Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
From my collections of antique postcards, a view of the French Market, some time early in the last century— something to hold in memory, against all the pictures of the last few days.
And as part of the Katrina Flood Aid blogburst, I commend the Salvation Army and Lutheran World Relief to our readers
I did my very last TDY at the little Naval station in Gulfport ten years ago to the month. It was a charming, sleepy place, flat as a pancake inland— as near as I could tell with my hill-bred senses—all around and between Gulfport and Biloxi. The highest bit of real estate anywhere around seemed to be a great artificially built ridge on Gulfport Naval Station, called the “Bauxite Mound”. We were sent there, and set up there, for a vast aerial war-game, involving the ANG camp by the airport, Keesler AFB, and an assortment of other units and bases.
I was there for two weeks or so, tasked to sit in a trailer on the Bauxite Mound, and hit “play/record” and “stop” on a videotape recorder twice daily. The VTR was connected to a Hi8 camera bungee-corded to a vantage-point in a mobile radar trailer, and focused on a radar screen. At the end of a two-hour exercise scenario session, I popped the tape out of the machine, another Combat Camera TDY expert did the same with the VTR that she monitored (from another camera, bungee-corded in another trailer) and we put them both in a padded envelope, and a runner with a security clearance came to collect them. I think they were Fedexed somewhere, for after action review and analysis. For this onerous duty twice daily for two weeks, the DOD paid airfare, travel and per diem. (Your tax dollars at work, people… the peacetime military had certain discrete charms.) Most of the unit videographers were on a real combat doc assignment elsewhere— those on this one were stray broadcasters, and a couple of engineers— I think they sent the unit graphic artist as well. The unit was essentially emptied of everyone but the commander and the admin NCO. We joked that they might as well pull down the blinds, turn on the answering machine and pretend that no one was home.
For all but the four hours or so that we were needed at the exercise, Monday through Friday, we were free. We had the use of a couple of rental vans, though, and by careful scheduling and cooperation, were also able to amuse ourselves in a mild way in what passed for the fleshpots of the Mississippi Gulf Coast— although I ought to make it clear that my own excursions were to a fabric store, services at an Anglican congregation in Gulfport on Sunday, and to funny little nursery and pottery where I bought some concrete and pottery animals for the garden.
People who don’t know better claim that Texas is a southern state. It isn’t. I found that out the first evening, a van full of us buying groceries at the largest upscale grocery in Gulfport. At six of an evening on a weekday night, it was all but deserted. Maybe one clerk, and a couple of other customers besides ourselves. At that time of day, that time of week, grocery stores in San Antonio are jumping. No, Texas hustles… Mississippi was lazy and languid and mellow. Except for the casino barges all along the coast to Biloxi, the sidewalks all rolled up at about 4 PM. (A clerk in the Navy Exchange told me that she had to finally take the afternoon off, when she wanted to buy a car. By the time she got off shift in the late afternoon, all the dealers were closed.)
Every local I met, on post or off— they were gracious, friendly, languid, unhurried. I was too much, I realized, the energetic and keyed-up Yankee to feel comfortable with that over a long period of time, not unless there was something mellowing in the water. I knew that otherwise, I would eventually snap and grab a local citizen by the shirt-front and begin screaming “Wake up! It’s the poppies, I tell you! Snap out of it!!” But since I knew that I would be going home long before I reached the exasperation point, I could accommodate the laid-back and casual attitude— well, for two weeks, at least— and enjoy the differences.
Back of the ocean front, the land seemed to be very flat, and lushly wooded, threaded by slow-moving creeks, ditches and canals. I loved to run a circuit around the back-forty of Gulfport NS, which featured a golf course and a picnic ground with a large lake. Turtles the size of soup plates basked in the sun, plopping hurriedly into the water almost as soon as I saw them. Egrets and other water birds haunted the woods and the tangle of canals, and one day I saw what I thought first was just a pathetically skinny, reddish little stray dog, grooming himself on the grass verge between a ditch and a paved road. But no, it had a sharp little muzzle and pointed ears edged in black; every time it looked down for a bit more grooming, I stepped closer to the fox. It would turn, and look at me uneasily, I would hold very still… and reassured, the fox would resume grooming, until I was almost close enough to touch it. I wouldn’t, of course. Besides fleas, parasites and rabies, it also had very sharp little teeth— but I had never seen a real fox, not up so close.
The coast between Gulfport and Biloxi was beautiful— not because the beaches were scenic like Big Sur—but because they were white sand, and the sea always smooth and calm, and Highway 90 was a four-lane motorway with a landscaped median that paralleled the shore, sweeping around every gentle curve and headland. On the inland side of it a graceful series of large and small houses overlooked the road and the endless beach. We drove along that highway a number of times, but the one that sticks in memory was coming back from dinner at one of the Biloxi casinos (the pirate ship one— I won $5.00 on a slot machine). It was just about sundown, daylight fading out of the sky. All along the coastal road, the beautiful homes sat, with their windows and curtains drawn open to the sea breeze, lights on inside the rooms. It was like looking into the windows of a series of elaborate doll houses, but ever in the back of my mind—even then— was the thought of how close the water was, how flat the country and how fragile those beautiful mansions and cottages would be, in the eye of a storm.
The news reports have the storm surge that hit Biloxi as being 30 feet, and I am wondering, without any way of ever knowing, how many of the lovely houses that I admired, and how many of the places that I spent my TDY money at, and how many of the people I met in passing— at the nursery, at the church service, or ringing up my groceries— are OK, and alive. Thirty feet of water, all at once…We think of our world as solid, immutable, but it is not— it has its own whims.
It looks sadly as if the worst-case scenario is happening in slow motion. New Orleans will be rebuilt, of course, but how, and maybe even where, and with what technologies… and what it will look like, a watery phoenix risen from the delta in ten years or twenty… well, who knows? It won’t be the city it was, last weekend, last decade, the century before.
But this is what it looked like, once. I offer it as something to hold in memory against the images of the last two days. (I will go on posting one of my antique postcards every other day or so)
I have a old Kinney shoebox full of antique postcards: this is one of about fifteen of various places in New Orleans— Jackson Square, the FrenchMarket, the Cabildo, the St. Louis Cemetary— all the touristy places. There is no date on most of them, but the mix of automobiles and horse-drawn carts and trams have a look of the 1920ies. Most of the rest of the postcards in the box are about the same vintage, most of them never used, and bought by the hasty handful to amuse a little invalid boy by his parents on their travels around the world. (Nice and Cap Jean Ferrat, castles of Britian, monuments in Japan and Paris, Italy and the Pacific Northwest— glamorous relics of the days of liesurely travel on luxuriously appointed ocean liners.) The little invalid boy was the youngest son of the family Grandpa Jim worked for, as the estate gardener. He died in his teens, and many decades later the estate was sold off, all the furniture and valuables removed. There were a lot of odds and ends stored up in one of the garages, and Grandpa Jim was allowed one day to bring us— Mom, JP and I— to look it over and see if there was anything we would like. I don’t know what JP took away, if anything, but Mom liked a cast-iron garden chair covered with three decades of paint (and regretted not taking the love seat that matched it, but was terribly heavy) and I was enchanted by the wealth of postcards. They have been in my posession ever since. Since I took them away from the deserted estate, I have been to some of the places pictured.
But New Orleans is not one of them, and I rather regret that I didn’t take the one chance I did have to see it, when I was TDY to Gulfport, Mississippi a decade or so ago. Unless we are terribly, terribly lucky, New Orleans will not look much like my postcards for a long, long time.
(Cpl. Blondie’s boyfriend left from New Orleans about mid-morning. His family planned to leave from Metairie last night, but put off leaving until this morning. The roads going out to the west were impossibly jammed, so they are all heading for Atlanta. Blondie can reach the BF on his cellphone, but he can’t make outgoing calls. He was out of the city on back roads by midday. She’s keeping in touch with him, as much as she can.
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about another gulf city, and another hurricane here.)
I think every village or suburb or city block must be afflicted with a bad neighbor, or in the luckiest locations, the “not so good” neighbor. At best this neighbor may be merely rude, clueless, thoughtless or just disagreeable— or an unfortunate combination of all those qualities. Ordinary bad neighbors may play loud music late at night, neglect the unmown lawn, leave garbage cans at the curb for weeks on end, and permit weeds to thrive unmolested until they are the size of small shrubs. They may dismember industrial machinery in the front yard, or leave the broken-down heap with three flattened tires parked in the street in front of their house for months on end, and have rowdy parties on weekends.
This sort of ordinary bad neighbor invariably lives right next door to the picky and house-proud sort, who lovingly groom their borders with nail scissors and maintain an exquisitely velvety green lawn… which renders the torment all the more excruciating. The bad neighbor may not actually be a suburban sloven, but instead maintains a rackety, public and disreputable personal life, one involving a lot of yelling, flung objects and frequent visits by law enforcement authorities. This sort of neighbor actually serves quite an enjoyable function, as the focus for lots of scandalized gossip. These are the two commoner sorts… blissfully, rare indeed is the malevolent or deranged bad neighbor. This would be the kind of person, which when they finally snap and melt down, usually involves automatic weapons or explosives, a number of messily dead bodies, and headlines in the local paper above the fold for days. And none of the neighbors, interviewed by minions of the press, are quoted as saying “Oh, very quiet. So nice. Kept to him/her/theirselves. Wouldn’t hurt a fly… we were just that shocked!” No, when they talk about this kind of neighbor, everyone says, “Well… we’re surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” Or “Human catastrophe, looking for a place to happen.” Or even, “They fought with everyone, and we all hated their guts.” And usually, someone throws in a lament about the authorities not having seen the danger signs and acted promptly, saving (fill in the blank number) lives.
My parents had such a neighbor when they lived at Hilltop House— and I was glad on one account when they moved down to their very own hill in Valley Center, as I was afraid that this particular neighbor would snap, and mow down half the neighbors with heavy artillery… as opposed to just harassing them with spurious complaints about manufacturing drugs.
Mr. F. and his wife (I will call her Mrs. F.) lived in a house on a cul-de-sac lower down the hill, and ventured only rarely into our ken, so were spared the full malevolent blast. (According to his mythology, with our house full of teenagers and the yard full of old cars, we must be in the distribution end.) His immediate neighbors were not so fortunate, as he gradually developed a bizarre delusion that they— immensely respectable, middle-aged home-owners all—were all manufacturing, selling, and transporting illegal drugs.
He insisted there were pipes full of drugs, running between all the houses. His suspicions were as strong as actual physical evidence was weak; over the course of several years he cut a swath through every law enforcement body in the state of California. Initially being interested enough, then increasingly disillusioned, and finally writing him off as just another unbalanced crank, Mr. F. would move on to another agency which knew of him not, and repeat the process. All this was terribly difficult for the immediate neighbors— everyone up to the DEA eventually wore a path to their various doors. Mr. F. was well spoken, immensely convincing at first, but as law enforcement increasingly declined to humor him, his behavior became freakishly bizarre. He took to prowling the streets at odd hours, taking pictures of visitors, or carrying around a box he claimed was taking samples of the air to test for drugs. Pippy’s wedding reception was held in the garden at Hilltop House, with Mr. F lurking in the oleander hedge by the front gate. We felt rather like the mafia family in the Godfather, with the shrubbery full of FBI agents, on this marital occasion.
But by that time, Mr. F. had well gone past the point of being an amusing local nut-case. One of the closer neighbors, a woman in late-middle age, was slowly dying of MS; Mr. F. insisted that it was actually the result of drug abuse. Even if no one credited that, it was a cruel thing to say. Other neighbors filed injunctions and suits, to no avail— Mr. F. could put on a pretense of rational normality in court. Eventually, Mom told me that people selling their homes nearby had to list Mr. F. as a sort of local toxic waste dump and inform potential buyers of his malign presence. Some time after I had enlisted and left Hilltop House for good, and Mom and Dad had decamped for the wilds of Northern San Diego County, Mom told me of the cruelest, most horrible thing he had done. A couple with two small children had bought a house farther down the hill— not on the same street, but a house where Mr. F. could see into their back yard from his. He called the child protection authorities, accusing them of drug abuse and neglecting their children— and because he was new to them, they believed. It took six months for them to get custody of their children again.
Several years later, I read of him in the “news of the weird” section of the local newspaper. Among other things, it seemed there was an injunction against him in the State of California, forbidding him to ever call 9-11. I can’t find confirmation via google, but that was a long time ago. With luck, he went undeniably barking mad, before the rise of the internet, and at this date, all the neighbors around Hilltop House are sleeping sound at night, knowing that Mr. F is not lurking in the shrubbery, or that gullible law enforcement officers are not wearing a path to their front door. We shall, with luck, not see his like again. Or very soon. And especially not on the same street.
(Accounts of horrible, impossible, malevolent and generally deranged neighbors are eagerly solicited, of course. I’d love to know that somewhere, some time, there was worse than Mr. F running around loose.)
To: Ms Sheehan and Friends
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Thinking Ahead
1. It seems that there are a lot of you out there with an enormous, throbbing hard-on to recreate those golden days of yore, those glorious patchouli-scented, Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Min chanting, drug-addled, socially-conscious days of freewheeling protests, days of rage and nights of long-haired hippy chicks getting it on with equally long-haired, sensitive draft-dodging musicians. OK, fine, everyone needs a hobby, but most people that in love with the past eventually hook up with a re-enactors group.
2. I will, however, accept that you mean well, and are acting from the best of intentions, but cannot help recalling the proverbial paving materiel of the access route to the infernal regions.
3. Should you be successful in infantilizing our volunteer military, and returning them from Afghanistan and Iraq to the bosoms of their families, from whence they were ripped by the brutal, unfeeling minions of the BushhitlerchimpAshKKKroftEvilOverlordRove conspiracy, repercussions in Afghanistan and Iraq will in all likelihood mirror those events which followed upon withdrawal of American troops and American support from South Vietnam.
4. In the interests of effective long-term planning, I urge that consideration of a refugee resettlement project become part of your “bring the troops home” campaign.
5. A comprehensive listing of those Iraqi and Afghan citizens who would be most endangered by an American withdrawal should be drawn up, to include (but not limited to) members of the current government, members of the military and police, the intelligentsia, minority clergy, employees of the American military and civil establishment, and their families. While the actual evacuation plan would be contingent upon actual events, and would probably fall to our military in any case, consideration should be made of where to position the initial reception camp. Ideally, it should be in-theater, situated in the territory of a friendly country.
6. Your input is also solicited on where to site the main refugee camps within CONUS, and on the processes for resettling families permanently in cities and towns across the USA— ideally in locations which as of this date, do not have good Persian or Afghan restaurants. Volunteers will be needed both at the grass-roots level, and to lobby Congress to set aside the funds for a refugee resettlement effort. This is a responsibility which should not be shirked, although it probably will, if past performance is any indication. At least you can say afterward that you tried.
7. Finally, if it is all about the $#%*#@!! oil, why did I just pay 2.53 a gallon for mid-grade last week, when I filled the tank of the VEV?
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
The end of the eighth month of the year in South Texas is usually an arid and dreary time, scorched and blasted by heat. At the end of the day, the large-leafed plants in my garden are limp, and begging for water. Clouds blow over occasionally; huge towering grey and white things, which sometimes deliver rain, and sometimes only tease with the possibility. This summer has not been quite as bad as others: the grass in the huge meadow over the back fence of my place is still pale green, only lightly tinged with yellow. The sky above it is infinitely blue, seemingly as huge as the sky can be, only in the American West.
The garden is recovered from the disastrous hailstorm of this spring, and newly adorned with a series of gorgeously colored glazed pots, offered as a seasonal bargain this spring by the local grocery-store chain, the Huge Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. Due to some quirk of the global economy, or expert wheeling and dealing (and excellent taste) on the part of their purchasing agent, fine-quality glazed pots and urns from Malaysia, China and Italy were available for next to nothing (comparatively speaking), lovely things, glazed in jewel-tones of celadon, deep green, rich blue, and amber. A selection of them is now displayed in the Garden of Cats, lining the walkway and the border at the back, planted with small lemon and lime trees, an exotic coffee plant, a flowering quince, an assortment of gardenias and others too numerous to name. Alas, it is too hot to sit out and enjoy this bounty in the afternoon; that pleasure awaits the day in autumn when the heat finally breaks, we can open the windows and turn off the air conditioning.
The cats enjoy it, nonetheless. Not my own cats, but an assortment of neighbor cats who look on my place as their gentleman’s club— not in that nasty titty-bar sort of way, but as a home away from home, a quiet place of comfortable repose and a light snack. It is a select club, however, with a limited membership. The other afternoon I was looking out from the window over the kitchen sink, when a large ginger cat with white underpinnings suddenly appeared, balancing on the back fence and looking into the yard with curious interest. It poised there for a moment, and then jumped down— I couldn’t see where it went, over the enclosure around the AC unit, and the cannas growing around it. Just as the ginger-cat jumped down, I looked out through the slider door onto the back porch, where Bubba-from-down-the-road, Sammy-from-across-the-Road, and Parfait-from-who-knows-Where were all lazing on the sun-warmed bricks. Bubba rose deliberately from his post-kibble snooze, and sauntered around towards the little path behind the cannas. He came sauntering back again in a few moments, and I heard no snarling, no yowling, no bad-cat-language, but the ginger cat obviously left swiftly and by the shortest and most efficient route. I could imagine Bubba, growing confidently to him, “Oi, you there… Ginger-cakes… a word in your shell-like, if I may… this here is a private club… Unnerstand? There’s the road… ta, then.” (OK so I imagine Bubba talking like Chief-Inspector Dalziel. Sue me.)
Oddly enough, all three tolerated, seemingly with amusement, the opossum family that lived on the porch roof this spring. I was amused myself by the opossums— at one point there were five of them, then three, then none at all. They would come down the trellis and help themselves to the leftover kibble, funny rat-tailed rodenty-looking things with white faces and dark eyes, and prehensile little paws. One afternoon when I was reading on the glider, the boldest of them suddenly swarmed up onto it as I sat very still, then climbed onto my lap. It experimentally gummed a fold of my shirt, then the pages of the book I was reading, and then my finger, evidently deciding that none of them were promisingly edible. It scrambled down off the glider and returned to the cats’ kibble dish; one of my neighbors to whom I told this, said she would be screaming still, if a nasty little bare-tailed wild animal had crawled onto her lap, on a sunny spring afternoon. The opossums are gone, now. I found the bones of one while mulching the corner of the shady border last month, and saw the body of another on the road; the others most probably fell to a new predator. An owl, a very large owl, has been observed perched on a streetlight standard at the corner across from my house, and it seems the local population of roof-rats and squirrels has declined precipitously. Well, nature is like that… and I had thought my relative freedom from rodents was due to the presence of the Gentleman’s Club.
Sammy’s people were the ones who first spotted the owl; they have moved to another house in the neighborhood, but have left Sammy to me, or more precisely to Blondie. When she was home for Christmas this last year, Sammy was only an occasional visitor the Gentleman’s Club. He fell into deep and slavish affection with her, much to his original owners’ surprise, they having raised him on a bottle as a tiny, tiny kitten. He grew into a very large, stately off-white cat, with watery, severely crossed blue eyes; we think he must be close to being blind. He looks like either a ginger cat washed with too much bleach, or a white cat who has not been washed with enough. His devotion to Blondie was such that he continued returning to the Garden of Cats after she returned to Cherry Point, and shortly after that he was struck by a car, while crossing the road. His people rushed him to the veterinary emergency room— he lived, although they could not afford extensive surgery. Sammy now gimps around on three legs, and some of his teeth were smashed, although he eats well enough, and can clear the fence and even go up onto my roof. Still, Blondie and I worried about him, and even felt rather guilty. When I tasked his original owners with the dangers of allowing him out at all, they said that he clawed at the door and yowled so much, they just had to let him out. Of course, they also have a herd of about half a dozen yappy little teacup Chihuahua dogs— did I live in a house with them, I’d be clawing at the door and yowling to be let out, myself. No place this, for a self-respecting cat with a yearning for peace and quiet.
And so Sammy came back, every day, spending most daylight hours in the Garden of Cats. His original owners moved this week: I went to ask them about Sammy, and were they taking him with them? They had planned on it, but then temporized— they were moving to another house, two busy streets away. Would he make a bee-line for us, if they let him out? I left the gate open, so they could come and take him away… but cats have a way of making their own choice, and Sammy had made his clear. He has hardly left the garden in the last four days, and I have gotten the estimate from the veterinarian. At the end of the month, he will be freed of fleas and intestinal parasites, and upon being pronounced feline HIV and Leukemia negative, will be permitted to come indoors— something I think he devoutly wishes for. Blondie, darling, you are “with cat”… when you have your own place, please take him with you. I have no desire to be the local crazy cat lady.
And I am still looking for a good family for Parfait: he has lovely peridot-green eyes, and occasionally when I pick him up, he relaxes so completely, it feels like he has no bones to him at all.
This lady of leisure stuff is for the birds, I tell you. I was so bored last week I detailed my sewing machine… no really, with q-tips into the little ventilator grilles and all. And today, I put in fresh shelf-paper in the dish-cupboard. It’s a thrill a minute around here, waiting for the temp agencies and potential employers to call.
There is nothing so far about a starting date at the very promising start-up which offered me gainful employment after a very nice interview three weeks ago, and indicated that the middle of August would be the tentative start-date. Candidly, I have the feeling that as a start-up, it may have been on somewhat more shaky ground than indicated, and continued scoping out other possible sources of a regular and generous paycheck; it ain’t for real until you have the paycheck in hand… and it doesn’t bounce, of course.
I still haven’t heard, although I have called the agency on Monday… they were supposed to call on Tuesday, and let me know something definite, and here it is Thursday with no news at all, and the conviction that A) I am being gaffed off, B) The investor is doing the same thing to the eager start-up entrepreneur, and C) The agency is hoping that I won’t keep calling.
So, yesterday I strapped on my “Serious Interview Outfit” (grey light-weight Talbots suit, white blouse with white and purple silk scarf, amethyst earrings, string of pearls, black shoes and black Coach handbag) and drove over to interview at another start-up, which had advertised itself as being in dire need of an Executive Admin Assistant… and oh, my god… my heart began to sink when I turned off the main road into a side street lined with… well, mostly warehouses. Warehouses and auto body places— dreary, shabby and emphatically low rent. It was in the nineties yesterday, and a half-hour drive, so I wasn’t going to put on the scarf and suit jacket until I got there, but I took one look at the place as I parked, and figured I was overdressed enough as it was.
Well, it turns out they are working out of a warehouse because the rent is cheap and no one would ever think there was anything to the place at all… and the entrepreneur didn’t even wince when I answered his question of what salary I was looking for ($27,000 to 30,000 yearly, depending on the benefits, or lack of same). But when he asked me what I would do first, I couldn’t help myself…. I said;
“Well, organize things for you…. And vacuum this carpet.” Not that it would do a lot of good, as it appeared— under a layer of dust, paper scraps and assorted other detritus— to be the color of dog turds. And the ceiling tiles had marked water stains on them, from leaks in the roof. Blondie said, “Don’t be a snob, Mom… you can always find something else, later.”
The entrepreneur was going to be interviewing other people, and would make a decision on Friday. I’m in two minds about my hopes for this one. On one hand— A paycheck. Possibly an interesting job with interesting and brilliant people. On the other: A long drive, to a dubious neighborhood, and a workplace that is… to be charitable, a bit of a dump. Decisions, decisions.
But another agency called this afternoon— this is the one that specializes in high-end staff. I have a initial telephone interview Monday morning, for a position as executive admin assistant at a very large industrial concern that is opening a new plant, locally… which would be, if it worked out, be about as good as it gets as high-end executive staff in this town. I’d take it in a heartbeat, if seriously offered. But I have to get that offer soon— I have the pension, and the part-time work at the radio station, and some incidental work from my previous employer, although I have had my last regular paycheck from that. I also have a couple of writing projects out there, although I have yet to get any income from them.
Although if anyone offers a lovely bonus at this point, for the Book, or some of the really good stuff I have stashed away, I certainly would not say no, at this point. (The Really Good Stuff I am saving, for the future, for a literary agent waving a large advance. What I write here is for everyday, I write it to keep my hand in, and to keep you all amused and informed.) Wish me luck and a dazzlingly good and productive interview— I will need it.
The Great Raid is a solidly old-fashioned kind of war movie, of the workmanlike sort made during or in the two decades immediately after World War II. Whether you like it or not depends very largely on whether you see this old-fashioned quality as a good thing or a bad thing.
Three linked stories are competently woven together, all taking place over 5 days in January, 1945, as the Japanese occupation of the Philippines comes to a final bloody end. The threads of the story come together at the POW camp at Cabanatuan, where the last five hundred or so ragged survivors of the Bataan Death March, and the siege of Corrigidor wait for death or liberation. Cabanatuan was the central holding camp for POWs in the Philippines, and by this time the fitter and healthier prisoners had been moved to other camps or to Japan for forced labor. Those left are sick, crippled, starving, many barely able to stand, mentally gone somewhere far beyond despair. They are afraid they have been forgotten by the outside world, but they have not been. In Manila, a Catholic nurse named Margaret Utinsky runs a small underground circle which smuggles desperately needed drugs into the Cabanatuan camp. Margaret, although the widow of an American Army officer, holds a passport from a neutral country and manages to stay at liberty and ahead of the Japanese secret police – for a while. The man she loves is in Cabanatuan, desperately ill with malaria. As the Japanese control over the Philippines begins to waver, he and the other prisoners are in danger of being murdered outright.
A massacre of American POWs at another camp sets the third story in motion; a hit and run raid on the Cabanatuan camp to free the POWs there, and spirit them to safety. The liberators will have to walk the last thirty miles, avoid any encounters with the Japanese forces, and pull it off with no rehearsals. The job falls to 120 picked men from the 6th Ranger Battalion, and their bombastic and colorful commander, Col. Henry Mucci. In turn, Col. Mucci assigns one of his company commanders, Capt. Robert Prince to come up with a plan to hit the camp, and to come up with it in 24 hours. Refining the plan, getting information about the camp, doing reconnaissance on the spot, coming up with a means of transporting the sick and unfit to safety, distracting the Japanese guards— it’s all done on the fly, over the next four days, working in concert with two separate Filipino guerilla organizations.
The elements of the actual raid is the most interesting and seemingly the most carefully recreated, a scheme of meticulously organized chaos— counting down to the last minutes as the Rangers carefully take up positions in the dark, just outside camp, and the Filipino guerillas prepare to block access on the road to either side. The moment when they open up is quite jolting, as it follows on fifteen or so minutes of quiet whispers, and the scuffling sounds of men crawling through the weeds. I think I would have rather seen more of the planning of it, rather than the doomed romance, which seems rather jammed in as an afterthought, and a contrivance. I did think it a little odd— since one of the keys to operating a successful underground organization is to be physically ordinary and persistently unnoticeable— that they could cast a dishwater blond actress who stands a head and a half taller than everyone else, as an underground operative in an Oriental country.
Otherwise, the attention given to the Philippine underground, and the guerillas out in the country was very appropriate, and much overdue in movies of this sort. The cast is a solid ensemble, turning in respectable performances; the lack of star power being somewhat of an advantage here. (Only three of the leads: Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielson and Joseph Fiennes are anyone that I have ever heard of, or noticed in a movie before.) The director and producers also hired Dale Dye as their military advisor, and would appear to have paid attention to him, although I am sure that William or any other enthusiastic experts will find small flaws and discrepancies in uniforms, weapons and vehicles. There was also a quiet, unobtrusive nod paid to religious beliefs, which I rather appreciated— another old-fashioned note. And the brutality of the Japanese forces in their treatment of POWs and Filipinos was not softened, or played down in the interests of political correctness; I doubt The Great Raid will play well in Japan, but it will go over splendidly in the Philippines. And if you see it, stay for the closing credits: it opens with what looks like contemporary black and white newsreel footage of the fall of Bataan, the Death March— and closes with the arrival of the transport ship carrying the survivors to a cheering crowd in San Francisco.
(NPR has revived an old radio series, inviting members of the public to expound on their personal credo: herewith is my potted list of personal beliefs.)
Women of a certain age should not wear mini-skirts. Ever.
Actual proof of Islam being a religion of peace is pretty thin on the ground, and in the headlines these days.
Teabags are a scourge and invention of the Devil. Real tea is made from loose leaf tea. And the pot is rinsed out with boiling water, first.
Children should not be allowed to call their parents, or any other adult by their first name, unless said adults’ name is adorned with an honorific such as “Aunt/Uncle” or “Mr/Miss”.
95 Percent of any popular culture—books, movies, art, music, and fashion— at any one time is utter crap. In five years or less, everyone will be poking fun at all but that quality 5%. Teenagers arrayed in the latest popular fashions, body-piercings and makeup would do well to keep this in mind.
That William Morris had the right idea: “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And as my mother said, “The bigger the house is, there more of it there is to clean.”
Only fools and the impatient pay full retail price. And second-hand will not kill you… how many previous owners do you think that expensive antique has had?
One way and another, the whole world is bigoted and prejudiced. To quote Tom Lehrer
“The whole world is festering with unhappy souls,
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
The Italians hate the Yugoslavs, South Africans the Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much!”
The best one can hope for, is to live in a place where they aren’t very much prejudiced about what you happen to be. It’s a human thing— adjust. Relocate, if absolutely necessary.
Children are not possessions, only undeveloped people.
(More to be added, as I think of them.)
The tiny dining room on the ground floor of the Golden Something of Other was as unpretentious, and as ancient as the rest of the place, scrupulously clean and un-memorably decorated— kind of like Grannie Jessie’s house, come to think on it. Breakfast the next morning was not served there, but at a couple of tables set up in what would have been a loggia overlooking the courtyard, with a fine view of the six cars packed in like so many metal sardines. The tables were very plainly set, with the same kind of thin plastic sheet over faded checked cloths that I had been accustomed to in Greece, laden with baskets of croissants and miniature brioche. Guests came and went as they pleased, helping themselves to bread, and butter and jam, and café au lait, while the staff constantly replenished the supply from the nearby kitchen. The staff appeared to consist of two grandmotherly ladies in similar overalls and aprons, and half a dozen teenaged girls. Were there anyone else, I never laid eyes on them. My notion of traveler’s nirvana was established right then and there; the most perfect place to stay in all the world would be a simple two-star hotel in a small town in France, run by women.
After breakfast, I took my daughters’ hand, and we went exploring. Either Blois was an extraordinarily small place, or we had driven into the historic part of by chance, arriving as we did on the old road from the north. We walked down the main street in front of the inn; after about a block, it dipped into a shallow defile, curved up on the other side, around a low hill— and there was the fabled chateau.
(Grand Staircase at the Chateau)
At the end of the tourist season, and fairly off the beaten track, it was pleasantly un-crowded, empty stone rooms filled with little but thin autumn sunshine spilling in through the eastern-facing windows. Perhaps it had never had much in the way of furniture anyway; up until the 18th century princes and great nobles had many houses and estates, and moved from one to another, taking the furniture, tapestries and small possessions with them, moving on as the privies overflowed, and the pantries emptied.( A house was essentially an established and permanent camping-place, and the good and great traveled with wagonloads of gear.) Only certain of the wings and galleries were open to the public, we had to show our little blue pasteboard tickets several times to the keepers of various sections. I let Blondie hold her own ticket, and at the last stop, I discovered that she had put it in her mouth, and all there was of it was a little wad of chewed blue pulp. Fortunately the doorkeepers were another set of grandmotherly ladies in overalls (Was this entire town run by grandmothers?), and they laughed, enormously amused when I showed it to them, and let us in.
In the dining room that night, there was an English family with two children about her age; they were passing through on their way home from Provence. The children hit it off, being able to chatter for once in a more-or-less common language. This time, Blondie did not astonish them by naming it: Being a logical and observant child she had worked out that Greeks spoke Greek, Italians spoke Italian, Germans spoke German… and being Americans, of course the term for our native language must follow the same logic. She had very much startled a couple of stuffy Britons, in a hotel in Italy, when she overheard them talking, and announced, with much delight, “You’re ‘peaking American!” We sat at the same table for dinner, comparing notes on the advantages and adventures of traveling with children. The main disadvantage was of course, being fussy about mealtimes. I had just about given up ordering a seperate meal for my daughter in the course of this trip, and so had the English couple. We took full advantage of the European custom of asking for another plate, and feeding ones’ children from whatever main course you had ordered for yourself. Whatever it was, we agreed gloomily, the children were just going to pick at it anyway.
Only it turned out a little different at the Inn of the Golden Something or Other. One of the grandmotherly managers took our orders, and a teenage waitress brought around baskets of bread, and the soup course. The soup had a clear, rich meat broth, and lots of vegetables in it; a delicious foretaste of things to come, and all of us spooned and sipped eagerly. The waitress came to clear the soup plates away, but to our astonishment, all three children chorused for more soup. No, they didn’t want any of the main courses the adults had ordered, they just wanted more soup. The eventually each tucked away three generous bowls of it, while the manager beamed fond matronly approval down on the three small heads over the soup plates.
“That, “remarked the mother of the two English children, “Is the most I have seen them eat willingly this whole holiday.”
It was truely a marvelous dish; I have gone into some of my cookbooks, and this recipe is probably a close approximation to what the children ate so eagerly. It’s a vegetable soup, or “Soupe Minestra” from “The Cuisine of Paul Bocuse”
In a heavy saucepan, render 2 oz finely diced bacon or fresh pork fat. Add 2 medium onions, chopped, 2 leeks, the white part only, finely chopped, and saute until golden. Add 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1 celery stick, all finely diced, and the core of a small head of cabbage, also finely diced. Cover and let sweat for 15 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar. Pour in 6 cups rich stock (or water), bring to a boil and let simmer for 30 minutes. Add 2 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and diced, a handful of green beans, stemmed and cut in 1-inch lengths, 1cup fresh peas, one large potato, peeled and diced and 4 oz broken spaghetti or small pasta. Let simmer for another hour. Just before serving, add another 2 oz. diced bacon or pork fat, mashed and mixed with one minced clove of garlic, basil and chervil to taste. (probably best to simmer for another minute or two, or use butter instead of pork-fat.)
In one of my books— a history book I had along on the trip for reference— I found the bill for our stay there, many years later, and it had the name of the hotel on it, and the address in Blois… but now I have forgotten the name of the book!
I have been flipping over the pages of my battered Hallwag Euro-Guide, attempting to reconstruct my hopscotch itinerary on little back roads across France, at the wheel of the VEV in the early autumn of 1985. I avoided the big cities, before and after Paris, and the major highways. For a foreign driver, Paris was a nerve-wracking, impenetrable urban jungle, a tangle of streets and roundabouts, and the major highways were toll-roads and expensive; much less fraught to follow the little-trafficked country roads from town to town to town. We ghosted along those two-lane country roads as much as a bright orange Volvo sedan can be said to ghost, the trunk and the back seat packed with mine and my daughter’s luggage, a basket of books, a large bottle of Metaxa brandy (a departing gift from Kyria Paniyioti, our Athens landlord) and two boxes of china and kitchen gadgets purchased from that holiest of holies of French kitchenware shops, Dehillerin in the Rue Coquilliere.
From Chartres, and the wondrous cathedral, I went more or less south towards the Loire; the most direct way would been a secondary road to Chateaudun, and an even more secondary road directly from there to Blois, through a green countryside lightly touched with autumn gold, where the fields of wheat and silage had been already mown down to stubble. The road wound through gentle ranges of hills, and stands of enormous trees. Here at a turn of the road was a dainty and Disney-perfect chateau, with a wall and a terrace and a steep-sloped blue-slate roof trimmed with pepper-pot turrets, an enchanting dollhouse of a chateau, set among its’ own shady green grove. There was no historic marker, no sign of habitation, nothing to welcome the sightseer, and then the road went around a bend and it was out of sight, as fleeting as a vision.
(Rooftops in Blois, from the grounds of the Chateau, 1985)
Blois was set on hills, a charming small town of antique buildings, none more than two or three stories tall, and I seemed to come into it very abruptly late in the afternoon. Suddenly there were buildings replacing the fields on either side. At the first corner, I turned left, followed the signpost pointing to the town center; might as well find a place to spend the night. As soon as I turned the corner and thought this, I spotted the little hotel, fronting right on the narrow sidewalk. It had two Michelin stars, which was good enough for me (plain, clean, comfortable and cheap) and was called the Golden… well, the golden something or other. I didn’t recognise the French word; truth to tell, I didn’t recognize most of them, just the words for foods and cooking, mostly, and could pronounce rather fewer.
The lobby was tiny; floored in mellow rose tiles that had a gentle roll to them, like the sea on a calm day, from wear and subsidence. Blondie looked around with interest: inside it was quite obvious this was a very, very old building: ancient timbers broke the expanse of cream-colored plaster at odd intervals. The manager appeared from another room, an elderly lady in an overall and apron who cooed over Blondie, graciously ignored the hash I made of asking for a room for two for two nights, handed me a room key and said,
“Les auto?” and indicated I should drive around the side of the building. “Marie!” she called, and a teenage girl appeared out of the back, wiping her hands on a towel. The manager rattled off some instructions to Marie, and made some shooing motions to me. Obviously, there was some parking in back, which suited me. I was wary of parking the VEV on the street, always better to take advantage of a secure place on the premises. I reversed the VEV, and drove slowly back around the corner, looking for the turn-in to the hotel parking lot. Halfway down the block I spotted Marie, pulling open a heavy door on tracks, revealing a low arched opening— a short tunnel into a tiny interior courtyard, just big enough to park six cars, three abreast. We had best not want to leave before the last vehicle in tonight, which would suit me fine; I had planned to explore Blois on foot the next day. In medieval times, this would have been the inn-yard, horses would have been stabled here, carts and coaches would have come in through that arched doorway and travelers accommodated in the second storey rooms. Traveling theatrical companies would have performed here, while the audience watched from the windows and galleries above. Now it was just a pocket parking lot, roofed over with fiberglass, and the galleries walled in to make larger rooms.
Marie waited while I got our bags out of the car, and then bustled us down a rambling corridor to a small staircase. The second floor corridor rambled also, and occasionally went up or down a step or two. Clearly the Golden Something or Other was not only very old, but had been added on to frequently and with slapdash gusto on the part of the builders.
Our room was very tiny, framed with heavy, ancient beams and almost entirely filled up by the double bed. We had a window with not much of a view that I remember, and a shallow niche framed in more antique beams which contained an incongruously modern bathroom sink, but nothing else. The WC was away down the hall— I left Blondie with some of her comic books, and went looking for it. It was a good distance away. ( In the middle of the night, I would boost Blondie up so she could pee into the sink, rather than wander that dark and uneven corridor, looking for it again.)
At a jog in the corridor, two room doors were open, and the sound of English floated out: two English couples and a fifth of fine Scotch were circulating between them. It had been a good few weeks since I had run into any other native speakers of my mother tongue, so I said “hullo” and was welcomed rapturously with a dash of Scotch,
“Isn’t just the most marvelous little place?” The two couples were old friends, and doing the Loire Chateau-country motor tour together. “We didn’t have reservations; we got the last two rooms, wasn’t that the most astonishing piece of luck?”
“I didn’t have reservations, “ I said, “I almost never do. It’s not luck, it’s just that I start to look for a place in the early afternoon, when I get tired of driving.”
They marveled at my sense of adventure, and I finished my dash of Scotch, and wondered how it was that I had only met a bare handful of Americans in the course of this trip, wandering around on their own, driving their own car and setting their own itinerary, instead of being stuck thirty or fifty in a group on an immense tour bus, with a guide. It wasn’t like Europe was this immense howling wilderness, after all.
(To be continued)
To: Damian Cave, @ The New York Times
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Some Cheese with that Whine
1. So you are baffled, baffled, I say by the lack of coverage in the major media, to the stories of heroism in Irag and Afghanistan, and wonder disingenuously as to why the names of SFC Paul Smith, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Sgt. Rafael Peralta are not right up there in the consciousness of the nation as heroes, heroes on par with Audie Murphy and Alvin York. (My comparison, not yours. Audie Murphy and Alvin York were… oh, never mind. Use a search engine, or read some history books.) Such is your supple intellect and grasp of the obvious that you manage fix the blame anywhere but with your own media culture. “…The military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”
2. Myself, I grasp the fact that the cluebirds are over your position, but at a very great height. I will do what I can, to bring certain realities within your reach. First, I suggest that you walk out of your office, leave the building, and stand on the sidewalk outside, and look back. (I assume of course, that you are a full-time employee of the paper of record. If you are a free-lancer, skip this paragraph.) Somewhere on the building you have just departed should be the inscription or legend, “New York Times.” Yes, Mr. Cave, you work for a newspaper, a fairly major national newspaper, as it turns out. I would suggest, if you wish an answer to your question as to why there is no attention paid to the heroes of this war, you first ask them of your co-workers at the Times.
3. And it’s not as if the stories have not been told: you know that mouse-clicky thing, to the side of the keyboard in front of the oddly-television appearing monitor on your desk? The stories are there, Mr. Cave, on the milblogs such as this, on Mudville Gazette (among hundreds of others), on various DOD websites, and at military press briefings. It’s called investigative reporting— remember when they covered that at j-school? Other newspapers can manage it, mostly papers in markets located close to military bases. Military bases… you know, those federal reserves, out in the sticks, full of noisy tanks and airplanes and things, and people with very short haircuts and a tendency to all wear the same sort of clothes? All these places have a little office on it someplace, called the Public Affairs office. They’d love to hear from you some time, tell you all about heroes and anything else about their personnel that you’d like to hear. Give them a jingle, they’re in the book.
4. And you expect to be spoon-fed by the White House, or the military, or whomever, about the heroes of this war? You want it tied up in a nice pink bow, or something, after three years of pretty much ignoring anything but the ever-floggable dead horse of Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo. Well, there is no contenting some people. Just do your job, instead of blaming everyone else. Pick up the phone, click on the mouse. I swear, when you go to the men’s room, do you have to have someone else hold your…. Oh, never mind, that’s a question to which I really don’t want an answer.
5. Just do your job. And stop whining.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
(Correction pointed out by Byna… I should not do rants when I am cooking dinner at the same time, from an unfamiliar recipe!)
Update: Full-frontal evisceration of Mr. Cave is here, and a gallery of heroes here.
There is a lively discussion going on over here, which began partly as a disquisition about the similarities between political extremes who go so far around the twist that they meet up with what would be their polar opposites, and has since evolved into a lengthy thread concerning exactly at which point along the political continuum a variety of political extremists should be installed.With some little exasperation, Michael Totten has written
Conservatives who try to rewrite history and make fascists out to be left-wingers remind me of how Noam Chomsky tries to rewrite history and make Stalin out to be a right-winger. It’s comforting, I suppose, to think all the bad people are on one side of a (false) binary political divide and that all the good people are on the other. But it isn’t so. The extremists on your side – whichever side you happen to be on – often strikingly resemble the extremists on the other side. I guess that’s one reason why this argument never ends.
It’s curious that the focus is on the leaders of various movements, but not the followers whose attraction to the movement, and dedication to it’s promises made such movements powers to be reckoned with. I also think it’s curious that no one has tossed out all the left-wing and right-wing labels and invoked the spirit of Eric Hoffer, who incisively examined the curious nature of the “true believer”, the fanatic, the dedicated follower, and pointed out that really, it is only the details of the particular cause that vary. The character of the believer is remarkably consistent— even the vocabulary, the background, the motivations— are as depressingly uniform as the usually bloody outcome of the cause espoused. Political opposites meet on the outer fringes not because their ideology is anything alike… but because they are the same sort of personality.
“The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources— out of his rejected self—but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and all strength. Through his single-minded devotion is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. And he is ready to sacrifice his life to demonstrate to himself and others that such indeed is his role. He sacrifices his life to prove his worth…The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another… his passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached… Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet…And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism, or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal… The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist, but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”
My copy of “The True Believer” is an inexpensive paperback copy I had to buy from the student bookstore (price: $.95) in college as a class requirement, scribbled over with many jejune notes, and underlines, the only relic I have kept from that particular class. Philosophy? Political Science? History? I don’t remember— only that it explained clearly to me a certain kind of mind-set, and made plain to me a road in the wilderness, and a way of understanding the horrors that thinking human beings could commit upon each other. And it also made it clear, that one should not pay much attention to what political and intellectual leading lights might say, but that one should watch, rather, what they did.
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-20
As part of the required head-games involved in being interviewed for a job, a number of years ago, I was once asked which historical figure that I identified most with, and the person who of course popped into my mind was the great Queen Eliza, Elizabeth I, of England, Wales and Ireland. There is probably some wish-fulfillment there, what with identifying with a tall, willowy and commanding red-head, an accomplished scholar and incomparable statesman, especially since I physically rather more resemble Victoria—short, plump, prim and domestic, with light-brown hair.
But the two of them, Elizabeth and Victoria are an interesting contrast, in the feminine exercise of power and authority, even allowing for how mores and politics changed over the three centuries separating their glorious reigns. Both came to power and the throne as young women, both died of old age, in their beds (or in Elizabeth’s case, in her bed-chamber) after decades of political and diplomatic success, wielding power in their various ways, earning glory and honor both personally and for the nation, so much that each of their reigns was in turn looked back upon as a golden age.
Elizabeth took a poor, fractious and schism-ridden nation, on the fringe of Europe in every sense, and saw it emerge as a major political power, a naval power, and a Protestant counter-balance to the land-power of Spain and militant Catholicism. Victoria ruled at the high-water mark of an empire that covered a quarter of the globe, saw her grandchildren married into the royal families of Europe, and technology move from that powered by horses, to that powered by great steam-powered engines, on land and sea, and even begin flirting with the idea of powered flight. Both of them distrusted their presumed successor: Elizabeth, childless, held off officially designating her heir, and jealously held power to herself and herself alone, and Victoria thought her son, Edward was an irresponsible wastrel and only allowed his participation in matters of state in the last years of her reign, when he was himself in late middle age.
Both of them, in their prime, displayed immense self-assurance, what an old Scots friend of my mothers’ called “a guid conceit of themselves”. That is, they appeared perfectly at ease with who and what they were, confident in the respect they were due as monarch of a unique people, and cognizant of the duties and responsibilities expected of them. They moved confidently among the trappings and obligations of their respective ages, although the circumstances of their lives differed in as many ways as they were similar.
Victoria, although she lived an almost suffocatingly sheltered life as a child, was clearly marked early on as the heir to her uncle and her succession was uncontested, a straight paved road to the pinnacle of the monarchy.
Elizabeth, the younger daughter of that much married Henry VIII, survived the reign of her Protestant little brother, (and the short-lived interregnum of her cousin, Lady Jane Grey) the almost equally disastrous reign of her older sister, the rigidly Catholic Mary, a couple of insurrections, a really nasty sexual scandal centered around a supposed affair between herself and the husband of her last stepmother, Catherine Parr, a stint in the Tower of London, and the abiding and deadly suspicions of a whole range of political enemies. The fashions of the age played in Elizabeth’s favor, though: she had the education worthy of a Renaissance prince, supple and subtle, whereas Victoria had only that which was thought suitable to a lady of good family in the early 19th century. But what education they were given, served them well: Elizabeth survived, and ruled. Victoria inherited and ruled. Both were respected, both worshipped by some, and feared by others.
Victoria, I surmise, was much more immediately trusting of others; the penalties for political miscalculation during her reign being immediately much less unpleasant; a matter of being “Not Received At Court and By Respectable People”, rather than “A Short Stint In the Tower Followed by An Appointment With A Man With a Really Sharp Ax”. Victoria was also fortunate in her marriage, to a competent and politically astute man whom she (to judge by her deep and demonstrated grief on his death, and the fact that she produced nine children with him) deeply loved and trusted unswervingly. But Elizabeth was known as “The Virgin Queen”, and I think it altogether likely that was more than just a politic bit of court flattery. When one considers how many women close to her as a child and teenager came to grief and an untimely grave through unwise affairs, ill-considered marriages, and perilous childbirth: her own mother, a stepmother and a cousin died on the block, another two stepmothers died agonizingly in childbirth, the marriages of both her sister Mary and cousin Mary diluted the political authority of both those Maries, and allowed factions to form around a royal spouse or court favorite…no, it would have been absolutely clear to Elizabeth that sex=death, actually and politically. But flirtation, and a rotating stable of political suitors, all played off against each other for England’s gain— Her personal inclination was perfectly matched to political expediency, and allowed her to keep the reins of power firmly in her own capable hands. She survived, by keeping it that way, and becoming an icon.
Victoria also became an icon, a bourgeois icon, surrounded by her children, very much in contrast to Elizabeth, solitary in jeweled and glittering splendor, but there was one more likeness; their imperishable sense of duty. Both of them had a job to do, a lifelong job, and they did it appropriately and suitably to their time, but in two vastly different and interesting ways. It amuses me, sometimes, to wonder if the two of them could have a conversation together, what would they say?
To: Mr. Steve Bochco
Re: “Over There”
From: Sgt Mom
The following items are noted, in no particular order of importance, based on the numerous reviews of the pilot episode of your TV series about a small Army unit engaged in the current war in Iraq, in the hopes of bringing certain realities to your attention. Please realize that the almost unanimous chorus of pointed criticism and the accompanying storm of brickbats and rotten vegetables are due to disappointment amongst a military audience. There are not many TV shows focusing on the military experience, so our expectations are high of those few. Shows about cops, doctors and lawyers are, god save us, a dime a dozen; the audience can pick and choose those nuggets of hearty, authentic goodness among the dross. A series focusing on soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines only comes along about once a decade, so all our interest and hopes are directed towards it, instead of being diffused among many. “Over There” may yet be salvageable, should you and your writers embrace the following:
1. We have had an all-volunteer military for thirty years. Only a bare handful are left on active-duty service that had anything to do with the draft, were draftees, or had to cope with draftees, or remember Vietnam.
2. Random urinalysis means that drug users are caught, sooner rather than later. There may very well be pot-heads in the service, but not for very long. Golden Flow will get ’em.
3. Units rotate in-country together; people have usually known each other for a bit before going “over there”.
4. Read the milblogs. Please.
5. Put in an application for some new clichés. The old ones are threadbare, and unsuited to further service. Replacement clichés are necessary and desirable; especially of you expect this show to last longer than “Cop Rock.” (Ohhhh, that was mean of me. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
6. Hire a new military advisor. Or pay more attention to the one you have.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
Last weekend at the radio station, the other announcer had the TV on in the production office, and we caught the leader for this film. I may very well go and pay money to see it in the theater, depending on the reviews. Benjamin Bratt heads the cast list, so I am not holding out that much hope for good reviews… but I’ve been known to be wrong. (My daughter dragged me kicking and screaming to see “George of the Jungle” because she had a mad pash for Brendan Fraser. I resigned myself to having my intelligence insulted for two hours, but surprise, surprise… a damn funny movie. William laughed his ass off when he saw it on video. He liked Rustlers’ Rhapsody, too. You never can tell…)
It may very well turn out to be an over-produced, over-rated, big steaming pile of a movie, (Hello, Pearl Harbor, part Deux!)… but if it is really based on this book it may turn out to be a ripping good story, about the rescue of military survivors of the Bataan Death March, from a POW camp at Cabanatuan, the Philippines in 1945. (Not this raid, which was just as daring, mounted to rescue American and European civilian internees at a camp at Los Banos, also in the Philippines in 1945).
The problem faced by movies dealing with WWII in the Pacific and in the Far East begins at a single starting point, which is that the conflict between the Allies and the Japanese was knock-down and drag out brutal, completely unscathed by any pretense of observing the so-called rules of war; that white flags would be honored, that prisoners and internees would be treated humanely, according to the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross would be respected… all these and a number of other chivalrous conventions were flung down and danced upon, beginning with on Day One— as far as Americans were concerned—- with a sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. Germany may very well have been run by a murderous Nazi gang headed by a demented paper-hanger and failed artist, Germans may have referred to disparagingly as Krauts, and lampooned in the movies and pop music by cut-ups like Charlie Chaplain and Spike Jones, but at least they made a good effort at honoring the rules of war in respect of all the allies but the Russians. In that, they had a certain amount of grudging respect; an enemy but a mostly honorable one. With the Japanese, there was no such mutual courtesy extended, no quarter offered and none given or expected. That, in concert with the poisonously racist attitudes and assumptions of fifty years ago openly demonstrated by all parties concerned, ensures that putting any of this on screen in a realistic fashion is fraught with peril for the movie-maker. (And please take note, the Japanese were more than equal in demonstrated bigotry. Often initially welcomed as liberators from the colonial powers all over south-east Asia, by 1945 they had made themselves so detested for their brutality, the returning Westerners had many local allies who hated the Japanese more than their one-time colonial masters.)
I had read that initially horrifying reports of the treatment of American and Filipino POWs on the Bataan Death March which leaked out through a handful of fortunate escapees were suppressed as a matter of national security, to avoid damaging morale on the home front. It was easier, in those days of written letters, telegrams and a few radio broadcasts, to keep a lid on everything but rumors. And of rumors there were plenty, across the United States, Australia and Great Britain. These countries and a handful of others had thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military citizens— nurses, missionaries, soldiers, businessmen, colonial authorities, expatriates, and their wives and children—all simply vanish into the black hole of the Japan administered Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere upon the fall of Singapore and Malaya, Borneo and the Philippines, Hong Kong and the European enclaves in China. No letters, no contact, no reassurance from the Red Cross that their people were alive, safe and well for more than three and a half years…. Because they were neither alive, and if so, not safe and increasingly as the war ground on to a bitter end, not well, either.
In a museum in Britain sometime in our wandering summer of 1976— was it Carlisle? Salisbury? York, maybe? One of those little local museums, with a case of artifacts given over to the relics of the local regiment, with dusty embroidered colors, and little Victoria sweet-tins, and souvenir hardtack crackers adorned with poems in careful copperplate handwriting. This museum had a long picture of an entire company of men— one of those formal things with four rows of men and officers standing on risers. Everyone who has ever served has been in at least one picture of that sort, but this one had a sad distinction; the entire company, fifty or so, were captured in the fall of Singapore… and none survived to the war’s end. They were sent to work on the Burma-Siam Railway, and among the museum’s relics was a metal measure about the size of a 12-ounce can. It was used, so said the card underneath, to measure out the daily ration of water and rice for the slave labor set by the Japanese to work on the railway. And that was what they got, day in, day out, doing hard physical labor in the tropics… just that little rice and water. The saying about the Burma-Siam railway after the war was there was a man dead for every sleeper laid, the whole length of it: POW, internee, or native civilians pressed-ganged into the service of the Japanese.
POWs and internees were routinely starved, forced into hard labor, denied any kind of effective medical treatment save what internee doctors and nurses could provide, spitefully prevented from communicating with the outside world, or keeping any kind of diary or record at all, subject to the most vicious punishments—up to and including murder in a revoltingly gruesome variety of ways— for the most trivial offenses or often none at all. Transported to Japan itself, to labor in mines and factories, POWs were loaded like cattle, into the holds of transport ships; men went insane, and tragically, died when the ships were bombed and torpedoed by the Allies. There are also stomach-churning accounts of POWs used as guinea-pigs in Japanese medical experiments, and vivisected while still alive, and un-anesthetized. The estimate is that 27% of the Allied POWs held by the Japanese perished in captivity, as opposed to 2-3% held by the Germans. Civilian internees fared hardly better; this account of women and children interned in Sumatra— most of them shipwrecked in the Java Sea while escaping Singapore by sea in the last days before the surrender— estimates about half perished in captivity. American internees in the Philippines fared a little better, although most survivors of Santo Tomas and Los Banos estimate they were about two weeks from dying of starvation when they were liberated. “Thou shalt not kill, “ runs the bitter couplet, “But need not strive, officiously, to keep alive.” Most survivor accounts estimate about the same… that is, if the Japanese didn’t massacre them all first, as they did at Palawan. At best, writer-historian Gavin Daws estimates that life-expectancy of the survivors was reduced by ten or fifteen years, so severe were the health problems resulting from near-starvation, exposure to every tropical and deficiency disease known to medical science, and the psychotic brutality of the Japanese camp guards.
During the war, this was not something much talked about, except in the vaguest sort of way— no spreading despair on the home front. Immediately afterwards, the most popular accounts of captivity, such as Agnes Newton Keith’s “Three Came Home” (1947) give the impression that it all was quite dreadful, but skimmed over the specifics. Many survivors wanted more than anything to just forget, to put it out of mind, and have a normal life again, and many more just could not talk about it at all, save to those few comrades who had been there with them. It is only in the last few years that I have really noticed the horrific accounts being published, historical memory uneasily jousting with political correctness. But what kind of movie this can make… as the major media reporters say, standing in front of a government building… all remains to be seen.
How many dogs does it take to change a light bulb? It really depends on the dog:
Golden Retriever: The sun is shining, the day is young, we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us, and you’re inside worrying about a stupid burned out bulb?
Border Collie: Just one. And then I’ll replace any wiring that’s not up to code.
Dachshund: You know I can’t reach that stupid lamp!
Rottweiler: Make me.
Boxer: Who cares? I can still play with my squeaky toys in the dark.
Lab: Oh, me, me!!!!! Pleeeeeeeeeze let me change the light bulb! Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Huh? Can I? Pleeeeeeeeeze, please, please, please!
German Shepherd: I’ll change it as soon as I’ve led these people from the dark, check to make sure I haven’t missed any, and make just one more perimeter patrol to see that no one has tried to take advantage of the situation.
Jack Russell Terrier: I’ll just pop it in while I’m bouncing off the walls and furniture.
Old English Sheep Dog: Light bulb? I’m sorry, but I don’t see a light bulb!
Cocker Spaniel: Why change it? I can still pee on the carpet in the dark.
Chihuahua: Yo quiero Taco Bulb. Or “We don’t need no stinking light bulb.”
Greyhound: It isn’t moving. Who cares?
Australian Shepherd: First, I’ll put all the light bulbs in a little circle…
Poodle: I’ll just blow in the Border Collie’s ear and he’ll do it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry.
And finally…… How many cats does it take to change a light bulb?
Cats do not change light bulbs. People change light bulbs. The real question is: “How long will it be before I can expect some light, some dinner, and a massage?”
ALL OF WHICH PROVES, ONCE AGAIN, THAT WHILE DOGS HAVE MASTERS, CATS HAVE STAFF!
(Forwarded by regular reader Barbara S.)
OK, so reading the scathing comments here and there about “Over There”— the drama about the war in Iraq which is supposed to be ripped from the headlines— are amusing enough; Hey, Mr. B, dude, if you are ripping stories from the headlines, let’s rip them from the right decade, ‘kay? The description of one of the main characters as a serious doper, though… An active-duty member of the military today, smoking rope on a regular basis? Yeah, shu-r-r-r-e. Right. I have two words on that for Mr. B.; two words and a Bette Davis-sized eye-roll…. And the two words are “Golden Flow.”
Yes, back in the day, there was a lot of smoking of the eeeevvil weed. There were legends from my early service days, about how to baffle the drug-sniffing dogs by mixing cayenne pepper into the floor wax, about small marijuana plants growing among the shrubs underneath the barracks windows, from so many people throwing their stash out the window shortly in advance of a shakedown search. I personally saw the stash kept by one of my tech school classmates under the passenger seat of his POV— so as not to implicate his roommates in the event that someone got off their ass and searched the dorm rooms. One of my own roommates indulged on occasion, although the two of us who did not asked her very nicely to keep her stash out of the room, and us in ignorance of her pot-consuming. Even in the late 1970ies, being busted for possession was grounds for being thrown out. And yes, I know what the stuff smells like, and I had friends who indulged, although Blondie was completely horrified to find out this, she being the product of a Catholic education, DARE and every other sanctioned youth drug-abuse-prevention program, and six years worth of AFRTS substance-abuse spots.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that DOD began landing like a ton of bricks on the consumption of pot and other illegal substances, especially at overseas locations. A part-timer at FEN-Misawa was busted by the Japanese cops with a shopping bag-full of the local stuff, and implicated so many other people when he began to sing like a demented canary that the unit he was assigned to had to shut down operations for a couple of days while everyone in it trooped obediently in to the local gendarmerie to be interrogated. He also fingered half of the FEN staff as well. I wasn’t one of them, fortunately— as MSgt. Rob elegantly elucidated, I was so notoriously clean-cut I probably gift-wrapped my garbage. The stuff grew wild in Japan, and the temptation was too much for some. It was to the point where the base Security Police offered a certain courtesy service: if you had just bought an automobile, they would have the sniffer dogs go over it, just to establish that any traces of dope they found in it could be held against the previous owner.
I am not sure exactly when they began to do regular random urinalysis tests on military personnel, and am too lazy to thresh through the mountains of data to pin down the date, but it must have been by the early 80ies, because I clearly remember being escorted to the hospital at Hellenikon AB, and asked to fill a small plastic cup; the nurse who proctored did so from the other side of a restroom stall door. That courtesy had gone by the board by the mid-80ies, when I was tasked with proctoring piss-tests ordered on members of the unit at EBS-Zaragoza, as the senior female assigned. I had to eyeball the stream of urine as it left the body and filled up the cup. How degrading and personally embarrassing this was for me, and for every female junior troop who worked for me can be imagined. One poor airman had bashful kidneys; we would be guaranteed to spend at least three or four hours waiting in the hospital waiting room, with her swilling soft drinks, and me telling her silly jokes and inwardly fuming, thinking of all the things I had left at work that I should be doing, except that the Air Force thought this was a much more important use of my time. A male Senior Airman at EBS was busted cold by one of these random tests— he was demoted back to E-1 and out of the Air Force in about six months, and the fact that he had been a sterling citizen, and otherwise an ornament to the unit had no effect at all on the mills of justice. He was out. From his account, he had only smoked it once, inveigled by his girlfriend, a fair Spanish maid and in bed after a rewarding evening…. No, it was plain and clear to the most clueless that polluting the temple of your body whilst in service to Uncle Sam with illegal substances was not only ill-advised… but a short-cut to all kinds of unpleasant outcomes, beginning with a bust in grade, dismissal from service, et cetera, et cetera. And the piss-tests were supposed to be legally iron-clad, and very, very sensitive. Hell, I have even been careful about what I baked and took in to work: nothing with poppy seeds. (I really didn’t want to count on the government lab being able to tell the difference between opiate derivatives… and lemon-poppy-seed tea bread.)
The subsequent investigation of anyone busted by a random urinalysis would take in a whole range of other parties; not just their friends, but their unit, known associates, everyone they had ever talked to, or even thought about talking to. This is something that everyone in the military culture post 1980 knows: a doper will be caught, sooner rather than later. When they are caught, they will bring grief down on every known associate, which has the result of dopers being about as popular as child molesters. The military of the late 1990ies was most emphatically not the military of thirty years before; in a lot of ways it was much more puritanical. I cannot, for example, imagine any of the practical jokes the broadcasters played on each other at FEN-Misawa in 1978, being even considered at AFKN-Seoul in 1994.
I do not think the Army has changed their corporate culture all that much in ten years. Sometime in 1994, AFKN pulled an exercise recall of all their staff, at 4 AM, ordering everyone to report for duty at once… and as soon as we signed in, the Readiness NCO handed us a lidded plastic cup and directed us to the lavatory.
“Oh, you sneaky, conniving bastard!” I told him, as I took the cup. They tested every one of us, in one fell swoop. No, I cannot see a doper lasting for more than a couple of months in the military as practiced today. I may have been out for eight years, but the kind of corporate culture instilled for two service generations… sorry, Mr. B. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
It also doesn’t look like anyone in Hollywood reads milblogs. Pity about that. Lots of good stories there, too. I am doing the best I can— you can lead whores to culture, but you just can’t make ‘em think.
Once upon a time in the West— during the eighties to mid nineties, to be specific– there was a sporadic but continuing rumble in the American news media about the so-called militia movement. The journalistic great and the good descended on occasion from their palatial bi-coastal aeries to frown gravely, and unreel serious and lengthy articles about the goings on in fly-over country. Basically, for about a decade, concatenations of good-old-boys in cammies and serious gummint surplus gathered in the woods to play war-games with everything short of light artillery, and bitch about the federal government, the ominous plans by the UN for one-world government, invasion by someone or other, the depredations of mysterious black helicopters, fluoride in the water, and for all I know, the banning of Pete Rose from the Baseball Hall of Fame. I suspect that mostly the guys bitched a lot, and drank a lot of beer. Before the massacres in Rwanda, and the Place Known as the Former Yugoslavia, the mighty military minions of the UN were seen as a potent threat… maybe all the beer would account for that, since in actuality, a brigade of Girl Scouts might have been more effective in some UN-sponsored situations.
But the militia movement was real; it did pull in numbers enough to sometimes make local and federal law enforcement occasionally nervous. (And it gave colonic spasms to movie-makers: see Costa-Gavras’ “Betrayed” for one sweaty fantasy about what all those red-state hicks were getting up to, out in the woods.) And then… the militia movement essentially shriveled up and died, in the months after the truck-bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by a guy who had militia sympathies, who had hung around on the fringes, who talked the talk… and took it one logical step farther. A lot of people suddenly realized that it was one thing to bitch about the government, and talk about blowing up a Federal building in theory, but in practice, it wasn’t the Federal government that blew up… it was little kids, and secretaries and military recruiters, and tens of ordinary citizens lining up at a help desk to see about social security or some such thing. It was a reality check, the metaphorical slap in the face with a wet haddock; after the Oklahoma City bombing, membership in various militia organizations plummeted. It never recovered, possibly also because even the most paranoid American began realizing that the UN couldn’t find its’ posterior with a map and a GPS fix, let alone institute a world government.
For Americans, 9/11 was the ultimate haddock-whack; you could now spend weeks just totting up blogs and blog entries by the rudely-awakened, and months making lists of people whose political views and assumptions abruptly jumped from the former comfortable track. A couple of small stories I noticed in the spring of 2002 had some small significance: it appeared that members of the IRA, who had formerly been guests of honor at various Saint Patrick’s’ Day parades in northeastern cities and townships were being curtly uninvited to the celebrations. The local fire and police departments— historically a large proportion of who were the descendants of Irish immigrants, and took center-stage at such local festivities— insisted. Firefighters and police, of course, had taken massive casualties at the World Trade Center. And now they took even a dimmer view than formerly, unfogged by sentiment about the Auld Country, of setting off bombs which targeted civilians.
In the last couple of months, the international haddock-whackings have come thick and fast, thanks in part to Al Quaida’s unparalleled talent for crapping in their own mess kit, and an assortment of enthusiastic jihadists taking cack-handed aim at a variety of soft targets. The brutality and indiscrimination of the insurgents in Iraq seems to be making them loathed, despised, and increasingly marginalized— deadly, but marginalized. Two massive bombings of tourist resorts in Egypt, and the murder of the Egyptian envoy to Iraq do not seem to be making them very much more popular in Egypt, if reports are to be believed. Even the Saudis were moved to make a show of effort, after a couple of compounds and hotels went boom, albeit with the usual pious insistence that Islam is a religion of peace.
Theo van Gogh’s murderer has been convicted, after an unrepentant and chilling monologue in the Dutch courtroom—- well that was another haddock-whack, courtesy of militant Islam.
There is no more proof needed for me that Britain has been shaken out of old assumptions and into a chilling new awareness than the taking-down of a suspected suicide bomber. Cold, efficient, and with five head-shots… and it seems to have been a tragic misunderstanding, but under the same circumstances, they’d do it again, so they say. After fifty-plus dead in subway trains and busses, two weeks ago, and maybe the same again but for an incompetent bomb-maker, I can’t say I blame British law enforcement in the least. Last night I listened to Robert Siegel on NPR, (who seems to have grown a pair and a spine, too) interview Lord Ahmed, the first British Moslem elevated to the House of Lords, and not only was Islam as a religion of peace not invoked, Siegel actually forcefully asked for an explanation of why blowing up a bus in London is terrorism and to be condemned, but that blowing up a bus of civilians in Tel Aviv or Baghdad is not. For the record, Lord Ahmed burbled something about it being different when F-16s are shooting at people, and there is no democracy— but six months ago, I don’t think the question would even have come up. Even NPR has been haddock-whacked and about damn time, too.
Nothing like having something blow up in your neighborhood— whether in Baghdad, Riyadh, or Sharm-el Sheik, as opposed to someone else’s, far, far away, to begin rethinking that whole concept of sticking it to the infidel at a safe distance. And so, I think we are very close to a tipping point, the grains of sand slowly beginning to slip downhill, the tentative beginnings of an avalanche. People are realizing the danger is here, now, to them, personally. They are moving quietly away from the abyss, even while the militant jihadis plunge headlong, little caring that they will be buried… and the world will move on.
(Do please add your own examples of haddock-whacks and tipping points.)
Later: Regular TDB reader Mike R., who is as he says “Out of the office fighting Indians”, emailed me this last night:
“Fighting Indians is going well. We had a big operation a
few weeks ago to take the city of Hit (the next in the chain
north of Fallujah and Ramadi). We went in very heavy,
expecting a bloodbath not unlike Fallujah, but instead not a
shot was fired. And now, instead of staying a few days and
leaving, we established two permanent bases in the city.
The terrorists have lost the city forever. Our pattern of
week long raids suckered them into not resisting us when we
came into this city, and now they’re blocked out.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re impotent. They still
attack with mortars and keep trying to plant IED’s, some of
which are effective, but mostly they’ve been inept.
Unfortunately, two more were killed by mortars. Our
battalion has been in the worst of the terrorist activity
since we’ve been here, we’ve had at least five times more
casualties than any other battalion in our regiment.
Now the terrorists only have a couple more cities that they
try to control, it’s not much longer for them now. In the
Euphrates River valley, only Hadithah and Haqlaniyah are not
completely pacified. The only ones remaining after them are
border towns, where we’ve had to be very “kinetic” in our
actions.
Even better is that we’ve got Iraqi battalions operating
with us now. I was very leery of them because the past few
years have been filled with one breathless description of
how “this time” the Iraqi military is going to actually
work, with only disaster and disappointment following.
However, it does appear that these new guys don’t loot as
much, don’t bugger each other as much, and aren’t
infiltrated by the enemy as much. I am truly hopeful now.”
I just received an e-mail from the West Coast office, which was closely associated with the office which I ran for my previous employer.
It seems that this Kristina Miller was the Kristina who answered the phones, or the e-mails, when ever I called with a matter to sort out between the two locations, until she moved to England to work for her father, last year.
Her boyfriend apparently loved to visit Egypt, and they had planned to travel on to Australia, later.
“…watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour…”
This last week ended on an upbeat note— long sessions at two different agencies on Monday and Tuesday, filing out forms and testing on general knowledge and the more common computer programs. I should like to point out for the record that to the best of my memory, this is the first time since the 5th grade that I have been asked to subtract 5/21ths from 6/7ths. That was followed on Wednesday and Thursday with interviews— potential employers or their underlings. By now, I think I have visited practically every grand high-rise office building with a marble-paneled lobby on the North Side.
One firm is long-established, and only about a block away from the previous employer; I would be one of a number of mid-ranked support staff— no word about exactly what I would be paid, and I am not so crass or stupid to bring that up during an initial interview. (The temp firm that sent me knows very well what I am asking for, though.) Likely, I’d be called back for a second interview— the temp agent was positive I would make the cut.
The second interview was for an executive admin position with a start-up firm, and I met with the man who is starting up the company. He seemed quite frazzled, but enthusiastic, and went into a lot of detail about his plans, and asked very specific things about my experience, to the point where I was a little unsure about which position he was interviewing me for, exactly.
We drove over to look at the building where the office will be— another splendid pile of glass and marble. (Why do I like these palatial office piles so much? It’s probably the result of all those years laboring away in what the military provided: aging temporary buildings, Quonset huts and sagging frame structures held up with forty years of accumulated paint, conblock walls painted pale green, worn industrial linoleum on the floor, and ancient latrines that could be smelt halfway down the hall on a hot day, no matter what sort of cleaner/deodorant was poured into them.)
So, I got the good news on Friday afternoon from the temp counselor who had scheduled the second interview— the letter offering terms of employment will be written up this week. I am about 90% sure I will accept them— the salary is about what I wanted, the location is perfect— about fifteen minutes commute, and I would so much rather be on the ground floor of a startup, reporting to one person and having a say in sorting things out to my own preference… as opposed to having to fit in to a well-established routine and having to juggle the admin needs of a team of people. The first place may yet offer a lot more money… but the start-up draws me, like a moth to a flame. Even if it only lasts a couple of years, or four of five, it will still be an impressive notch on the ol’ resume. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to the temp services, those who have the main line to providing high-end staff, and roll the employment dice again.
The poor moth-eaten ghost of Joe McCarthy has gotten as much mileage in the op-eds of the wise in the last couple of years as zombie movies have in the multiplex these days. When in doubt, drag it out, shake it around and yell “Oooogah-booogah! Red-baiting! Black-list! It’s a new McCarthyism! Save the women and children! Oooooga-boogah!” It has always struck me as amusing, how the significance of McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, the HUAC hearings and the whole Hollywood blacklist thing loomed over the chic intellectual set. In retrospect, it’s almost as if a child’s balloon magically expanded over time to the size of the Hindenburg. Popular memoirists and movies describe the whole period, as if Joe McCarthy was blotting out the sun, casting dark shadows over the land of the free, while everyone cowered behind the doors of their houses, afraid to speak above a whisper for fear of the dark, jackbooted minions of the (cue scary music here!) HUAC would break down the door and drag them away to an unspecified but horrible fate in some barbed-wire gulag.
Oddly enough, my parents who were in college at the time don’t remember anything of that kind. In fact, they remember Joe McCarthy being pungently described as a headline grabbing blow-hard politician and all-around scumbag who never managed to come within a country mile of a Russian spy, or keeping his stories straight. They remember him being denounced in no uncertain terms— everyone they knew had McCarthy’s number down to the third decimal place, recognized him for just another self-serving, glory-hunting pol, attaching himself like a remora to the issue of the moment. And, as we now know through the Venona transcripts, there was something, underneath all the popular hysteria; there had indeed been an assortment of Communists, fellow travelers and paid Stalinist stooges wandering at will over the home of the free and the land of the brave for decades.
Some of them were politically naïve and hopelessly gullible, the kind of people these days who respond to Nigerian spam, who believed (against every indication to the contrary) that Russia under Lenin and Stalin was the last, best hope for mankind, the shining light of the future, the brave new world. Others were genuinely anti-fascist, who had the misfortune to become politically aware during the hungry Thirties; revolted by the excesses of Italian and German fascism, they took refuge in the arms of what seemed like it’s political polar opposite, only to be brutally disillusioned by the brutal realpolitik of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and whiplashed once again by Stalin’s volte-face in 1941. Still others were indeed dedicated but conflicted Communists, cheering on the brave new Marxist world from the comfort and security of Brentwood or the Upper East Side, and seeking absolution and permission to lie about it in court.
McCarthy generated a great deal of headline noise, but not much useful light on the subject, aside from afflicting the comfortable Chablis socialist set. My parents’ contention that he was a paper tiger, expanded by bombast and hubris to a towering but fragile edifice is supported with the speed and thoroughness of his deflation and collapse… a collapse initiated by a single pin-prick of a question asked by a soft-spoken and gentlemanly lawyer, in front of a television camera. He was seen for what he really was, and in a remarkably short time, the cruel jest was that it wasn’t “McCarthyism” it should be “McCarthywasim”. But it surely must inflate the egos of those who ran afoul of him and the “red scare”, to paint McCarthy bigger, crueler and more dangerous in hindsight, to burnish their own heroism in opposition. The other thing that strikes me, besides the fragility of the McCarthy red-baiting machine, is the willful cluelessness of so many of the alleged “reds”, so in love with their fantasy of the perfect Marxist new world, they managed to entirely overlook the varied horrors of Stalin’s rule… the famines, the purges, the show trials, the gulags and all. Either that, or what is most reprehensible, they worked overtime to justify and excuse them, so in love with the fantasy were they.
In love with a seductive, rose-tinted glasses fantasy; not the first to do so, and lamentably, not the last to fall for the heroic vision of the brave freedom fighter, even to see oneself as one. But the subtle danger of fantasy is that it turns our eyes from the real, messy, grubby and corrupted as it might be in comparison; the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. Our heroes and great ones ought to be—as the military cliché goes— ten feet tall and bulletproof, served up to us on the front page of the major media outlets, with a book and movie deal to follow after. And yet, in Iran there is a man, a writer and reporter, who is on a hunger strike— near death, it would seem— in defense of the freedom to think and communicate what he sees as the truth. Here is a person who values freedom of thought, freedom of communication, freedom of the press, so highly, he would give his life for it… and yet all the traditional defenders of the free press seem to look in the other direction.
We heard enough about the alleged targeting of journalists in Iraq by the American military; I have heard nothing about Akbar Ganji on NPR, nothing in my local paper. I wouldn’t know anything at all about Mr. Gangi if it weren’t for e-mail and the internet. A quick google search this Wednesday afternoon goes to three pages before listing a story about him in the major Western media sources. I can only assume that one set of stories favors the fantasy, the other doesn’t. But this is reality, not the lovely fantasy— and this reality matters. I have a computer, a blog, a collection of readers, and a facility with the written word— and the freedom to put my words out there, without fear or favor. Michael Moore, the staff of the Wall Street Journal— a million or two others, great and small also have that freedom, although most of us do not have the income to show for it. Like oxygen, we wouldn’t notice it, until it was not there— as the oxygen of a free press is not there for Akbar Gangi. We have heard a great deal in the last couple of years about freedom of the press. Let’s hear how much it matters for Akbar Gangi and the people of Iran… and everyone else who values freedom of the press and heroes in the real world.
Although, candidly, a hunger strike (and a strict program of excercise) would do Michael Moore no end of good.
(Links courtesy of Ron Wright and Instapundit)
Well, as far as the continuing search for a means of affording luxury goods such as books and DVDs from Amazon, a new central heating plant and repair and repainting of the house exterior goes, this weekend defiantly saw things looking a little rosier. A bidding war for the services of your humble and obedient correspondent may be shaping up. No less than three local temp services are in play. Two of them seem to have a sideline specialty in placing very high-end and experienced executive support staff. This is not a commodity for which there is a very broad market— rather like original Chippendale furniture, Revere silver and Renoir paintings— but when one does come onto the market, those few who have the yearning need and the lucre are most desperately keen to acquire, assuming they are informed of the availability. As the staffing counselor at the first agency remarked,
“He’s terribly busy, but you’d be perfect… I am trying to get an interview set up before someone else hires you away.”
That’s a boost to the ego, anyhow you slice it. I have an interview on Thursday afternoon… I will go past the bank afterwards and deposit the paycheck from the previous employer. The fact that I closed out that office halfway through June, and yet my salary will be paid (although at a slightly diminished rate) until the end of August may be the strongest affirmation of my value, over and above said previous employer’s affirmation that I am worth my weight in gold, and my ability to find old files and seek out obscure information approaches black magic. The second agency called me in last Thursday; the senior counselor wanted me to re-write my resume, and do some re-training on various commonly used office software programs. I re-wrote on Friday, and spent this morning at their local office, running through the refresher courses, familiarizing myself with the newest versions and re-testing. Up to par after four hours in front of a computer, in a chair not nearly as comfortable as the one I had at the previous place (why didn’t I snag the chair, that last day— I could have, the boss let me take my computer!), with a slight stress headache— the senior counselor wished to put my re-written resume before a large manufacturing concern which has— with a great deal of pomp and ceremony—consented to open an operating location in San Antonio. (No, I am not going to name the company, but anyone who has followed local business news will be able to guess at it.) A position as an executive assistant/secretary would be a breathtaking leap, about as high as I would be able to go, in this sort of thing, locally. A bitch of a commute… but a hell of an opportunity… and the employee discount would be absolutely awesome.
The third agency is having me come in tomorrow, to test for computer skills, all over again. They have me in mind for a position at a local accounting firm, supporting a number of senior executives and coordinating the other staff… but of course, they want some test scores, first. (Never mind that the skills you need for this sort of thing— the ability to accurately judge people and situations, comfort in exercising authority, an encyclopedic memory and a facility with making logical connections, and the trust of those you work for— there is no real test for that kind of thing, only the hard experience.)
I would like so much to have the freedom to choose thoughtfully among available options, to be able to think about which position would be the one which would be the best match for my skills, interests and needs. More than anything else, I don’t want to have to feel rushed into accepting the first position offered, just because the bills need to be paid, and the cats’ dishes must be filled with high-quality kibble. It strikes me now, that may be the rarest freedom of all, to honestly be able to chose for whom you will work, and what are the terms of your employment.
I do need to get to work, though. The house is very clean… and I am hanging around in the neighborhood altogether too much.
Summer heat is at its’ worst in July and August, in Texas now as it was in Southern California when I was growing up, sequentially domiciled in the White Cottage, Redwood House, and Hilltop House. The summer heat seems much more merciless in Texas, even if it is broken on occasion— like it was Friday afternoon, by a thunderstorm blowing in— a violent wind lashing the tree branches, a blinding grey veil of falling water, the garden momentarily flooded, and the street running ankle-deep— everything momentarily cool and damp. This weekend, it will be humid, the mosquitoes encouraged no end; everywhere on the highways and byways Friday afternoon were reports of auto accidents. It has been nearly a month since the last good drenching, so the asphalt roadways have acquired a slick of oil, mixed with water, floating above the surface— to the great detriment of anyone trying to brake suddenly. But the rain cooled things down, even if only for a few hours, and I am grateful for not having to run the sprinklers. The garden was starting to look a bit limp and droopy— this storm perked up the plants enormously for the next couple of days. And the dry asphalt street and concrete sidewalks suddenly developed that curious indescribable smell, compounded from bone-dry surfaces suddenly wetted.
It’s as evocative as the feel of it, walking barefoot on the black asphalt in the late mornings, crossing the street to get my mail out of the community mailbox drop. The concrete sidewalk is comparatively cool, especially in the shade of the trash trees, my neighbors’ green lawns are also comfortable to the feet— although they are getting a bit dry and crunchy— but the street itself? This might be another meaning to the phrase “hot-foot”: Ooohh! Eeegh! Owww! Eeek! The soles of my feet are not as tough as they were when I was eight or nine, and going barefoot throughout the summer; I scamper across the street, unlock the mailbox and scamper back. It is as painful as it was, those summers when we went to swim in various pools, since Mom was convinced that flip-flops were bad for our feet. But perhaps it made the coolness of the water, all the more refreshing, all the more rewarding.
There were only a few places for natural fresh-water recreation when we were growing up— hardly any lakes, and the braided streams in Big Tujunga Wash were usually only at best knee-deep: no quarries full of ice-cold water, and snapping turtles, no muddy swimming-hole. An airline flight, on low approach towards any city in the southwest reveals where Pippy, JP and I explored the joys aquatic; the hundreds of translucent turquoise swimming pools, rectangular, square or bean-shaped cut gems, set into the green or tawny background of suburbia. Those children of one or two households in any given neighborhood who had a pool were guaranteed popularity everlasting, especially in the summertime— it was either that, or going to the public pool, which however well-chlorined, was always slightly suspect. And besides that, was full of eagle-eyed life-guards bellowing “Stop running!” “Stop fighting!” “Stop cannon-balling off the side!”
It was not like that, up the hill from Redwood House, at Waynes’. Possibly there were other households with pools nearby, but Wayne was JPs’ friend, so JP and I were there frequently. Mom didn’t let us go nearly as often as we wished, not wanting to impose on Wayne’s parents, but it truth, his parents hardly ever seemed to be present. We never went into the house, and in fact I have no recollection of ever seeing the inside, or his parents at all. The outside was fascinating enough, a hillside of pasture and a couple of horses, and a huge mulberry tree… and of course, the pool. Wayne seemed to live a sort of Pippi Longstocking existence, coming and going as he pleased. Although I am sure he went to school, he certainly didn’t have the extra lessons that we did… including swimming lessons.
We had learned to paddle, after a fashion, by floundering around in the shallow end of various pools, before Mom decided that lessons were in order. Several times a week, over several summers, we were loaded into the Plymouth and ferried to a large house in La Canada, which boasted a near-Olympic sized pool. Two women, mother and daughter, both of whom had been on the American Olympic swim teams in their respective younger days, briskly drilled an assortment of small and not so small children in necessary water skills. They were kindly but exacting teachers, not well disposed towards inattention or disobedience. Pippy, nervous in the deep end but a fair swimmer for all that, stubbornly refused to swim out of reach of the pool side. They patiently tried to talk her out of that bad habit, but she still refused to swim out into the middle. Finally, one of them picked her up bodily, slung her into the middle of the pool… and when she swam back to the side, howling, the instructor plucked her out of the water… and slung her into the middle again. I was at the other extreme; I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t up to something— like treading water.
On the very first day, we were directed to go off the diving board, come up, tread water for a minute and then swim to the side. I had never done that before, but didn’t want to admit it in front of all the other kids, and a teacher who went off the diving board and into the water with barely a teacup of disturbance in the water, which closed with a tiny splash and a schooping sound over her toes. It looked easy enough! I went out on the diving-board and went in, came up to the surface all right, and tried to do what the kids before me had done. I think it was the senior instructor— she must have been a little short of my grandmothers’ ages, who jumped in and swam me over to the poolside before I went down, gasping and choking for the third time. Sensible and practical woman, she didn’t let me out of the water. As soon as I finished gasping and spitting out faintly chlorine-tasting pool water, I got a hasty lesson in treading water, and rejoined the rest of the intermediate class. It was indeed easy enough, to make your body into a straight arrow, from fingertips to toes, as the Olympian woman coached us over the next couple of summers, to hit the water in a clean and focused movement, with only the tiniest of splashes, moving down into this strange cool element of water.
This was our refuge, in blistering dry heat, to stand on the diving board, and look down at the cool, embracing water, and taking a deep breath before diving in.
Tell you what, nothing except being stuck in an abusive relationship will do quite such a demolition job on your ego and self-respect as the hunt for gainful employment does. The day or two after sending out a round of resumes (Email, fax and snail-mail) to a crop of twelve or fifteen promising potential employers— all interesting-looking, all offering the right sort of compensation, all within your capabilities and experience— and being met with vast indifference… that is the worst. Here you have distilled your experience, your talents, the inestimable value and enthusiasm you could bring to any employer, poured it all out on a single sheet of paper… and the phone doesn’t ring, except that it is some dumbass trying to sell you satellite TV service, and there is nothing in the email inbox but some Nigerian dirtbag trying to arrange a money transfer… oh, and a message from an HR weenie who can’t figure out how to open a WP doc attachment— your resume! The working world, apparently, can get along just fine without you, and the reminder stings.
But there are lumps of cynical amusement to be mined out of the clay of the want-ads (both on-line, and dead-tree), although of late the SA Express News seems to have wised up about those deliberately vague little ads which promised all sorts of goodies but never saying what it was that prospective employees would be actually working at. Or even the name of the company. (Nine out of ten it’s A***y, people, A***y. They won’t say so up front, but it’s A***y or some other pyramid sales scheme which has you flogging crap to your family and friends, or what you’ll have left of them after turning every social occasion into a sales pitch. Beware, my children, of any place that has group interviews that start with a video… flee, flee, the moment it becomes clear! Plug your ears, and flee!)
This week’s potential employer giggle was afforded by a certain local institute of higher learning, which advertised for an administrative assistant for an academic department head. Eh, it looked interesting, and in the neighborhood of what I am looking for. They have the job description posted online. Oh, my; a page and a half worth of expectations and duties, everything but actually teaching a class of freshmen, handing tissues to the department chairman in the restroom, and making homemade jam for faculty teas. Everything else was there, though, all for the salary of a little over $9.00 an hour. Nothing like expecting Cadillac Escalade service for the price of a Geo Metro— I think the job has been open for a bit, cannot imagine why. Maybe they have a hell of a benefits package, one hopes so for the department chairman’s sake.
My last job hunt was a desultory affair— I scanned the want-ads for a year, and noticed that there was a revolving door at certain employers; either it was a sucky place to work, or they had a monster in the cellar that they were throwing human sacrifices to. Oddly enough, the local public TV station is one of those which constantly replaced employees— in contrast to public radio, which people only leave when they die, or their spouse is transferred out of town, (I work there, I know. Public radio and public TV have nothing to do with each other, actually but some of the regular staff cross over, on occasion. And it is a small town.)
At the urging of Robin, at Ranting n Raven, I did drive over to fill out an application at a commercial radio station, which wanted an administrative assistant/receptionist. The offices were at the top of a 12-storey building, with a view— only about the third radio station I have ever been in, which had a view. I went up in the elevator with one of the announcers— believe me, I can pick out a radio voice— who showed me there the office was… it was the one with about fifteen other women in the waiting room, all filling out forms. I should have sucked up a little more—I didn’t get the job, but I am not sure they could have afforded me, anyway. Basically, what commercial radio wants, is someone just out of a broadcasting school, who will work for minimum wage just for the éclat of working at a real radio station… and has boundless ambition, maybe a modicum of talent and tits out to here, although that last usually doesn’t apply to the guys. Me, I’ll take the money. (Besides I already work at a radio station, mostly out of sentiment, and a desire to keep my skills fresh. They can’t afford me, either, strictly speaking.)
So, on Monday, I had an e-mail complimenting me on my “impressive” resume, and thanking me for my interest, but that potential employee has already focused on several other people whose qualifications more nearly suit their needs Well, fair enough… at least I can be assured they got the damned resume but it’s a hell of a way to start off the week. Things might be looking up a little, though: I am on the books at a couple of temp services that do the more high-end, executive staff placement, and one of them had me come over to their office this morning and do a couple of tests that the employer likes to spring on all potential staff hires… and tomorrow I have an interview and form-filling session at another. They both think they have something that will suit. We shall see.
When the catalogue music place was closing, one of the other ladies and I derived a great deal of merriment from what we both claimed would be our last, desperate bottom-of-the barrel employment option. The phone-sex line operators were running advertisements offering a salary of $10.00 and benefits…Better than a university is offering these days, for an admin assistant to a department chair. We were handicapped, though, by our inability to talk dirty without breaking out in giggles.
There may be intelligent life in the universe, but if they landed at the multiplex this week, chances are they saw what was playing, barfed and departed in disgust. They, like me, can probably wait until the current collection comes out on DVD… and goes on special, marked down 50%. Even at that, the movie makers may go on waiting for my entertainment dollar. Looking at the cinematic joys on the schedule now and in the near future makes for depressing reading. Movie versions of comic books. Remakes of old and not so old movies. Movie versions of old television shows. Bloated special effects extravaganzas, by auteurs whose own self-importance is nearly as bloated as their production. Historical melodramas, whose actual fidelity to history is merely coincidental, of the sort that my mother used to describe as an “Urp-ic”…. Frankly, it’s all enough to make me barf as well. The last movie I went to see in a theater was “Phantom of the Opera” and only because Blondie dragged me, kicking and screaming; the one before that was “Return of the King”. Since then, it’s been all downhill, or at least, me looking at the movie reviews and schedules and thinking, “Bleah…I have better things to do… like wash my hair…brush the cats… haul mulch to the back yard… experiment with do- it-yourself-root-canal surgery.”
I shouldn’t have to tell you how sad and pathetic this is for our once-vaunted American movie industry, which still bestrides the world like a colossus, but is doing somewhat less well in American markets. Nearly fifteen years ago, my daughter and I rotated home from a decade spent in Europe, and counted one of the blessings of coming back to our home country, (along with having a telephone AND a washing machine in our house!) that of being able to go see a movie… the very day that it opened! To go and see a movie, ten hours after I read the review of it in the newspaper, instead of waiting six months until it appeared on the AAFES circuit for a couple of showings! Bliss was it to be alive in those days, to hit the multiplex in Layton for a weekend matinee, with a ten-dollar bill and a couple of supermarket candy bars tucked into my purse. (What, you think I am made of money, I want to pay the markup at the theater? Do I look like an idiot??!!) We loved going to the movies, I even had subscriptions to Premiere, and to Entertainment Weekly.
And then it just began to seem like all the fun of it, all the joy and anticipation just drained away, as if the plug on a lovely pristine pond full of goldfish and bordered by rushes and banks grown with violets all drained away, and there was nothing left but a baking mud flat, a couple of carp skeletons and a desiccated fringe of dead shrubbery. Going to a movie began to seem like a grim chore, a duty, something you had to do. There is a word for something you have to do, it’s called work. (Line stolen from someone else, not my own) Nothing much I read about movies lately, nothing much about the current crop induces me to spend two hours and the first run ticket price…it’s all too damn much like a grim duty and obligation.
I don’t want to see explosions and buildings collapsing— I’ve sort of been off that kind of thing since 9/11— I want to see sparkling conversation, not brief and easily translated sarcastic remarks filling in the short interim between explosions and buildings collapsing. I want to see stories about people, interesting, or admirable people, or at least people I wouldn’t mind knowing. (Sgt. Mom’s criteria for characters: “If you wouldn’t want to spend fifteen minutes with them stuck in an elevator, in real life… why the hell do you want to spend two hours and change stuck with them in a movie theater!???”) I don’t much care for graphic violence (emotional or the other kind) , torture, or spurting arteries, and no, I don’t much care for it in slow-mo or artistically choreographed, either. And I don’t care for car chases as a substitute for intelligent (or coherent plotting), and if that makes me the Little Mary Sunshine… well, I have been withholding my movie-jones dollar for a couple of years now, and it looks like a lot of other people are as well.
Is there a quiet, unfocused and non-centralized boycott in effect? Over a decade ago, Michael Medved outlined some of the discontents attendant on the contemporary movie industry—disrespect to religious values, to conventional families, to communities in fly-over-country, willful disregard, in other words, of every conventional standard in values and tastes. He detected a slump in movie attendance then, a slump that bears a resemblance to an avalanche in recent months.
All I can say is… thanks for catalogues of VHS and DVD movies and television shows— if it weren’t for the old stuff available to watch at home, I’d not have anything to watch at all.
(Discuss amongst yourselves)