And all over, suddenly, lots of people
Who weren’t eligible to fight,
Started to get American Flag Crazy,
And lots of people who were eligible,
To die, that is, for what we all knew by then was bullshit,
Went out into the streets to say, Hell No!
And many cities were troubled, and colleges,
And the smell of burning was everywhere,
Flags, buildings, draft cards, bras, neighborhoods.
The election suddenly became more important.
I was not a fan of President Johnson,
Now I know he wasn’t so bad, some stuff anyway,
He said, Hell No! I’m out, no way, but who then?
So many reasons to get up, and get involved.
Me? I pulled my collar up and my head down,
The cup had already passed from me,
I was just waiting for it all to be over,
But really it had hardly begun.
Over in old Europe,
The fever had caught on big time,
I read about those French students,
And saw it all on TV,
It all looked so unreal,
I thought to myself,
What are they so pissed about?
They’re French.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Yes, Race Matters
There’s so much loose talk around these days about criminals getting away with things. Only someone who get their ideas exclusively from movies could believe it. In that setting, it makes good drama and sets up a satisfying blood bath. In real life, most “criminals” are down, down, down.
In fact, if they’re Black, they’re way fucking down. How’d this be for a movie:
Young man, twenty or so, comes home to find a man beating up his mother in the kitchen of their home. His mother is hurt already, bleeding from a couple of places. The son jumps in to save his mother, and a terrific battle ensues, in the course of which the son kind of half pulls the man’s ear off. Police arrive at the scene. The son is arrested along with the man who was beating up his mother.
The man who was beating up the mother was let go, not enough evidence of a crime, but the cops kept him close as exhibit one in the case against the son. Some Assistant DA had a brainstorm: regarding the Assault and Battery the son can plead defense of another, that’d work, but if we charge him with Mayhem, he has no defense! Genius.
Technically, Mayhem is anything done by one person to another which would reduce that man’s effectiveness if called to fight for the King, like cutting something off, or blinding a person. Cutting, or pulling off an ear, qualifies. It’s still on the books. The man who was beating up the mother appears as a witness, the mother has no role in the trial, and the young man is found guilty.
I met the man some time later. I don’t know what the original sentence was, but it was long, and he was in California big-wall prisons for eighteen years. He was a really nice guy, he shook his head telling me the story, and it was like he still didn’t really believe it either, he didn’t seem to bear the state any malice.
He was the single blackest person that I have ever met. He was much blacker than coal, much blacker than car tires. I have seen crows almost as black, but they reflect too much light to be as black as this guy. Any black that you can name was a cheerful grey next to his skin. He was so black, his gums were jet black; he was so black, the palms of his hands were black. It’s a tough life for a Black man in America. If he were White, he’d have gotten a medal for saving his mother. Black? Eighteen years.
Good material for a movie? Nope. No one wants to be reminded about the absurd treatment that Black people receive in the name of American Justice.
All American Blacks have similar stories, not so extreme, but similar. Maybe no jail time in the story, but it sure is something bad that would never happen to a White person in a million years. Get to know a Black person and once they get to trusting you they’ll tell you their story. I have shaken my head in wonder at many such stories. It’s quite an education.
In fact, if they’re Black, they’re way fucking down. How’d this be for a movie:
Young man, twenty or so, comes home to find a man beating up his mother in the kitchen of their home. His mother is hurt already, bleeding from a couple of places. The son jumps in to save his mother, and a terrific battle ensues, in the course of which the son kind of half pulls the man’s ear off. Police arrive at the scene. The son is arrested along with the man who was beating up his mother.
The man who was beating up the mother was let go, not enough evidence of a crime, but the cops kept him close as exhibit one in the case against the son. Some Assistant DA had a brainstorm: regarding the Assault and Battery the son can plead defense of another, that’d work, but if we charge him with Mayhem, he has no defense! Genius.
Technically, Mayhem is anything done by one person to another which would reduce that man’s effectiveness if called to fight for the King, like cutting something off, or blinding a person. Cutting, or pulling off an ear, qualifies. It’s still on the books. The man who was beating up the mother appears as a witness, the mother has no role in the trial, and the young man is found guilty.
I met the man some time later. I don’t know what the original sentence was, but it was long, and he was in California big-wall prisons for eighteen years. He was a really nice guy, he shook his head telling me the story, and it was like he still didn’t really believe it either, he didn’t seem to bear the state any malice.
He was the single blackest person that I have ever met. He was much blacker than coal, much blacker than car tires. I have seen crows almost as black, but they reflect too much light to be as black as this guy. Any black that you can name was a cheerful grey next to his skin. He was so black, his gums were jet black; he was so black, the palms of his hands were black. It’s a tough life for a Black man in America. If he were White, he’d have gotten a medal for saving his mother. Black? Eighteen years.
Good material for a movie? Nope. No one wants to be reminded about the absurd treatment that Black people receive in the name of American Justice.
All American Blacks have similar stories, not so extreme, but similar. Maybe no jail time in the story, but it sure is something bad that would never happen to a White person in a million years. Get to know a Black person and once they get to trusting you they’ll tell you their story. I have shaken my head in wonder at many such stories. It’s quite an education.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Inflation in Thailand
No, I'm not talking about cosmetic surgery. It's all about the money. Somehow, as the value of the Baht against the Dollar goes up, the number of Baht required to buy anything is going up.
Gas is up to 40B a liter, that's $1.30, times four for the gallon price, $5.20. In Baht that's more than the daily minimum wage, which lots of people get paid. The 20B bowl of noodle soup is now 30B, and all food has gone up at that rate, 10B may only be thirty cents but that's a 50% increase, the poor people are going nuts.
Everyone here travels by bus, the roads are covered with them, those tickets are way up too. And the little pick-up truck local "buses" are up 30% to 50%, lots of people ride those twice a day; kids take them to school.
This oil thing is hurting the little countries worse then the big.
Gas is up to 40B a liter, that's $1.30, times four for the gallon price, $5.20. In Baht that's more than the daily minimum wage, which lots of people get paid. The 20B bowl of noodle soup is now 30B, and all food has gone up at that rate, 10B may only be thirty cents but that's a 50% increase, the poor people are going nuts.
Everyone here travels by bus, the roads are covered with them, those tickets are way up too. And the little pick-up truck local "buses" are up 30% to 50%, lots of people ride those twice a day; kids take them to school.
This oil thing is hurting the little countries worse then the big.
Mr. Fred's Poetry Corner: 1968 Part Two
Things settled down for me, but politics heated up,
I saw Bobby Kennedy in a college classroom,
Preaching to the converted, I liked him,
Practicing for the coming presidential season,
As it turned out, the calm before the storm.
We waited for the weather to clear.
When spring arrived, the real fun started,
Somebody, nobody is really sure,
Somebody, a good shot, gave the gift
Of Martyrdom to Martin Luther King.
Lots of people took the news very poorly,
Lots of acting out, frustrations pouring forth,
Condemnations flying in all directions,
It’s not so hard to understand,
Anguish, despair, and recriminations
Such as Law and Order,
Election-speak for “those people . . .”
Two birds with one stone,
One less thorn in the side of the power,
And one good election issue for people that vote,
The wrong people, as it happened.
Down South in Dixie
Came the first in a string of
Gratuitous massacres of university students,
The unmitigated gall, they wanted to go bowling,
Black, of course, the test case, hardly anyone noticed.
I saw Bobby Kennedy in a college classroom,
Preaching to the converted, I liked him,
Practicing for the coming presidential season,
As it turned out, the calm before the storm.
We waited for the weather to clear.
When spring arrived, the real fun started,
Somebody, nobody is really sure,
Somebody, a good shot, gave the gift
Of Martyrdom to Martin Luther King.
Lots of people took the news very poorly,
Lots of acting out, frustrations pouring forth,
Condemnations flying in all directions,
It’s not so hard to understand,
Anguish, despair, and recriminations
Such as Law and Order,
Election-speak for “those people . . .”
Two birds with one stone,
One less thorn in the side of the power,
And one good election issue for people that vote,
The wrong people, as it happened.
Down South in Dixie
Came the first in a string of
Gratuitous massacres of university students,
The unmitigated gall, they wanted to go bowling,
Black, of course, the test case, hardly anyone noticed.
Book Review: “The Last Gospel,” by David Gibbins.
The author is a quite accomplished archeologist, and the protagonist is a supremely accomplished, and supremely lucky archeologist. Art imitating life. Mr. Gibbins “has worked in underwater archeology all of his professional life;” he has a Ph.D. from Cambridge and has taught archeology in Britain “and abroad;” and he is a “world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities.” We find this out half-way into the first paragraph on the frontispiece, presented, as it were, as the most important information in the book.
The protagonist, Jack Howard, makes it all look very easy as he exceeds the accomplishments of Mr. Gibbins by leaps and bounds. In this volume, 500 plus pages, 150,000 words or so, he: 1) discovers the remains of the wreck of St. Paul’s ship, which sank off the coast of Sicily in about the year 50 AD; 2) intuits the location of and actually finds and enters the library of the Emperor Claudius in Herculaneum, discovering in the process that Claudius had not actually died by poison in 54 AD or so, but had actually faked his own death so that he could retire in peace (the library has miraculously survived virtually intact the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the ensuing 2,000 years); 3) intuits the location of, finds and enters the actual tomb of Queen Boudica of the Brits, intact and undiscovered beneath the streets of central London, her red hair still flowing wild, her fabulous gold treasure undisturbed; 4) is taken to and examines a perfect replica of a villa in the style of Romanized Brits which has secretly existed in Santa Paula, California for almost one hundred years; and 5) attends a meeting in the actual tomb of St. Paul, which unbeknownst to virtually anyone is under St. Peter’s in Rome, somewhat next to the tomb of St. Peter himself. I haven’t finished the book yet, I’m sure he will distinguish himself further. He is stumbling across these intermediate triumphs on his quest for the lost Gospel of Christ, in the great man’s own handwriting.
The book is very full of exposition in a pseudo-academic style. Much of it is clumsily introduced, as in “tell me more about Queen Boudica, Jack.” It was good information, though, and I enjoyed learning some details of archeology that have escaped me all of these years.
There are girls in the book, but so far no one has been kissed. There are guns in the book, but so far only one has gone off, hitting nothing. There has been some tension in the narrative, but I can recall episodes of the George Reeves “Superman” television series that had more drama in them. I’m not complaining really, I’m enjoying it, it’s a quick read, the sentences and paragraphs are tolerably well constructed, I’m traveling this week and it is a perfectly good “Railway Novel.”
You could do worse on a long flight.
The protagonist, Jack Howard, makes it all look very easy as he exceeds the accomplishments of Mr. Gibbins by leaps and bounds. In this volume, 500 plus pages, 150,000 words or so, he: 1) discovers the remains of the wreck of St. Paul’s ship, which sank off the coast of Sicily in about the year 50 AD; 2) intuits the location of and actually finds and enters the library of the Emperor Claudius in Herculaneum, discovering in the process that Claudius had not actually died by poison in 54 AD or so, but had actually faked his own death so that he could retire in peace (the library has miraculously survived virtually intact the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the ensuing 2,000 years); 3) intuits the location of, finds and enters the actual tomb of Queen Boudica of the Brits, intact and undiscovered beneath the streets of central London, her red hair still flowing wild, her fabulous gold treasure undisturbed; 4) is taken to and examines a perfect replica of a villa in the style of Romanized Brits which has secretly existed in Santa Paula, California for almost one hundred years; and 5) attends a meeting in the actual tomb of St. Paul, which unbeknownst to virtually anyone is under St. Peter’s in Rome, somewhat next to the tomb of St. Peter himself. I haven’t finished the book yet, I’m sure he will distinguish himself further. He is stumbling across these intermediate triumphs on his quest for the lost Gospel of Christ, in the great man’s own handwriting.
The book is very full of exposition in a pseudo-academic style. Much of it is clumsily introduced, as in “tell me more about Queen Boudica, Jack.” It was good information, though, and I enjoyed learning some details of archeology that have escaped me all of these years.
There are girls in the book, but so far no one has been kissed. There are guns in the book, but so far only one has gone off, hitting nothing. There has been some tension in the narrative, but I can recall episodes of the George Reeves “Superman” television series that had more drama in them. I’m not complaining really, I’m enjoying it, it’s a quick read, the sentences and paragraphs are tolerably well constructed, I’m traveling this week and it is a perfectly good “Railway Novel.”
You could do worse on a long flight.
My Unfortunate Absences from Your Lives
I have not been hit by a bus, or a water buffalo, nor been laid low by some fearsome parasite. I have just been traveling. I taught in Chiang Mai last weekend and then took a few days of R n' R in the mountains. Friends were in abundance, and being dragged from one good restaurant to another left me little time for keyboard pounding.
I did find time to teach a first grade class, that was fun.
Please be assured of my deep and abiding love for you, and thanks as always for reading and commenting.
I did find time to teach a first grade class, that was fun.
Please be assured of my deep and abiding love for you, and thanks as always for reading and commenting.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
More Pattaya Pix.
It was a "Staff" weekend, broadly defined. The woman on the left is a cafeteria worker.
A few of the guys.
Your humble content provider on the veranda.
On the right should be "Pat" or "Chris." I don't know, can you tell me?
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