  The rotary sharpeners were forbidden because they wasted to much wood and graphite.

But not so fast, Charlie.  Lots of people did get lead poisoning from pencils.  True, but the lead was not in the core that made the marks…the lead was in the yellow paint that coated the red cedar that held the graphite core, the surface on which we not only chewed but delighted in comparing teeth marks.

I doubt the wood is red cedar any longer, and  I don’t suppose the paint coating has lead in it now, but then I don’t have to worry much about that.  Not chewing our pencils was drilled–keep that word in mind for a moment–drilled into us pretty hard, and the plastic mechanical pencils I use these days don’t feature a painted surface.

My pencils now are cheap versions of the very good mechanical pencils some of my room mates who were engineering students had to purchase for their mechanical drawing classes.  My last regular use of the yellow painted pencils occurred when every fill-in-the-blank test required a “#2 pencil” and included the warning not to use ink lest you would never get the scholarship, pass the test, be admitted to law school, have your work scored, or have any hope of heaven.

As I recall, the origin of pencils is somewhat obscure.  Different sources credit the origin of the pencil not just to different dates but to different centuries. To some degree, I suppose, this depends on one’s definition of a pencil.  Defining what pencil meant was the furthest thing from my mind when I began collecting them.

Truth be told, back then pencils, like postcards, came into my possession because they were cheap and almost every business, organization, or tourist attraction had its own pencil.  I was an only child, which probably explains why, for years, I went almost everywhere my parents went. And wherever we went, we bought a pencil for my collection.  Sometimes we’d buy two, one from my allowance, one from my folks.

I must have like them a lot to make more beds, wash more dishes, shine more shoes, mow more lawns to buy them. And they still remind me of places we went, shops where some unusual name or shape caught my eye.

Still, my affection for the pencil collection stemmed not from any emotional attachment to pencils—the best part of which, the eraser, was added centuries after the rest of the apparatus—but to the board on which the pencils were displayed.

I was probably only eight or so when my dad took me to a lumber yard where we picked out a suitable board and some varnish, then to a Woolworth’s where we bought some elastic cord.  I already had a wood burning set, and I had nearly forgotten the smell of wood burning until this past month when people helping us refinish a kitchen were cutting into its old wood to mount cabinets and lay floor.  The burning smell the circular saw blade created is what recalled for me mounting the pencils. My folks must have had the mounting board in mind when they got me the wood burner not long before.

Principally, however, mounting the pencils meant drilling holes at intervals that would accommodate pencils of different widths and lengths, and hold them in place in the loops of elastic cord that threaded through the holes like lacing up shoes.  The measuring for this was pretty heady stuff for a little kid, and it is pretty obvious looking at it today that a little kid did it. But I was nothing but proud of it when I had finished. Proud despite a serious moment of chagrin.

The incident that left its mark on the experience involved the drilling.  Dad had a little drill driven by turning a wheel.  He taught me how to insert the bit and tighten it down, how to steady the drill while turning the wheel, and above all he stressed the necessity of keeping the drill straight up and down—otherwise, you risked breaking off the bit in the hole. Clean in and clean out, always kept at whatever angle you were drilling.

I think it was drilling my first hole, drilling perpendicular to the board, when I broke my first bit. There are moments of “what’s wrong with you” that only a child knows!  I dreaded having to wait until my dad came home to tell him, show him the broken bit, and possibly ask his advice—about how to extract the broken part of the bit still stuck in the board.

Dad was not known for calm, but in this instance, he simply looked at it and said, well, you have to learn from experience. “Maybe now you see better what I was trying to tell you,” was how I recall him putting it. And adding that I’d remember that lesson best if we took the price of a new bit out of my allowance.

He must have been right because I have never forgotten the lesson. And I never look at the board without remembering it. And I suspect it is that lesson which explains my keeping the collection all these years. It’s less a pencil collection than a collection of memories, a connection to my growing up—at least as the collection recalls it.

Kearney, Nebraska

February 22, 2017

Never Again Say “It Can’t Happen Here”

 

Never Again Say “It Can’t Happen Here”

By Charles Peek

 

Across two distinct eras in our history the phrase “It Can’t Happen Here” expressed a confident faith in American democratic principles.  That faith was buoyed up by the “greatest generation’s” defeat of fascism abroad (in which both our fathers, Nancy’s uncle, and two of my cousins did their part) and by a later generation’s marches in D.C., Selma, Birmingham, and points north, in the struggle for civil and voting rights in which we played a very small part but a part meaningful still to us.

Sadly, not only can it happen here, it is happening here and it is happening now.

After twelve years of study of Latin America, our family friend Erin Roark wrote recently that what is happening in our country right now resembles nothing so much as the first stages of coups by Latin American juntas.  Here and abroad, we are hearing sounds and seeing sights very much like what Europeans heard and saw at the time of the rise of the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The signs are widespread and recently found concise statement by our long-time friend, the Rev. Dr. Donald Hanway. In brief, this Constitutional Republic with its Democratic principles is under a black-ops siege.

This should not surprise us.  As one pundit wrote, “Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.”

Indeed, it is not reassuring.  But it was predictable, even from looking at Trump’s choice of advisors.  To take one example from a recent report, “Steve Bannon, former head of the white nationalist outlet Breitbart News, is Trump’s Karl Rove. He knows. In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Bannon suggested that the key elements in his strategy are dissimulation and “darkness.” “Darkness is good,” Bannon said; “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” And Bannon added, “It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

You cannot accuse some of the prominent west coast universities of being blind to who is in this gang and what they are doing. Students and faculty are protesting even as I am writing (Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple!), and for those protests Trump is threatening the schools with loss of federal funding for research.  We should understand that this threat, very real, would have come anyway, protests or not, because knowledge is the chief enemy of Trump’s world of “alternative facts.”

In the wake of the extraordinary record of abuse the Trump administration has ‘achieved’ in just so few days, there predictably have been outbreaks of violence, abuse, and provocation by the worst elements among his followers, the truly “deplorable” to whom the other supporters turn a blind eye.  They had their use in the campaign and the campaign’s victory has seemingly let them off the leash.

Abroad, Netanyahu has launched more illegal settlements that, any other time and place would be called acts of war.  And here at home certain elements in the Trump cadre have carried out individual acts of retribution.  Someone, for instance, busted into a complex housing a Muslim man whose sentence President Obama had commuted and killed only him of all the residents . . . the new form of vigilante justice.

Regarding these hooligans, Keven Baker has insightfully noted, (NYT, 1/21)

“From assorted commentators I have heard that it is unfair or condescending to say that all Trump voters were racists, or sexists, or that they hated foreigners. All right. But if they were not, they were willing to accept an awful lot of racism and sexism and xenophobia in the deal they made with their champion, and demanded precious few particulars in return. Lately Mr. Trump has endorsed the comparison of his personal populist movement with Andrew Jackson’s, and it is true that there was much that was racist and ignorant at the heart of Jacksonian democracy. For their love, the followers of Old Hickory demanded the destruction of Native American civilization in the South, and the furthering of slavery westward. This cruel bargain won Jackson voters land, and thus the vote. What have those who embraced “Mr. I Alone Can Fix It” obtained, save for the vague, grandiose promise, renewed in his inaugural, that they will soon “start winning again, winning like never before”? Or — worse — Mr. Trump’s vow to end “political correctness” and make this, at least rhetorically, the same white man’s America it was in Jackson’s time?”

And make no mistake…the billionaires here and abroad (read Russia) who supported Trump and are now receiving their rewards in positions and contracts, very skillfully exploited both the hooligans and those whose economic plights are genuine, those who were, indeed, ignored by both major political parties, and those whose lots will now inevitably get worse.

(I will look at the voter the parties neglected in a future blog, but for a good introduction see Paul Olson’s “Speaking Our Peace” in the January/February 2017 issue of the Nebraska Report. Better yet, join Nebraskans for Peace and receive the report regularly. www.nebraskansforpeace.org.  It’s one of the longest running peace organizations in the country.)

In any event, I wouldn’t for a moment take the supposed hard line on Russia or Israel announced by the White House today or yesterday as anything but a smokescreen.  Constant seeming changes in direction are part of the ‘keep them off balance’ strategy used to disarm the opposition and draw attention away from the absurdity (detaining the former head of state of Norway), enormity (by last report 60,000-100,000 detained), or duplicity (the cabinet nominations) of what is actually taking place.

Our best commentators, with the longest record of sane reflections on our country’s life, have had to scramble to describe the onslaught we have witnessed in the Trump ascendancy.  Bill Moyers is among those who have best captured it.  He wrote,

“Like one of those demolition drivers on a speedway, he keeps ramming his vehicle against all the others, especially government policies and programs and agencies that protect people who don’t have his wealth, power or privilege. Affordable health care for working people? Smash it. Consumer protection against predatory banks and lenders? Run over it. Rules and regulations that rein in rapacious actors in the market? Knock ‘em down. Fair pay for working people? Crush it. And on and on.

Trump came to Washington to tear the government down for parts, and as far as we can tell, he doesn’t seem to have anything at all in mind to replace it except turning back the clock to when business took what it wanted and left behind desperate workers, dirty water and polluted air.”

Or again, Moyers added elsewhere,

“While it seems clearer than ever that Donald Trump has never really read the US Constitution, he may have inadvertently picked up a wrong idea or two from the Declaration of Independence. Among the founders’ grievances against King George III was that the monarch was ‘obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners’ and ‘refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.’

Does it come as any surprise that with his refugee ban Trump favors a ban that sounds more like it came from tyrannical old King George than leaders of the American Revolution?”

So much for the Tea Party’s claim that they stood for the spirit of the American Revolution.  I suspect a few of their members were sincere. You can be misguided and sincere! But most of the radical right long since opted to support the president who coopted their movement and is even now turning it against the democratic principles of republican government.

Some doubt if the American way of life can survive.  I am not among them, but I know that much of our natural world and many of its ecosystems and inhabitants will suffer badly now and for some time to come.  Meanwhile, our new Nero worries himself about the ratings of The Apprentice and parades his going out to meet the return of the body of a fallen soldier—not even then able to resist the lie that his predecessor never did such a thing.  Trump is right—Obama never did what Trump crowed over.  Parading his compassion or subordinating it to ratings or profits was never in Obama’s nature.

February 2-4, 2017

Kearney, Nebraska