He may be "A Gentleman in Moscow," but he doesn't get out much anymore

In a May 16 post, I was only a few hours into reading Amor Towles "A Gentleman in Moscow." Things seemed especially grim at that juncture so I blogged this:

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

It helps to read a novel to the end before commenting. I won't spoil the ending but will say that it was not what I foresaw. Towles has a way of planting clues that may be MacGuffins. Very clever. He's also a great writer with a flair for language that I only see in the best books. When I open a book, I want to go for a ride and Towles takes me on an extraordinary one.

The world is filled with intriguing cities and Moscow proves to be one. But it's not a locale I turn to automatically. "I feel like reading a big Moscow book today, one from the scintillating Soviet era." Most of us know Moscow through one of the long-dead classic Russian writers. Others have been fascinated with its dramatic World War II battles, me included. The real stories behind the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad are gruesome and uplifting. Remember, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies then.

Alexander Rostov is an aristocrat. Many of them were sent to the gulag or executed during the regime's early years. Count Rostov is threatened with both until it comes to light that he did a favor once for one of the Soviet bosses now in charge. He is sentenced to a house arrest at the Metropol Hotel, the swankiest inn in Moscow. The Count already lives there in a luxurious suite. The bosses move him out into a cramped room in the attic. If he leaves the hotel, he will be shot. So Count Rostov tries to make the best of it. Beginning fiction writers are often told that a compelling character faces a challenge. The story is in how that character reacts. And that's what we have in this novel. He's no longer a world traveler and man about Moscow. His bank accounts have been frozen. He is persona non grata to those Soviets who know which side their bread is buttered on (it's the Red side).

The long journey through the count's life is worth it. Many surprises await you.

A look at the past and possible future in A Gentleman in Moscow and California

I’m reading two books concurrently. One is labeled historical fiction and is Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” The other is a sci-fi post-Apocalyptic novel “California” by Edan Lepucki. Meanwhile, here I am, living in the present tense.

Towles wrote a historical novel I am very fond of, “The Lincoln Highway.” The title grabbed my attention because I live a mile or maybe two from the route of the original Lincoln Highway. A history marker in downtown Cheyenne speaks at length about it, calling it “The First Transcontinental Highway.” A huge bust of Abraham Lincoln marks the high point on the Laramie Range where the highway crests and then shoots down Telephone Canyon, a long, looping downhill run that is an adventure during a blizzard (if the road’s open) and leads you to Laramie’s fine craft beers and indie restaurants if you make it.

An NPR reviewer in 2021 described the book this way:

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

So, it’s 1954 in Nebraska and points south and east. Quite a ride. As an admirer of “road novels,” this is a great one. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge is too although I’ve already written about it. Must mention here that Kerouac’s “On the Road” features a pivotal scene at Wild West Week in 1948 Cheyenne. What we have in miles and miles of asphalt and concrete are roads. Recently, I was pleased to see that Gen. Pershing, commander of all the armies who married a young woman from Cheyenne (a strategic move – she was the daughter of a U.S. senator), commissioned in 1921 a roadmap of the U.S. showing the Lincoln Highway as a priority number one route and the road from Cheyenne to Denver as priority number two. Take that, Colorado! Pershing hated your guts.

“A Gentleman in Moscow” is a very different story. It is a big novel and I just had to have a hardbound copy from B&N.com. It is 1922 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and Count Alexander Rostov has been quarantined at Moscow’s famous Metropol Hotel. He’s not sick. But he has the ability to infect the populace with highfalutin attitudes, a crime in the new communist state, where everyone is equal but some, we suspect, are more equal than others. The count is a snob and what we might call a ladykiller. He’s accustomed to women swooning over him and the pickings are quite slim on the corridors of the commie hotel. Still, he finds a way. Government apparatchiks check up on him and his dwellings and they try to train hotel staff to not call the count Count or Your excellency. To no avail.

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

Lepucki first got my attention through a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times. While most of it is about her new novel of time travel and family, “Time’s Mouth,” “California” is about family and apocalypse. Very down to earth and that’s the way the author likes it:

“I want there to be sex in my books. I want there to be periods and childbirth and feeling bad. There’s a lot of vomiting,” she says, laughing. “I feel like in a lot of contemporary fiction, the characters are not in their bodies in the way that I think in life we are.”

I read that and agreed that there is not a lot of periods and childbirth and sickness in most books. If described at all, sickness often is described romantically, as in the ravings of a sick Cathy in Wuthering Heights or the pining of a tubercular John Keats ("Bright Star" a fine Jane Campion film about Keats and Fanny Brawne). There is shit in “California” and it stinks. But that’s not the main story. A pregnant woman and her husband try to navigate the confusing and dangerous future world where all things fall apart. I’m only 120 pages into my Kindle version checked out from Libby but the author has my attention.

Is it wise to read historical novel and post-apocalyptic fiction at the same time? God only knows, if there was a God and he/she/it actually knew anything.

Nelson Algren lived the writer's life in the 1930s and J. Edgar Hoover was watching

I write a fan letter to fellow writer Colin Asher:

Dear Colin:

Just finished reading “Never a Lovely So Real.” I loved it. Your intro sections read more like an historical novel than standard biography. It helps that Nelson’s origins and his writing life were so real and unpredictable. Overall, I found out so much more about the writer who conducted my creative writing workshop at University of Florida in 1974. Nelson’s reputation preceded him and he took it with him after the 12-week session. Until I read your book, I was content to remember the grizzled old 63-year-old who wandered into the classroom on a hot September night in Gainesville. Now I know better. I’m glad you found his life worth writing about.

Nelson was my first writing teacher. He was a gruff but entrancing presence in the classroom. I only knew him by reputation. As you write it, that was part fact and part fiction, some of it fed by Nelson. I’d read one of his books and a half-dozen stories. His past was checkered but I knew little about it. He’d been friends with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and lover to Simone de Bouvier, a feminist writer found on many women’s studies reading lists. Two of his books were made into movies and he spent some crazy time in Hollywood. His political activities earned him a file in J. Edgar’s commie blacklist (886 pages – one heck of a file).

Remembering that time almost 50 years later, Visiting Writer Nelson Algren was an unsettling presence on the sprawling University of Florida campus. His clothing was more Dust Bowl Goodwill than Central Florida Casual. He wore rumpled shirts, loose-fitting slacks, and what looked like the army boots he wore during his time with a medical unit in France during World War II. He sported a grizzled beard and a cap that looked better on Tom Joad. He was old, probably the worst sin you could commit on a campus known for frats, football and consistent listings on Playboy Magazine’s “Top Party Schools.” Schools made the grade by earning an A-plus in three criteria: Sex, nightlife, sports. Creative writing is not mentioned. Keggers under the palms were the order of the day and nobody really wanted to take a walk on the wild side or meet the man with the golden arm who prowled The Windy City’s mean streets.

Me – I wanted to take that walk. Nelson Algren was the real thing. Here he was, stuck in a classroom in one of the campus’s oldest buildings teaching writing to kids from Daytona and Apalachicola. I looked at him as a weathered sage. We were a wave of youth in the U.S.A. who knew very little about what life was like for most Americans. We wrote stories about surfing and soured relationships. The stories in Algren’s “Neon Wilderness” might have been about Martians for all we knew. Grifters and gamblers, whores and junkies. I wanted to know these people because I desperately wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

Nelson was generous of his time and expertise. He told great stories. One of our fellow students invited us to her apartment where we smoked dope. Nelson partook, noting that he used to smoke it with Chicago’s jazz musicians and the addicts he met when writing “The Man with the Golden Arm.” He even grew his own brand of weed outside his bungalow near Gary, Indiana.

Another night, my pal Big Mike, piled us into his big black station wagon and took us to the strip club where he was a bouncer. Big Mike was a teetotaling Vietnam vet whose studio apartment was piled high with cases of bottled Pepsi because he could never find enough Pepsi in Coca-Cola country. I had a feeling that Algren had been in rougher places but he was a good sport. After his second drink, he demonstrated how he would put his head between the dancer’s big breasts and make motorboat sounds. It shocked me, the idea of this old writer motorboating a stripper. What he might have been saying is this: “Don’t waste any time, boys. Do motorboats when you can. It all goes by faster than you know.” I wasn’t listening then but now know something about the brief span of a lifetime.

In class, Algren was kind to our stories but made suggestions to make them better. I wrote a story about a homeless guy getting evicted from a tent in a mall parking lot. Algren said it needed some work. He handed out his recommended reading list. I wish I still had it. Hemingway was on it along with books I didn’t know: “A House for Mr. Biswas” by V.S. Naipaul, “The End of the Game and Other Stories” by Julio Cortazar, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Good Soldier Svejk” by Jaroslav Hasek, and the collected stories of John Collier. On the last night of class, Algren handed me a slip of paper with his agent’s name and address and told me to contact her. I didn’t see him do that with any of the other students and felt pretty special. I never followed up. I had nothing to show an agent except a half-finished story and late-night journal entries.

A year later, my next writing prof was Harry Crews. I figured he probably knew some of the same people Algren did, ne’er-do-wells and junkies and killers. Algren came from the mean streets and Crews from the mean swamps of the Okefenokee. If you’re curious about how mean it was, read his memoir “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” This was before Crews got sober and didn’t always make it to class, regaling the locals at Lillian’s Music Store which wasn’t a music store. When he did, he told great stories. One night, he read aloud his favorite story, “How Beautiful with Shoes” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, a wonderful writer whom nobody in class had ever heard of, This from Wikipeda: “Steele has been called ‘America's recognized master of the popular short story’ between World War I and the Great Depression.” Crews wrote an Esquire column called “Grits” and had stories and essays featured in Playboy. One I remember the best was “The Button-down Terror of David Duke,” infamous KKK grand wizard from Louisiana. Crews wrote about an ill-fated backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail that ended in a Tennessee town that once convicted and hung a circus elephant for stomping a boy to death.

I was lucky to have two great early mentors. At the time, I didn’t understand it but knew it was important to my imagined writing career. After graduation, I worked in Denver as a sportswriter and edited a weekly alternative newspaper. I was a corporate editor until I decided it was killing me. I wrote a novel and snagged myself an agent in Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency. He helped me revise the book and shopped it around. I told him I was quitting my job and he advised me to get a numbing day job so I could have plenty of energy left for writing. Instead, a went off to get my M.F.A. at Colorado State University. It helped my writing and helped me get published. It also sent me off with a career as an arts administrator at a state arts council and then the National Endowment for the Arts. It cut into my writing time. I’m retired now and have time to think about paths taken and not taken. I write every day and have a short list of published fiction. I have a fine family and a house. Still, Ray Powers might have been right. I’ll never know.

Thanks again. I look forward to reading your other work.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay, michaelshaywyo@hotmail.com, hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com

P.S.: Ordered a copy of “Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters” after reading about it in your book. Couldn’t resist.

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

"For All Mankind" shows what the U.S, space program could have been

As I move on to the second season of “For All Mankind” on Apple-Plus, I keep asking the same question:

What happened to us?

By us, I mean U.S. as in US of A. The show posits a vigorous space program motivated mainly by the Soviets beating us to the moon in 1969. One member of the Soviet crew is a woman cosmonaut. Down on earth, Americans with hangdog looks are watching this on TV. They can’t believe the Reds beat us to the moon. Didn’t President Kennedy promise us that we would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade? We did, in fact, land a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, well ahead of the Russkis who never managed it.

The genius of this show is showing how the U.S. took the Soviet challenge, recruited women astronauts (Nixon’s idea) and landed one on the moon to claim a spot on the rock. The astronaut was a chain-smoking blonde, Jerrie Cobb, who was one of the first choices back when NASA tried to match the Mercury 7 men with a female contingent. The Cobb in the series (Molly) goes to space while the real Cobb, an accomplished aviator who passed all the NASA tests, did not. Season 1 Episode 4 is dedicated to her.

That’s the cool thing about the series, imagining what could have been. It resembles the “Hollywood” series on Netflix which imagined a post-war Tinseltown that appreciated its gay actors and didn’t demonize them. Also, in the dystopian TV world, the U.S. lost World War II and was divided up between Nazi Germany and Japan. Or you can see an America which is now the Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Also, zombies. Zombies everywhere.

I ask again: what happened to us? What happened to the U.S. space program? My father worked for the space program from 1964-69 in Daytona Beach. We kids watched all of the launches. We were happy when July 20, 1969, came around and showed the U.S. what we were made of. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Ran into trouble with the balky shuttle, losing two crews and our sense of adventure. Vietnam kicked our ass as did all the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

We get to see what could have been on “For All Mankind.” I am only on the second episode of the second season so I do not yet know what ultimately happens. But I do know what has not happened during my lifetime. And that’s very sad. 

Cold War nuke site open for visitors on Wyoming’s high prairie

M as in Mike

I as in India

K as in Kilo

E as in Echo

That’s the spelling of my nickname in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the phonetic alphabet. You’ve used it if you have a commonly misspelled name, or if you find yourself on the end of a Mumbai-based IT help line. Help: H as in Hotel, E as …….

The alphabet is helpful but can be crucial in a military operation or if you’re a pilot on an international airline flight.

Or, let’s say the unthinkable happens and you are charged with the launch of a nuclear strike from a hole in the ground beneath the frozen Wyoming prairie. “Attention Quebec Zero One, we have some bad news for you and the rest of the planet….”

It never happened at the Quebec 01 Missile Alert Facility located about 30 minutes north of my house in Cheyenne. Coincidentally, that’s the amount of time it would take from missile launch in Wyoming to detonation in the former Soviet Union. On Friday, I thought about that as we returned from our tour of Q-01, now a Wyoming State Historic Site. Born in 1950, I’ve had nightmares about a nuclear apocalypse. But it’s been awhile since those duck-and-cover drills of elementary school and the very real scare of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

My father worked at Denver-based Martin Company, later Martin-Marietta and now Lockheed Martin. He supervised subcontractors building the earlier iteration of Minuteman and MX sites – Atlas and Titan. He did that job in Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska and Washington State and Kansas. He dragged his big family along, which gave us a unique view of the western U.S. and fodder for future therapy sessions. 

I was 11 when he arrived home from work in Wichita laden with canned goods and water jugs and commanded us all to get down in the basement. That spooky, musty place was where we were going to ride out the nuke firefight unleashed by the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The fear was real. History provided a better ending, thankfully. We avoided life as cellar dwellers or death as crispy critters. Two years later, we moved to Florida. Dad’s work with nukes was over and he now turned his attention to getting Americans to the moon.

Our family history is part of the fabric of American history. Maybe that’s why I was so anxious to take my visiting sister Eileen to the state’s newest historical site. She loves history, as do I. She is eight years younger than me, so we experienced those times in dramatically different ways.  But, as curious historians, we both know what happened in the world since World War II. The nuclear age began with the twin bombings of Japan that ended World War II. The arms race began between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that many thought would end with M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction. 

The western U.S. played a major role with Los Alamos and the first tests in the New Mexico desert. Many nuke tests followed, their fallout drifting over many cities, including Denver. We were all downwinders. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant was established between Denver and Boulder. Coloradans built plutonium triggers there. It was the site of at least one major accident that created a crop of local downwinders.

According to interpretive exhibits at Quebec 01, the government chose the interior West as hidey holes for its missiles for several reasons: Low population density (more antelope than people}; distant from the coasts and possible Russki nuclear sub strikes; the northern Rockies and Plains were closer to the Arctic Circle, the quickest missile route to Moscow and Red nuke sites. 

B-52s took off from western sites on their way to their fail-safe lines. Many a missileer did stints in the frozen wastelands of Minot and Great Falls and Cheyenne and still do. You can forgive a young airman/woman from Atlanta getting orders for Cheyenne and saying something about going to the middle of nowhere.

But I live there and it’s not so bad. I spent much of my working life touring Wyoming on behalf of the arts. You might be surprised by the art that’s created in this big semi-empty space. The humanities play a major role in our lives. Thus, we spawn some fine state parks and historic sites, even have a state agency to oversee them. Wyoming State Parks and Historic Sites employees staff the sites spread around the state. They are based at Quebec 01 to conduct tours and answer many questions posed by the curious. The site opened just three weeks ago after the feds gifted it to the state in 2010.  Staff say that it was stripped to the bone after being decommissioned in 2005. The Air Force brought back some items. Former missileers, retired airmen, and just plain collectors donated other items, such as the VHS player located next to one of the launch chairs (the TV is no longer there). The space looks fine now but it still a work in progress, according to our guide.

There are entrance fees, as there are at most state sites. If you are disabled and use a wheelchair or a walker as I do, call ahead and staff will deploy ramps over the challenging spots in the underground launch capsule. An elevator takes visitors from the topside facility and its historic exhibits to the capsule. Step off the elevator and pass through the gateway that, back in the day, could be sealed by a 30-ton blast door.

For background, go to https://wyoparks.wyo.gov/index.php/places-to-go/quebec-01. The site includes photos going back to its building in 1962 all the way to the recent renovation.

Our history, and maybe your family’ history, is just a short drive away.

The Birth of a Nation Feb. 17 at LCCC in Cheyenne

I first saw "Birth of a Nation" in a college film class 43 years ago. I had some electives to burn in my pursuit of a degree in English. The prof showed us "The Great Train Robbery," the first American Western film in 1903. It may have been based on Butch Cassidy's famous Wyoming train robbery. But did they film it in Wyoming? No -- New Jersey.

In the film class, we moved on to D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" or, as it was originally titled, "The Clansman." You can see the entire film on YouTube. Or you can see it in Cheyenne at 9 a.m.on Saturday, Feb. 17, at LCCC as part of the African-American Black Film Exposition Feb. 14-17. It's a long film -- more than three hours -- but worth the viewing. It's one director's view of race relations. Griffith was a Southerner, steeped in myth and ritual and prejudice. His movie doesn't only reflect his views but those of many Americans at the time -- and now.

1915 is 103 years ago. My grandparents were young adults. My parents were ten years away from birth. It would be 35 years before I arrived on the scene. Racism was a fact of life when I was a kid in the West and South. Racism still is alive and well in the U.S. I wish it weren't so but it is.

"Birth of a Nation" was a big hit at theaters. Promoter for the film was George Bowles, the PR whiz who worked with the Committee on Public Information to make its film, "Pershing's Crusaders." a hit in May 1918.  The CPI was just hitting its stride on disseminating propaganda when the armistice was declared. But it would also be used to stir up the threat against Bolshevism after the war.

A CPI propaganda illustration sent out during the war:. The U.S. was thinking ahead to the fight against Bolsheviks. Note the foreign-looking commie.  

History comes looking for you.

The Rolling Stones rock Havana today. The Western World's Capitalist Songsters in one of the last bastions of international communism. Unthinkable a year ago. The Leader of the Free World attends a baseball game in Havana. President Obama, the first black president in U.S. history, sits next to Raul Castro; they trade quips about on-base percentages and ERAs. The day before, they were debating Americanism vs. Cubano Communism. That was a course we had in high school in Florida -- Americanism vs. Communism. That usually meant the Soviet variety, but we were only too aware that Red Cuba was a threat just 90 miles from Florida. Mr. Muir taught eighth grade at Our Lady of Lourdes and we played basketball with his son. Mr. Muir, a respected teacher at a private school in Havana, fled Castro in 1959 and now teaching snotty-nosed Catholic Anglos in the same town that his honored former dictator Fulgencio Batista owned a house along the river. My father, who stashed supplies in our Wichita basement for the Apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis three years before, now pointed out Batista's house whenever we drove by in the station wagon overloaded with his Catholic brood.

And a NROTC midshipman, 1970, I spent three weeks in Cuba. Gitmo, now the U.S. terror prison, a confused 19-year-old. We tried to pick up the teen daughters of Gitmo officers at the base pool. Barbed wire barriers threaded the border, guard towers manned by soldiers the only Reds we could actually see. Soviet spies followed in our ship's wake, Russian fishing trawlers the big joke, antennae crowding out the fishing nets on deck. At night at the officer's club, we heard pilots' stories about night raids against the commies of North Vietnam, of buddies lost to SAMs. "You'll be there soon enough," they said, "that war not ending anytime soon."

My vas pokhoronim! -- "We will bury you!"  said Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the height of the Cold War. Fall 1956 -- I was five. My father buried nuclear missiles deep beneath the Colorado prairie.

Said Obama to the Cubans: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”

History comes looking for you.

Cindy Hill has a manifesto and a little red book

Cindy Hill may be a commie.

She has a “little red book” just like Chairman Mao. She has written a “manifesto” just like Karl Marx.

So wazzup with Cindy?

She’s running for governor against the Republican incumbent, Matt Mead, and another Repub challenger, Taylor Haynes, a physician, rancher and Tea Party fave.

At least they’re not commies.

My kids and my nieces and nephews and all of their fellow travelers may not know what a commie is. They probably don’t even know what a “fellow traveler” is. No, it has nothing to with travel. It has everything to do with hanging out with commies, traveling in the same circles. If it quacks like a duck…

And so on.

Monday's CasperStar-Tribune explored Ms. Hill’s little red book and manifesto. The newspaper found some inaccuracies in Hill's online manifesto, which is hardly surprising when it comes to our Superintendent of Public Instruction. Remember that when she ran in 2010 she argued for the teaching of creationism side-by-side with evolution. She must believe that the dinos, such as our very own Allosaurus, accompanied our human ancestors as they searched the high prairie for edible plants and small game.

Prehistoric Man: What do you think, Al. Should I eat this pretty plant?

Al O. Saurus (rolling his eyes): Sure, man, it’s not poisonous.

Prehistoric Man eats plant, keels over and dies.

Al: Silly man. This race of cretins is never going to make it. The dinosaurs shall inherit the earth.

That’s the thing about dinos – they had brains the size of walnuts. We had much bigger brains and survived, leading to today’s Republicans who don’t believe in global warming because… well, just because.

Miss Atomic Bomb did not exist -- but she could have

Hubba hubba! Alas, this Miss Atomic Bomb never really existed. She has a neat story though at http://digital.library.unlv.edu/objects/nts/1226

Ground zero, baby!

That phrase would look good on a T-shirt. Mushroom cloud in background. "Welcome to Cheyenne" logo on there somewhere.

Cheyenne is ground zero should the Russkis ever get tired of harassing Ukrainian grandmothers and get back to their Cold War role of harassing humankind. Laramie County has loads of Minuteman IIIs, baby. And despite the fact that some nuke officers heads rolled over recent cheating improprieties (did you see last Sunday's "60 Minutes" piece about our local missile ranch?), armed missiles still dwell on our prairie, ready for launch.

F.E. Warren AFB went nuclear in 1958. Several generations of Cheyenne residents have been hatched since then. Which begs the question: why aren't there more signs of The Nuclear Age in our fair city? We have the base, sure, and there's an impressive array of missiles flanking the main entrance. And Missile Drive snakes its way a short distance through town. But where are the Atomic Cafes and the Nuclear Sushi Bars? If I was starting a craft brewery, I would call it Nuke Brews or Atomic Brewing. I'd name my beers after Cold War icons -- Red Scare Ale, Fail-Safe IPA, Pershing Porter. Our motto: "Glow-in-the-dark goodness."

There is an Atomic Advertising listed in the Yellow Pages. And we have the venerable Atlas Theatre downtown, as well as the Atlas Motel  (not so venerable), Atlas Towing and Atlas Van Lines. Thing is, those places named Atlas may have the same namesake of Atlas the rocket -- the great god Atlas of Greek mythology, the Titan who held up the world. Titan -- another great name for a missile. 

If NYC can have a big-ass Atlas statue, why can't we?

What other towns can claim ground zero honors? Minot, N.D., and Great Falls, Mont. That's good -- we can all be the three points of a Rocky Mountain Nuke Tour. T-shirts all around. We are getting a state park at a former nuke control center north of town. That's a start.

Nukes are no joke, you might say. But the dark humor tradition demands that we turn mutually assured destruction (MAD, like the magazine) into 21st century kitsch.

The Cold War years were 1947-1991. That's a 44-year span, a couple generations worth of humans living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. There's some history to preserve there, many memories.Consider that Cheyenne was established as a railroad camp in 1867 and Wyoming became a state in 1890. The Cold War era represents 30 percent of the time the city's existed and 35 percent -- more than one-third -- of the time we've been a state. If I just consider my time on earth, two-thirds of my life was spent as a noncombatant but a very real target of the Cold War. I don't want a medal. I just want that time to be remembered for what it was.

For the military, the Cold War went from September 1945 -- the month after the end of the hot war -- to Dec. 26, 1991. The Cold War Veterans of America are lobbying Congress to make May 1 a Cold War Remembrance Day. I suppose it's no coincidence that May 1 was once a national holiday in the Soviet Union. My father was on occupation duty in Germany through the end of 1945, which makes him a Cold War veteran. Korea and Vietnam and even Gulf War I military are Cold War veterans -- those first two would never have happened without without the paranoid fever engendered by the commie menace. Veterans also want to build a monument to the Cold War -- lest we forget. Millions of Americans have been born since the end of 1991 -- my daughter, for one -- and they have nary a clue about the Cold War. They have the residue of their own wars to deal with.

We need to remember the Cold War right here in Cheyenne. I would love to see Cold War-themed public art. Not boring old representational bronzes. Let's use some imagination, as much creativity as went into Mutually Assured Destruction and the fail-safe device and "peacekeepers" and bomb shelters and "Dr. Strangelove" and Red Scares and "Star Wars" defense systems and blacklists and Richard Nixon and the domino theory and the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant and all the rest. It's a mother lode of material. Let's use it before it's forgotten -- or whitewashed. 

The era of witch hunts, loyalty oaths and the "Lavender Scare" returns to Cheyenne today

Authors appreciate full-page newspaper coverage, especially if it appears on the day of a major book promo event.

Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Managing Editor Reed Eckhardt wrote an opinion piece this morning that explores Rodger McDaniel's book "Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt." The book explores the dark days of the Red Scare in Washington, D.C., when many careers were ruined by Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy. It was a time of loyalty oaths and blacklists and the anti-homosexual "Lavender Scare" and extreme partisan politics. Sen. Hunt was ensnared and ended up killing himself.

Read the book to discover the whole sordid story, and why it took 60 years to tell it. Better yet, come to today's mock trial of McCarthy and his two U.S. Senate Republican fellow travelers, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho. Presiding will be retired Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Michael Golden and former Gov. Dave Freudenthal will serve as prosecutor. Defense will be represented by Diane Lozano, director of the State Public Defender's Office. The trial gets underway at 1 p.m. today at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 1908 Central Ave. Free and open to the public. Buy a copy of the book while you're at it.

I mentioned this before but I'm a witness at today's trial. I am playing the role of Roy L. Elson, administrative assistant to Sen. Carl Hayden and candidate for the U.S. Senate. I know some secrets....

Meanwhile, go read Eckhardt's column in the WTE. Like any good reviewer, he takes the author to task for perceived oversights. But it's a good overview of Rodger's book and the scary era that spawned it.

Rodger McDaniel's new book, "Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins," will debut on April 2

Here's some good news. Rodger McDaniel's biography of Wyoming U.S. Sen. Lester Hunt will be released on Tuesday, April 2. He's holding a reception at the Historic Governor's Mansion in downtown Cheyenne on that evening from 7-9 p.m. This will be your first chance to get a copy. 

Later that week, you may want to drop in on "The Trial of Joe McCarthy, et. al." on Sunday, April 7,at 1 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Cheyenne (Lester Hunt's church). The U.S. senators who were involved in the blackmail of Lester Hunt will be prosecuted in a "mock jury trial." Former Governor and U.S. Attorney Dave Freudenthal will prosecute. Retired Supreme Court Justice Michael Golden will be the trial judge. State Public Defender Diane Lozano will be defense counsel. Witnesses playing the roles of Drew Pearson, TA Larson, Red Jacoby and detective Roy Blick will present the evidence. The jury will render a historic verdict, according to Rodger.

Question: May I serve on the jury?

1980s calling to get their foreign policy back

One of the better zingers of last night's debate by President Obama (picked up from Crooks & Liars blog):

Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

You say that you’re not interested in duplicating what happened in Iraq. But just a few weeks ago, you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now. And the -- the challenge we have -- I know you haven’t been in a position to actually execute foreign policy -- but every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong.

Check out this cool new site, which also has a playable game of "Asteroids." Talk about your 1980s flashback. 

This just in -- health care is a commie plot

Clueless in Montana (from the Button Valley Bugle)

In memoriam: Colorado writer Ed Quillen

Freelance journalist Ed Quillen died at 61 last Sunday in Salida, Colo., a place he put on the map with his humorous, curmudgeonly columns. For decades, his columns were a must-read for me. His final piece was in the June 6 Denver Post and focused on Colorado’s rep as “home of the Red Scare,” a tradition that goes back to the 1870s, with the labeling of Utes as “indigenous communists” who must go. Big Bill Haywood and other union leaders got the commie label later and now we have the Denver Republican Party inviting Fla. Repub Rep. Allen West to speak about modern-day commies in the ranks of the Democrats. Who’s a Colorado commie in Congress? Rep. Jared Polis, millionaire entrepreneur turned public servant. Ed, We are going to miss you! Read his final column at http://www.denverpost.com/quillen/ci_20543845/yet-another-red-scare?source=pkg. Read his obit at http://www.denverpost.com/obituaries/ci_20781716/denver-post-columnist-ed-quillen-dies-at-age

Sunlight of a Cheyenne autumn morning

Driving my daughter Annie along I-25 this morning to visit a friend. She commented that she liked this part of the morning, about 9 a.m. The way the light looks and feels, the way it lights up the prairie. I had to admit that it was a beautiful November morning. Great light for an artist. Wispy horsetail clouds lit up on the eastern horizon. Even the gray Wyoming steppes looked brighter.

As I drove home alone, I paid more attention to the light. On top of the College Drive overpass, I saw a UP train traveling east, its dozens of white freight cars lit up by the sun. I wondered if it was a coal train. How funny that a coal train chugs east under the bright blades of Cheyenne's wind farm just west of the hulking white Wal-Mart distribution center. Between the rail line and the wind farm, I-80 stretches out, trucks pulling uphill toward the Laramie Range Summit and some all the way to San Francisco. Eastbound truckers are damn happy to be out of the mountains and Wyoming's crappy late-autumn weather and wild winds.

Not sure why autumn's morning light made me think of energy and transportation. But the College Drive overpass on top of I-25 gave me a great view of Cheyenne's reasons for being. Highway crossroads. Railroads. Wind farm to the west and Frontier Refinery to the east. If I look hard enough, I can see a few pumping oil wells out in the county. Up north is F.E. Warren A.F.B. and its many nukes. Guess you could call this an energy issue, although Warren's nukes are wrapped up in strategic metal and pointed at targets in the former Soviet Union. Odd to think that the former Commie powerhouse may now be a bigger threat as an energy-producing giant than it was as a Cold War "We Will Bury You" opponent.

Are nukes one of the solutions to the energy crisis? Right now, uranium is being mined again in northeast and central Wyoming. An in-state nuke plant could be in our future.

Deep thoughts on the day before Thanksgiving. Autumn's morning light shines on the present, provides clues to a possible future which often doesn't look so bright.

We don't need no stinkin' czars

Wyoming's lone U.S. Representative, Cynthia Lummis of Cheyenne, joined other Republican deep thinkers such as Michelle Bachmann (R-Penn.), Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), and Pete Sessions (R-Texas) as co-sponsors for H.R. 3226: The Czar Accountability and Reform Act or "CZAR."

I suppose this is an acceptable acronym. The legislators had to stoop to borrowing the first and second letters of "Czar." In reality, it should be TCAARA, but that's just an abbreviation and not an annoying acronym to wave in the faces of Democrats.

This bill proposes:

To provide that appropriated funds may not be used to pay for any salaries or expenses of any task force, council, or similar office which is established by or at the direction of the President and headed by an individual who has been inappropriately appointed to such position (on other than an interim basis), without the advice and consent of the Senate.

Sponsor is another deep thinker from the South, Rep. Jack Kingston [R-GA1]


I was surprised that Joe Wilson's name wasn't on the list of co-sponsors -- all Republicans, by the way. But you already knew that.

"The Disappeared" still haunt us

Nothing prepares you for the exhibition currently at the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

"The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos" brings together the work of 26 living artists from Latin America who, over the course of the last 30 years, made art about those who have disappeared.

I viewed the exhibit last week when I was in Laramie for the UW Art Museum's public art symposium.

The largest of the works shows a Guatemalan flag made from the exhumed bones of those killed during the country's dirty wars, which really were Cold War proxy battles between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Many of Latin America's killer thugs were military men trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Not all, of course. Paramilitary bands roved Guatemala and Argentina and El Salvador and Uruguay. They operated with the sometimes explicit -- and always implicit -- consent of the ruling juntas.

One of the most depressing works of the exhibit shows couples who were disappeared. Their crimes? Subversive activities. Belonging to student activist groups. Consorting with suspicious characters. Complaining about the government. Some couples were married and some weren't. The women were pregnant and they and their babies still are missing. The legend under the pictures read: "Baby was born on or about April 5, 1979" or "Baby thought to be due in December 1977." The mother was bayoneted or thrown from a chopper or beat to death while pregnant. Or the baby was born but never seen again. Neither was the mother and -- oftentimes -- the father. These were young couples who looked a lot like couples I knew when I was in my twenties in the 1970s. They looked like pictures I have of my wife and I. Happy. Together. But we're alive and they aren't.

"Exhumations: Appearing the Disappeared - Uncovering Repressive Archives in the Recovery of Historical Memory in Latin America" will be the topic discussed by Kate Doyle at the next Art Talk hosted by the UW Art Museum. Her presentation is set for Monday, April 13, 7 p.m. Doyle is a Senior Analyst for the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her talk will focus on uncovering the truth of military actions in Latin America during the mid-20th century, and the people who disappeared as a result.

Art Museum Director Susan Moldenhauer notes, "This talk comes at an historical moment in time, given the current news regarding the conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for crimes related to the death squads in that country." Doyle considers Fujimori’s conviction to be a landmark event. She states, "He is the first democratically elected president to be convicted of human rights crimes by his own country... in the world! Ever!"

The National Security Archive campaigns for the citizen’s right to know, investigates U.S. national security and foreign policy, and uses the Freedom of Information Act to obtain and publish declassified U.S. documents. Doyle directs several research projects on U.S. policy in Latin America for the Archive, including the Mexico Project, which aims to obtain the declassification of U.S. and Mexican government documents on the Mexican dirty war, and the Guatemala Project. Since 1992, she has worked with truth commissions in Latin America, including in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to obtain records from secret U.S. government archives in support of their human rights investigations.

Doyle’s public talk is in conjunction with the UW Art Museum’s current exhibition The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos exhibit. Doyle will also be giving a Gallery Walk Through of the exhibition from 10:30 a.m. to noon on Monday, April 13 at the Art Museum.

FMI: UW Art Museum at (307) 766-6622 or visit www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum
or the museum’s blog, www.uwartmuseum.blogspot.com/.

The museum is open Monday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Interesting to see that the exhibit originated with the North Dakota Museum of Art. N.D. poet Thomas McGrath would be proud.

Exhibit photo: Fernando Traverso from Rosario, Argentina, made a wall of silk "tombstones" emblazoned with the ghost image of a bicycle, one for each of his fellow resistance workers disappeared during those dark years of dictatorship. Why the bicycle? Because if someone went missing their abandoned bicycle served as early evidence of their fate. Entitled "In Memory, 2000-2001," the work consists of 29 silk banners, each 10 x 3.5 ft. with screened images of bicycles. Courtesy of the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Don't these people know they're on camera?

And where does all this hatred come from?

This filmed at John McCain's rally this morning at the Stock Show Arena in Denver.

"Daddy Grandpa, what's a "Socialist"

Gather 'round kids, and let me tell you a story about the old days of the Cold War, a war so cold that it almost froze us with fear.

We were afraid of a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R. Never heard of it, not even in History class? Well, the core of the U.S.S.R was Russia. The U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. butted heads on nearly everything. Our philosophies were as different as night and day. Back in the 1950s when I was a kid, America believed in freedom and equality, except for Negroes (African-Americans were known by this term), immigrants, homosexuals and women. The Soviets believed in the enslavement of all people, including Negroes, immigrants, homosexuals and women.

The Soviets wanted to spread their philosophy to all corners of the world, including Wyoming, and we fought them every step on the way. That's why we have so many nuclear missiles burrowed into the prairie outside Cheyenne. If the Russkis came to Wyoming and tried to change our way of life, we were going to shoot their eyes out with nukes. In the process, we would all be blind too, but nevermind that.

Because Americans were so afraid, they labeled anyone who didn't agree with them as "communists." Being a communist is kind of like being a socialist, although much scarier. So, if you were suspicious of your neighbor, if you thought he was some kind of community organizer or peacenik or civil rights activist, you labeled him a communist. Every Saturday at noon, people would gather in town squares all across American and curse the communists, who had been gathered there for convenience sake. We would call them "commie" or "commie symp" (sympathizer) or "Red" or "pinko" even "Socialist." If an insolent pinko spoke up, we would stone him or her to death. This made us feel so much better. The next day, we all went to church.

So you see, kids, Americans have a long tradition of name-calling. You can see the same tradition in action every day at a John McCain or Sarah Palin rally. "Socialist!" they shout, as if they actually knew what that meant. "Community organizer!" Ouch, that hurts. "Believer in redistribution of wealth!" Uh oh, someone's been reading "The Communist Manifesto." If anyone shouts "terrorist," you know that person watches Fox News.

I wouldn't be too concerned that all of this name calling will lead to the actual stoning to death of your neighbor. But you never know...