Another 'greatest' leader has died

McGovern, role model for my generation, passes away

By John L. Guerra

He was the kind of man who stood up for what he believed in and was willing to take a drubbing for it.
George McGovern, former U.S. senator from North Dakota and the Democrat nominated to take on President Richard Nixon in the 1972 campaign, won only one state--Massachusetts--and the District of Columbia on election night. That's more than a drubbing. That's a voice in the wilderness being beaten by villagers with clubs and axes.
The generations of American liberals he represented continued to love him in spite of his defeat, memorializing his, and their, defiance with a now-famous bumper sticker: "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts."
He argued early and often during the campaign that Nixon, one of the most popular presidents of the age, was full of bull when he declared that '"Peace was at hand."
"Peace is not at hand," McGovern told campaign rallies. "It is not even in sight."
Yet Nixon, having emerged through four years of societal fragmentation that saw the Tet Offensive, a victory for the U.S. but a public relations win for the North Vietnamese; exploding college campuses and city slums wracked by violent demonstrations, the surrounding of the Pentagon by thousands, the assassinations of Martin L. King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the collapse of confidence in other areas of American life, still rolled right over him in the voting booth.
"I wanted to run for president in the worst way," McGovern joked. "I guess I did."
There was so much to this man. Born in a small farming community in North Dakota in time to see the dust bowl and the depression, the thin young man signed up for the Army Air Force in 1941, when he was 19. He signed up to be a bomber pilot, not the sort of assignment that one sought if one wanted to survive the war.
"I survived at a time when half of the B-24 crews in that theater did not make it," the elderly McGovern told AirVenture Today magazine in 2007.

Guys my age have a thing for World War II. We love to read about it, talk about it, watch movies about it, and always, always, love to meet the people who fought it. In Key West, there's a gentleman at the VFW on North Roosevelt Boulevard who was on a submarine in the Pacific. He and the rest of his crew sat for two days on the bottom of the Yellow Sea as the Japanese dropped mines, trying to find them. They had to maintain complete silence, lights out. It was extremely cold. When the mines stopped falling all around them, the submarine restarted, pulled away and the crew survived. He told me that at the time, he knew he was going to die. Just 19, he knew his life was over. It was a fact. He thought of his family back home, convinced he'd never see them again. What that must be like, to look back on that from old age? Of course, millions died right where they fell. Under the sea, on top of mountains, in remote deserts, in thick woods, in open fields.
McGovern was such a man; what differentiates him from so many others is that we know his name.
McGovern was a B-24 bomber pilot, which made him commander of his crew, a group of seasoned 17 and 18 year olds. This adds to the amazement of what these guys went through.
McGovern, who called the B-24 ugly and a gas hog, named it after his young wife. The Dakota Queen flew mission after mission with McGovern at the wheel. Dozens of these aircraft would take off, loaded to the hilt with 500-pound bombs, so heavy they needed a half-mile of land to get airborne. They would join up in formation high above the free parts of Europe and head toward their targets. Sometimes it would be a ball-bearing factory, an oil refinery, train tracks, any facility that built weapons or supported Hitler's war machine. As they approached their targets, dozens of fighter planes with the German cross would dive on them from all angles, chopping up wings, crew, and pilots with heavy machine guns. The bombers were sitting ducks because under no circumstance could pilots pull out of formation. The tight grouping was the only way to ensure enough bombs would hit the target.
On many occasions, McGovern and his crew of kids would see blood splatter the inside of the adjacent bomber's cockpit, or watch as a bomber split in two, its crew cartwheeling into the props of other bombers. McGovern won the Distinguished Flying Cross after bringing his crew home, limping back to base with an engine or two out, or the hull of the aircraft looking like Swiss cheese.
Yet he railed against Nixon's bombing of civilians in Hanoi, Cambodia, and other parts of Vietnam. Was this hypocrisy? No, and I'll tell you why. A man who has bombed cities, albeit military targets, knows of which he speaks. For McGovern, civilians were off-limits but he knew they suffered when his bombs fell. In the era before smart bombs, hitting targets was far from assured.
While flying back to base one day, McGovern's plane had a bomb stuck in its rack. McGovern flew the plane lower so the men could free it without wearing oxygen masks. The bomb fell and landed square on a farmer's house in Austria.
"It blew the farmyard to smithereens," McGovern told AirVenture Today. "I felt terrible knowing that farmers eat lunch around noon and that we had probably blown up a family. That bothered me for a long time."
Years later, McGovern was serving as a professor at an Austrian university and while on television there, told the story of how he had unintentionally destroyed the farmhouse so many years earlier. Unbelievably, the farmer, still alive, saw McGovern on television and called the station.
"Tell him it was my farm," the man said. "We saw the bomber coming and knew it wasn't in formation. So I got my wife and three children, and we hid in a ditch and no one got hurt. Tell him if bombing my farm made this war one minute closer to ending, it was fine with us."
So McGovern spoke with authority when he criticized Nixon for the Christmas bombing that hit civilians in Vietnam. Though Nixon hoped the stepped-up bombing would bring North Vietnam back to the negotiating table, McGovern believed it was not winning hearts and minds in that part of the world or in the United States. Not to mention killing innocents.
McGovern also saw a difference between WWII and Vietnam. Though civilian deaths are ridiculously absurd during any war, the Allies believed punishing German civilians could speed the overthrow of Hitler. Besides, Hitler had bombed European cities, including London, not giving a hoot about civilians.
I love this man for another reason. He waged a losing battle to save his daughter Terry's life. In "Terry: My Daughter's Life-And-Death Struggle With Alcoholism," this very public man discussed his private hell watching his daughter descend into madness and alcoholism. She eventually died on a frigid night, frozen to death in a snowbank.
He and his wife, Eleanor, did a great thing discussing how their hearts moved from dismay, anger, and finally desperation and love for their child. In the end, the couple had to bury her. After his defeat in 1972, McGovern has moved heaven and earth to find ways to get food to starving regions and nations cut off by war and unreasonable leaders.
His name is synonymous with the movement to end world hunger. While some nations, like ours, dump thousands of tons of food into the trash every hour, other nations have children with bellies swollen with hunger-based illness and disease.
Want peace? Reduce hunger and want. Truly liberal ideas that should be embraced by all segments of the political spectrum.
I have spoken with Sen. McGovern on a couple of occasions. In the early 1980s, he lived in the top floor of an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. I lived across the street. On a snowy night, I walked to the 7-11 up the street and ran into him as he bought a cup of coffee. I thanked him for trying to defeat Nixon and commented on the snow. He said, "You're welcome," adding, "I love the snow, how about you?"
"It hides all sins," I said, repeating something my mother always said.
"Not all of them," he said, then laughed.
When I read "Terry," his book about his daughter's battle and death so many years later, I understood what he meant.
As our political center continues to fling apart, the loss of men like McGovern (and Teddy Kennedy last year) remind us that we must double our efforts to combat the cynics on the right.
Election Day is Tuesday. Vote for moderation, progress, and equality. Vote Democrat.

The world of Mandy Miles

Key West writer captures city's beat

By John L. Guerra

Mandy Miles, the veteran reporter at The Key West Citizen, writes a Sunday column in the newspaper that recounts what she sees and hears around the island city.

Each week, this energetic and expressive woman tracks the unique aspects of life in Key West in her column, "Tan Lines."

For instance, I love how she captures what happens when fall arrives, the temperatures cool, and we shut off our air conditioners. Without the hum of her air conditioner to block the sounds of the night, Miles writes this:

"... I now hear everyone traversing Simonton Street between 1 and 4 a.m.

The guy with the Boston accent was convinced the 'Bahs' in Key West stay open until 4 a.m. and could not understand why the duo was already heading back to the room."

"And the woman locked out of the guesthouse across the street decided to use her God-given talent of whistling through two fingers to get the attention of her friends or the management."

Miles also reveals that she worries whether putting her own sunglasses into her purse while in a drug store will cause the management to think she's stealing a pair from the store's shelves.
And this jewel: "Am I the only one who thinks driving sidesaddle on a scooter is absurd?"

After pounding the hell out of her bed when she jammed and bloodied her toe on its metal frame, "The old jingle for Band-Aids was running through my head ... as I affixed one of them to my toe."

This is not to mean she's crazy. She's not, at least not in a negative way. She just has a gift for capturing what makes us human, as well as what makes Key West dig itself into our hearts.

Mandy has just published the second collection of her columns called "Only in Key West" and I heartily recommend it. The writing is crisp and following her thought processes is like sitting down with a friend and listening to a string of stories that leave you thinking, "I am not the only one who thinks like this. That's a relief."

In this book, for instance, she writes of adopting a cat that in fact, had adopted her and Stan, her real-deal fishing captain husband with a heart of gold.

"I had no idea a cat could look disappointed.

"I swear I saw the one who lives at our house sigh and shake his head last week when I opened the door and saw him in his usual spot on the deck. Stan, on the other hand, is greeted with happy prancing, head rubs against his legs and a look that can only be described as awe every time he opens the back door."

(Note to Mandy: I think it's because Stan works around fishing boats and bait. My cat did the same thing when I worked at the marina. Now, she doesn't even stand up when I get home).

Not to say her columns are without a message. Her books serve as historical accounts, capturing the times we all share. Such as the unraveling of the AIDS quilt down the length of Duval Street or the mood of the island in the days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Readers will remember how impossible it was to drop or pick someone up at the new, multi-million airport out on the boulevard. Traffic cops forbid anyone to stop long enough to pick up passengers, making it difficult for families with babies and luggage or elderly or infirm people to get picked up in cars belonging to friends and family. Mandy wrote about the impossibility of the situation and the airport got lots of calls to fix the problem and it did so.

"Only in Key West" and "Tan Lines" are worth buying, especially as Christmas gifts. Not only will you be supporting a Key West author who doesn't have a look-alike contest to honor her or a history of bizarre public behavior to help her sell books, you'll laugh at the little details that explain life on this packed island.

When I pull one of her books off the shelf and read her accounts, I smile and realize how lucky we are to have someone who sees the lightness of being in Key West and I value her as someone who can show me that life need not be so serious.

She can be reached at mandymileskw@gmail.com. "Tan Lines" and "Only in Key West" are available on Amazon.com and are on sale at Key West Island Books at 513 Fleming St.

1935 car exec's opinion still rings true

Datsun comeback may not work, 103-year-old says

By John L. Guerra

How's this for an idea? How about building an American car that costs customers only $3,000?

It seems to me this would help the economy as well as introduce a fuel-efficient vehicle that would reduce the nation's consumption. An inexpensive car would by definition not have a large engine and thus would burn less fuel.

Not only that, but people on low incomes could afford it, thus giving them some way to search a wider area for better-paying jobs.

I believe introducing such a "people's car" (apologies to Volkswagen) would be a great success, making Ford or Chevrolet, or GM--whichever company does it, lots of money. The best reason, however, is that I might even be able to afford it.

It's Datsun, however, that has decided to build that car. Actually, Nissan is the actual name of the company, but to break into the American market in 1968, it used the moniker Datsun so if it failed, Nissan would not be shamed by failure. After a successful run with its B210, 240Z, and other models, Nissan decided to kill the Datsun brand in America and sell vehicles under the Nissan name.
Datsun's 510 sedan, introduced in America in 1968, was a favorite for American youth, according to The Wall Street Journal. Now Nissan wants to introduce a package of perhaps six inexpensive Datsun's to third-world countries by 2014. If the United States continues on its present path, we will be a developing country and we will be able to buy it.

Old advice the best advice

The Japanese executive who introduced Datsuns in the United States in the 1960s, including the wildly popular 240Z sportscar in the 1970s, says building such a cheap car is a bad idea. What's not unique is the executive's opinion, but that he's giving one at all.

This executive is himself a great story. He's the automotive industry equivalent of personal computing's Bill Gates. Yutaka "Mr. K" Katayama, a former Nissan executive who saw the first mass-produced Datsun roll off the line as a new hire in the spring of 1935, said this week the car won't sell if it's cheaply built as well as inexpensive.

Wait a minute ... did you catch that? A man who was a 26-year-old Nissan automobile executive in 1935 had an opinion this week? When was the last time you heard from someone who was a successful businessman 77 years ago give advice on his industry? Six years before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Mr. K was in charge of Datsun products at Nissan; three years before Germany invaded Poland he was in charge of an automotive line. Yet this man, who introduced Datsuns to the world in 1935, is still alive at the age of 103 and was ready to respond to a question when a reporter telephoned him this week.

Yahoo News quoted Mr. K Wednesday:

"When the Datsun name disappeared, I was very sad—it is good to hear its coming back," the 103-year-old Mr. Katayama said, sitting in an office in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo, surrounded by a lifetime of automotive memorabilia, including a U.S. Route 101 sign. "But it'll be a shame if they're cheap cars. I had really hoped they'd make a more polished car," he said.

Born Yutaka Asoh on Sept. 15, 1909, Mr K, was the first president of Nissan Motor Corporation U.S.A. He is considered the father of the Datsun 240Z and other Z cars. He first saw the U.S. in mid-1929, when he spent four months as a 20-year-old checking out the Pacific Northwest while the ship he'd been working on as a crew member was being repaired in Seattle.
According to Hemmings Automotive News, during Japan's military expansion in Manchuria and the rest of the Pacific in 1939, Mr. K was ordered to report to a Nissan plant in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, but managed to obtain a transfer back to Japan in 1941--when he was 32. Near the end of the war in 1945, he refused orders to return to Manchukuo; Katayama later credited his survival of the war to this decision. According to Hemmings, his wealthy father, a successful businessman, had several automobiles prior to World War II, and young Katayama grew up around classic cars. Following the war, when so many Japanese were searching for food and shelter, Katayama became obsessed with finding a classic car to drive.

In the early 1960s, Mr. K--at that time more than 50 years old--researched the car market in the U.S. and decided the Datsun 510 would succeed in America. It featured a more powerful 1,600cc engine that he'd been requesting for years. When the first one came off the ship in California, Mr. K drove it out of the parking facility himself. The 510 gave American customers something they'd never had before: an inexpensive, stout, durable car that was also sporty and not unappealing to the eye. It was a smash hit and the fulfillment of Mr. K's vision.
Understanding America's culture paid off for Mr. K when Nissan sent a car to the United States called "Fair Lady." Katayama refused to let the care be marketed under that name In fact, he pried the badges off the car--those are the metal nameplates on car bodies that describe the car's name--and replaced the name plates with badges carrying the car's internal name: 240Z.
Mr. K was voted into the Japanese and American Automotive Halls of Fame and remains a cult hero to Z owners.
The best thing about it is that he's stuck around to enjoy every minute of it.

Canine video shows animal's dedication

Injured owner helped by dog's heroic run

By John L. Guerra

My dear friend Carol Trent wrote me last week to say that she and her daughter, Julie, 11, enjoy reading about animals on this blog, so I think I have a great one that they, and other readers, will like.
In recent weeks we heard from Walker, another reader who told us how Spike, the puppy rescued from a dumpster, has added to his life in extraordinary ways.
I have another story that shows once again how animals share the same connection to life that we humans purport to embrace.
If you've heard this story, that's OK. I think it needs repeating.
Buddy is a German shepherd who lives in the woods near Anchorage, Alaska, with his owner, 23-year-old Ben Heinrichs. Ben was working in his garage on April 4, 2010, when an electric heater (it's cold up there, even in April) set paint cleaner blazing. The flames caught Ben's shirt, arm and chest on fire, and Buddy, who Ben describes as skittish, started to freak out. Ben ran outside and dove into the snow to put himself out, with Buddy circling him and whining.
Here's the part I love. Ben says he told Buddy, "We need to get help."
The dog then dashed into the dark and down the long driveway like a bat out of hell.
Switch to an Alaska State Trooper's dash camera a good distance from the burning house as it records his cruiser's headlight beams on a dark, wooded road. At a snowbanked intersection, a German shepherd suddenly leaps into the road, barking like a nut. It then breaks into a run down the middle of the road to the left, and the cruiser turns to follow. At each new intersection, Buddy guides the cruiser, repeatedly looking back to urge the trooper on. On and on the dog runs, with the trooper following. The dog cuts left into another road, hanging back to make sure the car makes the turn.
Buddy is clearly signaling the trooper to follow in several ways. First, it keeps looking back with urgency; second, when the trooper slows, the dog slows; and third, when the dog makes a turn, it waits for the trooper to make the turn.
At the bottom of the home's driveway, Buddy breaks into an even faster run toward towering flames that can clearly be seen in the cruiser's video. The trooper told reporters that Buddy came around to his driver's side door as the trooper exited. The dog nuzzled the trooper's hand as if to make him hurry to the house.
Once the trooper began to interview Ben, Buddy ran back into the darkness and met firetrucks far from the house to lead them in, the trooper reported. Both the trooper and the firefighters were responding to the blaze already, but Buddy made sure they didn't get lost.
Ben wasn't injured badly and the trooper made arrangements to honor Buddy with a ceremony and a silver food dish emblazoned with the Alaska State Police seal.

Watch Buddy run for help:




Buddy received an engraved silver-plated dog bowl from Alaska State Troopers for his heroic run. That's Ben holding his leash.

A doctor's warning

Deadly superbug gains foothold in Florida
 

By John L. Guerra



(AP) — A deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics has killed a seventh person at the National Institutes of Health Clinic in Maryland.

The Washington Post reported the death Friday. NIH officials told the paper that the boy from Minnesota died Sept. 7. NIH says the boy arrived at the research hospital in Bethesda in April and was being treated for complications from a bone marrow transplant when he contracted the bug.

He was the 19th patient at the hospital to contract an antibiotic-resistant strain of KPC, or Klebsiella pneumonia (KPC). The outbreak stemmed from a single patient carrying the superbug that arrived at the hospital last summer.

The paper reported the Minnesota boy's case marked the first new infection of this superbug since January.

This recent article reminded me of the stern doctor at Lower Keys Medical Center a few Sundays ago who made me promise to finish the antibiotics he prescribed me to kill a skin condition on my forearm.
As he wrote the prescription, however, I confessed out loud that I'd taken the last of some left-over ampilicin before deciding to see him.

The white lab coat froze, turned slowly and the doctor wearing it looked me in the eye (this is how doctors scare the living s--- out of you) and said, "What were you doing with ampicilin? Where did you get it?"

I never try to B.S. doctors, so I told him. "I had some left from a prescription  ..."
"Don't ... Ever ... Not take all of your antibiotics as prescribed," he stammered. He showed me silent scorn until he finished writing the antibiotic prescription.
"You promise to take all of this as directed?" he asked, holding the prescription close to his chest, awaiting an answer. I promised to follow his directions and now my arm is fine.

The doctor's warning to finish my antibiotics, however, was but a small reminder that doctors and hospitals in the Keys and elsewhere in Florida are very worried about superbugs such as KPC and other infectious microbial agents/pathogens that do not respond to antibiotics.

Key West Man died of infection

A local construction worker taken off life support last week serves as a stronger symbol of what is possible when someone in the Keys gets an infection that can't be defeated with antibiotics and other strategies. He did not have KPC, but hearing his story convinced me to have my arm checked out at Lower Keys.
The man's name shall remain anonymous, but he was well-known at Don's Place bar and in the construction community. According to people who knew him, the middle-aged man cut his leg during concrete work and may have waited too long to seek medical attention. When he was taken to Lower Keys Medical Center about three weeks ago, he was feverish, in and out of consciousness, and his leg had swollen -- symptoms of sepsis, or blood infection. He was airlifted to a Miami hospital, but apparently went into a coma during the flight. For the next weeks, doctors had him on a ventilator and tried the strongest antibiotics at hand. They amputated his leg and tried other drugs to halt the infection but he never recovered. His organs shut down and his life ended last week.

Florida doctors: MRSA was just a preview

According to an online site called "The Florida Infectious Disease Forum", as deadly as KPC is, the public has not been educated on prevention strategies. Experts say the victory is in prevention, as it was with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a skin infection that has been fatal for some people around the country. The Keys had a  nice little outbreak of it a few years ago, spurring schools and county officials to launch a MRSA-prevention education campaign.

Time to pay attention to KPC

There has been no such push to prevent KPC in the Keys and in the rest of the nation, according to the online forum.
KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high. What makes it scary is that it latches to other infections and rides right on to the lungs like a nasty hitchhiker. The pandemic flu of 1917 was so fatal to young and healthy people because it caused the body to fling so many antibodies to the lungs that victims drowned in their own sputum. KPC creates an antibody reaction akin to that.

I found this tidbit from the Florida Infectious Disease online forum:

"If KPC becomes prevalent to even a fraction of the extent that MRSA is, we are really in trouble. KPC is a lot more difficult to treat," a physician wrote.

"And if we can’t treat these patients due to antibiotic resistance, the number of deaths which are kick-started by influenza will be higher than anyone is currently thinking about."

The Miami KPC outbreak

A Miami teaching hospital in 2010 released the results of what happened when KPC broke out in one of its Surgical Intensive Care Units. Nine patients came down with it; six of them died; four others lived but caught KPC with accompanying sepsis.
When the hospital tested 15 surfaces in three rooms that held the patients, 10 of the surfaces showed KPC baccili: on door knobs, bedding, bed rails, and even on the keyboard of a PC-on-wheels in the hall outside the hospital rooms. Nurses and front office staff roll those PCs from bed to bed to key in patient and billing data, which turned out to be a great way to spread KPC from room to room.

Staff swabbed down everything in the rooms, including bedside tables, television monitors, bed railings, door handles, such medical equipment as heartbeat monitors, ventilator tubing--everything where KPC had colonized.
The warning about KPC's danger did not reach all staff members, however.
"Compliance with hand hygiene and with the use of gowns and gloves was not systematically monitored before or after the intervention started," a compliance review at the same hospital revealed.
The report said the outbreak ended without any transmission outside the hospital. It should be noted, however, that MRSA also was once constrained to hospitals.

-- John Guerra

The choice of two Americas

Will we finally lose forever the America we had?

By John L. Guerra

It is September and the unsettled mind sets in as it does every September.

I am a highly seasonal being, ruled by the relationship of the sun to the Earth. In the winter, I tend to hibernate and read even more than my voracious appetite usually requires. In the summer, my body seeks submersion in water and ocean breezes.

In September, my very being tugs me to the road. Don't know why, but that's just the way it has always been. Perhaps it's that very American instinct to get across the Rockies before the passes close, or something like that.
During my fourth September, my parents awoke at sunrise to find me missing from our little Cape Cod house in Rockville, Md. A policeman driving across a bridge spanning the railroad tracks spotted me below, walking down the center of the Baltimore and Ohio rail bed some two miles from my house. I was dressed in my pajamas, headed out of town. Good thing the cop saw me. The morning commuter train from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore and up the East Coast runs through town every mornng. Some argue that was the only train wreck I ever avoided. This is a true story and I bet many of you out there get the travel urge in the fall.

This year September has a thin layer of brooding to it, especially as we ponder the fate of this country and the choice we have before us Nov. 6. Do we keep Barack Obama, who I believe is doing his best to hold the center of our social structure together, or do we get Mitt Romney and the extremists in the Republican Party whose vision is of an America with much less support for the middle class and poor? I wish I were exaggerating, but I've read their proposed budgets; seen the arrogance and cynicism in their eyes as they repeatedly refused to even debate, much-less bring to the floor, a jobs bill or home owner rescue bill that might have ended some of the financial suffering.

There is much to be disappointed about in Obama; he hasn't exactly been the reformer we'd hoped. In the first 100 days of his term, traditionally the time when presidents hit the ground running, he seemed much too timid in his dealings with the opposition. He's had some big wins--the new healthcare law, saving General Motors and automotive industry jobs, and of course, whacking Osama Bin Laden in his bedroom--and under his leadership I feel there's at least an adult in the White House. George Bush Jr. ended his second term and the center sighed, "Thank God that's over."
The way we debate in this country has changed since my walk on the railroad tracks.
My America (I was born in 1958) seemed to be a place of optimistic adults, great options, and intelligent neighbors. I do remember when one's political opinion did not bring anger and vilification from others. Americans didn't voice so much invective at Others With Different Opinions. I know our cities were burning; I know Vietnam split this nation apart; I know we lost some of our best and brightest to the sniper's rifle. In spite of those horrible events I feel more ill at ease now for our future than I did then.

I don't hate Republicans. I want to make that clear, because it has to be said to any Republicans or conservatives who are reading this. I just want to give my opinion.

The center the enemy of the people?

Instead of open discussion and good-natured debate, too often Republicans spout that I am a second-class American. That I'm a non-patriot, a lover of terrorists, and a member of the Liberal media. They seem to say that about anyone who does not agree with their platform. Unfortunately, they use such terms when describing millions of others like me who occupy the political center. Those who don't agree with their plan to de-fund Social Security are Socialists, for instance, and are a danger to the American democratic way of life. Don't agree with the invasion of Iraq after 9/11? To Republicans, that meant one thing: I don't support the troops. I support terrorism.

Republican presidents were good for U.S.

In my America, Republicans had good ideas and I enjoyed debating friends from the right. I agreed with many of the policies GOP presidents led. Richard Nixon gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. He signed the law that created the Endangered Species Act. Upon signing the law that holds developers, corporations, and individuals accountable when they destroy habitat or harm or kill animals, Nixon said: "Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed."
That's a big difference from the present-day GOP leadership that scoffs at any evidence of polar bears in trouble or the Bush Jr. White House, which struck language from Office of Science and Technology Policy reports that described man-caused climate change and its destruction of environment and wildlife in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Nixon also opened relations with Communist China, an incredible move for its time and its effects are everlasting. Going back farther, Teddy Roosevelt created the National Park System, beginning with Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park. Class warfare? Teddy, just barely 40 years old, went after steel, coal, oil, train, maritime shipping, and other giant business trusts run by the Gilded families. The result was the stripping of absolute business power from a handful of wealthy men who felt the federal government was merely a foot stool.
The federal government, in fact, did owe these men a favor. J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and other wealthy me had lent money to the U.S. Treasury to keep Washington in the black during tough economic times. But Teddy Roosevelt, the young, Republican upstart, sat the old lions in a room at the White House and lectured them on the way things were going to be now that he was president. The barons tried to stop Roosevelt, but he launched legislation that gave the federal government power to regulate monopolies. By the way, another Republican president, William Howard Taft, sought court decisions to declare monopolies illegal.

New GOP run by fringe

The Romneys and other leaders of the Republican Party are not the Republicans of the 1950s, 1960s, or even the 1970s. Before the Tea Party and other radical right theorists rose in prominence in the GOP, Republican Party leaders like Dwight Eisenhower did what they could to isolate the anti-Communist, anti-Catholic John Birchers, the Phyllis Schaflys (who brought Southern Baptists and other Christian activists into the GOP by holding anti-Communism workshops in church basements) and other radical right wingers of their party when he led the GOP in the 1950s. He and other Republican leaders wanted nothing more than to build a Republican Party of moderates, expecially including the growing middle class, the families of which were headed by the millions of soldiers he commanded in Europe.

How to keep the center

The GI Bill, a large government social program Eisenhower endorsed and helped oversee, created a highly successful and upwardly mobile middle class. It is true, in 1959, that Eisenhower was against expanding the benefits to peacetime military, but he understood its importance to preventing a repeat of the Great Depression after World War I and the law's ability to prevent another Bonus Army March on the Mall in Washington, D.C., as occurred after World War I.
The creation of the GI Bill, however, was clearly a Republican act.

Benefits included low-cost mortgages, loans to start a business or farm, cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend college, high school or vocational education, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. By the end of the program in 1956, roughly 2.2 million veterans had used the GI Bill education benefits to attend colleges or universities. An additional 6.6 million used these benefits for some kind of training program.

It was passed during the Truman Administration, but that's beside the point. Unlike Romney's promise to kill Obama's health care program should he win the White House, Eisenhower embraced the GI bill created by his Democratic predecessor.

Harry W. Colmery, a World War I veteran and ex-Republican National Committee chairman, outlined his idea for the G.I. Bill on stationery and a napkin at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. By the way, the GOP was willing to fund the vast GI Bill at a time when the wealthiest Americans paid an average of 51 percent income tax. In 2012, the wealthiest Americans pay much less--closer to 16 percent. The decline in what the wealthy pay in taxes is the result of the tax policies of both parties over the decades, according to the book, "Death of the American Dream."

Attack, attack

When it comes to reaching out to the center, today's national Republican Party leaders have the sentimentality of Sen. Joe Mcarthy, who in the 1950s accused many in the center of being dangerous fellow travelers of Communist International.

I did not just read about the radical right's violent opposition to the center somewhere. I personally have been attacked on dozens of right-wing websites, including the Drudge Report, Gov.com, and others for my belief that strident Republicans created a dangerous atmosphere during the healthcare debates that could have led someone to take a shot at Obama.
Though my writing to them was extremely agitated, (the better to reach them, I thought) my opinion was not unique; columnists in many mainstream publications were warning ill-informed Tea Party activists to calm down and to stop carrying guns and clubs to public healthcare hearings around the country. One Tea Party member, carrying a sign declaring himself so, threw to the ground and stomped a young woman who carried a placard supporting Obama's program. Onlookers didn't move for several moments as the man repeatedly lifted his size 12 shoe and brought it down on her neck. Thankfully, other Tea Party members pulled him off.

At other events, reporters who tried to cover Tea Party candidates were detained by private security agents and in many cases were forcibly thrown out of events.

Far from urging calm debate, Republican candidates like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman used terms like "Second-Amendment solutions" (referring to guns) and declared Obama as dangerous as Hitler or Stalin. Palin, the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, accused him of being a terrorist.

I happily admit that so far the ugliness has not reared its head nearly as high this election cycle and that's good news. Whether Romney has laid down the law, we're not hearing as much invective against the Democratic candidate. Remarkable, too, because the two are so close in the polls. Perhaps they'll get ugly in the run up to Election Day.

A parting vision

Back to September and the road. Jack Kerouac wrote about the America I remember. In September, when I have that urge to travel, I pull him off the shelf. Here's the America that I love, and I know Republicans love, too.  We have common ground. There are still millions of Republicans who disagree with the politics of their present platform and love the simple things in life. In this column, I merely wanted to point out that those who are in charge of the party are not the same kind of people who led the party in the past.
Anyway, here's our American writer, celebrating the country that we all love. He and his friends in the post-war world, in a 1946 Cadillac, a truly American car. From On the Road:

In no time at all we were back on the main highway and that night I saw the entire state of Nebraska unroll before my eyes. A hundred and ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic, and the Union Pacific streamliner falling behind us in the moonlight.

It was a magnificent car; it could hold the road like a boat holds on water. Gradual curves were its singing ease. 'Ah, man, what a dreamboat,' sighed Dean.

Now doesn't that sound like something worth remembering as we debate how we want this country to proceed? I know, Romney was against saving General Motors during the 2008 financial collapse, but if you ask most Republicans, I'd bet they're happy the 2012 Cadillac and other Detroit steel is available this year.

Reader's life enhanced by disposed-of pup

By John L. Guerra

Readers may forgive me for focusing on animals in recent weeks. The space chimp, the cat that hates lightning, the dove that lost her tree--it's not by design but occasion that the creatures made their way into this column.
Three weeks ago, in "Letters to the Keys," I described the disposal of four, live German shepherd pups in a dumpster by some chill-blooded person. The puppies, still in their downy-fur stage, were rescued when someone by chance heard their cries.
Unharmed, thankfully, they were examined by a veterinarian and distributed to families that will care for them.

How Spike was rescued

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Lounging in front of a fan recently, Spike seeks relief from the summer heat. The dog that was thrown out in a beer box when a puppy has had a loving home with his human, Walker, for 11 years.

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Walker, a Key West resident, read about the four pups' plight and was reminded of how he got his dog, Spike, who also was tossed into the garbage when just a youngster. Another man's search for beer led to the animal's discovery.
Spike is a perfect example of a rescued pet whose presence is a gift to the world.
I happen to know Spike; he was a fixture at The Key West Citizen when I was there. He was a member of the staff, prancing into the newsroom with two tennis balls in his mouth, followed by Walker, who was busy making sure newspapers got delivered to news boxes and performing a million other tasks.
Spike does not let those tennis balls out of his sight. He can control both of them, too, by using his nose in combination with each front paw. I swear. I've seen it a hundred times.
He is all about food, too. If he smells a slice of pizza or a Cuban mix at an employee's desk, he's right there, sitting politely, awaiting a handout.
This dog is a real cool animal that could have had an awful, lonely end in his puppyhood.
I will let Walker relate the story.
"I have been enjoying your pieces in Key West the Newspaper but was especially touched by your "Letters to the Earth" one.

"I don't know if I ever told you about how Spike and I came together," Walker wrote me. "He had been thrown away in a dumpster almost 11 years ago to the day. Some woman had put him in a beer box and placed him in the dumpster at Stock Island Lobster Co., directly across the street from where I was working at the time. It was around noon in the middle of August."

No beer, but plenty of Spike

"A crazy Cuban man (I can't remember his nickname now) saw her and went to check if there was any beer in the box. He saw Spike, who was, maybe, 4-5 weeks old, in the box, and removed the box (and the puppy). If I would have hypothesized such a situation, I would have predicted that the man would have just left the box (and Spike) there. This guy spent his days hanging around at the entrance to the fish house, talking to himself and cursing Fidel Castro.
"He showed the puppy to another Cuban guy who worked with me and he brought the puppy to me.

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Spike stares at the tennis balls in Walker's hand as he took this photo last week. The grizzled fellow loves the outdoors but stays close to his owner, Walker. Note his rapt attention, expecting Walker to throw the tennis balls for him to chase.
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"I have always been so glad that I ended up with Spike, even though, at the time, I was not even contemplating having a pet.
"Ever since, I have thought about how horrible his fate would have been--he would have died before the sun went down that day 11 years ago. Anyway, thought your readers would appreciate the story."

Thanks, Walker for sending in the photos. Spike sure looks happy!

Puppy dumping happens everywhere

 If there's a place where people take care of their animals and pets, it's in the Keys. Puppy dumping is thankfully rare here, though we don't know how many animals aren't saved from such disgusting action by humans. It doesn't take a lot to imagine what kind of death that means for animals.

A quick Internet search for "puppies thrown in trash" Wednesday night included the following news headlines:
"Mother dog, six puppies thrown in trash"
"Puppies bagged and thrown in landfill"
"Fourteen puppies thrown in trash."

The dog dumping happens all over the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom--indeed, all over the world. There are YouTube videos of puppies being pulled from dumpsters, landfills and trashcans. Not a heartwarming scene, but it seems the act is not limited to one area.
This is reason No. 3,543 to neuter one's pets. Fewer unwanted puppies and kittens means fewer puppies and kittens will end up in the trash.