Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
(Found through a link posted in a historical novel enthusiast group – the story of a poet who’s words inspired his community … the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.
Hey, Louis! You probably don’t know
What your punches mean to us
You, in your anger, punched the Brown Shirts
Straight in their hearts—K.O.
Lost Words – an article from Tablet Magazine
Yes, it would appear that the lesbians are actually straight men, the women are women, and the tween-agers are FBI agents, and a certain NY congressman with a slightly risible last name and a penchant for tweeting suggestive pictures of his body or parts thereof – is a bit of a perv. Honestly, I thought everyone had gotten a piece of Wiener last week, and there were absolutely no further possible ways in which the gentleman in question could embarrass his party, his constituents and his spouse, after the pic of him in the gym dressing room, clutching his ding-a-ling through a towel, but my daughter alerted me to this gem, courtesy of the UK Daily Mail. Seriously, I am wondering what possibly could top that for humiliating revelations, although now that he has resigned, perhaps that will stop any more from appearing.
The Gay Girl in Damascus and the Paula Brooks thing – honestly, it seems like the plot for a movie – something titled The Gay Deceivers just suggests itself right off the bat. Seldom in real life do we have such a delicious confluence of pretense . . . what is real, what is the real identity behind those pixels on a screen, and how much of what you put out there is really, really, really real. And I speak as someone who has been blogging under a not-terribly opaque nom du-blog since 2002, mostly because I didn’t want to put my real name out there. My daughter was still on active duty, my parents and brothers are listed in the phone book, and I had enough of demented devotion from eccentric fans when I was on radio, here and there among military radio stations. Yes, you have a million fans, if you are in the public eye in some manner, and a half-dozen really sick f**ks as enemies, all of whom have never met you, don’t really know any more about you than what you put out about yourself . . . and I didn’t really want to deal with it, or have my family deal with it.
There were often discussions, early on – about blogging under a real name, or under a nom-du-blog; questions of credibility, of standing behind what you wrote. I took the line that yes, for piece of mind or actual physical safety, there were excellent reasons for someone to blog under another name. One could establish a reputation for verity, and honesty, no matter what name you called yourself. Over time, your on-line reputation could be as solid as it was in real-space, congruent with your real-life experience.
And there are bloggers who have been doing that – under cover or by their real names in various countries, and some of them in physical danger: Salam Pax is one that comes to mind at first, mostly because of the blogosphere controversy over whether he was a real and credible person, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hossein Derakhshan, the godfather of Iranian blogging may or may not still be imprisoned by the Iranian authorities. The Egyptian blogger who goes by the nom du blog Sandmonkey was briefly arrested in the recent past. They took – and still are taking risks by writing, and blogging. Creating a whole other persona and identity, at odds with real life, and claiming to bear first-hand witness in a blog to extraordinary current events, when you are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away?
When I do that, I call it a bit of historical fiction, and clearly label it such. Dunno why “Amina†and “Paula†didn’t think of doing it that way. Would have saved a bit of embarrassment, all the way around.
Right off the top, about the first thing we learned – and learned it the hard way – about making your own cheese is that ultra-pasteurized milk is no good for cheese-making, even if it is the high-end and expansive organic milk. The ‘ultra-pasteurized’ notation was in such small print on the cartons that we overlooked it entirely. Ah, well – chalk that up to experience. The good-enough HEB standard whole milk works well enough,
So, when did we get off on this whole do-it-yourself kick, regarding things? Partly, we’ve always been on it: I grew up sewing my own clothes, following Mom’s example. I made just about every garment my daughter wore, between the time she outgrew the baby-shower bounty and when she began to shop for and purchase her own. Owning a sewing-machine, and possessing a modicum of skill means never having to settle for what ready-made offers. So – the mind-set is already there, encouraged along by the subtle realization that a lot of the staple foods that we like are expensive.
It’s the natural outcome of having champagne tastes and a beer budget, for which there are three solutions: learn to like beer, drink water six nights and champagne on the seventh, or learn to make champagne. The first two are unappealing – hence, learning to make good stuff yourself. We have experimented with brewing beer, by the way. This is not hard – just follow the recipe.
After clothes – we progressed to bread, although my daughter is keener on that than I am. I just throw the ingredients in the bread-maker, and rejoice that I am not paying $3 and up for the all-grain seeded loaves. The homemade version is much more substantial than the mass-market version, too. But we are still lamenting the fact that Sam’s Club doesn’t stock the 25-lb sacks of high-gluten flour any more – that made good bread.
When we lived in Utah, I went through a round of canning jams and jellies; either it was something in the water, or I couldn’t stand letting the fruit go to waste, with a back-yard full of apricots. Had fun with it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t taste much difference one way or the other between what I did, and jams and jelly off the supermarket shelf. Well, the Concord grape jelly was a cut above the supermarket brand; three or four bunches, picked at once and into the kettle before the dew was off them – that made sublime grape jelly, even if I didn’t really like grape jelly. (Overdose of PB&J in school lunches as a child.) And I came away from Utah with a stand-alone freezer and a food dehydrator, items which have proved intermittently useful.
So – on to cheeses: two cheese molds, a stock of industrial-strength rennet tablets and a length of butter muslin. We got good at mozzarella, and it looks like the farmhouse cheddar will shape up nicely, even though my current cheese-press is a chunk of limestone and four exercise weights. The cheese presses from the supply houses cost a bomb, and it’s kind of an esoteric hobby, so we probably won’t see one at a yard-sale soon. I think I can whip one together, though – from two pieces of wood or two or three long threaded bolts and wing-nuts. Two gallons of milk make two pounds of cheese . . . and if I can line up a source for fresh goat milk, we can really branch out.
There is another reason for DIY foodstuffs – that being the actual experience of making it pays off when I write about the 19th century. Practically the whole of a frontier farm woman’s life was spent (between doing laundry and raising children) in processing food for the daily meals or to be put away for the winter – vegetables from the garden, fruit from an orchard or gathered in the wild, from the milk of the cows, from corn and wheat flour grown in her family’s fields and ground in a local mill . . . pickled, dried, preserved with sugar, smoked over a smoldering fire – that work never ended for a frontier woman. Pottering around with making cheese, bread, sausage and beer and the like brings me something of a sense of what it was like for them, although I’m certainly not hard-core enough o do it all over a wood fire.
Still, though . . . I’d like to learn more about the process of parting out a pig, for hams and sausages and all that. I found some accounts on line, but nothing is like actually watching it being done . . .
Ok then, it looks like absolutely, positively every middle-school snark that can be made about Congressman Anthony Wiener’s unfortunately risible last name has been made. Every blogger, commentator and internet wit has gotten in touch with our inner sixth-grader . . . it kind of makes a refreshing change from the depressing national news, the really depressing international news, and the suicidally depressing news from the Middle East. Really, the only way that more juvenile humor might of have been milked out of this is for the Congressman in question to have been christened Richard Head. God bless his heart, for someone represented to be so adept with the media, new and old, Congressman Wiener has misstepped so badly and so frequently he almost looks as if he clog-dancing. If he’s so good at it, I’d hate to see who’s the most inept of the current Congressional crop when it comes to dealing with the media. Oh, and one last slam at the cocktail-wiener Congressman? He looks like he was deliberately designed to be someone named Wiener. Central Casting couldn’t have come up with anyone so physiognomically appropriate.
Speaking of other misapplications of the male principle, it looks like John Edwards – he of another wandering wiener – has been indicted on several counts for conspiracy and receiving illegal campaign contributions during the 2008 campaign, all in frantic attempts to cover up the existence of a seriously flaky mistress and what the old-line tabs used to call a love child. Ironical in the extreme that it actually was a tabloid which first brought this sidebar to our attention . . . I guess Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) was correct: “Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.â€
And will Arnold Schwarzenegger pay some kind of penalty for his wandering wiener? Aside from his wife departing – rightfully PO’d – but you’d have thought that since she was a Kennedy, she might have been accustomed to the concept of hubby playing hide-the-salami with anything female and willing. What is it with male politicians these days – are they’re letting the little head do all the serious thinking?
Well, following upon da Blogfadda’s tireless coverage of the various implications of the currently about-to-implode higher education bubble, I suppose that I might weigh in on the various merits/demerits of the so-called bubble, and the efficacy of even bothering to attend an institution of so-called higher education, with respect to my current career as a producer of readable genre fiction – which is not as highly-paid as the casual reader is likely to expect, but still . . . that career is underwritten by a pension earned for military service. It’s not the generous pension that I might have earned as a public servant in California as a prison guard or lifeguard, or municipal employee in certain urban sinks . . . but it suffices to pay the mortgage and a little over, since I had the good sense to retire and buy a residence in Texas, fifteen years ago. So, anyway – college education, value of, personal development . . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Personally, I felt that I got a great value out of my college education, and my parents – being the first in their families to achieve degrees – were all about the four of us being college attendees also. Dad went all the way to a Masters and almost a PhD, courtesy to his own industry and the GI Bill. He was pretty pissed about missing being awarded the PhD, I tell ya – he took out his frustrations building an ironwork chandelier, exactingly designed to hold the thick beeswax candles that my great-aunt Nan scored though being a stalwart member of the altar guild at some Episcopal establishment that rewarded her with those. Well, anyway, the ‘rents were pretty well hipped on the values of getting higher education, and three of the four of us kids eventually do so – but in the meantime, at what expense? And for what payback? It was pretty well drilled into us; our college education would be self-paid, although Mom was an uber-mom, in comparison to the mothers of our peers, growing up where we did, and at the time that we did. Which was a working-class, blue-collar striving suburb; I don’t think Mom and Dad ever entertained fantasies of red-brick Ivies for us, or even their own alma mater, Occidental College. Which was just as well – saved wear and tear on the emotions, ambitions and pocketbook. Community college for lower division, state Uni for upper, and if you can figure out how to do that and not live at home – good for you, kid!
This meant for me that I lived at home for all four years. I attended a local community college for two of those years (Glendale Community College, for those who give a rodent’s patoot about these things) – all the while carefully selecting every course taken for it’s transferability to a state university – and then went to California State University Northridge for upper division. I graduated from that august establishment with a bachelor in English, discovering only upon graduation day that all the good-looking and personable guys were in the Engineering division. Well, as I had gone to college to procure a B. of A. and not my Mrs.; this discovery was only a matter of academic and aesthetic interest to myself and the girl in line next to me, standing in our cheap polyester robes rented from whatever concession that held the rights for that graduation year. I went on and enlisted in the Air Force – which had been my intention for much of the time that I had spent marooned in academia. I did not do ROTC, by the way – that was not offered at Cal State Northridge. All they had was a program at another Cal State school that I couldn’t get to easily as a commuter student.
So – four years at various community and state institutions of higher learning, paying for my textbooks, tuition and the gas to get to classes: how did I pay for all of this? I made dolls. I made twelfth-scale dolls, and sometimes client-commissioned dolls and doll-clothes, and sold them on consignment or direct sales through a miniature shop in a nearby town. I made $25 a week, week in and week out – that’s about five dolls, with hand-sewn clothes, and composition heads, hands and feet of soda-cornstarch clay, and bodies made of cloth-wrapped wire, so that they were easily pose-able. I didn’t then, or ever, claim to be the best 12th-scale doll artist in the world, but I was the only one in that particular field at that particular time, working through that particular commercial outlet. And it did add up, not having any big expenses, other than tuition, textbooks and gas. Or at least it didn’t in the early 1970s. So I paid for all of my college education, and I came out with about $1,500 left over. I went to England on it, and spent the whole summer staying in Youth Hostels and traveling on Brit-Rail and various public transportations.
Educated, with a relatively useless degree in English Lit? Such were the circumstances that I felt then and ever since – that I was perfectly well educated, from this experience and from a mad impulse to read everything I could get my hands on, with regard to subjects which attracted my butterfly-impulsive interest. In the early 1970s in California, community colleges and state schools still offered an adequate and intellectually challenging education, even in the softer degree programs like – umm, English. A degree in it was a good starting point for quite a lot of interesting careers, even though Cal State Northridge didn’t and doesn’t have any cachet at all in the grand educational scheme of things. But I didn’t bankrupt myself retroactively – or my family in procuring a degree from it. And as a family, we also spared ourselves that desperate pursuit of red-brick-ivy-covered status-education competition. Really, Mom and Dad were totally realistic about all that, and the prospects that we would all have. For myself, I didn’t want to go on and get a higher degree; I wanted to be a writer, and I sensed, even then – that the best and most efficient way to do that was to go ahead and have a life, an interesting life, full of interesting and varied people. I’ve been knocking around the world ever since, among all sorts of people. Some of them don’t have anything beyond high school, and some of them do – and from places that are much higher thought of than Cal State Northridge. Weird thing? I’ve never felt the least bit at a disadvantage, intellectually. I’ve never been able to decide if it was the degree itself – which guaranteed to the observer that I was basically literate-and-a-bit for the standards of the time – or just the experience of life in the military which would account for that confidence. Just one of those things, I expect – being realistic about the education I got from one or the other – and not being in debt from the experience. I’m in debt for certain things – but not for my higher education.
Yeah, I know – juvenile humor at best, but somehow that’s about the only reasonable response you can make to a walking, talking comic-opera cartoon villain like Moammar Khadaffy. Or Quadaffi, or what the hell – Khadaffy-Duck. I mean, the clothes, the sprocket-hung uniforms, the transparent megalomania, the fembot body-guards, the rip-off of Mao’s Little Red Book . . . and was he the inspiration for the villain in Jewel of the Nile? And then you remember the serious stuff: the airplanes and discos bombed, the terrorists like the IRA generously funded – the politicians and intellectuals paid to be his respectable front, the plight of those foreign doctors and nurses who were accused of deliberately infecting patients with AIDS, the death of a British policewoman in front of the Libyan embassy in London (who was shot from within the embassy), and the brutalization of his own people . . . no, Quadaffy-Duck was every bit as malevolent as Saddam Hussein; his pretensions and dress-sense was just a little more risible. Otherwise, just a matter of degree, and frankly, I can’t think of a nicer person to have a J-DAM coming down the chimney with his name on it, no matter how the heck you spell it. I did so hope that he would wind up like Mussolini (his corpse hanging from a gas-station – which would be ironic in the extreme) or stood up in front of a wall like Ceausescu; the thing being that it would be Libyans themselves performing the necessary chore of taking out the flamboyantly-clad trash. Ah, well; however the job gets done.
Anyway – as you can guess, I’ll be breaking out the popcorn and celebrating the immanent demise of the Duck of Death; it’s been long overdue, no matter who or what is responsible for seeing that he achieves room temperature. However . . . the infamous however, well-freighted with irony . . . I do have a few small concerns, chief among them being – who and what are the anti-Khadaffy Libyans, exactly? When all the dust settles, and someone who is not the Duck of Death or of his ilk and kin is in charge . . . who will that person be, and will they be an improvement?
Secondly; what next? Are we just clearing out the Duck’s flyable assets so that a no-fly zone may be installed? How long will the no-fly zone be in effect – as long as the no-fly zone over Iraq, which protected the Kurds? Months, weeks, days? Of the allied nations assisting in this, who will have the resources to continue that long? Should it be necessary to put boots on the ground . . . whose boots will they be, and what exactly will be the assigned duties of those boots?
And the irony of Obama doing just about what Bush was damned up one side and down the other for doing, with regard to another middle-eastern oil-rich nation ruled by a brutally iron-fisted autocrat with a penchant for seeing his own face everywhere? Rich, I tell you – as in two scoops of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Watching half of Obama’s backers turn themselves into pretzels trying to explain how one of these things is so not like the other, and the other half going into gibbering hysterics realizing that it is . . . it’s turning out to be quite a giggle for me. Enough reason for anther round of popcorn, anyway.
And finally – you know, they told me if I voted for McCain/Palin, that there would never-ending war in the Middle East – and damn if it doesn’t look like it.
So, observing the current imbroglio with the leadership of National Public Radio being played like a fish on the line for a five-million dollar donation from a so-called Muslim Brotherhood front organization . . . well, my feelings are mixed. It’s about 95% schadenfreude-drenched pure pleasure mixed with a 5% sprinkle of regret. I once did like NPR very much and listened faithfully, donated regularly to the local affiliate stations in Salt Lake City and San Antonio, even went to work part-time as an announcer at the classical-music public radio station for nearly ten years. I never missed an airing of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, which I thought at one time was about as close to a modern Will Rogers-type comedian as there was.
Alas, in the run-up to 2008, GK chose to go mean-spiritedly partisan, fell down on his knees metaphorically in worship of the One, and went full-on rabid bigot with regard to Tea Partiers, Republicans and conservatives generally since then. Ok, fine – free country and all that, and I am free to take my fanship – and my pledges elsewhere, preferably to a news and entertainment venue which doesn’t feel the need to kick me in the face, morning noon and night, and three times that on Sunday. Which brings me back to NPR – and yes, I know the two NPR executives featured in the video are management materiel and not reporters or on-air personalities . . . but to appear not to know anything about the Muslim Brotherhood, to be apparently eager to curry favor with a big-money donor, and be so willing to trash Christians and Tea Partiers, not to mention a well-respected former employee like Juan Williams, not to mention appearing to go along with the whole –Jews-control-the-media meme . . . Words fail me on that one, at least the words that I can put onto a family blog. Yes, it’s one thing to gracefully appreciate a potential donation, quite another to look like you’re about to break out the kneepads and the Binaca. So – like the old story of the woman who would sleep with a guy for a million dollars, but not for ten dollars – now NPR is just negotiating the price.
Sheesh . . . at this point, I’m not only convinced that NPR and PBS ought to be de-funded – I want back every dime of every pledge I ever contributed.
To: AIG
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Things Happening Almost Too Fast to Keep Track
1. So, it looks like the End is Nigh for Moammar Ghadaffy, or however the heck his name is spelled. I swear, over the last thirty years, it’s different every time he swims back up from the cesspool and back into public consciousness again. There is probably some rule governing this; something to do with whether there is an “r†in the month, or if the aurora borealis is showing . . . anyway, I suspect that when a dictator gets to the point of hiring masses of obviously foreign mercenaries because he can’t trust anybody but his immediate family – not his military, or his secret police, or his own body-guard – and orders those troops who do obey him to drop bombs on their own people . . . game over. There hasn’t been an equal to him as megalomaniacal, totally erratic, terrorist-enabling, crazier-than-a-shit-house-rat brutal dictator since Idi Amin shuffled off the international scene. Is anyone setting up a pool on when Ghaddaffy Duck gets the Mussolini-stone-dead-and-hanging-from-an-urban-gas-station-canopy? Can I get in for Friday?
2. Contemplating current unrest in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran and Lebanon, it looks like a good time to get out that old record of Barry McGuire, singing “Eve of Destruction.†Just saying.
3. It looks like the Koch Brothers are selected as this month’s Emmanuel Goldstein for the progressive-lefty media. Not bad for two guys who hadn’t been heard of until two or three months ago, out outside of libertarian and big-charity donor circles. Note: they really aren’t that big as donors go – the Tides Foundation and George Soros probably spend as much on coffee and crullers as the Koch Brothers donated to libertarian-oriented politicians. It seems to be that the Koch Brothers have committed the solecism of not doing things properly. Donations from billionaires ought to go to the proper causes and people. You know, the causes and people that that all socially conscientious and proper-thinking people endorse – because otherwise it would just wreck everything.
4. Madison, Wisconsin as the epicenter of the political s**tstorm-du-jour, American-style . . . whoever would have thought it, eh? Good old progressive, earnest mid-west Wisconsin, who elected a governor (by the same margin as the current resident of the White House was elected to his current office) who said what he meant, meant what he said, and then went out and did it. Wow – and now we are seeing the public employee unions and their sympathizers having a major meltdown. I somehow think that this will not end as the proper progressive people expect it to end; those who believe with the force of holy writ that a 21st century workplace is just exactly the same as a 20th century factory floor or a 19th century sweatshop. Allow me to break it to you gently, people: All the good things that unions did, they did a good while ago, and yes, it’s OK to be sentimental as all get-out about that and to honor the organizers – well, many of them anyway – who fought for all that. But that was then, this is now. The Man is just not slavering to put all working-class people back in the company town, working for a pittance and persecuted by the Pinkertons any more. (Maybe in China they are, or in Burma, though.) Now, a lot of ordinary, working-class and middle-class Americans do not have a good opinion of union labor as practiced in their own working lifetimes – because they have had experiences with it that were less than salutary. Rotten teachers in public schools to can’t be fired, surly and unhelpful DMV clerks, closed shops with enforced union membership, the antics of the SEIU –also known as the Purple People Beaters, unions who seem to benefit the union management rather than the rank and file, assorted criminal goonery, union demands which essentially wrecked various manufacturing companies, and insupportable levels of pay and benefits charged to taxpayers, politicians in the pocket of public employee unions . . . a word to the wise, oh union bretheren and sisteren – our affection and respect for unions has been worn to a thin shred. Don’t presume upon it. And the noisy antics of your union members and allies in public spaces everywhere in the last year or so is neither winning friends or influencing ordinary people – and voters – in a positive way. Especially when y’all don’t pick up the trash afterward.
5. Finally, how long was that plea for civility in the civic arena honored? A whole six weeks, eight weeks, tops? Ah, well – pleasant while it lasted.
Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom
The food-court flash-mob, singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Avery nicely planned and executed stunt, which took place last month in a mall in Ontario, Canada.
Friend sent me the link via email. I just thought it was so cool. I wonder how classical music enthusiasts will top this – maybe perform HMS Pinafore at half-time at a football game?
That would be so cool…
In the early 1990s, I did a tour in Korea; a year at Yongsan Garrison, working at HQ-AFKN, barely a stone’s throw from where my father had spent a couple of weeks at Camp Coiner in 1953. Camp Coiner was where new troops were processed for assignments in-country, and it was still a self-contained miniature garrison with a dining hall, movie theater, club, PX and chapel. Processing new arrivals takes only a day or two these days. When I was there, Camp Coiner housed soldiers assigned to Yongsan in a series of Quonset huts that had been covered in such a thick layer of foam insulation that they looked like nothing so much as a row of enormous Twinkies.
Camp Coiner to my father was a bunch of canvas tents in a field of mud, surrounded by deep rings of barbed wire and a deeper ring of hungry refugees, watching them intently. It quite took away one’s appetite, said my father, to have people watching you eat every bite of your C-rations; and it’s not as if C-rations were a gourmet treat to start with. The soldiers were forbidden to give away their food, but my father said a lot of them did anyway, tossing cans stealthily over the wire. Seoul was a wrecked place fifty years ago. While I was there at AKFN that year, I edited an interview which the late Col. David Hackworth had done for AFKN, where he described how he himself had first visited the place, retreating across the only bridge over the Han River. Nothing but rubble, and rats nibbling at corpses in the gutters, the only live people being his squad and the Chinese snipers shooting at them. What Colonel Hackworth and veterans like my father saw in the 1950ies and what they see when they visit Seoul now leaves them rubbing their eyes in astonishment.
I had the incredible good fortune to be put in the way of doing a lot of voice-over narration jobs while I was at Yongsan, as well as a regular part-time job copy-editing the English language simulcast of the regular Korea Broadcasting System evening TV newscast. Most evenings or Saturdays after I finished my day job, I was taking the subway or a bus to a production studio somewhere (a taxi if I was feeling extravagant), and reading an English-language script on practically anything that someone felt would go over really well if they did a version in English.Amonger other things, I did a script about the manufacture of soju (which put me off ever drinking the stuff), an assortment of company puff-pieces, some fiendishly complicated English lesson tapes, a kid’s storybook, unless they have re-done the whole thing since, I am the English-language version of the recorded information for Kimpo Airport. I was a skilled and experienced production technician, working with other skilled audio technicians, away from the post. I developed friendships with the people I worked with in the KBS newsroom, who laughed at me because I had never gone to any of the tourist things in Seoul. I had, I explained, gone close to them, or had seen them from the outside on my way to a job; just like a native does.
Modern Seoul is a sprawling city of high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways, a splendid subway system, a golden glass tower 63 stories tall close by one of the fifteen or twenty bridges spanning the Han, and the Namsan tower glittering like a Christmas tree topper on a green hilly island in the middle of the city. In the evening, coming back from KBS on the bus, I could smell the bakery smell of vanilla cake from a commercial bakery close by. Sometimes at KBS we talked about the North, wondering if the discipline of an invading army of North Koreans would last past the first big grocery store, or electronics shop. When the old Supreme Leader died, I sat in the newsroom and watched half an hour of newscast cobbled out of the same fifteen minutes of stock video of the North, plus new footage of the bereft Northerners mourning ostentatiously. It seemed to me the KBS technicians were horrified and embarrassed by the elaborate demonstration of grief; I and they could only wonder what sort of coercion could force such undignified displays from people.
I liked working in Seoul, I liked what Koreans have built in fifty years, these tough jolly people on the south side of the DMZ. Cosmopolitan and professional, possibly as a nation the sharpest-dressed people on the face of the earth, every salaryman or woman turned out fit to be on the cover of GQ; as different from their cousins and second cousins north of the DMZ and still be on the same planet.
OSer Don Rich poined out in a post yesterday that the North Koreans regularly perform what he called the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – every six months to two years, there is some kind of saber-rattling game, a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that they are there and bellicose. The old-time Korea hands that I knew over there, as well as my Korean friends were relatively blase about it all, for several reasons. One of them was that – well, mostly it was a bit of theater; it would die down in a week or so. Another being that for all the sprockets and medals hung on Nork generals – they really haven’t fought a serious war, balls-to-the-wall-and-all-guns-blazing war since 1953. There’s been a lot of evolution since then. But – lest the South Koreans get too over-confident about calling the North Korean bluff; the city of Seoul is well within range of Nork artillery, and quite a lot of it, too. Which is a very good reason to keep a cool head. And the other great argument for the status quo being maintained – is that if the DMZ magically evaporated and the Koreas were united once again, the South would be carrying the burden of the North … pitiful, starving, traumatised and hermetically isolated for sixty years, a country-sized concentration camp with all the brutality and horror that implies. The North has been in such bad shape for so long that teenage refugees from there are actually physically stunted, in comparison to their Southern cousins. So – while everyone gives lip service to reunification, in actuality, not so much.
But this week the Norks opened fire, shelling civilian areas on Yeonpyeong Island – an action which will be a little harder to brush off on the part of the South, Japan, and the United States. That ratchets up the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken to a whole new level. So – who acts first? At this point, any guess is as good as any other.
Can’t stand the usual run of reality TV shoes, but for some reason, this particular show hits the spot for me. Eh, maybe I am a snob, but it is one of life’s small pleasures, enjoying the sight of horrible, tacky, manipulative people behaving badly. And there is always the fair chance of a harassed maid of honor – or maybe even a vendor – loosing it and administering a richly-deserved knuckle sandwich to the bride . . . or a long-suffering groom recovering his gonads and his sanity and ditching his intended at the altar. Seriously, we wonder how many of these featured brides even have friends and family even speaking to them, after some of these televised shenanigans. Some of them may in the ordinary course of things, be reasonable and well-adjusted people under a lot of stress, and some may be spoilt, delusional and egged on by the producers of the show . . . but airing all your wedding dirty laundry on broadcast television?
Besides schadenfreude, close attention to the various bridal-party meltdowns also serves another purpose: an education in what not to do when planning and executing a wedding. Seriously – avoiding anything that the Bridezilla of the moment is doing, purchasing, or generally having a cow over in planning for her particular nuptial celebration – might be a very good thing. Certainly the Daughter Unit is taking notes: sometimes knowing what not to do is every bit as valuable as knowing what to do.
So, in no particular order of importance, here are Sgt. Mom’s thoughts regarding the modern wedding – and how to have one without breaking the bank, alienating family and friends and generally becoming one massive cloud of appallingly tacky taste.
1. Don’t have a comic cake topper on the wedding cake. Please – not that one of the bride climbing up the groom, grabbing his ass, or installing a ball and chain on his ankle. Please, just don’t.
2. If you weigh more than 180 pounds, don’t choose a strapless gown, either for a bridal gown, or for the bridesmaids. Just please don’t. Especially if you have tats that will show.
3. It’s not necessary to arrive at the venue in a horse-drawn carriage, on a horse, carried by the groomsmen, a converted Brinks van or a stretch limo. Really, it isn’t. Plain black town-car is fine. Trust me.
4. Don’t, for the love of god, write your own vows. Stick to the traditional service, of whatever denomination that you belong to, even you only go to church on major holidays – it’s much more dignified. Seriously.
5. If an outdoor wedding, for the sake of your own sanity, ensure that there is a sheltered option available in case of inclement weather. And speaking of outdoor venues; early spring or late fall in most of the northern States is liable to be cold, rainy and stormy. I’m just saying here, that frostbite and pneumonia are not attractive elements, especially if you have chosen strapless gowns for yourself and attendants.
6. Accept the fact that your average VFW hall, conference center hotel ballroom or modern church parish hall cannot be temporarily made over into something which will be mistaken by your guests for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Not going to happen. Adjust.
7. Don’t try and cut corners economically by forcing your bridesmaids/family/significant others to make your damn wedding favors and decorations. Either pay a professional, or skip it entirely. Don’t torture your bridesmaids, etc.
8. A buffet dinner is fine. So is substantial finger-food. Really, you don’t have to have table assignments for everyone: just the bridal party and your respective immediate family.
9. Rough rule of thumb here – tell no one among the vendors of relevant services that it is a wedding reception. Just tell them it’s a party, so many people, such and such a date, and you want this and such for noshes.
10. It’s supposed to be a celebration. For you and your friends and family. And treating said friends and family as if they were some kind of walking ATM is mega-tacky. And basically, the rest of the world doesn’t much care about your special day. Especially if you and the significant other have been living together for ____ years and already have ____ children.
OK – clear on the concepts. Good.
(Don’t have any liquid in your mouth while watching this … look, I warned you, I’m not paying for any new keyboards.)
(Couldn’t resist G&S updated, and an Obama look-alike…)
Found through a comment here, at Protein Wisdom, where Jeff G. is having yet another go-around with She Who Must Not Be Mentioned, in whom the serious crayzee is in full flood.
So, as expected General McChrystal resigned last week; a terribly drastic way to get an instant face to face attitude adjustment session with the boss, I must say. I skimmed the original Rolling Stone story, and I have to also observe that I am still mystified as to how and why a freelance reporter with no particular track record of being a friend of the military even got let through the door – or even was allowed by the General’s Public Affairs officer/advisor to ingratiate himself so thoroughly that they seem to have forgotten that said reporter was there. I mean, there are reporters and there are reporters . . . and as a public affairs professional, I completely internalized certain things; like being always aware that the outside media was present, and anything he or she saw had the potential to be on the record. In fact, most likely would be on the record, so a certain degree of circumspection was required. I would have thought that anyone savvy enough to have made any rank north of light colonel would also have absorbed that kind of situational awareness. Officers who have been promoted to general rank most always are pretty sharp. The military is a ruthless meritocracy, perhaps the most so of any of our various establishments. Even the political generals, promoted on account of who, rather than what they know – usually possess a high degree of low cunning. Was General McChrystal just arrogant enough to think that he, as Obama’s chosen general for Afghanistan, could treat with a supposedly sympathetic media outlet and get away with it. Arrogance I could buy – but not stupidity.
I read some comments and posts on OS and elsewhere, where the degree of pearl-clutching shock and horror over the disrespect reflected towards the civilian element in the chain of command by those comments from General McChrystal’s staff – as quoted in the story got to be rather poisonously amusing. If a military officer lets fall a derisive comment in private about VP Biden – and no reporter is there to hear it, does it make a sound? See; there is a difference between the private sphere and the official, duty sphere, the one where you follow the legitimate orders given by your superior – even if you privately disagree. Granted, sometimes the border between the two is blurry – especially at the levels where historians and reporters might be expected to take an interest, but it does exist. Official is when you put on the uniform, when you go on shift or deployment, when you release statements or make speeches in your official capacity as a member of the forces. Everyone in service has had it pounded into them repeatedly, about not bringing discredit on the service in your public actions; so did McChystal openly disobey any such orders given to him in securing Afghanistan? Or does failure to closely police the private comments of your close subordinates and staff in the manner of a grade school teacher with a classroom of fractious third-graders constitute an offense against the UCMJ? Apparently, under this current administration it does, although I suspect under the previous one, the parties in question might have been lauded for their courage in speaking “troof to power, man!â€
Frankly, this is not the first administration in my lifetime to be held in something less than complete affection and respect among the military, even as they followed orders and kept a stoical public silence about their personal opinions. Jimmy Carter’s inaction following the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran had many of us grinding our teeth, and Bill Clinton’s games with interns excited considerable contempt – especially since any military officer or NCO proven guilty of playing hide-the-salami with a subordinate and lying about it would have been disciplined and discharged. One standard for me, and another for thee, y’see.
It has been suggested by a milblogger or two, and a neighbor of mine with a background in Special Forces – that General McChrystal spend a lot of his military career in sort of a Special Forces cocoon, doing – and developing the habit of speaking bluntly – rather than having to deal much with those on the outside. I could tentatively accept something of that hypothesis, save that Special Forces is a ruthless meritocracy on steroids. Certain milboggers are speculating along the lines of General McChrystal deliberately setting off the explosive bolts on his career. What if he was going spare with frustration at the constraints and his civilian counterparts in Afghanistan are operating under, with zilch support from the current administration. What if he could already see the writing on the wall – or the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy and came to the conclusion that the military was going to take the blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan?
To this day that ‘other America of defense’ as written about by Arthur Hadley – is haunted by Vietnam. There was the losing of it by failure of the political machine to support South Vietnam logistically after the withdrawal of American troops, and also by the fact that there were generations (in military terms) of able and creative officers who served there, knowing very well what needed to be done, but felt their efforts were stymied at the very highest levels, to include the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. I began my own service when the services were still thick with NCOs and officers who remembered Vietnam vividly, but fairly quietly – and to a man (they were just about all men, then) they despised McNamara with a passion that fairly made them incoherent. McNamara had a toweringly high estimation of his own and his ‘wiz kids’ abilities when it came to overseeing the war in Vietnam, and relative contempt for the uniformed military; a contempt returned in spades. Now and again it was bruited about that it might have been better all around – that McNamara be brought to see the light about the true effect of his policies with regard to Vietnam, if the generals on the Joint Chiefs of staff, and those others who disagreed with him had resigned their commissions in protest. Interestingly, one of those officers who did spectacularly criticize the war – on Sixty Minutes, no less – was an army colonel named David Hackworth. Almost 25 years later, I edited an interview that he gave to AFKN-TV, where he cheerfully acknowledged that yes, he had indeed thrown himself on his own sword, over policy and accepted the consequences more or less gracefully. He finished up as a best-selling author, and military journalist for a major national magazine, along with the awed respect of the next generation of military, so it all ended rather happily for him.
Is the McChrystal McMystery a repeat of this? Same song, slightly different verse. Discuss.
There are days, as the late Molly Ivins once observed, when “ . . . you open the paper and it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator, smoking a cigar. Hard to know what to think . . .â€
So when I read in passing, on several different news aggregate and opinion blogs, of a complete unknown, who apparently did not campaign in any detectable manner – winning the South Carolina Democratic Party primary, I am having one of those moments of elemental WTF?
Blondie assures me that South Carolina is a very odd place, though (having served at a tour at Cherry Point) so perhaps enough of it slops over – and what little I do know about their peculiar variety of local political shenanigans should not surprise me at all . . . but still. Unemployed Army veteran, living with the aged parents, and having achieved almost total invisibility on the campaign trail, and seeming to be peculiarly in-adept at fielding the press and uncomfortable with the public, of less than dazzling verbal skills . . . yeah, all the way to Texas I smell a rat, and a rat the size of a brontosaurus.
But still – 60% of the vote . . . even listed first, alphabetically, on the ballot, and lord only knows how many addled voters might have been thinking along ecologically-correct lines, as in a suggestion to “go green(e)†. . . that so many were willing to vote for a complete and total unknown, over someone which they might have at least been expected to have heard of, to go against the Republican nominee, Jim deMint. My semi-scientific wild ass guess on that (and I am opining from a distance, mind you) is that whoever is responsible for setting up Alvin Greene as a post turtle might have been able to manufacture a handful votes for a plant . . . but inducing so many voters not in on the joke to go along? That goes beyond random, methinks – that goes all the way to a perfectly stunning degree of unhappiness with establishment politicians, or even those who had at least a shred of credibility and exposure as a politician.
In other words, how pissed off is the general voting public in South Carolina with their elected nabobs that they would just “x†the unknown name on the ballot? William F. Buckley once famously opined that he would “ . . . rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.â€
So, maybe voters in South Carolina have done just that? Discuss.
(From another one of those emails going around)
The economy is so bad that:
I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
I ordered a burger at McDonald’s and the kid behind the counter asked, “Can you afford fries with that?”
CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.
Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.
McDonald’s is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children’s names.
A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.
Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.
Motel Six won’t leave the light on anymore.
The Mafia is laying off judges.
Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.
Congress says they are looking into this Bernie Madoff scandal. Oh Great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!
And, finally…
I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.
Found through 2Blowhards, who thought it was a clever concept, but the examples posted just weren’t all that funny.
I disagreed – the whole blog is here: obscure vintage works of art, with new titles.
#91, The USS Conan O’Brian is especially hilarious.
There is a sucker born every moment, and who else should have known better, but the shameless old huckster? Even though it’s most probably one of his competitors who actually voiced that deathless observation, PT is the one that we remember today. Fleecing the credulous for a living is not a game which was thought up yesterday. People who desperately want to believe something are as common now as they were in the 19th century; they lined up then to gawk at the so-called Cardiff Giant, and now and again, there are enough poor gullible schmucks who answer a Nigerian spam email . . . and really think that someone with an uncertain grasp of vernacular English and indifferent punctuation skills is really going to transfer umpty-million dollars into their bank account. But belief in such improbabilities is not a crime, and does not generally do any more harm than to the believers’ pocketbook.
Part of this whole ‘free country’ thing is that you are free to believe in any such improbable thing you want to, like Megan Fox can act, or that Dan Brown can write a good book. Or as is sometimes the case – to not believe in something. I, for example, do not believe in global warming, or that sort of alleged global warming supposed to have been caused by human activity, the sort of global warming that calls down unexpected blizzards where-ere Al Gore doth appear, and causes polar bears to fall out of the sky. Never did, don’t and never will. As I have been tiresomely reminding certain of my friends over the years – it was warm enough in Roman times to grow wine grapes in Britain, and in the 10th century for European-style subsistence-farming in Greenland. It was also cool and wet enough for the Pueblo tribes in various places in the American southwest to do pretty much the same. Conversely, during the 16th and 17th centuries it was cold enough in some English winters for the Thames to freeze solid, at or above London. Once there were lush oases in the North African desert, and glaciers covering most of Europe and the North American continent . . . and all of that happened before human kind existed, or that our technologies, and our presence created nothing more than a gentle burp in the cosmos.
So, are we all clear now on the concept? The earth’s climate has changed in the past, sometimes quite drastically, it will change in future, and in fact the weather changes every darned minute. We don’t even have that much precise and reliable data about it anyway: systematic records are spotty at best, much before the 19th century. So, thinking human activity does much to change the climate of the Earth one way or the other? It’s a theory yet to be proven, and massaging, or vigorously pummeling the existing data, and not being able to provide enough of it for anyone else to reproduce the same result? There is a word for that – several ones, actually, but the one I have in mind is ‘opinion’. And dragooning scientific peers and rivals into seeming to share it by monstering or ostracizing them does the actual science no favors. (I would agree, in passing, that generally it is not good to foul our own nests, and to be tidy-minded and to refrain from spilling dangerous pollutants into the air, the earth, or the water; on the whole that has proved to be one of those Good Things that a concern for the environment has engendered over the last forty years.)
The assumption that mere human activity is having Dangerous World-wide Consequences And We Must Do All In Our Power To Ensure Perfect Entropy; that is marvelous to behold, how it became the trend of the moment, among public, the media, corporations and politicians . . . old PT Barnum thought only to fleece the gullible masses by exercising his own creativity! The suspicion about the Global Warmenists – that they were hoping to fleece the gullible by drawing governments into it, as well as corporations – or at the very least, score some more grant money and fat speaking fees for beating the good ol’ Global Warmest/Coolenist/Changiness Drum like a rented mule has been richly rewarded by the leaking of a body of emails from the institution most prominent in recent years for propagating the theory as if it was a matter of established fact. So, no surprise to me, the revelation that the smugly certain Global Warmenist/Coolenist/Changiness advocates were swapping e-mails about how to reward their friends and punish the insufficiently enthusiastic comrade-scientists. What is a bit of a surprise is how miserably like a bunch of middle-school snots deciding among themselves who is really cool enough to hang with the in-crowd that they appear . . . and alternately, how much like a cat trying to hide the crap on the kitchen floor by frantically scratching at the linoleum.
The theory of anthropomorphic global warning is certainly up for more discussion, and for more research . . . that is, honest research in the sense of the search for pure data, uncontaminated by any thought of arriving at the predestined conclusion, or corrupted by receiving the monetary benefits derived from magisterially insisting that it is settled, no more discussion. That’s what a theory is – and to bend the observations in order to serve a conclusion, which is what appears to have happened here – this is not good science. Or it isn’t the science that my dear old Dad taught to us. Science is never settled – what we think to be true is ever-evolving, and one of the first requirements is to be rigorously honest about the data. Fudging the data in order to provide the expedient and much-desired answer? That is not good science. And making social and political demands based on it is even less desirable.
(From one of those e-mails going around, this one from the military broadcaster’s discussion group, a well-known nest of racists and terrorist sympathizers. This will no doubt get me on several watch lists as a person of doubleplusungoodness.)
Wonderful news! After astonishing the world by receiving the Nobel Peace Prize that was so richly deserved (according to the Democratic leadership and all right thinking people everywhere) Our Dear Leader Barack Hussein has been honored again; the Pentagon announced today that the wonderful light of greatness that is our glorious leader has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor! this after visiting a Marine Corps base last summer. General Sabot, the new military czar in charge of “honoring dear leaders” stated today “We know some reactionary types both in the civilian sector and those in the military (who unlike myself have had their decision making process clouded by actual combat experience) will not agree with this decision. Nevertheless, a careful review of a cellphone photo-capture of the presidents’ arrival clearly shows the light of virtue and really great greatness that is our savior and bringer of change, his majesty Barack (the peace bringer) He has the clear facial expressions of someone who is really going to do something really really brave and stuff!”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stated: “It’s about time we gave this award to someone who deserves it!” she then expanded: “In the recent past we have given this medal to mostly Warmongering military types who followed the orders of the disgraced prior administration! These mostly Republican types received this award while committing horrible war crimes during the period when this was a illegal war. It is appropriate then that his majesty be given this honor as the war has magically become legal under our more enlightened leadership.” Col. Savemyarss, under-military czar of “sayin’ good stuff about our dear leader” stated: “We believe this award is a proper follow up to all those on the General Staff who are now saying that the new administrations’ war plans are enlightened and much better than the old plans of the prior administration and that it is better way to show our loyalty to the new administration since after almost a year we still have no idea what the new administrations war plan are yet. But don”t take that to mean that I think that a year is to long to come up with a plan! It’s just about right! and I am sure the plan will be like the greatest ever! As a matter of fact I hear there is a school in New Jersey that is writing a new song of praise for our dear leader based on the wonderful new plan we all know he is putting together! “and that you can quote me on!”
I took a break from all things Tea Party this last weekend, and hit the highway – this in support of the book thing. You remembered the book and author thingy, that I work on, in between blogging for this and that, managing this and that, editing or reviewing this and that, designing this and that? Anyway, months ago I had been invited to participate in a one-day multi-cultural festival at the Fort Bend Museum in Richmond on Saturday. It used to be more of a strictly Hispanic festival, but the director wanted to incorporate something of the German and Czech element, and I thought it might be fun, and they said I could sell copies of the Trilogy … so there I went. It was the first long road-trip in the GG, the new-to-me Acura Legend that replaced the VEV last month, three hours on IH-10 East, almost-but-not-quite to Houston.
Blondie was supposed to go with me; we were to stay Friday night at the director’s house, do the festival and stay Saturday night, and come back early Sunday morning. I guess we could have gone up early Saturday morning, as the festival didn’t start until noon, and come back that night – but it did seem like an awful lot of driving in one day. But our next-door neighbor’s grandson wasn’t available to look after the animals, and Blondie had a big test on Wednesday – so, there I went, off on my own. Driving back on Saturday night was simply out of the question, after a long afternoon at the festival.
What a joy to drive a car where everything worked, reliably – especially the air conditioning, even if I lost the classical music station a few miles east of the turn-off for Gonzalez. And even more of a joy – getting to Katy and only having run through half a tank of gas.
That part of East Texas is subtly different from the area around San Antonio, and the Hill Country that I know – it’s more heavily wooded, with stands of massive, spreading oak trees interspersed with meadows of tall-grass – and much, much greener, especially after a summer where we haven’t had all that much rain. I zipped over rivers – the Guadalupe, the Colorado, and finally the Brazos – all running deep and placid. Around Richmond, suburban lawns are lush and green – not half-dead and crispy brown as they are around San Antonio. In East Texas, tall oaks loom over the houses, and the smaller trees form tangled thickets, stitched together with wild grapevines. There are creeks with water running in them, lakes and waterways – it reminds me of England, a bit. This was the bit of Texas that was historically more Anglo; there was never much Hispanic presence here. It was the closest to the then-United States in the 19th century, and presumably offered those American settlers in Texas a little more of what they were accustomed to, as far as landscape and plant-life went; a little more Southern rather than Southwest, flatter rather than gently rolling.
Richmond is pretty much now a bedroom suburb of Houston. Enough remains of the town to show what it once was like, when it was a discrete entity to itself , anchored by the railway and a bend of the Brazos, adorned with stately, white-pillared homes, rambling Victorian cottages trimmed with yards of wooden gingerbread trim, and dignified old two-storey commercial blocks on the main street. Here and there, during the last half-century, someone with lots of money and no sense of fitness shoe-horned in a structure of concrete-shoe-box style modern – every example of such being as jarringly out of place as a juicy fart in church. Which is a good thing, I guess, that Richmond was prosperous enough over the years that institutions and businesses could to rebuild – but still, it must make it a challenge to pull off a historical district, when the district is broken up with indigestible chunks of Brutal Concrete Moderne.
Anyway – I had a lovely time, talked to a fair number of people, sold three sets of the Trilogy – including two sets to members of the local German heritage society, both of whom knew very little about the Hill Country settlements and the Adelsverein scheme generally. There were a lot of early Texas connections in Richmond – meaning, from the 1820s and 1830s. Jane Long – the widow of one early pioneer/adventurer lived there for many years, as did Carry Nation, she of the saloon-smashing temperance brigade. So did Mirabeau Lamar, sometime president of the Republic of Texas, who fought with Sam Houston like two tomcats in a sack. Sam Houston’s master of scouts, Erastus “Deaf†Smith is also buried there – ostensibly on the current museum’s grounds, but possibly underneath the nearby street intersection. And Benjamin Franklin Terry, of Terry’s Texas Rangers Civil War fame, came from nearby and recruited locally – his saddle, out of which he was shot in fighting around Woodsonville, Kentucky, is in the museum. And after the end of the Civil War, the Woodpeckers and the Jaybirds – gangs formed by partisans of Reconstruction, and of Southern sympathizers fought at least one pitched battle for control of Fort Bend County.
Some of this – people, places and events will eventually become part of my new trilogy, but you will probably have to wait a couple of years to find out exactly how much.
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 Leaderâ€. 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.
Well, now that all the gourmet beer has been drunk and all the initial dust has settled, I guess it may be OK for me to venture out of hiding, and as a person of decided pallor, to venture some kind of opinion. May as well, since darned near every other sentient being has, in the last week or so. Kind of comic, watching a distinguished and famous gentleman and possessor of skin of a year-round dark-tan color, as well as a professorship at a prestigious university – and boasting the instant and unreserved support of everyone from the chief of police of his fair city to the President of the US – carrying on as if he was a 1960’s Civil Rights marcher being whomped on by Bull Connor’s cops. So amusing, watching a grown man acting like a wanna-be street badass picking a fight, in the total assurance that the person he is picking the fight with won’t actually dare respond.
And the fact that the policeman in question – like me, a person of pallor, and probably a veteran of forty years’ worth of indoctrinating lectures on tolerance and diversity, and respect, and judging others by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin – behaved professionally throughout, and moreover seems to have the trust, and respect of his colleagues in the force … well, that’s pretty damn amusing, too. Thank god one of the participants in this little fandango acted like a mature, well-adjusted and responsible grownup.
Kind of puts the cherry on the top of the whipped cream on the sundae, how we were going to be all cool and post-racial, once a man who – if you kinda tilted your head sideways, squinted and used some imagination – could reasonably call black … Black with a capitol B, that is. Who is actually the son of a Kenyan bigamist, and a seriously mixed-up white anthropology student, who was raised by white grandparents in Hawaii, and educated at an upper-crust private school and a secession of equally upper-crust universities. He seems to have magically and effortlessly floated up to higher and higher levels in academia, local and national politics, without any exhibiting any notable talents or specific skills, other than that of standing there and looking gorgeous. No, it is perplexing, and the apotheosis of Barry O. brings to mind the crack made about a relatively undistinguished 19th century British politician: “Canning in office is like a fly in amber. Nobody cares about the fly: the only question is “How the hell did he get there?â€
No, the current resident of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue is not by any means straight outta Compton, although he has been taken quite to the hearts of many who are, or wish they were, or hoped that other people would think them so. Basically, Ms Dunham-Obama-Soetero’s little boy Barry has the unqualified, unquestioning and enthusiastic support of 97% of that segment of the American public defined as black or Afro-American, or whatever the hell the current racial designator is. And that may be the soil from which the poisoned tree grows, and where the problem begins, when considering L’Affaire Gates. I can’t say it’s never been a problem for elected officials who came out of various ethnic minority groups, to think of the welfare of their own groups first, and then of the wider constituency . Human nature works that way; mostly you are drawn to, and have much more in common with people who have the same background, the same values and pretty much the same experiences. But in the military I know – and in politics I would hope – that in order to best serve the nation, it is one’s duty to transcend that. It’s been a given in the military for at least the last three decades and more, that there is no black or brown, or yellow or white – there is just Army green, Air Force blue, Navy/Marine whatever. It has to be that way for the military, and it may come to having to be that way for our presidents, legislators and judiciary.
See, there are people who do a job, and do it either well or not so well, and who just incidentally are black, or Hispanic or whatever. Whatever their color or ethnicity is … it’s just an aspect of them, not at the center of their being. Where you get into dangerous waters is when this particular aspect is at the center of all, for certain politicians and activists. That’s the core of their character, the center of their self-image, it’s bread and butter, meat and drink – they could no more set aside that aspect than they could chop off a limb or two. A long time ago, when Jesse Jackson wasn’t half the philandering self-parody that he appears to be today, he conceived the bright idea to run for higher office than just all around racial busy-body. And I thought at the time – no, it would never work.
He is Black, with a capitol B, not black with a small-b, like then-Los Angeles Mayor (and former police officer turned lawyer) Tom Bradley. Say whatever you liked about Mayor Bradley, he was a serious and dedicated public official, who went on transcending color for what seemed like forever. You could picture him campaigning for office anywhere, with anyone, while I couldn’t really picture Jesse Jackson kissing white babies with any particular enthusiasm. I think that during the 2008 presidential campaign, that a lot of people – of all races but mostly white – rather hoped that Obama would prove to be an Tom Bradley … and not another professional race-hustling Black-with-a-capital-B-what’s-in-it-for-me-and-mine-sleaze-bag like Al Sharpton.
And that’s the unintended fallout from L’Affaire Gates, you see; that increasing numbers of people of pallor who gave the President the benefit of the doubt, or who just hoped against instinct for the best, are now looking him over and thinking … Nope, just another Al Sharpton, just another racial huckster with a smoother manner, a glossier education, slicker friends and a much more expert tailor. And I have detected fearful speculation here and there in the small tidepools at the edge of the great sea that is the blogosphere, that if the Yes We Can-man really, really karks up the office of the POTUS and by extension the rest of the United States – our economy, our medical care, our employment and subsequent electoral and judicial processes, it will be a cold day in hell before another person of color of his particular perceived ilk, either with a capital B or without, would ever be considered. No, very few people will ever be so crude and racist to come out and say so, up front – we’ve all had thirty years of lectures on that very subject from the properly accredited diversity experts on what is acceptable to say and do WRT to race, in the arena outside of our own thoughts and our private circles. Nope – it would never be overt, in public and out there. But I know the thought is out there. And I also know the threat of being called a racist for saying so is getting pretty damn hollow.
And here’s another uncomfortable thought – if the Black with a capital-B, post-racial, Yes-We-Can-man goes down, who goes down with him? Legacy media? Possibly, unless they can shift gears fast enough. And the Black-with-a-capital B support system, all those celebrities, activists, intellectuals like the thin-skinned Professor Gates? All of those who cling to solidarity with someone whose skin-color is somewhat like theirs, regardless of the content of character, or the results of his policies? That is an interesting thought, isn’t it?
(Comments seem to be frelled at the moment – but have a go. If you can’t post comments send me an email, and I’ll post them at the bottom of this post.)
Later – Comments still hosed: Danny H. sent me the following comment – Hiya Sarge. comments seem to be hosed so just wanted to let you know that was some great commentary. Thanks
Oh, man – there are some people who just cannot take being laughed at, as richly as they deserve it. Kudos for Sacha Baron Cohen, for having a brass pair … tastefully trimmed with some fashionable and expensive designer-something-or-other, I am sure.
Plans for the 4th of July Tea Party proceed apace, although mercifully for all concerned, this will not be anything like the Tax Day Tea Party. It won’t be downtown in Alamo Plaza for one, and it won’t be 15-20,000 people, all crammed together in front of a historical building on a warm spring afternoon …. No, no, no no – doing all that again on a Texas July afternoon would be like an open-air Black Hole of Calcutta, as much as that sounds like a contradiction in terms. I was trying to wriggle through the packed crowd in front of the entrance to the Hyatt at about 5:30 on that day. There was no way you could have passed a piece of paper in between the people massed in front of that stage … so just as well that the 4th of July Tea Party will be out in the country. Yes, it will be hot. It’s July in South Texas, it’ll be hot, just like it’s cold in January at the North Pole. Some things just ought not to need saying; they just are.
But the Rio Cibolo Ranch is out in the gentle-rolling country, a little east of that ring-road that marks the farthest outer boundary of San Antonio. In April the meadows around the various venues were green – the Cibolo is a little more of a creek, more like a baby river- and the groves of pecan and oak trees around were thick and shady. There are small gardens all around the two smaller buildings, a horseshoe pitch and an area to play Frisbee golf. The biggest building is a huge pavilion with a stage at one end – we will have a couple of local bands, and Evan Sayet to MC the evening’s speeches: Marcus Luttrell is one of them, and so is Joe The Plumber, he who once was a private citizen who had the temerity to ask The One an impertinent question during a campaign photo-op. He’s been a mini-celebrity ever since; the volunteer who has been organizing the event and who has been talking to him now and again says he is a really amusing person, and does great on the radio.
Doesn’t have quite the eye-ball attraction quotient of Glenn Beck and the Nuge, though – which might be a blessing, since we don’t know where we would have put all the fans and their cars, out among the fields and cows; it’s also proved to be a bit more of a chore, attracting the fickle attention of the big media outlets – such as they are, in San Antonio: most of said attention will come in the last couple of days. The local big-city paper, the Express News is still oohing and ahhing over our new mayor’s intentions to be in the Gay Pride Parade, which will be around midday on the 4th. We have formally invited Hizzonor to the Tea Party, and await his response with considerable anticipation. If he attends, or sends regrets only – it will be amusing for us, either way. I am getting ready to face the media hoards, one more time – so blogging over the weekend will be as light as it has been this week. Sorry – have to save the country, you know. Or the cheerleader, or something like that.
Later PS: Just been informed that Gov. Perry of Texas is coming to our modest little tea party event … so ummm … I may not be able to come up for a breath for the next two days…
I’t been around for a bit, but I thought you all might enjoy the worlds’ shortest slasher flic –
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.â€
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.
(These are lifted from an email sent out to the Yahoo group for FEN broadcasters. The following are alleged to be quotes from translated kung fu movies. No idea of they were really in movies or not; they just sounded pretty funny.)
1. I am about to choke you like a chicken!
2. Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.
3. Gun wounds again?
4. Same old rules…no eyes, no groin.
5. A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.
6. Damn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken!
7. Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.
8. Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?
9. Quiet or I’ll blow your throat up.
10. You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.
11. I’ll fire aimlessly if you don’t come out!
12. You daring lousy guy.
13. Beat him out of recognizable shape!
14. I have been scared shitless too much lately.
15. I got knife scars more than the number of your leg hairs!
16. Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.
17. The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?
18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?
19. This will be of fine service for you, you bag of scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your manhoods and leave them out on the dessert flour for your aunts to eat.
20. Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your gynecologist for a thorough extermination.
21. Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.
22. I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.