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.