I’m posting this note on both blogs, because it concerns both. It especially concerns both on a minor subject: wild animals, such as I’ve written on this past summer. To that, I will return in a minute.
1. What’s coming regarding local Dems
The other thing I wanted to note
concerns the next phase in my local Democrats series, whose later entries have
been shunted over to my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog for its final phase, Part 7
in several subsections.
If you think you’ve had enough
of this series, believe me, I would like to round it off, too—but not because I
am impatient with it. I just didn’t think it would well up into what it’s
become. But there is a portion of it that I think is very interesting, which I
didn’t expect would be so “big” when I started addressing the matter of Mark
Hartmann, onetime New Jersey Herald
reporter and later functionary in the county Dems.
This particular story turns out
to be very interesting for a number of reasons, and I have drafted quite a few
pages, to be split into several subsections, which may be winnowed down a bit.
The reason why this entry “swelled”—and, actually, turned into something that
seems more fitting for part of a book manuscript than a blog “vamp”—is that it
(1) touches base on several important themes in my blog and (2) is something
that I have considerable sources of information on—not least, numerous
newspaper articles from 2001-02 that are part of the essential basis of why
this story became notorious.
I not only knew Hartmann—not
terribly well, but peaceably enough—from within the county Dems, but after his
status within the Dems (and on a more personal level) started to encounter
serious problems in late 2001, I had some dealings with him within the lay-run,
volunteer psychological support-group context in the county seat of Newton in
2002. This in turn—to the extent that support-group precepts are at all
relevant—raises issues of “confidentiality”; but I think in this case—somewhat as
in the case of another set of matters on which I wrote a long book manuscript
in 2005-08—there is enough of the story in the public realm or otherwise outside the support-group realm that
whatever I have to say from the support-group realm is allowable, and in fact
is quite minor in terms of the substance. (In Mr. Hartmann’s case, there is
very little to say, if anything, that was said in a support-group session that
wasn’t revealed, or outshone by worse allegations, in a non-support-group
realm.)
Another issue concerns Mr.
Hartmann himself: would he want this story raked over again, 12 years after the
fact? That morally concerns me more than whatever some people from within the
precincts of the support-group culture might say. But I think the passage of
time might temper Hartmann’s own feelings about this, and moreover, he was
“done dirty” badly enough in 2001-02—most notably by at least one local newspaper—that
perhaps he might want this story aired with what perspective I can bring to it,
which includes input from several sources, and more generally a perspective
that would be far friendlier to him than that of the newspaper that covered him
most extensively and notoriously.
Lastly, because he was centrally
involved in county Democratic activities in 1999-2000, this story might have
interest from that perspective. And there is also stuff he told me in a private
conversation, which he meant (in giving it to me) to get his story out (though
he merely wanted a sounding board, not public exposure of the info at that
time), which remained either in my journal or in my memory. This latter stuff
might put some things into interesting perspective—for those who have been
interested by this Dem series—apart from opinions on him personally—that is,
related not only to “office politics” concerning the county Dems, but how the
newspaper that covered him most notoriously not only cast an unflattering light
on him but on the county Democrats in the same stroke.
This set of issues also, on a
general level, overlaps with the issue of a former employer mishandling the
reputation and rights of a former employee, the sort of thing that my blog has
looked at in other entries. And one benefit to Mr. Hartmann’s story for me is
that I can approach it with full understanding of the type of issues involved,
yet it isn’t an employer/employee situation that I was directly involved in, hence my story can’t be accused of
being colored or slanted by my own “interest” being bound up in it. Meanwhile,
I would point out that the “skeleton” of logic such as inheres in employer
disservice to a former employee, as it is manifested in Mr. Hartmann’s case,
has many commonalities with the same that I’ve seen in other contexts. This
sort of disservice seems to take its nastiest form in the publishing world.
So I have no lack of very
interesting material, and the remaining issues for me are completing the story
on Mr. Hartmann, and editing the whole set of entries on him. I should note I
haven’t communicated with him since fall 2002, and have no idea what he’s been
up to since. (If he were to contact me and request changes in what I’m doing
here, I would certainly consider them. I would much less welcome any requests from the newspaper that was most
troublingly involved in this 12-year-old situation.)
And by the way, my Dems series
will indeed wrap up—after talk about 2002-05 or so, including a positive
accounting of someone who did well in the context—with some “climactic”
recountings and assessments on the “star” of the whole set, Howard Burrell.
2. Critters
It is rather amusing to me that,
of all the topics I’ve covered during the past several months, when my output
seemed to slow a bit, that of various encounters I’ve recently had with wild
animals had some greater interest (to judge from the stats showing links) than
have some of the entries that I put more intellectual labor into.
One entry in particular was the
one from my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog on the turtle I found in the road, whose title had the concept “teleological suspension of the ethical” (an
idea from Kierkegaard). I wasn’t quite sure what to make of all the interest in
this, but—as before—I choose not to allow comments from readers, for a host of
reasons I last discussed in fall 2012.
I wasn’t sure if people thought
I was momentarily, or otherwise, cruel to the turtle. I don’t think I was at
all. I ended up helping it, going out of my way to do so, including driving
back to its location after hiking home. What I thought was interesting about
this episode was how—as you walk along, and are not in the best condition (by
reason of clothes, location, whatever) to help a wild animal, you get into a
sort of moral quandary about helping the animal, even though—rationally
considered—you do about as well as could be expected in the situation.
I have always had sympathy for
wild animals. I can get rather excessive about it. I try to avoid hitting
squirrels on the road. I don’t like killing insects or moths with the lawnmower
when I’m cutting the grass. I try, when practicable, to remove big bugs to the
outdoors when I find them indoors. (My mother, on the other hand, is a big one
for killing bugs of various sorts indoors.)
But I also know that, with us
humans having our own workaday lives, charging around in our cars, having
schedules to keep (and miles to go before we can sleep), etc., we might be
moved to help an injured animal, but we can’t always “fit it in,” and we
thereby—playing the philosopher for a moment—appreciate the wide divergence in
values and morally-based behaviors there is between humans and animals.
This may sound a bit stupid, or
professorly (not always the same thing), but a few examples will help.
Perceptual capacities define level
of responsibility
If you take psychology in
college, and you especially take courses in the psychology of perception and
experimental psychology, you realize that humans can be studied as to how they
respond to perceptual stimuli, and how this varies with the life cycle—for
instance, at what age does a baby get depth perception?—and also how perceptual
cues work in certain situations (for people of all ages). You also realize that
animals’ ways of perceiving things share something in common with humans, and
in other ways they don’t.
For instance, animals—presumably
developed over millennia of evolution, etc.—have ways of acting in their world,
moving their way along via their own modes of perception, that don’t exactly
square with those of humans. You can tell this when a wild animal is moving
into the road, and you are approaching with your car. Will it see you? Will it
get out of the way?
One thing to keep in mind is
that your traveling at 50 miles per hour, or thereabouts, requires a certain
spatial judgment on your part that animals typically don’t exercise. So, you
may suddenly see you need to brake quickly, to avoid a collision. Accordingly,
you step on the brake pedal hard enough to slow the car quickly, and may even
steer to one side to avoid colliding with something.
An animal, meanwhile, won’t see
you coming and think, “Oh, that bugger is coming at me at 50 m.p.h. Therefore,
I have to pick up the pace and turn this way
to avoid getting hit.” You can think of an animal as a fellow who failed
physics in high school but loves to eat. (This almost describes a large segment
of New Jersey.)
In short, animals don’t perceive
your coming car the same way as you might if you were in its position. Even if
they bumble out into the road, and are somehow aware of your car coming, they
tend to keep going in the direction they’ve been going (“This always worked for
me in the past!”)—bears are especially prone to this, keeping dopily to the
same path, while deer are more apt to change their direction. And they might
get scared by something “coming from your car’s direction” that means danger,
but they don’t quite know how to respond. They might even seem to freak a bit
and move as if they’re trying to get hit by you.
That is when your superior knowledge
of perceptual stimuli, and how animals can respond to them, can help.
What I often do is, if I’m
approaching a big animal, and I can vaguely estimate how quickly it seems I’m
approaching the animal, and I can judge from what it seems to be doing what its
likely behavior might be if I do something preemptive, I’ll beep my horn
several times. This can scare the animal into moving more quickly off the road.
Headlights can also help. In dim
or dark conditions (while your headlights are on), if you see a deer near the
side of the road, you can flash your “brights” on and off quickly, and this
could well scare the deer off into the woods.
There is an “urban legend” that
deer are always “drawn” to headlights when you approach them with your lights
on, and that there’s little you can do about colliding with them. Actually,
this isn’t true. Headlights may dazzle a deer at night, just as you may be
dazzled momentarily by bright sunlight at the beach. But what will effect some
difference is if you blink your brights off and on quickly. This makes for a change in the visual stimulus of the
light that may be disconcerting to the deer, and the change (because it may
cause fear) may cause it to head off, away from your car. Beeping your horn at
it can also help.
I don’t think these techniques
are taught in “driver’s ed,” but they are certainly something I’ve learned by
experience over the years.
In this way, you can
“communicate” with animals with the simplest forms of stimuli—noise or flashing
lights. In this connection, the communication is merely to set up a scary
situation that causes the animal to move away. If your speed, the space between
you and the animal, and other factors allow it, this can be a saving
exercise—both for your car and the animal.
Chipmunks
The other critters topic I’d had
in mind concerns chipmunks. These are little rodents, apparently of the
squirrel family, that we have a lot of where I live, in northwestern New Jersey. They look
somewhat like mice, but are bigger. They have stripes, and a largely rust-brown
color, and have a fuzzy tail. They make a range of squeaking noises, from a
sort of squeak (or rapid series of squeaks) that suggests fear when they hurry
off from you. They also do a characteristic “chip” noise they can repeatedly
make (their whole body shudders when they squeeze this sound out), which projects
quite a distance, and it seems to be a way they communicate with each other.
They subsist on nuts and
apparently worms and insects. According to the Wikipedia article on them, they live in holes in the ground that lead to a sophisticated tunneling
arrangement that has special compartments for waste kept away from their
sleeping areas. This would seem to be essential when they hibernate underground
for the winter.
Squirrels, by contrast, are out
all year long. They can emerge and try to do their daily thing even after a
deep snow has fallen.
Yearly, chipmunks come out to
live their lives in the spring, by sometime in May. They are especially active
by June, when they apparently are mating and starting to raise young. Then they
seem to disappear, for the most part, for the hottest, dreariest part of the
summer, from sometime in July through most or all of August. Then, in
September, when nuts are starting to fall off the trees (like acorns and
hickory nuts), they are out in force again, gathering food (to store away),
running around, and generally preparing for winter hibernation. They basically
disappear for the winter, en masse, by late October or early November.
Last year, they had disappeared (for
hibernation’s sake, presumably) by the time Hurricane Sandy hit. Then,
the following spring, we seemed to have noticeably fewer chipmunks around than
we had the previous fall. It seemed reasonable to suppose that Sandy, with its torrential rains, drowned a
lot of the chipmunks in their underground burrows.
Quite apart from this issue, several
days ago I found a dead chipmunk on the lawn of a house I go to a lot, across
the street. It seemed to have been killed by a cat, with a bloody head injury,
but it hadn’t been eaten, even in part, which cats that live outside can do
with chipmunks. And it didn’t have rigor mortis yet, so it had been recently
killed, maybe sometime in the earlier morning or the night before.
I picked it up with a shovel and
carried it to a wooded area to chuck it there. I looked at it in a way you can
rarely get a close-up look at them. Chipmunks often can “cross paths” with you
very close—just a very few feet away—so sometimes they seem to have remarkable
courage around humans, but just as likely they can be scared by you and race
off with an abrupt squeak when you come upon them and don’t even realize
they’re there.
This fellow—of average size—had
what struck me as a biggish head, with whiskers and well-developed snoot. If
you catch a house mouse, it is amazing for how insubstantial it is. A mouse can
be barely two inches long, and half of it is head; it can seem like a minimal instance
of an animal that can still make an awful lot of noise when it is scratching
and chewing on something inside a wall. And a mouse has beady eyes that seem
like something unseeing that you’d put on a craft project.
But a chipmunk has more
sophistication. They look, with their more developed head, a little more in the
direction of a cat. Like a lot of animals, they seem more well developed and
beefy to their body’s front end, including their shoulder area, while their
tail end seems a little scrawny, like an afterthought, with rear legs and tail.
But anyone who ever saw a chipmunk up close—or even from several feet
away—would not mistake it for a mouse.
And they blink their eyes if you
watch them steadily and they’re watching you. They can even be aware of you
watching them if you’re behind a window and you can reasonably know that the
visibility of you from outside isn’t good.
