Open Thread for Wednesday, July 19, 2023

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The former Fort Lee has a museum, which is always interesting: the Army Women’s Museum…

Some things that have grabbed my attention today:

  1. Russia strikes Odesa for a second day after withdrawing from the grain deal — Putin is aiming to starve not only the Ukrainian people, but the other people who depend on the grain that Ukraine exports. The effect of these latest actions — which include threatening to attack merchant ships coming to get said grain — has of course been to send wheat prices up sharply. Just in case you’re struggling to figure out who the good guys and bad guys are here.
  2. ‘Active club’ hate groups are growing in the U.S. — and making themselves seen — Our society continues to slide downward. There is just so much aggressive stupidity out there, and now at the paramilitary stage. And thanks to the Internet, these people are able to get together and reinforce their deviance, making themselves feel “normal.”
  3. Army base once named for Lee now named for two black South Carolinians — Which is fine, but I wonder — why South Carolinians, when Fort Lee was in Virginia? These were certainly not the only two non-Confederate soldiers to have distinguished themselves in the Army. Irrelevant digression: It’s too bad there are no Air Force bases named for Confederates (are there?). I’d be advocating to rename one for Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., probably best known for commanding the Tuskegee Airmen. I want to add that “I knew him,” but that would be an exaggeration. My Dad worked for him as part of Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and I used to walk by his house on the way to catch the bus to school. Also, when I worked at the base golf course, I was once assigned to clean his golf clubs. I guess it’s silly, but I’ve always been kind of proud of having that thin connection to him…
  4. Is It Ever Morally Acceptable to Visit a Confederate Historical Site? — Since we’re on kind of a theme here today. I was grabbed by this question in the headline of an email from the NYT’s “Ethicist” today. The simple answer is that of course it is morally acceptable — and even imperative, given the widespread, appalling ignorance about the past in our society — to visit any and all historical sites, to understand history better, or even a little bit. But that question doesn’t fully explain the dilemma posed in the reader’s question. This particular site is operated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and they charge admission. So no, I wouldn’t go to there. Want to learn about the Confederacy — and the Union, and everything else have to do with that conflict? Go to Gettysburg. I highly recommend it.
  5. What we know about Travis King, the U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea — Well, we know he’s not a candidate for promotion. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to be creative in demonstrating his unsuitability. Apparently, seeing as how we know he had just gotten out of the stockade for having “punched a South Korean national.” But I was drawn to this because of the “what we know about” language in the headline. That made this hed a close relative of the “what you need to know” headline that is all about getting you to click. Headlines used to TELL you something, rather than urging you to click in order to learn something. (An old school hed would have said, “U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea, was imprisoned for violent behavior,” or something along those lines.) Anyway, in this case as in so many, “what we know” is not much. Of course, you click wanting to know WHY he did it. How can we ever fully know what’s going on in such a person’s head?

I guess that’s enough, except that I’m thinking about adding this next thing as a regular feature, I’ve been having so many of these lately.

Today’s Earworm — A slight departure from my usual recent obsessing about the Zombies and the Moody Blues, today I woke up trying to remember the tune to Heart of Oak, the anthem of the Royal Navy. The words were in my head from having read a reference to it before going to bed. So I went to YouTube, went “yeah, that’s it!” You’ve probably heard the tune many times, generally as background music in historical movies. Anyway, it’s been stuck since then. England expects that every man will now go listen to some sea shanties.

 

 

 

OK, it’s hot enough for me now. Thanks for asking…

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Sure, here in West Columbia, it’s only 93 degrees at the moment, according to my phone app, But my PC claims it’s 95.

In any case, hot enough, and in fact too hot. What, by the way, would I consider to be acceptable? A high of 80. I realized that on our recent trip to Dominica. It was pretty much that every day. Reminded me of Hawaii. I only every got hot once when I lived on Oahu, and that’s because I spent the day at a rock festival down in the Diamond Head crater — the walls of which blocked off the trade winds.

But I digress…

Of course, hot as it is — and it’s hot enough that I haven’t met my 10,000-step-a-day goal since Monday, July 10 (which is embarrassing) — it could be worse. Consider:

So yeah, it’s hot enough. I’m very thankful for air-conditioning, and I’m especially glad that there’s a vent right over my elliptical trainer here in my home office. Which will be handy if I get up off my butt and starting making up some of those steps. Which I might do in just a few minutes. Really.

Sure, the weather is not considered the most exciting of conversation topics, but this is special weather.

And I was wondering how the rest of you are handling it…

Another way to look at our loss of the Garden of Eden

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Hey, Michelangelo: I thought they were wearing fig suits when they left the garden…

The Gospel reading at Mass yesterday got me to thinking about ancient agriculture:

“A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,
and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Back in those days, it seems, farming was kind of haphazard. Seed was scattered in ways that today would seem quite haphazard. Whenever I read that passage, I think, why didn’t they put the seed IN the ground? Had the dibble not been invented, or what?

Which reminded me of my theory of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

It suddenly hit me as I was reading one of those books about the history of our species, from hunter-gatherer days until now — which as y’all know I frequently mention. I don’t remember whether it was Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, or what. But it was one in which the idea that the big move to agriculture was a decidedly mixed blessing.

Oh, it afforded advantages to the cultures that embraced it, in a competitive sense. As Jared Diamond stressed, the peoples who moved the earliest, and the most successfully, to food and fiber production dominate the world today. That’s how Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire with a handful of Spanish soldiers. He not only had the guns and the steel, but smallpox had spread ahead of the Conquistadores and had hit the Incas pretty hard just before he arrived. More than that, he had writing — not him personally, but the scribes he had along. He knew how Cortez had taken down the Aztecs, and followed suit. Emperor Atahualpa hadn’t known either the Spanish or the Aztecs existed.

It’s why Maori conquered and wiped out the Moriori — former Maoris whose forebears had moved away and gone back to hunter-gathering — on Chatham Island. You may not have heard about that, though, since the Maoris themselves were eventually dominated by European newcomers.

But that’s not my point. The point is that some of these things I’ve been reading make the argument that the big advantage that farming offered had a steep price. Basically, the farming life sucked compared to hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, people worked less each day, and on the whole ate better. They went about and gathered what they needed, and had plenty of time to chill after that. They didn’t think about the future. They didn’t worry about their land, or the weather over the coming months, or the price of cotton. They weren’t the slaves of the farms they worked day and night to keep going.

I was thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me — that’s what the first chapters of Genesis were about. In the Garden, Adam and Eve could just stroll around naked and eat their meals off the bounty of their property, and life was good. Then they fouled up — they couldn’t obey one simple rule — and got booted out. And then they were cursed with farming, in no uncertain terms:

Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Which certainly sounds like a raw deal to me.

And it hit me: The people who composed the story of Adam and Eve — and later wrote it down — were on some level remembering the switch to agriculture, and saw it pretty much as Yuval Noah Harari did, thousands of years before he wrote that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” And they saw it as the ultimate human fall from natural grace.

So did I make some great discovery? No way. This was too obvious, and had been too obvious for ages. Search for “garden of eden hunter-gathering,” and you’ll see this idea all over the place. I liked this summary:

Apparently, the trauma of this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a huge and lasting impact on humanity. We’ve never forgotten it. It’s burned into our consciousness. And, that’s why it’s the subject of the Bible’s foundational story. The Torah tells us that when humans were first created, we lived in the Garden of Eden, where we ate the fruit that God provided for us. We didn’t have to work hard or grow anything on our own. In other words, we were hunter-gatherers….

I don’t know where I was when everybody else was talking about it. All I can say in my own behalf is that I realized it on my own. All the talking that people do about Adam and Eve — usually, unfortunately, in the silly arguments between biblical literalists and those who think a story about the Earth being created in six days means all faith is bunk (both sides seem to have trouble grasping the concept of allegory) — and I’d never heard a reference to this.

And it sort of blew my mind. I love it when I see connections to things I had not previously seen as connected — such as the Bible’s foundational story of life on Earth, and the findings of secular scientists and philosophers in our own age — and this was the Mother of All Connections. It tied everything about the origins of humanity and our world together.

And the most amazing thing is that it appears as though the originators of the Eden story had some memory — consciously or unconsciously — about what had happened to people ages earlier, long before writing, before Abraham, much less before anthropology, archaeology, DNA testing or carbon-14 dating.

I marvel at it…

So, did I read this right? Should I have hung in there?

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The only decent picture I could find illustrating the setting of the anecdote. No, I’m not in the picture.

It’s anecdote time. But first, a few words from Nicholas Kristof:

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Many Americans and Europeans flatter themselves by seeing the war in Ukraine through a false prism.

Too often, we think we have sacrificed for the Ukrainians. We pat ourselves on the back for providing expensive weapons and paying higher heating bills to help Ukrainians win their freedom — and we wish they’d get on with it.

In fact, what’s clear here in the Baltic countries is that it’s the other way around: The Ukrainians are sacrificing for us. They’re the ones doing us a favor, by degrading the Russian military and reducing the risk of a war in Europe that would cost the lives of our troops…

The whole piece is worth reading, but only those first three grafs are relevant to the memory that they stimulated…

It was a few months ago, maybe even in 2022. It’s hard to pin down, because it happened at Lowe’s, and I go there a lot.

This time, I wanted to copy some keys, and was using the self-serve machine devoted to that purpose. So for a minute or two, I was standing there, unable to easily evade folks who come up to strangers and initiate conversation.

There are a lot of people like that. And seriously, I try to go along and be nice to these folks. I get the impression sometimes that they are lonely. Maybe they live alone, and only get to speak to other people when they are out and about. And this is bad for everyone — but (or so I understand intellectually) especially painful for extraverts. (Although it would be great if some of them would stop whining about it! Oh, wait — I’d better add one of these… 🙂 )

This guy, whom I’ll describe as an older (as in, near my age) white guy, was at least topical. He comes up and without prelude (although maybe I’m just forgetting the prelude), he asks me who I thought would end up paying for all this aid we send Ukraine — us, or the Ukrainians.

I simply said, well, I assume we will, since we are the ones with the money as well as the goods. At that point, I could have gone on at length about how important it was for us to do so, and to keep doing so.

But I didn’t, because I sensed I was standing at the precipice, and one more step would take me into a spontaneous, fruitless argument with another isolationist. And I get into enough of those.

The conversation ended at that point. I don’t recall whether he just had no rejoinder — he may have been hoping to connect with someone who would say “It’ll be US, dammit! AGAIN! Those damn’ foreigners!” and didn’t know how to respond to my more neutral response — or I found some easy way of extricating myself.

Anyway, I now regret that I didn’t wait to see what was going on. It would only have taken a moment to find out whether I was in “America First” territory (in either the Trumpian or Lindbergh sense). I could have extricated myself at that point. Or perhaps I could have gotten him to see a broader picture (OK, everybody, stop laughing hysterically).

Or maybe he would have responded by saying “Hallelujah! Finally, somebody who’s not an isolationist!” And we could have had a high old time slapping each other on the back in mutual congratulation. That probably wasn’t where we were going, but let’s admit the possibility.

I think what chased me away was the thought that here’s a guy who comes up to busy strangers and starts conversations with something as likely to lead to acrimony as that. Made me wonder whether it was wise to stick around. Although I appreciated that he wanted to talk global affairs, rather than the weather or the Gamecocks.

But rather than keep kicking myself, I’ll close with Kristof’s words:

We’re right to celebrate a successful NATO summit. But especially if Ukraine struggles to recover large swaths of territory in this counteroffensive, there’ll be feckless grumbling in Western capitals about the price we’re paying and the favors we’re doing Ukraine. Anyone tempted to think that way should listen to the Baltic leaders, because they’ve learned the hard way how best to manage unruly bears.

 

Open Thread for Wednesday, July 12, 2023

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Just a few quick thoughts:

  1. Despite Successes at NATO Summit, Divisions Remain — So yay for Sweden, and yay also for Ukraine, but no membership there. And I’m sorry Ukraine’s not in, but I think I understand the rationale for being cautious.
  2. Idle, Anachronistic Thought of the Day, with a SPOILER ALERT — At the end of Catch-22, would Yossarian have taken off with the intention of paddling a rubber raft from Pianosa to Sweden had he known that Sweden wouldn’t always be neutral? I think yes, since he only needed to get through 1945 in a safe location. So, never mind…
  3. Convicted murderer back in custody after secret judge order released him 16 years early — I’m still not sure what happened here. Are you? Anyway, the guy was a fugitive for two months after the state Supremes voided his release. But no more.
  4. Giant sloth pendants indicate humans settled Americas earlier than thought — This is just a followup on the pre-Clovis post earlier. Now Brazil is weighing in, with prehistoric pendants that supposedly depict critters long extinct during the Clovis era.
  5. Will found in Aretha Franklin’s couch is valid, jury says — And yes, I’ve already written to complain to my attorney that he neglected to tell me I could do this. But upon reflection, I agree with him that this is probably not the best strategy for setting the future course of one’s estate. Especially if it has $80 million in it — which mine will not have, but Aretha’s did.
  6. Gratuitous baseball post — As one of the world’s least-engaged baseball fans, I went and took a look at the standings for the first time in a while. (I like to look at the big picture.) And my Red Sox are at the bottom of the AL East — but their percentage is better than the best team in the AL Central. And they’d be in third place in the West. So make allowances. Meanwhile, my Braves are dominating over the National League…

Hey, they’re in a tough division…

When did people get here, and how?

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You know, it’s hard to find accurate pictures of those earliest boats. So I went with this one…

I’m making a point of reading new books these days — by which I mean books I haven’t read before. For instance, right now I’m reading Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’ trilogy on TR, released in 2001. I’m getting to it about a decade after reading the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. But I guess that’s OK, since it took Morris way longer to get to writing it; the first book came out in 1979. I’m very much enjoying it, but at a leisurely pace.

That doesn’t mean I no longer indulge in my favorite way to waste time — reading the same books, over and over. And lately I’ve been drawn back to books about homo sapiens and how the species and our world developed. Right now, Guns, Germs and Steel is sitting on the kitchen table, and I thumb through it while eating (something I wasn’t allowed to do as a kid, but I’ve made up for that lost time).

And that got me onto this subject. I was reading a passage about the settlement of this continent, and Jared Diamond made a brief reference to archaeological discoveries that place humans here way before the Clovis culture came along. You see, the conventional thinking as he was writing was that people got here in about 11,000 B.C. Meanwhile, we have sites, including right here in South Carolina, that show indications of human presence as early as tens of thousands of years before that.

Diamond, writing in 1997 — well before some of the more startling claims about Topper — was sort of dismissive of these kinds of sites:

I wondered whether Diamond would be any more impressed by these more-recent claims. But I don’t know Diamond, and I don’t have his mobile number. So I reached out to the only archaeologist I know around here, our own Lynn Teague. I went over to her Twitter feed, and changed the subject by asking about what was on my mind. Looking back, I suppose I could have shown a little more interest in what she was writing about, but you know, the number count is limited on tweets. Lynn answered right away:

Yeah, just what I was thinkin’, Lynn. But I went on to ask…

Lynn’s answer satisfied me as much as one can be satisfied with regard to this question. Of course, that’s a minimal level of satisfaction. If I ever get a time machine, one thing I’d like to use it for would be to take a bunch of Dick and Jane books to the first modern humans just as they prepared started to break out of Africa and into Eurasia — long before they got here, by anyone’s reckoning — so that they could take up reading and writing and leave us some records.

I figure that by now, their books would be available in paperback, and maybe even free on Kindle…

Whoa! Slate needs to review its hiring and promotion policies

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A person who scores 220 on the Slate News Quiz should never be designated a “winner.”

And yet that’s what Slate did this week, when I racked up that painfully humiliating result. That’s because the publication’s designated staff “ringer” only scored 191. This one even holds an “editor” title. I think maybe she was asleep or something.

Of course, I still shouldn’t have been crowned the “winner,” since the average score, we are told, was 377.

I’ve never been fond of this quiz, because I seldom do well on it. But now I’m really starting to doubt its legitimacy…

Here’s why it’s hard to get things done…

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Here I am, finally, at the public library here at the beach, after two days in which I was unable to open my laptop during the few hours that my post-stroke brain allows me to do real work each day. First there was the Fourth of July, during which I scraped the rust off my grill long enough to build a fire and cook hot dogs and corn on the cob in the middle of the hottest day in the history of the world. After that, I only had energy to rewatch the first two epidodes of HBO’s “John Adam” with my wife and two of my daughters — which I thoroughly enjoyed, I’ll admit. That’s what everyone should do on that holiday.

Then, on Wednesday, there was the packing up and driving to the beach. We decided to come here a couple of days ahead of a cousin’s wedding in Conway on Saturday. That was tiring, especially since the rainstorm started while we were having lunch in Lake City, and didn’t end for the rest of the day.

So now I’m here at the library, with no distractions, where I can work, right?

Well, no. Never having been confined to a sensory deprivation tank, I’ve never been anywhere like that. I often claim, with some justice I think, to be the most easily distracted person on the planet.

For instance, look at the shelf next to me, since I made the mistake of glancing at it.

I think, That might be interesting. Not because of the stuff everybody knows about Mr. Shoe Business but I’m also thinking, I’ll bet it deals fairly extensively with his time as a newspaperman.

Which is something I only know about because of my own brief time as a reporter, in the late 1970s, before my long decades as an editor.

And it was just a chance thing that I learned it. It was during my time as “chief” of the Gibson County Bureau of The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun. That grand title meant that I was a lone reporter who was based 30 miles away in Trenton, charged with covering everything that happened in five counties to the north of Jackson. I think the “chief” part was because I had a secretary, who divided her time between me and the circulation and advertising departments. (I didn’t really need a secretary, but she tried hard. Once or twice, I pulled out multiple clippings that I needed to write a story and spread them over my desk, and stepped away to the men’s room down the hall before starting — only to come back and find she had refiled them all.)

I had a lot to do in those five counties, sometimes causing me to work more than 24 hours at a time — what with covering multiple things all day, writing them all overnight, and working through deadline the next morning. But that did not excuse me from the rotation that required everyone to do periodic human interest stories. Talk about distraction — not that I didn’t find them occasionally interesting.

I had found this old guy in one of my counties (and when I say old, I mean perhaps even as old as I am now) whose story interested me. He was retired to the country after a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency. This interested me a great deal as a fan of le Carré and Deighton, so when my turn came around, I went to interview him.

But what I remember now had nothing to do with intelligence work, because he had another career before the war, before even “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS existed, even less the CIA. He was a copy boy at one of the New York papers that doesn’t even exist any more. Maybe this one, but I don’t recall.

I, of course, particularly love one story he told from those times, because I’m probably the youngest journalist you’ll ever meet who actually started his career in that traditional manner — although by that time, thanks to the second wave of feminism, we were called copy clerks. (But it remained, despite that one girl who joined us some nights, a very boyish line of work.)

It so happened that the sports editor at that paper was Ed Sullivan. Hearing that was news to me at the time — I just saw him as that unlikely impresario, to use the book’s title (but once I learned that, the sports editor title seemed to fit him better than the later role). Anyway, one night Ed was hard up, and had no one to go cover the prize fights. So he sent this kid, my interview subject, giving him strict orders on the basics, telling him how to take notes, and just come back and write what happened. He was probably anticipating no more than a simple listing of who won which bouts. I mean, the kid should be able to handle that, right?

But that night, with no one there to cover it but this kid, a fighter was killed in the ring.

So the kid came back, and wrote what had happened, and his dreams were exceeded by this horrific occurrence — Ed and the other editors not only ran his story, but gave him a byline, which wasn’t something just handed out to anybody. I don’t have my story handy, but I think he even made the front, maybe even the lede.

So the copy boy in me was in awe. The biggest thing I ever got to do was once, on a holiday, I was sent to collect “the agate” — which meant going to the cop shop and the courthouse and coming back and typing up such dull stuff as property transfers and court filings.

That was a big day for me, in which I felt strongly the burden of responsibility. But what this guy was telling me was the stuff of legend…

Anyway, I’ll try to stop and do some work now…

Open Thread for Friday, June 30, 2023

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Alan Arkin as Yossarian, in 1970’s “Catch-22.”

Just a few quick thoughts:

  1. Affirmative Action — The court’s decision on this is the most significant of several this week, and if I had the day off I might try to write something about it. But I don’t, so I’ll leave it to y’all for now. If I were one of the ones-and-zeroes people, I could rip something out quickly, because all I’d have to do is copy and paste from my “side’s” talking points. But I acknowledge the painful complexity of this issue, so I’m neither cursing nor cheering. There’s a lot to explore here… (If y’all can get beyond the impulse to castigate me for perceiving painful complexity…)
  2. Goodbye, Yossarian — This item, as much as anything, prompted me to put up an Open Thread. I’ll miss Alan Arkin, and I hope you will, too. I can’t think of anything I ever saw him in that I didn’t think was great. But I still think of him as Yossarian, in Mike Nichols’ brilliant film adaptation of Catch-22. Months before I saw the movie — multiple times — in a theater, I read a cover story about it in TIME magazine, to which I subscribed in high school. After 53 years, I still remember a sentence from that story more or less verbatim: “Fear rides on his back like a schizoid chimp,” the writer said of Arkin’s suitability in the role of the famed Assyrian. I was proud to look it it up a moment ago and find out my memory had it right. Later, he became known for his brilliant performances as crusty old guy. I’d like to have had the chance to tell him how good I thought he was before the end, but he probably would waved the praise off, saying something like “Argo f___ yourself!”
  3. Still brooding over history — Just another heads-up, like the last one, that you’re likely to be reading a lot more about history here. Increasingly, I see Americans’ gross ignorance of history and civics as being a national crisis likely to bring an end to this country much quicker than we’re likely to get our feet wet from rising sea levels (to mention something other folks rightly worry about). This week the concern was kicked off by this passage from a George Will column: “The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. ‘the nation’s report card,’ for 2022 shows that a decline that started in 2014 (do not blame the pandemic) continues: Just 13 percent and 20 percent of eighth-graders met U.S. history and civics proficiency standards, the lowest rates ever recorded, erasing gains made since the 1990s.” And that’s one of the less alarming things I’ve read on the subject lately. Can you get a harrumph outta this guy, George? You bet. HARRUMPH!
  4. As the South Stews, Temperatures Are Set to Rise in the West, Too — Well, why should we be the only ones to suffer?…
  5. Indiana Jones — Hey, this movie might be great, but when I saw the image from it shared below this morning, it freaked me out a little. I usually try to not to panic over this AI stuff, but this morning I couldn’t help responding, “Oh, come on people, stop it with the fake imagery. What’s next? Are you going to ‘de-age’ him another 20 years for a ‘prequel’ to ‘American Graffiti?’… ‘The Roots of Bob Falfa?’…”

 

 

Some opportunities to learn some history, TODAY

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This isn’t the tunnel rat who will be speaking, but another guy who did the same thing, and it captures the essence…

Before I get to my work today, I need to post one more quick thing. Or two or three quick things, since Paul has reminded me that today is June 30…

Lately, my attention has focused less on the things that seem to get folks stirred up today, and more on history. And that’s made me take even more interest in the communications work I do for the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. And in the next few days, they have several really interesting things going on — and two of them are happening today…

  • First, at noon today, there is a free lecture by a guy who is a real-life Tunnel Rat — or was a real-life Tunnel Rat, back during the war in Vietnam. That means he made a regular practice of doing something I cannot imagine myself ever doing — plunge deep down into a hole in the ground, alone, with nothing but a flashlight and .45-cal. pistol, to search for the Viet Cong who (equally unbelievably) lived down there. He gave this same talk a couple of years back, and as I recall, he got somewhat into having a less-than-positive self-concept in those days that at least in part led to such self-destructive behavior. But the fact that anybody did it, for any reason under any circumstances, is what blows my mind. Anyway, you can hear him speak in just a little over an hour from now. Here’s the release I wrote about it…
  • Something else is happening today that you have more time to take in. A new exhibit is opening, and the remarkable thing about it is contained in the headline of the release I wrote: “Actual photos of Revolutionary War soldiers!” It’s no joke, and there’s no time machine involved. Or maybe, in a way, there is. It’s the display of some remarkable, high-quality daguerreotypes of men in their 90s who had fought in the Revolution when they were in their teens, or at most their 20s. This one particularly grabbed me because I’m fascinated not only by military history, but by early photography. I just love it that someone thought to take, and preserved, these photos of these men at the very ends of their long lives, and the very beginning of photography — two things that barely overlapped for a very few years.

There’s another one I want to tell you about, but it’s a few days off, and I’ve gotta get to work…

Here’s one of those early photos from the impressive collection of W.C. Smith III.

DeMarco: Who owns the rainbow?

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The Op-Ed Page

Found this on Wikipedia. It’s by someone named Eric Rolph, at English Wikipedia…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, remember the other day when I posted Paul’s abortion post, I said I had another one from him that I hadn’t even looked at, but would post soon? After which I didn’t have time for several days to think about posting on the blog? Well, this is it, and Paul just texted me to tell me it had to do with “Pride Month,” which he said was ending today. Sorry, Paul. Here you go…

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Remember when a rainbow was just a rainbow – happy surprise after a downpour? I sometimes long for the simplicity of those pot-o-gold days.

But we live in a complicated and changing world. Which means we sometimes we have to share symbols that our tribe has felt we owned. Christians are struggling with the appropriation of the rainbow, which for us evoked the story of Noah’s Ark. Every child that has ever attended Sunday School has been taught this story, often with images of happy animals strolling symmetrically up the gangplank.

I wrote a column in April in response to one of those Christians, the Rev. Michael Goings. Rev. Goings, whom I’ve not met, is a fellow citizen columnist for the Florence Morning News. He wrote a piece in March (“The Sacred Sign of the Rainbow”) in which he objected to the “thievery” of the rainbow by the LGBTQ community. He castigated its use as a symbol of gay pride as a “blatant act of defiance and desecration” claiming that it is “almost unpardonable, abominable, and dishonoring to the Almighty.”

I can understand some mild annoyance at the muddling of the rainbow imagery for young Christian Sunday School students. Kids can ask the darnedest questions, and a Sunday School room can be a dicey place to answer. But for me, that annoyance is overwhelmed by the enormous pride that the LGBTQ community is now able to express through the rainbow flag. Over the past decade, the ubiquity if the flag has paralleled their acceptance into the fabric of American life.

For Rev. Goings and others, rainbow imagery that supports LGBTQ people induces fear, rage, or the sense that apocalypse is nigh. Many Christians cannot accept that gay people are worthy in the sight of God. Some, like Lauren Boebert, have seats in Congress. When the Air Force recently tweeted support of Pride Month with an image of an airman saluting against a rainbow background, Boebert responded, “We salute one flag and one flag only in the United States of America. It isn’t the ‘Pride’ flag.”

I think it’s fair to describe Boebert as a Christian nationalist. At a Christian conference in Woodland Park, Colorado in September of last year, Boebert said, “It’s time for us to position ourselves and rise up and take our place in Christ and influence this nation as we were called to do.” Later she spoke of the end times: “We know that we are in the last of the last days. This is a time to know that you were called to be part of these last days. You get to have a role in ushering in the second coming of Jesus.”

Of LGBTQ people, she said they are “spitting in God’s face.”

Goings and Boebert read the Bible one way, a literal interpretation to which they are entitled. They believe that God sent a great flood that wiped out all of humanity except for Noah’s clan. Once the waters receded, God sent a rainbow as a sign of a new covenant with His people.

I read the Bible as literature, much of which I believe is divinely inspired. But it is filtered through flawed, limited human authors. Some of the Bible is confusing and some of it is simply wrong. Of many examples, I will give one – Ephesians 6:5: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

So here is this layman’s take on the story of Noah and the rainbow. There was no great flood (almost every geologist backs me up on this point). This story falls in line with flood myths that had been written and told for centuries before the Noah story. It is a way of trying to understand how a divine being or beings interact with their creation.

Like many Bible stories, this one is full of contradictions. Noah’s family, the best God could find on Earth, immediately shows God just what He has wrought in his second attempt at civilization. In Genesis 9:17, the ark account ends with God saying to Noah about the rainbow, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.” Four verses later, Noah “became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.” It is reassuring that God would choose someone as imperfect as Noah as the father of his new creation. He’s barely off the ark when he is found by his sons completely blitzed and naked. It tells me that God has a keen understanding of human frailty, an unending tolerance for our mistakes, and a bodacious sense of humor.

If you believe that men who love men or women who love women are reprobates warped by their sin and a danger to society, you have a right to your opinion. From that position, you have a couple of options. One is to try to completely shield yourself from the corrupting influence of gay people. Don’t listen to any music or consume any news, TV, movies, or social media produced by them. Don’t buy any products designed or services offered by them. I wish you luck. Or, more profitably, get to know a gay couple. Actively recruit gay people to your church so you can see who they really are. See if your opinion doesn’t change.

In my reading of Noah’s story, the rainbow is a sign of God’s new approach to humanity. This is the God of Love. Yes, there is still the God of Wrath who makes his presence known through the Old Testament (see, for example, Psalm 137). But here is our first glimpse of the God of Love who will later be personified in the New Testament in his Son, Jesus. In that light, the rainbow makes perfect sense as a symbol for gay and queer people.

If you like, you can cling to the few verses about homosexuality being an “abomination.” But, remember, God had much more to say about adultery than homosexuality – including that adulterers be put to death. Consider the possibility that these warnings come from a different time and were written by men who had little understanding of psychology and human relations. If, like Rev. Goings and Rep. Boebert, you are so willing to denigrate homosexuals, why not adulterers, who receive much more Biblical condemnation?

I have a brand new decal on my car’s back glass with a version of the rainbow flag. It advertises a new LGBTQIA+ advocacy group in our region called Pee Dee Equality. I’m hoping it will flourish. Our corner of the state could use a place that advocates for the dignity of every person.

This column is based on one that appeared in the April 26th edition of The Florence Morning News.

I’m glad I found these pictures I didn’t know I had…

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Before I actually get back to work after finally posting Paul’s column, a few words as to why I haven’t been posting.

Mainly, it’s been three things, although there’s plenty of other stuff going on:

  • I’ve been trying to rearrange my home office, which mainly has consisted of building new bookshelves of my own rather unusual, rustic design (made mostly with treated wood left over from the revamp of our deck a couple of years ago, which my wife has been eager to see me use or take to the dump). That, and cleaning out the big closet in the same room, space that could be much better used. This project alone, which is still in progress, would have been enough to keep any normal person from blogging.
  • In the middle of all that, we had new windows installed in our house. So I had to rearrange the wreckage in the office so the workmen could get to the windows, and do the same in varying degrees with furniture all over the house. The biggest part was taking down all the louvered wooden shutter-type blinds in most of the windows. The windows are in, and since that happened last Wednesday, we’ve been installing curtains to replace the blinds, which went to the Habitat ReStore.
  • And in the middle of those things, after a week in which hours were wasted in struggling to reconnect to our wifi, we switched internet providers. This has been fubar in most respects since the start. We’re on I think our fourth new router. The second was FedExed to us to replace the faulty first one. When that one didn’t work (something Spectrum was able to confirm, again, remotely), an increasingly frustrated repair guy spending a couple of hours installing a third one, and, when that didn’t work either, a fourth one. Since then, part of every day has been spent reestablishing contact with one or more of the dozen or so devices in our home that depend on wifi. I’m down to one that still isn’t working, and I’m trying to get in touch with the device’s manufacturer.

And lots of other stuff. For instance, this morning we were on the phone with our old internet service provider to make sure we knew how to send back their equipment so we don’t have to pay some outrageous sum for it.

Of course, there have been good things about all this. One was that, when I was moving some books onto one of those new bookcases, an envelope fell out of one of the books, and I opened it and found these two pictures, above and below.

Well, y’all know how much I liked John McCain, so I was glad to find them. I didn’t know any pictures of him and me together existed, much less that I had a couple of prints of them.

Obviously, because of the setting — The State‘s editorial boardroom — this is before or after an interview with the board. Probably an endorsement interview, given some of the people I see in the room. The question was, 2000 or 2008?

Then, in looking closely at the one below, I saw it was 2000, just before South Carolina’s Republican primary. You may notice that in both pictures, you can barely see that there are people standing directly behind both McCain and me, like shadows, making it look like our heads and shoulders are kind of doubled around the edges. But in the one below, the figure behind McCain is emerging slightly from full eclipse, and I can see that it’s Fred Mott — who was my publisher in 2000, but long gone in 2008.

Ironically, Fred is the reason Sen. McCain didn’t get our endorsement that year. Fred wanted to back George W. Bush. The fateful decision was made in a board meeting immediately after this interview. We normally worked by consensus, but this time, being so divided, we actually took a counted vote. It was something of a mess, since some in the room (my good friend Robert Ariail, for instance) weren’t technically members of the board under normal circumstances. But anyway, it was a 50-50 split. And I could see no graceful way to dispute the idea that in a 50-split, the publisher’s side wins.

Let me be clear — Fred is a great guy, for whom I have great respect. He was just wrong this time. If you want to know the reasons why, I’ll let you know if I also find the 4,000-word memo I sent him several days before this meeting. Anyway, I lost that one, but we endorsed McCain in 2008.

Anyway, I’m glad to have these pictures. Now, back to work…

DeMarco: The Boys’ Club takes on abortion

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The Op-Ed Page

EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul sent me this with an apology, calling it “a somewhat dated column.” And it was when he send it, on June 11. So I now offer my own apology, since I’ve hardly touched the blog since then, and now it is a REALLY dated column. I’ve been really, really busy lately, a condition that I think is now lessening, slightly. Anyway, here you go. He actually sent me another right after this, which I will do my best to post today or tomorrow…

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Most Americans are rightly conflicted about abortion. Those who favor more restrictions prioritize the welfare of the fetus. Those who favor less restriction, including most physicians, prioritize the welfare of the mother. As King Solomon knew, when he was confronted by two women who both claimed to be mothers of a newborn, there is no splitting the baby.

There is also no avoiding a decision. The irony for South Carolinians is that we had it about right. Our previous law, a 20-week ban that passed in 2016 during Nikki Haley’s tenure, successfully balanced the competing values of mother and fetus. Our current Legislature, which is more than 85% male, felt the law was too generous to women. It passed a 6-week ban which Governor McMaster signed on May 25th.

The 27 to 19 vote to pass the bill in the senate was accomplished without a single female senator’s vote. This wasn’t especially challenging, given there are only five female voices in the chamber. It’s not hard to believe that some of the supporters of the bill are striving to put women back in, what they consider, their rightful place. I don’t know what was in these men’s hearts, but I have some questions. By opting for an elective abortion, a woman is often saying, “I don’t believe I can successfully raise a child right now.” If the ban was to protect these children, why wasn’t it accompanied by a strengthening of our social safety net to ensure they are not raised in poverty?

How many of our male senators know women who have chosen to have an abortion? Let’s imagine, gentleman, that the woman in question is your daughter, whom we will call Elizabeth. Let’s drop your income to the poverty line so you have little ability to help Elizabeth. Surely if with one hand you have the power to force Elizabeth to have your grandchild, with the other you could strengthen her safety net by expanding Medicaid, providing affordable child care and preschool programs, and funding public schools equitably.

I’m not arguing that it is wrong for the senators to oppose abortion. Belief that life begins at conception and that God has known us since before we were born is beautiful idea that is scripturally based. However, that religious belief cannot be imposed on women who don’t share it. A Christian woman who supports abortion could ask, for example, “If God knows us from before we enter the womb, why are there almost as many miscarriages as there are abortions in the US?” She also could reasonably object to the belief (held by 35% of Republican voters in a 2022 Winthrop poll) that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape, presumably because God created that child.

Her conception of God and childbirth might be shaped by a different view of God, one that recognizes the difference between a fetus and a child and one that would never force a woman to endure a rape and then a pregnancy. As a Christian abortion opponent, you have every right to advocate for what you believe to be a life that God ordained before the beginning of the world. You have a right, and according to your faith, perhaps a duty, to preach about it, to publish your message on social media, to build crisis pregnancy centers-to do whatever you legally can to convince women not to have abortions. But, in America, you don’t have the right to impose your religious belief on women who don’t see the world as you do.

In your opposition to abortion, I would suggest you let women do most of the talking. I’m sure there are men who come to this issue with a pure heart. However, I have been with men in locker rooms and many of them talk, well, like Donald Trump says they talk. I also know Christian couples who believe the man is the head of the family and his wife has a scripturally enforced subservience, an arrangement to which they both happily adhere. Both of these approaches to women, as prey to be hunted or as servants to be dominated, are undoubtedly present in our state senate.

In an interview with The New York Times, Republican Katrina Shealy, one of the bipartisan group of five female senators who voted against the 6-week ban, recalled that during her tenure one of her male senate colleagues, Tom Corbin, had made derogatory comments to her like “women should be home barefoot and pregnant” and that women are a “a lesser cut of meat.”

Men like Senator Corbin, who remains in the Senate and who on his website describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative, (and) a family man” are threatened by the rise of women in every sector of society. They remember a time when almost every important political or business decision made in the state was made by a man. They may still worship in churches where women are barred from the pulpit. It’s not a big stretch for them to gather together in a male-only effort to control and diminish the lives of women.

Here’s what I would ask the good senators. If you, like your daughter Elizabeth, could get pregnant, would you have voted this way? If your birth control failed or your self-restraint failed or you were temporarily impervious to the reality of pregnancy because you were young, or intoxicated, or heedless, would you force yourself to live with the consequences of that decision for the rest of your life?

A version of this column appeared in the May 31 edition of The Florence Morning News.

Sure, the internet leads us to some pretty amazing things…

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I have to remind myself of that after the last couple of weeks of my life.

First there was the week when I could only occasionally get any wifi coverage up to the laptop in my home office. The extender had a great signal, but no internet. The main connection came and went, so it took me several extra hours to get any work done that week. So I switched from AT&T to Spectrum. And I’m now on my fourth Spectrum router, and still don’t have a signal that reaches everything in the house. Something I’ll have to work on today, as I’ve had to do every day for a fortnight.

So this is a good moment to remind myself that as frustrating as connecting to the internet can be, once it’s working, it brings you wonderful things. Such as this…

Y’all know I do communications work for the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, one of many ADCO clients. Which can be fun for me, with my interest in military history. I’ve also told you recently about the impressive new Vietnam exhibit that opened on Veterans Day. If you haven’t checked it out, you should.

One of the things you will see there is the combat fatigues of Col. Myron Harrington, USMC, retired. Well, Col. Harrington himself was the featured speaker Friday at one of the museum’s Lunch and Learn lectures. And at the last minute, we realized we couldn’t lay hands on the PowerPoint presentation from his last talk at the museum, so I undertook to put one together for him.

Of course, my main tool for that was Google Image Search. And there are quite a few images involving Col. Harrington there, as his is a fascinating story. At the start of 1968, then-Capt. Harrington was in Vietnam, but as part of a supply battalion. Finally, he got the transfer every young Marine captain wants, to command of a combat company.

Two weeks later, when he had barely learned the names of his platoon leaders, the Tet Offensive began, and his company was thrown into perhaps the most intense part of that fight — the Battle of Huế. There, he would receive the Navy Cross for what he and his men accomplished.

Back to the internet… So I find various images from Huế, some of them featuring Harrington. One of them I hadn’t seen before. The colonel was familiar with it, but hadn’t seen it in years, and was surprised I turned it up. It gave him an additional anecdote to tell on Friday.

The image is above. In the foreground you see an apparent combat-weary Marine. But actually, it’s Sir Donald McCullin, perhaps the most famous war photographer of his generation — later knighted by the Queen. You may have seen some of his work on display in another museum — The Tate in London. Behind him in the photo you see Capt. Harrington. This photo was the cover of The London Times magazine back in the late ’90s.

Turns out, the captain had contacted McCullin to tip him that he’d better come along to Huế, because he was really going to find some extraordinary images there. (Harrington had little use for the “war correspondents” who did their reporting from Saigon. But he respected McCullin, who came out and stayed and truly reported the war.) And McCullin did. One of them was the one you see below, which you’ve probably seen many times, especially if you read about PTSD.

As it turns out, not only was the photo taken during the Battle of Huế, but the Marine with the classic “thousand-yard stare” was one of Harrington’s own Marines, a member of Company D, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division. And no, Harrington can’t name him today (that story in the Times magazine was about trying to identify him), but he can tell us this was a veteran who had seen a lot of action before this battle. And now he had finally seen enough, and everyone could see it, so he was soon evacuated.

Anyway, it’s another one of those fascinating connections that crop up unexpectedly on the Web. Today, I’ll learn something else — if I can keep the blasted wifi working…

Thrilled to meetcha…

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I found the body language in the pool pics of Anthony Blinken meeting Xi this morning interesting.

Ol’ Xi seems to be going out of his way to make sure the world knows that he’s not thrilled to be finally meeting our secretary of state after the previous appointment was canceled over the spy balloon.

The one above is like, “OK, well, they told me I have to do this thing, so I’m doing it. Whatever…”

And I especially like the one below, evidently taken moments before by the pool photographer: Blinken eagerly striding over with his hand out, and Xi standing like his feet are nailed to the floor and he’s saying, “Yeah, OK, you can shake my hand if you must, but you’ve gotta come over to me, foreign devil…”

So, you know, no warmer relations yet, anyway…

Top Five Least Awful Republican Candidates

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It won’t be fun, but I urge you to think HARD on this one.

As y’all know, all I want to happen with regard to the presidency is for Joe Biden to win reelection comfortably, and remain alive and healthy for four years, during which someone — I have no idea who — as suitable as he is emerges to succeed him.

But as the philosopher said, you can’t always get what you want. (See video clip below. Or this one, if you prefer.)

All sorts of things can happen. And it’s not just a matter of Joe’s age — look up “Kennedy, John” or “Garfield, James” or “Harrison, William Henry” — although his age makes more people aware of reality than they really should be with younger examples. And there’s a great deal to think about beyond death or physical disability. Anything, from the spectacular to the mundane, can crop up to end a political career. A sharp downward trend in the economy, for instance, would do it.

So, if one wants a sane and happy future for the country, one would look to other options — the “get what you need” part of the philosopher’s equation. Although I earnestly pray that we don’t have to fall back to that, because any of the paths remaining to us would require major miracles even for the country to be just kinda OK.

One course would be some suitable Democrat that is not currently visible on the horizon emerges and somehow seizes the mantle before it settles on the shoulders of Kamala Harris. I have trouble even imagining a scenario.

The other most obvious path would be for someone remotely acceptable to get the Republican nomination. I’ve been shaking my head as each eager GOP candidate has emerged, ready to seize any opportunity that the rapid decline of his or her party creates in the next year. It’s not a pretty spectacle.

But this morning, I forced myself to rank them in descending order, from the least to the worst. Or at least, the top five along that continuum, among the ones who have thrust themselves forward upon the nation’s attention.

Here they are. Be mindful that I haven’t been given a lot to work with here. No actually good, decent, acceptable candidate — such as John Kasich — has stepped forward, apparently because such people see no chance for the likes of them in today’s GOP. So, working with what I have, here goes:

  1. Chris Christie — At this point, you throw up your hands and stop reading, right? You’re like, you think he’s the best? No. Have you been reading up to this point? We’re talking least bad, in a nightmare scenario. The thing about Christie is, I kinda remember when he was a not-too-terrible (but pretty awful at times) governor. No, I can’t shake that awful image of him standing behind Trump, with a look of horror that reflected a man whose very essence had just been scooped out of him, but at least he had the humanity left to know he should look that way.
  2. Mike Pence — Normally, I’d put Pence at No. 1 Least Bad. His worst episodes aren’t quite as lurid as Christie’s, and I’m mindful of the case Paul DeMarco made for him — a lot of good points. But his main bad point remains that he was, willingly, Trump’s boy for four years. Yes, I appreciate that, with MAGA hellhounds on his heels, he refused to abet his master’s attempt to overthrow the election. That, as much as anything, puts him at No. 2. Without that, he might not even make the list. The NYT reports that his announcement video sort of glides over his time as veep, and emphasizes his service as governor before that. Good idea.
  3. Tim Scott — As I’ve said, nice guy, but I don’t see anything from him that comes close to showing he is prepared for the job. I suspect I put him ahead of Nikki for one big reason: I don’t know him. I’ve never even met him, which emphasizes how briefly he’s been a visible statewide figure, much less national. I don’t even know he’s a nice guy — he just seems to be, from a distance. But I know Nikki.
  4. Nikki Haley — I’ll always honor her for taking the flag down. People who don’t know the situation — even people who haven’t seen the appalling videos of her submitting humbly to the neoconfederates — think this was a mere political calculation based on a necessity thrust on her by tragedy. But it was more than that. For a generation, Republicans in South Carolina had run from the issue. Even David Beasley, a very decent guy, only tried briefly to do something before collapsing under the backlash. So I give her credit. As for why she’s not higher on my list — well, search for her name on this blog, and review the entire record.
  5. Ron DeSantis — Clearly at the bottom. I’m unlike Democrats in that his constant harping on Kulturkampf issues that endure him to the MAGA base usually don’t appall me in any way having to do with the substance of the issues. What does appall me is that he spends all his energy on these things, which loom in our politics mainly as ways to divide the country, rather than on real issues that might address the good of all. So what use is he? None at all, that I can see. And has he done things that appall me in a substantial way? You bet. I can’t think of anything I’ve seen any politician do yet in this century that was as disgusting as duping desperate refugees to win the love of hateful people.

They’re all sad prospects — worse than that, really. There’s not a lot of distance between No. 1 and, say, No. 4. Some of the judgments I made are based on small, subtle, even whimsical things. But I decided to make myself do it, and this is what I came up with.

I don’t know much about this Doug Burgum guy who announced today, but he doesn’t sound promising. However, if further evidence offers reason to do so, I’ll post an amended list.

I’d really like to see y’all to take a shot at this unsavory challenge, and share what you come up with. One overriding rule: Do NOT under any circumstances rank them according to “the one I think would be easiest to beat.” That kind of grossly irresponsible thinking is one of the quickest ways to national suicide. Here’s the truth: Anyone, absolutely anyone — as we saw in 2016 — who obtains the nomination of either of the two major parties has about a 50 percent chance of becoming president. Let that sober you. Least objectionable first, then on down…

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And when she passes, each one she passes…

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In was in a two-hour Zoom meeting when this came across my screen and all I could think to do was reject what I was seeing:

This is hard to accept. Y’all know what a fan of Astrud I am. It’s not just her voice — although the simple honesty of it when you listen to her first and most famous recording sort of sweeps me away. It’s not entirely her visual allure, although that was pretty overwhelming as well, whether she was dressed in modest mod attire or less formally. I’m glad I didn’t see that picture back in the day. I was just a kid.

Back then, fortunately, I didn’t see a lot of things that the web makes accessible. There was just the wonder of seeing her on the tube, and hearing her. The web complicates things, and often it does so with nonsense and rumor.

I remember reading once, in recent years, that she left her husband João for Stan Getz. I thought that was on Wikipedia, but it’s not there now. Apparently it was something in the Brazilian press, connected to her going on tour with Getz as she was getting divorced from João — something that (as I read elsewhere) was João’s fault, by the way. Trying to check it, I ran across multiple stories about how Getz exploited her, which is just disgusting:

Getz often boasted that “he’d made Astrud famous”, but it seems he did his best to make sure she never received her fair share of the royalties. Gene Lees, the editor of DownBeat magazine, who translated “Corcovado” into English, later alleged that Getz intervened as soon as it was clear “The Girl from Ipanema” was going to be a lucrative hit. “Astrud hadn’t been paid a penny for the session and within days, the record was on the charts,” he wrote in Singers and the Song II. “It was at this point that Getz called Creed’s office. Betsy, Creed’s secretary, took the call. Creed was out of the office. When he returned and she told him Stan was anxious to talk with him, Creed thought Stan must be calling to see that Astrud got some share of the royalties. On the contrary, he was calling to make sure that she got nothing.”

The extent of the financial injustice is also made clear in Ruy Castro’s 2003 book Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World. Castro details that João Gilberto received $23,000 for his work on the album. Getz got the lion’s share of money for the album, estimated by some to be nearly a million dollars. Getz earned so much from its success that he immediately bought a 23-room “Gone With the Wind-style mansion” in Irvington, New York.

As for poor Astrud Gilberto, she was paid a relative pittance for turning millions of people on to jazz and the rhythms of Brazil. The woman “responsible for the record’s international success” (in Castro’s words) earned only what the American musicians’ syndicate paid for a night of session work: $120…

What an a__hole. How could anybody do that to Astrud? I mean, look at her. She was 22 when she recorded that. A babe in the woods. Someone a halfway decent person would want to protect. (See how my perspective shifts over the years from dazzled kid to father of daughters, and then to grandfather?)

Of course, maybe that story was just rumors, too. But I don’t think so.

To pull us all back from my digression — don’t look at her; listen to her. Here are some links. I’ll go away and leave you to contemplate them in peace, and become an Astrud fan. Some people like the piercing artistry of opera divas. I like this:

Apparently, my immune system is my superpower…

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Normally, I go to dump No. 9 (“number 9, number 9…”). But Saturday, I cranked it up to 11 (thank you, Nigel Tufnel)…

It started with the B-12.

I had been dragging recently in the mornings, so I thought I’d take some B-12 my wife had in a kitchen cabinet, but had quit taking. I let one dissolve under my tongue on Saturday, and it seemed to work. I loaded up my truck with stuff from our garage that we needed to get rid of, and set out to rapidly accomplish a series of tasks:

  • Went to the pharmacy to pick up a refill.
  • Wanting to give away anything charity might accept before going to the dump, I drove to His House over on Meeting St. The lady who came out said right off she wasn’t taking that mattress, but I assured her that was going to the dump. I was there about three things I thought someone might want. She accepted two of them, but not the almost unused Christmas tree stand (we went back to artificial several years ago). It seems they had too many of them.
  • On a lazier day, I might have gone on to the dump. But not today. I headed to Goodwill, and they gladly took the stand.
  • Then I headed to the dump — I mean the county Collection and Recycing Center. Not the one near me, but to one almost half an hour away that I had heard was more likely to take the mattress. I went out to the one at 325 Landfill Lane, Gaston (I assume no one’s trying to sell residential real estate there). And they took everything else. Done and dusted.
  • As I left the dump, I regretted I hadn’t thought to bring my golf clubs, or I could have hit a bucket of balls at the range next door. I was still full of pep.

But that didn’t last long. When I got home, I tried working out the measurements for another complicated bookcase I plan to build, but I started making mistakes on the arithmetic and spatial relationships. So I quit and took a nap. By dinner time, I had a sore arm. And I never even ate dinner.

That’s because, in my get-things-done mood, I had done one thing too many. Right at the start, at the pharmacy, I saw a sign urging folks to get the next COVID vaccine shot, and it reminded me I was due for my second shingles shot. So I stopped and did that, because I was up for anything. And the guy who gave it to me assured me I’d never need another one. Which is good news, as it turned out.

Once it took full effect, I was sick the rest of the weekend. I couldn’t remember whether this had happened with the first Shingrix shot, but it had with every COVID shot I’ve had.

My immune system goes nuts in reaction. It feels like having the flu, only there’s no measurable fever. I can’t do anything. Sitting at my computer is too difficult, even something fun like working on my family tree. I just sat and watched movies on the TV. And I had to take periodic recesses from that, for a nap. Watching TV was too tiring.

But this is a good thing, you see. I think it means I have a strong immune system, and it’s doing its thing. No, really. I must have the immune system of Superman. Even though I can’t fly. I just have the one superpower. Apparently, if I was given a choice, I didn’t choose well. Reminds me of something my 9th-grade English teacher said to a classmate: “Boy, when they were handing out brains, you took a ham sandwich.” But while it’s not as cool as moving at super-speed, it’s what I’ve got.

I was pretty much recovered by this morning, so I took another B-12. And look — already, two posts!…

Men and their goats

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This tweet from Mandy prompted a memory:

I mean, I don’t want to outdo Mandy or anything, but that is some goat the Goat Man of Sneem has. Of course, her goat man has a great gimmick with the kayak and all, but still…

The Sneem guy is sufficiently impressive that I was fairly sure I’m not the first to write about him, and I’m not. Here’s my favorite, which is a great Irish story — about the goat, not the man:

On a trip to Kerry last week, I meet this goat and his human. This male Irish Mountain goat is six years old and belongs to the chap behind him. One Christmas, Puck (the goat) was in a garden clearing all the overgrowth in it, when some local boys came and untied him. They proceeded to bring him to all the pubs in Sneem and fed him pints of Guinness, they then brought him to Midnight Mass. The owner (I don’t know his name) got a call to come and collect the goat, as the goat was unable to walk straight. When he got to the Church carpark the goat was lying in the corner not feeling too well. The man picked up the goat and placed him on a bed of straw in his van, he then brought the goat home and put him in the barn, where the poor goat lay for three days without moving. Now you can put a pint of Guinness under the goats nose and he will not drink it. Puck learnt a lesson. The man washes Puck everyday with L’Oreal shampoo.

I told my wife that story, and she remarked on how much smarter Puck was than most humans. Of course, she doesn’t like Guinness. Yet supposedly, she’s Irish…

Graham, Scott, also vote in favor of default

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After I posted last night about the debt limit deal, the Senate did as I had hoped and passed it. So that’s done.

No thanks to Lindsey Graham or Tim Scott, who were among the 36 — all but five of them Republican — who voted instead for the United States to default on its debt, plunging the U.S. and world economies into turmoil.

Graham, for his part, offered an excuse that gave us a glimpse of his old self, the senator we knew before he lost his mind in 2016 — he said it was about national security. But that doesn’t wash. I’ve seen nothing on his vote since it happened, but hours before, he made a speech:

Graham made an impassioned speech Thursday on the Senate floor, saying small increases in fiscal year defense spending are not part of a “threat-based budget” but one that lacks safety and security for Americans. He later said that a supplemental defense budget for Ukraine and other spending must be agreed upon swiftly by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to make up for the House GOP’s below-inflation 3 percent military increase….

And as it happened, Schumer and Mitch McConnell joined together to offer as much assurance as anyone could reasonably expect under such rushed conditions, with default looming on Monday:

None of the amendments were adopted. But in an effort to alleviate concerns from defense hawks that the debt ceiling bill would restrict Pentagon spending too much, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a joint statement saying the “debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries.”…

As for Tim Scott — I’ve found nothing about why he voted the way he did. Maybe I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I found nothing on his website, on social media or in any news reports. Which reminds us of why it’s weird that he’s running for president. He’s not a guy who tends to be out front on anything, making his views known in developing situations. He’s not making an effort to tell us, and if he said something on the floor of the Senate, no one covered it.

He’s just this nice guy who’s happy to be a U.S. senator — his bio line on Twitter says “Just a South Carolinian living his mama’s American Dream” — and who doesn’t get swept up in what’s actually happening. Look at that Twitter feed, by the way. There’s nothing there — at least, anywhere near the top — posted in real time in response to anything that was happening, or anything he was doing. It’s just a bunch of prewritten campaign stuff, going on about how awful Joe Biden is.

You know, the Joe Biden who threw his all into working with McCarthy to keep the nation from defaulting for the first time in history.

And then, Graham and Scott basically said Nah, let’s go ahead and crash into the mountain…