A World at War — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

A World at War

This view from above shows a world at war — at least in avi­a­tion his­tory. This is a wide view of the World War II avi­a­tion exhibit at the Smith­son­ian Air & Space Museum just out­side of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. I love this place, even if they hate my tri­pod. Why am I think­ing about war in this post? Mostly because I’m lis­ten­ing to elec­tion results on the TV and they keep talk­ing about bat­tle­ground states. As I write this, I have no idea who is going to win the Pres­i­dency. How­ever, I have one request for the win­ner. Please tell the Air & Space museum to stop has­sling pho­tog­ra­phers who use tripods.

The Smith­son­ian has won­der­ful muse­ums, but they don’t seem to have con­sis­tent poli­cies about tripods. This is clearly a sign of a divided nation and Washington’s inabil­ity to work together. No tripods at the Udvar-​Hazy cen­ter (and they were ini­tially skep­ti­cal about my Magic Arm & Super­clamp), but no prob­lems using my tri­pod at the Nat­ural His­tory Museum. It’s a shanda!

As many of us in the states wake up on Wednes­day and look at the elec­tion results, try not to get too excited. It seems very clear that half of us dis­agree with the other half. So if your side won, don’t gloat. If your side lost, accept it grace­fully. The world will not stop spin­ning. Per­son­ally, I’m hop­ing that a mod­icum of civil­ity will take over, but I’m not hold­ing my breath. Too many folks think that the way to engage in polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion is to berate and insult any­one who dis­agrees with you. Please try to remem­ber that there are far more impor­tant top­ics before us where we can unite as one — like the abil­ity to take a tri­pod into a museum.