My clever little brother the graphic artist has come up with the cover design for The Quivera Trail – it’s based on two of my own photos, merged together.
The book will be out in November – I’ll be taking pre-orders for it in late October. More at by book blog/website, here.
That’s actually what it feels like – all these revelations about the NSA possibly-maybe-likely snooping wholesale through personal communications for exactly how long – and how long does this go back? As far as an excuse note from my mother getting me out of 8th grade gym class? You know, I wouldn’t really mind whatever they were doing, if it had actually prevented something like the Beantown Blaster Brothers, Joxer and Speed-bump, from setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon, or if the Fort Hood shooter had been bounced out of military service before he even pinned on his bars. Actually catching Islamic fundamentalists with terroristic plans seems to have been just too hard; it’s much easier, spying on law abiding citizens, just like it’s too much trouble for incompetent police departments to put a crimp in the activities of the gang-bangers, so they substitute harassing the law-abiding instead. Lets not get into the over-militarization of our local police forces, or the mass-molestation of anyone wanting to travel by air these days.
Then there is the IRS, that organ of the FedGov which everyone loves to hate, weaponized to harass, hinder and hamper conservative-oriented organizations, while making the way smooth for liberal ones … that will not end well, seeing as it was authorized and encouraged from everywhere but a few low-level rogue agents in Cincinnati. And spilling private information on donors to political opponents … that will not end well, either. Nor will the EPA carelessly releasing private information on farmers and ranchers to environmental groups – we all know how grounded, considerate and civil some of the more radical enviros have been, when it comes to protesting. Then there is the possibility that future elections will be massively fraudulent, and that the last one might very well have been, that our political class seems to be only concerned with what they can grab in the way of short-term gain, that certain blue-state cities such as Detroit are circling the drain, that our establishment press is so deep in the tank for Obama – still! – that they need a deep-sea diver’s suit and an air hose. The military is being steadily demoralized – even as our Kardashian president seems to think intervening in Syria is a wonderful idea. Oh, and there still hasn’t been a reasonable explanation released by the Obama gang as to what the hell happened in Benghazi … or why so many upper-tier and influential senior officers so suddenly retired.
Speaking of circling the drain, our establishments of higher education teach less and cost more for the privilege, and those of the lower persuasion seem to be obsessed with kids playing with guns and drugging rambunctious boys into placidity. I have told my daughter that any children she has will be home-schooled, by me, if necessary. She will probably have to work several part-time jobs as an independent contractor to support them anyway, as the imposition of Obama care will do a number on those small business which provide the larger portion of those jobs which we still have.
On the up-side, it has rained here rather generously for June, and I bagged the cable TV package in favor of a Roku box, which saves me a good bit of money a month, and will allow me to pay of my very last creditor even sooner. So there is that. And it does seem like the global warming delusion has been pretty much thrown over by all but the dumb and die-hard, so there is room for hope.
That the man who sculpted and cast this, is already on an NSA list somethere. Likely that I am, too. Send me CARE packages, when we all get hauled off to the camps.
This is one of the very heavy metal sculptures set up in an outdoor display area along River Road in Boerne
… of how metadata can be used. The actual mathematics of it made my head hurt a little, since I am an English major, but the end-result is powerful stuff.
Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
Found through a link at Belmont Club, but Ace of Spades HQ has also linked.
That was a concept that I was reminded of Sunday afternoon, as Blondie and I drove away from the King William historical district – those witty and cutting remarks that you only think of later; in the staircase, or as happed with us, after we merged into traffic from the onramp from Commerce Street.
Our trouble was not that we didn’t think of appropriately witty and cutting remarks at the time and place; it’s just that what we immediately thought of to say would have been rude, even slashingly cruel, and totally ruined the popular image of Southern (and Texan) courtesy and hospitality to guest, even clueless ones. I don’t know from how far out of town this family group came, who chose to wander around King William on a Sunday mid-day; their accents were non-specific American … but from what they did say – rather loudly – upon wandering into the parking area behind the Steves mansion, I would guess that They Are Not From Around Here.
I would also judge that their knowledge of local history was conspicuously lacking, which most immediately offended me, straight off – and might have led to me saying such cutting things, or delivering a furious parking-lot lecture of at least twenty minutes in length … but even Blondie was angry, and it was more to govern her tongue that I told her to just leave it, and drive away. Even if she rolled down the passenger window on the Montero as we backed out of the parking lot; no, neither of us delivered a parting shot.
The overheard remark which so raised our ire was – as this extended family wandered within earshot and regarded the outbuildings at the back of the Steves Homestead was, “That’s the slave quarters.â€
The slave quarters.
Jesus jumping everlasting Key-rist on a pogo stick; it’s as if every big mansion south of the Mason-Dixon Line built before the mid-20th century had slave quarters as a matter of course.
Perhaps we should have said something, which is what we agreed on as soon as we were on the highway. I write my books to amuse and educate – and there went a chance to educate a party in the direst need of it that I ever saw in the flesh. Except that my own first remark would have been along the lines of, “I assume you must be a graduate of our finer public schools.†No, not a good start to a lecture on the history and background of the various families who established fine houses in King William … in the decade after the Civil War and well after slavery had been abolished. Lately I have begun to doubt any graduates of our finer public schools are acquainted with the details of abolitionist sentiment in Texas; or are even acquainted with the exact dates of the Civil War, any of the other nuances involving that war, or anything much to do with the peculiar institution itself, other than the immediately obvious.
So here was the thing – which I would have liked to have been calm enough to pass on to the family of visitors: the Steves Homestead was built in 1876 in a very showy French Second Empire style for one Edward Steves, whose family had originally settled in Comfort. Mr. Steves owned an extremely profitable lumber company, and the complex or buildings behind the house included an indoor pool, since Mrs. Steves loved swimming, a wash-house, to process laundry, a carriage house, and a small building which provided housing for the gardeners and the stable hand. Mr. Steves was prominent in city government during his life, and also in the many doings of the substantial German community, and contributed to the construction of the True to the Union monument in Comfort. In fact, two of the Unionists dead in the Nueces fight included Edward Steves’ brother and brother-in-law. So, no – the Steves and their friends and family were most emphatically not slave owners – and the casual assumption that they were struck us as insulting and ignorant in the extreme.
And that’s why we didn’t even begin to calm down until we got to the highway. Sigh. I missed a clear opportunity there to shed enlightenment. But I just didn’t think I could have held on to my temper. Which is why I could never have been an academic – I just don’t have that kind of patience.
Comment would be superflous, so I’ll just say I found this little gem in the comment thread here.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.†Benjamin Franklin.
“The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.†Rep. Maxine Waters
Who expected that 1984 has arrived? I recall that in the actual year of 1984, a great many commenters in the political arena rejoiced that the whole Big Brother thing had not arrived, but it looks like such rejoicing was premature. Now we have the NSA collecting telephone records from Verizon wholesale for the ostensible purpose of security reasons … not so much for tracking specific suspected terrorists, but rather for data-mining … and very likely for opposition research. The revelations of the IRS stalling Tea Party groups’ applications for 501 status? Almost certainly this distracted or discouraged those groups from going all-out in last years election season, which I believe was the primary purpose.
Back in the early days of starting the San Antonio Tea Party in 2009, one of our board members – a very thoughtful corporate lawyer and businessman – did have a warning for us who were in leadership positions; as soon as we began to make waves, he pointed out that those of us with embarrassing skeletons in our personal closets should adjust to the reality that those skeletons might magically appear, thanks to oppo research efforts directed against us. As it eventually turned out, several of those people did have rather substantial dark marks on their personal record; I might have been one also, but I had gone to the extent of blogging and writing about them all; my life was essentially an open book, available on Amazon for a modest fee.
Our lawyer member had the right idea, but I don’t think we fully grasped that we might be running a danger from a politicized IRS. I think he was not quite so cynical as to see that coming. But such was the tenor of the very invasive questions asked by the IRS of those later Tea Party groups – asking for information about group leaders and contributors, one might suspect also that this was part of a massive opposition research operation. Map the groups and their connections, get information about individuals; it worked very well in Iraq, in tracking down Al Qaida operators. Now I suppose it is being done wholesale on half the country who doesn’t think Obama is the greatest thing since canned date-nut bread – and this will not end well. The Tea Party group that I am still in connection with sent out an email last week, explaining that they had never applied for 501 status and so could assure anyone contributing toward or participating in their activities that their names were never confided to the tender mercies and the leaky data files of the IRS. Which certainly must have come as a relief to anyone who made big donations … because, curiously enough, information about big donors to various right-of-center causes and politicians just seemed to leak out all over during the last election season; how very curious was that, eh? Up to this very minute, I believe most Americans disliked and dreaded having to do anything with the IRS, but assumed that the revenue-collecting agency delivered their abuse of members of the public on a fair and ecumenical basis. And now to find out that such abuses were not just the actions of a few rogue agents, but directed and controlled from near to if not actually the top?
Congratulations; now at least half the taxpayers in the country now have even better reason to dislike and dread the IRS.
So, this IRS thing is one shoe dropping; I wonder if the EPA accidental-on-purpose releasing a wide range of personal information about farmers and ranchers – which they just happened to have accumulated – to a whole range of environmental groups, many of whom seem to be opposed to the whole concept of farming and ranching. Trotting around afterwards and asking for the information back is like shutting the barn door after the horse is gone, to use an agricultural metaphor. It is almost as if … I don’t know … someone is laying the ground work for a campaign akin to radical animal rights activists targeting research facilities which use animal testing. Would the ecological crazies start harassing farmers and their families in flyover country? I wouldn’t have thought so a couple of years ago, but time change. Congratulations, however – a great many food producers in our blessed nation now may have cause to fear and dread agents of the federal government from more than one agency.
This being a Friday afternoon, I confidently expect some other exciting confession from the Ruling Class to be dropped into the news cycle, in the fond hopes that it will die the death over the weekend, and be old news by Monday.
A foyer in the Spanish Governor’s Palace here in San Antonio. Which was neither a palace (only a rather rambling and much-added onto building), nor the home of the governor. It rather served as residence for whomever was captain of the Bexar garrison, so at least the Spanish part of it applies. Although since it was extensively reconstructed in the 1930s by an architech who had extremely romantic ideas of what it must have been like … maybe not even that much Spanish after all…
From Harry Gordon Selfridge, of department store fame. Obviously, our current administration cadre in Washington, D.C. knows not of these precepts:
“The boss depends upon authority, the leader on goodwill.”
“The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.”
“The boss says ‘I’; the leader, ‘we.'”
“The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.”
“The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how.”
“The boss says ‘Go’; the leader says ‘Let’s go!'”
We took the plunge this last weekend – a step we have been considering for months; we bought a pair of Roku boxes (new) and a flat-screen TV (a slightly used model which had been a floor display unit and subsequently marked down) at a local Sam’s Club, and now we are going to cut our cable TV service. (But not cable internet, which is completely necessary for me as well as being totally reliable from our provider, Time Warner, if anyone cares.) Two or three reasons for this; for the first, the cost keeps climbing from year to year, and I am sick to death of paying through the nose for it, when we watch only a handful of programs regularly. Many of those same programs are available through Hulu, Amazon, or Acorn … and if we are willing to wait a few months, the whole darned season of a program will be available on DVD, with minimal commercial filler.
Really, I would have been happy to have a basic cable plus a certain amount for an ala carte selection of a few additional channels, but Time Warner doesn’t work that way now, and I can’t wait any longer for them to get a grip on reality and change. The way that it was explained to me was that Time Warner has to accept those little-watched channels from their providers in order to acquire the madly popular ones, and so they pass on the little-watched channels to the public and demand that customers pay through the nose for the whole ball-o-wax. But no longer; I dropped the land line last year, upon realizing that we both used our cellphones on a far more regular basis. We already had a wireless router, Blondie has been watching a lot of her favorite classic programs on her computer anyway … and it just seemed like a good time to cut the Time Warner monthly bill by two-thirds and starve a portion of the media conglomerate beast.
Installing and programming the Roku boxes went rather more easily than expected; I feared that it would take a couple of hours and several trips back to Sam’s or Best Buy for necessary cables or connections or something dire, but it was only an hour and one short trip to CVS on the corner for a box of batteries. Sometime this week, we’ll go turn in the two Time Warner DVR units and take Blondie’s big-screen and heavy TV set over to Goodwill. This was the only big purchase, other than replacing our computers, that we have made in years, so if the economy improves microscopically in this fiscal quarter, that would have been the reason why. No one can say that we didn’t do our bit.
Flag, over the Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.
That is, they seem to be falling – as in scales-from-the-eyes sort of falling – with regard to the Chicago-Political-Machine political malevolence. I can hear the squeals of outraged innocence, all the way into my part of Red State Texas; Oh, f**k, they mean they were really real when they pounded the podium and threatened to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Yes, dear hearts and gentle people, the Obama political combine (the Chicago political machine writ large and nationwide) was entirely serious. They would reward their friends with access, perks and special favors – and their enemies with official harassment (and the malevolent regard of the lapdog media). Say, doesn’t that sound like one of those nasty, Turd World kleptropcies – why, yes it does, indeed – one of the especially malevolent ones, where representatives of the ruling party make threats and accusations, and the functionaries of the various bureaucracies carry them out under cover of just doing their job, and the press organs (which are unusually owned by the brother-in-law or cousin of the Presidente) all fall in line, with full-cry justification; These people are the ‘other’, malevolent enemies of the people and by all that is good and right and holy, they deserve such treatment! Which is a nice bit of work when the ‘other’ comprises a good chunk of the population, and that part of the working class and small business types who are still paying taxes anyway … who already had good reason to fear and loath the IRS long before this.
I think it has come as a shock also at how wide-spread through the IRS the mal-administration of requests from Tea Party-type groups for consideration as 501 groups was. Everyone probably went along, mildly irritated by the hassle, but assuming they were the only ones being stalled, stone-walled and bombarded with page after page of questions regarding everything from the contents of their websites, to their meeting agendas. But now it seems that other groups, some religious and some secular were likewise targeted for special treatment. The only thing that they have in common? Middle of the road to conservative orientations and just about every one of them is waking up to the icy splash of water in the face, and wondering what in heck is going on. For myself, I just hope that it’s not too late in the day. The good people running the Department of Homeland Security already believed to the bottom of their rotten little souls that Tea Party sympathizers and military veterans were a bigger threat to civic order than … umm, guys like the Beantown Blaster Brothers. And I haven’t even gotten to the matter of AP and Fox reporters being spied on for having the temerity to do their jobs, and I talked about the Benghazi follies last week. At this rate, the Obama administration may by the end of the summer, become about welcome in flyover country as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory – to steal a line from Top Secret! Even the brighter press minions are beginning to have doubts about the Mighty O, and it will be interesting to see if they can still run interference for him.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!
His name is Nemo, and we think he thinks he is a cat. We think the cats think he is retarded, and his Mama dressed him funny.
Having now developed what seems to be an annoying allergy-cough in the last couple of months, I have had reason to visit the Fort Sam Houston primary care facility more times lately than I had in years. I think I must have had about a dozen primary care providers in that time, who came and went without me ever laying eyes on them. In the time since I last had reason to seek medical care or a prescription renewal, BAMC itself compounded, split and compounded again like a cell undergoing mitosis – to the point where they moved the primary care clinic and the laboratory facilities which supported it out of the massive brick Skinner-box maze and onto a free-standing and very modern clinic building on Fort Sam itself. Where, in another couple of years, I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see undergo a mitosis of its own…
Anyway – walking into that building through the main door means that I walk past the serried array of pictures of the chain o’command, which includes a picture of our current president. The sight of this almost makes me start coughing again. Perhaps in light of the hearings this week regarding l’affaire Benghazi, I should begin coming in through the other door. I might actually begin to cough so hard that I throw up, whenever I see the current C’in’C’s picture, posted there.
I am actually glad to be retired at this point and that my daughter also completed her enlistment a good few years ago. Given current conditions, we are both glad to no longer be on active service, and past the point of being recalled. No, this administration must be a horror, to be any rank at all over E-2 or GS whatever in the State department … and I speak as one who did my first hitch during the Carter Administration. Say what you will about ol’ Jimmuh (and I can say a lot about that sanctimonious, double-dealing anti-Semitic creep) at least, you never got the feeling that he as the Commander in Chief would sell out military members and State Department functionaries for the sake of keeping his own political reputation bright an squeaky-clean. (He only went for that after he departed high office.) And if Jimmuh himself wasn’t the answer to a voter’s prayer, the top echelons of his government were stocked with responsible and experienced grown-ups. At least they mounted a military strike force to free the hostages taken in Teheran, whereas our current administration couldn’t even find it within themselves to do that.
Just as a personal aside, rumors had it during their administration that the Clintons – especially Hillary – didn’t much care for the military. And despite Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden making a show of attending to the moral and well-being of military family members, I very much suspect that the Obamas actually despise the military ranks. I should not at all be surprised to find out that things such as ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, permitting women in direct combat roles – even the rumors of Christians being disciplined for evangelizing inappropriately – were intended rather to sabotage morale and discipline among the military. Knowing that in the event of things going all pear-shaped, the highest levels in the chain of command will hang you out to dry, have a photo-op with the next of kin over your coffin, and then lie to cover up their own incompetence and lack of imagination … well, that is just the cherry on the top of the whole rancid sundae.
Sorry for the light posting here, with all the interesting stuff going on in the world; the Benghazi matter finally breaking into full daylight, Israel squaring up to Syria, the Beantown Blaster Brothers shoved off the front page of mainstream media by the escape of three young women kidnapped and held for ten years by three pervy brothers … I’m spoiled for choice of news developments to vent on, actually.
The thing is that I’ve got some projects for the Tiny Publishing Bidness going on, my business partner was briefly hospitalized for surgery last week, and I am coming down the home stretch on the next book – The Quivera Trail. But I took time to trawl through the archives and come up with a collection of rants, memos and reminiscences about my time in the military. It just went live on Kindle, and will be up on Nook in a day or so. Air Force Daze – check it out.
Well, here is a columnist going out with a bang (hey, can we still say that?) in a discussion of the 2nd Amendment, explaining in great detail over why pro-2nd Amendment legitimate gun owners are … to put it mildly, rather annoyed. (And also stocking up on arms and ammunition)
Tiny taste here – “How can we “gun people†honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them? There must first be respect and trust — even just a little — before there can be even the beginnings of legitimate discussion of the issue.”
Go read the whole, link-rich thing. You won’t be sorry.
Later: some added thoughts. Not on the 2nd amendment matter, but on the whole general red state/blue state split, and also (and this is tied in) with Condevilla’s Ruling Class and the Country class, with the establishment and the Tea Party – the whole ball-o-wax. I am just sickened and disgusted with the way that the current establishment (media, intellectual, political) feels free to insult ordinary Americans. It’s gone past snobbery, and well into ‘othering’ – that is, marking out a certain class as not worthy of recognition, honest argument, or even of existence. I live in a fairly red state, so I don’t encounter this at full strength save on-line. But it is horrifying, none the less. Sometimes it feels like having had a particularly brutal and humiliating practical joke played on one … and when called out for being brutal and humiliating, the perp sneers, “Whattsa matter wid you, don’t you have a sense of humor?”
Yes, exactly that. At some point, people who are well-meaning, have a sense of personal honor, and a concern for the political sphere in general – will get tired of being called names, insulted, made the butt of media yucks. I think, on evidence of this story – that it might already be happening at a degree that goes beyond merely fuming privately. If a member of a national establishment press came to my neighborhood and wanted to speak to individuals – I don’t think I would want to talk to them either.
So there you are. I don’t want to see it end in tears, I hope that it won’t … but my history sense is tingling.
This last weekend we were up in Boerne, where they were celebrating an all-American fabric art form – the patchwork quilt and all it’s variations. They actually had quilts hung up on the fronts of stores, in the store windows and from lines string around the edge of Town Plaza.
With the employment prospects being what it is these days, I have read repeatedly in the last couple of years that really enterprising individuals are tempted to turn indy and go free-lance. They look to establish a small enterprise, vending whatever talents and skills they possess as a so-called ‘independent contractor’ to the public at large, and earn a living thereby, rather than scrounge and maneuver and hope for a paying job on the bottom rung of the corporate and/or government establishment. Pardon the sarcasm – it seems that certain large and well-connected established corporations these days are almost indistinguishable from the government, at least to judge from the rapidity which which the well-connected move back and forth.
Oh, but enough about national policy – this all next is personal. My daughter and her best friend from high school have come to that point, of seriously pursuing independence in their own business. Edith – the best friend – is qualified as a nurse, and has two children and a husband who works at a blue-collar job. She lives for art – passionately, as she is a skilled painter with a small local following. Yes, it sounds improvident to give up on a sure-thing … but I can sympathize deeply. I also came to that point where I just couldn’t do a normal job any more. I had to go and do what I loved as a freelance writer and partner in the Tiny Publishing Bidness.
My daughter Blondie, the two-hitch Marine, currently works three different part-time jobs, having gotten the sense that until the higher-education bubble bursts, there is no use pouring any more of her G.I. benefits down a rat-hole. So, she was agreeable to Edith’s proposal that they form a business partnership. Blondie also has some artistic talents – although not a painter. She dabbles in beading and origami, and devises rather clever paper jewelry and hair ornaments. Blondie has a sense of organization, through having been an office manager – and through me and the Tiny Publishing Bidness, an idea of how a small business needs to be nurtured and run … especially when it comes to things like … oh, sales taxes, keeping track of expenses, customer care, buying a domain name and publicity. All of these things, Edith had never really considered before; she’s the dreamer, Blondie is the level-headed organizer.
Edith’s father is going to contribute a certain amount of money next year, to be used specifically for necessary art supplies for this business; myself, I can contribute nothing beyond advice and skill with words, a camera and advice. They are starting slowly and carefully; tables at local art shows this summer, a website, plans to sell small prints of Edith’s paintings, of appearing in art shows and galleries. Blondie and Edith both have a very good idea of who they are appealing to with their paintings and paper art. There is a thriving art scene in San Antonio, concentrated mostly in a funky but slowly gentrifying area called Southtown. Ideally, Edith and Blondie would eventually like to have a retail establishment and gallery, either in the heart of Southtown or on the fringes, one which incorporates living quarters over the gallery for Edith’s family. Eventually, Blondie would like to sell the occasional bit of vintage furniture, glass and decorative elements through this outlet. She does have the eye for good-quality vintage stuff, and after going to a couple of estate auctions, knows exactly how little such items go for at auction – and then how much when they appear in a retail antique outlet. We would also like this future venue to offer book-signing events for local authors, many of whom do not feel well-served any more by the one independent local bookstore. But that’s a dream far in the future.
As for now, we are nurturing the seedling of the business – which, incidentally, is being called Pastel Junque. I’ll keep posting updates.
(Cross-posted at Chicago-Boyz.net)
With Blondie, and the two small doggies –
At the world-famous Buda Wiener Dog races – of course!
Where many of the venues along Main Street were dog-friendly. But one of them was not in spite of having a quite large outdoor venue attached, the management seemed very hostile, when we opened the door – so we went across the railroad tracks and had lunch at one which was. The Buda Soda Fountain – check it out, the malteds and the lemonade are to die for!
That was my Saturday – and yours?
It seems, from the link posted on Da Blogfaddah, that our very own President Kardashian will be gracing the great state of Texas with his presence for a brief and flying visit … which to no one’s surprise (at least in my household) – includes an appearance at a fund raising event. Holy jumping Jesus, does this political leech’s every move outside the White House involve a fund-raising event? Guess so, although Blondie’s cynical guess involved the presence of a hitherto-unknown prime golf course in the vicinity of Dallas or Waco.
He is, according to the news reports, intending to visit with and console the bereaved of West-comma-Texas, a tiny mid-state town of which I am certain that he and most everyone else who never traveled the IH-35 between San Antonio and Fort Worth, had never heard … until the local fertilizer plant blew up during a fire last week. Which explosion killed one-third of the local volunteer firefighters, and demolished a good portion of the town, since it went up violently enough to register on the Richter Scale. Honestly, reading the brief obituaries of the identified, I wonder exactly how his visit will console any of the next-of-kin. Firefighter volunteers, members of local fraternal organizations, small business owners, people who liked to hunt, rodeo riders, NASCAR fans, devoted to family, church, and the community of their little town. What a rootless, drifting cosmopolitan like the current POTUS has in common with them, besides being red-blooded vertebrates is anyone’s guess. He might as well be teleporting in from Mars; my suspicion is that his scheduling office was shamed into adding it to the itinerary for the day.
On the other hand, this hideous tragedy occurred in the very same week that the Beantown Blaster Brothers set a couple of home-made bombs which killed and de-limbed a goodly number of people either running in or waiting at the finish-line of the Boston Marathon. And it’s a lot easier to cover that news which happens within an easy commute of New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta.
It now appears that the Beantown Blaster Brothers were motivated primarily by the ever-refreshing well of Islam in it’s most radical application. Which is ironic to almost an industrial grade, as the aforesaid brothers lived and … well, occupied themselves in the most blue of blue-state enclaves, an enclave which afforded them every indulgence and liberty, marriage, higher education, refuge and support … and yet, they repaid all that with savagery and violence. And as it turns out, it’s the Islamic version of the above, which must be terribly embarrassing to the current administration. Don’tcha know, Islam is all about peace, and tolerance and the cries of the imam calling all to prayer being the sweetest sound, and you’re the most awful bigot if you say otherwise.
And I am just cynical enough, after the events of last week, if President Kardashian would rather that the public memory of developments in Boston just go down the ol’ memory hole as far as the mainstream media and low-information voters are concerned? Hence the flying visit to Texas … which visit incorporates an appearance at the dedication of the Bush II library, which (again and cynically) moves me to wonder how heroic an effort will it take for Bush II to be polite to him in private.
I am fairly certain that Bush II, and the residents of West-comma-Texas will be polite. Perhaps frigidly so … but always polite. This is how we roll.
Well, it was all that for a great many other people besides the Mighty-O, so no wonder that he has been looking pretty pissy lately, especially after a scorching defeat on an expanded gun-buyer background check program. Yes, just because people seem to agree with a statement on a poorly-worded poll, does not mean they necessarily want to see it enshrined in law … especially one hastily rushed through in the wake of a horrific event with the skids greased with hand-wringing over the deaths of small children … and the ostentatious display of their parent’s grief. Look, that’s the same exact thing that happened in the wake of the Dunblaine shootings. Popular revulsion and outrage was transformed into strict gun control legislation … and in the long run, how did that worked out for Britain, then? Is the ordinary run of people any safer in their homes, streets and places of business? For those of us paying attention, one really cannot be certain that they are.
One would have expected someone lauded as being over-the-top-intelligence and acute political smarts to have realized that most of the American public does not live with on-the-spot instant personal protection from hired body-guards or the Secret Service, and in fact, a great majority of us live where the forces of law’n’order are a fifteen to thirty-minute journey away. So the Mighty-O and his media buddies didn’t see it coming. Here’s a Kleenex and let me call the Wahhhmbulance for you.
And now we move on to Monday’s carnage at the Boston Marathon … in which the main comfort to be found is the fearless and efficient manner in which first responders and volunteers rushed to the scene. Ball bearings and scrap metal inside pressure cookers, left at a time and in a place calculated to maim as many bystanders as possible; so the intifada comes to America. It looks like those media talking heads who made no secret of hoping that the perpetrator(s) were white, Anglo-Saxon Tea Party types are to be bitterly disappointed. (To David Sirota and to NPR – Up yours. Very kindly, Sgt. Mom.) From today’s all-neighborhood man-hunt in Boston, it looks like the perpetrators were ‘white’… but radical young Islamics from Chechnya. Yes, that Chechnya … the very same who brought us the Beslan school massacre, the Nord-Ost theater hostage-taking, a series of bombings in the Moscow subways, the downing of two Russian airliners in 2004 … yeah, that Chechnya. No wonder the young lads’ uncle is pissed beyond being coherent. Here he is, living a peaceful, prosperous life far removed from what is usually described as ‘sectarian strife’ and his young nephews seemed poised to bring all that over the big pond in job lots and make Chechens in general about as welcome in the United States as ‘a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory.’ That line is from the movie Top Secret! in case anyone was wondering. For the lot who keep insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, this week has proved to very, very, very disappointing … especially for an administration who seemed desperate to prove exactly that. Try telling that to residents of Boston and Watertown, where the manhunt is still going on.
This is one of the most famous and delicious places to stop, going up and down IH-35 between San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. The savory kolaches are delicious – and we stopped there for some, heading up to Fort Worth for a book event late last month. West is just a little hiccup of a town, and the loss of so many volunteer firefighters is bound to hit hard. But the Czech Bakery is OK – according to this story, just a few cieling tiles knocked loose. Sometime after Mother’s Day, Blondie and I are going to head up to Waco to see the Texas Ranger Museum … and then a little way farther up the road to buy a big box of kolaches at the Little Czech Bakery.
Pretty well, actually – I finished a chapter Saturday afternoon, and tallied up what I have so far; a little over 300 pages, but only about another three plot twists and set-piece scenes to go. I’ll do my best to bring it at or around 400 pages. A severe re-read and edit will probably shave it down some, at least I hope so. Brevity is the soul of wit and economical story-telling and characterization is a goal devoutly to be aimed for. It has not escaped my notice that Truckee is my shortest book, and also my best-seller over time. Back to basics, eh? Truckee covered the space of a single year, and had a fairly simple, straight-forward plot and a relatively small cast. My subsequent books were a lot more complicated, but it’s pretty clear that elephantiasis of the narrative is not widely appreciated, although there are exceptions. I will do my best to restrain myself.
This next book is supposed to focus on the next generation of the characters from the Adelsverein Trilogy; Dolph and his English Isobel, of Sam and Lottie Becker, and Lottie’s suitor, Seb Bertrand – all of whom were babies, children or just very young adults by a point halfway through the Trilogy. Time for them to pick up the chore of carrying on the plot, in and around the Centennial year of 1876 – although some of the older characters, heroes and heroines of the earlier narrative make occasional appearances now.
1876; a little more than ten years after the end of the Civil War, which I think was a great scar across the American psyche – as 1914-18 was for Europe. Everything was different, afterwards, although many of those things that made the difference so marked had already been put in train before that marking point. Many who had been rich, or even just well-to-do before the war were impoverished afterwards. But many who had been impoverished before were well-to-do or rich after it through mining, wholesale ranching, transportation, manufacturing and developing new and useful technologies. That very technology made the post-war world a different place; the telegraph brought far places closer, the railway brought them closer still. Before the war, it was pork which had been the favorite meat on American tables; ham, salt pork, bacon. Afterwards, beef from western ranches and shipped to the stockyards and slaughterhouses in the mid-West began to predominate.
Before the war, it was a wagon-journey of six months to get to California from the mid-West, or a long, bone-cracking stagecoach ride of twenty-four days. When the transcontinental railroad was completed – a traveler could go from Council Bluffs to Sacramento in about a week, and in relative comfort. Should the traveler possess a parlor car and sufficient funds and connections, the journey could even be done in considerable luxury – instead of the dangerous and difficult trek it had been a mere three decades before. I worked in this transition for the last chapter of Truckee; an elderly man who had been a small boy on the emigrant trail in 1844 traveled east over the route that his family had followed – and noted that it wasn’t have the labor and adventure it had once been. The steam engine brought Europe closer to the US; now it was possible to travel relatively easily, and comfortably. Regularly scheduled steamship packet lines transformed a miserable, cramped journey of a month or six weeks (or even more) to barely a week from New York to Hamburg, or Southampton. I pointed up this transition again, in the Trilogy, comparing the hardships suffered by Magda’s family on their journey from Germany on a on a sailing ship – and how, thirty years later, it was only a week on a steam packet from New York to Hamburg. And in the new book, there is a chapter of the Richter and Becker clans traveling across Texas in their own parlor car; think of the change this represented to those who lived long enough to see and experience it! But there was a shadow over all of this; the shadow of the war.
Another author in the IAG has reminded me of this – that someone visiting the United States ten years later would have noted effects of it, most especially in the South. There would have been the ghosts of the dead from a thousand battles haunting the living with their memories; the badly scarred and disfigured, the chronically ill – and the chronically criminal. Even more visible were those amputees with their crutches and empty sleeves, the widows wearing black, and the young women who never married at all because the boy they loved was buried in the Wilderness, at Gettysburg, or Shiloh. Progress came at a price; and although one can’t say one caused the other, it made the handy demarcation point of a life that for most Americans had been rural and agrarian.
And that’s what I am working around, in The Quivera Trail … then there is the difference between England and Texas, which one has to admit, is still pretty market. There is a reason that I am describing it to readers as ‘Mrs. Gaskell meets Shane.’
This is has been one of those weeks where – in the words of the late Molly Ivins – sitting down and powering up the internet of a morning was kind of like opening the refrigerator and seeing Fidel Castro sitting inside. You can’t help thinking there was something mighty strange going on.
The current round of “Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken†(as another blogger on Open Salon used to call it) continues, as Li’l Pudgy establishes his dominance. Still no rain of fire on Austin, Texas, Tokyo, Seoul or anywhere else, but Li’l Pudgy ramps up the rhetoric regardless; the Norks have played this game I think every six months for the last sixty years, and he has to get louder and more threatening to even get the old Korea hands to even pay attention, let alone take the threat seriously. Say, all his generals have gaudy sprockets and decorations hung all over their uniforms – and what military action did they earn all those in? Seriously, I can only hope the Chinese are getting as tired of Li’l Pudgy as we all are. I do wonder, though – how many more Korean Motherland Unity Games of Repeated Chicken will we endure until the Kim régime implodes of itself?
Following, in a desultory fashion the horrors revealed in the trial of the Philadelphia abortion clinic doctor, Kermit Gosnell – who among other things, specialized in late-term abortions. Very late term abortions, and in horrifically unsanitary conditions, or so it would appear from the trial testimony. I’m not following it very closely because I have a very low gross-out threshold, and accounts of the the good doctor’s fetus foot collection is enough to make me upchuck. Wait – I thought that legalizing abortion would keep women safe from quacks in filthy backstreet abortion mills. Guess I was misinformed. I blame the media, of course – most of whom have been remarkably restrained in their coverage of Dr. Gosnell’s contributions to women’s rights.
And finally – the not entirely-unexpected passing of Margaret Thatcher … as I say, not unexpected, but I am still boggled by the public vitriol uncorked on the occasion by certain elements in once-Great Britain. Good lord, I thought Sarah Palin had roused a s**tstorm of hatred among self-nominated media, political and intellectual elite in this country, but it’s but a fart to a tornado in comparison. Good lord, be a bright, ambitious and successful woman politician, achieving high office without the benefit of a husband or father having gotten there first, and do so as a conservative, and the knives will come out for sure. Just as a rhetorical aside directed to all the Maggie haters out there; people, do you realize how tacky, warped and insane this makes you appear to outsiders? For one, it makes it look like the Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge are about the only adults left in the room.
And that’s my week. By the way, I brought out Our Grandpa Was an Alien on Kindle, since I didn’t carry over the print version to Watercress Press when I reissued everything else. Enjoy – all the old romps and essays about my family, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.
This affray did not happen in Texas, but in New Mexico in 1884. It did have all the classic Western elements; rowdy cowboys, a small town fed to the back teeth with their destructive and abusive antics, and a single local lawman determined to up hold the rule of law and order. Here, however, ends any resemblance to High Noon, Tombstone, Stagecoach, Shane or any other classic Western movie. In this case, the single resolute lawman stands out in the annals of Western law enforcement for several reasons; first for sheer, stubborn crazy-brave courage, secondly for being barely 19 years old at the time, a tough little banty-rooster of a guy barely five-seven in boots… and thirdly for being native Hispanic in a time and in a place where anti-Mexican bigotry fell very severely on the non-Anglo population of any what class or income.
His name was Elfego Baca – and there was one more difference to him. Although he had been born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, he had spent most of his life in Topeka, Kansas, where his parents had sought work and an education for their children. This resulted in Elfego Baca being more fluent in English than Spanish at the time of his returning to Socorro and working as a clerk in a general mercantile owned by his brother-in-law. He had another notable skill; facility with a six-gun. Very much later in life he claimed he had been taught to shoot by Billy the Kid … either William McCarty-Antrim-Bonny, or some other adolescent shootist with the same moniker in New Mexico Territory around that time.
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In the sanctuary of the pilgrim church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Northern Spain. Have a blessed Easter!
The Hoo-Doo war eventually became so bitter and vicious that all sides involved in it splintered into factions – even the company of Texas Rangers eventually dispatched to quell the range war split over it. The one survivor of the Baccus lynching still in custody, one Tom Turley, was returned to jail when he recovered, but very shortly, he was joined there by one of Sheriff Clark’s original cattle-thief hunting posse; Caleb Hall, now accused of being a cattle thief as well. A second posse member, Tom Gamel, now claimed that the notion of lynching the Baccus gang was first bruited about by the members of Clark’s posse – and he, for one, had been strongly against it. Rumors began flying around Mason that another lynching might be in the works – of Turley, Hall and Gamel themselves. Turley and Hall promptly escaped the jail and Mason County entirely, never to return. Tom Gamel stood his ground, recruiting about thirty friends – cattlemen and ranchers from the local area. He and his friends rode into Mason one day late in March. Not prepared for receiving so many presumably hostile guests, Sheriff Clark skedaddled. Gamel and his friends lingered in town for a couple of days, stewing for a fight … which nearly happened when Sheriff Clark returned with sixty well-armed local German friends. But the two sides declared a truce – and an end to mob justice. More »