The Life and Estate of William C. Smith of Seneca, Missouri

by Rocky G. Macy
Great-Great-Grandnephew

William C. Smith was born in Tennessee on December 18th, 1839, and he died at his home near Seneca (Newton County), Missouri, on February 8th, 1920.  William died a widower and without children of his own.   At the time of his death he owned the farm and home at which he died in Missouri, as well as personal property - and a few business lots in the town of Miami, Delaware County, Oklahoma.  All told, William was a fairly prosperous man by local standards.

Sometime prior to his death William visited a lawyer and had his will drawn up.  He left his entire estate to be divided equally among the fifty-three heirs of his six siblings.  All of his siblings had preceded him in death.

William C. Smith was the fifth child of Louisa Catherine Smith whose maiden name is unknown.  Louisa Catherine (born in Kentucky, ca. 1810)  and her children have been found on the 1850 census of the South Division of Smith County, Tennessee, and the 1860 census of McDonald Precinct of Jasper County, Missouri.  There was no age-appropriate male in either census listing who could have been the father of the older seven siblings.

But there was an additional adult female named Elizabeth Smith in Louisa's household on the 1850 census with an indicated age of 37.  There were also two additional children on the 1850 census, a boy and a girl, each one-year-old, who could have belonged to either woman or one baby to each woman.  The parentage of the infants is unclear - and again there were no age-appropriate males in the household for the two infants other than Louisa Catherine's oldest son,  John (age 18).

William was the fifth child of the seven older siblings, and they are the ones referenced in his will. The Smith children included:  Mary Jane (born ca. 1828) who married James Mayberry Scarbrough and was living near Sien, Texas when their youngest child was born in December of 1868, Sarah (Sallie) Ann (born ca. 1830) who married Timothy W. Hankins and were residents of southwest Missouri, John A. (born January 11, 1831), who married Delania Poe and eventually lived in Lincoln County, Oklahoma,  Andrew Jackson (born 1836) who married Clarinda Carr and lived in Franklin County, Arkansas,  William C. (born December 18th, 1839), Elizabeth M. (born ca. 1841) who married David Wilson Boyd and spent their lives in Newton and McDonald Counties in Missouri, and Martha Parthena F. (born ca. 1844) who married James D.M. Cline and lived in Pope County, Arkansas.

William and each of his six siblings - as well as the two one-year-olds listed on the 1850 census - were all born in Tennessee.

William C. Smith married a woman named Lucinda (maiden name currently unknown) and they built a home and a life in Buffalo Township of Newton County, Missouri.  Sometime before 1870 his sister, Mary Jane Smith Scarbrough and her husband died, probably in Texas, and their four children came to live in the home of William and Lucinda.  The four (Sarah A. (age unclear), Nancy Anthaline (13), Catherine (8), and James "William" (born December 13th, 1868 in Sien, Texas) were residents in the home of their uncle and aunt by the time the 1870 census was taken.

Nancy Anthaline Scarbrough (who was my great-grandmother) was married to Samuel James Roark in the home of William and Lucinda Smith on December 10th, 1876 - and she went on to name her first daughter Lucinda Comfort Roark, presumably in honor of her acting mother (Lucinda Smith) and her husband's mother (Comfort Poe Roark).

Over the years William and Lucinda shared their home with other relatives and even a few non-relatives.  When William died in 1920 his niece, Martha Alene "Allie" Cline Reed and her husband and small daughter were residents in his home.  Allie was the daughter of William's younger sister, Martha.

But it was my great-grandmother, Nancy Scarbrough Roark, who seemed to have formed the closest attachment to her Uncle William.  Not only were she and her younger siblings essentially raised in William and Lucinda's home, Nancy remained in the immediate area after she married a local youth, and she was likely one of William's primary caregiver's during his declining years.

Or at least she must have considered herself to have been closer to Uncle William than many of the others.

While reading through old newspapers a few years ago in search of family history nuggets, I came across a legal notice that ran in December of 1920 and January of 1921 regarding an effort by six individuals to keep the estate of William C. Smith for themselves and to partition away the other forty-seven inheritors.  And the first name listed among the six plaintiffs was my great-grandmother, Nancy A. Roark.

I could not find any follow-ups in the press which gave the details of the case or its outcome, and getting the legal records from Newton County was not easy and took awhile, but eventually I secured the information.

The judge had apparently not been swayed by the arguments of the plaintiffs for excluding their relatives from the proceeds of the will, and he ordered the real and personal property of William C. Smith to be sold and the net proceeds divided equally among the fifty-three heirs - just as William C. Smith has intended.    Justice prevailed - and my great-grandmother was probably not the least bit happy about it.

For the record, the six plaintiffs were - in the order posted in the newspaper:  Nancy A. Roark,  Margaret L. Sparlin,  K.M. Nance,  Lee Burkhart,  Pearl Sellers, and  John W. Burkhart.

The forty-seven defendants were:  M.F. Smith,  Bennet A. Smith,  H.C. Smith,  Robert M. Smith,  Nannie D. Davis,  Stella M. Doty,  Jim W. Smith,  Thomas Smith,  Newton Smith,  Nannie Ramsey,  J.W. Boyd,  T.D. Rouse,  Samuel H. Rainwater,  Emily Nicholson,  Lillie Sherer,  Odell Burkhart,  Lola Burkhart,  Cleo V. Burkhart,  Dorris Burkhart,  Clarence Scarbrough,  Sylvia L. Scarbrough,  Nancy M. Scarbrough,  Samuel W. Scarbrough,  Theodore L. Scarbrough,  J.W. Cline,  J.A. Cline,  Allie Reed,  Cassie Cline,  Roy Cline,  John Cline,  Clarence Cline,  Oscar Reed,  Mamie Smith,  Ara Williamson,  Lee F. Reed,  Alta Quick,  George Hankins,  Andrew  Hankins,  Parrthena Hankins,  Loula Smith,  L.C. Hankins,  C.R. Hankins,  Alice Gregory,  Nellie  Wilsie,  Sadie Smith,  and  W.B. Hankins.

For the past couple of years I have pursued a personal project of trying to track each of those fifty-three inheritors and get a general sense of how they were related to William C. Smith and what became of them.  So far I have managed to track all but four:  T.D. Rouse, George Hankins, John Cline, and Roy Cline.  If any of those names ring a bell with anyone, please get in touch.

"Smith" is a surname that most people hate to encounter when they are doing family research.  It is the most common surname in the United States, and when Smiths start appearing in family trees, confusion often ensues.  I saw sorting through this particular group of Smith descendants as my contribution to clearing away a bit of the chaos.

If anyone who happens across this blog posting feels that they are connected to the descendants of Louisa Catherine Smith of Smith County, Tennessee and Jasper County, Missouri, I would be happy to share what information I have.

And anyone wishing to share this article in any way, please feel welcome to so so.

Relationship Issues

by Pa Rock
Genealogist

There are basically two types of relationships, those formed through emotional ties such as friendship or coercion, and family relationships, or those that arise through marriage or by bloodlines.

A pair of co-workers who are new to an organization may form a friendship or a "casual" relationship over shared likes and dislikes around the office, but as they begin spending more time with each other and even the occasional night together, their level of involvement with one another is seen by many to have elevated to a "romantic" relationship.  At about the time a third, or even a fourth office worker crawls into bed with them, the rest of the office is whispering about the "sordid" relationship, and when a member of the group suggests selling the entire story to Lifetime, the pile of sweaty, naked bodies may begin thinking of itself as a "business" relationship.

And when marriage licenses and contracts start appearing, those emotional relationships tend to become family relationships. Indeed, formal documents aren't even necessary for the law and society to recognize many physical unions as marriage, and many assortments of individuals as families.

Family relationships are generally delineated and defined through a system of titles, and that is the actual point of today's blog - a discussion of how family relationships are titled.

Every person on earth is the biological product of two other people, a man and a woman, commonly referred to individually as a father and mother, and collectively as "parents."  Yes, many people grow up in situations which are different from a being in a home with their biological father and biological mother.  Some have adoptive parents, some have step-parents, some are raised by other relatives, or friends, or agencies, or perhaps even wolves - but, at the moment of conception each person was brought about by a man and a woman.  That's biology.

Each person's parents also had two biological parents, one of each gender, and those four individuals are the biological grandparents of the person at the center of this discussion.  Any biological siblings of the parents are the aunts and uncles of the person being discussed.

All of that is simple and easy to understand, even when step-and-adoptive parents are entered into the mix.

But as we begin climbing the family tree and it starts to branch out as it gets ever higher, identifying relationships becomes trickier.  Grandparents, the main branches, aren't too tough, however.  The parents of a person's grandparents are their great-grandparents, and their parents are the identified person's great-great-gradparents, and so on.  Eventually people begin adding gender and numbers to those titles, such as describing a particular set off grandparents on their father's side as my "paternal 10th great-grandparents."  There are, of course, other sets of paternal 10th great-grandparents on that same tree.

Over the years genealogists have even adopted a unique numbering system for generations of grandparents which allows researchers to identify exactly how a grandparent multiple generations up the tree connects to someone lower on the tree.  It is called the ahnentafel numbering system and is easier to calculate than it is to spell or pronounce.

The siblings of a person's parents are called "aunts" and "uncles," and their parents are, of course, the grandparents of the person being discussed.  But what do we call our grandparents' siblings?  They aren't simply "aunts" and "uncles" because they are a generation too far back for that appellation.  Most tend to refer to these people as "great-aunts" and "great-uncles," but I would argue that most people are wrong.  At one time this level of relationship was called "grand" - such as "grandaunt and 'granduncle'" on a par with their sibling who is also the "grandparent."  Over the years people have gotten cute, or inventive, or lazy and changed the title to "great."

Under the old system a "grand" aunt or uncle was the sibling of a grandparent, and a "great-grand" aunt or uncle was the sibling of a great-grandparent.  A system that is  much easier to understand and keep straight.  But today if you scour the dictionaries, most equate "great" with "grand" when it comes to labeling the aunts and uncles of generations gone by.

And then there is a whole other mess called "cousins."

A person is a "first-cousin" to the children of his or her parents' siblings.  Many of us are on a first name basis with many or all of our first-cousins.

If a person has a child and his or her cousin has a child, those two children are "second-cousins," and if they, in turn have children, those kids are "third-cousins" to one another.  Or, to look at it a different way, first-cousins share a set of grandparents, second-cousins share a set of great-grandparents, and third-cousins share a set of great-great-grandparents.   And so it goes, as far back as your research takes you - as long as the generations remain even.

But what about the relationship between a person and the child of his or her first-cousin?  They are referred to as "first-cousins, once-removed.  And if that child grows up and has a child, the child and the original first-cousin are first-cousins, twice-removed.

Years ago, in the mid-1600's, the village bookkeeper in old Nantucket was a fellow named Peter Folger.  Peter and his wife, a former indentured servant by the name of Mary Morrill, had a passel of children (ten, if memory serves), but this tale only involves two:  Johanna, the eldest, and Abiah, the youngest.  Johanna married a local boy, John Coleman, and went on to have several children of her own - and ten generations later after her descendants had fanned out across the United States and beyond, I came along.  Abiah married a wool merchant named Josiah Franklin and moved to Philadelphia where she also had several children, the youngest of whom was a baby named Benjamin.

Benjamin Franklin was a first-cousin to Johanna's children, and Peter and Mary Folger were the grandparents to all of them.  But when Johanna's children began having children, those youngsters were first-cousins, once-removed to Benjamin Franklin.  Their children were first-cousins, twice-removed, and so on down to Pa Rock who checked in as a first-cousin, nine times removed to old Ben.

And if I wanted to identify my relationship to one of Ben Franklin's children, say William for instance, I would begin with William's relationship to our common ancestors - Peter and Johanna Folger.  He was their great grandchild which would have made him a second-cousin to Johanna's grandchildren.  And by the time that works it way down to this weary typist, William and I would be second cousins, eight-times removed.

Easy, peasy,  Right?

All of that is in preparation for a relative that I plan to discuss in this space sometime in the next few days.  William C. Smith was my great-great-granduncle who died in Seneca, Missouri, a century ago this month and left an estate that was fought over in court.

Just consider all of this as my way of ignoring Trump.

Senior Ring Finds Its Way Home

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

I occasionally collect oddball news stories and email them to my son, the screenwriter, in hopes that they might inspire him in his creative work.  Yesterday I came across the tale which follows, one that contains a true mystery and a happy ending.  You may have seen it elsewhere on the internet, but, if not, here is a recap:

Forty-seven years ago Shawn McKenna graduated from Morse High School in Bath, Maine, and was headed to college.  Before he left town he gave his senior ring to his girlfriend, Debra.  One day not long after that Debra was shopping in a department store in Portland, Maine, when she set the ring down on the sink in a restroom to wash her hands.  She noticed a short time later that she had forgotten Shawn's ring and she rushed back to the department store restroom - but the ring had vanished.

Shawn must have forgiven Debra because the couple were married a few years later and were together for forty years until Shawn's death in 2017 after a long struggle with cancer.

But, the tale of the lost senior ring was to have another chapter.

Last month a fellow named Marko Saarinen was out in the forest near his home in Kaarina, Finland, prospecting for coins and assorted junk with his metal detector when he came across a small object buried six inches beneath the forest floor.  At first he thought his find was a child's toy ring, but after cleaning it up Marko discovered that it was an American high school ring from Morse High School.  The ring was dated 1973 and had the initials SM.  It was a man's ring.

Marko Saarinen contacted the school, and a quick bit of research in Maine revealed that the class of 1973 had graduated 216 individuals, but only one male with the initials SM.  Debra and Marko were put in contact with one another, and Shawn's ring has found its way back to Debra!

Debra is of course happy to have the ring back.  She believes its recovery is a message from Shawn assuring her that he is still with her - and that it is his way of letting her know that she is making the right decisions.

And Marko Saarinen, nearly four thousand miles away in Finland, is pleased to have played a role in the ring's long journey home.  He said, "This has been an amazing discovery.  Best yet."

The ending is known, and it's a happy one - but the mystery of how a senior ring traversed the North Atlantic Ocean and wound up beneath six inches of soil in a remote Finnish forest remains.  That would be a tale worthy of a listen.

Somebody should write it.

Warren 2020!

by Pa Rock
Democratic Voter

I've been all over the place with regard to which Democratic presidential candidate I was supporting in this primary season, but I think that now the dust has finally started to settle and I can see my way forward to the March 10th presidential primary in Missouri.

Over the past months I have supported - and sent small donations to - Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren.  I didn't support Joe Biden - because of both his advanced age and the fact that he seemed to drift at times while speaking, and I didn't support Bernie because of his advanced age and the fact that having a heart attack during the campaign is a strong indicator that he has some serious health issues - or at the very least a questionable ticker.  (I was an ardent Bernie supporter four years ago.)    And I did not support Mike Bloomberg - also because of his advanced age and the fact that he was blatantly trying to buy the nomination.

I will admit that I did enjoy watching Bloomberg's attacks on Trump, and if I would have been lured into supporting a geriatric, it would have most likely been Bloomberg just for the fact that he did not shy away from going directly at Trump.  Defeating Donald John in 2020 is going to take a full-frontal, unrelenting, and vicious assault - and nice guys need not apply.

Of the candidates that I did support, only one - Cory Booker - provided me with any courtesy other than taking my money.  Booker, whom I have followed on Twitter since his days as Mayor of Newark, actually followed me back on the social media account.

And since serious presidential candidates never waste their time campaigning in outstate Missouri, I didn't expect to actually get to see any of them in person - but that changed last October when - while walking along the harbor in San Diego - a friend and I came upon an outdoor Elizabeth Warren rally.  We joined the crowd of 8,000 in cheering on the Massachusetts senator as she told her life story and laid out an ambitious plan for America.

When last night's debate started I was down to three possibilities:  voting for Kamala Harris in my state's primary where she will still be on the ballot, voting for Elizabeth Warren, or giving into my driving desire to see Trump completely humiliated in the next election and supporting Bloomberg.  But after catching bits and pieces of last night's Nevada debate on the radio, the field, for me at least, clarified.  I will be voting for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Missouri Democratic Presidential Primary.

Warren was on fire last night.  She pummeled Bloomberg so mercilessly that I was somewhat surprised not to hear this morning that he had exited the race.  The former New York City mayor now at least should have some sense of what it is like to play in the big leagues - and he can basically thank Elizabeth Warren for showing him that money can't hide who you are - or at least who you were.  Senator Warren was measured and steadfast as she brought up the former mayor's racist policies and chauvinistic attitude toward women - and she left him no means of escape when she suggested that he release - right there on national television -  all of his female employees from any non-disclosure agreements they had signed with his companies.  Bloomberg was forced to decline Warren's invitation to do so - right there on national television.

I support a strong government response to the dangers of climate change, strong environmental protections, clean energy alternatives, the rights of workers to organize and pursue fair living wages and safe working conditions, access to post-high school education for everyone, the fair and humane treatment of refugees and immigrants to our country, a foreign policy based on the needs of humans, and a single-payer healthcare system that covers all Americans - and so do Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.   Elizabeth Warren, who is a Democrat year-in and year-out and not just during election years, in my opinion, is the one who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump, and she is definitely the one with the energy, enthusiasm, and administrative skills to turn her bold ideas into reality.

Elizabeth Warren will get the job done - and she will once again make us proud to be Americans.

I am enthusiastic in my support of Elizabeth Warren for the presidency, and I will cast my vote for her in the Missouri Presidential Primary on March 10th.  I am also resolute in my desire to see Donald Trump leave the White House, and I will vote for the Democratic candidate in November regardless of who it is.

But for now - I'm with Warren!

Neil Young Has No Love for Trump

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump is - or has been - a big fan of rocker Neil Young.  Trump is such a fan that he has been spotted at concerts featuring the Canadian-born musician - and has supposedly employed him to entertain at a couple of his former casinos.  And, Trump likes Neil Young so much that he uses his song, "Rockin' in the USA" at his hate-fest/political rallies.

Trump told Rolling Stone magazine more than a decade ago that Neil Young has something "very special" and described him as a "terrific guy."   The feeling is not mutual.

Neil Young does not appreciate his fat fanboy even a little bit.  Young has been forceful in his demands that the Trump campaign quit using his music at its rallies, requests which Trump and his campaign routinely ignore.

Young opposed Trump the first time he ran for the White House in 2016, and was adamant that the campaign stop using his music, but to no avail.   The musician was a Canadian citizen at that time and could not even have the personal satisfaction of casting a vote against Trump.  Now, however, he has succeeded in acquiring a "dual" citizenship between Canada and the United States, and will be voting in this fall's US election.

Neil Young has a preference for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but it seems a sure bet that he will be voting for whichever Democrat secures the nomination to run against Trump.

But Neil Young will do more than just vote.  A few days ago he penned a lengthy open letter to Donald Trump in which he said, in part, that Trump was "a disgrace to my country," and went on to lament that Trump has led in the "mindless destruction of our shared natural resources, our environment, and our relationships with friends around the world."

The singer/songwriter also addressed Trump's unauthorized use of his songs:

"Every time 'Rockin' in the Free World' or one of my songs is played at your rallies, I hope you hear my voice.  Remember it is the voice of a tax-paying US citizen who does not support you.  Me."

Welcome to the United States of America, Neil Young - and thank you for supporting long-held American ideals and beliefs.  And thank you for voting!

See you at the polls!

Taxpayers Fund Trump's Resort Racket - Bigly!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump would have the world believe that he is making a grand personal sacrifice by donating his time to running the country when he would be so much better off - financially - running his big business empire.  He makes a paltry $400,000 a year at his government job which he magnanimously donates right back to various government programs.

Trump's charity knows no bounds.  He is such a saint!

Except, of course, for the fact that he is a greedy grifter who is making a literal fortune renting his luxury properties - bedbugs and all - to the United States government to support his nearly endless vacations at his own resort properties.

An article in the Trump's least favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, on February 7th of this year reported that as of that date he had spent 342 days vacationing at his resort properties - or roughly one third of his presidency up to that point.  And when the President of the United States goes somewhere overnight to play golf, he travels with an entourage - a big entourage.  During Trump's travels he requires an extensive protection detail of Secret Service agents - as well as any other government employees he finds necessary to pursue the fiction that he is also working hard while on the road playing golf.

And, big surprise, many of the "necessary" camp followers stay at the same Trump resorts as their King, and they appear to be paying top rates!

That same Washington Post article on February 7th revealed that the Secret Service often pays a rate of $650 per room per night at Trump's Mar-a-Lago property - a rate that is even higher than what other agencies of the federal government pay for their rooms at the same resort.  (At other times the Secret Service gets "discount" rooms for just $396.15.  Lucky dogs!)  But, it could be worse - and is:  When Trump visits his golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey, in the summer, his resort rents a 3-bedroom cottage to the Secret Service at a modest $17,000 per month.

(The Post article did not stipulate whether that $650 per night included a complimentary breakfast - or hookers.)

Eric Trump. Trump's nitwit son, tried to explain that the Secret Service basically stays free at Trump resorts, paying only a nominal fee for housekeeping services - because everyone knows how highly the Trump family values their domestic workers.  Eric also told Yahoo Finance  that when his father houses his entourage on his properties, he is legally required to charge something - though Eric could not identify what law established that requirement.

Now, in this heated political season and after the Washington Post stirred up this issue, Congress, which is supposed to control the government purse strings, is suddenly interested in finding out just how much money the Trump family is making off of the government.

The Secret Service is required to make two reports to Congress a year on what it spends to protect the President - but since 2016 it has filed only two of the required six reports.  The Secret Service told Congress that key personnel had left and no one had taken on the responsibility of making the reports.  Now the House Oversight Committee is officially requesting that the Treasury Department, which oversees the Secret Service, cough up the figures on how much cash it takes to support Trump golf outings.  Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has yet to comply.

(The Government Accounting Office - GAO - issued a report early in the Trump presidency which said that four early golf outings to Mar-a-Lago had cost the government $3.4 million each.  Or, in other words, one outing to Mar-a-Lago costs taxpayers more than eight times Trump's salary for one year.  Sweet!)

And then Trump has the golf balls to suggest that the next G-7 conference, the one scheduled to be hosted by the United States, be held at his Doral National Resort in Florida -  a resort that is reportedly having trouble making a profit.

The Trump family is on the grift - bigly - and the United States of America is the targeted sucker!

Monday's Poetry: "Bluebird"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

Valentine's Day was this past week, and I have established a tradition over the past few years of sending each of my six grandchildren a Valentine and ten dollars.  Not very much, I know, but I wanted each of them to get a piece of mail to remind them that they were in my thoughts.

This year I decided to change things a bit and send actual gifts.  My challenge was to see if I knew the kids well enough to come up with something they would actually like.

My two granddaughters, Willow in Oregon and Olive in Kansas, are both eight-years-old and in the second grade.  I sent each of them and illustrated "elementary" dictionary, something that I knew that I would have liked at that age - and the dictionaries seem to have been a hit with the girls.  My youngest grandson, Sully, is three, and his daddy suggested that a nerf gun would hit the spot - and probably the cat and everything else in the house!   I knew that my ten-year-old grandson, Judah, liked books about nature, so I was able to find one that looked like it would capture his attention.

Sebastian, my twelve-year-old grandson, is a businessman-in-the-making.  He runs a "store" inside of his bedroom, and often wears a jacket and tie to school.  He had been lusting after my old briefcase for a couple of years, and this Christmas I gave it to him - and the briefcase has become part of his school ensemble.  For Valentine's Day I was able to find a leather portfolio to go inside of the briefcase, a home for his notebook, pens, business cards and any other items requiring quick or regular access.  I have heard that it went to school with him the day after he received it.

That left only Boone, the twenty-year-old.  Boone in a junior in college and we usually only manage to connect in person once or twice a year.  I had no idea what he would like, so I emailed and asked.  He replied that he had all of the books that he would need for this semester's classes, but told me that he is into reading poetry for personal enjoyment.  He said that his two favorite poets are Sylvia Plath and Charles Bukowski - and from that insight I was able to send a couple of books that I thought would mesh with those interests.

Here today, for Boone, is one of Charles Bukowski's more famous poems.  The work, "Bluebird" has a hard edge, much like the life of the hard-working, hard-drinking, and hard-loving man who wrote it.  I hope that Boone's bluebird feels free to fly wherever the winds will take him!


Bluebird
by Charles Bukowski


there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale 
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that 
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the 
works?
you want to blow my book sales in 
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him 
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't 
weep, do
you?

Road Notes

by Pa Rock
Traveling Fool

This past week was unusual in that I managed to make two semi-significant trips beyond the confines of my comfortable little farm.

(The lady who prepares my taxes insists that I quit referring to my place as a "farm" because I don't produce anything.  From the government's point of view I live in a small frame house with an excessive amount of yard.  And there are no tax breaks for big yards - just lots and lots of mowing!)

The first out-of-town trip was from my home with the 10-acre yard just north of West Plains, Missouri, to one of my doctor's offices on the south edge of Mountain Home, Arkansas - a one-way distance of fifty-five miles.  Almost all of that trip is on two-lane roads, and it is not uncommon to get stuck behind Joe Bob and Bobbie Jo as they putter down the road to Walmart, but the traffic was moving fairly briskly on Thursday.  (Actually I got lucky in that regard and fell in behind a large Orscheln Farm and Home truck in West Plains that went all the way to Mountain Home, and that big rig driver literally intimidated all of the locals out of our path!)

There wasn't much to see politically along the way - just a few Trump signs and a smattering of Confederate flags - which are de facto Trump signs.  In addition to letting drivers know that these homes probably do not contain any reading matter beyond what the tenants and homeowners find in their mailboxes on the days the ads come out, homes with Trump signs and Confederate flags let passers-by know that the owners have guns to protect their property and stop the government from giving them free health care - so watch out!  Those same signs also let criminals know that the homes have guns - one of the few items in rural areas worth stealing.

Friday at midday I headed out for Carthage, Missouri, a distance of about 170 miles that was entirely on fast-moving, four-lane highways.  I didn't notice any political advertising on that high-speed race across the Missouri Ozarks, but as I passed through the Springfield radio market I heard Mike Bloomberg commercials on two different radio stations - an indication that Mr. Moneybags is literally slinging his cash everywhere.  (Springfield, the home of famed Missouri lobbyist and occasional senator, Ol' Roy Blunt, is very Republican!).  And later, while channel-surfing in my Carthage hotel room, I came across a Spanish-language Bloomberg commercial on Univision.  

All of that Bloomberg money has to be good for the economy.  I hope Trump appreciates his spending!

Belle Starr's father ran a hotel on the Carthage square when the outlaw queen was in her formative years.  I didn't stay there, nor do I know if the building still exists - though I doubt that it does.  I did stay at a nice hotel out near the highway where my oldest grandson has part-time employment as a desk clerk - a situation which gave me a nice "family" discount!  Thank you very much, Boone!

Boone is a junior at the "university" in Joplin - which was just a modest "college" when his grandmother and I got our teaching degrees there back in the 1970's.  Boone also wants to be a teacher.  I am sure that he is learning a lot in his classes, but I also suspect that he is getting an interesting education working the night desk at one of the largest hotels between Joplin and Kansas City!

It was good getting to see my grandson.  That is becoming an increasingly rare occurrence.

The funeral service yesterday morning for my good friend, Kolleen, was in the small town of Jasper, just up the highway from Carthage, where her husband, Bob, is the minister of the United Methodist Church.  It was a large crowd, no surprise there, but I was surprised and pleased to see that so many of those who came were from my hometown of Noel where Bob had been the Methodist preacher for many years.  Bob and Kolleen still had a home in Noel.

It was good seeing so many friends from Noel, even under the sad circumstances.

Jasper, Missouri, a town "south of Kansas City" was the setting for Patrick Swayze's movie, "Roadhouse."  The real town of Jasper was not featured in the movie.

Japser, Missouri, is located in Jasper County, Missouri.  Carthage is the county seat and much of Joplin in in Jasper County.  Newton County, Missouri, is to the immediate south of Jasper County. Newton County has a community called Newtonia which earned a bit of fame for a Civil War battle that occurred there.

Did you know that the names Jasper and Newton are linked together in many states?  Serious family researchers know that.

The trip back to West Plains yesterday afternoon was fairly uneventful, with no political sightings at all.  At one point I was passed by a very large truck that was hauling for Amazon Prime.  That was the first time I have ever encountered an actual Amazon Prime truck.  Walmart had better be looking over its shoulder, because it looks like Amazon is planning to do to Walmart what Walmart did to America's small towns!

It took Rosie a while to forgive me for leaving her at home, but we are back on good terms now.

Saying Goodbye to a Friend

by Pa Rock
Retired Social Worker

This morning finds me in Carthage, Missouri, preparing to drive a few miles up the road to the community of Jasper, a wide spot along the highway between Joplin and Kansas City, where I will attend the funeral of Kolleen Howard, the wife of Jasper's Methodist minister - and a good friend of mine.

Years ago when Kolleen's husband, Reverend Bob Howard, was the Methodist minister in my hometown of Noel, Missouri, she and I worked together at the Missouri Division of Family Services where we investigated cases of child abuse and worked with children in foster care and their families.   It was a physically and emotionally demanding job that created unusually strong ties between the underpaid state employees who were charged with finding and protecting those children - but it was also the kind of job where the child protection workers could physically see how how their actions were benefiting a highly vulnerable population.

Kolleen was younger than me by a few months.  Her death was sudden and unexpected.  I will miss her - and so will countless others.  Bob and their four grown children - and their families - have my deepest sympathies and encouragement in these hard times.

A Day of Service and Love

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Today is, of course, Valentine's Day, but for the past couple of years it has also been a day associated with the predominantly American issue of school shootings.  It was two years ago today that a student gunman opened fire in the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and killed seventeen students and faculty members.  When that event occurred America had become so accustomed to shootings in our schools that they often seemed to be rapidly forgotten.

But the young people from Parkland changed all of that.  They decided that they had had enough of the senseless school violence that was enabled in large part by America's love affair with guns - and those "kids" determined to do something about it.  A large group became politically active in the gun control movement and made their presence felt in Florida's state capital, across other states, and even in the halls of Congress.

Many of the students became national spokespeople in the campaign to curb gun availability in the United States - and many were reviled by conservative news outlets like Fox and the National Rifle Association.   The impassioned youth organized and brought public pressure to bear on the gun lobby unlike any that it had ever experienced before.

Now, even though many of those "rabble-rouser kids" are in college, they are also still engaged in fighting the good fight.

The students at Parkland taught America that the gun lobby was not invincible.

Today the Broward County Public Schools of Florida, the district that includes Parkland, has dismissed classes for the day to allow students and staff to spend time participating in various acts of public service.  Two-hundred-and-thirty sites have been established around the area where students and staff can engage in activities to benefit the members of the local community. The event is being referred to as "A Day of Service and Love," and it has been instituted to give back to the community in honor of all of those who lost their lives at the high school two years ago.  It is intended to raise awareness about meaningful issues and programs that impact the local area.

Students who are involved in the program will receive "community service" hours as a part of the school district's Student Volunteer Service Program.

It's a noble effort aimed at reaching across social divides to enhance the lives of everyone in the community, and Broward County Public Schools must certainly be commended on this very positive approach to opening the hearts and minds of all of the people who live in and around the school district.

And the young adults who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and are now scattered across the United States in colleges and universities -  and still fighting to ban assault weapons - need to be recognized as well.  Their work is a "community" service that is intended to benefit an entire nation.

 May they all be successful beyond their wildest imaginings - and may the United States of America once again become a civilized country where "active shooter drills" no longer have a place - or a need - in the curriculum of our schools.

Vogue Apparently has Standards

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

There seems to be a little boomlet of concern festering on the Internet as to why Donald Trump's "glamorous" wife has not been featured on any magazine covers since the Trump family moved into the White House.    The concern, or perhaps righteous indignation, is being fanned by conservative actor James Woods who whines that Mrs. Trump is being ignored because she is both too beautiful and too conservative for contemporary publications.

Melania, as a former "model," had been featured on a few magazine covers prior to and just after her marriage to Donald.  In January of 2000 she had a nude cover on British GQ alongside a headline that read "Naked Supermodel Special!"  The photos from the article as well as the cover are available on-line.  She was also featured on the cover of American Vogue in February of 2005 wearing her Christian Dior wedding dress, an outfit that, had it not been white, might have passed for something worn by Miss Kitty as she sashayed about the Long Branch in an old episode of "Gunsmoke."

So in her glam past life as a "supermodel," Melania Knauss did make some magazine covers, but since becoming the FLOTUS, crickets.

James Woods, or someone in the Trump administration, happened to notice and report that Michelle Obama, as First Lady, made the covers of twelve magazines - including three for Vogue.  Mrs. Obama, who was loved by millions for being as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside, also made the cover of InStyle, Essence, and Time - among others.

Michelle Obama is a lawyer, writer, and former college administrator with degrees from Princeton and Harvard.  Melania Trump, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who some believe may have gamed the immigration system in order to be allowed to stay in the U.S., once claimed to speak several languages and to have been trained as an architect, both of which have since been proven to be false.

The Trump administration is obsessed with removing all Obama achievements from the public record, and besting the Obama team by every measure possible - even magazine covers.

And so they wheel out James Woods and a buttload of faux outrage.

Excuse me while I snicker.

And guffaw.

And ROTFLMFAO!

If Yesterday was Tuesday, that must have been New Hampshire

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Yesterday, Tuesday, February 11, 2020, was a doubly-critical day in American politics.  First, it was the day that New Hampshire held its presidential primaries, events which allow a couple of hundred thousand cranky-assed farmers and small town residents the unique opportunity of limiting the choices that the rest of the country - with the exception of Iowa - will have in selecting a president to lead us all.   The vote in New Hampshire caused two candidates to drop out of the race yesterday and a third today.

Bernie Sanders won the Democratic contest - kinda, sorta - in a race that Donald Trump had said one day previous would feature Republicans voting for the weakest possible Democrat in the Democratic primary - although Trump added that he considered all of the Democrats weak.  Sanders received barely a quarter of the vote (25.7%), while former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, Pete Buttigieg, took second with just under a quarter of the vote (24.4%).  3,691 actual votes separated the two frontrunners.  Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was third at just under 20% of the vote, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was fourth with 9.2%, and former Vice President Joe Biden, the candidate who was once thought to be the one to beat, came in fifth with 8.4 percent.

Not on the ballot was former New York City Mayor - and Mister Moneybags - Mike Bloomberg, a man many think will become the party's ultimate choice to escape a Bernie nomination.  Bloomberg has yet to be tested by voters outside of New York City, but he has already shown an entertaining ability to make Trump foam at the mouth.  He will begin appearing on ballots on Super Tuesday,  March 3rd.

The top five all seem to be staying in for right now, but the rest of the field is more fluid, with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet and businessman Andrew Yang exiting the contest yesterday after the New Hampshire results became apparent and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick leaving the race today after a poor showing in New Hampshire.

The second major political event to transpire yesterday was that Donald Trump raised his middle finger to America as he blatantly interfered in our country's judicial process.  Yesterday prosecutors from the United States Department of Justice announced that they were recommending that a federal judge sentence Trump associate (and self-described "dirty trickster") Roger Stone to prison for a term of seven to nine years for lying to Congress and withholding evidence.  Trump issued one of his berserk tweets declaring that the recommendation was a "horrible and a very unfair situation."  Within hours the recommendation was withdrawn because the prosecutors' superiors at the DOJ decided it was too steep.

Trump then said it was "ridiculous" to suggest that he had interfered or influenced the process.  Later in the day Attorney General Bill Barr let his department know that he would personally manage cases that were of a personal interest to Trump from that point onward.

All four prosecutors in the Stone case quit the case after Trump chose to become personally involved in the sentencing of his friend and long-time associate, and there is a news story circulating that at least one of the four resigned from the Justice Department as well.

Trump, of course, still has the option of pardoning Stone altogether - and that option is a very real possibility in this corrupt and highly charged political atmosphere.

Bernie and Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar all had good days yesterday - and so did Donald Trump and Roger Stone - and chances are Mike Bloomberg also slept well last night.  My state does not get to vote in a presidential primary until a week after Super Tuesday, and by then the table will have been cleared of everything except for a few stale leftovers - and the dessert will likely be sitting triumphant for all to applaud.

And I am relieved of the responsibility of helping to plan the menu because it is all done for me in states where people are infinitely more important and smarter than me.

It is the same system that gave us Hillary v. Trump - and it still sucks.

And Tom Perez, you also suck!

Cruises are not the Luxury Vacations They Once Were

by Pa Rock
Land Lubber

My first cruise was a jaunt across the Caribbean that sailed out of Puerto Rico and hit nine islands in ten days - or something like that.  It was in the early months of 1997 and I had just gotten married.  My bride and I sailed with a group of bicyclists and literally bicycled our way across the Caribbean.  When the ship landed each morning we set out, as a group, to enjoy a leisurely (and sometimes not-so-leisurely) peddle across the island.   A lady from the bicycle shop in San Juan where we rented our bikes followed along and made sure our rides stayed in good repair.

The cruise lasted almost as long as the marriage - and was much more relaxing.

Then in very early 2007 I took an "educational" cruise with what National Association of Social Workers and Ms Magazine, to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, which provided me with a great sailing experience and the opportunity to earn social work CEUs.  I even met a few celebrities on that voyage including the feminist activist Eleanor Smeal and actress Tyne Daly.  

A year or so later I took another educational cruise, one with political overtones sponsored by The Nation magazine.  It was on that cruise that I met Howard Dean and managed to have a brief conversation with novelist E.L.Doctorow as I took over his spot at a computer in the ship's computer center.

And finally, in early 2009, I took my oldest son and grandson on a cruise across the Caribbean to Nassau in the Bahamas.  It was there that Boone discovered the Hard Rock Cafe and probably his love of guitars.

In 2010 I moved - for work - to Okinawa, Japan, on a two-year assignment.  While there I began doing some dabbling in the stock market, and I always looked to invest in companies with which I had personal and successful experience.  I bought Walgreen's which was busy putting up new stores all over Phoenix, the place that I had moved from - and Wendy's - for essentially the same reason.  The market was on a steady rise during the Obama years - when the recession was ending - and everything I touched seemed to be golden.

Until that fateful day when I decided to invest some money in a major cruise ship line.  I had been on some nice cruises, and they appeared to be the easiest way for the true middle class to enjoy a luxury vacation.  And things were fine for a couple of years until the Carnival Cruise Ship "Triumph" caught fire off of the coast of Mexico in early 2013 and "listed" across the Caribbean for five days as it desperately tried to reach its homeport in Alabama - with somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 passengers and crew aboard.

Social media allowed passengers aboard the "Triumph" to post their horror stories in real time, and the world listened in rapt disgust to tales of backed-up toilets, cabins without lights, floors covered with vomit, and a hundred other things not normally associated with "luxury" vacations.

And stock prices fell.

And there were other cruise ship horror stories - and stock prices fell some more.

Understanding how the market worked, I held on the cruise ship stock until the price got back up close to what I had paid for it - and then I bailed and never looked back.  And I also didn't go any more cruises - well, for a few years years - because I had begun to see them as being self-contained fire and health hazards.

Yesterday I believe that I referred to cruise ships as "petri dishes," or places where bacteria cultures could grow and flourish.

My next - and last cruise - was in the summer of 2015 when I went on an "Alaskan" cruise with my sister.  During that voyage I was shocked at how every aspect of the once luxurious cruise experience had slipped.  The food wasn't the caliber of that served on my previous voyages, and the portions were smaller, the entertainment was far below the level that it once had been, and the staff, particularly the office staff, was churlish and seemed to be deliberately unhelpful.

I have not been on a cruise ship since.

Now, as I mentioned yesterday, there is a cruise ship, the "Diamond Princess,"is parked in Yokohama Harbor, Japan, and passengers are not being allowed to disembark because the coronavirus is present among passengers and appears to still be spreading.  I heard on the radio this morning that another cruise ship, a Holland America ship called the "Westerdam" is apparently trapped at sea due to fears of the deadly virus.

(Princess Cruises and Holland America are both owned and operated by Carnival Cruise Lines.)

The "Westerdam" left Hong Kong on February 1st for a fourteen-day cruise to Taiwan and Japan, and although it reportedly has no known cases of the coronavirus, it has so far been denied the right to dock in five ports:  Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Guam, and now Thailand.  World Health Organization doctors are trying to get to the ship to screen passengers for the dangerous virus.  Apparently national governments are beginning to also see cruise ships as exceptional breeding grounds for deadly viruses.

The moral of all of these cruising notes is this:  If it's an adventure that you are searching for, a cruise might just fit the bill, but if it's quiet luxury you're after, send the kids to camp and buy some bubble bath!  And if you do decide to take a cruise, pack well because it may be a while before you are able to leave the ship!

"And they never returned, no they never returned - and their fate is still unlearned.  They may ride forever on the wild Pacific, they're the cruise that never returned!"

What Happened in Wuhan Did Not Stay in Wuhan

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

SARS became the first virus of the new millennium to reach pandemic status back in 2002-2003 when it surged out of the Hong Kong area and managed to establish a presence in many countries - particularly throughout Asia.  SARS raged on for nearly a year before finally being brought under control.

Now a new deadly virus, also with roots in China, has already surpassed the death toll of SARS and is on the verge of being declared a pandemic.   Cases of Novel Coronavirus were first reported in the Central Chinese city of Wuhan on December 31, 2019 -  thought to have originated in a large fish market - and quickly spread within the city's population and beyond.   As talk of an outbreak began to circulate, foreign nationals rushed to leave the city of eleven million and return to their home countries - and more that five million Chinese nationals left Wuhan before the government finally locked the city down in early February.

Wuhan is a large industrial city and the capital of Hubei Province.  It is located where the Yangtze River and its largest tributary, the Han, meet.   Foreign visitors with business ties to Wuhan have given it the nickname "the Chicago of China."

The virus easily managed to move beyond the city.   It spreads by saliva, urine, stool, and respiratory droplets.

As of this morning there have been at least 910 deaths attributed to Coronavirus, mostly in China - and there were 97 deaths yesterday alone - again mostly in China.  At least one of the dead in China has been reported to be an American.  The total number of reported Coronavirus cases as of today is 40, 615.

Four days ago twelve cases had been reported in the United States:  six in California, two in Illinois, and one each in Washington, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.

Symptoms include, fever, cough, shortness of breath, and other breathing difficulties.

There is a cruise ship currently quarantined in Yokohama (Japan) Harbor due to this outbreak.  The "Diamond Princess" has 2,666 "guests" and a crew of 1,045.  The ill-fated ship also has 135 confirmed or suspected cases of Coronavirus, of which twenty-three are Americans.  The quarantine is currently scheduled to remain in place until February 19th.

A comparison between cruise ships (captive cultures) and petri dishes would not be totally out of line.

Because so many individuals were able to flee Wuhan before the government of China isolated the city, and the speed with which people can now circumnavigate the globe, the potential for the virus to spread is great.  Add to those factors what appears to be a movement away from science in certain quarters of the world - such as Washington, DC - and the world could be in real trouble with this one.

What happened in Wuhan did not stay in Wuhan.  It impacts us all.

Getting to Betelgeuse Will Probably Take a While

by Pa Rock
Reader

When I read to relax, I usually immerse myself in the mystery genre or historical fiction.  When I stray from those two realms of comfort, I sometimes drift toward science fiction.  It's a guilty pleasure that I picked up in a college course where a fellow named John Mayfield taught me to appreciate writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut.

Last fall, while stumbling around an amazing used bookshop in Salem, Oregon, I picked up the newest issue of Analog, a "science fiction and fact" pulp magazine of which I had been a reader some years before.  The first piece in that issue (September/October 2109) was a guest editorial entitled "More than One Way to Skin a Starship" by fiction writer Allen M. Steele.   Mr. Steele talked about the long-standing push-and-pull between science fiction writers and actual scientists, noting that the work of each serves to spur on the other:  Science fiction writers use advances in science for direction in their writing, and scientists use ideas and concepts put forth in science fiction writing for inspiration and direction in their work.

I've not read any of Mr. Steele's fiction work, but I did check him out on The Google.  His primary focus seems to be on interstellar (between stars) space travel and intergalactic (between galaxies) space travel - long and far more complicated rides than just a six-month hop over to Mars.  Steele's main point in the article was to skip past fantastical "warp drives" and other sci-fi inventions and discuss the very real difficulties in long-distance space travel.

The primary problem is this:  Albert Einstein posited many years ago that it would be impossible to travel beyond the speed of light, and so far he has not been proven wrong.  That means that a trip to the star Betelgeuse - 642.5 light years from Earth - would take 642.5 Earth years to get there, if the starship somehow managed to attain the speed of light and travel at that speed for the entire trip.  Mr. Steele pointed out that current fiction literature addressing this type of trip usually has the starship crews descending into madness on the journey and never completing the trip - or descendants completing the trek but having long-since forgotten why their ancestors set out in the first place.

In discussing ways that sci-fi writers have sought to solve this problem, Steele talks about "warp-drives" like on the Starship Enterprise - drives that apparently can exceed the speed of light and prove Einstein wrong, and "traversable wormholes," or shortcuts through space and time somehow engineered by man.  Both of these remedies have been engineered by sci-fi writers, but have yet to make it into the real realm of science.

In my limited reading of science fiction I have also encountered plots where spaceships fly into - or are sucked into - black holes which take them to surprise destinations, and space vehicles that save great amounts of time and distance by slicing through waves or folds in space instead of plodding along on their surfaces.  That second scenario, of course, requires a whole new vision of what interstellar space may actually be like.

There is another possibility, and that is having the same crew make the entire trip.   They could be put to sleep, as with Hal's crew in 2001:  A Space Odyssey - and then have their bodies somehow preserved from aging - perhaps through a deep freeze - and hope that any aliens which the ship might encounter will not view them as a gift of frozen meat from their Gods.

One more version of the "same crew" idea was explored by a writer named Poul Anderson in a book called Boat of a Million Years that I came across twenty or so years ago.  Anderson envisioned that very, very rarely, and for reasons totally not understood, a person would be born on Earth who was immortal.  He or she could be killed, but, barring harm from an outside source, would not die of old age or normal deadly maladies.   They reached a young adult age and then remained at that age.    Anderson discussed a dozen or so of these imaginary mortals and how, once they figured out that they were different, managed to move and hide among Earth's growing population - and then how they began finding one another.  At the end of the novel, when technology had reached a level that could support extended space travel, they all assembled and had blasted off into a never-ending trip across the heavens.

Kepler Space Mission Data reported in November of 2013 its belief that over 40 billion Earth-sized planets are orbiting in the "habitable" zones of sun-like stars in the Milky Way - our home galaxy.  That's a lot of possibilities for life beyond Earth - and the Milky Way is just one of thousands of galaxies.  The nearest star to our sun is "Proxima Centauri," and it has a recently discovered orbiting planet in its "habitable" zone that scientists have named "Proxima b." - and it is a mere 4.24 light years from Earth.  It would take a determined starship launched from Earth or our moon four-and-a-quarter Earth years to reach - traveling at the speed of light, and another four-and-a quarter years to send a message about its findings home - also at the speed of light.

And all of that would require a government or some other institution willing to fund such an expense.  That could possibly happen in the lifetimes of my grandchildren, or more likely, their grandchildren.

But getting to Betelgeuse will probably take awhile.

Petty Trump Pursues Payback

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Everyone knew that petty and vindictive Donald Trump would wreak vengeance on anyone who dared to speak against him once the impeachment trial was over, and yesterday, right on cue, heads began to roll and were then placed atop the pikes of public scrutiny to serve as warnings to others not to ever speak against their Lord and Master.

Yesterday Trump recalled (fired) Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union who had testified as a part of the House impeachment inquiry.  Sondland, a hotelier and businessman, had essentially bought his ambassadorship by donating a million dollars to the Trump Inauguration Committee.  But, deep pockets or not, Trump would not tolerate someone whom he saw as a rat.

Trump also fired Army LTC Alexander Vindman, a wounded veteran of the Iraq War and the Director of European Affairs for the US National Security Council because he, like Sondland, honored a subpoena and testified in the House impeachment inquiry.  LTC Vindman was escorted from the White House in an effort to impose maximum humiliation on the decorated veteran.  Trump said he had been fired for being "insubordinate."

Also escorted from the White House was Army LTC Yevgeny "Leonoid" Vindman, a senior lawyer and ethics official who, like his younger twin brother Alexander, worked with the National Security Council.   Leonoid Vindman was not a witness to Trump's incriminating telephone call with the president of Ukraine - as his brother had been - and had not testified before the House panel that was investigating Trump.  Leonoid Vindman appeared to have suffered collateral damage just for being related to Alexander.

Maine's gullible Senator Susan Collins who had said prior to her vote in the Senate to acquit Trump that she believed he had learned his lesson, yesterday admitted that he may have not learned anything from the experience after all.

One is left to wonder if Senator Collins learned anything from the experience?

It Ain't Shakespeare, but It Is the Way We Talk

by Pa Rock

Typing Fool

I am not a big fan of those automatic responses that Google insists on attaching to every email - choices which allow the truly lazy to click an "appropriate" reply.   And even though they often say exactly what I happen to be thinking, I still regard that whole system as insultingly impersonal - and I feel challenged to find an alternate "original" short reply of my own.

My youngest son, a resident of the "Great State of Kansas" and I were exchanging emails at the beginning of the week when the subject of the victory parade that Kansas City, of the Great State of Missouri, was planning on Tuesday to honor the returning world champion Kansas City Chiefs football team, came up.    Tim, who lives in a Kansas suburb of Kansas City, is a big Chiefs fan.

But Tim, like his old man, is not a fan of big, raucous crowds.

I thought Tim might make an exception for this once-in-a-lifetime event and wade through the yelling revelers to cheer on the victorious Chiefs.   He said that he really didn't want to go, but one of his in-laws did, so he might be tagging along.

Late the next evening I happened to email Tim about something else and asked at the end of my communication whether he had gone to the parade or not.  He sent back this response:

"No.  There were hundreds of thousands of people wearing red who showed up at 5AM and earlier.  There were bodies in the trees and traffic as far as the the eye could see.  We just couldn't bring ourselves to do it."

The Google quick-response algorithm had difficulty unpacking that one for meaning, but it managed to kick out a somewhat non-committal and vague list of:

"Wow.   That sucks.  Interesting."

And in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, those three choices, taken together, captured the essence of my thoughts on the matter fairly well.

It ain't Shakespeare, but it is the way we speak, and the Google algorithm has mastered it.

Mitt Romney Stands Tall

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Utah's junior United States Senator, Mitt Romney, gave a speech yesterday in the well of the Senate that will likely prove to be one of the most important and memorable of his political career.  Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and Republican Presidential nominee from 2012, told a mostly empty Senate chamber that he planned on voting to remove Donald Trump from office on one of the two articles of impeachment - the one that accused Trump of abuse of office.  A short time later he followed through on that commitment.

Mitt Romney voted against his party's President,  and he single-handedly brought about the nation's first-ever bipartisan vote to remove a sitting President.  It was a decision fraught with political - and perhaps even physical - risk.  His other ninety-nine colleagues in the Senate voted with their respective parties on both articles of impeachment, and Trump was handily acquitted through the party-line vote.

But Romney's singular defection stood out.

In announcing his intention to vote against Trump on the "abuse of power" article, Senator Romney had this to say:

"As a senator juror, I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice.  I am profoundly religious.  My faith is at the heart of who I am . . . I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.  I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced.  I was not wrong. . . Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.  What he did was not perfect.  No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security, and our fundamental values.  Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine."

 Romney conceded that he would likely be denounced by his GOP colleagues in the Senate for his vote to remove Trump from office - a vote which everyone knew would not make a difference in the outcome - and then added this resolve:

"Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it?"

At the end of the day Mitt Romney stood alone among the senators of what some snidely refer to as God's Own Party in his fidelity in honoring an oath to be an impartial juror.

Mitt's niece, Ronna McDaniel, the Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, quickly posted a tweet saying that she disagreed with her uncle and supported Trump's acquittal.    (Ms. McDaniel used to be known as Ronna Romney McDaniel until three years ago when Donald Trump "suggested" she drop the Romney.)  She said this was not the first time she had disagreed with Uncle Mitt, nor would it likely be the last.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, went on record a week ago as "formally not inviting" Romney to its upcoming annual gathering after he voted to hear from witnesses in the Trump Senate trial.

And, in perhaps the most serious rebuke from a Republican spokesperson thus far, Donald Trump, Jr, tweeted after yesterday's impeachment vote:

"Mitt Romney is forever bitter that he will never be POTUS.  He was too weak to beat the Democrats then so he's joining them now. 

"He's now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled from the @GOP."

Junior then went on Instagram and posted a picture of Romney wearing a pair of high-top jeans which Junior referred to a "Mom Jeans" and then proceeded to describe the courageous Republican senator from Utah as a "pussy."

When it comes to pure eloquence, it's hard to beat a Trump!

Congratulations to Senator Mitt Romney for having the courage to stand by his convictions and his faith.  May he and his family be safe from the onslaught of ignorance and violence that rolls across our land - and may others be inspired by his brave example.

The Sheltering Sky

by Pa Rock
Reader

Paul Bowles didn't write his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, until he was thirty-eight years old,  but by that time he was a successful music composer, poet, essayist, and world traveler who was well known among the American expats of Paris and Berlin, as well as the most notable writers of the "Beat Generation" in the United States.

Christopher Isherwood was so taken with Bowles that he gave his surname to his most famous fictional Berlin character, the cabaret singer Sally Bowles.   Gertrude Stein, whom Paul Bowles met in Paris when he was twenty, encouraged him to travel to Northern Africa, which he did - and he fell in love with the Sahara and its environs and lived in Morocco for more than four decades.  William S. Burroughs, a fellow resident of Tangier, was one of his many close friends.

Bowles, a native of New York City, was living in Tangier, Morocco, in 1949 when he penned that first novel, a work that the American publisher, Doubleday, had given him a cash advance to write.  Doubleday did not like the finished product and demanded that he return the advance, but Bowles soon found another publisher.   By January 1st, 1950, The Sheltering Sky had made its way onto The New York Times best-seller list along with a review by Tennessee Williams which was steeped in heavy praise.

The Sheltering Sky tells the fictional tale of three wealthy young Americans who are traveling together in Algeria without a set plan.   Port and Kit Moresby are a married couple and their friend Tunner, who has a romantic inclination toward Kit, is traveling with them.  They go by car and bus and train - and even produce truck - from one heat-drenched, dust-ladened, fly-infested town to another, with the author describing in great detail that oddities that they discover and the hardships they are forced to endure.   The expansive Sahara in a very real sense mirrors their desolate lives as they wander about searching for meaning.

Along the way the three also encounter an older English woman and her adult son who are driving about the desert in a large Mercedes.  That couple cross paths with the Moresby's and Tunner on multiple occasions, and their interferences bring about major changes in the lives of the three central characters.  One of the three eventually succumbs to typhoid, and another becomes subsumed in the Arab culture to a point that almost all self-identity is lost.

The Sheltering Sky is an arid and pungent depiction of the landscape and culture of North Africa in the years just following World War II, but it is also a deep dive into the darkest reaches of the human soul.  The novel illuminates the desert that lies within each of us - and asks what we are capable of bearing in order to survive.

Life is a hard trek into the unknown that is defined by its challenges.  Pack well.

Iowa: Failure to Launch

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

The Iowa caucuses, a hoary old event that does little to show what most Americans think of particular candidates, holds the distinction of being the first official count of any kind during the presidential election season - and thus garners far more attention than it actually deserves.

Most of the presidential candidates of both parties bring in large groups of paid and unpaid staff to Iowa to campaign relentlessly for weeks and months and reach as many voters as possible.  The idea is that whoever wins Iowa leaves the state with "momentum" going into the other caucuses and primaries that quickly follow.  A win in Iowa can add legitimacy to a struggling candidate and make him or her a real contender, and a major defeat in Iowa can just as easily be a death knell for a campaign.

So a bunch of Democratic candidates went into Iowa, worked hard, spent tens of millions of dollars - and, at the end of the caucus night (last night) no results were known.  Supposedly a computer app that tallied votes failed to work properly - and now, Tuesday morning, Democrats in Iowa are scrambling to count the votes by hand and come up with a better-late-than-never winner.

Iowa Democratic officials are insisting - INSISTING - that this was a software failure and not a hack or election interference from some nefarious source.

But the campaigns have already pulled up stakes and moved on to New Hampshire where they are preparing for that state's presidential primary which occurs a week from today.    The Democrats left Iowa without knowing who won - and without any of that momentum for which they had paid so dearly.  Iowa was a cock-up.

Lots of people don't appreciate all of the political power that rests with Iowans because of their early caucuses.  They argue that a rural, primarily white, agricultural state is not representative of the United States, and that a much ballyhooed victory in Iowa gives a skewed depiction of which candidate would run the strongest race nationwide.  The United States, as a whole, does not resemble the coffee shops and kitchen tables of Iowa - or even those of New Hampshire.

But by the time the first handful of primaries are out of the way, the field of candidates has been winnowed down to a bare few, and when bulk of Americans finally get their say, the pickings are slim.

Iowa has failed the nation, and there will undoubtedly be plenty of recriminations and suggestions for fairer ways to select presidential nominees, ways that do not include letting Iowa have the first say in every election cycle.    But, as with the two recent thefts of election by the electoral college, talk is cheap and easy - but nothing is likely to change.

That's too bad, because the Iowa caucuses fly in the face of democracy.  The caucuses are a lengthy and cumbersome process that not everyone can - or is willing to - sit through, and people who have to work on caucus night are essentially disenfranchised.   And, as at least implied above, the caucuses give Iowans far more influence over our national elections than they should be entitled to.

One proposal that gets bandied about every election year is to divide the country into a series of regions and then have every state within a region hold presidential primaries on the same day.  The regions would rotate in voting order each election cycle.  The Northeast might be first this cycle, last in 2024, next to last in 2028, and so on until it works its way back up to first.  The Southeast, Southwest, Midwest, Far West, and Americans Abroad might also have their own primary days which would be rotated into the system.

A regional primary system would mean less campaign travel time, expense, and hassle for candidates who could then focus on a single area of the US at a time - and media buys in the various regional markets would make more sense and be more cost-effective.

And occasionally all citizens would get the opportunity to be among the very first in the nation to state their preferences  - instead of just those living in Iowa.

This old typist happens to think that he is just as patriotic and well informed as the average corn producer in Iowa, and he would like to have the opportunity to occasionally be at the front of the process in selecting his party's presidential nominee.  Fair is fair - even if the good people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire might not think so.

Trump Probably Couldn't Find Kansas City on a Map

by Pa Rock
Grandfather of Kansans

The broad expanse of businesses and homes commonly referred to as Kansas City actually stretches across many smaller cities, towns, and incorporated communities - like most other large urban areas in the United States - a geographic fact that often makes tallying populations and delineating boundaries on maps a challenge.  The heart of what many consider to be Kansas City lies in Jackson County, Missouri, but part of it stretches into two other Missouri counties.   The city's sprawling suburbs also cross two major rivers and reach into three counties in Kansas.  And, to add to the confusion, there is a large incorporated city in just across the line in Kansas that is officially known as Kansas City, Kansas.

And the new world champion Kansas City Chiefs regard the entire two-state area as their home - of that there can be no doubt!

When it comes to iconography, however, much of what is typically regarded as Kansas City is rooted on the Missouri side of the line:  the downtown and its famous skyline, the Power and Light District, Union Station, the World War I Memorial, the Kaufmann Center, the Sprint Center, 12th Street and Vine, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Nelson Art Gallery, Starlight Theatre, all things Truman - and on and on - including Kaufmann Stadium - the home of the Kansas City Royals -  and Arrowhead Stadium - the home of the Kansas City Chiefs.

People who live in the greater Kansas City municipal area understand the complicated political geography of the area and seem to intuitively always know where they are and which laws and taxes apply wherever they happen to be during the course of a busy day, but sometimes tourists get confused.   Apparently there is a history of drug-addled rockers stumbling onto concert stages in Kansas City, Missouri, and telling screaming fans how glad they are to be in Kansas - something that stirs local ire because the celebrities can't even be bothered to find out where they are actually performing.

It's "Kansas" City, so it must be Kansas, right?

Last week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, himself a Kansan, tried to embarrass a veteran NPR journalist by challenging her to find Ukraine on a map, a task that the well-educated journalist who had studied at Cambridge University in England, easily accomplished.  If Secretary Pompeo wants to become a geography teacher perhaps he should start by educating his boss, Donald John Trump.

Last night after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49er's in the Super Bowl, Trump, who has been known to disparage Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco, rushed out the following tweet to congratulate the victorious Chiefs:

"Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game, and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure.  You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA so very well.  Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!"

Soon after that tweet was posted, some underpaid staffer was shoved into the presidential bathroom to explain to Trump that the Chiefs are a Missouri team, and it was quickly pulled.  Trump's private school education had embarrassed him once again.

Former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri quickly posted her own tweet response to Trump with "It's Missouri, you stone cold idiot!"  Comedian Gilbert Gottfried chimed in with "Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I don't think we're in Missouri anymore!"  And another Trump critic posted a two-state map of Kansas and Missouri with the Kansas border pushed out, presumably with a "sharpie," and bringing Kansas City, Missouri, into Kansas.

If a national politician - like Trump -  is going to tweet about a United States' professional sports team, perhaps he ought to take a minute to find out where the team is actually from - before going with his gut instincts.  And if that politician is as dumb as a Trump, he would be a lot better off hiring someone to do his tweeting for him!

Just sayin' . . .

Jojo Rabbit

by Pa Rock
Film Fan

Making fun of Nazis is something that really hasn't caught on in the mainstream film industry.  One notable exception, of course, was the 1967 Mel Brooks' film, "The Producers"  with its play within a play entitled "Springtime for Hitler" - and the subsequent stage productions of essentially the same material with the same title.   "The Producers" hit the big screen just a scant twenty-two years after the end of World War II, and was undoubtedly more than a bit daring for the time.

Last night  I had the opportunity to watch another film that pokes fun at the Nazis and, in particular, Adolf Hitler.   "Jojo Rabbit" is the story of a ten-year-old boy in Nazi Germany during the closing months of World War II.  Jojo attends Hitler Youth meetings and activities in what appears to be a convenience for his working mother so that she will not have to pay a babysitter.  Jojo received his nickname from some of the adult Nazis who were running the Hitler Youth chapter after he refused to kill a rabbit and ran off to hide in shame.

Jojo is no ordinary little boy, however, and he has a most unusual imaginary friend:  Adolf Hitler. The imaginary Hitler is quick to offer Jojo advice on just about anything, and he makes himself at home in the house that Jojo shares with his mother, Rosie.   Herr Hitler, who cannot be seen by anyone other than Jojo, also accompanies the boy to the Hitler Youth meetings.  Jojo's father is supposedly in the German army fighting at the front, but some of the adults - and some of the kids - in the Hitler Youth - believe he is a deserter because he hasn't been heard from in a couple of years.

But it is Jojo's mother, Rosie, who is the interesting parent.  She is secretly a member of the resistance who passes out fliers, and, as Jojo discovers to his horror, Rosie has also hidden a Jewish girl behind a wall in a secret chamber in their home.  Jojo becomes a friend of Elsa, the Jewish girl who is a few years older than himself, and he decides to interview her and write a book about Jews based primarily on all of the "facts' he has learned at his Hitler Youth meetings.  Their question-and-answer sessions do much to illuminate the Nazi propaganda regarding Jews.   The book, which he titles "Yoohoo, Jew,"  is illustrated by Jojo and slowly becomes an encyclopedia of German propaganda about the Jews.

The storyline revolves around the war coming to an end and how that is changing everyone's lives.    The movie has some singing, lots of funny bits, but also is shaded by the serious pall of war.  It is mostly comedic, but the story will leave viewers contemplating the awfulness of the Second World War.

The title role of Jojo was played by an amazing eleven-year-old citizen of England and France named Roman Griffin Davis.  It was his first role in a movie, and he gave a performance that has already garnered a couple of major award nominations.   Young Roman, along with all of the other players in the movie, spoke English with sharp German accents - and gave a strong impression of being actual Germans who were learning to exercise their English skills.

A fellow named Taika Waititi wrote and directed this extraordinary film, and he also played Jojo's imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler.   By every measure he was the master of the material and developed it into something very unique and special.

Two other actors of note in "Jojo Rabbit" were Scarlett Johansson who played Jojo's mother, Rosie the resister, and Sam Rockwell was was Captain Klenzendorf, the leader of the local Hitler Youth chapter.  Johansson and Rockwell each made their quirky characters believable and memorable.

I've already used most of my favorite superlatives in describing "Jojo Rabbit" and some of the people who brought it to the screen,  so I will drop back to something a bit more constrained.  "Jojo Rabbit" is one helluva good movie - one that most people will enjoy seeing.    The only people who might do well to skip it are those who would be offended by a movie that mocks Hitler.  Its backhanded condemnation of the untrue things Nazis were saying about Jews was particularly brilliant.    The film serves to remind us that hate is often rooted in lies.

"Jojo Rabbit" does not disappoint.  Catch it if you can!

Redneck Regalia

by Pa Rock
Road Warrior

Rosie and I made the 277-mile drive from our home in West Plains, Missouri, to my son's home in Roeland Park, Kansas, yesterday without incident.  I think the last time I made it up this way was the week before Thanksgiving, so, as always, I was alert for any changes that had occurred since my last drive to the Kansas City area.

One observation from the drive was that (gauging from political paraphernalia) there is really only one candidate running for president in southern Missouri.  "Trump 2020" bumper stickers are beginning to blossom in this rural backwater along with a few yard signs - and I even passed one house which had a Trump flag flying from a tall flagpole.  (I saluted appropriately as I drove by!)

Trump will never hold one of his hate rallies in southern Missouri because he doesn't need to.  He owns it.  And absolutely none of the Democratic candidates will stop by either - unless they experience plane trouble hurrying from Iowa to South Carolina and are forced down for an inconvenient stop.  The rural Midwest is the land that time forgot - politically - and Trump can have it.  The national Democratic Party could care less about their country cousins.

It would be nice if every state could occasionally be Iowa or New Hampshire.

Tom Perez, you suck.

Normally by the time we get back into civilization - closer to Kansas City - Democratic yard signs and bumper stickers begin appearing.    But this is Super Bowl weekend, and all of the personal promotions seem to have poured into supporting the Kansas City Chiefs.  Once we reached the city we began seeing lots of car signs, flags, and decals, plenty of yard signs, and even Chiefs' flags flying in front of houses.   Two Chiefs' flags are flapping in the breeze on the very short street where my son and his family live.

Kansas City is fired up - but not over presidential candidates - yet.  That will come after all of the victory celebrations finally subside!

Tim's neighborhood is, according to past yard signs and bumper stickers, fairly Democratic, and in 2018 the local congressional district ousted a GOP incumbent, Kevin Yoder, and replaced him with Sharice Davids - a lesbian, kick-boxing, Native American who seems to have maintained very strong ties to the folks back home.  One of Tim's neighbors, though, had his home featured on the local news in 2016 after festooning it with tons of Trump trash and political propaganda.  The vulgar display was so outrageous that it brought gawkers from miles around.

That neighbor should move to southern Missouri where his flair for yard art would probably be more welcome - though far less controversial.

Home tomorrow.