Wayward Landlubber

For a while now I've been wanting to write a little something about a lot of nothing. A tribute to my old cat, Gracie maybe, or the beauty of nature, the susseration of the river, as it makes its slow journey to the ocean, or the delight of a Blue Heron wading in the shallows. But now is not the time. We are citizens of a land that is no longer familiar to us. We have watched it getting closer, like a jagged rock threatening to slice into our hull, but we are helpless, our steering is damaged, we are on a collision course, and the helmsman is incompetent. There could have been a solution, but that is gone. We are no longer protecting, however awkwardly, the Constitution of the United States. It is gone, POOF. We can credibly ask the question, will there be a 2028 presidential election? We can even ask, what will it look like? Russia has elections, very well run elections. India has elections, also tightly controlled, which is a phrase you never want uttered in association to democr...

I'm no expert on humor and comedy, but I hope someday to come pretty close. I don't know how it happened but it seemed to just open like a rosebud as i grew older. I can remember sneaking down the staircase to almost see the Johnny Carson in the far corner of the living room when i was a child. Some of the comics I listened to were Lenny Bruce, Mort Saul, Don Rickles, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-in, all the way to John Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and a host of others. Somehow, along the way, this saying stuck in my head and never left: HUMOR SHOULD OPPRESS THE COMFORTABLE AND COMFORT THE OPPRESSED. It may have come from Mel Brooks. It took me a while to recognize the truth in that. It could be no other way. If you reverse it, humor should comfort the comfortable and oppress the oppressed, you are a sycophant of power in the first case, and a sadist in the other. Only a Republican could fail to see that, and you know which group they choose to comfort. One of Mel Brooks many film...

Many years ago, when I was more interested in Tonka trucks than in this new piece of furniture my parents purchased; an Admiral TV set with a record turntable in the top of the cabinet, as well as containing an AM FM radio. There was a weekly television drama that I suspect was watched by WWII veterans like my dad. It was called, The Man Without a Country. The historical and biographical information comes from Google and Wikipedia. Two places rightwingers avoid, lest their minds be poisoned  by George Soros. The short story was written for Altlantic magazine in 1863 by Edward Everett Hale, a greatnephew of Revolutionary War hero, Nathan Hale. The subject of the story was a young Army Lieutenant, Phillip Nolan, who  befriends Aaron Burr  on a visit. When Burr is charge with treason, after a duel where he proved the better shot than Alexander Hamilton, Nolan is charged as well. I do not know if Nolan was an active participant, or an innocent bystander, but he is convicted b...

Some of us are obsessive about words. Or obsessive compulsive. That's  fine, delusion is over-used by those who overuse words, why should we not be obsessive or compulsive  about words? The definition of any word is agreed to mean something. Some of us challenge those rules, as we should; it is how we strengthen the boring rules of lexicographers. And we can be criticized for the content of our words. Cynics and humorists need to stretch truths the same way they stretch credulity. Lawyers and politicians must hue closely to those boring lexicographers definition of words. They are either prosecuting, or defending people who have no respect for what those truths represent, or who were prosecuted by elected people who have no respect in those words. And then you know you're screwed. A sign of a healthy polity, is not having to concern yourself with how narrowly the controlling power interprets your words or actions. Or what you possibly might be capable of. Would you want any Re...

I did not serve in the Vietnam War, though my graduating class was the last class to be conscripted into military service. How I escaped the draft is a long story which starts with a handout manual provided by the United Friends Service Committee, and the Selective Service that was a step or two behind the anti-war movement in 1968. That was the existential threat of my graduating cohort, and those that came before. The Domino Theory turned out to be an unnecessary fear and a mere hypothesis. In truth, I have not favored many of the wars and military actions that were to follow, with the possible exception of the war in Kosovo back in the early 1990s. Most of them can be attributed to one particular party. Vietnam can be shared by both party's, but JFK was sacrificed to Mars so that the war could go on and businesses that were riding the big waves of profits could afford vacation homes on the Costa Del Sol. It's ironic, I typed Costa del Sol, autocorrect changed it to Costa Del...

Most nights I sit with my cat in my lap as I scroll through the political offerings on YouTube. I have a TV, but I gave up trying to figure out how it works without cable. Thats how old i am. Like most things media, there are good Podcasts, and there are guys in muscle shirts. There are also historical snippets among the hysterical snippets. Some of them are very good and the narrators successfully run the gamet between professorial and subtle irony. Few are boring. It's not hard to tell the difference. The most disappointing historical snippets are the ones with digitally created voice-overs.  I used to know a fellow who was a pretty good actor, no one you would know, but one who strode the boards of local theater groups with characters that were believable; the aim of every actor. When I met Doug, he had been at it for about 10 years, after mustering out of the airforce at the end of the Cuba missile crisis. He completed his acting career in 2005 when his twenty-year battle with ...

There's an ancient tome studied by military colleges around the world, and by people who study peace. The Art of War was written sometime in the 5th Century--BCE. The author was Sun Tzu. He was a general but not your ordinary kind of general. He was great enough to be studied 2500 years later. One of his stories on proper generalship during war was about a great army, maybe 10,000 strong, marching on the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Great armies make noise, in the 5th Century BC, the noise they made was a distinctive noise to a trained ear. There's of course the rythmic stomp of marching feet on cobblestone streets. The occasional drop of a spear, maybe. The noise of wagons to carry the manual implements of war, and the food to feed them, voices of men commanding, and there was the slap of leather on leather as the soldiers moved briskly through the broad plaza. How do you enter the city undetected was the problem? The solution was to drive gaggles of geese before them. The gees...