Sunday the big NYC demonstration looked pretty civil and cooperative. What you’d expect for a town that is more than two to one Democrat vs. Republican. The usual spectrum of liberal to left-wing folks were there and a lot of kids who went along for the fun of taking part. The fringe folks were in evidence but the crowd seemed amiable and the NYPD looked easy going -- ready but not surly. The signs were slanderous, obscene and mean spirited -- as if we expected anything different.
Did you see the Rhythmic Gymnastics from Athens? All I got to say is they Russians must be feeding those girls magic potatoes. Every one of them was gorgeous, supple, amazingly flexible, quick and determined as cats. Every one of them could be a fashion cover girl and no doubt soon will be.
Another surprise was Senator Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press. She looked great, a new very flattering hair do, an elegant black dress and pearl choker. She looked down right Republican. She was in a very cheerful and reasonable mood -- the Friday polls indicating that Kerry might just be blowing things undoubted made her whole weekend. She loyally provided him with faint praise, undoubtedly pleased that it doesn’t look he’ll stand her way next time the Democrat have to pick a Presidential candidate. In her statements she was in full statesman like mode. “The problem now isn’t how we got into Iraq, what we need to do is finish the job properly.”
The big Sunday demonstration supports my intuition that the GOP picked the right town. The City and the NYPD are the all American varsity when it comes to crowd control and very professionally maintaining good order. They are getting a big IOU from the Republican Party that should mean a good chunk of Federal money to underwrite their significant security costs. Everybody knows New York is the main target for all the crazy bastards in the world. The way the Congress in its normal pattern doled out Homeland Security money on a census pro rata is nuts. Nobody thinks Little Rock, Fresno, Peoria and Portland are very high on Al Qaeda’s hit list. In fact if anything it looks like the crazy bastards have a fixation on New York.
Luckily for the Republican convention, the NYPD can deal with anything. As Mayor Blumberg said, “We had seven naked demonstrators on 8th Avenue. No big deal, we can handled it.” Even more, everyday New Yorkers can handle it.
Following are my imagined conversations between New Yorkers and visiting Republicans and anti Bush demonstrators:
“Out of my way!”
“Go back to the burbs pal!”
“Touch me and I’ll break your face.”
“Get a life.”
“Yeah, I could tell you was a Republican.”
“Spare me, I gave at the office.”
“You’re from out of town, like I couldn’t tell.”
“Sure, you got rights, but I got a baseball bat.”
“Like I care.”
“You’re from California? Who’d a’ guessed?”
“Use that spray can and I’ll break your arm.”
“Go back to your home planet.”
“Pastrami don’t go on white bread.”
“Next you’ll want it with avocados, right?”
“Do I got to draw you a picture?”
Following the horror of 9/11 and the gross snafu of the north eastern power outage, the rest of us Americans have dropped our long held opinion of New York city dwellers as the national grouches. The New Yorkers are now admired as people who can take a punch and pick themselves right up and do the right thing. We saw them pull together in the smoke and flames of 9/11. We also saw them deal with the stupidity of a total electrical failure. They pulled together again and with amazing good humor and hometown spirit to walk home miles and miles in surprisingly good humor.
For seventy five bucks there are bus tours of Soprano land in New Jersey. You get to visit Satrelli’s deli and for lunch you get to eat at the actual restaurant they call the Vesuvio in the series. You even see the Mall where Carmela and Meadow shop. The Bada Bing, the sleaziest strip joint in all of New Jersey, however is fictional.
The national media is having a bad time in the current campaign. The ability of the three major networks and the three major daily newspapers -- the New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to set the agenda of the news day has been challenged and broken by the new media -- talk radio and the internet blogs. Of the two the internet has matured enough to shape the Presidential campaign. The first thing the internet did was boost former Vermont Governor Dean from a long shot for the VP nomination into the Democratic front runner.
Big media didn’t like Dean and savaged him, making him a laughing stock. They took his Knute Rochne style campaign pep talk and made him out to be a nutty demagogue. What a hatchet job. They trashed him. It made the leading media feel powerful. When the Swift Boat guys took after their one time comrade turned antiwar firebrand John Kerry, the big media boys ignored it. When they couldn’t ignore it anymore they tried to discredit the Swifts as Republican stooges. When that didn’t work they finally began to take a look at them and their anti Kerry blasts. The Washington Post put good reporters on the story and has found some truth and some errors and inconsistencies with both the Swift Boat alumni charges and with the Kerry campaign positions and counter charges. The New York Times has yet to go even that far and is in odd position of damning Republican leaning 527 committees while presenting the Democrats slime machine as good and the Canadian goof ball and lair, Michael Moore as the greatest cinematic documentarian since Lena Riefenstahl.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Saturday, August 28, 2004
France, our national first wife
In baseball there is a little known implement called the fungo bat. It’s a light thin bat, about only inch thick except for the the top end where about a foot of it two inches thick. Never seen in a game, it is used in practice to knock pop ups and line drives to infielders and sometimes even outfielders to sharpen up fielding skills. Many coaches are very skilled at using it to place balls exactly where they want -- usually into the “gap” between players to see how the players react.
Today, I feel like peppering you with little items, like fungo practice.
This morning got off to a cheerful start as I watched China struggle hopelessly against Lithuania in the Olympic Basketball quarter finals. The greatest of nations with a billion people was down worse than the score since the Baltic five was dogging it, wanting to win, but not humiliate their opponents. The Lithuanians are a diffident people, not quarrelsome nor trouble making. They do play basketball well -- they beat the USA five too. Not bad for a small country of only a few million people.
This morning it looks like the cabrones were up to it again, blowing up two local flight planes coming out of Moscow’s suburban airport a few days ago. The Russian authorities have found explosives residue and some fools have taken credit (if that is the word) for it. They chalked up a 89 innocent victims, not a bad days work for the sorry ass delusional villains. May these dogs burn in hell!
What kind of religion demands human sacrifices? They say they are Muslim. I say they are not really Muslims, they are not full immersion Baptists nor mystical Sufi’s, nor Sephardic Jews, jack Mormons, militant Lutherans not even deranged Unitarians who have turned to the Dark Side. These dogs worship BAAL the evil god of their ancestors who demanded the blood of children and innocents. In case they missed it, the God of Abraham forbad and rejected human sacrifice thousands of years ago. It happened in what is now Iraq, the Iraqis can even show you Abraham’s house in the ruins of Ur of the Caldees. But I guess like Master Chief Boatswains mate Dooty used to say, “There always some sorry bastard who didn’t get the message.”
Did you hear, Sad'r , the Elmer Gantry of the Shi’a -- the one who never finished his clerical training and doesn’t have any right to clerical status -- and his boys (whose normal occupation is stealing hub caps and purse snatching small change and vegetables from widows and orphans) left the sacred mosque defiled with a couple dozen corpses of victims of their blasphemous “Islamic Justice.” He and his lads also looted the mosque of cash and ripped off as much treasure and art as they could jimmy off the walls. They are dogs -- no, that's too good and I didn’t mean to defame our noble and loyal canine comrades. They are pond scum. If they lived in LA they would be gangbangers who shoot down six year old girls in school yard playgrounds and kill eighty year old grandmothers sitting on their front porches. You know the kind of vermin I’m talking about.
Speaking of other species, this morning Cinder, our 14 year old front yard cat died in his sleep. Cinder was the monarch of the front yard -- ours and our neighbors. He adopted us, as is the way with true felines. Glossy coal black, he was a tom cat with attitude, a top of the food chain predator, junior grade. We fed him and he occasionally brushed against our legs or let us pet him. He maintained the good order of our front porch and yard, kept squirrels and pigeons at bay and possum and rodents out of sight. Hail and farewell, old friend, you were a cat among cats.
How about you, but if I never hear another word about the Peterson murder case or Michael Jackson’s misadventures it will be good news. With the world in turmoil, genocide in Sudan, war and terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, mayhem in Palestine and Israel, a simmering and bloody civil insurrection Saudi Arabia, increasing friction in China between a bare knuckles capitalist economy and a crooked Communist party that has degenerated into a Trade Union for oligarchs, a lunatic dictator with A Bombs in North Korea, youth gangs out of control in LA -- they knock off twice as people per year than the Iraqi insurgents -- not that the L A Times notices -- what is the fixation with these two lousy stories? If you realize that just in LA, gangs kill and maim more people that the professionals do in Iraq and Afghanistan, you wonder what is going on with our news media. Why do they hide this story. These punks are killing thousands every year and nobody cares. Most of the victims are black and latino, apparently only white deaths get establishment media ink and screen time. If this is not ugly bare faced racism, I don’t know what is.
Here we are in the dog days of August and the tomato vines are in full production. Enjoy them while you can -- fresh intense perfumed tomatoes great sliced with some sweet red onion and a tiny bit of salt. We eat so many commercial quasi tomatoes most of the year, enjoy it now along with white corn, sweet melons, and rich plums.
I agree with Dennis Miller, let’s drop of the fiction that France is an an ally. They are not, they haven’t been for years. They have a foreign policy based on an odd blend of Cartesian high mindedness and brazen opportunism that would shock New Jersey pol’s. They are not friends -- old acquaintances, but not really friends. Sure they holler for help with they are over their head in trouble-- twice in the past century. But other times they hang out with our adversaries and pimp us until those guys turn on them, which they always do. In reality France is America’s first wife. There were moments, but overall they are a pain in the ass.
For most of my life it has been an article of faith among a certain class of Democrat that Republicans are stupid. I think it began with bad feeling when Ike beat Adlai Stevenson. Now Adlai was a bright man whose family had been prominent in Democratic politics all the way back to the Civil War. Ike was obviously an intelligent man -- he ran WW II for our side.
In the case of Kennedy and Nixon, any fair observer would tell you both were exceptionally bright men. Thing got screwy when Jerry Ford become President and these snobby Democrats chortled Ford was a dunce and a spastic. I once drove Congressman Ford around the Bay area on a series of speaking engagements. He may not haven an astrophysicist, but he was an engaging and bright man, He has a degree from Michigan State. As for his being a spastic, I only point out that he was an All American Center and he later played pro football -- I believe, for the Chicago Bears before WW II.
In Reagan’s time, the snobby Democrats assured you he was a dunce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so dumb he put the Communist Party out of business and ended the Cold War. The same know it all's tried the same line against George H. W. Bush, but for his tangles with English grammar, he had fine grades at Yale and was also an All American Athlete, indeed his senior year he was considered the finest intercollegiate baseball player and turned down an offer to play with the New York Yankees. Both he and Michael Dukakas were smart serious guys who were honest, hard working and dull. After eight years of Bill Clinton honest hardworking and serious look pretty good.
Then we have the nineties and the era of Clinton and Gingrich -- if anything they were too smart of their own good. Both performed way below potential and for all they did accomplished its sad to think what they could have done if they would paid attention to business, especially during Clinton’s second term which end up an example of the unintended wisdom of total partisan gridlock. Nothing of lasting importance happened and now we are told it was a Golden Age of economic prosperity. What happened was that Congress wouldn’t let Clinton spend more money and Clinton wouldn’t let the Congress cut taxes. Ergo a miracle -- revenues soon surpassed expenditures and Clinton took to boasting he was the most skinflint President since Calvin Coolidge. A very odd thing to say, but then Girgrich was always praising FDR which was a singular novelty for Republicans.
Now we have George W. Bush. Michael Moore, a guru among Democrats, assures us he is only a step above being a drooling imbecile. Indeed, among all the smart, so cool, ahead of the curve savants in the New York Times it is dogma. Only Maureen Down in her unique and perverse way said on Tim Russert’s show that she had interviewed Dub’ya at length and she found him intelligent, not in a bookish way to be sure, but intelligent. Russert pushed her on this and she said, no he is intelligent. She sees him in light of Shakespeare’s young Prince Hall turning into Henry V. In her red haired wrong headed Irish way she is not bowled over by John Kerry either. She has scuffed him up a few times and who knows what Shakespearian character she will use to torment him. I will not say Hamlet beauce that is too obvious -- the prince who couldn't make up his mind.
While he may be dyslexic, George W. Bush is intelligent. First, he graduated from Yale and later got into and received an MBA from Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School is not hardly getting a GED from the local night school. Harvard Law did not receive Kerry so he went to Boston College Law School with the shanty Micks. I suspect his actual Yale grades are not that different from Bush’s. This indicates he was at least above average in brains.
His must despised service in the Texas Air National Guard indicates that he passed the Air Force flight physical and psychological examination. This is a big deal. It tells he had 20/20 vision, exceptional hand eye coordination. was not color blind, overall was in exceptional physical shape and he was checked out and verified not crazy. The Government is very careful about who they let fly jet planes and they let him. If he really was a dunce, he would have spent his Air Force career waxing planes in San Antonio. His career at the Texas Rangers baseball team also indicates real ability. Of all the pundits, only Boston's Mike Barnicle is the only one I know who has looked at Bush's time as General Manager and he thinks it indicates real ability. Bush took a team from the celler to a pennent. The sale of the team make him a rich man.
I imagine Senator Kerry did not fly because he had some otherwise irrelevant physical flaw that kept him from passing a military flight physical. Kerry does have a civil aviation licence, so he can fly. Very few people pass a military flight physical. Most athletes have enough injuries by the time they are old enough to take one that they would fail because of a bad knee, a dislocated shoulder or some other failing. My memory of the Vietnam period recalls that most of the exceptionally gifted jocks I knew failed the much easier Army physical. The second string guys and bench warmers usually passed. It seems counter intuitive but if you think about it, it makes real sense.
Today, I feel like peppering you with little items, like fungo practice.
This morning got off to a cheerful start as I watched China struggle hopelessly against Lithuania in the Olympic Basketball quarter finals. The greatest of nations with a billion people was down worse than the score since the Baltic five was dogging it, wanting to win, but not humiliate their opponents. The Lithuanians are a diffident people, not quarrelsome nor trouble making. They do play basketball well -- they beat the USA five too. Not bad for a small country of only a few million people.
This morning it looks like the cabrones were up to it again, blowing up two local flight planes coming out of Moscow’s suburban airport a few days ago. The Russian authorities have found explosives residue and some fools have taken credit (if that is the word) for it. They chalked up a 89 innocent victims, not a bad days work for the sorry ass delusional villains. May these dogs burn in hell!
What kind of religion demands human sacrifices? They say they are Muslim. I say they are not really Muslims, they are not full immersion Baptists nor mystical Sufi’s, nor Sephardic Jews, jack Mormons, militant Lutherans not even deranged Unitarians who have turned to the Dark Side. These dogs worship BAAL the evil god of their ancestors who demanded the blood of children and innocents. In case they missed it, the God of Abraham forbad and rejected human sacrifice thousands of years ago. It happened in what is now Iraq, the Iraqis can even show you Abraham’s house in the ruins of Ur of the Caldees. But I guess like Master Chief Boatswains mate Dooty used to say, “There always some sorry bastard who didn’t get the message.”
Did you hear, Sad'r , the Elmer Gantry of the Shi’a -- the one who never finished his clerical training and doesn’t have any right to clerical status -- and his boys (whose normal occupation is stealing hub caps and purse snatching small change and vegetables from widows and orphans) left the sacred mosque defiled with a couple dozen corpses of victims of their blasphemous “Islamic Justice.” He and his lads also looted the mosque of cash and ripped off as much treasure and art as they could jimmy off the walls. They are dogs -- no, that's too good and I didn’t mean to defame our noble and loyal canine comrades. They are pond scum. If they lived in LA they would be gangbangers who shoot down six year old girls in school yard playgrounds and kill eighty year old grandmothers sitting on their front porches. You know the kind of vermin I’m talking about.
Speaking of other species, this morning Cinder, our 14 year old front yard cat died in his sleep. Cinder was the monarch of the front yard -- ours and our neighbors. He adopted us, as is the way with true felines. Glossy coal black, he was a tom cat with attitude, a top of the food chain predator, junior grade. We fed him and he occasionally brushed against our legs or let us pet him. He maintained the good order of our front porch and yard, kept squirrels and pigeons at bay and possum and rodents out of sight. Hail and farewell, old friend, you were a cat among cats.
How about you, but if I never hear another word about the Peterson murder case or Michael Jackson’s misadventures it will be good news. With the world in turmoil, genocide in Sudan, war and terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, mayhem in Palestine and Israel, a simmering and bloody civil insurrection Saudi Arabia, increasing friction in China between a bare knuckles capitalist economy and a crooked Communist party that has degenerated into a Trade Union for oligarchs, a lunatic dictator with A Bombs in North Korea, youth gangs out of control in LA -- they knock off twice as people per year than the Iraqi insurgents -- not that the L A Times notices -- what is the fixation with these two lousy stories? If you realize that just in LA, gangs kill and maim more people that the professionals do in Iraq and Afghanistan, you wonder what is going on with our news media. Why do they hide this story. These punks are killing thousands every year and nobody cares. Most of the victims are black and latino, apparently only white deaths get establishment media ink and screen time. If this is not ugly bare faced racism, I don’t know what is.
Here we are in the dog days of August and the tomato vines are in full production. Enjoy them while you can -- fresh intense perfumed tomatoes great sliced with some sweet red onion and a tiny bit of salt. We eat so many commercial quasi tomatoes most of the year, enjoy it now along with white corn, sweet melons, and rich plums.
I agree with Dennis Miller, let’s drop of the fiction that France is an an ally. They are not, they haven’t been for years. They have a foreign policy based on an odd blend of Cartesian high mindedness and brazen opportunism that would shock New Jersey pol’s. They are not friends -- old acquaintances, but not really friends. Sure they holler for help with they are over their head in trouble-- twice in the past century. But other times they hang out with our adversaries and pimp us until those guys turn on them, which they always do. In reality France is America’s first wife. There were moments, but overall they are a pain in the ass.
For most of my life it has been an article of faith among a certain class of Democrat that Republicans are stupid. I think it began with bad feeling when Ike beat Adlai Stevenson. Now Adlai was a bright man whose family had been prominent in Democratic politics all the way back to the Civil War. Ike was obviously an intelligent man -- he ran WW II for our side.
In the case of Kennedy and Nixon, any fair observer would tell you both were exceptionally bright men. Thing got screwy when Jerry Ford become President and these snobby Democrats chortled Ford was a dunce and a spastic. I once drove Congressman Ford around the Bay area on a series of speaking engagements. He may not haven an astrophysicist, but he was an engaging and bright man, He has a degree from Michigan State. As for his being a spastic, I only point out that he was an All American Center and he later played pro football -- I believe, for the Chicago Bears before WW II.
In Reagan’s time, the snobby Democrats assured you he was a dunce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so dumb he put the Communist Party out of business and ended the Cold War. The same know it all's tried the same line against George H. W. Bush, but for his tangles with English grammar, he had fine grades at Yale and was also an All American Athlete, indeed his senior year he was considered the finest intercollegiate baseball player and turned down an offer to play with the New York Yankees. Both he and Michael Dukakas were smart serious guys who were honest, hard working and dull. After eight years of Bill Clinton honest hardworking and serious look pretty good.
Then we have the nineties and the era of Clinton and Gingrich -- if anything they were too smart of their own good. Both performed way below potential and for all they did accomplished its sad to think what they could have done if they would paid attention to business, especially during Clinton’s second term which end up an example of the unintended wisdom of total partisan gridlock. Nothing of lasting importance happened and now we are told it was a Golden Age of economic prosperity. What happened was that Congress wouldn’t let Clinton spend more money and Clinton wouldn’t let the Congress cut taxes. Ergo a miracle -- revenues soon surpassed expenditures and Clinton took to boasting he was the most skinflint President since Calvin Coolidge. A very odd thing to say, but then Girgrich was always praising FDR which was a singular novelty for Republicans.
Now we have George W. Bush. Michael Moore, a guru among Democrats, assures us he is only a step above being a drooling imbecile. Indeed, among all the smart, so cool, ahead of the curve savants in the New York Times it is dogma. Only Maureen Down in her unique and perverse way said on Tim Russert’s show that she had interviewed Dub’ya at length and she found him intelligent, not in a bookish way to be sure, but intelligent. Russert pushed her on this and she said, no he is intelligent. She sees him in light of Shakespeare’s young Prince Hall turning into Henry V. In her red haired wrong headed Irish way she is not bowled over by John Kerry either. She has scuffed him up a few times and who knows what Shakespearian character she will use to torment him. I will not say Hamlet beauce that is too obvious -- the prince who couldn't make up his mind.
While he may be dyslexic, George W. Bush is intelligent. First, he graduated from Yale and later got into and received an MBA from Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School is not hardly getting a GED from the local night school. Harvard Law did not receive Kerry so he went to Boston College Law School with the shanty Micks. I suspect his actual Yale grades are not that different from Bush’s. This indicates he was at least above average in brains.
His must despised service in the Texas Air National Guard indicates that he passed the Air Force flight physical and psychological examination. This is a big deal. It tells he had 20/20 vision, exceptional hand eye coordination. was not color blind, overall was in exceptional physical shape and he was checked out and verified not crazy. The Government is very careful about who they let fly jet planes and they let him. If he really was a dunce, he would have spent his Air Force career waxing planes in San Antonio. His career at the Texas Rangers baseball team also indicates real ability. Of all the pundits, only Boston's Mike Barnicle is the only one I know who has looked at Bush's time as General Manager and he thinks it indicates real ability. Bush took a team from the celler to a pennent. The sale of the team make him a rich man.
I imagine Senator Kerry did not fly because he had some otherwise irrelevant physical flaw that kept him from passing a military flight physical. Kerry does have a civil aviation licence, so he can fly. Very few people pass a military flight physical. Most athletes have enough injuries by the time they are old enough to take one that they would fail because of a bad knee, a dislocated shoulder or some other failing. My memory of the Vietnam period recalls that most of the exceptionally gifted jocks I knew failed the much easier Army physical. The second string guys and bench warmers usually passed. It seems counter intuitive but if you think about it, it makes real sense.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
New & maybe not so improved
We tend to think the newer is better. Actually newer is not always better, sometime new and improved is actually worse than what we had before.
OK, in things like televisions and computers newer is indeed almost always better, faster cheaper and more reliable. I remember fifty years ago when my parents spent almost enough to buy a new car on a 21 inch black and white television, it was a Hoffman with a sea green glass over the front of the picture tube. It was a cube three feet on a side with two dozen vacuum tubes inside -- seen one of them lately? Drug stores and super markets used to have large machines where you could test your TV's individual tubes. They ranged in size from a Christmas light to a very large and tall light bulb. Most people under thirty have never seen one.
A couple months ago I paid $450. for a 34 inch flat screen television with stereo speakers and a clarity and sharpness that is almost astounding. Real progress. No doubt in five or six years I will replace this one with a plasma flat screen set that will hang on a the wall and give pictures of unprecedented sharpness clarity and color. Now this is the sort of progress we like to think about.
The same things goes for computers. Twenty five years ago the company I worked for installed a huge IBM systems that had a gigabyte of memory. The equipment cost over one and half million dollars when you included the air conditioners, the rubber tiled raised floor computer room and the special power system. A couple years ago I bought a Mac with more than gigabyte of memory for a little over a thousand bucks. I brought it home and plugged it in.
Now this sort of “progress” is common enough in almost any kind of electronics and even in the case of house wears. Automobiles too are much better than they were a generation ago, more powerful, more reliable, longer lasting and both more comfortable and safer. OK when it comes to sex appeal, who can deny the awesome qualities of a candy apple red 1957 Chevy convertible with a black canvas top and red and white tuck and roll seats. It is is still a classic and remains what was called then a chick magnet. Same for a glossy Golden Gate Bridge Orange 1965 Dodge Charger with its huge “hemi” v-8. Now that was a machine, the all time muscle car that could pass anything on the road except a gas station. It was difficult to keep below seventy mph. When you were standing at a red light you could actually see the gas guage move ever closer to the red empty stripe.
Yet when you think back to the cars of a generation or two ago, they had some real problems and their reliability was lousy. For example until the auto industry adopted the modular connections and “harness systems” developed in aerospace, most cars, even new ones, were prone to constant and on going electrical snafu’s. In the fifties and sixties very few dash board clocks ever worked very long before they quit. Also, with the old fashioned coil, rotary distributor and loose wire harnesses, sometimes cars wouldn’t start because there was a short. It generally was easier and cheaper to rewire the damn thing than trying to find the “short.” Also, in the old days radiators didn’t have an overflow tank and you had to check your water level every time you filled the tank. Tires only lasted 5,000 miles then, not 50,000 as they do today. In almost every way cars then were crude in construction and engineering and far less reliable than what we have now. For example pickup trucks then and even large sedans didn't have power steering and it took serious upper body strength to man handle them around the countryside. I learned to drive in my Grandfather’s forrest green 1949 Ford 5 speed stick pick up truck. It was a beast to steer, it took perfect timing on the clutch to shift gears, although it’s 1949 flat head Mercury v-8 was a very powerful engine and the heavy old machine would roll along easily at 70 mph on the open road.
In some cases however, we are far worse off today than in my youth. For example “low flow” toilets are a very dubious improvement since they take a lot of flushes to clear, something that was not the case with the old timers. Progress here has not been a good thing.
Another area is our train service. When I was a boy, the old Southern Pacific, a cranky hard nosed railroad of the old school, had an express train called the Daylight. It left San Francisco every morning at eight am, pulled into San Jose at nine and arrived in Los Angeles at five that afternoon It was a bright colored streamliner with red, orange and black cars with big picture windows. The high speed express was pulled by one of the final class of American steam engines -- big locomotives with four seven foot tall drive wheels and every improvement available at that time.
Well today, Amtrak runs a daily train from Los Angeles to Oakland. It leaves LA at ten in the morning and gets to Oakland at ten at night. The San Francisco Station was torn down years ago so at San Jose the train goes north on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. It is three hours slower (on the rare days when it is on time) than its predecessor.
A few items, one of which is sort of political.
Notice that the version of Star Spangled Banner played at the olympic medal presentations is softer, more nostalgic sounding? It is after all an 18th century melody adopted to match the words of Francis Scott Key poem celebrating the failure of the British Navy’s attempt to take Baltimore during the war of 1812. The original song was called an Anachreonic Hymn -- patterned after the poems of Anachreon an ancient Greek poet. Since we are used to hearing a more bombastic brass band version of the melody, some people were surprised by softer tone. They shouldn’t be, it’s a perfectly valid version, much closer to it original sound and feeling.
Other 18th century national anthems have the same nostalgic quality. The Hungarian Anthem is sung to a smoky but haunting melody. The Polish Anthem also is nostalgic, “Where is my county, it is in my heart...” While technically an 18th century melody, the French national anthem is without a doubt the most gaudy and emotive, followed by the Russian anthem -- which still has no authorized words. (The lyrics were a prayer to Joe Stalin that was withdrawn from service shortly after his death. Stalin had it composed in WW II to give the Soviets a true national anthem -- until then they had used the Communist marching song, The International.)
Most Latin American Republics have bouncy operetta march sort of melodies. Brazil’s is the best -- an up beat melody of pure optimism. The German anthem with a melody by Franz Josef Hayden was actually written for Austria and served as the Imperial Austrian anthem until 1919. “May God exalt Franz our Kaiser . . .” In 1871 the newly united German Empire used the same melody but with the words, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles . . .” In practice this caused some confusion for fifty years, with the two largest nations in central Europe using the same melody at state occasions. In practice the Austrian original was played noticeably slower than the German version.
Three nations with very slow sad anthems are Japan, Israel and Ireland. Canada has “O Canada” which my daughter -- then ten years old -- on hearing it at a Canada Day fete in Vancouver pronounced -- “Wimpy.” But in two languages. Australia has it’s anthem, “Advance Australia.” It is pretty bland stuff for such an up front and truly wonderful nation.
The British Anthem, “God Save the Queen” was actually copied from the Danish original. The Scots have the familiar kilt swinging “Scotland the Brave” while the Welsh have the most beautiful and soaring anthem of any nation. It isn’t called the land of song for nothing. Wales exports opera singers like the Dominican Republic exports baseball players. Unlike the Irish, they still talk and sing in their beautiful native language.
Italy has a bombastic anthem called “La Victoria” but it also has Verdi’s majestic “Va pensero” where the composer took the biblical lament of the Hebrew slave in ancient Babylon and made it a prayer for the unification of Italy.
Did you know that the original anthem of the USA was Brothers in Liberty? Today it is played as the Vice Presidential march.
Thinking about it, John Kerry is the most enigmatic candidate to run for president in a long time -- he is full of contradictions and unexpected twists. He clearly doesn’t believe the old Irish adage that you can not run with both the fox and the hounds. (Translated: In a fight you have to take a side.) In the current flap he sincerely thinks has squared the odd enigma of being a big time military hero in a war where he also was a firebrand spokesmen of pacifist outrage. He is obviously enormously proud of serving with men he later denounced as war criminals. If a lot of people have trouble with this, you think he might notice. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the obvious confusing contradiction.
But this is hardly the only contradiction. Like most people, including Kerry himself, I always figured he was “lace curtain” Beantown Irish with some old yankee thrown in. After all he is a practicing Catholic and he does look sort of Irish. But it isn’t so at all. His Grandfather Kerry wasn’t Irish -- he was a Bohemian Jew named Fritz Kohn. He changed his name to Kerry when he came to America. I wonder if Senator Lieberman ever suspected Kerry was a little bit of a landsman when they were all at Yale. While this is not widely known nationally it is common knowledge in the Bay State. He has no Jewish family surviving in Europe, they were all murdered by the Nazis. Another thing Kerry's campaign oddly goes to great lengths to keep under raps is the fact his mother was French from a prominent old family that also had some Yankee conections -- that's where his middle name Forbes comes from. I guess his pollsters told them a French mother was bad news with voters except in Lousiana where a lot of folks are quite proud of their French heritage. Somehow it is inevitable that even the Senator's Jewish ancestors were upper crust. Kohn is a family name indicating they were Levites, decendents from the priestly tribe, not ordinary Jews.
As the candidate of the Democratic Party he automatically assumed the position the ancient Roman’s called, the Tribune of the People -- the voice of the working class. Let me say that again, John Kerry is the voice of the working class. Can you believe it? It is the single most absurd and laughable thing I’ve heard in years. Kerry is tied by blood to French royalty and even can trace his heritage all the way back to -- get this, I’m not kidding -- Russia’s Ivan the Terrible.
Watching Kerry in his thousand dollar French blazer and Levis mix with the common people is a sight to be seen. Senator Edwards and George Bush can mix in with the crowd -- the folks know immediately both of them can drive a pick up truck and know how to eat real barbecue and actually enjoy it. Kerry eating a Philly cheese steak sandwich is as discomforting as the first President Bush eating chicherones -- fried pork rinds. Even if they actually like it, as my daughter would say, “It’s really not you.” Kerry may want to project the prince of the blood charm of Jack Kennedy but he in fact radiates the awkward shyness and earnest but stiff desire to please of President Bush’s Dad. Both men were born in the Bay State of mainly patrician stock and boy does it show.
Now George W. Bush is every bit the New England patrician that Kerry is, indeed more so since his people have been going to Yale for a couple hundred years. Bush suffered many of the same privations the patrician class routinely inflicts on their children that Kerry did. Yet, Bush actually went to public school out yonder in Midland Texas. He played Little League and went his first two years of high school to San Houston High in Midland. He talks and walks like it. He actually knows regular Americans and who they are and where and how they live. Texas like Ireland is not a place will putting on airs will get you very far. His parents shipped him back Andover before Yale in an attempt to de -Texas him, but it didn’t take. You can take the lad out of West Texas, but you can’t ever take West Texas out of him. (One of his very West Texas traits is letting folks think he is a dunce until it’s too late and he rolls over them. West Texans play very shrewd poker.)
If fate had been different, it came to me as I saw Florida Governor John Ellis (JEB) Bush on television during and after the double hurricane hit, Kerry would be facing a Bush who is also very much from the same old patrician class. Almost as tall as John Kerry, Jeb Bush is soft and well spoken in two languages, (Kerry has made his ability to speak French and German top secret at least until the election is over) he is diffident yet obviously very bright, if not an out right intellectual. Where his old brother is all sharp angles and choppy words, JEB is as smooth as Kerry when he gets to talking. He even has a Latin wife like Kerry and is a Catholic. (President Bush, VP Cheney and Senator Edwards are all United Methodists.) Instead of the obvious clash we have today, if it was John Forbes Kerry vs. John Ellis Bush the news people would make jokes about the two Yale men debating the proper sequence of silverware at a state dinner, the correct wine to accompany various specific shell fish and when it was OK to wear a pastel shirt and when only a white one would do.
- XXX -
OK, in things like televisions and computers newer is indeed almost always better, faster cheaper and more reliable. I remember fifty years ago when my parents spent almost enough to buy a new car on a 21 inch black and white television, it was a Hoffman with a sea green glass over the front of the picture tube. It was a cube three feet on a side with two dozen vacuum tubes inside -- seen one of them lately? Drug stores and super markets used to have large machines where you could test your TV's individual tubes. They ranged in size from a Christmas light to a very large and tall light bulb. Most people under thirty have never seen one.
A couple months ago I paid $450. for a 34 inch flat screen television with stereo speakers and a clarity and sharpness that is almost astounding. Real progress. No doubt in five or six years I will replace this one with a plasma flat screen set that will hang on a the wall and give pictures of unprecedented sharpness clarity and color. Now this is the sort of progress we like to think about.
The same things goes for computers. Twenty five years ago the company I worked for installed a huge IBM systems that had a gigabyte of memory. The equipment cost over one and half million dollars when you included the air conditioners, the rubber tiled raised floor computer room and the special power system. A couple years ago I bought a Mac with more than gigabyte of memory for a little over a thousand bucks. I brought it home and plugged it in.
Now this sort of “progress” is common enough in almost any kind of electronics and even in the case of house wears. Automobiles too are much better than they were a generation ago, more powerful, more reliable, longer lasting and both more comfortable and safer. OK when it comes to sex appeal, who can deny the awesome qualities of a candy apple red 1957 Chevy convertible with a black canvas top and red and white tuck and roll seats. It is is still a classic and remains what was called then a chick magnet. Same for a glossy Golden Gate Bridge Orange 1965 Dodge Charger with its huge “hemi” v-8. Now that was a machine, the all time muscle car that could pass anything on the road except a gas station. It was difficult to keep below seventy mph. When you were standing at a red light you could actually see the gas guage move ever closer to the red empty stripe.
Yet when you think back to the cars of a generation or two ago, they had some real problems and their reliability was lousy. For example until the auto industry adopted the modular connections and “harness systems” developed in aerospace, most cars, even new ones, were prone to constant and on going electrical snafu’s. In the fifties and sixties very few dash board clocks ever worked very long before they quit. Also, with the old fashioned coil, rotary distributor and loose wire harnesses, sometimes cars wouldn’t start because there was a short. It generally was easier and cheaper to rewire the damn thing than trying to find the “short.” Also, in the old days radiators didn’t have an overflow tank and you had to check your water level every time you filled the tank. Tires only lasted 5,000 miles then, not 50,000 as they do today. In almost every way cars then were crude in construction and engineering and far less reliable than what we have now. For example pickup trucks then and even large sedans didn't have power steering and it took serious upper body strength to man handle them around the countryside. I learned to drive in my Grandfather’s forrest green 1949 Ford 5 speed stick pick up truck. It was a beast to steer, it took perfect timing on the clutch to shift gears, although it’s 1949 flat head Mercury v-8 was a very powerful engine and the heavy old machine would roll along easily at 70 mph on the open road.
In some cases however, we are far worse off today than in my youth. For example “low flow” toilets are a very dubious improvement since they take a lot of flushes to clear, something that was not the case with the old timers. Progress here has not been a good thing.
Another area is our train service. When I was a boy, the old Southern Pacific, a cranky hard nosed railroad of the old school, had an express train called the Daylight. It left San Francisco every morning at eight am, pulled into San Jose at nine and arrived in Los Angeles at five that afternoon It was a bright colored streamliner with red, orange and black cars with big picture windows. The high speed express was pulled by one of the final class of American steam engines -- big locomotives with four seven foot tall drive wheels and every improvement available at that time.
Well today, Amtrak runs a daily train from Los Angeles to Oakland. It leaves LA at ten in the morning and gets to Oakland at ten at night. The San Francisco Station was torn down years ago so at San Jose the train goes north on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. It is three hours slower (on the rare days when it is on time) than its predecessor.
A few items, one of which is sort of political.
Notice that the version of Star Spangled Banner played at the olympic medal presentations is softer, more nostalgic sounding? It is after all an 18th century melody adopted to match the words of Francis Scott Key poem celebrating the failure of the British Navy’s attempt to take Baltimore during the war of 1812. The original song was called an Anachreonic Hymn -- patterned after the poems of Anachreon an ancient Greek poet. Since we are used to hearing a more bombastic brass band version of the melody, some people were surprised by softer tone. They shouldn’t be, it’s a perfectly valid version, much closer to it original sound and feeling.
Other 18th century national anthems have the same nostalgic quality. The Hungarian Anthem is sung to a smoky but haunting melody. The Polish Anthem also is nostalgic, “Where is my county, it is in my heart...” While technically an 18th century melody, the French national anthem is without a doubt the most gaudy and emotive, followed by the Russian anthem -- which still has no authorized words. (The lyrics were a prayer to Joe Stalin that was withdrawn from service shortly after his death. Stalin had it composed in WW II to give the Soviets a true national anthem -- until then they had used the Communist marching song, The International.)
Most Latin American Republics have bouncy operetta march sort of melodies. Brazil’s is the best -- an up beat melody of pure optimism. The German anthem with a melody by Franz Josef Hayden was actually written for Austria and served as the Imperial Austrian anthem until 1919. “May God exalt Franz our Kaiser . . .” In 1871 the newly united German Empire used the same melody but with the words, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles . . .” In practice this caused some confusion for fifty years, with the two largest nations in central Europe using the same melody at state occasions. In practice the Austrian original was played noticeably slower than the German version.
Three nations with very slow sad anthems are Japan, Israel and Ireland. Canada has “O Canada” which my daughter -- then ten years old -- on hearing it at a Canada Day fete in Vancouver pronounced -- “Wimpy.” But in two languages. Australia has it’s anthem, “Advance Australia.” It is pretty bland stuff for such an up front and truly wonderful nation.
The British Anthem, “God Save the Queen” was actually copied from the Danish original. The Scots have the familiar kilt swinging “Scotland the Brave” while the Welsh have the most beautiful and soaring anthem of any nation. It isn’t called the land of song for nothing. Wales exports opera singers like the Dominican Republic exports baseball players. Unlike the Irish, they still talk and sing in their beautiful native language.
Italy has a bombastic anthem called “La Victoria” but it also has Verdi’s majestic “Va pensero” where the composer took the biblical lament of the Hebrew slave in ancient Babylon and made it a prayer for the unification of Italy.
Did you know that the original anthem of the USA was Brothers in Liberty? Today it is played as the Vice Presidential march.
Thinking about it, John Kerry is the most enigmatic candidate to run for president in a long time -- he is full of contradictions and unexpected twists. He clearly doesn’t believe the old Irish adage that you can not run with both the fox and the hounds. (Translated: In a fight you have to take a side.) In the current flap he sincerely thinks has squared the odd enigma of being a big time military hero in a war where he also was a firebrand spokesmen of pacifist outrage. He is obviously enormously proud of serving with men he later denounced as war criminals. If a lot of people have trouble with this, you think he might notice. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the obvious confusing contradiction.
But this is hardly the only contradiction. Like most people, including Kerry himself, I always figured he was “lace curtain” Beantown Irish with some old yankee thrown in. After all he is a practicing Catholic and he does look sort of Irish. But it isn’t so at all. His Grandfather Kerry wasn’t Irish -- he was a Bohemian Jew named Fritz Kohn. He changed his name to Kerry when he came to America. I wonder if Senator Lieberman ever suspected Kerry was a little bit of a landsman when they were all at Yale. While this is not widely known nationally it is common knowledge in the Bay State. He has no Jewish family surviving in Europe, they were all murdered by the Nazis. Another thing Kerry's campaign oddly goes to great lengths to keep under raps is the fact his mother was French from a prominent old family that also had some Yankee conections -- that's where his middle name Forbes comes from. I guess his pollsters told them a French mother was bad news with voters except in Lousiana where a lot of folks are quite proud of their French heritage. Somehow it is inevitable that even the Senator's Jewish ancestors were upper crust. Kohn is a family name indicating they were Levites, decendents from the priestly tribe, not ordinary Jews.
As the candidate of the Democratic Party he automatically assumed the position the ancient Roman’s called, the Tribune of the People -- the voice of the working class. Let me say that again, John Kerry is the voice of the working class. Can you believe it? It is the single most absurd and laughable thing I’ve heard in years. Kerry is tied by blood to French royalty and even can trace his heritage all the way back to -- get this, I’m not kidding -- Russia’s Ivan the Terrible.
Watching Kerry in his thousand dollar French blazer and Levis mix with the common people is a sight to be seen. Senator Edwards and George Bush can mix in with the crowd -- the folks know immediately both of them can drive a pick up truck and know how to eat real barbecue and actually enjoy it. Kerry eating a Philly cheese steak sandwich is as discomforting as the first President Bush eating chicherones -- fried pork rinds. Even if they actually like it, as my daughter would say, “It’s really not you.” Kerry may want to project the prince of the blood charm of Jack Kennedy but he in fact radiates the awkward shyness and earnest but stiff desire to please of President Bush’s Dad. Both men were born in the Bay State of mainly patrician stock and boy does it show.
Now George W. Bush is every bit the New England patrician that Kerry is, indeed more so since his people have been going to Yale for a couple hundred years. Bush suffered many of the same privations the patrician class routinely inflicts on their children that Kerry did. Yet, Bush actually went to public school out yonder in Midland Texas. He played Little League and went his first two years of high school to San Houston High in Midland. He talks and walks like it. He actually knows regular Americans and who they are and where and how they live. Texas like Ireland is not a place will putting on airs will get you very far. His parents shipped him back Andover before Yale in an attempt to de -Texas him, but it didn’t take. You can take the lad out of West Texas, but you can’t ever take West Texas out of him. (One of his very West Texas traits is letting folks think he is a dunce until it’s too late and he rolls over them. West Texans play very shrewd poker.)
If fate had been different, it came to me as I saw Florida Governor John Ellis (JEB) Bush on television during and after the double hurricane hit, Kerry would be facing a Bush who is also very much from the same old patrician class. Almost as tall as John Kerry, Jeb Bush is soft and well spoken in two languages, (Kerry has made his ability to speak French and German top secret at least until the election is over) he is diffident yet obviously very bright, if not an out right intellectual. Where his old brother is all sharp angles and choppy words, JEB is as smooth as Kerry when he gets to talking. He even has a Latin wife like Kerry and is a Catholic. (President Bush, VP Cheney and Senator Edwards are all United Methodists.) Instead of the obvious clash we have today, if it was John Forbes Kerry vs. John Ellis Bush the news people would make jokes about the two Yale men debating the proper sequence of silverware at a state dinner, the correct wine to accompany various specific shell fish and when it was OK to wear a pastel shirt and when only a white one would do.
- XXX -
Sunday, August 22, 2004
The Swift Boat brawl is like a revival of HAIR.
In case you’re interested, the taffrail is the rail on ship above the stern (back end if you don’t know any sailor’s lingo. The front of the ship, the “bow” is the pointy one, the back end is usually the roundy one although on most modern ships it is just a straight drop into the water.). The taffrail is a place where sailors have long gathered to shoot the breeze, gossip, tell jokes and just enjoy the sight of the prop wash blending into the foaming wake of the ship. It is place where you see where you have been.
Talking about looking at where you been, the dust up between Senator Kerry and his one time shipmates is bubbling over. Much of the mainstream press is still trying to cover up the story -- not a bad idea because they get hopelessly tangled in Navy jargon and ambiguous records when they try to make a closer examination of the story.
Some thoughts about it:
God knows 1969 was a long time ago, and things really change, in my case a dozen more belt notches are necessary to hold up my pants and there is no sign of a long gone head of curly dark hair -- I am now Hippocratically bald -- meaning there are no survivors on the top of my head, like the esteemed and venerated Greek physician whose best advise remains absolutely sound: “First, do no harm.”
Memories get tangled after all these years although some remain very vivid most don’t. Motives get tangled too. Now John Kerry’s terminally New England preppie manner may have rubbed some people the wrong way way back then. Like former President George H. W. Bush, he had Yale Skull and Bones almost tattooed on his large forehead. The guy did not have the common touch and his height and to most swabs odd way of speaking made him seem different. All that being the case, what made so many of his one time fellow officers HATE him, not just dislike but hate him with a righteous rage was was he did and said after he left the Navy and became one of the stars of the antiwar Movement.
While the Navy does not have the obvious and compelling Marine Corps “band of brothers” ethos, a Jesuit like sense of loyalty and tightness, the Navy does have its traditions and bonds. Shipmates have a real sense of community and small “f” fraternity, especially if you have served in combat, but even if you didn’t there is a real since of brotherhood with the people you spent a year or two at sea. On my second ship we all were proud that we had defended our honor against the creeps from the USS Ranger in a saloon brawl one night in Olongapo in the Philippines. There were old and running feuds in the Seventh Fleet and the guys from the Ranger were on one side and the guys from the USS Camden and the USS Kitty Hawk were on the other. The Kitty Hawk and Ranger were super carriers while the Camden was a very large oil and munitions ship that resupplied them at sea ever few days.
Anyway, John Kerry in calling his former shipmates war criminals and all the rest of his litany of crimes infuriate most of them. He ratted on his shipmates and tarred all with the broad brush of infamy. They are still furious about it. Sure it was a long time ago, but the bitterness is deep and sincere. In an us vs. them fight he was for them. He was not one of us. He was a rat.
As an aside I should point out that most people who were deeply involved in the bitter tumult of the the late 1960’s and early 1970’s have made their peace. The actress Jane Forda who was the poster girl of the antiwar movement a number of years ago became a Methodist and issued a statement where she reached across the divide and said she deeply regretted the excesses of that time and harsh words that engendered so much bad feeling. She didn’t apologize for her political position, but for the hurtful and excessive things that got everybody’s blood pressure up and left deep resentments. For me, she put PAID to the bad memories with an expression of good will and regret that seemed sincere and healing.
John Kerry’s big time mistake was not making a similar act and statement of reconciliation. This should have been done last year at a major veterans meeting. For some reason he appears to want it both ways -- the adulation for being a war hero while also taking full credit for being the big time antiwar firebrand.
John Kerry had good and honorable service but was not a hero. The other Senator Kerrey (D-Nebraska) was a HERO. Check it out. Bob Kerrey was the Bob Dole of my generation, the hero who overcame terrible wounds to go into business successfully and on into politics. If he was the nominee of the Democrat Party nobody would ever have raised a voice in anything but praise for his exceptional service. A few years ago there was mini fire storm of trumped up fake war criminal bullshit that I think broke his heart and he withdrew from politics. I’d love to know who cooked up this poisonous brew. It wasn’t the Republicans, but the small ferret minded gang of character assassins that operate on the far fringe of the Democratic Party. These creeps usually surface in the primaries. Enough said.
What would a full investigation reveal about Senator Kerry’s record? Honestly it would be nearly as inconclusive as the current debate, much passion but not enough certainty to clear things up. The paper work from the war period is incomplete and often riddled with contradictions. Who wrote the actual combat reports? Did Kerry write some? Maybe he did, but who can tell now. Further the documents are riddled with errors, some obvious like the Combat “V” authorized for Kerry’s Silver Star on his discharge papers. (Silver Star is a combat medal and doesn’t need a “V” attachments like those medals than can be for combat or non combat service -- Bronze Stars where the brass “V” is added to make it clear it is combat service.)
Finally, to judge the documents the people reading them must know the context of the time, Navy usage and custom, the real not the apparent meaning of the words. Sometimes a slight variation from the norm can actually have a major negative meaning that an outsider would not even notice. That's my take on this stuff.
Ironically most of the newsies who are covering this dog fight are shocked at the bitterness on both sides. They were too young to have known the pain and harshness of the time. I know my own daughter thinks my talk about Vietnam is as distant from her reality as the Spanish American War or her great grandfather’s four years in France with the Queen’s Yorkshire Rifles in WW I. In her last year at UCLA Theater Arts Department, they put on a production of HAIR. She and the other students considered it a funky but dated period piece, like Private Lives is a period piece of the 1920’s or Anything Goes for the 1930’s.
Little items:
1. After running a bunch of ordinary errands late yesterday afternoon, my wife and I had a wonderful simple dinner at a little family run Neapolitan place in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood. We had Veal Piccata as good as I ever had, a rich subtle cloud of veal with the tang of lemons and capers. The real stuff.
2. Last week Teresa Heinz Kerry told an interviewer that really nobody was qualified to be President. The job was just way too big for any mortal human. She naturally added that her husband was less unqualified than George Bush. But she is right in her blunt firm jawed Portuguese way. Portuguese widows don’t mince words. I like her a lot because she reminds me of my mother another woman of Portuguese heritage who was widowed early with three sons. Some say she is blunt and outspoken because she is so rich. Ain’t so. She’d be the same if she ran a bakery or a dairy or was a high school teacher in Los Banos or Tracy California.
Talking about looking at where you been, the dust up between Senator Kerry and his one time shipmates is bubbling over. Much of the mainstream press is still trying to cover up the story -- not a bad idea because they get hopelessly tangled in Navy jargon and ambiguous records when they try to make a closer examination of the story.
Some thoughts about it:
God knows 1969 was a long time ago, and things really change, in my case a dozen more belt notches are necessary to hold up my pants and there is no sign of a long gone head of curly dark hair -- I am now Hippocratically bald -- meaning there are no survivors on the top of my head, like the esteemed and venerated Greek physician whose best advise remains absolutely sound: “First, do no harm.”
Memories get tangled after all these years although some remain very vivid most don’t. Motives get tangled too. Now John Kerry’s terminally New England preppie manner may have rubbed some people the wrong way way back then. Like former President George H. W. Bush, he had Yale Skull and Bones almost tattooed on his large forehead. The guy did not have the common touch and his height and to most swabs odd way of speaking made him seem different. All that being the case, what made so many of his one time fellow officers HATE him, not just dislike but hate him with a righteous rage was was he did and said after he left the Navy and became one of the stars of the antiwar Movement.
While the Navy does not have the obvious and compelling Marine Corps “band of brothers” ethos, a Jesuit like sense of loyalty and tightness, the Navy does have its traditions and bonds. Shipmates have a real sense of community and small “f” fraternity, especially if you have served in combat, but even if you didn’t there is a real since of brotherhood with the people you spent a year or two at sea. On my second ship we all were proud that we had defended our honor against the creeps from the USS Ranger in a saloon brawl one night in Olongapo in the Philippines. There were old and running feuds in the Seventh Fleet and the guys from the Ranger were on one side and the guys from the USS Camden and the USS Kitty Hawk were on the other. The Kitty Hawk and Ranger were super carriers while the Camden was a very large oil and munitions ship that resupplied them at sea ever few days.
Anyway, John Kerry in calling his former shipmates war criminals and all the rest of his litany of crimes infuriate most of them. He ratted on his shipmates and tarred all with the broad brush of infamy. They are still furious about it. Sure it was a long time ago, but the bitterness is deep and sincere. In an us vs. them fight he was for them. He was not one of us. He was a rat.
As an aside I should point out that most people who were deeply involved in the bitter tumult of the the late 1960’s and early 1970’s have made their peace. The actress Jane Forda who was the poster girl of the antiwar movement a number of years ago became a Methodist and issued a statement where she reached across the divide and said she deeply regretted the excesses of that time and harsh words that engendered so much bad feeling. She didn’t apologize for her political position, but for the hurtful and excessive things that got everybody’s blood pressure up and left deep resentments. For me, she put PAID to the bad memories with an expression of good will and regret that seemed sincere and healing.
John Kerry’s big time mistake was not making a similar act and statement of reconciliation. This should have been done last year at a major veterans meeting. For some reason he appears to want it both ways -- the adulation for being a war hero while also taking full credit for being the big time antiwar firebrand.
John Kerry had good and honorable service but was not a hero. The other Senator Kerrey (D-Nebraska) was a HERO. Check it out. Bob Kerrey was the Bob Dole of my generation, the hero who overcame terrible wounds to go into business successfully and on into politics. If he was the nominee of the Democrat Party nobody would ever have raised a voice in anything but praise for his exceptional service. A few years ago there was mini fire storm of trumped up fake war criminal bullshit that I think broke his heart and he withdrew from politics. I’d love to know who cooked up this poisonous brew. It wasn’t the Republicans, but the small ferret minded gang of character assassins that operate on the far fringe of the Democratic Party. These creeps usually surface in the primaries. Enough said.
What would a full investigation reveal about Senator Kerry’s record? Honestly it would be nearly as inconclusive as the current debate, much passion but not enough certainty to clear things up. The paper work from the war period is incomplete and often riddled with contradictions. Who wrote the actual combat reports? Did Kerry write some? Maybe he did, but who can tell now. Further the documents are riddled with errors, some obvious like the Combat “V” authorized for Kerry’s Silver Star on his discharge papers. (Silver Star is a combat medal and doesn’t need a “V” attachments like those medals than can be for combat or non combat service -- Bronze Stars where the brass “V” is added to make it clear it is combat service.)
Finally, to judge the documents the people reading them must know the context of the time, Navy usage and custom, the real not the apparent meaning of the words. Sometimes a slight variation from the norm can actually have a major negative meaning that an outsider would not even notice. That's my take on this stuff.
Ironically most of the newsies who are covering this dog fight are shocked at the bitterness on both sides. They were too young to have known the pain and harshness of the time. I know my own daughter thinks my talk about Vietnam is as distant from her reality as the Spanish American War or her great grandfather’s four years in France with the Queen’s Yorkshire Rifles in WW I. In her last year at UCLA Theater Arts Department, they put on a production of HAIR. She and the other students considered it a funky but dated period piece, like Private Lives is a period piece of the 1920’s or Anything Goes for the 1930’s.
Little items:
1. After running a bunch of ordinary errands late yesterday afternoon, my wife and I had a wonderful simple dinner at a little family run Neapolitan place in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood. We had Veal Piccata as good as I ever had, a rich subtle cloud of veal with the tang of lemons and capers. The real stuff.
2. Last week Teresa Heinz Kerry told an interviewer that really nobody was qualified to be President. The job was just way too big for any mortal human. She naturally added that her husband was less unqualified than George Bush. But she is right in her blunt firm jawed Portuguese way. Portuguese widows don’t mince words. I like her a lot because she reminds me of my mother another woman of Portuguese heritage who was widowed early with three sons. Some say she is blunt and outspoken because she is so rich. Ain’t so. She’d be the same if she ran a bakery or a dairy or was a high school teacher in Los Banos or Tracy California.
Friday, August 20, 2004
Funny, but it's still THE DOORS
To: Chris Matthews, Hardball, MSNBC
You guys are driving me nuts ‘cause none of you talk Navy or have any understanding what it means.
Before you have two civilian lawyers who clearly don’t talk Navy lingo bang heads over Kerry and his Swift Boat guys, PLEASE have at least one old salty Navy alumnus who can keep you from making fools of your selves.
Today you and the young woman author fell into utter cross purposes because neither of you understood what was meant by self inflected. Nobody is accusing Senator Kerry of shooting himself. That’s not what “self inflected” means when you’re talking about a Purple Heart. In one case Senator Kerry shot a round from an M-79 grenade launcher and the grenade detonated close enough to his boat to “blow back” shrapnel. On another one of his Purple Hearts the shrapnel that hit him appears to have been caused by one of his boat's rounds setting off a cache of VC munitions and rice on the beach and again their was a shrapnel blow back. Kerry did good. But the rules for Purple Hearts are clear that the injury (it can be small, medium or major) must be cause by hostile fire -- the bad guys had to shoot at you. Blow Back, even when it is a major wound does not rate a Purple Heart.
Capish’?
Even a minor nick from enemy fire gets a medal. Even a major wound from “blow back’ or friendly fire gets no Purple Heart. (It might get you some other medal, but that a different story.)
I served up river from the Swift Boats from Jan through August 1969 when my ship was ordered home to be scrapped. .(It was an ugly old tub that had been an LST in WW II.) The Swift Bats operated in the ocean just off the coast and in the lower Mekong, they drew too much water to operate well up river. Up river the Navy used smaller faster PBR's and Mike boats and some other shallow draft boats.
My opinion is: Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia yarn is pure fiction. The two times my ship wandered into Cambodia in 1969, the Cambodians came right up in patrol boats and led us back to Vietnamese water. Everything was friendly and polite. The river charts were 1935 French Navy surveys and hopeless. The Mekong is a big muddy river and the channels are always changing. Things got nasty in Cambodia in 1971, long after me and Senator Kerry were back in the USA.
Senator Kerry’s Bronze and Silver Stars smell OK to me, a lot of guys of his rank got them and I don’t have any reason to doubt them.
Senator Kerry’s three Purple Hearts don’t fit the normal pattern for Navy guys. They got a geedunk quality. His early out home really smells geedunk.
Note one: as you have seen for yourself, most of the officers who served on Swift Boats got it out for Senator Kerry. He rubbed them the wrong way big time back in 1969. This is an old and very deep Navy feud. You get the picture. They have hated him for more than thirty years. He had to know he would stir them up big time when he presented himself as the John Paul Jones of the Mekong Delta.
Note two: In addition to his old squadron mates and wardroom fellows, there is another attack on Senator Kerry’s Vietnam campaign that could in fact be even more dangerous. The no surrender stripe of Left-wingers doesn’t like him. Check out Alexander Cockburn’s July column on Kerry. It is the most vicious attack on Kerry I have ever read. Mr. Cockburn is a Trotskyite Brit who lives in Mendicino County California. His Dad was Claud Cockburn who was the novelist Evelyn Waugh’s “Communist Cousin.” Old time left-winger, but as you might expect, he writes very well. He openly accuses Kerry of being an real war criminal and someone who was deranged and acted out his derangement with a M-79 grenade launcher and machine guns. Kerry killed some people who may or may not have been legit targets, he alleges.
He ends his column quoting Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (a truly beloved Navy leader) that Kerry was a loose cannon who shot up civilians every chance he got and they had to straight jacket him and get him home early. (If true it would explain why a couple of the Purple Hearts look geedunk. They were the geedunk that Zumwalt used to finesse Kerry's early trip home to the States.)
If you want to know what geedunk means, ask an old Navy guy.
Johnny Cabral
SM2 USN 1968-1971
PS Tonight I was reading a blog by a young California soldier in Mosul, Iraq. After a long day he was on his bunk listening to a CD of THE DOORS. Like a familiar smell that triggered memories -- THE DOORS were a major part of the sound track to the Vietnam War. I remember hearing them on AFVN Saigon. I guess there is no Armed ForcesRadio Iraq like we had all those years ago. I doubt soldiers also listen the Shirrells? AFVN Saigon used to play them a lot, but I don't think today's army listens to "Soldier Boy, I'll be true to you" or "Dedicated to the one I love."
You guys are driving me nuts ‘cause none of you talk Navy or have any understanding what it means.
Before you have two civilian lawyers who clearly don’t talk Navy lingo bang heads over Kerry and his Swift Boat guys, PLEASE have at least one old salty Navy alumnus who can keep you from making fools of your selves.
Today you and the young woman author fell into utter cross purposes because neither of you understood what was meant by self inflected. Nobody is accusing Senator Kerry of shooting himself. That’s not what “self inflected” means when you’re talking about a Purple Heart. In one case Senator Kerry shot a round from an M-79 grenade launcher and the grenade detonated close enough to his boat to “blow back” shrapnel. On another one of his Purple Hearts the shrapnel that hit him appears to have been caused by one of his boat's rounds setting off a cache of VC munitions and rice on the beach and again their was a shrapnel blow back. Kerry did good. But the rules for Purple Hearts are clear that the injury (it can be small, medium or major) must be cause by hostile fire -- the bad guys had to shoot at you. Blow Back, even when it is a major wound does not rate a Purple Heart.
Capish’?
Even a minor nick from enemy fire gets a medal. Even a major wound from “blow back’ or friendly fire gets no Purple Heart. (It might get you some other medal, but that a different story.)
I served up river from the Swift Boats from Jan through August 1969 when my ship was ordered home to be scrapped. .(It was an ugly old tub that had been an LST in WW II.) The Swift Bats operated in the ocean just off the coast and in the lower Mekong, they drew too much water to operate well up river. Up river the Navy used smaller faster PBR's and Mike boats and some other shallow draft boats.
My opinion is: Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia yarn is pure fiction. The two times my ship wandered into Cambodia in 1969, the Cambodians came right up in patrol boats and led us back to Vietnamese water. Everything was friendly and polite. The river charts were 1935 French Navy surveys and hopeless. The Mekong is a big muddy river and the channels are always changing. Things got nasty in Cambodia in 1971, long after me and Senator Kerry were back in the USA.
Senator Kerry’s Bronze and Silver Stars smell OK to me, a lot of guys of his rank got them and I don’t have any reason to doubt them.
Senator Kerry’s three Purple Hearts don’t fit the normal pattern for Navy guys. They got a geedunk quality. His early out home really smells geedunk.
Note one: as you have seen for yourself, most of the officers who served on Swift Boats got it out for Senator Kerry. He rubbed them the wrong way big time back in 1969. This is an old and very deep Navy feud. You get the picture. They have hated him for more than thirty years. He had to know he would stir them up big time when he presented himself as the John Paul Jones of the Mekong Delta.
Note two: In addition to his old squadron mates and wardroom fellows, there is another attack on Senator Kerry’s Vietnam campaign that could in fact be even more dangerous. The no surrender stripe of Left-wingers doesn’t like him. Check out Alexander Cockburn’s July column on Kerry. It is the most vicious attack on Kerry I have ever read. Mr. Cockburn is a Trotskyite Brit who lives in Mendicino County California. His Dad was Claud Cockburn who was the novelist Evelyn Waugh’s “Communist Cousin.” Old time left-winger, but as you might expect, he writes very well. He openly accuses Kerry of being an real war criminal and someone who was deranged and acted out his derangement with a M-79 grenade launcher and machine guns. Kerry killed some people who may or may not have been legit targets, he alleges.
He ends his column quoting Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (a truly beloved Navy leader) that Kerry was a loose cannon who shot up civilians every chance he got and they had to straight jacket him and get him home early. (If true it would explain why a couple of the Purple Hearts look geedunk. They were the geedunk that Zumwalt used to finesse Kerry's early trip home to the States.)
If you want to know what geedunk means, ask an old Navy guy.
Johnny Cabral
SM2 USN 1968-1971
PS Tonight I was reading a blog by a young California soldier in Mosul, Iraq. After a long day he was on his bunk listening to a CD of THE DOORS. Like a familiar smell that triggered memories -- THE DOORS were a major part of the sound track to the Vietnam War. I remember hearing them on AFVN Saigon. I guess there is no Armed ForcesRadio Iraq like we had all those years ago. I doubt soldiers also listen the Shirrells? AFVN Saigon used to play them a lot, but I don't think today's army listens to "Soldier Boy, I'll be true to you" or "Dedicated to the one I love."
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