Comment would be superflous, so I’ll just say I found this little gem in the comment thread here.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.†Benjamin Franklin.
“The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.†Rep. Maxine Waters
Who expected that 1984 has arrived? I recall that in the actual year of 1984, a great many commenters in the political arena rejoiced that the whole Big Brother thing had not arrived, but it looks like such rejoicing was premature. Now we have the NSA collecting telephone records from Verizon wholesale for the ostensible purpose of security reasons … not so much for tracking specific suspected terrorists, but rather for data-mining … and very likely for opposition research. The revelations of the IRS stalling Tea Party groups’ applications for 501 status? Almost certainly this distracted or discouraged those groups from going all-out in last years election season, which I believe was the primary purpose.
Back in the early days of starting the San Antonio Tea Party in 2009, one of our board members – a very thoughtful corporate lawyer and businessman – did have a warning for us who were in leadership positions; as soon as we began to make waves, he pointed out that those of us with embarrassing skeletons in our personal closets should adjust to the reality that those skeletons might magically appear, thanks to oppo research efforts directed against us. As it eventually turned out, several of those people did have rather substantial dark marks on their personal record; I might have been one also, but I had gone to the extent of blogging and writing about them all; my life was essentially an open book, available on Amazon for a modest fee.
Our lawyer member had the right idea, but I don’t think we fully grasped that we might be running a danger from a politicized IRS. I think he was not quite so cynical as to see that coming. But such was the tenor of the very invasive questions asked by the IRS of those later Tea Party groups – asking for information about group leaders and contributors, one might suspect also that this was part of a massive opposition research operation. Map the groups and their connections, get information about individuals; it worked very well in Iraq, in tracking down Al Qaida operators. Now I suppose it is being done wholesale on half the country who doesn’t think Obama is the greatest thing since canned date-nut bread – and this will not end well. The Tea Party group that I am still in connection with sent out an email last week, explaining that they had never applied for 501 status and so could assure anyone contributing toward or participating in their activities that their names were never confided to the tender mercies and the leaky data files of the IRS. Which certainly must have come as a relief to anyone who made big donations … because, curiously enough, information about big donors to various right-of-center causes and politicians just seemed to leak out all over during the last election season; how very curious was that, eh? Up to this very minute, I believe most Americans disliked and dreaded having to do anything with the IRS, but assumed that the revenue-collecting agency delivered their abuse of members of the public on a fair and ecumenical basis. And now to find out that such abuses were not just the actions of a few rogue agents, but directed and controlled from near to if not actually the top?
Congratulations; now at least half the taxpayers in the country now have even better reason to dislike and dread the IRS.
So, this IRS thing is one shoe dropping; I wonder if the EPA accidental-on-purpose releasing a wide range of personal information about farmers and ranchers – which they just happened to have accumulated – to a whole range of environmental groups, many of whom seem to be opposed to the whole concept of farming and ranching. Trotting around afterwards and asking for the information back is like shutting the barn door after the horse is gone, to use an agricultural metaphor. It is almost as if … I don’t know … someone is laying the ground work for a campaign akin to radical animal rights activists targeting research facilities which use animal testing. Would the ecological crazies start harassing farmers and their families in flyover country? I wouldn’t have thought so a couple of years ago, but time change. Congratulations, however – a great many food producers in our blessed nation now may have cause to fear and dread agents of the federal government from more than one agency.
This being a Friday afternoon, I confidently expect some other exciting confession from the Ruling Class to be dropped into the news cycle, in the fond hopes that it will die the death over the weekend, and be old news by Monday.
“The propaganda had a certain purpose: to wipe the past out of our consciousness. We should forget that it had ever existed. We really should doubt our own memories. The revisionists of history had usurped the preferential right of interpretation, and we had silently let it happen. We were not supposed to remember the country that we were part of, and it made us deeply sad and furious. Without a rear-view mirror we had no yardstick for the present time. But that wasn’t the intention, either.”
Read the whole thing, at Gates of Vienna. The author is writing about Sweden – but it can very well apply here in the US, too.
A foyer in the Spanish Governor’s Palace here in San Antonio. Which was neither a palace (only a rather rambling and much-added onto building), nor the home of the governor. It rather served as residence for whomever was captain of the Bexar garrison, so at least the Spanish part of it applies. Although since it was extensively reconstructed in the 1930s by an architech who had extremely romantic ideas of what it must have been like … maybe not even that much Spanish after all…
From Harry Gordon Selfridge, of department store fame. Obviously, our current administration cadre in Washington, D.C. knows not of these precepts:
“The boss depends upon authority, the leader on goodwill.”
“The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.”
“The boss says ‘I’; the leader, ‘we.'”
“The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.”
“The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how.”
“The boss says ‘Go’; the leader says ‘Let’s go!'”
We took the plunge this last weekend – a step we have been considering for months; we bought a pair of Roku boxes (new) and a flat-screen TV (a slightly used model which had been a floor display unit and subsequently marked down) at a local Sam’s Club, and now we are going to cut our cable TV service. (But not cable internet, which is completely necessary for me as well as being totally reliable from our provider, Time Warner, if anyone cares.) Two or three reasons for this; for the first, the cost keeps climbing from year to year, and I am sick to death of paying through the nose for it, when we watch only a handful of programs regularly. Many of those same programs are available through Hulu, Amazon, or Acorn … and if we are willing to wait a few months, the whole darned season of a program will be available on DVD, with minimal commercial filler.
Really, I would have been happy to have a basic cable plus a certain amount for an ala carte selection of a few additional channels, but Time Warner doesn’t work that way now, and I can’t wait any longer for them to get a grip on reality and change. The way that it was explained to me was that Time Warner has to accept those little-watched channels from their providers in order to acquire the madly popular ones, and so they pass on the little-watched channels to the public and demand that customers pay through the nose for the whole ball-o-wax. But no longer; I dropped the land line last year, upon realizing that we both used our cellphones on a far more regular basis. We already had a wireless router, Blondie has been watching a lot of her favorite classic programs on her computer anyway … and it just seemed like a good time to cut the Time Warner monthly bill by two-thirds and starve a portion of the media conglomerate beast.
Installing and programming the Roku boxes went rather more easily than expected; I feared that it would take a couple of hours and several trips back to Sam’s or Best Buy for necessary cables or connections or something dire, but it was only an hour and one short trip to CVS on the corner for a box of batteries. Sometime this week, we’ll go turn in the two Time Warner DVR units and take Blondie’s big-screen and heavy TV set over to Goodwill. This was the only big purchase, other than replacing our computers, that we have made in years, so if the economy improves microscopically in this fiscal quarter, that would have been the reason why. No one can say that we didn’t do our bit.
Flag, over the Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.
A day may come when the courage of men fails,
when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.
An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down,
but it is not this day!
This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth,
I bid you stand, Men of the West! – Aragorn’s speech, before the Black Gates
It always comes back to Tolkien, doesn’t it? A man who lived through the hell of the WWI trenches, who recalled from first hand a time when you could use the term ‘Great Britain’ without ironical quotes around it, a time when there were very real social issues and pathologies to criticize and to try and deal fairly with – but also a time when the common people took enormous pride and confidence in what they were, in their country, in themselves, in their institutions – and in turn, the various institutions looked toward the general welfare of the commonality. I like the 19th century for that very reason, both the British and American versions. It’s a kind of mental refuge to me, these days. For all its pathologies and shortcomings – citizens of both countries had cultural self-confidence. In the main, a self-confidence based on real accomplishment is a hell of a lot more attractive than a pitiful, helpless and apologetic bleating about ones’ societal and cultural shortcomings.
Really, whom would you look to; someone like Isaac Kingdom Brunel, or Lord Gordon … or a cringing and eternally self-abasing creature like Uriah Heep? Never mind that the first two are real, the third a literary creation; there are plenty of vicious, ostentatiously humble Uriah Heeps now active in political life, and plenty of them – a sufficiency of them, actually – infiltrated into academia and in the media. They’ve been doing their destructive work for decades, always with the best intentions, and ostentatiously for the good of us all. They preen themselves on this, and make good careers out of it.
Only, somehow and mysteriously, it has had such malign results as the vicious and very well documented murder of a British soldier by Islamic jihadi muppets in front of a large crowd, in the capital city of what was once a proud empire. Wrap your mind about that. A public street adjacent to a military base; they bash him with a car first, and then carve him up with knives, swagger about the street declaiming on their purpose, shouting Islamic slogans … and wait for the armed officers of the law to appear. Who did arrived, twenty minutes later, when the victim had doubtless bled out – some news reports have it that his head was cut off, which would certainly remove any urgency in responding with medical aid. Meanwhile the murders, with bloody hands swagger about, explaining why they did it. Three women come forward, and I accept that this took enormous courage on their part – given that this horrible event took place out of the clear blue. I also accept that the initial witnesses to this atrocity were shocked, disbelieving … but that any impulse on the part of members of the public to intervene in any meaningfully effective way was likely squelched on the instant of being considered. The duty of any good British citizen these days, or so I have gathered, is to to be passive, and never to resist being robbed, raped or murdered, since such resistance is likely to injure or inconvenience the robber, rapist or murderer. This precept of non-resistance has been enforced over the last few decades by prosecution and convictions obtained against those who actually did resist outrages against their own or others’ property and persons. The end result was what we saw this week in Woolwich; no resistance, no rescue. Thus are a free people reduced to serfitude. Pity, that – but I am certain that the ruling classes like it very much that way.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)
As a palate cleanser, for those who viewed the picture at this post … I present this, courtesy of Bookworm, who found it on Facebook. (Pouts prettily.) I never find good stuff on Facebook.
That is, they seem to be falling – as in scales-from-the-eyes sort of falling – with regard to the Chicago-Political-Machine political malevolence. I can hear the squeals of outraged innocence, all the way into my part of Red State Texas; Oh, f**k, they mean they were really real when they pounded the podium and threatened to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Yes, dear hearts and gentle people, the Obama political combine (the Chicago political machine writ large and nationwide) was entirely serious. They would reward their friends with access, perks and special favors – and their enemies with official harassment (and the malevolent regard of the lapdog media). Say, doesn’t that sound like one of those nasty, Turd World kleptropcies – why, yes it does, indeed – one of the especially malevolent ones, where representatives of the ruling party make threats and accusations, and the functionaries of the various bureaucracies carry them out under cover of just doing their job, and the press organs (which are unusually owned by the brother-in-law or cousin of the Presidente) all fall in line, with full-cry justification; These people are the ‘other’, malevolent enemies of the people and by all that is good and right and holy, they deserve such treatment! Which is a nice bit of work when the ‘other’ comprises a good chunk of the population, and that part of the working class and small business types who are still paying taxes anyway … who already had good reason to fear and loath the IRS long before this.
I think it has come as a shock also at how wide-spread through the IRS the mal-administration of requests from Tea Party-type groups for consideration as 501 groups was. Everyone probably went along, mildly irritated by the hassle, but assuming they were the only ones being stalled, stone-walled and bombarded with page after page of questions regarding everything from the contents of their websites, to their meeting agendas. But now it seems that other groups, some religious and some secular were likewise targeted for special treatment. The only thing that they have in common? Middle of the road to conservative orientations and just about every one of them is waking up to the icy splash of water in the face, and wondering what in heck is going on. For myself, I just hope that it’s not too late in the day. The good people running the Department of Homeland Security already believed to the bottom of their rotten little souls that Tea Party sympathizers and military veterans were a bigger threat to civic order than … umm, guys like the Beantown Blaster Brothers. And I haven’t even gotten to the matter of AP and Fox reporters being spied on for having the temerity to do their jobs, and I talked about the Benghazi follies last week. At this rate, the Obama administration may by the end of the summer, become about welcome in flyover country as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory – to steal a line from Top Secret! Even the brighter press minions are beginning to have doubts about the Mighty O, and it will be interesting to see if they can still run interference for him.
And so it begins; at first a trickle of rocks falling down a steep mountainside; then more and bigger rocks, and then half the mountainside comes away and falls away in a mighty roar, the earth trembles, and White House spokes-minion Jay Carney is probably looking around desperately trying to figure out what hit him.
The first of these is l’Affaire Benghazi, which just will not die, especially as those who serve at the front line in the military and at the State Department are totting up their personal balance sheets. My semi-informed guess is that such personnel are concluding that if and when they should ever be unlucky enough to be the target of a local protest, that the highest echelons of their command will let it all happen, merely to enhance their own political aspirations. Hillary Clinton did herself no favors with, “At this point, what difference does it make.†Hillary, babe, it makes a great deal of difference, most especially to the friends, associates and next of kin. We always knew that you despised the serving military, anyway. Say buh-bye to any thought of running in 2016 and being a female head of state; at this point you aren’t fit to carry Margaret Thatcher’s jock-strap.
The biggest, and the most damaging cascade is a revelation – from a representative of the IRS yet – that the IRS willfully, deliberately and maliciously targeted Tea Party groups in their efforts to establish themselves as 501 organizations, while giving a pass to progressive groups doing pretty much the same kind of thing. That was about as bright as Pickett’s Charge for several reasons; everybody hates the IRS anyway, now it looks as if pro-Israeli Jewish groups and Billy Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse group were similarly scrutinized and harassed with endless demands for information regarding the actions and members of the various groups, and honest liberals hated it when Nixon did this to groups and individuals that he perceived as enemies. Great way to unify the nation, people; using government bureaucracy to target perceived enemies. At least the brighter progressives have twigged that doing so can be very, very dangerous.
Secretly obtaining the phone records of reporters for the Associated Press… at this point, I have to stop and giggle manically. Way to go, Justice Department; tread heavily all over the mainstream press, or as I like to call them, the Obama White House’s Public Affairs Division. The mainstream press carried him into the White House on their shoulders and cheered him on ever since, and for all that loyal service, they get treated like this?
It is curious that suddenly, all of this is breaking loose now. My daughter and I speculate that perhaps it is driven by the rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama which first broke into the open in the 2008 Dem convention. I referred to it the battle of Ebony and Ovary, back then, when I wasn’t calling them Her Inevitableness and the Fresh Prince of Chicago. Just suppose that she is using the IRS imbroglio against him, and he is using the Benghazi debacle against her – or vice versa. Suppose also that the more self-aware members of the mainstream press and the political establishment in Washington are just beginning to conclude that Obama is tainted goods – and it might be good to dust off Her Inevitableness again and present her as pure and pristine, while hanging on to some few pitiful remnants of their reputation as honest brokers.
Discuss … and break out more popcorn. (Thoughts from the great Den Beste, here.)
Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!
His name is Nemo, and we think he thinks he is a cat. We think the cats think he is retarded, and his Mama dressed him funny.
Having now developed what seems to be an annoying allergy-cough in the last couple of months, I have had reason to visit the Fort Sam Houston primary care facility more times lately than I had in years. I think I must have had about a dozen primary care providers in that time, who came and went without me ever laying eyes on them. In the time since I last had reason to seek medical care or a prescription renewal, BAMC itself compounded, split and compounded again like a cell undergoing mitosis – to the point where they moved the primary care clinic and the laboratory facilities which supported it out of the massive brick Skinner-box maze and onto a free-standing and very modern clinic building on Fort Sam itself. Where, in another couple of years, I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see undergo a mitosis of its own…
Anyway – walking into that building through the main door means that I walk past the serried array of pictures of the chain o’command, which includes a picture of our current president. The sight of this almost makes me start coughing again. Perhaps in light of the hearings this week regarding l’affaire Benghazi, I should begin coming in through the other door. I might actually begin to cough so hard that I throw up, whenever I see the current C’in’C’s picture, posted there.
I am actually glad to be retired at this point and that my daughter also completed her enlistment a good few years ago. Given current conditions, we are both glad to no longer be on active service, and past the point of being recalled. No, this administration must be a horror, to be any rank at all over E-2 or GS whatever in the State department … and I speak as one who did my first hitch during the Carter Administration. Say what you will about ol’ Jimmuh (and I can say a lot about that sanctimonious, double-dealing anti-Semitic creep) at least, you never got the feeling that he as the Commander in Chief would sell out military members and State Department functionaries for the sake of keeping his own political reputation bright an squeaky-clean. (He only went for that after he departed high office.) And if Jimmuh himself wasn’t the answer to a voter’s prayer, the top echelons of his government were stocked with responsible and experienced grown-ups. At least they mounted a military strike force to free the hostages taken in Teheran, whereas our current administration couldn’t even find it within themselves to do that.
Just as a personal aside, rumors had it during their administration that the Clintons – especially Hillary – didn’t much care for the military. And despite Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden making a show of attending to the moral and well-being of military family members, I very much suspect that the Obamas actually despise the military ranks. I should not at all be surprised to find out that things such as ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, permitting women in direct combat roles – even the rumors of Christians being disciplined for evangelizing inappropriately – were intended rather to sabotage morale and discipline among the military. Knowing that in the event of things going all pear-shaped, the highest levels in the chain of command will hang you out to dry, have a photo-op with the next of kin over your coffin, and then lie to cover up their own incompetence and lack of imagination … well, that is just the cherry on the top of the whole rancid sundae.
I’m in. Boycott of NBC is just the first shot. In another month or so, we’re cutting off cable, and going to a Roku box. This is just a nice coincidence.
Sorry for the light posting here, with all the interesting stuff going on in the world; the Benghazi matter finally breaking into full daylight, Israel squaring up to Syria, the Beantown Blaster Brothers shoved off the front page of mainstream media by the escape of three young women kidnapped and held for ten years by three pervy brothers … I’m spoiled for choice of news developments to vent on, actually.
The thing is that I’ve got some projects for the Tiny Publishing Bidness going on, my business partner was briefly hospitalized for surgery last week, and I am coming down the home stretch on the next book – The Quivera Trail. But I took time to trawl through the archives and come up with a collection of rants, memos and reminiscences about my time in the military. It just went live on Kindle, and will be up on Nook in a day or so. Air Force Daze – check it out.
Well, here is a columnist going out with a bang (hey, can we still say that?) in a discussion of the 2nd Amendment, explaining in great detail over why pro-2nd Amendment legitimate gun owners are … to put it mildly, rather annoyed. (And also stocking up on arms and ammunition)
Tiny taste here – “How can we “gun people†honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them? There must first be respect and trust — even just a little — before there can be even the beginnings of legitimate discussion of the issue.”
Go read the whole, link-rich thing. You won’t be sorry.
Later: some added thoughts. Not on the 2nd amendment matter, but on the whole general red state/blue state split, and also (and this is tied in) with Condevilla’s Ruling Class and the Country class, with the establishment and the Tea Party – the whole ball-o-wax. I am just sickened and disgusted with the way that the current establishment (media, intellectual, political) feels free to insult ordinary Americans. It’s gone past snobbery, and well into ‘othering’ – that is, marking out a certain class as not worthy of recognition, honest argument, or even of existence. I live in a fairly red state, so I don’t encounter this at full strength save on-line. But it is horrifying, none the less. Sometimes it feels like having had a particularly brutal and humiliating practical joke played on one … and when called out for being brutal and humiliating, the perp sneers, “Whattsa matter wid you, don’t you have a sense of humor?”
Yes, exactly that. At some point, people who are well-meaning, have a sense of personal honor, and a concern for the political sphere in general – will get tired of being called names, insulted, made the butt of media yucks. I think, on evidence of this story – that it might already be happening at a degree that goes beyond merely fuming privately. If a member of a national establishment press came to my neighborhood and wanted to speak to individuals – I don’t think I would want to talk to them either.
So there you are. I don’t want to see it end in tears, I hope that it won’t … but my history sense is tingling.
This last weekend we were up in Boerne, where they were celebrating an all-American fabric art form – the patchwork quilt and all it’s variations. They actually had quilts hung up on the fronts of stores, in the store windows and from lines string around the edge of Town Plaza.
With the employment prospects being what it is these days, I have read repeatedly in the last couple of years that really enterprising individuals are tempted to turn indy and go free-lance. They look to establish a small enterprise, vending whatever talents and skills they possess as a so-called ‘independent contractor’ to the public at large, and earn a living thereby, rather than scrounge and maneuver and hope for a paying job on the bottom rung of the corporate and/or government establishment. Pardon the sarcasm – it seems that certain large and well-connected established corporations these days are almost indistinguishable from the government, at least to judge from the rapidity which which the well-connected move back and forth.
Oh, but enough about national policy – this all next is personal. My daughter and her best friend from high school have come to that point, of seriously pursuing independence in their own business. Edith – the best friend – is qualified as a nurse, and has two children and a husband who works at a blue-collar job. She lives for art – passionately, as she is a skilled painter with a small local following. Yes, it sounds improvident to give up on a sure-thing … but I can sympathize deeply. I also came to that point where I just couldn’t do a normal job any more. I had to go and do what I loved as a freelance writer and partner in the Tiny Publishing Bidness.
My daughter Blondie, the two-hitch Marine, currently works three different part-time jobs, having gotten the sense that until the higher-education bubble bursts, there is no use pouring any more of her G.I. benefits down a rat-hole. So, she was agreeable to Edith’s proposal that they form a business partnership. Blondie also has some artistic talents – although not a painter. She dabbles in beading and origami, and devises rather clever paper jewelry and hair ornaments. Blondie has a sense of organization, through having been an office manager – and through me and the Tiny Publishing Bidness, an idea of how a small business needs to be nurtured and run … especially when it comes to things like … oh, sales taxes, keeping track of expenses, customer care, buying a domain name and publicity. All of these things, Edith had never really considered before; she’s the dreamer, Blondie is the level-headed organizer.
Edith’s father is going to contribute a certain amount of money next year, to be used specifically for necessary art supplies for this business; myself, I can contribute nothing beyond advice and skill with words, a camera and advice. They are starting slowly and carefully; tables at local art shows this summer, a website, plans to sell small prints of Edith’s paintings, of appearing in art shows and galleries. Blondie and Edith both have a very good idea of who they are appealing to with their paintings and paper art. There is a thriving art scene in San Antonio, concentrated mostly in a funky but slowly gentrifying area called Southtown. Ideally, Edith and Blondie would eventually like to have a retail establishment and gallery, either in the heart of Southtown or on the fringes, one which incorporates living quarters over the gallery for Edith’s family. Eventually, Blondie would like to sell the occasional bit of vintage furniture, glass and decorative elements through this outlet. She does have the eye for good-quality vintage stuff, and after going to a couple of estate auctions, knows exactly how little such items go for at auction – and then how much when they appear in a retail antique outlet. We would also like this future venue to offer book-signing events for local authors, many of whom do not feel well-served any more by the one independent local bookstore. But that’s a dream far in the future.
As for now, we are nurturing the seedling of the business – which, incidentally, is being called Pastel Junque. I’ll keep posting updates.
(Cross-posted at Chicago-Boyz.net)
With Blondie, and the two small doggies –
At the world-famous Buda Wiener Dog races – of course!
Where many of the venues along Main Street were dog-friendly. But one of them was not in spite of having a quite large outdoor venue attached, the management seemed very hostile, when we opened the door – so we went across the railroad tracks and had lunch at one which was. The Buda Soda Fountain – check it out, the malteds and the lemonade are to die for!
That was my Saturday – and yours?
It seems, from the link posted on Da Blogfaddah, that our very own President Kardashian will be gracing the great state of Texas with his presence for a brief and flying visit … which to no one’s surprise (at least in my household) – includes an appearance at a fund raising event. Holy jumping Jesus, does this political leech’s every move outside the White House involve a fund-raising event? Guess so, although Blondie’s cynical guess involved the presence of a hitherto-unknown prime golf course in the vicinity of Dallas or Waco.
He is, according to the news reports, intending to visit with and console the bereaved of West-comma-Texas, a tiny mid-state town of which I am certain that he and most everyone else who never traveled the IH-35 between San Antonio and Fort Worth, had never heard … until the local fertilizer plant blew up during a fire last week. Which explosion killed one-third of the local volunteer firefighters, and demolished a good portion of the town, since it went up violently enough to register on the Richter Scale. Honestly, reading the brief obituaries of the identified, I wonder exactly how his visit will console any of the next-of-kin. Firefighter volunteers, members of local fraternal organizations, small business owners, people who liked to hunt, rodeo riders, NASCAR fans, devoted to family, church, and the community of their little town. What a rootless, drifting cosmopolitan like the current POTUS has in common with them, besides being red-blooded vertebrates is anyone’s guess. He might as well be teleporting in from Mars; my suspicion is that his scheduling office was shamed into adding it to the itinerary for the day.
On the other hand, this hideous tragedy occurred in the very same week that the Beantown Blaster Brothers set a couple of home-made bombs which killed and de-limbed a goodly number of people either running in or waiting at the finish-line of the Boston Marathon. And it’s a lot easier to cover that news which happens within an easy commute of New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta.
It now appears that the Beantown Blaster Brothers were motivated primarily by the ever-refreshing well of Islam in it’s most radical application. Which is ironic to almost an industrial grade, as the aforesaid brothers lived and … well, occupied themselves in the most blue of blue-state enclaves, an enclave which afforded them every indulgence and liberty, marriage, higher education, refuge and support … and yet, they repaid all that with savagery and violence. And as it turns out, it’s the Islamic version of the above, which must be terribly embarrassing to the current administration. Don’tcha know, Islam is all about peace, and tolerance and the cries of the imam calling all to prayer being the sweetest sound, and you’re the most awful bigot if you say otherwise.
And I am just cynical enough, after the events of last week, if President Kardashian would rather that the public memory of developments in Boston just go down the ol’ memory hole as far as the mainstream media and low-information voters are concerned? Hence the flying visit to Texas … which visit incorporates an appearance at the dedication of the Bush II library, which (again and cynically) moves me to wonder how heroic an effort will it take for Bush II to be polite to him in private.
I am fairly certain that Bush II, and the residents of West-comma-Texas will be polite. Perhaps frigidly so … but always polite. This is how we roll.
Enjoy. It’s controversial, apparently, that Sting took to singing 400+ year old pop music … but to each their own.
Well, it was all that for a great many other people besides the Mighty-O, so no wonder that he has been looking pretty pissy lately, especially after a scorching defeat on an expanded gun-buyer background check program. Yes, just because people seem to agree with a statement on a poorly-worded poll, does not mean they necessarily want to see it enshrined in law … especially one hastily rushed through in the wake of a horrific event with the skids greased with hand-wringing over the deaths of small children … and the ostentatious display of their parent’s grief. Look, that’s the same exact thing that happened in the wake of the Dunblaine shootings. Popular revulsion and outrage was transformed into strict gun control legislation … and in the long run, how did that worked out for Britain, then? Is the ordinary run of people any safer in their homes, streets and places of business? For those of us paying attention, one really cannot be certain that they are.
One would have expected someone lauded as being over-the-top-intelligence and acute political smarts to have realized that most of the American public does not live with on-the-spot instant personal protection from hired body-guards or the Secret Service, and in fact, a great majority of us live where the forces of law’n’order are a fifteen to thirty-minute journey away. So the Mighty-O and his media buddies didn’t see it coming. Here’s a Kleenex and let me call the Wahhhmbulance for you.
And now we move on to Monday’s carnage at the Boston Marathon … in which the main comfort to be found is the fearless and efficient manner in which first responders and volunteers rushed to the scene. Ball bearings and scrap metal inside pressure cookers, left at a time and in a place calculated to maim as many bystanders as possible; so the intifada comes to America. It looks like those media talking heads who made no secret of hoping that the perpetrator(s) were white, Anglo-Saxon Tea Party types are to be bitterly disappointed. (To David Sirota and to NPR – Up yours. Very kindly, Sgt. Mom.) From today’s all-neighborhood man-hunt in Boston, it looks like the perpetrators were ‘white’… but radical young Islamics from Chechnya. Yes, that Chechnya … the very same who brought us the Beslan school massacre, the Nord-Ost theater hostage-taking, a series of bombings in the Moscow subways, the downing of two Russian airliners in 2004 … yeah, that Chechnya. No wonder the young lads’ uncle is pissed beyond being coherent. Here he is, living a peaceful, prosperous life far removed from what is usually described as ‘sectarian strife’ and his young nephews seemed poised to bring all that over the big pond in job lots and make Chechens in general about as welcome in the United States as ‘a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory.’ That line is from the movie Top Secret! in case anyone was wondering. For the lot who keep insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, this week has proved to very, very, very disappointing … especially for an administration who seemed desperate to prove exactly that. Try telling that to residents of Boston and Watertown, where the manhunt is still going on.
This is one of the most famous and delicious places to stop, going up and down IH-35 between San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. The savory kolaches are delicious – and we stopped there for some, heading up to Fort Worth for a book event late last month. West is just a little hiccup of a town, and the loss of so many volunteer firefighters is bound to hit hard. But the Czech Bakery is OK – according to this story, just a few cieling tiles knocked loose. Sometime after Mother’s Day, Blondie and I are going to head up to Waco to see the Texas Ranger Museum … and then a little way farther up the road to buy a big box of kolaches at the Little Czech Bakery.
When the house that my parents had built for their retirement retreat burned in a catastrophic brushfire in 2003, they had only about half-an-hour warning, and so there were a good many things they simply did not have time to pack into the car, or even to remember certain items that would have been easy enough – if they had thought of them in that half-hour. One of those items was my mothers’ nearly-complete collection of the run of American Heritage Magazine. She had all but the first two or three years of issue, back when the enterprise was under the supervision of Civil War historian Bruce Catton – Mom had a complete collection of his books, also – as well as the full run of their companion publication, Horizon. I grew up reading American Heritage – of course, I delved into them as soon as I could read, and possibly even before then, as the articles within were all beautifully illustration with contemporary paintings, portrait photographs, lithographs and modern photographs of the relevant relics. Even if I couldn’t grasp the meaning of the bigger words, much less pronounce any of them, I was still intrigued.
Until the late 1970s, the regular issues all had a uniform look; a pale ivory-white cover, matte finish, with an illustration on the front cover to do with the main article and a smaller one, sometimes as a kind of humorous coda on the back cover. The ivory-white yellowed over time, and given heavy reading, the spine usually began to peel away from the rest. In the late 1970s, they flirted with dropping the standard ivory-white cover – now the cover picture spread beyond the formerly conscribed margins and wrapped around the spine. That lasted a year or so, and then it was an edge-to-edge illustration with a black, or sometimes a dark brown spine – the last gasp before it went to paperback, accepted advertising, and looked like just about everything else on the newsstand. The big articles of note seemed to concentrate on the 20th century, which became rather tiresome for Mom, and she had dropped the subscription entirely around the time the house burned, with all the back issues.
But I have begun to reconstruct Mom’s collection, especially my favorites – the issues from the late 1950s, up to when they abandoned the ivory-white covers and went to worshipping strange designer gods. Once a year, my daughter and I head for the massive PTA book sale which is held in a regional school sports and recreational facility; the entire floor of the basketball arena is covered with tables piled with donated books. I head for the Texiana, mostly – and then to the general history; most shoppers head for the novels, kid’s books and YA, so I usually don’t have to get there early and elbow my way to the good stuff. Last year I found about a dozen issues of the old American Heritage, and snapped them up – the wonderful thing about the sale is that the PTA prices to sell; a flat $1 for a hardbound book (even lavish coffee-table books) and 50¢ for a paperback. This year, I found another twenty-five or so, and it’s a darned good thing that I added three shelves to the wall next to my desk; for the printer, and the paper supplies – and now one of them filled with American Heritages. Next year, I’ll have to make up a list of the issues that I have, so as to avoid duplication. But every issue is an old friend; and many of the articles are as sublime as when I first read them.
Pretty well, actually – I finished a chapter Saturday afternoon, and tallied up what I have so far; a little over 300 pages, but only about another three plot twists and set-piece scenes to go. I’ll do my best to bring it at or around 400 pages. A severe re-read and edit will probably shave it down some, at least I hope so. Brevity is the soul of wit and economical story-telling and characterization is a goal devoutly to be aimed for. It has not escaped my notice that Truckee is my shortest book, and also my best-seller over time. Back to basics, eh? Truckee covered the space of a single year, and had a fairly simple, straight-forward plot and a relatively small cast. My subsequent books were a lot more complicated, but it’s pretty clear that elephantiasis of the narrative is not widely appreciated, although there are exceptions. I will do my best to restrain myself.
This next book is supposed to focus on the next generation of the characters from the Adelsverein Trilogy; Dolph and his English Isobel, of Sam and Lottie Becker, and Lottie’s suitor, Seb Bertrand – all of whom were babies, children or just very young adults by a point halfway through the Trilogy. Time for them to pick up the chore of carrying on the plot, in and around the Centennial year of 1876 – although some of the older characters, heroes and heroines of the earlier narrative make occasional appearances now.
1876; a little more than ten years after the end of the Civil War, which I think was a great scar across the American psyche – as 1914-18 was for Europe. Everything was different, afterwards, although many of those things that made the difference so marked had already been put in train before that marking point. Many who had been rich, or even just well-to-do before the war were impoverished afterwards. But many who had been impoverished before were well-to-do or rich after it through mining, wholesale ranching, transportation, manufacturing and developing new and useful technologies. That very technology made the post-war world a different place; the telegraph brought far places closer, the railway brought them closer still. Before the war, it was pork which had been the favorite meat on American tables; ham, salt pork, bacon. Afterwards, beef from western ranches and shipped to the stockyards and slaughterhouses in the mid-West began to predominate.
Before the war, it was a wagon-journey of six months to get to California from the mid-West, or a long, bone-cracking stagecoach ride of twenty-four days. When the transcontinental railroad was completed – a traveler could go from Council Bluffs to Sacramento in about a week, and in relative comfort. Should the traveler possess a parlor car and sufficient funds and connections, the journey could even be done in considerable luxury – instead of the dangerous and difficult trek it had been a mere three decades before. I worked in this transition for the last chapter of Truckee; an elderly man who had been a small boy on the emigrant trail in 1844 traveled east over the route that his family had followed – and noted that it wasn’t have the labor and adventure it had once been. The steam engine brought Europe closer to the US; now it was possible to travel relatively easily, and comfortably. Regularly scheduled steamship packet lines transformed a miserable, cramped journey of a month or six weeks (or even more) to barely a week from New York to Hamburg, or Southampton. I pointed up this transition again, in the Trilogy, comparing the hardships suffered by Magda’s family on their journey from Germany on a on a sailing ship – and how, thirty years later, it was only a week on a steam packet from New York to Hamburg. And in the new book, there is a chapter of the Richter and Becker clans traveling across Texas in their own parlor car; think of the change this represented to those who lived long enough to see and experience it! But there was a shadow over all of this; the shadow of the war.
Another author in the IAG has reminded me of this – that someone visiting the United States ten years later would have noted effects of it, most especially in the South. There would have been the ghosts of the dead from a thousand battles haunting the living with their memories; the badly scarred and disfigured, the chronically ill – and the chronically criminal. Even more visible were those amputees with their crutches and empty sleeves, the widows wearing black, and the young women who never married at all because the boy they loved was buried in the Wilderness, at Gettysburg, or Shiloh. Progress came at a price; and although one can’t say one caused the other, it made the handy demarcation point of a life that for most Americans had been rural and agrarian.
And that’s what I am working around, in The Quivera Trail … then there is the difference between England and Texas, which one has to admit, is still pretty market. There is a reason that I am describing it to readers as ‘Mrs. Gaskell meets Shane.’
At the Belmont Club, a very apt comment by BC Alexis on the the absence or presence of mainstream media with regard to the Kermit Gosnell trial; I have bolded the bit that I found the most amusing:
“It takes more than mere assertion for a media outlet to become legitimate. The Washington Post and the New York Times presume they are more authoritative than the Daily Mail, but are they? If the Daily Mail does a better job of actually reporting the news, what is keeping that paper from becoming a new source of legitimacy?
I think one principal problem with the media is that it is filled with reporters rather than historians. Newspapers (and often government agencies) often have the attention span (and institutional memory) of an aphid, while historians are supposed to know historical context, are trained to tell long stories, and construct frameworks which can put current events into context. Is it investigative reporting if one discovers scandalous material that is over one hundred years old? What is the “expiration date†for a scandal? When is it no longer “newsworthy�
Another problem is with how the media can be so easily manipulated. It is a lot less work to copy and paste a press release than to bother to fact check one’s sources. The White House press corps has long had a strong reputation as a horde of brown nosers who get regularly enticed by dangled stories that look big and juicy – until one finds out how those stories had been pumped with water by media strategists who were leading the reporters by the nose.
Distorted media narratives don’t only promote amnesia – they also promote the very polarization that the same media outlets then decry. People don’t like getting lied to and people don’t like getting lied about. And it is not easy to correct the record once a newspaper prints a lie – it’s nearly impossible. That is why a track record for truthfulness is so important. Given how newspapers (digital or print) cost money, who is going to pay reporters for telling the truth? Is there any way to promote incentives for honesty in reporting, as opposed to telling people what advertisers (or journalism professors) want to hear?”
This is has been one of those weeks where – in the words of the late Molly Ivins – sitting down and powering up the internet of a morning was kind of like opening the refrigerator and seeing Fidel Castro sitting inside. You can’t help thinking there was something mighty strange going on.
The current round of “Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken†(as another blogger on Open Salon used to call it) continues, as Li’l Pudgy establishes his dominance. Still no rain of fire on Austin, Texas, Tokyo, Seoul or anywhere else, but Li’l Pudgy ramps up the rhetoric regardless; the Norks have played this game I think every six months for the last sixty years, and he has to get louder and more threatening to even get the old Korea hands to even pay attention, let alone take the threat seriously. Say, all his generals have gaudy sprockets and decorations hung all over their uniforms – and what military action did they earn all those in? Seriously, I can only hope the Chinese are getting as tired of Li’l Pudgy as we all are. I do wonder, though – how many more Korean Motherland Unity Games of Repeated Chicken will we endure until the Kim régime implodes of itself?
Following, in a desultory fashion the horrors revealed in the trial of the Philadelphia abortion clinic doctor, Kermit Gosnell – who among other things, specialized in late-term abortions. Very late term abortions, and in horrifically unsanitary conditions, or so it would appear from the trial testimony. I’m not following it very closely because I have a very low gross-out threshold, and accounts of the the good doctor’s fetus foot collection is enough to make me upchuck. Wait – I thought that legalizing abortion would keep women safe from quacks in filthy backstreet abortion mills. Guess I was misinformed. I blame the media, of course – most of whom have been remarkably restrained in their coverage of Dr. Gosnell’s contributions to women’s rights.
And finally – the not entirely-unexpected passing of Margaret Thatcher … as I say, not unexpected, but I am still boggled by the public vitriol uncorked on the occasion by certain elements in once-Great Britain. Good lord, I thought Sarah Palin had roused a s**tstorm of hatred among self-nominated media, political and intellectual elite in this country, but it’s but a fart to a tornado in comparison. Good lord, be a bright, ambitious and successful woman politician, achieving high office without the benefit of a husband or father having gotten there first, and do so as a conservative, and the knives will come out for sure. Just as a rhetorical aside directed to all the Maggie haters out there; people, do you realize how tacky, warped and insane this makes you appear to outsiders? For one, it makes it look like the Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge are about the only adults left in the room.
And that’s my week. By the way, I brought out Our Grandpa Was an Alien on Kindle, since I didn’t carry over the print version to Watercress Press when I reissued everything else. Enjoy – all the old romps and essays about my family, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.