Tea Party Hearty (Part One)

18. April 2009 · Comments Off on Tea Party Hearty (Part One) · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Tea Time

About two weeks ago, the other members of the San Antonio Tea Party committee said to me –“You’re the one with a with the broadcasting background, YOU go out in front and interface with the multi-headed and hungry media beast, while the rest of us work our a***s off trying to organize a nationally broadcast tea party rally for upwards of 9,000 people in the middle of downtown San Antonio… check in with us now and again, we’ll let you know if we have anything specific we want you to put out there.” I took it as one of my media relations duties to see what else was going on out there in the wilds of the internet, regarding a potential tea party in San Antonio. I discovered by the miracle of google, a discussion thread appended to a MySA blog, in which one commenter sneeringly remarked that any proposed Tea Party would be a pathetic bust, with maybe four or five looser racist RethugliKKKan freaks in attendance. I don’t know what that commenter does for a living, if anything, but accurate prophecy is not one of his or her gifts. One of the other organizers and I were told by a police officer, as the rally was winding down, that attendance was clocked on the ground as 16,000 people, give or take. (Subsequent analysis of the aerial photo of Alamo Plaza by the San Antonio PD at the peak of the rally showed approximately 20,000 people. Not bad at all, for a work day.)

Blondie and I headed down early, as I was scheduled to do a walk-through the venue with John, a professional photographer who was volunteering his services to document the event, and some other volunteers who were doing the same with video cameras, Matt who had been working out all the necessary permits… well, it turned into a gathering of about half the executive committee, standing in the little ornate Victorian bandstand that stands in front of the Menger Hotel. It was very cool, and pleasant, and the paving stones around the bandstand were wet, as if it had rained the night before, or if the whole area had been washed down. The trees are now all well out in leaf. At nine AM there were already early-bird tourists in the Plaza, and moving across the square of lawn, and through the walled gardens and pergolas that frame the old mission church of the Alamo. Even at that hour, there were people setting up folding chairs and holding up signs, along the barriers set up where the stage for Glenn Beck’s Fox broadcast would be.

I wasn’t needed for much of the walk-through, so I talked with John and some of the other committee members, before I walked over to the Emily Morgan Hotel with Robin – the guy who wound up being the Chairman of the Tea Party, very much to his surprise. One of my ‘oh, duh – we probably need to arrange for this’ moments in the last week before the party came when I realized we would have to arrange for a place to park the descending media – the large, the small, the bloggers and all. And several days after that revelation, that we ought to have some kind of press conference, too… and the Menger Hotel was already the site for Glenn Beck’s luncheon. We were already setting up a command post there; best to have the press room elsewhere; the Menger was already maxed-out. It seemed throughout all this, that helpful volunteers popped out of the woodwork, offering extraordinary skills, or contacts, or facilities just at the exact moment when those skills, contacts or facilities were most needed. The volunteer who took over as security coordinator appeared in just that very way, a retired career LAPD officer, with command experience, just when it appeared that we would have need someone with skills in juggling major event venues, large crowds and celebrities. So it was with this; a helpful lady called on the very morning that I realized we would need a space, scoped out the Emily Morgan, and procured for us the use of a conference room. She even put it on her credit card, until the committee could reimburse her; a nice-sized room, with a series of narrow tables, all arranged class-room style. We also used it for our data entry volunteers to work in, and at the end of the day we had a plan to assemble our non-celeb speakers. It was actually quite refreshing, as the afternoon wore on, to have a quiet place to sit, and as a fallback place to stash things for a while; video equipment, boxes of tee-shirts. I was only grateful that they found another place for the canoe. Wrestling that into the freight elevator would have been a bit much for the poor bell staffers. Look over the conference room, set up a table in front to do the press conference from; Barbara, the events manager checked in with us and had her staff bring in a podium, which was very much appreciated.

People were already gathering, with folding chairs and signs by ten or eleven of a morning. John the photographer – another one of those volunteers who had appeared out of the woodwork, with vast experience in covering sprawling events like this – had been circulating all morning. He told me there were a lot of people who had come from out of town; from California by plane and a carload by marathon overnight road trip from Missouri. Back to the Menger – the crowd already tripled by the time that I walked back. The lobby was jammed; attendees for the fund-raising luncheon, and a handful of Tea Party volunteers cutting apart the sheets of laminated badges, punching holes in them, and stringing them onto lengths of elastic; numbered badges in different colors for the executive committee members, for VIP guests, for media and our documentation team, to access back-stage areas, for those who were going to be provide roving security and medical services, for venders, for the sign-in tables… more or less serving the purpose of letting everyone know who had authority of one sort or another, and who would be allowed through security barriers. This is one of those things that come up, when what had originally been thought to be a 600-person gathering in a city park suddenly explodes into a national event. The teen-aged daughter of the committee member overseeing all this had stayed up half the night, cutting and knotting lengths of elastic for these badges, and been excused from school for the day for real-life experience of a peaceful civic protest.

(To be continued)

Tea Party: San Antonio

16. April 2009 · Comments Off on Tea Party: San Antonio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs, World

This is the speech that I gave last night at the San Antonio Tea Party rally. I was sort of squeezed in between various celebrities, local and national. My job – to set the scene. I had one of those stupid hand-held mikes, which was very nice for Ted Nugent, doing one of his restless and kinetic rants, but it was a b**ch for me to handle it with one hand and keep my script laid flat with the other, against an intermittent breeze . Quite a lot of people didn’t hear me clearly, I’m afraid. Sorry, all. I thought there was a tech, minding the audio board. Anyway, this is what I said. I have no idea how it all looked – I didn’t dare look towards the jumbotron.

Hullo – and thank you all for coming to our modest little tea party in the heart of San Antonio! (pause for laughter) First of all – are we having a wonderful time? Fiesta San Antonio begins tomorrow, so we have been telling everyone to come for the Tea Party and stay for Fiesta. First though, I would like to thank everyone who took that extra effort, and worked very hard to make this particular place – this very special place – available to us, on very short notice. We would like to thank the ladies and gentlemen of the various departments of the City of San Antonio, and acknowledge the graciousness shown us by the members of the Fiesta Commission! Thank you, City of San Antonio!

Yes, this is a very special and significant place for our Tea Party – although most visitors, upon seeing it for the first time are surprised, because it looks so very small – nothing like the way appears in all the movies. San Antonio de Valero… so called ‘the Alamo’ for the cottonwood trees that grow wherever there is plenty of water in otherwise dry country. And there were cottonwoods nearby then, enough that the soldiers of Spain who set up a garrison in this old mission called it so, after those trees. Imagine – if you can – how this place would have looked, then! Just… imagine.

Close your eyes, and if you can, banish the sight of all these tall modern glass buildings, and those rambling beaux-arts storefronts, while I paint a word-picture for you. Go back… go back a hundred and seventy three years. The actual town of San Antonio is now some little distance away, a huddle of adobe and stucco walls around the tower of San Fernando.
The air smells of wood-smoke and cooking, of sweat and horses, and spent black-power. We are in a sprawling compound of long low buildings, a single room deep, with tiny windows, and thick walls. Some of these have flat rooftops, others with shallow peaked roofs. Many buildings have their inside walls razed – others have been filled with rubble and dirt to make cannon-mounts. The gaps between them are filled by palisades of earth, tight-packed and reinforced with lengths of wood, and tangles made of sharpened tree branches. All of this work has been done painfully, by hand and with axes, picks, shovels and buckets. The chapel – of all of these the tallest, and the strongest – is also roofless. Another earth ramp has been built up, inside; to serve as yet one more cannon-mount. This place has become a fortress, and last defense, surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force, a large army of over two thousand men, outnumbering bare two hundred or so defenders by over 10 to 1. This enemy army…, trained…, hardened and disciplined, is well-equipped with cannon and ammunition, with cavalry and foot-soldiers alike. By the order of the enemy commander, a blood-red flag signifying no quarter to the defenders of this place has been flown from the tower of the San Fernando church.

The story is, that on the day that the last courier left the Alamo – a local man who knew the country well, mounted on a fast horse bearing away final letters and dispatches – one of the Texian commanders called together all his other officers and men. He was a relatively young man – William Barrett Travis, ambitious and to be honest, a bit full of himself. I rather think he might have struck some of his contemporaries as a bit insufferable – but he could write. He could write, write words that leap off the page in letters of fire and blood, which glow in the darkness like a distant bonfire.

He was in charge because of one of those turns which bedevil the plans of men. His co-commander, James Bowie was deathly ill… ironic, because he was the one with a reputation as a fighter and a leader. Bowie was seen by his enemies – of which there were many – as a violent scoundrel, with a reputation for bare-knuckle brawling, for land speculation and shady dealing. And of the third leader – one David Crockett, celebrity frontiersman and former Congressman, he did not claim any rank at all, although he led a party of Tennessee friends and comrades. He had arrived here, almost by accident. Of all of the leadership triad, I think he was perhaps the most amiable, the best and easiest-tempered of company. Of all those others, who had a stark choice put before them on that very last day, that day when it was still possible to leave and live… most of them were ordinary men, citizens of various communities and colonies in Texas, wanderers from farther afield – afterwards, it would become clear that only a bare half-dozen were born in Texas.

It is a vivid picture in my mind, of what happened when a young lawyer turned soldier stepped out in front of his rag-tag crew. Legends have that Colonel Travis drew his sword – that weapon which marked an officer, and marked a line in the dust at his feet and said “Who will follow me, over that line?” It was a stark choice put before them all. Here is the line; swear by stepping over it, that you will hold fast to your comrades and to Texas, all you volunteer amateur soldiers. Make a considered and rational choice – not in the heat of the fray, but in the calm before the siege tightens around these crumbling walls. No crazy-brave impulse in the thick of it, with no time to do anything but react. Stay put, and choose to live, or step over it and choose to go down fighting in the outpost you have claimed for your own.
The legend continues – all but perhaps one crossed the line, James Bowie being so ill that he had to be carried over it by his friends. It was a choice of cold courage, and that is why it stays with us. These men all chose to step across Colonel Travis’ line. Some had decided on their own to come here, others had been tasked by their superiors… and others were present by mere chance. They could have chosen freely to leave. But they all stayed, being convinced that they ought to take a stand … that something ought to be done.

Imagine. Imagine the men who came here, who made that choice, who had the cold courage to step over a line drawn in the dust at their feet.

They were animated by the conviction that they were citizens, that it was their right – and their responsibility to have a say in their own governance. They were not subjects, expected to submit without a murmur to the demands of a remote and arbitrary government. They did not bow to kings, aristocrats, or bureaucrats in fine-tailored coats, looking to impose taxes on this or that, and demanding interference in every aspect of their lives. They were citizens, ordinary people – with muddled and sometimes contradictory motives and causes, fractious and contentious, just as we are. But in the end, they were united in their determination to take a stand – a gallant stand against forces that seemed quite overwhelming.

This evening, we also have come to this place, this very place – as is our right as citizens and taxpayers, to speak of our unhappiness to our government in a voice that cannot be ignored any longer. This is our right. Our duty… and our stand.

(Afterwards, I sat on some of the leftover stage platforms from the Glenn Beck program and talked to Blondie, one of the other executive committee members, and the husband of another. The husband had run a pizza place in New York, and he and Blondie swapped recipes and techniques for making calzones. For a bit, we were also chatting with Janine Turner, and her daughter, who had also come to the Tea Party luncheon with Glenn Beck, and was a last-minute addition to the program. Lest you think I have gone all celebrity ga-ga, I haven’t… it’s just that she was a a very charming and unpretentious person, and it was a crowd of us, waiting our turn to speak, or hanging around in the back-stage area with the spouses and friends, and a bunch of roadies knocking down the Glenn Beck set, and security types with earphones all murmuring into their sleeves, all fenced around with industrial yellow barricades. More to tell in the next installment… like, why I know now how Ted Nugent is so popular. And how a bunch of uninvolved, un-politically connected citizens managed to pull off a huge Tea Party rally in about ten days flat.)

Not Quite Up to This Standard, But It WAS a Heck of a Party

16. April 2009 · Comments Off on Not Quite Up to This Standard, But It WAS a Heck of a Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs



(Thought all the Trek fans out there would appreciate this version… detailed after-action post to follow.)

Political Aristocrats

14. April 2009 · Comments Off on Political Aristocrats · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Veteran's Affairs, World

This is a thought that I have been kicking around for a while, and I actually voiced it, during the TV interview Sunday morning; that our current political uber-class have become the new aristocrats, and that is one of the reasons that the Tea Party protests have been springing up relentlessly, like mushrooms after a good few weeks of rain. Our permanently-revolving political class has somehow mutated into becoming something of a hereditary aristocracy in the last few decades. I know there were always people who served long terms, or whose families – Hey, John Addams! Teddy Roosevelt! William Henry Harrison, John Kennedy, George Bush! – tended to show up in the corridors of power, over and over again, yea down to the fourth generation. But this current situation has something of a different feel about it to me; not so much an aristocracy of blood, although certain of our current crop are indeed the spawn of professional politicians of yesteryear – but an aristocracy of interests.

They sometimes seem like a mad mash-up of the Soviet aristocracy, during the Stalin era, as outlined in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Court of the Red Czar” and the court aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France. Here we have a combination rapacious and self-serving functionaries, viciously defending their perks and the source of their power while giving lip service to the Party of the People… and the vapid, frivolous and completely clueless, dining on $100 a pound Waygu beef, and sending out for gourmet Chicago pizza. From a Washington, DC address… um, yeah, I know it wasn’t all that bad, the chef was going all that way by regular airline and on his own dime. Hey, at least they didn’t send an Air Force transport aircraft for him. Like the old aristocrats at the court of the Sun King Louis, and his ilk; preening and posing in elegant clothing, against magnificent backgrounds, oblivious to the world outside steadily crumbling away at the edges. But those are all superficial things. Tacky, heedless and oblivious to other people may be no way to go through life, but these qualities usually do nothing but amuse or appall everyone else.

Alas, the current political aristocracy are also not just standing there… they are doing things… passing stimulus bills they haven’t entirely read, passing laws which – in the case of one particularly ghastly example – has the ostensible purpose of protecting children to exposure to lead from toys manufactured in China and imported into the US. A bill which was so broadly written and badly conceived that complete enforcement of it will bankrupt or close many boutique toy manufacturers, and home crafts ladies with a tiny but tidy sideline business, empty out second-hand stores of children’s clothing and toys, and gut libraries and publishers alike, either of new books or those published before 1985.

Always remember – they work for us. They are our employees. We hire them, through elections, to look after this stuff for us – as we are… you know, busy with our real lives? Earning a living, paying taxes, raising families…Maybe it is time for a serious talk about this with our various political hirelings.

Think of the Tea Parties as a sort of counseling letter; the last step before we think about getting someone who can better able to handle those duties sent before them.

Tax Day tomorrow. Tea Party also: I’m the one appearing on various local San Antonio TV channels (Fox mostly, other networks as the mood takes them and as their programming people dictate) with a faintly English accent, looking like a gentle and earnest Catholic school principal, urging listeners to live up to what our mothers, the better angels of our natures, and the founders of this Republic encouraged us to do…)
All that… and me, I could really do with loosing some pounds. Over and above that which the camera puts on…

Adventures In Public Relations

12. April 2009 · Comments Off on Adventures In Public Relations · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Nothing serious, just a long schlep from the north-east side, over to KENS-5, over in San Antonio’s Medical Center area, for a quick morning show interview about the upcoming Tea Party… in the pouring rain, in the dark. We cut it close, having to be there by 6:45 – and of course, we had to slow down because of the rain. Heck, I don’t think there was anyone out, but a couple of police cars on 1604 who had someone pulled over, the Easter Bunny… and the skeleton holiday-weekend staff at KENS, who were charmingly relaxed and laid back. So, a quick stint in the female’s dressing room, using the hair dryer on my top, and there we were, casually waved into the studio… which was THE KENS-5 studio. I spent a good half of my adult life in TV and radio studios, so I really wasn’t all that intimidated.

In fact, it all seemed very comfortable and familiar… if slightly more plush and substantial than the usual military TV studio, what with having a whole series of sets for various special purpose shows arrayed around the walls; a cityscape from a roof terrace, the living room sofa set, the two leather chairs and bookshelf set, the kitchen show set, plus the weather set and the main news desk. Blondie remarked how they seem somehow much less impressive, smaller and even a little grubbier in real life. Hook up the wireless mike and transmitter, sit up straight on the leather chair, a few minutes casual off-mike chat with the anchor (this intended to put the guest at ease – he seemed quite relieved that I was actually, quite at ease, or at least not a jittering bundle of nerves.) A few quick general questions, about where, when and why… and there you go. Blondie and I picked up breakfast tacos on the way home.

Tomorrow, it’s a call-in to a morning show, an interview at Texas Public Radio in the morning, and in the afternoon, an update for PJ Media… sort of a media trifecta, as it were. Blondie has to go downtown for a safety walk-through, and then we have a social get-together, which will probably turn into one final executive planning meeting.

Two more whole days to plan this, and then we will see a 9,000 person Tea Party on Alamo Plaza – come for the Party, y’all, and stay for Fiesta!

Looking For Ripples

06. April 2009 · Comments Off on Looking For Ripples · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics

That’s me, looking for very specific ripples, and currents, in the vast placid ocean that is the blogosphere, where one twitch by a blog-fish on the far side of that body can be magnified by other blog-fish with sensitive antennae reflected, magnified and passed on, passed back and forth, linked and sent rippling out into the farthest reaches. When I say blog-fish, I don’t really mean a fish, really – fins and gills and all that. I picture something more like a Portuguese man o’war, with all those sensitive tentacles and tendrils hanging down, floating and lurking, waiting patiently for some little current, a change in temperature, some isolated agitation. And there is always something of the sort out there, some little agitation that starts on a discussion thread, and gets linked and blogged, and copied to someone elses’ website, and pretty soon… voila, a tempest. Sometimes the tempest is so huge that it spills over into the political arena and the general mainstream media – a veritable Hurricane Katrina. Rathergate is the classic example for me: the source documents upon which a 60 Minutes story about former President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard was based, were posted online after the story aired, some little things about them which didn’t seem just right were noted almost at once, and all throughout the next day, the storm grew and grew. I spent a lot of time on-line that day, as it was slow in the office where I worked then, and I saw the storm expand, as more and more other experts in obscure fields checked in and commented, and were quoted and linked and… well, everyone knows how that turned out. My point was that someone going on line, and surfing around a bit in the correct quadrant would encounter the outlaying ripples of this coming storm within a very few minutes.

So in my capacity as the media expert for the local Tea Party planning committee, I’ve been quietly snorkeling around, doing google searches on various phrases (the google-fu… it is powerful in this one!), looking for chatter about Tea Parties in general, and the San Antonio one in particular. Yeah, I’m curious, but it would help to know just how unglued that any local radicals are becoming, if we might have counter-protestors or provocateurs. Finding a lot of ranting, or calls for action, cross-linking and commenting on the San Antonio Tax Day Tea Party would be a cause for concern, and something that we would have to be prepared for, in a good Public Affairs professional sort of way. It is always nice to know from which direction the next sh*tstorm will blow in.

And I found… well, not very much at all, among the Kossaks, the Huff-pos, and the Duers. A lot of cross talk and interest on the center/conservative/libertarian blogs, lots of events being planned, and lots of plans being generated and shared. But the leftwards wing of the blogosphere is all but silent. No ripples at all, no storm of interest and awareness building. Oh, a couple of sniggering discussions about a small group of KKK/racist/hater/losers who might have four, or twenty-five show up at their pathetic little rallies, but aside from those discussion threads – hardly any mention. Really, it’s as if they are in a tightly-closed little bubble. And they are, in a way. The various tea parties are getting some local media mention, but very few national outlets other than the Wall Street Journal and our own very dear PJ Media are really going all out to tie it all together. It’s as if it is all happening under the news radar; if you aren’t involved in a Tea Party, or snorkeling around in the center/conservative/libertarian section of the big pool, it’s as if there is nothing at all going on at all. Nothing to see, move on, and lets all talk about-insert name of current tabloid fave celebrity here.

But there is. And it will be big. On April 16, I rather think there will be a lot of stunned citizens (and legislators and major media folks) picking themselves up off the ground and saying, “Did anyone get the number of that 18-wheeler that just ran us over?”

All Righty, Then…

02. April 2009 · Comments Off on All Righty, Then… · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

Guess it’s on, for April 15th…

Strictly speaking, my video compadre was slightly exaggerating; we don’t have the Alamo – just the Plaza in front of it. The Alamo is above such partisan matters. It’s a memorial, and even though it was once a church, people can’t even get married in it. The Tea Party will be in the Plaza in front of it.

Me, I am to work, sending out about a kajillion e-mail and printed news releases. Yeah, I volunteered. Must try to recall what Dad said, about doing that.

Swear to the Almighty, about a week ago, when one of the other planning committee members told me that Glenn Beck was getting all interested in this Tea Party thing, I thought they meant Jeff Beck, and thought – “Cool – a rock guitarist who is also a conservative!” Did wonder why he was so keen on showing up at the Alamo, though. I mean, Ozzy Osborne has never lived down his big visit there….

OK, so I never watched Fox, I really was an NPR sort of person, and I’ve spent much of the last three years in the 19th century, anyway. Interesting times, people, interesting times. If, on occasion, somewhat baffling.

(OMG, an Instalanche – just as a reminder, the San Antonio Tea Party’s website is here!)

Burning Question for Today

31. March 2009 · Comments Off on Burning Question for Today · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, The Funny

Ummm… ok, so I just saw this picture on another site, and went to find the link…

And, although I myself am now a lady of certain age and think it very bad taste to make fun of people’s looks, especially the somewhat aged and never-terribly-dishy… (glass houses, stones, and all that.)

Can anyone tell me when the heck Helen Thomas began to look like the Emperor Palpatine in drag?

Off On Another Adventure

30. March 2009 · Comments Off on Off On Another Adventure · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Politics, World

Sorry for the sparse posting of late, and putting off the promised second half of the essay about why I am taking such mean-spirited pleasure in watching the Chosen One, the Fresh Prince of Chicago, metaphorically crash’n’burn right in front of a large and amused audience. Pity he appears to be taking the stock market, the auto industry, and a nice selection of old-line city newspapers along with him… oh, the old Stalinist saying about eggs and omelets may apply here. Where will this all end… it remains to be seen, as the TV reporters standing in front of a Significant Gummit Building always announce portentously, as they wrap up their brow-knittingly serious examination of whatever it is that they have just gotten two or three minutes of local news huffing and puffing about. Probably the serious and potential effect of Lint In Small Children’s Belly-Buttons! This Scourge, If Left Unattended And Without A Lot of Dollars Thrown At It… Think of the Cheeeeldren! (or possibly at the foundation run by the person whose generated news release was just lightly re-written for the news story itself)… Oh, I wouldn’t know about the current local TV news scourge-de-jour, I only watch local news when Downtown is under water, or in danger of being glazed over with ice. Of the national news scourge-de-jour, I have heard vaguely of the ruckus over a sweet little tot in… Florida, was it? Went missing, body searched for by volunteers, mother suspected, name-something-Anthony… no, I don’t watch national channels much either. And although I used to love the various NPR shows – even with their decided tilt… I just got fed up with them, too. When the Bush-bashing and the Obama adoration got to a certain level on Prairie Home Companion – and even on, god save us, Car Talk… well, that was it.

Even before the local public radio affiliate fired me and about fifteen other part-timers, last year… I was seriously considering asking if I could have back every pledge dollar I had ever contributed. I get most of my news from the internet, hopping from story to story, blog to blog, and if I want expert comment, there are another couple of blogs that I will go to, rather than open my local newspaper and consider the maunderings of whatever NY-Times retread or local lamoid who has been so dazzled with an offer of a local byline that they will condescend to dribble away for a couple of paragraphs. (All but TH Fehrenbach… I’d read him. Pity he doesn’t have a blog or something. Maybe he does. I’ll have to check. Nope, no website and no blog – only links to his columns for the newspaper … He’s our local Victor Davis Hansen, just not quite so prolific. By the last couple of columns, it doesn’t look like I am missing much, in having canceled my subscription over a particularly scurrilous cartoon by the on-tap cartoonist Branch, a couple of years ago. It was about the Haditha Marines, and I pulled the plug on the weekend edition within about three minutes of seeing it.)

So, there you go… a fair amount of worry about the way things are apparently headed, under the benign yet feckless aegis of the Affirmative Action President and his boatload of Chicago cronies. I got involved with the local effort to host a Tea Party in San Antonio, through another San Antonio milblogger, the Ranten Raven. Before you could say Jack Robinson, or some other interesting and prophetic phrase, I volunteered… what was it, they used to say, about never volunteering? Yeah… don’t. Too late, I’m in, coordinating news releases, writing speeches and coaching those who have committed to deliver them, coordinating volunteers to have expertise in doing all that, and who have interesting contacts in local media. With luck, and eventually, said local media persons may begin returning phone calls. For this Tea Party may be something big, something splendid and awesome. It’s getting a little frightening; at how fast it has grown – from a handful of people who came to the first planning meeting, to well over a hundred last night… and a hundred or so who were vocal, engaged, and willing to step forward…and to contribute funds. At my estimation, about half were political enthusiasts, who have many years experience in the fray, in support of their various causes – but the rest were new, unblooded and engaged, fresh and energized. So one of them was only a candidate running for city council – sensing the presence of a large body of potential voters, or at least, an audience, although it was definitely comic, watching the way that everyone sidled away from him at the end of the meeting, as he launched into his set speech. All props to paying attention to what is going on locally – but minus-points for not paying a whit of attention to what had been said for about an hour and something; which was, that we all were desperately unhappy with the current lot of our elected officials, albeit at a much higher level than that of city councilperson.

It would appear that the cause of a lot of this interest in the San Antonio Tea Party was the video that I posted previously. It wound up being aired on a national news program of which I know nothing, and excited the interest of a news commentator of whom I had to confess that I also had never heard of. Until this week, I thought Glenn Beck was a guitarist with one of the noisier rock bands… eh, maybe I should pay more attention to this sort of thing… except that I am a writer, and live a fairly cloistered life. I spend more of my time and energy in the 19th century than perhaps I ought to, in these times.

So, Tea Party on the 15th, somewhere in San Antonio. The committee is still working out the venue. But I’ll be there. God knows, I’ll probably be one of the speakers, too. The rule about speakers has been pretty firmly established by the committee. No politicians.

Absolutely no politicians. They will have to come and listen to us. For once.

San Antonio Tea Party Promo

28. March 2009 · Comments Off on San Antonio Tea Party Promo · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Politics

One of the other volunteers helping to put together the San Antonio Tea Party on April 15th put together this awesome spot, for Youtube and other venues:

Just thought I would share: the project is growing by leaps and bounds: we have a planning committee meeting scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

Putting By

27. March 2009 · Comments Off on Putting By · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

I’m having one of those intermittent impulses to start stockpiling shelf-stable, dried and canned foods again. Not sure where it comes from, only that some of the generalized dark-gray cloud of gloom and doom that is lurking in the atmosphere may have just finished drizzling a mist of vague paranoia down onto Blondie and me. Or maybe it’s the ancestral memories of my grandmothers, no mean slouches in the food-prep and stash-away in case of a spectacularly bad winter or some unspecified disaster. They both of them lived through the Depression; when Grannie Dodie passed on, there was a couple of years worth of canned goods stashed in the garage, some of them so old the tops of the cans had gone dull-colored under a decade of dust. Grannie Jessie was raised on a Pennsylvania farm where they butchered a pig every fall, filled the root-cellar with potatoes, beets and carrots, and canned the results of their summer garden, in shelf after shelf groaning under the weight of mason jars, filled to the top with jewel-toned tomatoes, green beans, piccalilli and Concord grape jelly.

Save for the two years and some spent living in Utah, my own packing-the-larder-with-massive-stocks of food was pretty much modeled after Mom’s… which is to say, we didn’t, much. We generally had just enough on the shelves and in the fridge to last until the next go-round of grocery-shopping. Why not? The grocery store was always there, Dad’s paychecks were at least marginally generous, and regular; and Mom really didn’t care for canned foods, preferring the fresh and/or made from scratch variety. And we lived in California, for pete’s sake, the year-round fair weather and agricultural champion of the west. Generally the emergency food stash in Mom’s larder consisted of a couple of cans of tomato sauce, some canned Vienna sausages and an extra-large can of tuna. Maybe some dried pasta, and something exotic in a tiny can with foreign lettering on it, which someone gave to Mom and Dad as a Christmas present a couple of years previous which Mom was saving for a special occasion and which no one ever quite had the nerve to open, because if it was really vile, no one would want to eat it and then it would all go to waste. And if it turned out to be really, really good, then we wouldn’t be able to find or afford another can, so best just leave it safely on the back of the shelf.

Besides, at the Redwood House, we did have a vegetable garden, and a range of olive trees, and Hilltop House was planted all around with orange and lemon trees, so in the case of a grand economic meltdown, as a last resort, we would have had olives and oranges and lemons, by the bag… anyway, the long and short of it is, that I never felt the least interest or impulse to stash away mass quantities of relatively imperishable food until that period when I was assigned to Hill AFB, Utah—where, for a variety of reasons, this was a cultural and religious imperative, to the point where most old-style suburban houses came ready-stocked with a couple of fruit-bearing trees and a vegetable plot, along with the seasonal water-system to irrigate same. My own rental house in South Ogden came equipped with a root-cellar, lots of larder-space, a bearing cherry tree and a hedge of insanely prolific apricot trees… some of the best of them were intensely succulent; it was as if someone, thirty years before had walked the fence-line planting apricot trees, and so ever since the lawn along that side of the yard was mined with moldering fruit and mounds of apricot stones. There were so damned many apricots, and I did my best, I really did, but I haven’t been able to bear the smell of a dried apricot ever since. All the ordinary grocery stores stocked lavish quantities and varieties of canning supplies, and restaurant-sized bags of flour and sugar, and other staples… so it was as if there was something in the water. I eventually bought a deep-freezer, and an electric dehydrator, for reasons that I cannot very well articulate. It just seemed like a very good idea, at the time.

And so, now it seems like a good idea again. Maybe the various experts in disaster preparedness, dinning advice into my ears over the last couple of years – after Katrina, after floods, fires, riots and diverse other disasters – have finally achieved a degree of success with me … or there is something about these times, and reading about all those people who- through forethought, were comfortably equipped to ride out disasters. I just have the feeling that I ought to start doing this. Have enough food on hand at all times, stocks of things that I just cannot live without, like tea and jam for bread, and the means to cook food, if there should there be a power interruption that lasts for weeks. I ought not to be depending on a local grocery store, if we run short in a day or so. I ought to have sufficient a stash – for days, weeks and even months. I ought to have a garden again, for more than just ornament, and something in the larder- more than just the usual couple of cans of tomatoes, the half-used packet of Japanese-panko dried bread-crumbs, and the various bug-proof glass jars with about half a cup of dried beans in the bottom, lentils ditto.

So, this Friday, Blondie and I were checking out Sam’s Club and making a list. I can’t, with all my other financial obligations, say that I spent a bomb, on everything that we looked at… but I invested in a 8-pack case of canned tomatoes, a quart each of olive oil and honey, a brick of cheddar cheese – which, alas, tastes nothing as good as the Department of Ag surplus cheddar, which used to be sold at the military commissaries at like, about 50 cents a pound and made the most totally awesome mac-and-cheese imaginable. We made notes about the costs of 25 and 50-pound bags of rice, and beans… and the costs of another propane bottle… I just can’t get away from the feeling that I ought to be doing something more. I bought a bunch of 2-inch pots of tomatoes and pepper plants a couple of weeks ago; they were on sale, at a very good price at the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery chain, a week ago. We planted them, last weekend, the tomatoes in pots, and the peppers in the ground… but I can’t escape the feeling that I ought to be doing more, that I can squeeze some more edible plants into the sun-warmed spots in the garden…

I have read that letting potatoes sprout, and then cutting them up, with a sprout in each piece, that they grow very well… and that fava beans will grow in a heap of gravel.

Spring is here, and with the usual promise of a new season. Its just that those promises are all of vague and threatening things. Thus to work, this weekend. In the garden, and on other projects.

With a Splash of Schadenfreude On the Side

26. March 2009 · Comments Off on With a Splash of Schadenfreude On the Side · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant

Ok, so in the main, I’m kinda torn. Watching the Fresh Prince of Chicago and his administration melt down is pretty amusing, in a sick, sadistic sort of way; I wake up in the morning, and turn on the computer now, and wonder if the State Department has gifted the Turkish Prime Minister with a bobble-headed Mohammed, or presented President Sarcozy of France with a fine selected case of box-wine and a tastefully gift-wrapped tube of deodorant. Seriously, after the cut-rate Box ‘o Movies to Gordon Brown – in the wrong format yet – I don’t think I would be all that surprised to read of the above official gifts being dispensed by the administration of the guy who was supposed to make the whole world like us again, after that uncouth Cowboy Bush. That’s the trouble with being surreal and humorous in these dark times – just when you had thought up something that you assumed was impossibly, comically far over the top – there it is, all over the headlines. The serious headlines, not at the Onion, or Iowahawk.

I have to admit that seeing all the ecstatically worshipping minions of the main-stream press who drank the hopey-changy Kool-Aid all these months ago, waking up with an ‘omigawd, what did I do last night’ hangover… That’s also kind of fun, too. In a grimly amusing, ‘didn’t I warn you not to trim your short’n’curlies with the weed-whacker’ sort of way. Hey, I will get my jollies where I can, and “I told you so” is one of life’s great unsung pleasures. Watching the major media organs collapse like a dirigible with a slow leak is also no end amusing, especially when it happens to be those very same organs who kept banging on about Governor Sarah Palin’s inexperience, as compared to the Anointed One’s sanctified role as a ‘community organizer’. Live by taking political sides – perish from the same. Thanks. My only regret is that in future, I may not have anything packing materiel for stuff to be mailed out of state. A couple of sheets of newsprint were always good for that.

I said, all these months ago, that Barak Obama was an attractive, empty suit, with a pleasant voice, a puppet of Chicago machine politics, with no discernible bad record – and what did you – or 52% of the electorate, or whatever percent actually did vote for him – have to go and do, but elect him, just because he was so cute, with the year-round-dark-tan, glamorous and exotic background and (insert fangirly squeal here) besides, he made such cool-sounding speeches! So now, here he is in office, the ultimate Affirmative-Action candidate/American Idol fave – stuck in a hideously exposed position, under the pitiless lights, with no possible way to vote ‘present’ and go on doing what he seems always to have done – which is to move on. Having had some experience in the real world, I’ve see his like before; the favored golden candidate, one of those charming and ambitious fast-burners who go all the way up, glad-handing and using all the way, and never staying long enough in any position to actually do the job. They generally leave before the damage they have done becomes evident. As the old saying goes, they leave the stink behind them. Alas, this time, he is stuck, like a treed cat, up on top of the highest telephone pole in the land, with no graceful way to come down.

So that’s the thing – I would be amused, save for all the damage that was done, getting him up there, and all the damage that will be done, when he comes down. (To be continued.)

(Note – re-posted to allow comments. There is a bug in our system which dislikes apostrophes in the titles of posts.)

Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School

16. March 2009 · Comments Off on Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, ages ago, Karen M. who manages the speaker’s schedule for the German Texan Heritage Society emailed me to ask if I would like to come and do a talk about the history of the Adelsverein in Texas, and how I went about writing three historical novels based on those events – which are dramatic to the nth degree and which hardly anyone outside of Texas has ever heard of. Of course I said yes, how could I resist any organization which contains a large number of people who are, or might be interested in my books, and whose’ tag-line on their website is “Guten Tag, Y’all?” Besides, they offered refreshments for afters; I will work for cookies and punch. Perhaps someday I will be able to throw all sorts of hissies and demand Perrier on tap, a fruit tray and a private dressing room before engagements, but that day is not yet – really, my sense of entitlement is all but stillborn. Either that or I haven’t become jaded – darn it, I still enjoy these things, once I get over the initial panic of standing up and looking at all those strangers or almost-strangers in front of me, waiting for me to say something deathlessly witty. This is where having been a broadcaster comes in handy. I know that I have spoken, through a microphone or a TV to larger numbers of people, but those audiences were not ‘there’, not in the same room. On those occasions, I could fake myself out, pretend that I was only speaking to a handful of people, be casual and friendly, informative and remember to stand up straight, not pick my nose and not cuss in front of them … but having them all look back at you – that is another kettle of fish. Fortunately, I am getting accustomed to a live audience…

Blondie programmed the GPS unit, and I did a google-map search for the venue, which was described as being “The Old German Free School” in beautiful downtown Austin, Texas… which is, I feel only fair to point out, really quite beautiful, as it is spread over a number of scenically lumpy and rather nicely-wooded hills on either side of a lovely deep-green river. A lot of the streets were strategically and alternately one-way, but – thank god – there was no particular festival going on, which might have clogged traffic unbearably – but we did have to go to one exit and then zig-zag through another couple of streets which afforded us some nice views of assorted college students enjoying their last day of spring break, and one particularly large complex which seemed to be ‘street-people central.’

The old German Free-School turned out to a lovely antique two-story building, constructed of stone, and stone and plaster, and stone and plaster over rammed-earth, a long structure just one room deep and turned sideways to the street, with balconies and terraces overlooking a series of pocket-gardens connected by stairs. Most of the rooms opened onto balconies or the terraces, with long windows on either side, which reminded me irresistibly of 18th and 19th century townhouses in Charleston or Savannah or Beaufort, built up on narrow town-lots with the narrow end of it to the street. All of the rooms had tall windows on either side – to ensure a good draft through the room, essential in those far-distant summer days before the invention of air conditioning. It had just gotten over being unbearably chilly and rainy, so the rooms were quite pleasant. The German Free School was the first institution of public education in Austin, according to one of the members of the society who came for my talk. In the mid-1850s, there were sufficient numbers of German-speaking settlers who were totally exasperated with the lack of educational resources; the only option for educating their children was to hire a private tutor, or send them to the Anglo-American ‘Sunday Schools’. According to my informant, one of the founders was totally fed-up, (possibly with listening to all his fellows kvetching about the subject) so he threw down a thousand dollars in gold and growled, “So, build a school!” and there you go – apparently the Free School predated the Austin Independent School District by at least a decade.

There were about fifteen or twenty attendees – and the room was fairly small, so I went ahead and used the podium, with my notes and my pictures of certain relics and locations, 81/2 by 11 pictures mounted on foam-core board, with little hinged supports to hold them up – all of essential items or evocative locations in Fredericksburg. It really went well, this time – I have quite a sort-of-planned talk-with-notes that I use for these occasions, a list of notes, names and things that I simply must cover, and in the proper order; not a set script, for that is the absolute death of this kind of event, just a memory-jogger of the high points. This is the best and most-spontaneous seeming kind of talk, I am not bound by an every-single-word script and can play up or play down things, and respond immediately to what the audience seems to be most interested or engaged in. I wing it, every time – but a wing-it with some sturdy yet invisible supports! Finished with a reading – a couple of pages from “The Gathering” – about the feast and bonfire the first settlers held among the trees of what would become Fredericksburg, and took questions until everyone repaired for punch, home-made coconut cake and a plate of little baked pastry and sausage nibbles.

The members of the audience were all enthusiasts – the very best kind of audience an author can ask for, for they had interesting questions and a lot of knowledge behind them – even if only one person among them had actually the Trilogy. Doris L. purchased the Trilogy and read it all – her husband is from one of the old Gillespie County families and by one of those interesting coincidences of history and the internet and all – it was her husband’s several-times great grandfather who owned the sheep-flock that a boy named Adolph Korn had been watching over, when he was taken by raiding Comanche Indians. Adolph Korn’s g-g-I don’t-know-how-many-times grand-nephew Scott Zesch wrote bout his life and the ordeal of a number of children taken by Indians from the Hill Country in his book “The Captured” – which was one of my references in writing Book Three “The Harvesting” – about the multi-leveled tragedy of young children taken captive by the Comanche or Apache and later returned to their white families. Some of the other questions asked of me were about Prince Solms – who I do still think was rather an idiot, in spite of what one of his particular partisans could say. Sorry, buying into the Fischer-Miller Grant was not an act bringing any particular credit upon Prince Solm’s financial or political acumen. Also, the train of personal servants and his insistence on his title of nobility – not a good move, all around, no matter what his qualifications as a serving military officer might have been in other fields. Although there was an excellent point made, about how perceptions about Germany and German settlers went to the bottom of the tank after about mid WW I or so.

Until that very point in time and history, and in most places in these United States – being from the German settlements and of German ancestry were seen as pretty favorable things. It was OK to be one of ‘the folk’, to remember Germany as it was… until history and Germany changed; the place that these hard-working and cultured immigrants came from, the place that they remembered with fondness and reminiscent affection morphed into something ugly. That Germany – or those duchies and principalities that they came from – all of those places changed during their absence, into something that they would not have recognized, these innocent and trusting immigrants, taking ship from Bremen, carrying their memories and those wooden trunks with them, hoping for new lives but recalling their old country. But in the 20th century, their new country would fight two wars against the old – against what the old country had become, while they were busy building lives and towns, bringing up their children as free citizens of their new country. Funny, how history happens, when you are just trying do your business and get by.

All in all, a most gratifying Sunday afternoon spent, in the company of book and history enthusiasts.

Having a Tea-Party

13. March 2009 · Comments Off on Having a Tea-Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Veteran's Affairs

It appears that San Antonio is brewing up a tea party too, along with all the others in the works for April 15th. The grand plan is to throw a thousand tea-bags into the San Antonio River – how the River Authority will feel about that, also have no idea how they would feel about me adding a little milk and sugar – well, that’s the way I drink my tea… and even though we’re as mad as hell about an impossibly pork-packed, and most likely totally counterproductive stimulus package which most of the Congressional numb-skulls who voted for it never read… there is no need to let the standards down.

More here. Blondie and I plan to attend, and to take pictures. Any suggestions for signs would be appreciated; something witty, literate and short would be appreciated.

The Horns of a Dilemma

10. March 2009 · Comments Off on The Horns of a Dilemma · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Yep, it truly is a bit of a dilemma – is the just newly-new and fresh-out-of-box purveyor of hope ‘n’ change and all that – just beginning to gleam with a discrete and gentlemanly film of flop-sweat? Mom always used to say ‘never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity’ but as I scan the newsblogs of late, I am seriously torn: is the man of hopey-changy acting out of deliberate and long-considered malice? Or is he just an arrogant, medium-city pol with delusions of grandeur, now dug into a job which is so far above his head that he would need a couple of floors worth of elevator to even get level with the demands of a position that a narrow majority of American voters, a large portion of the MSM and such international hacks as the BBC airily assumed he was more than equal to?

Eh – I just don’t know, can’t decide… and can’t even figure out which of those two options is the lesser of evils. And here I was, lo, these many moons ago, pointing out that his resume was thinner than Callista Flockhart’s thighs, and all he really had going for him was that he looked so nice and talked so sweet, and a dismayingly large portion of the traditional news media were drooling over him like fan-girls in the presence of Menudo – (the boy-singing group, not the tripe soup.) Yes, even with a series of unfortunate friends and associates, like the Reverent Wright, Bill Ayers, the entire Chicago political machine and a scarily resentful BAP of a spouse, he was hauled like a juggernaut, by the labors of his supporters and a complacent media into the highest office in the land. So there he is, rather like a fly in amber – except that everyone pretty much knows how he got there, unlike the late 19th century British politician of whom a similar comparison was made.

But now that the One has been duly anointed, blessed and installed – what next? Chaos, disaster, and the stock market dropping like Michael Moore stepping off the top of a tall building seem to be the order of the day. And the Russian-language gaffe over a gag gift ‘reset’ button, and the really unfortunate gift exchange with the British PM. Ugh – that was truly cringe-inducing. Al and any other British readers – I deeply apologize: a couple of cheap toy helicopters and a gift-package set of DVD movies apparently pulled at random out of the “miscellaneous white-elephant gift assortment closet” that most sensible social persons keep as a kind of emergency fallback when presented with last-minute present-giving occasions. But there are people and occasions where something pulled out of that closet is appropriate and expected – like unit Christmas parties, or Red Hat association affairs. A State Visit by the head of another state is not… especially when the poor man is going blind and the DVDs are the wrong format, anyway. Honestly, until this week, I thought our gummint had a very efficient protocol office who would keep track of occasions, and of the likes and preferences of State visitors, the general suitability, utility and tastefulness of formal gifts — just to prevent embarrassing things like this happening at the highest levels. Perhaps all the people who had expertise in these matters were let go in January, and replaced by twenty-somethings who are – or were, until last week – relatively innocent in the savage requirements of the higher good taste. Still – a very hard and embarrassing lesson, which may cost the One with regard to foreign allies, farther down the line. The other option is, of course – the tacky gift-giving was a deliberate slam. Hard to know which bodes worse; petty and deliberate malice, and the joys of sticking it to ‘the man’ or just plain administrative incompetence? In any case I do apologize, and note that I did not vote for him. Whatever criticisms that Al and others might have about GWB – at least the point can be made that none of his state visits had this kind of fall-out in their wake.

Oh, yeah – interesting times. Pass the popcorn.

On the Marquee in Lights

05. March 2009 · Comments Off on On the Marquee in Lights · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs

Perhaps not in lights, but it was definitely my name on the marquee in front of the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library in Kerrville last Saturday. Blondie took a picture, so we have the evidence. It seems that they like to do author talks on Saturday afternoons, and it would appear that Phillippa Gregory or Diana Galbadon already had busy schedules – so the librarian in charge of author-wrangling emailed me to ask if I would come and talk about the Trilogy. Of course I said agreed; I’d much rather drive an hour and talk with a group of people about my books, or local history, or the vagaries of 19th century frontier Texas then sit at a small table in the front of a big-box bookstore and watch shoppers carefully avoiding me for an hour or so. There’s just no contest there – and frankly, doing a talk and answering questions is much the better way to build my local fan base anyway.

This talk turned out to be for an audience of about a dozen or fifteen, in the basement meeting room of the library, which – since it is built on a steep hillside overlooking the river, looked out on a stone-paved terrace and a line of trees at the edge. I’d feel such an idiot, standing at the podium and talking to such a small group, so we circled the chairs and sat down. As it also turned out, most of the audience hadn’t been able to read any of the Trilogy yet, not even the librarian. Although the library does have a single copy of all three books – they have hardly spent any time at the library and the reserve list for them is lengthy. Gratifyingly, as soon as they return, out they fly again! Excellent news for me, and perhaps they might even consider buying another set, if Adelsverein is going to be that popular.

For my talk, I did a brief overview of the entrepreneur scheme, the grand plans and bungling that doomed the Mainzer Adelsverein, outlined how I came to be interested in such a relatively obscure historical event, and what I did for research, and how I really had to make up very little regarding the various historical events that I touched on. Amazingly, most of the people present – just about all of them from Kerrville or close by – had not heard much about either the Adelsverein, or the travails in the Hill Country during the Civil War, so much of I had planned to talk about was a) new and b) interesting. All in all, a pleasant afternoon, well spent – although we did have to hustle back to San Antonio in time for me to get to work – in my ‘author’ tailored suit and well-chosen accessories, which proved something of an astonishment for the Saturday evening co-workers, who are used to seeing me slop around in something considerably less professional-appearing.

On Tuesday evening, with my computer returned to me and functioning more or less normally (fried mother-board and CPU, but all docs retrieved and saved – whew!) I followed up the library talk with a book-club meeting, on-line and through an organization called Accessible World, which provides books to the vision-impaired. Nan Hawthorne, another author and IAG member, had finagled me into putting the Trilogy into the Accessible World library, and Book One was the book to read for Accessible World’s historical novel book club. So that made another very gratifying hour, linked into their internet ‘conference room’, with about fifteen people who had read “The Gathering” and loved it, loved the characters, and had lots of detailed questions about what was real, what were the character’s motivations, and why had I written things in the way I had. Now, that was an hour that went past very quickly. It’s caviar to the writer’s soul, hearing from people who have read your books and are passionately interested. It makes up in a small way for the months and days, spent alone but for the world that you have created in your head, when you hear from people beginning to share that world and to become as engaged and interested in that world as you are.

And as of this morning, and possibly thanks to a wonderful write-up from David Foster at Chicagoboyz – the Amazon ranking for all three books of the Trilogy was at and around 150,000, which is possibly the highest it has been at since all three were released for sale in early December. So it appears that I am a few steps closer to being a famous ‘arthur’!

Data Stream

04. March 2009 · Comments Off on Data Stream · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, The Funny

Still waiting to see if there will be another “Tea Party-San Antonio” in the near future, in which case Blondie and I will happily join in; the weather is fine and mild, and I wouldn’t mind at all a chance to actually commingle in the real-world with some of the other people that I know are getting more than a little annoyed with the current administration. As another commenter remarked on another blog – and it was so apt that I have promptly stolen it and used with great effect ever since: “I knew the Obama administration was gonna be a train wreck; I just thought it would make it out of the station first.”

The nice thing about having low expectations is that one is very rarely disappointed in a politician, and often quite pleasantly surprised. At this point in time, all I am reduced to asking of our elected public servants is that they would cover their mouths when they cough, and to kindly refrain from sexually molesting barnyard animals and interns in public – and there have been moments over the last couple of years, when I wondered if that were asking altogether too much. The passing spectacle is just getting to be all to much; the affirmative action President and his race-mongering attorney general all hot to have conversations about race in America, as if we haven’t hardly been having anything else for the last forty years. Then there is Sen. Dodd with the charming Irish cottage and his sweet-heartedly favorable mortgage arrangements – and his many friends in the House and Senate who also appear to have had similar friendly arrangements with their mortgage lenders. Follow that with a chaser of the pols who scrambled to explain their omission in paying taxes … jeeze Louise, does everyone going into politics these days have amnesia when it comes to filing their income tax report?

And the stock market has been dropping like a rock over the last two days, to the tune of ineffectual bleating by the Anointed One, who appears to be making the discovery for the very first time – that what he says does, indeed, have effects in the real world, outside the arena of Chicago politics. It would be amusing, watching him twist and turn – if it weren’t for the very real repercussions. It’s also amusing watching a variety of Obama media fans from last fall owning up to second thoughts now that their guy is actually ensconced in the White House. Nice timing, sports – very nice timing, indeed. Sorry, mediawhores, in my own mind and after your performance coming up to the election, you are now firmly and irretrievably stuck to him. Would it be racist of me to draw a comparison to the tar-baby? Perhaps – but it is apt enough. You are stuck on to him for good, and even if you break free at the last minute, you will still have all that icky tar smeared all over your face, and the rest of us will point and laugh, as your TV network or newspaper goes down to insolvency and you look for another job.

Interesting times – just as that ancient Chinese curse prescribes.

(Later – another perspective, found courtesy of Rantburg, home of all that is surly and cynical.)

Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming!

25. February 2009 · Comments Off on Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

And more here, at “The Tainted Archive” – one-stop shopping for all fans of traditional westerns … which the Adelsverein Trilogy is, sort of, if you bend down and squint at it sideways.

Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion

19. February 2009 · Comments Off on Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Rant

To: Atty-Gen Holder
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Not having open discussions about the r-word

1. Well, thanks, your attorneyness. Just thanks. After about forty years about being called racists when we open our mouths on any topic remotely to do with race, now we get whipsawed by being called cowards for not opening our mouths. Look, we got wise about noisy race-hustlers long since… is it OK to lump yourself in with them? With Al Sharpton, Jesse the baby-momma-banging-hypocrite Jackson, and Spike Lee and all the rest of the easily offended crowd with the dark year-round tans?
2. Frankly, no one really digs being screamed at when we had one of these mandatory equal-opportunities encounter sessions, and no, it never much changed anyone’s mind, and these little sessions hardly ever cleared the air much. It just took up however many hours were mandated by whoever dictates those matters.
3. It did, however, shut up most of the virulent white bigots… forty years ago. I have a heck of a time recalling the last time in real life that I actually heard someone in a social setting uncork some casual racism, misogyny, or anti-Semitism, so mad props for social pressure and all that. Pity one can’t say the same of thug-rap music, but then I’m white so I’m probably disqualified from commenting on that.
4. Let it be noted that we do, in fact, have discussions about racism with friends and acquaintances of all color – but they tend to be those people who we are fairly sure will not come f&$#@ing unglued and begin screaming and calling us racists when we decline to blame ourselves personally for everything to do with race relations in the United States over the last couple of centuries.
5. Hoping this memo will prove of help in assisting you to understand this, although I am not gonna hold my breath about it. Will we have to listen to you bang on about this for the rest of the Obama administration? (God, it’s going to be a long four years!)

I remain,
Sgt Mom

PS – Just as a reminder, a good chunk of the Founding Fathers were not slave-owners, and very much disapproved of chattel slavery… and seventy years after the founding, we fought a particularly bloody civil war over that very issue. Do history much. AG Holder?

Thrift Shopping

18. February 2009 · Comments Off on Thrift Shopping · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Honestly, I can’t help but think that I am way ahead of the game when it comes to an economic down-turn, incipient depression, bubble-bursting, or whatever the heck the mighty media organs want to call it. I lost three jobs alone last year, before the major misery even started. I’ve already processed the grief, adjusted to a fairly Spartan lifestyle, and gotten very well adept at bargaining with institutions demanding money from me. I cobbled together another series of paying ventures, including fifteen hours a week at the phone bank – which does have as a virtue (perhaps it’s only virtue!) that it is at least reliable in providing work hours and the resulting paycheck. Amazingly enough, I’ve lasted there long enough that many of the other drones on the floor know me by name, which is nice enough, I suppose – but I still call it “The Hellhole”. My original plan called for quitting around Christmas – but alas, Blondie loosing a job of her own put paid to that notion. So – tight budget all around, and welcome to the joys of bargain hunting, at yard sales, thrift-stores and in the untidy shelves at the back of various retail establishments labeled ‘clearance’ or ‘final sale’ or ‘70% off!’

I don’t know if I will really ever be able to embrace full retail prices again, after this year. I don’t think I will ever be able to walk into an upscale shop and cheerfully pay the full price for something, without feeling an incapacitating twinge of regret. I guess I have just enough of my grandmother’s canny puritan soul in me, and how it has a chance to flower. Unlike Granny Jessie in the Great Depression, though – we will not be keeping chickens. That’s going a little too far. But we have picked up a barely-used bread machine (at a yard sale for $10) and make our own bread, since I have a liking for the very expensive wheat varieties that are loaded with fiber and flavorful seeds and spices, which cost better than $3.00 a loaf at the Humongously Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. So one step closer to self-sufficiency – and Blondie is teaching herself how to knit. Much more of this, and I can see us living away off in the country with a satellite dish, a generator, our own water well and a milk cow. Talking over this whole gestalt with Blondie, and neither of us can remember the last time we bought a non-food item at full price. Everything has been on sale, second hand, bought in bulk at Sam’s Club or an ethnic grocery, or made at home. Even the ink cartridges for my printer are recycled from Cartridge World.

And this is not to say we don’t have a lot of quiet fun with this – we have bought some lovely, frivolous things for practically pennies and even some items which miraculously replaced those lost in the fire at Mom and Dad’s house in 2003. This very week at the new Goodwill Store which opened in our neighborhood, Blondie found a round silver-plate drinks tray which – after ten years worth of grimy black tarnish was cleaned off of it and she checked the now-visible hallmark – turned out to have a market value of about a hundred times what she spent for it. And there was also an odd set of crystal glasses, all jumbled among a long shelf of glassware. These were as fragile as bubbles, and appear to be hand-etched with a bamboo pattern; four with a short stem, three with a long stem and three which look like miniature martini glasses. I think they are Japanese, since they look so much like a set of crystal that I bought in the BX there ages ago. Blondie adds them to the collection that she is setting aside for her own house, against the day when I am a best-selling author and can buy her one.
I was much more interested in a find on a table of books: a stack of the old Time-Life series about the foods of the world. Mom had a subscription to the series in the late 1960s; each volume focusing on the food of a particular country or region came as a two-part set. One was a lovely, lavishly illustrated examination of the country and it’s cuisine, and the other a small spiral-bound collection of recipes. Of course, Mom’s collection was among those lost in the fire, and the ones I found at the thrift shop were the coffee-table book only – but still, I was very fond of that series. The cooking of provincial France, of Spain and Portugal, of Great Britain, and Scandinavia…. I think those books were where we all learned to be adventurous about food. It’s good to have them back.

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2)

15. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2) · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

One of the most curious instances of the rich American heiress for old European title exchanges was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough; the wedding itself was covered with breathless interest by the media of the time – which since it took place in 1895, meant coverage by newspapers only. However, the wedding was as lavish, and the interest in every tiny detail as intense as that paid to the nuptials of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It took place at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on New Yorks’ 5th Avenue, and the crowds of spectators outside the church and for a good way down the avenue was so thick that squads of policemen could barely force enough of an open way between them for the invited guests. The inside of the church was lavishly decorated with flowers – pink and white roses, swags of lilies, ivy and holly, arches of ferns, palm leaves and chrysanthemums. No expense was spared – even more astonishing was the fact that Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke had only been engaged for about six weeks and only known each other for barely a year. She was barely eighteen, reserved and sheltered, the very pretty daughter of a woman with a will of iron and ambition to match. After her marriage, she would blossom into one of the acknowledged beauties of that era: Playwright James Barrie supposedly said he would wait all day in the street just to watch her get into a carriage.

Alva Smith had married for money herself – having pursued, wed and just recently divorced the oldest grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, called ‘The Commodore’, who had founded the family fortunes in shipping and branched out into railways. Her own father’s fortunes were sadly diminished by the Civil War, and Alva resolved to secure her own future and those of her family by marrying rich. She emerges as a domineering, driven and stubborn woman with a fiery temper. Very few people ever said ‘no’ to Alva Vanderbilt, least of all her own family; neither her parents, either of her husbands, or any of her children. Her own mother, a cultured Southern belle spoke French, and traveled widely in Europe with her children in those distant days when it meant a long voyage on a sailing ship. In a fragmentary memoir written late in life, Alva recalled that her mother had made a yearly order of clothes for herself and her daughters from a Paris dressmaker. All the clothes they would need for the next year would arrive one time – a means which was sufficient for that era, but not when Alva was raising her own children. By that time, being rich and in the social set meant a degree of ostentatious competition that is purely mind-boggling to contemplate today. Everything about those at the very top of the social network still astonishes, beginning with the ‘summer cottages’ built at the edge of Newport, Rhode Island. Alva was responsible for one of the most lavish, ‘Marble House’ which seemed like nothing much but a couple of square acres of the Sun King’s Versailles, set down in the New World. The balls and parties that prominent members of this high society threw for each other also defy belief. At one infamously grand banquet, an artificial river filled with live fish ran the length of the dining table – and guests were provided with little silver shovels to search for jeweled party favors in the sand at the bottom of the river. Such a grand dinner ran to course after course of elaborately prepared dishes, and an ordinary day for a society woman might involve changing clothes four or five times over. And Alva Vanderbilt was one of the leading social lionesses by the time her daughter was of marriageable age, despite having divorced William Vanderbilt.

Divorce was almost unthinkable in that milieu – and yet, Alva went ahead with it; she would marry her daughter off to a nobleman, and having achieved that apotheosis, would marry again herself, to Oliver Belmont – another wealthy member of the Gilded Age’s highest social circle. Incredibly, she would have a contented marriage with him – and maintain her high position in that society – until his sudden death from complications of appendicitis. Almost without a moment’s hesitation, Alva would involve herself in the campaign for women’s rights to vote, using her considerable wealth to fund suffrage organizations and publications, to lobby in Washington and among the highest levels. She would fight for women’s property and political rights with the same stubborn intensity that she applied to any of her previous enthusiasms. In fact, she became something of a militant – and after her own death in 1931, had a full suffragette’s funeral, with women pallbearers and choir. Never mind the contradiction, of being for women’s rights, yet having dictated Consuelo’s marriage and overruled any of her daughter’s considerable misgivings.

Consuelo married reluctantly, in obedience to her mother. In spite of that, she serenely adorned the great estate of Blenheim Palace – which her marriage settlement helped repair and renovate – and the highest levels of British political and social circles equally. She was one of the noble wives who carried the canopy over Queen Mary at the coronation of King George V. She would produce two sons, and is thought to have been the originator of the expression ‘an heir and a spare’. The marriage was not happy; she and the Duke were of different and incompatible temperaments and Consuelo had something of her mother’s spine. They separated barely ten years after their lavish wedding day, and divorced in 1921, upon which Consuelo married a wealthy French aviation pioneer named Jacques Balsan. She achieved no small victory in managing to remain on easy and affectionate terms with her ex-husbands’ family, which included his redoubtable cousin, Winston Churchill. Her further life adventures included escaping with her husband from France in 1940, and returning to live in the country she had departed nearly half a century before. Amazingly, she lived until 1964 – and if pictures taken of her are any guide – she was still amazingly beautiful.

(No particular reason for writing all this – I had heard of these women in a vague sort of way, but the entire book about them was rather fascinating.)

Wild West Monday

10. February 2009 · Comments Off on Wild West Monday · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, I belong to a number of different chat-groups about books, and historical novels and Westerns and all … and at one of them, fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns – any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. The thinking is, we can achieve a critical mass of fans, and maybe take the book-selling world – if not by the throat, maybe we can gum their ankles a little, when it comes to stocking genre Western books. Which are really madly popular, but you’d hardly know it, to look at the shelves in your local Borders or whatever.More here, thanks to Gary Dobbs of “The Tainted Archive“.

Gary says, in part:

“At the moment we are in a situation where bookshops control the market (a select amount of buyers chose the titles they think we want to read ) and they seem to think all we want to read are massive tomes with more padding that substance. The days of cheap paperbacks that existed to entertain, excite and delight are long gone. Strange when those are the reasons we started reading in the first place. But it doesn’t have to be so – so come on get involved, hit the bookshops, hit the libraries. All of us on MARCH 2nd.
Come on get involved.”

Not just my books, which count as Westerns if you get down and squint at them sideways, but a whole range of others. Some of the classics are being profiled at Gary’s blog, and I would like to throw in a mention of a book by the micro-publisher who helped me launch The Adelsverein Trilogy, Michael Katz at Strider Nolan. His Western is called “Shalom on the Range”, and is about the adventures of a Jewish railway detective who knows nothing about the west but what he has read in dime novels, investigating a train robbery in the 1870s. Think ‘Seinfeld on the Prairie’.

Mark it on your calendar, if you are a fan of Westerns: March 2 is Wild West Monday!

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers

09. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

I am immersed in a schedule of reading over the next few weeks, devouring omnivorously a stack of books from the local library branch, another stack from my sometime employer at Watercress Press – she has a splendid collection of Texiana – and re-reading some of my own not-inconsiderable collection. This is where the stories, characters and incidents are planted and begin to grow and entwine; but the soil they sprout from is composted from all this reading, if I am allowed to milk out the gardening metaphor as far as is possible… well, anyway, circling back to the beginning again – I’ve got a tall stack of books about Texas, about the Gold Rush, and the 19th century in general. Too many to stack up on the nightstand, so the overflow is piled up on the flat-topped cedar chest, in three or four tall stacks. One of the potential story-lines in the projected trilogy is about how the American cattle business boomed and collapsed in the 1880s, which is about the very same time that many of the most popular envisionings of the Wild West were laid down in the form we have come to know best. It is also the setting for the concluding volume of my projected new trilogy; picking up the story of the next generation of the Becker family, once the Texas frontier calmed down a little.

There were a lot of other things going on at about that same time, including a veritable explosion in the number of American millionaires. In the post-Civil War years, enormous fortunes were being made in industry, from building railways, in steamship lines, in mining, in mercantile interests. The post-Civil War decades increasingly came to be dominated by ‘new money’ men, beside which the ‘old money’ families – with fortunes based on land, banking, the fur trade, sailing ships, or cotton and rooted in the earlier decades of the 19th century began to appear pale, and dull to everyone but each other. Mark Twain called the latter decades of that period ‘The Gilded Age’ – and he didn’t mean it particularly as a compliment, even if people have used the expression ever since as implying something rather fine. Twain meant it in the sense of something cheap, of a microscopically thin layer of gold overlaid on cheap metal, something flashy, over-ornamented, an object which would not wear very well, but caught the eye and impressed no end in the short term.

That era seemed strange and uncomfortable to someone who remembered an earlier day – for all it’s comforts, convenience, riches and plenty. Changes came thick and fast; the telegraph, the transcontinental railway, the ease of taking a steamship passage across the Atlantic and being there in a week or so, where once it had taken months. Americans of the upper crust began traveling for pleasure and for education, rather than strictly business and in numbers, once the crossing became relatively pleasant and short. The United States had never, even before the Civil War, been particularly isolated, but the 19th century world became appreciably smaller. Mark Twain himself became a part of this trend, by participating in one of the first great American tourist excursions, the 1867 voyage of the “Quaker City” to the Holy Land and elsewhere, which was documented in one of the funniest travel books ever, “The Innocents Abroad”.

It was an interesting time, no two ways about it – and one of the interesting aspects is that there were so very many assorted experiences recorded in the years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the new century – rich pickings for someone like me, doing research. One of those collisions that I am interested in exploring is the same collision that Twain wrote about so humorously: the Old World and the New. There were quite a lot of opportunities for them to collide, and nowhere more than among the very newest of the new money, or even the semi-new money of the New World and the aristocracy of the old. One book I picked up at random was a joint biography of Alva and Consuela Vanderbilt – of whom I was sort-of-aware, mostly because the Vanderbilts are one of those filthy-rich families that you can’t help not having heard of, and because Consuela Vanderbilt was married off – mostly unhappily – to an English Duke. It was kind of ick-making to think about; fabulously wealthy American heiresses married off to the impecunious inheritors of ancient name, royal favor – and crumbling stately homes. Their vulgar American new dollars in exchange for an old name, a title and a coronet with strawberry leaves on it; it’s hard to decide which is more awful, the decayed noblemen hunting for heiresses that they would condescend to honor with their titles and past-due bills, or the social-climbing and wealthy American families of a supposedly democratic and more or less equalitarian nation going all weak-kneed at the thought of a title in the family.

(to be continued)

Sunday Afternoon at the Dog Park with the Lesser Weevil

03. February 2009 · Comments Off on Sunday Afternoon at the Dog Park with the Lesser Weevil · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, General

There is a dog park, hidden away in the back forty of McAllister Park, a sprawling public park/semi-wilderness area in Northside San Antonio. It is formed by a large fenced area, about half an acre of trees and shrubs, dotted with benches, a pavilion with a concrete table and benches under it, a couple of structures that hopefully the dogs might find amusing to run through or jump on top of and a lavish number of heavy trash cans and dispensers offering what my daughter describes as ‘poopy-bags’. There is a paved path leading around the perimeter of the fenced area, the rest of it being spread with free mulch generated by the city waste disposal department’s industrial-sized tree shredders. Another long paved path leads from a parking lot: on any given afternoon when the weather is fair and mild, and most especially on weekends, that path is alive with leashed dogs and their people. The dogs are normally wild with excitement, for they are either coming from or heading toward their social-hour, play-date or mad-minute. It must be something they look forwards to all the rest of their limited, doggy lives – if they are capable of retaining a pleasurable memory. I rather think they are; at least they know, through constant repetition, that something nice is about to happen. Spike and the Lesser Weevil are insane with excitement every morning when I put on my exercise things; for they know that it means the morning walk is imminent. So when the dogs are decanted from their owner’s cars in the parking lot on the third or forth time around – they must know. By the time they get to the double-gated entry-way enclosure to the park itself they are usually mad with excitement

It was one of our neighbors told us about the park; admittedly, we were nervous when it came to the whole off-the-leash concept when it came to the Lesser Weevil. We know that she is part Boxer; it’s obvious, just to look at her. But we don’t know for sure what the other half is, and suspect that a considerable lashing of what is usually described in screaming headlines as ‘pit bull’ is included in her genetic makeup. She is adoring and lovable to all humans. Without exception everyone she meets is instantly her bestest friend in the whole wide world, and the way she went all gooey and affectionate over the cable guy was quite embarrassing – especially since she is supposed to be a guard/watch dog. No, we have no apprehensions about the Weevil and humans – it’s other dogs, and only now and again in the early months that she took an instant and abiding dislike to another dog on a leash. If she had not also been on a leash herself, and for Blondie or I instantly half-strangling her in the pinch-collar, it might have gotten very ugly. But our neighbor assured us, over and over – that it is all right, the dogs seem to govern themselves very well, off leash, and the more there are of them in the confines of the park, the better they all behave. So we took a chance – and we stuck very close to her that first time, and waited until she had behaved well for the first half-dozen dogs who came romping up for a bit of friendly butt-sniffing.

Weevil still does not play quite so uninhibitedly with the other dogs as some of them do. She will chase a thrown tennis ball and race with some of the others, but she will stay fairly close to Blondie. And Spike basically attaches herself to my ankles, never going much farther than ten feet away, even if there are other small dogs – Shi Tzus, Jack Russells and Chihuahuas and the like who want to play with her. It was quite lively this last Sunday; not least because it seemed to be Big Dog Day. No kidding – don’t they keep insisting that everything is bigger in Texas? Sometimes people tell us that the Weevil is a big dog; no, she actually is rather agreeably medium-sized. On Sunday she looked positively dainty, next to a Newfoundland the size of a small sofa (there were three of them there, that day), two mastiffs who topped out at a couple of hundred pounds each, and a Great Dane who looked big enough to put a saddle on and ride like a horse. No kidding, that last dog’s nose alone was bigger than the smallest dog present – a four-month-old Chihuahua puppy, too small even to be put down on the ground among all those specimens of canine gigantism.

And of course, the Weevil behaved herself – how could she not, when the whole place was seething with dogs; dogs running, chasing tennis balls and each others’ behinds, begging to be played with and petted, and romping in front of, or behind their people making a slow circuit of the path around the park? No, it was a good day and good for her – and kind of a relief to know that Blondie has trained her to obedience well enough to trust her off the leash and with a large number of other dogs.

Lawmaking in Haste

23. January 2009 · Comments Off on Lawmaking in Haste · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, My Head Hurts, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

…and repenting at leisure, or so it would appear with a new consumer product safety law, which will go into effect in about twenty days. Yes, indeedy, Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, or HR 4040 which is supposed to take effect February 10th, was supposed to strike a mighty blow against the forces of evilness and icky lead contamination in children’s toys, but instead looks fair to bankrupting all sorts of micro-and home businesses in the US, instead – and to plunge a dagger into the hearts of all kinds of well-meaning handicrafters, thrift-stores and various enterprising individuals scrounging a living by selling stuff on e-Bay. Not to mention any parent on a budget, hoping to save some of their diminishing funds by purchasing second-hand clothing, books, toys and accessories for their children.

And I am not about to be frivolous about the problem of lead contaminates in children’s toys, although the temptation is there.

(Hey, did you hear the one about the shipment of lead from China that was turned back at the port of entry because it was contaminated with children’s toys?)

Yes, lead is not healthy for children or other growing things, and frankly, those manufacturers knowingly or unknowingly contaminating their export crap with lead, arsenic or any other dangerous substance ought to be taken out and have their pee-pees whacked with iron bars. Repeatedly – so yes, there ought to be a law. But oh, what a lesson in unintended consequences there is in the hurried and apparently careless formulation of this one! No lobbyists around who speak for the thrift shop industry, I guess, or the little workshops making this or that specialized product, or all the little church ladies across the US, piecing quilts or knitting baby-clothes. The law as written flatly mandates a level and degree of safety-testing which – it may might be argued and probably already has – is appropriate to a large manufacturing industry. Say, something that churns out product by the box-car load daily, weekly, or even hourly.

What got overlooked until the last few months, what with all the good intentions about ‘protecting the cheeeeldren’ was that all those mandated testing of all the elements of every product meant for the use of those under the age of 12 also applied to just about every body who makes stuff for kids, either for sale or charity. Everyone from the guy with a small woodshop making high-end traditional wooden toys, to the lady with the small business making ornamented hair scrunchies, those little businesses making doll-clothes or children’s clothes will fall under this law. Even the POD publisher who designed and printed my own books – they do children’s books; Or they will, up until February 10th. Heck – this law might even apply to me; I made clothes for my daughter, and now for my niece. Once upon a time, I also made bespoke doll-clothes and stuffed toys for sale at church bazaars and craft shows; I still have several boxes of finished outfits in the den closet, which is where they will remain, now. I’m not out all that much, for this was a hobby for me a good few years ago, but serious crafters who depend on small retail sales of their output are stuck with an inventory that they can’t sell legally, or even give away, after having invested in their raw materials and done the work. According to the scattering of news stories (linked here, here and here) second-hand and consignment stores are already feeling a pinch; how can they possibly test every garment or toy, according to the letter of the law? They are either refusing donations or consignments of those items, and very likely making plans to dump those stocks already on hand into landfills or into the market in the next couple of weeks. The fines are insupportable for an individual or a small business; practically no one wants to risk being charged with a violation of the act. Assurances that ‘oh, no – boutique handicrafters and second-hand stores will not be prosecuted under this act, everyone knows it’s really meant for the big mass-producers’ are falling flat among those most concerned. And rightfully so – for what is a law that is on the books, but enforced by bureaucratic or prosecutorial whim? It is a suspended weapon, to be used selectively against people who have drawn the unfavorable attention of the state upon themselves.

And it is purely ironic, that just as the economy is in dire straits, with businesses large and small going through tough times, and individual entrepreneurs doing their best to stay above water, and people who are desperately trying to economize – a consumer safety law is about to wallop those very same small businesses and entrepreneurs whose hold on economic security is least secure. It’s almost as if the captain of the Titanic called for another iceberg to crash into the other side of the ship – just to make sure the whole thing sinks on the level.

Random Thoughts on Getting What You Ask For

18. January 2009 · Comments Off on Random Thoughts on Getting What You Ask For · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant

So the impending Obama ordination/coronation/apotheosis is nearly upon us and of course the media is all girlish a-twitter, breathlessly declaiming yet again how extraordinary, how very historical, how bright-new-day-adawning it all is… meeeh. I switched over to a strict diet of the classical station two weeks ago, it was all getting to remind me of girly fan-mags like Tiger Beat going all gushy over Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees, and I have a low nausea threshold, anyway.

Still, there he is, and there he will be, in all his Urkel-geek glory – attended by a fawning press establishment, and the multitudes who see in him whatever they wish most to see – and no doubt trailed by all sorts of unsavory connections from the old Chicago hood. Commander in Chief, President of the Good Old US of A, and the current Resident of the White House – I shouldn’t wonder if he and the rest of his family might not be thinking second thoughts about the whole thing, at this point. It’s probably pretty different, actually being the one at the tippy-top of the chain of command, rather than just being able to skate past, by voting “present” .

Wish ya luck, Baracky… I really do. Wish ya luck and a real thick skin. You wanna hark back to Abraham Lincoln? Take a look at the pictures of him, before he took the Presidential oath the first time around, and then the pictures of him as he was starting his second term. Looks a couple of decades older, doesn’t he? But that’s what four years will do to you, in the highest office in the land. It isn’t all standing up and making mellifluous speeches to the adoring crowds … but I daresay you’ll be finding that out very shortly, of you haven’t already.

I shouldn’t sound all that discouraged, really I shouldn’t. We’ve had worse chief executives over the 19th and 20th century, although some of them were such pale nonentities considered over the long haul that even the actions they took while in office are relegated to the footnotes. I am sure people felt passionately about Millard Fillmore, at the time of his election, although at present I have no idea of why. The long haul tends to even out the bumps and the dips in the road. What was Warren G.Harding, after all, but a temporary rut, a long-ago embarrassment with a hatchet-faced wife, a mistress in the downstairs broom-closet and a scandal at Teapot Dome. At the very best (and we will be extraordinarily lucky if this is the case) Barak Obama might turn out to be presidential material like Truman – a hard-headed, competent and personally uncorrupted man who emerged relatively unscathed from a perfect sink of a political machine every bit equal to that which made Chicago famous. At worst, he’s Jimmy Carter with melanin.

Hey, I’m an optimist – I can dream.

And you know what the nicest part might be? Maybe we can finally hear the very last of “Amerikka is teh most racist nation evveh!” I’m personally looking forward to cutting off at the knees the next race-hustler who tries to lay that one on me. Really, I am. Almost as much as I am looking forward to hearing Garrison Keillor lampoon Barak Obama on Prairie Home Companion – or the Saturday Night Live crew do a similar parody.

Just to get them inspired, here’s a link to an entry on Protein Wisdom which has the most perfect photoshop eveh of the post-coronation appearance. Enjoy.

Are We Not Having Fun

31. December 2008 · Comments Off on Are We Not Having Fun · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant

I know, I know, late to the party on all this, but I have taken such viciously cruel enjoyment in the spectacle of our very own totally unbiased, completely politically neutral commentariat/mainstream news media pretzel themselves into Gordian knots trying to explain (with increasingly redder faces) to us dumb proles why Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is justly naturally qualified and specially ordained to rest her tuchas in the seat formerly held by The Fresh Prince of Chicago, but that Sarah Palin, as a sitting governor, former Mayor and office-holder in her local PTA just doesn’t have the experience to be the Vice President of the USA.

Seriously – I love watching them squirm. Mind you, I am sure that Ms. Schlossberg us a very nice person, and anyone who knows a bit of American history can think of any number of occasions where a surviving spouse or total stranger was named to fill out a suddenly vacant term of political office with no other qualifications than a family connection and a familiar name. It’s just that watching various sycophantic news-critters scramble for cover is so darned amusing; really, oughtn’t they have hesitated for a couple of seemly moments before breaking out the knee-pads and waving the palm-fronds and singing “Hosannah! A Kennedy is come among us, Hosannah in the highest, for it is Camelot returning!” That Ms Schlossberg came out among us and stood revealed (apparently – and I will give credit for her just having a bad day and worse advice) as a relatively inarticulate, upper-middle-class air-head, with absolutely no experience in political life other than just standing there and being ornamental, and not a shred of anything resembling a qualification other than her maiden name and a sense of nobless oblige – well, really, it was pretty funny. But then I have odd tastes in comedy – I thought Mr. Bean’s Holiday was funny, too.

The only reassuring part about this whole farce is that it instantly became evident to practically everyone, save those die-hard Kennedy worshipers outside the state of Massachusetts (all half-dozen of them) that as a tenable proposition, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg in the Senate flew about as well as a twenty-pound lead brick. Perhaps we are not as close to a house of lordly, hereditary nobles as I feared.

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