DRUGS

 Long before I read “The Fort Brag Cabal” by Seth Harp I had determined, through my experience, study, and observation that drugs, illegally obtained and used, represent a top, if not the top, problem facing America. The book didn’t reinforce this. It only created a primal fear that my country has been elicit in teaming with international drug warlords. They help our government fight anti-capitalist regimes and our government allows them to amass fortunes by creating havoc in American neighborhoods.

Now it seems that havoc is even more pronounced in certain of our military units.

Thinking people with whom I discuss things tend to believe that the case of a majority of American voters choosing to elect a total charlatan, grifter, and demon as president of our country is a unique phenomenon.

My primal fear this morning suggests that maybe that isn’t true. I worry that the metaphor for the election of this monster is closer to the peeling of an onion. As each layer is removed, it reveals a rottenness that began when the first slave stumbled in chains from a prison ship to work lands obtained by murdering the original inhabitants.

I wish nothing more strongly this morning more than that I be proven wrong.

Sunrise With Schubert: April 10, 2018

Tempted to feel sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg today? Instead, why not have a moment of silent sympathy for other victims of the U.S. Congress? How about a bit of remorse for the victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee? Add to them the victims of Senator Joe McCarthy and his venomous aide Roy Cohen. Many of those victims saw the loss of their jobs, their savings, their homes, and even their families in a particularly sad moment in our history.

Who were the victims and what was their crime? Most times, the crime amounted to having attended meetings, perfectly legal at the time, with known communists or about communism. These would have occurred in the 1930s, when the poverty and cruelty of the Great Depression spawned an interest in the government’s helping the poor, in whatever way possible.

Most of the victims had toyed with the ideas of communism and abandoned them, much as college sophomores read Ayn Rand, become enamored, then abandon her foolishness during their junior year.

The greatest transgression in appearances before HUAC seems to have been a refusal to provide the names of others who had attended meetings or read communist literature in their younger years. The committee went after those in the arts with particular vehemence: artists, entertainers, actors, and writers.

Some actors, like Ronald Reagan and Robert Taylor, gleefully supplied names from among their friends and colleagues. More honorable people, like playwright Arthur Miller, refused and were found guilty of contempt of congress.

In a particular example of dark humor, a HUAC Chairman offered Arthur Miller, who was married to Marilyn Monroe at the time, a deal to drop Miller’s upcoming hearing if he would arrange a photograph of the Chairman with Marilyn. Miller refused, and we can each decide the more honorable of the two.

It was a dark time in America. The tactics of the committee were repeated by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Cohn, if you remember, was, before he died of Aids, was a legal advisor and confidant of the now President of the United States of America.

Mark Zuckerberg walks into the halls of congress today as a billionaire genius. He will be a billionaire genius when he leaves, and will be a billionaire genius when he wakes up tomorrow, the day after, and the day after.

Weep not for the billionaire. Weep instead for the innocents who saw their lives destroyed by the darker forces of government.

Oh, and read about the new museum dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynchings in our country. Sorrow and sadness should always appear to us through the prisms of time and context.

One of the few memorials in
our country to true victims.

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.

Morning Thoughts: October 5, 2017

May I make a modest proposal on the violence imposed on America from firearms? After all, everyone else has.

Thanks. Now these are just my personal thoughts. You are welcome to yours. If we don’t agree, we can still be friends. Okay? Here goes.

First, our congress will not seriously consider passing any legislature involving gun control anytime soon. Emotions are too high, potential political repercussions too drastic, fear of strangers too endemic, and the firearms lobby too rich for there to be any serious discussion.

Let’s just shut up about legislation? Okay? I know the majority of Americans desire it. But, the majority of Americans would like for women to be treated as equal to men. See what that’s gotten us?

Second, the violence will continue. It is too tightly woven into our country’s emotional fabric. Just watch the movie trailers. Any problem that can’t be solved with a car chase and shootout isn’t worth addressing. Violence is not, it would appear to aliens, our best solution to failed human interactions—it is the only solution. Now, the bar has been set even higher. “Only 58 killed? Hold my spare Uzi and watch this.”

Can we do anything? Perhaps. Consider the following.

Americans don’t urinate or defecate in public. Why not? It’s a natural thing to do, after all. They do it in some societies. The Vietnamese do. At last they were doing it the last time I was there. My first memory of the country was standing by my sea-bag at the airport staging area, waiting for a mortar round to land, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man,” and watching a local worker “hist up” one leg of his silk pajamas and take a leak in front of everyone. It didn’t rate a second look. Going to the bathroom in public, or anywhere, is a natural thing.

Face it, any American would do it under the right conditions. For “the happy few,” of us who still believe in biology, it is one of humankind’s most sacred rights.  Nonetheless, we discountenance the public practice of the act to the point of passing laws and regulations against it. Those laws result from no intrinsic threat to the health, safety, welfare, or morals involved. We simply choose, as a society, to deny the public practice of a completely natural function granted our bodies by (take your pick) a benevolent deity or 4.5 billion years of genetic descent through modification.

So what? Here is my thought: if we can, through the force of social abhorrence, deny display of a natural bodily function in certain places, a function that is necessary, unavoidable, and a right, why couldn’t that same technique be applied to firearms?

See, we don’t deny ourselves the right to go to the bathroom, we simply say that it’s not fitting to do it in certain ways. That works, generally, with the exception of babies, and southern males feeling the call of nature within a specified driving distance of a beer joint.

Anyway. Suppose society begins to say, “Keep your guns. Collect your guns. Shoot your guns. Hunt with your guns. Sleep with your guns. Fondle your guns until your heart’s content. Protect your home with them if necessary; I would with mine.”

“Just don’t:

- Expose them to view or pull them out in public,

- Wave them around it public,

- Empty them out in public,

- Talk about them in public, particularly in a bragging manner,

- Tell young children what you would like to use them for (your guns, that is) in public,

- Or use them to be a jerk in public.”

We are talking about social approbation, not legal stricture. Why goodness, in a few years, the violation of the any of the above would be as socially unacceptable as describing one’s female problems while yelling into a cell phone at Walmart. Uh, wait ….

Let me use another example. It would be as socially unacceptable as “dropping trow” at a Sunday School picnic. Yeah, that’s better.

I won’t go as far as to suggest registering repeat offenders. Someone very close to me did, but she always sets higher goals for society.

At any rate, for gun worshipers, go at it. If you feel the need for heat or the smell of cordite, go inside and blast away. Outside? Hold it in and don’t talk about it. It will be hard, but take Hamlet’s advice:

“Refrain to-night,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence: the next more easy;

For use almost can change the stamp of nature …”

You will soon be welcomed back into polite society.

Just thinking.
Pardon the length - complicated topic