Frontier 1

The Frontier in American History is a leisurely read, as befits a book written just after the turn of the century when you could settle down in your easy chair, a damask pillow behind your head, a cigar and a snifter of brandy would be nice but not necessary, and you wouldn't have to worry about  when your tv show would come on, and, unless you were a high techy of the time, no phone to ring.  It's one of those books where the author makes his point over and over, and his main point is that the frontier was the making of the nation.  Democracy may have been written into the constitution, but it was the free wheeling frontier where any man could pack up his junk and walk a few miles and start a whole new homestead.  That made all men equal, something I have noticed Tocqueville talks about a lot, and even today people coming from England remark on our relative lack of class consciousness.

If you think about it our first pioneers came in big boats and were part of communities, used to a hierarchy, maybe a little pissed off at somebody telling him how to buckle his belt and what tilt the brim of his silly hat should have, and all that land lying there beyond the pale and all you had to do was maybe kill an Indian or two and you could fell a few trees and be king of your castle and wear your silly hat anyway you pleased, and maybe go beltless, because what the hell, who could tell you what to do?  Nobody. certainly not that guy just up the hill who bolted just like you did anymore than you could tell him how to wear his hat.

I have to think the landed gentry did not mind so much, these guys were most likely rude and scalawags and didn't even know how to hold their teacup properly and good riddance to the lot.

Remember those old maps where Massachusetts and Virginia extend clear to the Mississippi river.  I think there was something in the constitution, maybe Beagles, our constitutional scholar, would know, about  how to divide up the rest of the continent. The old eastern gentry was sipping their tea in their drawing rooms when they heard that those rude scalawags out there now wanted to form their own states, states that would be ruled by the likes of those guys with the muddy, unfit for porcelain cups, hands, and the votes of those states would be equal to the civilized votes of the gentry.  Outrageous. 

I'll continue about Frontier in subsequent posts. In other issues I looked at Old Dog's searchable chart in wiki and I would call all those countries above the US second world at best.  Actually according to this map:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page they are all third world.  That whole first, second, third world thing is a remnant of the cold war and I think it's categories have slipped, but generally just the US and Canada, most of Europe, Australia, and Japan are considered first world.

Honor killing is when the relatives or hubby of a supposedly loose woman kill her.  In Saudi Arabia they behead and it's just considered an execution. 

If we haven't bombed Iran by tomorrow morning I'll be back to continue with Frontier.