Memo: Another Bottle of That Whine?

02. September 2007 · Comments Off on Memo: Another Bottle of That Whine? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Iraq, Politics, War, World

To: Representatives Moran, Tauscher and Porter
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Slimed in the Green Zone

1. Well, my heart pumps pure piss for your pathetic predicament and your wounded sensibilities. Traveling all the way to Iraq, to demonstrate your tender consideration for the troops serving there at the whim of the Bushchimphitler and his eeeeevil war, only to find out that they had your number, short bios and an assortment of your previously reported remarks on the war. What a shocker, eh?

2. Yep, it sure was just another example of the deep-laid plots of the eeeeevil Bushchimphitler and his crafty minions… that troops assembled to meet ‘n greet should actually have read news reports. Really… how damn stupid do you really think the average military member is? Wasn’t it enough of a warning, when John Kerry’s adlibbed comment about dropping out of college and being stuck in Iraq rebounded within twenty-four hours with this priceless repost from troops in-theater?

3. Allow me to break it to you gently, lady and gentlemen; the military mind-set, like that of the Boy Scouts worships at the high altar of preparedness. It is an essential part of the culture to swiftly acquisition and disseminate necessary intelligence about whatever task they are ordered to accomplish. Doesn’t matter if its’ taking Omaha beach, Baghdad or providing the suitable background for a collection of globe-trotting pols burnishing their credentials; be assured that they will do their homework, and come to the party with all the angles covered.

4. Trust me on this also; while there a great many in the military today are apolitical, indifferent, or otherwise un-interested in the current political landscape, many more are intensely interested. They are betting their lives, in a manner of speaking, on their ability to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into something with a closer resemblance to a functioning and fairly democratic nation. Which may yet be possible: South Korea didn’t look like much of a good bet fifty years ago and look at the place now.

5. Finally, this is a wired and interconnected world these days; military bases overseas are not nearly as isolated as they were fifteen, or thirty years ago. That you could innocently assume that what you had said to your constituents or in the halls of power would not reach the ears of those serving in a garrison on the other side of the world indicates that you have not taken this to heart. You assumed that all the good little uniformed peasantry would trot obligingly up and tug their forelocks for their betters, and never mind in the least that your previous remarks could be construed as undermining their mission. I trust that you have been enlightened.

6. Military people do vote, you know. And sometimes their votes even get counted.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

Adventures in the Literary Life

30. August 2007 · Comments Off on Adventures in the Literary Life · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Finally got paid last week for the ever-loving magazine article, but alas, just as I feared, being implacable and insistent about being paid did rebound. My friend who referred me to them said “Ummm – you know you won’t be getting any more story assignments from them.” Which neatly coincides with what I had decided; if actually getting a check for work performed and published was going to be so prolonged an agony that I would pass on doing any more for that particular publication.

Getting the check at last means I could order another box of review copies of To Truckee’s Trail which will go out in the mail the instant I get them. Most of them will go to Mom, who is even more brash about promoting my work than I am. Always has been; she was the one who practically frog-marched me into the place where I got the job that carried me all the way through college.

I mailed out autographed copies this week to everyone who paid for one, one to be considered for review by �True West�, another to be reviewed at Blogger News Network, one to B. Durbin with extravagant thanks for the use of her photo for the cover, one for The Fat Guy, who loves Westerns and Westernish things. Does anyone else want an autographed copy? Dave the Computer Genius helped me install a donation/payments page at www.celiahayes.com where you can order one with a simple click of the button. I�ll be sending for another box of copies in a couple of weeks, if anyone does.

On the marketing front, I have sent out quantities of postcards to various museums, historical societies and independent bookstores across the western states, and followed up with emails. A google map-search only turns up one independent bookstore in San Francisco which isn�t self-consciously leftist, new-age or oriented to alternate lifestyles and/or the LBGT community. I haven�t tackled Los Angeles yet; San Diego I�ll leave to Mom and her friends.

So far, a bookstore in Truckee has e-mailed me back, saying they will order copies � they carry about a dozen books about the Donner Party alone. I am picturing my book in the �local history� shelf, waving its hands and calling �Hey � read about the people who didn�t screw up their journey big time!� And the Truckee-Donner Historical Society is making noises about reviewing and stocking it as well. So my instincts for marketing the book are paying off in a small way; not bad, considering I have no reviews at all to publicize it with, so far!

I do believe I shall finish the first draft, volume two of �Barsetshire with Cypress Trees, etc� this week, at about a chapter and a half to go. This ends neatly with the conclusion of the Civil War, with all the men trickling home and facing up to the ruin that the war left of their farms and businesses. I�ll be taking a breather and doing a lot more reading before I do necessary revisions and additional research. Then comes the final volume, and finding a new way to write about trail drives and cattle baronies, something that hasn�t been seen in about a couple of million books, movies and TV Westerns.

There is some promising stuff I have discovered so far. Did anyone know that there were trail drives out of Texas, to California, well before the Civil War? And that refrigerated beef began to be shipped out of Indianola almost as soon as the war was over? Or even that the long trail drives towards the railheads in the mid-west even began because Texas was glutted with cattle that had run wild during the war?

Stay tuned�.

Deep In the Heart

26. August 2007 · Comments Off on Deep In the Heart · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, The Funny, World

There are reasons for not particularly enjoying residency in Texas; beginning with the brutal summer heat, and working down through the serious lack of good mountains, distance from the seacoast, the brutal summer heat, highway interchanges that look like the planners just threw a plate of spaghetti at a wall-map, self-chuck-holing surface roads, the brutal summer heat, a distressing tendency for citizens to drown in urban low-water crossings, a high percentage of drivers of large vehicle who completely spaz out when it rains (as if they had never, ever seen such a thing before!), the brutal summer heat, urban downtown areas (I’m looking at you, Houston!) which look like Calcutta had thrown up on Los Angeles…. And the fact that everything is bigger applies to the insect life as well. You wanna see a garden spider large enough to snag small birds? Check out my back yard… but bring along a baseball bat. And did I mention the brutal summer heat?

Against those considerations, though, there is an even longer list of reasons to relish living in the Lone Star State… look, flyover country is not cultural Siberia. We’ve got the bookstores, the boutique cinemas, the museums and opera companies, and the whiney self-centered artistes to prove it. In no particular order of importance, we also have…

Wildflowers; square miles of wildflowers; For months in spring the highway verges and the empty lots, and the hillsides look like paintings by the better sort of early impressionalist painter.

And given enough rain, the countryside looks really, really quite pretty. Not spectacular, mostly of a gently-rolling variety, cut across with green rivers and creeks. The Hill Country is rather more enthusiastically rolling. West Texas is really, really rolling, but not very green most of the year. More medium crispy, and not to everyones’ taste… but this being Texas – where everything is bigger – there is more than enough of it all to go around.

Fields of grazing cows… very restful to look at, although in some places this program is startlingly varied with flocks of llamas and other exotica.

The HEB grocery chain. Statewide powerhouse, having sent several national chains running for the borders with a matchless combination of quality, excellent service and attention to detail. Quite simply, if it isn’t on the shelf at HEB’s Central Market, you probably don’t need it anyway. There are whole sections devoted to local salsa, hot sauce and BBQ sauce.

Austin local music scene; not that I know much about that first hand, other than seeing “Austin City Limits” on PBS but Cpl. Blondie does, and she made me put that in.

Local history: a rich mine containing many solid gold nuggets. Like Churchill once remarked about the Balkans, Texas produces almost more history than can be consumed locally.

Breakfast tacos; the food of the gods… oh, ye who only know of this marvel through the medium of Taco Bell should hide your faces in shame, and make a pilgrimage to San Antonio on your knees. I solemnly swear that every block on every main avenue has a breakfast-taco place on it somewhere. Many of them also offer drive-through service.

And Texas also has a most exuberant sense of being a distinctive place. Utah is the only other place that has anything like the same strength of identity, of pride in a shared and unique history. I suppose it comes from both states having been politically independent and separate entities during their respective founding decades. Sometimes this sense of identity strikes new visitors as rather overstated, but after a while it’s kind of endearing, and makes other places feel a little bland in comparison.

And finally, this is only a personal and purely anecdotal statement… but I do believe that out of all other bodies of human beings in the world, a substantially higher proportion of Texans will slide out of this existence and into the next, breathless, exhausted and whooping triumphantly, “Day-am! What an incredible ride!”

Occasional Nightmare

22. August 2007 · Comments Off on Occasional Nightmare · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Technology, World

Everyone has a reoccurring nightmare, so I have always been told. If you are very lucky they are fairly benign, sometimes to the point of making you wonder if they can really be classed as a nightmare, like dreaming that you are stark naked in your place of work. A good few years ago, there was an article published, the result of a survey that revealed that college-graduates of all majors and vintages still had finals nightmares. They dreamed they went in to take a Terribly Important Final Exam, and when they actually began taking the test, realized that they didn’t know any of the answers, or it was an essay question and their mind was a Complete Blank… or that, like my mother’s reoccurring Finals Nightmare, they skipped that class for the entire semester.

My reoccurring nightmare is a peculiar variant of the Finals Nightmare; The Radio Station Where Nothing Works. Either I am walking into a sort-of-familiar radio station control room, where the control board has been subtly reconfigured, where all the board switches which activate and control the audio levels for the mikes, the CD players, the computer (which as replaced the cart decks where the spots, inserts and IDs used to play from) have been changed around… or they have been disconnected completely. Or it’s a completely new control board.

And in a bare three minutes or so before I have to go on the air, I have to figure it all out, or fix it so it does work.

Sometimes it’s the CD players which suddenly cannot be made to work properly. Adding piquancy to this particular nightmare variant is the fact that some of the early broadcast CD-player models used in AFRTS got terribly buggy when over-heated. No matter how carefully the DJ cued up a particular cut, they would reset themselves to another selection, usually the first cut on the CD. Nothing is guaranteed to make a DJ feel more like an idiot than to cheerfully announce the next song,… and have something else entirely go out on the air. I got to the point where I would not announce the next selection on the playlist, unless I recognized the up-ramp. But total nightmare material: not being able to make the darned thing work at all.

Playlist. That’s another nightmare. Not being able to find the next thing you’re supposed to be airing, because the CD/record library is a complete shambles. Or to cue it up in time; see above as regards non-functioning CD players. At least my nightmare has progressed technologically, to the point where I’m no longer afflicted by record-players with missing tone-arms or needles. There was a new element in my most recent radio-station nightmare, though. I can barely read the tiny print on CD cases now, without my reading glasses, and I dreamed the other night of having a playlist with print too small to read.

And I didn’t have my glasses. It sucks to be getting old… but it does beat the alternative, doesn’t it?

South Texas Monsoon Season

19. August 2007 · Comments Off on South Texas Monsoon Season · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, World

…Or in other words, for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. No matter where Hurricane Dean makes landfall, South Texas will most likely get more rain. And we need more rain, (on top of the forty days and forty nights quantities which we have already been blessed with this year), about as much as Custer needed another Indian.

The first two weeks in August were about the longest stretch we had gone without a gully-washer, all spring and fall. Quite honestly it’s not like we were really complaining about that; a couple of times a decade it is damned nice not to have a summer drought. The wildflower meadows were spectacular this year and they lasted until… well, the tougher wildflowers, like yellow daisies, Mexican Hat, and sunflowers are still gong strong even as I write. I saw fields of purple wild verbena that I had almost never observed before. And when Wil and Blondie and I went down to the coast in June, Wil kept remarking that everything appeared as lush and green as the English countryside. Usually by high summer, the wildflowers are gone and the hills and meadows are starting to look light brown and medium-crispy. By August, everything is the color of dust. If it weren’t for watering gardens and lawns, suburbia would look pretty much the same, but not this year. The kvetching about not being able to go out and mow the yard because the lawn squelches underfoot like a soggy sponge has risen to nearly unbearable levels.

The grass itself is nearly up to an elephant’s eye; mine would be, if I hadn’t pulled out the last of it and did xerioscaping and a lot of pavers set in gravel by way of dog-proofing the back yard last year. But the bay tree and the fig tree, and the crepe myrtles have practically exploded, having put on so much new growth. Aside from the lawn-care fanatics, who really don’t want their private patch of paradise to look like an 8th of an acre of tall-grass prairie, the gardeners and wild-flower enthusiasts have few complaints about the rain. The ground is now so saturated, and the aquifer topped up to the over-fill level, any more rain will just spill off.

Our main local headache after the next bad storm does a prolongued swirlie over south Texas is that suburban San Antonio is threaded by creeks, and fairly substantial ones at that. Leon, Salado, Cibolo Creeks, and a handful of smaller tributaries all feed eventually into the San Antonio River. Even when there isn’t an established stream-bed, usually a wide swath of mown grass with some interesting rocks and a trickle of water down the middle, there is a well-known tendency for water to collect in the roads at certain points after there has been any more rain than a gentle sprinkle.

Some of these places are marked as low-water crossings, with a kind of giant yellow yardstick set vertically into the ground. Others can be recognized as such by mud-stains and an assortment of ground-level debris trapped at a higher level in fences and shrubs. The police put up barriers at most of them, but others are just well known by regular commuters. After living in the city and experiencing the aftermath of a couple of rainstorms, you just know where water gathers and swamps the street and adjust accordingly. With an extended rainstorm, though, the deeper such pools will become. Water in the creek-beds will rise over the level of the bridges crossing them… and water will collect in new places and catch everyone by surprise. It’s kind of embarrassing, to know you can be swept away in your car, in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Yeah, it’s nice to stay in touch with nature, but when the rescue services have to bring a rope out to you, marooned on the roof of your car in the middle of a raging torrent at the Basse Road and Highway 281 off ramp; it’s all a bit too much of a good thing. So, we’re watching the weather services with a bit of nervousness, and wondering if we should just take a vacation day or two next week, rather than risk the commute.

On the bright side, at least someone hasn’t drowned in high water in a parking garage elevator, in the same manner as a luckless office worker did in Houston several years ago.

True to the Union Part 3

12. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union Part 3 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

The flood of enthusiastic volunteers for service in the Army of the Confederacy had slowed to a trickle. Early in 1862 the Confederate Congress drafted and passed a general conscription law, essentially declaring that every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for military service. Within months the upper age limits was moved to forty-five. In the last desperate year of the war it was seventeen to fifty… and if a man fell into that rather broad category, he had better have a damn good reason for not being in uniform. Of course there were outs: for a while and on both sides, wealthy men could hire a substitute to serve. There were exemptions for elected officials, and for men who owned more than a certain number of slaves. This last exemption was particularly galling, especially in those portions of the Confederacy where the peculiar institution was not much practiced, either because of inclination or economics. Nothing was more calculated to prove the truth of the bitter observation that it was a rich mans’ war but a poor mans’ fight.

In the Texas Hill Country, feelings about the draft were especially bitter. Firstly, most of the Germans had been Unionists and abhorred slavery. Secondly, a prime motivation for emigrating from Germany in the first place had been the existence of conscription there. To be forced to fight in the defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body whose very existence they had opposed was an insult past bearing. And finally, Gillespie County was very much still a part of the frontier. Fighting off war-parties of Indians was much more of an immediate concern to settlers there, than whatever difficulties the Confederacy had managed to run themselves into. And there was also that ongoing concern about raising crops and protecting families and property, since the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from the frontier forts which had protected them. The Texas State troops which had replaced them after Texas secceeded had not proved any more effective. Dissatisfaction with the Confederacy rose, as the Union blockade began to bite deeply at economic interests and most especially in those parts of Texas which had not been enthralled by the whole concept to begin with.

Gillespie and neighboring Kerr County was put under martial law in the spring of 1862, and by summer the military officer in charge essentially declared war on the Hill Country Germans. It was ordered that all males over the age of 16 must register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Suspicion followed by repression only bred resentment and further defiance, which in turn bred violence… and resistance. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush whenever anyone in a uniform came around. Even companies of volunteers raised by Hill Country settlements to protect against Indian raids and freelance brigandage were looked upon by suspicion; for they had… it was whispered… only volunteered for frontier defense in order to keep out of the Confederate Army. It had already been noted by the commandant of the South Texas district that volunteers and conscripts for the Confederate Army were quite thin on the ground in Gillespie County. A company of so-called Partisan Rangers, under the command of Captain James Duff, who had been a freight-hauler and wagon-master before the war, were sent to keep order. Duf’s company set up camp near Fredericksburg, and set about establishing their commander as the most hated man in the county; amongst a long list of actions, they arrested a respected local merchant for supposedly refusing to accept Confederate currency in his establishment.

By summer, Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not made the difficult journey into town to take the loyalty oath. In a sweep of a thinly-settled area north of Kerrville, half a dozen men who had failed to do so where arrested by Duff’s troopers, along with their families. The families were sent to Fredericksburg, to be held under appalling conditions in a cramped one-room hut, but the six men were sent under guard to Fort Mason, in northern Gillespie County, where a large body of others suspected of being Union sympathizers were being held. During an overnight camp, two of the younger men saw that their guards were sleeping, and took the opportunity to slip away. The next morning, the frustrated guards simply hanged the four others and dumped their bodies into a nearby creek. Upon returning to Fredericksburg, the guards taunted the families of the men they had murdered with accounts of what had been done. To judge by the names, only one of the six was actually a German.

Duff’s rangers waged a savage campaign against the local settlers: flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking hard-built settler’s homes, arresting whole families and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock wholesale. After burning her home to the ground, one woman is said to have told Duff that he must have little enough to do, since he had left her and her children without any shelter at all. Captain Duff answered that at least, he was leaving her a spring of water, to which she shouted fearlessly that if he had known how to destroy that, he surely would have done so.

Thinking that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and that they had an opportunity to depart Texas unmolested, rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of sixty men gathered south of Kerrville in August of that year, led by a German settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener. They intended to travel westward towards the Mexican border; some of them intended to (and later did) join the Union Army. But there was no such amnesty in effect, and they were pursued and ambushed by a contingent of Duff’s troopers along the Nueces River. About half of Tegener’s party were killed outright in the resulting fight, and another twenty wounded, were executed upon capture. One was taken to San Antonio and executed there. The survivors scattered; some over the border, and some to the Hill Country, where their families brought food to them as they hid in the fields outside Fredericksburg. Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. They lay unburied until the end of the war, until the remains were gathered up and placed under a monument in Comfort.

(Next: the ‘Hanging Band’… to follow. Sorry, this is complicated, and I want to put it in small, edible bites!)

A Jolly Good Time Was Had by All: Pvt. Beauchamp

08. August 2007 · Comments Off on A Jolly Good Time Was Had by All: Pvt. Beauchamp · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Home Front, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military, World

Well, that was fun; sort of what I imagine a fox-hunt to be, with a pack of hounds and a merry collection of red-coated hunters on swift steeds. The successful conclusion of the milblogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour, the beat-down of aspiring fabulist Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just like one of those exhilarating hunts beloved by viewers of the very high-quality BBC dramas that have been exported to the lonely outposts of Peoria, Tujunga and Boise for lo, these many years.

There was the wily fox; not as wily as he thought he was, obviously… spinning an oh-so-tempting yarn for the editor of TNR, who eagerly snapped it up. And over there is a hound, a hound with a very clever nose who thinks something stinks and begins to bay, and a huntsman with a horn blows “tally-ho”, as the hounds quarter the rough ground, yapping noisily as they discover more and more interesting little discrepancies. No wounded woman at FOB Falcon? A small graveyard and not a dumping ground for victims of an atrocity? And where are the officers and NCOs, and how the hell is it possible for a clumsy tracked vehicle to run over a nimble street-mutt anyway? And for someone to find himself jaded and degraded by war… before he even arrives in theater?

So the hunt went off, in full cry, hounds and horses pounding over the rolling field and between the trees, spilling through the gaps in the fences, in hot pursuit of the nimble fox… who runs and runs and runs, twisting and backtracking. But every time he looks over his shoulder, the pack and the hunters are closer behind. And when the fox looks ahead, suddenly there is another hunt… a hunt of grim-faced people in mottled green and brown cammies, with lots of stripes on their sleeves or dull-metal stuff on their collars.

And the fox runs to ground. But he is hauled out by the scruff of his neck by the grim-faced people, and held so that everyone in the milling crowd… the hounds, the hunters, a great crowd of spectators can take a good long look. The fox squeaks out a few words admitting that everything he wrote was not true, whereupon he is sentenced to clean latrines with his long bushy tail for the foreseeable future.

Oh, there was a hunt-saboteur who tried to run interference for the fox, insisting that everything the fox said was of a high degree of truthiness… most everything had been confirmed by other foxes and experts, but that he just couldn’t share their names just yet, and why was everyone being so mean?

Well, that’s what the hunt-saboteur was saying just as he got trampled by the hunt, so he went off on vacation, and is there still, nursing some bruises and wondering what he did to deserve this, no doubt.

I shouldn’t worry, though. There’ll be another fox and another hunt, any time now. Just listen for the hounds and the sound of a horn, ringing over the blogosphere. And it will be fun!

True to the Union: Part 2

06. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union: Part 2 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

More new settlers than just the Germans were making their way into Texas, in the fifteen years before the Civil War. Once that the coastal lowlands below the Balcones Escarpment could be fairly said to be settled, Texas attracted more than just the land-hungry and restless. It drew ambitious and more prosperous settlers from across the south, settlers and entrepreneurs who brought their slaves with them. These men farmed sugar and rice and built fine plantation houses, gracefully adorned with neoclassical columns and ironwork balconies; in jarring contrast to the plainer log blockhouses and cabins built by the settlers on the western and northern borders of what passed for civilization. A fissure formed among communities in Texas that mimicked the split between North and South, between free-soil men and slave-owners. This split was exacerbated by the fact that the Germans, recent arrivals all, heartily disapproved of slavery, and retained strong cultural connections to other German communities in the north. Within a few months after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw the question of permitting slavery in the Western territories on those who settled there, a fresh ruckus broke out in Texas. The Act kicked up considerable bad feeling on both sides, since it was seen as allowing the peculiar institution to spread into where it had theretofore been forbidden. Many were the barrels of ink consumed, and thousands of spleens quite thoroughly vented, as adherents of free-soil and abolition expressed their disgust and disapproval.

One of those expressions took the form of a rather mildly-worded resolution disapproving of slavery, which was put up at a state-wide meeting of the various German choral societies, or “sangerbund” late in 1854 in San Antonio. German-American political and social organizations in other states had approved similar resolutions, but the vote of the Texas Germans set off a firestorm, especially among nativists and “Know-Nothings”, who were suspicious of foreigners anyway. Questions were asked, in increasingly belligerent voices, about the loyalties of the German settlers to Texas; very soon the abolitionist editor of a popular German-language newspaper would have to depart San Antonio at speed, driven out by threats of violence. The question of slavery morphed into a states’ rights issue; exactly what could the states decide for themselves was a burning question amongst the philosophically inclined. How much authority did the federal government hold when it came to strictly local issues? These and related points were vociferously disputed, even as attitudes about abolitionists hardened into a blanket detestation of anyone whose enthusiasm for the “peculiar institution” was less then wholly enthusiastic, across the South and Texas.. By the time that Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency as a free-soil man, Texas was aflame, literally and figuratively; although one can wonder just how much of the eagerness for war can be chalked up to the natural temperament of the Scots-Irish borderers who had an affinity for any fight going and gravitated towards it like a salmon going upstream.

Just because Abraham Lincoln was heinously unpopular across the South as president-elect did not mean that every Texan, slave-owner or not, made a mad dash for the exit and the passionate embrace of the Confederacy. There were men such as Sam Houston, a slave-owner, who were also Unionists. And there were also those who detested the “peculiar institution”… but who were strong for the abstract principle of states’ rights, even if they held no particular affection for the concrete policy of chattel slavery. And finally, there were those bedrock Texan settlers, like The Fat Guys’ ancestral kin who felt that:

a) “Texas never should have joined the union, as we were managing just fine on our own, no matter what the politicians said
b) since we did, though, we should stick to it and
c) how about a little help with these Comancheros?”

When the fighting began in the spring of 1861, the states-rights, and the pro-Confederacy factions carried the day had carried the day. Texas departed the Union and cast its lot with the Confederacy, over the objections and misgivings of a substantial minority, which included most of the German settlers.

By the second year of the war, barely a handful of men had volunteered out of Gillespie County for the Confederate Army. There were recruits a-plenty for the Home Guard, and for the Frontier Battalion, and for locally-recruited ranging companies to defend against Indian raiders sweeping in from the west and from the Plains… but a year and a half of full-out fighting in the east had already burned through those eager volunteers who had the inclination to leave their fields and families and go to fight. Halfway through 1862, New Orleans fell to the Union. Anyone could look at a map and see that the Union now commanded both ends of the Mississippi River. Perhaps many of those Texans who had doubts about the wisdom of departing the Union and joining the Confederacy now felt completely justified. And many of those who had been so eager for it now must have felt a cold little trickle run down their spines.

The Confederacy’s reaction to the Union threat would unleash riots and vigilante mayhem across the Hill Country, and in the Northern Texas settlements.

(To be continued)

True to the Union – Part 1

03. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union – Part 1 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Local, Old West, World

Last week one of my occasional employers and I were talking about my current writing project, “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. This employer knows the Hill Country and Fredericksburg quite well, and he remarked at once upon how clannish many of the old German families are, and how difficult it was for him, as an outsider selling farm supplies, to do much business with them. They were, he said, very loyal to each other and to those few outsiders who had established relationships with them. I didn’t find this hard to believe at all, since the part of the chronicle I am writing now covers the bitter days of the Civil War in Gillespie County.

There is actually not much available in print or on line about that specific period; just barely enough to give tantalizing hints at what happened during those years. It’s a skeleton upon which to drape a story of split loyalties, of bewildering events and sudden hatreds, seemingly sprung fully-armored out of the ground, like dragons-teeth, much to the astonishment of recently arrived but cultured and hard-working German settlers. In the space of a decade and a half, they had turned Gillespie County from an all-but empty wilderness into their new homes. They established singing-societies, and newspapers, celebrated the Forth of July with parades and festivals, and participated in the great American experiment of democracy with passionate enthusiasm. The finest doctor practicing in San Antonio was a recent émigré from Germany. The German settlers also built stone houses and planted orchards, established mills, hotels and workshops. Their communities, even on the edge of the frontier, were prosperous and several degrees more attractive than similarly-situated Anglo-American settlements, and connected by regular stage lines and the US mail to the larger communities of Austin, San Antonio, Indianola and Galveston. But something happened, something that put a roadblock in the blending that usually happened with even the largest immigrant communities.

Those Hill Country towns are still very distinct, even a hundred and fifty years later. The same family names crop up over and over; Herff, Arleheger, Ransleben, Marschall, Keidel, among others. Other 19th century immigrant-founded towns diluted over the decades following their establishment but the Hill Country Germans did not. Up until WWI, German was the predominant language, almost exclusively, and I had read an account of a traveler passing through Fredericksburg in the 1880s, who insisted that he had only found one person in the place who spoke English, and that was the sheriff and he spoke it very badly at that. At first, I wrote this tendency off to the sheer numbers of German immigrants who poured in to Gillespie County, and the homogeneity of the communities they formed. They came all at once, relatively speaking, first through the auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein in the mid 1840s, and then a second wave following upon the failure of the 1848 Revolution.

And then I read a little more, finding an interesting tid-bit in a translation/replica of a book put together for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Fredericksburg, which covered practically aspect of the founding of the town, in great detail, and with detailed first-hand reminiscences by many early settlers; how they forded the Pedernales River, and passed by an encampment of Delaware Indians, and one of the Verein troopers escorting them killed a bear at the river ford. They held a great celebratory feast that evening, in a grove of post-oak trees near where the Verein had begun building a blockhouse and a fenced compound, around which the town of Fredericksburg had been surveyed and marked out. (The blockhouse was about where the Subway sandwich shop on Main Street is now, catty-cornered from the Nimitz hotel.) Such accounts were so thorough I hardly needed anything else for a good few chapters… but contrasted oddly with comparatively terse accounts of what had happened among Fredericksburg’s citizens during the Civil War. Essentially, the person who wrote that particular segment in the mid 1880s admitted that feelings were still so raw about the Civil War, that it was best to just not go any farther with such details.

Interesting, but not entirely unexpected, that tempers would still be pretty hot, and wartime grudges would still be held. But still, I wondered about that. Texas had been a pretty far-distant corner of the Confederacy. And someone who had fought as a soldier in that war would be middle-aged when that book was written. A veteran or survivor would have spent twenty years building a post-war life, repairing a farm or business that would have been interrupted by the storm of war, or the Reconstruction that followed upon it. Texas had not been fought over, marched over, occupied and reoccupied to the same degree that some of the eastern states had been. The economy had been wrecked… but that was more due to the Union blockade, and the diversion of able-bodied men into military service. Emancipating the slaves caused barely a hiccup; there weren’t that many in Texas, comparatively speaking… and the German immigrants were famously opposed to chattel slavery anyway.

And that turned out to be exactly why feelings had run so hot and so hard, you see. (To be continued)

The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving

29. July 2007 · Comments Off on The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, World

TNR’s “Shock Troops” diarist is just the gift that keeps on giving. After reading this, and shaking my head, I sent the following email to “editors@cjr.org” offering this feedback:

I read with interest and considerable amusement Mr. McLeary’s comment, as regards the wanna-be Hemmingway, Pvt. Beauchamp and the kurfuffle-du-jour over his “Shock Troops” article in TNR:

“How dare a college grad and engaged citizen volunteer to join the Army to fight for his country! (Which is something that most of the brave souls who inhabit the milblog community prefers to leave to others.) ”

I doubt that I am the first, and probably won’t be the last to write to inform Mr. LcLeary that the term “milblog” is a contraction of “military blogger” and in current usage means “members of the military, their families, or veterans who blog”.

Such veterans and currently serving military members took the lead in reviewing and debunking Pvt. Beauchamps’ extremely dubious stories, offering an expertise in military culture and current events in Iraq which seems to sadly lacking at TNR. And to judge by Mr. McLeary’s off-hand comment, it appears to be also lacking at the CJR.

BTW, all military officers are required to have a college degree, as a prerequisite for recieving a commission. These days, it is not uncommon for enlisted members to also have degrees, either before enlisting, or to work towards one while in service.

I myself came into the service with a college degree, but while I flatter myself that I am a much better writer than Pvt. Beauchamp,…so are most of the milbloggers out there. TNR would have been better-served with practically any of them.

Sgt. Mom, TSgt, USAF (Ret)
The Daily Brief

This tempest is far outgrowing it’s teapot; is anyone making more popcorn? If I get any reply, I’ll post it.

Note, as of 9:45 CST: recieved the following reply from Paul McLeary, at CJR:

“I’m getting slammed with emails about this, but I want to answer
every one, because I think that it’s important. Here’s the email
that I sent to the Mudville Gazette milblog, who posted part of it
Sunday afternoon.

————-
I really walked into this one.

I actually spend a lot of time on milblogs. I was careless in my
choice of wording when I wrote the piece. What I meant was the
whole community of blogs that have sprung up in the same universe
as milblogs — Hugh Hewitt, etc., who act tough about the war, but
have never served, and have never left the comforts of their
air-conditioned offices to see what might be going on in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

I’ve written a lot about milblogs, actually: Interviewed Matthew
Currier Burden for CJR, as well as a couple soldiers who were
blogging for the New York Times. I’ve also spoken to, and exchanged
emails with Yon and Bill Roggio and such, and I blogged the whole
time I was in Iraq back in ’06, which doesn’t make me a milblogger,
but hey, it’s something, I guess.

Like I said, I really stepped in it because I didn’t take the time
to clearly define what I was talking about.”

OK, so honor is served. Says something that he is replying to emails on a Sunday evening, and admitting to not paying proper attention to detail. On that account, I’ll give him a pass from being the milblogosphere’s chew-toy du-jour. Go ye therefore and sin no more, but what any other milblogger does is up to them, of course.

Way To Much Time On His Hands

27. July 2007 · Comments Off on Way To Much Time On His Hands · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Navy, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Good God, Technology, World

A model of an aircraft carrier… made entirely out of Legos.

(link courtesy of Rantburg, the source for all things civil and well reasoned.)

Fortune and Mens Eyes

24. July 2007 · Comments Off on Fortune and Mens Eyes · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Iraq, Rant, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

It is a curious coincidence that just as the milblogosphere is reveling in the righteous joys of thumping another credulous editor of a formerly-pretty-reputable legacy media venue… here we are dished up another heaping helping of military bashing from a couple of personalities that I have never heard of. Allegedly, this doofus is claimed to be a regular on Saturday Night Live. The hell you say… is that show still on? Wow.

Whatever A Whitney Brown’s problem is, I’ll bet it’s damned hard to pronounce. And this guy at least had a few remaining shreds of decency left to him… enough that he pulled his post about how the modern military was creating mass murderers and serial killers…

Ops, scuse me, while I go outside, and flag down that idiot with the car speakers which go whoop-whoomp-whoomp at such a deafening level that his car actually sounds like it’s farting. I’m going to chop up his inconsiderate ass into quarters with a chain-saw and Fed-Ex each quarter and his head to five different places…

No, just kidding. But not about the car stereo… it really does sound like the car is farting.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes… military = killers. Got it. Kind of the point actually, in an official, just-doing-our-job, ma’am sense. Yes, we kill those who have been designated as our enemies; neatly, efficiently, and without particular prejudice. Unsanctioned, off the books free-lancing is still frowned upon, however. Just so we’re all on the same page, here.

Still, to note all this is to wonder… why all this perfectly rotten press now? And without the obligatory “Of course we support the troops!” in this round of being pissed-on… guess they’ve noticed we’re not buying the claims of the stuff just being rain.

I do wonder what has brought the usual suspects to a fine frothing boil; I haven’t seen such hysterical insistence on the brutality and licentiousness of the soldiery since the putrid days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Makes a bit of a change from painting them as poor widdle disadvantaged and victimized cheeeldren who had no other way to get ahead than to listen to the siren allure of the recruiter, which is the alternate method of denigration to date At least the “brutal and licentious” bit will give the troops credit for being grownups. Sort of.

But no credit for anything else, and credibility is where this whole thing is going… oh, not by any deep-laid strategic plan. More like some kind of subconscious hive-instinct, an irrational passionate urge to make the Iraq war and the whole WOT thingy just go away. And to go away without any blame attaching to the usual suspects, win or loose. Loose is always in the cards, of course. The middle east has been a veritable snake-pit for decades. If it reverts to type… no skin off ours, as long as we’re safely out of the middle, and a repeat of Saigon, 1975 can all be safely blamed on the Bush cabal. With appropriate tisk-tiskings, of course.

But…. What if the “surge” is working? What if the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate, and taking real control of their lives and their country? What if all those nice hardworking reservists and those high school graduates from Nowheresville, and those Marines from flyover country have managed to pull of a shaky miracle, and in another fifteen or twenty years, Iraq looks like South Korea, only with palm trees and more sand?

Wow, wouldn’t that be a facer for people like Senators Kerry and Murtha, for the Kos Kidz and the staff of the Guardian, among a long list of others… like A. Whitney Brown? Their advice has been spurned, and they are in peril of being shown up by the people that they secretly, or in some cases, not so secretly, hold in contempt. Makes it kind of hard to maintain that effortless air of superiority over lesser mortals, so of course, something must be done!

When old-time autocrats didn’t like the message, proverbially, they shot the messenger. The new autocrats in the legacy media, the nutroots, or in the higher ivory-towers wouldn’t be so crude. They’d rather denigrate the messenger; the troops and the leaders alike. Taint them by association; paint them as sociopath degenerates, brutal and vengeful and incompetent. Shame them into silence, make them shrink back into the little Nowheresvilles they crawled out of, put away their uniforms and their medals, and hide their associations away in the corners.

Really, it makes it so much easier to betray allies and friends, when these pathetic little people and their stupid “duty, honor and country” just forget all of that and do as their betters like A. Whitney Brown tell them.

And that’s what I think is going on here. Your mileage may vary, of course

Question(s) of the Day (070721)

21. July 2007 · Comments Off on Question(s) of the Day (070721) · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Why do I know so much about the Atlanta Falcons? Don’t they suck? Would we care so much about the dog fighting thing if it wasn’t an overpaid NFL “gangstah” being indicted?

Did we really need to know the President was getting a colonoscopy?

A friend of mine insists that I need to see “Sicko.” I said sure, if you promise to watch a couple of night’s worth of Glenn Beck with me. Any guess on how that went?

Back to inappropriate coverage of political body parts…Why in God’s name is the press paying attention to Hillary’s cleavage?

Crescendo for the Writers Life Waltz

20. July 2007 · Comments Off on Crescendo for the Writers Life Waltz · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Site News, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Just a quick update on the current book, scribbled between slaving over a hot computer, a couple of job assignments, and mundane things like… oh, I don’t know, cooking meals? Taking the dogs out for a walk. (Er, drag-around-the-block. They. Drag. Me. Just to make that point absolutely clear.)

The text is uploaded to the printers, and the cover is finished and approved… it has all taken nearly two weeks to accomplish this; much longer than I expected. I hope this might be some kind of indication that business is absolutely booming with the POD houses. I was clawing the walls with impatience all this week, but the cover is well worth the wait, thanks to B. Durbin’s very generous offer to let me use one of her photos of the Truckee River. (Appropriate credit is given, natch!)

So, once I have a hard copy in my hot little hands, and approve the whole thing, “To Truckee’s Trail” will be in the booklocker.com catalogue, all 272 pages and eighteen long chapters (with notes!) of it; a gripping read of adventure and discovery along the 19th century emigrant trail to California. I’ll be doing some more marketing, and scrounging for reviews and ad space here and there, and generally trying to sell a good few copies of it. At the very least, I can claim to write fewer clunky sentences per chapter than Dan Brown, of “The DaVinci Code” fame! (That blasted book was unreadable, to me… I kept tripping and falling headlong over sentences that sounded like entries in the current Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest!)

And I’ll be scribbling away on the Adelsverein saga, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. Going by my latest chapter outline revision I’m about halfway through volume two, although as complications and side-stories develop, this is guaranteed to expand to epic proportions, so to say. There are just so many interesting people, and fascinating scenes, dramatic and historic events; a kid in a candy store has nothing on me! Of course, I can’t help writing about them, I tell stories, it’s what I am driven to do. I just completed a tension-filled account of the local Confederate provost-marshal’s men searching a house for a draft-evader… on Christmas Eve… the searchers being unaware that the man they are looking for is dressed as Father Christmas. (In the parlor, with his family… and everyone who knows what is going on is frantically pretending that nothing is the least bit out of place.)

But three volumes of about twenty chapters each… and my chapters seem to clock in at 6,500 to 7,000 words each… that will mean 400,000 words.

So, back to slaving over the hot computer keyboard…

Later: Just realized upon consulting the archives, that today is exactly one year to the date that I was fired from (Boring Corporate Entity Inserted Here) and decided to try for that “best-selling writer brass-ring-thingy”! With the very book that is about to be launched upon a hopefully breathlessly-anticipating world. So, I have way to go to beat out that Harry Potter book… still, funny old world, innt it?

Committee of Vigilance

18. July 2007 · Comments Off on Committee of Vigilance · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

California in the Gold Rush era was by all accounts a wild and woolly place for a good few years after discovery of gold, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Until that moment in 1848 when John Marshall found gold in a mill-race under construction at Coloma, California had dreamed away the decades as first a Spanish and then a Mexican colony, remote from practically everything, lightly settled, and with a small economy based on cattle ranching… not for beef, in those days before refrigeration and the railway, but rather for their hides. Yerba Buena , which would soon be renamed San Francisco was a sleepy little village of at most about 800 residents.

But in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, everything changed. The world rushed in, both in a matter of speaking, and literally. By 1851 some estimates put 25,000 people in and around San Francisco; those seeking gold and those seeking to make a living in various ways from those seeking gold. For a few mad months and years, even otherwise respectable and responsible citizens were more interested in gold than in attending to civic affairs. This was not at first much of a problem. Most gold-seekers, or Argonauts as they were called, were basically inclined to be law-abiding… even in the absence of heavy law-enforcing authorities.

But there was a minority amongst them who were not so inclined. In the absence of enthusiastic law enforcement, or even any law enforcement at all, they settled down to enjoy that happy (to them) situation to the fullest, forming a loosely-knit gang called the “Hounds”, which mainly targeted the non-Anglo, Hispanic miners and merchants, principally Mexicans and Chileans for bullying and general extortion. When a riot by the Hounds resulted in the destruction a part of town called “Chiletown” on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, a coalition of businessmen headed by long-time resident Sam Brannon concluded that up with this situation they would not put. They established a tribunal to housebreak the “Hounds”, arresting and punishing or exiling the gang leaders. Almost as an afterthought they also established a police department, charging a recently arrived Argonaut named Malachi Fallon with establishing a police department. Fallon had some tenuous connection with police business in New York City, in that he had been a prison-keep at the Toombs. On the strength of that sketchy resume, he went to work, establishing a force of about thirty constables operating from a single flimsy building.

Thirty police officers pitted against a shifting population of over 25,000 did about what could have been expected; at best, well-intentioned but ineffectual. Given that most of those 25,000 were young males, from a hundred different nations, hungry for adventure, riches and strong drink, touchy about personal honor and mostly well-armed… Malachi Fallon’s little band would have had as much luck emptying the Bay with a teacup as they did of keeping order. When crime eventually began to surge again, it was whispered that the police force was in cahoots with the criminal elements. Whether it was corruption or incompetence, the solid and law-abiding citizens were long out of patience by 1856 and not feeling inclined to debate the difference. Another committee of vigilance was formed, and when all the shouting was done, San Francisco had a reputation for being a place where lawbreaking was not tolerated. For long, anyway. And so it was, all across the West, especially in the mining towns, in the early years, when towns sprang up like mushrooms, practically overnight.

The people who lived in them would have law, and security of their homes, their persons and their possessions. They would demand it of the governments they instituted for themselves. And if those governments could, or would not deliver it, for whatever reason, the citizens would go and deliver it for themselves, however ham-fistedly.

Renaissance Man

15. July 2007 · Comments Off on Renaissance Man · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, World

Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and Sam Houston, his personal life was already fairly checkered, including one divorce. Unlike the first two, Ford would live through the tumultuous affair that was the Republic of Texas. Like Sam Houston, he would survive all the vicissitudes that an active life on the Texas frontier could throw at him, and die in bed at the ripe old age (for the 19th century) of 82. I assume he was mildly surprised by this happy chance. He had survived the usual accidents and epidemics of an age which predated antibiotics and germ theory in general, any but the crudest of surgeries, and routine vaccination for anything other than smallpox. He had also survived service in two wars and innumerable campaigns along the borders and against various hostile Indian tribes, several rounds of frontier exploration, election to public office… and as a newspaper editor, in the days when public discourse was conducted metaphorically with a set of brass knuckles.

He arrived in Texas in 1836 at the age of 21, having missed Santa Anna’s campaign against the recalcitrant Texans, and Sam Houston’s momentous victory over him at San Jacinto by a bare month. That was about the last significant historical event in Texas that John S. Ford would miss. He would be in the thick of it for the next sixty years, and at the end of his life he would sit down and turn his pen to writing his memoirs, which would fairly double as a history of Texas in the 19th century.

Over that time, Ford embraced a variety of causes with vigorous if sometimes unwise enthusiasm: unionism, temperance, know-nothingism, and secession, and education for the deaf. But he began his career in Texas with a medical practice in the settlement of San Augustine. He had studied medicine in Tennessee, with a local doctor, and under the rather sketchy standards of the time was qualified to hang out a shingle. He spent eight years there, practicing medicine, teaching Sunday school, and riding as a volunteer ranger with a series of local companies… including one commanded by Jack Hays. He also taught himself law. One supposes that San Augustine was a small town, where residents had to double-up on various jobs. In 1844 he was elected to the Texas Legislature as a pro-annexation platform, and took himself off to Washington on the Brazos. He served a term, married (for the second time) and decided to give up medicine for the newspaper business, specifically a weekly paper called the Texas National Register.

Ford was very much a partisan of Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, who was not all that popular in Austin; Ford leapt to his defense with gusto. He and his partner changed the name of the paper to the “Texas Democrat”, and campaigned persistently for such things as more and better schools, and effective defense of the frontier. It was for the time, a rather liberal newspaper… and Ford participated gleefully in every ruckus raised in a state where the political scene usually resembled the ‘tomcats in a sack’ model. But in late 1845, Ford’s wife fell ill, and soon died, in spite of all he could do. Grief-stricken, he took himself off to join the company that his old friend Jack Hays was raising… for Mexico was disputing with the United States over the Texas border. Ford eventually became the regimental adjutant, and from his practice of writing “rest in peace” or “RIP” below his signature on the required reports of casualties, the nickname of “Old Rip”, which followed him for the rest of his life.
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End Run

05. July 2007 · Comments Off on End Run · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

The crescendo of the writers’ life waltz, as I have been calling it, is yours truly making a determined end-run around the established behemoths of the literary industrial complex, thanks to contributions gratefully received from fans and supporters… and from Mom and Dad. I have been able to pull in enough to start the process rolling for “To Truckee’s Trail” with those nice people at Booklocker.com. I have sent them the formatted text, and in a short time, they will have one of their contracted artists do the cover, and once I approve it, they will include it in their website and catalogue… and there you go, Sgt. Mom’s next book. It’ll be available on Amazon.com, of course.

It’s not just going to stop at that, though. It just doesn’t. I will be buying a box of copies, to use to generate reviews in various websites and magazines. Once I have a nice collection of kind words, then I will use the cover art and the kind words to purchase advertising space, and to print up some folders or flyers to send to various bookstores. Do you know how many museums there are, along the Western emigrant trail, and how many of them have bookstores? You may not, but I am making a concerted effort to build a list of each and every one, and I’ll know when I am finished. I’ll also know about any independent bookstores anywhere in towns of note along the trail… especially if there is any kind of trail-related tourism in that town. All hail Google, the avatar of the DIY advertising campaign!

It’s been dawning on me, that perhaps the world of book-publishing, or as I have begun to call it, the “literary industrial complex” is beginning a slow downward spiral in the face of the POD revolution, the internet and DIY marketing, and even the availability of quality color printing at Kinkos. All those processes that were once owned by a big publisher because the technology involved was huge, complex and expensive… now they are reduced, pared down and available to anyone who cares. Once upon a time, doing a book on your own used to be called a vanity press, and it cost a bomb, but now self-publishing is within reach. The resulting books aren’t any more dreadful than what is churning out of the traditional publishing houses; so much for the sneering about vanity presses, and writers so pathetically eager to be in print.

It’s been kind of curious, to hang around in the book and publishing blogs, and read what insiders say about it: that agents are harried and harassed, and have only enough time for a tenth of the good-quality stuff that crosses their desks. That publishers are risk-adverse… and like the producers of block-buster movies, want that sure-fire good thing that is just like the last fifteen or twenty sure-fire good things that came down the pike. It’s a crapshoot for writers; even if you do grab the brass ring, and get a deal from a traditional publisher, you’re likely to be treated like dirt anyway… and wind up doing most of the marketing yourself. So, POD looks more and more like a viable alternative.

And I am wondering if the literary-industrial complex is going to start feeling the pinch of competition, and considerable dissatisfaction from the consuming public… just like the major news media is feeling now. Old news stalwarts like the NY Times, Newsweek and the CBS evening news are all beginning to tank. Bloggers like Michael Yon can do news reporting from a war zone, expert analysis comes from someone like Wretchard at Belmont Club, and the dreaded Mo-Toons o’Doom were featured on more blogs than were published in newspapers. The entire news industry looks fair to going down like that enormous spaceship in that old Disney movie that spiraled down into a black hole, emerging in the fourth dimension as something entirely different… what was the name of that flick? Anyway, I wonder if current technology is going to send traditional book publishing in the same direction.

On This Day in 1776

04. July 2007 · Comments Off on On This Day in 1776 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

(It was the custom in many 19th century communities to have a public reading of the Declaration of Independence as part of the 4th of July Festivities. It’s a good tradition, and I hold to it on this site.)

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

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Ratatouille

29. June 2007 · Comments Off on Ratatouille · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, That's Entertainment!, The Funny, World

So, we went to see Ratatouille this afternoon, and are still giggling. I will do a review tomorrow, when I am finished giggling.

Or, I may be giggling until next weekend. To tide you over, a recipe for “ratatouille”… in which no rats are harmed.

Combine in an 3-quart ovenproof casserole:

3 TBsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove minced garlic
1 1-lb eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 medium zucchini, cut in 1-inch slices
1 1-lb can whole tomatoes and their juice, chopping tomatoes roughly with a spoon
1 tsp basil leaves
1/2 tsp salt

Cover and bake in a 400 deg.oven for about two hours, until vegetables are very soft, uncovering and stirring once or twice. Serve garnished with parsley.

(from Sunset “French Cookbook” 1976 edition“)

As an aperitif, the website for the movie.

And I am still blegging for funds to cover printing and publicity for my next book, “To Truckee’s Trail.”

PS: The introductory short to this is a hoot, too!

Garden Greenery

24. June 2007 · Comments Off on Garden Greenery · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, The Funny

I have only had to run the sprinkler to water the garden once, so far this year. A rainy spring is extremely unusual … well, at least for the whole twelve years that we have been living here. There has been a nice, deep-drenching rain about every week and a half, almost as if it has been scheduled. The only thing to equal it was four or five years ago when for some mysterious reason tropical storm systems kept stalling right over Bexar County for several weeks at a stretch. Not only was Memorial Day weekend rained out that year, but the Fourth of July weekend also. And not just plain old pitter-pat little showers, but a full bore tropical deluge that went on for hours. And days. And weeks.

Everyone went around expressing their surprise that South Texas appeared to have a monsoon season, although I think the story of kayak racing on North New Braunfels avenue between the Nacogdoches and Austin Highway intersections was an exaggeration. Not an impossibility, though. It is one of the embarrassments of our fair city that it is entirely possible to be swept away and drowned within city limits, given sufficient rainfall over certain urban locations.

The upside is that everything is green – green, green, green and ever more green; gardens, parks, highway verges and hillsides. The wildflowers have lasted for weeks longer than usual. Every tree has put out vigorous new growth as regards branches, and the crepe myrtles all have great piles of old bark shredding off their trunks, like snakes shedding their old skins for the new one underneath.

Our neighborhood was scheduled for the bulk-trash pickup during this week just past. We’re still waiting for the huge trucks with the mechanical claw that reaches down to scoop up the great piles of rotting fence palings and landscape timbers, building waste and cut tree branches. On Monday when I went out for a run with the dogs, I saw no less than three tree-trimming services at work on various streets – and an equal number of battered pickup trucks driving very slowly down the blocks, pausing to look at those piles featuring other items – mostly busted furniture.

I think my neighborhood is moving slightly upwards on the socio-economic scale. The people moving in lately have taken to throwing away a better class of stuff. Last bulk-trash pickup week, Blondie and I scored a sturdy wooden chaise-lounge very neatly constructed of two-by-fours, which gravitated to our back yard once I made an oilcloth covered mattress for it. Until it became too hot, it was pure bliss to lay out on it in the afternoon, with a cool breeze stirring the branches overhead and the scent of sweet-olive, almond verbena and jasmine teasing the olfactory senses. When Blondie bought a long extension cord so she could take her laptop out there too, blogging nirvana was achieved.

Gleanings this year were not so rich, but also garden oriented; the junkers with pickups may have beaten me to the good stuff, unlikely as that seems. I did score one very heavy terracotta garden urn in perfect shape (no cracks or damage) and a pair of shiny metal spheres the size of softballs that were the bodies for a pair of a wire-form garden ornament flamingoes. The wire had gone to rust, so I popped out the spheres, and took them home.

They’ll make very satisfactory gazing spheres – and better yet, gave me the chance to walk in the house and say to my daughter,

“So, you wanna polish a pair of big steel balls?”

Southernisms

15. June 2007 · Comments Off on Southernisms · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, The Funny, World

(Another one of those amusing e-mailed lists, posted at the Far East Network Yahoo Group chatroom)

1.) Only a true Southerner knows the difference between a hissie fit and a conniption, and that you don’t “HAVE” them, — you “PITCH” them.

2.) Only a true Southerner knows how many fish, collard greens, turnip greens, peas, beans, etc. make up “a mess.”

3.) Only a true Southerner can show or point out to you the general direction of “yonder.”

4.) Only a true Southerner knows exactly how long “directly” is – as in: “Going to town, be back directly.”

5.) All true Southerners, even babies, know that “Gimme some sugar” is not a request for the white, granular sweet substance that sits in a pretty little bowl on the middle of the table.

6.) All true Southerners know exactly when “by and by” is. They might not use the term, but they know the concept well.

7.) Only a true Southerner knows instinctively that the best gesture of solace for a neighbor who’s got trouble is a plate of hot fried chicken and a big bowl of cold potato salad. (If the neighbor’s trouble is a real crisis, they also know to add a large banana puddin’!)

8.) Only true Southerners grow up knowing the difference between “right near” and “a right far piece.” They also know that “just down the road” can be 1 mile or 20.

9.) Only a true Southerner both knows and understands the difference between a redneck, a good ol’ boy, and po’ white trash.

10.) No true Southerner would ever assume that the car with the flashing turn signal is actually going to make a turn.

11.) A true Southerner knows that “fixin'” can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adverb.

12.) Only a true Southerner knows that the term “booger” can be a resident of the nose, a descriptive, as in “that ol’ booger,” a first name or something that jumps out at you in the dark and scares you senseless.

13.) Only true Southerners make friends while standing in lines. We don’t do “queues”, we do “lines,” and when we’re “in line,” we talk to everybody!

14.) Put 100 true Southerners in a room and half of them will discover they’re related, even if only by marriage.

15.) True Southerners never refer to one person as “y’all.”

16.) True Southerners know grits come from corn and how to eat them.

17.) Every true Southerner knows tomatoes with eggs, bacon, grits, and coffee are perfectly wonderful; that redeye gravy is also a breakfast food; and that fried green tomatoes are not a breakfast food.

18.) When you hear someone say, “Well, I caught myself lookin’ .. ,” you know you are in the presence of a genuine Southerner!

19.) Only true Southerners say “sweet tea” and “sweet milk.” Sweet tea indicates the need for sugar and lots of it – we do not like our tea unsweetened. “Sweet milk” means you don’t want buttermilk.

20.) And a true Southerner knows you don’t scream obscenities at little old ladies who drive 30 MPH on the freeway. You just say, “Bless her heart” and go your own way.

Words to Remember

12. June 2007 · Comments Off on Words to Remember · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, sarcasm, The Funny

….when it comes to the age-old battle of the sexes:
(gleaned from the FEN Yahoo news-group)

1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

3. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.

4. Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It!

5. Loud Sigh: This is actually not a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of nothing.)

6. That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

7. Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or Faint. Just say you’re welcome.

8. Whatever: Is a women’s way of saying F@!K YOU!

9. Don’t worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking “What’s wrong?” For the woman’s response refer to #3.

(Post any additional loaded words or phrases in coments)

Absolutely the Very Last Word

09. June 2007 · Comments Off on Absolutely the Very Last Word · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, sarcasm, Stupidity, That's Entertainment!

On Paris Hilton. Really. I promise. I also promise you won’t stop laughing.

Art Appreciation

09. June 2007 · Comments Off on Art Appreciation · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, World

This has nothing much to do with the topic at hand, but I would like a t-shirt that says “As a matter of fact I am not a $#@!ing tourist, I live here!”… but Blondie says that would be rather too hostile. And what brought that on? Oh, just the experience of going downtown late yesterday morning, intending to partake in the multicultural delights of the Texas Folklife Festival, which we had heard was starting on Friday.

Which it was… but not until Friday afternoon at 5:00 PM. So we decided to prowl the little art galleries and shops in La Villita, instead. It’s a collection of very old houses, nearly the oldest in San Antonio, most of which were restored over the last thirty or forty years or so; electricity and plumbing being added to them with considerable difficulty. A good few have very low doorways, and very thick walls, and once were heated (if at all) with tiny fireplaces. The neighborhood is adjacent to the River Walk, and the Alamo… even if the shops and galleries offer merchandise that is a couple of cuts above the usual tourist tat, it remains that nearly everyone wandering through is in fact most usually…from out of town.

And since it was Friday, and there weren’t too many people wandering around, most of the vendors were a little bored and very friendly, well disposed to be helpful; really this part of the world is a very friendly place. If you are antisocial, you’d have to beat them off with a stick, but about the first thing anyone asked was “So, where are you folks from?” I just got tired of growling “From here!” by the fourth or fifth time; hence, the wish for the tee-shirt.

Blondie bought a silver and garnet ring from a small jewelry and art gallery, and admired a bronze cat statuette, one of an issue of fifty, by an artist who lives in Kerrville; she might very well go back and buy it next month. I fell in love with some paintings by another local artist, who does lovely impressionalist Texas landscapes: great sweeps of meadow, or gently rolling hills… but above them the even bigger clouds, piling up in a clear blue sky. It looked like what I saw out of the car windows on last week’s road-trip, so there was no surprise when the gallery manager said the artist lives in Victoria and paints the countryside thereabouts. Oh, yeah… when I’m a rich and famous writer, I want a couple of those!

I couldn’t afford anything at all yesterday, so I had to get my amusement out of describing my ideal piece of Texas kitsch art: it’s a big-ass painting of a field of bluebonnets, with some longhorn cows, standing knee-deep in them. In the background is a windmill, and a tumbledown old barn with the Texas lone-star flag painted on the roof, and the clouds in the sky form the silhouette of the Alamo! Maybe even on black velvet, too! I’d have it somewhere where I could see people’s faces when they looked at it, and know that if they looked absolutely horrified, then they did know something about art. Alas, irony was taking a vacation somewhere away from La Villita yesterday; most of the people I described this vision to said that it sounded rather nice… and did I want to commission an artist, since all they had in stock along that line were painting of bluebonnets only.

My parents had a painting that performed the same function for them; separating those who really knew something about painting from those who just thought they did. It was a painting that had been done as part of a TV show set design; we actually spotted it, once, on an old rerun of a Perry Mason mystery, in the studio of an artist who was the corpse du-jour, about twenty years after a friend of my parents had given it to them.

It was an oceanscape, in blues and blue-greens; the moon over the ocean, with a pier on one side and some rocks along the other, only the rocks were sort of cubist and blocky, and the pier was vaguely impressionalist, and the water in between kind of blah; anyway the colors were pretty and matched Mom’s dining room décor at the time and for years afterwards. Mom and Dad used it as sort of a gauge of taste. Anyone who admired it extravagantly got points of manners but none for artistic taste. Anyone who sort of winced and looked away obviously knew it was a piece of dreck as art, but was too well brought up to say so. Mom and Dad rather relished anyone who had the nerve to come right out and ask what in heck it was hanging on the wall for: one very dear friend cemented their high estimation of his artistic taste by finally asking if he could sit on the other side of the dinner table so he wouldn’t have to look at it.

Summer is here, it’s hot and the clouds are piling up. Some day, with luck, I’ll walk into that one gallery and buy one of the landscape cloud paintings.

Slightly Accelerating Waltz

08. June 2007 · Comments Off on Slightly Accelerating Waltz · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Home Front, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Kind of a scrambled week, overall: Saw William off to California after his long visit. T’was ever thus, just as I get accustomed to him being here, he is off again. Blondie started her summer term of classes, and my part-time employer is off and away most days showing properties… so I spent most of this week chained to a hot computer, metaphorically speaking, writing away. I’m well launched into the second book of the “Adelsverein” saga, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees”. Four chapters drafted, covering the lead-up to the Civil War, which here in Texas turned out to be more than usually interesting. Especially as not everyone bought enthusiastically into the noble gallantry of the Confederacy. I had a notion to stage a family wedding at the same time as the secession crisis came to a head in Texas, which will allow me to do a sort of “Duchess of Richmond’s Ball on the Eve of Waterloo” set-piece, all swirling crinoline and gallant men being called away to rejoin their militia units, while the women bravely wave their lacy handkerchiefs… oh, yeah. 19th century drama by the cart-load. Margaret Mitchell, eat your heart out!

The anticipation of writing this almost makes up for receiving another regretful rejection letter; this from the agency that wanted to review the first fifty pages of volume one , a detailed synopsis, a copy of my original query letter, a copy of their reply, etc…(and I think they wanted a small sample of belly-button lint. That would have been in the very small print at the bottom.). Their letter thanks me for sharing, and says that the story just doesn’t send them into the transports of excitement and enthusiasm that are necessary for them to take it on, blah-blah-blah, wishing me luck with another agent blah-blah-blah. I have enough of these letters in the last year to see the pattern forming; it’s one of the polite ways to say ‘no, thanks and while your book may or may not suck the paint off a Buick fender there’s a hundred like it on my desk every day and I can only pick one by some whimsical and mysterious process of personal taste and cross my fingers that you don’t get a deal somewhere else and I’ll look like a chump for having given a pass on a best-seller in case you save the damn letter’.

As you can see, I’ve gone lurking among some of the book publishing blogs lately… reconnoitering the territory, so to speak. What is really amusing is that the publishing and lit-agent bloggers insist that while there are piles of dreadful slush for them to wade through, in search of the potential pearls… those pearls do stand out! They gleam with a holy light, and the publishing world is just aching to discover them, and it’s not that hard to do! (Blow loud raspberry here.) I’d put more credence into that… if the so-called pearls thus discovered didn’t actually suck so badly themselves. If that’s the immediately obvious good stuff in the slush pile, the bad stuff must be so bad it’s toxic. Like Love Canal, Chernobyl or Michael Bay movie toxic.

Oh, well, hope still for me, anyway: another agent asked for the whole manuscript of “Adelsverein”. I am assured that the secret is to grab them in the first chapter; what could be more grabbing than a leading character escaping a massacre, I ask you?

In the meantime, while I await word from that agent, and any of the other agencies and publishers I have applied to, I am doing reviews for Blogger News Network… for the exposure (and to score free books and CDs!) and for a local monthly magazine of quite stupendous glossiness: also for the exposure and for what they pay, which is a tidy little sum. Not a fortune, but an amount well worth the time. I have proposed a handful of other article ideas for upcoming issues to the editor. I’ll hear which ones she would like me to pursue for publication towards the end of the month. I seem to be viewed with favor though being totally professional and ego-free as regards editing and rewriting on request. The essay on Hot Wells that I posted this week was the stuff that didn’t make it into the final draft. Blog material is not magazine materiel, but nothing goes to waste, as far as I am concerned. And one of my book reviews is actually now posted on the author’s website, along with a couple of reviews from the major media outlets; something to feel a little flattered about, even if it is for a book that is not yet published in the US.

Stay tuned… I am still taking donations, towards doing “Truckee’s Trail” in the fall, as a POD, and marketing it myself.

The Ghost of South Presa Street

06. June 2007 · Comments Off on The Ghost of South Presa Street · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

On a mild spring day, my daughter and I walk on a narrow trail, trampled out between tall grass and wildflowers grown knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high. A light breeze ruffles the flowers, around which orbit a fair of butterflies. We are on a quest, looking for the past, and exploring the ruins of the old Hot Wells resort, a sort of architectural sleeping beauty. There is no crystal coffin protecting this place, just a prosaic chain-link fence… but the place exudes quiet enchantment nonetheless. A feeling of serenity wraps around us; nothing threatens us. It is quiet, restful… even soothing.

Hot Wells today lies in a clearing among a grove of trees, across the railroad tracks, between South Presa and the San Antonio River. Someone casually driving by might think the ruins are of a factory, or a mill… but they would be judging by what the neighborhood nearby is now, little knowing that once there was a long elegant promenade, which terminated in a circular carriageway in front of the bathhouse and the hotel, a carriageway ornamented with a planting of flowerbeds, hedges and footpaths on either side. Little is left of that glory now, only the ragged stand of palms and some pomegranate shrubs grown lank and wild, far back in the scrub trees. The central ruins seem to float in a rippling green sea, a wrecked ship of buff-colored brick.

A few ranges of wall go as far as their original three stories. Some walls support a cob-web fragile roof over what had been changing rooms. Everywhere in the crumbling walls there are regularly-spaced openings for windows and doors. Faded flecks of aqua paint still adhere to the otherwise weathered grey wood. Mats of dark green vines shroud some walls, as if trying to pull them down to ground level. Trees of a good size grow up through what were once interiors; a prickly-pear cactus perches on top of a high wall, above a narrow interior courtyard

And yet, if you close your eyes, sit quietly and hold your breath in this place, one can almost hear the sound of ragtime music floating on the air from a nearby bandstand under the trees, or a wind-up Victrola paying in a high-ceiling room behind a deep verandah. Gravel crunches under the narrow tires of tinny little sedans and open touring cars, sweeping up to the front of the sprawling grand hotel, and a train-whistle blows, from the spur where a wealthy magnate has his private parlor car waiting. The past is just barely out of reach here at Hot Wells, the sounds of it just beyond our hearing, in this twenty-first century.
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The New Aristocracy

03. June 2007 · Comments Off on The New Aristocracy · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Politics, Rant, World

For a people that with a great deal of fanfare and self congratulation threw over a monarch and the accompanying aristocracy over two centuries ago, Americans have displayed an avid interest in the doings of such parties, and a dismaying tendency to genuflect before a patent of nobility and a decorative coat of arms, no matter how dubious. Mark Twain sent up this tendency very aptly, with the Duke and the Dauphin, at a time when fabulously but newly wealthy American families were busy marrying off their spare daughters to impoverished European aristocrats. As a small ‘d’ democrat, and amateur historian who is more often amused by ancestor-worship, I wondered why they would bother: forking over tons of cash for the privilege of being condescended to by the descendents of successful mercenary soldiers, social-climbing whores of both sexes and businessmen whose initial successes were made centuries previous just seemed like a pretty bad trade. But this sort of social game is at least consensual; and the families involved at least got their houses fixed up, or built new ones, and presumably injected a little hybrid vigor into their gene pool. Whatever floats the boat – or the familial pretensions, and it gave good materiel to the likes of Twain, Edith Wharton and Henry James.

The domestic variety of aristo-worship has been around nearly as long in our dear old republic. Or at least since the early days of mass communications, and a voracious and fairly literate readership, many of whom were interested in whatever celebrity tidbits a newspaper editor chose to throw in their direction. No, newspapers in the 19th century were not all the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, or portentous deliberations about this or that great political matter. Quite a lot of the newsprint pages were taken up with pretty much the same fleeting concerns as the newspapers today: horrific crime, dreadful accidents, bad weather, scandalous doings among people who were supposed to have known better, and the doings (scandalous and otherwise) of celebrities. Yes, indeed, Lilly Langtry and Lola Montez, and Sarah Bernhardt (among others) were followed just as avidly by 19th century fandom as Paris Hilton is today, although none of them seem to have been quite as witlessly air-headed, and Lola Montez might have been just as rotten an actress. None of them showed off their whoo-whoo in public anyway, although in private might have been another matter. No, an interest in the doings of silly and aimless celebrities is no more a hazard than an interest in the doings of silly and aimless aristocrats. Such interest meets some kind of human need, sells a great many magazines, and provides amusement to people standing in supermarket checkout lines reading the tab headlines.

I can’t be quite so indifferent and amused by the third sort of American aristocrat, even though one particular clan has a tiresome propensity to overlap with the celebrity class as far as the tabloid covers are concerned. I refer to the Kennedys, of John F. and his ilk, and all their various descendents; they are the most colorful but not the first and least of our political dynasties. Such a family as that of John Adams, the Rooseveldts, the Bushes and Gores and all the rest of them where generation after generation gravitated into elected office or public office have served the nation well – but still, the whole notion of political dynasties in America gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s one step away from a hereditary aristocracy and a bad precedent, operating on the assumption that a recognizable name constitutes entitlement to political office. This bothered me during the 2000 election; frankly I couldn’t see much to choose between either one of the candidates. But these political families have been around for a while, and on balance they’ve probably done us more good service than otherwise.

In one of Lois McMaster Bujould’s Vorkosigan books one of her characters remarks that an egalitarian has no trouble living in an aristocratic society – as long as they can be one of the aristocrats. It’s coming to me that we have become well-stocked around here lately with supposed egalitarians who nonetheless display an unseemly eagerness to secure themselves a high perch from which to lay down the rules for others. This would-be aristocracy runs the whole gamut from well-paid entertainers and journalists, active and retired politicians, to tenured academics and busybodies of every stripe and variety. They all have certain things in common; their personal lives are secure and comfortable, if not downright lavish – but they spent a lot of time in public venues of late urging the rest of us to eschew certain things which they themselves seem to have no intention of giving up.

These Marie Antoniette ‘Let them eat cake’ moments seem to be happening with more frequency. Cheryl Crow’s TP rationing, John Edwards humongous house, lavish travel arrangements and princely fees to make a speech about poverty, the high cost of Prius cars and other “green” accoutrements, intellectuals falling all over themselves rationalizing so-called national leaders like Hugo Chavez, and pricing the working class out of the labor market with docile work-gangs of illegal immigrants. Oh, it goes on and on, and I wonder sometimes in dark moments if such people are like the old Soviet revolutionaries, who overthrew the czar, and then lived in no less privilege and comfort, all the while giving lip service to the ideals of equality. I wonder if in their innermost hearts our would-be aristos wish to demoralize, impoverish and destroy the bumptious, unruly and independent middle class, the rock of any enduring republic. It is almost as if they would prefer a new and docile serf class, who would vote in easily controlled blocs as long as the bread and circuses kept coming – and never talk back to their betters. Who of course, know what is in their best interests. Lately, every time I hear someone sneer at flyover country, or the middle and working class, their taste and preferences in anything, I hear the ghost of Marie Antoniette, and I wonder anew about our new aristocrats.

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