A 21 Story Salute

19. March 2010 · Comments Off on A 21 Story Salute · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

Take a look at this –

Looks nice, doesn’t it? Finally, in February, Alice and I finished the latest book project from Watercress Press, the tiny specialty subsidy press bidness which affords the both of us some kind of living and a fair amount of amusement, as well as entrée into what passes for the literary scene in San Antonio. Alice does the fine editing and some of the admin stuff, I do the rough editing and the author-wrangling, and keep the website updated. We hire an independent contractor to do the book design and layout, to ours and the author’s specifications; I must say that when the pocketbook permits, we can do some very nice, high-end books indeed: History, Texiana, memoirs, some poetry – that kind of thing.

A 21 Story Salute combines two of our favorites; history and memoir. Barbara Bir, the author/editor went around to twenty-one World War II-era veterans and a couple of spouses, and interviewed them about their experiences during the conflict, and about their lives afterwards. All were pretty interesting, in themselves, but a good few of them were downright fascinating; it depended, I think, on how good a story-teller they were.

Bob Ingraham, for instance: he had some great stories. He survived being shot down flying a Spitfire over Dieppe in 1942, and a round of imprisonment as a POW in Sagan, where he helped to dig the Great Escape tunnel. There were three American diggers, helping with Tom, Dick and Harry – he is the only one still living.

Clara Morrey Murphy, and her friend, Aleda “Lutzie” Lutz – Clara and Lutzie were two of the very first Army air-evac nurses – there is a picture of them in the book, trying out their flight gear, while in special training in 1942. They went on to air –evacuate patients during the campaigns in North Africa, Italy and France. Clara Murphy’s military uniform is now on display at the Brooks ‘Hanger 9’ aerospace medicine museum, in San Antonio. “Lutzie” died in 1944, when the air-evac flight she was on crashed into a mountainside in Southern France.

Eddie Patrick? He was the kid genius, when it came to radios and electronics: he wound up as a senior NCO at the age of 19, in charge of the comm gear, serving at a Flying Tigers airbase in China, well behind the Japanese lines.

Litzie Trustin was Jewish and born in Vienna. She escaped to England on one of the last Kindertransports, just before the war began in Europe in 1939. Returning to Europe to work with the American forces as a translator, she married a transport pilot and came to Omaha to settle down and raise a family – and to work for civil rights.

Bob Joyce kept a diary, all through his tour of duty as a B-17 radio operator, flying a series of nerve-wrackingly dangerous missions from Italy. He carried with him on those missions a pair of regular Army boots, his father’s rosary, a good-luck bracelet from his home-town girlfriend, and a $2.00 bill, so he would never be broke.

Ignatio “Nacho” Gutierrez never saw snow until he went into the Army for basic training. He and his unit came ashore on D-Day in the early evening of June 6th, 1944 – and he painted signs – and sometimes stapled them to trees himself – for the constantly-moving XIX Corps, First Army headquarters, all through Normandy and into Belgium and Germany.

During the war, Marshall Cantor directed the building of runways and scratch airbases on Ascension Island for Air Transport Command, and then moved on to do the same in New Guinea and in the Philippines. He met Ellen Berg, who was a nurse serving at a forward hospital in Papua, New Guinea. They married in 1944.

More excerpts and a few more pictures are at a section of Barbara’s website, here.

Now that is a good dog

17. March 2010 · Comments Off on Now that is a good dog · Categories: General

He counted loud he counted long he waited for the shock.
He felt the wind he felt the cold, he felt that awful drop.
The silk from his reserve fell out and wrapped about his legs,
WOOF ARF WOOF WOOF ARF WOOF ARF!

Airborne!<br/><br/>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7063359.ece

“Dogs don’t perceive height difference, so that doesn’t worry them. They’re more likely to be bothered by the roar of the engines, but once we’re on the way down, that doesn’t matter and they just enjoy the view.[1] It’s something he does a lot. He has a much cooler head than most recruits.”

Blah-Delta-SAS-Afghanistan-blah-HALO-dog scouts-blah.

The important part: Airborne Dogs. That is AWESOME.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

[1] You know there is a whole of tail wagging going on at this point.

Whither Hollywood?

16. March 2010 · Comments Off on Whither Hollywood? · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, That's Entertainment!

Seriously, what is it with the people that make our movies? I might almost believe there was something about the higher reaches of show biz that turns people into complete and raving loons. What with a long series of much-ballyhooed movies culminating in The Green Zone, most which in some degree or other, can easily be construed as anti-troops/anti-war productions and most of which have tanked at the box office, an Oscar evening which I didn’t even bother to watch, let alone seeing any of the movies involved, and Tom Hanks near as dammit shooting himself and his TV series The Pacific in the foot with statements about American racism in interviews . . . oh, heck, can I be forgiven for wondering if there something in the water? Never mind how the Hollywood good and the great appeared to jump on the global warmening and the Obama bandwagon, almost simultaneously. Never mind how the Law’n’Order TV concession painted tea partiers as dangerous terrorists. Never mind the incessant slams against the religiously observant, or the monstering of Sarah Palin. The cumulative idiocy is almost too much to be born; it’s almost as if they don’t want us to be watching any of their damned movies or TV at all.

For the record, this last weekend, we went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which is about the first time in a year that we went to see a first-run movie in the theaters. (Last time it was Gran Torino, if memory serves, and no, I can’t remember what we went to see the time before that.) I might have gone to see Up, and Blondie and I were considering Julie and Julia, but just didn’t feel strongly enough about either to make the effort. Seriously, I used to love going to movies, but somehow and somewhere in the last decade or so I lost my enthusiasm. Between the expense and hassle of actually going to the theater, the sheer badness of most current releases, the speed with which the best of the current crop show up on DVD (where I can ask to do a review and get the darned thing for free) and the steady drip-drip-drip of ignorance and insult directed at flyover, working-class Americans, conservatives, military, and tea partiers – all sourced from the glitterati . . . well, really, what’s the point? Why should I put up with having my values routinely insulted, right along with my intelligence? I have long insisted on skipping anything which features car chases, machine-gun fire and massive explosions, in lieu of plot and dialogue. And I’d prefer to think of actors as a kind of well-trained performing monkey, whose job is to amuse the audience. I do not want them to be lecturing me on politics, history, international relations, global warming or ecology at the drop of a hat or Charlie Sheen’s trousers, whichever happens oftener. Not unless they actually have some professional education or expertise in those fields, which damn few of them appear to do anyway. Stick to entertaining me, dammit.

Check…One-Two, Check-Check…This Thing On?

03. March 2010 · Comments Off on Check…One-Two, Check-Check…This Thing On? · Categories: General

Yawns…stretches, cracks knuckles, cracks neck, cracks lower back “ow-ow-ow…sigh.”  Sips coffee.  Thinks.  Alrighty then.

So an “old HS Friend on Facebook” posts that he’s joined “The Coffee Party” (giggle, really?  The best they could do?) and so I come over here to see what Mom’s got and apparently she’s been writing up a storm and then I figure I’d see if my sign-in still works and lo and behold it DOES and so I started thinking about some stuff and what I might want to write about and…deep breath…why yes…yes MY coffee is particularly strong this morning, why do you ask?

Same Old Same Old

02. March 2010 · Comments Off on Same Old Same Old · Categories: General, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

One of the most exasperating elements WRT to tracking the fortunes of the Tea Party movement is going into comment threads here and there and running slap into the constant insistence from commenters of a certain persuasion that Tea Partiers are stupid! Stupid, I say, dumber than dirt! Drooling morons, apparently barely able to find their way to the latrine, the voting booth or to tune their radios to whatever channel is carrying Rush Limbaugh!

They bang on and on about the stupidity and reckless lack of clue among the Tea Party set constantly, seemingly impervious to any contrary evidence – such as that of my own lying eyes. Of the activists who launched my local tea party, included among them was a corporate lawyer – an A & M grad (so of course the jokes about that are endless), a professor at a local and notoriously expensive and upscale private university, a madly creative and seriously eccentric video producer, a IP techie of proven skills and a very hot temper, a military contractor specializing in very high-end specialist software, a good few scrappy real estate agents, an academic doctor . . . and then myself, the historical novelist. There was also the married lady of irreproachable virtue and deeply Christian principles who had at one point in her now-distant youth been a Playboy Bunny, a guy with a long career in print media sales who now runs a tiny construction bidness of his own, and we have since added another two lawyers, an insurance-firm executive and others of the same professional ilk. In other words, lots of professionals, managers, and graduate degrees The picture ought to be fairly clear, I would think – not too terribly many mouth-breathers among the cadre of the seriously involved, but bless their hearts, the leftoid commenters everywhere have only a few horses to flog when it comes to the Tea Party, so they flog it relentlessly. (The other equine targets being ‘you’re all raaaaacist!’ and ‘you’re all tools of the GOP/Fox News’ being the main ones, although “where were you when Booooosh maneuvered us into two illegal wars/put us into a deficit first!” is being brought around from the stable.)

It’s pathetic – this is all they have, when anyone who has ever attended, or had anything to do with a Tea Party knows that the dumb/racist/GOP tool is not only false, but completely lame. Seriously, pukes – do you want to have any credibility left as a sentient being, after November, 2010? And then I think – perhaps that is all they have. No real and workable ideas, no energy, no stamina for the dull and boring labor of actually doing political activism, the kind that takes years, the kind which consumes your life, the kind of work done by William Wilberforce and Tom Paine, by Abraham Lincoln and Lucy Stone. For a while, I did battle in comment threads, regarding the derisive epithet “tea-bagger” – I said (over and over) that using it in a discussion of the Tea Party was like using the word “n****r” in a discussion of civil rights. Eh, I think my point has been made. Of late I don’t much waste time objecting to the use of it, since it has become a time-saver. Someone using it has already marked themselves as so bigoted and essentially closed-minded that they are hardly worth wasting time and pixels over. I have to save my energy for the long fight. I can’t waste time over correcting fools.

Oh, and yeah – I have to save enough energy to earn a living, and to write some more books; currently have drafted six chapters for “The Quivera Trail” and five and a half for “Gone to Texas.”

In the meantime, it looks like my suspicions from last week about the so-called Coffee Party being nothing more than a fresh roll of Axelrod Astroturf? Oh, yeah – big time. The blogosphere is on the hunt. I deduce that fresh scalps will soon be joining those on the drying-rack next to those lifted from the heads of the global-warming crowd. Good times, people, good times.

I am breathless with laughter

24. February 2010 · Comments Off on I am breathless with laughter · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time

We just got a telephone mecho-call from Kay Bailey Hutchison – claiming that she had been endorsed by National Tea Party leader Dick Armey…
So, Blondie said… “Er… who?”
And I said, “We have a leader?”

Seriously, we have a leader? OMG, if this call went out to everyone in Texas with a telephone … she has seriously just stepped all over her … er. Whatever.

Down By the Station

24. February 2010 · Comments Off on Down By the Station · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs

Sunset Station, that is – the turn-of-the-last-century historic railway depot in San Antonio, a splendid pile of Mission Revival stucco and russet-colored roof tiles, which was the pride of the town when it was completed in 1903. The main depot building had electric lights up the wazoo, and a pair of round stained-glass windows in the peak of the roof on either end, glass windows that were as big as ornamental fishponds. There was a grand divided staircase at one end, and heavy wood benches arranged to best effect on the lower level. It was the waiting room, then, although I think most people waiting for a train would have been out under the awnings, where there would have been a bit of a breeze, and train travelers could have appreciated the gardens and the ornamental trees – the Southern Pacific architect and landscapers did not do things by halves, back in the days when rail travel was the thing, and automobiles were cranky and unreliable toys for rich men.

After mid-century, the rule of the steel rails diminished, and the rule of the automobile came to pass: city planners slapped six lanes of highway along the edge of Downtown, thirty or so years ago. This amputated the railway station and the blocks of hotels, warehouses and cafes off from the rest of Downtown, the part with the Alamo and the Riverwalk and the people – still the old Depot remained. Fortunately, they re-vamped the old depot building as an event venue a decade or so ago, lovingly re-constructing every bit of plaster ornament and stained glass, and out in back of the main hall is an open terrace with an arcade along one side, and landscaping and an iron fence along the other. There are some fine old buildings surviving in the blocks around the Station, although I don’t think it will ever be as lively as it was in it’s heyday.

Facing the back of the old Depot is a covered pavilion with a raised stage, and all that is necessary for concerts and entertainment. I had never been there before – but that is where the San Antonio Tea Party held their first anniversary rally on Sunday. We drew a fair number of people, about 230 or so, on a lovely breezy Sunday afternoon. We were gifted with a fine warm day, wedged in between a couple of cold and icy ones, just right for a meeting which turned out to run about an hour longer than expected. At the last minute, we had added Kevin Jackson, Sheriff Mack and Stewart Rhodes of the Oathkeepers to Joe the Plumber – which proved to be at least semi-attractive to three out of five local TV news networks. And after the rally, our Cap & Trade working group had set up another guest speaker, who had a presentation about Global Warming. To be precise, his presentation concerned the fraud thereof, and that apparently drew out some counter-demonstrators.

I think this must be the first time that the local progressives actually organized something: usually it’s just been a handful of regulars showing up with singularly uninspiring signs. It would appear, from the TV news stories posted on Sunday evening, that one of the things which raised their ire (well, besides even having a Tea Party to start with) was the presence of the so-called “global warming denier.” That apparently is still a high crime, to those who haven’t yet managed to hear about Climate-gate. They came on a bus, pranced down the street to opposite where we were, and chanted “Health Care Now!” and “Green Jobs Now!” – although they did break it up at one point by singing Happy Birthday – although to whom, I can’t be sure. Then the bulk of them did hop onto their bus and depart – I guess forty minutes was about as much as they had stamina for, or maybe that was all that the Acorn budget allowed.

There were a handful of die-hards, though; one with a video camera, and another with a bullhorn who kept shouting incomprehensible questions from across the street; basically that we were all rich racists, and something about the jerk in Austin with IRS issues and a small plane. It seemed rather laughably pointless, as they were doing this while a succession of candidates for local office were acquainting us with their campaigns and their fitness for the various offices they were running for. Here we are, basically holding a town meeting, being serious about evaluating people we are about to vote into various offices, attending to our basic civic responsibilities . . . while a stupid woman with a bullhorn shouts irrelevant insults through the hedge. I did stand up in a gap between the bushes and waved cheerfully at her companion with a video camera in front of her face, and Blondie wrote “Hi, Mom!” in her palm with a Sharpie and waved also.

So, they couldn’t be bothered to come to the Tea Party rally – which was free and open to the public, or to the Global Warming talk, which also was free, etc., and ask questions, and enter into a real debate, and take part in a fairly serious encounter with people who are asking us all to vote for them . . . but still preferred to stand on the sidewalk and screech like howler monkeys. As Blondie said at the time, “Mom, sometimes you can’t fix stupid.”

And the funniest part? I went a googling here and there, and found some of their own videos and websites – and this little event was put together in part by what appears to be a joint effort of activists from San Antonio and Boerne (all thirty of them or so), some of whom are calling themselves “The Coffee Party.” No, I didn’t make that up. They have a website and all, with a nicely designed logo and some facebook meet-ups, although the nationwide chapters still seem pretty thin on the ground. I am thinking that I have probably found the follow-on to last week’s little patch of Astroturf, “The Tea Party is Over.”

Memo: Monday Morning Miscellany

14. February 2010 · Comments Off on Memo: Monday Morning Miscellany · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Stupidity, Tea Time

From: Sgt Mom
To: Various
Re: Some Apparently Inconvenient Home Truths

1. Oh, my – the case of the absent-minded professor, the irreproducible results and the ‘dog-that-ate-my-data.’ Yet another stake through the heart of man-made-global-warming, to add to the existing collection; I swear, in popular media culture this global-warming c**p has more lives than Freddy Kruger. Hey, aren’t we all ready to have a good long laugh at Al Gore, now? And can we at least have our incandescent light-bulbs back? Thanks, ever so.

2. Note – to aspiring politicians (I’m looking at you, aspiring candidate for governor of Texas Debra Medina, who was about to break out on the national media level, but flubbed a key question asked by Glenn Beck – who, I may add, was not exactly hostile media to fiscally conservative, independent and grassroots candidates, m’kay?) – there is only one acceptable answer to that particular question. That acceptable answer is “no.” Or “hell, no.” Although the Bush administration, and before that, the Carter administration, might have been able to put together the pieces of the intelligence puzzle a little more efficiently, or take more seriously the rantings and threats of a wierdy-beardy Islamist squatting in an Afghan cave – the US government most certainly did not coldly and callously enter into a labyrinthine plot to murder 5,000+ of their own citizens in one morning. If you well and truly believe that a conspiracy of that magnitude is doable, probable and technologically possible – than why do you chose to remain a citizen of such a monstrous country? And more to the point, if you believe in 9/11 as a government plot, why would you even want to become a part of the government? S**t, people, the X-Files was a fictional TV show, not a documentary – get a grip.

3. OK – one more time: the Tea Partiers are not knuckle-dragging, sister-humping, room-temperature IQ racists, and the more certain of you choose to bang on about this meme, the more you are blowing your credibility with the public, outside your own cozy little echo chamber that is. One more time – they are fiscal conservatives, small federal government, free market and libertarian. The Tea Partiers I know don’t give a good g***amn about the color of your skin, the color of the POTUS’ skin – and we wouldn’t care much about what Captain America thinks of us either, except that once a meme gets going, it’s a pain in the *** to uproot. See item 1, above.

Oh, yeah – and our protests are fun. Lots of smiling, friendly people, lots of laughter, music – kind of like a very laid-back neighborhood block party. And we clean up after ourselves, too.

4. And in reference to item 3 above? Yeah, for a while I went around explaining earnestly that using the word “teabagger” in a discussion of the Tea Party movement was kind of like using the word n*gger in starting off a discussion about civil rights – now? Eh, not so much. When I see it being used, I can be pretty sure the person using it is as aggressively ignorant as they are bigoted and rude, so I can safely disregard anything they have to say. Just by using it, they’ve already proved they have nothing much to say, so I can save valuable time.

5. I’d write a good scathing essay about Courtney Cook – except that it looks like pretty much most of the milblogosphere already seems to have taken some good hearty thwacks at her Salon essay. (Jeeze, what is it with Salon and Open Salon these days? Is there some kind of convention going on for shallow, narcissistic writers over there?) Passive-aggressive, self-absorbed and immature is no way to go through life, dear – just my opinion.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

Tea Party and Tea Parties

11. February 2010 · Comments Off on Tea Party and Tea Parties · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, the funniest thing about being active in a local Tea Party – aside from some of the soap opera antics resulting when people involved have different ideas about where we should go and what we should do – comes from going back and reading, over and over, in comment threads, editorials/commentary and news stories, those unsupported and wildly asserted claims about what we are and what we want. Strict Constitutionalists, limited federal government, free markets . . . nothing more radical than that, actually. No, seriously, nothing more than that. Really, cross my heart, et cetera – it’s nothing more than that, as a handful of the media anointed who have come down from their lofty heights and actually did their jobs have discovered. Much to their own mild surprise, I might add. However, sometimes it seems that the larger portion – or at least the noisier portion of academia, the media, the political elite and dumbasses commenting on blog and news threads are still convinced otherwise. According to this particular assortment of gits, such beliefs in the strict interpretation of the Constitution, and a small federal government with limited powers are horrifically radical and dangerously un-American notions. This would suggest that in general, public education has reached astonishing new lows in total incompetence, when it comes to education in basic civics and history – Especially, it would seem, among those in the leadership cadre among certain unions.

No kidding, looking around at all that is said of us in various fora – it’s an absolute hoot. I am following one comment thread now where it’s being asserted, over and over again that the Tea Partiers are the tools of big corporations. No actual proof of the assertion are posted, mind you – such as details about which corporations, and how they are supposed to be commanding us Tea Party sheeple. If anything, and to go by my personal knowledge of Tea Partiers – more of them are owners of small, and even micro-small businesses. There’s a fair number of retirees, lots of military veterans, heaps of fairly observant churchgoers; all of this makes one particular assertion fairly risible – that we were all stupid dope-smokers in high school who couldn’t into college or get real jobs and don’t pay taxes. Have to admit, I was shaking my head over that one. If anything, most of us were probably totally earnest, clean-cut parent-respecting nerds, back in the day – and were roundly laughed at by the dope-smoking crowd.

Seems to me also, that the level of disparagement aimed at the Tea Partiers is rising, of late – and so is the ugly slant taken by some popular culture outlets. At least those responsible for the latest kerfuffle, which has a plotline of Captain America meeting what appears to be a Tea Party protest, have had the grace – or at least the economic good sense to back down and render an apology. Even if it does seem more along the lines of “I’m sorry you were offended/I’m sorry we got caught” sort of weasel-apologies.

Oh, and for the umpteenth time – Sarah Palin is not our leader. Glenn Beck isn’t either, and Rush Limbaugh certainly isn’t. And most of us are at least as angry at the Republicans as any else, so please spare me the insistence that the Grand Old Party is our puppetmaster. If fact, most of us wouldn’t bother pissing on the traditional Republican leadership cadre if they were on fire.We have no leader. The whole thing is a distributed insurgency – and for what it is worth, some of the loosely-associated groups are going and doing their own thing. With greater or lesser degrees of success. Personally, I think those groups who are depending on a handful of funding sources with deep pockets and paying for services rendered, rather than the dedication of volunteers and many small donations are on the wrong track. That runs the danger of becoming what made us angry in the first place. But as I said before: a herd of cats, all moving more or less in the same direction.

Ah well –interesting times. And on the anniversary of the start of the whole Tea Party movement (February 21, which strangely enough is also my birthday) they may get even more interesting yet.

Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly

03. February 2010 · Comments Off on Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

If there is a phrase which makes my socio-political antennae begin to quiver, that will be anything that begins with the words “The People’s – whatever.” The People’s Park, the People’s Republic – the People’s Whatever. I suppose at one time – around the early part of the 20th century, perhaps – dubbing something as belonging to the ‘people’ sounded fresh, innovative, democratic, not the exclusive preserve of some elite or other. Alas, by the middle of that century, it usually meant some grim, joyless and grinding totalitarian establishment, with a rhetorical smiley-face painted on the front, which increasingly fooled only the starry-eyed true believers.

And so it is with the late Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” – not so much a straight history, but a grim and joyless Marxist slog through American history. Which in the end amounts to an unrelenting snorkel through the sludge at the bottom of the national sewer, as seen through the lenses of a late 19th century political thinker, with the helpless lumpenprolitariat being royally screwed over and over by the capitalist and plutocrats . . . oh, and we murdered the Indians! And lynched black people! And slavery – don’t forget about slavery! From the way the man banged on and on about imperialisms of every stripe, war, social injustice, and all the rest of the progressiveist bug-bears you’d have thought that no other nation in the world evah! had perpetuated any of those numerous crimes against humanity which the Zinneastas gleefully charged the United States with. And God help us – the whole grim polemic is frequently assigned as a history textbook.

And yes, we should know our history, including the inglorious parts – but all that, only that, and to the exclusion of anything else? Debunking is a worthy exercise to be sure, but there ought to be some bunk there in the first place, some basic knowledge and understanding, nay, even some appreciation for those people who built their little corner of America, who made a life for themselves, built towns and railroads, fought to end slavery, and to devise a political system which invested citizens with rights as well as responsibilities. That kind of history is endlessly fascinating to those of us imbued with ordinary curiosity about ‘what happened way back then,’ and lacking a mindset which insists on jamming the square peg of events and people into the round hole of ideology.

The trouble with Zinn and his ilk, when it comes to history – there is no place for complicated stuff, nothing meaningful exists outside the round hole of ideology. Which is a pity as well, for history is a treasure-store of riches, in the experiences of people, of fame and name, or no-name and no fame. I make a part of my living from telling some of their stories – and now and again readers have written to tell me how they wish they had been able to learn such stories in school, for then they might have taken more of an interest at the time. What is also a pity is that a relentless diet of Zinning our history is to leave us guilt-tripped, short-changed and ashamed – instead of seeing our history whole, and steadily.

It could be that this is what the Zinneastas intend – for how much easier it is to destroy a people, once you have demoralized them from within.

Amazon – And the Perils of POD-ing

31. January 2010 · Comments Off on Amazon – And the Perils of POD-ing · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

It didn’t seem to have made much of a ripple in the political blogosphere, but two years ago among the various writers’ discussion groups, websites and e- newsletters, discussion of the Amazon-Booksurge imbroglio achieved a melt-down-and-drop-through-to-the earths’ core degree of nuclear passion. Amazon basically announced that they would require those independent and publish on demand (POD) presses who wanted to sell through Amazon to print those books through Amazon’s Booksurge publisher-printer entity. (It’s now called CreateSpace, BTW.) The implications of that policy were chewed over like a mouthful of rubbery and vile-tasting bubblegum for weeks.

A short background refresher in the vagaries of independent publishing may be in order here. Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away there used to be two ways of being published. The first kind was the respectable kind, with one of the big name publishing firms that with luck and if you were any good, or fairly good or even a literary genius, and you had any sort of agent, you would wind up with stacks of copies of your book in all the bookstores, a nice royalty check, maybe even an advance, good reviews in the right magazines, and hey, presto – as my daughter says, pretty soon you were a “real arthur.” The other kind of publishing was disdainfully known as “vanity”publishing. The assumption was that untalented hack with lots of money would contract with a publisher to print quantities of a book that “real” publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and no one but the author and his family and friends would ever read. Classically, the assumption was that such an author would wind up with a garage full of expensive books that would never go any farther than that.

That whole picture was turned upside down and shaken like some vast etch-a-sketch, what with the internet, the development of POD, or print-on-demand technology, just as the big-name publishing houses became risk-adverse, unadventurous and stodgy. Rather like Hollywood and the music industry, come to think on it: stuck on established big names, carefully constructed sure-fire blockbuster hits and guaranteed big returns. The quirky, original, eccentric and genuinely creative will likely never be invited in the door – even if they are talented, too. The result was an explosion in the numbers of writers who have gone “indy” – just like filmmakers and musicians, because the technology has allowed it. Getting in through the doors of the big-name publishing houses was no longer the only game in town.

Print on demand technology allowed a printer to print up copies of a particular book as they are ordered from a formatted electronic text file. Because they are usually printed in small batches, not in 10s of thousands at a whack, the cost of the individual copy is somewhat higher. And being printed to order, the matter of warehousing thousands of copies doesn’t come up; all very ecologically sound. It allowed writers who couldn’t or didn’t want to publish through a traditional publisher and couldn’t afford to pay for a print run from a vanity press to pay a small set-up fee for their text and cover, which would be available to the printer. Whenever orders came in for their book, the printer could run off as many copies as needed and drop-ship them to the customer.

Sensing an opportunity, a whole host of new publishers sprang up or morphed from their previous incarnation. Most of these were and are internet-based: just check out the IAG books and members page to get an idea of the range. A fair number of authors set up as publishers themselves, since the actual printing of the books was now relatively inexpensive and accessible. While a good many of resulting POD books are just as much vanity publications as ever were, and are pretty dreadful besides – quite a few are not. In fact, the best of them are as quirky, literate and as high quality as anything available from the big traditional houses and those authors who took it seriously have reached a wider audience. As another IAG indy writer pointed out, readers don’t much care how a book that they love to read was published – they just want to read it. Nothing is in stasis for long: POD publishers grew, or were absorbed by others.

Amazon.com purchased the POD publisher Booksurge in 2005; not a large publisher or a particularly well-regarded one. In fact the worst POD book I ever reviewed was a Booksurge product, although that seemed to have resulted from author stubbornness rather than Booksurge incompetence. Still, it didn’t seem to be terribly out of line for a book retailer to be also in the book publishing business – and Booksurge books didn’t seem to be given any special favors among all the other POD books available from Amazon – until a little less than two years ago. (Up until then, I thought it might indicate that the bright sparks at Amazon thought that POD published books were the wave of the future.)

The main printer for many, if not most POD publishers is called Lightning Source; it’s owned by Ingram, the mega-huge book distributor, and puts out a darned good product at a reasonable rate. It’s also essential for POD books to be included in the Ingram catalogue; it’s a main line into brick and mortar bookstores; otherwise you might just as well be back in the vanity-press days, with a garage full of copies to hawk around.

But it’s also essential for your books to be available on-line, and on-line means Amazon.com, the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla of internet book marketing. If it’s published, it’s available from Amazon. Over the last couple of years, Amazon.com was relatively welcoming to readers and writers alike; offering opportunities to review and blog about our books, to do Kindle reader editions of our books, to do wish-lists and recommendations, to set up discussion groups; as a matter of fact, the IAG – the Independent Authors Guild started as an Amazon discussion group.

So the demand by Amazon.com, that a number of small POD publishers had to have their books be printed by Booksurge, or else their authors books would not be sold directly through Amazon came as a rather thuggish slap in the face. In essence, POD writers were told to make a choice between doing business with their chosen publisher and printer – or being sold through Amazon. Richard and Angela Hoy, at Booklocker.com (who published two of my books, and printed and distributed three others) declined the offer of a contract for Amazon-Booksurge’s services with the vigor and force of a concrete block thrown through a plate-glass window – in fact they went ahead and filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging their actions violated federal antitrust laws. Just this week, Amazon has moved to settle – just before the phrase of discovery would have begin. More about Booklocker and the Amazon settlement here, from Angela.

For myself, I was just asounded to discover that there are actually real people at Amazon. Ordinarily, my vision is that of a huge, cavernous underground warehouse, piled high with books and other goods, sort of like that in the final scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. Up in the dim ceiling overhead, there is some kind of vast, clanking machine, with tracks and pulleys and long arms which reach down and pick up something, and carry it away. I visualize those items being dropped into a huge hopper, and eventually they emerge on the other end – which is an anonymous UPS drop-box on an anonymous street in a featureless urban warehouse development. The point is, there don’t ever seem to be any humans involved, save for someone in a long gray cloak that slips around the corner and runs away, immediately you catch sight of them … or the whole place may be run by rubbery-tentacled aliens, like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest. In any case, interaction with a real human at Amazon always seemed just about impossible, to me. But Richard and Angela did it – and made them back down. Victory is sweet – even if it took two years

Domesticity

31. January 2010 · Comments Off on Domesticity · Categories: General

Ahhh, Spring…. when a youngly middle-aged woman’s fancy turns to — what’s that? It’s not yet spring? Are you sure?

Well then, that explains the chill breeze that blows across my back yard, and the lack of green growth in my yard. Well, most green growth, anyway. Some of the weeds are still thriving. More importantly, the crocuses (crocii?) have bloomed. So spring is obviously on its way, even if the forsythia is still just foliage.

I must say, Jan/Feb are probably my least-favorite months — bitter cold, even here in the southeast, with spring still a distant promise. But March will be here before I know it, and it will be time to move the house plants outside, clear away the detritus of winter, and transplant the seedlings I’ve not even planted yet. Guess I’d better get some seeds and get them planted.

Cut but not that

27. January 2010 · Comments Off on Cut but not that · Categories: General

Bruce Bartlett on The Oregon tax vote and Tea Party Membership

I can easily see many tea party goers becoming rabid tax-the-rich folks if the alternative is higher taxes on them. Let us not forget that just about a year ago many of the House of Representatives’ most conservative members voted to impose a 90 percent tax rate on bank bonuses. As I noted at the time, those supporting this confiscatory tax measure included Eric Canter, Peter Hoekstra and Paul Ryan.

I think Bruce is making the mistake of thinking that Tea Party = politicians.  My understanding is that guys doing the Tea Parties are fed up with everybody we’ve elected whose solution to fiscal shortcomings in the capitol is not to trim the budget but to levy more taxes.  In this regard conservatives in the House are just as guilty as liberals.

I do not know any Tea Party members in person. But hey, our own Sgt. Mom has been a busy bee down in the Tea Party down in San Antone – what say you, Julia?

New Experiences

26. January 2010 · Comments Off on New Experiences · Categories: General

Did two things tonight I’ve never done before…

Went to a town hall meeting hosted by my state rep and the state senator that represents the other side of my cross-street: that was cool. I’m getting more interested in the political process, instead of just being a semi-informed voter. (I’m not a tea-partier, but they have my support.)

On my way home, about 9pm, I drove by a building that I’ve never seen occupied, never seen any cars parked near it or in its parking area. There was a white SUV backed up to its lower level, with the tailgate lifted. So when I got home, I called the non-emergency number for the PD, and told the nice lady who answered the phone what I saw (that was only like 5-10 min after I saw it). I stressed that it could be perfectly legit, but I’ve NEVER seen vehicles around that building, and don’t even think it’s occupied. So they’re going to have someone drive by and check things out.

I feel like I’ve earned my good citizen credentials tonight. Or at least my neighborhood busy-body certification.

Oh – I guess it’s 3 things — I told my state rep that I’d put his sign in my front yard come election time. I have NEVER advertised/campaigned for any political figure, but I really like my rep. (it helps that he opened a gun-shop/range 3 miles from my house and is a fervent 2nd Amendment supporter)

The End of the Beginning

22. January 2010 · Comments Off on The End of the Beginning · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time

Or maybe the beginning of the end – either way, the Massachusetts landslide on Tuesday has really given the political landscape a really good Richter-detectable shaking. And I have to say I have enjoyed the whole thing, immensely, and hope, oh-hope-oh-hope that it is a harbinger of good things to come, that it means an enormous mass of Americans realizing that – yes they are people who can make a substantial mark, that responsible citizens have an obligation to become interested, even focused with a laser-like intensity on matters that for too long, we left to the political wonks to take care of. The conduct of our civic affairs can no longer be left to the usual suspects. For our own good, we must, we must become involved. And now we are, and we – the cranky independents, the bloggers, the Tea Party political virgins, sadder and wiser young Libertarians who cut their political baby teeth on Ron Paul, single-issue gadflies pursuing every conceivable local issue to the point of acute tedium . . . we made a mark and shook the larger political world. I know beyond a doubt that a large portion of donations to Scott Brown’s political campaign came from Tea Party independents: I know that the San Antonio Tea Party put out the word that the Massachusetts special election this week was something that we ought to take an interest in. I also know that while he may not be a perfect small-government, fiscally-responsible-strict Constitutionalist, in the real world, the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and he is good enough for government work. Good at campaigning, established record of accomplishment, quick with the repartee, a military reservist, and not-half-bad looking.

With luck – there are lots more candidates like him, coming up to the starting line, and a larger media that will – from this moment on, be inclined to pay attention. It’s been a gradual thing, this building up; I think practically no one but the moderate blogosphere paid much attention early on: and at that, no one more than Da Blogfaddah. I do recall very well, when I started being drawn into the Tea Party; through a blog-friend, Robin Juhl, who was a fan when this site was till SSDB, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, back in the Dark Ages of Blogs. This which would be, inter alia, about 2003, when Robin had a blog, called Rant’n’Raven. We kept in touch – and about March of last year, just when the concept of a Tea Party to protest the horrible, awful, astronomically-deficit producing stimulus package. Robin and some other people had used Facebook to put together a local Tea Party group – and, hey, I had experience writing, and with microphones and TV cameras and all that besides blogging – so did I want to come on board and write their press releases.

At the time, I assumed we would have a few hundred people meeting in a city park, I’d send out a release or two, snap some pictures myself for the website, we’d listen to some speeches, wave some signs and maybe get a trickle of interest from local media. But one thing and another – and our big Tax Day event ballooned into something much more than that. I did have to giggle at one of the local bloggers; two weeks before the event, he sneered that there wouldn’t be more than five or six stooopid red-neck H8ers in Alamo Plaza on April 15th. It turned out there were considerably more than that: the sheer numbers of people startled even us organizers. But I think the local media saw the event as a one-off, one-time-only, and that Glenn Beck was the big attraction, overall. One reporter even wistfully asked me, beforehand, was it just a Fox event, or could anyone play.

Things settled down after the Tax Day rally – there was interest from people, not much from the media, particularly. We did a protest here and there, rustled up some interest, and planned a 4th of July event, with a little bit more time to spare than we had for the Tax Day. There was local media interest in that event, mostly because the Governor of Texas made a pit-stop appearance. He was meant originally, I think, to zoom in, introduce our headline speaker, and zoom out again, but he stayed for hours, and that’s when we could begin to see concrete proof that the Tea Parties had something to offer, on the long-term scale of things. Whatever else you say about Governor Perry – he and a handful of other state and local office-holders were perceptive enough to see there was a good-sized crowd there, and there might be some political utility in getting out in front of it.

Still and all, after the 4th of July, it seemed that media interest settled down again – and of course, we in the Tea Party were still working out what to do next, what we would focus on. We had come to a conclusion that events – big events – although they brought us attention, they were very draining on time and energy. Even smaller coordinated protests were draining, although certainly enjoyable for the people participating in them. To really make a mark, we would have to make long-term plans, and concentrate on the 2010 mid-term elections. We would have to focus on candidates, and on education, and a lot of other rather un-splashy stuff; we’d also have to structure ourselves, coordinate more effectively, and raise funds for long-term projects. This isn’t much the stuff of news releases – but as part of this, another experienced media hand suggested that we do face to face outreach, with every local TV station, and the management echelon of the local paper. We’d set up an appointment, and talk to them about coverage, what we could do to make it easier for them, about our long-term plans and goals, offer them the expertise of various experts within the Tea Party. We thought we’d start with the easiest – the local Fox affiliate, and it went so well, we were emboldened to set up a meet with what we thought would be the toughest: the local daily newspaper.

Just by coincidence, that meeting was scheduled a within a few days after the 9-12 rally on the Mall in Washington, DC. I know there is still quite a considerable disputation about how many people were there; one million, two million – but for every person there on the Mall, we calculated fifteen or twenty more who wished they could have been there, but couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t get away from work. We met with not only the various editors, and two columnists, but also the publisher of the paper – and for a good two hours, in the morning of a working day for them. After that, the second most astonishing thing was their own relative astonishment; we were all so normal, rational, and articulate; not sign-waving crazies, screaming on the sidewalk. Everyone came away with their eyes opened, after that. We’ve had a great deal of cautious respect from our local media outlets ever since, although in a lot of venues – including some which you’d think would have known better – the Tea Partiers are still described as red-neck racists, uneducated, reactionary, fascists, racists, easily led by obvious propagandists – the whole vocabulary of ignorant abuse from people who I am sure preen themselves regularly over their own tolerance, and breadth of mind.

And so to the Massachusetts special election – which I see as a kind of nation-wide wake-up call: there in the heart of Kennedy country, the cranky independents all organized, raised funds, campaigned and won – cheered on by out of state cranky independents. This is a defeat so stinging, and so decisive, that I sense it has become a wake-up call for many of those bloggers and members of the commentariat who were formerly inclined to take the ignorant-racist-reactionary-sheeple line to heart. Reluctantly, it appears to me that the more sensible – or those whose social instincts are more finely honed are beginning to reassess not only Tea Partiers, the current administration, but their own opinions, in the light of Tuesday’s Massachusetts upset.

The Economy is so bad…

21. January 2010 · Comments Off on The Economy is so bad… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Politics

(From another one of those emails going around)

The economy is so bad that:

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

I ordered a burger at McDonald’s and the kid behind the counter asked, “Can you afford fries with that?”

CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.

If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.

McDonald’s is selling the 1/4 ouncer.

Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children’s names.

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.

Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

Motel Six won’t leave the light on anymore.

The Mafia is laying off judges.

Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

Congress says they are looking into this Bernie Madoff scandal. Oh Great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!

And, finally…
I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

A Short Exerpt From a Historical Speech

18. January 2010 · Comments Off on A Short Exerpt From a Historical Speech · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

This was found among the comments at Neo-Neocon – somewhat appropriate, considering the special election in Massachusetts tomorrow, and the marked degree of unhappiness generally with our re-elected aristocracy.

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

“Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

“Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God’s help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do.

“I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”

Well, yeah, it was Oliver Cromwell, on the eve of the English Civil War, and he eventually became as odious a dictator as those he fulminated against. Still, a cracking good speech … and in the current political situation, curiously resonant.

Later: and in the current mood, and from the same source – a Hitler Movie Parody Edit:

Road Trip!

17. January 2010 · Comments Off on Road Trip! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Home Front, Military, World

I’ve been invited to be on one of the panels at the 5th Annual MilBlog Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, April 9th and 10th – and Blondie and I are intending to drive, since she will be on spring break! (Route tentatively planned as Dallas-Memphis-Knoxville-Harrisonburg)

Any other milbloggers from the San Antonio or Ft. Hood area also going to the Milblog Conference? Anyone in Arkansas, Tennessee or Virgina want us to stop and visit along the way? Recommend some good eats, or something interesting to see?

We are all Spartacus

16. January 2010 · Comments Off on We are all Spartacus · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, it amuses me no end, checking out the comment sections on various websites and blogs, especially when the commenter start to go to town, with regard to tea parties, tea partiers and the whole Tea Party thing. After the obligatory snigger about teabagging, I find out that Tea Partiers are screeching-angry, hateful, racist, rude, Nazis, sister-humping rednecks who hate everyone else, and most especially the fact that we have a black president. That apparently is supposed to be the thing that sticks in our craws the most – I guess the oh-so-observant commenters have missed the sign that said, “We don’t like his white half, either!” Oh, and we’re all old, and/or uneducated losers, and the Tea Party rallies are more of a mass temper-tantrum, there’s only a handful of them, and they’ve all been deluded by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or perhaps by the Republican Party, and we’re secretly being lead by all of the above, or maybe Sarah Palin and her little dog, too . . . So they can be safely ignored and scored by all right-thinking people.

Seriously, I’m almost sure that none of the commentators holding forth in this manner, from the high – say, the New York Times, down to the very low, which would be some whacked-out Kos diarist, or possibly some more than usually-deranged denizen of Hollywierdland, like Janeane Garafolo – have actually ever gone to a mass Tea Party event. Nope – I’d be surprised as heck, to find out they are opining from actual, real-world encounters with Tea Partiers.

See, folks – I’ve been to one monster Tea Party event, a good few smaller ones, worked on media strategy for a metropolitan Tea Party, and helped pound out their long-term strategy. I have something to base my opinion of Tea Parties and Tea Partiers on – such as the evidence of my own lying eyes. While it might make a portion of the public and the old-line media happy as a pig in swill to believe the angry-racist-red-necking-dumbass-sheeple meme, and to agree with all the other voices in the echo-chamber . . . I have to say up-front – y’all aren’t doing yourself any favors. Especially, you won’t have done yourself a favor, when the Obama Administration, and all its works and all its ways goes down faster than a Japanese carrier at the Battle of Midway. You won’t be able to figure out why, having been blinded by willful mis-perception. Reality, she is a right bitch, and she will eventually crash any party of the delusional.

Mind you, there is a smidgeon or sometimes more to justify the stereotypes: yep, there are Rushbo and Glenn Beck fans among the Tea Partiers, and a goodly number of evangelical Right-to-Life types; there are Republican establishments and politicians who have been quick to grasp the advantages of being perceived as having something to do with the Tea Party, and lord help us, there are a scattering of screeching, ignorant ranters and racists who call themselves Tea Partiers. But to assume that is the truth and sum of all is to delude yourself – and if you are a media person or an academician saying this, than you are deluding the public that you are supposed to be informing.

Here’s the real deal: the Tea Parties have a couple of unifying principles: small government, fiscally-responsible and strict constitutionalists pretty much says it in one sentence. Everything else is secondary, and at this point, kind of a distraction. Blessedly most are not distracted – although because of the sheer number of passionate people involved in a Tea Party does mean that sometimes contrary opinions are involved. Groups split, morph, form other groups. Among the flavors of political opinion drawn into the Tea Party brew are libertarians, people who run small businesses, generally middle-to-working-class, veterans, people who pay taxes, people who are angered by the same old, same old. There is anger as deep as an ocean about politicians who seem to be more of an aristocracy, spending decades in office doing what is best to secure reelection rather than what is best for the country. Many of the Tea Partiers that I know are just as angry at Democrats as they are Republicans – and they come in all colors and religious backgrounds. Myself, I’ve been describing the Tea Party movement for months as a herd of cats, all motivated by pretty much the same thing, and going in more or less the same direction.

Tea Partiers may also rightly be described as angry; there is temper-tantrum angry, but there is also purposeful and focused anger. The sort that I see within my Tea Party is the purposeful, goal-oriented kind. Their focus and their strategy – and it is a focus, not spasms of temporary anger about administration policies – is to search out, and elect people who will uphold the principles of small government, fiscal responsibility and adherence to the Constitution. In other words, they are starting from the bottom up. This is not spectacular; this doesn’t make a flashy television statement, or make it easy to follow, if you are not directly involved. There is no known leader, really – oh, everyone in the lefty commentariat goes on about Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, or Rushbo, but they aren’t really our leaders. There are no leaders. We are all leaders, each of us pushing on towards a goal, according to our own inspiration and our own beliefs. Such beliefs are buttressed not by Fox Television, but in the provisions of the Constitution, which we are – if not familiar with it before – are studying with a renewed attention and appreciation.

And I sense, this is what may prove to be much for frightening to the powers that be, the old-line media sitting in easy and ignorant judgment, or the internet commenter who has enough actual first-hand knowledge about the Tea Party to fill up a small cheap tea bag. Not that we are all they have proclaimed us to be – but that we aren’t. And that there are a lot of us, working quietly and with intelligent focus within our communities, picking up the trash after our protest events, seriously applying ourselves to the intricacies of applying to be precinct chair, or running for local office, recalling to ourselves what it meant to be truly politically involved, instead of hiring through pro-forma elections some empty cipher with good hair and a smooth line of patter, to go to Washington and bring home enough pork to be elected again, one way or an other.

Yes – we are all Spartacus. And there are a lot of us, who have remembered what it is to be citizens. Not subjects.

Art Humor

14. January 2010 · Comments Off on Art Humor · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, The Funny

Found through 2Blowhards, who thought it was a clever concept, but the examples posted just weren’t all that funny.
I disagreed – the whole blog is here: obscure vintage works of art, with new titles.
#91, The USS Conan O’Brian is especially hilarious.

Snow Bound

11. January 2010 · Comments Off on Snow Bound · Categories: General, History, Media Matters Not, Old West

I’ve been offered an opportunity to review a new movie about the Donner Party – which seems to be one of those arty flicks, with some moderately well-known actors in the cast, which appeared at a couple of festivals and then went straight to DVD. I can’t find much on line about it – certainly no hint or clue that it ever had a general release. The plot as outlined actually appears to focus on a small group of fifteen, who called themselves the Forlorn Hope. As winter gripped hard, in November of 1846, they made a desperate gamble to leave the main party, stranded high in the mountains, and walk out on snowshoes. They took sparingly of supplies, hoping to leave more for those remaining behind, and set out for the nearest settlement down in the foothills below. They thought they were a mere forty miles from salvation, but it was nearly twice that long. (Seven of the Forlorn Hope survived; two men and five women.) Although the poster art makes it seem as if it verges perilously into horror-movie territory – which I usually avoid, having an extremely good imagination and a very low gross-out threshold – I am looking forward to watching the movie, and doing a review. The subject – a mid 19th century wagon-train party, stuck in the snows of the Sierra Nevada – is something that I know a good bit about. And I’m interested in what this cinematic take will be; being that ghastly experience of the Donners and the Reeds, and their companions in misery, starvation and madness has horrified and titillated the public from the moment that the last survivor stumbled out of the mountain camp, high in the Sierra Nevada, on the shores of an ice-water lake.

Their doom unfolded inexorably, like a classic Greek tragedy. It seemed to historians, no less than the survivors, that in retrospect, every step taken closed off an escape from the doom of starvation, of murder, betrayal and grisly death which waited for them in the deep mountain snows of the Sierra Nevada. They had departed from the established emigrant trail on advice of a man who had never actually traveled along the route which he had recommended in a best-selling guidebook. They lost precious time, wandering in the desert, lost supplies, lost a portion of their draft animals – and what may have been a worse misfortune, at a critical point, they lost a large portion of their faith and trust in those outside the immediate family circle. (Comprehensive website about their journey, here.)

And yet, two years earlier, another wagon-train party, the Stephens-Townsend Party had also become marooned in the mountains, on the very same spot. Ten wagons, carrying fifty or so men, women, and children had also gambled against being over the wall of the Sierras before winter blocked the passes. They also had suffered in the Forty-Mile Desert, had also taken short-cuts along the trail, consumed nearly all of their supplies, become lost, and occasionally distracted with personal disputes, and had made the same hard choices. They also had split their party – but by choice rather than chance, exhaustion and accident. They also built rough cabins – barely more than huts and brush arbors – and slaughtered the last of their draft oxen for food. And yet, the Stephens-Townsend Party, with the Murphys and the Sullivans and the Millers, and young Mose Schallenberger and the rest of them – they survived. Better than survived, for they arrived in California with two more than they started with, two wives in the party having given birth along the way. But hardly anyone has ever heard of them. The eighty or so of the Donner Party, the Reed family, with the Breens, the Graves and the rest – under the same circumstances, same kind of gear and supplies – they lost nearly half their party to starvation and perhaps murder, and became pretty much a byword in the annals of the West.

What made the difference; why did one group manage to hold together, under challenging circumstances, and the other fall apart, spectacularly? I don’t suppose anyone could give a definitive answer at this point, although I wrote a fictional account of the Stephens-Townsend emigrant journey experience in an attempt to explore that question.

It was my theory that the Stephens-Townsend people were fortunate in two respects and that would be their salvation. (Of course, they were also hampered in one respect – of not actually having a trail to follow once departing from Ft. Hall, save the faint tracks of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party from three years before.) Against that handicap, of having to scout the longest and most perilous section of the trail to California themselves, they had men among them who were knowledgeable about what they faced generally, if not specifically. Hired guide Caleb “Old Man” Greenwood was one of the old breed, a mountain man and fur-trapper, who had married a Crow Indian woman. Another member of the party, Isaac Hitchcock, who was traveling with his widowed daughter, had also spent much time in the far west. He is thought by some of his descendents to have been an associate of Jedediah Smith, and to have ventured to California, sometime in the late 1820s. In any case, he also had vast experience, existing in the untracked wilderness which lay beyond the ‘jumping off’ places, all along the Mississippi-Missouri. Their elected leader, Elisha Stephens, one-time blacksmith and all-around eccentric may have been a teamster on the Santa Fe Trail; he appeared to have superior skills when it came to maging the daily labor of moving a number of heavy-laden wagons over rough trails.

The other fortunate aspect which strikes me, in reading the accounts of these two emigrant parties, is that the Stephens-Townsend group was a more cohesive organization. Over half the party was an extended family group, that of Martin Murphy, Senior – his sons and daughters, son-in-law, and various connections. But although they had lived for a time variously in Canada, and in Missouri, they seem not to have been accustomed to the west in the way that the two old mountain men were, and sensibly accepted the leadership of Elisha Stephens. Indeed, Stephens appears to have been trusted implicitly by everyone in the California-bound contingent, even before splitting off at Ft. Hall from a larger group bound for Oregon. The Donner Party was also made up of family groups, but in reading the various accounts of historians, it becomes plain that during the increasing hardships attendant on crossing the worst stretches, they fractured, with each family left to look after their own. James Reed, who emerges as the strongest and most able leader, killed another emigrant in a violent dispute, during the arduous passage along the Humboldt River. Exiled from the wagon-train, he borrowed a horse from his friends, and went on ahead, later bringing back help and spearheading the eventual rescue of his friends, family and friends.

But at the time when active leadership was most required – the ill-fated emigrants were deprived of it. As historian George R. Stewart described it, their crossing of the 40-Mile Desert – that deathly stretch between the last potable water at the Humboldt Sink, and the Truckee River – turned into a rout. They had lost draft animals, wagons, supplies, many were on foot, straggling up the twisting canyon of the Truckee River. They had no margin for making considered choices after that point. They could only make a desperate gamble on whatever chance seemed to offer slim odds of success over none at all.

It makes for terrific drama, after all. Still, it has never seemed fair that one party should be infamous, and the other barely known at all.

A Gentleman from the NY Times Looks Down from a High Balcony

05. January 2010 · Comments Off on A Gentleman from the NY Times Looks Down from a High Balcony · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

And raises a lorgnette with trembling hands and wonders “Who are these people?” And then scurries back into the safety of his cubicle and tries to explain it all to his readers, who promptly break out in an epidemic of pearl-clutching in the resulting comments not seen since the days of Margo Dumont and the Marx brothers.

Of course, since this is David Brooks, the NY Times token “conservative” * whom I sort of visualize as being kept around the august premises of the NY Times as a live exhibit in an upper-crust menagerie – a sort of miniature, well-clipped, tamed and polished pet buffalo, neutered and well-housebroken, so that everyone else can look at him and coo “Oh, so that’s what one of them look like . . . really, they don’t appear all that dangerous, do they, Pinchy?”

Yeah, he’s a real expert on tea parties, and the people who run them, having noted magisterially from his high balcony that, well, yes – there are an awful lot of people down there, who appear to be a little upset, and oh- the horror – they are not being led by . . . well, anybody, let alone the best people . . . and well, what do they know? The poor dears, how can they really cope, without one of the well-educated, well-heeled, well-known and duly anointed to lead them? Oh, the horror – where is my fainting couch and my smelling salts! They actually have the nerve to think they can think for themselves!

And the comments get even more insulting, although I should be used to it now; the same old, same old – just a bunch of old white people, racist to the core, tools of the Republican Party, Beck & Limbaugh-worshipping, barely-literate, drooling, sister-humping, gun-loving morons, all they have is unfocused anger . . . oh, and a new twist: apparently the Tea Partiers are the new incarnation of Weimar-era Nazis – and we all know how all that worked out, don’t we?

Of course, this would have to be the same day that NPR posted an antimated cartoon which combined ignorance and insult to such a degree that the comment thread has now coalesced into a mass so dense that it threatens to sink into the earth’s core and emerge out the other side . . . of course, at a guess, a portion of the commenters are outraged Tea Party sympathizers who floated in on a link from Da Blogfaddah, and the rest are NPR regulars, a large portion of whom think that Garrison Keiller – evidence to the contrary – is razor-sharp cutting edge and still funny. Basically, another heaping helping of the above. SSDD**, as the saying goes. Or maybe just SS, different sclerotic old media dinosaur with delusions of detachment and adequacy.

If all you know is what you read in the NY Times, and hear on NPR, well then … you are a bit limited, I think.

All righty then – here’s the scoop, Brooksie. And Pinchy and Muffy and Buffy, and all of the rest of you wanna-be aristos with three last names and an Ivy degree. By all means go on believing all the tripe displayed in the comments on these two items. Go on believing all that balderdash about moronic, directionless, Nazi-like racists. Do, please – it’s what your chosen dispensers of news have fed to you, either explicitly or implicitly, through laziness or chosen ideology over the last year or longer. Pass over any evidence to the contrary. Ignore anyone who points out in a small, still voice that the Tea Party people are small-government, fiscally responsible constitutionalists, of all colors, and religious persuasions, and that many of them are doing a sudden crash course in political activism at the local, nuts’n’bolts level. And that yes, they are angry – but not ignorant, and not unfocused.

That flaccid little pink thing which they may very well be handing to you all after the next mid-term election? That will be your ass. Try not to look too surprised – the pleasure will have been all ours.

* Viciously skeptical quote marks
** SSDD – Same S**t, Different Day

Another Set of Foundations

31. December 2009 · Comments Off on Another Set of Foundations · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Yep, I am starting again, on another book – so here I go, into that kind of giddy and receptive stage, doing research and reading the usual tall stack of relevant books, where the details of plot and character are not quite nailed down yet, where I might at any moment read or hear about a fascinating someone, or tiny detail of an event, which will be that something that will suddenly set a lock on my imagination, whispering seductively ‘this HAS to be in “The Book.”’ (It’s always “The Book,” even though I am actually juggling two of them, set in Texas but fifty years apart.)

The basic characters are there – a selection of minor characters from Adelsverein that I never got a chance to really develop; either whose characters whose stories were either fascinating in themselves because it was hinted at here and there of what they had seen and experienced, or because they were just introduced in the final chapters, and I had already hit a certain word-count and had to simply wrap up the existing narrative, and not take any more time to explore who they were, and what would happen to them.

Margaret is the subject of the earlier book, time-wise, and the one that I am now doing the most research for – Margaret, who was Carl Becker’s sister, political hostess extraordinaire, who survived two husbands, her brothers, and three of her sons, and who knew everyone important in mid-19th century Texas; she’s an imperious survivor, who scared the c**p out of Sam Houston in his prime – among others. As outlined, she comes to Texas in the early 1820s, marries a wandering schoolteacher from Boston, and settles in Gonzales with him – just in time for the War of Independence, the “Come and Take It” fight, and the horrors of the “Runaway Scrape” – and the tomcats-in-a-sack aspects of Republic-era Texas. So, I am studying up first on the days of early settlement, which will mean basically becoming as much of a walking encyclopedia about those aspects, as I already have about Fredericksburg and the Gillespie County German settlers. I’ve even spent the day in Gonzales, on a research trip – I have to say, it’s easier to carry off this sort of thing, having already been a “published Arthur.”

I have to form a kind of mental map of Gonzales, and indeed all of the landscape of that time. How did people talk, dress, how much did they keep in touch, how did they furnish their houses, find their fun, what did they worry about, how closely were the Anglo settlers entwined with the Tejanos: if you wanted a printed book, a length of calico or a bottle of patent medicine, where would you go to get it, and what would you pay for it? How drastically did the changing political situation affect everyday life, from the mid-1820s on? What did people talk about, what were the day-to-day concerns – and most importantly, from my point of view – who were those very local people, those characters that their neighbors talked about, wondered about, worried about? What were they like, can I somehow dredge up a few small personal quirks from the great well of historical memory, and build a believable and interesting character out of those small shreds of verifiable fact?

In one way – the field is wide open to me. I am still not much interested in writing about the Alamo; simply everyone seems to have written about the Alamo, but if I touch on it in this new book, it will be to put it in perspective. And sometimes it seems as if no one who does a novel about early Texas has written about anything else BUT the Alamo. I think to pay more attention to the second and third-rank spear carriers, especially the thirty or so volunteers from Gonzales who answered the plea for reinforcements, sent out just as Santa Anna’s siege began to choke off a garrison too small to chew what they had bitten off. Granted, Jim Bowie has a sort of dark, violent glamor about him. He was perhaps Mexican-Texas’ very own Lord Byron: mad, bad and dangerous to know. William Travis was a hot-tempered pain in the ass, with an elevated sense of his own magnificent destiny – but they were only two, among all the personalities at the time. And there are so many stories – again, like the German settlements, there were so many likely and unlikely heroes and heroines, so many incredible happenings . . . some of them have appeared in fiction, many more not. And no one has ever heard of those who have not, although their stories are at least as gripping.

Among the militia volunteers from Gonzales who went to the Alamo, three of the youngest were teenaged boys. The first husband of my heroine, Margaret, is a schoolteacher, when the war for independence begins. Those boys would have been his pupils, for at least some of the time. Like just about every other fit and able-bodied male settler, he is also a member of the militia, of the company of horse-mounted volunteers. All the others are his friends, neighbors and the parents of his students; Margaret is a friend and neighbor of their wives. But on the day assigned – he is too ill to climb on his horse . . . and so he remains behind.

Something like a fortnight later, the exhausted and traumatized young wife of a Gonzales neighbor stumbles into town, riding on a mule and carrying her toddler daughter in her arms. She is accompanied by two black slaves, and the leader of a troop of scouts, whose men have found her wandering along the road from San Antonio; she is one of a handful of survivor-witnesses. She has been sent as a messenger from General Santa Anna . . .

Oh, I can hardly wait to get started.
But research first . . .

One Little Cannon – Come and Take It

30. December 2009 · Comments Off on One Little Cannon – Come and Take It · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War

It was small – up on that, everyone agrees; a six pound cannon, most likely of Spanish make, very likely of bronze, or maybe iron, perhaps of brass. It was called a six-pound cannon because it fired a missile of that weight; pictures of an iron cannon of that type and thought to have been the original show a rather small – barely two feet long, from end to end, and hardly impressive piece, since it had been spiked and otherwise rendered nearly useless. Really, it appears to have been intended mainly for show, or as one early chronicler observed in disgust, for signaling the start of a horse race. Nonetheless, this little cannon – or perhaps another of similar size and made of bronze was issued to the settlers of Gonzalez, Texas early in the 1830s, for defense of the infant settlement. Texas was wild and woolly – plagued by raids from various Indian war parties – Tonkawa, Apache and most especially, the feared horse-stealing, slave-trading Comanche. Anglo settlers newly come to an entrepreneur-founded settlement near the Guadalupe River, and their Tejano neighbors succeeded in making some kind of peace with all but the Comanche. Knowing this, the Mexican authorities in San Antonio de Bexar approved issuing that one small cannon to the settlers.

Their town was called Gonzales, after the then-governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Called informally the Dewitt Colony, it had been established after a couple of false starts by Green DeWitt, who spent a great deal of his own personal funds in recruiting families and adventurous single men to an outpost on the farthest western fringe of the various Anglo settlements. Eventually Green DeWitt’s settlement was laid out in a neat grid of city blocks, each block divided into six lots. This layout is still preserved in present-day Gonzales; including a row across the middle of town set aside for civic purposes, although the historic buildings lining those streets are from much later. Only one building – a dog-trot log cabin with a shake roof – remains to give an idea of what this thriving little town would have looked like in 1835, when a small party of Mexican soldiers sent by the military governor in Bexar came to get the little cannon back.

The political situation in Mexico, which had once been favorably-inclined towards Anglo settlers, and entrepreneurs, like Stephen Austin and Green DeWitt had deteriorated into a welter of mutual suspicion. For a while, it had appeared that Mexico, with a Constitution modeled after that of the United States, would evolve into a nation very similar, with fairly autonomous states, a Congress, and a central federal authority which administered with a light hand. Unfortunately, a newly-elected President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had other plans – plans involving tight central authority, revoking liberal reforms, dissolving the Congress, and establishing rather a kind of dictatorship backed by armed force. Out on the far frontier, even with shaky and irregular communications with the larger world, the settlers in Gonzales may not have known much for sure, but their suspicions had a firm basis. Resistance to the central government, especially in the outlying regions – accustomed to managing their own affairs in the face of more or less benign neglect from the governmental authorities in Mexico City sprang up at once. Rebellious provinces included Zacatecas, Jalisco, Durango, Nueva Leon, Tamaulipas . . . and Texas. Santa Anna, a brutal and efficient commander of armies utterly smashed the rebels in Zacatecas, taking 3,000 prisoners and allowing his soldiers to loot, burn and rape at will – making it abundantly clear that any other acts of organized defiance would earn the same punishment meted.

In September, 1835, Col. Ugartechea, the commander of Mexican military forces in Bexar sent a corporal with five soldiers and a small oxcart, to retrieve the cannon from Gonzales. Andrew Ponton, who was the alcalde (mayor and justice of the peace) cagily stalled for time, not wanting to give up a cornerstone of local defense, and suspecting – along with may other Anglo citizens of Texas, that the little cannon might very well be turned upon them, next . . . “Cannon, you say? What cannon – are you sure there is a cannon around here? I don’t see anything of the sort . . . “ The cannon was hidden, buried in a peach orchard near the river. Baffled of their aim, the soldiers returned to San Antonio, empty-handed – but Colonel Ugartechea did not give up as easily as all that. He sent an officer and a hundred mounted troopers, with a more strongly worded request. There were only eighteen settlers, standing on the riverbank at the edge of Gonzales when Ugartechea’s soldiers appeared on the far bank of the river – but that handful had hidden the ferry-boat, and anything else which might be used to cross the rain-swollen Guadalupe River. Again, they pointedly refused to hand over the cannon – and wisely, they had also sent out word to other settlers.

Frustrated, the soldiers from Bexar retired northwards along the river-bank to a more defensible position, but on the night of October 1st the Texian volunteers – who now outnumbered the Mexican force, with more arriving every hour – crossed the river in force. They brought with them the little cannon, repaired and mounted on a make-shift gun carriage – and a banner made from the skirt of a silk wedding dress – adorned with a single star, and a rough outline of the cannon which was the cause of the whole ruckus – with a taunt “Come and Take It”. There was a slightly farcical face-off between the two sides, among the corn and melon-fields, aided and impeded by morning fog, and a well-meaning go-between, during which the cannon fired a load of scrap-metal in the general direction of the Mexican dragoons, but in the end, they retreated, leaving the Texian volunteers in possession of the field, and the little cannon . . . for the moment. The time had not yet come for open war; Colonel Ugartechea did not wish to press the issue too far – and for a time, neither did the citizens of Gonzales. But still – the first shot had been fired. Within the space of six months, a good few of the Gonzales volunteers who had stood on the riverbank and taunted Ugartechea’s soldiers, telling them to come and take the cannon, if they could – would be dead. Thirty-three of them would answer a desperate plea to come to the aid of another strongpoint under siege – the Alamo, and Gonzales would be deserted and burned to the ground . . . but that is another story.

Proposed Derisive Nicknames for the Christmas Day Jihadi

29. December 2009 · Comments Off on Proposed Derisive Nicknames for the Christmas Day Jihadi · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun With Islam, General, GWOT

In furtherance of my ambition to fight the war against the more homicidally inclined jihadist by humiliation and laughter directed at them – the following derisive references to the Nigerian who attempted to blow up a landing airliner with an explosive b*tt-plug on Christmas Day are suggested. Vote for the one you think the funniest, or of you have heard of a better one, add it in comments.

Weapon of Ass Destruction

The Knicker-Bomber

Fruit of the Boom Guy

BVD-Boomer

The Crotch-Rocket Bomber

The Undie-Bomber

The Panty-Boomer

A Favor From a Blog-Friend

27. December 2009 · Comments Off on A Favor From a Blog-Friend · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Military, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine...

(Recieved this request from a reader of my Open Salon Blog

I am an officially middle-aged, female, Canadian civilian from the Toronto area in Canada. You can find the first of several weekly Sunday night posts at my Open Salon blog, here.
Sgt Mom, I am hoping you may be willing to help me with a writing project I am developing. The project is about the stories of the fans, or fanatics as he likes to call us, of Henry Rollins. I am going to take time this next year researching, and compiling the personal stories of a significant number of ‘fanatics’ who have been inspired, influenced, helped, and otherwise impacted, by Henry. While the personal stories will not be specific to those in the military, it is absolutely critical that as many of those stories are captured as possible. During the first week of this project I have received some great personal stories, both military and civilian, through my preliminary post at opensalon.com.
If you would be willing to put this request for stories from Henry Rollins fans out to your online community at The Daily Brief, and any other blogs or networks you might be connected to, I would be so grateful.

Any personal stories, will not be published without the consent of the writers, prior to final publication. At this early stage I am thinking it will be an electronic publication, with a completion date of December 2010. I will stay in touch with all contributors as the project evolves to answer any questions, and keep people up to speed on how it’s unfolding. I would like to send the final work to Henry Rollins for his 50th birthday in February of 2011. None of the information I receive will be published elsewhere without the consent of the authors prior to publication. I will keep people posted on the project as it starts to roll out. I expect it to take most of 2010 as I will be working on this around my paid gig and teenagers, responsibilities I am grateful to have, yet leave little time for life’s other passions like writing.
Questions, stories and comments can be emailed to me at bennettangela@rogers.com, or through my Open Salon Blog.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about posting this to your online community. I sincerely appreciate anything you might be able to do to help. I’m just another Rollins fanatic, trying to give back a little something to someone who has had a significant impact on me, and many others in our global neighbourhood.

Sincerely,
Angela.

(All right then – got any good stories for Angela?)

An Oddly Satisfactory Christmas

26. December 2009 · Comments Off on An Oddly Satisfactory Christmas · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Domestic, General, Politics, Tea Time

It was shaping up not to be a very merry Christmas for us, under circumstances which at first appeared even more strained than last year, when I was still working at the hell-hole job – a job which brought in a regular paycheck, but earned under circumstances which . . . well, least said, soonest forgotten. (Never forgotten though – but leaving me with a burning determination to henceforward earn a living doing work that pleases me, not work which I hate every second of every minute of every hour performing.)

This year I am working for a teensy boutique press. I thought we would be able to finish one project in time for a Christmas release, which would earn me enough of the profits from it to pay some bills, buy some presents and pay enough that I could afford the drive to California. That did not work out – the book will most likely be delivered to the client by mid-January. Dad absolutely freaked at the thought of me driving to California alone, (Blondie being in school and needing to care for the pets!) and Mom’s hospitable nature is worn to tatters by Christmas, anyway. So, gave up on that plan early last week, and Blondie and I spent Christmas at home . . . our home. The one with dogs and cats, and a Christmas tree which has seen all the ornaments removed to the upper 2/3rds of the tree, due to the Lesser Weevil’s tail, and the cats’ proclivity to knock down and play with those ornaments within in reach.

Even with not finishing that book, I have two clients who are paying me to edit their own memoirs, a possible contract to ghost-write another book, beginning in January, and a regular client who pays me for content for a real-estate blog; plus a constant trickle of royalties for the Trilogy, and Truckee’s Trail. All things considered, I’m economically better off than I was last year – or I may be, once everyone gets back to work after the holidays!

We even were able to afford a bit of a splash for Christmas. Through another member of our local Red Hat Ladies chapter, Blondie scored three days of work, delivering for Edible Arrangements. Last year, no one was hiring temporary workers for Christmas, so this year she had given up entirely. And I had my royalty checks, and the usual generous gift from Mom and Dad. We also had another unexpected and totally unlooked-for blessing. We did a good deed, agreed to do a favor for someone, almost in a fit of absent-mindedness. I was scribbling away on one of my writing projects, with an eye on the pizza dough rising – (yeah, our family tradition has pizza for dinner on Christmas Eve. We do home-made, with whatever we like on it, by god! Even anchovies!)

One of my nearby neighbors pounded on the door – totally ignoring the doorbell, and it’s a mystery to me why people don’t see that, since it has a little illuminated button anyway – and explained, breathlessly that as he and his wife were about do hit the road, could we do them a favor, do a good deed over Christmas, if we were going to be at home over the holiday. It was about a stray dog, he said. As he was loading the trunk of their car with luggage, this dog came up to him. A nice little black dog, sort of poodle-ish, very friendly and well-mannered, and he thought it might be the same dog as was being advertised on a flyer attached to various mailboxes and light-posts. At this very moment, his wife was feeding the dog, but they absolutely had to hit the road in the next few minutes – could we keep the dog, and call the number on the flyer, and see to returning this nice little dog to it’s owner? Well – it’s not like we haven’t done that before. Sometimes I have thought that Blondie and I are magnets for every lost dog in our neighborhood, and beyond. On particular memorable weekend, there were four of them returned to owners; we have gotten particularly experienced at this. It’s almost a routine; check for tags, call the clinic which issued them, call the local clinics, call the various voluntary groups. If it’s a weekday, take the dog to the nearest service for a chip-check, put an ad in the paper, and walk around the neighborhood with the animal, asking everyone we know if they recognize it . . . this works, it really does. We have kept stray dogs in the back yard, and in the house, never for more than a few days, before finding the owner – usually people who have been frantically searching for their pet. There is something about a dog which is cherished, and beloved; they behave themselves, they gratefully eat the kibble in the bowl, make friends with our dogs, tolerate the cats and generally . . . behave like dogs who have people who are missing them, and ransacking the neighborhood.

Blondie came home, just as the neighbor was going down the walk – he was relieved no end to be able to pass off this project on us, for he couldn’t leave a strange dog alone in their house with their own dogs, unsupervised over the weekend, and what if the owners were going away for the holiday weekend? So Blondie took the telephone number from the poster, and called, leaving a message which was returned in a few minutes. Yes, they had been looking for their little black schnauzer, he was ten years old, neatly groomed, but no collar, neutered and with unclipped ears – they would come immediately and look at the dog which seemed to match their description. We had cheerfully put amongst our menagerie. He was very sweet and well-mannered; he sat obediently for a dog-treat and allowed the cats to dubiously sniff at him.

He had been missing for five days, as it turned out – and his owners’ family was frantic. This was sentimental movie material, when the husband and older daughter walked into the living-room, and he scampered up to them; of course he was theirs. And how wonderful to get him back safely on Christmas Eve, although where he had been for five days was anyone’s guess. It had rained on Wednesday night, and then been bitterly cold, and he was a sheltered indoor dog, for the most part. The owners said, they had posted a reward, for whoever returned him – would we accept it. We’ve only been offered a reward once – and the first time, we were very noble and turned it down. This time, I admitted that, well – Blondie’s a student, and I’m an erratically employed writer, so, yes, we would accept a reward. We truly expected it to be in the range of 25$ or so. When consulted, the neighbor who had left the situation in our hands didn’t want a share. Although we really hadn’t done all that much in this case, we had taken an awful lot of trouble on previous occasions, with all the other strays. We could consider this our cumulative reward, for all we had done for other dogs, and feel all right with accepting it. The husband thanked us again, and said they would be back in a bit.

Which they were, this time with the wife, who has been papering the other side of our neighborhood with flyers; the dog was her particular pet. They all teared up again, thanked us profusely, admired our own dogs, told us how worried they had been, and how desperately they had been searching . . . and to get him back again on Christmas Eve. They left us with a Christmas card, which contained a check for an absolutely stunning amount . . . so, yes, we were enabled to have a very pleasant Christmas, knowing that our casually-accepted good deed would help us pay a couple of bills, too.

It’s just that last year, outside my own personal situation – everything seemed more hopeful. We could cross our fingers and hope that B. Obama, once inaugurated, could grow into the job of president, that maybe having come out of the Chicago political machine would not be so much of a bad omen. After all, he did seem intelligent, politically adroit, reasonable and well-spoken – or at least the people in his proposed administration seemed to be. All the political experts, media personalities, and big intellectual authorities kept assuring us so Harry Truman came out of another such big-city machine, and he turned out OK. We could hope a little. Last year at this time, I had never heard of a Tea Party, save in the history books, would never have considered being party of a protest, carrying a sign, or sending a message to my congressman. And now . . . here we are, not yet on the edge of an abyss, but fearing that one will open up at our feet, any moment now. I am now haunted by a line a year-end roundup by Wretchard at Belmont Club, enjoy the champagne, this year – for by this time next year, we will be eating the glass.

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