Another Teenager: Happy Birthday, Willow!

 

by Pa Rock

Proud Grandpa

I have been blessed with six grandchildren, and, as far as I know, all are healthy and happy.  One is twenty-five, another is eight, and, as of today, the four in the middle are all teenagers - and three of the teenagers live in the same house.  What an exciting place that must be!

Happy birthday, Willow Files, my newest teenage grandchild!  

Willow was born while I was still living and working on Okinawa, so she was several months old before we finally got a chance to meet - at a hotel in Portland, Oregon.  Willow lives in Salem, Oregon,  with her mother and father and two older brothers, Sebastian and Judah.  They are in the only home in which she and Judah have ever resided.

Because I usually only manage to see Willow once (sometimes twice) a year, I am limited on my firsthand knowledge of her and probably tend to repeat things when I write about her on her birthday.  I do know, for instance, that she used to be a big fan of Disney princesses and at one time she was a very aggressive and skilled soccer player.  More recently she has shown an interest in the arts - acting and stand-up comedy.  I also know that Willow is sweet and thoughtful.  This year she texted me on my birthday, completely on her own, with good wishes.  (Her mother was surprised when I told her about the text - and it was a gesture that I will always remember.)

Willow, you are a young flower just opening your petals to a world of sunshine and promise.   Enjoy every single good thing that life has to offer, and never pass up an opportunity to learn or help others.  

Happy, happy 13th birthday!

The Other "Harris" Who Ran for President

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

A half-century has now passed since another prominent Democratic politician whose last name was Harris ran for President - and in fact, did so twice, in 1972 and 1976.

Fred Harris was nine days shy of his 34th birthday when he arrived in Washington, DC in early November of 1964 to assume the duties and responsibilities of being Oklahoma's junior US Senator.  Harris had won a special election to complete the term of Robert S. Kerr who had died in office.  Even sixty years ago Oklahoma was trending hard right politically, but Harris, who had pronounced liberal tendencies, managed to win not only that race, but also managed to get himself elected to a full 6-year term two years later.  Harris had brought President and Mrs. Johnson to Oklahoma to campaign for his in his initial senate run, and his opponent former OU football coach Bud Wilkinson, used former Vice President Richard Nixon in his campaign.

Harris proved to be a strong supporter of LBJ's "Great Society" programs which sought to fight poverty, improve educational opportunities for all,  and created the Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), as well as Medicare and Medicaid.  He also fought to keep Church and State clearly separated.

In 1968 after LBJ announced that he would not run for re-election, the Democratic Party chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey (after a very turbulent political convention in Chicago) as its presidential nominee, and Humphrey reportedly only had two candidates in mind to run as Vice President on his ticket:  Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie (whom he eventually selected) and Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Humphrey's primary concern with Harris was his young age:  thirty-seven.

Fred Harris also served as the Chair of the National Democratic Party from early 1969 through early 1970.

As Fred Harris's six-year term neared its end with the 1972 elections, the young senator realized that he was too far to the left politically the be re-elected to the Senate from Oklahoma, so he chose instead to push all of his chips onto the table and run for President, and while he had some limited successes in the primaries, in the end he was far outpaced by other candidates - and his fellow senator, George McGovern of South Dakota, won the nomination and went on to lose every state in the nation but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, to the Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon.

But Fred Harris refused to give up on national politics, and in 1976 the former US Senator from Oklahoma again entered the presidential race, which also proved to be unsuccessful.  After Jimmy Carter won the nomination that year, Harris gave up on politics and relocated to New Mexico where he spent his remaining years teaching at the University of New Mexico and writing about politics.

Fred Harris, the former United States Senator and two-time presidential aspirant, passed away at the age of ninety-four at a hospital in Albuquerque last Saturday.

I met Fred Harris and his beautiful Native American (Comanche) wife, LaDonna, at a small political rally in Miami, Oklahoma, while he was running for President in 1976.  It was in the winter, not long before he ran in and lost the Iowa Primary.  The Harrises were traveling the country in an RV and staying at campgrounds, which I remember him talking about at that event.  He said at some point a fellow had struck up a conversation with him in a restroom at a national park and said that he had heard there was a presidential candidate staying at the park.  Harris said that he then washed his hands and introduced himself.

Fred and LaDonna would also avail themselves of the hospitality of others and stay in private homes while on the campaign trail.  At those homes they would leave a certificate that was good for one night at the White House during the Harris administration.

Political money apparently did not flow as freely back in the day as it currently does.

Fred and LaDonna divorced in the 1980's and he remarried the next year.  I was privileged to meet LaDonna Harris again in the new millennium when we were both paying guests on a Caribbean Cruise sponsored by Ms. Magazine and the National Association of Social Workers.  LaDonna Harris ran unsuccessfully for Vice President of the United States on the Citizen'sParty ticket with Barry Commoner in 1980 - so Kamala wasn't even the first Harris to seek that position.

The Harrises were and are good people - all of them!

What We Do While the Big Bird Bakes

by Pa Rock

Distant Cousin

(Note :  Much of the background for today's posting comes from material that was recently sent out by Newspapers.com to try and coax former subscribers to their service, like me, to renew lapsed memberships.  Newspapers.com is either owned by, or connected to, Ancestry.com and is one of their many very useful genealogy services that can be accessed for an extra fee.   Some US libraries also provide the subscription service free to their users.  Articles found through Newspapers.com are very easy to transfer to a person's family tree on Ancestry.com, and I found many of the more interesting tidbits in my own family tree through that service.)

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade began one century ago yesterday on November 27, 1924 - which was Thanksgiving Day that year.  It was originally called the Macy's Christmas Parade and was designed as a commercial activity to promote holiday sales and to welcome Santa to New York.  The parade ended at the flagship Macy's Department Store on Herald Square where enormous windows decorated for the holidays were on display.

Most of the people involved in the earliest Macy parades were store employees, but it was also populated with brass bands, bareback riders, clowns, and wild animals from the Central Park Zoo.  The parade featured lavish holiday floats based on nursery rhymes, and Santa would arrive on board the most elaborate of the floats.

The name of the parade was changed to Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade three years later in 1927.  That was also the year that the parade's organizers quit using wild animals in their event and instead began featuring large animal balloons as parade highlights.   The first character balloon to float above the parade was Felix the Cat.  The original balloons used hot air instead of helium, and when the parade was over, they were released.  People who found and returned the balloons were rewarded with a prize.

The practice of releasing and then chasing down the balloons came to an end in 1932 when a 22-year-old student pilot (referred to in the press as a "girl") intentionally flew her plane into one of the balloons at 5,000 feet, apparently hoping to force it down but instead getting one of the plane's wings caught up in the balloon.  The plane was in a nosedive when the supervising pilot somehow managed to get it free of the balloon.

The parade was cancelled from 1942 through 1944 because of World War II.  Helium and rubber were both in short supply and needed by the military.  Macy's announced that the giant balloon characters had all enlisted in the war effort, and the store donated 650 pounds of rubber to the military.

New Yorkers were basically the main audience for the parade up until the late 1940's, but the film, "Miracle on 34th Street" which was released in 1947, changed all of that because it focused on Santa and his involvement in the parade.  Suddenly everyone was aware of the big Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City.  The following year the parade was televised for the first time, which brought even more interest - and from that point onward the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was well on its way to becoming an annual holiday tradition across the nation.

It's what we do while the big bird bakes.

War Novels: "Johnny Got His Gun"

 

by Pa Rock

Reader

(Note:  This posting is the second in a series which began in this space on November 17th and is intended to explore the use of literature as a way of transmitting the realities of war to students of history.  The first novel discussed in this series was Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" which dealt with a young man's desire to discover and test his fortitude during a very bloody battle in the American Civil War.  In it, the author was also exploring his own desire to make tales of war more personal, realistic, and ultimately more accessible and interesting to the reading public.  "Johnny Got His Gun" takes realism in war even further, painfully so.)     

"Johnny Got His Gun'" is a novel of World War I that was written by famed Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 1938.  Trumbo, who was only twelve when the First World War began never served in the military,  but he was a first-rate writer who had a compelling sense of drama and recognized a good story when he came across one.  This novel is based loosely on the experiences of a Canadian soldier in that same war.

The novel, "Johnny Got his Gun" is so deeply thought-provoking and disturbing that it has become an anti-war "classic" and is often banned by library and school boards.  I first read it more than thirty years ago and became so distressed by the sheer savagery of the tale that I had difficulty finishing it.  I have always felt that I should give it another read, but have never been able to summon the inner-strength to do so.

The central character of the novel is not "Johnny," but rather a young American soldier by the name of Joe Bonham.  Joe is stationed in Europe and fighting in the "Great War" when he is brutally injured in an explosion. As Joe awakens, which is where the story begins, he can't see, speak, hear, or even smell, but he somehow senses that he is awake and that he has suffered horrific injuries.  As the days slowly progress Joe realizes that he has some sort of bag or mask over his head, no doubt due to facial injuries, and that he has lost his arms and legs.  He is essentially a stump of a young man with no way to take care of himself or communicate, and with only very limited sensory inputs.

One thing that Joe can feel is the touch of the nurse who tends to him, and he also senses the morning sunlight when it lands on what is left of his body.  He uses that sense of the sunlight to measure the passage of days, and he eventually reaches more than four years in his silent count.

Joe Bonham is a literal prisoner in his own body.  He uses his time as a captive to reflect on his life before the war, his family and his girlfriend, and the experiences that he had in the war which led up to his current situation.  One of his more poignant recollections involves his girlfriend's father who was so proud of Joe for joining the military to fight in the war that he arranged for the new soldier to spend a night with his daughter before he shipped out for overseas duty.  Joe at least had that sweet memory to sustain him in his subsequent life of silent darkness.

The earlier writer, Stephen Crane, wanted tales of war to become more personal and show the horrors of war as they played out among the humans who actually wore the uniforms and did the fighting -  rather than be the tired old musings of the generals and senior officers who managed the wars.   That concept of a personal accounting had to have hit its zenith with the the awakening of Joe Bonham in the military hospital because every detail in the novel comes from his memory and his mind.  There are no third-party interferences

Actually though, there is a bit of outside input into the story, though it, too, is filtered through Joe.  At one point he develops a way of communicating through a slight ability to move his head, and the young soldier who knows Morse code jerks his head as much as he can to deliver a cry for help in dots and dashes.  A nurse finally recognizes what he is attempting to do and responds by tapping. Morse code with her fingers on his chest.    The soldier asks to be put on display to show others the horrors of war, but when the military, who are literally his captors, realize that he can communicate, they quarantine him to keep his subversive thoughts away from others.  When Joe ultimately realizes the extent of his isolation and captivity, he asks the nurse to kill him.

Dalton Trumbo, the writer who took the story of a severely wounded Canadian soldier and grew him into the silent horror that was Joe Bonham, was himself a unique American character whose life merited a 2015 movie called simply "Trumbo."   The title character in the move was played by Brian Cranston, and Trumbo's arch-nemesis, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, was portrayed by Dame Helen Mirren.  That movie focused on the period during the early 1950's when Dalton Trumbo became the focus of the Joe McCarthy (and Richard Nixon) witch-hunt for communists in the film industry,  Trumbo was accused of being a communist as were many other Hollywood notables, and, as a part of the infamous "Hollywood ten," he was ultimately sent to prison for eleven months for refusing to name other "communists" in the film industry.     During that dark period in order to feed and care for his family, Dalton Trumbo had to do his work under pseudonyms and in the names of other (and lesser) screenwriters.

Dalton Trumbo, like his fictionalized soldier, Joe Bonham, found a way to get his message out past forces that wanted him to remain silent, and the message that Dalton and Joe put out about war was deeply, deeply disturbing.

Better Cabinets at IKEA

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The incoming President of the United States (All Hail Caesar Corruptus!) has now finished naming the cabinet for his upcoming administration.  Interestingly, none are holdovers from his first term in office, a possible indication that he considers his first cabinet to have been a cabal of disloyal fools, or that this time he intends to operate at a far shadier level than he dared in his first administration.

So far only one of the President-Elect's cabinet choices has crashed and burned, and that was the selection of Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida to be the US Attorney General.  Gaetz  has been investigated by both the federal government and the House of Representatives regarding allegations of illegal drug use and the sex-trafficking of a minor.  The congressman along with the incoming US Vice President walked the halls of the US Senate last week trying to confirm that he would have the majority of Senate votes necessary to secure the job - and he came up short by at least one vote.  That humiliation was quickly followed by another when the President-Elect reportedly called Gaetz and told him it was time to withdraw.

Aside from the fact that the Gaetz fiasco put the looming incompetence of the next presidential administration on full display, the only other net positive to come out of that poopshow was the fact that Gaetz resigned from Congress on the day the announcement of his nomination was made, and now he says he will not accept an appointment back to that seat, nor will he serve the upcoming term to which he was elected earlier this month.  To return to Congress would have served to possibly reopen the House Ethics Committee's investigation into his reported drug use and affinity for youthful escorts.

Within hours of Gaetz's withdrawal, the President-Elect selected former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be the next US Attorney General, and while Ms. Bondi is considered by many to be almost as repugnant as Mr. Gaetz, she at least has never been publicly accused of dating adolescents.

Another cabinet nominee from Florida is US Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, whom the President-Elect has selected to be the next Secretary of State.  The fact that Rubio, a strong partisan backer of the incoming President, is seen as a shoo-in for the job as Secretary of State, with even some likely Democratic support, speaks to the fact of just how rancorous many of the other cabinet nominees are.

Pete Hegseth, a television personality on the Fox network and a former platoon leader with the US Army in Iraq, is being nominated to head the massive US Department of Defense.  US Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a former military pilot who lost both legs in a combat mission, has been highly critical of Hegseth's nomination, calling him "unqualified" for the job of Defense Secretary, and she has said that Hegseth's nomination is an "insult" to the Defense Department.  Senator Duckworth is particularly incensed over Hegseth's reported view that women should not serve in combat.  Hegseth has also been  dealing with allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in a motel room seven years ago, and while no charges were filed, he did admit making a payment to the woman for her silence.   At this point Pete's Hegseth's confirmation is not a done deal.

Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to run the National Security Agency is also not a done deal.   Ms. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who is now an outspoken supporter of the US President-Elect, has been publicly labeled by some in politics as a "puppet" of Russian leader Vladimir Putin and once, while still serving as a member of Congress, she had a private and highly controversial meeting with Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria.  Assad has been credibly accused of torture and using chemical weapons to annihilate his own people.

One of the problems with the nomination of Linda McMahon to be the US Secretary of Education, in addition to her pronounced lack of experience for the job, are reports that while she was a "professional" wrestling promoter, she and her estranged husband, Vince, knowingly allowed a situation to develop in which one of their employees sexually abused young boys over an extended period of time.

Scott Bessent, a former right-hand man and two-time employee to billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, now runs his own capital management group, a perch from which he has become a cheerleader for the economic policies of the President-Elect and from which he has built formidable ties with Wall Street.  Bessent, who along with his husband renovates colonial mansions in South Carolina, will be the first openly gay man to serves as Secretary of the Treasury.  (It remains unclear at this point whether Marge Greene and Nancy Mace will stoop to using currency that bears the signature of a gay person.)

Another surprising cabinet choice for the new administration is that of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as the new Secretary of Labor.   Chavez De-Remer, a Republican who just lost her congressional seat in Oregon, is a-typical for a Republican in that she has a history of supporting unions, and the Teamsters, as a matter of fact, had endorsed her to be Secretary of Labor.   Republicans are generally seen as being pro-business owners and anti-union, so her nomination is already proving to be unsettling in Congress and the business community.  The President-Elect, however, received a bigger share of the union vote in the recent election than was expected, and his selection of Lori Chavez-DeRemer is seen as an effort to try to cultivate and grow that union support.

There are some more cabinet selections worthy of mention such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, for Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Kennedy, a vaccine mandate opponent who also has opposed fluoridation of the public water supply.   Kennedy has expressed beliefs tying childhood vaccinations to autism and connecting the use of fluoride to children being transgendered or gay.  The future cabinet secretary has a reported history of eating roadkill, and has said that doctors discovered a portion of a worm in his brain that had eaten part of his brain and then died.

And then there is the strange duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the imaginary Department of Government Efficiency.    The world's richest human will certainly have plenty of thoughts on ways us mere mortals can tighten our belts and Make America Great Again - at least for him and Vivek.

More surprises may spring up because so far no  official FBI background checks have been completed on any of the potential nominees because the President-Elect has not signed the necessary paperwork.  One US senator is suggesting that the public doesn't care who does the checks, and there is also a suggestion floating around that the incoming President may pressure Congress into taking ten days off so that he can use recess appointments to install the entire batch without Senate approval.  

Is the President-elect concerned about what the background checks will dig up on his nominees, or is he just trying to show his barnyard dominance.  Time will surely tell.

And there are more Cabinet nominees worthy of mention, but I have grown tired of typing.

The incoming cabinet has a couple of potential bright spots, but overall it just appears to be a strange (perhaps even absurd) collection of "yes" men and women, con artists, and social misfits.   One wag on the internet (and I don't remember his name) put it this way in a tweet:

"You can find better cabinets at IKEA."

Amen, brother, amen.

The Unique Artistic Experience of Eating Art

 

by Pa Rock

Art Critic

American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" to discuss one aspect of the lives of the rich and famous in the late 19th century.  One modern dictionary defines conspicuous consumption as "the act  of displaying ostentatious wealth to gain status and representation in society."   

That era of obscene wealth and savage inequality was described by many as America's "gilded age."  The emergence of the Great Depression a few decades later spurred the American government into developing social programs to address the vast economic chasms between this country's "haves" and "have nots," and ever since the rise of FDR's "New Deal" a certain segment of the population has been quietly licking its imagined wounds and awaiting its rightful return to social and economic dominance - and now, of course, that is about to happen, with a vengeance!

Some of the changes that average Americans will witness and endure over the next four years will be intentionally cruel as those in power figure out more ways to place the burdens of paying for public services on the backs of the poor, and some will be shock and awe as people who have trouble paying for rent and food are forced to watch obscene amounts of money being wasted by people who are apparently lacking any social conscience whatsoever.

As a case in point, this week a young crypto billionaire purchased a banana that was duct-taped to a wall for $6.2 million, an amount of money that would pay for a hundreds of thousands of school lunches or hot meals for shut-ins.   

The banana duct-taped to a wall in an art gallery is the artistic creation of Italian artist and satirist Maurizio Cattelan.  The piece is called "Comedian," and it actually came out in three editions.  One was purchased by a private collector who donated it to the Guggenheim Museum, another went to a private collector who is apparently still unidentified, and the third went to a young crypto billionaire named Justin Sun who announced soon after the purchase that he intends to eat the six million dollar banana,

In addition to the very real banana and the strip of duct-tape holding it to the wall, Mr. Sun also received a new roll of duct-tape and a certificate declaring him to be the owner of the work.  It is the certificate that actually holds the value of the purchase.  Since this most recent version of the art work has been completed, the banana has actually been replaced three times, and it will presumably continue to be replaced long after the current iteration has been eaten by the billionaire.

If one was ever looking for a perfect example of "conspicuous consumption," eating a six million dollar banana would have to be a contender!

In a tweet on X, the purchaser had this to say about the duct-taped banana which he bought at auction through Sothebys:

"I'm thrilled to announce that I bought the banana!!!  I am Justin Sun and I am excited to share that I have successfully acquired Maurizio Cattelan's iconic work, Comedian, for $6.2 million.  This is not just an artwork;  it represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.   I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.  I am honored to be the proud owner of the banana and look forward to it sparking further inspiration and impact for art enthusiasts around the world.

"Additionally, in coming days I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.  Stay tuned!"

Justin Sun copied his tweet to Space X and Sothebys, perhaps giving a clue as to whom one of the other bidders may have been.

Maybe the best that can be said for this oddball art purchase is that it represents $6.2 million that will not be flowing into some right-wing nut job's political campaign. Small mercies.  Of course, it also represents $6.2 million which will not be of benefit to the purchaser's fellow human beings.  They won't even get a taste of the banana!

(You know, I have a dust bunny beneath my big iron bed that is about the size and shape of an adult rabbit.  I could probably part with it.   Somewhere in the low-to-mid eight figures sounds about right. Hello, Sothebys?")

Alice has Left the Restaurant

 

by Pa Rock

Loud Singer

Folksinger and song writer Arlo Guthrie announced on social media late last week that Alice Brock, one of his dearest friends of many decades, had passed away.

Arlo, the son of legendary singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie, first met Alice in the early 1960's when he was a high school student in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and she was his school librarian.  They remained friends throughout Arlo's time in high school and beyond which resulted in her inviting him and one of his friends to Thanksgiving dinner at her home in 1965 a few months after Arlo had graduated from high school.  

At that time Alice was running her own restaurant, the first of three that she would eventually operate, although she always claimed not to enjoy cooking.

But the restaurant was closed on Thanksgiving Day, and Alice and her husband, Ray Brock, invited the young men to dine with them in their home, the old Trinity Church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, seven miles south of Stockbridge.    The Brock's had converted the church into a residence.   Alice and Ray and Fasha the dog lived in the bell-tower and, according to the way Arlo remembered it, they used the sanctuary, which had been stripped of its pews, to store their trash.

Arlo's recollection of that day, which later became the basis for the most famous Thanksgiving song ever written, said that he and his friend decided to take the trash to the dump, so they loaded "half a ton of garbage" into "the back of a red VW microbus" along with "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction" and headed for the city dump.    But when they got to the dump, it was closed for the holiday. 

As they drove the backroads trying to figure out what to do, they came across a ravine along the side of the road at the bottom of which was another pile of garbage.     They logically decided that "one big pile was better than two little piles," and rather than try to bring the other one up, they chose to throw theirs down.

And thus began the saga that was to become "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree," a song written by Arlo Guthrie in 1967 and which runs 18 minutes and 34 seconds.   The song tells not only the tale of the young men disposing of the trash and their subsequent arrest for littering  by a small town cop, but also how Arlo was later able to parlay that arrest record and conviction for littering into a successful bid to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War - a much more plausible dodge than spurious bone spurs.

"Alice's Restaurant" was made into a movie of the same name in 1969 in which young Arlo Guthrie portrayed himself (he was 22 when the film was made).  One other Stockbridge local was also in the film.  Officer Obie, the clownish lawman who had arrested the young men in Arlo's account, was portrayed  by William Obanheim.  Obanheim later said that when he learned that Office Obie had been based on him, he demanded to play the role because if he was going to be made to look the fool, he wanted to do it to himself.

The song became an anthem in the growing anti-war movement.

But this is a story about Alice.  Remember Alice?

Alice went on to become a successful painter and had her own studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  One of the projects in which she was involved during her elder years was the Guthrie Center, founded by Arlo Guthrie and his family and headquartered in Alice's former home - the old Trinity Church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  The Guthrie Center bills itself as "a campaign for community, caring, and peace," and one of their projects is to provide a free Thanksgiving meal to anyone who shows up on the holiday.  This year the meal will be served on Thanksgiving Day at 1:00 p.m.  The center also displays art and historical items of the Guthrie family.

Alice Brock passed away last Thursday, November 21st, exactly one week before Thanksgiving.  She was eighty-three.  (Arlo is seventy-seven.)  It's nice to know that even with Alice's passing people will still be sharing and enjoying a Thanksgiving meal in her old home - only now they probably won't feel obligated to take out the trash!

Educators impact lives, and occasionally they inspire movements.

"And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and

all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the

guitar

With feeling.  So we'll wait for it to come around on the guitar, here and

sing it with feeling.  Here it comes.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Walk right in it's around the back

Just a half a mile from the railroad track

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

That was horrible.  If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud.

I've been singing this song for twenty-five minutes now.  I could sing it

for another twenty-five minutes.  I'm not proud . . . or tired.

So we'll wait until it comes around again.  This time with four part

harmony and feeling.

We're just waiting' for it to come around is what we're doing.

All right now.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Excepting Alice

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Walk right in its around the back

Just a half a mile from the railroad track

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Da da da da da da da dum

At Alice's Restaurant"

This Thanksgiving I am especially thankful for Alice Brock, Arlo Guthrie, and that wonderful anti-war anthem, "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree."  We're in desperate times, America - sing loud!

Struggling to Stay Vertical

 

by Pa Rock

Headbanger

After lamenting in this space a little more than a week ago about the fact that the calendar was way into November and the Ozarks had yet to have a significant frost, and then yesterday using this space to recount the history of my two broken arms over the past four years, one of which occurred from slipping on a frost-covered incline, I can now report that the Ozarks had a good hard frost last night, and furthermore, that I somehow managed to slip on a frosty incline this morning while taking Gypsy for a walk and banged my head on the cold, hard ground.  However, no arms were broken in this fall, and my glasses which were slung off when my head hit the ground were not broken either.

(I have broken my glasses twice in the last month - once while in New York City - which led to my encounter with St. Theresa of 42nd Street - all of which I also blogged about here.)

Irony can be such a bitch.

I'm not blaming Gypsy for today's fall even though she was pulling the leash firmly this morning trying to follow the alluring scent of her boyfriend whom I had spotted sitting in the road about a quarter-mile beyond our house.  As soon as I hit the ground poor Gypsy rushed over and began licking my face.   She was really scared, and I was able to use her as a brace in helping me to stand.

I make a point of carrying my phone almost every morning when I walk just in case of a fall or some other catastrophe, but of course this morning I had forgotten it.  I had also forgotten in on each of the days when I managed to fall and break an arm.  I had intended to take it each time, but the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions.

Anyway, to recap:  the rose blooms and little tomatoes are now gone until next spring, and Pa Rock is still here struggling to stay vertical.

Them's the breaks.

A Triumph of Modern Medicine

 

by Pa Rock

Aging Citizen Journalist

For the past six weeks or so I have been visiting an array of physicians regarding a sudden drop in my pulse rate that lasted several days back in mid-October.  Since that spate of doctor visits and some changes in medication, the condition seems to have generally corrected itself, but the cardiologist did put me through a couple of tests to get a clearer read on the current situation with my 76-year-old ticker:  an echocardiogram and a chemical stress test.

Medical tests are normally performed to see how something is functioning and are not intended to be corrective measures in and of themselves, so I was surprised when the chemical stress whose purpose was to photograph my heart under varying conditions fixed an issue with my arm which I had suffered with for more than two years.

I fell and broke my right arm in May of 2020 in what was a totally avoidable accident.  It broke in a straight  line just below the shoulder.  I went to physical therapy afterward and eventually regained full use of the arm.  Two years later, in February of 2022, I again fell, that time on a slick incline that was covered with a black frost that I hadn't detected.   I broke my left arm in exactly the same place and manner as happened two years earlier with the right arm.  I again went to physical therapy, but that time when I "graduated" I could tell that I was still somewhere short of being back to normal.  I tried to use the arm as aggressively as I could at home, but, being the left arm of a right-handed person, it did not get the same amount of attention as its right counterpart.    My range-of-motion never returned to normal and there were certain tasks, like taking a shower, that required more effort than before the accident.  

I told myself that I was just getting old and would have to live with it, and when my doctor would ask for updates on my aches and pains I would either not mention the arm or minimize the occasional pain and inconvenience.  I was not in the mood to repeat a physical therapy regime that had been ineffective  the first time.

Fast forward to the chemical stress test.  The procedure involves lying on a narrow table and being wheeled into a long white tube similar to an MRI tube.  The technician putting me through the procedure told me to put my arms above my head - which I did, resting my hands on top of my head.  "Oh no," he said, "Stretch those arms so we don't catch your elbows on the tube as you go in.  I was still wearing my windbreaker, and the shoulders of that garment got especially tight as I raised my arms.  After I was finally situated, most uncomfortably with pain in my shoulders, the attendant looked down and said, "Remain as still as you can while you are in the tube.  I will be back in five minutes."

"Huh?"  Five minutes!  But I managed to do it, and when he finally returned it took almost as much time and effort to lower my arms as it did to climb off of the skinny table.  Then I was sent out for a mandatory "fatty" breakfast meal and came back to do the follow-up.  Soon I was on the table again and being slid into the tube - and I had forgotten to take off the windbreaker, so my shoulders were immediately back in pain mode - but I persevered, heroically and silently.  This time he told me that he would be back in three-and-a-half minutes.  (Time off for good behavior?)

The long and short of it is that by the time I drove fifty miles back to the house, my entire left arm seemed to have lost the low-grade pain that I had become so used to over the past two years.  Probably just my imagination, I thought.  But that night I woke to find myself sleeping on my left side, and old preference that had been missing from my sleep routine for a long time, and the next morning I found that my range-of-motion was nearly complete, and showering was much easier than it had previously been.

The heart test had fixed my arm.

Modern medicine is miraculous!

The Fine Art of Minding Your Own Damn Business!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Is someone who is accepting of new ideas that seem to be following the moral arc of justice toward the betterment of society "enlightened" and worthy of praise, or is that person "woke"  and begging to be scorned and vilified?

Not everyone is on board with the composition of the moral arc or the direction in which it is heading, and that is the crux of the Great American Culture War.

The culture war has several fronts, but during the recent political campaign it was the conflict over transgender rights that seemed to draw the most fire.  Republicans whipped up a whirlwind of hate over the idea that anyone except God Almighty could determine a person's gender, and if God chose to bring you into the world with male genitalia, you were a male and would remain so all of your natural life.  The same was true for females.  If a baby was born equipped as a female, then that is what "she" would remain, even if from "her" earliest memory onward she had known that "she" was actually a boy who had been born into the wrong body.

Transgender stories and issues proved to be electoral gold for the Republican Party, and their politicians milked fears of transgender individuals in restrooms, locker rooms, and on sports teams for all they were worth - all the while completely ignoring burgeoning sex scandals surrounding multiple cabinet nominees of their own party.

Earlier this month Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, was elected to become the first transgender member of Congress, and even tough the election was over, some Republicans in Congress could not concentrate on legislating when they could instead be prancing around in front of news cameras and manufacturing social media memes as they gleefully attacked a colleague they had yet to even meet.

Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, rushed to declare that the new member of Congress must not be allowed to use women's restrooms in the Capitol, and Mace said she would push for a congressional rule to keep her out.  Rep. Mace said her push for the ban was "absolutely targeted" as Rep. McBride.

Not to be outdone in the hate department, regular blowhard, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, said that she would fight the newcomer if she found her in one of the women's restrooms.  Maybe Netflix should look into booking it.

House Speaker Johnson of Louisiana, A Republican and a man who would be ill-advised to fight either Mace or Greene, quickly enacted a rule to bar transgender individuals from using any restrooms in the Capitol other than those aligned with their birth gender.  Every member of Congress has a personal restroom in their office, so hopefully Rep. McBride can relieve herself in her office restroom without the potty police kicking down the door to see if she is standing or squatting.

Okay, let's recap:  first we had the government snooping around in our bedrooms, and now it is in our bathrooms.  What's next?  Will the FBI be in our laundry rooms going through dirty clothes hampers searching for evidence of cross-dressing or missed periods?   Attorney General Gaetz is going to love sorting through those photo files!

I guess I'm getting too old.  I can remember when members of Congress actually at least pretended to work at legislating, and when people were content to practice the fine art of minding their own damn business!

Tariffs: One Way to NOT Make America Great Again

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Yesterday my sister (a diehard Walmart shopper) sent her only sibling (me - who has not been inside a Walmart store in over thirty years) a copy of an internet news article from the Daily Mail.  The article covered a statement by Walmart CFO David Rainey in which he said that due the anticipated increase in tariffs on imports by the incoming presidential administration, consumers might see price increases on some items at Walmart.

Mr. Rainey appears to be a master of the art of understatement.

The article that my sister forwarded further stated that the President-elect is talking of imposing an across-the-board tariff of ten-percent on all imports and a sixty-percent tariff on all imports from China. Tariffs are not paid by the exporting countries, but rather by the companies that import the goods - and those companies recoup their costs by raising the prices that consumers pay. 

According to the statement Mr. Rainey made yesterday, one-third of the items Walmart sells are imports, so yes, if there is an additional fee (tariff) placed on everything coming in from abroad, prices will undoubtedly be going up at Walmart - and at Best Buy - and at Dollar General - and at all of the other stores in the United States which sell imported items.  

And just how deeply will this new de facto sales tax reach into our pockets? According to the Daily Mail article that my sister forwarded:  

"A May report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a non-profit think-tank, estimated that these levies (tariffs) will cost middle-class families at least $1,700 a year." 

$1,700 is a significant amount of money in my household. 

Or, as Jim Bob says, "Tariffs will learn them foreigners not to mess with America!  MAGA!"

Salt Lake City in December

 

by Pa Rock

Family Historian

Much of the time that I spent at the computer during the early years of my retirement was focused on genealogy.  The first big task was getting my old genealogy newspaper columns ("Rootbound in the Hills") typed into the computer, indexed, and finally printed into book form.  It was a massive undertaking (over 240 individual columns with thousands of surnames), but when the chore was completed the columns were preserved and available for research in several local libraries and two national genealogical libraries, and my children each had copies to pass on to their descendants.  

After that I researched my own personal ancestors and published profiles of them in this blog, and spent an abundance of time tracing and writing about the descendants of one of my 19th century ancestors on whom I had extensive information due to records from an old court case.  The original family surname was "Smith," and I thought that by carefully sifting through a few generations of their descendants, I might not only learn more about many of my distant cousins, but also provide some helpful material for future family historians who are researching a "Smith," the most common family surname in the United States.  I titled that collection of blog-postings "One Smith Family."

Now I have separated all of those old blog profiles into three separate collections:  my father's lineage ("The Macy Family"), my mother's lineage ("The Sreaves Family") and "One Smith Family," and am finally ready to begin a final proof-reading, filling in gaps, and getting them ready for publication.  To do that most effectively - for the peace and quiet as well for the ready availability of a world-class family research facility - I am preparing to head to Salt Lake City for six full days of research and work at the Family Search Library (commonly known as the Mormon Library).  I will be staying next door to the library at the Plaza Hotel.

I made that same trip in 2018 and had an extremely good research experience - and I hoping that this excursion will be even more productive. The trip is planned and booked for December 15th through the 22nd, and it will hopefully knock three more things off of my bucket list.

And I suspect that Salt Lake City will be a very nice perch from which to enjoy the holiday season.

A Tanning Bed and a Foul Smell

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

In what sounds like a cascading series of failures to  use established protocols and common sense, a 39-year-old Indiana man apparently died in a tanning bed at a commercial fitness center last weekend and his death in the business facility went unnoticed for three days.

The man had left his girlfriend and her daughter shopping at a local department store on Friday, November 8th, and walked to a nearby fitness center (a member of a national franchise) to inquire about a membership.  There he apparently joined, went to one of the center's tanning rooms, possibly injected drugs (a syringe was later found in the tanning room), and then got into a tanning bed where he died.  Even though the center was reportedly open throughout the weekend, the man's body was not discovered until the next Monday when customers began complaining about a "foul" smell coming from the tanning area.

Failure #1:  An open business failed to notice that the door to one of its tanning rooms remained closed during three business days.

The man had been arrested and brought to trial last year on a charge of narcotics possession and possession of controlled substances, and he had entered a plea arrangement which confined him at home for a year wearing an ankle bracelet and under the supervision of a probation officer.

Failure #2:  Whoever was responsible for monitoring the location of the ankle bracelet over the weekend apparently did not notice that it was no longer located at the man's residence.

The man's girlfriend reported him missing to the police when he had not returned home on Sunday morning.  One news report says that he was found by police on Monday when they followed up by searching at his last known location.   Another report indicates that he was found by his probation officer.  Interestingly, he was apparently not found by staff members of the fitness center, even though customers told the press that they had reported the bad smell in the tanning area to employees of the business.  Evidence from the ankle bracelet shows that the man never left the facility after entering on Friday, November 8th.

Failure #3:  There was no immediate clamor from the man's family or support group to locate him when he initially disappeared.

The man's mother said that she anticipated that when her son's toxicology report comes back it will show that he had fentanyl in his system.  She referred to him as "a human being with value and worth," and said he was "the kindest person" with "the softest heart."   Other family reports indicate that the man "struggled with drugs."

Now, it would seem, his struggles are over.

The Lesson:  We need to be looking out for one another whether it is our job to do so, or our family responsibility, or simply because it is just the right thing to do.

War Novels: "The Red Badge of Courage"

by Pa Rock

Reader

(Note:  This posting will hopefully be one of several which explore the use of literature as a way of transmitting the reality of war to students of history.)

I mentioned in this space on Veteran's Day that I am a veteran of four years of active duty service with the United States Army, though thanks to a long college deferment from the draft I never had to serve in the Vietnam War which was raging during those years - so I am what is commonly referred to as a "non-combat" veteran.  My major in college was history with a strong emphasis in American history, and I went on to teach history at the junior high, senior high, and undergraduate college levels, and while doing that I quickly discovered that although many students regard history as being fact-laden and dull, they do tend to perk up when the topics are war and politics, especially if those subjects are taught with some insights into the human situations that played through the history - if the subject matter has a personal feel.

As an illustration, think of how director Ken Burns ignited broad public interest in the American Civil War with his in-depth series that told the war from the perspective of the people who lived it - through personal accounts (journals and dairies) and photographs showing the actual sadness and savagery that resulted from the four years of blood-soaked battles.  Burns had to use the archives for his video retelling of the war from the human perspective, because all of the participants and observers had been dead for decades.

Many of the generals and political bigwigs of the Civil War era published books on their involvement and the war, but those tomes were almost always heavy with facts and light on the humanity exposed by the war -  the impact that it had on ordinary individuals and families.  That began to change when Stephen Crane came on the literary scene.

American poet, short story writer, and novelist Stephen Crane was born in late 1871, more that six years after the end of the American Civil War.   By the early 1890's he was an established writer and like many young men of the time had an interest in war and combat.  (Some of that mass popular interest presented as a sort of "envy" toward the Civil War vets and a desire by the young men to have their own glorious war - one of the factors feeding into the rush toward the Spanish American War.)

Crane read some of the available books on the Civil War and was disillusioned by what he saw as sterile factual accounts that neglected the human element.  He interviewed surviving veterans, visited battlefields, and developed a feel for what the experience had really been like, and channeled his research into a fictional war experience of a very conflicted young man.  Crane's protagonist, 18-year-old Private Henry Fleming of the Union Army, had joined up in the hopes of acquiring some glory and honor from the experience that would hopefully follow him through life.  His service might even result in one of the greatest honors of all, a war wound - also known as a "red badge of courage."

The author told the story from a third-person (outside observer) perspective, but he would occasionally reveal the thoughts of his main character, Henry, as a way to advance the story while giving the readers more insight into the complicated soldier and his situation.

The unit that Henry joined did not immediately engage in battle, and, in fact, remained encamped for several weeks, and that gave Henry time to think about things.  Would he be brave and thrive during battle, or would he be overwhelmed by his growing fears and be subsumed by cowardice?  Before the multi-day battle (based loosely on the actual Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville) ended, he lived both experiences amid very brutal and bloody circumstances.

Stephen Crane's novel of the Civil War was so original with its strong bent toward realism and naturalism along with a unique style of narration that American readers  were slow to engage with it after the book was first published in 1895, but it was a big hit in England -  which made American readers give it a second and more enduring look.  The novel has never been out of print since its initial publication.

"The Red Badge of Courage" is relatively short and would be a quick read if it did not give readers so much to stop and ponder.  After its publication, future books about war generally followed Crane's example of being compelling stories rather that collections of maps and facts.   For those who would like to develop a sense of what combat is really all about, "The Red Badge of Courage" is a good place to start - and, teachers, it will quickly captivate novice students of history and generate much discussion.

Rusty (the Mutt) and the Arrogance of Humans

 

by Pa Rock

Dog Servant

Many years ago when I worked in the field of education by day, one of the ways that I supplemented that meager income was by also working in the field of education a couple of nights a week as an "adjunct" instructor for a small community college.  The coursework that I taught for the college was varied and interesting, everything from freshman composition to American and world history, geography, government, economics, and even general psychology.  It was during one of the general psychology classes that one of my most memorable nights of teaching - and learning - occurred.

On nights when the basics of the lecture had been completed we would dedicate some time to class discussion on various related topics.  One night I led off the discussion with this question, "Can animals think?"  The class, mostly my age or older, caught fire with that one and the responses were still coming fast and furiously when it was time for the class to end.  The unanimous opinion was "Yes, of course they can think!" and the class offered up an enormous supply of fantastic animal tales.  We heard about animals, primarily dogs and cats, who solved their own problems, outsmarted their owners, performed complicated and multi-part physical operations, showed empathy, and were just generally all-around smart creatures.  Everyone had amazing pet stories to tell!

As anyone who has ever had a long-term pet knows, they quickly learn to understand what their human companions want and expect from them, and they also seem to innately know how to get what they want.

Most of us who have been around more than half a century probably remember Koko, the gorilla, who was taught American Sign Language and promptly used that skill to request a pet kitten which she cared for and loved until the feline was unfortunately run over by a careless driver behind the wheel of a car - and even then Koko used her sign language skills to grieve for her lost companion.  Koko learned more than one thousand words in American Sign Language and she was able to show an understanding of two thousand other words which she learned through listening.  It would be hard to argue that Koko the gorilla did not possess a great deal of intelligence, the ability to learn more, and the ability to share her thoughts and feelings.

Ranger Bob forwarded a brief video clip of famed primatologist, zoologist, and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall who has spent much of her life studying and working with chimpanzees in the African nation of Tanzania.  Dr. Goodall, who is ninety now and still educating the world on environmental and animal welfare issues, actually met and visited with Koko the gorilla on several occasions.  This clip is of Dr. Goodall's response to one question which was posed to her at the Clinton Global Initiative:

Question:  "What can we learn from the chimpanzees?"

Goodall:  "How arrogant humans have been.  When I got to Cambridge to do a PhD in 1961, I was told that I couldn't talk about chimps having personalities, minds, or emotions because those were unique to humans, and as a scientist I shouldn't have empathy with my subjects.    But fortunately I had a great teacher when I was young who taught me that all the learned professors were totally, totally wrong - and that was my dog, Rusty.  He was a mutt, he was just amazing, and, you know dogs are my favorite animals.  But we now know (and it's a very exciting time for young people wanting to study animal behavior, you know) we now know the intelligence of chimpanzees and other apes, whales, elephants, as well as pigs, rats and octopuses."

Dr. Goodall's remarks certainly lay the groundwork for the acknowledgment of the intelligence of the little monkeys who escaped their captivity from a lab testing facility in South Carolina last week.  Many of them are still free and now there is even some discussion of their potential legal rights as escaped wildlife.  (For a look into that subject please see:  "43 lab monkeys escaped in South Carolina. They have a legal claim to freedom."  by Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau in the current online issue of Vox Magazine.)

When an "animal" shows clear signs of being smarter than the guy who lives down the road, it feels immoral to condemn it to captivity or slaughter.

Perhaps I have now exhausted this topic, or maybe it has exhausted me.   We'll just have to wait and see.

Missouri Passes Progressive Ballot Measures

 

by Pa Rock

Missouri Voter

While Missouri has morphed into a reliably red state over the past quarter century with regard to candidates for political office, the show-me state can take a surprisingly liberal view of specific issues which make their way onto the ballot.

Over the past several years the people of Missouri have rolled back a gun "concealed-carry" bill that had been passed by our legislature (though it was later enacted anyway) and gutted a "right to work" bill that had been passed by our lobbyist-controlled, fundamentalist state legislature by passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights of workers in the state to organize and join unions.  A couple of years ago we even enshrined in our state constitution the right of adults to partake in the  recreational use of marijuana. 

This year Missouri voters, while voting for the GOP candidate for President by a margin of over eighteen percentage points, also managed to pass some surprisingly progressive ballot initiatives.  First, there was the issue of sports betting (which I do not regard as progressive because the gambling industry targets the poorest among us and lonely senior citizens).  But nevertheless in a state with a high density of self-proclaimed, fundamentalist Christians, and in an election where almost three million votes were cast, sports betting managed to squeeze out a victory at the polls with just over four thousand votes statewide.

Missouri also had one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, again thanks to our rigid moral compass, the Missouri State Legislature - but a constitutional amendment passed by voters this year rolled that back and repealed the abortion ban making abortion legal in Missouri up to the time of fetal viability - while at the same time inexplicably returning anti-abortion zealot Josh Hawley to the US Senate!  The abortion amendment passed with 52% of the state vote.

And after ensuring Missouri worker's right to join unions just a few years ago, the people of Missouri delivered another victory to working people with the passage of a constitutional amendment this year that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Missouri over the next two years and will force employers to provide earned sick leave to employees.

Missourians may have their collective heads stuck deep in the sand when it comes to candidates, but with policies that affect them directly, they seem to be paying more attention.

The Climate Is Changing; Politics be Damned!

 

by Pa Rock

Earthling

The incoming President assures us that climate change is a hoax and that he will protect us from the dangers and inefficiencies of energy technologies which he does not like, such as wind and solar, and instead create American jobs by more digging, drilling, and clear- cutting our very limited natural resources until they are used up and the air and water so noxious and poisonous as to render the planet essentially uninhabitable. Squandering our resources and destroying Planet Earth is good for business, don't you see?  

The flaw in that "comprehensive" energy and environmental plan is that it is based on nonsense.  Climate change is happening.  I can look out my living room window and know that for a fact.  Ten years ago when I first moved to this house, almost all of the leaves were on the ground by Halloween.   This year, halfway through November, they are still falling and will be for another week, or possibly even two.   There has only been one light scattering of frost so far, and I still have roses blooming and a lilac bush that is trying to bud again.  The tomato plants in the backyard have blooms, and yesterday I even picked a delicious little red tomato and ate it.

People are still mowing their yards in this area during the middle of November.  I will give mine one more good mow, but I am trying to wait until the leaves have basically all fallen.  It would be nice to get the lawn put to bed before Christmas.

I grew up in southern Missouri, a hundred-and-seventy-five miles due west of here.  When I was a lad in the late 1950's we had two years in a row where the first snowfall happened on Thanksgiving Day - and they were major snows!    Thanksgiving this year is two weeks from today, and we haven't even had a decent frost!

I did see one encouraging climate story in the news this week.  Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil has gone on the record encouraging the incoming President of the United States not to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords - like he did during his first term as President.  Mr. Woods sees climate change as being a global concern and says "we need a global system for managing global emissions."   

All of the world's countries have been a part of creating the climate change that is happening, and all of the world countries have a shared interest in combating and fixing the problem.  The United States has been a major industrial force and polluter for the past two centuries, and we own a good share of the current climate and environment problems that the planet is experiencing.  Of course we should be involved in finding solutions.  Thank you ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods for making that point.

People who will be living on the Earth a hundred years from now will not be strangers who are of no concern to us.  They will be our grandchildren's grandchildren, and they will (rightfully) be holding us accountable for the condition of the planet on which they struggle to survive.   

In a week or so I will be mowing and mulching the leaves which are covering the yard in order to help build the soil for the benefit of people who will be living on this property years from now, people I will never meet - and I should be doing even more.  Somewhere someone else is out planting a tree today, and tree that will make shade and oxygen and perhaps even fruit for someone who hasn't been born yet, perhaps one of my great-grandchildren - or yours.

The Earth is our home and it will continue to be a home for humanity for a long time.  We must protect it for ourselves and for our future selves.   Politics be damned!

Great Apes and Monkeys, Deer and Cows

 

by Pa Rock

Student of Nature

(Note:  As some of you may have noticed, I am on a hiatus from writing about politics.   I used to devote a lot of space in this blog to discussing the politics of our nation, certain states, and even my local community, because it was always easy to find outrages to write about, but of late the outrages have been piling up so quickly, and so high, that I have decided to leave digging though the shit to others, and I will endeavor to find more interesting things to write about.   Expect more variety and less tension.)

I had an email yesterday afternoon from my good friend, Ranger Bob, a former ranger with the national park system and a well-trained naturalist.  In responding to yesterday's blog posting where I talked about the plight of elderly chimpanzees currently being housed in a chimp research facility at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, I referred to the chimps on multiple occasions as monkeys.   Ranger Bob informed me of the error of my ways and said that chimpanzees are actually a type of "great ape" and monkeys are not.

I did a little digging on my own after receiving Bob's message and collected a few more specifics.  According to a pamphlet published for the Center for Great Apes called "About Apes" which is available on the internet:

"Although there are a number of differences between apes and monkeys (apes have a longer life span, larger body size, larger brain-to-body ratio, and higher intelligence);  the main difference is that monkeys have tails and apes do not have tails.  The difference between great apes and lesser apes is general size.)

Apes and monkeys are distinct and different, but they are members of the same order of mammals, "primates," and so are humans.  Merriam-Webster defines "primate" as:

"Any of an order (Primates) of mammals that are characterized especially by advanced development of binocular vision resulting in stereoscopic depth perception, specialization of the hands and feet for grasping, and enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres that include humans, apes, monkeys, and related forms such as lemurs and tarsiers."

Bob also told me in a humorous fashion that referring to chimpanzees as monkeys was like calling a deer a cow - which put me in mind of an old Ozark folktale about some guys from St. Louis who decided to head to the Ozarks and hunt deer.  After two or three nights of getting drunk at their deer camp, and two or three days of hungover hunting, they had no dead deer to show for their efforts and decided to pack it in and head back to the city.  However, on the way home they happened to pass a meadow where they saw a few deer grazing peacefully.    They quickly pulled to the side of the road, took aim on the poor creature who was standing closest to the road, and opened fire with several rounds hitting the target which fell dead.  They gutted their prize, tied the carcass to the top of their minivan, and headed home to certain praise and glory.  They were on the outskirts of St. Louis when a state highway patrolman pulled them over and asked why a dead cow was strapped to the top of their vehicle!

That is a folk tale.  It undoubtedly has its genesis in something that actually happened in a rural location many years ago, and it likely is enhanced with every retelling.  If the guys who actually shot that cow are still around, they should send their resumes to the incoming presidential administration because one of them would certainly be a shoo-in for Secretary of the Interior - or perhaps Secretary of Agriculture!  Nothing speaks louder in a job search than experience.

Finding things to blog about is simple if you possess an untethered mind!

Caring for the Elderly. (More Monkey Business)

 

by Pa Rock

Elderly Primate

There was a report out yesterday morning stating that twenty-four more of the little monkeys who escaped from a research facility in rural South Carolina had been recaptured.   The CEO of the company that breeds and owns the monkeys said later in the day that “more than half” were now back in custody.
 
I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I guess they are safer in the testing facility than they would be out in the wilds of South Carolina, at least for the time being, but who knows what ugly fate awaits them now?
 
There is one other monkey story in the news, but it involves chimpanzees.  The Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico has been housing a colony of chimps that were brought from Africa as juveniles sometime around 1970.  They were initially under the supervision of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and used for flight and space travel research, but over the years, as the colony grew to over six hundred, the facility was contracted to a company that used them for medical research.
 
No medical research (at least the “invasive” research) is reportedly being done with the chimps now, but those who were exposed to certain diseases are still being studied and tracked.  Some of the chimps who have survived thus far are quite elderly, and so too are some of the human primates who care for the chimpanzees – and many of the humans are expected to retire by next summer.  Most of the chimps have been moved to a non-research facility in Louisiana, some sort of “care” home, but twenty-three very elderly ones were thought to be too old and frail to endure the trauma of a major move.
 
Now apparently the NIH has reconsidered their earlier decision and will send the old chimpanzees to “Chimp Haven” near Shreveport, Louisiana.  
 
I’m not sure how I feel about that either.
 
(I have a very elderly friend who was incarcerated for several years in a women’s prison in California.  Old prisoners are a big drain on prison budgets, and my friend had plenty of medical maladies that are common to old people.  A few years ago California got smart and released many of their elderly prisoners, those who were too feeble to resume their lives of crime, to the care and supervision of family members.  My friend’s family were all in southern Missouri, and she was sent home to be with them.  Not long after that the relatives placed her in a nursing home, and when I occasionally visit with her over the phone, her description of life in that facility is very similar to the life she had been leading in prison – one of pain, misery, and captivity.)
 
I hope that the elderly chimps were moved for their own benefit and not to take pressure off some government bureaucrat’s financial spreadsheet.
 
We need to be showing more humanity to all creatures, great and small.

Thoughts Regarding Veterans on Their Day

 

by Pa Rock 

Veteran

Today is Veteran's Day.  It is one of those rare federal government holidays that is attached to a specific date - November 11th - and therefore does not automatically fall on a Monday, but this year it does.  I need to remember not to bother checking the mail today.

November 11th is the old "Armistice Day," or the date on which World War I officially ended - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

I am what is called a "non-combat" veteran, a person who wore his country's uniform (for four long years!), but because the Vietnam War was winding down when I went into the service in April of 1971 with an ROTC commission, I never had to go to the hellhole that was Nam.   Even without the constant danger of getting killed, maimed, infected, or addicted in a rotting jungle thousands of miles from home, I still found my time in uniform to be generally demoralizing.  At one point during my service I was putting in such long hours training troops for combat roles that they would hopefully never have to fulfill, that I had time to smoke four packs of cigarettes a day in a culture that encouraged consuming alcohol in excess.

The military did afford me and my very young family an opportunity to travel.  My oldest son was born at no cost in a military hospital on the island of Okinawa, Japan.  After the military experience was over, my spouse and I each received multiple college degrees thanks to the then generous GI Bill program.  Those benefits lasted forty-eight months, and we made the absolute most of them.  The Veteran's Administration also helped many young people just starting out in life with home and small business loans.

I rejoined the military, in a manner of speaking, later in life when I was in my early fifties and accepted a position as a civilian social worker with the military.  My first duty station was with the Army at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and not long after that I was transferred to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, another army base.  Luke Air Force  Base near Phoenix, Arizona, was next, followed by two years at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, and then back to Luke.  I retired to the Ozarks following my second stint in the hot sands of central Arizona.

My years as a civilian working with the military were more productive and personally rewarding than the years in which I served in uniform, but that is not to say that they came without a cost.  As a professionally licensed clinical social worker, much of my time was spent counseling young men and women whose lives had been impacted by their involvement with the oil wars in the Middle East.   The amount of emotional harm that can befall an individual or a young family when one member is removed from the home and placed in a combat role for a year or more can be staggering.  I still hear from some of the troops that I worked with more than a decade ago, and many of them continue to struggle to regain control of their lives - and that is not hyperbole!

In Phoenix ten years ago we still had homeless veterans who were sleeping on the streets.  God damn a country that lets that happen.  Just wearing the uniform leaves a mark on your soul, and serving in combat can eat your soul.  A bed, a roof overhead, and good medical care is cheap compensation for what our veterans have given.

(Thank you to the West Plains High School which has a nice program honoring veterans every year, the community of West Plains which hosts an annual Veteran's Day Parade, and the local Arby's which is giving away free roast beef sandwiches to veterans today.  Salute!)  

Another Monkey Tale

 

by Pa Rock

Sympathetic Primate

There are reports out this morning that one of the forty-three monkeys who escaped from a research lab in the backwoods of South Carolina (and whom I wrote about yesterday) has been captured and returned to the research facility where she will be used to test a variety of horrors concocted in the mind of man.  Investigators believe the other forty-two are close by, perhaps within yards of their "home." 

I had heard about the monkeys fleeing their lifelong captivity several days earlier, but had intentionally chosen not to write about it because the circumstance of cruelty to those beautiful little creatures brought to mind something that I had read in a fictional novel about the Vietnam War, a passage so moving that it has stuck with me ever since I first encountered it more than a decade ago.  But now that I have breached that very painful literary encounter, I have decided that the best way to deal with it is to share the troublesome passage here and pass it on to others.

The novel, Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, is approximately 700 pages long and tells the story of the Vietnam War roughly over the period of time that the United States was involved and a few years beyond.  The characters in Tree of Smoke are fictitious, but the speak mighty truths.  The writing is elegant and at times poetic, and the story portrays the savagery of war in a way that can never be replicated through news accounts.  Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007.

The novel begins not in Vietnam but on an island in the Philippines on which a contingent of US Navy personnel are stationed in what appears to be some sort of preparation for the big war in Vietnam that would soon follow.   The year is 1963 and it is just hours after word has arrived of the assassination of President Kennedy in the United States.  A young Navy seaman by the name of Houston who is stationed on that Philippine Island, decides that he wants to go out into the jungle and hunt wild boars, perhaps as a way of dealing with the shock of Kennedy's death as well as all that is occurring around him.  After carefully picking his way through the humid jungle for an extended time, the young seaman places his rifle next to a tree and takes a break, and while he is resting he suddenly sees movement in a tree.

(The following five paragraphs were taken from pages four and five of the copy of Tree of Smoke which I still own and cherish.  If this scene does not break your heart, it is doubtful that you ever had one.)

"He kept his vision on the spot where he'd seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze.  It moved again.  Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog.  Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree's trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste.  Seaman Houston took the monkey's meager back under the rifle's sight.  He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey's head into the sight.  Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.

"The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground.  Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there.  It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.

"Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey's fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it.  It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon.   The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

"Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two.  "Jesus Christ!" he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about it's embarrassing and hateful condition.  He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like someone following the progress of some kind of conversation, with some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle - the morning - the moment - was having with itself.  Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other.  With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying.   Its breath came out in sobs and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked.  It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing.  "Hey," Houston said, but the monkey didn't seem to hear.

"As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating.  He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless.  He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child.  He was eighteen years old."

Animals and children stumbling around in a world ravaged by the hate-riddled mind of man - and trying to survive and make sense of it all.

There, I've purged.  The little monkey is now yours.