Sailing To Oblivium: September 6, 2017

It now appears that the much of the anti-immigrant stench floating about today wafts from the still smoldering “science” of eugenics. Sad.

What is eugenics? It is nothing less that the attempt to improve a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.

Then along came Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, reminding us that, as William Faulkner famously said, in Requiem For A Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Odd that it took one Southerner to frame the obscenity of another. Regard the complete falsehoods— Slate Magazine called them “nativist lies” in fact—Sessions used to justify ending DACA yesterday, remembering that a first step toward the open practice of eugenics could be the dehumanizing of target “unfits:”

“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty (DACA), among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”

Does that perhaps, vaguely suggest a kinship to The Eternal Jew?

Few Americans know that our country flirted, in a most serious way, with eugenics in the first decades of the 20^th Century. Click here for a detailed accounting. Posters announcing that “Only Healthy Seed must be sown” flourished and a belief spread that society must seek out the unfit and prevent them from propagating.

The most famous case, one involving a woman named Carrie Buck, created one of the most odious legal observations in American history. The speaker was a Civil War veteran, and otherwise revered jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Carrie Buck was considered to be “feeble-minded” because her mother and grandmother were considered to be. In summation of a decision justifying her forced (and secret) sterilization, Holmes, then a Supreme Court justice, wrote:

“…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Too late, it became clear that Carrie possessed normal intelligence. An outstanding account or the sad affair, written by the late biologist Stephen J. Gould can be found by clicking here.

America turned away from eugenics, or so we thought, after Adolph Hitler and the Nazis embraced and employed it to rid the “master race” of the unfits.

 Will it plague us again? One hopes not, but current trend toward the deporting of, denying entry to, and incarcerating people of color evokes the ominous sound of hobnailed boots along the winding road of history.

After she married and couldn't have children

Carrie Buck, of normal intelligence,

discovered she had been sterilized

as a youth for assumed imbecility

Off to "earn" today. Maybe I'll post something from the road. Meantime, I'll spend some time wondering how the area around the farm will look when it is a complete rain forest.

Growing Up Southern: September 4, 2017

Labor Day. Work, jobs, good jobs, bad jobs, I’ve had a few. Some I liked. A few I hated. One I wouldn’t do again but I’m glad I did it, now at least.

The first was helping on a milk truck. My mother woke me up at 1:30 a.m. and the milkman/boss picked me up thirty minutes later. I was 11 years old, if I remember correctly. The boss was nice but the job pretty much sucked. The scariest part was when we parked on a street and I had to walk half a block down a dark alley at three in the morning. Then I climbed through a hole in a board fence and crossed a yard. I would leave two quarts of milk (the old-fashioned kind in bottles) on the back porch of a Catholic Church and run like hell.

The thought of encountering a nun scared the bejeezus out of me. So, I fled when my mission was accomplished. Then one day we were delayed by engine trouble and I didn’t make the delivery until after sunrise. Wouldn’t you know it? There stood a nun on the back porch. She gave me the sweetest smile this side of Heaven and I gave her the milk. I wasn’t afraid after that.

Probably the best job I ever had was as a lifeguard at a country club during summers while attending college. I won’t go into the details as to why. One splendiferous thing about it was that a frequent sunbather was Sandy Seymour, now Sandy Seymore Elder. She was girl of word-class beauty and poise—nice, friendly, and without pretense or guile. A model American teenager, much too young and classy for the likes of me, her presence alone was one of those things that can make a job memorable. I was proud to count her as an acquaintance then and a FB friend now. (Not that my wife isn't classy, I simply overmarried).

From beauty to the beasts, I worked for one evening serving meals at the athletic dormitory at the University of Arkansas. Enough said. Even a college degree wouldn’t have been worth that.

From the beasts to the beauties, I left the pigs to work as a janitor and busboy at the Chi Omega sorority house. Enough said. There were pleasant memories, all in all.

Worked for nearly a year for Babcock and Wilcox’s San Francisco office in the Mission District while waiting for the Draft Board to catch up with me. I spent one interesting week working with an older man organizing some records in a nearby warehouse. Some dealt with boilers that had been destroyed during the 1906 earthquake.

The man with me lived in San Jose and told me of a neighbor who, along with his family, learned that they were to be relocated to a prison camp, for being of Japanese descent, after Pearl Harbor. His son was in college and his daughter was headed for Stanford. He held a good job.

He committed suicide rather than face the shame. My co-worker cried when he told me the story.

Well, we now come to the last job I had before beginning my professional career. That was driving the Admiral of a submarine flotilla around Charleston harbor in his boat, called “The Admiral’s Barge.” Not a bad gig except when we had to take the Old Man (a real old man he was too, probably near 50) out to the entrance to the harbor to meet a sub coming in from patrol. I’d have to ease the boat between the sail planes and the stern planes of the sub while we were all underway. Sailors on the sub would secure us and the Admiral would jump off the barge and climb on board the sub. It wasn’t “anchors aweigh as much as sphincters compressed,” probably more so on the submarine commander’s part than mine.

I never dumped him, and as a reward, the crew and I would get to take the Admiral’s wife and some wives of visiting dignitaries to visit Fort Sumter. She would bring along a servant who served them chilled chicken, wine or beer, and other delicacies.

She must have known that I was well-schooled in military protocol, for she would say, as we deposited them before heading back to our ship, “Now Boats, I’m sure you know how properly to dispose of the wine, beer, leftover food.”

We did. That’s what anchors and secluded spots along the Cooper River are for.

America would sleep well that night.

Sailing To Oblivium: September 3, 2017

“Problem solving is a little different in City Hall than it is in the coffee shops. We have to live with the solutions.”

I was talking to Mayor Furlow Thompson of Pot Luck, Arkansas. We’ve benefited from his insight before. He’ the one who’s been called “the best mayor in America.” Born in 1943 after his daddy came home on leave before shipping out to the European Theater, he has presided over the town of Potluck for as long as folks can remember. I value his wisdom, so we talked and I took notes.

He continued. “For one thing, we have to deal with that there thing (he said ‘thang’) they call the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences,’ and it can be a tough teacher.”

“Oh, how?”

“Well, take that time the cities around here got a bunch of grants for law enforcement. Some police chiefs wanted to buy tanks and machine guns with the money but their wives put a stop to that after some of the cops over at Backway ran over Charlie Elwood’s chicken roost in a half-track they called Hell Buster.”

“That was the Law of Unintended Consequences in action?”

“Naw, that happened next. There wasn’t all that much property crime to fight, so a bunch of the towns around here decided to go after sex crimes. We opted out ‘cause we was busy with a citywide mentoring and sex-education program.”

“That sounds worthwhile. What happened?”

“The one real big sex crime problem was boys having sex with underage girls, you know, what they call ‘statutory rape’ around here. So they put the grant money to good use—or so they thought—and put a stop to that kind of sexual perversion. They filled up some prison cells, let me tell you.”

“What could possibly go wrong with that?”

“They wasn’t a high school anywhere near here that fielded a football team for nearly four years, except ours, and we had nobody to play. So we just expanded our mentoring program with some vocational training.”

“Lets’ move on. Anything else different in dealing with problems from city hall?”

“Yep. We have to face the problems as they are, not the way we would like for them to be.”

“How so?”

“Well take how agitated folks is about our Mexican neighbors.”

“And?”

“I’m talking about the ones that ain’t got the right papers.”

“I see.”

“We’d like them all to look like that ugly man on TV that does all those commercials. More than that, we’d like for them all to have rap sheets and be locked up already, easy to deport, and all that.”

“That would make it easy, couldn’t it?”

“You got that right,” he said. “Problem is, our only illegal is Consuelo O’Malley.”

“O’Malley. Is she Hispanic?

“Her mama was. Her daddy had been born in Nuevo Laredo, stayed there, and married. They would come over here on a work contract every year and follow the harvest. When Consuelo was a baby, they took her along. There were four families lived in the back of flatbed truck while they followed the work. Each family had a corner where they ate and slept.”

“So they ended up here?”

“She did. They was this wreck one day and her folks was both killed. Everybody was killed, except her. Nobody had no idea what to do with her until Fred and Rosalie Bohanon took her in. They found some Mexican papers in the wreckage that identified her and they thought that was all they needed.”

“What happened?”

“They raised her.”

“And she is still here?”

“Until next fall, a year from now, unless they send her to Mexico before then. If’n they don’t, she has a full scholarship to that college out in Palo Alto California. At ‘air one where President Clinton’s daughter went.”

“Stanford?”

“I think so.”

“English is her second language and she got into Stanford?”

“On one of them academic scholarships, physics or something. And English ain’t her second language. She was only ten months old when the wreck happened. She can’t speak no Spanish, but she speaks English as good as me.”

“Does she have relatives in Mexico?”

“Who the hell knows? We haven't found none. It’s a crappy mess if you ask me. Folks around here are pretty upset about it, even Roedoc Tiggens, and his bunch has voted Republican since before Herbert Hoover got us into that mess.”

“Well, I hear folks ask, both of those senators from Texas included, ‘what part of ‘illegal immigration’ do you not understand? How would you answer them?”

“What part of ‘don’t build your cities where it floods’ do they not understand?”

One final thought from the Mayor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOqjlRsUnBM

Sailing To Oblivium: September 2, 2017

Did some informal research last evening while watching a little television. Discovered that I know very little about modern business, nor care to. That’s what happens when one strays from PBS into The Wasteland. I formed some amazing conclusions, to wit:

- In over 35.6 percent of the TV commercials displayed, I had no idea what product or service was being advertised.

- Unlike in my youth, when movie trailers (we called them “previews of coming attractions” in those days) made you, by design, want to see the movie being featured, today’s trailers are warnings that a normal person should not allow themselves to be dragged to see the film by a team of horses.

- The chances of a modern drug (A) curing you, or (B) killing you, are 1 in 25.

- In this modern world, a patient seeing a physician must be warned, for some reason, not to forget to tell their physician if they are pregnant or have had an organ transplant. Has the concept of “top of mind awareness” fled our modern psyche as did the ability to utilize cognitive logic?

- Every cell phone service is the cheapest with the broadest service area and the most doodads. A few even still offer the ability to call someone up and talk by voice, although this feature is considered arcane and increasingly unnecessary.

- The female models in TV commercials are all beginning to resemble, to a marked degree, the president’s wife or daughter.

- The primary purchasing factor in a new automobile is its ability to transport the driver via public streets at speeds far beyond the legal limit or within safety regulations.

- Americans have grown weak. Unlike my wife or me, or millions within our age group, they cannot quit smoking by simply ceasing to smoke, they must have some medication to help them. Sad. I simply can’t imagine another physical benefit that would require pharmaceutical input to produce happiness.

- Self-mutilation, or worse, resulting from a poor credit rating may be the next crisis in America.

- To earn the title “feel-good hit of the summer,” future films will probably be forced to include multiple gunfights and at least one car chase exceeding 45 minutes in length.

- The future of America will largely be guided by a long-standing academic relic that academicians refer to as “Miles Law,” originated by a high-ranking bureaucrat during the Truman era. It states that “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” There is a slight variation to its modern definition: the phrase “where you sit” has been expanded to include “what TV news channel you watch.”

I think I’ll go read some Charles Dickens.

Nobody asked me, but …

Growing Up Southern: September 1, 2017

I have this older sister who is a lot smarter than I. In fact, she’s scary smart. She once received an A+ on a report card in high school and was a two-year inductee into the National Honor Society. I had to follow her and try to measure up. Didn’t always work.

She started out, in her working career, in the basement of an office building in our home town, punching those old IBM cards. She retired from the same outfit, but in an office way up in a high-rise building in Little Rock, running a major department. We’ve become pretty good friends as we have grown older. We don't talk politics and we avoid discussing a few ancient incidents, but we enjoy one another's company, and each comes when the other needs help. All is good.

I’ve even forgiven her for, with the aid of a cousin, dressing me in girl’s clothing when I was about six, and taking a photograph of me. I’m eternally hopeful that she has forgiven me for some of my transgressions aimed specifically toward her. She hasn’t mentioned them lately at any rate.

In addition to being smart and successful, she is a survivor. She’s lost immediate family members in tragic circumstances and still suffers from the effects of a fall off a horse years ago. But, she still gets up and goes after it, life that is, every single day. She lives quietly now, surrounded by grandchildren, content and peaceful. We call her “The General,” for she is quite the commanding officer of our family. She takes it all in stride … I think.

I started thinking about her this morning when I noticed it is the month in which her birthday falls. She wouldn’t want me to mention her age, so I won’t. Let’s just say she is a handsome senior citizen, and I'm always proud to be seen with her.

When we were young, I always felt my parents were partial to her since she was the firstborn, and because Mother and Daddy were still poor sharecroppers then. Poverty seems to form bonds in the South. When we got older, we were both certain that our parents were partial to our younger brother because he was “the baby.”

As for me, the middle child, I always felt my parents would have traded me to a band of gypsies on any given day for a good pickup truck and another baby girl.

I guess all families are like that. The important thing is that ours was stable, and that accounts for a lot in this world. The gypsies never showed, and we kids all reached maturity without major problems. Our parents were hard-working, honest, and well-respected. They maintained high expectations for us, and we knew it. My sister met them, and that’s an inspiration for me.

A few extra pounds ago

Growing Up Southern: August 31, 2017

Folks from different places see life differently. Take storms. Inland, they are like redneck sex, over in seconds and “Let’s eat!” That’s assuming the kitchen is still standing. On or near the sea, they are like being forced to ride the entire length of Interstate 40 with Donald Trump talking all the way. It seems the agony will never end.

I’ve been in a few fair blows, nothing labeled a hurricane. One reached the status of “tropical storm,” and if it wasn’t a hurricane, I never want to be in one. And we sailed through a storm at sea in the old USS Hunley, out in what they call “The Bermuda Triangle.” I thought that was kind of neat, for Jimmy Huddleston, Sidney Bussey, Carl Ferguson and I pretty much had the fantail to ourselves before it got too bad. Everyone else was inside hugging a “head” if they could find one vacant. We were eating kipper snacks and channeling old John Paul himself.

The old girl was seaworthy, but she had a pronounced fondness for rolling. Men who had bounced across the Pacific in seagoing tugs or LSTs grew ashen at times when it seemed like she wouldn’t stop on a particularly bad roll. But, she always did. She’d shudder like a drunk with the DTs and start back the other way. Port to starboard. After decks up. Starboard to port. After decks down. Port to starboard. After decks up. Starboard to port. After decks down. Get the picture? Oh, go ahead. I don’t mind waiting.

They finally chased us inboard and closed the decks. It went on like that for two days. Imagine trying to sleep in conditions like that.

Out in the heartland, we deal with tornadoes. They are swift, deadly, and totally capricious. When one hit our community in the 1940s, it obliterated the houses on either side of our store/home. Our only damage, and it was minor, resulted from a large oak tree blown over in the back yard.

A religious person might assign some spiritual hand to all this. From our undamaged grocery store, my father gave away goods to whomever needed it and never asked for payment. Oddly, he didn’t wait for the city to tell him he needed to. He just did it, and bankrupted himself in the process. A headline praising his actions carried the subheading, “George [von Tungeln] said, ‘If you need it come and get it.’” I guess those were different times, sort of the “prosperity gospel” in reverse.

Later, I recall a man relating his story to a group gathered around the old pot-bellied stove my dad had in the store. The man had gotten his family to safety, and returned alone after the storm had passed. His home, barn, and other buildings had completely disappeared. He described walking around where they had once stood and finding the only undamaged thing still standing. It was a large board resting on brick supports, a make-believe cookstove his daughters had set up to “play kitchen.”

The storm had not even disturbed the inverted jar lids the kids had used to make mud pies.

Yes, storms can be capricious. For 32 people in our community, that particular one was also deadly.

Carl Ferguson and and the author.
Shipmates tried and true.