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.
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.
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.
It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore. It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns.
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemming-like they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those invading Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands, Lost Lunas, and up by Belen.
There they’ve mostly already grouped. They’ve dropped off the rats, cows, deer, dogs and coyotes. The earliest ones are drifting south ahead of the others. They’re the lucky ones. Those got far enough south yesterday to find a stray muskrats along the river and get a little something to eat. The stragglers will find it hard going.
It’s sad, but hopeful: tiny seed ticks huddling close to their mamas at night, the great herd constricting in the cold dark, mama and daddy ticks worrying about the great crossing of the Jornada del Muerto, about the dearth of animals on the Jornada. But also knowing in their tiny network of neurons passing for a brain, that once further south, things will still not be easy……the migration there, the gathering will have already emptied the countryside of hosts, bloodmeals will be a rarity.
When those Isleta and Lost Lunas ticks get as far south as Socorro, the southern ticks will have eaten away everything available. Fishermen will know something’s up by then; they’ll be staying away from the river bottom country sensing some new thing, some change in the atmosphere near the river, hectored by the early gathering; the dogs, the feral cats, the rodents, all driven away from the river bottom by the strange new presence of so many tiny pests.
The animals left will be sucked dry. Probably when the latecomers reach Socorro they’ll have to take their chances in town. Maybe they’ll find pets or townspeople for a last meal before they try to cross the dreaded Jornada del Muerto.
Some of them will drift up onto the freeway to find broken-down motorists with flat tires or dead batteries. Truck drivers stopped to urinate by the road or unsuspecting drunks sleeping with the window opened a crack to release the foul tobacco smoke from inside the car will save a few. Maybe an unlucky hitchhiker sleeping under a bridge or one of the frequent escapees from the prison or jail; some hapless hobo along the railroad, waiting for the next train.
If the motorist doesn’t get bitten by too many at once there’ll be a chance for a jump south by vehicle across the Jornada and avoiding the hard crossing….a quick ride to Cruces, or Truth or Consequences, or El Paso for a small group if they don’t get greedy and just take it easy on the driver. But so many of these younger ticks want everything now.
It might be hard going for them when they get down toward Cruces. That’s where they’ll first meet the newly arrived fire ants. Also, those deep southern ticks will resent their presence, nudging their little fat grey bodies aside as they scramble in a fold of flesh for a foothold and a meal. And ahead, Texas.
The ancestral homeland.
Renewal.
Yes, it’s sad, of the hundreds of millions of ticks starting home; tens of millions won’t make it. There’ll be stained smudges on the freeway where they try to cross, but many run over by recklessly speeding cars.
Thousands clogging the river with their tiny carcasses where the water rose unexpectedly during a crossing, catching many unaware, the long march, the trail of tears, the trek home; so many dead, so many lost, the seed ticks, the mama ticks, the large swollen soft ticks shriveled and wrinkled with hardship….so many friends left back there along the trail, so many loved ones, lost, so many seed ticks lying there in the massive killing fields along the route.
But they’ll do as they can, do as they are able, do as they must, heading south on that lonely migration that long dusty trek, always knowing they won’t be welcomed by their distant kinsmen.
The plethora of ticks in Texas, those hungry, selfish younger generation ticks will push and shove on the hosts, fighting for the best positions in and behind the ears, high on the necks where teeth can’t reach, tiny skirmishes and struggles for position everywhere; on cows, on dogs, on rodents, in the thick hair of women and unreconstructed hippy men in cowboy hats..
As always, those selfish Texas ticks will not agree to share their bounty. They’ll fight despite the sad happiness of the return of their distant relations.
Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.
I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor: Shaving with sheep shears.
Well, heck! I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for. I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare. So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth. Riding the Bread Line
Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard. Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts. Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.
The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.
All this feral swine talk reminded me of one of the most succinct, philosophical, psychological, sociological, sexy and romantic poems I’ve ever read. Dorothy Parker authored it sometime back in the ’50s, I think:
Hogamus higamus men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.
Inspiring, thought-provoking and titillating. It doesn’t get much better than that.
One thing that happens when you get a group of country people hanging around without a lot going on involves a mysterious sorting and filtering process. Small groups of strangers with similar interests are drawn into intense exchanges of arcane esoterica.
Saturday a few old guys including me got talking about chickens, coons, skunks and feral hogs none of us would have ever learned if we hadn’t been to the auction.
The wild hogs seem to be concentrated, we found, in some locations and absent in others. A guy from a few miles east of town seems to have the worst problem of any in the group, and despite the fact he’s killed a hundred hogs this year he says it hasn’t made a dent in the population.
He’s devised an ingenious trap with several interior rooms the hogs can get into but can’t get out, allowing him to capture a dozen at a time. He kills them in the traps and drags them down to a remote corner of the property with the previous hauls.
That guy knew some hog catching tricks I’ll probably use here next time they come in here or up and Gale’s tearing things up. He uses boxes of Jello as bait. Says they can’t resist it and they’ll choose going into a trap after Jello over breaking into a feed bin or tearing the walls off a storage shed for chicken feed.
But everyone agreed the hog population in Central Texas is out of control something awful.
Then, this morning, my old bud Rich sent me a link to this Yahoo News story:
Mexican officials have unveiled plans to slaughter some 50,000 wild boars that have crossed the border from the United States and now threaten agriculture in Mexico.
The Ministry of Environment in Chihauha state said some 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of farmland in the border town of Ojinaga have been affected by the large number of feral pigs that have come from Presidio County, Texas.
“We must get rid of these European wild boars because they sleep overnight on US soil during the day and cross over to the Mexican side to feed,” Ignacio Legarreta, a state official, told local media.
The boars of European origin, which were imported to Texas as pets and then replicated in the wild, have caused serious damage to the flora and fauna of the area, officials said.
“They have reproduced to reach more than 50,000 animals that threaten the area,” said Legarreta.
The authorities intend to use cages with food inside to trap the animals.
But back at the auction. I asked whether any of them had ever tried bringing the hogs in and selling them at auction. None had, and at first everyone’s reaction was a guffaw. Nobody likes getting close to a critter capable of ripping you in two and eating you. Probably the auction folks wouldn’t take them despite the fact they handle a lot of dangerous animals.
But then someone mentioned there’s a place in Ingram always advertising they want to buy swine on the hoof. Sausage place, one thought. Which got us thinking how a person might build a trap on a trailer so’s to not have to deal with them more than dragging the trailer to Ingram, letting them inspect them and kill them in the trap, drag them out, weigh them, and pay up.
I allowed if I’d considered that and thought of it earlier this year I’d be a lot better off financially today than I am. There was a lot of muttering and thinking going on among all of us before the conversation changed to coons.
Yesterday Gale and Kay were away on another craft fair and I had access to Little Red, so I decided to trip into Harper for the farm/livestock auction.
The pickings were fairly slim because fewer people showed for it than I’ve ever seen at that auction. But things were going dirt cheap as a result.
Cheap, I should have said, by comparison with the usual fare. On a normal third Saturday someone falls in love with this sort of thing and is willing to hock the family jewels to carry it home.
But yesterday even jewels of this sort were going for a couple of bucks:
You’d think the seat and steering wheel on this would be worth someone hauling home at those prices.
A few items did draw bids a bit higher.
This compressor that might work went for around $15.
Plenty of antlers of all description but I wasn’t sure what Gale could use or I’d have stayed around to bid on some of the lots.
The poultry barn only had a few dozen birds, none I found a compelling need for. The livestock weren’t out in force. A few bighorn sheep, four starving longhorns, a few ibex, maybe a wildebeest I didn’t get a look at, and a horse headed for the dogfood factory.
I could have left after one quick swing around except for this:
It was set up for propane and water at some time, but mostly everything except the wiring and hoses were removed. That bottom-middle vent, when opened, looks directly inside through a stripped cabinet that evidently once held a sink.
This rear window would have to be removed to get anything wider than the door inside. It doesn’t open. And I couldn’t help wondering why there had been a deliberate removal of the tail lights. No evidence of a license tag ever having been on it.
Those two vents open directly into the trailer underneath the two seats at the front, which would be a problem on the road in inclement weather.
But even knowing it was going to require a lot of work, beginning with protecting that particle board, it was a possible. This winter would be a lot warmer living in there, and that’s a factor to warp judgement to a degree. And having something that would provide a mobile escape route if I need one, a lot easier than anything I’d come across thus far lent itself to a decision to bid if the competition wasn’t strong.
I figured it might go for $300, which I could cover. I decided I couldn’t go more than $500, and even that would squeeze things a bit uncomfortably. When the bidding came it went to my $475, long pause and someone bid $500. I turned to walk away, then spur of the moment raised my arm for $525. And the bidding stopped.
I’d just bought the damned thing.
I went to the office to pay for it, forked over the money and the young lady was filling out the paperwork when the older lady behind her chimed in. “He told you about not being able to get a trailer title for it didn’t he?”
“Hmmm. No.”
Her face curled into a snarl. “That SOB! He was supposed to announce that before he auctioned it. You can’t take it onto the road. You can’t get a title for the highway.”
This caused me to have to back up and try my hand at rapid thinking. Not my long suite.
After a pause, both of them staring at me, “Do you still want it?”
“Um. I guess not.”
She counted my money back to me, I handed them the keys and went back outdoors to re-organize my life.
Nothing much had changed while I went from one package of my immediate future back to the one I began the day with. The world was still waiting for Godot.
But while I went about the task of getting my mind back unshuffled I watched this dog make a statement about the whole event, laying a line of cable between me and all that potential future I’d just stuck my toe into, then pulled it back out.
Morning, readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit.
Today marks an event I never expected to see. Old Sol’s about to light things up, shake his head and shrug when he looks down and sees I am here again, come spang around him one more time. Sixty-nine times I’ve gone around him and come to this same spot, tipped my hat and said hi.
Here’s the reason neither Old Sol, nor I, had any reason to expect this:
Back in the late 1970s I had occasion to spend some time looking around nursing homes. I managed to do it enough times and look them over closely enough to convince myself that we Americans haven’t kept our eye on the ball when it comes to living and being alive.
The people in those nursing homes are alive, but they aren’t overjoyed about it, and the life they’re living only has in common with actual life that the bodies and food are warm. The caretakers roll them back and forth or they hobble between television sets, meals, games, then through the long hallways filled with the forever odor of urine, back to their rooms.
I did a lot of thinking about why that happens, those mass coffins for the living. Of one thing I was certain. I didn’t want it to happen to me.
The reason, I decided, people end up in those places is because they live longer than they’d have expected to, wanted to. The reason they lived so long was that they took all kinds of measures to make certain they did, increasing the intensity and focus as the years built up on them.
Every year those elderly reduced the numbers and kinds of risks they took. They watched their diets, quit doing things they enjoyed when they were younger, many barely did anything at all as they reached into the advanced years of retirement besides a golf game or sea cruise.
And they got what they paid for. Lives that endured long past anything a person would call living. They sidestepped and hid and and ran from Death, and he didn’t find them when he was supposed to. So now they sit around strapped into wheel chairs watching rolling television screens paying the price for being too worried about dying when they were still alive.
That’s when I came to an important conclusion about how I wanted to live my own life.
From that time until now one of the rituals I’ve tried to perform around birthday time and New Years Day involves examination of the physical risks I’m taking now, and how I’m going to increase them during the coming year. And how I’m going to stay as far as possible away from do-gooder, busybody medicos and CPR-knowers sticking their noses in my living experience getting me cross-wise with Death.
How I’m going to be out there when Death comes looking for me, in a place where he can find me, doing something I love to do.
“A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.” “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.
A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’. Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed. 60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.
The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors. Now those results are out. Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.
Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed. But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go. The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.
But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust? What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?
The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way. Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties. Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back. Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.
All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.
Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway? It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.
The Making of the Roman Army From Republic to Empire, Lawrence Keppie
I don’t recall ever reading the Keppie version.
Myles Keogh Biography by Charles L Convis
The Art of War, Sun Tzu, forward by Liddell Hart. My version’s paperback and doesn’t have the Hart forward, so I’m tickled pea green with this.
Frontier State at War – Kansas 1861-1865, Albert Castel
I’ve already got this, but it’s an old copy and doesn’t have the dust jacket.
Brown Water Black Berets – Lt. Commander Thomas J. Cutler
Never read this one.
I’d have been back sooner if it hadn’t been for this billy goat on the Ranch Road. Spent considerable while trying to find an unlocked gate to one or another ranch nearby. He was tame, really tame, and I could have lifted him over one of the fences, but didn’t know which side of the road to choose. Gale and Kay are calling around to try to find who owns him.
Lots of roadkill deer and exotics in the ditches between here and Kerrville. I’d hate to see this guy join them.
But the biggest, most exciting haul of the day: Someone dumped an intact Kenmore Water Softener in the grader ditch. The outer shell is rigid nylon, looks to hold 20 gallons, and inside’s a fiberglass cylinder might hold another 7, 8 gallons if I can think of something to use it for. And the pump appears to be undamaged, also. Something really heavy in there somewhere. The whole shebang must have weighed over 100 pounds.
The HEB grocery store parking lot was jam-packed and I REALLY didn’t want to go in there. But I said to myself, “If you’ll go in there and promise not to be forever whining and complaining about it I’ll give you a special treat.”
“Hmmm,” says I. “What do you have in mind?”
“How about a pie? Or some Elgin sausage?”
“If you don’t want me whining and complaining you ought to fork over Elgin sausage AND a pie. All or nothing.”
“Cripes! You’re driving a hard bargain, but time’s wasting. You got it.”
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 
