Tour de Hello Kitty

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Tour de Hello Kitty

When did America cease to be a nation of workers and become a community of guys in knee pants?

A recent tiff among those of the male persuasion who address each other as “Dude!” and aren’t joking about it is the alleged doping scandal regarding Lance Armstrong, The All-American-French Boy.

France, the nation who gave the world the great Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, took it all back by inventing the Tour de France. “Tour de France” is a French (obviously) phrase which translates roughly as “boys wearing brightly-colored plastic toadstools on their heads and racing their bicycles.”

Once a year the sort of people who subscribe to PBS and voted for John Kerry become excited about the Tour de Knee Pants, perhaps because their boats are being refitted for the yachting season.

Professional cyclists seem to be the sort of people who, if they actually had jobs, would come to work with cell ‘phones and keys in one hand, and designer bottles of designer water in the other.

As in all races, someone wins a pedally-thing, and the others complain. Lance (what were his parents thinking?) won the Tour de Dude on numerous occasions, much to the annoyance of the French. Now he is accused by his bike-riding guy-dude-homies of having taken dope in order to win the Tour de Pedal-Pushers. Why are these accusations made years after the fact? Did Lance sneer at another bike-riding-guy-dude-homie’s bicycle helmet?

And what is with bicycle helmets, anyway? How does a Glad-Bag on steroids reposing on the top of a bicyclist’s hair protect the bicyclist? If a sport requires a helmet, wear a helmet, not a Hello Kitty fashion accessory.

But here’s the thesis of this article: who could be so excited about winning a bicycle race that he would take strange chemicals and ruin his health in order to win it? And, really, who could be so excited about watching a bicycle race without chemicals, mega-doses of caffeine, for instance? “I say, Percy, wake up; here come the leaders in the Tour de Yawn. Rather. Wot.”

Bicycle racing seems so, well, not American. Does one imagine Zorro riding to the rescue on his trusty bicycle? General Patton on a Schwinn? John Wayne pedaling off into the sunset? President Reagan polishing the saddle of his Raleigh? Teddy Roosevelt wheeling up San Juan Hill with one of those bubbles on his head? George Washington kneeling in the snow and praying while his faithful bicycle stands by? I think not.

Look, bicycling is a healthy sport, and many of us grew up falling off our Western Flyers, but when we were old enough to borrow the car we didn’t reject the Ford Galaxie 500 and choose to go cruisin’ downtown on the old bicycle instead.

Bicycling as a serious sport – what next, helmets and knee-pants and accusations of drug usage in shooting marbles?

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The Class of 2011

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

THE CLASS OF 2011

Children insist on growing up and going away. Their teachers are not happy about that. Really. Every year the old…um…venerable faculty see their high school seniors off to the new world they will make for themselves. Oh, sure, there are always one or two of whom one can sing “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone,” but the loss of most of the students is very real, very painful, and very forever. And while the teachers taught them not to ever split infinitives (cough), which they immediately forget, the block form for business letters, which they usually remember, and the possible symbolism of Grendel in Beowulf, there are always lots of other little things one hopes they have learned along the way.

Here then, Class of 2011 are some disconnected factoids your old English teacher meant to tell you earlier in the year, before the month of May very cleverly sneaked up on all of us:

1. In October you will return for homecoming. You will find pretty much the same teachers, school, and friends you left behind. It will all seem very familiar at first. But you won’t be on the team or in the band; it isn’t about you anymore, and that will be oddly disturbing. By October of 2012 most of the students in your old high school won’t know who you are -- or were. And they won't care. You'll just be old people.

2. Some day surprisingly soon you will hear shrieks of insolent laughter from your child’s room. You will find your child and her friends laughing at your yearbook pictures. You will feel very old.

3. Change the oil in your car more often than the manufacturer recommends.

4. Billy Graham attended a public school; Adolf Hitler attended a Christian school. Don’t obsess on labels.

5. You are not going to win the Texas lottery.

6. T-shirts are underwear.

7. MyFace, SpaceBook, Tweeter, and all the rest are surprisingly dangerous to your career and to your safety.

8. When posing for a photograph, never hold your hands folded in front of, um, a certain area of your anatomy. It makes you look as if you just discovered that your zipper is undone.

9. Have you ever noticed that you never see “Matthew 6:5-6” on a bumper sticker?

10. College is not high school.

11. Work is not high school. There is no such thing as an excused absence in adult life. The boss will not care about your special needs, sensitivities, artistic gifts, or traumatic childhood.

12. God made the world. We have the testimony of Genesis and of the Incarnation that all Creation is good. Never let anyone tell you that the world is evil.

13. Most people are good, and can be trusted. But the two-per-centers, like hemorrhoids, do tend to get your attention.

14. Listening to radio commentators with whom you already agree is not participating in our democracy. Until he was in his thirties, Rush Limbaugh never even registered to vote in any place he ever lived. You can do better than that.

15. Why should someone else have to raise your child?

16. Tattoos do have one useful purpose – they will help your relatives identify your body after you die of some weird disease that was on the needle. Oh, yeah, sure, the process is sterile – a tattoo parlor looks like a hospital, right?

17. Your class ranking is little more than a seating chart for graduation, reflecting your performance in a sometimes artificial and often passive situation for the last four years. Your future is up to you.

18. Knowing how to repair things gives you power and autonomy. You will amaze yourself with what you can do with duct-tape, a set of screwdrivers, a set of wrenches, a hammer, and a pair of Vise-grip pliers.

19. Movies are made by committees. Sometimes they get it right. Books are usually written by one person. Sometimes he or she gets it wrong. But there are lots more good books than there are good movies.

20. Put the 'phone down. Grasp the steering wheel firmly with both hands. Stay alive.

21. Save the planet? Reform the establishment? Stop meanies from beating harp seals to death? Get a job first.

22. Time to wear the big-boy pants.

23. Some people are Democrats because they believe the Democratic Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Democrats because they are part of the Socialist / Communist continuum and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Some people are Republicans because they believe the Republican Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Republicans because they have Fascist tendencies and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Hiding out in the woods and refusing to participate is not a logical option.

24. Everyone tells cheerleader jokes, but cheerleaders are among the most successful people in adult life. The discipline, the hard work, the physical demands, the aesthetics, the teamwork, and the refusal to die of embarrassment while one’s mother screams abuse at the cheerleader sponsor do pay off in life.

25. You are the “they.” You are the adult. You are the government. You are the Church. You are the public school system. You decide what will be on the television screen in your home. Your life is your own – don’t become one of the bleating, tweeting sheep.

26. Giving back to the community begins now. Do something as an act of service to humanity -- join the volunteer fire department, teach Sunday school, clean up the city park one hour a week, assist at the nursing home.

27. Don’t bore people with sad stories about your horrible childhood. No one ever lived a Leave It To Beaver or Cosby existence. Get over the narcissism.

28. The shouting, abusive, 1-900-Send-Money TV preacher with the bouffant hairdo strutting about on the low-prole stage set while beating on a Bible and yelling is not going to come to the house in the middle of the night when your child is dying, you don’t have a job, and you don’t know where to turn. Your pastor – Chaucer’s Parsoun -- may not be cool, may not be a clever speaker, may not sport a Rolex watch, and may not have a really bad wig, but he’s here for you.

29. If you insist on taking your shirt off in public, shave your armpit hair. Or braid it. Or something.

30. Don’t wear a shirt that says “(bleep) Civilization” to a job interview.

31. When someone asks for a love offering, offer him your love and watch his reaction. He doesn’t want a love offering; he wants money. Sloppy language is used to manipulate people. Call things by their proper names, and hang on to your wallet.

32. Stop eating out of bags and boxes. Learn how to use a knife and fork.

33. Life is not a beer commercial.

34. On the Monday after graduation you’ll be just another unemployed American.

35. When you find yourself facing a dinner setting with more than two forks, don’t panic; no one else knows quite what to do with three forks either. No one’s watching anyway, so just enjoy the meal.

36. What is the truth? Is it something you want to believe? Something repeated over and over until you come to believe it in spite of your own experience?

37. Green ideology means that gasoline costs more than you make.

38. A great secret to success in a job or in life is simply to show up.

39. No one ever agrees on where commas go. If someone shows you a grammar book dictating the use of commas one way, you can find another grammar book to contradict it.

40. Most people do not look good in baseball caps.

41. There is no such thing as a non-denominational worship service.

42. You will always be your parents’ child. You may become a doctor, lawyer, banker, or, God help you, president, but your mother will still ask you if you’ve had enough to eat and remind you to take your jacket in case the night turns cold. And parents are a constant surprise -- they always have new knowledge you need to acquire.

43. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is all the English grammar and usage book you’ll ever need. If more people understood that and had a library card, every English teacher in America would be an ex-English teacher standing in line at the Wal-Mart employment office. Keep it a secret, okay?

44. From now on the menus should be in words, not pictures.

45. According to some vaguely named family institute or some such, raising a child to the age of eighteen costs the family $153,000 and a few odd cents. The taxpayers of this state spend about $5,000 per year on each student. Thus, a great many people have pooled their resources and spent about $213,000 on you since you were born. They did not do this in order for you to sit around complaining about how unfair life is.

46. There was never a powerful secret society variously known as The Preps, The Rich Kids, or The Popular Kids, just as there are no unmarked U.N. helicopters. But if you ask me, those guys who play chess need watching; I hear that the pawns are reporting all your movements to The 666 Beast computer in Belgium via computer chips in your school i.d. card.

47. Thank you notes: write ’em. It shows class. You can write; you’re a high school graduate, remember?

48. Don’t reach for the pen in someone else’s pocket. Carry your own.

49. The school award you should have received: For Compassion. While I must confess that I was happy to see some of you on a daily basis because that way I was sure my tires would be safe, there was never one single instance of any of you taking any advantage or being unkind in any way to those who were emotionally or physically vulnerable. Indeed, most of you took the extra step in being very protective of the very special young people who are blended into the student population. There is no nicely-framed award for that compassion, not here, anyway, but even now there is one with your name on it on the walls of a mansion which, we are assured, awaits each of us, in a house with many mansions. God never asked you to be theologically correct; He asked you to be compassionate, and you were. Keep the kindness within you always.

50. Take a long, lingering look at your classmates during graduation. You’ll never see all of them ever again. In ten years many of you will be happy and honorable. Others will have failed life, and at only 28 will be sad, tired, bitter old men and women with no hope. Given that you all went to the same cinder-block school with the same blinky fluorescent lights, suffered the same old boring teachers, drove along the same dusty roads, and grew up in the same fading little town, what will have made the difference?

Well, Class of 2011, it’s time to let go. Thanks for everything: for the paper balls and pizza and pep rallies and recitals and concerts and games, for your thoughts and essays, for your laughter and jokes, for usually paying attention to roll call (“Focus, class... focus...focus...focus...”), for really thinking about Macbeth and Becket and Beowulf, and those wonderful pilgrims (who, of course, are us) forever journeying to Canterbury, for doing those business letters and resumes’ over and over until YOU were proud of them, for wrestling with iambic pentameter, for all the love you gave everyone around you every day. Take all those good things with you in your adventures through life.

And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take:
For ever, and for ever, farewell...

--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.iii.115-117

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With Our Thrift-Shop Televisions We Will Conquer the World

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

With Our Thrift-Shop Televisions We Will Conquer the World

With the death of what’s-his-name in a small airborne assault in the great tradition of American raiders dating back to John Paul Jones, the world waits and wonders and ponders this great question: couldn’t the Scourge of Allah afford a better television set?

Did anyone ever tell The Pride of Riyadh “Hey, Fatwallah Guy, they’ve got flat screens now. I can score you one down at the souk for maybe two hundred filthy pagan dollars.”

But The Big Wookie was apparently comfortable with his thrift shop 15-inch and his Just For Bin dye job. Images of the old poop show him squatting on the floor huddled in a blanket and surfing the channels in a filthy room that any monotoothed Hardin County nester would disdain.

Wikipedia reports that the Lyin’ of the Desert’s favorite activities were charity, reading, horses, writing poetry, and following the English soccer team Arsenal. He was a soft-spoken man who perhaps enjoyed walks on the beach and candle-light beheadings of infidels. Hey, girls, isn’t that pretty much the blind date your well-meaning cousin set you up with after your guy Skippy cheated on you with your best friend Tammy?

The Big O was quite the family man, too. No one is clear on just how many wives he infested, and several of his exes (none in Texas) were never seen again. He sperm-donored some 20-25 children, and before his death was living with three wives, which may explain the haunted look on his face.

Did this Ward Cleaver of the Sands attend PTA meetings?

And imagine the home life of the family:

“Daddy, daddy! We’re playing Arabs and Jews, and Brother #12 won’t ever let me be the Arab! Why do I have to be tortured and beheaded all the time?”

“Now, boys, your father’s very busy plotting world domination and global genocide of the infidels; you go outside and play with the nice new Russian Kalashnikovs he gave you for World Peace Day.”

“Aw, shucks, honey, you’re the greatest. I think I’ll wait awhile before having you stoned to death.”

The sad reality is that Lurch was an evil man, a genocidal maniac who inspired others to murder thousands of people, most of them of his own religion. This spoiled son of the rich was technically trained but not educated, and loved machines – especially machine guns – but disposed of humans as mere obstacles to his demon-haunted fantasies of a perfect world.

When a good man dies one often says “We shall not see his like again,” and this is true. All good men exhibit the traits of honesty, loyalty, courage, and civilization, and yet they really are individuals.

But the evil little men who bedevil the world – they are drainage-ditch-common, mumbling and muttering as they listen to The Voices in grubby rented rooms or even grubbier tents, scribbling into their notebooks or tapping into their machines their eternal shrieks against God and man, their endlessly recycled versions of Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Das Kapital, and warehouses full of sophomoric manifestos.

Alas that we will see his like again.

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Always Wear a Clean Shirt at a Wedding

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Always Wear a Clean Shirt at a Wedding

During the recent royal wedding one could not help noticing the wild, bizarre headgear that seemed to detract from the sacredness of the occasion – I refer to hairy Prince Harry’s hair, of course. He seemed to be channeling Donald Trump. Oh, the follicles of one’s youth!

Prince Harry was in military uniform, and one wonders why his commanding officer didn’t tell him “Lieutenant, prince or no prince, you get that hair cut to regulation.”

Otherwise, how good to see women wearing hats in church and men respectfully bareheaded in the presence of God. Many middle-aged men have done great harm with the me-me-me thing of teaching younger men that respect for God, women, and country is secondary to keeping one’s costume ballcap on during all occasions because, like, y’know, this cap is who I am.

Yes, what man does not want to be a made-in-China cap?

The young princes, both pilots, looked great in their uniforms, and their families and friends were very proud of them. One imagines the awkwardness of someone opposed to military service getting married: “The groom and best man were resplendent in matching cable-knit sweaters.”

No one in the congregation displayed a cell ‘phone. Now that’s class.

No one in the congregation wore tee-shirts.

No one in the congregation wore advertising on his or her clothing.

No guitars. Thank God.

No cringe-making amateur musical moments.

No microphones or loudspeakers dangling from the ceiling.

No miscued audiotapes of “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”

No one in the congregation called out “Where’s the birth certificate, William!?”

Baby sister as maid of honor and baby brother as best man – a brilliant way of avoiding squabbles and crowds on the altar.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London both mentioned God. This could distress NBC and CBS.

There were no air-raid sirens during the wedding; NATO hasn’t yet gotten around to bombing England.

Some gossipy old women on the television judged the guest list and found it wanting. Hey, Miz Grundy and Aunt Pittypat, not your call, okay? Not your family, not your decision. Just be happy if your own children ask you to their weddings.

Finally, although the wedding pictures were lovely, let us not neglect the great photograph of Princess Kate in khaki and boots in a muddy field, a shotgun in one hand and a brace of fowl in the other. Now that’s an English princess of the old school! Cue that country song about the tractor.

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The Mice That Ate My Car

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Mice That Ate My Car

The micezillas are eating my car.

Why do mice eat the wiring of some makes of cars but, apparently, not of others? My mother’s pickup, made by Brand X, has lived in the country for years, and has yet to host the first mouse. My car, on the other paw, Brand Y, is like a cruise-ship buffet for the better class of rural rodentia.

This is probably because of man-made global warming and so is your fault for not using squiggly light bulbs.

The folks at the dealership are kind and patient and helpful, but lately they look from the gnawed wiring to me and then back to the gnawed wiring, all with profound disappointment, not unlike my parents when they saw the algebra grade on my report card.

The latest manifestation of rats in the wiring was the failure of my right-turn signal. I was quite worried about not having a right-turn signal, not only because I did not want a ticket but because of the safety issue. Further, I felt that good people would stare and point, and dismiss me as unworthy of civilized company because I wasn’t deploying the signal for right turns. I needn’t have worried; in East Texas folks almost never use turn signals at all. Indeed, the safe driver who signals for a turn is an eccentric.

But I drove the afflicted vehicle for a while because I could not endure the guilt-making of the guys at the shop. No sidewalk yellevangelist appears to be as despairing of your soul as a quiet, mournful service writer who really wants the best for you but can only shake his head at your miserable failure to control your rats. A yellevangelist loudly demands “How’s your soul, sinner!?” A service writer quietly and sympathetically asks “Do you know how much a new wiring harness will cost you?”

Were mice one of the plagues of Egypt? Was the harness of Pharaoh’s custom-built chariot cursed with critters? “So let it be bitten; so let it not run.”

I have sewn the ground beneath my car with rat poison, but anything that feasts on wiring laughs scornfully at poison. Someone suggested mothballs, which seems illogical since the wiring is not being eaten with moths. I placed sticky traps, which stuck nothing. After a water moccasin beat itself to death with a shovel (because, PETA knows, I would never, ever wish harm to one of our reptilian co-inhabitants of Gaia, the Water Planet) I respectfully flung its corpse underneath the car as a critter-deterrent.

If I had placed the snake on the windshield it would have been a windshield viper.

And yet the mice cometh and they goeth, and they doeth so in insolence.

In my despair I turned my hopes to a higher power, the internet, which sayeth unto us that some new wiring is coated with soy-based insulation which rats and mice find a part of this complete, nutritious breakfast. Hey, it was on the internet, so it must be true, right?

The ‘net says that I should spread forth rat poison, mothballs, and sticky traps, which I had already done, and avoid soy-based wiring harnesses. The dead snake was my idea; I’m thinking of getting a patent for it. As for the putative soy-based insulation, is there anyone who ever asked a car salesman about the nutritional quality of the wiring harness? Is the battery labeled for its calorie count? Are cruise controls fattening?

I’m at my rats’ end in the matter of the micezillas, and am definitely open to suggestion.

In the meantime, as you go to sleep tonight, remember that The Mice of the Baskervilles might be coming for your car in the hours of darkness when evil is exalted. They might even be under your bed, lurking there, grinning, with glowing green eyes, waiting to feast upon your soy-based flesh, waiting, waiting, waiting….

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Russian Easter Overture

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Russian Easter Overture

Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.

REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.

The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.

But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.

This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.

Well, they probably are.

And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.

But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.

I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.

Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.

One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.

And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.

Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”

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With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World!

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World

The other day I spent several hours proctoring a standardized test of the sort so beloved of a multinational entity named Pearson – young Texans sitting alphabetically at tables in a gymnasium and silently blotting bubbles and writing essays within the lines.

If you want to know who or what Pearson is, go to www.pearson.com and, well, good luck. I think Pearson, not China, owns us.

The State of Pearson, um, Texas gave me not just one but two different booklets explaining my difficult task, and a sheet of paper with an oath of secrecy requiring me not to know anything about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing and not to speak to anyone about that which I did not know about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing, and what could be more logical than that?

As I walked my post in an unmilitary fashion for Pearson-ness I thought upon these things:

1. I am old.
2. I am overweight.
3. I am holding a coffee cup.
4. I am supervising people who are working but am not actually doing anything useful myself.
5. Thus, I must be a Chief Petty Officer.

Some works of literature will never serve as sources of gobbets for standardized tests. You may have noticed that there are now only three contemporary categories of fiction, one for men and two for women.

The covers of every new book for men feature, in dark tones, any combination of the following: 1. an image of the Moscow Kremlin, 2. an image of an onion-domed Russian church, 3. a swastika, 4. a hammer-and-sickle, and 5. a semi-automatic pistol.

For women there are two categories. All the covers of books in the first category show precisely two – never one, never three – Adirondack chairs on a beach. As we all know, every woman’s life is centered on two Adirondack chairs on a beach and not on her job at BurgerX-Treem while her parasite accessory hangs out in their trailer all day playing video games. Also note that the beach is never cluttered with ranks of rotting seaweed or piles of beer cans.

The second category of fiction for women is all about a pale, rather vacant-eyed young blonde wearing a white beanie with two white strings hanging down. I have no idea why.

What is The Main Idea? Give support from the text. Do not write outside the lines.

As for me, I look forward to seeing a book with a cover featuring a Chinese girl wearing a white beanie while posing in front of the Kremlin with a semi-automatic pistol, tap-dancing on a swastika, and proctoring a standardized test, all at the same time.

Let us compare notes by candlelight, in a hidden underground bunker outside Prague, about conspiracy theories, albino test proctors lurking in shadowy Vatican corridors, secret Templar codes, hidden Nazi gold stashed in a 1939 Imperial Airways passenger plane submerged at the bottom of Lake Sam Rayburn, the Club of Rome, the Third Murderer in Macbeth, the 666 Beast Computer in Belgium, demented Navy CPOs on secret missions to poison the world’s supply of lapsang souchang, and King Solomon’s DNA hidden in a microchip – they can all be traced back to (dramatic pause) Pearson’s. Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

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The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs

“Guitar” is a French word for kindling, but a great many people enjoying listening to the guitar as well as burning it. A very few can play it well, and too, too many fancy they can play it without inflicting acoustic distress, but their haunted families will painfully scream a dissenting view if asked. But you’d have to ask loudly.

The other day I was at the store looking at music albums, which still exist physically as little plastic discs and so can still feature cover art, though much reduced from the grand days of 33 1/3 rpm albums. On any album on the rack in which guitar music was featured, the cover art featured the artist wearing a guitar. One young musician was depicted (1) playing her guitar, (2) posing on a railway line with her guitar slung on her back, and (3) in bed with her guitar.

Photo #1 makes perfectly good sense – the album photograph accurately advertises the fact that the young woman plays the guitar, and so if the customers wants guitar music he can purchase that album.

Photo #2 is less logical and heavily overdone. Everyone who has ever made a noise with guitar strings has had his picture made while posing soulfully on a railway line and wearing his guitar slung over his back. As we all know, rail passenger traffic declined in the early 1960s because the famous trains, such as the Santa Fe’s Chiefs and the Missouri Pacific’s Eagles, were wrecked in a devastating series of collisions with country-and-western singers. It is a little-known secret that this is the reason air travel become popular.

Photo #3 – I’m not going there, folks, other than to wonder if the guitar were a reincarnation of Les Paul.

Flutists, you will observe, do not pose on railway lines with their flutes strapped to their backs. Satchmo wisely kept his trumpet and himself out of the way of The Sunset Limited. Concussionists generally don’t carry their drums, cymbals, gongs, bells, and other crashy-bangy things about at all, and delicate people are grateful for that. I’m not sure about bagpipes. Since bagpipes sound like a muscular Celt squashing a pig to death I suppose the sound could stop a train.

Herbert von Karajan never required his Wagnerian ensembles to muster in a marshaling yard with their spears and helmets, and James Levine would look plumb silly trying to direct “Orange Blossom Special” with that little baton.

Other occupations avoid posturing on railway lines. The plumber does not gaze artistically upon his premiere pipe wrench while trodding the crossties, and the electrician does not cross the rails with his most expensive circuit-tester. A CPA is never shown gazing down the line with a calculator slung over his shoulder, and a nurse never listens for that lonesome whistle while trying out a new chord on her rectal thermometer.

Enviros have yet to stand in the way of trains while arranging garlands of those poisonous squiggly light bulbs around their necks, but one wishes they would.

Libyans seem to be inadvertently standing in the way of The Cannonball Express, and its stops are unscheduled, its destination is unknown, and no one seems to know who the engineer is.

Perhaps someone will take a photograph of a guitarist in the middle of the runway at the airport as he sings a song about growing up poor and barefoot in a broken-down old Boeing 747 and being snubbed by the rich kids in the AirBus A380 down the long and winding dusty long-lost country road through those old cornfields back home in the condominium where Grandma thawed her special recipe PETA-friendly critter-pie in the microwave lit by one of those squiggly light bulbs giving off down-home country radioactivity.

-30-

The Reporter in the Closet

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Reporter in the Closet

In a masterful, post-dawn kinetic journalism action strike, Vice-President Joe-the-Tank-Engine Biden’s henchminions made the world just a little bit safer for the most open administration in American history by confining a reporter in a closet and posting a Sergeant Schultz outside the door.

Amtrak Joe was a guest last week at Winter Falls, the Florida mansion of a developer and philanthropist who was hosting a fundraiser for Senator Bill Nelson. The pool reporter for the event was the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Powers, who upon arrival was Colonel Klinked to a closet lest he contaminate the $500-a-plate faux nobility with the presence of his wretched, ink-stained self.

And certainly there were plenty of closets from which to choose; Winter Falls was designed with all the understated elegance of an oil-sheik-princess’s concept of a shopping mall, bridging the architectural and aesthetic gap between Hello Kitty and an airport.

After an hour or so Mr. Powers was given a brief parole to listen passively to the speeches given (for a price) by the champions of the workin’ folks, and then escorted back to The Cooler without being given a chance to ask any questions of the elected members of the government or talk with any of the Great Washed.

Mr. P wasn’t permitted to refresh himself at the buffet, even in silence. According to the Orlando Sentinel the pre-prandial snacks for the guests (no scriveners need apply) included caprese crustini. I don’t know what caprese crustini is, but then I’m not a welder, miner, or truck driver. The caprese crustini was topped off with oven-dried mozzarella and basil, and I’m not sure how Basil felt about that. Lunch featured Chicken Caesar (no comment) and vegetable wraps.

Vegetables – does this call for a legume change?

The next time I visit the truck stop café’ I’m going to try the caprese crustini in solidarity with The People.

All Mr. Powers got for sustenance was a bottle of water, and nothing was said about how radioactive it might have been.

Mr. Powers was not imprisoned, as some have alleged; surely he could have demanded that he be released, but then he would have missed out on a good joke worth a couple of good columns, some publicity for his paper, and a notch in his resume’. Mr. P sent his editor a picture of the closet via his Blackberry, and so could have dialed 911. A false imprisonment charge, unlike the wings of an angel, wouldn’t fly.

Still, this is not pretty for the President who, for reasons best known to himself and perhaps The Voices, has ordered the military to drop bombs on Libya. The first bomb he dropped, though, was on himself, two years ago, by allowing his grey eminences to pair him with a vice-president who makes PeeWee Herman look positively statesmanlike.

The homeowner, to his credit, later telephoned Mr. Powers to apologize for the enclosetment, maintaining that, like Sergeant Shultz, he knew nothing. Perhaps he sent Jeeves over to the Orlando Sentinel offices with a takeout plate and a festive selection of new typewriter ribbons.

So who is this great nation bombing next week? Canada, maybe? Or Luxembourg? Perhaps the Principality of Liechtenstein? But the President doesn’t need to bomb Liechtenstein; it’s small and harmless and so can be stuffed into a closet for any reason or for no reason at all.

-30-

Technology -- EEK!

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Technology – EEK!

If an individual were to awaken from a winter of hibernation and read the news today he would conclude from the limited information given that the deaths and destruction in Japan these last two weeks are the result of a nuclear explosion.

There have certainly been explosions enough, hydrogen gas explosions, but there has been no nuclear explosion because a nuclear power plant cannot explode. Our hypothetical reader would also be surprised to learn that the deaths and destruction, including the wreckage of a power plant, are in reality the result of a powerful earthquake and resulting wave action.

Contemporary ideology works within a philosophical framework posited in the grounding myth that all bad things are human in origin, and that the prime cause of evil is that man is a self-actuated tool-maker, not a wretched, hungry hunter-gatherer. In reporting the disasters in Japan, the earthquakes and tsunami are not simply underreported in favor of the it’s-all-some-man’s-fault thesis, they appear now not to be mentioned at all, rather like Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

Japan, with more cause than any other nation to be sensitive to the negative possibilities of nuclear power, is gridded with nuclear power plants, and these power plants have for years operated with great benefit to the Japanese people and economy by producing cheap electricity and warm water. The warm water, by the way, makes for improved sport fishing at the outlets. To the fish in the cold northern Pacific, shivering in their little designer parkas, the waters cycling out of a nuclear reactor are as a dream cruise in the Caribbean to you and me.

To say that nuclear power is dangerous is a truism equal to stating that storing containers of gasoline in one’s living room is dangerous or that building a campfire during a drought is dangerous. Most human activities – welding, bicycling, mowing the yard, building fences, fishing, milking cows, playing baseball -- contain some element of danger. Shall we thus simply cease living? We humans have frontal lobes, and generally know not to give 6-year-olds the keys to the car or allow newly-commissioned lieutenants access to weapons or sharp objects.

As of this writing, not one person has been killed because of the wrecked nuclear plant in Japan.

Further, the American ships that have sailed to Japan with generous gifts of American food and American water and American blankets and American medical care are powered by nuclear power plants. For over fifty years American submarines and large warships have been powered by the atom, and our sailors and Marines don’t come home glowing in the dark and giving birth to children with three eyes. The solution to nuclear safety issues seems to be building nuclear reactors just like those used by the United States Navy.

Finally, while short-term exposure to radiation is dangerous, the long-term implications are less alarming. In 1945, before the bomb was dropped, 419,000 people lived in Hiroshima; now some 1.6 million prosper there. 212,000 folks lived in Nagasaki in 1945; now there are 446,000.

At this point some twit will tweet, indignantly and with two fingers, “So what u sayin is bombin cities is good uh.” No, I’m not saying that at all; the conversation is about nuclear power used wisely for the good of all people.

In an aside we may note that Detroit, which hasn’t suffered combat since the French and Indian War, boasted a population of 1.5 million in 1945; now some 910,000 exist in the ruins of a once-great city.

Nuclear power is good; abandoning humanity to starve in the cold because of Greenist ideology is bad.

-30-

Reverend Charlie Sheen

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Reverend Charlie Sheen

An organization styling itself Family Radio declareth unto us that the world is going to end on the 21st of May. There are several reasonable responses:

“What? The world is ending? Again?”

“Oh, no! Can’t the end of the world wait until after graduation?”

“It was on the ‘net, so it must be true.”

“But I haven’t finished reading all my vampire books yet.”

“Well, okay, I guess I won’t have the lawnmower serviced.”

There are few among us these days who aren’t ministers, priests, priestesses, or preachers. Indeed, there are so many churches, ministries, outreaches, fellowships, temples, assemblies, assemblages, and what-nots that soon each one of us will be his or her own The Bright Light Free Will Four Square Full Gospel Missionary Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Lamb Holiness Sanctified of the Infallible Me, Me, Me, complete with a website and an official tee-shirt.

The leader of Family Radio is Harold Camping, who calculated the end through pushing together lots of numbers in a loosey-goosey spasm of numerology that would embarrass even Pope Mel Gibson, grounding the base numbers in dates which aren’t in any of the hundreds of versions of the Bible, but maintaining their (and his) inerrancy anyway.

Oh, yeah, we gotta follow this man.

The Family Radio website (www.familyradio.com) features a button for online donations. Now if the world is going to end in two months, why would Family Radio need your money? They could close out the holy checking account and use the cash for milk and fresh bread, eat out of the pantry and freezer, and not sweat the utility bills. After all, are they going to need money when they’re beamed up to the Hale-Bopp YK2 and KY Mother Ship? It’s not as if there’s going to be a baggage fee.

True believers have left families to travel around the country in caravans of SUVs to advise folks that the very few who are to be saved will be teleported up on the 21st of May and that the rest of us are going to live in a totally Charlie Sheen / Fred Phelps world until October, at which point the cosmic plug will be pulled.

One of the site’s “Caravan Letters” reports from San Antonio, but the photograph accompanying the letter (as of last Saturday) is of the state capitol building in Austin. If these folks don’t know the way to San Antonio, what are their chances of directing you to Heaven?

While The End is only two months away, there’s plenty of time for all of us to start our own churches and then start sneering at each other as unscriptural. Friends have suggested the Cowboy Happy Trails End-Times Ministry, the Truckers’ Last Jump-Start Fellowship, and the Certified Public Accountants for Jesus (Your Number’s Up), but I think I’ll begin The Official Massey-Ferguson Three-Point Hitch Bible Fellowship and Gallery of Collectibles, joining the many who have found the Holy Spirit to have been off-task for the past 2,000 years.

Oh, and where will the Family Radio whatever folks be on The Day? Jerusalem? The Bermuda Triangle? Captain Kirk’s house? Nope. The end of the world takes place in Flagstaff, Arizona, the City of Salvation and jumping-off point for the Planet Krypton. Hey, see ya there, okay? But go ahead and send me your bank account and credit card numbers and your car title. It’s all for the Lord’s work.

-30-

The World's Largest Shopping Mall and Noodle Cart

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The World’s Largest Shopping Mall and Noodle Cart

The world’s largest shopping mall is open for business, but the business isn’t there.

The New South China Mall (is there an Old South China?) features 2,350 spaces for lease, but only about fifty are taken.

With so much empty spaces, mall rats in the New South China Mall really are rats, squeaking about in loneliness along the kilometers of empty hallways.

There is no Target store, of course, for in the glorious People’s Republic of China anyone who disagrees with The People becomes the target. It’s sort of like dealing with the American Department of Justice, a division of the S.E.I.U..

The good part about an empty mall is that finding a parking space is no problem.

And Chinese food? “Hey, kids, we’ll meet at the food court at eleven.”

“But Dad, where’s the food court?”

“Oh, about two miles thataway you’ll find Mrs. Chin’s noodle cart. You can’t miss it; just look for the one light bulb in the mall that’s switched on.”

Organizing a rave would be a problem, though: “This is Sino-Dude evr 1 meet by the Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot that duznt xist for a r8ve.”

“This is Shanghai Lil over by Cheap Plastic Extreeme Sneaker City that also doesn’t exist. Where is Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot since there izzn 1?”

“Yeh, guys, this is Beijing Bomber Boy at Xtreem Snail and Eel Kitchen Express which never moved in. Where are y’all?”

“Help! I’m at Old New Jersey Exteeeeeme Cell Phone Outfitters Supply Company Xpress which is empty and all I see is some old guy with bad breath who tells me I need to get right with Buddha. Help! Find me!”

Given the lack of customers, the one book store is named Books-a-Dozen.

Coffee is available at RedStarbuck’s, and there is a HallMarxist store specializing in sympathy cards for political prisoners:

Dear (former) Comrade Sister,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Hu Jin-Tao’s
Got a death sentence for you

Dear (former) Cousin Comrade Chang,
I detest
Your protest arrest
But I warned you, dude,
And I wasn’t rude
You know our laws
And all their flaws
Surely you cannot
Think it so odd
That due process in China
Is a firing squad

The New South China Mall might be empty because instead of shopping some of the Chinese people are busy working 16-hour days in unsafe factories for poor wages and others are occupied in conquering Asia and in stripping Africa of her mineral wealth. Given this, new uses of the near-empty shopping mall could be dreamed up. Since China is densely populated, perhaps individuals wishing to be alone for a few hours could to go to their local shopping mall and pay for the privilege of solitude.

-30-

The Day the Attack of the Killer Dachshunds Didn't Stand Still

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Day the Attack of the Killer Dachshunds Didn’t Stand Still

“I perceive that you do not own an Afghan hound but rather a dachshund,” Holmes remarked to Doctor Watson.

“Remarkable!” exclaimed Watson. “How did you know?”

“Elementary,” replied Holmes. “I observe that your fashionable and understated Cole-Hahn loafers are missing their tassels.”

Okay, Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t really begin A Study in Scarlet quite like that, but he missed a chance to write Die Dackel von Baskervilles.

Dachshunds make a career out of chewing their humans’ possessions, eating the debris, and then throwing up all that and more on the floor: shoes, plastic water bowls, rugs, their own collars, the cat’s toys, and things that we don’t even want to think about.

What if a dachshund were to be exposed to fast-food, global-warming, and a near-fatal overdose of Glenn Beck, and transformed into something out of an old American-International film? The result could be The Day the Attack of the Killer Dachshund Piranhas Didn’t Stand Still. I am sending the first treatment to Martin Scorsese:

Mild-mannered reporter Cliff Hangar comes home after a long day at The Trout Creek World News and Empire Defender and decides to take a dip in the pool. While sloshing in the cool water he notices that the head of his dachshund Thunderbolt rises out of the water, eyes glowing an eerie green, baring his fangs. As the camera fades out we see Cliff’s horrified and distorted face as he cries “No, Thunderbolt, no! I promise – I’ll get you the really good doggie treats instead of the dollar-store brand…noooooooo…!” Later that same day, Cliff’s wife arrives home to wonder where Cliff is. Thunderbolt sits innocently on the doormat wagging his tail.

The next afternoon, Girl Scout Priscilla Ponsonby arrives at the Hangar house selling Girl Scout Hungarian Shortbread cookies. Unknown to Priscilla, Mrs. Hangar is at the police station reporting the disappearance of Mr. Hangar, and the only being to observe poor, doomed Priscilla (cue the grim harpsichord music) is Thunderbolt, his eyes beginning to glow a mysterious green.

When Mrs. Hangar arrives home with Deputy Cuffenstuff, certified peace officer and defrocked computer guru, they observe on the lawn a fragment of Girl Scout uniform and a broken box of Hungarian Shortbread Cookies. Deputy Cuffenstuff whips out a magnifying glass and a diagnostic CD. After evaluating the scene carefully he holds up the box and says “Hmmm…I think your cookies are disabled.”

“Oh, no!” exclaims Mrs. Hangar. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to call in Scotland Yard.”

“Scotland Yard? But they’re in England.”

“Yes, but they now have a branch office in Buna. They specialize in cereal killers.”

“But Deputy Cuffenstuff, a box of cookies isn’t cereal.”

“Cookies contain wheat, and Girl Scout extremists are pushing whole grains on unsuspecting citizens. And notice this stray dog hair – dog fur. That’s why we need to call in a furrin detective force.”

“Oh, no!” exclaims Mrs. Hangar. “I’ve had occasion to paws – paws, get it? – lately. Something, some mysterious force, has been dogging my dreams.”

“Ma’am, you’ve got to know – I feel something terrible has been unleashed, and I’m going to sniff it out.”

“Is there a catastrophe looming?”

“No cats, but there’s a strophe here somewhere. I feel it in my Milkbones.”

“Is there anything I can do to make the fur fly?”

“Yes, if you would, please keep your ears to the ground.”

Note from Martin Scorsese: “Thanks, but I’m booked up with dog stories, so stop hounding me. But now if you could come up with a piranha barking in the nighttime, you might have something.”

-30-

A Martin Luther King Moment

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Rioting in the Streets

Any civilized man must grieve to see benighted peoples, deprived of culture and literacy, rioting in the streets and the souks of their primitive cities. Yes, one hopes that perhaps soon Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon can somehow inspire the sectarian rivals in backwards Wisconsin to see the light of a new day of peace.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who never saw a camera with which he did not fall in love, has declared the instability in Madison as “a Martin Luther King moment.”

Well, no, it isn’t. After all, where are the Madison city police with their attack dogs and fire hoses and clubs? They seem to be home relaxing in front of the widescreen, and any dogs, hoses, and clubs they might possess appear to be of the dachshund, garden, and golf variety. Fifty years ago Martin Luther King and his friends were beaten, hosed, and jailed for asking folks to recognize that all people are equal before God. The worst risk the protesters in Wisconsin seem to be running is a shortage of Starbuck’s coffee.

The Wisconsin malcontents have occupied the state house, sitting in the legislature’s comfortable chairs, holding up signs, posing for photographs, calling people Hitler, and checking out the legislative restrooms: “Excuse me…excuse me…we’re out of toilet paper in here. Do you have any free trade, organically-grown, recycled, green-aware TP for my delicate skin? I have a college degree, you know, and not just any old toilet paper will do.”

Before this onslaught of barbarism Wisconsin’s Democrats have abandoned their duties and their people, and fled the state in terror, perhaps taking refuge with Hosni Mubarak in Sharm-El-Sheik in Egypt. Martin Luther King, by contrast, didn’t take a limousine ride to safety; he got the snot beat out of him and was locked away in the Birmingham jail. He didn’t face a security guard named Tiffany; he faced Bull Conner. Bit of a difference there.

And Martin Luther King had a real cause – human freedom and dignity, enjoying the God-given rights to live free from fear, to live free to work and save and vote and walk with pride. That’s just a teensy bit more of an issue than forging a doctor’s note and skipping a work day to complain about a 4% difference in retirement contributions.

There’s a little rioting going on in my yard during this false spring: the really fat raccoon does not want to share with the rabbits and squirrels the bit of dog food I put out every evening. A tough gang of cardinals has marked the birdseed feeder out on the oak tree as their turf, and with their little Marlboro cigarette packets rolled up in their little sleeves they bully all the other birds and even the local squirrels who, between the raccoon and the cardinals, are having a rough time. I’m calling my front yard Madison for now.

-30-

Mucus on Call

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Mucus on Call

My mother’s last words to me were not “I love you,” but rather “Now you know I like lots of ice in my ice water” (I obeyed, and found the ice machine near the nurses’ station). If in the last hours of her life a trio of unemployed musicians had intruded with their own unique stylings of “Lady of Spain” or “Harbor Lights” she would have firmly pointed them to the door.

A singularly annoying radio commercial has recently been blighting the aether with advertisements for an organization tooting itself Musicians on Call. The theme of this organization is that if you will give them money then they will send teams of musicians to hospital bedsides so that patients might die cute.

The geriatric Hallmarxism of the ads is as unrealistic as it is patronizing – to Musicians on Call the patient is always elderly, and the intrusive melodists play sentimental music which provokes everyone present to hug each other and have a good cry.

I think I’d preferred being gnawed to death by blood-crazed, tone-deaf hamsters in a post-apocalyptic desolation.

My mother despised being baby-talked as “sweetie” or “honey” or “darling” by complete strangers, and certainly no one who knew her would have dared do so. As she often said, “I’m old; I’m not stupid.” Musicians on Call, through their ads, suggest that they wish to make dying as insipid as the baby-talk, a made-for-television movieness that focuses on the preciousness of the musicians and not on the needs of one of God’s children making the transition to another world.

Someone who is dying might want lots of people on call: physicians, nurses, the nice aide who brings lunch and helps with a bath, a priest, and a friend, all those people who bring comfort and dignity. Elvis impersonators – maybe not.

“Code Blues…Code Blues…we need a jazz trombonist in Room 304 stat!”

“Nurse, I’ll need some nylon sutures, a dressing tray, and a harmonica.”

“There was a fire and explosion at the plant, and we expect mass casualties – send all the flutists to the triage area.”

“I’m sorry but your father is not doing well. Do you want us to call his priest or minister, or maybe a high school marching band?”

What if the patient wants German opera, not just another look-alike, tee-shirted, unshaven thirty-something with a guitar?

Do our soldiers and Marines in combat call out “Corpsman! I need a Corpsman over here! And a pianist who specializes in post-war Italian cinema soundtracks!”

What next? Klowns on Kall? Jugglers on Call?

Okay, so maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe Musicians on Call is a good thing. I dunno. It’s a big non-profit (alarm bells ring) and raises money for itself all over America. But whatever its virtues, M on C is not well served by its annoying radio ads.

-30-

The Discount Dictator

Mack Hall


The Discount Dictator

His Excellency the President
Presidential Palace
Cairo
Egypt

Alternative address:

The Kloisters Ski Resort and EuroHooters
Switzerland

Dear President (or ex-president) Mubarak:

I understand that you are considering a career change. I wish you to know that I look forward to following your future endeavors with great interest.

In the meantime, I beg of you a favor. Since my Social Security has already been looted and the other retirement plan to which I have contributed for over thirty years is in trouble, I am looking for secure employment. Therefore, old pal, I wonder if you would give me a job reference so that I too could be one of the many inept dictators subsidized by the American taxpayer. Perhaps I could get back some of the Social Security and retirement I paid in.

My fitness for the job of dictator is demonstrated by my love of indolence and luxury. If the State Department hires me I promise that I will detail all the work to my pals regardless of their fitness for any sort of honest work, and will give them maximum freedom to accomplish their own personal and career goals by frequently absenting myself to London to be fitted for Bond Street suits. I will also ski in Switzerland (where you and I can get together and share laughs about the hard working Americans and Egyptians we’ve swindled), vacation in Viet-Nam’s expensive new coastal resorts, buy a new yacht in Hong Kong, grouse-shoot in Scotland, and hunt for other game with the prime minister of Italy.

At no time will I do anything for the Americans who will support me in the grand style to which I wish to be accustomed. Indeed, I will always criticize America, trash democracy, and blame everything on Israel.

I realize that, partly because America has exhausted its national wealth in supporting thugs…um…statesmen like you, the nation is broke. Thus, I will practice economy as a discount dictator for the 21st century. I will make do with being given only one international bank to use as my personal account. Further, the local airstrip next to the county maintenance barn is quite small, so the only airplane I will require will be a neat little DeHavilland Twin Otter from Canada, eh. Naturally I will require three full crews and a complete ground staff on duty at all times. They will have rather more training in actually landing aircraft safely than some of your co-religionists. I won’t need one of those new Euro Airbuses of my own, but I will expect one to be provided on standby at Houston within 24 hours’ notice.

Now for my personal household I will require a butler, chef (hey, Mayor Bloomberg of New York has three), manservant, housekeeper, and any number of housemaids, drivers, and groundskeepers. This might seem excessive, but as you well know, to us dictators humans come cheap. My security staff need be only a division or so of former SAS and French Legionnaires, fitted with a few of those new English tanks, a squadron or so of Harriers, and whatever other equipage you might recommend.

Well, Mubby old boy, I hope you don’t end with your head being cut off when the Peace-Loving Brotherhood take over Egypt, but, hey, that’s a chance we all take, right? When you’re in that great Kaaba in the sky with your 72 vermins you can look down on the masses of Egyptians being oppressed by sorrier and meaner wretches…um…democratically-elected leaders than you ever were and have the last laugh.

Your loyal and loving bff until and unless it becomes necessary to sacrifice you to a mob,

Maximus I, Comrade and Eternal President and Beloved of the Workers and Peasants, and, Like, Y’know, Stuff. His Mark: X

-30-

Captain Blood Did Not Save the Whales

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Captain Blood Did Not Save the Whales

Captain Blood, the 1922 Rafael Sabatini novel on which the terrific Olivia DeHavilland film is based, is insensitive on many levels, and not appropriate for the delicate tastes of our progressive times.

The crime of Captain Blood is that it is a pirate yarn with no redeeming value, no politics, no didactic meaning. Instead of preaching global warming or whales or green something at the reader the novel presents murder, comradeship, treachery, fortress assaults, swordfights, sea-fights, and a rather turgid romance, but no sex.

In its relative political innocence Captain Blood is not unlike other pre-1968 adventure stories in books and films: Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, Prince Valiant, Robin Hood, Kim, Sherlock Holmes, and lesser fictional boy-book heroes long-since filed away down the Orwellian memory hole. Totalitarians have always purged disagreeable individuals and disagreeable books, but now such anti-democratic behaviors are called inclusion.

The plot of Captain Blood is almost fatalistic, based as it is on the hero’s reactions to events which he seems unable to control: 30-ish Irishman Peter Blood, a veteran of Dutch and French wars, settles down to practice medicine in the west of England in the late 17th century. While treating a survivor of the Battle of Sedgemoor (Monmouth’s wonderfully stupid attempt to usurp the Throne), Dr. Blood is accused of being one of the rebels, not unlike America’s historic Dr. Samuel Mudd. After months of imprisonment and maltreatment, Dr. Blood and others are brought before the infamous Bloody Assizes of Judge Jefferies, and sentenced to slavery in the colonies.

In Jamaica, Dr. Blood’s skills as a physician brings him to the attention of the governor, and this provides Blood some protection from the perverse brutality of his owner, Colonel Bishop, and brings him to the notice of Colonel Bishop’s beautiful daughter, Arabella.

Dr. Blood and his pals stage a violent and confused escape, and our hero, now styling himself Captain Blood, forms a pirate crew, re-names his captured ship the Arabella, and merrily robs French, English, and Spanish ships. In Sabatini’s world the English are hypocrites, the French are foppish hypocrites, and the Spanish are (prepare ye now for a catalogue of 1922 stereotypes): cowardly, brutal, sneaky, treacherous, lascivious, sniveling, posturing, pompous, ignorant, superstitious hypocrites. Whew.

Surprisingly, the middle part of the book is when the action drags. Captain Blood, the Scourge of the Spanish Main and manly leader of men, begins perpetually whining about Miss Arabella Bishop and the rude things she said to him. In this Facebook-y emo-ing he seems more like an 8th-grade schoolgirl (with apologies to 8th-grade schoolgirls) than a pirate, and takes to his cabin, the bottle, and passivity. Through the secret service of England (this was when England was England, not vapid, inclusive Britain) he takes a commission in the Royal Navy, and then gives that up. Then through the secret service of France he takes a commission in the French Navy, and lets that go too because the French are Not Nice. Whew again.

In a climatic battle with the Spanish, Captain Blood saves Port Royal, is reconciled with the new English government under William of Orange (who was Dutch), and is made governor of the colony while Colonel Bishop, who had lately been made governor, has left the colony unguarded while chasing Captain Blood.

Captain Blood’s reconciliation with Arabella is abrupt and incomplete, and as the book ends the humiliated Colonel Bishop, now a prisoner himself, is marched into Governor Blood’s office.

The 1935 film adaptation with beautiful Olivia deHavilland and that fellow from Tasmaina serves the story better by eliminating a great deal of the extraneous muddle in the middle, and tidying up the finish much more satisfactorily.

Many a boy came away from the Saturday matinee of this film, made a sword of a convenient stick, and refought pirate battles with his friends until dusk.

And that is good. Captain Blood is not history; it is a yarn, a story, two hours of happy anaesthesia, just like the Robin Hood stories.

One fears a serious, grim, grainy, ill-lit re-make of Captain Blood with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the leads, and with a George Bush double as Colonel Bishop.

Errol Flynn, the fellow from Tasmania, was a great Captain Blood, also made a great Robin Hood, as did his good friend, Richard Green. Their Robin Hood is, at heart, a ten-year-old boy stalking imaginary deer and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham with a homemade bow strung with twine from feed sacks and with arrows made from weed stems.

Alas for civilization that, beginning in the 1970s, sour, humorless, Miz Grundy filmmakers decided that Robin Hood should no longer be a joyful man defending the good and having a merry time while do so, but rather a sour, humorless, Facebook-ist moping sulkily around a Sherwood Forest that is more Miss Havisham’s decaying wedding breakfast than anything else.

A ten-year-old boy now who displayed an interest in cap pistols, bows and arrows, and stick-swords would probably be identified as a menace to vegetarians and referred for political re-education. For his own safety he’d better stick to electronic games in which he can destroy whole planets instead of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

-30-

Cloning the Woolly Mammoth

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Woolly Booger

Scientists from several countries are using the frozen DNA of a long-gone woolly mammoth in an attempt to make a new one.

The problem is this: if biochemistry majors behind thick spectacles build a woolly mammoth (“It’s alive! It’s alive!”), what will they do with it?

The exotic-animal market might take to this scheme. Instead of baby alligators or snakes, the rich and pointless might bring home cuddly little woolly mammoth babies to indulge. But then there is the fear that once the novelty has worn off the owners might flush the baby mammoth down the toilet (I hear the rich have really big toilets, royal flushes), leading to a new category of cheap sci-fi flicks featuring braless federal agents in really tight pants being chased along the sewers of New York by computer-generated woolly mammoths.

Texas Aggies would be tempted to kidnap the critter and cook him the night before the big game with the University of Texas, thinking the woolly mammoth just a Bevo belt-buster special.

There are moral issues in cloning, of course. Scientists with no moral grounding might reproduce Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Dung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Saddamn Hussein, or, worse, The Captain and Tennille (shudder).

Our present federal regime would surely declare the woolly mammoth an anchor mammoth, and steal…um…reallocate yet more Social Security from the working poor to give the woolly mammoth medical care, a monthly check, and free tuition to any out-of-stone-age university.

The Tea Party, however, would want the woolly mammoth for a reality show featuring Sarah Palin and a high-powered rifle, while the Republicans would hold hands across the aisle and utter such vagaries as “We respect the privacy rights of a woolly mammoth to choose a dignified death because this is a quality-of-life issue. We wouldn’t kill a baby woolly mammoth ourselves, but we understand that others might want to do so.” Cue the default soft-rock Republican convention music.

Few situations are more wake-up-at-0200-screaming-terrifying than woolly mammoths rampaging through the streets or Republicans trying to be cool.


Native Americans can then appear before a federal judge claiming that the critter is “The Sacred Woolly Mammoth of Our People” and should be turned over to the ancient casino authority.

The S.E.I.U. will demand that only they are legally entitled to care for the woolly mammoth, but when they all go out one night to beat up people in the streets the woolly mammoth might die of neglect.

Catholics are a problem too – aging hippies would dismiss the woolly mammoth as decidedly pre-Vatican II while the rad-trad-more-Catholic-than-thou types would bemoan its lack of Latin.

The Chinese will undoubtedly buy up all the available cloning resources and relocate them to China so they could monopolize the world-wide manufacture of woolly mammoths.

Finally, the African elephants and Indian elephants would sneer at the woolly mammoth as inauthentic. Woolly mammoth sympathizers would form Elephants Without Frontiers, one of the many organizations shamelessly profiting from riffing on name of the noble French organization, Doctors Without Frontiers.

Perhaps scientists should leave off trying to clone the woolly mammoth as a wool-of-the-wisp; too many hairy situations and legal hirsutes might arise, and there’s nothing to Rogaine from it.

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Katherine Mattie Bevil Blanchette Hall, 1922 - 2011

Katherine Mattie Bevil Blanchette Hall

In 1917, Louie MacMicken (Mack) Bevil left off pitching pine-knots into the firebox of a Santa Fe locomotive and joined the 36th Infantry Division of the Texas National Guard to fight in France. As reported by Mrs. Lera Crow of happy memory, Mack and his sweetheart, Mae Christina Herndon, scandalized polite Kirbyville society by kissing goodbye in public on the depot platform. Mrs. Crow added: “But when he came home he married her, so it was all right – I suppose.”

In 1922 their only child was born: Katherine Mattie Bevil.

Katherine grew up in Kirbyville and graduated from Kirbyville High School. After her family moved to Kingsville for her father’s new job with the Missouri Pacific Railway she attended Texas A & I College for a year before marrying Claude Blanchette, second officer on the tanker S.S. Muskogee.

In 1942 the Muskogee, en route from the Caribbean to Halifax, Nova Scotia with a cargo of oil for the Canadian and British fleets, was reported missing. Although there was no doubt that the ship fell victim to a Nazi u-boat in those terrible times, Katherine never knew exactly what happened until one day, some fifty years later, when she saw on the front page of the Beaumont Enterprise a photograph, taken from the deck of a German submarine, of Claude Blanchette and other survivors on life rafts just before the sinking tanker exploded and killed them. In the chaos of war the United States government had overlooked telling Katherine and the other families.

If you have ever been to see the Statue of Liberty you have probably also seen a statue of Claude Blanchette. At the ferry landing at Battery Park there is a memorial to the America’s Merchant Marine, the civilian sailors who never took the military oath but who died as the heroes they are. One of the figures, of three desperate men clinging to a life raft, is Claude Blanchette, based on the photograph snapped by a young German sailor, almost surely a teenager who loved his family too, on a terrible day in 1942.

Claude Blanchette never knew his son, Claude Bevil Blanchette, born several months later.

In 2009 Katherine journeyed to Halifax and so finished, 67 years later, that voyage for Claude Blanchette and the rest of the crew of the Muskogee.

After World War II one of the many young Kirbyville men returning home was Hebo Ogden (Bo) Hall. He had landed on Normandy on the second day of the invasion, and said he hadn’t missed anything by not being landed on the first day. He fought with the 602nd Tank Destroyer Battalion across France and into Belgium, where he spent the Christmas of 1944 on the defensive perimeter outside Bastogne. Bo and the 602nd were the first allied soldiers to enter Ohrdruf, part of the Buchenwald complex, and then among the first to enter the main camp. The 602nd then drove through Munich, where Bo took time to pose for a photograph outside the beer hall where Hitler made his first try at politics, and then on to Zwickau and the end of the war in Europe. After the war he spent several months with an allied commission helping rebuild the police department of the city of Marseilles, France.

When they were in school before the war Bo Hall dismissed Katherine Bevil as an obnoxious little red-headed brat, and she didn’t like him either, so naturally they married in December of 1945. Bo raised Claude as his own son. Priests are said to be priests after the order of Melchizedec; men who adopt are fathers after the order of St. Joseph, and there is no nobler calling because St. Joseph wants every child to have a father.

Katherine and her husbands Claude Blanchette and Bo Hall, true heroes, were a part of what has truly been called America’s greatest generation, children of the Depression who became the men and women of World War II. They took a starving, desperate nation and, almost with their bare hands, built a free and prosperous nation to give to us.

The younger Claude’s life was complicated in 1948 by the birth of twin boys, Hebo and Mack, who insisted on more than their share of the spotlight. You can always spot the oldest sibling in a family; he or she is the one with the pained expression of existential despair.

Katherine was very proud of her sons, none of whom has yet been arrested, but, hey, they’re young; there’s still time.

And she was proud of her nieces, Donna and Mary, daughters to her, who took her for dinner and shopping every month, and occasionally to Missouri to visit grandchildren and great-nieces.

We are told that America enjoyed great prosperity after World War II, but East Texas never got that news. For farm families the 1950s were but the Great Depression continued, only with a chance of a television set someday.

Those who were raised by the children of the Depression and World War II remember vividly the commandment that there are few crimes greater than wasting food. Our parents never asked us if our supper was good; they asked us, in depths of fear and meaning we can barely comprehend, if we had gotten enough to eat. For the rest of us, their work and their sacrifices mean that we have never gone without food, but they themselves never forgot the hunger of the Depression and the desperation of global war; the fear of hunger and war haunted them always. If we fail to understand that, we fail to understand them, and that would be to fail to honor them.

While Bo farmed and raised dairy cows, Katherine worked outside the home: for the Woods Brothers, for Dr. John Thomas Moore, for Drs. Richardson, Jones, and Bailey, all of blessed memory, and then for Burdett Pulliam, CPA, and his son Ross in Jasper.
Katherine began crunching numbers for Burdett in the 1970s, and theirs was a wonderful relationship: they took turns firing each other. Their arguments were reported by the traumatized witnesses to have bridged the philosophical gap between a train wreck and an air raid. They enjoyed scrapping so much that they kept at it for over twenty years, with Mrs. Pulliam always taking Katherine’s side, and after Katherine’s retirement Burdette and his family always remembered her with gifts or dinners out every birthday and every Christmas.

Katherine loved her flowers and her birds and her books and her dachshunds and her grandchildren, probably not in that order.

When her three sons were young a Christmas custom was for Bo and them to scout out the woods for the perfect Christmas tree. One Christmas they also brought home a little magnolia, and planted it in the front yard. All of Katherine’s grandchildren loved to play in that magnolia tree when it was grown, and often that happy tree hosted all of the grandchildren, laughing and giggling, at one time.

And Katherine finally got to travel: she visited Pearl Harbor, and read the names of her generation engraved in the memorial above the USS Arizona. She and Maudie Barton flew to Ireland, that land of saints and scholars and good beer. One winter she made a pilgrimage to England with her granddaughter Sarah, and saw London and the Home Counties where Bo had spent a year in training for the invasion of Europe. She was privileged to worship God at the site of St. Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, and saw the White Cliffs of Dover, only twenty miles from France.

Her last adventure in this life was to visit Canada, God’s second-favorite nation, where she took pictures of every flower in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and reflected in the quiet of the site where the Acadians of Grand Pre’ were exiled from the world they had made. In the harbor at Halifax she remembered Claude Blanchette and all the other young men of 1939-1945 who will never grow old.

In her mid-eighties her health weakened, but not her spirit.

She began to take to the moral perils of gambling with Harold and Jenny, yes indeed! Her granddaughter Sarah says that Katherine and Jennie planned gambling trips while still in the pews just as soon as the final “Amen” was said, but this is not true – sometimes they planned gambling adventures before Mass, too!

Only a few weeks ago she fell while trying on a new pair of size-eight jeans, but the next day she was at Mass wearing a gynormous (as Sarah would say) pair of sunglasses to cover the shiner, and, yes, the new size-eight jeans. You just can’t keep a Depression-baby down.

And she sneaked cigarettes, like a naughty teenager. Well, why not? If you’re 88 years old and have survived depression, war, farming, and children, you’ve earned a cigarette, so go ahead and light up.

Last Friday night she visited her great pals, Pete and Peggy Stark, as she did most evenings, for coffee and comradeship, and stayed for supper. As she drove herself home she began feeling bad, and knew that the long-ago diagnosis was falling upon her at last.

So many of the wonderful friends who blessed her through the years made her happy by blessing her again with visits on Saturday for good-byes, which are only temporary, of course. As the older English funeral service says, we live “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.”

Not even a big book could name the people who were such a joy to her – how could any Life of Katherine be complete without, for instance, mentioning Linda the Dog Lady? -- and this memorial is only a few sheets of paper, so thank you, everyone; thank you, thank you, thank you.

And so the tough little redhead is gone; her passing was one of dignity, courage, and grace. We are the less for her passing; we are the more for her blessing.

“Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual Light shine upon her.” – Psalm 111

Saving Private Robot

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Saving Private Robot

30 robots wearing European faces and controlled by Filipino technicians are teaching English in South Korean schools. With South Korea suddenly our dependent child again, the ROK government needs more of its people learning how to say, in English, “Give us more money, stupid Yanks” and “Send your young people to die protecting us while we carry on business as usual and pretend to be your BFF.”

On the second day of school half the robots called in sick with those fakey coughs.

One wonders if the robots wear no-name sneakers and Goodwill ties, and are programmed to blurt out every ten minutes some moldy platitude prefaced with “When I was your age….”

But, really, how can anyone tell the difference between a human English teacher and a robot English teacher?

But how will the teacher-robots cope with being covered with sticky-notes reading “I get high on 30-weight” and “Your mama dates a garbage disposal?”

This robot idea could be applied to other occupations. A robot clerk in a big-box store could flee from customers at higher speed, and a robot waiter at a really fancy restaurant could ignore diners in French as well as in English.

Robot motorists – hey, they couldn’t drive worse than humans.

Robot Catholics – they’d all start ‘blogs and call each other sedevacantes and Vatican Two-ists and rad-trads.

Robot citizens would argue politics but they wouldn’t bother to vote, just like human citizens.

Robot culture – Robots reposing silently for hours with their unblinking ocular receptors of e-audioanimatronicbionic rods and cones registering images of Dancing with the Stars.

Robot supervisors with the Texas Department of Transportation would drive around all day in large white TXDOT pickups while overseeing the undocumented worker robots.

Robot shoppers wouldn’t simply push each other down, they would blast each other into non-existence with warbling death rays.

Toyota robots would sneer at Hyundai robots as declasse’.

Each robot would start its own church. The Electrons for Jesus would maintain that the Pixels for Christ aren’t scripturally sound, and the Pixels for Christ might argue that the Electrons for Jesus smell of ritualism.

Q: Why did the scientific robot cross the road?
A: Because it was programmed to do so.

Q: Why did the philosophical robot cross the road?
A: To argue determinism with the chicken.

Q: Why did the killer robot cross the road?
A: To destroy the other half of humanity.

Q: Why did the robot throw the alarm clock out the window?
A: To measure the horizontal and vertical deterioration, in centimeters per second, of the trajectory of hurled object with reference to air temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed.

A priest, a rabbi, and a robot walk into a bar…

But at this point a large North Korean generalissimo with immobile facial features clomps mechanically into the bar with a glowing, pulsating collection of conflicting nuclei under his arm, and even the robot falls silent, trembling.

One question, though: why don’t our governments send the robots into battle and have young Americans teach English to young Koreans?

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A Remembrance of Death

The last summer leaves at last spinning silently down in the grey, misty, dying days of December often remind thoughtful men of their own mortality; the seriousness of the reminder is perhaps compromised by the awareness that human bodies falling from oak trees would hit the ground with loud thumps.

The Patented Electrical Reading Machine & Moustache Waxer

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Patented Electrical Reading Machine & Moustache Waxer

For Christmas long ago my parents gave me a boy’s book of Robin Hood, and Robin Hood stories read as well in adult life as in boyhood. If I ever lose this Christmas volume I can now call up Sherwood Forest on The Patented Electrical Reading Machine & Hoof Trimmer.

For Christmas this year my daughter gave me an e-reader, hereinafter referred to as the Noodle (the reviews imply that there is little to differ between the Nook and the Kindle), and the gadget appears to live up to its ads.

The Noodle is a little larger than a paperback and about as light. The machine displays a page at a time, and it really is as easy on the eyes as an ink-on-dead-tree page. The typeface can be made larger, and this is certainly a bonus for the optically-challenged among us.

The Noodle comes with a leaflet instead of an instruction book, and getting started is fairly easy. One must register the Noodle with its book chain sponsor, and generate the usual passwords and such, which is only a minor nuisance. Once this is accomplished, using the Noodle is quite easy.

At the foot of the screen is a menu which is relatively easy to navigate although the touch-screen controls are designed for small and nimble fingers. My first attempt to download a book was very slow, but that was on Christmas afternoon when everyone in America who found a Noodle under the tree was doing the same; early the next morning there was no delay at all.

To download a book one must be within what is termed a Wi-Fi hot spot, which is where people with computers gather together to ignore each other. However, since the book is stored within the electrical brain of the machine, one needn’t be near civilization at all in order to read it.

E-books are cheaper than dead-tree books, and the catalogue of new books is the same as one would find on display at the bookstore. Besides new books, though, the Noodle offers thousands of more obscure books (“many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”) not otherwise available, and many of these are free. I downloaded some ten out-of-copyright books by G. K. Chesterton without any cost at all.

For my Noodle I bought a cover made of imitation Italian leather. I wish I had bought one made from a real Italian instead of an imitation Italian; the imitation leather is a bit greasy-finger-printy. However, it does hold the Noodle securely, making a drop less likely, and provides some padding. The cover also has convenient pockets inside.

Advantages of a Patented Electrical Reading Machine:

1. The electric brain stores hundreds and possibly thousands of books (an Agatha Christie takes up much less space than the Douay-Rheims Bible), which is very convenient for travel. Further, shelf space is at a premium even for the settled among us; our old friends need not be crowded out by new purchases.

2. E-books (to go with your e-dog and e-coffee, and e-chair) are cheaper than physical books.

3. You own the books. If the Patented Electrical Reading Machine is lost or stolen or eaten by the family dachshund, the replacement machine need only be re-coded in order to access your portable library.

4. Long battery life, days at least when disconnected from the Wi-Fi.

5. You can subscribe to e-editions numerous newspapers and magazines.

6. Walking around with a Noodle under your arm will make you look both scholarly and tech-y, sort of a cross between Tennyson and Steven Jobs.

Disadvantages of a Patented Electrical Reading Machine:

1. It is a gadget, and will eventually break.

2. It is not a real book; you can’t underline favorite passages or clever repartee, or makes notes on margins or the blank pages. I haven’t yet discovered a quick way of skipping around chapters or short stories, and you can’t work the daily crossword on it.

3. The communications channels are crowded, especially in the evenings, and there can be some delay in accessing and downloading.

4. The Noodle has to be recharged occasionally. You can’t carry spare batteries; everything’s internal. This could be a problem if you join Robin Hood’s men because there are no electrical outlets in Sherwood.

5. The 1984 factor: our successive governments centralize and gather power, and presume even to control electrons and an abstract concept call “airwaves.” Thus, electronic books are far more subject to censorship and destruction than physical ones. In a recent matter one company, learning that it didn’t own copyright permission to sell a certain book, simply made the book disappear from the electronic readers of people who had bought it. A hostile government or individual could just as easily make unwanted electronic books disappear so that Americans wouldn’t get uppity.

6. Maybe you don’t want to look like Tennyson or Steven Jobs.

There is an irony that the great books – and even the frivolous books – of free nations should be available only on contraptions made in a country that has never known an elected government and is at present a giant slave-labor camp. Robin Hood would not approve, but then, perhaps Liu Xiaobo is China’s archer of freedom, and maybe someday we can read about him on a Noodle made in a free country.

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Christmas Among the Sandbags

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas Among the Sandbags

An old Navy buddy telephoned me for Christmas, and we marched down memory grinder to long-ago days in San Diego.

Mike and I were in boot camp together for four months, real boot camp, not the Barbie-therapy thing for petting the misunderstood youths who stole your car, and then Hospital Corps ‘A’ School for another four or so months. On the day we graduated from ‘A’ school all of us new Corpsmen were loaded into three trailers and trucked to Camp Pendleton for a month of Field Medical Service School. Upon arrival we were given a jolly greeting by Sergeant Snyder, who had us sit in groups of four for a little comforting this-ain’t-no-S-word advice: he told us to look at the other three, and said that within a year one of the four would not be alive.

A civilian teacher never has to tell his students that their mortality rate by the end of next term will be 25%.

Most of us who later found ourselves up and down small rivers on small boats survived; far more of those who patrolled with the Marines died violently because men in Washington all clean and dry in white shirts and expensive suits thought the deaths of 19-year-olds was somehow a good idea.

They still do.

After Field Medical Service School, orders took Mike and me different ways, as orders do, but those intense months still inform our lives as nothing else could. One hears drivel about a stupid song or a stupid concert or a stupid celebrity “defining a generation,” but anyone so weak and so facile as to believe that deserves to be defined. During Woodstock a few of us on the other side of the world were also camped out in the woods and fields; our campout didn’t define us and we still refuse to be defined.

But this is a Christmas story, so let us put out the cigarettes and get to our feet: in our first Christmas in the Navy Mike and I and 97 other guys were still in ‘A’ School but were given the day off. We were all homesick, but there was nothing for it. Mike-the-Lutheran, Bill-the-Catholic, and I got up early, even though for once we didn’t have to – and that annoying, scratchy record of “Reveille” blasting through speakers on other mornings was happily silent for Christmas - and on a cool, misty morning walked down the hill and into town for early Mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

And that was good, because not many of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had a Christmas morning service of any kind.

After Mass we found a hole-in-the-wall café’ with cookery-steamy plate-glass windows and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast.

And that was good, because not any of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had fresh eggs and fresh milk on Christmas morning; a great many of them had to feast out of a can.

And then we walked for hours in Balboa Park – at $96 a month you find the free entertainment - and the mist blew out to sea and the sun came out.

And that was very good, because there was no fear of land mines buried in the grass in the park.

And because our expectations had been very low, that Christmas was a very happy one indeed. Christmas is where you find it.

And, anyway, my father spent the Christmas of 1944 in the snow outside Bastogne; San Diego was a much better deal.

This Christmas we pray – and we must really do so, not just say the words carelessly - for our young men and women in the desert. Some of them are Marines and Navy Corpsmen (the desert Corpsmen who survive will, again, come home to be told by the ill-informed how lucky they were to have been on a ship and away from the fighting). Some of America’s best will be close enough to an airfield to enjoy a real Christmas meal shipped in (if the lovers of peace out among the rocks don’t blow up the plane or helicopter); others will spoon mysterious glop from a can or pouch with a little sand, smoke, and gun oil for dressing, and maybe the downwind stench from the latrines to serve as the odor of sanctity.

Other postings and operations and ships around the world are a little safer than patrolling in the danger, dung, and dirt of Whosedumbideawasthisstan this Christmas, but those assignments are no less lonely for young soldiers away from home for the first time and for older soldiers away from home yet again. A 19-year-old from Minnesota standing the mid-watch won’t find Christmas in Fort Hood to be very Normal Rockwell-ish, and another 19-year-old posted to some air base on the Arctic Circle might not be able to spare a moment to appreciate the full Christmas moon while de-icing a jet about to launch. Other 19-year-olds deep inside an on-station submarine that won’t surface for three months can’t look at the moon or even listen to the radio.

But Christmas is where you find it, and we can expect that our innovative youth will somehow find a way of making the most of it, some by sharing their Christmas meal with children who are programmed to hate them. Certain events 2,000 years ago also began in a cold desert with two young people far away from home because of government orders, and that eventually worked out fine.

God bless our sailors, Marines, soldiers, Coast Guard, and airmen everywhere this Christmas.

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Advent Rosary

Advent Rosary

Dark Advent is a silent waiting time
When autumn chills into pale, year-end days
And joy seems smothered by hard-frosting rime:
Cold is the debt that spring to winter pays

The seasons link to seasons in a chain,
The chain of being that links, also, our souls,
Seasons and souls, not always without pain:
Summer’s wild lightning falls and thunder rolls.

Linked to us too, rose by mystical rose,
This holy Advent is Our Lady’s Grace
To us who wait in exile sad; she knows
Where souls and seasons sing, the Night, the Place.

Seasons and souls, linked to days dreary-dim:
Follow them with roses to Bethlehem

Mack Hall
Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 2010

False Grit: The Remake of True Grit

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

False Grit

True Grit has been remade, and we true-as-blue-steel John Wayne fans are as apoplectic as Yosemite Sam on a bad-moustache day. Does a composer remake Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg? Does an artist remake Gainsborough’s Blue Boy? Does a photographer remake Ansel Adams’ Moonrise? Does a writer remake Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty?”

No, no, and (Newark, New Jersey) no.

A contemporary businessman remaking a great film is no more an artist than a child with a paint-by-numbers set. The child, at least, can plead youth and innocence and delight in messing up the living-room floor. The adult cannot plead innocence; he is no artist but rather a moral and aesthetic dwarf attempting to delude the customers that he is a reincarnation of Hal Wallis, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, or Michael Curtiz.

Given the cliches’ of contemporary movies we know some of the ways this revisionist pastiche of True Grit will be constructed:

1. Interior shots will be sepia-toned and will feature harsh shadows and window light streaming through dust. The convention now is that the insides of houses and offices and courtrooms in the past were all dusty and sepia-toned. Dusty sepia interiors are like, y’know, artsy, and, like, existential, and, like, stuff.

2. The screen will be polluted with the agony of computer graphics instead of honest filmmaking.

3. At some point someone will perform a slo-mo Ninja whirly-through-the-air thing.

4. If Chin Le is in the remake he will not be referred to as a “Chinaman” and will not be a fussy landlord and owner of a general store but rather a stereotypical sage mystic who spends much of the time being spiritual and working on his PhD.

5. Judge Walker will probably be a woman wearing a red power blazer.

What might the looters remake next?

Mary Queen of Scots with Miley Cyrus as Mary and Justin Bieber as Bothwell.

A Man for All Seasons with Mel Gibson as St. Thomas More. During the protracted execution scene the saint’s head falls in slo-slo-mo with lots and lots of blood sloshing everywhere. Julian Assange is the sniveling, treacherous Common Man. More’s daughter Margaret finds peace and harmony in a Zen Buddhist temple with a guru named Shawn while working on her PhD.

Casablanca starring Woody Allen as Rick and Lindsay Lohan as Ilsa. Stone Cold Steve Austin is Major Strasse. Sam (RuPaul) is a sage mystic who spends much of the time being spiritual and working on his PhD.

The Great Escape – the commandant is played by a George Bush impersonator who says “Zis iss a new camp, y’all.” Werner the Ferret is working on his PhD.

The Sound of Music with Oprah Winfrey as Maria. Maria shuffles the seven children off to perpetual daycare, has herself ordained a wymynpriest by Master Bishop Phil, and become a wise spiritual mother working on her PhD. Children’s scenes directed by Roman Polanski.

Becket – Sean Penn is Henry II and Alec Baldwin is Thomas Becket. Al Gore has a cameo as the King of France.

In Which We Serve – The crew of HMS Torin discard all class differences, form a sailors’ soviet, issue a manifesto about global warming, shoot the captain, and flee to Leningrad, where Stalin (charming newcomer Helen Thomas in her breakout role) gives them all medals. Shorty was working on his PhD but gave it up because that would have made him a class enemy.

The 39th Parallel – Villainous Republicans flee across Canada after their global-warming nuclear submarine, the USS EvilBush, on a secret mission to steal all of Canada’s fresh water, is sunk by Rosie O’Donnell flying the long-hidden Avro Arrow.

Lassie Come Home, starring Michael Vick.

Oh, Hollywood, “in what unhappy landscape of disaster did you lose your way?” (Thomas Merton)

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