EPHEMERA

1995-2022

BRUCE JACKSON

B LA ZE VO X[ B OO KS ]
Buffalo, New York
Ephemera 1995-2022, On people, politics, art, justice, torture, and war
by Bruce Jackson
Copyright © 2023

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Photograph by Bruce Jackson

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-442-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940307

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 Introduction

Over the past 25 years, I’ve done three hundred, probably more, articles
for daily or weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, and internet sites. I long
ago stopped filing or even keeping a record of them. I’ve also given scores of
talks: some were singular events; others were parts of conferences or symposia.
Many of them became articles or chapters in books; some had a life no longer
than the event that occasioned them. And some were unpublished because I
never found the right periodical or book for them.
Earlier, most of my articles appeared in academic journals or
established periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly, Harpers’ Magazine, The
Nation, The New Republic, and the New York Times Magazine. My favorites of
those were collected in Disorderly Conduct (University of Illinois Press, 1992), a
book with the worst title I ever thought up. The few people who noticed it
seem to have taken it as a book on the misdemeanor offense, a matter of minor
interest; the editor backing it moved on during publication, so no one at the
Press advocated it. The book was published—and almost immediately
disappeared.
Since the late 1990s—because of a bad bridge design in Buffalo—my
interests have turned more to public affairs, so most of my article writing has
been for print and Internet weeklies and monthlies, such as Artvoice, The
Public, Counterpunch, and First of the Month.
Some of the weekly print publications I regularly wrote for—Artvoice,
The Public, Blue Dog and Buffalo Beat—have gone belly-up; only fragments of
some of their web sites survive. Stories carved into drying mud in
Mesopotamia have greater longevity than stories printed on paper; print has
greater longevity than Internet sites. Online pieces sometimes disappear when
the sites evaporate or morph into something else. Talks not translated into
print are the most ephemeral of all: many of the talks I gave over the years
made their way into articles and books; some never found the right home. So,

11
curiously, many of the more recent essays and talks are more ephemeral than
the ones that were published fifty years ago.

How the Buffalo News Got Me into This

This started with the political and social conflict that developed when
the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (usually referred to as the
PBA), a binational public benefit corporation, decided to increase the number
of lanes on the Peace Bridge, the three-lane steel structure that connects Fort
Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York. They were responding to a volume of
truck traffic that had been slowly increasing at the crossing through the 1970s
and 1980s, and which increased dramatically with the implementation of the
North American Free Trade Act in 1994. Their solution was to build a
companion three-lane steel bridge, almost a direct copy of the 1927 bridge
already in place.
In 1996, the city’s only daily newspaper, the Buffalo News sponsored a
bridge design competition, open to anyone. In 1998, the Buffalo Niagara
Partnership (formerly the Chamber of Commerce) joined the Public Bridge
Authority in sponsoring a design charette. Participants in the charette were not
permitted to vote on the several alternatives to the PBA’s plan and, at the end,
the News and the Partnership both said that the public should support
whatever choice the PBA made.
Opposition to the companion span developed steadily. A businessman
and an architect, John Cullen and Clinton Brown, constituted themselves as
“SuperSpan Upper Niagara PLC.” They got people to sign petitions and make
contributions that enabled them to take out ads arguing that instead of an
anachronistic steel twin span, the PBA should instead build a six-lane bridge
that would dramatize the border crossing. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a
passionate advocate of high quality public architecture, began saying that the
PBA should plan imaginatively rather than copy dully, that it should use this
opportunity to create a signature bridge, a bridge that would put an iconic
stamp on the region.
Bruno Freschi, then dean of the University at Buffalo School of
Architecture, in collaboration with the noted San Francisco bridge-maker T.Y.

12
Lin, designed a bold and imaginative six-lane single-pylon, concrete, cable-
stayed curved bridge to replace entirely the aging three-lane Peace Bridge.
Many people on the Buffalo side of the river thought the Freschi-Lin
design a fine solution to the problem, preferable by far to the Public Bridge
Authority’s companion plan. Why use high-maintenance century-old
technology, Freschi argued, and why build an equally ugly duplicate, when for
the same amount of money or less you could build something beautiful?
Senator Moynihan quickly became an advocate of Freschi’s and Lin’s signature
bridge design. With that design, opponents of the twin span for the first time
had a specific answer to the PBA’s litany: “Our design works here. What do
you have that’s better?” The problem was, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public
Bridge Authority wasn’t the least bit interested in something better. It had
made up its collective mind long before it even held public hearings to consider
various bridge designs, long before the Buffalo News competition, long before
the Partnership charette (which in retrospect turned out to have been a sham,
“a charade, not a charette,” as several architects later put it). The PBA would
consider nothing other than its steel twin span. The Buffalo Niagara
Partnership pushed hard for an immediate end to discussion and a quick start
to construction. The Buffalo News agreed.
The PBA never wavered in its decision to copy the 1927 bridge until a
New York judge and Buffalo’s mayor and Common Council gave it no other
choice.
In July 1997, Bruno Freschi urged me write an op-ed piece for the
Buffalo News about all of this. “They’re always asking you to write opinion
pieces for them. Write something about this. It might help.”
He was right about my relationship with the News. The editorial page
editor, Barbara Ireland, had several times asked me to write commentaries on
public issues or cultural affairs. I usually did, and she always published them, as
well as pieces I sent in on my own (this book ends with one of those, written in
1995).
So I wrote the piece that stands first in the second section of this
collection, “Talking Ugly.” But things had changed at the News. Barbara
Ireland had shortly before gone to the New York Times as op-ed editor, and

13
Gerald Goldberg, her replacement at the Buffalo News, didn’t know or care
who I might be. Barbara had always responded in a day or two; Goldberg
didn’t respond at all. After few weeks I called and left a message, and then a
few days later I called again. He said he’d looked at the piece that day but
wouldn’t use it because it was of no interest.
What Goldberg said next astonished me: “We had an editorial board
decision and decided that the bridge is a dead issue. The News is not interested
in the bridge question anymore and we won’t be running any more editorial
comments on it.” He wasn’t unfriendly. He said that my writing showed
promise and I shouldn’t let their lack of interest in this piece deter me from
sending something else in the future, if it was timely and of broad public
interest. The only reason they were rejecting it was because what I’d submitted
lacked timeliness and significance.
Um? The largest construction project in this part of the country since
the new campus of State University of New York at Buffalo thirty years earlier,
an opportunity to have something grand instead of something boring, a chance
to do something useful for a community that had been savaged by lousy public
works decisions for decades, a project with huge environmental issues—and
the only daily paper in town decides it’s “a dead issue”!
I told everybody. My son Michael, a Buffalo attorney and musician,
said, “Send it to Jamie Moses at Artvoice [then a Buffalo weekly]. He’ll print
it.” I tweaked the article a bit and mailed it. Moses published it about five days
later, on August 5, 1999.
There was an immediate reaction. Old friends and people I’d never met
called or emailed me about the bridge issue. Some said, “Leave it alone, you
can’t change decisions like this once they’ve been made.” Others said, “What
can I do?” WNED, the city’s public television station, asked me to do a pro-
and-con about the signature versus twin span issue with Andrew Rudnick,
president and CEO of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, an aggressive steel
twin-span advocate.
That, I thought, was the end of it, at least of my part of it—until the
last week of January 1999, when Jamie Moses called and said, “Don’t you think
it’s time you did another Peace Bridge article?”

14
 I did. I wound up writing about 100 articles about the Peace Bridge
affair for Artvoice and other publications. The first 64 appeared as a book, The
Peace Bridge Chronicles (1964).
I meant to write that first article on the bridge that Bruno talked me
into writing. And I meant to write the second one six months later, after Jamie
Moses called. But I never planned to do the rest of them. They just happened.
The Peace Bridge War was like Tarbaby: once I started slapping at it, there
was no way I was able to shake loose.
The longer it went on, the more I learned. The steel twin span wasn’t
just bad design; it was also lousy planning. The project would disrupt traffic in
Buffalo for most of a decade and the final truck flow would add a huge amount
of air and noise pollution to a section of the city already suffering some of the
region’s highest rates of lung disorders. In the short run, there would be jobs
created by the steel construction project – but most of them would go to
distant manufacturers; a bridge incorporating modern design and technology –
concrete cable-stayed – would bring jobs here. In the long run, the
anachronistic design favored by the Public Bridge Authority and the Buffalo
Niagara Partnership would add virtually nothing to Buffalo’s economy, and it
would impose continuing harm on Buffalo’s infrastructure. The steel bridge
would be vastly more expensive to maintain, which most people saw as a
disadvantage but which a few saw as a way to make a lot of money for a long
time, and those few seemed to be influencing the major decisions.
People had to know those things, they had to know that many of the
claims by Bridge spokesmen were absurd or mendacious, and that the Buffalo
News wasn’t reporting all it might. More and more people got involved and
they sent tips, questions, reports, leads. One email message began, “I work at
the Partnership and I want you to know that a lot of us on the staff don’t agree
with what Andy Rudnick is saying and I can tell you that they never polled the
membership about the bridge issue. “
How can you ignore things like that?

The Arrow of Time

Like a junkie, I got high on the rapid response.

15
 Most of my career has been as an academic and most of my books are
academic books. In the course of writing about the Peace Bridge War I came
to appreciate the difference between journalism and scholarship as I never had
before.
With journalism, whether factual reporting or opinion, you submit your
copy sometime between the event you’re reporting on and your paper’s
deadline. If it’s an ongoing story, you publish ongoing reports. There’s an
arrow of time: what you know and think at the end of a series of stories may be
very different from what you knew and thought at the beginning of the series,
and the writing reflects that. Every article along the way includes, overtly as
part of the text or covertly as part of your understanding, what you learned last
time and the time before.
With scholarship, you publish your work after everything is over. The
last thing you find out or decide modulates every single page. If at the end of
your research and thinking you have a key insight, you alter everything to
incorporate that key insight. What the reader sees first – the introduction – is
the section you write last of all. How could it be otherwise? You cannot
introduce what does not yet exist.
When I was writing primarily for academic journals (which published
articles a year or two after submission) and for literary periodicals such as
Atlantic and Harper’s (which published articles three or four months after
submission), a friend who was a reporter on the Charleston Gazette said to me,
“You have all the time you want to write what you think, and by the time it
comes out you don’t remember what it was any more. What I write tonight is
on my doorstep tomorrow morning, and it’s wrapping fish the next day.”
At the time, I thought what she said applied only to cloture: she could
be done with something and on to something new far faster than I. But it’s
more than that: in scholarship, you’re responsible for all of your facts. In
journalism, you’re responsible for only that day’s facts. If, in journalism, you
meet on Thursday someone who gives you data showing a totally new aspect of
what you had in the paper on Wednesday, that’s just material for an article that
will be in Friday’s or Saturday’s paper. If, in scholarship, you meet on Thursday
someone who gives you data showing a totally new aspect of what you just sent

16
to the publisher, you send the publisher a letter saying, “Hold it, gotta make
some changes.” And if the publisher says, “Too late,” you take a lot of Maalox.
There’s another major difference in the two modes of writing: the way
each regards and utilizes what people say or the documents people or
organizations create. In daily or weekly journalism, spoken or printed
utterances are their own validation; they’re what the story is. It’s perfectly
adequate to have an article about an official’s press conference that does
nothing more than quote or summarize what the mayor said, or to have an
article about a report delivered to the press by a corporation or public agency
that does nothing more than quote or summarize what the report seems to say.
In scholarship, utterances are only data; they’re not just used, they’re
also examined. What the official said and what the report claimed are of no
moment in themselves. They matter only insofar as they become part of the
analysis or exploration or explanation of something larger, more complex, more
ranging, deeper.
Neither mode is of itself better or worse than the other. They serve
different ends and therefore ask different questions.
Writing without a deadline for a weekly newspaper lies somewhere
between the two: sometimes you’re just getting the facts out, sometimes you’re
trying to figure out what the facts mean, and sometimes you’re trying to do
both at once.
One of the great pleasures of scholarly writing is, when you’re done
with it, you’re done with it. You can move on to something else. One of the
great pleasures of newspaper writing or giving a talk about something is, when
you’re done with today’s version, tomorrow always gives you a chance to do it
better, deeper, another way. So, what you’re going to read now are drafts from
moments in time. They are drafts I like. Revision is always possible.

B.J. May 31, 2023

17
1. Personal Encounters
The Beat Goes On
(First of the Month, October 1, 2019)

I’ll begin at the end: I’m now in almost-infinitely better physical shape
than I was a few days ago. And between then and now, nothing hurt.
On Saturday, September 9, I was in Philadelphia for a Wooster Group
performance of The B-Side, their play based on some of my early work. In the
Philadelphia airport Sunday, I had to stop frequently because of discomfort
behind my sternum. When I sat down, the discomfort went away; when I
walked fifty yards, it came back. I’d had a few such episodes earlier, which my
internist thought was probably acid reflux. He’s a careful guy, he so he sent me
to a cardiologist for a workup, just to be sure.
She said, “It may be reflux, but you’ve got a lot of risk factors.” One of
the key factors is that my father’s side of the family had a terrible coronary
history: none of them lived close to my age (I’m 83), and several didn’t make it
past 40. She scheduled me for an ordinary echo stress text yesterday,
September 11.
Sunday, when I got home from Philadelphia, I wrote both doctors a
note describing what happened in the airport. They both called the next
morning, expressing concern. The cardiologist said she was going to do the
echo stress test anyway, but she was also going to send me for an angiogram,
maybe in a few days, maybe immediately, depending on what the stress test
revealed.
Tuesday night, Diane Christian and I did our usual session of Buffalo
Film Seminars at the Dipson Amherst Theater. It’s a weekly film series we’ve
been running for 20 years. Each week, we spend maybe 20 minutes
introducing the film; it screens; then we have an open discussion. That night’s
film was Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours. Everything went fine except,
halfway thought our introduction to the film, I couldn’t remember Sturges’s
name. Diane had to remind me. Afterwards, she said, “You’re under some
stress.” I hadn’t thought I was, but I was. I had a pretty good notion of how
Wednesday was going to end up.

21
 They did the resting echo cardiogram. Then I got up on the treadmill,
Surprisingly, I had no discomfort at all; I completed the routine only mildly
out of breath, which was normal for the pace and elevation we reached. The
post-exercise cardiogram, however, was lousy. I don’t know what she saw, but
she didn’t like it. “Your heart’s perfectly sound, but… I’m sending you for an
angiogram right now,” she said.
That’s what I’d suspected that might happen, so I had a charger for my
iPhone and a Kindle in my shoulder bag. Diane and I got ready to go to the
car.
“He’s going in an ambulance,” the cardiologist said. Diane asked why.
“Because he might have a heart attack on the way,” the cardiologist said. She
stepped out of the room for a moment. She returned and said, “They’ll be
waiting for you at the hospital.”
When they put me in the ambulance, I said to the driver, “My wife’s
going to be following us in a white Honda Pilot.” He said he’d take care not to
lose her. On the way to the hospital, I took some iPhone photos of Diane
following us.
The hospital had me in a room immediately on arrival. Most of the
people in the rooms we passed getting to my room looked to be in very scary
condition. Maybe five or ten minutes after I was settled in (that means, attired
in that absurd open-backed gown), the surgeon came into my room. We
chatted and she told me what she was going to do. “If we can fix it here, we
will. If we can’t, we’ll do something else.” I asked when she was going to do it.
“Now,” she said.
She gave me some numbers I remember only vaguely. I think she said
the procedure was pretty safe, but there was a one in 300 chance of something
going awry. And there was a one in 100 chance of infection afterwards. At
first, I thought those were great odds, then it occurred to me that the possible
consequence of being on the wrong end of those odds was death.
They had me on a gurney as soon as the surgeon left the room. As they
were wheeling me into the operating room, the nurse pushing the gurney said,
“Would you two like a last kiss before we go in?”
Diane said, “We already did that, but sure.”

22
 I said, “How about a blowjob?”
The nurse made a slight gurgling noise in her throat that was either
suppressed laughter or horror. As we moved along, I thought, “It would have
been wittier to have said, in a British accent, ‘I suppose a blowjob is out of the
question,’” but there was no way to revise: you can revise a written text before
you send it, but words uttered are out there. (Hi-ho, Rudy Giuliani.)
I was thinking such foolishness when they hit my drip tube with stuff
that, as an old folksong had it, “drove dull care away.” I never had time to get
anxious.
The only things I felt were the brief prick of the needle with the stuff
numbing my wrist (they went in through the radial artery) and a not-painful
sensation of the catheter going through my bicep. I said, “Are you in my
bicep?”
The surgeon said, “Is it hurting?”
I said, “No, I’m just curious.”
That wasn’t significant enough to rate a response. She bent back to her
work. A few seconds later, I was about to ask, “Are you in?” but I saw on the
monitor what was obviously a beating heart. She was in.
The pumped in the dye to light up the arteries. There was, she told me,
only a single compromised artery, one of those feeding the right coronary
artery, which is located exactly where I’d felt the chest discomfort in
Philadelphia.
They inserted a stent, and that was it. After a while, the surgeon said,
“Somebody get me some other shoes. I don’t want to track the floor up with all
this blood.” I understood why they had a partial curtain blocking my field of
view on the side where they’d been working.
While they were getting ready to put me on the cart to take me back to
the room, a nurse showed me before and after pictures. The felonious artery
had been 90% blocked. I really was dangerously close to something depressing:
a heart attack or a stroke. But now, that is completely fixed and I know none of
the other arteries is compromised, which is very good news indeed. Something
is going to get me, but the CV system lost its opportunity.

23
 I’d been out of my room no more than 90 minutes. The entire process,
from arrival at the cardiologist’s for the stress test to being back in my hospital
room bed took four hours and ten minutes! They kept me there overnight for
monitoring, then set me free about 10:30 Thursday morning. I had been out of
the house 22 hours. We got home a little after 11 A.M. After we let the dog
out, I said, “I’m going to have a martini.”
Diane said, “Do you think it’s safe to have a martini?”
“Nothing here”—I pointed at the pile of instructions they’d given me at
the hospital—“says to avoid them.”
“Isn’t it a little early for a martini?” she said.
“Not today, it isn’t,” I said.
She had one, too. Then I took a nap. Then I got up and went back to
work.
I felt, and continue to feel perfectly fine. There’s no recovery period
from this. It’s sort of like a root canal, only easier (because the dope is far
better): you go in with a problem; you come out without the problem; whatever
discomfort got you there is totally gone.
The only traces indicating something had transpired were two bruises:
one on my left arm, where the drip had gone in; the other on my right wrist,
just above the insertion point. The day after the surgery, the bruise on my wrist
had the shape of four fingers, just like one of those strangulation victim photos
on TV. One of the nurses had, obviously, manually clamped my radial artery
for a while. Both bruises were gone in a few days.
The operation was done at Mercy Hospital of Buffalo. It’s not one of
the city’s major hospitals. If major work had to be done, I’d have been moved
to Cleveland Clinic, if there was time, or to Buffalo General, if there wasn’t.
But the cardiologist knew that the staff there could handle this phase of it
perfectly well, that they’d take care of me immediately, and that once out of the
OR they would be constantly careful, solicitous, and friendly. The three or four
times I pushed the button, someone was in the room within one minute.
The only time I had to wait for anything was getting to the car. The
physician’s assistant on duty said Diane couldn’t wheel me to the parking lot;
we had to wait for someone she referred to as “The Transporter.” (I thought of

24
“The Cleaner” in Pulp Fiction.) He didn’t come for a while so we tried to sneak
off, but she caught us. When he did come, he took a far more circuitous route
to the parking garage than Diane had taken coming in. “It’s raining out now,”
he said. “If we go the way you came, you’ll get wet.” We had to wait a long
time for the parking attendant to bring the car up. I asked the Transporter if
he could break a $20 bill. He said he couldn’t, so I gave him the twenty. He’d
spent a lot of time with us, and he’d told us good stories along the way and
while we’d waited for the car. He refused it. “That’s entirely too much for
something like this,” he said. Buffalo is like that.
So: I got rid of something that might have killed me; I learned that my
CV system is (now) in very good shape; I got the incentive I needed to get me
back on my exercise routine; and, as I said, nothing hurt.
A happy story, but consider one thing: I work for a university and I
have a very good health plan. Other than a $25 co-pay at the cardiologist and
$5 for a three-month supply of the blood-thinner I have to take for a year, this
didn’t cost me a dime. What if I’d been one of the millions of Americans
without a health plan? Would I have gotten to write, and you have gotten to
read, this report?

25
Emily Rose
(Buffalo Spree, November 15, 2013)

Meeting
The first time I encountered Emily Rose was at the Buffalo Animal
Shelter, where she was trying to claw her way out of a cage with a concrete
floor. She was then about 50 pounds and six months old. Her paws were
bloody from the digging, but that seemed to bother her not at all. The whole
time we were there she dug, and bled. She wanted out of jail.
Across the aisle was a dog who seemed mostly German Shepherd, who
sat very neatly, wagged his tail and seemed to be saying, “Take me, I’ll be
good.”
Emily Rose was, the animal shelter person told us, a castaway from
someone at the Seneca reservation near town. She kept running off and was
too much trouble for her owner to bother with. Henry, the mostly-German
Shepherd, she said, was a stray found in the streets of Buffalo. They thought
he was about three years old. “That one,” he said pointing at Emily, “will get
bigger.” That day, Emily came up to Henry’s shoulder. She would eventually
tower over him and top out at 110 pounds.
We took them both. Henry (no one knew what his previous name had
been; Henry is the name our daughter Rachel gave him, in honor of the author
of Walden) and Emily Rose.

Henry and Emily

Henry was to be Rachel’s dog and Emily ours. Rachel was then living
in the apartment above our garage. She bought all kinds of things for Henry:
bowl, pillow, dish, toys. But all Henry would do was go to the bottom of the
stairs and moan. When she opened her door, he rushed to our house, very close
by, and scratched at the door. It turned out the only thing Henry wanted in life
was to be near Emily. They had never known one another before the animal
shelter but he had fallen desperately in love with her there, in his cell, across
the aisle from hers. Rachel wanted a dog and we didn’t want two dogs, but we

26
couldn’t beat true love. So Diane and I found ourselves with two dogs and
Rachel found herself with none.
For the next thirteen years, Emily dominated Henry, and Henry,
without reservation, adored Emily, his former across-the-aisle jailmate. We
would give them both dried chicken breast treats; she would eat hers, and then
go take his out of his mouth. It always seemed as if he were waiting for that.
When we split a can of tuna between them, he’d always leave a little in his
bowl, a tithe for her. She’d eat most of hers, go lap up the tithe, then go back
and finish hers. Henry never once attempted to have at what was uneaten in
Emily’s bowl.

Runners
When they were young and she sometimes took off, he would get
frenetic. Henry couldn’t stand not knowing where she was. If he were outside
when she took off, he would follow her for miles. We’d get calls from people a
town or two away saying, “We’ve got two big dogs here and both their tags
have your phone number.” If we went for walks with them on leashes, he was
happy to be in front leading the way. But if she got in front and turned a
corner where he couldn’t see her, or jumped up on a neighbor’s raised lawn,
he’d go quite mad. He always had to know where she was.
Emily liked to run and, for the first year or so she was here, she
continued what she’d been trying to do in the animal shelter: dig her way out
of our fenced-in back yard. A few times she succeeded, so we lined the entire
fence with railroad ties.
One evening when she spotted a rabbit in the adjoining yard, she took
after it at a dead run and cleared the fence by a good six inches. We were at the
edge of real trouble then, but she never did it again: the chase happened so fast
she did it on instinct and didn’t absorb the fact that the four-foot fence was no
obstacle. Emily was a really smart dog and I haven’t a doubt that if it had
happened a second time she would have recognized it as an option, but happily
it didn’t happen a second time and she stopped sailing over the fence. There is
something very impressive about seeing a 110-pound dog sailing over a four-
foot fence, so I always had mixed feelings about that. I wanted to see her do it

27
again, but I knew that if we did see it, we were in real trouble. She learned how
to do things very quickly.

Dead squirrels
She liked to bring me presents. Once I came out of the shower on the
second floor of our house, opened the bathroom door, and found a dead
squirrel, perfectly aligned with the doorway, its tail straight out behind it.
Emily had not only caught and killed it, but carried it upstairs and arranged it.
Several times she did the same thing on the back step of the dining room,
placing the kill right there, off the yard. If the animal was a rabbit, we usually
only got part of the catch. She never ate the squirrels, but the rabbits were
another matter entirely. They were to be shared. Not always. I know she got
some rabbits, took them behind the garage, and didn’t share them at all.
She had a lovely sense of geometry. Sometimes we’d go out back and
find her things—real and rubber bones, balls, a squirrel or rabbit, a nice stick or
two—all neatly arranged in parallel rows. I don’t remember ever having had a
dog so into geometry.

Rabbits
She wasn’t much interested in barking. Usually the only things that
would set her off were rabbits outside the living room or dining room window
or small black dogs, which she loathed more than anything in God’s universe.
Often, when she started barking at a rabbit through the glass the rabbit would
freeze, as they tend to do when frightened. Emily would continue barking, the
rabbit would continue not moving. Emily was very perseverant and rabbits are
very stupid. She never got bored barking at the terror-frozen rabbits and the
rabbits would never think of moving into the bushes that surround our house.
Usually, Diane or I would have to go outside and scoot the rabbit into motion
before Emily would stop carrying on.

Mud
Once, during the Bush years, there was an anti-war rally in Delaware
Park, at the corner of Parkside Avenue and the Scajacwada Expressway. It had

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been raining for days and the ground was slick. Perhaps 100 people were
gathered there, holding candles in the dark rainy night. Emily spotted a small
black dog the far side of the group and went after it. Usually, I could hold her
without much difficulty, but my shoes could get no traction in the mud and
slick grass, so she hydroplaned me about thirty feet before I managed to dig in
and stop her. I was able to stop her only because Diane caught up and grabbed
the leash or my belt and also dug in. Someone said, in a very flat but widely
audible and patronizing voice, “That is not the kind of dog to bring to a peace
rally.”

Feet
When strangers came into the house she wagged her tail, went over to
be petted and, if she liked their voice, lay on the floor under their feet. That
made some of our visitors nervous because they had no place to put their feet.
We’d tell them it was okay, she didn’t mind having feet on her rib cage. Some
believed us; some did not. Some people were comfortable having their feet on a
dog almost their size; some never quite relaxed. Emily never directly vexed any
of them.

Work
Emily was my working dog, the only one I’ve ever had. We’ve always
had dogs, but Emily used to come with me to creepy places when I was
photographing and she’d check out the dark corners for villains. When I’d be
shooting slow, using a tripod and concentrating totally on the shot, I didn’t
worry because I knew if anything odd were going on she’d let me know about
it in time. At least, that’s what I liked to think. I couldn’t have done a lot of
the work I did in Buffalo’s grain elevators were it not for Emily. She knew the
ground level of those places every bit as well as I did, and perhaps a lot better.

Breeds
We never knew what breed of dog Emily Rose was. Everyone who
knew about dogs who met her told us something else. We heard dozens of
opinions, all of them different. Dog fanciers, vets, people we met in the park or

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the street or at the elevators, all of them had another configuration for her gene
pool. All we know is, she was one of the great dogs.

Dogshit in the car

A year or so ago two old friends were in town, Tom Rankin and Bill
Ferris. Both are writers and photographers and folklorists and our paths have
crossed for decades. At the time of that visit, Tom was Director of the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke, and Bill was Joel Williamson Eminent
Professor of History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill He’d
previously been chairman of the National Institute for the Humanities. We’ve
been friends for nearly 50 years.
When we were a few blocks from the Silo City group of grain elevators
in which I was then working and to which I was taking them for a visit, Bill
said, “Emily just shit all over me.”
At first, Tom and I took it as a joke. Then the aroma filled the car and
we knew the joke was description. Bill said, “Pull in that gas station there.” I
said, “There isn’t any gas station there,” and kept on driving. It turned out Bill
was right, but the gas station was on the left side of the street at a traffic light
and I’d never seen it because of a hockey game accident a few years earlier that
still keeps me from turning my head very much. “There’s a gas station there,”
Bill said. “We’ll be at the elevators soon,” I said. Tom laughed like a fiend.
A few minutes later we got to the elevators, we got Bill partially cleaned
off, and we did a big walkaround. When we got back to the house, the three of
us stood at the back of the car recounting the trip and laughing about it. Emily
went off somewhere. And Diane said from the kitchen windows, “What’s with
you guys?”
What I didn’t know then but realized later is, that was the beginning of
the end for Emily, the first time she lost control.

A pal, slipping away

For many years, she would come upstairs at night when Diane and I
went to bed and would leap into the bed between us. It always amazed me how
she did that: she’d leap from the floor and land in the small space between us

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but never upon us. At first, she’d have her head at our end of the bed, toward
the pillows. Then after a while she would do a one-eighty and have her head at
our feet. Then she’d leave the bed and spend the rest of the night on the cool
marble in front of the fireplace in the room. It was like she’d twice established
her community and authority, and now was going to sack out in comfort.
Much later, in the early morning, she’d move alongside the bed, either on
Diane’s side or mine. When we got up in the morning we’d always look to see
if we were about to step on rug or on dog.
For most of the past year, she’d come up, but she wouldn’t leap up on
the bed. Then she stopped coming up.
And then she went into her endgame. She slept most of the time, and
for a while had a difficult time standing. We took her to the vet and got some
pills and she could stand again. And then there came a time when she once
again couldn’t get up. We again took her to the vet who said, “There might be
a mass around her heart or lungs. Why don’t you leave her here for the
weekend and we can take pictures to find out.”
“By ‘mass’ do you mean cancer?” we said
“Well,” she said, “yes.”
“If there is a mass, can you do anything for a dog that size who is
thirteen years old?”
“Not really,” the vet said
“So why bother?” we said.
“That makes sense,” the vet said.
That was a Friday. We took her home and when we got here she went
out back and wouldn’t come into the house. We brought her food, water and
treats, all of which she pretty much ignored. She hadn’t eaten the previous two
days either. Saturday was rainy and gloomy. Diane kept going out to check the
blankets over her. When they got wet, she’d go out with another one. She did
that through all of Saturday night.

Sunday
On Sunday, every so often Emily would lift her head, but not for long,
and then she put her head on the ground and didn’t raise it any more. She

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turned a few times. The last time, she turned toward the house. And then she
was gone.
That evening, two friends came over and dug a grave under our big
magnolia that miraculously survived the snowstorm a few years ago that killed
a third of the trees in Buffalo and half of the trees around our house. And that
is where Emily now resides.
Of all the six great dogs Diane and I have had since we’ve been in this
house, every one of whom we’ve loved as they’ve loved us, Emily Rose is the
only one we’ve wanted out there, outside the dining room windows, under the
magnolia tree that survived the storm.

Great dogs
Diane and I have had a lot of great dogs over the years. Most of our
good friends are dog or cat people and know how close you can get. Writing
this, and gathering images of Emily Rose, I’ve realized that what I love most in
a dog is being able to say, “Let’s go,” and the dog, with unqualified enthusiasm
and not a single question of purpose, would leap into the car and we would go.
To wherever. As long as that window was down and you could put your head
out and smell the air, life was just as it should be. What more could you ask?
What more could you want?

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Aliens & Vaccinations
(The Public, February 24, 2015)

Last July, I was passing through Roswell, New Mexico, and I

encountered a small group of bizarrely attired young women. I was then
working on a photographic project in the Chihuahuan Desert, so I stopped to
photograph them.
I asked, “Why are you dressed like that?” They pointed behind me and
I saw the outer wall of the Roswell, New Mexico International UFO Museum
and Research Center, which they told me they had just visited.
I said, “You know, there is no real evidence of any kind of alien
invasion ever.”
“Well,” one of them said, pointing over my shoulder, “then why would
they have a museum?”

Questions are not facts

She had a good question, but she opted for the wrong answer. They
have a museum because it will cater to people who like to believe there are
people dedicated to keeping secrets from us, and who are even willing to buy
tickets, as she and her friends had, to endorse that notion.
You may remember some of the conspiracy theories around John F.
Kennedy’s murder. All of them hinged on the “fact” that one man could not
have fired those two or three shots in that period of time and done the nasty
deed. The theorizing resulting from that assumption manifested itself in many
ways in pop culture, in movies and books and TV talk shows.
Lee Harvey Oswald had been qualified as a Marine sharpshooter. He
was firing at a car moving straight away from his position at a few hundred
yards. Any of us who, in those years, qualified as Marine sharpshooters could
have made that shot. I have never seen any JFK assassination conspiracy theory
coming from anyone who did that work. It has all been from people outside.
People say, “If it wasn’t a conspiracy, how could that have happened?”
Well, if you knew how to use a rifle at that range, that’s how it could
have happened.

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 Could it have been a conspiracy? Sure. Lots of could-haves are out
there. But I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that there was.
Likewise with 9/11. After the World Trade Center and some close-by
buildings went down, there was a lot of conspiracy business about how the
CIA had secretly planted explosive devices to make sure that after the terrorist-
controlled airplanes hit, the buildings would not only catch fire but collapse.
It wasn’t just conspiracy-freaks and run-of-the-mill idiots who got fired
up with this. I received five emails from a SUNY Distinguished Professor, all
beginning with, “If there wasn’t CIA involvement, how do you explain…”
It turns out there are lots of reasonable, rational ways to explain what
happened when JFK got killed and when the WTC went down. About the
government’s refusal to tell us about the aliens: Yeah, they haven’t told us
about the aliens. But the fact that they haven’t told us about something that
doesn’t exist isn’t evidence of their continuing mendacity. It is evidence only of
our power to imagine.
Asking a question is not a fact. It is just a question. Saying, “Well, how
do you explain…” is not evidence; it is just a question. I can’t explain why some
people are happier than others, but some are and some are not. The inability to
answer a question goes to two things: the limits of our knowledge (what can
we know?) and the legitimacy of the question (does it matter?).

Vaccination
Which brings me to the real subject of this essay. Inoculation against
preventable diseases.
If you spend any time on the social media you’ve probably seen rants on
why you should not have your children vaccinated, or citations to medical
reports about the dangers of vaccination that have long been discredited, or
essays about chemicals in children’s vaccinations that haven’t been in them for
years. Or essays saying that the Centers for Disease Control are issuing reports
about the safety of various vaccinations that are mendacious or duplicitous.
I have one friend with an autistic child. She writes, again and again,
asking if the vaccination didn’t cause her child to become autistic, what did?

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