World – Page 10 – The Daily Brief

Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

25. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm, Science!, World

There are a good few reasons besides sheer contrariness that I am standing off to the side, pointing and snickering at the antics of the “global warming” warming crowd. One of them is that I have been to the “omigod-it-could-be-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” rodeo before. Several times, actually; when I was in junior high school the panic-du-jour was about overpopulation. Eventually we would all wind up, standing shoulder to shoulder, running out of food and clean water. When I got to high school, it was global cooling; great honking ice sheets were going to advance across the earth, the sun would grow dim and we would all freeze to death. If we didn’t starve, first.

Before and during that was the oldie but goodie of global thermonuclear war; we were all going to be annihilated by the Russkies or a melting power plant. Or die of starvation afterwards. For a while in college we were supposed to be all freaked out by the scourge of “future shock” wherein things changed so fast and so suddenly that our poor little minds just couldn’t cope, and we would… oh, I forget what was supposed to happen to us with “future-shock”. Curl up in the fetal position, suck our thumbs and turn up the electric blanket up to high, I suppose.

So, I am a little resistant to someone jumping up and down and screaming “oooga-booga!” and demanding that I panic along with the rest of the lemmings about the latest panic-du-jour. Deal with it.

See, I know the climate of the world has changed, is changing and will go on changing. There were glaciers over the upper Mid-West, once. In Roman times, it was warm enough in England to grow grapes. Until about the 14th century (give or take) it was warm enough in southern Greenland for subsistence farming. A volcano eruption on the other side of the world resulted in a year without a summer early in the 19th century in the northern hemisphere. So it went. So it goes. How much global warming in the last umpty-ump years-decades-whatever is due to human activity? I don’t know, but I am not going to rush into taking a position on the say-so of the same sort of people who were banging on about global cooling, overpopulation, nuclear annihilation, future-shock or whatever in the days of yore.

Sorry. I’ll make jokes about them, though.

Which brings me down to the one over-hyped panic-du-jour that followed upon all the others listed, the one that commanded tabloid-style headlines all during the mid 1980s. That would be the “ritual-satanic-abuse-of-children-in-daycare-centers” scare. While it is not the same kind of issue, it seems to be meriting some of the same kind of popular press. Standing off to one side and looking on, I keep seeing the same sort of shrieking hysteria, the same light-speed jumping to conclusions, the same degree of absolute conviction, the same kind of ‘piling on’, and the same shouting-down of all the people who said “now just wait a darned minute”.

The global-warming trend might very be as real an issue, as much as the day-care ritual abuse wasn’t, but the degree of shrieking hysteria on display when the issue comes up doesn’t do it any favors. Or win me over as a convert, because I am pretty sure that in ten years, the usual suspects will be banging on about something else.

No Such Thing

24. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, World

…As too many books.

There is however, such a thing as not enough bookshelves.

When Blondie and I PCSed out of Spain over fifteen years ago, the packing crew had a pool going on how many boxes of books they would eventually pack. The grand total topped out at 64 boxes at that point. Since we returned to the land of the Big PX, replete with establishments such as Half-Price Books, the sales tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various library and book-club events, the increase on the 1991 book census has been geometric. At a certain point, accommodating all the books in free-standing bookcases would have reduced the house to a kind of solidly-packed, book-lined burrow, dark and fusty, with barely enough space for a reading light, and a stove.

Beginning bout five years ago, I took the situation in hand, and began buying lengths of shelving and brackets of the ornamental sort— for the ends that showed— and utility brackets for the interior of the shelves which wouldn’t show when properly packed full of books. The first efforts at securing order among the books involved a narrow stretch of wall where the kitchen merged into the dining area, to one side of a large window looking out into the back yard. Three small white-painted shelves advanced up the wall towards the ceiling, for the cookbooks that I used most frequently, and the jar of pencils and notepads best kept close to the telephone. The rag-tag collection of shelves that had served us until then were banished to the garage. Most of them were heavy, ugly dark-wood things that took up a lot of space, bought at the PX because I had an urgent need for storage at the moment, and they were cheap. A couple of weekends later, another set of shelves went up on the other side of the window, for the not-so often used cookbooks, and the gardening and home-improvement porn. I put up a long shelf over the window for the blue-flowering Danish china, and there was that whole end of the house rendered light, and bright, and all the books in order. So, I looked around and said, hmmmm.

The wall opposite the big window was next. This had a double-doorway from the living room into a little room that we used as a TV den, more or less in the center. Four-foot-long shelves went up on either side, all the way to the top of the door… and then five more shelves above those which ran the width of the wall, but shortened to follow the angle of the ceiling. I need a very tall ladder to get to the top three shelves… in fact; the stuff that I never use is all parked up there. Everything was ordered by subject or genre, and a couple of nice vases and knick-knacks interspersed between the books. Last of all, I fitted six shelves on either side of the fireplace, and all but one of the old bookcases were banished to the garage. Now the living room was lined with books on three walls, and all the space between freed up. The three wooden shelves I kept in the house still, were squeezed into the TV den, as they were oak and matched the stereo/media center.

The only place where chaos, clutter and disorganization still reigned was among the oldest collection of books… the paperbacks, banished to a set of tall walnut-veneer bookcases in the hallway, and shelved two ranks deep. I had made a stab at alphabetizing them by author, but locating a particular book was a particularly frustrating crap-shoot. But this last weekend, Blondie had prevailed upon me… since she had a shelf of her own books, overflowing in a most untidy way… to bring order, discipline and installed shelves to that last holdout.

We took ourselves away to Home Depot for brackets and five lengths of 5-inch wide shelving, and ran a series of shelves from the end of the hall to the washer and dryer closet. We’ll need to put in another three shelves, actually, but at least everything is now only single-deep. Heck, I can now find stuff that I didn’t lay eyes on since the last time I unpacked it.

Hey, I knew I had a copy of “That Darn Cat”… Granny Jessie took us to see that movie, and my copy was a tie-in, bought at Vromans for 35 cents! And I do have all of Dorothy Dunnets’ Francis Lymond books… read the first of them when I was sick with the flu in a youth hostel in Lincoln. And there was the episode guide to “Blakes’ 7”, and every damn one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” books. Wow, that’s kind of an embarrassment. So is the R.F. Delafield “The Dreaming Suburb”. Not too many Agatha Christie mysteries, though. They always seemed a little formulaic to me; I preferred Josephine Tey. And one of the most uproarious novels about the Restoration ever written, John Dickson Carr’s “Most Secret”… So what if they are all stacked sideways on the shelf? At least they are not all hiding behind each other! In not a few cases, I despaired of finding a book that I thought I had, and bought another copy. (Half-Price Books buy-back desk, here we come!)
At least now, we can find what we are looking for. And the hallway seems a great deal wider, too.

Our Peculiar Local Institution

18. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, World

OK, now I am in the mood to thump the head of a spectacularly ignorant commentor….

“Being able to walk into a supermarket any time day or night, and buy a gun and bullets is obviously too much for the weak-minded American. It’s basic stupidity. Surely, surely the US can no longer deny the fact that their “freedom of protection” is a load of crap. Or must thousands more innocents die?”

Emily, Cape Town, South Africa, comment on Sky News thread, via commentor Dylan Kissane at Tim Blair’s place

Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit, if that doesn’t qualify in my book as purely the stupidest, most ignorant and bigoted statement I have run across in regards to the recent sad events. Of course, I have charted a careful course to avoid some of the deeper and most notorious fever-swamps in the blogosphere. There may be more densely concentrated blocks of ignorance out there, but fortunately I am not moved to hunt them down… stumbling over that little example was enough to get the bile ducts going like Old Faithful.

That and the fact that South Africa, as dear little Emily must be aware, has a hell of a problem with home-invasion robberies, rapes and violent carjackings just puts a nice shiny gloss on the phrase “freedom of protection”. Wasn’t South Africa the place where an inventor had worked up a flamethrower that shot out from either side of the car, scorching the hell out of anyone standing there and menacing the driver or passenger? Why, yes it was. Doesn’t look like it was popular for too long, though. Must have been hell on the poor squee-gee guys, too.

As a matter of fact, you cannot buy guns and bullets from a supermarket, any time day or night… either that, or I have persistently missed seeing that aisle at HEB Grocery, or Smiths or Kroeger. Nope, sweetie… not even in Texas.

You can buy ammunition during the wee hours at Walmart, though… and guns from those Walmart outlets which have a well-stocked sporting goods department, and they are open twenty-four hours a day, but it’s stretching things a bit to call Walmart a supermarket.

Here’s what the Constitution says about our “right of protection”, Emily dear…
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Savor the taste of the words “security of a free state” and “Right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. So, the part about “well-regulated militia” is a little loose and lumpy… somewhat like Michael Moore, come to think on it. My point is that a lot of common, ordinary Americans think of guns as tools… sort of like a band-saw, or a power drill, the sort of thing that a do-it-yourself enthusiast has around the house.

Because we are still, for a variety of reasons, a do-it-yourself kind of people… kind of prone to take care of stuff ourselves, especially in those places which do not boast 24-7 private security. We’ve been that way for a while… and sometime it gets ugly when it happens, but the odd thing that I keep noticing, is that it happens in the w-a-a-a-a-y biggest ugly way in those places…oh like Darfur, and Somalia, Kosovo and Zimbabwe, where the means of providing Miss Emily’s , “freedom of protection” is a little on the sketchy side. For the foreseeable future though, we are all stuck with the existence of unbalanced losers who want to go out in a blaze of glory and 24-7 news coverage, as well as the distain of people as exquisitely well-informed as Emily from Cape Town. It’s tragic and horrible… but it happens in other places than the US. And when some raving loony, or some hopped-up robber is disuaded by a do-it-yourself good citizen, it’s a couple of lines on the local police blotter… maybe on the local TV newscast for an evening.

I don’t own a gun, myself, and even though I have lived in Texas for a dozen years now, this last weekend was the first time I had seen a lot of people walking around with a surplusage of side arms. Even in the Air Force, our SPS were held down to one major weapon per person, two at max. Most of the antique firearms enthusiasts I saw this last weekend were dressed up in old West costume, and they were having fun plinking away at metal targets. It’s just not my cup of tea…but it amuses me as much as it would probably horrify Emily from Cape Town, to think that my own neighborhood may be as well equipped, weapons-wise as many small European militaries. (Say, San Marino, or Monaco? Do they even have militaries?) It guarantees that violent home invasions and car-hijackings in Texas are refreshingly not as frequent as they might be in those places where everyone has decided that “freedom of protection is a load of crap”.

In the Interests of Pure Research

15. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, My Head Hurts, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

In the interests of pure research, over the last couple of days, Blondie and I have ventured into deepest, darkest downtown San Antonio… and also to a point well beyond the city limits. I can report that I have returned with a dozen pages of notes indecipherable to anyone but me, and Blondie came close to having her leg humped by a wolf. OK, so a wolf-dog hybrid. About fifteen percent dog, eighty-five percent wolf, said the owners and proprietors, who also said that he was very friendly. Yep, we figured out that much right away. He was chained outside a vendor of frontier clothing and accessories at a re-enactor’s event, on the grounds of a ranch in the Hill Country. Some people we talked to at the event said that something set him off howling, night before last, which was a sound enough to make your skin crawl. We figured that any coyotes in the vicinity must have been a) scared out of their next years’ growth and b) decided after careful consideration, that discretion was the better part of valor and removing to the next county was therefore an excellent career move. For the duration of the event, of course.

This all came about because I emailed The Fat Guy a couple of weeks ago, asking if he (as an enthusiast and Texas history buff) could put me in touch with any collector in San Antonio who owned an 1830s model Colt Paterson revolver… and who would be kind enough to show me how it was loaded, sighted and broken down for maintenance. So he gave me a link, which led to an e-mail addy, which led to a club-wide appeal from a certain organization, which led to some contacts… which led to the owner of a matched pair of replica Colt Paterson revolvers, the only person in San Antonio who possesses such, apparently. We set up a meeting at his place of employment on Friday afternoon, and Blondie drove me there after her classes. We spent a very informative hour or so, in a locked and windowless conference room. This is not exactly the sort of event where one welcomes the casual kibitzers. Even in Texas, someone walking in and discovering three period revolvers and the necessary tools are spread out over the conference table is obligated to make a comment to the building management. The fact that there was no ammunition involved would not have ameliorated the resulting excitement.

So, I was actually able to examine very carefully, all the resulting broken-down bits and pieces of a period revolver. It was necessary for the plot and character development to do this, so that I could write about it with authority and attention to tiny detail, and I am extraordinarily grateful for having had the opportunity to do this… all hail the power of the fully functional internet! It was rather a curious experience, because I had been able to write about it and get things mostly right, just from looking at diagrams and reading… but still, nothing beats the experience of actually holding the real thing.

Oddly enough, it was a rather small weapon, dull matte metal with a polished wooden stock. It fit my hand comfortably, and I have rather dainty hands. Blondie’s fingers are about half an inch longer than all of mine, when we match hands for comparison; when I did M-16 training, and side-arm training, I found that my hands were too small to grip and still reach things comfortably on the issue M-16 and the Beretta. And the Beretta was hard for me to hold steady after a while, even with two hands. So, the revolver that made things equal in a fight between Jack Hays Rangers and the Comanche was actually… rather small, especially in comparison with the next iteration, the Walker Colt. The collector who generously took time from his workday to show us all this told me he has a pair of those, as well. The Walker Colt is a massive weapon, weighing about four and a half pounds. After expending all six shots, anyone armed with one would have still had a dandy club/brass knuckles. No wonder they were immediately popular. But after wearing a pair of them on a gun-belt for a whole day of re-enactor events, he really, really felt every ounce of them, in a considerably painful way.

And after the re-enactor event, we went on up to Fredericksburg, where I bored the heck out of Blondie at the Pioneer Museum, talking about the early Fredericksburg settlers. I wanted to take a look at the various household implements on display. And the wooden trunks they brought them in. And the corner town-lot that I willfully assigned to the fictitious family that I am writing about, at the corner of San Antonio and Adams. There is a one-story, stucco professional building on that particular plat… but strangely enough, I described my fictitious family as leaving two trees on their townlot, shading the back of their house… and there are two trees, shading the back of that building.

Really, sometimes I do scare myself. It’s scarier than Blondie wanting a wolf-dog hybrid… well, one that doesn’t try to hump her leg.

Donations being accepted, via the Paypal button, to the left, underneath the ad for the memoir. They will be used to set up a website to market the books, and if I don’t get an agent and a traditional publisher, I plan on doing a POD book of “Truckee Trail” and the “Adelsverein Trilogy”. I just listened to a story this morning on NPR about how best-sellers are decided upon by the publishing industry, so I am feeling particularly sour about the whole literary-industrial complex.

Rites of Spring

12. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, World

We are having a very pleasant spring here in South Texas…of course, being that it is South Texas, where is saying is “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes…” These conditions are apt to change with practically the speed of light. But this spring, all the climate u-turns have been favorable. Well, all but the overnight freeze over Easter Weekend which has probably trashed the Hill Country peach harvest for this year, as it hit when all the trees were blossoming. (As far as I know, Al Gore was not in town that weekend.) The next spectacular thunderstorm may yet favor us with golf-ball-sized hail… but so far all that has resulted is to make everything spectacularly green. Richly and lushly emerald green, as green as Ireland ever was, all the fields and the trees and the hedges that people have planted along the roads. And the flowers this year are splendid, not just the bluebonnets, but this year there are fields of purple wild verbena, and bright yellow daisies, drifts of pink primrose, more of them than I have ever seen before. And butterflies… we have had butterflies all this winter, for some strange reason. They are supposed to be especially sensitive to environmental pollution; guess we are not getting as much of it these days.

In my own garden, all the things that were blasted back to ground level by winter frost are practically exploding out of the ground. In a fit of boredom last fall, I had poured out some patented fertilizer goop on the ground under the rosebushes, and over the winter another fit of boredom led me to prune them all. Oddly enough, they have responded to this abuse by covering themselves entirely with bloom; red, white, pink and apricot. The sage and lavender plants that I scored from the severely-marked-down-get-em-outta-here-before-they-croak shelves at Lowe’s last fall are also blooming madly. The front garden actually looks, if you squint a little and back off to view it from a certain angle, like one of those spectacular pictures of a border at some stately English home; a mass of red, lavender and sulfur-yellow, on grey-green foliage.

Round in back, the wisteria came and went as it always does, in a week flat, but the jasmine is going strong, and the various potted limes and lemon, and the sweet-olive held out bravely… well, they did, once we banished the faint odor of dog-poop. The next rain shower took care of the lingering bits, and we finally moved around one of our junking finds to the back yard.

The last time the city came around for the bulk-trash pickup, where they will take everything but building debris and wrecked automobiles, Blondie and I spotted a wooden chaise-lounge put out in a pile of other trash. It was one of those sturdy home-made things, made out of 2x4s… very well made, actually, with metal slats on springs to support the cushions. The only thing the matter with it was one of the legs was a little rotted at the bottom, where it must have been sitting on wet ground for a while. And there were no cushions, of course. Until I made a set a couple of weeks ago, out of oilcloth, and we put it out where we have paved a large space with ornamental pavers set in gravel.

It is now nearly our favorite place to sit outdoors. I sat there for an hour yesterday evening, reading “The Worst Hard Time”… which seemed a terribly incongruous choice, given the garden and green trees all around me.

Relatively Unsung Heroes

10. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, World

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be always on the border between the Anglo Texians and the Mexican Tejanos, during his lifetime and after. He was born in the first decade of the 19th century, a native of San Antonio. He came of a prominent local family; his father Erasmo Seguin was a signatory to Mexico’s first constitution of 1824. Juan Seguin married into another prominent local family, and was himself elected to the office of alcalde, a sort of cross between mayor and justice of the peace while in his late twenties. Altogether, he was a promising young man in local politics, when Texas was merely a far-distant province of Mexico itself, and gradually becoming disaffected by the dictatorial actions of the Centralist President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the self-styled Napoleon of the West.

When Santa Anna soon dissolved the Mexican Congress, and threatened to come down like a ton of bricks on those who disagreed with his way of running Mexico, moderates such as Seguin were thrown into opposition, right alongside their Anglo neighbors. Stephen Austin granted a captain’s commission to Seguin, who raised a company of scouts. When General Martin Cos was thrown out of San Antonio at the end of 1835, Captain Seguin’s company of nearly forty men were among those doing the throwing. He and his company were among the small garrison of the tumbledown mission compound known as the Alamo. I have read of speculation that Seguin might have been detailed as it’s commander, given his local prominence and background… but that he personally was too valuable, first as a scout, and secondly for his local connections. He was sent out of the doomed Alamo as a courier. At Gonzales, when Sam Houston began gathering his ragged Army of Texans, Seguin gathered up the remains of his little band of Tejanos, who served as scouts and as rear-guard, as Houston fell back into East Texas.

When Houston finally turned to fight Santa Anna, at first he wanted to leave Seguin’s company out of his line of battle, fearing that in the thick of it all, Seguin’s men might be in danger from their own side. After the massacre of the defenders of the Alamo and the Goliad, many of Houston’s army were not inclined to make distinctions between Mexicans. Houston first suggested that Seguin’s Tejanos guard the camp and the baggage.

Seguin angrily refused, insisting on a place for his company in the line: he also had lost some of his men in the Alamo. All of those he had left to him were from San Antonio, and they could not return to their homes until Santa Anna was defeated; they had just as much or more cause to hate him as any Anglo Texian. It was their right, to take a part in the fight. Houston relented, asking only that Seguin’s men must place pieces of cardboard in their hatbands, to distinguish them.

In Stephen Hardin’s book “A Texian Illiad”— a history of the Texas Revolution, illustrated with careful sketches of many of the soldier participants — there is one of a member of Seguin’s Tejano volunteers. His clothes and equipment are of the borderlands: American shoes, short Mexican trousers, a fringed buckskin jacket, a rolled serape and a Brown Bess musket, a gourd canteen and a wide-brimmed vaquero’s hat with a rosary around the crown and a slip of cardboard with “Requerda el Alamo” scrawled on it.

More about Seguin here :
His monument in Texas is the town of Segiun, a little south of San Antonio.
More »

Fire on the Hill-Top

07. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Old West, World

On Easter-evening, 1847, the hilltops around the new hill-country town of Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, on the far frontier of Texas suddenly blossomed with a crown of fire… bonfires that appeared, after sundown. The story is told that many people in Fredericksburg first thought that the fires were lit by Comanche Indians, to send messages about the movements of citizens of the town, to their chiefs far north in the Llano country, who were then negotiating a peace treaty with John Meusebach. Fredericksburg was then on the far frontier, a huddle of log cabins and huts in a clearing in the post-oak forest between two creeks in the Pedernales River valley, built by settlers newly come from Europe.

They came straight from comfortable, well-established towns and villages, where you could not travel a mile or two without encountering something— a wall, bridge, a castle or a church— which had been there for centuries. They came from a secure and orderly country, believing the promises of the entrepreneur who had recruited them with promises of land. They had packed up their belongings and taken ship— leaky wooden sailing ships— expecting to find something approximating in a rough way to what they had left behind. Which they did, eventually… but only after they had buckled down and built most of it themselves.

But on that Easter-eve, they looked up and saw the fires, and a fair number of them were afraid. Perhaps a quick-thinking mother told her terrified children that the fires had been built by the Easter rabbit and his helpers, to cook the eggs that they would have on Easter morning, all colored and decorated, and so that comforting story came to believed… among some of the settlers.

But in fact, the custom of setting fires on certain hilltops had been long-established in north-western Germany, in Westphalia and Saxony, from which areas nearly half of the Fredericksburg settlers had come. But the other half, from Hesse and the south, they would never have seen the Easter bonfires on the hilltops. And in any case, Meusebach had already met and negotiated the peace treaty with the Comanche by Easter of 1847.

They had brought more with them then their keepsakes and books and tools: they had brought their customs and habits. Some of them were refined and changed by new circumstances, but they endured. As did the people who brought them.

Why I Write

01. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Because I breath, and I can tell stories, and stories are important. They connect us to our history. Those stories are a shining path in the tangle of that amorphous mass loosely known as popular culture. Stories are a guide and inspiration for those of us who must find our way through the tangled jungle, for those of us who would rather not sleep-walk along a perilous knife-edge… and certain stories are also a warning of danger

“The story of the Fall of Singapore has exercised a powerful influence over my imagination, because it was in its way a dramatic re-enactment of the tragedy of the Titanic on a much vaster scale. Singapore was a place where the assumption of the British hereditary right to rule was so strong that even the obvious advance of the Japanese Army down the peninsula could not waken social circles which had known nothing other than ineffable superiority to the new reality.

The British governor told his army commander, “oh I suppose you’ll see the little men off.” Only after the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk in an afternoon did it begin to dawn on them that they were all of them doomed. Doomed.

They simply couldn’t imagine what doomed meant. People accustomed to teas and dances, deference from the natives; accustomed to snapping their fingers and parting crowds at the bazaar simply couldn’t come to terms with the idea that in a little while they would beaten, raped, and starved. If they were lucky. This effervescent bubble of oh so clever people even organized something called a Surrender Lunch, during which they were supposed to gorge themselves in preparation for the privations ahead. It was beyond sad. It was pathetic.

And as I said, Singapore has exercised a powerful influence on my imagination because this forgotten incident is the nearest we can come to past as prologue. That is what awaits the liberals when Islam takes over. They will still be yelling for their rights as they are led away to be flogged.”

Comment, Wretchard, at The Belmont Club

Wretchard’s example of the fall of Singapore is an example of an historical event that I also circle back to, along with a handful of others. Writers have our favorites, apparently. Certain events, times and places force a recognition that all things are transient, that all flesh is grass, that these things shall pass, as immutable as they might seem to the casual glance. The apparently unsinkable ship can sink out from under you. We aren’t at the end of history, after all. Maybe this might be a good time to retrieve into active consideration certain of our historical memes.

I started writing on this blog when it was still Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, when the original creator of it put out a call for more writers, active duty and veterans both, round and about July or August of 2002. A lot of things changed in five years. My first post here is now three jobs (not counting temp assignments), and three posts weekly times 52 times 5 years more or less, plus a whole change in professional focus ago. When I started, I thought of myself as an office-manager/administrative assistant who wrote on the side, but as of last July I began to think of myself as a writer who did a little office managing/administrating on the side. So, for a few years, I wrote about mil-bloggy matters, interspersed with entries about my admittedly eccentric family and non-conformist childhood, about living in Japan and Europe as a military member, and about my daughter’s doings as she was deployed with her Marine Corps unit to Kuwait and Iraq, early in 2003.

I looked at writing for this blog as a means to educate and entertain the general reader about the wonderful, wacky world of the military. But on the way to that end, a lot of other stuff happened. First, there are other military blogs now, veteran’s blogs, family-of-military blogs. We stopped being unique in that respect quite some time ago, in blog years. (Which must be somewhat like dog years) Writing for the blog was always supposed to be about the writer wanted to write about. Current events, politics, war, military trivia, and popular culture. Whatever… just make it good writing, sparkle a bit; and someone will find it interesting. Which is good, but nothing stays the same for long.

I pretty much milked the family stuff pretty well dry. (It’s all in the book, mostly, be a sport and order a copy if you want all the scandalous details). The same for my various cross-Europe junkets; I wrote all about that, don’t want to repeat myself. I can only extract so much amusement out of the menagerie of dogs and cats, and the maintenance of my house. So… I moved on.

Everyone does. A lot of the bloggers that I used to read regularly in 2002-2003 have done exactly that. Other interests, other lives, they had said all they wanted to say on a particular subject, they wanted to write a book, they had health issues, family issues, other interests, another job. Some of them turned to writing seriously about things that they felt were important to them. And so have I.

(More to follow. Of course. Would I leave the regular readers hanging?)

Stories

16. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!, World

I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of “You Light Up My Life” was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read “The DaVinci Code”, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances… no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed — contemptuous, even — when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.

“300” looks to be one of those wildly popular things, for which the intellectual great and good have no explanation. This amuses me very much, because I think I do. As I wrote last week “the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years… Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country… those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for.”

It’s all about stories, and our human need for stories; stories about other people, stories that explain, that make things clear for us, that inspire us to great deeds, to set an example or spell out a warning. We need stories nearly as much as we need oxygen. And we will have them, bright and sparkling and new, or worn to paper thinness in the re-telling. We will have stories that have grown, and been embellished by many narrators, with heroes and minor heroes and splendid set-piece scenes, and side-narratives, like one of those sea-creatures that collects ornaments to stick onto its’ shell any which way, or a bower-bird collecting many brilliant scraps and laying them out in intricate patterns. A longing to hear such stories must be as innate in us, as it is to those creatures, for our earliest epic, that of Gilgamesh may be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture, and towns, and the taming of animals, and the making of a written language. It may go back even farther yet, but there is really no way to know for sure what those stories were, although I am sure the anthropologists are giving it the good old college try.

Our values are transmitted in the stories that we go back to, over and over. A long time ago, I read this book, which recommended, rather in the manner of the old Victorians, that children be given improving books to read, that their minds be exercised by good examples. I was initially rather amused… and then I went over the reading list in the back. I realized just then how many of those books the author cited I had read myself… and how many quiet demonstrations of honesty, courage, ethical behavior, loyalty to family, friends and community, of doing the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong had been tidily incorporated into such books as the Little House books, or Caddie Woodlawn, or “All of a Kind Family”, or Johnny Tremain. We imbibe all these values from stories… and lest we think that these sorts of moral lessons are obscure and tangled things, best suited for a long theoretical discussion of the life-boat dilemma in some touchy-feely ethics seminar, the author (or someone that he quoted – it’s been a long time since I re-read the book) brought up the old black and white movie “A Night to Remember”… the movie account of the sinking of the Titanic. The whole story of the unsinkable ship is laid out, based on research, and with the aid (at the time it was filmed) with many still-living survivors; running full-tilt into an ice-field, hitting an iceberg…loading the relatively few lifeboats while the band plays, and the ships engineers keep the lights and power going, of husbands putting their wives and children into the boats and stepping back to leave more room, knowing that the ship is doomed… of steerage passengers taking matters into their own hands and finding their way up to the boat deck, and deck-hands trying to launch the very last boat as the seawater rises to their knees. Twice a hundred stories, and at the end of it one has a pretty good idea of who has behaved well and honorably… and who has not.

Stories. We need them, and we’ll keep coming back to them. And to the best ones, we will come back again and again.

Job Descriptions in the Real World

15. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Fun and Games, General, sarcasm, World

(From one of those e-mail lists going the rounds)

A programmer is someone who solves a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand.

A consultant is someone who takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. (Mark Twain)

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he
predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the
personality to be an accountant.

An actuary is someone who brings a fake bomb on a plane, because that
decreases the chances that there will be another bomb on the plane.
(Laurence J. Peter)

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat
which isn’t there.(Charles R. Darwin)

A topologist is a man who doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000 word document and calls it a
“brief.”

A psychologist is a man who watches everyone else when a beautiful girl enters the room.

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.

A schoolteacher is a disillusioned woman who used to think she liked
children.

A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.

THINGS I LIKE ABOUT EUROPE

10. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: European Disunion, Pajama Game, World

Sgt. Mom’s post got me to thinking about some of my past experiences in Europe. I first started travelling there on business in 1987, when I spent quite a bit of time in Burnley, Lancashire in northern part of the UK. At that time, we had just entered into a joint venture with Lucas, aka The Prince of Darkness, to develop a multifunction column switch for a U.S. auto company. Despite the seemingly endless rains (the sun broke through only one day on my first visit, with the local weatherman reporting that the temperatures “soared into the seventies” – this being July), it was quite a nice place with a small town feel to it. They serve a particular type of beer there called bitter, which, once one acquires a taste for it, is a pleasant way to end the workday. The locals were friendly and very welcoming of us Yanks to challenge them to a game of arrows (darts) at the local pubs. We had contracted some test equipment to a tool shop in nearby Nottingham, necessitating a trip to evaluate their progress. Accompanied by our hosts and some engineers from Chrysler, we took the motorway to Yorkshire, travelling by the Major Oak, which is alleged to have been used by Robin Hood as a hiding place. It turns out that the managing director of the tool shop had some sort of relationship (brother or something) with the curator of Nottingham castle, so after our business was concluded we enjoyed a personalized tour. What a neat place, whether or not you believe in the legend of Robin Hood. Afterwards we retreated to Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, a pub across the square from the castle that has been in continuous operation since 1189 with the name inspired by the start of the third crusade. At one point our host asked us what we thought of all that we had seen that day. The auto company engineer thought a moment, and replied (WARNING – UGLY AMERICAN MOMENT AHEAD) “Well, its all very nice, but what have you people done lately?” My only beef with England is their aversion to ice water. If you ask for a glass, you will get one ice cube. That’s it.

Another of my favorite places is the Principality of Liechenstein and its capital city Vaduz, located in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The hotel where we stayed is about a bucolic setting as can be imagined. There was a cow pasture just outside my hotel window, with (sorry California) some of the happiest cows I have ever seen, each wearing a traditional cowbell and munching on the prolific wildflowers. As we were leaving the hotel in the mornings, we would pass groups of children in their neatly pressed uniforms heading to school, singing and playing stickball. While the locals seemed quite friendly, they viewed us with a little suspicion, as though wondering whether we truly were the barbaric Americans that had undoubtedly heard about. One night, our hosts took us to a fine restaurant located high up on a mountain in nearby Switzerland, overlooking the upper Rhine valley, with the river itself being little more that a creek at that location. On our return down the mountain (WARNING – UGLY AMERICAN MOMENT AHEAD), I pressed our host to treat us to a yodeling performance. I was firmly informed in no uncertain terms that “We do not yodel!” I would like to return one day, although I am concerned about their national security.

Paris may be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but I find its residents to be among the most hostile toward Americans – not in any specific way – just a general distaste. I found Toulouse, on the other hand, to be quite the opposite. My last visit was on short notice, so the hotel where we stayed was an unknown quantity, though proving to be a hidden gem. The rooms were quite small – the building dated to the eighteenth century – though most of them opened into small interior courtyards. The owner made a general-purpose room available for us to work on our presentation. He had never seen the sort of hardware we had – laptops, projectors, PowerPoint, etc. – and was fascinated with the process. Each day, he would go to the market to buy fresh breads and pastries for us, serving them with the most wonderful espresso I’ve had before or since. In exchange for showing him the finer points of creating a presentation, he responded to my curiosity about the espresso machine with a compete tutorial on its complicated operation. I remembered enough French to get the basics, but I suspect that, on my own, I would have blown it to smithereens.

In general, I have found that positive attitudes toward Americans are inversely proportional to the sophistication of the city in question. I suspect that much of this is because cities like London and Paris are not so different from cities like New York or Los Angeles, where cynism is the currency of the realm. American influence has shaped much of post-war Europe and, to the extent that things are not going well, Americans are getting the blame. The irony of all this is that, as I alluded in my comment to Sgt. Mom’s earlier post, many of the ideas imported from America by Europe are those held so dearly by the left in America – secularization, liberal immigration policies, socialized (name the government program), etc. The further irony is that the fury of those attitudes is largely directed to those in the U.S. who are most likely to resist the very policies that have failed so miserably in Europe. I am looking forward to my upcoming first trip to Ia?i Romania. Their recent history suggests a more likely aversion to these far-left liberal influences.

One last point I would make is that the Europeans also blame crass commercialization, another bane of society, on Americans. It is, more accurately, a by-product of capitalism, and I would accept it over the alternatives any day. More than any other region, Europe should have learned this (anybody remember the Dark Ages?)

More Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm….

09. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: European Disunion, General, My Head Hurts, Politics, World

Interesting trip report, from a regular contributor at “Cold Fury”. Anyone else whose traveled overseas lately have input?

Courtesy of Rantburg

Tears of a Clown

02. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, World

I think one of the sadder things about the recent death of columnist Molly Ivins was that the cancer that killed her this week seems to have also killed every scrap of humor in her writing long ago – it’s as if chemo killed the funny bone, too and replaced it with an advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Nothing I read after 9/11 had the same panache, the same sort of hilarity and affection for even those she disagreed with politically. It was painful to read, and so I stopped reading her columns, possibly because I dropped a lot of the publications they were printed in. In the shadow of falling towers, magazines like Harpers, or Mother Jones and the local Current (the oh-so preciously politically correct weekly funded by ad revenue from titty bars and kinky personals) just seemed … well, frivolous. They hyperventilated over the same old obsessions and concerns as if nothing had happened at all, and if they so much as acknowledged 9/11 happening at all, well it was just one of those unfortunate things that was really our own fault for one reason or another. An air of antiquation hung over them, as if they were knights in tatty and hand-me-down armor, going through the rote motions of chivalry, holding jousts in the age of cannon. Besides, I got hooked on the internet and began blogging, exchanging one addiction for another.
More »

The Writers Life Waltz

27. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Pajama Game, World

It’s been kind of a frenetic waltz this week… which is a round-about way of explaining why I didn’t write much original stuff this week. I just got obsessed with the new book; yeah, this one has taken hold, and when I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll, and nothing else seems quite real, or very important.

See, the first book… well, it was actually the second book, if you count the memoir which you really can’t because that was all basically little scraps of reminiscence stitched together… the first book was pretty easy to write. I sat down and wrote the first draft in a pell-mell rush, all over the space of about two months. The plot was pretty much already there, from start to finish; being based upon real people and real events has the effect of handing me the hardest part on a silver platter already. All I had to do was flesh them out a little, do a little guessing as to how they might have related to each other, come up with some amusing conversation, and a lot of description… hey presto, there you go. 120,000 well-polished and carefully chosen words. As a celebrated wit whose name I can’t remember at the moment was supposed to have said, “It’s easy, just open a vein, and let it flow.”

It actually was easy, because I was able to think about them for a long time, before I actually buckled down and did the writing…. For me, that’s what I need to do about half the time; to work out in my head what needs to happen, and how to go about making it happen. Sometimes I need to bounce ideas off other people: believe me, that kind of feedback is above price. It’s were the best ideas develop. And sometimes the magic is happening. I sit down at the computer and stuff just happens. I cope up for air, and there’s half a chapter written, and it’s pure gold, and it’s already four in the afternoon, and where the hell did the time go?
Anyway, the last book was something I lived with for a long time, before I actually buckled down and put it all on paper.

(It’s still in front of a publisher, by the way … and there are two more I will submit it to, in case of rejection. (Have to wait and do it sequentially, these people are anal about simultaneous submissions!) As my writer friend on the West Coast says, trying to find a publisher for a novel is kind of like trying to find adoptive parents for a minority Down ’s syndrome child: they are out there, but it takes a bit of looking.)

The new book; now, the one about the German colonies in the Texas Hill Country? I have built the scaffolding of plot and character for that from scratch… although there are some real people in it, some of who are very interesting people in their own right and who will take over, if I don’t keep a firm grip on them… (You… sit down, and behave, this story is not about you!)
What is really curious to me is how many of the fictional people, and the plot events just seemed to spring up from something I read in the course of doing research. A sentence here, a paragraph there, even just a single name… and a whole character is launched, obstreperous, amusing, and fully alive to me. There were incidents and events that I just kept circling back around towards, without knowing quite why: I just had the sense that they would have something important to do with the story. I had to set them aside like pieces for a mosaic, and figure out how to fit them all together later. There are also some characters who start out in the plot as a sort of extra, with one or two lines, but one way and another they turn out to be a little more important and before you know it, there is a fully functional and almost essential sub-plot… when all I had really needed was… you know, like two lines! It may take a lot longer to work through the first draft, then sit down and expand, edit and polish to a high shine. I’m guessing six months, at least, especially if I have to take (bleah) more paid outside work!

At this rate of proliferation, there just might be two books in this epic: the first one to cover the immigration, the building of the settlements, and the peace treaty with the Comanche, and the second to cover the Civil War and aftermath. There is no end of incident to cover, not to mention operatic levels of drama, murder, revenge, stolen children, madness, true love, sudden death… all this and civil war, too. And maybe a cattle stampede, just to vary the program. Just by way of a tease, I think I shall post a sample chapter…. (Suggestions and feedback are welcome, always. And any introductions to a literary agent will be extremely welcome, being that the big publishers are closed to me, unless I have one… and they are even harder to find!)

Later: Entry deleted and re-entered, in order to allow comments. Something about punctuation in the title often screws these things us. Don’t know why – Sgt. Mom)

State of Denial

26. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: European Disunion, Fun With Islam, General, GWOT, World

Another interesting essay, here. (Found courtesy of Rantburg, from whence cometh all sorts of odd tidbits and free-flowing springs of sarcasm)

The Sum of Our Fears

25. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, Iran, Israel & Palestine, World

This essay linked last week via Instapundit, and PJ Media, and no doubt others.
I anticipate the usual anti-nuclear war concerns to be out there in the streets protesting away, with paper-mache puppet heads and signs and all.

Not.

In Living Color…

25. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Technology, World

The past, of course. Near distant and far distant… and more alive than you would think, here.
(Check out the other links for other color photo archives. Courtesy of Photon Courier, and company.)

A Little Light Classical Travel Reading

04. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, World

Found this lovely article here, about a writer who ought to be more well known in the US. I first read his books “Roumeli” and “Mani”, at the urging of my next-door neighbor in Athens, Kyria Penny. She about swooned when describing “A Time of Gifts”, and I was so enchanted when I read it that I bought the sequel “Between the Woods and the Water” in hardback and sight-unseen when it was first published. (I seem to have a first edition of it, but the dust-jacket is a little worn, and there are two dribbles of brown stain across the page edges and one edge of the book jacket)

At the age of 18 and on the budget of a pound a week, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This was in 1933; He kept a diary, and made notes, which were not written up until decades later; a third volume has been promised, but yet to be delivered.

Excellent reads… and as a side-note, Leigh Fermor had an extremely interesting time during World War II, working with Greek partisans on Crete, where he and another commando, W.Stanley Moss, kidnapped the German Army divisional commander, and spirited him off the island, a short way ahead of a massive German manhunt. This is a very good account of it, written by Moss some years afterwards.

Found courtesy of Photon Courier

Presenting Amazing Skills of Balance and Control!!!

04. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

One of the things that I saw in Korea that I wish more than anything else I had taken a picture of was a young man who must have had enormous confidence in his own sense of balance, and in the strength of his (reinforced!) motorcycle, for I spotted him one day tooling confidently down the avenue outside Yongsan’s Gate #1 with a full-sized, American-made, 19 cubic foot refrigerator, lashed several times around with ropes and bunjee cords ,balanced and standing upright on the back of his motorcycle!

Let’s not even imagine how he got it up there, would be getting it down, and what would happen if he toppled over on a turn… but for your amusement and education, I present the Lords of The Logistic !

(link courtesy of 2 Blowhards)

Question of the Day (061010)

10. October 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: World

North Korea. Now what?

Lieberman Interview

29. September 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Home Front, Politics, World

PJ Media interview with Sen. Joseph Lieberman here.
(Gee, does this mean PJ Media is close to the big time? Is there any reflected glory for us to bask in?)

At the Point of a Gun

09. September 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, World

I know that I am leaping into this very late – after all, it was so like whatever – last weeks’ tempest du blog, the kerfuffle as regards the two journalists kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza, and forced to win their release by being videoed avowing their conversion to the Islamic faith – at gunpoint. But I have been spending this week, buried in the 19th Century, in a snow camp in the Sierras, writing about imminent starvation, and perils that – well, to me this week, were a little more present in my mind. I’m focused on the next book, ‘kay? Being that I grew up in a world that was more than half convinced that Omigawd! the dirty Commies would rain down nuclear annihilation on us all , and now residing in one where even less-well-adjusted parties are freely brandishing a nuclear threat – well being stuck in the Sierra Nevada with dwindling food supplies and no rescue in sight seemed to have the charm of the unusual, as well as being – well, somewhat more manageable. In the 19th Century, one seems mostly to have had a little more time to consider the news cycle, as it were, and to proceed thoughtfully and deliberately down whatever paths of thought were presented to one. I am still buried in a mind-set which took a written letter a whole year to move from Monterey or Los Angeles, to the Middle West. I assure you, the 19th Century has certain discreet charms, once you adjust to a slower pace.

The resulting kerfuffle with representative opposing parties sounding forth, here (David Warren) and here (Captain Ed) seems to devolve around not so much the actual conversion, but the reluctance of the parties involved, to make clear they had been under duress, and/or denounce their treatment. Depending on whom you take sides with, it was either an understandable ruse to gain their freedom and lives – or the most horrible of capitulations, with serious of ramifications imaginable in the much-storied Seething Moslem Street – and then there are people like me, in the middle of the road, like the storied yellow stripes and dead armadillos, saying “But yes, to save their lives – but on the other hand, doesn’t that send some sort of signal – do you think? And what happens, next time – and what about -? –

Because, you see, it’s all about what you’ll give up, when someone points a gun at you. And as to what you’ll do in that circumstance, the truth of it is no one really knows what they would do. All we know is that other people have done, in some analogous situation. And some of those people have been most amazingly brave, have exhibited a degree of heroism and moral clarity that approaches – well something beyond what we have come to think of as merely human. And some people have been craven, and most of the rest of us have muddled through, and the great unifying principal of this kind of moral score-keeping is that one really never knows for sure, until one has actually faced the experience.

A story, from the Warsaw Ghetto, c1942-43: a party of German soldiers, SS or Gestapo, or whatever, amuse themselves by going into the Ghetto and make sport with the Jewish prisoners in it (and they were prisoners by the time of this story) by going to a coffee-shop next to a synagogue, rounding up the patrons and holding them at gun-point, while they ransack the synagogue and bring out the Torah. One by one and at gunpoint, they order each of the coffee-shop patrons to desecrate the Torah. One by one, each of them does: old-fashioned devout Jew, or modern and secular intellectual, young or old, each of the coffee-shop patrons does what they are bidden to do by the men who are holding guns at their heads, who have given every indication that they will shoot any Jew who refuses. Shamed, unthinking, embarrassed or otherwise, the coffee shop patrons do as they are bidden by the men who hold guns at their heads. Until they get to the one man, who is neither devout, nor intellectual – but he is modern, in that he is a notorious gangster, and has been for most of his life. A bad hat, a criminal, a dissolute menace, a frequent and enthusiastic violator of the laws of man and God – and when in his turn he is ordered to desecrate the Torah, he looks at them calmly and says, “I’ve done many things in my life – but I won’t do that.” He is immediately executed, at point-blank range. Alone of all the cafe patrons, he had an idea of what he wouldn’t do – and something innate led him to refuse, absolutely.

So, what would any of us give up at the point of a gun? Wallet, or handbag – absolutely. PIN? For sure. We’ve been told over and over, those are only things. You notify the bank and put a stop on the cards, get a replacement drivers’ license. All that stuff, sure, they can be replaced. Car keys? Jewelry ? Yeah, those too. That’s what insurance is for.

Slightly tougher question: They point a gun at you and say – “Give us the kid.” Or maybe “I’m taking the woman.” Or maybe, if you are a women, the person with the gun ties your hands and says “Don’t make a fuss.” Do you give them the kid, or the woman, or come along without making a fuss?

Now, the big question: what intangibles would you give up, under threat of violence, civil, nuclear or whatever?

We’ve already seen how swiftly most of our legacy media, newspapers and television stations quickly redefined intellectual freedom, in the wake of the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. The swiftness with which they capitulated to threats of violence if the cartoons were published , after decades of posing as fearless champions of the public’s right to know at any price was revealing. And cause for some dismay, for we are left to wonder what other concessions might be extorted in future by a nuclear threat – and that some of our most cherished traditions, principals, laws and allies would be yielded up with dispiriting speed by those whom we had expected to show a little more spine.

Before the World Rushed In

03. September 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, World

Being that I am now engrossed in writing a story about the early California emigrant trail… (Yes, PV, I am working on Chapter 13…. But I have to do a post for today, ‘kay?) I have been going back through my books and recollections about California, at a time when it was for all intents and purposes, a sleepy little backwater at the far end of the known world, a six-month to a year-long journey from practically anywhere else on the planet loosely defined as “civilization”.

Growing up there meant a bit of an advantage in that one could be aware of all the other layers behind the glitzy modern TV and Hollywood, West Coast/Left Coast, surfing safari/Haight-Ashbury layer that everyone with an awareness level above that of a mollusk knows. But peel that layer back, and there is another layer; the pre-World-War II layer, of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, of sleepy little towns buried in orange groves, Hollywood Boulevard a dirt track and Beverley Hills a wilderness… go back another couple of layers, and you arrive at a place that always seems to have had a dreaming, evanescent feel about it to me; California in the first half of the 19th century.

In many ways, that California marked the high tide-line of the Spanish empire in the New World: when the great tide of the conquistadores washed out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century looking for gold, honor, glory and land, and roared across the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping Mexico and most of South America in consecutive mighty tides , seeping into the trackless wastes of what is now the American Southwest, and eventually lapping gently at the far northern coast, where that tide, cresting in the 18th century, dropped a linked chain of twenty-one missions, four presidios or military garrisons* and three small pueblos**, one of which failed almost immediately. Mostly on the coast, or near to it, this was the framework on which hung the charming, but ultimately fragile society of Spanish (later Mexican) colonial society in what was called Alta, or Upper California.

It was a rural society, of enormous holdings, or ranchos, presided over by an aristocracy of landowners who had been granted their vast holdings by the king, or the civil government, who ran cattle or sheep on their holdings which were worked at by native Indians. The great holdings produced hides, wool and tallow, and their owners lived lives of comfort, if no very great luxury, and from all accounts were openhandedly generous, amazingly hospitable, devout…perhaps a little touchy about personal insult and apt to fight duels over it, but that could said of most men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The climate was a temperate and kindly one, especially in comparison with much of the rest of that continent, winters being mild, and summers fair. The missions, which in addition to the care of souls had an eye towards self-sufficiency, did a little more in the way of farming than the rancheros; with great orchards of olives and citrus, and vineyards.

Far from the eye and control of central authority, they managed a fair degree of self-sufficiency; the scattering of structures from that era which survived to the 20th century set a kind of architectural tone to the whole area. Stucco and tile, courtyards, miradors and balconies, which looked back to cathedrals in Spain and Moorish castles in Grenada were adapted in adobe and brick, copied in stucco, and hung with church bells brought with great effort from the Old Country. Richard Henry Dana’s classic “Two Years Before the Mast” is an eye-witness account of the trade in hides with the rancheros, in the 1830ies, and this novel offers an accessible description of what it looked like, in the 1840ies, as well as the difficulties involved in even traveling to such a distant fringe of the world. The immortal “Zorro” movies and TV show is set in this milieu, which is probably where most people know of this little, long gone world.

But the Spanish empire slowly lost it’s grip, and independent Mexico fought a rear-guard action for a while. I think they succeeded for a fair number of years, keeping their pleasant and gracious outpost, because of it’s very isolation, but other national powers waxed as Spain waned. The British had Canada to the north, and trade interests in the Pacific Northwest, the Russians had Alaska, and even a tiny foot-hold at Ft. Ross, on the coast of present-day Sonoma county, north of San Francisco. There was even a vaguely Swiss interest in Alta California, due to the presence of John Augustus Sutter, who founded an agricultural establishment where Sacramento is now… which inadvertently brought and end to the gracious life of the rancheros. The Spanish who ransacked Mexico and South America looking for gold, even sending a fruitless expedition far into the present-day American Southwest, eventually gave up looking for gold on the fringes of their empire… and it’s the purest sort of irony that gold in greater quantities than they had ever dreamed of was found, initially discovered during construction of a millrace for a saw-mill that Sutter had contracted to build at Coloma in the foothills, as he needed lumber for his various entrepreneurial projects.

*San Jose, El Puebla Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles sobre El Rio Porcinuncula, and Branciforte
**San Diego, Monterray, San Francisco, Santa Barbara

Viva Cuba

03. August 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Media Matters Not, World

As you’re probably tired of hearing, I grew up in a relatively integrated neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. I say relatively because it was still VERY Irish when I was a kid, but we had just about every nationality I can think of. Just across the backyard of our apartment building lived the Caba Family. They had escaped Cuba. (Pronounced “Coohbah”)

Memory is a funny thing, especially the memories of a family that smelled that wonderful. They were always spicy. Senior Caba (which he insisted we call him) was a jolly large man who could make his huge belly roll in undulating waves, completely fascinating. When he got off work we’d hang out at the Caba house (technically an apartment, but we called everyone’s apartment their house) with Ebito and Eva until he’d give us a wave or two. Every now and then he’d forget to put an overshirt on and would walk around in just his tank top undershirt (which we called Dago-Ts because…that’s what they were called) and we’d see the scars across his back. Being kids, we asked. He just smiled and said, “Be grateful mijos to live in such a wonderful country as America.” His wife, Senora Caba would get a wistful look in her eye and say, “He can’t live forever…someday our children will go back.” Being kids, we asked. She got a fierce look in her eye and said, “Castro!” and she spit…right there in her kitchen…she spit! Now you have to understand, that while their kitchen was and is the spiciest smelling place I’ve ever been in, it was immaculately clean. You would have never imagained.

So all I have to say to Val Prieto over at Babalu Blog is, “Testify brother…testify!“

Hellooo, Blog By Generic

11. July 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: World

“BOMBAY, India – Eight bombs hit Bombay’s commuter rail network during rush hour Tuesday evening, killing at least 147 people and wounding more than 400 in what authorities called a well-coordinated terrorist attack.”

There, now maybe Blog by ___________ (insert one of several names here) will stop comment spamming ancient posts with a story that’s been on every freaking news channel most of the day.

And no, this will not get you links nor will I ever do this again.

Yes, I like to link some of my favorite and least favorite blogger folks, but I reserve the right to link who I wish, not someone who’s just plain annoying.

Most Deeply, Sincerely Dead

08. June 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, War, World

That head-chopping psychopath, Zarkawi – and his aides and so-called spiritual advisor. It must be excellent news, as NPR has been banging on about nothing else for the last two hours. Haditha was only mentioned only once.

I’d wish they had mentioned how the tips about his location came in from local Iraqi nationals just a little more… and perhaps explored how unpopular his tendency to blow up school children, police recruits and the odd passing stranger has made him among ordinary citizens. I hope the bounty on him is shared out fairly among anyone who had a hand in narking out the murdering freak.

Discuss.

Changes

03. June 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Pajama Game, World

In the air, in the water… oh, sorry, flashback to last weeks’ post. Changes, they come thicker and faster. There was an article posted about the six most important strategic overseas bases last week, and none of them any that I had ever served a tour at— and I think I clocked duty time at about every major overseas base there was, even if it were only to pass through long enough to get a soda from the machine and admire the gooney birds.

1. Andersen Air Force Base & Apra Harbor, Guam;
2. Balad Air Base/Camp Anaconda, Iraq;
3. Bezmer Air Base, Bulgaria;
4. Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory;
5. Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba;
6. Manas Air Base, Kirgizstan

Three old, three new, and none of them the old, stalwart long-established bases, the very anchor of service in the Far East, or in Europe— Clark AB, in the PI is long-closed and buried in volcanic ash. Yongsan Garrison in Seoul is for the chop also; transferring all functions to the Hump may turn out to be more of a hassle than it’s worth.

If the Cold War is over, South Korea might have nothing more urgent to deal with than their starved and retarded cousins to the North, and much joy of that may they have of that. No mention of Okinawa on the list… and none in Western Europe. The Cold War is truly over, there. The chain of kasernes and camps in Germany is much reduced—one senses only little removed from having the last floor swept and the last light turned off, and generations of American military and dependent family members who rotated in and out, and raised their children, and developed a fondness for German beer and gemutlichiet, volks-marching and sightseeing among the castles of the Rheinland – all will soon be only a ghostly memory.

Harry’s in K-Town, the Kino in Landstuhl, the McDonalds on the 40-Mark Strasse, and a thousand other retail establishments who counted very much on the GI dollar may look back ruefully on what will seem a golden age in retail sails and services. Hellenikon and Nea Makri in Greece are long closed: some years after I drove away down the road towards Patras and the car-ferry that would take us to Italy and points west, my next door neighbor sent me a clip from one of the English-language papers that catered to the ex-pat community: a story about taxi drivers and owners of bars in Sourmena and Glyphada, lamenting their personal economic woes after Hellinikon AB closed. The final paragraph of the story was the kicker; across the apse end of a church that faced (across an barren lot) the front gate on Vouliagmeni, which had long born a bright red spray-painted memo “Americans Go Home!” someone had spray-painted an addenda: “And Take Us With You!”

Zaragoza reverted to the Spanish Air Force Air Tranport Service; even while I was there, I escourted a party of Spanish officers on a property survey through the EBS buildings, pointing out the equipment that was ours, and would be going with us, and what we would be leaving to their use with our best wishes. Not a whole lot, actually, three ancient Quonset-huts, only one with indifferent plumbing, but all of them with electrical conduits up the wazoo, and they were welcome to it. It was already evident that the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Menace had crumbled, and what we were still doing there was still a matter of debate. Anderson and Guantanamo are long-established, with a permanent infrastructure and corporate memory and all those habits that this implies, all the employees, all the structures… but the other four are new and raw, and where the action is, in this new war. The military moves on, as we are not mired in old habits and the practices of the war before the last war, clinging on to them like a child with a well-worn security object. I do wonder what the ville outside the gates of Bezmer and Manas are like, though… but I would advise everyone not to get to used to it all.

One of the saddest conversations I ever had was sometime before I left Spain, when Zaragoza was already scheduled to be closed down. There were a scattering of retired Air Force men who lived in my neighborhood, or worked at EBS, who had married Spanish women , and made their homes in Spain, for decades in most cases. They had raised their children in Spain, had jobs on base, had boxes at the post office, and/or BX privilidges, health care through the base hospital and by extension to the major military hospitals and specialists in Germany, they had NCO club memberships, they managed to reconcile two different worlds, and the imminent closing of the base meant that they had to live entirely in one world without any of the accustomed support systems… or uproot their lives, and live in the other.

The Daily Brief