Sailing To Oblivium: July 8, 2017

He looked at me, frowned, and said, “Mr. Jimmie, if y’all don’t straighten out, the Lord’s gonna quit blessing you white folks.” That made me stop and think.

It was in response to some whimpering complaint about a burden I felt at the time. I can’t remember now if it, the burden, was real or imaginary. The speaker was, though. He was a man who lived next to us and whom I had known my whole life. His name was Amos Fletcher. I’m sure his grandparents had been born slaves.

At any rate, I think of his admonition a lot. It never fails to bring to mind, as well, the verse, currently much out of fashion, from the 12^th Chapter, 48^th verse of the Gospel According to Luke in the Christian New Testament: “to whom much is given, much will be required.”

Today, we’ve turned that one around, haven’t we? In the next version, I’m sure it will be corrected to read, “to whom much is given, more will be given until all is given, and even that will prove wanting of justice.”

For the time being, we’ll just use the “taken out of context” ruse. It seems that every time the Galilean steps on someone’s toes, he is accused of out-of-contextedness, Is that a word? Well it should be. We can pretend it is anyway.

We have looked at two of the world’s great philosophers, Amos Fletcher and the Galilean, now let us visit a third, Jonathon Swift. I don’t think we could contemplate our current set of political leaders without thinking of a species encountered in the classic Gulliver’s Travels. I’m speaking of course of the Yahoos. Swift describes them as noxious, hairy creatures and adds,  

“They're endlessly greedy: they kill each other over a certain shiny rock found in Houyhnhnm Land (which, beyond being shiny, has no value). And even if there are only 5 Yahoos supplied with enough meat to fill 50, they will still attack each other for control of these supplies.”

Houyhnhnms, on the other hand, are a breed of intelligent horses who, in Swift’s mind, represent the most noble of creatures. He says of them,

: "… the Houyhnhnms, who live under the government of reason, are no more proud of the good qualities they posses, than I should be for not wanting a leg or an arm, which no man in this wits would boast of, although he must be miserable without them.”

For now, perhaps it is time to think about where we Americans stand in the great river of history. As we exercise our precious privilege of being able to vote for our leaders, will we choose Yahoos or Houyhnhnms?

If we choose poorly, will our blessings disappear?

Sailing To Oblivium: July 7, 2017

 Humans may carry a cruelty gene. I don’t know. Sometimes I know their actions make me despondent, but I have antidotes.

First, there may be some scientific basis for cruelty. In the nearly five billion years of life on our planet, the trait may have served some purpose for allowing some groups to succeed in the constant need for survival. During this “descent with modification” as Charles Darwin called it, (he never used the term “evolution”) there may have been some slight benefit to some abnormality in a particular gene that provide a slight step up the ladder. Why? Perhaps it was a benefit to the tribe. Perhaps the benefit disappeared long ago as have some other motivators contained in our genetic makeup.

Anyway, cruelty shows its ugly snout fairly often in nature. Cats toy with dying mice. Some females of species murder their mates during the sexual act. Most males desert their mates just after this act of all acts. No less an amateur scientist than the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson warned us against basing our morality on “nature red in tooth and claw.” At any rate, we witness the cruelty daily in the news and the postings of unsocial media.

When it gets too much to bear, I listen to the music of a man named Schubert and think of the lives of good, decent, generous people I have known. And I am fortunate—blessed as my religious friends would say—to have known many. One was a man named Bob Ashcraft.

Oh, don’t worry, you never heard of him. He was one of the commonest of a class of common people I grew up with in L.A. (lower Arkansas).

They have a compliment in the south, “He would give you the shirt off his back”. Bob Ashcraft would have. You would have only had to ask. A common laborer all his life, living on subsistence wages, he didn’t have too many shirts to give away, though. He did own an old black pickup truck and he drove it all the years I knew him. He was the kind of driver, peculiar to the rural South, who waved (his was the ‘two-finger flip’) at everyone he met.

He was kind, gentle, generous, and able to survive, intact, a life filled with many trials, other than his poverty.

He saw a grand baby burned to death in a horrific accident in his garage. He survived the tragedy.

His wife went bad and her actions graced the front pages of the local newspaper for months. He stuck with her.

He fell victim to con men who stripped him of his life’s savings. He moved on.

He had, as they say in these parts, neither a pot nor window his entire life. He rose above it.

Why do I remember him? He was a fishing buddy. My dad worked Saturdays, so Bob and I would load up an aluminum boat into his truck and head off. No matter how miserable the weather, he would always start the trip with, “It looks like a good day for it. They ought to bite today.”

He was a man who adjusted, it seems to me, to the many situations life presented. I can’t tell you how many times, as we floated in some Eastern Arkansas lake, among the cypress trees and dead snags, he would say, “I ain’t getting’ a bite fishing this deep. I think I’ll ‘shaller” up a little bit.”

I think often about this good and gentle man, of whom the Galilean would have been proud, and who had none of the things society uses to judge success. I think of how kind he was to take a young boy fishing and smile through most days of his life. Then I think of the daily greed and cruelty we see from those who have everything.

What did I learn from Bob Ashcraft? I think it was that, every once in a while in life, we all just need to ‘shaller’ up a bit. Who knows? This might be the day the fish bite.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 6, 2017

Seems our Secretary of State is going to give Donald Trump some of my personal voting information. Amazing.

Here's a hint. Before each election cycle, I study the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew in the Christian New Testament. Then I think about them. I don't encouraging the mixing of politics and religion, but I think the Beatitudes, whether viewed as religion, literature, philosophy, or moral guidance, are useful in contemplating the manner in which a country is governed.

So, I use them to initiate thought. I must say they have influenced my voting record over the years, so Mr. Trump can view it, along with our Secretary of State, Mitch McConnel, Paul Ryan, and the Koch Brothers.

I don't think they are going to like it, though.

Just Thinking

Sailing To Oblivium: July 5, 2017

 To say the weather we’re having is weird is a bit of an understatement, like saying that the Internet is controlling a large segment of our life.

Had anyone told me 20 years ago that, here in the Arkansas Delta, on the fifth of July, we would be hoping for a few days of dry weather, I would have called them crazy.

I think it was a mere three years ago when it didn’t rain all summer. The old folks, in their predictable colorful language, said, “It’s as dry as a popcorn fart.” Now they say, "It's so wet I just saw some bullfrogs building an ark."

The odd thing is that this is the third wet year in a row. This, though, is the wettest. It will soon be the middle of July and folks will not have had to water their vegetable gardens. Some farmers seem to have given up on getting any crops planted atoll.

I see a rain forest in our future, if we have a future. There are those who believe, based on data collection, scientific analysis, and computerized statistical indicators, that we are at the beginning of a massive change in weather patterns that will result in much of the development on the East coast of America, as well as most of Florida, being underwater. That doesn’t bode well for a lot of people.

Of course, there are some conservative legislators who doubt this on the basis of … well they just doubt it, that’s all. They’ve even made it illegal in North Carolina, to make plans to accommodate such change. They’ve enlisted the help of some religious fanatics to assure us it will not happen unless their particular god deems it expedient for some reason or other. They say it would be sacrilegious for us to even worry about climate change.

Meanwhile, our military is spending millions in preparation for the changes.

It is a simple fact that most of us don’t like change. That is to say that we don’t like change unless it may benefit us. Heck, it’s beginning to look as if some of us would tear the whole structure of America down if we saw some personal benefit, or affirmation of internal beliefs, in it. Where you stand on such matters depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before.

It the matter of change, some of my friends like it and some of my friends don’t. And some people are in a position from where they can prevent us from doing anything about it anyway. We’ll just have to live as long as we can with whatever happens.

I just hope that the rain forest doesn’t attract alligators, pythons, or more mosquitoes.

Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about it much longer. In the great cosmic scheme of things, change doesn’t really care what we think about it.

Just Thinking …

Memories On A Holiday

“His feet,” she says. “I remember his feet.  They froze in the Ardennes in 1945, and he had trouble with them the rest of his life.”

Then she adds, “When I was a little girl I used to rub them on a winter’s evening. They would hurt him so bad.”

That’s Brenda talking about her dad, the late Robert Julius Cole who served in the 313^th Regiment of the 79^th Infantry Division during the Second World War. The 79th Division became known, in the lexicon of World War Two History, as “a fine attack division,” an honor among the highly honored. Its members wore the Cross of Lorraine from service in World War I. After landing in Normandy on D-Day plus eight, it fought almost continually across France, Belgium, and Germany until war’s end.

I think about Julius on holidays such as this. A gentle man, he survived the awful experience of war, came home, and never fired a gun to harm another creature again. He skipped all of the 313^th Regiment’s reunions, too busy farming and raising his daughter. He did, though, grace many a supper table with stories of the war, some horrible, some sad, some tragic, but some humorous. Life is like that.

Shortly before he died, Brenda decided to attend one of the reunions, just to see if she might find someone who had known him. He was suffering from the cruelty of Alzheimer’s by then. When she explained to him where she was going, he just looked and nodded. Whether he understood or not lingers as a mystery of the cruelest type.

She left me to watch over her parents and flew to Pittsburgh. Once there, she had just started introducing herself to anyone standing still long enough when a man startled her with the simple statement: “I knew your dad.” To her further amazement, he added, “I have a Nazi flag at home that your dad and a bunch of us captured in 1944 and signed.”  The man was Jim O’Neil, from near Sacramento, California. He waded ashore at Normandy when he was barely 15. Brenda remains friends to this day with his widow, Dorothy O’Neil.

(For a great look at war through the eyes of a very young soldier, purchase O'Neil's autobiograpy, The Kid From the 313th: My Boyhood Years From the Streets of Chicago to D-Day Plus Eight, here).

The next time Brenda attended a reunion, she took her mother, Hazel. Jim O’Neil brought the flag that his squad had captured and signed. She has a photograph of her mom with the flag. It occupies a sacred place in her life. It rests beside a heart-wrenching Christmas Card from 1944, pre-printed with the silhouette of a soldier in a fox-hole and the cryptic words: “Somewhere in France.” It is signed in pencil simply: “Julius Cole.”

Each year, in a solemn ceremony, the survivors would ring a bell for each of the men of the 313th who had died during the preceding year. The wives of the 313th would watch it through their own dimming eyes. The reunions are gone now. The brave men who crossed the Rhine and stormed the Fatherland died, or grew too feeble to make the trip. All that’s left are memories and the everlasting honor granted to men who served our country in its greatest hour of need.

In the summer of 2000, they rang the bell for Julius at the 313th Infantry reunion. Never a fan for those wearisome end-of-the-year “bragging letters” or overblown obituaries, his daughter simply mentioned, in the local notices, his family, his service with the 79th, his Purple Heart, and his Combat Infantry Badge—so cherished by those who have earned it. He would have liked that.

Hazel, Jim O'Neil, and the flag with signatures.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 3, 2017

Just mentally connected some dots that help explain why the current administration troubles me so. It’s all about renovating old houses.

Say what?

Let me explain. Early in our marriage, my wife Brenda and I, in what now seems like fit of collective insanity, decided to try our hands at renovating a Victorian cottage in the legendary Quapaw Quarter district of Little Rock. It sat immediately north of the iconic “Egyptian Revival” (Fordyce) house.

Built in 1898, and “remodeled” shamelessly, it needed a lot of work. Naturally, we let our friends at the time know that assistance would be appreciated with smiles, and rewarded with mass quantities of alcohol.

Oh, and when I say “a lot of work,” I mean a prodigious amount of work. For example, the previous owners had converted the dining room into a sound-proof film studio.

Don’t ask.

Just take my word that it need gutting and rebuilding. Enter the friends. With crowbars a’flashing and sledgehammers a’swinging, they came and destroyed. They were quite good at it, the process of destruction. I think one reason was that it took no talent, knowledge, experience, or forethought at all. It was a process devoid of any nuance, requiring no planning or expertise, just anger and energy born of the need to destroy.

Did I mention that our friends, people from all works of life, were good at it? Oh yes, they were. Soon there were piles of plaster, dirt, splintered wood, and other detritus covering the floors. Tired and dirty, we loved the mess and hated anything associated with the previous owners. Any remnants of their habitation had to go. We stood among the ruins and smiled, proud with our friends.

Then they left.

We were alone. Our friends had reveled in the destruction and despising of the previous owners, but our friends had left when the cleanup started. Most never returned. Those few who did usually came only to offer comments along the lines of “Ya’ll sure are taking a long time, aren't you?” Some bragged about how they could have done it better by simply demolishing the old house and building a modern one on the site. We chose, though, to stick with the charm, strength, and history that the old girl represented.

The experience taught us that hate and destruction do not equate to either building or progress. Those require positive, and sometimes painful, work. So, we worked. Many nights we would patch ceilings until near midnight and report at our jobs the next morning with plaster dust on our clothing. But we stuck with it.

Oh, we had help, because we had new friends. These were neighbors who had muddled through the same experience, gaining expertise, and learning about the pitfalls and mistakes that are concomitantly associated with positive action and progress. They knew how to build homes, neighborhoods, and cities: one act at a time. We learned much from them. Most important of all, we learned how much can be accomplished through mutual cooperation and the avoidance of personal rancor.

It took us ten years to rebuild a livable home from the piles of junk. I often think about that and realize how it took eight years to rebuild our nation from the debacles of the first presidential administration of the 21^st Century.

On this eve of our national celebration of our country’s independence, it is with profound sadness that I wonder how long it will take to clean up the effects of the current spasm of hate and destruction. I’m thinking we’ll do it, though. After all, we did gain independence despite far greater odds.

The old girl, second from the right, still stands today.
Alas, the median is gone.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 2, 2017

They were there, had we only looked: bigotry, prejudice, and racism, the monsters of our psyche, writhing and slobbering like a den of 1950s science fiction monsters.

They were not dead, as we had hoped and dreamed. They were not even moribund. They were simply submerged, like Godzilla, or a giant spider, just waiting to be freed by a shock of super-seismic proportions. What would it take to release them upon an unsuspecting public?

It would take nothing more than the election of a president of the United States born of a white mother and African father, the very model of a modern African-American.

That’s all it took. The “monsters from the id,” as they called them in the 1956 film, The Forbidden Planet, took control of the minds of otherwise decent people. Things changed overnight. Old friends began to greet you with, “How do you like our n****r president?” Hatemongers on the internet devised the acronym “SOS” to describe the elected leader of the United States of America. Photoshopped images of watermelon patches on the White House lawn appeared on social media. The man’s family members drew descriptions as “gorillas” or worse. Sentiments and language that had been shoved to the bottom of our cultural sea and buried were fashionable again. Hate groups flourished and became more emboldened, as did hate media. A sense of shame settled over us.

Campaigning against candidates of the Democratic Party in our state became simple. All one had to do was request it from East Coast PACs and they would deliver boatloads of brochures, simple ones with just a photo of their opponent facing a photo of President Obama. The stated message would be, “he/she is with him.” The hidden message would be “the n****rs are coming for your women and he/she is going to help them.” Mike Huckabee gloated publicly that the election of Barack Obama had handed the American South over completely to the Republican Party.

It worked like magic, even among citizens of our state who are alive today, or whose family member is alive today, because of the President Obama’s efforts toward universal health care. The illogic of that could make a well-person nauseated.

Our state will suffer for decades, not because one politcal party is all bad or all good. The fact remains that bad politicians will be elected, and good ones defeated, because of the lingering effects of racism. Shame on us for that.

Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly support the rights of Americans to vote for the candidates of their choice. I spent four years of my life under an oath to protect such rights. My only wish is that we would all vote for candidates on the basis of the principles of good government, as we see it, and not the principles of the KKK.

Meanwhile, can’t we work toward eliminating the monster born of bigotry and racism? Unchallenged, it will destroy us as a unified nation as surely as a giant lizard could destroy a city. The Galilean’s admonition for us to “love one another” might be that best hope for us. As they used to say in the aforementioned films of the 1950s: “It just might work!”

It becomes more obvious every day that such healing will not come from the highest offices of government. It must begin at the citizen level.

I’ll try. That’s what I think on July 2, 2017.

And let the people say, "Never again."