Kids say the darndest things

 

I used to watch TV

And I enjoyed it!  What's that?  PBS?  British snooty pants melodramas and Charlie Rose?  Oh, naw.... 

Take me back to before

 I thought I'd check out what the top songs of 2021 were and my eye caught something called "Thot Shit," a very popular production (more than 40 million YouTube views in six months), 'though I'd never heard of it.  So out of curiosity I clicked on it.  

Mistake.

Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit
Post me a pic, finna make me a profit
When the liquor hit, then a bitch get toxic
(Why the fuck you in the club with niggas wildin'?)
I've been lit since brunch, thot shit...

 And on and on, getting worse as it goes along.  Maybe a third of the lyrics I didn't even understand at all.  But what the lyrics seemed to be was essentially an id howl shouting I am great, I am better than anyone else, but exulting in a life of utter pointlessness depicted in the crudest way possible.

 I don't get it. Who listens to this?  Why?  The song may baffle and repel me, but obviously I am an outlier, merely a weirdo freak with oddball tastes.  The rest of the modern world enjoys and understands this type of entertainment.

I mentally staggered back and regretted my peek into the present. Whatever this...this...civilization -- if it deserves that name -- is, it's got nothing to do with what came before, the grand civilization, sweet and decent in its pop culture and magnificent and awe-inspiring in its high culture that existed just a few decades ago.  Gone.  All gone.  And as likely to come back as Periclean Athens or Florence of the Renaissance.

Well, to hell with it all.  I will go back in reverie to that world that was and ignore today.  You may well say that I can choose to ignore the present but the present won't ignore me.  I suppose. But for as long as I can, to the extent that I can, I will ignore it.  Life is short and soon over.  Maybe I can make it across the river before the tidal wave of horror overwhelms me.  But what of the next generation?  Our children?  All I can think to do is rescue and pass on to them as much of our ancient cultural heritage, high and low, as I can, so that they can know there was once a world of beauty, happiness, love and sincere emotions, a world worth living in.

 On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,

 Near the cross I’ll watch and wait
Hoping, trusting ever,
Till I reach the golden strand,
Just beyond the river.

 PS:  Looky what I found.  Seems like I'm not alone in loathing the new after all.  But, you know, it's a bad sign when your culture can no longer generate art and entertainment that your own people have any interest in.  A really bad sign.

Old Music is Killing New Music 

"Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. ... The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music.

I encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on 'Message in a Bottle'(a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old. I asked my server: 'Why are you playing this old music?' She looked at me in surprise before answering: 'Oh, I like these songs.'

Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead. New songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population."

Johnny Reb, then and now

 Click to enlarge the images, or open the image in a new tab and enlarge.  I hope you can read the text.  It tells so much about what a thoughtful, understanding, magnanimous  people we once were.  We honored our fallen foes and allowed them dignity in defeat.  We tore down no statues. 

Why did that change?  What advantage has accrued to us by changing?  Did we voluntarily change, or were we manipulated or forced into changing?  Or have we not changed but are simply no longer in control of our own country?  If we are not, who is?

Published in January, 1960.

 

The Wearing of the Gray

Diligent doo wop

I dropped by a local mom and pop general store the other day to pick up something.  Alas, and to my surprise, they were out of stock.  I got to talking with the cashier/proprietor and she said that they were out of 35 percent of the items they normally carry.  Looking around the store, the shelves seemed full.  But, as she pointed out and phrased it, there were "a lot of some things and a lot of no things."

“The government is merely a servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't.”
~ Mark Twain

An acquaintance operates a recruiting agency that he founded after he graduated from business school almost 20 years ago. He survived the 2008 economic crash but isn't sure he will make it this time.  Hardly anyone is hiring in the fields he services, and when they are, no one is applying.  I asked how badly he had been hit. He said he only billed about a million dollars last year.  I had no idea employment agencies were so lucrative, not that I'd ever thought about it.  I said so you are still making pretty good money anyway.  But he shook his head.  In 2019 he had billed over eight million dollars.

 “The present facts are that the world is insane.”
― Martin Luther

I stopped by a local diner to have their grilled cheese-and-jalapeño sandwich and garlic fries dusted with chili powder and began chatting with an old guy (he said he was 85) who had been sitting a few stools away but moved over next to me with his coffee and pie.  He said he hoped I didn't mind but he hated to eat a alone. He offered to buy me a slice of key lime pie but I passed but did accept his offer of a cup of coffee.  He began talking about the swell times he had back in the horse-and-buggy days, a subject I never tire of hearing about.  One thing he said struck me.  He said that as a child he was taught that the road to success in life was to be diligent, humble and sincere.  People would notice and you would be rewarded.  He said that had been true when he was young but that at some point it changed and the brash, bungling boasters had taken over.  It's all crap now, he said.  The counterman, who had been half listening, came over then and asked the old guy if there was something wrong with his pie.  

“He did not give a damn for the world or the universe or heaven or hell. But he liked women.”
― John Fante

Does the "wop" in doo-wop refer to Italians? Just kidding.  But there sure were a lot of Italian singing groups and solo artists back when -- Bobby Rydell, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Freddy Cannon, Frankie Valli, Connie Stevens, Santo and Johnny, Dion....  They practically owned pop music. I got to thinking about Italian-Americans after I read something about them being denigrated as nothing but gangsters and thugs that our country would have been better off without.  I put down my pizza slice and set aside my glass of Chianti, turned off the Frank Sinatra recording and pondered.

A few years ago I participated in an oral history project to record the memories of World War II vets before they passed from the scene.  My assignment was a retired insurance salesman who had flown P-40s with the 325th Fighter Group, the Checkertails, in North Africa and Italy.  One of the stories he told was about the time he was shot down by ground fire during the invasion of Sicily.  He was fished out of the water near a small village by some fishermen who brought him to shore where he was met by a delegation that included the mayor, the village school teacher and the local Fascist party official.  The mayor's wife took his soaking wet and tattered uniform to be washed and mended.  Then he had lunch with the mayor's family and the others. The Fascist party official wanted to know why Americans -- Americans!

-- were attacking them.  They all loved America.  And, as it turned out, the school teacher had been born in New York City and only came to Sicily to visit his grandparents, then got stuck there when the US entered the European war.  The mayor had worked for 25 years in construction in St. Louis and retired to his native village.  His children and grandchildren were scattered throughout the States. The Fascist had never been to America but his brother lived in New Jersey.  So they all had a jolly meal, deciding not to discuss the war or politics but baseball.  How was Joe DiMaggio doing?  Later some British paras arrived in the town and the Fascist made himself scarce.  My P-40 pilot greeted the Brits in company with the mayor and school teacher, welcoming them and informing them there were no soldiers in the town nor anything of military value. The paras were suspicious of the trio, especially the pilot, who, when they asked for ID, could not provide any because  his credentials were with his uniform, which was off being mended.  The Brits decided all three were spies and planned to shoot them, then roust the inhabitants of the town and detain all males.  But before they could carry out their plans a patrol of Americans commanded by an Italian-American arrived and things got straightened out over a few bottles of wine and a nice dinner. 

 

Cowboys

 The cowboy is a man who possesses resilience, patience, and an instinct for survival. Cowboys get climbed on, rained on, snowed on, kicked, battered by the wind, burned by the sun. The cowboy's job is just to take it.  It doesn't require courage as it's commonly thought of to do that. It demands stoicism.

To be tough on a ranch has nothing to do with combativeness or macho strutting.  It's about dealing with what you have to deal with and can't turn away from.  That's what a cowboy does, handle situations that are trying to overwhelm him.  He routinely faces such things as the horse he’s riding miles from anywhere breaking a leg or a sudden rock fall knocking him senseless, blocking the trail and trapping him in a coulee. When he comes to, his head is bleeding and hurts like hell, and his horse has wandered off and is nuzzling a clump of jimson weed.

In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting quickly, correctly and without regard to  injury to oneself to help an animal in your charge or another rider. If a cow is stuck in a bog hole, the cowpoke throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he takes it home, warms it in front of the kitchen fire, and massages its legs till dawn.

One cowhand, whose horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles on, dove under water and cut its legs free, then swam it to shore, his arm around its neck lifeguard-style, and saved it from drowning.  Another, working on foot with border collies to herd some cow brutes, carried one of the dogs more than two miles in his arms over rough ground when it stepped in a bear trap and had its paw nearly severed.  He tourniqueted the leg, calmed the hysterical dog as it struggled and bit at him in its pain and fear, then trudged for an hour up and down dry washes to his truck, drove to the line shack, sewed up the wound and settled the dog, then drove and hiked back to where he was working and finished getting the cattle out of the mess they had gotten themselves into.

Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the cowboy’s courage is selfless, a form of compassion, of empathy.  He becomes used to thinking about about the welfare of others, animal and man and land, and not about himself.  If he doesn't, he doesn't make it as a cowboy.  He probably heads for the swarming, foul, me-me mobs of the city with their self-centered hedonistic ethos.

The physical punishment that goes with cowboying is brutal. When I asked one cowboy if he was sick as he struggled to his feet at the bunkhouse one morning, he replied, "No'm, just bent." Cowboys do not complain. They laugh at their failures and injuries and at what fools they are for doing the job.  They are the kind of men who, if they accidentally cut off their foot in a chain saw accident would say they were okay, they'd walk it off.  That's only partly a joke.  I knew one cowboy whose foot was crushed when a tractor rolled back on him.  His boot filled with blood as he kept working for the rest of the day.  Only that night, when, his foot swollen and purple, he couldn't get his boot off did he causally mention the accident.

Although a cowboy is a man’s man—laconic, reliable, hard-working—there’s no person in which the balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural. If he’s gruff, handsome and physically fit on the outside, he’s compassionate at the core. Ranchers are midwives, nurturers, providers. The toughness, the weathered skin, calloused hands, squint in the eye and growl in the voice only mask the tenderness inside.

Around women, cowhands are stand-offish but chivalrous. A cowboy tips his hat to a woman and calls her miss or ma’am, tolerates no disrespect to her character or person, whoever she may be.  Urban males would deride them as white knights. If one of these called a woman a "bitch" or "'ho'" in the presence of a cowboy, he would get a quick and forceful explanation of the lay of the land and his position in it, and probably a broken jaw as well.

But the geographical vastness and the social isolation of the West make emotional involvement with the women a cowboy interacts with difficult. Caution colliding with  passion gives a cowboy a wide-eyed but drawn and wary look.  He wishes he had someone to care for him the way he cares for a lost dogie, but doesn't expect he ever will and doesn't look for someone who might.  She has to find him.

At heart, cowboys are fragile. Women are, too. But for all the women who use frailness to avoid work or as a sexual ploy, there are just as many cowboys who try to hide their emotional vulnerability, even as they cling to an almost childlike dependency on the women in their lives.  Urban males, sophisticated in the ways and wiles of man- and womankind, have developed a callousness that  insulates them from the pain of failed relationships. Cowboys have no such internal armor and often misunderstand a woman's words and can be deeply hurt.  They can grow bitter and prefer to be away from all people, working far out on the prairie where there is just God and his country and his creatures.

Because cowboys work mostly with animals not machines; because they live outside in landscapes of overwhelming beauty; because they are confined to a place and a routine rife with violent variables; because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life; because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage, their strength is also a vulnerability, their toughness a kindness.


The moon rides high in the cloudless sky,
And the stars are shining bright.
The dark pines show on the hills below,
The mountains are capped with white.
My spurs they ring and the song I sing
Is set to my horse's stride.
We gallop along to an old-time song
As out on the trail we ride.
My horse is pulling the bridle reins,
I'm hitting the trail tonight.
You can hear the sound as he strikes the ground
On the frozen trail below.
His hoof beats hit and he fights the bit,
He's slinging his head to and fro.
We'll ride the trail till the stars turn pale
And camp at the break of dawn.
Nobody will know which way I go,
They'll only know I've gone.
~ Bruce Kiskaddon


"It's beefsteak when I'm hungry,
Corn whiskey when I'm dry,
Pretty girls when I'm lonesome,
Sweet heaven when I die."
~ Dick Duval 

 

He loved his country as no other

A story from the days of the America that used to be and that still lives in the hearts of her native children.  Who punishes treason now?  Is there even such a word, such a concept anymore?  Is the very concept of a country, a nation, a motherland, obsolete? Should it be?

"Remember that behind officers and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to her as you belong to your own mother."

 I suppose that very few casual readers of the "New York Herald" of August 13th observed, in an obscure corner, among the "Deaths," the announcement,

"NOLAN. DIED, on board U.S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11' S., Long. 131° W., on the 11th of May: Philip Nolan."

I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old Mission-House in Mackinac, waiting for a Lake-Superior steamer which did not choose to come, and I was devouring, to the very stubble, all the current literature I could get hold of, even down to the deaths and marriages in the "Herald." My memory for names and people is good, and the reader will see, as he goes on, that I had reason enough to remember Philip Nolan. There are hundreds of readers who would have paused at that announcement, if the officer of the Levant who reported it had chosen to make it thus:—"Died, May 11th, THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY."

 Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
~ Sir Walter Scott

 Radio play:

The Man Without A Country 

 

The original story in the December, 1863, edition of The Atlantic: 

The Man Without a Country

 

 

1941

 The same year, but two different worlds.
The photo on the left is a vacation snapshot of the Grand Canyon, taken in 1941, the car an up-model Chevrolet, a good car that took a young couple from San Diego to Arizona in style and comfort, while getting 17 miles per gallon, according to their trip notes.
They stayed in motor lodges, motels and then the national park's luxurious accommodations.  They rode to the bottom of the canyon on a tourist mule train and it was all pretty much like Donald Duck and his nephews' vacations.  It was a fun, safe, comfortable world they lived in, and which they expected to continue forever.  Why should it not?
This photo to the right below was taken that same year, in the Philippines.  Army Air Force pilots walk past obsolete Boeing P-26A fighter planes.   Within weeks of this photo being taken, most of these men would be dead, killed in a desperate struggle with the invading Japanese, against whom their old fighter planes were no match.
One of my great uncles was in the Army Air Force in the PI when the Japanese attacked, and fought them in those early days.  He died in that distant land.
From what I understand -- and I don't know much for sure -- he started out there flying P-26s, then moved on to P-35s, then the P-40s.  All I have seen of his days then are a few old snapshots of old planes.  He was not killed in combat but became a PoW after the surrender, an experience which he did not survive.
Besides the P26As, we had P-35As that the government had commandeered from a Swedish order.  When they arrived in the Philippines, they still had the Swedish Air Force markings on them.  They were highly maneuverable fighter planes, with a tight turning circle, but they were under-powered and slow, with a poor rate of climb.  They didn't dive very well either and were under-gunned.  Below is a photo of some of these P-35As taxiing for take-off on a sunny day in the summer of 1941.  Many of them would fall in air combat in the weeks after Dec. 8, but, surprisingly perhaps, more were disabled by lack of spare parts than were shot down by the enemy.
 
The plan was for both the P-26 and P-35 to be replaced by P-40s by the spring of 1942.  Some early model P-40Bs had arrived in the PI earlier in 1941, and a number of the current-model P-40E had begun arriving in November, the last shipment on Nov. 25.  They were crated and had to be hauled from the docks to the airfields, assembled and flight-tested, the engines slow-timed, while the new pilots who arrived with them and who had never even flown anything more sophisticated than an AT-6 advanced trainer, read the operating manuals and tried to get some flight time in them.
To the right below is a photo of a P-40B being assembled.  Not a lot of sophisticated equipment to do it.  Just some crates and hand tools.
Fifty cal. ammunition for their guns came loose in cases.  "Belting parties" were held to load the bullets into machine gun belts so they could be fired.  I looked at the amount of .50 cal. ammunition that had arrived in the Philippines by December 8, when the Japanese attacked, and compared it to the number of .50 cal. guns in the P-40s that were on hand at that date and calculated that if all of it had been belted -- which it hadn't -- it would give each gun three seconds of firing time.
When the Japanese attacked on Dec. 8, the P-40 pilots, contrary to old myths, acquitted themselves very well on their first encounter, shooting down and killing the pilots of eight Japanese Zeros while losing three of their own planes, and
having only one pilot killed in the air (at least eight of our pilots were killed on the ground trying to get airborne and 20 of their airplanes destroyed).  They continued to acquit themselves well in subsequent days.
But their fate was sealed from the onset of the war, as no reinforcements or resupplies were ever sent, and the Japanese came down on them in overwhelming force.  At the left is a photo of a shot-down P-40.  Pretty grim memento mori.
Still, they and our ground forces held out for four months on the mainland of Luzon and another month on Corregidor.   Heroes and legends were born in those days.  And long since have been forgotten.
We should not forget such times and such events. But, of course, we do. We have our own lives and our own wars, and what happened in grandpa's day seems increasingly irrelevant to our own times. But is it?
Below is a photo the Japanese conquerors of the United States Territory of the Philippine Islands took of a disabled P-35A they seized when they overran one of our airfields.  Note the American flag dishonored on the ground as our enemies exult, proud in their possession of a war prize, waving their own banner high.
Do we ever want such a thing to happen again?  If we don't, we had better remember that it has happened before, try to understand why it happened, and do whatever we can to make sure that it never happens again.  Ever.

 

Women??

Often these celebrity transsexual guys who are asserted to be actual women still like stereotypical guy stuff even though they now wear a wig and their aunt's old dress.  Rightist website participants often mock them for this, saying real women only like girly-girly stuff.  Most of the males saying this are, from what they've written that I have read, assorted varieties of nerds and dorks and don't seem to have much experience with actual, real women.  Plenty of women have interests similar to men's, although they may have different reasons than men for doing so, and I don't think you can distinguish a real woman from a tranny by the things she likes to do or is interested in.

But I am about as sure as I can be without actually knowing any transsexual "women" that there is one certain way to distinguish them from real women:  the way they talk, how much they talk and what they talk about.  

I consider myself not much of a talker, but one time I accidentally left my phone's record mode on for some time while el jefe and moi were at home and I was astonished at how chatty I was.  For every word he said, I said 20 -- no, I take that back:  for every word he said, I said 100.  No lie, kimo sabe.  What did I talk about?  I don't even know, just random blah blah, what the weather was like, what a neighbor said, where I got a recipe, should I buy this or that when I next went shopping.... 

I mentioned this to him, apologizing for being  such a nuisance, but he said no need to apologize.  He enjoyed hearing me rattle on. It reminded him that he was home and everything was all right.  It was like listening to a canary chirping and twittering.  It was a kind of verbal sunshine.  When I was away from home, the house seemed cold and empty to him without the sound of my voice giving life to it. 

So, anyway, with these trannies, maybe they can take hormones or whatever they do to give themselves man boobs and shoehorn their feet into size 12 heels and slather on LA Girl cosmetics, but I bet they still talk like men, have the same speech patterns as they always had.  No hormones or operations can change that.

 

 

Children and fools...

                                      Uh oh!