If World War One were a bar fight …
(found on Facehook and on PJ Media. Enjoy.)
And also just for fun – World War Two as if it were played out on a Facebook news feed.
How a European visualizes an American breakfast. Scroll down, the comments are hilarious.
(Found courtesy of Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom. Yeah, I slum, now that I am apparently not permitted to post comments at PJ Media. Which I find to be pretty ****ing insulting, since apparently any doofus whose cousin-friend-sister’s-mother-in-law can make $70 an hour from home on their computer can post comments.)
Thinks about going to a movie this weekend; ah-ha! Liam Neeson has a movie which opened last week; a white-knuckle thriller about a US air marshal on board a hijacked airliner.
Not my cuppa, actually – but Liam Neeson is one of the few actors around who can convincingly play an adult man doing a job … like an air marshal.
*Does internet search for reviews of Non-Stop. Look, I work for a living. Do you think I want to waste $10 on something I might not get a good two hours of enjoyment out of?*
Oh, dear. Making the villain the survivor of someone murdered by Islamic terrorists on 9/11, and a veteran, with a military member as a side-kick?
Really?
Look, if there had been a whole stream of movies from Hollywood since 9/11 where survivors and military were the good guys, maybe I might be inclined to cut some slack for an unexpected plot twist. Alas, this is Hollywood, behaving in the movie manner which we have come to expect of them since 9/11.
No sale. I hereby put on my magic Cassandra hat and predict that Non-Stop will sink at fly-over country box offices as if it had a fifty-pound lead weight strapped to it and dumped over the Mariana Trench.
It looks from here that Ukraine is pretty wells scrod; just as I figured a week or so ago before I caught the rag ends of Blondie’s flu. Sigh. Our “Beloved Leader†has pissed away seventy years of credibility, wasting that many decades worth of hard diplomatic work and military blood. Blondie points out that we have problems of our own, and practically no historical mission/connection to that part of eastern Europe, save for having historically given refuge to the wretched refuse of their teeming shore. All that I can lament is that once upon a time, all our president would have had to do was to look grim, issue a noncommittal-sounding statement to the effect that we were watching, and send an aircraft carrier group to lurk meaningfully in the eastern Med. But no – “Beloved Leader†hasn’t the credibility to make that kind of soft-voiced warning stick with anyone anymore.
It was almost a relief to have come down with some kind of winter crud; a cough, feverish, clogged head, mild earache. Blondie has had some of these elements for a week or so, I may have escaped with only three days of feeling sluggish, feverish and otherwise under the weather. It’s weeks like this that I am glad to not have to answer to an employer, and that my commute to the office is a short stagger across the bedroom-slash-office. Yesterday, the DBA certificates (the doing-business-as) came from the County Registrar; a pleasant surprise since I had only put in the applications for them in the last week of February. From the looks of the Bexar County website I had thought I’d be lucky to hear from them in a month, at least. But what they heck – they are really serious about being kind to small businesses in Texas. The DBAs were important because I needed them to open a business account with Frost Bank, so that my former partner could close the two accounts in her name – but in the meantime, I still needed to route payments through a bank account. So, that is one less thing keeping her tied to the business. All this week, Blondie is ferrying the publisher file copies of books and stashes of office supplies over to me. All this fills up the office corner rather thoroughly. I really ought to purge the printed files of completed projects … and come to think of it, donate a lot of the books that I have reviewed to a local book drive, especially the ones I have no interest in reading again.
The review project I am working on at present is becoming adept at Pinnacle Studio 18 video editing software. I asked for a copy as a Vine reviewer, and so … here I thought that having lingered meaningfully in the area of acts of video production being committed (ummm… some years ago) that I might be able to pick it up with some speed, right away. Nope, guessed wrong on that one. It’s a bit more complicated than Photoshop, and not particularly intuitive at all. Fortunately, I located the 300-page manual, and downloaded it. I’d like to be able to do simple, yet professional slide-shows, using collections of my pictures, and post them on the websites, but that project looks like it’s gonna take more time.
And that’s where it stands for Sgt. Mom, the first week of March, 2014. Could be better, but could be a lot worse.
Left to myself, I don’t think I would have watched Enlisted, but Blondie insisted, saying it was pretty darned funny a show, and had the right ‘feel’ for a comedy about the present-day military. Or at least – the US military as it was a couple of years ago. (What it is becoming as of this very moment, I have no idea.) So, I we watched the first three or four episodes together, and darned if she isn’t right. It’s a funny, rapid-fire comedy about three brothers at an Army post in Florida, which is affectionate, respectful and knowledgeable about military life … something that I swear hasn’t been seen on network television since Gomer Pyle, USMC or No Time for Sergeants, although perhaps Major Dad took some detours through that route.
Blame me for being jaded, as regards television; a couple of years ago I realized that most shows were just the same-old, same-old, served up one more time. Same old doctor-lawyer-cop triad, same old mystery twist I had seen twenty times before, same old cliché characters, dressed up with a few 21st century attire and attitudes…
All in all, Enlisted is well worth watching – and with luck, perhaps it will last more than just one season. There haven’t been any sudden nasty thwacks of conventional political correctness, so far. And we appreciate a nice little grace note at the end of every episode; service pictures of various kin of people having something to do with show production. Who would have thought it – people working on a TV show about the military life actually having a familial connection to the military? Seriously, that alone is worth a mention.
By the way, I am not the least interested in the Academy Awards. Although … I do have a mild academic interest in what is awarded Best Picture (purely for trivial knowledge points in future), and which actress wears the fugliest dress on the red carpet. Other than that – the last picture I went to see in a theater was the latest installation of The Hobbit, and the last before that was the first installation of the Hobbit.
PS – Enlisted does have a Facebook page. Go ahead and like. You know you want to.
Sigh – now that the story of this particularly classless young Army troop has gone all the way around the world, mayhap it’s time for me to weigh in. Look, young Private Torkwad – having to stand at attention at 5 PM, or whenever the official end of the duty day is marked with the lowering of the flag and the sounding of taps – is an established custom on military bases. If caught in the open at those times, stand and render, if in an automobile, pull over and sit at attention. This is the proper procedure, and those who are cognizant of it are pretty well hep to the timing of the day. No, there is no particular shame to neatly time your errands while around and about on post/base to be indoors at 5 sharp; most sharp young troops figure this out within a year or two of going on active duty.
(My daughter figured it out within days of her first overseas at Iwakuni, where the 5 PM retreat involved not just taps, but also playing the US national anthem, the Japanese national anthem, the US Navy anthem and the USMC Hymn. Twenty minutes at least of rigid attention, facing in the direction of the flagpole.) They also figure out that making a flagrant dash for the nearest door at the first notes is obvious, crass, and extremely disrespectful of custom and tradition. Being observed to do so will draw an attitude adjustment session, either impromptu and on the spot by any NCO or officer observing that action, or in your commander/NCOIC’s office later. But going to far as to post pictorial evidence of this on social media goes way beyond all that into unexplored depths of witless self-regard.
See here, Private Torkwad, let me explain it to you in simple terms. When you are in uniform, you are seen as a representative of the military. You are essentially on duty – even if it’s your own Facebook page. Even if you are not formally assigned to the post public affairs office, you still represent the military in the eyes of civilians. Your actions reflect upon the military no less than yourself … and believe me; you have outed yourself as immature, borderline illiterate, extremely self-centered, and appear to take more care of your makeup than your responsibilities as a member of the military. In the pre-social media era, no one would have been aware of this outside your immediate chain of command, and frankly, no one else would have much cared. You would have been reprimanded, and perhaps learned from the experience and gone on to become a stellar young troop and a good example of what the American armed forces can be. Probably just about everyone who ever put on a uniform has done things – reckless, potentially embarrassing and ill-considered things – which by the grace of god, were not a matter of public record.
Console yourself, Private Torkwad, with the knowledge that you are not the only troop ever to screw up. However, now that the matter of your particular screw-up has become of passing interest outside your immediate chain of command, the repercussions will be if not more severe, possibly more personally embarrassing. The internet, dear Private Torkwad, is forever, and everywhere, so do consider this, the next time you post a picture of yourself in uniform to the internet. My own advice to you in this matter is to say no more to anyone (especially in your chain of command) than, “It’s my fault, I screwed up, I’m sorry, and it won’t ever happen again.†Repeat as often as necessary. You’ll be a better troop for it.
Yes, I know very well that that is; to be the in-house media functionary. Not quite the so-called ‘real’ news media, but to be an employee/technician/writer/personality for the in-house public affairs media of a large government element – the US Air Force. I wouldn’t be so bitchy as to call the various offices that I worked in – base Public Affairs, the stint with a couple of production detachments focusing on informational elements for various departments of government, and for the largest part of my service life as a low-level minion of the keeping-up-the-morale-of-our-overseas-stationed-troops – as an in-house claque … but yeah. I’m almost two decades retired from the game, so maybe I can. Yes, I – and all the other AFRTS, PA pukes and military videographers – we were hired, paid and maintained in order to further the public affair goals of the US military. No shame in admitting that. Good outfits in the main; paid only moderately well, and a smidgen of a retirement after all that – but good on the whole to work for, and any number of former military public affairs personnel have used the experience as a stepping-stone to careers in journalism, television, and politics, to name just a few fields.
The thing is – we all knew who we worked for; the military. And one of those lessons was that we should never reflect discredit on the military in our productions or in our actions in uniform. Fair go, being employees, being seen to was the institutional dirty laundry in public, and all. Public Affairs’ mission in the event of the dirty laundry coming out, was to spin so as to make it seem somewhat less dirty.
Given that, what is one to make of reports that the FCC was (and likely will again, only under a different name) intent on instituting something called a “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs†… a survey of the news-reporting process? And not just at television and radio news organizations, but at newspapers as well. The stated intent as noted in the linked Wall Street Journal opinion piece, was to “ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected†and how often stations cover “critical information needs,†along with “perceived station bias†and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.†Well, well, well … and on pain of not having their broadcast licenses renewed, radio and television newsrooms would have to justify the judgment of the managing editors to the FCC operatives in answering those and other questions. And if the FCC was not pleased? What then, oh wolves, especially if and when – and it would come to when, I am certain of that – covering a story which would reflect discredit on the federal government? How long would it be until every newsroom had an official minder?
I do not like to think that it would come to that, but there are things that I thought unlikely – such as the IRS being used against Republican and Tea Party activists – which have now come about. That both the major print and broadcast media outlets (with Fox News appearing to be the exception) are not up in arms about having government minders ‘overseeing’ news production is just one more indication of how close they are to becoming in-house media functionaries. Without uniforms, of course.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)
So, we have been having fun with a new kitchen gadget – nnnooo, not the kitchen gadget what is on the to-buy list at the Scratch and Dent Superstore (the awesome side-by-side refrigerator freezer which is on layaway and due to replace the 20-year old Whirlpool in the next month or so) – but the Food Saver vacuum device which came with half a roll of the plastic medium and the instruction manual. I spotted it at a neighborhood yard sale, barely used and for the unbelievably low, low price of $5 cash. The previous owner said that it worked – but not why she was letting it go, when it is so useful a gadget. This, when new went for a cool $170 or so. I had been considering purchasing a home vacuum-packing system now and again, but was always put off by the price. Yeah, I’m turning into my pinch-the-penny-until-a-booger-comes-out-Lincoln’s-nose grandmothers. Deal with it.
With the price of groceries going up and up, my daughter and I are running through all the means of saving here and there; to include copious use of coupons, buying on sale and freezing, and making a whole lot of different things from scratch. But the trouble with freezing is that even the sturdiest zip-lock freezer bags grow frost on the inside, and the stuff gets refrigerator-burn and generally unappetizing, and within a short time you forget what the heck it is and how long it has been in there anyway.
Insert the truism about the freezer being only interim storage for leftovers, before they are old enough to be thrown away.
But the Food-Saver eliminates the frost and freezer-burn, along with the air from the sealed package. We also discovered to our joy and surprise, that it makes the package of pre-made and pre-flavored hamburger patties or marinated chicken-leg quarters so much smaller that space-saving in the freezer is achieved almost instantly. Now we can buy the family-packs of chops or chicken-breasts or whatever, and package them in two-serving-sized bags which will not degrade the quality of the meat when frozen, or leave me trying to pry apart lumps of hard-frozen meat.
I’m already considering my options as far as purchasing a half or a quarter of a cow in one fell swoop … and we are racking our brains now, for the names of people we know who hunt. I’d like to have a bit of venison or wild boar in the freezer now and again, also.
I am a business owner. My partner and founder of Watercress Press has always intended that I should take over the business eventually … and as of today, the papers have been signed. Oh, there are a couple of more things to be sorted out, and essentially I have been the active partner for more than a year … but here I start on the next big part of my life, as a business owner and raving capitalist. Although I do promise not to starve and flog the employees while chuckling manically and swan-diving into my pool of gold coins.
Too much. The blood spatters get everywhere after a good flogging, and the stains never come out.
When a writers’ organization forgets that its primary goal should be to assist and support writers and starts trying to look more politically correct and then to force that image on all members or else they be publicly shamed, it has outlived its time.
(From a comment by Amanda, at the discussion thread here.) For an explanation of glittery hoo-haa, go here – and remember, you have been warned.
Now, aren’t you all glad that I have taken to writing historical fiction? Those organizations which I am interested in joining, or semi-qualified to join based upon scribbling moderately competent, interesting, and OK-selling genre fiction (Women Writing the West, or the Historical Fiction Society) are not having these nuclear-melt-down-sink-through-to-the-core-of-the-earth perturbations. Or at least, none that I know of – mostly because I am interested in writing, not organizational politics, because – what was the reason for the writers’ organization again? Oh, yeah – the care and feeding of writers, and their economic interests, not some kind of neo-Stalinist clique imposing a kind of savage Mean Girls political correctness upon the membership and exiling all those who don’t or won’t go along with it.
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Bizarrely enough, that’s what it has seemed like around here for the last few weeks. Winter during the week, with temperatures in the twenties, summer on the weekends, with a high that just barely escapes the threshold for turning on the AC. While the British Isles seem to be considerably more soggy than usual (old joke – English roosters don’t crow, they gargle) and just about every part of the US but for the west coast and south Texas are snowed in, we are here able to contemplate spring planting. That, and taking the tender plants from the plastic greenhouse and hanging them out in the open air. My daughter’s hibiscus has gone back to it’s accustomed place, and I have two packets of seed potatoes ready for the big raised bed. The winter cold here – such as it was – did for most of the perennial vegetables which were on their third year anyway; pepper, okra and eggplant. The first weekend in March, though – off to various outlets to replace all of the above and tomato starts, too. Historically the final freeze of the year in these parts is March 15th. After that, it’s full steam ahead.
Having the overgrown photina cut down kick-started the garden projects this year, too. The front entryway is entirely re-vamped, and planted with a new rosebush, some interesting bulbs and seeds, and some ornamental garden bits. The narrow flower bed alongside the walkway to the front door will also be cleaned up and fixed with brick, pavers and gravel, with a few plants allowed in certain places. I trimmed away all the dead stuff from the three pots of gladioli – and the new green growth is already putting up little green fingers. I believe the plants know that hard winter is already over.
The various spider plants wintered over in the greenhouse without much harm, and return to their usual places … or close to some of their usual places, since the limbs of the mulberry were pruned back quite severely. The frost-nipped bushes in the back which grew to a great height and attracted swarms of butterflies and humming-birds have all been tidied up – and my daughter has been filling the bird-feeders again, to the great joy of the various wrens, sparrows and doves. This is also to the great joy of the cats, who sit on the windowsill, with their tails twitching, and impotently watch the birds through the glass.
We meant to begin planting things – the potatoes, onions, beans and lettuce, but the day got away from us, with sorting out the back porch. It had become a kind of dump, with the bicycle parked in the middle of it. I hated sitting on the glider with my back to the garden, so we switched around the glider and the gas barbeque, threw away a pretty hefty bunch of accumulated stuff – and there we are; a back porch that I can sit on once again, and look out at the garden.
This is what I used to call her, in blog posts at ncobrief.com during the run-up to the 2008 primaries; Hillary Clinton; who seemed so … inevitable. She would be there, a power to behold and take seriously in the presidential primaries. “In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!â€
Well, I am certain that some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters have loved and despaired, in the resulting contest between ebony and ovary in the 2008 primaries. Eh – I didn’t care at the time, still don’t care and can’t be made to care. I will note for the record that my daughter was taking college classes then, and both of us were annoyed beyond all reason by the assumption that because we were both women, and politically involved, that we were OF COURSE all about Hillary. Our support was taken as a matter of fact. THE FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT! This possibility was apparently intended to make us both go wobbly in the knees and vote with our vaginas instead of our brains.
I might have considered Her Inevitableness with a little more seriousness if – after departing the White House, she had formally divorced the charming serial-abuser she was married to, and devoted herself earnestly to a political career on her own hook and her own efforts. But even if to all intents and purposes Her Inevitableness and the Big He appear to mostly live separate lives, the prospect of the wife of a former president in turn being nominated, elected and installed in the White House just gives me the heebie-jeebies; this is not Argentina and she is not Evita. As a small-l libertarian and strict constitutionalist, any whisper of a hereditary political elite in this country gives me the cold chills – and yes, I was at least as upset about the Bush family appearing to have a lock on high political office as I was about the Gores, and the Kennedys. It’s not a good thing, even if such political dynasties like the Adams family have been around from the very beginning. We should not be doing a hereditary nobility here, end of discussion.
Of course, Her Inevitableness arrives with more baggage that Delta Airlines anyway, and she does not seem to have much of her husband’s easy charm and liking for the necessary rounds of schmoozing required. She has always come off to me in interviews as stiff, forced and uncomfortable – and shrill in making speeches. But those are superficial qualities, and not necessarily the kiss of death politically. Richard Nixon wasn’t particularly personally charming either, and watching old footage of Lyndon Johnson and imagining being in the same room with him makes me want to take a shower. No, what will be the biggest piece of old baggage in Her Inevitableness’s luggage van will be Benghazi and the deaths of four Americans there at the consulate, including the Ambassador. What exactly was going on at the consulate, and why it appears that there was no real effort made at rescue is still pretty murky. Her impatient response at the subsequent hearings will come back to bite, as much as the establishment media offers air cover for Her Inevitableness. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans – what difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.†Six months after the event and she appeared not to know if it was a protest, or just one of those impulsive things, cared less if it was – and was certainly getting tired of being asked about it. Some job she did there; I am pretty certain that the matter of Benghazi will not die, but come roaring back again. There were too many people involved; eventually some of them will talk.
(cross-posted at www.chicagoboyz.net)
I was reminded by Ace of Spades HQ that this is the 40th anniversary of a movie that probably could not be made today, although Django Unchained may have been the serious and un-comically blood-spattered version. Yes, indeedy, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles debuted four decades ago, and certain western and cowboy tropes will never be the same, especially the scene of cowboys eating beans around the fire… which always reminds me of one of our innocent young lieutenants assigned to Det 8, Hill Combat Camera, during my assignment there. This one was especially innocent, having come from a sheltered background and done his ROTC time at Baylor University, where apparently they were such observant Methodists that they didn’t even know any rude cadence-count chants.
He also had a problem digesting MREs – they gave him such awful intestinal gas that no one wanted to share a pup-tent with him on field deployments. The major commanding at the Hill detachment heard of this, and waxed exceeding humorous, telling the young Lt. that it recalled the famous campfire scene … whereupon the innocent young Lt. looked totally blank and confessed that he had no idea what the major was talking about. The major immediately ordered him to rent Blazing Saddles from the nearest Blockbuster, to watch it in entirety over the weekend, and turn in a report to him on Monday.
Sigh. There is a website for Combat Camera – I have sent an email to the administrator, asking for log-in privileges. We’ll see. I guess it is a reflection of my experience as a broadcaster that I am much more interested in reconnecting with the Combat Camera units that I was assigned to, rather than any of the broadcast outlets. I will be sixty on the 21st of this month, and another two years will see me retired from the military for as long as I was in it.
Cold. It’s unnaturally cold here in Texas – has been for a good few weeks, off and on – even to the point of having to scrape ice off the windshield of the cars once or twice. I am fairly certain that I had some ice-scrapers in the glovebox of the Very Elderly Volvo, but I think that they went with the Volvo when I sold it, along with one or two other things in the trunk – like the roadside survival kit packed in a surplus ammo can. I definitely should have kept that; it may be still in the garage somewhere.
Ah, the garage. It’s packed full of stuff that Blondie brought home from her stint in the Corps, and additional stuff that she has bought at yard sales. There may be a small wandering black hole in there as well. We will have to sort out the garage one of these days … after sorting out some other stuff. Like the closets. We did make progress on the cupboard which houses the washer and dryer last week. The washing machine died, after twenty years of good service – and it turned out it was just easier to buy another one, from the provider of all quality appliances at cut-rate prices – the Scratch and Dent Superstore. Slightly dinged, or chipped – but usually brand-new. And they deliver, install and take away the old unit. We added some more wire shelving units to to hold cleaning supplies and sorted out a number of useless things which had gravitated there. Mose of them went straight to the trash can, and now the laundry closet is a thing of beauty to contemplate. Since it is too darned cold to work outside in the garden, we’re looking at indoor projects. The kitchen pantry closet is next. And that was my week…
A house, as Dave Barry once cogently remarked, is a square hole in the ground, into which you pour money. Well, after all – it is the place that you live in, and which has all your stuff in it. How much one counts on that sort of thing – well, my parents were reminded of that, when their retirement house burned to the ground in 2003, in one of the catastrophic brush fires that Southern California is so famous for. My parents, having a liking for living away out in the country and preferably at the end of at least half a mile of dirt road, were accustomed to the risk and indeed, the possibility. Still, it was a wrench when the house went up in flames. They had half an hour to get out some of the most valuable stuff, but not many other things; Mom’s wedding dress, the family heirloom christening dress, a huge box of photographs that my daughter had intended to sort out, all of Mom and Dad’s books, the motley assortment of Christmas ornaments – to include the Christmas stockings that my grandmother had knitted in wool, with all our names worked into the top – all of the Danish Christmas plates from the AAFES catalog that I had sent Mom over the time I was stationed overseas – the letters that my uncle had written to his family during WWII. All gone – as Mom said, “They burned up real good.†Everything – and I still think about the things lost in the fire, although some of them I did not miss. The Danish Moderne teakwood dining table and chairs, for example – the chairs hit the back of your knee like a karate chop. (Mom bought them for cheap in the early Sixties, and it turned out they were valued at much, much more than what she had paid originally. In that particular case, I’d have rather had the insurance money.)
Whenever the house seems to get too crowded, the bookshelves crammed and overflowing with books and trinkets, and I think about how nice it would be not to have so many things, and to move into a tiny little cottage in the Hill Country … then I remember Mom and Dad and all the precious, accustomed bits and pieces that they had to let go of, all on a Sunday afternoon in the space of an hour.
I could probably do with less – not with fewer books, though. The constant moving at the pleasure of the Air Force did help us by whittling down the extraneous things every three or four years. But I have been in this house now since 1994, and the stuff has been creeping out of the closets and corners – so perhaps it is time for a belated New Years resolution, to sit down and sort out the storages spaces in the house, and purge the things for which we have no present or foreseeable use. The den closet, I am pretty certain, is home to some boxes from the last move which I threw in there when I got tired of unpacking them.
We had to get a new washing machine this weekend, which necessitated a good clean-out of the closet where the washer and dryer (and a few other small and relatively little-used appliances) live. Result – A much cleaner closet and a trash can filled with useless stuff – pillows stained beyond all hope of cleaning, a box of the disposable plastic receptacles for the long-gone automatic litter box – which never really worked properly and some other bits and bobs which we steeled ourselves to throw away. It got easier as we got down to the bottom of the cupboard.
So, my daughter and I have gotten ambitious; the pantry cupboard is next. It’s one of those with deep shelves, spaced too far apart, with the result that stuff gets lost in the back and forgotten forever. The plan is to rip out all the wooden shelves and their supports, repair the walls, and put in closely-spaced shallow wire shelves along all three walls, so that it will be easy to see what all we have in there – no need to go in with a rope and a headlamp next time I am looking for a can of tomato sauce.
To put it in simple terms, that’s what I call it when a whole group, or sub-set of people are deemed the Emmanuel Goldstein of the moment by a dominant group, and set up as a focus for free-wheeling hate. In practice, this hate may range all the way from a mild disinclination to associate professionally or socially, all the way to 11 in marking the object of that hate as a suitable target for murder, either singly or in wholesale lots – and sometimes with the cooperation and blessing of the state. It’s more something that I have read about – either in the pages of history books, or in the newspapers – and increasingly on-line. Still, it is no end distressing to see it developing here in these United States in this century. Am I paranoid about this current bout of ‘otherizing’? Perhaps – but don’t tell me that it cannot happen here.
Some hundred and fifty years ago, the ‘otherizing’ reached such a pitch that young men marched against their countrymen – they were clad in blue and grey, and fell on battlefields so contested that lead shot fell like a hailstorm, and swept away a large portion of men recruited by regional-based units. Passionate feelings, words and small deeds, public and private regarding slavery were balanced against states’ rights. The pressure built up and up, like steam in a boiler – and finally there was no means for them to be expressed but in death wished upon the ‘other’. By the end of twenty years of editorials, speeches, and political campaigns had been worked to a fever pitch. Civil war became not only possible – but in the eyes of the editorialists, the speech-makers and the politicians – a wholly desirable outcome. And a goodly portion of a generation lay dead, as if a scythe had swept over a wheat-field. Everyone was very sorry afterwards, but the words could not be unspoken, the hatred and resentment re-bottled in a flask, or the dead re-animated, to go about their ordinary lives as if the great divisive issue of mid-19th century America had never been.
Words eventually lead to deeds – especially hot, angry words spoken or expressed by those in cultural authority. Which in this West of the World means politicians and intellectuals, and the popular media; even the not-so-pop media, come to think on it – like NPR, or lesser organs like CNN or MSNBC. (Which is my private jest to call PMS-NBC. See, two can play at this denigration game.) They used to say that sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me. But it’s the words, you see; eventually the tide of insult and slander takes a toll. The trouble is that words used with deliberation and intent will lead to application of the sticks and stones. It will also lead, as history demonstrates, to the misuse of the law to criminalize political opposition, to encourage mob actions to retaliate against the ‘other’ for perceived offenses, and at the very least to shun the ‘other’ socially.
Are we at the point of 1861 again, with a divide so deep, and the words spoken so incendiary that they might only be erased in blood? I don’t think so, not quite yet. But we are certainly closer today to 1861 then we have been in the last few decades. And that prospect scares the heck out of me – but it doesn’t seem like many of those in cultural authority, in the media, the commentariat or in politics quite feel the same fear. Just possibly they knew recent history about as well as Andrea Mitchell does … which is cause for even more alarm, if possible.
(crossposted at chicagoboyz.net)
It’s been a quiet week here at Chez Hayes this last week – mostly because of the latest round of global warming which swept through here on Friday and left every tree twig and leaf encased in a medium-thick shell of ice – the streets and sidewalks also. We had quite forgotten the odd rattling noise produced when the breeze blows through the branches of a tree thus treated by ice-cold rain and temperatures plunging well below 20 degrees for a good few hours overnight. We very deliberately scheduled all necessary errands for Wednesday and Thursday, not wanting to need to go anywhere at all on Friday. Walking the dogs was adventure enough, with patches of slick ice everywhere. No, I did not want to risk either of our lives or the continued good condition of either car by driving anywhere. Not only am I out of practice with regard to driving on ice and snow – I have seen south Texas drivers driving in heavy rain. No-bloody-thank-you.
The sale of the Tiny Bidness to me proceeds apace. My business partner’s niece and executor wants to see that her dearly-loved aunt winds up the business properly; all the bills paid, and whatever monies are left in the main account go to her. The business has supported my partner for a good few years, and I hope that it will do the same for Blondie and I. She had a secure base in the home that she and her husband owned, and in Social Security – which she pas paid into all of her working life. I have the military pension, and what comes in from my own books – the Tiny Bidness serves to provide the extras. The agreement is that I will pay the costs of the legal eagle who will draw up the agreement transferring the other company assets to me: the website, the care of reoccurring clients, the various files, three shelves worth of publisher copies of the various published books, whatever passes for DBA certificates, intangible things such as client good-will, the good-will and knowledge of several local providers of services … in another week or so, it will all be mine.
I am naturally restraining myself from romping, Scrooge McDuck-wise, through an Olympic-swimming-pool-sized pool of gold coins. It’s not that kind of company and likely will never be otherwise in this age of Obama, even if I had a mad wish for that to be the case. No, I will deliberately keep it small, personal, depend on personal connections and good service rendered. I may eventually have a storefront office, just for the look of things – but I think to depend otherwise on taking client meetings at a local chain’s coffee shop locations. I swear, there are probably more deals made over their tables by small niche businesses and independent salespeople than practically any other venue. As for assistance in the business, I’ll be training Blondie up in it; first assignment, to memorize the Chicago Manual of Style, and second; learn Photoshop inside and out. I also negotiated an exhibitor space at the upcoming second annual San Antonio Book Festival. Alas, they are being a trifle rigid about subsidy publishers, so an exhibitor space is about the best that I can do. None of my own books would be eligible to be nominated; they lifted their requirements from the Texas Book Festival in Austin – and that organization is also rather snotty about books published by subsidy presses, or those published by their authors. No one has explained some of the facts of the current publishing life to them – which is that there are writers taking it all very seriously and hiring editors, book designers and cover designers and marketing talent out of their own pocket and producing a book every bit as good as or better than those produced the traditional way.
I already have a good client, with promise of repeat business; a retired Army officer and amateur historian, who has a series of five books – or rather, original documents to do with the Civil War in the Hill Country, which he has pulled out from various sources, and annotated through his own research. This is just the sort of thing which the Tiny Bidness has specialized in – and he is no end chuffed that I already am familiar with the events and dramatis personae. So … to work. And to work some
I’m having mine chocolate-flavored, with a dash of whipped cream and mini-peanut-butter cups and toasted almonds sprinkled over, watching the Wendy Davis meltdown, high atop my perch in suburban San Antonio.
Yes ma’am, the spectacle of a relatively unknown local state senator, suddenly elevated to national media attention and anointed the great feminist hope of out-of-state Dems everywhere, suddenly melting down … it is delicious. I ought not to feel this degree of vicious satisfaction … but I do. Heretofore, Ms. Davis only annoyed me for her filibuster opposing tighter regulation of abortion and the three-ring circus which ensued in the Capitol; Honestly, is insisting that abortions must take place before 20 weeks of a pregnancy have passed, and that the facility in which they are performed be at least as hygienic as your average Lasik surgery clinic somehow rise to the status of Teh Great War on Wymens? Really!? She wasn’t representing a district anywhere near mine, and lord knows I have heard tales of state senators and representatives who were notorious for shenanigans even more embarrassing. She, in other words, was not my representative and not my problem.
So I paid very little attention to her, other than to note that she had that sort of slim, tanned and polished look which only can be achieved by relentless dieting, working out, regular beauty-parlor appointments and a lavish expense account at Neiman-Marcus; the very epitome of a modern major feminist. Of course, she would be the latest liberal flavor-fave, especially since her story of working up from being a single teenage mother, living in a trailer … and yet managing to pull herself up by her own efforts and graduate Harvard Law. Well, as Bertie Wooster would say, huzzah for all that! What better liberal candidate for governor of the state of Texas could there be? Although, as my daughter pointed out, if being a relatively impoverished, self-educated and hardworking single mother are the criteria for higher political office these days, I might be at least as well qualified as Ms. Davis.
I have not a shred of a doubt that Ms. Davis has pulled in out of state donations by the bucket-full – and I also have no shred of a doubt that she will move on to a profitable perch in the national Democratic party organization, or maybe to their propaganda arm, otherwise known as the national media. Where else can someone so essentially unself-aware be assured of a comfortable living after having mucked up a political future at the state level? Thanks to that devastating report in the Dallas Morning News, and her own ill-considered reaction to it, Ms. Davis likely has sunk herself with Texas voters three different ways. To male voters, she looks like the vindictive and social-climbing ex-wife from hell, to women voters, she comes off as a manipulative, gold-digging mean girl, and to all Texas voters, she appears as if she is more wedded to outside-Texas interests. And to whimper about having her personal and family life put under a hostile microscope, and have media outlets like NPR whine on her behalf, after what was said about Sarah Palin’s personal and family life? In this cruel world, that’s called turn-about being fair play. Hence the extra scoop of schadenfreude.
I must have been in college (or possibly even just high school), when I read a thoughtful essay in TV Guide, of all places, to the effect that people all over the world who had never met an American, or been to the United States, almost always formed their impressions of us based on what they saw in the movies, or in television shows. As one of our AFRTS public service announcement tag-line had it – foreigners don’t know America, they just know Americans – and the Americans which the movie and television audience saw was usually not a very favorable one. This essay must have been put out in the early 1970s, so I imagine the general picture is even less favorable now. Just think of current popular TV shows with an American setting – and consider how America would look to you if that was all you saw, and all you knew was Breaking Bad, a dozen cop shows set in big cities, and half a dozen sit-coms where the characters spend most of their time in suspiciously well-decorated living rooms.
Lately – especially in the wake of the Great Duck Dynasty Imbroglio of 2013, I have begun to suspect that the TV and movie tycoons don’t know America any better than those foreigners, as they seem to be looking at everything between the coasts and half a dozen trendy enclaves dotted here and there, though the same distorting lens. There is a disconnect between the people who make our movies, and the audience who watches them, a gulf between which is presently about as deep as the Grand Canyon. How else to account for … a lot of stuff, like Roman Polanski having the sympathy and support of many entertainment gentry while the rest of us are recoiling in revulsion at the pervy old teen-molester. Or the popularity of the previously mentioned Duckers – yes, when their branded stuff is all over retail outlets in fly-over country, you can bet they are pretty darned popular. This popularity seems to have escaped the management suits at A&E, although probably not their accounting department.
And now I see a two-fer; both of which involve Meryl Streep. This is a rather a pity, as I had always thought of her as a darned good actress who had the sense to eschew both tabloid-fodder antics in her personal off-stage/off-screen life, and generally to keep a low profile when it comes to politically incendiary material. Alas, she felt obliged to accuse Walt Disney of being racist, an anti-Semite and a misogynist, in the course of presenting an award to Emma Thompson for a role that the latter played … in a movie about a Disney movie. Tacky, in the least, as the man has been dead for more than forty years and certainly in no position to defend himself against the charge of having been a man of his own time and not this presently tolerant and enlightened one.
And according to Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul whose production company has graced the viewing public with such serene, non-violent and principled movies such as Gangs of New York, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, one of his new projects is an anti-NRA opus. Supposedly, it will move the great American viewing public to drop their weapons and their NRA membership as if they were suddenly made of radioactive materiel. Accused of hypocrisy on this contradiction between his previous movies and his proposed one, naturally Mr. Weinstein swears that from now on, he will go forth and sin cinematically no more. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if his fingers were crossed behind his back. He has the great good fortune to live and work in places where he can feel personally secure, and obviously has little knowledge of and sympathy for those of us who don’t. I’d say I’ll probably boycott his movies from now on, but as I have never been to any of them anyway, I’m not certain that I can call it a boycott.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)
Around the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, I was working two days a week at a Tiny Bidness owned by a friend of mine, Dave the Computer Genius. I had known Dave off and on since 2002, ever since I had looked for a local computer tech to tell me what was wrong with my very first computer. I think that I found Dave through some on-line search, possibly through some local variant of Craig’s list. Anyway, he pronounced my computer well and truly dead, and sold me a rehabbed unit which even if rehabbed was still a better and more up-to-date one than the defunct unit, which I had gotten ten good years out of since buying it at the Yongsan PX. So, I referred Dave to my then-employer, the consultancy dealing in intellectual property (read – did marketing packages and a provisional patent for people who had invented a gadget), and later on he referred me to one of his clients, the ranch realtor, when I was job-hunting.
Dave did computer installation, training, and trouble-shooting – rather like a one-man Geek Squad – and having a nice collection of regular clients, he did pretty well at it. He talked once or twice of one of them, another Tiny Bidness – a little local publisher owned by Alice G. whom he insisted I would get on with like a house on fire. He promised that one of those days he would take me along when he went to her home/office to work on her computer system, and introduce us. He always thought that we should get together, since he thought we both had a lot in common. And so we did, eventually – although that wasn’t until six months after Dave died of a sudden heart attack.
So, Alice and I went into partnership. Her little company was basically a one-person shop, after the death of her husband – coincidentally about two weeks before Dave’s death. I re-did her website, and re-did it again, when the cost of the specialized software to maintain it got to be too much. I learned her system for estimating costs, took client meetings – and she had been doing business so long in San Antonio that the company has a lot of name recognition locally among those with the wherewithal to publish a book privately. I did editing and sometimes transcriptions when the client had only a paper manuscript and not a word-processing file. I learned how to do formatting – that is, book interior design – and a couple of years ago I talked Alice into establishing a publish-on-demand imprint. We had lost a good number of otherwise promising clients, you see; Alice preferred using a local lithographic printing enterprise, which is only a bargain if you want to print more than a couple of hundred copies at a whack, whereas a POD imprint which also fed into a national distributor would let us be more competitive – and put our client’s books on Amazon. The days of clients who could afford to pay $5,000 to $15,000 and up to publish their book was coming to an end, I would argue, and we were in competition with Createspace and Booklocker and Booksurge and a hundred other POD houses. She would point out that there were years when she only did two books a year, and I would say that we wouldn’t even have that many at the rate we were going.
So, we set up the POD imprint – and of our five clients last year, four of them were POD. I handled them all anyway. We re-did all of my own books that had been published already – and the sales of the printed versions came trickling back to the imprint’s book account. Alice was sidelined more and more with health problems, which have come to a head in the last few months.
The bottom line is that I am going to buy her out, for pretty much the cost of her lawyer doing all the paperwork to transfer the business to me. It’s a good thing that the land sold when it did – as I can just about afford to do this. It’s a nice little business, with all the necessary connections to freelance service providers. There are clients with reoccurring orders for reprints, and potential customers who just prefer to be able to sit down and meet face to face with a real person. Together with my pension, with the income from my own writing – there’ll be enough. I’ll never look to grow it to the point of hiring employees, though. Training up Blondie as my junior partner, as Alice trained me – well, that’s where my work future lies, and with luck it will provide for us both.
I saw this on the comment thread for this article – and it was so good, I simply have to repost. Of my four grandparents, one only was American-born. The others were hopeful immigrants.
For me, the “old country” is West Virginia. I wasn’t born there and never lived there, but my father was, though he lived most of his life as an Air Force brat away from it, and my paternal grandparents, both born there, lived their working lives away, too, only going back after they retired. Yet I own land there that I inherited, an old farm far up in the mountains that’s been in my family for generations, and I feel a deep and abiding affection for the homeland of my people.
The happiest summer of my life as a child was spent on my grandparent’s farm, where I walked paths and drank from springs that generation upon generation of my folk walked and drank from. I played with dogs that had never known a leash, learned marksmanship by shooting the head off Prince Albert with a .22, picked berries and was taught how to make them into pies and cobblers, jams and preserves.
While the West Virginia side of my family has Scotch-Irish blood, it also has plenty of German Dunkard and Hessian, Dutch and French Huguenot blood as well, and maybe a little bit of Delaware Indian.
The implication of the article that all Appalachian peoples are Scotch-Irish feeds into the old canard that they are incestuous retards; I’ve had Jews–who as a people are so inbred they have genetic diseases–mock me as an inbred yokel when they learn my people come from West Virginia. It gets tiresome, especially when I am really the product of hybrid vigor.
I’ve sat in the parlors of great aunts while a coal fire sizzled in a pot-bellied stove and listened to them tell me in their soft drawl, putting “h”s and “r”s in odd places, who married who and from what county they came from for generations back, and heard references to incidents that occurred in the year of the bloody sevens (1777). I’ve been led to a spot where a giant American chestnut tree stood for hundreds of years, only dying of blight in the 1930s. That tree, so they told me, bore the marks of the bullet fired by a Shawnee Indian in the pay of the British that killed one of my direct ancestors during the Revolutionary War.
But I’ve been put down by sophisticated, worldy-wise urban people who have no clue where their people came from–they don’t even really have “people” and don’t understand the concept. For that matter, they don’t even have a native land, a native soil fought for by their own blood that is theirs forever. In my mind, they are the true neo-peasants–landless, ancesterless, cultureless, helpless metrohumans–while I come from a long line of independent, arms-bearing freeholders.
I understand the prickly defensiveness of many commenters to this article: it seems just another hit piece on the dumb hillbilly corn pones. Why, even the white trash Okies had enough sense to get out–and never mind that most of those Okies were originally part of the Appalachian diaspora.
People have been leaving Appalachia for generations. But of course there will always be some who don’t emigrate. Does that mean they are worthless human debris?
There’s an old American expression–“There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.” It never fails to get a rise out of all that dumb, stay-behind Euro-trash. Is it true? If it’s not, then why should we accept that the Appalachian people who “stayed behind” are losers and failures?
Yes, Appalachia has lots of problems. But so does rural California, where I live. We need infrastructure here–especially roads and bridges but also high-speed internet and air service–and jobs and good schools. Will we get them? I doubt it. The only things we produce that the wider nation has any use for are soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. Lots of those.
Many of the local people are of old settler stock, their ancestors trekking the Oregon Trail or rounding the Horn in clipper ships in the 1840s and ’50s. Ranches and farms typically have been in the same families for four or five generations, at least. Nobody wants to leave. Nobody wants to live in cities or suburbs. They hate the commercial pop culture that corrupts their children. They dislike the lifestyle attitudes of the NPR radio stations that blanket the airwaves (five FM and three AM stations where I live, all broadcasting the same thing). They have been exploited and abandoned by amoral timber and mining companies, and by turns pandered to and oppressed by federal, state and local governments.
Somebody ought to write about their fortitude and stoicism, their relentless “next year will be better” optimism, their abiding religious faith. But no one does. When someone does write about the area, it is pretty much like this piece. Interview people in beer joints and welfare offices, find a stoner or two, hear tales of meth heads, find a back-to-the land old hippie, and that’s about it.
What else is new?
20 â–³ â–½
All during late November and December of last year, I began seeing internet discussions of the looming disaster that is Obamacare – and yes, I will hang that name on the so-called Affordable Care Act, also known as the un-Affordable Care Act. The man behind the desk in the Oval Office pursued this as his singular achievement; his legislative allies rammed it through over protest, and his media allies have viciously abused those who advised caution. So it is only fitting and fair that his name get attached to it at every opportunity, especially if it brings down his whole political machine in a spectacular fashion, rather like a slow-motion Hindenberg collapsing.
Just before the disastrous roll-out of the Obamacare sign-up websites, I began note, among all the chaff, some sober speculations here and there; commenters speculating that once people began having to write substantial checks for healthcare insurance, out of their own pocket – that’s when the beautiful theory of quality healthcare insurance for all would run into the jagged rocks of reality. Exactly those people who had bought into it as a lovely idea, because it was fair and all – they would be disillusioned in large numbers.
Which is what we see coming to pass; first in blog discussion threads, then the major media organizations begin dipping a cautious toe into reporting the actual impact of Obamacare on real people, I discussed it privately with certain friends who share somewhat of the same beliefs, and just this week, I overheard a vociferous discussion in a public place, among people who were strangers to me. My daughter and I were in a retail store, a defiantly old-fashioned five and dime – and up at the front, the three cashiers were discussing their insurance options under Obamacare. They were all three at a guess, about ten or fifteen years older than me, and the town where this establishment is located is a pretty well-to-do place. No, the three ladies were baffled, upset and venting freely – being of the age when chronic health problems begin to bite.
Increasingly, the internet ‘chatter’ is speculation that the disastrous roll-out of the Obamacare website, the paltry numbers who have actually been able to sign up for health care insurance through it, and the wide-spread unhappiness with it as evidenced by the overheard discussion, all have another purpose. Yes, the Obama administration had a cunning plan all along – and all this was intended to pave the way to so-called ‘single-payer’ once those pesky private health insurance providers are sidelined. Never mind that this has and will continue to cause disruption of every sort; from employers cutting back on hiring and the number of employee hours worked, to people with serious health issues who will be affected, and those who had health insurance but don’t any more. People will suffer and some – very likely some will die because of it – but apparently the ends justify the means, if the end is a noble goal such as a national health service like Canada, or England.
Which is apparently what all the civilized nations have, as a commenter on Open Salon had it, some months ago; one nationalized health care service coming up, for which everyone pays in taxes – or at least, those of us who do pay taxes pay for it – and everyone receives what they need in health care services. Just like … the Veterans Administration medical care, or military medical care, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs medical care, only spread nation wide and to all citizens. Yum, yum; the appetizing prospect of having your doctor not work for you, with your best interests and health at heart as a primary goal because if you are unhappy with the result, you will go elsewhere seeking a better result. Instead your medical care provider is working for an impenetrable, unanswerable bureaucracy, a bureaucracy which – no matter what it’s failing might be in your particular instance, is somehow never found at fault in a meaningful way, especially of you or one of your loved ones suffers or dies from that bureaucratic failing. And the worst insult of all is knowing that those elected officials who are preparing this particular s**t sandwich for us, have and will exempt themselves from ever having to take a bite of it.
Interesting times. Discuss.
(Crossposted at www.chicagoboyz.net)
Always loved Mark Knopfler’s music, with and without Dire Straits. Enjoy
Yes, we did indeedy – the elusive fast armadillo of Uptown Luckenbach, Texas! you see, there really is a place in the Hill Country called Luckenbach, it’s just not a name in a country-western song.
It’s a feed mill, actually – just up the road from the loop which leads into downtown Luckenbach, home of the old post office/general store/concert venue. But in the same unpaved driveway there is a small souvenir store, run by a guy named Monroe, who advertises his own home-made custom art. If he is not there, the store runs on a self-serve, honor basis. See what you like, drop the money for it in an old butter-churn crock, or in a lockbox outside.
And many of Monroe’s roadside signs advertise asking about the fast armadillo.
What is the fast armadillo, you may ask? This.
Yes, he does a free-hand sketch of an armadillo, etched with a Dremel tool, on a glass bottle (scrounged from local dumpsters or by donations, I guess), adds an ornamental squiggle, the date, and ‘Luckenbach, Texas.’ He does this – when he is there at the shop – for tips. Apparently many curious travelers have stopped, looking for the fast armadillo, but it’s a matter of luck, catching Monroe in the shop at the right time.
He did two bottles for us – one is for Mom, so he did an especially large fast armadillo, and put her name on it. We tipped, and Blondie folded him an origami crane out of a piece of lined notebook paper, but it still took her twice the time that he took, doing the bottles.
Yep, that is one fast armadillo.
Ah, the New Year is upon us, now that we have successfully negotiated the month-long holiday hurdles – and no, I am doing my best not to ask myself what fresh hells await, since I am barely done with the rich banquet served up to us at year-end.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh, and laugh, and laugh at the spectacle of a boat-full of global-warmenist tourists venturing on an Antarctic expedition to prove that the polar ice is melting faster than the Wicked Witch when Dorothy emptied a bucket of water onto her … being caught in the ice … and having to be rescued by ice-breaking ships. The topper is that this is actually the summer season at the bottom of the world, and the darned stuff is supposed to be melting seasonally anyway. But apparently not, and the gales of laughter at this bit of misfortune are not quite strong enough to dislodge the ship. Was Al Gore anywhere around? The unseasonably horrible weather hitting all of the United States but a tiny band along the west coast argues the presence of He Whose Chakras Need to be Raised, or at least smacked with a bucket of cold water.
Ah, the fortunes of the ruling dynasty in North Korea have taken a positively surreal turn into I, Claudius territory, with the long-time advisor and uncle (with a handful of Uncle’s top aides) of Pudgy-Boy Kim executed by being served up naked to a pack of starving dogs – and the ruling echelons made to watch the proceedings. To encourage the others, I guess. This was reported via Chinese news media, which makes me wonder how tired the Chinese are getting of the antics of Pudgy-Boy and all the other Kims. Given that dog-meat is a traditional Korean delicacy, and in North Korea eating it is likely a matter of survival, perhaps the dogs considered this arrangement a fair turn-about. No wonder Dennis Rodman appears to be getting fond of North Korea; height and color aside, he blends right in with the general freakishness.
And speaking of a parade of … well, not freaks exactly, more a case of being freakishly out of touch, I give you MSNBC, or as I have begun to call it, PMSNBC – now in a dead heat with Time Magazine as they race to the bottom. Well, both of these media entities were once respected, popular and purveyors of the news. Now I suppose it is commentary and opinion all the way, and very strident and in-your-face opinion, too. The insults are just the extra, although I am certain Melissa Harris-Perry got an earful over that notorious segment poking mean-girl fun at Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson. Being that she was a child of color – or anyway, half-color – born to a white Mormon mother, one would have thought Ms. Harris-Perry would have been a little more circumspect. I can hope that perhaps her own mother put her straight, about how painful it would be for mother and child alike to hear sniggering cracks about how one of these things is not like the other, and one of those things does not belong.
And finally, Obamacare, sweet Obamacare, the unAffordable Care Act, now in the act of a slo-mo clash and burn even more spectacular than that of the Hindenberg. Yes, thank you, I’ll have my serving of schadenfreude in chocolate flavor, with a spritz of whipped cream, toasted almonds and a cherry on top. Harsh? I’ll save my sympathies for those people now caught within the deadly toils of trying to work out some kind of healthcare coverage for themselves and their families who did not vote Dem in the last two elections. For those who did, and are now unpleasantly confronted with the results – sorry, we warned you, over and over, and all we got for that was abuse and ridicule. Sometimes enlightenment is only achieved through pain. I haven’t ventured into Open Salon lately to see how enlightenment is progressing these days – I’m not a sadist that way. I’ll just settle for my tasty cup of schadenfreude.
Hang tight – it’s gonna be an interesting ride through 2014.
Dawn over the Guajito with bird-of-paradise bushes, January 2010.
One would have to possess a heart of stone, to read about the grand Antarctic expedition intended to prove that the Antarctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate… get stuck in the ice!
(Found at Samizdata)
This is not so much a compendium of the experiences of those Americans present in Germany when the Third Reich began it’s ascent to power, but a character study of a particular family. There were a fair number Americans resident in Germany at that time, or just passing through; diplomatic personnel and their families, scholars, newspaper and radio reporters, travelers, businessmen, expatriates of all sorts, or even German-Americans paying extended visits to kin. The family of Ambassador William Dodd falls into the first category and Dodd himself into the second as well. He was an academic, a historian who earned his PhD at the University of Leipzig at the turn of the turn of the century, where he picked up fluency in the language and a deep affection for the country. He was a friend of Woodrow Wilson and when FDR’s administration was stuck to name an ambassador (when their first two choices declined) Dodd was tasked with the honor, which he took up from 1933-1937. Dodd was not a professional diplomat, and it soon emerged that those whom he had to work with at State Department didn’t think all that much of him. For one – he was not particularly wealthy and vowed to live in modest fashion while carrying out his assignment, which lasted from 1933 to 1937. This was rather a strike against him in the circles that he was expected to move; if the professionals had to put up with a patronage appointment, a rich one who would spend lavishly from his or her own purse while in pursuit of diplomatic objectives would make up in some fashion for the bother of conducting business with the host nation through an amateur.
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