We all need to stay positive and upbeat. With the discovery of the Eagle Ford Shale Formation oil reserves the US now his more oil reserves than the rest of the world combined.
Now’s the time to nationalize US oil reserves and production, sell gasoline to US drivers for 25 cents a gallon, and make a deal with the other oil producing countries of the world. Run the price of oil up to $1000 per barrel and bleed them dry. Squeeze every country that doesn’t have any oil until they are walking or riding bicycles, heating their bath water on wood fires, plowing their fields behind mules and oxen.
We’ve been patient with the rest of the world up until now, and look at the good it’s done. Do they love us? No. They don’t even agree with us on a lot of things.
But now we can set them straight, finally. Put those Japanese back up to their knees in the rice paddies where they belong. Sell toasters and rubber monster toys to the Chinese if they can find any money to buy them.
We can bring back the good old days of everyone having a good job without anyone having to go to work. Hire Mexicans to do it all.
Thumb our noses at Arab Sheiks and Shaws who used to have more oil than us.
Positive and upbeat with good old American know-how to keep the home fires burning.
When I joined the US Army in 1961 it had a lot of attractions for a young man of 17. First off, it didn’t involve going to work in a moly mine in Questa, New Mexico. Secondly, it was the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and I naturally hoped I’d get an opportunity to kill me some young Russians to defend this country. Thirdly, the recruiter promised they’d teach me some skills I’d find useful in civilian life.
Eventually I learned that moly mine mightn’t have been a bad idea. Never got to kill me any Russians, neither. Never defended this country worth nuthun. And thirdly, the only skill I learned that might have helped me as a civilian was how to kill a man by hitting him in the face with an entrenching tool. A lot of years have passed since then, but I’m still hoping to put that entrenching tool thing to use.
Fact is, that like the US troops who served in WWI, the Spanish American War, the Mexican War, and all the US Army who fought the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne along with dozens of other tribes, we were not ‘defending’ this country. Until WWII a person would have to go back to the Civil War and include the soldiers fighting for the Confederacy to locate someone defending his country.
Well, I suppose you could say the Mexican soldiers who fought against the US in the Mexican War were defending their country. And the Apache was defending his, and so on.
But those serving in the US Army were doing something else, entirely.
Trucking down mainstreet toward the courthouse I immediately noticed the flags are gone, and of the dozen-or-more of these signs there a month ago, only three are left.
Bad sign, thinks I while ignoring inconvenient puns. Might mean there are some intelligent, ethical people in Junction, Texas, with some class. People who aren’t allowing themselves to be brow-beaten by kneejerks to backhandedly exploit the dead for some obscure political message.
People who’ve thoughtfully arrived at the realization that some things are better forgotten.
Lousy people to have on juries. Might reduce my chances for getting exempted.
However, then I arrived at the courthouse. The place was strangely quiet.
Clock said it was what? 4:30 am? I’m there in plenty of time. But my watch says it’s 9:00 am.
But the sign on the door explains all.
But parenthetically adds we ain’t allowed to burn down the County Courthouse.
So, I’m free. Got time to kill, a whole town to stick my nose into. Gas gauge is showing empty, so first I swing in for a tank of cheap petrol.
$50 later I drift over for five minutes of free prayer and a Kow Kick. Hadn’t done any gratitude affirmations yet about jury duty being cancelled, and a non-Christian doesn’t get many offers for free prayer. Much less with a Kow Kick thrown in.
Sooooo. Off to the city park for a while, spent an hour or so in the graveyard, which is cool, had some Lum’s barbeque, examined various historical markers. All of which I’ll report to you in loving detail during otherwise dull moments of the future.
Meanwhile, feel free to forget. It’s surprisingly uplifting, cleansing, and clears the conscience of all that guilt for trying to exploit the dead. Helps make a classy individual of you. Might make people believe you’re intelligent, well-rounded and capable of thinking for yourself.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
This book ought to be required reading for all these namby-pamby ‘thank you for your service’ self-hugging smugness goodygoody submerged hypocrites, thinks I.
These are the WWII experiences told by men who came back from WWII and didn’t talk about it. Didn’t join the VFW, didn’t wave any flags, and grew old holding it inside their heads because what they saw and experienced as young men didn’t fit inside the picture the US Empire was drawing of itself and its conduct of WWII.
Eventually some decided it was time to tell it and O’Donnell was there to record what they said. Into The Rising Sun was the result. They told of being sent into places nobody needed to go, under-equipped with incompetent leadership, under-supplied, half-starved into malaria swamps against an enemy no better off than they were.
They told of the most significant experience of their lives. A dismal experience perpetrated by negligence, mediocrity, politics, publicity and lies for the folks back home waving flags and beating drums. Sending their own sons off to join them in jungles where getting captured meant becoming a meal for the enemy. Where shooting all prisoners was the norm.
Burma, the Solomons, the South Pacific they lived didn’t make its way into any Broadway musicals and the ‘thank you for your service’ expressions represented an irony too confusing to face. Legions of men betrayed by their government for convenience, whims and indifference. Betrayed by a failure of the military leadership to commit itself to the reality they were living and fulfill their own responsibilities, the only excuse for their existence.
The 20th Century is loaded with places a person wouldn’t care to have been. What these men lived wasn’t unique. Happened so many places to so many men of the 20th Century from all countries a book couldn’t list them all.
But this book probably represents as good a synopsis as anyone’s likely to produce. It’s good the old men finally told it.
It was flags and God Bless Americasigns I noticed mostly in Kerrville last trip in. Had me wondering whether something was going on I’d missed.
Here’s a country where they’re still planting grass in the suburban yards so they can mow it at $3.50+ per gallon for the mowers, giant television sets, shiny new doolies, SUVs, RVs and golf courses demanding more blessings because the ones already provided don’t fill the cup.
But maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe God Bless America’s a parenthetical statement:
(Help me God, because the onliest people I’ve got to choose from are all going to provide me with more undeclared wars, ship more jobs overseas, bail out more banks, automobile companies, allow my savings to be ravaged, and treat my Social Security as though it were welfare beggings.)
I dunno. Seems to me this nation’s enjoyed considerable blessings for the duration of the lives of everyone living in it. Even those living on the streets, on the Reservations, just about everywhere, compared to a great majority of the less-deserving who didn’t manage to get born here.
If there’s a diety out there looking for advice maybe a “Thankee!” would get a better hearing than, “Gimme more!”
Maybe it’s time to belly up to the bar and recognize that life’s a tough place to live and sometimes people have to live it without giant television sets and new SUVs. Judging by the people the US public have selected to look out for their interests it would take a diety a lot more forgiving than the one a majority of believers believe in to heap more blessings on those demanding them.
Thowing good money after bad isn’t one of the traits attributed to the usual diety.
This email was waiting for me when I logged on this morning, in part:
“The total bumper stickers on a 2000 mile trip was one Semper Fi, two Obama/Biden, one home made one that said Troginator or something, and one that said “ If religious groups want to get into politics they should pay taxes” which I’ll send to you re-sized sooner than the others if you want to use it. If there are certain subjects I might have taken that you’d like me to email the pic of, let me know and I’ll resize those first just to send along quickly.
“Saw something in a comment that the new bumpers don’t do well with bumper stickers, and since almost all the cars I saw were new, I suspect people don’t want to mess their bumpers up with something that won’t come off. Just guessing.”
Jeanne might be right, of course, same as any of us might as easily be as being wrong at any given time, on any given issue we enjoy strong opinions about.
I hate to think US drivers have become so sissy they’d quit spewing their certainties, hatreds, biases and half-baked simple solutions to complex phenomena just because of their paint-jobs. I’d prefer to think they’ve become uneasy about what’s going on around them, sensed it enough to cause the hair on their necks bristle a bit.
The deliberate polarization of strong feelings in this country regarding politics, religion, environmentalism, ethnics, abortion, sexual preference and patriotism seem to me to have introduced the potential for having tires slit in the parking lot as a means of counter-expression.
The guy in the picture at the top today is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona. His hat was his bumper-sticker. Someone shot a hole in it, ripped it in half so’s he had to sew it back together.
But in another sense, a person might figure, “Hell, if I’m going to be in Swilling’s neighborhood, I ain’t putting no bumper-sticker on my horse.”
The country’s jam-packed with people today who might be sneakier and more cunning than Jack Swilling, but have the same eyes developed listening to talk radio too much. Or spending too much time in the slammer to love their fellow Americans. Or snorting too much of this or that recreational drug.
Jack Swilling’s still out there, but he’s wearing his hat backward most likely. Instead of saying, “What the hell are YOU looking at?” most likely he’ll just drag his keys the length of your paintjob or slit your tires. Unless he can catch you alone broken down on the highway.
Good morning, readers. I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time. Never quite got around to it.
I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.
Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.
Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less. They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.
Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.
Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.
One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.
Amazing footage.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.
The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief. But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.
But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.
Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.
At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.
Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood
Just keep it safe and simple pretending to remember something about the ‘fighting’ by Allied troops across the planet. Hug yourself with some feelgood to help you feel sensitive and patriotic.
Carefully remember today ONLY the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor carrying some vague message we should remain prepared against similar future events.
Carefully do NOT remember the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the savage treatment of Allied POWs and civilians in occupied territories of The Greater-East-Asian-Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Carefully do NOT remember the beheading of hundreds, maybe thousands of prisoners, the starvation and death by disease of a huge percentage of other prisoners compared to elsewhere, almost anywhere among the armies of either side.
Carefully do NOT remember the overwhelming percentage of that conduct was perpetrated by enlisted men and officers below the rank of captain. Men who returned to their homes to be accepted within a couple of years as allies and fast friends of the US and other nations they fought, invaded, raped, pillaged and slaughtered only months earlier.
Carefully do NOT remember the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japanese industry and infrastructure destroyed by the war, rendering much of US industry obsolete or absolescent. DON’T remember the 20,000 suicide-before-surrender Japanese cliff-jumps at Okinawa.
And while you’re at it see if you can find a feelgood argument with someone about the ethical and moral side of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Better to forget all of it than pretend to remember some of it. Crank up your Mazda, turn on the FM and listen to some oldies while you remember what it was like to have a job. What happened 1941 – 1945 had nothing at all to do with anything happening today.
You don’t remember a damned thing about anything that happened to other people. Just remember Santy’s coming to town.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 