The First Hit Men

I agree that terrorism today usually involves the use of explosives, but it wasn't always so. The National Geographic article that I told you about claimed that the first terrorist know to history was "The Old Man of the Mountain". That's how his name translates into English anyway. This guy first became known to Europeans from the writings of Marco Polo, who claimed to have once been his "guest", but eventually managed to escape. Now Marco Polo claimed a lot of things, and some of them might even have been true but, in his lifetime, he was generally considered to be kind of a bull shit artist. Most of the information we have about The Old Man of the Mountain comes from rumors and legends anyway, but there is general agreement among historians that the guy really lived, even if he didn't do all the stuff the legends attributed to him.

The Old Man, so the story goes, was the founder of an organization called "The Hashashan", The Hashish People. Our English word "assassin" is derived from this Arabic word, because these guys were indeed assassins. As their name implies, The Hashashan did a lot of drugs, which made them formidable adversaries because they didn't seem to care if they survived one of their missions or not.  They mostly took out prominent, well guarded, people, and they usually didn't make it out of there alive, which didn't seem to bother them. One fictionalized account that I read, which has about as much a chance of being true as any of them, went something like this:

When The Old Man would send somebody to town to recruit new help, they would put something in the guy's drink that would render him unconscious. When he woke up, he would find himself in a pleasant place surrounded by wine, women, and song, and was given drugs that would make him feel like he had died and went to Heaven. Indeed, that's what everybody told him had happened to him. Some time later, the guy would pass out again and wake up in some unpleasant alley back in town. He would then be contacted by one of the Old Man's agents who would inform him that he had been sent back to perform an important suicide mission, say to take out the Caliph or somebody like that. Of course he would be killed instantly by the Caliph's bodyguards but, not to worry, he would immediately be transported back to Heaven, where he would be amply rewarded for his loyal service.

I doubt that the Hashashan used explosives, they might have had them in China by then, but I don't think they had them in the Middle East yet. Nevertheless, these guys are credited with being the first terrorist organization known to man. As we all know today, a dedicated killer who doesn't care if he lives or dies is really hard to stop. Of course you don't have to be suicidal to be a terrorist, but it helps.

Going back to the dictionary definition, it said that terrorism is the systematic use of terror for the purpose of coercion. This would seem to imply that, just because people are terrified of you doesn't make you a terrorist. To qualify, you would need to be deliberately instilling terror in people for the purpose of getting them to do something, or not do something. While bombing or other acts of war certainly instill terror, I believe you would need to be doing it for the express purpose of instilling terror, rather than to accomplish some other military goal like taking Hill 109. Then again, it would certainly be easier to take Hill 109 if your enemy was scared shitless and ran away as soon as your guys started to advance. As with most of our discussions, there doesn't seem to be an easy answer to this question but, if there was, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to talk about it.

Happy New Year.

The real cause of terrorism

Back in the old days, as I have said, we hippies didn’t have much truck with the new left types. They were boring and we pretty much dismissed any interest in the ways of the world of politics as boring and pointless. Maybe it was when they started to draft us that we began to take an interest in politics, and by then the yippies, who were more like us had appeared, and we all became generally leftist.

I can’t say that we ever did much outside of a lot of talk and maybe a little marching, but I always had good feelings for the political types. It seemed like they were doing the hard work of the revolution, and though they sounded strange sometimes I was for them.

Then one day I picked up the paper in southern Illinois where I was working as a janitor for my CO, and read where one of their bombings had killed a janitor. A janitor? Kind of an accident, they expected the building to be deserted, but really no excuse. A janitor?

What the fuck? What were they thinking? Did they think somehow Lyndon would hear about this and think, oh, well I guess I better end the war then?

I haven’t been really satisfied with either of our definitions of terrorism, but this example was really what I think of as terrorism. This janitor was killed for no reason at all.

Of course on the other side of the world, we had our guys eating a nice breakfast, maybe writing a love letter to their sweetie and then getting into a big airplane and bombing the fuck out of people they have never met. I am talking here mainly about the bombing of Hanoi. It had no strategic interests, it was mainly to try to get the North Vietnamese to they peace table, which it never did. I suppose it was also meant to soften up the populace a bit, terrorize them as it were. There had been studies that the V2 bombing of London had not softened up the English, and the bombing of Dresden had not softened up the krauts, just gotten their backs up, but we did it anyway. So I guess those people all died for nothing.

But that doesn’t make killing the janitor any better.

Does seem to me that terrorism really begins with the use of dynamite. Only with dynamite, or some equivalent, can a small group of people kill a bunch of other people and not suffer any consequence. It seems to me that it begins with a bunch of guys, you know how we guys are, always trying to outdo each other and never wanting to chicken out on a dare. And maybe there are many things you can do to advance your cause, but most of them are boring and involve hard work, but you get some dynamite and what an impact you make.

It may be, and almost surely is, that this impact will not advance your cause, but anybody trying to point that out would surely be considered chicken.

That’s what I consider the real cause of terrorism. Boys playing with matches.

Terrorism and Territory

Lets start with the dictionary definition: "terrorism -  noun (1795) The systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion......terrorist - noun or adjective"

National Geographic had an article about the history of terrorism some time ago, but I no longer have that issue, so I'll have to rely on my memory. According to them, the Boston Tea Party was technically a terrorist act. Although there were no deaths or injuries from it, there was destruction of property, which they classify as a terrorist act. I don't know if I agree with that or not, but according to my dictionary, the word was not in use until 1795, so it couldn't have been called "terrorism" at the time it occurred. They also said that the old time Anarchists were terrorists, but that they differed from the modern terrorists in that they exclusively targeted political or military leaders.

I don't think that a terrorist has to be fighting for a lost cause to be called a terrorist, but I can see how you might get that impression. A terrorist is trying to have a larger impact than he could get by conventional military tactics with the resources currently available to him so, while it may not be a lost cause, it's a cause that he couldn't win by conventional means right now. There was something like that in my military training, but they didn't call it "terrorism", they called it "harassment". That's when you try to soften an enemy up with random limited attacks, like with snipers. The intent is to make the enemy nervous because he doesn't know when the next attack is coming. Hopefully, this will demoralize him and weaken his resolve so that he won't be so enthusiastic about resisting the regular attack that you are planning for later. Sounds a lot like terrorism to me but, for some reason, they didn't call it that.

I think that governments do indeed employ terrorism, they just don't like to call it that when they do it. The nuclear attack on Japan at the end of World War II was certainly terrorism because, although there were some military and industrial facilities in the target areas, the main intent was to break the Japanese will to fight and end the war sooner than they would have with a conventional invasion like D-Day. I think that most people on both sides knew by then that the U.S. was going to win eventually, and the Japanese had already offered to negotiate a surrender, but our guys wanted unconditional surrender, and they got it.

An argument could be made that any kind of warfare is terrorism, and maybe it is nowadays. Traditionally, wars used to be fought over territory, and the main idea was to put your guys on the ground instead of the other guys. Either you kicked them off and replaced them with your guys, which is called "offence", or your guys were already there and you tried to prevent the enemy from replacing them with his own guys, which is called "defense". At some point in time, the U.S. changed the name of their War Department to the Department of Defense. I don't remember when that was, but our guys haven't fought a strictly defensive war since 1812-14, unless you count the Civil War. Now we have the Department of Homeland Security, which is basically doing what the Department of Defense would be doing if they weren't so busy conducting offensive operations on foreign soil. Be that as it may, the U.S. already has more territory than it knows what to do with, so they don't fight over territory like they used to. If they did, Japan and Germany would probably be our 51st and 52nd states by now.

The Israel/Palestinian conflict was originally about territory, and maybe it still is to the two original belligerents, but I think it's gone way beyond that by now as far as he U.S. and the Islamic terrorists are concerned. I think that, if Israel were to sink into the sea tomorrow, those guys would still be after us. I doubt that their goal is to conquer and annex the United States, that would be like the minnow swallowing the whale. At this point, I don't know what the terrorists want from us but, whatever it is, we shouldn't give it to them, no good can come of that. Anybody who has ever trained dogs or kids can tell you that, if you reward bad behavior, you're just going to get more of it.  

Who's a terrorist?

Generally the Arab people treat their women pretty badly. I’m not saying that that’s right. What I am saying is that if you want to have a strong argument, don’t include charges that you aren’t sure if they are true or not, especially since there is a wealth of information you know to be true. For instance, the Saudis, among others, don’t allow their women to drive, and the Taliban don’t mind stoning the occasional woman for sin, so say either of those, but don’t say that they stone women for applying for driver’s licenses, because when the audience discovers that you are being dishonest about that, they will stop listening to you.

Kind of like that thing about the only thing the enemy understands is force. That’s all all we understand too. We talk to the enemy for awhile and when we don’t get it we use force. Force is all anybody understands, so when you use that weak argument people think that you aren’t a deep thinker.

Well what is a terrorist anyway? Can we construct a general definition, like say the definition of the word ‘rock?’ Or is it more like ‘I know it when I see it?’ And I think that a terrorist is seen as a bad guy, so we are going to tend to want to describe our enemies that way more than our friends.

Was the tea party a terrorist act? Well maybe no, because I don’t think anybody got killed. Say we killed some British soldiers in the execution of the act, guys who weren’t doing anything bad at the time, just guarding the ships? I still say it’s not. One, because it was an act of revolution, and at the time the perps could have had a reasonable belief that a revolution could succeed. Two, because even though the British soldiers weren’t doing anything in particular they were British soldiers. Attacking enemy soldiers is also an act of revolution, whereas killing civilians is not.

So those are my two rules for a terrorist, acting in a lost cause, and attacking non-combatants. And one more thing, I think if a legitimate government does it, it is not terrorism. That doesn’t make it right, but at least if a country does it, the victim has a target to avenge himself on, as opposed to some shadowy organization.

So where does that leave me? Is the PLO okay then because they have a kind of a war going on and maybe they could reasonably expect to win the goal of driving Israel out of the west bank, and right now they rule a territory, so they are like a nation? Hezbollah has some kind of political goal as far as Shia vs Shiite, but they are also kind of an army for hire. Al Qaeda, or whatever calls itself Al Qaeda these days, seems purely terrorist. They kill almost exclusively civilians, and don’t seem to have any realizable goals.

I don’t know if this is really getting anywhere. Maybe terrorism is just one of those things that you know it when you see it.

But then you get to the situation where my freedom fighters are your terrorists and vice versa, so that we could both say that we are fighting terrorism and mean quite different things. But then it seems that there are some terrorists that are nobody’s freedom fighters, like these car bombers in Iraq, what the hell are they accomplishing?

"Everybody Must Get Stoned."

I agree with what you said about weak arguments and careless insults, but I still think that the only thing those terrorists understand is force. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are intimidated by force. It is my understanding that their religion teaches them that, if they die fighting the Infidels (that's us), they go directly to Heaven no matter what else they have done in their lives, so it doesn't matter to them if they win or lose, as long as they get to use force. Then again, this doesn't prove that the only thing they understand is force, it only proves that force is their preferred method of operation, so maybe you're right about that after all. I agree that they are not cowards, what they really are is mentally ill because they believe that committing suicide is a good thing to do.

I may be wrong about that driver's license thing too, but I do remember reading something about some women, I believe it was in Saudi Arabia, who caught a lot of flack for trying to get driver's licenses. Truth be know, I don't know if any of them got stoned to death over it, but they do still stone women to death for adultery over there, so maybe I should have said that instead. Are you saying it's okay for them to do that?

This reminds me of a story: One day Jesus met up with a mob that was about to stone a woman to death for adultery and He said, "Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone." This took the wind out of their sails, and the mob began dropping their stones on the ground and drifting away. Just then, one big rock sailed into the air from the back of the crowd, struck the woman in the head, and killed her instantly. Jesus shook his head sadly and muttered, "You know, Mom, sometimes you piss me off." (Since you probably weren't paying attention when we discussed this in Sunday School, I should explain that the Virgin Mary was supposed to be "without sin". Get it now?)

I don't know enough about the recent treaty with Iran to criticize it. I understand that the agreement is for only six months, and that they're supposed to talk about it some more. I suppose it's okay if it works, but that remains to be seen. I've got nothing against our guys talking to the Muslims, I just wish they would stop feeding them and buying their oil.

That story about Joe Swallow wasn't a big deal, it was just something that I remembered from back in the day. The more I think about it, I think it went something like this: Welfare programs in Michigan are administered by the counties, but most of the funding comes from the state and federal governments. I think that some of the rural counties either didn't have welfare programs or had really small ones, and were not interested in getting involved with that sort of thing. I remember hearing about other issues where our county didn't want to sign on to state or federal programs because they didn't want those people coming in here and telling them what to do. This has changed over the years, and now they are just as eager to belly up to the pork barrel as everybody else. 

The last I heard, Michigan was requiring welfare recipients to either get a job or go to school. It used to be that, with the low wage scale around here, some people could make more money on welfare than they could by working. I think what they do now is make up the difference between their wages and what they would have made just going on welfare. I'm not sure about that because they keep changing this stuff all the time. There recently was some talk about making welfare recipients take drug tests, but I don't know whether or not it was passed.

Have a nice weekend.

Some guy told me you guys are a bunch of cowards and the only thing you understand is force

Let’s start with the Islamic terrorists first. These are the guys we are droning the fuck out of, bombing the snot out of them and their friends and relatives and still they keep at it, so I think you can say one thing they don’t understand is force.

Maybe bombing them is a good idea, maybe it is a bad idea, that is not what I am arguing here, I am only arguing against the use of that misleading phrase.

And you know lately there has been some furor over this new Iran treaty. And maybe this is a good idea and maybe it isn’t, but there is a certain crowd of wingnuts (and I don’t know if you are among them or not) who are all pissed off because we are talking to the Iranis at all, so then how can they say we tried diplomacy and it didn’t work when we don’t believe in talking to people we don’t like.

Remember when Bill Maher caused that uproar because he criticized the prez for calling the 9/11 fliers cowards? He said here are guys flying airplanes into buildings knowing they are going to die, and our guys are sitting in bunkers in the southwest pushing buttons and looking at video screens, so who are the cowards here? Certainly he isn’t saying these guys aren't bad guys, he is just saying that they are not cowards.

By the definition of cowards they aren’t, but people know it is an insult and these are the bad guys so every insult should be piled on the enemy and anybody who doesn’t think so must be an enemy themselves.

Language is how we communicate. If we pollute it by using abusive and meaningless (and worst of all illogical) phrases, we are impairing our means of communication. We are violating our sacred trust to provide a reasonable discussion among reasonable people.

And what is this about stoning women to death for trying to get a driver’s license? I don’t know if that particular offense ever happened, but I will agree that they treat their women badly. See how much calmer and more truthful my formulation is than yours, how much more amenable to reasonable discussion?

Here is the thing, we did not go to war with them because they treated their women badly. They treated their women badly all the time the USA has been a nation, and they will do so long after we are gone, and we did not attack them for that reason in the past and we will not in the future.

Hijacking airplanes, bombing marketplaces, and beheading people, these are the reasons we went to war with them, and they are all good reasons. Why toss in that argument about women?

A lot of times when people are making a case they just pick out any argument good or bad, and toss them all against a wall, figuring the more the better. I think it’s more like building a dam, not that I know shit about building a dam, but I think you have to be careful about what you put into it. If you put in crappy material you will just weaken the dam. If you include a weak argument your opponent will attack you on those grounds, and since it’s a weak argument he will tear you to shreds, and there you will be trying to defend yourself by arguing an argument that you, yourself knew was weak, and all your good strong arguments will sit on the side unmentioned. I don’t know why they never let me on the Gage Park debate team? I was ready Jack.

I googled this Joseph P Swallow guy. It was a bit of work. I did find an article in something called the Ironwood Gazette, or something like that, but they wanted me to sign up to get any information, and I thought what the hell, why am I doing this and not Beagles?

I think anecdotal info has it’s place in maybe illustrating a point, or as a springboard for some logical argument, but otherwise I do not like it at all.

I could just as well say some guy at the Ten Cat a few years ago told me that the Russkies infiltrated northern Michigan and put something in the water and now all the inhabitants there spout some kind of commie-inspired gobbledygook that prevents reasonable discussion among reasonable Americans, polluting their language and weakening America so that it will soon fall like a ripe apple into the knapsack of the commissars. Ha ha ha, ha ha ha.

Pretty sure that was what the guy was saying.

Anecdotal Evidence

I said before that I was giving you anecdotal evidence because that's all I've got on this subject. I agree that some of it doesn't make sense, but lots of things that people do don't make sense. I have not researched this subject, and don't plan to because I'm not all that interested in it but, since you brought it up, I am sharing what I remember reading or hearing about it at the time. Speaking of time, don't forget that we are talking about the 60s here. A lot of shit that went down in those days would not be tolerated today, which is probably for the best.

I remember reading about welfare programs in the South back when this civil rights thing was just getting started. Apparently, they were denying these benefits to Blacks because I remember some civil rights leader telling them to "Demand your entitlements." I think that what was going on in Northern  Michigan was that they didn't have a lot of money in the budget for that sort of thing, and weren't interested in expanding the programs, so they didn't publicize the fact that these programs existed at all. Around the time I moved here, there was a  big influx of White refugees from Detroit, and there was a lot of resentment about how the Blacks had "taken over" that city. Cheboygan people had  ties to Detroit because they used to go there to find work, and many of them had friends or relatives still living down there. I think that court case in the U.P. involved somebody who tried to apply for welfare and was told that there was no such a thing. This young lawyer, Joe Swallow, who was probably trying to make a name for himself so that he could go into politics, which he eventually did, jumped on the case. Like I said, I don't think I ever heard how the case came out, but I do remember that Swallow's argument was that, since Black people in Detroit were collecting welfare, White people in the U.P. should be eligible for it too.

When I first moved here, Cheboygan had only recently started recovering from the Great Depression, which had started earlier here than in some other parts of the country. My father-in-law told me that, if he hadn't read about the Depression in the newspaper, he wouldn't have known anything about it, because their lives were pretty much the same before, during, and after the Depression. Some of the rural areas around here didn't even have electricity until the 1950s, and a few homes still didn't have running water when I arrived. Except for few well connected families, poverty had been a way of life for so long that many people were just resigned to it. Those who weren't went to Detroit to find work, and now that option had been closed off to them.

Back in those days, us right wing nuts were all paranoid about the U.S. becoming a "welfare state". Looking back on it now, I think we got it backwards. Welfare was developed as a response to poverty, it was not the primary cause of it. We were always complaining about our taxes going up. Little did we know that, someday, many of our incomes would be reduced to the point that we wouldn't even have to pay taxes anymore. Maybe that's one reason there are so many poor people around today, they have raised the bar as to what qualifies as "poor".

I agree that you shouldn't build your argument around meaningless clichés, but I don't see anything wrong with throwing a cliché in there on top of everything else if it seems appropriate. "The only thing they understand is force" may be an over used cliché if you apply it to every war the U.S. has ever been involved in, but I think it's fair to say that it is true of the Islamic terrorists we are currently dealing with. When have they tried diplomacy or did anything that didn't involve the use of force? I also agree that the U.S. shouldn't go around telling other countries what to do, but I don't see anything wrong with telling them what not to do, like "Don't hijack airplanes and crash them into tall buildings, don't set off bombs in the marketplace, don't stone women to death for trying to get a driver's license, and don't put videos of you chopping off somebody's head on the internet."  

Telling it like it is

When I was comparing minorities in France to minorities in the USA of course I meant by percentage. When I am talking about something like this I always mean percentages. I hate those graphics you sometimes see in papers where like California leads the nation in DUIs while Wyoming comes in last, and of course that just tells what state is more populous, has nothing to do with who drives drunk more. That kind of thing drives me nuts.

That upper peninsula case you cite doesn’t make any sense to me. There are certain rules about how much money you make etc, that determine whether or not you get welfare. To claim you should get welfare because Blacks get it, is like claiming you should be able to sell cigarettes tax free because Indians do it. I’m also going to not believe that story about poor whites not knowing that they could get welfare until they heard blacks got it. I believe the local people tell stories like that, but if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense either.

The point I was trying to make was that one reason we have so many poor people is because many of them are blacks and white people tend to not want to give money to blacks, and here we have your statement:

‘In those days I was against welfare, and the fact that most of it was going to Blacks probably had something to do with it.’

And there it is. It logically follows that if you thought the money was going to whites you would have been more generous in your thoughts about welfare (and when I say ‘you’ I am speaking of white people in general) and they would have got more money so their kids would more often be born in good conditions and they would get good food to eat, so they would grow taller, and overall we would measure up better to the French, who don’t mind giving their money to less fortunate Frenchmen.

And along the same lines, there is always this thing where people are taxed to help out people generally in another country, but it could be in another state of another city within their state and they write those indignant letters to the editor about why are we helping out the poor in faraway places when we have plenty of poor people right here in River City. Like somehow the poor in faraway places are less deserving than the nearby poor.

Of course what is really going on is those writers to the paper basically just don’t want to pay the tax period. But they don’t want to seem uncharitable so they come up with this dodge.

If you don’t want to help the poor, just say you don’t want to help the poor, don’t pretend that if these poor lived closer you would be opening your wallet. And if you want to go to war with someone, just go to war with them, don’t pretend that it’s only because the only thing the other side understands is force.

If you want to make an argument, make a strong argument, don’t use trite and meaningless phrases just because they sound good.

There, I’ve said it.

As Different as Black and White

When I first started on the internet I was with a forum group that was a pretty diverse bunch. We had college students, high school students, working people, and even this 14 year old Indian girl. (Indian Indian, not American Indian.) This Indian girl was always asking us what Americans thought about this, that, or the other thing. She was frequently surprised that, if she got a half dozen responses, all from Americans, no two responses would be alike, and sometimes we would get down right divisive about it. Now India is a big country with lots of different types of people, so I don't know why the diversity of opinions among Americans should have surprised her, but it did. The fact that she was 14 years old might have had something to do with it, but she seemed intelligent beyond her years and spoke better English than we did.

You may be right when you say that France doesn't have as many minorities as we do, but then again, France doesn't have as many total people as we do, which might have something to do with it. When they had those riots a few years ago, I think that most of the rioters were Black. They all lived together in neighborhoods like they do here, and they were protesting their poverty and lack of opportunity. I seem to remember that France had some kind of deal with their former colonies that allowed lots of their people to immigrate to France, and that's probably where all their Blacks and Muslims came from.

You may also be right when you say that American Blacks are, on average, poorer than American Whites, but there are lots of poor White people in this country too. I remember, back in the late 60s or early 70s, there was a court case in the Upper Peninsula about somebody who was denied welfare benefits. Her lawyer claimed that she was the victim of racial discrimination because lots of Black people in Detroit were getting welfare, and his client was just as poor as they were. I never did hear how the case turned out, but I know that the lawyer later became a judge and also ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature. I have also heard stories from some of our local people who grew up poor and their families didn't even know they were eligible for welfare until there was a big uproar about the Blacks getting it, which inspired our local poor to go down to the court house and see what they could get too. Okay, this is anecdotal evidence, but it's all I've got right now.

In those days I was against welfare, and the fact that most of it was going to Blacks probably had something to do with it. Back then, unemployment was low and there was a general belief around here that the Blacks didn't want to work and were milking the system. It's different nowadays because it's hard for anybody to find a decent job anymore, no matter what color they are. I now believe that any civilized society should provide some kind of safety net for any of its members who fall on hard times. The thing is, though, somebody has to pay for all this, which means that there needs to be decent jobs for enough people to support the system. The way things are going, we're all going to be on the dole some day. Who's going to pay for everything then?

We're going to my daughter's tomorrow and will be getting home late, so I won't be going online till Thursday. Merry Christmas!

The tall, tall, people of Paree

Altruism is a thing that only goes so far. Some people like themselves but nobody else, and sometimes they like their immediate family, and sometimes their extended, and maybe their neighbors, and maybe their city, their state, their country, and then it usually stops there. People think we ought to be nice to people in our own country, but people in other countries, fuck them, because they feel the same way about us, and you know what, the only thing they understand is force.

That phrase kills me. Whenever we go to beat up on some other country it’s because the only thing they understand is force. It’s like we’ve tried reasonable discussion and that doesn’t work so now we have to punch them out. The reasonable discussion amounts to we want them to do something and they don’t want to do it, and so it’s clobbering time. If everybody always did what we wanted them to do we wouldn’t have to use force on anybody. There will always be war of course and sometimes we will be more right and sometimes we will be more wrong, I just wish we would quit using that phrase ‘the only thing they understand is force,’ as if that meant anything. Sorry, off the track, Christmas eve, just a little peacenik talk.

But the fact is there is always us on one side and the other guys on the other side. And we have to be nice to us, but we can treat the other guys like shit. Not that we are actually all that nice to people in our tribe, but there was no limit (slavery, extinction) to what we did to the other guys. Way back when kings converted to Christianity they were technically not allowed to attack other Christians. Well they found ways around that of course, but with pagans they didn’t even have to make excuses.

What I meant by the example of France and those other western European countries that have less infant mortality and are taller, is that they see themselves as essentially one people, different from other people, and so they are more willing to share their stuff with other French people who are like distant cousins. This does not extend to other countries who they are willing to go to war with from time to time. And it doesn’t extend to people in their country who they don’t think are like them, like muslims. They are just as bad as we are about that, maybe worse, it’s just that they don’t have so many minorities.

When I said they were maybe worse to their minorities, I was thinking about how anybody born on American soil is a citizen of this country, but that is not the case in France (which I am going to use to stand in for European countries). Actually I had to look that up on wiki, because it seemed so wrong, so unamerican, but it’s true. You have to wait until you are an adult, and then you apply for citizenship, and then I assume you could be turned down. Well it’s not quite like that, it’s more complicated, facts get in the way.

Let me try it this way. When Martin Luther King got shot, he was down in Memphis to support a garbage men’s strike. All the garbage men were black, and they paid them poorly and treated them like shit, and the assumption is that if there had been some white garbage men they never would have treated them that way. I guess that’s what I mean when I say that one factor in America’s big percentage of poor people is that most of them are black and white people aren’t as eager to help them as they would be if they were white. As opposed to Frenchmen who are more willing to lend a hand to a fellow Frenchman and that is why they, on average, have a lower rate of infant mortality and are taller.

Still Tribal After All These Years

I think that you're right about primitive people sharing their stuff with other members of their tribe, but they weren't too keen on sharing with other tribes, especially when the other tribes attacked them and took their stuff by force. Before they had tribes, there must have been family groups or clans that had the same problems. They say that man is a social animal, but that doesn't mean that he believes in the universal brotherhood of all his fellow humans. I think that was an idea that was developed fairly recently, within the last couple thousand years. Even then, it was slow to catch on, and is not universally accepted even unto this day. A lot of people say they believe in it but, in practice, they are still clannish or tribal at heart. This may be expressed as racism in places where they have more than one race living near each other but, even in places like Cheboygan where everybody is pretty much White, people tend to divide themselves into social groups based on family name, income level, or just plain personal preference. There must be something in human nature that causes people to band together and exclude other people like that. That doesn't mean it can't be changed, but the change must be deliberate, it won't happen by itself. Tribalism is the default position.

I don't know where you got the idea that Europe doesn't have issues like that, or Asia or Africa either. Those people were massacring and enslaving each other for thousands of years before the U.S. of A. was even invented. Western Europe may have settled down a bit since World War II, but they've just found more subtle ways to express their tribal tendencies. There is a big worry in Britain right now that, if present trends continue, Englishmen will soon become a minority in their own country. This shouldn't surprise anybody because the same thing happened to the Celts, the Saxons, and the Normans in turn a long time ago. There may have even been somebody for the Celts to overthrow when they first arrived there, but their history was never recorded, so the only hints we have about these "Dawn People" come from myths and legends. France has also been in an uproar for some time over the influx of colored people from Third World countries. A few years ago they had a series of riots about it, and many Frenchmen were demanding that they all be sent back where they came from. I haven't heard anything about that lately, but that doesn't mean it's not still going on, maybe the news cycle has just moved on to other issues like it typically does.

Since the big economic crisis, which has been going on so long that it's beginning to feel like the new normal, there has been a lot of tension between the "have" and "have not" countries of the European Union. A lot of Europeans were never thrilled about the Union in the first place, and now they are taking every opportunity to say "I told you so!" English, French, and German people are pissed about having to bail out countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece, and the Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks are pissed because they are expected to get their finances in order as a condition of being bailed out. Truth be known, none of these people ever really liked each other in the first place and, if they didn't have this issue to be pissed about, they would probably find another. We haven't heard anything about the Balkans in years, but I understand that we still have troops stationed there to keep those people from lapsing into the ethnic warfare that has been going on there since forever, except for the relatively brief period when the Commies knocked everybody's heads together and forced them to play nice.

You're probably right that the forced integration of rich and poor in this country would never work. I'm sure that there is a racial component to it but, even if the rich and poor were all the same color, they still wouldn't like living next door to each other, which is probably why they live in separate neighborhoods in the first place. Racial discrimination in housing was abolished a long time ago, but the birds of a feather are still flocking together. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Spreading the poor around

I think historically it was with the rise of agriculture that we began to have distinctions between rich and poor. I think tools were generally shared among the tribe, not sure where I heard that. Heard last night on tv that the bronze age looked pretty good as far as poverty, but that was in Britain, it wouldn’t have held for Egypt or Mesopotamia.

I always think of that old time emperor thing when I am flying in a plane. Even Napoleon or the tsars never got to do that, look down from that high. And yet as I look around me on the plane hardly anybody is looking out the window, they are more obsessed with trying to open that little bag of peanuts, which are suddenly so important, but if someone had offered that to them while they were sitting in the airport, they probably would have refused it.

For a brief time there when I first started working in that office in Chicago, I thought maybe I should try to get ahead, because what else was there to do? I was no longer a hippie, all my friends were back in Champaign, might as well become a bigger bureaucrat, but everybody I worked with had been bureaucrats for years and knew the game and kicked me to the curb, which in retrospect was just fine.

When they first started putting in public housing the plan was that they would spread the poor around the city, but inasmuch as the poor were mostly black, the white people didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, so they just tore down the black neighborhoods and put up those awful high rises in the old black neighborhoods.

One thing you hear from time to time is that in the bad old days all the black people were confined to a little patch on the south side, but because of that, all the blacks that did get ahead, the doctors, the funeral directors, the preachers, etc, all lived cheek to jowl with the really poor, and that gave the kids something to look up to. But as soon as segregation weakened a little, all the rich black people moved out of the patch and then all the black kids had to see was other poor black people.

When they tore down Cabrini Green the progressive thought was that there would be mixed income communities. Rich and poor would live together in harmony in the same building, but that hasn’t worked out to well. The poor people tended to hang out in the common areas all day long, and leave their stuff around and stay up late and drink, and the rich people didn’t like that.

You know one of the problems is that the blacks tend to be poor and the whites rich. I think white people would be more likely to want to share with other white people, but not so much with black people.

That is one of the reasons Europe does better than the United States in things like infant mortality, and surprisingly enough, height, we used to be the tallest in the world, and many of us are, but there are those unhealthy poor bringing us down. Because France is full of Frenchmen, they are likely to help each other out, so their income is more even, they don’t have a huge class in poverty to bring them down. They do have some poor muslims who I think they treat shabbily, but not that many of them.

Poor people probably wouldn’t mind living with rich people, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

More on Poverty and Virtue

I've been thinking about that poverty thing today, and it occurred to me that poverty is the original human condition. According to stuff I've read, everybody was poor before the last glacial period. When the climate was warm, there was no need to stockpile supplies for the winter, so people just lived hand to mouth. When it started getting colder, people had to learn how to make clothes out of animal hides, which requires a certain amount of tools. Once you go through the trouble of making a tool out of a piece of stone or bone, you're not likely to throw it away after one use, so it came to pass that people started accumulating things. Some people, rather than do their own accumulating, would knock people on the head and steal their stuff, which caused the accumulators to band together for their common defense.

When you think about it, we were all born poor, we came into this world with nothing. There's an old joke about that: A bunch of immigrants were bragging about how little they had when they first came to this country. One of them finally said that he came to this country with nothing but the clothes on his back, and another guy topped him by saying that he didn't even have that because he was born here. Reminds me of what Edward Gibbon said about the Roman emperors: The richest emperor that ever lived didn't even have a shirt on his back or glass in his windows.

I never cared much about "getting ahead" if, by that, you mean getting ahead of other people. I wanted certain things in my life, but I didn't care if other people had more than I had, as long as I had what I wanted. This reminds me of another joke: This White guy suddenly became rich, so he bought a 20 room mansion out in the suburbs. One day, he was sitting on his patio when he heard a rustling in the bushes that divided his yard from his neighbor's yard. He looked up to see a grinning Black face sticking out of the shrubbery and taunting him, "Hey White Boy, we is better than you is because we gots a 40 room mansion." The White guy, not willing to be bested by this Black guy, ordered a swimming pool constructed in his yard. The next day, there was this rustling in the bushes, and the Black guy said, "Hey White Boy, we is still better than you is because we gots an Olympic size swimming pool." So next he bought his wife a mink coat, and his neighbor said, "Hey White Boy, we is still better than you is. I bought my wife a sable coat." Finally, the White guy gave up trying to compete with his neighbor and didn't buy any more stuff for awhile. Nevertheless, there was this rustling in the bushes one day, and the Black guy said, "Hey White Boy, we is still better than you is. We ain't got no colored folks living next door to us."

The kids in my neighborhood wouldn't steal your bike and keep it, but they would take a ride on it without your permission, leave it someplace, and you would have to go looking for it. That happened to me only once, then I bought a padlock and chain and secured my bike to some immoveable object whenever I left it, even for a few minutes. Problem solved! They told us in the army that a lock wouldn't stop a thief, but it would keep an honest man honest. I guess that means the kids in my neighborhood were basically honest, if a bit mischievous at times. We had some bully types who tried to pick on the younger kids, but all you had to do was stand up to them and they would leave you alone. You might have to fight them once but, win or lose, they never bothered you after that.

I don't admire somebody because they are either rich or poor, I admire them if they're honest and don't pursue their goals at the unfair expense of other people. I don't know about the hard working part. If a guy can find an easier way to get a job done, more power to him. I used to think that there was a certain virtue in doing everything the hard way, but old age has cured me of that. Bring on the power tools!

It just occurred to me that one way to fight poverty might be to break up all the poor neighborhoods and make all the poor people live among the rich people. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished without violating everybody's civil rights, but it's at least worth considering. Let's think about it over the weekend and see what we can come up with.

Is it good to get ahead?

I think that poor thing, where people have been poor for generations, is kind of a chicken and egg thing. The kids get a bad start on life because their parents are not so good, so they become not so good and then raise their kids poorly and on and on. The kid grows up in a crumby neighborhood, goes to a crumby school, has crumby pals, doesn’t have books in the house, doesn’t visit museums, doesn’t go on vacations to other parts of the country, and worst of all is he has to fight for everything he gets, that’s a lot of time spent fighting when he could be enriching his mind. And of course he is fighting all the time he is in school. That’s what makes the school crumby, everybody is fighting everybody else so that it’s all the teachers can do to to keep order and they don’t have time to teach anything. it’s not a crumby school because of the teachers who generally do the best they can, but they just get burned out.

You know when we were growing up, if some kid beat us up or stole our bike, we could go to our parents and they’d go to the other parents, and things would be worked out, we could get some justice, we wouldn’t have to try to jump the kid who beat us up, or to steal back our bike. And we didn’t have to watch out all the time for kids who might beat us up, and we could leave our bike alone for short periods of time without too much worry about it getting stolen.

Then those kids, when they get out of school, they haven’t had much of an education, and they likely don’t have a car so they can drive to a job far away, and their clothes aren’t that good when they go to the interview, so they end up with a crumby job, and people in crumby jobs are treated poorly, because they can easily be replaced, and they don’t have money for the doctor or a dentist, or a lawyer if they get into trouble. That’s pretty much what I mean that everything is harder for poor people.

I think there is a connection between doing good and doing work. We always admire the guy who works hard. We think the guy who keeps his house up and maybe makes additions and stuff is a good neighbor, but the guy who lets his house go to hell is a lousy neighbor. I’ll bet when you saw your daughter not going to the beach and finishing up that little bit you thought “Good girl.” If she never got a job and sponged off you, you would think she was not such a good girl. But then again if the family is rich, they might not care if the kid sponged or not. Well I’m going to back off on this. I think that a lot of people think a person who is a hard worker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is good. What if he is a gangster?

I think we’ve been around the argument of what exactly is good, and we agree that it is hard to define, but we have a general idea of what it means. What if you had two sons, and one was good, but he never got higher in employment than minimum wage, and you had another son who made a pile and was generally pretty good, but cut corners from time to time, which would you be prouder of? I think most people would take the second. I think you would take the first. I’ve posed this question to myself and I am a little embarrassed that I never knew exactly what my answer would be, but posing it to myself now I think I would also take the first. Maybe I have aged in wisdom.

Maybe the difference is earlier I had been working, and not so much when I was tending bar as later when I was working in offices, I always thought that I should be getting ahead. So maybe I thought it was more important then, then I do now that I am retired.

What about you, did you ever think you should be getting ahead?

Poverty, Rituals, and the Work Ethic

That was an interesting observation  that you made about poor people: "Everything is harder for them". I don't believe that I've ever looked at it that way but, now that I have, I tend to agree with you. Do you think that everything is harder for them because they're poor, or do you think that they are poor because everything is harder for them? Of course, correlation does not prove cause and effect, but it does make me wonder about it.

We kind of agreed before that we couldn't eliminate poverty by just taking money from the rich people and giving it to the poor people. Eventually, they would spend it all and still be poor, and now the formerly rich people would also be poor and unable to help with future anti-poverty efforts. I don't know if the experts have thought of this, but maybe we should be looking for the reasons why poverty exists in the first place. One thing about poverty is that it tends to run in families, if your parents are poor, you are more likely to end up poor yourself. Although being born to rich parents doesn't guarantee that you will end up rich yourself, it certainly improves your chances. It's the same with neighborhoods, poor people tend to live next door to other poor people. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, it increases the chances that you will remain poor all your life but, of course, it doesn't guarantee it. Then there's kind of a cultural aspect to it. Kids who grow up with poverty are often discouraged by their families and friends from trying to improve their situation. I call it "The Who do you think you are? syndrome".

Speaking of cultural stuff, I don't know if all those cultural rituals that you disparage are intended to teach you something, or just to make you feel good, or maybe it's a little of both. Take funerals for example. Maybe the ancient Egyptians believed that it was important to give the dead pharaoh a big send off so that the gods would accept him into Pharaoh Heaven, but I don't think that's why we do it today. Most of us would agree that we can't do anything for the dead guy, the purpose of a funeral is to provide some kind of comfort for the survivors. I always used to be a little envious of the Catholics because they had something to do at wakes and funerals. Us Protestants would just stand around the coffin trying to think of something reasonable to say, but the Catholics would kneel down, make the sign of the Cross, recite a couple of well rehearsed prayers, and they were done. I think that it helps people to deal with events of great joy or sorrow if they have something concrete to say or do, something that they have rehearsed often enough that they can do it automatically without thinking too much about it.

You're missing the point about paying kids to do chores. You're not paying them to be good, they should do that for free. You're paying them to do useful work that somebody else would have to do if they didn't. I remember the summer that we paid our daughter to paint the house. We paid her $2.00 an hour, which was below minimum wage, but that's what they had paid her at Kentucky Fried the previous summer, and she wasn't thrilled about going back there. We told her that she could work as many hours as she wanted to, and not to worry if she didn't finish it, because it was a big job and any part that she did was that much less that we would have to do later. She ended up doing all the scraping and chipping, two coats on the trim, and one coat on the main walls. All we had to do was put one more coat on the walls, which was the easy part. When we got into a spell of really hot weather, she would paint in the morning and then go to the beach in the afternoon. One day I came home from work at 3:00PM to find her painting while sitting in a washbasin full of ice water. (I'm not making this up!) When I finished laughing, I asked her why she wasn't at the beach by now. She told me that she just had a little bit to go on that one wall, and she wanted to finish it today. Nobody told her that she had to do that, she just took it on herself. Now that's what's called a "work ethic"!

Rich and poor and good and evil

I remember rabbit ears, and I remember how modern and progressive we felt when we got our outside antennae. Later on I remember the crappy old tv sets my beer drinking buddies had and how they had elaborate assemblages of coat hangers and tinfoil to get reception, and once they had a picture nobody was allowed to move from their seat lest they lose it, unless it was to get beer for everybody.

No Kindergarten huh? Perhaps that’s why you never became a commie in the sixties. Back in the day all we did at Kindergarten was play, but when I became a sub I noticed that they are already teaching them how to read and some very basic math. Kids of today learn more in school than we ever did.

Some report came out today that Chicago Blacks were lagging behind White kids in test scores. This is always happening. The answer is as plain as the nose on your face. The problem is the Black kids are poorer than White kids. Poor children do worse than other children because everything is harder for them. I know we have just had a long discussion about poor people, and it’s probably too early to get back into that, But there is this No Child Left Behind rationale, that the problem is that the teachers are not teaching Black children well enough, so what we should do is fire all the bad teachers and close down the bad schools and it’s all bullshit and the main thing driving it is converting schools to charter schools so that they can bust the union. Just saying.

I’ve probably told this story before, but every school but one that I taught in said the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the day, and of course everybody stood for that. But one time I was in the office and the pledge came on and I looked around and there were no kids so I settled down into my seat with my paper, but it was strangely silent and when I looked up all the clerks were facing the flag (every room had a flag of course) with their hands on their hearts, so I stood and took off my hat and joined them.

I always take off my hat and do whatever is required whenever one of those situations arise, just to show all those wingnuts, that even though I am a liberal I am just as good an American as they are.

Actually I think the whole thing is stupid. Pledges, prayers, moments of silence, weddings, graduations, funerals, those parts where everybody stands tall and looks solemn. Some people think it is a sign of respect, but I think it is a big waste of time.

At some point it came to the attention of my sisters and me that other kids were getting an allowance, so of course we demanded one too. There were chores we were supposed to do around the house which we did when we couldn’t somehow wriggle out of them, but there wasn’t that much of a connection between them and the allowance. If I didn’t take out the garbage a couple times a week, I still got my full allowance.

I’m not sure what side I am on about paying kids to be good. One time I subbed at a school for very bad kids, when they got off the bus they walked past a gauntlet of burly teachers into the school, there was chicken wire everywhere. They had some program where they could earn points by behaving and earn certain prizes, and the prizes were all prominently displayed so that was always on their minds. I didn’t get the impression that it worked very well though. Those kids were like little tough Jimmy Cagneys, they’d rather spit in your hand then accept a gift, dirty coppers.

I know it’s not that simple, but if a good is only good because he is getting something for himself, he is liable not to do good without being paid. On other hand, at least he is good when he is being paid. It’s kind of like one of those bull sessions. If you do good because it advances your situation, are you really being good?

TV and Real Life

The snow on the TV that I was talking about wasn't the stuff you got after the station signed off, it was the stuff you got right while you were watching a show. It usually didn't obscure the picture entirely, but it made it all fuzzy and difficult to watch. It might have had something to do with our antenna, at first we just had rabbit ears, and then my dad put a roof top antenna on our brick chimney. That gave us better reception, but it also made us vulnerable to the disruption caused by airplanes passing overhead.

I used to watch the late movies on weekends and in the summer, but not on school nights. I seldom watched TV during daylight hours except the year or so after we got our first set. I think my parents got it mostly for my benefit because I had been sick with rheumatic fever when I was three or four and, for several years after that, I wasn't allowed to play sports or otherwise exert myself. The doctor recommended that my parents hold me back from school for the first year, and I ended up skipping kindergarten and starting with the first grade at the age of six. I don't feel that I missed a thing. The way I remember it, the stations used to sign off about midnight, after the late movie and a brief news and weather report. After they announced that they were signing off, they would play the National Anthem and then go to their test pattern. Maybe it was as you said, the test pattern was on for only a few minutes and then just the snow. I don't think we ever left the set on long enough to find out. Sometimes we didn't even wait until the National Anthem was finished, which I felt kind of guilty about. I also thought that we should all stand at attention when the anthem was played, but my parents didn't want to, which is probably why they turned it off so soon. Years later, I read somewhere that you don't have to stand for the anthem in your own  home, only in public places.

Most of what I have read about primitive tribal societies said that the male children went through some kind of rite or passage at the age of 10 or 12, and then they were considered to be adults. Actually, they became braves or warriors, which were sort of junior adults. Around 25 or 30, if they lived that long, they would be promoted to elders or chiefs and people began taking them seriously after that. The rite of passage for females usually involved having a baby, and girls that never had one were looked down upon, like it was their fault or something.

I worked part time in the store from an early age, and also did chores around the house, and I was paid for all of it. Other kids got an allowance, I got a salary, and I didn't mind that a bit. I have read that some experts say you shouldn't pay a kid for doing chores, they are supposed to do them out of the goodness of their heart, and you're supposed to give them an allowance out of the goodness of your heart. I couldn't disagree more. I think it's important for kids to know where money comes from, and it helps them to develop a healthy work ethic because they feel that their work is valued. It's not a bribe, it's what they deserve because they earned it. I knew some people at the paper mill who grew up on farms, worked their asses off, and never got a dime for it, and I felt sorry for them. At the other extreme, you have kids who grew up in homes where there just wasn't any useful work for them to do, and I feel sorry for them too.

I always considered being kid a temporary assignment with no real future in it, and I wanted to grow up as fast as I could. I knew that there would always be people in my life telling me what to do, so that wasn't it. I just wanted to be my own man, taking myself seriously and expecting others to do the same. That was one of the reasons I didn't go to college, it seemed to me to be just an extension of childhood dependency. Like with the army, I served my time honorably, but I didn't see any reason to re-enlist for another hitch. As Ann Landers used to say, "The sample was ample."

Growing up and going to work

Ah yes snow, and how about when you first got a color tv? I remember when color tvs were exotic. And they had these color knobs that you could fiddle endlessly with trying to get the perfect color. I still compare some of the painting I do to that, just fiddling, trying to get the color perfect.

And remember when something went wrong with the tube the repairman would show up and fiddle with the arcane gizmos in the back of the set while the whole family would stand around wringing their hands hoping it would get fixed before Ed Sullivan came on.

And then there would come a time after the late movie, and maybe there would be some little commentary, and I think I recall there sometimes would be some sort of blessing or prayer, and then that pattern with the numbers and lines and the Indian, I don’t know why the Indian. I think that only lasted like ten minutes and then it was gone and there was all that awful snow with its menacing buzz.

I think that snow was random electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere which would be the echo of cosmic rays which would be the echo of the big bang itself. I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but I think it’s close, and what better to tune in at the end of a day watching the tube than the birth of the universe?

You know a couple things I miss about the not too long ago tv schedule are the three o’clock and ten thirty movies. That three o’clock movie hit the spot for those of us without nine to five jobs. I think it generally had some dialing for dollars component, which livened things up a bit, and it seems like it was always some old timey black and white TCM type movie. Kind of stupid, but that was ok because you didn’t want to have to pay close attention to it.

This whole late night tv thing with all these guys fighting over spots and the shows themselves packed double deep have no interest for me. Well one reason is that I’m hitting the hay shortly after nine, but even if I weren’t I wouldn’t watch those shows, just trying too hard to be entertaining or something. What fit into those spots very nicely long ago was the late movie.

Normally the folks would have dragged you screaming and crying to bed by then, but sometimes, maybe they were just too tired to deal with you, and they would let you stay up.

The movies again would be those TCM movies, but since you were a kid they wouldn’t seem so stupid, indeed they would seem deep and mysterious, all those people wearing suits and fancy dresses and saying all these cryptic things to each other and then, bam, somebody gets shot. You just couldn’t wait to become an adult.

I remember once thinking about kids and adults when I was a kid. Some kids were bigger than others, and adults came in all kinds of sizes, but still there was a clear distinction between adults and kids. it seemed I had gleaned that kids became adults, and that adults were once kids, but it just seemed too fantastic, and I decided that it couldn’t be true, once a kid, always a kid.

Which was good because then I would never have to have a job. I didn’t know what a job was, but nobody talked about it very fondly. I remember being a real little kid, and my sister had to go to school, which I was so glad that I didn’t have to, and then late one summer she told me that in a couple weeks I would have to go to school too. The horror. The horror.

I have read that hunter gatherers, the parents keep the kid with them until the kid is maybe five/ten years and then they dump him into the scrum, which is all the people who are neither little kids or adults, and they all hang together. I think the adults get some work out of them, but seriously, how much work are you going to get out of a bunch of kids? So mostly they just hang out. Anyway they say that’s why at an early age kids cling to their parents, but later on all they want to do is hang with other kids.

I am thinking that my dad left for work in the morning and came back in the early evening and I knew almost nothing of where he went or what he did. But didn’t you live above the butcher shop, or near it, and I imagine you got pressed into service there from time to time. Was it something you liked to do, or something you tried to avoid?

Snow On the Ground, Snow On the TV

I remember the old TV days pretty much the same as you do, but I don't remember watching Garfield Goose. I do remember Howdy Doody and Kukla,Fran, and Ollie as being two of my favorites.

Speaking of snow, we used to get that on the TV all the time in those days. I had forgotten that, and I'm sure that most people half our age wouldn't even know what I was talking about. Then there was the vertical hold and the horizontal hold, which you could adjust with knobs. You usually had to adjust them when you first turned on the TV, and then again when you changed channels. Every time an airplane headed in or out of Midway passed over our house, the vertical and horizontal holds would go nuts, but there was no point in adjusting them until the plane was gone. Then they would sometimes settle down by themselves, but not always. Sometimes, when the adjusting knobs proved ineffective, you could stamp your foot on the floor or whack the side of the TV with the palm of your hand, but that didn't always work either. I don't remember if there was anything you could do about the snow. Some days it was worse than others, which we attributed to weather conditions. Looking back on it, though, it was more likely caused by electronic interference of some sort.

Chicago is known for its cold and snowy winters, but it's nothing compared to Northern Michigan. Of course, it's not the same every year. People like to say that the winters were worse when they were kids, and there's probably some truth to that, but it wasn't all the winters. I remember two or three hard winters in the 1950s, but I also remember at least one mild one. My grandparents went to Florida for a week or so after Christmas, and we had warmer weather in Chicago than they had in Florida. Of course, that wasn't normal, which is probably why I remember it. We tend to remember the extremes and forget the average stuff, it's just human nature.

Cheboygan is about 50 miles north of the Lake Michigan Snow Belt, and they generally get a lot more snow than we do, but whatever snow we do get is likely to still be on the ground after theirs is all gone. We are not much colder than they are, so I've always wondered about that. These last two snow events that we got came off of Lake Huron to the east, which is unusual but not unheard of. I told you how light and fluffy that snow was and, now that I think of it, lake effect snow is often like that. This may explain why Traverse City can get two feet while we get two inches and, two weeks later, theirs is all gone while ours is still here. That fluffy stuff doesn't have to melt, it just evaporates directly from snow to water vapor in the air. Well, technically, that process is called "sublimation", not "evaporation", but most people don't know that.

Snow sublimates more readily when the air is cold and dry, and we've been getting a lot of that lately. It was 12 below at our place on Monday morning, which was the coldest we've had this season. Sub zero temperatures are not uncommon for us in January or February, but mid December is a little early for that to happen. I don't mind winter weather but, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to ever get below zero. I mean, isn't that why they call it "zero"?

Let it snow

I had always thought of Chicago as a snowy place. I guess growing up you have more awareness of a snowy day. You remember going out with your sled and having snowball fights. You don’t remember all those days of cold with no snow when you sat home watching tv or whatever you did at home before tv.

What did we do before tv? I remember before tv. I remember visiting some relatives and in some basement room was some guy I thought of as one of those crazy old uncles and he was sitting in the dark watching this thing with a small round screen and I was told it was a tv, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

Then in school I remember kids talking about going home to lunch (back in the day we all went home for lunch) and coming back and talking about The Uncle Johnny Coon’s Show, and Little Rascal’s cartoons which they were watching on tvs. Then the next door neighbors got one and we used to sneak onto their front porch and watch it through the porch window.

And then we got one. It was a big deal. I do dimly remember that before this we had a radio, one of those big standup ones, in the frontroom and we used to sit around and listen to it. That seems so odd now, almost like science fiction.

And life was kind of good then, kind of simple. It was a small world, only three channels (there was an educational channel, but nobody ever watched that), and there were our kid shows like Garfield Goose before supper, and then after supper, seems like there were three hours of shows, three channels, and seven days a week, which makes 63 different shows, few enough for someone to remember each one, and I do recall carrying around the whole schedule in my head.

It was a big deal, settling in at your place on the floor or the sofa, and someone would turn the knob, and then you would have to wait a bit, and then it would come on. And then every hour when we wanted to watch a different show, somebody would have to get up from their place, physically walk to the set and manually change the channel. Oh can you imagine that? I guess that’s what made us tough huh? Unlike those obese video gamers of today.

Oh snow, seems like there was a lot of it when I was a kid, and when I was down in Champaign reading the Chicago papers it always seemed to be snowing. And, God Bless Them, when I was in Austin Texas, sitting on my balcony sipping iced lemonade to cool off a bit, I’d open the paper and there would be those gritty Chicago faces, frostbitten, squinting against the howling winds trying to drag some two ton hunk of metal out of a Grand Canyon of snow. Oh it was beautiful. There is nothing so grand as sitting somewhere sun kissed and knowing that the folks at home are being blitzed by some Calgary Cutter.

But then in 1987 when I finally ended up back here for good, I discovered there really isn’t that much snow. We are on the wrong side of the Goddamn lake. Those places on the east side of the lake get all the snow. You would think that would be good news, but I happen to like snow. Probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t drive and I live downtown so the sidewalks get cleaned off pretty quickly, but I just feel like as long as it’s going to be cold we might as well have snow.  

Snow Jobs and Other Fables

We got a couple feet of snow over the weekend. I know you've seen snow before, but I wanted to see how Blogger handled photos. These two loaded quickly with no glitches. I would have put them side by side instead of one on top of the other, but that's no big deal. As clingy as this snow looks, you'd think it was heavy and wet, but it isn't. It was knee deep, but I walked thorough it like it wasn't there. That last batch we got was like that too and, within a few days, it had settled to about half of it's original depth.

Pork wasn't the only thing that Moses told his people not to eat, you know. There were several other things, and Moses pronounced them all "unclean". I suppose that's why somebody came up with the trichinosis theory. There is also some evidence to support your theory about keeping the Jews from socializing with the heathens. One prohibited dish that sounds really strange was "a kid (goat) boiled in its mother's milk". It seems that this was a favorite of the Canaanites, and it might have had some religious significance for them, kind of like our Thanksgiving turkey. I don't think that Moses felt sorry for the poor little goat, which I'm sure wasn't boiled alive anyway. It's more likely that he just didn't want his people celebrating any pagan holidays.

The practice of keeping bits and pieces of human bodies in churches dates back to the Middle Ages. It seems like something that might have been carried over from the old pagan days, but I don't remember ever reading or hearing that. These bits and pieces were called "relics", and they allegedly were part of some long dead saint. Truth be known, most of them were probably fakes, brought back from the Holy Land by crusaders who bought them from slick Arab merchants.

I know they eat horses in Europe, and in Canada too but, for some reason, we don't and I don't know why. A horse eats pretty much the same stuff that a cow eats, so it seems like they should be good to eat. Remember that big horse meat scandal when we were kids? Selling horse meat was not illegal at the time, but they were passing it off as beef because nobody would have bought it if they sold it as horse meat. Now that's got to be a cultural thing. It might be different with dogs and cats because they are carnivores. I'm not sure about that either because I have read that people eat cougars, and a cougar is nothing but a big pussy.

One of the magazines I get is called "Fur-Fish-Game" and, as the name implies, they have a lot of articles about trapping. I have never been all that interested in trapping, but I read the magazine because I like the fish and game parts. I read the fur parts too, mostly because they talk about the lifestyle and habits of the fur bearing animals, which is interesting to me. What I have learned from this is that trapping involves a lot of work and skill. You don't just set traps all over the place and collect a bunch of animals the next day, there are all kinds of special things you have to do with your traps if you want to be a successful trapper. Then, if you want top dollar for your furs, you have to process them yourself, which involves more skill and work. I have a hard time keeping up with the hobbies and projects that I have now, and it's not getting easier as I get older. In some areas, farmers will pay a trapper to clean out problem animals, usually beaver, but I haven't heard of anybody around here doing that.

Trappers and people who hunt with dogs occasionally come into conflict, but we try to minimize that because we all have to stick together against the antis. A properly set leg hold trap usually won't cause serious injury to a dog, and a responsible trapper checks his traps almost every day and releases any dogs or kitties that he has caught. My beagle Splash came limping home once after being gone for several days. He had a mark on his paw that looked like it had been caused by a trap, but he soon recovered from it and was his old self again. I didn't know of anybody trapping in he neighborhood, and still don't but, of course, I don't know everybody. Cheboygan is not that small of a town.

I used to think that all the antis were a bunch of communists but, truth be known, there are probably other factors that motivate some of them. Of course, that still doesn't make them right. I read once about a bunch of "activists" who went to a mink farm and opened all the cages so the little minkies could run free. The farmer told the reporter who covered the story that his minks, being pen raised for generations, wouldn't know how to survive in the wild and probably died shortly after their liberation.

Eating animals

I don’t believe in that trichinosis thing, where that was the reason the Jews, and hence the Arabs, but not those bacon snapping Christians, thanks to St Paul who stepped in and saved our foreskins as well, didn’t eat pork. How the hell could they have known that, and if they did why didn’t they just say we don’t eat pork because it’s unhealthy. And it’s not like the Jews prospered and everybody else sickened and died because of eating all that pork.

I do remember hearing that theory though. It’s the kind of thing where at first it seems clever and then later more like poppycock and I don’t see it promoted much anymore.

I’m particularly suspicious of those religions that tell their followers what not to eat and what clothes to wear, or that goes in for lucky charms. Seems so superstitious. Just saw a show where they were talking about a chapel that was built in a church, but then they razed the church but left the little chapel untouched, and then inside the church they showed us, inside a glass case, the leg bone of Mother Cabrini. What the hell? This is the twenty first century. This is America. This is the Catholic Church, not some zombie institute from the Caribbean.

I did read lately though that there were a lot of Jews living in Rome, and they were pretty cosmopolitan, but they obeyed the dietary laws and hence they could never go over to any gentile house for a meal, and that was where a lot of socializing went on, and so this kind of kept them separate even thought they were neighbors.

I don’t go in for that heritage stuff. We do this because this is what our ancestors did, because generally what we are doing is just what our ancestors did at a certain time, but if you look back further they did something different.

I’ve always been sympathetic with vegetarians. I have that city boy idea that all rabbits are Bugs and all deer are Bambi and all pigs are Porky. It would be nice not to kill them, and it would certainly be a more efficient use of our grain if we just ate it and then fed it to animals. Of course that doesn’t mean we would end up distributing it nicely to all those starving people in the world, and if we didn’t raise them to eat how many cows or chickens would ever see the light of day? But those no cheese or eggs, or leather shoes or belts guys, I have to think they are a little strange.

Those sophisticated Europeans eat horses, and I never saw why we didn’t. Maybe when Obama brings us European style socialism that will come along with it. And those people that the Death Panels give the thumbs down on can be fed polar bear livers.

That anti fur thing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s not like all those anti people are vegetarians. Maybe it’s those traps, they seem so cruel with their sharp steel jaws. You told me the story of trying to skin the raccoon and from that I guess that you don’t do any trapping. Does anybody around you? How does that work? Do people just spread traps around their land and take what they get, or do a few people pay others to put traps on their lands?

I think it’s the coats themselves, that get people against them, they look so soft and furry just like the animals.

Santa, Eating Stuff, and Wearing Furs

When I found out the truth about Santa Claus, it precipitated my first crisis of faith. Not my faith in God or anything like that, my faith in my parents and the other significant adults in my life. Before that I believed everything I was told by the adults I knew. I took what the other kids said with a grain of salt, but I believed what the grown ups said without question. I wasn't mad at my parents for lying about Santa, I knew they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do, but it made me wonder what else they had been lying about. For this reason, we told our daughter the truth about Santa right from the start. We explained that the Santa story was part of our folk culture and, as such, should be respected, and that she shouldn't disillusion the other kids she knew because their parents might have different values than we did, and that should also be respected. It worked out pretty well, our daughter told us decades later that, while she was a little disappointed about missing out on part of the magic of Christmas, she respected us for our honesty and seldom doubted our word about the other things we told her later.

Ever since Biblical times, different cultures have had taboos about eating one thing or another. I've often wondered how much of that was just a cultural thing and how much of it had some nutritional validity, like the Jews with their pork. We now know that eating undercooked pork can give you trichinosis, but I wonder if that was the real reason Moses told his people to not eat the stuff. Some cultures think that it's just fine to eat dogs, cats, monkeys, and even each other, but ours doesn't. They told us in the army that, in a survival situation, you can eat just about anything except polar bear liver. They said that, because polar bears eat seals, and seals eat fish, there is so much vitamin A concentrated in their livers that eating one could be lethal to humans. I read years later that you can get the same effect from eating dog liver if the dog had eaten a lot of fish in it's life. Sled dogs in the arctic used to be fed a lot of fish, and people used to believe that, if you ate too much dog meat, it would make you crazy. Turns out there is some truth to that, especially if you eat just the liver and feed the rest of the dog to the surviving dogs, which is what they used to do in extreme situations. Nowadays, when they run those long distance dog sled races, if a dog gets injured of worn out, they evacuate it by helicopter and leave a bag of dog food in its place. This approximates the historical conditions in a safer and more humane manner.

I'm sure that those coon skin caps were popular in Davy Crocket's day. Walt Disney wouldn't lie about something like that, would he? The wearing of fur clothing must have started out as a practical thing, and only later became a fashion statement. After it became politically incorrect, the American fur business almost died out, but it has recently resurrected itself because of the increased demand from Russia and Red China. Funny, I always thought that political correctness was a commie thing, but those Chinese commies and Russian ex-commies, don't seem to care about it. One of my outdoor magazines runs a monthly feature that analyzes the fur market, both current and predicted. They say that most of the fur produced in the U.S. and Canada goes to Russia and China, and the rise and fall of our fur prices follows the ups and downs of the economic conditions in those two countries. It also helps if they have a hard winter over there, which they did last year, and North American fur prices currently are at record high levels. Go figure!