Archive for October, 2005
Martyr, Second Class
After my second nervous breakdown the friends I still had in Washington were all Catholics.
Hard-core Catholics.
Conservative Catholics? That is one hell of an understatement.
I have no use for anybody who believes in an omnipotent God of Heaven and Hell and then tries to make this concept reasonable and acceptable to Modern Thought. He is speaking a language that means nothing to me.
If there is no Heaven or Hell religion is silly.
And believe me, at that point in my life I could believe in Hell. You think I am joking?
DEFINITELY no joke.
In my state “Creo in Deo Crudel,” “I believe in a cruel God,” made perfect sense to me. I gave it a one percent chance of being true.
Being true FOREVER.
At that time I was also very interested in the Shroud of Turin. It was inexplicable, and I was ready to be convinced.
One never wholly sheds the faith he was raised in.
So I went to the only religious friends I had. Calvinists required a faith I could not mustger.
Myy friends were so Catholic they weren’t Catholics any more. All of them had decided that, since Vatican II, the pope wasn’t really Catholic any more.
You think I’m joking, don’t you?
Paul Weyrich and the others had gone to the Eastern Rite. They would have gone to the Orthodox Church if the theologians had not stood in the door blocking their way.
So I joined Paul’s church, in which he later became a deacon. That is the order just below priest.
Jesus forgave the repentent thief, so the idea that he had passed on the power to forgive sins made sense to me.
Politics is everything.
By my connections, I got a benefit. To become a member of this sort of church normally requires a year as a catechumen. It took me three months, which was the amount of time I had in DC during that particular assignment.
I spent a lot of my time worrying about the “tonsure.” In order to join you had to have a new baptism and a “tonsure.”
I kept thinking about going around with a monkish haircut, the whole top of my head bald, until the hair grew back.
It turn out this was a fortunate. In fact, the “tonsure” was just cutting a tiny bit of hair off. I still have the hair along with my baptismal certificate. But worrying about weeks with a bald head kept me from minding the baptism too much.
And the baptism was something else.
The Orthodox baptism makes you Baptists look like a bunch of amateurs. I was staying with my ex-wife, and on the day of my baptism I put on a bathing suit. I had to explain to her that I was being baptised.
Being a good Odinist, she had a little trouble understanding why you had to wear a bathing suit when being baptized.
Oh well, you know how ignorant these heathens are.
In the Orthodox Church and the Melkite Church you are not just immersed in water the way the Baptists do it. You are taken to the huge font which is filled with oil and water — you can certainly feel the oil, Lord knows how much they put in — and you are shoved under three times.
Which is just the start.
Over your bathing suit you are given a thin white robe to wear. You are soaking wet and your hair is oily.
There is more ceremony, then you have to stand in front of an icon during the entire church service with a wooden cross in one hand and a burning candle in the other.
Did I mention you are soaking wet and you don’t comb your hair?
Have you ever stood motionless for a solid hour with candle in one hand while you are soaking wet?
Probably not.
For one thing, the candle drips. Having wax on a hand is like having a nose itch. But you have a cross in your other hand.
Have you ever stood for a solid hour, soaking wet, while your nose itches and both hands are full and you have to think nothing but Elevated Thoughts because you have just been baptized and you really want to be good and earn the trust the priest and Paul Weyrich have placed in you by giving you a short catechumen?
Probably not.
At the end of the hour, the service ends with the taking of the bread and wine. The priest had told me that the catechumen was served FIRST, even if a bishop was present.
I wanted to have my Holy Supper soonest for purely spiritual reasons. But the physical part of me was anxious too. It wanted to stop standing there with the nose itch and both hands full as soon as it could.
The priest totally forgot I was there. So I stood there while everybody else went up front and took the bread and wine. Finally I just put down my burden and got to the back of the line.
I never reminded the priest he had forgotten me.
I also never demanded what I should have gotten for this ordeal:
A medal that declared me a Martyr, Second Class.
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.
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.
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.
Yesbuts
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 10/07/2005
A driver who is going 55 mph in the passing lane, along with another car on his right, holds up every rush-hour driver, thousands of people, for about ten to fifteen minutes.
The police, naturally, go after “aggressive drivers,” tired people who want to get home and resent spending an extra fifteen minutes on the road, a total of at least a thousand hours, so some impotent old man can prove he knows how fast everybody should go.
Thousands of people spend thousands of extra hours on the road for that one clown.
“Yesbuts” are exactly like that.
A “yesbut” is somebody who makes a promise to get back to you and doesn’t.
When you are trying to get something done, you will call people and clear it with them. Then you run into a “yesbut.” He doesn’t get back to you and everything gets jammed, like traffic behind that impotent clown in the passing lane who wants his one chance to bully the world.
One “yesbut” holds EVERYBODY up.
A “yesbut” doesn’t last long in serious business. Grownups don’t play that game.
PS: A yesbut is also known as a “flake.”
New Orleans and the Black Sea
Twelve thousand years ago, give or take a klick, there was a huge land which was below sea level.
It was very warm and very fertile. It was protected from the sea by a solid block of land many miles across.
But over the years that land block became smaller and smaller. Today, we would blame global warming and people driving SUVs. But there weren’t many SUVs back then.
Finally the land block collapsed and a wave came larger than any seen since came in all at once. It was unimaginably large. Within months thousands, yes I said thousands, of square miles were inundated. We do no know how much of it was coverd in a matter of days by the first titanic wave.
Today that once-fertile valley, easily large enough to put a sizable country in, is called the Black Sea. The Black Sea has several hundred feet of river water on top, but the rest of the way down it is still the heavier sea water, the salt water that came across in the first giant wave.
And a Kyoto Treaty would not have stopped it.
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Some Hints on Finding Things Out
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 10/17/2005
Peter is still ragging me about finding a book.
This could be useful.
The problem is that most of the time when I tell people first steps in finding things they think I am making fun of them, because what I do is so simple.
That’s not true. Finding an obscure fact in zoology is fairly easy. You just call a zoology department.
But finding something that “everybody knows” can be very tricky.
I was known for finding things when I got to the Reagan Admininistration, so, like all my bosses, my new boss decided to try me out. He wanted to know a quote from Shakespeare.
I called three or four local library reference services, told them who I was, and they went to work hard. They did not find the quote. What they found out was something MUCH harder:
There was no such quote.
Here’s the kicker: Nobody else would have been able to find that out without days of work. My boss was, as they all were, very impressed. It also reenforced my practical Ben Franklin image.
BUT remember that I DID this myself. If someone had come to me and asked me how to do it and I had told a major appointee of the Reagan Administration he should call the local library, he would have been grossly insulted.
In the internet age, our problem is telling the damned machine that we want something very simple. We do NOT want to buy pimple removers.
The advantage of having an institutional memory like me around is that I spent decades finding HUMANS with information.
Peter wants to know if a book exists. He needs to call several bookstores and ask if they have a book search.
You do NOT have to promise to buy a book to get a full search done. Most of these searches are for out-of-print and hard-to-find books.
Your library will also do it for you
It takes a while.
Most book searches also have a list of actual books, books that exist or existed, on hand. When you are dealing with a fake book this is very useful.
Peter’s question touches on an interesting sidelight: Almost everything under the sun, and a lot that the sun never saw, is discussed somewhere in the Congressional Record. Finding it is an art in itself. If your local library doesn’t have the CR, your local college will. But the library can find out where one is.
Never forget the interlibrary loan service. Your library can get you almost any book that still exists. Even if it doesn’t exist, the microfilm archives, world-wide, to which your library can get access, are awesome.
Be very pleasant and as unbending as a California redwood.
Elizabeth, do you have any more hints?
It is funny people think my hints are insulting because they are so “simple.”
I remember one of the top political fundraisers of all time whom I knew well, Richard Viguerie, addressed a group explaining the basics of direct mail. Richard was a poor Texas cajun who came up in the world, so when he discovered how “simple” direct mail was, he honestly didn’t think it took a genius to do what he did.
He said he had more business than he could handle, so he would just tell his conservative audience how to do it.
I know he meant it, because I think the same way. But I have learned that simple is not simple.
So Viguerie went on for about an hour with short hints he had learned by statistical analysis of responses to direct mail:
Long letters with short sentences.
How YOU can help.
Specify how much money you are trying to raise.
How to get a list of uninvolved sponsors with big names.
And on and on and on for a full hour.
Willis Carto could give you days of this.
He thinks it’s simple, too.
Then Viguerie finished with, “So as you see it’s not some kind of science. It’s all very simple.”
When he came down from the podium I said, “Richard, you don’t know it but what you just told people was, ‘Look, it’s very simple. Here’s Volume One.’”
Everything that works is based on something that seems simple once you grasp it.
But with nanotechnology, if we could grasp molecules, making ANYTHING would be simple.
“Once you grasp it” is a hell of a modifier.
It is the charlatan and the priesthood that seeks complication and arcane theories. As I cannot point out too often:
“If you babble in English you are a fool. If you babble in Latin you are a scholar.”
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