I have been living in Ithaca New York since 2002. I never imagined living in New York before 2002. Naturally being a curious liberal, I have been learning about my current home. I may end up making this into a series of dairy postings as there is just so much interesting stuff going on here both past and present. Like I just learned from our local newspaper, The Ithaca Journal, that house assessments will be going up again, bucking the trend of most of the rest of the nation. But that is not what I am writing about today.
My thoughts if you can follow.
My youngest son was born in Elmira, New York in March 2006. He was premature and stayed at the Arnott Ogden Medical Center for a month after his birth. I drove to the hospital almost everyday during that time.
On my way to the hospital I drove through a town called Horseheads, passed by the Elmira Correctional Facility and a national cemetery. The national cemetery is next to another cemetery that has the grave of Mark Twain. All of these sites have been on my mind often since.
The national cemetery is very interesting as it is the final resting place of confederate prisoners of war who, after being captured, were sent to the place that is now the Elmira Correctional Facility. What makes the Confederate cemetery so interesting is almost all of the graves are marked with names, ranks and birthplace. This is unheard of for the other prison cemeteries from the Civil War. Most were mass unmarked graves. Elmira is different because the sexton of the cemetery was a man named John W. Jones who kept meticulous records. He was also an ex-slave who gained his own freedom by fleeing north and living in Elmira.
I learned about Mr. Jones three years ago. But more recently I have become interested in Elmira Correctional facility, and that lead me to read about other maximum security prisons here in New York: Elmira, Auburn, Attica, Sing Sing, 5 points, Clinton. These places have interesting histories. Mostly I have just been reading Wikipedia. It is so easy to click on the links and read. The first execution by electric chair happened in New York at Auburn prison in 1890. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla are part of this history as neither wanted their electric system (AC vs.DC) to be used for the electric chair as it might have made people less accepting of their system in their homes, well I mean, if it could kill you who'd want that. Edison carried the day on this one. AC was chosen to kill people. But he also lost the bigger "War of Currents" as AC was also chosen to bring electricity into our homes.
In my Wiki linking I also came across a real gem that shines light on our current cult of republicans. In 1892, an author by the name of Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy) was able to pinpoint the cause of a series of murders that were happening in the United States at that time. Well let me allow Mr. Dreiser to explain.
A contrary view was put forth by Theodore Dreiser. In 1892, he “began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States that proved very common. It seemed to spring form (sic) the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially.” “Fortune hunting became a disease” with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime." An example is the murder of Avis Linnell. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette eventually became the basis for “An American Tragedy".”[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
It seems so unseemly to attribute a quote to Wikipedia. Well I am also a lazy slacker and although I am in a library now, I am not moving away from my chair. So there.
So Mr. Dreiser was able to find the cause of a particular kind of American crime in the form of murder, and those same personality characteristics can be found in the members of todays conservative movement. I am trying to make a joke here, but like some many of the jokes these past years, there is some basis for reality.
That is all for today.