Once Again: Beware the Identity Card; Reminiscing on the Donner Party During Christmas in Truckee; Peggy Noonan's the Silliest Person of the Year, Maybe the Decade

Card of Identity

Welcome to 2002. How time flies! It seems only yesterday, though actually it was in the early 90s, that urban sophisticates were sniggering at our homegrown rural militiamen for fretting about supposed Defense Dept. plans to imprint a secret bar code on the forehead of every American.

A couple of months ago, after Oracle's Larry Ellison presented himself as the prime national lobbyist for an ID card, I quavered out a similar warning in this very space, boding forth the time when it will be mandatory for your card to carry your criminal record if any, all your outstanding parking tickets, credit card bills and similar impedimenta of modern life.

Now here's William Safire, right before Christmas, raising similar alarms about the prospective ID card: "Hospitals would say: How about a chip providing a complete medical history in case of emergencies? Merchants would add a chip for credit rating, bank accounts and product preferences, while divorced spouses would lobby for a rundown of net assets and yearly expenditures. Politicians would like to know voting records and political affiliation. Cops, of course, would insist on a record of arrests, speeding tickets, E-Z pass auto movements and links to suspicious Web sites and associates."

Safire concluded thus: "Beware: It is not just an efficient little card to speed you through lines faster or to buy you sure-fire protection from suicide bombers. A national ID card would be a ticket to the loss of much of your personal freedom. Its size could then be reduced for implantation under the skin in the back of your neck."

Which brings us exactly to where those crazy militiamen were, almost a decade ago, or to the grim future Alf Landon, campaigning in 1936 against Roosevelt, gestured at as he thundered against the plans for Social Security. The late Murray Kempton used to recall Landon shouting to the crowds: "Mark my words, those Social Security numbers will track you from cradle to grave!"

And so they do, which is the price of progress.

Donner, Party of 81-er, 45

Later that day we all had Christmas lunch overlooking that same Truckee Lake, renamed Donner Lake in honor of the mostly doomed party of Midwesterners who tried to survive one of the worst winters in the history of the Sierras on its eastern shore.

They got to the lake at the very end of October 1846, realized they couldn't make it over the pass, which was already covered with four feet of snow, and made camp. As they ate their pack animals and the situation worsened, some men did manage to make it to Fort Sutter, to sound the alarm. One of these returned, later to perish. In mid-December another group of 15, later known as the Party of Forlorn Hope, set out for the pass on crude snowshoes. Eight men died, while two men and five women reached safety.

As Joanne Meschery writes in her vivid little book Truckee, "these survivors could not have pushed through if they hadn't resorted to cannibalism." Clearly, the age of chivalry was alive and well that winter in the Californian Sierra. The weaker sex were mostly spared. Then again, maybe the women were simply better negotiators in the Survivor parleys before the bludgeon took its toll and another haunch of human was readied for the picnic table.

The first relief party from Sutter's Fort reached the lake on Feb. 19, 1847. Little Virginia Reed, 13 years old, heard them come, crawled from a snowbound cabin and greeted them with the words, "Are you men from California, or do you come from heaven?" Of the 81 who had arrived at the lake in October, 45 survived by dint of cannibalism, of whom 32 were children.

Their travails had been observed by Paiute Indians who'd fled into the mountains to escape the whites. Sarah Winnemucca later recalled, "All the Indian tribes had gone into the mountains to save their lives... There was a fearful story told us children. Our mothers told us that the whites were killing everybody and eating them? These were the last white men that came along that fall... We could have saved them, only my people were afraid of them." As I recall, there's a fine description of the Paiutes viewing the white cannibals at the start of Thomas Sanchez's novel Rabbit Boss.

There's not too much to recommend Truckee, whose past is freighted not only with cannibalism but also bloody eviction of the Chinese who had come to the mountains to build the transcontinental railroad. Of the peak Chinese work force of 10,000, some 1000 remained in Truckee once the job was done. By the 1870s a national depression was fueling racism and the stage was set for one of California's most terrible chapters. "The Chinks must go" was the cry in the saloons of Truckee, and a Caucasian League began to burn down Chinese dwellings. The Chinese fought back, but were finally burned out in 1880. According to Alexander Saxon, author of The Indispensable Enemy, Truckee set the pace for anti-Chinese activities throughout the West. These activities included laws criminalizing the smoking of opium, a habit favored by the Chinese, though consumption of opium in liquid form, as practiced by the genteel classes, was not similarly penalized.

You either like snow or you don't, and these days I'm of the latter persuasion, having spent too many winters of my adolescence at a fierce Scottish school where early morning runs in one's underclothes through snow were mandatory. Our party, Jasper excepted, did make its way on Christmas Eve to Squaw Valley, south along Hwy. 89 from Truckee. We were carried to the summit in a cable car ($56 per head for an all-day ticket) filled with so many families of visibly Middle Eastern origin that I wondered whether, aside from the profusion of Iranian families, some were detachments of the Al Qaeda forces that had successfully made their escape from Tora Bora and were now enjoying a much deserved spell of r&r.

Though we were suspended several hundred feet above the valley floor, sitting ducks for terrorist attack, a spirit of interracial harmony prevailed I'm glad to say, without so much as a downward glance at ski boot or snowshoe to see if any detonation was imminent. The entire carload of 100 or so listened cheerfully as a couple of Middle Eastern brothers on a bus excursion from Reno with their girlfriends described their gambling misfortunes the previous night. It was one of those moments when ones feels the human race, or at least that section of it roosting on these shores, has a fighting chance of vindicating one's most foolishly optimistic hopes. These weren't notably rich or stylish folk, just crowds of genial holidaymakers clutching their boards or their skis, having a good time and well disposed toward everyone else slithering and tumbling down the slopes.

The Silliest?

Of the year, of the decade? Oh, surely it must be Peggy Noonan. I gave up saving her absurdities, but here's a slab I put in storage from La Noonan sometime in early October: "A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11... I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its place. And their style is back in style."

And thus it was that Noonan discovered working people, with just the sort of excited yet somehow patronizing lilt in her voice that Lady Chatterley had in her first interchanges with the manly gamekeeper Mellors. Of course Noonan says the Age of Wayne is back. So who says good can't come out of evil?