Wayward Landlubber

I think I was about 14 or 15. The boy becoming the man, with the zits to show for it. I was learning my politics at family gatherings, encouraged by my uncles. The usual topic, aside from the careful talk about WWII, was Vietnam. It was known at that time as a "police action" but would soon be declared a bonified war. For a very bone-headed reason. I wrote a letter to the Editor of the Oregon Statesman, there being two Salem papers of record at that time. I opined passionately on the Vietnam War and patriotism as only a fifteen year-old male with a face full of acne could. At sometime during my rant, with no attempt at subtelty, I called our two great Senator's, Wayne Morse (D) and Mark Hatfield (R), "worms in the bowels of government". They were, and still are among our great Senators. How many middle-school boys know anything about subtelty?       Shortly after the appearance of my Letter to the Editor, I recieved a subscription to a cheap newsprint monthly ca...

The USA has a Cricket team. And they have done pretty well on the world Cricket tour. The match against Ireland on June 14, was abandoned without a ball bowled. I don't know what that means, they don't call balls and strikes and they don't play in a bowling alley. It's a confusing game. There are Eleven players on each side, most of whom have nothing to do. There is a 22yd pitch in the center of the field, which is a couple feet longer than the distance between home plate and the pitchers mound in baseball, I think it serves the same function. I don't know what that is in meters. None of the eleven players is the Catcher, or British equivolent, to catch the bowlers pitches, or the pitchers bowls, or whatever they call throwing at the wickett in Crickett, which could be sticky. Should the batsman hit the ball, one of the eleven players will try to catch the bowl-or ball-or whetever.  Cricket doesn't seem to have innings, or other designated ways to define when th...

     My dad was a lifetime member of the VFW. This was not an honor based on longevity, he paid higher yearly dues to gain that distinction. He did that because he believed in the organization and its goals. Consequently, the monthly VFW magazine was among the magazines available to me to read as a child. Many's the time a traveling veteran joined us at the dinner table. Many's the time that dad would call the VFW secretary-treasurer, on the old bake-light rotary-dial telephones of the 50s and 60s.  Pretty soon the doorbell would ring, dad would answer the door and then they, and the down-on-his-luck veteran, would stand on the porch. Dad and our guest would return to the table, they would finish their meal, including dessert and coffee. Lousy coffee, I would learn many years later. When the veteran left, he had some traveling cash for food and gas. That's the way things were done in those days. I suppose the American Legion worked the same way. Dad had a good friend...

     Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law. Unlike philosophy, jurisprudence requires a verdict. All candidates for higher court judgeships in the past have given their support to the legal concept of Stare Decicis which means to "stand by things decided". Until recently it was a legal standard accepted by both party's. At some point the party that believes in a questionable concept of Constitutional Originalism stopped giving lip service to Stare Decisus. The ultimate effect was to strike down Roe v Wade, after a half century of it being law. It may overturn a lot of legislative races in states here-to-fore considered red. I will not weep.       Our judicial branch has undergone a conservative make-over. It started with the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He was appointed to the bench upon the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, the first black jurist on the Supreme Court. Thomas was nominated because he was also a black juris...

     I grew up at a time when a family home could be afforded on a single-earner paycheck. We still had poverty, but about 30% of the workforce was covered by a union contract, and that became the floor payed by non-union employers. Back in that time we were employees, and none of us had heard of an HR Dept. This was a time when we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We had, after all defeated fascism. We had, thanks toKeynesian economic, FDR and the Democrats, in the previous two decades built the strongest middle-class in the world, and we rebuilt the cities of Europe bombed out during WWII. Even the cities of what had been our enemies.      We had eight decades of relative peace among those old allies and enemies, with the exception of a cold war world-wide, and a hot was in Indochina where we shouldn't have been. All was not perfect, we still had the scourge of racism to defeat, but we were working on it. For a while we thought we were starting to...