Wednesday Miscellany

06. March 2013 · Comments Off on Wednesday Miscellany · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Health and Wellness, World · Tags: , ,

So another week in Chez Hayes, sportsfans; Blondie and I are both creeping back to something resembling health after a bout with the current crud, which may or may not be this years’ flu. Whether or not – it’s a hum-dinger. The comprehensive exhaustion, lack of appetite and the racking cough are something special, and in my case, it is added to the mysterious chronic cough that has had me sounding at intervals as if I were hacking up a lung, ever since the end of November. This is especially mysterious, as I have never smoked. A chronic cough lasting for three months has challenged my medical provider at the BAMC family clinic. Tuesday afternoon I returned from another appointment bearing some serious prescriptions; including for a cough syrup containing codeine, another round of antibiotics and two sorts of inhalers, which I may yet figure out how to use effectively. I know, I am supposed to breathe in two puffs of the ‘emergency’ inhaler … the first attempt made me cough, yet again …

So, it appears that Oooogo Chavez has finally shuffled off this mortal – not unexpectedly, as the folks at Rantburg have been putting up the pic of him with hovering buzzards for about a week or so. I know, speak no ill of the dead … but I’ll bet you anything that Sean Penn is curled up in the fetal position, sobbing uncontrollably. And Venezuela is now blaming the US for Oooogo’s demise, which I would find as amusing as hell since the current administration now must come up with some kind of response, or not… depending. Ah, well – comes on the same day of a couple of other foreign relations crises come to a full boil and likely claiming President Kardashian’s butterfly attention; Iran and North Korea both may have nukes. What fun.

Sigh – yet another black celebrity makes my personal ban-list. Now it’s Bill Cosby, apparently mouthing the canard that the GOP wants to bring back slavery … I had thought better of old Coz, but now alas, he seems to have drunk the racial solidarity Kool-aide. Bye, Coz – it was nice to have been a fan.

And that’s been my week so far – yours?

A Poem by Edgar Lee Masters – An Incident in the Civil War

03. March 2013 · Comments Off on A Poem by Edgar Lee Masters – An Incident in the Civil War · Categories: Ain't That America?, History

(I knew this poem from an anthology collection that I had as a kid – it was called The Magic Circle – and I suppose my sister wound up with it, although most of our childhood books wound up in my possession, as I was the first of the four of us to produce offspring. Something – never mind what – reminded me of it, and my daughter had never, ever heard of this poem before. It turns out to be very obscure and finding it by routine googlectomy took some time.)

Achilles Deatheridge

“Your name is Achilles Deatheridge?
How old are you, my boy?”
“I’m sixteen past and I went to the war
From Athens, Illinois.”

“Achilles Deatheridge, you have done
A deed of dreadful note.” “It comes of his wearing a battered hat,
And a rusty, wrinkled coat.”

“Why didn’t you know how plain he is?
And didn’t you ever hear, He goes through the lines by day or night
Like a sooty cannoneer?”

“You must have been half dead for sleep,
For the dawn was growing bright.”
“Well, Captain, I had stood right there
Since six o’clock last night.”

“I cocked my gun at the swish of the grass
And how am I at fault
When a dangerous looking man won’t stop
When a sentry hollers halt?”

“I cried out halt and he only smiled
And waved his hand like that.
Why, any Johnnie could wear the coat
And any fellow the hat.”

“I hollered halt again and he stopped
And lighted a fresh cigar.
I never noticed his shoulder badge,
And I never noticed a star.”

“So you arrested him? Well, Achilles,
When you hear the swish of the grass If it’s General Grant inspecting the lines
Hereafter let him pass.”

ulysses-grant

I Got Those Low-down Sequestration Blues

28. February 2013 · Comments Off on I Got Those Low-down Sequestration Blues · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Politics, Rant · Tags: , , ,

But not so bad a case as Bob Woodward is having, I’ll bet. So the automatic spending cutbacks are set to take place tomorrow, and the dominoes begin to fall. Slowly, I think at first, and then faster and faster. Will John Boehner hang onto his newly rediscovered backbone? Will the citizens of this great nation fall once again for the old ‘Closing the Washington Monument’ ploy, wherein a government activity (such as the Park Service) when faced with a proposed budget cut, threatens to cut the most useful/attractive/popular activity within it’s purview? Will President Kardashian be able to finger-point and hector his way out of this one? Probably not, and in any case, he’s probably got a golf game scheduled, and Mrs. O has another television appearance to make. I have it on good authority that she’s angling for the personal appearance grand-slam; a guest appearance as the NBC weather reporter, announcing the prize winners at this year’s Poteet Strawberry Festival, and surprise celebrity judge on America’s Got Talent. It’s a pity that the guest-star gig on Downton Abbey fell through, though. I understand it was a scheduling conflict – there wasn’t enough room for Mrs. O’s entourage at Highclere Castle.

So here we are, one-sixth in to 2013, and the White House seems to be declaring war on Bob “Follow the Money” Woodward, for – I guess – insufficient reverence towards our very own dear President Kardashian. I guess what we are about to see a demonstration of is whether the Chicago Way can really be scaled up nationally. Well, it can – the last four years have been a demonstration of that – but the key question now is – for how long? And is there enough popcorn to last? Ah, well – with poor old Richard Milhaus, the established press seemed to hate his guts on general principles anyway; IIRC, the Washington peanut gallery was cheering on Woodward and Bernstein all the way. Whether they will do the same now – that, as any number of press puppets standing in front of a government building to do their closer are wont to say – remains to be seen. If there is a preference cascade in the making, it might depend on how many other reporters have that ‘O-F-I’ moment and decide to let the chips fall where they may, now that the Grand Old Man of the Washington Press Corpse has led the way. On the other hand – jobs are hard to find these days. On the third hand, given the way in which print media outlets are collapsing – sometimes there is an advantage in jumping before you are pushed.

So – tomorrow begins another month; beginning of the end, or end of the beginning? That all remains to be seen.

Wait, Were the Oscars on Last Night?

25. February 2013 · Comments Off on Wait, Were the Oscars on Last Night? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Media Matters Not, sarcasm, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs

Well, damn … so they were. They were written up in the media this morning, which was nice, I suppose. I skimmed the list of winners and noted that I had not gone to see any of them at all. This has been happening more and more often, of late. Curiously, those movies are being released on DVD almost as soon as they have premiered, so that ones’ chances of actually catching them in a theater are, shall we say, diminished. The only movie that we actually made an effort to go see was “The Hobbit” and we went all out to see it at the local Alamo Drafthouse, where we could get dinner and a drink in the theater along with the movie. If going to the theater to see a movie is the expense that it has become these days, might as well go all out. Getting back to the Oscars, I also skimmed the pics of the various personalities arriving, and didn’t see any outrageous get-ups, not like Bjorks’ infamous swan dress. The only big tizzy is that Michelle Obama appeared via remote feed to help present the best picture award. Sigh. There, too, oh Lord? Like Chicken Man, she’s everywhere, she’s everywhere! Just another reason not to watch self-reverential award shows for an increasingly incestuous industry. I might also get away with throwing in the observation that the old canard about Washington being show business for ugly people is in danger of being invalidated…

Sigh … where was I? Oh, yes, Hollywood and showbiz in general, and the fact that most of Hollywood’s shining stars seem perfectly willing to jump into bed, metaphorically speaking, with the Obama Administration. The thought of being a repeat guest at the White House must be a tempting prospect to the many Hollywood A-listers, and those who only dream of it … but still, there is a large chunk of the country who is not absolutely enamored of Barry O and M’Shell. I count myself among them, naturally – and I am given to wonder, if the Hollywood elite who are inclined to worship at the shrine of Obama won’t eventually pay a price for it, in popularity with the general public. I do know that my own household is maintaining an ever-growing list of personalities whose movies and shows we will no longer patronize, precisely because of this unfortunate tendency. As the cost of producing mainstream movies goes up, and as the general public picks and chooses more carefully, won’t this eventually begin to bite? Something to think about, anyway.

For Valentine’s Day – True Life True Love

13. February 2013 · Comments Off on For Valentine’s Day – True Life True Love · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Literary Good Stuff · Tags: , , , , ,

So not being really a romance writer, and having pretty much washed out of the lists of matrimony personally, I still have managed to write about romance … mostly by pulling in a little bit of inspiration from here and there from real-life couples. For instance, the main romantic couple in my first book, Dr. John and Elizabeth in To Truckee’s Trail were inspired by … you’ll never guess. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning! A married couple, wildly, passionately, crackers-in-love with each other after twelve years of marriage – why not? The romance doesn’t and shouldn’t end at the altar, but it should go on. I rather liked the Victorians, by the way – they weren’t nearly as prudish as they’ve been painted, nor were their emotions quite so stifled. Robert fell in love with her through reading her published poetry – and lest that sound rather stalker-ish, it worked out. They married blissfully, although she was an invalid and several years older than him. They went off to Italy and were more or less happy for the rest of their lives together, just as I imagined Dr. John and Elizabeth to have been. Men and women alike poured out their souls in letters and poetry, and they weren’t ashamed or repressed in the least, especially when it came to a good manly weep or putting down on paper how they really, really felt.

I didn’t particularly have a literary model for the central romance and tragedy in the Adelsverein Trilogy – that between Magda Vogel, the immigrant German girl, and Carl Becker, the former soldier and Ranger. I did think at first that it might be one of those sparkling Beatrice and Benedict-type confections, where they poured witty scorn at each other, and only later realized that they were in love. There did have to be a romance, of course – between the daughter of an immigrant family, and a representative of the country they were coming to – bridging the two worlds, as it were. But I just couldn’t make it work in that way; Magda turned out to be rather humorless and stern, and Carl was just too reserved. I did recycle the Beatrice and Benedict angle for the romance in the third book of the Trilogy; with Peter Vining and Anna Richter. They both had a sense of humor, and were quite aware that their sharp teasing of each other amused the heck out of anyone who had the luck to be in the vicinity.

Another great historical romance happened between two very real people, and which I put into Deep in the Heart; the marriage between Sam Houston and Margaret Lea Houston, which initially horrified her family and dismayed his friends. Some of them gave it six months, tops. He was twice her age, twice and disastrously married before, had a reputation of being a drunk, a rake and a reprobate, and being the hero of Jan Jacinto and the President of an independent Texas just barely made up for all of that. Marry a gently-bred Southern girl barely out of her schoolroom? Everyone confidently predicted disaster – and everyone was wrong. They were devoted to each other. She had a spine of pure steel, unsuspected under those fashionable Victorian furbelows. For the rest of their lives, whenever they were apart – and they were often separated, since Sam Houston spent much time at his official duties as a senator in Washington DC, or campaigning for office – they each wrote a letter a day. Margaret Lea bore and raised a large family of children, made a comfortable home for him whenever he was there to enjoy it, made him stop drinking and eventually to be baptized. His very last words included her name.

And my final real-life romance inspiring a romance between a couple of my characters is that of the painter Charles M. Russell, and his wife, Nancy – who, like Margaret Lea, was very much younger than a husband who had a bit of a reputation. Half his age, a bit prim and self-contained, Nancy also had steel in her spine – and she was a much better marketer and business agent than her carefree cowboy artist husband. C.M. Russell lived for art, and likely would have been no more than locally known as a wrangler-cowhand who had a talent with a paintbrush, but he made a partnership with Nancy, and she put him on a wider artistic scene. And that is the angle for one of the romances in the current book – between a young prospective professional artist, and a woman with a head for business. Because it all isn’t just love – it’s a partnership between a woman and a man, each filling in each other’s lacks and supporting each other in a mutual endeavor called life.
(cross-posted at my book-blog)

Helter-Skelter

11. February 2013 · Comments Off on Helter-Skelter · Categories: Ain't That America?, Good God, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

I was a teenager when the Manson murders went down, in the autumn of 1969 – of course, the cruel and inexplicable murder of a movie star and several of her friends made all the headlines, and had lots of law-abiding citizens looking over their shoulders and being very careful about locking the doors and windows of their homes at night. It wasn’t until some time later that the associated murders of an elderly retired couple also hit the headlines of the LA Times, and other national newspapers. A blood-drenched, hippy cult with a weirdly charismatic leader had committed those murders in order – so they claimed – to trigger a devastating racial war, which they termed ‘helter-skelter’ from a Beatles song moderately popular at the time. Well, it was the late 1960ies; after assassinations, race riots and anti-war protests, ordinary citizens were pretty shell-shocked. A lot of extremely deranged people held equally deranged beliefs back then, and continued to do so for a good few years – cults and communes like Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple, for instance. My parents often resignedly repeated the truism about the US having been tilted at a steep angle, and all the unmoored nutcases, nonconformists and grifters sliding west and ending up in California. Having both been born there, and with recollections of how it used to be, they would grumble about how they wished such people would slide the hell back to where they came from, and stop embarrassing hard-working and relatively conservative citizens of the Golden State.

Helter-skelter didn’t happen – well, not then, anyway. Reading this week about Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD cop and former Navy reserve officer, with a chip on his shoulder the size of an an aircraft carrier and a string of revenge murders on his slate … now, I could see helter-skelter happening now, forty years later. A lot of things have happened over in Los Angeles, not many of them for the better. One of them is that the LAPD are nowhere near as respected now as they were formerly. It might very well be that they were no more or less competent or corrupt then than they are now, but it is the public perception of them now that sets the bitter tone. Corruption scandals like the slow train-wreck of Rampart division, the beating of Rodney King, the perception of racism among police officers which allowed OJ Simpson’s legal team to plead for acquittal on those grounds … all of those incidents and accidents have blotted the LAPD’s reputation in the eyes of ordinary citizens of all races.

So, is Christopher Dorner a good and moral man driven mad by the system, or a race-card pulling manipulator with a very hot temper? Big boastful talker or a cold and calculating planner of a campaign of murder? The various stories in the news about the matter have it both ways and every gradation in between. One can take away anything that one wishes to see in his posted manifesto; in any case, the man has gone Rambo, and gone to ground, leaving at least fifty families under police protection, and three people – who looked nothing at all like him, but merely had the misfortune to be driving pickup trucks with a likeness to his vehicle – injured by panicky LAPD officers opening fire. Where is he now? Lost and dying of exposure in the woods at Big Bear, or blending into the background in a comfortable hide-out in Compton. Heading into Canada, or into Mexico, or just laying low until the row dies down? When and if he emerges again, and encounters the LAPD – or any other law enforcement body – the chances of it ending quietly with an uncontested arrest are pretty small. And should it end quietly or not – what are the chances of riots breaking out, regardless?

(crossposted at chicagoboyz.net)

Gessler’s Hat

04. February 2013 · Comments Off on Gessler’s Hat · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, General Nonsense, Good God

In the foundation-legend of the Swiss confederacy, Alberect Gessler was a cruel and tyrannical overlord installed by the Austrians, who installed his hat atop a pole in the public marketplace and decreed that all should bow to it … to his hat, not merely his person. Such a declaration was, I think, a way of rubbing in his authority over the common citizens – indeed, rubbing their noses in the fact that he could make them do so, and do so in front of everyone else.

Having read now and again of small businesses run by devout Christians, such event venues, a bakery doing wedding cakes, or a wedding photographer, even a bed and breakfast refusing to provide a good or a service to a gay couple, I am lead to wonder if this isn’t a kind of Gessler’s hat, metamorphosed to the 21st century. Of course, in this best of all possible worlds, anyone’s money ought to be as good as anyone elses’. And in the case of some of the complainants, loud comparisons are made, comparing the way in which small businesses dealt – or didn’t deal at all – with customers of the African-American variety, fifty years and more ago. Left unsaid, but still implied is a kind of smug satisfaction that devout Christians will be called to heel just as unrepentant racists were.

Somehow, I can’t be so certain of that outcome. Browbeating and bringing suit against the religiously observant into compliance with society’s dictates most usually has the opposite of effect intended, even if superficial compliance is eventually gained. Devout and observant Christians do make up a larger portion of the population than gays – who for all their prominence in media and entertainment, still only comprise less than 3% of the population overall – if that. African-Americans, give or take a couple of percentage points either way are at about %12, which is probably not a market segment which can be ignored by someone selling services or a product.

So, can you refuse service to a member of the public, and for what reason? Do you need a reason? Or will just a polite demurral do, such as “I am so sorry, we can’t fit that into our schedule” ? Making the question a little more complicated – will any religion do? Suppose a Jewish photographer didn’t want to photograph a Catholic quinceanera celebration, or a Muslim-owned halal caterer refused to provide food for a specifically Jewish or Christian event? Seriously, even if such a thing happened in the real world, I can’t imagine the customer getting too bent out of shape by the refusal – unless the refusal was couched in less than tactful language.

So what are we to make of stories such as those that I linked, and others of the same sort? I am pretty sure that it’s not so much a question of civil rights for a very small, but socially influential minority at issue here. Rather, it’s a metaphorical Gesseler’s Hat, for which is not sufficient to merely tolerate – all must be seen to approve, and in loud voices in the public square. Discuss.

It’s a Matter of Trust

28. January 2013 · Comments Off on It’s a Matter of Trust · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, Politics

As the old Billy Joel song goes; that is, a fair portion of a civil society is built on trust. Or at least – a large portion of the citizens in that society not only trust each other, but they generally also trust the civil institutions, too. There is an assumption, albeit slightly frayed around some edges that our institutions are generally benign and have the well-being of the larger public at heart. We assume, or did in the past, that laws are passed for our benefit, that rules are instituted for the same reason, that our elected leaders did, or at least mostly made a convincing pretense of representing the interests of their constituents, and not those of lobbyists bearing large favors. We assumed that our print and broadcast outlets were generally telling the truth and living up to their oft-stated mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We assumed also that our various law enforcement bodies – with the occasional horrible local exception – were out there to protect us from crime and the bad guys. We generally trusted our local town and city governments – unless of course, we lived in a sinkhole of civic corruption and incompetence like New Orleans, Washington DC or Chicago, or anyplace where former mayors and city councilmen frequently wind up in prison. We also trust our fellow citizens, in a large part; a trust which appears perfectly astounding to foreign visitors. We trusted our doctors, to do their best for us, within the scope of what is and was medically possible. And there still remain many places in flyover country where hardly anyone locks the back door of their house, and keeps elaborate garden ornaments in the front yard, secure in the believe that everything – inside as well as outside – will remain in their proper place.

It is to my sorrow that this trust – is becoming ever more shredded every day which passes. Oh, there always was that fringe who maintained a lively distrust in civic authorities and institutions, about anything and everything from fluoridated water to godless communists on the school board. Members of all minority groups maintained a lively distrust of mainstream establishments over the years, from country clubs to those who enforced the law, to city hall and mainstream churches, frequently with good reason. But at present all that I might see when I look around is the accelerating pace of mis-trust, and an increasing degree of suspicion. Distrust has gone mainstream in a big way. After the Supreme Court ruled on Kelo, who still feels secure in their ownership of property, given the circumstance that it might be a nice bit of property and potentially more valuable in the hands of a corporate owner, aided by a cash-hungry municipal authority? Who, reading about the confiscation of large sums of cash and property from travelers on the bare suspicion of criminal involvement – and knowing that the income from such confiscations becomes part of the law enforcement body’s budget – cannot put aside the suspicion that such seizures are only a pretext to loot the citizenry? The same also goes for stop-light cameras; traffic safety is not the issue – but a substantial cash-flow to the municipality from fines is the main motivation. And older citizens and those with chronic health complaints might have good reason – pace the example set by the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway – to suspect that under universal public healthcare, the cost of treatment might be more of a concern to the healthcare provider than the care of the individual patient? Knowing of the infamous ‘JournoList’ and supposing the existence of a successor to it, one might look at the stories given wall-to-wall coverage, and those which are shoved below the fold and onto the back pages, one also has reason to suspect the worst of journalists as well.

I could go on with a good few more examples of how trust in what is published and broadcast with regard to the current administration has been severely and perhaps fatally damaged public trust in our newspapers and television news programs. Yep, trust is become a diminishing and precious commodity these days. Of all the damage that has been done to these United States and it’s institutions since 9/11, I wonder if that hasn’t been the most telling blow – and the one from which it will be hardest to recover from. That is, if it will be possible to recover at all.

(Cross-posted at Chicagoboyz.net)

The Wages of Partisan News Reporting

20. January 2013 · Comments Off on The Wages of Partisan News Reporting · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, World · Tags: , ,

I have noted recent news reports decrying incidents of Sandy Hook trutherism with a certain degree of cynical un-surprise. This then, is the fruit of modern journalism; now we have news consumers who are absolutely convinced that the mass murders either didn’t happen, didn’t happen as most reports have it, or believe that it was a put-up job entirely. Of course there have been conspiracy buffs since human history began; wherever there was a tragic or shocking event there have always been unexplained details, dangling loose ends and things which just seemed to convenient, too coincidental. Supposing a conspiracy existed explains shattering and usually random events all very well, which is why people are attracted to conspiracy theories in the first place. Since I was in grade school, I’ve been hearing about the plot, or plots which supposedly took down JFK. It’s to the point where I can paint myself as a a radical just by insisting that Oswald was a lone radical nut-case and no, it wasn’t that hard a shot. And sometimes suspicion of a conspiracy has been very well based; look at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

So, nothing new here, that there should be whispers of conspiracies with regard to the Sandy Hook murders, and nothing new that with the rise of the internet, conspiracy-minded people have no problem finding a wider audience for their particular obsessions than they would have, back in the day when getting the word out as a single activist or group meant a mimeograph machine, a mailing list and sufficient postage. The element that I suspect is new would be the widening lack of trust in the establishment media; broadcast and print alike. I’ve often lamented the manner in which formerly respected news outlets perceived by the public as being generally trustworthy have been pissing away that trust for the last two decades. Of course, up until about fifteen years ago, the internet wasn’t developed to the point where it was relatively easy to fact-check the establishment media; they may have have been just as craven, partisan or incompetent back then, (Hello, Mr. Duranty, your table is waiting!) and there would have been no way for any but a tiny number of people to know for sure.

But now we do know … and one of the things we also know is that just about everything first reported about the Sandy Hook murders, or the Zimmerman-Martin shooting, or the shooting of Gabby Giffords and a hundred other more news stories-du-jour turned out to be wrong. Just about everything said about the Tea Party by the major media turned out to be wrong – and this I know form personal experience as a local Tea Party activist. On the other hand, we know practically nothing about the takeover of the American consulate office in Benghazi late last year and the death of four Americans there. As a candidate for the highest office in the land in 2008, Barack Obama was treated as a precious and lustrous pearl by the national media, given only the lightest buffing and polishing, while his experience, qualifications and past associates went carefully and (to all appearances, deliberately) unexamined.

Reasonable, un-paranoid and non-tinfoil-hat-wearing Americans these days have every reason in the world to distrust what has been printed or broadcast. Rich soil in which to plant the seeds of paranoid conspiracy theories – and the funniest and most ironical part, is that the professional mainstream news media have laid down the deepest layer of that soil themselves, in seeming to trim the sails of coverage to suit the favored political and politically correct winds of the moment. As ye sow, ladies and gentlemen of the establishment press – so shall ye reap, a full crop of suspicion and paranoia.

A Brief Memoir of Guns

17. January 2013 · Comments Off on A Brief Memoir of Guns · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, Home Front, Memoir, Military, Old West · Tags: , ,

Oddly enough – guns were not a terribly real presence in the household – or even the neighborhood where I grew up. Dad, and our near friends and neighbors didn’t hunt, and as near as I can recall, none of them were obsessed collectors. I never even saw a firearm, in use on on display – save in the holsters of law enforcement personnel – all the time that I was growing up. The use of firearms of any sort was an issue so far off the table that it wasn’t even in the same room. Oh, my brother JP had cap pistols, and Dad did possess two sidearms – a pistol, which may have been a Luger, and with which he nailed a particularly annoying gopher one evening with a clean shot through the nasty little buggers’ head – and a Navy Colt (actual model unspecified), which was rather more of a relic than a useful firearm. I saw it once and once only.

Dad kept those firearms in some secure place in the house; I do not know where, never wondered and none of us children were never motivated enough to search for them. We just were not that curious about guns, even though the Colt had a story behind it. Mom and Dad had found it secreted away between some rocks on the beach, in a battered old-fashioned leather holster, I think about the time that they were living in Laguna Beach when Dad had just gotten back from a tour of Army service in Korea – or possibly this happened when we were all living in GI-Bill student housing in Santa Barbara. From what Mom had said, some six or eight months before they found it, there had been a robbery of a local gun collector. They didn’t hear about the robbery for months or possibly years afterwards – so, they kept it. I don’t imagine Dad ever attempted to fire it, although being a tidy and logical person, he might have cleaned it up before putting it away.

Being a west-coast suburban sort of person, and since Dad and none of his friends were hunters – guns just were not a presence in real life, save in holsters on the hips of law enforcement personnel. As strange as it may sound to a European, or to someone from an American inner-city sink, it is entirely possible to live for decades without ever seeing anyone but a law enforcement officer carry a weapon, or witness an act of gun violence or the aftermath thereof. Just chalk that up to being a middle-class person with absolutely no inclination to walk on the wild side … of anything. It is possible that any number of my friends and neighbors at the time, or since then, had a side-arm or long gun which they kept quietly in a closet, or in the glove box of their car. Taking it out and waving it about was just not the done thing.

In point of fact – I never even handled a weapon personally until well into my military service; first an M-16, which I had to qualify on sometime in the early 1980s, and then again with a Beretta pistol in the early 1990s, upon being suddenly faced with a TDY to Saudi Arabia, better known as the Magic Kingdom. American military personnel with orders there had to be qualified to handle that sidearm. Fortunately, the orders fell through once the powers who issued them realized that I was not the flight-qualified documentary photog they were looking for.

And then I finished up settling in Texas, and turning to writing historical fiction, in which guns of various sorts do play a part. Again, although Texas is supposed to be the wild, wild, gun-loving west, personal weapons generally they aren’t any more visible here then they were back when I was a kid … although I do believe more of my friends and acquaintances here do have them – mostly as collectors and historical enthusiasts. Again, usually only the law enforcement officers carry openly … unless it is a historical reenactment event, and then it’s katy-bar-the-door. Through the offices of another blogger, I did manage to get a brief course in the use and maintenance of an early Colt revolver, and through the good offices of another friend, we enjoyed an afternoon of black-power shooting on a ranch near Beeville. But all of that – and a bit of ghost-writing about early revolvers is about all that I have ever had to do with guns. I should hate to think that I might need more than this – because it will truly mean that my world has changed, and not for the better.

(Crossposted at my book blog)

Best Comment Evah!

09. January 2013 · Comments Off on Best Comment Evah! · Categories: Ain't That America?

From this thread, at Chicagoboyz.net. Lexington Green speaks thusly –

“Doesn’t it always boil down to politics, one way or another?”

Nancy! NO! No, no, no!

Love, books, friendship, beauty, art, happiness, music, literature, poetry, punk rock, carousing, brawls, sports, poetry, seduction, making out on the couch, copulation, marriage, children, grandchildren, gardening, exploring, building, discovering, inventing, making, hunting, spelunking, swimming, fishing, nature, art, birthday cake, loyalty, magnanimity, kindness, God, faith, revelation, sacraments, woodworking, drinking scotch, drinking a Manhattan cocktail, seeing a friendly face after a long time, forgiveness and a handshake, finding someone who loves the same things you do, finding new friends, finding the best book you ever read, kissing the girl you really love, seeing the best band ever saw and dancing and getting sweaty, finding out something that makes many things click into place, winning, triumphing, surviving, prevailing, being there for the sick, being there for the dying, dogs, horses, bracing cold days, brilliant moonlight, spring breeze and soft clue skies and a barracuda jacket, blazing suns and squishy asphalt underneath your feet, the most badass car you ever drove, being out on the highway at the crack of dawn and home still 18 hours away and your favorite song comes no the radio, having the tool you need when you need it, figuring out how to fix something yourself, memories, nostalgia, recollection, a picture of your elementary school classmates, your high school yearbook, finding out that someone grew up and turned out all right, seeing your sister marry a terrific man, coming home after two weeks of hard work and having your 2 and 4 year old leap into your arms and kiss you, talking to someone who actually understands you, finding out that the person you were not sure of loves the book you love so he is OK, hearing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction for the first time, hearing Mahler’s 1st for the first time, hearing Rockaway Beach for the first time, walking across the room and talking to the girl despite the concealed fear, getting on the bike and getting out of the house and staying out until you are really tired, finishing the race when you thought you never would, walking into the church on a midday afternoon and the faint smell of incense and candles, and you and a few old ladies and God are the only people there, reading the memoir and feeling it and seeing it and hearing it as if you were there, getting on stage and counting off the song and it is blaring and the girls down front are dancing and you are kicking ass, getting Mom on the phone, getting old mannish emails from Dad, signing up the big client, filing the big lawsuit, winning the big motion, finishing the book and sending it to the publisher, the Mod polka dot shirt, the paisley tie, the Pop Art shift dress, the chukka boots, the brown wingtips, the woman’s earrings and her hair up and the smell of her perfume, hearing Wouldn’t it be Nice in the car when the world is cratering and getting choked up, picking up the six year old, and carrying him upstairs kicking and screaming for a bath, befriending a man you know is a hero, the saints and angels and the holy souls in purgatory and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the rosary, the priest saying I absolve you, standing on Lexington Green where the minutemen stood and where the Redcoats filed onto the green just over there and hearing the muskets fire and the screams and and the blood and the second volley like a single roar and the bayonets and seeing it all like it is all happening agains and will always happen and freedom is never free and it is a gift we don’t deserve and swearing without words to yourself and the world that we will never give up.

That last one is political. But you get the idea.

Nancy, never accept the lie that the personal is political.

The personal is INFINITELY more important than. Politics is the way we clear a space so we can LIVE.

We fight the political struggle so we can have, in the immortal words of Roy Batty, “more life, fucker!”

We know that life is worth living and we want the state and its cement cells and boots and handcuffs and clubs and rubber-coated caterpillar treads to get the fuck out of our way.

OK?

Let us all now go forward together!

Meeting of the Minds

08. January 2013 · Comments Off on Meeting of the Minds · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Literary Good Stuff, Politics, Rant, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

You know, I am purely surprised that the CNN television studio didn’t completely implode when Alex Jones guested on Piers Morgan Tonight. Two competing champions of paranoid idiocy meeting in the same space-time continuum must have been something like the collision of matter and anti-matter. In a just universe, there should have been nothing left but smoking rubble and a small pool of molten glass. I suppose to Mr. Morgan, Alex Jones represents the typical conservative 2nd Amendment fan … just as the Westburo Baptist freaks are typical Christian fundamentalists, instead of being a clan of legal shakedown artists.
Ah well – I haven’t watched CNN in years, and the presence of an ignorant blowhard with a British accent is certainly not a good reason to reverse the habit. Good lord, didn’t we have enough condescending pseudo-intellectuals of our own that we had to go importing them from Britain. As a matter of fact, my required daily ration of condescending British twits is now adequately filled for the nonce, now that Downton Abbey is back for another season.

So, it looks like Senator Chuck Hagel is being put forward as prospective Secretary of Defense. Well, an improvement on John Kerry, anyway. (Pause for a brief and appropriate one liner; So John Kerry walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?” Thank you, I’m here all week. Try the veal and don’t forget to tip your waitperson…) So … any bets on the national Republican Party lasting past the next year … or even the next mid-term elections? Should they cave on defending the 2nd Amendment as they have so far appeared to cave on everything else, than I would guess ‘no.’ I actually did get a fundraising call, long in about August 2012 from some fund-raising functionary pleading for donations to the national GOP. The poor woman’s ears are likely still ringing, although I swear – cross my heart – that I didn’t use any bad language, and I was perfectly polite, when I told her that I certainly would NOT be sending in any such contribution to the national GOP, and that I would make any donation that I could directly to the campaigns of those Tea Party Constitutionalist-Fiscally Responsible-Free Market candidates who swam across my ken.

Which brings me around to the topic of the Tea Party, and how brutally efficient the establishment media has been in painting them – anent any actual concrete and verifiable evidence – as violent and racist fanatics. It’s been an education, seeing the Big Lie demonstrated and deployed in this 21st century … and do not think for a moment that I shall forget the names of those journalistic and media personalities who have most notoriously assisted in its perpetuation. No, I have a little list, and they will hardly be missed in my household.

On the cheerful side – as bad as the national situation seems to be getting, Blondie and I are doing OK, really. I have paid off a number of outstanding debts in the last year, and sales of books – digital and print are quite satisfactory, if not as yet up to Amanda Hocking standards. Sales seem to have begun being made in Germany, with the entry drug being the German edition of Book One: The Gathering. Hah! Once you read the first book, you have to come back for the second and third! Even if they are in English … Watercress Press has a number of new clients, I am shouldering a lot of the business aspects to it, being very well acquainted with the POD/indy author aspects of it all.

The occasional employer – the ranchland real estate specialist – had a couple of good sales, and so he can afford me to come to work for him. Well, as he had his skilled mechanic friend fix the GG’s most recent problem which rendered my car undriveable – I owe him some hours. Which, as he forgets how to do some of the most simple tasks, like printing up a sheet of mailing labels or attaching a PDF to an email, I am rapidly repaying, especially when he calls me frantically, asking me to sort it out, either over the phone or in person.

And that’s my January – so far. Yours?

Metropolis

05. January 2013 · Comments Off on Metropolis · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

It’s been most unsettling, over the last month or so, watching as the ship of state powers straight towards the reefs of financial meltdown, while the Dems and Pubs – establishment ruling class, with just about every one of them grubbing snout deep in the trough – do nothing much but squabble over the arrangement of the deck chairs, and figure out how to be the first one into the purser’s office to loot the safe. And if that wasn’t bad enough to put a dent in my enjoyment of the season: the Newton massacre of school children, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the murders in my own neighborhood, the fact that a basically decent and widely experienced candidate could be defeated in a national election by a legislatively untalented and inexperienced machine hack … all of this was depressing in itself. And don’t get me started on the State Department and the Mysteries of Benghazi. But when a credentialed spawn of academia is given op-ed space in the so-called paper of record to call for deep-sixing the Constitution as an outdated and discredited piece of paper, network television personalities can hector and abuse interviewees with regard to the Second Amendment of same, and an editorialist in a mid-western newspaper (who may be exaggerating for humorous effect, not that he would have a micro-speck slack cut for him if he were a conservative ripping on progressives by name) can call for the torture and execution of those not in agreement on a particular matter, and some fairly senior military commanders can be abruptly side-lined and discredited for playing hide-the-salami (or being assumed to have been playing hide the salami) with a woman not their spouse … well, really, one has to wonder what has been happening here. The ‘othering’ proceeds at a perfectly dismaying rate of speed, with mainstream media and assorted celebs cheerleading from front and center.
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New Year – 20123

01. January 2013 · Comments Off on New Year – 20123 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, here it is – and I can’t honestly say that I was looking forward to it, what with all the stormy clouds on the horizon. The fiscal cliff, President Kardashian being sworn in again, and the prospect of his merry band of thuggish progressives haunting the corridors of power like some kind of political sewer gas, while elements of the intelligentsia and mainstream media commentariat appear to be relishing the prospect overturning the Constitution wholesale and licking the boots of an American oligarchy. Well, it saves them all the trouble of traveling to China or Cuba, or some other socialist hell-hole with universal medical care where jack-booted power stamps on a human face every day, but is a bit rough on the tempers of us responsible strict Constitutionalists. I also wish that the establishment GOP had evidenced more of a spine during 2012 – and at least pretended with more enthusiasm to be something more than the same old go-along-to-get-along gang, pitifully grateful for a turn at the trough now and again. Ah, well – water under the bridge. Go Tea Party, go Wolverines.

The only movie I anticipate seeing in the near future with any relish at all is The Hobbit. I sincerely hope that anyone who has had anything to do with it at all can keep their mouths shut on American political matters and quaint native customs for the foreseeable future – else I shall have to scratch that off my list as well. Yes indeedy, Sgt. Mom has gotten well and truly pissed off with a large segment of the entertainment world lately; even with the ones that I wouldn’t have moved two feet off a rock ledge to see anyway. I am looking at you, Quentin Tarantino.

So – not all that much to look forward to this year … although I have to confess that I do hold on to some hopes that people like Piers Morgan, Matt Lauer and Oliver Stone (to name but a few) may well and truly come to know how most of flyover country holds them in deep contempt, as they are showered every day with rotten eggs and vegetables. Thin comfort, I know – but I take it where I find it.
I suspect that most of my comfort over the next year will be found at home, and among family and friends. Wherever happens in the US over the next twelve months, Texas will very likely be OK. The housing market wasn’t too badly overbuilt, the oil extraction bidness is thriving – and most other kinds of business are doing very well. I’ve managed to pay off some debts and catch up to some of the regular bills. The tiny publishing firm managed to get three new clients at the end of the year, and prospects of more, my sometime-employer – the ranch realtor – has work for me to do most weeks, my books sell in modest yet sufficient numbers. The fallout from the Sweet Meteor o’Death will not land very hard in Texas – but as for the rest of the United States, it’s anyone’s guess. Tough times can’t be avoided … but tough people have at least some hope of outlasting the tough times.

Caput lupinum

27. December 2012 · Comments Off on Caput lupinum · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Veteran's Affairs · Tags: , , ,

Cynic that I am, I am deriving a great deal of amusement from some of the media-political-general public storms whipped up in the wake of the horribly tragic Newtown shootings, and the deaths of two firefighters in an ambush set by an ex-convict in upstate New York. As if the shootings weren’t horrible and tragic enough in themselves, we get to enjoy the reflexive Kabuki dance of ‘we must ban those horrid gun-things!’ being played out – especially since some of the very loudest voices in this chorus are politicians and celebrities who live with a very high degree of security at their workplaces and homes, and whose children attend rather well-protected schools. Such choruses appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that for many of the ordinary rest of us, poor and middle-class alike, the forces of law and order are not johnny-on-the-spot in the event of an attempted robbery, rape, break-in or home invasion. To rely on the oft-used cliché, when moments count, the police are minutes away. In the case of rural areas in the thinly-populated flyover states law enforcement aid and assistance might be closer to being hours away.
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Looking Ahead

23. December 2012 · Comments Off on Looking Ahead · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Local, Pajama Game, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs

I’m still fighting the remnants of the Cold From Hell (possibly complicated by an allergy to blowing cedar pollen which hits a lot of people around here) but at least I am starting to feel a little more in the Christmas spirit. Not much more, but at least I am enjoying the Christmas music on the radio, and just last Monday I was inspired to go ahead and sort out the last of the Christmas presents that I wanted to give to some people I am fond of. So, all that is sorted. Our Christmas dinner is sorted also. Blondie will be out doing deliveries for Edible Arrangements until the last minute, so practically everything to do with Christmas was done in the last day or so.

Which leaves me looking out at next year, and considering what I will do, and what I can do, as the fiscal cliff approaches; no matter how you slice it, 2013 is going to be a bumpy ride. So, in no particular order of importance, I am resolved to – More »

See the Violence Inherent in the System!

12. December 2012 · Comments Off on See the Violence Inherent in the System! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Local, Media Matters Not, Tea Time · Tags: , , ,

So it is not like violence by union members in Michigan against pro-right-to-work activists came as any big surprise to me … or should have to any other sentient being. I mean, this comes after a couple of years of incidents involving members of the SEIU – better known as the Purple People Beaters – and Tea Party protesters going at it. Not that our gutless establishment press organs ever seemed to take notice … or as little notice as they can and still retain a few lingering shreds of credibility, while they remain prostrate and adoring the mighty figure of Ozymandius … sorry, Obama. And in pop-culture circles, historically unions seem to enjoy at least a token respect, for which I hold Hollywood responsible. Why the entertainment industry adores unions, as they are full of plucky, honest blue-collar laboring types, and if it weren’t for unions, why we would be working seven days a week, up to our knees in toxic sludge, owing our soul to the company store, and breaking rocks in the hot sun … oops, sorry, flashback there to about a million Phil Ochs pseudo-folk songs.

This sentimental fondness persists to this day, even though it would appear that most people in the here and how who have had any personal encounters with any sort of union, either public employee or the private sector do not seem to have been left with a good impression generally, either as a consumer, a customer, a worker, manager or business owner. I’d venture to guess that most of the public also do not have a terribly good opinion of the senior management cadre of unions like … say, the Teamsters. Theoretical good will towards the historical struggle for the rights of working men and women is balanced against a present-day monstrous, self-serving, and possibly criminal – or criminally incompetent reality.

Anyway – the kerfuffle in Michigan will resolve itself one way or the other. My own personal hope is for criminal prosecution, or a civil suit, but in this current atmosphere, I am not holding my breath. No, what concerns me about this is something a little deeper … the willingness to do violence against the ‘other’ and a perfect willingness to do it in public, before cameras, and apparently in the assurance that there will be no repercussions … ever. Shades of the brown shirts and black shirts of the twenties and thirties in Italy and Germany, energetically going after political opponents and even relatively uninvolved citizens … because it is perfectly OK to bash opponents over the head and beat them bloody. Why … oh, just because they deserve it, because they don’t agree enthusiastically with the prevailing and carefully-cultivated orthodoxy. And because they disagree, and because they have been effectively ‘othered’ or ‘monstered’ it is thus perfectly OK, even laudable to beat them up, shout them down at public speaking venues, harass their families, sneer at them on television, flame them on the internet, libel them in publications and movies, ‘swat’ them, and trash whatever area they might be using for a meeting place or headquarters, vandalize their motor vehicles and other property … all that and more is legitimate and acceptable.

I have noted this going on increasingly since 2004, and picking up steam in 2008, although certain elements have been in play for longer than that. I watched it happen close up when posting at Open Salon over the time that I was blogging there, although I tried to avoid the more fetid depths of political nutbaggery on offer. I had the disconcerting experience of being active in a local Tea Party from the earliest days of that movement, and then observing how easily and efficiently – and without any basis in fact at all – that the meme of Tea Partiers as racist-stupid-red-necked-reactionaries was perpetuated in the general public by a consortium of the mainstream press, on TV and among the commentariat. Now that vicious meme is embedded in a good segment of the public like an impacted wisdom tooth – even among people whom I would have thought might know better. It was frustrating and frightening to me, how thoroughly it took hold among the OSers and in the general public who had never, ever actually gone to a Tea Party meeting or rally – and just about all of it without a single element being true. Now and again I did try to point out the dangers of reducing people with whom one had political differences to a caricature and then metaphorically burning the caricature at a stake. That way leads eventually to burning real people at a stake, or consigning them to reeducation camps. I don’t know that I had any success in making this plain with any but the most thoughtful and philosophically-inclined.

And very likely it is too late to make this clear to those who are already ready, willing and eager to work out their frustrations by beating up on the ‘other’ – as has been demonstrated in Michigan this week.

(Cross-posted at Chicagoboyz)

Wolverines

05. December 2012 · Comments Off on Wolverines · Categories: Ain't That America?, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs, World

I don’t think I ever actually watched Red Dawn, the move – not the original, and probably not the remake, either. I haven’t been in the mood much for movie going lately, and I view remakes of successful old movies to be proof absolute that the creativity of mainstream Hollywood is a well pretty much run dry.

And the whole notion of Russia, China or North Korea having enough transport capability to bring over sufficient troops to overrun and overwhelm the continental United States is one which boggles my mind over into disbelief. Sure, Germany and Russia both did a fair amount of that military overrunning of adjacent nation in WWII, and Japan certainly managed to do all that and solve the transport issue well enough to do the same in Asia … but schlep a huge number of soldiers and necessary support the whole width of an ocean away, and then completely subdue a large portion of a continent? Nope, not with a block and tackle could I suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the popcorn.

And besides … as it turns out, maybe the dedicated socialists didn’t have to militarily invade at all. They’re already here, and plenty of them, ready to set aside the Constitution, to govern by decree and by thousands and thousands of dictates and rules touching upon everything from what kind of light bulbs we may buy, to what kind of healthcare we might have, what we pack in the kid’s school lunch and a thousand other matters large and small. And all of it decreed by the best and brightest for the very, very best of reasons and our own good, of course. Just call them the new Ruling Class. Some are political, some are academics or in business, or even entertainment – but all wish to cement their place at the apex of authority as quasi-aristocrats.

So what is a dedicated, small-government Constitutionalist to do but go Wolverine … but not by moving into the country and living out fantasies of the WWII-era resistance. No, the new Wolverinity is to stay in place and doggedly, sullenly resist. Resist by supporting small local businesses, independent authors, artists and fellow resistants. Use the power of the pocketbook as much as you can to starve the Ruling Class and it’s supporters. Ridicule and mock them, demonstrate your contempt – and never let a chance pass to remind certain of your fellow citizens (the ones who put Obama/Biden signs on their lawns) that the current administration is one that they voted for – especially when those unintended consequences begin turning up. Gas at $6 a gallon? You voted for that. Rolling brownouts in cities? Voted for that. Now you’re working part-time, or as an independent contractor because your employer can’t afford to implement Obamacare and remain solvent? Hey, you voted for that. As an old and wise NCO who was my mentor once observed, “Hey, sometimes you just got to let them fall on their sword.”

Go, Wolverines.

Julian Fellowes and Beacon Hill Redux

29. November 2012 · Comments Off on Julian Fellowes and Beacon Hill Redux · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Media Matters Not · Tags: , , , ,

Seriously, I hope they have better luck than the last time American TV producers tried to riff off the success of the original Upstairs, Downstairs; it was called Beacon Hill, as I recall and a routine googlectomy confirms. It started with great fanfare and interest, and promptly fizzled out, probably confirming expectations that American TV just cannot do family saga/period drama in anything other than as a TV miniseries with a limited run. It’s certainly a wise choice to go back to the rip-roaring decades of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. Twain did not mean it as a compliment, though ; he meant something vulgarly over-ornamented, cheap pot-metal covered with a microscopic layer of gold. All flash and glitter, trashy glamor to fool the tasteless and/or newly-rich, of which there were a lot in post Civil War America, which was going industrial in a way and in a degree that made the genteel old-money established families, with fortunes based on land, trade, banking and the occasional eccentric invention look on in horror. So, it seems from the story linked above that Mr. Fellows is going to go for the New York Gilded Age elite; the Vanderbilts, the Astors, Carnegie and Morgan and all. Best of luck to him, as there was a lot of drama in them all, over the years. The trouble is, though – it’ll be hard to encompass the American Gilded Age in just one family, or extended family, or even set of rival families – especially if it’s confined to the New York upper crust of the time.

Ultimately, it might prove to be very boring. New York, contra to what the average Brit entertainment mogul might believe is only a very small piece of the United States, and how long the rest of the country might put up with watching the 19th century society glitterati contemplate their own navels is anyone’s guess. Based on Beacon Hill, probably not for long, but it might be amusing to watch for a couple of episodes anyway. But, how is he going do do it?

Darned if I know, but here’s how I’d set it all up, if it were my project. First, I wouldn’t tie the plot and dramatis personae so tightly to the New York setting. Although the place was the focal point for the glamorously wealthy, other places in the United States produced wealth, or had produced it in the relatively recent past, and often viewed New York as a necessary but easily avoided evil. Mining and transport wealth in San Francisco, transport magnates in the mid-west, old-moneyed Southern aristocrats, clawing their way back into the power game, up and coming steel manufacturers in the upper Midwest, Chicago stockyard barons, Texas cattlemen with adventurous old-money and European investors in the wild trans-Mississippi west! That would be a far more interesting mélange than a bunch of mustachioed, upper-crust suits and their corseted ladies, glooming through the overstuffed rooms of a 5th Avenue mansion. And I wouldn’t tie it to a single family …  boring, boring, boring.

So, start with a new-money family, industrial new money in fantastical amounts, made by a man from relatively humble beginnings and not much more than elementary school education, which then would be at least as much as a high school today; someone like Andrew Carnegie, only American born. Add to that, perhaps a rival or sometimes allied family –  even perhaps a single character from an old Southern land-and-cotton-rich aristocratic family smarting from the loss of the Southern Dream. This did happen, historically; Alva Erskine Smith, later Alva Vanderbilt and even later than that, Alva Belmont, was a Southern belle of a formerly well-to-do family, ruined by the War. Of a particularly steely and determined nature, Alva engineered her marriage to a Vanderbilt grandson of the founder of that families’ fortune; a fortune made in steam transport on land and sea, and later the marriage of her daughter to an English duke. Then blend in one of the pre-war industrialist empires –  maybe a stage-coach king, like Ben Holliday, who had the sense and vision to adapt his coach line as a profitable adjunct to the railroad, when completion of the transcontinental rail lines superseded his magnificent horse-drawn coaches.

A character like that would bring in a stiff breeze of old west personalities and frontier adventure. Or perhaps some characters and family based on early industrial innovators like the Colt family, of armament fame. Developer and mass manufacturer of a popular revolver through several iterations, Samuel Colt died in the early years of the Civil War, but left his entire enterprise to the control of his widow, making her one of the richest woman in America. Elizabeth Colt never really seemed to embrace that fabulously competitive social life and conspicuous consumption that typified women like Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and the New York society circle at its most rarified. Although she was a contemporary of it, and knew a great many people such as JP Morgan personally, she seems to have moved serenely in her own circle of good works and art collecting and care of her surviving family, as well as burnishing the memory of her husband. Finally, I’d work in some kind of western connection, if the Ben Holliday-type character didn’t make the cut –  perhaps a wealthy European aristocrat or remittance man, come to make a fortune by investing in the western cattle boom, like Antoine Vallambrosa, the Marquise de Mores, who came to the Badlands of the Dakotas with his glamorous wife, and made a small fortune in ranching and an innovative meat-packing plant. Of course, he had started with a large fortune …

That’s the way I’d start to set it up. It would be much more fun and typical of the time. But who knows if Mr. Fellowes’ version will last longer than Beacon Hill? I’d hope so, as one gets very tired of the everlasting TV triad of modern-day doctors, lawyers and cops.

The Legend of Sally Skull

24. November 2012 · Comments Off on The Legend of Sally Skull · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West · Tags: , , ,

It was said of Texas that it was a splendid place for men and dogs, but hell for women and horses. Every now and again though, there were women who embraced the adventure with the same verve and energy that their menfolk did; and one of them was a rancher, freight-boss and horse trader in the years before the Civil War. She is still popularly known as Sally Skull to local historians. There were many legends attached to her life, some of them even backed up by public records. Her full given name was actually Sarah Jane Newman Robinson Scull Doyle Wadkins Horsdorff. She married – or at least co-habited – five times. Apparently, she was more a woman than any one of her husbands could handle for long.

Sarah Jane, later to be called Sally was the daughter of Rachel Rabb Newman – the only daughter of William Rabb, who brought his extended family to take up a land grant in Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1823; an original ‘Old 300’ settler. (In Texas, this is the equivalent of having come on the Mayflower to New England, or with William the Conqueror to England.) Rabb and his sons and daughter, with their spouses and children – including the six-year old Sally – settled onto properties on the Colorado River near present-day La Grange. Texas was even then a wild and woolly place, and several stories about those years hint at how the frontier formed Sally the legend – well, that and the example of her mother, a formidable woman in her own right. One story tells that Rachael and her children were safely forted up in their cabin, with hostile Indians trying to break in through the only opening … the chimney. Rachel threw one of her feather pillows onto the hearth and set fire to it, setting a cloud of choking smoke up the chimney. Another time – or possibly the same occasion – an Indian raider was trying gain entry by lifting the loose-fitting plank door off it’s hinges. When the Indian wedged his foot into the opening underneath the door, Rachel deftly whacked off his toes with one swipe of an ax.
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Weihnachtmarkt in New Braunfels

21. November 2012 · Comments Off on Weihnachtmarkt in New Braunfels · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Literary Good Stuff, Local, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

All the other authors and publishers whom I talked to over the three days of the Christmas Market agreed – as an author, and none of us being of the NY Times best-seller class – it is profitable and much less dispiriting to do an event like a Christmas craft fair in company with a bunch of other authors. Much less foully dispiriting than doing a single-author event at a book-store, which is usually total ego-death-onna-stick. First and most importantly of all – customers with money and the intention of spending it are plentiful at a craft fair or a similar community market event, especially in the holiday gift-giving season. Trust me; many of them can see books as the perfect gift, and they are inclined to buy. Secondly – it’s a venue where one is in completion with vendors of a wide variety of consumer items – not every other published author on the shelves. And thirdly – in the slack times, there are other authors to talk to.

Seriously, nothing quite beats the tedium of sitting alone at the Dreaded Author Table in a not-very-well-frequented bookstore, and watching the occasional customer slink into the store trying to avoid your eye. Or worse still, at a large and popular chain bookstore, observing them heading into the computer games or DVD movie section. Which is the trouble with the Hastings chain, as I experienced and other authors concur; the staff are wonderfully helpful, great about ordering and stocking the books, but alas, the client base usually is there for the games, the music and the movies, eschewing the printed word generally. Not even libraries are proof against this; another author told me of participating at a local author event staged at a big public library. He and the other hopeful authors watched as a large crowd assembled out side the library, every one of them anticipating that they would have a wonderful and author-life-affirming event … only to see that every one of those in line headed straight for the library computers.

Yes, the Author’s Life (especially as a not-very-well-known indy author) is full of little kicks to the ego as this – but an event that sells out half the stock of books that one arrived with, is indoors, well-publicized in advance, and mostly-well-attended (although Sunday afternoon slacked off considerably) and having the organizers being quite generous and helpful – this is one well worth recollecting with fondness and returning to again. The good volunteers for the Weihnachtsmarkt even had a vendor’s lounge, stocked with coffee and ice water and all sorts of home-made pastries and baked delights. New Braunfels is Little Germany – they DO that kind of thing here! The whole event is to benefit the local historical museum, the Sophienburg – and it did draw a good crowd. My daughter was afraid that I had pretty well tapped out the market for the Trilogy in New Braunfels; not so, as there were a fair number of fans who came and bought the follow-up books (Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart), or asked impatiently about the next book, and even two who bought the German translation as a gift for friends and family who would appreciate a German translation of the first of the Trilogy. In between all these high points though – I spent time studying the interior architecture of the New Braunfels Civic Center, briefly wandering down the hallway to other author tables and the occasional quick foray into the main sales floors. The shops set up in the main ballroom and the annex all featured a great many lovely things that I just cannot quite yet afford.

Ah, well – someday.

For the Honor of Service

13. November 2012 · Comments Off on For the Honor of Service · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Military, Politics, Rant, sarcasm, Veteran's Affairs, War, World · Tags: , , ,

It looks really weird to me, this last Veteran’s Day weekend … not even a week after the election results came in. A couple of days after General Petreus put in his resignation as head of the CIA – conveniently for the American news cycle – on a Friday before a three-day weekend. So, kind of astonished over that – a mere several days before he was to testify about whatever was going on with regard to our quasi-official establishment in Benghazi on the 11th of September last. Of course, the second most astonishing aspect to me is that the head of the CIA can’t keep an affair secret, and the third most astonishing is that someone so politically wily as to be able to pin on four stars would still be stupidly reckless enough to engage on such a very public affair. What, were they doing the horizontal mambo in the middle of the parade ground at reveille at whatever base they were at in Afghanistan? Ok, never undervalue the comfort of situational friendships between persons of the opposite sex in a far country, double if in a war zone. Been there and … err, backed off from doing that, in the physical sense. But the friendship was enormously satisfactory; a way of getting through a hard tour in a distant and unforgivingly difficult place, and a lot of people there with us and who noted that we were a quasi-official couple also probably assumed that our relationship included an ongoing sexual aspect. Which it did not; part of the friendship involved an understanding between us that carrying it that far would inflict unacceptable damage on each other, emotionally and professionally. I thought the world of him, and he loved his family, back in the World; that’s the way that responsible and caring adults manage that kind of situation. It’s in the field, and it ends in the field.

But the way that the Petreus mess is expanding is enough to cause me to raise an eyebrow – and now it turns out that the second woman involved – is she the South Beach Mata Hari or what? – also had a good friend of the multi-star adorned command-rank level, as well as the somewhat dogged interest of the investigating FBI agent, who sent her a pic of him shirtless… dear god, people – this is not high school. Or at least, I assumed it was not. As it is, I could swear I watched a story line like this on General Hospital in the late 1970s, only with doctors, nurses and consultants, instead of commanders, reporters and socialites.

It is curious though – the sudden retirements, resignations, and reassignments of high-ranking and notable officers lately. It’s almost like there is something going on: earlier there was that kerfuffle about General Carter Ham being relieved of duty, with dark hints that it was because of events in Benghazi. On the bright side, though – since General Petreus was deeply involved in the events of 9/11/2012 in Benghazi, it just might be that there might be a little more interest in what happened there than has been displayed so far by our mighty mainstream press.
Or not.

After Math – Thoughts on 11-07-2012

08. November 2012 · Comments Off on After Math – Thoughts on 11-07-2012 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Blondie and I went to bed Tuesday night around 9:30, already fearing that things were not going well as regards Mitt Romney’s chances of taking up residence in that big official governmental residence on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington … so it was not a totally incapacitating shock to the system on Wednesday morning to wake up (to the tune of our next door neighbor’s Basset hound incessantly barking –G*d, are we beginning to hate that dog!) in the wee hours, turn on the computer and discover that Michelle will have another four years of lavish vacations on the government dime.

Ah well – as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and perhaps this turn of events might turn out to be a blessing in very thick disguise. Obama will be in office when all the various incontinent chickens – which he or his party launched in the first place – come home to roost. Fast and Furious, the overrunning of the Benghazi consulate and his administration’s inaction with regard to, the insupportable burden that Obamacare will place upon small businesses, the expected hyper-inflation Weimar Germany Style, Iran taking aim at Israel in a non-friendly and nuclear way, the Chinese edging into a tangle with Japan, domestic AND international threats to our First and Second Amendments, the fact that the nomination of at least one justice to the Supreme Court will be in his purview, the fact that his administration generally seems to be a rancid commingling of Chicago gangster politics, 1930’s style with the worst of the 1960’s academic Marxism … With the best intentions in the world, I fear that Romney would not have been able to clean out the Augean stables in any meaningful way.
So, let it happen and let it all be done. That percentage of the voters who wanted Obama most have now got him. Over the next four years they will continue to get him – good, hard and unlubricated, starting with the prices of gas and heating oil skyrocketing, the money being devalued, our industrial base being even more gutted than it has been already, and rolling brownouts becoming a regular occurrence, and the economy basically going over a cliff. Sometimes there is no way of learning other than to completely and utterly screw up.

What to do, personally? Well, life will go on, much as it has from age to age. Fortunate I am to be living in Texas – who might have thought that it would be our last best hope? Molly Ivins is probably revolving in her grave like a Black and Decker drill. Otherwise – consider the means of going mini-Galt, and ratchet up what we have been already been doing over the last couple of years. Buying second-hand as much as possible. Stockpiling food and other essential supplies. Starving the Beast by minimizing the taxes that I do pay, bartering as much as possible for goods and services. In the next year, we’re probably going to give up cable television – although we’ll keep the internet. Redouble the efforts to keep a viable garden. I gave up just about all of my print subscriptions to magazines and the local newspaper. Our list of entertainment personalities who will not be getting anything from us in the way of patronage of their music, movie and television show patronage is now several pages long. (Goodbye, Cher, so long Ken Burns; in my eyes you have joined the ranks of Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen. Bow down and lick the hands of the new autocrats – enjoy the taste and forget that you ever thought of yourselves as free citizens.) I’ll continue supporting the Tea Party, and carry on with building a support network of like-minded cranky independents who voted with our brains rather than our lady-parts. Get more involved in local and State politics, and utterly reject any attempts by anyone who diminish any part of the Bill of Rights. OK then – it’s not the beginning of the end; it’s the end of the beginning.

Home Stretch

05. November 2012 · Comments Off on Home Stretch · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Politics

Alas and alack, I haven’t paid attention to this blog since Friday – all my attention and care was given over to getting the various bits and elements for the German-language version of Adelsverein-The Gathering all worked out. Including having my little brother the graphic artist having to re-do the cover, since the German translation worked out to fifteen pages more than the English version – and that without the dedication and the historical notes included. What can I say? I guess it’s the effect of all so many words being longer. For the next books, I will expect this. So, I was wrestling with formats and fonts and tweaking the spacing … and Blondie and I already went and voted on the first day of early voting in Texas anyway. As far as we are concerned, it’s over but the shouting.

Of which there is likely to be a lot, especially if the slightly-less-than Fresh Prince of Chicago goes down in a landslide of votes for Romney Ryan … which just might happen, if the enthusiasm at Romney-Ryan rallies is as unfettered as reported, and attendees at Obama Biden events are as dispirited. There will be a lot of disappointed people who are assuming that another four years is in the bag. And they will not be happy. Still, it will be interesting, in the way of that old supposed Chinese curse. Blondie and I are going to split watching election coverage between Fox, and NBC.

So, that’s how that stands: the print version of Adelsverein – Book One: The Gathering will be up on Amazon in about two weeks, and now we find out if there really are a lot of far-west adventure fans in Germany. I am assured that there are by the gentleman who staked a lot of his own time in translating for a share of the hoped-for future profits. But then perhaps we are both gamblers. And times always were interesting…

Hip To Be Square?

19. October 2012 · Comments Off on Hip To Be Square? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Politics · Tags: , , ,

As I contemplate the coming election, I do wonder if a sort of cultural turning point hasn’t been reached, which was elucidated lo these many decades ago by Huey Lewis and the News – that it’s soon might be seen to be hip to be a square. Or to put it in standard English – if being sober, responsible, cheerfully working at a blue-collar and non-corporate job, engaged in a traditional man/woman marriage, and living out in flyover country somewhere, and being a traditionally patriotic, fiscally responsible, striving small business entrepreneur and home-schooling more than the requisite one or two designer-perfect offspring … might be the default option for the rebellious and non-conformist? I mean, really – look around at the current social and educational landscape in some of our larger and supposedly more urban and urbane environments. Take a good long look; I have a stack of barf-bags handy. What could be more logical than to rebel against such decay, despair, conformity and criminality than to stake out a suburban (or even rural) homestead in flyover country somewhere and wholly become what the putrid 1960’s retreads were rebelling against in the first place?

Look, the standard-bearers of 1968 have taken over the higher ground, roosted in the educational, media and political establishments like a flock of grackles – shrieking to high heaven and splattering the surface underneath with a Jackson-Pollocking layer of artistic but bad-smelling dung. Well, really – what could be more fun to the naturally rebellious youth than to tell the baby-boom cohort of elders (who basically trashed every American institution as they moved through it, save perhaps the military, technology, the culinary arts – and possibly retail) to take a hike, I’m going to live like my grandparents, or maybe my great-grandparents? Plant a garden, go off the grid and make your own clothes, and preserved food? I know that Martha Stewart was responsible for a lot of renewed popularity with regard to home-making, but she always seemed to me to be someone striving for Right-Coast upper-class respectability. What does one make of web and cable cooking-show personalities like Ree Drummond, the accidental country girl who wound up on a ranch in Oklahoma, living a comparatively laid-back life, cooking and gardening, and home-schooling four children?

Could this rebelling by going back to basics account for the retro appeal of Mitt Romney? Staid, conventional, traditional 1950s-Leave It To Beaver-style marriage, large and happy family, picket-fence suburban ideal home – everything that the brigades of 1968 revolted against, and subsequently established a new normal of something completely different from it – and now a new generation is rebelling against that? Amusing to contemplate, anyway.

I just hope the fashion for girdles and wearing high-heels and stockings to vacuum the floor is one thing that never revives. That stuff is uncomfortable.

Upstairs, Downstairs and All Around the House

16. October 2012 · Comments Off on Upstairs, Downstairs and All Around the House · Categories: Ain't That America?, General Nonsense, History, Media Matters Not, Memoir, That's Entertainment!, World

My family was, for various reasons, devoted to the first Upstairs, Downstairs series, back in the day. Mom loved the whole dichotomy of the ‘family’ upstairs, and the servants, working away behind the scenes and below stairs – very likely because her father, my Grandpa Jim was engaged in practically life-long service to a wealthy family living in a magnificent mansion. Dad had a mild guy-crush on Rachael Gurney, who played Lady Marjory Bellamy – she was what Dad apparently considered the perfect upper-class Englishwoman. And I loved it all because it was … England, that very place that three of our four grandparents had come from, and during the two decades that were pictured in the show. The outer world of Upstairs Downstairs was what they would have remembered; the music, the manners, the fashions, habits and social customs, the scandals and events.

So we followed it devotedly, even as we admitted to each other that it was really a high-toned soap opera in period costume. I think primarily the reason that it succeeded on those terms was that it was entirely character-driven. That is, the characters drove the plots, and they were pretty consistent over the arc of the show; there was a womanizing rake – actually two of them, one upstairs and one down – the imperious lady and her devoted sour-tempered maid, the upright lord of the house, several charming ingénues – and their affairs of state and otherwise, personal crises large and small, courtship, marriages, birth, death … the whole enchilada, as it were. And always in the background there was history going on, but it usually took a back seat to personal lives and concerns. Which is how it is for most of us; what we do, the decisions that we take are driven by our characters and our needs. So, dialed up for dramatic purposes, the Bellamy saga managed a high degree of consistency that way.

And now we come to the new Upstairs, Downstairs iteration … and a couple of episodes into the second season, it is not going well, character and plot-wise. It was a good idea, to update Eaton Place to the 1930s, and bring in a whole new upstairs and downstairs family, with the character of Rose Buck to tie them together, but it’s already gone south, between season one and two … which we have easily deduced from the rushed manner in which the transition between the two was made. You mean – now they have two children? And the mother-in-law died? (And they killed the monkey… not a good start, FYI, and it matters little that it was a well-meant accident.) And Sir Hallam will be boinking his sister-in-law, who doubles as a Nazi spy? Hooo-kay, then. There could have been a whole season of character-developing high-toned soap opera worked in, between the end of one and the start of the second, but apparently everyone wanted to rush on to the drama of historical events. Pity, that – what they finished up with was plot-driven characters; where the needs of plot drove the characters to do things that radically changed what they had first appeared to be ... which is very likely why one of the key originators of the original and the follow-on series departed at speed, while the other had serious health problems.

No, it’s not a bad thing do do plot-driven characters, especially in the confines of a historical narrative, but abruptly contradicting the established character, and rushing over certain developments? Sigh. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the next season of Downton Abbey. At least, they are not doing things in a mad rush ... although they did rather hurry through WWI, and muddled the sequence of the end of the war and the great influenza epidemic.

(Cross-posted at my book-blog website)

In the Shadows of Melting Monuments

11. October 2012 · Comments Off on In the Shadows of Melting Monuments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Rant, That's Entertainment!

So, a week after the debate and stuff is still happening. Well, I think the preference cascade has well and truly begun. Once someone – or several influential someones came out and said that our esteemed resident of the White House has feet of clay and several other shortcomings, and didn’t get struck by lightening, or tied up and burned at stake by a vengeful mob … well, now it’s safe for everyone.
Look, he did a craptastic job last week; sweaty, blinking, repeating the talking points … apparently he believed that all he had to do was saunter out on stage and that ol’ 2008 magic would put everyone under it’s spell. Riding on a shoeshine and a smile … right up until everyone stops smiling back. Look, Mr. Hopey-Change – there’s some work involved in this Presidential gig; some long hard work, late hours, late nights … and not spent partying with J.Z. and Bouncy. (Yeah, I call her Bouncy. Easier to pronounce. Somehow, I don’t think the parties with celebs are going to go on quite as often, after November 6, no matter who wins.)

Oh, and about form letters of official consolation to the next of kin with an auto-pen signature? It’s not that difficult to have your staff vary the standard letter a little, and scribble a signature yourself. Governor Romney apparently generates personal, hand-written letters of consolation, if this story is correct.

Remember Benghazi, Mr. President – coupla of dead former Navy SEALS, and an ambassador dead? Bloody dragged fingermarks on the doorway of a consulate from which official US protection had been withdrawn? You don’t? Well, seeing that the major press lords are not the least interested in dead soldiers and ambassadors, the plight of the homeless and gas prices shooting up to $5.00 a gallon during a Democrat Party administration, I can’t really say I’m surprised.

So – looking forward to the debate tonight. Note to self – make a big bowl of popcorn.

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