The Smell of Napalm…

14. August 2009 · Comments Off on The Smell of Napalm… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Which, according to the deathless line from Apocalypse Now, is loved by the speaking character because it smells of victory … and so am I detecting faint wisps of napalmy odors, now that our elected Congressional aristocrats – at least those of them who have enough nerve to hold an open forum with their constituents – are getting an earful and more from those very constituents. Oh, and the squealing and screeching from oiks like San Fran Nan, and her side-kick Harry-Palms Reid, and their whole amen-chorus in the legacy media is just too rich for words. It’s music to my ears, reading lectures on decorum and civility, the unsuitability of Nazi symbols and imagery, and the evils of –gasp – astroturfing. This from out of the mouths, pens and keyboards of the very people who cheerfully and frequently compared GWB to Hitler, called for his assassination, had no problem with screeching like a cage of howler monkeys at people they had differences with, and over and over again urged us poor ignorant sheeple to get involved, to move ahead politically, and make our voices heard. Double-standards, much?

OK, so an unexpectedly large proportion of the heretofore fairly quiescent and silent middle-of-the road constituency got up to speed, we got involved, organized ourselves and showed up at meetings, demanding answers from our elected aristocrats … and look at where that got us. We scared the ever-loving be-jesus out of a great many local pols who seem to assume they would come home during the break, whip up a quick dog-and-pony show in their home district, bloviate about health-care reform in front of a respectfully submissive audience, and go skipping back to DC having manufactured a pretty little box of consent, all tied up with a tasteful, rainbow ribbon. Whoops – talk about walking into a buzz-saw. Hey, Mr or Ms Congressperson, put town the cellphone, and talk to us – and answer the question! I think about now, most of them would rather put naked in a barrel with a dozen rabid weasels and rolled down hill than take the chance on that … especially since a lot of town-hall attendees are showing up with cameras. Which brings up the old saw about being careful what you ask for, as you may get it. And the other one, about not asking the question, if you don’t want to really hear the answer.

But there has developed somewhat of a down-side to all this. Perfectly ordinary Americans of all ages and political persuasions, exercising their rights as citizens are now are denounced and ridiculed as deranged, ignorant kooks, radical teabaggers, as closet Nazis, puppets of the health-insurance complex and I don’t know what else all, by much of the media and a lot of the so-called intellectual set. I haven’t the nerve, the stomach, or a pair of hip-waders to go venture into Kossack country, or the Huffington Post – just checking out the front page and a couple of links on Open Salon during the last couple of days was enough for me.

Yeah, I post at Open Salon; I have a good few blog-friends over there, as they are not all a raving collection of left-wingers. In fact, many of them are literate, amusing, fairly sane, are excellent and polished writers, and have the excellent good taste to appreciate my own stuff, not that I do much of the in-your-face political stuff there anyway. There was sudden flurry of “OMG-those awful teabaggers are destroying everything that’s good and fair” posts. I went into one comment thread, trying to break it gently to the author of the post that no, the Tea Party that I am associated with is all volunteer, and few of us had ever been politically active in anything much above a church council, that we are funded by donations and our own work, that it doesn’t cost that much to set up a website, or host it either, that we weren’t being directed by anyone but ourselves, or programmed by some sort of mind-control beam directed from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. To no avail – she eventually wound up calling me clueless or a liar and closing the comment threat. I’m afraid that her mind was already made up – there was no point in confusing her with facts straight from a witness with first-hand knowledge.

So, yeah, it’s a bit insulting to be personally called names over this, but there is the light of a faint, guiding star, an Erandil, shining in the darkness – and that is, that we may be turning the tide. We might be on the verge of winning, now that so many ordinary people; old and young, working class and bourgeoisie, libertarians and former Democrats, veterans and college professors are looking at the situation, and getting pissed-off, and insulted, first by our elected aristocracy, and then by a partisan media throwing every scrap of garbage that they can. Way to win friends and influence people, President O, your administration, your friends in Congress, and your house-trained media organs – you’ve stepped right in it now. I don’t know when or how soon victory will come – but it will be sweet, and not a moment before time.

(Later … sigh … comments on this post are frelled because I put punctuation in the title. Reader JL sent the following comment to email, and I thought it so relevant, that I am pasting it in:

I’ve noticed the same thing you’ve noticed about massive, MASSIVE denial
on the left. I left some comments about what I observed at a recent
visit to an ER when my mother fell and hurt (thankfully, not fractured)
her hip – there were two people who passed through the other side of the
bay while we were there who had no insurance, but were given care.

That I wasn’t believed would be putting it very mildly. They simply
cannot believe that their view of the world may be in error – no matter
what evidence is shoved in their face. Even the existence of my mother
was called into question – and this on a ‘feminist’ blog.

(The left is kind, compassionate, and caring. It says so on the label.
Package contents may vary considerably from label descriptions.)

I wasn’t saying the right things – therefore I HAD to be lying, trying
to deceive them. But why? Why would THEY think they were so important
that someone would bother coming on the blog to try to hoax ’em?

I finally found a good description of what’s going on with some of the
more rabid left – it seems to be a combination of paranoia and
projection. Dr. Sanity (she used to work with NASA, btw) has an
interesting post on it here It’s a long one, but worth the time to read.

There has been a series of bizarre conspiracy theories emanating
from anxious leftists for the past 8+ years as they have desperately
attempted to keep the holes in their ideology plugged; and thus
preventing any **reality** from washing over them or flooding their
cognitive processes.

Every time a leak in that ideological dike appears, the
postmodern-progressive-paranoid chewing gum is brought out to plug
it up. The TNG memos were a clever plot by Karl Rove. The Bush
Administration was behind 9/11; Katrina was allowed to destroy New
Orleans because Bush hates blacks. George Bush is about to impose a
theocracy on the unsuspecting U.S. Pat Tillman was murdered because
he wanted to meet with anti-war activist Norm Chomsky. Sarah Palin
is not the mother of Trig and faked her pregnancy. The list of the
paranoid delusions goes on and on and on.

Taken as a whole, they are evidence of an ongoing and determined
refusal to face reality–because it is a reality that threatens the
belief systm of a very large section of the American population.
Without the delusions and conspiracies concocted by the always
creative political left, their whole house of Marxist cards will
come crumbling down.

Some have said that Unwillingness To Face Reality And Its
Consequences is the most serious mental illness of our time; and that is most
certainly true.

The post I referred to on the liberal blog is here – my
posting name was JLawson. I’ve tried posting a couple of other times
there, but my comments disappear in moderation. Oh well.

The left do not want to see that they’re not what they think they are,
or that their ideas aren’t as good as they believe them to be. They
prefer to believe that government’s got a whoppin’ big credit card, and
they can spend as freely as they want without ever having to pay
anything. They prefer to believe that anyone who DOESN’T believe as
they do is evil – not just wrong, or mistaken, or simply offering a
different opinion – they’re EVIL with a capital EV. And sadly, all too
many of them have made their way into our elected aristocracy – and with
their elevation to that lofty position believe that suddenly they’re
beyond their responsibilities to those who put them there.

So, like you, I’m VERY encouraged by the Tea Party phenomena. You’re
right – they ARE scared about it – and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be
trying so blasted hard to discredit them. Same thing with the town hall
meetings – you don’t go through the time and effort and expense to
coordinate and transport your people to block out folks who you think
are being ineffectual – you allocate your resources to take care of a
perceived threat – and the more resources you allocate are a significant
indication of how seriously you take the threat.

The left is scared. Of the right, to be sure – but I think also
somewhat of their own freedom. With no one to basically tell them ‘No’,
what they’re doing now, unfettered, is what they’ve wanted to do for
decades. The results are not what they were hoping, but they have no
ideas other than what they’ve dreamed of for years, so they’ll press on
no matter the cost. But people simply won’t stand by and be silent.
The left realizes they’re waking up the folks they’d rather keep asleep
– but there’s no way to stop it. All they can do is hope for the middle
and right to hit the snooze alarm one more time…

Because if we really wake up – they’re screwed as far as a social
movement goes.

Good luck, and keep up sounding the alarm!

JL

A Set of New Wheels

08. August 2009 · Comments Off on A Set of New Wheels · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir

So it turned out to be fairly painless, finding a sensibly-priced and in good-condition automobile to replace the VEV – which served long, perhaps longer than a good few people close to me, such as my father and daughter felt altogether comfortable with, especially as the frequency of unexpected auto malfunctions leaving me stranded by the roadside had begun to increase. Well, really – I could do the math. The VEV is a 35-year old car, with better than 200,000 miles on it, about the oldest Volvo that my local garage maintained, necessary replacement parts were getting rarer and harder to find – jeeze, even finding a replacement light bulb for the side running light at Riley’s or AutoZone was a flat impossibility, thank god I had a very aged packet of them buried in the bottom of the glove-box. So I considered that the VEV had crossed over the line from “reliable, comfortable, daily transportation” into the category of “classic automobile, carefully maintained and occasionally taken out to drive short distances mostly to show off its very special classic-ness”. Alas, not being well-paid enough from book royalties to keep and maintain that sort of car, it was time (well past time, to hear my daughter Blondie tell it) to move on. I put the VEV on EBay, where it has excited some interest and an acceptable bid from a buyer … and last week I consulted Craigslist and went the rounds of some private sellers, a couple of used car lots and finally wound up with a well-kept 1990 Acura sedan, henceforth to be called the GG, or the Golden Ghost. It has had only one owner, has much lower mileage than would be expected, was top-of-the-line when new, and everything – including the AC works very well, thank you. I don’t think I’ll ever have an entirely new car of any sort, but a 1990 is a considerable of an improvement on a 1974.

The St.Christopher ikon, which the last owner’s wife glued to the dashboard of the VEV, to keep it safe on the roads in Greece (and over all those miles ever since) has been transferred to the Acura, and with luck, the VEV’s new caretaker will be coming to collect it sometime this weekend.

(Comments still frelled … just send an email to me, if you are moved to comment on this once-every two decade phenomenon of me, getting a newer car.)

Talking About Revolution…

06. August 2009 · Comments Off on Talking About Revolution… · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine...

Really, the title of this ought to be “talkin’ ‘bout revolution” but WP does not handle apostrophes or any other weird punctuation in titles for posts. It tends to frell comments, but comments are frelled anyway, but against the moment-hour-day when they are unfrelled… old habits.

Anyway – my point, and I do have a couple – is that a certain shake-up to the established order of several things has been in progress over the last couple of weeks. And having had some small part in bringing a tiny corner of it to pass, I have to say that I am sorta thrilled. And relieved, and reassured … and laughing my ass off at the reaction to the Obama-as-Joker poster. I first saw it early this week, and called in Blondie to have a look: it was disturbing, subversive, and very much to the point, which is good, and going viral, which is even better, because it has tapped into a rich vein of untapped derision for our very own “Dear Leader”. It’s not the first crack in the perfect façade, but it’s the breakout one … and watching the very same people and publications who thought it was just jake to have GW Bush parodied as an ape, a vampire or a NAZI melt-down in hysterics is absolutely rich. As in two-scoops of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey with some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top rich. Talk about an intellectual glass jaw, and people who can dish it out but can’t take it. Not everyone adores the Dear Leader, people – adjust. Let the derision flow, freely. It’s good for the body politic, and for the last eight years weren’t these the same people claiming that dissent was patriotic?

So, the town-meetings held in their home districts by our resident congress-critters are meeting with … shall we say, a somewhat less than cordial reception? That almost universally, the congress-critters are meeting up with constituents who are angry, frustrated and have a mind – as citizens of a free republic – to voice their opinions instead of having said opinion manufactured by so-called public interest groups and lobbyists. And that the congress-critters are having their feewings hurt, by people yelling at them for not reading the damn bill, or the stimulus bill before it. OK, all with me, and all together: Awwww! Tough titty, said the kitty. Deal with it, congress-critters. Remember, we hired you, through elections to work for our best interests, and we actually might have a strong opinion on what that best interest is. Don’t let Washington and the life of privilege inside the Beltway go to your head.

Apparently, some of the brighter sparks in the Democrat Party establishment (Ooops, almost called them the House of Lords!) are sure that everyone protesting current administrations dictates and policies must be hirelings of some anti-national health-care org, or maybe the Republican party, or some malevolent right-winger mirror image of George Soros, or someone. If this is true, can they tell me where and to whom I should turn in my time sheets for work performed over the last five months? And should I charge varying rates for general secretarial work, as I would for drafting news releases, doing radio interviews, and standing on the sidewalk, holding a sign in front of a senator’s office. Can I also charge for prep-time, for TV interviews? What about hastily cleaning up dog-poop in my garden, so that KENS-5 can do a quick stand-up interview? Does that count? Maybe I should have hired someone else to do that, and spread around the wealth a little bit? Let me know, in any case

Finally, a commenter over at the Belmont Club pointed out that maybe it is time for a middle class revolution – our natural elites, of the upper classes in everything – appear to have abandoned everything but the appearance of a democratic republic. Our so-called leaders are happily looking forward to being the oligarchs, feudal nobility, or nomenklatura in whatever would come next, secure in their superiority and their natural ability to rule. Nothing would appear to excite them more than am ability to discipline and silence those uppity lower-classes, that rabble who have the nerve to think they can run their own lives, when really … they didn’t go to the elite schools, know the right people, speak with the correct upper-class accent and mouth the politically-correct verities. It’s up to the remains of the middle class to do it – the poorer are already choke-chained and leashed, with the necessity of earning some kind of living, or by whichever power which controls whatever subsidies they receive. It’s left to us, while we still can, before the serf’s collar is riveted around our necks, and we are no longer free citizens, controlling our own lives and our own property; but rather a species of two-legged, talking sheep, to be sheered whenever the rulers feel the need to pass another subsidy to a well-connected member of it’s own class.

Time for Letting Go

29. July 2009 · Comments Off on Time for Letting Go · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, Memoir

So, it’s come down to this – I have to let go of the Very Elderly Volvo, AKA “The Pumpkin” which I bought from another NCO at EBS-Hellenikon early in 1982. It is a 1975 242 Volvo two-door sedan, which I drove all over Greece and Spain, across Europe and up and down the IH-15 between Southern California and Utah too many times to count, to Albuquerque and back, and from San Diego to San Antonio when we first came to Texas. I’ve had it fixed in five European countries and four Western states, but it is now at the end of it’s reliable life. There are two many little things wrong with it now, things that make it harder to drive, things that I can’t afford to fix, and every essay out of the neighborhood with it was a nerve-wracking experience, both for me, and for Blondie waiting nervously at home. Eventually, and as my daughter repeated pointed out, the likelihood that the VEV would break down in a bad spot, resulting in a degree of personal danger to me had increased dramatically. People had always been kind and helpful, during these incidents, but I really couldn’t go on trusting in Providence and the kindness of strangers for much longer. This had the result of limiting driving the VEV to within city limits – no long road trips, and then to within the radius of a AAA tow to my favored garage. This orbit gradually narrowed – only to the Hellhole job and back, and then one night I had an awful time getting it started. I began borrowing Blondie’s Montero for trips to work, and finally just left the VEV in the driveway, not even risking driving it within the neighborhood. And that essentially negates the whole purpose of having a car, never daring to take it out of the driveway. I had hoped that by this time I might be able to afford to have it rehabbed and made mechanically reliable – and although sales of both Adelsverein and To Truckee’s Trail are gratifyingly steady, neither of them are nowhere near #1 on Amazon.com (More like #100,000, give or take a couple of thousand – nice, but nothing enabling me to quit one of the day jobs.)

So, we’re going to put it up for sale, with the trunkful of spare parts included, in hopes of attracting the interest of someone with a mad passion for re-habbing classic Volvo sedans. I know they are out there, and it may take a bit, with the combined mighty second-hand sales organs of E-Bay and Craigslist. Knowing that Blondie and I were essentially sharing one car, and that our schedules would be completely incompatible, once she goes back to school this fall, Dad offered to straight-up buy me a car last weekend. He specified a budget that he was OK with, and suggested a 90’s Honda Accord with about 150,000 miles on it, as being tops for ease of maintenance and reliability, and old enough to be affordable. So, over the last two days, I ran a fine-toothed comb over all the Craigslist ads in San Antonio offering Honda Accords, and made the discouraging discovery that Dad’s target sales price of $2,000 pretty much limited to me to something not much more reliable than the VEV, and anything less than that was truly a beater. $5,000 seemed to be the going rate for what I really needed, and one dealer advised us that if I located any Accords on the market in decent condition and in good repair for less than that, to jump on it at once. We had actually found one – owned by an elderly lady who’s son was selling it, as she was unable to drive any more. It had high mileage, and needed a new compressor, but was in excellent condition otherwise, and had only the one owner – but as the car dealer had warned, that sold twenty minutes before we were to take a look at it.
Dad and I have settled on a low-mileage 91’ Acura sedan, at a price of a little less than $3,000, through the good offices of a dealer on O’Connor Road. Why we had to drive all over town, before finding the perfect car a mere hop-skip-and-jump from the house is just another one of the ironies. It’s sort of a pale gold color, was high-end with all the bells and whistles when new, the interior features buff-colored leather upholstery (somewhat worn, admittedly) and the exterior is pristine – no dings, dents or scratches. It seems to have had only one owner, who took excellent care of it. I test-drove it yesterday – it has a very smooth ride, turns on a dime, feels much more solid, and the AC works, too.

So, I shall have it by the end of the week, most likely – and perhaps I will feel better about emptying out all the stuff on the VEV – the maps in the glove-box, the odd things in the trunk, washing off the dust and the bird-crap, and taking some pictures of it to appeal to the auto-restorer who will – with luck, decide that he or she wants it for their next project.

Time for letting go. Of everything about the VEV, but the Greek medallion of St. Christopher on the dashboard, which the Greek wife of the guy I bought it from all this time ago stuck there. That goes onto the Acura – it did a good job for thirty years, and should be good for thirty more.

All the News

18. July 2009 · Comments Off on All the News · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

… that’s fit to ignore in the desperate hope that it will go away. So here there was a big Tea Party push on yesterday, to have moderate numbers of Tea Party protesters show up in the street at the local offices of every elected federal official in the land at around midday. Not an inconsiderable effort, considering that it was nationwide, in the middle of a working day, and that most of the people making that effort – at least those of us in San Antonio – have day jobs. Perhaps the hours are flexible, or maybe not – but we all have day jobs. And there were no less than five offices in Greater San Antonio to cover, but we had enough people to send to every one, no need to make a progressive protest from one to one to another. Me, I went to Charlie Gonzalez’ office, in the Federal Building on Durango; it’s my second protest there. At this rate, the policemen routinely on duty there are getting to be old pals with the Tea Partiers. I met about thirty other people there, nice assortment of ages, good mixture of Anglo and Hispanic, including one lady who came with her sister, visiting from out of town who wanted to get in on the Party, and her school-aged daughter. She abominates Charlie Gonzalez, by the way – she has communicated quite often with his office, and received nothing for her pains but mealy-mouthed evasion in print.

So, gather with the flags and signs, stay on the sidewalk and in the shade as much as possible, the guy who organized it had thought to bring a cooler with ice and individual water bottles, and five of us went in to present our petition and a list of questions to the staff in his office. The good Congress-critter was not there, of course. I have to say that although his staff really couldn’t answer any of the questions – the office-manager elected to deal with us had that barely-veiled panicky expression of someone without any real authority or guidance shoved out in front to deal with an unexpected development, and kept referring us to his Washington staff for answers. They were at least courteous and polite. We were not received as the Tea Partiers in St. Louis, where Senator Claire McCaskill’s office staff rolled down the blinds, locked the doors and called the cops — way to treat constituents, people.

(I guaran-damn-tee that every one of those people, their family members, friends and neighbors will remember how they were treated, when election time rolls around, Senator. Word to the wise, and better have a nice sit-down come-to-Jesus talk with your office staff, too)

We fielded about the same numbers to the other federally elected official’s offices in San Antonio– that of John Cornyn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Ciro Rogriguez and Henry Cuellar. From a quick scan of reports and updates on Da Blogfaddah, that looks about par, for protests all across the countryside; mainstream big media news is absent – bizarrely so, considering the cumulative numbers of people, and the numbers of events. Last night, elements of the SA Tea Party was burning up the e-mail, trying to figure out why there was no coverage; not at any one of our events. Nada, zip, zilch, although I had sent out three different releases over the three days before the protest: I know that they were received, and I know that we have gotten coverage before; I had a call from the Spanish-language channel, Univision almost immediately, and someone from KENS 5 called on Thursday morning, who didn’t leave a message and never called back. Perhaps this reporter – about the only newspaper reporter I could find through the miracle of google might have the right explanation of this curious turn of events.

Or, on the other hand, it could be one of those untouchable things like the l’affaire Swiftboat, of the 2004 Presidential campaign, when John Kerry’s wartime Navy comrades all emerged, almost to a man portraying him as the Frank Burns/Eddie Haskell of the Vietnam era Navy Swiftboat service. That was all over the internet, all over the milblogs, and a matter of most lively discussion, barely a word of which emerged into the mainstream print and broadcast media for months.

Still – exasperating to contemplate: simultaneous grass-roots rallies of ordinary and normally non-activist citizens, all across the country – and nary a word in the traditional media. But let ACORN or Moveon.org belch heavily … and like a cheap plaid suit, the camera crews are all over them instanter.

Thursday Random Assortment

16. July 2009 · Comments Off on Thursday Random Assortment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Military, Politics

(Insert ritual apology for apparent disinterest in providing rich bloggy ice-creamy goodness in the way of posts in the last week. Sorry, blog-fans, beat to a crisp, and not for lack of material. Just … well, beat to a crisp and the necessity of earning a living, mixed in with a greater-than-expected number of duties post 4th of July Tea Party…)

Well, I deduce that the income stream for the Southern Poverty Law Center must be drying up, so a new money well must be drilled, somewhere. Dammit, folks, there must be a rich vein of rampaging white bigots somewhere that we can raise a fresh alarm about! Don’t you people realize, we have offices to support, and salaries to be paid! So after much ado, they find no less than forty saddoes on a white-power website who claim to be members of the US military … well, leaving aside the fact that people on the internet can claim any damned thing they like, forty out of what… something like two million active duty and reservists, doesn’t seem like a threat worthy of a whole new massive fund-drive. Now, if Mr. Dees would like to drill farther down, in his mad search for racial extremists who just happen to be members of the military, and consider members of – oh, I don’t know, La Raza and the Black Muslims spring to mind; he might then find numbers worthy of a full-court-press as far as fund-raising goes. Or maybe not – the military has a way of kicking a lot of racist attitudes out of individuals, a peculiar capability of which Mr. Dees seems to be fairly ignorant.

Speaking of the military, now there’s a push on to ban smoking entirely? Hey, good luck with that. Note – I do not smoke, never did smoke, was never event empted to smoke and the smell of it drives me mad, but seriously, are these nanny-state types picking on G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane just because they can? Ohhh, here’s a captive element we can screw around with for their own good, and because it makes us feel well in control of lesser mortals.

Sarah Palin, resigning from the governorship of Alaska … I dunno, but I don’t think she should be written off as a dead duck, just yet. She drives the elite political/media establishment seriously nucking futz, which is good for the rest of us, pointing and laughing at their spasms of incoherent temper. Leading the Tea Party insurgency? Eh – I don’t think it’s a good idea to pin our homes on one person, one shining leader on a white horse out in front. Seriously, they’re too good a target. I like better the idea of a thousand anonymous leaders, all moving in more or less the same direction. Relentless, swift-moving and unstoppable, too many for the usual media attack machine to concentrate fire upon: We are all Spartacus. No one holds a leash on us, we are beholden to no political combine, the usual political observers have never heard of us in a meaningful way until now. Spartacus – that’s the way to go.

Oh, and if anyone has read the Adelsverein Trilogy, and loved it, can you post a review on Amazon.com? Pretty please? Reviews – even just short ones – generate interest, which generates sales, which move me closer the day that I can quit the hell-hole. (And spend more time working on the next book!) Thanks!

Life is Good….

15. July 2009 · Comments Off on Life is Good…. · Categories: Domestic, General

It’s 3pm on a weekday afternoon, a balmy 85-ish Farenheit here in the Hotlanta area, and as I sit here attending a webinar on my computer, I’m watching the birds exploring my back yard, and the dogs sleeping beside my chair.

I love being able to work from home, for the most part, and even though it’s a little muggy out here on the back porch, it’s not often I can indulge myself this way. It just happens that I’m attending today, instead of facilitating, so I don’t have to worry about extraneous noise going out over the audio channel.

Yeah, I have to listen to the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower or weed-eater, but that *just* kicked in – for the most part, it’s been very quiet out here this afternoon.

Every now and again, a juvenile ruby-throat hummingbird will visit my feeder – it brightens my heart every time he shows up. In my 8 years in Georgia, this is the first time a hummer has deigned to accept my sugar-water. Unfortunately, the pictures I’ve taken are poor-quality – I’m taking them from the back porch, through the screen.

hummer

Earlier this summer, I got to watch the young bluebirds leave their house for the first time – the other day, I got to watch a couple young bluebirds thoroughly enjoying my home-made birdbath. I stacked several terra-cotta flowerpots upside down on each other, and glued a saucer to the top of it. The bluebirds were DELIGHTED. Again, that’s not something it’s been my pleasure to see before.

birdbath

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of the previous owners of my house, and silently thank them for the screened-in back porch (complete with ceiling fan). I spend a couple hours out here each morning, with my coffee and either a book or a notepad. Friends who are accustomed to only receiving emails from me have been astounded to find hand-written letters in their snail-mailboxes.

Most of the letters have been long and involved, detailed descriptions of the changes I’ve made to my yard since buying this house in February. I’ve been living here for almost 2 years now, on a lease-purchase agreement, so I’ve had plenty of time to plan yard changes.

Since late March, I’ve planted 10 trees (8 are still doing very well), probably two dozen shrubs of various types, and uncounted seeds. My little Mantis Tiller and I have created a “wildlife garden” that is around 1000 sq ft in size. I’m trying to plant things there that will appeal to our native birds, hummingbirds, butterflies, and other critters. The butterflies haven’t shown much interest yet, but the birds seem to be loving it.

I had a Bradford Pear next to the house when I moved in – it was near the end of its lifespan in fall 2007, and gave up the ghost about 3 weeks ago. So for now, I’ve scattered sunflower seeds where it used to stand, and I’ll give myself until fall to decide on a replacement for it.

My focus is on native, non-invasive plants, that will look nice for the neighbors, and provide homes/food/shelter for the local critters. I have red-bellied woodpeckers living in the sweetgum tree in my backyard, cooper and red-shoulder hawks in the vicinity, and last spring I saw a pileated woodpecker in the trees behind my back fence.

My lot is just under an acre, mostly lawn, but there’s a bit at the back behind the fence that is still the original woodlands. I have 2 neighbors who share that wooded section, and we all do our best to just leave it alone, and let it be the critter-haven that it needs to be. Critters have a hard time in today’s urban environment — I’m delighted to share my little bit of Georgia with them.

I’m watching it rain, now – the hard, fast thunderstorms of a humid summer afternoon. And as I sit here looking for a gracefull summation of this stream of consciousness post, a way to tie the thoughts together in a coherent ending, all that comes to mind is a Louie Armstrong song:

“And I think to myself… .what a wonderful world.”

Indeed it is, Satchmo, indeed it is.

Texas Tea Party

06. July 2009 · Comments Off on Texas Tea Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, Tea Time

Well, I can’t use the “meanwhile, back at the ranch” line, since I used it for the last post – but the 4th of July Tea party at the Rio Cibolo Ranch went pretty well. We had a crowd of 5,000 turn out, in hundred-degree plus heat, to sit under the trees and in the main pavilion, listening to the bands and to our speakers … oh, dear, it was a long program, and having the opening ceremonies start in the late afternoon – when the heat is at the absolute worst – was not such a bright idea. But we had a lot to go through, and the bands played sets in between times, to break up the solid walls of talk, and everyone sat around drinking cool drinks. The kids played in the shade and ran around doing those kid games, with Frisbees and rode in a tractor-pulled wagon sitting on bales of hay … I think every time I looked beyond the edge of the crowd it was to see that wagon go past, full of kids. I imagine they were taking the kids down to the meadow where a herd of longhorns are pastured … that and the buffalo. Yes, the ranch has a buffalo – and darned as if it doesn’t stand exactly in the same pose as the buffalo on their logo.

I had sort of a press rendezvous point, behind one of the small banquet-halls, with a terrace cantilevered out over the edge of Cibolo Creek, which is fairly deep and looks like pale green jade, at that point. There was a nice breeze, which came just often enough to take the edge off the heat. I spent some of the first part of the party there, with my blog-pal, The Fat Guy, and a crew from Univision – a cameraman and a newscaster, a slender young woman who was the only woman I saw during the whole day with the courage to wear high heels. Otherwise, it was sandals, crocks and tennis. TFG posted his report here, and his pictures here, so you can pretty much get the idea of what the main venue looked like for much of the day. There were three other TV stations there also – the local affiliates of ABC, CBS and Fox, and a writer and cameraman from the Express News – the cameraman took a lovely series of photos –much nicer than anything I could have taken (Link here

Of course, the biggest element in the program was Governor Perry signing off on our “Contract with the Constitution” – a statement of principles, which we would like to present to every elected politician or prospective politician. If they sign off on it – good and well; if not … well, then, that says something. And if they sign off on it, and then don’t keep to it … that says something else. Up until the last minutes, we were under the impression that he would just zoom right in, introduce Marcus Luttrell, sign off on the Contract and zoom out again. He actually stayed for about three hours, some of it in rustic little banquet hall where the VIP dinner was being held, and the rest in the backstage area. When the VIP dinner was over and a lot of the guests were scattering to their seats in front of the stage, Blondie and I went and bought plates of chopped brisket on a bun from the food vendor, and brought them in to eat in the relative coolness of the hall. We sat next to the elderly lady known to us all as Matt’s Mom; Matt is the webmaster for the Tea Party Committee. His Mom comes to all the meetings and events with him. On Matt’s Mom’s other side was Other Matt, the husband of another Committee member who was wearing his 82nd Airborne baseball cap. After a bit, Governor Perry came over, and pulled up a chair opposite and began ragging on Other Matt, the old paratrooper for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes; the Governor had been an Air Force transport pilot, it transpired. So we had quite a frivolous and merry conversation, with Blondie ragging back at him, when he confessed that he had broken a collarbone lately in a bike accident – but not a motorcycle, a mountain bike, and I recommended that he give up on the VIP chicken dinner, and try some of the brisket from the vendor outside. Not quite sure why he glommed on to us, out of the people left in the hall – possibly because we didn’t want to talk politics or ask for a picture.

Anyway, eventually we went outside to the back stage, with bottles and bottles of ice water, and waited everyone’s turn to make their speeches, and the Governor to sign off on the contract. … It turns out that Senator Jeff Wentworth was also there, and also signed off on the Contract, only I was too busy taking pictures. Blondie took a good picture of Evan Sayet, and I took a very nice one of Steve Vaus, with his guitar in hand, waiting to go on at the very last. (With luck, they will be up on the Tea Party website soon.) And then after that, there were fireworks, quite spectacular and very close, appearing just over the top of the main pavilion, and neatly framed by a pair of trees. It was near to a full moon; after sundown the heat slackened until it was just comfortably warm. All in all, I think most people had a wonderful time at the party – the news coverage was good, and the Rio Cibolo people were very pleased. It would be nice to come back every year and do a 4th of July party there; but maybe start later in the day. The heat was so bad, and we both spent so much time running around in it, we were still exhausted on Sunday.

Resolved…

04. July 2009 · Comments Off on Resolved… · Categories: Domestic, General, History

…That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances. That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

The above resolution was unanimously passed in Congresss on July 2, 1776. On July 4, 1776, the following men pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to accomplish the resolution they approved on the 2nd. Remember them today, in the midst of your barbecues, car races, and family reunions. Remember their courage, and be grateful for the wonderful gift they gave to us, 233 years ago.

Connecticut
* Roger Sherman
* Samuel Huntington
* William Williams
* Oliver Wolcott

Delaware
* Caesar Rodney
* George Read
* Thomas McKean

Georgia
* Button Gwinnett
* Lyman Hall
* George Walton

Maryland
* Samuel Chase
* William Paca
* Thomas Stone
* Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Massachusetts
* John Hancock
* Samual Adams
* John Adams
* Robert Treat Paine
* Elbridge Gerry

New Hampshire
* Josiah Bartlett
* William Whipple
* Matthew Thornton

New Jersey
* Richard Stockton
* John Witherspoon
* Francis Hopkinson
* John Hart
* Abraham Clark

New York
* William Floyd
* Philip Livingston
* Francis Lewis
* Lewis Morris

North Carolina
* William Hooper
* Joseph Hewes
* John Penn

Pennsylvania
* Robert Morris
* Benjamin Rush
* Benjamin Franklin
* John Morton
* George Clymer
* James Smith
* George Taylor
* James Wilson
* George Ross

Rhode Island
* Stephen Hopkins
* William Ellery

South Carolina
* Edward Rutledge
* Thomas Heyward, Jr.
* Thomas Lynch, Jr.
* Arthur Middleton

Virginia
* George Wythe
* Richard Henry Lee
* Thomas Jefferson
* Benjamin Harrison
* Thomas Nelson, Jr.
* Francis Lightfoot Lee
* Carter Braxton

Just For Fun

18. June 2009 · Comments Off on Just For Fun · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, sarcasm

I’t been around for a bit, but I thought you all might enjoy the worlds’ shortest slasher flic –

The News Making Machinery

10. June 2009 · Comments Off on The News Making Machinery · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Local, Politics, Tea Time

I am reminded this morning of the old axiom about law and sausage – if you are fond of either one of them you’d best not watch either one being made This also applies to news; if you are a consumer of it, you just don’t want to watch it being made. And also of the other understanding, so often noted by bloggers recently: that would be the one about how one can be intimately involved in an event, or even just present at it – but the way that brief snippets are presented afterward by the news media present something so different from what you experienced.

All righty, then – yesterday, elements of the San Antonio Tea Party had a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s office in downtown San Antonio: basically, our aim was to encourage him to step up to the plate when it came to reviewing Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s fitness for the Supreme Court.

This was how the story played on one local news channel which covered it:

And the local Fox affiliate (which doesn’t have the video portion of the story in easily linkeable format wrote it up this way, on their website:

“The confirmation hearing for supreme court justice nominee. Sonya Sotomayor is now set for July 13th. Here in San Antonio, those in favor and against her nomination confronted each other in front of Senator John Cornyn’s office. As Yami Virgin shows us. The exchange got so heated police had to get involved.”

Yep – for about ten minutes we had a dueling bullhorn thing going on, between our group and about three pro-Sotomayor partisans; one of whom was, so one of the policemen told me, a professional protester of long-experience and an even longer arrest record. And yes, they did step in and tell us all very firmly to stop it with the bullhorns. Not that it stopped the protest in the least, for despite how the news channels framed it – the protest went on for another hour or so, albeit at a lower decibel level.

And where, you ask, was your fearless media rep, Sgt. Mom, in all of this? Oh, yes – I was there too, not that there is much evidence on the final edited video coverage on either of the news reports, and yes, I did look for any evidence that I was. I’m not completely without vanity, you know, and I had dressed up a bit. I did spend a good few minutes in front of their cameras. Efficiently, both camera crews taped me, side by side; which was nice, as I didn’t have to repeat myself. I was speaking in quiet and reasonable tones, outlining the various reasons that we had for doing this, our very real reservations about Justice Sotomayer’s ability to be fair and impartial, given her record in various cases, and her associations and assorted public statements. And yes, Senator Cornyn is theoretically one of the good guys, but we wished to remind him of who he worked for, that we were constituents with issues that we wanted to see addressed, and apparently the only way to get the attention of Washington insiders these days – as well as that of the legacy news media – was to make a fuss on the sidewalk.

All of this, as I said – in quiet, respectful and measured tones… none of which wound up being included in the finished broadcast stories. Of course; passion and raised voices draw the eyeballs, shedding lots of heat and not much light on the subject.

I have better hopes for serious consideration from the two guys with the cable access show, who spent some serious time with everyone – even taping a long dialog between one of our members and one of the Sotomayor partisans, a conversation which was conducted with decorum and which will probably turn out to be much more informative, all the way around.

Oh, and we did present a petition with a great many signatures to one of Senator Cornyn’s assistants – a young man who seemed to be acquainted with the concept of ‘mau mauing the flack catchers’ if not the actual literary reference , so it wasn’t all a wasted effort.

I Thought It Was Your Turn

13. May 2009 · Comments Off on I Thought It Was Your Turn · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Military

So, I rather giggled over this link, courtesy of Da Blogfadddah this morning, about a funky breakroom refrigerator, the righteous cleansing of which sent seven people to the hospital, and grossed-out everyone else within smelling range; I’d bet anything that some sort of air intake vent was within or near the area in question, and that was how everyone in the building got to share the experience. That’s how it worked but in a pleasant way, at AFKN-Seoul. Our microwave was directly underneath such, and whenever anyone nuked a bag of popcorn, everyone else in the building would smell it and get hungry; one person would set off a whole chain reaction of other personnel with the serious munchies.

I don’t recall the unit refrigerator there having a serious funk; unless it might have been momentarily generated by the Korean staff’s kimchee box lunches. But bless them all, Miss Radio Yi, Miss TV Yi, Miss Finance Office Yi, Mr. Pak, Yu Mi the Receptionist and all the others, even the Boot Odishi – they were all terrifically fastidious about all that sort of thing. Never any qualms or worries about the AFKN refrigeration, but I couldn’t say the same about the previous unit refrigerator, at Det 8, Hill AFB Combat Camera.

We had a nice little break room there, with a television, and shelves for all the little snack items sold by the unit snack fund; an assortment that was so varied and usually so well-stocked that frequently had people from other units wandering in to buy their candy bars, snack cakes, soft-drinks and bottled ice teas from it. Alas, the refrigerator often fell far below the standard held by the rest of the break room. Well, what can you expect, when there are nearly a hundred people in the unit, counting military and civilians, TDY visitors and all, many of whom bring a lunch and store it in the refrigeration? It is just one of the immutable laws of the universe that leftovers will be forgotten, that healthy bits of fruit will be forgotten in the bins, to grow mushy and disgusting, and that whole colonies of mold will stake out new territories inside plastic containers, and bottles of condiments will be abandoned, far, far after their “best-if-used-by-date”. Eventually, when people passing by in the corridor outside the break room could detect the funk from the refrigerator – which happened about every month or so – someone would be voluntold to sort it out.

This usually translated to posting a notice on the fridge, notifying everyone of the date, warning them if they didn’t remove, they would loose – then arming oneself with a large double-weight trashbag on the chosen day and ruthlessly dumping everything left into it. The refrigerator usually didn’t have much sticky crud stuck to the shelves or bins, so a quick wipe-down with Clorox and hot water usually did the trick, setting up a fairly clean slate until next time.

But on one particular occasion, the reek from the fridge was especially noticeable; it had a sort of grab-around-the-throat-and-squeeze power about it, and was reaching a considerable distance down the central hallway in either direction. Obviously, there was something especially rancid, simmering away in the back forty of the refrigerator – and just by luck, I was the one administering the monthly cleansing. Really, I didn’t find anything much out of line, until I got to a thick plastic zip-lock bag, pushed to the back of one of the lower shelves … and there it was. I knew as soon as I maneuvered it carefully out of the refrigerator and towards my trash bag, swathing it in another couple of layers of plastic, just for good luck.

Before I did that, I called in some witnesses – I wanted to make sure that everyone else saw it as well; an 18-20 inch long whole fish, head, scales, tail and all, gone impressively rotten, but still recognizable, in about a cupful of unspeakably murky fluid. Everyone agreed, looking at it and uneasily at each other, that someone had gone fishing over the weekend, several weeks previously. For some reason, they brought in the fish to the unit – perhaps to present to someone else – and then forgotten it in the break room fridge.

Well, no wonder the smell was so bad, that month, with a dead fish molding away in the back.

Tea Party Hearty (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued)

San Antonio Tea Party Promo

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

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

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

A Simple, Dog-related Question

13. January 2009 · Comments Off on A Simple, Dog-related Question · Categories: Critters, Domestic, General, The Funny

What do you call a little doggy who is the result of a cross between a chihuahua and a Shi-tzu? (and what would you give to have not been present at that moment, the barking would have been deafening!?)

Blondie and I spotted one, in Fredericksburg last weekend – kinda cute, actually. But small, and probably yappy. The best we came up with was

(wait for it …. drumroll, please…)

A ‘Cheet-zu!’

Any other suggestions?

Just because…

23. December 2008 · Comments Off on Just because… · Categories: Domestic, General, World

It’s mid-winter and bleak and cold, and almost Christmas.



(Found through a couple of links, through The Belmont Club and The Virginian)

And going from the sublime to the low-rent, there’s this…

(Courtesy of Chicagoboyz)

A Deep-dyed Villian

21. December 2008 · Comments Off on A Deep-dyed Villian · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, World

He really was a black hat, this particular villain; he was known and recognized throughout the district – around mid 19th century Fredericksburg and the German settlements in Gillespie County – by a fine, black beaver hat. Which was not furry, as people might tend to picture immediately – but made of felt, felt manufactured from the hair scraped from beaver pelts. This had been the fashion early in the 19th century, and made a fortune for those who sent trappers and mountain-men into the far, far west, hunting and trapping beaver. The fashion changed – and the far-west fur trade collapsed, but I imagine that fine hats were still made from beaver felt. And J.P. Waldrip was so well known by his hat that he was buried with it.

There is not very much more known about him, for certain. I resorted to making up a good few things, in making him the malevolent presence that he is in “The Adelsverein Trilogy” – a psychopath with odd-colored eyes, a shifty character, suspected of horse-thievery and worse. I had found a couple of brief and relatively unsubstantiated references to him as a rancher in the Hill Country, before the Civil War, of no fixed and definite address. That was the frontier, the edge of the white man’s civilization. Generally the people who lived there eked out a hardscrabble existence as subsistence farmers, running small herds of near-wild cattle. There was a scattering of towns – mostly founded by the German settlers who filled up Gillespie County after the late 1840s, and spilling over into Kendall and Kerr counties. The German settlers, as I have written elsewhere, brought their culture with them, for many were educated, with artistic tastes and sensibilities which contrasted oddly with the comparative crudity of the frontier. They were also Unionists, and abolitionists in a Confederate state when the Civil War began – and strongly disinclined to either join the Confederate Army, or take loyalty oaths to a civil authority that they detested. Within a short time, those German settlers were seen as traitors, disloyal to the Southern Cause, rebellious against the rebellion. And they paid a price for that; the price was martial law imposed on the Hill Country, and the scourge of the hangerbande, the Hanging Band. The Hanging Band was a pro-Confederate lynch gang, which operated at the edges of martial law- and perhaps with encouragement of local military authorities.

J.P. Waldrip was undoubtedly one of them – in some documents he is described as a captain, but whether that was a real military rank, or a courtesy title given to someone who raised a company for some defensive or offensive purpose remains somewhat vague. None the less, he was an active leader among those who raided the settlements along Grape Creek, shooting one man and hanging three others – all German settlers, all of them of Unionist sympathies. One man owned a fine horse herd, another was known to have money, and the other two had been involved in a land dispute with pro-Confederate neighbors. Waldrip was also recognized as being with a group of men who kidnapped Fredericksburg’s schoolteacher, Louis Scheutze from his own house in the middle of town, and took him away into the night. He was found hanged, two days later – his apparent crime being to have objected to how the authorities had handled the murders of the men from Grape Creek. It was later said, bitterly, that the Hanging Band had killed more white men in the Hill Country during the Civil War than raiding Indians ever did, before, during and afterwards.

And two years after the war ended, J.P. Waldrip appeared in Fredericksburg. No one at this date can give a reason why, when he was hated so passionately throughout the district, as a murderer, as a cruel and lawless man. He must have known this, known that his life might be at risk, even if the war was over. This was the frontier, where even the law-abiding and generally cultured German settlers went armed. Why did he think he might have nothing to fear? Local Fredericksburg historians that I put this question to replied that he was brazen, a bully – he might have thought no one would dare lift a hand against him, if he swaggered into town. Even though the Confederacy had lost the war, and Texas was under a Reconstruction government sympathetic to the formerly persecuted Unionists – what if he saw it as a dare, a spit in the eye? Here I am – what are y’all going to do about it?

What happened next has been a local mystery every since, although I – and the other historical enthusiasts are certain that most everyone in town knew very well who killed J.P. Waldrip. He was shot dead, and fell under a tree at the edge of the Nimitz Hotel property. The tree still exists, although the details of the story vary considerably: he was seen going into the hotel, and came out to smoke a quiet cigarette under the tree. No, the shooter saw him going towards the hotel stable, perhaps to steal a horse. No, he was being pursued by men of the town, after the Sherriff had passed the word that he was an outlaw, and that anyone killing him would face no prosecution from the law. Waldrip was shot by a sniper, from the cobbler’s shop across Magazine Street – no, by another man, from the upper floor of another building, diagonally across Main Street. He was felled by a single bullet and died instantly, or lived long enough to plead “Please don’t shoot me any more”. I have created yet another rationale for his presence, and still another dramatic story of his end under the oak tree next to the Nimitz Hotel. I have a feeling this version will, over time be added to the rest. Everyone who knew the truth about who shot Waldrip, why he came back to town, how the town was roused against him, and what happened afterwards, all those people took the knowledge of those matters to their own graves, save for tantalizing hints left here and there for the rest of us to find. The whole matter about who actually fired the shot was kept secret for decades, for fear of reprisals from those of his friends and kin who had survived the war. This was Texas, after all, where feuds and range wars went on for generations.

So James P. Waldrip was buried – with his hat – first in a temporary grave, not in the town cemetery – and then moved to a secret and ignominious grave on private property. The story is given so that none of his many enemies might be tempted to desecrate it, but I think rather to make his ostracism plain and unmistakable, in the community which he and his gang had persecuted.

As noted, the Adelsverein Trilogy is now loosed into the wilds of the book-purchasing public. All three volumes are now available through Amazon.com: Book One here, Book Two here ( wherein the Civil War in the Hill Country is painted in great detail) and Book Three, in which Waldrip recieves his just desserts, under a tree by the Nimitz Hotel Stables.

Books, Books and More Books

18. December 2008 · Comments Off on Books, Books and More Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Local, World

After a good deal of agonizing and back and forth with Angela at Booklocker, all three volumes of the Trilogy are up and in stock at Amazon – which is kind of a relief, since most fans who want to buy them on-line will buy them there, Amazon.com is apparently becoming the Walmart/Target/Costco of on-line shops. That is, in the sense that the place is mind-blowingly huge, and has everything imaginable and at a competitive price, but unlike them in the sense that it is completely automated and you can never find a real human when there is a problem. And also there are no senior citizens in a felt Santa cap and plastic gloves offering samples of chocolate cake or cocktail nibbles.

The PJ media rep very kindly added all four of my books to the Christmas Shop page for books. I might yet get some sales out of it, although it is hard to tell, other than the sales rank for them bobbing up and down like yo-yos from one day to the next. This week, being the week when the Trilogy is properly launched in the neighborhood where it all happened, a hundred years ago and more, the action is in local bookstores. Traditionally it’s difficult for POD books to get a toe-hold in brick-and-mortar bookstores, unless the writer buys copies in bulk and puts them on consignment. The wholesale discount from the retail price of the book is pretty steep, usually starting at 40% , and with a guarantee of return of all unsold copies – traditional bookstores have overhead and a budget, you know. Unless they have a darned good reason to stock a local author, and some assurance that those books will fly out the door, it’s consignment all the way. The economic burden is placed on the author to prove at his or her expense that the book will sell.

This time around, in writing about the Hill Country, I seem to have hit upon that winning formula. All my consignment copies for the launch event last week sold – all but a single copy of Book One – before I even walked in the door at the Twig. They have ordered five more of each, and bought them outright from Booklocker. This is at some expense, and without guarantee of return of whose copies with don’t sell… but last week proved to everyone’s satisfaction that they would sell. Hell, they took pre-paid orders from at least three people at the signing. Berkman’s Books in Fredericksburg have also bought outright no less than ten copies of each for a signing event on Friday and emailed me to say they wish they could afford fifty, for interest is getting pretty intense. There was a notice last week in the Fredericksburg paper, with a line at the bottom that the Adelsverein trilogy was endorsed by the local German Heritage Foundation. A bit of a thrill actually, for this may inspire even more descendents of old-time families in Gillespie County to buy a copy to see if I have made mention of their ancestors. A bookstore on Main Street which specializes in Texiana also wants to stock the Trilogy, and so does another one in Kerrville, which request came out of the blue, after the owners saw the notice. The first weekend in January, I will have a talk at Fredericksburg’s Pioneer Museum, for which the bookstore manager there has bought an amazing quantity of copies. He also promised to bring out some of the exhibits in the museum that had given me ideas for possessions of the Steinmetz and Richter families.

After Christmas, I will start on getting the Trilogy carried in other areas with a local tie-in. Yeah, an imminent depression/recession/economic reversal (or whatever the newscasters want to call it) is a heck of a time to start trying to sell books in a big way, but I note that it didn’t stop Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind.

I’d write a few hundred pithy words about current politics, with Obama, Blagojovich, and Caroline Kennedy, but I’m afraid it would all boil down to “what the hell did you expect, people?! Obama is out of Chicago machine politics, and didn’t I say so months ago?” I’ll give that dead horse carcass a couple of vigorous thwacks at a later date, but right now, I care more about my books and Christmas, in that order.

Decking The Halls…

08. December 2008 · Comments Off on Decking The Halls… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Military

…and the boughs, and the front of the house. Blondie and I are staying in Texas this Christmas, so we got out the Christmas tree and the various tubs of ornaments, and strings of lights. I can’t claim that we do anything remotely like the full Griswald when it comes to Christmas cheer, but we do put together a very nice traditional tree, with presents underneath and all. It’s an artificial tree – sorry. The only live trees available in Texas are half-dead by the time they are bought, are hideously expensive and shed needles all over, coming and going. The current tree is, alas, artificial and sheds needles (in the form of narrow, needle-like slips of plastic) – but was not expensive, even the first year that Blondie bought it. And it actually looks very nice, once decorated, and with equally artificial springs of poinsettia inserted between the branches, to fill in the gaps. We will leave the giant inflatables, the miles of lights, the bows and the herds of wire-form deer, the banners and ribbons and all to the various enthusiastic neighbors. Really, I wonder what the Chinese workers who manufacture this stuff think of it all … the giant inflatable Santa riding a Harley, the teeter-totter with Santa on one end, and three fabric reindeer on the other, and the eight-foot tall snow-globe a family of carolers and a blizzard of plastic fluff whirling around inside. Probably wonder about the sanity of the American consumer, not to mention their aesthetic taste. Frankly, I haven’t got the energy that some of them have, to redecorate seasonally – not just at Christmas, but every month.

I do like our own Christmas tree, though – it’s quirky, just like Mom and Dad’s tree used to be, with a similar accretion of ornaments. When Mom and Dad’s house in Valley Center burned some years ago in the Paradise fire, one of the first things that Blondie and I thought about missing was the Christmas stuff. At the time, we were pretty sure that some things had been saved out of Mom and Dad’s house. After all, we had been drilled on the eventuality of fire for years. We were fairly certain that in such an emergency, no one would spare a thought for three crumbling cardboard boxes full of Christmas stuff, stashed in the rafters of the garage – the garage which turned out to have been the first to go up in flames. Gone the 1930’s Santa-Claus lights and the crumbling four-colored printed carton they had come in, decades since. Gone the Anri Christmas angels that I had sent from Italy, the pipe-cleaner and bead ornaments that JP and I had constructed in grade school, the assorted blown-glass balls, the red and white stockings with our names knitted into the tops, which Granny Jessie had done for each of us; for Mom and Dad when they married and produced us all. Gone the hand-knit stocking for Blondie that I had bought for her at a craft-fair in Utah, with a black kitten knitted into the pattern, and her name that I had added in chain-stitch… all of that gone to ashes, which were scraped up by a bulldozer and carried away, in preparation for rebuilding the house.

Our traditional Christmas stuff is now devolved on my own collection, as eccentric as ever my parents assembled, for I now have a record of celebrating thirty years of Christmasses on my own, and all the ornaments to go with it. I only occasionally was back at Mom and Dad’s for Christmas during the time that I was overseas. In the meantime, in between time, I generated my own collection. The oldest of the lot – thirty felt-covered round ornaments, trimmed with lace, gilt ribbons, fake seed-pearls and jewels, to adorn the little plastic tree in my room in the barracks in Japan, when I first went overseas. These were augmented with a flock of little birds, made of satin and ornamented with silk embroidery – they came from India, and I bought them at a base Christmas bazaar at about the same time. Both sets have proved fairly indestructible – since they can stand a drop to a hard floor. For a couple of years while in Greece I bought a single box of ornaments from one of the high-end catalogue retailers every year: the paper-mache globes covered with red and green curlicues, the stuffed teddy-bears with little scarves, and the vintage wooden airplanes are from that period; the airplanes looked especially fine, hanging from the ends of the branches, as if they were whirling in some endless tree-shaped dog-fight. There are the terra-cotta ornaments from Portugal that look like ginger-cookies, and dozens of traditional German wooden ornaments; little Santas on the backs of whales, or in the basket of a dirigible, angels and little sleds with piles of presents, Father Time with a tiny golden key… all those bought when we were in Spain and I went TDY to Germany every January for a broadcasting conference. A handful of Anri flying angels – those bought when we passed through Rome on our way to Spain. All very traditional and conventional … until we get to the three Enterprise spaceships, and the shuttle-craft, with their tiny blinking lights. I bought the first of those when we came back to the States, the very year they brought the Star Trek ornaments out. I wish I had a Tardis ornament, but I don’t even know if they make one. The rest of the tree is filled with things bought on sale, usually after Christmas and saved for the next year. Blondie contributed four blown-glass ornaments she bought in Egypt, when she went there in 2001 for Bright Star. Those are hung very carefully at the top of the tree, being not nearly as hard-wearing as my own first Christmas ornaments.

It’s more than a Christmas tree – it’s a sort of family history, a history that only families know.

Orbiting Speed In the Writers Life Waltz

06. December 2008 · Comments Off on Orbiting Speed In the Writers Life Waltz · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Light posting this week, for which I apologize lavishly once again – but this is the last week that I have to prepare for the launch of the heralded “Adelsverein Trilogy” – about which I have banged on about here for much of the last two years. Anyone who came to this blog looking for insights into late 20th century military culture must have been disappointed beyond belief by my excessive interest and scribblings about 19th century Texas history. Sorry about that, but people move on. I wrote a book based on entries in this blog, then another, and then I decided I liked writing novels so much that I took on a trilogy about the German settlements in 19th century Texas, the last volume of which achieved 500 print pages and was so thick that when I unwrapped my final print proof, I could only look at it and think in disbelief ‘I wrote all of that?!’ (for which my current editor would ding me for double usage; either a question mark or an exclamation point. Including both are superfluous.)

So, I took my publishers’ advice, and finished polishing and editing all three, to be available this month… next week, as a matter of fact. The first two books have been on, and then off, and then on again, as regards the behemoth internet book retailing All three were just set up this day on Booklocker (here, here and here) – although it is one of those funny turns of the modern publishing game that I actually have two publishers. The ISBN, the editing and the marketing is through Strider Nolan, and it says ‘Strider Nolan’ on the books, but the cover design, interior formatting, and the actual mechanics of supplying copies will be handled by Booklocker. All clear? Yeah, I know — it’s an odd situation, but then the current way of getting books published and out there seems to be melting down and reforming. It’s pretty well acknowledged now that unless you are one of the mega-biggie authors, you’re pretty well got to market your book yourself, scrounge the reviews, set up the signings, generate the postcards, flyers, book-markers yourself. Having the aegis of Strider Nolan on the Adelsverein Trilogy might have made it a little easier to get reviews in publications which otherwise might have shied off from the Booklocker Brand. Like the local newspaper – the San Antonio Express News, so I was informed loftily a couple of years ago – does not review publish-on-demand books. The implication that all such were low-quality, unprofessional offerings of limited appeal. Eh… we’ll see. Lately it seems that the best independently published books are getting better and better, just as the traditional publishers are going moribund, and their books more formulaic. Insisting on sticking to the same-old same-old strikes me as someone insisting absolutely on first-class tickets for the Titanic… even as the ship slowly sinks.

On Friday I began mailing all those copies of autographed copies of the trilogy to all of those who had pre-ordered over the last couple of months. After hitting the post office, I had a box, full of five copies of each volume to take to the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights; extras to have on consignment, in case the copies they had ordered for the launch signing on Thursday didn’t arrive. The management was glad to see them – everyone is getting pretty excited over the Trilogy, what with the local tie-in and all. There were some customers in the Twig, and they got excited, too. One of said customers immediately bought an autographed set as a Christmas present, saying that she hoped she had time to read all three before she had to wrap them up and give them to the person they were inscribed for. Not bad – the signing isn’t for another six days, and already the copies are flying out the door. I have another signing the following week at Berkman’s in Fredericksburg, still another at a large Borders bookstore here in San Antonio over the weekend before Christmas, a small bookstore in Fredericksburg which specializes in Texiana wants to stock them, the Pioneer Museum is also planning an event the first weekend after New Years… and I sent a copy of the first book to the manager of the Sophienburg Museum in New Braunfels – they might be interested in another event in January. No bites from the manager of the museum at the Goliad, though. Pity – the whole saga starts just there, and I drew a lot of information for that first chapter out of their website.

Unfortunately, I won’t see any royalty income from these various events, and from Booklocker until next month… and I have a couple of bills coming due. None of the places that Blondie applied for are hiring temporary help for this Christmas season, and my hours at the corporate call center have been cut as well. Not as many people making holiday reservations, apparently. If anyone else would like to order autographed copies, or make a donation through paypal, I would be ever so grateful. The next few weeks are going to be horribly busy, terrifically gratifying to me as a writer, and enormously promising … but a little tight on actual disposable income, otherwise.

The Mild, Mild West

02. December 2008 · Comments Off on The Mild, Mild West · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Old West

I succumbed to the blandishments of the overloaded bookshelves at Half-Price Books last Friday, whilst getting a good price on some redundant DVDs. I just knew I shouldn’t have wandered into the section housing assortments of ‘Texiana’ but I did and I was tempted. Since I can resist anything but temptation, I gave in and bought a slightly oversized volume (with color plates!) with the gripping title of “German Artist on the Texas Frontier: Friedrich Richard Petri” for a sum slightly less than the current price on Amazon.

Who was Friedrich Richard Petri, you might ask – and rightfully so for chances are practically no one outside of the local area might have heard of him, he finished very few substantial paintings, was only resident in the Hill Country of Texas for about seven years, and died relatively young.

He was one of those student intellectuals caught up in the ferment of the 1848, along with his friend and fellow-artist (and soon to be brother-in-law) Hermann Lungkwitz. Upon the failure of that movement to reduce the power of the old nobility in favor of something more closely resembling a modern democracy, the two of them resolved to immigrate to America, that promising new land. Once there, they settled upon traveling Texas, where the Adelsverein had previously established substantial enclaves of German settlers, and the weather was supposed to be particularly mild – a consideration, for Richard was plagued by lung ailments. Besides Hermann’s wife, Petri’s sister Elisabet, other members of their had families joined them: Hermann’s widowed mother, and his brother and sister, and Petri’s other sister, Marie. They would become part of the second wave of settlers in the Hill Country; probably just as well, because neither of the Lungkwitz men or Richard Petri had any skill or inclination towards farming, or any other useful pioneering skill. Hermann and Friedrich were artists, Adolph Lungkwitz was a trained metalsmith and glass fabricator.

Traveling by easy stages down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then presumably by regular packet boat to Indianola, the Petri-Lungkwitz families arrived in New Braunfels. They rented a small farm there in the spring of 1851, but did not intend to settle in New Braunfels permanently. It seemed they wished to look around; and so they did, house-hunting and sketching scenes and quick portraits of each other and the people they met. Hermann Lungkwitz later made use of these sketches and scenes in an elaborate lithograph of San Antonio. In July, 1852, the families settled on 320 acres at Live Oak, about five miles southwest of Fredericksburg – and there they settled in, trying to make some sort of living out of farm work and art. They were unaccustomed to the former, although from this account, they seem to have sprung from stock accustomed to hard work, if not precisely in the sort of agrarian work required to make a living in a frontier settlement.

They seem to have gotten along pretty well at that, for the book is full of sketches, watercolors and finished paintings by Petri and Lungkwitz; accomplished and vivid sketches of their friends, their families and the countryside around. There are landscapes of the rolling limestone hills, the stands of oak trees and meadows around Fredericksburg, a distant view of the town, with a brave huddle of rooftops, a poignant sketch of Elisabet, mourning beside the grave of hers and Hermann’s baby son, who lived for only three weeks after his birth. There are sketches of their farmstead, of neatly fenced areas around the two small log houses in which they lived, charming sketches of his sister’s children and their pet deer, of theatrical productions in Fredericksburg – all elaborate costumes and ballet dancers – and of the women in the family going to pay formal calls, balancing their parasols, sitting primly in the seats of an ox-cart. There are sketches of friends, of officers from the Federal army’s garrison at nearby Ft. Martin Scott, of sister Marie’s wedding to neighbor Jacob Kuechler. And there are elaborate sketches of Indians, mostly people of that Comanche tribe which had signed a peace treaty with the German settlers of Fredericksburg and the surrounding areas, for Friedrich Richard Petri had a sympathetic eye and considerable skill. Oh, this is indeed the American frontier, but not quite as we are accustomed to think about it – that never-never land that is the popularly assumed picture that comes to mind whenever anyone thinks “Old West”.
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The End of One Road

20. November 2008 · Comments Off on The End of One Road · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

… And with luck, the beginning of another – Wednesday afternoon I went to get the mail, after having put in a short day at the loathsome telephone bank job— which however much I detest, and however much I fear that I have no aptitude for, even though I am getting passingly skilled at their legacy data entry system, and can answer most stupid guest questions now from off the top of my head without looking at their fact-book website… oh, where was I? Oh, yes, the horrid part-time day job, where I am about the first to raise my hand and volunteer to leave, when the incoming calls begin to lag after I have put in a couple of hours. Of the class of ten that I trained with early in July, there is only another person and myself remaining, still putting on a headset and grimly tackling the intricacies of setting up for a shift, logging in to a computer database system that was cutting edge, the very latest word … about three decades ago.

At the time I took the job, having bills to pay, and knowing that I wouldn’t see any income from my books until December, I knew very well that the average tenure was about six months max. This is not the subtle way of saying that yes, Sgt. Mom has been fired again—no, this time I plan to leave on my terms and if I can endure—to leave only after scooping up enough of the time-and-a-half boodle earned through working on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, New Years Eve and New Years…

Or maybe not. Life is short, too short to put up with working at a corporate call center. It is not the way I want to spend a minute of my life any longer than I have to, and at this point I might even boycott the casino/resort chain involved for the rest of my natural life. I have come to despise their insanely complicated guest services software program, their once-size-fits-all sales protocol, their demands that we treat their guests with every consideration yet not spend more than 340 seconds or so doing so… a whole long set of contradictory demands placed on phone agents. I’d walk in the door and begin to shake with suppressed resentment about every aspect of the place – the restaurants, the room facilities, all of it. I would hate it that much, for reminding me of the phone bank hell. Nope, the only good thing about this job is that it is a regular paycheck. Something to consider in this time of economic stress… but as they ruthlessly cut back all the part-timers hours at the end of October, there is absolutely no guarantee of that not happening again after the year-end holidays. With luck, they will be done with me at about the same time that I am done with them. Work for the tiny local micro-press is already picking up, almost sufficiently to replace those hours. Capitalism, what a concept, hey?

In the mail yesterday was the final hard copy proof of the final volume of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – a satisfactorily fat paperback with a gorgeous color cover – I looked at it and thought ‘Oh my, did I really write all that?‘

Yes, of course I did – a long and complicated family saga, full of dreams, drama and ambitions, set in a place that I have come to know and love (even though I came to it quite late in my life) an epic chock-full of historic detail, fascinating people, interesting events… a sort of Texas version of Gone With the Wind. I have great hopes for it, and have posted many sample chapters here, as I wrote them. Being that much of the Trilogy is set in the Hill Country, San Antonio and South Texas generally, perhaps many of these hopes will be realized. The story of the Adelsverein colonists and their descendants has much wider appeal, across a couple of genres – so there you go. I will be ordering quantities of each of the books of the trilogy over the next few days, in order to fulfill pre-sold orders, and to have enough for upcoming signing events. If anyone wants a set, to be delivered by the release date (and in time to have autographed copies in time for Christmas!) please order them as soon as you can. I get a break for ordering 50 books at a time – and I probably won’t put in a massive order again until after Christmas.

End of one road, and the beginning of another. After Christmas, I will start on the next project, tentatively called the Cibola Trails Trilogy. I’m a writer, it’s what I do.

Adelsverein Passing In Review

16. November 2008 · Comments Off on Adelsverein Passing In Review · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Just a quick update – it’s about three weeks until the official launch of the Adelsverein Trilogy. I should get the final approval print copy of Book 3 – The Harvesting this week from the publisher. The reviews are starting to come in – first, the all-important but short and slightly puzzling one from True West, on their website here. (I really don’t recall writing anything about tornadoes, though. But the important part – a review in True West!!)

Another slightly longer and appreciative review here, at Western Fiction Review. Fun fact; Steve M. the mad fan of Western fiction is actually located in the UK. Must be some sort of cosmic payback for all those American ladies writing breathless Regency romances, or tales of the doings of the Tudors.

Another workmanlike and short review at Midwestern Reviews… mystifyingly parked not at the genre fiction page, but at the American History page. A compliment… I think.

Not a compliment, about the dialogue in this review… sorry, Victorians really talked that way. Just crack a copy of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. (Consider a grumble about the dumbing down of the American reading public to be inserted here… what, they didn’t talk like the characters in an episode of Friends?! No, sorry. Ah, never mind – although I am beginning to grasp the essence of the eternal writer grumble about remembering a critical comment longer than all the complimentary ones.

Also, amusingly enough – although this blog is a member of PJ Media and on Da Blogfaddah’s blog-roll, I can’t say that I have been particularly overwhelmed lately with helpful links and materiel interest in my attempts to reclaim certain essential American stories, and to publish interesting works of genre fiction outside the mainstream of the American Big-Ass Publishing Combine. So it goes, I expect. To them who have, more shall be given. To those who don’t… suck it up, hard-charger!.

Magic

12. November 2008 · Comments Off on Magic · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine...

I suppose it does seem a little like magic, this storytelling thing. Explaining it, even to yourself, much less to other people usually results in bafflement. Like the old joke about dissecting humor being like dissecting a frog – by the time you are done, there is nothing but a bit of a mess and confusion and the frog is dead anyway. Mom and Dad are as puzzled by this aptitude in me as anyone else – they can’t for the life of them figure out how I came by the gift of spinning an enthralling story, of creating people on a page and making them so interesting and endearing that they care very deeply about them. Made-up people… and these are my parents, who have known me all my life. They can’t figure out how I do it, especially Dad, the logical and analytical scientist.

“Are you picturing it in your head, as if it was a movie?” he asked me once, and I suppose that comes as close as anything – although it is as much like to a movie as real life is, or maybe a hyper-life. I can see what the characters are seeing from all angles, know what they are feeling, the little things they do which betray that feeling, I can sense what the weather is like, how where they are smells… a couple of readers have pointed out that I do take a lot of notice of smells. Can’t account for that, either; just another aspect of the gift, I expect. The semi-employer who has also volunteered to edit much of Book 3 (which will be available after the first of the month- thank god and what a panic that has been!) also notes that I do pay particular attention to the weather, what the sky looks like, if it is hot or cold, rainy or clear. She noted this in particular as regards “To Truckee’s Trail”, which I didn’t think surprising, because living in a covered wagon, and in tents, walking ten or fifteen miles every day, of course one would have taken note of the weather. The weather would have governed every aspect of their existence for six long months, all along the Platte River trail, to Fort Hall, and into the wilderness of the Great Basin – never mind the Sierra Nevada, where weather would kill half of the Donner Party, not two years after the pioneers of the Stephens-Townsend Party dragged their wagons over the summit.

Don’t know where I got this sensitivity from – unless it was as a teenaged Girl Scout, being dragged along on all sorts of back-packing expeditions into the mountains; miserable experiences which usually resulted in making me sick from exhaustion and sun-exposure for a couple of days after returning from the worst of them… but I still hold in memory, the taste of sweet water, from a rivulet, high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe, and drinking it from my cupped hands. And also the experience of trying to sleep in a wet sleeping bag in March, high in the Angeles National Forest, after melting snow had trickled through our campsite all the day. After that one, I had a whole new appreciation of weather, even though I was never at any hazard for frostbite.

Places – I construct them in my imagination as carefully as I used to build miniature interiors; what is in the room, what are the walls made of, how sound is the roof, what do you see when you look out of the windows. What is growing in the ground outside? People live in these interiors – what would the imprint of their lives have left on that space. I saw a vignette at a miniature show once; an elaborate scene of a WWII fighter plane and a cross-section of the maintenance shed close-by, in 1-12 scale. The craftsman who had built the vignette had made the shed a show-piece of squalid disarray, including a thread of cigarette smoke rising from an ash-tray on the workbench. It was as if someone had just stepped outside for a moment… and that is such art, to make it so real that you can see the cigarette ash crumbling into the tray and a bit of smoke rising from it. In 1-12th scale, it was a real place, as real as any of those places I have built in my imagination.

People – that is one of the other weird aspects of this gift. I can read people, after a time. I have always been able to do this, not instantly – that is supposed to be one of those really, really useful talents, extraordinary valuable for a personnel manager, or someone doing job interviews, reading people as accurately as one of those instant-read cooking thermometers… but it is not mine. I’ve been fooled as well as anyone else, on short acquaintance. There have been people that I thought initially were major-league assholes who turned out to be quite the reverse, and people whom I had a good first impression of, who turned out to be so useless or malevolent that they should have been marked off with day-glo tape and tall plastic cones as a hazard to human navigation… but after six months of work-day association, I would know someone. I would know someone so thoroughly, be able to assess them down to the sub-atomic particle, with a fair degree of accuracy. This used to astound my fellow NCOs. They would not have realized some essential truth about Airman So-and-so, until I pointed it out to them. Then, with a shock, they would realize that I was right, and everything about Airman So-and-So would be understandable, out in the open, and perfectly transparent … and why hadn’t they have seen it?

I think that being able to create convincing characters might be somehow linked to this ability. Always, when I had to do a performance rating on a subordinate, my crutch in constructing this official bit of documentation was “What is the thing about this person which instantly comes to mind when you think about them?” And there would be the first sentence in their required yearly Airman Performance Report, and all the rest of it would flow after that. What is the key bit of their character, what is the essential bit that you have to know? Everything flows naturally from that… and so it is with creating characters. In my “Adelsverein Trilogy” I had to get a grip on what is their essential core characteristic. Everything flows from that: I couldn’t get a read on Magda and Carl’s children until I was writing a scene of their sons and Magda, digging up potatoes, before Christmas, 1862, during a year when they were living in poverty in Fredericksburg. Everything about the two boys became clear – the older was grieving and traumatized, the younger was taking emotional refuge in books, and would emerge as being elastic and undamaged by the experience. Everything about them was established – they would go in different directions, their reactions to various experiences would be complete as this sudden insight would take me – and everything would be coherent and sympathetic.

But of course, that is the other aspect – kind of an uncomfortable one, as far as I can see; seeing people at the best and worst, to know them down to their core – especially when it comes to people who are not all that admirable. That is actually the most challenging bit of writing a story – that is, writing about characters who are psychopaths. The major villain in Adelsverein is one if those – so cruel, so brutal – I actually don’t want to go there. I don’t like or sympathize with that character and I don’t want to go any farther into the story of him. No farther than it would take to outline the effect that he has upon the other characters, or how my main characters feel about how he meets his eventual doom. Which is as just as it is unexpected – or so I hope has appeared to anyone who reads all three books of the Adelsverein Trilogy.

(to be continued)

Post Election Thoughts

09. November 2008 · Comments Off on Post Election Thoughts · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, World

A number of random thoughts, only some of them sad and cynical. Hope springs eternal – after all, we survived four years of Jimmy Carter. A quarter of a century later, we are still mopping up after his major foreign-policy/military disaster – the Iran hostage taking at the Teheran Embassy – but the Republic survived.

The Obama campaign outspent the McCain campaign four to one. I will look to hear murmurings about ‘buying public office’ and ‘campaign reform’ and ‘public financing’ in the next couple of years from the Mighty Wurlitzer of the mainstream news organs, but I am not holding my breath. I will also look to serious investigation of vote fraud in various precincts, especially as regards your friendly neighborhood ACORN office, but again – no breath being held there.

Do you suppose this will put an ash stake through the heart of the ‘America is teh most racist nation eveh!’ meme? Jumping Jeezus on a Pogo Stick, I hope so. I can also hope that the Good Reverend Sharpton and the Good Reverend Jackson might actually go out and get real jobs, doing something useful in their respective communities. I can also wonder if secretly they were both crying into their respective beers last Tuesday night, as the returns came rolling in.

I have about just had it up to here with “unnamed officials” and “anonymous sources” spilling dirt to compliant reporters. This most recent bitchfest of McCain campaign functionaries complaining about Sarah Palin is just the final straw. Sorry, mainstream media whores – up with this I will not put, starting here and from this moment. Either put a name on it, or skip it. And to those Unnamed and Anonymous highly placed sources? Man up and put your name where your mouth is. I mean it. I’ve complained about Sy Hersh doing this for years, suspecting that he is merely being used by his so-so-inside sources and he is too arrogant and F&&#ing dumb to know that he is being played..

And la Palin herself? She was the only reason McCain had a chance at all, so nice way to treat her, just so you have a chance of holding on to your insider access. I still wonder if the incredible, venomous anti-Palin spewings, which seemingly came up from nowhere didn’t have a lot of help from the notoriously efficient Axelrod organization.

How long will the Obama honeymoon last? Probably only a little longer than it takes the One to discover that the Presidency is not an office like that of the Tsar, that matters cannot be instantly resolved with a wave of an imperial hand. Also, the behind-the-scenes activities of various minions cannot be concealed by a local and compliant press for long, anyway. At some point the adoring press will have to get up off their knees and wipe the drool off their lips. The mainstream media, god help us, have been acting like a teenage girl in the throes of their very first crush. The fangirly squeals of “Oh, isn’t he marvelous!” are getting fairly wearing. So are the comparisons to Camelot. I can’t say I particularly remember Camelot at first hand – but I do know that practically everything about the Kennedy administration was a fraud, except for Jackie’s dress sense. And maybe the space program.

It’s one thing to quibble, strike heroic poses and Monday Morning quarterback, when you are on the outside – another to actually have full charge of whatever. Blaming your predecessor usually only works for about six months. A year, tops. I’d feel better about the Obaminator if he had actually stuck around in any of his jobs longer than it took to decide on which upward rung on the ladder he wanted to try for. I also can’t throw the notion that he is one of those fast-burners who rocketed up the ranks so fast that they actually never had time at each step along the way to do much. I think of him as the political version of the charming and ambitious scoundrel hero of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”.

On this weekend’s Prairie Home Companion, I listened to Garrison Keiller warble a hymn of praise to The One, and threw up a little in my mouth. I used to love that show, back when he was poignant and funny.

Finally – wouldn’t it be a hoot if everything that GWB and the Republicans were accused of doing over the last eight years – stealing elections, reviving the draft, corrupting the political process, allowing terrorists to attack on our own soil, selling out our allies for oil, fumbling national disaster response, trashing freedom of speech, oppressing minority racial and religious groups, bullying legislators and civil servants, neglecting military veterans – actually turn out to be SOP for the new administration?

Oh, yeah. I would laugh and laugh and laugh – if I weren’t already crying.

Touching History

31. October 2008 · Comments Off on Touching History · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, History, Military, Old West, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

My… is it Friday already? The end of October, with tomorrow being the Dia de los Muertos… or as we plain Anglos call it, the eve of All Saint’s Day. Time does have when you’re having fun. And I am having fun this week. My hours at the Corporate Call Center just up the road were slashed to the bone this week, allegedly to accommodate their slow time of the year. Perhaps I’ll get them back in November, perhaps not. It’s a job that I am privately most unenthusiastic about, although you’d never know it to hear me answer the incoming calls with brisk and chipper enthusiasm. I would not mind very much actually – I’d miss the money but not much else, as I the local publisher that I am doing work for has actually begun to pay me on a regular basis and shoot interesting little jobs my way.

The two most recent are transcribing old documents – one not all that old, since there is a Star Wars reference in it, but the other might have some actual historical interest, being a pocket year-diary from 1887, bound in crumbling red leather. The owner of it plans to sell, and wants an accurate transcription – or at least, as accurate a transcription of the contents as is humanly possible. The reason he is willing to pay someone to do it – is because the diary-keeper wrote in occasionally illegible ink, couldn’t spell for s**t, had an uncertain grasp of the principals governing the use of capital letters and appears to have been completely uninterested in using punctuation. On the plus side, each entry is only about one run-on sentence long, and three-quarters of those entries are variants on ‘spent the four Noon at Ranch/town …. No news … fair and cloudy to day’

It’s the other entries that are mildly fascinating, for the diary-keeper seems to have been a manager for a cattle ranch in the Pleasant Valley of Arizona, and on the periphery of the murderous Graham-Tewksbury feud. His apparent employer was one of the owners of the “Hashknife Outfit” – famed in West Texas lore and in the books of Zane Grey, so perhaps this is why the current owner thinks the diary is worth something to a collector. I don’t see any evidence so far that the diary-keeper did anything more than pop around like a squirrel on crack all through that year, from town to the ranch and up to various line camps, to Flagstaff for the 4th of July celebrations, seeing to his various duties, which must have ranged from the office-managerial to overseeing round-ups and short drives of cattle from the back-country to the railway (which paralleled Route 66 through Arizona.) There were a few interesting slips of paper tucked into a pocket in the back of the diary, like a bank receipt from a bank in Weatherford, Texas, long strings of figures which appear to be a tally of cattle and a scribbled recipe for some kind of remedy, featuring a lot of ingredients that today are controlled substances (belladonna? Sulphate of zinc and sugar of lead, one drachm) Still and all, as Blondie said – he was dedicated enough to actually sit down and make an entry, every day, in a whole year of days in which one day was mostly like any other, full of work and responsibility, and very little in the way of amusement, or at least amusement worth mentioning specifically. Still, an interesting peep-hole into the past, and another life, distant and yet close.

The other document is a rollicking memoir written by a WWII veteran, who spent nearly 18 months in the China-Burma-India theater, flying cargo over the notorious “Hump” – the Himalayas. At that time, there were large chunks of the land below their air route that was simply white on their maps; never explored by land or by air. This writer lost some friends to the perils of high-altitude flight among mountains that were sometimes even higher, but his exuberance and energy come through in his memoir, quite unquenched. His personality is a little more accessible than the ranch manager of 1887, and he spent a little more time noticing marvelous things like a spectacular show of St. Elmo’s fire lighting up his aircraft during a flight through a high-altitude blizzard, or the white-washed towers of a mountain monastery, perched at the top of a 6,000 foot sheer drop. He wondered about the faint lights seen at night, from tiny villages far below the aluminum wings of his aircraft, wondered if the people living in those simple houses even knew that young men had come from so very far away, to fly a perilous re-supply route over the dark land below. Did it make any difference to their lives? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The flier went home, married his girl, lived a long and successful life. Among the little things to be included in the transcription of his memoir was an envelope of papers – receipts from a grand hotel in Calcutta… and a BX ration card, in which Blondie and I were amused to note that he had maxed out his beer ration for the month of September, 1943—but only purchased one bar of soap.

The history, the past, near and a little distant, in bits of yellowed paper, a year of entries bound in faded red leather or eighteen eventful and frequently nerve-wracking months racking up 800 flying hours. It’s all there, our history. We must remember where we came from, who we are – who our ancestors were, and how they built their lives and did their work. It’s not far distant, it’s more than a few tedious chapters in a history textbook written by an academic with an ideological ax to grind. Our history is real people, meeting challenges and accepting responsibility with courage, grace and humor. It’s why I write books, to try and get people in touch with that history again, to connect with our ancestors. To remember who we are, and where we came from.

(Still taking pre-orders for the Adelsverein Trilogy, here The official release is December 10, and I have lined up some signings locally – schedule is here. Also a review of Book One – The Gathering just appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of True West (dead tree version) ! It’s on page 91, for those that are interested, but alas, no links – the True West website only goes as far as… September)

The New Aristos

25. October 2008 · Comments Off on The New Aristos · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Politics

Funny old world that. It took the nomination of Sarah Palin to the R-VP slot to bring it to our attention – with a considerable jolt, let it be added – that we have a native aristocratic class in this here U S of A. Over and above the one that we thought we always had before, but every bit as snobbish and loaded down with entitlements and sense of superiority as any member of the pre-revolutionary French nobility. The ancient regime is what they were called in the history books, only our current and most visible lot are every bit as capricious, arrogant and demanding- and as viciously insulting as any French nobleman in powdered wig, satin coat and four-inch red heels, about some hardworking plain sturdy bourgeoisie in a plain cloth coat who has the nerve to think that because they work at a trade that dirties their hands that they also have the right to grasp the reins of political power. Especially in matters to do with taxes and all that.

Ah, well – the French ancient regime found out that the resolution to that conundrum soon enough – the conundrum that postulated that free citizens who contribute to the upkeep of necessary institutions might have a right and a duty to have some kind of say about the manner of that upkeep, and the duties of those institutions as defined. The resolution of that little dispute was messy … and in any case put the French generally in the hands of a regime even more destructive of personal choice, peace, freedom etc. than the exquisitely dressed swells of before.

You see, we always had our own aristocracy, from the earliest days of the republic; an aristocracy of talent mostly, of money sometimes, and very occasionally of family – but never for long. Over the long haul, this republic of ours was a ruthless meritocracy. Money might be there, family might be there, ability and ambition by the bucket-load, but absent any institutional aristocracy to cement it all into place, our native aristocracy was an ever-shifting affair, more a matter of local ‘old families’ who owned a bigger farm, had a bigger house or a larger industry than all of their neighbors. (I wrote about them last year, here )
But lately I can’t help but wonder if the new aristocrats are something more malignant in their regard towards those they wish to rule over, more purely poisonously, nakedly self-serving of their own interests, regardless of the harm being done to the nation as a whole.

Our career-serving political class, the education establishment, the traditional news media, the people responsible for (in a good and in a bad way) for our movies and television entertainment – it seems of late that too many of them are singing with the same voice and the same song. Different words, perhaps, and out of some obscure motivation, but all to the same end, and now and again I detect some whisper of the same motivating contempt for the American public. Contempt for our tastes or lack of same, of our habits in shopping, amusing ourselves, our persistent attachment to religious beliefs, to habits of self-sufficiency, and our stubborn disinclination to do or believe as our self-nominated betters dictate – it’s all on very ugly display. The media gang-up on Joe the Plumber, for having the impertinence to ask a tough question of the favored candidate was just the most recent and most open, and the most unsettling display.

Really, what do these new aristos expect of the masses, the proletariat, the common citizenry? More and more I have the feeling that we are seen as a kind of herd animal, to be periodically sheared like sheep, relieved of whatever fleece or funds that the new aristos feel they could make better use of, to do as we are told, to not really consider our property, our children, or our earnings as our own. If the aristos decide that they require such things to be given up – well, then, fall in line the loyal peasantry. And don’t forget to smile.

We are being put back in our place, after a two-hundred plus year experiment of being responsible and independent citizens – not so much by actual physical repression, but by words – words and deeds wielded by the new aristos, to wreck our institutions from the inside, and water down those basic freedoms as established in the constitution, to shred free speech and condemn us to silence for fear of a mob – a mob directed by an unholy confabulation of the aristos. Not too late to go storm the Bastille though – on Voting Day. Don’t give up. Ever.

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