The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

Mack Hall, HSG

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

(In green accordance with the green Cliché’ Protection Act of 1904 as greenly amended in 2008 and greenly interpreted by a green and hemorrhoidal federal GS-4 clerk this week, no predictable puns on frets and sour notes were employed in the green construction of this green column)

With the falling dollar, the worst unemployment since 1945, a border so open that the Mexican army makes unopposed raids into the USA, and the ownership of what remains of our economy by our merry friends the People’s Liberation Army, we can take comfort in the fact that our federal government is at last striking back – against Gibson Guitar.  

Extremist Gibson craftsmen in Memphis and Nashville have been terrorizing the American people long enough with their unregistered guitars manufactured from unauthorized wood.

But all is not lost – in the past few weeks crack squads of federal commandos have mounted bold raids against jihadist woodworkers armed with chisels of mass destruction.  Evil guitars have been seized, as well as undocumented alien wood.  The records of the un-mutual activities of the out-of-control Gibson Guitar workers may well lead to a series of trials in the spirit of Roland Freisler, the patron not-a-saint of the modern federal judiciary.

Something styled the Lacey Act and the whims of the Forest Stewardship Council, the Customs service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (Fish?  Wildlife?  Guitars?) are used to suppress guitar manufacture and ownership in these United States.  A maker of guitars must be able to provide to any of the increasingly numerous and pestilential types of federal police documentation about the species and national origins of any wood used to build a guitar in this country.  Further, any American who owns a guitar must also be able to provide documentation to any of the many types of federal police about the species and national origins of any wood in a privately-owned guitar.  Failure to do so will result in a fine and in the seizure of the guitar.

Don’t try to cross a border or board an aircraft with a guitar you want to keep – if you don’t have the paperwork for your guitar and some fellow with a federal badge wants your guitar, it’s his.

You’ll never see your guitar again.

How’s that for a topic for a protest song, eh?

Your possession of a guitar or any other musical instrument containing wood is now a crime of which you are automatically guilty unless you can document your innocence.  What sort of wood is in any part of your great-grandpa’s fiddle?  Prove it, citizen.  That old guitar you bought in a pawn shop and restored?  Your papers, please, citizen.  The piano your ancestors bought in the 19^th century?  Tell us what we want to know about the ivory and the wood, citizen.   Your grandma’s old high school Bundy clarinet from the 1950s?  You must explain yourself, citizen.

And what offense has the Gibson Guitar company committed against The People to find itself particularly singled out by the regime?

What a better world this would be if the internal security police were to lay aside their stinkin’ badges, their pistols, and their warrants and other inky blots and sit with the Gibson Guitar workers at their work benches for an hour.  Imagine a federal agent who never had a real job learning how a craftsman selects and processes a bit of wood for a guitar fret.  Imagine federal judges learning something about work and art instead of oppressing workers and artists.

In anticipation of Labor Day the feds did an Eliot Ness on guitar makers; maybe in memory of 9/11 they’ll bust some uppity flutists.

-30-

Cellphonia in F Flat

Mack Hall

Cellphonia in F Flat

A chamber piece for two sulks and a soda

He yawns, his head propped up against a wall
Of head-stained, head-banged green-fluorescent blocks   
In the back of the room, in Marlboro Country
Reposing in sad, sullen insolence
Furtively strumming a silent keypad
Flinging his unique existential angst
Into cool, pure, plasticized electrons
And out into the post-Dairy Queen night
Where there’s real life, man, not these books and stuff,
Real life; you wouldn’t understand. I’m me
And you don’t know who I am, man.  I am:
An inspirational singer-songwriter
An artist, a great soul misunderstood
Raging against a machine that isn’t there
An angry Romantic on government grants

Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie

Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie Ltd: 1970

One of Miss Christie’s stand-alone (that is, not a Poirot or a Miss Marple) yarns, Passenger to Frankfurt is a dated query into the various post-war revolutions that continued the foul works of Hitler and Stalin. Miss Christie considers the world-wide situation of that dark time, and then creates fictional characters to investigate the source. The neo-Nazi denouement is, in retrospect, mostly in error, but then Miss Christie was writing fiction and, anyway, could not have known that the mischief was almost wholly Communist in origin.

The villains of this story are part of a secret, international Nazi resurgence of youth funded by decayed tycoons and even more decayed European aristocracy. That Nazis, like Communists, originate with dysfunctional and uneducated gangs posing as workers’ movements seems not to have occurred to Miss Christie, or perhaps she assumed that the reality would not have the appeal of alpine castles and marching Hitler Youth. With a little more violence and any sex at all this book could have been any one of the hundreds of mass-market, look-alike paperbacks with lurid covers featuring swastikas and / or hammers-and-sickles and / or automatic pistols occupying, like Soviet soldiers along the Berlin Wall, yards and yards of bookstore shelves .

Even so, this is a good read for an airplane trip or a vegetative Sunday afternoon, and the characterizations, especially of the minor characters, are delightful.

Agatha Christie’s books, more than a generation after her death, continue to sell by the thousands and thousands.

The reviewer’s books sell not by the thousands, or even by the hundred or dozens, but rather by the ones from lulu.com.

THE WORLD OF SAINT PAUL, by Joseph M. Callewaert

The World of Saint Paul
Joseph M. Callewaert
Ignatius Press: San Francisco. 2011

What an excellent book! Mr. Callewaert ‘s life of St. Paul reveals a thorough familiarity with the geography, history, and mythology of the Mediterranean world.

With the usual caveat of “I have no window to look into a man’s soul” (attributed to St. Thomas More and to Queen Elizabeth I), one infers that Mr. Callewaert is a believing Catholic, the adjective “believing” sadly necessary at present.

Mr. Callewaert gives the reader an informal but not patronizing style, and deliberately and skillfully comes close to fiction in depicting for us the scenes and characters in St. Paul’s life. He describes the cities, especially, and provides clear maps to show us these cities and the routes of travel. His knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Semitic mythologies is wonderful, and he dissects – respectfully – many of Saint Paul’s letters to show us the historical and mythological allusions the Saint uses to appeal to his audiences. Perhaps without meaning to, Mr. Callewaert makes an excellent argument for returning to the teaching of mythology, the mythology which all Christian knew for 2,000 years and to which most schoolchildren were exposed (on a g-rated level) until the 1970s, when a secular obsession with testing isolated skills and a fundamentalist fear of anything that “ain’t in the Bible” pretty much ended the teaching of Christian civilization in grade school.

The only weak part of the book is the brief introduction in which Mr. Callewaert employs the first-person singular repeatedly and almost as repeatedly uses quotation marks to indicate sarcasm. These lapses into adolescent FaceBook-ese are, happily, not continued in the text.

Mr. Callewaert was born in Belgium and grew up during the German occupation. He is a Knight Commander of the French Order of Merit, has written numerous travelogues, and is now a citizen of the U.S.

The reviewer barely graduated from high school.

Hurricane Season is Here -- Stock up on Filler Language

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The height – or depth – of hurricane season is here, which means it’s time for us to review all the Weather Channel cliches’ so we can try to sort out the reality:

1. Weather Channelistas always employ allusions to Hurricane Katrina, which, as we all know, was the only hurricane to strike these shores within living memory.
2. “We’re not out of the woods” – curious metaphor for a hurricane.
3. “Rain event” – why don’t they just say rain?
4. “Dodged the bullet” – hurricanes don’t shoot
5. “Stormed ashore” – well, yes, storms do indeed storm.
6. “Wreak havoc” – what, really, is havoc, and why and how is it wreaked? What is wreaking, anyway?
7. “Swath of destruction” – okay, Mr. Weather Channel Dude, quick, without consulting a dictionary, what is a swath?
8. “Mother Nature’s wrath” and “Mother Nature’s fury” – to which Greek or Roman nature goddess would the concept of Mother Nature apply?
9. “Decimated” – not unless the death rate is 10%
10. “Trees snapped like matchsticks” – do matchsticks ever snap like trees?
11. “Looks like a war zone.” No, it doesn’t. No one involved in the horror of combat looks upon the scene afterward and says “It looks like a hurricane zone.”
12. Storms that brew – what do they brew? Tea? Coffee? White lightnin’?
13. Storms that gain or lose steam, as if they were teakettles or steam locomotives
14. Hurricanes that make landfall – well, what else would they make? A gun rack in shop class?
15. Batten down the hatches (Darn, I forgot to buy a hatch; I wonder if the stores are still open)
16. Hunker down
17. Calm before the storm, always “eerie”
18. Calm in the eye of the storm, always “eerie”
19. Calm after the storm, always “eerie”
20. Visually, the stock shot of some doofus in a slicker, standing on the beach, and yelling into a microphone to tell us to stay off the beach.

Finally, always remember that, first and last, hurricane reporting is about Katrina; everything is about Katrina. Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. Audrey? Carla? Rita? Ike? Never heard of ‘em, pal.

Migratory Waterfowl

Mack Hall

Migratory Waterfowl

Loud-quacking, honking, singing, winging, they,
Beneath their wild-wind-beating wings rise up
From the waters of life, towards the sun,
Refreshed in holy pilgrimage along
Cold sky-trails from a long-ago warm nest,
Across the tattered scapes of history,
To a perfect visual landing at dawn
In the golden trees of Jerusalem

Fuhrerbunker

Mack Hall, HSG

Fuhrerbunker

Do not descend into that withering world
Of pale self-pity dying in the depths,
A ghost hugging resentments to itself
And long-decayed hatreds treasured and fed
Upon the corpse of your frail, failing flesh
Hopelessly trapped in souring concrete cells
The empire you carefully constructed
Constricts, constrains, contracts, conforms, condemns

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You are without hope, doomed,
Waiting, lurking in a hugging wallow of
Stagnating fulfillment of the god-Self
Sitting on a floor fetid with refuse
Foul failures feeding on your inwardness
The feeble fluorescent lamps flickering
Shed shadows, never light, and never Light.

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You cannot win. Not you.
Not with the fantasy maps you drew, or
Upon the dead telephones whereon you
Communicated your nothingness to…
Nothing.
Open your hands. Open your eyes.
Don’t go down there. It’s dark down there. Don’t go.

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Mack Hall, HSG

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Eat, drink, pray, love, hamburger, shake, and fries
Boyfriend, baby, trailer park, sad tired eyes
Creepy men, cranky boss, and ice-cream floats
A wheezing Honda with overdue notes
Cinder-blocks, fluorescents, grilled cheese to go
No child-support this month, ‘nother cup of Joe
Ten-year-reunion, can’t go, how time flew
Two shifts that day, the trailer rent is due
Baby at Mama’s, boyfriend still in bed
He’ll look for work tomorrow, that’s what he said
“Order up!” the fry cook hollers, and she
Dreams of a someday-summer in Italy

In Malignant Repose

Mack Hall, HSG

In Malignant Repose

A plastic sphinx in malignant repose
Perpetually admires its sered-soul self
Echoing self-seeking irrelevance
Head bowed in wanton worship of pale lights
Passionately drooling on soft tessarae
Drowning in a stoup of metaphor soup
Night-glowing community loneliness
The glowing box and the box-glowing self
Whose Rods and cones fix back upon themselves
Self-adoration in a far-closed loop
And die unknowing on a long-dead moon.

At the Sign of the Blue Boar

Mack Hall, HSG


At the Sign of the Blue Boar

Under the oak tree, long ago,
We lived with merry Robin Hood,
Who taught us how to bend the bow
And live aright in green Sherwood

Now let us now part the leaves again,
And find that merry life, and bold.
We’ll roam again as we did then --
How came it that we all grew old?

Let us stroll to the Blue Boar Inn,
Quaff a mug of October ale
Nigh unto Sherwood and the fen,
And, laughing, tell a jolly tale

Old Gaffer Swanthold might rest there
Easing his bones in the summer sun
Chatting sweet Joan whose auburn hair
Reminds him of his youthful fun.

Stout of sinew and bold of heart,
Home from the wars i’the Holy Land,
A gallant knight now takes his part,
A hero and a brave, strong man:

Sir Richard o’ the Lea, a knight
A warrior’s heart, but mortgaged land,
Always first in a desperate fight
Poor, but we know no better man

O Alan-a-Dale, tune your lute
And sing how Midge the Miller’s son
Bullied by men (of ill repute),
With Robin’s aid fought them, and won.

O sing of good Saint Swithin whose
Feast day predicts the summer’s moods,
Forty days as the Saint doth choose,
Smiling on England’s grain-fat roods

Maid Marian, she’s just a girl
So lightly dancing through the wood
But she can outshoot any churl
And she is sweet on Robin Hood

Will Scarlet, too, and Little John
Scathelock and Stutely, still
Ambushing fat bishops anon,
Not far from old Hanacker Mill

And we were with them there along
The London Road from Nottingham
Whistling a happy, wordless song,
For nothing rhymes with “Nottingham.”

Sing of Sherwood’s high-leaping deer
Falling to arrows swift and sure
Around the campfire, such good cheer
Venison and ale – the poor man’s cure

Far off in London, Henry, King,
And his Eleanor of Aquitaine
Too oft ignore their far-off shires
And their people’s sheriff-ridden pain

But with us always, happy Tuck
Ever hungry but never mean,
A Friar of faith, of joy, of pluck,
A child of blessed Mary, Queen

Telling his beads, sharpening his sword
Saying Masses for Robin’s band
Seated first at the groaning board
Oft poaching on the bishop’s land

O, merry robbers once we were
In green and sunny barefoot youth
“Stand and deliver, noble sir!
Your purse is too heavy, in God’s truth.”

Under the oak tree, long ago,
We lived with merry Robin Hood,
Who taught us how to bend the bow
And live aright in green Sherwood

The President, the Governor, and a Parrot Walk into a Bus...

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The President, the Governor, and a Parrot Walk into a Bus…

Last week we saw the televised images of poor people in Martha’s Vineyard collapsing from the summer heat at a job fair. Leaping gracefully to action like a gazelle on a mission, the President immediately boarded his armored bus (and surely it is a hybrid), Merovingian 1, and betook himself to the relief of His people.

As the armored bus blew by displaced folks forced to wait by the side of the road, many raised their clenched fists in salute and cried “Strelnikov!”

Or possibly not.

Some scriveners have compared the grim, light-absorbing, windowless Presidential wheels to a police mortuary van or perhaps Darth Vadar’s Death Star, but the careful observer will note that it is actually one of the dark obsidian slabs that keep popping up in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On its journey to the east the Presidential ‘bus shared road-space with Texas Governor Rick Perry’s bus. Although superficially similar – the wheels on all buses go ‘round and ‘round -- confusing the two vehicles would be quite impossible. The Presidential barge features a bar stocked with French wines and all the makins’ for martinis. The Governor’s rented wagon boasts a foam cooler full of ice and Shiner.

The horn of the President’s look-at-me goes “Toot-toot.” The horn of Governor’s rented vote-for-me plays “The Aggie War Hymn.”

The President’s rolling hideout is surrounded by armed Secret Service dudes in dark glasses. The Governor’s mobile deer stand has a gun rack with an old .30-.30 and a J. C. Higgins shotgun. When Rick Perry is President he will protect the Secret Service.

On the back of the President’s bus a Raleigh 10-speed is mounted; on the front of the Governor’s bus are some steer horns from an I10 truck stop near Marfa.

The President’s bus was armored in Canada. Maybe there was no mechanic or armorer still employed in the USA. But the Governor’s bus is not armored; if Carlos the Hamster or some other unwashed liberator were to attack it, Rick Perry’s glare would cause the Russian-made 40-mike-mikes to fall to the ground in a palsy, modify their lifestyle, and take up gardening and antique collecting.

But Governor Perry did not make the pilgrimage to the Holy Island of Martha’s Vineyard, for that was pacified long ago, and the sons and daughters of farmers and fishermen were set to cleaning the houses of their mainland betters. Governor Perry knew that somewhere, along the Brazos de Dios or on some dusty jogging trail, there were coyotes that needed taming and infinitives that needed splitting, and so he turned his trusty steed west.

Martha’s Vineyard is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts. The principle towns on MV, as the in-the-know call it, are: Tsarkoye Seloe, Potemkin Village, Brigadoon, Hanging gardens of Babylon, and Versailles, although the upstart resort of Xanadu is said to be the coming scene. To this Bower of Bliss, grounded as it is in the reality of the shared sacrifices of all Americans, the leaders of government, finance, art, cinema, theatre, publishing, broadcasting, and law withdraw every summer to do penance in sackcloth and ashes from Abercrombie & Fitch.

Some old Tag Heuer watchfaces will be missing from Martha’s Vineyard this year; those number-spinners who work at Standard and Poors will soon probably summer (and winter, and summer, and winter…) on another island, Devil’s Island, but that’s another matter.

And it is a curious triangle trade: people from middle America visit Washington and New York, people from Washington and New York visit Martha’s Vineyard, and the original inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard, who can no longer afford to live there, well, who knows where they end up?

On a bus to nowhere?

-30-

Down From the Door Where it Began

(With a new and even happier ending)

First printed in 2001

Down From the Door Where it Began

The road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began
Now far ahead the road has gone
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet –
And whither then? I cannot say.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Our former random collection of stem cells left for university on Sunday, alternating between giggles and tears as she loaded her little Volkswagen with flutes, clothes, books, tennis racket, computer, makeup, pillows, blankies, and all the other impedimenta of the late-adolescent female beginning her journey on her chosen road. This has been a week of departures, the annual late-August migration of high school graduates out of America’s fast-disappearing little towns and into the groaning centers of population for college or careers. In ones and twos they have flown away like hummingbirds in November, all the little rug-rats who squealed at birthday parties and sleepovers, and scampered through the house with the merry dachshunds. They long ago packed away the Barbies and took up books, musical instruments, microscopes, and computers instead. Some are off to great universities, some to the Marines, and some to the wonderful world of entry-level jobs: “Ya want fries with that?’

I woke up early on Sunday morning, and did what all fathers do for their college-bound kids: I washed Sarah’s car. It didn’t really need it, but I didn’t know what else to do. We had all gone to Mass the night before, because all journeys properly begin and end at the Altar. However, this left us with maybe too much time before Sarah joined The Other Sarah for their two-car departure. So I mowed the lawn. It didn’t really need it, but I didn’t know what else to do.

Eldon came over in the early afternoon; both his girls have left for A & M, so in our great sorrow we broke out a couple of cigars, sat under the fan on the back porch (now more commonly known as a patio), and felt old. Finally, around two, I violated my own no-cars-on-the-lawn rule and backed Sarah’s little Bug to the front door, where I followed orders and helped Sarah load her gear to her specifications while the usually merry dachshunds watched sadly. They didn’t know what was going on, but they somehow knew that their little world was about to change. And then there was nothing left to do. Sunlight fell on the green grass and the blue Volkswagen while the sky to the north darkened with an approaching thunderstorm. Hugs all around, and then Sarah drove away down the lane and the dusty East Texas road -- not to a movie or pizza with her buds, and not for an afternoon or an evening, but far away and forever.

Now the house is very quiet, and the babble of the television and the rattle of the washer can’t disguise the emptiness of a house where a child used to live. Sarah’s awards-heavy letter jacket hangs in her closet in its plastic bag from the cleaners. Last week it was her resume’; now it’s just an artifact of the past, stored away with plastic boxes of toys and games. On her bed reside the stuffed animals she cuddled at night and when she was sick. Her books are stacked on their accustomed shelves: the worn Little House books she read over and over, Diary of a Young Girl, My Cat Spit Magee, 501 Spanish Verbs, Agatha Christie mysteries, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, every Sweet Valley High book ever churned out on spec, Finland, Jane Austen.

One of the best things I ever did for Sarah was to ban daytime television during her childhood summers. Thus, she climbed her favorite tree with books, cats, and her cap pistol, and spent many warm afternoon hours in her green-lit, bee-humming world, hidden away from adults, reading. This was sometimes alarming, but she got through it without any broken bones.

They will wait patiently for Sarah: cats and dachshunds and stuffed toys and books and her climbing tree. I’ve even saved her cap pistol in case she should someday feel the need to be Queen of the West again. No kids run in and out of the house, and the ‘phone doesn’t ring a dozen times or so nightly -- The Divine Sarah’s Answering Service is definitely out of business. The stereo doesn’t shake the walls. I can watch The History Channel all I want. Heck, maybe I am The History Channel.

Fare thee well, Sarah Elizabeth Maria Goretti Hall, daughter of Cromwellian Roundheads and French refugees, of American Indians and Yankees and good Confederates, of soldiers and sailors and farmers and railroad men and laborers, of women who crossed oceans in wooden ships and gave birth in wagons along forest trails. Thank you for the magical gift of your childhood. I hope you get to see the sunset at midnight in Finland again, and climb on a bronze lion in Trafalgar Square. I hope you play your flute in Italy, visit castles in Germany, ski in Austria, and do whatever it is they do in Australia. I hope your friends are always like those great kids you grew up with. May your little Blue Bug carry you to great adventures, and may it follow its nose home when you are ready to come back to the door where a couple of little dachshunds and an old dad sit waiting for you.

A codicil:

Ten years later Sarah came back to the door where she began, bringing with her a PhD from Texas A & M. An old dad was indeed waiting for her, and a young dachshund, and a litter of kittens. Doctor Hall immediately sought out the new babies and was once again childhood Sarah, playing on the floor and baby-talking to puppies and kittens.

The road goes ever on and on, but sometimes it comes back, for just a little while, to the door where it began.

-30-

"No Problem, Guys; Have a Blessed Day"

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

No Problem, Guys; Have a Blessed Day

When did “Have a blessed day” replace the equally irrelevant noise “Have a nice day?”

Several weeks ago I was in New Orleans, gasping in the heat, when a couple of fellows asked for my camera. I said no. Then they asked for money. Again I said no. Then one of them growled “Have a blessed day,” and the two stumbled away.

The “have a blessed day” really meant “go to (somewhere far, far under even the possibility of a rainbow).”

More recently a singer / songwriter (no doubt) presented himself uninvited at my door to try to sell me what he alleged (and who am I to judge? The Bible says you shouldn’t judge.) was fresh meat. Since I seldom purchase proffered and possibly putrefying perishables from the backs of pickup trucks in high summer, I declined the offer to inspect and buy whatever the peddler had decaying in the heat in my driveway by employing my New Orleans “no.”

He was persistent in urging conversation, asking about the neighbors and so on, and my repeated use of my now well-exercised New Orleans “no” exasperated him. Finally he told me to “have a blessed day” in a somewhat hostile manner, rather like my acquaintances in New Orleans, which suggested to me that, whatever he intended for the day, there was no blessing for me in it.

What does “have a blessed day” mean? It typically means nothing. As used by the shop assistant or the waiter, “have a blessed day” is but conventional sales exchange noise replacing the venerable “have a nice day,” said day maybe being a nice day or perhaps it could be a bad day but either way a day so decidedly yesterday, unlike “have a blessed day,” which is so today.

As used by someone whose expectations you have not met, “have a blessed day” appears to be a curse, just like the “I’ll pray for you!” screamed at you by someone who has deemed you unworthy of salvation.

Even with the perhaps Pollyanna-ish presumption of a positive purpose, “have a blessed day” still says nothing. What, after all, is a “blessed day” as opposed to, say, an unblessed day? All days are created by God, and so all are in that sense blessed. What, then, are the speaker’s intentions for you? If he wished to bless you, he could say so: “God bless you.” That’s clear enough, and your day, as well as your porch and your dog and your washing machine, would all come under the protection of that blessing. Or does he wish the day, not you, to be blessed?

“Have a blessed day” has infected, like a pus-oozing tattoo, the speech of young waiters, the gum-chewing sort who would address even an assemblage of supreme court justices and elderly nuns (for the purpose of this illustration you must now imagine supreme court judges and elderly nuns out on the town together) as “you guys,” sometimes “y’all guys.”

And then, when you thank the waiter (as you do, because your momma raised you right) for a coffee refill, more often than not he now nasals the cliché “no problem” instead of speaking manfully the elegant and correct response, “you’re welcome.” You would like to think that his momma raised him right too, but that in his youth he has fallen under the wicked influence of bad companions who chant “no problem” over and over in the scullery because they have seen too many Harry Potter movies, and that he will grow out of it.

I haven’t actually heard a waiter say “No problem, guys; have a blessed day” all together, but I know it’s happened. That’s why the economy collapsed; Chinese waiters never say “No problem, guys.”

If you are blessed (forgive me) with a waiter or waitress who refers to you as a lady or a gentleman, says “sir” or “ma’am,” “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome,” and avoids the guy thing, that fine young person deserves a little extra on the tip.

Have a blessed day, y’all guys. No problem.

-30-

"No Problem, Guys; Have a Blessed Day"

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

No Problem, Guys; Have a Blessed Day

When did “Have a blessed day” replace the equally irrelevant noise “Have a nice day?”

Several weeks ago I was in New Orleans, gasping in the heat, when a couple of fellows asked for my camera. I said no. Then they asked for money. Again I said no. Then one of them growled “Have a blessed day,” and the two stumbled away.

The “have a blessed day” really meant “go to (somewhere far, far under even the possibility of a rainbow).”

More recently a singer / songwriter (no doubt) presented himself uninvited at my door to try to sell me what he alleged (and who am I to judge? The Bible says you shouldn’t judge.) was fresh meat. Since I seldom purchase proffered and possibly putrefying perishables from the backs of pickup trucks in high summer, I declined the offer to inspect and buy whatever the peddler had decaying in the heat in my driveway by employing my New Orleans “no.”

He was persistent in urging conversation, asking about the neighbors and so on, and my repeated use of my now well-exercised New Orleans “no” exasperated him. Finally he told me to “have a blessed day” in a somewhat hostile manner, rather like my acquaintances in New Orleans, which suggested to me that, whatever he intended for the day, there was no blessing for me in it.

What does “have a blessed day” mean? It typically means nothing. As used by the shop assistant or the waiter, “have a blessed day” is but conventional sales exchange noise replacing the venerable “have a nice day,” said day maybe being a nice day or perhaps it could be a bad day but either way a day so decidedly yesterday, unlike “have a blessed day,” which is so today.

As used by someone whose expectations you have not met, “have a blessed day” appears to be a curse, just like the “I’ll pray for you!” screamed at you by someone who has deemed you unworthy of salvation.

Even with the perhaps Pollyanna-ish presumption of a positive purpose, “have a blessed day” still says nothing. What, after all, is a “blessed day” as opposed to, say, an unblessed day? All days are created by God, and so all are in that sense blessed. What, then, are the speaker’s intentions for you? If he wished to bless you, he could say so: “God bless you.” That’s clear enough, and your day, as well as your porch and your dog and your washing machine, would all come under the protection of that blessing. Or does he wish the day, not you, to be blessed?

“Have a blessed day” has infected, like a pus-oozing tattoo, the speech of young waiters, the gum-chewing sort who would address even an assemblage of supreme court justices and elderly nuns (for the purpose of this illustration you must now imagine supreme court judges and elderly nuns out on the town together) as “you guys,” sometimes “y’all guys.”

And then, when you thank the waiter (as you do, because your momma raised you right) for a coffee refill, more often than not he now nasals the cliché “no problem” instead of speaking manfully the elegant and correct response, “you’re welcome.” You would like to think that his momma raised him right too, but that in his youth he has fallen under the wicked influence of bad companions who chant “no problem” over and over in the scullery because they have seen too many Harry Potter movies, and that he will grow out of it.

I haven’t actually heard a waiter say “No problem, guys; have a blessed day” all together, but I know it’s happened. That’s why the economy collapsed; Chinese waiters never say “No problem, guys.”

If you are blessed (forgive me) with a waiter or waitress who refers to you as a lady or a gentleman, says “sir” or “ma’am,” “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome,” and avoids the guy thing, that fine young person deserves a little extra on the tip.

Have a blessed day, y’all guys. No problem.

-30-

The Smurfs at the O.K. Corral

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Smurfs at the O.K. Corral

We may take this as official: the something-istas who make movies think you and I are idiots. Exhibit A, The Smoking Phaser: Cowboys and Aliens.

Movies are art. They fuse visuals with the essentials of literature, plot, character, and setting, and through this dialectic make something new. This relatively new art is still evaluated by transcendent aesthetics: Is this beautiful? Does this speak well of the human condition? Does this speak truth? Is the audience in some way better or happier for having considered the work?

Films, like other forms of art, tend to follow genres. One does not compare The Bells of St. Mary’s to a Three Stooges wheeze because while both address misunderstandings and portray humans positively, they do so in entirely different ways. We see conflicts of good and evil both in Robin Hood and in Star Wars, but we would be greatly surprised if the Sheriff of Nottingham and merry Robin were to draw light-sabres on each other. Even within a genre the forms of address can be so very different that they could not with integrity be conflated: Support Your Local Sheriff isn’t Red River, nor should it be; each film enjoys its own valid artistry.

Given an aesthetic reality which is obvious to a ten-year-old, what were the producers of Cowboys and Aliens thinking? Not much of the audience, certainly.

However, not wanting to miss out on the possible profits to be ill-gotten from this trend, I offer to modern film producers the following cowboy-fusion treatments for their consideration:

The Smurfs at the O.K. Corral
Bridezillas Meet Jesse James
Sushi Red River
The Ballet Russe at the Alamo
Beavis and Butthead Ride the High Country
The Man from Laramie’s Starbuck’s
The Lone Ranger and Captain Kirk
Sergeant Rutledge on Sesame Street
The Northwest Mounted Therapists
Across the Wide Ganges with Daniel Boone and Mohandas Ghandi
Belle Starr Does Riverdance
Zorro and Princess Leia Save the Harp Seals from the Evil Canadians
They Died With Their Cell ‘Phones On
The Short Texan
Davy Crockett and Ringo Starr Solve the Debt Crisis at Fort Apache
The Santa Fe Email
Gabby Hayes – Vampire
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in Libya
Buffalo Bill Meets Mussolini
Zorro and Mickey Mouse against the Martians
Gene Autry and the Invisible Copper Wire Thieves of El Dorado Meet Batman
Annie Oakley and the Hell’s Angels in Hawaii
Cochise, Shogun Peace Activist
Pancho Villa and Hercule Poirot in Old Kentucky
Destry Bicycles Again
The Nazi Undead Who Shot Liberty Valance
Ho Chi Minh and the Cosmic Apaches

Gabby Hayes – Vampire. Dude! That has Palm d’Or written all over it.

-30-

A Tribute to the Cigar Box

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Tribute to the Cigar Box

Cigar boxes are no longer a part of childhood. In an office supply store last week I saw a display of plastic boxes for children for use in school, for storing pens and pencils and glue and scissors and all the other easily-misplaced little impedimenta of very young artists.

Once upon a time, children employed wooden cigars boxes for such purposes; if one’s father didn’t smoke cigars then someone else’s did, and so nice little wooden boxes were as common as 1943 steel pennies. I suppose that if now a child were to carry his art supplies to school in a cigar box he would be sent for therapy and his parents filed on with some state agency for Not Thinking Correctly.

The plastic boxes for sale now contain only air, and to a father that’s disappointing; wooden cigar boxes came filled with, well, cigars, so everyone was happy. Contemporary boxes are filled with nothing more than the chemical aromas of Shanghai, and no one ever celebrated an accomplishment or a birth by lighting up a victory Chinese air molecule.

In another time-space dimension, the birth of a child was celebrated by the proud father handing out cigars to his pals. Upon retrospect one realizes that the young mother probably needed a cigar more than anyone, but such an image would not make an appropriately-sentimental greeting card. One wonders if somewhere there is at least one mother who smokes cigars while holding her infant, in Newton County, perhaps.

For children, though, a cigar box was not about stinky rolls of vegetation being ignited, but rather about creativity. The good old wooden cigar box had two purposes: (1) storage of treasures and (2) as a quarry for building projects.

Childhood is even now manifested in little treasures: a Christmas pocket knife, a rock from the beach, a few illicit firecrackers, coins, marbles, an old watch that doesn’t work. The best pirate’s treasure chest for these valuables is a cigar box, carefully hidden under the bed or in the back of a closet, away from snoopy siblings.

A wooden cigar box was equally useful in its parts for construction projects – wood and those tiny little brass nails. The sides suggested airplane wings, and often became such. The top and bottom could, with care, be split into spans useful for the cabins of aircraft, hulls of boats, or the bodies of cars. With glue and rubber bands and the tiny nails a child could cobble together something that, well, it looked like an airplane to the kid, and no other audience got a voice in the matter.

Children now carry bottled water and little plastic thingies that light up and make noise. If they want to make an airplane they call up a program on one of their little plastic thingies that light up and make noise, tap on its screen, and look passively at a flat image of an airplane. The computer program will even make the “Zoom! Zoom!” noises for them. Oh, well, at least they won’t prick their little fingers with little brass nails.

Last week I had occasion to visit a little storefront on Decatur Street in New Orleans, and inside the store men were rolling cigars and smoking cigars. I bought a few stogies, and the nice young man included with my purchase a real cigar box, made of wood, made in the Dominican Republic. I’m going to have to find a boy to give the box to, maybe around Christmas (“Gee, thanks, Mr. H, a box. Wow. Just what I asked Santa for.”).

And as for the cigars that came in little wooden boxes in the long ago: those of us of a certain generation remember our fathers, strong and lean, young survivors of the Depression and World War II, work-stained in overalls or khakis after a long day on the farm or in the refinery, leaning on the pasture fence and looking over the cows grazing, celebrating life with a gasper, far happier than we can imagine at the joy of simply being alive, of being able to raise a family, of being able to feed their children. No longer rationed by desperate poverty or by whatever supplies survived the trip to the battlefront, they could enjoy more than three cigarettes a week; they could even splurge on that glorious, for-the-silk-hat-set-only luxury, a box of cigars. The cigars weren’t very good, but that wasn’t important. That there were cigars at all was the hard-won celebration for men who had not known much in the way of food or clothes or shoes in boyhood. To them, every cigar was a victory cigar.

They were men – may their eternities include their cigars; God knows they deserve them.

-30-

Blue Bell Ice Cream

Blue Bell Ice Cream commercials are as annoying as screaming children on a long flight. The only mercy in them (the commercials, not the screaming children) is that the narration is not yet whined in a fake Australian accent.

The Governor and the Guru

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Governor and the Guru

Wel coude he rede a lesson and a storye,
But alderbest he soong an offertorye

- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 711-715


Last week the President was pleased to host the ever-fashionable Dalai Lama at The People’s House, while Governor Perry was sued for planning to attend a Christian prayer service in August.

The thesis here seems to be is that hanging out with a Buddhist of very questionable background who claims to have been reincarnated fourteen times rocks, dude, but associating with Baptists is a crime.

Folks are inexplicably drawn to trendy gurus, and without much thought in the matter: the Tibetan in Dorothy Lamour’s old sarong, Fred Phelps, the Hale-Bopp spaceship guy, John Corapi, and other opportunists all the way back to Chaucer’s Pardoner (General Prologue 671-716). They may have their eyes on the Heavens but their hands so often wish to reside in your wallet.

President Bush I, President Clinton, President Bush II, and President Obama have all had the Dalai Lama over to the White House for some greeting-card theology, and no one seems to know why. But, like, hey, the Dalai Lama’s, like, cool, y’know. One would like to think that presidents exchange, like, hey, ideas, and, like, stuff, y’know just to annoy the Chinese, who have in effect commanded the President not to receive the DL, but one never knows. The fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama posing in the White House is no more significant than Elvis visiting President Nixon, and no more substantive.

The President didn’t wear a tie for the occasion, but then, neither did the DL.

The last time the DL visited the President he (the DL, not the President) had to leave by the back door, next to the Presidential garbage cans, The Garbager Can-ers of the Free World. Well, hey, can you claim that of your garbage can?

The Dalai Lama, channeling Oprah Winfrey, said of his visit to our own Dear Leader that “we developed a very close sort of feeling for each other.” Good grief, couldn’t these two just Facebook each other?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Governor Rick Perry, a Methodist, is being sued by something styling itself the Freedom from Religion Foundation because he plans to spend a day in prayer at the holy temple of Reliant Stadium, nee’ Enron Field. When you think of prayer you just naturally think of Reliant Stadium’s home plate.

If the Dalai Lama shows up, maybe to share some Green Beret stories with John Corapi, will the Freedom from Religion Foundation call off the lawsuit?

This event is being hosted by the American Family Association, which is wonderfully vague. The prayer service is billed as non-denominational and folks are encouraged to come and bring a Bible and a notebook (is the material testable?). No mention of a Rosary, though.

Governor Perry has urged other governors to declare the 6th of August a day of prayer, which implies that the 5th and the 7th aren’t. We’ll have to check in with Fred Phelps and the good folks at Westboro Baptist to see if all this caesaropapism stuff is cool with the 10th Amendment.

We haven’t heard if some large guys in leathers and Tats for Jesus are going to rip apart telephone books. Perhaps that’s how St. Paul got the attention of the crowd at Ikonium.

Security could be an issue at St. Reliant Stadium – rumors abound that Rupert Murdoch is going to try to hack in to Governor Perry’s Bible. This would be pretty easy since Rupert owns Zondervan, said to be the world’s largest publisher of Bibles. How’s that for news of the world, eh?

And speaking of security, we can only hope no one falls from the bleachers while trying to catch a pop Our Father.

The Secret Service may have to be deputed to guard the first-base ikon of the Theotokos from metal thieves.

And when the 6th of August ends, will folks leaving Notre Dame de Reliant Stadium consider the old, old question: “What went ye into the desert to see?”

-30-

Veggies du Mal

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Veggies du Mal

The President may cultivate his little vegetable garden at the White House without fear of let or hindrance, but such freedom of agriculture does not obtain in Oak Park, Michigan, where the oaks had better be oaks; no apple trees need apply.

Julie Bass’s lawn was dug up because of repairs to the sewer system, and she chose to re-plant part of her own yard with cabbages, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, and herbs.

You and I, Julie’s fellow Americans, do not possess a veto in the matter, nor do we want one. Julie owns her yard and pays her taxes, and if she wishes to plant salads instead of grasses, such is her small expression of the freedom we all share. We are free to approve or disapprove of her horticultural aesthetics, and she is free to ignore us.

Your ‘umble scrivener highly approves, not that anyone cares or should care. A tomato plant is aesthetically pleasing, all pretty and green in the summer sun and, with care, soon accented with attractive red spheroids which are also edible.

One of Julie’s neighbors, who is not into freedom, turned her in to the Oak Park plant police, the corn constabulary, the marrow marshals, the veggie vigilantes, the cabbage carabinieri, the potato Peelers, the gourd Guardai, the carrot crop cops, the mustard green Mounties, the soybean shore patrol, the broccoli bobbies, the hominy highway patrol, the garlic gendarmerie, the peas posse, the dandelion deputies, the shallot sheriffs, the chive Cheka, and the sweet potato S.W.A.T.

Oak Park’s Planning and Technology Director (that is a real title) ruled that Julie’s veggies are disruptive. No kidding. Disruptive. And he wrote her a ticket for growing vegetables in her own yard. Your peppers, please, comrade.

T. H. White, in The Book of Merlin, posits that the rule of an ant colony is “That which is not forbidden is mandatory; that which is not mandatory is forbidden.” Such is not the rule of a free people, but such is, alas, the rule of Oak Park, Michigan.

How infinitely ant-colony-y of Oak Park to spend scarce public funds on the pumpkin patrol; in these troublesome times every American walking a lonely street fears assault by a drugged-out rutabaga or a gang of feral Brussels sprouts.

We have elected a federal government which has sent thousands of illegal automatic garden trowels across the border to Mexican garbanzo gangs who in turn used the garden trowels. Given this, there is no logical reason why assault garden rakes in America should not be registered and regulated. Thus, Julie and her disruptive vegetables may be sentenced to 93 days in jail, and perhaps her unlicensed hummingbird feeder confiscated.

What a country – a woman may kill her baby with the approval of the courts but she can be jailed for raising a row of carrots.

Perhaps the problem is that vegetable gardens, like Julie, are productive, and don’t gee-haw with the current behavioral template of passivity and dependence.

We’re waiting for the telly reality show: Vegetable Cops – Houston. In tonight’s episode, Inspector Digg Durt is in hot pursuit of a dozen crazed cucumbers who have hijacked a tomato tray. Tomorrow – Durt goes under groundcover and gets the dirt on a woman reportedly smuggling concealed potash.

And what if the Oak Park comrades were to picket the White House and demand that the President surrender his sweet corn? Imagine the protest signs: “Beer Summits, Yes; Fresh Vegetables, NO!” “No Irish Potatoes in Our Country!” “We Demand to See the Guest List in The Old Farmer’s Almanac!” “No Vegetation Without Representation!” “Sweet Corn is Not in the Constitution!”

Oak Park’s most famous resident was Ernest Hemingway, the Gabby Hayes look-alike who never met a tyrant he didn’t like, especially his pal Fidel Castro. His socialist ideology has indeed come home to Oak Park. Perhaps Julie Bass should give up gardening to become a writer. Her books might include: The Sunflower Also Rises, But Only With a Permit; The Old Man and the Unmutual Seeds; For Whom the Bell Pepper Tolls; Across the River and into the Government-Approved Trees; The Short, Happy Life of a Socialist Cucumber; A Moveable or Else Feast; and A Farewell to Broccoli.

-30-

Ken Follett's THE PILLARS ON THE EARTH on DVD

Sometimes you risk a few dollars on a DVD based on a book anticipating that it will probably disappoint, and are pleasantly surprised to learn that the filmmakers have done a good job.

This was not one of those times.

Cartoons, cliches', and drivel.