Send Not to Ask for Whom the Clock Ticks

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Send Not to Ask for Whom the Clock Ticks

 

“Time is but the stream I go afishing in.”

 

•  Thoreau
   
  Several decades ago I bought a clock at Jerry’s Family Pharmacy on Main Street in Kirbyville.  When I bought the clock the mere fact of buying a clock would not have been worthy of mention.  Now it is, because clocks are uncommon.
   
  People seldom determine the time from clocks or watches.  In the mornings tiny little made-in-China Orwellian telescreens wake up their obedient humans, who then pass the rest of the day, heads humbly bowed, perusing, viewing, reading, or hearing their masters.  When a modern wishes to know the time, he (the pronoun is gender-neutral because calling one person “they” is barbaric) pulls from the recesses of his garmenting his Orwellian telescreen.  Then he reads his twits, twoots, and Me-mails, slides the news to see what some embalmed personality has done further to degrade himself, and goes back to the Me-mail as a validation of his existence.
   
  In 1914 no man would have worn a wristwatch because they were “sissy.”  That changed with trench warfare, and the suddenly manly wristwatch enjoyed a century of service and adornment.  In 2014, though, a modern young man would no more wear a wristwatch than he would stand up when his mother enters the room.
   
  As with watches, buying a clock is worthy of note as a curious activity from a bygone day, rather like not wearing camouflage at a funeral.
   
  This clock was made in the USA by a company that still exists as an office somewhere but which has long since farmed out the construction of clocks, for the few eccentrics who want one, to China.  The mechanism for ringing the alarm gave out years ago, but the clock continued its dependable tick-tick-tick (being a superior sort of clock, it refused ever to tock) until a sad day not long ago when its winding mechanism would not wind.  After its final day as an intact ticking clock its spring wound down for the last time.  It ticked no more.
   
  As would any good American, I took the clock apart to explore its innards.  The key had stripped its threads (dang, after only twenty or thirty years…).  I wound the clock with pliers, and once again it tick-tick-ticked nicely. 
   
  The clock machinery now resides on my desk, wound each day with a pair of pliers (made-in-China) kept handy for the purpose.  It is wonderfully inaccurate, gaining or losing about five minutes each day, but it is aesthetically pleasing as an objet d’art.  Three metal stampings bound together with slender bolts form a matrix for the springs, gears, and escapement wheel, all of which can now be seen in action.  The hour hand and minute hand, painted with some luminescent material that would probably give the EPA the Aunt Pittypat vapors, still glow briefly in the dark after lights out.
   
  The ticking is curiously comforting, reminding the tick-hearer of Jerry’s Family Pharmacy, a happy heartbeat for Main Street, now just another dark and empty storefront and an empty place in the hearts of those who remember good ol’ Jerry Nobles and his wheezy jokes.  The castoff 1950s chairs and table where old men made merry and told stories over coffee are all gone, as are most of the old men, as are the stories.
   
  But only for us, and only for a time, for in God’s omnipresence no happiness ever really goes away, not from Him. 
   
  Tick, tick, tick…
   
  -30-

Henry Kissinger's ON CHINA

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Henry Kissinger’s On China

 

“Blood will have blood”

- Macbeth 

On China was a Christmas gift by a couple of folks who really do qualify as Old China Hands.  Well, okay, early-middle-age China hands who spent several years in China, and whose curiosity about what was happening in Tibet, in the western provinces, in small towns, and in the cities and factories annoyed the Chinese government on a number of occasions.  One hopes someday they will write their narrative on China, for it will be far more reliable than Henry Kissinger’s self-serving door-stop.

 

Kissinger’s own story is fascinating.  He was born in Germany to Jewish parents, and as a young man escaped with his family to New York via England.  He was drafted late in World War II, and his service to his adopted country is remarkable indeed.  His Bronze Star was well-earned.

 

Unfortunately, Kissinger’s will to power led him in subsequent decades to dispose of nations and thousands of lives through his arrogance and his reptilian insensitivity to human suffering.  His Nobel Peace Prize reeks of blood and death and decay, as does his career.

 

On China is over 500 pages of turbid Henrican self-indulgence though on occasion some sense can be filtered from the cascading fall of words, words, words, big words, small words, all striving for hegemony, which is possibly the author’s favorite word.  The preface and the first few chapters are very useful; the beginning brilliantly and succinctly defines, compares, and contrasts American and Chinese concepts of exceptionalism (p. xvi), and the early chapters are a good overview of Chinese history.

 

After that, the adventure becomes a plod.

 

And in all of this plodding, Kissinger never employs even one of his warehouse of words in sympathy for the millions of Chinese murdered by the Communist Party in the revolution and afterward in purge after purge, in managed starvation, in mass executions, and in the genocidal horror of the Great Leap Forward.  And there is no surprise in this, for Kissinger never grieved for the thousands of deaths for which he is responsible in Viet-Nam (almost 60,000 American dead alone), Cambodia, Laos, Cyprus, Bengal, Chile, East Timor, and Kurdistan.  In his book he never mentions the Chinese government’s murders of protestors in Tiananmen Square and in numerous cities in China in 1989, nor the thousands of Chinese citizens who “disappeared” in the weeks following.  His consulting business and his relationships with the power structure in China might be compromised were he to do so.  In Kissinger’s narrative of Tiananmen (pp. 408-439) he does not mention the deaths (“This is not the place to examine the events…” [p. 411]), and suggests that using tanks and machine guns against the protestors was really the protestors’ fault.

 

In her 11,000-year history, China has not yet acted imperially, and there are no Chinese military bases outside of China.  China’s influence on the world has been generally positive through its culture and its mercantilism.  Dr. Kissinger assures us that China will continue to be an inward-looking nation.

 

However, China’s rapid development of her army, air force, and a blue-water navy suggests otherwise.  China invaded its former ally North Viet-Nam in 1979 (and lost), threatens Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, and is messin’ and stirrin’ all over the Western Pacific.  The United States Navy, through its fleets and air arm, can, in concert with other nations, defeat Chinese aggression at present.  However, no situation is ever static.  The United States is a declining power while China is a rising one.  China probably does not want to dominate the United States militarily, but China does own this nation financially and soon we may well be a supplicant hoping our new masters will be kind to us.  This is not Kissinger’s script; this is reality.

 

China quite rightly resents her humiliation by Western powers in the 19^th century and Japan in the 20^th.  China insanely murdered millions of her own people after World War II and into the 1970s.  A nation with a catalogue of resentments and a recent history of violence, a nation that in the 21^st century arranges the executions of her healthy young people so that their organs can be harvested for transplants for sale to the wealthy, is not ruled by flower children, and is not a peaceful nation of vegans meditating on ancient Confucian wisdom.  China is not this nation’s friend, and neither is Henry Kissinger.

 

Another reality, a bizarre one, is that Dr. Kissinger, author of deaths and books, has dedicated On China, a serious if deeply flawed examination of China and its influence on the world now, to a dress designer.

 

Anyone wishing to give this mildly interesting recycling of vegetable matter a look can check it out of the public library; this would minimize the profits to an evil man.

 

-30-

"O Canada, We Obey the IOC"

Mack Hall

P.O. Box 856

1286 County Road 400

Kirbyville, Texas 75956

409 423 2751

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“O Canada, We Obey the IOC”

 

Last week Penguin Books pulled Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: an Alternative History from circulation in India, and destroyed copies still in its supply chain.

 

Professor Doniger’s book is almost surely boring – any book with a colon in its title is going to be a yawner.  After all, from our high school lessons in anatomy and physiology we remember what a colon is full of.

 

But Penguin didn’t destroy its own book because it is a doorstop; Penguin meekly surrendered to a religious group which didn’t like the book. 

 

One might expect self-censorship by a company in India, but surely not in Canada, the nation based on that whole thing about The True North Strong and Free.

 

USA-ians wanting a frozen-moose report from Newfoundland or another exploding-train-in-Quebec news item from north of The World’s Friendliest Border will not be hearing anything on CBC Radio via livestream.  To call up CBC radio on the ‘net (rather like Macbeth calling up those witches in Act IV?) is to be greeted with Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”  The electronic page is there, all right, but nothing happens except a sign reading “From Feb. [sic] 6-23, CBC Radio One live streams will only be available to Canadian listeners due to Olympic rights restrictions. However, you can visit cbc.ca/radio/ to listen on-demand or download podcasts.”

 

Whatever amount of money was exchanged between the International Olympics Committee and the CBC apparently wasn’t sufficient to buy enough letters to spell out “February.”

 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which Canadian taxpayers must fund through taxes, chose to silence its own livestream outside Canadian borders.  The bit about listening to on-demand to podcasts is not technically a lie, but until the IOC gives Canada permission, no new podcasts are being generated.

 

If this self-censorship by the CBC applied only to live Olympics broadcasting, well, fair enough.  Bribes…um…money has been exchanged from oily hand to oily hand for the games.  However, the CBC has silenced all its livestreaming outside Canada’s borders – weather, news, recipes for roadkill moose, and the latest rumor about the whereabouts of the elusive Lyuba Orlova.

 

The last news USA-ians heard of the abandoned Russian ship Lyuba Orlova was that it was infested with giant cannibal rats and drifting toward Ireland.  Until the IOC gives its colonial minions in Ottawa permission to broadcast again, no one will know if the giant cannibal rats on the Lyuba Orlova are reading up Irish stew recipes in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Rod Serling’s To Serve Man, or innocently rehearsing choral routines from The Flying Dutchman.

                                                                                        

Canada is this nation’s biggest trading partner and a solid ally.  Every day thousands of Americans cross the border to work and shop in Canada, and thousands of Canadians cross the border to work and shop in the USA.  All along that 3,000-mile border people cross this way and that for lunch with the in-laws.  Tons of food, manufactured goods, raw materials, and the occasional moose are daily traded via rail, roads, and air between our two great nations.  That Canada can be bribed or bullied into silence, compromising friendly relations, suggests not incompetence by a few functionaries but malicious intent by a third party.  Who?  And why?

 

Emails to several CBC address were not answered.  Well, maybe all the headquarters gnomes were too busy listening to the games.  Certain the CBC leadership listens to the IOC.  The emails were not impertinent; they did not ask if some CBC vice-president’s daughter or son recently received a full scholarship to an exclusive private school in Switzerland or France, or if another CBC executive suddenly sported a shiny new SUV in his driveway.  To ask such questions would not only impertinent but wrong.  No rude questions were asked, and the respectful questions were not answered.

 

Perhaps CBC Radio shares the same ‘tude toward listeners that Air Canada displays toward passengers: “We’re Not Happy Until You’re Not Happy.” 

 

-30-

The Banana-Gat Song

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Banana-Gat Song

 

A man wearing a banana suit and carrying a Kalashnikov while walking along a street was stopped and questioned by the police in Beaumont, Texas last week.  And in these troubled times, one understands – some people are made nervous by the open display of a banana.

 

Beaumont usually votes Democrat, so perhaps the police thought the man was a banana Republican.

 

Maybe the perp was singing “Yes, we have no ammo; we have no ammo today…” without a music license.

 

Not sure if the police handcuffed him, but he was a slippery customer.

 

What do law enforcement officers have against fruits?  Haven’t we progressed?

 

Maybe this was an advertisement for a new Orwellian telescreen program, Banana Dynasty, oriented for a specialty viewer market, rustic vegans.

 

When bananas are outlawed, only outlaws will have bananas.

 

Curiously enough, banana-boy’s Kalashnikov was fitted with a drum magazine instead of a (wait for it…now use that drum magazine for a drum roll…) banana clip!

 

For manly men, bananas have always had a peel – um – appeal.  John Wayne is said to have worn a banana suit in one or two of his early movies, and certainly the banana sub-text is continued in Bananigan, The Green Bananas, Rio Banana, The Banana and the Geisha, and Angel and the Bananaman.

 

As John Wayne would say, partner, the West wasn’t won with a registered banana.

 

When filming cowboy movies in the United States became too expensive, some movie companies produced a series of Banana westerns in Central America.

 

Bananas are slippery; Sergeant Preston of the Yukon kept his on a lanyard so it wouldn’t get away from him.

 

The Mae West gag naturally follows: “Is that a banana…?”

 

Traditional hunters don’t understand the need to import all those foreign semi-auto bananas with the fancy rails and scopes and stuff.  Once upon a time a real man got his deer with a good old J. C. Higgins banana from Sears.  And no matter what the National Banana Association says, we just don’t need armor-piercing bananas.

 

But Freud keeps us grounded by reminding us that sometimes a banana is just a Kalashnikov…um…banana.  Or cigar.  Or something.

 

Finally, let us all remember the first rule of banana safety as taught by responsible fathers and in effective banana-safety courses: there is no such thing as an unloaded banana.

 

-30-

Tejas y Libertad Para Siempre!

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Tejas y Libertad Para Siempre!

 

This Sunday is the 178^th anniversary of Texas’ declaration of independence from Mexico.  An assembly of dubious legality in Washington-on-the-Brazos put together a most noble document, signed it, and then fled for their lives.  Within a few years the short-lived Republic of Texas was absorbed by the United States.  When, in 1861, Texas voted herself out of the Union, the Union welcomed her errant child back into her arms by force of arms.  Joining the United States is not unlike joining the Mafia – you can’t unjoin.

 

Our Texas Declaration of Independence might seem like a pretty dead letter, but it is still worth reading for its elegant language, the rightness of its cause, and its occasional wild and inexplicable failures.

 

The first four paragraphs are long, complex, dependent clauses beginning with “When” but never concluded.  This is the sort of thing that gives delicate English teachers the vapors.

 

The dependent clauses are brilliant, though, because, without a resolution, they sort of propel the reader forward, looking for a verb and the recipient of action.

 

The following paragraphs then make a series of excellent complaints – freedom of speech, trial by jury, public education, ownership of firearms (“the rightful property of freemen”) – and does so excellently.  The flaw here is that the complaints are made against Mexico, not against the usurper, Santa Anna

 

To fault Mexico in 1836 for being in a mess is rather like blaming the Polish government for poor domestic policies in 1942.  In 1942 there was no Polish government, only occupiers, just as in 1836 there was no Mexican government, only a tyrant who had replaced a previous tyrant who had crushed Mexican democracy.

 

A real irony is that almost all of the rebels were Mexican citizens, some by pledge of allegiance, others by birth who risked their lives, their families, their friends, and their hard-earned property to join in the fight against the tyrant.  Tragically, after the Revolution those truly native to the soil were betrayed by the young nation they had helped build.  Colonel Juan Seguin, a hero of the Revolution, was to the later immigrants a non-citizen, a non-person, and he withdrew into exile.  The citizens of Goliad, who rescued as many of Fannin’s men as they could without being shot by their own soldiers, were thanked by the new government by being burnt out and forced to flee.

 

The declaration of independence dismisses all Mexicans – including those who fought for Texas – as “unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.”  This dismissal should have been addressed only to one man, the wicked Santa Anna.

 

The declaration of independence dismisses the Spanish language, the language of Texas for over three hundred years to that point, as “an unknown tongue.” 

 

The declaration of independence dismisses Indians, who lived on this land long before the Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Americans got off the boat or rowed across the Rio Sabina, as “merciless savages.”  And, yes, they were rough, especially the Comanches.  No one, not even the Apaches, ever thought of the Comanches as especially nice neighbors.

 

That’s a whole lot of long-time residents to annoy when starting up a new nation – what were the boys in Washington-on-the-Brazos thinking?

 

And then, after the fight for freedom was won, new immigrants introduced slavery into Texas, an evil forbidden by the constitution Santa Anna had discarded.  History is heavy with bitter ironies.

 

Every nation has its myths – King Arthur for Britain, Roland for France, El Cid for Spain, Davy Crockett for Texas, Brian Boru for Ireland, ice hockey medals for Canada, Mel Gibson for welfare-state Scotland – and myths are good for encouraging unity.   But no one should substitute myths for hard facts, or employ them to cover up injustice. 

 

Anyway, I say it’s a hard fact that in Texas we’re far better, freer, and more just than those 49 provinces who think they’re something, so may God bless Texas, and may He confound all our enemies, on our Independence Day and always.

 

Tejas y libertad para siempre!

 

-30-

By the Smart Phone's Early Light

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

By The Smart Phone’s Early Light

 

Any nation is perceived both by its own people and by others through its symbols: the Star of David for Israel, the monarchy for the more-or-less-maybe-kinda-sorta United Kingdom, the maple leaf for Canada, the eagle and serpent for Mexico, the Byzantine eagle for Russia, and expensive little bottles of water for the United States.

 

A more accurate symbol of the modern USA might be bottled water in the hands of Americans being probed, patted, and frisked by other Americans.  No, not in a hootchie movie; it’s just the way we live now.

 

An old Viet-Cong veteran watching television news images of Americans with their hands up and being flushed out their own places of work in their own country by squads of uniformed men wielding M-16s must surely gloat as he yips “Back at ya, Yanks!”

 

But, by golly, we Americans surrender like nobody else.  We might give up our dignity and even our trousers so we can be fondled in public by some otherwise unemployable Homeland Security doofuss in a polyester uniform, but we never surrender our water bottles and our MePhones.  There are limits.

 

How might the symbols of history be different if bottled water and little Orwellian telescreens had been available long ago?

 

George Washington crosses the Delaware while looking for a geo-satellite signal on his MePhone while the lads in the boats search each other for contraband.  “Sorry, Private Winthrop, but we have to place you in a holding cell because of this one-inch Swiss Army Knife.  You are forbidden to board the boat, make the hazardous river crossing amid ice floes in the middle of the night, march miles through the snow to Trenton, and then risk being shot by German mercenaries.”  Or perhaps suffer a little traffic problem ordered by someone in the governor’s office.

 

Lady Liberty, faux pagan goddess, holds aloft over New York Harbor a plastic bottle of designer water enriched with Tahitian vitamins. While being patted down.

 

The Texas Army never receives the order to advance on San Jacinto because General Houston can’t get enough bars on his MePhone for texting.  While being strip-searched.

 

Abraham Lincoln with earbuds.  While being wanded.

 

Henry Ford, while texting, is run over in the street by the first Model T.  No one goes near the body because they’re too busy taking pictures with their little Orwellian telescreens and captioning the images with our new national anthem: “OMG! OMG! OMG!”

 

At the Battle of Bunker Hill Colonel Prescott commands his men “Don’t fire until they can see your underwear with their electronic glasses!”

 

Davy Crockett, age three, shoots an electronic image of a bear with his game console.  He then has to write an apology to PETA.

 

Indians give Sir Walter Raleigh an electronic cigarette.  And a cavity search.

 

Sculptor Gutzon Borglun receives a federal arts grant to render the images of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt as a photoshop image and so never gets around to carving up Mount Rushmore.  However, a TSA agent goes through all his stuff anyway.

 

Could we Americans sink any lower in subjecting ourselves to the humiliation of being interrogated, searched, frisked, prodded, patted, poked, wanded, and ordered about by menacing bullies in scary uniforms?  Well, yes, we could fly Air Canada.

 

-30-

If I Had a Hammer - and Sickle

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

If I Had a Hammer - and Sickle

 

To paraphrase an old wheeze, last month the world learned that someone named Pete Seeger died.  Before that much of the world didn’t know he was alive.

 

Without a doubt some journalism-school graduate will draw from his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) big bag of filler-language one of the oldest and most erroneous cliches’ of all: “his music defined a generation.”

 

Well, no, Pete Seeger’s music did not define a generation.  For one thing, Mr. Seeger’s career lasted over seventy years, covering several generations.  Second, there are always individuals who refused to be defined by others.  Third, “generation” is an artificial construct, projecting stereotypes based on the year of one’s birth. 

 

Tom Brokaw, for instance, has made good money defining other people by the accidents of their birth.  He invented the expression “the greatest generation” and sold lots of books and articles on that stereotype.  And it is a stereotype - after all, if everyone who survived the Great Depression and participated in World War II are to be stamped with Mr. Brokaw’s label, then General Tojo, Eddie Slovik, Lord Haw Haw, Robert McNamara, and Admiral Horthy were really great guys.  But stereotypes sell, and Mr. Brokaw has profited greatly from World War II.  Your grandfather didn’t, but Tom Brokaw did.

 

Pete Seeger did not profit from World War II; he was drafted into the Army Air Force and served in the Pacific as a mechanic.  He does not seem to have learned much about tyranny from the experience, though.  Before the war Mr. Seeger was pleased to sing songs praising Hitler and Stalin for their (cough) non-aggression pact.  After the war he celebrated one dictator after another with his banjo, and does not seem to have composed a song about the Soviets invading Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania. Greece, and much of the rest of the planet, nor did he bother to yodel about the gulags and mass executions.

 

And he honored murderers so prettily: “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “If I had a Hammer,” and on and on.  Nice, hummable, deadly little songs.  They just make you want to get up and dance on mass graves.

 

Pete Seeger meant well, but meaning well is so often an excuse for subsequent disasters.  Pete Seeger perceived, better than most, the inequities of American life in the early 20^th century, especially racism and the concept by some industrialists of workers as disposable economic units.  He took up his banjo as an instrument of wrath.

 

The tragedy is that Pete Seeger thought that only a fresh new set of international tyrants would solve the problems of the old localized set of tyrants.  Instead of The People submitting passively to a succession of often inadequate but democratically-elected governments, Mr. Seeger sang that they should submit passively to his sequential catalogue of fatherly-looking mass-murderers: Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. 

 

In a perhaps irrelevant aside, what is it with dictators and their love of facial hair?

 

Pete Seeger despised the American government until the American government began giving him honors and medals.  Then he became the lap-dog of whatever president invited him to the White House to purchase his soul with shiny things.  As Becket says in Jean Anouilh’s eponymous play, “A good occupational force must never crush. It must corrupt.”  The irony would have eluded Pete Seeger.

 

By celebrating dictators, having no use for real workers, and accepting hollow honors from a government he professed to despise, Pete Seeger insured that his music would become as irrelevant as television jingles for fizzy sodas.

 

-30-

 

High Noon at the Bird Feeder

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

High Noon at the Bird Feeder

A little dog, a streak of dachshund red,
Across the grass speeds to a squirrel’s doom
She wants its blood, she wants its flesh, she wants it dead;
Ripped, shredded, and torn, it will need no tomb.

The fat old squirrel, a fluff of forest grey,
Is unimpressed by doggie dementia;
To Liesl’s grief he leaps and climbs away -
Never underestimate the Order Rodentia!

Liesl’s squirrel clings to a low-hanging limb
And chatters abuse at the angry pup
Who spins and barks and spins and barks at him
Laughing among the leaves, and climbing higher up.

So Liesl snorts and sneers, and marks the ground;
She accepts not defeat, nor lingers in sorrow;
For Liesl and squirrel it’s their daily round;
They’ll go it again, same time tomorrow.

Not Toll Bridges, But Troll Bridges

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Not Toll Bridges, but Troll Bridges

“In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?”

- from Stanza XXIX, Horatius

Many electrons have been sacrificed in the babblesphere regarding whether or not the governor of New Jersey, who is three or four or five times the man you’ll ever be, went all conehead and shut down multiple lanes on the George Washington Bridge in order to punish an uppity Democrat by annoying and even endangering thousands of people.

Better than finding a severed horse-head in one’s bed, though.

Compounding the chaos is the fact that the George Washington Bridge is a toll bridge. The driver’s freedom of movement is not free; one-way passage is $13.

But here is a question no one has asked: why does the George Washington Bridge require a toll? It’s 80 or so years old; isn’t it paid for by now?

And here’s a better question – why are there tolls on bridges and roads at all?

Several government entities in Texas charge drivers for freedom of movement along certain roads and across certain bridges. Up to a point, this practice might enjoy some limited defense – any bridge is a very difficult engineering challenge because it is a structure that must carry traffic across the instability of water or air. Sinking a bridge pier is a matter of finding a stable platform beneath both water and sediment, and once it is in place the pier and its footing must withstand incredible pressures and currents that are constantly shifting. If there is no footing, then a suspension system is required, which is a complex way of requiring a bridge to support itself. It’s all like, you know, physics and stuff, which I didn’t pay attention to in high school. Gordon Gaskin and I dumped a road-kill possum on the physic teacher’s front porch one night, though, and that was fun.

Good Socialist wishes and Disney fairies don’t make a bridge happen; from concept to the last paint stripe, building a bridge requires the work of lots of smart, tough, energetic people. And smart, tough, energetic people who build bridges are worthy of their hire. Thus, charging a toll until the bridge is paid for might be reasonable.

But then, drivers also pay for the bridge through fuel taxes and a specific sub-category on their yearly car registration. A Texas driver crossing a Texas toll bridge pays for the bridge three times over. When one considers the extra levies on commercial vehicles, Texas drivers are paying, through the higher costs of goods, for the toll bridge four times over.

So where does one go to see the budget for a given toll bridge or toll highway?

And then there is the matter of freedom, the freedom to go and come as one chooses. Why should a Texan, who pays any number of taxes to fund a bridge before he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) even gets to it, be stopped by a functionary and, sanctioned by the laws of Texas, be required to pay off that functionary in order to cross that bridge?

The matter of the bribes…um…payoffs…um…tolls is even more subject to questions of, well, questionable behavior when one learns that some of the controlling agencies are private companies.

Cintra (a vague, fuzzy, harmless-sounding name) owns the make-him-an-offer-he-can’t-refuse control over a portion of Interstate 35 in Fort Worth. Cintra is a Spanish company. Thus, not only does a private company demand a payoff for you to drive along a public road you’ve already paid for, this private company is not even an American company.

Even for a slow thinker like y’re ‘umble scrivener, that doesn’t sound right on multiple levels of not sounding right.

http://www.texashighwayman.com/texhwys.shtml

http://www.examiner.com/article/texans-call-for-boycott-of-first-foreign-owned-toll-road

http://www.nbcdfw.com/traffic/stories/Spanish-Company-Signs-50-Year-For-Profit-Toll-Road-Deal-173618611.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/us/texas-road-tolls-proliferate-as-public-financing-dwindles.html?_r=0

http://tollfreenc.org/news-info/national-toll-information/

-30-

The Frogs of January

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

The Frogs of January

Have the frogs of January lost their minds?
This is the season of reptilian sleep,
To leave the winter’s frozen world behind
And keep their dormant lives in storage deep

This balmy dusk is not a time for song;
This temporary warmth is but a cruel tease;
Frogs won’t sing through this winter dusk for long:
The soft winds whisper of a coming freeze.

Floyd Gaffney and James Avery

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Floyd and James

Okay, I did not address Dr. Gaffney as Floyd; he was the director and a brilliant man, and although others presumed to address him familiarly, I did not. James Avery was equally brilliant but my age, and so he was James.

The play was a middle-1970s mediocrity, leaden in its preachiness, but that was what the committee had given Dr. Floyd Gaffney, a forgettable play and a cast of amateurs. Some were well-intentioned but bumbling, and others were princesses of both sexes whose purposes in donning the buskins and trodding the boards remain a mystery. Tardiness, inattention, and self-indulgence were constants – no wonder Dr. Gaffney looked like a man with a secret sorrow. One of the cast, a former Miss Famous Name Brand Beauty Pageant Something-or-Other™, spent more time rehearsing her Academy Award acceptance speech than her immediate lines. She was insolent, incompetent, and barely literate. Oh, yeah. Another cast member worked diligently on his I’m-an-actor-‘tude and considered taking direction and even showing up for rehearsal beneath his level of creativity.

He may have been the walking, talking cliché’ who stopped a rehearsal to ask “What’s my motivation?”

The exception to this Dysfunction Junction was James Avery, then a young college graduate and Viet-Nam veteran. His purpose – not his dream, his purpose – was to write and act. And he did. James was always in the old theatre for rehearsals before anyone else and remained late. He not only knew his part, he knew everyone’s. If you missed a line or a blocking point, he saved you. Despite his relative youth he was fully as professional as Dr. Gaffney, and less acerbic. He had no patience with folly, but was supportive and an eager teacher.

At this point it is relevant to mention that I was the only white performer in an otherwise all black play, and the only goof in an otherwise serious narrative. My limited function was that of the traditional Shakespearean Clown, the oaf whose comic irrelevance serves to break the tension.

One of my encounters with the lead was to insult him with a crudity. Verbally abusing, even in jest, a man the size and presence of James Avery was quite a challenge, and as supportive as he was in person, his character was intimidating. During a rehearsal or a performance, he never stepped out of character.

Dr. Gaffney and James formed a committee of two to solve the problem.

At this point the convention is to insert a life-changing quotation from them, some glowing words That Will Live Forever. Well, it’s not going to happen. I really don’t remember what James and Dr. Gaffney said to me. Whatever they said was immediately practical and functional. They didn’t give inspirational speeches; they solved the problem in a workmanlike manner, and the rehearsal went on.

Neither Dr. Gaffney nor James Avery babbled about following your dreams. They expected you to do your job, learn your lines, come to rehearsal, and think.

That’s not florid or gaseous, but it’s a pretty good lesson.

Both Floyd Gaffney and James Avery are gone now, but they continued the old, old tradition of theatre given to them by their mentors, enriched the tradition with their own special gifts, and passed it to the young. They left behind bodies of work that are excellent in themselves, and new generations of actors, writers, and directors to help civilization carry on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Avery_(actor)

http://theatre.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/InMemoriam/FGaffney/index.html

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And Then a Light Bulb Didn't Come On

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

And Then a Light Bulb Didn’t Come On

The Christmas casualties have hardly been processed through triage in time for the next offensive, New Year’s.

The odd thing about New Year’s is that it probably isn’t. January 1st as the beginning of the year is a late Roman tradition honoring Julius Caesar and his reformed calendar as well as Janus, the pagan god of doors, gates, and beginnings. Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism recognize other dates, as does China. For Christians the new year begins with the first day of Advent, and the U.S. government recognizes a fiscal year that does not correspond to the calendar year.

These considerations mean little to the thousands who will lemming together in New York’s Times Square (undoubtedly the Center of the World) on what may or may not be new year’s to be patted, probed, interrogated, and inspected in anticipation of yet another semi-obligatory jollification followed by casualty lists on the next day’s news, surrounded by pictures of Chinese-front millionaires in Chinese-made camouflage and strange young women posing naked on cannonballs which perhaps were not made in China.

We won’t be reading our morning newspapers with the aid of light bulbs for much longer, since with the new year almost all light bulbs will be forbidden by edict in the land of the free. By order, our mandated light sources will be strange helical constructions filled with toxins. We have been instructed to believe that these Buck Rogers gadgets last many years longer than the beastly old global-warming light bulbs in spite of the demonstrated reality that they don’t. The brilliant excuse made after the glowing fact is that the new squiggly things will emit rays on the visual spectrum for longer if the base is down. So, foolish people that we are, we didn’t build our houses with the light fixtures on the floor. What were we thinking?

The old joke about this being President Bush’s fault doesn’t work here since (we must throw some light on the source of the light source) President Bush really did sign off on the people’s permitted illumination on December 19, 2007.

Some people, perhaps well-lit themselves, celebrate what might or might not be a new year by discharging firearms into the air. A real problem with this is the old law of gravity, which really isn’t a law, the fact that whatever goes up must come down: tennis balls, birds, arrows, airplanes, your retirement investments, and bullets. A bullet fired into the air begins to slow, and then to slowly slow, and then to stop. Following its brief pause to check out the scenery ‘way up in the sky, the bullet begins slowly falling back to earth. Then it begins to fall faster and faster, following the acceleration constant as taught in 6th grade. When that little bullet falls back to earth, its small weight is propelled so fast by gravity that it will with ease penetrate a human. One moment someone’s outside celebrating a new year that might or might not be new, an artificial date on an artificial calendar that exists with or without one’s celebration, and the next moment that someone is dead from someone else’s falling bullet. What fun.

This is why for years (however they are measured on this irregular spheroid wobbling around along an elliptical orbit) the New Orleans police have parked beneath highway overpasses at midnight. Indeed, the beginning of 2013 was marked by the astonishing news that no one in America’s Most European City was struck by a falling bullet for three years running (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/01/no_one_hit_by_falling_bullets.html).

Well, here’s a wish that your new year (if this is a new year) is happy in every way, that no bullets fall on you or your family, that your democratically-elected toilets flush, and that your democratically-elected squiggly lights emit enough light to permit you to read without being poisoned or irradiated.

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Winter Dawn

For our Mothers on Christmas Eve

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

For our Mothers on Christmas Eve

Beyond all other nights, on this strange Night,
A strangers’ star, a silent, seeking star,
Helps set the wreckage of our souls aright:
It leads us to a stable door ajar.

And we are not alone in peeking in:
An ox, an ass, a lamb, some shepherds, too -
Bright star without; a brighter Light within
We children see the Truth three Wise Men knew.

For we are children there in Bethlehem
Soft-shivering in that winter long ago
We watch and listen there, in star-light dim,
In cold Judea, in a soft, soft snow.

The Stable and the Star, yes, we believe:
Our mothers sing us there each Christmas Eve.

Christmas in the China Seas

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas in the China Seas

In the run-up to Christmas, cult leaders Martha Stewart and Kim Jong Un have both reduced their staffs.

Martha Stewart gave some 100 of her employees more time to spend with their families this holiday season by sacking them. Kim Jong Un will miss seeing his favorite uncle and political advisor at the festive board; Kim had the old man shot.

And their remaining followers all said “it’s a good thing™.” Or else.

Will Martha Stewart and Kim Jong Un’s surviving office staffs play Secret Santa this year?

What does the pudgy little dictator do for Christmas after he’s pruned his gift list by one relative? Perhaps he could buy one of those snuggie-blankie-thingies as advertised on the Orwellian telescreen and cuddle up with his good buddy Dennis Rodman while they watch It’s a Wonderful Life in the Communist translation, It’s a Miserable Death.

“Wow, Uncle Jang sure would enjoy the scene where Jimmy Stewart has Mr. Potter executed. Oh…wait…!”

“What’s up, man?” asks Dennis.

“Dang!” replies Kim Jong Un. “I just realized that I mixed up my death list with my gift list! I so hate it when that happens. Okay, so I’ve got a new Y-Box I don’t need. Can you use it?”

Martha might conjure up some chips and dips recycled from leftover snacks found in her former employees’ desks and garnished with bitter gall and a smile. Then she and the boys could pose at the gate to one of Dear Leader’s death camps for a look-at-us-ain’t-we-cute selfie complete with duck lips while all the generals clap desperately.

In North Korea, inadequate clapping is a neglect of social principle, and neglect of social principle is punishable by firing squad, having to hold still and wait for mortar rounds, or, on especially merry occasions, being eaten by hungry neighbors. The generals clap desperately.

On Christmas morning John Kerry, who says he was wounded three times in Viet-Nam, might swiftly boat up the river to join the party, with John Kerry Wounded Three Times in Viet-Nam™ tees (each featuring a patented glow-in-the-dark Purple Heart) for everyone. This will cause a row because Kim Jong Un’s gifts are Kim Jong Un™ tees, featuring Dear Leader Himself sporting a cool Che Guevera™ beret. At this point, Martha Stewart™ will quickly dial the USA to see if there’s a clause stipulating her cut on Kerry and Un tees in her many contracts with department stores. The generals clap desperately.

Following Christmas dinner, and the jolly throwing of the leftovers to the starving liberated people on the pointy ends of the bayonets, the party could take a cruise downriver to the several China Seas to fire missiles over Japan and watch the Chinese Navy and the United States Navy playing bumper-boats. The generals clap desperately.

You’re right – it’s not funny. How many young Americans home for Christmas will die before next Christmas in yet another undeclared war? Japan, China, Viet-Nam, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea take turns menacing each other and despising the American people who stand in lines to buy their junk. Our government appears to feel that 19-year-old Americans are disposable foreign aid that will somehow make other nations hold hands, get along, and approve of us.

One wonders if our generals are clapping desperately.

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A Watching Star

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Watching Star

On Christmas Eve in Bethlehem the Holy Family were put through a rough time, but they were spared moderns on MyMyMyFaceSpaceBook telling them how they got it all wrong: that science proves the Star could not have been there at that time, or that the Holy Family were cave-dwellers, or that someone’s misreading of this text or that inscription conclusively proves that, oh, a species of now-extinct giant hamsters, not oxen, were present.

Someone once said of a 2,000-year-old teaching “Well, maybe we’ve gotten it wrong for 2,000 years.”

How casually old stories and transcendent truths are tossed away.

No one has yet proposed that the shepherds weren’t present on that Night of all nights. They saw a Star and angels, not tweets or twerks, and in obedience to God, not to fashion, walked across the hills to see and to worship.

The conventions of advertising tell us that Christmas is only about really nice houses in the middle of snowy landscapes, and that people riding about in horse-drawn sleighs visit each other while laden with Orwellian telescreens and bottles of liquids labeled champagne (of the sort aged in railway tank cars for days), while some holly and lights and impossibly happy children hang about looking enthusiastically merry. Everyone, by the script, is home for the holidays.

In reality, on Christmas Eve a great many people aren’t home to hang socks on fireplace mantles. Just like the hotelier who had no room, and the shepherds watching their sheep, caretakers and guardians are out and about beneath our lesser stars: if the power fails, linemen will be out and up high in the cold and storms making it work again. Police will be on patrol because crime, too, will be on patrol, and hospitals, fire departments, railways, communications, air traffic control, and all the other necessities of a complex civilization will operating because a nation can’t simply turn off the lights for the night. Young sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen posted from Frozenb*tt Air Force Base in North Dakota to some rocky pit in Afghanistan must be awake and doing.

They are all our watchers, making our Christmas safe, and may that eternal Star shine upon them always.

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