Archive for October 14th, 2005
Why the Greatest Generation was so Small
They called themselves “dog faces.”
The reason they were called “dog faces” was because they were put through the Basic Training of World War II. Basic Training made them obey their masters like dogs.
The British Army had a slogan for recruiting:
“It’s a MAN’S Life.”
If Basic Training made a man of you, it was a failure. The purpose of Basic was to make you perfectly obedient.
It takes generations of breeding and training besides to make a dog perfectly obedient.
The Army had eight weeks.
Four years of Obedience Training. That was World War Two in America. You had to unlearn everything our ancestors came here for.
But it got WORSE.
There was the GI Bill of Rights.
Over fifty percent of those who proudly called themselves GIs, “Government Issues,” took advantage of the right to go to college free.
After four years of Obedience Training, their professors taught them that only professors knew how to rule the world. They called it Progressive Thinking, they called it Liberalism.
I have lived a lifetime hearing people call slavishness heroism and hearing people call hatred humanity. So I am not the least surprised that the group that called itself The Greatest Generation called abject, groveling obedience “Being Realistic” and “Being Tough.”
They thought they were mature. They thought they knew what the world was all about.
So when I said they should fight back, they laughed and said I did know the world the way they did. They had learned that the sergeant was meaner than they were. They had learned that you have to “go through channels.”
Above all, hey learned that “You can’t beat Town Hall.”
In the American Revolution, everyone of them would have been a Tory.
That was just from Basic Training. Everybody who got Basic Training in World War II would have been a Tory in the Revolution. They were obedient dog faces and proud of it.
But Basic Training was followed by Politically Correct Training.
After Obedience Training the Dog Face went to college for the “education” they had earned. At the universities they were dog faces again:
At the universities the dog faces learned there that there were Authorities in the world. The Authorities knew what was best.
If you didn’t believe it, the Authorities would flunk you.
Once again, if you didn’t obey, the Authorities would squash you like a bug.
That generation, the people who called themselves dog faces, were convinced that believing professors made them Real Men.
Real Men knew the Real World.
They were Real Men.
They knew how to Obey.
You are now living in the world the Greatest Generation made for you.
Mondo cane, the world of dogs. You are living in the world the dogs made for you.
The Old Man Wants to Ramble
One of our favorite blacks in the brick plant, Charlie, had to spend several months on the chain gang.
He didn’t like it.
It wasn’t the work he minded. Working on the chain gang was much, much, MUCH easier than working on the brick plant.
MUCH easier.
Did I mention the word “much?”
On the brick plant there was one major qualification for getting the job. That was not “monkeying.”
“Monkeying” meant passing out. If you passed out twice on the job they let you go.
Did I mention that the chain gang was easier than that?
So Charlie didn’t mind the work. He made jokes about it.
He also didn’t mind the man with the shotgun. The man with the shotgun was a friendly old guy and you would only get shot if you ran.
RAN?
It was a CHAIN gang. They actually did have chains on.
Anybody who tried to run with chains on would not have been shot. He would have been sent to the State Hospital for mental observation.
So Charlie didn’t mind the work or the shotgun.
No, Charlie didn’t mind the work, Lord knows, and he didn’t even seem to mind the jail.
What got to him was corn bread and peas.
Every day for months he ate nothing, and I mean nothing, but corn bread and black-eyed peas.
We had very little in the sand hills, but we had FOOD. Lots of food. Lots of GOOD food.
Whenever I walked down to the plant through the places that were referred to by everybody, including the blacks, as the “niggah houses,” my mouth watered. The same was true of the rest of my family.
The “niggah house” were shabby, but they were free, and only Charlie and a couple of other black men got them. We gave them to the blacks we WANTED to live near us. They didn’t have to commute many miles to the brick plant as so many others had to.
Work was scarce in the sand hills, very scarce. You had to drive and you could not “monkey.”
Nobody EVER gave up one of the “niggah houses.”
Food and shelter, sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? My family provided that for some eighty people with those throw-away things. Most of the the people we provided them for were black.
Nobody ever gave up a “niggah house.” To live there, you had to be on personal terms with the Whitakers. We were big people in our little world.
So Charlie wasn’t upset with the lack of decor in the jail. What he talked about for months afterward was corn bread and peas.
I could see why.
When you walked by the “niggah houses” all you remembered was the smell of the stuff cooking. It was cooking all the time, and whoever wanted something to eat just took some.
I didn’t go in and eat after I was about five. When I was very small, my parents would leave me with the black folks, and me and the other “niggah” kids would eat whenever we felt like it.
The average African today would give his soul for a steady diet of corn bread and black-eyed peas.
I’ve been there. I know.
Charlie missed FOOD, and he missed it bad.
You can’t have food like that today. It was dripping with fat, it was made to taste good and it made your stomach dance.
My yuppie niece went to a black wedding in the low state a few years back and she couldn’t believe how good the food was. She ate and she ate.
It was her only chance to eat it. It would have scandalized her Yuppie friends. Every bite was verboten, Evil and full of every poison we are warned against.
She just couldn’t stop. She talked about it for months.
Many a person in Pontiac, South Carolina back then died at the age of ninety or so of cholesterol poisoning. So Modern Opinion has to be right.
But nobody out there was EVER hungry.
I don’t know where Jane Fonda found her “children starving in South Carolina.”
But it sure wasn’t in our sandhills.
There are no Careers Today
Posted by Bob in General, Musings about Life on 10/14/2005
My grandfather began his work for the railroad about 1900. He retired about 1946. The job changed almost not at all during that entire period. He learned telegraphy and he was a station
master.
My father was the world’s top consultant on brick making. But when he died in 1961 the brick plants were very little changed from the ones in the 1920s. Every single brick had to be moved individually by hand in each stage of the process. The clay had to be found, the clay mixed, then the brick was shaped and cut and dried and fired.
To start with the ground, find clay, then burn that clay into exactly into exactly the color you needed, all this took a lot of expertise.
But from the time he started to the time he finished, it was the SAME expertise.
NOTHING is like that now.
My other grandfather was a Methodist preacher. The Methodist Church like so many other Protestant churches had split before the Civil War into Northern and Southern branches. My grandfather began preaching in the 1870s and retired in the 1930s. During that entire time he was employed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
If you had asked my grandfather whether he was a fundamentalist, I doubt he would have understood what you meant. All Southern Methodist ministers were fundamentalists. There was no Modern Theology to learn, there was no Political Correctness to keep up with. Even the names for colored people didn’t change every couple of years.
His job was to bring people to Christ.
Not to teach them the latest progressive theories. Today it is hard to imagine a mainline Protestant minister taking “all that salvation and damnation stuff” seriously, but that was all he did.
We had doctors who learned their medicine in practice.
They even came to your house. They didn’t keep up with the latest fads in medicine, which is about all medicine is these days, and they didn’t keep up with “the latest developments in their field.”
They didn’t HAVE a “field.” They were doctors.
As for the latest developments, there were very few to keep up with. There were earthshaking drugs like penicillin developed was huge progress, but they took very little time to learn about.
My father took time out in his teens to read law and pass the bar exam, apparently for a lark, because he was too young to get a license to practice law. Lawyers practiced law in front of a jury or before a judge they knew.
The question was whether a guy was guilty or innocent and what to do about it. Like a preacher saving souls, this is now an old-fashioned and irrelevant business in the modern legal profession, but back then that was what they did for a living.
There were many last-minute decisions by the courts to keep up with. The law changed very slowly back then.
Preacher, station master, brick maker, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. These were careers.
There are no careers today.
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Clams, Oysters, Duck Doo and Joe
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 10/14/2005
In response to my “There are no Careers Today” Joe writes,
“Are all the clamdiggers gone too? I grew up on the bay. I don’t see how that could have changed very much. Last I heard duckshit had polluted the bay and the clamdiggers had to stay off the bay. Duck farms, you know. Them ducks have a tendency to dump a load now and again. They tell me it got into the bay and polluted it. Those were the days. I have many fond memories of working out on the bay. I knew nothing about the people who have a stranglehold on our country today. Real freedom seemed to exist in those days. If the criminals in charge today have their way, our children and our grandchildren won’t ever know what that freedom was like. Who would have dreamed such a thing could have happened in our country?”
MY REPLY:
Last sentence first. As anybody who knew me will attest, I was saying these things would happen in America when I was a teenager.
When I was fifteen I would come back from my lunch to my high school and somebody would shout “Federal Troops!”
Unlike absolutely everybody else who would tell you now they knew it, I took it for granted that the Federal Government would use Federal troops to enforce integration.
Everybody thought “Federal Troops” Bob was being ridiculous.
The list of my ridiculousness back then is endless. My sister remembers when I said the old ladies walking on Green Street near the University would not dare do that in the future and she thought how extreme that sounded.
There is not a thing happening now that I was not ridiculed in the 1950s for taking for granted.
That was then.
It happened in the 1960s when I was predicting fifty years ahead, and no one believes what I say about 2010. Likewise the 70s and the 20s, and so on.
No one takes me seriously today.
I’m used to it.
I’m tired of talking about that, so let’s go on to what may strike a chord with some readers: I do not know the difference between clams and oysters. I do not know the difference between frogs and toads. I expect someone on the Blog to let me know.
I do know that oysters clean the bays.
I watched my father wade with me in the bay and look through oyster shells and find one with an oyster in it and eat the damned thing raw.
But he also pulled his nose hairs with tweezers.
And I worked on the brick plant long before I was old enough and never passed out.
I was TOUGH. And I resent the fact I had to be.
Pain is CHEAP. A decent civilization is one which does not ask people to suffer, but a society that makes people WANT to live in it.
What I realized in the 1950s is that we could have had a joyful future.
We blew it.
I don’t miss the 1950s. I don’t miss outhouses and raw oysters.
But I do miss the future we could have had if they had listened to me.
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