Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
Tora tora tora!
Maybe it will come to me later in the day.
Old Jules
Posted in 1940's, 2011, America, History, Human Behavior
Tagged country life, culture, Events, History, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, miscellaneous, music, other, personal, society, thoughts
From 1970 until he died a few years ago I had a friend named Bill who required some getting used to in the visual encounter department. Bill, Gale and I were part of a coffee-klatch at the University of Texas Chuckwagon. They’d both been recently released from the military, both were Russian majors, so I suppose Bill was the instrument for my becoming acquainted with Gale, who owns this place and lives through the woods half-mile from me.
Bill wasn’t an easy man to look at. He weighed around 250 pounds, had a huge head, eyes that didn’t look in precisely the same directions, kinky hair and teeth with a lot of distance between them. But he was a fine, intelligent person. Unfortunately for him, Bill also spoke with a stutter. He was acutely, uncomfortably aware of his appearance.
At the time I met him Bill had never had sex with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and he confided once he never expected to. A profoundly unhappy man whom I spent countless hours with trying to help persuade him away from suicide. Every month or two I’d ride with him to the Chicken Ranch, the famous Texas whorehouse, and wait, chatting with the girls while he took care of his needs. For me, one of the outcomes of those visits was the magazine article shown here: Vietcong Seductress, et al. For Bill the visits only provided temporary, but necessary relief.
Around the time he got his bachelors degree Bill found a woman who had a few problems of her own, and who was evidently able to see beneath his exterior into the fine human being he was. They were eventually married and seemingly enjoyed a happy enough life. Still, Bill and I remained close friends, talking on the phone several times a week.
One day Bill came to see me sometime in the mid-1980s with something weighing him down. We talked a while before he confided to me that he was a ‘sex addict’.
“What the hell is a sex addict, Bill?”
He explained the concept to me, as it had been explained to him by his wife, along with various pamphlets of the feminist genre describing it in loving detail. “I never knew this about myself,” he explained, carrying more guilt and self-remorse than I’d seen since he became a married man.
“Have you talked to a doctor about it?”
“I talked to [a mutual friend who was a psychologist]. He just laughed me off and said there’s no such thing as a sex addict.”
This brought a frown from me. Our bud the psychologist was a pro. If sex addiction existed, he’d know about it, and if Bill had a problem he wanted to talk about he wouldn’t brush him off. “Did you talk to him in any detail about what makes you think you’re a sex addict?”
Bill just shrugged and stared at the floor. “Yeah. He said it’s just normal. He said I’m the same as almost every other man.”
Not too long afterward Bill adopted the religious preference of his wife, Anglican. He became a deacon, and something of a zealot. But he carried his guilt and his conviction he was a sex addict with him, probably to the grave. And frankly, I never believed a word of it.
Bill had described enough of his sexual needs and practices to me over the years to convince me if he was a sex addict, so was I. I tended to agree with our psychologist friend more than I agreed with Bill, his wife, or the feminist pamphlets where the concept was invented.
Recently The Honest Courtesan, a retired prostitute has had a couple of articles and discussions about the subject in her blog. Not An Addiction, and Neither Addiction nor Epidemic examine the subject of the concept of sex addiction and what’s behind it in loving detail.
My general thought is that this wouldn’t work on most men. It would require one such as Bill, a man already inclined to guilt and one already decided to let others define right and wrong for him. Most men, I believe, would simply get a mistress or pick up a lady in a bar somewhere. A lady who measured the sexual desires and needs of the normal man as normal.
He’ll be something else then, a ‘cheater’, and she’ll be the ‘other woman’.
And that’s normal too when terms such as ‘sex addict’ become a replacement part for ‘too tired’, or ‘I’ve got a headache’.
Old Jules
Posted in Human Behavior, Relationships
Tagged family, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, miscellaneous, musings, Nature, other, personal, psychology, random, Reflections, Relationships, sex addict, sexual addiction, society, sociology, thoughts, wisdom
Possibly this one would choose something by Arthur Rimbaud,
“True, the new era is nothing if not harsh.
“For I can say that I have gained a victory; the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of hellfire, the stinking sighs subside. All my monstrous memories are fading. My last longings depart, – jealousy of beggars, bandits, friends of death, all those that the world passed by. – Damned souls, if I were to take vengance!
“One must be absolutely modern.
“Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!… The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men; but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God alone.
“Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.” From ‘Farewell’ by Arthur Rimbaud
Or Baudelaire:
“— Enjoyment fortifies desire.
Desire, old tree fertilized by pleasure,
While your bark grows thick and hardens,
Your branches strive to get closer to the sun!
“Will you always grow, tall tree more hardy
Than the cypress? — However, we have carefully
Gathered a few sketches for your greedy album,
Brothers who think lovely all that comes from afar!”
From ‘Flowers of Evil’, ‘The Voyage’, by Charles Baudelaire
Or Edgar Allen Poe:
From ‘Spirits of the Dead’, by Edgar Allen Poe
My own saga with Oak Wilt and this particular tree is sung in these past posts:
Oak Wilt, Firewood and Sawmilling
For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise
I’d written about possibly trying to salvage some of it for sawmilling, but that’s not in the cards:
The interior of the trunk is riddled by cracks caused by the rapid shrinkage.
Oak Wilt came on it fast from the roots. By the time anything showed topside the tree was evidently already dead.
Arthur Rimbaud, Charlie Baudelaire and E.A. Poe should have put their heads together and written something immortal about how to get the rest of it down. The job has the potential for being right there in the target zone for their kind of writing. It’s going to be a booger-bear any way I cut it.
Old Jules
Everything else being equal I think I favor pines:
All that tree-stuff hanging up there leads me to think our songsters are too humanocentric about hanging trees.
Posted in 2011, Country Life, Homesteading, Poetry, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Texas, White Trash Repairs
Tagged country life, environment, home, homesteading, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, music, musings, Nature, other, personal, poems, poetry, random, Reflections, thoughts, wisdom
Tree Numero Uno didn’t agree to my offer to let it go down without a fight. The trunk broke but the uppidy part refused to answer the demands of modern physics.
I’m not the sort of man to sit still for anything defying science and gravity.
I got my digging bar and proceeded to put forward reasoned arguments as to why that tree needed to obey the law.
The top part of the trunk moved over on the stump every time I applied pressure to the bar.
I cut the trunk at an angle so the trunk couldn’t slip back this way when it fell and get in the way of the path I was leaving to get the cut wood out. But now, by cunning Communist refusal to do what’s right there are several tons of potential energy trapped in the upper trunk. If I use the bar to pry it further this way that upper trunk’s going to snap out of there like a catapult and knock the bejesus out of everything downrange.
But if I leave it standing it’s going to pick its own time to come down. And it’s already demonstrated a lousy set of values and ideals enough create a suspicion I’ll be under it when it does.
Maybe I was actually supposed to go to Kerrville today.
Old Jules
4:04 PM edit: I got it down, but with more style and panache than I consider tasteful under the circumstances. No broken bones, no serious injuries, nothing destroyed I can’t live without. On the other hand, there’s still a lot more tree left propped up on dead branches 10-15 feet in the air, so there might be another dance left in the old dame yet. Jules
Posted in 2011, Adventure, Country Life, Current Issues, Homesteading, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, White Trash Repairs
Tagged country life, culture, Education, Events, home, homesteading, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, Nature, other, personal, random, Reflections, science, senior citizens, thoughts, wisdom
Good morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit and read. I went to sleep last night with the thought on my mind to try a run into Kerrville today. I figured I’d wander around in the AutoZone store for a while to see if I could locate some Chinese engineered tool designed to outsmart Japanese mechanical engineers.
But it turned out to be one of those nights when a lot goes on. A high wind rose for a while and started dropping dead tree branches, I assume it was, with a lot of fanfare and drama, on things probably didn’t need any trees falling on them. I recently got that fuel-line bulb replacement for the chainsaw For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise and at that point my middle of the night thinking changed my plans for the day.
Seemed everything was stacking up for me to spend the day bringing down dead oaks and cutting firewood. I settled back to sleep peacefully dreaming of a fire in the woodstove and a few layers less clothing on my agingly fragile bod.
Daylight was still a long way off when I was awakened by a ruckus on the front porch I interpreted as the cats telegraphing me there was a coon out there bothering them, so I got the .22 and the spotlight and went out to unravel whatever was happening. Turned out it was the invader-cat crosswise with Hydrox, second-in-command around here.
I adopted my mean-evil-ugly persona, put down the .22 and started yelling and waving my arms around to break up the spitting growling party, then chased the invader-cat off the porch and across the meadow keeping it lit up in the spotlight. Hydrox was playing point-man, but chasing with no intention of catching. The invader-cat has me figured out, I reckons, and kept turning around hoping I’d say something friendly and we could come to an agreement, adding a cat to the local population.
But that ain’t going to happen. You can’t stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps coming. Hydrox and I chased that cat clean into the woods to the east, me breathing steam and gutsy language.
When I got back to the porch with Hydrox the other three were waiting and demanded a prayer-meeting. They all saw me put down that .22 and interpreted it as an ominous sign I might be sneaking around wondering if we couldn’t fit another cat into the equation. The consensus was that we can’t.
So one of the jobs today is puzzling out how to get the invader-cat into the live-trap and deliver it to one of the herd of wildlife-rescue women springing up like weeds all over the Texas Hill Country.
It looks like a pretty good cat and I’ve got to tip my hat to the fact it’s awfully well groomed for a stray. But it’s a long way from anyone likely to be grooming it. Just the fact it’s survived out in the woods a while, though, has me thinking it mightn’t be easy to lure into the live trap.
Anyway, after daybreak I went out for a perusal of whatever damage the trees might have accomplished and found things are normal, though one’s a lot nearer the ground than it was yesterday. It’s foggy, cold and feels like rain. Maybe I’ll cut wood, and maybe I won’t.
But what I originally intended to tell you this morning was that last night I came across a blog where someone’s discovered an identical replication in nature between a beetle and a parasite duplicating the relationship between government and high-finance interests, multi-national corporations, almost every facet of human organizational structure. I think it might be where we learned how to do all the stuff we do.
Mind-controlling beetle parasite.
Instead of studying cats, chickens, deer and other critters to puzzle out what’s going on with us humans I think I need me one-each of those beetles and parasites. I’ll keep you updated on whether I find one.
Maybe old Franz Kafka wasn’t too far wrong.
Old Jules
Posted in 2011, America, Current Issues, Homesteading, Politics, Senior Citizens, Texas
Tagged animals, cats, country life, culture, Education, environment, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, other, personal, politics, psychology, random, Reflections, senior citizens, society, sociology, thoughts
Confession #1: I’m in almost daily communication with the team of Toyota mechanical engineers who designed the 1991 Toyota 4-Runner and the Japanese Toyota assembly plant worker who tightened the starter-bolts on the one parked across the meadow jacked up and partly dissassembled.
Those men don’t need to have a command of the English language to be laughing and giving one another the high-five while saying: “Hahaha you Yankee pig! You’ll never get that starter off! Hahahaha! We nailed your young ass good!”
Although that bolt head is the ‘easy’ one, this American can’t get to it with any wrench yet invented for a straight-on shot. The mechanical engineers made sure of that. But the guy working in the assembly plant lacked sufficient confidence some can-do American wouldn’t come up with a way to put a wrench on it, so he torqued it down with a cheater-bar, thinks I.
Trying to get it loose repeatedly already has the grim prospect looming that I’m going to round off that head. If that happens I might as well take a cutting torch to the whole shebang and use it for a new chicken house.
The engineers did their job and the assembly-line worker did his. Now where did I leave that right-angle cutter and 300 foot extension cord?
But they had a backup plan. I’ve been talking about the easy one. This one I can’t even get into a position to see, but I think that might be it, back where I have to stick the camera in to try to get a view of it. I can’t think of a single way I’ll ever get a wrench anywhere near it.
Confession #2: I am the stupidest person you’ll ever encounter writing a blog on the Internet. The proof is enshrined here: The Communist Toyota 4-Runner. “But there it is. Hot diggedy damn!” “Easy! Easy money!” “Man, people pay good money to get to do a job as easy as this one’s going to be.”
*Old Jules
*Old enough to know better.
This was written before I realized the rats are just a diversion and Chinese containerized cargo-boxes are the real invaders.
“Trouble!” says you. “What trouble?”
“The Ruskies went home a decade ago,” You say. “Berlin wall came down and no one even remembers it. The Germans are all running around hugging one another worrying about mad cows and leaving everyone else alone.
“We kicked the holy bejesus out of Samdam Hoooosane and his royal guards,” you say, “And might do it again if he doesn’t behave,” you say, “And we’re all safe and sound here in the land of milk and honey…..Ain’t gonna war no more,” you say, “Except the occasional invasion of a minor third rate Middle Eastern or Balkan country,” you say…..”All safe and sound, swords into plowshares, all that.”
And you really believe that, do you?
Well, if you believe that, you’d better prepare yourself for a shock down to your carefully manicured and polished toenails……’cause the real challenge is still out there, the real challenge is happening right there in your back yard even as we speak, in your attic, in the sewer under your squeaky clean porcelain commode; in the trees behind your quiet complacent little hidey hole you’ve made for yourself to stick your soft American head into.
You kept your guard up all those years because one of the Marx brothers talked about lulling the West into a false sense of security, and of course he was right. Of course he was.
Only the time-skid was slower than anticipated and all the Marx brothers died.
Yeah, Groucho and Harpo sleep with the fishes, but it’s still going on.
The fifth column is here, now, at work near you, near your home.
“Rats.” I say.
“Rats?” You say.
Yeah. Rattus Rattus, the good American rat, the roof rat, is the only real American who knows, and he ain’t saying much.
Old Rattus Rattus suffers silently in his simple Christian American way; fighting quietly for his homeland with American know-how. Sure, it sounds silly and pointy headed, Rattus Rattus, but that’s his damned name, same as yours is Homo Sexian or some such thing.
Rattus Rattus struggles without complaint for his tiny children, while slowly, the habitat and other lousy habits, recede every year. You ought to know by the name; Rattus Norvegicus, the Norwegian rat, the dreaded wharf rat: the foreign rat the communist pinko athiest moslem heathen yellowjapaneseinvader super rat of the future is bullying him back.
While you sleep there in your complacent soft pillowland, it’s going on outside and up in your attic, in the streets, the alleys, the sewerplants, the amber grainfields, the feedlots, the silos, Rattus Rattus battles for you against the silent invaders. Rattus Rattus draws his lines in the sand, digs his little burrows, fortifies, and retreats as the highly mechanized divisions of Norwegian rats advance, house by house, burrow by burrow……Every year the Rattus Rattus line moves inward a few miles, seven miles in along the whole perimeter.
Yeah. There are bulges, enclaves of encirclement. Enclaves of resistance, but Norvegicus takes no prisoners, spares no one. And you sleep silently, peacefully while your own good American rats are diminished, you who gutsylike bomb the bejesus out of other commie pinko foreign middleastern terrorist muslim and Balkans, sleep while your own brother-rats in your own back yard die without your help.
And what do you think, you sleeping bastards, will happen when the final conquest is complete? Do you think you will be left alone, when the last fighters have all fought on your behalf, when the silent armies of Rattus Rattus are all destroyed, all the food for ravens scattered on the battlefields of America? Don’t bet on it. The sound of scratching in the ceiling, inside the walls has barely begun.
Time to join the battle, fellow Americans, time to get out the cyanide, the 1080, the pellet guns and the mousetraps, time to stock up on cheese, and warfrin, and time to prepare for the big battle for America in the American way. Time to begin the manufacture of tiny tanks, (maybe Tonka and some of those can help) and artillery pieces, and scatterguns and nervegas and miniaturized nuclear weapons…..time to join in the real battle for America here at home.
If you aren’t with us, you are against us, behind enemy lines, already under the areas controlled by the foreign devils, and you won’t be spared, unless you form an underground, a fifth column of your own…..
They’ve already got all the other countries, the other continents, and as has happened so often in history, America stands alone against them, a tiny host of good American rats, behind the scenes, fighting against all odds for you, to the end……
And that doesn’t even touch on the imported fire ants killing our domestic fireants, the imported Africanized bees killing our good American queen bees and selfishly taking over the hives, the Russian Thistles (tumbleweeds) cluttering up our prairies, the imported hares (jackrabbits), the English Sparrows (that battle’s already lost), the tamaracs (salt cedars stealing our precious water for their foreign interests), and the imported fruitflies…….it’s all there, all in black and white, been written down, so it’s true …..a multi-pronged attack against all that’s good in America…..while you sleep…….
And now the foreign weathermen, the Canadians and Mexicans, are predicting our weather, keeping the good stuff for themselves……
Old Jules
Posted in 2011, America, Human Behavior, Politics, Survival, Trains
Tagged animals, culture, environment, Events, History, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, Nature, other, personal, politics, random, Reflections, science, society, sociology, thoughts, Wildlife
In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life: Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction. But important things first:
Here he is November 28:
As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.
Here’s today.
Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.
Strangeness
SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:
“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.
The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.
Okay. Now for the main thrust of this post. Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3
A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson. She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him.
But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies. She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.
To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living. Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico. I considered him a friend.
But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob. He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.
I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me. Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.
Naturally, I bought and read a copy. Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder. My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.
I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction. But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.
Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.
We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery. But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar. And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.
Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself. Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying. Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.
But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me. That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.
Live and learn.
Old Jules
Posted in 1980's, 1990's, 2011, Books, Creative Writing, Hack Writing, Human Behavior, Liars, NM, Portales
Tagged authors, Bobby Jack Nelson, Books, culture, Education, Events, family, History, home, Human Behavior, humor, Liars, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, New Mexico, other, personal, psychology, Reflections, Relationships, senior citizens, society, sociology, thoughts, wisdom, writers, writing
In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn. In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled. Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.
The song was ended but the melody lingered on.
Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song. I’d be remiss leaving it out.
The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to: Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops. Sound familiar?
Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’. Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker. Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.
Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.
The US Government isn’t a fast learner. They were already controlling and taxing whiskey. They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine. The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets. Nor even out of the prisons.
Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.
But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough. The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.
But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers. Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.
I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.
I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.
Old Jules
Posted in 2011, Liars, Music, YouTube
Tagged country life, culture, economy, Education, environment, Events, History, Human Behavior, humor, jail, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, other, personal, politics, prisons, psychology, random, Reflections, society, sociology, thoughts, wisdom
If the power to intimidate is derived from a 'legitimate' source the term 'bully' is not applicable.
When I promised a summation of conclusions about bullying behavior based on ponderings and experiences described in those recent other posts, I didn’t grasp what I was setting myself up for. Every direction I took in my thinking led to unsettling places I couldn’t trust without backing up and thinking it through from other directions.
If you’re new to this blog and haven’t read the earlier posts it’s possible you’ll find it easier to follow if you read them first.
More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past
A Bullying Commie Americauna
The Bullying Homestead Part 2
Half-Century of Male Evolution – Bullying Part 3
Stolen Horses and Baby Rattlers – The Anatomy of a Bully – Part 4
Okay, all that prefacing and cowardly side-step-waffling out-of-the-way, here’s what eventually I found myself inescapably glued to as a conclusion:
Bullying is so much a part of life on this planet we don’t even notice it. It’s the glue holding every community together, every species, cross-species, inter-species. It’s the determinant governing community behavior of every description. We just don’t recognize it as bullying unless it falls into a class of activities we happen to disapprove in our matrix of human-cum-societal judgements.
That’s if ‘bullying’ is defined as a behavior, as opposed to being anchored to a larger concept: the source from which the power being exerted is derived. Building a concept bounded by ‘legitimacy’ and protocols does allow what we usually label bullying to be cut out of the herd and isolated in a pen of repudiation. But by doing so we’d be forced to accept an equally unpalatable conclusion:
If the ‘bullying’ behavior subtracted from the bullying definition is legitimate because it derives power from approved sources of authority is an important piece of what holds things together, we’re stuck with it. Lock, stock and banana-peel. As an example, that 5th grade teacher of mine who liked to beat-hell out of me and other kids who weren’t in a ‘protected’ mode, wasn’t bullying us at all. Reason being that his power derived from his position as a designated tool of the power of legitimate authority.
Similarly, all that Jew-baiting that went on in the 3rd Reich and elsewhere in the world. The pervasive use of police forces to beat hell out of union strikers in the late 1800s and early 20th Century. The iron fist used constantly after the Indian wars in the western US to keep tribal members on the REZ and out of the hair of the ‘legitimate’ citizenry far into the 20th Century. The removal of the tribes east of the Mississippi, to designated places west of the Mississippi, even though doing so was a clear violation of previous treaties and agreements. National Guardsmen shooting students at Kent State. Policemen spraying little old ladies with mace.
Almost overnight, previously accepted non-bullying behavior/attitudes can become disgusting examples of bullying.
Sometimes focusing precisely on where the power resides becomes ambiguous.
Other times it’s not ambiguous in fact, but owns the tacit approval of de facto power.
Sometimes it’s bullying when it happens to the the group in question, but non-bullying when they’re doing it.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of being the wrong place at the right time.
And when the ‘legitimate’ source of power tacitly approves it, it’s not bullying.
So when a cop tasers a ten-year-old kid it’s actually business as usual. It might eventually become ‘brutality’ or might be deemed excessive force, but it will never become ‘bullying’.
But it gets more complicated than that. There’s a more subtle side of non-bullying we all see so frequently we take it for granted. For instance, the entire pantheon of political rhetoric today is choreographed to promote an atmosphere of something akin to bullying, character assassination, and denigration of the opposition. But because it’s satisfying to the targeted body of listener/participants, it’s ‘legitimate’.
Bullies constantly strive to give the moral high ground to their attitudes and behavior. Frequently, they succeed, and when they do those attitudes and behaviors cease to be bullying. Probably the best example can be found in the most non-bullied segment of society filling the jails and prisons in the U.S. Prostitutes.
They do openly and honestly what millions of women do every night with less honesty, more covertly, in singles bars and honkytonks. They do it on streets surrounded by ‘legal’, ‘legitimate’ porn houses run by ‘legitimate’ businessmen and patronized by ‘legitimate’ consumers paying to observe the act of fornication.
But prostitutes enjoy the unique, traditional status of being bullied by pimps and johns, brutalized and extorted for sex by cops, exploited by lawyers, and of being the ‘product’ passing through the criminal justice system into the prisons-for-women industry.
They’ve never achieved the sanctity of the moral high-ground to get wives, girl-friends, and ‘respectable’ women objects of scorn and outlawed. They’ve never found a reservoir of support to allow them to see those other classes of women outlawed and thrown into jails.
But they probably would if they could.
Inside they’re almost certainly bullies, too, like cops and schoolteachers, and like you and me.
Old Jules
Posted in Human Behavior, Relationships
Tagged bullying, country life, culture, Education, History, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, music, musings, other, personal, politics, psychology, random, Reflections, Relationships, society, sociology, thoughts, wisdom
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/
So Far From Heaven 