The bond between a father and daughter never breaks, but it can hurt each very much to maintain. If you don't understand this story, you probably aren't the father of a daughter or a daughter.
First broadcast August 23, 1976:
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
The Train Stops
Monday, November 8, 2021
Odds and Ends
"You men do not want women educated to do anything, to be able to earn
an honest living by their own exertions. They are educated as if they
were always to be petted and supported, and there was never to be any
such thing as misfortune."
~ protagonist Laura Hawkins in Mark Twain's "The Gilded Age"
"The world is against me. Well, let it be, let it. I am against it."
~ ditto
Whenever I need help when I'm shopping, I always seek out a male store staffer, the older the better. They are always kind and helpful. The old-timers are the most helpful of all and I look for them. My mother and father both say the same thing. In fact, they taught me to do so. Here's to old men, keeping civilization going one helpful act at a time!
―
If there ever is a military coup in this country, it won't be led by Gen. Jack Armstrong, all-American. It will be led by Col. Jaime Gonzalez, immigrant from south of the border, down Mexico way. The English-speaking world doesn't have a tradition of the military seizing control from civilian authorities. It's just not done, no matter what troubles we face. But Latin America....
“Liberalism moves toward radical individualism and the
corruption of standards. By destroying
traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural
collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the
opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education,
by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than
the qualified, liberalism prepares the way for that which is its own
negation: the artificial, brutalized control which is a
desperate remedy for its chaos.”
―
In my HG magnet high school I had a teacher who said, "In my class I will
talk most of the time and you will listen most of the time because
although you may be smart I've been smart longer." “The fate of this man or that man is less than a drop, although it is a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.”
― T.H. White
Back when I was in high school there used to be a fad for making lists about yourself that were in the form of questions. This was around the time Friendster and TagWorld were things. Oh, and good old MySpace. Anyway, the questions were things like what was the last thing you ate, what was the first thing you saw when you woke up in the morning, what was the last TV show you watched and so forth. Kind of lame, right? But everybody was into doing them, I guess because everybody else was doing them.
A spin-off from that was lists of things about yourself. These were long. I think one was called 85 Things About Myself. There were no questions. It was up to you what to write down. I found them enormously interesting to read. People would put down all sorts of things about themselves, often things best left unsaid -- those were the most interesting of all, heh. I don't think guys were much into them -- I mentioned this stuff to one of my brothers and he didn't remember it at all. After a while, the fad died, maybe because making all those lists made people realize just how trivial and dull their lives were, even their transgressions, so they quit making them.
So what sort of things would I put down if I were making one of those Lists About Myself? Hmm. Um... Well... There was this time that... And another time... Once there was this guy and this girl and I almost... When I went to... There was this homeless guy and he came up to me and... My boss once called me into his office, closed the door and... My boyfriend brought his friends over to the house and they all got...and we played...and they suggested...and I said...and then I was the only one except... and he and I...right in front of... When I was just...my uncle...and when my mother found out... The first time I ever...was at my friend's house when she invited me to a sleepover and we... Once when my mother was away visiting relatives I saw my dad's...when he was... and I said...and he said...and then we...and while we were my brother and his friend came in and they...and afterwards I could hardly...but they wanted...so I....
Okay, as you can see, I got nothing. And you have a dirty mind!
“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
―
I once knew a phone sex operator. At the time, she had been divorced for nine years and hadn't been on a date or had sex since her divorce. When she got divorced, she assumed that sooner or later she would find somebody else and her life would resume its normal course. But nothing ever happened.
She was middle-aged, with an older child and a job that kept her on her feet all day. When she got home, all she wanted to do was take off her shoes and rest.
She got into doing phone sex by answering an ad for audio text operators. She thought it would be transcribing phone calls for deaf people or something. But she needed the extra money so she took the job and soon found she was good at it and began making more money than she did at her day job, so she quit that to devote herself full time to her new profession. But the job turned her into a recluse. She worked from home and only made infrequent and quick trips to the grocery store because every minute away from the phone was a potential dollar lost (the phone sex calls netted her a dollar minute).
She stopped taking calls from friends and family, including her daughter, who had gone off to college, because she didn't want to lose paying calls. After a while, they stopped calling.
She realized the job, well-paying as it was, was destroying her life so she quit, but the only job she found was stressful and tedious and paid just $8 an hour, not enough for her to live on. So she went back to being a phone sex operator and a recluse. She said if it wasn't for her phone pervies she would have no social life at all.
―
What I wonder is: if it's supposed to be impossible to catch the falling dollar, why did this ever become a game? At some point, enough people must have been able to catch the falling dollar that it made it a fun thing to try with your friends. Otherwise, why bother?
Maybe this is a sign of generally falling intelligence.
“If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.”
― Dorothy Parker
Once when I was a senior in high school I went with my boyfriend to an air show at Van Nuys airport. He wanted to see the old airplanes and I wanted to see him. I dressed as if I were going on a hot date because I thought we would stop by for a few minutes and then have a nice meal at the nearby World War One-themed 94th Aero Squadron Restaurant, one of my favorites, and then go do ... something ... else. So I wore red four-inch mules and a form-fitting red miniskirt over red lace thong panties with a red lace half-cup push-up bra under a low-cut off-the-shoulder red top. Looking back, I must have looked like a very sexy fire extinguisher. I skipped out of the house just as my mother spotted me and demanded, "Young lady, where do you think you're going dressed like that? Hey! Come back he--!" Too late. Well, I was a teenager.
At the airport there was a C-46, a B-24 and a B-29 on static display and a dual-seat P-51D and a B-25J they were selling rides in. Of course, there were some T-6s. I knew all those airplanes by sight because I had been dragged to airshows and aviation museums since before I was in kindergarten by my dad. My brothers were nuts for them but me...not so much.
Anyway, my boyfriend was in heaven and climbed all through the planes, which I didn't want to do because I was not dressed for it, and talked and talked to the docents. I eventually got bored standing around being ignored, plus it was hot in the sunshine out on the ramp, so I wandered off to find some shade. There were crowds around the big bombers, the cargo plane and the Mustang, but only a few people by the B-25 so I sought out the shade under its wings. It smelled of hot metal, paint and rubber, oil and high-octane gasoline. They were selling rides for $250 and two or three customers were about to climb aboard.
One of the crew members approached me smiling and I thought he was going to tell me I had to move away because they were going to be taking off, but instead he asked me if I wanted to go along on the flight. I said I didn't have $250 but he said there was room since they hadn't sold out so why not come along?
I hesitated, knowing old airplanes are full of dirt and grease and sharp corners and I wasn't dressed for that. I also looked at the aft ladder the other passengers were climbing up and doubted I'd be able to manage it in my heels and tight skirt.
The guy must have read my mind because he said, "C'm'ere," and steered me to the front hatch which he pulled open and then grabbed me by the waist and boosted me up over his head, telling me to grab something and pull myself in as he pushed me up. So before I knew it I was inside the old bird on my hands and knees.
He hauled himself up right behind me and steered me through the tunnel below the cockpit into the bombardier's compartment in the nose, steadying and directing me a little more literally hands-on than was strictly necessary as he helped me lie on my back and pull myself forward by the two handrails overhead, then helping me get strapped into the jump seat. My shoes came off in the tunnel and he fetched them and put them back on my feet after I was seated. He said he had to get to the cockpit while we took off as he was the co-pilot but after we were airborne he would be back. We took off with a rattling roar and flew south towards Catalina Island, thundering low over San Pedro after passing Signal Hill then climbing high as we crossed the channel before soaring over Avalon and Blackjack Peak. My friend the co-pilot did come back and crouched next to me, draping his arm across my shoulders and squeezing me to reassure me, I assumed, as well as to help brace himself as we maneuvered through some steep turns. The view was magnificent from the glassed-in nose. I spotted the Banning House Lodge above Two Harbors where my family had vacationed recently.
Then he helped me unbuckle and crawl out of the nose back through the tunnel, he behind me again guiding me along, then he boosted me up to the crew station behind the pilots' seats. There wasn't much room so he stood behind steadying me with his hands on my hips as I looked around. Then he lifted me up again, helping me straddle the bicycle seat in the top turret gunner's position, steadying me with his hands on my thighs. The turret was facing aft so I had a good view along the top of the airplane to the twin tails and rear gunner's position. Then he lifted me down and helped me get settled into the co-pilot's seat. I got to try steering the plane. The control wheel was very stiff and I could barely reach the rudder pedals, but I did manage to induce a few Dutch rolls which I got out of with the pilot's assistance.
As we returned to the field, my friend helped me crawl aft through the flat tunnel over the bomb bay and slide down into the radio compartment with the other passengers where he helped me strap into an empty seat and put my shoes, which had slipped off in the tunnel, back on. The passengers looked at me with some surprise and puzzlement. One tentatively asked me if I was part of the crew. I said yes, I was the bombardier. He nodded.
After we landed, my co-pilot friend helped me down to the ramp and brushed some of the dirt I had accumulated off me. I had grease smudges on my clothes and had somehow torn my blouse on something, and my hair was a mess. He led me over to the flight crew office or whatever it was and waited while I went into the ladies lounge to clean up. Looking at myself in the mirror, I swore I would never dress like this for a date ever again. Jeans or cargo pants over granny panties and a tee or sweatshirt over a sports bra with tennies or, better yet, hiking boots, my hair tied up in a bun. If my date didn't like it, phooey.
When I came out he said I looked fine and if he wasn't an old married man he would ask me for my phone number and a date. He paused as if waiting for a response from me but I said nothing. He bought me a cup of vending-machine coffee and we chatted for a bit and then he had to get back to his airplane and I had to go find my boyfriend.
After lunch, I asked him to take me home. When I got in the door long before I had expected to be back, my mother was waiting for me. I said, "Sorry, mom." She gave me a hug.
“She dreamed of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.”
― Dorothy Parker
Monday, November 1, 2021
Melancholy days
November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And the earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
~ Elizabeth Coatsworth
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And the earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
~ Elizabeth Coatsworth
November's sky is chill and drear.
~ Sir Walter Scott
The wild November come at last
Beneath a veil of rain.
~ Richard Henry Stoddard
It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.
~ Wallace Stevens
"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear."
~ William Cullen Bryant
A Rebel?
In a previous post I mentioned that some job interviewers had referred to me as a corn pone, and when I first started classes at an HG Magnet high school I was looked down on as some sort of yokel not only by many of the students but by some of the teachers as well, both because I was a service brat and thus of course the spawn of worthless human debris, and because I had a distinctive "southern" accent. I wasn't aware of it myself and no one had ever remarked on it to me before. I guess I picked it up from other service brats, there being a lot of southerners in the service. I took an on-line test once that said my accent most closely resembles that spoken between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, a region of the country I've never even visited.I got particularly mocked for pronouncing the word "aunt" the same as "ant" rather than as "awnt." -- that pronunciation to me is really ridiculously snooty pants and I will not say the word that way. I also pronounced "route" as "rowt" rather than "root," which once got me a severe scowl from a teacher. The way I pronounced "know" also seemed to set people off. 
At the DoDEA schools I was educated at, most of the students were the children of career military personnel, and their parents very often were, too. Most were old-stock Americans, pre-Ellis Islanders without a doubt and often pre-Revolutionary War pioneers, same as me. Of course, the blacks were real American blacks with deep roots in this country, not Somalis or Nigerians. The most common non-old-stockers were the Latinos, but they all had ancestors who had been in North America for a very long time.
But at the civilian magnet I stood out as an oddity. About 40 percent of the students were Orientals, almost all Chinese, children of FOBs. They were very clannish and did not associate much with non-Chinese. They had no ties to this country and no feeling for it as a nation and a people. Another 40 percent of the students were classified as "white" but not the kind of whites I was used to. These were Armenians and Iranians and Russians and who knows what else. They, too, were the offspring of FOBs with no ties to this country. The rest of the students were call-center Indians, some Latinos, a few African blacks and assorted. I had nothing in common with them and they had nothing in common with me. They all had "old" countries full of relatives. When I said I had nothing similar and that to me the old country would be Montana or maybe Pennsylvania, they were baffled. In that world, I was the foreigner.
One time at the end of a speed-reading course we were tested for speed and comprehension. I scored 1,400 words a minute with 100 percent comprehension. As the teacher read aloud the students' scores to the class, she particularly praised a boy who had received the highest score so far mentioned -- 800 words a minute with 90 percent comprehension. I expected to be praised at least as enthusiastically when she came to my score, but when she did she merely read it off without remark and passed on to others, some of whom, who did not score as well as I did, she singled out for praise. I was surprised and could not understand why she had ignored my achievement. Later my mother said that it was probably simply because she didn't like me. I couldn't think of anything I had done to offend her. My mother said that sometimes people just don't like you, and there's nothing you can do to change that. After thinking about it a while, I concluded that the teacher probably considered me a dumb hick who shouldn't even have been allowed to take classes at that school and my high score was just a fluke. The service brat thing didn't help. I did make an effort after that to watch my pronunciation and mimic that of my fellow students and teachers, and I made it a point never to mention that I grew up mostly overseas on Navy bases. No blurting out that I had taken field trips to Kamakura or hiked up the slopes of Mt. Etna or mentioning that my dad joked that I had been baptized with JP-5.The thing is, as far as I know, I have no recent ancestors, if any, from the South. I don't know of any who fought in the Civil War, though I suppose some did, of course. But most of those from back East were Anabaptists of one sort or another or Quakers. Pacifists, in other words. And almost certainly abolitionists.
I do know of one ancestor in California who had served under General Crook in the second Pitt River Expedition in 1857 and headed east at some point during the Civil War to try to join up with Crook's boys in what I think was the Kanawha Division of the Army of West Virginia. But he never made it farther east than Nebraska, enlisting in a cavalry regiment there that ended up fighting in the Indian Wars that erupted in 1864. He kept a diary of his service days, which I have seen. He wrote mostly about personal things, as is to be expected in a diary, recording what dreams he had or what was served for supper, that sort of thing. But he did mention that the infantry the cavalry operated with were all Confederate PoWs, "galvanized Yankees" he called them. These were men who apparently were given the choice of being confined to a prison camp or serving on the frontier and chose the latter. He also mentioned that his cavalry unit's slogan was "40 miles a day on beans and hay" and that the cartridges their Burnside carbines used tended to jam in the breech.
He did write about coming across the remains of a wagon train attacked by the Sioux, who killed, scalped and mutilated the corpses of everyone and looted the wagons, scattering the goods and personal possessions of the travelers across the prairie, kegs of flour smashed, bolts of cloth unwound and left in great ribbons of calico. The oxen were slaughtered and feasted on. The only things taken were guns, ammunition and the horses. And, as it turned out later, some women and children. He also wrote that his troop, sent to reinforce Ft Rankin, defended adjacent Julesburg, Colorado, from an attack by over a thousand Arapaho, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, who in a series of assaults eventually overwhelmed the defenders and burned the town to the ground. He noted that of the 60 men in his troop, 22 were killed or died of wounds as a result of those battles. But they did hold the fort, saving the lives of the civilians who had taken refuge there.
About the oddity of having pacifist and war-fighting ancestors, at least one reason that I know of happened during the American Revolution when the British paid the Shawnee to attack homesteaders in the Ohio River valley. The German immigrants that included my ancestor had originally settled around Germantown in what is now a part of Philadelphia but later moved to western Pennsylvania where they established farms. I guess the French and Indian War, especially the Braddock Expedition disaster, led them to move even farther west in an attempt to keep clear of trouble. But in 1777, the year of the Bloody Sevens as it was called, their little settlement was massacred by the Shawnee, only my ancestor, his brother, sister and mother surviving out of a village of maybe a hundred people. The experience killed his pacifism and he fought through the Revolution, then lit out for the far west, eventually joining 
John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company as a trapper and trader. To avoid having his hair lifted, he needed the protection of Indian allies so he married into the northern Cheyenne tribe. His descendants were associated with the Bent brothers. Some adopted the white man's ways, one of them that I know about becoming a wagon train guide on the Oregon Trail and then going to California during the Gold Rush. Others blended into the northern Cheyenne tribe. Two of these that I know of joined the US Army after the final defeat of the Cheyenne in 1879, one serving with the 1st Battalion, 22nd infantry, E Company, out of Ft. Keogh, Montana, fighting the Sioux,and the other serving with the 8th Cavalry, Troop L, out of Ft. Union, New Mexico. He fought the Apaches and Comanches.
I suppose all old stock Americans have similar ancestral stories. Maybe they know something about their forebears, maybe a lot, maybe nothing much, if anything. But one thing they do know, even if they never really think about it, is that this is their native land. America is home. After all, they and theirs created it, one felled tree, one plowed furrow at a time. And sometimes one rifle ball at a time.
After looking back over my long line of American ancestors, you know what? I am proud to be a corn pone, a real native American whose people founded this nation, and a country girl at heart who always looks with love and longing to prairie and mountain, sea and sky -- and prouder to be a service brat. I come from a long line of soldiers, sailors and airmen. It's what we do. It's what we're good at. When this civilization dies, when all the great cities are nothing more than grass covered mounds -- and that day will come to our civilization as it has to every other -- my descendants will survive, if only as mounted warriors with bow and lance .... Fiddler’s Green
Halfway down the trail to Hell,
In a shady meadow green
Are the Souls of all dead Troopers camped,
Near a good old-time canteen.
And this eternal resting place
Is known as Fiddlers’ Green.
Marching past, straight through to Hell
The Infantry are seen.
Accompanied by the Engineers,
Artillery and Marines,
For none but the shades of Cavalrymen
Dismount at Fiddlers’ Green.
Though some go curving down the trail
To seek a warmer scene.
No Trooper ever gets to Hell
Ere he’s emptied his canteen.
And so rides back to drink again
With friends at Fiddlers’ Green.
And so when man and horse go down
Beneath a saber keen,
Or in a roaring charge or fierce melee
You stop a bullet clean,
And the hostiles come to get your scalp,
Just empty your canteen,
And put your pistol to your head
And go to Fiddlers’ Green.
Fear no danger! Shun no labor!
Lift up rifle, pike, and saber!
To arms! To arms! To arms!
Shoulder pressing close to shoulder,
Let the odds make each heart bolder!
Thursday, October 28, 2021
This and that IV
―
“Individualism
attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The
family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied
that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral
behavior in its members. Private association are denied the
autonomy to define their membership for themselves.
“The upshot
is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the
individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly
dictated by or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less a
member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an
unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the
state. Thus does individualism prepare the way for its
opposite.”
―
“Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion
pictures and television entertainment, et al.…delight in nihilism and
destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their
weapons are just different.”
―
When I was attending a DoDEA high school (I later transferred to a civilian magnet school), I was a cheer leader and one of our cheers to razz the opposing teams was: "Cornbread! Chicken! Rice! Peas! We got higher SATs!" Heh. But I guess it's an obsolete chant now. Soon nobody will even know what an SAT score was.
“To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel, when setting one's
stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”
―
It bemuses me how often on-line commenters quarrel with and insult each other. But it can be eye-opening. You really get a picture of how people think and what they believe with no social Styrofoam cushioning their interactions. The other day one commenter put down another who had often referred to his days in the military by saying that he had voluntarily served the globohomo empire and now had PTSD as a result. That bothered me on a number of levels.
First, the guy who was always mentioning his days serving Uncle Sam and keeping America safe I was skeptical of because I know lots of veterans and active duty and not one -- I repeat: not one -- has ever said anything flag-wavingly patriotic. I could sum up their attitude by what one former
Marine said once: "You know what I learned from my deployments? I learned how to say with real sincerity, 'Fuck this shit!'" That rings true. Second, I don't know and can't imagine anybody enlisting in order to serve "the globohomo empire," whatever that is. People join up for personal reasons: because a relative you look up to did, you want to learn a trade or get financial aid for college, you want to get away from home or the crummy town you live in, you are bored, sick of going to school and need a break, or some very personal reason that you are not about to tell anyone.
And third, PTSD
is not something to be made light of. Sure, sure, some people fake it, and some people who have no clue what real PTSD is like claim to have it for all sorts of trivial reasons. But PTSD is real and it is caused by physical damage to the brain that can only be discerned by examining brain tissue under a microscope post-mortum. Sometimes not even then, depending on what caused the PTSD. To trivialize the condition or imply someone has it for the views they express on some stupid on-line blog post comment section is contemptible. “Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.”
―
History is full of obscure zigs and zags, seemingly minor events that turn out to be major turning points in history. Often they are never widely known, and usually only blundered across by detail-oriented history buffs. An example:
One result of President Franklin Roosevelt ignoring his new vice president Harry Truman and keeping his plans limited to only those whom he believed it essential to keep informed was, in retrospect, probably a catastrophic misunderstanding.
bitterly disappointed with Stalin; in fact, it seems he was furious with Stalin. Both men had acted high-handedly toward Roosevelt and the US, as if they were on the same economic level with America when both were actually essentially bankrupt and would need US economic aid even after the war with Germany was concluded.
Neither knew that at the Yalta conference Stalin only agreed to attack Japan if Lend-Lease was continued into the post-war years. So maybe Roosevelt had had second thoughts about involving the Soviet Union in the war against Japan, possibly because of progress in the development of the atomic bomb.
What Roosevelt was thinking we will never know, but when, just 10 days later, Sen. Taft (R-OH) introduced an amended bill ending Lend-Lease when Germany surrendered, and 34 Republicans, 4 Democrats and 1 Progressive voted for it and 37 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against it, creating a 39-39 tie, Vice-President Harry Truman jumped to his feet and shouted, "The chair votes no!" breaking the tie and
continuing Lend-Lease. Truman thought he was doing what the president wanted.
Had Roosevelt briefed Truman on the situation with Stalin and the Soviet Union as well as Churchill and Britain, the months and years after his death might have been very much different. As it was, Truman was left to learn the dog-eat-dog world of international politics on his own.
“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation
between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its
fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
―
Sunday, October 24, 2021
This and That III
-- Walt Whitman
Lecherous profs have been around forever. Most often they are in the liberal arts, the tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, blue jeans and loafers type. I was not an English lit major but once an English lit prof overheard 19-year-old me yakking about how I enjoyed reading Henry Miller and liked Charles Bukowski's and Kenneth Rexroth's poetry.
Pow! He was on me like white on rice, or, since he was black, um...hmm...well, like some appropriate comparison that will come to me later.
That guy tried every which way to seduce me. Along with my literary interests I played the piano and through my enthusiasm for Maurice Ravel had developed an interest in Les Apaches and especially the pianist Ricardo Viñes, so this guy tried to snow me by pontificating about the music of that era, though it was immediately clear to me that he knew nothing about it.One time he said he was having a soirée at his home with a number of students and faculty and invited me to attend. Suspecting nothing, I went only to discover I was the only one there. Ushering me into his parlor wearing a bathrobe and slippers, he said the others were just running late....
Aaaand the rest of the story shall remain untold. Unless you buy me a drink. Um...better make it two....
Okay, okay, save your drinks, they would only make me barf anyway. Nothing happened. As my dad would say, I may have been born at night, but I was not born last night, so I got the picture right away, about faced and marched right out of there.
Speaking of Ravel, there's a well know anecdote recounting that when George Gershwin asked Ravel to give him composing lessons, Ravel said, “Why become a second-rate Ravel when you’re a first-rate Gershwin?”
Many have considered that a put-down by Ravel, which it was not at all. Gershwin asked Ravel this at a party in honor of soprano Eva Gauthier and in declining his request Ravel was basically saying that Gershwin should follow his own muse, as Gauthier had done.
The interaction between Gershwin and Ravel is quite interesting. According to Howard Pollack, author of George Gershwin: His Life and Work, there was a real aesthetic difference between the two that Ravel did not want to interfere with. Pollack described Ravel as the 
"References to BBC are actually quite common in ancient texts from the Mediterranean and the Middle East, including The Bible:Ezekial 23
Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
The Hebrews tended to use the terms 'Egypt' and 'Egyptians' in a loose sense to encompass Nubia and Nubians. The Egyptians were perceived as a dark-skinned Other."
~ Peter Frost
That Old Testament is something else, ain't it? All that incest, rape, family dysfunction, murder, depravity and genocide. But maybe it is just telling it like it was among semi-civilized tribes thousands of years ago. Not a lot different from what goes on in the boondocks of Afghanistan today, and probably a lot of other places as well. Cartel-controlled areas of Mexico, for example. Civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism and savagery that's hard to establish and harder to maintain. I much prefer the New Testament and don't pay a lot of attention to the Old. It's too alien. I don't relate to ancient middle easterners or their ways. I am much more comfortable with the Germanized Christianity (as defined by James Russell in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) than I am with anything non-European.
But if you stripped me naked, tied me up and tickled me unmercifully while loudly playing The Tammys' "Egyptian Shumba," I would confess that I suspect all religions to be just plastic banana, phony baloney, good-time rock-and-roll. Whistling past the graveyard. But what do I know? I'm only a grassland hominid evolved into an apex predator with a brain too big for its own good.
And being tortured like that, I would confess to anything you wanted me to confess to. I would just John McCain it with my mental fingers crossed. Wouldn't you?
I do often suspect that God is a randy practical joker fond of slapstick humor and sick jokes. After all, He created human beings didn't He?
About the fixation on gigantic organic gamete injectors, I think that's a guy thing more than a gal thing, and has to do with dominance displays toward other males, as has been recorded among various species of monkey, and not toward females. For a female, the mind and how it is stimulated is vastly more important, at least to me, anyway (always have to be careful not to project! -- no pun intended). As with that English lit prof I wrote about above: I didn't care how big his Mr. Happy might have been, as far as I was concerned he was a creep. Make that a Creep with a capital "C." And that's all he was or ever would be.
"We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk,
shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it."
~ Michael Crichton
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
― Herman Melville
Friday, October 22, 2021
Look Away
The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.
In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.
Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendor.
The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air.
A swift cut to the horse’s neck
and a hunk of armor crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake, I know better.
Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valor sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.
It’s no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.
In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel Bible
for a souvenir.
I’m just as human as you.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
One step beyond
I know about an incident very similar to that depicted in this dramatization. Something that couldn't possibly have happened, but did.
First broadcast October 6, 1959.
"Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is an errand-boy in heaven, nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power, how then can this one small heart beat, this one small brain think thoughts, unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I."
― Herman Melville