Detachment

I don't want to secede from anybody, to secede is to leave. I want to stay where I am and make the people I don't like go away. I don't want to chase people out of their homeland, I just want to detach their homeland from my homeland. Throughout history, people have spent a lot of energy fighting over land. Then, when they get the land, they have to do something with the people who are already there, and it's usually not pretty. When a state takes over somebody else's land, it is said that they annex it. It seems like the opposite of annexation would be detachment. It would be like granting independence to the territory without the consent of the people who live there. Historically, land has frequently been annexed without the consent of its residents, so why can't we detach it the same way?

I don't think the people of Detroit allowed Cheboygan exiles to work there out of the goodness of their hearts. They had job openings that were not being filled by their local people, Cheboygan people heard about it, and applied for some of those jobs. I doubt that the auto companies actively recruited Cheboygan people. It's more likely that they advertised the job opening in their local newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, to which people all over Michigan subscribe. If Detroit locals wanted those jobs, it seems they would have been hired first because they wouldn't have had to travel 250 miles to submit their applications.

I think that most historians would agree that the riots initiated the long downhill slide of Detroit. There were other factors, but it began with the riots. The landlords and shopkeepers were reluctant to rebuild and, if they did, they probably would have had a hard time getting insurance. Many properties were abandoned by their owners and ended up being seized for non payment of taxes. These derelict buildings became hangouts for druggies, teenagers, and other undesirables, which drove out whatever value may have been left in them. I'm not sure about the chronology, but I think all this happened before the decline of the auto plants. Of course that doesn't mean that one thing caused the other, any more than it means the other thing caused he one. I think that, by the time the auto plants were in trouble, most of their employees weren't living in the city limits anyway.  

We have discussed my racial attitudes before. I left Chicago before the troubles started because I didn't like living in the city. If I had been there when the shit hit the fan, I probably would have moved to the suburbs like everybody else. Well, everybody but you. All I know about Detroit is what I have heard from other people or read in the newspaper. I never had any intention of moving there, if I had wanted to live in a big city, I would have stayed in Chicago. You have said that there are Blacks living in your building, but I'm sure they don't behave like the Blacks who live in the "bad" neighborhoods outside the Loop. If your building were to be "taken over" by people like that, I'm sure that you would move out as would anybody else in their right mind. It's not as much about racial preferences as it is about quality of life and simple survival. Thank God that I live in a swamp next to a junk yard! There's not much that anybody could do to ruin this neighborhood.                                                                                                        

no man is an island

I’m looking for some kind of point here, but I’m not seeing anything. Detroit was riding high for many years because of the auto industry which became arrogant and inflexible and fell and took the city with it. Most of the people with means left to get jobs elsewhere leaving the people without means to remain there and sometimes behave badly. End of story, could happen to anybody, so what?

You know Beagles, you have an itchy secede finger, you are always wanting to secede from something, the country, part of the state, even Cheboygan, to stand proudly with your cracked deer rifle facing the border where all the gay dogs howl because they will never get to marry you, because Beaglesonia forbids it.

I’m sure you know the impossibility of seceding, and it is some kind of running joke with you. “No man is an island,” said that tiresome long-winded, as many of them are, old timey English poet. He did not say “No man is an island except Beagles.”

When Detroit was fat and providing all those fat jobs to the young lads of Cheboygan and filling the coffers of the state which built the roads and infrastructure of Cheboygan, did it say screw these hicks who are taking the jobs that Detroiters should keep for themselves and spending our money on improvements to their desolate waste, we should secede their ass. They did not, out of the good of their hearts they held out their hands to you, and now that Detroit is no longer your sugar daddy you want to secede. Shame.

And what do riots have to do with it? And of course when we are talking about riots we are not talking about what white people do when their sports team wins something or other, we are talking about black people looting liquor stores in some podunk neighborhood of theirs. Some of the black people like it because they feel like they are standing up to whitey. Some of the white people like it because it is proof of the world going to hell because of the liberals. CNN likes it because they can stay away from those boring shows where there panels of experts drone on forever about something they know nothing about.

Maybe I am going overboard here, and you know I decry some of my fellow liberals who see racism everywhere, but I see a bit of racism in the elevation of riots to a big event causing something like oh, white flight out of Detroit. People watch The Grapes of Wrath and feel for those Okies, and they look at those photo books of craggy Appalachians, and they think they should lend a hand, out of the good of their hearts. But then they look at black people rioting in their outlandish hip hop clothes and their obscenity-laced anti whitey slogans, and even though these are less than one percent of all blacks, they think they don’t need to do anything to help black people because look how they act. They just want to secede from them and keep them off their island.

Some friends from St Joseph are arriving today for my opening and they will be around until Monday, so I probably won’t be getting back to The Institute until Tuesday.

Tales of Detroit

I've only been to Detroit once, in the early 1970s, to visit a friend of mine who was in a special hospital there. He had just come out of a six week coma and we could only visit with him for a few minutes. As luck would have it, my hypothetical wife had some relatives there, so we dropped in on them to make it worth the trip. They lived in a nice neighborhood, but they didn't think it would stay nice for very long and were already working on their exit strategy. We had to drive through the riot torn area on the way to the hospital. It had been a few years since the riots and we didn't encounter any trouble. Every thing was boarded up and we didn't see anybody on the street. My friend was soon released from that hospital and came back to Cheboygan, so we never had another reason to go to Detroit.

Some of the guys I worked with at the paper mill had gone to Detroit to work in the auto plants after they graduated from high school. In those days it was said that Cheboygan's biggest export was high school graduates. Some of them came home when the paper mill re-opened and some other small factories started up. Others moved to the suburbs, raised their families, and came back to Cheboygan when they retired. One guy I knew said that, when he was working in Detroit and still single, he lived in an apartment building that was almost entirely inhabited by Cheboygan exiles. Once a month they would throw a "Cheboygan party" for all the other exiles in the city, but I don't remember him saying how many there were. Another guy I worked with had been born and raised in Detroit and expected to raise his own family there. He said he had held on as long as he could, which proved to be too long, because he had to sell his house at a loss.

Some people blame the decline of the auto plants for the depopulation of Detroit, but others say it was the riots and their aftermath that caused the decline of the auto plants. I seem to remember that competition from the Germans and Japanese had something to do with it as well. I understand that General Motors still has their headquarters there, in some big shiny office building that used to be called the Renaissance Center. They would show a picture of it on the news whenever they were talking about the bailout. I always thought they should have sold the building and moved into something less pretentious before begging Uncle Sam for alms.

More recently, when they were talking about the bankruptcy of Detroit on the news, they would show pictures of the downtown area, which looked pretty prosperous to me. I have also seen pictures of some devastated neighborhoods that looked like they had been bombed in World War II. I wonder why they didn't show those pictures when they were talking about the bankruptcy.

I originally proposed that Michigan expel Detroit from the state long before this bankruptcy thing came up. This was on another site, and I couldn't get any agreement from my esteemed colleagues. They said that they didn't to lose any territory, although I had already pointed out that we don't control that territory anyway. What good is a territory that you can't live in, or even drive through on your way to someplace else? The last guy I heard of that tried it was beaten to within an inch of his life. He had accidently hit a kid and stopped to render assistance like you're supposed to. They didn't say what he was doing in Detroit in the first place. I didn't think that anybody went there anymore.

No deer this year. Old Betsy worked just fine with her taped up stock, but I didn't see anything to shoot at except the target I have set up by the house.

barefoot on the streets of Cheboygan

I don’t think Saddam agreed to any no fly zones, I think we decided on them unilaterally. The Kurds were gassed before the no fly zones, that was the main reason we put them in, we felt bad about urging the Kurds to rise up and then standing around with our hands in our pockets while he slaughtered them.

And the Kurds are certainly not nomadic. If they were they would have packed up and left long ago. They have lived as far back as history between Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Of course those three countries have only existed in the past 100 years, and it’s been around that many years that the Kurds have wanted their own country. They did quite well within the Ottoman empire, Saladin was a Kurd, but in these new countries they are just an oppressed minority.

And they are the only guys out there that are willing to fight ISIS, they just retook that podunk border town we have been bombing the fuck out of for about a month. Of course they have Kurdistan to fight for, while their erstwhile allies just want to fight Shiites. And for all that the US still wants to keep them in Iraq, not that we have much to say about it, thank God.

You know if you all country folk with your hearts steeped in goodness unlike us slickers whose hearts are owned by Satan, had seceded from the Union fifty years ago, Beagles the Bohunk would never have been allowed into Podunkia because they wouldn’t want no slickers. He would probably have ended up running some shooting gallery in a neighborhood carnival watching the tin deer pass by.

Sure all the bumpkins liked Detroit well enough when it was making the big cars and they could leave the back forty and get a good job. But anymore when Detroit is a handbasket case they want to send it to hell.

They did write some beautiful sad songs while they were there though. I am thinking of Detroit City and Streets of Baltimore. We have an area here about five miles north of downtown by the lake called Uptown where all the hillbillies flock to. I’ll wager there is no place in Cheboygan where the urban immigrants gather. I guess when you get used to wearing store-bought shoes there is no going back.

I see where the Supremes are taking up gay marriage. Probably less than a year from now you will be gay married to your gay dog, but on the brighter side you can both probably go hunting with matching deer rifles.

What is up with Old Betsy anyway? Did you ever bag a deer in this last season.

From Iraq to Old Betsy

You may be right about Iraq. I don't remember it all that well, so I'll have to take your word for it. But what about those "no-fly zones"? I seem to remember that Saddam agreed to keep his war planes out of certain areas as a condition for him being allowed to remain in power. We had our own planes constantly flying around the no-fly zones to make sure that Saddam was keeping his word so, although the war was officially over, we still had people there. Every once in a while one of Saddam's radar installations would target one of our planes and our guys would fire a missile at them. Meanwhile, Saddam was gassing the Kurds from the air, but I don't know whether or not that was a violation of the no-fly agreement. The Kurds are kind of nomadic, so maybe they wandered in and out of the no-fly zones on occasion. Peace is Hell!

That thing I said about people doing things out of the goodness of their hearts was not a plan, it was a fantasy. Of course nobody's going to do things out of the goodness of their hearts. If they did, we wouldn't even need a government. Then what would we do with all those useless politicians who would be out of a job?

I have said before that, rather than seceding from the union, we should just kick out the undesirable parts, like the East Coast and the West Coast. The East coast is going to be under water in a few years anyway, and California is going to break off and sink into the sea. I guess we could keep Washington and Oregon, I've never heard anything bad about them except that it rains a lot there. On the state level, Michigan would be a lot better off without Detroit, and Illinois would be well rid of Chicago, or Chicago would be well rid of Illinois, depending on your point of view.

I have also said before that I didn't think the Second Amendment was about anything but state militias. The idea of depriving private citizens of their firearms was, and is, so patently absurd that the Founding Fathers didn't see any reason to bring it up. It would be like if, today, somebody came up with the idea to ban private ownership of automobiles. Next thing you know they would be going after junk food, cigarettes, and alcoholic beverages. Who would want to live in a world like that?

how ye olde second amendment got written.

H W didn’t stop before reaching Baghdad because of the UN. He stopped because his advisors told him he would have a mess on his hands if he deposed Saddam. Those advisors were still around when W went in and his dad urged him to listen to them, but W wouldn’t because his own advisors told him that the troops would be walking down rose petal strewn paths, and it would be no trouble at all to transform Iraq into a stable democracy that would be the envy of the rest of the mideast causing everybody there to also convert to democracy, and there would be no more trouble from the middle east. Oh, and that Iraq would be so grateful that they would repay us our costs for invading them out of their oil money, so that in the end it wouldn’t even cost us anything.

I think you know that any plan involving the good of the hearts of the oil companies, or for the good of the hearts of anybody, is not a very good plan. And the oil producers I think are mostly multinational corporations and why should they give a fig about the US, and if the word got around that they were doing things out of the good of their hearts nobody would want to invest in them.

I’m sure you know that when Texas joined the union there was a provision that anytime they wanted to they could divide up into five separate states, and as a matter of fact they still could do it tomorrow if they so chose. They would have five times as many senators, why wouldn’t they want to do that?

Well in the first place they love Texas, every man jack of them, when the band is playing Beautiful Texas their hats are over their hearts and their eyes are misty with manly tears. On a more practical side, the senator from east Texas wouldn’t give a fig for the interests of west Texas and vice versa, and in the end instead of one mighty Texas would be just five

squabbling states with about the population of Colorado. And certainly if any of the original thirteen states had decided to go their own way, they never would have made it.

So maybe the founding fathers just never considered the possibility that a state would be foolish enough to leave the union. Of course it’s hard to know what they were thinking. Remember that thirsty late afternoon when they drafted the second amendment providing for the militia to be armed, and one of them objected that the way it was worded some idiot could think that they wanted everybody in the country to be packing heat, but then his bewigged buddy said nobody in the enlightened future could possibly interpret it that way, and it was hard to rewrite things when the delete button hadn’t yet been invented, and you were working with quills and ink for Chrissake, and yonder ale house would be starting its happie houre in just five minutes, so they let it go.

And because yon taverne offered two tankards of ale for the price of one we will never, never ever ever, pry that deer rifle out of Beagles’ hands. Though if we were real sneaky we might find a way to split the stock and force him to forgo a deer season.

I'm Not So Sure About That

I'm with you on the Spanish American War and World War I, but I'm not so sure about Desert Storm and the Civil War.

Granted, it turned out that taking out Saddam didn't solve anything, but that's hindsight. At the time, a lot of people wondered why Bush I didn't finish the job while we were there. I believed that it was because the United Nations was involved. Ever since Korea, any war that involves the UN never seems to be really finished. As soon as the good guys start winning, the U.N. calls a cease fire, insuring that the bad guys will live to fight another day. At the time, I thought it was for the best that Bush II couldn't talk the U.N. into the second Iraq war, but it didn't do him a lot of good in the long run. Looking back on it, I doubt that there is anything that can be done about Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East. Those people have been like that since forever, and I don't see any effective way to rehabilitate them. If it wasn't for Israel, I would abandon the Middle East and tell them to shove their oil up their ass.

We wouldn't need their oil if we would keep all the oil we have in the U.S. and not export any of it to anybody. I feel compelled to part company with my esteemed Republican colleagues on that Keystone Pipeline. What we really need is a pipeline going east and west, because most of our oil is in the West while most of our people are in the East. Keystone will just transport oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, where it will be loaded on tankers and shipped out of the country. I'm not against exporting anything of which we have a surplus like wheat, but anything we need here should stay here. I know this sounds contrary to the laissez faire theory, but we shouldn't need to pass laws about this, the producers should just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for the benefit of their native land. Of course they won't, but they should.

Of course the Civil War was about slavery, but they had been arguing about slavery for something like four score and seven years. It was only when the Southern states seceded that the shooting began. Well, that's not exactly true. There were some minor skirmishes leading up to the war, but those were mostly hot heads acting on their own. Of course the South wouldn't have seceded if Lincoln hadn't been elected so yeah, it was mostly about slavery.

I still don't understand why the framers of the Constitution didn't put something in there saying that states either could or could not secede. It may be because they didn't think the Constitution was going to last that long. I believe it was Jefferson who predicted that they  would be holding another convention and having a do-over in about 20 years. If that had happened, I suppose they wouldn't have had to worry about secession, any state that didn't like the old union could have just refrained from joining the new one.  

I remember when we first studied American history in school, I asked the teacher why it was okay for the Colonies to secede from the British Empire but it was not okay for the South to secede from the North. She said it was because slavery was an evil institution that needed to be abolished. While that is true as far as it goes, she also should have added that the Colonies won their war while the South lost theirs. When all is said and done, it still comes down to that: "The victors write the history books."

secession and isolation

As for ending isolation, there was the Spanish American war. I think that one started out because we didn’t like the way the Spaniards were treating the Cubans. Supposedly Hearst started the war to sell newspapers. Somehow we ended up in possession of the Philippines, but then some Filipinos didn’t like the way we treated them and we ended up in a Vietnamese style war with them that hardly anybody remembers. I’m going to have to wiki that war.

I think WW I was the war where we are firs considered to have shed isolationism. Even though the war was meaningless and a lot of our guys died, we did pretty well with that one in that we were on the winning side, and likely we were what made it the winning side. The end was a little strange though with Wilson as the naïve American divvying up Europe while the Europeans were just trying to get what they could, then there was that League of Nations thing.

You know what war had a good exit strategy, Herbert Walker’s Desert Storm. We took back Kuwait and bloodied Saddam’s nose and got out. We also encouraged the Shiites and Kurds to rise up which maybe made them think we were going to help them, but we didn’t, so that was bad, but at least the boys were home. Herbert Walker took a lot of shit for not taking out Saddam, but it turned out to be a good decision when his son proved that taking out Saddam was nothing but trouble.

That plan about the government buying the slaves was brought up at the time, but the northerners didn’t want to pay the money and the south wanted more than money, slavery was a part of their way of life and they had no intentions of ending it.

The southern states seceded because they were afraid Lincoln was going to take away their slaves. It was certainly about slavery. I don’t know why people are always trying to weasel word their way out of that. The roots of it were there at the constitutional convention and it was inevitable, and it’s a wonder why it took so long to happen.

I’ve always thought it odd that states couldn’t secede. If Montana decided they would rather be part of Canada I would be fine with it. But what if Texas decided they wanted to go back to being their own country? What about their oil? All the states have resources and they are supposed to be shared among us. It’s not right for one state to pull out and take their resources with them. What if Mississippi wanted to secede and then to reconstitute slavery? Could we allow that?

It might not be mentioned in the constitution but for as far as we can see there will be no seceding. Forget about it.

Neo Isolationism

Ever since I first heard about Post Modernism, back in 2001 or 2002, I have been wondering if it's still going on or if we had started a new age by now. What do you do after Post Modernism? Post Post Modernism? Neo Modernism? Neo Post Modernism? Being an old fashioned kind of guy, it occurred to me that we could call it "Neo Old Fashionism". That would be a reversion to old fashioned values without giving up any of the modern technology. Well, one thing we could give up is nuclear weapons. They cost a lot of money and it seems unlikely that we or anybody else is ever going to use them. It would be better to spend the money on something we could use, like deer rifles. That way, when there was no war going on, everybody could take their rifles home with them like the Swiss people do. The more I think about it, though, maybe a better idea would be "Neo Isolationism". As the Post Moderns rejected Modernism, we could reject Most Modernism. Then we could isolate ourselves from whatever goofy idea is coming next and just be ourselves.

All kidding aside, I'm not sure exactly when the U.S. trashed it's policy of isolationism. That would be a good thing to look up this weekend so that I would know what I'm talking about. Meanwhile, I'll just blunder on ahead, I can always recant it later. For starters. I would have kept our guys out of Korea and Vietnam, not because those wars weren't worth fighting, but because our leadership seems to have had no intention of actually winning them. Any former military man can tell you that you should never go into battle without a clearly defined objective and a clearly defined plan of how you intend to accomplish that objective. You also need something called an "exit strategy", so that you can get your people out of there with minimum casualties in case your initial plan doesn't work.

This isn't an isolationist thing but, while we're on the subject of wars, the Civil War never should have happened. If it was indeed about slavery, all they had to do was buy the slave owners out like they did in England. Our constitution says that you can't confiscate private property without paying "just compensation". Although the idea of human slaves being property was and is abhorrent to many people, the fact is they were considered to be property under the law at the time. You want to change the law, you have to compensate people who are going to lose their property in the process.

I don't think the Civil War was primarily about slavery anyway, I think it was about the Southern states seceding from the Union. The Constitution is strangely silent about whether or not states have a right to do this. They should have either said, "No they can't", or they should have provided an orderly procedure for them to secede without resorting to war. I find it hard to believe that none of the delegates thought of this at the time. Didn't it occur to them that, at some point somebody might want to get out of this deal? No contract is forever. Either it has an expiration date, or it provides a way for either party to terminate it if they want to. We'll have to be sure to remember that when we set up our Utopian New World Order.

Houthis and the Blowhards

I think postmodernism is mainly confined to the academic world and in some of the arts. You can tell that it is postmodernism when it doesn’t make any sense, and if they use the phrase ‘challenging assumptions,’ and if they are constantly calling everybody a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

And you’re right, the peasants weren’t enlightened during the enlightenment, and, well I don’t know about to whom Locke was referring, but probably not women or blacks. He might not have been so hard on blacks since he wasn’t an American, but from what little I know about him, I think he was mainly talking about land, and I don’t think poor people had land.

People, particularly southerners, sometimes get a little picky about why the civil war was fought, but of course I was fought over slavery. And of course most northern whites didn’t think much of black people, but they didn’t like slavery, also they didn’t like competing with slavery economically. The emancipation proclamation was a wartime ploy, still the thirteenth amendment had to follow as long as the north won the war, which everybody knew they would by then. Maybe not, I had to look that one up on wiki, and it was pretty early in the war. One good thing about our conversations is it keeps us checking up on things we thought we knew.

I guess I’m done with the clash of cultures. I hadn’t thought it through when I began, and I thought I would come up with some kind of answer at the end, but I never did.

I question your professed isolationism. What war (or those things we do lately that we claim are not really wars, but they do involve troops and shooting) has the US ever gone too, that you would have kept the troops home from?

And speaking of this one, a couple recent developments. Israel just killed some high ranking Irani general in Syria who was with some Hezbollah guys. Well that sounds like good news, but then you have to consider that Hezbollah is fighting for Assad in Syria, and ISIS is fighting Syria.

Don’t hear that much about ISIS anymore. I think we’ve stopped them cold with our massive bombing, and the Kurds, you gotta love the Kurds. I’ve been going to the gym in my building the last couple months. There is a big screen tv always tuned to CNN which is always reporting on BREAKING NEWS, and yesterday it was talking about 6,000 ISIS guys killed. Of course we don’t really know, we don’t have any reporters there and all the guys doing the fighting are going to be lying to us.

Then those Shiite Yemen guys, the Houthis, took over the government, and I heard one NPR reporter talking to a guy on the ground and he was asking him who are these Houthis, do they like us. And the guy on the ground said, that the banners at their checkpoints read Death to America, Death to Israel, and the reporter allowed as how that didn’t look so good, but the guy on the ground said, well that’s what the banners of everybody around here say.

No Age For the Aged

I think I told you before that I first found out about the Post Modern Age after I had been living in it for over 50 years. I asked a number of other people, both on line and off, and none of them had ever heard of it either. This makes me wonder how many unenlightened people lived during the Enlightenment, blissfully unaware that they were missing out on something big. I made a joke once that the Age of Reason ended a long time ago, but maybe not. There must still be some reasonable people around, maybe even more than there were during the actual Age of Reason. Somebody should do a study about that.

I think the egalitarian movements of the 19th and 20th Century belong in a different category than the Enlightenment Age. When John Locke originated the phrase "All men are created equal", I'm sure that he meant "white males".  He certainly didn't include women and children, such an idea was unheard of at the time. When our own Declaration of Independence quoted that phrase, slavery was still widely practiced in this country. It seems that our Founding Fathers were concerned about that and argued about it some, but it wasn't until 1865 that slavery was finally abolished. People commonly say that Lincoln freed the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation, but that was just war time  propaganda. Slavery was not legally abolished until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865. Then it took another hundred years to get them their civil rights.

I'm sure I mentioned before that, if I had my druthers, I druther be an  isolationist but, realistically, that's not going to happen. Like it or not, we're stuck with this globalism thing, maybe forever. Cultures will continue to clash until they wear all the rough edges off of each other and meld together into one homogenous glob. With any kind of luck, we'll both be dead by then.

clash of cultures 5

What I do is start an email, write my post in that letter and copy and paste it into the Beaglesonian new message. A little more work, but the type is just too small typing into that little blog box.

I’m a little vague about the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, ah, it appears that wiki thinks they are the same thing, gives the dates 1650 to 1780. That ending date puzzled me a little as I did think it was still going on. Maybe those are the dates when we became enlightened, and now that we are, we just continue to be.

I don’t know if something else came up to replace it, well historians just make up this age of stuff after the fact, and then if the other historians like it, it goes into general use.

I do include that egalitarian aspect within the age of reason, because logically it just follows that no race is inferior to any other. I tend to think of the French Revolution as the apogee of the enlightenment. Well things did get out of hand, but it did include the dethroning of a king and breaking the control of the church, and bringing in the metric system and just a lot of stuff like that. I think archeology began when Napoleon invaded Egypt and brought a bunch of scientists along with him.

I’ll admit to being a little vague on all that, but I brought in France because this is where the incident happened, and I think the French are uniquely proud of their secular nature. Not that they are atheists or anything, but they take separation of church and state more seriously than we do in the US. They consider it part of their Frenchness.

And here on the other hand we have these Arab immigrants, descendants of a once mighty culture that once ruled a vast area of the mideast and Africa and significant parts of Europe, and were more advanced scientifically than the barbarians in Europe, although it has all fallen on hard times in the last 500 to 1,000 years. I am just saying that they have a pretty strong culture.

Well here we have the two cultures, each one sure that they are right. Can we settle this with reason, as is our enlightenment way?

Um, no

Because to them faith triumphs reason. We could start out with some axioms that we all agreed with, construct some air-tight chain of IFs and THENs, prove our thesis, but then they would throw in their BUT, but the book says this. At some point before the enlightenment the church allowed logical discussions, but whenever the logic drew a conclusion that was contrary to faith it had to be tossed out.

Actually I think the pragmatic way you suggest, where you just go over each issue individually is probably the best way to handle the whole thing. Women covering their heads, ok. Female circumcision, no. Women posing for their drivers license in a chador, hey I thought you didn’t let your women drive.

Cultures and Sub-Cultures

I'm going to try typing in the "bold" mode like you do. I think it's easier on the eyes. Don't you?

I think I understand now what you mean by "our culture". The other little cultures that dwell within it are more properly called "sub-cultures", aren't they.

Funny you should mention the Enlightenment, I was just thinking about that today. Remember when you challenged me about turning the clock back? You asked me what time I would turn it back to and I couldn't say for sure. Well, I've decided that I would turn it back to the 18th Century, the Age of Enlightenment. I wouldn't want to turn the technology back to there, just the political and philosophical attitudes. I'm surprised, though, to hear you talk about it like it's still going on. I thought the Enlightenment expired in the 19th Century, giving way to the egalitarian social activism that has continued even unto this day. You seem to consider them both to be the same thing and, come to think of it, maybe they are. Without the one, you wouldn't have had the other, so you could think of them as two consecutive chapters in the same book. In some books, the Enlightenment is said to have sprung from the Age of Reason, and others talk about them like they were both the same thing. There seems to be general agreement, though, that the Age of Reason was preceded by the Age of Faith. So you have the Age of Faith giving way to the Age of Reason, which gave birth to the Enlightenment. I don't think, however, that any of this is necessarily anti-religion, it's just that religion is viewed differently now than it used to be, except for those Christian and Islamic fundamentalists that are still hung up in the Middle Ages. In their view, the Crusades are still going on.

Well, if that's what you mean by "our culture", then I tend to agree with you that it's way ahead of whatever culture is in second place. That doesn't mean we should force it on other people at the point of a gun, but a little friendly persuasion wouldn't hurt. If they want to have this global economy, then they need to have some sort of common ground upon which to build the global marketplace. Kind of like that ethnic food festival that they have in Chicago once a year, they serve food from all over the world, but I'm sure there are certain foods that are not allowed, like cannibal casserole. I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere !

I seem to remember that Kelvin Scale from school. In that one they have something called "absolute zero", which is when all molecular activity ceases, Hell freezes over, and Minnesota schools have a two hour delay. One thing I try to remember when our local weather gets me down: It could be worse, I could be living in Minnesota.

clash of cultures 4

Yes you are right, Phineas and Apu are both hypothetical, I wasn’t familiar with Phineas so I wanted to introduce my own metaphor where there wouldn’t be any distracting details, like where she was educated at.

Maybe a guy dropped into the Kwik E Mart and told Apu about savage killers living in a swamp way up north and suggested that maybe he should investigate. You never know.

I don’t think I can define culture very closely, it’s one of those things like intelligence or pornography where we know it is there, but it’s hard to define. Let me say it’s where we get our ideas of right and wrong, generally from the people we are living around. Not everybody in an area shares all these values, but they are just stuff that’s generally agreed upon with little debate necessary.

Way back in the day when we were just tribes we all invented our own little religions and whatnot and we didn’t have to worry about the culture of another tribe because we would just be clubbing each other anyway.

But when we started mixing we ran into problems. The Romans were pretty good about it all you had to do was pay them money and give lip service to their gods and you could go along as you pleased. That’s what made the Jews and later the Christians, such a pain in the ass. They would not go along to get along. They had the one true god, and he was telling them what to do, and be damned if they were going to listen to a bunch of puny mortals.

I guess religion is the strongest component of culture and I guess that is really what I am talking about here. You may not like that immigrant’s stinky food, but when they start telling you that their god is the only true god, that’s when we get into fisticuffs.

I know you remember The Enlightenment, when Europe shed itself from a lot of religious superstition and petty localism, and stepped onto the path of rationalism. Well this is kind of what I mean, call it recent western civ, call it the secular society, something like that, not that it is free of religion, humanist and philosophical versions of the religions are welcome, but stoning is forbidden. The rule of law, equality for all are endorsed, education is valued. This is what I think of as our culture.

It includes most of north America, though we do have our snake handlers and gangbangers who I don’t think are properly members of that culture, and most of Europe has it and some of the rest of the world, mostly in enclaves of the more educated.

Even though I don’t believe in good and evil as root realities, and I rather like some aspects of that cultural relativity thing, I have to admit, that I think our culture is superior to other cultures, and I will get into that in the next posting.

You know you could set Beaglesonia on Kelvin temps, then you would never go below zero. I think you are kidding about the year 0, but you have to wonder about the foresight of those in the year oh, 5,432, who knew the redeemer would show up exactly that many years later. But then they threw it off by four years, just to be a little coy.

It's All Hypothetical

Okay, so Phineas is a fictional character. I just used him as a hypothetical example. The stoning in Afghanistan is also hypothetical, since it's unlikely that you or I will ever go there. Apu in Beaglesonia is hypothetical too. For one thing, there aren't any Jains around here. If one did pass through as a tourist or something it's unlikely that he would come by Beaglesonia. My road dead ends in a junk yard just past my driveway, and there's nothing else on that road to attract the attention of a tourist. Nevertheless, I think I get the point you are trying to make that one culture is not intrinsically superior to any other culture.

I guess I agree with you in theory but, in practice, my culture is my culture, and I intend to keep living in it until someone shows me one that I like better. Come to think of it, that's also hypothetical because I don't think I actually have a culture, unless two crazy old people living in the swamp constitutes a culture. When I go to town I don't join the local culture, I'm just visiting. Maybe we need to define the word "culture" for the purposes of this discussion. It's like society, there is really no society with a capital "S", there are just all these little societies that each think they are the main one. Is culture like that?

When I wrote about those people taking videos it wasn't just about Fergusson. I don't know how many times I've seen on the news where there's some kind of disaster going on, maybe an auto accident or a fire, and you can see several people holding their cell phones up over the crowd so they can get a photo or video of it. Shouldn't they be trying to help, or at least staying out of the way? Then there's those idiots who film themselves committing some kind of crime and then put it on the internet. Whatever are they thinking? Now that I think of it, I think it all started with Richard Nixon making those audio tapes of the Watergate conspiracy. Why would anybody who is dong something wrong deliberately produce evidence that could be used against him in court? Isn't a conspiracy, by definition, supposed to be done in secret?

One thing that is no secret is this weather we've been having lately. I guess I shouldn't complain because we don't have nearly as much snow on the ground as we did last year at this time. I just have this thing about below zero temperatures. I mean, why do they call it "zero" if it routinely goes below that? I guess that's no more illogical than the way they used to count the years back in the BC days. No wonder people thought the Apocalypse was imminent when the years got down to the single digits. Funny though, I don't think there ever was a Year Zero. It is generally believed that Jesus Himself was born around 4 AD, so at what point did they stop counting down and start counting up? I'll have to look that up on Wiki one of these days, but right now I have to go put more wood in the stove.

clash of cultures 3

We need to have parallel cases here, this Phineas Fogg is a fictional character. And this whole thing about England having conquered India is kind of irrelevant. The British conquered it a the point of a sword, not by having free and honest elections, and regardless of whether or not the British had conquered it, I think Phineas Fogg would have pulled that woman out of the fire, but I am not talking about Phineas.

So there you are ambling along through Afghanistan which, well who knows who rules it nowadays, certainly not us at any rate, and you come across a bunch of natives stoning some woman because she mistreated a Koran. Assuming you have the means you are going to rescue her. Your thinking is here is a human life, and the offense is trivial and the right thing to do is save the woman. Maybe later you will have to face some authorities over your breach of law, but that is not your concern when you are saving a life.

Meanwhile, Apu, let’s make him a Jain, those are the guys that walk around wearing face masks so that they don’t accidently inhale bugs and kill them, is strolling along the road past Beaglesonia, and happens to notice you pointing old Betsy at a deer, let’s say a deer is close enough to a cow to be included in that reincarnation thing, or that maybe Apu is nearsighted, but what he thinks is here is a human life, temporarily in the body of a cow or a deer, and he knows that there is a Whole Foods nearby so it isn’t like this yokel is going to starve to death, and assuming he has the means, he foils your kill.

Well both of you are doing exactly the right thing by your culture, so is there any way to determine who is right and who is wrong?

Seems to me the only way is to prove that one culture is superior to another in the, you got it, crucible. I’m thinking of making that the subject of my next post.

I think those people recording violence have already called 911 or somebody else has. I assume you are referring to that general societal eruption that now goes by the simple name of Ferguson, and which appears to be dying out right now. One good thing to come about from it are those body cams which make perfect sense, one bad thing is those New York cops acting like the mayor isn’t their boss because of something he said.

Well of course terrorists have no respect for cultural diversity. They believe that their culture is superior and that is that. That’s what makes me a little nervous about thinking that the western civ is superior.

Byrds, Buddhists, and Local Cultures

The Byrds version was prettier sounding, but they didn't sing all the words. What good is a folk song without all the words?

If some Buddhists came to Beaglesonia I would expect them to abide by my rules, since I own the place. We also have a law in Michigan that says you can't harass or interfere with somebody who is legally hunting. Now if I invited those Buddhists to come visit Beaglesonia, I would refrain from hunting while they were here. I wouldn't have to, I would just do it out of courtesy for my guests. Of course I wouldn't invite them during deer season. If they dropped in uninvited, like those Jehovah's Witnesses who caught me naked in my garage, it would not be reasonable for them to expect me to accommodate their sensibilities. If I was visiting their country, I would expect to abide by their local customs while I was there. If I didn't want to do that, I wouldn't go visit their country.

The thing with Phineas Fogg is a bit more complicated. I suppose he didn't consider himself to be a guest in India, since it was British territory. I agree, though, that the lady having been educated in England was not relevant. I don't think he knew about that until later anyway. Burning the lady was almost certainly illegal under British law and, if Fogg had the time, he could have just reported it to the authorities. As it was, he had to make a life and death decision on the spur of the moment, and he did what any self respecting Englishman would have done under the circumstances. A modern day equivalent would be if an American was in Saudi Arabia and saw that they were about to stone a woman to death for adultery. In that case, he would have no legal authority to intervene but, if he didn't, he would never forgive himself. Of course, if the stoning occurred in the U.S., he might just make a video of it and sell it to the news media. (sarcasm here) All kidding aside, what's up with those people who use their cell phones to record an assault or a murder instead of using it to call 911?

As I understand it, those cartoons in France were just stupid, like that racial stuff you mentioned. Publishing them was probably ill advised but, of course, that doesn't justify killing all those people. I think the terrorists went out right after that and shot up Jewish synagogue that had no connection with the silly magazine. People like that have no respect for civil rights and cultural diversity.

clash of cultures 2

I don’t think that Bob knew you and those people were going to be viewing the sunset over lake Michigan and that the leaves would be still with no wind, but it all goes to show about how a song can mean different things to people and how that doesn’t mean that one set of people are wrong about it.

The first time I heard Mr Tambourine Man it was by the Byrds, what beautiful music, and then I think I was in a record store when I first heard Bob sing it, and I was all like, who the hell would want to listen to his version?

Yes cultural relativism was what I was talking about. I knew there was a phrase, but it wasn’t coming to mind. I think I would pull the lady out of the fire too. But what if some vegan Hindus or Buddhists were visiting Beaglesonia and they saw you about to plug a deer and blew a whistle and scared it away, and maybe took your gun away and destroyed it to keep you from killing again?

What difference would it make if she wasn’t British educated or if England ruled India at the time? Would it have been okay for them to burn her then if that was the case, but not if it were otherwise? I think the difference is in who is looking at it. If an Indian of the time was looking at it, it would be right in both cases, and if we are looking at it through English eyes it would be wrong in both cases.

Well it’s a difficult matter, it’s not like we could just sit under the broad banyan tree and hammer out our differences in the crucible like I am always recommending, because both cultures have different axioms and there is no logical way to reconcile them.

Let’s go back to the case at hand. Did those guys have a right to print their insulting cartoons? It certainly wouldn’t have been allowed in medieval times, or early on during the reformation, and maybe even as late as the 1950s. Remember the censorship trials over Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Howl? How quaint that all seems now. What if they were printing insulting racist stuff? Well I wouldn’t like that, but I think I would allow it. That kind of stuff is generally so stupid that I think bringing it out in the open helps the anti racist side.

But the real issue here is that they killed those guys. if they had protested at the site, written letters to the editor, hired a lawyer, we would have had a spirited debate and one side would have won and the other lost, and everybody would still be alive. And isn’t that the point of democracy, not that it leads to good government, but that it allows people to settle their differences without killing each other.

I was thinking of getting into western civ, maybe tomorrow.

Mr. Tambourine Man - 2

"Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time,
Out past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, sheltered trees,
Out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow."

The lady I told you about was here on vacation with her daughter and her daughter's husband, and they hung around for a couple weeks after the festival. I ran into them at Legs Inn one evening and they invited me to go watch the sunset over Lake Michigan with them. We drove to the old Indian Church near the tiny village of Goodhart. According to the historical plaque, some missionaries came by a few hundred years ago, converted some of the local Indians, and inspired them to build this little church which is still in use today. Nobody was using it when we got there, so we parked in the church parking lot and followed this foot path through the woods down to the beach. There were no signs marking this path to the beach, it was the kind of thing that, if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there.

It was kind of spooky in those woods, not scary spooky, mystical spooky. Maybe the place was guarded by the spirits of long dead Indians. If so, they didn't seem upset by our presence, but we kept our voices respectfully low anyway. It was already pretty dark in the forest, and we needed a flashlight to find our way back after the sunset. The wind was flat calm, and all the leaves on the those "haunted, sheltered trees" held perfectly still in the semi darkness, like time itself had been frozen in place. It occurred to me that might have been what Dylan meant by the "frozen leaves", not frozen by cold, just frozen in the stillness of time.

Musicians and other stage performers commonly hold parties after their show. They're all pumped up and need something to wind them down, kind of like the way they walk a horse around for awhile after it's been working or racing. The more I thought about it, I was pretty sure that's what Dylan was talking about in Mr. Tambourine Man. There probably were some drugs involved, but I don't think the song is primarily about drugs. It's about how it's sometimes good to just let go and let the moment carry you.

"To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow."

*****************************************************************************

I think what you're talking about is called "cultural relativism", the belief that one culture is as good as another for the people in it, and that it ain't nobody's business but their own. It kind of makes sense, but I think there are exceptions to this rule. In the movie "Around the World in 80 Days", Phineas Fogg rescues this Indian lady (Indian Indian, not American Indian) who is about to be burned alive along with her dead husband in keeping with the local customs. Should he have just let her burn? I don't think so! Besides, she had been educated in England, and India was under British rule at the time. Shouldn't the locals have refrained from burning the lady out of respect for British customs?

Have a nice weekend.

clash of cultures 1

Well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, says, life has her her cookies to give out, and sometimes maybe she likes the cut of your jib, and maybe sometimes she is just in a good mood and looks down and there you are.

And there you go, though I wouldn’t believe a word that comes out of flim flam man Bob’s mouth, this is what the writer does, he writes general enough so that it could mean something to almost anybody, and specific enough so that it has some substance. Well this song is not that specific, but it is full of rich images, and the language, oh my.

I particularly like the language on Blonde on Blonde. The words seem so meaningful and deep, but then when you see them on paper, they kind of don’t make any sense. Visions of Johanna has this nice little story of him cuddled up with Louise, but not able to get Johanna out of his mind, and then we come to:

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes

Fish truck? Fish truck, Bob what the fuck? But anyway it is a song that you can relate to.

I think a good writer writes something that is complex and has ambiguity so that you can take his writing several different ways and still enjoy it. Good guy/bad guy stories can be taken in only one way and again, I don’t like them.

Nice story Beagles. I will be looking forward to hearing about those leaves and trees after the weekend, but right now I want to get to the the clash of cultures. I see that what I wrote yesterday was class of cultures, my mistake, I should reread more carefully.

But it does begin with a class. In order to get into edukashun skool I had to take a few extra classes that I had never taken at U of I. One of the classes was Cultural Anthropology, and I thought swell, Martha Mead, exotic lands, I like that stuff.

And it had some of that stuff in it, and that was cool, but then I noticed at the end of the chapter, in the summation, it always came out that everything the white man had done was wrong and everything the natives had done was right, and so it went on for chapter after chapter. This was all political correctness stuff, and one thing that political correctness doesn’t like is other opinions. Anybody who might quibble with them is by definition a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or something, so clearly they have nothing worth saying.

But maybe they have a point. Is any culture superior to another? Was the Incas’ culture superior to some culture of canoers in Indonesia? Well probably not, they both took what was around them and built up something and though they might be different, no reason to think that one was better than the other. Let’s say the Incas had more people, and covered more land, and they had a little better technology, does that make them any better? I don’t think so.

And we have a culture, let’s call it a secular culture because no particular religion predominates. We are against racism, we think women should be treated well, we like education, we believe in rationality. And we don’t only believe these rights are right for us, but we think they are right for everybody. But we don’t want to impose them on everybody. 

Strangers come to our town to do some manual kind of work, because they are not very educated, and they have their own religion, and their own customs, which seem odd to us, and also sometimes repellent, but we don’t want to be telling other people what to do.

Okay than we are France and those guys are muslims. Well certainly they are not allowed to murder us, we can all be against that. But are we allowed to make fun of them? In the one sense, certainly, everybody is allowed to make fun of everybody else, but that is our value system. In their value system nobody is allowed to make fun of the prophet. Well should we soft pedal it then, just to be nice? I think probably. But should we be forced to, should we be expected to stop some of our guys from doing it? But then isn’t that violating the principle of freedom of speech, which is one of our most important values? I think it is. How can you have freedom of speech if you are not allowed to hurt anybody’s feelings?

But the muslims aren’t that big on freedom of speech, so aren’t we at a point where we are trying to decide which culture is superior? But then we are in France, our country, so doesn’t that trump the question of which country is superior?

But if we look from the muslim side again, here they are in this other country, and there are doubtless a lot of white Frenchies who are out and out racists, so that it just looks like racism to them.

And then there is the matter of our servicemen and our businessmen working in Saudi Arabia who, if they are Christians, have to keep it on the down low, and if they are women they have to cover their heads. Well we do that, just to get along, but still does that make it right? And if it’s not right for them to do that to us in their country, is it right for us to make them do stuff in our country?

Just thinking this through here, writing helps me think.

Mr. Tambourine Man

Everyone was always looking for the hidden meaning in Dylan's songs, and maybe there was one, but I remember him saying in an interview once that his songs "mean what they say". I guess that's one of the characteristics of a true work of art, different people will see different meanings in it, and the meaning that the artist originally intended might be none of the above.

The Bliss Fest runs for three days, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Many of the patrons have to be back to work on Monday morning, but those who don't stay over Sunday night. It's easier to break camp in the daylight, and you don't have to drive home drunk that way. Monday morning, about noonish, the volunteers set to work taking down the tents and other temporary structures and cleaning the place up. Sometimes the civilians will jump in and help if they're not in a hurry to get out of there. Monday evening is the Survivor's Party for anybody who's still hanging around. Most of the survivors leave after that, but there's always a few diehards who stumble back to their camps to sleep off the effects of the Survivor's Party before bidding each other a fond farewell. You'd think that, after four days of wine, women, and song, a guy would just go back to camp and crash for the night, and many of them do, but sometimes you get a second wind and aren't ready to give up just yet, so you hold the Survivors of the Survivor's Party Party.

"Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
In the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you.
Though I know that evening's empire has returned unto the sand, vanished from my hand, 
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet, I have no one here to meet,
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming."

One year, back in the 1990s, when I was at the peak of my involvement with the festival, I and this lady found ourselves the sole survivors of the Survivor's Party. It was a warm night, with heat lightning flashing on the horizon, and we vowed to keep making music until the storm broke upon us, but it never did. At one point, there was lightning flashing all around us, miles away, while the sky overhead was clear and starlit. We took it as a sign.

Sometime before dawn, she asked me if I knew "Mr. Tambourine Man". I knew what cords to play, but I wasn't sure that I remembered all the words. She said that she knew some of them and that, between the two of us, we might be able to put it together. I sang some, and she sang some, and both of us sang some together. Between the two of us, I think we got it all. As we were belting out the last verse, it dawned on me that the song was really about us, and I'm not ashamed to say that it brought a tear to my eye. After all those years of trying to decipher the hidden meaning that Dylan had encrypted in the song, it turned out that it indeed, "meant what it said".

Not that it's any of your business but, just so you know, nothing happened between my and that lady. Well, something happened, but not what you think, you dirty old man.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about "the frozen leaves" and the "haunted, sheltered trees".  

hello Mary Lou, good-bye heart

Of course Saddam was a very bad man, but at least he kept things tidy in that area. There were these countries in the mideast and they all hated each other and everybody in them hated everybody else inside them, but people kind of knew where they were at. If you kissed Saddam’s butt, he still might fuck with you, but probably not. Anymore nobody knows whose butt to kiss and everybody is fucking with everybody else.

I admit I am generally anti military, but I would never have sent our boys to Iraq. If they hadn’t gone they might have married Mary Lou and raised a passel of the cutest kids you ever saw west of the Pecos, or they might have knocked over the local 7-11 and gone on to a life of crime and now be doing fifty years in one of those scary prisons that they used to show on tv all the time, all full of tattooed thugs. But they would have been been better off than being dead, or walking dead like you see in those Wounded Warrior commercials. I think I would have been better for our boys then those guys waving the flags.

But what drives me nuts is then we bury them in these handsome caskets in these inspirational cemeteries, and dress up on Veteran’s and Memorial Days, and a Sunday every now and then, and we talk about the great sacrifice (for nothing) that they made and shoot the salutes and click our heels and play the bugle and think how noble of us for honoring these brave boys, when in fact we sent them there to get killed.

And then if anybody says anything like I just did, they are denounced as anti American, and as disrespecting our boys.

Drives me nuts.

But what to make of these brothers and that other guy? It does seem that one of the rules of taking on a faith is that people of other faiths will insult you. It’s not nice, but it’s what happens, I remember in the basement of Elsdon church making fun of those Catholics for engaging in the sinful act of playing Bingo . If these guys had written angry letters to the editor or gathered in front of the offices of that magazine and screamed their bloody heads off, fine, nobody has a problem with that.

And now for the last few days the news has been full of stirring words about freedom of expression and solidarity and condemnation of my man Obama for not marching arm and arm with all the world leaders, though I suspect if he had they would have been on him for grandstanding and associating with furriners and how about that tie he wore. Oh and inclusiveness, there was this African muslim guy among the arm and armers and the marchers have proclaimed that they don’t hold this against the muslims. And they are sure that the muslims of France agree with them in condemning this vile act. But not all of them do, there is a class of cultures, and I will get into that in the next post.

I seem to remember the yoyo guy coming around every spring, but maybe he only came once. I have written to a couple other people about this and haven’t heard back.

But see you have these kids doing their humdrum stuff, bent over playing marbles, a game I never really got the hang of, and here comes this guy out of nowhere and he’s got these amazing tricks, he’s dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, and all the kids want to fade into his parade. Of course the song was widely interpreted at the time, as was everything at that time, as being about drugs, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. I see it more as wanting to escape the humdrum, but you can’t quite do it yourself and then along comes this guy who can help you do it.

I didn’t realize that war games had scripts. You know it’s always more fun to be the bad guy. Even after the good guy shoots the bad guy and rescues Mary Lou and is walking off with her into the sunshine, he knows that she is going to miss that bad guy.

Good For the Goose, Good For the Gander

I hate to admit it, but communism probably was good for Russia, and Red China too for that matter. At least it was better than what both of them had before. Now that both of them seem to evolving towards capitalism, we'll have to wait and see if that's even more better for them. Of course that's not how it was supposed to happen. Marx predicted that, as feudalism had evolve into capitalism, communism would be the next step, and then the state would ultimately wither away, leaving everybody free and happy for the first time in recorded history. Russia and China went from feudalism directly into communism, and now they are finally getting around to capitalism. Meanwhile, the state doesn't seem to be headed for extinction any time soon.

I don't know if Saddam Hussein was so good for Iraq. There's been a lot of trouble since he was overthrown, but there was also a lot of trouble while he was in charge. Maybe Iraq is just a troublesome place by nature. It's hard to believe that it was once called "the cradle of civilization". I agree that the U.S. would probably be better off if we had never gotten involved with those goofy people in the first place.

Speaking of goofy people, how about that big uproar about the latest terrorist attack in France? Hard to believe that it all started with some silly cartoons in a low circulation magazine. Come to think of it, didn't something similar happen a few years ago in the Netherlands or Denmark, or some place like that? It doesn't take much to piss those people off, does it.

I don't remember seeing anybody like your yo-yo guy at Sawyer. There was one year that almost everybody seemed to be playing with their yo-yo, but I never saw the guy from Duncan who got them all started. Maybe I was home sick the day he came around. Be that as it may, I don't see the connection of the yo-yo man with the tambourine man. Maybe you have to be stoned to appreciate it.

All kidding aside, you're probably right that, in real life, the line between the good guys and the bad guy is not always clearly defined. When we played war games in the army, the fake bad guys were called the "aggressors", no matter if they were playing the attackers or the defenders. We never played any of those competitive games where the outcome was in doubt, it was always a scripted scenario and we had to follow the script. Sometimes it was a graded exercise and we were judged on points. Other times it was a "mox nix exercise", which meant that it was just for practice and nobody was grading us. Either way, it was more fun to be an aggressor than a good guy because the aggressors didn't have to follow the script so closely, having more leeway to put their own creative spin on it.

life in the 50s

That thing about wars and rumors of war, reminds me of the phrase, in these (those) troubling times, all times are troubled.

Well the Russians, not only were they the Russians, they were commies, and there were a lot of people here who were afraid that even if they couldn’t overpower us militarily, their ideology might sneak across the ocean and convert us. And I think you have to give communism some of the credit for making them strong. it got all the people working together, and say what you will commie dictatorships tended to have better educated, and healthier, because they had socialized medicine natch, than your generic right wing dictatorship.

Now that the cold war is over we no longer call them right wing dictatorships, we just call dictatorships. Seems like we don’t cozy up to them as much as we used to because back in the cold war we were always afraid their country would go commie, so we were always propping up this guy with a chest full of medals, or this other guy with a big hat with feathers on it. Anymore I don’t think we have that many dictatorships, they mostly seem to have at least a rudimentary form of democracy.

But another thing about those commies is that they can do whatever they damn well please, and it pleased the Russkies to build bombs and missiles and let their people go without fridges, after all it was Russia, people could just leave their food outdoors.

I suppose good guys vs bad guys are more fun, certainly that is the premise of most of our movies. Myself I find those kind of movies boring because, well because you know right from the beginning it is going to end with the goodest good guy punching out the baddest bad guy in an abandoned warehouse. Even if it is science fiction and they have all these cool weapons, it will come down to a fistfight. Myself I like a movie where the good guy is kind of bad, and the bad guy is kind of good, and the closer the better. But then I am a liberal so what do you expect?

Saddam Hussein, who I admit didn’t have much good in him, think of how much better off we and the people of Iraq would be if we hadn’t toppled him.

Hey here’s something. Some article on fb about spinning tops got me to thinking about it and I waxed a little poetic, and here it is:

So there you are, a kid on the playground at morning recess, doing kid stuff, maybe marbles, maybe soldiers,and here comes this guy.

And years later when you were in some dark smoky party, from the record player across the room, you first heard Mr Tambourine Man,

And maybe you would make the connection then or maybe it wouldn’t be until a winter night in your old age, that this guy, stepping out of seeming nowhere onto the grey gravel of the playground, spinning this thing off this way, while his other hand spun another off the other way, was the tambourine man.

At the time though he was called the Duncan man, or maybe the yoyo guy. He was an adult, probably young, though at that age, all adults seemed pretty much about the same age.

But the tricks were the point. He had a million of them, each one more amazing than the last, and he performed each one equally effortlessly.

And so could you, all you had to do was practice. You would learn later that it was way more practice than he hinted at. And it had to be a Duncan, no other yoyo had the balance or the bounce or the spin or something.

And then he was off, into the jingle jangle morning.

I wonder if you had a guy like that come by Sawyer School back when you were a lad.

"Wars and Rumors of Wars"

That's from the Bible. Supposedly, you will be able to tell when the Apocalypse is coming because "There will be wars and rumors of wars, and earthquakes in various places." Going by that, the Apocalypse has always been coming. So what else is new?

How did Russia get so powerful? That's a good question. By all rights, they should have been flat on their ass after the war, as was most of the rest of the world. The U.S was the only major industrial power that wasn't devastated by the war. Indeed, we seem to have come out of it better than we went in. That's the main reason that you and I grew up with all that prosperity, everybody was making money rebuilding the rest of the world from the devastation of the war. Then, around 1970, the job was done, and the downsizing began. Russia did annex a lot of territory after the war, but most of that territory was as impoverished as they were, which should have made it a liability instead of an asset. The only thing I can figure is that somebody was slipping them foreign aid under the table. Maybe they were being paid to play the bad guy for us. With Germany and Japan suddenly on our side, we needed a new bad guy to keep our people rallied round the flag. It worked for awhile, but then we got involved with Vietnam and Russia got involved with Afghanistan, and nothing was the same after that.

I don't think the depression made people submissive to authority, I think it was the war. From what I've read, the depression made a lot of people angry at authority. The war channeled all that anger at the Germans and the Japanese and made our guys look good by comparison. It was either submit to the good guys or you will be forced to submit to the bad guys.

I've always liked the concept of good guys and bad guys. Of course, in real life, most people are somewhere in the middle, which is confusing and takes all the fun out of it. Can you imagine our soldiers marching into World War II singing something like this?
"Hitler's not so bad, he's just misunderstood.
His mommy and his daddy didn't raise him like they should.
We blame it on society, that's why he's so shrewish.
We'd send him off to therapy, but Sigmund Freud is Jewish."

living off the fat of the land

I think after WW II the US was at its peak. We had just beat those awful Krauts, who really were horrible, so there needed to be no guilt about that. We had pretty much pulled the chestnuts of England and France from the fire. Of course the Russkies had borne the brunt of the war, and they had done it with the ropa dopa that they used on Napoleon, but still when they had to they had stood and fought, and fought well, but then they were fighting the Krauts who didn’t so much want to conquer them, but to kill them all and take their land, that puts some starch in your spine.

When the smoke cleared it was us and them facing each other. You know you wonder how they became so powerful. They were just a big backward backyard of bearded oafs in a frozen land at the time of WW I, and they were blasted out of that war early and taken over by crazy commies who ruled it with their crackpot ideas until the Germans came ramrodding through their country, but then when it was over there they were facing us across Europe, our mortal enemy.

How did they emerge so powerful? Well I guess they had those nuclear weapons, and then the power of their army was vastly exaggerated by our politicians. But we always have to be an enemy, and as enemies go they were a tidy one with a well defined country. There was a certain stability to the cold war, so that it kind of ran itself.

But I’ve gotten far afield. For me it was my parents who went through the great depression, and they never got tired of telling me about that whenever I lost my coonskin cap and wanted to go out and buy a new one. I don’t know if it was the depression, but there was something very cautious about them, and they were very submissive to authority. I assumed that was from being downtrodden by the depression.

And our parents did well for us, in that conservative bungalow beltway of Gage Park. We were all fed, we were all clothed, we all got a sufficient education enough to learn to read and write.

I was cocky, and I expect you were too heading off to Alaska with a shoeshine and a smile. The land was fat, and so if we fell it was going to be soft. If we were a bit hungry or without a fixed address for a time, it was by choice and temporary, we knew if it should come down to it we could always get some kind of job somewhere.

Anymore, I agree with you, it is not the same. Kids today they can’t drop out of high school and get a pretty good paying job at the factory down the street. If they do the right thing, stay in school, don’t do too many drugs, and go to college like everybody tells them to do, they end up with a shitload of debt, and either some low paying job making lattes, or a nice college job where they have to do the work of two people.

Well I don’t know where this is going either. Here is something that has begun to stick in my craw, the phrase the bad guys. We used it a lot when were kids, the good guys and the bad guys, a simple world. And it used to be used a lot in describing movies, because they are almost all based on good guys and bad guys.

But now you hear it everywhere, spoken by adults about the real world. The army spokesman doesn’t say Taliban, or ISIS, or whatever, he says the bad guys. The police spokesman doesn’t say miscreants or perps, he says the bad guys. I don’t like it. It gives a distorted view of the world where it is nothing but good guys (us) and bad guys (them). What do you think?

The American Dream

Remember that song, back in the 60s, by Pete Seeger?

"Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky.
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes in a row.
There's a green one, and a blue one, and a pink one, and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

And the people in the boxes all drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children, and the children go to school.
And the children go to summer camp, and then to the university,
And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same."

I guess it's true that a lot of those little boxes were built right after World War II. There were all those soldiers coming home from the war who had put their lives on hold for four years, and now they wanted to get married, have kids, and move into a nice house with a picket fence around it. The G.I. Bill provided them with the opportunity to do just that. They could continue their education, and/or get a mortgage to buy a modest home of their very own, things that their parents could only have dreamed about when they were that age. They also wanted to own a nice car so they could "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet". It became known as "The American Dream".

You and I were born into that world and just took it for granted. Our grandparents used to tell us, "The trouble with you kids is that you've got it too easy." Then they would brag about how they came over from the Old Country with little more than the clothes on their backs and survived the Great Depression by working hard and denying themselves any kind of pleasure so that their kids would have a better life than they did. I always wondered, if poverty and hardship were so good for you, why did they try so hard to shield us from it, and than complain that we have it too easy.

Kids growing up nowadays don't have to worry about that. They can go to college, incurring mountains of debt in the process, and still end up working for low wages the rest of their lives. Forget about the little house made out of ticky-tacky, they will be lucky if they can afford to move out of their parents' home into some crummy apartment before they have kids of their own. The Chevy, if they are lucky enough to own one that doesn't get recalled for safety defects, will sit at the curb much of the time because they can't afford to fill the gas tank. They can still "see the U.S.A." on television which, I guess, is better than nothing. At least they won't have to listen to the old folks harping about how they've got it too easy.

You and I went in two different directions, but one thing we had in common was our disdain for the American Dream. We called it "materialistic", as if that was a bad thing. Truth be known, materialism, like a lot of other things can be carried too far, but it's not so bad in moderation. One thing about us, we had choices. We could turn our backs on materialism, confident that, if we ever changed our minds, all we had to do was just turn around and it would still be there.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I'm just kind of rambling, and I seem to have run out of ideas for the moment. Just as well, it's time to go stuff more wood in the stove and huddle under the covers for the rest of the night. The temp has dropped below zero, and our little ticky-tacky house is groaning in protest. Come on global warming!