The Daily Brief

Well, today I had a reminder of how those of us on the scene of, or immediately after an incident are the ‘first responders’ on the scene – generally beating out the police, fire department and ambulance, by minutes and sometimes hours. As this happened in a suburb, and on a heavily-trafficked intersection where two four-lane roads meet not half a mile from the fire station, the professionals were on the spot within five minutes. I’m certain other people had their cellphones out and calling 911 within seconds, as did I.

It was all very startling – and as these things usually do – happened in a matter of split seconds. I had concluded that I needed to make a run to Lowe’s for some more spray paint and other stuff for a couple of furniture renew projects and stop by the HEB grocery store for pet food on my way back home. So there I was, waiting in the left-hand turn lane on Nacogdoches, to turn left onto O’Connor, with one or two cars ahead of me, also waiting for the signal to turn green for us. The intersection seemed to be mostly clear; traffic waiting in both directions on Nacogdoches – first for the line of cars behind a small white compact, waiting to turn left from O’Connor, then for the other lanes to move.

I am not certain where the blue car came from – either flying up O’Connor from the direction of the highway, or up Nacogdoches in the other direction from me and trying to beat the red light. It was going at a good clip, at any rate. And it crashed head-on into the little white compact, just as it edged out into the intersection on seeing the light for the turn-lane go green. No matter which direction the blue car came from, it was going so fast that the impact flipped the white compact clear over, front to back. There it was, wheels up to the sky, and everything frozen for a moment.

It’s a peculiar metallic crunch, the sound that an auto crash makes, a sound that sticks with you. Several of us agreed on that, later. It’s the sound that an aluminum baseball bat the size of a small telephone pole makes, upon striking a pallet of empty cans.

It was a bit past noon on a working day, so there was a lot of traffic at the intersection – there’s a HTeaO outlet on one corner, a Black Rock Coffee outlet on the other, and across from those two enterprises on Nacogdoches, a CVS, and a Chase Bank with a good-sized HEB and a row of other enterprises behind it. I don’t imagine there was more than a moment before people began piling out of their cars, and going to the aid of the driver and whoever else was trapped in the white compact. It reminded me of the dash-cam video of the concrete pedestrian bridge over a busy artery in Florida a couple of years ago. A moment of shock … and then car and truck doors opening, and people – mostly men – running towards the scene of the collapse.

I was at a place where all that I could do was call 911 – and when I got through, the dispatcher already knew there had been a rollover at that intersection. I did manage to weave through the parking lot of Black Rock and make a way through the CVS parking lot – by that time, two police cars, an ambulance and a fire truck were already on the scene, and the police had all the witnesses that they needed for their reports. By the time that I came back through that intersection an hour or so later, everything was cleared away, all but a couple of piles of absorbing grit poured onto fluids leaked out of the crashed automobiles.

Reminder to self; remember to count to three before venturing into an intersection, upon the light turning green. Also – keep an eye out for a-holes coming the other way who don’t seem to be slowing down…

Just about every day now that I wake up, fire up the computer and begin reading, I am left in a state of mild depression after wading through the litany of bad news, disaster, corporate and political malfeasance which features on blogs, aggregator blogs and the established news sites. Public schools appear to be open hunting grounds for pervs and freaks, places where the intellectual development of children, tweens and teens must be cut down to the lowest common denominator, so that the lazy and disinterested must not be made to feel discomforted over being lazy and disinterested. The volunteer military demoralized and all but non-functional, our major and Democrat party ruled cities all but drowning in crime while the homeless routinely crap in the streets and stagger around while high on substances which our government has allowed to pour through an unsecured border. A former president has apparently been railroaded on ginned-up charges by a nakedly partisan effort. Our shining republic on a hill, the two hundred-year-plus long grand experiment of engaged citizens actually ruling themselves looks to have degenerated into the worst of a banana republic, where the inner coterie reserves privilege and riches unto themselves and brings criminal charges against any who dare protest … oh, and all the while a tame and sycophant national media licks the boots of the ruling class, and slavishly obeys every command issued by that ruling class, orders to play up some stories, play down and/or denigrate others. Mostly because a lot of the media class are married to or are the spawn of the ruling class … funny how that all works out.

Remember; I was part of a local urban Tea Party early on, and I cannot and will not forget how the Tea Party – as decent, engaged and well-educated a body of local concerned citizens was denigrated by the national news media as a bunch of racist reactionary yahoos. Why yes, I do recall very well how contemptuously we were treated, and now rejoice at CNN/NPR/NYT and all the rest of the unholy national media cabal going down, with regard to credibility and economics. Grudge-holding? Yeah, you think memories and grudges after the defeat of the Confederacy were held long in the South? Welcome to the new civil war, where one side remembers well what it was like to belong and to operate in a high-trust, egalitarian and meritorious society. And on the other side, those entitled bastards pissed away a relatively well-functioning and successful country, in whoring after personal materiel wealth and power. I hope that they do enjoy the horrible world that their mismanagement has created – alas, the rest of us are going to be pulled in after them, into a dysfunctional, violent (state-authorized violence, or violence committed by their chosen pets, as retaliatory/defensive violence by the rest of us committed in self-defence will be punished by full force of the law) and grotesque banana republic. The ruling class and their wanna-bes might live securely for a while in privately protected enclaves, but the rest of us …

Anyway, it’s a positive relief to turn away from the computer and go out into the slightly wider world where I live. Walk the dogs, talk to friendly neighbors, look at the blue sky and the trees all coming out in rich green, see that some neighbors are landscaping their yards, or improving their own personal patch of paradise, more or less in perfect security. Which is nice to see, after some hours on the internet. There is happiness and contentment in my own part of the world, still – in spite of all the madness going on. The various grocery stores where we shop are full enough, and Costco is jammed on most days. Prices are a little bit higher – or sometimes eye-poppingly higher – but the clerks are as friendly as ever, and make much of Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson. The stupid Plexiglas shields have even come down, at the local HEB outlets. There is a Folkfest planned for the weekend at mid-month in New Braunfels, on the grounds of the Heritage Society’s campus – displays of crafts, reenactors and a children’s costume parade, which has been a part of New Braunfels since the founding days, a hundred and seventy years ago. The city where I live is still functional, although there are some notable examples of criminal behavior and very third-world driving noted on my local Next Door. On the surface, life in my personal Shire goes on, much as it has from day to day. Life remains normal, more or less … for now.
Do those of us who are news junkies notice the societal dysfunction in certain places and feel it more deeply, while for most everyone else, life flows blithely by? Discuss as you wish.

As a footnote, I add a Bible verse that brings me comfort, when I have scanned the daily disasters. This verse was noted in a pop historical novel about the American Revolution, and I used it for my own purposes in my book about the Civil War in the Texas Hill Country. Take it as a talisman, yourselves.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. – 1 Kings 19:18

In the last year that we lived in Spain, I came to the knowledge that many very supposedly-well educated people had the most surprising gaps in their general knowledge of things. This realization came sometime in 1991, I think – and since then, evidence of this has mounted into a heap the size of the Matterhorn. But this was the first time that I saw proof of this in someone that I had assumed to be somewhat well-educated. I took a neighbor and her children on an excursion downtown. (I had been assigned to the base there for more than five years, the neighbor and her family were recent arrivals – the father of the family was our newest Protestant chaplain.) I wanted to show them the fascinating and quaint old city heart of Zaragoza; the Cathedral of the Pilar, the ancient cathedral, La Seo, the central plaza with the old palace of the city hall at one end, a stretch of ancient Roman wall at the other, and the 19th century food market with its’ ranges of individual tiny stalls under the iron roof. The children were of an age to appreciate all this, enormously.

There was an art exhibit in the city hall – late medieval and Renaissance mostly, just about all of it was of a religious nature. I was telling kids about the interpreting symbols and motifs in the paintings of saints, scholars and heroes. The evangelists, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were represented by an angel, a lion, an ox and an eagle, a dove in a golden halo meant the Holy Spirit, an iris symbolized the trinity, grapes and wheat sheaves the communion, a skull in the painting of a saint in meditation meant that the subject was St. Jerome, and a wheel for a female saint meant it was St. Catherine. I had grown up attending churches which had elaborate stained windows incorporating versions of this, looking at those windows during long boring sermons. I assumed this was basic cultural knowledge – but it appeared to all be news to the chaplain’s wife. She was listening to what I was telling the kids, with rapt attention; “I didn’t know that!” she exclaimed, and I was a bit boggled. I had assumed that, given her husband’s profession and that she was a college graduate too, that she might have picked up a working knowledge of religious iconography, by osmosis, if nothing else.

At that time it seemed to matter very little; odd bits of knowledge could be out there, like flowers in an endless meadow, and just not appeal to a person wandering along a path with their mind on other things. It is or was all out there – the wandering intellect can gather what they want. Or not. What is becoming frightening now in this awful decade, is the deliberate, wholesale replacement of that wild and random-flowering meadow of intellectual knowledge with a strictly-defined monoculture. Only the approved concepts and interpretations are allowed to grow; all the rest are clear-cut, mown down to the dirt, because… reasons.

Statues and monuments removed, books removed from library shelves and from school curricula, histories censored and the fake (like the 1619 Project) loudly promulgated, researchers, scholars and teachers removed from laboratories and classrooms if they presume to differ from the established new narrative. No more study of the classics of western thought – the ancient Greeks and Romans, the great medieval theologians, those artists and architects of the Renaissance, the great thinkers who worked out details of a revolutionary American experiment in self-government, the generals who fought the wars that defined the western world and the inventers and industrialists who shaped the modern world. Nope, all of them are horrible ‘ists’ of one despicable variety or another, unworthy of the attention of (assume Critical Drinker voice) *THE MODERN AUDIENCE*
What are we doing, what can you suggest, to preserve that intellectual meadow? Preserve hard copy books of cancelled authors and history? Protest public-funded wokery at state-supported universities? Walk away from those corporations like Disney, which are among the worst offenders. Discuss as you wish.

Well, that’s it for Disney for now and the predictable future – anything whatsoever to do with a Disney brand anything for this family. Disney-brand movies, Disney-owned media outlets, toys, games and clothing with Disney characters on them, the parks – the whole ball-o-wax. I was pretty certain I was done with them when I wrote this, almost a year ago. (Disney was already circling the drain with me, the year before, when this posted.) This most recent release of theirs has gone beyond offensive wokery, romped through partisan propaganda and plunged headlong into purveying outright lies – lies about American history, which to me, as a passionate reader of history (as well as a scribbler of historical fiction) is a form of blasphemy. Worse than that – a putrid and manipulative lie.

Slavery did not build this country. The ‘peculiar institution’ as it was described in antebellum writings, in fact rather retarded industrial development in the old South. I will concede that extensive production of cash crops as rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton did depend on slavery. Those enterprises enriched a small elite fraction of Southern slaveholders and kept the rest of the south relatively poor, undeveloped, and almost medieval in backwardness, although like the medieval nobility, convinced of their own superiority. Industry, innovation, and immigration all inclined to those places north of the Mason-Dixon line, while the South stagnated, even after Northern victory in the Civil War brought an end to chattel slavery.

I will concede that slave labor did play a part in the construction of certain historic buildings and public developments, and in some industries like Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works. But slaves did not build the Erie Canal, the fabric mills of New England, Samuel Colt’s industrial armory. Black slaves did not create or maintain the telegraph lines which bound the country together, nor did slavery figure in the Santa Fe trail, the Oregon-California trail, the various precious metal rushes which eventually filled up the far west, the Pony Express, the web of stagecoach routes that prefigured the transcontinental rail network, the coal mines and steelworks that dominated industry after the Civil War, the oil industry that eventually powered much of that growth, Thomas Edison’s laboratory and a hundred other manufacturing, mercantile or inventive enterprises … none of that was based on slavery, nor did formerly enslaved people play very much of a part, other than that of employees. To insist, as this wretched cartoon does, that slavery “built” the United States is a pernicious and poisonous lie, a gross distortion.

The Disney company should be deeply ashamed of perpetuating it – I am certain that the late Walt would be. The danger in pushing such a gross misreading of history is that people without much historical knowledge will come to accept them as a fact. It’s a kind of racism every bit as destructive as the distorting fungal infection in the game and series The Last of Us. We have already seen countless instances of black on white or black on oriental violence, via the so-called ‘knock out game’ – or even outright murder in the city streets, such as in this incident. And now the shambling corpse of reparations returns, yet again. If it weren’t for the fact that most of us genuinely judge by the content of character rather then the color of the skin envelope it’s in – I believe that we’d already be in a race war to the knife. It may yet come to that, if Disney and the rest of the so-called anti-racist brigade are super-spreaders have their way. Discuss as you wish.

We took Wee Jamie on another road trip, this last weekend. My daughter and I have decided that we should dedicate one day a week to “Not Doing Work Stuff” – and have an outing of at least half a day, doing something … something diverting. This long weekend demanded a whole day of ‘Not Doing Work Stuff.’ My daughter suggested a road trip to Fredericksburg, and I thought that we should check out the Museum of the Pacific War, as it has been at least five years since I visited it. It was indisputably the last war which we won, after all. The first time I went to the War Museum was maybe in 1995 – when it was all still contained in the old Nimitz Hotel on Main Street, and an annex down the road – IIRC, a side-less pole barn. (And Fredericksburg was still a sleepy little town with an attractive Main Street, with local-oriented business situated in profitable commercial real estate, where they tended to close shop and roll up the sidewalks at about 5 PM. Well, that has come to a screeching halt, I assure you.)

We took the back way, to Fredericksburg, after stopping at a local restaurant for a breakfast which turned out to be more substantial than expected – a local outlet for the Maple Biscuit Company. The fresh-squeeze orange juice was fantastic, and yes, I would know about all that, having grown up with orange trees in the back yard. The biscuits and sausage gravy were so generous and so good that we were resolved to split an order next time. (This was the last place I saw anyone wearing a mask, BTW. The staff were all masked-up.) The back way to Fredericksburg meant driving up 281 to Johnson City, passing memories all the way; Blanco, where we had done market events at the Old Courthouse, and where once we scored some amazing deals at an estate sale at an old house just off the highway. Johnson City, where we had a wonderfully fun three-day long market one year, for the lighting of the Courthouse, the weekend after Thanksgiving. (We had to stay two nights for that in a cabin at the Miller Creek RV resort, which meant that we barely broke even.)

Johnson City, when I first went through in the late 1990s, was sad and depressing in comparison to Fredericksburg. It seemed to be hanging on based on the relation to LBJ, the Johnson ranch and various residences where LBJ’s family had lived. Now it is the beginning of the Texas Wine Road and has a new lease on tourist life. Some years ago, I had suggested that the Hill Country had all the components save castles, villas, and quaint hilltop towns to become the New Provence, since they produce such Frenchified specialty items as lavender, wine, olive oil, goat milk cheeses … and wine. Oh my gosh, have they gone into producing wine. Someone has even built a castle! The usual maps of the Texas Wine Road usually include only the top twelve or fifteen of the biggest and most well-established of the wineries along 290 – or at least, those with the flashiest central building. As we discovered, just about every commercial or retail business along that road was posted as a winery, and even a couple of places, like Wildseed Farms, which initially specialized in some other commodity – like peaches or wildflower seeds – had added on a wine tasting room. If you started at the two wineries just outside Johnson City to the south and stopped at every single winery or tasting room and had a single glass … your liver would be screaming for mercy when you got to Stonewall, and you’d be on the list for a liver transplant once you got beyond Fredericksburg itself.

Yes, it looks as if every ambitious vintner wants a piece of the Hill country – and it appeared they were all doing a land office business, judging by the number of cars in the parking lots, even on a Sunday. As for the wineries and tasting rooms in Fredericksburg itself – the sidewalks and businesses were jammed; families, with children and dogs. If there is a recession in our future, it certainly wasn’t in sight in Fredericksburg; shoppers were out in force, and it looked as if all the restaurants and specialty shops were crowded with shoppers, whole families with small children, babies in strollers and dogs on a leash. However, I must regretfully admit that inflation is clearly out in force. My very favorite vintage from the Fredericksburg Winery – the Fredericksburg & Northern Red, is about ten dollars more a bottle then it was, when I first started buying it. A couple of years ago, someone who studies this kind of thing noted that the Hill Country was where Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino were thirty and forty years ago, as far as wine production went.

I wanted to see if the War Museum had ever managed to put all the relics of that war which they had in the archives on display. One of my favorite displays in the ‘liberated POW division’ was a pair of panties and a bra crocheted out of cotton string, made by one of the military nurses during her time of incarceration at the Santo Tomas internment camp. Alas, that still wasn’t an item on display, among several other clothing relics of civilian internment. When they first put up the main building for the museum, it was essentially a bare warehouse with some vehicles and aircraft parked in it, then a series of full-size dioramas, and then … well, more and more and more. It is now a tightly organized maze of displays, with arrows on the floors, and all kinds of interactive displays and videos. They have a whole B-24 on display to memorialize the Dolittle Raid, and an entire Japanese mini-sub (found adrift shortly after the raid) for the Pearl Harbor section. Models of ships, galore – I was interested to see one of the Lanakai, which had an amazing escape from the Philippines early in 1942. The Lanakai was an old sailing yacht with a diesel engine, which bounced around among various missions, owners, and nations, including being a movie prop ship, converted to military purposes as circumstances dictated. The escape of the ship and crew from the Philippines would make an amazing adventure movie – but never mind. I was glad to see that note was made of the fall of Singapore, since that features so heavily in my own last historical novel. There was not much mention made of campaigns in New Guinea and Malaya; of intense interest to Australians and Brits … but I guess there is only so much room in a museum like this, where the initial focus was on Admiral Chester Nimitz and the American campaigns.

It was so refreshing, all this crowded, happy normality – people having fun, crowding the shops and restaurants, spending money, enjoying themselves. Wee Jamie charmed everyone, and was incredibly well-behaved through the whole day, even if it was a considerable break from his routine. A woman standing next to me in the Fischer & Wieser outlet commented to her friend that she had never seen so many so many cute children and darling, friendly dogs in one single day. And I said, “Well, of course – we breed both in Texas!”