MESSENGER’S NEW MEGAPHONE

 

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

There were no Twitter moments in the information revolution of my youth, which was the transition from radio to television. Entertainer Milton Berle, newscaster John Cameron Swaze and funnyman Jackie Gleason came to life, literally, as most TV was live programming, replacing the on-air radio voices and sound effects. It was magical, this slapstick and haphazardly directed programming. Imagine, live “video” in your home. You no longer stared off into day-dreaming space listening to radio drama or comedy.

Yet that — radio — was a revolution, too, in my grandfather’s time, when small crystal radio sets without battery could pick up nighttime signals in New York from as far away as Chicago. Imagine, voices in your living room, replacing a an occasional trip into town to see the traveling vaudeville show.

And, of course, vaudeville replaced whatever entertainment came calling in the 1800s, 1700s — before.

Today’s Internet, Twitter, Facebook, other information/entertainment/social media, are the fleeting moment’s new getting-out-the-message modality, challenging or replacing TV and radio and vaudeville, the theater and whatever else that used to have us sit for a spell and actually absorb in minutes, even hours, rather than the seconds pushed by “hashtag” this and that.

Ironically, the hash sign — # — now commonly called hashtag, is used in Twitter and elsewhere as part of an information search. But in my early newspaper days, and for generations before me, a hash symbol was required at the end of each typewritten page or “take” of a story to indicate to the copy editor that more material followed. So, essentially, newspaper #s meant “more.” So do Twitter hashtags. New version of same old.

What goes around comes around, or as Yogi Berra would put it, “If you’ve seen it, then you saw it.” Radio was an extension of vaudeville made possible by Hertz, Marconi and others; television pushed information delivery thanks to people like Farnsworth and Zworykin. Then came the Internet, with Twitter, Facebook, digital newspapering. Ahead are additional ways to deliver information. Truly next is “#” — “more.”

I did not get to enjoy a vaudeville performance, so I cannot comment on how my mind would have absorbed the sights and sounds and come to any conclusions about the entertainment. I did not attend the Lincoln-Douglas debates, so I don’t know how I would have taken in that live information.

But I have been through radio, television, early and later Internet, now Twitter and Facebook. I was also a newspaperman for 42 seasons and am still one by instinct and practice. Information is my suit, ands for that reason, I am in awe of the possibilities ahead, just as my grandfather probably was in 1914 when he listened under the covers to the “nether” via  his crystal radio set. I just hope we take the time to digest — and question — all that massive information, given so quickly and often without vetting.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

RETURNING TO EARTH

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

Whether it is worry about family finances, or county government, the state of the nation or the world, the realization that we are but specks in time can put things in perspective. Quickly, the headache that comes with self-absorption is gone, and life can exist in the greater scope of existence.

No, this is not day-dreaming gone wild or too much pre-bedtime wine but the effects of the Internet, that remarkable portal to information, which has shrunk the world and perhaps the universe, too. Another way of expanding our limited outlook.

Working the Net recently, a teaser appeared on a story about the NASA’s onboard Mars rover Curiosity Mastcam recording of what looks like a petroglyph, the stick figure which has appeared since cave days all over the world. And now on a planet far away.

Of course, it could be coincidence that the rock on Mars has an indentation which  simply looks like a petroglyph, but is it also coincidence that stick figures from continent to continent, thousands of years apart, are so very similar?

In those times, despite what 2014 smart phone users might believe, there was no Internet to spread the message, to promote copy-catting.  Not even newspapers or books or TV. No Facebook or Twitter.

So, was civilization more advanced than now? Or were we (are we still) visited by others not of this world, who left (leave) their mark? Or did we advance and then horribly put the world into a dark age from which we are still emerging, rebuilding technological greatness?

Ah, perspective. It can bring you back to earth. Or is it the other way around?

     The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced. 

A POLICE OFFICER’S RESPONSE

   On Aug. 18, I offered an essay, “It’s a two-way street,” which argued that policing is a super tough job, and the officers deserve respect while being trained to know the community. It also  expressed concern about using military equipment and what I described as para-military clothing. Joe Badalamente, a retired New York City police officer, writes an articulate response in my space today.

 

By JOE BADALAMENTE

Thank you for your recent column about the police. Although I have been retired for nine years, your words struck a chord. Even after all that time, I still feel very much a part of “the police” in general, and the NYPD, specifically.

I spent twenty years with the NYPD, from 1985 to 2005. My field training took place in Brooklyn before I was transferred to the Central Park Precinct in July ’85, a little more than a month prior to the murder of Jennifer Levin by Robert Chambers.

Although I agree with the spirit of your argument, and again, very much appreciate any support of police, I must take issue with a couple of points. Regarding salaries, I’m not sure how you define the Northeast, but I’m pretty sure outside of the immediate New York metro area, cops aren’t pulling down anywhere near Orangetown and Clarkstown money. I’m currently working as a financial investigator at a large bank, and my 29-year-old team lead is making roughly 125k after only two years, with only an undergraduate degree from SUNY. A 20-year veteran of the NYPD at the rank of Police Officer can’t come close to this without putting in a ton of overtime; not to mention cops in hundreds of small towns from  Boston to DC. It seems living in places such as Rockland, Westchester, Bergen, Nassau and Suffolk counties skew the public’s perception of police salaries.

Perception is a great lead in for my second point: Your opinion of cop’s uniforms. In 1995, the once and future NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton brought back the department’s original dark blue uniform shirts and issued us nine-millimeter handguns. The confidence that one-two punch instilled in the rank and file was exponential. We no longer looked like bus drivers (not that I have anything against them!), nor felt so outgunned. The nine millimeter’s 16-round capacity afforded us a better chance in any potential gun battle — reloading a fresh magazine into a semi-automatic weapon takes much less time than fumbling with a speed loader, the “fast” way to reload a revolver. Numerous cops over the years and around the world have been killed while reloading during firefights.

As for the combat-style boots you mentioned, on patrol, support is the most important thing, whether trying to catch a perp or fighting with one. As for uniform pants, I’ve never seen camouflage on a city or Rockland cop, so I can’t speak to that. However, the paratrooper/cargo type pants are utilitarian, containing many more pockets than standard uniform trousers. Having spent most of my career on patrol, pockets are important; it is quite difficult to reach into the front pockets of regular uniform trousers while wearing a gun belt; the cargo-style pants’ leg pockets come in very handy for the average patrol officer to stuff their memo book, extra pens, flashlight or what have you. (I know it’s leading with my chin to those who think all cops are corrupt to go on about the importance of pockets for police, but I’ll take that chance!)

The “demilitarization” of the police is something I keep hearing and reading in wake of Ferguson. Yet, at least in the NYPD, it is the Emergency Services Unit that utilizes such equipment, and they are called in when appropriate, such as when people are rioting and looting. Patrol cops are ill equipped to deal with rock and bottles being thrown at them. Helmets are needed, as are armored vehicles when the rocks suddenly turn into Molotov cocktails. Or would people prefer numerous police officers going on sick leave with injuries caused by these projectiles?

I find it difficult not to devolve into sarcasm here, but it amazes me how everyone is an expert on police tactics now because they watch “Law & Order” and “Blue Bloods,” or the latest ill-researched blockbuster churned out by Hollywood.

You seem to imply that civilians “feel” a certain way in reaction to how a cop might be outfitted; frightened, intimidated — perhaps non-verbally bullied? Yet, society tells us how one “feels” when walking towards a group of kids whose pants are hanging below their asses, baseball caps turned sideways, toothpicks in their mouths and cursing up a storm, or seeing a bunch of bikers with ZZ Top-type beards outside a bar, or a couple of want-to-be Tony Soprano-types hanging in front of a social club in Bensonhurst is “profiling?” Aren’t you or your theoretical law-abiding citizen profiling any particular officer because he or she prefers to wear boots and paratrooper/cargo pants? Isn’t it more about your perception than about what a particular officer may or may not be trying to project?

A historical note; in the late ‘70s, leather jackets were taken from the NYPD because some felt it made them look like the Gestapo. The city even went so far as to change the names of groups of precincts from Divisions to Areas in an attempt at demilitarization. Yet crime continued to soar in and around the five boroughs through the ‘80s into the early ‘90s, until the aforementioned Bratton was brought in. Of course, the improving economy and Roe vs. Wade’s 20th anniversary dovetailed in with CompStat and the new weapons and uniform changes, all of which may or may not have had something to do with crime stats falling off a cliff. (And let us not forget how Rudy Giuliani took the credit for it all!) Lest I digress,  my main point is that the  confidence created by our being outfitted with more stylish uniforms and modern weaponry created a much more professional and potent police department, which played a major role in the drop in crime, in my not so humble opinion.

I know first-hand that no department, no officer is perfect. There are many problems in policing, including blatant racism, that interfere with how the public should be serviced. But like any other group on the planet, it is a small percentage of cops who tarnish the image of the rest. All I ask is for people to keep this in mind while consuming and digesting the so-called news.

BACK TO THE EARTH

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

Home heating systems may have kicked on to deal with lower temperatures in the USA’s Northeast and wherever there is seasonal change, but for me, the change involves more than a turn of the thermostat dial. There is  a memory journey as well.

Back when I didn’t worry about such things as heating, when the cocoon of early childhood had others taking care of room and board, my only assignment was to watch for the coal man.

In that time, before there was a massive bridge connecting interstate carpets on both sides of the mighty Hudson River, before the hustle-bustle age, we lived in a sleepy community, Spring Valley, population perhaps 4,500, though summer tripled, maybe quadrupled that since there were seasonal bungalow colonies.

Our cherished quiet time returned in September, and the assuring hum of small-town life as well, with its Main Street shops, two elementary schools, one high school, a few doctors, dentists, lawyers and other professionals whose family names had long been known by residents, and the village regulars all communities have and without which there is no small town, USA.

One regular was the coal delivery man, from Comfort Coal or the other outfits which received their anthracite and bituminous lumps by Erie rail car. Living at 14 Ternure Ave., corner of Summit, at age 5, I watched for him.

I would sit on the mound of grass and small Mountain Pink flowers, day-dreaming as a past time and an obsession, one ear cocked for the sound of truck gears changing as the coal man’s rig climbed Ternure’s hill.

The delivery fellow would pull into the gravel driveway and stop next to the Mountain Pinks. I would run and tell my grandfather or grandmother, and they would open the coal chute door above the basement bin. Then the deliveryman would connect a metal chute to his truck and begin shoveling supply into the chute and down into the bin. The bin would always reach the same level, as the man had done his job for so long and was quite good at it, another community constant.

When the fellow was finished and had his chute  back on the truck, but before he hopped in his cab and left, he would come over to me, give me a lump of shiny coal and tell me to bury it for a day when I might need it as a big boy or an adult, probably when I had to provide my own room and board.

I did what he said, and if anyone cares to dig into the dirt behind the Mountain Pinks at 14 Ternure, the east side of the house, they surely would find my stash of coal, buried there numerous times.

That home, long gone from the family, now has natural gas for heating, not coal, and there are no such delivery men in what is no longer a small village, nor a small county. Progress relentlessly has  been on the march, but if it ever stops, I know where my rainy day savings account lies.

    The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.