To the Surprise of Many…

18. April 2024 · Comments Off on To the Surprise of Many… · Categories: Media Matters Not

… It turned out that there was one genuine, for real, professional old-line journalist still working at National Public Radio. Was being the operative word, as business reporter Uri Berliner quit, after spectacularly blowing up any lingering pretense of the publicly financed institution being an impartial and unbiased news-gathering organization, reporting on news without fear, favor or partisanship. Frankly, anyone claiming to be the teeniest bit rightish of center and believes that load of codswallop is likely too innocent to be let out in public without a dedicated keeper. They probably believe every word in the NY Times, as well – although as Agent K of Men in Black observed – that publication stumbles into the truth on rare occasions.

Uri Berliner’s final report may yet blow apart NPR federal funding, both that which is direct, and that which is paid to them by local affiliates for the rights to air their various news, information and entertainment features. The new CEO for NPR, one Katherine Maher, appears to be a singularly unappealing progressive apparatchik, a neurotic child of ruling-class privilege without a single shred of a background or experience in journalism … but all the right progressive opinions. (I swear, I’d be a better fit for that job based on a DINFOS shake-n-bake course for print and broadcast journalism, followed by twenty years as a military public affairs specialist!) I’d also swear that Katherine Maher was another generated parody like Titania McGrath, but alas – she’s all too horribly real.

I do wonder if this might be the final straw that breaks NPR. For all their many awards, organizational self-regard, and incestuously close connections to the Washington power structure, they have also been hemorrhaging ordinary listeners in Flyoverlandia for years now. I’m one of those once-listeners myself. Heck, I even worked for years at the local affiliate here in San Antonio on a part-time – on the classical music side, though. Every time I mentioned how I came to quit listening to NPR – a fair number of commenters chimed in with similar tales of disenchantment and outright disgust. NPR used to make at least a pretense at being even-handed, the presence of that lugubrious old talking prune, Daniel Schorr notwithstanding – or Cokie Roberts, the daughter of two (count ’em!) longtime career Democrat Party politicians, Lindy and Hale Boggs. NPR did more than the immediate sensational bleeding and leading coverage of news, and extended features … and then … and then, they seemed to have less and less to say to anyone who wasn’t a bicoastal progressive. For me, the point came sometime between 9-11 then the election of Obama; definitely by the time of the rise of the Tea Party. NPR looked at the Tea Party with the horrified interest of someone discovering a dead worm in their expensive mushroom vol-au-vent appetizer, before thumbing through their golden Rolodex of experts and demanding an explanation … instead of, you know – calling up any of the local Tea Party organizations and asking them.

Ah, well – sic transit all things considered. Will this spell the end of NPR being financed out of the public purse? Or is the organization too close to the hearts of the soi-disant ruling class, as well as employing too many of their otherwise unemployable spouses and spawn? Discuss as you have insight into the matter.

Cursive and Other Archaic Skills

04. April 2024 · Comments Off on Cursive and Other Archaic Skills · Categories: Ain't That America?

My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive – which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late – in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering – freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly – you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.

Some years ago, I made a tidy amount for a local researcher, who in the course of his studies, been able to access the letter archives of a prominent early 19th century inventor/industrialist, preserved in the archives of a major East Coast university. There were pages and pages of PDF scans of personal letters and business correspondence – not just of the industrialist himself, but from his wife and son, in-laws, friends and business associates. The researcher didn’t have time to read and transcribe the whole archive himself, so he hired me to do it … and it was rather fun, as well as remunerative. There was a wide range in quality of the handwriting, too – some of the business letters were as easily read as if they were typewritten; rather obviously, the industrialist hired men who could write with a clear and elegant hand. His mother-in-law, alas, wrote with a scrawl nearly as illegible as my own. His wife had the habit of saving paper by turning the page 45 degrees and writing more lines crossways over what had already been written – which was even more challenging to read when the ink bled through to the other side of what was obviously very thin paper. The industrialists’ father-in-law would have been schooled in the late 18th century, as he routinely used the then-archaic formulation of the letter ‘f’ instead of the rounded ‘s’ in his letters. (This meant confusion in deciphering his letters until I figured it out. I got rather fond of the father-in-law through his letters although he was about 150 years dead by then. He was a decent and kindly old stick, charitable and modest, although his son-in-law was one of the richest men in America at the time.)

Anyway – being able to read original old documents can be a very useful skill, especially for someone with an interest in history and culture. I have read that in countries like Japan, there have been so many simplifications and variations of the alphabet in use over the recent decades that many ancient documents can only be read by specialist scholars. It would be a pity if the same happened here in the US. Perhaps the urge to move away from teaching cursive is a deliberate ploy; a means to sever younger generations from our founding documents and our history.

Anyway, I got to think about skills that are commonly seen as outdated, outmoded, superseded by new technologies … but maybe, just maybe … really aren’t. The ability to drive a stick shift automobile or truck. Morse code. Celestial navigation. Editing audio tape with a razor blade and specialty sticky-tape. Hand sewing – didn’t Doctor Kennedy mention once that the skills of doctors doing sutures had fallen off because so few people did hand sewing any more? Discuss as you wish; what other seemingly-outdated skills are still useful or may become useful again in our lamentably chaotic world?

Fever

27. March 2024 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Good God, Working In A Salt Mine...

A fever, so the doctors and medical experts tell us, is a symptom of a deeper issue; an illness which most often is a mild and fleeting thing. And then, there is the serious and life-threatening fever – in either case, a fever is a way of telling us that something is wrong, and we’d best pay attention.
Just such an indication in the body politic is the occurrence of vigilante groups – a kind of civic fever, an indication that civic adjudication – the administration of justice in the case of offenses against law and order to the satisfaction of those offended by crime – has become seriously out of whack. It is a purely human drive; if one has been harmed by the unlawful actions of another, one would prefer to be assured that justice has been served – and if not made whole again, at the very least satisfied that the offender has been properly chastised for their offense.

Bad things happen in a nation or a city when ordinary citizens become convinced (rightfully or not) that justice is not being done, as in the case of local bully and thug, Ken McElroy, a couple of decades ago. Eventually, citizens realize that the civic authorities are not living up to their end of the bargain, as did the residents of Skidmore in the McElroy case. If not actually indulging in crime themselves, police, district attorneys and courts are turning a blind eye to criminal offenses. Citizens are even more quietly offended when they note that criminals are being treated by the ruling class as a kind of protected pet. Eventually the end of patience is reached. Americans historically run out of civic patience sooner than most other nations and ordinary citizens tend to take administration of justice into their own hands. Not as an undisciplined mob, although that has happened a frequently in American history as anywhere else – but as a vigilante organization. As I wrote some years ago about the San Francisco vigilance committee; “The image of a ‘vigilante’ most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise … and they would not back down.”

In the last couple of years, I have seen murmurings about a kind of pre-vigilante actions – most of it along the lines of a kind of informal local neighborhood watch; neighbors banding together informally to secure their own areas. It’s not gone as far – yet – as banding together, taking oaths, fortifying a stronghold, electing leaders, and going after the most notorious miscreants, as the San Francisco Vigilance Committee did, back in the day, but the impulse appears to me, when I read various news sites, that the vigilante impulse is solidifying around a most unexpected offense against the laws of man. And that would be the current wave of squatters moving into vacant or temporarily unoccupied homes and defying all efforts by the legitimate owners to get them out. This is substantially different from deadbeat tenants overstaying their lease and milking the tenant-protection laws for all that they are worth. Landlords and property managers have long had to deal with this kind of tenant.

What is a new twist is squatters breaking into and setting up housekeeping in a temporarily-vacant home and defying the owner of the home, brandishing a fraudulent lease or a claim to have purchased the place – and the police shrug and tell the legal owner to take it through the court as a civil matter. This is happening to people who aren’t landlords, who perhaps have inherited a house from a deceased next of kin, gone away on vacation for a couple of weeks, a stint of active duty in the military, or to care for a sick relative. Such people likely don’t have a lot of money to pursue a long, painful journey through the courts to get back their property … property which may have been thoroughly trashed and scavenged to the bones by the time the squatters are thrown out.

Thinking a little more on this situation, I am not surprised at the level of smoldering anger that property-owners might feel about this. A house is a very personal thing; for most people, a residential property would be the single most expensive thing they own. Having a total stranger invade their property, their home, or the home that their parents lived in – and brazenly steal it – and with only a long, expensive court battle can they get their property returned. How galling this must be, how insulting! Then of course, there is this fool, telling his social media followers that the laws will let them just ‘occupy’ empty houses; which will almost certainly end badly for those other fools to take his word for it. People have already been killed in at least one case, and a handy-man entrepreneur is achieving a mild degree of fame by offering anti-squat services and advice to home owners who have had their properties targeted in this way. Having a home taken over in this way is a deeply personal insult to a property-owner; and this is rich soil for a new vigilante movement to grow in. Comment as you wish and have insight into this matter.

Separate

14. March 2024 · Comments Off on Separate · Categories: Ain't That America?, Home Front, Media Matters Not

So this is a story which first percolated up to my attention at the Powerline blog last week – a perfectly vicious attack on a teenager by a bigger and apparently stronger teenager, which has put the first teenager in hospital with likely permanent brain damage – if she even recovers consciousness at all. There’s something about having your skull repeatedly slammed on a concrete sidewalk which will do that. The attacker has been detained, which is a nice gesture on the part of local law enforcement, and a Go-Fund-Me appeal has already raised a considerable sum for the medical care of Kaylee Gains. The name of her attacker, hereinafter referred to as Little Miss Thugette, however, seems to be under a veil of secrecy in those few stories which have appeared in the news media. The comments appended on sites where the story does appear tend towards the cynical: if the colors of the two girls were reversed, most commenters acknowledge that there would be screaming headlines for weeks in all the print media, TV pundits rushing to make their two cents clear by taking a knee (literally or metaphorically), the inner cities in blue states would already be in flames and Al Sharpton would be ubiquitous in demanding justice. (Of the mob and rioting sort, naturally.)

But Kaylee Gains is white, and Little Miss Thugette is black. We have all become accustomed to how the news-making machinery addresses matters racial in this age of DIE. News media-wise this beatdown is a non-story in the mainstream media; of apparent interest only to Miss Gains’ family and friends. This is not this first instance of a Little Miss Thugette, or her male kinfolk, Mr. Inner-City Gangbanger going all fight-club and clubbing the stuffing out of some hapless teenager of white, Jewish or Asian background and posting video of the beatdown to their social media account. Such black-on-white beatdowns make a brief splash on the local news … and then the media and our intellectual class goes right on bleating about white privilege, microaggressions and the desirability of reparations for people of color … because living in the United States in this century is just so soul-searingly damaging for such persons of color, having to associate with whites…

Which brings to my mind an interesting speculation – what if parents of white, Asian or Jewish students at public schools – especially the schools in sink neighborhoods are reconsidering the whole school desegregation thing and reassessing the so-called benefits thereof? The DIEists insist that it is so soul-searingly damaging for black kids to be around white privilege and white culture every single day, and the only way to minimize the harm done is to maintain black-only spaces. And the parents of white, Asian and Jewish students might very well believe that their kids might be safer in such a segregated school – although they probably don’t come out and say so, save among close friends and trusted associates.
Discuss as you wish.

Another Visit to the Quadrangle

06. March 2024 · Comments Off on Another Visit to the Quadrangle · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Devil Dogs, Domestic, Local

My daughter and I with Wee Jamie had cause to visit Fort Sam Houston this week, to pick up some prescription refills and make a run through the commissary – but before we did, we went by the historic old Quadrangle, so that my grandson could pester the deer and the peacocks and admire the enormous koi goldfish in the little landscaped fishpond. Yes, the historic limestone Quadrangle, the original structure and oldest building at Fort Sam houses a kind of petting zoo in the courtyard in the middle of three block-long ranges of buildings. That is, it would be a petting zoo if the current herd of nine deer were slightly more tame.

The Quadrangle was originally constructed to replace the Alamo, which had been the original military HQ in this part of Texas, serving sequentially the Spanish colonial army, the Mexican army, the Texian militia and army, the US Army, the Confederate Army, and the US Army again over the space of 200 years. (The Quadrangle is now HQ 5th Army, and home to the post’s historical museum.) In it’s last decades as a military installation, the Alamo was basically a central supply depot for the US Army in the Southwest, and the plaza before it a wagon park. When city sprawl swamped it all in the 1870s, the Army took the opportunity of some donated land out north of town to build a brand-new post with plenty of room for quartermastering activities – to park wagons, pasture horses and mules, warehouse supplies, and to establish a proper garrison for training and housing troops and officers.

Originally constructed for defense against attack by hostile Indians, the Quadrangle was first built without doors and windows along the outside walls. This was a somewhat remote reality by the time that the Quadrangle’s cornerstone was laid – but not entirely out of the question, and certainly not outside of living memory by troops and ordinary citizens then. About the only activity in the Quadrangle involving hostile or formerly hostile Indians came in the mid-1880s, when the Apache war leader Geronimo and the survivors of his war band were captured and interned there for a month before being moved to Florida. The legend is that the deer and birds were brought in to serve as meals on the hoof for the Apache prisoners … but that is an oft-debunked legend. According to some accounts, the presence of the deer predated the Apache internees.

Which does bring up the question – why? Why is a herd of semi-tame deer and a flock of peacocks and waterfowl kept on an active military post? They must be maintained at some expense and trouble, after all – there are pens for the deer and sheltered quarters. Presumably deer chow has to be gotten from somewhere, not to mention veterinary care. The first obvious answer is – military tradition! Like the Barbary apes at Gibraltar, and the ravens in the Tower of London. They are there, because they always have been there, and caring for them is enshrined in custom since time immemorial, or at least in this case, since the 1870s. But why – and since when? I began to wonder about this during our visit and did a little research when I got home … and it turns out that … no one really knows for certain. A local historian ventured the supposition that having a few peacocks and tame deer around the place was a popular domestic thing to do in the late 1800s. I have my own theory about the deer herd, though. I suspect that sometime after troops and families came to live at Fort Sam that someone rescued an orphaned deer fawn and made a pet out of it … and the best place to keep it when it was grown was in the confines of the Quadrangle, which seems to have become a park very early on. Could have been an officer’s wife or family member … or equally – a soldier. The deer fawn became a unit mascot – goodness knows that other unlikely animals have since become beloved and honored unit mascots – bears and horses, among them. Within a few years, having the deer at Fort Sam was an established custom, and everyone forgot about who and under what circumstances the deer herd had been established.

Discuss as you will – and share any theories that you might have.

Visual Disaster

01. March 2024 · Comments Off on Visual Disaster · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, Media Matters Not

I admit to being alternately horrified and amused at Google’s Gemini AI visual disaster. Usually, a pratfall of this magnitude involves a bakery-worth of thrown cream pies. Frankly, I am relishing the spectacle of a publicity disaster this epic; a fail so huge as to be practically visible from outer space. We mere mortals are not often given the privilege of watching our so-called betters sequentially step on a yard full of cosmic rakes. Just desserts, just main course, a whole hors d’oeuvres of crow!

Everyone to the right of the harridans of The View pretty much had gathered over the last few years that Google as a search engine had bias in favor of the progressive flavor o’the month and against anything with the slightest tinge of conservative, traditionalist, skeptical leanings. But what a gift it was to have it demonstrated so openly and undeniably. I don’t know which was more risible and ridiculous – the Vikings as black, the oriental woman trooper in a Nazi Army uniform, or the American founding fathers as black or indigenous – or whatever the current correct term du jour is. How nice to have it proved, once and for all.

Tt couldn’t be more clear, if painted in three-foot tall letters across highway billboards – Google Gemini was absolutely determined to give users not what they wanted and asked for, but what the tweaked and massaged algorithm dictated that clients/requestors ought to get. Shouldn’t really have come as a surprise, after all, because that is that the cultural gatekeepers having been doing for the last decade or more – in traditional publishing, in the news media generally, and in Hollywood producing movies and television shows for public consumption, and other fields. They have been serving up great heaping helpings of what they think we should have; movie franchises with acres of unpleasant and unappealing Mary Sue girl-bosses, and all the rest of the progressive pantheon of race and sex-swapping progressive nominated heroes and designated hapless villains … not what we really want. (Interesting discussion here on that topic of the cultural leaders giving us what they think we should have, rather than what we want.)
Discuss as you wish.

The Question of When…

21. February 2024 · Comments Off on The Question of When… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Home Front, Politics, The Bear

The question of when to talk to your children, when you live in a repressive dictatorship was something I remember from reading James Michener’s essay into political reporting The Bridge at Andau; an account into the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 against the Soviet Union, published the following year. There came a time when parents of school-aged children, Michener wrote, had to open up to their children, if they were anti-Soviet dissidents, religious, or simply Hungary-first patriots. It was a fine line; either live a lie in front of your children regarding your own beliefs, and at worst, see them irretrievably buy into the whole Soviet system if you left it too late, or trusting that they were sufficiently mature, to be adept at concealing such dissident beliefs in front of their schoolfellows, Communist-indoctrinated teachers – and informers among them. How old did your children need to be, before they could dissemble in front of peers, teachers and spying informants among them? It was a matter of deep concern to Hungarian parents, as Michener related. (Parenthetically, as a teenager and young adult I had never been the least bit enchanted by the golden chimera of communism in any guise. Growing up, my parents knew too many people who had fled from Communist-dominated or threatened countries and had heart-rending stories to tell of their experiences in living in and fleeing Cuba, Russia, Eastern Europe, the far East. Reading Michener’s account of the Hungarian Revolt definitely drew a line under my antipathy towards all-powerful dictatorships of the so-called proletariat.)

So the Department of Homeland Security – a governmental entity which just by it’s very name, sends nasty chills down my back – has funded a program to train teachers, ostensibly in something called ‘media literacy’ but which in practice looks more like monitoring students and their families political and religious beliefs, directing them in the preferred set of progressive doctrines and encouraging kids to inform on their peers … or their families who dissent from such doctrines. (This linked post on Legal Insurrection goes into greater and unsettling detail.) I should think that parents of school-aged children would be looking at this so-called ‘media literacy’ with considerable alarm; it has even more dangerous implications than pushing gender-confusion and outright porn for the elementary-school set. Exactly how many other school systems are participating in this program?

This is all of a piece with authoritarian dictatorships across the political spectrum; get ahold of the youth through the education system, mold them into the new man/woman/whatever, encourage them to inform on their families and peers, and reward them with praise, honors, after the example of Pavlik Morozov, the Boy Hero of the Soviets. I wonder if membership in a new organized youth group is part of Homeland Security’s long-term plans for their properly-indoctrinated school-aged cadres. Perhaps the Department’s experts are considering cute uniforms for participating student participants; something with brown shirts and black shorts, or maybe a bright red neckerchief. Discuss as you wish – and is this program being utilized in your local school district?

Too Many, Not Enough

16. February 2024 · Comments Off on Too Many, Not Enough · Categories: Geekery, Local, Media Matters Not

I have to confess to feeling a positively unholy degree of amusement, watching the Establishment Mainstream Media publicly coming to grips with Joe Biden’s senility … this after pretty much papering over his decaying mental condition over the past three years. That President Biden’s remaining brain cells have been melting into a slightly greenish and glowing puddle of goo has been screamingly obvious to everyone on the center-to-right quadrant of the blogosphere with any sense and worldly knowledge since his installation in the Oval Office. That the major national media minions are now having to wrap their tiny minds around that realization, and not just acknowledge but explain how it is now urgent that he be replaced on the Dem party ticket this year, as well as how they managed to escape noticing the freaking obvious for the past two or three years … well, all sorts of fun for those of us with a freakish sense of humor. It’s like watching a hapless stage magician try and gingerly handle a turd by the clean end.

The National Establishment Media – the public affairs branch of the Democrat Party – just spent the last three years trying to cover up his mental incapacity, not to mention his corruption, mendacity, and nasty tendency to perve on any attractive female of any age within reach, even on public occasions. The jig is up. The party’s over. Credibility is shot … not just shot but bleeding messily out in the center of the dusty street, while the large crowd of onlookers who perhaps held Tea Party sympathies, willingly served in our nations’ armed forces in the past, believed that our votes – and our protests counted for something – point and jeer. Yes, indeed – learn to code. Or wait tables, dig ditches, sling packages at Amazon or drive for Uber. If it’s good enough for former millworkers, coal heavers and truck drivers in the industrial heartland … it’s good enough for those who have called themselves news reporters for years, people who have lied to us by commission and omission. There are too many Taylor Lorenzes, and not enough Salena Zitos, it seems to be all too important for the top-ranked national news outlets to have a seat in the farcical White House press conference room, and thus, the national news industry is a fading one. It’s fading for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones is that a large proportion of consumers of news are tired of the lies and are fleeing to other sources than the mainstream purveyors of the government party line.

As an aside, there once were two daily newspapers in my home town of San Antonio – the Express News and the San Antonio Light. The Light was bought out years ago by their rival, but the Express News has shrunk from a once-substantial newspaper which everyone read, to something the size of a small tabloid and mostly running content gleaned from AP, UPI and other syndicated materiel. The editorial columns were usually by nationally syndicated personalities – and why bother? Eventually I dropped subscribing, and evidently, so did most everyone else. I used to see the paper in the driveway of practically every home in the neighborhood in the early mornings when I used to run before dawn. Now, I don’t think it’s delivered to more than a handful of houses.
Comment as you wish.

Floating in the Trope-Sphere

08. February 2024 · 1 comment · Categories: General

Towards the end of the Vietnam war, and for at least another decade after it ended, there was a trope/cliché which always could be depended on in movies and television; the whacked out, dysfunctional and traumatized veteran; sometimes a victim, often the guilty party, but always and reliably whacked-out. Even news media got into the act, now and again, interviewing theatrically dysfunctional, traumatized veterans, who – on cue – related how they had supped full on the horrors of the war in southeast Asia. This was so pervasive that for-real veterans for years were advised to leave periods of military service off resumes when job-hunting, and to never, never, ever advertise any connection to military service, be it with a ring, a gimme ballcap, a tee shirt, or an OD green field jacket … unless, of course, they were in the war protest movement.

It came out eventually that a lot of it was pure fakery. Most Vietnam veterans were quite well adjusted, thank you very much; they were upright and successful members of their communities, but the whacked-out Vietnam veteran trope didn’t even begin to die until the TV show Magnum, PI made the hero of that series and his buddies all veterans. Lately, I’ve been remembering how pervasive the whacked-out military veteran trope was, and how completely unrelated it was to reality. It was not just false, it was insulting; it socially isolated and stigmatized Vietnam war veterans and likely cost them opportunities both professional and personal. But the trope was out there and perpetuated for years in the entertainment media. I doubt that it was an organized kind of thing – it was just fashion, and a fashion eventually replaced by other tropes when it came to pop culture storytelling.

It seems that lately a lot of our movies and television series are staggering under the load of even more lazy tropes and stock characters – and like the whacked-out Vietnam veteran trope, with even less connection to reality. It is true that there is a Vietnam, and there was a war there which we were involved in… but just as too many viewers then confused reality with what they saw every night on the TV screen, too many now are doing just the same. For example – the proportion of gay men and women in the US is most reliably estimated at 2-3%. Yet a couple of years ago a survey of college and high school students had the kids estimated that gays were more like a quarter to a third of the population. To watch TV, and perhaps social media, one might very well come away with that perception. Looking at TV shows, commercials and print media, you might assume that practically every American marriage or relationship is interracial, that every judge and elected official is wise, kindly and black, and that just about all non-city dwellers are toothless, illiterate rednecks. Deliberate, or just laziness on the part of scriptwriters, show-runners and advertising executives? What will happen when personal experience and/or observations collides with reality, or has that collision happened already, and that is why viewership for mainstream American movies and TV shows is dropping like a stone. I admit to being cynically amused at the corruption and incompetence demonstrated by certain elected or appointed females of color, who apparently had no other qualities to recommend them for high office, other than possession of melanin and a vagina. According to the TV trope, they should have been the next thing to a wise, kindly goddess. Comment as you wish and are amused. Or horrified.

DIE, Quiet Quitting, And the Exit of Competence

03. February 2024 · Comments Off on DIE, Quiet Quitting, And the Exit of Competence · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Ain't That America?, Home Front, My Head Hurts, Rant, That's Entertainment!

About the only comfort that I could take away from the initial election of B. Whose-Middle Name-Shall-Not-Be-Mentioned Obama was a small one – a hope that the election of a man of partial color and relatively cosmopolitan upbringing would at last bury the last lingering shreds of AmeriKKKa-Is-The-Most-Raaaaacist-Evah! Alas – it soon became very clear this was a sad, and forlorn hope. The new intellectually powered Diversity-Inclusion-Equity racism came roaring back like a movie serial killer in a twentieth remake of a Hollywood horror flick franchise. A decent regard for civil rights of black citizens has somehow metastasized into ‘DIE, whitey, DIE’ or at the very least, ‘no well-paying prestigious job for you, pale-male-and-stale.’ Never mind if the beneficiaries of these policies appear far less able to perform to the standards which the job requires … it seems to be the intentions that count. It’s no biggie if the bridge collapses, the aircraft collide on approach, the expensive movie bombs at the box office, or the press secretary babbles nonsense when asked a difficult question. The good intentions of DIE conquer all, even reality.

Is this a power-play on the part of the Democrat Party, the intellectual fashion o’ the moment on the part of our educational establishment, vicious class snobbery on the part of a managerial elite, nostalgic for the days of forelock-tugging peasantry who wouldn’t disobey the orders of their petty lords? A combination of all three? In any case, the would-be supreme powers appear to be going all out to demean, demoralize and economically beggar a confident property-owning, independent American middle and working class — a class of citizens which is mostly but not exclusively of European origin, and therefore mostly-sort-of-mainly white under the current popular description.

The results of ‘no job for you, whitey!’ is playing out in several wildly different areas with interestingly calamitous results, especially when it comes to lowering standards of competence in order to favor the chosen minority over those competent but disfavored by the principles of diversity/inclusion/equity. Ace of Spades linked to a post on a website called Film Threat, lamenting the difficulties of writers for TV shows; no cushy writing gigs on a diminishing number of shows unless the writer is anything but a white middle-aged heterosexual. Such experienced writers with a good (or even so-so) track record are being passed by, in favor of the trendy young gay, multiracial female (or identifying as such) – who have no experience and little apparent craft in actually telling a story and engaging more than a narrow audience segment. This would explain how domestic audiences for American TV and movies are crashing in such an extraordinary degree of late. Hollywood at large has established what amounts to a color bar; shafting the competent and experienced in favor of the not-so competent and relatively inexperienced … who then produce movies and TV which only a small portion of the available audience want to watch without a gun pointed at their head.

Another area where this is happening appears to be the military, especially in recruitment, now crashing to heretofore unexpected levels. It was conventional wisdom when I was active duty that generally black troops enlisted to get skills training and experience, mostly on the support part of the long spear. Whites and Hispanics enlisted or were commissioned, on the other hand, for the challenge and experience of being at the tip of the long pointy spear – fighter pilots, special forces, rangers, SEALS, whatever. Those guys (and most but not all were guys) came from a working-class, rural and/or southern background and the combat arms were what they wanted to be and to do. Now if they are still on active duty, they are being treated like moral lepers. Potential recruits from families with a long tradition of serving are snottily informed that they aren’t wanted in this splendid new and diverse military. So the rural working-class southern boys are bypassing the recruiting office, to the surprise of practically no one paying attention. Given the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, any sensible parent or authoritative adult in the life of a potential recruit clearly sees that competent military leadership has left the building. I’m not the only veteran around these days, quietly discouraging any young person from considering a military career or a place in one of the academies.

The more heavily the thumb of the DIE advocates press down on the hiring/promotion scales, the faster the professionally competent will either quiet-quit, quit entirely, or not even be hired in the first place. Anyone not addled by diversity-inclusion-equity at the expense of competence can see this will accelerate the doom loop in the activities cited. Discuss as you wish, and if you have gruesome examples from personal experiences, or insights to share, please do.

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

25. January 2024 · Comments Off on Say Goodbye to Hollywood · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, Memoir

Last week, in a discussion thread on a story about plans to revamp Hollywood Boulevard and make it attractive to tourists, against an apparently overwhelming tide of homelessness, addiction and petty crime, someone posted a link to this Billy Joel song. For some curious reason it struck me, since I have been saying goodbye to Hollywood – the physical place, and the entertainment concept – over the last couple of decades.

I grew up on the fringes of physical Hollywood. My immediate family was not directly involved in the entertainment world, although there were a great number of curious connections. A fair number of friends and associates were employed in show-biz, mostly as technical specialists for various studios. One very dear friend of Mom and Dad’s was a makeup artist; curiously, as a straight and good-looking man, he wound up dating a fair number of stars and starlets before his marriage. They were gorgeous women and lonely when it came to dating, as their degree of fame intimidated the heck out of most potential dates who were not ‘in the business’. The husband of my Girl Scout troop leader when I was in high school was an audio tech for Warner Brothers; he got the troop a private tour of the studio lot. The set of the throne room/Round Table for the movie Camelot was still set up on one of the enormous sound stages, and it was every bit as cavernously awesome as it appeared in the movie, with enormous candelabras filled with dripping candles as thick around as my wrist. We also got to see and be introduced to Efrem Zimbalist, as he was shooting an episode of The FBI. Richard Widmark’s brother was one of my high school teachers – and another high school teacher had Tommy and Dick Smothers as students back in the day. Ronny Howard went to the same local junior high for a while – he was the same age as my next-younger brother. (Ronny’s stint in public school didn’t work out well – he was bullied and scorned for being a cry-baby, and his parents eventually removed him from that school.)
The Lutheran church in North Hollywood that we attended for many years also had a coterie of Hollywood people in the congregation – again, mostly techs, although Barbara Hutton coached the kid’s chorus for a while, and Elke Sommer also turned up now and again. (At a time, she had the public image of being a Continental sexpot – against type, she was a devout Lutheran and daughter of a Lutheran minister back in Germany.) As I had written before, Granny Clarke, the mother of one of Mom’s best friends had a storied career for half a century as housekeeper to the stars. The Cal State University Northridge campus, which I went to for upper division was a location for exteriors for the medical drama Medical Center, and there was often a camera crew working there. For years afterwards, running the TV control room for whatever AFRTS outlet I was assigned to, I amused myself by spotting familiar places around Los Angeles which had served as backgrounds. For TV shows mostly, as the movie location shooting could go very much farther afield by the late 1970s and early 80’s.

Say goodbye to Hollywood … my brothers and sister also knew physical aspects from the weekly commute to church. Over the hills from the San Fernando Valley, and down through Laurel Canyon – past the forest-grown grounds of Harry Houdini’s estate, although we were never looking in that direction. There was an old rustic house on the other side of Laurel Canyon, with a spiral staircase from an upper floor room wound round the trunk of a big tree next to the building. We were enchanted by that house, and always looked for it. Down to Sunset Boulevard, turning right and past the place where the Garden of Allah had been, and where there was a model of that legendary hotel complex in a glass case next to the bank HQ that sat for a time on that very spot. Past the Whiskey-a-Go-Go – then the white-hot live-music and clubbing venue on Saturday nights. Past the great neo-gothic cliff of the Chateau Marmont … past the more-than-life-size rotating showgirl on the signboard for the Sahara Hotel in Los Vegas – a billboard made famous by the book and movie Myra Breckenridge … all this to the tune of Mom quietly grousing about the drivers with out of state license plates, driving oh-so-slowly, thinking they would catch a glimpse of a real movie star! Yeah, a recognizable movie star, walking along the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk, on an early Sunday morning. It was considered rather tacky to make a big thing about recognizing a movie or TV star, gushing over how much you luuuuved them, and asking for an autograph. That was for tourists; for us here in that part of California, it was just the local industry, the business that many worked for; we were properly blasé. Gushing over stars that you recognized on the street, in a grocery store, or anywhere else? Tacky, tacky, tacky.

I was gone from there by 1977. The congregation of the Lutheran church had dwindled to almost nothing well before then, the building deconsecrated, sold and torn down, which was a pity, as it was a lovely neo-Tudor structure with gorgeous stained-glass windows, and traditional, richly embroidered paraments to dress the altar and sanctuary with. The various studios are still there, sort of, although much diminished from their heyday of more than half a century ago. Movies and television shows are filmed and taped practically everywhere else. The tourists who still come to see Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, and the handprints of stars in the sidewalk apparently have to step over human poop on the sidewalk and dodge aggressive street people. I don’t think that proposed revamping will help much. It will all be a Potempkin set dressing on a decaying urban setting. And I haven’t set foot in a movie theater in ages, and the TV shows that we watch at home now are all produced and filmed/taped practically anywhere else.
Say Goodbye to Hollywood, indeed.

Shopping Daze

21. January 2024 · Comments Off on Shopping Daze · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

We spent most of Saturday morning doing the semi-monthly grocery shopping run; a rather abbreviated run as it turns out, as my daughter has some houses to show on Sunday to clients who work Monday-Friday. We have given up driving to New Braunfels once a month to drop a goodly lot of money on meats from Granzin. This is lamentable, as Granzin’s sausages and the various meats, fresh, marinated, smoked and dried were absolutely prime and relatively inexpensive, but with Wee Jamie, a full schedule of real estate stuff for my daughter, and the nerve-wracking drive on a busy highway … road trips like that were just not something we can keep on doing – and never mind the hours’ long trip to Pflugerville or Victoria to the Aldi outlet. (That’s for when we are going in that direction for something else, anyway.)

The cost of most grocery staples has gone up, making certain economies necessary. I’m accustomed to cooking most things from scratch and have lived through patches of extreme economy and a limited budget, so the shopping list doesn’t include much in the way of frozen prepared items anymore – just basic ingredients. As my daughter says – ‘We are Old Poor, compared to the New Poor,’ for whom necessary austerity must bite very hard in the last year or so. But even basic ingredients have increased in price, to the point where now the military base commissaries offer a better deal than HEB, the Texas grocery chain, which has a huge distribution center here in San Antonio, and which has run just about every other national chain out of the state. (It’s a small town indeed, which doesn’t rate a HEB grocery outlet.)

This wasn’t always the case. When I first came to Texas, assigned to the video production unit at Lackland AFB, it was honestly even money whether HEB offered better pricing than the Commissary – various HEB locations certainly offered a wider selection than the commissaries, which mostly featured national big-name brands, and offered in-store bakeries and deli counters and numerous Texas-local brands. After so about a decade and a half of having the base commissary as the only and often limited grocery option, I was glad to shift my grocery-purchasing custom to HEB, and the lavish array of staples and specialty foods on offer, and to either Costo or Sam’s Club for items we used in quantity. We still do Costco, for certain items, and Chewy for pet food … but we’re back to making a commissary runs twice a month. It turns out that the DOD has extended commissary and PX access to veterans across the board, not just retirees, which means that my daughter can shop there for baby and toddler food for Wee Jamie, as the prices for the brands that we favor for him are somewhat less expensive – one thing that has changed for the better, I guess.

Misplaced Sarcasm

19. January 2024 · Comments Off on Misplaced Sarcasm · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Media Matters Not

One of my occasional internet stops is a group blog featuring analysis of costuming, hair and makeup in a wide range of movies, TV shows and miniseries set in all periods and countries, up to the late 1950s or so. The various contributors have, between them, considerable expertise in aspects of historic costuming, apparently unlimited time, access to the material under consideration, sharp eyes for detail, and a reservoir of snark the size of Lake Michigan. Now and again some of them have gone all out for diversity, inclusion and equity, but not to an absolutely insufferable degree; mildly annoying, but not enough to put me off returning. I have a mild interest in historic costuming, since I do like to dress in period Victorian or Edwardian attire for book events. And the sarcasm is occasional diverting, especially when aimed at badly done costuming, or at a variety of commonly-committed goofs in the genre – things like corsets without any shift underneath, metal grommets in lacing-up garments much before the late 19th century, a tragic lack of hairpins and hats in settings when they would have been required absolutely, zippers up the back of costumes … I’ve occasionally waxed sarcastic about some of these aspects myself.

The other limit to the range of movies considered, besides pre-1950s, is that they don’t ‘do’ war movies, ancient and modern, not having any interest or expertise in uniforms and generally no interest in war movies anyway. Which is a perfectly OK principle to maintain … but just this week, one contributor yielded under protest into watching Band of Brothers because her boyfriend wanted to watch it. Apparently she was so resentful about having to watch that she posted about the experience; just stills of the various actors with a bitter and brief tagline about what their other acting roles had been and a request for judgement on whether she was an a-hole for not relishing the series, as all those white boys looked alike when covered in dirt. Oh, my – the comments on that post were pretty fiery. I’m still working out in my own mind why I was so offended by the flippant dismissal. Likely it’s on the principle of keeping silent if you can’t find anything nice to say. You know – if you and your weblog doesn’t do war movies and don’t know anything about military uniforms, then you just might be better off giving a miss to posting about it all, rather than being spiteful and sarcastic.

But there is a bit more than that; Band of Brothers is an excellent series; the producers took every care to make it as accurate as possible (which at least she gave credit for), and to cast actors who looked as much like their real-life counterparts had appeared at the time. As a dramatic representation of what it was like for the guys of Easy Company in the European Theater 1944-45, Band of Brothers is as good as it ever gets. It just seemed like the blogger/contributor was just dumping on a generation of men because she had to watch a series about them.

I don’t know if I will go back to checking out their posts, after this. I can get my fix of costume design and historical critique at Bernadette Banner and Prior Attire, I think.

Incoming

14. January 2024 · Comments Off on Incoming · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry

A winter storm/extreme cold front has hit this weekend, with overnight temperatures falling into the ‘well-below-freezing’ range; rare indeed for this part of Texas.  Our planting zone falls around “9” – which generally means that warm-weather plants – banana trees, citrus, ferns and the like – generally do rather well. The occasional snow that stays for longer than a couple of hours after sunrise is a rare happening. Like about every twenty years or so. But one of those last long-predicted winter blasts hit a little less than two years ago and hit so catastrophically that everyone’s memories are still quite unpleasantly fresh … especially memories of how badly our civic power authorities bungled a long-predicted cold front which left much of suburban San Antonio freezing in the dark, and without tap water. A foot of snow on the ground, too – which would have left places in the Northern tier doubled over laughing; ‘That’s not winter … this (pointing to four feet and more on the ground for weeks and months on end) is winter!’ But the naked fact is that places like Ogden, Utah, Denver, Colorado, and Truckee, California are set up to cope with lots of snow and prolonged freezing temperatures, and South Texas is not. (What we are set up for is months of summer heat at temperatures in the three figures.)

Every one of my neighbors whose memories of the Great Snowmagedden of February, 2021 are uncomfortably vivid grimly prepped for something like it to happen again: stocking up on any groceries to be needed in the next week, making certain that electronic devices are charged, and that we are stocked up on propane, bottled water and toilet paper. The word on Next Door is that various HEB groceries are entirely out of canned soups and the like. Probably bread, milk and sandwich fixings, too. What saved a lot of my neighbors and I during Snowmagedden was having camping gear, propane camping stoves or barbeques, and a lot of blankets and firewood. We made out OK, generally – not happy about it all, especially the owners of one house which burned because the fire department couldn’t pull water from the hydrants because the pipes were frozen or empty – but we all remembered the week of misery. Hence the grim preparations, just in case. Our faith and trust in the power grid and those who manage it has been considerably reduced in the last couple of years. If what I heard on a walkabout during the last prolonged power outage this spring, at least a dozen neighbors have bought and set up household generators.

Right now it’s overcast and 30 degrees outside, and it’s late afternoon. The temperature will drop after sunset: a hard freeze is predicted for tonight, and pretty much the same for the next few days. We’ve taken the few tender plants that the hot, rainless summer didn’t kill into the garage, hung a blanket over the front door, and drawn the curtains and shutters over the windows to preserve as much of the warmth as possible. The dogs and cats are all inside and sheltered – at least this time around, we don’t have chickens to keep inside, too. The battery lanterns, our cellphones and my Kindle are all on their chargers – so, we’ll see what develops. Already, the inside walls and windows are cold to touch. We’ll keep the heat on tonight, which is not our usual custom, but with Wee Jamie as part of the household now, we can’t long endure an excessively cold house.

 

The Price of DIE

09. January 2024 · Comments Off on The Price of DIE · Categories: General, My Head Hurts, Working In A Salt Mine...

So serial plagiarist and Professional Womyn of Color (Academic Division) Claudine Gay has been turfed from the comfy corner office at Hah-vaard, to the tune of much lamenting from The Usual Suspects. Frankly, I’m long past caring very much about what goes on in the hallowed halls of an increasingly overrated, intellectually debased institute of so-called higher learning. I was never in a position to be an Ivy student/alum, contribute monetarily to an Ivy, or in a position to hire a graduate from one of them, so the matter to me would be moot. Except …
Unfortunately, the ruling class, intellectual elite of this increasingly bedraggled nation have been overimpressed for decades with Hah-vaard and other enormous hedge funds with a finishing school of storied history attached, so willy-nilly, we must pay attention to the place. Apparently, MS Gay achieved her exalted position through the magical combination of possessing a vagina, a melanin-enhanced epidermis, and an expertise at vicious academic infighting, but no great intellectual shakes, literary skills, or any but the most banal insights into the human condition in evidence. Nice work, if you can get it, I suppose. A triumph of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity industry, or as we like to abbreviate it around here, DIE.

Like all ‘brilliant’ progressive notions for reordering society in a manner more pleasing (to them) it sounds very good straight off the bat. You know – fair, humane… and what kind of awful person could be against such a reasonable effort to better conditions for those poor folks previously disadvantaged and discriminated against … the exact definition of groups held to be disfavored previously by things like color of skin, ethnic background, economic status, religion, or national origin tends to be somewhat elastic. Some humans, apparently, are simply more equal/disadvantaged than others, as Orwell noted in another context, and are more worthy of having advantages, scholarships, promotions and high offices bestowed upon them, regardless of actual talent and fitness for them.
But one does wonder – are the monetary and status benefits all that worth it to the designated recipients of such favors in the long run? Do those beneficiaries of corporate/governmental affirmative action and DIE programs look around from the eminence of their GS-whatever office, the C-level suites or the university chair and know in the depths of their souls that they got there because of color, ethnic identity and sex, and not ability? Do such people ever wonder if the perks and paychecks are worth the realization that that everyone looking at them knows – not just suspects – but knows that they are an incompetent, and relatively useless token, secretly held in contempt and derision by peers, underlings and supervisors. Competence or lack of it is a quality that just cannot be hidden for very long in an organization. Word does get around. I suspect that only the supremely and delusionally self-confident escape having such doubts at all – and such knowledge must be absolutely crushing.
Discuss as you see fit.

Coming Storm

03. January 2024 · Comments Off on Coming Storm · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Eat, Drink and be Merry, History, Literary Good Stuff

Out of the blue in the week before Christmas, my daughter asked me if I had any idea of how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, early in December, 1941, generally affected the Christmas mood that year. Of course, she knows that I wouldn’t have any personal memories of that period (as I wasn’t even born until 15 years after that event) but I grew up pretty well marinated in memories and memoirs of World War 2 – even more so when I sat down to write a novel set in that time period. Yes, the Christmas of 1941 was a nerve-wracking time for more than just Americans, even if a war in Europe had been going on for more than two years. In the Far East, countries and colonies were falling like ninepins to imperial Japanese invasion and occupation all through the first months of 1942. I have gathered so from memoirs; and also from my own memories of the lead-up to Christmas, 1990 and the buildup when operations began before the first Gulf War (the last year that we were in Spain) and how mothers and fathers put on a brave face for small children. They did their best then, as we did that year, to have an absolutely normal, reassuring Christmas, with presents and Santa, carols and a nice meal. In 1941 and for three subsequent years, parents had to explain the sudden absence of older brothers and cousins, younger uncles and fathers, and the necessity of blackouts. Probably later, they had to put a brave face on depressing headlines in the newspaper that yet another island, town or province had been attacked, and might soon surrender – just as I and other parents stationed at European bases had to explain Desert Shield; new concertina around the base perimeter, a flightline full to bursting with parked transport aircraft, the long hours that military parents and spouse volunteers were all working.

This last Christmas wasn’t so fraught as all that, but it still seemed to me to have been pretty restrained; the two Christmas markets that we participated in were almost flat-lined. Everyone seemed to be holding on to what money they had. We went to one small-town Christmas tree lighting ceremony, which was crowded … but it was a small town, out in the Hill Country, which we presumed to be fairly sheltered against disruptive shenanigans. But everything costs more, this year – we couldn’t do massive batches of fudge to give away to friends and neighbors this year but had to settle for baking a few sheet pans of bar cookies instead. UPS used to park a storage unit in the driveway of a house just inside the neighborhood and made deliveries in a golf-cart with a trailer hitched to it … not this year. (Or last, to be fair.) On the other hand, the post office was swamped; they had at least four days backlog on deliveries. This seemed to be nationwide, as it made the local news. I suspect it was not the number of parcels in the system, but that transportation systems were clogged and erratic. I have the sense of people hunkering down, looking at a dark horizon, waiting for the storm to hit. Inflation, terrorism, crime, war and civic unrest, the near-certainty of an election season that will make the history books in a bad way as a cautionary tale and a renewed panic over a wildly-communicable but relatively harmless virus – any or all in combination.

There is a brief passage towards the end of Marcia Davenport’s family epic of the Pittsburgh steel mills (a book and the movie made from it posted about here at Chicagoboyz by David Foster) which resonated with me, when I reread it late last year… “One thing was held by everybody in common, everybody from the flower-seller on his corner and the gruff driver of a rattling hack, to the artists at the opera and the sober officials up in the Hrad?any; a knowledge that every day of the good life now was a day gained from an ominous and impenetrable future. They would make and listen to their music and cook and eat their delectable food and promulgate and live by their wise laws intently aware that the rim of security and sanity was shrinking, shrinking visibly around them, every day. … it was the infinite personal perfection of life that glowed warm and treasurable against the thickening miasmas of the wilderness outside. Each homecoming now was not merely the delight of coming home, but the tense appreciation of this home to come to, this perfection balanced so delicately on the brink of a volcano.”

Ah, well – I wish that I could hope for a happy new year – but I can read the skies as well as anyone. Discuss as you wish.

2023 – Wrap-up & Plans for 2024

27. December 2023 · Comments Off on 2023 – Wrap-up & Plans for 2024 · Categories: Domestic

Ah, yes – the last week of the old year rapidly dribbling away, and time for me to sit down and assess what I managed to get done out of the goals set for last year at this time.

Last year, I vowed to complete three books, which at the time were only partially completed or just barely begun: the Civil War novel That Fateful Lightning, the latest installment of the Lone Star series, a new collection of Jim Reade and Toby Shaw adventures in 1840s Texas, and the 12th volume of the Luna City series.

Well, best two out of three; Lone Star Blood launched in ebook in March, and That Fateful Lightning launched the first of December, in Kindle and print both. As for Luna City #12, that has to roll over into next year’s projects and goals.

I have started on Luna City #12 and hope to have it done and ready for launch at mid-year. I have decided, though, to make it Kindle only, but generate it in print as part of the fourth compendium of Luna City. That makes a nice round number of four extra-hefty collections. Because the story arc of Richard Astor-Hall will come to a nice conclusion with his marrying Katie Heisel, and because one larger-than-life real person who inspired creation of a character in Luna City has since passed away – we have decided to wrap up the present-day cycle at twelve books. However, I am very fond of the mental place that Luna City occupies, as are the fans, so there will be future books set in that space – but in the 1920s and 30s, with Stephen, Letty, Douglas, and their friends as children. They will have adventures and solve mysteries, and generally assist Chief Magill and John Drury in fighting minor crime – a sort of American Emil and the Detectives. I haven’t started on that book yet – still thinking about it and coming up with possible story lines.

We decided to put off doing vinyl flooring throughout the house for the foreseeable future – it’s too big and exhausting a project to tackle myself. It was bad enough, just doing one small room. The privacy fence from the garage to the neighbor’s gatepost was completed early on, though – and as predicted, delivery people are confused about where the front door is! But it makes a secure and private patio for the front bedroom. So that goal done and dusted, and the dryer vent also was cleaned out, at a much greater expense than expected. It might never have been done by the original owners of the house, as the technician found the vent cover permanently attached. That was a disconcerting discovery, and so were the massive quantities of lint removed from the stack.

We didn’t get the slider insert with a pet door in it for the cats to go in and out as they wish – but we did put in some patio furniture, cat beds and litter boxes, feeder and water butt for the cats, so the patio is sort-of reclaimed. The slider insert has gone up in price since last I checked – so for now, we’re just leaving the slider door about six inches open most days, so the feline herd may go in and out as the mood takes them. Although the back fence has been totally rebuilt – we’re holding off on chickens until this next spring. That and the slider door insert with the pet door are on the agenda for 2024.

In March of 2025, the mortgage on the house will be entirely paid off, and I should have made a good dent in paying for the new siding, windows and HVAC system – all of that installed in 2020 or 2021. As an aside, the siding and the specialty paint on it are wearing extraordinarily well – they all still look as if they had been freshly done just last week.

As for the ongoing projects and plans, I will do my best to get a good vegetable garden going this year, now that I have the somewhat sturdier greenhouse to start seeds in. And I might be able to fit into a pair of size 14 jeans once more. And that’s the state of the author for this year, and the plans for next. Happy New Year!

Let the Nerdification Begin!

26. December 2023 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Memoir

It was my daughter’s notion to watch Christmas movies beginning at the first of November, but we pretty well watched all the ones that we wanted to watch by last week – even old favorites like A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation and new favorites like Arthur Christmas. This has had the effect of Wee Jamie being perfectly happy and sociable when introduced to that weird stranger known as Santa Claus – a fat jolly man with a long white beard and a red coat trimmed with white fur. That project being successfully accomplished, we commenced on a secondary aim… to properly nerdify Wee Jamie with a watching of the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Yes, not only did my daughter and I made it a project to go see each of the movies as they launched (normally at a multiplex in Oceanside when she was still in the Marines and I came out to California to spend the holiday at my parents’ house) but I had started her off early by reading all of RR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and LOTR to her as a bedtime story when she was three … and I had read them all to my little brother Alex as well when he was about seven or eight. This was a project which took at least a year, and my little brother was so immersed in the story that he could do a very creditable voice as Sam Gamgee by the time we were done. He also dressed as a hobbit that Halloween, in a tunic and cloak, with a sword and shield by his side. (Wooden ones that Dad made for him.)

The whole four-volume epic is a great read-aloud adventure, by the way – every chapter, practically, ends on a cliffhanger. We still love the movie version, though, in spite of the mild violence done to the storyline in the interests of moviemaking. Skipping over Tom Bombadil was understandable, and Arwen had to be introduced as a character, instead of appearing out of the blue with no explanation at the very end. Faramir, unlike his brother twigged the peril of possessing the Ring almost at once, but really, was it necessary to make Denethor such an unpleasant character?

On the other hand, the visual sweep of Middle Earth was just mind-bogglingly wonderful – the pleasant, rural Shire and golden, stream-threaded Rivendell, the ancient statues looking over the river, Meduseld, the Golden Hall of Rohan, the charge of the Rohirrim before the walls of Minias Tirith, and the splendor of the White City itself. What I really liked over the course of the Trilogy was the care taken in the design of sets and props; instead of settling for a vaguely medieval-fantasy of places and folk, Peter Jackson and his designers made an obvious distinction between the various settings. The Shire was vaguely late Victorian rural cottage, Rivendell was very Art-Deco, while Rohan was early Saxon/Germanic, and Gondor classical Roman/Romanesque. I like that the distinctions were so carefully drawn and noted. This just added so much visual texture to the Trilogy.

The one thing that we both wish, as far as movie-making goes – is that Peter Jackson had decided to do movies all of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, instead of padding out The Hobbit to make three movies out of what could have been only rather long one. I get chills, just imagining what Jackson could have made of that mythic tale. The Prydain story arc could have been a series just as riveting, and with as many yearly releases as the Harry Potter epic. Ah, well – we all have our dreams, in the world of Nerddom.

Depth of Disgust

12. December 2023 · Comments Off on Depth of Disgust · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, History, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, Rant

You know, I would be completely, totally, utterly disgusted and disillusioned with the non-reaction of international , professional and academic ‘capital F’ Feminism, in the wake of Hamas’ rape, pillage and kidnapping spree of last October … except that I sussed several decades ago that the same international, ‘capital F’ professional and academic feminists didn’t really give a waffle-fried damn about the lives, ambitions, challenges and condition of ordinary women. I had no illusions to lose about the big-name capital F feminists, not after I came to a certain realization sometime around 1985 or so.

Until then, I had thought of myself as a mild sort of feminist – really wanting nothing more than equal access to education, employment, and consideration by society in general, given meeting the same standards/qualifications. While the situation for women in the early latter half of the 20th century weren’t quite as limited as they had been a hundred or two hundred years earlier – there were restrictions, a few of them legal (such as military women not permitted to marry or have children and continue to serve) but most were societal expectations affecting middle and upper-class women. (Working class women, married and unmarried, almost always had to have jobs. Even in the 19th century.) Feminism in the 1970s meant to me personally that there were choices that individual women could make about choosing and balancing a career, a family and the domestic obligations involved, rather than having them made for us. (That many women have since been free to make unwise choices is a separate issue.)

What I came to realize after about a decade of subscription to MS Magazine (Yes, I had a subscription – to that and about half a dozen other progressive/liberal publications, in the pre-internet days) was that there was a definite bias therein when it came to defining a feminist. The message that I got from the MSlings and the rest was that it might all very nice to be a woman employed in a fairly non-traditional profession, but you really weren’t a ‘real’ feminist and down with the cause unless you worked at some academic establishment or in the creative or publishing fiends, earning an upper-middle-class salary, were a single parent, man-hating vegetarian, lesbian or at least bi, who celebrated ones’ abortion/s and reliably voted progressive. There was, briefly, a ‘feminists for life’ action group, which, predictably, got read out of meeting when the Mainstream Capital F feminists decided to go all in on abortion access.

Increasingly, it was obvious that mainstream professional feminism had practically nothing to say to me – I was only one of those things (single parent through an unfortunate choice of potential life partner). I gathered that being working class was beneath consideration, and military was just too infra dig for the MSlings and the professional feminists: Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, and other influential voices. They were all notable professional capital ‘F’ feminists of the ‘Second Wave’ as writers, theoreticians, campaigners. They weren’t quite as far out on the man-hating whack-job fringe as Valerie Solanas, who tried to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. But over time it eventually became clear that they were desperately unhappy women; they hated men, despised family life, had no affection at all for children – and eventually didn’t have much to say to me. I liked men as friends and romantic partners, treasured a family life and held children to be precious. I did rather agree with Naomi Wolf, who briefly wandered off the mainline feminist plantation with publication of her 1993 book, Fire with Fire. She argued that mainstream feminism had to basically grow up, make common cause with women across the political spectrum, stop glorying in victimhood, and stop wasting time and energy in man-hating and abortion; work to benefit all women, not just the doctrinaire hard-core Feminists. I rather think she was chased back onto the plantation after that – she only totally rebelled recently.

My second disillusion regarding the Feminist Establishment came about two decades after the first, watching an able politician like Sarah Palin monstered and denigrated by the mainstream establishment Feminist voices in the media, mostly, but also in academia and among the surviving intellectual Feminists. It was an absolutely disgusting display of snobbery. Here was an able, attractive, and intelligent state-level politician, happily married with mostly well-adjusted children until the glare of the establishment media put them under the unbearably white-hot spotlight. She was neither spawn or spouse of an established male politician, who made a career in politics entirely on her own merits, previously well-respected as a state governor … and she got treated like something nasty, tracked in on someone’s shoe after the 2008 election. There was an awful kind of bitchiness about the aftermath of that campaign – as if a hundred thousand doctrinaire Feminist mean girl snobs piled on to the chosen victim.

These observations all left me less than impressed with the current crop of ostentatious feminists, out there protesting, cosplaying the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale or wearing pink knitted hats and bleating about microaggressions and the patriarchy or the male gaze, or because their feelings were hurt because someone somewhere wore a shirt they didn’t like or said something they found offensive. Meanwhile women in certain African cultures are mutilated genitally, South American women are sex-trafficked … and Israeli women were gang-raped, mutilated, murdered or kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. The professional capital F feminists are mostly silent, especially about this last. I’d like to think it’s an embarrassed silence, but I know better. The professional feminists are first and foremost progressives – and they really don’t care for the lives and fortunes of women not in their own little circle.
Comment as you wish.

(PS – the latest historical novel is released into the wild, and is now available in print and as a Kindle version, here on Amazon!)

Close to the Edge

29. November 2023 · Comments Off on Close to the Edge · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, World

I’ve felt over the last couple of years, that there is a steep precipice in our path, up to which our current Ruling Class is staggering blindly. Not just our American path, but in the developed world generally, and in that of western Europe. Things just can’t continue as they are. There is a breaking point coming. Really, no one might accurately predict exactly what small spark will kick off the explosion or the fall from a great height, or exactly where it might occur. The precipitating powers move in the shadows, veiled by a news media which deliberately veils them anyway. Too many national and international elites are pursuing policies which benefit them, rather than the countries they are supposed to govern. Too many of the transnational ruling class, indeed, seem to be in competition to pour contempt and derision on their less-fortunate, relatively powerless fellow citizens … and that’s a situation which can’t continue indefinitely. People are too stressed, made angry by things which they can’t control. Road rage incidents, riots that flame up like a prairie fire, unprovoked beatings, mass brawls in fast food restaurants and on commercial airliners; people are snapping over the slightest provocation, a misheard word, a momentary inconvenience…

There are just too many small indicia of trouble – small things, taken individually which wouldn’t mean much. But all the big things pile up like firewood, only wanting the tinder – which I fear that the small things will provide, to our cost. Big things like the Covidiocy, locking people into their houses and out of a social life, and then the vax mandate which cost them jobs, BLM/Antifa riots and protests which wrecked downtowns across red states, and inspired city governments to turn a blind eye towards property crime and the organized looting of retail outlets. The erasure of national borders is another one of those big things, stressing on a local level, when mobs of strangers suddenly show up and are favored with shelter, food and considerations not given to local citizens, deserving or not.

A recent incident which caught my attention and hinted to me that we are very close to the disastrous edge was the unprovoked knife attack at a school in Dublin – an attack which severely injured a woman and three children. (Link goes to Neo Neocon, and an interesting and informative discussion in the comment thread.)Initially, the local police were coy about describing the assailant, although he was captured almost at once. In the US, we have learned what to assume – with a high degree of accuracy – when a Person of No Description is apprehended after committing violence. Apparently, the Irish have learned that lesson as well. Having been fed to the back teeth with assorted petty and major crimes committed by an alien element – third-world migrants forced upon their communities by a governing class who appeared to be much more interested in currying favor with their international ruling class elsewhere in Europe, the locals chose to make their unhappiness in a language which the ruling class can’t ignore.
“… Some in Ireland believe too many people have arrived, too quickly, and that we need a ‘mature debate’ about it. But whenever they say something, they’re branded bigots and scum.”
Firey riots appear to be an acceptable means of protesting when it comes to an urban underclass, but only of the aggrieved are the right sort, dontchaknow. In any case, the national stereotype is of the Irish generally being truculent and ready to fight on any ground; after all, they fought being colonized by the British for a good few centuries; who would have expected them to lie down and be colonized by anyone else.

The observation in the above-linked article does ring very true to me; the ruling class willfully closing their ears to the voices of the ruled class by branding them bigots and scum. And deplorable, racists, stupid … Our own ruling elite did the same with the Tea Party. As courteous, reasonable, responsible and thoughtful a body of citizens as ever was in the United States political life, and for all that, called names and abused by the media, entertainment and political class.
Discuss as you will, while we still can.

Rage

17. November 2023 · Comments Off on Rage · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, History

So a month and a bit after the Oct.7th pogrom in Israel, the streets of American and European cities, and university/college campuses are filled with rage, and a disgusting display of Jew-hate. It’s as if none of them ever read Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or had the slightest clue about what happens when the survivors of a genocide have the chance to pay back the perpetrators of mass murder – the wholesale murder of kin, friends, and coreligionists – with appropriate coin. But mostly … rage. By coincidence, the hand-scribbled ravings of the Covenant School transexual murderer were leaked to a media outlet – it looks like some local police officers are believed to have been the conduit for the leakage. Because what comes clear about the girl who wanted to be a boy was the pure, white-hot insane and murderous rage, which somehow became focused for whatever reason on the kids, kids who were of a privileged enough background that their parents could send them to a religious-sponsored private school. I wonder if the rage grew out of frustration. The kids had something that Audrey Hale felt that she lacked – a secure sense of self in the world, comfort within their own skin, innocence and trust, parental approval – whatever. They had all that or some other quality – and she didn’t and it wasn’t fair – and so she was consumed with rage, a rage which could only be assuaged by lashing out.

Sometime around the start of Gulf War 1, I read Bernard Lewis’ article in The Atlantic Magazine – The Roots of Muslim Rage – and I was so struck by his insight and explanation that I really made a pest of myself, showing the article to a number of my fellow NCOs and airmen – “See! That’s why they hate us! They really, really hate us! And this is WHY!” (Well, not all Muslims, actually – but a far number of those who were lashing out back then, even before 9-11.) Here you had a body of people who had been promised everything by their Prophet – wealth, domination, all the goodies that this mortal life has to offer as well as unending orgies in the heavenly knocking-shop – and yet, they looked around at the rest of the world and saw that they lived in poverty-ridden, unsanitary, dysfunctional dumps, while the supposedly unworthy infidels had riches, health, power, scantily-clad women … well, you’d be pissed. Consumed with rage, and envy, and the conviction that it just wasn’t fair!

So what comes out when I look at what I can bear to look at in the videos of the October 7th pogrom Palestinian pogrom and read in the various news reports is the motivation of sheer rage. All-consuming, envious rage, never to be assuaged by all the progressive sympathy in the world, all the donations by the UN for the poor, suffering Palestinians over eighty years (as if they were the only folk in the world who lost a war that they initiated and perpetuated). They squatted in an enviable bit of Mediterranean shoreline that could have been a tourist and garden mecca and marinated in rage. A rage made even more white-hot at how Jews made a prosperous, tidy, advanced little nation out of a desert. The Hamasniks looked over the border into Israel at the pretty homes and prosperous farms and businesses … and went insane with unreasoning rage at what they didn’t have … everything that they wanted and deserved. All the goodies that those cheating, unbelieving Jews had, and it just wasn’t fair.

And so, they went mad with rage. And there we are. Comment as you wish,

Good Times, We Hardly Knew You

16. November 2023 · Comments Off on Good Times, We Hardly Knew You · Categories: Ain't That America?

My daughter and I are off on a binge of watching Christmas movies, as it seems that episodes of Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi and a cast clad in lamentably Ren-fair costumes, inspire nightmares in Wee Jamie. So to my regret, we ditched Cadfael … honestly, why is it that the top English actors are generally so ordinary, and individual in appearance? Too many American actors look like underwear models, one indistinguishable from the next, peeled out of the same mold…

Anyway, we started with Home Alone, and Home Alone 2 … although I do note that McCauley Culkin was one of those kid actors who did not ‘adult’ well as he grew. But it was sad to look back at the Home Alone franchise from a nostalgic point of view. No interminable wait to go through security at the airport, for example. And once upon a time, my children, it was possible to go straight to the gate to meet someone arriving. And Home Alone 2 was even more of a punch to the nostalgia gut – the top of the World Trade Center tower, shining and silver. The Plaza Hotel, with Donald Trump in a brief bit part, when he was just a flamboyant TV and tabloid celeb with a penchant for dating models … New York City streets without crazies punching out total strangers. No one wearing masks because they feared the Commie Crud. The first Gulf War was over and won, the Russian Iron Curtain had fallen … and oh, things weren’t perfect, by any means … but most of us didn’t fear our local cops and we trusted the professionalism of the FBI. We could be sure that our politicians and national media didn’t hate the guts of half the American population with a white-hot passion, and we were also pretty certain that kids in most public schools were learning the basics, and not being perved on by teachers and bullied by the urban thug element … well, mostly.

Life was pretty good – and we didn’t even know it.

Tale of the Moroccan Brass Table (And Stand)

30. October 2023 · Comments Off on Tale of the Moroccan Brass Table (And Stand) · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

So I was wandering though my YouTube subscription channels and noticed this one particular bit of restorage – a mid-century modern Moroccan brass coffee table on a wooden stand, which rather decayed object was being renovated and restored. And it reminded me very much of a similar table which served in my parent’s various houses for nearly four decades, until it was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain Fire in northern San Diego County. That fire pretty much obliterated Mom and Dad’s retirement house. All that was left standing was a quadrangle of conblock walls … everything else in the house burned to a crisp, unless it was a few things that Mom threw into the back of her car, or which the firemen grabbed when the fire began exploding the glass windows inwards. When all was said and done, the insurance claim paid off and the house rebuilt, I think Mom rather had fun replacing the furniture and contents to her own taste, rather than what had been a random collection of family hand-be-downs and stuff acquired because it was available and either inexpensive or free.

The Moroccan brass table that my parents had in their various living rooms looked more like this one on eBay: almost five feet across, engraved overall with an ornate deckle edge and a matching wood and brass “spider” stand, which folded flat. Mom usually had the current issues of her magazines arranged on it, with an antique globe-shaped bowl with blue irises on it in the center. When we were expecting guests, it was usually my chore to remove all the issues of Harpers, The Atlantic, American Heritage and whatever, to apply about a quart of brass polish and the equivalent amount of elbow grease and polish the darned thing, before replacing the array of magazines. But when Mom and Dad refurnished their house, the Moroccan brass coffee table wasn’t something they were fond enough of to replace. The one like it that I located on eBay is on offer for almost $900, nearly half again what it originally ought to have cost. The insurance would have paid for a replacement … if they had wanted one. And why did Mom and Dad give houseroom for so many years to an expensive, high maintenance but distinctly flashy bit of mid-century exotic modern? They didn’t pick it out or pay for it – it came as a gift from Great-Aunt Nan. And thereby hangs a bit of a family story.

I think Great-Aunt Nan worked a lot of different jobs in her lifetime – I am not entirely certain what some of them were; secretarial positions for certain, possibly up-scale retail sales, a telegraphist in the 1930s, a government job in WWII and an enlistment in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. She might also have had income from what remained of the family fortunes established by her father, my Great-grandfather George. She lived very simply in small rental apartments, and traveled when the urge took her … anyway, one day in the mid-1960s, she was tootling around one of the high-end department stores in downtown Los Angeles. It may have been Bullocks, could have been May Co., or Robinsons. For some reason, Nan went wandering through the furniture department – and spied the Moroccan table and stand.

Holy cow! It was priced at $60, which even then was a steal! Obviously, someone marking the price tag on that table had made a howling blunder by misplacing a decimal point; it should have been marked $600! Well, never one to disdain a bargain, Nan insisted on buying the Moroccan brass table (and stand) for $60, over the strenuous objections of the salesperson, and the department head, and for all that I know, the store manager. No, (said Nan, standing her ground as only a spinster lady of independent means and irreproachable English upbringing could) – she knew the rights of retail sales. What the price on the sales floor was marked as – that was what it would sell for, and she would have that Moroccan brass table (and stand) for the $60 marked price, or else… I have no doubt that Nan would have raised the matter all the way to the Bullock’s company president and the board of directors.

Of course, Nan emerged triumphant, with the $60-dollar Moroccan brass table (and stand) in her possession – an item for which she had about as much use for as a goldfish does for long winter underwear. It was the principle of the thing, and too good a bargain to pass up. She gave it to Mom and Dad, who also appreciated bargains, even if it wasn’t for an item which they liked particularly well. Free was an even better deal than $60.

And that is the tale of the inadvertently marked-down Moroccan brass coffee table (and stand.) You’re welcome.

Consequences

27. October 2023 · 1 comment · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, Israel & Palestine

So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thomson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them. Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

While those educated in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our fair nation may not grasp the obvious double standard, a fair number of the rest of us see it all very plainly. Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of civilians by armed bullies is bad, m’kay? The Geneva Convention, that much-violated set of rules governing the conduct of war operations frowns on it, for all that only a few nations conducting warfare lately have ever observed them. I am also certain that I am not the only one of the post-WWII generation who had those few brave individuals who sheltered European Jews, or helped them escape from the Nazi’s “Final Solution” held up to me as the epitome of moral courage in a dark time.

So, it emerges that has been considerable blow-back to the poisonous Jew-hate on display after the October 7th Pogrom – students and individual bigots being doxed, fired, or having offers of post-graduate employment rescinded, counter-protests in front of their houses, anonymous death threats (so alleged), and the threat of an internet mob harassing them. My heart bleeds for them… well, no, it doesn’t. Not a bit of it – all this has been established as the accepted treatment for conservatives, or the unwary innocent caught by the progressive cancel culture mob. Let it all unfold in the manner established by the progressive mob.

Discuss as you will, and while we can.

Finished!

24. October 2023 · Comments Off on Finished! · Categories: Domestic, General, History, War, Working In A Salt Mine...

The Civil War novel is at last finished! I rounded off the last few bits of dialog and narrative this last weekend. I’ll have to look back in my archive for when I started on it … sometime in early 2020, I think. The narrative concerned the experiences of Miss Minnie Vining, of an old Boston family, who was an abolitionist crusader in the 1850s, and then a battlefield nurse during the Civil War which resulted. The rough outline of her experiences and the Boston Vining family were alluded to in Sunset and Steel Rails, when the indominable Miss Minnie was a very elderly character, whose importance to the plot in that book was to aid her niece in escaping a dreadful situation. Minnie Vining was also briefly mentioned in My Dear Cousin, when a distant younger relative also served as a wartime Army nurse. Miss Minnie was first mentioned in Daughter of Texas, as the older bluestocking sister of Race Vining … well, anyway, this book rather filled out her character as a strong-willed and determined spinster of independent fortune and considerable education.

This narrative also allowed me to explore through Minnie’s experiences a number of fascinating themes; the immense yet subtle power that women wielded in 19th century America, and the enormous degree to which the anti-slavery movement roiled every aspect of American society and politics during the two decades leading up to the Civil War. The commonplace perception among most 21st century Americans is that because women didn’t have full political rights and were often treated unequally in legal proceedings, that women were completely without power economically and within their communities; barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. And that is just not the situation at all. Women had and wielded considerable economic, intellectual, and social power within communities, even under those constraints. This was demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in the abolitionist movement, where many of the popular “influencers” of the time were women, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin … a narrative that turned out to be so popular in the North that Abraham Lincoln himself humorously attributed the war to it. So, contra the dark insistence of those pushing the 1619 narrative, that the United States was primarily and irredeemably founded and perpetuated on the institution of Negro slavery, the fight against it was long, passionate, and carried on by a wide swath of citizens, almost from the very first. Although only the most prominent of them are known today, many of their peers in the abolitionist movement are relatively obscure – but they left writings and memoirs of their struggle. A lot of those memoirs, published in the decade after the Civil War are available through on-line archives. Many such activists, like my fictitious Minnie Vining, were women. Quite a few were also later involved in campaigning for female suffrage, or like Dorothea Dix, reformers in other causes. A fair number of these women were friends, or at least, acquainted with each other, and became much more famed for their efforts in that crusade for full suffrage.

Another eye-opening aspect, at least to me, was the degree to which women contributed to the military effort in the civil war, by getting involved with the Sanitary Commission – a volunteer organization formed to provide to the Civil War era military what now is provided by a combination of the military medical system, the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation service, and the current Red Cross. Up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, the US Army was small, the medical corps even smaller – and when the enormous numbers of militia volunteers took to the field, the existing medical care and soldier-support system was utterly swamped. Although the top leadership of the Sanitary Commission was male, women were everywhere else at regional levels, and formed the core of volunteers. Women, wishing to see to the welfare and care of their brothers, fathers and sons – raised funds to pay for all those necessary services through all manner of fairs, sales and donation drives, volunteered themselves as nurses, sewed shirts and knitted socks, contributed all kinds of comforts, and saw to goods being packed and distributed. The Sanitary Commission volunteer organization fielded hospital steamships to transport the wounded, opened hospitals, provided comforts for the troops, facilitated communications with families, and assisted soldiers traveling on furlough – all those services necessary to field a large national military and keep morale as high as could be expected. It was fascinating to read about all that.

It was even more interesting to read the memoirs and accounts of the volunteer nurses, practically all of whom had any formal training for that field. Only a few orders of Catholic nursing sisters had any kind of training in the profession which we would recognize today. Just about all the nurses recruited for service in Civil War hospitals came straight from their homes, which might sound curious from today’s perspective, but caring for the sick at home would have been a large part of woman’s work, before vaccinations, modern sanitation standards and sterile surgery. Nurses Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Bickerdyke, just to give an example of two real-life women who feature as characters in That Fateful Lightning were widows who had spent years caring for husbands with compromised health. As an indication of how important this was in the 19th century, Mrs. Beeton’s popular cookery and household management book, contained a whole chapter on invalid cookery – light, nourishing and appealing dishes intended to appeal to the appetites of the ill. Those women volunteers who came into Civil War service already possessed a practical knowledge of nursing.

So there it is – all finished but for the final polishing. The next two book projects after this likely will be the 12th Luna City installment, and another collection of YA short adventures for the Lone Star Sons series – probably not to start on those until after the holiday season, though.

The New Pogrom

11. October 2023 · Comments Off on The New Pogrom · Categories: Fun With Islam, Iran, War

I think the reason that last Saturday’s massacre in Israel hits so close to the nerve of Americans like my daughter and I, is because we can look at the pictures and video of the victims and the aftermath and see ourselves. My daughter and I look at pictures of the blood-spattered crib and the baby carrier and see Wee Jamie. Hear him crying in pain and bewilderment. We see pictures of the pleasant little houses, the tree-planted neighborhoods targeted by the Hamas savages, and see our own neighborhood, as a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered smoking ruin. I look at pictures of the audience at the all-night music rave, and see my daughter among them, dancing with her friends and having fun, the next minute dragged away dead, or for treatment that used to be described as worse than death. My daughter can look at me or consider her memories of her bed-ridden invalid grandmother, and readily imagine either or both of us cut down mercilessly … and the murderers recording the whole bloody cruelty for posting to social media for the approval and cheers of their friends.

This is an organized and sponsored pogrom the cruelty and viciousness of which hasn’t been seen since medieval times, although the Nazis and Imperial Japanese certainly did their best in Europe and China within the living memory of elderly people still alive today.

Eventually whoever was responsible in the Israeli intelligence and defense organizations for last weekend’s failure will be identified and chastened. The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing, smoking rubble, regardless. Whichever state actor – looking at you, Iran – aided and abetted will likewise have some kind of retaliation meted out to them. I am also pretty certain that those Hamas operatives who were braggart and foolish enough to be videotaped or photographed on social media with recognizable faces will also be identified, as has various Antifa dirtbags here in the US were identified by the weaponized autistics of 4-Chan. I am certain that in coming days we will be treated to a succession of adorable dirty-faced moppets rescued from bombed buildings, and poor abaya-clad women of certain age wailing about their ruined home. I am also certain that members of the Greatest Generation vaguely regretted the necessities of war which meant scenes of adorable dirty-faced Japanese moppets rescued from the ruins of their homes, or the good German frauen lamenting the ruins of their cottage or apartment in Berlin or Hamburg. But we couldn’t then allow Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to continue as they were. Neither can Israel continue living with the proven threat posed by Hamas in Gaza. (Or anywhere else.)

The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing rubble. Any country, not just Israel can’t endure the cruelty of what happened last Saturday morning. A long time ago, I would have felt sorry for the residents of Gaza. They wasted every chance, every opportunity to be a combination of Singapore, the Maldives, and the Marbella of that corner of the Mediterranean. Yes, they lost a war in 1947, a war they didn’t expect to lose, but hey … ask Japan, Germany, Argentina, the southern US or Mexico how it feels to lose a war that they all thought was in the bag. A lovely stretch of coast, with marvelous beaches, which could have drawn free-spending tourists and vacationers all across Europe, even day-trippers from Israel and Egypt itself. Such wasted potential, potential sabotaged by poisonous rage and resentment. Bernard Lewis wrote years ago, an explanation for Muslim rage and envy. Everything that Allah promised good observant Muslims seemed to have been withheld from them – and lavished upon the unbelievers. Riches, power, happy successful societies, military might, beautiful women dancing the night away at an outdoor concert … all of that. Muslims must look around, and see that almost without exception, strictly Muslim-ruled countries were pits of dysfunctional, wretched despair and poverty. And so, they raged and went rabid-mad.
Since last weekend, there have been a number of organizations and individuals pledging their true allyship and support of Hamas and the Palestinians – looking at you, BLM. I can only assume that these people and groups are perfectly OK with mass murder of defenseless audiences at an outdoor concert, slaughtering families wholesale, decapitating babies and gang-raping women until they hemorrhage. Good of you to let us all know where you stand, and what you stand for. Noted.
(Although a number of individuals have walked back from such statements of support for Hamas. I’d like to think that they realized how awful it made them look, personally, but suspect such regrets may have more to do with employers declining current or future employment.)
Discuss as you wish, and have the heart.

Hood Ornament

05. October 2023 · Comments Off on Hood Ornament · Categories: Ain't That America?

In the early 80s (which now seems to be as long ago as the High Victorian era seemed to be to those looking backwards from the vantage point of the 1920s) acclaimed literary lion Norman Mailer took up the cause of a life-long convict, Jack Abbott by name … and discovered to his dismay that it was easier and safer to champion a violent felon at a considerable distance, than to actually wrangle the man close up. After being out of prison for a matter of weeks Abbott lost his temper and fatally stabbed another man … thereby demonstrating a certain drawback to an intellectual burnishing their public credit by adopting an edgy cause. It was liable to backfire, and make the adoptee appear to be a gullible prat. At about the same time, Tom Wolfe called it ‘radical chic’ and poured erudite derision on Leonard Bernstein for doing much the same with the Black Panther leadership.

Alas, since then, the politically trendy have taken to adopting more than single individuals and fringe elements as what a current wit termed ‘hood ornaments.’ – to the point that an entire criminally-inclined urban underclass has been adopted wholesale by the civic leadership – adopted and excused every failure to be a good and responsible member of the community. All this has made it interesting lately – not to mention dangerous – for an urban dweller working in retail, riding the public transport system, walking down the street, or even just living in an apartment building that doesn’t have iron-clad, 24-hour-a-day security. Ordinary people living in cities where defund-the-police and cater-to-the-homeless have become the primary focus of local government are on edge, unhappy, jittery … and in come sad recent cases, dead on a slab in the mortuary. It’s happened too often; an otherwise harmless person attacked for no particular reason by a street crazy. No wonder that Uber driver picking up a takeout order in a mall food court felt sufficiently threatened and shot the guy following him around the mall, shoving a phone in his face playing a nonsensical message. How can any sane person tell the difference these days between a genuine nutcase arguing with the voices in their head, and a prankster doing it for laughs and his Youtube channel? Hood ornaments are now the most valued constituency in just about every blue city.

And then there is the Portland (naturally!) school superintendent, more indignant about the public and parents of students having the nerve to be angry about a male student in a dress bullying and beating up genuinely female students. I definitely get the feeling that school superintendents and administrators across the nation have taken on gender-bending boys-claiming-to-be-girls as their primary hood ornament, such is the apparent enthusiasm for allowing boys in dresses and Maybelline to compete as girls on school-supported sports teams.

Comment and discuss. I should note that last weekend, I had a client meeting at a lovely venue on the edge of downtown San Antonio. We had arranged to meet in front of the Food Hall at the Pearl Brewery – a lovely redeveloped and very upscale reworking of a former 19th century industrial brewery on the edge of downtown along the extended Riverwalk, which is no adorned with parks, lawns, ornate fountains, a boutique hotel and expensive apartment blocks over boutiques, restaurants and other upmarket retail. On weekends, there is a farmer’s market, rows of portable pavilions, with venders selling more gourmet groceries, meats, eggs, cheeses and artisan chocolates. People shop with their dogs on a leash or children in strollers; there is a splash fountain by the Food Hall that is very popular with children, especially on days as hot as last Saturday was. The Pearl was crowded with shoppers and their families – it was all very pleasant. And not an urban hood ornament in sight. I wonder why? Then again, this is Texas.

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