EVIL

 Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a silent drum but, hey … a malignant dictator has been ruling my beloved country since, as he promised, the day he took office. He has continually trashed and degraded every promise of hope and tradition we have built in this country of such promise. He is a nasty, vile, and degenerate person who rules the country for which I gave up four years of my life.

That bothers me.

There are six elected officials, elected to national office, in my state who have chosen to become politically “joined at the hips” with this creature, enabling each of his antics with their silence. A majority of our state officials frolic behind him shouting hosannas.

This bothers me.

But, people I once knew as kind, generous, patriotic, and righteous souls laud his every act because he has attacked, or promises to attack, people they don't like or ideas they don’t agree with. Many of those ideas come straight from the mouth of the Galilean. Cult members support each destructive move as long as their enemies are in the line of fire. Good people now praise evil and worship the evil one.

That's what really bothers me.

Facts and Fools

It's funny how we learn things. I posted something about the late Dale Bumper's this morning, mentioning that he was  was Governor of our state and then our senior U.S. Senator for years. He wrote a book titled, The Best Lawyer in a One-lawyer Town, He was an attorney. And a statesman. And a source of pride for our state. Now the funny part: I had originally added, "That's a rare combination, one that's not likely to be matched in a while."

Then I remembered a lesson I learned from an unusual source. A friend and I were having lunch in Little Rock's Riverfront area one day. The friend taught Law and a friend of his, whom I didn't know, joined us. The stranger was a successful trial lawyer. We talked of many things, specifically of a trial taking place in Washington, D.C. at the time. A piece of the trial transcript had caught my attention. "Why," I asked, "Didn't the government's attorneys point this or that out?"

The answer, from a complete stranger, amazed and enlightened me. "You never want to state the obvious. You have to assume that the judge is no fool."

I can't tell you how many times I've used that advice in writing. Accordingly, I amended my post to take out the final sentence. Any reader at an eighth grade level or above will get the point about giants and pygmies.

Don't Get Me Started: December 4, 2017

A few years back, my trophy wife fell and broke her ankle in three places. I used the “Fireman’s Carry” I learned in the Navy and got her into the car. At the emergency room, we were lucky. They got her in quickly and efficiently (Springhill Baptist in North Little Rock, AR ☼☼☼☼☼).

It was Friday. Turned out the Doc on duty was the surgeon who operated on such breaks. He operated on Saturday. I took her home on Sunday. Within a week I was pushing her through Lowe’s parking lot in her wheelchair going “Whee whee whee!”

Until she made me stop, but that’s another story.

We’ve had to go back to that emergency room a couple of more times: once with a kidney stone (me) and once with acute dehydration and pneumonia (mother-in-law).

It’s gotten more crowded each time. Last time, I’ll swear I sat beside a teenager and 12 of her close relatives. From all appearances, she was there for a pregnancy test, or something very close to it. (When she came back from consultation, they all wanted to know if it was a boy or girl). Also saw someone we knew who, from all accounts, has the distinction of never having held a job in his adult life. He was with his latest girlfriend and their baby, I think his fifth. No. Not African-American—white and ultra-conservative. You ought to hear hear him rant about that "n****r" president."

Here’s my big fear for the future. The current plan for the ruling party, apparently, is for the emergency rooms across the country to provide care for those who don’t see the need for health insurance. I guess we’ll pay our share of the cost. We don’t like to watch suffering.

But … and here is the real rub. It’s going to be a helluva wait if you happen to need emergency care.

Oh, and I recently saw a particularly hateful and venomous essay by former football coach Lou Holtz. Yeah, he’s the one who left Arkansas because they wouldn’t let him use his position as football coach at U of A to advertise air conditioners. Anyway, he claims our country is divided into doers and takers. Made me think, yeah, there’s some truth to that. I thought of America’s “Sweetheart City,” Savanah, Georgia and how the “doers” who built those fancy homes were, upon completion, never allowed within them again except, perhaps, to serve the “takers.”

Now there’s the current ex-coach. He was supposed to “do,” but he didn’t. So, he’s “taking” somewhere near $12 Million to go and “not do” somewhere else.

I think I read in the Book of Ludicrous that oversimplification is as great a sin as worshiping riches.

Growing Up Southern: November 12, 2017

There’s a body of water near where I grew up that is of some local interest. It’s Bayou Bartholomew, the longest one in the world. They say it is, anyway. It runs from Pine Bluff, Arkansas all the way to South Louisiana. It’s the meat of legend and song.

I say “runs” with a fair degree of hyperbole, for bayous don’t really run. They merely slug along, catching and preserving whatever flows into them, much like the South itself. But anyway, what’s a Southerner without hyperbole? We feasted on the concept long before it reached the Borough of Queens, in New York. It matches the tendency of our minds to take sharp turns.

Our hyperbole, though, tends to favor the harmless variety. For example, our mosquitoes are so big that they can stand flat-footed and [have sex with] a turkey, or keep a person awake at night as they crack “hikker-nuts” (Hickory nuts) with their beaks. We have snakes that are so mean that one can kill a tree by coiling around it and stinging it with its tail. We had a banker once who was so crooked that it took three grave plots to bury him. And I personally knew a man whose cousin’s postman told him of a fallen woman so attracted to “group sessions,” that she had to buy thank-you notes by the case.

So what if we would, as William Faulkner observed, cut down a 100-year old oak tree to get at a squirrel’s nest? It would be like Joseph and Mary clearing a spot in the manger for the little Galilean baby, wouldn’t it? Well maybe not, but what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Can’t hurt anyone, can it?

What if we are tending more and more toward electing our politicians for their entertainment value rather than potential benefit to humankind? It allows us to say, “Did you hear the one about the one senator that was so mean the other senators started noticing it?” What about funerals? Would one of the Northern Tribesmen, when asked to say something grand about the deceased, ever stand and say, “Well, I always heard his brother was worse?” The South, after all, originated what the late columnist Richard Allin called the act of “filibustering the deceased into Heaven.”

Are there people anywhere other than the American South that are so “hard-featured” that their face would “make a freight train take a dirt road?” It might even be a face that closely resembled a “mule’s ass sewed up with a logging chain.” Such people thrive here, bigly.

But back to Bayou Bartholomew. It was once what they dumped raw sewage into, but they stopped that back in the 1950s, I think it was. We might expect them to start the practice again. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The tornado of 1947 generally followed the course of Bayou Bartholomew as it ravaged a huge area south of the city of Pine Bluff. There were, if I remember correctly, 32 people killed as a result of the damage. Six young men shooting craps of a Sunday afternoon died in the storm. This happened in an abandoned house less than two city blocks distance from our little country grocery store. To the East of us, an entire family died when their house was lifted, turned upside down, and deposited into Bayou Imbeau, a black-water body near Bayou Bartholomew.

The houses on both sides of our house and store were totally destroyed. The store was undamaged. My father gave away its entire inventory to survivors, asked no money, and went bankrupt. The local newspaper suggested erecting a monument to him. They never did. The small town of Lonsdale, Arkansas did send him a check for $45.00.

In 1957, the bayou flooded. I could watch it from our front porch rise a couple of feet above the highway. They built a major “big box” development at that location a few years ago. When it floods, if there is a functioning government then, we’ll all pay for the recovery. Such is life.

I guess one lesson is that the function of a responsible government, including disaster relief, is not a matter for humor, hyperbole, or political aggrandizement. The best we can hope for is to ooze along like a bayou, hope for the best, love our fellow humans, and be thankful when we aren’t targeted for destruction in the meantime. Peace.

There's not a huge demand for "Bayou-side Mansions,"
but it is possessed of a certain charm.

Sailing to Oblivion: June 20, 2017

Odd thing is, there is not a city council in this country that could pass a law the way our United States Senate is doing. Why? One wonders.

Why would we hold local politicians to a higher standard than national ones? Local ones may make decisions that affect us more directly, “where the rubber meets the road,” and all that. But they lack the power, as individual bodies of government, to destroy the economy, the world, or our planet. The ones in Washington can accomplish all those things, and now seem hell-bent on doing just that, and doing it in secret. Why? One wonders. As a social-media post asked recently, “Why is everything not enough?”

Further, my experience with city governments, and it is an exhaustive one, demonstrates that the leaders most often seem to be trying to build something, solve a problem, or make ends meet. They, in the vast majority of cases, attempt to look after us.

But we watch them, the women and men who run our cities, just the same. We make the operate in the sunlight. We make their methods transparent. We make their records public and available to the press. We hold them accountable. We do, in a surprising number of cases, kick them out it they don't do right. More often than not, they behave accordingly.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our senators did the same? Perhaps they would if we started selecting them by performance and not by party.

That is the question I ponder after reading the news of June 6, 2017.

Just wondering.