Dubya Library!

I would never try to top this.

The Elephant in the Living Room

While I've been indulging in frivolity here, all the while I'm thinking: the war, the war, what can we do about the war? We the people of Rock Ridge have spoken, and it just goes to show that you are the leading ...

No, no, no, I must be serious. We the electorate by somewhat of a majority have told this president that we do not want him to stay the course or stay until the mission is complete or however he chooses to put it. We want out, one way or another. How? In God's name, how?

I've ranted enough about how these people will not listen to reason and how all they care about is saving face and looking tough and PR hype and they truly don't care about human life -- compassion my ass. This man is sleeping like a baby at night, planning his presidential library funded with 500 million dollars, while Iraqis and his countrymen and women are dying daily in droves.

We learned before W. ever got to Washington (or Austin for that matter) that his pattern was to get involved in some enterprise, mess it up, and have friends of his daddy bail him out. Molly Ivins told us all about him and some of us were wise and voted against him -- good that it did us.

Jim Baker,who bailed him out with dirty tricks in Florida when he lost the election in 2000, hurting us in the process, is back to bail him out of this war. Why am I apprehensive over what this Baker commission will come up with? I know that the redoubtable Lee Hamilton is co-chair but somehow that doesn't reassure me as much as I would like it to.

In any case, I believe that whatever they come up with, particularly if it is anything other than "stay the course" or some verbal variation of I'm the decider and I'll do as I please because I can and because you have to know that fact, regardless of what it costs in life and resources to you. I don't know you and I don't care about you. I won't listen to you if you differ from what I have already made up my mind to do.

Senator Joe Biden of Delaware is talking about encouraging partition, i.e. three separate states, one for the Sunnis, one for the Shia, and one for the Kurds. Pundits are curling up their lips in scorn, but why not explore it? Put each warring faction in its own zone with demilitarized zones in between and enforce those DMZs with the UN and of course -- since we have to atone for the sins of Junior and clean up his shit, as people have always had to do -- include a large proportion of US military forces in the peacekeeping force. The critics will say you can't manipulate these people like puppets and make them go where you want them to go and do what you want to do. They are speaking from bitter experience, given that their misadventure in the first place did not turn out to be a "cakewalk" and our troops were not "greeted as liberators." And the Iraqis they encountered were not puppets and the "liberators" could not make them go where they wanted and do what they wanted the Iraqis to do.

We should announce how long we will continue with our military presence of foreign troops in the crossfire of a civil war -- hell, calling it a "civil war" is a euphemism for what it really is -- total anarchy. Chaos. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Hell on earth. We should announce how long we are going to stay and then promptly get out. Take French leave. Just hop on a bus, Gus. Then let go and let Allah.

Since Junior won't go along with that, since he would have to admit he was wrong, which he has never done in his life, and that he has been defeated by the terrorists -- he really believes this is what it would mean -- we shall just have to impeach Junior and try -- try -- to get him out of office before he breaks any more toys. Because his toys are the people of the United States and the people of Iraq.

God -- Allah, Yahweh, HP, Whoever -- help us. I ask this as an earnest prayer. God deliver us from this insanity. Amen.

Basil Poledouris, 1945-2006

I just found this out. Basil Poledouris, movie composer, died November 8th. He did the kind of stuff I like, e.g. Lonesome Dove and the movie that first caught my attention, Quigley Down Under. I loved the scoring that combined banjo and trombone, two of my favorites, with a big orchestra in the Quigley themesong. When I was in show business -- so I was foolishly deluded at the time -- I downloaded a CD of Basil's music in a certain radio station's library, and I'm glad I did. Other great stuff Basil did was for Conan the Barbarian, Free Willy, The Blue Lagoon, and The Hunt for Red October. Basil was from Kansas City, Mo. He was 61.

Nostalgic about Sidekicks

"Fuzzy pants!" Saw that on my son's girl's blog and it brought up one of my "clang associations" (see schizophrenia) from the past -- from the last century, from the medieval ages. My dad (who Johnnie is a lot alike in temperament and character -- that's a compliment -- take my word for it) used to tease me about going to B-grade westerns on Saturdays. The formula for those included a funny "sidekick" for the hero. (Johnnie has a photo of Rudy and his sidekick, Xena.) Lee "Lasses" White (slow as molasses --in January, as I think the cliche goes) was the sidekick of Jimmy Wakely, a troubadour (who really sang quite well and wrote some nice old country standards, including "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes"). My dad would refer to "Lasses White and his fuzzy pants" and I would crawl under the couch with embarrassment. I didn't like Jimmy Wakely because he sang. I liked the cowboys who were no-nonsense, always winning fistfights, always shooting the gun out of the villain's hand, who didn't sing, and who never kissed girls. Nowadays I like kissing at least as well as fighting. My favorite sidekick now (at least in retrospect) was Smiley Burnette, who split his sidekicking between Gene Autry and the Durango Kid. Smiley sang well, played violin (OK, fiddle, he wasn't Nathan Millstein), and wrote a lot of songs. And he was really funny. I miss him and his gentle kind. I think he might have been the composer of the song that has the chorus:

"Oh what a face! It's a disgrace! To be showing it in any public place!"

(I know the tune. I can still hear Smiley and his country swing band, decked out in ten-gallon hats, western shirts, and string ties, singing it with big grins. The supposed hatchet-faced lady was mercifully absent, in fact nonexistent. Those guys weren't mean. Not a mean bone in all of their bodies.)

Bear with me. Just an old coot with his memories...

Nuck Fewt

Regarding the speech by Newt Gingrich on abridging FREE SPEECH: You can't save the Constitution by destroying it. You're a bigger terrorist than Osama, you little butterball. It gives me great comfort to know that you are close to the bottom of the list of public figures who have presidential pretensions, right down there with John Kerry and Bill Frist (another comfort). I'd be really comforted if you were in jail where you belong. I know I'm subtle but maybe you'll get the point. Just hope you get it in Uranus. That would be a good place for the rest of you, along with your head.

Love Feast

Our House is a movie on TV this afternoon starring Doris Roberts in a role slightly different from Ray Romano's mom. She is a filthy rich old lady who takes a bunch of homeless people into her Beverly Hills residence after one of them rescues her from suicide.

It's fantastic, of course, and by now formulaic, as such movies are, but it's a kind of parable. Its based on Jesus' parable about the wedding feast that the king first offers to the "respectable people" and when they spurn it, tells his lieutenants, " 'Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.' And those servants went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good; so the wedding hall was filled with guests." (Mt. 22:9-10)

The Book of Bebb by Frederick Buechner is about the life of a weirdo preacher who, among other things, holds a "Love Feast" for the poor and homeless. It's an intriguing idea.

I'm not preaching any sermons. I confess that I don't minister much to the poor and homeless. I contribute a little to Salvation Army and of course, as those of you who read this, I try to afflict the comfortable more than comfort the afflicted with my harangues about tax cuts for the rich and all of that.

But literally feeding and housing and providing medical care to the less fortunate -- it's an intriguing idea.

Happy Thanksgiving and go with God.

Letter to Mo on "Squeaker of the House" (11/18/2006)

Letter to Maureen Dowd re. her New York Times column on Saturday 11/18/2006)

Mo (May I call you Mo? Call me JT.)

I got a comment on my blog from a frequent anonymous poster, one who feeds daily on Rush and Bill-o and Sean and Ann. Following? He said that "Pelosi" and the "demo-craps" would louse things up, starting with her endorsement of "that crook Murtha."

My dear Mo, and you really are dear to me -- because you are, as you said your detractors call you, a "liberal slut" (your words, I forget which interview) -- Mo, Mo, Mo, why did you have to trash Ms Pelosi for the first mistake she makes? One week after lauding her as a liberating Valkyrie?

Do you know what she and the Democrats are trying to liberate us from? Do you know you aid and abet "Anonymous" and his dreadful mob when you attack the good guys? Yes, Nancy messed up. I hope she learned from it. Your writing in high dudgeon about "throwing like a girl" and "Playskool telephones" and petty motives and catfights between her and Jane Harman (about which you know no more than I, an old fart from a small town in Indiana) is, as you like to say, kerfuffle.

I know, dear Mo, you are at the top of your game when you are trashing somebody, but for God's sake, pick your battles. I remember all the silly crap you were writing about Al Gore's "earth tones." Sorry now? (No, I guess not. You'll say your ridiculing him along with the rest of the morons (you're not a moron) wasn't the deciding factor.)

Choose your battles, Mo. We're at war. And I'm not talking about the godforsaken misadventure in Iraq. While you're devastating Nancy Pelosi, Bush-Cheney-Rove-Gonzales et al. continue to mock us and drag us down in the muck. Pick your battles, girl. And stay focused. I love your work when you're trashing the bad guys. I also like it when you write lovingly of your mother and your Catholic upbringing. (I don't know why, I'm not Catholic, not even a very good Christian.)

Affectionately but pissed, J.T. Evans

Anonymous Comments on This Blog

To those few "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" who read my blog:

I just changed the "comments" feature of Window on JT's World so that only "registered users" may comment. This is pending further communication and deliberation and I may change it back.

For now, if people who read the blog have trouble commenting, please send me an email.

Thanks.

JT

More on David Kuo's Book, "Tempting Faith"

People who are looking for the confessions of an outright defector from the religious right in this book will be disappointed. I would deem it less valuable in exposing the Bush administration if Mr. Kuo had renounced his beliefs entirely and went into a Kitty Kelly type of smear from a newly adopted "liberal" viewpoint. But this guy worked for Bill Bennett and John Ashcroft and thought Chuck Colson was the cat's meow at one time. All three of those folks have an emetic effect on this observer, but that is beside the point -- which is, I have inferred thus far, that you cannot serve God and Caesar any more than you can serve God and Mammon. He quotes from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, in which "Screwtape" tells his subordinate tempter (whose goal is, of course, to lure the Christian into hell) the following (the quotation comes directly from Kuo's book):

"Let him begin by treating patriotism ... as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. [My italics] Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the 'cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce ... [O]nce he's made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."

Seems that Jesus put this point more succinctly with the words: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?"

More to come. I haven't read all of the book. It's quite thought-provoking. And enlightening.

More on the Peace Corps

We did a lot of partying when we were training for the Peace Corps and after we arrived in Nigeria. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and during the continuing hateful resistance of whites to integration, particularly in the South, but also in states like Indiana -- especially Indiana. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the movement, and his approach was modeled on the non-violent resistance of Ghandi. When demonstrators sat in at lunch counters and so forth, they would often sing. I regret that I was not one of the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s. One of the songs they sang was "We Shall Overcome." We sang it in the Peace Corps, though. I am very fond of that song and believe fervently in what it stands for. We still need that song and our non-violent resistance that the song symbolizes, resistance to the hatred and bigotry which is dying but still resides in the hearts of cowards who hide their identity. "Black and white together, black and white together / For deep in my heart / I do believe / that we shall overcome some day..."

See, Sah! I Tink You Are One of de Peace Corpse

A pleasant interlude this evening: I had a date with a Hanover coed! Her name is Casey, and she is writing a paper on the Peace Corps for her senior sociology class. She is from a small northern Indiana town, where her father is an elected public official. Casey has brown hair and green eyes, and yes, for the record, she is quite cute. She was attentive to her personal appearance but not fixy -- which I guess is my way of saying that her shoulder-length hair was squeaky-clean and combed but not fussed with, she wore casual but not slouchy clothes, and if she used makeup it was not detectable. She rode off on a bicycle after our interview. I didn't ask her if she has a Greek affiliation. I hope she doesn't. (Natalie will appreciate my sentiment on that.)

I met Casey at the library and she asked me lots of questions about my experience as a PCV in Nigeria and took down more than a page of densely written notes. One of her motives is to find out if she might like to volunteer herself. She majors in sociology and minors in Spanish, and she obviously has poise and sociability, so she might be a very good candidate indeed for one of the Central or South America countries.

She had met Emeka K. and Julie B., two other returned PCVs in our area. Emeka (pronounced Eh-MEK-ah: he was given an Ibo name by his RPCV parents, whose tour of duty in Nigeria overlapped mine a little) went to Guinea, and Julie served in Panama. Casey also interviewed a Hanover professor, Daryl K., who was a member in, I believe, a sub-Saharan African country. She asked me for names of other RPCVs in the area and I promised her I would try to get them to her. She is going to have more than enough material for her paper.

I told her that I am very proud and grateful to have been one of the earliest Peace Corps Volunteers. And so I am. I wear a cap from UCLA, the place where I had my training in 1962. I taught physics and math at a girls' secondary school in what was then the Western Region of Nigeria, and which is still the land of the great Yoruba people. When I went out of the school "compound," I would hear calls of "Oyibo!" (European) and bold young men who would walk up to me and say, "See, Sah! I tink you are one of the Peace Corpse." Then we would have a conversation about world politics, in which they were disappointed when they found out I was no expert. (I was never asked if I was a CIA agent, although some of my colleagues got that question from time to time.)

Let's just say that events that occurred there led to my life vocation. Casey asked me if I was glad I joined the Peace Corps and if I thought that the Peace Corps was a good thing. My answers to both were an unqualified "Yes."

Bumper sticker to be read by Bush and the Bushies

BISPARTISAN THIS!

THIS JUST IN!

Baron Hill recaptured his seat in Indiana's 9th District! John Yarmuth defeated Ann Northrup! The Democrats have taken back the House of Representatives! After six years of unopposed power leading us into the horrible mess we are in, the executive branch is for the first time at the least going to have some checks on it. Thank God for that. Amen.

Die-Hard Yellow Dog, Yours Truly

This morning I went to the home of my good friend John Collins, who is running for the Madison school board, to get another yard sign. Then I went to Democratic headquarters and got a slew more of signs for my candidates. Then I went to the library and got two books, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Can Take It Back, by David Sirota, and Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean. Then I went home and put my signs out in the yard. There are more than there were before. Brian, here to get his firefighter's uniform pants that his mother had hemmed, asked me how it was going as he left. I said, "I'm just exercising my right as a United States citizen to campaign for the people I believe should be in office." I didn't have to defend my action to Brian, but I was feeling paranoid at the moment. That saying about defending to the death my right to say what my opponents don't want to hear seems kind of remote in the current political climate. I think we're going to win a few this time. I feel it.

Southpaw Stew

An old whiskered sidekick in a B-oater of yesteryear (think Gabby, Hayes or Johnson, or Fuzzy St. John -- he was the sidekick of Lash LaRue) was cooking a pot of something in one of the comic relief scenes where Roy or Bart or Lash wasn't chasing or shooting or fistfighting. Roy-Lash asked him what he was cooking. He said, "Southpaw stew." (Why do you call it that?) "Cause it's made of whatever's left." (Yuk yuk yuk!)

Which is my way of segueing into a potpourri, olio, olla podrida, slumgullion of this and that about everything and nothing. Mostly nothing. This week we visited friends at their home in Bay Village, Ohio, which is on Lake Erie. They are dear people and three of the four of us go back to MHS Class of '56 so we had plenty to reminisce about. They lost an adult daughter to cancer earlier this year and we talked about it and it was good and I hoped it helped them -- it helped us. We took a walk in a beautiful little park beside the lake and other than freezing our asses loved it. We went to Kohl's, which had a sale of 50% off on some items and 15% more off for seniors and we didn't buy a thing. (We can get the same thing at a much lesser "full" price elsewhere with no "discounts," way I see it.) We went to an Italian restaurant and had delicious chicken entrees. We dipped real bread in herbed olive oil, etc. The music was Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. I expected Al Pacino to pop in. The atmosphere and service were great. It was an honest-to-god restaurant, for a change. We wandered through Ohio and Indiana on the way home.

I'd started to write a couple of other things for the blog and decided not to finish or post them. I wanted to comment on The Grapes of Wrath, which we finished reading and followed up by watching the 1941 movie with Henry Fonda, and I was writing a treatise on economics,which I know nothing about. It is a beautiful, elegiac book and I think its views of socioeconomics are still essentially true today. I also started to discuss an article by Paul Krugman in which he urged Democrats "not to make nice" with the opposition, as the Dixie Chicks sang in their first album after they'd been accused of treason for simply saying they are ashamed of the man who happens to be the president and then being subjected to a Krystallnacht of burning their CDs (incited by rightwing media owners, for the most part).

When we got back from Ohio we discovered that our candidates' yard signs were gone. I did a little Sipowicz work this morning and have some of the Franks Drive Irregulars on my short list of suspects. Nobody will 'fess up even though I don't want to get any kids in trouble. Yet I don't approve of that kind of vandalism. Bottom line: I'd rather it would be the kids with no political agenda than a Republican dirty trick.

Rosie's son, Brian, who is a volunteer firefighter, had a close friend die in a fire this past week. Firefighters from all around are going to attend the young man's funeral and Brian will be among them on Sunday. He obtained a pair of black firefighter's uniform trousers for the occasion and Rosie hemmed them for him.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have campaigns in which the candidates seriously debated the issues and didn't have multimillion-dollar TV ads that distort the truth and smear their opponents -- because the big bucks were truly forbidden to pay for them?

Campaign finance reform, anyone?