REASON

 Binary arguments plague us these days. These are situations which offer only two opposing sides or choices, often implying that if one is true, the other must be false. A form of "either/or" thinking, it is sometimes considered a logical fallacy because it may ignore the possibility of more nuanced or complex realities.

If I am a MAGA, I can’t say that I don’t believe in abortions, but health care choices should be determined by a woman and her physician, making abortions safe and rare.

If I am a far-left progressive, I can’t say that gender dysphoria is a medical phenomenon affecting less than one percent of the population who should be loved and cared for, but that some gender-selection advocates have pushed the extremes of thought to uncomfortable levels.

If I am a MAGA, I can’t say that regulations stifle the economy, but some are necessary to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the general population.

If I am a far left progressive, I can’t say that protection of the welfare is essential, but that America has become over-regulated when we fine companies for not placing "Do not stand." warnings on the top of stepladders.

We must, as in some Biblical admonition, choose whom we will serve and how we will serve them, never in the lukewarm, or rational, middle, but hot or cold.

 Increasingly, we don’t seek to serve the vast general public.

Increasingly, we avoid reason to guide our thinking.

Increasingly, we approach life from the extremes of thought.

That’s how we have ended up where we are.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 FACTS

This week, we learned that Russia had released American hostages not through negotiations with the current administration, but because of fears that Donald Trump might be elected and negotiations would get tougher. Was this a case of “anticipatory conciliation?”

Might we then say that the economy is doing well for the same reason? As the Alien C.W. once pointed out, “In the new conservative paradigm, “Facts are of no use until one fits them to a pre-arranged set of claims, beliefs, myths, viewpoints, or religious dogma.”

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 ELECTIONS

Our next election won’t rely on facts. Both extremes of the political factions denounce any facts that don’t resonate with embedded emotions and this phenomenon is spreading laterally.

It won’t rely on the Rule of Law. We are abandoning that.

It won’t rely on majority rule. The electoral college obliterates that.

It won’t rely on history. We distrust the telling of history, sometimes for good reason. (See: The Lost Cause Myth.)

It won’t rely on information. Too few control the dissemination, quality and content.

It won't rely on calm reflection. Our cell phones demand too much of our time for that.

It won’t rely on a concept of morality. The most commonly accepted source of morality in America is a book that lauds mass extermination, the murder of innocents, slavery, and harems, among its other tenets.

It won’t rely on sacrifice for the common good. That goes without saying.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 WORDS

A couple of things I’ve seen recently bother me. One happened yesterday when I clicked a YouTube video featuring a replay of a local TV news show reporting a rape. All was fine except that the word “rape” was blocked. Same-same the “F” word or the other six forbidden utterances. Something is wrong here and I struggle to imagine just what it is.

I’m not a fan of gory, but I do revere history. The old films of war and holocaust now suffer from having explicit scenes and photos of dead bodies blurred. Disclosures appear before ads and videos warning that the following may make someone uncomfortable.

Have we gotten too “woke?”

I fear it may be so. Will the word “Nazi” be blurred in future telecasts because millennials don’t “feel safe” when they hear it? How about "Manson, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gingrich?"

I tell you what makes me feel “not safe.” It’s the wimping and bastardization of human intercourse and the blurring of reality in the name of succor. I've been so "not feeling safe" in my life that I would have emptied a clip on my Sainted Mother had she come screaming out of the jungle at me. I think it served to make the rest of my life more joyous. Reality teaches and strengthens. An impenetrable wall to block fear is nothing more than a woke Plato's Cave. 

The unfortunate result of all this? I’m drifting farther from the left and toward the center. I’ll never reach the cruelty, selfishness, and irrationality of the right, but the extreme left may lose a tacit supporter. And just ask those who participated in the American revolution, women’s suffrage, or the civil rights struggle how important tacit support is.

Exemptions

You kinda have to wonder what the Galilean thinks when he sees some of memes posted on Facebook. As far as anyone knows, he hasn't shared his thoughts on line. He does give us a hint, though, in The Sermon on the Mount.

It comes right after he reminds the crowd on the hill about the Old Testament injunction regarding killing.

 “But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”

Oh goodness. He didn’t really mean to imply that being angry with one’s brother is tantamount to murder, did he? Listen, and you will hear the out “of context crowd” saying, “he really didn’t mean that. How can we rid the world of homosexuality if we don’t teach our children to be angry with a brother or sister who chooses such a life? Anger is bad? He surely didn’t mean that.”

Well, he said it, or so the story goes.

And this word “raca,” is an interesting one. Some say it comes from the Aramaic word “reqa,”meaning “empty headed.”

“Empty headed” is extremely mild compared to what some of our “Christian” friends post about Michelle and Barack Obama, oh, and their children. And one doesn’t see the Galilean providing an exemption for our African-American brothers and sisters, or … our gay ones either.

Of course other professed followers of the Galilean aren't exactly circumspect about posting their opinions of those whom they consider empty-headed fools, even at the highest levels of political office.

Is the message that we can't forbid ourselves the choice of eschewing indifference? Is he saying that we can't speak out against evil? Can we not resist a malicious cancer that threatens our country and planet? Are we bound by silence in the face of wrongdoing?

No. He implies that abusive words reveal the true condition of our heart for which we will be punished. Does murder begin in the heart? Is the hatred that causes a person to post memes, (perhaps created in Russia) the very root of the hatred that causes murder?

We just don’t know. We might ask a survivor of the Holocaust. Maybe that was the sort of thing the Galilean was warning us about on that lonely hill.

Corroboration

Today I shall concentrate on considering the views of people with whom I may disagree on some major matters. I promise, at least, to regard, and think through their views, although I shan't go anywhere near as far as even considering, for a millisecond or less, that Donald Trump is a follower of the Galilean. That's off the board.

That said, let's consider the conservative view that we have created an over-regulated America. I don't agree fully. I stood on a balcony in Los Angeles in 1967 and my eyes stung and watered from the air pollution. I remember wondering what it might be doing to my lungs. I didn't worry too much for I was headed into harm's way and figured that would take care of things. Now, though, I do worry a bit about the not-so nascent ravages of Agent Orange. I think pollution ranks as a proper danger for regulation.

Also, I might be convinced about jail-time for anyone tossing soiled baby diapers onto a shopping center parking lot.

But, I do think we go overboard when we fine companies for not having warnings printed on the top of stepladders prohibiting the user from standing on the damned thing while working.

That's not protecting the health, safety, welfare, and morals of the community. No. That, in effect, is contributing to the pollution and weakening of the homo sapien gene pool.

Here is my take, for what it's worth:

If your job is to solve problems or carry out sound policy, it is fine to write regulations.

If your job is simply to write regulations, you will write regulations and some of them will make life unnecessarily more complicated and frustrating for the average person, with no discernible benefit to humanity. Hence, the requirement that the State of Arkansas create legal protection for a species of fish that cannot exist anywhere in the state's temperate zone. At least not yet.

I won't get into zoning regulations, a topic for which I have been deemed an expert in both state and federal courts. I run the risk of offending, and losing the work I do as a hobby in my semi-retirement. (Keeps me off tractors and from behind garden hoes).

So there, my conservative friends. I think we could sit down, with reason guiding us, and discuss this topic without once using the "F" word, as long as we avoided discussing the person who gleefully talks about grabbing things he shouldn't.

Next, the controversial topic of a society that forbids the concept of redemption. You called your sister a dirty name when you were eight-years old? Don't plan on running for office as a progressive.

The End or the Beginning?

One has to worry that yesterday marked the beginning of the march to the end of the world as we know it. Maybe more accurately, maybe it marked the beginning of the return to a world from which our ancestors recoiled. America has lived through a lawless history before. The last significant one was in 1968, the year that I was sent to war, presumable in harm’s way. From the accounts we heard, there was plenty of harm awaiting those who didn’t go to war. Just ask Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. That period seemed to have its ending point when, on May 4^th, 1970, some of our brothers in the Ohio National Guard fired upon some of our brothers and sisters on the campus of Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine more.

The nation recoiled and began to heal itself.

Yesterday, though, was the first time one of our sacred places were invaded by the lawless who were members of our own national congress and whose actions were suborned  by the President of the United States of America. To borrow a phrase from a far better president, it was "date which will live in infamy ... ."

It was a sad day and one that will lead us to take a fork in the road of the fate of our nation. One road will let to anarchy of the type once described in a novel folks thought ludicrous at the time, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. The other fork could, by national revulsion to its action, lead us back to a road of relative harmony.

Taking a warning from Mr. Lewis, we need to watch for the appearance of brown-shirted gangs calling themselves such names as “Trump’s Troopers,” “Posses of Purity, “Nuklaverns,” or “Der Braunhemden.” That will signal the end.

Let us hope that instead we see a national revulsion to the acts of few yesterday. It can’t simply be a revulsion from progressive students of history, though. It must come within the incubators that spawned such a hideous act.

After all, this is America, still. We can at least hope so.

Is how we see what we see?

One odd thing about the South always amazes me. It has to do with herpetology. Yeah, that’s the branch of zoology concerned with reptiles and amphibians. You might think that I’m not an expert. I did, though, room with two men accomplished in the field as a college undergraduate. One earned a PhD in the field. The other used his Master’s Degree in Zoology to gain entry into Med School. Both are deceased now, unfortunately, and can’t bear witness.

The two of them had a habit of keeping live reptiles in our apartment. Need I say more? My impressions of the field of study are most extant.

Oh, and once, while stranded on an isolated base of the United States Navy, and suffering from poverty caused by a records SNAFU, I gained solace in my square time by reading, at the small base library, the classic work The Reptiles of North America by Raymond Ditmars.

So you see, by social media standards I am three steps above the “Exalted Expert” classification on the topic of snakes, the reptilian kind at least.

Here stands my dilemma. The common, what we call, Cottonmouth snake, Agkistrodon piscivorus is, of course, a venomous viper, also bearing the name “Water Moccasin.” They don't bear messing with, as the old folks used to tell us. They don’t tend to grow too large, being thick with blunt tails. Overall, these snakes normally range from 2 to 4 feet in length, but may grow longer. They do hang out near water, but seem to avoid stock ponds, maybe because cows tend to step on them.

Now, according to my former roommates, these snakes are somewhat secretive, hanging out in underbrush near those bodies of water. The two roommates had a difficult time finding one on various expeditions, a fact that I found most comforting back in the day.

Consider next the yellow-bellied water snake, Nerodia erythrogaste. These reptiles represent both a common and gregarious species. They are found just about everywhere in our state where there is a bit of water. In mating season, they tend to gather up and form writhing balls, for the pure fun of it, I suppose.

Here comes the rub. I don’t think I know of an Arkansan who has ever seen a water snake. Gosh, they fish, swim, hike, and cut down forests near lakes, never encountering a Nerodia. Odd, isn’t it? It’s like living in rural Arkansas and never seeing a Confederate flag.

On the other hand, I’m entertained almost weekly by the accounts of Cottonmouths on every lake, stream, pond, and mud hole in Arkansas. Giant ones, averaging six feet or more in length. You can hardly walk without stepping on one. Isn’t that something?

Yes, taxonomy is a strange thing. We tend, don’t we, to organize and classify our acquaintances the same as we do reptiles? As an admitted devotee of progressive government and politics, people classify me as a liberal, pronounced here “lib-ral,” and I’m not to be near their children or attend the local cross-burnings for fear of morality contamination. As Jimmy Buffett would say, “My feet stink and I don’t love Jesus.”

On the other hand, I tend to view folks who attend churches where they forbid their women to speak aloud in services as a tad backwards in the modern world. They must hate females, all of them, each and every one, wouldn’t you say? Don’t they behave like Neanderthals living in a homo sapiens world?

Wow. It just occurred to me. Maybe they aren’t, not all of them anyway. Maybe we just think about people the way we program ourselves to, seeing danger where none exists. Maybe we see venom where there is nary a drop.

I need to go study on this awhile.

Places and People

This week I came to understand what a lucky life I’ve led in many ways. Oh, it wasn’t an exemplary one. Oh no. There are those who make that plain when I let them. But I’ve muddled through somehow and, along the way, I’ve gathered a plethora of memories and friends for which and for whom I wouldn’t trade all the mansions in all the gated communities in all the cult cities in this great land of ours.

For example, take the neighborhood in which I lived as a child, no socio-economic homogeneity there. That sort of sameness can make a person fearful of those who may not look like them, talk like them, live like them, or love like them. No, I grew up in what would now rank as a “mixed” neighborhood, thanks to “whatever gods may be.”

Our little country grocery sat at the intersection of a state highway and a little dirt and gravel appendage known locally as “King’s Road,” after an old man who had lived there forever, maybe even having inherited his place from his slave ancestors. We’ll never know. When the 911 folks came around, they, over the strenuous objections of my Sainted Mother, named it after our family. Go figure.

At the end of that road lived a lady named Sarah Eiseley, known stereotypically as “Aunt Sarah.” My sister and I would load her bicycle’s basket with old newspapers and pedal them down to the lady. In season, she would send us back with a rose for “Miss George,” reflecting the manner by which people often classified married women back then and back in that place. I always thought she, Mrs. Eiseley, must have been 100 years old at least. To my seven-year-old eyes, she looked it. I even fantasized, later in life, that she might have been born a slave.

Image my surprise when Brenda found the results of the 1940 census and I learned that Mrs. Eiesely had only been 70 years old at that time, 1940 that is. That would have made her born five years or so after the war ended. Though not born a slave, she certainly wasn’t “to the manor born.” Can you imagine what stories she may have heard from her elders?

Oddly, I remember that she had a painted portrait of an American Indian, in full chieftain’s regalia, on the wall of the living room of her “shotgun-shack” home. I never had the nerve to ask her why. I suppose she lived on what was then known as an “old-age pension check.” Sometimes at three or four in the morning, I think of those folks, some of them dear friends or relatives, who would have had her pass a drug test as a condition for that modest wherewithal.

Up the road from her, and next to our property, lived Amos Fletcher and his family. Amos made a unique study in Americana. He was one of the strongest men and hardest workers I’ve ever known. I think maybe he was a nephew, or some sort of kin, to Mrs. Eiseley. I say he was a hard worker and he was, from Monday through Friday. Then he would likely fall victim to what he called “one of my weak moment drunks.” His wife, known only as “Miss Essie,” was a saint, if ever one lived on Earth.

Their son, Jim, was near my age, actually a little older. (More about that when we get to sex education.)  For then, he and I, along with Benjamin Shannon, who lived a city block’s distance down the highway, were almost constant playmates. They also said of Benjie’s dad that “he drinks a little.” Sadly, he didn’t limit his to weak moments during the weekend. Binges cost him his jobs, the respect of the community, and, at Benjie’s young age, his life. Benjie’s mom had been “to the manor born” and, although her family had disapproved of her marriage, they helped support her and her family in their most destitute times.

So there you have the makings of our little band of miscreants. Jim and Benjie and I were inseparable in the summer months except for a ten-year sentence comprising two weeks of the pure hell of something called, “Vacation Bible School, that was handed me one tragic summer. But that’s a story for another day. Right now, the boys and I need to go play with some of Daddy’s newly born piglets.

Don’t you, though, feel a little sorry for kids born in a so-called “white-flight city?”

Pals and piglets.
All a young boy needs.

We Save America

We showed those immigrants a thing or two, Brenda and I. Showed them their place good and hard.

Here’s what happened. We received a call from a friend who shall remain nameless. She and her husband have a pea patch, (purple hulled, of course: only Yankees and the unenlightened would eat any other kind). Because of all the rain, the friends’ patch had taken off from them like a runaway train.

Would we like some peas?

Well hell yes.

Would we like to pick them?

Uh ….

Now we know that pea-picking is the job of loyal conservative Christians who labor in the hot sun so that unwashed hordes of immigrants won’t invade our shores and borders, taking jobs away from loyal Americans.

We looked and couldn’t find any such workers anywhere. Being about two purple-hulls shy of a bushel, I suggested we take on the job ourselves. “After all,” I reasoned, “we can’t be among those responsible for brown-skinned illegals swarming about forcing loyal Americans away from high-paying jobs with all those benefits.”

You do understand, don’t you?

Did I mention that the temperature was in the 90s and they wouldn’t report the humidity for it was well over 100 percent and the weatherchild didn’t want to face ridicule by reporting such an atmospheric anomaly?

So … you guessed it. Our allegiance to the flag (not yet lowered for the week’s massacre(s), won out and we saved the American way of life. We joined spirits with all those in the pea fields and orchards of America, saying, “Go back to where you came from, Jesus and Maria.”

Did I mention it was hot? We ventured forth anyway. We even broke the agricultural version of the “Draftsman’s Rule,” i.e. don’t draw (pick) more in the morning than you can erase (shell) in the afternoon (at night).

I shall not forebear telling you how good the air conditioner felt after we had loaded our afternoon’s harvest in the back of the truck and headed home. Neither shall I forebear telling you how good that frozen Margarita tasted when I was stretched out on the recliner and that first pea hit the bowl.

Let’s hear it for Brenda. She went back the second day and finished the job. I managed to find some work far away at my professional rate which is something like 13 times the pea-picking rate. I lied and told her I had it scheduled for a long time.

We did finish the shelling, though, and “I heyulpped” as the girl in the Shake 'n Bake ads used to say.

Last evening, for supper, we had our first “mess” of peas, along with cornbread made from a recipe Brenda found on the internet. The recommended wine for such a dish (referring to the meal and not the cook, here) is Roca Patrón. For those with other pallet-orientations, Four Roses Single-Barrel would work nicely. Its flavor is a bit less whimsical and more assertive.

 After all the sweating, bitching, muscle pains, and near-heat strokes, we were proud that we had done our little part to save our way of life. So, we would like to ask all other loyal Americans to share with us this final plea:

Jesus, please come back, and bring Maria.

La Jefa claims victory.

Jogging Through The Past

When I left you yesterday, it was February 17, 1980, a wintery day in Little Rock. There were clear skies, and the chilly temperature was perfect for jogging. My friend, and sometimes running, buddy John Woodruff, and I were set to follow an advance team of faster runners on a 20+ mile jog, our last before the Arkansas Marathon coming up on March First.

We had but one regret. There was excitement in Little Rock that day. Two icons of Arkansas history were to be imploded that morning and the whole city was prepared to watch, either in person or live TV. The majestic Marion Hotel and its neighbor, the Grady Manning, had been fixtures in the city for ages. Our schedules would force us to miss their end.

Jewish businessman Herman Kahn broke ground on the Marion Hotel in 1905. The hotel bore the famous nickname "The Meeting Place of Arkansas." The Marion Hotel had five hundred rooms, a marble fish pond in the main lobby, green carpets, and green leather couches. The bellboys also wore green twill uniforms. Interestingly, Kahn’s great-grandson, Jimmy Moses, as a dreamer and developer, is making a significant impact today on the physical setting of Little Rock.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford, before he was a famous writer and during summers as a boy, lived in Room 600 of the Marion, where his grandfather, Ben Shelley, was manager. Other famous guests of the hotel included Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas McArthur, Will Rogers, Helen Keller, and Charles Lindbergh.

In our time though, the Marion and Manning had been more widely known for phenomenon tinged with notoriety. They were favored meeting places of the Arkansas legislature. In an infamous bar, in the Marion, known as the “Gar Hole,” many, in not most, of the legislative decisions that determined our state’s future were made during that era. Note to my out-of-state friends: the gar is a trash fish, native to Arkansas lowlands, that grows to great lengths. They say the bar had a stuffed one on the wall, but I never saw it.

Stories abound, some even repeatable. I’ll share one that I heard years after the Gar Hole ceased to exist. An old barber, who had worked in the Marion during the heyday of legislative history, told it to me. It occurred, this story, during the reign of State Representative Paul Van Dalsem, one of the acknowledged bosses of the legislature for years. Yes, he’s the one who became locally infamous for his remark about some female detractors. All he said was that in Perry County (his home), such would-be troublemakers were kept “barefoot and pregnant.” Arkansas women were a little touchy back in those days. Many still are. Others have become inured to such degradations.

Anyway, according to my barber, the representative became outraged when he heard that the Gar Hole was raising the price of a beer from a quarter to thirty cents. Almost immediately, a bill appeared on the legislative agenda that would seriously and adversely affect bars in our state fitting the description of the infamous Gar Hole. Next day, it was announced that the price of beer stayed at a quarter. The bill disappeared into the dustbin of legislative history.

So that was what the City of Little Rock and the State of Arkansas were going to lose that day. One might say it was the end of an era. One would be more accurate in saying that the day would begin the evolution of an era.

As William Faulkner once observed in his famous novel, Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The Paul Van Dalsems and his pals from the Arkansas Legislature still hang out here, in spirit, if not in body. They all changed political parties a few years ago. Don’t ask me to explain. The answer is highly complicated but terrifyingly simple. Decisions affecting our state are still being made in bars and secret meeting places. Those places just aren’t in our state, where innocent-looking barbers might overhear.

But John Woodruff and I knew nothing of all that on this fine winter morning. All we knew was that we were off on an adventure in a city that we both loved.

Our seat of government?

Travel Day

Headed far up into North Arkansas today to earn a bit of money. Yeah, I'll have a bit of a Chicagoan accent when I return. Saw a funny post the other day pointing out how Southerners never move up North to retire. Maybe I'll take some photos of interesting things.

Meanwhile, I see some jokers want to enact a Constitutional amendment to protect the American flag from being mistreated. Uh, does this mean the U.S. Constitution should pay more attention to the rights of a piece of cloth than it does to my wife, or your mother, sister, or daughter?

Some times I wonder if something is changing in America. Other times I wonder if someone just hasn't scratched the scabs and let the poison come oozing out.

Theology Time

More on the Sermon on the Mount. Some writer I read once said that the Galilean was almost breathless on that barren mountain. Whoever it was said the reading resonates more with modern audiences if one inserts, periodically, “And another thing …”

Well whatever. If we are to believe the Gospel of Matthew, our hero really “shucked the corn” back then. As they used to say in my day, “It was radical man,” or, just “Rad, man, rad.” (It sounds more meaningful with smoke in the air).

We’ve already beat The Beatitudes to a fine dust. It’s still fun to think of how “rad” it must have been to the conservative Roman rulers, the bankers, and the Temple Vision evangelists to hear a man say that their worst nightmares—the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the peacemakers, the righteous, and so forth—were standing by to inherit the next world.

Today’s “out of context” crowd stays busy with all that. Maybe they wouldn't have heard it correctly.

Either He had a mighty fine voice, or it must have been hard to hear that day. That possibility occurs in the film spoof by Monty Python, The Life of Brian. One of those at the fringe of the crowd wonders why He is saying something about “Blessed are the cheese-makers.” That might, in fact, make more sense to men in those Manhattan skyscrapers and their third, fourth, or fifth wives.

Let's take a look at some of the other radical things he said:

"If you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire." (5:22)

"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away." (5:29)

"Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." (5:32)

"Do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." (5:42)

"Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear." (6:25)

"The gate is narrow and the road is hard […] and there are few who find it." (7:14)

Maybe that’s why, in a 2006 speech, President Barack Obama (perhaps the last president we’ll ever have who could quote this masterful work), said, the Sermon on the Mount was so "radical" the Defense Department wouldn't survive its application. Earlier he suggested the economy couldn't get along without it.

Rad, man. Rad.

On the theist side, Augustine called the Sermon on the Mount "a perfect standard of the Christian life."

On the doubting side, Thomas Jefferson thought it was "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered".

For the young fans of the Harry Potter series, Albus Dumbledore quotes the Bible word-for-word in placing an inscription on the tomb of his mother and sister, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." 6:19-24

Not all of the Sermon is comforting, however. Think of how members of the “Tax Cut Cult,” when dreaming of their latest riches, must find it a bit troubling that the Galilean said, "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."

Rad, man. Rad.

Radical, beautiful, or both?
I report. You decide.

A Love Story

A funny thing happened to me yesterday. I never thought it would at my age. Took me by surprise it did. What was it? I fell in love. Blindsided, you might say. Don’t tell anyone.

It happened this way.

Each year, the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History sponsors a performance by a wind orchestra on the grounds of MacArthur Park with the historic Arsenal Building (where the General himself was born) as a backdrop. They play Sousa marches and other things. There’s free ice cream and chilled water. The Boy Scout troop from Pulaski Heights Methodist Church makes sure that everyone has plenty of both.

Oh yes, and flags. Everyone gets a flag.

I always try tmo make the affair since it’s right across the street from the condo and I serve on the Museum’s commission. I always enjoy it, especially when they perform the Armed Forces Medley. When your theme song comes up, you stand if you served. (The standers get fewer each year, for less than one percent of Americans now serve).

Anyway. I waited patiently but respectfully until they broke out with “Anchors Aweigh.” They play it last, the Navy being maybe the oldest and certainly the most respected of the forces. We stood, we few, we too-seldom-honored few. It took me back a few years and I teared up, just a bit. I ain’t no crybaby, you understand.

Then it happened.

The orchestra went into “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Now if that doesn’t make you blood stir, nothing will. I’ve heard it even heals bone spurs.

Anyhow. Everyone stood this time, flags just a’waving. To my right were a family with young kids getting excited about the music. To my left was a group of friends, including a couple of vets. In this old park, with the honored and majestic building in the background, I could see not one shred of hate, avarice, anger, or wroth. Just Americans.

At that moment, I realized that I love this country. Oh, it’s made some mistakes, and paid a price for some of them. It has withheld its dream from some and bestowed its blessing unjustly on others. But in the years after I put aside its uniform, it made progress in righting the injustices. There were signs that we might reach a point someday where Stars and Stripes Forever resonated with all Americans.

Then a group challenged that dream, wanting to take us back to the ugliest of times.

I ain’t about to stand by while that happens. My America doesn’t mock the disabled. My America doesn’t denigrate the service of brave people who answered its call and paid dearly for it. My America doesn’t reward people who “make their bones” spreading hatred for groups of other humans. My America doesn’t allow churches to stamp their individual, and sometimes insidious beliefs upon the unwary. My America doesn’t march forward on propaganda-induced and artificial patriotism. My America believes in redemption, not in ruining the lives of people who are now doing good but may have a lingering scab from some decades-ago transgression. My America believes in salvation for all humans, not just for deserving sub-groups.

My America believes in love, not lapel pins. My America believes in respect, not slogans.

So step aside. I can be silent no more. Lead, follow, or get out of the way. I’m standing, with Stars and Stripes still sounding strong in my ears.               

See, I love this country.

The Boy Scouts were concentrating
on doing their job. Photo by the MacArthur
Museum of Arkansas Military History.

 

Adrift on strange waters.

 A great tragedy has befallen our state and it must trouble any thinking person. It occurs at a time when the powers that govern us believe less in progressive policy than at any time in my adult life. Education is scorned. Science lies abandoned. The belief that government can be a positive force for humankind is denigrated as a doctrine.

But the floodwaters keep rising. And the rain keeps coming. And government grows less able to meet the dangers each day. We now find that running from them isn’t the answer. Mother Nature can find us even in homogeneous communities where everyone thinks and looks like us. She follows a Biblical paradigm and spreads her waters on the just and unjust alike.

Things are changing. They will continue to change. Who knows how that will affect Americans? I know change scares us. Americans seem to spend a great deal of time and resources protecting themselves and their children from change, strangers, and the different. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.

There was a time when I thought I had it made. I was young, educated, healthy, and living in the most exciting city in America at the time, San Francisco, California. A mass exodus of the young and ambitious from my state resulted in quite a band of expatriates living there, so I lacked not for friends.

I was invincible, bulletproof, and untouchable. Each day was a new adventure and each night a new discovery. Nothing could spoil this blessed life.

The Draft Board though, was like Mother Nature. It followed the sage teachings of the country hymn, “There’s no hiding place down here.”

A year after finishing a long ordeal of working my way through college, and setting forth to reap the rewards in this wonderful place, things changed. I found myself sitting, instead of “on a dock of the Bay,” atop a bunker outside Da Nang, South Vietnam, cradling an M-16 assault rifle on loan from the United States Navy.

Stuff happens. Things change. Life veers from its course. We find ourselves facing a world so different from what we expected, that we don’t recognize it. We find ourselves adrift on a sea upon which we never expected to sail. We can be “helicopter parents,” or “bulldozer parents," neither nature nor fate cares. Trust me.

In one of the wisest decisions of my life, I made the situation into a blessing. One morning, I took a long walk around Monterey Bay and contemplated my current orders. Looking out on the Great Tide Pool, I decided that, from that moment on, I would not base my happiness upon where I lived, who my neighbors were, or how protected I was from life’s vicissitudes. I would strive, each day, to make the most of what “little postage stamp of native soil,” I happened to stand. (Apologies to William Faulkner.)

I survived the war, survived a storm at sea, and survived a tepid, sometimes chilly reception from my fellow Americans, best expressed by a personnel officer of the telephone company in my home town. He informed me that there were no jobs in his organization that fit my qualifications, but did offer the suggestion that, in future applications to other employers, I keep my military service to myself.

Many friends and fellow Arkansans now face a ship of life on which the anchor finds no bottom. To be adrift upon a cruel and heartless sea is a lonely life, one whose only solace lies not in the promise of a distant harbor, but upon peace within our own heart.

Sailing on. ... not always easy.

The Storms of Life

Just what we needed: more rain. It happens I suppose. It sure happened in 1927. I’ve heard old-timers say that flooding was what made the Arkansas Delta so fertile, all those nutrients being deposited, as the floodwaters receded. Does that mean something positive may come from all this? I don’t know.

What I hope may come from it is the awaking of an understanding that we need adults in charge of government. A slow dismantling of state government, for example, hardly prepares us for facing a catastrophe like we are experiencing.

I can remember as a lad when a bad storm would hit. My Sainted Mother tended to go into hysterics, one of the few signs of weaknesses I ever observed in her … well, that and snakes. She wasn’t, I will admit through the fog of time, above elevating the histrionics a bit for the pure delight of garnering attention.

Anyway, it scared the hell out of my sister, my brother, and me.

Know what though? We made it through those violent electrical storms (and they did seem more violent back then) because of one thing. Our daddy was there. There was an adult of legendary proportions who wasn’t about to let a puny little thunderstorm threaten his family. Why he would walk outside and seem to taunt it. We knew we were safe.

It used to be like that in our politics. When disaster hit, we knew we had adults there to protect us. We, as a country, might stumble, but we couldn’t fall. We feared no evil when we had the likes of James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA.

Then it started, this dismantling of government, this cancerous belief that public service had no meaningful role to play in our lives. We fist elected those who denounced government. Then we elected those who distrusted government. It's finally led to electing those who hate government. Somewhere, in a lonely place, we left the adults. It’s like if our little group of pirates that made my childhood so memorable suddenly quit listening to our adult, Boogie Shannon, and made Nicky Bohannon quit picking his nose and take over as our leader.

It’s like if the crew of the USS Hunley, (AS 31), on which I served, were to decide that we would vote our beloved Captain Anders out of office before we reached that storm down in “the Devil’s Triangle” and put SA Dewayne Puttephat in the Captain’s seat.

It’s like if some insidious force had, one day, put me in charge of our household.

I make light of it now, but it’s painful, very painful, to watch people who don’t believe in government try and tell us what we, as a state and nation, are going to do to face our current crisis. So far, they've mumbled platitudes, as the floodwaters devour home after home. Very painful. Very sad. Maybe the more fertile seeds of understanding will enrich us if the floodwaters ever recede. We may even find the adults waiting for us there.

Some think better times are ahead.

The Assignment

Fiction Friday: Only a slightly fictionalized account of something that happened to me years ago.

The Assignment

By Jimmie von Tungeln

         

Truth be known, I didn’t want to do the piece in the first place. Hell, I wasn’t even a journalist. I was a consultant, a pretty good one, and should have stuck to it. But I had been doing these modest little columns for a Little Rock quarterly that promoted historic preservation. I was acquainted with the editor, I lived in a so-called historic district, and I knew most of the people who lived there. So, I agreed to help.

 It was a good fit. People associated living in historic neighborhoods with eccentricity back in those days. Things that supported that viewpoint were always welcome. So, folks liked my little “human interest” pieces. As for me, I was happy to stick to them. There was no chance of running out of characters, and I didn’t have to travel.

            Then the editor called me one day and asked me to stop by. When I got there, she up and gave me an assignment. Just like that, like I was some cub reporter or something. This posed a noticeable departure from the usual process whereby I just picked out some local oddball and wrote about how they had adjusted to living in an old house.

This time she picked the subject. Why? Beats me. Maybe I was getting stale or she was trying to sell more copies or something. Rather than speculate, I went along with her for the moment.

            Well guess what? You never know what dish life is going to serve up and what decisions are going to throw themselves in front of you, threatening your homeostasis like a group of western bandits with their pistols drawn and ready.

Here’s how it started.

            A local banker, known to us all as a neighbor and a nice guy, had bought one of the most historic homes in the city. It boasted such long-term ownerships that the house and grounds came with a caretaker who had worked there since the Depression. Mr. Pitts cared for the grounds and lived in a small apartment attached to the carriage house, a.k.a. the garage. He was a quiet little man of advanced age who lived alone and remained out of sight when not working. All the neighbors knew him to nod at, but none of us had ever talked to him.

            The editor explained the human-interest angle. Supposedly, a friendship had grown up between Mr. Pitts and the banker’s young son Alfie—Alfred Chidester LaRue was his full name—a little blond-haired kid from the high-rent side of life. Get it? Old black gardener and white heir apparent, the image of an odd couple as corny as it was appealing to our liberal audience. All I had to do was interview the old man, mine a few historic nuggets and take a picture of him and the kid together. It would produce enough “ain’t that cutes?” to make a tough man buy a round of drinks. There was no Pulitzer looming, but it would get me through until another deadline appeared, like a hungry tiger emerging from the mist. No problem.

Anyway, I didn’t have to. These columns represented a public service for me. In other words, I didn’t get paid. Seeing my words in print provided my only emolument. So, I had a degree of leverage unavailable to a poor inky wretch actually writing for a living.

I could have refused the assignment and interviewed, instead, a friend who was restoring a cottage near ours and who looked more like Charles Manson than Manson did himself. He played cello in the city’s symphony orchestra and would have been great material for a photo essay, the research being carried out over a couple of beers. Why should I spend a dry afternoon interviewing the town’s oldest gardener? It didn’t make a bit of sense. “To hell with the editor and her aspirations,” I kept telling myself. Was I my own man or what?

            Naturally, I took the assignment. I had to go through the banker himself and he pretty much outlined what he wanted the piece to say. Alfie was an only-child and, having few young friends in the neighborhood, he had taken up with Mr. Pitts. Followed him everywhere. Shared secrets with him. Even helped with the yard work. Well, maybe a little. The important thing was the friendship that had developed between man and boy. That was the angle.

            Sure. One of the greatest and most persistent dreams of American Caucasians is that, someday, an African-American will love them. But I could pretend with the best, so I pressed on to complete the assignment.

            I set up an appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. It was a nice autumn day that welcomed a person outdoors like an old friend wanting to show you his garden. I grabbed an ancient Rolliflex camera that I used for such work, made sure I had pen and paper, and walked the two blocks to the house.

The house sat on a half-block facing one of the two main streets leading directly to downtown. When it was built, wealth had followed the topography. The larger houses were on the highest ground and homes fell off in size and value as the topography dropped. It was never more than a short walk from the mansions to the homes from which domestic help could be hired, for practically nothing, in the good old days. In other words, urban form followed economic function. Households weren’t separated by income as they are now. That’s how, thanks to the historic preservation craze, I could afford to live near a bunch of mansions.

            Anyway, I arrived. Mr. Pitts had dressed up a bit. He always wore neat clothes with a narrow-brimmed dress hat. Today he had added a tie. He stood at attention with his hands to his side and presented a smile like a boot-camper at inspection. Alfie was bouncing a ball against a tree and the parents stood by with pride. All was set for this to be a painless adventure. Wham, bam, thank you m’aam and I meet my deadline.

            I called little Alfie over and made him sit for a picture with Mr. Pitts. As I lined it up, I pulled a few grunts out of the kid to the effect that he liked Mr. Pitts and enjoyed helping him with the yard work. Mr. Pitts sat smiling through thick eyeglass lenses that distorted his face to where it looked like one of those cartoon characters that has just seen something either real juicy or real dangerous.

            So far, so good.

            Figuring I had about all out of Alfie I was going to get, I excused him with “Now Alfie, why don’t you let Mr. Pitts and me visit while you get back to your yard work?” In other words, “Scram, kid!”

            Alfie was more than happy to be rid of adults so he walked to beyond the garage. There, someone had dug a shallow pit from which smoke was rising. Within the pit, I assumed from the smell, were dead leaves, trash, and some sort of organic waste. Alfie amused himself by kicking more leaves into the fire.

His mother saw the opportunity and appeared from nowhere with a tray of cookies and iced tea. She sat them on the bench between us and asked, sweetly, and devoid of sincerity, the way a southern woman can ask, if we were comfortable. After receiving affirmatives, she then swished away amid a crackling of petticoats and an almost audible smile. I pushed the tray toward Mr. Pitts. He smiled and pushed it back toward me.

            “No, please, go ahead,” I stammered, fumbling for my writing pen.

            “Thank you, suh,” he said. He exaggerated the “suh” so I—so we both—would know he didn’t attach any meaning to it. Then he took a cookie in one hand and a glass of tea in another. He neither drank nor ate right away, though. He rested the arm with the cookie on his leg and wrapped a hand around the glass of tea as if to keep it from flying away. He smiled at me. His eyes looked even larger than before.

            A breeze filled the yard and blew smoke from Alfie’s fire toward us. As it did, Mr. Pits finally raised the cookie in a soft arc to his mouth and took a small bite. He lowered it and raised his glass with the same grand gesture and sipped his tea.

            Hoping to get started, I asked him how long he had lived around there.

            “Oh, I was born around here,” he said. “I been here for as long as I can remember. We lived on Tenth Street but it went for the freeway. House ain’t there no more.”

            He chewed his cookie with what I thought was a grim expression. As he did, the smoke circled us and I caught the pleasant smell of burning leaves punctuated by the sharp odor of the other trash smoldering in the pit. Mr. Pitts stiffened slightly and his eyes retreated behind his thick glasses.

            “I been here since when things were different than they are now,” he said. “Way different.”

Then, that far into the interview, he stopped talking. His voice didn’t exactly trail away as much as it fluttered beyond us like a feather caught in a whirlwind.

            I was losing him. I hurried back to work.

            “Different in what way?” I asked.

            He just looked at me. He seemed to struggle to respond and when he did, it wasn’t really to me but, it seemed, to the trees and the garden and maybe to the city itself with all its history and smoky secrets.

            “Way yonder different. Folks weren’t as good to you then.” He took another bite of cookie and drank from his glass. That energized him.

“My folks had it hard back then.”

            I tasted panic. Alfie had disappeared behind the garage and I felt as if I were on an asteroid hurtling through space with an alien. This affair wasn’t going according to plan. I nodded as if I understood and scratched on my pad without looking up. He continued.

            “The worse was what they done to Mr. Carter.”

            “Mr. Carter?” That was all I could manage.

            “Ain’t nobody should have had that done to them. Nobody. I don’t care if he was colored.”

            I gave up and stared at my pad. What was he saying, and where was he taking me? I stared right through my pad and into the ground. From therein oozed a memory. I met it halfway and solved the mystery.

Back in the 1920s, there had been a lynching in Little Rock, less than a half-mile from where we sat. It happened right in the middle of what was then the center of the “colored” commercial area, along West Ninth Street.

“Oh my god,” I thought. “This is where he is going.” I tried to raise my head but it took three attempts to overcome the gravity created by that realization. When I did manage to look up, Mr. Pitts was somewhere far away, and scared. I mean really scared. His hand was shaking so much the tea was spilling.

            “I remember that day like it was yesterday,” he continued. They made us all go inside, for they knew there was to be trouble. I was just a child, but the oldest. My Momma put the youngest under the bed and made me watch after them. She said the white folks had done killed Mr. Carter and was draggin’ him down Ninth Street behind a car. She was scared and she made us all cry.

“We could hear people yellin’. They was honkin’ their horns and yellin’ so loud we could hear them in the bedroom. Wasn’t no colored folks on the street, except Mr. Carter and he was dead. They hung him and beat him and drug him up and down Ninth Street. We was all hidin’ and cryin.’ My Momma was tellin’ us to be quiet.” He stopped, looked away and back, directly at me.

“They shouldn’t have done that.”

            Here I was. It was a nice brisk autumn day and I should have been somewhere else, but I was sitting in someone else’s yard listening to an old man reciting his version of our city’s most awful moment and I couldn’t escape.

            “They drug him and drug him. All back and forth on Ninth Street. We could hear the cars and them horns honkin’, the honkin,’ oh my lord, the honkin’. Ain’t nobody ought to have that done to them. We was still cryin’ when they built a fire at Ninth and Broadway and burned him up. We could smell the smoke and that made us cry harder. My momma had some cookies in her apron pocket and she gave one to the younger kids to hush them up. She broke one in half and gave me a piece. She took the other half and then she started cryin’ too.”

            He looked at the cookie in his hand, then returned to that awful day.

            “Somebody said they broke one of his arms off and waved it at the cars going down Broadway,” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody looked out the window the whole time, for we was too scared.”

            I pretended to write something.

            “Too bad,” he said so low I barely heard him. “Them was bad days. Bad for us all.”

            The smoke circled us and I sat as still as I could. Mr. Pitts stopped talking and sat with his hand with the cookie resting on his leg. As the fog of remembrance cleared, he began to smile. He didn’t say anything. He was done talking to white strangers for the day.

            He sat there proud and triumphant, a black-skinned Cicero having had his say, needing neither accolades nor approval. I thanked him, not sure at all whether he even heard me, and then eased away and headed home. I was all confusion, trying to sort out what had just happened. I still had an assignment but what the hell was I going to write? The truth about what happened? That would be the honest thing. It might even be a good piece. Shake the readers up a bit. Let them know that history wasn’t all about Victorian houses. Hell yes!

            Back home, I sat in the kitchen and stared through the window. When I tried, I could hear the shouts on the street, feel the throb of the car engines running, and smell the acrid smoke of man and wood burning.

Damn that old man!

Outside the afternoon was dissolving into evening. The shadows got longer and darker the way our thoughts will as we doze. Beyond the kitchen window, the air was still crisp and clear. Inside, it was dark and gloomy. The evening sky changed purposefully that time of year like a lover moving from caresses to kisses, and then to the dark undertones of passion. My thoughts moved that way, too, as I reflected on the day and what it was trying to tell me. Maybe it was trying to tell me to be brave, or truthful …, or honest. Maybe it was suggesting that I approach what I was doing with something a little deeper than just seeing my name in print. Maybe it was just trying to tell me to say something else entirely, before darkness came. Maybe. Maybe.

After a time, I stood and retrieved a beat-up Remington typewriter and package of paper from a closet and carried them, with as much gentleness as I could muster, into the kitchen. I placed the typewriter on the kitchen table so I could see beyond it into the deepening gloom. Then I slid a page of paper into it and turned the cylinder so the paper was position precisely across the top, aligned there neat and worthy of higher-level thought. I drew and released a long breath of sad air—air that had once moved through the city and down the streets and around the large oak trees past the moving cars and quaint old houses and had once even flowed around the twitching, smoking body of John Carter.

I didn’t want to, but I smelled that smoke.

Click, click, I advanced the paper.

I was ready. My mind was as clear as the way of a traveler making the last turn on the last curve before home. I rubbed my hands. I thought how funny it would be to make the Sign of the Cross.

Instead, I started to type: “Mr. Otis Pitts, age 70 and a lifelong resident of Little Rock, has a new best friend who is only five years old.”

Change ...

One of the things I’ve noticed about urban problems is the immediate tendency to blame someone or some individual group for them. While study sometimes proves this to be justified, it’s not always true. Sometimes things just happen and we have to act wisely. I think that some of us who matured in the turbulent 1960s when we suffered the indignity of being uprooted from whatever life we were leading and then thrust into a war halfway around the globe, a war that no one understands, or can justify, even today. Worse still, we are blamed for it.

We understand that sometimes stuff just happen. Survivors accept and adjust. Losers bitch and moan. But there are those who must suffer.

Some cities, including Little Rock, are now facing revenue shortfalls. Someone has to accept the blame. Who? Is it the previous Mayor who might have pursued policies that we didn’t like?

Is it a board member who once torpedoed a wise policy or program?

Is it the present mayor who should have soared into office on a wave of exuberant economic enthusiasm?

Is it the policy-makers of past years who worked hard to make the regressive and unreliable sales tax the basic revenue source for Arkansas municipalities?

Is it the local citizen who, having been denied learning how government works, during high school, no longer comprehends the need for municipal services and the cost thereof?

Is it the citizen who supports politicians from a party that starts wars on credit and requires its members to sign pledges never to increase public revenues, no matter what the need?

Is it the citizen who orders goods on-line for the convenience, then chortles about not paying sales tax on the goods as a delivery truck, protected by municipal fire and police, ambles along streets maintained by the city, to deliver those goods to homes whose mortgages are protected by public largess?

Is it the cult member who activates against birth control while unwanted children wander our streets with career options seemingly limited to pro sports or criminal enterprise?

Today’s social media drippings are rich with answers. Everyone has one and they are all true. So far though, no one has mentioned simply raising taxes to meet the demands of our brave new world.

Heck, I know only one thing: two plus two equals four. Always has. Always will. As my old college pal, John Keats would put it, “That is all you know on earth, and all you need to know"

Pure of heart ... ?

Theology Time: Still stuck on the Beatitudes I am. I suppose it’s because they suffer these days from being so “bigly” ignored. I can’t turn anywhere without having the stricture from Leviticus against homosexuality thrust in my face. Pretty explicit it is. The writer called it, a man laying with another man as with a woman that is, “an abomination.”

The writer was from a group just emerging from the Stone Age, so he wrote without the scientific knowledge of biological descent through modification, or of genomic organization and the modifications possible. Still, he allowed his strictures to be quite explicit.

But so were the commands by Moses concerning the fate of the Midianite women and children captured in war—explicit that is. Seems he commanded his victorious soldiers, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” - Numbers 31 (NIV)

How can we, if we are to accept every sentence in the Old Testament as coming directly from the mouth of the Almighty, supposed to reconcile all this? Last time I visited a church full of evangelicals (the ones who hate the differently genomed the most), about half those under 40 years of age had violated a direct command from Himself. In Leviticus 19:28, the Bible says, "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am Lord."

I am sure that he didn’t mean to include faded nautical tattoos on the shoulders of aging vets, just the flowers and snakes crawling from the bodices of beautiful young women and the hateful sayings on the arms of swaggering young men. But, anyway …

Do I stand as the only confused one? I fear that many (so-called) Christians seem to have abandoned the words of Yahweh and, instead, follow the words, written by poet Paul Simon, and sung with his pal Art Garfunkel, “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” How are we supposed to maintain a purity of heart in these times?

That brings us to today’s Beatitude, the sixth: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”

Oh dear.

Are you afraid, dear reader, as am I, that our national leaders of today would consider the act of striving to be pure of heart as a sign of weakness? If you aren’t, carry a person who is dying of a curable disease to one of our leaders and seek succor for this example of the least of those among us. You’ll find out real fast (dare I say “bigly”) who shall see God and who won’t, at least according to the Galilean. (Someday, we’ll get back to what he had to say about divorce. That’s a real hoot).

The Sermon on the Mount is a marvelous account of purity in thought and heart. I only wish someone could get the haters to read it. Maybe some have. That possibility makes me think of Exodus 9-12, (NIV) “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen … .” The Lord? Surely not. That makes me think of a college experience. A nationally-known sociologist, Dr. Grant Bogue, assigned me a reading back in the 1960s called Our Schizophrenic Society. It as all about how the disparity between the teachings of adults and their actions must have been adversely affecting the minds of the young.

If that was true in the 1960s, what would we make of it today? Pure of heart? Give me a break.

Fantasy truths ...

Last night I dreamed the strangest thing. I was helping a city with some administrative work associated with planning when a man brought his mom in to see about getting some work done on her house. He was inquiring about the quality of contractors in the area. He needed some help in making a choice.

We, the city staff and I, explained to him that we couldn’t recommend a contractor but we could provide a list of those whom we knew had done work and possessed the proper credentials.

“That won’t exactly work,” the man said.

“Oh, why?”

“If you line them all up,” he said, “they ain’t going to say, ‘I’m qualified but I do crappy work from time to time.’ We’ve tried that,” He paused. “On top of that, they won’t take the blame for any mistakes. Oh, little things like overestimating the cost and having to make a refund, they will accept blame. Big things, like putting a fireplace in backwards, they blame the city.”

“The city?”

“Or Hillary Clinton.”

His mom stood at his side saying nothing.

“Could you just let her make the choice?” someone asked.

“Oh,” he said, “she’s off making mistletoe soup with the Little People. She don’t make decisions no more. Anyway, this whole idea about using qualified workers seems a bit farfetched to me.”

We all just stared.

“On top of it all,” the man said, “the city won’t let us do what we want on account of its stupid regulations.”

“Like what?” I said.

“We want to use a new type of electrical wiring we bought on the Internet. They use it overseas, but here? Noooo.”

We all just stared.

“You want to use untested and improper material on your mother’s house?” someone said.

“She wouldn’t care, as long as it’s cheaper. Besides, she ain’t got long left.”

We all just stared.

Finally, someone said, “Well, you can’t do that. It could start a fire and burn a whole block,”

“You and your stupid regulations are ruining this country.”

We all just stared.

I woke up then, realizing how dreams sometimes carry too much truth for comfort.