Unions, Riots, Cemeteries, and Job Fairs

It's been a rough couple of weeks here in V-Town. First, not too long ago, Freeman-United sold the mines that employ several hundred people in this little town, and the new buyers closed the Crown II. Coal mining has a long history in Virden; when I was in college, my Socialist history professor was very excited to learn that I was from this area. (She really was a Socialist, which she used to say she thought was pretty mild compared to her British history-professor husband, whom she identified as a Communist.) In 1898, when Virden was still a company town and the mine head was right in the center of town, the miners struck.

The company responded by locking them out and advertising nationwide for hundreds of "good colored miners" (no kidding--apparently they didn't want to send white guys to get shot?) and putting them on a train to nearly-beautiful downtown Virden. The trains were full of company "security" men and "detectives." When the train entered Virden, the miners opened fire and the company men fired back. Miners were killed, "detectives" were killed, and by some miracle, not many of the "good colored miners" were killed, which is pretty impressive considering that the were between the two factions AND they were the only ones unarmed. The miners even killed the company storekeeper before they were done.

The company was so incensed that it wouldn't allow the dead strikers to be buried on company land--which, at the time, meant anywhere in Virden or the surrounding township. That's why there's a large Miner's Cemetery in Mount Olive, IL, to this day. The miners' union bought the land and built their own burial ground.

Ever hear of Mother Jones magazine? The lefty rag? Well, the real Mother Jones--who would probably spit on her granola-sandal-wearing "heirs of the movement" if she encountered one today--is buried beneath a small monument in that little graveyard on the edge of Mount Olive, Illinois. She said she wanted to be buried with the miners of Virden. Ironically, that meant she couldn't be buried in Virden.

It wasn't so many years after that that the mine unions split into factions and were close to open bloodshed among themselves. In fact, last year a local scholar found a few old miners who recounted the story of almost shooting one of their own in that same aforementioned cemetery in Mount Olive. You see, Mother Jones' monument was almost finished and had been covered with a tarp. It seems that a miner was headed home after a late shift and cut through the cemetery. He walked up to the monument and stood looking at it for a minute or two, then headed on his way. He never realized, apparently, that several miners from one union were lying in wait for members of a different union in the cemetery that night. They had been warned of a plot by the opposing union to dynamite the Mother Jones monument and had set up an ambush with shotguns. Each had a shotgun pointed at the lucky late-shift miner when he approached the monument, and the surviving member told a local reporter that if the man had lifted the cloth off the monument, that would have been the end of him with pellets tearing into him from all directions. But he didn't, and so he lived to see the next day--and as far as anyone knows, he never knew how close he came to dying over union politics.

Now, Freeman United has sold their two mines, Crown II and Crown III, to a new local company. One is still operating; the other is closing. I question whether it will stay closed. It may be that the new owners want the miners to get a feel for what sort of career opportunities are out there for retrained coal miners, then renegotiate the labor contract based on that knowledge. After putting in applications at Hardee's and Wal-Mart, a pay cut and a mine shaft might start to look good. Either way, it was clear that the F-U company wasn't doing well with these mines. Their biggest customer was the independent power generator for Springfield, City Water Light and Power. CWLP tries to adjust the price of F-U's high-sulfur (thus high-pollution) coal downward every time the contract comes up, but F-U has always managed to get them to continue paying higher than market value. I suspect a lot of lobbying of Springfield officials was done and it was probably theorized that CWLP was helping stimulate the Springfield economy by helping float the Virden economy, since we all shop there. In any case, that sort of thing is at best a temporary deal. Your long-term business plan can't be based on the forlorn hope that market forces will be suppressed forever.

Were I a young guy in those mines, I'd do whatever I could think of to avoid going back no matter who the manager is. The mines are doomed until the high-sulfur coal is economically viable. The only way I see that happening is if this "coal gasification" thing gets off the ground. The problem with the high-sulfur coal is that it gives off sulfur oxides when burned, and those create sulfuric acid which falls in our rain--acid rain. Remember when acid rain was going to be the end of the world? I do.

Anyway, coal-gasification involves somehow converting coal into a gas that burns efficiently, but also pumping the exhaust underground to seal it away from the atmosphere. This is being proposed now in order to sequester Carbon Dioxide away from the atmosphere and thus avoid killing cute baby polar bears with greenhouse gases, but it would (I think) also mean that sulfur emissions wouldn't matter much.

Now, is there a downside to pumping all that exhaust gas underground? Other than dead mole-people and lavatorr-creatures? Probably, but I don't know what it is.

Hmm . . . Ironical.

You just never know what you'll find hidden away in a little prairie town.

I was looking for something fun to do with some of the kids as we talk about the Clovis, Monte Verde and Topper sites when I stumbled across the Lithic Casting Lab. How cool is that? You can get inexpensive castings of authentic stone-age artifacts delivered to your doorstep. They're not the real thing, but then, you won't have a stroke when you drop one on the sidewalk (and you know you're going to drop one on the sidewalk.) You can also get cool posters and prints that show all three sides of an artifact, but I think the "collection" posters might be the coolest. The one pictured at left is "Stone Age Artifacts of the World" It spans 2 million years of human history and comes with its own illustrated guidebook . . . that's cool. Supposedly, there's a blade on this poster that no modern craftsman has been able to reproduce. How awesome is that?

The poster below is the "Artifacts of Cahokia Mounds" poster. The Cahokia Mounds are the remnants of a stone age "mound builder" city just across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. In fact, from the top of Monks' Mound, the largest mound on the site, you can look across the river and see the St. Louis skyline. I highly recommend the experience of standing on the top of that thing with the wind blowing over your scalp (for some of you, through your hair.)


But why is that ironical? And is ironical a word?

Well, at first glance, Troy is a sleepy little place with a lot of fast food restaurants and a couple of truck stops, about 20 minutes outside St. Louis on I-55. But if you look to your left as you pass by on the interstate, you'll see a small white building with a blue roof sitting all alone on the frontage road. The sign on the front looks insignificant next to the giant fast-food eyesores, but when I go to St. Louis, that's where I go.

That's Grand Prairie Knives. GPK is by far my favorite knife shop. They specialize in collector Case pocketknives because, frankly, that's what the owner collects. But they sell just about everything from United Cutlery and Cold Steel to real knives from Camillus, Spyderco, Benchmade, TOPS, Chris Reeve, Mad Dog, Busse, and more custom makers every year. I can kill a LOT of time in that place. Even worse, there's not one piece in the displays that they won't cheerfully hand over for your inspection, which only makes it take longer. Melissa doesn't even come inside anymore; she settles into the car with a book.

Anyway, what could be more perfect than one sleepy little town on the edge of the prairie where you can get a Clovis point, a Sebenza, and a full tank of gas in one afternoon?

More Whining

Remember the other day, when I complained about all the crazy stuff that happened to me, and a few of you thought I'd completely lost it? And Matt wanted people to give me a car?

Well, yesterday didn't go quite that well.

However, yesterday ended on a positively hopeful note, so don't alert the suicide hotline or anything, you bunch of mother hens.

I probably won't post details; it's pretty personal. I just didn't want to leave this space empty.

Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?

Everybody has been writing about where they were when the 9/11 attacks were reported, so I suppose I might as well get mine off my chest, too.

I was actually teaching 8th grade English in a small Illinois town when it happened, and I missed it. School there started promptly at 8:00 a.m., and although we had televisions with cable in every classroom, we didn't use that particular feature much.

I didn't find out that anything was wrong until my 2nd-hour students began filtering in; a few came straight to my desk.

"Mr. Gwinn! You have to turn on the TV! This guy just crashed into the twin towers!"

"Twin towers?" (I was a country boy from Illinois--I honestly had no idea what they were talking about.)

"In New York! These huge buildings--this guy flew an airplane right into the building!"

"All right, guys, that's really not funny. If that really happened, people would really die. Let's get to our seats and get to work--we've got a lot to do."

That's right--when 9/11 happened, I was pretty sure it was a hoax my students were playing on me. When they convinced me to turn on the TV, there were the towers, with smoke billowing and the news crawl on the bottom of the screen. Even then, I remember wondering whether this was really an accident; actually, I remember several students saying they thought it was probably a deliberate attack. We left the news on, intending to watch a few more minutes, shut it off, and get on with our day.

Then the second plane hit, and I knew there would never be any way back to the old world.

We toggled between FOX and CNN all day. I tried to discuss what was going on with the students, but I didn't have any answers for them. We talked a little about Bin Laden--we had actually talked a bit about him when we discussed the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole--but remember, we weren't at all certain for awhile whether he'd actually done it. Nobody was taking responsibility that day, and I remember being puzzled by that.

A few things I remember that I don't see many others talking about:

1. I remember that there were reports that 50,000 people worked in the towers . . . and many of us were trying to think what 25,000-45,000 casualties would do to the world. We didn't think that was unlikely at all--frankly, we had no idea how amazingly well the evacuation would go. 3,000 dead is a figure that gets bandied about a lot now. It's real, and it's horrible. But I don't want to forget how bad it could have been.

2. I remember reports on CNN and FOX of car bombs, truck bombs, hostage situations, and terrorist sightings all over. We (as in, all of us--America) were frantic and convinced that there were terrorists around every corner.

3. A new (and as it turned out, short-lived) sense of unity between rural and urban dwellers emerged almost instantly. Where I live, New York City is not held in high esteem by many. But when we watched their buildings burn, their people screaming in the blinding clouds of dust and smoke, blood caking the dusty remnants of their city's greatest monument to their faces . . . they were just Americans after all. We wanted to donate our blood (remember the rush to donate barrels of blood, even though it was really too late to donate in time for the blood to help with the immediate trauma in NYC?) And we DID give. It helped somebody, after all, and what else could you do? What we wanted to do was shoot the motherfuckers who hurt our friends in New York and Washington in their faces, but we couldn't really do that either.

4. The public perception of New York City changed in a week or two, turning around 180 degrees. It's true that New York had been getting safer for years under Giuliani (whether he made it happen or not, it happened.) But the general perception, at least around here, was that New York was a city of pimps, thieves, murderers and looters; the decent people living in New York were the ones who couldn't afford to move out or the "elites" in Manhattan who liked living in their version of Sodom on the Hudson. At some point after 9/11, it became clear that the rampant looting, murdering and generally disgusting behavior we all expected were not coming. I don't know anyone who didn't have a grim prediction that riots and looting were right around the corner. I predicted it, too.
I wonder whether anyone else out there remembers an unaired episode of the old NBC cop show "Third Watch." The show starred the psychic guy from Heroes as a gruff NYC cop, but it portrayed cops, medics, and firefighters on the third watch. Pretty good show. Anyway, right before 9/11 happened, they were advertising a multi-episode "mini-series event." The plot was to follow the cast through the night of a power outage in NYC. In accordance with the assumptions of the time, a power outage in New York inevitably led to rioting. The money scene in the previews was the older cop and his younger partner sitting in a police van with a bunch of other officers in full riot gear, gripping nightsticks. There were no windows, but something outside was clearly rocking the van's body back and forth. The younger cop was breathing in and out in ragged spurts, staring at the ceiling, desperately trying to master his fear. His older partner shouts at him over the sound of the riot outside, "Keep your back against mine no matter what happens!"
Then the cut to darkness.

After 9/11 . . . . that episode would have caused riots everywhere but New York. You couldn't say a bad word about New York, and you certainly couldn't get away with saying that New Yorkers would seize any excuse to riot. As far as I know, those episodes simply never aired.

Foxworthy Rip-Off, Part II

If you've ever heard a trained firefighter/EMT say "Gawddammit, that's the last time I ever wear flip flops on a rescue call!" then it's possible that you might be a redneck.

. . . and if you're not, you're probably outnumbered.

That Seems About Right.

Notice that Sci-Fi is my lowest area . . . . all their sci-fi questions were about Star Trek with some Star Wars thrown in--and one of their Star Wars questions seemed to imply that you'd score higher for owning a Jar-Jar Binks t-shirt!
No questions about Heinlein, Asimov, Firefly . . . . I question the true sci-fi credentials of the authors of this so-called "test." By what right do they dare question the sheer sci fi nerd power of a man in a homemade Jayne Cobb PCH? They also underestimated my awkwardness, but what can you do?

With Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy:

. . . if you've ever had to drive your pickup because your Camaro wasn't running, you might be a redneck.

. . . . if your baby son has ever tried to snatch the froggy tattoo off his grandmother's back, you might be a redneck.