There are boys enough in the movies now, all dressed up in costume and mincing around, waving the prop weapons in a manner meant to be intimidating. Generally they look a bit nervous doing so. They have light boyish voices, narrow defoliated chests, delicate chins adorned with a wisp of beard, and sometimes they come across as clever, even charming company for the leading lady or as the wily sidekick to the first name on the bill, but as hard as they try to project mature and solid masculinity they remain boys, all dressed up in costume pretending to be men. Even when they try for a bit of presence, they still project a faintly apologetic air. Imagine Peter Pan in camo BDUs, desert-boots, full battle-rattle and rucksack. It’s a far cry from picturing John Wayne in the same get-up. Where have all the cowboys gone?
You could not really describe John Wayne as movie-star handsome; neither could you honestly say that Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, Charlton Heston or William Holden were movie-star handsome. They had something more – magnetic physical presence. They owned a room, just by walking into it. They had lived-in faces, especially as they got older, rough-hewn, weathered and individual faces, broad shoulders, strong and capable hands, and total confidence in themselves – even when the plot necessitated a bit of self-doubt. They had growly, gravelly voices, and sometimes didn’t talk much at all. They even had enough strength and confidence to be tender – at least, when not everyone was looking. They and their like – of whom John Wayne was the epitome – were capable enough that even an equally strong and capable woman could breathe a sigh of relief when they walked in. Because, no matter how bad it was, they could cope, and they wouldn’t see her as a threat – and afterwards, they would be perfect gentlemen, either pitching woo or walking away, whatever the situation called for. With the current crop, one always has the lingering fear that in a rough spot, the strong and capable woman would be carrying them, metaphorically if not literally. This would never happen with John Wayne.
He was just one of many leading men from the 1930s on, but for three generations and more of moviegoers, John Wayne established the standard. Although he could wear a suit and tie, he did not look particularly comfortable in it; better in an open-collared shirt and bandana, Levi jeans, boots, a working-man’s clothes with the sleeves rolled up, or battledress utilities – and a weapon to hand that one would be absolutely confident that he would use, if necessary. He would not be particularly eager to use it – but he would, when pressed to a certain limit. That was John Wayne in his element, no matter what the title of the movie or the situation called for by the plot. Sometimes a loner, quite often not being able to get or keep the girl – but always a gentleman, almost always unfailingly polite to every woman, no matter if she were respectable or not, or even in the case of Maureen O’Hara, estranged by reason of plot device. The kind of understated tension in heroes of the old-movie – that capacity for violence leashed and kept under iron control is strangely endearing, and even reassuring, or at least it used to be. No matter what happened, one was certain that he would protect those he loved, felt loyalty towards or pity for, or even . . . just because it was the right thing to do. Damn, do I miss John Wayne and his kind, after watching so many movies lately, starring the pretty, beardless boys!
The only solution I could come up with was to create a handful of characters in the John Wayne tradition, and write about them, in my own books: strong, capable, un-self pitying men, and the women who come to stand shoulder to shoulder with them.
“You were a Marine? Oh, I could never do that, X.”
Where X is a phrase like ‘I could never stand the discipline’ or ‘I could not stand being yelled at’ or ‘I hate it when people tell me what to do’.
This is bullshit.
All of us put ourselves under discipline for one reason or another, and we do it willingly.
If you can make the team, hold down a job, graduate college, learn a skill, you can certainly stand four years in the military. Don’t have to be an automaton, don’t have to loose your individuality, neither. Me, I had a problem with authority [1] for few years, until I settled down: I did okay.
It’s just that the consequences of screwing up in the military are more immediate. Present a failure to adapt in the office, the consequences are slow or no promotion, loss of pay. It’s all very slow and gradual. Failure to adapt in the military and you will find yourself doing many, many, push-ups with a metaphorical boot up your ass.
Funny – I have only heard this from younger people who have not found themselves, or older folks who are clearly losers. Adults making a living . . . not so much.
[1] And I have the Page 11 entries [2] to prove it.
[2] Page 11 is page in the Serviceman’s Record Book (SRB) where the bad stuff [3] is chronicled.
[3] The Corps, in it’s wisdom, arranged the SRB very neatly. Page 11 – the bad stuff – comes first. The page with the good stuff, next. The first thing your new C.O. sees as he pages through is the list of bad stuff, neatly typed and arranged line by line. Which totally eliminates any kind of distance between one’s youthful escapades and the present day. The first thing any CO will say is ‘Hmm. I see offenses X, Y, and Z. (long pause) We going to have any problems?'[4] [5]
[4] I do believe they rehearse this line at The Basic School.
[5] The one exception to this was Master Gunnery Sergent Howard, then the (so I was told) senior WM in the Marines, or at least in the 4000 MOS. She said ‘I see you had offenses X, Y, and Z. (short pause) Clean slate as far as I am concerned. Don’t fuck up anymore.’ Gob’less you Master Gunnery Sergeant Howard.
So, a scattershot essay with a number of different topics that have come bubbling up to the top of my admittedly scattered attention this last week:
The Neighbors from Hell, part –I-don’t-know-how-many, there are just too many to count. See, there are bad neighbors who commit sins of omission, such as not mowing their lawn, keeping up with house maintenance, or just have an aesthetic sense that does not jibe with the others in the ‘hood. Every neighborhood seems to have a couple of those; people who are just fricking clueless. Think of them as small lumps in the happy oatmeal of life. Sometimes you can work with them, bring them around to the right way of doing things, but generally it’s not worth the effort. Just look away from them as much as you can, and call city Code Compliance only when absolutely necessary, because they just might turn into Neighbors from Hell – the other kind of bad neighbor; the aggressive, sins-of-commission kind. The ones who deliberately court offense, who declare open war upon another neighbor, and generally do their best to create Suburban Hell; I’d guess that this piece o’work is that kind of neighbor. Frankly, I’m glad she’s not ours, and extend my heartfelt sympathy to the people who are.
Life on the border, Falcon Lake edition: kinda hard to say at this point exactly has been going on there . . . save to say that the just-south-o’the-border lawless’n’drug-gang situation has been heading to the proverbial nether regions in the proverbial wicker-work carrying container for quite some time now. Seriously, it’s getting really, really bad. Blondie was freaking out this spring when my SO and his snowbird friends and I went to Progresso, Mexico for a day jaunt. How bad is it going to get in the next five months? The odds on some horrific cross-border affray which might actually make the Mainstream f*****g Media sit up and pay attention due to the penetration distance within the US, the number of innocent lives messily lost and the presence of YouTube video detailing every splatter are pretty high. Just my semi-educated guess, people. Just my guess.
Kind of nice, how everybody wants to be a Tea Partier now, isn’t it? Or at least, not be an incumbent. (November is coming – I can see it from my house!) Seriously, everyone is pretty well wise to the method of getting expensive federal government crap for your district, and expecting to get votes in response? They are bribing us with our own money, people. It’s a local and parochial benefit, at the expense of the long-term national good. Personally, I don’t think any federal or state installation should be named after a local politician still living, but that’s just me.
Which brings me to Jerry Brown getting the NOW endorsement not twenty-four hours after being inadvertently recorded as calling Meg Whitman a whore . . . Guess she isn’t the right kind of feminist. Funny, that. Reminds me of why I no longer subscribe to Ms. Magazine. Or identify myself as a capital F feminist . . . It seems as if only the properly credentialed can apply. Screw that, and identity politics generally.
All this, and the Great VFW Endorsement disaster, which I think must be close kin to the AARP ObamaCare endorsement disaster. Way to go, people . . . umm, or way to go those at the tippy-top of such national organizations who have decided it is nicer to go along to get along than pay attention to the real interests and needs of those who have joined your association voluntarily. Shoot yourself in the foot, much?
Well, that should get you off to a good Monday start. No need to thank me, I live to serve.
Sgt. Mom
PS – Apparently someone winged a book at the Mighty O-man last night at a speech – and missed by a narrow margin, but no one knows the title of the book! My guess is a copy of the Constitution, or maybe the Federalist Papers. Blondie ventures: “Maybe a copy of that craptacular autobiography and they wanted a refund!”
This five-day long celebration of books and music has been going on for a good few years; two weekends ago, I made the five-hour long drive from San Antonio to participate in the Hall of Texas Authors – for the second time. The Hall – that’s the main display room at the Abilene Convention Center, wherein local authors and a handful of publishers (some established and well known, some whom only hope to be established and well known at some future date) have a table-top display of their books on the last day of the festival. All during the week there are concerts, a medley of free and open events, readings and panel discussions. All of this has several stated intentions: to benefit the Abilene Public Library system and to support their programs, for one, to spotlight local and regional musical and authorial talent, for another, and for a third, to promote Abilene as a cultural Mecca and tourist destination. It isn’t New York or Las Vegas, by any stretch of the imagination yet, but that isn’t for lack of trying.
Abilene, you see, was established in the boom years of the Wild West: every element embedded in popular imagination about the Wild West was present there for one reason or another, from the classical wood-frame buildings, wooden-sidewalk and dusty streets visualization of a typical frontier town, the railways and occasional Indian warfare, to cattle drives and gunfights in the streets and saloons. (And the Butterfield Stage line, buffalo hunters, teamsters, traders and Army posts, too.) A lot of interesting stuff happened in and around Abilene, and a fair number of interesting people passed through town, or nearby. Many of these people are featured in a state-of the art museum called Frontier Texas, where there was a nice get-together for visiting authors, for volunteers and various members of the Abilene literary scene on Friday evening. I was especially interested in meeting one of the two big-name featured authors: Scott Zesch, whose book The Captured, was an account of white children kidnapped by Indians in raids on Hill Country settlements during and just after the Civil War. The story of his great-great-uncle, captured as a boy of ten or so, and eventually returned to his white family haunted me. Such a cruel thing, to loose a child, get the child back years later – and then to discover that the child has been lost to you for all time; I simply had to make that a plot twist in my own book. He’s from Mason, and from one of the old German families who settled the Hill Country. Anyway, interesting person to speak with, and listen to: he spoke briefly at that gathering and at the awards luncheon the following day. He is another of those completely convinced that a place like the frontier was so filled with interesting and heroic people, of fantastic events and things that seem too bizarre to be true (but are!) – and furthermore are almost unknown – that a writer can’t help but try and make a ripping good yarn out of them. The second featured writer had done just that, with creating a novel about a relatively unknown hero: Paulette Jiles, whose book The Color of Lightning was about Britt Johnson – supposedly one of the inspirations for the storyline of the movie The Searchers. It looks like Britt Johnson may get a movie in his own right, according to what Ms. Jiles said at the awards luncheon. The script for a movie based on Color of Lightning is in the works – all about how he went looking for his wife and children, taken by Indian raiders in 1864, and went back again and again, looking for other captives. He was, as Ms. Jiles said in her own remarks, very proper classical hero material: on a quest for something of great value to him, against considerable odds, blessed with a companion animal (his horse), good friends, and lashings of pluck and luck, so it is only fair that he get to be better known than in just dry-as-dust local historical circles. (Blondie and I inadvertently toured the Frontier Texas exhibits with her; just three of us and a hovering volunteer/docent. I didn’t recognize her – not being good at remembering faces. That is, I recognize people that I have seen before, but not always remember who they are or where I know them from.)
I sold a few sets of the Trilogy in the Author’s Hall the next day, and passed out a lot of fliers about my own books – including the one that’s due out in April, 2011 – but it’s not about sales, it’s more about getting out there and connecting with readers and potential readers.
And some darned nice BBQ, too – but that came later, from the Riverside Market in Boerne, on the way home. Only in Texas!
So, after a year and three-quarters of the existence of the political entity known as the Tea Party (only it isn’t really a party, just a sort of decentralized mass movement) said movement is getting a little respect. Fearful respect, to be sure – but ever such an improvement on crude and ignorant denigration! Oh, we’re still getting the denigration, but it has become a little more muted lately, and use of the epithet t******er is not as frequent as formerly, possibly because the media personalities who delighted in using it may have discovered that a good-sized subset of the viewing audience took exception and offense . . . which might have affected ratings, and audience share and the sales of advertising time. Myself, I can deal with fearful respect, and so – no doubt – can the rest of those scattered the length and breadth of the Land of the Free Home of the Brave who cherish Tea Party principles. Especially when the fearful respect comes from the likes of Dick Armey . . . or from RINO squishes who come to love the perks of office so much they will do anything, and say anything to stay there. Yes, it was most especially amusing – since I have not the slightest shred of a doubt that the senior GOP strategists and long-serving office holders were quite absolutely sure – right up until the last few weeks – that Tea Party principles would automatically translate into votes for Republican candidates. Booted, spurred and ready to ride, they seemed to think that all was necessary to do was to saddle that Tea Party mustang, and it would obey.
The Dems also assumed – and trumpeted it loudly and often – that the Tea Parties were nothing more than great swaths of GOP Astroturf; the GOP’s sudden horrid discovery vis-à -vis the biddability of Tea Partiers is presumably as much of a surprise to them as well. I can only assume they were goggle-eyed with horror, upon making this discovery, since you’d have thought a canny strategist would have known the words of Sun Tzu.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Ah, yes – the dear old Donks, they may know themselves but, I am pretty sure they do not know Tea Party: they know only a caricature of the Tea Party. I derived some innocent merriment these last few months, visualizing the expressions on the faces of various political operatives in the current administration, the higher reaches of the Democrat Party and their water-carriers in the media, as they tried to counter the Tea Party – and discovered that none of their favored tactics worked. I swear it’s been like Wily Coyote, Super-Genius trying to catch the Road-Runner. The results were pretty much uniform; Wily Coyote scorched to a crisp, forming a neat crater at the bottom of a deep ravine, or augered in by a falling 5,000 lb weight – and meanwhile, the Tea Party elements pause for a brief moment, shout meep-meep and zip on, unfazed and . . . more to the point, un-distracted.
So, one more time, just to make everything clear: The Tea Party is a loosely organized, essentially leaderless and distributed political insurgency, holding these things as our highest values: fiscal responsibility, strict adherence to the Constitution, small government and free markets.
Everything else is secondary: believe me when I say this. Everything else is secondary. People who hold to those principles may also have strong convictions about illegal immigration, social issues, gun rights, home schooling or any number of other current rights-and-issues brangles; some of these Tea Party supporters may have had a long history of advocacy with regard to these issues, but they are not the Tea Party’s main motivating influence. And even though the Tea Party did not exist in anything like the currently accepted form, there were some of us whose concern with federal government excess – to include ill-advised regulations and ballooning deficits – predated the anointing of President Obama. It’s just that damn few in the media, or anywhere else outside the blogosphere gave a rat’s ass, and most of us were lone voices, crying in the wilderness. Just because it didn’t make the headlines doesn’t mean such concerns didn’t exist before 2008.
And just so that we can get that straight – when it comes to President Obama, it’s not the color of his skin, it’s the content of his character, and his admittedly thin resume. (And his weird Chicago friends, his effortless rise to the top unassisted by actual accomplishment, and of late, his propensity for vacations and golf days.) Which a scattering of us were pointing out in 2008, for all the good it did come Election Day. Curiously, in many of the admittedly libertarian/fiscally conservative/veteran circles in which I have been hanging out since 2002; a President and Commander in Chief of color was pretty well accepted – it’s just that we all thought then that Colin Powell or Condi Rice would have been a better bet, as well has having a much more reassuring resume and some, you know, real-world experience. Demanding that Tea Party leaders do, or denounce, or disavow something or other, just to prove something-or-other? Good luck with that. Leaderless, distributed political insurgency, strong emphasis on the leaderless, high value given to individual personal initiative and responsibility. Think D-Day, when everything on the beaches had gone to s**t, but individual NCOs and soldiers stepped out and did what they knew had to be done.
Some of the Tea Partiers I began to know over the last year came from a strong evangelical Christian background, which in this part of the world is hard to avoid. A casual observer might assume that the Tea Party is an evangelical Christian movement – and the casual observer would be wrong. Frankly, not too many of us had any heartburn over Bristol Palin’s baby, Scott Brown’s college pinups, or Christine O’Donnell’s flirtation with witchcraft. Seriously, the evangelical Tea Partiers were supposed to get all bent out of shape over all that? OK, I realize that a lot of people took their ideas about Evangelical Christians from Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady . . . but what did I say about Sun Tzu, again? One more time – the main thing is fiscal responsibility, small federal government, free market, strict adherence to the Constitution. Social issues – secondary importance. A good few other Tea Partiers were cranky and independent libertarian types, and not conventionally religious in any way. In fact, in our own quiet way, a lot of us are pretty worldly. Quite a few are military veterans, small and medium-sized business owners, a good few were bloggers, and well-versed in the ways of the internet as a means of informing and coordinating.
About Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News? Not our leaders. Sarah Palin? Not our leader either. Personally, I never cared much for the first two, never watch the second unless there’s some local disaster – but I did think that picking the fourth for the VP slot on the GOP ticket for 2008 was a stroke of genius. So, mayor of a small town, effective governor of a pretty large state – and with high local approval ratings; nah – don’t believe the lady is an idiot, a fascist or an ignorant hillbilly, not for a moment. But if it satisfies something in the soul of those of the progressive persuasion to think so . . . well, Sun Tzu again. Or whoever it was that advised never interrupting your enemy in the process of making a complete douche of him or herself.
So, after a year and some of being constantly belittled as ignorant, closed-minded bitter clingers and racists – how do I feel? That holding to that line has probably bounced back and resoundingly. Because those of us who are Tea Partiers know it isn’t true. And those who are close to us – friends, co-workers, neighbors and kin; I think they have probably figured out by now that it isn’t true also. Those of us within the Tea Party movement – we can keep our cool, and be a bigger person about the mindless abuse and constant rain of accusations – but don’t for a moment think that we have forgotten, or will ever forget the names of the worst offenders.
So, everyone clear on the concept? Good. I can see November from my house. And until then, a musical interlude. Enjoy.
Accept that vampires are real. Ignore the mystical mumb-jumbo krep about souls: merely hyper-intelligent apex predators.
Being not complete dummies, they wish to conserve their stock of prey, homo sapiens.
Western Civilization is about progress. More social integration, better technology, members are citizens, not serfs. There are more of us, we’re healthier. But we’re better armed, now, and can effectively fight back. A society that can effectively organize to eliminate blood-sucking ghouls is, from vampire-kind’s point of view, double-plus un-good.
Western Civilization is a danger to vampire-kind.
Eliminating this threat is tricky. Push one way, anniliation and mass die-off. Push too hard in another, you get a stronger culture.
The prudent thing for Vampires to do is slowly devolve this civilization into a mass of superstition, gullibility, and malleability. People who will depend not on themselves for their needs and their thinking: the President, the pop star on teevee, someone. They require prey smart enough to feed themselves, but not so smart they question what goes on around them: dumb down the schools, eliminate critical thinking.
The end-game is a gentle decline into fuedalism and a new Dark Age. Ideal hunting grounds for vampires.
Serfs, not citizens. Prey, not competition.
I submit that the actions of certain elements of the Progressive wing of politics in America are indistinguisible from the actions of blood-sucking ghouls.
Progressives are vampires, man. The majority of humans in that wing are, at best, deluded dupes.
A former coworker put it very well (about running something through a table saw w/o glasses or something). “If something goes wrong, I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I had this moment in time back so I could make a different decision. I have that moment now. Let me make the decision I’m going to wish I made. “
This five-day long celebration of books and music has been going on for a good few years; this is the second time that I made the five-hour long drive from San Antonio to participate in the Hall of Texas Authors. The Hall – that’s the main display room at the Abilene Convention Center, wherein local authors and a handful of publishers (some established and well known, some whom only hope to be established and well known at some future date) have a table-top display of their books on the last day of the festival. All during the week there are concerts, a medley of free and open events, readings and panel discussions. All of this has several stated intentions: to benefit the Abilene Public Library system and to support their programs, for one, to spotlight local and regional musical and authorial talent, for another, and for a third, to promote Abilene as a cultural Mecca and tourist destination. It isn’t New York or Las Vegas, by any stretch of the imagination yet, but that isn’t for lack of trying.
Abilene, you see, was established in the boom years of the Wild West: every element embedded in popular imagination about the Wild West was present there for one reason or another, from the classical wood-frame buildings, wooden-sidewalk and dusty streets visualization of a typical frontier town, the railways and occasional Indian warfare, to cattle drives and gunfights in the streets and saloons. (And the Butterfield Stage line, buffalo hunters, teamsters, traders and Army posts, too.) A lot of interesting stuff happened in and around Abilene, and a fair number of interesting people passed through town, or nearby. Many of these people are featured in a state-of the art museum called Frontier Texas, where there was a nice get-together for visiting authors, for volunteers and various members of the Abilene literary scene on Friday evening. I was especially interested in meeting one of the two big-name featured authors: Scott Zesch, whose book The Captured, was an account of white children kidnapped by Indians in raids on Hill Country settlements during and just after the Civil War. The story of his great-great-uncle, captured as a boy of ten or so, and eventually returned to his white family haunted me. Such a cruel thing, to loose a child, get the child back years later – and then to discover that the child has been lost to you for all time; I simply had to make that a plot twist in my own book. He’s from Mason, and from one of the old German families who settled the Hill Country. Anyway, interesting person to speak with, and listen to: he spoke briefly at that gathering and at the awards luncheon the following day. He is another of those completely convinced that a place like the frontier was so filled with interesting and heroic people, of fantastic events and things that seem too bizarre to be true (but are!) – and furthermore are almost unknown – that a writer can’t help but try and make a ripping good yarn out of them.
The second featured writer had done just that, with creating a novel about a relatively unknown hero: Paulette Jiles, whose book The Color of Lightning was about Britt Johnson – supposedly one of the inspirations for the storyline of the movie The Searchers. It looks like Britt Johnson may get a movie in his own right, according to what Ms. Jiles said at the awards luncheon. The script for a movie based on Color of Lightning is in the works – all about how he went looking for his wife and children, taken by Indian raiders in 1864, and went back again and again, looking for other captives. He was, as Ms. Jiles said in her own remarks, very proper classical hero material: on a quest for something of great value to him, against considerable odds, blessed with a companion animal (his horse), good friends, and lashings of pluck and luck, so it is only fair that he get to be better known than in just dry-as-dust local historical circles. (The Daughter Unit and I inadvertently toured the Frontier Texas exhibits with her; just three of us and a hovering volunteer/docent. I didn’t recognize her – not being good at remembering faces. That is, I recognize people that I have seen before, but not always remember who they are or where I know them from.)
I sold a few sets of the Trilogy in the Author’s Hall the next day, and passed out a lot of fliers about my own books – including the one that’s due out in April, 2011 – but it’s not about sales, it’s more about getting out there and connecting with readers and potential readers.
And some darned nice BBQ, too – but that came later, from the Riverside Market in Boerne, on the way home. Only in Texas!
My surfing of the information superhighway today led me to a blog post by one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Moon. As I began reading her post, I really liked what she was saying about good and bad citizenship, and what is expected of citizens.
The first paragraph drew me in – how could it not? (emphasis mine)
I was on a “Politics in SF” panel at Dragon*Con which once more convinced me that a lot of people should’ve been made to read “The Man Without a Country” a few more times. Though, with the sneering generation (Baby Boomers, starting a year after my unnamed contingent, were spectacularly good sneerers) that probably would not have had the desired effect…my desired effect, at least, which would be to remind people that the person with no loyalty to anything but his/her own pleasure is not a noble hero of individualism, but a pathetic failure as a human being.
Well, I liked it up until the paragraph I quote below… the next few paragraphs after this one also irk me, because she only picks on conservatives and business-people (Pres. Bush & Ken Lay, respectively), without noticing that what she describes cuts across party lines.
The post I’m quoting can be found here: click me. Again, any emphasis is my own.
This nation was founded with an overt appeal to universal rights of mankind–those stated (but not stated to be all) being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the survival of this nation depended then, and has depended since, on citizens taking responsibility, not just liberty, as one of the rights of mankind. Had the signers of the Declaration been as wedded to personal liberty as the right wing today, there would have been no successful Revolution. For these men, who pledged their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the cause, did not want total freedom for themselves–they did not demand that others bear the burdens so they could ride in the well-sprung coach.
Ummm… I don’t think it’s the right-wing that demands others “bear the burdens so they can ride in the well-sprung coach.” I think it’s the folks who want to do away with the colonial Jamestown edict that he who did not work would not eat. Although again, I’m confident it cuts across all party lines.
They were familiar with, and based their concept of citizenship on, ancient understanding of citizenship–that courage/fortitude, integrity, temperance, sound judgment were all desirable virtues which, if held by all citizens, would knit together a culture otherwise tolerant of diversity. They knew enough of human nature to know that no nation had yet achieved such a citizenry–that it was unlikely to exist in future even with the best possibilities–but they knew it was worth trying for.
She moves on to talk about 9/11, and The Mosque. You know the one – it’s been in all the news, and all the blogs, and all the emails. That Mosque. And her words have aroused a firestorm among certain people, folks who are fans of her books, and would most likely agree with her comments that I quoted above, and the paragraphs that followed after it.
…in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population. (snip)
Whether a group changes its core behaviors and values after immigration or not, it must–to be assimilated later–come to understand the culture into which it has moved. To get along, it must try not to do those things which will, sure as eggs is eggs, create friction, distrust, and dislike. (snip) A group must grasp that if its non-immigrant members somewhere else are causing people a lot of grief (hijacking planes and cruise ships, blowing up embassies, etc.) it is going to have a harder row to hoe for awhile, and it would be prudent (another citizenly virtue) to a) speak out against such things without making excuses for them and b) otherwise avoid doing those things likely to cause offence.
The firestorm was such that she has since deleted the comments and closed comments on the post. But she says things that have been said here, and in other blogs that I read, and on other message boards that I read, and she speaks the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth may be to those who are now up in arms and ready to boycott her. I’m not quoting the portion everyone took issue with, I’m quoting the portion that we don’t hear often enough.
But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing…but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a “peace and reconciliation” program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque–but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was–totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.
I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E….(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don’t give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don’t get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution…I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country.
And then she ruins it all for me with her final line.
(And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There’s been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)
Elizabeth Moon. Award-winning author. Texas Native. Former Marine. Statist. *sigh*
So it begins – the seeing of what was screamingly obvious to me a good few months ago; the horrified realization among the politically connected (especially in the GOP) that the loose confederation which amassed under the yellow Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake motif and goes by the name of the Tea Party is not just a sort of mass temper-tantrum, or a collection of irate voters to be gentled, tamed and gelded to better serve the purposes of the Grand Old Party. Nor are they – being a loosely connected and leaderless network of fiscal conservatives, free-market small business owners and strict constitutionalists – a tool and Astroturf organization deliberately created by the machinations of the Dark Lord Rove. Nope – the fact the Dark Lord himself got downright pissy over the fact that Christine O’Donnell scooped the primary in Delaware over the favored GOP candidate . . . and then went on to demonstrate that financially, she has no need of the established lords of the GOP and their deep coffers. It’s not just a case of the tail wagging the dog; the high lords of the established American political process (Republican Division) have discovered to their absolute horror that in this political season, the Tea Party is not the tail . . . but the dog itself, and they have been reduced to being the tail. Or possibly the materiel which emerges regularly from a little bit south of the tail – but I don’t think they will be the first to come to this realization, nor will they be the last.
See – if you really had paid attention to the Tea Party, or been deeply involved from the get-go, you’d have known a number of things about them. One of those things is that – although a fair number of original Tea Partiers are social conservatives, even evangelical Christians – the fiscal-conservative/free market/strict constitutionalist mindset trumps all that. There’s also a strong libertarian bent among them, and a prejudice towards individual responsibility. Basically, it’s ‘let me alone to work out my own economic/personal salvation’ which usually results in statist tools pouncing triumphantly and saying things like “Ah-ha! So you don’t want roads, or police departments, or an FDA screening dangerous drugs, or social security – hah! You hypocrites!†This is something of an exercise in straw-man construction when it comes to Tea Partiers; generally we acknowledge that a government is good for something: roads, delivery of the post, defense of the nation, and a care for the health of the public are good things, and the rightful interest of a representative government elected by the people. It’s just that a good thing taken too far eventually becomes a bad thing . . . and in the words of that wonderful document, the Declaration of Independence ‘destructive of those ends.’ The way to Hell is paved with good intentions – in the eyes of Tea Partiers, a cold and unsparing look at the long-term results of those various good intentions is way, way past due, as well as a reconsideration of maintaining such programs which grew, like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, out of good intentions some thirty, fifty or eighty years ago. Or even severely modifying them – because one of the other unspoken tenets of people who tend to become Tea Partiers – is that if well-intentioned laws, programs and practices have a bad result in the real world, than perhaps such laws, programs and practices out to be revised, amended or terminated.
All the good intentions in the world do not – repeat, do not – excuse or justify a destructive result. In the real world – that one where one in which most of us live – that which has a bad result should not be continued, full stop, end discussion. It has also been noticed that frequently those who insists that such a law, program or practice ought to be continued with just because of the original good intentions were noble, and that it hasn’t worked because we haven’t worked hard enough at it – have a vested interest in such continuation. As it looks to be shaping up this election season, that kind of blind devotion to principles, lack of consideration to results and self-interest has consequences, some of them severe. Life-threatening, even. Certainly career-threatening, to judge by the way that long-time career Dem politicians are distancing themselves at speed from bagatelles such as Obama-care, and top GOP strategists are regarding primary victories by Tea Party oriented candidates over the properly anointed candidates with horrified disbelief. I can almost hear them saying ‘OMG – they are serious about small-governments and the Constitution!’
So, what do you call it when you – theoretically speaking – have a certain designated freedom bestowed upon you, such as freedom of speech or thought . . . but you are afraid to exercise it, for whatever reason? What then, oh wolves; are you then truly free if you are constrained from exercising that right because . . . ? If honest discussion of certain topics is essentially forbidden because it is infra dig, or rude, or may cause hurt feelings to another, or offend a segment of society, then can we still claim that we have freedom of speech, or any sort of intellectual openness, even if convictions for sedition or blasphemy are relatively rare in the West? That speech is still unspoken, those thoughts un-aired are still un-aired, whether it is fear, social pressure or the rule of law what keeps them so.
Which brings me back to the matter of the Danish Mohammad cartoons – even after four years, the matter is still resonating: at the time I wrote this:
(It) depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon – but a dozen relatively tame cartoons? Oh, dear – we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Muslims. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people . . . The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
The latest iteration in this farrago of freedom of the press is the fatwah on American cartoonist Molly Norris, who originally created “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.†The fatwah originated in Yemen, a place which I am sure a great many members of the American public would have difficulty pin-pointing it’s exact location on a map of the world. But the tentacles of the murderously offended reach a long way. She is now in hiding, and in various discussion threads, a dismayingly large number of commenters are blaming her for provoking Moslem ire.
But that is my point – what good is it to have brave principles about open, intellectual discussion, freedom of the press, of thought and expression, if in the end they are not exercised out of fear?
Here’s the thing – the other half of the intellectual freedom thing; there is no right of the individual never to be offended. In a free and open discussion, there will be differing opinions and interpretations, and there may even be people offended by the exercise of it. God knows, the artistic set have been cheerfully offending the bourgeoisie for decades, on the principle that it is good for us to be shaken up now and again, just to make us all consider or reconsider our preconceptions, or expand our consciousnesses or whatever twaddle they will use to justify themselves with. And the good bourgeoisie, even if offended, usually wasn’t motivated to do much more than grumble and write a letter to the editor; they didn’t go around chopping off heads. One might therefore have grounds for suspecting that in the case of the Danish Cartoons o’ Doom, and Everybody Draw Mohammad’ that a good part of this sudden unwillingness to offend is plain old fear.
Compounding the irony is the fact that those who are the most fearful of repercussions are also afraid to openly admit their fear in the first place – that some Islamic radical nutbag would come after them with a knife, or a car-bomb, or even just get their asses fired for ‘Islamophobia.’ So much easier to transfer the blame, and never have to admit that intellectual freedom has been stifled – not by law, but by fear.
11. September 2010 · Comments Off on Repost for 9/11 – In the Shadows of Dissolving Towers · Categories: General
(I wrote this a couple of years ago, and posted last year on Open Salon – reposed for today)
Supposedly, seven years is the time it takes for a human body’s cells to regenerate, to have new cells completely replace the old cells. I don’t know that factoid is true, strictly speaking, or if it just applies to the skin. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it’s not true at all, but is just one of those curiosities which seems right, if somewhat startling at first thought.
Seven years – eight years now, by the calendar; long enough for the scar tissue to grow over, for the breaks in the solid rock underpinning our universe to calcify, to heal over – and for us to become accustomed to living in a world without the silhouette of a pair of silver towers gleaming in the sunshine of a cool September morning. Long enough to become used to the absence, and accustomed to the wrenching changes, to acclimate ourselves to a new reality. But not long enough to become used to the absence, to the space in a life where a husband, a wife, a son or daughter, or a friend used to be. Never long enough to forget the sight of a tall building – first one and then the other – falling into itself, dissolving into a dark blizzard-cloud of smoke and debris, and taking the lives of thousands of people with it. No, never forget that; it’s the vision I see now, whenever I listen to Mozarts’ Requiem.
Eight years of change since that morning, the morning when our world shuddered and for many of us, wrenched itself onto a new track. The changes have come so thick and fast, that the glorious September morning now and again seems to have happened a couple of decades ago. Two wars, one which seems now to be perilously won and the other still in balance, two presidential elections, the rise of a new media, the slow implosion of the old – the aftermath of a violent hurricane devastating the Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast,and any number of other events which strutted and fretted for their moment on the national and international stage; all of this moved the events of one day, the day of 9-11-01 away from a current event and into the pages of history.
But for today, and just for today, we set down the burdens of today for a moment, and remember.
This is the letter I wrote, over the following days, to my next-door neighbors in Athens, upon realizing how worried they would have been.
“Dear Penny and George:
I mailed a cheerful letter to you on Monday, with pictures of my garden and Blondie, but today I have woken up in another country. One of the NPR radio announcers was saying that, today when I was listening to the news, and it’s a bit melodramatic but correct. After Tuesday morning we are all in another country. I know from what I have read, and my mother says so also, that the America on Monday morning, December 8, 1941 was not the same place it had been twenty-four hours before. A lot of things were very, very different. Some of the changes came all at once, some developed more slowly.
I wanted to let you know that I am all right, and so is Blondie and the rest of my family. The trip to Egypt that she was going on is cancelled, a good thing to do considering the circumstances. Being military, we were already acquainted with the idea that your nationality and your uniform make you a target for people you have never met. The sick feeling in the pit of your stomach passes away after a couple of days, and you just take proper precautions and do your job and try not to be too paranoid. The Pentagon being a target was about par for the course, other bases and facilities have been blown up and threatened, it happens all the time. Someone told me once that the Hellenikon base got telephone bomb threats on an average of two or three a night, it was a big yawn and mostly a joke to us. But using commercial passenger planes, full of hundreds of people, crashing them into a huge office building, that goes so far beyond vile that most people cannot even find words.
I was the first person into the office on Tuesday, and I was listening to classical music on the radio and sorting out Mr. P—–s’ appointments. A woman who had his first appointment at 9:00 called to say she would be late, and she was almost hysterical, telling me that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center, she couldn’t stop watching CNN, the building was on fire and I should turn on the news. I switched over to the news at once, of course. The two guys in the back office came in at 10:00 and tuned their radio to another news channel and for the rest of the day we could hardly bear to be out of the sound of them. Blondie kept e-mailing me from her office at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines had access to a higher grade of rumors than even the talk radio channel had, telling me to leave the building and go home at once. It seems that there were several other commercial airliners that could not be accounted for at once, and she insisted that one of them was headed for Texas. As noted frequently, Texas is a big place, and the Mercantile Building (which I work in) is comparatively small, and I had enough work to do, thank you anyway. She called in the afternoon, and when I answered the phone she yelled “I thought I told you to go home!â€. The military is on Threat-Condition D, the highest there is. I don’t think we were ever in Threatcon D, even during the Gulf War. She says all the Marines in the unit were very tense: she walked up behind one of her male buddies and tickled his ear, and he jumped a mile, and nearly slugged her. Mr. P——–s’ sister called from South Carolina, also begging him to go home at once. Blondie begged me to call my parents, have them warn my sister and brothers. I did, just to get her to calm down, and when I got home that night, I called them again. My sister works at Jet Propulsion Labs, in Pasadena— they were sending everyone home at midday.
I walked over to the mall across the road today, to get some lunch, and I have never seen it so empty. All commercial aircraft were grounded, and still are. I have begun to miss the aircraft sliding down past our window on approach to the airport. I went to the grocery store last night on my way home, since I was out of milk. The parking lot a bit emptier, the clerks and other customers seeming a bit abstracted, but plenty of stuff on the shelves. The mail is being delivered, all the little things gratifyingly normal.
Later: Sept. 13
I can’t give blood, since I lived in Europe for so long. (Mad cow disease— and I couldn’t afford beef on the economy anyway!) When I retired, they presented me with a flag in a little triangular case, and I have a bracket on my front porch but no flag staff. I stopped at the hardware store to buy a four-foot length of dowel and some safety cup-hooks, and hung out my flag. People are putting them out on their houses. In my neighborhood it’s mostly the military and the military retirees, but more and more other people are doing so. The cashier in the hardware store told me she had fifteen American flags in stock that morning, but had sold every one of them.
I don’t know what they are writing in the English and the Greek newspapers about “The Mood Of Americans†after Tuesday. It’s a very odd, grim mood,, rather more the post-Dunkirk, stiff-upper-lip, all-in-this-together, get-the-job-done sort of mood that one associates with the British. I think a lot of people (myself included!) would expect Americans to be a bit more demonstrative, even a bit hysterical, but that’s just not the mood at all. Even as the numbness is wearing off, people are being very calm, very rational in accepting that war has been declared on us. And that has been accepted almost unanimously across the board by intellectual and otherwise, and by all political parties. There are the usual loudmouths indulging in petty violence and threats against Moslems, of course. But they are being told firmly to sit down, and shut up. This calamity fell across economic and party lines. There are cleaning women and heads of corporations among the dead, a political commentator, an actress and a couple of TV producers, ordinary people by the hundreds, certainly by the thousands. There were families on the aircraft, and hundreds of New York police and firemen. The single saddest thing I have read so far was of a fireman who was off-duty on Tuesday morning and taking his children to school. He saw his ladder company responding to the first crash, their truck passed him on the street, and all thirty or so were in the collapsing building twenty minutes later. We will not know for weeks how many were still in the Trade Center then, although it has now been well past time for people to have returned home on their own.
I won’t know until they publish a list of the Pentagon dead if any of them are people I knew. So we wait. This morning I drove through my neighborhood on my way to work, listening to the classical station as usual. I noticed more and more flags hanging from the houses, and the radio station began playing Elgar’s “Nimrod†variation, very sad, stately music, you would recognize it. And I was in tears, as I was driving down the street. Perhaps I am a little less numb this morning.
I am all right… just in another country.”
Later – found this through Rantburg (click through for all the pictures)
So, now in the multitudinous fall-out from the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House or Park51, or whatever the heck it’s being termed – is a threat by a Florida whack-job minister to burn Korans as a public demonstration of something or other on Saturday. Cheesncrackers, people, just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any more demented. Is there someone I have to sleep with, in order to live on a planet with sane people, preferably ones with a sense of proportion and humor, not to mention toleration for those who don’t agree with them in every aspect of existence?
Frankly, I’d like to set the good Iman Rauf and the good Reverend Jones down on the other side of my official Sgt. Mom desk for a nice discussion of principles. And those would be principles which would apply to both of them, and yes, I expect to be the one doing the talking.
Yes, there is nothing in this supposedly free country which would prevent the Reverend Jones from incinerating copies of the Koran, as a demonstration of his lack of appreciation for Islam and his ingratitude for the many blessings that the strict practice of Salafist Islam brings to the modern cultural table. And yes, there is also nothing which would legally prevent a mosque/community/cultural center from being established adjacent to that place where there were 5,000 people (give or take) crushed or incinerated when a pair of hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed into two tall and shining skyscrapers nine years ago to the day by representatives of the Religion of Peace.
So, established – they each can do this thing which they want to do, for whatever reasons. And Andres Serrano can take pictures of a crucifix in a vial of his own pee, and Chris O-whatever can adorn a painting of the Virgin with mounds of elephant dung, and Danish cartoonists can do cartoons about how fear of drawing a picture of Mohammad leads to self-censorship, and Salman Rushdie can joke around with Satanic Versifying and all of that is perfectly OK in a free country, or it ought to be.
But where is the line to be drawn, then? And if you are offended by one or the other, than what is the acceptable response? Letter to the editor, an angry post on a blog, a boycott? Threatening violence? Should the fear of violence lead one to self-censor? What about a fear of offending people? Why is it OK to offend one particular class of people by your actions in support of religion or art, but tip-toe around giving offense to the other? Exactly what is the standard at work here, and who decides to apply it? And hey, isn’t the poor old bourgeois getting a little tired of being constantly epatered?
At the risk of being viewed as a skinless person in a sandpaper world, I have to admit that in the last couple of years or so, I have really added more and more actors, entertainers, musicians and writers to my own private boycott list – in fact, I have added more in the last year by a factor of twenty to one than I ever added over the last three decades. I still can’t decide if this is because my toleration of stupid celebrities mouthing off has just withered away to the thickness of tissue paper in recent years, or there are just more stupid celebrities who feel obliged to step up to the plate and make a demonstration of their general f**kwittedness in those intervals when they are not actually entertaining us.
Jane “Hanoi†Fonda was the first actress that went on my personal no-dice list, for historic reasons which should need no explanation here. Hasn’t made a movie in years, but I skipped the exercise tapes as well, just on general principles. Next on the list – Cat Stephens, following the 1989 fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie for the Satanic Verses. Mr. Cat publicly supported the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khoumeni. Frankly, the only output of Mr. Cat which merited my boycotting was his hit Peace Train– which had achieved the status of a Golden Oldie by that time. Eh – we had a library full of Golden Oldies, when I was working as a AFRTS radio dee-jay. I was happy to play anything other than Peace Train for all the rest of my time serving in this duty. I suppose I ought to add in Marlon Brando, post-Apocalypse Now, for general serious weirdness, elephantiasis of the ego and screwing up what could have been a fairly decent movie. And as much as I could, I avoided John Landis. Not for anything he said – but for directorial incompetence in setting up a film-stunt involving a hovering helicopter in the Twilight Zone Movie, which managed to kill Vic Morrow and a pair of child-actor extras. Basically, he skated away from manslaughter charges on that one. Call me Miss Judgmental, but I cherish my grudges.
Move on into this present century, and what riches there are, as far as Celebs Mouthing Off! Really, one is spoiled for choice. Induction into my personal hall of shame is reduced from something that would resemble Grand Central Station at rush hour through the happy chance of not being particular fans of certain directors, actors, musicians and writers anyway. Having never watched anything of Oliver Stone’s oeuvre after Platoon, and nothing at all of Michael Moore’s – eh. Is it really a boycott if you never watched them anyway? Or a star who never really appealed, like Barbara Streisand? On the other hand, it’s a bit of a mild wrench to walk away from actors and writers whom I really did enjoy watching, or reading, once upon a time; Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon, and Jane Smiley. (Hey, I loved Moo, and the Greenlanders.) Rosie O’Donnell once was funny; she had the best lines evah! in A League of Their Own. I suppose the biggest wrench of all was not listening to Garrison Keillor any more. I used to love Prairie Home Companion, and never missed an airing of the show on Saturday afternoons, or the repeat airing the next day . . . but GK just got too one-sided with the political comedy, too snide and mean-spirited, and finally it just got too much.
Really, I would have preferred to think of actors, singers and the like to be just another sort of well-trained, costumed, performing monkey. Put on the costume, go out on stage or on the set, say the lines, and then go the hell away; don’t lecture me about politics, religion, the environment, politics or nuclear war from the bully pulpit of your celebrity. The odds are that my opinions on any and all of those matters will probably differ, and in some cases, differ substantially from a large chunk of those in the audience – and presuming to lecture me from a position of presumed moral authority on your part will have the effect of seriously annoying me. It may seriously annoy me to the point of not going to your movies and shows, watching or listening to them on radio and television, and never buying any of your DVDs or CDs – ever again. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks and think of that as a cautionary tale. I am sure that they felt all morally-superierly after kicking their fan-base in the teeth, but having an appeal which is becoming increasingly selective does translate to a smaller audience; not a good thing in the long run. Audiences do not remain around forever, Wayne Newton to the contrary. Encouraging them to head at speed for the exits – not a good long-time career move.
Which is not to say that celebs shouldn’t have opinions or take up causes near and dear to their hearts. Heck, save the whales, adopt an orphan, dish up meals for the homeless, come and help bail out a flooded area, convert to an off-brand religious sect, whatever. Just don’t beat us over the heads with it, ‘kay? Walk the fine line, keeping in mind that we’ve got our own causes and our own problems.
Been kind of amusing, surfing the blogosphere in the wake of the Beck rally last weekend – the usual quibble over how many people were actually there, as if a threshold of so many people crammed elbow to elbow at the Lincoln Memorial actually will confer legitimacy/credibility in the eyes of our so-called bettors, looking down their lorgnettes from the lofty heights and sniffing “Oh, honestly, who do those plebs think they are?†Still, 300,000 or half a million, sweating in the hot sun in a crowded venue; for every one who actually attended, how many would have been there, but couldn’t afford it in these economic hard times, or had obligations elsewhere. How many watched it on television, or on streaming video, and wished they had been there?
How many more will come to the 9/12 rally – more than last year? I know very well that the Restore Honor rally was more of Glenn Beck’s ecumenical religious revival thing, whereas this years’ 9/12 march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol is intended as a tax-payer’s protest and organized by a far wider coalition of groups generally lumped together under the heading “Party of Tea.†In a fair number of so-called elite minds, though, the two are pretty much conflated, if only because it’s pretty much the same kind of citizen participation in both. There is a lot of overlap – no sense or utility in pretending otherwise, but the difference in focus is a subtle one. I’d have to say that generally the Tea Partiers I knew put the fiscally-sound, strict Constitutionalist and free-market principles first, and then the socio-religious principles standing about a half-step behind. Which means that they’ll make common political cause with the gay atheist libertarian any day of the week, and probably enjoy each others’ company enormously to boot, especially if beer and tuna hot-dish is involved.
This might have the common run of moderately-leftishly-liberal bloggers would be quivering in their boots as well, if they ever cared to look beyond the grotesque caricature they have created of a Tea Partier. Now and again, a commentator on Open Salon (and in other places) will venture out among Tea Partiers, rather in the sense of an Anglican arch-bishop venturing among the cannibals, and return either startled at being treated politely and respectfully, and how very . . . very nice they all are. Usually, they are jumped upon by their peers, and brought back around to the correct way of thinking toot-sweet. But they are worried on some level – I would guess, just from the level of vituperative comment.
There will be a great many attending 9/12 rallies; there maybe even more than the Beck revival at the Washington one, or so I am presuming, given the level of deep unhappiness welling up. Not uncontrolled lynch-mob anger as the elites of our political/media/academic class keep assuming, picturing something like a rightist version of anarchists protesting at the G-8 summit. The anger is real, but it’s cold and focused, not easily baited into acting or speaking foolishly, and somewhat beneath the surface of things, rather like a deep ocean current. The very existence of that current must have a lot of other people – in media, and in politics-as-they-are waking up in a cold sweat at night. Because November 2010 is coming, and after that, November 2012 – and I just don’t see things improving for our very own established professional political class in the next two years. If I have observed anything of the current administration over the last year or so – it’s that everything they have tried to do to fix a problem area has just resulted in making it infinitely worse. Even the redecorated Oval Office looks worse than it did before. (Yikes – 70ies earth tones, back again!)
The only times I ever got ahead of any particular zeitgeist was when I started blogging – which was in 2002, and for this blog. There may have been fair number of blogs in existence back then, in the Dark Ages of blogging, but you still had to explain exactly what it was, this mysterious thing called a blog – and god bless ‘em, people like my parents who were only barely aware of the internet, had to have the whole concept explained to them very, very, carefully. And I was way out there when it came to the Tea Party, but that was only because a person I knew and liked – through blogging – asked if I would like to get involved.
More usually, I am the one wandering along the well-trodden track, well after the herd has gone by, wondering vaguely where all the footprints were going, and then being distracted by butterflies or rabbits or something. So it was, when it came to reading Lord of the Rings – I didn’t actually read it until I was well along in high school, and all my friends had read it ages ago. For some reason – possibly because The Fellowship of the Ring was checked out of the library – I read The Two Towers first, and then Return of the King, before reading The Fellowship of the Ring. This had the advantage of kick-starting the adventure off in high gear. Anyway, simply everyone else had already read the whole thing, and in some cases, years before. (It was just one of those books that you read then, just like everyone had read Stranger in a Strange Land. You just did.) So, I read it all, and caught up with everyone else – and then, I did something a little radical: I read it aloud to my little brother, Sander, who was then about four or five. My parents did not believe in TV, you see. This is how people used to amuse themselves, back then.
They read books, and I had established a regular habit of reading a couple of chapters of appropriate kid-lit to my little brother. We had already read The Hobbit – so, one afternoon we launched into LOTR. At a chapter or two a night, it took most of a year, and he was absolutely enthralled before we had gotten very far, and would often beg for another chapter – because the end of most chapters is a cliff-hanger, you see. You simply have to start the next chapter to find out what will happen to our sturdy hobbit adventurers, and before you know it, here comes another peril. As I said, it took most of a year; and by the end of it, Sander could talk like Sam Gamgee. That Halloween, he insisted on dressing up as a hobbit, with a tunic and cloak (we had to fudge on the furry feet, though) and a little wooden sword and a shield with Tolkeinish runes painted on it. I have no idea what his various grade school teachers thought of all of this, by the way. He must have come to school with some very strange turns of phrase, during this period.
And then, when my daughter was four years old – I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings aloud to her, as well. We were in Greece then, and still without a television, VCRs had just barely come on the market and it wasn’t as if I could afford one anyway. So – back to the refuge of books. Blondie, the Daughter Unit became as enthralled as my little brother had been – again, it took the best part of a year. She began relating the latest development to her best friend, at nursery school, and the best friend begged her mother to begin reading LOTR to her. But Blondie was still ahead as far as the cliffhangers went, for we remained a few chapters in the lead, and she could still let her friend know what was coming next.
When the Peter Jackson movie version came out – of course, Blondie and I were so there; every year, when I came back to California to visit my parents for Christmas, we’d go to the big movie theater in Oceanside together; another one of those family rituals. And the last freelance project I finished, allowed me to indulge in some books and DVDs that I had always wanted, among them a boxed set (second-hand, naturally!) of the extended-version of LOTR; the one with all the extra scenes included. Just couldn’t stop at the end of each disc, by the way – had to go a little way into the next. What a visual feast of a movie; and how very curious that it all looked just as I had imagined it would look, all those ages ago, when I read it to my little brother.
I find three definitions of the term ‘barratry’ when I look it up – two of them are obscure, but the third is relevant, and if stretched a bit, can apply to the current blogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour – the Righthaven violation of copyright lawsuits. Well, that’s the politer term; a quick internet search on ‘righthaven’ also turned up qualifiers such as ‘trolling’, ‘extortion,’ ‘bottom-feeders’ and ‘barratrious a**holes.’ A more thorough search would, I am certain, turn up more pungent terms of abuse and a fair collection of lawyer jokes. (Sample – what’s brown and black and looks good on a lawyer? Answer – a Doberman.) Suffice to say, I went through five or six pages of google-search results before finding a single link to a post which made a feeble attempt at defending Righthaven’s practices – of searching out instances of copyright infringement on the part of bloggers and news aggregators and without warning, or demanding credit and a link to the original story – suing the bee-jezzus out of the proprietor – usually small enthusiast bloggers without deep pockets or institutional support. Adding fresh insult, Righthaven LLC also demands that the domain name of the offending website or blog be turned over to them, as well as fairly substantial payments. Yes, copying someone elses’ work off a website or blog and posting it on your own and taking credit for it. Quel tacky, and plagiaristic, and someone doing it probably richly deserves being served with a complaint, a cease-and-desist order, or just hunted down, smeared with honey and staked out over a fire-ant nest.
However: is posting the story with a link to the original source, with a plainly posted credit – is that plagiarism as well? What about a paragraph excerpt, or the ‘three line’ fair-use standard, with a link, a credit and a recommendation such as “Read this!†A discussion group, with members posting excerpts, and links and talking about it? Is that a violation of copyright also? What about just a link . . . urm, through those little news feed dinguses at the bottom of the page. A Facebook recommendation? News aggregate sites consist of constantly updated pages of all these variants, with links to the new, the weird, the newsworthy or just plain interesting, from a variety of sources, large, small, official, unofficial, regular media or whatever. Even blogs like my main blog which focuses on original writing – I’ve occasionally posted interesting links. Linking, promoting, tweeting and favoriting interesting stories has been the lifeblood of the blogosphere as I have known it for yea these many years; advantageous linkage is beneficial to bloggers and websites alike, guaranteeing a larger and wider audience than the unlinked story or post might have had. But the way that L’affiare Righthaven is shaping up, it appears that all of the above may open up liability among news aggregate and commentary blogs for legal action from the ‘barratrious a**holes.’
The Righthaven law firm has entered into a professional alliance with an enterprise called Stephens Media Group, which owns a number of local newspapers across the southern and western states. One of their publications is based in Las Vegas, a city large enough to generate a fair amount of national-interest news – and it appears that bloggers who excerpted or linked to stories from that particular newspaper over the last few years are now providing a rich harvest of copyright lawsuits brought by Righthaven. Righthaven’s method of operation appears to be either to search out those posted and linked stories, and obtain the copyright for the story from Stephens Media, or to have had the copyright in their sweaty little hand all along before filing suit. Give them credit – Righthaven has figured out how to monetize the blogosphere, and Stephens Media has figured out how to extract a few more bucks from their newspaper holdings. For now, at least – until bloggers and news aggregate sites begin acting on the principle that any content in any Stephens Media newspapers is about as toxic as radioactive sewer sludge. While a fair number of bloggers and websites have paid up just to make it all go away, others are fighting back by either ‘Righthaven-proofing’ their sites, or blacklisting Stephens Media through their site-posting rules. There are even Firefox and Chrome plug-ins to automatically exclude Stephens Media from your internet browser. Righthaven and Stephens Media may perhaps gain in the short run, but prospects for long-term gain seem pretty iffy.
Rantburg, my own favorite one-stop website for all things sarky and WOT-related, is one of those sites being sued. They are taking donations. A blog which lists the websites being sued is here.
I am, praise be to certain workaholic habits of mine (the one which goes into hyper-space warp-speed drive when faced with an impending deadline) actually able to come up for air today. One large chunk o’impending deadline all but finished but for the polishing and tweaking, and the other all but finished save for the author getting back to me to answer some questions about her MS. Life is good. And so is that 12-ounce bottle of Shiner Bohemian Black Lager that I have drunk about half of, as a reward to myself. Nice burnt-sugar overtones. I’m writing this Sunday evening at about 5:45 PM Sunday, so no need to go all interventionish on me.
Of course, I still have about three other big projects hanging over me – but the largest are out of the way, so I can come up for air and take note of some of the weirdness around me.
OK, so it looks like America’s next top model . . . is six foot something and so impossibly thin that a man’s hands can span her waist: Which was a charmingly old-fashioned standard of feminine beauty in the 19th century, when it was achieved only by the use of a fierce whale-bone corset and a couple of strong maids, hauling away. Dear god, the girl looks like she is morphing into a praying mantis. So, if this is what the fashion designers want to hang their clothes on, just animate a wire hanger and be done with it, and leave the rest of us alone with our cellulite.
So, the same breed of statist limpd**ks that tried to launch the Coffee Party and are trying yet again, with yet an amazingly stupid tee shirt and mug with the logo ‘f*ck tea’. Apparently that’s all you have to do, to get a movement really going. Print up some tee shirts and get your friends in the juice-box mafia (aka whatever has taken the place of JournoList) to push the meme. Hey, boys and girls, we can put on a show ourselves, around in back in the barn!
Apparently, they insist they are trying to bring about a serious discussion of serious issues and
the something like 54% of citizens who approve and support Tea Party principles should just . . . I dunno, sit down and shut up and be ruled over unquestioningly by the new aristos. OK, one more time: strict interpretation of the Constitution, fiscally responsible, free markets. The Tea Party is a distributed, leaderless insurgency, based on a few core principles, not one person. I don’t know how I can make it any more plain than that. Aside from that, boys and girls, if it looks like bought n’paid for Astroturf, smells like Astroturf, feels like Astroturf and is being rolled out there by the same ol’ Astroturf purveyors . . . then it probably is indeed, Astroturf. Here’s hoping that not too many of the ‘f*ck tea’ ‘tards don’t get stuck with a garage full of un-sellable tee shirts . . . oh, f*ck that – I hope they do.
So, the Mighty O’s approval ratings continue to crater. Time to take another vacation. Look, Mr. Hopey-Changey, coming out with support of a mosque/community/center/arms bunker whatever in the neighborhood of New York’s Ground Zero on one day, then walking back the next – not a good idea. Indecisive, duplicitous, or just plain old telling-the-audience-what-they-wanna-hear? I don’t know, I’m not a licensed political professional, or a mind-reader, but you are getting bad advice from someone. Or if you are getting good advice . . . oh, f*ck it . . . take the bad advice. No one will ever notice. Really. November is a little more than a month and a half away. Kick back, you and the wife and kids take another vay-cay. It’s all on us, I insist.
Yes, freedom of religion in America technically would permit the mosque/whatever to be built wherever . . . good taste and a sense of tact would argue that Ground Zero is perhaps a good place. Sorta like a museum of the Confederacy would not be a good fit in downtown Harlem. (But it might give Cholly Rangel a case of the vapors, so it wouldn’t be a wasted effort to suggest it.)
Ah well – enough of a rant. Blondie and I went up to Boerne yesterday, and brought back some smoked ribs and BBQ sauce from (I kid you not) a Shell gas station quickie-mart on the corner of Main Street and SH-46, which has a meat counter and a BBQ stand which has the best BBQ around. It’s called the Riverside Market. We stopped in for some soft drinks, and it smelled so enticing that we stopped in on our way home from Boerne Market Days and bought some for take out. Remember – Boerne, Shell Station, on Main Street, and SH-46, just as you cross the river. The place was wall to wall with local people. And the BBQ smelt like the food of the gods.
…a note in C-sharp.
I have a couple of horrifically impending deadlines, so blogging is at a minimum until I can meet them – and it is important to meet the most impending of them since it is a paid writing project.
Another of them is the follow-on to this book, A 21 Story Salute…
Finally, I have to carve out some time after these two projects are done to finish the next book, which will be called Daughter of Texas, although the working title all along has been Gone to Texas.
In September, I will be at the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene, Texas to promote the books now available. May I ask a favor – of those readers who have read To Truckee’s Trail and the Adelsverein Trilogy? If you haven’t done so, can you post a rating and review on Amazon for them? Nothing especially lengthy; just let readers know what you liked about it – and if you have criticisms, be honest about that, too. It’s kind of embarrassing, they’ve been out on the market all this time, and have only a handful of reviews each. (Although oddly enough, they still continue to climb in the ratings. But slowly … like an arthritic snail crawling across a hot asphalt parking lot.)
Apparently, our own very dear royals are having a wonderful time in Spain. Kinda makes GWB chopping brush on the ranch in Crawford look positively plebian.
05. August 2010 · Comments Off on Ah! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! · Categories: General
Mr. Nadler’s bill would “require the IRS to adjust tax brackets proportionally in regions where the average cost of living is higher than the national average.”
In other words, the various tax brackets would apply to residents in certain regions at higher income levels versus other parts of the country. A family with an income of $50,000 or even $1 million in Manhattan would pay less federal income tax than a family with the same earnings in Omaha. The bill is called the Tax Equity Act …
Representatives Nadler, Bishop, Israel, Lowey, Maloney and McCarthy: you are associated with a pack of thieves, liars and cheats 535 strong who, nearly to a man, deserve long stretches of time in jail for the laws you’ve flouted, the bribes you’ve taken, the damage you’ve done to this country.
You are a pox on this land, a disease in the body politic. Y’all aren’t even very smart except for the low cunning needed to come up with ever more inventive ways to cheat the public and lie your way to another term in office. You deserve neither re-election nor pension, nor any job that does not involve the phrase ‘Would You Like Fries With That’?
You should be turned out of your office to make your way by your scant wits in the world you insist the rest of us live in.
So, it looks like the mosque in NYC near Ground Zero has cleared another hurdle. Seriously though, the NYPD is against it, the NYFD is against it, the families of those who died that day are against it. Having known and befriended just a couple of NYPD’s finest in my life, I have to wonder if anyone thinks for a moment that it will get completed much less stand for very long. I predict many unfortunate accidents.
If I hadn’t already decided for whom I was voting in our Gubernatorial primary run-off next week, the robo-call would have done it for me. I understand the perceived need for the robocalls – my disagreement today is with the caller-id. My phone said I had a call from Red Lodge, MT.
Now, why on earth would a GA governor candidate be sending robo-calls from MONTANA? Is there no company in GA that could do those calls? The recession or whatever it’s called these days has hit us just as hard as it’s hit anyone else. Stimulating the economy begins at home, Mr/Ms Candidate.
If the call was, in fact, NOT from Montana, but only appearing to be so, then I have a different beef, regarding caller-id spoofing, etc.
In either case, this candidate did not have my vote to begin with, and definitely does not have my vote now. Since my candidate didn’t make it out of the primary, I’m going with the lesser of two weevils, and hoping against hope that I don’t receive a robo-call from that candidate, too.
I wonder why they don’t understand that robo-calls are as welcome as telemarketers?
02. August 2010 · Comments Off on Noggin’ Bloggin’/Product Review, Headblade (100802) · Categories: Memoir
About a month or so ago I got another trim at another one of those discount “Master Care Hair Care Performer Care Clips Care” places and realized that the “stylist” was messing with my hair in such a way as to make sure the ever growing thin spot on the crown of my head was covered. Sigh. Beautiful Wife, bless her heart, insists this isn’t technically a comb over. Just one reason I love her, she doesn’t slam my ego at every turn.
Since I retired from the Air Force (can you believe it’s been three years?) I’ve tried various and sundry hair/beard configurations. While I’d like to have the patience to go for Billy Connolly in “Boondock Saints,” the best I can really hope for is Jeff Bridges in anything from the last dozen years, but with a Monk’s Bowl where the crown of my head is. I don’t think The Dude prevails with a bald spot.
A couple of Saturdays ago, it was hot and we hadn’t quite got the air conditioner thing worked out for the summer yet and I had beads of sweat running down my neck and back etc., so…out came the clippers. A quick buzz and then into the shower with the good ol’ Gillette and poof, back to the cueball look.
I’ve tried going back to AF short. I’ve tried medium. I’ve tried medium-long. With my hair thinning more and the weird color pattern that seems to refuse to balance out, and the fact that it’s just plain easy, I think I’m going to keep it shaved at least for the foreseeable future.
So six years ago when I first shaved the dome, I tried this thing called a Headblade. It’s a razor specifically made for shaving your head. It looked cool. It’s well-designed. It’s got kind of a YinYang logo. They supported the UFC. It was an American invention from the 90s, back when Americans were still inventing things that worked better. But I digress. Six years ago when I first tried the Headblade Classic, I pretty much shredded my scalp. It used a two-blade cartridge and I never quite got the balance of the thing. You’re supposed to put NO pressure on the blade end. I somehow couldn’t get my hand to to figure that out.
The latest version, the Headblade Sport, ran $12.99 at my local Walgreens and works so well it’s kind of scary. Yes, it looks like half a Hot Wheel. And it’s got three blades vs two so the blades are a bit more pricey. However, one pass and the hair was gone, leaving all the skin intact and smooth as a baby’s butt. So not only did it shave amazingly close, it did it with LESS irritation than my (insert ridiculous number)-blade face razor because I only had to make one, maybe two passes to get the hair gone. I don’t know if it’s the wheels or the three blade configuration or that I’ve mellowed considerably over the past six years, but this thing works!
The first day of August, in South Texas. It’s hot. I should probably not have to reiterate this; it should go without saying, like the North and South Poles are cold, Saudi Arabia has oil, Russians drink a lot of vodka and NY Rep. Charles Rangel is as corrupt as the day is long.
Speaking of good ol’ Chollie Rangel, I guess that he is the next one under the Obama-bus, he and Maxine Walters both. What brought that on that spot of Capitol Hill Cleanup, BTW – a bit of pre-emptive housecleaning against a turnover in November? Ah, well – enjoy the view of the axles and transmission. Heck, there are so many others under that bus it must be jacked up like one of those monster off-road vehicles that you need a 16-foot ladder to get into.
I see – mostly through noting the Yahoo News cliplets which come up whenever I access my email – that Chelsea Clinton got married this last weekend, in a lavish, celebrity-studded, ultra-high end round of festivities at some grand estate in scenic upstate New York. Two or three million is the price-tag . . . which I presume has stimulated some segment of the economy, at least the bridal-industrial complex portion of it. Oh, and air traffic over that part of NY was cut off – security concerns, of course, and between the guests, their entourages, the news crews and the rubberneckers, I presume the related traffic has been a nightmare for the ordinary residents. Three million. On a wedding. While the peasants watch from the sidewalk, tugging their forelocks in obeisance to their betters. Look, I don’t mind weddings, and even wish the presumably happy couple the best, and all that . . . but wasn’t this exercise a little . . . I don’t know – vulgar? Unnecessarily ostentatious, kind of Marie Antoinettish, in time of severe economic downturn? Again, the two or three million wasn’t flushed down the john, I am sure a lot of people got a nice few days or weeks of work out of it, from the waiters hired by the caterer, the flower-arrangers, the owners of local hotels and motels, the limo-drivers and the extra security . . . but still – it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth – it smacks of royalty putting on a show. Jenna Bush’s wedding, and John F. Kennedy’s wedding just seem comparatively more sensible, suitable and tasteful.
Where in the world is Shirley Sherrod, the Mouth from the South – and are her fifteen minutes of fame over? Is she still planning to sue Andrew Breitbart – and on what grounds? You know, PBS could make a kid’s show out of this, a la Carmen Sandiego, with Shirley zipping around to racial hotspots, and dropping clues to the audience. Hey, they could even do an international edition. If any producers want to discuss this concept with me, drop me a private message.
And speaking of the NAACP – how come their president, Ben Jealous looks about as white as my brother JP? No kidding, he looks a lot like my brother – dark hair and eyes, gets a decent tan in the summer.
And finally – JournoList. So I wasn’t having a tin-foil hat moment, wondering why suddenly some news stories, such as that about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Fred Phelps of the Chicago area mega-church scene – just seemed to suddenly vanish down the memory hole during that 2008 campaign season. Here I was thinking that having listened to that nutcase in the pulpit for twenty years would surely have been the kiss of death for a candidate for any office, let alone the highest in the land. My bad – here came the JournoListers to save the day for their guy! Note to self – memorize the lists of members, and consider with a handful of fleur de sel anything they write which I happen to come across. Give them a ration of &$#@! in any comments permitted about having aided in the corruption of the newsgathering process – and the political process.
