Literary Life

04. November 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts

(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)

I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)

Anyway, in full Marxist throat, Ms Rooney has gone all out in a typical Marxist-manifesto mode, flogging her scribbling fraternity pals on to greater endeavors; a mass boycott of Israeli publishers, book events and festivals, lecture tours. It is her right to do so, I will concede – to pick and choose her publisher when it comes to translating her books and to pick a side and to put at least some of her money and influence on the side where her sympathies lie. It is a great convenience to me and to other pro-Israeli sympathizers, in providing a list of authors, celebs and intellectuals who have chosen to ally with her in this boycott, as I now know who to avoid patronizing with my eyeballs and my pocketbook. I have never made a political decision based on a celebrity endorsement, but I most certainly have avoided movies and music because of public declarations made by performers over the years.

I did have another thought, though – regarding the influence of authors and books on events; that is, there have been books which deeply influenced readers towards backing a particular cause or sympathy. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was instrumental in firing a wide-range of anti-slavery sentiment in the years before the American Civil War, after being read by people who hadn’t thought very much about the issue. But the novel made it real to readers, aroused sympathy for the plight of the enslaved, and in the end … as Abraham Lincoln jestingly commented to the author, she was the lady who wrote the book that started the whole war. Sally Rooney herself, and so many others of her successful and well-placed friends in the scribbling trade are madly pro-Palestinian, I wonder why she has not considered writing some kind of best-selling, popular, heart-rending novel to bring overwhelming sympathy for their plight, instead of just hectoring us with public statements and boycotts. Comment as you wish, and if you care.

A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect

28. October 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

The Atlantic, along with Harpers’, Horizon and American Heritage were publications that my mother had subscriptions to, from the earliest days of my own childhood – even when she and Dad were raising two children (later three, and subsequently four) on a graduate student’s GI Bill stipend. Although Harpers’ and Atlantic were similar in content and quality, and Mom could have saved a bit more of that tiny income by giving up one or the other – she never could decide which, and so kept both. They arrived regularly at the family home, and when I departed that home, I kept up subscriptions of my own, all during the long two decades of military service, most of it overseas. They provided between them a bit of a connection to an intellectual and literary world which – to be frank – didn’t come my way very often. I had many regular magazine subscriptions then; about twenty or so, if memory service. Between them and the catalogs that I was on a mailing list for, the post office clerks swore up and down that on some days they had to use a crowbar in order to wedge all of my mail into my military post office box. I recall most particularly reading a Bernard Lewis article, sometime during the build-up to the first Gulf War – an article on the reasons for Moslem rage against the modern western world, generally. I remember going around to other people in the unit with that issue in my hand saying, “See?! This is why they’re so pissed at us! It’s not anything that we did – we just succeeded at modern stuff, and they didn’t!” Yes, it all made sense to me then. Still does.

Anyway – I regularly devoured issues of the Atlantic, even after I retired from the military and set up a home in Texas … and then over the years since 9-11, and finding other connections and sources through the internet, all those subscriptions fell off. A good few of them, like Brill’s Content ceased publication. Others, like Entertainment Weekly and Premiere … I just lost interest. Newsweek – a weekly digest of news just got dated and increasingly pointless, as the internet sped up. I dumped Harpers after getting annoyed at the pretentions of prosy old prune, Lewis Lapham, in the wake of 9-11. I think that I gave upon the Atlantic about the same time that I gave up listening to Prairie Home Companion, and for much the same reason – a combination of poisonous hatred for GW Bush and the slobbering worship of Obama which just got too much to endure.

I suppose that I shouldn’t really care so much what degradation Atlantic has sunk to, of late – but for so many decades it provided a very real intellectual pleasure to my life, and to that of my family, but this latest turn of fortune for it is just sad and infuriating – sort of like seeing your once respectable and beloved third-grade teacher becoming a homeless crack whore turning tricks at the nearest truck plaza. Comment as you wish.

With Dread and Foreboding

23. October 2024 · Comments Off on With Dread and Foreboding · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, Politics, Texas

So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.
If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Diety knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.

That’s uncharted waters, in modern American politics – although not unknown in South America, or Europe of the early 20th century. Americans did not routinely do things that way, and since 1865, we had rather prided ourselves on that record of relatively peaceful turnover between parties. Not that assassination of various notable American politicians hasn’t happened – but most usually at the hands of the freelance nutters. In this present overheated political atmosphere, we can be assured that an assassin would be made a hero/heroine (overtly or covertly) by the media, academic and intellectual elite. Anyone with eyes to see must know this and also acknowledge that Trump fans and voters generally would be made … very unhappy by such a turn of events. How unhappy? That’s one of those things that I dread finding out. Even if a political assassination is not in the cards – the Harris/Walz partisans and the party supporting them will take every opportunity to be obstructive, and even more vicious and nasty than ever before. Witness the current slime vented by the Atlantic Magazine, which used to be a respected publication.

The Harris/Walz combo achieving a win on November 4th, possibly through an overwhelming flood of ballot farming and fakery in various districts particularly vulnerable to such … bald, undisguised fraud, giving the win to Kamala and Elmer Fudd; this will absolutely inflame Trump voters, for all that we can do about in the immediate aftermath. We learned a hard lesson of January 6th; likely those of a mind to criticize the outcome won’t be so eager to go to Washington to protest openly and run the chance of experiencing debilitating lawfare and interminable imprisonment in a Washington DC gulag, pending trail by a biased jury and a corrupted justice system. But Trump voters will be infuriated. Deeply angry – and the cohort which engineered a victory for Kamala-walla-bang-bang and Tim the Tampon Man will not rest easy in that victory. They will be insecure, suspicious and ready to lash out at any perceived threat or defiance of Federal government authority, likely with disproportionate violence. Those states which succeeded in maintaining a sane and competent governance in accordance with the votes and desires of the majority of their residents may manage to stand against rounds of Fed-gov madness.
It will all be very interesting reading in history books, assuming that any detached and relatively non-partisan accounts will be written in future.

Two more weeks. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, I guess. Comment as you wish – how does it all look from where you are standing?

Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever

20. October 2024 · Comments Off on Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Veteran's Affairs

In the time before the internet became a thing, when I was mostly stationed at bases overseas, I could rejoice when the base post office put up the mail … we had numbered post boxes, the kind that one sees in the post offices now, with the little locking doors with a small glass window. mine was nearly always packed tightly with mail. On really, really good days, there was a pink cardboard slip which meant a package – take the slip to the window and collect your package. Depressing it might be to see a package slip, and the parcel window had already closed on a Saturday afternoon  which meant  waiting until  Monday to get the package. (In Greenland, though, whenever an airplane came in with mail, the post office clerks would call the radio station, and the duty announcer would read out that so many pounds of mail had been received, and the post box numbers who had gotten packages on the air. The post office window would be open for exactly half an hour then, no matter what the day, or hours – and on hearing your box number read out, everyone would beat feet for the post office. This was Greenland – everyone knew to the minute when an aircraft came in, and if it were coming from Stateside, there would be mail on it.)

I subscribed then to a number of magazines – magazines of news and cultural interest, mostly, with some hobby publications among them … and catalogues. Oh, I got catalogs – so many that the post office clerks swore that sometimes they had to wedge my mail into my post box with the aid of a crowbar. There were just so many things that weren’t available to  us through the exchange, or on the local economy. Clothing, books, household goods, hobby materials and supplies, small furniture kits, movies … even certain food items – anything the least bit non-standard had to come by catalog mail order. (In the case of Greenland, there was no local economy, only the souvenir booth on the Danish side of the runway, and the little trading post store, which was about  the size of a corner minimart.)

Of course I was the recipient of catalogs galore, for all the things that couldn’t be obtained locally and for which I had a taste or an interest. One of my very favorite clothing catalogs was the original Banana Republic line, when it was truly a vendor of quirky yet practical travel clothing and accessories. A fair number of their early items were military surplus of all sorts of other militaries, much of which came in color palettes which explored the vibrant spectrum of olive-drab green, tan, brown, gray and dull blue, but which had the benefit of being durable, practical and well-made. The original Banana Republic’s clothing tended to be pricy – rather like LL Bean items of the same era – but ever so worth it in the long run; comfortable, practical fabrics, flattering cuts, and modest – suitable for wear on countries where excessive displays of flesh were not advised – and infinitely variable. The ideal for their kind of traveler, I gathered from their content, was the one who could do a world tour with a single small piece of luggage, and still be comfortably, practically, and tastefully turned out for every possible occasion, from morning trek to see a ruined temple in the jungle to a tea party at an embassy that afternoon. I liked that kind of practicality – liked it very much, although I could only afford a couple of pieces from them. A mid-length khaki drill skirt was one of them, and another was a pair of flat-heeled ballet pumps that I wore all over Europe; the soles were ribbed rubber. Perfect for hiking through places and streets floored with slick stone and cobbles, which – wet or dry – were a hazard. The Banana Republic catalogues were literate, even just fun to read. They stood out among my collection of catalogs for that very reason. I understand that the handful of Banana Republic brick-and-mortar locations were just as spectacular, in décor and design. Alas, I never got to visit one in person. Eventually, the couple who had built the brand sold it to the company which already owned a big nationwide chain and a couple of other brands, and Banana Republic stopped being the quirky, original source for high-quality travel clothing and exotic military surplus. It became just another generic brand of mall-marketed clothes, just like all the other generic, cheaply-manufactured generic mall clothing brands.

I wish that I had kept some of the catalogs, though. Just for sentimental value. Maybe I have – and they are buried out in a box in the garage.

 

They Have Their Exits

10. October 2024 · Comments Off on They Have Their Exits · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Home Front

I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other Federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dogs’ breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.

At any rate, FEMA, like so many other government organizations, corporations, and universities seem of late to have slavishly follow the dictates of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE as we call it in conservative/libertarian circles). FEMA, after taking care of illegal immigrant, would prefer focusing on service to the D-I-E client base instead of those who are … you know, impacted by the disaster regardless of race, sexual orientation, religion or income. In any case, FEMA as an organization seems to be of less and less use, compared to local volunteers, churches, organizations like the Redneck Air Force, the Cajun Navy and those states, like Florida, whose disaster-recovery offices are so well-practiced at coping with hurricane activity and the aftermath that they can actually locate their posteriors without the aid of a large-scale map, PowerPoint flip charts and GPS.

In any case, I speculate that the various devotees of DIE in various orgs and corporations are writing their own corporate/activity death sentence, sooner or later. (Probably later, in the case of government bodies, as civil service hires tend to dig into the body politic like ticks and not easily dislodged.) In any case, competence at the core activity is bread and butter, when it comes to that bottom line. “Do or not do”, as the weird greenish Jedi master admonished Luke Skywalker. Base the hiring and promotion decisions on the race, sex, or orientation of the hired/promoted, and putting actual competence at the job at a distant second? “Not do” appears to be the assured result.
I will admit that perhaps the DIE checkboxers might on random occasion turn up a previously unconsidered racial or sexual minority capable of performing at a high level required for optimal performance results. And I may score a hot date with the Pride and Prejudice era Colin Firth or have a Hollywood producer option one of my books for a blockbuster movie. I believe the odds are about the same.

It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to government services. But when individuals are hired or recruited for an organization/activity based on superficial aspects such as their color or sexual orientation and NOT their core competencies … the organization/activity can skate along for a while, based on the labor that the remaining competent staff provide. Eventually those able and dedicated will burn out, retire and depart, leaving the activity in the situation as the human appendix – useless, purposeless and inclined to nasty inflammation. At some point when “do” is not delivered in a commercial setting, the purchasers of a service walk away, taking their eyeballs and discretionary dollars elsewhere. Look at what’s been happening with movies and TV miniseries in the woke era; the competent and experienced writers, producers, directors who can work up and tell a good story translated to the big or smaller screen that will pack them in are basically sidelined in favor of the wokerati, with results that give the Critical Drinker hours of materiel.

Discuss as you will. Be as amusing as anything on Netflix or at the multiplex of late.

Don’t Fear the Beeper

26. September 2024 · Comments Off on Don’t Fear the Beeper · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Military, Smells Like Cedar, War

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

A commenter at Bayou Renaissance Man’s post about Operation Grim Beeper huffed and puffed indignantly – War crime! Horrible! Unprecedented! What about the Children! and calling the rest of us all kinds of unflattering names as we are markedly unsympathetic to the plight of the Hezball-less command echelon and those few innocent unfortunates caught in the immediate vicinity. The commenter went by the nic of Anonymous for the purpose of that comment thread, and likely for good reasons – cowardly reasons, but there you go. So brave to stand up thus anonymously on a conservative blog-thread! So … whatever. Sabotaging pagers, cellphones and walkie-talkies specifically ordered for the use of and put into the hands of a terror org’s operatives is a heck of a lot more targeted and focused than say … dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and Japan in WWII, firing rockets at random into Northern Israel or sending hijacked airliners into a couple of tall office buildings in New York.

Frankly, I applaud the specificity of Operation Grim Beeper – it delivered in a very satisfactory way to people who had richly deserved such retribution and had deserved it for decades. I have not forgotten the Hezbollah truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, or the hideous torture and murder of kidnapped Americans in Lebanon at around the same time. The Israelis took out the trash in a way that it seemed that our own administrations since then were unable and then unwilling to do. Thanks, Mossad; you might not get anything but backbiting and quiet sabotage from the Biden administration and our State Department generally, but you have my personal gratitude as a military veteran.

Besides defanging Hezbollah/Hezball-less, in decapitating their chain of command by killing or incapacitating everyone sufficiently high-ranking enough to be issued a pager, Grim Beeper has some other interesting side effects; first, in lumbering the organization for immediate and ongoing medical care of their wounded. The dead burden an organization to a certain degree, but care of the wounded and permanently crippled ties up considerably more in resources. And secondly – having essential bits of male anatomy atomized by an exploding beeper – that’s just cruelly comic. Heartless – but funny. Becoming a laughingstock across the Middle East just has to sting. I’ve also seen speculation that Hezbollah/Hezball-less might also have lost whatever remains of toleration for their activities within Lebanon itself, although there may not be enough normal folk left there to return Beirut to being the Paris of the eastern Med again. As for notable Hamas-Hezbollah fan Rashida Talib getting all indignant and bent out of shape over a cartoon … well, she IS a fan of both … and pointing it out humorously by referencing an exploding pager on her desk is something we still can do. Honestly, you’d think that someone elected to a seat in our national legislature would have developed a thicker skin.
Your thoughts and insights?

The Most Wrecked House

17. September 2024 · Comments Off on The Most Wrecked House · Categories: Ain't That America?

So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.

Some of these spaces are very far gone – the Swedish cottage was burned out in a fire, and the Portuguese farm complex is such a tottering wreck that the best that the young couple can do with the remains is salvage the cut stone that it all was built from and use the stone to sheath new conblock walls of a construction in the original footprint. But I think this week, I have found the most thoroughly wrecked historic structure available in any real estate market – this first through a feature in the English Daily Mail newspaper. For some reason their newshounds lighted on a mid-19th century house in Frankfort, Maine – a mansard-roof mansion at the crossroads of a hiccup of a town, and one which is so visibly wrecked that even the most optimistic real estate listings can’t even begin to hide the decay.  When the listing warns you to wear safety shoes and bring a flashlight … and there aren’t even any pictures in the listing of the interior … yeah, this place is a real estate disaster.

If it were built of stone or brick, there might be hope for a renovator – but if it is all wood, the roof has leaked for decades, with wood-rot and black mold throughout all three stories and not a shred of anything resembling preventative maintenance … no; as my daughter the real estate agent says cheerfully – nothing wrong with it that a couple of gallons of gas and a book of matches couldn’t fix. We had a friend in South Ogden, when I was stationed at Hill AFB, who were trying their best to renovate an 1895 Italianate brick three-story on 5th Street. It had been the wife’s childhood home, and she had a sentimental attachment to the place. It eventually turned out that there was nothing much of good quality about the structure, save for perhaps the thick and solid brick exterior shell. If they knew at the beginning of the project what they knew by the end, they would have gutted the shell and built anew, bottom to top. She wound up hating the place – and was inexpressibly happy when they purchased and moved into a well-preserved 1920s Craftsman-era bungalow several blocks distant. In reality, I suspect that many hopeful renovators share  that discouraging experience.

The mansard historical wreck in Frankfort comes with an acre, which looks like woodland. Probably, the only workable solution is for a purchaser to salvage every shred of usable elements surviving decades of neglect, demolish the wreck – and build an exact replica incorporating those elements on a new site a bit farther back from a well-trafficked local road.

Well, I will be keeping track of the mansard wreck in Frankfort – it might very well turn up someday, as the focus of a madly optimistic, skilled and well-financed YouTube enthusiast. And I wish them the best of luck.

They’ll need it.

Visible Signs

05. September 2024 · Comments Off on Visible Signs · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics, Texas

My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.

Not the case in the suburb where I live; San Antonio is supposed to trend blue – not as deep-dyed fanatically blue as Austin – but slightly blue and tempered with a strong military and veteran retiree presence, most of whom tend conservative. (And half Hispanic by census count, a good few of whom, I sense, are not really all that enamored of current Dem party values: Catholic, family-oriented, small-business-sympathetic, and absolutely hostile towards those who have jumped the queue with regards to legal citizenship.) In any case, blue or red, we’d prefer to live at peace with our neighbors, and not invite trouble by advertising political sympathies on our person, home or vehicle. The last couple of election cycles, about as overt as political display got in my neighborhood was an American flag … which I suspected from random conversations with neighbors was a covert signal of conservative sympathies, but one which wouldn’t excite retaliatory vandalism.

We’ve noticed a change in the last month, or perhaps six weeks – an absolute blossoming of Trump/Vance yard signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts and gimme baseball caps. Every few days we spot another yard sign defiantly staked out; another person in a Trump t-shirt, or a vehicle adorned with a MAGA-associated bumper sticker. This is a rather curious development, considering how very rare such demonstrations of support for Trump or other Republican presidential candidates were in previous years. There are only a pair of Harris/Walz lawn signs, in contrast – and one of them is from the previous presidential campaign with Biden marked out with strips of duct tape. I speculate that perhaps people are encouraged to come out of the political closet by the absolute awfulness of Kamala Harris as a candidate and Tim Walz, the real-life Elmer Fudd. The only thing that duo has going for them is a national media establishment so far in the tank that they must have surface crew pumping them oxygen through a long tube.

Comment as you wish – have you noted more visible Trump support in your neighborhood?

Dancing the Minnesota Walz

15. August 2024 · Comments Off on Dancing the Minnesota Walz · Categories: Ain't That America?, Military, Politics

I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans
This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three; who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?

I will concede that aspects of Tim Walz’s political persona are terrifying to contemplate in a political context – but his masculinity, such as it exists, is not one of them. His determinedly progressive policies, long-time and personal close ties to China, the way that he rolled over for BLM (AKA Buy Large Mansions) and allowed local rioters to Burn Lots o’ Municipalities, and how local police went all Stasi on ordinary citizens sitting on their front porches during the Covidiocy lockdowns … all that does send a frisson of unease down my spine at the thought of him inflicted on the nation rather than a single state. Minnesota voted for him as their governor; presumably they are happy with him. If he is what the good people of the state want in a civic leader, they should keep him, and spare the rest of us from the Walz brand of Minnesota Nice.

There is also a bit of media ruction in the media about Walz’s career as a member of a national guard unit. I’ve got nothing to say about his time of service in it; not my service, not my specialty, and his time of service barely overlapped with mine. Like John Kerry’s time in the Navy, it’s only really fitting for those in service with him to pass judgment on how he performed during that time. Taking retirement so suddenly, cutting short a six-year commitment and command training school, just before deployment to a conflict, or at least, to place where conflict is likely to happen? Eyebrows raised, skeptically – but there ought to be no shame in considering the prospect, deciding that “f**k it, I’m getting too old for this game” and then gracefully training up your replacement, advising your command and comrades, and supporting them from home after they have all deployed. What does stick in the craw of military veterans is the unavoidable fact that Governor Walz bowed out of participating in deployment to a conflict zone … but since has demanded respect and consideration as if he had deployed with them as a senior NCO. If that’s the sort of masculinity that Frances Wilkinson means for conservatives to be terrified by … I’ll have a couple of shots of whatever she is drinking. (I’ll bet it’s expensive, and if so, I’d like a case. It must be the good stuff…)
Comment as you wish: terrified or amused?

Slow But Exceedingly Fine

31. July 2024 · Comments Off on Slow But Exceedingly Fine · Categories: Devil Dogs, European Disunion, Fun With Islam, History, Memoir, Military, War

I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.

I had to take an intense interest in all this at the time, because I was stationed in Athens, as part of the staff for the military radio station at Hellenikon Air Base. It was a particularly fraught time for Americans stationed in Europe generally, because of ongoing terrorism. Yes, there was terrorism aimed at Americans before 9-11, but the brunt of it fell on military, diplomatic staff and those generally alleged to be CIA operatives who stationed in Europe. The rest of the US might not have paid much attention at the time; we did, and almost obsessively, because it was a matter of life and very real death.
I was working the overnight shift in the days after the Marine barracks bombing and remember when the list of casualties came over the teletype – yard after yard of yellow paper, with triple-spaced names. The Marines are the smallest service, and the mesh in webs of relationships are probably closer and tighter than most other services. It’s not six degrees of separation, it’s more like two or three. Three or four years later, I worked with another military broadcaster who had made a cross-service jump from the Marines to the Air Force. He had been assigned to the Beirut force and had rotated out a month or so before the bombing, so of course, knew many of the dead and injured Marines – including the young Marine troop who had been on the cover of a Time magazine issue.

The hijacking of TWA 847 was even more horrifying for those of us stationed in Athens for a reason that didn’t get much mention then. It was the regular flight rotating between the US and the Mediterranean – and military personnel and families rotating in and out of Athens, and Crete usually came and went by that flight. The military travel office just purchased seats on civilian airliners going back and forth from CONUS (continental US) rather than erratically-scheduled and usually very uncomfortable Air Force transports. And I was on duty again, when news of the high-jacking came over the teletype, just before lunchtime.
Oh, my god – a flight out of Athens! I looked at the flight number and absolutely froze with horror. TWA 847. I went running through the building to where there was a little balcony with an emergency fire exit staircase over our parking lot and called down to the station manager and program director, were about to get into their cars to go someplace for lunch. “They’ve hijacked the TWA flight! The one that everyone rotates out on!”

They were also horrified, of course. We hung over the teletype for the rest of that day, the whole staff wracking our collective brains, trying to remember who we knew who had orders and was due to leave Hellenikon on leave, permanent-change-of-station or temporary duty, who might have had seats on that flight … and who would be traveling with their wives and children.
There might very well have been – but for the grace of G*d and good fortune, there weren’t any military families on that flight. There was a small party of Navy divers returning from a TDY to Iraklion, and I think some Army reservists. The reservists had the wit and foresight to hide their military ID and escape much abuse from the hijackers, if I am recalling correctly, but the Navy divers were traveling on orders and their ID cards, and so were readily singled out. Robert Stethem was beaten and murdered as a means of getting a demand for jet fuel met.

In the months after that, we had our eyes in swivel-stalks, whenever we traveled on by civilian means. We wore civilian clothes, ditched anything superficial what might indicate we were military, avoided known American hangouts, got civilian passports – and were told that if there were anything like the TWA 847 going down again, to conceal or ditch our military ID. For years afterwards, when anyone I encountered casually asked if I were American … I had this instant, paranoid hesitation in answering. Why do you want to know?

Retribution

25. July 2024 · Comments Off on Retribution · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

The last couple of weeks are certain to be wild chapters in future history books and feature any number of scorching memoirs written by insiders in future years, as far as political life in these United States goes. Drama, treachery, double-dealing, lies upon lies, assassination and plots within plots – a spectacle that we can only watch from the outside in horrified fascination, while attempting to unpick the various threads and figure out what in the name of the wide, wide world of blood sports is going on. That something tremendous is happening, and we can sense that once-solid verities are shifting and reforming under the surface. We conservativish long-time observers of the scene can sense a fresh breeze beginning to rise, the dawn of something bright shining over the horizon, the first rumblings of a preference cascade. In the words of the Bishop of Wakefield’s inspiring hymn
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong!

Our hearts are renewed and encouraged, at the very least – all is not lost. Some national corporations appear to be concluding that a focus on management by Diversity-Inclusion-Equality at all costs is a way to go bust in a big way. The LQBTQWERTY-Celebration month last month seemed to have gone low-key as far as rainbow merchandise went. In pop culture matters, Disney stock prices have dropped, just has family attendance at their parks (although that may just be a matter of rational economics) and the Star Wars universe series Lesbian Witches in Space seemed to be watched only by video critics lining up to slam it. Sales of electric vehicles appear to be tanking – the market for such expensive toys might very well be tapped out, at least for now. This and dozens of other indications suggest that a brink of toleration, or grim endurance has been reached.

People will push back, once they have been harassed beyond enduring; several different blogs and Substack commenters hosted discussions about striking back; the whys and hows, even if striking back in kind and degree was even ethically appropriate. (The general consensus of this one was to serve the same sauce with a goose as with a gander, and only escalate to a degree sufficient to make your point clear.)
Others, like this writer – are harsher, and for good reasons.

So – is there a new wind blowing? What do you think has changed in the last couple of weeks. What have you observed, on-line or real life? Last week, my daughter noted a massive pro-Trump car parade across the northside, here in San Antonio. Comment as you wish.

Best Eaten Cold

16. July 2024 · Comments Off on Best Eaten Cold · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!, World

Revenge, as the old saying has it, is a dish best served cold. And revenge may not be the only – or the most dangerous – platter best dished up chilled. That would be the dish of anger – that ice-cold, sullen reservoir of fury in the hearts of every right-of-center, non-elite, law-abiding flyover-country middle American with Tea Partyish inclinations … a dish of anger ready to serve up in the wake of a just-barely unsuccessful political assassination attempt this last weekend.
You see, there is a considerable difference between hot fury and cold. Hot fury is impulsive, immediately violent, reactive and more often misplaced. It’s the unthinking destructive fury of the mob, lashing out indiscriminately. Cold fury, on the other hand, does not manifest itself in such spectacular fashion. Cold fury is focused, calculated, unspectacular; it takes it’s time, waiting for the optimum moment. Cold fury usually can’t be appeased, once unleashed. As I wrote some time ago, regarding the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance –
“The image of a “vigilante” most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise – and they would not back down.”

Something like the campaign of the Vigilance Committee of 1856 stands as an example of cold fury in concrete action; a large component of otherwise law-abiding citizens finally pushed over the edge, pushed to the point where they had to take action: calculated, rational, pitiless action to end the threat posed to their city, their various living, and indeed, their lives.
For those of us on the non-progressive spectrum, socially and politically – we have been living with escalating crises on various fronts – social, political, cultural – for a good two decades – perhaps longer. Too many of these issues can be blamed on or excused by Democrat party policies and personalities. We’ve thoroughly ventilated and discussed those issues previously, so I won’t go into details, but everyone knows the anger and frustration level has risen to an unbearable pitch.

That hairsbreadth miss was, I think, the last straw – on top of everything else lately. The kangaroo court convicting Trump of a non-crime. The American gulag for the J-6 protesters. The sledge-hammer drumbeat of Pride month and Diversity Uber Alles from government and corporations alike. Jew-hate on elite college campuses. The establishment news enthusiastically covering for Biden’s incapacity and his family’s corruption – a coverup only ripped to shreds a few weeks ago. Media personalities and news outlets going all out for painting Trump as Hitler and suggesting openly that assassinating him would be a good thing.

My sense is that the cold fury has reached that adamantine point of no return. Perhaps I am reading straws blowing in a cold wind, but there are things happening that haven’t happened before. There are reactions; quiet, cold, and calculated. People and academics who posted social media approval of the Trump would-be assassin and wished for better aim and better luck – have lost their jobs. A progressive stalwart’s MSNBC radio talk show is cancelled for a day because hosts and guests can’t be trusted not to throw gasoline on a bonfire. Another stalwart progressive entertainer cancels the rest of a comedy band tour of Australia after a member of the troupe expressed disappointment in the would-be assassin’s aim.

Other harbingers: Jew-hating student activists aren’t getting jobs in the first place. Hollywood’s latest movies and Netflix’s ballyhooed series are bombing at the box office, and the only ones watching the latter are YouTube critics making fun of them. The Disney theme parks were reported to be almost empty over the 4th of July this year. One senses that perhaps various authorities are belatedly sensing danger and deciding that perhaps better dial it back, before going too far in outraging the normies. Straws perhaps … but is the cold fury of normal citizens finally being felt? Discuss as you wish.

The Tar-baby

10. July 2024 · Comments Off on The Tar-baby · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not

Never mind the currently-fashionable bit of wokery in the link explaining this reference, bolting on a vague accusation of racism (or raaaaacism) onto anything that a person of pallor says, does, or references – the metaphor of something nasty sticking harder and more firmly no matter how one tries to fight it off and disengage is curiously valid in the case of Joe Biden and the National Establishment Press.
The realization that Mr. Biden is a couple of sandwiches short of a full picnic comes as a horrible shocker … to practically no sane, non-partisan observer of the political scene for the past … I don’t know, decade? Two decades or more? But everyone else is shocked, horrified, discomfited! Until two weeks ago, he was almost universally painted by the National Establishment Press as the Sage of Scranton, honored and revered solon of the Senate, the experienced and steadying VP in the Obama Administration, a kindly and revered family man, beloved by all! (Or at least, somewhat better than that awful, bad, Orange Man!) Unthinkable, asking a blunt and unscreened question of the Incredible Talking Mop, Karine John-Pierre, at a White House press conference about Mr. Biden’s disintegrating mental facilities! The very notion – so rude, unprofessional, so very, very Deplorable!

In the wake of the disastrous debate two weeks ago, now we are entertained by the spectacle of well-established members of the professional National Establishment Press, or NEP, squirming and twisting in the wind, reduced to protesting, “What … what? We didn’t know… No one told us!” while desperately trying to disengage themselves from the tar-baby, the tar-baby of all that previous coverage poo-pooing concerns! All those past news features and editorials, insisting on Joe Biden’s peerless command of his mental functions and his administration are on the record, years’ worth of them and there for anyone to review, unless and until they are all until firmly escorted to the memory hole and pitched in. Where they likely will be consigned, once those members of the NEP recover their composure and receive new marching orders! How large a segment of the general public who were formerly unaware are now wondering what we have been paying these people for, all these years with our dollars and attention, when all they have been is the Democrat Party public affairs branch. Those who have been paying close attention might just as well say, like John McCain in Die Hard – “Welcome to the party, pal!” Alas, like Winston Churchill’s comment about a political rival occasionally stumbling over an inconvenient truth – likely, they will pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing ever happened. In the meantime, we can all point and laugh.

Will the NEP be able to carry on, likewise? For the last ten years or more, they played along with the charade, and indignantly told us not to credit what we could see with our own lying eyes, because it was a Russian plot, or a MAGA exaggeration, or raaaaacist, or something or other. But for this election season, at least, the tar-baby of Biden’s incapacity and their complicity in concealing it, is firmly attached – like the legendary tar-baby. For now, there appears to be little hope to dislodge it. No handy briar patch, or memory hole, for the moment; trust in the major news organs by the general public is dropping as fast as the cost of groceries is rising.
Comment as you wish. How much longer will the NEP remain stuck to the tar-baby? Another week? Until the Dem party convention? Election day?

Dollars and Eyeballs

28. June 2024 · Comments Off on Dollars and Eyeballs · Categories: Ain't That America?, Local, Stupidity

While everyone else on the conservative side of the blogosphere today is marveling over the concurrent train wreck of the Biden-Trump “debate” last night, and the “deer in the headlights” reaction from the Establishment Media over their horrible realization that they can’t possibly pull any kind of media veil over the wreckage – I just thought that I might wander off on another tangent. I’ll meditate and marvel a little on there on how a national retail corporation pulled decisively back from the brink of a Bud Light-like, company-wrecking disaster. I speak of the Tractor Supply turn-around. I should like to have been eavesdropping in the C-level suite of Tractor Supply’s headquarters, when everyone concerned there realized that going all out for progressive causes like DEI/DIE, the Pride Mafia and open borders was about as popular with their rural and suburban fly-over country market demographic as a case of genital warts. I would assume that the meeting where they realized “Oh-krep-on-a-biscuit-we-gotta put a stop to it now before we lose our phony-baloney jobs!” was pretty epic.

All props for even coming to that realization, and another round of props for acting decisively in putting out a statement strongly emphasizing action steps, instead of one of those sniveling and mealy-mouthed ‘we’re-so-sorry-that-you-stupid-proles-were-offended’ non-apology apologies. The current retail and entertainment landscape is littered with the still-twitching corpses of entities who went all in for DEI/DIE, the glories of randy Pride parades and free-lance gender-bending, and expecting their customers/audience to sit still for wokie lectures. In the future – if university marketing courses even have a future – likely there will be a couple of compare-contrast chapters on how Bud Light and Tractor Supply handled the fiasco resulting from dissing their customers.

For myself, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about rolling up to a Tractor Supply store, or any other local feed and seed outlet driving a small sedan. One really ought to be in a slightly battered not-quite-new pickup truck with a layer of dirt on the paint and mud on the tires. While I don’t live on a ranch or farm, we have kept chickens in the past, and the spoiled avians preferred chowing down on the brand available there. They also have a pretty good array of pet foods, deer corn, sundry dry goods and work clothing, garden and outdoor items and country kitsch. We’ve bought a chicken coop there, a dog crate, plants, seeds and large-capacity mason jars for home canning … and when we start with chickens again, we might just go regularly again.

Still, though – there are independent, non-chain farm and ranch supply stores, and genuine old-style feed stores around here. Like this one, or this one. Or this small local chain, which has an outlet just up the road from us.

It Was Funnier in a Movie

21. June 2024 · Comments Off on It Was Funnier in a Movie · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not

Wondrous to behold, in these degraded days, an equally-degraded national media blob, nakedly and unashamedly going all-out as the Democrat Party’s publicity department. Yes, we always knew – or it became clear to us over the last decade or so – that the major news publications, to include the broadcast version as well as the most notable internet sites – skewed progressive. They got down on their knees and worshipped the Kennedys back then, and just carried on, quaffing deeper and deeper of the intoxicating brew that proximity to power appears to provide. They haven’t yet got off their knees and realized in the cold light of day what their job ought to be, which is our loss. Ah, well – we do have the conservative side of the internet, social media, and the ability of everyone with an up-to-date cellphone to record video of anything interesting happening right in front of them. (Like Hillary Clinton being rushed away from a 9-11 memorial event and flung into the back of a van like a sack of potatoes.) And it would seem that the national media machine is losing consumers and viewers in substantial numbers, so we have that to cheer us up, at least a little.

Next to that small consolation, we now have the spectacle of Joe Biden’s handlers and media advisors frantically insisting that we have not seen the man stumble, fall, glitch out, wander away from the crowd, loose his composure and his last couple of brain cells … no, no, no. We have all been watched cheap fakes, deep fakes, our eyes have deceived us … we’ve been fooled, and Joe Biden is in full possession of his considerable facilities! Yes, our president is large and in charge, in perfect health considering his age. I am reminded of a brief scene in the Melanie Griffith 1988 movie, Working Girl, when the title character walks in on her then-boyfriend, stark naked on the bed with a naked woman. (Amusingly, the two-timing boyfriend is played by noted marksman Alec Baldwin.) The boyfriend leaps off the bed, shouting defensively, “This isn’t what it looks like!”

The big laugh in that scene came because it couldn’t possibly be anything else than what it looked like. That was a movie, though – and this is now our reality. Anyone who has ever watched an older relative, neighbor, or friend decline into that slow dissolve of personality and character know exactly what we are seeing in Joe Biden’s public appearances. It’s all to awfully familiar. Having the national media and the Biden administration frantically telling us that it’s not what it looks like … the scene was so much funnier when it was in a movie. Now it’s only an indicator of how desperate establishment Democrats and their press handmaids are. Discuss as you wish.

The Rainbow Limit – A Personal Rant

12. June 2024 · Comments Off on The Rainbow Limit – A Personal Rant · Categories: Ain't That America?

Here we are, only a bare week and a half into “Pride Month” and I’m already tired of it all – triggered by an email for a fabric and interior decorating store that I did subscribe to and don’t anymore. Yes, they sent me an email advertising their assortment of Pride-themed fabrics and that’s when my last nerve was stomped on, metaphorically, with hobnailed boots. A small thing … but it hit my limit of toleration. Mainstream commercial retail has been doing this – Target stores being the example which comes most often to mind. I can only assume that their leadership gets a nice warm fuzzy feeling over catering to a miniscule minority while annoying the heck out of a larger segment of the purchasing public.

For some reason June has become the month set aside by … the current zeitgeist, the ad agencies, the LGBTQVWXYZTLGBLT-whatever orgs … to celebrate the LGBT-BLT lifestyle of a minority of the human population in these variably-blessed and sort-of united States. A minority which encompasses perhaps two percent of the population overall, three percent at best, plus maybe another two or three percent comprised of confused adolescents trying to shock their parents and deeply unbalanced adults hopping on the current social fad bandwagon. Yet, somehow, this relatively tiny but ear-splittingly loud minority get a whole month wherein to pester the general public, parade through the streets and flog rainbow-themed merch wherever you glance. Activists and politicians wanting to goose their ratings in the polls, exhibitionists wanting to shock the daylights out of the normies by wearing fetish gear in public during the day and commercial interests looking for a few extra dollars in these inflationary days have seized on any old excuse to hawk their wares between Memorial Day and the 4th of July. As has been pointed out frequently by commenters on the conservative side of the spectrum – our war dead, our veterans, our past presidents and our country itself only get a single day each; why do the LGBT-BLTs rate the whole darned month?

This is not, by the way, to be construed as me expressing a dislike or even a hatred of LGBT-BLT individuals. I just don’t care what consenting adults get up to in private; haven’t cared for simply decades. (The operative words here are consenting, adult and private. Like Mrs. Patrick Campbell is supposed to have said – Don’t care what you do in the bedroom, just don’t be doing it in the road and frightening the horses.) Why the heck should we be hectored into a pretense of caring about the LGBT-BLT spectrum now; as if they let up any time during the other eleven months? It used be said that it was the love that dare not speak it’s name, now it’s the love that never shuts up. As I said, I’m sick and tired of Pride Month already, and it’s only a week and a half into June. Your comments?

California Dreaming

09. June 2024 · Comments Off on California Dreaming · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Memoir

My daughter and I and Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson had to make a flying visit out to California all last week. Family reasons – my mother asked to see the three of us. She is in her nineties, bedridden and failing; this was the first time that she had asked to see us. We knew it would be the last, so we dropped everything, packed Thing the Versa and hit the road on Memorial Day for the twenty-hour-long drive, rather dreading everything that we might encounter when we got there. Not just the personal – but dreading encounters with the progressively-inclined and everything else which has come about in the nearly half-century since I upped sticks and left California behind for the military and then retirement in Texas.

I grew up in California – a nice, normal 1950s and 60’s upbringing in an outlaying fringe suburb, backed up against the wall of the San Gabriel Mountains. The first house that my parents owned there was a hill-top bungalow built shortly after WWII. On a dirt road among similarly rural properties, we had a horse and a garden, walked to school, a row of olive trees in the back yard, and watched fireworks over Hansen Dam on the 4th of July. The second house was on a paved road, but with a view and a swimming pool, bountifully producing orange and lemon trees in the back yard. We visited the grandparents regularly, went to Cotillion, confirmation class, summer camp, and Scouts … Vietnam was ongoing, but Ronald Reagan was governor, and Tom Bradley was the mayor, so California then was a sane and well-organized place, with beautiful scenery that might range from desert palms to snow in the pines in the space of half a day’s drive. Temperate weather, bountiful farming country – growing everything from rice to dates to almonds and acres and acres of citrus fruit. There was a strong industrial element, too, along with an enviable public education system, and a state-of-the-art highway network. The nutbars, fruitcakes and relatively harmless eccentrics stayed or were kept away from the levers of power. Or so it seemed, then.

I went to the military for twenty years, then spent the following thirty in Texas – increasingly happy with the chance that deposited me there, after the Air Force.

My daughter went out every year by Amtrak to spell my sister and her family, so that they could take a vacation from overseeing Mom’s constant care. Last year, she took Wee Jamie (then aged two) to introduce to my brothers, sister and Mom. She returned from every visit with discouraging stories of homeless camps lining the streets downtown by Union Station and freeway overpasses, horrifying mountains of trash and graffiti disfiguring buildings and the railway sidings, and disintegrating highways. Last year it was a deranged woman in the doorway to the local neighborhood Ald1, screaming abuse at shoppers. It was also a comatose street person on the sidewalk by a thrift store. She curtailed a visit to that shop, since she had Wee Jamie with her, and didn’t want to risk a dangerous encounter with an obviously substance-addled individual. And of course, stories of California political and social dysfunction are almost a permanent feature in the alternate media which is my regular source of information, as well as countless stories of California residents departing in droves for practically anywhere else. I was expecting – and dreading the same and perhaps worse on this trip.

But no – my sister’s neighborhood was a placid, well-kept and to all appearances a stable and secure place. The streets are lined with mature trees, shading beautifully maintained cottages and small houses of every vintage from turn-of-the-last-century to mid-century post-war, lush with well-groomed gardens and hedges of sweet-olive and mock orange. (TV series often use this neighborhood for exterior location shoots, it is that attractive.) Rows of palm trees lined some streets, and the familiar silhouette of Mount Wilson loomed up on the horizon to the east. Rose bushes in bloom were everywhere – Pasadena calls their New Year’s festival the Rose Parade for a reason.

The homeless were nowhere in evidence, much to my daughter’s mild surprise. I walked Wee Jamie every morning, pushing the cheap Cocomelon-themed folding stroller that we keep in Thing’s trunk for emergencies. The weather was cool, in comparison to late May in Texas – no need for air conditioning and closed windows and doors. We went to the LA County Arboretum with Jamie, admiring the flowers, the Queen Anne cottage, Lucky Baldwin’s bespoke stable, and the peacocks, who were in mating season, and in full voice. There were volunteers at the Arboretum, dead-heading the roses, and a well-mannered class of high-school kids from a private school, appreciating a morning of freedom from routine. We went to a nearby up-scale mall, let Jamie into the play area and let him run around with the other littles for a bit, bought lunch in the food court… the mall had about as many shoppers as one could expect at a mid-day mid-week, and there were no vacancies along the shop fronts. And it all was … good. I talked now and again with people that I met; an elderly gentleman walking his German shepherd dog, the expatriate Englishwoman tending her lovely garden at the front of a pair of cottages on a deep lot (as was the custom in that part of Pasadena – stacking two houses on a deep lot), the young woman walking her baby son in another stroller. We had one of those weird heart-to-heart conversations, in which she confessed that she and her husband really didn’t want to raise their little son there – but they had family close by and depended on them … and I looked around and realized that for most people in a comfortable situation, in a prosperous neighborhood, close to kin and friends… it’s all good.

It’s lotus-land. For now. Maybe it will continue being OK. For now.

Norms

22. May 2024 · Comments Off on Norms · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, European Disunion, Media Matters Not

Walking through my own neighborhood this week, I was reflecting on norms – not this Norm, but the established, accepted and socially-enforced norms make a neighborhood like mine a rather pleasant, secure and safe place to live, as well as being mildly attractive. We really don’t have to worry, even now, about plants and ornaments routinely being stolen, vandalism or random violence. Such incidents do happen, as noted on Next Door – but are not routine and are cause for much comment when they occur.
The accepted norms and standards for housekeeping and public behavior make for a pleasant and livable community, especially in a high-trust society. When violation of the established norms becomes routine – that becomes grounds for unhappiness and worse, especially in the minds of those who remember and valued the old, high-trust norms. There aren’t many ways to fight back effectively against a collapse of high-trust norms and the rule of law, other than moving away, or socially shunning the offenders. The English Daily Mail offered up an example of a community fighting back, this week.

The Daily Mail is one of my long-time guilty pleasures, although I skip over any stories about various Euro royal families, the Kardashians and Taylor Swift. I’ve long been aware of a subculture on the English scene – Irish Travelers. The Travelers used to make the local scene in horse-drawn wagons; quaint and picturesque little conveyances. The traditionally minded still do. Probably the best known to Americans is the one which Mr. Toad took such a fancy for in The Wind in the Willows. In the past, the peripatetic owners of these mobile little homes earned a living doing small repairs, dealing in horses, fortunetelling, and specialty retail. They were usually considered not entirely trustworthy. They were rovers and wanderers, hadn’t been settled in a village or as shire for so many generations that everyone knew who their great-great-grandparents were. Outsiders naturally were suspected of dodgy dealings – but as long as they moved on without making much of a fuss or boosting too many unconsidered trifles, this was fine. The social norms and the law were upheld, and seen to be upheld; just as important as actually being upheld.

The Travelers used to be called gypsies, or tinkers, before such nomenclature was branded as rude and racist or something. I have no idea why. To judge from pictures of members of the Traveling community posted in the Daily Mail and others, they don’t look all that much different from your average working-class Anglo-Saxon. The most visible Travelers now prefer trailers and RVs, camping here and there, moving on as the mood and calendar takes them, and staging weddings for their young which (to judge from TV and the Mail) explore the farthest boundaries in flashy bad taste. It also seems that a good portion of the present-day Traveling community view that Britian through which they move only as a source of plunder and easily cheated non-Travelers. It’s been reported again and again: groups of Travelers take up camping on empty public and sometimes private land, often over the objections of local residents and landowners, dining and dashing on an industrial-level scale, trashing pubs and party venues … and then to move on, leaving mountains of trash behind, to the outrage of local citizens and authorities. (Representatives of the Traveler community sometimes vary this program by complaining vociferously about prejudice against Travelers … gee, it’s hard to imagine why!)

An important event in the Traveler calendar is the yearly Appleby Horse Fair, in northern England. Apparently, the fair is enormously popular; billed as the biggest Gypsy/Traveler event in Europe, drawing participants and spectators by the thousands every late spring. But this one story caught my eye – a town close enough to Appleby that serves as staging and prep area is planning to basically close up for the duration. All but a single pub and just about every business is planning on locking their doors. Talk about pulling out the ‘welcome’ mat, rolling up the sidewalks and turning out the lights. It seems that the influx of Travelers violated so many community norms in previous years, that their equivalent of the chamber of commerce decided there would be no future in staying open for business. The losses in vandalism, property damage, crime, shoplifting, abuse by juveniles throwing bottles of urine … yuck … the various business owners didn’t make enough from the temporary influx to make it worth the candle. Enduring yet another round of violations of their norms, violations against property and persons … just wasn’t worth the hassle. And so the exasperated citizens of a town, who rather obviously reverence the norms of civil conduct in their community did what they could with regard to a temporary challenge to them. They cannot be forced to do business with those who abuse and presume on their hospitality.

Comment as you wish.

Literary Imagination

17. May 2024 · Comments Off on Literary Imagination · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, General Nonsense

The matter of a certain literary style and practice came up a couple of months ago – and I was reminded again of the discussion in a weird way, when my daughter and I watched the Night at the Museum movie series. This was in the interests of not freaking out Wee Jamie terribly, who is soaking up information and stimuli like a small, child-shaped sponge. I vaguely recall watching the first of the series, but my daughter did not, so I must have seen it in a theater, possibly when the Gentleman With Whom I (Once) Kept Company was on one of his yearly visits to Texas. Cute movie, and one which loaded in a lot of established actors in supporting roles (Ricky Gervais? Seriously?) …but anyway. (It is kind of cool, though – imagining an animated dinosaur skeleton playing ‘fetch’ the bone, and behaving like a playful puppy…)

The museum of the initial movie setting reminded me of an elementary school field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park, which also covered the La Brea Tar Pits, with all the life-sized landscaped dioramas, and the stuffed critters, mounted dinosaur bones and the remains of paleolithic critters excavated from the tar pits… all terribly retro and rather quaint, actually. There’s a natural history museum here in the old upscale part of San Antonio, the Witte Museum, with pretty much the same sort of exhibits, established around the same period, now with the addition of lighting and sound effects.

In any event, I began to think on how these kinds of exhibits became so very popular in the 19th century: I mean, the showman P. T. Barnum started with his exhibit of natural curiosities, scientific exhibits, wonders, and marvels early on. People flocked to see them in the flesh, and twice natural size – because most ordinary people didn’t often see extraordinary things; dinosaur bones, ancient Eqyptian temples, statues of Greek gods and goddesses, African elephants … such were curiosities, and rare ones at that. So going to P. T. Barnum’s flamboyant exhibits, and later on to more staid and scholarly local museums of natural history – well, there they were; all the exotic natural history and fabled creatures that you could wish to see, before movies and television brought them to us in living color in theater and living room.

On one of the book/author blogs which I follow (can’t recall which one or when, or even if it is an original insight!) another writer made what I realized immediately was a perceptive observation, regarding those verbally florid Victorian novelists who went on for pages and pages, describing scenes, settings and characters. Modern readers find this terribly frustrating, as this tendency bogs down the plot something awful. The reason Victorian authors did so was because most of their readers then had no mental archive of visual references to build on! When someone like Sir Walter Scott wrote about medieval Perth, or Dumas wrote about Renaissance France, or Lew Wallace about the Roman-era Holy Land, they were setting the necessary scene for readers in necessary and exacting detail for a reader who perhaps might at best have seen a crude black and white line drawing, or a hand-colored lithograph of a castle, Jerusalem, or the skyline of Paris. There was nothing in the 19th century reader’s visual vocabulary anything like what movies, television, even color photographs in glossy coffee-table books provide modern readers. We have the advantage of already having those visuals in mind, and don’t need to have them spelled out at length.

And that is my off-the-wall observation for this week – the news is just to depressing to contemplate at the moment. Comment as you wish.

Pity Poor Mexico …

05. May 2024 · Comments Off on Pity Poor Mexico … · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Memoir

… so far from God, as the saying went – so close to the United States. Mexico was very close to us, when I was growing up in suburban Los Angeles in the 1960s and early 70s. My elementary school had us study Mexican history in the 6th grade – if I remember correctly, that was part of the unified school district curriculum. We did a field trip to Olvera St., in the old part of downtown, at least three of the old Spanish missions were within a short drive from our various homes, and we weren’t allowed to forget that Los Angeles itself had Spanish origins and Mexican governance for decades before American statehood. For Southern California, Mexico was just a hop, skip, and a jump away – just as it is for South Texas.

A day trip to Tijuana when I would have been about thirteen or fourteen was my first trip to a foreign country. Dad took JP, Pip, and I with him on a trip to could get a new headliner installed in the ’52 Plymouth station wagon which was our family’s main ride. I don’t know why Tijuana, or how Dad located a workshop there that could do the work – but he did, and we spent a whole day there. I guess they could do it in Tijuana for a fraction of the cost of having it done anywhere closer to home. We drove down from Los Angeles, crossed the border, dropped off the car, and spent the hours until it was ready wandering through nearby shops catering to the tourist trade; folk art, hand-blown glass, and Mexican-style furniture. We watched some glassblowers at work, which was pretty interesting, looked at the finished glass menageries, walked by the bull ring and looked at the posters – but as it was a weekday, there was no bullfight scheduled, which was mildly disappointing. We went to a grocery store were Dad bought fresh rolls, cheese and soft drinks for lunch … and in the afternoon, we collected the station wagon and drove home.

Later, when Dad got interested in dune buggies and off-roading, he built a custom dune buggy on the chassis, transmission and engine of a VW bug – they were favored for their low profile and disinclination to roll over on steep inclines, which couldn’t be said of jeeps. Dad welded a custom body out of tube steel lengths, and sourced seats, dash, windshield, and enormous-capacity gas tanks from his favorite junkyards. The resulting junk-parts vehicle looked pretty much like something out of the Mad Max franchise. Over the Easter week holiday break, Dad would take my brothers P.J. and Sander in that dune buggy and go on an extended off-road camping trip to Baja California. They’d camp out in the desert, or on the beaches, eat beanie-weenies out of the can, forgo washing … and have a glorious time of it, all week long. (Meanwhile, Mom and Pip and I would go shopping, see a movie or go to the theater, and elegantly lunch in restaurants … and towards the end of the week, get ready for Easter; each of us had a glorious time over the Easter week break, partaking in those activities which engaged us the most. Pip and I would have been miserable, dragged on such a road trip; Dad, JP and Sander would have hated the ladies-who-lunch routine. To each, their own, and we were much happier for it.)  

What brought all this on was this horrifying story – of three surfing tourists turning up dead – murdered on their dream surfing trip to Baja. Not just the violence, robbery, murder and all – but that it all happened in a place that Dad and my brothers used to frequent, without any shred of concern about danger on visiting. Dad had no worries taking two kids through Baha, no more than any other place north of the border. He possessed a sidearm and was a good  shot with it; I do not know if he took it with him on those trips for personal projection; likely not, as that was frowned upon by Mexican authorities even then. The small towns and the open country along the length of Baha California seemed as safe as any place north of the border. Baja, Ensenada, Rosarita Beach … all those places named in the news stories are familiar. Ensenada and Rosarita just an easy day trip over the border, for the beaches, the bars and restaurants serving excellent and comparatively inexpensive local seafood cooked with Mexican flair.

But that was then, this is now – and another horrible reminder that places which once were fun and safe to visit are not safe now.

 

Finishing School

03. May 2024 · Comments Off on Finishing School · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Local

So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.

Adding insult to this injury, just about every malignantly bad idea infecting our society and body politic today originated in academia; diversity-equity-inclusion or ‘white people bad!’/POC can do no evil, the viability of gender-swapping and forcing women to share intimate spaces and sports teams with men LARPing as Audrey Hepburn, and those designated as disadvantaged minorities are entitled to whatever retaliation they want to take against those they hold responsible for their condition. I’m certain that dozens of other bad ideas can be laid at the feet of the ivory-tower academics. They’ve long been enamored of communism and that slightly less poisonous junior partner, socialism, because it sounds so logical and sensible in theory. Never mind that extolling Marxism in practice means glossing over mass murder, famine, gulag slave labor, political corruption, and a stagnated manufacturing sector. If academia can overlook all that … well, what’s the murder, kidnapping, mass rape and torture of 1200 Israelis in comparison? Going all I-Heart-Hamas is sooooo daring, rebellious, romantic, and the logical extension of those other bad ideas, in addition to wholly unwarranted ‘60s protest nostalgia. Why not turn out and protest for the Cause, whatever the cause is, this week?

However, I am not entirely certain that fondness for Hamas and the Poor Pitiful Pathetic Palestinians runs all that deep at American universities, even the ivy-shrouded bastions of privilege favored by the otherwise useless spawn of the elite class. Oh, sure – a lot of the proggie professorate are keen, with visions of ’68 dancing in their relatively vacant heads, or administrations keen on all that full-fare tuition from foreign students of a Middle Eastern origin and naturally anti-Semitic leanings. News stories like this one, about the high proportion of professional activists among the detained, the pre-positioned buckets of concrete chunks, the uniformly expensive pop-up tents all of a color and make, professionally pre-printed protest signs … all scream ‘astroturf’.

It’s an ‘astroturf’ protest movement enabled by spaghetti-spined administration and chancellors, at the expense of students there who actually – get this – still expect an education out of it all, while enjoying something of traditional fun and non-activist college experience. I also suspect that in the long run, indulging the I-Heart-Hamas student activists and the professional protest organizing cadre will not work out well for places where the most destructive, disruptive protests have taken place, and which retain the most anti-Semitic faculty. When the brightest and most focused students decide they can be better served by taking their interests and their tuition dollars elsewhere, formerly respected academic establishments will just become an expensive finishing school for privileged foreigners, and the offspring of our own elite class who can’t hack more demanding school programs.
Comment as you wish.

Where Went the Wind?

25. April 2024 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, History, Literary Good Stuff

Honestly, I’ve always been considerably conflicted about Gone With the Wind – both the book and the movie. Yes, best-seller, and loved extravagantly by more readers and movie-goers than partisans of the antebellum South, a gripping tale of a time, a place and a people, in a war that stripped away every shred of that noble and deluded gentility and Southern cavalier-worshipping delusion… shades of Vanity Fair, with a spineless, guileless and gentle supposed-heroine whom we are supposed to sympathize with in the main, contrasted with a conniving, spiteful and yet … entrancing stubborn, gutsy and conniving anti-heroine. I was reminded of all this once again, on reading this recent essay – by another woman and writer, similarly conflicted.

On initial reading of GWTW I thought that Scarlett was an amoral, heartless, and manipulative bitch, (I based a supporting character in my own series on Scarlett – as experienced by people who didn’t like her at all. Yes, she annoyed me that much.) Melanie was a deluded simpleton, Ashley ought to have been knocked on the head and put out of his conflicted sexual misery, and Rhett Butler given a good round of treatment by a competent therapist and sent off on a long ocean voyage to someplace else … anywhere else. Maybe British India. China. Anyplace.

I also wanted to wall the book every time Margaret Mitchell made some spiteful comment about abolitionists, Yankees, and Union soldiers. Look, my Smedley great-great-maybe another-great grandfather was a fire-eating and diehard abolitionist. Family legend has that the Smedley family farm was an alternate safe house on a branch of the Underground Railway which ran through Lionville, Pennsylvania. GGG-Grandfather Smedley was also unceremoniously (or perhaps ceremoniously although Quakers normally didn’t seem to go for ceremonies as a rule) read out of his local Quaker meeting for his unseemly enthusiasm for Mr. Lincoln’s war. In response, he took his religious custom to the Lutheran congregation, where we remained ever since, although I confess to flirting with Episcopal tradition, based mostly on a literary fondness for the language in the Common Book of Prayer.

But I kept on reading – because it was that kind of book, the kind that a reader just can’t put down. Early on, I thought that it must have been because some particularly vivid episodes and scenes must have been drawn from the memories of survivors and veterans of the South’s civil war. They had the ring of authentic experience, at one remove. Margaret Mitchell was of an age and era where she would have known and talked to people who vividly recalled such wrenching sequences as the gathering at the newspaper office, as the lists of the Gettysburg casualties were posted … and Scarlett realizes that just about every man she has flirted with, danced with, grown up knowing, the sons of her families’ neighbors … is dead in a battle in Pennsylvania.

On rereading GWTW a couple of years ago, I realized something else – that practically every character outside of the central quartet of Scarlett, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes and Melanie – had particularly vivid stories of their own. Some were hinted at in the narrative. Other backstories like the tragedy and courtship of Scarlett’s parents, Gerald and Ellen were gone into a little …but they all were there. The elderly neighbor who hustled Scarlett away from hearing clods of dirt hitting a coffin, and told of how she was the sole survivor of a massacre of her family, the crippled soldier, Will Benteen, who took refuge at Tara after the war and married one of her sisters (About the only male around who sussed out Scarlett’s character almost immediately.) The slaves – Mammy, Pork, Dilcey – they all had stories too, just barely hinted at. The other survivors of the war who pick themselves up, carry on, make a new kind of life for themselves, after the wind has blown away their previous existences. It’s those vividly-drawn secondary characters who engaged my interest and sympathy when I read FWTW all again. If it hadn’t been the fashion of the time to jumble it all into a single book Margaret Mitchell could very well have drawn out a whole rambling, loosely connected series of novels with a cast of hundreds, dealing with their lives, loves, extravaganzas, war, hardship, fighting up from poverty again and again.

Mention of poverty, though – brings to mind Danusha Goska’s observation regarding how nastily judgmental Margaret Mitchell and her planter upper-class and upper-class adjacent characters were, when it came to the O’Hara’s relatively impoverished poor white neighbors. She and they sneered at the non-gentry as shiftless, disease-raddled, deplorable poor white trash. It appears that nothing much changed since the time that she wrote or the time she wrote about, when it came to the elite Democrat party view of Southern working-class or poor whites. They’re only wanted and useful in elections, or to fill out the ranks of enlisted soldiers, when there’s a war to be fought. Comment as you wish.

To the Surprise of Many…

18. April 2024 · Comments Off on To the Surprise of Many… · Categories: Media Matters Not

… It turned out that there was one genuine, for real, professional old-line journalist still working at National Public Radio. Was being the operative word, as business reporter Uri Berliner quit, after spectacularly blowing up any lingering pretense of the publicly financed institution being an impartial and unbiased news-gathering organization, reporting on news without fear, favor or partisanship. Frankly, anyone claiming to be the teeniest bit rightish of center and believes that load of codswallop is likely too innocent to be let out in public without a dedicated keeper. They probably believe every word in the NY Times, as well – although as Agent K of Men in Black observed – that publication stumbles into the truth on rare occasions.

Uri Berliner’s final report may yet blow apart NPR federal funding, both that which is direct, and that which is paid to them by local affiliates for the rights to air their various news, information and entertainment features. The new CEO for NPR, one Katherine Maher, appears to be a singularly unappealing progressive apparatchik, a neurotic child of ruling-class privilege without a single shred of a background or experience in journalism … but all the right progressive opinions. (I swear, I’d be a better fit for that job based on a DINFOS shake-n-bake course for print and broadcast journalism, followed by twenty years as a military public affairs specialist!) I’d also swear that Katherine Maher was another generated parody like Titania McGrath, but alas – she’s all too horribly real.

I do wonder if this might be the final straw that breaks NPR. For all their many awards, organizational self-regard, and incestuously close connections to the Washington power structure, they have also been hemorrhaging ordinary listeners in Flyoverlandia for years now. I’m one of those once-listeners myself. Heck, I even worked for years at the local affiliate here in San Antonio on a part-time – on the classical music side, though. Every time I mentioned how I came to quit listening to NPR – a fair number of commenters chimed in with similar tales of disenchantment and outright disgust. NPR used to make at least a pretense at being even-handed, the presence of that lugubrious old talking prune, Daniel Schorr notwithstanding – or Cokie Roberts, the daughter of two (count ’em!) longtime career Democrat Party politicians, Lindy and Hale Boggs. NPR did more than the immediate sensational bleeding and leading coverage of news, and extended features … and then … and then, they seemed to have less and less to say to anyone who wasn’t a bicoastal progressive. For me, the point came sometime between 9-11 then the election of Obama; definitely by the time of the rise of the Tea Party. NPR looked at the Tea Party with the horrified interest of someone discovering a dead worm in their expensive mushroom vol-au-vent appetizer, before thumbing through their golden Rolodex of experts and demanding an explanation … instead of, you know – calling up any of the local Tea Party organizations and asking them.

Ah, well – sic transit all things considered. Will this spell the end of NPR being financed out of the public purse? Or is the organization too close to the hearts of the soi-disant ruling class, as well as employing too many of their otherwise unemployable spouses and spawn? Discuss as you have insight into the matter.

Cursive and Other Archaic Skills

04. April 2024 · Comments Off on Cursive and Other Archaic Skills · Categories: Ain't That America?

My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive – which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late – in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering – freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly – you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.

Some years ago, I made a tidy amount for a local researcher, who in the course of his studies, been able to access the letter archives of a prominent early 19th century inventor/industrialist, preserved in the archives of a major East Coast university. There were pages and pages of PDF scans of personal letters and business correspondence – not just of the industrialist himself, but from his wife and son, in-laws, friends and business associates. The researcher didn’t have time to read and transcribe the whole archive himself, so he hired me to do it … and it was rather fun, as well as remunerative. There was a wide range in quality of the handwriting, too – some of the business letters were as easily read as if they were typewritten; rather obviously, the industrialist hired men who could write with a clear and elegant hand. His mother-in-law, alas, wrote with a scrawl nearly as illegible as my own. His wife had the habit of saving paper by turning the page 45 degrees and writing more lines crossways over what had already been written – which was even more challenging to read when the ink bled through to the other side of what was obviously very thin paper. The industrialists’ father-in-law would have been schooled in the late 18th century, as he routinely used the then-archaic formulation of the letter ‘f’ instead of the rounded ‘s’ in his letters. (This meant confusion in deciphering his letters until I figured it out. I got rather fond of the father-in-law through his letters although he was about 150 years dead by then. He was a decent and kindly old stick, charitable and modest, although his son-in-law was one of the richest men in America at the time.)

Anyway – being able to read original old documents can be a very useful skill, especially for someone with an interest in history and culture. I have read that in countries like Japan, there have been so many simplifications and variations of the alphabet in use over the recent decades that many ancient documents can only be read by specialist scholars. It would be a pity if the same happened here in the US. Perhaps the urge to move away from teaching cursive is a deliberate ploy; a means to sever younger generations from our founding documents and our history.

Anyway, I got to think about skills that are commonly seen as outdated, outmoded, superseded by new technologies … but maybe, just maybe … really aren’t. The ability to drive a stick shift automobile or truck. Morse code. Celestial navigation. Editing audio tape with a razor blade and specialty sticky-tape. Hand sewing – didn’t Doctor Kennedy mention once that the skills of doctors doing sutures had fallen off because so few people did hand sewing any more? Discuss as you wish; what other seemingly-outdated skills are still useful or may become useful again in our lamentably chaotic world?

Fever

27. March 2024 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Good God, Working In A Salt Mine...

A fever, so the doctors and medical experts tell us, is a symptom of a deeper issue; an illness which most often is a mild and fleeting thing. And then, there is the serious and life-threatening fever – in either case, a fever is a way of telling us that something is wrong, and we’d best pay attention.
Just such an indication in the body politic is the occurrence of vigilante groups – a kind of civic fever, an indication that civic adjudication – the administration of justice in the case of offenses against law and order to the satisfaction of those offended by crime – has become seriously out of whack. It is a purely human drive; if one has been harmed by the unlawful actions of another, one would prefer to be assured that justice has been served – and if not made whole again, at the very least satisfied that the offender has been properly chastised for their offense.

Bad things happen in a nation or a city when ordinary citizens become convinced (rightfully or not) that justice is not being done, as in the case of local bully and thug, Ken McElroy, a couple of decades ago. Eventually, citizens realize that the civic authorities are not living up to their end of the bargain, as did the residents of Skidmore in the McElroy case. If not actually indulging in crime themselves, police, district attorneys and courts are turning a blind eye to criminal offenses. Citizens are even more quietly offended when they note that criminals are being treated by the ruling class as a kind of protected pet. Eventually the end of patience is reached. Americans historically run out of civic patience sooner than most other nations and ordinary citizens tend to take administration of justice into their own hands. Not as an undisciplined mob, although that has happened a frequently in American history as anywhere else – but as a vigilante organization. As I wrote some years ago about the San Francisco vigilance committee; “The image of a ‘vigilante’ most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise … and they would not back down.”

In the last couple of years, I have seen murmurings about a kind of pre-vigilante actions – most of it along the lines of a kind of informal local neighborhood watch; neighbors banding together informally to secure their own areas. It’s not gone as far – yet – as banding together, taking oaths, fortifying a stronghold, electing leaders, and going after the most notorious miscreants, as the San Francisco Vigilance Committee did, back in the day, but the impulse appears to me, when I read various news sites, that the vigilante impulse is solidifying around a most unexpected offense against the laws of man. And that would be the current wave of squatters moving into vacant or temporarily unoccupied homes and defying all efforts by the legitimate owners to get them out. This is substantially different from deadbeat tenants overstaying their lease and milking the tenant-protection laws for all that they are worth. Landlords and property managers have long had to deal with this kind of tenant.

What is a new twist is squatters breaking into and setting up housekeeping in a temporarily-vacant home and defying the owner of the home, brandishing a fraudulent lease or a claim to have purchased the place – and the police shrug and tell the legal owner to take it through the court as a civil matter. This is happening to people who aren’t landlords, who perhaps have inherited a house from a deceased next of kin, gone away on vacation for a couple of weeks, a stint of active duty in the military, or to care for a sick relative. Such people likely don’t have a lot of money to pursue a long, painful journey through the courts to get back their property … property which may have been thoroughly trashed and scavenged to the bones by the time the squatters are thrown out.

Thinking a little more on this situation, I am not surprised at the level of smoldering anger that property-owners might feel about this. A house is a very personal thing; for most people, a residential property would be the single most expensive thing they own. Having a total stranger invade their property, their home, or the home that their parents lived in – and brazenly steal it – and with only a long, expensive court battle can they get their property returned. How galling this must be, how insulting! Then of course, there is this fool, telling his social media followers that the laws will let them just ‘occupy’ empty houses; which will almost certainly end badly for those other fools to take his word for it. People have already been killed in at least one case, and a handy-man entrepreneur is achieving a mild degree of fame by offering anti-squat services and advice to home owners who have had their properties targeted in this way. Having a home taken over in this way is a deeply personal insult to a property-owner; and this is rich soil for a new vigilante movement to grow in. Comment as you wish and have insight into this matter.

Separate

14. March 2024 · Comments Off on Separate · Categories: Ain't That America?, Home Front, Media Matters Not

So this is a story which first percolated up to my attention at the Powerline blog last week – a perfectly vicious attack on a teenager by a bigger and apparently stronger teenager, which has put the first teenager in hospital with likely permanent brain damage – if she even recovers consciousness at all. There’s something about having your skull repeatedly slammed on a concrete sidewalk which will do that. The attacker has been detained, which is a nice gesture on the part of local law enforcement, and a Go-Fund-Me appeal has already raised a considerable sum for the medical care of Kaylee Gains. The name of her attacker, hereinafter referred to as Little Miss Thugette, however, seems to be under a veil of secrecy in those few stories which have appeared in the news media. The comments appended on sites where the story does appear tend towards the cynical: if the colors of the two girls were reversed, most commenters acknowledge that there would be screaming headlines for weeks in all the print media, TV pundits rushing to make their two cents clear by taking a knee (literally or metaphorically), the inner cities in blue states would already be in flames and Al Sharpton would be ubiquitous in demanding justice. (Of the mob and rioting sort, naturally.)

But Kaylee Gains is white, and Little Miss Thugette is black. We have all become accustomed to how the news-making machinery addresses matters racial in this age of DIE. News media-wise this beatdown is a non-story in the mainstream media; of apparent interest only to Miss Gains’ family and friends. This is not this first instance of a Little Miss Thugette, or her male kinfolk, Mr. Inner-City Gangbanger going all fight-club and clubbing the stuffing out of some hapless teenager of white, Jewish or Asian background and posting video of the beatdown to their social media account. Such black-on-white beatdowns make a brief splash on the local news … and then the media and our intellectual class goes right on bleating about white privilege, microaggressions and the desirability of reparations for people of color … because living in the United States in this century is just so soul-searingly damaging for such persons of color, having to associate with whites…

Which brings to my mind an interesting speculation – what if parents of white, Asian or Jewish students at public schools – especially the schools in sink neighborhoods are reconsidering the whole school desegregation thing and reassessing the so-called benefits thereof? The DIEists insist that it is so soul-searingly damaging for black kids to be around white privilege and white culture every single day, and the only way to minimize the harm done is to maintain black-only spaces. And the parents of white, Asian and Jewish students might very well believe that their kids might be safer in such a segregated school – although they probably don’t come out and say so, save among close friends and trusted associates.
Discuss as you wish.

Another Visit to the Quadrangle

06. March 2024 · Comments Off on Another Visit to the Quadrangle · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Devil Dogs, Domestic, Local

My daughter and I with Wee Jamie had cause to visit Fort Sam Houston this week, to pick up some prescription refills and make a run through the commissary – but before we did, we went by the historic old Quadrangle, so that my grandson could pester the deer and the peacocks and admire the enormous koi goldfish in the little landscaped fishpond. Yes, the historic limestone Quadrangle, the original structure and oldest building at Fort Sam houses a kind of petting zoo in the courtyard in the middle of three block-long ranges of buildings. That is, it would be a petting zoo if the current herd of nine deer were slightly more tame.

The Quadrangle was originally constructed to replace the Alamo, which had been the original military HQ in this part of Texas, serving sequentially the Spanish colonial army, the Mexican army, the Texian militia and army, the US Army, the Confederate Army, and the US Army again over the space of 200 years. (The Quadrangle is now HQ 5th Army, and home to the post’s historical museum.) In it’s last decades as a military installation, the Alamo was basically a central supply depot for the US Army in the Southwest, and the plaza before it a wagon park. When city sprawl swamped it all in the 1870s, the Army took the opportunity of some donated land out north of town to build a brand-new post with plenty of room for quartermastering activities – to park wagons, pasture horses and mules, warehouse supplies, and to establish a proper garrison for training and housing troops and officers.

Originally constructed for defense against attack by hostile Indians, the Quadrangle was first built without doors and windows along the outside walls. This was a somewhat remote reality by the time that the Quadrangle’s cornerstone was laid – but not entirely out of the question, and certainly not outside of living memory by troops and ordinary citizens then. About the only activity in the Quadrangle involving hostile or formerly hostile Indians came in the mid-1880s, when the Apache war leader Geronimo and the survivors of his war band were captured and interned there for a month before being moved to Florida. The legend is that the deer and birds were brought in to serve as meals on the hoof for the Apache prisoners … but that is an oft-debunked legend. According to some accounts, the presence of the deer predated the Apache internees.

Which does bring up the question – why? Why is a herd of semi-tame deer and a flock of peacocks and waterfowl kept on an active military post? They must be maintained at some expense and trouble, after all – there are pens for the deer and sheltered quarters. Presumably deer chow has to be gotten from somewhere, not to mention veterinary care. The first obvious answer is – military tradition! Like the Barbary apes at Gibraltar, and the ravens in the Tower of London. They are there, because they always have been there, and caring for them is enshrined in custom since time immemorial, or at least in this case, since the 1870s. But why – and since when? I began to wonder about this during our visit and did a little research when I got home … and it turns out that … no one really knows for certain. A local historian ventured the supposition that having a few peacocks and tame deer around the place was a popular domestic thing to do in the late 1800s. I have my own theory about the deer herd, though. I suspect that sometime after troops and families came to live at Fort Sam that someone rescued an orphaned deer fawn and made a pet out of it … and the best place to keep it when it was grown was in the confines of the Quadrangle, which seems to have become a park very early on. Could have been an officer’s wife or family member … or equally – a soldier. The deer fawn became a unit mascot – goodness knows that other unlikely animals have since become beloved and honored unit mascots – bears and horses, among them. Within a few years, having the deer at Fort Sam was an established custom, and everyone forgot about who and under what circumstances the deer herd had been established.

Discuss as you will – and share any theories that you might have.

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