killing the king with our song

I just used the term king because it's kind of a popular term, down with the king, or kill the king.  There is that Rolling Stone lyric from Street Fighting Man:

And I'll shout and scream
And I'll kill the king and
I'll rail at all his servants

See there we have rock and roll (cool) and rebellion (killing the king) all neatly tied in one package.  In the meantime those stodgy Beatles were singing:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

Well screw them, it sounds like they just want to sit around and talk.

Well that's kind of the way it was in the sixties.  Music was a force.  The bands were like prophets.  When a band came out with a new album we all rushed to buy it to hear what they had to say.  Which was a little strange I thought at the time.  These are just a bunch of guys with guitars, what do they necessarily know about anything?

I exaggerate a bit, but this gives me a chance to get back to cool and rebellion and away from child rearing among the hunter gatherers.

So, rock and roll then.  We know Beagles was no fan, and still isn't to this day.  I guess I first noticed it around 1957.  My sisters had been big fans of Johnny Mathis, those big 33 1/3 albums spun on the turntable morning to night, and then suddenly there was a 45, and there was Elvis.  I didn't like him at first but that was just because my sisters liked him (looking him up in wiki just now I see that he became a sergeant, in a tank battalion when he was in the army.  How about that?), but it wasn't long before I got into the whole thing, got myself one of those new-fangled portable radios and walked up and down 55th and 59th and Kedzie Avenue listening to Dick Biondi. 

As you know, having once tried to explain it to me, I don't know much about music, I don't know the difference between a melody and a rhythm.  I don't know what elements of a song make it blues or country or rock and roll.  Common lore is that rock and roll came out of blues and a bit of country (the country of that time which I guess would be like Hank Williams.  Seems like country has changed quite a bit over the years, what passes as country today is nothing like the country I used to listen to in the middle seventies.). 

Music was kind of segregated then, the whites and blacks had their own music and there weren't that many crossovers.  As today, the whites had most of the money and the blacks had most of the cool.The teenagers of the time, the ones just before the boomers, let's call them the Davy Crockett generation, being attuned to cool the way teenagers are, picked up on the cool of the black music, just beginning to move from blues to rock and roll.

I think we can safely say that that whole sixties political thing came out of the civil rights movement, so there we had it, rebellious white teens race mixing with black kids, to the horror of the establishment. 

How far was that from the Rolling Stones singing about killing the king?  Not that far I allege, and I'll continue my crackpot theory next week.

Without Followers There Would Be No Leaders

Okay, I think I'm starting to understand your "crackpot theory" now, but I still think you're making a mistake using hunter-gatherers as a model because hunter-gatherers didn't have kings. Their leaders were chosen by consensus and, when their followers didn't want to follow them anymore, they would just walk way from them. The leader might say something like, "Follow me and I will lead you to better hunting grounds to the west." Somebody else in the group might say, "I think we would find better hunting if we went east instead." After some discussion, half the group might follow the old leader to the west and half the group might follow the new leader to the east. The half that did indeed find better hunting grounds would have a better chance of survival, so that's where natural selection came into play.

I think I made a mistake myself when I said that the trouble started with the advent of city-states. Now that I think of it, Genghis Khan was a nomadic herdsman, so it's more likely that the first despotic conquerors were nomadic herdsmen. I read a book about Genghis Khan a long time ago, and I seem to remember that he got his start by murdering his brother. Well, he didn't do the job himself, he persuaded his small band of followers to do his dirty work for him. Then he invited his late brother's followers to join his own followers, which they did, and an empire was born. If being cool is what causes people to follow other people and do their bidding, then Genghis Khan must have been one cool dude.

Genghis was eventually elected by a council of other tribal chiefs to be the leader of all the Mongols, but it was kind of a rigged election, sort of like when Octavian got himself elected Augustus Cesar. First he kicked ass all over the place, then he humbly approached the Senate, and suggested that they elect somebody to bring law and order to the land. Some big suck senator nominated Octavian, who reluctantly agreed to accept the position if that's what everybody wanted him to do. All the senators shouted "Hail Cesar!", and another empire was born. Democracy in action, just like at Sawyer School.

Yes I was trying to be funny in my essay, but that's only because it has been my experience that people are more likely to listen to a comedian than a stern lecturer. I do believe that my central premise is sound, however. Children don't grow up anymore, they just become older children. It might not be the only thing wrong with this country, but it certainly is one of our primary problems.

That quote from Socrates was the closest thing I could find to the much better quote I had been looking for unsuccessfully. It's a longer piece that rants about what's wrong with kids nowadays. It sounds like something that could be said today, but it actually comes from the BC years. I thought I remembered that Cicero had said it, but I couldn't find it among his most famous quotes. Then I tried Plato, and then Socrates. I finally got tired of searching and settled for the quote I used. Now that
I think of it, both Socrates and Plato were school teachers by trade. Well, Socrates mostly just sat under a tree and harangued any passerby that would stop and listen to him. It was Plato and Aristotle who ran formal schools for rich people's kids. Damn, why didn't I think of Aristotle? Maybe he's the one who said it. I'll have to look that up one of these days. Whoever said it, he probably wasn't talking about all the Greek kids of his day, only the spoiled rich kids who had the luxury of going to school instead of working for a living. It's like some other famous guy said, "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

kids these days

I really didn't want to get into the youth culture which is just a side issue in what I what I wanted to discuss which was the nature of cool and how it is a driving force, or maybe it is an effect, of the human natural.  The human natural is a phrase I picked up from George Chin the owner of the restaurant where I worked for around ten years.  It's basically just a paraphrase of 'human nature,' but it has a certain ring to my ear. 

In a perfect society there would be no cool.  Well actually there should be no cool, but we are speaking of the human natural here.  I guess that is the problem with those ideal societies, they look pretty good on paper, but when you put people into them they fuck it up.  When I was tending bar in Champaign one of the deans used to talk about how well the university would run if it didn't have any students.

But anyway my crackpot theory is that cool is an outgrowth of a survival mechanism that allows us to kill the king.  Otherwise the king would hog all the stuff and all the wives (like those Mormons in the hills do) and Joe Sixpack would never get to have any progeny so his genes would end right there.  Which would be great for the king but not Joe Sixpack.

But what if we were able to shoehorn people into that perfect society, maybe we could remove their sense of cool, or maybe we could channel it into some video game kind of gizmo.  We would have all these nice people living nice lives being nice to each other and having just the right amount of kids and never coveting their neighbors or lusting after their neighbor's wife, and what would they do for entertainment?  What would their tv shows and movies be like?  No bad guys, no conflicts, just nicey, nicey, nicey.  That doesn't sound like entertainment.  Hardly sounds like a life worth living.  Maybe we should smuggle some philosophers into their nicey nicey society, philosophers always make trouble. 

I think I have seen that essay before.  I think you are mostly trying to be funny.  A lot of people believe that the current youth culture began with Davy Crockett, or more particularly his coonskin cap, of which i am sure I had at least a couple.  They were cooler to look at than to wear, they were hot in the summer and they had no bill to block the sun and that tail kept getting in the way.  But anyway the advertisers realized they could make big bucks peddling stuff to kids who had money from their indulgent parents in the fat post war boom, and it was in their interests to cater to this crowd via the corrosive effects of that new device tv.  Others think it was the automobile because now kids could get away from prying eyes and be up to no good in the automobile. 


I expect it was always around.  Isn't there some quote from like Socrates about how kids are no good these days.  Whenever the conversation wanes among us oldsters it can always be perked right up with the phrase 'How about kids these days?"

The Youth Culture

There's one you could look up on Wiki. It's been awhile since I read it, so I can't guarantee it still says the same things, but it might be a good place to start. Another one that I took a quick look at tonight is "Rite of passage". It's pretty general but, if you start clicking on the highlighted terms, you may find something specific to tribal societies. One book, that I still have somewhere but can't seem to locate at the moment is titled "The Death of the Grown Up", by Dianne or Dianna West. Funny thing is that I had written an essay on the same subject some time previous to reading the book, and the book pretty much reinforced everything I had said in my essay. The book is much more thorough and scholarly, but that's why she is a professional writer and I am not. I sent her a copy of my essay, but I don't remember whether or not she replied. It's been a few years. I'll see if I can find it and attach a copy, tomorrow if not today.

When I said that I was working from memory, I meant memories of stuff I had read over the years, not necessarily memories of stuff that I have actually done. I have always been interested in hunter-gatherers because I am kind of one myself. I'm no professional, you understand, just a hobby hunter-gatherer, but I have read lots of stuff about real hunter-gatherers in my life. The point I was trying to make was that real hunter-gatherers didn't have anything like the modern adolescence we have today. Their period of 12-20 was spent as hunters and/or warriors. By the age of 25 or30, if they lived that long, they became elders in most primitive cultures. Instead of warriors, the women became mothers and, if they lived long enough, grandmothers.

Our modern youth culture came into being around the time we were born. Our parents generation was the first one where most kids went on to high school after eighth grade, and ours was the first generation where a college education became the norm. Before that, most people were working by the time they became teenagers. I never really identified with the youth culture, considering childhood to be a part time job with no future in it. We have discussed this before, so I will go look for that essay before I start repeating myself.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH KIDS NOWADAYS?
by Talks With Beagles

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers."
Socrates (470-399B.C.)

Ever since the days of Socrates the Greek, people have been asking the question: "What’s wrong with kids nowadays?" Of course, if Socrates had driven a school bus, he would have figured out the answer in only seven years like I did. Nevertheless, since history repeats itself, we would have gone through it again in modern times anyway.

The origin of our present difficulty dates back to my parents’ generation. These were the people who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Life was hard and kids had to grow up in a hurry in those days. Many of these people, feeling that they had been deprived of their childhood and resolving that their kids would have a better life, began to institute a child-oriented culture in America.

The first thing they did was make a whole bunch of extra kids that nobody needed, like my little sister. At the same time they were doing this, they invented machines to do all the useful work, so that these extra kids would have nothing productive to do. Then it became necessary to build more schools to store all of these extra kids and keep them off the street so they wouldn’t clog up traffic. To justify all this expensive construction, it became necessary for the kids to spend more time in school. In order to be humane about it, it was decided to make school fun so the kids would be able to tolerate spending more time there. Meanwhile, the parents had to start working overtime to pay for all this, so they had less time to spend with their kids and had to trust the professionals to raise them in collective groups. Whenever people are herded together in groups like this, they have a tendency to bond to each other and form their own internally validating society. To understand why this is a problem, you need to know something about primitive tribal cultures.

In most primitive tribal cultures, the name that the tribe calls itself translates into English as "The Real People". Their neighbors, who live in the mountains, are referred to as "The Mountain People", but the mountain people don’t call themselves "The Mountain People". They call themselves "The Real People" and refer to the other tribe as "The Valley People". This practice is known as "The Illusion of Central Position", and is a natural thing.

The kids of today spend way more time with each other than they do with adults. Time spent in anything like school doesn’t count as time spent with adults, since the kids greatly out number the adults and are obviously the Real People here. It doesn’t matter how good of a teacher or parent you are. Nobody is going to pay attention to you because you are not one of The Real People. I laid this theory out to one of the kids on the bus once and he said, "Well, there are way more kids in the world than there are adults, aren’t there?" Your Honor, I rest my case.

There is an old African proverb that says, "It takes a whole village to raise a child". I think what they meant was a whole village of adults, not a whole village of children raising each other. The problem with kids raising kids is that everybody learns how to be a kid but nobody learns how to be an adult. Nobody wants to grow up anyway because all of The Real People are children. Of course, this doesn’t stop them from having kids of their own and raising them the same way. After several generations of this, the child culture has totally displaced the adult culture and civilization has ground to a halt.

A lot of people nowadays believe that kids should have more discipline in their lives. In my opinion, kids already have way too much discipline in their lives. One of the first things a kid hears when he starts kindergarten is, "Keep your hands to yourself". For the next thirteen years, all kinds of people put all kinds of pressure on him to comply with this rule. When he finally graduates, guess what? He still doesn’t keep his hands to himself. It is human nature to follow the course of least resistance. To remain steadfast against pressure like this takes real discipline. The problem here is not lack of discipline; the problem is that we are not all marching in the same army.

Armies use discipline a lot because it is the only known antidote to mass hysteria. If you were at the Mackinac Bridge Walk and everybody started jumping off the bridge together, that would be mass hysteria. If you had discipline, you could use it to resist the impulse to jump off the bridge with everybody else. On the other hand, if you knew about a bus load of people that was headed to the Mackinac Bridge for the expressed purpose of jumping off, common sense would tell you not to get on the bus in the first place. Discipline is no substitute for common sense.

Many people believe that sports teach kids discipline. As far as I am concerned, the only real sports are hunting and fishing; everything else is just a game. The only thing I know about games is what I’ve seen on television. First a bunch of people get all sweaty by running around and crashing into each other. This inspires the audience to scream and holler and jump up and down. After the game, everybody goes downtown and stages a street riot. This is not discipline, folks, this is organized mass hysteria.

I don’t know if hunting and fishing teach discipline or not, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t have mass hysteria when you are out in the woods all by yourself. Some say that, if you stay out there too long, it makes you funny in the head, but I have never had a problem with this.

The reason I know so much about discipline and mass hysteria is that, when I was in the Army, our unit specialized in riot control tactics. We never did a real riot, but we practiced a lot. We were so good at it, that once a year, we put on a demonstration for visiting dignitaries from America and all the NATO countries. One year I was part of the riot, and the next year I was part of the riot control. Little did I know, at the time, that this experience would be so valuable to me in my later employment as a school bus driver. When I first started this job, I thought that these kids either were on drugs or needed to be on drugs. While there may be a certain amount of truth to that presumption, there is more to the problem than that.

Did you ever wonder why you get drunk faster when you drink in a bar or at a party than you do when you drink at home alone? This is because there is something in human nature that causes people to become energized and excited when they do something together as a group. This is useful when you are trying to kill a hairy elephant, build a pyramid, or win a war; but it can be down right dangerous when it is all dressed up with no place to go.

People who are instinctively trying to bond together as a group need something in common. The one thing that everybody knows how to do is to act stupid. To insure that everybody qualifies for membership, we all model our behavior on the stupidest acting person in the group. This is known as "The Lowest Common Denominator Effect".

In summation; what's wrong with kids nowadays is that there are too many of them, they spend too much time together in groups, and they have nothing productive to do. Most people alive today don't remember living under any other kind of system, so they think that what we have now is just fine. Sooner or later, people will get tired of this, like they do everything else. When this comes to pass, here is what we need to do to fix the problem:

The first thing we need to do is stop making kids faster than we can assimilate them. Way back when I was a kid, some experts were concerned about over population in the world and they told us all to have 2.3 children. I think what they meant was 2.3 children in your whole life, not 2.3 children with each partner.

Now, my generation wrote the book on The Sexual Revolution way back in the 1960’s, and I’m sure that I was just as revolting as anyone in those days. The way I remember it is that you are supposed to use birth control until you are ready to settle down and raise kids properly. Of course, some people still don’t believe in birth control, but they don’t believe in The Sexual Revolution either, so they are not part of this problem.

The next thing we need to do is find some kind of productive work for these kids. In the olden days, children worked like slaves and laws had to be passed to stop this practice. Nowadays, both parents are working two jobs and the kids are bored because there is nothing to do in this town. Somewhere between these two extremes there must be a happy medium.

I started working with my parents in the family business at the age of seven. Now, I didn’t work very hard, I didn’t work long hours, and I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was my own money, and I could spend it without asking permission from anybody. At the age of fourteen, I bought a canoe, not a toy canoe, a real canoe. How many fourteen year olds do you know today that can paddle their own canoe?

The next thing we need to do is start including these kids in our adult activities; one at a time, not in groups. The kids should never out number the adults in any given situation.

When I was ten years old, my father bought me a shotgun for Christmas and started taking me hunting with him. Not long after that, I gave away all of my toy guns. I didn’t totally stop playing with the other kids, but it became a low priority on my agenda. Nowadays everybody is worried about keeping guns out of the hands of children. Well, that’s how I got my start, and look at how good I turned out!

Many people will argue that adult activities are not suitable for children. Are they then suitable for adults who act like children? Because that is the only kind of adults we are going to have in this country until we can start getting kids to grow up again. TWB

rebels are too cool for school

That's not from memory, that's from some book you read or some other source it sounds like you picked up some years ago.  If you had read a different book or material, you might have said something different.  That's why it's so important to know where you got your information.  Myself I got my information from a book that has powerfully influenced my thinking, The Nurture Assumption by Judy Harris, though I admit that I haven't taken the time to look up where in the book it presents this information about young tribal messages.

Or you could do what we usually do which is go to the wiki.  It would take some mucking around because it's kind of a complex thing to look up, not a name, but a sentence, something like 'child rearing in hunter gatherer societies.'  There, I could copy and paste that right now, but like you, I am presently pressed for time.  I have two things on my agenda for today, and you know, as a retiree, that makes for a very packed day.

But having said all that, I agree essentially with what you said and i don't think it's much different from what I have been saying.  The important part of that is how kids have that adolescent period (12 to 20 sound like good bracketing years, though it could begin a little earlier or later and likewise end earlier or later.), where kids' society consists mostly of other kids and where cool reigns supreme.  One could observe it by just looking at the people around them, or go back to their own memories.

Except maybe Beagles can't.  He seems to be a guy who is immune from cool, who has to ask what it is and therefore can never understand what it is. You were in ROTC for Chrissake, I don't think anything, including the slide rule club, was uncooler than ROTC.  But you did seem to sense that something was going on, you certainly sensed that the girls liked the cool guys, or maybe it was that the girls who liked the cool guys were more, ahem, accessible than the other girls.  You have made some mention about your forays into the world of cool to get girls, but you haven't given many details about them and I gather that they weren't very successful.

But maybe i was worse because I spent way more time trying to be cool than you did, and I had no success whatsoever, I believe I had five dates, none of which were consummated by a kiss goodnight.

I did plug that phrase":'child rearing in hunter gatherer societies.'  into the google machine, but it was all like advice on how to raise babies, and the idea was generally to raise them like the hunter gatherers did, who they basically viewed as noble savages and had their own claims as to how the hunter gatherers did it, which they interpreted to enforce their own theories about raising kids. 

That's the trouble with the internet, you use it to find information but then you are greeted by a bunch of salesmen.  And the whole idea that our forebears did things in some natural way that we should emulate is so much crap.  They may have been noble (which I wouldn't bet the farm on), but they were also savages.

Okay I was going to go on about cool a little more here, but the hour is getting late, so I'm just going to make a little comment.  How about in most of our movies and our literature the guy we root for is the rebel and never the authority figure, and even when the hero is a cop, he is a rebel cop?  Because that's what's cool, a little bit of rebellion.

That's Not How I Remember It

Here I go again, working from memory but, if I take the time to look it up, I won't have time to write about it tonight. If you want, I'll see what I can find on Wiki about it this weekend.

Tribal people generally have three phases in their lives: The first phase is childhood, which usually lasts till about age 12. The second phase is usually called something like "warrior, hunter, or brave". That's just for the boys, the girls' equivalent is "wife and mother". The third phase is called "elder" or, for the women, "grandmother". Each transition to the next phase is accompanied by certain rites of passage, which may vary from tribe to tribe, but there are some commonalities among cultures. I have never heard of a tribe that allows their kids to just hang out with their friends until they think they are ready to become adults......except ours.

When boys are ready to become braves, they are taken out of the village in groups under adult supervision. I have never heard of boys being allowed to raise themselves. They may camp out for months, but I don't think it's ever more than a year. During this time they are instructed in the ways of the tribe, and the new role they will be playing in it when they return. There are also certain physical trials that they have to endure. These trials generally involve some form of pain, deprivation, and/or mutilation, not enough to cause serious damage to the body, just enough to toughen the kid up and mark him as a warrior. It is believed that the Jewish custom of circumcision may have originated this way. The Egyptians practiced it before the Jews, and I understand there are African tribes that still do it. Often the kids are sent individually on a vision quest. This involves staying out in the wilderness alone, often without eating, until you have a dream or vision. They called it a "medicine dream", although modern non-believers might call it a "hallucination". The vision often takes the form of an animal, in which case it will become the brave's totem animal or spirit guide.

The transition from brave to elder has its own rites of passage, but I'm not all that familiar with them. I'm not sure what the females do either, except that it involves marriage and childbearing. A few African tribes still practice something called "female circumcision", which is a cruel procedure that is nothing like regular male circumcision, but let's not go there tonight.

Tribal leaders are usually chosen by consensus. There may be some kind of formal election process but, more often than not, people just drift away from one leader and start following another. I think leaders are judged by their results. A shaman might be able to influence people with his hocus pocus but, if he can't lead them to good hunting and gathering grounds and protect them from illness, famine, and their avaricious neighbors, he will lose whatever influence he has gained and the people will find somebody else to follow. I don't think many primitive leaders could hold onto their jobs by brute force, that came along much later, about the time people started building city-states. If a hunter-gatherer didn't like what was going on in his tribe, he could move a couple miles down the river and start his own tribe. The trouble began when there started being more tribes than there was river.

Sometmes the bull goose loony is cool.

Cool is not obeying society's mores, it is breaking society's mores.  Well not necessarily breaking them, but looking at them askance, mocking them if you will.  That's what I am talking about.  I am not sure exactly what you meant by social crap so i am going with something I call cool, but I'm not sure if I can define it.  Elvis Presley is cool; Pat Boone is not.  A sports car is cool; the family sedan is not.  Sarcasm is cool; good natured fun is not.

Customs vary across cultures, though I think you will find that they have more in common than in differences, but I am going to claim that cool is a constant, since it is the mocking of customs.

Again with the cannibals.  Well I guess you just always go with them as an example of people who are not like us everyday Americans, but as long as we are speaking of them, and knowing nothing about them, I will say that it's not necessarily cool for a cannibal to eat somebody.  All cannibals eat somebody, so it's just the normal thing to do, nothing special about it.  The cool cannibal would maybe wield his fork a little differently, and I think he would probably mock eating people a little.  The cool person is a little different and he has that mocking thing going.  But that's not enough, coolness is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders have to think he's cool and why they find one person cool and another not cool is a question I am going to dodge for right now.

We descend from hunter gatherers.  Studies of current day hunter gatherers reveal that the young kids are kept close to their parents but once they approach adolescence they move into the kids' group where they remain for a few years until they become adults with families of their own.  See it's kind of like high school, I am going to put it at roughly from fifth grade through high school, maybe college, it's the age when your parents are not very important anymore, nor really are any adults, what's mostly important is other kids. 

And kids you know, they are not really part of society.  They don't get no respect.  They are too young to have much experience at anything or to know very much, and by their nature irresponsible, and frankly they think the old tried and true ways are stodgy, and they tend to make fun of them.  They are cool.  This is the age where cool is strongest as a motivator, as the kids get older and mate and have kids and accept responsibilities they will be more accepting of the stodgy old ways, but cool will still be a force, more for some than for others.

Rules are supposed to be there for a reason, spoken like a stodgy old man.  Sez who?  Well there is a reason for everything, some clowns put it there maybe.  You admit that it might be a bad rule, but then it sounds like you are saying that it should be obeyed until it is taken off the books, which sounds pretty stodgy.

I am not saying the tribe should pick the coolest guy for their leader, the cool is just to get them rebellious so that they choose a leader who treats them better than their current one.  If everybody followed the leader without a whimper the leader would take advantage of that and take all the goods and wives for himself and that tribe would be weak and would fall to another stronger tribe where the chief could be deposed if the tribe didn't think he was a good leader.  The genes of the obedient tribe would whither and the genes of the rebellious tribe would prosper and that's why we have them in our jeans today and why coolness is a force among us.

Not that cool is necessarily a good thing.  I do think Trump is bull goose looney.  Throwing the bums out is certainly a cool message.  Actually they all say that to some extent, as politicians have always done.  My man Bern is a little more specific about who the bums are. Lyin' Ted seems to think they are godless atheists which makes us godless atheists nervous, as well as those among us who are not but can tell that Lyin' Ted thinks they are.  Kindly Uncle Johnny, takes a softer line to throwing the bums out, which frankly, is why he has only won one state.

But there is something more to the cool of Trump than his throw the bums out message, there is also the way he talks.  He talks like a regular person, well if that person is a big fucking asshole, but then there are plenty of big fucking assholes among us.  There are really not all that many politicians.  You can spot them right away.  They don't talk like us, they are like on a five second delay.  When we shoot off our mouths we shoot off our mouths and sometimes we are as surprised as our listeners at what comes out.  When a politician shoots off his mouth, his words pass first through a little filter that smooths them out, makes them a little less offensive, maybe like we do when we are on a job interview. 

But Trump doesn't have that five second delay, he's not a politician.  And who got us in the mess we are in today, (and we are always in some kind of mess) politicians?  So let's elect someone who is not like them, let's elect somebody who is cool. 


I'm not going to blame the media for the bathroom thing.  The media picks up on what people are saying and goes with that, and my ilk likes to be on a crusade, and your ilk sees some threat everywhere they look.  Lyin' Ted is beating the drums on this because he thinks he can make some hay on it, but so far it hasn't gotten much traction.

Mox Nix

"Mox nix" is an old army term that was derived from the German phrase "macht nichts", which translates literally as "makes nothing". We used it to describe something that was not important to us personally or collectively. A mox nix rule was one that was not usually enforced and thus could be violated with impunity. A mox nix field exercise was one that was not being graded by anybody, we were just doing it for practice. If we blew off a task or did it half heartedly, we would say that we mox nixed it. I can't think of any better way to describe coolness, except maybe "social crap". It's obviously important to some people, but not to me.

Coolness is a cultural thing, and it's not the same in all cultures. It's cool for a cannibal to eat people, but not for an American. Each culture thinks it's the primary one, with all the other cultures being peripheral. If I was trying to gain acceptance into a certain culture, I would try to be cool by their standards. If their standards conflicted with my standards I would not be seeking acceptance from them in the first place. Children are not born with cultural standards, they pick them up from the culture of their parents at first, and then from their ever widening circle of social contacts. When the standards of a new contact conflict with the standards to which the child has been accustomed, he must decide which way he wants to go, or he might be able to straddle the fence, depending on how important gaining acceptance from the new contact is to him. By the time the child has reached our age, he might become a crotchety old man who no longer cares about being accepted by any culture, including the one he was born into, it's all mox nix to him. I want to be just like that when I grow up.

Rules are supposed to be there for a reason. If a particular rule becomes ineffective, it should be altered or abolished. Keeping it on the books and not enforcing it just breeds disrespect for rules in general. Leaders are like rules in that way, they have a job to do. If they become ineffective, or if somebody else demonstrates the ability to do the job more effectively, then it's time to change leaders. Changing leaders for frivolous reasons is a recipe for disaster. Being cool will not defeat an enemy raiding party or put a hairy elephant in the tribal freezer, it takes skill to do that. I guess the leader needs to be a little cool to get people to follow him, but a tribe that chooses its leaders for coolness alone is going down the evolutionary drain.

It's not surprising that you think Sanders is cool, but I am surprised to hear you say that Trump is cool, I thought you believed him to be "bull goose loony". Would you care to elaborate on that?

It sounds like this whole bathroom wars thing is a tempest in a teapot. Maybe, after more than a year of cramming that election crap down our throats, the news media thinks we should have some variety in our diet. It may be true that public bathrooms bring out the worst in people, especially young people. I suppose, like you said, it's because they think being in a bathroom puts them out of reach of the long arm of authority. Then again, maybe there just are a lot of freaks and weirdos in the world. And you wonder why a guy wants to live in the swamp!

the advantage of cool

I know that you are not a fan of cool.  You like systems and rules and cool is not only outside of that, it is even against them.  I'm sure you can see it, the way sometimes somebody enters a room and nobody notices, but then somebody else enters and heads turn.  It's there, but it's impossible to define.  If you analyzed it and come up with a lot of rules and somebody followed them to a T, as soon as somebody realized that they were following rules they would be revealed as a dork.  Following rules is dorky, breaking rules is cool. 

Not all rules, you kind of have to know which ones and certainly this is a situation where if you have to ask, you can never know.  The cool guy just knows instinctively what to do, he never has to think of what would be the right (or in this case wrong, not wrong call it bad, as in badass) thing to do or say.

Trump is undoubtedly the coolest man running, Sanders is a distant second, the rest of them are complete dorks, probably the big girl is the biggest dork of them all.  There is something evil in Lyin' Ted that gives him a little aura of cool, but when he speaks in that whiny preachy voice the cool melts away.  Uncle Johnny Ohio is like one of those old timey late night talk show second bananas, a certain element of the population might find him cool, but that element is all dorks.

We've spoken of the selfish gene before.  It has its roots in a field called environmental biology/psychology, which takes the attitude that we are the survivors of four billion, or in the case of the human natural, about a hundred thousand years of evolution, of the survival of the fittest, so it's only logical that any quirks we have, we must have them for a reason, they must have somehow helped make us fitter or else we wouldn't still have them.

So that's where I think cool comes in.  It's good for a tribe to have a ruler, it keeps it organized and whatever, a tribe with a leader does better than just a bunch of guys hanging around.  To get a leader the members of the tribe have to give up some of their freedom, which is a good deal because what they make up for it in successful raids is probably worth it.

But power corrupts right?  It helps the leader to have successful raids, but it helps him even more to take first picks of the goods of the raids and of the women.  At this point it's no longer in the interest of the tribesmen to have this particular leader. 

So what I think happens is the chief is giving one of his long winded speeches and one of the tribesmen, who by the way, is not wearing the feathers in his cap in exactly the way the chief requires them to be worn, makes some little joke at the leader's expense.  The chief, full of himself, doesn't notice, but the other tribesmen do.  Hey, they begin to think, that guy is cool, and the downfall of the chief is just around the corner.


What I meant about bathroom problems with the kids as a sub was loss of control of the class.  Maybe through herculean efforts on my part I had soothed the savage beasts and they were writing something on paper or maybe i was speaking about something, but all was well in my world, and then the time would come for their bathroom break.  I had to line them up somehow and march them through the halls in semi military order.  Those halls were just drab locker-lined passageways but the sweet wind of freedom blew strongly through them and went straight to the brains of the savage beasts.

Once we got to the bathroom I would allow the first four or five in and then others in as they left, which was sometimes hard to keep track of, and once they were in there they were out of the eyes of the despotic teacher and they could do whatever they wanted and stay in there as long as they wanted. 

Then there were the girls, sometimes the girls' room was by the boy's and you could sort of watch them both, but sometimes it was around the corner.  But they were girls.  Usually you could appoint one or two of the more responsible girls to oversee the operation and they would be ok, but not always, and if things went awry you couldn't charge into the room and yank them out like you could with the boys. 


That LBTTQ bathroom thing is not really an urban thing, it is more of a wealthy suburban thing.  There were surely kids in my sub classes and on your bus and in the halls of Gage and Tonti and Sawyer who thought they were really of the opposite sex and wanted to dress like it and act like it, but they knew that they could never get away with it in their current environment.   The ones we hear about are the kids of the wealthy and indulgent, and maybe that's good, but there aren't that many of them and the whole thing is not that big a deal either way.

I Was a Teenage Squarewolf

You must know, after our years of correspondence, that I wasn't anything like that when I was a kid. Funny, though, I had plenty of friends and I was reasonably happy. Of course I was anxious to grow up and get out of that town, but I think I tried to make the most of it while I was there. All that stuff you call "cool" was something that other kids did, and I had no desire to be like them. The only thing I envied about them was their sex life, but I couldn't have that without buying into their whole program, and I thought that their price was too high. I found out years later that their sex life was mostly imaginary anyway, so I don't think I missed much.

Speaking of sex lives, I find it hard to believe that there are significant numbers of kids that look, dress, and act like the opposite sex. I didn't see anything like that in ten years of school bus driving. I saw lots of goofy acting kids, but not like that. When I saw that bit about it on the TV news, they interviewed one of our local principals (I think it was Traverse City), and he said that they didn't have any LGBTQ kids in his school but, if they ever did, he would deal with it when the time came. For some reason, though, our state school board thought it was an important issue that needed to be addressed. Maybe it's an urban thing.

You said something about having lots of bathroom problems in the elementary schools where you subbed. What kind of problems? The only thing I remember from Sawyer was that there was never any toilet paper or paper towels in the boys' bathrooms. After a couple kids shit their pants in first grade, our teacher started keeping a roll in the classroom for emergencies. I carried my own for awhile, but then I guess my guts got used to not shitting in school, and I don't remember it being a problem after that.

Shortly before graduation, our principal came to our eighth grade class and asked us if we had any suggestions about improving the Sawyer experience for future generations. I told him that it would be nice to have toilet paper and paper towels in the bathrooms, and he was surprised to hear that there wasn't. The girls said that they had those products in their bathrooms, and maybe some other products that we didn't need to know about, so it was only the boys' bathrooms that were lacking. The principal said that he signed a requisition every month for supplies like that, and he wondered where all those paper products were going, so he sent for the janitor and asked him about it right in front of the class. The janitor explained that, if he put those products in the boys' bathrooms, the boys would just use them to make a big mess, so he only put them in the girls'. The principal then asked him what he did with those products that he didn't put in the boys', and the janitor said that he took them home so they wouldn't go to waste. At this point the principal told the janitor to return to his duties, and that he would talk to him about this later. Looking back on it now, it seems hard to believe that something like that could go on for eight years before somebody said something about it, but it did. I never said anything before that because I assumed everybody knew about it and that was just the way it was.

Then there was Pissing George, who could knock a fly off the wall from eight feet away. The boys' bathrooms at Sawyer had two banks of urinals facing each other with a divider between them. George would piss right over the divider and rain down on the boys on the other side, who couldn't tell who was doing it because they were too short to see over the divider. Somebody must have caught him eventually because he stopped doing it, but I didn't learn his identity until years later. One evening I observed my friend George pissing outdoors and commented that I had never before seen anybody piss that far. He said that he didn't know how he did it, it just came naturally to him. George then confided that he had been the Pissing Bandit of Sawyer School some years previous. George was a strange boy, that's for sure, but at least he never tried to change himself into a girl. Such a thing was unheard of in those days and, as far as I'm concerned, it still should be.

And they called it (pause) Rock and Roll

I think high school is the epitome of cool.  Before grade school it's your family, and during the first few years of grade school the teacher is cool.  The teacher, imagine?  But then there comes a time, around fifth grade in my substitute teacher experience, when things change. 

When kids first begin school everything is wonderful.  The kids all like each other (well generally), they like the teacher, what they are learning is interesting and fun, and everybody tells them their work is great and they think it is.  When the little kids were drawing things, and they were close to being done, and I wanted to stretch things out so that we could make it to lunchtime without having to figure out something else for them to do, I would ask the nearest artist (some were pretty good and some were terrible) if I could show their painting to the rest of the class.  I'd hold it up and say, "Hey kids isn't this great?" and they would all ooh and aah, yes it was, and they'd all be raising their hands, show mine next, because they knew that their drawings were great too.

Around fifth grade the kid has been around the block enough times to know that his drawing is not all that great, it looks nothing like a horse, and look at Judy's drawing, that looks much better.  Some kids draw better than other kids, and now that the kid thinks about it some kids are smarter than other kids.  Some of the kids will end up asking the other kids if they want fries with that.  I think maybe this is the end of innocence that is talked about so much.

Along with that loss of innocence comes the realization that they are in a dictatorship.  Who put these teachers in charge?  None of the kids ever signed a stinking social contract.  And they are beginning to suspect that the teacher, like their parents, doesn't know everything.

Rebellion is in the air, cool is in the air.  There is an element of rebellion in cool.  Elvis was cool.  Pat Boone was not.  There is an element in the human natural that resents authority.  Mostly they go along with authority because they want to get ahead and they don't want to get in trouble, but they resent it and they kind of admire someone who stands up to it, that cock of the head, that curl of the lip, that defiant attitude. Look at the way Judy is looking at him, look at those jeans he is wearing.  I wonder if I can get my mom to buy me some like that.

Elvis wasn't really much of a rebel.  He was always polite, he was ruled by the Colonel.  When Uncle Sam called he went without a murmur and sat quietly in the barber's chair while girls across the nation wept and wailed. 

I guess it was the music.  I guess it was that (pause) Rock and Roll.  God, how straight-laced we were then, swiveled hips how shocking, hair falling across his forehead, give that man a comb.  The lyrics were basically just love songs, but maybe a little harder, rawer, maybe a little (long pause) black.

That's the rock and roll story, the white kids listening to the black kids' music, wanting to dance to it, wanting to mix races.

That got the establishment all upset, got the tongues of the politicians and the preachers wagging, and that had a lot to do with making Elvis popular.  And like a lot of people said, Sam Phillips among them I believe, here was a white guy singing black music so it was safe enough the kids could go for it.

Why blacks?  What was so cool about them?  They didn't even have any money.  Remember earlier I said that money trumps cool?  Well it does, but when you don't have any money all you have is cool, so you work on it and you perfect it, and the black cool was so much cooler than the white cool.


That's all for today.  I have stretched things to fit into the narrative, it's not quite logically correct, but close enough i think.

That bathroom thing,  It's not guys declaring something so they can hang out in the girls' locker room.  It's guys who dress and act like and think they are girls, and of course the parents are aware of it and they are the ones pushing for their boygirls to be able to go into the girl's washroom, or maybe have one of their own, it gets complicated.  I just wanted to clear up some points before i left for my madcap weekend.

Social Crap and Bathroom Wars

The more I think about it, the social crap is a system unto itself that runs parallel to the official structure. You can have an official hierarchy and a social hierarchy, and official class division and a social class division. These two systems sometimes overlap, but they often operate independently of each other.

Like so many other words, "class" may be defined in more than one way. The way I was using it has nothing to do with politics or philosophy, it just means the division of a population into two or more groups with a distinct line drawn between them. Although there are sub groups, school populations are divided into two main classes, the kids and the adults. In the military you have the officers and the enlisted men. In the corporate work place you have the hourly and the management. Although I would prefer a classless world, I can live with official class designations like these because they are based on some practical consideration that is meant to enhance the efficiency of the operation. Come to think of it, though, these official class systems are intertwined with social crap, and I'm not sure which came first, the official or the social. Nevertheless, as long as the primary function of a system is to enhance the operation, I will go along with it but, when the social crap becomes a thing unto itself that overshadows the practical purpose of the system, I will protest.

Then there is your generic social crap that has nothing to do with the function of the operation. This is where the "cool" factor come into play. I suppose there's nothing wrong with this unless it causes material harm to either the participants or the operation, but it is, after all, a diversion, something we do in our spare time. In all cases, the job should come first. This is what I meant when I said that many people put their social crap ahead of their job which, in my opinion, they shouldn't do.

I saw something in the paper today about those bathroom wars. (Yes, we have re-subscribed to the Cheboygan Daily Tribune, after this nice lady promised to go into her computer and fix it so we won't be charged for stuff we didn't order. According to her, the official policy can't be changed, but she can opt us out of it somehow. Not the way I prefer to operate, but it's better than nothing.) Anyway, it seems that these kids who are changing genders in school are not having sex change operations, they are merely declaring that they have changed genders, and everybody is supposed to go along with it. I can see where some boys might have fun with this by declaring themselves to be girls just so they can hang out in the girls' locker room. Back in our day, no girl would ever consider doing something like that, but they're equal now, so why not? Another thing is that, when a kid comes out like this, the parents are not to be notified because that would be an invasion of the child's privacy. As a wise old philosopher once said, "Every time you think you've seen it all, you find out that you ain't seen nothing yet."

what's cool

Let's start with the three forces you claim rule school the army and corporations, to wit: hierarchy, classicism, and social crap.  I think the big thing about hierarchy is that it is written down, it's like one of those charts where the top man is in a box on the top and there are lines going down from him to the boxes of guys he is in command of, and lines going down from those, and so on and so on and doobie doobie do on. 

Sorry that last part comes from Everyday People, a song of the sixties, hijacked now as are all those great paeans to the equality of man and to peace and to love, put now into the service of peddling some stupid fucking pill which if you watch the commercial to the end a fast soft voice warns you that it may cause madness and a long and lingering and painful death.

Anyway the hierarchical chart is clear as a bell, you know who you are above and who you are beneath.  It's the kind of thing that Beagles likes, he likes chains of commands and procedures to be followed.  He doesn't like breaking rules.  If that teacher had said no jeans and that's it, he would have been fine with it, but she said the students could decide and then she overruled their decision, violating her own procedures, a contradiction in the logical chain of command, that many years later had Beagles heading north to Alaska. 

Myself I am not such a stickler for rules, they are only so many words, they are written by mortal and fallible man and they are often at variance with what is really going on.  If you want to know what is going on you can look to the constitution, but it's more informative to look at who is occupying the congress the presidency and the supreme court.

Classism has a distinct definition in Marxism and postmodern philosophy, if the latter can even claim the exalted mantle of philosophy, which I don't think it can, but this is my second digression and it is almost sunrise so I'll move along.  Hard to figure exactly what Beagles means by it, but I think he means something close to family and money.  If you are the son of a famous or rich family then you are upper class, and have various social advantages just because.

Social crap appears to mean cool and that is the toughest one.  Where does it come from?  Let's go back to high school.  You may be the class president, and you may be from a prominent and rich family, you may be good-looking, athletic, or smart, but none of these are enough to make you cool.  It's just something, the way you walk, the way you talk, other kids can see it right away.  You show up in a flannel shirt and the next day all the kids are wearing flannel shirts, just the way it is.

They've done studies, advertising agencies have done studies, as to what makes a kid cool, mainly so that they could harness this innate and elusive property to selling their flannel shirts.  If they could harness this power they could become rich and rich is the only thing that trumps cool. 

They observed, they isolated, they distributed questionnaires.  Now that I think about it, I read the article twenty years ago, maybe thirty, it's all the same at our age huh?  I wonder what came of it.  I have always kind of assumed nothing, but now that I think of it, look at the clothing industry.  Maybe in our day a certain kind of shirt was cool, you know i particularly remember that thin silver belts were all the rage when I was starting high school, but it didn't matter who made them, as long as they were thin and silver.

But maybe they admen have conquered cool because now the company that makes clothes is what's cool, it doesn't matter what they make, the fact that they make it is what makes it cool.  They put their name on a t shirt and the t shirt becomes cool just because it has their name.

I think.  What would i know about it?  The thing was, these advertising companies who did that study twenty or thirty years ago that I wrote about, what they wanted to do was find the cool kids and pay them to wear their clothes.  But I think if the other kids found out that the cool kids were taking money to wear certain clothes, they would instantly become uncool.

I think there is something inherently uncontrollable about cool.  There are no procedures you can follow that will guarantee that you will be cool.  If you have to ask how to do it, you can never do it.

People Are the Problem

I don't know about college, having never attended one. When I say "school", I mean elementary and high school. Nowadays they also have middle school, which used to called junior high, but I have no reason to believe it's any different there.

School, the military, and large corporations all have three things in common. They are hierarchal, classist, and they are full of people who care more about their social crap than they do about their jobs. I don't have a problem with the hierarchal part, as long as it's based on the job and not some social crap. I have never liked the concept of class, but I can live with it if it's based on some practical consideration instead of some social crap. In school it makes sense that the teachers and the students be in two different classes because the teachers are older and know more than the kids, which is why they are teachers in the first place. Military classism is based on tradition more than anything else. The officer class evolved from the days of old when knights were bold. The knights were professional soldiers that rode horses, while the peons carried their spears on foot. Incidentally, that's why they call minor players in a theatrical production "spear carriers", but I digress. The Great White Father in Cincinnati tried for years to break down the class system in our paper mill, with limited success. He efforts were resisted by the hourly as well as by the lower and middle managers. I think classism is programmed into human nature, it can be deprogrammed, but it's not easy.

Then there's the social crap. It's not enough to have more skill and experience than the average guy, you have to be cool to be a social leader. I asked a kid on my school but once what it takes to be considered cool. He thought about it for a moment and replied, "If you have to ask, then you probably wouldn't understand it." I have heard it said that life is not fair and I disagree. Life, be it school life, military life, or corporate life is fair, at least on paper, it's the people that aren't fair. All organizational structures have a certain amount of fairness programmed into them, but people are always trying to subvert, circumvent, and manipulate the system to their own advantage. Funny thing is, the fairness that is built into the system was put there by people too, but apparently not the same people.

The thing I saw on TV about the bathroom wars said that the Michigan State Board of Education has published non-compulsory guidelines about how schools should deal with LGBTQ students. I thought the "Q" stood for "queer" but, come to find out, it stands for "questioning". I think this means that, if a kid has any doubts about his gender, you have to cater to him just as much as if he was diagnosed by a physician to be a true hermaphrodite. True hermaphrodites are exceedingly rare, but a lot of kids might entertain doubts about their gender at some point in their lives, and that number can only increase with all this publicity. I think we should be trying to help them resolve those doubts, not cater to them, but that's just me.

A for boycotts, I've got nothing against them, as long as they're voluntary. If the Beaglsonian Institute was going to hold a convention, and the vast majority of the multitude of members voted to not have it in North Carolina, then so be it. If you don't like it, don't go to the convention. If you really don't like it, quit the Institute, start one of your own, and hold your convention anywhere you want.

don't stand too close to my urinal

College was a strange little interlude as I was writing to a friend yesterday. 

You know I had a vision a few months ago.  I was listening to a Natalie Merchant song and she was on an airplane and she happened to notice that the woman across the aisle had some old letter with her, and then it's revealed that it's postmarked Saigon, and here the music rises with a clang.  The song goes on and it has something to do with visiting the wall and probably the futility of war, but I am already set to thinking.

The names of those places in Vietnam, Saigon, Khe San, Ho Chin, how faraway, how exotic, how strange on the evening news.  These were the places that you ended up if you were a bad boy, if you didn't keep up with your studies.  We were living in a little bubble of nickle beer nights and love me, love me not, something between high school and the pretty good job and the pretty good house with the pretty good girl, but the nickle beer and the babes were distracting from your studies and before you knew it that final would be coming up and you could flunk it and end up in the mud of Vietnam.

I was thinking about some guy who maybe had a girlfriend, who was not a bad girl at all, but just feckless, and maybe dropping him for some more attractive guy, like buying a new pair of shoes, and the guy goes on a bender, flunks a final, loses his 2-S, and before he knows it there he is, in the jungle, in some bunker, in the dark, and all around him there are Viet Cong, or somebody has told him because he can't see anything, and all he can think of is she put me here, and he imagines the Viet Cong all looking like her, with her fancy blonde hairdo and wearing one of those little plaid skirts with the big safety pin that were all the rage, hauling military hardware through the mud, encircling him, coming to finish him off.

You know some of us college students were antiwar people but some of us were just Joe Sixpacks who didn't think much about whether the war was right or not, but they wanted to stay in the land of nickel beer nights and fancy blonde hairdos and short skirts. 

There was another thing about school that was nicer than the real world.  If you worked hard at it you would probably get good grades and do well, unlike the real world where maybe you worked hard but maybe the new boss didn't like you or the company went down the tubes and you would be out on the street, whereas some freeloader, the kind of a guy who barely earned a C, might luck into some dream job.  The school world is just more in your control, things are fairer.  I wonder if the same was true for the army with its rigid hierarchy. 


We certainly didn't have anything like it in Gage Park or Tonti or Sawyer, but apparently nowadays there are little boys who think they are actually little girls and vice versa.  It seems a little strange to me, i have never gone along with this girl in a boy's body and vice versa, but I'm a good liberal, if that's what they want to do, it's no skin off my back.

But then there is the problem of bathrooms (let me tell you as a substitute teacher there is a big problem with bathrooms in grade school, but like you say, that is a whole nother story).  Which bathroom does the boy who dresses like a girl and his counterpart go to?  Sometimes they want to have a special bathroom for these kids, but then do they need two, one for boygirls and one for girlboys?  And some think having separate bathrooms is discriminatory. 

It's a big deal.  Sometimes I think my ilk won the war for gay rights too easily and now the momentum is taking them into this transgender stuff, not that I don't think the little boygirls and girlboys don't have their rights and all, but it just seems like they are making too big a deal out of it.

These North Carolina laws are a reaction to that.  You have to go to the bathroom your driver's license says you should, but these kids are too young to have driver's licenses, and do we need a law for this?  Has there been an epidemic of men going to women's bathrooms and women to men's?  And even if there was women have those stalls and I don't think we men care as long as the person doesn't take the urinal right next to us, right fucking next to us, when there is an open urinal right over there.

And my ilk is all outraged over these laws and that's why they are kind of boycotting North Carolina, and I'm kind of ambivalent over boycotts because there is sort of a mob psychology behind them.

It's the Same, Only Different

When I was in the army, we called civilian life "The World", as if the army wasn't part of the real world. It seemed that way because most of us hadn't had all that much experience in the real world before we went into the army. I never thought of school as part of the real world either, and the army was like school in some ways. I didn't think that working a real job was like either school or the army, but that's because I never worked for a large corporation like Procter & Gamble until after I got out of the army. P&G wasn't exactly like the army, nothing is, but it wasn't as different as you might think. They didn't have the drill and ceremonies of the army, but they certainly had a chain of command, and the rules under which it operated were almost exactly the same.

One difference was that we had a union grievance procedure that was supposed to help you when you went over your boss's head, but that was frequently less effective than just doing it yourself. Another difference was that they seldom gave us direct orders at the paper mill. They preferred the manipulative style of management, and would only go authoritarian on you as a last resort. I think they got points if they could con you into doing something, and lost points if they had to give you a direct order. What was the same was that you could get into official trouble for disobeying a direct order, but not for disputing one of their manipulative suggestions. The same test applied where, if you doubted the authenticity one of their instructions, you could ask them if it was a direct order and, if they knew they were in the wrong, they would admit that it wasn't. In the army they got mad at you if you argued with them, but they encouraged it in the paper mill. The only time that they got mad at you for arguing was if you won. In both places, they got mad at you if you went over their head, especially if you won. In both places, they higher up guy didn't care about your concerns, but they did care that the lower down guy wasn't able to handle the matter himself so they wouldn't have to be bothered with it. They didn't say that to your face, but they must have said something to the lower down guy because he would never like you again after that.

You're right that this kind of thing didn't happen very often, except for the part about having to ask them if it was a direct order. That happened more at the paper mill than it did in the army, believe it or not. Most military leaders were just trying to get the job done with the least hassle, while the paper mill mangers seemed to thrive on hassle. I think it was part of their ongoing training, stir up trouble and then see how long it takes you or somebody else to straighten it out.

I saw something about that bathroom controversy on the TV news the other day. They were talking about Michigan where, so far, it's only a suggestion, but they mentioned that a couple of states have passed laws about it. Let me get this straight: School children are having sex change operations? What in the hell is the matter with their parents? Never mind, I think I know the answer to that.

you're not in the army anymore

 There are many kinds of misconduct that do not consist of issuing an illegal order.  I just wanted to make clear that the particular issue we were talking about was the issuing of an illegal order.

What I was trying to point out was that military rules do not apply in the civilian world.  When the sarge legally orders you to peel potatoes, you don't have the option of saying fuck it, I quit.  It's a powerful thing giving up a job, but once you do your boss is just another guy on the street to you.  Back in my military days, when I was forced into ROTC in my first year of college, once a week I had marching practice, oh wait, they called it drill.  Depending on my schedule I would have to wear that hated uniform to whatever classes I had before and after drill and if anybody, any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who happened to outrank me in ROTC and was wearing their uniform walked by, I had to salute them.  I hated that too, why should I have to salute some jerk who is no better than I am?  Isn't this America? 

When my alderman walks by I don't have to salute him, nor the mayor, or my senator, or the prez.  You know what, I am sure the army has many arcane rules about when you can take you hat off or not, I'm sure the army has many arcane rules about everything, but you know what Private, you're not in the army anymore.  This thing about chain of command and what to do if you are issued an illegal order in the army, has nothing, nada, zilch zero, to do with what goes on in civilian life.

It never came up during my once weekly foray into military life, but i wonder how often this disobeying an illegal order ever actually arises.  If I am the master sergeant I don't think I am giving a shit if the private under the sergeant under me is upset because that sarge ordered him to take off his hat while he was holding onto a flag holder.  I don't think any of those guys under Calley disobeyed.  It sounds like so much window dressing to me.  Not that it matters because I am not wearing my ROTC uniform anymore.

So I guess some of the birchers thought that some of the outsiders thought that they were a commie front.  It didn't matter to the birchers that nobody outside of the birchers actually felt that way, because they read it in their birch newsletter that it was so, so it must be. 

Fox does stuff like this.  They'll run some story about accusations against, oh say the big girl.  And then they'll say the lamestream press refuses to cover this, and I as a non-Foxie know that these accusations are all over the lamestream press, but the Foxies don't know it because all they ever watch is Fox, so it just looks like a deeper conspiracy to them.

I've been wanting to say something about these North Carolina bathroom laws.  Of course the laws themselves are bull goose loony, but this boycott, no Bruce Springsteen, no such and such convention, troubles me a little.  It's a little too much like when the baptists boycotted Proctor and Gamble products or other products whose commercials showed gay couples.  If I didn't like it when they did it, why should I like it when we do it?

Orders is Orders - Usually, But Not Always

Maybe I didn't make this clear, but I consider issuing an illegal order to be an act of misconduct.

I'm pretty sure that the director of the CIA works for the President. Who else would he be working for? I'm really sure that the Attorney General works for the President. When Nixon ordered his AG to fire the Special Prosecutor, that was an illegal order because the Special Prosecutor could only be fired under certain circumstances, and this wasn't one of them. In this case, the AG chose to resign rather than obey an illegal order. Another option would have been to obey the order under protest and report the matter to somebody in Congress. Either way, the AG would not be prosecuted, if it ever came down to that. Nixon eventually resigned to avoid being impeached but, if he hadn't, the AG would likely have been called as a witness during the impeachment process. Like I said, it's better to be a witness than a co-defendant.

Military personnel usually take of their hat when they come indoors, but not when they're under arms. The term "under arms" has a specific definition which includes, but is not limited to, carrying a weapon. It also includes certain other items, like a pistol belt or a flag holder, that might be worn for some ceremonial purpose. If a sergeant ordered me to take off my hat when I was under arms, I would point out the fact that I was under arms, and he would likely rescind the order. If he insisted that I take off my hat anyway, I would obey under protest and report it to the next highest authority. This would prevent me from getting my ass chewed by the next highest authority if he saw me walking around under arms without my hat on. The sergeant might be pissed at me, but that would be his problem. Better he should have a problem than I should have a problem. Now if I was a big suck who wanted to please my sergeant at all costs, I might just take off my hat without argument. In the event that I was caught, I would take the fall for my sergeant and not report him. This would put the sergeant in my debt and, if he was any kind of a sergeant, he would find some way to reward me for my loyalty to him. This might be why Bork agreed to fire the AG for Nixon, but it didn't work out for him because Congress refused to confirm his appointment to the Supreme Court years later. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, but I believe being right is more important than winning or losing.

I don't think it was ever illegal to be a member of the Communist Party. Of course it was illegal to be a spy who gave secret stuff to the Russians, but being a card carrying party member had nothing to do with that. During the Great Commie Witch Hunt there was something called "The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations." I saw a copy once, and there must have been hundreds of organizations listed. I'm pretty sure most of those organizations were not illegal, but if you were  member of one of them, you might not get hired for a job or admitted to the country club of your choice. I think what happened with the Birchers was that somebody started a rumor that the John Birch Society was on that list, but I don't believe it ever was. I don't think any formal charges of any kind of illegal activity were ever filed against the Birchers, but a lot of people thought there were because of all the attention they got from the media for awhile. Ironically, the Society's membership rolls experienced a growth spurt during this time, which may be why the media quit talking about them. Then again, maybe the media just got bored and moved on to something else. Believe what you will.

disobeying the prez

Contact my congressman over presidential misconduct?  Wait a minute we were talking about him giving me an order that I thought was illegal.  Thinking about it this military analogy is not a good fit.  If your sergeant tells you to take off your hat, I believe you have to take off your hat, but if the prez tells me to take off my hat, I believe I can tell him to go fuck himself, and walk away and that is the end of that. 

This whole thing came about in discussion of the CIA saying it wouldn't waterboard on Trump's sayso, and Trump thinking he is going to be like the CEO of the USA and he can give orders to his underlings and they have to obey him.  In a real corporation you can fire somebody who disobeys your order and hire somebody that will, but the prez can't fire a citizen or even the lowliest civil servant if that person doesn't work directly for him.

I did a little Birch research over the weekend.  That investigation was hard to find, and it was a low level affair operated by a right wing committee of the California legislature, and details beyond that exceeded my fifteen minutes of internet research.  Not that it matters much, the organization was just a paper tiger anyway.  I thought i was making a joke about the Birchers being communistic, but you say there were actually people at the time who accused it of being a communist front, but I have to say my internet research didn't turn up anything like that.

I saw the movie Trumbo Saturday night.  He was a screenwriter who was a member of the communist party who got caught up in that Joe McCarthy thing and ended up out of work and in the slammer,  Of course it's just a movie, and the movie had a slant, but he was a real guy and those things did happen to him.  It was the studios that stopped giving him work, but they were heavily pressured by the government.  Then the government subpoenaed him to appear before HUAC and when he didn't name names they found him in contempt of congress and that's how he ended up in the slammer.  That was a little shocking to me that congress could do that to someone, doesn't sound like due process to me.  Maybe that needs a little internet research.

The Calley case was a little strange.  The pro-war people wanted to prosecute him to show that is was an aberration in an otherwise well-run war, but they didn't want to come down too hard on the guy because they didn't want to offend the military.  You might think the anti-war people would have wanted his scalp, but their point was that the whole war was like Mai Lai so to make a big deal out of this one episode was a distraction and what we should really be doing is ending the war.

I have no doubt that often the little guy takes the fall for the bigger guys, but there was as lot of information that came out in the trial and it looked to me like Calley did this by himself.  Maybe he snapped or maybe he was always like that.  but then you know here is this like twenty-year old guy who has command of like twenty heavily-armed people who are also around twenty, and to them all these people look like the enemy, so you can't be all that surprised that this sort of thing happened. 

Shit indeed happens in a war, and I think maybe the people who are sending an invasive force into another country should take that into account before the ships sail and the airplanes fly, rather than acting surprised afterwards when it happens.

Who You Gonna Call?

If you want to report presidential misconduct to Congress, the logical place to start would be with your own state's congressmen. If they won't do anything, you could try congressmen from other states, especially ones that are of the opposite party. No luck there, try the news media. You're right that Congress might not want to do anything about it, but remember the main reason you're doing this is to cover your own ass. You want to go on record as being the whistleblower in the case, because it's better to be a whistleblower than a co-defendant. As one of the president's men, the worst thing that can happen to you if you disobey a lawful order is you get fired. The worst thing that can happen to you if you obey an unlawful order is you go to prison.

In the military you can go to prison either for disobeying a lawful order, or for obeying an unlawful order. The way you handle this is you ask the order giver, preferably in front of witnesses, if he is giving you a direct order or just a suggestion. If he knows he's in the wrong, he will tell you it's just suggestion. You can't go to prison for disobeying a suggestion, but you can go to prison for obeying a suggestion that you do something illegal.

The Birchers have an inner sanctum? Well maybe, but why would they need something like that? My experience was that they were just a harmless bunch of booksellers, which is pretty much what the California investigation concluded. I was not bragging about that California investigation, I was just saying. I seem to remember you asking me if the Birchers might be a commie front, and I was telling you what I knew about that. It happened a decade or so before I joined the Birchers, so it was old news by the time I got it. I read about it in their literature and discussed it with other Birchers. I passed the information on to you in good faith, it's not my fault if it was a lie. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it is a lie, I'm just saying that, if it's a lie, it's not my lie.

Speaking of My Lai, now there was a real massacre for you. Your so called "Saturday Night Massacre" pales in comparison. It happened after I was out of the army, but I talked it over with one of my old army buddies who came up north to visit me. We concluded that the most likely scenario was that Lt. Cally's boss had indeed told him to kill all those people, but he probably didn't make it a direct order. We'll never know for sure because Cally's boss conveniently died before the trial. At any rate, Cally was convicted and sentenced to life, but Nixon or Ford, whoever was president at the time, immediately commuted it to 20 years. After the media frenzy died down, Cally was paroled and went home. We kind of suspected something like that might happen. Cally likely took the fall for somebody else and was rewarded with a light sentence. Shit happens in a war, but that don't make it right.

a blue joke about yellow snow

So where in congress would you go if the prez gave you what you considered to be an illegal order, the speaker of the house, the senate, the vice prez, cause he presides over the senate, the Special Committee for Folks Disobeying Presidential Orders, your local senator, your local rep? 

Right now I imagine the freedom caucus would welcome you with open arms if you disobeyed anything Obama said.  But their only power is to stop anything from going through congress, they have no power to actually do anything other than obfuscate.

The victims of the Saturday Night Massacre didn't go to congress.  Of course congress had a very itchy finger on the impeachment trigger, remember even Republicans (back when republicans were really republicans) were calling for Nixon to step down.  I believe your man Goldwater was among them. 

So even you, who have been sort of bragging about this investigation as proof that the Birchers were, well we don't even know that because we don't know what the specific allegations were, don't know who in the California legislature was running it, or when it happened or what the findings were.  So even the Birchers who were complaining about the big blackout didn't know exactly what was being blacked out?  How did you ever even hear about it?

But again I don't personally think the Birchers did anything especially bad.  I think they tried to besmirch some public officials with the red tar of comsymp, but public officials are big boys and used to being smeared and I don't remember anybody going down because of the Birchers,  I imagine the inner sanctum guys were probably plotting something, because isn't that the point of being in the inner sanctum, but for the good folks in THOTO THOTOM it was more like whittling in front of the courthouse or coffee at McDonalds.  Did you drink tea at your meetings? 

First ladies have always had some little pet project.  Michelle pushes healthy food, Laura used to wear that I'm with Stupid t shirt, Hillary, I believe she dabbled in health care, Barbara Bush was nice, Nancy ended drug use, Rosalind must have had some kind of Christian thing, Betty had that dipsomaniac thing, Pat had that yellow snow incident.

One winter morning, Richard Nixon looked out on the White House lawn and saw "Impeach Nixon" written in yellow across the snow. He quickly ... "You're not going to like this, sir, but the substance in which the message was written analyzed as Kissinger's urine." "I suspected as ... Out with it..." "Sir...it's in Pat's handwriting.".

I don't know if you heard that joke before.  It's a little blue for The Institute, but when I was going down the list of first ladies I knew i had to include it.

Going Over the President's Head

"I don't know that being able to impeach the president makes Congress the highest power in the land." - Uncle Ken

Well, maybe not, but that's not the point I was trying to make. The Constitution is not clear about this, but it does say, in Article II, Section 4: "The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." It doesn't say exactly who does the impeachment, conviction, or removal but, traditionally, the job has fallen to Congress. My reasoning was that, since Congress can fire the President but the President can't fire Congress, then Congress must be a higher authority than the President. Ergo, Congress would be the logical place to lodge an appeal of a presidential action that you believe is illegal. Specifically, if the President ordered me to torture prisoners of war, and I reported that to Congress, I think Congress would have something to say about it. The President would likely fire me over it, and Congress might not order him to reinstate me, but I think I could sell the book and movie rights to my story for enough money to fund a comfortable retirement for myself.

The Constitution isn't very clear about congressional authority over the Supreme Court either, but I did find, in Article III, Section 1: "The judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior," and also, in Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2: "In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." Since it appears that Congress can fire justices of the Supreme Court, and put limits on their authority, it seem logical to me that Congress is the Supreme Court's boss.

I have already told you everything I know about that California investigation. As I said twice before, it is my understanding that the Birchers asked the California legislature to investigate them because Congress declined to do it, and they wanted to have some forum to challenge the allegations that had been made against them. Now that I think of it, they might have been further ahead if they had sued the allegators for slander in civil court, but the Birchers never sought my counsel at the time. The fact that I was 16 yeas old and unknown to them might have had something to do with that.

I don't know if the Birchers were in league with Joe McCarthy when he went on his commie witch hunt, but they did say, after the fact, that McCarthy had been right and that people should have listened to him.

Lady Bird Johnson could not have been responsible for the billboard regulations because First Ladies have no authority to pass legislation. Congress or the state legislators must have done it. I do remember that there were a lot of billboards and then there weren't so many, but the ones that were there were larger and farther back from the road than the old ones used to be. This must have given an advantage to the bigger advertisers over the smaller ones. So what else is new?

good citizen Bork

I don't  know that being able to impeach the president makes congress the highest power in the land.  And where is their power over the supreme court?  And even if they had some power to fire the supremes i don't know how that would make them the highest power.  I don't see the mechanism where one could appeal to the congress if one didn't want to obey an order from the prez, and certainly not the current congress which can't do anything but piss and moan. 

But now that I think about it, we do have an example of disobeying the prez and that is the Saturday Night Massacre.  Let's look at the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre

It's a little complicated but I think the gist is that Nixon ordered both Richardson and Ruckelshaus to fire Cox and they both refused and resigned and finally Bork, that paradigm of virtue, did the dirty deed for Tricky Dick because Dick promised him a job on the supremes.

I guess something like that would happen with Trump.  When informed that the CIA said they would not waterboard, Trump came back with something like if he gave them an order they would have to obey, if he yelled loud enough i guess.  He has since taken that back, but you never know when he is going to take back his take back. 

One wonders about the wonderland of a Trump presidency, who would he appoint as his cabinet?  Most likely a bunch of his yes men who would obey his orders, but could such a bunch of clowns ever get approved by congress?  Come to think of it, all his followers are as bull goose looney as His Trumpness.  Who is the most respected Trump guy right now?  I can only come up with Christie.  I think there might be a congressman or two, I don't think there is a senator.

I would like to hear a little more about this California investigation than just a sentence that they were found not guilty.  There is something fishy about being investigated by someone you ask to investigate you.  Who presided over the investigation, what were the charges, what was the final pronouncement?  I assume you are aware of all this, why have you not come forth with the details?  Why are you being so secretive?

I do remember being secretive was one of the things that people didn't like about the Birchers, though I'd have to say I don't think that's a crime.   I don't think secrecy was leveled against the HOTO THOTOM branch, but more against the inner sanctum.  But I don't know if there was anything to it, or if it was just a symptom of the times.  Now that I think about it weren't they alleging a lot of people were commies but not showing any evidence of that, hinting that they had some secret proof? 

Well that was Joe McCarthy wasn't it?  But weren't the Birchers tight with Tail Gunner Joe?

I too get bored with people who think like me.  Many of my liberal buddies watch MSNBC and proudly declare that they have never seen even a second of FOX.  Myself I have never seen a second of MSNBC and I am always dropping into O'Reilly's Pub and Hannity's Saloon, and that Megan Kelly runs a comparatively high-toned cocktail lounge. 

It seems to me that I vaguely remember the Impeach Earl Warren billboards, but maybe I am thinking of all the billboards about Jesus that we used to drive by on the way to visit Grandpa in Goshen Indiana. 

Wasn't it Ladybird Johnson who got rid of the billboards?  Nice not to have them but generally the interstates are so far out in the country there is nothing to see anywhere.  I guess we all know how successful Nancy's say no to drugs was.  I wonder what will be Bill's side project?