Community vs Communication

September 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

Through more than two decades of travels about the series of tubes that comprise the online world, I’ve often found myself pondering the nature of community, as that word is applied to groups that form and function in virtual spaces.

I’ve watched the word “community”  being ever-more widely and casually used over the years to describe clusters of physically remote individuals interacting collectively online, via an ever-evolving spectrum of technological applications, from ARPANET to the World Wide Web, from bulletin boards to LISTSERVs, from mailing lists to MMORPGs, from blogs to tweets, and from Cyber-Yugoslavia to Six Degrees to Friendster to Orkut to Xanga to Myspace to LinkedIn to Facebook to Google+ to whatever the next killer social app may be.

But are the groups that form in such virtual locations truly communities in any meaningful human sense? When evaluating traditional definitions of the word “community,” several key themes emerge:

  • An organized group of individuals;
  • Resident in a specific locality;
  • Interdependent and interacting within a particular environment;
  • Defined by social, religious, occupational, ethnic or other discrete considerations;
  • Sharing common interests;
  • Of common cultural or historical heritage;
  • Sharing governance, laws and values;
  • Perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some way from the larger society in which it exists.

If you’re willing to accept that a “specific locality” or “a particular environment” may be defined by virtual boundaries, rather than physical or geographical ones, then it’s generally pretty easy to conclude that, yes, online groups can, in fact, meet the most basic parameters for declaring that they are communities. But other elements embedded within those defining traits raise more difficult questions and considerations, including (but not limited to):

  • What, exactly, is an individual in a world where identity is mutable? Is a lurker who never comments a member of a community? Is a sockpuppet a member of a community? Are anonymous posters members of a community? If a person plays in an online role-playing game as three different characters, is he one or three members of the community?
  • How are culture and historical heritage defined in a world where a six-month old post or product is considered ancient? Do technical platforms (e.g. WordPress vs. Blogger) define culture? Does history outside of the online community count toward defining said community?
  • What constitutes shared governance online? Who elects or appoints those who govern, however loosely, and does it matter whether they are paid or not for their service to the group? What are their powers? Are those powers fairly and equitably enforced, and what are the ramifications and consequences when they are not? Is a virtual dictatorship a community?
  • How important is “distinctiveness” to community, when online groups are often defined by what they are not as much as by what they are? Are online groups merely the ultimate manifestation of Peter Gabriel’s prescient 1980 track, “Not One of Us,” wherein he asked “How can we be in, if there is no outside”?  And can you truly build a community of peers within an Orwellian world where “All bloggers are equal, but some bloggers are more equal than others”?

At root, the fundamental fallacy or flaw with online communities is the fact that virtual gatherings cannot (yet) replicate physical gatherings, as their impacts are limited to but two senses: sight and sound. While these two senses are clearly those most closely associated with “higher” intellectual function, learning and spirituality, the physical act of gathering or meeting in the flesh is much richer, as it combines those cerebral perceptive elements with the deeper, more primal, brain stem responses that we have to taste, touch and smell stimuli.

Exchanging a message online removes any ability to experience the physical reality of actually touching another person, be it through a hand-shake, a kiss, a squeeze of the arm or a pat on the back. There is no ability to taste and feel the texture of the food we discuss in a chat room, or the feel of crystal against the teeth as the first sip of wine passes our lips. The nuances of facial expression and inflection are lost in e-mails, often leading to confusion or alarm where none was required or intended. The physical act of community building is a visceral one that appeals to, and requires, all of our senses, not just those that can be compressed into two-dimensions on our computer screens.

Two-dimensional communities are, ultimately, destined to disappoint for precisely that reason. While it’s become cliché to compare the dawn of the Internet era to the dawn of the printing press era, it’s important to note that the earlier cataclysmic shift in the way that information was preserved and presented (from spoken word to widely-available printed material) did not result in the elimination of the physical gathering, upon which all of our innate senses of community have been defined and built. I have come to believe that community requires physical connection. It is deeper than an e-mail, more resonant than a blog post, more important than your hit counts or number of followers.

At bottom line, for me, “communication” occurs online, but “community” must be rooted in the soil or the flesh. So I consider myself a member of the University at Albany community, or the community of Latham, New York, or the community of Naval Academy Alumni, or the Capital Region music community, among others. And I look forward to soon becoming an active, engaged member of many new communities in and around Des Moines, Iowa, where we will be moving in November.

My current and future communities involve geographic boundaries, shared interests, common heritage, supportive beliefs. And while the members of my communities may choose to communicate with each other online (since there’s no escaping the fact that we spend a lot of time in front of computers, every day, whether we like it or not), the communities themselves are not defined by what happens in virtual space.

And that makes all the difference in the world, I think.

Filed under Communications, Media, Philosophy Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Where The Air Is Sweet? Valuing American Public Broadcasting

June 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

This is a feature-length piece derived from the research I conducted while earning my Masters of Public Affairs and Policy. While I love the concept of public broadcasting, I think its modern incarnations in the United States are not necessarily true to the vision of the idiom’s founders . . . and not for the ideological reasons often cited by those who perceive public broadcasting to have a political slant or agenda. Clink the link below to open the PDF file and learn where I believe public broadcasting’s true shortcomings lie.

WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET?

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You Ain’t Got A Dog In That Fight . . .

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

The best thing about today’s social media applications is that everyone with a computer can write about whatever they want to write about, push a button, and share it with the world. But the worst thing about today’s social media applications is also that everyone with a computer can write about whatever they want to write about, push a button, and share it with the world.

Just because you can write about something, doesn’t always mean you should write about something, and it seems to me that this ability to self-filter is a dying skill in the blogosphere of late. One of the great truisms of successful written communication is to “write what you know,” and I’ve always taken the word “know” to mean more than “I researched it on Google and Wikipedia for 10 minutes.”

Here’s the deal: some people are very knowledgeable about certain topics, while other people are very knowledgeable about other topics, but precious few human beings are qualified to serve as blogging polymaths. The best bloggers, to me, are those who stick within a reasonably tight span of personal expertise and experience, and whose responses to current affairs and news are tempered by a mature understanding of where they can add value to a particular debate, and where they can’t.

Unfortunately, such nuanced, informed bloggers are becoming an increasingly rare commodity. Their more-measured words are all too often trumped by the “I blog about everything” school of online scribblers, often backed by the endless, self-reinforcing do-loops created by equally non-selective readers. Collectively, they’ve created an all-noise/no-substance paradigm that appears to be as addictive and destructive to discourse as any opiate, beverage, fetish or vice.

This “blog about everything” compulsion becomes particularly annoying when such bloggers are first out of the blocks on sensitive, important or fast-breaking news topics and, by virtue of their cranked-up reflexes, become default sounding boards for addressing such topics, even though they have little to offer beyond half-baked opinions about things they gleaned from headlines. This rush by the ill-informed to serve as first responders results in them posting some truly idiotic and embarrassing material, though their shame responses seem to perish around the same time that the self-filters burn out.

As I am assaulted by such material while looking for more mature and responsible fare, I often find myself wondering why so many all-purpose bloggers feel compelled to offer endless running commentary on topics beyond their ken. I generally conclude that it’s either because they have a desperate need for constant attention, or because they’ve become obsessed with their online hit counts, impressions, visits and follows. Or both. Either way, though, their pathologies manifest themselves through malformed blurts online, typically written from a center-of-the-universe perspective that places them (and their feelings) smack in the middle of narratives where they have no meaningful place whatsoever, by any lucid, objective standard.

Where and when I grew up, if you spouted off in public regarding things about which you were ignorant, or which had no bearing on your life in any meaningful way, you’d be told in no uncertain terms to shut up, since you ain’t got a dog in that fight . . .

I’d like to see more of us use that kind of response online when we’re confronted with ill-formed blogger blather, especially when it’s peddled to us by commercial interests. Perhaps if we collectively push the B.S. button on such bloggers more often, we’ll be able to raise the level of online discourse above the point where it is controlled by the folks who have little more to offer beyond their ability to get to their computers before anybody else does.

At bottom line, not every thought that enters a blogger’s head is valid, and not every feeling that a blogger experiences merits sharing. A little discretion goes a long way, even here, even now, and to those bloggers who fail to recognize this most fundamental fact, there’s another expression from my childhood that fits you to a tee . . .  That dog don’t hunt . . .

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The Newspaper Junkie Speaks

April 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

I generally read three newspapers (preferably local ones) each and every day, in a private, solitary series of rituals. As an early-bird type, I start off with my first paper as an accompaniment to my morning coffee in the quiet time before anyone else arrives in the office. At lunch, if I can find a copy, I try to grab something in a convenient tabloid configuration, since that is perfect for reading while eating by one’s self on a diner two-top. (Something I quite enjoy doing, actually, so don’t insult me by saying “Oh, just one,” in withering terms when I show up at your greasy spoon seeking grilled cheese). Absent a handy local tabloid, copies of which are becoming harder to come by around here lately, I’ll settle for USA Today and its magnificent sports section. At home, I subscribe a regional daily, so I read that every night before my wife gets home and we head off to the gym or dinner or my regularly scheduled ass-whipping at the Scrabble table.

With all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments lately about the decline and fall of various venerable daily newspapers, I suppose I should be worried about whether I’ll be able to satisfy my tactile news-gathering needs, since handling paper and ink clearly satisfies me in ways that clattering away at a computer can’t. Which isn’t to say that I’m any sort of Luddite or technophobe: I’ve had an internet presence longer than probably 98% of the folks reading this, so certainly appreciate the power of the post-print paradigm. I just like newspapers too, and not only because they go so much better with bacon or biscuits.

Given the amount of money that I’ve pumped into my newspaper addiction over the years, I figure I’m the guy (in a universal sense) that the newspapers really want to keep happy on some plane. They wouldn’t have to run around scared, trying to court and capture new customers who require a lot more grooming with a lot less promise of steady-state return over the long run, if they were guaranteed to keep me and my ilk, and our spawn, engaged and paying for their products. I mean, just look at the per-paper price increases that I’ve absorbed without blink or pause over the past few years, simply because newspapers in their current configurations are essentially perfectly inelastic commodities to me: I’ll keep paying for papers whatever they cost as long as they meet my needs.

But the flipside of that inelasticity is true as well: once newspapers stop meeting my needs, then I’ll stop reading them, even if they cut their prices back to keep me. So with all of that as rambling preamble, and at the risk of biting the generous hand that hosts me here, I’d like to offer some observations about what the newspapers need to do to continue meeting my needs, thereby keeping me, a self-admitted ink addict, from entering into a newsprint detox program and moving on with my life, finally smudge-free and with one less recycling bin to manage.

I’m reminded of the wonderful and insightful song “Ted Key Beefs” by Killdozer, in which my all-time favorite lyricist Michael Gerald dolefully intones the following passage:

“It amuses me to see businesses spending so much money every year to get me back, when I was there in the first place. All they needed to do was give me some service, and show a little courtesy. In fact, I was the most important person in the world to them: I was a customer. But now . . . I’m the fellow who never comes back.”‘

That’s a wise and cautionary lesson for businesses of all stripes that Mr. Gerald offers: don’t chase the customers you don’t yet have to the detriment or neglect of the customers that you already do have.

So what do my newspapers need to do to prevent me from becoming the fellow who never goes back? As Mr. Gerald noted, first and foremost, the newspapers need to give me some service and show me a little courtesy. Above all else, this means: don’t insult my intelligence by trying to spin fairytales out of the tough times you’re having of late. You know times are hard. I know times are hard. Belts need to be tightened. Be straight with me. I can take it.

But if instead you tell me that you are eliminating five sections a week in order to give me more of what I want, then you’ve insulted my intelligence. As would trying to convince me that front-page advertisements were a quaint throwback to Victorian design ethics or establishing a story-swapping service with other papers within your corporate family, then trying to assure me that the model is the same one underpinning the Associated Press, and isn’t going to result in some reporter, somewhere, losing his or her job. I’m not that stupid, and I suspect that other newspaper readers aren’t either. So don’t talk down to me that way, please and thanks.

Once my newspapers resume treating me, their current customer, with a basic modicum of courtesy and respect, what else do I want from them? First and foremost, I want news. That’s why I buy a newspaper. If I wanted style, dating, or parenting tips, then I’d buy a style-paper, a dating-paper or a parenting-paper. This isn’t to say that there can’t be news stories about style, dating or parenting, of course, but if you are running an “any old time” puff piece on those or related soft topics with no currency or immediacy, then why waste precious page space on that? News, to me, implies change. Stories that never change aren’t stories.

There’s certainly no shortage of things changing around here in the political, social, athletic, artistic, creative, dramatic, educational and medical worlds, on top of the various earth-shattering events unfolding planet-wide around us. Cover them as a priority, please, in the space you might instead use for, say, full-page photo spreads of people at parties, cruel observations about folks in the community who don’t meet certain cliques’ fashion standards, or reprints of the absolute worst columns from the otherwise choice Wall Street Journal.

After you’ve laid the news out on me, then I want some analysis. This is why I can read three local papers covering many of the same events, since each paper offers me some unique perspective on what happened and what it means. The differences in tone and content of coverage between local or regional newspapers are marked and fascinating, and you get a much richer sense of a story reading multiple newspapers. I expect my newspapers to find, hire and keep journalists, editors and reporters who can provide such unique, independent analysis in stimulating and responsible ways, unlike the unwashed rabble online (me included) who are held to no standards, and whose voices, while legion, are often shrill and uncouth. I can get that for free. If I’m paying for your newspaper, I want something better.

One of the related real beauties of the daily newspapers to me is that while stories may be breaking, at some point they have to be put to bed and processed, and given beginnings, middles and ends, at least for a day. Facts, analysis and commentary are preserved as they were perceived at the time, rather than being subsumed in an unending, ever-morphing wave of blog posts and comments. The bottom line is, I don’t need instantaneous updates for 99% of the news stories that impact me on a daily basis. I’m fine with them being captured in amber, and then getting another piece of amber the next day, perhaps with the same insect preserved within, but now in a different posture. It’s still beautiful, even if I have to wait a little bit for it to be delivered to me.

And speaking of blogs and websites, don’t send me to them. Seriously. You have me in your newspaper, so figure out how to keep me there, rather than sending me elsewhere. I like to surf, sure, but if you force me to go to your website to get something related to an article I’ve read in print, then odds are I’m going to find it, and then quickly move onto something that’s entirely web-based, rather than oscillating back and forth in an uncomfortable netherworld between print and digital like some Lovecraftian half-dead thing that requires both a laptop and newspaper to share the table with its fish and chips. That’s just too complicated and crowded. And when you boil it all down, it’s ultimately all just words and pictures in either place, so why not work to make your words and pictures so rapturous that only a fool would deign to seek the shallow, vapid imitations that blight Cyberia?

And, sad to say, but most online newspapers really are blights at this point, staffed as they are with an eager army of unskilled and untrained and unpaid community writer-bloggers who, desperate for the elusive “exposure,” give away their words (some of which might, occasionally, actually have value), while the marketeers in their cubicles hope that you who read the swill will please pretty please click on some of the advertising banners that flash and burble around it, so that they can continue to get paid to produce the paper product that their website and others like it are helping to destroy.

It’s a pretty weird business model, isn’t it? I think so, and I don’t believe that it’s a sustainable one. I believe that the few print dailies that are going to survive in the long run are going to be those that recognize that fact, and get off the web, and devote all of their time and talent to producing unique, local, exceptional written product that makes the price you pay for it seem like a bargain. Like television and radio, the daily newspaper market has long been defined by rapacious holding corporations devouring choice local properties as soon as it seems like they might be profitable. The sooner those corporations go under and homegrown (or re-rooted) locals move in to take their places, the better the product that survives will be. Yes, it’s going to be a convulsion. Yes, lots of papers aren’t going to make it. Yes, lots of writers, editors and photographers are going to have to seek new careers. But that’s going to happen no matter what.

Of course, in the aftermath of that convulsion, unit prices of the surviving products will be higher and circulation will be lower, meaning that the print newspapers are not ever going to reach the market share they once did. But that’s okay, isn’t it? Most people may buy CD’s or MP3’s these days, but there are still tough, efficient little companies out there pressing vinyl records for folks who love the heft and quality of them, and who appreciate having something tangible to hold in their hands in exchange for their hard-earned money. So here’s hoping that newspapers will find a similar niche, where reasonable profits can be made for high-quality product with a devoted, dedicated audience who are willing to pay for it, along with businesses that are willing to advertise in front of such devoted consumers for related products which may appeal to them.

But in the same way that record companies are not likely to impress vinyl audiophiles by pushing MP3s on them, newspapers are not likely to impress their most fervent readers by pushing websites and podcasts at us. We can find those on our own if we want them, thanks. We’re here with our faces buried in your newspapers because we want you to offer us something better than that.

Why do you seem so determined to make us all go away?

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Better Angels

February 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it’ . . . We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Those are the final words of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, one of the most eloquent and elegant evocations of the sanctity of the American Union ever put to paper. His words resonate with me, 150 years after he delivered them. Like President Lincoln, I once swore an oath as a military officer to support and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and it remains “registered in heaven” all these years later, even though my time of active service is over.

Given that fact, it honestly pains me how glib many people have become in their use of secessionist language within contemporary political discourse, especially when the Confederate States of America (CSA) are evoked and lauded as part of that discussion. It has become fashionable in some circles to dress up and romanticize the Confederacy today in terms of States’ rights or pride in Southern heritage, but the fundamental bottom-line is that the “general welfare” and “blessings of liberty” that the leaders of the CSA desired hinged solely on the disenfranchisement of millions and millions of slaves.

Regardless of one’s political views, I can see no combination of current social, cultural or governmental ills coming anywhere close to the raw evil of a government that went to war to preserve the utter debasement of human life and dignity implied and enacted by institutional slavery. I’m proud to be a native Southerner, I’m proud of my deep South Carolina roots, but I’m ashamed of the role that my ancestors played in attempting to perpetuate and preserve the miseries of human slavery for economic gain. I view the Confederate flag with every bit as much antipathy as I view a Swastika accordingly. I hate seeing it displayed publicly today, no matter what the rationale for hanging it may be. It’s a tarnished symbol, beyond restoration or rehabilitation.

So I grieve for the soul of my Nation when this most shameful chapter in our collective history is often glossed over for the sake of political expediency in contemporary political debate, and the model of the CSA is upheld as a viable, admirable solution to current events. The way I see it, the question of whether or not healthcare should be considered a public good (to cite but one example) is in no way, shape or form comparable to the question of whether or not one human being should be able to treat another as chattel. Media and political operatives who make such romanticized and sanitized connections to the Confederacy as they cry for the dissolution of the Union do a grave disservice to us all. It’s one thing to be educated about and vigilant toward our government’s actions, but it’s quite another thing to call for the sundering of the Nation when the government doesn’t pursue the political agenda we might prefer it advance.

Lest you think this is a partisan screed aimed only at right wing demagogues who use fearful incitement as a blunt instrument to whip their followers into a frenzy, I should note that I hold left-leaning operatives who play to their listeners’ senses of victimization by evoking the specter of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Stalinist Soviet Union in exactly the same disdain. Holding up the CSA as an admirable model is grievously wrong-minded, but so is comparing anything going on in the United States today to the systematic genocide of millions of Europeans. The Nazi exaggeration is just as provocative, and just as incorrect, as the myth of the noble Confederacy. Frankly, I’d be just as happy to see Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo go away as I would be to see Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck disappear. Propaganda is propaganda, no matter which side of the political spectrum it serves. Discourse doesn’t thrive when you’ve got a waggling finger shoved in your face.

And what we need more than anything else today is discourse. Not ranting, not hyperbole, not finger-pointing, not name-calling, not personal attacks, not insinuations, not skullduggery and certainly not a fantastic rewriting of American or European history to create a sense of fait accompli pointing us toward some particular contemporary outcome.

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Compassionate Grounds

October 1, 2010 Leave a Comment

Jim was my best friend in junior high school. He was a Navy brat, I was a Marine Corps brat, and we were fortuitously thrown together by the fates when our families both moved to Mitchel Field before the start of our seventh grade year. We were both placed in a “Talented and Gifted” program at our friendly neighborhood junior high school, where they basically sequestered us and some other bright kids away from the mainstream of the school, likely turning us into odd ducks, if we weren’t so already. I suspect that Jim and I were in the latter category.

We essentially functioned as a two-person intellectual tag-team unit for the next three years at school and in our neighborhood, generally hanging out together except for during the six weeks in summer when he went to camp in Virginia, and we wrote long, elaborate, coded letters to each other laying out of plans for the year following his return. I still have a lot of those letters from him, most of them written with a fountain pen, blobs of ink all over them, preserving one of Jim’s more persistent (and eccentric) preferences at that time.

Jim and I first connected over our shared obsessions with the early music of Steely Dan and Jethro Tull, and we would spend hours and hours playing, discussing, analyzing and dissecting their albums. He was a bit more cosmopolitan than I was, and introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Monty Python, and Perrier. I think I introduced him to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Series, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (via a copy of Tarkus that I pilfered from the library of a nearby community college).Whatever we got into, we got into deep, and my cultural tastes today are largely similar to those that I forged with Jim during those formidable, formative years.

We did many of the things that smart junior high school boys do, and some that many don’t: we skateboarded, we smoked things we shouldn’t have, we figured out how to deal with girls, we wrote pretentious poetry, we worked on the school’s closed-circuit television show, and we designed elaborate linguistic and wargaming systems that combined Burroughs, Tolkein, and our own rather off-kilter senses of humor. We also liked to set things on fire, and once almost burned Jim’s house down while igniting model airplanes in his basement. (I still have scars on my left leg where molten model plastic splashed me).

Soon after the accidental fire, Jim hand-delivered a note to my house, which I still have. On the outside, it said “Special Bulletin to Eric Smith (Only)”. Inside it read:

“Though you may have guessed already, I will tell you that on the Friday 19th, after I took Wendy out (yup! yup!) my mother discovered her bottle of Sobo (TM) glue in the “small” room (basement) and also other things (hint: [some drawings of candles, model airplanes and fire appear here]). I made sure your mom didn’t find out, so things went a little easier, and I was heavily restricted for one night, for which I compensated by reading my (and Tolkein’s) companion. So, you guessed, fate has destined our pyromaniacal phase to terminate and I accept his decision on the matter and have decided that we now must enter a more conservative phase, where we must seek peace of mind, keeping within the limits, being subtle, yet radical, and settling down to more time with Wendy and Maria (yup!). But we must stay tactical, shrewd, uncanny, as we battle our foes. Also, we must be a team without civil war. I have drawn up a file to record and index anything or anyone concerning our organization(s).”

Of course, as happens with all organizations built around or for military brats, eventually duty calls for the military members, and their kids go with them. Jim left Mitchel Field first, the summer before our tenth grade year, moving to New Jersey, where (like me) he grew a foot in a year or so, and took up fencing, because he was the type of guy who just looked right with a sword in his hand. We continued to correspond regularly, and got together a couple of times that year before I moved to Newport, Rhode Island, for a year, and then to Jacksonville, North Carolina, at which point our letters tended to become less frequent, though more florid. I have a six-page, handwritten letter, for example, containing an epic poem called “Green Dragon Friday” that Jim sent me during the first semester of our senior year in high school. It’s really a spectacularly clever and creative piece, and it’s one of the reasons that I consider Jim one of the best writers (and smartest people) I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.

College time came, and I went off to the Naval Academy, and Jim was accepted to a prestigious Ivy League school, where he went on to become an All-American fencer. His school and my school were rivals on that front, so whenever he came to Annapolis to compete, we would get the chance to catch up. I made it through college in four years, but Jim’s wanderlust took him, and he left school before graduating, and headed off to Europe to explore, travel, think, and write for a couple of years before finishing his degree.

Just before Christmas of 1988, Jim boarded a plane in London to return to the United States. But he never made it home, perishing instead with 269 other people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and plummeted to the ground, 31,000 feet below. Jim had a window seat, just above the wing. According to the investigation report:

“. . . when the cockpit broke off, tornado-force winds tore through the fuselage, tearing clothes off passengers and turning insecurely-fixed items like food and drink trolleys into lethal objects. Because of the sudden change in air pressure, the gases inside the passengers’ bodies would have expanded to four times their normal volume, causing their lungs to swell and then collapse . . . A minute after the explosion, the wing section containing 200,000 lb (91,000 kg) of fuel hit the ground at Sherwood Crescent, Lockerbie. The British Geological Survey at nearby Eskdalemuir registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale as all trace of two families, several houses, and the 196 ft (60 m) wing of the aircraft disappeared . . .”

I think it’s safe to say that Jim would have liked to have lived another several decades, and to have spent his final moments not as described above, but rather in the presence of his loved ones, as will Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of killing him, who was released from his life sentence on “compassionate grounds” in August 2009, returning home to a hero’s welcome in Libya. He is still alive at the time of this writing.

I lost only a childhood friend over Lockerbie and I’m viscerally appalled by the Scottish judge’s decision, so I can’t comprehend how those who lost children, parents, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives must feel. There are strong ties to Pan Am Flight 103 in the Capital Region and other parts of Upstate New York (especially Syracuse), and I grieve for those families here and elsewhere as they watch mercy being dispensed to the person who unmercifully robbed them of their loved ones.

Those families are the ones worthy and deserving of relief on compassionate grounds, though there is none to be granted them.

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