In At the Beginning

18. February 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Memoir, War

Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood-of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

We were relieved when it was all ended in 1972 – you have no idea of how the horror lifted, or maybe you do, if you are of an age to remember. And then horrified by the pictures of the scramble to get Americans and those Vietnamese citizens unfortunate to be American-adjacent and thus fearful of North Vietnam reprisals barely three years later. It seemed as if all the horrors were crashing in on us and the South Vietnamese again. The mobs of frantic Vietnamese at the gates of the embassy, helicopters loading up and taking off from the pad on the roof of the US Embassy, small boats laden to the gunwales with frantic Vietnamese families setting out from the shore in hopes of being rescued by ocean-going ships waiting offshore … The North Vietnamese had won, after all – and was there anything that we could do for people who had been our allies?

It seemed that there was something that we could do; the pastor of the church we attended at the time sent me as a representative of our congregation to a meeting to discuss what steps our denomination could take to sponsor refugee families through the auspices of Lutheran Social Services. Within weeks, I was neck deep in a local ad-hoc organization since we decided that our congregation did not have enough resources to sponsor refugees. By sponsorship, I mean that everything to assist a family or two of Vietnamese refugees over their first months or years in the US would come out of our resources: rent, fitting out a residence with the bare necessities, food assistance, transportation, finding employment, schooling, language lessons if necessary, and help coping with various bureaucracies.
So our church clubbed together with several other congregations and some local chapters of fraternal organizations – the Lions club was one. We took stock of what we offer and informed Lutheran Social Services that we thought we could sponsor a large extended family of up to 25 people. (It was our understanding that was the greatest need – support for large families.) We were informed several weeks later that we would be sponsoring three small families and three single young men – teenaged boys, really. We quickly found a small house and two apartments to rent and decided that perhaps the boys would best be situated with volunteer families, since the rent for three residences for two or three months was all that we could afford. It all worked out well, in the end – one of the families and the single young man who came to live with us stayed in touch for decades afterwards. They all found jobs, bought homes, built lives as Americans. A mostly happy ending, as these things go.

I must reiterate that all this support, monetary and otherwise, for the refugees that we and other local churches sponsored was the direct responsibility of our various local community groups. There were no grants of money passed on to us by Lutheran Social Services, although a congressional act passed in May, 1975 allocated funds to each of the national refugee assistance organizations based on how many individual refugees signed up to be assisted by them. Those funds amounted to $250 per person, adult and child. That specific sum sticks in my head for a particular reason; at least one of the assistance organizations in 1975 just passed those funds on to individual refugees overseen by their agency as a gift: pin money to help them start new lives. Word got around concerning this generosity, and the father of one of our refugee charges asked us (demanded, really) – why didn’t his family receive $1,000, for himself, wife and two children? We passed the enquiry to Lutheran Social Services and received their answer; their decision was to use the funds granted by Congress to help cover unforeseen and out-of-cycle needs like extensive and expensive medical care needed by some refugees. It was their way of doing things. The complaining refugee father continued demanding what he believed to be his rightful due and eventually changed agencies to get it. We were honestly glad to be rid of him, and rather sorry for his wife, who was sweet and shy and possibly rather embarrassed by her husband’s cash-grab.

When I read about how NGOs like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have since made bank out of getting government funds to resettle refugees and cart migrants all around the country in large groups, I am certain that 1975 was when the corruption of organized charity began. Refugee resettlement became a matter of getting a generous payout from the government, rather than depending on the efforts of small self-organized groups in local communities to help refugee clients settle into the US. Resettlement became a means of fattening on some of that big-government cash; a vital part of the refugee/migrant funding complex. Discuss as you wish.

Live Not By Lies

11. February 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not

It’s often been observed that many great scientific discoveries, as well as evidence of criminality often begin with someone casually glancing at some kind of anomaly, saying to themselves “Hmmm – that’s odd!” and curiosity drawing them into taking a closer look at the matter. Such was the case when an activist for matters to do with native American tribal identity (these would be the folk who used to be called Indians of the feather variety) was watching a TV interview. The activist was one of those who specialized in unmasking so-called “Pretendians” – those who claim Indian descent for reasons of social advantage or monetary gain. (Yes, looking at you, Senator Elizabeth Warren). Remarks made during the interview, by singer-activist Buffy St. Marie triggered a “Hmm, that’s odd!” reaction. Those remarks concerned St. Marie’s search for her real parents among a Canadian First Nations tribe, and the circumstances under which she was adopted by a white American couple as a baby. “Gee,” thought the activist, “That’s what all the other Pretendians say!”
That may not have been the absolute beginning of the thread-pull which unraveled the tangle of St. Marie’s decades-long claims, but it had the same eventual result.

It must be a horrible and soul-destroying thing to have invested so much of her life and career in a pretense such as that, even as it brought her opportunities and fame. She was and is talented; no denying that, but one does have to wonder if she would have been quite as famous if she remained plain old Beverly Santamaria, a plain old Italian-American girl from upstate New York. It would have seemed like just a small thing at first, a ready temptation to polish one’s image in the press, just to stand out as a little more exotic, a bit more romantic, a bit more authentic in the early years on the 1960s folk scene. Considering again, though – the burden of living a lie, always aware of the media-sharpened sword of Damocles suspended on a thread over one’s head In the end that must be soul-warping; thinking of the additional lies required to perpetuate that pretense over decades.

They say the road down to hell is paved at first with attractive materials. But as involved, elaborate as the pretense eventually became, so must have the gnawing secret fear that perhaps one day, it might all come tumbling down, just as it finally has in the last few months. The Canadian government has revoked the honors bestowed on her. The proof must be iron-clad that she is Beverly Santamaria, and not a Canadian Piapot tribe member adopted by an American couple through curiously untraceable international governmental shenanigans in 1941. It seems, additionally, that her own son has taken a DNA test, as has her surviving sister – and yes, it turns out they are close blood kin. Which completely invalidates the adoption tale. (More background here, in this documentary.)
I think the ugliest aspect of what would have begun as only a little padding of the ethnic resume is how St. Marie treated her own birth family – a family who otherwise might have taken very real pride in having a talented and famous member. About the time that she began appearing on Sesame Street, her brother Alan went briefly public, protesting that she was not Indian, not adopted at all, but born naturally to his parents, and brought up as his blood sister. In response, the already famous and well-established personality unleased her lawyers on him, threatening to smear him publicly as an abuser and child molester. There was no way to defend against such a threat, although it appears that no one else in the immediate family gave any credence to the accusation. There would be no way to prove the accusation false; doing so would be messy, public, protracted and would likely cost Alan Santamaria his career and his good name anyway. So the Santamaria family were terrified into silence after that, a silence which continued until recently.

What an ugly, spiteful way to treat your family – because they could and would have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that your public persona was a complete lie. Comment as you wish.

The Handcart Saga

07. February 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far west – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the mid-west to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

The epic of the handcart companies followed on the initial founding of Salt Lake City, and the various other settlements in Utah Territory – a stretch of wilderness between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, first encountered in 1846 by early travelers to California following a new route established by would-be explorer Lansford Hastings.
Brigham Young may not have been the dazzlingly charismatic, mesmerizing visionary that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon or LDS church (Latter Day Saints) had been – but his talent for organization and giving scope to the talents of other people with the same set of skills and vision approached the supernatural. There were many off-beat religious movements, sects and idealistic communes in existence in the US in the first half of the 19th century – Millerites, Owenites, Shakers, the Onida and Amana Colonies, various Fourier societies – but the LDS which Brigham Young led was the most successful and longest-lasting of them all; it is still vigorous and growing, unlike most of the other 19th century idealist communities.

During the 1840s and 1850s, wagon train pioneers heading west to California and Oregon usually transported family, goods and required supplies in wagons most often pulled by two or three pairs of draft animals. That was also the means most often utilized in the first decade of emigration by LDS converts and believers to Utah. However, by the mid-1850s straited circumstances and shortages of funds hampered efforts to bring LDS emigrants to Utah, while at the same time an enormous backlog of converts built up in the British Isles and on the continent. Hundreds had come by ship to the east coast, and then by train as far as the mid-west – but then, how would they make the last 1,300 miles? Brigham Young conceived the notion of light two-wheeled carts, pulled by the converts themselves on the last leg between the railhead at Iowa City and Salt Lake City. Each cart company would be accompanied by a few regular wagons, carrying supplies, bedding and tents. And most wagon-train emigrants in earlier years had walked much of the trail anyway … so there was a cheaper solution for LDS believers, eager to get to their Zion.

So potent was the desire to bring these converts to Utah, matched by the organizing skills of the leadership, that it was accomplished. Not without some hardship and the usual setbacks, but three companies, for a total of 800 souls departed on their long journey in the summer of 1856. They were all shepherded by experienced teamsters, or returning LDS missionaries, all on foot and pulling their few possessions in carts (four or five persons to a cart was the estimation). Unfortunately, two more handcart parties, the Willie and Martin companies (so called for their leaders, James Willie and Edward Martin) departed in mid- or late August … against advice, and too late in the year to make it to Salt Lake City before winter set in. There were about a thousand men, women and children in the two groups, most being recent immigrants, unaccustomed to the frontier, and scantily equipped for bad weather.

A cascade of miscalculations by the various authorities at either end of the trail, bad decisions by leaders in the companies, and misfortune along the trail resulted in nine hundred men, women, children and babies becoming stranded by winter near present-day Caspar, Wyoming. One company lost the draft animals to pull their supply wagons to a stampede of buffalo. They had to lighten their carts – of heavy clothing and bedding that might have provided more shelter against winter … when winter then closed down on them. They were cold, starving, sickened and worn down by exposure to the elements and the hardships of walking and pulling the carts. A survivor later wrote that fathers pulled the carts with their small children on them, right up until the day before they died.

There was one fortunate aspect to this purgatory of cold and misery – rescue was on the way. A fast-moving small party of LDS missionaries returning to Salt Lake City had overtaken the two lagging parties. They arrived in Salt Lake City early in October, and informed LDS leaders that there were two more large parties still on the trail. Brigham Young and his leadership council were sensible men – and were horrified to receive this intelligence. They could look at the calendar and read a map. Volunteers for a rescue party were called for at once, and dispatched east along the trail. The Willie company was found first, camped on the Sweetwater River near South Pass. Half the rescue party stayed with them, while the other half pushed on to find the Martin company, a hundred miles farther east. The surviving members of that company had eaten nearly the last of their meagre rations, were exhausted, sick and starving, many of them crippled by frostbite. It was a tale of suffering with a toll of casualties only second to the Donner-Reed party, but without the gruesome element of cannibalism. At least 200 of the Willie and Martin companies died and were buried in mass graves along the way. Only an equally heroic rescue effort kept the toll from being even higher. It seems that most survivors rose above their suffering, viewing it later as a test of their faith and dedication. While only about 3,000 LDS converts journeyed to Salt Lake City in handcart companies before the arrival of the railway made that means of travel redundant, the experience of the handcart companies remains, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of LDS Iliad.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
John Newton – Amazing Grace

Considering Media Teflon

28. January 2025 · Comments Off on Considering Media Teflon · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,All they will call you will be “deportees“

Oh, pity the poor establishment media folks, the woke clergy, and the professional bleeding heart progressive activists, all making woeful faces and lamenting regarding the round-up and repatriation of masses of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s as if they all honestly believe that the masses of illegals are all doe-eyed innocent widdle cheeeldren and humble suffering agricultural workers, all packed off by their cheating employers once the harvest season is finished. The bubble in which these sentiments are enshrined as gospel is being severely battered over this last week as it becomes apparent that many, many Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and incomes welcome the ICE roundups and deportations with cheers of rapturous approval. Imagine that.

See, it looks like the various prog bubble-dwellers could burnish their luxury beliefs without feeling in the least inconvenienced by the realities posed by mass quantities of illegal immigrants, especially those who compounded their illegal status by piling additional criminal behavior on top. Not just sex-trafficking, murder, rape, robbery, and drug-dealing, but identity-theft, driving without a license, insurance, or knowledge of traffic laws, and defrauding social services. Swamping working-class neighborhoods, overburdening schools and health-care facilities to the point of being untenable, depressing wages for lower-end unskilled work, bringing in diseases that hadn’t been current in the US for decades. Ordinary folk in working-class neighborhoods were catching the brunt of all this. To a lesser extent, so were those paying for auto insurance, especially in cities and states where, if you were T-boned at an intersection by a driver running a red light you could count yourself extremely fortunate if that other driver were sober, licensed and fully insured, or best two out of three.

I’d guess that the rapturous approval of the deportations this week is precisely because those being frog-marched onto the big airplane are the criminal scum of the scummiest, whose absence from these shores absolutely no one will miss, save for perhaps their addict customers, their fence for stolen goods and maybe an addled activist, and whatever NGO was paid for bringing them here in the first place. The addled activists are lamenting that practically everyone else is deeply unsympathetic to their laments, and demanding of decent folk that they collude in sheltering the illegals … as if they really were the poor widdle cheeeldren and downdrodden field workers …. Instead of being the criminal scum of the earth. Good luck with that line of reasoning. Really. Good luck, because you’ll need it.
I’d also guess from the lightning-speed at which local law enforcement, ICE, and the Boarder Patrol dropped on the various criminal scum that a lot of people in law and border enforcement had, like Koko the Lord High Executioner, their little lists of those who wouldn’t be missed. Very accurate little lists, of who, and when and where they could be most expeditiously found.
I suppose that once the stock of illegal alien criminals is drawn down, they will start on the illegal widdle cheeldren and the field workers – but by that point, perhaps they will have already self-deported.

On another aspect of the Trump administration, one week and a day in – I am also hugely amused at the Teflon aspects of J.D. Vance, as his vice president. Our establishment media has become so accustomed to Republican political operators who never bite back, or who tended to snivel like third-graders giving up their lunch money to playground bullies, that they seem quite discombobulated by J.D., who wasn’t even much a Trump fan at the first. The usual media crew can’t sanctimoniously score off him as a child of privilege, giving his hard-scrabble rust-country background. Can’t call him a raaaaacist, as he is married to a woman who is very obviously Indian. Can’t sneer at him for having studied at a no-name university, the way they sneered at Sarah Palin. All that – and he gives as good or better than he gets. There was a comment this morning on an Instapundit comment thread which pretty much sums it up: With JD, the Sunday shows are like shooting fish in a barrel. Not much of a challenge for him, but entertaining nonetheless. 🙂
Comment as you wish.

Rare and Fine Books

22. January 2025 · Comments Off on Rare and Fine Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Geekery, Local

(A break today from matters political.)

Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.

A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.

Digital printing and POD became a thing shortly after we became partners, and I set up an account with Lightning Source to serve clients who didn’t have the wherewithal to pay north of $15,000 for Alice’s schedule of services but still wanted to get their book out through Amazon and other on-line markets. I predicted accurately that such clients would soon become very thin on the ground, given the rise of digital printing and competition from existing POD publishers. We could not perhaps, supply such an elegant and high-end volumes as had become her standard through that subsidiary imprint – but we could work with clients who wanted the same high degree of editing, lay-out and covers, as well as distribution through Ingram.

Alice developed a cancerous node on her lung around 2013 and was not able to put much work into the business after that. With the agreement of her family, none of whom were interested in maintaining the Teeny Publishing Bidness, I bought her out: business, client list, contacts, files and all. Many of the remaining clients were touchingly grateful that someone was there to carry on with the firm. It has since developed that many of our older books, especially the ones dealing with local history are in demand … and command quite high prices on the rare book market. They were originally printed in limited quantities – perhaps a couple of thousand in one go – and while we kept a copy or two for record purposes, the rest of the print runs were turned over to the client for private distribution. I wish that we kept at least half a dozen copies of some books, as they presently command at least three-figure prices on the rare book market, if they can be found at all.

I field an occasional call from researchers and historians searching for a copy of one of our limited-run books. Our original authors (many of whom have, like Alice, passed away) did a lot of basic grunt work in researching local history, a mildly famous ancestor or an event, The late Fred McKenzie, who exhaustively researched local histories around Avinger and Hickory Hill, Cass County, Texas – at least has his books available on Amazon through second-hand dealers. I’ve fielded quite a few calls looking for copies from people researching their families, the place they live in, or a business that their family used to own in that part of Texas. I had no luck when a woman called, looking for a copy of this book for sale at any price. Best I could do was to find a nearby library which had a copy, and tell her to ask for it by interlibrary loan.

In the case of this biography, of a woman who was one of the dozen nurses evacuated by submarine from Corregidor before it surrendered to the Japanese in 1942, more copies are in existence; a naval commemorative group did several editions, which were widely distributed. Army nurse Lucy Wilson was barely a hundred pounds dripping wet at the start of the war; she lost twenty-five pounds in the few months of the American retreat. The chief nurse responsible for selecting the handful of women to be evacuated chose those who she feared would not survive captivity for very long, because of their physical or mental condition. Lucy Wilson likely was one of the first on her list. She later qualified as a flight nurse and returned to serve in the South Pacific before the war ended. I used it myself as a reference for my own WWII novel, My Dear Cousin. But no one can locate the current whereabouts of any of Lucy Wilson Jopling’s descendants, who hold the original rights – so no further editions.

Some of our authors wrote a memoir of events which later turned out to be of interest to higher-level researchers and historians. As participants or witnesses to events, they provide sources which are pure, original, unsullied gold to an academic researcher. In his youth during WWII, the author of this memoir was a transport pilot who flew transport aircraft over the hazardous “Hump”. Decades later, he wrote up a rollicking account of his adventures in that theater, and had six copies typed out by his secretary, one for each of his children. His youngest daughter came to us another decade and a half later with her copy and some other relics of his service, including his ration card for a month in late 1943, documenting that he had maxed out his beer allotment, but only used a single bar of soap. The daughter had us do a limited publication, for friends and family for Christmas gifts. Much, much later, a historian called me, looking for a copy of it – I have no idea how he even found the title, as the only place that even lists it is our website, and the Bowker, Inc. data base. Sometimes I can help by sending them in the direction of the author or client, who holds the rights to the book as well as any remaining copies. In this case, I could provide him with the name and last known address of the daughter.

This only applies for a handful of our older and rarer books, though. With the inprint to do publish on demand books, for those authors who have chosen to get their books available for distribution and available, say on Amazon, there is no such thing now as a limited quantity available, and a hard search to find them. Anyone who wants one of those later books can find it readily and easily, without going to the trouble of turning every used book store and rare book website upside down.

And that is my break and yours, from matters political this week. Comment as you wish, on rare books that you wish you had, or kept copies of, knowing now how much they might be worth.

The Fire Next Time

15. January 2025 · Comments Off on The Fire Next Time · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Politics, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.

So we lived in the hills as soon as Mom and Dad could afford a mortgage rather than rent, kept the brush around the various houses trimmed, the garden well-watered, had a mental list of the precious and irreplaceable items to be grabbed and taken with us in case of a sudden fire evacuation. (In the end, in spite of all care and precautions taken, Mom and Dad’s retirement house in northern San Diego County burned in the 2003 fires, destroying any number of inherited family relics.)I have never forgotten the peculiar odor of smoke from a big burn hanging in the air, the odd beige-orange color of the sky, how the smoke from a distant brushfire piles up in sullen beige clouds, and the peculiar deep roaring sound of a fire well under way. One night in the week of Thanksgiving 1975, we watched the Mill fire burning downhill towards Sunland, Tujunga and La Crescenta. Through Dad’s binoculars, we saw a fire tornado sucking flying debris into itself, while a line of advancing flames stretched as far to the east and west as we could see. Fire engine sirens wailed almost constantly, near and far that night, along the streets below us.

The LAFD were able to beat out that massive fire in the Angeles National Forest within three days or so. But that was then … this is now, and half a century later. Managerial competence in governance and administration appears to have departed California, right along with that portion of a middle and working class who despair of ever getting ahead of the game. So many essential blocks have been pulled out of the jenga tower that was California, through political expediency and mismanagement. The infrastructure of lines and hydrants neglected. Reservoirs and dams were not filled with a particularly generous snow-melt and routed where it would be needed when the fires came; instead, precious water was allowed to pour unhindered into the ocean. Fire breaks and roads were not maintained, preventive burns not done, because environmental activists within and outside the state government have made it nearly impossible. Insurance companies, upon seeing the writing on the wall and knowing that catastrophic fires were inevitable, flatly declined to provide coverage to homeowners. The LAFD fired essential personnel for refusing the Covid shot, deferred equipment maintenance, appeared to prioritize celebrating gay and transgender rather than focusing on fire prevention. In the final insult, the LA FD had their budget cut by the mayor’s office. The mayor herself seems to be one of those who revels in the rewards of the office and those ceremonial honors attached but has little appetite or ability for attending to essentials of civic management.

So all those jenga blocks had been pulled out, when the fires started burning after the Santa Ana winds began to blow. It matters very little if those fires were started by any deliberate or random accident, as they always will in California. Anything and everything will spark off a fire: a discarded cigarette butt, a short in a power line or a string of Christmas lights, a steel bulldozer striking a flint rock, sunlight focusing through a piece of broken glass, a campfire not entirely extinguished, a hot catalytic converter on a car parking in long dry grass … accident or arson.
The hills will burn.
This time, they have burned out the wealthy and well-situated. (Again – like the 1961 Bel-Air fire did.) To a large degree, those in Malibu, along the coast, and in the Pacific Palisades generally appear to be people who were perfectly OK with the initial extraction of the jenga blocks which permitted their secure and privileged lives. Until the fires came over the hillside. (The Eaton fire simultaneously burned out whole neighborhoods in Altadena. This didn’t seem to get half the breathless coverage in the mainstream establish media, mostly because it’s a middle-class to working class neighborhood, with many residents who have lived there for generations, and whose small urban single-family cottages will not be as readily replaced.)

Some commenters speculate that the fires this time will lead to a conservative reawakening in California. A nice thought, but I rather doubt it. Even with the various mismanagement of things in California … it’s still very pleasant for those who have a comfortable income, have lived there all their lives and distain the thought of living anywhere else. The climate is mild year-round, compared to most other places, the range of scenery is glorious, and there still are some cultural advantages. A handful of counties back of the coastal zone and outside of the big cities are still well-managed and sane.
I think it more likely that what will happen as a result of the fires will be a west-coast Curley effect. The electorate will be shaped as the long-time mayor of Boston did, driving out those most inclined to vote against progressive policies. Those who can see the writing on the wall are leaving and will leave with all speed, and perhaps the speed will increase after this disaster. The Californians left behind probably won’t vote for Karen “The Commie” Bass, Governor Brylcreem or their ilk. It’s even more likely that they’ll pull the lever for another even worse Dem next time around and probably one even more incompetent. Whoever the next generation of California politicians and managers will be – it’s a guarantee that their progressive credentials and their chosen pronouns will be perfect. Comment as you wish.

For Christmas – A Christmas in the Barracks, 1978

25. December 2024 · Comments Off on For Christmas – A Christmas in the Barracks, 1978 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

In November, it only seemed logical to plan our own Thanksgiving dinner. We took up a fund for groceries, did a headcount of who wasn’t going to their supervisors’ houses and immediately hit a snag:

“Who’s going to do the turkey?” was the main question, followed by “Well, who helped enough at home to stuff and bake a 20lb turkey without giving anyone food poisoning?” AFRTS spots at that time of year always spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on this unpleasant possibility.
I had helped Mom and Granny Jessie with the holiday turkeys and was unwary enough to admit it. Before I could come up with a plausible way to wiggle out, I was rushing to the commissary with a pocket full of crumpled notes and change on the Wednesday afternoon, with just fifteen minutes before I had to be up the hill and on-shift at the TV station.

Turkey, 20+ pounds, frozen solid: OK, I would leave it to defrost outside in my car during the shift; Northern Japan in November was slightly chillier than the inside of most refrigerators anyway. Onionscelerysagesausage…bread. Mom always bought a loaf of bakery wheat bread, tore each slice into clunks and dried them on a sheet-cake pan in the closet where the hot water heater lived. I zigged down the bakery aisle, threw a loaf into the basket and headed for the quick-checkout register, making it to work with about a half-minute to spare.

Didn’t even notice until I got back to the barracks that night, and took out the bread so that it could dry overnight, that I had a loaf of rye. There was no way to get a loaf of wheat bread, no way at all. It was nearly midnight, and even there was such a thing at the Japanese grocery store the next morning, it would be too late. The turkey had to be in the oven first thing.

“Oh, go ahead and use it anyway,” Marsh consoled me. “Who’s going to notice a couple of caraway seeds with all the other stuff and gravy on top!”

No one did, and it made fantastic stuffing. We all lay about afterwards burping gently and nibbling on just one more bit of pumpkin or pecan pie. I can’t remember who launched the trial balloon for our Christmas— either Marsh, or Thea ventured.

“You know, we could do a really nice bash for Christmas….”

The room perked up, interest had been piqued.
“A way bigger turkey…”
“Maybe not, the oven can’t handle it.”
“Steamed pudding… a ham, too.”
“They’ve got a fake Christmas tree in storage, and a box of decorations, too…”
“Our doors…. We could decorate our doors… and… and…. Have someone in to judge a contest on Christmas Eve.”
“Santa! They have a couple of Santa Suits at MWR!”
“He could bring gifts… we can draw each others names, and get a gift… and Santa can deliver them…”
“OK, who all is going to be here… make a list.”

The room bubbled with enthusiastic plans: the dinner would be bigger, more lavish than Thanksgiving… Santa would deliver the gifts on Christmas Eve, after the judging of the doors. Thea and I exchanged slightly smug looks: yes, this would be a vast improvement on the year before. Our cunning plan came together, as those who would have been otherwise inclined to stay in their room and gloom through the holiday were seized by the spirit of competition in decorating their doors with wrapping paper, and lights, to buy small plastic fir trees downtown and put them in their rooms. I began making ball ornaments from Styrofoam, covered with velvet and laces and gold braid, and baking tray after tray of cookies, telling everyone they were for the guys at work.

The regular dinners in December became planning sessions: we drew names, arranged for renting the Santa suit, inveigled the Catholic chaplain – the most approachable of the base chaplains – into judging the door contest, set up the somewhat bedraggled fake spruce that the dorm manager pulled out of storage. Kenny, one of the five male residents, volunteered to be Santa, although he was young and skinny, and looked more like an adolescent Donald Sutherland than Santa Claus. Some of the girls put up lights in their windows, which reflected pastel colors onto the snow outside. The upstairs and downstairs corridors became a mini-Christmas Tree lane, with tinsel and paper and ribbons applied to the doors or doorframes. Thea made a small door out of cardboard covered with paper like her own room door, and attached it to the wall just above the baseboard, several feet from her room, and parked a pair of felt dolls, 28 inches tall and tricked out like Christmas caroling mice in front of it.

On Christmas Eve, I was taking one last tray of cookies out of the oven, while the Chaplain was going around, reviewing the doors.

“Come and see how Kenny looks,” Thea said, “He’s got the costume on, but we need another couple of laundry bags for the presents.”

Even a couple of pillows stuffed down the front couldn’t transform a lanky and somewhat drunken 19 year old into a convincing Santa, but this one would arrive bearing gifts. Thea and I hastily rounded up two more GI green laundry bags, and began filling them with gift-wrapped packages, making sure that no one had been left off, there was a present for everyone. Almost everyone else was already in the dayroom, listening to the Chaplain award first prize in the door-decorating contest – to Thea’s Christmas mouse door! We cheered heartily, and the Chaplain took himself off, and Kenny lurched into the dayroom, with a lumpy laundry bag over his shoulder and dragging two more.

“Merry Christmas, ho ho ho… and have you all been good little girls and boys this year?” He leered at the room, and was answered with a raucous chorus of “Yes, Santa” and “Hell no, Santa!” He reached into the first bag, and squinting blearily, read off the name. Everyone watched as the gifts were opened, slowly and individually, while Kenny kept up a stream of drunken, slightly obscene but very funny patter, and the piles of torn paper and ribbons mounded up at our feet.

Thea and I swapped a satisfied glance: the room was filled with laughter and lights and good fellowship. Tomorrow we would dish up a lavish Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Like last year, everyone in the barracks would still be thousands of miles from family, in a foreign country, but we would not be alone, and we would have Christmas joyfully.

I had one more little thing to do. A lavishly large box of cookies had already been left in the break-room at FEN, but all the rest—brownies and sugar cookies and macaroons, and peppermint sandwiches- were divided amongst thirty little bags, tied with ribbon and a little tag “A Present from Sandy Claws”. Just before midnight, when light showed under the doors of only the night owls or insomniacs, I went around and quietly hung a bag of cookies on each door.

Everyone deserves that unexpected surprise gift at Christmas.

The Lie at the Heart

19. December 2024 · Comments Off on The Lie at the Heart · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, Good God, Health and Wellness

There was a time when most of us neither knew or cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and that new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.

There was certainly no rush on the part of activists and the popular media urging anyone else to follow along the trans-brick road and screaming at us to extensively tolerate and enable them. Indeed, for a good few decades there were men who put on women’s cloth for a lark, a laugh, and entertainment; to escape the mob (Some Like It Hot), get out of the Army (M*A*S*H), rent an apartment (Bosum Buddies), or just have good comic romp (Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Late in the 19th century, and early 20th it was a convention for local groups to stage ‘womanless weddings”, elaborately lampooning formal marriage ceremonies as a good, rowdy fundraising event. (One of my Tiny Bidness Publishing clients wrote an insightful monograph about this once-widely-spread custom, which is how I first heard about it.)

But that was then, and this is now, and it’s ‘trans’ and demands for toleration, acceptance and something called ‘allyship’ everywhere you look, as well as any number of fading celebrities wearing their trans children as a kind of trendy accessory. The rage of trans activists against women who object to having private female spaces – bathrooms, spas, locker rooms – invaded by intact men claiming to be trans is as disconcerting as it is frightening. (I wonder now if the establishment feminists wouldn’t have firmer ground to stand on presently, insisting on female-only spaces, if they hadn’t been so bloody-mindedly insistent on invading men-only spaces back in the day.) There have been just too many incidents of male sex offenders with intact male genitals claiming to be female in order to be admitted to places where they can continue harassing females. (No, I was not surprised in the least when I read that the Wii spa tranny turned out to be a registered sex offender who invaded the no-clothing area of the spa for jollies and gratification.) The frantic enthusiasm among trans activists and allies to rush children and vulnerable teens into chemically and surgically mutilating their genitalia is even more horrifying to contemplate, let alone to wonder why they are so determined to do it, or see it done. One might very well conclude that the sexually misfit/deeply confused want to ensure a continuing supply of younger sexually-misfit/confused into their ranks on the grounds that sexual misery loves company, and that medical professions pushing trans treatment for teenagers and children are merely ensuring a nice income stream for themselves.

It’s also concerning that male athletes claiming to be female for competition purposes are steamrollering over from-birth females, and in some cases, causing life-affecting injuries. This is so prodigiously unfair. The last time that I was able physically to hold my own in rough housing with my brother’s friends, I was twelve or thirteen. There is no arguing around the fact that a male who has gone through puberty will be physically stronger than a female of the same size, age bracket and general state of fitness. I don’t care if he has been mainlining female hormones, growing out his hair, sprouting breasts and calling himself Loretta – he will still be faster, stronger, and able to lift more than original-issue XX females. Allowing manufactured XY-females to physically go up against original-issue XX women in most sports competition is not just unfair, it also carries the risk of permanent injuries to a smaller and comparatively weaker party. Refusal to play may be about the only option at this point. And that is likewise unfair to women who have honed their talent in a sport, only to see the prize, awards and scholarships go to a pseudo-woman.

I hope that this progressive enthusiasm for transexuals will just turn out to be a transient and overhyped concern/fad, to diminish as swiftly as did ‘daycare satanic abuse!’ and ‘recovered memory’ once the madness of crowds has sobered up a little. I do take mild comfort in knowing that the trans-fad isn’t nearly as pervasive among the normal as the media would have us believe. My daughter and I have spotted only one very obvious hulking-guy-inna-dress in the course of our lives, although I will accept that there may have been others who were a wee bit more successful in presenting as a delicate flower of fair femineity. How much longer will this particular mania last? Discuss as you wish.

The Ephemeral World

28. November 2024 · Comments Off on The Ephemeral World · Categories: Ain't That America?

There was a YA novel that my mother had a cherished copy of – likely a first edition, because I vividly remember the dust jacket painting in the 1930s commercial style – a pair of teenagers on horseback, in a landscape that was very clearly California’s back country. There was a gnarled live oak tree behind them, some ranges of green trees that looked like a citrus orchard, and a range of purple mountains on the horizon. Mom had her own bookplate pasted into the inside cover of that copy – a black and white picture of a cowboy on a horse, swinging a lariat. That book gravitated from Granny Jessie’s house through three or four houses where we all lived, until it finally was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain fire, which burned Mom and Dad’s retirement home to the ground, along with just about all the inherited memorabilia and books from both sides of the family. I had a go at replacing some of the books which had been lost, but I was stymied for years at remembering the name and author. And things happened: Dad passed away in 2010, and Mom fell catastrophically some years after that. She has been paralyzed from the shoulders down ever since. She had to go to a nursing home, and then to my sister’s home. The retirement house had to be sold, all the furniture and fittings dispersed among the family, sold at an estate sale or given away … which is irrelevant to this essay, but for the fact that that book was the one which I never got around to replacing.

I couldn’t remember the title of that book, or the author, although I could remember such things as the name of the protagonist, his friends, the general plot, and the fact that there was a map of the relevant area in the book. His name was Billy, his cousin from the big city was Penny, his horse was named Querida, and the family name was Deane – they lived on a ranch in the back country of Northern San Diego County, as it was then. He had a good friend in a boy from the local Indian reservation, and the plot involved dangerous smuggling from over the border, and an earth tremor which had somehow rerouted the natural springs which watered the Deane ranch. Such is my erratic memory – one which Mom once compared to an untidy filing cabinet, full of curious odds, ends and strange but true facts, but all jumbled together in no particular organized order. Now and again, I tried out a search using these bare factoids, but nothing ever turned up, until I threw out the question to the regulars at the Sunday morning book thread at Ace of Spades HQ – and yay – a miracle!

A regular reader there applied those various sketchy details out to a better search engine and came up with the title and author name! Hurrah! The book was titled The Singing Cave, by one Margaret Leighton Carver, who apparently had a good long run as a writer of young adult historical fiction and biographies for about twenty years. The Singing Cave, originally released in 1945 was one of her first popular novels. She lived in California, which accounted for the local west-coast color. I found a reasonably-priced copy at Abe Books and ordered it at once. Not only was there a certain sentimental value for me – but that in many ways the plot and setting was in a California long-gone, and even fading in memory as those who recall it as children and teenagers in the 1930s and 40ies pass from this mortal coil. There once was a California of ranches and small farms,  orchards of citrus trees surrounded by windbreaks of eucalyptus, olive trees and grapes for raisins and wine, dairy farms, plantations of olive trees, almonds and other specialty crops, interspersed with small towns of comfortable early 20th century houses, modest suburbs and the occasional grand estate in Pasadena, Santa Barbera, or San Marino, established by a scattering of old wealth who loved the mild climate. I was around to see the last few bits of pre-WWII California, which my parents remembered from their own growing up, before it was all swamped in miles and miles of development sprawl and strangled by new freeways. The California that my parents knew and loved, and that I remember most fondly is all but gone – the world described in The Singing Cave is saved from the wreck like a bit of flotsam, a window into a previous time, and a reflection of the way that things used to be.

The Time of the Season

27. November 2024 · Comments Off on The Time of the Season · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry

Yes, the time of the season has arrived again, although seeing all the pumpkin spice scented and flavored seasonal stuff on the shelves of various retail outlets should have provided what is popularly known as “a clue.” (Along with all the autumn leaf and scarecrow and harvest décor things…)
Yes, Thanksgiving, followed closely by Christmas, featuring a centerpiece dish of what I used to call Eternal Turkey, Strong to Save. Thanksgiving when I was living at a home with my parents and sibs, meant a ginormous turkey on both holidays, followed by my mother’s schedule of dishes incorporating the leftovers thereof: plain old warmed up leftovers initially, followed by hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey a la king, turkey croquettes, turkey and noodle casserole … and when the carcass was stripped to bones, into the pot for broth and another two weeks of turkey stew/soup.

Yes, these days, I’ll do a turkey for Thanksgiving, a couple of evening meals of leftovers in various guises, and then practically anything else for Christmas. For the last couple of years, it’s been Beef Wellington for our Christmas supper main dish.

Getting back to turkey and Thanksgiving, though – although I do like roast turkey, and a modest (no more than a week’s worth) schedule of meals incorporating the leftovers – I do not like most of those so-called traditional Thanksgiving side dishes. While mashed potatoes and giblet gravy (made from pan drippings and the extra bits normally contained in a small bag in the turkey’s interior) are acceptable, bread stuffing is OK when fresh-baked, but rapidly turns disgusting, baked yams are heavy and indigestible, especially when emptied from a can and adorned with (yuck) marshmallows, I simply cannot hate that baked canned green bean casserole enough, and then adding rolls and cornbread on the side… it’s all too heavy and indigestible. We generally bag everything but mashed potatoes, and a smidge of stuffing. Our favorite side is oven-roasted brussels sprouts with red onion, slim slices of kielbasa all sprinkled with olive oil and salt, and sometimes a corn pudding casserole. Some years I’d also fix a corn and bell pepper relish, or a confit of pears stewed with currents and sweetened with honey, along with the cranberry relish.
Pepper Corn Relish
This is a recipe for a pepper and corn relish which I copied out of a Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet Magazine, lo these many years ago.
Combine and simmer for half an hour: 5 ½ cup fresh or frozen corn kernels, 1 finely chopped red bell pepper, 1 finely chopped green bell pepper, one medium onion, 2 carrots, also finely chopped, 1 ½ cup sugar, 1 teasp dry mustard, ½ teasp celery, ¼ teasp turmeric and 1 ½ cup vinegar. This relish can be eaten fresh, or processed in the canning kettle for fifteen minutes. It makes about 5 pint jars.
Honey Pear Conserve (also from the same issue)
Combine in a large saucepan: 4 lbs Anjou pears, peeled, cored and cut unto chunks, ¾ cup lemon juice, 1 cup honey, ½ tsp cloves, 2 tsp cinnamon and ½ cup dried currents. Simmer until thickened and pears are cooked through.
Cranberry Chutney
Combine in a large saucepan: ½ cup cider vinegar, 2 ¼ cup brown sugar, ¾ tsp curry powder, ½ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cloves, ¼ tsp allspice, ¼ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cinnamon, and 1 ½ cups water.
Bring to a boil, then while stirring simmering mixture, add: 2 lemons, rind grated finely, pith discarded and lemon sectioned and chopped, 2 oranges, (ditto), 1 apple finely chopped, 3 cups cranberries, ½ cup golden raisins, and ½ cup chopped dried apricots. Simmer gently for 40 minutes, until mixture is thickened.
Add: 2 additional cups cranberries and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add: 1 cup cranberries and ½ cup chopped walnuts, stirring until the last cup of cranberries are just cooked. The variously cooked cranberries give it a lot of cranberry texture, and a very fresh flavor.
Bon appetite – and the happiest of Thanksgiving to all of our readers, since we have an extra special reason to be thankful this year.

Schadenfreudelicious

22. November 2024 · Comments Off on Schadenfreudelicious · Categories: Ain't That America?

Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Aso movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.

You’d think that anyone paying attention might have realized this some months, or even years ago, but apparently our managerial class of the liberal persuasion need to be smacked with the obvious – along the lines of a mushroom cloud over a Japanese city, a dinosaur-killing asteroid, an earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone, (which made the Mississippi River briefly flow backwards) or the Trump landslide. If, as Andrew Breitbart observed once, that politics is downstream from culture – are we seeing that current reversed, and culture is flowing downstream from MAGA?

More than two weeks have gone by, and Trump’s success is still all too much for some of them to take. A good few are reacting in an embarrassingly theatrical manner. Abandoning Twitter/X and flouncing off to the echo chamber of Bluesky. Rob Reiner is signing himself into some kind of rehab center, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are flouncing off and going to Britian to live … well, at least one celebrity couple are making good to leave the US on account of Trump’s election. My only question is – can’t they take Oprah Winfrey with them? I’ve never paid any heed to celeb endorsements, by the way – and the gruesome crew who came out for Harris-Walz is enough to put one off going to going to their movies ever again. (Good thing that Harrison Ford is pretty much aged out of anything but character parts. He’s now in my ‘not unless dragged by wild horses’ category, right alongside Jane Fonda and every single one of those participants in that horrifyingly embarrassing ‘zoom call-avengers assemble!’ video promotion.)

The more sensible corporations and companies – or those who have been paying attention to the bottom line, and who desire their companies to continue making a handsome (or even a moderately attractive) profit seem to have made a rational decision. Indeed, the owner of the L.A. Times (which once used to be substantial and respected newspaper) and the international book publisher Hachette apparently do want to rein in the hysterical progressives among their respective employees and appeal to that niche market of the majority of American consumers. Even if their employees are having screaming meltdowns. Yes, there’s a large audience out there – probably more for books, than for newspaper subscriptions. How many other companies have decided, in the wake of Trump’s election that they had rather make a fat bottom line, and never mind the howling from their in-house woke element? Discuss as you wish.

Stick a Fork In…

11. November 2024 · Comments Off on Stick a Fork In… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.

The mainstream, big-money, corporate national news media was so far down into the tank for Harris and Walz that they probably needed a surface crew in a boat pumping down oxygen to them, or so I gather from the election post-mortem analyses. And this time, it didn’t do the least particle of good in moving masses of voters to vote for them. Not the last-minute OMG-Trump said bad things about service members story! OMG, he’s a convicted rapist-bully-thug-crook who hates women, Jews and people of color! It didn’t work … and Kamala’s campaign team apparently couldn’t even begin to figure out why, according to some of the post-mortem laments. Spending money like it was water gushing from a fire hydrant didn’t work, all those celebrity endorsements (Which apparently were bought and paid for) didn’t work. Reporting on poll results putting her in the lead didn’t work. All the old tried and true methods which always worked before … didn’t work.

It wasn’t just that credibility of mainstream corporate news media has sunk lower than the Titanic. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – especially Harris – came off as horribly inauthentic, fake, manufactured personalities. In none of their brief, scripted and staged appearances did they seem natural, engaging, likeable. And there was not a single thing that their campaign staffers could do to counter that plastic impression to everyone outside of committed true believers. Kamala seemed like a kind of life-sized Chatty-Kammy doll; pull the string in her back and out came a kind of scripted focus-grouped garble that almost seemed like relevant speech. Off-the-cuff, spontaneous, non-scripted? With a less-than-worshipful interviewer? Oh, heck no! In contrast, Trump and Vance came across as relatable, authentic, humorous – they could do hours of unscripted interviews with someone like Joe Rogan, Indeed, I’m halfway convinced that the Rogan podcast interviews with Trump and Vance that pushed undecided voters towards supporting them. They talked about what the audience truly wanted to know … not the same, tired, over-focused party line.

Discuss as you wish – what else do you think also pushed the voters towards Trump and Vance?

Literary Life

04. November 2024 · Comments Off on Literary Life · Categories: Ain't That America?, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts

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

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

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

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

A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect

28. October 2024 · Comments Off on A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

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

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

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

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

With Dread and Foreboding

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

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

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

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

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

Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever

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

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

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

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

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

 

They Have Their Exits

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Fear the Beeper

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

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

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

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

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

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

The Most Wrecked House

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’ll need it.

Visible Signs

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing the Minnesota Walz

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

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

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

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

Retribution

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

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

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

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

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

Best Eaten Cold

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tar-baby

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

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

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

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

Dollars and Eyeballs

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

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

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

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

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

It Was Funnier in a Movie

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

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

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

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

The Rainbow Limit – A Personal Rant

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

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

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

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

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