That Island, That Book

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
March, 2013

That Island, That Book

A favorite discussion topic used to be about what book someone would take with him (the “him” is gender-neutral) into exile on a deserted island.

There was always some princess of either sex (one supposes now that it would be a matter of any of the four or five genders now decreed by any given federal court who takes Psalm 82.6 to new places) who brought up the Bible, and some leveler who snarked “Yeah, well, it’s about time you read it.”

Last week the London Daily Mail published a piece about a life prisoner who is into his twentieth year of talking to six walls and who feels very sorry for himself but not for the several folks he shot for not understanding his special needs and his sensitive, artistic spirit. 

The article mentioned that the prisoner has read about the little plastic boxes that people carry around and talk to (rather like the prisoner conversing with walls) but has never seen one.  He has no computer, no telly, no movies, and no radio.  The prisoner can read about such things because he is permitted to have at one time any twenty books, newspapers, or magazines from the prison library.

This is somewhat more than the one book on that hypothetical island, and certainly more entertainment than fictional Hilts’ baseball in The Great Escape.

If you were locked into a it’s-just-you-and-the-walls cell with a tiny concrete table, concrete stool, concrete bed (with a thin, fireproof mattress), and a steel potty for 23 hours of each day, what would you read?

Maybe the real book: Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

When P. G. Wodehouse was imprisoned by the Nazis, he managed to take with him the complete works of Shakespeare.  He probably didn’t have to worry about his fellow prisoners borrowing the volume all the time.

Under the category “Books for Prisoners,” Amazon.com lists 21,847 results – not only is a significant percentage of this nation in prison, they seem to be more literate than the free population.

When 18-year-old Joseph Ratzinger was marched into a prisoner-of-war camp by Americans he carried a pencil and paper, and wrote poetry.

Giovanni Guareschi, an Italian officer, managed to write his thoughts on scraps of paper while in a series of German prison camps for two years, and used them as the basis of My Secret Diary, dedicated “To My Comrades Who Never Returned.”

Fr. Jean Bernard of Luxembourg was sent to Dachau with nothing, but lived to write about it in Priestblock 25487.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, survived four different death camps and after the war wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.

Ho Chi Minh wrote poetry while in French and Chinese prisons.  Those who know both Chinese and Vietnamese tell us that his poems blend both traditions and are cultured, traditional, ironic, and precisely styled.  Thus, one of the few formalist poets after World War II was a Communist mass-murderer.

Many of St. Paul’s letters were written in a number of Roman prisons.  John Bunyan, St. Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatte, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Malory, Boethius, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Charles DeGaulle, James Clavell, Cervantes, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, O. Henry, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Vonnegut, Ronald Searle – many of the world’s most famous writers were inside the wire fence, starving but thinking, thinking all the time.

If you wonder what books our sometimes shadowy government provides for prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base at the southern tip of Cuba, America thus completing Castro’s theme of that unhappy island as one big prison camp, the Guardian (U.K.) has the answer: Harry Potter stories, Agatha Christie, the Twilight series, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dan Brown, travel books, and Islamic books. The library hopes to expand to 20,000 volumes, which would be the envy of most grade schools in this country.

We do know that despite seques-can’t-spell-it, the remaining few workers in this nation will be required to fund $195 million (New York Times) for improvements to the prisoner compound at Guantanamo, including $750 thousand (Fox News) for a soccer field.  The approximately 166 prisoners must be mad about footer, eh?

The prison also offers cable tv (perhaps Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is popular), which is a good idea for any entity who wants to keep people from thinking.  Television is anaesthesia.  Books and paper, though, those are dangerous.  Some of those prisoners are scribbling, and maybe one will write another The Consolation of Philosophy, but possibly one will scrawl another Mein Kampf.

-30-

Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Oberlin College in Ohio dates to the early 19^th century.  Oberlin claims to be the first college to admit women and black men, though Middlebury College in Vermont says that honor belongs to them.  Certainly men and women from Oberlin helped save people from bondage during the slavery time, and some 1,000 Oberlin men, black and white, served during the Civil War, enabling their classmate Mary Jane Patterson to become the first African-American woman to earn a BA, in 1862.  At the turn of the 20^th century missionaries from Oberlin, then a Presbyterian school, felt a call to witness in China, and many died there from persecution.

Oberlin has truly been a light unto the nations.

Sadly, Oberlin has recently suffered a series of racist graffiti incidents, vandalism, and physical assaults.  Apparently no one did anything about the enormities except feel bad. 

More recently, someone said that someone said that he or she had seen a Ku Klux Klansman, bedsheet in full sail, walking across campus around two in the morning.  However, there is no source or me-phone footage.  Local police report that other witnesses report that saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket, so someone needs to verify the whereabouts of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus.

Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, stood to his tackle like a true Oberlin man – he canceled classes, saying "…let us be very clear, we stand united. We will not give into hate."

However, in canceling classes, Dr. Krislov, hereinafter referred to as Aunt Pittypat, did indeed give in to hate.  A few bipedal pimples with spray paint bullied him and an entire college into abandoning their vocations as scholars.  Instead of standing up for the freedom to learn, to live, to work, Oberlin spent a day feeling sorry for its collective self.

That’s not exactly the spirit of the Oberlin men who helped hold the union line in the cause of freedom.

With classes canceled out of fear last week, the men and women of Oberlin finally did something – they made signs, they staged a sit-in, and they organized tolerance sessions.

Oh, yeah, a sit-in – that’ll stop evil in its clawed tracks.  Hey, and signs.  Wow.

One student told a rally that “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”  The content and the use of the passive voice says everything we need to know about a young adult who, given the rare opportunity to study civilization, explore ideas, develop concepts, write, dance, paint, compose music, and perhaps, like her Obie predecessors, help free oppressed peoples, could only bleat out in weakness: “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”

Reports of reports report (finding anything solidly sourced about the problems at Oberlin is at present impossible) that two Oberlin students were allegedly / maybe / sort of arrested / detained as persons of interest / expelled from school, but if so, no one is saying why.

When Aunt Pittypat addressed the newsies at a press conference, his students reportedly yelled vulgarities at him, so maybe a culture of spoken obscenity already obtains at Oberlin, and only written obscenity is offensive to the young scholars.

In addition to sponsoring teach-ins, Oberlin has called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to, well, investigate crudities scrawled on walls.  And if that’s not a worthy use of the FBI, then what is, eh?

The reader can follow the Oberlin community as they twitter and tweet at

https://twitter.com/oberlin.  Somehow one gets the idea that Oberlin College at present is the sort of place where people seriously read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Oberlin was once a moral and cultural light, a college of heroic young people who not only called for injustices to be righted, but hazarded their lives in doing so themselves.  Just now about all they seem to be capable of calling for is their smelling salts.

-30-

Goodbye, Miz Burres

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Goodbye, Miz Burres

Music teachers are even more essentially American than red brick schools, soda fountains on Main Street, Studebakers, baseball, and sidewalk cracks that must be carefully stepped over.  Without a Miss (or the East Texas variant, Miz) Burris or Bernice or Emma to play the piano for school assemblies, weddings, funerals, Sunday liturgies, and visits to the nursing home, America would lose some of her soul and much of her Soul.

After all, some adult once showed young Beverly Sills how to grace a high note and young Ivory Joe Hunter how to echo life on the keys of an old piano.

Our Miz Burres died last week at the age of 102.  At 100 she was still giving private lessons at home.  In her 80s she was infinitely pleased to have her own childhood piano teacher, Miz Lexie / Aunt Lexie, sit in on her young students’ recitals.  And for decades before that she demonstrated infinite patience with schoolchildren, including a few inattentive oafs.

Like the wonderful old three-story school that reposed in pontifical majesty between First Methodist and First Baptist, perhaps in order to keep the peace between them, Miz Burres had always been there and would always be there.  A photograph of her with second-graders in 1955 and a photograph of her at a celebration of her happy century taken last year show exactly the same woman: elegant, white-haired, smiling, surrounded by adoring fans, including her last student. 

And that last student, still a schoolgirl, will in years to come teach other children how to play the piano, and will show them ways of patterning notes, saying, “This is how Miz Burres taught me…”  And so, yes, Miz Burres will always be there when little hearts and hands learn the keys and then grow up to celebrate civilization through music.

A young person of my acquaintance once visited Westminster Abbey, and in a cloister ambulatory now stepped out by sneakers rather than by monastic sandals, noted that she was looking down at the grave of her friend Muzio Clementi, who lived to the age of eighty despite having been married four times.  “Miz Burres taught me his sonatinas,” the young person said, “They’re fun to play.”

While driving to Miz Burres’ funeral, the same person, now a young woman, switched on the CD player and heard the prologue to Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, something else she learned to play from Miz Burres.

Much of what is good in life we all owe to each Miz Burres who blessed us in our youth.

Parade magazine is offering its first ever Music Educator Award of $10,000 to a music teacher working in an American school, kindergarten through university.  At Parade.com/music you can nominate that special music teacher who so much influenced you.  There is surely in your life a Miz Burres who could use that money to buy some better instruments or some new sheet music for her children’s lessons.

Miz Burres never had children at home, but like James Hilton’s fictional Mr. Chips, and in very truth, she can say, and surely does from a happy, happy place in Heaven, “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity... pity I never had any children. But you're wrong. I have. Thousands of them. Thousands of them...”

Goodbye, Miz Burres.

-30-

Cincinnatus

Rough Draft

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

17 February 2013

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Cincinnatus

When Cincinnatus in a desperate time

Was called to serve the undeserving state
Imperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls

No

But rather for the fuller at his cloth

The builder with his plans and rule and line
The seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings

For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing

 

 

Jack Kerouac in Houston

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Jack Kerouac in Houston

In Houston I saw a man in a shiny metal helmet featuring two antennae (the helmet, not the man) blocking traffic and waving his arms madly while screaming.  Perhaps he was trying to hitch a ride to his home planet.  If he continues that sort of thing in the street he will soon find his way to another world under the wheels of a Mercedes-Benz with a tastefully discreet University of Texas Alumnus sticker.

Before an excellent lunch at Kenny & Ziggy’s New York (it’s really in Houston, but, well, you know) Delicatessen, 2327 Post Oak Boulevard, 77056, www.kennyandziggys.com), the daughter-person took me to Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, 77005, www.brazosbookstore.com. 

Located in a retro-1960s building in a charming neighborhood, Brazos Bookstore is a Texas cultural treasure.  Associated with the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the Academy of American Poets, the American Institute of Architects, Rice University, the Baker Institute, the Houston Public Library, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and a number of local publishers and literary magazines, Brazos Bookstore is an independent agora for readers and writers, and swears no obedience to polls, fashions, top-ten lists, marketing gnomes, or the alligator-shoe boys.

The store is well-lit and features comfortable chairs and a large table for spreading out a folio, a map, a picture, a newspaper, a manifesto, or a magazine.  The various genres are categorized clearly, and the staff are helpful and cheerful.  Alas that there is no coffee machine or cat, but towards the back an orange stripe on the floor leads you on an Alice-in-Wonderland journey through a workroom to the minimalist but clean and wheelchair-accessible euphemism with framed art and a neat length of iron I-beam angling from the floor to the ceiling.

Brazos Bookstore nurtures young Tejano, Texian, and Texan writers, yes, but you will also find John Keats and Evelyn Waugh.  As with any good book store, the staff will order “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” for you, which keeps your credit card information off the snooping and thieving magic electric box of wondrous misinformation and obedience.

A panel of announcements keeps one current with literary, artistic, and musical events, and perhaps it all sounds a little self-consciously artsy, but we must ask ourselves if we as workers and builders and waiters and cowboys are going to celebrate the First Nations, Spanish, Mexican, German, African, Czech, English, Lebanese, Jewish, Swedish, Danish, French, Chinese, and other cultures that Hegelize into our look-out-world-here-we-are Texas culture/s, or are we going to slump into isolated corners passively obeying the mother-ship lights and noises from magic electric boxes of wondrous misinformation and obedience?

As the country-and-western song says, if you’re going to play in Texas, ya gotta have a fiddle in the band.  A flute will do too.  Or your book or poem, your painting, your sculpture, your backyard fence that is your sculpture, or that functional and aesthetically-pleasing iron I-beam that keeps the building from falling down on the night-shift welder and the aging adjunct faculty dude considering the nature of iambs and their relevance in contemporary poetry.

So what’s your fiddle, eh?

But back to the announcements:  Orange Show Monument (I don’t know what that is) at 2401 Munger Street in Houston is hosting a Kerouac Fest on the 9^th of March from three to ten.  For most of us, three to ten means three in the afternoon until ten at night, but with Kerouac-istas one can never be quite sure.

 The occasion features a film screening, a poetry showcase (I don’t know if that’s a metaphor or if cabinetry is part of the evening), poetry buskers (one fears that this might involve English Morris Dancers leaping about with copies of Shelley and Byron strapped to their legs with cords hand woven by Huguenot descendants in The Fens), a panel discussion (be still, my heart), a twitter by Exquisite Corpse (or not), readings, live jazz (as opposed to dead jazz), something about Domy Books, and a chance to exchange Kerouacan bon mots with Oscar Pena, Salvador Macias, Chris Wise, The Free Radicals, DJ Black Slacks, Michael Hoerman, Dr. Chuck Taylor, Dr. Chris Carmona, Kelly Ann Ellis, and Josh Hayes.

You can order a ticket in advance for $10 at orangeshow.org, or you can buy one at the door / gateway / portal to an alternative universe for $15.

I left Houston without seeing Helmet-Guy again.  I wish him happiness.  I hope he drops the helmet of endless and self-destructive introspection, reads a little Kerouac, and learns to play a fiddle of some sort.

-30-

Is This Seat Saved?

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Is This Seat Saved?

As Abraham was called to leave his home,

To serve one God in haunted emptiness
Where errant spirits misguided pilgrims’ steps
Into those thickets that entangled lost souls

And

As Brother Francis, barefoot in the wild,

With rock and prayer rebuilt long-fallen shrines
When they had crumbled into weed-choked ruins
Where wolves gnawed on the bones of civilization

Now

An old man riding in a city bus,

Wearing spectacles and a cheap wristwatch,
Has come to see us through the wilderness,
And enkindle for us the Easter fire

From My Cold, Dead Paws

 

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

From My Cold, Dead Paws

Last week a police dog discharged a firearm into a house on Crescent Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

At around two in the morning the police were in cold pursuit (cold, because of the snow) of three perfectly innocent young men on their way home from Bible study.  At some point the driver stopped the car so that one of other theologians could bury his pistol Bible in a snow bank. 

The police put an end to scripture study and set a specially trained dog, Ivan, to search the snow bank.  Ivan found the Bible pistol and, to everyone’s surprise, discharged it into a nearby house.  That’s a pretty good accomplishment for a critter without an opposable thumb.

Ivan.  That’s a Russian name.  What does this tell us about Soviet moles, not to mention dogs, in the Lawrence Police Department, sniffing out secrets and the ham sandwich Corporal Bronski brought for his lunch?

Among the charges filed on the humans were possession of a stolen firearm, which was also an unregistered firearm, which was also a firearm whose serial number had been filed off (that won’t work, future James Bonds; the cops have ways of making the serial numbers talk), and for shooting at some folks earlier in the night, probably because of a spirited dispute over sanctification versus justification. 

Ivan-the-Dog wasn’t arrested or even ticketed, which seems terribly species-est in favor of quadrupeds.  Quadrupeds get off but bipeds don’t.  What kind of Massachusetts justice is this, hah?  Yeah, tell me something, Massachusetts.  It’s time for bipeds to occupy Lawrence and stand up (on two legs) for our rights!

When the Lawrence Police refer to a bullpup, they really mean a bullpup.

Is Ivan a candidate for the Westminster Dog Show or the Winchester Gun Show?

The perceptive reader can tell where all this is going: when beagles are outlawed, only outlaws will have beagles.

Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than your Chihuahua.  Come to think of it, Kennedys flying airplanes have killed more people than your Chihuahua. 

Dog control is careful aim at a fire hydrant.

When a cop is minutes away, miniature French poodles count.

The west wasn’t won with a registered rat terrier.

Collar criminals, not Rin-Tin-Tin.

The SS, when not partying down, might in a panic put the White House on lockdown: (Buzz / click) “All units, we have a suspicious-looking subject with a suspicious-looking Pomeranian on foot near the south gate…”

Imagine the old, grizzled, non-nonsense sergeant on the rifle range: “This, you ****y-looking bunch of *****s, is yer shoulder-held, semi- or fully-automatic, gas-operated dachshund.  Its muzzle velocity is about twenty snuffles a minute…”

The court case against the three young, um, scholars ought to be interesting.  After all, proving that one of them fired the weapon earlier is going to be a matter of testimony and laboratory examination; there are no witnesses.  As for the Ivan-the-police-dog, a number of bipeds (but are bipeds quite trustworthy?) saw him shoot the gun on that wild night in Lawrence.  Wow!  In this trial the fur will really fly.

Fur.  Fly.  Get it?

Didn’t want it, huh?

-30-

Cincinnnatus - Rough Draft

Rough Draft

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

17 February 2013

Cincinnatus

 
When Cincinnatus in a desperate time
Was called to serve the undeserving state
Imperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls
No
But rather for the fuller at his cloth
The builder with his plans and rule and line
The seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings
For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing

 

 

An October Chill

October, 2012
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An October Chill

 

A merry dachshund yaps and leaps for leaves

Wind-blown across the still-green summer grass

As autumn visits briefly, and looks ‘round

To plan his festive moonlit frosts when next

Diana dances ‘cross November’s skies.

Harvest Time in the Fens

January 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Harvest Time in the Fens

St. Michael’s Church, Chesterton

 

A calendar knows little of a day,

Of any day; its arbitrary squares

Mark seasons as they amble on their way

From holy Advent ‘til the harvest fairs,

 

When summer’s crops, all red and gold and blue,

Along with piglets, ducks, some well-fed hens,

Are carted squeaking, squealing, creaking to

Saint Michael’s fields in the Anglian fens.

 

Old Father William lifts a pint (no less!)

With farmers selling cows and chicks and corn,

For he is merry too, and quick to bless

The laboring marsh-folk on this autumn morn.

 

Earth, sky, and air mark seasons as they fall,

And now comes Martinmas, joyfully, for all.

Paterfamilias

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Paterfamilias

For Eldon

An empty chair beside the fireplace waits,

And lamplight falls upon an open book,

Pen, pocketknife, keys for the pasture gates,

Dad’s barn coat hanging from its accustomed hook.

 

But he will not return; his duties now

Transcend the mists of the pale world we know,

And you in grief must carry on, somehow;

Your duty is here, for God will have it so

 

The good man takes that chair reluctantly;

It is a throne of sorts, and one imposed,

Not taken as a prize, triumphantly,

But in love’s service, and in love disposed.

 

An empty chair beside the fireplace waits

For you, whom doleful duty consecrates.

A Hitchhiker Arrested

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Hitchhiker Arrested

Hunched in his football letter jacket, he,

Graduated into anonymity,

Flogged by his demons through the winter air,

Screams out his might-have-beens to the sirens

      there.

On Manchester's THE LAST LION

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On Manchester’s The Last Lion

 

There were lions then,

Tawny in the pale twilight,

Roaring down the dark

Sending Your Daughter to War

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Sending Your Daughter to War

A covy of Merovingians in court dress sat around in the White House last month and decided that sending young women into combat is a good idea.

Well, if Betty, Veronica, and Barbie can kill and die in this nation’s undeclared wars (cf. The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8), we might as well go ahead and send in the children, too. 

After all, the nasty young man who shot schoolchildren in Connecticut, the nasty old man who, as of this writing, is holding a five-year-old hostage, the actions of Cardinal Mahony, the inaction of absentee sperm-donors, and the assembly-line murder of children under the Goebbels-esque euphemism of freedom-of-choice make abundantly clear that in this nation children are disposable.

No less a national figure than Rahm Emanuel, currently the mayor of Chicago, where they know something about disposing of children, said last week that children are “our greatest resource.”

Resource. 

Mr. Emanuel presumably loves his own children, but to him and to our national government your children are nothing more than a resource, like a bunker full of coal, a grain elevator full of corn, a tank farm full of oil.

The idea of humans as a resource is nothing new to Mr. Emanuel; in 2006 he advocated compulsory service for young people.  Compulsory.  The President proposed the same idea in 2008. 

Women have served in combat, but as an accident of their roles as physicians, nurses, corpsmen, pilots, and drivers; now they are to be assigned to combat by intent.

Women are often smaller than men, and children definitely are, so they would be, logistically, far more economical in combat.  They eat less, so feeding them would be cheaper, and the generalissimos can stuff more of ‘em into helicopters and trucks to get them to the fighting where they would make smaller targets.  Smaller blankets, smaller uniforms, smaller body armor, smaller bandages, smaller body-bags.  Their little guns would require less steel and plastic, so, hey, let’s Go Green, eh. 

More women and children can be flung into a medevac helicopter when they’re wounded, and more of their little corpses can be loaded onto a transport for fuel-efficient shipping to Andrews Air Force Base where really important people can pretend to be sad when the tiny, flag-covered caskets (note to budget office – smaller flags) are offloaded.

So you think this nation will never send children into combat?  Really?  But what is an 18-year-old girl?

When teenaged girls are shipped off to war, where will the grown men be?  Some will log-in on conservative websites acting all John Wayne while tippy-tapping their support of the little-bitty troopettes, and others will be shooting skeet or doing something with groundhogs.

Who would have thought that Anne Boleyn’s father would be our national guy role model?

-30-

 

One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

King: Forks?

Becket: Yes.  It’s a new instrument…for pronging meat and carrying it to your mouth.  It saves you dirtying your fingers.

King: But then you dirty the fork?

Becket: Yes.  But it’s washable.

King: So are your fingers.  I don’t see the point.

-      Becket, Jean Anouilh

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Shukov always removes his hat when eating.  As a long-term prisoner in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags, his purpose is to work and suffer until he dies.  Cold, malnourished, and overworked, there is no reason for Shukov to take off his cap over his evening bowl of fish heads and other, more mysterious bits of solids floating in the hot water except for this: Shukov is determined to maintain his sense of self. 

Most of the other prisoners have completely surrendered to dehumanization.  Shukov, too, can do nothing against the tyranny of Communism, but he can choose to remember who he is.  That he takes off his cap in the grim, cold chow hall causes him to stand out.

Shukov also eats with a spoon, a forbidden object, and not with his hands or a wood chip.  He cast the spoon from a scrap of aluminum in another camp some ten years before, and has managed to keep it concealed from the perpetrators of progress.  The illegal spoon is another symbol of Shukov’s self-hood, of civilization.

He can do nothing about his ugly, padded uniform made from scraps.  His number, Shcha-854, painted on his cap and trousers, is the identity imposed upon him.  But inside, and through subtle acts, he keeps his dignity.

The gulag’s chow hall anticipates modern dining in America: men wear their caps in restaurants and eat mysterious substances with their hands, and their formless clothing is badged with the alias identities of the Communist factories where it is made.

Quite often moderns stand as petitioners before windows or at stainless-steel counters in cinder-block, bunker-like structures for food and drinks whose antecedents, shipping, and handling are questionable.  Consider the now common chicken nugget, now made by many purveyors of comestibles, which is not a nugget although it may share some strands of DNA with a long-dead chicken.

Fred Turner, the man who in the 1980s invented the first chicken nugget for McDonald’s, died last week.  A generation has grown up eating this staple of fast food and cafeteria service.  Mr. Turner’s chicken nugget is finger food, perfect in a country where the possession of knives, forks, and spoons, even soft plastic ones, by The People can be suspect.

Hamburgers (not from Hamburg), tater tots (made from real tots?), tacos, wraps (not your granny’s coat), fish fingers (one wants to see that fish in the wild), and steak fingers (ditto for that cow), are all ordered from pictures and sometimes through loudspeakers: “That’s be a snakefinger basket, big ol’ chemical fizzy-drink, and fries!  Oh, and Prisoner #6 is to report to the delousing shed!”

In our sad world, are dishes, forks, napkins, menus, identifiable foodstuffs, and sitting at a table with one’s hat off really important?

In Jean Anouilh’s fictionalized play about the relationship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the king is unfamiliar with forks, an otherwise trivial matter which foreshadows his own uncivilized behavior later on.

 When the king says to Becket that he doesn’t see the point of a fork, Becket replies “It hasn’t any, practically speaking.  But it’s refined, it’s subtle.  It’s very un-Norman.”

-30-

From 2012: Super-Servile Sunday

Lawrence Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
From The Road to Magdalena
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Super-Servile Sunday

O sink not down to that corrosive couch,

Docile before the Orwellian screen
That regulates the lives of the servile,
Dictating dress and drink, demeanor, dreams;
Declare your independence from the sludge
Of vague obedientiaries who drowse
Away their empty lives in submission
To harsh, diagonal inches of rule,
Poor weaklings chanting tainted tribal songs
In chorus hamsterable, huddled, heaped,
While costumed in their masters’ liveries,
And feeling little while thinking even less,
The very model of the State’s non-men,
Predictable and dull, submissive ghosts
Crowded, herded in cosmic cattle chutes,
Reflected in dim, noisy nothingness.

But you, O you, be not of them, but be

A wanderer in the moonlight, one known
To God and to His holy solitude.