At the last moment in the training process they decided to go with a robot which sucked in RSS feeds instead what they had wanted me to do, which was present the links in my own voice. They probably made the right decision.

Anyway, here is what would have been my first submission:

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers

As a bastion of information once held sacred and untouchable, the Internet gives us the opportunity to break boundaries, become nourished by the great thinkers and stay abreast of the latest news from an increasingly complex world.

Also, it allows us to deeply catalog the seemingly endless bounty of men who bear more than a passing resemblance to Kenny Rogers. Such is the topic of discussion at Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers, where visitors can browse photo galleries, learn how to festoon their attire to be more Rogers-like and gain insight on what to do if you spot a simulacrum of the country-music legend such as, “be polite…or be sly. Use a line like, ‘Hey, you look just like my Uncle Bernie. Would you mind if I took your picture to show the family?’”

Sugar Bush Squirrel

Of all the non-human Internet celebrities, perhaps none are as glamorous, as urbane and svelte as  Sugar Bush Squirrel. Once a humble eastern gray squirrel, she rose to fame over the last few years thanks to the efforts of her owner, Kelly Foxton, who admits to dressing the tree-dwelling rodent into over 2,000 different outfits and snapping over 5,000 photos – most of which you can see at the website.

Most of the photo shoots are accompanied by commentary from Sugar Bush herself, and Foxton claims a catchphrase coined by the squirrel – you’ve been squirreled – has blossomed “into an overnight success. It is fast becoming her very own, international, household expression.”

Watching Grass Grow

Maybe photos of a squirrel in reverse drag are a little too racy for you. Perhaps the placid splendor of well-groomed lawn yearning for the sun is more your speed. If so, the technological wonder of  watching someone else’s grass grow from anywhere in the world is likely to grab your attention and never relent.

Like digital sedatives, this is one website that delivers on the promise: “Most Boring/Exciting Website in the World.”  The site features a blog, a photo gallery and free, streaming bluegrass music to enjoy as you bathe in the beauty of a lush patch of green near an intermittently busy suburban street. This is what high-speed Internet is all about.

The Urinal Museum

Have you ever walked into a men’s bathroom and just stood there in awe over the grandeur and radiance of a perfect urinal with geometrically proper cake adornment? Who hasn’t?

The real question is: have you ever thought about photographing and cataloging your passion for bathroom technology, and then placing it online for the world to collectively enjoy?

Do not fret, someone else has already found the time over at urinal.net to post galleries complete with locations, descriptions and top-10 lists devoted to the greatest urinals in the known universe.

Love Advice From Dr. Zaius

The Minister of Science from “Planet of the Apes” is branching out like a slightly more simian version of Dr. Phil in an effort to help the filthy human race be more successful in love.

With the opener, “I will attempt to help you – even though you are simple animals, like dogs,” Dr. Zaius dispenses some of the greatest, yet pithy, relationship advice on the Internet.

For instance, when asked if bald men are more virile, Dr. Zaius responds, “The more hair they have covering up their repugnant appearance, the better.”

Nail Passion

It is important in this brief life to find something you can be truly passionate about. For some, it may be fine wine. For others, the roar of a crowd as you walk on stage. For many, the elaborate world of growing and painting toenails and fingernails

Bordering as a fetishist Web site (tap dancing on the border),
nail passion delivers the goods when it comes to celebrity nails, candid nail moments and, of course, galleries of notable nail atrocities.

Particularly classy is the section titled “NTV.” Get it, like MTV, but devoted to nails? Sublime.

Captain Ozone

Remember Captain Planet, the eco-conscious crusader from the fertile territory of ’90s syndicated cartoons – the one who was trying to get us to stop destroying the environment way before Al Gore donned a cape? Yeah, well, he’s a punk in comparison to Captain Ozone.

Captain Ozone lives in the mountains, has no Internet connection and endorses turning old toilets into works of art instead of tossing them into landfills.

Despite a double face mask, his suit is revealing in an unsettling way, something I consider unfriendly to the environment, but hey, he’s bringing global awareness to a far greater problem.

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I’d love to create it, but I would need serious funding.

Let me just put the idea out there:

Right now, it is difficult for users to find local content on socially populated news aggregators like Digg, Reddit and others.

You can find local content on Google News, but it lacks the social aspect, the pre-selection based on popularity.

This is because news aggregators are global, and for a signal to rise above the noise, it must have mass appeal.

You could solve this problem by giving news stories a geographic radius of influence which would expand or contract as users vote them up or down.

As it arrived, each news story would be tagged with a radius of influence, and each user would be tagged as inhabiting a radius of interest.

The radius of influence would be circle on a map, drawn around the location where each story was reported. The circle would be larger when the population density was low. So, an area with a small population would have a large circle on the map. Densely populated areas have small radii of influence. So, an area like a neighborhood in New York City would have a small circle on the map.

The radius of interest would be a circle drawn around each user. It would follow the same rules, but could be adjusted if the user wished.

All stories would begin with a small radius of influence, but this radius would expand as users voted up the story. Stories with local interest would not expand far beyond the area relevant to the users in that community. Stories with mass appeal would expand rapidly and eventually become available to all users.

Users could click on areas around the country to see what was most popular in a specific community. A story about state taxes would generate a circle which would likely cover the state and the surrounding areas. A story about a mass shooting would cover the entire country based on interest, but do so organically.

There is a need for local news to be delivered to the public through the social aggregation tools which have proved so valuable over the last few years. Local news outlets are constantly attempting to get stories picked up by larger outlets.

At the same time, there is a need within those social aggregation tools to eliminate skewing of data through agendas and hijacking by PR and advertising efforts. Between the two models – algorithm based news delivery and social link sharing – there is a gap.

The above would bridge that gap and bring something new to the table – the “living” organic growth of important news stories across multiple audiences by first serving the intended audience and then the worldwide one.

It’s nice to see some news outlets are coming around to the idea information overload is part of life, and the human mind has always wrestled with filtering chaos into something manageable.

A jungle full of food and predators and allies and enemies is no less of a deluge of data than an Internet full of blogs and social networks and emails and Tweets.

Getting up in the morning and going through 200 emails while you browse Twitter and check the statuses of your Facebook friends before cleaning out your RSS reader is laborious – but so is waking up to feed the pigs, milk the cow, reap the wheat, dig the outhouse and make sure all the kids have breakfast.

The Slate article points out how soon after the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, intellectuals began to warn the public of the dangers of information overload.

The world at that time suddenly had more books in it than any one person could ever read.

But, our collective fear of new technology overloading our puny brains  goes back further than that.

“Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

“These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children’s overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the “wholesome” media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.”

The article goes on to point out how just about every medium or technology was  once criticized by intellectuals of the day as being the ruin of their time – newspapers, books, phonographs, telephones, telegraphs, radios, motion pictures, televisions, cable, cell phones and now, of course, the Internet.

All of these things were once warned against as overwhelming the senses, ruining the attention span, isolating the heart and dumbing down the children.

Today, modern critics warn us about social networks, Google, Twitter and video game with the same ominous predictions.

They are wrong.

Information overload simply doesn’t exist. We have been dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available to us from moment to moment since we first starting keeping up with allies and enemies, locations of food, agriculture and so on.

There has always been more to take in mentally than we could spend our time digesting.

Clay Shirky correctly identified the real problem in a recent talk – filter failure.

Each generation has to learn the same lesson – you can’t keep up with everything. You have to establish filters, and those filters will have to be updated often.

To sum up his ideas, every once in a while the rules of information production change. After mass production made it possible to mass produce books, we became accustomed to filtering at the source. The people who owned the presses chose what got published.

The same rules later applied to TV stations and newspapers, magazines and radio stations.

The person who stood to profit from the media they produced also stood to lose their ass, so they learned to filter what went out into the world. The rules of natural selection weeded out those who did it poorly.

With the Internet, the cost of producing content dropped to almost nothing. Now everyone can produce it, and the filters are no longer at the source. Everyone is a town crier, a journalist, a newspaper, a TV station. Content is pouring in from everywhere. The filters are now within each consumer.

It turns out, Timothy Leary was right when he said power to the people is now power to the pupil. Properly choosing to put in our heads is the new liberty.

David Weinberger said in his lecture “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age” that it was the physical limitations of the book which led to the parsing of data for the last few hundred years.

Books can’t be infinite. They have a beginning and an end. It makes more sense to have books be about specific subjects instead of a mishmash of rants about disparate ideas.

Books also must be republished in new editions to gain updates and go through a long process of creation before eventually reaching the public.

There are many limitations in using the book, but it was the best way to keep our knowledge for over 500 years.

Our systems of categorizing and organizing data naturally followed the patterns which come from aggregating books into collections. Universities followed libraries, and until the Internet changed everything, these patterns of knowledge transmission shaped the flow of information in our lives.

Now we are experiencing a change in how data gets distributed to us, and we have to adjust. The comfort afforded us by allowing filtering to occur at the source, and the manageability which came from static documents like books are both gone.

Even the nature of telegraphs, the mail system and telephones allowed for an easier way to filter incoming data. But with text messages, email and voice mail – the filtering is on our end.

With everyone producing content from every corner of the planet, we must learn how to filter well. Every minute, 22 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Right now, there is about 400 years worth of video already uploaded there.

With living documents like Wikipedia and blogs, and the ephemeral shape-shifting outlets like Twitter and Google Buzz – we must learn to be agile.

The thing is, even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. In 500 years hence, people will have already adapted to current concerns in the way we have with old technology. Their concerns will be the same with whatever they must deal with.

Whenever an engineered system replaces an evolved one, we freak out, and rightly so. Oral history and storytelling evolved over time, books and scrolls swooped in and created an artificial organizational system – an engineered replacement for something we already had an intuitive understanding of.

In other words, some things are just in our blood. We come out of the womb with a brain ready to deal with a variety of information inputs. Systems which take advantage of those instincts work better and are more successful, but they don’t always get it right.

We will always have an intuitive connection to anything our ancestors experienced. Our genes hum in ecstasy when we hear a good story told well. We instantly connect and accept television shows and movies – but those formats have had time to evolve to match our instincts.

As Clay Shirky has pointed out, Facebook is another engineered system which has replaced the old way, for many, of spreading rumors, or inviting people to parties, or sharing intimate information about things like breakups or illness.

Right now, social media is hit and miss, but over time, it will evolve to match our gut expectations. When you use Twitter to tell the world about your job, an evolved system smashes into an engineered one – the results will be messy while we continue to figure out how this system best meshes with our culture.

So, expect chaos for a while, and once we get all this nailed down, expect more.

Here’s the address right now: http://youarenotsosmart.wordpress.com/

Here’s the first entry:

The Misperception: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.

The Truth: You are only aware of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.

Magicians build careers around inattentional blindness.

It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. Innattentional blindness is literally looking without seeing. It turns out, your brain isn’t a passive receiver of your eyes. Instead, you actively participate, choosing what to perceive.

Many car accidents are the result of having your eyes wide open, but failing to see the car, the bike, the deer.

You are familiar with focusing attention on sounds. For instance, at a party you can listen to a single person talk while a cacophony of voices and music bounces around the room.

You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in – but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually.

You are “blind” to that which you are not attentive.

As events unfold before you, you tend to pay attention to a small cone of information and then, when thinking back on what you saw, you tend to believe you saw more than you did.

Consciousness is all about filling in the gaps. You assume you know what’s happening right outside whatever it is you are focused on, but all over the place, you are imagining the things you can’t see.

So, when you form a memory, and then later recall that memory, anything which wasn’t right in the center of your attention is a fabrication – a dream.

This phenomenon takes a strange turn when you start to consider other ways of becoming blind to things which you can see, even if you are paying attention.

People who have been blind all their lives and then gain sight find it difficult to see the same objects and actions as those who are familiar with sight. They have no frame of reference for their perceptions, and so their conscious mind ignores the unfamiliar information.

This phenomenon can vary from culture to culture. Asian cultures seem to be less susceptible.

Inattentional blindness can also come about from an overload of visual information, all of it considered important, but all of it familiar. Experienced pilots are less likely to see a plane on the runway than pilots who have only landed a handful of times. Experienced lifeguards often miss a body at the bottom of a large, busy pool.

When it comes to seeing everything you’re looking at – you are not so smart.

Click here for More Examples.

I often feel like it has stolen him from me.

Endangered are my memories of him from when I was most impressionable, when I was most committed to emulating him. I remember his independence, his revulsion for the media and all those “apple polishers” with bitch tits and cuff links.

He was one of those Vietnam vets who grew up on a farm, raced muscle cars and skinned deer before enlisting. The first time he saw a bumper sticker which read, “Love My Country. Fear my Government” he pointed it out to me and nodded, remaining silent for the rest of the trip. He was always willing to hear out someone who had a new conspiracy theory involving THE MAN fucking everyone over.

Inside, it was mostly science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. There was also a good bit of pulp fiction with awful painted covers of naked women being saved by badass men with beards and laser rifles. Aside from this, there were many practical nonfiction books on survival and history and war and homebuilding – the sort of things prosecutors point out after the wind blows over a tarp covering someone’s stash of pipe bombs.

My father would sometimes mention the Bible or God, but he seemed to treat it the same way he did the pyramids and electromagnetism – as a mystery he felt humanity had come to a consensus on too soon. My mom made me go to church, but she never once asked Dad to join us.

After the war, he bounced around the bars of New Orleans like a bird trapped in a house. At family reunions, his cousins would tell me unbelievable stories about brawls and women and “The Mafia.”

He became a reclusive tinkerer and hunter as I grew up. He worked construction and became an electrician, falling back on the training he received in the service.

He was boisterous and outgoing when in public, a talker who would gab about the good old days with the simple people we lived near, but spin out of control with wild ideas and theories about space and time when he was with hackers and college students.

At home, he retreated into his shop to build radios or airplanes or sharpen broadheads. Stacks of Popular Science and Discover and Omni leaned in the corners of the shop he slowly filled. It became a sprawling laboratory where you would not be surprised to see a Jacob’s Ladder sizzling nearby a deep freeze with a year’s supply of deer meat inside. We probably had the first home computer in our city, and he was always taking it apart. (All of that would later be eaten by Hurricane Katrina and spit out into the woods were it lies now, covered in leaves and lizards.)

He once taught me how to use a rifle scope by letting me get a black eye. I was 10.

My uncle, an obviously gay man who has never admitted it to his family, once owned a florist shop. When the man who owned the building began harassing my uncle for being a dirty faggot, my dad went to the shop and smashed the landlord’s head into a wall. He never told anyone about this until after my grandfather died because it would have revealed my uncle’s sexuality.

Looking back, Dad seemed like that guy in the zombie movies who has been waiting all his life for something apocalyptic to visit, something to place in his busy hands, which I think is why he changed so much after 9/11.

He became that guy – the one who put American flags akimbo on the sides of his hood like a visiting dignitary. He had yellow ribbons, real ones, on his front porch. He installed a flag pole in his yard as high as the tree line and has replaced Old Glory at least seven times as the poor-quality Chinese fabric shredded in the wind each March.

He wanted to strangle the hijackers one by one. He wanted to be 20 again so he could enlist. He satiated this desire with multiplayer first-person shooters, the more realistic the better.

He stocked up on ammo and gas and canned food, which would all come in handy a few years later when the aforementioned hurricane would put his skills to use. At first, he kept the TV tuned to CNN; I know this because he started recording it to videotape. He has the towers coming down on VHS.

But, as the ripples started to dissipate, and the news stories became anniversary stories, FOX News moved into his heart. He started watching the pundits as much as the anchors.

While I was in college, he was watching FOX, and when we were in the same room it was like that old Mad Magazine cover from 1969. I was telling him about history and anthropology and sociology and Rupert Murdoch. He was telling me about the nature of man. I argued from books. He argued from experience. We both became convinced the other was brainwashed.

I’ve calmed down since graduating. I avoid the fights.

We still can’t talk about politics; it’s impossible. He parrots FOX News because at this point he depends on it exclusively for all his information about the world. Other sources, he feels, are biased.

His take on the Iraq war was simple. He never cared about bringing democracy to the Middle East. He would tell strangers about how oil is necessary for America to continue to operate the military industrial capitalist complex. Without it, our system will collapse, and if we have to kill a few thousand people to keep the oil from getting nuked – so be it.

He started thinking of other people as civilians who need to be protected from the enemy and themselves. For dad, 9/11 awakened a survival mode which he can’t let go of.

I don’t understand the embrace.

When I was about 13-years-old, my father took me with him to a job site in Alabama near a mine. It was far in the distance, and as they set off charges it created a muffled whomping sound that moved through the earth and passed underneath us at regular intervals. I remember Dad’s screwdriver hovering each time the earth shuddered, and the cords in his forearm rising to the surface as he waited. Just as he returned to the work, the sound would pause him again. After a few more whomps, he closed up the panel of wires and relays and said, “We have to go now.”

Somehow, this televised, esoteric, virtual involvement in the war on terror has allowed him the distance he needed to participate on some level with the ghosts he has kept out of his head. With the regime change here, he can love his country and fear his government.

I’ve come to realize people who watch Fox News do not wish to be informed by it, they wish to have their beliefs confirmed. Fox News says to them, “Your fears are justified.”

So, when people talk about hating Glenn Beck or wishing they could punch Bill O’Reilly, I see their anger as a tiny pea in the bottom of a washpan, and I wonder how many are out there like myself who feel cheated by those who spit when they talk to the camera.

How many of us have been forced by small men to put away the way we used to see someone we love?

He recently gave a talk where he described a world where local news is so strangled for resources it will no longer be able to hold governments and institutions accountable. The public will not be privy to sort of information which keeps people with power from abusing that power.

From his speech:

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself — and I’ll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between theProtestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.

So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don’t think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don’t think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent.

Wow. That stinks.

It’s a great speech, and you can read the transcript here:

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom to Replace Newspapers

I saw an interview with Daniel Radcliffe the other day, and that’s what he had to say to all those people who still think he’s a cute little wizard.

I too am a man, and apparently it means a number of things.

For some, it means to be one of the last remaining hairy, muscled warrior kings without need for emotions or pity clenching a battle axe in your calloused hands at the ends of your scarred and bleeding forearms barking orders to your brethren as they join in conquest of the enemy in hopes of one day returning to your womenfolk and ravishing them so one day their 15 sons can go on to inherit your glory.

For others, it means being someone who works hard for a living, coming home sweaty on Friday and washing up with Lava before dressing in denim and driving your pickup to the local bar where you’ll spend an evening tossing back beer, making fun of midgets, and discussing just what it is you like more – custom-built V10 racing lawnmowers, or women’s Jello wrestling.

Still, for many it means high-fiving at a college football game and tanking up on cheap brew while slipping nips of Jagermeister between field goals before stumbling back to the frat house turning your visor sideways to better shoot a cell-phone video of some dumb brunette playing truth or dare in her underwear as Chumbawumba jostles the organs in your chest cavity.

Recently, a number of people think it means pausing your game of  ”Gears of War 2″ to set the Tivo to record “The Science of Star Trek” and checking the progress of your torrent download of 10,000 photos of Jenna Jameson in action before you head out to the mailbox to collect the shipment from the seller on Ebay who promised you a mint “Sin City” Marv Bobble Head action figure with the rare misspelling on the packaging.

Guess what ladies? You think being a man is sad, depressing and gross.

We know, that’s why we changed and/or hid our manliness for nearly two decades. But then, suddenly it seems, something happened.

Perhaps you’ve noticed it. The backlash against sensitivity and feminine aesthetics over the last few years.

Men, it seems, are tired of being emasculated and are seeking some form of release.

The first modern exploration of this was probably 1996′s “Fight Club,” and later the movie.

Chuck Pahluniuk wrote a book out of a desire to create some sort of place where men could be men. Other novels like “The Joy Luck Club,” “How to Make an American Quilt,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “The Ya-Ya Sisterhood” and so on had created these tiny exclusionary groups where women could indulge in their womanhood, yet men had nothing other than video games and sports.

He saw a modern life where many of the attributes men bring to the table in an evolutionary sense were no longer valued. Aggression, physical strength, competitive drive and ribald sexual appetites are all frowned upon. Likewise, the things society suggested we were to aspire to – rock gods, astronauts, tycoons, quarterbacks – were largely unattainable goals.

“Fight Club” is about two generations of men who are living in the shadows of the manliest men who ever lived; The Greatest Generation laughs in their faces. Ghosts of fathers and grandfathers munch on cigars right behind you as your short, overweight douche of a boss tells you how it is.

He suggested deep within all men there is a yearning to return to a place where the things that make us male are important again, and the things that keep us in cubicles and hair salons are once again meaningless.

Of course, in the book and the movie, the result was a fascist dictatorship of sorts causing mayhem through terrorist acts and violence. The duality of man is a harsh and ugly truth.

“Fight Club” often ends up in user-voted top ten lists for best movies of all time. The book is passed around and read by men who barely skim sports pages. Men dig it because just about every one of us would end up in a fight club if we had the chance, or at least we like to believe we would. Why, you might ask?

If you are a woman, I highly recommend you go and get a shot of testosterone (yes, you can actually do this) and get a taste of what it’s like being a man. Some women who do this report unfathomable horniness, uncontrollable aggression and a sudden and deep desire to eat the raw flesh of the noble elk.

Ladies, imagine the horniest you have ever been, multiply that by 17, and that’s us every second of the day until we die. Add to this a hair-trigger temper that demands blood for transgressions on our honor, pride and possessions along with a need to defeat anyone who challenges us in anything – be it nuclear war or table hockey – and that’s us every second of the day.

Some men are able to keep all that manliness in check, pushing it down and denying it. Some can’t. Either way – bars, stadiums, strip clubs and arcades act as refuges where the monster can roam free for a while before Dr. Jekyll is forced to put on his suit and act like an evolved human being again.

Consider the Real Doll. Men will have sex with a doll if it looks enough like a beautiful woman. Who wants to live like that? No one does, but we do what must with the brain we were given. Male Australian jewel beetles will mate with discarded brown beer bottles because the shape and texture resembles a female – a gigantic, yet irresistibly hot female. The circuitry is hard-wired to respond, and it does.

Biologists call Real Dolls and brown beer bottles supernormal releasers. When a normal stimulator of behavior gets exaggerated, sometimes it overwhelms you. The beetles fuck the bottles instead of actual females, and then they die without having passed on their genes or formed a mutual, lasting relationship based on respect.

I promise you, men would love to be able to turn off our stupid, hyper sexual, hyper aggressive mind at will. Being a man means being in control. Being a man means not descending into a place where you engage in pseudonecrophilia with a lifeless automaton. For some, this is the only way they can cope. Without the doll, they might descend further still.

Advertising has caught on in a big way. Always roaming around in our collective unconscious, advertising geniuses recently discovered our emasculation and are using it to sell us all sorts of stupid shit.

Examples:

I could fill the page with ads devoted to this. You get the point I’m sure. Men want to be men again, want to celebrate that which was once scorned, and they’re willing to buy stuff in the name of being a man. Companies out to make a buck oblige by creating products designed to appeal to men. How can metal strips glued to a strip of plastic be gender specific?

But wait, there’s another way to capitalize on this feeling of emasculation, sell people a chance to reclaim their manhood. The military loves this. You’ll find Navy ads with rock and roll, Marines ads with men fighting hellspawn, and the worst, Army ads with young men playing videogames and being taunted by real soldiers. “Hey, pussies. Want to be real man? Then put down that remote and stand up straight. Wipe the Cheeto crumbs off your shirt and call a recruiter!”

Seriously? No one sits there playing “Halo” thinking, “You know, the only thing that would make this game better would to be the sensation of the actual blood of my friends being sprayed into my eyes and mouth.”

They relentlessly play these recruitment commercials during “The Daily Show,” “Adult Swim” and “Attack of The Show.” They know who they’re after. Hell, why do you think there’s a cable network devoted to men? Spike is just capitalism at work. Target demographic acquired, launch “Girls Gone Wild.”

But, far worse than the Army of One campaign and the Army Strong campaign, both designed to make you feel as if taking orders somehow makes you a stronger individual, are the Strength for Now, Strength for Later ads.

In one, a skinny, chiseled-face man wearing a uniform and a beret walks up to a group of old buddies; they all yell and slap each other welcoming him home. One asks, “So, what did you do?”

He looks into his old friend’s eyes, his steely glare piercing the very heart of his inquisitor. He’s thinking how naive and soft these guys are. He’s thinking, Jesus, was I once like them?

“Computers, mostly,” he replies.

No need to go into details. They wouldn’t understand. These sorry excuses for men should just go castrate themselves right now and look over some sultan’s harem. What pathetic dipshits. Why did I even come back?

His high-school buddy, who probably still reads comic books and plays with dolls timidly moves closer.

“But, couldn’t you have just done that here?”

The mind if the soldier who was once a boy explodes into shards of flashbacks; the smell of cordite and fear fills his nostrils. He’s back in a tent, surrounded by laptops; the sound of battle rages outside. He’s yelling, “Quick, hit control, alt and delete. No, you fool! Simultaneously! Move out of the way!”

The soldier turns his head, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth might buckle.

“Not really.”

I assume he stands up after that, does an about face, and then walks out of the room and into his cab. Later, on the base, he fires up “World of Warcraft” with his uniform still on.

The other ad, which leads me into the other side of this emasculation phenomenon, features a pudgy dad sitting at a coffeehouse in the middle of the night.

Outside, rain is sheeting down. A train in the distance moves away. His son sits beside him, dressed sharply in a uniform, his face clean and his posture correct.

The dad’s gravel crunching voice comes up slow and steady like a moan from the bottom of a well, “You’re a changed man.”

The son, unflinching, returns, “How’s that?”

“Back there, when you got off the train, “the father looks away,” you did two things you’ve never done before at the same time.”

The father pauses. Is he really going to admit this?

“You shook my hand, and you looked me square in the eye.”

The dad looks into the face of his son who meets the glare like a matador waiting to strike. His body is a statue, his neck filled with tightened cords of steel. He smirks.

I assume the very next second the son stands up, looks down on the man he once feared, the man who used to beat him as slobber tinged with the tang of bourbon dribbled out of his yellowed teeth onto the carpet right before he stumbled off to enjoy violent maritals with his sobbing mother; he looks at that same man, now so small and hollow, and tells him, “I have a ride. I just wanted to meet you here and say one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Fuck you.”

You see, advertising is a the canary in the coal mine of American culture. People with something to sell or something to gain who have the money to spend do everything they can to keep up with the rapidly shifting psyche of their targets. When you start to see a trend, there’s always a good reason for it. The Army knows what they are selling, and they only need to sell it once per customer.

The Devry and ITT-Tech commercials, aimed at the same people and aired with the same programs, show people who were in dead-end jobs and had no girlfriends who, after going to Devry Technical Institute, not only get a decent job but also get to have sex with real women. Every Devry student graduates with a degree and his father’s respect.

So, it isn’t just “The Man Show” and Maxim magazine profiting from this need to be hairy. Stuff, FHM, “300″, “Jackass” – all of it is the result of people profiting on the woe that is modern man’s realization. We are no longer needed.

Don’t get me wrong here. I understand the problem.

Men don’t have wombs, and wombs can seriously get in the way of acting a fool until you’re 50. Men can be boys forever if they play their cards right. Most of us act like 16-year-olds as soon as no one is looking.

Before the birth-control pill, we had free reign of the Earth. All the institutions and governments, all the science and technology – men kept women out of the loop. Women entered the workforce, academia and politics without looking back, and it has taken a lot of struggle to get to where women are today – still short of the prize.

I think somewhere in the late ’80s, and early ’90s, there was a push to embrace femininity, to get in touch, to wear sweaters. There was a cascading wave of guilt crashing into us for being such assholes for so long, even if you weren’t one.

It was doomed from the beginning. Men may be subject to devolution, but it isn’t going to just fizzle out. That’s too bad in many ways. Holocausts and wars are certainly the domain of men, not women.

Charlie LeDuff, an inspiration and among my favorite journalists and authors, recently tapped into all of this in a new book, “Us Guys.”

LeDuff is in search of the American male. He finds a lot of men in the Heartland wandering aimlessly through life, boozing it up, drifting into old age with nothing but regret. All the dragons are dead, it seems.

His revelation? The only real men left are gay rodeo stars and their fans.

A final note. Thanks to Match.com and other online dating sites, a great deal of information has been gathered about what it takes to persuade a woman to look at a man’s profile, dig deeper, decide to share information with him and eventually meet.

If you love evolutionary psychology like myself, then you already know certain things would be revealed by the data.

According to the boo, “Freakonomics,” women are far less concerned about looks and far more concerned about income than are men. But, what’s interesting for the sake of this blog entry, is how women tend to gravitate toward a very specific group of men who don’t earn big money.

Soldiers, firemen and police officers get a lot more action in the world of online dating than do men who make a comparable amount of money. In fact, those men in uniform do just as well as wealthy businessmen and other professionals. Women tend to avoid students, actors and waiters. Also, you can be overweight, but not short.

What does that say? It says women want men to be men as much as men do. Meanwhile, men still find blond hair more attractive than college degrees.

To be a man means rising above your animal instincts and embracing humanity. It means having integrity, courage, honesty and accountability. But it seems, at least for next few hundred years, a balance must be achieved. Because as much as I love poetry and dandelions, I still wouldn’t mind being allowed once in a while to run at full speed through the highlands with a battle axe in hand.

Like Viking warriors before them, these soldiers were sending off one of their own. They had lit a secret funeral pyre for a man whose wife and family were going about their lives oblivious on the other side of the planet.

We will never know what went through their minds as the blaze licked the air between them. We can imagine the flames illuminated their stoic faces as they avoided eye contact. We can assume they stood with their rifles slung low, shifting their body weight and scratching to spend nervous energy. We can almost see them now, alone out there on the sands with one shared purpose for the night – destroying the evidence.

It wasn’t Pat Tillman’s body in the fire; it was his armor and later his uniform, the result of panic within his unit. Two of his fellow Rangers were wounded, a member of the Afghan militia was dead. The blood of a great football hero, the famous patriot, was on all their hands. But for weeks, only a handful of people would know how and why he was killed.

In the years since his death, The U.S. Department of Defense has closed and reopened the case a number of times and even launched a criminal investigation into Tillman’s death. Tillman’s parents believe a cover-up began before the body was cold, and new evidence revealed in spurts over the years points to medical examiners sharing that opinion.

Everyone’s Martyr

Tillman, born in San Jose Calif., started his college career as a linebacker for Arizona State University in 1994. Proving to be an extraordinary athlete, breaking records and standing out from the crowd, he was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in 1998. In May 2002, eight months after the 9/11 attacks, he turned down multi-million dollar signing deal and left a promising NFL career to join the U.S. Army.

After his death, pundits rushed in on Tillman, and a political feeding frenzy threatened to shred his legend. His life was open to interpretation, and his story was translated into the rhetoric of hundreds of campaigns both for and against the president, the war and America itself.

Failure came swift for most who attempted to advance their cause through Tillman’s death.

Journalists who called him a “dumb jock” and wrote columns about how he was a “macho man” brainwashed by the Bush regime were forced to apologize when they learned he had a 3.8 GPA, majored in accounting and was fond of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He had even arranged after his tour of duty to meet with Noam Chomsky, an often-quoted MIT professor who remains a key figure among the left wing of American politics.

Those who sought to build a hero and wrote of Tillman as an example of what constitutes true patriotism suffered the same fate. Bush referred to him as an “inspiration” at Tillman’s televised memorial. His fellow soldiers remember him campaigning for John Kerry and speaking out against the war. His brother said Tillman was not with God because he was not a religious man. His planned meeting with Chomsky stunned those on the right who assumed Tillman had been moved to serve by the attack on the World Trade Center because the professor was one of the first intellectuals to speak out against the United States following 9/11.

Then, with both sides circling his story for meaning, the military admitted he did not die in a prolonged firefight with the enemy as his family had been told weeks earlier; instead, he had been shot in the head by his own men after repeatedly screaming out his name and pleading for them to cease fire.

It was a killing blow for the campaign to canonize his image. His family soon spoke out about how they were deceived by the military, their anguish turning into rage.

Struggle to Understand

“If you feel you are being lied to, you can never put it to rest,” Tillman’s mother, Mary, explained to the Washington Post. “It makes you feel like you are losing your mind.”

The recent decision to reopen the case may be result of the Tillman family’s relentless effort to inform the public about how his death was used as a propaganda tool in an official story based on intentional lies.

“It has been a cover-up from the start,” said Tillman’s mother. “The military has had every opportunity to do the right thing and they haven’t.”

The family and their supporters, including Sen. John McCain, believe the truth was covered up on purpose. They want to know who is behind the conspiracy, and why they concealed the truth for so long. They believe someone in the Bush administration allowed the Tillman memorial service to continue, all the while knowing he had been snuffed out by American bullets.

Tillman’s father still believes the Army wished only to protect their image. He told the Washington Post, “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this.

“They purposely interfered with the investigation. They thought they could control it, and they realized their recruiting efforts were going to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out,” he said. “They blew up their poster boy.”

Tillman’s mother added, “The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting.”

In their initial inquiry in May 2004, Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones revealed Army investigators were aware of the nature of Tillman’s death days after the incident, yet senior officials still approved the awarding of the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and a posthumous promotion from Specialist to Corporal. The citation report accompanying these awards said Tillman was killed by enemy forces and contained a detailed description of a battle Army leadership knew had never taken place.

After pressure from the family and Sen. McCain, an inquiry launched in May 2005 concluded there had been no “official reluctance” to report the truth.

Last week, the Associated Press uncovered documents revealing the opinions of doctors who examined Tillman’s body after the incident. One is quoted as saying, “The medical evidence did not match up with with the scenario as described.”

A Real American Hero

Tillman’s skills had been lauded in the press long before he became a national news story.

Sports Illustrated, among many others, took notice of the tenacious young athlete who seemed to defy convention by writing, “Most football players fit into a box. They’re big, fast and strong… they submit to authority without resistance…Then there is Arizona State senior linebacker Pat Tillman, who not only doesn’t fit into the box but also would have to consult a travel agent to find it.”

In high school, he often defied his coach, running unapproved plays and improvising on the field. At 5-feet-11-inches and 195 pounds, it was likely he would be passed over by most college coaches anyway.

According to Sports Illustrated, Tillman was once asked by Sun Devils coach Bruce Snyder what he thought of the recruiting process. “It stinks,” Tillman said. “Nobody tells the truth.”

The following August, he told Snyder he wouldn’t take part in redshirting, the tradition of training an incoming freshman for one year before putting them into play. Tillman told Snyder he had things to do with his life adding, “You can do whatever you want with me, but in four years, I’m gone.”

At Arizona State, Tillman progressed from special-teams madman as a freshman to situational sub as a sophomore to defensive standout as a junior. He had the second-most tackles and most interceptions, pass deflections and fumble recoveries on the team

By the time Tillman had grown his close-cropped hair into a flowing, golden mane, Sports Illustrated was referring to him as the best player in the country who didn’t have his own award campaign.

After being named the league’s defensive player of the year, he told the magazine, “Dude, I’m proud of the things I’ve done, my schoolwork – because I’m not smart; I just worked hard.”

Tillman added, “But it doesn’t do me any good to be proud. It’s better to just force myself to be naive about things, because otherwise I’ll start being happy with myself, and then I’ll stand still, and then I’m old news.”

Tillman seemed to be the kind of man who made those around him scratch their heads. He fit no stereotypes, no clichés. He looked like a surfer but was fond of jumping through the forest from treetop to treetop like Tarzan minus a rope. He played football like an insatiable beast, but he majored in marketing. He wasn’t religious, but he often circled passages of the Bible, Torah and other such texts, sending them to friends so they could discuss the implications.

“People in our town were basically afraid of my brother,” explained Kevin Tillman to Sports Illustrated. “He just has this tough-man mentality about him.”

After being drafted by Arizona State, Tillman was arrested and charged as a juvenile for felony assault. He had defended a friend in front of a Pizza Hut at 17, reducing the 20-year-old attacker to a pulp. In the summer of ’94, he served 30 days in a juvenile detention facility. His conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor upon his release – two weeks before his first college football practice.

“I’m proud of that chapter in my life,” Tillman said. “I’m not proud of what happened, but I’m proud that I learned more from that one bad decision than all the good decisions I’ve ever made. I’m proud that nobody found out, because I didn’t want to come to Arizona State with people thinking that I was a hoodlum, because I’m not. It made me realize that stuff you do has repercussions. You can lose everything.”

Looking back, knowing all we do about Tillman, he still makes us scratch our heads.

In 2001, Tillman turned down a $9 million, five-year offer from the Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams to remain with the Arizona Cardinals. The next year, he turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals to enlist in the Army. Most assumed he had been moved in the wake of 9/11.

“My great grandfather was at Pearl Harbor,” he told NBC News soon after the attack on the towers. “I really haven’t done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that.”

Tillman had played four seasons with the Cardinals before he enlisted for a three-year stint in the Army with his younger brother Kevin. He told Sports Illustrated he would return to the NFL after his service.

Both denied requests for media coverage of their basic training and deployments. Officials said the two wanted no special treatment or attention – they wanted to be considered soldiers doing their duty.

Both successfully completed training for the Rangers, the Army’s elite infantry regiment. Pat was deployed to Iraq in March 2003 where he saw serious combat; later he was sent to Afghanistan, where he served in the same unit as his brother.

The Battle

A number of accounts have surfaced after multiple inquiries into Tillman’s death. This much is clear, something went terribly wrong on the battlefield.

According to testimony, on April 22, 2004, a Humvee in the 30-member A Company, 2nd battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment led by Lieutenant David Uthlaut, broke down as the unit drove towards Manah, south of Kabul.

The patrol halted and took up defensive positions while attempting to repair the vehicle.

After failing to revive the Humvee, the patrol split in two. The forward unit moved ahead while the rear unit followed towing the disabled jeep with a truck. The rear group was about 15 minutes behind in a deep ravine, out of visual and radio contact, when they believed they were ambushed.

Tillman left the forward group and headed back with another Ranger and an Afghan militiaman. He set up on the side of the ravine opposite where enemy fire was supposedly coming from. The Afghan and Tillman rose from cover to shoot at the enemy’s position. His fire drew the attention of the rear group in the ravine, and they answered with every weapon they had.

The Afghan was killed instantly. Tillman, fellow soldiers testified, waved his arms, yelled “cease fire” and set off a smoke grenade to signal he was not an enemy.

A soldier in the ravine called for a cease fire. When the firing stopped, Tillman and his colleague stood up. Then, for reasons still unclear, the shooting resumed. Tillman’s body armor was riddled with “numerous” hits.

One soldier testified, “I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies! I’m Pat fucking Tillman, dammit.’ He said this repeatedly until he fell, hit by three bullets in the forehead.”

Later, they would burn his bloody, bullet-punched body armor and uniform.

Until last week, this was the official story. Now, new evidence suggests something more sinister may have happened.

The Doctor’s Report

Documents uncovered recently by the Associated Press revealed doctors told investigators, soon after the battle, the bullet holes in Tillman’s skull were so close together the M-16 they came from must have been approximately 10 yards away.

The doctor, whose name is blacked out, said he called the Army’s Human Resources Command but was turned away. He then asked the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division if they would open a criminal case. He was told “no.”

These new documents also show there was no evidence of enemy fire found at the scene, nor was any soldier wounded by hostile bullets.

These new documents, released by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request form the AP, also change the official story as to Tillman’s last moments.

According to the new information provided by an Army chaplain, Tillman told a panicking soldier clinging to Tillman’s leg, “Would you shut your fucking mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling…”

A Confusing Memorial

Despite knowing much of the particulars of Tillman’s death, officials pressed forward with his televised, emotionally-charged, patriotism-soaked memorial service. But already something stirred among those who knew Tillman best.

Maria Shriver, wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, read from a letter written by her husband, “I was told he admired me but it’s the reverse. Pat’s journey, that’s the American dream, and he sacrificed that. That to me is a real hero.”

Shriver went on to quote John F. Kennedy.

“My uncle once said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ You, Pat, have lived those words,” she said.

“It was an honor to coach Pat,” former Cardinals assistant coach Larry Marmie said. “I learned a lot from him. Players often look for the respect from their coaches. I found myself trying to earn Pat’s respect.”

His brother-in-law and close friend, Alex Garwood, came to the ceremony dressed as a woman. “We had two godfathers, no godmother,” Garwood explained.

His brother Rich attended in a plain white shirt and blue jeans. When he reached the podium he cursed and ranted in an unprepared speech telling the audience, “Thank you for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.”

The ceremony at the San Jose Municipal Garden concluded with an excerpt from one of Tillman’s favorite Emerson quotes, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

It wasn’t long before detractors, sickened by the iconography, spoke out.

The Portland, Ore., chapter of Indymedia.org posted the news of Tillman’s death accompanied by a headline reading, “Dumb Jock Killed in Afghanistan.” Comments on the website suggested alternate titles for the piece, like “Privileged Millionaire, Blinded by Nationalist Mythology, Pisses Away the Good Life,” and “Capitalist Chooses to Kill Innocents Instead of Cashing Check.” The Urbana-Champaign, Ill., chapter ran an article about Tillman with a headline reading, “Pat Tillman is gone good riddance.” A commenter wrote, “I saw the Post this morning, on the front page. It was sickening. They built this guy up like he was Audie Murphy or something, publishing this foto of him in his Ranger getup, all tough-looking and stony-jawed, like a goddamn recruiting ad … Puke-o-rama. Cold as it may sound, ‘Dumb Jock Dies for Pipeline in Afghanistan’ pretty much sums it up.”

Most of the websites and news organizations have since apologized publicly for their ignorance after statements from Tillman like one calling the war in Iraq “so fuckinging illegal” surfaced. In the initial inquiry it was revealed Tillman joined the Army specifically to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but was sent to participate in the invasion of Iraq against his wishes.

As before, Tillman defied those who would jump to conclusions about his motives.

The Last Inquiry

In more than four hours of questioning by the Pentagon inspector general’s office in December 2006, Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr. often contradicted his and other officers’ testimony. He said he did not recall 70 times.

“You’ve got me really scared about my brain right now. I’m really having a problem,” he told Pentagon officials.

Tillman’s family, who refuses to give in, want to know what did Donald Rumsfeld know about Tillman’s death and when did he know it? They suggest if Army Ranger commanders and the Army Secretary knew Tillman was killed in a fratricide, Rumsfeld must have known too.

When Tillman first joined the Army, Rumsfeld personally commended him with a signed letter. If Rumsfeld knew the nature of Tillman’s killing in April, 2004, some believe he directed the obfuscation of the truth.

“There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army about Tillman’s death are heavily censored, with blacked-out sections and deleted names on almost every page.

Add to this many of the people who have testified have been allowed to change their stories several times, and one can understand the frustration of Tillman’s family

“I want to know what kind of criminal intent there was,” Mary Tillman told the Chronicle. “There’s so much in the reports that is (deleted) that it’s hard to tell what we’re not seeing.”

Tillman’s father added, “In Washington, I don’t think any of them want it investigated. They (politicians and Army officials) just don’t want to see it ended with them, landing on their desk so they get blamed for the cover-up.”

The Man, the Metaphor

At this point it is still uncertain how history will treat the story of Pat Tillman.

Russell Baer who served with Tillman told sfgate.com Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”

Other soldiers remember Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time.

Baer also told sfgate.com Tillman was popular among his fellow soldiers recalling, “The guys who killed Pat were his biggest fans.”

If Tillman had not died under such questionable circumstances it would have been easy for politicians to turn him into something mythical.

It is easy to imagine propaganda posters featuring two photos of Tillman, one showing him holding a football, his free arm pumping the air in victory, the other featuring him in combat gear, both arms steadying a machine gun, his chiseled brow shading eyes looking somberly into the distance.

At first glance Tillman was a symbol, a martyr for everything in the American subconscious. For many, he didn’t wave the flag or sing the anthem. He was the flag; he became an anthem.

Perhaps Tillman only wanted to mean something. After all, he grew up in the same world that tried so hard to pigeonhole him in memoriam. If he fit no stereotypes in death, then it is reasonable to assume he had a need to avoid them in life. In an era far different than the one his grandfather lived, when he fought in Pearl Harbor and defended his country from a Nazi scourge, Tillman was searching for meaning. He could have chosen the easy path his entire life, but instead he intentionally put himself in situations where he was forced to overcome obstacles.

Perhaps he left it all behind not for God, or country or idealism, but just because it seemed to him like the only important thing left in a world of smoke and mirrors. He had to die before anyone could use him for their gain. He had to be still before anyone could catch him and put him on display.

The Cardinals retired Tillman’s No. 40 and named the plaza surrounding the new stadium under construction in suburban Glendale the “Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza.”

Arizona State retired Tillman’s No. 42 jersey and placed his name on the honor ring at Sun Devil Stadium.

A highway bypass around the Hoover Dam will have a bridge bearing Tillman’s name. When complete, it will span the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona.

Pat Tillman’s high school in San Jose, Calif., renamed its football field after him.

His family remains hopeful this new investigation will prove the U.S. government lied about his death for one reason; they created a hero, and then they killed him.

Tillman’s former roommate, Zack Walz, took a newspaper clipping to the podium at the memorial and read about how his teammates made up faux dog tags for themselves years ago, declaring their unit a band of warriors.

“Soldiers, battlers, lay it on the line,” Walz said, weeping. “What the hell did we know? Listen to the words. Listen to the metaphors. How hollow they ring.”

—

The Pat Tillman Foundation

This article was originally published in 2006.

It includes:

5. The Internet is the victory of information.

Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world’s information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

Read the full list here.

We packed into a small car, five of us, and slowly navigated our razed suburban streets until we emerged into the city. A few neighbors with chainsaws had cleared narrow paths while we collected ourselves earlier in the day.

We moved through Hattiesburg as if diving along a coral reef. There were no lights other than an occasional passing car. Our child-wide eyes would flick to movement or damage as our high beams washed across broken buildings, their roofs peeled back like sardine cans. We pointed; we gasped.

It was like browsing a museum with a magnifying glass, and as we headed back home it was easy to imagine hundreds of bodies strewn across the mall parking lot or upturned cars perched on twisted McDonald’s signs.

We had a sense, after making a few rounds in the city and returning, all of Mississippi must have looked like Hiroshima after the bomb.

Our frenetic preparations seemed distant once we unloaded from the car and lit a kerosene lamp inside our spared home.

My wife, in-laws and I had been preparing for Hurricane Katrina for a day or so, the fear slowly building as we put tape on the windows and stocked up on food and water. We picked up what could easily fly and gathered flashlights. We did a million things around the clock with the Weather Channel barking at us and flashing the terrible red and green pinwheel a little closer every 15 minutes. I was almost thankful when the television expired.

We were all shaken and tense when the first branches began to snap and shoot into the sky. When the tree in the backyard spiraled open like a time-lapsed flower, and the shingles started peppering the lawn, we darted into the hallway and stayed there for the next three hours.

I felt sore afterward, worn out from fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when you are pulled over and you know you’re busted and are going to go to jail. That’s some sort of logical, cognitive fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you think your dad is having a heart attack. That’s some sort of electric, slippery fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you are 8-years-old and you know you’ve been caught with a porn magazine in the school library. That’s some sort of judicial, repugnant fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when it’s raining and the guy next to you on the highway lurches into your lane, causing you to slam on the breaks so fast you fishtail, weaving backwards through traffic till you settle in the median. That’s some sort of sharp, fierce fear that leaves your adrenaline tapped.

And it certainly isn’t the fear hanging on you for days as you wait for your girlfriend to start her period. That’s some sort of barren, empty fear.

While I was in the hallway, the slivers of light under the doors to the bedrooms flickering, the walls breathing, the roof clattering, the wind bellowing, things cracking and crashing outside, the windows screeching, I felt the kind of fear that asks you to submit.

This is the kind of fear that asks you if you are satisfied with what you’ve done with your time. This is a fear radiating from the reptilian portions of your brain, but you have time to consider it, to hold it in your hand and examine it. It permeates you, but also delivers a sort of calm – probably endorphins – because your body is telling you this is the end. There will be no consequences, no one else to consider, nothing to ponder after this. You are going to die, and there are no words worth fumbling for.

I suppose this is terror, but stretched for so long you are somehow comforted by the sensation of the hunger juices cascading along the insides of your belly.

I kept my hand under the door to our bedroom and felt the air pressure alternate. Sometimes it would suck at my hairs; sometimes it would push into the room, always cold. I kept trying to explain it away with all the science I could remember.

But, eventually, I just focused on the sensation. I was alive, and I was processing information from my skin’s receptors, maintaining muscle tone to hold myself up, remembering and experiencing and cross referencing and sustaining homeostasis as much as possible with my heart thumping and my fight or flight system exhausted.

I focused on being a living thing.

I know it’s probably lame, but I thought of people in the towers, in the tsunami, in war.

I didn’t join their club, but I had been there and spent the afternoon. I brushed against the same dread they felt when they could no longer descend the stairs or could get to no higher ground, the same fear one feels when you think the next mortar might have your name on it.

I thought I was going to die for about 10 minutes, and only the people who read this sentence will ever know that.

Once we returned from our excursion, we were eager to get some sort of information after all the insanity of the day. With 90 percent of the roads blocked and no power anywhere for a hundred miles, we felt as though we needed to hear something official.

We fished an old television out of a closet and hooked it up to a generator. After fumbling with the antennae for a few minutes, something started to emerge behind the static.

Someone was on a couch next to someone at a desk. Everyone gathered around, inching closer as the snowy reception threw shadows across the room. Then I froze.

I recognized the voice and the hair, my stomached rattled against my ribs. It was Conan O’Brien.

We waited for news, but none came. We sat through commercials for cars and soap and other things from the real world.

I watched a steak sizzle on the screen and looked at the faces of my in-laws. They drooped and leaned as I asked them if I could turn it off. We agreed it wasn’t worth the gas.

We had no source of information other than a distant radio station for about two or three days. Trees were collapsed like accordions in the neighbor’s walls, ants were getting in our food and our dog somehow hung itself on its makeshift rope leash. Meanwhile, all the television was running were sitcoms.

Things quickly degenerated. The home was intact, but the foundation of our little group was not. We knew we couldn’t hold out much longer after hearing gunshots as someone in the neighborhood tried to frighten off suspected looters. Everyone was arguing and sweating and worrying. We decided it would be best if we parted. My wife’s 10-month-old nephew, three sisters (and a fiancé), mother and stepfather headed north.

My wife and I decided to travel west instead, to my parent’s home in Sumrall. It was more rural, less hysterical. Our in-laws begged us to come with them to fresh water and electricity. Somehow, after three days of screaming, it didn’t seem appealing.

I come from a farming family. I’m among the first generation to have never manned a mule-driven plow. They bought clothes from the profits made from growing cotton and cucumbers. They grew all their vegetables and built all their additions to home and farm.

When I was old enough to get to know my grandparents, they had already given in to the microwave, the riding lawnmower and the grocery store; but they still grew and canned most of their own food.

My family had long since abandoned that way of life when I was growing up. We microwaved and ate out, and we bought our vegetables and meats. We used Tupperware instead of mason jars.

But, during my childhood, everyone still enjoyed the fresh and pure results of my grandparents’ labor, and that was what my grandparents wanted. They saved everything they grew and distributed it to their children and grandchildren.

Without them, I often feel the loss of something real and honest. Like the man who prefers the feel of work at the end of simple tool to the lazy, noisy convenience of a weed-eater, I find I prefer the food I received at my grandparent’s table to the grocery store versions.

I have tried to eat greens and black-eyed peas from restaurants, but they are not very good. I have tried to make red-eye gravy and biscuits, but apparently I never paid much attention to the details.

Right before Katrina, I had given in to the fact I would never again eat the kind of food my grandmother used to cook.

But, a few months before, my dad found a pack of collard greens my grandmother cooked and froze before she died. He had thawed them out and brought them to a boil one afternoon before I came to visit him.

We sat together and ate the greens, grown by her and my grandfather, cooked the way she had perfected over the course of her lifetime and returned to us from the other side by the freezer in the utility room.

I wish hadn’t done it. It was awful and strange to stumble into such territory.

Tasting her food somehow reanimated her spirit. I wanted to chew slowly, savor every second as my teeth squeezed out her essence. But, instead, it felt unnatural. I had the sense I was doing something perverse.

It did not bother my dad. He was happy to commune with his mother one more time, and he ended up eating the entire pot over the course of the afternoon.

I was able to experience the life of my grandparents at the dinner table; the old ways spooned out onto a plate and laid out before me.

Until Katrina, I thought my brief interlude with the old ways would be the last of those sorts of memories.

On the fourth day after Katrina we stepped out of the car in Sumrall and were struck with the sweet smell of frying sausage.

My father, a lifetime electrician, had set up a contraption that converted power from old car batteries into a power strip. Despite this, the ice in the deep freeze was still melting.

With electric grills and ovens, my family had been cooking everything they could pull out, some of the food stored for years.

We sat down and ate our first cooked food in days, and we chewed it slowly.

That afternoon, my uncle came over with several whole chickens and some corn on the cob from his own freezer. We feasted together. We talked. We laughed. When we went outside, a cool breeze billowed my shirt away from my ripe belly. I felt as if I had come out of a long sleep, or been cured of an illness. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I had confidence I could last as long as it took to get our power back.

The night of the storm, a friend of mine left his home in the drizzling aftermath to join a crew of men with chainsaws, trucks and elbow grease who methodically cut and cleared the roads around Sumrall. It took them 10 hours to get to the highway, and when it was over, they cheered a little bit, said goodbye and disappeared from each others’ lives. I figure this happened on a thousand roads and back streets before the official responders could come and do anything.

Most days we made at least one trip to find gas. Most of the gas stations did nothing, but one guy in Sumrall – Jack Aultman – wired up a generator to his gas pumps and filled up the emergency and police vehicles in the city before offering his gas to everyone in town.

After gas lines started stretching over hills, hooligans started to siphon gas tanks and snatch gas cans. We left Hattiesburg to stay with my parents in the long wait for power to get away from such insanity. While there, we kept our eyes and ears open at night, coming to the window whenever the dogs were agitated.

I saw signs everywhere that read “You loot, we shoot.” I realized once this was over all those people, the ones willing to kill and the ones willing to take from others in need would be shuffled into the same deck.

Neighbors started checking on each other, gathering for cookouts and passing information about the location of ice, water and gas. Our families, once spread out and distant, congealed to support each other.

My friend Blake, the one who cleared a path to the highway, came over every afternoon, and we sat on my parent’s porch. We lazed and debated when and what would happen next.

“It’s not so hot this evening, huh?” he said.

“No.”

“Makes you wonder, huh?”

“What’s that?”

“How people used to live like this. How did they stand it?”

Somehow, around the seventh day, a neighbor got us some tomatoes, and since some of the bread was already growing mold, we made sandwiches.

Biting into a fresh tomato sandwich, with or without tomato juice running down the forearm, is as close as mortals can ever hope to get to kissing the cheek of God.

I’ve seen them prepared in a variety of ways. My family used two slices of white bread, a healthy dollop of mayonnaise and sometimes a little salt. After Katrina, the mayonnaise was stored in a cooler covered with ice from Oloh Baptist Church .

My grandfather loved tomato sandwiches so much that during the summer he rarely ate anything else. He still had a microwave with the words “radar range” written across the handle, and you had to turn a dial in order to set the time on it. Still, he went right out and bought a brand new Salad Shooter after he saw the first commercial for it thinking it would make perfect slices of tomato. I remember he got steaming mad once he realized it couldn’t handle a whole tomato.

Our olfactory bulbs are part of a direct circuit from our nose into the brain, so smell is the most rapid, most powerful trigger for memory. If I eat a tomato raw, I am transported into my grandfather’s backyard, and through squinting child eyes I can see him approaching his workbench with an armload from the garden.

If I eat boiled peanuts, even the awful ones that come from a bag, I’ll think of my grandmother’s pebbled surface pressure cooker hopping on the stove and all of my family tearing into the pot. Some people would get bowls and eat until there was nothing left but shells, others would use napkins. My favorite was to take a handful outside where the hulls could be tossed carelessly into the grass. Sometimes, a peanut would be so cooked that one could chew it up and swallow it shell and all. I can’t put my finger on why that makes me smile so deeply I have to take a breath, but I’m happy it does.

I can be moved to memories of my mother shelling peas and snapping beans just by being in the frozen food section and catching a glimpse of a pack of frozen butterbeans, although I much prefer traveling to that memory via an old metal washtub.

Before we had to dump the freezers and begin eating out of cans, my father told us about biscuits with cream skimmed from fresh milk and cane syrup. He paused for a moment to truly take the memory in with his lids half closed, then he lamented on how that sort of food is gone forever.

After all the food was gone, and we stopped cooking, it seemed to stay hot inside and out.

My wife and I sat for long periods stretched out, saying nothing. We watched out the window listening to insects and pine trees. Without any sort of predictable schedule, we did a lot of sitting and lying on the floor waiting it out like a fever.

Outside that afternoon, Blake lit a cigarette.

“Have you noticed how much more focused you become without all the distractions?”

“Yeah. There’s nothing to think about other than surviving.”

“I know. It’s like, you’re just alive. You’re just aware of existing.”

Somewhere in all of this we were able to get a small television working and watched the NBC Nightly News two times. We just wanted to know of something beyond our community. The coverage centered on New Orleans , and until this point all we had heard were rumors.

After seeing the people wading in water up their chests and waving signs on rooftops, some of our despair washed away. When the news ended without making mention of Mississippi, it trickled back in.

On the tenth day, after returning from Hattiesburg to check on our home, we saw the streetlight glowing next to my parent’s house.

The air was on full-blast. The television was squawking. The refrigerator was humming. We took hot showers.

Our neighbors retreated to their living rooms once the cable flickered back to life. Restaurant sales soared, as did Blockbuster’s rentals.

Four months later, I saw a commercial on our local television station for a DVD of their entire week-long coverage. They’ve edited together all of the reports and news desk footage into a DVD they are selling for $24.95.

For months, all around our city there were little tents set up selling Katrina T-Shirts and homemade DVDs about the storm. Several books have emerged as well, the kind you can write in a week. There are still Katrina-themed bumper stickers and key chains in local gas stations.

It is only every once in a while I think about Katrina now, despite vowing I would never take anything for granted again. I laugh at Conan O’Brien every time I watch his show.

Occasionally, it will just pop into my head without warning while I take a hot shower or eat a home-cooked meal. I think about those long ten days sometimes when I turn on the light to read, or get online to check my email, and I know that one day I’ll tell my children about Katrina.

They’ll be complaining about something banal, and I’ll unleash a Katrina story on them in the same way my parents did with Camille.

I’ll say, “Your great uncle slept outside in a rocking chair with a sheet over him to avoid the mosquitoes and the heat, but sometimes the stench of dead chicken houses would keep him up.”

Or, I’ll say, “Your grandfather and I went around the neighborhood delivering Powerade and baby formula, but we could never get rid of the big box of maxi pads the church gave us.”

Or, I’ll say. “Our friend Blake saw a seagull walking in his yard right after the hurricane passed over him.”

I will not mind if they find it difficult to understand, or if they even care. I’ll make them tomato sandwiches if they develop a taste for them, and I’ll be sure to make them chew their food slowly.

This story was originally published in 2005 at the After Katrina Newswire.