More Reflections on Spirit Lake

Paul King adds to yesterday's post about Spirit Lake, which for him was both beautiful and eerie.

I just read your essay on where you stood 30 years ago on
the eve of the eruption of Mt. Helens. I recall visits to Spirit
Lake circa 1960-66 when I, too was a reporter at the Longview
Daily News.

You have described the tranquility and beauty of the lake at
the foot of the mountain. Let me relate a few of my own
experiences. I first visited that area in the early 1950s when
we lived in Tacoma and our oldest daughter was an infant.

Although my wife and I were overwhelmed by the natural
beauty, I strolled about the campground on the lake shore
and spied the holes in ground which appeared to have no
bottom. I asked a group of campers about them. They told
me they were the casts of a forest destroyed by a massive
eruption of the mountain centuries earlier and where the
wood had rotted away with the passage of time.

I had no way of knowing then that we would move with our
three daughters in a few short years to Longview, buy our
first home and make many friendships that endure to this
day. And my newspaper work was fulfilling and enjoyable.

I was sent once to interview Harry Truman, owner and operator
of the tourist lodge on the south lake shore. Harry was a flawed
character who reeked of booze, frequently invoked the deities and
was addicted to inventive scatological outbursts. Today he, the lodge
he built, and a legion cats who dwelt in it with him lie beneath
200+ feet of volcanic ash.

But I digress. Although my family and I enjoyed the alpine beauty, I
was never able to visit the site without a sense of eeriness and
impending doom. Two of our girls attended the youth camp on
the north shore. But whenever I walked through the campground,
the hair would rise on the back of my neck when I inspected those
ancient tree casts. And I always managed to find some reason why
some other peak, say Mt. Rainier, would be a more suitable site
for our mountain camping excursions.

We have visited the volcano several times since. We are impressed
at the rapidity of recovery of the flora and fauna and look forward
to new OPB TV coverage of what 30 years can do to restore vegetation
and wildlife. I hope the infirmities of age will permit us to make
one more visit to what is left of that magnificent mountain, doubtless
resting for its next uncontrollable and catastrophic spasm.

Frontline documentary blind to cultural repression

Watching “Obama’s War,” the PBS Frontline documentary on American military involvement in Afghanistan, a few million of us in the audience were forced to suspend our disbelief.

That’s what television asks us to do most of the time — to our peril. I’d hoped for better from PBS.

In one hour of programing last night, we saw but one Afghan woman. She was barely visible. She said nothing. She was little more than a bundle on the back of a fleeting motorbike. We saw her head-to-foot in a burka and wearing goggles as a man, presumably her husband, transported her down a dusty street.

So much for women in Afghanistan.

Much of the rest of the program was about Marines (all males) trying lamely to jolly stolid, slightly bemused, suspicious Afghan men into rapport and ultimate resistance to the off-stage, but clearly feared Taliban. How religion and notions of “infidels” might play into the relationship was never explored.

What the audience saw were men doing men’s futile, often violent, work in a culture that bars women from sight and opportunity. The program’s directors and its correspondent/narrator Martin Smith never so much as acknowledged the obvious.

The rights of woman, half the Afghan population, weren’t on the table or the screen.

Some criticize American military and diplomatic policy in Afghanistan as futile nation-building. The critics rightly doubt that Americans and Afghans share the same definition of “nation.” Or, I would add, the same definitions of “loyalty,” “honesty,” “integrity,” and “democracy.”

Clearly the Afghan culture in the country-side, where the war for "hearts and minds" is being waged, doesn’t share our definition of human rights.

Forget nation building.

Is a culture so starkly at odds with our own culture worth the dollars and lives we are spending to preserve it?

It’s a sad commentary that this program failed to explore, let alone acknowledge, the cultural disconnect.


P.S. Paul King, a regular Red Electric reader, has written this response:

We, too, watched the PBS piece on Afghanistan. I agree with
you about the futility of our trying to bring their culture into the 21st
century. That can only be done by Afghans.

When watching films on third world countries, I often muse over
our own history. How short the years since our forebears painted the
big red "A" on women who committed adultery and burned them as
witches while stoning others to death in the name of God.

How long have our women been considered anything other than
property under the law and how long have they had the right to vote?

I think we, betimes, are a tad quick to judge those who, under nearly
inconceivable conditions to westerners, are centuries behind us and
burdened with religions and cultures which demean women as we
once did.

And while we're about it, consider the King James version of the Holy
Bible which certainly does not accord to most of its women the
independence and self-determination given to its men.