alias Bruce.

Killing.

Sean Paul Kelley over at The Agonist recently posted a thoughtful piece about his having been raised as a hunter and his sorting out a personal stance toward the taking of life and the sharing of the planet. In response to what he wrote, I posted a comment. With its now being hunting season (my neighbor went out for deer last week but only saw a small buck, which he spared) and the immediate aftermath of the Thanksgiving feast fest, I am posting an expanded and hopefully more thought-out version of it here:

The act of killing is something a person had damned well better take seriously.

I have fished since I was about five years old, when I waded, scared to death, at the edge of an underwater drop-off in one of the big rivers in upstate New York, at the bottom of a 300-foot gorge, with my Dad. He was crazy to have let me do this at that age, but since I ended up not drowning I'm now glad he did it. I now spin fish and fly fish wherever there is clean water, fresh or salt, including a cold, clear river near my house where a few days a ago a fat, strong, more-than-foot-long rainbow trout gave me dinner. I never set foot in a river or in the surf without intending to bring home food, whether the day turns out that way or not. When I kill a fish I know damned well I am killing a being, and I express thanks for its feeding me. Nothing fancy or sanctimonious. It's just the reality: I've killed and I'm going to eat and I need to acknowledge it.

For me personally, knowing what it feels like to kill seems like the very least I can do as a flesh-eating person, and I'm pretty weirded out by our society's accepted habit of eating dead creatures while shielding ourselves from any experience of the killing. Sure, we have all gotten hints or explicit evidence of the predatory lie we live from news stories or horrific food documentaries, and we all know that the pale flesh beneath the plastic wrap in the market was a living creature that felt pain just a while ago. But for me, if we have have never held a writhing fish in our hands and then conked it to render it unconscious before disemboweling it and cutting off its head, or if we have never followed the blood trail of a dying deer and then put it out of its suffering, or if we have never wrung a chicken's neck, something at the heart of the death-for-dinner reality has escaped us.

I know better than to get up on any high horse about this. We all have hypocrisies in our personal ways of life. It goes with the territory when our beef comes from a far-off giant processing plant and our porch furniture comes from a repressive factory regime in Asia. I like and own leather jackets, but I have never executed or skinned a cow or witnessed its death in an industrial abattoir, and I never will. I may one day own a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots, but I will never slay and skin a rattler. You have your own version of the same dynamic. I know meat eaters who very comfortably eschew any knowledge of how cattle and pigs and chickens die on corporate killing floors. I know catch-and-release fishermen and women who regard my habit of catching-to-eat as awful and self-indulgent, and I respect the conservation ethic that makes catch-and-release the rule in many waters due to sheer human traffic and mistreatment of nature. To me personally, making fish suffer purely for one's own pleasure, when one intends simply to throw them back, is barbaric. But the fact is that, even as a food fisherman, I'm wild about fishing itself. I find something both primal and connectively grounding in it. I enjoy the strength and the wiliness and the fight of a healthy fish that is fooled by what I offer. So I cannot claim that this is purely a food thing for me (although, especially these days, that's a big part of it). More messily still, even if I am stalking a particular fish that I can see in the water, I cannot control my sometimes catching a young fish that I need to put back or that may die from the ordeal of having been caught. Hunters with guns or bows, I guess, at least have more control over which animals they kill. So I freely admit that my approach to this is no tidy or clean affair. It's just my way of working out what feels balanced and what I can live with.

But I do think it is important for us, as people, to put some personal thought, some feeling, some effort into trying to work this out within ourselves, wherever that leads each of us. Our see-no-evil consumer ethic encourages the opposite. And I think that's bad. At a time when manufactured experience seems to shield us from virtually all knowledge of the effects of our way of life, I think the effort of paying attention to these questions, however conflicted and incomplete, adds some leavening to our sense of place in the living world, some sense of impact. Especially when it comes to something as essential as what we eat.

Sometimes, I think, even a little knowledge can be a good thing.

Racism, Intent, and Hybrid Trout.

ITEM: In an August 19 post, anti-racism advocate Tim Wise mentioned that racial incidents sometimes go beyond the legal principle of mens rea, or "guilty mind," in the sense that an act can carry meaning and consequences not dependent on its intent. Wise's point: an act can be racist even without explicitly racist intent if its perpetrator is sufficiently ignorant of the causes and effects of his or her actions. In a comment responding to Wise's remarks, a reader wrote the following, which is one of the best and most succinct explanations of the workings of everyday racism I've seen:

Frederic Christie says:
Mens Rea...

Doesn't always apply in a court of law either, Tim. (As I'm sure you know). In fact, I think the way that the criminal justice system handles it is an EXCELLENT analog to race and racist actions.

Take drunk driving. No one seriously argues that drunk drivers mean to run over someone or crash into other cars, thereby threatening their own lives. But they're responsible because they did not behave PRUDENTLY by making sure that they would not be in a car while drunk.

Similarly, manslaughter convictions in general take it for granted that someone has to pay for a death, even taking into account many ameliorating factors.

Just like drunk driving, whites are operating under the influence of something that arrests the reason: Racism. And just like accidentally killing or harming someone, someone who behaves in such a way as to lead to a racist impact better have a damn good reason why they did so. Ignorance, as in the type of ignorance that most whites have, is no excuse.
Wed, 08/19/2009 - 3:03pm

ITEM: Meanwhile, in the conscious intent department, this appeared in the August 20 Baltimore Sun: 

Two teenagers have been arrested and charged as adults in connection with what police describe as a racially motivated beating of a 76-year-old black man.

Zachary Watson, 17, of the 900 block of Jack St. and Emmanuel Miller, 16, of the 1600 block of Spruce St. were arrested late Wednesday and have been charged with 18 counts of attempted murder and other offenses, along with Calvin E. Lockner, 28, who police arrested Tuesday.

Lockner, a self-professed white supremacist who is a registered sex offender and has a tattoo of Adolf Hitler, told detectives that the victim was targeted because he was black.

According to charging documents, the teens said Lockner instigated and carried out the beating and car theft, which left retired state employee and Baltimore County resident James A. Privott hospitalized with a fractured eye socket and two missing teeth. Lockner said it was Watson who beat the victim.

Miller said the three had watched Privott and his wife fish at Fort Armistead Park in South Baltimore and approached them to ask if they had water or cigarettes, according to charging documents. Lockner became angry when Privott said no. As the group walked away, Lockner shouted a racial epithet at Privott, Miller said.

They waited for Privott's wife to leave, then Lockner struck Privott at least 10 times while yelling slurs, according to records. Watson described the weapon as a sledgehammer, Miller as a baseball bat, records show. Lockner picked up Privott's wallet and keys and the three left in his 2008 Chevy Tahoe.

I wish Mr. Privott a strong body and a stalwart soul. I suspect he has both.

Many a nonwhite fisherperson who plies remote streams, rivers, and lakes thinks (and sometimes plans) about the possibility of this kind of thing happening. It would be unwise not to. As I told a relative recently when we discussed this very subject, even in the back country of Alaska and other wild places, the creatures I have always regarded as the most dangerous are humans. No contest, really. Grizzlies? They have manners, smarts, and no desire for trouble unless you do something really dumb or have the very bad luck to run across an ursine psycho case. Wolves? Like Dick Cheney during the VietNam War, they have Other Priorities. Moose? Avoid putting antlers on your head during rutting season and you'll be fine. But people? As a poet friend of mine once dryly observed, they will "say anything, do anything."

I remember wading a remote Northeastern trout stream one day years ago, in pretty serious Angry White Unemployed country, when I encountered one of the rare black fishermen I have met in such places. As it happened, he was dragging behind him on a stringer in the water a monster of a trout, a good four-pounder at least, one of the big hybrid brook trout that some states have begun stocking. We got to talking, and he warned me to watch out for some of the hostile white locals upstream. We talked about what drives some miserable creatures to behave in this way. As if to sum it all up, he shrugged philosophically and said, "It will solve itself." I can still see him wading off, moving downstream, dragging his huge trout.

I think he was right. It will eventually, and agonizingly, solve itself. The only question is how long it will take.

Soul Priority.

So I'm casting in a trout stream a few evenings ago. It's a downright holy beautiful dusk, about 75 degrees, the light softening into dull orange as the last of the sun filters through the contours of a riverside cornfield littered with straw-colored stalks from last year's crop. The water is ice-clear and swishing-fast and I can feel its cold through my waders. A friend told me the fishing would be incredible for these few days after the big rain that swept the muck out of the stream, and she was right: the trout are leaping out of the water for mayflies, and I already have a hefty brown on my stringer that I'll gratefully take home for dinner after having returned maybe a dozen smaller trout to the water.

I am wading back upstream toward the riverbank trail to head home, and I have basically let go of fishing for the day but I figure, hell, why not cast my way back. So as I slosh upstream I make maybe my second or third casual cast, and a few feet from my left leg -- whammo! -- fish on. Nice one. Whoa. Really nice one. I give it line, play the fish out, try to avoid doing anything stupid, and I clumsily if effectively land it, and, man, it's an even bigger brown than the other, just gorgeous, fat and the length of half my arm and wet-sheened with its brown and yellow skin and red and black speckles. And now, suddenly, I have dinner for two days instead of one. I thank the river and this trout -- which is the least one can do before eating a creature -- and I resume wading upstream, shaking my head. I'd been barely fishing at that point. I'd thought I was done. Who knew?

All of which is a way of saying that time spent without intent is a good thing.

Don't get me wrong; intention matters. A lot. You'd starve without it. Ask anyone who has been hungry. Grasping intentionality, actually, has been one of the great lessons of my life. But there are also many things that planned intention will never, ever bring. A big trout in a spot where you'd never reasonably expect a trout to be is one of them.

Fact is, a nonstop diet of schemed-out intent is a bad thing. It is one of our afflictions as Americans. So many of us rush around in this moment-to-moment stream of appetites, each one 10 minutes long but cumulatively consuming a lifetime: I want this. I need that. I'll accomplish this. I'll have that. And when we look up we're fat, unhappy, sick, and then dead. Because it is never enough. Faster is not more; louder is not stronger; fuller is not happier. It's a starvation diet of gluttony. Because the less the soul gets, the more it craves, and the more it claws for satisfaction in moment-to-moment appetites, the less it receives.

I am convinced, for instance, that this soul starvation is what is behind the current product category of "Extreme" experiences: Extreme sports, Extreme amusement park rides, Extreme vacations, Extreme contests, Extreme caffeine drinks. It's a kind of buried desperation, a panting place within us that lusts for what every next moment might deliver: Wanna feel. Wanna feel.

Action -- in the sense of ceaseless American pursuit -- will never get us there.

But certain kinds of anti-action, or at least interludes of anti-action, will. This antidote to consumptive addiction goes by a million names, and each works pretty well in its way. Meditation, a temporary suspension of intent, is one. Prayer or reverence, a surrender to one's sense of a greater reality, is another. Plain old silence and stillness without plan or destination is another. Call it whatever you want. Do it in whatever way you want. But without some measure of it in your life, you are on a gerbil wheel. Which is why I think so many Americans -- including the followers of a certain goal-directed narcissism that passes itself off as fundamentalist religion -- are spinning out in the hyper-pursuit of true feeling.

A drummer I know, driving home the point at which blindingly-fast technique becomes intuition, said to me one day, "Some things are impossible to play at the speed of thought. But they can be played at the speed of feeling." A Buddhist friend of mine cited a quote: "The great matter of life and death is at hand. Do not waste time." It's all the same thing: your soul, or, if you like, the awareness at the heart of you, wants to be entirely here in the world. When it is not, it gets frantic and unhappy.

This is what, on his best days when he is not caving to expediency, President Barack Obama can now bring to American political identity: soul. I don't mean soul in the sense of cool moves and brother-with-a-red-phone power, although that's all good. I mean soul in the sense of moral integrity. Not the phony kind that praises Jesus while torturing at secret prisons, but the genuine variety that sets and follows humane and just standards for what it means to be an American. Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist put it this way in writing about the current controversy over torture:

And still, we're asking the wrong questions about torture--meanwhile the newspapers still label it as 'harsh interrogation techniques,' like this semantic bullshit means we didn't do something horrible, unspeakable and immoral. Alas, the question still being asked comes in the form of today's New York Times headline story: 'At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?'

That's not the right question or even assumption to debating torture. Torture is immoral and unspeakable under any circumstances. Its efficacy shouldn't even be considered. Why am I such an absolutist about this? Because once we torture we lose our soul. There is nothing left to fight for after that, no brutality that will not be considered or implemented. We are either civilized, enlightened human beings or we are not.

We are a nation in search of some kind of equilibrium with the larger world. This will not come with proud ambition or strutted prowess or studied expertise. It will come only with an honest reckoning of what is right and how to act in accordance with how we ourselves would want to be treated. It's the kind of thing that comes only when you are not trying to prevail: when you have caught your trout and you are headed upstream toward home, having let go of any demand for more.

It's enough to make you want to sit and be quiet for a little while.

Trout Shocker.

 
Cat sends this photo of the spectacularly rare Crocheted Rainbow Trout, unknown in virtually all trout waters worldwide. In fact, it's the first specimen I've ever seen. Note the complete lack of gills (which itself challenges all known fish physiology) and the odd tint and placement of the pink lateral stripe, due, no doubt, to the vagaries of yarn and mutation. Its apparent preferred habitat also seems very strange.

I've been to every trout database I know, and they've got nothing, zilch, on this strain of Rainbows.

You saw it here first.

Go with the Flow.

The river I've been fishing runs through big old farms, through cardboard McMansion subdivisions with words like "Estates" or "Heights" in their names, and through stretches of fairly deep forest. In a matter of just a few weeks, these woods have jammed themselves with undergrowth at impossible speed, as they do at this time every spring. (As in the above photo I took.) One week you're strolling through the trees toward the river on a bed of dead leaves, the next week you're bushwhacking in growth over your head. I swear, if you could sit and watch long enough, you'd see the ferns actually rising.

I think spending time in places where things grow, or flow, or both, is a good idea. It's a good antidote to the fake inertia of public charlatans and engineered meaning. Wading in moving water works for me. What do you like?

Just at sunset the other night on the river there was a huge mayfly hatch. Again, it's incredible how fast it happens: first there is nothing, then the air is filled with these little fluttering critters as if they've always been there. An adult mayfly lives anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Hatch, fly, go to the prom, fall on the water. That's it. I'd been flinging a hand-tied grasshopper made by my friend Sandy and the fish were liking it. (Sandy's abstract-looking Montana hoppers out-fish every realistic hopper I've ever tried. Somewhere in here I think there's an idea about art and symbols. But I don't know where.) When the mayflies hit, I tied on a brown Hendrickson mayfly pattern that looked like what was hatching, and whammo, I caught a respectable-sized brown trout. This is always a thrill, especially since I'm not that great a fly caster or a fly-matcher. But this hatch would have been pretty hard to get wrong.

Most of the fish I've brought home in the past few days -- six rainbow trout -- have been with a spinning rod, which is so much easier than fly-fishing that it makes you feel you ought to stop but is so much fun that you can't. Plus if you've got an empty fridge and you're fishing for dinner, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I've seen a river otter two days in a row at the same spot; it looks as if it's made a nice slide for itself down the bank but I haven't yet seen it use it. (Ever see an otter slide down a bank into the water? It will cure you forever of the idea that humans are the only folks who have fun.) Last night a beaver stood on its hind legs in shallow water, maybe 15 feet from me, and used its hands to carefully pull down a branch to get to the specific clump of leaves it wanted to eat. It turned up its nose at the easier-to-reach leaves on the branch, kept bending the branch down til it reached the desired delectable selection, then yanked off a mouthful of greenery and crouched in the shallows, chewing. Loudly. With glee, I'd say. What do you imagine a beaver is thinking while it strains to go after that one good-looking clump of leaves? Is it thinking, "Man, those higher-up leaves were good last time, I'm going for them." Or, "Something tells me to go for that clump of leaves; I don't know why." Or, "Leaves. Grab. Chew." Or, Nothing. I can tell you that it sure looked to me as if this beaver knew what it liked and liked what it chose.

But back to mayflies. You'll like this: Sandy, the fly-tying ace, wrote me recently to say that his latest kick is tying what he calls "ultra-realistic flies."  He explains: "It's sort of a paper maché technique. I mush a slurry of chewed up toilet paper and wheat flour paste with food coloring, and then meticulously dab drops of colored goo onto a wire foundation. It takes about three months per fly." He includes this sample photo of one of his creations:



This is a classic Sandy gag, which I'm ashamed to say I took seriously for exactly four minutes before good sense kicked in. Sandy then explained that this mayfly, a March Brown, hit his screen door and he picked it up and took the photo before it woke up and flew away.

Anyway, the streams here on the Mid-Atlantic Coast are warming up with late spring and summer, and the trout are hunkering down and getting fewer and farther between.

But then, there is always north and west.

Obama Meets Montana.

 
My Montana friend Sandy Pittendrigh -- who I usually talk about for his fly-fishing and boat-building exploits -- traveled to the Crow Indian Reservation for an Obama rally recently, and he took pictures. Beautiful pictures, and a lot of them, a selection of which I've posted above and below. Sandy also sent me this link to a video clip of Obama's speech at the Reservation, which I recommend to you if only as a welcome reminder of what presidential demeanor looks like.

Obama gives a good speech, all right: light-years more inspiring than, say, the presumptive Republican nominee's warmed-over McBush War Corporation sales pitch. At the Crow Reservation, he also spiritedly addressed principles of justice for Native Americans – itself a rare thing in mainstream political campaigning. What continually leaves me less than thrilled about him, though, it that his rhetoric so often sounds like coy progressive foreplay: "change we can believe in" without the daring details of the changes themselves. Obama seems to stop chronically short of how, for example, we could step in to streamline and tightly regulate our absurdly redundant and obscenely price-gouging health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, or craft policy to actually block (or deter) private money from public politics, or propose hard numbers for how and when we will direct our military's ravenously unnecessary share of our national treasury back into education, health, the environment, and diplomacy. And let's not even start on the Israeli regime and the occupation, on which Obama parrots the one-sided American pro-Zionist line as if he has been personally threatened by the Massad.

I know, I know, I'm carping. I should think positively, be grateful that the system of cash flow we call our electoral process has allowed a candidate like Obama within speechifying distance of the nomination; be happy that the over-cranked Republican machine has busted its own gears and that the virtues of liberalism are once again becoming popularly self-evident. And I am happy. See? I'm smiling.

But cripes, Senator. Have you studied the tapes on FDR and on Howard Dean's pre-ScreamTVLoop campaign? How long will it take for you and your party to realize that a candidate with a bold agenda of specific, brass-tacks social action can actually win? "Change We Can Believe In" would have the architect of the New Deal rolling in despair in his grave.

Okay. I'm done. Let's get to the important stuff: These photos from the rally at the Crow Reservation.

Jimmy.

For three successive days after trout season opened in New York this year I waded a small upstate creek (pictured above) that's heavily stocked and heavily fished. I caught a total of maybe a dozen brown trout, the biggest of which were beautiful fish in the 14-inch range. I took them home to the frying pan, with gratitude, especially since on the first day I fished for six hours in nonstop rain at 40 degrees. (What can I tell you? If this was about logic or good sense, we'd all stay at home.)

If you have never seen a brown trout, it truly is an exquisite fish. It's tougher and likelier to go native than the other main stocked trout in the northeast, the rainbow, so browns are often wilier and stronger than stocker rainbows living in the same creek. You'll notice, though, that the rainbows evaded me this time with total success, which suggests something about their intelligence as well as mine. Anyway, in case you have never seen one, while you're wondering where in the hell this blog entry is going (I promise it's not where you think), take a look at this photo of a brown trout (that I did not catch):

This particular creek gets hammered by fisherpersons on and after Opening Day. I mean slammed. Guys who won't walk 30 feet from their cars crowd the banks plunking Power Bait (don't ask) into trout pools, using boulder-sized sinkers and line heavy enough to dredge up a Volkswagen -- for fish that, in this creek, rarely exceed two or three pounds. The good thing, though, about the slothful ways of this breed of trout-slayer is that if you're willing to walk a mere quarter-mile upstream, wade across the creek and navigate a little brush, you suddenly find yourself alone in the woods -- and grinning upstream at a mile or so of pretty riffles and pools populated with hungry and unmolested trout.

So I had a sweet time wading water largely alone, fell once and nearly took icy water into my waders, put a hole in them crawling on my hands and knees through brambles (which gave me a wet and cold right knee), got followed by a very defensive nesting goose who hissed at me for a good 20 yards as I waded and as he or she followed me along the bank (you do not want to mess with a two-foot-tall nesting goose), and I caught some trout.

And at one point on a rainy day while walking one of the more popular stretches of bank, I ran into a talkative, no-bullshit guy named Jimmy.

Jimmy and I made the usual "did-you-catch-any" small talk, which evolved into more general fishing talk (he told me, for instance, that the state is now stocking the Genesee River with sturgeon, a once-native fish of primordial lineage that can reach 100 pounds. Now THAT will add a wrinkle to any given morning's fishing.) Then Jimmy groused about how little money the state is putting into its overall fish stocking program while the nation, in his words, pours billions into "that war that's killing our boys." I agreed with him, and then we got onto money in politics, which is when Jimmy launched, without warning, into his riff on Barack Obama.

Jimmy, who looks to be about 40, said Obama is the first politician he has gotten excited about in years. He said Obama is the only candidate now in the race who has a conscience and actually cares about ordinary people. He said he thinks Hillary Clinton is a fake; she sucks up to too many causes and he doesn't trust her. He makes it a point to watch every one of Obama's speeches, and he said that Obama's message and his presence are so powerful that they "give me chills." He talked about Obama the way I remember people talking about JFK and King and Bobby.

I'm not saying Obama deserves all of this. I'm just reporting to you what Jimmy said to me.

Jimmy -- he's a white guy, by the way, who you'd make to be maybe a security guard or a plant worker or a technician although we didn't talk about work -- never said a single word about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or the disgraceful company Obama supposedly keeps, or any need for Obama to be ashamed of his former pals and to denounce their statements.

I have written before that I think a lot of Obama's success -- or, better put, his lack of vulnerability on standard "black" grounds -- has to do with his nimbly leapfrogging white mainstream and media anxiety about the political "bad nigger:" you know, the black ex-slave with an attitude. Deep in official Washington, and I suspect in the fearful center-right of much of the Democratic leadership, is a suspicion that a passionately popular black candidate has got to be hiding some bad nigger in him somewhere, and that when it finally emerges it will scare the hair off of white America, like a fast-moving black kid who suddenly jumps onto their elevator. I'm not much enamored of Obama's actual politics -- he's soft on banks, private-sector-protective on health care, and more protest than policy on Iraq -- but I believe there is a body of official wisdom poised to nail the ostensible "bad nigger" in Obama. Reverend Jeremiah Wright is now that designated bad Obama nigger: angry, preachy, unrepentantly accusatory, and, by the way, absolutely correct on the subject of America's moral and political hypocrisies. Wright's ceaselessly-soundbited "God damn America" quote, for instance, if you read or listen to the sermon from whence it comes, is in fact part of an extended reference to the failure of a long line of world empires to live up to the demands of a just God. It is clearly not a call for Locusts and Inferno to visit upon Washington. But the "bad nigger" script calls for a vengeful escaped slave behind the spectacularly appealing Obama persona. And if Obama himself cannot be successfully tagged with the feared role, then the search turns to his associates.

Such is life within the long-lived official white narrative of staying ever on the lookout for the Scary Black Male. If Clinton has her way and hijacks the nomination by jumping as she has on any and all convenient opportunities to impugn Obama, she will likely succeed in handing the presidency to John McCain.

All I can tell you is that one guy named Jimmy, standing in the rain trying to catch just one lousy trout, isn't buying the story. Right now, the guy he is most scared of and mad at is not black; he is white, rich, and in the White House.

Reality Check.

I'm back from another blog-free zone. Did you know that when you're fishing in the surf, an innocent-looking seal will sometimes follow you for the expressed purpose of nabbing a fish off your line? They're cute as hell, those seals, popping their heads up out of the waves like big glossy-headed Black Labs to keep you company as you wade and cast – until you find out that their idea of friendship isn't exactly what you thought.

I've heard tell this season, along the stretches of surf where I fish, that the seals are getting bolder this way. Kind of like the way some sharks seem more brazen at the beaches these days, at least anecdotally. Someone I know has suggested this is because Americans are getting fatter and juicier. Not a pleasant theory to ponder, but I can't argue with the reasoning.

As for the seals and the coy "gotcha" act they've been pulling on anglers, maybe they've gathered from reading the seal newspapers since March 2003 that contemporary Americans are ready-made suckers. There's no reason this shouldn't include fisherpersons.

Speaking of predation, you haven't lived until you've watched a full acre of open water suddenly erupt like a boiling cauldron as eleventy-million minnows and small fry literally fling themselves out of the sea trying to flee a massive onrushing school of voracious stripers or bluefish. Never have I seen such a mass display of blind, thrashing panic in one place. Except, perhaps, on Fox News after yet another Bush Administration anti-terror panic-button ploy.

Which brings us to dry land, where we have plenty of ongoing spectacles of our own. A couple of weeks ago a huge, angry and peaceful crowd dwarfed the sorry little burg of Jena, Louisiana (population: just shy of 3,000) by a factor of at least ten to show their displeasure with 1950s-style Jim Crow justice in the year 2007. You've heard the accounts: with each new wave of international ridicule and notoriety, the town's Bull-Connor-era functionaries drop more charges and the state's courts tolerate less nonsense. Mychal Bell, 17, the first of the Jena 6 to be convicted of these magically-vanishing charges, is now out on bail and will not be re-tried as an adult, although he faces juvenile charges. Only one of the 6 is still in jail, and although all still face serious charges and serious jail time, sustained world condemnation of  Jena and its Flintstonian ways may further evaporate this racially indefensible prosecution.

Jena is a vivid reminder that justice is, and always has been, political. Protest, the shedding of blood, and a resulting shift in political credibility spelled the difference between slavery's being safely legal and its being officially criminal; between women's rights being unthinkable and being undeniable; between gay rights being totally ignored and totally unavoidable. No less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court has declared the basis of law to be, essentially, what most people in the society come to agree is right. You can't get much more political than that.

Meanwhile, much farther down in the justice food chain, as Baltimore City Paper columnist Vincent Williams has put it: "Apparently, that damn O.J. is just not going to go and sit his dumb ass down somewhere." Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think O.J.'s going and sitting his dumb ass down somewhere would be an intelligent thing to do. If I were O.J.'s attorney, that is what I would tell him: "O.J., you need to just go and sit your dumb ass down somewhere." But I guess being unable to do that is part of being a dumb ass.

And then, in the military thuggery department, there is Blackwater USA, the face of today's corporate mercenary industry. The firm has, according to a laudable report on the front page of the October 3, 2007 Washington Post, officially opened fire on Iraqis in 195 incidents since 2005 but has likely carried out far more shootings than it admits, say former Blackwater employees and current officials in the industry who claim that underreporting or nonreporting of shootings by private contractors is epidemic. There are more than 100 private security firms now working in Iraq, employing tens of thousands of guards. Two anonymous company officials told the Post that the industry may be reporting as few as 15 percent of actual shootings. Former Blackwater guards explained that since shootings generally raise questions and involve possible liabilities, employees have a strong incentive to either not report them or to conceal them outright.

The crux of the matter, in the words of a former top Pentagon official who tracked private security firms, is this: "In their contracts, it says they are supposed to report [shootings], but whether they do or not is up to them."

Got that? They are told they ought to report, but they don't have to because the Pentagon doesn't check.

As if proudly acknowledging this Swiss-cheese enforcement arrangement, current Pentagon overseer of private security firms Maj. Kent Lightner told the Post: "If Aegis [a contractor] sends me a report and says, 'Bad guys shot at us, and we shot back and dropped two of them,' I'm not going to investigate. I'm not going to worry about it, unless somebody comes back and says, 'Yeah, they dropped two children, or they dropped a woman.'"

Note his wording: unless somebody comes back and says. Meaning, he doesn't ask, he doesn't look. No news is good news. And it's mostly no news.

The entire underlying principle of this private warring, is, of course, bankrupt. Private industry has no business mounting an army at public expense for private profit, period. Armies ought to be strictly public entities because combat, like policing or fighting fires, carries out an intrinsically public function that ought to be inherently accountable to the voting public; and because killing in the purported national interest ought not be a profit-making enterprise; and because the small scale, the redundant administrative functions, and the profitable nature of these companies make them inherently more expensive to taxpayers, not to mention corrupt. All of this is so obvious on the face of it that, were it not for a money-rigged system of political and defense policy, no argument for privatized soldiering would have ever even gained traction in the public sphere.

But what makes it worse is that this morally indefensible enterprise is administered by hacks like Lightner who have little or no interest in ensuring scrutiny or transparency.

So when you fill out your next federal tax return, remember that a sizable chunk of what you paid this year went to trough-feeders like Erik Prince, the rich and unrepentant Blackwater CEO who happens to be a former Navy Seal.

No offense to seals.

A Trout Story.

It was a spring morning earlier this year and I was casting a little Panther Martin spinner with ultralight tackle on an Upstate New York trout stream. And I was feeling a little bit guilty because it seemed to me that instead of doing it the easy way I ought to have been fishing with a fly rod. Especially since a huge mayfly hatch had just appeared out of nowhere a few minutes ago, and all I had caught all morning on my spinning tackle was a couple of 8-inch browns.

But my fly rods were at home. And anyway, I love spinning. It's how I learned to fish as a kid and it's how I fished all my life until a few years back when friends out West ruined me by putting a 5-weight 9-foot Loomis in my hand and taking me out on the Madison River. Still, spinning is its own inimitable animal. There is nothing like working a sleek, trusty little plug through the unknowns of a trouty-looking stretch of water. It's like high-speed underwater puppeteering, or maybe guiding a tiny Maserati through a rapid-fire course of submerged obstacles and veering runs. All while trying to make your chosen plug perform the panicked "Aiiiee! Chase me!" dance through the precise pocket where you've guessed a trout is poised watching what the current brings past.

For those who fish like they mean it, spinning exacts plenty of other demands, too: Making the surgical cast that zips the plug just beneath the overhanging branch from which your snagged lure would be irretrievable, and drops it neatly into the deep undercut of the bank just in time to get a decent retrieve across the current. Daring to maneuver your sentimentally favorite plug around the barely-visible jutting underwater logs way down in a pool where you're sure a big honker is hunkered down. Reading the water. Deciding whether to take 5 minutes to wrestle with that nasty line tangle buried in the spool or cast around the pesky thing to make the most of the maybe 20 minutes of good fishing time you've got left. Hell, spinning can be plenty tough.

But since I've started flycasting, and occasionally managing to fool a trout who is beyond the foolishness of adolescence, I have had to face the painful truth: Compared with fly fishing, spinning is almost criminally easy. Come on, admit it. When the fish are hungry and hitting, fishing with a spinning rod is like taking a trout census.

But I love spinning anyway, even though on this particular morning I was feeling a little guilty and a little stupid standing in a cloud of mayflies flinging a metal spinner. I was fishing a Panther Martin, which to me is the plug of plugs. It is far and away my favorite trout spinner and maybe my favorite small-water lure. It does everything I like: casts like a bullet, lands where you want it in spite of the wind, sinks quickly in fast water but responds to every twitch of the rod tip, makes a flashing spectacle of itself, and even makes its own brand of underwater ruckus with that patented curve on the spinner blade. Best of all, it catches all kinds of fish in all kinds of water: trout, largemouth and smallmouth bass, walleyes, pike, silver bass, perch, sheephead, even catfish, for God's sake. I am always amazed that I don't see more people using it. Hit a nice stretch of trout water with a small Panther Martin, and there's a good chance that the fish haven't yet seen too awfully much of it. (Why am I divulging this to you?)

So anyway, in my cloud of guilt and mayflies I made what I decided would be one of my last casts before heading back to the car, and I began my retrieve in deep water along a cut in the opposite bank, and POW!! I'd hooked a freight train. I could not yet see the fish; he was bulling for the bottom, ripping out line while my reel drag whined and my little ultralight rod doubled over. Then he made his first run and streaked past my feet in the water, flying downstream, and I saw the torpedo-shaped body almost the length of my leg with its telltale pink-red streak along the side, and before I could let out a yell he made a full body-arching leap, completely clearing the water. He was one of the most beautiful rainbow trout I had ever seen, two feet long at the very least. That was when I really did scream, a full-throated Hollywood blood-curdler, part shock and part primeval thrill.

The trout re-entered with a massive splash – this was a small stream I was fishing, maybe 10 feet across at this point – and he tore off on another mad run, this time toward a far cut bank downstream where I feared he might bury himself in the tree roots. I somehow managed to turn him without blowing it by trying to horse him. My job now was clear: don't lose this fish. I remember telling myself to slow down, to breathe the three-part breath my yoga instructor teaches us, belly-midsection-chest. Easy. Inhale. Exhale. Go with this fish. You're on very light tackle. Follow him, let out line, then lead him gently, then follow some more. Breathe. Don't lose him. Don't lose him.

The rest was a blur. I don't know if I fought him for five minutes or for fifteen before I landed him. My little wooden-handled trout net, plenty big enough for the trout I typically catch, was suddenly a joke; it was just large enough to gain a purchase on this fish's tail so that I could shove him partly ashore once he was exhausted and I was ready to make my final move. I got him partly out of the water, pounced, got my hands around him just behind the gills, and then tried to stop hyperventilating.

He measured out at 25 inches. I never even consider keeping a fish unless it's going to be dinner. I kept this one, but I had to think about it. I gave thanks to him and the stream – it's the least one can do when about to take another creature's life – and I went back into town, where the picture was taken, and my relatives and I enjoyed exquisitely fresh fish that night.

I have caught bigger fish, but none more beautiful or more thrilling. I expect I'll not have an experience precisely like that ever again.

Anyway, I emailed the photo of the trout and me to my Montana fly-fishing friend Sandy Pittendrigh, who, smart-aleck that he is, posted it on his website with a note saying I'd caught it on a "Panther Martin Mayfly."