One of the best things about buying a house and retiring from the military was being able to feel free to actually get serious about a garden. I went through a phase of planting roses – many of which have thrived and survived – and a long project to rip out the existing lawn, back and front, and put in xerioscape plants. The back yard was the place that I put the most into, though. Because of the layout of the rooms and the windows in them, the back was the part I looked at the most. And because of the peculiar soil composition – a foot or so of heavy, dense clay laid down over an impermeable layer of caliche which apparently goes all the way to the core of the earth – getting certain things to thrive and grow in it has been a challenge. Really, if I had known then what I do now, I would have hired someone to come in with a bulldozer, scrape up all the topsoil and replace it with Miracle-gro. But I made do with putting a lot of things in pots, and I had quite a nice little garden going, until a pair of disasters. The first were the two rambunctious young dogs that my daughter fostered for a couple of months. They were whirling balls of destruction … and by the time we found permanent homes for them, they uprooted half a dozen of the potted and planted specimens and dug holes everywhere. Then a hard and prolonged freeze in January, 2010 pretty well finished off everything else.
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That is what I have finally reached this week, in the wake of the Rush Limbaugh-Slutgate imbroglio: the far frozen limit. I’ve never been one to flounce off in a huff, having neither the figure for flounces or possession of a late model huff-mobile. That was my Granny Dodie’s style; she was the one who was prone to throwing hissy-fits in public places at being the recipient of bad customer service. I personally always rather preferred the model provided by my other grandmother, Granny Jessie, who would simmer quietly, depart silently … and then never darken the door of the offending establishment ever again. Which, as Granny Jessie lived to the age of 96, probably resulted in a lot of establishments being vaguely puzzled as to why the heck they didn’t ever see the tiny, grim-faced old lady in the print rayon dress ever again … or maybe not. Say what you will, at least Granny Dodie’s method left the offending establishments in no doubt that they had offended grievously, which from a customer-service point of view, at least clued them in to the fact that there was a problem. And that they just might have to take steps to fix it.
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Ned Buntline, that is … a dime novel writer, publicist, playwright and producer … as well as publisher and popularize of popular cheap novels about the American west, published in mass quantities during the latter half of the 19th century. His name was actually Edward Zane Carroll Judson, and he had been a sailor, a brawler, an instigator of riots, an ex-convict and a prodigious drinker and public lecturer on the benefits of temperance. Presumably he knew whereof he spoke, on this subject, although the phrase ‘do as I say, not as I do’ certainly does occur to one. But this is not about E.Z.C.Judson, or his alter-ego, Ned Buntline … or even any of the Wild West personalities that he wrote about in his dime novels.
No – what he, and his scribbling ilk did in a fair part, was to popularize the far west – the frontier west as it then existed in the late 19th century – as a fountainhead of unending drama and breathtaking adventure. Granted, anyone who does this now, or in previous decades has had wonderful material to work with: eccentric characters galore, marvelous and improbable events, romance of every variety, warfare and friendship with strange and alien peoples (Indians, unreconstructed Confederates and Mormons among them). But Buntline and his less famous competitors did it first, establishing the meme almost before the dust was settled.
Of course – some of that dust was purposefully raised, in the course of telling a ripping good yarn for the price of one thin dime. They had not the luxury of being able to wait and see, to consider events steadily or see them whole. They were also not able to thoroughly fact-check the back-stories alleged by some of their most famous heroes – say, Buffalo Bill Cody, or Wild Bill Hickok, or cared very little others were out and out criminals and sociopaths. Or that others –like the small landowners and homesteaders who came out on the wrong side of something like the Johnson County War were not, and had experienced the bad fortune of being relatively voiceless in a contest where the other party had the bigger public megaphone. (And that much of their output is hideously racist by modern attitudes should go without saying.) They also were guilty of creating or flat-out exaggerating every convention imaginable regarding cowboys; who were usually plain old working men of every color, performing backbreaking and/or totally boring labor – but they did it in the open air, and from the backs of horses, which must have looked pretty good from the perspective of a factory hand or clerk back east.
Still – Buntline and his ilk set the stage for the enduring image and conventions of the Old West: timeless stories and stock characters, which were lovingly sent up in a movie like Rustler’s Rhapsody. Even so, it was vision of the Wild, Wild West which gripped our grandparents and great grandparents in print, entranced our parents at the movies … and had us glued to the television.
But you know what? The real Wild West was even more incredible than Ned Buntline ever dreamed.
As I wrote – gosh, how many years ago in the Brief – about wishing that Hollywood could find it in their heart and wallets to make movies that didn’t kick military members and veterans in the teeth; now they finally come up with one: Act of Valor, after lo, these many years. It looks as if looks as if the regular movie-going public likes Act of Valor as much as the movie critic establishment seems to despise it. Or so I can see from the Rotten Tomato ratings. But hey – opening weekend box office figures tell something. And if it cleans up on subsequent weekends, maybe, just maybe I might have hope that the usual Hollywood ‘tards can connect the dots.
And about time, too. But I still think the ‘Obama gets Osama’ drama is going to fall flat, unless the current administration works with their folks to drag us to see it by the bus-load.
…they toil not, nor do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Enough of that simile, since it’s pretty obvious that Solomon in all his glory was not spread all over just about every fashion and women’s mag for the last couple of years, accompanied by cutlines, stories and editorials, all drooling over how chic, fashionable and oh-so-modern and otherwise laudable the spouse of the current occupant of the White House was.
Yep, upon the apotheosis of the Empty Suit known as Barack Obama, to the highest office in the land, I could hardly pass the supermarket checkout stand, without being assured that his Significant Other was the best thing since Jackie Kennedy or sliced bread… so lovely, so tasteful, so chic, the very model of an ultra-modern First Lady. Frankly, the sycophantic chorus got to the point where I began muttering to myself something along the lines of, ‘Sister, I remember Jackie Kennedy – and you, darlin’ – aren’t no Jackie Kennedy. If Jackie Kennedy had ever dressed for a public event by raiding her daughter’s closet and the nearest Goodwill outlet, she would have at least made it look good!’ Frankly, if I never see another picture of Michelle in a boob-belt and too-small cotton cardy, or one of Laura Ashley’s more unfortunate evening dress designs, it will all be too soon. And I speak as one who does raid her daughter’s closet, the local Goodwill store and loved Laura Ashley, but then I do not see any fashion mags out there breathlessly lauding Sgt. Mom’s inimitable sense of style.
About the only mystery left unexamined regarding Michelle Obama’s dress sense is how on earth one can spend a bomb of money and still finish up wearing such desperately unflattering clothes, or clothes grotesquely unsuited for the occasion – or both.
So, you will have gathered that Michelle Obama annoys me. I would have been content to dismiss her as I did, yea these many months ago as “a seething pit of resentment in spite of two high-end degrees, a large income and a mansion; a BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement.†I might have been able, eventually, to blow off the fashion and women’s magazine going all full Pravda on us … but for the vacations.
The incessant expensive vacations to lavish resort locations annoy me. I don’t grudge rich people their amusements, knowing that they mostly pay for such excursions themselves, and that spending on them will trickle down to make a good living for the people who own, run, and work at such places – heck, I live in a destination city, although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a tropical paradise like Hawaii, or an enclave of the uber-rich like Martha’s Vinyard. I certainly didn’t grudge President Reagan, or either of the Presidents Bush from taking vacations at property they owned and improved, and even hosted VIPs at. (I did derive amusement out of the White House Press corps being dragged to Crawford, Texas, in August, though. Awwww, poor cosmopolitan urbanites, being dragged to the ass-end of nowhere in the most miserable part of a Texas summer!)
But at a time when ordinary working people are cutting back to a week or so, taking a frugal holiday here and there, or even not taking a vacation at all – Michelle Obama taking a lavish holiday every two months or so, looks very, very bad to the general public. And the White House must know that it’s going over about as well as a case of the chicken pox at a kid’s birthday party. That someone whose job it is to consider damage control can’t or won’t talk her into slumming it at Camp David instead is not a good thing.
Tomorrow…
Found, courtesy of a comment thread on PJ Media.
Three carriages entered the square, and as they halted before the jail door, the ranks of waiting men presented arms. Half a dozen men descended from the carriages – William Tell Coleman and the other leaders of the Committee. They talked for a few moments through the wicket-gate … and then they were admitted into the jail, to speak with Sheriff Scannell.
“We have come for the prisoner Casey,†Coleman told him. “We ask that he be peaceably delivered us, handcuffed at the door immediately.â€
“Under existing circumstances,†replied Sheriff Scannell, “I shall make no resistance. The prison and it’s contents are yours.â€
“We want only the man Casey at present,†One of the other Committee members added. “For the safety of all the rest, we hold you strictly accountable.â€
Casey was taken to the Committee headquarters – later, Charles Cora was also added to the Committee’s bag. Three hundred men guarded Fort Gunnybags, another hundred the jail, while the rest were relieved for the moment. The next day, Vigilantes patrolled the streets, and warned merchants selling weapons not to sell any such … for now. James Casey and Charles Cora were allowed visitors. On Tuesday, Cora was brought before the Committee and informed that he would be tried for murder. All the forms of law would be observed, and he would be represented by a lawyer. Who was one of the Executive Committee … Cora provided a list of witnesses, who would testify in his defense, and they were all sent for; none could be found.
That evening, word arrived that James King of William had died. Sometime that evening, both Cora and Casey were convicted and sentenced.
Thursday at noon was the time set for King’s funeral to begin. The nearby Unitarian Church where it was to be held was jammed to overflowing by mid-morning, and the procession with the coffin was said to have been two miles long. Mourners stood in the streets to pay their respects … and in the street before the Vigilance Committee’s headquarters there were also men standing; men in three ranks, in the pose of attention as they had stood in the square before the county jail on Sunday morning.
Just before one o’clock, the tall windows on the second floor of the building were opened; from two of them, a pair of small wooden platforms were pushed out, and balanced on the edge of the window-sill. Above, from the flat roof of the building, a pair of heavy beams was set into place, just over the platforms; a noose of heavy rope dangled from the end of each beam. Then … silence again, although those who waited in the street below could hear the faint music of a church organ. The music seemed to be a cue of some kind. Charles Cora, his eyes covered by a white handkerchief blindfold was guided out of the window, to stand silently on the little platform. A few moments later, James Casey followed; he was not blindfolded at his request, but his nerve broke, looking down at the implacable faces below. He babbled, pleading that he was not a murderer, he had done nothing, he only responded to insult … the words fell into grim silence.
In that silence, the commotion at the door of the Unitarian Church could be heard clearly; James King’s coffin was being carried out by the pall-bearers. From the steeple above, the church bell tolled a single note. Another church bell joined, and then another and another, as those men in the street presented arms. The platforms beneath the Casey and Cora dropped … and justice as it had been declared by the Vigilantes was done.
Postscript: the Committee did not disband, immediately. They went on adding members, conducting military drill, and doing business – one item of which was the formation of a list. Those on it would either leave, or be charged and tried under the ordinary rules of law. Only two more miscreants were hanged, and thirty banished officially, although it was estimated that at least eight hundred left town voluntarily. The Committee formally dissolved in August of that year, with a grand parade and an open house of “Fort Gunnybags.â€
Many years later, a curious visitor to the city asked, “What has become of your Vigilance Committee?†“Toll the bell, sir – and you will see!â€
The shooting of James King – political murder disguised as a justifiable response to a personal insult – inflamed the city of San Francisco immediately. King, shot in the chest but still clinging to life was taken to his house. Meanwhile, an enormous mob gathered at the police station, and the police realized almost at once that the accused James Casey could not be kept secure. He was removed under guard to the county jail. The indignant mob was not appeased, not even when the mayor of San Francisco attempted to address the crowd, pleading for them to disperse and assuring them that the law would run its proper course and justice would be done. The crowd jeered, “What about Richardson? Where is the law in Cora’s case?†The mayor hastily retreated, as the square – already guarded by armed marshals, soon filled with armed soldiers. The angry mob dispersed, still frustrated and furious. No doubt everyone in authority in the city breathed a sigh of relief, confident that this matter would blow over. After all, they controlled the political apparatus of the city, at least one newspaper, as well as the adjudicators and enforcers of the law … little comprehending that this shooting represented the last, the very last straw.
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It appears that a great number of veterans and relatives of veterans are increasingly incensed at the news that the late Senator Murtha may have a new Navy ship named for him. The late senator was famed for nearly being nailed in the Abscam scandal, lo these many decades ago, for sucking down absolutely mind-boggling quantities of political pork for his district, and last but not least, pre-judging the Marines charged in the so-called Haditha incident.
Those veterans and relatives feel so strongly about this gross insult to military honor that they have opened a website, and a means of communication their displeasure to the Secretary of the Navy.
This is the website –
www.nomurthaship.com
Go, therefore, and do your duty, with regard to their petition. That is all.
(sorry, means of posting embedded links has gone the same way as the ability to post pictures.)
It seems that there is a bit of bother on in military circles … or rather in the media circles which concern themselves with the conduct of the military … going on with regard to the Marines who were recorded some years ago pissing upon the bodies of some dead Taliban fighters.
The Taliban, like other gentlemen of similar Islamic persuasion in prosperous and peace-loving locations like Somalia, Chechnya and Iran are, of course, known the world over for their upright moral principles. They are famous for this, as well as their strict adherence to the practices of the Geneva Convention when it comes to captured military and interned civilians like Daniel Pearl, and their gentle and respectful treatment of female and child noncombatants. It seems like every other day or so, the Afghan and Pak Taliban are burning down another school, or throwing acid into the face of another woman whose appreciation of the charms of an individual enthusiast for the Religion of Peace is somewhat lacking.
Gosh, I just don’t know what got into our Marines. I clearly recall seeing WWII-era pictures of the aftermath of fighting in the Pacific, where a truck or half-track hood was adorned with a Japanese skull. Now, that was serious desecration. This? I am reliably informed that there are pervs who will pay good money to be pissed on by a professional. Well, the perv is usually alive and wearing a codpiece, high-heels and a ball-gag, but that’s a small detail.
Anyway – Bad Marines. Don’t let us catch you doing this ever again, or it’s no dessert for you for a week. And if you do, don’t take pictures of it for pete’s sake. And if you do take pictures for you and your buddies to snicker over … don’t show them off in public for about twenty years.
If, on the other hand, you want to piss all over Michael Moore, or that creep at the Daily Kos, or Bill Ayers or someone like that – feel free. Claim they were on fire, and you just wanted to do your duty as a good citizen.
Ever since I finished the Adelsverein Trilogy, I’ve wanted to have a German language version out there.
I’ve had emails from fans asking about it, and talked with native German speakers who assured me that Karl May (the German equivalent of Zane Grey) has an enormous and devoted Old West fan-base. This in spite of the fact that he shuffled off the mortal coil in 1912, and only visited the US once: on that occasion, he only went as far west as Buffalo, New York – but in book-world, his characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were in the thick of it.
In any event, movies, television and radio dramas and comic books based on Karl May’s version of the Wild West have continued to be madly popular in Germany ever since. I have made an arrangement with a freelance translator, Chicagoboyz fan and commenter Lukas R., who has provided a sample translation of a chapter. If you are fluent in German, take a look at it (here on my book blog) and tell me what you think. If it works out as I hope, the German-language version of Adelsverein: The Gathering would be available in about a year, as an e-book and print paperback edition.
(Crossposted at my writer’s blog and at Chicagoboyz.)
Flash Mob in a mall food court sings Hallelujah Chorus
Everyone living in my house hopes that everyone living in your houses has a wonderful holiday season and that 2012 will be your best year yet.
One of my favorite Christmas carol videos –
And from A Festival of Lessons and Carols, from Cambridge, England …
I did a tour in Korea in 1993-94, which hardly makes me an expert on the place, seeing that I have that in common with a fair number of Army and Air Force personnel over the past half-century plus. Reading about the expected fallout from the change of régime-boss north of the DMZ I think of that tour now as something along the lines of being put into place rather like an instant-read thermometer: there for a year in Seoul, at the Yongsan Army Infantry garrison, where I worked at AFKN-HQ – and at a number of outside jobs for which a pleasant speaking voice and fluency in English was a requirement. One of those regular jobs was as an English-language editor at Korea Broadcasting; the national broadcasting entity did an English simulcast of the first fifteen minutes of the 9 PM evening newscast. I shared this duty with two other AFKN staffers in rotation: every third evening, around 6PM, I went out the #1 gate and caught a local bus, and rode across town to the Yoido; a huge rectangular plaza where the KBS building was located, just around the corner from other terribly important buildings – like the ROK capitol building. Once there, I’d go up to the newsroom – which was a huge place, filled with rows of desks and computers, go to the English-language section, and wait for any of the three or four Korean-to-English translators to finish translating the main news stories for the evening broadcast, correct their story for punctuation and readability, stick around to watch them do the simulcast at 9 PM, critique their delivery.
These various activities put me out and about in Seoul, and made me Korean friends and working acquaintances that had nothing to do with the military, especially at the KBS job. I got to know the translators fairly well. They were all native Koreans, whose education or life experiences had led to them being a fairly cosmopolitan bunch and fluent in English – translators, particularly Miss Min, since we would catch the same bus after work, heading back to the neighborhood of Yongsan, and the old elevated traffic roundabout. I think now, that was one of those times that I liked best – the bus ride; seeing the lights of the city reflected a thousand times in the dark-serpentine shape of the Han River as the bus went over one of the many bridges, back towards the Christmas-tree-topper shaped tower that crowned the Namsan Hill. There would be the scent of vanilla cake baking, when the bus passed by a certain place where there was a commercial bakery; even with the bus windows closed against the winter cold – and Seoul was bitter cold in winter, with a wind that came straight off Siberia – we could still smell vanilla cake.
I liked Seoul very much, at those particular moments, as much as I liked the Koreans that I worked with, and encountered on the subway or riding the bus: tough, jolly, out-going and hard-working people, possibly the most snappy dressers on the face of the earth outside of the Italians, but intensely patriotic. Someone once described them as the Irish of Asia, and that struck me as a fair parallel.
But all the time I was in Korea – being at an Army base – we couldn’t help being aware of the situation; that the DMZ was just a short distance away, that Seoul itself was in range of heavy artillery fire from the north, and that as regular as clockwork, the NorKs would indulge in a bit of sabre-rattling; Another internet commenter called this the “Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken†– every six months to two years there would be a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that the North Korean establishment was there, bellicose, somewhat relevant – and that there was some kind of concession to be extracted from the outside world. The old-time Korea hands that I knew and my Korean friends were relatively blasé about it all. Perhaps the Norks could level Seoul, if they wanted to – but Miss Min and the other interpreters doubted very much that any but the most well-disciplined and elite Nork troops could make it past the first well-equipped grocery store south of the DMZ, let alone Electronics Row … and the Nork military anyway hasn’t fought an all-out war for real since 1953. But figuring out what is going on inside North Korea anyway was a bit like looking at a sparse scattering of accounts from inside, and consulting a Magic-8-Ball. Riddle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma doesn’t even begin to come close. Will the Norks go out with a bang, or whimper? What does the Magic 8-Ball say?
What is pretty certain to me at this point – and I’m not nor ever have been any kind of intelligence wonk – is that North Korea likely can’t last very much longer. The dynasty of Kims and their allies are like an extended crime family, sitting at the apex of a structure that looks more and more like a country-sized labor and concentration camp. The place is stripped bare – even the mountainsides are stripped of trees for firewood. When it comes to food, North Korea isn’t even able to economically support itself, having nothing left to trade to the outside world, save possibly nuclear arms. How long have regular famines been going on? Twenty years or so – long enough to physically stunt the growth of ordinary North Koreans, as is evident when they defect to the South. Possibly even China is tired of the antics of their psychotic little pet, after having enabled them for fifty-plus years.
So, whither North Korea? Damned if I know – but I guess that it will probably not last much longer. My Magic 8-Ball guess is that it will implode, without much warning at all, in the manner of Ceausescu’s Romania; just poof-like that. How the ordinary people of North Korea will cope with such a suddenly revised world is anyone’s guess. I don’t think they have been kept quite so hermetically sealed away that it will take a good few decades to readjust and catch up. They are, after all, the same basic physical and cultural stock as the South Koreans – who have come an amazingly long way since my father was stationed there, at the very end of the Korean War. Your thoughts?
(Earlier post here on this subject: http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/korea-meditation-revisited/
Also – Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)
This year, my mother has decided to break the family custom for Christmas and send an actual, delivered by UPS present, in a large carton which arrived on the doorstep Friday morning. We don’t know quite why she decided to do this, since the usual present for the last decade or two has been a check discretely tucked into a Christmas card. Maybe it’s because it will be the first Christmas without Dad. Possibly Dad was the one who thought just a plain unadorned check in a Christmas or birthday card was the most welcomed gift by adult children, and didn’t want to futz about with shopping or mail order catalogues – anyway, Mom sent is an awesomely lavish gift basket from this place, La Tienda – the foods of Spain, and we went through the basket and the catalogue enclosed with happy squeals of recognition. We came home from Spain twenty years ago, October – after living in the city of Zaragoza, while I was assigned to the European Broadcasting Service detachment at the air base there. Which wasn’t an American air base, as we reminded people with tactful delicacy; it was a Spanish air base, and we merely rented a small, pitiful portion of it, a few discreet brick buildings and a scattering of ancient Quonset huts, going about our simple and purely transparent business, humbly supporting those various American and European fighter squadrons coming down from the clouds and fog of Northern Europe and practicing their gunnery skills at a local military range set up just to accommodate that kind of trade. Really, there was no earthly reason for anyone to hassle us … not like it had been in Greece. Still, we religiously abstained from wearing uniforms off-base. The local terrorists were mostly interested in blowing up the Guadia Civil; which I thought regretfully was hard luck for the Guads, but made things easier than they had been for American military stationed in Greece;¦ More »
I was always a bit cynical about the major media news organs, thanks to twenty years in military public affairs, and the related field of military broadcasting. That is, I didn’t expect much of the poor darlings when it came around to dealing with matters military. The military and all its works and all its strange ways were terra incognita to all but a handful of mainstream media personalities and reporters, all during the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 1990s. Stories of media misconduct were fairly common among us; attempted checkbook journalism, howling misstatements of fact, generalized anti-military bigotry, pre-existing biases just looking for a whisper of confirmation … all that and more were the stuff of military public affairs legend. I expect that most media reporters and editors just naturally expected military personnel, pace Platoon and other Vietnam-era movies, to be drug-addled, barely competent, marginally criminal, knuckle-dragging morons. The air of pleasurable surprise and relief almost universally displayed by various deployed reporters during the First Gulf War, upon discovering this was not so – that in fact, most members of the military were articulate, polite, competent professionals – was one that I noted at the time, and found to be bitterly amusing.
So the usual mainstream civilian media tool didn’t know bupkis about the military: this was not a shock to me. Most other dedicated civilians didn’t know all that much, either. As Arthur Hadley noted, it was a whole parallel world, what he called the “Other America of Defense.†It did come as a bit of a disheartening surprise, discovering that the mainstream media didn’t actually know much about anything else, either — and that over the last decade or so, they’ve been frittering away the credibility and respect accumulated since the middle of last century. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise – but it did. Especially to one raised in the baby-boom generation, with the high standards of Edward Morrow always before me, who grew up reading the LA Times when that paper was at the very top of it’s form, journalistically speaking, who had subscriptions to practically every news and commentary magazine going, from Time and Newsweek, to Mother Jones and the Village Voice, Utne Reader, US News and World Report, Brill’s Content, Spy, Harper’s and Atlantic … even the Guardian, courtesy of an English friend. I had a local newspaper subscription, and raised heck if it wasn’t delivered promoptly. I loved NPR and even watched the Today Show – well, that was part of my job, then. I once thought well of the mainstream media. There, I said it. The Fourth Estate, essential in a democracy to keep the public well-informed regarding important issues, our last defense against political malfeasance and corporate shenanigans … all of that inclined me to hold the media in moderate regard. That they might have a particular editorial slant, politically one way or the other, that reporters might be mistaken, or flat-out misinformed by their sources … that I accepted. Like many another news consumer, I rather expected that eventually, the truth would out.
And then … the shark was jumped. Or actually, double jumped, with a half-gainer in between, and I’ve been hardly viewed established news media outlets with favor ever since. More than that – I’ve no subscriptions to any of the above listed publications, some of them because they’re no longer available, but mostly because they’ve dwindled in importance and credibility. They have nothing much to say that I can’t get from various news aggregate websites or special-interest blogs … or because something in a story, or in an editorial pissed me off beyond forgiveness.
Rathergate: that was the first shark-leap, and the audacity of it just about took my breath away, once I considered the implications; a bare-faced attempt by a supposedly reputable news organization, to throw a presidential election, barely days before the polls opened, using a story based upon a faked document with a deeply suspicious provenance. That someone like Dan Rather would rush to broadcast that story meant something sinister was afoot in media-land. Once that of worms was opened, and doubts began to multiply, there was no going back for me. The well was poisoned.
The second was what I began calling the Affair of the Danish Cartoons, or the Mo’Toons O’Doom; when the fearless guardians of the American public’s right to know … caved like a soggy macaroon when given the opportunity to print or post a dozen fairly innocuous cartoons satirizing the fear of … publishing drawings of Mohammed. Well, yeah – there would be threats from the perennially offended adherence of the Religion of Peace, but I had halfway expected our fearless members of the Fourth Estate to display evidence of having a pair. Instead, craven retreat, following a sprinkle of excuses.
And it’s been straight downhill, ever since: Journolist, the Global Warmening Scam, serving as the Obama Administrations’ public affairs arm, sliming the Tea Parties and lauding OWS – the list goes on. And this week, there was a poor schmuck going door to door, trying to sell newspaper subscriptions for the Sunday San Antonio Express News. It was most sad, actually: his main pitch was the many valuable grocery coupons in the Sunday paper. I wish I had thought to tell him that we don’t use coupons much, but if they ever went to printing the paper on soft absorbent tissue, then at least we would have some use for it all.
(Cross posted at Chicago Boyz)
(A repost from the archives, for today)
It is a sad distinction, to be the first in three generations to visit France while on active duty in the service of your country, and to be the first to actually live to tell the tale of it. For many Europeans, and subjects of the British Empire— especially those of a certain age, it is not at all uncommon to have lost a father or an uncle in World War Two, and a grandfather or great-uncle in World War One. It’s a rarer thing to have happened to an American family, perhaps one whose immigration between the old country and the new allowed for inadvertent participation, or a family who routinely choose the military as a career, generation after generation. Ours is but lately and only in a small way one of the latter, being instead brought in for a couple of years by a taste for adventure or a wartime draft.
When JP and Pippy and I were growing up, the memory of Mom’s brother, Jimmy-Junior was still a presence. His picture was in Granny Jessie’s living room, and he was frequently spoken of by Mom, and Granny Jessie, and sometimes by those neighbors and congregants at Trinity Church who remembered him best. JP, who had the same first name, was most particularly supposed to be like him. He was a presence, but a fairly benign one, brushed with the highlights of adventure and loss, buried far away in St. Avold, in France, after his B-17 fell out of the skies in 1943.
Our Great-Uncle Will, the other wartime loss in the family was hardly ever mentioned. We were only vaguely aware that Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan had even had an older half-brother – a half-sister, too, if it came to that. Great-Grandpa George had been a widower with children when he married Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan’s mother. The older sister had gone off as a governess around the last of the century before, and everyone else had emigrated to Canada or America. I think it rather careless of us to have misplaced a great-aunt, not when all the other elders managed to keep very good track of each other across two continents and three countries, and have no idea of where the governess eventually gravitated to, or if she ever married.
“She went to Switzerland, I think,” Said Great Aunt Nan. “But Will— he loved Mother very much. He jumped off the troop train when it passed near Reading, and went AWOL to came home and see us again, when the Princess Pats came over from Canada.” She sighed, reminiscently. We were all of us in the Plymouth, heading up to Camarillo for dinner with Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie — for some reason; we had Great-Aunt Nan in the back seat with us. I am not, at this date, very certain about when this conversation would have taken place, only that we were in the car — Mom and Dad in front, Nan and I in the back seat, with Pippy between us, and JP in the very back of the station wagon. Perhaps I held Sander on my lap, or more likely between Nan and I, with Pippy in the way-back with JP. Outside the car windows on either side of the highway, the rounded California hills swept past, upholstered with dry yellow grass crisped by the summer heat, and dotted here and there with dark green live oaks. I can’t remember what had been said, or what had brought Great Aunt Nan to suddenly begin talking, about her half-brother who had vanished in the mud of no-man’s land a half century before, only that we all listened, enthralled — even Dad as he drove.
“He fairly picked Mother up,” Nan said, fondly, “She was so tiny, and he was tall and strong. He had been out in Alberta, working as a lumberjack on the Peace River in the Mackenzie District.” She recited the names as if she were repeating something she had learned by heart a long time ago. “When the war began, he and one of his friends built a raft, and floated hundreds of miles down the river, to enlist.”
(William Hayden, enlisted on October 13, 1914 in the town of Port Arthur. His age was listed as 22, complexion fair with brown hair and brown eyes— which must have come from his birth mother, as Al and Nan had blue eyes and light hair. He was 6′, in excellent health and his profession listed as laborer, but his signatures on the enlistment document were in excellent penmanship)
“He didn’t get into so very much trouble, when he walked into camp the next day,” said Nan, “Mother and I were so glad to see him – he walked into the house, just like that. And he wrote, he always wrote, once the Princess Pats went to France and were in the line. He picked flowers in the no-mans’-land between the trenches, and pressed them into his letters to send to us.”
(There is only one family picture of William, old-fashioned formal studio portrait of him and Nan; he sits stiffly in a straight ornate chair, holding his uniform cover in his lap, a big young man in a military tunic with a high collar, while a 12 or 13year old Nan in a white dress leans against the arm of the chair. She has a heart-shaped face with delicate bones; William’s features are heavy, with a prominent jaw— he does not look terribly intelligent, and there isn’t any family resemblance to Nan, or any of the rest of us.)
“His Captain came to see us, after he was killed,” said Nan, “Will was a Corporal, by that time – poor man, he was the only one of their officers to survive, and he had but one arm and one eye. He thought the world of Will. He told us that one night, Will took five men, and went out into no-mans’-land to cut wire and eavesdrop on the German trenches, but the Germans put down a barrage into the sector where they were supposed to have gone, and they just never came back. Nothing was ever found.”
(No, of course— nothing would have ever been found, not a scrap of the men, or any of their gear, not in the shell-churned hell between the trenches on the Somme in July of 1916. And the loss of Great-Uncle William and his handful of men were a small footnote after the horrendous losses on the first day of July. In a single day, the British forces sustained 19,000 killed, 2,000 missing, 50,000 wounded. Wrote the poet Wilfred Owen
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,–
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”)
And that war continued for another two years, all but decimating a generation of British, French, German and Russian males. Such violence was inflicted on the land that live munitions are still being found, 80 years later, and bodies of the missing, as well. The nations who participated most in the war sustained a such a near-mortal blow, suffered such trauma that the Armistice in 1918 only succeeded in putting a lid on the ensuing national resentments for another twenty years. But everyone was glad of it, on the day when the guns finally fell silent, on 11:00 o’clock of a morning, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
“Amazing,” Mom remarked later, “I wonder what brought that on— she talked more about him in ten minutes than I had ever heard in 20 years.”
I went back a few years ago, looking for Uncle Jimmy’s combat crew, and found them, too, but even then it was too late to look for anyone who had served with Great-Uncle Will – although, any time after 1916 may have been too late. But there is an archive, with his service records in it, and I may send away for them, to replace what little we had before the fire. But they will only confirm what we found out, when Great-Aunt Nan told us all about the brother she loved.
(added – a link to haunting photographs of WWI battlefields today. Cross-posted at Chicago-Boyz, and at my Celia Hayes Blog.)
We went to Wurstfest in New Braunfels this last weekend, to celebrate all things Germanic. I posted the pics in a Facebook album here – enjoy!
And no, I don’t have a recipe for the German Taco … I would guess, since it is fair food, that it is basically a grilled country sausage, with jalapeno cheese and maybe some salsa, wrapped in a flour tortilla.
Being that I am snowed under with finalizing the last details for the second edition of To Truckee’s Trail, and preparing to launch the sequel to Daughter of Texas at more or less the same time in order maximize my portion of what increasingly looks like a pretty dismal Christmas shopping season with sales of my books . . . I have been only intermittently able to put my head above the parapet lately and take a look around at the socio-political landscape. A more relaxed schedule might permit me to address each of the developments listed below at length . . . but time does not permit. Heck, brevity is supposed to be the soul of wit, anyway.
1. Potential Candidate Cain’s purported sex scandal. Hey, it would be a treat to have a sex scandal in which some actual sex was involved, rather like John Edwards and his campaign-trail inamorata/baby mama? At this juncture, all we have, though – is some unspecified act(s) committed by Mr. Cain, complained of by anonymous persons (presumably female) which took place in some unspecified venue, which resulted in an unspecified money settlement . . . which no one involved can talk about, because they all signed an agreement not to talk about it. At least the time frame of this unspecified action has been nailed down by our heroically working mainstream media professions to sometime in the 1990s. Ok, it’s nice to have that specific nailed down, but seriously; unnamed sources? I’m sorry, but unnamed sources, with a charge like this do not fly freely with me any more. If you want this charge to be creditable, start naming names and specifics, otherwise I will treat this matter like the gutter gossip that it appears to be,
2. At least the matter of the rock on a hunting lease in West Texas, which had a disparaging term for a racial minority painted on it, and which was painted over at least two decades ago, seems to have been dropped – er – like a rock into the well of memory. Did any of the faithful national press gumshoes actually find the damned rock? If that’s all the dirt you can find on Rick Perry . . . Look, the guy has been in Texas politics for years. They play for keeps here, politically – the brass knuckles at no extra charge. If there were any substantial dirt to be found on him, it would have been found, long since. Oh, and thanks for floating teh ghey rumor, alleging it to have been an open secret in Texas political circles for years. I haven’t had a good laugh like that since the last time I watched The Money Pit.
3. So – looking at the list of Occupy Whatever Street supporters and backers . . . including you, “San Fran Nan†Pelosi, Michael “One Teensy Thin Mint†Moore, Mayor Bloomburg, our “illustriousâ€* Commander in Chief, and assorted other fellow travelers, anarchists, anti-Semites and career protest ‘tards . . . you own them, root, branch and arrest records. They are all yours, even as various OWS locations melt down gloriously into Lord of the Flies territory. I repeat; all yours. Kinda make the Tea Party rallies look good in comparison, don’t they?
4. Isn’t it well past time for the Kardashian sisters’ ration of fame to be up? I mean; fifteen minutes each, there are three of the talent-free and parasitical skanks, which adds up to 45 minutes total. I had a case of mono which lasted longer than Whats-er-fern’s most recent marriage. The Cardassians of Star Trek fame were much more interesting. And realistic.
5. Finally, in site news; this weekend Brian is going to fight off the locusts that ate his day off, long enough to look at why we can’t easily post pictures on this website. I have a raft of pictures I want to put up, including a new header . . . and, well all sorts of stuff.
Sincerely, Sgt Mom
PS: The Kindle version of To Truckee’s Trail – second edition has already gone live. I am still taking pre-pub orders for Deep in the Heart, and for Truckee’s print edition. Your purchases help support me, and this blog, so . . . a portion of your consumer dollars thrown in my direction will be greatly appreciated.
(For your enjoyment – a selected chapter from Deep in the Heart – the soon-to-be-released sequel to Daughter of Texas. Advance orders for autographed copies are being taken now, through my website catalog page, here. and for the print second edition of To Truckee’s Trail. Purchased copies will be mailed out by November 15th. My books now are being published through Watercress Press, rather than Booklocker, so I am working very hard to get them switched over, and to have mybacklist available in print editions once more. For now, it’s only the Complete Trilogy, and Daughter of Texas, so any purchases directly from me will help!)
Chapter 19 – The Last of the Lone Star
In the morning, Margaret rose at the usual hour, when the sky had just begun to pale in the east, and it was yet too early for the rooster to begin setting up a ruckus in the chicken pen. She had a house full of guests, even though most of them had not spent the night. One of the last things that Hetty had done before retiring for the night was to have Mose move the dining table back into the room where it normally resided, and return all the household chairs to their usual places. Margaret viewed the now-empty hall with a sigh, for the temporary glory that it had housed on the previous day – now, to see to breakfast for those guests who had remained. That breakfast should be every bit as good as the supper on Christmas night – for Margaret would not allow any diminution of her hospitality. She tied on her kitchen apron and walked into the kitchen, where she halted just inside the door, arrested by the expressions on the faces of the three within. Hetty bristled with unspoken irritation, even as she paused in rolling out the dough for the first batch of breakfast biscuits, Mose – who stood by the stove with an empty metal hot-water canister in each of his huge hands – had a nervous and apprehensive expression on his dark and usually uncommunicative face. Carl sat at the end of the kitchen table, interrupted in the act of wolfing down a plate of bacon, sausage and hash made from the leftovers of last night’s feast. He looked nearly as nervous as Mose, and his expression – especially as Margaret appeared in the doorway – appeared to be as guilty as a small child caught in the midst of some awful mischief, mischief for which he was certain to be punished.
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It has been terribly amusing for me to observe the genesis and development of the Occupy-Insert-Location-Here movement over the last couple of weeks, especially as it has been trumpeted as the liberal answer to the Tea Party. First on Open Salon a good few of the resident bloggers were sniffling over how this Terribly Important Movement was being callously ignored by the main-stream establishment media. As of last week, thought, conventional media can’t seem to keep their eyeballs or their cameras off them – especially the Occupy Wall Street faction. Cynicism leads me to suspect that this is because it is convenient to establishment organs such as the New York Times, who all but gave faux-movements like the Coffee Party essential life-support, but that’s just me.
So, is this the Tea Party of the left? Based on my experiences during the early weeks and months of the San Antonio Tea Party throughout 2009, I would say not – but with some caveats. There are a few similar aspects, notably detestation of business crony capitalism as it is currently practiced, suspicion of the works and ways of the Federal Reserve, and a similar deep distrust of establishment politicians. There was and is also a strongly libertarian streak, to judge by the presence of Ron Paul fans, or Ronulans, as we used to call them during the 2008 election season, when they were as noisy and ubiquitous as a sort of internet grackle.
The most notable likeness is the protesting thing: the earliest organizers organized via Facebook and held at least one protest on Alamo Plaza – the main motivation being the Obama-generated fiscal deficit, and the then-proposed economic stimulus. Interest snowballed at a local and grassroots level all during March, 2009, following upon Rick Santelli’s Tea Party rant. What with one thing and another, we held very public large public protest rally on April 15th in Alamo Plaza. There were some after-event quibbles about whether there had been 15,000 people or over 20,000 – but it was a lot, and all but a handful had never, ever been to a protest before. And – it was fun! Really, it was like the world’s largest block party, which may be the elemental reason to hold a protest in the first place. They’re fun. They grab eyeballs, especially if there is a huge turn-out.
I suspect that’s what motivates a lot of volunteer participation in the Occupy Whatever protests; newbies discovering this for the first time, old protest hands relieving their glory days . . . or spoiled young trustifarians making a grab at relevance. Ours was also a lot of work to organize beforehand, down to getting permits from the City, arranging for porta-potties and security, working out the program of speakers, holding a press conference – all that stuff. We’d made a splash, media-wise, and gotten a heck of a lot of people together in the service of a common interest . . . But it was just a single day. The government machinery doesn’t stop on a dime and turn around, just because of a protest, no matter how large or well-publicized. The SA Tea Party, and others that I knew about continued on – not so much with protests, but a sustained effort to recruit voters, to become involved politically at the local level and to support candidates running for office who espoused the principles of fiscal responsibility, Constitutionality and free (really free, not the crony-capitalist kind which only pretends) markets. It took months of effort, and I believe will take months and years more, past the election season of 2012.
As far as I can see and to date, in observing the Occupy Whatever from a careful distance, it appears that the rally/gathering/extended squalid camp-out has become an end in itself. Sure, there appears to be some kind of organizing principle, even if it is merely the finest all-plastic and a yard wide Astroturf. Some of the participants seem to be working up a list of demands after the fact, but I can’t see any evidence of follow-through to the protests. Not much organizational outreach, no continuing education, no outreach to those who might be sympathetic; I suspect that many of the protest participants are old career protest hands, ready to turn out at any time to protest whatever the cause du jour might be. Occupy Whatever is successful in getting media coverage, but I’m not really seeing that as a long-term public relations advantage. The images which have been revealed to us over the last week: a protester defecating on a police car, a truly squalid, garbage-strewn campsite in a neighborhood park, a lot of creepy/incoherent/clueless protesters, mobbing the National Air and Space Museum . . . these are not images calculated to draw political adherents and effective sympathy from the larger community of Americans who might otherwise been inclined to involve themselves politically.
(Cross posted at Chicago Boyz)
All righty, then – we had a great time at the Evening with the Authors last weekend in Lockhart, Texas – sipping fantastic wines from Pleasant Hill Winery, and nibbling wonderful little noshes; the food and waitstaff were from the Austin Community College Culinary school, which has their own café and apparently does cater events like this.
I had only one opportunity to give a mini-lecture to a full table: how important it was to know our history, how I came to write historical fiction as a way to teach people about it . . . and the best way to teach history is to make a ripping-good and readable yarn (while still being historically accurate!) I also had the chance to face one of my greatest private dreads – a descendent of a villain. Ever since the Trilogy came out and I began doing book events, I’ve met people descended from those historical figures which I wrote about in it: C.H. Nimitz, Dr. Keidel, Herman Wilke, Louis Schultze and others. Those descendents I have met have been pleased with how I ‘wrote’ their ancestors, although one sniffed that she had never heard of CH Nimitz ever being called ‘Charley’. Anyway, one of the attendees was a descendent of the notorious ‘black hat’ J.P. Waldrip . . . and as she whispered to me, upon departing from the table it appears from the family records and memories – that he was pretty much as I wrote him. I love it when I get things right – even if it comes through instinct.
The Barnes & Noble outlet, who supplied the books to be sold at this event, to benefit the Dr. Eugene Clarke library sold out entirely of Daughter of Texas, and a lot of readers were asking me – well, when is the sequel coming out?
The sequel will be called Deep in the Heart, which picks up the extraordinary life of Margaret Becker Vining during the Republic of Texas era – and will be available on the 19th of November, just in time for Christmas. I am taking pre-orders through my book website – the copies bought will be mailed on the 15th.
I am also taking pre-orders for the second edition of To Truckee’s Trail – which I always wanted to do, since the typo quotient in the original edition was embarrassingly high. That also will be released on the 19th, and purchased pre-release copies will be also be mailed on the 15th.
In no particular order of importance, I contemplate the following:
1. Regretfully, Morgan Freeman has now joined my personal celebrity s**t list, for pronouncing the Tea Party to be racist. Usually those who fall into my list have a long track record of offences; he has done it in one fell swoop of a lengthy TV interview. Yes, I know that most actors and entertainers are political morons – especially those who feel obliged to piss off a major portion of their fan-base.
2. So . . . thirty years ago, there was a rock on a hunting lease in West Texas with a racial epithet painted on it . . . which was painted over by the lease-holder, at the urging of his son, who is now presently the Governor of Texas. And this is all that the WaPo can find by way of criticism of the man. Hoooo-kayyy. From those wonderful people who brought us Watergate, this is a sad come-down.
3. And speaking of Watergate – it didn’t actually kill anyone, which is more than you can say for Operation Fast and Furious, or ‘hey boys’n’girls, lets have the ATF take the lead in supplying serious weaponry to the Mexican drug cartels!’ Seriously, if the Mexican government was to demand extradition of Attorney General Eric Holder, the head of the ATF, and every other numbskull who expedited the various gun-running operations on charges of criminal misconduct and accessory to murder, I’d say – have at it. Deliver them all to the border in handcuffs, with a big pink bow around their necks. Impeach now.
4. Michelle Antoinette’s little excursion to Target? Oh, please, woman – if you had any nerve at all, you’d have gone to Walmart.
5. Will Amanda Knox dethrone Casey Anthony when it comes to criminal justice tabloid fodder? Should I or anyone else not in the immediate family or social circle of either one really care one way or the other?
6. And why is it now October and we are still having to run the air conditioning?
PS – and one more thing: every time I hear something being flogged as ‘green’ and ‘environmentally sound’ or ‘renewable’ … I am fairly sure the object in question is a rip-off, and/or completely unsatisfactory compared to the non-green, environmentally unsound, and non-renewable version.
Yea these many months ago, I was invited by the organizers to be one of those authors in a fund-raising event to benefit the Clark Library. This is the oldest functioning public library existing in Texas; and since Texas was not generally conducive to the contemplative life and public institutions such as libraries until after the Civil War, generally – this means it is a mere infant of a library in comparison to institutions in other places. But I was thrilled to be invited, and to find out that Stephen Harrigan is one of the other authors. There were two elements in his book, Gates of the Alamo which I enjoyed terrifically when I finally read it. (Well after finishing the Trilogy, since I didn’t want to be unduly influenced in writing about an event by another fiction-writers’ take on it.) First, he took great care in setting up the scene – putting the whole revolt of the Texians in the context of Mexican politics; the soil out of which rebellion sprouted, as it were. (And he also touched on the matter of the Goliad as well.) Secondly, he had a main character who experienced the Texian rebellion against Mexico as a teenaged boy and who then lived into the 20th century. I liked the way that it was made clear that this all happened not that long ago, that it was possible for someone to have been a soldier in Sam Houston’s army, and live to see electrical street lighting, motorcars, and moving pictures.
That just appealed to me, for as another author friend pointed out – we are only a few lifetimes ago from the memories of great events. For instance – my mother, who is now in her eighties; suppose that when she was a child of eight or ten, she talked to the oldest person she knew. Suppose that in 1938, that oldest person was ninety, possibly even a hundred. That oldest person that my mother knew would have been born around 1830 to the late 1840s; such a person would clearly remember the Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, possibly even the California Gold Rush and the emigrant trail, the wars with the Plains Indians. Now, suppose that the oldest person that my mother knew and talked to as a child and supposing that person as a child of eight or ten had then talked to the oldest person they knew – also of the age of eighty to ninety in the 1840s . . . that oldest person would have been born in 1750-1760. That oldest person, if born on these shores would remember the Revolution, the British Army occupying the colonies, Lexington and Concord, General Washington crossing the Delaware. All of that history, all of those memories, in just three lifetimes – three easy jumps back into time! Nothing worked better to establish how close we are to events.
Anyway, I am looking forward to this – and since my daughter and I will drive up to Lockhart around midday Saturday, and the event doesn’t even get started until early evening, we are planning to go to the Kreuz Market and prove to ourselves that it really is one of the five best BBQ places in Texas. And she wants to check out any thrift stores and estate sales going on.
(Reposted to allow comments – that old punctuation in the post title bites again)
Sigh – it’s happened again. Blondie, the Queen of All Yard Sales, went out prospecting last Saturday morning to the neighborhood on the opposite side of Stahl Road, and returned with a very cute stuffed bear (practically new!) who sat in his own (cheap but cute!) upholstered armchair, which was for sale for the OMG-have-to-have-it price of a whole $3!
And there was another item, accompanying her, upon this expeditionary trip into another neighborhood: something live, black-furred, wiggly and friendly. A small and relatively well-kept dog, about twenty pounds at a guess, somewhat gray about the muzzle – which Blondie found, running around in the street, a heavily-trafficked suburban street adjacent to the yard sale – a venue which could easily spell death to small dogs.
We’ve rescued a number of dogs, in our residence here – mostly lost, and now and again dumped. We can read the whole sad story in their demeanor and behavior. Someone gets a cute puppy, puppy grows up, becomes a handful and not so cute, someone decides not to want to cope with it any longer . . . short drive to a likely neighborhood, a quick dump out the door . . . and the problem dog becomes someone else’s problem. I wish we could put people like this in the stocks, so we could throw rotten vegetables at them. Better yet – dump them in a strange town, completely naked and gagged, and let them fend for themselves and find their way home. Dogs are . . . well, they are dogs. Thousands of years ago – wolves who decided to throw their lot in with us, to look to us as the leader of their pack of one or two. The love of a dog is the only kind of love that money buys – and sometimes a love that is horribly misplaced.
Why, oh why do we always seem to undertake these rescue missions on weekends? No collar, no tags. He (definitely he and neutered) is about 20 pounds, black fur with a grizzled grey chin. Mixed breed – almost certainly part Shih-tzu, for the body conformation is the right size and confirmation, although I think there must be something else in the genetic mix. He has a long muzzle, and the veterinarian’s assistant who regretfully turned up no chip guesses Maltese, or Maltese-poodle-Shih-tzu. He is inclined to be glued to whichever one of us is working at a computer, and lays quietly under the desk, unless provoked by a cat. This is what lap-dogs do, they want to be near their chosen person – He isn’t chipped, no collar, no tags. No one has papered the neighborhood looking for him. I’ve put his picture on a couple of local lost and found websites, but no one recognizes him. He was well-cared for, healthy, fairly clean, well-mannered, obedient and affectionate … the only rationale we can come up with is that perhaps he belonged to an older person, who either passed on, or was moved into a nursing home, and the next of kin just didn’t want to botherIn the meantime, we have another dog about the house. We will make one last stab at finding his owner this weekend, by going for a walk with the dogs in the neighborhood where Blondie found him – which will probably prove to be fruitless, for no one is papering that neighborhood with posters of him.
I confess – I have rather missed the rapid clicky-clicky-clicky-nails sound of a small dog’s toenails, as they follow me about the house. Another neighbor presented us with a barely used pet-bed – the kind with the removeable cover, over a heavy foam base. We washed it all, and put it under my desk, and there he is, every day after I work. He’s there now.
Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years – since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it – a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed – became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.
Being that humans are mostly optimistic and pretty adaptable, we patched together some new understandings and assumptions, which worked pretty well – or at least we became accustomed to them . . . until the 20th century ended on a glorious autumn morning, ten years ago. One day. And then we had to become accustomed to the new reality. More than three thousand dead, a hole in the New York skyline that will never be filled in again – the ghosts of twin silvery towers showing up in the backgrounds of movies, now and again, drawing your sudden attention with a catch at the heart and memory.
And three thousand-something men and women who went off to work one morning, families who took a vacation, catching an early morning airplane flight, firefighters going on shift, everyone living out those thousands of petty daily routines, most of them probably quite boring. I am certain that practically every one of those who became casualties on that morning – a name and a face on a makeshift poster, a black-framed picture on the mantel or in the obituary pages – were looking forward to the end of the workday, the end of their journey – to coming home for a good dinner, wrapping up that business trip and getting on with that portion of our life that is ours, and belongs to us and our families and loved ones alone.
But they were never allowed that luxury, of having a tonight, a tomorrow. Those lives which they might have had, would have – were brutally wrenched from them, in an organized act of terrorism, wrenched from them in fire and horror and blood, while the rest of us watched or listened – watched in person, on television, or were glued to a radio – ten years ago today.
Ten years. Time enough for children to grow to middle-school age, never remembering that time before, or the loss of a father or mother, who worked in a department in the outer ring of the Pentagon, or in an office on a high floor of the World Trade center. A foreign country to them, is that place, where once you could go into the airport terminal and go all the way to the gate to meet an arriving friend . . . and for travelers not to have to take off their shoes to go through security. Or even have to go through security, come to think on it. A world where one could have no reaction but idle curiosity upon noticing a woman in full black burka, or a nervous-appearing man of Middle-eastern appearance, taking pictures of an otherwise undistinguished bridge or power station. A world where a familiarity with the dictates of the Koran and the Hadith, the maunderings of Sayyid Qutb as regards America and the workings of a desert tribal autocracy are an eccentric interest and hobby – not a professional necessity.
Ten years. The world that was passes from memory, and we have the brutal world of ‘now.’ As an amateur historian, one of my own comforts on this anniversary is that – it was always like this. We will survive, we will live in a world that is made new and eternally renewed by events, events that will eventually fade . . .
But today, we remember.
Past anniversary posts –
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
I didn’t write a specialized post for 2009, and last year I only reposted some music videos.
Yes, never underestimate the capacity for extremely bored and intelligent military personnel in amusing themselves.
Yeeks – and this was even published in a presumably responsible military-oriented publication.
Kinda puts my whole being sarcastic about the movies scheduled for late Friday night at Zaragosa AB in the local TV Guide kinda pale … although I did have viewers now and again tell me that they stayed up deliberatly to watch them, just so see if they were as awful as I hinted that they were.
Enjoy. This is funnier than any of my movie promos were.