Michelle wore a pair of $540 shoes to a food bank?
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Those of us on the Tea Party planning committee knew it was going to be huge, even if attendance at it only met the minimum SWAG (semi-scientific wild-ass guess) – which early on, we set at four or five thousand, if it didn’t rain and with no celebrities. We had an RSVP meter on our website, which eventually topped out at nine thousand planning to attend. At the final executive meeting, Easter Saturday, we agreed to go ahead and secure an overflow site on Hemisfair Plaza. At some point, to be left to the SAPD on-scene, we would start directing partiers there. We had made arrangements for portapotties and a jumbotron or two, but pretty much forgot about it in the press of everything happening in Alamo Plaza. Our bad – when we compared notes afterwards, none of us had been able to make our way over there; I sure as heck didn’t have the time on Tea Party Day.
Monday and Tuesday, after Easter was just flat-out insane; I think I did a call-in to most of the radio morning shows, with updates about what was happening. I did venture over to the public radio station where I used to work, otherwise it was phone-in. And three print media interviews… and it’s all a bit of a blurr now, but on one day I had three stand-ups for local news – for which they were all so eager that they hied over to the house to do a stand-up in the garden. Well, too of them did, KENS-5 set up in the street; the neighbors were curious, I am sure, but too well-mannered to come over and ask what the heck. And one of the cats yacked up on KSAT-12’s extension cord. (At least, I hope it was cat vomit, and not from the other end…)
There were so many more things that we could have organized, so many more people we might have brought into it – but it happened so fast, especially over the last four days that we had barely enough time to make an immediate decision and move on to the next three or four items screaming for attention. I still have a list of things screaming for attention at a slightly lesser decibel level, such as a pair of very apt cartoons, done up as posters, which we used for the media center, and for which I still owe a thank-you email… it just never stops. Apparently I am a political activist now. Or as Robin and the others keep pointing out – community organizers.
I knew it was going to be a long day when we headed downtown, and heard an update on the Tea Party on the car radio… which brings me neatly back to where I started this epic, with a walk-through of Alamo Plaza, and helping to assemble the media badges, at desk in the Menger Hotel lobby. I walked back to the Emily Morgan with a thick handful of them, held by their elastic leashes, set up to hand them out at 2 PM to the anticipated descending media hordes. It was about noon by the time I finished with that, so I went with one of the photogs to grab a hot sandwich and fries at a funky little restaurant on the Plaza, just across from the Menger where all the important celebs, VIPs and members of the committee were probably eating something a lot more higher end, culinary-speaking. Back to the Emily after we were finished – the Plaza was even more crowded, and I could hear amplified music, an electric guitar and wild applause. It seemed that they were testing the sound system, with Ted Nugent’s assistance – he was out there, goofing around, even though it was still only mid-day, the streets weren’t even blocked off. It was getting crowded, too – one hour to go until the media people came to pick up their passes, two to the press conference, three until the start of Glenn Beck’s broadcast, five until our own event.
There was a crowded room for the presser – just Robin, and Eric G. and I on one side of the table, and a room full of press, cameras and laptops on the other. I think we may have run out of chairs, for the first five minutes or so, until the major TV media reps got the couple of seconds they needed, folded up their tripods, bagged up their gear and left. No surprises among the questions, pretty much what we had expected. Robin expounded on the almost-by-now-standard accusation that the Tea Parties are astro-turf; a false front for some shady corporate or political party. No, calmly and rationally, one more time – none of us were ever politically active before, all of us have day jobs, and we were brought to participate in the Tea Party for various reasons, but the insanity of a cripplingly large stimulus package passed by legislators who hardly bothered to read the darned thing proved to be the final straw.
One hurdle safely over – I thought I would go upstairs to a room at the Emily taken by a friend of ours and put up my feet for a while. Blondie and I had a key-card for it, so we could leave our purses there. The room had a view of the Alamo grounds and the Plaza, from eleven floors up, and even with the windows sealed I could hear the cheering from down below. Reconsider original impulse – I would circulate, and take some pictures for myself, with Blondie’s digital camera, and get a sense for myself of how it was all coming together. I meandered through the Alamo Gardens, across the famous front of it, and into a long pergola, behind an arcade that lines the Plaza; a fair number of people, not terribly crowded. I came out of the Alamo Gardens across the street from the Menger Hotel.
Not being an aficionado of protests and political action projects I have nothing much by way of comparison, but it felt rather like a rather jolly block party – but with signs and banners. Everyone seemed to be polite, and having a wonderful time, discovering how many other citizens felt just they same way they did. There was one strange man with a bible in one hand and a sign of the “Repent or you are DOOMED!†variety in the other, shouting a blood and thunder sermon at the top of his lungs. Everyone seemed to be ignoring him, and I overheard someone in the crowd say that he was a regular; anyway, his voice gave out after fifteen minutes. A number of people noticed my committee badge and thanked me and the other organizers for having thrown such a nice party
The crowd became thicker, the closer to Glenn Beck’s stage that I got. I gave it up, by the entrance into the Hyatt. There was just no going any farther; people were standing so close together that it was impossible, not unless I wanted to push and shove. One of the photogs later said he was stuck for half an hour in the dense crowd there. I went back the way that I came, towards Ripley’s and the bandstand in front of the Menger. About halfway there I found three guys, one with an Obama shirt having a shouting match with another Tea Partier. For all that we were worried about agent provocateurs picking fights with other Tea Partiers, filming the results and winding up on YouTube as brutal reactionary racist KKK thugs beating up on some innocent counterprotester; these three were the only ones. Sigh; well, here I was, one of the committee members – better look like I had some authority over all this, in my best Catholic high-school principal style. It hardly seemed necessary to remind the people standing around that well… the Obamanauts were trying to provoke a reaction. Just about everyone seemed to know that already. Politely pointed out to the shouting Obamanaut that he could perhaps win over more agreement with his views if he stopped shouting, actually read the Constitution, and engaged in calm and rational discourse… and could everyone please recall the manners that their mama’s taught them? They did appear to have a confederate in the crowd with a video camera; another committee member said that I did show up on a brief and thankfully boring YouTube video. Other reports have them giving up and going away shortly afterward. Ah well – just recall, dissent is patriotic.
Just before six, Blondie and I and some of the other speakers – the non-celeb ones and some committee members and their families- assembled in the lobby of the Emily Morgan, to be taken from there through the crowd to the backstage area. We did have a law-enforcement escort, an off-duty county sheriff who looked for all the world like a huge concrete car-bomb protection bollard dressed up in a black suit and cowboy hat. We threaded through a couple of barriers, across a raised planting made bumpy with tree-roots and into an area behind the stage, which was only a little less crowded than the area outside of it. No place to sit, except on some leftover staging. Someone brought us bottles of ice-cold water – and there we waited and talked, and looked nervously at the stage from the back. Someone pointed out Janine Turner, with her middle-school-aged daughter, sitting with Matt Perdue on the staging along with the rest of us. It turned out that she was a last-minute addition to the program – eh, what the heck. She had a draft speech, which Robin asked me to check out. Otherwise, it was something like the military; sit around and wait. She is a very pleasant and unpretentious person, by the way; also physically very tiny. I had never known she was from Texas – Matt and I talked about books, and the weird coincidence that I had written about his great-grandfather in Book 2 of Adelsverein.
The seriously celeb speakers – Glenn Beck and Ted Nugent – came in through another passage-way through the crowd, from the Menger, practically swamped with security… that is, large, tough-looking gentlemen with earphones, speaking quietly into their sleeves. They were delivered to the back-stage a few minutes before their appearances, and lingered a little bit afterward. I had the feeling that we were all just sort of a blur of faces, passing in front of Glenn Beck. He was hurried away by his bodyguards, but Ted Nugent hung around for a bit longer. It seems very odd to say that he has charisma, but he has, and also the gift – when he is with other people – of seeming to be very intensely focused on that individual. Blondie and I talked about this, and with some of the other committee members who also talked with them both, and they all agreed. When he talked with anyone, even briefly as he scribbled an autograph – he was just overwhelmingly interested in you. On-stage in front of an audience he was just magnetic; he seemed to draw in the energy of the crowd and feed it back to them, amplified up to the max – and that this was something that he lived to do. In a strange way, it was the class clown, grown up; Oh, there is a crowd! I must get in front of people, entertain them, excite them, make them cheer! It was actually kind of endearing – and he did get rather carried away, and uncorked some pretty uncensored language, permanently bollixing any of our claims to be a strictly family-friendly event. But even the most strait-laced members of the committee seemed prepared to be indulgent about this – I guess they felt the endearing-class-clown vibe as well. Curiously, one of our non-celebrity speakers, Katherine Moreno seemed to feed on the audience in the same dynamic way.
Ah well – it took me almost longer to write about it, than it did to happen, from start to finish. My feet hurt so much that night, from walking around in boots – next time, I swear, it’s running shoes for me.
And there will be a next time. We are finalizing our location – a destination ranch, in a loop of the Cibolo, with a grove of trees, some ready-built stage venues and a herd of longhorns. Think of it as Woodstock, Texas-style. The April 15th party was just the opening shot across the bows.
So, there we were, a good part of the SA Tea Party executive committee, sitting at a picnic table under a shady tree, at a site which we were touring with an eye towards making it the venue for our great 4th of July San Antonio Tea party Blow-out, when one of the other members had a story to tell.
She was at a bar the other night with a friend of hers – (what? You thought we were all a bunch of prudes and blue-noses? Honey, this is Texas; Football Friday night, bar Saturday night, church Sunday morning. Life is a wonderful thing, you have to live it in the right proportions!)
– Anyway, she and her friend were stragegizing about the event, discussing who we could get to come and speak, and who else might come and entertain – not without mentioning a lot of big names – and all the while, there was a guy sitting next to them at the bar, eavesdropping like mad. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any more; he said,
“Hey, what are you – some kind of political activist?!”
And she turned right around and answered …
(wait for it)
“No – I’m a community organizer!”
1. I always wanted to have someone to hold, someone to love. And now that you’ve come into my life…
(Inside card) – I’ve changed my mind.
2. I must admit, you brought religion into my life…
(Inside card) – I never believed in hell until I met you.
3. As the days go by, I think how lucky I am….
(Inside card) – That you’re not here to ruin it for me.
4. Congratulations on your promotion. Before you go….
(Inside card) – Will you take the knife from my back?
You’ll probably need it again.
5. When we were together, you said you’d die for me…
(Inside card) – Now we’ve broken up, I think it’s time to keep your promise.
6. We’ve been friends for a very long time…
(Inside card) – What do you say we stop?
7. I’m so miserable without you…
(Inside card) – It’s almost like you’re still here.
8. Congratulations on your new bundle of joy….
(Inside card) – Did you ever find out who the father was?
9. You are such a good friend. If we were on a sinking ship and there was only one life jacket…
(Inside card) – I’d miss you terribly and think of you often.
10. Happy Birthday, Inside card ” Uncle Dad! ”
11. Looking back over the years we’ve been together, I can’t help but wonder…
(Inside card) – What was I thinking?
12. Congratulations on your wedding day!…
(Inside card) – Too bad no one likes your husband
(These are lifted from an email sent out to the Yahoo group for FEN broadcasters. The following are alleged to be quotes from translated kung fu movies. No idea of they were really in movies or not; they just sounded pretty funny.)
1. I am about to choke you like a chicken!
2. Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.
3. Gun wounds again?
4. Same old rules…no eyes, no groin.
5. A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.
6. Damn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken!
7. Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.
8. Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?
9. Quiet or I’ll blow your throat up.
10. You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.
11. I’ll fire aimlessly if you don’t come out!
12. You daring lousy guy.
13. Beat him out of recognizable shape!
14. I have been scared shitless too much lately.
15. I got knife scars more than the number of your leg hairs!
16. Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.
17. The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?
18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?
19. This will be of fine service for you, you bag of scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your manhoods and leave them out on the dessert flour for your aunts to eat.
20. Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your gynecologist for a thorough extermination.
21. Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.
22. I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.
We had basically concluded that Alamo Plaza would be impossible to get as a venue site; perhaps Fox would be able to gain permission to broadcast from there, but our Tea Party would probably be best held nearby, perhaps at Alamo Stadium. We were checking out other urban venues as well, but when Robin announced this and explained some of the difficulties in securing the Plaza, an attendee at the open meeting leaped up and challenged him; Hadn’t we even tried? Who had we talked to, in securing permits – didn’t we even KNOW anyone? This was Matthew P., who insisted forcefully that it was quite possible, and that he could do it. Matthew looks a bit like General Grant on one of his dyspeptic days. But he has all of Grant’s iron stubborness; he was all for the Tea Party, and all for having it on Alamo Plaza, and he knew just the people to talk too. So we kept his name and telephone number, and Robin told him to go for it, and to coordinate with another key volunteer, Eric G., the lawyer better known among us as The Other Eric. In the mean time, Eric A., the video producer had another stroke of genius – as many of the volunteers on the committee would meet him on Alamo Plaza Monday morning, and he would do a quick guerrilla shoot of us inviting Glenn Beck to come to our Tea Party – it turned out that this was not needed at all, as it appeared that Glenn Beck committed himself that morning to coming to San Antonio.
And by Friday, April 3rd, we got the word from Matthew P. and Eric G. that the miracle was done; we had secured the Plaza – with about a week and a half to go until the Tea Party. Matthew P. would coordinate between the City of San Antonio and the Fox people, Eric G. would handle all the considerable legal stuff … and Dee M. and Jerry H. would manage fund-raising. Keep it in mind that most of us only met face to face for the first time around the last of March and the beginning of February.
We had barely enough time to take in this news – ten days to sort out all the logistics, which were enormous, and to raise the funds to pay for the necessities. I think it was that Friday morning that I spent about an hour on the phone with a woman who had organized many such events downtown. She couldn’t be involved to any extent in the Tea Party, because of her own full-time job, but she expounded forcefully on several aspects that we had never considered until that moment: barricades, and security, crowd control, securing places to park jumbotrons, which would mean another permit, of security badges for our personnel, of me as the media representative being constantly available to the minions of the press. I took notes, lots of notes, and went to Robin over the weekend with them; we needed someone dedicated to event-planning, someone who had done massive events. I had only done one, years before, and in the military at that, and with six months to pull it off. I’d be out of my depth on that and knew it.
But among us, we already had a volunteer, Diane E. who had set up a sign-painting party that very weekend – she’s a local realtor and by good fortune, had done some big golfing events… which involved the media, set-up, security, crowds – the whole ball o’wax. So Diane was in play as the overall event organizer, working with Matthew. We had a couple of epic telephone conference calls during that week, which clocked in at well over two hours, and another set of meetings on Palm Sunday, which also went on for hours; who to have as master of ceremonies, who to have as speakers besides Glenn Beck… absolutely no politicians, we had agreed from the start. Not even as VIPs attending, although they were welcome to come and attend, and listen like everyone else.
The financial crunch was alleviated somewhat, by Glenn Beck offering to host a fund-raising luncheon for us at the Menger Hotel on the day of the Tea Party. He had already withdrawn as keynote speaker for our event – which, upon consideration was probably a good thing. This was supposed to be about us, not about celebrities. He would open the event, and then give over to our program of local speakers – and this was when Ted Nugent got into the picture; coming to perform the National Anthem. Just how cool was that going to be? In that case we could handle another celebrity, but the line on politicians was set in cement, no matter how much they asked. By this time, we had all begin to sense that we were riding a wave – best not to look down, just keep going forward.
At the Palm Sunday meeting, we gained another key volunteer – to oversee security. Early on, we had a pair of volunteers who worked in law enforcement, but the way that this event was growing, we knew very well that we would need someone with command experience, and more than that – command experience at large events … and out of the blue, another volunteer, Dennis O., who was an acquaintance of Robin’s. Dennis spent some time talking to me after the meeting, Robin being tied up talking to other people. After my educational lecture from the experienced organizer-of-events, someone like Dennis seemed to have the right skill set; retired LAPD at a fairly high level. He was brought in, just in the nick of time, for a final executive meeting on Easter Saturday.
I would guess that at least part of the reason that we came together so quickly is that San Antonio is a small town cunningly disguised as a large city, and so all of us brought our ready-made acquaintance-network into the mix – and in some cases a pretty fair idea of their skill-set. It turned out that a lot of our networks overlapped and intertangled. Robin knew me through blogging, and knew Dennis through his church; Matthew turned out to also know the lady who gave me the quick course in event-planning, who also is acquainted with Diane… and as it turned out I had written about Matthew’s g-g-g-grandfather in Book Two of Adelsverein; the Fredericksburg school-master Louis Scheutze, who was murdered by the Hanging Band during the Civil War. Topping that off, the publisher of a local construction newsletter who came to help in the newsroom may be a distant cousin of Matthew’s. I am fairly sure if I asked other members of the planning committee about their own networks, it would turn out that we were pretty thickly connected already, through friends and friends of friends and various civic organizations.
(Next – riding the wave at the San Antonio Tea Party, and why Ted Nugent is so darned popular.)
“So one of the things — messages that I delivered today to all members of the Cabinet was, ‘As well as you’ve already done, you’re going to have to do more.’ I’m asking for all of them to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their administrative budgets,†he said.
Bit by bit, line by line, $100 million by $100 million he’s going to earn our trust.
How dumb does he think we are?
SB7 did up a table to put it in perspective.
spending: $ 3,500,000,000,000
deficit: $ 1,200,000,000,000
requested cuts: $ 100,000,000
$100 million represents .003 percent of the 2010 budget.
Think of it in terms of a middle-class family budget: it’s cutting out a single Happy Meal during the next fiscal year.
Isn’t that a drop in the bucket, the concerned reporter spouse asks?
“It is and that’s what I just said,” the president said. “None of these things alone are going to make the difference but cumulatively, they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. So what we’re going to do is line by line, page by page,
$100 milliona Happy Meal there,$100 milliona Starbucks Latte here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money.â€
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
It didn’t start out this way – a national event, with news interest from all over, and Ted Nugent coming out to the stage for an audio check around midday, and goofing around, doing a mini-performance for an appreciative crowd. We were going to have a Tea Party, very much like all the other Tea Parties in the six or seven hundred other cities, suburbs and towns that were planning them. We expected having something like the very first Alamo Plaza tea party, which occurred around the end of February, and seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed in the grand national scheme of things. A lot of the foundation work was done on line in February and early March, on Facebook – which was networking those interested in Tea Party protests in the San Antonio area. The San Antonio Tea Party outgrew Facebook about the middle of March, when an old milblogging compadre (and fan of The Daily Brief) got involved. Robin J. is also retired Air Force – he even got a group of San Antonio-area bloggers together for a picnic in McAllister Park a couple of years ago. The other prime Tea Party instigator wanted to concentrate on the Boerne Tea Party, so she offhandedly asked Robin if he would take over responsibility for San Antonio’s. Robin set up a website, drew in some more interest, including that of another military veteran, Eric A. Eric runs what another SA Blogger, the Fat Guy, would call “a tiny bidnessâ€, producing videos – mostly of weddings. Eric whipped together a quick video promo for a San Antonio Tea Party, launched it on YouTube… and managed to get attention paid to it by Glenn Beck, who hinted that he would love to come and broadcast live from Alamo Plaza, if we were going to hold our Tea Party there.
I would like to point out that since I do not watch Fox (or listen to Rush Limbaugh, either) I had managed to not know a single solitary thing about him. The first couple of times his name was mentioned, I had him mixed up with Jeff Beck and I thought in passing that it was rather cool that there was another outspoken conservative rock musician other than Ted Nugent. As someone who will doubtless wind up on Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security watch-list, I fear I have rather let my credentials as a deranged extremist lapse. I spend as much time as possible in the 19th century, I much prefer classical music and I get most of my news online, through wicked, racist and right-wing sinks of iniquity like Instapundit and Rantburg.
Robin had already emailed me about doing media releases for the Tea Party, and shortly after Eric A. had set off an explosion of interest in a Tea Party in Alamo Plaza – I went to a special meeting of the organizing committee. This would have been on the last Sunday in March. Somehow, I had found myself being the media expert in all of this. This would be the first face-to-face meeting for most of us, having heretofore conducted most of our plotting on line, through emails and telephone calls. There were a couple of gentlemen from the 9-12 Project, who were interested in what we all acknowledged to be a madly optimistic notion to have the Tea Party in Alamo Plaza. I have to confess that we all saw it as a long shot. Fiesta would begin the following day; San Antonio’s massive two-week-long civic blow-out would pretty much scotch any effort to secure the Plaza for a date which was then a little more than two weeks off. There would be permission from the city; the logistics would be a nightmare, Glenn Beck had only hinted at coming to San Antonio – eventually we agreed that realistically, we should look at another venue. We already had secured the use of a small downtown city park, but in the interests of having a larger crowd and somewhat more media interest than we had bargained for, we agreed to consider some other venues; Alamo Stadium and some other places with generous parking and sufficient facilities. Three or four of the attending planning members agreed to check out that availability. There was a public meeting following the organizing committee, on the terrace of a restaurant which was closed on a Sunday afternoon. There were 130 people there – and that was when it all got rather interesting.
(to be continued. I’ll get to the part about Ted Nugent, eventually)
About two weeks ago, the other members of the San Antonio Tea Party committee said to me –“You’re the one with a with the broadcasting background, YOU go out in front and interface with the multi-headed and hungry media beast, while the rest of us work our a***s off trying to organize a nationally broadcast tea party rally for upwards of 9,000 people in the middle of downtown San Antonio… check in with us now and again, we’ll let you know if we have anything specific we want you to put out there.†I took it as one of my media relations duties to see what else was going on out there in the wilds of the internet, regarding a potential tea party in San Antonio. I discovered by the miracle of google, a discussion thread appended to a MySA blog, in which one commenter sneeringly remarked that any proposed Tea Party would be a pathetic bust, with maybe four or five looser racist RethugliKKKan freaks in attendance. I don’t know what that commenter does for a living, if anything, but accurate prophecy is not one of his or her gifts. One of the other organizers and I were told by a police officer, as the rally was winding down, that attendance was clocked on the ground as 16,000 people, give or take. (Subsequent analysis of the aerial photo of Alamo Plaza by the San Antonio PD at the peak of the rally showed approximately 20,000 people. Not bad at all, for a work day.)
Blondie and I headed down early, as I was scheduled to do a walk-through the venue with John, a professional photographer who was volunteering his services to document the event, and some other volunteers who were doing the same with video cameras, Matt who had been working out all the necessary permits… well, it turned into a gathering of about half the executive committee, standing in the little ornate Victorian bandstand that stands in front of the Menger Hotel. It was very cool, and pleasant, and the paving stones around the bandstand were wet, as if it had rained the night before, or if the whole area had been washed down. The trees are now all well out in leaf. At nine AM there were already early-bird tourists in the Plaza, and moving across the square of lawn, and through the walled gardens and pergolas that frame the old mission church of the Alamo. Even at that hour, there were people setting up folding chairs and holding up signs, along the barriers set up where the stage for Glenn Beck’s Fox broadcast would be.
I wasn’t needed for much of the walk-through, so I talked with John and some of the other committee members, before I walked over to the Emily Morgan Hotel with Robin – the guy who wound up being the Chairman of the Tea Party, very much to his surprise. One of my ‘oh, duh – we probably need to arrange for this’ moments in the last week before the party came when I realized we would have to arrange for a place to park the descending media – the large, the small, the bloggers and all. And several days after that revelation, that we ought to have some kind of press conference, too… and the Menger Hotel was already the site for Glenn Beck’s luncheon. We were already setting up a command post there; best to have the press room elsewhere; the Menger was already maxed-out. It seemed throughout all this, that helpful volunteers popped out of the woodwork, offering extraordinary skills, or contacts, or facilities just at the exact moment when those skills, contacts or facilities were most needed. The volunteer who took over as security coordinator appeared in just that very way, a retired career LAPD officer, with command experience, just when it appeared that we would have need someone with skills in juggling major event venues, large crowds and celebrities. So it was with this; a helpful lady called on the very morning that I realized we would need a space, scoped out the Emily Morgan, and procured for us the use of a conference room. She even put it on her credit card, until the committee could reimburse her; a nice-sized room, with a series of narrow tables, all arranged class-room style. We also used it for our data entry volunteers to work in, and at the end of the day we had a plan to assemble our non-celeb speakers. It was actually quite refreshing, as the afternoon wore on, to have a quiet place to sit, and as a fallback place to stash things for a while; video equipment, boxes of tee-shirts. I was only grateful that they found another place for the canoe. Wrestling that into the freight elevator would have been a bit much for the poor bell staffers. Look over the conference room, set up a table in front to do the press conference from; Barbara, the events manager checked in with us and had her staff bring in a podium, which was very much appreciated.
People were already gathering, with folding chairs and signs by ten or eleven of a morning. John the photographer – another one of those volunteers who had appeared out of the woodwork, with vast experience in covering sprawling events like this – had been circulating all morning. He told me there were a lot of people who had come from out of town; from California by plane and a carload by marathon overnight road trip from Missouri. Back to the Menger – the crowd already tripled by the time that I walked back. The lobby was jammed; attendees for the fund-raising luncheon, and a handful of Tea Party volunteers cutting apart the sheets of laminated badges, punching holes in them, and stringing them onto lengths of elastic; numbered badges in different colors for the executive committee members, for VIP guests, for media and our documentation team, to access back-stage areas, for those who were going to be provide roving security and medical services, for venders, for the sign-in tables… more or less serving the purpose of letting everyone know who had authority of one sort or another, and who would be allowed through security barriers. This is one of those things that come up, when what had originally been thought to be a 600-person gathering in a city park suddenly explodes into a national event. The teen-aged daughter of the committee member overseeing all this had stayed up half the night, cutting and knotting lengths of elastic for these badges, and been excused from school for the day for real-life experience of a peaceful civic protest.
(To be continued)
This is the speech that I gave last night at the San Antonio Tea Party rally. I was sort of squeezed in between various celebrities, local and national. My job – to set the scene. I had one of those stupid hand-held mikes, which was very nice for Ted Nugent, doing one of his restless and kinetic rants, but it was a b**ch for me to handle it with one hand and keep my script laid flat with the other, against an intermittent breeze . Quite a lot of people didn’t hear me clearly, I’m afraid. Sorry, all. I thought there was a tech, minding the audio board. Anyway, this is what I said. I have no idea how it all looked – I didn’t dare look towards the jumbotron.
Hullo – and thank you all for coming to our modest little tea party in the heart of San Antonio! (pause for laughter) First of all – are we having a wonderful time? Fiesta San Antonio begins tomorrow, so we have been telling everyone to come for the Tea Party and stay for Fiesta. First though, I would like to thank everyone who took that extra effort, and worked very hard to make this particular place – this very special place – available to us, on very short notice. We would like to thank the ladies and gentlemen of the various departments of the City of San Antonio, and acknowledge the graciousness shown us by the members of the Fiesta Commission! Thank you, City of San Antonio!
Yes, this is a very special and significant place for our Tea Party – although most visitors, upon seeing it for the first time are surprised, because it looks so very small – nothing like the way appears in all the movies. San Antonio de Valero… so called ‘the Alamo’ for the cottonwood trees that grow wherever there is plenty of water in otherwise dry country. And there were cottonwoods nearby then, enough that the soldiers of Spain who set up a garrison in this old mission called it so, after those trees. Imagine – if you can – how this place would have looked, then! Just… imagine.
Close your eyes, and if you can, banish the sight of all these tall modern glass buildings, and those rambling beaux-arts storefronts, while I paint a word-picture for you. Go back… go back a hundred and seventy three years. The actual town of San Antonio is now some little distance away, a huddle of adobe and stucco walls around the tower of San Fernando.
The air smells of wood-smoke and cooking, of sweat and horses, and spent black-power. We are in a sprawling compound of long low buildings, a single room deep, with tiny windows, and thick walls. Some of these have flat rooftops, others with shallow peaked roofs. Many buildings have their inside walls razed – others have been filled with rubble and dirt to make cannon-mounts. The gaps between them are filled by palisades of earth, tight-packed and reinforced with lengths of wood, and tangles made of sharpened tree branches. All of this work has been done painfully, by hand and with axes, picks, shovels and buckets. The chapel – of all of these the tallest, and the strongest – is also roofless. Another earth ramp has been built up, inside; to serve as yet one more cannon-mount. This place has become a fortress, and last defense, surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force, a large army of over two thousand men, outnumbering bare two hundred or so defenders by over 10 to 1. This enemy army…, trained…, hardened and disciplined, is well-equipped with cannon and ammunition, with cavalry and foot-soldiers alike. By the order of the enemy commander, a blood-red flag signifying no quarter to the defenders of this place has been flown from the tower of the San Fernando church.
The story is, that on the day that the last courier left the Alamo – a local man who knew the country well, mounted on a fast horse bearing away final letters and dispatches – one of the Texian commanders called together all his other officers and men. He was a relatively young man – William Barrett Travis, ambitious and to be honest, a bit full of himself. I rather think he might have struck some of his contemporaries as a bit insufferable – but he could write. He could write, write words that leap off the page in letters of fire and blood, which glow in the darkness like a distant bonfire.
He was in charge because of one of those turns which bedevil the plans of men. His co-commander, James Bowie was deathly ill… ironic, because he was the one with a reputation as a fighter and a leader. Bowie was seen by his enemies – of which there were many – as a violent scoundrel, with a reputation for bare-knuckle brawling, for land speculation and shady dealing. And of the third leader – one David Crockett, celebrity frontiersman and former Congressman, he did not claim any rank at all, although he led a party of Tennessee friends and comrades. He had arrived here, almost by accident. Of all of the leadership triad, I think he was perhaps the most amiable, the best and easiest-tempered of company. Of all those others, who had a stark choice put before them on that very last day, that day when it was still possible to leave and live… most of them were ordinary men, citizens of various communities and colonies in Texas, wanderers from farther afield – afterwards, it would become clear that only a bare half-dozen were born in Texas.
It is a vivid picture in my mind, of what happened when a young lawyer turned soldier stepped out in front of his rag-tag crew. Legends have that Colonel Travis drew his sword – that weapon which marked an officer, and marked a line in the dust at his feet and said “Who will follow me, over that line?†It was a stark choice put before them all. Here is the line; swear by stepping over it, that you will hold fast to your comrades and to Texas, all you volunteer amateur soldiers. Make a considered and rational choice – not in the heat of the fray, but in the calm before the siege tightens around these crumbling walls. No crazy-brave impulse in the thick of it, with no time to do anything but react. Stay put, and choose to live, or step over it and choose to go down fighting in the outpost you have claimed for your own.
The legend continues – all but perhaps one crossed the line, James Bowie being so ill that he had to be carried over it by his friends. It was a choice of cold courage, and that is why it stays with us. These men all chose to step across Colonel Travis’ line. Some had decided on their own to come here, others had been tasked by their superiors… and others were present by mere chance. They could have chosen freely to leave. But they all stayed, being convinced that they ought to take a stand … that something ought to be done.
Imagine. Imagine the men who came here, who made that choice, who had the cold courage to step over a line drawn in the dust at their feet.
They were animated by the conviction that they were citizens, that it was their right – and their responsibility to have a say in their own governance. They were not subjects, expected to submit without a murmur to the demands of a remote and arbitrary government. They did not bow to kings, aristocrats, or bureaucrats in fine-tailored coats, looking to impose taxes on this or that, and demanding interference in every aspect of their lives. They were citizens, ordinary people – with muddled and sometimes contradictory motives and causes, fractious and contentious, just as we are. But in the end, they were united in their determination to take a stand – a gallant stand against forces that seemed quite overwhelming.
This evening, we also have come to this place, this very place – as is our right as citizens and taxpayers, to speak of our unhappiness to our government in a voice that cannot be ignored any longer. This is our right. Our duty… and our stand.
(Afterwards, I sat on some of the leftover stage platforms from the Glenn Beck program and talked to Blondie, one of the other executive committee members, and the husband of another. The husband had run a pizza place in New York, and he and Blondie swapped recipes and techniques for making calzones. For a bit, we were also chatting with Janine Turner, and her daughter, who had also come to the Tea Party luncheon with Glenn Beck, and was a last-minute addition to the program. Lest you think I have gone all celebrity ga-ga, I haven’t… it’s just that she was a a very charming and unpretentious person, and it was a crowd of us, waiting our turn to speak, or hanging around in the back-stage area with the spouses and friends, and a bunch of roadies knocking down the Glenn Beck set, and security types with earphones all murmuring into their sleeves, all fenced around with industrial yellow barricades. More to tell in the next installment… like, why I know now how Ted Nugent is so popular. And how a bunch of uninvolved, un-politically connected citizens managed to pull off a huge Tea Party rally in about ten days flat.)
(Thought all the Trek fans out there would appreciate this version… detailed after-action post to follow.)
News reports here and here. I don’t think ours was quite a non-partisan as others and the petition to put the bible back in schools seems out of place, but all in all, a LOT more people than I expected. Boise’s not know for it’s “activism.” Unless the Feds move in and shoot someone’s dog and then, well, all bets are off.
This is a thought that I have been kicking around for a while, and I actually voiced it, during the TV interview Sunday morning; that our current political uber-class have become the new aristocrats, and that is one of the reasons that the Tea Party protests have been springing up relentlessly, like mushrooms after a good few weeks of rain. Our permanently-revolving political class has somehow mutated into becoming something of a hereditary aristocracy in the last few decades. I know there were always people who served long terms, or whose families – Hey, John Addams! Teddy Roosevelt! William Henry Harrison, John Kennedy, George Bush! – tended to show up in the corridors of power, over and over again, yea down to the fourth generation. But this current situation has something of a different feel about it to me; not so much an aristocracy of blood, although certain of our current crop are indeed the spawn of professional politicians of yesteryear – but an aristocracy of interests.
They sometimes seem like a mad mash-up of the Soviet aristocracy, during the Stalin era, as outlined in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Court of the Red Czar†and the court aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France. Here we have a combination rapacious and self-serving functionaries, viciously defending their perks and the source of their power while giving lip service to the Party of the People… and the vapid, frivolous and completely clueless, dining on $100 a pound Waygu beef, and sending out for gourmet Chicago pizza. From a Washington, DC address… um, yeah, I know it wasn’t all that bad, the chef was going all that way by regular airline and on his own dime. Hey, at least they didn’t send an Air Force transport aircraft for him. Like the old aristocrats at the court of the Sun King Louis, and his ilk; preening and posing in elegant clothing, against magnificent backgrounds, oblivious to the world outside steadily crumbling away at the edges. But those are all superficial things. Tacky, heedless and oblivious to other people may be no way to go through life, but these qualities usually do nothing but amuse or appall everyone else.
Alas, the current political aristocracy are also not just standing there… they are doing things… passing stimulus bills they haven’t entirely read, passing laws which – in the case of one particularly ghastly example – has the ostensible purpose of protecting children to exposure to lead from toys manufactured in China and imported into the US. A bill which was so broadly written and badly conceived that complete enforcement of it will bankrupt or close many boutique toy manufacturers, and home crafts ladies with a tiny but tidy sideline business, empty out second-hand stores of children’s clothing and toys, and gut libraries and publishers alike, either of new books or those published before 1985.
Always remember – they work for us. They are our employees. We hire them, through elections, to look after this stuff for us – as we are… you know, busy with our real lives? Earning a living, paying taxes, raising families…Maybe it is time for a serious talk about this with our various political hirelings.
Think of the Tea Parties as a sort of counseling letter; the last step before we think about getting someone who can better able to handle those duties sent before them.
Tax Day tomorrow. Tea Party also: I’m the one appearing on various local San Antonio TV channels (Fox mostly, other networks as the mood takes them and as their programming people dictate) with a faintly English accent, looking like a gentle and earnest Catholic school principal, urging listeners to live up to what our mothers, the better angels of our natures, and the founders of this Republic encouraged us to do…)
All that… and me, I could really do with loosing some pounds. Over and above that which the camera puts on…
Nothing serious, just a long schlep from the north-east side, over to KENS-5, over in San Antonio’s Medical Center area, for a quick morning show interview about the upcoming Tea Party… in the pouring rain, in the dark. We cut it close, having to be there by 6:45 – and of course, we had to slow down because of the rain. Heck, I don’t think there was anyone out, but a couple of police cars on 1604 who had someone pulled over, the Easter Bunny… and the skeleton holiday-weekend staff at KENS, who were charmingly relaxed and laid back. So, a quick stint in the female’s dressing room, using the hair dryer on my top, and there we were, casually waved into the studio… which was THE KENS-5 studio. I spent a good half of my adult life in TV and radio studios, so I really wasn’t all that intimidated.
In fact, it all seemed very comfortable and familiar… if slightly more plush and substantial than the usual military TV studio, what with having a whole series of sets for various special purpose shows arrayed around the walls; a cityscape from a roof terrace, the living room sofa set, the two leather chairs and bookshelf set, the kitchen show set, plus the weather set and the main news desk. Blondie remarked how they seem somehow much less impressive, smaller and even a little grubbier in real life. Hook up the wireless mike and transmitter, sit up straight on the leather chair, a few minutes casual off-mike chat with the anchor (this intended to put the guest at ease – he seemed quite relieved that I was actually, quite at ease, or at least not a jittering bundle of nerves.) A few quick general questions, about where, when and why… and there you go. Blondie and I picked up breakfast tacos on the way home.
Tomorrow, it’s a call-in to a morning show, an interview at Texas Public Radio in the morning, and in the afternoon, an update for PJ Media… sort of a media trifecta, as it were. Blondie has to go downtown for a safety walk-through, and then we have a social get-together, which will probably turn into one final executive planning meeting.
Two more whole days to plan this, and then we will see a 9,000 person Tea Party on Alamo Plaza – come for the Party, y’all, and stay for Fiesta!
Matthew 28:1-7 (New International Version)
The Resurrection
After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
2/7 Marine awarded Navy Cross. And meritorious promotion to Corporal. Go. Read.
Dude was manning the turret machine gun in an MRAP. Vehicle took an RPG. Which partially amputated the gunner’s leg. And stunned the driver. Which left the vehicle stuck in the killing zone.
Gustafson stayed at his position returning effective fire and blowing up bad guys.
And reloaded the gun, which requires presence of mind and dexterity.
Twice.
Jesus wept – where do we get men like that?
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
In case you missed Adam Lambert singing Mad World last night, I finally found it online.
So basically the contest is over, the only question is whether or not he’ll tank it so he can cut a decent record when the show is over.
And I haven’t really been watching the show, I just catch the videos online the day after.
That’s me, looking for very specific ripples, and currents, in the vast placid ocean that is the blogosphere, where one twitch by a blog-fish on the far side of that body can be magnified by other blog-fish with sensitive antennae reflected, magnified and passed on, passed back and forth, linked and sent rippling out into the farthest reaches. When I say blog-fish, I don’t really mean a fish, really – fins and gills and all that. I picture something more like a Portuguese man o’war, with all those sensitive tentacles and tendrils hanging down, floating and lurking, waiting patiently for some little current, a change in temperature, some isolated agitation. And there is always something of the sort out there, some little agitation that starts on a discussion thread, and gets linked and blogged, and copied to someone elses’ website, and pretty soon… voila, a tempest. Sometimes the tempest is so huge that it spills over into the political arena and the general mainstream media – a veritable Hurricane Katrina. Rathergate is the classic example for me: the source documents upon which a 60 Minutes story about former President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard was based, were posted online after the story aired, some little things about them which didn’t seem just right were noted almost at once, and all throughout the next day, the storm grew and grew. I spent a lot of time on-line that day, as it was slow in the office where I worked then, and I saw the storm expand, as more and more other experts in obscure fields checked in and commented, and were quoted and linked and… well, everyone knows how that turned out. My point was that someone going on line, and surfing around a bit in the correct quadrant would encounter the outlaying ripples of this coming storm within a very few minutes.
So in my capacity as the media expert for the local Tea Party planning committee, I’ve been quietly snorkeling around, doing google searches on various phrases (the google-fu… it is powerful in this one!), looking for chatter about Tea Parties in general, and the San Antonio one in particular. Yeah, I’m curious, but it would help to know just how unglued that any local radicals are becoming, if we might have counter-protestors or provocateurs. Finding a lot of ranting, or calls for action, cross-linking and commenting on the San Antonio Tax Day Tea Party would be a cause for concern, and something that we would have to be prepared for, in a good Public Affairs professional sort of way. It is always nice to know from which direction the next sh*tstorm will blow in.
And I found… well, not very much at all, among the Kossaks, the Huff-pos, and the Duers. A lot of cross talk and interest on the center/conservative/libertarian blogs, lots of events being planned, and lots of plans being generated and shared. But the leftwards wing of the blogosphere is all but silent. No ripples at all, no storm of interest and awareness building. Oh, a couple of sniggering discussions about a small group of KKK/racist/hater/losers who might have four, or twenty-five show up at their pathetic little rallies, but aside from those discussion threads – hardly any mention. Really, it’s as if they are in a tightly-closed little bubble. And they are, in a way. The various tea parties are getting some local media mention, but very few national outlets other than the Wall Street Journal and our own very dear PJ Media are really going all out to tie it all together. It’s as if it is all happening under the news radar; if you aren’t involved in a Tea Party, or snorkeling around in the center/conservative/libertarian section of the big pool, it’s as if there is nothing at all going on at all. Nothing to see, move on, and lets all talk about-insert name of current tabloid fave celebrity here.
But there is. And it will be big. On April 16, I rather think there will be a lot of stunned citizens (and legislators and major media folks) picking themselves up off the ground and saying, “Did anyone get the number of that 18-wheeler that just ran us over?â€
How is it that the narrator of an audiobook can CORRECTLY PRONOUNCE INCHOATE and BADINAGE, yet cannot pronounce Rafe (raff), neural (neutral), and a host of other simple words that currently escape me? To make it worse, she is the only narrator of the unabridged audio version of Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta Series, which means I have 3.5 more books to suffer through.
She’s still better than Meredith MacRae, but that’s not saying much.
Guess it’s on, for April 15th…
Strictly speaking, my video compadre was slightly exaggerating; we don’t have the Alamo – just the Plaza in front of it. The Alamo is above such partisan matters. It’s a memorial, and even though it was once a church, people can’t even get married in it. The Tea Party will be in the Plaza in front of it.
Me, I am to work, sending out about a kajillion e-mail and printed news releases. Yeah, I volunteered. Must try to recall what Dad said, about doing that.
Swear to the Almighty, about a week ago, when one of the other planning committee members told me that Glenn Beck was getting all interested in this Tea Party thing, I thought they meant Jeff Beck, and thought – “Cool – a rock guitarist who is also a conservative!” Did wonder why he was so keen on showing up at the Alamo, though. I mean, Ozzy Osborne has never lived down his big visit there….
OK, so I never watched Fox, I really was an NPR sort of person, and I’ve spent much of the last three years in the 19th century, anyway. Interesting times, people, interesting times. If, on occasion, somewhat baffling.
(OMG, an Instalanche – just as a reminder, the San Antonio Tea Party’s website is here!)
Ummm… ok, so I just saw this picture on another site, and went to find the link…
And, although I myself am now a lady of certain age and think it very bad taste to make fun of people’s looks, especially the somewhat aged and never-terribly-dishy… (glass houses, stones, and all that.)
Can anyone tell me when the heck Helen Thomas began to look like the Emperor Palpatine in drag?
Sorry for the sparse posting of late, and putting off the promised second half of the essay about why I am taking such mean-spirited pleasure in watching the Chosen One, the Fresh Prince of Chicago, metaphorically crash’n’burn right in front of a large and amused audience. Pity he appears to be taking the stock market, the auto industry, and a nice selection of old-line city newspapers along with him… oh, the old Stalinist saying about eggs and omelets may apply here. Where will this all end… it remains to be seen, as the TV reporters standing in front of a Significant Gummit Building always announce portentously, as they wrap up their brow-knittingly serious examination of whatever it is that they have just gotten two or three minutes of local news huffing and puffing about. Probably the serious and potential effect of Lint In Small Children’s Belly-Buttons! This Scourge, If Left Unattended And Without A Lot of Dollars Thrown At It… Think of the Cheeeeldren! (or possibly at the foundation run by the person whose generated news release was just lightly re-written for the news story itself)… Oh, I wouldn’t know about the current local TV news scourge-de-jour, I only watch local news when Downtown is under water, or in danger of being glazed over with ice. Of the national news scourge-de-jour, I have heard vaguely of the ruckus over a sweet little tot in… Florida, was it? Went missing, body searched for by volunteers, mother suspected, name-something-Anthony… no, I don’t watch national channels much either. And although I used to love the various NPR shows – even with their decided tilt… I just got fed up with them, too. When the Bush-bashing and the Obama adoration got to a certain level on Prairie Home Companion – and even on, god save us, Car Talk… well, that was it.
Even before the local public radio affiliate fired me and about fifteen other part-timers, last year… I was seriously considering asking if I could have back every pledge dollar I had ever contributed. I get most of my news from the internet, hopping from story to story, blog to blog, and if I want expert comment, there are another couple of blogs that I will go to, rather than open my local newspaper and consider the maunderings of whatever NY-Times retread or local lamoid who has been so dazzled with an offer of a local byline that they will condescend to dribble away for a couple of paragraphs. (All but TH Fehrenbach… I’d read him. Pity he doesn’t have a blog or something. Maybe he does. I’ll have to check. Nope, no website and no blog – only links to his columns for the newspaper … He’s our local Victor Davis Hansen, just not quite so prolific. By the last couple of columns, it doesn’t look like I am missing much, in having canceled my subscription over a particularly scurrilous cartoon by the on-tap cartoonist Branch, a couple of years ago. It was about the Haditha Marines, and I pulled the plug on the weekend edition within about three minutes of seeing it.)
So, there you go… a fair amount of worry about the way things are apparently headed, under the benign yet feckless aegis of the Affirmative Action President and his boatload of Chicago cronies. I got involved with the local effort to host a Tea Party in San Antonio, through another San Antonio milblogger, the Ranten Raven. Before you could say Jack Robinson, or some other interesting and prophetic phrase, I volunteered… what was it, they used to say, about never volunteering? Yeah… don’t. Too late, I’m in, coordinating news releases, writing speeches and coaching those who have committed to deliver them, coordinating volunteers to have expertise in doing all that, and who have interesting contacts in local media. With luck, and eventually, said local media persons may begin returning phone calls. For this Tea Party may be something big, something splendid and awesome. It’s getting a little frightening; at how fast it has grown – from a handful of people who came to the first planning meeting, to well over a hundred last night… and a hundred or so who were vocal, engaged, and willing to step forward…and to contribute funds. At my estimation, about half were political enthusiasts, who have many years experience in the fray, in support of their various causes – but the rest were new, unblooded and engaged, fresh and energized. So one of them was only a candidate running for city council – sensing the presence of a large body of potential voters, or at least, an audience, although it was definitely comic, watching the way that everyone sidled away from him at the end of the meeting, as he launched into his set speech. All props to paying attention to what is going on locally – but minus-points for not paying a whit of attention to what had been said for about an hour and something; which was, that we all were desperately unhappy with the current lot of our elected officials, albeit at a much higher level than that of city councilperson.
It would appear that the cause of a lot of this interest in the San Antonio Tea Party was the video that I posted previously. It wound up being aired on a national news program of which I know nothing, and excited the interest of a news commentator of whom I had to confess that I also had never heard of. Until this week, I thought Glenn Beck was a guitarist with one of the noisier rock bands… eh, maybe I should pay more attention to this sort of thing… except that I am a writer, and live a fairly cloistered life. I spend more of my time and energy in the 19th century than perhaps I ought to, in these times.
So, Tea Party on the 15th, somewhere in San Antonio. The committee is still working out the venue. But I’ll be there. God knows, I’ll probably be one of the speakers, too. The rule about speakers has been pretty firmly established by the committee. No politicians.
Absolutely no politicians. They will have to come and listen to us. For once.
One of the other volunteers helping to put together the San Antonio Tea Party on April 15th put together this awesome spot, for Youtube and other venues:
Just thought I would share: the project is growing by leaps and bounds: we have a planning committee meeting scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
Kevin Connors wrote a post a few years back extolling the virtues of radioparadise.com and I’ve been hooked ever since. Sure, Bill plays some tracks that leave you wondering WTF, but it’s more than balanced by the old but great ones, and the new little jewels that could only happen with a healthy indie recording industry.
For the most part Real Wife and Red Haired Girl try to ignore the fact that I have it playing through at least two computers pretty much non-stop, although they pretty much dislike the entire play list (they LOVE American Idol – ’nuff said).
Anyway, RP recently played a song – Dance The Night Away – by the Mavericks. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I went looking for it and found this video on last.fm. The wife and daughter HATE it. I think it’s awesome – you be the judge.
I’m having one of those intermittent impulses to start stockpiling shelf-stable, dried and canned foods again. Not sure where it comes from, only that some of the generalized dark-gray cloud of gloom and doom that is lurking in the atmosphere may have just finished drizzling a mist of vague paranoia down onto Blondie and me. Or maybe it’s the ancestral memories of my grandmothers, no mean slouches in the food-prep and stash-away in case of a spectacularly bad winter or some unspecified disaster. They both of them lived through the Depression; when Grannie Dodie passed on, there was a couple of years worth of canned goods stashed in the garage, some of them so old the tops of the cans had gone dull-colored under a decade of dust. Grannie Jessie was raised on a Pennsylvania farm where they butchered a pig every fall, filled the root-cellar with potatoes, beets and carrots, and canned the results of their summer garden, in shelf after shelf groaning under the weight of mason jars, filled to the top with jewel-toned tomatoes, green beans, piccalilli and Concord grape jelly.
Save for the two years and some spent living in Utah, my own packing-the-larder-with-massive-stocks of food was pretty much modeled after Mom’s… which is to say, we didn’t, much. We generally had just enough on the shelves and in the fridge to last until the next go-round of grocery-shopping. Why not? The grocery store was always there, Dad’s paychecks were at least marginally generous, and regular; and Mom really didn’t care for canned foods, preferring the fresh and/or made from scratch variety. And we lived in California, for pete’s sake, the year-round fair weather and agricultural champion of the west. Generally the emergency food stash in Mom’s larder consisted of a couple of cans of tomato sauce, some canned Vienna sausages and an extra-large can of tuna. Maybe some dried pasta, and something exotic in a tiny can with foreign lettering on it, which someone gave to Mom and Dad as a Christmas present a couple of years previous which Mom was saving for a special occasion and which no one ever quite had the nerve to open, because if it was really vile, no one would want to eat it and then it would all go to waste. And if it turned out to be really, really good, then we wouldn’t be able to find or afford another can, so best just leave it safely on the back of the shelf.
Besides, at the Redwood House, we did have a vegetable garden, and a range of olive trees, and Hilltop House was planted all around with orange and lemon trees, so in the case of a grand economic meltdown, as a last resort, we would have had olives and oranges and lemons, by the bag… anyway, the long and short of it is, that I never felt the least interest or impulse to stash away mass quantities of relatively imperishable food until that period when I was assigned to Hill AFB, Utah—where, for a variety of reasons, this was a cultural and religious imperative, to the point where most old-style suburban houses came ready-stocked with a couple of fruit-bearing trees and a vegetable plot, along with the seasonal water-system to irrigate same. My own rental house in South Ogden came equipped with a root-cellar, lots of larder-space, a bearing cherry tree and a hedge of insanely prolific apricot trees… some of the best of them were intensely succulent; it was as if someone, thirty years before had walked the fence-line planting apricot trees, and so ever since the lawn along that side of the yard was mined with moldering fruit and mounds of apricot stones. There were so damned many apricots, and I did my best, I really did, but I haven’t been able to bear the smell of a dried apricot ever since. All the ordinary grocery stores stocked lavish quantities and varieties of canning supplies, and restaurant-sized bags of flour and sugar, and other staples… so it was as if there was something in the water. I eventually bought a deep-freezer, and an electric dehydrator, for reasons that I cannot very well articulate. It just seemed like a very good idea, at the time.
And so, now it seems like a good idea again. Maybe the various experts in disaster preparedness, dinning advice into my ears over the last couple of years – after Katrina, after floods, fires, riots and diverse other disasters – have finally achieved a degree of success with me … or there is something about these times, and reading about all those people who- through forethought, were comfortably equipped to ride out disasters. I just have the feeling that I ought to start doing this. Have enough food on hand at all times, stocks of things that I just cannot live without, like tea and jam for bread, and the means to cook food, if there should there be a power interruption that lasts for weeks. I ought not to be depending on a local grocery store, if we run short in a day or so. I ought to have sufficient a stash – for days, weeks and even months. I ought to have a garden again, for more than just ornament, and something in the larder- more than just the usual couple of cans of tomatoes, the half-used packet of Japanese-panko dried bread-crumbs, and the various bug-proof glass jars with about half a cup of dried beans in the bottom, lentils ditto.
So, this Friday, Blondie and I were checking out Sam’s Club and making a list. I can’t, with all my other financial obligations, say that I spent a bomb, on everything that we looked at… but I invested in a 8-pack case of canned tomatoes, a quart each of olive oil and honey, a brick of cheddar cheese – which, alas, tastes nothing as good as the Department of Ag surplus cheddar, which used to be sold at the military commissaries at like, about 50 cents a pound and made the most totally awesome mac-and-cheese imaginable. We made notes about the costs of 25 and 50-pound bags of rice, and beans… and the costs of another propane bottle… I just can’t get away from the feeling that I ought to be doing something more. I bought a bunch of 2-inch pots of tomatoes and pepper plants a couple of weeks ago; they were on sale, at a very good price at the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery chain, a week ago. We planted them, last weekend, the tomatoes in pots, and the peppers in the ground… but I can’t escape the feeling that I ought to be doing more, that I can squeeze some more edible plants into the sun-warmed spots in the garden…
I have read that letting potatoes sprout, and then cutting them up, with a sprout in each piece, that they grow very well… and that fava beans will grow in a heap of gravel.
Spring is here, and with the usual promise of a new season. Its just that those promises are all of vague and threatening things. Thus to work, this weekend. In the garden, and on other projects.
Ok, so in the main, I’m kinda torn. Watching the Fresh Prince of Chicago and his administration melt down is pretty amusing, in a sick, sadistic sort of way; I wake up in the morning, and turn on the computer now, and wonder if the State Department has gifted the Turkish Prime Minister with a bobble-headed Mohammed, or presented President Sarcozy of France with a fine selected case of box-wine and a tastefully gift-wrapped tube of deodorant. Seriously, after the cut-rate Box ‘o Movies to Gordon Brown – in the wrong format yet – I don’t think I would be all that surprised to read of the above official gifts being dispensed by the administration of the guy who was supposed to make the whole world like us again, after that uncouth Cowboy Bush. That’s the trouble with being surreal and humorous in these dark times – just when you had thought up something that you assumed was impossibly, comically far over the top – there it is, all over the headlines. The serious headlines, not at the Onion, or Iowahawk.
I have to admit that seeing all the ecstatically worshipping minions of the main-stream press who drank the hopey-changy Kool-Aid all these months ago, waking up with an ‘omigawd, what did I do last night’ hangover… That’s also kind of fun, too. In a grimly amusing, ‘didn’t I warn you not to trim your short’n’curlies with the weed-whacker’ sort of way. Hey, I will get my jollies where I can, and “I told you so†is one of life’s great unsung pleasures. Watching the major media organs collapse like a dirigible with a slow leak is also no end amusing, especially when it happens to be those very same organs who kept banging on about Governor Sarah Palin’s inexperience, as compared to the Anointed One’s sanctified role as a ‘community organizer’. Live by taking political sides – perish from the same. Thanks. My only regret is that in future, I may not have anything packing materiel for stuff to be mailed out of state. A couple of sheets of newsprint were always good for that.
I said, all these months ago, that Barak Obama was an attractive, empty suit, with a pleasant voice, a puppet of Chicago machine politics, with no discernible bad record – and what did you – or 52% of the electorate, or whatever percent actually did vote for him – have to go and do, but elect him, just because he was so cute, with the year-round-dark-tan, glamorous and exotic background and (insert fangirly squeal here) besides, he made such cool-sounding speeches! So now, here he is in office, the ultimate Affirmative-Action candidate/American Idol fave – stuck in a hideously exposed position, under the pitiless lights, with no possible way to vote ‘present’ and go on doing what he seems always to have done – which is to move on. Having had some experience in the real world, I’ve see his like before; the favored golden candidate, one of those charming and ambitious fast-burners who go all the way up, glad-handing and using all the way, and never staying long enough in any position to actually do the job. They generally leave before the damage they have done becomes evident. As the old saying goes, they leave the stink behind them. Alas, this time, he is stuck, like a treed cat, up on top of the highest telephone pole in the land, with no graceful way to come down.
So that’s the thing – I would be amused, save for all the damage that was done, getting him up there, and all the damage that will be done, when he comes down. (To be continued.)
(Note – re-posted to allow comments. There is a bug in our system which dislikes apostrophes in the titles of posts.)
This past weekend I was letting Red Haired Girl know that I was not happy that she could not find time in her busy social schedule to do the chores that we had asked her to do. After listening to various and sundry excuses such as “some of the clothes in the washing machine AREN’T EVEN MINE or, it’s not MY fault that the stupid dog got the gum from my jacket” (which was left in the kitchen where the allegedly stupid dog is fenced in our absence), etc., I erupted in exasperation, telling her that I expect those kinds of excuses from the President of the United States, not from a fifteen year old.
That sound you hear is me banging my head on the table.