Tea Partied – Party Deux

17. May 2010 · Comments Off on Tea Partied – Party Deux · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, it amuses the bitter cynic within me, that of the critics, pundits and just plain bloviating a-holes of both the professional and ungifted amateur varieties who felt the urge to charge out there and start opining on the Tea Parties, and the people who participated in them – damn few of them appeared actually to have gone to a real Tea Party protest for longer than about twenty minutes. In the case of news professionals, those seem to have remained just long enough to shoot the footage and scoot back to the studio or newsroom. Few of the national mainstream media geniuses felt a need to talk in depth to anyone who participated in any of the planning for same, or read any of the various Tea Party websites and newsletters. Too much trouble to actually search out some genuine representative samples, apparently – easier just to talk to some self-identified expert already in the rolodex, and come up with a superficial judgment based on two or three minutes of TV news camera footage.

I do have to admit, while this has provided an irony-rich environment for me over the last eight months – it seems to have left the national main-stream media and those of the leftoid persuasion floundering in a sea of misconceptions: Those awful, horrible, rude Tea Party people! They-they’re dumb! They’re a put-up job by Faux News! They’re red-neck, bitter-clinging white men! They’re raaaacists! They’re potentially violent! They have no real program other than expressing their resentment of a Black Man being in the White House! They don’t think! They’re a bunch of religious nutters! They’re a front for the GOP/the health insurance industry! They’re a crop of Dick Army-corporate supported astroturf! Und so weider, und so weider, so on and so forth. Myself, I came away from the experience of reading what was said about the Tea Parties and what I knew from first-hand immersion with bad case of existential whip-lash.

Our events were jolly and laid-back, kind of like the largest neighborhood block party in the world. We very carefully picked up the trash, policed ourselves for threats of violence and intemperate talk about secession. Not a GOP party front, or a shill for any media network; most of us were angry at both organized political parties. Racial-hate element? Oh, please. For all that the CBC and elements of the frothing media keep insisting on it by comparing the Tea Parties to the KKK, actual, verifiable evidence for that is pretty thin on the ground. We were funded by small donations from individuals. There’s no national leadership calling the shots, no big corporate sugar-daddy, no paychecks for any of us. Frankly, there’s not enough money in any slush-fund, no matter how humongous to pay for what we did as volunteers, and go ahead: multiply that among Tea Parties in other towns and other states. It turns out also, according to a CBS/NY Times poll (which actually surveyed real Tea Partiers- whotta shocka!) that the average Tea Party activist tends to be a little better educated than the average American, and in another recent poll that a large proportion of the ground to mid-level organizers are women. I have tried to explain various elements of this, to people who fall somewhat along the leftish side of the spectrum, and seem to pride themselves very much on their intelligent toleration for everyone who agrees with them. Nope – no credence given for the evidence of my own lying eyes.

This kind of serial misunderstanding, dismissing the Tea Parties out of hand as just another unfocused temper tantrum, has come at something of a cost in credibility for the mainstream national media: is it a coincidence that MSNBC’s ratings are tanking, readership of the NY Times is down, and Newsweek is on the block? Granted, coincidence is not necessarily causality – but still . . . people who are Tea Partiers, and those who only sympathize with them have very little appetite for being continually denigrated, ridiculed and marginalized. And that portion of the public who still retains any faith and credence in mainstream media outlets may be in for an unpleasant surprise. We do more than just protests. There’s been an effort gathering steam over the last eight or nine months, as more and more people inside the Tea Party organizations sat down and thought about it, working at the local level to support candidates who support the small-government-strict-constitutionalist-free-market POV. Not a third-party; that way lies disaster, but to work at the local caucus level, to get the word out about viable candidates in ones’ own and other districts – candidates who perhaps might see a term or two in the House or Senate as a citizen’s temporary duty, rather than a thirty or forty-year long career. You don’t have to believe me, of course – free country, still – but don’t be surprised, come November. I will have told you so.

A Place Apart – Last Thoughts on the Milblog Convention

04. May 2010 · Comments Off on A Place Apart – Last Thoughts on the Milblog Convention · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military

So, three weeks later, and I am finally getting around to writing up the last of the Milblog Conference; real life intervened, had to go back to work a great number of hours for a regular client, and find a permanent home for the poopies, and do some work for the Tiny Publishing Bidness . . . and my problem is that I can get easily distracted . . .

Hey, was that a chicken? I could swear that was a chicken, outside in my yard . . . I wonder if it escaped from the neighbors’ yard. I found a ferret in my back yard, once. Really – cute little fellow. He came along quietly and rested in the cat-carrier until we could locate the owner . . . and where was I?

Oh – meditating on how the world of the military – the Other America of Defense as Arthur T. Hadley described it. He made note of how rarely the world of the military, their families and veterans intersected with that of the various elites – the political, social, intellectual and media elite. His book came out in the late eighties, and confirmed pretty much what I had sensed about the military generally. Which was, unless members of the military had been killed either grotesquely and/or in significant numbers, the existence of the contemporary military pretty much skated by the notice of the great and the good, with the exception of a fleeting up-tick in general interest during the Gulf war. Not much notice taken, otherwise – hardly any movies, maybe once or twice an abortive TV series, or a character who was a veteran of the non-messed up and fairly well-adjusted kind. There wouldn’t have even been much in popular fiction either, if it weren’t for WEB Griffen and others, writing in the military/adventure genre – and that is not everyone’s cup of tea, not even mine.

Arthur Hadley thought this kind of cultural/societal disconnect did not bode very well for the country as a whole – and so I thought I might do my very best to enlighten the general web-readership about the wonderful wacky world of that “Other America.” So I began contributing to the earlier iteration of this blog, at the crack-of-dawn, blogging-time. (August 2002, for those who keep count.) I have to say, the whole civilian-military cultural divide is not quite the yawning chasm it was twenty years ago. I have no idea of what to account for this feeling – probably something to do with 9-11, and the internet generally. Even so, I don’t think we’ll ever replicate the kind of national situation in which a citizen-scholar-soldier like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain could move from being a professor of rhetoric and languages at Bowdoin College, to a combat command in the Civil War. In one shining, desperate moment on a hill at Gettysburg, the balance of that battle and by extension possibly the whole war – hung on his command for a bayonet charge. No, I don’t much think we’ll see that crossover involvement of that kind and to the degree that we did when there was a draft on, but now and again I am a little more hopeful about the likelihood of such a thing happening again than Arthur Hadley was, twenty years ago.

For at the Milblog Conference, one of the establishments or personalities making an appearance (aside from the others I have written about previously) was a representative and some students from Hillsdale College – a tiny and very traditional co-ed liberal arts college, buried in the wilds of southern Michigan. To read about Hillsdale’s history is to read the history of higher educational establishments on the American frontier. If Joshua Chamberlain hadn’t emerged from Bowdoin, he would have likely come from a school like Hillsdale. According to their website, a higher percentage of Hillsdale students enlisted for service in the Civil War than any other western college. Hillsdale’s other claim to prominence is a devotion to independence so fierce that it refuses all federal and state subsidies – student aid monies, as well as the GI Bill. Liberal when they were founded in 1844, although in stubbornly sticking to their founding principles when the world around has changed so much, they have indisputably slid all the way to the conservative side of the spectrum, through no other action than being . . . er stubborn. And dedicated to high standards.

Nonetheless, the college makes it possible through scholarships and donations for veterans to attend. I did meet one student, 2Lt Jack Shannon, who is now on active duty in the Marine Corps and stationed at Virginia Beach going through intelligence officer school . There will also be nearly a dozen other Hillsdale recruits attending the Marine’s Officer Candidate School this summer- which out of a student body of around 1,300 is not too shabby at all. Two of the other Hillsdale students I spoke to were veterans – when my daughter looked at a picture of the three, she could tell which two by the look of their faces.

James Markman served as a medic in the 82nd Airborne – in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which he was awarded a Purple Heart. Now he is intending to pursue a medical career, modeling himself after an Army doctor who impressed him no end, when he was serving.

Jon Lewis served three overseas tours as a Marine – a rifleman (although every Marine is a rifleman) section leader. Two of his tours were in Iraq. He intends to go into the ministry. I had the same feeling from all three of them that I have from my daughter – of a sense of focus and maturity in them that one usually doesn’t get from the ordinary college student in their early twenties. James and Jon preferred to attend Hillsdale on scholarships rather than any other school, where they could use their GI Bill educational benefits. In a way – through Hillsdale and other schools where these new veterans are going to classes – we may be replicating what happened just after World War II, when veterans flocked into higher education. There is a new cadre of citizen-leaders being developed – which will make it interesting when they run up against the old cadre.

And so that was it, for this year – the conference wrapped up with a banquet of no more than usual rowdiness – milbloggers being rather more exuberantly extrovert than would be expected of the stereotypical blogging sisteren and bretheren – and an awards ceremony for various categories of mil-blogs. There was a raffle (some gift bags featuring Ranger Up tee-shirts – very popular among military circles) to benefit Homes for Our Troops – another military-oriented charitable effort, that like Soldiers’ Angels, hardly anyone in the larger world might have heard of. They retrofit or build homes for veterans seriously disabled in service since 2001. All in all, a very interesting weekend – possibly the first time I have gone farther and stayed longer away from home in about fifteen years.

Time and Memory

24. April 2010 · Comments Off on Time and Memory · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, World

I was momentarily distracted last week by a comment thread at The Belmont Club, when one of the participants made mention of historian Jacques Barzun, who is something like 102 this year. The commenter noted that Mr. Barzun not only remembers Paris during World War I, when the German Army came perilously close to bombarding the place – but how he also remembers conversing with his own then-very-elderly grandmother, whose memories went back to the 1830s. Imagine, being just a step or two removed from such memories. It reminded me also of a conversation with another writer I know, who teaches languages and music, down in Beeville, Texas.

Imagine, he said – someone of our age (we are both in the fifty to sixty spectrum) talking to the oldest person we know – who would be in their nineties. So, their own childhood memories would go back to the early twentieth century – like Mr. Barzun’s. I did have this experience once, when I was just about 18, and because 18-year olds had just then been given the right to vote and it was an election year, I thought I ought to take some interest in politics. Which I did, but it proved to be very fleeting – the interest really didn’t kick in at full-strength until the last year or so. The mild interest of that year took the form of an afternoon at the Republican Party HQ in my home-town, doing what-I-can’t-quite-remember . . . but the other person minding the office that day was an elderly gentleman who said he was ninety-something, had grown up on a ranch in Montana and had been sent to school (a one-room schoolhouse, of course) every day on a horse; a very tall horse, so his father had to lift him up into the saddle, the horse took him to school, and the teacher lifted him down at the other end, and tied up the horse. In the afternoon, the teacher put him up into the saddle – and the operation proceeded in reverse. This would have put those schooldays of his in the late 1880s, at least – but he had some other fascinating yarns, of joining the Army and being a cavalryman in the days before World War I when the cavalry still meant horses. He had been on Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa, and had deployed to the Western Front as a very new 2nd Lieutenant. I so wish I had written much of this down at the time, or even remembered his name – it was much more fascinating than stuffing envelopes and answering the phone.

But, said my writer friend – now imagine that the oldest person you know, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew. So, a child of ten or eleven in about 1920 had talked to a ninety-year old person . . . and that person’s memories – since they would have been born in the 1840s – might encompass the Gold Rush, and at the very least, the Civil War. A roll of typescript among some of my Granny Jessie’s papers paralleled that kind of memory-span. In about 1910, two of her aunts were learning to use that newfangled gadget, the typewriter, and as a typing exercise they had interviewed the oldest man in Lionville, Chester County PA. Alas, I do not recall his name either, and the roll of typescript is also long gone (a wildfire which burned my parents’ house pretty well cleaned out all the family memorabilia in 2003) but his first-hand recollections dated from the early 1800s. He told the great-aunts of long-horned wild cattle being brought in from the west, and of working as a carpenter. One of the curious notations was that coffins that were built then were constructed with a peaked lid, a puzzle which had just then been considerable of a mystery to the archeologist excavating Wolstonhome Town, near Jamestown. That design turned out to be the last of an archaic custom, which the archeologist went to a great deal of trouble to unravel – but there it was, testament for the use of an ancient and disused custom, preserved in an old typescript.

Now, let’s get really adventurous – and suppose that that oldest person who talked to the oldest person that you knew, who was born in the 1840s, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew, who at eighty or ninety years of age in the 1850’s meant they had been born about 1760 – so that their memories would encompass the Revolution. Depending on where they lived, they might have seen George Washington, or his little army of Rebels on the march, heard Paul Revere or William Dawes riding by their house, shouting an alarm, or heard the church-bells ringing to celebrate their victory.

Yes, it is two hundred and change years ago – but to think of it in terms of memories, transmitted across the generations, we are only three steps removed. It isn’t really that long ago at all. History isn’t past – as another historical commentator remarked in another context, certain memories lie at the bottom of our minds, like lees at the bottom of a cup of wine, only waiting to be stirred up again.

Continuing Interesting Stuff at the Milblogger Conference

20. April 2010 · Comments Off on Continuing Interesting Stuff at the Milblogger Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Technology, Veteran's Affairs

Yes, it was a week ago last weekend, but I have several jobs, four books to market, two more to write . . . oh, and a tax bill to pay. So, forgive me for dishing out the good bloggy ice cream in small dishes, ‘kay?

One of the unexpected highlights of the conference was a late addition to the morning panel lineup; this man was almost a proto-blogger: Major Norman Hatch, who as a young NCO and combat cameraman in the Pacific during World War II oversaw the filming of the battle for Tarawa. Greyhawk provided a short version of this video, with the audio turned down, and Major Hatch gave us a live commentary – a sort of directors’ cut.

Anyway, as I have pointed out many times, the military is its whole ‘nother world. I swear, I’ve been convinced for years that most civilians get their ideas about it – not from a genu-wine military person, but from some (usually self-appointed) expert, anointed by the cultural powers that be. Which usually makes those of us who have long been domiciled in the military world just roll our eyes and laugh behind our hands. Or throw something heavy at the television – it all depends. BTW, really perversely-humored military members often amuse themselves by feeding tall tales to said self-appointed experts, just to see if they are going to bite on the tall tale, hook line and sinker. I know they do this – I’ve always called it the Wister Effect.*
Trying to put across something of what the military experience is really like to the average normal civilian is what got me started in mil-blogging, back in the Dark Ages of blogging. And sham-wow! Did Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief suddenly have a lot of readers! On one notable occasion just about the time that the drive into Kuwait began, CNN linked to our home page – and the resulting traffic crashed the server. We were included in a short list of mil-blogs listed in a short (is there any other sort?) article in Time Magazine, and Yours Truly was interviewed a couple of times by reporters for national newspapers, who were putting together a story about the Great E-Mail/Milblogging Adventure, and how it was possible for the deployed military to be in such very close contact with their families and friends. All very heady and amusing stuff, this was – but I kept thinking how odd it was that the official military Public Affairs offices seemed to be completely clueless.

Having worked in an airbase PA office, I knew very well that part of the PA staff’s duties was to scan print media for any mention of the service, the particular base, or the military in general. I didn’t think it likely, in other words, that the official military could NOT know about mil-blogs in 2003 – especially since I made a special effort to visit a local PA office and offer to blog about any particular needs the local command had, with regard to deployed troops from that post, or for any casualties they might be caring for. I talked to a civilian in the office – who seemed quite keen, and left my name, email addy and URL for his commander, and never heard another word. Eh – no skin off mine, as the saying goes. But at the first afternoon panel of the Milblog Conference, we had a full brace of commanders – including Admiral J.C. Harvey, Commander U.S. Fleet Forces Command, who is an enthusiastic blogger, and Col. Gregory Breazile, who blogs for the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan.

Obviously, the official blog has arrived; the technology has been embraced by the higher levels. I did get up and asked, precisely when and what event precipitated this interest, when we early bloggers were treated as if we smelled bad, early on. Eh – the answer seemed to be that the very high ranks realized the value of social media fairly early on. One does not achieve the high command rank in the military by being an idiot, by the way. I’ve met some colonels who were dumber than a box of hammers, but every general I ever met personally seemed to be pretty sharp. At the other end of the scale, the very sharpest of the junior ranks had embraced social media, blogging, twittering and youtube almost at once. It was just the intermediate level, or so the Admiral explained, who weren’t quite sure what to do with or about it. This tracked pretty well with my experience, being as the Daily Brief’s founding blogger was a smart-ass Air Force enlisted mechanic who loved to spend his nights on the intertubules. (He also got bored easily, which is why he recruited other writers for his blog after a year.) I have to admit, there is a decidedly different feel to a blog which is there because it’s essential to communicating about the mission, and one that’s a volunteer effort and done for sheer enthusiasm.

Final wrap up tomorrow – stay tuned, sportsfans.

* The Wister Effect: so called after Owen Wister, the writer of The Virginian, who related a story about some cowboys in a small Western town. When some traveling Easterners came to town on the train, and began hyperventilating about the violence and danger in the Wild West, the cowboys obligingly staged a mock-lynching for their edification. Wear your expections too openly – and very likely someone with a perverse sense of humor will make a special effort and arrange to deliver what you were expecting.

Still More of What I Saw @ The Milblogger’s Conference

18. April 2010 · Comments Off on Still More of What I Saw @ The Milblogger’s Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military, Veteran's Affairs, World

There were four panel discussions during Saturday, the one full day of the 5th Annual Milblogger’s Conference – some with panelists present front and center, and a few with either taped, or teleconferenced interviews. All of the panelists and the moderator, Greta Parry (who originated a blog called Kiss my Gumbo) touched upon the use of social media – that is, networking, blogging, tweeting and other uses of the internet in the service of various military enterprises. The first panel discussed the use of social media with regard to various military oriented charities, only one of which had been in existence longer than the last decade or so; the US Navy Memorial in Washington, DC. The VP for Marketing Communications confessed resignedly that she must still print out blogposts and email messages for many of the senior managers to peruse, since they are not exactly comfortable with this internet-thingy. The other organizations, such as Soldier’s Angels grew organically in response to various needs upon being publicized through mil-blogs and email appeals for items to be sent to deployed, hospitalized or disabled military members, or to assist their families. Soldier’s Angels started with family members sending ‘care packages’ to individuals – and then it just sort of snowballed.

Just to illustrate how these things grow: my daughter’s Marine unit deployed to Kuwait very early in 2003, and of course my parents and friends began sending her useful things – snack food and sanitary-wipes, drink mixes and big spray, books and magazines. She wrote to me about a kid in her unit who’s family had his APO address all mixed up, with the result that he was over there for almost two months and hadn’t gotten a letter or a care package from anyone. I wrote about this on my own blog, with the result that LCpl. Varnum was immediately adopted by about forty different people, and got so many boxes of goodies that there was no room for him to sleep in his little pup-tent shelter. My daughter’s unit was the recipient of boxes of books collected by another blogger, and a case of moon-pies from a lady in Virginia . . . eventually they had so much in the way of home comforts that I began referring people who emailed me asking to adopt-a-troop to Soldier’s Angels, which was formally organized and launched by this time. The milblogs have been supporting Soldier’s Angels every since. One of their big projects was to provide voice-activated laptop computers for the seriously injured – and another project I clearly recall was to collect clothing; underwear and sweats, and tee-shirts, for injured troops who had been medivacked from the field on a stretcher to hospitals in Germany to recover – and separated from all of their friends and possessions, had nothing but hospital PJs and robes to stand up in. Kind of hard, walking across the post to the PX in your slippers to buy more clothes; I suppose this problem must have come up now and again before, but in this case, Soldier’s Angels had an immediate solution.

I cut a certain “Doonesbury” strip out of the local newspaper the day it appeared, and it’s been on the front of my refrigerator ever since; the final panel of the strip contained the punchline. “Is it true that only 13% of American kids can find Iraq on a map?” And the reply from a cynical reporter character, “Yeah, but all 13% are Marines.”
During the first session, someone pointed out Garry Trudeau, among the conferees . . . yeah, that Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury guy, who was not the very last person I would have expected to find at a military blogger’s conference – I’d say he’s have been among a list of a hundred or so. But it seems that he does a lot of quiet good for veterans, as well as providing a mil-blog venue. And yes, I did go up to him in the interval and tell him about the “13%” comic strip, still bravely magneted to my refrigerator door. Told him that he could have made another mint or so, selling the original art, or even prints of that strip. Just about every mother of a Marine would want one. Alas, he donated all the originals, all at once. (Yeah, I talked a little about my own books – do I look like an idiot! It’s all about the marketing, baby!)

The mild thrill from the second session came in a conference call from Afghanistan, from Michael Yon, who as of last weekend was lurking in the vicinity of Kandahar. Michael has been operating as a freelance journalist, covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for a good few years, now. He is supported through donations from his readers; all the milbloggers know of Mike Yon – the top story on his blog today is about one of those efforts to collect donations for a unit, or a place or a purpose . . . and how they expand. He thinks there is a ‘surge’ beginning to build up a head of steam in that part of Afghanistan; we’ll know by Christmas what kind of effect will be had by it. His next project is a means of introducing little biogas fuel generators to Afghanistan, in the hopes of replacing scarce wood as a fuel for cooking: off to Nepal to research on how they do it there. Apparently biogas generated from waste material is being widely used in Nepal . . . the technology is fairly simple, and straightforward. It would save the trees and save the time spent searching for a few little sticks of dry wood. I can see the sense in this – one of my books about the far west mentions that it was the constant quest by settlers for wood for fuel and for building that alienated the Plains Indians, at least as much as the ravages of buffalo hunters . . .

Seriously off-topic – more to follow, about the conference. Most amusingly – and I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of some of them doing so – about a third of them were tweeting and blogging each session as it happened. I did not have the advantage of a Blackberry, or i-Phone, laptop or notebook computer that many of the other conferees had, so I have to catch up days later.

More of What I Saw at the Milblogger Conference

15. April 2010 · Comments Off on More of What I Saw at the Milblogger Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, General, Military, Veteran's Affairs

Milblogging – alas, I have had to explain that concept to a number of my purely civilian contacts over the last few weeks. Just a plain old military blogger. A blogger on active duty, a veteran, a family member or someone just interested in aspects of the military life, all of whom are blogging about their experiences and life in the military, around the military, or as the military touches on their life. To mainstream America, since the end of the draft, this is terra incognita. If all one knows about the life military is what can be gleaned from current movies, television and popular culture, then there might just as well be dragons out there over the edge in DOD land. Another language, of slang and shorthand, of instantly understood references, certain subtle habits of manners and bearing, the quiet display of badges, rings, patches, souvenir coins or tattoos – all of which serve as tells to other residents (or past residents) of DOD land. Most pure civilians usually miss the ‘tells’ – which is why fake veterans will fool them practically all the time.

So, I have been a milblogger since 16 August, 2002, which is the Dark Ages of blogging, practically. I was invited to join this blog when it was still called Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, at a time when there was a sudden and increased national interest in the military experience during the ramp-up to the Iraq War. SSDB was one of only a handful of milblogs carried on the Instapundit blog-roll. I had just barely discovered this newfangled internet thingy, I had a background in public affairs, wanted an outlet for my own writing . . . and my daughter was a Marine, heading towards a deployment in Kuwait and eventually, Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003. Comparing notes at the Milblog Conference, I discovered that the date of my first blog-post predated everyone elses’ by at least six months.

That entry is included, for your benefit, as a historical document –

Sgt. Mom’s Ancient Tech Story:

So the new colonel commanding was getting a tour of the AFRTS station, from the Station Manager. The colonel looks through the soundproofed glass window into the radio studio, and there is the on-duty DJ, stripped to his underwear, sitting cross-legged on the turntable*, going round and round and round. The colonel, slightly-bug-eyed, turns to the Station Manager and demands
“What the %#@&&& is he doing?
The Station Manager shrugs and says,
“Thirty-three and a third.” **

(footnotes appended for those under the age of 30ish)
* Probably a heavy, 16″ Gates turntable. They were used to play “records” also called ETs, or Electrical Transcriptions, which in the days when the only body parts being pierced were ears, were 16 or 14 inches across.
** Revolutions per minute. 16-inch records were played at 78 RPMs, 14-inch records (which replaced them) at 33 1/3

Yeah, I’ve gone a long way since then, although the audience laughed their hummm-hums off, when I re-told it at the conference. A good few didn’t even need the footnotes – but don’t let that lead you to assume that all attending were old fogies . . . I met a trio of earnest young college students, two veterans and one heading military-wards. A bit of an interview to follow about them, over the next two days. (Look, am I a public utility? I produce good bloggy ice-cream when I can!) There was also this young lady present, who is not only extraordinarily pleasant and patriotic, but possesses a charmingly retro aesthetic sense – as well as a sense of duty. (No, I never minded girlie pinups – as long as I could admire the equivalent and aesthetically pleasing male form . . .)

But enough of the wander down blogging-memory lane, more observations of the 5th Annual Milblogger Conference. It is the very first one which I have attended, which made for a curious experience. I have ‘known’ some of the other bloggers nearly as long as I’ve blogged and consider them as friends and fellow veterans, but this was the first time I ever met them face to face. I tend to think of them first as they named themselves with their original nom du blog – Greyhawk, Blackfive, Baldilocks – rather than their given names. Most of the early milbloggers chose to do so, not wanting to put absolutely everything out there.

Another curiosity – I’d guess that a little under a half of the conference attendees were women: fair number of veterans, or DOD civilian employees, some from various military-oriented charitable organizations, or military spouses. There were present, though, a fair number of active-duty men with the high-and tight haircut – that which makes them look as if they had shaved their heads entirely, and then parked a small, short-furred rodent on top. On the first panel of the conference – a selection of early bloggers, three of us were Air Force or AF veterans (Baldi, me, and Greyhawk – all NCOs), one Army veteran – Blackfive, and one Marine officer – “Taco”. (His last name is Bell.) This distribution drew some comment from the audience: I have no explanation for this. Another very early blogger was a Reserve Navy officer, Lt. Smash. My purely amateur and scientific wild-ass guess about this distribution is something along the lines of the Air Force and the Navy being more technically oriented, and drawing in a more middle-class and educated recruit. Another curiosity is that four of us have written or edited books, and “Taco” is planning to write one as soon as he retires and can uncork his best stories. Eh – one of my best-received one-liners: blogging is a gateway drug. (Did I mention that I do have a mad compulsion to entertain and inform? Laugher from an audience – manna to the starving!) More to follow, including how I had the neck ask a blunt question of a 4-star and to tell Garry Trudeau about the newspaper clipping that has been on the front of my refrigerator for almost eight years now – I promise. Real life and bills to pay will interfere. Really.

What I Saw at the Milblogger Convention

12. April 2010 · Comments Off on What I Saw at the Milblogger Convention · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Home Front, Media Matters Not, Military

Let’s see – I experienced air travel at the end of the first decade of this century. I can report that practically every shred of comfort, convenience, and excitement has been removed from the travel experience itself with almost surgical precision – although the ability to check in from your home computer and print up your boarding pass is a welcome development, and the lavish proliferation of food courts at the major hubs is similarly welcome. Especially as it seems that a tiny bag of peanuts, or a cookie and some juice or a soft-drink of choice is about the only thing served to coach passengers on short haul flights. I expect that the next step in the progression will be that the cabin staff will no longer actually hand them out from the narrow metal cart hauled up and down the aisles. Within a short time, I think they will probably hand them out after they swipe your boarding pass at the departure gate, and save the cabin staff considerable trouble. (It’s still better than MAC flights, though. Not much, but still better.)

The Atlanta airport is presently so big that it could possibly secede from Atlanta proper, and set up as its own municipality.

The area around the mid-Atlantic coast is green, green, green. Even from the air, you can make out vivid blobs of pink from the cherry trees in bloom. The dogwood trees are in bloom, too, and all along the parkway between Baltimore and Washington DC, there were tangles of purple wisteria. It’s very nice, to have belts of trees, along the parkways and highways, separating the housing tracts, warehouses and whatever from the highway. Looking at the ass-end of a strip-mall as you drive along is not aesthetically appealing. Sad lack of ground-growing wildflowers, though. I looked at the verges, which had grass and dandelions in plenty, but not much else, and thought, “Dandelions! Dandelions!!!That’s all you got, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia! Pah!”

I have seen the Washington Monument at a distance and close-up and from many angles, as I suspect the shuttle-bus driver actually circled through downtown DC several times. I have also seen the Capitol Building, and the White House, inspected the façade of the Department of Commerce building, and the quaint brick sidewalks and cobbled streets of Georgetown. We were stuck in traffic, so I had plenty of time to contemplate all of these structures. Teensy brick three and four-story townhouses in Georgetown about the width of a small yawn apparently sell for $500,000 when they come on the market.

This is a beautiful time to visit that part of the country; I am told that only the autumn foliage equals spring for sheer natural spectacle.

The Westin Arlington Gateway is a very pleasant place to stay, as hotels go, although slightly on the pricy side. The rooms are mega-comfortable, being designed around a tasteful luxury-spa theme, with lots of pale green, sage and white. The beds are piled with pillows and a thick comforter – all in pristine white. They have their own very special brand of scented white-tea-aloe soap and toiletries – and have them for sale in regular sizes for those who just can’t take away enough of the little individual bottles.

Contra the usual expectation of bloggers being socially inept loners and introverts, who cannot relate face to face to others of their species – the military version appear to be exuberant extroverts . . . even without having had much alcohol to drink.

No one that I talked to at the conference had been mil-blogging longer than I had. I started in August, 2002 – the Dark Ages of mil-blogging – and am still at it, although I have drifted into wider circles than a strictly military/veteran focus. Which makes me rather famous in those circles, although no one asked for my autograph.

To Be Continued – Garry Trudeau, a blogging 4-star admiral, the most gullible troop in all the world, three young men from Hillsdale, and other observations from the 5th Annual Milblogging Conference.

A Pair of Poopies

07. April 2010 · Comments Off on A Pair of Poopies · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, World

Actually they are really puppies, according to the strict definition of an immature, immensely appealing and sweetly clumsy canine. There are two of them, though. And they do poop. Dogs in good health do this, with joyful abandon, although how joyful an event this is for the human who collects it all up and disposes of it in the proper receptacle is a matter of considerable debate. When laboring under the suspicion that one of our dogs has ingested something unhealthy (like a sock, a rubber chewy-toy, or a wad of fiber stuffing from a comforter, pillow or doggie bed) having it appear out the other end commingled with the normal fecal material – or indeed, having anything appear from the other end – is considerable of a relief, for both the dog and the human. There’s another expensive veterinary/surgical bill avoided.

Anyway, my dearest daughter, who I swear has never laid eyes on an animal that she didn’t immediately fall in love with and bring home – found this pair, gamboling happily on a deserted suburban street in our neighborhood, last Saturday morning. (I found it, Mom – can we keep it? For a little while? I promise, I will take care of it – really, I will!) This has happened with dismaying frequency, over the last fifteen years, reaching some kind of record one weekend a couple of years ago, when we set our personal-best stray dog-return record – four of them, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. We find a dog – usually a singleton – wandering around, unescorted by an owner. Sometimes these dogs are wearing a with collar and ID and rabies vaccination tags, sometimes not. A collar and tags is an easy fix, since all that needs to be done is to call the veterinary clinic which issued the tag and tell them the number. With fiendish regularity, this happens most usually about mid-Saturday, or even Sunday of a week with a holiday Monday, so we are stuck with the stranger for at least two days.

Dogs who are beloved pets have a sort of aura about them. They are socialized; they have manners, and do not pick fights with our own dogs and cats. They are well-kept, well-fed and generally well-groomed. Quite often they are older animals – It’s been our experience that no one intentionally dumps an older dog – in fact, the dog with the graying muzzle is usually especially cherished, and has owners who are frantically searching for him or her. Sometimes, they have come from very far outside our neighborhood – a big dog can go a pretty fair distance if panicked. A dog without tags or chips presents a different set of problems: sometimes, they are so small and timid that you know they have not come from very far. In that case, it is a matter of going around with the dog on a leash, asking everyone we meet if they recognize it.

And then there is the routine of putting up posters on the mailboxes and light-posts, and the free ad in the newspaper, registering with a couple of local services and websites, putting up flyers at several local veterinarians . . . all those things that are advised, when trying to return a lost pet. Only in this case, it is not working. We have had them now for five days. We can’t even properly ID what breed they are – boxer or boxer mix? Pit-mix? Shar Pei? No one recognizes them. No one has called, or emailed, to claim them. They have no chips. They aren’t at the cute puppy phase of development; they are at the rambunctious adolescent stage. The very dismaying possibility now is that that someone just got fed up, drove through our neighborhood and dumped them. Which I find absolutely horrific – because they are sweet and endearing dogs, who have easily grasped the concept of ‘sit’ and ‘stay,’ even if only for a few nanoseconds.

We can’t keep them – my house and yard are tiny. We already have two dogs and barely manage to keep them fed, let alone the matter of veterinary care. The local Humane Society has wants us to call every morning at a certain time to see if they have spaces for them – and they also charge a fee to turn in animals. The Animal Defense League also has a fee, although they call it a ‘donation’ per animal; they have a waiting list also. Which is basically no help to us at all, if we can’t find another home soon. We can’t afford to keep them for very much longer, we barely can afford the fees and to feed them during the wait to turn them over to either. The city pound is just a no-starter: no chips, no tags and no one claiming them means they will be put down within three days and it is a hell-hole anyway. It would be kinder just to have them put down ourselves, and I am so stressed out about it that I can hardly think straight. How dare their owner not bother to be responsible – how dare they put it all off onto us?

Milblogger Conference 2010 – Update

05. April 2010 · Comments Off on Milblogger Conference 2010 – Update · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Veteran's Affairs, Wild Blue Yonder

OK – so it doesn’t look as if it will be a road trip, after all. There are some serious problems with the GG (sigh!) so that planned little jaunt is out. I’ll be traveling by regular airline on Friday morning (very early!) to Arlington, for the Milblogger Conference at the Westin Arlington Gateway, and coming back the same way on Sunday afternoon.
I am still holding off on a hotel reservation there – hoping to reduce expenses (hey, we’re in a recession, dammit! And there is work that I have done/services provided that I haven’t been paid for yet, so I must economize until those chintzy b**tards come through! ) so, if anyone of the femalion or family-oriented persuasion and a non-smoker wants to share a room this Friday and Saturday at the Gateway (or other nearby establishment) let me know! Like, ASAP!

The Shape of Things to Come

30. March 2010 · Comments Off on The Shape of Things to Come · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

Not being one of those terribly imaginative people – except when it comes to my books, and then it’s katy-bar-the-door – I’ve managed over the years to avoid being caught up in many of those OMG-TEOTWAWKI panics. I know that people with books to sell, and local television news reporters, not to mention the talk shows love this kind of thing, but the truth is, I’ve just seen too many of them fizzle out. Future shock, global nuclear winter, satanic abuse in day-care, overpopulation, Y2K, and AWG . . . not any of those sent me into any kind of panic, although it wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of various peers. Chalk it up to a skeptical gene, inherited from Dad the research biologist. Or maybe I just have a sort of mental time limit rule about this – if it’s still a concern after half a decade, then maybe I’ll dredge up some shreds of more than passing interest and concern.

That having been said, I wasn’t one of those entirely crushed by the election of our current President. You know, said I to myself cheerfully, ‘Self, although he is almost totally inexperienced, never been in the military, never managed a shop or met a payroll – he could develop into an effective administrator, since he doesn’t have a lot of pre-existing baggage to overcome. He’s supposed to be bright enough – everyone says so, and perhaps this time some of them could be right. He can adapt and learn – OJT! The United States is a big, strong, stable entity; this is just one president – how can just one kark up anything too badly in the space of one term? And since he is kinda-sort of black, or at least half of him is, maybe with him in office, people will get off our case about the inherent racism of the establishment, for once. What do you think about that, Self – room for optimism?’

And Self chuckled darkly, and answered, ‘Just have to wait and see about that, beeyoutch! And while you’re at it, pour me another glass of Chablis – the good stuff, not that gack-from-a-box.’

So – train-wreck. I hoped it wouldn’t be, but it’s been happening in slow-motion, all this year long. It’s not just a matter of ‘Will the administration kark up this?” but more a question of “How badly?” as the overall approval ratings for the One sink. Seriously, at this rate, by mid-summer, they’re going to have to batten down the hatches and do whatever it is with the ballast tanks that they do in old war movies to make the submarine ready for a deep dive as the alert horn goes ‘Ahhh-oooo-gah! Ahhh-oooo-gah!‘ This would all have considerable cynical amusement value for Self and me – save that a lot of other stuff will sink with the One – and no, this time I am getting worried with all the rest. Before, it had always seemed to me that the worry was more of a theoretical thing; all that was required seemed to be that you worry, too. Maybe sign a petition or two, post about it on your blog – even go to some long meetings and short protests, if you really, really felt strongly about the issue.

I keep sensing all kinds of oddball stuff, not precisely internet or news-media based, but in the no-kidding-real-world, or some mixture of the two – like a whiff of smoke in the air, or some straws blowing by, a casual comment here or there. Timmer remarking about how farmers are moving out of California, and setting up in his state. Friends of friends, moving up into the Hill Country, and having a well dug, buying a generator and plenty of emergency gasoline for it. My friend Alice’s internist grouching to her about how he is about to close up his medical practice, now that “Health Care Reform” has been voted through. Various firearm enthusiasts complaining to each other about how hard it is to buy ammunition now. And this last Sunday, when Blondie and I went out to a local nursery and specimen garden (a place of which I am terribly fond, since a lot of my money – when I had it to spend – wound up there). It was very, very crowded last weekend, more customers than I had ever seen unless there was a special event going on there. I asked one of the long-time managers of it was all right to take pictures, since I wanted to do a little feature about the beauties of spring flowers for one of my paying clients. This manager has known me casually for years, and asked after Blondie, and what she was studying in school. Blondie explained about her major – research biology, and the manger said cheerfully “Well, at least you can earn something of a living at that!” and went on, unbidden, to make mention of what Obama and his “Health Care Reform” were going to do to the medical professions – and then to tell me about how they had been selling flat after flat of vegetable starts this spring.
“Everyone’s starting a garden,” she said, “And it seems like everyone who started one already is expanding it.”
“Oh really,” I said, noncommittally.
“This is the best spring for vegetables that I’ve ever seen,” she said.
And now, I am really, really, wierded out.

Battle space Preparation

25. March 2010 · Comments Off on Battle space Preparation · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

So, even though the so-called Health Reform Act was pushed through Congress by an interesting mixture of threats, bribes and general arm-twisting, over the objections of well over half the American public, and Botox Nan got her chance to strut her stuff with a gavel the size of a fifty-pound sledge-hammer . . . the denigration of Tea Partiers continues apace. In fact, it has gotten even shriller . . . gosh, you’d think the Democrats and their tools in the media would be just thrilled to pieces that they won, but the mere existence of opposition appears to constitute an unbearable offense to our very own House of Lords.

Yeah, it must be a real bummer for Democratic legislators and the Obama Administration, having people all over the Capital lawns, screaming “Kill the Bill” so loudly. You could almost hear them muttering to themselves; “Honestly, who are these rubes, and what in the world gives them the idea that we work for them?” Must have been a real bummer, expecting to stroll into an auditorium of bored elders, political cranks and busybodies and administer a bit of emollient verbal pablum, field a couple questions, and stroll back to DC and get on with it. Instead, all those obstreperous Tea Partiers showed – not just at the town-hall meetings, but at the district offices, bringing letters and petitions, sending emails and faxes . . . geeze, do you have any idea how much toner costs these days? And nothing contented these people, day after day after day, with the insistent questions and demands for answers; how’s the House and Senate supposed to do business and parcel out the pork if all these voters get ideas above their pay grade!

So, ignoring them didn’t much work, and ridiculing them as teabagging, sister-humping minority-hating morons didn’t much work; neither did all sorts of heavy breathing about the Homeland Security watchlist as possible terrorists, or painting them as such in Law’n’Order episodes or Captain America comic books . . . (look, I refuse to call them graphic novels. Same with places where mobile homes are parked. I call those trailer parks, ‘kay? And you kids – get off my lawn!)

Anyway, I am viewing the current antics of our American House of Lords, and their water-carriers in the traditional media with a wary eye. Now, from being ignored and ridiculed – Tea Partiers are routinely accused of encouraging violence, or even outright accusations of it. Not much actual evidence is offered for such claims. Videos from last weekend’s protest rallies around the Capital showing members of the CBC being spit on, or called racial epithets are at best inconclusive. Obscene and threatening phone calls to Congressional offices and homes, and un-sourced vandalism present a more serious problem; as your mother would say, someone could get hurt.

And when and if someone does get hurt, that’s when the fur will really fly, and don’t tell me that the Obama Administration, the Democrat side of the House and Senate, and the mainstream media creatures who adore them aren’t just aquiver with happy anticipation at the thought, especially if responsibility for an act of violence can be pinned to a frustrated citizen with some kind of Tea Party connection – no matter how tenuous the actual connection. And insisting, as I have had, over and over and over again, that Tea Partiers are generally responsible, law-abiding citizens, who really don’t have much of a race problem – that will have no effect. We will all be smeared, with the greatest vigor – and in fact, the smearing has already begun. The battle space is being prepped; and it is entirely possible that the required incident may be manufactured to order, if it doesn’t present itself naturally. Thoughtful and sensible commentators like Wretchard, at the Belmont Club, and Neo-Neocon are drawing unsettling historical parallels.

Yes, it’s going to be a damned long eight months. When we get to the end of that period of time, are we going to see anything that we recognize as familiar?

My Map of San Antonio

25. March 2010 · Comments Off on My Map of San Antonio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

I bought a map last month, when I got a slightly-more-than-usually generous check for work that I had done, a map that I had my eye on for a while: it’s a reprint of the 1873 birds-eye view of San Antonio, done by an artist-printer-mapmaker-entrepreneur by the name of Augustus Koch. There’s a very high-end reprint available from the Amon Carter museum, but I found a rather more affordable version from an antique shop, and bought a frame from a thrift shop for it. To cover the gap between low-rent map and low-rent frame, I had a matt for it cut at a big-box hobby store which does this at very reasonable rates. So there it is, hanging on the wall to my left at the corner of my bedroom chez Hayes which serves as my office. The magic happens here, people – adjust. Please ignore assorted dust bunnies and the very dirty and scrofulous Shi Tzu sleeping underneath my office chair, also the three levels of desk, piled with computer tower, monitor, speakers and reference books – the writers’ life is supposed to be so romantic and all, I would hate to demolish anyone’s fond illusions.

So – this is the mental foundation which serves me when I try and visualize mid-19th century San Antonio – a spaghetti-tangle of streets, eight public plazas of various shapes (the oldest of them being the most asymmetrical as to layout) and an aqua-blue river which can’t actually be said to cross it. Lord no – the river rambles like a spastic snake in the middle of a particularly energetic fit, although the course of San Pedro Creek, and the remaining constructs of the old Spanish aquicias describe a considerably more rational line. The San Pedro Springs once came leaping out of the ground, such was the pressure exerted by the Edwards aquifer: so much water seeping down into the limestone layer of the Hill Country – when it escaped, it escaped with a bang. There are still natural springs and seeps, visible for weeks after it rains, even in my neighborhood. In the 19th century, the San Pedro Spring was focus for a summer excursion, a nice relaxing afternoon in the park-like setting and in the local beer-gardens.

This map was drawn and published before the railway arrived, when the middle of all but the oldest city blocks were open – even if the streets were lined with Monopoly-block little houses, plain little cubes with pale walls and dark dashes for windows. Throughout, significant buildings and mansions are given a trifle more detail than the “Monopoly-house-and-hotel” treatment: a second or third story, a tower, ornate apse or merely an eccentric lay-out relative to the street adjacent. The Menger Hotel is clear, on Alamo Plaza – where it exists to this day.

The aspect is from an imaginary viewpoint somewhat to the north of modern downtown, looking out towards the south and east. It looks a very tiny town, my town of the past and my imagination. As such, it devolves very rapidly from a tight-packed huddle around Commerce Street and the old Main Plaza, dominated by the spire of San Fernando – which would be re-built in grey-stone neo-gothic splendor within a few years.
During the siege of the Alamo, the blood-red banner of ‘no quarter’ was flown from the stumpy tower which existed then – an event which would be well within the memories of anyone above the age of forty, who had been living in the town at the time. In my mind, and aided by this map, I can place so many landmarks now overbuild with steel, concrete and glass. Samuel and Mary Maverick had a house on the corner of Houston and Alamo. The last few structures remaining of the mission of San Antonio de Valero are relatively unchanged, save that they are now a shrine of another sort. The Veramendi Palace on Soledad Street just a little way from what the Main Plaza (would they have called it the Plaza Mayor, back in the day?) is gone now, but it still remains on this map – a long low, windowless building, so-called because it was the town-house of a powerful Tejano family. James Bowie married a Veramendi daughter, and lived there briefly: by the year of my map, the building housed offices, and around in back – a beer garden. The grand double front doors of the Veramendi Palace are on display in the Alamo.

Mid-19th century San Antonio’s city blocks devolved very rapidly from that core into city blocks, loosely lined with houses, then to blocks with just a scattering of them, interspersed with regular plantings of trees which could be seen as orchards. As the pale, buff-colored streets ravel out into the countryside, the houses become sparse – although some of them are distinguished by a bit more detail, a porch perhaps, or a row of miniscule dormers along the roof. The present King William district – almost the first high-end suburb – is a twelve-block stretch of town laid out to the south and adjoining the San Antonio River as it rambles off in a coast-wards direction, or at about 2 o’clock as I view the map. This is where the good German bourgeoisie magnates and men of business built their homes, when Texas began to recover some semblance of post-Civil War prosperity. C.H. Guenther’s Pioneer Flour Mill anchors this district today – but it does not appear on this map, although it is there and plain to see in the follow-up birds-eye map done a little more than a decade later, when the railway had come in, connecting the town with the greater world. But that’s what the 19th century American rail system did – connect far-spread communities with the larger world. There is another birds-eye view, by the same artist, done a bare ten fifteen later, in 1886, after the railway, after the Army had decamped to a new-built post somewhat to the north – the Fort Sam Quadrangle and the clock tower in it, all clear and neatly inked in. The houses are tinier, and even less detailed in the second man – for by then, San Antonio had become a city.
I think I will go and buy the second map, also – as soon as I have a bit more of the spare change.

So if the HCR Act is Rammed Through Today

21. March 2010 · Comments Off on So if the HCR Act is Rammed Through Today · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, sarcasm, Tea Time, World

…It’s not over. Oh, no, my friends – it’s definitely not over.

It’s just beginning. And the gestures won’t be stupid and futile.

Later – yep, just as I suspected. As one of those e-mails going around says:

Let me get this straight……we’re trying to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president that also hasn’t read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

Still Later – While I am doing quotes, howsabout this one?

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams

A 21 Story Salute

19. March 2010 · Comments Off on A 21 Story Salute · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

Take a look at this –

Looks nice, doesn’t it? Finally, in February, Alice and I finished the latest book project from Watercress Press, the tiny specialty subsidy press bidness which affords the both of us some kind of living and a fair amount of amusement, as well as entrée into what passes for the literary scene in San Antonio. Alice does the fine editing and some of the admin stuff, I do the rough editing and the author-wrangling, and keep the website updated. We hire an independent contractor to do the book design and layout, to ours and the author’s specifications; I must say that when the pocketbook permits, we can do some very nice, high-end books indeed: History, Texiana, memoirs, some poetry – that kind of thing.

A 21 Story Salute combines two of our favorites; history and memoir. Barbara Bir, the author/editor went around to twenty-one World War II-era veterans and a couple of spouses, and interviewed them about their experiences during the conflict, and about their lives afterwards. All were pretty interesting, in themselves, but a good few of them were downright fascinating; it depended, I think, on how good a story-teller they were.

Bob Ingraham, for instance: he had some great stories. He survived being shot down flying a Spitfire over Dieppe in 1942, and a round of imprisonment as a POW in Sagan, where he helped to dig the Great Escape tunnel. There were three American diggers, helping with Tom, Dick and Harry – he is the only one still living.

Clara Morrey Murphy, and her friend, Aleda “Lutzie” Lutz – Clara and Lutzie were two of the very first Army air-evac nurses – there is a picture of them in the book, trying out their flight gear, while in special training in 1942. They went on to air –evacuate patients during the campaigns in North Africa, Italy and France. Clara Murphy’s military uniform is now on display at the Brooks ‘Hanger 9’ aerospace medicine museum, in San Antonio. “Lutzie” died in 1944, when the air-evac flight she was on crashed into a mountainside in Southern France.

Eddie Patrick? He was the kid genius, when it came to radios and electronics: he wound up as a senior NCO at the age of 19, in charge of the comm gear, serving at a Flying Tigers airbase in China, well behind the Japanese lines.

Litzie Trustin was Jewish and born in Vienna. She escaped to England on one of the last Kindertransports, just before the war began in Europe in 1939. Returning to Europe to work with the American forces as a translator, she married a transport pilot and came to Omaha to settle down and raise a family – and to work for civil rights.

Bob Joyce kept a diary, all through his tour of duty as a B-17 radio operator, flying a series of nerve-wrackingly dangerous missions from Italy. He carried with him on those missions a pair of regular Army boots, his father’s rosary, a good-luck bracelet from his home-town girlfriend, and a $2.00 bill, so he would never be broke.

Ignatio “Nacho” Gutierrez never saw snow until he went into the Army for basic training. He and his unit came ashore on D-Day in the early evening of June 6th, 1944 – and he painted signs – and sometimes stapled them to trees himself – for the constantly-moving XIX Corps, First Army headquarters, all through Normandy and into Belgium and Germany.

During the war, Marshall Cantor directed the building of runways and scratch airbases on Ascension Island for Air Transport Command, and then moved on to do the same in New Guinea and in the Philippines. He met Ellen Berg, who was a nurse serving at a forward hospital in Papua, New Guinea. They married in 1944.

More excerpts and a few more pictures are at a section of Barbara’s website, here.

Whither Hollywood?

16. March 2010 · Comments Off on Whither Hollywood? · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, That's Entertainment!

Seriously, what is it with the people that make our movies? I might almost believe there was something about the higher reaches of show biz that turns people into complete and raving loons. What with a long series of much-ballyhooed movies culminating in The Green Zone, most which in some degree or other, can easily be construed as anti-troops/anti-war productions and most of which have tanked at the box office, an Oscar evening which I didn’t even bother to watch, let alone seeing any of the movies involved, and Tom Hanks near as dammit shooting himself and his TV series The Pacific in the foot with statements about American racism in interviews . . . oh, heck, can I be forgiven for wondering if there something in the water? Never mind how the Hollywood good and the great appeared to jump on the global warmening and the Obama bandwagon, almost simultaneously. Never mind how the Law’n’Order TV concession painted tea partiers as dangerous terrorists. Never mind the incessant slams against the religiously observant, or the monstering of Sarah Palin. The cumulative idiocy is almost too much to be born; it’s almost as if they don’t want us to be watching any of their damned movies or TV at all.

For the record, this last weekend, we went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which is about the first time in a year that we went to see a first-run movie in the theaters. (Last time it was Gran Torino, if memory serves, and no, I can’t remember what we went to see the time before that.) I might have gone to see Up, and Blondie and I were considering Julie and Julia, but just didn’t feel strongly enough about either to make the effort. Seriously, I used to love going to movies, but somehow and somewhere in the last decade or so I lost my enthusiasm. Between the expense and hassle of actually going to the theater, the sheer badness of most current releases, the speed with which the best of the current crop show up on DVD (where I can ask to do a review and get the darned thing for free) and the steady drip-drip-drip of ignorance and insult directed at flyover, working-class Americans, conservatives, military, and tea partiers – all sourced from the glitterati . . . well, really, what’s the point? Why should I put up with having my values routinely insulted, right along with my intelligence? I have long insisted on skipping anything which features car chases, machine-gun fire and massive explosions, in lieu of plot and dialogue. And I’d prefer to think of actors as a kind of well-trained performing monkey, whose job is to amuse the audience. I do not want them to be lecturing me on politics, history, international relations, global warming or ecology at the drop of a hat or Charlie Sheen’s trousers, whichever happens oftener. Not unless they actually have some professional education or expertise in those fields, which damn few of them appear to do anyway. Stick to entertaining me, dammit.

I am breathless with laughter

24. February 2010 · Comments Off on I am breathless with laughter · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time

We just got a telephone mecho-call from Kay Bailey Hutchison – claiming that she had been endorsed by National Tea Party leader Dick Armey…
So, Blondie said… “Er… who?”
And I said, “We have a leader?”

Seriously, we have a leader? OMG, if this call went out to everyone in Texas with a telephone … she has seriously just stepped all over her … er. Whatever.

Down By the Station

24. February 2010 · Comments Off on Down By the Station · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs

Sunset Station, that is – the turn-of-the-last-century historic railway depot in San Antonio, a splendid pile of Mission Revival stucco and russet-colored roof tiles, which was the pride of the town when it was completed in 1903. The main depot building had electric lights up the wazoo, and a pair of round stained-glass windows in the peak of the roof on either end, glass windows that were as big as ornamental fishponds. There was a grand divided staircase at one end, and heavy wood benches arranged to best effect on the lower level. It was the waiting room, then, although I think most people waiting for a train would have been out under the awnings, where there would have been a bit of a breeze, and train travelers could have appreciated the gardens and the ornamental trees – the Southern Pacific architect and landscapers did not do things by halves, back in the days when rail travel was the thing, and automobiles were cranky and unreliable toys for rich men.

After mid-century, the rule of the steel rails diminished, and the rule of the automobile came to pass: city planners slapped six lanes of highway along the edge of Downtown, thirty or so years ago. This amputated the railway station and the blocks of hotels, warehouses and cafes off from the rest of Downtown, the part with the Alamo and the Riverwalk and the people – still the old Depot remained. Fortunately, they re-vamped the old depot building as an event venue a decade or so ago, lovingly re-constructing every bit of plaster ornament and stained glass, and out in back of the main hall is an open terrace with an arcade along one side, and landscaping and an iron fence along the other. There are some fine old buildings surviving in the blocks around the Station, although I don’t think it will ever be as lively as it was in it’s heyday.

Facing the back of the old Depot is a covered pavilion with a raised stage, and all that is necessary for concerts and entertainment. I had never been there before – but that is where the San Antonio Tea Party held their first anniversary rally on Sunday. We drew a fair number of people, about 230 or so, on a lovely breezy Sunday afternoon. We were gifted with a fine warm day, wedged in between a couple of cold and icy ones, just right for a meeting which turned out to run about an hour longer than expected. At the last minute, we had added Kevin Jackson, Sheriff Mack and Stewart Rhodes of the Oathkeepers to Joe the Plumber – which proved to be at least semi-attractive to three out of five local TV news networks. And after the rally, our Cap & Trade working group had set up another guest speaker, who had a presentation about Global Warming. To be precise, his presentation concerned the fraud thereof, and that apparently drew out some counter-demonstrators.

I think this must be the first time that the local progressives actually organized something: usually it’s just been a handful of regulars showing up with singularly uninspiring signs. It would appear, from the TV news stories posted on Sunday evening, that one of the things which raised their ire (well, besides even having a Tea Party to start with) was the presence of the so-called “global warming denier.” That apparently is still a high crime, to those who haven’t yet managed to hear about Climate-gate. They came on a bus, pranced down the street to opposite where we were, and chanted “Health Care Now!” and “Green Jobs Now!” – although they did break it up at one point by singing Happy Birthday – although to whom, I can’t be sure. Then the bulk of them did hop onto their bus and depart – I guess forty minutes was about as much as they had stamina for, or maybe that was all that the Acorn budget allowed.

There were a handful of die-hards, though; one with a video camera, and another with a bullhorn who kept shouting incomprehensible questions from across the street; basically that we were all rich racists, and something about the jerk in Austin with IRS issues and a small plane. It seemed rather laughably pointless, as they were doing this while a succession of candidates for local office were acquainting us with their campaigns and their fitness for the various offices they were running for. Here we are, basically holding a town meeting, being serious about evaluating people we are about to vote into various offices, attending to our basic civic responsibilities . . . while a stupid woman with a bullhorn shouts irrelevant insults through the hedge. I did stand up in a gap between the bushes and waved cheerfully at her companion with a video camera in front of her face, and Blondie wrote “Hi, Mom!” in her palm with a Sharpie and waved also.

So, they couldn’t be bothered to come to the Tea Party rally – which was free and open to the public, or to the Global Warming talk, which also was free, etc., and ask questions, and enter into a real debate, and take part in a fairly serious encounter with people who are asking us all to vote for them . . . but still preferred to stand on the sidewalk and screech like howler monkeys. As Blondie said at the time, “Mom, sometimes you can’t fix stupid.”

And the funniest part? I went a googling here and there, and found some of their own videos and websites – and this little event was put together in part by what appears to be a joint effort of activists from San Antonio and Boerne (all thirty of them or so), some of whom are calling themselves “The Coffee Party.” No, I didn’t make that up. They have a website and all, with a nicely designed logo and some facebook meet-ups, although the nationwide chapters still seem pretty thin on the ground. I am thinking that I have probably found the follow-on to last week’s little patch of Astroturf, “The Tea Party is Over.”

Memo: Monday Morning Miscellany

14. February 2010 · Comments Off on Memo: Monday Morning Miscellany · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Stupidity, Tea Time

From: Sgt Mom
To: Various
Re: Some Apparently Inconvenient Home Truths

1. Oh, my – the case of the absent-minded professor, the irreproducible results and the ‘dog-that-ate-my-data.’ Yet another stake through the heart of man-made-global-warming, to add to the existing collection; I swear, in popular media culture this global-warming c**p has more lives than Freddy Kruger. Hey, aren’t we all ready to have a good long laugh at Al Gore, now? And can we at least have our incandescent light-bulbs back? Thanks, ever so.

2. Note – to aspiring politicians (I’m looking at you, aspiring candidate for governor of Texas Debra Medina, who was about to break out on the national media level, but flubbed a key question asked by Glenn Beck – who, I may add, was not exactly hostile media to fiscally conservative, independent and grassroots candidates, m’kay?) – there is only one acceptable answer to that particular question. That acceptable answer is “no.” Or “hell, no.” Although the Bush administration, and before that, the Carter administration, might have been able to put together the pieces of the intelligence puzzle a little more efficiently, or take more seriously the rantings and threats of a wierdy-beardy Islamist squatting in an Afghan cave – the US government most certainly did not coldly and callously enter into a labyrinthine plot to murder 5,000+ of their own citizens in one morning. If you well and truly believe that a conspiracy of that magnitude is doable, probable and technologically possible – than why do you chose to remain a citizen of such a monstrous country? And more to the point, if you believe in 9/11 as a government plot, why would you even want to become a part of the government? S**t, people, the X-Files was a fictional TV show, not a documentary – get a grip.

3. OK – one more time: the Tea Partiers are not knuckle-dragging, sister-humping, room-temperature IQ racists, and the more certain of you choose to bang on about this meme, the more you are blowing your credibility with the public, outside your own cozy little echo chamber that is. One more time – they are fiscal conservatives, small federal government, free market and libertarian. The Tea Partiers I know don’t give a good g***amn about the color of your skin, the color of the POTUS’ skin – and we wouldn’t care much about what Captain America thinks of us either, except that once a meme gets going, it’s a pain in the *** to uproot. See item 1, above.

Oh, yeah – and our protests are fun. Lots of smiling, friendly people, lots of laughter, music – kind of like a very laid-back neighborhood block party. And we clean up after ourselves, too.

4. And in reference to item 3 above? Yeah, for a while I went around explaining earnestly that using the word “teabagger” in a discussion of the Tea Party movement was kind of like using the word n*gger in starting off a discussion about civil rights – now? Eh, not so much. When I see it being used, I can be pretty sure the person using it is as aggressively ignorant as they are bigoted and rude, so I can safely disregard anything they have to say. Just by using it, they’ve already proved they have nothing much to say, so I can save valuable time.

5. I’d write a good scathing essay about Courtney Cook – except that it looks like pretty much most of the milblogosphere already seems to have taken some good hearty thwacks at her Salon essay. (Jeeze, what is it with Salon and Open Salon these days? Is there some kind of convention going on for shallow, narcissistic writers over there?) Passive-aggressive, self-absorbed and immature is no way to go through life, dear – just my opinion.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

Tea Party and Tea Parties

11. February 2010 · Comments Off on Tea Party and Tea Parties · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, the funniest thing about being active in a local Tea Party – aside from some of the soap opera antics resulting when people involved have different ideas about where we should go and what we should do – comes from going back and reading, over and over, in comment threads, editorials/commentary and news stories, those unsupported and wildly asserted claims about what we are and what we want. Strict Constitutionalists, limited federal government, free markets . . . nothing more radical than that, actually. No, seriously, nothing more than that. Really, cross my heart, et cetera – it’s nothing more than that, as a handful of the media anointed who have come down from their lofty heights and actually did their jobs have discovered. Much to their own mild surprise, I might add. However, sometimes it seems that the larger portion – or at least the noisier portion of academia, the media, the political elite and dumbasses commenting on blog and news threads are still convinced otherwise. According to this particular assortment of gits, such beliefs in the strict interpretation of the Constitution, and a small federal government with limited powers are horrifically radical and dangerously un-American notions. This would suggest that in general, public education has reached astonishing new lows in total incompetence, when it comes to education in basic civics and history – Especially, it would seem, among those in the leadership cadre among certain unions.

No kidding, looking around at all that is said of us in various fora – it’s an absolute hoot. I am following one comment thread now where it’s being asserted, over and over again that the Tea Partiers are the tools of big corporations. No actual proof of the assertion are posted, mind you – such as details about which corporations, and how they are supposed to be commanding us Tea Party sheeple. If anything, and to go by my personal knowledge of Tea Partiers – more of them are owners of small, and even micro-small businesses. There’s a fair number of retirees, lots of military veterans, heaps of fairly observant churchgoers; all of this makes one particular assertion fairly risible – that we were all stupid dope-smokers in high school who couldn’t into college or get real jobs and don’t pay taxes. Have to admit, I was shaking my head over that one. If anything, most of us were probably totally earnest, clean-cut parent-respecting nerds, back in the day – and were roundly laughed at by the dope-smoking crowd.

Seems to me also, that the level of disparagement aimed at the Tea Partiers is rising, of late – and so is the ugly slant taken by some popular culture outlets. At least those responsible for the latest kerfuffle, which has a plotline of Captain America meeting what appears to be a Tea Party protest, have had the grace – or at least the economic good sense to back down and render an apology. Even if it does seem more along the lines of “I’m sorry you were offended/I’m sorry we got caught” sort of weasel-apologies.

Oh, and for the umpteenth time – Sarah Palin is not our leader. Glenn Beck isn’t either, and Rush Limbaugh certainly isn’t. And most of us are at least as angry at the Republicans as any else, so please spare me the insistence that the Grand Old Party is our puppetmaster. If fact, most of us wouldn’t bother pissing on the traditional Republican leadership cadre if they were on fire.We have no leader. The whole thing is a distributed insurgency – and for what it is worth, some of the loosely-associated groups are going and doing their own thing. With greater or lesser degrees of success. Personally, I think those groups who are depending on a handful of funding sources with deep pockets and paying for services rendered, rather than the dedication of volunteers and many small donations are on the wrong track. That runs the danger of becoming what made us angry in the first place. But as I said before: a herd of cats, all moving more or less in the same direction.

Ah well –interesting times. And on the anniversary of the start of the whole Tea Party movement (February 21, which strangely enough is also my birthday) they may get even more interesting yet.

Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly

03. February 2010 · Comments Off on Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

If there is a phrase which makes my socio-political antennae begin to quiver, that will be anything that begins with the words “The People’s – whatever.” The People’s Park, the People’s Republic – the People’s Whatever. I suppose at one time – around the early part of the 20th century, perhaps – dubbing something as belonging to the ‘people’ sounded fresh, innovative, democratic, not the exclusive preserve of some elite or other. Alas, by the middle of that century, it usually meant some grim, joyless and grinding totalitarian establishment, with a rhetorical smiley-face painted on the front, which increasingly fooled only the starry-eyed true believers.

And so it is with the late Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” – not so much a straight history, but a grim and joyless Marxist slog through American history. Which in the end amounts to an unrelenting snorkel through the sludge at the bottom of the national sewer, as seen through the lenses of a late 19th century political thinker, with the helpless lumpenprolitariat being royally screwed over and over by the capitalist and plutocrats . . . oh, and we murdered the Indians! And lynched black people! And slavery – don’t forget about slavery! From the way the man banged on and on about imperialisms of every stripe, war, social injustice, and all the rest of the progressiveist bug-bears you’d have thought that no other nation in the world evah! had perpetuated any of those numerous crimes against humanity which the Zinneastas gleefully charged the United States with. And God help us – the whole grim polemic is frequently assigned as a history textbook.

And yes, we should know our history, including the inglorious parts – but all that, only that, and to the exclusion of anything else? Debunking is a worthy exercise to be sure, but there ought to be some bunk there in the first place, some basic knowledge and understanding, nay, even some appreciation for those people who built their little corner of America, who made a life for themselves, built towns and railroads, fought to end slavery, and to devise a political system which invested citizens with rights as well as responsibilities. That kind of history is endlessly fascinating to those of us imbued with ordinary curiosity about ‘what happened way back then,’ and lacking a mindset which insists on jamming the square peg of events and people into the round hole of ideology.

The trouble with Zinn and his ilk, when it comes to history – there is no place for complicated stuff, nothing meaningful exists outside the round hole of ideology. Which is a pity as well, for history is a treasure-store of riches, in the experiences of people, of fame and name, or no-name and no fame. I make a part of my living from telling some of their stories – and now and again readers have written to tell me how they wish they had been able to learn such stories in school, for then they might have taken more of an interest at the time. What is also a pity is that a relentless diet of Zinning our history is to leave us guilt-tripped, short-changed and ashamed – instead of seeing our history whole, and steadily.

It could be that this is what the Zinneastas intend – for how much easier it is to destroy a people, once you have demoralized them from within.

Amazon – And the Perils of POD-ing

31. January 2010 · Comments Off on Amazon – And the Perils of POD-ing · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

It didn’t seem to have made much of a ripple in the political blogosphere, but two years ago among the various writers’ discussion groups, websites and e- newsletters, discussion of the Amazon-Booksurge imbroglio achieved a melt-down-and-drop-through-to-the earths’ core degree of nuclear passion. Amazon basically announced that they would require those independent and publish on demand (POD) presses who wanted to sell through Amazon to print those books through Amazon’s Booksurge publisher-printer entity. (It’s now called CreateSpace, BTW.) The implications of that policy were chewed over like a mouthful of rubbery and vile-tasting bubblegum for weeks.

A short background refresher in the vagaries of independent publishing may be in order here. Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away there used to be two ways of being published. The first kind was the respectable kind, with one of the big name publishing firms that with luck and if you were any good, or fairly good or even a literary genius, and you had any sort of agent, you would wind up with stacks of copies of your book in all the bookstores, a nice royalty check, maybe even an advance, good reviews in the right magazines, and hey, presto – as my daughter says, pretty soon you were a “real arthur.” The other kind of publishing was disdainfully known as “vanity”publishing. The assumption was that untalented hack with lots of money would contract with a publisher to print quantities of a book that “real” publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and no one but the author and his family and friends would ever read. Classically, the assumption was that such an author would wind up with a garage full of expensive books that would never go any farther than that.

That whole picture was turned upside down and shaken like some vast etch-a-sketch, what with the internet, the development of POD, or print-on-demand technology, just as the big-name publishing houses became risk-adverse, unadventurous and stodgy. Rather like Hollywood and the music industry, come to think on it: stuck on established big names, carefully constructed sure-fire blockbuster hits and guaranteed big returns. The quirky, original, eccentric and genuinely creative will likely never be invited in the door – even if they are talented, too. The result was an explosion in the numbers of writers who have gone “indy” – just like filmmakers and musicians, because the technology has allowed it. Getting in through the doors of the big-name publishing houses was no longer the only game in town.

Print on demand technology allowed a printer to print up copies of a particular book as they are ordered from a formatted electronic text file. Because they are usually printed in small batches, not in 10s of thousands at a whack, the cost of the individual copy is somewhat higher. And being printed to order, the matter of warehousing thousands of copies doesn’t come up; all very ecologically sound. It allowed writers who couldn’t or didn’t want to publish through a traditional publisher and couldn’t afford to pay for a print run from a vanity press to pay a small set-up fee for their text and cover, which would be available to the printer. Whenever orders came in for their book, the printer could run off as many copies as needed and drop-ship them to the customer.

Sensing an opportunity, a whole host of new publishers sprang up or morphed from their previous incarnation. Most of these were and are internet-based: just check out the IAG books and members page to get an idea of the range. A fair number of authors set up as publishers themselves, since the actual printing of the books was now relatively inexpensive and accessible. While a good many of resulting POD books are just as much vanity publications as ever were, and are pretty dreadful besides – quite a few are not. In fact, the best of them are as quirky, literate and as high quality as anything available from the big traditional houses and those authors who took it seriously have reached a wider audience. As another IAG indy writer pointed out, readers don’t much care how a book that they love to read was published – they just want to read it. Nothing is in stasis for long: POD publishers grew, or were absorbed by others.

Amazon.com purchased the POD publisher Booksurge in 2005; not a large publisher or a particularly well-regarded one. In fact the worst POD book I ever reviewed was a Booksurge product, although that seemed to have resulted from author stubbornness rather than Booksurge incompetence. Still, it didn’t seem to be terribly out of line for a book retailer to be also in the book publishing business – and Booksurge books didn’t seem to be given any special favors among all the other POD books available from Amazon – until a little less than two years ago. (Up until then, I thought it might indicate that the bright sparks at Amazon thought that POD published books were the wave of the future.)

The main printer for many, if not most POD publishers is called Lightning Source; it’s owned by Ingram, the mega-huge book distributor, and puts out a darned good product at a reasonable rate. It’s also essential for POD books to be included in the Ingram catalogue; it’s a main line into brick and mortar bookstores; otherwise you might just as well be back in the vanity-press days, with a garage full of copies to hawk around.

But it’s also essential for your books to be available on-line, and on-line means Amazon.com, the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla of internet book marketing. If it’s published, it’s available from Amazon. Over the last couple of years, Amazon.com was relatively welcoming to readers and writers alike; offering opportunities to review and blog about our books, to do Kindle reader editions of our books, to do wish-lists and recommendations, to set up discussion groups; as a matter of fact, the IAG – the Independent Authors Guild started as an Amazon discussion group.

So the demand by Amazon.com, that a number of small POD publishers had to have their books be printed by Booksurge, or else their authors books would not be sold directly through Amazon came as a rather thuggish slap in the face. In essence, POD writers were told to make a choice between doing business with their chosen publisher and printer – or being sold through Amazon. Richard and Angela Hoy, at Booklocker.com (who published two of my books, and printed and distributed three others) declined the offer of a contract for Amazon-Booksurge’s services with the vigor and force of a concrete block thrown through a plate-glass window – in fact they went ahead and filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging their actions violated federal antitrust laws. Just this week, Amazon has moved to settle – just before the phrase of discovery would have begin. More about Booklocker and the Amazon settlement here, from Angela.

For myself, I was just asounded to discover that there are actually real people at Amazon. Ordinarily, my vision is that of a huge, cavernous underground warehouse, piled high with books and other goods, sort of like that in the final scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. Up in the dim ceiling overhead, there is some kind of vast, clanking machine, with tracks and pulleys and long arms which reach down and pick up something, and carry it away. I visualize those items being dropped into a huge hopper, and eventually they emerge on the other end – which is an anonymous UPS drop-box on an anonymous street in a featureless urban warehouse development. The point is, there don’t ever seem to be any humans involved, save for someone in a long gray cloak that slips around the corner and runs away, immediately you catch sight of them … or the whole place may be run by rubbery-tentacled aliens, like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest. In any case, interaction with a real human at Amazon always seemed just about impossible, to me. But Richard and Angela did it – and made them back down. Victory is sweet – even if it took two years

The End of the Beginning

22. January 2010 · Comments Off on The End of the Beginning · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time

Or maybe the beginning of the end – either way, the Massachusetts landslide on Tuesday has really given the political landscape a really good Richter-detectable shaking. And I have to say I have enjoyed the whole thing, immensely, and hope, oh-hope-oh-hope that it is a harbinger of good things to come, that it means an enormous mass of Americans realizing that – yes they are people who can make a substantial mark, that responsible citizens have an obligation to become interested, even focused with a laser-like intensity on matters that for too long, we left to the political wonks to take care of. The conduct of our civic affairs can no longer be left to the usual suspects. For our own good, we must, we must become involved. And now we are, and we – the cranky independents, the bloggers, the Tea Party political virgins, sadder and wiser young Libertarians who cut their political baby teeth on Ron Paul, single-issue gadflies pursuing every conceivable local issue to the point of acute tedium . . . we made a mark and shook the larger political world. I know beyond a doubt that a large portion of donations to Scott Brown’s political campaign came from Tea Party independents: I know that the San Antonio Tea Party put out the word that the Massachusetts special election this week was something that we ought to take an interest in. I also know that while he may not be a perfect small-government, fiscally-responsible-strict Constitutionalist, in the real world, the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and he is good enough for government work. Good at campaigning, established record of accomplishment, quick with the repartee, a military reservist, and not-half-bad looking.

With luck – there are lots more candidates like him, coming up to the starting line, and a larger media that will – from this moment on, be inclined to pay attention. It’s been a gradual thing, this building up; I think practically no one but the moderate blogosphere paid much attention early on: and at that, no one more than Da Blogfaddah. I do recall very well, when I started being drawn into the Tea Party; through a blog-friend, Robin Juhl, who was a fan when this site was till SSDB, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, back in the Dark Ages of Blogs. This which would be, inter alia, about 2003, when Robin had a blog, called Rant’n’Raven. We kept in touch – and about March of last year, just when the concept of a Tea Party to protest the horrible, awful, astronomically-deficit producing stimulus package. Robin and some other people had used Facebook to put together a local Tea Party group – and, hey, I had experience writing, and with microphones and TV cameras and all that besides blogging – so did I want to come on board and write their press releases.

At the time, I assumed we would have a few hundred people meeting in a city park, I’d send out a release or two, snap some pictures myself for the website, we’d listen to some speeches, wave some signs and maybe get a trickle of interest from local media. But one thing and another – and our big Tax Day event ballooned into something much more than that. I did have to giggle at one of the local bloggers; two weeks before the event, he sneered that there wouldn’t be more than five or six stooopid red-neck H8ers in Alamo Plaza on April 15th. It turned out there were considerably more than that: the sheer numbers of people startled even us organizers. But I think the local media saw the event as a one-off, one-time-only, and that Glenn Beck was the big attraction, overall. One reporter even wistfully asked me, beforehand, was it just a Fox event, or could anyone play.

Things settled down after the Tax Day rally – there was interest from people, not much from the media, particularly. We did a protest here and there, rustled up some interest, and planned a 4th of July event, with a little bit more time to spare than we had for the Tax Day. There was local media interest in that event, mostly because the Governor of Texas made a pit-stop appearance. He was meant originally, I think, to zoom in, introduce our headline speaker, and zoom out again, but he stayed for hours, and that’s when we could begin to see concrete proof that the Tea Parties had something to offer, on the long-term scale of things. Whatever else you say about Governor Perry – he and a handful of other state and local office-holders were perceptive enough to see there was a good-sized crowd there, and there might be some political utility in getting out in front of it.

Still and all, after the 4th of July, it seemed that media interest settled down again – and of course, we in the Tea Party were still working out what to do next, what we would focus on. We had come to a conclusion that events – big events – although they brought us attention, they were very draining on time and energy. Even smaller coordinated protests were draining, although certainly enjoyable for the people participating in them. To really make a mark, we would have to make long-term plans, and concentrate on the 2010 mid-term elections. We would have to focus on candidates, and on education, and a lot of other rather un-splashy stuff; we’d also have to structure ourselves, coordinate more effectively, and raise funds for long-term projects. This isn’t much the stuff of news releases – but as part of this, another experienced media hand suggested that we do face to face outreach, with every local TV station, and the management echelon of the local paper. We’d set up an appointment, and talk to them about coverage, what we could do to make it easier for them, about our long-term plans and goals, offer them the expertise of various experts within the Tea Party. We thought we’d start with the easiest – the local Fox affiliate, and it went so well, we were emboldened to set up a meet with what we thought would be the toughest: the local daily newspaper.

Just by coincidence, that meeting was scheduled a within a few days after the 9-12 rally on the Mall in Washington, DC. I know there is still quite a considerable disputation about how many people were there; one million, two million – but for every person there on the Mall, we calculated fifteen or twenty more who wished they could have been there, but couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t get away from work. We met with not only the various editors, and two columnists, but also the publisher of the paper – and for a good two hours, in the morning of a working day for them. After that, the second most astonishing thing was their own relative astonishment; we were all so normal, rational, and articulate; not sign-waving crazies, screaming on the sidewalk. Everyone came away with their eyes opened, after that. We’ve had a great deal of cautious respect from our local media outlets ever since, although in a lot of venues – including some which you’d think would have known better – the Tea Partiers are still described as red-neck racists, uneducated, reactionary, fascists, racists, easily led by obvious propagandists – the whole vocabulary of ignorant abuse from people who I am sure preen themselves regularly over their own tolerance, and breadth of mind.

And so to the Massachusetts special election – which I see as a kind of nation-wide wake-up call: there in the heart of Kennedy country, the cranky independents all organized, raised funds, campaigned and won – cheered on by out of state cranky independents. This is a defeat so stinging, and so decisive, that I sense it has become a wake-up call for many of those bloggers and members of the commentariat who were formerly inclined to take the ignorant-racist-reactionary-sheeple line to heart. Reluctantly, it appears to me that the more sensible – or those whose social instincts are more finely honed are beginning to reassess not only Tea Partiers, the current administration, but their own opinions, in the light of Tuesday’s Massachusetts upset.

The Economy is so bad…

21. January 2010 · Comments Off on The Economy is so bad… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Politics

(From another one of those emails going around)

The economy is so bad that:

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

I ordered a burger at McDonald’s and the kid behind the counter asked, “Can you afford fries with that?”

CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.

If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.

McDonald’s is selling the 1/4 ouncer.

Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children’s names.

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.

Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

Motel Six won’t leave the light on anymore.

The Mafia is laying off judges.

Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

Congress says they are looking into this Bernie Madoff scandal. Oh Great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!

And, finally…
I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

A Short Exerpt From a Historical Speech

18. January 2010 · Comments Off on A Short Exerpt From a Historical Speech · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

This was found among the comments at Neo-Neocon – somewhat appropriate, considering the special election in Massachusetts tomorrow, and the marked degree of unhappiness generally with our re-elected aristocracy.

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

“Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

“Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God’s help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do.

“I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”

Well, yeah, it was Oliver Cromwell, on the eve of the English Civil War, and he eventually became as odious a dictator as those he fulminated against. Still, a cracking good speech … and in the current political situation, curiously resonant.

Later: and in the current mood, and from the same source – a Hitler Movie Parody Edit:

Road Trip!

17. January 2010 · Comments Off on Road Trip! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Home Front, Military, World

I’ve been invited to be on one of the panels at the 5th Annual MilBlog Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, April 9th and 10th – and Blondie and I are intending to drive, since she will be on spring break! (Route tentatively planned as Dallas-Memphis-Knoxville-Harrisonburg)

Any other milbloggers from the San Antonio or Ft. Hood area also going to the Milblog Conference? Anyone in Arkansas, Tennessee or Virgina want us to stop and visit along the way? Recommend some good eats, or something interesting to see?

We are all Spartacus

16. January 2010 · Comments Off on We are all Spartacus · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, it amuses me no end, checking out the comment sections on various websites and blogs, especially when the commenter start to go to town, with regard to tea parties, tea partiers and the whole Tea Party thing. After the obligatory snigger about teabagging, I find out that Tea Partiers are screeching-angry, hateful, racist, rude, Nazis, sister-humping rednecks who hate everyone else, and most especially the fact that we have a black president. That apparently is supposed to be the thing that sticks in our craws the most – I guess the oh-so-observant commenters have missed the sign that said, “We don’t like his white half, either!” Oh, and we’re all old, and/or uneducated losers, and the Tea Party rallies are more of a mass temper-tantrum, there’s only a handful of them, and they’ve all been deluded by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or perhaps by the Republican Party, and we’re secretly being lead by all of the above, or maybe Sarah Palin and her little dog, too . . . So they can be safely ignored and scored by all right-thinking people.

Seriously, I’m almost sure that none of the commentators holding forth in this manner, from the high – say, the New York Times, down to the very low, which would be some whacked-out Kos diarist, or possibly some more than usually-deranged denizen of Hollywierdland, like Janeane Garafolo – have actually ever gone to a mass Tea Party event. Nope – I’d be surprised as heck, to find out they are opining from actual, real-world encounters with Tea Partiers.

See, folks – I’ve been to one monster Tea Party event, a good few smaller ones, worked on media strategy for a metropolitan Tea Party, and helped pound out their long-term strategy. I have something to base my opinion of Tea Parties and Tea Partiers on – such as the evidence of my own lying eyes. While it might make a portion of the public and the old-line media happy as a pig in swill to believe the angry-racist-red-necking-dumbass-sheeple meme, and to agree with all the other voices in the echo-chamber . . . I have to say up-front – y’all aren’t doing yourself any favors. Especially, you won’t have done yourself a favor, when the Obama Administration, and all its works and all its ways goes down faster than a Japanese carrier at the Battle of Midway. You won’t be able to figure out why, having been blinded by willful mis-perception. Reality, she is a right bitch, and she will eventually crash any party of the delusional.

Mind you, there is a smidgeon or sometimes more to justify the stereotypes: yep, there are Rushbo and Glenn Beck fans among the Tea Partiers, and a goodly number of evangelical Right-to-Life types; there are Republican establishments and politicians who have been quick to grasp the advantages of being perceived as having something to do with the Tea Party, and lord help us, there are a scattering of screeching, ignorant ranters and racists who call themselves Tea Partiers. But to assume that is the truth and sum of all is to delude yourself – and if you are a media person or an academician saying this, than you are deluding the public that you are supposed to be informing.

Here’s the real deal: the Tea Parties have a couple of unifying principles: small government, fiscally-responsible and strict constitutionalists pretty much says it in one sentence. Everything else is secondary, and at this point, kind of a distraction. Blessedly most are not distracted – although because of the sheer number of passionate people involved in a Tea Party does mean that sometimes contrary opinions are involved. Groups split, morph, form other groups. Among the flavors of political opinion drawn into the Tea Party brew are libertarians, people who run small businesses, generally middle-to-working-class, veterans, people who pay taxes, people who are angered by the same old, same old. There is anger as deep as an ocean about politicians who seem to be more of an aristocracy, spending decades in office doing what is best to secure reelection rather than what is best for the country. Many of the Tea Partiers that I know are just as angry at Democrats as they are Republicans – and they come in all colors and religious backgrounds. Myself, I’ve been describing the Tea Party movement for months as a herd of cats, all motivated by pretty much the same thing, and going in more or less the same direction.

Tea Partiers may also rightly be described as angry; there is temper-tantrum angry, but there is also purposeful and focused anger. The sort that I see within my Tea Party is the purposeful, goal-oriented kind. Their focus and their strategy – and it is a focus, not spasms of temporary anger about administration policies – is to search out, and elect people who will uphold the principles of small government, fiscal responsibility and adherence to the Constitution. In other words, they are starting from the bottom up. This is not spectacular; this doesn’t make a flashy television statement, or make it easy to follow, if you are not directly involved. There is no known leader, really – oh, everyone in the lefty commentariat goes on about Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, or Rushbo, but they aren’t really our leaders. There are no leaders. We are all leaders, each of us pushing on towards a goal, according to our own inspiration and our own beliefs. Such beliefs are buttressed not by Fox Television, but in the provisions of the Constitution, which we are – if not familiar with it before – are studying with a renewed attention and appreciation.

And I sense, this is what may prove to be much for frightening to the powers that be, the old-line media sitting in easy and ignorant judgment, or the internet commenter who has enough actual first-hand knowledge about the Tea Party to fill up a small cheap tea bag. Not that we are all they have proclaimed us to be – but that we aren’t. And that there are a lot of us, working quietly and with intelligent focus within our communities, picking up the trash after our protest events, seriously applying ourselves to the intricacies of applying to be precinct chair, or running for local office, recalling to ourselves what it meant to be truly politically involved, instead of hiring through pro-forma elections some empty cipher with good hair and a smooth line of patter, to go to Washington and bring home enough pork to be elected again, one way or an other.

Yes – we are all Spartacus. And there are a lot of us, who have remembered what it is to be citizens. Not subjects.

Art Humor

14. January 2010 · Comments Off on Art Humor · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, The Funny

Found through 2Blowhards, who thought it was a clever concept, but the examples posted just weren’t all that funny.
I disagreed – the whole blog is here: obscure vintage works of art, with new titles.
#91, The USS Conan O’Brian is especially hilarious.

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