Thinking about War on Veteran's Day

War is something every man I have ever known was deeply interested in.
Why?




 

 

 

Calm and full the ocean under the cool dark sky; quiet rocks and the
birds fishing; the night-herons
Have flown home to their wood...while east and west in Europe and
Asia and the islands unimaginable agonies

Consume mankind. Not a few thousand but uncounted millions, not a day
but years, pain, horror, sick hatred;
Famine that dries the children to little bones and huge eyes; high-explosive
that fountains dirt, flesh and bone-splinters.

Sane and intact the seasons pursue their course, autumn slopes to
December, the rains will fall
And the grass flourish, with flowers in it: as if man's world were perfectly
separate from nature's, private and mad.

But that's not true; even the P-38s and the Flying Fortresses are as natural
as horse-flies;
it is only that man, his griefs and rages, are not what they seem to man, not
great and shattering, but really

Too small to produce any disturbance. This is good. This is the sanity, the
mercy. It is true that the murdered
Cities leave marks in the earth for a certain time, like fossil rain-prints in
shale, equally beautiful.

~ Robinson Jeffers



In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
~ Randall Jarrell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.
 

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine
the fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.

Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence, the bloody sire of all the world's values.
~ Robinson Jeffers

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can still kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies.

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?
~ Richard Eberhart

 

 Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I drawn near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
~ Walt Whitman

 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.
~ Carl Sandburg

The Train Stops

 

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:

 

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 we are to have another contest for the future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
― Ulysses S. Grant

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.”
― Robert H. Bork

 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.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

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.

“The People's' historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.”
― Charles Portis

The purported decline in reaction times as a sign of declining IQ is intriguing. There's a bar game you can play where someone holds up a dollar bill and you position your fingers over it to catch it when he releases it. If you do, then you can keep the dollar. If you can't, you have to pay him a dollar. Supposedly, it's impossible to catch the bill, but I can do it easily, and so can my brothers and, of course, my dad, who taught the game to us.
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. 

I thought he would be frantic, but he hadn't even noticed I was gone, so busy was he with going through all the airplanes, taking pictures and talking with everyone.  He asked if I had seen the B-25 take off and said he had gotten some good shots of it as it circled the field.  I said I hadn't really seen it take off as I had gone inside.  He looked apologetic at this and said he was sorry he had neglected me and suggested we have lunch.  So he escorted me over to the 94th where we got a nice table and I tried to get the date back on track -- my track -- but all he did was talk Sperry gyroscopes  or something.  Finally, I put my elbows on the table, resting my face in my hands, and just looked at him.  My lush, perky boobs were on full display practically in his face, but he didn't notice as he informed me that the World War Two Japanese, German and American bombsights all used Sperry gyroscopes.  Or whatever it was he was yakking about. 
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

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

 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!

This and that IV

“The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. I would fight for the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. I must fight against any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”
― John Steinbeck

  “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.”
― Robert H. Bork

  I was in line for something the other day and began chatting with the man in front of me.  It turned out he was an English visitor. During the course of our conversation he said, "I've been to Los Angeles and San Francisco, but I've never been to California."  I was about to gently correct him when I realized that he wasn't really wrong.

“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.”
― Robert H. Bork

When I was an undergrad, I applied for all sorts of jobs to keep me in folding money.  At one, I had what I thought was a successful interview and the interviewers -- there were two -- seemed to like me personally.  But as I left their office and began walking down the hall I heard one of them say to the other, "So, are we going to hire the corn pone?"  And they both laughed. 

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.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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.”
― Thucydides

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.
At the end of March, 1945, Roosevelt was unhappy with Churchill and
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.
Roosevelt asked Leo Crowley, Administrator of Foreign Aid, how much Lend-Lease had been provided to Britain and the Soviet Union. Crowley told him. Roosevelt then discussed Henry Morgenthau's proposal to lend the Soviets $10 billion more for reconstruction purposes. He remarked that he had gotten nothing from Stalin but lies and Churchill was acting as if he were Roosevelt's boss and America was a mere appendage of the still-mighty British Empire. Then he told Crowley, "I do not want you to let out any more long-term contracts on Lend-Lease. Further, I want you to shut off Lend-Lease the moment Germany is defeated. Don't wait for any further orders. Just cut it off the day Germany surrenders."
James F. Byrnes, Director of War Mobilization, was also informed of Roosevelt's wishes.
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.
Roosevelt died within days, and by the time Germany surrendered, there was a new administration in the White House.
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.”
― William Francis Butler

This and That III

 Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
-- 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 aristocrat of music and Gershwin as a sort of man of the streets composer.  "There’s really an interesting dichotomy there. They admired each other, but probably from some distance," wrote Pollack. Well, I don't know.  Being a fan of Ravel's Concerto in G, looking at the first movement, it's pretty obvious that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue got inside Ravel's head. 

"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

When I read right-wing websites I am always impressed, sometimes stunned, by the vicious hatred of women the writers and commenters express, especially, as I've noted before, hatred of white women -- by white men, mind you.  I can't help wondering how many wife-beaters and other abusers there are among these people.  And also serial killers.  I'm serious about that.  The hatred of women is so intense and so relentlessly expressed that you really have to consider that. In fact, I know one police officer who, after reading some columns by one of the contributors to a particular on-line publication, expressed the belief that he might well be a serial killer, not of women in his case, but homosexual men.  He's looking into it now, but has stopped talking about it, which indicates to me that it is a serious investigation.

 “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.

"Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville