True to the Union – Conclusion

03. August 2012 · Comments Off on True to the Union – Conclusion · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West, War · Tags: , ,

Late in the fall of 1862, under the mistaken assumption that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and allowed to depart Texas unmolested rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of Unionists gathered together at Turtle Creek in Kerr County. They elected a settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener as their leader, and Henry Schwethelm as second. Their number included Phillip Braubach, who had served as the sheriff of Gillespie County, and Captain John Sansom, a Texas Ranger before and after the war, and also the sheriff of Kendall County, two sons of Edwin Degener, a prominent free-thinker from Sisterdale, Heinrich Steves, whose large family had helped establish Comfort, and the Boerner brothers, one of whom had married a Steves daughter. Heinrich Stieler was also one of them; he was Henry Schwethelm’s brother-in-law and son of Gottlieb Stieler, an early settler whose family later established a ranch between Comfort and Fredericksburg which still exists today.

The Unionists in the group were bound by ties of kinship, by community as well as personal loyalty. There were sixty-eight of them: all German, save four Anglos (including Sansom) and one Mexican. They intended to travel on horseback westward towards the Mexican border; most meant to go from there to the United States and join the Union Army. Having a three-day head start and no heavy baggage wagons to contend with, they should have been well over the Nueces and into Mexico but for their belief in the non-existent amnesty … and so they made their way across country in a fairly leisurely manner. Duff was enraged when he heard of their departure. To his mind, they were deserters in time of war and deserving of death. He sent word to Lt. C.D. McRae in San Antonio that Tegener’s party was to be pursued at all cost; implicit in his orders was an understanding that he didn’t want to hear much about survivors. McRae led out a company of more than ninety men after the Unionists and prepared to follow Duff’s orders to the letter.

On the evening of August 9th, 1862, Tegener’s party camped in thin cedar woods, not far from the Rio Grande, between present-day Brackettville and Laguna. The built campfires and set out four sentries a good way from the camp. Sometime early the next morning, McRae’s scouts encountered Tegener’s guards, and the exchange of shots alerted the Unionists. There followed a short and confusing firefight. Some sources claim that McRae’s company had overridden the sleeping Unionists and caught them by surprise in their bedrolls. Other accounts have it that nearly half of Tegener’s party had decided to give it up as a bad job, and go back to the Hill Country to defend their families … or scattered when it seemed clear that Tegener had chosen a bad defensive position. John Sansom, certainly no coward and not unaccustomed to dirty fighting was one of the survivors; he urged Hugo Degener to come away with him, but the younger man refused. Most of those who stood and fought were killed outright. Eleven of the wounded were executed upon capture, to the horror of one of McRae’s volunteers who left an account; one survivor was taken to San Antonio and executed there. Others were hunted down and executed a week later by McRae’s troopers as they tried to cross the Rio Grande. The survivors scattered, including Sansom and Schwethelm; who both made it safely over the border. Others fled back to the Hill Country, bringing news of the fight to the families of the dead.

Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. Minna Stieler, the sixteen-year old sister of Heinrich Stieler, and her mother managed to get permission to go to where the bodies of her brother and another comrade had been left unburied, and cover them with brush and stones, the ground being too hard to dig a grave, and the bodies too far decayed to remove. The other remains lay unburied for three years. Exactly three years to the day after the Nueces Fight, Henry Schwethelm returned with a party of kinfolk and friends from Comfort, and gathered up the scattered bones. They brought them to Comfort, and buried them in a mass grave, on a low hillside on what then would have been the outskirts of town.

The stone obelisk is plain and stark, shaded by a massive oak tree: panels on three sides list the names of the 36 dead of Tegener’s party, all of whom were True to the Union.

(Crossposted at my book blog, and at www.chicagoboyz.net)

The Nueces Fight and ‘True to the Union’

01. August 2012 · Comments Off on The Nueces Fight and ‘True to the Union’ · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West, War · Tags: , , ,

As I am going up to Comfort on the 11th, to take part in the 150th anniversary observences of the Nueces Fight, and since it has been a while since I wrote about this — herewith some background.)

Who would have thought that deep in the heart of a staunchly Confederate state, there would have been a large population of Unionists? But there was; and not only did they vote against Secession, but the governor of Texas himself was a Unionist. He was none other than Sam Houston himself, the hero of San Jacinto, who more than any other Texas man of note had politicked and maneuvered for ten long years so that Texas could join the United States. In the end, Texas seceded; instead of going it alone again, the secession party joined the Confederacy with what some observers considered to be reckless enthusiasm – especially considering the perilous position of those settlements on the far frontier. Those settlements had been protected from marauding Comanche, Apache and Kiowa by the efforts of US troops – and who would guard them now? When the Texas legislature passed a law requiring all public officials to swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, Sam Houston resigned rather than take it. Being then of a good age, of long and devoted service to the people of Texas and held in deep respect even by citizens who didn’t agree with his stand, Sam Houston retired without incident to his home near Huntsville.

Other staunch Unionists in Texas were not able to refuse the demands of the Confederacy as easily as wily old General Sam. Among those who felt the wrath of the Confederacy most keenly were the German settlers of the Hill Country. Most of those settlers had come from Europe in the late 1840s; others had settled in San Antonio, Galveston and Indianola. In many cases they were the mercantile elite, as well as providing a solid leavening of skilled doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, teachers and writers in those communities. They were also Abolitionists; and in an increasingly perilous position as the split between free-soil states and those which permitted chattel slavery widened during the 1850s. Once Texas went Confederate, they were in even more danger, although they did not at first appear to realize this. Those citizens and counties which favored the Union and abolition could not easily separate, as West Virginia had from Virginia: they were stuck. The war began and ground on … and the breaking point came early in 1862 with passage of a conscription law. Every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five was liable for military service. This outraged those who had been opposed to slavery and secession, to the point of riots, evasion and covert resistance. Texas abolitionists and Unionists would be forced to fight in defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body they had opposed. Only a bare handful of men from Gillespie, Kendall and Kerr counties volunteered for service in the Confederate Army throughout 1861 and 1862, although good few more were perfectly willing to serve as state troops protecting the frontier, or in local volunteer companies of Rangers. Anyone who wanted a fight could take on the Indians, without the trouble of going east for military glory.

Before very long, the distinct un-enthusiasm in the Hill Country for the Confederacy and all its works and ways became a matter of deep concern to military and governing authorities. In a way, it was a clash of mind-sets: the German immigrants were innocently certain that the freedom of speech and political thought which they had always enjoyed since coming to Texas were still viable. The pro-Confederate authorities saw such thought and speech as disloyalty, clear evidence of potentially dangerous spies and saboteurs … and acted accordingly. In the spring of 1862, Gillespie and Kerr County was put under harsh martial law. All men over the age of 16 were ordered to register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Few did so – and many never heard of the order, until the state troopers arrived to enforce it, under the command of a peppery, short-tempered former teamster; Captain James Duff.

By summer, Captain Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not taken the loyalty oath. His troopers waged a savage campaign; flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking settler’s homes, arresting whole families, and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush near their homes, while their families smuggled food to them. Frequently parties of Duff’s men assigned to arrest certain men returned empty-handed, with the subject of the arrest warrant left dangling on a rope from a handy tree on the return journey. Four out of six men arrested near Spring Branch in the Pedernales Valley and taken to be interned with other Unionists were summarily lynched when two of them escaped while their guards were asleep. A state trooper serving in the Fredericksburg area at that time remarked, “Hanging is getting to be as common as hunting.” Suspicion followed by repression bred resentment and defiance, which bred violence… and resistance.

(To be continued …)

The Strange Case of l’affaire le Poulet Filet

30. July 2012 · Comments Off on The Strange Case of l’affaire le Poulet Filet · Categories: Ain't That America?, Rant, sarcasm, Working In A Salt Mine..., World · Tags: , ,

Yep – when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro … Here we are, shaking our heads in amazed disbelief that now a fast-food chain purveying tasty chicken entrees, distinguished among other fast-food outlets only for a corporate policy of being closed on Sunday and a rather witty advertising series featuring illiterate cows urging us to eat chicken … is now is the hill to be defended in the culture war. That would be the newly-vicious cultural war between the forces of tolerant political correctness and those conservative and libertarian defenders of free-market principles as well as the freedom of belief and expression. Most of us of that persuasion are actually rather stunned at how suddenly Chick-Fil-A is suddenly now the demon that must be defeated! And defeated by any means, fair, foul, shrill or underhanded as is required by the mission, naturally. Is there some PC target of the week decided upon? Last time I looked around it was the Koch Brothers who were the Goldstein o’the Week. One can hardly keep up without a scorecard.

It seems that the offense against the gods of Political Correctness that has been committed by Chick-Fil-A is that the owners of the company in an interview have elucidated their belief that marriage is one of those traditional things: between a man and woman, families for the production and support of, which they personally (and in their own donations) support wholeheartedly. That kind of thing apparently sends the Shrieking Harpies of Political Correctness into overdrive. Such opinions appear in their view to be the same thing as urging that gays be bundled up and thrown alive into furnaces, or have walls toppled onto them … something fatal and unpleasant, anyway. So Chick-Fila-A is to be scorned, harassed, and driven from the public marketplace, through consumer boycott, urged on by the comments of has-been and soon-to-be has-been celebs, and a couple of deluded local pols pandering to their voter-base or fishing for payoffs in some form or other. (Cash or goodwill – can’t see from this distance what it would be. Evil-minded as I am, I can probably guess with a fair degree of accuracy.)

This new targeting of Chick-Fil-A, as another blogger/writer of my acquaintance has outlined, is liable to backfire in a big, big and ultimately counterproductive way, as far as the partisans of same-sex marriage are concerned. For a sitting politician, using the power of local government to block establishment of a business because of the personal beliefs of the CEO or owner, or their pattern of charitable giving is a violation of Constitutional principles any way you slice it, and the chief offenders in that respect are already walking back from public statements to that effect. The degree of fury over this is curious, though. How the heck did the love that could not speak it’s name become the love that won’t shut up about it? Are there really that many gays out there relative to the general population, wanting to take that hike down the aisle and collect kitchen appliances and silverware from their nearest and dearest and settle down to suburban conformity? Or is it just that the adherents carrying on so loudly ad infinitum about of same-sex marriage (who may not necessarily actually be gay and wanting to get married) have latched onto it as the trendy cause du jour with which to epater the bourgeoisie, and to prove that they themselves are really hip and tolerant people.

It would be pretty funny if Chick-fil-A had the best couple of months they ever had – from people deliberately going out to their local Chick-Fil-A get a spicy chicken wrap and some waffle fries. What with a fairly devout religious element in the US, and a fair number who may tolerate an ostentatiously gay life-style lived by their fellow citizens, but draw the line at being forced by social pressure to express approval of it, not to mention contrarians who are just tired of being hectored by the politically correct, I suspect the boycott will fizzle out.

Besides, the food is great, cooked fresh to order, and the service from the employees is excellent. I can attest to the fact that the single Chick-fil-A outlet in North-eastern San Antonio was sparkling clean, and on last Saturday night it was jammed to the rafters. I had never seen quite so many people in a fast-food place at one time, and the drive-through lanes were practically grid-locked, there were so many cars pulling through. We’ll probably go again, the next time we have a fast-food jones.

(cross-posted at Chicagoboyz.net)

Junker Delight

25. July 2012 · Comments Off on Junker Delight · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local · Tags: ,

This week in the neighborhood where I live was designated for the annual bulk-trash pickup – so residents were notified a week or more ago. Once a year we can put out on the curb … well, just about anything except concrete rubble and chunks of stone. The city sends out a couple of long open-topped trailer trucks, and a special truck with a large mechanized claw that reaches down and gathers up the bulk items.

Well, all of those who have not been picked over thoroughly by the pros … and the other neighbors, of course. This year, we were amazed at how little was left for the city crew, as the professional junkers had already descended like a swarm of locusts. Usually there are only two or three; they are easily recognizable. They are the people driving battered pick-up trucks, sometimes towing a rough flat-bed trailer of the kind usually used to haul yard-maintenance equipment – and pick-up and trailer piled tower-high with salvage. Rusted-out barbeques, metal frames of this or that, battered furniture of all kinds, upholstered chairs with gruesomely stained upholstery and stuffing and springs bursting out of the cushions, clapped out appliances and monitors, cheap furniture with the thin veneer peeling off the disintegrating pressed-board that it is made out of, and construction grade kitchen/bathroom cabinets that have been replaced by upgrades …

Yes, and if I am sounding very familiar with the contents of what is put out in front of my neighbor’s houses … it’s because I am. We inspect the bulk-trash offerings quite thoroughly ourselves, and have shamelessly selected a number of still-useful and/or salvageable items for our own use. At least half of the ornamental elements in our garden were picked out of trash-piles, including a good number of large pots, plant-hangers, plant stands, a standard to hang a banner from, shepherd’s crooks, bird-houses, the big pottery chiminea, a small ornamental bench … and those that weren’t gleaned from the bulk trash were bought at yard sales for pennies on the original price. So, I have that funky-junky shabby chic style going in the garden. It works, and it’s cheap. A good number of the plants in it were also rescued from here and there.

This year it seemed like there were a much larger number of junkers, circulating. As soon as it hit the sidewalk, within minutes – or hours at best – the battered pickup swooped in, and the item was gone. We noted that one neighbor had put out three or four clapped-out vacuum or carpet-cleaning units; they were gone by the next day. I had read somewhere or other, of a tinkerer who would scoop up items like this, repair and clean them, and sell them for a small sum on eBay, and was doing very nicely out of it, too. There are gifted amateurs, people like my Dad who could take apart an appliance and put it back together again and have it work, but there wasn’t – well, until a bit ago – too many many professional small-mech tinkerers working the retail trade any moe, not when it’s usually cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one. When I wrote about this once before, commenters waxed lyrical about items they had salvaged entire, or rehabbed for their own use; it’s all to the good, you know – it’s all being recycled, one way or another. Better to fix it up, and use it again, than let it take up space in the dump.

This year, we put out a garden chaise lounge made from lengths of two-by-four, which had weathered to the point that it was near to falling apart. We had actually picked it out of a bulk-trash pile five or six years ago, but now the legs and armrests were rotting away, the squirrels had raided the cushion (bought on sale at Lowe’s at the end of the season) and I didn’t want to take the time or effort to repair it. It was gone by the next morning. My daughter thinks another neighbor scooped it up. It will be kind of amusing to see if it continues going the rounds.

(Cross posted at my book blog, and at www.chicagoboyz.net)

Nat Love – Cowboy Rock Star

24. July 2012 · Comments Off on Nat Love – Cowboy Rock Star · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West · Tags: , , , ,

Nat Love, who was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1854, went west to Dodge City after the Civil War and cadged work as a wrangler and cowboy. He was already a pretty good rider and bronco-buster, and in a very short time had picked up the other requisite skills – with a six-shooter and lasso, earning the nick-name ‘Deadwood Dick’ through a contest of cowboying skills at a 4th of July celebration in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. He not only won the roping contest, but the the grand prize pot of $200 in the shooting contest. He was a hit with the audience, as well as with his fellow cattle drovers. He cut a striking figure in his star cowboy days; lean, slim-hipped and cocky, with a mop of long black hair to his shoulders, and a wide-brimmed sombrero with the front turned rakishly up – a Jimi Hendrix of the 19th century rodeo.

As a teenager, Nat Love worked the legendary long-trail cattle drives; when Texas cattle ranchers faced with a glut of native long-horned cattle and no other means of making money in the desperate years following the Civil War thought to trail them north to where the transcontinental railroad was slowly creeping across the upper Plains. There, in the open prairies of Kansas, there was no hazard of infecting local farmers’ cattle with tick fever, and for ten years, millions of Texas cows walked north to the stockyards of Abilene, Hays City, Wichita and Dodge City. For a few years he was employed on the Duval ranch, in the western part of the Texas Panhandle – near Palo Duro, the sheltered canyonlands that were last heartland of the wild Comanche.

His autobiography contained many stories of derring-do familiar to aficionados of classic Westerns; accounts of chasing bandits and Indians who had absconded with the best part of a herd of longhorns. On one memorable occasion, when under the influence of something stronger than lemon sarsaparilla, Nat Love tried to lasso and drag away one of the cannons that sat in the open compound at Fort Dodge; he told the astonished soldiers that he wanted to take it back to Texas to fight Indians with. He was one of those who also were enshrined in cowboy legend by riding his horse into a drinking establishment (a Mexican cantina, location unspecified) and grandly ordering drinks for himself … and his horse. He had cleared the way for himself and horse with a splatter of wild shots from his revolver – which rather excited some wholly understandable hostility from the local citizens, and so he had to depart at speed before having a chance to enjoy his drink. He even claimed to have been captured by Pima Indians while working at a ranch in Arizona. In the best tradition of adventure novels, he was thought so much of that he was adopted into the tribe and only made his escape a year later, presumably leaving several broken hearts behind him.

Even if his life as a cowboy had not been all that eventful … and many of his adventures remembered with advantages … it was still a life better suited to a young man. The work itself was physically hard, most of it in the out-of-doors, and not that well-paid. Most working cowboys only did it for a couple of years until something better came along. So after two decades, Nat Love wisely took up a second career. He became a Pullman porter on the railroad; apparently being just as well-respected by his employers and fellows as in his first career … and with more remunerative and regular paychecks. He died of respectable old age in the 1920s, after completing an autobiography which related his gloriously rowdy days as a cowboy.

I read a good few chapters of his autobiography – he comes across as a very appealing person; unusual in his charm and swagger, but not for his color; something like one in seven or eight cowboys were black, one in seven or eight Mexican. An actor like a young Will Smith could have played him, in his younger days. There will be a character very like Nat Love in the next book – I promise.

The Spectacle of Wrecks on the Internet Superhighway

19. July 2012 · Comments Off on The Spectacle of Wrecks on the Internet Superhighway · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, General Nonsense, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine...

I am not one of those people who thrive on discord – which may be one of the reasons that I gave up posting on Open Salon yea these many months ago. I am at heart a rather peaceful and well-mannered person who does not actively seek out confrontation, on the internet or in real life … no really, stop laughing! I merely present myself as someone who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, and who will not hesitate to squash them, which has the pleasing result of not being very much bothered by fools. It’s called ‘presence’… and has worked out pretty well, actually online and in real life. I can easily count the number of fools I have squashed … only a dozen or so that I remember. And none of them came back for seconds.

I don’t deliberately slow down to gawk at epic highway pileups either … except that in real life, everyone ahead of you has slowed down anyway, and the full spectrum of destruction is spread before you. And as for epic internet crackups … one can go for months without being made particularly aware of them, but this week my attention was caught by news of the mother-in-law-of all internet crack-ups to do with books. This one I must pay some attention to, as books are my vocation. It’s a more appalling spectacle than the Great Books And Pals/Jacqueline Howett Review Crackup of 2011, which should have served as an object lesson in how an author should not respond to a mildly critical review. This fresh slice of internet literary hell is what I am dubbing the Great Stop the Goodreads Bullies Cluster of 2012.

Goodreads, for those who have not had it wander across their ken … is kind of like Facebook for book enthusiasts. More specifically, for readers of books – although I do have an author page there, for all the good it does me. Not much; this is why I am not inclined to spend much time and effort on it. Anyway, it seems that a handful (or maybe more) of the regular Goodreads reviewers have earned a reputation for what is – or could be interpreted – as snark, scathing wit, or just dismissive disinterest. As the fictional food critic, Anton Ego said, “…the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”

Yes, it is fun and easy to cut loose with all barrels on some hapless bit of publication – and since the mad and wonderful world of books in this year of our lord offers such a wide array of targets, I can’t really blame various Goodreads reviewers for being rather spiky and judgmental about books. It’s a site for readers, after all. And there are plenty of wallbangers out there. (That is, a book so awful that you throw it across the room hard enough to bang against the opposite wall) But handful of Goodreads reviewers who have have been colorfully blunt in expressing their opinion of particular books now are classed as bullies? And that a handful of aggrieved Goodreads members (who may be writers, or just overly-impassioned fans) have set up a website, specifically dedicated to ‘outing’ those reviewers, terming them ‘bullies’ and tacitly encouraging other people to stalk and harass them online and in their real off-line lives. The irony, it burns. OK then – is the principle being established here is that the cure for bullying is … more bullying? Must be merely one of those interesting coincidences that the intended targets of Stop the Goodreads Bullies are women … oh, and the whole schmezzle of revealing Goodreads members personal information is a violation of the Goodreads policies, anyway.

Say, was there some act of Congress or the current regime passed lately which demanded that all book reviews are slavishly adoring, else the wrath of someone-or-other be excited? Is this the natural outcome of giving trophies for participation? Are certain writers thinking, “I wrote a book so I deserve nothing but glowing reviews for it?” I’ve reviewed books myself, often enough, and now and again administered an unfavorable or a mixed review. Not too many of those lately, as really don’t want to waste valuable hours reading a stinker, and fortunately the ‘Look Inside’ feature pretty much lets me screen out the really awful selections. A review isn’t a advertisement for the book; it is, or ought to be at the very least, a reasoned analysis of why or why not a reader should spend a good few hours of their life reading it. Nothing more, nothing less, although this rule is frequently trampled upon.

The bottom line is that the only response an author should make for a favorable, or even mildly critical review – and even if any response should be made is debatable among the cognoscenti – is, “Thank you for your consideration.” For a critical or scathing review – no response at all is best. There is no crying in baseball, and there should be no whining from authors; especially not to the extent of setting up a website to complain about being bullied. You put your stuff out there for everyone with the interest or the wherewithal to read it. Accept that there will be a number among them who will not like it, miss the point entirely, fail to grasp the whole point … well, grownups and professionals bleed about that silently and move on. Comfort yourself with those reviews and the appreciation of people who did get the point, and who loooooove it.

Frankly, I also comfort myself against unappreciative reviews by going and looking at my vast collection of publisher and agent rejections for Truckee’s Trail and Adelsverein. I think of it as the best kind of plate armor against bad reviews.

(Crossposted at my book blog, and at Chicagoboyz)

Annals of Summer 2012

16. July 2012 · Comments Off on Annals of Summer 2012 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Literary Good Stuff, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine... · Tags: , , , ,

Darned if I’m not coming up on my ten-year mark as a blogger; my, how the time flies when you are having fun. I made my very first post in August, 2002, after the fun of being a solo blogger apparently burned off for the original founder of this blog, the semi-legendary smart-ass known as Sgt. Stryker. And then, I just got into the habit of it. Things happened – a war, for one. And after a bit, and a couple of years of producing content and of getting very, very tired of working for other people and corporate organizations (some of whom although not all were – not to put too fine a point on it – raving loonies or singularly unappreciative of my mad and various skilz) I began to think of myself as a writer (and independent contractor) who did a little office and administrative work on the side, rather than an office administrator/secretary who did a little writing on the side. Since then, I’ve brought home the bacon as an editor, writer and publisher, having written seven books, counting the first one, which was my ‘training wheels book’ and mostly of reworked blog-posts anyway. There have been bloggers who have done even better out of being early bloggers … but that’s not my point, really. I’ve done well enough to suit myself, even if I could not figure out how to do certain book-advert things with the original blog layout, or to incorporate pictures into the current one. Just one of those things.

One of those things that happened in the decade since was to become a Tea Partier – a devotee of small government, strict application of the Constitution in matters governmental, and of classical free markets … no, not crony capitalism, which is the kind that only mimics free markets, in which the establishment political elite and the top-market-economic elite are one and the same. No, it is not the same thing at all … and being an independent writer really is underlining that point quite sufficiently. As if I had not already figured much of that out, through reading the book and author blogs …

Ugh – small interruption there, a grad-student with the thankless job of hawking books from door to door on a Sunday afternoon. Nice – work hours for the freelance are … non-standard. Whereas I couldn’t afford any of his books, even if I was interested in them, it seems that he is an exchange student from Brazil, come to improve his English and Spanish, and has written a text-book. And needs an editor. Of course I gave him my card – but how comic would that be, getting a paid editing job from doing door to door cold-calling? One of my on-line author friends, Janet Elaine Smith, apparently does this all the time: she pitches her books to sales-persons who call her or ring her doorbell, deftly turning around all of their lines. Nine out of ten, she sells more to them, than they do to her…

Anyway – back to life as it is being lived in this campaign summer. It looks like Mittens is the nominee, and it looks like it is actually not going too bad for him. He wasn’t really my first, or even my second choice, politically … although it might be that he can really electrify the campaign by picking a dazzling VP. I wouldn’t presume to say who … except that observe that a running mate of the dark-brown year-round-tan color would certainly defang some of the objections to a pure-white-cleaner-than-next-to-godliness-white candidate. Who has political and extensive managerial business experience far, far beyond the ken of the current incumbent … who seems to be pretty down with that Chicago-Machine-Political-Dirty-Dealing-Your-Opponent-Down –Before-He/She/They-Can-Do-It-To-You sort of thing. Your mileage may vary, though.

Really, I ought to go back and order the second season of Rome, soon. I’ll bet that will make a lot of stuff perfectly clear. Note – this week, we did have a precinct-walker doing my neighborhood for a Republican candidate. Or so he said- and I hope it’s true. He was also doing a quick Tea-Party-ish poll, and tallying up the answers on an I-pad. So all props to the organization which send him forth on this mission in being able to work with cutting-edge 21st century technology. I seriously hope that he was in earnest about who and what he said that he was – otherwise… It seriously wierds me out that I must reconsider this kind of honesty in answering his questions, in this year of 2012. Yeah, hope and change. We hope that we have some change left at the end of all this.

The Ruins of Athens

11. July 2012 · Comments Off on The Ruins of Athens · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Good God, History

Actually, no – not the ruins of Athens … that’s a Beethoven piece that popped into my head – the Turkish March, from The Ruins of Athens … I’d always wondered in a desultory way, what would happen to me, if I played that classic music piece without comment, when I was stationed at EBS-Hellenikon, back in the day. I was never reckless enough to do the experiment and find out, actually. The Greeks were hair-trigger temperamental about any mention of Greece, Turkey, or the EEC (the forerunner to the EU) on the perilous airways of the American Forces Radio station where I worked – mostly on the swing and mid-shifts in the early 1980s. As exasperating and sometimes as deadly as the political stuff got during those years – and it did get deadly, for the N-14 organization and elements of the PLO were more or less targeting Americans on a regular basis – I loved Greece unreservedly. More »

Deep Summer in the Heart of Texas

10. July 2012 · Comments Off on Deep Summer in the Heart of Texas · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Local, World · Tags: , ,

Well, because of the drought and all, and in spite of the occasional productive storms blowing through, it’s not entirely bone-dry and ready to blow away on the next stiff breeze. As a matter of fact, the garden is looking quite beautifully lush, almost tropical. Of course, this may be due to about half an hour of hand-watering the pots and the hanging baskets every morning. But still – the back yard is no longer something I am embarrassed to have people see. Nothing like the desolation left in the wake of a hard and prolonged frost a year and a half ago, and the depredations of a pair of stray mutts that my daughter took pity upon, and we housed until we … umm, passed them off on a couple of likely suckers … no, make that fond and indulgent dog-lovers. As for rain – we went halfsies on a rain-gauge, and there’s been rain in it, every couple of days; how coincidental is that?

Anyway, the back yard was left pretty much as a wreck after these twin disasters, but now it is brought back, and if I can figure out a way to cram in even more raised beds to grow vegetables in, I will – for next year, at the very least. And there seem to be more and more people doing that backyard homestead thing; keeping chickens for eggs, bees for honey and all. If I had half an acre to spare, I’d consider one of those mini-cows … one of the regulars at Chicagoboyz suggested that breed, a couple of months ago, and don’t think I didn’t consider it, for when I have my eventual country retreat. My grandmother kept chickens during the Depression, and we had a hive of bees for a couple of years.

We went up to Canyon Lake for the 4th of July – rather than spend a day baking under the hot sun at the rocky edge of the lake, as we did last year. Since we took the dog, we had to go to the campground, rather than the public beach, so this year we omitted the dog and floated a bend of the river instead. Candidly, it wasn’t all that much fun, since the current wasn’t all that, and the river ran so shallow that we wound up portaging the tubes over the last third. Struggling out of the tube, schlepping through the rocky shallows, wondering what the heck is that nasty thing you are stepping on all unseen, knowing that the odds of turning an ankle on a slime-covered rock are pretty good, seeing that most everyone else is pretty well toasted – from alcohol and the sun – before they have gotten out of sight of the launch-point … not again, I don’t think. Unless we do the Comal, take some friends, a picnic lunch and remember to slather our shins with waterproof SPF-30 … I did remember to bring a hat, though. But the views of the banks, of cypress trees and of vacation houses that cost more than my entire family (including the brother-in-law who works for JPL) will make in five years or more were very nice. They went by, very slowly … and the tubers with loud, waterproof radios were … not pleasant. Mom and Dad always preferred a ‘stay-cation’ – they were doing it before it was cool, and now I see the wisdom of that.

On This Date in 1776 – The Declaration of Independence

04. July 2012 · Comments Off on On This Date in 1776 – The Declaration of Independence · Categories: Ain't That America?, History

(So I’m old-fashioned – I believe this should be read aloud at celebratory gatherings on this date every year.)
Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.

He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.

He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.

He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pre-tended Offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized Nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

(All righty then – memories freshed, everyone? Ready to go out and ensure that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth? Good.)

Bring Me Figgy Pudding

03. July 2012 · Comments Off on Bring Me Figgy Pudding · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

… and figgy wine, whole preserved figs, dried figs and jam of figs … As you can deduce, we have a bounty of figs, at this very moment. This miracle has occurred, even as the small tree in my front yard stubbornly refuses to bear more than five of six measly figs in a season, which the birds usually beat us to anyway. How is this possible? Because we have neighbors who have fig trees … one of which – of the huge-and-purple-when-ripe Celeste variety – has the most of it’s fruit-bearing branches leaning over the fence into a public space. The other – to judge from pictures – is of the small-and-pale-yellow-when-ripe Kadota variety – and is growing in the front yard of a neighbor who has given us permission to pick the darned things when we feel the need. They are both prolific trees, the Kadota especially; and there is a point when the owners of a fruit tree get damn sick of eating the output. I know this – I had something like ten or fifteen apricot trees lining the south boundary of the house that I rented in Utah, and it was years before I could bear to look at an apricot again … dried, or ripe, or especially rotting in the grass. In any case, we have gleaned nearly fifteen pounds of them this week, and have barely scratched the surface of the Kadota bounty. In other words, there appear to be just about as many unripe figs left on the tree after we’ve spent ten minutes snagging all the ripe ones in reach and filled two plastic grocery bags half-full.

Now we know why figs are so expensive in the market – the things are delicate, almost impossible to pick without bruising them or splitting their skin. The supermarket sort must almost be wrapped in bubble-wrap in order to get them to the market in any condition at all. They are almost instantly perishable, which must be why most people only know them in their dried incarnation, or as the filling for fig Newton cookies. And the only way that I can only afford to explore the myriad modes in which ripe fresh figs can be preserved … is by having access to the fresh-from-the tree source. (Warning – do not rub your eye, with fresh fig-sap on your hands.)

Fig jam is easy enough – the dried version is a bit of a challenge, because drying them whole in the American Harvest Gardenmaster dehydrator which was a souvenir of my tour in Utah … is a tough fit, at first. Even the smaller Kadota figs are too fat to fit onto the drying trays – which are designed to accommodate fruits and vegetables sliced to inch-thick or less slices. I did three trays of them sliced in half, which was not satisfactory, aesthetically or taste-wise. Then, I put a tray of them in the oven at lowest temperature for a couple of hours to shrink and dry at least a little bit … and they seem to be moving on very nicely.

So, on to a recipe from a much-lauded Southern cookbook, which calls for them being washed in a bicarb-of-soda and water solution, and then simmered and steeped over most of a week in a sugar solution; this has promise, I think. And I will bottle them, and save on the pantry shelf, which is now taking over the top shelves of various closets in the house …

I don’t know quite why I am moved to do all this now. Something in the air, I think. Even thought it is scorchingly hot now … there is a winter coming. And I want my pantry shelves to be full. I want my household to have food to eat – to have pickles and jams, and canned bounty. It’s one of those atavistic impulses, I know. But winter is coming.

Monday Morning Miscellany

01. July 2012 · Comments Off on Monday Morning Miscellany · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Veteran's Affairs

OK, so it’s Sunday afternoon. I’m just planning ahead, ‘kay?
1. So the Supremes upheld Obamacare … well sort of. Is it a tax, or isn’t it? Dessert topping or floor-wax. All that I can tell from here is that the closer and closer it gets to being implemented, the more unpopular that the whole program seems to be becoming. Why, oh, why couldn’t the Obamster have just tweaked Medicare to cover those uninsured. What towering illusion of adequacy led him to devise what appears to be Britain’s National Health scheme writ large and applied willy-nilly to the US. Anyway, now he’s staked his political career – what’s left of it – on ramming it through, over objections.

2. Oh, and his reelection campaign is going big in Paris for the 4th ofJuly, which kicks off a campaign swing through Europe. Guess the Obama reelection campaign has squeezed enough out of Wall Street and Hollywood, so it’s on to greener pastures. Words fail, they really do. I’ll probably never watch George Clooney in anything, ever again. If Mittens has any sense at all, he’ll be at a traditional down-home American community 4th of July bash. I swear, the campaign ads practically write themselves.

3. Colorado burning … the pictures of the fires burning along the mountains, and the homes going up in flames give me the cold shivers, they really do. The Obamster did show up to console the good citizens of Colorado Springs though … Which is nice of him. Texas burned last year though, with nary a peep.

4. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes breaking up. I think there must be some order of contemplative religious in a monastery on an isolated mountaintop somewhere who did not see that coming.

5. I posted a sample chapter of the next book – The Quivera Trail, on my book blog, here. Check it out, if you’re interested.
And that’s my weekend. Yours?

Voltaire’s Prayer

26. June 2012 · Comments Off on Voltaire’s Prayer · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm, Tea Time · Tags: , ,

“I have never made but one prayer to God; a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God answered it.”

I have a feeling that Mittens Romney, the heir-apparent to the Republican Party nomination in this year of our Lord 2012 also made that prayer in the last couple of weeks – and the deity came through like a brick. I speak of the jaw-droppingly tacky suggestion that the Obama campaign be added to bridal registries – that friends and loved ones give a donation to to his campaign rather than a gift to the happy couple. Mind you, it’s been my observation that couples marrying their fortunes (or lack of them) together in these modern times had usually been living out in the real world long enough to have acquired most of the necessary impedimenta and furniture – and that in marrying they needed to get rid of duplicates, once their separate households were merged, rather than acquire any more. But times have been tough enough lately – and many of these single-and-soon-to-be-merged households might have been living on a string and cheap Walmart/Target c**p anyway. I am a traditionalist – I believe in the gravy boat (yes, it is a gravy boat), the good china, and silverware, the crystal, a good toaster, and all of that. Getting married is when your kin and friends lovingly provide you with the items that you will use for special occasions and cherish for decades. That’s why – when I realized one day in 1984 that I probably would never marry and thereby score any of the really good stuff, I went and bought a set of good china for myself. (Bing & Grondahl Blue Traditional – no trim, and yes it was a good bit cheaper in the AAFES Catalog, back in the day)

So, this … method of presidentially Hoovering up additional campaign funds just seems to me as crass as it is unseemly. This is not anything like asking mourners at a funeral to skip the flowers – which the honored dead and their dearest kin are usually in no position to appreciate anyway – and just send a donation to a cause that the deceased favored or a medical research front against the ailment which carried off the dearly the departed. This fresh horror verges more into the political landscape North Korea or some other totalitarian state demanding that the Dear Leader get first dibs on the social and emotional lives of his/her subjects, and that the subjects must make a public demonstration of their devotion. What’s next – a picture of his Highness Barry displayed on the gift table with all the china, crystal and silver? Maybe all the attendees turning towards it and drinking a fulsome toast to him, before toasting the happy couple? I guess we only should be grateful that no one in his campaign thought to ask for a pledge on first night with the bride … or the groom. And I await the announcement of some scheme to dedicate birthday party money, and kid’s Tooth Fairy quarters to the Glorious Leader. Really, the jokes about this about write themselves. Like this particular visual.

Who, in what must be a terribly closeted and blinkered administration/campaign thought this was a good idea, the bee’s knees, a scathingly brilliant notion to milk a few more dimes and dollars from the faithful? Honestly, I might speculate on the existence of a mole within the Obama campaign – perhaps a Hillary fan with a grudge and a long (as these things go) memory, ensuring that every bold new step forward instead makes the Obama-naughts the laughingstock of the blogosphere. Which is a notion that I – in a cruel sort of way – would like to see take hold in the bowels of whatever gatherings, meetings and focus-groups that the Obama campaign holds over the next few weeks and months. I would like to see paranoia strike deep, into their minds it will creep … the notion that the guy, or gal over there is a Romney saboteur.

Yes, I am being cruel and devious, but I live to serve.

(Crossposted at Chicago Boyz)

Off the Island

22. June 2012 · Comments Off on Off the Island · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics, Rant, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!

The clouds of self-destructive stupidity gathering around the brows of those writers and entertainers who believe with the force of holy writ that they are not affected by the laws of action and consequence which govern the world and the rest of us, has now achieved an almost early 1960s Los Angeles smog-like density. And where I once was fairly indulgent towards those big names in the literary and entertainment industrial complex who entertained political opinions incongruent with mine and were mouthy about it, I am not inclined to be indulgent any longer. In fact, I’m downright annoyed … no, worse than annoyed; I’m fed to the back teeth with tolerating it all. Yes, this blog doesn’t have half the readership it did, back in the mists of time, and no, I do not delude myself that the world trembles at the frown of Sgt. Mom.

I am a writer, with a small and hopefully growing readership, and I do understand that kicking potential readers in the teeth by going full-bore on political matters is … well, it can be a self-limiting thing. I understand completely the tension between being dependent on the affection of a public, and the draw of publically attaching yourself to a cause or a political campaign which might prove to be controversial. I’m not such a big wheel in the grand literary scheme of things that I want or can afford to be perceived as kicking half my potential audience in the teeth … I’d rather convince readers subtly and through my books – not scream at them from a podium. I have friends, and even family who do not espouse the same Tea Party principles that I hold dear – and so I do not want to declare a sort of scorched-earth policy. I am fond of my friends, and my family. A mini-civil war is not something I want to have, especially around the table at a family Thanksgiving dinner.

I am OK with disagreeing on matters political, with someone merely registered to vote Dem, or anything else, like Green or Libertarian. Let it also be admitted that I disagreed vociferously with many of my Tea Party comrades on certain matters, matters which we all agreed should take second place to the Big Three of fiscal responsibility, strict constitutionality and free markets. What I will not tolerate any longer is being insulted, openly and repeatedly by various entertainers with delusions of political acuity. Garrison Keiller lost me as a listener three years ago – not so much for his slobbery worship of Obama, but for his disgusting slams against conservatives generally, Morgan Freeman is about to come under the same ban-hammer, and regretfully Tom Hanks is teetering on the verge. Janeanne Garafalo – banned. Rosanne Barr, Whoopie Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell – all banned and boycotted. There’s a growing list of other offenders; from what I have observed in various discussion threads over the last year or so, other bloggers and commenters are working up their own lists. From the whip-lash reaction by HBO to the ruckus over the severed head of GWB in an episode of Game of Thrones, I seriously am wondering now if the cleverer and more far-sighted denizens of the entertainment world are sensing the danger to their own careers in being overtly partisan in their political commentary and attitude. As the classic stand-up on-the-spot reporter closes the story while standing in front of a government building, ‘Only time will tell.’

So Far From God

18. June 2012 · Comments Off on So Far From God · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, On The Border, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs · Tags: , ,

Poor Mexico, runs the saying usually attributed to long-time Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz, So far from God, so close to the United States. I was thinking of this, when we went to see the movie For Greater Glory – mostly because I had seen brief mention of it here and there on the libertarian-conservative side of the blogosphere, and the whole premise of it interested me, mostly because I had never heard of such a thing as the Cristero War. Never heard of it, and it happened in the lifetime of my grandparents, in the country right next door … and heck, in California we studied Mexico in the sixth grade. It appeared from casual conversation with the dozen or so people who caught the early matinee at a movie multiplex in San Antonio, only one of them had ever heard of it, either. Was there some cosmic cover-up, or did we have troubles enough of our own at the time … or was it just that Mexico was so constantly in turmoil that one more horrific civil struggle just blended seamlessly into the one before and the one after?
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Further Adventures in Book Marketing

16. June 2012 · Comments Off on Further Adventures in Book Marketing · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Geekery, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine... · Tags: , , , ,

Well, no one ever really considered our family or anyone in it as cutting-edge … although it might be fairly argued that we were mosying so slowly along behind everyone else in our practices and preferences that the cutting-edge, tres-up to the minute actually came around full circle in the last half-decade and caught up to us at last. Home-made everything, home vegetable garden, chores for children, no television, tidy small houses and abstention from debt of every sort, from student to credit-card … an enthusiasm for all such things are now apparently trendy and forward-thinking.

I think about the only time that any of us got ahead of the zeitgeist in any way – and it was only for a brief time – was when I got into blogging and indy-publishing. Even then I wasn’t an early-early-Dark-Ages of Blogging adapter, only more of the first flush of the Renaissance, where practically all of us whose sites were honored by being on the Insty blog-roll knew each other – in the on-line sense of commenting on each other’s blogs and being free with personal emails. Fortunately for my family standing, that all passed about the time that comment-spam became a plague upon the earth and various formerly wide-open websites began requiring registration to comment, or at least acquiring some heavy-duty spam-prevention plug-ins. A blog? Now, everybody had a blog.
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Blogging, SWATing, and Brett Kimberlin

08. June 2012 · Comments Off on Blogging, SWATing, and Brett Kimberlin · Categories: Good God, Politics, Tea Time, Technology · Tags: , ,

This is the text of the email that I sent to the office of Lamar Smith, who is my congressman. Any reply will be posted here.

I am inquiring if you are aware of how conservative and libertarian bloggers have been maliciously pranked in the last few months by the practice of “SWATing”?

(A bogus 911 call is made claiming that there has been a shooting (or some other act of domestic violence) at the home of a conservative blogger. Usually these “SWAT-ing” calls are made in the middle of the night. Per emergency protocol, such a 911 call triggers a guns-drawn police action at the blogger’s home which puts the blogger and his or her family at immediate risk.)

This is not only a fraud and a waste of police time, but puts both the family of the blogger, any dogs they might have in the household, and the police officers themselves in danger of physical harm.

This a deliberate attempt to intimidate conservative and libertarian bloggers into forfeiting their right to exercise free speech and political commentary. I assume that you likewise would be concerned about this practice, and would like to know if you intend to take any action in this matter.

I am one of your constituents, a military veteran, Tea Party sympathizer – and a blogger. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Update: Monday morning – well, no answer other than the usual robo-email, but it is noted that Lamar Smith is a signatory to the letter from 85 members of Congress to AG Holder demanding that he address and investigate the issue. We’ll see what develops, then!

After Math in Madison

07. June 2012 · Comments Off on After Math in Madison · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time · Tags: , ,

Well, that certainly was interesting … in the sense of ‘slow down and gawk at the multi-car pile-up on the interstate’ kind of interesting. By this, I mean the spanking administered by pro-Walker voters in the much-ballyhooed recall effort. I guess it is a sign of the times that I was mildly surprised by how overwhelming the support for Scott Walker was. But then again, seeing how deranged so many of the recall adherents were in their behavior and in their statements to the press and on the kind of blogs which were covering the whole Madison circus … maybe I shouldn’t have been. Because that kind of over-the-top excess is really kind of of-putting, and Scott Walker really seems like a fairly sensible executive and manager, as well as being a rather likeable person. Painting him as Hitler and Genghis Khan all rolled into one … really, people. No better argument than that? Papering the capital building with signs and the internet with death-threat tweets, and insisting that the Koch brothers are the very devil incarnate … that kind of shrill, irrational fury is counter-productive, to put it mildly. No wonder the good, voting middle-of-the-road citizens of Wisconsin got fed up with it all and voted for an end to the open-air, public-space sixteen-month-long temper tantrum.

Interesting, though – the reactions of the lefty-lib side of the media and blogosphere; Open Salon seems to be stunned into silence by the very horror of it all, although I have found some commenters trying to blame it all on the machinations of the Koch brothers, or the bigotry and stupidity of the average Wisconsin voter. Music to my ears, the cries and lamentations, although I do wish that some of them would grasp the essential clue: that you cannot go on robbing tax-payer Peter to pay public-union employee Paul with a salary and benefits package several degrees more generous than Peter could ever hope for. You also cannot go on spending more than you earn, at least not for very long. It’s a fact of life for private citizens and business-owners. That it is considered by the great and the good among the establismen commentariat be a dangerously reactionary, racist, proto-fascist, fringe and radical notion when applied to a government, certainly comes as a surprise for earnest Tea Party-sympathetic persons like myself.

So – was this week a foretaste of things to come, on Election Day? My personal Magic-8 Ball viewer says yes, although many of those choosing to vote for Mittens Romney will be voting against the narcissistic, teleprompter-dependent miserable cluster of a failure known (this week) as Barack H. Obama. The wailing and lamentations will certainly be at an ear-splitting pitch, and certain inner-city rust-belt neighborhoods will probably erupt in riots. It might even get pretty ugly at CNN and MSNBC, even supposing those stations have any real viewers left.

The one big unknown in my mind, though – is if Obama looses the election in November … how graciously will he and his family depart the White House on Inauguration day? During the inauguration ceremony, the White House staff is supposed to totally move out the outgoing president’s personal possessions and household goods, and move in the new president’s stuff. How agreeable do you suppose the Obamas are going to be about all that … or will they trash the place like defaulters skipping out on a mortgage they can’t afford any more.

This and That – Jubilee Edition

04. June 2012 · Comments Off on This and That – Jubilee Edition · Categories: European Disunion, Fun and Games, History · Tags: , ,

We were distracted Sunday morning by the Jubilee procession of the boats on the Thames, as covered by BBC America. Blondie noticed that none of her various friends in Britain were on-line Sunday morning; presumably they were all off at various street parties, celebrating Her Majesty’s sixtieth year on the throne. She turned on the television and we were glued to it for an hour and a half: yep, the Brits really do know how to pull off a spectacle, although the dogs were increasingly distraught because it was time for walkies, dammit, and we never watch TV during the day, so there was their tiny domestic universe being rocked. The various long shots did look like Canaletto’s views of the Thames; the parties, the people, the banners, the displays along the riverbank buildings … and above all, the boats. What a feat of organization that must have been – to get them there at the start, to keep them together for the convoy up the river … and then, of course, to disperse them all afterwards.

I looked it up – the last Jubilee was Queen Victoria’s, in 1897. There probably isn’t anyone alive now who remembers that one, unless they were a drooling infant at the time and have lived to be over 110 years old. You have to go back to Louis the XIV and the 17th century to find a monarch who lasted longer. There won’t be another Jubilee for a British monarch in our lifetime, so you really can’t blame them for going all hands on deck for the Jubilee. It looks as if it is all a fantastic celebration … and I hope, more than anything that it gives ordinary Brits a kind of sense of self, and of national pride again. They were a great nation, with a glorious past, who did fantastic things all during the 19th century … and I hope against hope that something – anything can arrest the horrible downward slide, which everyone who visits Britain or lives there has noted. My grandparents and great-aunt all recollected Britain fondly; it was once a rather pleasant, industrious, sober and polite place, full of small pleasures and quiet beauties; eccentric perhaps, and definitely class-ridden, and certainly not devoid of snobbery and injustice, but still… All of Britain’s nicer qualities are now comprehensively wrecked, seemingly – unless you are very, very rich.

I can’t help seeing that when one of the British papers that we read online; whenever they run a photo-feature of times of yore – there was one just this week, of pictures taken of British life the year when Elizabeth came to the throne – the comment sections fill up with nostalgic memories from readers; It wasn’t all that bad, back then, and there is this pervasive feeling that the best of Britain’s gifts and capabilities have been shamefully squandered, and the working and middle classes beaten constantly over the head about all those things they should be ashamed of by the intellectual class. The past is not just a foreign place, but a better one and a more honest one, even with the defects noted. I wonder if this doesn’t account for the popularity of all those TV series and movies set in the 19th and early 20th century. Even with economic disparities, painfully ugly industrialization and poisonously suffocating snobbery – that past was a confident, optimistic place, a successful and a safer place for individuals, with wider horizons than are presently available.

Anyway – Long may Elizabeth II reign; so do we all wish, especially when considering Prince Charles. Oddly enough, in pictures of the Thames flotilla, he looks every bit as old as his father.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Meusebach!

28. May 2012 · Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Mr. Meusebach! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, History, Literary Good Stuff, Local · Tags: , , ,

John O. Meusebach was born exactly two hundred years ago in Dillenburg, Germany – and his birthday was celebrated in Fredericksburg last Saturday with a community picnic in the city park, with beer, BBQ, singing, dancing, gemütlichkeit and all. Who was John O. Meusebach, besides being the founder of Fredericksburg? He was the second commissioner for the Mainzer Adelsverein in Texas, the first commissioner being Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels; a well-intentioned but hapless princeling stranded well-beyond his depth in the dangerous waters of frontier Texas in the late 1840s. John O. Meusebach was also a noble, but a mere baron – and he sensibly gave up the title and became an American citizen as soon as he arrived in Texas. He was also a lawyer and experienced civil servant, whose family motto was “Steadfast in Purpose”. He spoke five languages, including English, and had a wide circle of friends both in Texas and Germany.

His was the herculean task of sorting out the fortunes of an unfortunate venture into a Republic of Texas-era scheme to take up an entrepreneur grant and settle thousands of Germans on it. By the time he arrived in Texas, the whole project was in a shambles; and that it didn’t collapse completely was due to John Meusebach’s skill and diligence. That the network of Hill Country settlements weren’t wiped out by Comanche Indian raids almost immediately upon establishment was also his doing, for he sought out the leaders of the Southern, or Penateka Comanche, negotiated a peace treaty with them – which the Penateka lived up to, much to the surprise of practically every Texan who had ever dealt with the Comanche other than at gunpoint. Even after the Adelsverein organization floundered and went under, John Meusebach remained a strong and respected figure among the Hill Country German settlers, and served in the State legislature, where he advocated for public education. A man of worth and consequence, and held in respect by three very different communities; the Anglo Texans, the German-Texans and the Comanche.

A celebration of his birthday was well worth a trip up to Fredericksburg and a warm Saturday evening in the Pioneer pavilion in Ladybird Johnson park, listening to the band, and talking to many of the stalwart citizens that I’ve met through the writing of the Trilogy … which adventure involved reading practically every shred of material written about the early days. A local historian, Kenn Knopp invited us to come, and bring books – and although Blondie is certain that Fredericksburg was tapped out as a market for them, we wound up selling a respectable number of books: I do wish that we had more copies of Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart on hand, as those two are the prelude to the Trilogy, and so they would have gone like hot-cakes to everyone who had read it and wanted more, more, more.

Note to self: maybe I’d better finish the sequel about Dolph Becker and his English bride first, before tackling the adventures of Fredi Steinmetz in Gold-Rush era California. Well, Kenn has always said I should do something about the Mason County Hoo-Doo War, which was one of those horrific post-Civil-War range feuds wrapped in in a layer of mystery around nougat of enigma embedded in a riddle…eventually, so I have been told, even the participants themselves lost track of why they were fighting each other so viciously. Present-day historians are still baffled.

Anyway, Blondie and I set up the table with our books next to Kenn’s table of books, and we spent almost three hours, eating our own picnic supper between talking to friends and people fascinated by books and history. Another local author set up next to us, with his wife minding his own books; and we wound up swapping copies: James C. Kearney, who has the dignity of being published by the University of Texas Press. A fellow local historical enthusiast! A common interest and knowledge-base! He did a translation of a book by an early settler at Fredericksburg – one Friedrich Armand Strubberg, who was a bit of a con-man, actually – and another about one of the early Verein purchases; a plantation property, which turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment, all the way around. (The German nobles of the Adelsverein were abolitionists, you see.Aristocrats, giving commands to the lower orders. Likely the irony escaped them, completely.) I swapped some email addresses, talked face to face with some people who I had only email exchanges with before … including a gentleman who was related to the Townsends (from To Truckee’s Trail) and recalled visiting the mansion and gardens that Dr. John and Elizabeth Townsend’s son built in San Jose in the 1880s … alas, the house was ransacked and then condemned and torn down, and if Dr. Johns’ diary was anywhere in it, then it is long gone. Still – we hope that it will turn up someday…
Anyway, that was my long Memorial Day weekend – yours?

Learning Curve

25. May 2012 · Comments Off on Learning Curve · Categories: Ain't That America?, Good God, Politics, Veteran's Affairs · Tags: , ,

Like a number of other unpleasant experiences, a brush with a full-on, balls-to-the-wall sociopath can be a soul-scarring but life-educational experience. Generally, unless you are in a professional field such as the law, law enforcement or a working psychiatrist, you will – in the normal run of life, not run into them all that often. This is a good thing, generally – that they are rare. And a bad thing, because sheer disbelief freezes the normal, human reaction when they get heaved up to the top of one’s awareness. This is probably why they are able to do so much damage; they are as rare as man-eating sharks, and when they do pop up, the initial reaction is to think that … no, they couldn’t possibly have said/done/believed that. No normal, thinking, decent person could possibly … well, do what they do. It’s an experience so far outside ordinary experience that the first reaction is disbelief, and quite often the disbelief is prolonged because sociopaths often and at first glance (and even second) seem to be quite normal, reasonable and reality-based people.

The second quite human reaction when encountering one of these cold-blooded human sharks is fear, cold, stark fear, once you come to the realization that there are no limits to what the sociopath will say or do. Let me say that again: no limits. They will do or say anything, without remorse or second thoughts. They will tell any lie, use any person or tool they happen to have at hand, and then move on like a tornado, leaving the physical and emotional wreckage behind them. It’s frightening as hell – as I know from personal experience. It must be even more frightening for those bloggers who are now the target of a vengeful and malicious sociopath like Brett Kimberlin, one with an established track record of violence and sufficient friends in high places to enable harassment of blogger/reporters who have run afoul of him by spotlighting his criminal past.

I ran into a Kimberlinic personality once although at the time I didn’t know what she was. I described her as poisonous when I wrote about her years later. I still didn’t use her real name, although I have been retired from the Air Force since 1997, a matter of eight years after we were assigned together. I still would not want to have anything to do with her, especially after I looked up some of the identifying markers of a sociopath: Habitual liar? Check: she lied like she breathed, effortlessly. Egotistical to the point of narcissism? Check again – the whole world revolved around her. Scapegoating – whatever happens, it’s always somebody elses’ fault. Yep – check again. Remorselessly vindictive, when exposed or thwarted? OMG, check in spades. Everybody who ever had any kind of run-in with her, even administered the mildest reprimand – she would go nuclear in retaliation. I’m still a bit surprised though, that she didn’t ever think to accuse me of being a lesbian – in those days before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, it would have been the ending of my military career for sure, even if I had been able to fight it. Manipulative, absolutely no empathy, and capable of violence? Well, definitely manipulative: that was one of her shticks; getting other people to do her dirty work. I’m still in two minds about the violence, although I wouldn’t have put it past her, if she were frustrated enough. I did have a point in writing about malignant, manipulative, cold-blooded sharks-in-human form today; the most obvious one was to participate in ‘Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day’ … which I did think long and hard about doing, just as I thought long and hard about doing a post about the Danish Motoons o’ Doom, a good few years ago. He is a vengeful, violent sociopath, and people are very right to fear such. But I do not believe it is wise or right to give in to fear.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain!

(Later – here’s what you can do, should you feel moved – http://ace.mu.nu/archives/329575.php )

L-D-S

23. May 2012 · Comments Off on L-D-S · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, Home Front, Local, Pajama Game, Politics, Tea Time, World

It looks like Mittens is our man, as far as the GOP presy-nom goes in this year of Our Lord 2012. Not my personal first choice, as I retained a sneaking affection for Rick Perry as one of the very first among our dear establishment Repubs who glommed onto the Tea Party from the get go … but, eh … this is not a perfect world, probably will never be a perfect world. Speaking as an amateur historian, it’s more interesting as an imperfect world anyway. As far as I’m concerned in this current election season, Anybody But Obama will do for me. I don’t care wildly for establishment career Republicans, especially the ones embedded in the Washington D.C. establishment like an impacted wisdom tooth … but in a realistic world, we work with what we can get.

Of course, one of the sneaky push-backs generated as the campaign season wears on through summer and fall will be objections and veiled – or not so veiled – criticisms of Mitten’s Mormon faith. That is, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, LDS for short, the common reference within those communities particularly thick with them. (In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which saw the Enterprise crew voyage backwards in time to our tumultuous century, Captain Kirk attempted to cover for strangeness in Mr. Spock’s conduct by saying, “Oh, he did too much LDS in the Sixties. That line raised an enormous horse-laugh in the theater in Layton, Utah, where I saw that movie in first run: Probably not so much as a giggle, everywhere else.)
In the event of his nomination as GOP candidate, I remain confident that every scary trope about Mormons will be taken out and shaken vigorously, as representatives of the U.S. establishment press furrow their brows thoughtfully and mouth the successor-to-JournoList talking points, and members of the foreign press corps (such as the BBC) worry their pretty, empty heads about those crazy fundamentalist Americans going at it again. Christian fundamentalists on steroids, is what it will boil down to, I am sure. Polygamous marriage, every shopworn cliché about Religion American-style that you’ve ever seen in books, movies and television will be put out there. How our press nobility can accomplish this and still look away from the nuttier-‘n-squirrel-poop ravings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago without giving themselves existential whiplash, I can’t imagine. I am confident that a prospective Romney presidency will be painted as about one degree off from A Handmaid’s Tale, and there will be plenty of blue-state punters who will eat it up with a spoon. I would hope that the sensible ones would be able to stop hyperventilating long enough to listen to reason about all this.
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The Dying of the Light

13. May 2012 · Comments Off on The Dying of the Light · Categories: General, History, Tea Time, War · Tags: , ,

I am not quite sure when I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels; it was sometime in my teens. The public library had several copies of Rider on a White Horse, which I thought immediately was the most perfectly evocative historical fiction ever, knocking such lesser lights like Gone With the Wind effortlessly into the shade. Besides, I was a Unionist and an abolitionist; and I thought Scarlett was a spoiled, self-centered brat and Melanie a spineless simpleton and I usually wanted to throw GWTW across the room so hard that it banged against the opposite wall when Margaret Mitchell began complaining about Northern abolitionists. Anyway, the only book that came close to Rider was Sutcliff’s adult Arthurian novel – Sword at Sunset. This was the book that had me dragging my poor younger brother and sister to every significant site of Rome in Britain, the summer that we spent there. Here and now I apologize here for dragging them to the remains of Galava Roman Fort, near Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1976 it was on the map, a clear and distinct quadrangle … but when we went to see it then, there was nothing but some shaped rocks edging a grassed-over stretch of ditch in a field full of cows. A thing of less interest could hardly be imagined … but I wanted to see it, anyway, being haunted by the sense that Sutcliff conveyed in Sword at Sunset and in books like Lantern Bearers – that of men and women who were living at the end of things, among the half-crumbled ruins of a great and dying empire, wistfully seeing all the evidence around that things had been better, greater, grander once, and now they weren’t – and wishing there was something that could be done to call those days back again.

“…we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crows pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a file place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of ever hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades…” That’s from an early chapter, describing a visit to the horse fair at present-day Narbonne. Another chapter describes the arrival of Artos and his companions at Hadrian’s Wall.

“It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow … the towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walks crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near…”

Sutcliff’s revisioning of King Arthur as Artos, the half-British, half-Roman cavalry commander, with his company of fighting horsemen – spelled out to me what it could be like; selling your lives dear to hold back the darkness for just a little longer, a long fight in twilight among crumbling ruins, with men and women who half-remembered the ways and habits of an older age. Sutcliff’s Artos and his comrades – they picked their hill, their Badon Hill and made their stand. They valued those ways and the memories of those institutions handed down, more than they valued their own lives, for living under the yoke of barbarian raiders … meant nothing at all. Better to die on your feet as free men and women, than live in chains … and to make the choice while it is yours to make.

Such a Disagreeable Man

11. May 2012 · Comments Off on Such a Disagreeable Man · Categories: History, Old West · Tags: , , , ,

I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be;
You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,
I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer.
To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,
Yet ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why! –

From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida

I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England – three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books – walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.

Ah, well – the Muse of History records mercilessly and without particular favor … although she does seem to favor the literate and those with a basic grasp of favorable marketing. She will have her ways with her humble devotees.
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Murderers of the Middle Class

08. May 2012 · Comments Off on Murderers of the Middle Class · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, History, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine... · Tags: , , ,

I was reading about an aspect of the composite New York girlfriend which our current President incorporated in that gracefully luminescent autobiography which apparently very few people read, when I was reminded yet again of how much I despise Bill Ayers. Yep, that Bill Ayers, wanna-be terrorist, influential educationist, neighbor and apparently BFF with said president. My daughter has a word (or several, actually) for people like him, of which the mildest is ‘hipster douchbag.’ It seems that some of the elements of the composite girlfriend have something in common with the girlfriend of Bill Ayers in his bomb-throwing days … the one whose skills at bomb-making were – shall we say – somewhat less than skilled?

Diana Oughton – like Mr. Ayers and some of his other confreres – came from an embarrassingly well-to-do family. They pleased and amused themselves four decades ago by messing around with violent revolution, bank robbery and the inexpert assembly of high-explosive devices, presumably for the benefit of the working class, the poor, the proletariat, or whatever Marxist euphemism it pleased them to label the recipients of their beneficence. The bomb, which exploded prematurely in March of 1970 in a Greenwich Village townhouse, was made of roofing nails and dynamite stuffed into a length of water pipe; the intended target was a dance at the Fort Dix NCO club.
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The Life of Celia

04. May 2012 · Comments Off on The Life of Celia · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, sarcasm, Working In A Salt Mine..., World · Tags: ,

(With apologies to the Obama perpetual re-election campaign. Other people have had a go at this concept – I think The Life of Brian is one of the funniest, but I wanted to have a go at this myself. )

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.
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May Miscellany

04. May 2012 · Comments Off on May Miscellany · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm

Holy krep, is it May already? Guess it must be – time flies when you are having fun. My excuse is that I actually took a whole Sunday off; Blondie and I went up to the World Famous Buda Texas Wienerdog Races on Sunday, and I have been working alternately on two paid projects all this week to catch up. So – barely able to keep up with the news, such as it is, between all this and noodling around in the kitchen making another wheel of Leicester cheese and starting two crocks of home-made sauerkraut. All this German stuff is starting to catch up to me, I swear.

Sauerkraut, red potatoes and nice little sausages from the best meat market in New Braunfels, all cooked up in the same pan, make a darned tasty meal. (The recipe is on my book blog, under “The Splendid Table” page. No, seriously – good eats. I’ve begun to wonder, tasting the glories of home-made cheese, how good are the pickles that we have canned, and the sauerkraut which will eventually emerge from the canning kettle.)
Anyway – the news is it’s usual bounty of the richly comic:

Like Professor Elizabeth Warren, who looks like an older version of a Bund Deutcher Madel recruiting poster (League of German Maidens, the female version of the Hitler Youth) claiming to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian … ok, then. Now and again, I met people who told me they were part whatever American Indian. A fair number of them were blue-eyed blonds, which led me to assume that … certain physical traits must have been pretty darned recessive. Even if my friend Esther T. who was one-eighth Shoshone did look like Geronimo got up in drag as a Wagnerian soprano. So who’s really a minority, when you look at first glance like a member of the majority class? Oh, and I won’t even get into how the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous is almost a dead-spit look-alike to my brother J.P. – who in spite of having dark hair and brown eyes and used to tan very easily … is a person of unmixed pallor, Anglo-Saxon and protestant descent for as far back as family records go. Seriously. But honestly, how seriously can you take this s**t these days?

I see where some Occupy Whatever doofuses had a plot to blow up a bridge. But they didn’t have the wit to see that all their needs for explosives were being met by surprisingly helpful FBI informants. I am being reminded of those dear sweet days in the late 60s and early 70s, when law enforcement alphabet agencies made up a substantial portion of the membership of so many of these fringe little groups with violent inclinations. Apparently, they were the only ones willing to come to tedious meetings and reliably pay their dues. I kid, I kid.

And now that all the jollies have been wrung out of President Obama’s boyhood proclivities for chowing down on chow (and hound, and peke and collie), I guess now it’s time to make fun of his composite girlfriends. Seriously, he had girlfriends, composite or individual? My impression was that he was too much in love with himself to get involved with an outsider, but OK … You know, after a certain point, when enough stuff has been composited, created, massaged and shaped, you may as well call it fiction, not a memoir.
And that’s my week. Working up a piece to accompany the administrations latest bit of work “The Life of Julia” will call for a separate entry of it’s own.

(links below – somehow the posting of embedded links on this blog is frelled beyond redemption.)
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/edit/a.3037076371979.2121366.1415091659/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls
http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/one-pan-wurst-supper/

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