Tag Archives: musings

When racism isn’t racism, bigotry isn’t bigotry

Posted on July 21, 2013 by | 8 comments

Hi readers.

Back during the bad old days of my hippy-dopesmokerism, during the throw-rocks-at-cops times, during the turbulence of the Vietnam War, this happened:

I was sitting on the steps of the University of Texas Student Union Building with two other Veterans Against the War, five self-proclaimed Black Panthers, two Viva La Raza types, and a handfull of white girlygirls not wearing bras.  Two of the girlygirls were paramours of a couple of the Panthers.  The subject of racism came up.

Keep in mind that all the Panthers and both Viva La Raza types were white-haters, though they indulged those two white guy among us by ignoring the fact we were white.  Indulged the girlygirls similarly.  And keep in mind the two Hispanics had no love for blacks, nor the blacks, any love for Hispanics.  Only the white girlygirls and we white Vets Against the War had felt no anti-black nor anti-Hispanic rage against the others of the group.

So tirades against whites became noisy, Hispanics and Panthers all in agreement, all making blanket statements proclaiming white bigotry.  Somewhere during that I asked, “You guys are lumping us all together because we’re white.  Isn’t that racism?  Is it different when you do it, as opposed to a white lumping you all together?”

Caused an uproar, general outrage and denial.  Universal even among the girlygirls, and one of the white guys.

“Victims of racism can’t be racist!”  Repeated and re-phrased in numerous ways.  “Only whites can be racists because they have the power!”

Wellllllll.   Uhhhhh.

I suppose it’s probably consoling to a guy getting his ribs caved in by someone standing above him yelling, “You honky bastard!” to know he’s not the victim of bigotry and racism. 

Or my neighbor in Placitas, New Mexico, who, though an old unreconstructed hippy, couldn’t get the Hispanic guy who controlled irrigation water to open her gates to her orchard when her turn came because of his outspoken hatred of Anglos.  “My trees are dying because of what white-hating son of a bitch!”  Her old hippy too-much-sun face reddening.  “There’s nobody but other Hispanics I can appeal to!”

But at least it wasn’t racism.  At least it wasn’t bigotry she was a victim of.  Because bigotry and racism aren’t possible for people who don’t have the power.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Government, Human Behavior, Politics

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Blown tires and ‘the homeless’

Posted on July 20, 2013 by | 16 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Strange trip to town yesterday to get my town business taken care of.  A guy was telling me about a bunch of ‘homeless people’ living down behind the Kerrville Public Library and the Guadalupe River, and I moseyed down for a looksee.  Middling surprising.

Kerrville’s a fairly wealthy, relatively small community filled with mostly retirees from government, military, and top drawer private sector.  It has golf courses the way most small towns in Texas used to have churches…. one-per-street-corner.  The rest of the population mostly makes do fetching and carrying, ringing up cash-registers to fill the needs of the golf-coursers.  Ingram used to be a different town a dozen miles down the road, but now it’s indistinguishable from Kerrville except for the population being part of the old-timers and people working to make life better for the rich retirees.

But here, out-of-sight in the midst of all this resides a colony of ruffled, smelly people sleeping on the grass and under the bridge over the Guadalupe.  A cursory look would number them somewhere between 50 and 100.  A good many do their washing up and hanging around in the library to get cool now, warm when it’s cold.

Not a homogenous group in any way I could see.  Some are the usual ‘homeless’ stereotype in the larger urban areas, some younger, some drugees and alcoholics, some maybe ghetto types, and some you wouldn’t spot as any of this, just seeing them on the street.

Evidently the Kerrville city government’s getting enough complaints about it to cause them to try to figure out how they can drive them off to somewhere else where they won’t be a nuisance.

I’ve never been comfortable with the word, ‘homeless’ as a means of placing people into a tribal stereotype.  The emphasis on the structure a person dwells in as a tribal name is just too damned lots-of-what-I-wish-different-about-America-disease.  The straight fact is that every single one of us has a few thousand generations of ancestors who lived in similar homes to the ones these people sleep under, minus the library. 

And the names we give our ancestors are peasants, serfs, nomads, hunter-gatherers, the whole range of words describing people who weren’t aristocrats, struggled to stay alive any way they could.  People who were fetching and carrying for the aristocrats and starving/freezing-to-death-doing it.  Filthy, stinking peasants, serfs, nomads, scratching out a living any way they could, stalking the game animals in the rich-man forests and getting hanged for it, or wandering around grubbing for nuts, plants and meat varmints they could eat because they hadn’t advanced far enough to have aristocrats.

What those people used to be was tramps, hobos, beggars, derelicts, which was nearer the truth, but still didn’t cover the subject.  That place between the river and library is a hobo jungle minus a railroad track.  But I don’t think the people living that life can qualify by any stereotype.  For instance, my long-time-ago post about Stephen Schumpert, a guy I grew up with:

Could you choose to live on the street?

 If the cats all croaked on me I think I might like to try that for a while to flesh out my life experience while I still have some.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this as I drove home when I blew out a tire on the RV…. another inside-rear.  Sounded a lot like a shotgun when it went.  After examining it I decided to nurse it home instead of trying to change it on the road. 

The cost of a new tire’s going to set me back about a month in my best laid plans, and trying to get the RV off  the ground high enough to change it’s going to be a day spent in hard labor.  Haven’t decided whether  to try to nurse it back to Kerrville and let one of the working-for-a-living serfs and peasants at the WalMart or Discount Tire do the work.

Maybe instead of ‘the homeless’ a better word to describe the colony of people down between the library and the river would be, ‘the blown tires’.

I sort of like that.

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Senior Citizens

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These damned ego-warts

Posted on July 17, 2013 by | 35 comments

Hi readers. 

Although most of you probably figure I’m just a quiet, well-adjusted old hermit living out in the boondocks with all the ups and downs of life fairly settled quietly into my guts, I’ve revealed parts of my life here to suggest otherwise.  I’ve lived through enough emotional storms and shed enough skins to force me out of a lot of the usual hideyholes, to hold things up into the light and examine them.

But some things still come out in the dark of night.  Some things are still damned difficult to accept.  Pride, ego, and self-worth are powerful forces.

Around this time in 1992, I left a 25 year marriage and a 20 year career behind, along with dozens of long-time friends, pals, hunting partners, acquaintances, and both sides of a joint-family.  I began a new career in Santa Fe, a new life.  All secure in the knowledge the extended family and friends remaining behind were part of my life in which I’d been and remained, important.

All of which I eventually discovered was an illusion.  For 2.5 decades I’d believed I was a vital part of those interactions and relationships.  Kids, young adult nephews and neices  I’d coddled and bounced on my knee peeled out of my life like layers of an onion.  Most I never heard from again.

I was a long time realizing I’d merely been tolerated, been a piece of furniture in their lives.  Tolerated because of my proximity to my ex-wife.

Even for a confident human being such as myself, it was a tough pill to swallow.  I gradually rebuilt my life with a far deeper skepticism than I’d previously enjoyed concerning my own worth and my place in the lives of others.

Which resulted in my becoming a hermit.  Or at least, contributed to my becoming a hermit.  I no longer assume I’m important in the lives of other human beings and get my satisfaction in knowing I’m at least important to the cats.  Because cats, though sometimes dishonest, aren’t capable of the depth and duration of dishonesty humans indulge constantly.

For me, all of this distilled emerges as a statement I spent at least 25 years of a 70 year live being insignificant in the lives of others.  And a painful awareness that life is entirely too important and too short to be wasted in insignificance.  A determination in the direction of significance measured in teaspoons of reality, as opposed to 55-gallon drums of  dishonesty and self-delusion.

Teaspoons measured in contracts with cats not equipped to lie.  Teaspoons, I find, don’t spill away as much life in the discovery when they’re found to be just another ego-wart of pride and self-importance.

Old Jules

35 Comments

Posted in 2013, Relationships

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Ever wondered who the Vietcong were?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by | 22 comments
Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams photo 1968

Last night I came across a thrift store book I’d never gotten around to reading.  One of those ‘last resort’ books set aside again and again.  A backup for a time when I would be desperate for anything besides the labels on sardine cans.

But as I thumbed through it I was abruptly captured.   When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, by Le Ly Hayslip.

Here’s a woman born in 1949 in a Vietcong controlled village near Danang where her family’s spent the previous generations fighting, first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again.  As a small child she watches relatives and neighbors in her village raped and slaughtered by French mercenaries.  Then:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ly_Hayslip

“Hayslip was born in Ky La, now Xa Hao Qui, a small town in central Vietnam just south of Da Nang. She was the sixth and youngest child born to farmers. American helicopters landed in her village when she was 12 years old. At the age of 14, she endured torture in a South Vietnamese government prison for “revolutionary sympathies”. After being released, she had fallen under suspicion of being a government spy, and was sentenced to death but instead raped by two Viet Cong soldiers.[2]

“She fled to Saigon, where she and her mother worked as housekeepers for a wealthy Vietnamese family, but this position ended after Hayslip’s affair with her employer and subsequent pregnancy. Hayslip and her mother fled to Da Nang. During this time, Hayslip supported both her mother and an infant son, Hung (whom she would later rename Jimmy), while unmarried and working in the black market, as an occasional drug courier and, once, as a prostitute.

“She worked for a short period of time as a nurse assistant in a Da Nang hospital and began dating Americans. She had several disastrous, heartbreaking affairs before meeting and marrying an American civilian contractor named Ed Munro in 1969. Although he was more than twice her age, she had another son with him, Thomas. The following year Hayslip moved to San Diego, California, to join him, and briefly supported her family as a homemaker. In 1973, he died of emphysema, leaving Le Ly a widow at age 24.

“In 1974 she married Dennis Hayslip. Her second marriage, however, was not a happy one. Dennis was a heavy drinker, clinically depressed and full of rage. Her third and youngest son, Alan, was fathered by Dennis and born on her 26th birthday. The couple filed for divorce in 1982 after Dennis committed domestic violence. Shortly thereafter, he was found dead in a parked van outside a school building. He had established a trust fund, however, that left his wife with some money, and he had insurance that paid off the mortgage of the house.”

So here’s a woman, a real, no-shit Vietcong, tortured by the South Vietnamese, suspected of being a traitor by the Vietcong and sentenced to death, raped and escaped.  Married a US civilian and became a US citizen.

Probably a person couldn’t be more caught-in-between from birth than she was.  Surrounded by hundreds, thousands of other peasants caught in-between.  Trying to dodge the steamrollers of forces they didn’t understand, South Vietnamese and US rifles pointed at them daytimes, Vietcong rifles pointed at them nights.

Yep, this lady is one of the people the guys with Vietnam Veteran caps walking around mining for praise and ‘Thank you,” spent their tours in Vietnam trying to kill.

Damned book ought to be required reading for anyone buying a SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sticker.  Because at a foundation level, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS isn’t about the troops.  It’s about people who are being defined as ‘the enemy’ those troops are going to do everything in their power to ruin the lives of.

People in US government who couldn’t locate the place on the map defining one side as ‘the enemy’ and the other side as ‘friends’.

Old Jules

Grandkid:  Granpaw, what did you do in the Vietnam War?

Old Vet:  I helped Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon kill a lot of people who didn’t need killing, helped destroy a country that didn’t need destroying, helped get a lot of GIs killed and maimed in the process.  And I’m damned proud I did.

Grandkid:  Oh wow!  Thank you Grandpaw!

22 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, America, Book Reviews, Books, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, US Army

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The nightmares of acceptance

Posted on July 7, 2013 by | 22 comments

high water

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Probably I was four years old, must have been 1947, I was a kid with a recurring nightmare.  I was walking along a raised roadway with my mom, my granddad, and my two sisters.  A deep gravel pit reached alongside the road and my feet slipped, I fell and began sliding into the pit screaming for help.  None of them looked around, none paused, they all just kept walking and I kept sliding and screaming until I’d wake.

With all these decades of hindsight I find that dream of a four-year-old amazing.  I had no business knowing that much about people, about life, about my particular gene-pool at that age. 

At the time my mom was between marriages and we were living in Causey, New Mexico in a two-room shack with no running water, an outdoor toilet, maybe no electricity, though we might have had electricity.  I can’t recall.  My granddad’s presence in the area was the only thing to draw us there.  My mom was doing anything, seamstress work, pulling cotton, trying to operate a miniscule variety store in the house to earn a living. 

A deeply troubled young woman with three kids and almost certainly more nightmares of her own to keep her company than anyone purely needs.  Her financial woes gradually improved when she married again, but my thought is her mental processes turned concurrently to lies and manipulation.  Maybe they’d never been otherwise.

Such a woman!  I don’t believe my sisters ever recovered from the experience of having her for a mother, of always being caught in the vice of ‘love your mother’ and that mother being a destructive, master manipulative sociopath.  I believe I did recover, but it’s just me believing it.  I do know that when she died a couple of years back and I heard the news I felt nothing but a sense of deep relief, of peace.

I suppose it was the neighbor got me thinking of this.  He came down bringing a cup of expensive coffee before dusk.  As we sat he told me about some trial in Florida of a man who killed someone who was beating him up in a parking lot.  An angry tale of violence and racial politics and justice.

As he described it to me I remembered something else he’d told me a while back, off-hand and matter-of-fact, about how his father had murdered two, maybe three people he [the neighbor] knew of.  One a whiskey salesman who didn’t get his purchases for the bar he operated delivered.  Beat him to death on the sidewalk in front of his bar.  Another salesman he beat badly might have lived, might have died.  I can’t recall for certain because when I heard the story I was still digesting the first salesman.

The next homicide by his father he was sure of involved a Mexican [or at least a Hispanic] who did farm work.  Evidently screwed up a switch on an irrigation pump.  That night the neighbor says the father took his .22 pistol and went out somewhere.  The next day the Mexican farm worker was found dead on the railroad tracks shot nine times with a .22, then run over by a train.

The jokes around town proclaimed it to be the most elaborate suicide ever.

When he told me this story it didn’t include any value judgements, no overtones, no repudiation, no anger of the sort contained in the story of the trial in Florida.

I suppose an infinite number of monkeys pounding an infinite number of typewriters will indeed eventually write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as someone claimed.  I’ve seen enough families and enough parenting this lifetime to accept that some families and some parenting must fall within the ‘normal’ part of the bell-shaped curve.

But to go a step further and suggest there’s enough ‘normal’ floating around among the father and mother components to celebrate seems to me to be a possible overstatement.  I count myself lucky my nightmares were only my own.  When Bobby Dylan’s song offered to let me be in his dream if I’d let him be in mine I was never tempted.  Still ain’t.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Parents, Relationships

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Lookee here what I’ve got! Lookee here what I did!

Posted on June 27, 2013 by | 6 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Tabby:  “Lookee here what I’ve got!  Lookee here what I did!”

Me:  “Well, Tabby, whatever the hell it is you’ve got, evidently at least it ain’t rabies.  Which is more than I can say for most of the human species.  As for what you did, I admire the time you spent preparing a hole to do it in.  I’m awed by the cable you laid precisely into that hole.  And I’m impressed by the patience you demonstrated and the trouble you took covering it, afterward.”  More than I can say for the human species.

——————

Humane Society Thrift Store cashier [to the old guy ahead of me wearing a ball cap declaring he was once a US Marine]:    “You were a marine?”

Old guy, standing a bit straighter:  “Yes.”

She:  “Well.  Thank you.  Thank you for ‘being there’.

Old guy:  “Um.”  To himself:  “Well, shit.  Why do you think I’m wearing the cap?  Never done anything else in my life anyone was likely to thank me for.  But I did shoot at some people nobody remembers once a long time ago.  Never figured out exactly why.  But if someone thinks that’s worth thanking me  for, I’ll try to believe them.”

————————

Restaurant in town, two oldsters talking across a table.

Oldster #1:  “Look what they’re doing!  Voting themselves pay raises, benefits.  Giving everything away to the niggers and Mescins!”

Oldster #2:  “Sons of bitches.  They multiply like rabbits.  Now they’re getting to be voting age, controlling the government.  Half of them can’t even speak English.”

Oldster #1:  “Yeah, bastard Communists!  They don’t believe in democracy!”

—————————————

Seems to me the great majority of the oldsters I come across, watch, listen to as they interact and try to maneuver around in life, are lost.  Are fools.  No better, no worse than me.  Fools, knowing they spent their lives chasing the illusion that the more shit they could acquire, the wiser they’d be thought to be by someone, somewhere.

Some aren’t well off, sure as hell nobody cares what they think about anything because they didn’t pass the test.  But then there are the others, walking around in golf shirts, loafers, trying to demonstrate by their cars, their bumper stickers, their personal bearing, that they passed the test.  That they know shit someone should want to hear.

Nobody wants to hear it.  Not the oldsters without anything, because they aren’t taking anymore tests.  Not the youngsters because there’s nothing they see to admire in those richer-than-18-inches-up-a-bull’s-ass oldsters.  Nothing they want to emulate except having more shit sooner than the oldsters got it.

———————-

Back before civilization kicked in, tribes and villages supposedly thought oldsters were wise, looked to them for guidance, gave them a role in things.  But all that went away when things got complex.  Politicians, aristocrats, academians and priests were assigned the roles oldsters had when things were simpler.

Probably not because politicians, aristocrats, academians and priests were better equipped with wisdom.  But because the oldsters had demonstrated they weren’t.

No smarter, no wiser than they are today.  Maybe it’s time to find some other cadre of fools to replace the politicians, aristocrats, adademians and priests, who’ve had their chance and come up wanting.

How about rappers?  Ganstas?  How about celebrities?  TeeVee stars and rock-and-rollers?  Bikers?

They might not be any good, but they ain’t going to be any worse.

And what they get mightn’t be rabies.

6 Comments

Posted in 2013, Senior Citizens

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Macho Robbing High-Tech Living

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | 14 comments

RV x 2

If you’re like me most of you probably already know there’s something counter-frontiersman, counter-pioneer about just pushing a button to kick on a pump, then stepping inside a little room to have a hot, pressurized shower.  Washing dishes in a sink with hot water instead of putting them upside down over a fire-ant bed and just wiping them down after the ants do their work.

Like me, you probably feel a lot of guilt, something vaguely counter-natural, counter-human when you indulge in this type of behavior.

But yesterday and today I did.

And damn it felt good.  Probably do it again tomorrow and dwindle off some more macho.  I’m old enough to have some to spare that I would have needed for other things when I was younger.

Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Transportation, Trucks

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Boundary issues

Posted on June 9, 2013 by | 11 comments

I stepped out of the RV to pee around 4:00 am and since it was too dark to read while I stood there pondering life to pass the time.  Tried to anticipate whether, late as it was, I’d be able to get back to sleep, or should I come indoors and do some work on the computer I’d been putting off doing.

So when I finished I’d decided to go up to the cabin and get some coffee, maybe do the comp thing.  But I noticed the wind had blown over a chair where I’d left a pinch bar and it was on the ground.  Picked it up and headed for the cabin porch.

Suddenly I was proud to have the pinchbar because one of the bigger coons I’ve ever encountered met me at the head of the steps, teeth bared.  I leaned backward to begin a step and the coon leaned forward suggesting he/she’d be following while I reared the pinchbar back to strike if needed.

Coon came down the top step with its front legs looking me straight in the eye when I spang hit it with the pinchbar and knocked it backward onto the porch.  This was beginning to tick me off.

I came up the first step while the coon turned around to face me again baring teeth and sort of whine/growling, not much of a pause before it came fast and I whacked hell out of it again upside the head.

Stunned it enough to give me time to think a moment and decide I wasn’t crazy about how this was all going, so as the coon struggled up and turned to face me I hit it again, this time with all the force I could muster.  Took it down again, but not dead, not unconscious.

So I stepped into the cabin and dragged out a .22 pistol inside the door, turned back around just in time to have the coon turning on me again.

Lousy way to start a day.

11 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Animals, Nature, Texas, Wildlife

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I might be forced to find me a woman

Posted on June 8, 2013 by | 22 comments

Don Giovanni

At least for a while.  I’ve been kicking it around in my head a lot lately.  If I’m going to do any serious trekking into the high mountains for more than a few days I’m going to have to have someone looking after the felines.  And if I want to spend a season work camping somewhere they almost always require couples, as opposed to singles.

Fact is, I run across a lot of men who might be a lot easier to get along with than a woman, but most of them have their own ideas about what they’d prefer to do with themselves as opposed to doing what I might wish them to do.  And women tend to be a lot easier to come by in my experience.  The problem is keeping things clean and well lighted, the parties of the first and second parts each knowing where the other’s coming from, and where they’re going.

That can get complicated.  Mainly because one of the two parties is working on more than one agenda without coming out and saying so, figuring the agenda of the other can be modified after the hook is set better.

But a lot of the things I want to do before I die are going to require someone to lift the other end of something.  Finding someone willing to lift the other end and take joy in doing it is no easy matter.  Whatever the object needs lifting, whatever the agenda.

Afterthought:  A woman who owns a couple of mules or a string of pack goats and a few acres of land up near the continental divide might work out well.  Also a stock trailer and something to pull it.  Probably can find something on Craigslist.

Afterthought #2:  I can’t, in good conscience, recommend me to any woman.  In fact, I’d counsel strongly against me as a consideration.  Fact is, I’m a nice guy.  Got an honest streak in me and enough of a century behind to know this whole thing was a lousy idea.  Though fun, in an oblique sort of way.

22 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Human Behavior, New Mexico, Outdoors, Senior Citizens

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Tough year here for cats

Posted on June 8, 2013 by | 12 comments

invadercat1

Something snagged the Invadercat here a while back, tore him up badly and took out one eye.  He hung around here a week-or-so for food, didn’t appear to be getting worse.  But then he vanished, as he’s always been prone to do.  I know he was getting food at one of the ranches around here, probably several.

But once he left he hasn’t been back.  Might be one of the other folks who’ve been feeding him took him to a vet and had him doctored, or maybe something got him in the woods.  Life’s dangerous enough in the real world for a cat with two good eyes and no serious injuries.

Meanwhile, Ms Tabby’s having worse than her usual battle with spring and summer leg and skin troubles.  Getting welts from either cactus, or fire ants on her legs, belly and tail.  I see her crouched in the meadow stalking things in places where I know there are fire ant beds, so that might be the problem.  But she’s looking worse now than anytime since she’s been with me.

Ms Niaid and Mr Hydrox are doing generally okay, though Niaid’s looking skinnier than I’d like.  She’s bringing in several mice per day to show off before she eats them, but still wants the catfood and is the eagerest eater of them all.  After I used the sheep shears on her she hasn’t picked up burrs and gotten matted hair so badly, seems a lot more pleased with herself.  Gets around well for a senior citizen.

Mr Hydrox only has half of himself sheep sheared, avoided being caught to have it finished after we had a difference of opinion during the operation regarding how much more to take off.  But last night he wanted to sleep with me, so I’m thinking he’s going to have less hair soon.

All in all central Texas probably just ain’t the exact right place for these felines and this 70 year old man and the Coincidence Coordinators are raising the ante for staying any longer than I have to.

12 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Outdoors, Texas

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