Melanie and I moved to West Virginia and Morgantown in 1985. She hired on as an assistant professor and I as a doctoral research assistant in the Department of Communication Studies at WVU. While WVU had big time Division I sports in football and basketball, it was in other respects a nice little university and Morgantown was a nice little university town. While the geography of the mountains and hills makes travel slower and more difficult compared to, say, Lawrence, Kansas, you could easily get around town in just a few minutes. It was a great little place.

But, some people couldn’t keep the secret.

We started showing up on those damn surveys as being among the most “livable” small cities in America. (Here’s a recent WVU press release describing this.) And, then our senior Senator, Robert Byrd became the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations committee. Money and people came pouring into our most livable little city and have destroyed it.

Two recent crime stories illustrate. A women has been indicted on Federal charges for running a large prostitution ring in Morgantown and several men connected with a drug operation in a local student bar have also been indicted in Federal court.

Now, I’m not arguing that before the world found out about Morgantown things like prostitution and drugs were unheard of. Of course not. This is 21st century America. Illegal sex and drugs occur everwhere. The big deal here is that the crimes have become Federal rather than local or state crimes. There’s enough money here now that truly evil people want to come here.

It grows worse with density and crowding every day.  And, it’s affecting peoples’ judgment.  Our Board of County Commissioners devised one of the craziest government plans for handling traffic congestion in Morgantown that required a 30 year “service fee” of approximately $100 a year for fulltime workers in the county.  The tax would have raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars with no serious project plan for controlling the spending.  It was small government run amok.  Our governor, Mr. Joe Manchin, did PSAs for TV extolling the virtues of this service fee.  All the smart people, including a lot of new folks at WVU talked it up.

It got voted down with nearly 80% rejecting the proposed fee.  That’s not a typo.  Nearly 80% of the voters voted against the fee in one of the worst electoral beatings I’ve heard of in my lifetime.

I want to believe that this is the beginning of the end of the stupid growth in my great little university town.  The big test will occur when Mr. Byrd is no longer on the Appropriations Committee.  Right now, the growth in this town is largely driven by public tax dollars and not by private capital in the free market.  In other words, it is a supply driven economy rather than a demand driven economy.  When that public money goes away, will there be enough infrastructure to keep growing?

In the meantime, growth continues for the foreseeable future changing what once was a nice little town into a crowded, overhyped, sprawl of people.

Today I took our cat, Turk, to the vet to be put to sleep. About two weeks ago, Turk came into the house for dinner along with Flynn, Rocket, and Newt, but he seemed a little wobbly. His wobbling got worse in the coming days. After first we thought he might have had a small stroke, he’s twelve or more years old, but then we found a bad wound around and in his left ear. He’d apparently been struck by something – we live in the woods and on a country road, so who can know with certainty just what. As time passed we looked for improvement, but he only worsened. The motor coordination problems continued and he began to develop a deepening paralysis on his left side. His vision and hearing deteriorated. He was able to eat and motor around the house and lawn, but always with great and worsening difficulty. He did not show the normal signs of pain that cats in general or Turk in particular show. He did not cry or yelp or pant. He would often pause as he tried to stumble to a new location and seemed confused, frustrated, or tired, but not pained. He would let us pet him and brush him, but he never liked to be held before and now it was no different. He stopped commanding Melanie’s lap with his intense, staring pose.

Our vet, Kelly, did her usual expert job of examining Turk when I brought him in today. After checking him and talking with me, she, too, concluded that Turk’s condition would not likely improve and would probably worsen. She also recommended putting him to sleep. I agreed.

I petted him and got almost no response from him. Since the injury he’d lost the ability to communicate awareness of me or Melanie or much of anything. But, he was warm, alert, and self-contained. Somewhere in his body he seemed to still be Turk.

It had been a good day today. We’ve finally gotten some warming in the slow West Virginia spring, so Turk layed out most of the day on our deck, high in the air, safe, warm in the sun, caressed by the breeze. He came in for dinner and catfully struggled through a generous feeding. He then made his way to a favorite indoor spot by a vent and resumed his nap. About an hour later I put him in his cat carrier, an act that he always hated and resisted in the past, but in his discombobulated state, today, he simply complied with the move. While driving to the vet, he complained only a little and considerably less than usual trips like this.

We waited outside the office for 30 minutes. I opened the rear lid of the Ford and we just sat in the back of the truck, feeling the sun and the wind as the late afternoon wound down. Turk complained infrequently. I would talk to him and pet him in the carrier, but he seemed largely unaware of me. I think the injury diminished his capacity to sense much of the world around him. He could smell and feel the sun and the wind. He could sense motion and he knew if he was being touched, but he was not showing much recognition of me. I took him inside with only one other customer. Turk and I waited quietly in the office and again he complained only a little. The new greeter cat at the vet, Norman, a relaxed, calm tiger boy, watched Turk with interest and jumped down to the floor to investigate. They sniffed and touched each other without any drama. Turk spent a big chunk of his young life on his own in the woods and had the bad habits of a feral cat. He didn’t like any competition and would respond aggressively. Today, he had to know a strange male cat was near him, but he showed no agitation.

When our turn came, I took Turk in his carrier into the lab room. It’s usually a fight to get him out and if you open the door he typically retreats to the back of the carrier and punishes the hand that reaches for him. The routine is to unscrew the pieces that hold the top and bottom of the carrier together, remove the top, and then let Turk step out on his own terms. Today, we just opened the carrier door and he crawled out without a word. There was a thick, heavy blanket on the table and Turk kneaded it like it was Mom or Melanie’s lap. He was relaxed, calm, and trusting.

I named Turk and properly so. He was a tough, mean, independent cat who had trouble learning the rules of a social household with several other cats. For several years we had running dominance battles and Turk was always the one pushing it with the other boys. He wanted Melanie more than anything else in the world, but was still a wild child that required her vigilance. As you will see, he was a handsome fella, strong, thick, and when he was fully Turk he walked like John Wayne – a bit sideways, but you always knew he was coming for you and you’d better be serious about it. He scared everyone else when he played, but he didn’t leave surprises in the house, he didn’t destroy furniture, and he stayed very clean and dapper. I regret we did not have him as a kitten. He would have liked growing up with us.

Instead he became a special needs cat, a rescue cat that we coaxed from the woods in the deep of a winter many years ago. It took a long time to socialize Turk and it many ways he never did get it. There was always a violent sense of independence and self reliance in Turk. He learned to relax quite a bit, but never like our cats like Rocket or Newton or Flynn or Nick or Emily who came to us very young. Turk’s early hard times marked him for life and never left him completely.

I could not get close to Turk. I clashed with him when he went nuts with the other cats and I frequently enforced the social rules of the house. We had a wary relationship that had grown comfortable. I could feed him, pet him, or brush him, but he wouldn’t sit on my lap.

Tonight I hope that I did this right for Turk. He was not in pain or at least not in obvious pain. We’ve tended pets, dogs and cats, into great age, so we know what is bad or tough or hopeless. With Turk, I thought it was hopeless, but not yet bad. He could still eat and get around well enough to do his business out doors, but it was clearly only a matter of days at most before the paralysis and discoordination robbed him of intentional, useful action. Turk would not tolerate the lifestyle of an indoor, pampered cat. So, I made the decision to put him to sleep today rather than wait for those cries of pain I’ve heard from our kits like Creamy who died slowly and painfully from feline leukemia. When I took Creamy to the vet almost 20 years ago (to Kelly’s dad, in fact), I wept like a boy over first, Creamy’s suffering and then, his painless death. We waited much too long with that feral boy and I vowed then to be more watchful and more determined if a death like this lurked on the horizon.

So, after a warming day in the sun on our high deck in the woods, after a good meal that he still could taste and enjoy, and after a good nap under an end table by a vent, I put my Turk to rest.

Farewell, our Turk.

This Sunday the NYT ran an interesting and unintentionally revealling story about the role of literature in the education of high school students, particularly the “brights” at Boston Latin. Teachers at that prestige Boston high school have their students read, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in their English classes. The teachers there have an unusual take on that classic novel and encourage their students to see the novel through this perspective. Let me quote key paragraphs.

Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

I love American novels and have read and reread “The Great Gatsby” several times across my life. It in no way can be read an inspirational tale of aspiration for clever kids. It describes the failure of 1920s brights - Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan - and details exactly how aspiration is the source of their failure as people and as partners. And, if these characters had any insight into themselves, they would have seen their futility and its source making the novel a great tragedy in the classic sense of the term. Instead Gatsby and the rest lack any self understanding or awareness, learn nothing from their own lives, and fail in ignorance and pain.

Yet, the writer for the Times, Sara Rimer, and the instructors at Boston Latin see Gatsby as an educational exemplar for striving young talent and recommend it as a light by which they can plan their own achievements. Gatsby is an inspiration for aspiration for these misreaders. It astonishes me that the New York Times can publish this perspective on the cultural wonder that is “The Great Gatsby.” Both the Times writer and her editors appear to me to be in that embarassing position of holding yourself in great public esteem while behaving in the most provincial way all without any self awareness. It’s rather like preaching to the congregation on modesty with an unzipped fly.

Warning:  This post is completely off topic for the blog.  Nothing about persuasion theory and research and its application in the world.  Just a values-based post . . .

By now you’ve probably learned that the Virginia Tech attacker used the time between attacks to mail a press kit to NBC.  The folks at NBC knew exactly what to do with it.  They called the cops.  Oh.  And they made copies of it.  Then they hid this knowledge from the rest of the world until the 6:30pm Nightly News with Brian Williams.  And they showed selected portions from the press kit.  But not all of it.  They saved some for tomorrow’s broadcast of the Today show.  They brought in their expert, a former FBI profiler, who explained on camera that killers often create information like this as a means of attacking their victims yet again.  (Imagine that you were in one of those classrooms, survived it, then turn on NBC tonight and see the killer again on live TV explaining why he tried to kill you.  Imagine one of your kids went through this.  Imagine.)

NBC would air video of people having live sex with dead animals if they could find a tasteful and newsworthy angle on it.  They are infamous, corrupt, and without value, ethic, or  commandment.

I’m sure they agonized over this press kit in much the same way they agonized over Don Imus.  Where’s the line?  What do you stand for?  What are the values of this organization?

Are there no adults in the room at NBC?  No one with common sense, good taste, and simple respect?  And these folks are the sophisticated ones.   The new best and brightest.  An elite of America.

Shoot fire.