Moments Before the Wedding: "Awwww, Mommmm...!"

Whose Bible? Whose Army?

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Whose Bible?  Whose Army?

ABP (Associated Baptist Press) News reports that the Pentagon will no longer license Lifeway Christian Resources (associated with the Southern Baptist Convention) to emboss official military emblems on a line of its Bibles.

The casual reader will be surprised that the Joint Chiefs of Staff license any product, as if they were a sports franchise negotiating with Chinese factory bosses for tee-shirts, water bottles, and underwear with advertising printed on them.

The second problem is that the Pentagon is a 70-year-old building in Washington.  It doesn’t license, say, or do anything; it is a building with a roof and walls and offices and restrooms and cafeterias and windows.  Buildings are remarkably deficient in intellect, will, or voice, except in late-night horror movies about lust-crazed elevators.  Attributing a statement to the Pentagon is as careless as attributing one to the Vatican.  The Vatican is a small city-state, and can’t say anything.  One might as well attempt to attempt to give a voice to Luxembourg or Liechtenstein. 

An accurate attribution is to report that a properly constituted authority figure by name within the Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Vatican, or the Pentagon has made a moral, ethical, legal, or business decision.

Any variation on “The Pentagon says…” is sloppy reporting, for it does not say what individual or named committee under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff enjoys the power to license tchotchkes.

And for me, there’s nothing that echoes the sacrificial spirit of Sergeant York, Audie Murphy, and Dorie Miller like a committee of commissioned officers in air-conditioned suites cutting deals for Chinese coffee mugs with the Navy seal on them.

So who put the “Eeeeeeeeeeeek!” into the unnamed licensing committee at the Pentagon?

Mikey – yes, a grown man who goes by “Mikey” - Weinstein is the recipient of a first-rate education first at the Air Force Academy and then at law school, all funded by the taxpayer.  He has demonstrated his gratefulness by suing lots of folks because apparently, in one of those late-night bull sessions that are an essential part of barracks life, a sort of Hyde Park Corner safety valve granted by the wiser sort of NCO, he once heard religious opinions with which he did not agree.

The horror, the horror.

In such matters one should, of fairness, not only read about an individual, but should read what he says: http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org.   Note the statement under the banner of the web site:

When one proudly dons a U.S. Military uniform, there is only one religious symbol: the American flag.  There is only one religious scripture: the American Constitution.  Finally, there is only one religious faith: American patriotism. 

– Mikey Weinstein

Mikey’s proposed incarnation of the State as a religion, and as the sole religion, is a novelty of tyranny quite in opposition to the Constitution Mikey purports to defend.

There may or may not be ethical and legal arguments for a military symbol embossed on the cover of a Bible, missal, siddur, or other prayer book.  However, to imagine an soldier in the heat, filth, dust, and danger of Whose-Brilliant-Idea-Was-This-istan being offended because the fellow next to him owns a copy of a Bible with an Army symbol on its cover is, to the generous-minded, unthinkable.

If Mikey, a keyboard commando who apparently has not been in combat himself, wants to own and read in his comfy office a copy of a Bible without anything embossed in the cover, under the Constitution he is free to do so.  And if an E-2 in 120-degree heat can take a few minutes to read from a Bible whose cover is different from Mikey’s, he not only has the same Constitutional right to do so, he has earned and defended that right in ways Mikey fails to understand.

-30-

The President and the Deadly Dinner Forks

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

The President and the Deadly Dinner Forks

Last week the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials met at Florida’s Disney World (the National Association of Canadian Elected and Appointed Officials perhaps had to settle for Dollywood).

The President spoke at a dinner for the group, but before he could safely do so, Raquel Regalado, an official of the NALEO, required the Elected and Appointed Officials to give up their forks – they were never trusted with knives from the beginning -- because of the danger of such instruments to the Leader of the Free World.

There is no word whether the Elected and Appointed Officials were later strip-searched for unauthorized teaspoons.

Ms. (no doubt) Regalado said to the Elected and Appointed Officials: “As you know, we’re having another speaker and there is some Secret Service involved. So there’s a reason why there’s (sic) no knives at your table and the forks will be collected…“So, like the good Hispanic mother I’m here to tell you to please, eat your lunch.”

With that, Ms. Regalado and the Secret Service promoted layers of stereotypes: according to them, folks who have some Spanish ancestors are not to be trusted with the safety of the President or even with ordinary dining-room tableware.

Given reported recent behaviors, shouldn’t the Secret Service have been disforked instead?  Has NALEO busted heads in bar-fights in Martha’s Vineyard?  Did a NALEO official refuse to pay a, um, fun date in Colombia? 

And imagine the President speaking at a Knights of Columbus dinner.  Grand Knight Feeney comes out and says “Sure, faith ‘n’ begorrah, and because yer Irish we can’t be trustin’ ye, sure, so we’ll be givin’ ye mashed potatoes and ye’ll eat ‘em with ye bare hands, sure, so ye won’t be hurtin’ our darlin’ president.”

Or at the Churchill Club: “Eh, wot, chaps, righty-o, then, just sit quietly while the staff remove all sharp objects.  We who had an English ancestor centuries ago are marvelously malevolent, and the Secret Service fear we might fling cutlery, crumpets, and Shakespearean bon mots at the august personage of our elected President, rather, don’cha’know.” 

No, the President and the Secret Service doesn’t require that forks be confiscated from other loyal Americans, so why was a Latino organization singled out?

Ms. Regalado referred to herself as a “good Hispanic mother.”  Would a good mother of any cultural heritage permit a guest to bring his bully-boys to dinner and humiliate her children?

This incident, reported by The New York Times and others, is disturbing in its narrative of the fear, distrust, and hubris of the Secret Service, if not the President.  But even more disturbing is the passive acceptance of such arrogance: Ms. Regalado, a leader of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, instead of refusing the slight, submitted to it and required the audience to surrender their dinner forks.  And if even one courageous member of NALEO refused to be patronized by such goon-squad behavior, and quietly left the room with human dignity intact, there is no record of it.

The Huffington Post reports that the audience applauded and cheered for the President – the President who fears and distrusts them.

-30-

Who Defines You?

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Who Defines You?

The 20^th Century may not be remembered as much for the invention of radio, television, flight, and broad-spectrum antibiotics as it will for the matter of so many governments putting so many people behind barbed wire.

In 1942 Dr. Viktor Frankl, a middle-aged Austrian psychiatrist considered unworthy of life in the new world order, was one of the millions sent to Nazi camps, and in 1945 was one of the several thousand who survived.  His intellectual discipline as a physician remained with him through the horror, making him a rational observer in an irrational milieu.

In 1946 Dr. Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a two-part book reflecting on his experiences in the prison camps and analyzing those experiences for meaning that extends to all of life.  His conclusion – and this is an oversimplification - is that all of life has meaning, especially suffering, even when we do not know what the meaning is.

Dr. Frankl does not lapse into that tired 19^th-century Darwinianism about the survival of the fittest: he states categorically that the best died because they helped others, often with their own inadequate bits of food:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Just as strongly, Dr. Frankl repudiates determinism: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

Dr. Frankl is a bit rough on himself for making it through, perhaps because of survivors’ guilt, but he never indulges in self-pity and never focuses on himself.  Indeed, his concept of therapy is openly against that of Freudianism and its ideas of endless introspection and self-pity.  For Dr. Frankl, emotional healing lies in the individual searching for meaning for his own life but simultaneously outside his life:

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system…being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

One of the cliches’ of our time is “defined a generation,” a weak passivity that should be rejected, certainly in the context of such drivel as “The music of X defined a generation” or “The movies of Y defined a generation.”  No, they didn’t.  Collective definitions are always flawed, and in any event a strong individual defines himself and refuses to be a lemming.  Dr. Frankl was no lemming sobbing into a MySpace account:

We have come to know Man as he really is.  After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Some collateral reading:

Bernard, Jean.  Priestblock 25487.

Frank, Anne, Diary of a Young Girl.

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar.   One wonders how much of this book is by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was behind the wire, and how much is by James D. Houston, who was not.  Is Mr. Houston a not-so-grey eminence? 

-30-

Graduation Portrait

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Graduation Portrait

Dyscostumed as a polyester monk

The graduate poses on the railway,
Then leans and pouts against an old brick wall,
And then again at the city limits sign,
Or walking barefoot on a dusty road,
And there must be a guitar there, somewhere,
And his pickup truck and the neighbor’s horse,
His letter jacket with a scripture verse,
And maybe a book that he’s never read:
Electronic images in a camera
Made in China, revealing nothing
But a tabula pretty darned rasa,
Unique, because his mother told him so,
Unique in his made-in-Shanghai jeans,
A child of God, according to the minister
Of the Adjective Fellowship of Hope

Where once he was Joseph in the Christmas play;

A target audience for Anheuser-Busch,
A tapping texter sexter flipping off
The world in a file he thinks is secret.

But in one frame he’s shyly caught in thought,

And in that accidental snap one sees
The merest hint of something that might be
Someday a man, a man who’ll stand and dare
To disobey the order of the day,
And then, wilder and bolder yet, obey
The Catena Aurea of eternity.

The Starbuck's on Mount Everest

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

The Starbuck’s on Mount Everest

The Truth is Out There (whispered in all caps)
Hidden in a tax-sheltered bucket list
Guarded by albino republicans
On the nepallingly deadly ice
Of the something-est mountain in the world.
Where the Sherpas are like, so cool and stuff,
So at one with their, like, inner thing-ness,

Spiritual advisors to lemmings lined up

Like padded, rainbow-colored walruses
In baseball caps, lining up patiently,
Lining up in the cold for group lattes
Lining up in the cold to twit their deaths
Civilization lining up to die
A litter of bodies frozen ice-green
Above, beyond the death-hot Syrian plains.
After making, perhaps, pallid obeisance
To a little god-king playing at cards,
His picture-card death-lists for Nobel peace.

Poor Blind Milton

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Poor Blind Milton

Will those who risk the bleak and arid heights
Of grim Paradise Lost require a guide,
A Sherpa of iambics for the trail?
The high blue ice of true discovery
Is littered with the tinkling toys of time:
Manifestos and men of destiny,
Loud ideologies like frail free verse
Evolving night by night, bringing, each dawn,
This morning’s firm eternal verities
Hammered in smoke upon the hissing wind,
For man’s first fall was to believe himself
To be Himself, th’eternal Self-ness,
An Orpheus before whom nothing was,
Or yet a better Vainamoinen
Here now to sing the broken world aright
With his latest electronic Sampo
Recording styled Myself Agonistes.

Their bodies litter for a time the earth

Beneath the leaf-fall orchards of the Now.

But Milton, poor blind Milton, sang the Truth

In soul-seared pain, in self-awareness bleak,
Since Milton, too, composed a song of death,
First-person singular in Satan’s voice;
He knew of Hell: for he betrayed his King.

Telephony Candidates

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Telephony Candidates

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

-      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze”

That curious silence on Wednesday morning of last week was your telephone not ringing, not ringing at last, after weeks of auditory assault on your work, your leisure, and your home.

Mr. Alexander Graham Bell probably did not anticipate the ubiquity of the ‘phone or its susceptibility to misuse by governments.  For the past few weeks our ‘phones have been occupied by folks who proclaim their desire to be politicians by decrying politicians.  Governor Palin and Governor Perry wanted to be my automated best friends forever, and all sorts of strange people interrupted my day to tell me their opponents are bad people.

Here’s the problem – candidates use my telephone in order to bother me.  They are not paying for my telephone; I am.  Private-sector vendors are now forbidden to bother people with unwanted telephone calls, but clearly Section 1 of the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution does not apply to political candidates who propose to protect and defend Section 1 of the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution, and that’s some serious irony indeed.

If someone other than a political candidate telephones you repeatedly, you have a legal case regarding stalking.  Political candidates get a free pass, a free telephone pass, and you have to pay for it and you have to put up with it.

Even the most casual observer would deduce (elementary, Watson, elementary) that unwanted telephone calls invariably result in negative feelings.  A candidate or his minions who bother folks by telephoning them have given the annoyed citizen one good reason for NOT voting for said candidate. 

Public Utilities Commission of Texas probably can’t do anything about political ice-calls, but you could write them a brief email letter (block format, six parts, just as you were taught in school) POLITELY telling them how you feel about receiving repeated unwanted telephone calls (my personal best is nine in one day) from political candidates:

Public Utilities Commission of Texas

1701 N. Congress Avenue
P. O. Box 13326
Austin, Texas 78711-3326
customer@puc.state.tx.us

No, no, don’t call the fat boys on a.m. radio; email the P.U.C.

But my feelings are really hurt – Governor Palin ignores me now.  She just wanted me for my vote.  Sniff.

Graduation 2012

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

It’s on the ‘Net; It Must be True

Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian who was born in Scotland, invented the telephone so that young Americans could use the thing to talk, text, tweet, and twit to each other during high school graduation and thus ignore high school graduation.  Since Mr. Bell never finished school, we may appreciate the layers of irony.

In May of every year, like buzzards returning to wherever it is buzzards return to, tiresome screeds about the ignorance of graduates arrive to roost in one’s in-box. 

One of the most popular is wrongly attributed to Bill Gates, another successful fellow who did not finish school and who does not write silly stuff, and is usually titled “Rules They Didn’t Teach You in School” or some such, and is forwarded by the sort of people who never vote in their local school board elections because they’re too busy complaining.

The idea of hopeless naivete is not true of most high school students, and it’s certainly not true of college students.  Very few graduates ever finish a degree on the mummy-and-daddy nickel, and for those who do, well, good for their mums and dads.

The reality is that most college students work their way through school, usually in minimum-wage jobs and at odd hours.  A student who works the night shift flipping burgers can only wonder about why he is falsely stereotyped as someone who thinks he’s too good to flip burgers.

My daughter spent some college time shoveling (Newark, New Jersey) in a stable.  Hamburgers would have been better.

Any college classroom will feature, yes, a few princesses of both sexes, but they are far outnumbered by folks who know their way around the loading dock, Afghanistan, and hospital wards at 0-Dark-Thirty, and who can wield with great skill an M4, a broom, and a bedpan.

One of my fish English students was a former sergeant who left the Army after sixteen years.  When I asked him why he didn’t finish his twenty he said that after three combat tours in the desert he figured he had pushed his luck enough.

He and his mates studied English literature in a college hydraulics lab because of a shortage of classroom space.  No ivy grew on the equipment.

Two of my students were in their mid-thirties, had been pals from childhood, owned a roofing company, and were nursing students.  In their late thirties, they said they were getting a little old for climbing up on roofs all the year ‘round and were going to sell the company and work in the shade for a while.  I asked them why they didn’t keep the company and spend well-earned time out of the sun by delegating more authority to their employees.  They said that their names were on each roof (metaphorically), and that they would never sign off on a job if they didn’t have first-hand knowledge of each square inch of that roof.

Oh, yeah, some dumb college kids, huh?

Age and experience are good, but they are only predictors: there are adult students who become angry when they are required to show up on time (which, presumably, was required of them on the job) and actually do some work (ditto).  In the same class there can be 18-year-olds demonstrating a far better work ethic (not the one texting behind her Volkswagen-size purse, second seat, second table on the right) than their elders.

In the end, success is almost always the result of an individual’s choice to show up for work, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom, and hit a lick at it.

That is, after the individual takes the tin cricket out of his ear.  In school we were taught that in ye olden days of yore crazy people who stumbled around mumbling to themselves were kept safely away from others by being chained to a wall somewhere.  We thought that was a bad punishment.  Silly us.

One of life’s lessons – it needn’t come from the classroom – is that stereotyping is wrong.  Just because something’s on the ‘net doesn’t mean it’s true.  Those giddy folks waving their diplomae (“diplomae,” he wrote, for he had been to night school) around and yelling almost surely worked very hard for the moment, both in and out of the classrooms and laboratories.

+Ray Bradbury

Some years ago I attended a computer convention at which Ray Bradbury spoke, and I wish I had a transcript of his speech -- he was so logical, so reasonable, so balanced in his discussion of civilization and technology.

Afterward we were told that Mr. B would be happy to sign copies of his books, but not other bits of paper -- the man was not naive about marketing! I had with me my boyhood copy of Fahrenheit 401 and wanted him to sign that. I don't think he was happy about signing a thirty-year-old paperback but he did, and an acquaintance took our picture. The expression on his face very clearly expresses his thought: "Who is this strange man and why couldn't the cheapskate have bothered to buy a new copy of my book in the lobby?"

Tim Horton's

The Drones' Club

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Drones' Club

The FAA is expected to grant permission for public and private entities to fling into the spacious if somewhat crowded skies above the fruited plains of freedom some 30,000 pilotless aircraft to spy on Americans (http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-spying-memo-leaked-088/) in addition to the hundreds flyin’ ‘n’ spyin’ domestically now.  Further, no privacy rights in public or in private are recognized; the Fourth Amendment has, oh, evolved.  And, hey, is that an electronic eye peeking through your bedroom window?

There is some babble about how useful these 30,000 projected drones will be in finding lost hikers, and, sure, if there’s anything the Founding Fathers focused on, it was finding lost hikers.

Indeed, the repeated drone telephone calls that interrupt our days and evenings have repeatedly stressed how important this election is for lost hikers.

The Daily Mail recently published maps of drone-launching sites in use now – there’s one near you: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134376/Is-drone-neighbourhood-Rise-killer-spy-planes-exposed-FAA-forced-reveal-63-launch-sites-U-S.html. 

The drone looking at you can be as big as a fighter aircraft or as small as a toy rubber-band airplane.  Not only are these almost silent flying Orwellian telescreens capable of face-recognition and wifi intercepts, they can be armed with a catalogue of missiles, machine guns, and death rays.

Thus, when you step outside your door tomorrow morning you can be monitored by a pimply oaf whose online name is Dork Lord of the Thunder-Sith and who perhaps has access to a little red button connected to Newarkfire missiles aboard his remote-control hunter-killer, the USS Steve Jobs.  May it please God he isn’t still traumatized by that late-night hissy-fit-flap in Starbuck’s over Star Trek versus Star Wars.

Once upon a time the skies over America were guarded by brave military airmen who had taken the military oath and who were the products of a culture of honor and integrity.  They protected us by watching for Soviet missiles flying in over the Arctic Circle or from Stooge Castro’s occupied Cuba.

Now we are snooped on by peeping-tom nerds in Pink Floyd tee-shirts.

The greatest risk to a not-a-pilot in some bunker is tennis-finger from playing with his joy-stick (Resist the obvious joke.  Resist it.).

A young man or woman who successfully completes flight training is honored to have a loved one pin his pilot’s wings to his uniform.  A drone-hero asks a guy in an R2D2 costume pin a plastic thumby-toggle-thingie to his knee-pants.

A real pilot returning from a successful mission does a victory roll; a drone-pilot high-fives his Bill Gates poster.

The dialogue in new war movies will certainly be different: “You’ve got an enemy fighter on your tush!” and “We have a decaf triple latte at twelve o’clock high.”

But, seriously, one is sure we need those drones.  After all, private enterprise clearly reads our emails and site accessions now, and governments at all levels can do so if they wish.  If we travel, we are subject to identification checks, strip-searches, and touchy-feely-we’re-not-even-married searches by capos.  All that is left to make control complete is visual spying.  What are you growing in your garden?  Now move your thumb so the Eye can read the complete serial number on your grandpa’s 1955 J. C. Higgins .22.  Where are you going?  Is that a low-flush toilet, comrade?  Let’s check to see if you possess illegal light bulbs.

There is an old hymn about how you’ll never walk alone.  And it is truer than ever.

-30-

No Political Signs on Church Property

Old Ford Truck, Zavalla, Texas

About That Bill Gates Forward...

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

It’s on the ‘Net; It Must be True

Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian who was born in Scotland, invented the telephone so that young Americans could use the thing to talk, text, tweet, and twit to each other during high school graduation and thus ignore high school graduation.  Since Mr. Bell never finished school, we may appreciate the layers of irony.

In May of every year, like buzzards returning to wherever it is buzzards return to, tiresome screeds about the ignorance of graduates arrive to roost in one’s in-box. 

One of the most popular is wrongly attributed to Bill Gates, another successful fellow who did not finish school and who does not write silly stuff, and is usually titled “Rules They Didn’t Teach You in School” or some such, and is forwarded by the sort of people who never vote in their local school board elections because they’re too busy complaining.

The idea of hopeless naivete is not true of most high school students, and it’s certainly not true of college students.  Very few graduates ever finish a degree on the mummy-and-daddy nickel, and for those who do, well, good for their mums and dads.

The reality is that most college students work their way through school, usually in minimum-wage jobs and at odd hours.  A student who works the night shift flipping burgers can only wonder about why he is falsely stereotyped as someone who thinks he’s too good to flip burgers.

My daughter spent some college time shoveling (Newark, New Jersey) in a stable.  Hamburgers would have been better.

Any college classroom will feature, yes, a few princesses of both sexes, but they are far outnumbered by folks who know their way around the loading dock, Afghanistan, and hospital wards at 0-Dark-Thirty, and who can wield with great skill an M4, a broom, and a bedpan.

One of my fish English students was a former sergeant who left the Army after sixteen years.  When I asked him why he didn’t finish his twenty he said that after three combat tours in the desert he figured he had pushed his luck enough.

He and his mates studied English literature in a college hydraulics lab because of a shortage of classroom space.  No ivy grew on the equipment.

Two of my students were in their mid-thirties, had been pals from childhood, owned a roofing company, and were nursing students.  In their late thirties, they said they were getting a little old for climbing up on roofs all the year ‘round and were going to sell the company and work in the shade for a while.  I asked them why they didn’t keep the company and spend well-earned time out of the sun by delegating more authority to their employees.  They said that their names were on each roof (metaphorically), and that they would never sign off on a job if they didn’t have first-hand knowledge of each square inch of that roof.

Oh, yeah, some dumb college kids, huh?

Age and experience are good, but they are only predictors: there are adult students who become angry when they are required to show up on time (which, presumably, was required of them on the job) and actually do some work (ditto).  In the same class there can be 18-year-olds demonstrating a far better work ethic (not the one texting behind her Volkswagen-size purse, second seat, second table on the right) than their elders.

In the end, success is almost always the result of an individual’s choice to show up for work, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom, and hit a lick at it.

That is, after the individual takes the tin cricket out of his ear.  In school we were taught that in ye olden days of yore crazy people who stumbled around talking to themselves were kept safely away from others by being chained to a wall somewhere.  We thought that was a bad punishment.  Silly us.

One of life’s lessons – it needn’t come from the classroom – is that stereotyping is wrong.  Just because something’s on the ‘net doesn’t mean it’s true.  Those giddy folks waving their diplomae (“diplomae,” he wrote, for he had been to night school) around and yelling almost surely worked very hard for the moment, both in and out of the classrooms and laboratories.

-30-

Flip This Dancing Storage Unit off Bridezilla Island

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Flip This Dancing Storage Unit off Bridezilla Island

Viewing reality television is rather like watching Republicans trying to dance to rock music, repulsive and yet somehow fascinating.

A current entertainment is the flatscreening of shaky images of people arguing with each other about other folks’ junk. 

Back in ye olden times television filmmakers hired writers who then generated scripts featuring plot, character, and setting.  Producers then hired actors, cameramen, set designers, electricians, carpenters, and other professionals to put together often-beautiful works of art.

Perhaps the ultimate Hegelian dialectic of television art now would be James Arness, Loretta Young, and Patrick McGoohan shrieking at each other while bidding on a cowboy boot that was once seen in Gilley’s Place, like babushkas squabbling over the last bowl of lentil soup in Petrograd in the winter of 1917.

What might the obsession with abandoned storage units symbolize?

“Look at this, dude – rare monaural recordings of Duke Ellington’s early work!”

“Who’s Duke Ellington?”

“I dunno; I guess we could get something for these old records from the recyclers.  But, hey, look at this old book. Nice leather.  Must be worth something.”

“That’s a Bible; someone will want that for a dashboard decoration, you know, along with fuzzy dice.”

“Okay, we’ll keep that.  Oh, hey, look at all this metal junk.”

“Oh, I know what those are – that’s a hammer, that’s a saw, that’s a folding carpenter’s rule, and those pointy things in that bucket are nails.  I’ve seen pictures of such things on my laptop.”

“But what are they for?”

“Oh, back in the Dark Ages, y’know, in the 1980s, people used them to, like, cut wood, and, like, build and repair their own stuff.”

“Freakin’ primitive, dude!  But how do you plug them in?  Or do they have batteries?”

“No, the cavemen used these things by hand.”

“So did they get to sue someone for that?”

“No, I think I remember being told that they felt fulfilled or something by work and sweat and creativity – totally old school.”

“Wow, that’s like, you know, existential and stuff.  People were, like, so spiritual back in the day when they did stuff with hammers and read books and stuff.”

“What does ‘Made in USA’ mean?”

“Back during the Civil War in the 1930s people used to make their own stuff in this country, polluting the rivers and killing the striped owls or something.”

“That was dumb.  Stuff comes from the mall, and doesn’t pollute.”

“Hey, what’s that covered by dust?”

“This?  Oh, it’s the soul of a civilization.”

“What’s civilization?”

“Oh, art, music, literature, faith – you could look ‘em up on Wonkiepedia.”

“Can we get any money out of it?”

“No.  Old stuff.  Forget it.”

“So the meaning of life is outbidding other people for old golf clubs and record players in an abandoned storage shed?”

“Gosh, dude, you make it sound so inadequate.”

-30-

The Class of 2012

The Class of 2012

On graduation night you’ll sit among
Your friends, a make-the-sponsors-flustered crowd
Of the alphabetized, well-rehearsed young,
Well-shepherded, well-chaperoned - still loud!

And yet, somehow, surprisingly alone
You’ll be, your thoughts spinning wildly, your heart
Aflutter as you stifle a nervous yawn,
Yes, one among many, but still apart.

For this brief hour is when your childhood ends,
An awkward, happy, frightening, joyful truth,
And you must make your way without those friends
Who with your loving family blessed your youth.

But, oh! It’s here, it’s here – up stands your row;
Adjust your cap – it’s time for you to go.

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

James Bond is Assigned a Chaperone

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

James Bond’s Chaperone

The Secret Service is so secret that they’ve got their own web site:

http://www.secretservice.gov/join/index.shtml.  One wonders if they’ve also got their own lingerie catalogue.

The matter of the lads in the Preobrazhensky Regiment doing a geriatric spring break in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, is no secret, either, and like Fyodor Karamazov making goo-goo eyes at a tired waitress at closing time, the matter simply won’t go away.

One of the many problems with the Victoria’s Secret…um…Secret Service is that not even they seem to know their purpose.  An American might infer that the boys in buzz-do’s are assigned to guard the President, but consider these two paragraphs from the SS’s own site:

The United States Secret Service culture is represented through the agency’s five core values: justice, duty, courage, honesty and loyalty. These values, and the Secret Service adage “Worthy of Trust and Confidence,” resonate with each man and woman who has sworn to uphold these principles. Not only do these values foster a culture of success, but they also hold each person to the highest standards of personal and professional integrity.

Because our highly-trained workforce is one of our greatest assets, we empower each individual to realize their full potential and more. The Secret Service offers career growth and opportunities to make your future as dynamic and rewarding as it can be. Those who are dedicated, driven by integrity and welcome unique challenges often find that the Secret Service is a perfect match.

And let The People say: Huh?

The SS has cores that resonate with dynamic thing-ness fostering assets whose potential is dedicated and unique, and, like stuff.

Who wrote this obtuse, cliché’-sodden, Mission Statement drivel?

Shocked, shocked that there are hormones (and possum-poor English usage) going on in here, our otherwise let-it-all-Bill-Clinton-out government is suffering its quadrennial election-year spasm of Puritanism and has promulgated a Willy Wonka list for the superannuated frat boys who trifle with girls’ hearts while carrying weapons.

The first rule is that on overseas trips the SS agents must not have foreigners in their rooms.

You see, there’s already a problem here.  If you are a Yank visiting, say, Liechtenstein, you are the foreigner.  One is reminded of the Bill Mauldin cartoon of Willie and Joe on pass in Paris and remarking “Did you ever see so many foreigners in all your life?”

The second rule is that SS agents may not patronize “non-reputable” (minus two points for not writing “disreputable”) establishments.  Y’know, back in the day that would have pretty much put all of San Diego’s Lower Broadway off limits.

The next three rules detail drinking.  Excuse me, ma’am, but shouldn’t a forty-year-old SS agent pretty much know how to order a single glass of wine with dinner, go to bed early (and alone), and behave himself?  And if not, why have you given a drunk guy weapons and turned him loose among our nation’s friends?

Another new rule advises the Boys Gone Wild that from now on they will be accompanied by a chaperone.  This leads one to consider whether our we’re-a-world-power government is clear on the distinction between the Praetorian Guard and a high school marching band trip to Waco:

“Okay, kids, ten more minutes in the pool and then room check and weapons check.”

“Jimmy, you left your shoulder-held, gas-operated, fully automatic M4 in the lobby again!  I am so tired of picking up after you!”

“No, Billy, you won’t need your concussion grenades at breakfast.”

“You forgot your shoulder holster, Bobby?  But all the other agents remembered their shoulder holsters.”

“No, Timmy, filling the French president’s office with clown balloons would not be funny.”

“Biff, you were told very clearly to bring along tear gas, not poison gas.  And you think you lost those canisters where?”

In all seriousness, any nation’s leader is a target for evil.  The President should be protected.  To this end he should reassign his current Streltsy to parking-lot duty and hire some old-fashioned street cops for the White House grounds and a couple of no-b…um…no-nonsense Army or Marine sergeants for his trips.

-30-

Courthouse Square, Jasper

Verizon: Massive FAIL

A lovely photograph of a foggy street scene in Jasper should be here; I suppose, as the Chorus in Henry V says, you can picture it in your imagination.

And picture this: Verizon lies.