Wed Aug 31, 2005
GEORGIA'S LATEST SAT SCORES
How The Black Leadership Exploits African Americans
Part One
How The Black Leadership Exploits African Americans
Part One
The state has just released the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores from last year’s testing.
The results are abysmal here in the Peach State. Summarized we find: (1) Georgia is tied with South Carolina as being at the bottom of the heap among the fifty states. Students here averaged (totaling verbal and math scores) together 993 points; the national average stands at 1028. (2) In my home County, Bibb, the average was a pathetic 901. (3) Heard one statistic on the radio this morning (Kenny Band Jami G, natch) that said (I think) statewide white students averaged 1044 while Black kids came in at 864.
The local BLATT und BUGLE had few useful statistics except totals from local counties; information was very hard to come by on both the county’s BOE website or the State’s DOE site. The latter was long on bullshit rhetoric; short on stats. The former was just inadequate….a simple comparison between last year’s scores and the more recent.
What strikes me as most significant is not that the state ranks so low, for that is to be expected given the level of teacher competency our docents daily exhibit, nor that Bibb scores are so terrible. The fact that Black kids average almost two hundred points below whites is a crying shame.
The black student is being exploited by black leadership which is so bankrupt in the fresh idea and innovation department that it is condemning a majority of Georgia’s African American youth to a life of second tier status.
And you thought it was the white power structure!! Well, it was, once, but the place of overseer Simon Legree has been usurped by Jesse Jackson, Charlie Rangel, and the whole cadre of the NAACP. These are men and women who cultivate a black power structure by keeping their constituents dumb, fat, and, where necessary, pregnant.
What the black leadership is doing to the black citizen is the most singularly exploitive bit of chicanery to come around in more than a hundred years.
I want to spend a little more time looking into these raw statistics, if more such are forthcoming. Will get back to you very, very soon.
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Tue Aug 30, 2005
"FUCK YOU" COMES TO SCHOOL
Just Don't Use It More Than Five Times Per Class
Just Don't Use It More Than Five Times Per Class
There it was…a screaming headline in the sometimes erratic, usually interesting DRUDGE REPORT…sure caught our attention. It read:: YOU CAN USE THE F-WORD IN CLASS (BUT ONLY FIVE TIMES)
“Wow”, thought I, “Sounds like a concept worthy of the Bibb County Board of Education, where decisions about schools and school kids are often made with no regard for their genuine educational value.”
Fortunately, my snap decision was in error. The ‘effin’ policy was made by the faculty and administration of a high school in England, the Weavers School in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, to be exact. Weavers is a technical high school with 1107 students. Its head teacher, Alan Large, can be reached by email at head@weavers.northants-ecl.gov.uk (Amazing what you can learn with a few well-spent Google minutes.) Wellingborough is located roughly north of London, not far from Cambridge, in a section of the Sceptered Isle known as ‘The Midlands’. Wellingborough’s best known pub is a watering hole known as The Crown and the Anchor, which was treated a year or so ago to a re-paint job in the olde games room.
The last bit of information is added for those who prefer pub crawling to school inspection and who might one day find themselves in Wellingborough.
The new school policy allows pupils to swear at teachers, particularly to say ‘fuck you’ directly at the hapless docent, provided it doesn’t happen more than five times in a class period. The teacher is expected to keep track of the number of ‘fuck yous’ uttered in an individual class and, if the fifteen and sixteen year olds gover over the suggested limit of five, the teacher will put his foot down and will then give those naughty boys and girls….are you ready for this?….a good talking to.
Assuming that a teacher has five classes a day, he or she can be told ‘go fuck yourself’ twenty-five times per diem and it’s perfectly OK within the parameters set by school policy.
Actually the aim of this ‘fuck-you’ rule is two specific classes which have gotten, perhaps, just a little out of hand. Imagine that.
Way to go, our limey cousins. Way to go. Once part of the best educational system in the entire Western World, schools in Great Britain have bow reached the very bottom of the cesspool in understanding how to deal with teens. They use the same tactics that the French do to combat Muslim terrorists: if a synagogue gets defaced or a Jew beat up, blame the Jews, not the Arabs. Apease, appease, appease…turn your back on root causes, give in, give in again and yet again, if necessary. Never frustrate the self-esteem of the young and innocent!!!
Innocent my gluteus maximus. (I would say ‘ass’, but we have enough potty mouth in this column to satisfy the lowest common denominator among my readers including two brothers and one Old Man.) These kids are as innocent as Judas, Iscariot, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano (my namesake), or O.J. Simpson.
Writes Richard White, assistant head, "Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board so all students can see the running score,"
"Over this number the class will be spoken to by the teacher at the end of the lesson." ‘Tolerate but not condone.’ That’s educationese for ‘turn to Jello and become one with the limp-wristed and the spineless.’
If I were fifteen again. Hell, even today, if I had a shot a five free ‘fuck yous’ directed at an immediate authority figure, you can bet your last buck yours truly would make certain that each and every day each and every one of the alloted ration would be uttered, even if it meant a quick speech at the bell. And most kids with an ounce of self-respect would do the same.
Tolerate but not condone!!!
Yes, before you send me an email, this is an extreme example of all that is wrong with the educational system of the English speaking world. And we are, in both the U/K/ and over here, English speaking countries despite misguided attempts at bi-lingualism’ and the increasing ghettoization of standard English. Just because ‘Fuck You’ is a term that teens use in the company of their peers, it should not be transferred to the structure of a formal learning situation.
Yhere is a good parallel here with ‘the N word’. The child who uses ‘nigger’ when addressing his fellows, must not be allowed to bring that word into the classroom where its use will do far more damage than good.
Exceptions? Yes, when discussing real literature like Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN, wherein the enobled Jim, a runaway. Black slave, is not infrequently referred to as '‘Nigger Jim'’. This is an important phrase for it marks the first time in American literary history when an African American is identified as a viable character, as a literary individual, as a true human being. Sadly, in most American schools ‘nigger’ is stupidly omitted even in those schools which still teach Clements’ classic, possibly the greatest American novel of all time.
Mr. Large, rethink your stupidly short-sighted policy and put a little backbone into your dealings with your more troublesome students.
Political Correctness now runs the asylum.
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Mon Aug 29, 2005
WHAT IS TELEVISION 'NEWS', ANYWAY???
Came to a big decision over the weekend.
To be honest, it wasn’t really big, and it wasn’t exactly over the weekend. It is the culminating of some serious thinking that has gone over three or four years.
That’s a long time when you’re nineteen, if some of you can remember back that far. Come on, use a little imagination.
Now this non-earth shaking decision has to do with the way we look at our news sources. For many of us that means checking out the 24/7 cable guys, FNC, MSNBC, and CNN. Fox has been beating up on the other two pretty regularly for some time. The nightly lineup of O’Reilly, the three hundred pound gorilla, Baby Jesus and Colmes, and Greta what’s her face generally take the ratings top spot in a given news hour. I used to watch O’Reilly once in a while, especially during the time slot a couple of years back when Atlanta’s very own, Neal Boortz, beat the hell out of the big guy over the question over the question of high school proms in the Peach State. Big Bill got so pissed off that he called the B Man a ‘vicious sonofabitch’ on the air. We even wrote about it once upon a time: http://expage.com/luciusson259 (if my memory serves me).
It started back when I used to get up early on Sunday Mornings to catch the panel/discussion….’news’ shows like MEET THE PRESS and FACE THE NATION. I even went so far as to take notes in an effort to incorporate what I was viewing into my writings. No More. Gave up watching all the Sunday morning news gigs some time back. Why? They are predictable, repetitive, and just plain dull. ABC has fallen on hard times with Georgie Stephanopolis and the new line up. Frankly it is not worth staying glued to the tube for an occasional bit of combative exchange in a format that usually appears reasonably civil and as dull as some Pastor’s oft-repeated Sunday sermon.
When NBC have Chris Matthews a thirty minute show, it worked for a while. But even Matthews, as good and savvy as he is, gets tea leaf predictable.
Long ago I stopped tuning in to the evening news programming of the major networks. Now I have stopped watching the cable shows. Except Tucker Carlson’s, when I’m up that late and don’t have a paper to write or three hundred pages of seminal reading. The programming bastards at MSNBC did me in when they moved that show from prime time to 11:00 PM our time, just to accommodate Rita Crosby who had just been kidnapped from her weekend gig over at Fox. She isn’t any better on MSNBC and I am fading fast when Tucker appears.
I have complained to the network but they never answer back. You would think that they could contact by email every one of their regular viewers three or four times a day, there are so few of them. But no….MSNBC limps along pretending to be important.
The problem with the way we receive news is that it always comes to us through a filter, a filter of bias, a filter of slant, a filter of opinion. It is never object nor ‘fair and balanced’ no matter what the claim made for it. Blue staters tend to watch CNN; denizens of red states probably watch more Fox. Most adults watch the news channel they feel most comfortable with. Kids couldn’t give a flip about current events unless, like a snow day school closing, it affects them directly.
Years back televised wrestling made a monumental decision to come clean with the North American public and stopped calling its parade of hormone and chemical enhanced beef on the hoof ‘sport’ and went instead with ‘Sports Entertainment’. Good move. A little more honest. A little more truthful. Nobody would then confused a steroid enhanced wrestler with, say, a major league batting champion.
Oops, bad choice. Better leave it alone.
I propose that all televised news, local or national, from here on in call itself NEWS ENTERTAINMENT. What they do is not really news….its presented in mega doses to attract and hold viewers….entertain them…..cause some of them to believe the faux mantra of ‘fair and balanced’.
That’s all.
THIS MORNING WE LEARNED, much to our chagrin, the ‘we’ being the people of Middle Georgia who listen to Kenny B. and Jami G. in the early hours of the morning, not that I would suggest you turn your AM dial to 940 and pick up what has to be the best local talk radio anywhere in the South, that there has been a heated telephone exchange between Bibb County Commish Joe Allen and everybody’s favorite Mayor, the honorable C. Jack Ellis. Mr. Allen said in a subsequent interview with WMAC, “He’s a gutless liar….” Looks like one of those boys is trying to call the other out for a good old fashioned duel.
We will have more to say about this exchange tomorrow. Or the next day.
BEEN LOTS OF TORNADIC ACTIVITY in Middle Georgia this evening. Will take a walk to check damage locally in the morning when it gets light. There were no tornadoes here in the city, but some outlying districts took a pounding.
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Sun Aug 28, 2005
SUNDAY NIGHT AND ALL IS WELL
Long night of paper writing followed by a long day at work.
A beer would be nice but that won’t happen, not in this house until I’m twenty-one which seems like such a long time from the now. If Pop has his way it will be a never happening. Don’t know why they don’t treat me more like a grown up.
Is there news anywhere this weekend. Have to assume Cindy is still encamped outside tiny Crawford, Texas. By this time she will have been joined by such luminaries as Ms Joan Baez, who busied herself recycling old ‘Nam era tunes, and The Reverend Al Sharpton, still peddling his very own brand of Black Exploitation. Big Al isn’t as crass as say, Jesse Jackson and the Mafia Noir, but he does like to insinuate himself into situations where he isn’t exactly the most popular gopher in the cabbage patch.
And there is a mega hurricane bearing down on the Big Easy, New Orleans. It was supposed to visit us here in Macon but decided to meander off to the west. May get some rain here, that should be all.
But yours truly has not heard a news broadcast nor read a paper or online source in several days. We could have won or lost in Iraq by this time for all I know. Is Bush still President?
It was a slow day at Dos Cojones. Sundays usually are. We get a bump for lunch. People come in after church…dressed their Baptist finest….kids and all. Then that’s it. We stay open for early diners, but mostly my job is to chop veggies in prep for Monday. Oh, and clean out the freezer, the walk-in, and other refrigeration units. Sometimes they ask me to do the grease trap which is the dirtiest job anyone ever had. It ranks up there with digging latrines on Guadalcanal.
Real short night. Have to put the final touches on that English paper due first thing tomorrow. It’s through the rough draft stage….now for some congenial re-writing and inserting all the proper footnotes in the proper format into the proper places.
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Sat Aug 27, 2005
SATURDAY NIGHT AND NO PLACE TO GO
Saturday night and not a creature is stirring. Both cats asleep, the gray atop this desk kind of spread-eagled, comfortably contorted into a relaxed feline pose, Fatwa the tabby-stripped female slumber on the uppermost surface of a shelf that overlooks this work surface. From my angle only her face looms over the lip, eyes closed, mouth in a kind of sleepy time smile. Now cats are not supposed to smile, but this one does. She’s a self-starting, auto purrer filling the air immediately about her with a soft, whispering, soothing sound that says all is well in the universe. The cat universe, anyway. It is very comforting.
Popster is listening to his music. His and his alone. Three hours of folk, Gaelic, and blue grass delivered via Peach State Public radio. Nothing is permitted to intrude upon his Saturday night serenity. No TV…no guests unless they are willing to be quiet and listen as intently as he. No Luke unless he has a legitimate reason for being here. I usually work Saturday night at Dos Cojones where I second cook and wallop pots. There are days when I never want to see a refried bean.
The volume is turned up a little loud for my taste, but the old man is fighting encroaching deafness and, like most of his kind, refuses to acknowledge that fact. The stereo sits diagonally across this room, only a few feet from the desk where the cats purr and contort and smile, and I type, doing my best to concentrate on a complicated English paper due at the beginning of class Monday.
This music, Pop’s music is unlike anything else in the world. He started college way back in 1957 when the world was much younger than it is now. 1957 was also the year that The Kingston Trio got its start out on the west coast. Dad was a fan then, and still he. He has vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes of groups from that period like The Brothers Four, Chad Mitchell Trio, and the young Joan Baez, whose voice in those days had to have been the purest, most clear sounding human instrument anywhere in the world. There were many other performers in Pop’s Pantheon, Ian and Sylvia from Canada, for instance, who encapsulated so brilliantly the chill of a western prairie winter (Four Strong Winds)and the plaintive note of a French Canadian exile who has no hope of returning to his beloved Quebec (Un Canadien Errant); Peter, Paul, and Mary who seems not to have been the nice person of her stage persona, and so many others I have lost count.
This was the music of my father’s youth. It is also the music of his old age. Not all his music, for he dotes on early country and western, jazz, and, above all, grand opera.
I envy him to a large extent. I do like most of what he listens to, but it’s not ‘my music’ the way it is Pop’s. He made it his when he was younger than I am now and never let go, never once. With me music tends to be incidental, something that goes on in the background of my waking life. The Old Man’s music has wormed its way into his very soul. He listens carefully to tunes heard hundreds of times over five decades or so. He never gets bored.
So goes Saturday Night this week, a time when I wouldst prefer to be out raising a little teen-age hell, doing all those things we ought not to do, but do anyway during these bright college days when responsibility is one of those theoretical imponderables from a far distant future like marriage, parenthood and military service. Things that need not concern us now at what adults think is a kind of clueless nineteen.
Weget used to it. My brothers are always telling me to ‘grow up Luke’, which I think I am doing pretty well. How soon they forget. I was in a bar in Millegeville one day this week….WITH MY BROTHER AND DRINKING H2O….. The bar gal was perky and attractive with a killer personality. And what did big brother do? He introduced me to her, showed her my driver’s license, and said, “If he ever comes into this place without me, let me know and I’ll kick his ass all the way back to Macon.” That’s about thirty miles of ass kickin’. Rob can be sooooo unreasonable.
So here I sit…listening to music which has switched from early Folk to Gaelic, listening also to the soothing purring of incredibly relaxed pussycats, and the soft clicking of this keyboard, planning an English paper due in less than forty-eight hours.
Actually I’m not planning much of anything beyond writing this B’log entry. Pop will hit the hay after the eleventh o’clock news, I will stay up late writing. Probably finish a rough draft, drag my carcass off to the sack, and get up in time to negotiate my way through mounds of refried beans, barrels of chili, and a ton of chopped lettuce.
Sometimes when I have a nightmare, which is not actually infrequent, the setting is the windowless kitchen of DOS COJONES. I am all alone. The entire kitchen staff has been purged by the INS. People are coming through the door in record numbers.….hungry people, people with huge appetites who want their food NOW. And I am all alone and don’t have a clue about preparation and plating. And in this dream yours truly is throwing slop on hundreds of platters, sending it out with the wait staff, who are bringing it back as fast as they can because the customers are mightily pissed off that their food resembles low tide at Coney Island.
I always wake up them. I have a nagging fear that if I don’t, the angry crowd of customers will join the irate waiters to lynch the cook. Hey, that be I.
They say if you dream that you are falling off a tall building and don’t wake up before you splatter then the real you dies.
I wonder.
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Fri Aug 26, 2005
LETTER FROM GROTON
We received an unauthorized copy of the following email overnight. Unauthorized because it seems to come from an untraceable internet source. It is reproduced exactly as was sent to us:
Dear President Carter,
Thank you so very much for strongly supporting the Groton Navy Yard here in Connecticut. My friends and I are convinced that without your timely letter, the base would have been closed and the entire operation shifted to Georgia.
Nothing wrong with Georgia, I guess, but most of these jobs require a large measure of skill and education since they are of a highly technical nature. We all know from published statistics that the educational system in Georgia is terrible, ranking at the bottom of all fifty states. It is likely that those undereducated crackers could be trained to acquire the skills necessary before China becomes a military threat to our two ocean supremacy.
Again, thank you from all of us here at Groton. Looks like a merry Christmas hereabouts for many, many years.
Sign Me,
THE GROTON GURU
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Thu Aug 25, 2005
LITTLE LEAGUE and AMATEUR SPORT
It’s Little League finals week up in Pennsylvania. Probably two hours of TV-time around here featured the talented little bastards.
We have a family member, Rob, who drops in not infrequently for a bourbon and coke. Now Rob is a college coach (more, later), mentoring soccer and softball, he breathes sports. He also is one of those people devoted to the proposition that the TV remote, any TV remote, is the sole property of himself. Further, getting control of said remote is, if necessary, a full-body contact sport.
Put those ideas together and we find our home-folk watching sports when Rob is about because there is simply no way around it.
These little leaguers are talented. Some of them may well end up playing in ‘The Show’ when they get old enough. ESPN paints them as a happy group of kids from all over the world, playing the game because they love it.
Pure amateurism. Sadly for many of them this will be the last time in their young lives when such amateurism will be part of their lives. Increasingly the ‘professional’ aspects of the game will creep into their lives even if they remain but committed spectators to the game.
Other than these playoffs, our TV hasn’t brought us a single baseball game this summer, neither pro nor college. Yours truly made the decision not long ago that he didn’t really like professional sports: the money, the thuggery, the insanely inflated salaries, the egos, the broads and bimbos who cling to the overpaid athletes, the the pure hypocrisy that peddles professional sports as something important.
They are not important. It is high time the public took them back and revolted by not paying the increasingly exorbitant entry fees.
I mentioned that Rob is a small college coach. A junior college, actually, where the players are not paid, but are given a chance to get a leg up on the ladder of higher education. His school is also a military college, Georgia Military College, a place that promotes solid, what might be called ‘traditional’ values and morality.
GMC is a good place, a great place, in fact, one of the few places I have ever been where manners, civility, and respect are an integral part of the lives of faculty and students alike.
And the sports played here are amateur. Just like the kids in Little League. Just like the kids in my favorite sports movie THE SANDLOT, where a gang of pre teens spend an entire summer playing their game, fighting their battles, learning to depend on one another without interference from the mysterious, far-away world of the adult.
‘Amateur’ does not mean ‘of poorer quality’….all it means is that the players go at their game with energy, skill, dedication and soul without getting paid for it.
I like amateur. I like high school and college sports, especially small college sports. I like watching young people playing their hearts out simply for their love of the game. I love watching Rob’s teams…he recruits well, there is talent galore, and he’s one hell of an effective coach. His players are enthusiastic, dedicated, and kind of immature…and that’s not a bad thing.
The hell with professional sport…..all professional sport, and that, friends, includes the Olympics which has become little more than a get-rich scheme for some highly paid, international crooks. You know, a little like the denizens of the United Nations.
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Wed Aug 24, 2005
DOWNTOWN CULTURE QUEST (continued)
CHERRY STREET
from the pages of THE ELEVENTH HOUR
CHERRY STREET
from the pages of THE ELEVENTH HOUR
Again this week it will be culture over politics and criminal venality. As much as I would like to write about Standard and Poor’s downgrading Macon’s bond rating, or about sagging moral among police and fore fighters, or even the ongoing conflict ‘twixt Hizzoner’s office and the hidebound gang of fifteen, this column will remain fixed upon its intended purpose.
Sigh. So much bullcrap; so little time.
But watch out, folks, on or about the autumnal equinox, September 21st or thereabouts, Luke will declare total war on inept politicians, venal civic leaders, and the entire Bibb County board of education. Throw in the DOT, the Chamber of Commerce, and the sphinctocrats currently strangling the political process way up in D.C. and you have cannon fodder aplenty.
Ready, aim, …….
And so we come to what will be our next-to-the-last article on what I call ‘culture’ in downtown Macon. The quest has been a trip and a half for me and has opened up many delightfully unexpected vistas. Contrary to the opinion of many, our downtown is coming alive with pockets genuine culture coupled with mom and pop entrepreneurship. THE ELEVENTH HOUR is one such enterprise, which, for obvious reasons, we have kept out of this series. Whoa, you wouldn’t want me to become a ‘designated kissup’, would you? Bussing the buttocks of the rich and famous doesn’t do much of anything for me personally.
So under the premise of PARK AND WALK, we turn to Cherry Street, once the premier shopping center in Middle Georgia. Despite the numerous vacant store fronts, cosmetically updated every twenty years or so, there is real life in the old girl. Architecturally, Cherry is Macon’s downtown jewel, where every building teems with examples of a long-dead building craft.
We are going to examine only three venues, three and only three, three that have earned Luke’s personal stamp of approval as genuine examples of local urban culture. They are: THE HUMMINGBIRD, an eclectic and exciting newly-opened nightclub; JOYCINES, one of Macon’s oldest and best kept secrets; and ENCHANTED PIECES OF FURNITURE BOUTIQUE, an incredibly delightful furniture and accessory emporium.
More...
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Tue Aug 23, 2005
YOU SUCK, LUKE
Early (obscenely so) I was working on a submission to THE ELEVENTH HOUR due at 8:00 in the A.M. (thank Zeus for email attachments) when an email came through. It was a nasty email, full of vindictive and sarcasm, yet devoid of all but a very few primitive profanities. I can do better in my sleep. Using profanity, that is. I was trained at the feet of the masters.
I quote in part….and will keep this individual’s anonymity as to name and address: Dear Luke Angelo…..Shouldn’t you choose sides? I mean are you a republican or a democrat? You know, you gotta be one of the other. But you diss both sides. You suck. I’m a democrat and I hate Bush Signed
Now let’s get something straight. Politically I could labeled a ‘conservative’ more than any other single handle, I suppose. But my conservatism is not of this day and age. Maybe ‘Goldwater Conservative’ would be a little more accurate, for I admire this man and his thought more than most of the less-than-towering political personalities of the century just past.
Yet the politician I admire most was President Harry S. Truman, a democrat and a hands-on leader, a man of action, unafraid to assume a stance despite the threat of negative political fallout. We need a Truman this very moment, but he couldn’t be elected here in 2005. Not nuanced enough. The press wouldn’t like him and would wage war on his campaign. In fact he was an object of near ridicule running against Dewey in ’48.
So much for the fourth estate, which was more honorable in the days of Edward R. Murrow.
Mr. Truman once called a music critic a ‘son of a bitch’, a hapless fellow who wrote a negative review of a performance by Truman’s daughter, an aspiring singer. Here was a man (Truman…not the critic) who did the paternal thing, flying to defense of his only child. In 1945 he adopted the same attitude when he allowed the A-Bomb to be dropped twice on Japanese cities, thus saving possibly millions of lives, ours and theirs, which would have been sacrificed by an invasion of the Jap home islands.
I have a motto that is not infrequently seen in these pages: I HATE REPUBLICANS, I JUST HATE DEMOCRATS A LITTLE MORE.
Truth is I have very, very little use for politicians of all stripes. On the local, state, and national level….to say nothing of our smarmy ‘friends’ in Europe and the bureaucratic bunglers mismanaging the blighted United Nations, I find little to admire, I find an inordinate of egotistic self aggrandizement, I find a lesser than noble individual who seems almost to have sold his soul to Satan in his climb up the Jacob’s ladder of politics.
So, I won’t tell my inarticulate critic that he sucks, although to tell the truth, it seems pretty obvious that he does. And probably does so daily.
In fact, I won’t say anything to him at all.
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Sun Aug 21, 2005
CELEBRATING THE SECOND AMENDMENT
EUROPE'S LOST CIVILIZATIONS
EUROPE'S LOST CIVILIZATIONS
Hottest day of the year, today. And yours truly had to take to the rifle range and put in three or four hours under the relentless Georgia sun.
I try to do this periodically…we call it ‘exercising our Second Amendment Rights’, and it simply entails a short drive to the Range or some friend’s property. Keep in practice. Practice makes perfect. Practice makes us better shooters. Practice makes us safer shooters.
There is a mountain of misconception about our sport out among the great unwashed. Most of us know men and women who won’t go near guns or allow one into their house. Most of them try to raise their boy children to be non-violent types, forbidding to play with toy guns or to consort with kids who do. It becomes an emotional issue: guns are evil, maybe the devil incarnate. Guns kill people. Guns should be banned as they are in the more civilized nations of Europe.
More hog wash. Other than some mighty good eatin’, there is not much we should attempt to emulate from the Old European countries. They ceased to be viable in 1918, at the end of the ‘war to end all wars’, when the cream of European youth lay slaughtered on the fields of dishonor, sacrificial victims to a military mind set bent on fighting Napoleon’s battles one last time.
1918 is the year Europe died,
We have no need to be like them, to think like them, to do like them, to want anything from them. Except the food. Except the good eatin’.
Theirs is a neo-socialist way of life, a kind of let the government take care of us from the cradle to the grave. European economies are in the tank. Their thinkers unable or unwilling to face up to the burdens of an ever encroaching modern world.
They have a problem, you see, with Muslims. And with Jews. Muslims breed faster than either Europeans or Jews. They don’t practice birth control very much and breed like flies in the desert. Now in sex ed you might have been told that they use condoms made of sheepskin sheep intestine in the Middle East. Don’t know if that is true. Bet they don’t use pig intestines for anything.
Anyway, Anti Semitism is rampant in Old Europe. Hate those Jews. Gotta favor the Muslims breeding like whatever. Blame the Jews for everything. Hitler did it and he wasn’t all that bad, was he. I mean he built roads and made the trais run on time. Or was that Mussolini? Kind of hard to remember which fascist accomplished what after all these years.
So while the Old Europeans practice socialism and anti Semitism, while Muslims breed like camel crabs, we practice the shooting sports out on the edge of Twiggs County, a largely rural entity where tree farmers are treated like minor deities and the bear population outnumbers the human.
Don’t be afraid of firearms. Guns can be your friends. Better than most Europeans.
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Sat Aug 20, 2005
ILLEGALS...UNDOCUMENTEDS....WET BACKS
I don’t know whether it’s a case of inner strength and nobility on the one hand, or sheer stupidity on the other.
The ‘it’ here is our President’s silence on the entire immigration controversy. Is this man above the fray and being statesmanlike as the storm circles about him, or is he held captive by a phalanx of special interests that include Vincente Fox and the entire corrupt Mexican government at one end, while special business interests willing to exploit the cheap labor of the illegal tug at the other end of the same rope.
Much depends on how the individual sees Mr. Bush. His political opponents have portrayed him for years as a bumbling, inept stooge who can not and will not think his way out of a wet paper bag. Time after time these folks have been bested in the political wars by the President. If nothing else they must now grudgingly agree that he is a first-rate manager who appoints the very best minds to his inner circle.
But it is our opinion that the administration appears to be out of touch with the genuine problems caused by current immigration non-policy, as well as the real fears most citizens feel about an unchecked influx of illegals coming in almost at will.
9/11 raised the ante. It appeared (and still does) likely that potential terrorists can walk or drive across our largely undefended boarders without any real fear of being stopped. While there may not be Al-Quaeda cells in every little hamlet and wide spot in the road, it is likely that we already have among us a fair number of foreign terrorist operatives waiting for the right moment to strike. Add to these the homegrowns, Muslims largely but some good Christian lads like Tim McVeigh to fill out the ranks of the enemy within.
It seems only logical that with hundreds of thousands of wet backs streaming over the border from Mexico seeking employment, there are men and women bent on doing us serious danger.
Let it always be remembered that one major goal of the Muslim Fundamentalist is the destruction of American civilization. Let’s not whitewash that little bit of historical truth with a veneer of political correctness. It is us or them, folks, simple enough arithmetic for even the bloodiest of liberal bleeding hearts to comprehend.
This spring’s take-over of border duties by elements of the militia was an eye opener. There was, during their tour of duty, a significant drop in illegal entry. This is a fact the federal government has gone to great lengths to hide, but, according to one figure at least, there were areas where the number of undocumenteds was 85% lower. And not one wetback was shot to death, it appears, by ‘trigger happy’ militia. It was their mere presence and the fact that they promised to take action if threatened that made the difference.
The argument that ‘America has always been a nation of immigrants’ does not hold water in this day and age. We, our way of life, our belief systems, our prosperity, our religion are all under siege as never before in our history. We must not make it too easy for Amhed Q. terrorist with a bomb in his backpack to walk across the border at Matamoros or Niagara Falls. It will only take one, one big one. A dirty bomb, a poison induced into a city’s water supply. Then all hell will break lose and the people will scream and a knee-jerk government will respond with measures repressive enough to make the current Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights.
Governors Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano of New Mexico and Arizona, Democrats both, have declared a kind of state of emergency dealings with crimes arising from illegal immigration. They are, perhaps, doing it ‘for political reasons’, as has been observed. But so what? Politicians tend to do many things for political reasons. They may be doing an end-around, circumventing the Bush Administration, stealing a vital election issue which should be the Republicans to win.
We tend to react. In the area of terrorism in immigration we must learn to become pro-active.
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Fri Aug 19, 2005
BITS and SNATCHES in the EVENING
BERNARD GOLDBERG: ”Reporters want to know about your business, but they don’t want you to know about their business.” Quoted recently on C-Span.
WE HAVE A NEW PET NAME for the two female, liberal RINO members of the GOP…both hailing from the once great state of Maine. Call them THE BOOBSEY TWITS.
MACON’S BOND rating has been downgraded again, this time by Standard and Poor out of the Big Apple. Hizzoner held a news conference and tried to put a little lipstick on the public porker. Said mayor Ellis, the City Council must start coming around to his way of doing business. Councilman Ficklin informed us that the city’s financial woes were not the fault of the Gang of Fifteen, but were rather due to the spendthrift ways of the Executive Branch. Remind us again, Mr. Ficklin, how did you vote in the matter of some hundred and forty thousand dollars to purchase new golf carts for Bowden, the city’s public albatross public golf course.
Right now it is a simple matter of holding our breath and squeezing tight our cheeks to see if there is enough dough in the bank to meet city payroll between now and the time tax revenues start rolling in.
MSNBC HAS MOVED TUCKER CARLSON to Eleven PM which is a bloody shame because the show is good enough to survive in Prime Time.
What happened? The third ranked newsie Network hired Rita Cosby, The Fox Network’s leading weekend lady after she and the network were not able to get together on contract renewal.
Suggestion….sticker her on at 11:00 and bring the Tucker back to prime time. Rita ain’t gonna help your deplorable ratings.
FAVORITE TV SHOW? Thought you would never ask. But some reader did. It’s MONK, only show I watch with any degree of regularity. Great acting. Tony Shalub is a trip.
READING? Yes, of course, every which way I can. Just finished Dick Morris’ REWRITING HISTORY and am about to start the hottest best seller on the NY TIMES current list, Neal Boortz treatise on THE FAIR TAX. It is amazing how this thing is selling….of course we have the Mouth of the South shilling it three hours a day on his radio show. Eat your heart out, Limbaugh!!
Let’s call it an early night, OK?
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Thu Aug 18, 2005
JOHN ROCKER REDUX
I wrote about John Rocker twice back in the late nineties or so, right after he was savaged by a snide idiot named Jeff Pearlman in the pages of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. Pearlman let the then twenty-five-year-old rant on about baseball and immigrants, mostly, then turned his surreptitious tape into an article. It was called AT FULL BLAST and hit the stands just before Christmas in 1999.
As the Braves’ closer, Rocker had enjoyed something less than a kissy-face-huggy-bear relationship with Mets’ fans with whom he had waged war since spring training. Once the Pearlman article hit the streets, John’s career went downhill steadily. He was humiliated variously, even being required to take ‘sensitivity training’.
Rocker is a Macon native and graduate of First Presbyterian Day School here in town. After the S.I. fiasco, I wrote two articles about Rocker which you can access at http://expage.com/luciusson104 and http://expage.com/luciusson117 They are called A CHILD’S GARDEN OF PHILISTINES and JOHN ROCKER REVISITED respectively. Of all the online writing yours truly has done, these pages have garnered mega hits and brought hundreds of mostly angry emails, heaping insults upon my head. I re-read these pieces just tonight….I like them now better than I did then. FOX SPORTS did a special on Rocker and featured a recitation of the original piece by several Macon children filmed in front of the squat Terminal Station at the lower end of Cherry Street.
Not unlike the Material Girl, Rocker is trying to re-invent himself. He took a last fling at baseball this spring, playing briefly for a low-level Long Island team. And seems to be devoting most of his energies to a combination of business and charitable projects. No longer a young kid, poised on the jump-off to middle age, Rocker seems to have come to grips with his past, his temper, his anger, and sometime irrational behavior.
He made an appearance late July on HANNITY and COLMES. A partial transcript of this less than in-depth interview appears at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,164091,00.html I took the liberty of taping the entire episode.
John hired a publicist and created a personal web site http://johnrocker.net which does give a glimpse into the mind of this potentially great athlete.
What does this all mean? First of all, Rocker made one hell of a mistake when he let Pearlman tape him (if he did allow it to happen). He compounded the mistake by shooting his mouth off. He had made himself a target earlier in the year, at least as far as the Mets’ loya fans were concerned. The article simply caused to be pasted a large paper heart smack in the middle of his chest, a target so large and tempting that he became the object of immediate and total ridicule among writers, media pundits, and the press.
Rocker never stood a chance from then on.
My original articles really had nothing to do with JR. They were about racism here in the deep South, the kind of racism that the Braves’ Closer was only a single link in a long and accepted tradition of kicking the Black man in the face. Rocker was and, presumably, still is a product of his environment. Hopefully, he has learned to tread carefully and not expose too much of that product to the outside world.
Rocker, you see, was a media darling here in Macon while still attending almost All-White First Presbyterian Day School, a biblically correct of sometime learning off Peake Road in, you got it, socially prestigious North Macon. He was most probably a spoiled kid, a highly sought Baby Jock with reporters and coaches spending more quality time with him than did his teachers.
Such attention is heady stuff, particularly to a less-than-brilliant kid whose values are tied into one day playing in ‘the show’, and to whom ‘being a millionaire’ is a most important measure of one’s worth as a human being. Eternal values these are not.
If you have read this far and followed any of the links, you are probably tired and in need of a change. We wish john Rocker all the luck in the world. He is neither the good guy nor the bad guy in an all-too-human drama drummed all out of proportion to its intrinsic value by the clarion of today’s American mass media.
Your modern ‘media type’ has forgotten how to dig for the meat of an article and is all too willing to take things on their shallow face value.
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Wed Aug 17, 2005
THE GAZA DILEMMA
Many have mixed feelings about the Israeli government’s forced evacuation of the Gaza Strip.
I sure do.
If it works, Arial Sharon will easily win a Nobel Peace Prize in a year or two. If it doesn’t, his givernment will fall, the war between Israel and the Palestinians will escalate, and we may all live to see the end of the Jewish State, crushed by its enemies, the loss of its territory, and the almost total indifference of the nations that should constitute the civilized world.
In many respects we are dealing with the same kind of anti-Jewish sentiment that dominated European thought in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The stuff that the Nazis capitalized on….blame the eternal Jew for all a nation’s ills….there is a vast Jewish conspiracy…..’They’ control all the media, or the government, or the entertainment industry, or the arms complex….or all of the above. It’s crap, of course, but it is easy for many of the simple-minded to believe. The singular success of a re-invented KKK in the 1920’s was due in large part to that organization’s targeting ‘niggers, jews, and papists’, the three betes noire of both the Klan and the post war American Nazi Party up and around since the 1950’s.
But there isn’t much room to rehash history or revisit old political philosophies, not today while settlers are being rounded up and deported from the land they have turned into a home.
So let us look deep into my personal crystal sphere. If the Palestinians, as the result of Sharon’s pulling out, come to grips with their own terrorists, restraining them, punishing them for violence, things may work out for the cause of peace. But, sadly, the Palestinian leadership has never yet reigned in its own terrorists, but rather has encouraged their ‘indefada’, a kind of eternal uprising against the Jews. In this part of the world memories are long…we are still fighting the brutal spread of Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries as well the later crusades. Events like WW1 and Lawrence of Arabia are not even history, yet. Neither are the defeats in four successive wars against the Jews beginning back in 1948.
And of course we have Muslim fundamentalism which preaches death to the infidel. Anybody not willing to live under Sharia law, kicking his fully-robed women around at will, is an infidel. These clowns have a narrow a view of the world and their place in it, narrower even than some of our home grown, blindly obedient, Christian fundamentalists who will (whilst we are still gazing into that crystal ball) prove the ruination of not only the Republican Party, but also traditional conservatism. Abortion. The only cause that matters.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that the Israeli Government’s current effort will be wasted in the long term scheme of things. For all the nobility of that effort, it is not likely to change the Palestinian-Arab mindset as to the existence of the Jewish State. We can hope that a little common sense will prevail, but such is nowhere to be seen in the good old Holy Land.
PANHANDLING: As goes Atlanta, so goes Macon, which is too bad since they don’t seem to have any real political sense up there either.
Been in Macon’s downtown lately? If you have been, the chances are very good that you have been asked for money or cigarettes by the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the indigent, the unfortunate, and plain old lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing bums.
We have all these categories in super abundance. The homeless and the truly needy are pretty well taken care of by private agencies, churches, and a few publicly funded groups.
But there exists here, as everywhere, a fair number of die-hard panhandlers, men (mostly) and women who have pretty much dropped out of society and make a pretty good living begging.
The tell us they want money for food or shelter, but most of it goes for booze or dope.
Some make a better living out of pan handling than many of the working population do, and it’s all tax free except for sales tax when they want to purchase something.
I have personally seen some of our more successful beggars sitting in a pretty good restaurant counting wants of dough that would astound you. My guess, some take home more than two hundred bucks a day.
Buy a lot of Mogan David 20-20, wouldn’t it, or some primo weed?
All tax free.
SOLUTION: in 1996 Atlanta sent her homeless south during the Olympics, many of them ending up here. We should round these characters up, give them twenty bucks spending money and a one way bus ticket…..back to Atlanta. Let Shirley Franklin worry about them.
AND FINALLY...Congrats to Jami Gaudet on the fifth anniversary of her collaboration with Kenny B. on what continues to prove to be the best damn talk show in the South. You guys are one of the top cultural resources our little part of the world has.
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Tue Aug 16, 2005
RUNNING IT UP THE FLAGPOLE
Midsummer News Doldrums
Midsummer News Doldrums
It happens every summer, always in August, everywhere the press corps finds itself.
Tell you the truth, I don’t have a lot of use for the current incarnation of the fourth estate. Not in the aggregate, anyway. Too much emphasis on scoop and popular appeal. Gathering the news has become a crazy business since the proliferation of the 24/7 cable networks.
Oh sure, individual reporter-gatherers are OK, a few even very ethical. But there seems be a neurotic need for the media to cover the same thing, the same ‘let’s pretend that such-and-such a story is really important’, a syndrome that causes the concentration of media firepower on what some idiot flying a corporate desk deems to be momentous of the particular moment. More and more the news game is the old story of corporate bottom line, and less on educating a public as to the real issues of the day.
This is why we get the saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson Trial, the sad death of Terry Schiavo, and the sheer stupidity going on currently in Aruba, where there is a missing student, whose name mercifully escapes me, from near-by Alabama.
There are probably more reporters covering Cindy Sheehan than there are the forced eviction of Israeli settlers from their homes in the Gaza strip. Covering Sheehan is easy. The media folks in Crawford, TX are supposed to be bored and looking for something to occupy their times. Hence Cindy, merely the latest in a long line of American media whores. Given the paucity of news in August, it is little wonder that the woman is getting attention all out of proportion to her message or her importance.
And down home here in Macon last week, in a last article filed for the TELEGRAPH by departing Mike Donilla (A damn good reporter, by the way, better than we deserve….ever notice how the truly gifted newspaper folk at our local DAILY BLATT and BUGLE go to better jobs in less hidebound cities after so short a time?) it was suggested that Mayor Ellis, after fulfilling his term of office (and assuming that the Federal Government has decided not to land his ass in Jail) might run for the City Council post new held by part-timer, Philomena Mullis. Mullis, you may recall, has just informed us that she will be spending the next six months in the Philippines, for health reasons, and will forgo her current salary, but will retain her seat on the Grand Horseshoe.
This has got to be a joke. Either Donilla or Mayor Ellis or both must be in on it…a scheme cooked up to provoke both discussion and commentary….but without a scintilla of real fact or intent.
Nicely done, fellows. A joke well taken.
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Sat Aug 13, 2005
DELIGHTING THE INNER CHILD
I turned into a tiny kid about noon today. The delicious mood didn’t last more than an hour or so, but it was certainly long enough to recapture briefly the kind of wide-eyed anticipation most of us can remember from a few, forever treasured moments from the days of our evanesced innocence.
Christmas and Easter morning. A birthday. Prize day at the end of an eternally long school year. Daddy coming home from a business trip with something just for you stowed in his suitcase. A Thanksgiving groaning board that Mom has worn herself out over.
The event that triggered my trip back in time was the arrival of a catalogue. Damn thing was initially mis-delivered to a neighbor’s house, so careless the carriers who tote heavy, book materials to our homes. Said neighbor saw my name on the address and brought it to me.
It was something I had ordered almost two weeks earlier having sent off a ten dollar personal check direct from my hard-garnered bank account. In this house we don’t expose credit card numbers to somebody we can’t see.
And it arrived intact. Not a page torn, bruised, or even turned down. This catalogue is unique. And it is the 433 page output of an outfit called TRACK OF THE WOLF, Inc, a company that specializes in providing just about anything the primitive weapons, black powder shooting enthusiast. It will sell you kit flintlock rifles, parts to replace the guns you already own, tents and teepees styled from the revolutionary War, knife kits, tomahawks, and an entire panoply of unusual items from kitchen ware to reproductions of period books and tracts dating back more than two hundred years.
It’s technology in reverse.
Yours truly spent more than an hour lost in the gorgeous photographs and illustrations that hearken back to a simpler, more self-reliant period in American history. This was the hour of my second childhood, when every page gave promise of something fine and well crafted without need for computerized, soulless machine.
Now I confess I am a black powder shooting enthusiast. Primitive weapons have made shooting fun once again, a little like an eight-year-old getting his first twenty-two single shot.
They are hard to shoot, prone to cause human error, finicky, and absolutely wonderful. They go off, if every step in a complicated process has been taken correctly and in prescribed order, with a flash and a roar and a swirl of acrid, sulphur-heavy smoke. The discharge of a patched lead ball even at a paper target puts the shooter in a long queue of men stretching back to the emboldened improper Bostonians who rained lead down on the British ascending Bunker (Breed’s) Hill, to Daniel Boone and Roger’s Rangers, to Everyman relying on his skill and long rifle to place food in the family larder.
It is a personal identification with a long gone past, never to be recaptured in full. We reach out to the long ago to better understand ourselves and to find something, be it an activity or something more spiritual than, less transitory than modern life seems to provide.
Archaeology does the same thing for me. In my case, it is primarily the footprints of Greece and Rome, or the Middle East, or Aegypt with its feet firmly rooted in human eternity. But I can still get a little teary eyed holding an Indian arrowhead pried from the bank of a tiny stream, left there by a man or boy, perhaps carelessly/ I try to imagine what thoughts might have gone through the head of the long dead owner. Did he flake the piece himself or trade for it? Had he ever seen one of the white men who were slowly invading his lush, unspoiled territory? Did he love his family? Own a dog? Die young? Contemplate his own death?
Civil War re-enactors are common hereabouts. That’s not my thing. I don’t want to dress up as a Union or Confederate soldier and play act according to a well-known script, even though I love to witness these displays of living historiography. No, my sojourn back in time is more cerebral which gives full range to the old imagination.
And so it was with my massive catalogue. Yes I was transported to our common past, but I was also brought face to face with some delightful times in my own childhood when nothing could alter the shivery mood of a child’s wondrous anticipation that something glorious was about to descend upon his small person.
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Fri Aug 12, 2005
MORE FROM THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF LUKE'S FATWA
ﺹﺻﺽﺶﻀﺼﺹﻁ
I have no idea what the characters given above mean. Is it an Arabic post? Pharsee? Ghettoese? Know what I’m sayin’?
It was contained in an email with a blocked return address, no signature, nothing to indicate either its source or its meaning.
Maybe, just maybe, it was a response to the FATWA declared in this very space just yesterday.
My first fatwa. Don’t even know if I got the words right, but I declared a genuine, honest-fer-real fatwa on the person of Abu shithead Al-Zarqawi, the stupid behind the current spate of killing taking place in Iraq, the guy who issued a warning to both The United Kingdom and The United States.
I don’t know why we don’t hire some Israeli operatives to kill Zarqawi and some of the other Al-Quaeda leadership, Ben Laden especially. It would be a bargain to pay the Jewish agents ten million bucks for each kill of a big time leader. Cheaper than the twenty-five million now offered up. Cheaper than the war now being fought. And more efficient.
Just so there will be no question, I declared the Fatwa yesterday. And only against Al-Zarq, so far anyway. Who knows, if they kill this one, then maybe we go after the others.
This is a freebie fatwa. Nobody is going to pay you twenty-five or even ten mill for this job. This is for the good of all Muslims everywhere. So do it for the public relations fallout you will glean. Maybe somebody will begin to see muslims as the good guys. Some muslims, anyway. We don’t go for that ‘religion of peace’ bullshit.
Don’t wait too long. Ne need to exterminate this creep just as soon as possible.
Also. Don’t think Americans are going to let their firearms be taken away. The denizens of the desert own selective fire AK-47’s and –74’s. A few senatorial jackasses have tried that, you know, lefties like Feinstein and Kennedy and a few RINO repugs like the bobsie twits from the once great state of Maine. We still have them and ours work better than yours do.
So, muslims everywhere, do your duty. Kill Al-Zaq for Allah. If that offends you, kill him of Jesus….doesn’t matter much to me just as long as the job gets one.
TURNING TWENTY-ONE TODAY….Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Mitchell, happy birthday to you.
You remember Mitchell. Mitchell Johnson. He was just a brand new teen ager a few years ago when he and his little buddy, eleven-year-old Andy Goodwin ambushed their middle school killing four little girls and one teacher.
Under a law which was subsequently changed, the longest the state ould hold either boy was until his twenty-first birthday. And yesterday Mitch became, believe it or not, twenty-one and is expected to be released soon, released into a society still shocked by the senseless killings.
Andy will be out in two more years. It doesn’t seem like justice somehow.
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Thu Aug 11, 2005
COMING TO A FEDERAL BOONDOGGLE NEAR YOU
Macon’s riverwalk is one of the best quality of life items in the entire county. To date only runs a couple of miles or so from the little Otis Redding park at the corner of MLK (B’Way) and Riverside Drive extending to a residential area half a mile or so upriver from the Stribling Bridge. By the first of the year it is scheduled to extend southwards through Central City Park along the southern levees ending up at the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds. In the fullness of time, several more miles will be added heading North and will connect the entire project with the Old Waterworks. When finished it will be am incredible to the runner/jogger, walker, hiker, biker, and anybody who desires a trek, at whatever pace, alongside the turgid Ocmulgee.
Except when flooded, of course, which renders the current portion quite useless.
I confess a real love for the current riverwalk. I walk its length up and down several times a week. No need to drive to go downtown from the Baconsfield section…just walk. Or walk to the Centreplex. Good exercise, interesting people, the sheer joy of a piece of nature in an urban area.
U.S. Representative Jim Marshall informed us a few days ago that, with the help of our two Republican Senators, the current Federal transportation Bill, signed into law by pen presidential, gives something like 5.5 million additional dollars to Newtown Macon for the completion of the riverwalk.
Great, I guess, although I am truly bothered that the final version of the bill contains literally hundreds of millions of such dollars, earmarked locally, to projects that really have nothing to do with ‘Transportation’. It doesn’t bother most locals, dems or repugs, who love to lie around sucking at the hind tit of a swollen Federal Boondoggle, which increasingly is an American fact of life.
And we thought the GOP was the party of smaller government and less spending. HAH!!!
Somewhere in a federal government as large and ungainly as ours there are sure to be screw-ups of all sorts. Some of them have to do with lack of communication.
Remember before 9/11, the CIA and the FBI barely knew the other existed, so jealously did each guard its secrets. Popular wisdom and an intelligence czar claims the problem is fixed, but we know better. In a large bureaucracy old habits never really die. They may lie dormant for a few years or a decade, but they come back unbidden like unwanted digestive gas.
So, it seems, in the area of road building. For the DOT, both the one-minded state and the ultra arrogant federal plan to put in a vast complex of roads, ramps, access points, exits, and concrete megastructure to ‘fix’ the outmoded I-16 to I-75 interchange. They will spend millions on the project. With every retelling of every new proposal, the scope of the entity gets larger and larger. It now threatens to destroy houses in two neighborhoods….one black, the other predominantly white. And the riverwalk. The current riverwalk. Destroy what the government is giving us more than five million dollars to improve. And destroy neighborhoods where people have lived since before the Civil War. This is progress?
Hello? Anybody out there. Anybody listening? Anybody have a sense for the absurd? Anybody thinking that our government with all its excess has simply gotten too large bloated to do much else save give lip service to the welfare of its citizens.
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Wed Aug 10, 2005
KULTUR QUEST In Downtown Macon
Chapter 3
From The Pages Of The Eleventh Hour
Chapter 3
From The Pages Of The Eleventh Hour
Given the choice, I would prefer this evening to write a column on the current state of politics in Georgia. After all, The Slightly Reverend Jesse Jackson was in town recently proving that he is even more photogenic than our own, august mayor. They stood should to shoulder at a news conference one bathing in the aura of the other. Jesse led a mega march through Atlanta this weekend, demanding that Congress keep certain provisions of the forty-year-old VOTING RIGHTS ACT, one segment of which treats Georgia and other southern states as the nation’s red-headed step children, too ignorant, too tied into a long-gone history of Jim Crow, too traditionally racist to be trusted. Trusted with what? Keeping Georgia’s elections on the up and up. Trusted with the voting process/
And truly, half a century ago the white power structure in some areas did it’s level best to deny the right of franchise to black citizens. But that was a long ago and times they are a-changin’.
The whole thing is idiotic. Large urban enclaves like Boston and Chicago have had a much nastier history of voting fraud. Yet they’re not straight jacketed under four decades of court order. It’s a privilege to be able to vote decades after you die.
But Jesse Jackson says these provisions of the voting act must continue and Jesse is an honorable man. Well sometimes, I guess. Martin Luther King was a great man and a humanitarian with a dream. Jesse Jackson is a much lesser light who relies largely on the politics of pseudo victimization to keep his name in the news. Falleth far from the tree, doth the fruit presumptive. What is the source of his ‘Reverend’ title anyhow?
And so to continue our trek through the tangled web of Macon’s downtown culture. Before we leave Cotton Avenue and its rebirth as a viable center of cultural activity, let’s check out two more sites.
The first is BIBB MUSIC COMPANY a venerable business near the lower end of the avenue. I confess that most of my knowledge of this particular store comes from Newton Collier, Macon’s Dean of Downtown, and the chap who knows more about the music industry than anybody else in these parts.
Most local, professional musicians rely heavily on Bibb Music for equipment, source, inspiration, and advice. To the talented player working in the trenches, playing regular or irregular gigs after toiling a full day at the day job he needs to put food on the table and shoes on the bambino, Bibb Music is a blessing. It is here that the musician truly finds kindred soul as well as a source for all his needs.
Melodramatic? Not at all. Obviously the professional can buy all his equipment and instruments here, as well as music, fake books, tapes, and sound equipment. But the good folks at Bibb Music provide a kind of inspiration to the working musician that can only come from like-minded people who share the highs and lows of this most creative art form.
I, personally, have always been more than a little envious of the gifted music maker. Middle Georgia has a superabundance of these gifted individuals….more real talent per capita than, possibly, any place in the fifty states. Bibb Music offers a kind of elixir of creativity to the professional. It is also one heck of a place to pick up an instrument for that teen who has been pestering you for a guitar so he can form his very own garage band. I have no idea if they sell sound suppressors for long suffering moms and pops.
Park and walk.
Another unique spot far enough up Cotton’s gentle slope so as to have a first street address is GINGER MICHELLE, an extraordinary boutique known for its well-defined sense of style, taste, and refinement.
You have to understand that a fully accessorized boutique is not exactly my glass of beer. Usually such places make me feel just a little uncomfortable. Goes back to being dragged around by a shopaholic mother as a little kid, I guess. I walked into Ginger Michelle one day simply to look around and was taken by the colors, the variety, and elegance of the displays. Ginger Hess was very helpful recognizing my initial discomfort and made me feel quite at home. Were I married, this is where I would shop for Mrs. Luke. The small staff is pleasant, most helpful, willing to take the time to explain the ins and outs of this sort of business in our under-appreciated downtown.
Their web page does this shop much better justice than can I. Check out http://www.gingermicjelle.com Then come on down.
Park and walk.
Our last stop today is all the way down at 469 Martin Luther King, not far from the intersection of Cherry Street. To call Stacey Lazarus’ REAL RECORDS a ‘record store’ is to term Carnegie Hall a ‘juke joint’. His place is truly unique and deserving of the title ‘cultural oasis’.
I found IDEAL RECORDS quite by accident last winter and have become something of a walk-in regular. The place has never disappointed me. Not once. The first thing you will notice is that most of the shop is devoted to vinyl records, a recording medium that existed before tape, long before CD, long before there was electronic stereophonic sound There are thousands of the things all neatly arranged, many uncatalogued, a treasure house of vibrant sound.
Seek and ye shall find.
Maybe this little bit of anecdote will help explain why I like this store so very much. Usually I enter the domain to browse. This takes time. It is a fascinating sojourn through fifty or more years of musical heritage. But on three separate occasions I came in looking for something specific. Amazingly so, each time Mr. Lazarus was able to provide just the right recording, They were (1) a CD of the sound track of OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (which happens to be my favorite movie), (2) a 1953 recording featuring Lily Pons and Richard Tucker of Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor (Which I had been coveting for years), and (3) a wonderful old collection of original Willie Nelson pieces covering prolific, early career.
Putting these three experiences together forces a wonderful conclusion. REAL RECORDS is a fantastic place to locate hard-to-find music. It is a rare day that yours truly leaves the shop without at least one cherished recording. And the quality? Not perfect, these are used items. But they are damn good and once on the turntable provide hours of listening pleasure from an era before the talentless teen age ‘diva’ burst upon our consciousness, or the bad poetry and predictable rhythm of ‘rap’ (crap) began to assail the senses.
Mr. Lazarus sometimes keeps odd hours, but he can usually be found in situ from about 11:00 AM and late afternoon.
Next week we shall visit three and only three delightful places along the entire length of Cherry Street, treasures in a thoroughfare blighted by almost two dozen empty store fronts.
See you there.
Park and walk.
EMAIL LUKE: Luciusson@yahoo.com
HomePage and B’log http://gospelaccordingtoluke.com
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Tue Aug 09, 2005
BAPTIST CAMP
A friend of mine, and a neighbor, is a man of the cloth.
Baptist cloth that is, whole Baptist cloth, and quite conservative as would be expected here deep in the Bible Belt. We shall call him Tom, which is not his name.
Tom makes Herculean effort to convert yours truly to the straight and narrow, that elusive path of Christian righteousness. I resist. Many have tried and all that.
He adheres to the word of scripture and wastes no opportunity to spring a ‘witnessing’ on me usually on the way to our rifle and pistol club or to a day’s hunt. He does it, almost always, in front of his kids, a brood of six delightful wombats aged two to eighteen. Setting the example as it were, always in the eternal hope that they will follow in his footfalls and do the same.
They don’t. Not yet, anyway. Maybe someday. Pk’s usually have a streak of rebelliousness in them. Tom’s kids have honed that stubborn streak into a fine art.
Tom leads a kind of double life. He is both teacher and pastor, spending several hours a day teaching a local private middle school, probably the best little academic institution anywhere around despite the burden of religious stricture. He also heads a growing congregation of middle class faithful, a group of like-minded, kindred souls. Good people, these. Salt of the earth types these, with feet firmly planted on the ground. Good citizens. I can take exception with their religious views, but I am yet to meet a member of this flock I do not instinctively like. These are solid Americans, the kind completely misunderstood by so many of America’s political left.
One of the Reverend’s projects every summer is a short, three or four day ‘camp’ in which the male kids of the congregation and their fathers get together for some old-fashioned outdoor fun. Shooting is the primary activity, supervised instruction and practice in rifle, pistol, and shotgun. They also fish a great deal and swim since the camp is located on an outlying farm with lots of room. It is a kind of father-son bonding thing, a few days filled with politically incorrect activity that allows boys to see what being a traditional man is all about. I am sure that there is a whole lot of praying and witnessing going on, although none of the kids or adults has ever mentioned that facet of camp to me.
Now Tom has been worried about what to call this project. He wanted to call it ‘Shooting Camp’, but feared that might give the wrong idea either to outsiders or to members of the church who might be squeamish about firearms. So the Reverend and his flock went to work to find a more neutral name. Somebody came up with ‘Manly Camp’, but it was soon discovered that certain outsiders were making fun of the name as being something south of true maleness. The eager Baptists examined several possibilities: ‘Outdoor Camp’, Father-Son Bonding’, and simply ‘Baptists Outdoors’.
None of them worked, lacking the proper ring. So yours truly, when bidden, of course, came up with KILL THEM ALL AND LET GOD SORT THEM OUT CAMP. The kids loved it; the adults didn’t. We abbreviated it to Camp Killem….or even Kamp Killem. Sounded great to me.
Whatever they ended up calling it, camp was held last week, thousands of rounds of ammunition were expended in a secure, supervised environment, enough fish were caught to feed an army, and the only casualty was a twelve-year-old who got his head split open by an oar while horsing around in the water. He bleed like a stuck pig, required several staples to knit the torn flesh, and returned to Camp Killem a wounded her.
The kid? One of Tom's.
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Mon Aug 08, 2005
ANOTHER SCREW-UP BY THE BIBB COUNTY SCHOOL SYSTEM
Here’s a little piece of anecdotal evidence that points to some utter incompetence deep inside the Bibb County School System.
I say anecdotal because it was told to me by the single mother of the student involved, a fine person whom I have known for several years. She is a strong woman, a long time department head, mother of two.
Now her younger child was, last academic year, a thirteen-year-old seventh grader. Like many kids that age he is full of mischief, raging hormones, and is strongly attracted to his peer group. He is personable, almost to a fault, bright, clear-eyed, and disorganized. Add to that disorganization a strong streak of laziness and you have a kid who, despite the best efforts of his mother, failed four academic subjects this past year.
And he was retained. Amid not a little woe is me and a few tears shed for what he imagined to be his lost youth, our hero became almost cheerfully resigned to repeating the seventh grade this fall. In May the school sent its final dictum: RETAINED, HELD BACK, FAILED, FLUNKED….whatever the politically correct euphemism is these days. Much of his spare time this summer was spent reading under the watchful eye of his mother. He got a little tutoring as well, the basics of language arts and mathematics.
So what happens. The day before school opened this fall, the day before, the youngster’s hard-working mother find a notice upon returning from work informing her that her young genius had been assigned to an eighth grade ‘cluster’.
It turned out he hadn’t been held back at all.
Well, not quite, he had been retained for he had failed four academic subjects BUT, needing classroom space in the seventh, a number of the flunkees from the spring’s seventh grade were determined to have actually ‘passed’, and so, without any viable academic reasoning, this kid was ‘promoted’ at the last minute and will be allowed to disport himself as an eighth grader without any real scholastic justification.
This situation is one of the biggest outrages we have encountered in a school system know all over the state for it’s underachieving schools, kids, and faculty.
I told the mother this morning to get the principal on the phone this evening. Yes, call the pathetic little bureaucrat at home and make some strong demands. First ask why, then when the stupid decision was made? How many kids were affected? Then demand to put the kid back in the seventh grade where he will stand a chance of achieving some academic success. Why wasn’t the woman notified before school started? Lots of questions. Probably lots of answers laced with moronic educationese, that wonder means of communicating without actually communicating.
This incident has put a face on ‘social promotion’ for me, at least. Where the hell is the school system headed? No wonder Johnny can't read, write, or do math!!
Let’s get rid of Sharon Patterson….and when school board election time comes around, let’s vote out the entire pack of inadequate jackals.
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Sat Aug 06, 2005
CLOSING THE GUN SHOW LOOP HOLE
WHAT LOOP HOLE?
WHAT LOOP HOLE?
Close it? What? What’s ‘it’?
The loophole, the ‘gun show loophole’.
You know, it’s that thing where all the criminals and terrorists get guns at gun shows just as easy as walking fown the street. The gun show loophole. Schumer and Kennedy and Feinstein and Kerry talk about it all the time. It’s called the gun show loophole and its killing people all over the country.
THAT gun show loophole. Know what I’m sayin’?
Except there is no such thing. No such thing as a gun show loophole. It is a figment of the fevered gray matter of any number of anti-gun nuts across the land. Those individuals who would take our constitutional right to keep and bear away from us just so that the police can protect us from the bad guys. Wouldn't want to shoot a would-be rapist, murderer, or thug rummaging through our closets. would we?
Tested the loophole just this afternoon. Bought a firearm. It’s a Christmas present for Gracie, my favorite four-year-old and her seven-year-old sister, learned to shoot a rifle just this past week.
Their Dad came with us. He’s the product of Pop’s school of riflery That’s they one where a horsewhip lurks ready and waiting for any kid who violates the Old Man’s very strict rules of safety. Archaic? Medieval? Primitive? Barbaric? Yep, that’s our dear old dad.
But his rules are pure common sense and take nothing away from the fun of an afternoon’s shooting or hunting or even a family togetherness evening spent cleaning the weapons fired earlier the same day.
These little kids proved eager pupils and it fell to yours truly to purchase just the right starter gun for Annie O. Kinzie and Machine Gun Gracie, the fastest trigger in any pre-kindergarten either side of the Pecos.
What a chore!! Here I was ‘required’ to attend at the local Centreplex (Macon seems just a tad bit affected with that –re spelling but that’s part of our rustic, retrograde charm.) Oh joy unbounded. And I had enough cash to get a little something for yours truly as well.
Now we come to the ‘loophole’ part. For some reason liberals are convinced that any bozo with criminal bent can walk into one of these aaffairs and walk away with enough firepower to tie down the entire NYPD. Ain’t so, folks.
And the why of the ‘ain’t so’ is plain as the nose on my brother’s face….any gun show purchaser must go through exactly the same background check into his character, criminal past, and sanity that he would were he to purchase the same firearm at a Wal-Mart.
Now it is true that individuals can and do buy and trade weapons on a one-to-one basis, off the books, so to speak. For there are no laws limiting or prohibiting private sales between consenting adults. But it is no different than buy a gun from a chap whose ad in the local paper you answered.
There is no gun show loophole.
I had to present legal identification, fill out some paperwork, have my person and application subjected to a state central databank, and pay my money. Were I twenty-one, I could present a Georgia Firearms License, which requires that the individual submit to a complete check on his background by local, state, and federal officials. The FBI gets involved. Since 9/11 what used to take a month, now requires four or five. But the process is thorough and the successful applicant is guaranteed to be squeaky clean.
Pop has one such; that’s the first thing yours truly will do on his twenty-first birthday, even before making the purchase of what will then be a legal beverage.
The gun owners I know are responsible people. Very responsible. Yes there are flaming militia types out there somewhere getting ready to go to war against the rabbits and squirrels of the woodland. Survivalists, some of them, mistrustful of government and all that it implies. But the overwhelming majority are good citizens who take their civic responsibilities and vote in large numbers. For every Eric Rudolph there are millions of law-abiding citizens.
Don’t look to punish legal gun ownership because there are bad guys, young and old, out there who commit felony with a firearm. The sixteen-year-old hoodlum has a prized Glock which he uses to hold up a Burger Durger. He does not own that weapon legally. Find out how he acquired the damn thing then punish both the kid and the guy who sold it to him to the full extent of the laws we already have on the books.
One more day of the gun show left...sunday. Better'n' going to church, methinks. But you can still come after church if the gospel has you by the short ones.
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Fri Aug 05, 2005
DROPPING THE BIG ONE
HIROSHIMA, MON HORREUR
HIROSHIMA, MON HORREUR
Sixty years ago we dropped the big one.
The called it ‘the big one back then’, but it was pretty small by today’s advanced standards.
Still it was big enough to incinerate Hiroshima and turn the area near ground zero into a flaming maelstrom of hot gas, broken cement, flying glass, and human bodies charred beyond comprehension.
The decision to drop the thing lay primarily with Harry Truman who assumed the responsibility following the death of Franklin Roosevelt. That decision has been criticized for three generations now. How could the United States unleash such a terrible super weapon on innocent women and children? The international community, comprised largely of phony, lefty goody two shoes, has maintained a steady drumbeat of let’s pretend outrage all this time.
Who listens to the goddamned French government anyway? And the Germans? Those kraut-loving sausage belchers are primarily upset that we got the bomb before they could. God knows they tried hard enough. Had a problem with something called ‘heavy water’. Adolph might had had the world’s greatest scientists, but we had the world’s best bombs. Blew that deuterium to bits.
What did dropping the bomb accomplish? Everything, really. It shortened the war by as much as two years. It prevented a projected two million allied (American, mostly) casualties, the horrific result of a direct invasion upon the Jap homeland. It kept Stalin’s USSR from being able to take an active role in the Japanese surrender. The death and destruction caused by the two A Bombs seem insignificant when compared with the wholesale slaughter that would surely have been inflicted upon a Japanese civilian population fanatically resisting the allies with every drop of its blood.
Harry S. Truman was a great president. Perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century. He wasn’t afraid to confront the harsh realities of the last, chaotic months of World War Two. He is best remember as the BUCK STOPS HERE president, who made decisions thinking not of his own popularity ratings but of the best interests of his country.
Was he popular. Not terribly. But much more so than Thomas E. Dewey and the GOP establishment figured in the presidential election of 1948.
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Thu Aug 04, 2005
COOTER
GUN SHOWS
and
FIRST NIGHT MACON
GUN SHOWS
and
FIRST NIGHT MACON
Kind of short and sweet tonight, folks. Let’s take a quick look at:
1. GUN SHOW AT THE MACON CENTREPLEX THIS WEEKEND, August 6-7. This is an EASTMAN knife and gun show and they are usually pretty good. These things are more family affairs than militia let’s play soldier types, pretty tame, lots of clean fun for all ages.
Most of you know that I am a strong supporter of the SECOND AMENDMENT to the constitution. That’s the one that gives us gun rights which the likes of Ted Kennedy would like to take from us.
My favorite bumper sticker reads: TED KENNEDY’S CAR HAS KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN ALL MY GUNS PUT TOGETHER.
2. FIRST NIGHT MACON TOMORROW. Lot’s goining on. Ran into Lilly at the Baconsfield Kroger this morning. She was shopping for what promises to be a great evening of art, reading, and some music at our favorite reading emporium, the GOLDEN BOUGH. There is a rumor that the Telegraph’s OUT AND ABOUT is doing a feature story on this fine, cultural venue. We shall simply say, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Thank you TELEGRAPH. Thank you Dan Maley. Thank you Charles Richardson. Charles, if you’re good, I’ll call you as you sub for Jami Gaudet tomorrow morning.
3. COOTER SEZ don’t let your kids see the sleaze that is the DUKES OF HAZZARD MOVIE coming to a theatre near you tomorrow. Too much gratuitous sex and dope which clashes with the family orientation of the original series. Me? Of course I’ll do what Cooter suggests. Who is Cooter? Whoa. Everybody knows who Cooter is. And he’s still going strong. Caught him on Tucker Carleson this very evening. Who is Tucker Carleson? Whoosh. Y’all don’t know nothin’ ‘bout bow ties.
4. PRESIDENT TAKING A WORKING VACATION. And, of course, the intrepid WASHINGTON POST is questioning not only his right, but his need to do so. Fact is, the man stays just as busy down in Crawford as he does in D.C. It’s dangerous to underestimate this president.
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Wed Aug 03, 2005
MIKE ADAMS BOOK REVIEW
ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA
ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA
Mike Adams is a college professor, decidedly pro free-speech, conservative or libertarian by nature and inclination. He writes for Townhall.com and is syndicated nationally. Now Mike teaches at what appears to be a typical liberal college up North Carolina way called The University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he engages in making enemies out of liberal campus causes and college faculty and administrators whom he skewers regularly with wit and perception that usually goes over their collective heads.
This morning I read his latest column at townhall.com. It is a delightful piece called WHY BERNARD GOLDBERG IS CREWING UP AMERICA. It is a joke title and is a kind of review of a new book by Bernard Golberg, whose BIAS last year was a best seller much to the consternation of the New York Times. Golber’s title is 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA.
In his review, professor Adams cites some of his favorite ‘screwers’/ We will quote the following, Adam’s treatment of Ms Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder of what has to be the biggest collection of idiots this side of RecallEllis dot com, a group of bored housewives who have been trying to get a ballot initiative going to oust Macon’s mayor for over a year.
“Ingrid Newkirk. The co-founder of PETA gives us some insights into why her organization ranks second only to NAMBLA in perversity. I can’t muster the words to do justice to this idiot. So, I’ll use her words instead. For example:
“Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” - 1983
“Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” – 1989
“There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all mammals.” – 1989
After Yasser Arafat bombed Israel, Newkirk was incensed. But she was angry because Arafat used a donkey to carry explosives. When the donkey was killed, she asked him to “leave the animals out of this conflict.” Oh well, at least one explosive jackass survived the episode.
All this PETA garbage makes me want to head to the woods to hunt some game in Ingrid Newkirk’s honor. I think I’ll invite Bernie Goldberg to go with me. In the meantime, I’ve given you at least eight good reasons to buy his book. There are only about 92 more.
Mike Adams is a Townhall.com columnist.
I will order this book first thing in the morning. Looks like a solid winner.
WE PARTICIPATED IN THE NATIONAL NIGHT OUT LAST NIGHT and found ourselves in Shirley Hills with Rick Hutto and friends. It was a good time. There weren’t any speeches or anything like that. But people stood around and talked about the impending doom over the proposed ‘spaghetti junction’ confluence linking I-75 and I-16 (a mile from our house) which promises to destroy a dozen or so houses in one Black neighborhood, one White neighborhood, and to lay waste utterly the best thing Macon has created in recent years, a Riverwalk worthy of any city anywhere. We discussed that evening’s City Council meeting and the bold stroke made to reduce that body’s number from fifteen to seven. And we discussed crime.
When we got home, we found our little house had been burgled.
GUESS WHAT? MACON IS BROKE AGAIN!! A month ago The City took out a five million dollar TAN (Tax Anticipation Loan) from Wachovia to tide us over until tax revenue starts coming in in September. Turns out that we have enough in the bank to meet just one more payroll. But we did spend 141 thousand on those sorely needed golf carts at the city-owned Bowden golf course. Unbelievable.
ONLY IN AMERICA: In the pork heavy Transportation bill, passed by the House a few days ago, Macon is getting something like five million bucks to complete and extend RIVERWALK. At the same time the Department of Transportation, an overblown bureaucracy, is spending something like 70 million to destroy the whole thing.
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Tue Aug 02, 2005
OVER-THE-HILL ICONS COME TO MACON
JESSE JACKSON and the NAACP
JESSE JACKSON and the NAACP
DAMN!!! I missed him. Didn’t get an invite to city hall to see the Slightly Reverend Jesse Jackson when he visited Macon yesterday. He was here to put in an appearance demonstrating his support for opposition to the new Georgia voting act that mandates a photo ID. Jackson and others opposed to the law, already passed and only awaiting imprimatur from the Justice Department, which oversees most of the voting here in Dixie.
The smokescreen thrown up is that requiring a state issued photo ID, like a driver’s license or something similar, is that poor blacks and the elderly will find themselves disenfranchised.
Hogwash, say I. You can’t use a porta-potty these days without showing photo ID. We would do the elderly, the halt, the lame, the poor, and the stupid a favor by requiring they own a state ID and helping them attain the same. And so the legislation has built in safeguards guaranteeing proper identification availability to all even free of charge.
Tell you what, Jesse. Contact the state NAACP and tell them to start canvassing the groups you claim threatened and arrange for them to get the little cards. Trouble is the NAACP has become a hidebound organization living in an imaginary Martin Luther King past, which is a little like modern labor unions reliving an idealized should-to-shoulder mythology when all the working people of the world were somehow united.
Come on, it’s a good law. A damn good law. Quitcher Bitchin’. Jesse. Let’s hope the leadership of the local NAACP, a largely ceremonial-do-nothing gaggle of well intentioned folks removes its head (collective) from the dark place and realize its purpose should be to aid the people it claims to represent. Mindless obstructionism is not the way to go.
Oh, and had I been invited to attend the news conference I would have asked Jesse what is the source of his title ‘Reverend’. Did he attend divinity school or did he get a certificate out of a box of shredded wheat?
A LITTLE POETRY: This is an example of what might be called ‘Pick-Up Poetry’. It’s from the local bar scene, but the setting could be anywhere:
“She’s a brick…outhouse,”
thought he, mind fixed on this night’s
foreplay: drinks, strong, of course,
Cuervo…..si!!!
Dim lights, faded sheets,
Soprano Kenny G. forced painfully
Through tinny motel speakers.
All this upon his mind as he
Sidled next to her: blond and slim
And ladylike, ankles crossed her
Insoles arched atop the brazen
Rail ‘neath the contoured plastic
Of a wobbly tripod stool.
Close, now, his tongue grew thick
Forgotten lessons in society polite,
Forgotten, too, those openings rehearsed,
Refinements wrought through eons
Of gentile, man-to-woman conduct code.
“Wanna fuck,” he choked.
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Mon Aug 01, 2005
LOST IN SPACE
The End Of Human Evolution
The End Of Human Evolution
The real importance of the problems surrounding NASA and last week’s shuttle launching has been missed by pundit, by media, by scientist, and by academe.
The focus has been almost entirely upon the imminent danger caused by pieces of the ship coming off during lift-off. There has been much discussion concerning the ‘rush’ to return to space and the pressure NASA is under right now. Also, many question the need for a space program at all. The old argument resurfaces, “Wouldn’t this money better be spent right here in America, the inner cities, perhaps, Appalachia, farms, energy ad infinitum”?
But the discussion misses the big picture. Our exploration of space peaked in 1969 and the years immediately following when we landed men on the moon fulfilling a martyred President’s pledge. After the Apollo Program was over, and all the moonwalks taken, the space program shrank to putting men and their machines in close orbit in nearest outer space. Born the Shuttle. It has been going aloft for decades, halted twice by disaster and death, fulfilling needs, it is claimed, to repair satellites, insert commercial and military hardware into orbit, and conduct scientific experiments that cannot be done in a gravity environment.
OK, I guess, but the shuttle seems to have become a static, bureaucratic entity, sending up payloads from time to time only to prove the virility of its ebbing self. It took eight years from the Kennedy Promise to the landing of the first men on the moon. He current program has been in existence for three decades now, doing virtually the same thing, over and over, getting nowhere.
What does this mean to the totality of man’s span on earth? A great deal, I’m afraid, in a very real sense it is one more proof that we have entered a period of Reverse Evolution which spells the end of our species as the dominant life form. It’s over, folks. We just don’t know it.
Since early man-becoming creatures learned to walk upright, to hunt, to gather, to live together in a social unit, he has been an explorer. He is, indeed, an explorer by his very nature. Our immediate ancestors, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, wandered far and wide, and inhabited the globe from the arctic circle to the Southern Pacific. They were explorers. Later the more ‘civilized’ colonized the world, finding men just like them everywhere they went. It was Neo-Explorer meet Paleo, and the latter generally lost because the former had devoted centuries to honing its technologies.
By the twentieth century almost every corner of the globe had felt the footfalls of homo sapiens. Always the explorer he turned to undiscovered worlds: some ever deeper into the sea, others to space. Having located the Titanic and sojourned into the Mariana’s Trench, he quickly became aware of what lay within the realm of water, while not yet its master, he was able to grasp and comprehend the complexities of the deep.
We got ourselves into what was called ‘a space race’ after the Ruskies put a little beeping globe called Sputnik into Earth Orbit in the fall of 1957. American science (as well as her armed forces) was humiliated by early Russian successes, outdoing us at every turn of an orbit. Of course the motivation to enter space (and the deep sea) was primarily military whether we be Red or Red, White, and Blue. So one hand we scared silly that our rivals were about to drop nukes on us from afar with impunity, while on the other that our educational system, our schools, universities, and graduate enclaves were inadequate to the task at hand. Send us ten-year-olds who know quantum physics and advanced calculus, please. Get rid of Latin and Greek!!! Who needs the humanities!!! Science and Math forever.
The Soviet space race imploded as did the society that created it thanks in great part to Ron Reagan and his outspend ‘em policies of the eighties. No nukes is good nukes. We win, you lose, and I’m goin’ home.
Now the desire to explore is not limited to physical exploration. It goes hand in hand with two other facets of the human experience….’religion’ and, what we shall call for wont of a better term, ‘philosophy’.
Religion, Western Religion, especially, was once a vital force in society and drove Western Civilization toward the zenith of its attainment. Once up a time educated men were philosophers….learned, well read in Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Boethius, Rousseau and Kant.
These guys were thinkers, well versed in what was once called (and not long ago) ‘the arts and sciences’, thinkers, doers, activists, men leading the cutting edge of contemporary thought.
Throughout much of our history these two intellectual forces, often at war with one another, and just as often the one reinforcing the other, have been a cornerstone of civilization. Philosophy was probably first thought of as a separate discipline during the sixth century B.C.; religion has been with us far longer. Together these two elements have been a kind of intellectual backbone of what makes man, western man, at least, what he is.
But today these forces are in retreat. Philosophy has been reduced to a kind of meaningless futility and semantic absurdity in our colleges and universities. It has become a rarified kind of thing, discussed and somewhat understood by a small body of academics better known as intellectual snobs.
And religion. It is dying out in Europe and the United States. Man has lost touch with the supernatural and is substituting a vanilla social gospel that preaches to the poor, neglecting the dynamic tensions that faith, Christianity brought into play at the service of humanity.
The decline of these two forces parallels our retreat from space. We have lost the essence of what we once were. As a civilization. As a race. We have turned an evolutionary corner, peaked back a few decades, and are now in decline.
It will take eons, most likely, until the last Adam and the last Eve tread this tired globe. But it will happen if we don’t use our technology to wipe ourselves out beforehand. Devolution, not evolution.
We have lost the guts and the willpower to evolve further. Sad. It’s been a great ride.
And the cockrich shall inmherit the earth.
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