Tag Archives: Human Behavior

Who Has Been an Inspiration in Your Life, and Why?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by | 13 comments



I’m not an admirer of human beings as being particularly inspirational, on the whole.  Yeah, a lot of human sentences find themselves trapped between quotation marks in fragments people find supportive of viewpoints that won’t stand on their own hind legs.  Pithy wisdomoids giving authority to vapid premises.  Often this does happen in a synthetically inspirational context.  But the sources of those quotes usually don’t appear so wise or unblemished under careful scrutiny.

Maybe ‘inspirational’ isn’t the appropriate word to capture the concept I’m hoping to convey.

Maybe ‘has had an influence on your life you believe helped you to be a person you came nearer admiring than the one you were previously’ would more accurately describe it while filling the need for cumbersome rhetoric.  The inspiration derived from firing wisdomoids back and forth at one another isn’t made of the strong stuff I’m trying to communicate.

For instance, I used to be acquainted with a Vietnam vet, who lived in an Econoline van in Albuquerque.  He had a route of parking spots and a time schedule he’d follow to hang around each place for a while.  The street guys who were dumpster-diving knew his schedule.  They also knew  he’d pay a fair price for  anything he could get his money back on that they’d salvaged out of the trash.  After making his rounds, the Econoline would head to the flea market and he’d sell first to the crowd, then whatever was left to the flea market merchants.

By reselling it from homeless guys dumpster-diving, he provided them a means of getting some cash for a lot of things they’d have no way to sell  for themselves, or would have had a lot of difficulty getting more than a few cents for.  His route superimposed an economic network devised to offer those submerged in hardship a trickle of income, a safety net.  He provided a valuable service.

But what I particularly admired was that, when he came across someone he believed was ready to try drug or alcohol withdrawal he’d pack them up in the van and head off somewhere to the middle of nowhere, usually a small town with a restaurant or grocery store where he could pick up food and supplies. Once out of the city environment, he’d keep the addict in the van a week, two weeks, a month, drying them out, getting them clean, being there for them.

I came across him once parked at Vietnam Memorial Wall park in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  I didn’t realize at first what I was seeing.  I just saw his van with the white Ministry sign roughly painted on the side and recognized it and him outside it.  I stopped to chew the fat with him, then heard the moaning in the Econoline.  He caught my eye and shrugged.

“Trying to kick smack.  He’s on his second week.  It ought to start getting better in a few days.”  The odor of vomit, urine and human excretions was strong near the truck, so we drifted further afield as we talked.  Probably he was used to it, but I wasn’t.

Christian guy.  One of the Christians I’ve known that kept me believing there are honest-to-goodness bona fide Christians in the world.

I surely admired his guts, his determination and compassion.  There’s a lot about him I’d admire in myself if I looked inside me and surprised myself finding it there.

Nice to come across a Christian occasionally who isn’t all hat and no cattle.

“I wonder what Jesus thought about sin.  Jesus did his talking about loving neighbors, compassion, peace-making, mercy, that sort of thing.  Hardly said anything about sin.  If he could speak his mind today I wonder if he’d forgive Saul of Tarsus the way he did Judas.”  Josephus Minimus

Here are a couple of blogs you might find of interest:

Urbandumpsterdiver’s Blog

Doing It Homeless

Old Jules

Kingston Trio-Reverend Mr. Black
http://youtu.be/sKJiDbvKbZs

John Lennon– Cold Turkey
http://youtu.be/n6wxTkkfLqM

13 Comments

Posted in America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Thrift Stores, Welfare, YouTube

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Learn a New Language with YouTube

Posted on August 22, 2011 by | 14 comments


Hi blogsters:

I rarely talk to young people, though I’ll confess to craftily observing them when I can, watching their interactions reflected in a plate-glass window, sneakily watching them at another table in a restaurant, trying to hear and understand what they’re saying.

The problem is, mostly I can’t understand what they’re saying.  As the years have progressed I’ve noticed that, even in convenience stores and fast-food joints I often can’t understand the simplest thing that’s being spoken.  I tilt my head, ask them to repeat, explain I’m a bit hard of hearing and ask them to repeat again, and finally usually give up and just smile and nod ‘yes’ if that seems it might be appropriate.

I don’t believe it’s entirely my hearing doing this.  I think there’s something new and different going on with language, but more importantly, inside the heads of people who sound as though words should be spoken through a mouth full of something, and really fast.

Mostly I don’t have a clue.  Frequently my curiosity taunts me.  I don’t know who these people are.  I don’t know what, nor how, they think.  To me it would be easy to merely mutter to myself, these kids are incredibly stupid, illiterate, and so whacked-out on television and public school brainwashing it’s a wonder they can function at all.

But I’m trying to insist to myself that the human race hasn’t truly devolved all that much in only a couple of generations.  These aren’t subhumans, though it would be easy to conclude they are, based on a lot of their mannerisms and behaviors in public.  I think these creatures probably think and feel, but that they don’t express those thoughts and feelings in ways that allow me to fathom them.

Enter, the blessing of YouTube.  When they aren’t too long, it rarely takes more than half-hour download on my dial-up.  But it’s a chance to actually decipher something one of those people thinks, feels and expresses, in a way that bypasses the mouth full of marbles and the speed with which the words come to the fore.  Once it’s downloaded it can be repeated until near-understanding arrives.

Old Jules

Steve Goodman– Talk Backwards [Edit: hope one of these links will work better]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMSMAjg2zCU

http://youtu.be/AMSMAjg2zCU

(Cee Lo Green) “Fuck You” sign language performance
http://youtu.be/sv3tadz5Q3o

Note: Thanks to Monique Maes for her photo.
http://moniquemaes.tumblr.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/teapartyseance

14 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Education, Human Behavior, Internet, Senior Citizens, Youth, YouTube

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Important Events from the Middle of Nowhere

Posted on August 19, 2011 by | 9 comments
Mouser wins prize for lousy judgement

The cat you see above came to me as a loaner 13-or-so years ago.  A litter mate to Hydrox, the jellical cat I’d established an actual contract with for the remainder of one of our lifetimes.  Mehitabel, an adult in the household, hated Hydrox and I thought he needed some company, so I borrowed Naiad on an indefinite loan, no contract involved.

 Turned out she’s probably the best mouser I’ve ever enjoyed spending a piece of my life with, a survivor.  She went through Y2K with me, has braved every available kind of predator stalking cats from dogs to coyotes, an eagle, hawks, bobcats and probably others she’s never had the courage to divulge, even to me, a liberal and open-minded sort of guy.
She generally trusts me but there’s always been that no-contract thing hanging over her head, and the guy loaned her to me got murdered a few years ago.  She’s acutely aware if I hold strictly to our original agreement I have no option other than to return her to Socorro, New Mexico sometime.  So she’s careful not to cross me.
But I’ve digressed.
When Gale, Kay and I encounter one another we almost always exchange news about which predators are currently threatening our chicken-herds, particularly predators that might commute from mine to theirs, or vicee versee.  Yesterday Gale sprung one me:
“There’s a cat working up here you might want to keep an eye open for.  Kay took a shot at it, but she missed.  Black cat hanging around down by the hen house.”
“Black cat?  Stalking your chickens?”
“Stalking something down by the hen house.  Lots of rats down there because of the chicken feed.”
“Black cat?  You sure it wasn’t Naiad?  She’s been around chickens on and off forever.  Never bothered a chicken.”
“You have a black cat down there?”
“Yeah.  I’ll email you a picture.  I’d be obliged if you don’t shoot her.  She won’t bother your chickens.”

Toyota Goes Communist

Thursday I needed to go to town, so I packed the ice-chest with ersatz ice, a shopping list, and went to roll the 4Runner downhill to start it so’s to get up to Gales and borrow a truck to go to town.  The 4Runner did okay rolling down but I suppose just half-mile trips back and 4th to Gale’s place hasn’t kept the battery charged.  I’m thinking it spang went completely dead.
So, 100 degrees out there and me all dressed up for town I pulled up my galluses and hiked my young-ass over the hills and through the woods, picked up Little Red, the loaner truck, bumped my young-ass back down here, picked up the list and ice-chest, then off to town, where I happened to notice L’il Red’s license tag and Safety Inspection Sticker had both expired back in June.
Sweated blood and bullets all the way to town, various thrift stores, feed store, grocery store, all without getting into a gunfight with the law over the expired civilization indicated on the windshield.  And not entirely the result of me being unarmed.  Every time I saw a police vehicle I kicked into my ‘invisible’ mindset mode, which works a lot more frequently than a person might be led to expect if the person isn’t into such esoterics.
 NEWS ITEM #3
The Terlingua blogsman
http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/
Posted a piece this morning I love and I think you might love too.  Popular Science Magazine archives going back to before the invention of life as we know it.  Going back so far there weren’t even any human beings running around to publish and read it, at least no human beings as we’re currently prone to indulge in believing humans are.
Stay tuned.  Likely something else will happen here sometime.
Old Jules

Johnny Horton – Old Slewfoot
http://youtu.be/xKcCyhUgbnY

9 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Country Life, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Relationships, Solitude, White Trash Repairs, Wildlife

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Papillon

Posted on August 19, 2011 by | 4 comments


Hi blogsters:

A couple of days ago I came across a tattered copy of Henri Charrierè’s, Papillon on the bookshelf.   I’d read it many times over the decades, but there’s always one more read left in it, it seems.  This might be the last.

Charrierè’s autobiography always has something new to tell me, depending on where my life is when I re-read it.

Papillon (Charrierè) was transported to the French prison islands of Guinea in the Caribbean in 1931, where thousands of prisoners were kept out of sight and mind of the French citizenry.  Devil’s Island was the most well known, but it was only one of the camps where 80 percent of the prisoners died before serving out their sentences.

The book is a story of courage, determination, brutality, as Papillon goes through a series of escape attempts, dungeons, unthinkable tortures, solitary confinements at a time in history when the ‘civilized world’ was no more civilized than it was before, or since.  Eventually, he escaped and became a worthy citizen of Venezuela from 1945 until he wrote the book in 1967.

In some ways the writing and the stories both remind me of the fiction works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Strange how some nationalities get all the credit, while others manage to escape notice.  The Spaniards and Portuguese take their battering from the waning memories of the Inquisition.  The Russians from the Gulag camps.  The Chinese from the Great Cultural Revolution.  The Belgians from the terrors they poured onto the Congo.  The Cambodians, the Ethiopians and the Germans have all been held up to the light and examined with appropriate repudiation.

Somehow the Brits and the French just managed to escape notice when the recognition for some of the vilest institutionally sanctioned acts of human brutality in modern human history.

Papillon.  A book worth reading and thinking about by all you ‘jail’em-til-they-rot’ enthusiasts.

We haven’t caught up to the French, Brits, Spaniards, Cambodians, Chinese, Russians, Belgians, Germans, and other civilized nations yet.  But we have the ingredients.

Plenty of prisoners and prisons.  A freedom-loving population of the same kind of jurors, courts, prosecutors who sent Papillon and thousands of others off to a life and deaths they’d never tolerate for any cute animal that appeared in a Walt Disney film named Bambi.

Old Jules

Papillon Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARD1l-tr6g

Papillon（1973） – Theme from Papillon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNp_3dpiTno&feature=related


4 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Human Behavior, Reading

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Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3

Posted on August 17, 2011 by | 12 comments

That’s my telephone line running horizontally across the pre-dawn.  It used to didn’t look precisely as it does now.  For a while, maybe a couple of years that piece of plastic electrical tape wasn’t hanging down from it, giving it a tidier, more professional appearance.

Before that, even, it had the standard non-innovative, regular stretched-across-to-the-house look you find in other, less interesting, living places.

When I moved into this cabin several years ago that phone line was one boring piece of wire with plastic insulation.  All over this planet unimaginative people are gazing at telephone lines going to their houses, probably wondering what they could do to add some savoir faire, something with flair, to the scene.

Luckily, mine was the result of careful planning and artful inspiration.

The first few years I lived here this land was plagued with cows the owner of the place didn’t own, but didn’t want to put the money into fencing out.  Fencing this place well enough to keep cows out would run in the neighborhood of $10,000, maybe higher.

But Texas, being the forward-thinking place it is, doesn’t require a person who wants to run cows to provide fences to keep them inside grazing on his own land.  Texas figures if someone doesn’t want livestock belonging to someone else running all over him eating his grass, tearing things up, knocking things over, Texas, I was going to say, figures a narrow-minded person of that sort needs to put his money where his mouth is and build a fence.

The default position is that a cow’s gotta do what a cow’s gotta do and the onliest way a cow can be kept from doing it is for someone who doesn’t like it to belly up to the bar and pay to keep her from doing it.  Beef prices being what they are you sure as hell can’t expect the man running the herd to pay for fencing them in.  He’d be robbing himself of graze surrounding his own holdings.  He’d be cutting into his own profit, lifestyle, devil-take-the-hindmost image, and he’d be eroding the tradition ranchers all over the west have worked hard for generations to maintain of being lowlife, cheap, greedy, penny-pinching scum who would do anything for a buck.

But I’ve digressed.  I wanted to tell you about my phone line, how it came to pass that it needed to change from a regular piece of unbroken wire into the work of art you see before you in that pic.

There were cows running all over this place when I got here.  They weren’t scared of anyone, nor anything, because they’d had it demonstrated nobody was going to shoot them and go to jail for it.  The man who owned them lived a long way off somewhere, never checked on them, never fed them, and the drought going on here had left them some of the poorest, scrawniest, lousiest cows a person could want.  There wasn’t a blade of grass on this, on any of the several other unfenced properties where they ran, more than an inch high.

But cows get lonely, even when they aren’t wanted.  Out in the woods spending the night they can’t find water hoses to chew to pieces, things to knock over, break, buildings to rub up against to get rid to the fleas and ticks plaguing them.  So, when those cows were here they loved to gather up around Gale’s house up on the hill, and around this cabin.  We tried everything short of building an expensive bunch of fences to keep them out.

But I need to get to the telephone and quit this rambling.

One night when I’d had a bellyful of cows already I heard them outside the window.  Things were falling and the sounds of them rubbing against other things told me to get the spotlight and have a look-see.  Might have been 20-30 cows out there, a few feet from the window.

I grabbed the 12 gauge from behind the door, ran outside in my birthday suit, lifted that shotgun to my shoulder and carefully shot my telephone line in two.  It was dark, but I heard it fall, knew something was amiss, but I could hear the fridge running, so I knew I still had electricity.
Next morning I looked around for something I could use to splice it back together, then twist around to get it back up sky-level instead of hanging around low for someone to forever be tripping on or cows chewing to pieces.

Art is function.  Art is simplicity.  Art conveys emotion, the human condition, the need of humans to communicate with other humans.

When you’re driving along and you see this sign it means you are in a free-ranging area and that the man running cows without having to fence them off the public right-of-way will get a prize-breeding-stock price for his beef from your insurance company if he can arrange a way for you to run one over.

That’s the reason you see straw scattered on the blacktop and in the grader ditch.

Old Jules

Afterthought:  One positive thing about having those cows around was that Shiva the Cowcat and I used to spend a lot of quality time together running around the hills chasing those cows off with a slingshot.  It kept me in shape and provided Shiva the Cowcat with cheap thrills of having something big run from her. Shiva misses those cows something awful.

Eddy Arnold – The Lonesome Cattle Call
http://youtu.be/MHE496Z-Sf0

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Country Life, Emergency Preparedness, Homesteading, Solitude, White Trash Repairs, YouTube

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So Long, and Thanks for all the Valentines

Posted on August 16, 2011 by | 19 comments


During the early 1990s I had a lady friend with whom I was close enough to
exclusively share a few years of my life.  Interior decorator lady who grew up in the same town and entirely different social strata than I did.

I first remember noticing her in the fifth grade, and from then until the time I left that burg as a high-schooler, I don’t believe she ever spoke to me.  She was upper crust and I was somewhere down there below the lower crust.

Anyway, 30-35 years later we spent a few years together seeing one another every day and night.  She had a lot of strong points, beautiful woman, smart, and well-intentioned.  I’d mentioned to her once that it used to really hurt my feelings in school on Valentine’s Day.  I hated it, all those kids getting valentines from one another and I didn’t get any.

Valentine’s Day, maybe 1993, ’94, I headed down to her house after work.  Came in the door and fell over.   She’d decorated the house with valentines, fed me a piece of cake shaped like a valentine, and handed me a box shaped like a valentine wrapped. Made me open it.

Crazy woman had filled that box with old-timey valentines like were around when we were kids…… full, chock full, that box was, with valentines claiming to be from kids we went to school with, all addressed to the kid I used to be …… the lower-class scum of yesteryear. Crazy stuff.

I’ve cried maybe twice during my adulthood, but for some reason I was having to hold back tears on that one. But that isn’t why I’m writing this blog entry.  I just wanted to preface the next thing with that one, so you’d understand she wasn’t a bad person underneath everything.

Anyway, she had two habits I found particularly irritating, aside from being miserable and liking to spread it around, toward the end of our relationship. She pronounced the “G” in guacamole. “Gwakamohlee.”  Drove me nuts.  Knew better, but maybe couldn’t remember, maybe didn’t care.

Secondly, she had this thing I figure came from being upper- crust as a kid.

“You find someone to work on the roof?” I might ask.

“Oh yes,” she might warble. ” Hired this little Mexican man.”

When I see the guy, he ain’t little.  He’s 240 pounds.  But he is Hispanic.

“Oh!” she might say.  “I hired this little Indian woman to do some bead work for me.”  Turned out the little Indian woman was taller than she was and weighed in heavier than the roof repair man.

You get the picture. Non-Anglo-Saxons were little, particularly if they were hired to do something.

No, the lady wasn’t a bigot, precisely.  She wouldn’t sit still for racial slurs unless they were subtle, oblique, or less so, but about Navajo folks, whom she generally disliked.  She conveyed the impression instead, that she found little men who did repairs to the plumbing so cute, so lovable, so adorable and quaint.  Something akin to looking through the big end of a telescope at them standing there so tiny doing their assigned jobs.

When we parted company after a few years it wasn’t pleasant, but I learned a lot about myself from her, once she began explaining what all was wrong with me.  It was worth a lengthy listen because she probably knew me as well as anyone ever has.

After I decided it was over I continued talking to her every night on the telephone for about a month, an hour-or-so per night, determined to listen carefully and consider everything ugly she could think of to say about me without any argument.  She mightn’t be right, or she might be right but about something I didn’t want to change, or she might be right and I might want to change it.

But we don’t get many opportunities in this life to have someone who knows us well go into loving detail explaining every flaw and wart, everything we haven’t noticed  about ourselves.  There aren’t any little people a person could hire to do that.

Eventually I came to realize she was enjoying those protracted nightly diatribes more than was possibly good for her.  She’d begun repeating herself, also.  So I told her it was over.

I mostly remember her for the valentine side.  The going up big was worth the coming down little.

Old Jules

P.S.  For you bloggers, a note from Jeanne (Admin):

Click here for a chance to win a slot in The Bloggess sidebar for a month sponsored by freefringes.com
http://freefringes.com/2011/09/20/lovelinks-24-open/

P.P.S. Another note from Jeanne (Admin):
We’re getting a few new readers from the contest site who are probably confused about my linking  to some old guy’s blog… so I wanted to mention that I’m a background partner on this blog and no, I didn’t write most of these posts!  I didn’t really understand the submission forms, so the blog is listed under “Jeanne Kasten”. I don’t know why. Sorry for any confusion!

Paul Simon– Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

19 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Communication, Ethnic Supremacy, Human Behavior, Native Americans, NM, Portales, Relationships, Youth

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“Number, Please?”

Posted on August 14, 2011 by | 5 comments

A few years ago my cell phone fell out of my overalls pocket into an irrigation ditch when I reached down to worry a valve.  Sank spang to the bottom, but came out seemingly okay after I dried it out.  But was never the same afterward …. grew progressively worse until it was useless for a couple of months.  I waited, figuring it might come back, or that I might decide I just didn’t need a cell phone.  But I’m a pansy-arsed modern man these days and I finally just decided to give in to progress.

Got myself a new one.  Gives me something of a start, the stuff on that new phone.  Rattles me to the core that we’ve become so futuristic Dick Tracy-esque.

This thing will take pictures!  It will surreptitiously  take videos or recordings of the cop who’s leaning over your car window acting the way cops shouldn’t.  It will do all manner of things I don’t know how to do with it yet and maybe won’t be able to justify learning.  Gives me the fantods thinking about trying to figure that thing out.

Reminds me of when I was a kid and we got our first phone.  They were teaching me about it, how you put this end to your ear and that end to your mouth and listen for an operator to say, “Number, please.”

Then how you say, “3621” if you need to call Jeanne Ann and Hollis because someone had an accident and you need to get help.  Or when you call KENM radio station to give the answer to the College Dairy Quiz and win movie tickets for the family.

And how you stay the hell off of it in all other circumstances.

I was a precocious kid and had a tendency to get us all to the movies pretty often, but my problem was that when that operator came on I usually blew up.  My mind went blank, I’m ashamed to say, when I heard that beeeeeeutiful female operator voice.

Fortunately, the operators got on my side after a while, with the College Dairy Quiz.  At 6pm when I lifted that phone they’d just say, “I’m ringing them, dear.” without me having to say anything.
This one won’t do that, but it’s still okay without any operators.

Note:   I recently came across this, written before I left New Mexico.  Tweaked it a bit, but nowadays it’s foreign to me because it’s “NO SERVICE” when you click the button.

Old Jules

Johnny Rivers– Memphis
http://youtu.be/V1kGuUZUgI0

5 Comments

Posted in 1950's, 2011, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, NM

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Amazing Synopsis

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 4 comments

Have you ever considered how much time, energy, money and lousy grades could be avoided if world history could be summarized for the kiddos into videos lasting a few minutes?  For instance, consider the European conquests of Africa, the American continents, and India.  The chillerns spend all kinds of time having to memorize the nigglingest details and names the teachers can’t even pronounce.  Pizzzzarrro.  Montezooooma.  Courtessss.   Geroneeemo.  Krazyhorse.  Not to mention the even worse ones in Africa and India.

But the hilarious fact is that all that isn’t needed.  All those books didn’t need to be printed.  All those names and dates didn’t need to be memorized to understand the basics of the European conquests of more-primitive geography.

Here it is.  The incredible 4 minute 56 second summary of the European conquest of Africa, the Americas and India:

http://youtu.be/1csr0dxalpI

If the video doesn’t play the link below should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csr0dxalpI

Those kids can now go back to playing on the computers with a total understanding of the history of their ancestors.

I’m going to search around to try finding some more good summaries of other hard-to-remember history.

Old Jules


4 Comments

Posted in Education, History, Human Behavior, Movies

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Could you choose to live on the street?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 19 comments

That little farm you see down there is the place where I spent a good many of my formative years after my mother remarried and we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As you can see, we’d had a pretty good year for hay, which dates the picture to 1949, or 1950, before the big drought hit.

When we sat outdoors in the evening the red neon lights blinked “Schumpert Farm Supply” across the top of the long building running diagonally to the railroad tracks until I went to bed. From my limited perspective the Schumperts were ‘rich’. In that small town that railroad running through didn’t identify who was rich but it did identify who wasn’t. That little farm I lived on and no other property that side of the tracks had any rich people.

In the rigidly established social structure in Portales business men generally came down on the side of being ‘rich’, along with professors at Eastern New Mexico University, bankers, physicians, preachers, school teachers and a few elderly ladies who lived in houses big enough to be thought of as mansions. Farmers, ranchers, Mexicans and people who worked in the businesses weren’t ‘rich’.

I doubt the adults paid a lot of attention to the social strata, but school teachers did, and the kids adopted it more firmly than a religion. Rich kids were easy to recognize because they made good grades, weren’t hassled by teachers, got elected to everything, brought cookies to school Christmas, Easter and Halloween, and had the best bicycles early, cars later. For the most part they were insufferable snobs.

But not the Schumpert boys. I was in school with Stephen and Billy, and there was a precocious younger one I don’t recall the name of. Stephen was a year older than me, Billy a year younger, and there wasn’t a breath of snobbery in the entire family. Stephen, particularly, had a knack for getting in just the right amount of just the right kinds of trouble to keep from qualifying as a goody-goody. Good solid boys from a good solid family. I had a lot of respect for all of them.

I left that town early and stayed mostly away for several decades. I lost track of almost everyone I ever knew there.

But after Y2K when I moved into town to Grants, New Mexico, I came across Billy Schumpert being president of a bank there. Naturally we got together and talked about whatever we each knew that might interest the other. Billy’s the one told me what happened to Stephen.

Stephen worked as a bank examiner several years, then became president of a bank in Colorado, maybe Denver. Had a regular family, seemed to be destined to follow a career path and eventually retire. But one morning he didn’t show for work late in the 1980s. Nobody had any idea what became of him. He wasn’t a drinker, didn’t use drugs, didn’t have a ‘secret life’. He just vanished for no apparent reason.

Over time the police and other agencies gave up, assumed he was the victim of some crime, dead. But the family put up a reward for information about Stephen, sent private investigators and others searching for him. Eventually, six, seven years later they located him living under a bridge in Seattle.

Over time everyone who loved Stephen went up there trying to talk him into returning to real life, return home.

“No! I had enough!” That’s all he’d say and he never came back.

I’ve pondered Stephen a lot during the years since I learned what he’d done with his life. In some ways I think I understand, though I’m not sure. My own life has been a long series of reversals in direction. It’s meandered, cutting as wide a swath of human experience as I was able to pack into it. So, from that perspective, I can gnaw at the edges of understanding Stephen’s behavior. But I was a wild kid and I’ve always pushed the envelope, all my life.

Stephen was ‘tame’.

I’d like to see old Stephen again if he’s alive. He’d be 70, 71 years old now and maybe wiser than he was in the 1980s when something told him he’d had enough. I’d like to sit on the porch and talk with him a long time to come to know how he came to make his choice to isolate himself, to impoverish himself.

Simon & Garfunkel – Richard Cory 1966 live
http://youtu.be/euuCiSY0qYs

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Posted in 1950's, America, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Senior Citizens, Welfare, Youth, YouTube

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How Do You Say the Pledge Nowadays?

Posted on August 12, 2011 by | 14 comments

It’s come to my attention that school is starting already. I recall being in a school auditorium as a youngster when they added the words,
‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Doak and Mr. Burke, Civics and
History teachers, were up there trying to get it right while teaching it to a couple of hundred kids.  Kids who were still on shaky ground from learning it the first time. That would have been in the mid-1950s:

Mr. Doak:  “Okay.  This isn’t complicated and shouldn’t take long.  Just say it like you always said it, but after, ‘one nation’, pause, then say, ‘under God’, then pause again before going on.

“Try it.  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation,

under God,

with liberty and justice for all.”

Cacophony of 300 kids lost mid-way through.  Mr. Doak pauses with a frown waiting for the noise to die down. Mr. Burke’s frowning too.  He nudges Mr. Doak.

Mr. Burke:  “Eh, John, hold on a minute.  I think it’s supposed to be ‘one
nation under God’, not ‘one nation with a pause, under God with a pause.”

Mr.Doak:  “Ralph, look at it.  The comma’s in front of and after ‘under God.'”

Mr.  Burke: “John, that doesn’t mean it’s supposed to sound like some run-on sentence.  This is the Pledge of allegiance!”

Mr. Doak:  “Ralph, I know what it is.”  Doak scowls and turns back to the 300 lost faces.  “Let’s try it again now.”

Burke:  “No, no, no, John.  Let’s try it one time my way.”

Doak grinding his teeth:  “Ralph, we have to get this over with.”

Burke:  “I’m not the one holding it up John.  We’ve got to get this right.  What you’re telling them is wrong.”

Doak:  “Who’s in charge of this, Ralph?  When Livingston said one of us has to do it you didn’t volunteer to get up here and explain it.”

Burke:  “Neither did you.”

Doak:  “No, but I eventually agreed to.  You just agreed to come up and help.”

Burke:  “Never mind.  Tell them to do it any way you want to.  The Pledge is yours!  I have nothing more to say.”

Doak:  “Good.”  Turns back to the 300.  “Okay, let’s try it again.”

The question of whether the framers of the Constitution would have thought a child having to say, ‘under God’ is a fairly weird one, by hindsight.  But not because the placement of the commas is a major issue.

The reason it’s weird lies in the fact that the question of whether this nation
is indivisible was never considered by the Supreme Court, never mentioned in the US Constitution.  The founders put off any debate about the indivisibility issue because every member knew that no state would agree to become a member if the decision was irreversible, whatever the circumstances.  So, while it was discussed, it was also pointedly not discussed in loving detail.

Half century later it was discussed, however.  The discussion began at Fort
Sumter and ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. That avoidance by the founding fathers of an inevitably crucial issue was decided by force of arms, one half, (the half possessing an army) of the nation believing it was indivisible, the other half believing it was divisible. The stronger half forced the weaker half to accept indivisibility at gunpoint after a lot of bloodshed.

Thus, the Pledge of Allegiance came into existence after Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox. The winning side forced each surrendering Confederate soldier to say a pledge accepting indivisibility as one of the precepts of citizenship, followed afterward by many generations saying the pledge from early childhood since then.

But the US Supreme Court was never asked whether that Pledge acknowledging indivisibility was Constitutional, which might have saved a hundred thousand lives, legs, arms, and a whole different approach to US governance.

Instead, they’ve been asked repeatedly to decide the easier matter of whether it’s a violation of a child’s civil liberty to utter the words, “Under God”.

Old Jules

Civil War Songs – Oh I’m A Good Old Rebel
http://youtu.be/mO2cL64Fbaw

Battle Cry of Freedom — Civil War song on mountain dulcimer
http://youtu.be/K_jANE2QPFE

Fife and drum – Battle Cry of Freedom – 145th Gettysburg
http://youtu.be/eAsD4Bg0st0

Note:  The flag with a Native American waving a weapon flies summertimes near the booths along IH10 as it passes through the Laguna tribal lands.  Although the Laguna universally despise the Acoma neighbors neither tribe has engaged in warfare against anyone since 1597. 

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Posted in 1950's, America, Current Issues, Education, History, Human Behavior, Youth

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